Nature's Way in a Modern World

Urban bounty

2009-09-06T16:24:00.003+02:00

It's amazing what you can find if you know what you can look for.

In the middle of August I went blackberry picking in the woods by our apartment. During that same trip I noticed some elder trees. Elderberries, however, don't ripen until...well, about now (September).

Today we went foraging for elderberries--the goal being to get enough to make a decent batch of jelly. And it is truly astounding, how common elders are, and how bountiful they are, if you know how to look for them.

They tend to grow in clusters--where you find one, you'll likely find another one or two. It can be a bit of a trek to find one, but once you find one, if it's a good one, you'll be pleasantly rewarded with handfuls upon handfuls of dark purplish berries, ideal for making jams, jellies, syrups. The fruits can lie beyond the reach of a mortal arm--however, the tree is quite flexible and, if you have a partner on hand, it is possible to bend it to your will. Literally.

We managed to collect about 2 kg of them, from perhaps a dozen bushes. And no, we didn't strip any of the bushes clean, either--I make it a point to leave behind what I call a "bird tithe", so that the birds can also partake--and propagate the plants. We left at least 1/2 of each bunch on the trees.

We also came upon plenty of rowan bushes, which are actually more commonplace than elder trees in this area. Although you can make rowan jelly, my boyfriend (who is actually the preserve-'spert between us) wasn't quite certain about the taste, and furthermore I wasn't quite certain of their ripeness. There were also three enormous chestnut trees, filled to nearly-bursting with unripened burrs, and I know of at least two walnut trees in the neighborhood.

This all makes me a bit sad, really--to live in the midst of all this bounty, and not see a single soul (other than my boyfriend) partaking of it, to realize how divorced people are from what food actually is: we met up with another couple who were curious as to what we were doing (admittedly, walking around with a bucket is kind of strange). You would have thought we were sharing the secrets of the dead when we explained that elder trees were everywhere in these woods. Which was, perhaps, somewhat of an exaggeration--but not by much.

Ladies only

2009-08-22T17:43:00.003+02:00

"Being in tune with your body" these days has the connotation of sending little scrubbing-bubble cartoons through your body and getting the inside and outside completely "clean". I won't deny that a few days' fasting or near-fasting makes you feel damn good, and hypes your brain up to almost-supernatural speeds (hey, you try writing a grant in a week), but frankly I think there's some point at which you're only deluding yourself. Alas, that point happens only after you've sent in your $39.95 for the acai/apple cider vinegar/green tea pills.

But apparently there is another type of "being in tune with your body" that actually works, unlike the promises of less-than-slick adverts in Parade. The Fertility Awareness Method of birth control requires that a women recognize the biological markers of fertility, and abstain or engage in sexual activity during and a few days after.

I've never really liked the idea of hormonal birth control, but that's mainly due to the fact that I am gifted (or cursed?) with a liver that might as well not exist, for all that it fails to metabolize. The pill is certainly one of the most reliable methods of birth control, but frankly the slight increase in strokes, which is minimal to begin with, makes me nervous about taking them (I am quite aware that the statistics say my chances are minimal--but still, this is a stroke we're talking about, something that could damage you for the rest of your life in a very real way, that I don't want the odds improving, as it were). Furthermore, seven days every four weeks seems rather excessive to me--I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that I do not follow the average twenty-eight day cycle. I have yet to meet a woman who did, for that matter.

The main difference between FAM and the Family Planning method (sanctified by the Catholic Church) is that FAM doesn't require you to count days and divide by two and add three before subtracting...you get the picture. Besides, FPM assumes that you are absolutely regular, and that is something almost no woman is.

What FAM requires is that you know your body. Inside and out, literally: keeping track of the state of one's basal body temperature, vaginal secretions, and cervical position. All of these change when you are ovulating, and if you really, carefully, listen to your body, it is a simple matter to figure out when you are most likely to be ovulating.

All the same, I can't see it catching on. For starters, while "being in tune with your body" sounds great as a catchphrase for gluten-free diets, it gets robbed of the holistic-touchy-feely aspect once you start measuring basal body temperatures to the tenth of a degree. Yet this kind of scientific probing is, oddly, what enables things like perfectly natural birth control to be effective.

Pet peeve of thrift stores

2009-08-15T23:05:00.002+02:00

My boyfriend loves crystal glassware. Unfortunately, he doesn't love the price tag it usually comes with. So every time I hit town, I stop by the thrift stores to see if they have any lovely pieces that I can take home.

You've probably encountered this: a beautiful bowl/vase/plate/cup at the thrift store, just waiting for you to buy it. Snatch it up, pay for it, trundle it home--only to find that the stupid little price sticker is practically cemented on. You pick at it, trying to remove the gunk, and then you end up with a little rectangle of gunk, and what's worse, it can't be washed off without scratching your find.

Vegetable oil is your friend in this case--"Fear not! You will never again have to live with a little black patch of sticker-gunk again!". A little dribble directly on top of the sticker, then rub it in with your fingers. Peel back an edge, and from then on the sticker should come off easily, though slowly.

