John Wayne On Liberals

I'm looking for the year on this one. I left a message over on YouTube and hopefully someone will come through.

Money quotes: I always thought I was a liberal.
And: What else would there be in life if you lose optimism?

Chuck D from Public Enemy on John Wayne:

Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me you see, straight up racist that sucker was, simple and plain, mother fuck him and John Wayne.

A New Periodic Paradigm

Before vanishing from the blogosphere, commenter Ritmo wrote back here:

I remember coming up with an improved periodic table while daydreaming during the inorganic chemistry course I took in college. When we were learning about d and f orbitals it occurred to me that a 2-dimensional table is flawed. Ultimately it should loop around as a cylinder, with the lanthanides and actinides poking out in a raised, textural format. For the life of me I can't remember how I worked it out in perfect detail, but it avoided the unnecessary breaks between groups I and II and reflected the fact that s and p orbitals underlie any expanded orbitals. Putting the transition metals smack dab in the middle of the non-metals and group II just didn't make any sense. And starting over again between the noble gases and group I instead of looping them around to the next orbital seemed an arbitrary convention, like hitting the return key or banging whatever that part was named on a typewriter as you finished a line and needed to move on to the next.

That is absolutely brilliant. It's like a revelation or a prophecy. It's not 100% original, but then few insights are. I will say more about that later. This revelation vexed me off and on for some time and I tried to sketch it until I realized that I needed to sit down like Richard Dreyfuss did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and build the vision:

So sitting at the kitchen table, I started playing around with a flat periodic table, cutting it up and rearranging and I came up with this:

Cylindrical Periodic Table

Cylindrical Periodic Table

I'll be writing lots more on this in future posts. Lots more!

Wealth Redistribution and the Global Warming Agenda

There can be no doubt that the stop global warming and wealth redistribution agenda are linked. Look at this gem from the preface to Global Warming A Very Short Introduction:

So to deal with global warming, we must deal with developing countries, and thus we must for the first time in humanity's history tackle the unequal distribution of global wealth. Hence global warming is making us face the forgotten billions of people on the planet, and we must make the world a fairer place. In the 21st century we must deal with both global poverty and global warming. link

This is profoundly misguided logic. First of all, this is not the first time "we" have dealt with developing countries; nor is it the first time "we" have addressed the unequal distribution of global wealth.

I thought the way to deal with global warming was to stop emitting carbon dioxide? This means shutting down a goodly section of American and Western standards of livings.  Why mince words?  What does pumping up Africa have to do with global warming?  Surely the author of this polemic cannot seriously be thinking of improving the lot of Africa's poor.

A profound sense of humanity occurs when something is given to the poor.  A profound sense of propriety is violated when something is taken from someone and given to someone else. Mandated charity is charity destroyed.

I also object to the top-down driven "we" collectivism implicit in the author's grammar and syntax. The author implies that developing countries are unable to help themselves--they need a patriarchal benefactor--a global leveler.

Hence global warming is making us face the forgotten billions of people on the planet, and we must make the world a fairer place.

Imperatives aside, the author of sentence needs a refresher course on economics.  Need we reach back all the way to the Sumerians to show that poverty has always been with us?  Income disparity is a natural phenomenon. This was the implicit "message" of The Parable Of The Gas.

Inequality drives chemical reactivity--for example--electromotive force. Perfect equality is a depressing notion because it implies stasis: there is no potential or driving force for change.  There is no reason to invent because there is no reason to become different.

Party Like It's 1848

Tea Partiers may seem to want to party like it's 1773, but the Off-the-Wall Streeters seem to wanna party like it's 1848. Alexander de Tocqueville said of that time period:

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror. link

I finally bought the book 1848, recommended to me by a commenter several months ago.  I hope to read it next week.

The Very First Guinea Pig?

Commenter Ritmo's link to the wiki article about dioxin mentioned guinea pigs, which reminded me of Lavoisier, who may have been the first scientist to test theories using that animal. Lavoisier famously taught that combustion was the combining of oxygen with other elements, overthrowing the older notion of phlogiston which I wrote about here.

