Um…

Well… it is a weak acid so it could possibly react with chemicals that are either alkaline in nature or are just prone to breaking down in acid.  But those “chemicals” are rather high up in altitude, and aside from that obvious problem, one might think that if the chemicals were potent enough to be dangerous even after drifting down and surviving the harsh conditions of the upper atmosphere than vinegar probably would not do much.

Really, do I need to explain the flaws in the logic here?

Apparently so.

There are actually a lot more videos about this on Youtube. I did not have time to look at them all, so some may be even more lame.

Helsinki/Finland, January 11, 2012-Epidemiological studies are given the most weight in evaluation of human health effects. Therefore, when researchers started their effort to find out whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer, epidemiology was given the most of attention – and the most funding.

Well… yes, since Epidemology is the study of health events, disease patterns, health statistics and disease rates and their relation to factors like environment, lifestyle and other causes, it would seem to be the field of study that would apply to such a question.

It’s as straight forward as determining that geology is the appropriate field of science to look to when trying to determine the characteristics of a rock.

However, and please let me play “devils advocate”,

Only if I can play with science advocate.

is the epidemiology overrated?

No.

There, are we done?

Will epidemiology ever give us reliable answers concerning cell phone radiation and brain cancer?

Yes, and they have. Or is it simply that you don’t like the answer and want it to be something else, therefore you consider it flawed?

In 2010 and in 2011, two of the largest epidemiological studies on brain cancer were published. It appears that the time and money were used generously,

There’s a lot of interest in the topic, so a lot went into it. I’m not certain which studies you mean, but there have been some enormous ones recently.

but the studies failed to provide reliable answers concerning cell phones radiation and brain cancer. Flaws in the design of both studies prevented delivering conclusive answers.

Really? Well, if you say so. But thankfully, we don’t have to rely on any two studies. Two studies don’t mean much in the world of epidemiology anyway. To actually get a conclusive answer, you need to have confirming data coming from many studies. In this case we’re lucky enough to have literally thousands. So, you could actually discard two of them if you so choose and it won’t change the balance of the evidence much, because there’s such a huge amount from other sources.

It was 1999 when the largest case-control epidemiological study, INTERPHONE, was planned. At that time, optimists hoped that by the end of this project in 2004 we would know whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer.

Actually, I think we had a pretty good idea even back in 1999, so it doesn’t seem very optimistic to think we would by 2004. That would be like me predicting that in the year 2017 we’ll know that the earth revolves around the sun. Unless there’s some kind of complete collapse of civilization that leaves behind only a handful of completely uneducated people, I am pretty sure we will know that in 2017, since we do already know it now.

I think I see where this is going though. The Interphone study was supposed to be one of the largest studies of this type and would dispel the doubt forever. It pretty much did.

After several delays, INTERPHONE published the results of the glioma brain cancer study in 2010.

The results were confusing, to say the least. Use of the cell phone for less than 10 years seemed to have a “protective” effect, whereas the use of the cell phone for more than 10 years showed a small increase in glioma occurrence.

Well I agree on one thing: The study abstract didn’t do a very good job of putting this all in context. It might simply be that research scientists are very apprehensive about using absolutes and tend to talk in degree of confidence. The tiny increase in giloma, but only in certain subsets was almost certainly statistical noise. It was miniscule. The “protective” effect can be attributed to a combination of statistical noise and possibly some slight confounding factors.

The balance of the data provides pretty good confirmation of no overall risk increase. Again, this should have been made more clear. The problem largely stems from having non scientifically literate persons get involved in the reporting. Reports and public officials have a tendency to focus on very narrow portions of a study like this and take them out of context. They will generally then demand to know whether the researchers can be 100% confident that this is not in fact a risk effect. The answer to that question is always no, statistical analysis never regards anything as being 100% certain. Then the study gets reported as if it raised doubts, when it actually does not.

Several problems with the design of INTERPHONE were debated. By design, the INTERPHONE study was unable to detect brain cancer induced by cell phone radiation because of its long (over 10 years) latency period.

Okay, that might be the case, but plenty of other studies did look at longer latency periods. A few went so far as to track down some of the early adopters of cell phones who started using them frequently in the early 1980’s and they also found no increase in brain cancer.

That said, even if the AVERAGE latency period were something like twenty or thirty years, it’s hard for me to imagine that there could be a bell curve so narrow as to have zero detectable risk increase after a much shorter period of time.

At the time of execution of INTERPHONE (2000-2004), cell phones were in common use for only a few years. There would be not enough time for the development and diagnosis of brain cancer if it was caused by cell phone radiation.

It does not matter how common they were by the early 2000’s. The fact of the matter is that they have existed since the late 1970’s and they have been used by many people since then. Sure, the actual proportion of the population that began using cell phones a lot in the early 1980’s is small, but it’s still more than large enough to produce good study results.