Keep your cats inside

2009-08-08T21:32:00.004+02:00

The other day, my boyfriend and I were standing in our kitchen, which overlooks a grassy spread that people often use as a shortcut. We heard a most distressed eeping noise, and when we looked down, we saw that one of our neighbor's cats had caught a bird. It disappeared with the bird by the time we made it down the stairs, thank goodness, because otherwise my boyfriend would have been stuck with the task of snapping the bird's neck (something he knows how to do, but really would rather not do it).

In the Netherlands, there are no natural predators (minus birds). The last wolf was shot in the 1890s, and you have to go all the way to Maastricht before you start to encounter lynx. So hunting plays a huge role in maintaining stable and healthy populations of just about everything. One of my colleagues tells me that, unless you trap muskrats regularly, they'll tunnel through and damage the dikes. (Ironically enough, there is no real "gun culture" here, perhaps because gun laws are so strict.)

However, there are many, many different species of songbirds (and waterfowl, and birds of prey, and gulls), many of which nest on the ground--not to mention small animals like hare and rabbits. Needless to say, where it's normal to let your cat outside, there's a dearth in these animals.

"But it's only natural for the cat to go out!" some people say, as they defend letting their cat out. Look, I completely understand letting your cat out if you're on a farm and need mousers to keep the rats out of the barn. But no cat needs to be outside. My cats are happy as clams sitting on our balcony, sunning themselves and chewing on the cucumber vine.

Consider that, on average, a cat has the intelligence of a three-year-old child (and some have less, *cough* Shadow). You wouldn't let a three-year-old run around by himself, would you? Yes, they might be smart enough to avoid cars and dogs--but will they be smart enough to not eat mouse poop (which contains parasites), stay away from rat poison, not drink antifreeze (some human children will do this, for Chrissakes, never mind cats), differentiate between a dove and a hawk that can kill them, and not get lost? There's a reason why the average life of a feral cat is 5 years, while an indoor-only housecat lives three times that.

"But I can't keep my cat inside!" If you can't outsmart a cat and keep it inside, then you've got no business owning a cat.

"But if I don't let it out, he'll scratch/pee/poop all over!" It's called training. And believe it or not, it can be done with cats. My own cats are very well-behaved. They know their names. They know the signal that I want them to come to me. They sit still when it's time to clip their claws. And they don't scratch the antique furniture. I don't really know anything about training a cat, so if I can do it, you can figure it out, too.

The point is, letting cats run around outside is basically a sentence of genocide for all the wildlife that lives in your area--even if you don't see it (and believe me, that's kind of the point of most creatures, not to be seen)--and a death sentence for your cat. So please, keep your cats inside.

Inconvenience Yourself

2009-08-02T11:28:00.003+02:00

We're pretty self-sufficient, as much as you can be while living in an apartment. In fact, we do just about everything on this checklist that are supposed to save you a few bucks, except for the thing with the air conditioner. The additional benefit which is almost never touted is that most of these practices are pretty green, too.

And really, it's not all that inconvenient to make your own cleaners, cook your own meals, clean your own house--this has the added benefit of turning you into an anti-clutter freak and keeping hoards of stuff from building up--repair your own clothes, etc etc etc. I suppose you could consider the convenience of buying all of these goods and services worth it if the time saved amounted to enjoying your life more. But really, what are we doing with the time saved? Odds are, you're watching more TV (I've been sleeping this week).

I've never seen WALL-E, but it's extremely tempting to make a comparison between the space-blobs in the movie and the current helplessness of people in general: the degree of our dependence on technology has infantilized us to the point where we're completely divorced from our "natural state". The optimist in me says this can't possibly be for real, but I begin to despair when I consider that many people apparently don't know how to put a button back on.

My favorite weed

2009-07-17T22:59:00.002+02:00

Around here, blackberry bushes run rampant. They're everywhere that's even remotely neglected: a little patch of grass next to the train tracks, and certainly all over the woods (which, despite this being the Netherlands, there are actually lots of, just in patches).

They've got a little ways to go, about three more weeks, before the berries will be ready for the picking. I've got my bucket already.

For those of us into natural food, or free food, it really doesn't get any better than this. Just walk into the woods with a bucket, and a few hours later, you've got enough jam to last you until the next season. Spring for a little winemaker's yeast, and you can easily pick enough to make enough wine to sip over Christmas.

The one thing you do want to be aware of when you're picking your own produce from the wild is where you're picking from. The side of the road? Probably not so hot. And certainly, by all means, stay as far away from golf courses as you can get. You want to step around places that are heavily treated with pesticides and herbicides, or exposed to industrial waste.

It used to be that foraging for good eats was our main source of food. These days, we're lucky enough to be able to go to stores and pick out what we want. It always surprises me that, whenever I do go out berry-picking, I never see anybody else picking them--given what blackberries cost and the notorious Dutch stinginess (which I've yet to encounter), surprises me. It makes me wonder how it is that we're so far divorced from what real food looks like that we can't recognize it when it's growing in front of us.

Why the little things matter, or the paradox of green

2009-07-16T22:33:00.007+02:00

Who hasn't bought a cup of coffee on their way to somewhere, only to feel a little twinge of guilt when it comes time to toss the cup? Of course, some people do bring their own coffee mugs--but I don't buy coffee nearly often enough to justify lugging a thermos around. It's a rare morning that I need an extra boost.

