Fallows on the Bush attorney scandals - murder suppressed?

Fallows suggests that Bush administration gun politics may have impeded investigation of the murder of Tom Wales, a federal prosecutor. The prime suspect may have been well connected.

Fallows is an establishment journalist. Years ago I'm sure this connection would never have occurred to him, but six years of the worst presidency ever has made everything conceivable.

Incidentally, he mentions the curious timing of a plum job offer and $1.5 million dollar "bonus" that terminated the investigation of another allegedly corrupt GOP congressman. I wonder if Debra Wong Yang could be encouraged to talk to Congress ...

Cho: the system worked, until it didn't

So the system worked. Cho was identified as a danger to himself and others two years ago. Except the system had gaping holes in it. Disaster must have narrowly averted dozens of times, but humans don't learn from averted disasters. We're just not built that way.

We only learn from true disaster, and then we learn as little as possible in the smallest possible domain. It's probably part of how we got through the day in simpler times, but it's an evolutionarily obsolete behavior.

Virginia might fix their system. Will Minnesota's Secretary of Health order a review of our involuntary commitment procedures in light of the Blacksburg tragedy? Probably not, though one can dream.

Somehow we need to do better.

Eta Carinae: no need to worry

Back before the dinosaurs, in a galaxy not so far away, a big star blew. We have similar one nearby ...

Huge star explodes in brightest supernova yet seen | Science | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A gargantuan explosion ripped apart a star perhaps 150 times more massive than our sun in a relatively nearby galaxy in the most powerful and brightest supernova ever observed, astronomers said on Monday.

... The supernova, designated as SN 2006gy, occurred 240 million light years away in a galaxy called NGC 1260, and was studied using observations from NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as earthbound optical telescopes...

... Astrophysicist Mario Livio said the supernova may have resulted from a type of explosion mechanism that had existed only in theoretical calculations. He said the first generation of stars in the universe may have died in such a manner.

In a normal supernova, the core of a star collapses when it exhausts its fuel, and forms either a neutron star or a black hole, with scant heavy elements blown into space.

But this supernova appears to be the result of the core not collapsing but being obliterated in an explosion blasting all its material into space, the scientists said.

Dave Pooley of the University of California at Berkeley said this star appears similar to Eta Carinae, a star perhaps 100 to 120 times the mass of the sun located 7,500 light years away within the Milky Way. There has not been a supernova in our galaxy in more than 400 years, Pooley said...

... If Eta Carinae were to burst into a supernova, Pooley said, "It would be so bright that you would see it during the day, and you could even read a book by its light at night."...

... "This could happen tomorrow, it could happen 1,000 years from now," Livio said. "Is there a risk to life on Earth as a result of this explosion? Well, not very likely."

Livio said Earth could be affected if there were a gamma ray burst that potentially could harm the atmosphere and life, but the chances of this aiming directly at Earth are slim.

When I read these stories I spare a moment to reflect on whatever was "downwind" from SN 2006gy.

I liked the "slim" comment. Really, I don't need to know how slim. If Eta Carinae's future gamma beam travels our way we're toast. Happily we have far more urgent things to worry about ...

ACE inhibitors and dementia: radiation protection?

These kind of loose association studies are a dime a dozen, and usually misleading. They're digging data obtained for other reasons to look for an association. What makes it interesting, however, is the animal study:

Some heart drugs may slow mental decline with age | Health | Reuters:

... The study found a link between taking these "centrally acting" ACE inhibitors and lower rates of mental decline as measured by the Modified Mini-Mental State Exam...

For each year that subjects were exposed to centrally acting ACE inhibitors that enter the brain, the decline in test results was 50 percent lower than the decline in people taking other kinds of high blood pressure pills...

... Centrally acting ACE inhibitors include captopril (Capoten), fosinopril (Monopril), lisinopril (Prinivil or Zestril), perindopril (Aceon), ramipril (Altace) and trandolapril (Mavik). [jf: several of these are off-patent now]

Sink decided to investigate the effect of centrally acting ACE inhibitors on dementia risk after her Wake Forest colleagues found the drugs protected rats from brain injury due to radiation. She presented her findings May 5 at the American Geriatrics Society's annual meeting in Seattle.

