Minnesota, home of the massive neutrino

I once visited the Soudan mine with two young children. I try not to think of the background radiation from all that granite.

It's famous now:

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Light shed on mysterious particle

A high intensity beam of these particles was fired through a particle detector at Fermilab, and then to another particle detector 724km (450 miles) away in a disused mine in Soudan, US.

. The mine tour doesn't visit the lab, but you can see the locked entrance. It is a spectacular tour, but it is not for those who suffer from fear of bats, the dark, loud noises, enclosed spaces, heights (the elevator ride!) or mad, sadistic, tour guides seeking revenge on the bourgeoise for the sufferings their fathers endured digging dirt for distant capitalists.

Aside from that, I highly recommend it. Don't be fooled by those innocent and cheery looking tour guides by the way. You'll learn their true nature soon enough ... I swear ours cackled when she described how long it would take to climb the ladder to the surface ...

Iowa City: invisible to the spy eyes

The southern half of Iowa City isn't imaged very well on Google Map. I've come to rely on those maps to scout out new terrain -- so this was an unexpected disappointment.

So is there a top secret alien base in Iowa City?

HIV: if you can't beat them ...

HIV came out of the closet when I was in medical school. We followed it closely, back when it was a disorder of Haitians and hemophiliacs. The gay connection came later.

There's a lot been learned about its biology since then. For an old-timer this Loom article gives a flavor of what's current (emphases mine) ...

Learning To Ignore Your Viruses. The Loom: A blog about life, past and future:

In an opinion piece in PLOS Pathogens, Viktor Muller and Rob J. De Boer ... [show] the relationship of HIV-like viruses in apes and monkeys... HIV, marked in red, is not a single lineage of viruses. One form, HIV-2, jumped from sooty mangabey monkeys into people several times. The more common form, HIV-1, descends from chimpanzee viruses, which have moved into humans many more times. As the tree shows, lots of primates get infected by their own HIV relatives, and this appears to have been going on for millions of years. But if you look at sooty mangabeys or some other monkey, you generally find abundant amounts of the virus without any sign of an overactive immune system... The blue arrows on the tree mark the rise of new virus strains in macaques that came from sooty mangabeys. This shift appears to have happened at primate research centers in the past few decades. In their new hosts, these viruses cause lots of nasty symptoms.

Muller and De Boer propose an intriguing hypothesis to explain all of this: perhaps apes and monkeys don't suffer ill effects from these viruses because they carry copies of the viruses in their own genome. After all, the authors point out, HIV's genes have been isolated in human sperm DNA, so these viruses clearly have the potential to make their way into a host genome. Muller and De Boer suggest that primate viruses got into their hosts' genome. The young primates then began making proteins from the virus, which their developing immune system recognized as part of their 'self.' When the primates then got infected with new copies of the virus, they didn't mount an attack or become overstimulated. The viruses infected the primate's immune cells, but they were only a minor burden to the primates compared to a collapsed immune system...

...It's cool but a little frightening to imagine if Muller and De Boer are on to something. It would mean that primates have not survived their own HIV epidemics by destroying the virus. Nor would it mean that the virus had become more benevolent, in order to spare its host. It would mean that they simply evolved to ignore the virus altogether...

Invite them in. Give them food. Let them take what they want. Go about one's business. Didn't China do that with the invading Mongols?

Niven scores: The organ trade grows

Larry Niven made his mark as a science fiction writer in the 1970s and 1980s. Among his earlier writings are a series of stories about organlegging, an illegal and legal trade in human organs. In Niven's books organ rejection has been solved and transplants promise a form of immortality. Jaywalking becomes a capital crime; executed prisoners are the primary source of legal organ donation.

We haven't solved the rejection problem, but Niven gets full marks anyway. Recently China's executed prisoners have been donating their organs to Japan. In 2004 the NYT profiled the sales of a Brazilian live donor kidney to an American recipient. A NYT ethics columnist was asked about another kidney sale to a US donor. Some years ago I read an extraordinary NYT article examining the sale of Chinese and Pakistani organs throughout asia, including sale to US recipients who traveled for their transplants (I cannot find the reference!).

This is a true growth industry, there's big money to be made for those who've developed their moral fiber in the tobacco industry. And what about those ethics?

From an ethical point of view, the prisoner trade is more clearly wrong. It incents the state to execute, and the prisoner gets nothing from the deal. The "voluntary" donations from the impoverished are in practice also terribly wrong, but the reasoning is more complex.

If my family was mired in dire poverty, I would probably donate a kidney for the right price. Alas, in practice the social consequences of this sort of transaction are likely to be so severe that they outweigh any theoretical utilitarian benefit to donor and recipient. In any case, in our world, such trade would take advantage of hundreds of millions of people with limited judgement and cognitive abilities -- taking their organs for a song.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Any physician partaking in this trade in any way should have their diploma revoked.