OK, so it's one little cup. Big deal. Right?

One little cup.

It matters because nobody makes one little cup at a time. Companies buy huge stacks of (hopefully recycled) paper and roll, glue, and print hundreds of thousands of these at a time. You'd have to swear off paper cups for the rest of your life in order to make any sort of dent in their profits--and they probably wouldn't even notice.

This is why everybody has to do something to help the cause, whatever that may be. One vegetarian meal a week. Bringing your own mug to Starbucks--if there's still one around. Buying something organic once a week.

But the paradox is--the easier you make it for people to go green, the harder it is for society as a whole to become green. Someone may decide that once a week, they'll have a vegetarian meal. Which is a great start--I'm not questioning that. But what if they decide, too, that that's the end?

We make a big deal of little changes--it's hard for people to change dramatically, if you make them feel guilty about it they'll just turn away. This is true. But we also have to realize that when it comes to environmental impact, scale matters. One person committing himself to an lacto-ovo vegetarian lifestyle removes meat from fourteen meals a week (assuming that two meals a day have some kind of dead animal tissue in it). It would take fourteen people to commit themselves to one vegetarian meal a week to make that same impact. Has anybody done the math to see just how many partial-vegetarians it would take to equal the effect of one vegetarian? Because I'm almost certain that the number is higher than we would like to think it is...

Little things matter, but do they also make it more difficult for society as a whole to become more green? We'd have to slash emssions by 80% to keep the atmosphere below 450 ppb CO2. I'm sorry, but you're not slashing emissions 80% by turning your lights off, or even by hypermiling your car (unless you're insanely good at it). Yet we keep hearing that such things are enough, that if enough people could do just that one thing, it'll be okay.

Simple, Green, Food

2009-06-30T12:30:00.002+02:00

Don't eat factory-farmed meat. Wait--free-range food isn't what it's cracked up to be, either. Buy organic--or not. Local is greener. Except when it isn't.

To green, or not to green, that is the question--and how. Take any statement that sounds good and someone somewhere will prove it false (like I do, with GMOs). The fact that nobody has a clear environmental agenda only adds to this dilemma. It doesn't help that sometimes what's clear from an environmental point of view clashes with the morals of the matter. For instance, organically raised beef is better for the environment--at least, until you consider the massive increase in acreage involved.

But fear not, gentle readers! I offer you one key to all of your greening dilemmas--at least, when it comes to food:

Don't eat what you wouldn't kill.

In my mind, it essentially amounts to cowardice to do otherwise. Of course, most of us don't raise our own meat. So most of us don't know what it's like to kill something. For most of us, the idea never even crosses our minds, unless we get it vicariously from watching crime shows.

But ask yourself, what would you happily kill for dinner? I'm not talking about survival situations, where you're stuck in a deathscape with no chance of life unless you kill Fluffy (actually, if it gets to that point, Fluffy's probably killed you first). I'm talking about your everyday meals. Could you catch a chicken and lop off its head for lunch on Sunday? Would you butcher a pig so that you can enjoy a hot dog?

Summer lovin'

2009-06-18T08:33:00.004+02:00

It's finally gotten hot in the Netherlands, by which I mean, "I occasionally break a sweat when running around while wearing jeans." Summers in the Netherlands are mild, generally, and so the full power of the following drink is probably lost here. Nevertheless, it is delicious, refreshing, and you can make it as healthy or unhealthy as you'd like.

Basil Lemonade

~ 1 C of basil leaves, chopped fine
Sugar (at least 1/2 C is recommended)
3-4 lemons
Cold water
Sieve
Pitcher
A refrigerator
A few hours

Mix the chopped basil leaves with the sugar, bruising the leaves.

Squeeze the juice out of the lemons. If you're using one of those citrus juicers that can cut into the rind, make sure you don't cut into the pith.

Mix the sugar/basil mix with the lemon juice. Let it sit for ~10 minutes. This allows the essence of the basil to be captured by the acid of the lemon juice. It goes without saying that you should not let this sit in an aluminum bowl. Use glass or ceramic. A cereal bowl works really well.

Seive the sugar/lemon juice/basil mix into the pitcher. Pour water through the sieve to fill up the pitcher. Chill. Drink.

Makes ~1 qt.

Meet Virginia

2009-06-10T20:35:00.002+02:00

Some time ago I heard the astounding statistic that every DAY in Brazil, an area the size of Virginia was being cleared of trees. Virginia is not Texas, to be sure, but it's still an entire state and of course I was outraged and probably wrote a letter to the mayor or something (it was that long ago).

Of course, what I failed to appreciate at that time was that Brazil is big. Very big. You could probably cram two thousand Virginias into it. Although it doesn't ameliorate the budding panic I feel every time I think of a massive tree getting sawn down (I don't mean to be overly sentimental, but it doesn't take a math genius to figure out that if you're cutting down huge trees much faster than they can grow soon you won't have any huge trees, or any trees at all--just ask the Easter Islanders) for the sake of making a cabinet, or someone's slash-and-burn field, it does make the cavalier attitude about the rain forest a little easier to understand: if you're in the jungle, it's massive. During the right seasons, you can stand on one bank of the Amazon, and not see the other side. We see the rainforest as a precious resource. To the folks who live there, it's something that gets in the way of making a living.

