Science, Technology & Health: January 2008 Archives

From various sources is a plan by Robert Zubrin to break the OPEC cartel for $100 per car.

What is needed is for the Congress to pass a law requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled - able to run on any combination of alcohol or gasoline fuel. Such cars are existing technology - in fact about 24 different models of flex-fuel cars were produced by the Detroit Big Three in 2007, and they only cost about $100 more than the same car in a gasoline-only version. But, since alcohol fuel pumps (such as E85, a fuel mix that is 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline) are nearly as rare as unicorns, flex-fuel cars only command about 3 percent of the new-car market.

The reason E85 pumps are so rare is that gas station owners don't want to dedicate one of their pumps to a kind of fuel that only a few percent of the cars can use. If we had a flex-fuel requirement, however, then within three years of enactment there would be 50 million cars on the road capable of running on high-alcohol fuels. Under those conditions, E85 and M50 (a 50 percent methanol, 50 percent gasoline fuel mix; flex-fuel cars can use any alcohol, including methanol) pumps would start appearing everywhere.

But most important, this would not just be happening here. By requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled, we would be forcing all the foreign car manufacturers to switch their lines to flex-fuel as well, effectively making flex-fuel the international standard. So there would be hundreds of millions of cars worldwide capable of running on alcohol, forcing gasoline to compete everywhere against alcohol fuels that can be produced from numerous sources. This would effectively break the vertical monopoly that the oil cartel currently holds on the world's fuel supply and keep prices in the $50-a-barrel range, because that is where alcohol fuels become competitive.

I'm not in favor of government regulation to further social agendas, but this economic manipulation would be to enhance national security. Seems like a valid use of government power that both Lefties and Righties could support.

A British boy is cured after a decade of deafness when a cotton swab pops out of his ear.

Jerome Bartens was diagnosed as deaf in his right ear when he was just two-years-old.

Over the next nine years, he struggled to live a normal life as a young boy — but everything changed when he felt a sudden pop in his right ear while playing a game of pool with friends.

He put his finger in his ear and pulled out a tip of a cotton wool bud that had been wedged in his ear since he was a toddler.

"It was just incredible — his hearing returned to normal in an instant," Barten's dad said.

"I had always suspected Jerome had stuck something in his ear when he was little and that was causing the problem. But the doctors and hearing specialists said it was wax and he would probably grow out of it."

"I am amazed they didn't spot something as obvious as a cotton wool bud."

Don't be amazed! Miracle cures are just another benefit of the UK's socialized health care.

Another article on about plunging computer science education requirements from a couple of college professors who have witnessed the decline first-hand:

Let us propose the following principle: The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want. How it does it is not interesting! The result is a student who knows how to put a simple program together, but does not know how to program. A further pitfall of the early use of Java libraries and frameworks is that it is impossible for the student to develop a sense of the run-time cost of what is written because it is extremely hard to know what any method call will eventually execute. A lucid analysis of the problem is presented in [4].

We are seeing some backlash to this approach. For example, Bjarne Stroustrup reports from Texas A & M University that the industry is showing increasing unhappiness with the results of this approach. Specifically, he notes the following:

I have had a lot of complaints about that [the use of Java as a first programming language] from industry, specifically from AT&T, IBM, Intel, Bloomberg, NI, Microsoft, Lockheed-Martin, and more. [5]

He noted in a private discussion on this topic, reporting the following:

It [Texas A&M] did [teach Java as the first language]. Then I started teaching C++ to the electrical engineers and when the EE students started to out-program the CS students, the CS department switched to C++. [5]

Computer science needs to fork and create a "technical" branch X that fulfills the analogy:

electrician:electrical engineer::X::computer science

Rand Simberg agrees.

(HT: GeekPress.)

I'm not alone in thinking that the next decade will see an exponential increase in medical breakthroughs, and here's another potential: growing organs from stem cells.

SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.

The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein “skeleton” that created its shape was left.

Then the skeleton was seeded with live “progenitor” cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart. ...

The new technique was reported at the American Heart Association’s recent annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. “This is a proof of concept,” Taylor said. “Going forward, our goal is to use a patient’s stem cells to build a new heart.”

Like the last paragraph says, the researchers from the University of Minnesota think they will be able to grow organs from a patient's own stem cells -- yet another medical advance that won't require murdering babies for their embryonic stem cells.

Power and network companies often talk about the "last mile" in their distribution networks -- that is, the mile between a network substation and the customer's house. The last mile is the hardest to build, the most expensive to maintain, and the most important part of the network. Well, I think the "last mile" for internet video is the distance between the office chair and the couch. Internet video is exploding but it will be restricted to the tech-savvy until there's a simple, cheap, way to bring that video to the couch where people currently watch traditional television.

About a minute into the latest B-Cast by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV (whom we interviewed a few weeks ago on PJM Political), they casually mention that their previous show attracted about 400,000 views.