According to the OED of etymology, the first recorded use of the term guinea pig in a scientific context dates from the 1920s. However, the following description of the work of Lavoisier and Laplace clearly antedates that usage: link to original

Lavoisier's respiration experiments invalidated the phlogiston theory despite protestations from Priestley and Scheele. Lavoisier collaborated with French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749 -1827) on problems in respiration chemistry. Their vital experiments with guinea pigs in 1780 first quantified the oxygen consumed and carbon dioxide produced by metabolism. Over a ten-hour period, they collected approximately 3 g of carbonic acid from an animal breathing oxygen. In a second experiment, they placed a guinea pig into a wire cage, which in turn was placed into a double-walled container. Ice packed into the double walls of the outer container maintained a constant temperature; ice between the cage and the inner wall of the container melted because of the animal's body heat. During 24 hours 13 oz. (370 g) of ice melted. Lavoisier and Laplace concluded that the total heat produced by the animal equaled the amount heat required to melt ice. In their own words:

Respiration is thus a very slow combustion phenomenon, very similar to that of coal; it is conducted inside the lungs, not giving off light, since the fire matter is absorbed by the humidity of the organs of the lungs. Heat developed by this combustion goes into the blood vessels which pass through the lungs and which subsequently flow into the entire animal body. Thus, air that we breathe is used to conserve our bodies in two fashions: it removes from the blood fixed air, which can be very harmful when abundant; and heat which enters our lungs from this phenomenon replaces the heat lost in the atmosphere and from surrounding bodies.
...animal heat conservation is thus largely attributable to heat produced by the combination of humid air inspired by the animals and dry air in the blood vessels.

Lavoisier's ideas were radical for 1780 because they connected heat, work, and energy.

Ritmo may be too young to remember this...

...but I remember it well:

Conversations With Ritmo

Blogger will not allow me to post comments on my own blog as "chickenlittle and so I'm posting my response to Ritmo's question here. This is a huge pain and I don't like this, but I refuse to post as "anonymous." ]

Ritmo: Q. Should we not exercise the precautionary principle and, instead, take it on the "faith" of our industrial over-lords that this ignorance and exposure is a good thing?

Me: My gripe is a general one. Since the 1970's, the so-called environmental movement has had the upper hand in the public arena of debate. Company after company has lost the right (privilege) to manufacture in the US until, finally, at long last, industries have decided to move elsewhere.

Yes, the issue of dioxin was overblown. The rhetorical hand played was one of fear--fear of the unknown--and as it turns out, dioxin is not the the most toxic chemical known to man. Yet what was the lay person to think after being fed misinformation? How far do lay opinions go in determining things regarding chemical manufacture?
Watching Althouse gives me hope that anti-business leftists can be confronted and opposed. What's happening in Madison need to occur at other levels.  Instead of cursing and hating the wealth makers, we need to encourage them.

Conversations With Ritmo

[This is a continuation from the comment thread back here]:

Me: The public trust and opinion of DoE at this point speaks for itself.

Ritmo: I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree. I must have far less faith in how well educated most Americans are on matters of science to endorse public opinion of a science agency, as a whole, as a meaningful mark of its performance.

Me: I'll concede that the average American is unaware of the damage Chu is doing. Hell, most people wouldn't even recognize him or any other previous DoE Secretary.

[pause to swig beers]

Ritmo: I simply don't understand why an industry - especially an industry with a financial stake in how a scientific matter is decided - should be privileged in determining a regulatory agency's decisions. They have the least reason for objectivity of any party.

Me: The litigious nature of our country would see to the extinction of such polluters well before any agency need intervene.

Ritmo: I don't agree. Litigation benefits from harms that are very damaging, immediately observable and intensely personal. (Makes for a better narrative in front of a jury, I suppose). If the costs of a small scale harm, pollutant, toxin, etc. are spread out over an entire population, over a very long period of time, the harm is ignored, the harm is conflated with natural, pre-existing risks, the harm is allowed to be seen as normative, and then allowed to be increased based on a higher threshold level of damage now becoming the new norm.

Me: I was thinking more along the lines of Erin Brokovich in California. The alleged culprit in that case, hexavalent chromium, was present in wells and drinking water in CA. Cancer deaths were alleged.  Yet chromium VI has no aqueous carcinogenicity. Like asbestos, is an airborne, inhaled threat. (BTW, have you ever toured the USS Missouri or the USS Midway? Asbestos throughout--everywhere inside because the inside of ship has lots of hot water and steam flowing around and the ship fitters just wrapped everything in asbestos.  Nowadays, to make it a non-airborne threat, it has all been clear-coated with a polymer.  But I digress.
So the Erin Brokovich story (a story of legal greed) is based on fraudulent scientific claims.  If there were a waterborne threat from Cr(VI), the EPA (not just California) sure as hell would have slapped some limits on it.
Another favorite environmental overreaction: Time Beach, Missouri. Dioxin was once alleged to be the most toxic chemical known to man...not true!  That Ukrainian politico ate a ton and survived. I've followed this incident since around 1982, though I haven't kept up on it.
Third, taconite tailings in Lake Superior.  This is a bit personal..my dad used to bemoan how taconite tailings clouded the waters around Silver Bay, Minn, around where taconite is processed.  Reserve Mining Co. dumped the tailings into the water until 1977 when an injunction forced them to dump it back on land. In my opinion, Reserve Mining should have returned the waste ore products back to where the removed it from, unless the item of commerce was the bulk of the material.  Yet the Reserve Mining Case decision was decided in part on fraudulent claims of cancer!

