Category Archives: Current Events

Eat Venter’s Dust

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I gave a talk in a morning I&EC session last thursday at the Denver ACS National meeting. During an interlude provided by a no-show speaker, a member of the audience began to quiz down a hapless speaker who earlier presented on the filtration of plasmids. The gentleman’s concern was this- We are continuing to develop conventional processing technology while fellows like Craig Venter are devising step-change techniques for genomic analysis and synthesis. People like Venter have their names mentioned in the same sentence with “synthetic biology”.  Why do we bother with the more primitive methods of research when the real action is with folks like Venter?

The inquisitive fellow was asking a rhetorical question to all of us. But the point he skipped over was the matter of intellectual property. He kept asking why don’t “we” just switch the paradigm right now and use such technology? Why continue with highly manual R&D?  The problem with his question was in the assumption that Venter’s technology was something that “WE” have access to. Venter’s technology does not automatically translate into a community tool. It is more like an item of commerce. In reality, this will likely represent a major uptick in productivity to the financial benefit of the intellectual property owners and licensees and their stockholders.

How the scientific workforce will fare is a different matter. Increased productivity usually means reduced labor per unit of output. I suspect that Venter’s technology represents a higher entry barrier to those who want to be in the market.  It may be that the outcome will be a broader range of diagnostic and treatment services available to a shrinking pool of insured people able to afford it.

Confessions of a Country Boy

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After much thought I have decided to come clean on the matter of the supposed inherent goodness of growing up rural. I was born to Iowa corn and hog farmers in the late 1950’s.  This business of supposing that growing up on a farm magically confers a kind of wholesomeness is based on some faulty assumptions:  1) Farms are wholesome environments untread upon by people corrupted by the incessant Bacchanalian orgy of wanton excess found in the city. This is plainly wrong. Farms and farmers are just isolated. Modern conveniences get to farms later because of the isolation. Farmers are exposed to pathogens and insecticides in the course of their work. They often get mangled in unspeakable ways by their equipment. Farmers would party like brain-damaged test monkeys with everyone else if it wasn’t such a long ride into town.

Misperception 2) Growing up on a farm brings one into better harmony with nature.  This is wrong as well.  Farming is about the conquest of nature. Farmers know alot about nature, but take it from me, people who plow the ground, churn in soil amendments, and neutron bomb the insect population are not nature lovers. They are nature conquerors.  Farming is about return on investment. Just watch Ag PhD if you don’t believe me. Hey, I watch this show- it’s pretty interesting.

Misperception 3) Growing up on a farm is peaceful and soothes the soul. Well, it seems outwardly peaceful. This is true. And that can soothe the soul. But consider that the prolonged lack of intellectual stimulation has a dulling and isolating effect that prevents people from finding a whole spread of achievement that is possible in the modern world.

Misperception 4) rural life is good because people know each other. You know the guy who owns the CO-OP and the family who sells the home grown eggs. Folks pull together when times are tough.  Well, maybe. The Gaussian distribution of saints and knuckleheads applies everywhere. In a rural community you just know the saints and knuckleheads who farm. Farms have produced Ed Gein and Dwight Eisenhower. Less pathologically, people in rural communities are just as frequently unhappy with their lives as those in the city.  It’s faulty thinking to conclude that the farming or rural life imbues some special merit to a person.  As always, your life story is about what you put into it. I would offer that rural life is less than good because people know each other.

The notion that a politician with a rural history, or one displaying an outward appearance, is invested with a more nuanced sensibility than some city slicker is also faulty thinking.  You can manipulate people with the “aw shucks, ma’am” act as effectively as with the tools of a cosmopolitan confidence man.  In fact, the country boy approach may be more persuasive.

Astronomers talking about matter again

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I’m always a little skeptical when I hear astronomers talking about specific compositions of matter out in the universe.  The recent gushing press release from Reuters about a diamond planet orbiting a neutron star just adds to my burden of disbelief. 

I truly hope there is more evidence than that revealed in the press release. That is, the assignment of the diamond allotrope of carbon based on density (3.53 g/cm3).  The report seems to express amazement that the planet is “so dense”.  A specific gravity of 3.53 is not that high. Many other compositions are possible.  Perhaps Reuters should look at high density objects closer to home.

Play it forward. Science as an extended subsidy.

