2006 Archives

A (pointless) smoke inhalation toxicity study exposed various rodents to cigarette smoke for four hours, five days a week. Unexpectedly, many of the animals responded by placing their feces in the smoke-delivery tubing, repeatedly and in quantity. One poor hamster stuffed the air inlet so effectively that he/she suffocated.

Source: Pleasurable Kingdom: Balcombe, Jonathon. Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good. Macmillan, 2006.

Human geneticists testing people for heritable diseases quite frequently stumble across cases where the father of record cannot be the biological parent. Genetic counselors have a rule of thumb that these discrepancies, known delicately as nonpaternity cases, will range from 5 to 10% in an average American or British population. For the US population as a whole, "The generic number used by us is 10 percent," said Bradley Ppovich, vice president of the American College of Medical Genetics.

Source: Wade, Nicholas. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. Penguin, 2006.

From an excellent book for teenagers that probably isn't so appropriate for teenagers but is absolutely hilarious if you're looking back:

My mom has this funny habit of ending practically all of her sentences like this: "[Random sentence]. So…"

There's another part that comes after the so, but it's either so obvious that it's not necessary to say it, or she doesn't quite know what it is and gives up trying to figure it out.

"I've got to get to work early tomorrow. So…" That means "I've got to get to work early tomorrow. So I'm going to bed early and I don't want anyone making too much noise." Or possibly: "… I'm taking this big glass of bourbon into the bedroom and I do not wish to be disturbed and I'm seriously considering giving you the silent treatment for the next couple of weeks starting now."

More interesting, and sometimes more disturbing, are the mysterious ones where you can't figure out exactly what's supposed to come after the "so."

"Elaine [the old lady down the street] said she's sorry she decided to have children after all and wishes she had spent the money on herself instead. So…"

"When I was growing up, they didn't expect you to go to college. High school was enough. So…"

"Well, they do say if you ignore something, it goes away on its own in ninety percent of all cases. So…"

Source: Portman, Frank. King Dork. Delacorte, 2006.

In recent years, there has been a trend toward replacing lawns with gravel, wood chips, and xeriscaping to use less water. There are numerous resources and websites out there that explain how to choose a replacement ground cover, arrange plants, setup an efficient irrigation system, etc. But there's very little out there on the actual removal of the lawn itself.

A month or so ago Brian and I decided to remove our 540 sq. ft. or so of dying grass and replace it with gravel. I quickly discovered that there are two options for removing sod: with a sod cutter or with a shovel and your hands. Renting a sod cutter requires a truck, and sadly we couldn't track one done. That left us with option number two. My guess is that most people go with option number one or they pay someone to get rid of the lawn and don't worry about this stuff.

I wish we were most people because option two was hard and tiring. It took two days at the end of which I couldn't move. My advice is to water a few hours before you start. You want the lawn wet, but if it's too wet, the sod becomes very, very heavy and difficult to move.

Dig in with a gardening shovel. Use the shovel to break up the sod into pieces that are about one foot by two feet. Get under each piece with the shovel and loosen it up from the ground. Grab a hold of each piece and lift it up. Each piece will be heavy; remember to lift with your legs and all that jazz. Then you'll need somewhere to move the. I really hope you thought about this before you started tearing up the lawn. Keep in mind that you'll end up with a lot of sod and dirt that will be very heavy. We stuck ours in our giant compost pile which began to break under the pressure.

If you can enlist some help, this is the step where you'll need it the most. Grab some beer and call your friends. Better yet… make a friend with a truck and just rent the sod cutter.

Once you've got all of the sod up and out, you'll need to decide what you want to do. If you want plant in the area, I'd recommend you follow these directions on You Grow Girl.

If you want to be lazy like us and go with gravel or wood chips, lay down some weed barrier and top the area off with the material of your choice. That's it, and it's great for dogs and kids.

Thursday night we got a new addition to the dog family: Amos. He was rescued from a horrific situation with 30 chihuahuas locked in a trailer with no food or water about a year ago. You can read more about that here and here. A local rescue group was willing to take him on, even though he had never been around people and had heartworm.

He's still not too keen on people, but he's curious. And he's insanely adorable.

Luckily he likes other dogs so he'll fit right into our house.