She and her colleagues looked at a subgroup of 1,074 men and women participating in a study of cardiovascular health who were taking drugs to treat hypertension and were dementia-free when the study began.

While the centrally acting ACE inhibitors did slow cognitive decline, as Sink had hypothesized, the non-centrally active ACE inhibitors that don't reach the brain actually boosted the risk of developing dementia by 20 percent, although the effect didn't reach statistical significance....

The radiation protection effect is what made my ears perk up. The rest of this is thin stuff, enough only to justify further work. We do have animal models for dementia, so that is the place to look next. The "risk increase" numbers are probably random error in this type of study.

Trying to locate a science fiction story

I dimply recall reading a science fiction story or tv show whose plot went something like this:

• wealthy eccentric is puzzled by the continued survival of humanity after the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb
  
• wealthy guy employs cynical protagonist (neer do well political scientist with a past) to investigate
• protagonist cynically takes the money, but slowly begins to realize his employer is right -- there's no way humanity should still be around
• protagonist starts to close-in on the conspiracy (aliens of course) but then ...
  

I know "it's out there" :-). Anyone remember reading this? It might be from a long time back ...

Submit comments or just email at jfaughnan@spamcop.net

Disasters that weren't: lessons not learned

Extraordinary heroism spared 1950s Britain from a "China Syndrome" catastrophe:

Damn Interesting: The Windscale Disaster

... Reactor Manager Tom Tuohy– thought to have been exposed to the most radiation during the event– is now in his mid-80s and is living with his wife in the USA. One study conducted in 1987 estimated that as many as thirty-three people may eventually die from cancers as a result of this accident, though the Medical Research Council Committee concluded that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that any harm has been done to the health of anybody, whether a worker in the Windscale plant or a member of the general public." In contrast, Chernobyl caused forty-seven immediate deaths and as many as 9,000 may die from related cancer.

Today, some areas of Cumbria still prompt a few clicks from Geiger counters due to lingering caesium-137 isotopes. While the Windscale reactors have been in the process of being decommissioned since the 1980s, the core of Windscale Pile 1 still contains roughly fifteen tons of warm and highly radioactive uranium, and the cleanup is not expected to finish until 2060.

Ultimately the unnecessary incident could have been avoided with a bit of knowledge from the Manhattan project. Had the American government opted to share the nuclear knowledge which the British had helped to gain, the mishap could have been avoided altogether. Fortunately the foresight of Sir John Cockcroft and the valor of men like Tom Tuohy and Tom Hughes

Tuohy and Hughes exhausted a lifetime supply of heroism in 1957. The article doesn't mention if they ever got any fancy medals, but it's not too late for Tuohy to pick one up ...

I suspect we learn far less from disasters averted than from disasters confirmed. If only we'd had ten thousand more years of cortical evolution before we went singular ...

Phishing and the retreat from the net

I believe fewer "regular folk" rely on the net than was true a few years ago, even as more use it purely for entertainment. I don't think this is a reasoned, conscious decision for most, I think it's more of an instinctive reluctance. I think this is why:

coding horror: phishing ...

... There's only one conclusion you can draw from the study's results: when presented with a spoofed web page, a large percentage of users will always fall for it. Forever.

Once that spoofed page is up, even if we use the extraordinarily optimistic estimate that only 15 percent of users will fall for it, that's still a tremendous number of users at risk. Given the poor statistics, the only mitigation strategy that makes sense is to somehow prevent showing the spoofed page to the user. The good news is that the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer have anti-phishing capabilities which do exactly that: they use real-time, distributed blacklists to prevent showing known spoof sites to users. I visited the PhishTank site to gather a set of known phishing URLs to see how well these browsers perform.

Firefox may be using PhishTank as a source; every URL I visited showed the most severe warning, blocking the phishing site from the user behind a sort of smoked glass effect. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to click the little red X and use the page. I don't think it's a good idea for this dialog to be so easily dismissable, like any other run of the mill dialog box...