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I search chemical abstracts nearly every day. What occurs to me is that this vast treasure of knowledge is substantially the result of tax revenue channeled into scientific research by numerous technologically advanced societies. While at the time of any given publication, the value might seem minimal. But over time people like me, people in applied industrial science, consume this treasure for the purpose of generating new goods and services. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we consult the subsidized results of other workers in the field. Subsidies of the past play forward to subsidies of the future. If we can’t lift an exact procedure from the scientific literature, then often we can apply new substrates to known transformation. 

In a very real sense, a resource like Chemical Abstracts is an engine of ingenuity. It’s content provides the means to innovation by outright disclosure or by sparking the imagination.  This work is enabled by government organizations funding people and institutions for the purpose of placing technology into the public domain.

While industrial or private organizations have the ability to generate a knowledge base as substantial and as in-depth, the fact is that the imperatives of private business are not in the direction of public disclosure. The imperative of the private sector is to channel wealth to the ownership. The free exchange of knowledge, in the context of business, is discouraged in that it amounts to the free distribution of cash. 

I hear people saying or implying that all things government are bad and that the private sector is inherently “more efficient” and therefore more meritorious.  What we have gotten from government subsidized science is an everlasting fountain of knowledge available to all to put into practice for whatever lawful purpose they can envision. 

An efficient life seems like a puritanical and regimented life.  And the application of efficiency will always fall under the control of the dominant social order. Is this really so desirable?  

Intellectual property has two sides. On one side, the generators of intellectual property can have the right to a timed monopoly on their art via patents. On the opposite side, the public treasury releases national treasure in order to educate the citizens who then generate proprietary art that is withheld from public use.  This amounts to a subsidy of the private sector.  It is a subsidy that sees little acknowledgement in the politics of today.  But such a thing has actually worked well for generations.  

What we are seeing in contemporary politics is the attempt to vilify and deconstruct government. But government has been central to the technological and consequently the economic expansion in the post WWII era.  The mechanism of collecting resources and focusing them on the solution of certain kinds of problems cannot be matched by the private sector. How would you operate the Centers for Disease Control on a greed based system like capitalism? 

Libertarians are always acknowledging the fundamental nature of greed and how it can be channeled into the efficient use of goods and services. I don’t disagree. What I take issue with is that greed must then be acknowledged as the dominant and true influencing force in society. We cannot allow this to be true. We must make provisions for tight control of greed. It is a useful but savage animal. 

In my view, the generation of knowledge and expertise is time and resource consuming. In order to have a particular amount of practical expertise on any given thing, you have to turn over a great many stones and learn an amount of art that is in large excess of the problem of the day. This actually applies to a definition of expertise- the ability to deal with problems that at first seem to be bigger than you can get your arms around. Expertise brings knowledge in the form of facts and problem solving skills. In order to attain expertise you have to absorb to information that at the moment seems superfluous.  In the end, the expert has a grasp of the length and breadth of a topic in excess to any given problem.

Our national system of scientific discovery and information abstracting serves to provide the reservoir of information that serves users into the future.  This information forms the basis of economic growth well into the future. As we go forward with the seemingly inevitable deconstruction of government, let us not forget what government has given us.

Texican on the move

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So Tejas governor Rick Perry is going to throw his hat into the ring for the republican nomination. Really, people?  Are you kidding me? A smarmy, neo-confederate, evangelical Texican praying for a resolution to the debt crisis? I have no doubt that Jesus Christ himself would tell us in lilting Aramaic to pull our thumbs out of our asses and reach for a settlement, not stand around in a stadium groveling for forgiveness of our sins with outstretched arms. Fix the bloody thing and save your wishes prayers for grandma’s recovery from hip surgery.

Christians should be grateful for the concept of sin. The whole religion is built on it. Sin is the denominator of Christianity- if it collapses to zero the whole religion becomes undefined. Without sin, our cherished fraternal hatreds would resolve to mere anthropology and lose that zesty cosmic fizz that we so enjoy.

Thursday links

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Do the Math has a zesty essay on the physical limits to economic and technological growth.  Rabid libertarians and free market triumphalists may need a maintenance shot of Viagra after reading this. I’m just sayin’ …

Have you noticed that numerous states with conservative governments (especially Ohio and Wisconsin) are on strikingly similar trajectories? You can thank ALEC for that. I think that the authorship of legislation should be transparent. On any given bill, the sponsors should be able to cough up the names of those who wrote the code.