It’s not even really a cell phone issue. Wireless phones are just UHF/Microwave transmitters and those have been around for ages. There are studies that have been done on others exposed much longer. Police officers started using radar guns in the late 1950’s to measure the speed of motorists and some cops spent thirty years working highway patrol with a radar gun in their car. Others spent their careers as microwave technicians for AT&T or television networks. Military personnel worked on the deck of ships with radar antennas energized nearby.

Studies have been done on these individuals. Many of them, in fact. The results are consistent and compelling: The only health effects ever detected are acute thermal injuries and no chronic effect of exposure to RF fields has ever been documented.

However, there was an even more important design flaw. The information about the extent of exposures to cell phone radiation was based on individual recollection of the subjects in the study. The study subjects were asked about their history of using cell phone, including how long and how many phone calls they made in the past.

Perhaps in this study, but not in all. While it may introduce a potential source of error, I’m hard pressed to see how this could possibly skew the studies that badly. Even if you rely on spotty recollection, the fact that people who reported being heavy phone users show no greater cancer risks than those who never owned a cell phone at all would seem to be pretty hard to mess up.

By the way: Studies on cigarette smoking and cancer have largely been based on the subject’s recollection of how many packs they usually smoked a day. Despite this, they had no problem picking up on the fact that tobacco causes lung cancer.

It is a very unreliable method. Who of us remembers how many and how long calls made a few days ago? The study subjects were asked to recall cell phone use up to ten years before the study.

Okay, lets see if I can do this…

Got my first cell phone in the summer of 2001. Before that I had used cell phones a bit, but only occasionally when on that belonged to someone else. I worked for a company that sold cell phones so I had a good plan with a discount. Consequently, I used it a good few minutes a day or more. I would say my use has generally been on the increase since then, although not always. I’ve generally made or received three or four calls per day, usually each one only being a few minutes. Occasionally I have longer calls. In 2004 and 2005 I had a job that had me on the road a lot and my usage went up to about a dozen calls a day, but mostly short. As it stands now I use about 180 minutes of talk time in a month, but occasionally one or two long calls can push that way up. That’s how it’s been for the past few years.

Good enough?

Therefore, by design, INTERPHONE compared reliable information concerning diagnosed cancers with entirely unreliable information about exposures. Such kind of comparison can not produce reliable result, as was seen in the confusing results of the study published by INTERPHONE in 2010.

Again, you’re presuming that this error is so great that it would make someone who has never owned a cell phone indistinguishable in risk from someone who says they’ve been a heavy cell phone user for the past ten years. That just does not make sense. Even if recollection skewed the data, it shouldn’t so enough to cause that kind of discrepancy.

In 2011, the Danish Cohort published another largest study, evaluated in this column in December 2011.

Similarly to INTERPHONE, the Danish Cohort compared reliable information on diagnosed brain cancers with the absolutely unreliable information about exposures based not on the use of cell phone but on the length of subscription with the network operator.

No. That’s actually perfectly reasonable. It stands to reason that a person who has a cell phone contract and owns a cell phone will be more prone to using a cell phone than one who does not. This is even more true in the early years. In 1983, a handheld cell phone cost about four thousand US dollars. Anyone who pays that much for something obviously has reason to do so. For example, real estate agents were some of the first to embrace the technology, because even given the high cost, they needed to make appointments while traveling between properties.

It might be imperfect in that some cell phone owners will use it more than others, but a cell phone owner will always use it more than one who does not own a cell phone.

The study also contaminated the control group with the cell phone users.

The study looked at the habits of long term user as compared to the general population and to groups of similar demographic profiles. Some of those included those who had used a cell phone as well, but didn’t you just assert that it would not matter since the latency period is very long? In any case, it’s all but impossible to find a large group these days which has never owned a cell phone. So the study compared long term cell phone users to those who either had recently acquired a cell phone, never owned a cell phone or had been very light user. The study actually looked at the groups using more than one method. It examined it based on the length of the phone ownership, the average usage of the phone, the reported habits etc.

In all cases, no coloration to increases in brain cancer was ever detected.

Again, as with the INTERPHONE, the Danish Cohort made comparison of reliable data on cancer with the unreliable information about exposures cannot produce reliable final result.

And what the hell would you consider to be reliable data?

Brain cancer is a rare disease, somewhat in the range of around 10 cases per 100,000 people. It means that in order to reliably detect the change, which seems to be less than 50% according to flawed INTERPHONE, tens of thousands of the study subjects should be analyzed. This is very expensive but not necessarily productive.

It’s actually not quite that rare. In fact, it’s about twice as common as cited.

But regardless, the fact is that if the probability of brain cancer were increased by using a cell phone, it would be easy to detect if that probability increase were large. In other words, if it increased the risk from, 22 per 100,000 people to 23 per 100,000 people, that would be very hard to find and a massive sample would be needed. On the other hand, if it increased it from 22 per 100,000 people to 100 per 100,000 people, that would be easy to detect and would stand out from the statistical noise in even a modest study.

Therefore, what we can say from these studies, without doubt, is that while it is impossible to rule out the possibility that there is an increased risk, it must be vanishingly small, if it does exist, because otherwise it would have been easily detected.