... I'm no fan of distributed blacklists, but I think they're a necessary evil in this case. Throughout the last ten years of incremental browser security improvements, users have always been susceptible to spoof attacks. It doesn't matter how many security warnings we present, or how much security browser chrome we wrap websites in. Phishing is the forever hack. If the phishing page is displayed at all, it invariably reels a large percentage of users in hook, line, and sinker. The only security technique that can protect users from phishing scams, it seems, is the one that prevents them from ever seeing the phishing page in the first place.

I don't think Camino is using a phishing filter yet, and I know Safari isn't. It's a prerequisite now.

More fundamentally, I think we're coming to the end of the first generation of the net. The next version won't be anonymous ...

Poisoned medicine: Even I am stunned.

[updated to include a link to the 2/07 story.]

I've written relentlessly about the Melanine pet food poisoning for four reasons. One is personal - our pack includes a dog. Another is personal - our pack includes children who eat food. A third is personal - our pack includes dogs and children who take medicines. A fourth is moral - even in the age of the GOP (the waning days we pray) we are still somewhat more protected than many others.

Now, in a Pulitzer Prize class story, Bogdanich and Hooker of the NYT have dropped the next bombshell. This is one of a series of related NYT exposes, including a 2/07 story on how Chinese counterfeit medications in Africa may have killed over a hundred thousand people.

This is not only a story of "foreign" suffering. Did you know that in 1995 50 tons of poisonous glycol was shipped to the US from China and was barely stopped from entering our medication supply? Another instance of how the stories not told are far more important than the average celebrity headline.

Any resemblance between this story and the recent pet poisoning story is, of course, fundamental. Emphases mine.

From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine - New York Times
By WALT BOGDANICH and JAKE HOOKER
Published: May 6, 2007

The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die.

Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.

The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze.

It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.

Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.

Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.

Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly [jf: they thought it was glycerin] mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison...

Forty-six barrels of the toxic syrup arrived via a poison pipeline stretching halfway around the world. Through shipping records and interviews with government officials, The New York Times traced this pipeline from the Panamanian port of Colón, back through trading companies in Barcelona, Spain, and Beijing, to its beginning near the Yangtze Delta in a place local people call “chemical country.”

The counterfeit glycerin passed through three trading companies on three continents, yet not one of them tested the syrup to confirm what was on the label. Along the way, a certificate falsely attesting to the purity of the shipment was repeatedly altered, eliminating the name of the manufacturer and previous owner. As a result, traders bought the syrup without knowing where it came from, or who made it. With this information, the traders might have discovered — as The Times did — that the manufacturer was not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients.

An examination of the two poisoning cases last year — in Panama and earlier in China — shows how China’s safety regulations have lagged behind its growing role as low-cost supplier to the world. It also demonstrates how a poorly policed chain of traders in country after country allows counterfeit medicine to contaminate the global market.

Last week, the United States Food and Drug Administration warned drug makers and suppliers in the United States “to be especially vigilant” in watching for diethylene glycol. The warning did not specifically mention China, and it said there was “no reason to believe” that glycerin in this country was tainted. Even so, the agency asked [jf: note "asked", not required] that all glycerin shipments be tested for diethylene glycol, and said it was “exploring how supplies of glycerin become contaminated.”...

... Beyond Panama and China, toxic syrup has caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and twice in India.

In Bangladesh, investigators found poison in seven brands of fever medication in 1992, but only after countless children died. A Massachusetts laboratory detected the contamination after Dr. Michael L. Bennish, a pediatrician who works in developing countries, smuggled samples of the tainted syrup out of the country in a suitcase. Dr. Bennish, who investigated the Bangladesh epidemic and helped write a 1995 article about it for BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, said that given the amount of medication distributed, deaths “must be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”..

... The makers of counterfeit glycerin, which superficially looks and acts like the real thing but generally costs considerably less, are rarely identified, much less prosecuted, given the difficulty of tracing shipments across borders. “This is really a global problem, and it needs to be handled in a global way,” said Dr. Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization’s top representative in Beijing.