Two factors mitigate the difficulty of preservation efforts. First is a vacuum of land use laws concerning the jungle, and second is poverty. According to the latest issue of The Economist, the jungle is taken over on a first-come, first-served basis. Stake your claim, shoot those who contest it, and when you've finished with it, sell to the highest bidder.

The solution seems simple--a bigger carrot. Commercialization of products derived from the rain forest, eco-tourism, and flat-out bribery (technically it's known as "subsidization for not cutting down trees") are all incentives to leave the forest be.

Well, maybe not. Eco-tourism, for instance, requires you to go into the forest with your group of tourists, show them around a bit, and then get them back out. Getting, say, exotic nuts or plants from the forest requires the same thing. Bribery--well, that works. The first two require roads. But it's been shown that roadways into the jungle are potentially more devastating than just cutting down a swath of trees.

But none of this will matter without Brazilian law extending its reach. Carrots are all very well and good, but without a suitable stick, there won't be enough incentive for people to change. Free market theory suggests that this will never work. The government, corrupt as it is (or will be, once enough money is involved) will somehow endeavor to screw it up.

I'm not sure I buy the idea that the best way to go about fixing the economy is necessarily to give people a stake in keeping the environment intact. People are notoriously bad at making decisions that involve delayed gratification (witness the credit crunch) and investment, and that is doubly true when there's no obvious benefit--for them--to keep the trees alive.

Ed-ja-ma-whuh?

2009-06-06T22:07:00.004+02:00

This photograph was taken off the coast of North Berwick, a little seaside town in Scotland that boasts the Scottish Seabird Center which was (apparently) built at the behest of HRH the Prince of Wales. The gannets in this photograph are fairly common. The colony on Bass Rock numbers 120,000, and it only stands to reason that other improbably large colonies are scattered elsewhere on impossibly small rocks in the North Atlantic. So, you might wonder, why the hell did I have to go all the way to Scotland to see them?

One of the long-running themes of the Science-Based Medicine blog (on which I sometimes comment) is the despair at how seemingly intelligent people fall for things like homeopathy (which =/= herbal medicines, and that's a whole 'nuther game entirely) and the Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy. The writers on that blog especially bemoan the influence of idiots like Jenny McCarthy for their refusal to believe that vaccines are safe (barring rare genetic conditions), do not cause autism--and their refusal to shut the f*ck up already.

There's a connection between these two. I promise.

The McCarthy campaign* was fed by the rise in autism cases, an "epidemic", as the fear mongers like to call it. I have no idea how they picked vaccines to blame it on, since it's become apparent that it's genetics--but anyway: the point is that autism is only reliably diagnosed at around age 2, the age that coincides quite happily with the recommended age of administration of the MMR vaccine. For your average parent, who doesn't have access to neuroscience textbooks and Piaget's work, it's a simple cause-and-effect. If enough parents--just one other one will do--have similar experiences, you start to wonder if you've missed something. And if someone fakes research telling you that your experiences have been scientifically validated, well, there you have it! Proof that vaccines cause autism!

Both of these illustrations point to the importance of education through experience. In the first case, until I saw the birds for myself, I was inclined to think that these were rare. The second case demonstrates how even nominally intelligent people allow personal experiences to trump their better judgment (although the truly intelligent know when to back down in the face of irrefutable evidence). It's very hard to unlearn something that has a deep emotional significance (i.e., validation that your whack-job theory was right)--the corollary is, it's very easy to learn something that does.

So my interest in environmentalism arose largely because when I was 7, one of my mother's friends gave me, as a Christmas present, a little suction-cup-on-the-window bird feeder that came with a little book showing all the pretty birds I could see. It may surprise you to know that I never saw anything more interesting than a crow, but for some reason I got hooked on birdwatching. I'm the person who will stand and scan every last Canada goose in a flock in the hopes of seeing something different--something new. And I did, often enough to make me realize that birds were interesting creatures which in turn sparked even more interest in how to keep them around.

This is probably the main reason why most people just don't care about the environment to the extent that Greens do. In the suburbs of carefully tended lawns and decor-only plants, they don't hear the awesome chirping of a thousand frogs (or one massive bullfrog). The artificial environs mean that most of the smaller songbirds have to find homes elsewhere, so "wildlife" means robins and the occasional fight with the raccoon over the garbage. To enjoy the "outdoors", you drive to a park, where the wildest thing you'll encounter is a fairly tame mallard. If this is the sum of your wildlife experience, of course you won't feel it's worth protecting.

It's all very well and good to point to rising lines on graphs, but to paraphrase the Governator, we have to make Green connect with people like Coke and Pepsi have done with their legions of fans, and you cannot make a solid connection with guilt. Nobody ever got addicted to guilt. They get hooked by "cool!"

Next: Behavioral modification

*Isn't it ironic that Joseph McCarthy did the same thing in the 1950s? Coincidence? If Jenny McCarthy (their names both begin with "J"!) can ask us to believe that vaccines cause autism, then surely my indulging in some little fantasy connecting her, the Communist Party, and eventual world takeover by China is harmless. Right?