As shown by the experiences with INTERPHONE and Danish Cohort, large amounts of money (tens of millions of Euros) and ample amounts of time (over 10 years) were used and no reliable answers received.

No, we have reliable answers. They’re just not the ones you want.

In the current situation, with the above presented experience, should the epidemiology be the first kind of studies to use our scarce research resources? Epidemiology is very expensive and takes a very long time to get results. Any flaw in the study design sets us back by ten or more years.

Well I agree in so much as there’s no point in throwing more money at this. We have plenty of data. The jury is not out. The questions have been answered. It’s time to consider spending money on things we don’t know.

Would we be we better off using the available funding for the human studies examining acute effects of cell phone radiation on physiology? This would, of course, include studies of the known molecular events leading to initiation and development of cancer. We still do not know if cell phone radiation triggers any such events in living humans.

We’ve actually done that too.

And as far as molecular events that lead to initiation and development of cancer, those are not observed with microwaves. No mechanism by which that could happen has ever been discovered, despite more than a century of study of RF fields and electromagnetic radiation.

Performing physiological studies on volunteer will provide information whether any known carcinogenic events are triggered by cell phone radiation. Depending on the result, we could act immediately by imposing preventive measures based on scientific evidence.

Yes, we have done that. We’ve done it on humans. We’ve done it on animals. We’ve done it on live tissue cultures. We’ve done it on chemical systems that mimic what goes on in cells.

To provide such information, epidemiology will still need tens of years before it is able to perform effective studies, assuming that studies will be designed without any major flaws. Volunteer studies examining physiology and pro-carcinogenetic events would provide information much faster.

It’s been done. At some point it becomes time to give up on the existence of something which has been studied for so long and has not been determined to exist.

In this time of scarce resources, we need to make choices how to obtain, most reliably and expeditiously, information about the possible effect of cell phone radiation on brain cancer.

Based on the experience of the last 10-15 years, epidemiology does not seem to be the method of choice.

Well, compared to an assclown with an ax to grind and a desire to be in the newspaper, it actually does pretty well.

I love how she says she didn’t know the age of the anchor woman’s daughter and therefore couldn’t know if she had a boyfriend.   The whole damn point of being a psychic is you’re supposed to know stuff without being given all the information necessary to figure it out.   If you know a person’s daughter is seventeen, for example, it’s not a long shot to guess she either has a boyfriend or has some kind of romantic interests.   If she’s six, you can probably guess she does not.    It’s so ridiculous to think a real “psychic” would need to be primed with the information to know this.

The best part is the other news anchor who actually takes her to task, pointing out that she didn’t guess the name of the woman’s daughter but only guessed J or an M for someone relating to the woman.   It’s very common for a psychic to claim success for something they didn’t get outright but were lead to.  It’s also rare to get a news personality who will take them to task for this.  I wonder why she wants to do his reading off camera?

Via the Mail and Guardian:

Obama rescues the Grand Canyon

Barack Obama took a big step towards preserving one of the world’s natural wonders on Monday, banning uranium mining on 400 000 hectares of land around the Grand Canyon.

The move, announced by the interior secretary, Ken Salazar, at a film screening in Washington DC, bans new mining claims around the canyon for the next 20 years. The area is rich in uranium deposits.

“A withdrawal is the right approach for this priceless American landscape,” Salazar said. “People from all over the country and around the world come to visit the Grand Canyon. Numerous American Indian tribes regard this magnificent icon as a sacred place and millions of people in the Colorado river basin depend on the river.”

Environmental groups said the move, which was opposed by the mining industry and some Republicans, would secure the American president’s environmental legacy.

The measure does not affect about 3 200 existing mining claims around the canyon, however. The administration said there would be continued development of 11 uranium mines.

Conservation groups said Obama had shown political courage in going ahead with the ban in the face of opposition. “Despite significant pressure, the president did not settle for a halfway measure,” said Jane Danowitz of the Pew Environment Group. In the final years of the George Bush presidency, when uranium prices were rising worldwide, mining companies filed thousands of claims in northern Arizona on lands near the Grand Canyon.

They also proposed reopening old mines adjacent to the canyon.

Salazar ordered a temporary halt to claims in 2009 after Obama came to office. Government officials proposed the 20-year ban in October last year, after an environmental review calling for the preservation of an “iconic landscape”.

The reality is that the Grand Canyon was never actually in any danger of being torn up for mining. That’s because the iconic expanse of canyon of eroded sandstone and river bed is located within the Grand Canyon National Park. It might depend a little on how you define the beginning and end of the canyon, but in general, the expansive “grand” part is all within the national park. Because it is within a national park, there can be no mining claims. The area is permanently and unquestionably protected and the only development and construction allowed is limited infrastructure for the park itself. (things like visitors centers, hiking trails and such.)