Seventy years ago, medicine laced with diethylene glycol killed more than 100 people in the United States, leading to the passage of the toughest drug regulations of that era and the creation of the modern Food and Drug Administration...

...When at least 88 children died in Haiti a decade ago, F.D.A. investigators traced the poison to the Manchurian city of Dalian, but their attempts to visit the suspected manufacturer were repeatedly blocked by Chinese officials, according to internal State Department records. Permission was granted more than a year later, but by then the plant had moved and its records had been destroyed.

“Chinese officials we contacted on this matter were all reluctant to become involved,” the American Embassy in Beijing wrote in a confidential cable. “We cannot be optimistic about our chances for success in tracking down the other possible glycerine shipments.”

In fact, The Times found records showing that the same Chinese company implicated in the Haiti poisoning also shipped about 50 tons of counterfeit glycerin to the United States in 1995. Some of it was later resold to another American customer, Avatar Corporation, before the deception was discovered. [jf: what the #$!#$@?]

“Thank God we caught it when we did,” said Phil Ternes, chief operating officer of Avatar, a Chicago-area supplier of bulk pharmaceuticals and nonmedicinal products. The F.D.A. said it was unaware of the shipment.

In China, the government is vowing to clean up its pharmaceutical industry, in part because of criticism over counterfeit drugs flooding the world markets. In December, two top drug regulators were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs. In addition, 440 counterfeiting operations were closed down last year, the World Health Organization said.

But when Chinese officials investigated the role of Chinese companies in the Panama deaths, they found that no laws had been broken, according to an official of the nation’s drug enforcement agency. China’s drug regulation is “a black hole,” said one trader who has done business through CNSC Fortune Way, the Beijing-based broker that investigators say was a crucial conduit for the Panama poison.

In this environment, Wang Guiping, a tailor with a ninth-grade education and access to a chemistry book, found it easy to enter the pharmaceutical supply business as a middleman. He quickly discovered what others had before him: that counterfeiting was a simple way to increase profits.

And then people in China began to die...

... Panamanians wanting to see where their toxic nightmare began could look up the Web site of the company in Hengxiang, China, that investigators in four countries have identified as having made the syrup — the Taixing Glycerine Factory...

... The Taixing Glycerine Factory bought its diethylene glycol from the same manufacturer as Mr. Wang, the former tailor, the government investigator said. From this spot in China’s chemical country, the 46 barrels of toxic syrup began their journey, passing from company to company, port to port and country to country, apparently without anyone testing their contents.

Traders should be thoroughly familiar with their suppliers, United States health officials say. “One simply does not assume that what is labeled is indeed what it is,” said Dr. Murray Lumpkin, deputy commissioner for international and special programs for the Food and Drug Administration.

In the Panama case, names of suppliers were removed from shipping documents as they passed from one entity to the next, according to records and investigators. That is a practice some traders use to prevent customers from bypassing them on future purchases, but it also hides the provenance of the product.

The first distributor was the Beijing trading company, CNSC Fortune Way, a unit of a state-owned business that began by supplying goods and services to Chinese personnel and business officials overseas.

As China’s market reach expanded, Fortune Way focused its business on pharmaceutical ingredients, and in 2003, it brokered the sale of the suspect syrup made by the Taixing Glycerine Factory. The manufacturer’s certificate of analysis showed the batch to be 99.5 percent pure.

Whether the Taixing Glycerine Factory actually performed the test has not been publicly disclosed.

Original certificates of analysis should be passed on to each new buyer, said Kevin J. McGlue, a board member of the International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council. In this case, that was not done.

Fortune Way translated the certificate into English, putting its name — not the Taixing Glycerine Factory’s — at the top of the document, before shipping the barrels to a second trading company, this one in Barcelona...

...Upon receiving the barrels in September 2003, the Spanish company, Rasfer International, did not test the contents, either. It copied the chemical analysis provided by Fortune Way, then put its logo on it. Ascensión Criado, Rasfer’s manager, said in an e-mail response to written questions that when Fortune Way shipped the syrup, it did not say who made it.

Several weeks later, Rasfer shipped the drums to a Panamanian broker, the Medicom Business Group. “Medicom never asked us for the name of the manufacturer,” Ms. Criado said...

