GE pays employees to start smoking!

Well, that wasn't quite their idea. But researchers did pay a bunch of GE employees $750 to stop smoking. Which means, in effect, that they were paid $750 to start smoking, since nonsmokers never had the opportunity to quit and earn the cash.

Apparently GE is going to start offering this to employees in 2010. I swear, the second I thought such an offer might be in the works, I'd start smoking in order to quit and get the money. Mostly as a demonstration of the power of perverse incentives.

After that, I'd start a bank and let it fail so I could get my package stimulated.

Dream Job

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Cabin boy on an 1800s whaling ship!

Bleach Soup

Yesterday we undertook a shock chlorination of the water system. For people with wells, it's not such a big deal, but tanks complicate the situation considerably. Our water is probably OK without it, but the spring is completely unprotected, and I wanted to make 100% sure that when the health inspector comes to test the water it comes out clean. Otherwise, he could totally shut down our operation.

There were a whole bunch of things that could go wrong. We had to avoid wasting excessive amounts of water, poisoning the stream (or our septic tank), ruining the carbon filter, or - worst of all - ending up with no drinkable water at all. I had a very careful checklist, and it turned out to be a fairly elaborate procedure with little room for error. We finally managed to get the whole system chlorinated, the potable tank emptied, and everything set up so that the lines to and within the house could disinfect overnight while the tank refilled with sterilized water.

One sticky point was that the potable water only empties down to about 5% of its capacity, so I didn't know how to get all the chlorine out after the treatment. However, John turned up a sump pump that was able to bring it to a nearly empty state. So we only had to chlorinate about 200 gallons of water, with just 150 gallons dumped into the ditch - less than a liter of bleach overall. I'm sure a few frogs bit the dust but that's about all.

Another thing that held it up was that in some of my initial tests, our chlorine test strips have turned out to be 10x too sensitive. 10 PPM registers at 100 PPM on the strip. I triple-checked all the calculations and that was the only thing I could conclude. Either that, or we somehow got a bottle of super-bleach with 50% chlorine, which is a chemical impossibility. I will have to ask the test strip manufacturer about this, since it's obviously a health hazard to think you have enough bleach when you don't.

A little bleach goes a long way! Bleach is at about 5% chlorine, or 50,000 PPM, while shock chlorination happens at 200, and anything over 10 PPM is completely undrinkable. (That's even too high for swimming pools.) I wanted to get the residual down to at most 1 after it was all over.

Everything went flawlessly. Almost. In the morning, I ran all the faucets until the strips showed nothing, and was pleased to find we had nice, fresh, chlorine-free water again.

So I go to make lunch - duck and rice soup, using some nice duck leg confit I'd made earlier. But something was very, very, very wrong. Then it hit me - d'oh! I'd overlooked the flushing of the whole commercial kitchen, and all the lines were still full of bleach! Wow, that was an awful experience. One tiny little sip of the broth, and I can't even get the taste out of my mouth with whiskey. Bleach plus organics makes a huge number of horribly carcinogenic compounds, but I don't think I tasted enough to actually cause a problem. Hopefully. I can't believe that a lifetime of weakly-chlorinated water isn't already worse than a half a teaspoon of bleach soup.

Amazing how even the most careful plans can fuck up just when you least expect it.

Happy Darwin Day

Darwin's 200th. Yay! The series of articles about him in science magazines has been extremely interesting - lots of things that I didn't know.

It's a great day to remind people, also, of why we believe in evolution. For the most part, it's because we've been told to - belief in evolution is almost entirely a matter of deference to the authority of the scientific establishment. I would wager that not one of you could produce primary evidence that demonstrates that evolution by natural selection actually happened. Sure, you can point to journal articles, and pictures in books. Have you personally seen the hip-bones of a whale? Have you personally performed phylogenetic analysis on DNA sequences? Even if you did - as I have - can you be sure that belief in evolution did not entail the contents of the sequences themselves? Ascertainment bias creeps in everywhere! How do you know it's not all a big house of cards? The answer is that you don't: you merely trust that these things are true, and you do so because other people say they are.

It is fortunate that most people I know defer to the authority of science. Because, as authorities go, it's really quite good, and well worth supporting. Deference to science has supported our household very well. Like everyone else, we believe whatever we are rewarded for believing, and the rewards for believing in modern biology are rich indeed. But I don't make the mistake of attributing this belief to "intelligence" or "rationality". That's just a gloss people put over their faith in order to make it seem more respectable. Belief in evolution is fundamentally a political decision, and the reason it is political rather than rational is because we encounter it not through interaction with the natural world, but through the words of other people.