The park is enormous. It’s 1,902 sq mi or 4,927 sq km. It includes the canyon itself and much of the surrounding area. It was established as a National Monument in 1906 and has enjoyed the protection from commercial development of a US national park since 1919. There is absolutely no way that any part of that massive area will be mined for uranium or anything else.

The park is in Arizona, in a relatively sparsely inhabited region. Much of the area around the national park is federally administered land. As such, claims can be staked for mineral recovery. It’s not actually in the park and it’s certainly not in the canyon. It’s many miles away, but in the general region of the Grand Canyon. More than two thousand potential mining sites have been staked, many for uranium, as uranium can be found in the sandstone of the area. This is normal. Mining companies can, depending on the circumstances, claim or lease federal land for mineral recovery.

In 2009, it was proposed that a massive area that is only remotely close to the Grand Canyon be closed to mining. Now that decision has been extended, at least for the next twenty years. Vague environmental concerns are cited as the reason. There are already some long standing hard rock mines in the area, which apparently will still be allowed to operate.

I have to admit that I don’t actually have any expertise on this area or the eco-systems or whether it’s so unique or amazing as to make it worthy of complete protection from mining and development.   However, it should be made clear that regardless of the validity of this decision, this is not the Grand Canyon and the Grand Canyon was never in danger of being destroyed by mines.

But uh oh… it seems nuclear plant operators may have surfed the net

Via CNN:

NRC: Nuclear technicians surfed web on the job

Nine technicians responsible for monitoring operations at a Louisiana nuclear power plant spent on-duty time surfing the Internet — visiting websites that included news, sports, fishing and retirement information — jeopardizing the safety of the plant, federal regulators say.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission disclosed the web-surfing activities Monday in a letter that proposes a $140,000 fine against the River Bend nuclear power station, 24 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.

No pornography sites were accessed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. And importantly, the NRC said, the computer use did not present an avenue for hackers to gain access to reactor control systems, a modern-day fear at industrial plants.

But the NRC said the web-surfing control room operators were directly responsible for monitoring the reactor and other plant systems, and that their actions violated plant procedures requiring operators to remain attentive and focused on their work.

According to an NRC investigation, nine operators “deliberately violated” the safety procedures by surfing the web between January and April of 2010. Three of the nine did so with such frequency and duration that they are being issued “severity level three enforcement violations.” (Severity level one represents the greatest significant violation and severity level four is the lowest.) The remaining six operators will receive severity level four violations.

The operators were not named by the NRC.

An NRC spokesman said the proposed fine for web surfing is the only such action for web surfing in memory, and may be the only such action in the history of the agency.

In a notice to Entergy Operations Inc., operators of the River Bend Station, the NRC said that it appears that operators “remained attentive to reactor operations, indications, and alarms” while surfing the Internet.

“However, because most of the operators involved knew and understood” the prohibitions on Internet access, they exhibited “deliberate misconduct” and engaged in “hundreds of instances” of accessing the Internet from the “at-the-controls” area of the control room.

Score one for ridiculously reporting.

No, there was never a safety risk. While I don’t know exactly what the operators were assigned to do or how the systems operated here, all indications are that they were simply passing some time by surfing the net when they didn’t have any need to directly interact with the controls. Nuclear reactors certainly do not require continuous second by second human input nor do they need to have a reactor operator spending hours blankly staring at the dials that usually don’t change. Granted, all indicators are checked frequently, as they should be, but that was never interrupted.

It seems that in this case the operators were doing something many of us have: using company computers with internet access for personal surfing. Companies don’t like this, of course, because it tends to encourage employees to spend their time non-productively. If not for the internet, the operators might be more prone to doing something more useful for the company during the time they spend babysitting the control room. It’s like anything else, where the operator is primarily there for contingencies or if problems arise.

Still, this really just isn’t a news story. The workers never left their posts and they were ready to respond to any incident. That’s the important thing. I guess in the future they’ll have to go back to old fashioned paper crossword puzzles and magazines.

I was disappointed by how apologetic the article was, but it still made an important point about where our food actually comes from.   Indeed, the “ideals” that the Times refers to never really were embodied by the organic farming movement in any meaningful way.   The entire idea really comes down to a philosophy that certain things are bad simply because they are man-made, while others are acceptable.   There’s no science to it at all and there never was.

Via the New York Times:

Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals

TODOS SANTOS, Mexico — Clamshell containers on supermarket shelves in the United States may depict verdant fields, tangles of vines and ruby red tomatoes. But at this time of year, the tomatoes, peppers and basil certified as organic by the Agriculture Department often hail from the Mexican desert, and are nurtured with intensive irrigation.

Growers here on the Baja Peninsula, the epicenter of Mexico’s thriving new organic export sector, describe their toil amid the cactuses as “planting the beach.”

Del Cabo Cooperative, a supplier here for Trader Joe’s and Fairway, is sending more than seven and a half tons of tomatoes and basil every day to the United States by truck and plane to sate the American demand for organic produce year-round.

