Rhinocrisy

I remember a few years back when the Media Lab at MIT announced that it had developed a “sound laser”, a prototype device that could focus sound, laser-like, in a particular direction. I’m not exactly surprised to see the Guardian report that a weaponized version of the thing is being used as a crowd control device against G20 protesters in Pittsburgh. This is, after all, what our society seems to think engineering is most applicable to: better and better ways to hurt, kill, and torture each other. Hopefully the machines will come quickly and slice us into cube-shaped biotic units so that we’ll finally stop hurting each other.

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that NASA is deliberately false-coloring images so that Mars appears to have a red sky, to cover up the fact that it’s actually blue there. I’m not exactly sure why NASA would be doing this, but I’ll admit I’ve been disappointed by the color of the sky (and the ground) in Mars photos, so I’m on board! Let’s deconvolve:

First, for the uninitiated, our a priori expectation should be a blue sky. The sky everywhere should be blue, because the color of the sky is the product of Rayleigh scattering - which is basically to say, the atmosphere tends to scatter higher-frequency light more than it scatters lower-frequency light. If you look up at any random part of the sky that isn’t the sun, the light you’re seeing is light that has scattered off some part of the atmosphere in that direction; in space, that light would have gone straight to its target, and you would see no light coming from that direction. Since the atmosphere scatters violet light more than red light, this, combined with our human visual system’s spectral bias (weak in the blue end of the spectrum), results in our seeing the sky as blue. This simple phenomenon should apply equally well to all atmospheres.

So it’s a bit glum when we’re told that Mars has a red sky - red because it’s full of thick, choking dust. Well, poop. But maybe it’s not so! Maybe NASA is attempting to pull the dust over our eyes, and Mars is really true-blue. Fortunately, we can verify for ourselves. NASA puts up “raw” JPEGs of all the data the rovers send back. The relevant images are the “PANCAM” ones, which apply a series of fairly narrow bandpass filters before the CCD capture (that is, each filter captures an image of the scene at a specific wavelength of light).

The NASA “true color” images are generated by the PANCAM group at Cornell; their methodology is quite rigorous. The naive method (employed by most conspiracy theorists, notably Keith Laney) is simply to use the three filters that closest approximate the human visual peaks - 600, 530 and 480 nm, for Red, Green and Blue - and slap them together with Ye Olde Photoshop (or in my case, Perl) to make a full-color image. This produces very satisfying images. Check it out!

However, this method has a flaw: the human visual system is additive, meaning that single-wavelengths don’t give the whole picture - each color opsin in your eye is stimulated by the whole spectrum, meaning that what you see as “red” might actually be an amalagam of two individually non-red peaks.^*

Unfortunately, we don’t have data from the whole spectrum available to us - we only have eight wavelengths, six of them in the visual range. PANCAM takes this data and fits a third-order polynomial to it to generate an approximation of the true spectrum. This spectral data is then converted into the XYZ color space (a standard color space) by convolving it with the XYZ standard observer functions that (more or less) define the primary colors of that space.^† Those XYZ values are then mapped to the familiar sRGB space and slapped together to produce a “true color” image. The result, side by side with the “naive” method:

Egad! There’s a world of difference there. So who’s got it right? Hard to tell… unfortunately PANCAM doesn’t have any pictures of the color calibration target that sits on top of the rovers posted in their collection of true color images, so it’s difficult to be sure. However, the average spectra values in the data for the above image for the sky (blue line) vs. the ground (red line) look like so:

This seems to suggest there’s something off about the PANCAM results - the sky should be white-tending-to-blue, and the ground should be red. Of course, it’s possible our visual system is so heavily red-skewed that we’d still see the spectrum on the left as reddish, but I’m inclined to disbelieve it could see the deep, dusty red shown in the PANCAM image. It seems more likely the reconstruction method is flawed somewhere. Furthermore, the naive method should be pretty good at telling us the color of the sky, since the sky color is composed of all wavelengths in varying intensities (which may not be true of rocks on the ground, meaning those colors are more likely to be wrong in the naive method). I’m staying aboard this conspiracy ship!

^* Leading me to wonder if we will, one day, encounter a fully spectrographic visual system - one that sees spectra instead of colors. You’d recognize the chemical composition of everything!

^† Sloth prevents me from recapitulating their method - all the necessary data is linked from here, if you feel inclined to do it for yourself.

A few weeks back I happened across a news story trumpeting a link between cell phones and brain tumors, containing the ominous warning that cell phones are “worse than cigarettes”. By coincidence my roommate had happened to ask me if I knew anything about the subject, and so I spent a portion of the previous day scouring PubMed to answer this very question, and had, of course, also compared against cigarettes as the outstanding example of a public-health disaster caused by personal foibles.

So my immediate reaction to the story (”Balls.”) was based on more than just a gut feeling.