...In Panama, the barrels sat unused for more than two years, and officials said Medicom improperly changed the expiration date on the syrup.

During that time, the company never tested the product. And the Panamanian government, which bought the 46 barrels and used them to make cold medicine, also failed to detect the poison, officials said...

... Last fall, at the request of the United States — Panama has no diplomatic relations with China — the State Food and Drug Administration of China investigated the Taixing Glycerine Factory and Fortune Way.

The agency tested one batch of glycerin from the factory, and found no glycerin, only diethylene glycol and two other substances, a drug official said.

Since then, the Chinese drug administration has concluded that it has no jurisdiction in the case because the factory is not certified to make medicine.

The agency reached a similar conclusion about Fortune Way, saying that as an exporter it was not engaged in the pharmaceutical business.

“We did not find any evidence that either of these companies had broken the law,” said Yan Jiangying, a spokeswoman for the drug administration. “So a criminal investigation was never opened.”

A drug official said the investigation was subsequently handed off to an agency that tests and certifies commercial products — the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

But the agency acted surprised to learn that it was now in charge. “What investigation?” asked Wang Jian, director of its Taixing branch. “I’m not aware of any investigation involving a glycerin factory.”

Besides, Huang Tong, an investigator in that office, said, “We rarely get involved in products that are sold for export.”...

This is not a system that's broken in a small way.

This is not a problem of "just" food or "just" medication or "just" lead poisoned tree ornaments or "just" fake fur that isn't or "just" contaminated herbal remedies. This is the return to our life of the conditions of 1930s America, an age before effective regulation and effective government. This is not a "China problem", though China because of its scale and power is at the center of it today.

We have a global trading system that's in crisis, colliding with a US government that's incompetent and paralyzed. Whoever takes over after Bush shuffles off will need to address this extremely aggressively.

Can we have a world trading system without the beginnings of a world legal and governmental system?

FAQ on the state of quantum computing

Scott Aaronson, who conned me with an April 1 post on his failed job search, is now interviewing for true faculty positions. His research is in quantum computing, so when he created an FAQ based on his interviews he also provided a 2007 summary on the state of quantum computing.

Offshoring: 30 million US jobs?

Cringely claimed yesterday that IBM is going to cut 150,000 IT jobs (consulting mostly), moving the work offshore.

Today in WaPo ...

Free Trade's Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me - washingtonpost.com

...In some recent research, I estimated that 30 million to 40 million U.S. jobs are potentially offshorable. These include scientists, mathematicians and editors on the high end and telephone operators, clerks and typists on the low end. Obviously, not all of these jobs are going to India, China or elsewhere. But many will....

...In addition, we need to rethink our education system so that it turns out more people who are trained for the jobs that will remain in the United States and fewer for the jobs that will migrate overseas. We cannot, of course, foresee exactly which jobs will go and which will stay. But one good bet is that many electronic service jobs will move offshore, whereas personal service jobs will not. Here are a few examples. Tax accounting is easily offshorable; onsite auditing is not. Computer programming is offshorable; computer repair is not. Architects could be endangered, but builders aren't. Were it not for stiff regulations, radiology would be offshorable; but pediatrics and geriatrics aren't. Lawyers who write contracts can do so at a distance and deliver them electronically; litigators who argue cases in court cannot....

In fifteen years, will an American garbage man make more than an American accountant? I disagree about pedes not being offshorable btw; we could use nurses or aides to talk to the child and remote pediatricians to provide backup. Plumbing, carpentry, roofing ... Oh, wait, aren't many of those jobs done by illegal aliens?

I have to laugh when I see articles bemoaning the disinterest of American women in IT jobs.

So when will we get universal health care?

Pet food roundup: more bad news

Just more bad news

• estimated deaths now about 8,500 with expectation of many lives limited by future renal failure
• a mail order pet food supplier joined the recall
• 20 million chickens may have eaten contaminated feed
• Menu Foods admits studies have shown "cross contamination" -- foods thought to be safe are found to contain melanine

That announcement prompted ASPCA to issue its warning to pet owners.