But even as more Americans buy foods with the organic label, the products are increasingly removed from the traditional organic ideal: produce that is not only free of chemicals and pesticides but also grown locally on small farms in a way that protects the environment.

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops. And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming.

From now until spring, farms from Mexico to Chile to Argentina that grow organic food for the United States market are enjoying their busiest season.

“People are now buying from a global commodity market, and they have to be skeptical even when the label says ‘organic’ — that doesn’t tell people all they need to know,” said Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He said some large farms that have qualified as organic employed environmentally damaging practices, like planting only one crop, which is bad for soil health, or overtaxing local freshwater supplies.

Many growers and even environmental groups in Mexico defend the export-driven organic farming, even as they acknowledge that more than a third of the aquifers in southern Baja are categorized as overexploited by the Mexican water authority. With sophisticated irrigation systems and shade houses, they say, farmers are becoming more skilled at conserving water. They are focusing new farms in “microclimates” near underexploited aquifers, such as in the shadow of a mountain, said Fernando Frías, a water specialist with the environmental group Pronatura Noroeste.

They also point out that the organic business has transformed what was once a poor area of subsistence farms and where even the low-paying jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants in nearby Cabo San Lucas have become scarcer during the recession.

To carry the Agriculture Department’s organic label on their produce, farms in the United States and abroad must comply with a long list of standards that prohibit the use of synthetic fertilizers, hormones and pesticides, for example. But the checklist makes few specific demands for what would broadly be called environmental sustainability, even though the 1990 law that created the standards was intended to promote ecological balance and biodiversity as well as soil and water health.

Lets stop and consider the greater context here: there are eight billion people in the world. That’s a lot of people to feed. Thankfully, we can feed them all. The fact that not everyone gets enough food is not due to a lack of capacity to produce it but more because of localized socioeconomic and political issues in getting it to those who need it. We grow enough food in the modern world to feed everyone. Not only that, we do it at a very reasonable cost, which results in people generally not having to spend the majority of their income just to get their daily nutritional needs filled.

For example, if you’re in the United States, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. If you work one hour a day at the minimum, you can make enough money to keep yourself reasonably well fed. And not only that, but in first world countries, the average citizen can afford to buy things that are imported out of season. Better yet, our food rarely carries serious pathogens and when it does, it gets recalled rapidly. We don’t suffer from periodic famines. The worst thing most of us will ever suffer through is a regional drought or frost driving the cost of a particular type of produce up for a few weeks.

Sure, we take all this for granted, but considering what it has been like for most of human history, the fact that you can reliably go buy a meal for a few dollars, that it will be free of pathogens and that it’s always available and not subject to periodic shortages is pretty damn impressive.

We did not get to this point by forcing all foods to be grown in small mom and pop farms.   Such local food is great when you want something that’s as fresh as you can get and happens to be in season, but make no mistake, it’s a luxury.   We could never feed all of society by such small operations and doing so would not have any real ecological advantages.   All human activity will have some impact on the local ecology, and agriculture is no different.   That does not mean the impact has to be unacceptably large.   However, the best way to keep that impact to a minimum is by efficiently farming the land, using the most modern practices and technology available.

“Organic food” is not about small, local mom and pop farms.   Most people seem to think that if food is “organic” it means that a friendly old man in overalls grew it while chewing on a blade of grass and whistling a tune about how he loves the land.   It’s not.   Farming is a business like any other business and farmers will use the tools they have at their disposal to produce as much as they can with as few resources as possible.  The farms are located in the most favorable areas.  That means that fruit and vegetable farms are often located in tropical areas where they can provide fresh product to market all year long.

On large farms, efficiency is very important and great efforts are taken to get as much product from the given area as possible.  They’re run and managed like the industrial-scale operations they are.   Many, but not all, of these large farms are owned by families.  Thanks to modern management and farming methods, these farms are productive enough to make their owners very comfortable financially.

It is much harder for anyone to support themselves on a small farm.  Many of the smallest local farms are not full time operations.  The owners may have other jobs and keep the farm as a “hobby farm.“  Those which do work small farms full time may have to concentrate on a specialized sector in order to remain commercially viable.  Some manage to make small farms economically viable by operating them as a specialty product provider, such as a winery a nursery for ornamental plants.  Others make money by having a store that provides other products.  A few may capitalize on Halloween hayrides or pick-your-own events.

There’s nothing wrong with these small farms that cater directly to consumers looking for the novelty or nostalgia of such products, and many do provide excellent fresh products and make great pies.  Yet they may give some the wrong impression of what farming really is.  They are not the food producers that provide the staples which keep the world fed.

Those who do work small, low-production, low-income farms as their primary means of getting by are subsistence farmers.   Thankfully this practice has largely vanished from industrialized nations, yet it remains common in many parts of the world.

When a farm decides to go “organic,” they are simply giving up some of the tools at their disposal to grow foods.   Many types of fertilizer suddenly become forbidden.  Tractors, tilling and irrigation are generally not affected, but the types of crops, fertilizer and insect control uses are.  In some cases, the organic farmer will be required to buy materials that are chemically identical to forbidden compounds simply because they come from a certified source that is regarded as “natural.”