Ritmo: Public, common resources, are therefore especially prone to degradation - despite our crucial reliance on them. This probably argues for more vigilant oversight over such resources than over private property, given the lack of stakeholders with a solely personal interest. Organizing class action suits is hard enough. Organizing an entire society around these more easily hidden harms, damn near impossible.

Me: The litigious nature of our country would see to the extinction of such polluters well before any agency need intervene.

Ritmo: Since it seems we may be getting into a discussion on the best way to regulate the commons, negative externalities, etc., the collapse of fisheries might be a better example. Recent (dare I say "ground-breaking") economic research has been recognized in this field. The basic idea seems to be that important long-term interests and short-term goals may often be at odds with each other, and balancing them out doesn't always fall best under the purview of a single party.

Me: Care to expand upon that?

Comment Link Broken

For some reason, blogger isn't letting me post a comment in my last post, so I'm putting it here instead until I figure this out.

Ritmo wrote:

At some point, science should be allowed to inform public policy.

Yes. There's an earlier post here where I praise Nature for publishing dissenting opinion on AGW.

As for Chu-- I have a tag for him.  I have been following DoE politics at least since the 1980's. My negative opinion of him stems from his stewardship of the agency, and not from his capability as a scientist.  I tend to dislike the sort of blind respect he garners, for example from POTUS during the Deepwater Horizon event. I looked for, but could not find, a video link to Chris Matthews when he, fed up with Obama's dithering said (paraphrasing) "If he says one more thing about his Nobel Prize I'm gonna puke."

If Chu were appealing to personal beliefs and feelings as a way to trump a stance on the issues about which politics is allowed to opine and governments obliged to seek empirical evidence, then as with Giaever, Pauling, Mullis and even Einstein (when he famously rejected quantum mechanics on theological[!] grounds), I'd say he's wandering too far afield from the mission asked of him.

The public trust and opinion of DoE at this point speaks for itself. If POTUS wanted to fix one thing with one fell swoop he could replace Chu with someone less adversarial towards the energy industries in America.

Of course we allow/encourage creativity and dissent to inform the scientific spirit in ways that will allow for superstitious cranks as easily as they will for genius. But shouldn't a public service be compelled to rely on the most accurate evidence possible? [Yes!] And when it comes to the projection of limited data on an evolving, real-life scenario decades into the future, is the precautionary principle and reliance on smaller scale models really too much to ask for?

If pharmacologists were allowed to treat animal toxicology the way Americans treat climate science, we'd have generations of flipper babies and other disturbing catastrophes to show for it.

The litigious nature of our country would see to the extinction of such polluters well before any agency need intervene

We rely on smaller preclinical studies to temper our willingness to proclaim an IND absolutely safe, no matter how notoriously difficult it is to extrapolate animal toxicology to safety in humans.
I think this is at it should be and the appropriate model for planetary real-time experiments in tinkering with the composition of the atmosphere, and for public policy generally.

The flip side of that risk does not allow for a favorable cost/benefit trade-off to the population as a whole.
One could call environmentalists overzealous, but their track record on giving us a cleaner and more sustainable planet is better than that of their adversaries. And I have a difficult time understanding why financial conflicts of interest are obvious and acted upon when it comes to petty crimes and personal matters, but not when entire industries and political factions are involved.

My scientific understanding would be greatly enhanced by an adequate explanation of that.

Let's consider the environmental movement and public perceptions.  I'm just old enough to recall the birth of the EPA and also the public sentiment at the time, perhaps best summarized in that brilliant advertisement of the American Indian paddling through the polluted water and shedding a tear.

Is there anyway, today, that such a simple and effective message could be used to promote the dispersion of CFL bulbs? I'm bothered by the dispersion of mercury into the environment which those bulbs foster. Smokestacks emit Hg too, but the emissions are more efficiently captured in a flue trap. Today's "big messages" are clouded with ambiguity.

Another example:  I seem to recall The Economist championing carbon taxes as an acceptable idea apart from any disincentive for CO2 production. The notion was IIRC, just an admission that such taxes would be "most fair."  Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.