... “Given the fact that there is new evidence of cross-contamination in ingredients that may have been considered safe prior to this news, we need to be much more aware of where the ingredients in our pets’ food are coming from,” said Dr. Steven Hansen, a board-certified toxicologist and senior vice president with the ASPCA. He manages ASPCA’s Animal Poison Control Center (APCC) in Urbana, Ill.

Hansen added: “We are strongly recommending that pet parents immediately investigate, via their pet food manufacturer’s Web site or by calling them directly, where the ingredients--specifically protein supplements--are sourced from.”

ASPCA recommends pet owners only feed their dogs or cats products that contain U.S.-made protein supplements.

I wonder how many US made protein supplements exist. I also suspect that manufacturers aren't going to reveal their supplement sources. Your best guide may be if they don't explicitly say it's US based, then one can assume it's coming from China.

The greatness of geeks: Ad block software

Other than pop-up blockers, I've not bothered with Ad block software. The sites I go to have very rarely use obnoxious adds.

Until today. Slate had an ad, for a movie called 28 I think, that was beyond obnoxious. I happened to be using Camino (I alternate between Camino and Firefox depending on my mood and how badly behaved FF has been recently), so I turned on their Ad Block feature. Sweet relief.

This is where the greatness of geeks comes in. Ads are the primary revenue source for web content providers. The success of web browsers is tied to the success of web content. If web browsers were produced by publicly traded companies, they'd never implement ad blocking. Enter the geeks. There are enough geek-controlled browsers to keep even IE honest.

Thanks!

Boltzmann’s Brain explained

I'd blogged earlier on a Cosmic Variance article about emergent brains in the eternal soup of a senescent universe, but I didn't know the original context of the Boltzmann Brain idea. Another CV article today pointed me to one from last year that filled in the gaps. The Boltzmann Brain comes from a 2004 paper by Albrecht and Sorbo, and it was described in CV last year:

Boltzmann’s Anthropic Brain | Cosmic Variance

...Let’s posit that the universe is typically in thermal equilibrium, with occasional fluctuations down to low-entropy states, and that we live in the midst of one of those fluctuations because that’s the only place hospitable to life. What follows?

The most basic problem has been colorfully labeled “Boltzmann’s Brain” by Albrecht and Sorbo. Remember that the low-entropy fluctuations we are talking about are incredibly rare, and the lower the entropy goes, the rarer they are...
...So if we are explaining our low-entropy universe by appealing to the anthropic criterion that it must be possible for intelligent life to exist, quite a strong prediction follows: we should find ourselves in the minimum possible entropy fluctuation consistent with life’s existence.

And that minimum fluctuation would be “Boltzmann’s Brain.” Out of the background thermal equilibrium, a fluctuation randomly appears that collects some degrees of freedom into the form of a conscious brain, with just enough sensory apparatus to look around and say “Hey! I exist!”, before dissolving back into the equilibrated ooze.

You might object that such a fluctuation is very rare, and indeed it is. But so would be a fluctuation into our whole universe — in fact, quite a bit more rare. The momentary decrease in entropy required to produce such a brain is fantastically less than that required to make our whole universe. Within the infinite ensemble envisioned by Boltzmann, the overwhelming majority of brains will find themselves disembodied and alone, not happily ensconsed in a warm and welcoming universe filled with other souls. (You know, like ours.)

This is the general thrust of argument with which many anthropic claims run into trouble. Our observed universe has something like a hundred billion galaxies with something like a hundred billion stars each. That’s an extremely expansive and profligate universe, if its features are constrained solely by the demand that we exist. Very roughly speaking, anthropic arguments would be more persuasive if our universe was minimally constructed to allow for our existence; e.g. if the vacuum energy were small enough to allow for a single galaxy to arise out of a really rare density fluctuation. Instead we have a hundred billion such galaxies, not to count all of those outside our Hubble radius — an embarassment of riches, really....

Of course there's no end to the anthropic principle, which I tend to think of as an extreme application of Bayes theorem. We can be anthropic ad absurbum, and say that since we live in a rich universe we must exist in a really, really, really big and really, really, rare entropic excursion event.