PS. I would be remiss if I did not mention my solution to a part of the organ shortage. In the US there are many, many adults who want to ride a motorbike with a helmet. We should simply require that than any brain-dead motorcyclist recovered without a helmet is a mandatory organ donor ...

Healthcare IT Vendor to Offer Sex in HIMSS Booths

I hardly ever comment on anything related to my real job. This column from a blog that's read daily throughout the healthcare IT industry could not, however, be resisted: The Obligatory April 1 Phony News Issue (HIStalk).

The anonymous CIO behind HISTalk was clearly feeling a bit nervous, hence the all revealing title. If you've ever had anything to do with large healthcare IT vendors, however, you really must read the column. Where's EPIC though?

Scanning developing brains: the excitement to come

The brains of very high IQ, high IQ, and average IQ children follow different developmental paths. Fascinating, and humbling. These are exciting times for brain research, akin to physics in the early 20th century. Paradigms falling and new ones rising. The next burst of excitement will come when the study is repeated across gene cluster groups, aka "races".

Slashdot: OMG Ponies!

WTF?! Was my first thought. Had someone stolen Slashdot's domain?

Pink? Hearts? A survey on whether "Poneys" or iBooks were cuter? What an insult to the original hard core geek web site.

The effect only lasted a few seconds, but it was great fun as I realized the date. I love when that happens, but of course it really only works first thing in the morning.

A wonderful project, lovingly done. They must have spent months on it, there's a lot to explore.

Update 4/1: Alas, it was not all so well done. My wife reports parts of the spoof were gross in a "14 yo unwashed male geek" sort of way. A sign that Slashdot is well into a senile decline?

Will ethics boards allow further experiments with prayer?

Will future prayer studies pass review by Institutional Review Boards? IRB's have to approve human experiments. A novel treatment, like prayer therapy, can be approved if the likelihood of harm is considered miniscule. That is no longer true. A 40% increase in bad complications, even if it is within the range of statistical error, means the IRB must consider prayer as a possible toxic treatment. Given the limited results for a positive effect, and the suspicion of significant harm, ethical considerations will likely prevent any further experiments with prayer in medical settings.

Personally I find a toxic effect of prayer to be at least as interesting as a beneficial effect, though as I noted previously I await the P values with great interest. Even if the P values are not significant, however, the IRB issue will remain.

Prayer by strangers harmful to inpatients

Prayers for recovery offered by strangers was found to cause a 40% increase in major complications among patients receiving coronary byapss surgery:

Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer - New York Times

.... The study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group, 18 percent, suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers.

Does praying for a stranger anger God? Does all prayer annoy Him, or just Christian prayer? Perhaps multiple deities are involved...

Or perhaps the effect is only a statistical fluke, as many scientists and theologians, as well as all atheists, would expect. Catholics, for example, allow for miracles, but I think among mainstream catholic theologians prayer is thought to be about asking for wisdom and the strength to bear what comes, not a plea to a mercenary deity.

Personally I find the result disquieting, but I'm betting the P value is not significant. Note, however, a harmful result is just as suggestive of supernatural intervention as a beneficial result would have been. Both outcomes are a matter for contemplation.

The Sago survivor is a mutant

And I mean that in the best possible way. This man has something different in his genes (emphases mine).

CNN.com - Sole Sago Mine survivor heads for Miracle Road - Mar 30, 2006

I think he's a got a great potential for a complete, possibly complete, recovery,' said neurologist Julian Bailes, who suggested 'genetic individual variability' might help explain McCloy's survival.

Bailes also cited other factors, including that McCloy was about 1,000 feet away from the miners who perished and was 'in better air.'

I wonder if his physicians expected him to walk or talk again. There's something rather unusual about how he managed severe carbon monoxide poisoning. It's unlikely he's unique, so researchers will want to figure out who else responds this way and why. The results could help with managing carbon monoxide poisoning in general.

Yahoo! yellow pages: the problem with being mostly right

Yahoo's yellow pages flopped big time today.

I used it to find a local business. The number was right, and so I sent my wife to the address, using the handy map link.

Wrong.

They moved some time ago. Many miles away. I am in deep doo-doo; ergo so is Yahoo.

From a systems perspective, this is a fundamental problem with a 'mostly correct' solution. Google's algorithmically constructed local search service is even less reliable, but ironically that's not a problem. It's easy to discover that Google's data is stale; so I've never trusted it the way I used to trust Yahoo.