Other factors (part 3 of 3)

2009-06-06T17:47:00.002+02:00

Perhaps one of the hardest things to do as an owner of a cat with renal failure is not to get too invested in the Numbers (Blood Urea Nitrogen, Creatinine, Phosphorous). The Numbers are an indicator of renal function--i.e., lower is better, because lower means that the kidneys are taking the stuff out--and, as such, it is often recommended that they be tested frequently. The Tweeb has an appointment with the much-dreaded vet about 3 times a year (evidenced by the pee stain on our couch), but depending on the severity of the case it can be as often as once a month.

But going strictly by the Numbers ignores the cat. The fact that the BUN and Creatinine have gone down slightly from the last visit sounds like a cause for relief, if not celebration. But if the cat is so miserable from the change in food and starts wasting away because it won't eat--well, that could also contribute to the decrease in BUN and creatinine, and it's probably not nearly so worthwhile.

I won't presume to make an assertion as to what's worse: starve the cat to death, or let it eat itself to death. Every cat is different, and every owner likewise. The point is that there is still a lot we don't know about cats, and even more we don't know about renal failure, and to treat by the Numbers alone is to ignore the overall status of the cat: is it still reasonably healthy? Does she still play? Has her personality changed? The gestalt often tells a more complete tale of how the therapy is working than just the Numbers.

We've recently started the Tweeb on a prescription diet (Science Diet), as her Numbers have been elevated for two tests in a row. Fortunately, she seems to love the stuff more than life itself (as does Shadow, who most emphatically does not have renal failure) and it seems to agree with her, though her coat is somewhat more scruffy than it had been. We've agreed to take her in about four months later to see how she's doing.

Four months is a long time. I've had the Tweeb for two years now--that makes almost two and a half years as a CRF kitty for her. They don't call it "chronic" for nothing, and that's the thing. It may seem like a hopeless fight--after all, it starts badly and can only get worse--but keep in mind that if it is indeed the chronic, idiopathic kind of renal failure, proper care can keep a cat going for years. The moment of diagnosis is not the moment to consider euthanasia, but a moment to seriously re-evaluate your commitment to your cat--the whole Cat.

The Great Protein Debate (Part 2 of 3)

2009-05-14T21:24:00.001+02:00

The usual treatment for renal failure is a low-protein diet. This makes sense: proteins are the main source of nitrogen (vitamins contribute a negligible amount), and there is no urea or creatinine without nitrogen, so on a low-protein diet the levels of of these two compounds go down, meaning that (hopefully) the body is not poisoning itself as much. Even in a diet completely devoid of protein (not recommended), though, there will always be some protein breakdown as a part of "business as usual".

Unless you're a cat. If you're a cat, your metabolism, unlike those of your human slave-monkeys, is so attuned to the life of a carnivore that its preferred fuel source is not carbohydrates, but proteins. This means that for cats, protein is not just something that builds muscles and makes them strong--protein is also their main source of energy. To a cat, substituting protein with carbohydrates is like trying to run a diesel truck on jet fuel. It'll go--most likely with an explosive bang.

I realize that this doesn't really make sense--cats need to break down protein in order to build up carbohydrates so that their bodies can be properly fueled. Note the word "properly". Because cats are also extremely efficient at utilizing carbohydrates. Too efficient--the energy they cull from carbohydrates, if it's not burned off, is usually stored as fat. Even skinny cats may have a larger percentage of body fat than is strictly good for them.

For a cat with renal failure, then, protein is not the bane it is in the human counterpart of the disease. Protein is the fuel on which their bodies run most efficiently, meaning that there's less waste for the kidneys to filter, and giving them more energy to fight the disease. A diet high in carbohydrates, on the other hand, jacks everything up to hi-speed, too high--generating lots of waste and putting lots of stress on the kidneys.

So goes the theory, anyway. The reality is: it's complicated.

It's complicated because kidneys are complicated, and kidney failure even more so. It's not just the loss of filtering ability or concentrating urine. Kidneys generate erythropoietin, which stimulate the production of red blood cells. They regulate blood pressure--25% of the body's blood volume passes through the kidneys every minute. They regulate blood pH, calcium levels, sodium and potassium. Since renal failure isn't obvious until 70% of kidney function is lost, maintaining whatever kidney function is left becomes critical.

And it could very well be that decreasing azotemia at any cost may be the best course of action for this. I theorize that it has to do with the stage of the disease. If you caught it early--as I did (so early that the vet had to do a urinalysis to be sure)--then perhaps a diet of high-quality protein might buy you more time. As the disease progresses, perhaps low quantities of protein will be more important.

I'm not a vet. What I write is based entirely on my understanding of metabolism and biochemistry from my few years in medical school. Your vet will most likely think that my advocating a raw diet--which is not actually a high-protein diet, as meat is only about 20% protein--is heresy to begin with, and doubly so for a sick cat.

Yet the Tweeb is doing well. Questioning dogma is something I do regularly anyway, not necessarily with concrete evidence. To have a living, breathing, healthy counterpoint to accepted practice merely enforces what some might consider a bad habit.