Or maybe we're a dream of a more modest excursion, which is, after all, more likely.

Hmph. Cosmology is becoming about as satisfying as quantum mechanics.

Genetic testing hits the big time?

Almost every article on this discovery emphasized that this gene flaw was found in palefaces. I assume that's because intimations of genetic inadequacy are less controversial when applied to a (transiently) powerful community. In reality they've yet to study the prevalence in non-euros:

BBC NEWS | Health | Heart disease genetic link found
Last Updated: Thursday, 3 May 2007, 18:23 GMT 19:23 UK

... US and Canadian researchers found that up to one in four white people carries the section of DNA which increases the risk of heart disease by around 40%.

A separate study in Iceland found the same genetic variant was linked to a fifth of heart attacks...

... The US/Canadian team found a section of DNA - called an allele - on a specific chromosome that was associated with heart disease.

Their study of 23,000 people, showed that those who carried one copy of this allele have a moderately increased risk of heart disease.

But people who have two copies, which accounts for about 20-25 % of white people, have a 30 to 40% higher risk of heart disease than individuals who carry no copies.

Professor Ruth McPherson, of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, who worked on the study, said: "The effect is less than that of smoking or having a high cholesterol level....

... The researchers will now check if the findings also apply to people from black and Asian ethnic minorities.

... The Iceland study looked at the same stretch of DNA in 17,000 people.

They also found that more than 20% of people had two copies of the faulty allele.

People with both copies had a 60% increased risk of heart attack, compared with those who with no copies.

The risk factors for premature heart disease of hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, smoking and male gender are as old as the hills. (Intriguingly family history doesn't usually make the list, I assume it didn't add much to the linear regression models.) For many years we've known that these variables are not fully predictive (I'm thinking 50%, but that's based on ghosts of old memories). Clearly there are other factors to be named, and maybe this gene is one of them.

This is the first mass market gene test candidate I know of, so this is a historic discovery. Once it's commercialized a gene test will be compared to coronary calcium measurement in the management of patients for whom the costs and risks of lipid therapy may outweigh benefits. It will also play a role in deciding who gets cheap life insurance.

BTW, the funny thing about laws that prevent insurers from using gene testing in coverage decsions is that they're unfair ... to insurers. Patients, of course, can use the tests on themselves. If the risks look high, they buy term insurance. If the risks are low, they don't. Poor insurer :-). Really, this stuff is just another shove towards a system of universal minimal health care coverage.

It will be very interesting to learn what this gene codes for. Not only will that open new therapeutic options, we will also suggest the benefit of this allele. It's too common in the euro population to be only dangerous ...

Venus: the forgotten planet

I was going to bed last night, and it occurred to me that I never hear much about Venus. We read about Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto (not even a planet!), Mercury ... but not Venus. Venus, the planet the most like earth -- save for one minor detail -- no tectonics. Oh, and a bit of greenhouse gas issue ...

A conspiracy? Probably not, since Wikipedia has a great article (emphases mine):

Venus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... About 80% of Venus' surface consists of smooth volcanic plains. Two highland 'continents' make up the rest of its surface area, one lying in the planet's northern hemisphere and the other just south of the equator. The northern continent is called Ishtar Terra, after Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love, and is about the size of Australia. Maxwell Montes, [named after James Clerk Maxwell] the highest mountain on Venus, lies on Ishtar Terra. Its peak is 11 km above Venus' average surface elevation; in contrast, Earth's highest mountain, Mount Everest, rises to just under 9 km above sea level. The southern continent is called Aphrodite Terra, after the Greek goddess of love, and is the larger of the two highland regions at roughly the size of South America.

... Venus has a number of unique surface features. Among these are flat-topped volcanic features called farra, which look somewhat like pancakes and range in size from 20–50 km across, and 100–1000 m high; radial, star-like fracture systems called novae; features with both radial and concentric fractures resembling spiders' webs, known as arachnoids; and coronae, circular rings of fractures sometimes surrounded by a depression. All of these features are volcanic in origin....