Yahoo's listings have a corporate feel, as though they were updated, validated and maintained. They probably are, but I suspect the paper yellow page listings are still substantially more accurate -- if only because businesses aggressively maintain their paper listings.

Sigh. I hate the paper yellow pages, but maybe I'm stuck with them again. Certainly I can't trust Yahoo's directory service, and the cost of validating what I find may push me back to a solution I thought was dead 10 years ago.

Immigration: an interesting debate

Ahh, immigration. It divides Republicans and Democrats alike, so we can get a break from the usual culture wars.

My mother emigrated from England to Canada. I emigrated from Canada to the US. My paternal grandfather emigrated from Ireland to Canada. Speaking of Canada, my birthplace has an interesting take on immigration. They select for wealth and entrepreneurial productivity, a very mercenary approach that favors job growth in Canada and minimizes disruption.

The US has a different approach, and a different problem. Immigrants are selected for a willingness to work in harsh conditions for low wages (often associated with illegal status), for professional rather than entrepreneurial skills and for family bonds to citizens (the latter is where I came in). The consequence is economic benefits to immigrants and their employers, a mildly positive benefit to the nation as a whole, and probably negative effects on some US workers (per a recent Krugman/DeLong set of essays). The calculus is complex; if illegal aliens didn't harvest US crops either robots would do the work or the crops wouldn't be grown here any longer. On the other hand roofers would be paid more -- that work has to be done and can't be outsourced. Nannies would be paid much, much more, but many women and a few men would switch to day care or stop working.

Besides the economic complexities, there are interesting legal and cultural issues. To what extent is the US owned by its citizens -- vs. for example, the foreigners who increasingly own our bonds, our stocks and our land? What special privileges do America's owners demand as a benefit of ownership? Do we owners want to do something to boost wages and employment of less skilled workers, or do we want to boost overall wealth and lessen the impact of the aging boomers?

If it were up to me, I'd take a hard look at what Canada does -- maximize the economic benefits of the immigrant stream. I'd also want to get some real data on the impact on less skilled US workers; I'd probably choose "protection" of some domains. I would also look at a range of measures to favor and increase english language skills; I came from a nation divided by language (Quebec) and I think that's a very bad idea for the US. Lastly, I think a lot of labor intensive agriculture probably doesn't make sense for the US any more.

Indict the dogs

Molly Ivins wants to indict military dogs. She also uses the word "plangent". Clearly she is an enemy of America, and now that I've turned her in I assume I'll be forgiven my past sins.

I think Molly is starting to despair. I know I am ...

CEO Corruption: will there be unexpected consequences

Unless someone's made a gross statistical error, it is certain far beyond a mere reasonable doubt that a good number CEO option grants are being backdated to maximize returns:

The Big Picture: CEO Options: Luck -- or something else?:

... A Wall Street Journal analysis suggests the odds of this happening by chance are extraordinarily remote -- around one in 300 billion. The odds of winning the multistate Powerball lottery with a $1 ticket are one in 146 million.

Suspecting such patterns aren't due to chance, the Securities and Exchange Commission is examining whether some option grants carry favorable grant dates for a different reason: They were backdated. The SEC is understood to be looking at about a dozen companies' option grants with this in mind.

The Journal's analysis of grant dates and stock movements suggests the problem may be broader. It identified several companies with wildly improbable option-grant patterns. While this doesn't prove chicanery, it shows something very odd: Year after year, some companies' top executives received options on unusually propitious dates.

What kind of impact does this corruption have on a society? At what point do people start dropping out -- or become receptive to a populist reaction? It's happened in America before.

Prime numbers, Zeta functions, and quantum mechanics

Seed magazine has a very readable article that provides a 200,000 foot view of the relationship between number theory and quantum mechanics: Seed: Prime Numbers Get Hitched. I do wish Du Sautoy had mentioned whether this had any implications for cryptography; I believe current techniques rely in part on the technical difficulty of factoring large numbers. Naively one might think a breakthrough in understanding prime numbers would not be all that great for the stock market.

He mentions by way of background Riemann's role in anticipating general relativity, and also describing the Zeta functions that play a role in both QM and prime number theory. If we do reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, it would not be amazing if Riemann should turn out to be a common source. I have a bit of a personal connection here. As a high school student, back before there were photocopiers, I gave a talk on non-euclidean geometry. I don't believe I've subsequently worked my feeble brain as hard as I did preparing for that presentation. I doubt much of the class got anything from it; I could just as well have delivered it in ancient Greek. All the same, Riemann made a lasting impression on me.

At one point in my brash days I foolishly dismissed the uncanny connection between mathematics and physics with some "clever" phrase that I mercifully don't remember. I apologize to my victim. I've long since joined the ranks of those who find the relationship more than a bit unsettling.