Sick cat, raw food (part 1 of 3)

2009-05-08T20:12:00.002+02:00

When I adopted the Tweeb as a companion to Shadow (my other black cat), there was no reason to think that she had renal failure--a slowly progressive disease that is fairly common amongst elderly cats. Now, I knew she was old, as she'd been in "foster care" for six years. But she was healthy, for all her physical shortcomings--she has had no less than five broken bones in her little tough life, and most of them healed at odd angles, giving her the appearance of a Cubists' cat.

I'd been feeding Shadow a raw diet. Shadow was doing incredibly well on it, growing in leaps and bounds, and miraculously not getting fat despite my studio apartment being barely big enough for the two of us. The Tweeb took to raw instantly, too, much to my relief, chowing down enthusiastically on her bloody morass of ground chicken and organ meat.

But she was still drinking water.

That was the key: had she remained on her kibble diet, I would have thought nothing of the Tweeb drinking water, and would never have brought her in for the tests. Had she remained on kibble, I would not have realized that something was wrong until much, much later--possibly too late, when the sole choice remaining to me was not if euthanasia, but when.

Now, two years post-diagnosis, the Tweeb is doing quite well. She is energetic--perhaps even more so than Shadow, trotting after us when we go to the kitchen in hopes of begging a morsel out of us, and skittering through the apartment in a bout of the cat-crazies--and her appetite is undiminished. Far from losing weight, she's actually gained a significant amount of muscle and fat (not so much as to be anywhere near obese, but she's no longer the skin-and-bone kitty she used to be). She's quite personable, too, loving nothing better than to curl up on me when I sleep. You'd be hard-pressed to believe that she has renal failure, unless you were at the vet's with us.

I do not attribute this entirely to the raw food. Renal failure progresses differently in every cat, and it could simply be that she had the fortune to get the long-term variety. At the same time, though, it's hard not to believe that a diet of easily-synthesized protein, minimal carbohydrates, and plenty of water (in the form of meat and canned food) has nothing to do with her good health. I realize that the disease is progressive--that eventually we will have to give her more intensive care, along the lines of subcutaneous fluids and medications, and may even have to make that hardest of decisions concerning a rainbow bridge--but for now her renal failure seems to have been beaten into a sort of remission.

Next: the Great Protein Debate

Can't miss what you never had

2009-04-26T18:10:00.004+02:00

"What have you given up due to the recession?"

That was the question posed by MSN's Smart Spending blog--an interesting smorgasbord of tips and tricks to help you pinch pennies, and one that I read for handy how-tos like cleaning your windows with newspaper (most of the tips and tricks are also green).

And oh, the litanies of responses--soda, manicures, dinners out! Paper towels! Watering the juice! No more season tickets! No more *gasp* cable TV! Brand names!

When I read lists like that, I tend to fluctuate between "smug" and "disbelief". Smug because I would never consider a manicure a necessity, much less something I'd have to give up. Disbelief that there are people who do.

And, after a while, a little sadness--sadness for everybody who is so out of touch with their wants and needs that they have soda to give up. Giving up something implies that economic necessity has driven you to stop doing something you'd normally do. And it surprises me how many people drink soda regularly enough to say that they've given it up.

It's not so much that I'm anti-consumerist--even I buy an occasional half-liter of Diet Coke for those aspartame cravings--but that such levels of consumerism obscure the meaning of living well, providing an artificial measure of happiness that can be measured by the numbers of labels plastered all over one's pantry.

No two people are made happy by the same thing. My boyfriend and I are a case in point--we love each other, but I can't persuade him to come birdwatching with me, and he can't stoke my interest in brewing mead (though he does pick my brain about keeping yeast happy). Finding your own internal happiness and using that as a guide for one's purchases, rather than the other way around, is the key to living well. And maybe it does involve a ton of stuff, but it usually doesn't.

And in the end, that's what living naturally is all about. We're all different, we've all got different lifestyles, different environments, but we all want to be happy. But we've forgotten, or never thought to ask, what it is that makes us happy. If you keep that in mind, you'll never have to give up soda, because it'll never be around.

Semantic Pedantic

2009-04-22T21:43:00.005+02:00

The problem with "green" is that nobody really knows what it means to "be green". Sure, you drink fair-trade organic coffee. But shipping it from Nicaragua to New York isn't exactly environmentally friendly. Or what's it mean when a food product claims to use "all-natural flavoring"? Last I checked, flavoring isn't exactly a natural thing--it doesn't grow on trees.

This means that lots of companies can make claims to be green, which are only true in the most expansive sense of the word "true". Faking it is a bad idea no matter where you do it--on labels, in bed...

We should have, rather than "green", a letter grade (which can also be green, to match the ethos), sort of how appliances have letter grades for energy efficiency. I therefore propose a universal set of criteria, clearly defined, to determine just how "green" a product is. A lawnchair made of bamboo would be greener than the plastic counterpart, but not nearly so green as one that you build yourself out of scavenged lumber, for instance.

To lay out the criteria:

Sustainability: Is the product something that can be, with proper resource allocation, perpetuated for a lifetime? This covers things made from recycled goods that can be recycled, as well as materials that are grown. If your product, on the other hand, is mined (say, that granite sink) or comes from a forest that's not managed (say, some teak furniture), then it's not sustainable.

