Category Archives: Science

Lady Ada books opening May 11

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Ada’s Technical Books is Seattle’s only technical book store located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Ada’s specifically carries new, used, & rare books on Computers, Electronics, Physics, Math, and Science as well as hand-picked inspirational and leisure reading, puzzles, brain teasers, and gadgets geared toward the technically minded customer.

From the store’s blog, “Grand Opening: June 11th”

I’ve been helping David and Danielle a little with book selection because they’re good folks and I love great bookstores. I encourage Seattle readers to stop by.

Life

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Today will be remembered along with the landing on the moon and the creation of the internet:

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization, published results today describing the successful construction of the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell. The team synthesized the 1.08 million base pair chromosome of a modified Mycoplasma mycoides genome. The synthetic cell is called Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 and is the proof of principle that genomes can be designed in the computer, chemically made in the laboratory and transplanted into a recipient cell to produce a new self-replicating cell controlled only by the synthetic genome.

Press release, or read more in Science or the Economist. (Whose image I borrowed.)

This is what science is for

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In “The Quest for French Fry Supremacy 2: Blanching Armageddon,” Dave Arnold of the French Culinary Institute writes:

Blanching fries does a lot for you – such as:

  • killing the enzymes that make the potatoes turn purpley-brown. Blanching is always necessary if the potatoes will be air-dried before frying.
  • gelatinizing the starch. During frying, pre-cooked fries form a crust faster than raw ones, and they can be cooked at higher oil temperatures than raw fries – which is easier for workflow.
  • pre-salting the interior of the fries. We blanched two batches of fries, one in boiling 3% salt water, one in boiling plain water. The plain-water fries tasted like crap next to the salt-water ones. All subsequent tests fries were blanched in a 3% salt solution.
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It’s easy to think of science as just being good for building computers and the internet, extending average lifespans, giving us goretex, nylon and vulcanized rubber. Some people may worry that it’s in the weeds when worrying about string theory. But science is an approach to problems. The testing of ideas to see how well they work, rather than loving the idea.

And Dave Arnold, along with Harold McGee and others, and driving the intersection of science and cooking. And while they’re likely to skewer quite a few cows along the way, the results are worth it.

It’s Hard to Nudge

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There’s a notion that government can ‘nudge’ people to do the right thing. Big examples include letting people opt-out of organ donorship, rather than opting in (rates of organ donorship go from 10-20% to 80-90%, which is pretty clearly a better thing than putting those organs in the ground or crematoria). Another classic example was participation in 401k retirement accounts, but somehow after the market meltdown, that’s getting less press.

A smaller example is how telling people they’re using more power than others, their power consumption declined. Awesomeness, right? Conservation is the easiest, freest power you can get. Remember that a 150 watt lightbulb consumes twice as much power as your laptop. And most of that goes to waste heat, but I digress. Let’s go back to that nudge study, described in this Slate article:

In a study evaluating the program’s effectiveness, Opower researchers compared power use before and after the HERs began arriving, and further compared this change with a group of control households that never received the reports. On average, the HER households reduced their consumption in the months that followed by a little less than 2 percent. Not bad, but probably not enough to save the planet.

and also:

One problem with this approach is that we all define “better” differently, as a new study emphasizes. UCLA economists Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn analyzed the impact of an energy-conservation program in California that informed households about how their energy use compared with that of their neighbors. While the program succeeded in encouraging Democrats and environmentalists to lower their consumption, Republicans had the opposite reaction. When told of their relative thrift, they started cranking up the thermostat and leaving the lights on more often. … One explanation is that many conservatives don’t believe that burning energy harms the planet, so when they learn that they’re better than average, they become less vigilant about turning the lights off. That is, they’re simply moving closer to what they now know is the norm.

People are complex. It’s hard to know what matters to people, and it’s hard to know what additional information will do to a market. As Hayek pointed out, this is why central planning fails. The planners can’t know all.

And when we start nudging people, lots more chaos will emerge. Planners don’t become better by giving people opt-outs from their planning. And while nudging is better than authoritarianism, it’s still worse than a government which does only what it needs to do.

In the case of energy consumption, a market is emerging to help people see what drives their energy consumption and environmental impact. Better to let a thousand startups bloom, and let the creativity of engineers and those who care deeply help people drive down their electricity use. Everyone else will pay for their long-burning lights, and if electricity is fairly priced, then that’s their choice.

The paper is at “Energy Conservation “Nudges” and Environmentalist Ideology: Evidence from a Randomized Residential Electricity Field Experiment,” National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Liquids ban is a worse idea than you thought

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According to new research at Duke University, identifying an easy-to-spot prohibited item such as a water bottle may hinder the discovery of other, harder-to-spot items in the same scan.

Missing items in a complex visual search is not a new idea: in the medical field, it has been known since the 1960s that radiologists tend to miss a second abnormality on an X-ray if they’ve found one already. The concept — dubbed “satisfaction of search” — is that radiologists would find the first target, think they were finished, and move on to the next patient’s X-ray.

Does the principle apply to non-medical areas? That’s what Stephen Mitroff, an assistant professor of psychology & neuroscience at Duke, and his colleagues set out to examine shortly after 2006, when the U.S. Transportation Security Administration banned liquids and gels from all flights, drastically changing airport luggage screens.

“The liquids rule has introduced a whole lot of easy-to-spot targets,” Mitroff said.

Duke University press release, Mitroff’s home page, full paper.

Monkeys krak-oo krak-oo

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According to “Campbell’s Monkeys Use Affixation to Alter Call Meaning:”

We found that male alarm calls are composed of an acoustically variable stem, which can be followed by an acoustically invariable suffix. Using long-term observations and predator simulation experiments, we show that suffixation in this species functions to broaden the calls’ meaning by transforming a highly specific eagle alarm to a general arboreal disturbance call or by transforming a highly specific leopard alarm call to a general alert call. We concluded that, when referring to specific external events, non-human primates can generate meaningful acoustic variation during call production that is functionally equivalent to suffixation in human language.

Sorta via Wired, who, not being monkeys, did not use the invariable suffix “here’s a link.”

Photo: Macque monkey and kitten by Kaz Campbell.

Deny thy father and refuse thy gene sequence?

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There’s a fascinating article in the NYTimes magazine, “Who Knew I Was Not the Father?” It’s all the impact of cheap paternity testing on conceptions of fatherhood. Men now have a cheap and easy way to discovering that children they thought were theirs really carry someone else’s genes.

This raises the question, what is fatherhood? Is it the genes or the relationship? There’s obviously elements of both, but perhaps there’s a rule in here: adding identity to a system makes the system more brittle.