Religion from the viewpoint of the neurosurgeon:

In working with the brain as an object, especially one dissected free of the body, I can't help but turn my thoughts to the philosophical once the anatomical and pathological requirements of the job are out of the way. Frank Lloyd Wright, when asked about his core religious beliefs, once answered something to the effect that he believed in "nature with a capital N." I like that answer. I know what he was getting at. I fundamentally believe in Nature too, with the human brain as a key part of it…

Most people believe in religious teachings simply because they were brought up with them from an early age, not because they critically examined the fundamentals and concluded that they made sense. Culture and tradition often trump good common sense. From the viewpoint of a Nature-based believer, then, traditional religion can lead to false hope or false comfort starting at an early age. Think of the ramifications. How many people sell themselves short on life because they expect great things after death? Life is not a dress rehearsal. You have to enjoy it, make the most of it, while your neurons are still buzzing with live connections. It's amazing how holding a brain can emphasize these points, at least for me.

Source: Firlik, Katrina. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe. Random House, 2006.

I got back from two weeks in Zambia last Friday. It was a truly amazing trip. I was visiting my friend Ringo who is in the Peace Corps there. She took care of most of the details from booking us at the hostel to hailing down our rides from one place to another. I spent most of my time adjusting to a completely different style of life. The most interesting part of the trip had to be getting into the village and seeing how people live without running water, electricity, or any of the things I take for granted here. The next highlight would be getting out on safari and seeing the wildlife. I'll post more details later, but in the meantime, my best pictures are posted online.

As I work my way through Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, I can't help but pondering the rise of voluntary simplicity and pledges to not shop on the black friday or buy Xmas gifts. And I came to the realization that pledges to buy nothing might just be the new chastity pledges of the left.

On a related note, I failed at buying nothing after a month because I am going on a a trip to Zambia next week. Zambia ... a country where an average person lives on less than $2.50 a day. What kind of first world whore am I?

I got back to the Spiral Jetty last week, and am glad to inform you that it's still there although covered in a bit of water:

More photos are here, and more information about the Spiral Jetty can be found here.

Brian gave her the worst haircut this weekend which you can just barely make out in this photo.

I like a good drink as much as the next guy, but…

Alcohol thus ranks at the dangerous end of the toxicity spectrum. So despite the fact that about 75 percent of all adults in the United States enjoy an occasional drink, it must be remembered that alcohol is quite toxic. Indeed, if alcohol were a newly formulated beverage, its high toxicity and addiction potential would surely prevent it from being marketed as a food or drug. This conclusion runs counter to the common view that one's own use of alcohol is harmless. That mistaken impression arises for several reasons.

First, the more frequently we experience an event without a negative outcome, the lower our level of perceived danger. For example, most of us have not had a life-threatening traffic accident; thus, we feel safer in a car than in an airplane, although we are 10 to 15 times more likely to die in an automobile accident than in a plane crash. Similarly, most of us have not had a life-threatening experience with alcohol, yet statistics show that every year about 300 people die in the United States from an alcohol overdose, and for at least twice that number of overdose deaths, alcohol is considered a contributing cause.

Second, having a sense of control over a risky situation reduces fear. People drinking alcoholic beverages believe that they have reasonably good control of the quantity they intend to consume. Control of the dose of alcohol is indeed easier than with many natural or illicit substances where the active ingredients are not commercially standardized. Furthermore, alcohol is often consumed in a beverage that dilutes the alcohol to a known degree.

Source: Gable, Robert. The Toxicity of Recreational Drugs. American Scientist, April/May 2006.

Once upon a time I used to come home from work and flip on the TV to find a myriad of home improvement shows like Trading Spaces or While You Were Out. I dreamed about painting my walls a luscious red and replacing my ceiling fans.

Times have changed. I now come home to It Takes a Thief where two reformed burglars break into a family's house, steal their possessions, and then give each family a security makeover. And I lose sleep over the fact that I haven't yet replaced my deadbolts at the new house.

The shift from slipcovers and new paint to locking up all of our possessions just can't bode well for the future.

I don't normally believe in magic or the supernatural, but this guy might just have us all fooled.

The Amazing Randi calls himself an "investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudo-scientific claims," and although he is a magician - in the sense that Penn and Teller are - he has made a name for himself by debunking the claims of people like the famous psychic spoon bender Uri Geller, who maintain they have a God-given (or in Geller's case, alien-given) ability to break the laws of physics, rather than aptitude for well-choreographed illusions. Randi performs many of the same tricks such "paranormalists" do, and he doesn't reveal their secrets, but he has notarized statements from other magicians confirming that they have seen his methods and found them to be naturalistic and mechanistic.