Distance: One of the biggest contributors to pollution is getting stuff from point A to point B. Obviously, the more local, the better. But a local artist who uses materials flown in from the ass-end of the world is, in this context, less green than buying grapes from California. It should not be the final product that takes primary consideration in terms of distance traveled, but the materials used.

Biodegradable/Recyclable: Self-explanatory. Except that it doesn't matter how recyclable a product is if there's nowhere to recycle it. A case in point: cans. I don't know of a single place that takes cans where I live. For most people, it's the plastics conundrum, where they live in a place that only takes 1 or 2 plastics.

Toxicity: Does this compound release substances that are known to have toxic effects?

Corporate commitment: Does the company implement strategies to reduce waste and consumption of resources? By what percentage?

If there are any other categories you can think of, let me know. Next post will be the points that are assigned to each of these categories for the grade--and that should be interesting.

Taxes, Housing, Global Warming, and a Handbag

2009-04-15T21:48:00.013+02:00

Indulge me for a moment: about six months ago I saw the PERFECT handbag in a store (ironically it's not on the website anymore). It was also €140. Definitely not an impulse buy--not that I make many of those. For six months, I dithered--spend the money and get a perfect bag, or just put up with schlepping my L.L. Bean backpack everywhere? Don't get me wrong, I love my L.L. Bean backpack. But there are only so many times you can terrify yourself into thinking that you've forgotten your wallet only to find it sitting smugly in the next pocket, or swear that the pen you just put in has to be there, before you start thinking that there has got to be a better way to manage your stuff.

I finally did get the bag. And like all good purchases, I wish I'd bought it sooner.

I'm not in any position to make any of these types of home changes, but they are all things I'd consider doing. Alas, none of these are as simple as making a draft-catcher or lowering your thermostat before you go to bed every night. Most of these choices for lowering your energy bill require a hefty investment, but if done right, they can dramatically lower utility bills--and for now, they come with tax incentives.

So it might seem like a no-brainer to install a turbine, or get that damn leak in the roof fixed. But let's be honest--it's a lot of money. If you've so far managed to escape the recession, you've probably hunkered down and aren't inclined to spend a ton of money on anything, much less installing a new water heating system. Fair enough, in my mind--it took me six months to decide whether or not to get my bag, so I can understand debating whether to sink the cost of a new car into a heating system.

You'll notice, throughout the slide show, that the cost of the technology is coupled alongside the amount you'll save, usually expressed as a percentage of which bills get slashed. Obviously, this means that in order to break even on a $2000 tax break on a geothermal heating system that costs $8000 to install, you'll have to stay in your home for as long as it takes to run up $6000 in heating bills (if you use heating for six months of the year, and each heating bill is $200--a tad high--that means at least five years).

Obama is currently proposing a similar investment in green tech--his budget proposal includes $59 billions alotted to the development of renewable energy. It's a huge amount of money, but the potential for savings--dramatically cutting back on imported oil (even if most of it does come from Canada), no longer having to buy the lives of coal miners, possibly revitalizing the economy--are equally huge.

Which is great, but at distinct odds with the ultimate goals of the housing plan: to enable (some) homebuyers to stay in their homes. This wouldn't really be an issue if most of the homes that are victim to foreclosures were in well-planned developments, but most of these homes are in that dreaded no-man's land called suburbia. Or worse, ex-urbia (who the hell comes up with these names?). You know what I mean: the types of neighborhoods populated by McMansions, where it's a 10-minute drive to anything, where playgrounds are deserted because kids are sitting on their rapidly-expanding fat asses playing Super Mario on their Wii and thinking they're getting a workout. These are the types of homes which are worthless, and not just because of economic factors that burst the housing bubble. They're worthless for the very same reasons that New York City real estate continues to remain high-priced: functionality. Or, in their case, lack thereof.

What I call "functionality" is best described as a well-planned neighborhood, where everything is conveniently located and where you don't have to drive to get everything. Big Box stores (i.e., Walmart or Costco) require huge parking lots, and thus tend to be far removed from any residential locale, as they're ugly. If they're far removed, then you have to drive to get there. If you're driving, then there's no such thing as a "quick trip" to pick up some milk that results in just milk (something I actually do on a regular basis--milk is heavy when you're on a bike). It becomes a trip that begins in milk and ends with "Well, as long as I'm here, I might as well pick up..." So you end up buying a ton more crap that you probably didn't really need, in order to fill up the trunk of a car that's too big because you don't feel safe traveling down the freeway in anything smaller than an Explorer (oh, remember the days when SUVs were cool?).

In other words, we have a case of schizophrenic goals: one is to save the environment, the second, to save a lifestyle that is one of the most environmentally unfriendly that I can think of. Cars are one of the biggest polluters around (as anybody unlucky enough to be caught sucking tailpipe can attest to) and while they may be handy for getting you to and from that big box store, they are one of the major reasons why the US hasn't gotten around to slashing CO2 emissions to where they need to be.