...Venus has several times as many volcanoes as Earth, and it possesses some 167 giant volcanoes that are over 100 km across. The only volcanic complex of this size on Earth is the Big Island of Hawaii. However, this is not because Venus is more volcanically active than Earth, but because its crust is older. Earth's crust is continually recycled by subduction at the boundaries of tectonic plates, and has an average age of about 100 million years, while Venus' surface is estimated to be about 500 million years old...

... on Venus, about 85% of craters are in pristine condition. The number of craters together with their well-preserved condition indicates that the planet underwent a total resurfacing event about 500 million years ago. ....Without plate tectonics to dissipate heat from its mantle, Venus instead undergoes a cyclical process in which mantle temperatures rise until they reach a critical level that weakens the crust. Then, over a period of about 100 million years, subduction occurs on an enormous scale, completely recycling the crust. [jf: I think this means the turnover starts ever 500 million years, but it takes 100 million years to exhaust the mantle heat and restabilize the crust.]

... Venus has an extremely thick atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. The pressure at the planet's surface is about 90 times that at Earth's surface—a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The enormously CO2-rich atmosphere generates a strong greenhouse effect that raises the surface temperature to over 400 °C (752°F). This makes Venus' surface hotter than Mercury's, even though Venus is nearly twice as distant from the Sun and receives only 25% of the solar irradiance.

Studies have suggested that several billion years ago Venus' atmosphere was much more like Earth's than it is now, and that there were probably substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere. Venus is thus an extreme example of climate change, making it a useful tool in climate change studies.

... The permanent cloud cover means that although Venus is closer than Earth to the Sun, the Venusian surface is not as well heated or lit. In the absence of the greenhouse effect caused by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the temperature at the surface of Venus would be quite similar to that on Earth. ...

... lack of an intrinsic magnetic field at Venus was surprising given that it is similar to Earth in size, and was expected to also contain a dynamo in its core. A dynamo requires three things: a conducting liquid, rotation, and convection. The core is thought to be electrically conductive, however. Also, while its rotation is often thought to be too slow, simulations show that it is quite adequate to produce a dynamo. This implies that the dynamo is missing because of a lack of convection in Venus' core. On Earth, convection occurs in the liquid outer layer of the core because the bottom of the liquid layer is much hotter than the top. Since Venus has no plate tectonics to let off heat, it is possible that it has no solid inner core, or that its core is not currently cooling, so that the entire liquid part of the core is at approximately the same temperature. Another possibility is that its core has already completely solidified.

... If viewed from above the Sun's north pole, all of the planets are orbiting in a counter-clockwise direction; but while most planets also rotate anticlockwise, Venus rotates clockwise in "retrograde" rotation. The question of how Venus came to have a slow, retrograde rotation was a major puzzle for scientists when the planet's rotation period was first measured. When it formed from the solar nebula, Venus would have had a much faster, prograde rotation, but calculations show that over billions of years, tidal effects on its dense atmosphere could have slowed down its initial rotation to the value seen today.

A curious aspect of Venus' orbit and rotation periods is that the 584-day average interval between successive close approaches to the Earth is almost exactly equal to five Venusian solar days. Whether this relationship arose by chance or is the result of some kind of tidal locking with the Earth, is unknown....

The major flaw with this article is it doesn't make clear why Venus lacks plate tectonics. There's a throwaway line about "dry crust", so maybe the theory is that Venus' solar proximity led to early water loss, the loss of water led to arrested plate tectonics (and to the CO2 accumulation and greenhouse gas effect?), then arrested plate tectonics and greenhouse gases led to a volcanism dominated globe with a hot ultra-dense atmosphere ...

I think The Onion recently suggested Dick Cheney is Venusian, which probably explains the GOP's attitude towards CO2 accumulation.

PS. If you know a planetary person, can you ask them to edit the article to clarify the tectonics/CO2/volcanism relationships?

PPS. I had a high school science teacher who was a fan of Velikovsky's "When World's Collide". Messed up my thinking for a few months. So I thought it was curious that we still don't have confident explanation for the retrograde orbit. (Alas, Velikovsky's explanation was inconsistent with basic physics.)