Others have a very different experience with science; they are alienated, and sometimes oppressed by it. The church, on the other hand, rewards some people quite lavishly for their deference to scripture. I know several people who have been literally pulled out of the gutter by fundamentalist faiths. This makes me shudder, to be sure, but I can't deny that the church has a hell of a lot more authority in their lives than some white-suited geek that spouts unintelligible jargon at them. How could it be otherwise?

The past does not exist. It is gone. It has no more claim to reality than the future. However, we can construct models of the past that have enough fidelity to allow us to not only suspend disbelief, but to influence events in the future in ways that we find agreeable.

When postmodernists moan that science is "just a social construction", I can't argue with that, but I do wonder about the meaning of the ever-present word "just". That's like saying your house is "just" the work of a carpenter - as if you expect your home to be some sort of natural object that springs out of the ground on its own. Pity that it isn't, because then it would be something you could take for granted, something you wouldn't have to worry about. Something unimportant. Once you realize that it's constructed, you realize that it requires maintenance and repair, that what is constructed is easily un-constructed and rendered useless. Your home, by being a construction, must be defended if it's to keep the rain off your head.

So it is with science. We justify belief in science because we can see that multiple lines of evidence point to consistent conclusions. This "evidence" doesn't consist of observations of the natural world, but rather, it's overwhelmingly built from observations of copies of texts we believe were written by people who observed the natural world, and who in turn serve as the subjects of copies of other things written by the people who observe the people observing the natural world. Sometimes, we can use these texts to accomplish interesting things ourselves, and when they work as planned (which any science student knows is not always the case), we are reassured that this system of knowledge that holds the world at such a distance is more than just words on a page.

Consider something a little less controversial: the atom. We don't just believe that atoms exist because we observe stoichiometric relations in chemistry, or because we can run electricity through gases and predict the color with which they will glow. We believe in atoms because a single theory yields precise predictions about multiple unrelated results in different situations. [And we must include in this theory the whole system of publication and peer review that brought it to us in the first place.] Atoms are considered "real" because this belief is parsimonious. And that parsimony is in no way diminished by a system of mutually interlocking theories that describe, among other things, the apparatus used to make the measurements that support the theory itself. Are atoms really "out there" in the way tables and chairs are? Maybe. Maybe not. But the theory is not a "house of cards" - it is a strong, solidly built house that has withstood everything that has been thrown at it. A well constructed house. There is no "just" about it; social construction is the whole point.

In thanking Darwin for the fine theory he has presented us with - a theory of the unseen past - we should thank him for being not just a good scientist, but for being an even better politician. And we should believe in evolution not because it is true in some objective sense, but because it is so useful for achieving the things we want to achieve, none of which can be accomplished outside of the social and political systems that created it. And finally, we should not casually dismiss the creationists, for one simple reason: There but for the grace of the angels go I.

Instead, we should respect creationism for being yet another socially-constructed paradigm in the multiverse of human rationality. Then we should crush it, and destroy its supporters, because insofar as our socially-constructed world of science can never be taken for granted, they are a threat to civilization itself.

The 30,000 kilogram gorilla

Wow, this is one of the most provocative things I've read in months. Not sure if I really believe it, but if it's true the implications are astonishing. I can't find the text of the essay on teh intarwebs, but it's so interesting as to be worth typing it all in by hand. From an essay by Melanie Moses in the Feb. 5 Nature:

Applying [the Metabolic Theory of Ecology] to human social systems sheds light on the well known but little understood decline in fertility rates that occurs with economic development. As societies consume more energy, people become wealthier but also have fewer children. Today that energy primarily takes the form of fossil fuels. The average human uses up only about 100 watts from eating food, consistent with predictions based on body size. But in North America, each person uses an additional 10,000 watts from oil, gas, coal, and a smattering of renewable sources, all of which are delivered through expansive, expensive infrastructure networks.

The decline in fertility rates with economic growth, called the demographic transition, has puzzled human life history theorists for decades: that the people with the most resources have the fewest offspring apparently contradicts basic Darwinian expectations, particularly as the gain in fitness resulting from improved offspring survival is far too small to compensate for the drop in birth rates. But MTE shows that this pattern is not unusual. In fact, across contemporary nations, the decline in human birth rates with increased energy consumption is quantitatively identical to the decline in fertility rate with increased metabolism in other mammals. Put another way, North Americans consume energy at a rate sufficient to sustain a 30,000 kilogram primate, and have offspring at the very slow rate predicted for a beast of this size.

The essay goes on to suggest a new approach to finding our way out of the energy-hungry lifestyle we are trapped in, which is surely dooming the planet to destruction. The author recognizes something that has been obvious to me for a long time - that encouraging personal conservation is an utter waste of time, since the forces that lead people to consume lots of energy are far stronger than any individual will to conserve. But it's not like anyone else has come up with anything better. Her ideas on network-centered analysis may be wrong, but they represent a new way of thinking about the problem that at least gives me a glimmer of hope.