But let’s start off by poisoning the well a little bit: the source for this story was an Australian neurosurgeon named Vini Khurana. Vini’s methodology in answering this question was exactly the same as mine: reading some papers on PubMed. We should be clear that reviews are an important part of scientific literature, and they are a great way to collect information and present a perspective on the field. They’re usually the product of specific solicitations by journal editors to respected members of a field - e.g., asking James Hansen to write a review on the global temperature record, or even asking someone like Carl Woese to write a review on the future directions for the entire field of biology. The idea is that someone with a demonstrated expertise in the field is surely best-positioned to report on its history and state-of-the-art.

But no one solicited Vini’s article. In fact, Vini has no history of publication in the field. In fact, Vini didn’t even publish this paper anywhere. It was published on the web and was completely unreviewed.^*

As I’ve suggested before, I think the manner of propagation of many news stories is purely viral: something happens to make it onto some wire service, and if it is interesting or sensational, it spreads. As its exposure increases, so do opportunities for further dissemination - another outlet picks it up, and the cycle continues. This process doesn’t seem to include anything like quality control or actual journalism (mayhap the journalists here can speak to why this might be the case), with the result that bad, bad science gets broadcast loudly around the globe.

At any rate, the question at hand remains to be answered: do cell phones cause brain tumors? After Vini’s own pathetic review, he recommends an actual review in the Journal of Radiation Biology, whose abstract tells us:

Biophysical considerations indicate that there is little theoretical basis for anticipating that RF energy would have significant biological effects at the power levels used by modern mobile phones and their base station antennas. The epidemiological evidence for a causal association between cancer and RF energy is weak and limited. Animal studies have provided no consistent evidence that exposure to RF energy at non-thermal intensities causes or promotes cancer. Extensive in vitro studies have found no consistent evidence of genotoxic potential, but in vitro studies assessing the epigenetic potential of RF energy are limited. Overall, a weight-of-evidence evaluation shows that the current evidence for a causal association between cancer and exposure to RF energy is weak and unconvincing.

That first sentence, by the way, is an important one: there’s little justification for the notion of non-ionizing radiation being a significant cause of DNA damage.

Meanwhile, a simple comparison of some epidemiological studies on the question is revealing. This study finds odds ratios of 1.22 and 0.70 for gliomas and menigiomas respectively. This one finds an odds ratio of 0.6 for gliomas, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.4-0.9. I.e., the study finds that regular cell phone use is slightly protective against gliomas! And finally, this study examines both long- and short-term users of cell phones and finds no increased odds of acquiring tumors through phone use in either group.

By now you are probably shivering in your boots^†, so let’s take you back down a little, with a sentence from this case-control study:

The odds ratio (OR) for lung cancer in current United States smokers relative to nonsmokers was 40.4.

The short version: As you were, lieutenant.

^* Yes, reviews are normally reviewed. The reviewers of reviews are called re-reviewers, and they are required to do their reviewing work between two facing mirrors to deepen their powers of meta-analysis.

^† You are wearing your boots, right?

This song is from the ending credits of Valve’s stellar first-person-puzzler game Portal, as sung by the mad AI GLaDOS. I find the lyrics very poignant, especially:

I’m doing science and I’m still alive.

Lately I’ve been interested in the Fusor, a device which achieves fusion by accelerating individual ions to high energies using electric fields (rather than creating a high-temperature plasma, the strategy employed by expensive and to date unsuccessful “tokomak”-based methods). It seems some guys at UC Irvine have done something similar. Check it out.

Note that this is NOT “cold fusion”, it is “hot fusion”, and the physics is relatively uncontroversial. Fusion power in a matter of years?

UPDATE: Apparently not.

One of our most popular posts, google-wise, is hedgehog’s missive about the health effects of bisphenol-A, a common ingredient in many plastics. I happened across a nice letter in PLoS Biology, written by Rebecca Roberts, describing her fears as a new mother on her child’s exposure to BPA. Included is a nice summary and references for some of the research supporting the need for tighter regulation (some say banning) of BPA in plastic products, especially with regards to kids, and a chronicle of the failed legislative efforts at removing it.

Many liberals are crowing happily about a new study in Nature Neuroscience that purports to prove (basically) that liberals are better at parsing input correctly than conservatives. The study authors are careful to be politically circumspect in their statements, saying that this is only one test, conservatives might do better at others, but it’s pretty clear what they want to say: liberals are smarter.

It’s hard to argue with their results. As you can see from the figure I stole from their paper, the correlation is quite strong. A regression like that is an experimentalist’s wet dream. The only question is, what are they measuring?

I’m deeply skeptical of studies like this. Political orientation is not plastic; people change their views all the time, especially during college (which I imagine is where the bulk of the study sample was drawn from). Case in point: me. When I started school in 1996 I was a Dole supporter, staunchly conservative. When I graduated at the end of 1999 I was an anarcho-communist. Furthermore, political orientation is a very ill-defined quantity. “Liberal” or “conservative” may be taken on many, many different bases, and I would strongly dispute the authors’ contention that there is a political “spectrum”. I do not believe in a holistic “liberal” worldview, any more than I believe in a holistic “conservative” worldview. These are constructions imposed on public discourse by a self-feeding party machinery, and I don’t think actual political viewpoints can be so neatly broken down. I therefore find it hard to believe that there should be fundamental neurological attributes correlating with political orientation. How, then, do I explain these results?