Since some of the tools are now taken away it becomes harder to grow food reliably and at high capacities.  Some other commodities become more important.   If fertilizer is less concentrated, more water may be needed to get the nutrients to the roots.   If more of a crop is lost to pests, larger areas must be planted for the same yield.  If crops yield fewer fruit per plant, more plants are needed.  Not using one tool means all the others will tend to be more taxed.  It may require more labor, more energy, more land and more water.   It costs more too.   Farmers don’t do this because they’re stupid, of course.  They do it because they know that consumers are stupid and will pay a premium for this stuff.

Before buying some of that overpriced organic food, stop and think about the bigger picture.  Do you really think Old McDonald is the one who feeds the world?   Farming is an industry and if you want everyone to be fed, you wouldn’t want it any other way.   Modern society requires that most people work in fields other than agriculture.  We need farmers, but we also need doctors and dentists and mechanics and engineers.   Trying to force society back to the days when a farm fed only a few local families is not going to help the environment or our food supply.

A number of studies have been conducted on the use of various SSRI drugs during various stages of pregnancy and breast feeding. The majority of the studies done have not found any harmful effects of the use of SSRI’s on developing fetuses or infants who breastfeed. While these drugs do pass through the placenta, the concentration of exposure is at least two thirds less for the developing fetus than for the mother.

However, one study, done in 2007, did find a slight increase in a few birth defects in mothers who received relatively high doses of certain SSRI medications during the first trimester of their pregnancy. The study did not find any significant increase in overall odds of most birth defects, but did find an increase in a few birth defects, such as certain cardiac defects. Still, the total risk remains tiny with or without SSRI’s, and while the increase was greater than the statistical error of the study, confounding factors cannot be ruled out, such as the possibility that depressed mothers might have less healthy babies for a variety of reasons.

You can read the entire study here.

The reception of the study in the medical community was generally more one of reassurance than concern. While it indicated that there was at least a possibility that a few narrow birth defects might possibly be associated with SSRI’s, the overall risk is very low. Interestingly, the study did not find that these risks increased for all types of SSRI drugs. Zoloft and Paxil did appear to produce slight increases in some birth defects, but Prozac, Lexapro and other antidepressants did not produce any detectable increase in any birth defects.

Given that the risks are not completely proven and appear to be extremely low, the Mayo Clinic says the following about the use of antidepressants during pregnancy:

Overall, the risk of birth defects and other problems for babies of mothers who take antidepressants during pregnancy is low. Still, few medications have been proved safe without question during pregnancy and some types of antidepressants have been associated with health problems in babies.

It should also be noted that these slight increases in risk have been speculated about since before the 2007 study, and most women who received the drugs during pregnancy would have been told (or should have been told) by their doctor that the possibility existed that there could be a small increase in some birth defects.

Now enter the lawyers. Lets say, you happen to have had a child with a common and minor birth defect, like a cleft lip or a club foot, both of which are fairly common and correctable. You might have just put your child’s foot in a brace or taken them for minor plastic surgery and then thought nothing of it. Well, if you happen to have been taking an anti-depressent, there are lawyers out there who want to be sure you don’t just go on with your life without giving them a crack at the drug companies. And they’re paying for advertising to make sure you know.

Also, to be clear: Most of the conditions listed in the above ad have never been associated with Paxil or Zoloft, and it’s pure speculation that they would have any effect on those conditions simply because they MAY have effects on other conditions. Also, most of the drugs listed have, despite extensive study, never been linked to ANY birth defect. They are in the same class as the drugs Paxil and Zoloft, but it is pure speculation to think that because they have a similar mechanism of action that they MIGHT have an effect, even despite the fact that all studies to date have shown they do not and that the drugs that they are related to have not been linked to the conditions listed.

Worse still, there are several ads now running (sorry I could not find a video) that are saying the same thing about autistic children, despite there being not a shred of evidence that SSRI’s during pregnancy would have an impact on the probability of a child developing autism. It seems to be some kind of assumption that if some do possibly increase the risk of some birth defects then they must all cause autism.

Go figure…

Sorry, to say “I hate lawyers” is a rather rash and harsh statement, but this stuff really makes me sick.

Now there has been a turn toward trying to blockade ports.   I’m not sure what the reasoning is.  Perhaps it’s a hatred of imports or a belief that blocking trade will somehow undermine the big businesses.  Regardless of their goals, it seems that some of the tactics have gone far beyond just getting in the way to the point of absolutely astounding danger.

Here is an amazing example of how bad it has gotten.

Faith in humanity? Okay, that’s fine. I really don’t think that any train driver wants to blow through a crowd or run over a toddler. I’ll even go so far as to say that the majority of the evil corporate executives at a railroad or transportation company would be horrified by the idea of a young child being torn apart under the wheels of a massive locomotive. I’m sure that the train driver, upon realizing that there is a child in the track will do everything possible to avoid running them over, which, unfortunately, is not much.