In and of itself, that's an impressive number for a newscast. (Any show on MSNBC would be considered a hit if it pulled those numbers.) But consider the extreme economy of scale going on here:

As of 2005, CNN in primetime attracted less than 700,000 daily viewers, but with a budget of zillions of dollars and a ton of real estate, technicians and on-air talent. In contrast, the B-Cast is, I believe, run out of an office in Pittsburgh by two people with one set, a couple of cameras, laptops for the on-air talent (in other words, Liz and Scott) to cue those cameras and YouTube clips, and I guess another computer or two to record the sum of all those parts and upload the show to Andrew Breitbart’s news aggregation site.

I know there are a lot of ways to do this already, but none of them are simple enough that I've bothered yet, and I'm hardly a technophobe.

(HT: Instapundit.)

WowWee's Rovio robot looks amazing. Here are more details, including an expected release data of Fall 2008. For $299 it looks like a steal.

Too bad my wife is scared of robots.

Bernardo sent me a link to some neat software from the Australian Center for Visual Technologies that can extract 3D models from video with some human assistance.

VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video—models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model. Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail.

As that sales pitch indicates, automated 3D model generation from video is very hard and doesn't work that well yet. By relying on a human operator to perform some of the edge recognition Video Trace is a great intermediate step towards full automation.

From the National Air Traffic Controllers Association FAQ we can see some interesting numbers.

On any given day, more than 87,000 flights are in the skies in the United States. Only one-third are commercial carriers, like American, United or Southwest. On an average day, air traffic controllers handle 28,537 commercial flights (major and regional airlines), 27,178 general aviation flights (private planes), 24,548 air taxi flights (planes for hire), 5,260 military flights and 2,148 air cargo flights (Federal Express, UPS, etc.). At any given moment, roughly 5,000 planes are in the skies above the United States. In one year, controllers handle an average of 64 million takeoffs and landings. ...

There are 14,305 air traffic controllers that work for the Federal Aviation Administration, according to FAA data (dated Aug. 2006).

Assuming the air traffic controllers don't work much overtime (unlikely) we can guess that 20% of the ATCs may be on-duty at any particular moment -- they work 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- so about 3,000. Does it really take 3,000 air traffic controllers to coordinate 5,000 flights?

I'm not a pilot, so am I missing something? Is our air traffic management system so inefficient that we need a controller for almost every flight?

One can only hope that Wal-Mart solves the "health care crisis" before November....

The issue highlights the difference between the right and the left. Leftists see our health insurance / care system and think the answer is more government regular. Rightists see the same problems but think that the best way to solve them is by unshackling the free market. Wal-Mart's example should be a light for our path.

(HT: Instapundit.)

In 2002 some physicists determined that the Large Hadron Collider is not likely to destroy the universe this May. Fortunately, there's very little need to worry that the LHC will create micro black holes that will suck up the whole earth, magnetic monopoles that accrete all charged matter in the universe, or strange matter that converts everything it touches into quark plasma. Whew.

This story about a "hearty eater" being banned from a buffet can serve as a great example for why socialized medicine doesn't work.

On his most recent visit, he said, a waitress gave him and his wife's cousin, 44-year-old Michael Borrelli, a bill for $46.40, roughly double the buffet price for two adults.

"She says, 'Y'all fat, and y'all eat too much,'" Labit said.

Labit and Borrelli said they felt discriminated against because of their size. "I was stunned, that somebody would say something like that. I ain't that fat, I only weigh 277," Borrelli said, adding that a waitress told him he looked like he a had a "baby in the belly."

Buffets are very similar to health insurance in that everyone pays nearly the same price, but people use very different amounts of service. Health insurance providers are prevented from many forms of price discrimination by law, which means that like a buffet that can't discriminate all they can do is refuse service to unprofitable customers. Socialized medicine would reduce the ability to discriminate by price even further, leading to even more unhealthy people being denied treatment.

The end result is that unhealthy people won't be able to get treatment from the socialized system because they're too far from the norm, and they won't be able to buy treatment because the free market will have been destroyed. It goes without saying that poor, uneducated people tend to be the least healthy, so who's really going to benefit from socialized medicine?

Even though we humans can only perceive three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, Itzhak Bars thinks there may be two dimensions that we're missing.

"There isn't just one dimension of time," Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles tells New Scientist. "There are two. One whole dimension of time and another of space have until now gone entirely unnoticed by us." ...

Changing our picture of time from a line to a plane (one to two dimensions) means that the path between the past and future could loop back on itself, allowing you to travel back and forwards in time and allowing the famous grandfather paradox, where you could go back and kill your grandfather before your mother was born, thereby preventing your own birth.

He has proposed some experiments for testing his theory with the Large Hadron Collider when it opens this year.

It's fascinating to consider how humanity might appear to a creature capable of perceiving all six dimensions described by Bars. I highly recommend the novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions to get a flavor for such speculation. (Having been written in 1884, Flatland is available free from Project Gutenberg.)