Just prior to performing the trials, the subjects are given a questionnaire on their political orientation. That is, the study primes them to think about politics before they enter the trial. The study methodology relies on the ability of the subject to distinguish between the letter ‘M’ and the letter ‘W’.

Liberals have spent the past eight years imbuing the symbol ‘W’ with a particularly strong sense of hatred. Since they are going into the study primed to think about politics, it stands to reason that those subjects self-identifying as liberals would not see the two alternatives as value-neutral. That is, conservatives are distinguishing between the letters “M” and “W”. Liberals are choosing between “Bush” and “Something Else”, and are therefore bringing different cognitive resources to bear on the task.

This is a conjecture, of course, and easily tested by using two other symbols (say, ‘b’ and ‘d’) that don’t have any political implications. But given the dubious nature of the proposition and the visceral nature of the reactions being measured, I suspect that the choice of letters goes a long way towards explaining this difference.

By all accounts this is a low point for this country.

Many people in Europe were upset to find out that some European countries may have been hosting secret CIA detention centers, implicitly condoning the legal and probable human rights abuses going on there. Some EU officials even went so far as to threaten sanctions against any countries that had been found to have aided the CIA in such a fashion. (Strangely, no one seems to have suggested sanctions against the United States itself, which, presumably, was the most responsible party.)

As if that weren’t enough, the American president seems to be the worst one ever. He has now admitted to what is surely a flagrant violation of the law, for no other apparent reason than the fact that he could.

Never fear. I have devised a way for all of us to profit from these developments.

In fact, you might say my revolutionary scheme will solve a great number of problems for the entire world, like that whole ‘peak oil’ business we’re always worried about here at Rhinocrisy. Things are going to start looking up for humanity. Way, way up!

Like most good ideas, this one came to me on the pot. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that this is a place where a lot of good thinking can be done. (Garbage out, garbage in, as they say.)^*

Although I have not provided any working prototypes of my idea, I think the concept is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require extensive proving. The basic premise is this:

Over the years empirical observation has taught us that outrages committed that offend the memory of the deceased causes them to revolve in their graves. (I’m a bit rusty on my Maxwell’s equations, but the direction of rotation should be given by the right-hand rule, or something.) Since we know there is conservation of angular momentum, this means over the years some of our ancestors will have acquired quite a high rate of revolution. Someone like Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson is probably running at a good two or three million RPMs.

This is a huge amount of stored rotational energy that needs to be tapped right away. A simple belt and turbine device, as illustrated, will suffice to capture the energy.

Even if it is not very efficient, I think it will be hugely beneficial, since this will basically result in another energy boom comparable to the discovery of petroleum. (Even better, this one produces zero emissions, and it’s renewable, to boot. We’re putting more dead people in the ground every day.) The great thing is, everything you do will outrage SOMEONE. Gays being persecuted? Harvey Milk is incensed! Fags getting hitched? Richard Nixon just sped up by a few hundred clicks.

There’s only a few problems I can see with my scenario. One is that my own country will be at a distinct disadvantage, since we’re in the habit of burning our dead and have no buried ancestors to exhume and strap into a generator device.^†

The other is that people will probably end up trying to increase ancestral outrage in order to increase power production. Funerals will be disrupted by people pissing on the casket during the eulogy. Babies will be given absurd names like “Mushelda” and “Smelly Poopy Pants”. Carrot-Top will be elected Pope and will do prop comedy on the balcony of Saint Peter’s basilica.

In the extreme, we might see the development of “outrage factories”, where electrical workers would have orgies featuring farm animals, copious quantities of Johnson’s baby oil, and the current crop of Mouseketeers, all while reciting the Lord’s prayer backwards. Parents would strive to raise the most ill-mannered, loutish children they possibly could.^‡ In other words, the immoral will become moral, and there will be an almost total breakdown of the social fabric. However, this all becomes worthwhile when you consider that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to fill up your tank of gas in fifteen years.

Finally, it should be made clear that this boom time won’t last forever. We can expect the law of diminishing returns to apply, as existing generations suffer from “outrage fatigue”, and later generations will be forced to do more and more outlandish things to outrage the deceased. It’s possible there will be breakthrough advancements in outrage technology (e.g. mime cloning), but we shouldn’t count on these.

^* Fortunately I had the good taste and presence of mind not to run out of the bathroom, half-naked, shrieking “Eureka!” when I had my idea, unlike SOME people I could mention.

^† Note that while cremation seems like a bad idea in general, some laid-back people who are not easily outraged (e.g. stoners) are just a waste of valuable graveyard plots and definitely should be incinerated at death. This probably comprises a good portion of my readership, but there’s nothing for it.

^‡ I know it seems like parents are already doing this, but this is apparently an unrelated phenomenon.