Have you read any of Pliny’s Natural History?  Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) was an amazing fellow. He was a Roman polymath who commanded military regiments yet found time to chronicle an encyclopedic collection of writings on life as a Roman. His Natural History is a detailed recollection of customs, medicaments, natural history and metallurgy. I’ve been reading his chapter on metallurgy in the 1855 translation by Bostock and Riley.  Pliny died in the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD. His body was found covered in pumice. Had the Romans known how to sail up wind, he would have survived.

David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy and Mather, was a master of advertising. This link is a distillation of his thinking on the enterprise of advertising.

Before I pass from this earth I want to take a tour of Iceland.

Kunstler is the Master

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James Howard Kunstler is the master. There comes a time when one must step back and acknowledge your betters. This is such a time for Th’ Gaussling.

Europe is arguably worse off money-wise, more broke, flimsier, crapped out, crippled, and paralyzed. Sad, because in outward appearance Europe  is – how shall I put this? – better turned out than America. Europe is a fit, silver-haired gentleman in a sleek Italian suit and a pair of Michael Toschi swing lace wingtips, holding a serious-looking Chiarugi leather briefcase. America is pear-shaped blob of semi-formed male flesh, in ankle-length cargo shorts, a black T-shirt featuring skull motifs, tattoos randomly assigned (as if by lottery) to visible flesh, a Sluggo buzz-cut, and a low-rider sports cap designed to make your head look flat. In other words, he lacks a certain savoir-faire compared to his European cousin. But both are broke. Neither has any idea what he will do next – though, for the American, it will probably involve the ingestion of melted cheese or drugs (or both). When the European collapses, a certain air of delicacy will attend his demise; the expired American will go up in flames in a trailer and they’ll have to sort out his remains from the melted goop of his dwelling-place with a front-end loader.

The influence of a committed minority

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A paper recently published in Physical Review Letters E is stirring some attention on the web.  The citation and abstract are below.  The work was funded by the Army Research laboratory.

J. Xie1, S. Sreenivasan1,2,*, G. Korniss2, W. Zhang3, C. Lim3, and B. K. Szymanski1
1Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180, USA
2Department of Physics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180, USA
3Department of Mathematics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, New York 12180, USA

Received 17 February 2011; revised 25 April 2011; published 22 July 2011

We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc≈10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time Tc taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion. In particular, for complete graphs we show that when p<pc, Tc~exp[α(p)N], whereas for p>pc, Tc~lnN. We conclude with simulation results for Erdős-Rényi random graphs and scale-free networks which show qualitatively similar behavior.

I’ll confess that I have not paid for a download nor have I been to the local university library to look at the paper.  There is an RPI website that details the highlights of the paper. 

The results of the work seem very intriguing, though. And making a tie to current events is all too easy, so I’ll attempt to restrain myself.

If you have ever done simulation work, you know not to confuse simulation with reality.  However, the great value of simulation is that it forces one to think hard about the parameters of a system and to develop quantatative relationships. This is especially useful in iterative or non-linear processes where intuition easily breaks down.  Even if you do not succeed making a bullet proof model, you have almost certainly come to understand the system better.

Thr RPI article goes on to say-

Once the networks were built, the scientists then “sprinkled” in some true believers throughout each of the networks. These people were completely set in their views and unflappable in modifying those beliefs. As those true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.

“In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models,” said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.

This seems to connect quite naturally with Chomsky’s notion of the “Manufacture of Consent” by the ever burgeoning political-media complex in operation today.  My guess is that the backers of conservative media have had an intuitive grasp of the benefits of repetition and existential certainty for a long while.  When you claim to have the “founders” and a deity on your side, logic and reasoning becomes distinctly non-linear.

Borders Books to close its doors this week.

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The Borders books chain is set to liquidate, possibly this Friday according to this link. But, like the elk with a broken leg, if the grizzlies don’t get it, the winter surely will. According to reports, the firm was beset with poor management, superior competition, a paradigm shift in buying behavior, and a crummy overall economic picture. The creditors- publishers to a large extent- must be satisfied.

As a frequent patron of Amazon, I hold some personal responsibility for this. I did enjoy browsing in the local store. I bought my issues of Nuts and Volts, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Kitplanes. But in the end, Amazon had the selection I wanted to spend money on. Obscure print-on-demand books from the 19th century. Not your basic consumer fare at a Borders.

For we browsers of the world, this is a definite loss. Of course, the lesson for browsers is to actually buy something while in the store. That way they can keep the doors open. Or so I’ve heard.