Which means the Amazing Randi is able to make his living off these "supernatural" tricks without claiming they are supernatural, but without giving anyone the satisfaction of seeing how they are accomplished. "So Randi gave this performance," said Dennett, "and then there's a question period. And one fellow absolutely stopped Randi in his tracks by arguing as follows: 'You claim to be able to explain Uri Geller's tricks, but you don't actually give us the explanation, and moreover, I think you're a real psychic just like he is. You have magical powers. You just don't want to admit it. And you see, the reason is there's only room in this world for one Uri Geller, and you're riding his coattails by claiming not to be a psychic. It's the only way you can earn a living in this racket.'" The amazing Randi, said Dennett, "found it very hard to prove you're not a psychic.

Source: Moffett, Shannon. The Three Pound Enigma. Algonquin Books, 2006.

We took a trip out to Antelope Island this weekend and saw a surprising amount of wildlife, such as:

A Great Horned Owl

A Porcupine in a Tree

A Tame Deer

Human-Lizard Hybrids

There are more photos here.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "antirealist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

Source: Frankfurt, Harry. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.

Next time I complain about spending too much on food, I'll know that I have no one to blame but myself.

Compare the price of the typical Wholefoods shopper's basket of goods, and nine times out of ten it will indeed be more expensive than the typical Safeway shopper's basket of goods. As a matter of verifiable fact, when you compare the prices on the same goods, Wholefoods is just as an inexpensive as Safeway.

Safeway and Wholefoods charge exactly the same for bananas. Exactly the same for a carton of cherry or grape tomatoes. Admittedly, Safeway's prices on yellow onions, Irish butter, and Cheerios are lower. But Wholefoods charges less for mineral water, Tropicana Premium orange juice, and sweet onions. The simple truth is that if you bought a big basket of the same goods from Safeway and from Wholefoods, the price tag would probably come out within a dollar or two - and it would be just as likely that Wholefoods would be cheaper.

Wholefoods is not expensive in the sense that it charges more for the same foods. It is expensive because of where its price targeting policies are focused: prices for the basics may be competitive, but the selection in Wholefoods is aimed at customers who have a different view of what "basics" are.

Source: Harford, Tim. The Undercover Economist. Oxford, 2006.

From Jonathan Rauch who wrote the definitive article on introversion:

It seems to me that the world would be a much better place, and that people would be much more rightly popular, if they talked less. Because so little of what most people say is actually worth hearing.

Source: Atlantic Monthly

I just finished two excellent books with very different takes on economic development in the developing world: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins and The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. Both were excellent and made a great pair being read together.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is about John Perkins personal experience in the 1970's and 1980's making economic forecasts to help developing countries secure loans from the IMF and World Bank for large-scale projects completed by companies like Halliburton and Bechtel. Basically he was encouraged to lie so that the countries could get gigantic loans that would keep them beholden to the first world. It also helped that Americans got big jobs in the process.

Jeffrey Sachs comes into the picture a bit later in the game. In the mid-1980's, he was asked to help Bolivia solve it's economic problems. He quickly saw that the large loans they had acquired through the IMF and World Bank were crippling them and encouraged them to quit repaying the loans as part of a larger initiative to spur the economy and stop inflation. He went onto urge the same approach in other countries and is working to change the way the first world approaches development in the world's poorest countries.

These books outline two very different approaches to the same issues and shed an interesting light on pivotal issues like the war in Iraq and the root causes of terrorism.

From the best novel I've read in some time…

If a parent has it, you have a fifty-fifty chance of going down too. Chromosome four. The misfortune lies with a single gene, in an excessive repeat of a single sequence - CAG. Here's biological determinism in its purest form. More than forty repeats of that one little codon, and you're doomed. Your future is fixed and easily foretold. The longer the repeat, the earlier and more severe the onset. Between ten and twenty years to complete the course, from the first small alterations of character, tremors in the hands and face, emotional disturbance including - most notably - sudden, uncontrollable alterations of mood to the helpless jerky dance-like movements, intellectual dilapidation, memory failure, agnosia, apraxia, dementia, total loss of muscular control, rigidity sometimes, nightmarish hallucinations and a meaningless end. This is how the brilliant machinery of being is undone by the tiniest of faulty cogs, the insidious whisper of ruin, a single bad idea lodged in every cell, on every chromosome four.