Perhaps this is just evidence that the educational system is failing, because in addition to humanity, there are some things you should always count on because they always work.

Inertia – It’s the property of an object to resist any change in its motion. It’s directly proportional to mass. In other words, heavy objects are more difficult to get moving that light objects. Makes sense, right? Well, conversely, once you get them moving, they’re also hard to stop.

Ever try pushing a car because it wouldn’t start? It’s hard to get it going but once you do it’s also hard to stop, which is why you need someone inside it to push the brake when it needs to. A two ton car has too much inertia for a human to easily stop it, even when it’s moving quite slow.

Trains have a lot more. A locomotive can weigh over one hundred tons. Fully loaded, each of the additional cars weighs anywhere from fifty to one hundred or more tons. So even a small freight train weighs thousands of tons. The ones that are used for transporting containers to and from ports are not small, however, and weigh a real real lot. They have a lot of inertia. When they get going, even at slow speed, it’s not easy to stop them.

Friction – It’s the property of two solid surfaces to resist motion against each other.  With wheels, it’s often considered to be synonymous with traction, the ability of the wheels to “grip” a surface and provide control and acceleration or stopping ability.   When you hit the brakes in a car, it’s the friction of a surface that keeps the car from just sliding away forever.

Not all surfaces have the same friction.  You will notice this if you are driving in different conditions.   Dry asphalt against rubber has quite a lot of friction, so if you hit the brakes on an asphalt road, you’ll stop pretty fast.   You may skid a bit, but it won’t be that much because the road provides plenty of friction against your wheels.   Now if you do the same on a wet road, which has less friction, you’re going to skid a lot farther.  Do it on an icy road and you’ll skid further still.  If you hit your brakes on a patch of smooth ice you will keep going almost like you didn’t hit them at all, although your car may also spin out.   One thing that will not happen on ice is a nice sudden stop, because there’s not enough friction.

You know what else doesn’t have a lot of friction?   Smooth steel rails against steel wheels.

And this is why, regardless of the humanity of a train driver, the train is not going to stop unless it has a good mile or so of warning that you’ve put your kid on the track.  It will keep going and kill you and your child.

For those interested in what actually happened: The original story can be read here. While it’s pretty clear from the video that the idiots were in the track right in front of a train, there are no reports of any deaths. Either the train was already coming to a stop and was light enough to not kill them all, or they realized it was not going to stop before it ran them over. Note that they are on the tracks but not chained to the tracks.

Just the same, this is one of the worst parents I have ever seen. It makes not vaccinating your children seem rather mild.

Hitchens was an illuminating, if controversial force who contributed much to the world, especially in the areas of ethical and religious debate.   Despite his deteriorating health, he managed to continue his irreverent and pointed public commentary almost to the very end.

I first met Christopher Hitchens at Tam-5.  Sadly I never got a picture with him, but at least I shook his hand.  He was not able to make the next two Tam’s for various reasons and then he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which prevented him from attending many more conferences.

I’m sorry I did not get to know him better, though many of my close friends did.   We appreciate his contributions enormously and will miss him.

For those involved in skepticism, secularism and related areas, this is a sad day.

Some news stories you really can’t make up.   Perhaps it’s a little bit off color to chuckle at a story about someone who is very likely mentally ill, but in some cases it’s hard not to.

For that matter, I suppose we could also at least consider that this might be true.

Apparently, a man from the future has come back to the present day (or so he says) to stop the LHC from discovering the Higgs boson, which would lead to some as yet unknown source of limitless energy for humanity.  While this sounds like a good thing, he explained that this ultimately was the undoing of society and therefore he was there to stop it.   Tragically, he made the mistake of forgetting to fill the tanks on his time machine with whatever fuel it uses, and it now seems he might be trapped in the present, which to him, is the past.

Via Cnet:

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment’s vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his ‘time machine power unit’, a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

This isn’t the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so “abhorrent” that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

Professor Brian Cox, a CERN physicist and full-time rock’n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. “Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn’t mention bloody black holes.”

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Unfortunately Mr. Cole apparently did not take into consideration some important factors that really all time travelers should consider.

1. Always bring enough fuel. (Although I thought he was from a future of limitless energy.. oh well). In fact, you should bring more fuel than you think you’ll need, because you never know when you’ll make a wrong turn or you’ll have to go back to the past yet again, because for all you know, Biff Tannen might have stolen the sports almanac and stopped your parents from falling in love at the dance, and then what are you to do? You can’t just rely on an opportune bolt of lightning, because lightning doesn’t even provide a huge amount of energy, contrary to popular belief.

Remember to bring both kinds of fuel that you will need. Sure, the time circuits may be electric, but what about the internal combustion engine? That runs on regular unleaded and always has. You can’t always find that.