Source: McEwan, Ian. Saturday. Doubleday, 2005.

I've been really surprised by the amount of feedback I've gotten from my post on pit bulls and breed specific legislation, all of it positive. I really appreciate the feedback and am glad that there are a lot of people out there against BSL. If you didn't see it, Malcolm Gladwell had a great article on the irrationality of BSL in the New Yorker last week. According to him:

The best data we have on breed dangerousness are fatal dog bites, which serve as a useful indicator of just how much havoc certain kinds of dogs are causing. Between the late nineteen-seventies and the late nineteen-nineties, more than twenty-five breeds were involved in fatal attacks in the United States. Pit-bull breeds led the pack, but the variability from year to year is considerable. For instance, in the period from 1981 to 1982 fatalities were caused by five pit bulls, three mixed breeds, two St. Bernards, two German-shepherd mixes, a pure-bred German shepherd, a husky type, a Doberman, a Chow Chow, a Great Dane, a wolf-dog hybrid, a husky mix, and a pit-bull mix—but no Rottweilers. In 1995 and 1996, the list included ten Rottweilers, four pit bulls, two German shepherds, two huskies, two Chow Chows, two wolf-dog hybrids, two shepherd mixes, a Rottweiler mix, a mixed breed, a Chow Chow mix, and a Great Dane. The kinds of dogs that kill people change over time, because the popularity of certain breeds changes over time. The one thing that doesn’t change is the total number of the people killed by dogs. When we have more problems with pit bulls, it’s not necessarily a sign that pit bulls are more dangerous than other dogs. It could just be a sign that pit bulls have become more numerous.

The article talks specifically about the incident that led to the banning of pit bulls in Ontario and all the other factors involved beyond the fact that the dogs were pits.

I'd moved on in recent months, but the article brought back an incident that happened last summer. Brian and I were walking the dogs when a husky-mix who was off-leash came headed straight for us. As usual, I tried to block the dog but she headed straight for Boo and latched onto his ear. The owner was on a bike and took a whole to get over. Brian grabbed Boo's head to keep the other dog from ripping off Boo's ear. He got two nasty bites in the process, including a several inch long gash on his leg. The owner couldn't get the other dog off until a neighbor offered a metal spike that we used to pry apart it's teeth.

A small crowd had gathered but they weren't able to see exactly what had happened because we'd been in so close trying to keep the other dog under some sort of control. Once we got the dogs apart, it became apparent that everyone thought Boo had attacked the other dog. Several people went to pet the other dog and expressed fear at my dog. Here they were down at eye-level with a dog who had just bitten a person twice and nearly bit off my dog's ear. Luckily Animal Control was on our side, and both Brian and Boo recovered.

The scariest thing is that I've seen that other dog at the dog park. If I tried to take Boo there, I know we wouldn't be welcome, but somehow people are fine with a husky-mix who has at least one nasty attack under her belt.

According to economics, it's irrational to vote because of the extreme rarity of any individual vote making a difference. Yeah, your high school civics teacher wouldn't ever tell you that, but it is probably true in most elections.

Tonight I discovered a more rational way to get some representation. Salt Lake is divided into communities, and each community has a council that meets monthly. I decided to check it out because (1) I bought a house and want to have some say about my hood and (2) mayor Rocky Anderson was going to be there. Initially I was surprised at the number of people who were there, probably 50. Then Rocky got up to speak and asked all the representatives from city government to get up and introduce themselves. There were about 30 of them from every single aspect of everything the city does.

Sadly I hadn't come with anything decent to ask so I got to sit around while all the elderly folks got up and complained about traffic.

My kitchen is officially famous. It was featured on an episode of Hammered TV last week. Unfortunately, it was my kitchen as of a few weeks ago in the following state:

Today it's looking much better with a new tile countertop:

It's amazing what a little tile can do to a room… not that I did it. I broke down and called my in my old landlord Stefan. If you're doing any home improvements yourself, check out Hammered TV. They have a great show with some very useful tips. Or shoot me an email if you want Stefan's number instead.