Also keep in mind that 1.21 gigawatts is not actually an amount of energy at all.  It’s an amount of power, which means a reasonably large capacitor bank can provide it, but only for a brief period of time.   If you need it for longer, it’s still not impossibly high.  Any large power plant should be able to output it.    I never really figured out the whole “1.21 gigawatt” thing, but the best I can think of is it might be the amount of power continuously needed to travel a given amount of time.   For example, time traveling a year means you need 1.21 gigawatts times one year for the total energy.   That would seem to work, but then again, a lightning bolt would still never be enough.

So in any case, choose your fuel well and bring plenty of it.   You don’t want to rely on lightning or hijacked locomotives.

2. To be perfectly honest, don’t expect to return to the future you left and have it look anything like you expected or have a place for you. If you change anything, even slightly, those changes will propagate. If that happens your great great grandparents may not meet or may not marry and procreate. And just having your parents meet is not good enough. You can’t just set them back up if you mess up their meeting. Everything has to be identical, which it never will be. If they mate at a slightly different time or if the temperature is different by a fraction of a degree or anything like that, a different sperm will fertilize the egg and the resulting offspring won’t be you. This goes for all generations all the way back to where you have traveled.

So in all likelihood, just stepping into the past will result in a different time stream that you will return to in which you never existed.   You could go back to 1890, for example, and just by swatting a fly, you end up stopping World War I and World War II from happening.  That might seem like a good idea, until you realize that it prevents a guy from dying who then goes on to marry your grandmother, thus avoiding the marriage of her and your grandfather and now you don’t exist.

Or even if you did exist, you will find that you had not traveled back in time because you had no reason to, thus when you return, you will find yourself and have a real identity crisis.

You might be better off not going back but sending some kind of terminator unit.   The terminator could be made of living tissue around a metallic framework or out of some kind of shape-shifting metal.  It’s up to you.   The only problem is it probably won’t change your present because it gets inserted into an alternate reality.   Really, you just can’t win at this.

3.   You have all the time in the world.   Plan well.   Don’t just show up at the LHC with no idea how to stop it.  Bring weapons or something.  Flesh out a response plan and run it by a couple of your friends for input.  Consider what could go wrong.  Take the tools you might need.  Brush up on your period lingo and customs in case you had to blend in.   Just be sure not to mess up.

You only get one shot at this… well, actually, I suppose you can do it as many times as you want, but then you really start to make things messy and complicated.  You can encounter yourself on one of your aborted missions, for example.   It’s just best to avoid such problems.

4.  Consider *when* you want to go back to.   Is this really the best time?  Why wait until the LHC is constructed and operational?   You can go back a little further and it might be easier to stop it during construction.  Perhaps you could somehow disrupt the funding for it or sabotage the construction.  OR, you could try to stop an earlier accelerator from being built, which would stop the discoveries that would lead to the creation of the LHC.

5.  Remember there are alternate possibilities.  Don’t focus too much on one issue when it will likely spawn others.  Sure, you could shut down the LHC, but what will that do?  Some other accelerator will eventually be built and make the horrible discovery.  You need to think big and stop all particle physics.

6.  If you are going to resort to telling people not to do it, make sure you are believable.   It’s not a terribly bad plan to just be honest and tell the world that you are from the future and stopping a horrible mistake.   If you can get the governments of the world to listen, that might be the best way of actually stopping the project, but you really need to make it clear you are from the future, so bring some future stuff to show everyone.   Since you will be coming from the future, you’ll be able to choose the most opportune time to make a big splash.  You might want to pick a time when the news cycle is slow and when you can grab some media attention to warn the world before the government tries to stop you.

Of course, as long as you’re well prepared, the government shouldn’t be a problem.   They’ll have no way of stopping you with the crazy ray guns and telliportation devices you’ll have on you, so be sure to be well equipped to prove you’re from the future and that you are serious.

7.   Why not mix business with personal time travel?   We don’t get many visitors from the future, so it’s obviously fairly expensive or difficult to do, so use the trip wisely.   Once you’ve stopped the LHC, why not invest some money in a stock that you know is going through the roof or at least put it in an interest-bearing account.   Stop by some of the scenes of the past before they’re gone and enjoy the quaintness of 21st century culture.   Maybe grab a few interesting photos, like giving the future president of the world a wedgie while he’s still eight years old.   Now that’d be something cool to show your friends!

8.  Consider doing something nice.   After all, you’re messing up the time stream as is, so you may as well stop 9/11 or warn the Japanese about the 2011 earthquake or the Indian Ocean region about the 2004 tsunami.   At the very least look up some people who died of cancer and tell them they have it while it’s still treatable.

You don’t have to do this, but since you’re messing up the time stream, it just seems like you’d be a dick not to.

It could also help with your image, which might be hurt pretty badly if you happen to do something like destroy the LHC.   If you destroy the LHC, you’ll go down in history as the guy who destroyed the LHC, and when you return to your day and age they might not think you’re a hero, because they won’t be aware of the problems the LHC caused.

On the other hand, if you evacuate the Indian coast before the Tsunami and then destroy the LHC, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be remembered well just the same.