And where do they need to be? That depends on who you ask. I don't think we'll ever get around to pre-Industrial age levels, nor do I particularly cherish the idea of living in the eighteenth century. But it's safe to say that we'll need extraordinary measures to keep CO2 levels below critical. As the world's population grows, as developing countries move from the present participle to the past tense, their power needs will grow, too. So while we might very well be able to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% by cutting back, that's not going to do a whole lot compared to a 40% increase by those who've just discovered the joys of the Tata Nano. ("Fuel efficiency" is one of those insidious phrases that make you feel good while continuing to contribute to a problem that wouldn't exist if you didn't buy the damn car to begin with, and if you're buying a car that small you might as well ride a bike)

We can't get somewhere without figuring out where we want to go, first. Obama made his presidency on the promise of being able to make those hard choices--let's see if he can.

Y'know? Part 3 of a series on Energy

2009-04-09T20:28:00.004+02:00

Supporting organic farming is great--or is it?

The core problem with organic farming is that its yields are lower. I've seen numbers run the gamut from a mere 20% to 50% and sometimes more, depending on where the study was done and which crop was assessed, but the fact remains that, in order to produce the same amount of food as conventional methods of farming, you have to plant more food. If you're growing non-GMO foods, you must also contend with the possibility of a crop that's significantly weakened by non-optimal growth conditions (drought, heat, cold).

Growing food takes energy--moving water, machinery, fertilizer, etc. Therefore, organic farming takes more energy, and therefore lies in direct conflict with our earlier premise of using less energy/water.

Aside: I support organic farming, but that's because most of our organic produce comes from a small-scale local farmer. On that scale, the benefits of not poisoning the environment outweigh (at least, I think so) the detriments of additional energy expenditure. But the point of that little rant about organic is not to say that it's bad, but rather to make people realize that it's not all good.

This micro-dilemma illustrates one of the problems with our environmental policy: we don't know what we want. Actually, for the most part, we don't know that we don't know what we want. And that's a problem, because it makes successful policies impossible to implement.

Do you want to save water? Then stop supporting farming in the deserts of California--even if they are organic. Do you want to cut back on the use of fossil fuels? Support a carbon tax, or sign up for more nuclear power stations (and in the meantime increase research funding for better breeder reactors).

You'll notice I don't mention anything like turning off the tap when you're not using it. They help, but not nearly on the scale that shutting down--or starting up--an entire industry would (beef comes to mind). And when it comes to conservation measures, scale matters. One paper cup of coffee doesn't strike anybody as the difference between life and death, but scale that up by a few million, and it's no wonder doomsday conservationists love to point out how we're drowning in our own sh*t.

"Industry" is the scale that the federal government operates on, and so to effectively change policy, that's the scale environmentalists are going to have to start thinking on, too. And there's the rub: on an industrial scale, most of the best environmental policies are the worst PR--heh, it's a good thing Greenpeace doesn't read this blog, advocating nuclear power as the most environmentally sound and all that jazz.

The other stickler is the knowing-that-we-don't-know bit that I discussed earlier. This will present the biggest issues to any serious attempt at changing federal policies for how we want to safeguard our resources. It's easy to say, "Energy independence," but hard to acknowledge that this may mean paving over deserts with solar collectors and actually using Yucca Mountain for the purpose for which the $13 billion project was intended. "Resource conservation" sounds good--until you realize that it means stopping the subsidies being sent to grow millions of dollars' worth of produce in the desert.

Right now we don't know what we want to achieve, so deciding whether any of these sacrifices are worth it is difficult at best, and political suicide at the most probable. Here's hoping that we'll figure that out, and soon.

The End of Days

2009-04-08T21:03:00.004+02:00

According to NEWSWEEK, Christianity is declining in America. Depending on where you stand on the spectrum of religiosity (devout believer vs. atheist), and which axis (monotheism vs. polytheism), this could be a great thing or a terrible thing, or a piece of non-news, some bit of fluff that takes up your bandwidth that you don't particularly care for.

I thought I was in the last category. To me, religion has always been a non-issue--I'm a scientist by training, and science and religion, while not mutually incompatible, have their differences, and I'll freely confess my bias towards a rational system of thinking. Religion doesn't interest me (except where it interferes with science), so I tend to ignore it, even though it is apparently very important to a lot of other people.

How important to how many? Well, I don't know, and more to the point, I don't care enough to go Google the answer. The point I'm about to make doesn't need exact numbers:

Could it be that this drop in religiosity is the turning point in people's relationship with the natural world?

Let's not underestimate the importance of this Jewish book in our lives (the Bible's Old Testament is the Jewish Torah, and the New Testament--well, Jesus was a Jew). To this day Creationism's bogeymen are still lobbying to have their "point of view" taught as a science (I don't mind if you teach creationism as literature, philosophy, or as part of a theology course, but it's not a science). The Bible is still being misused as the main point of denying gays the right to marry--nowhere does the Bible actually state that marriage is a union between a man and a woman (and you have to wonder what exactly transpired between Moses and Aaron, Peter and Paul). The Good Book was instrumental in shaping the American West, what with Manifest Destiny driving good Christian soldiers onwards in the wilderness, and the taming of the "savages" and the landscape.

I doubt that we will ever be rid of every Judeo-Christian presence in our lives--and I don't think that's a laudable goal, either. Man needs religion, as a psychological crutch if nothing else, and if you take away the Bible you'll end up with something else. Worse, probably.

The Christian point of view: the world is there for humans to use as they see fit, God granted dominion to Man, animals are dumb beasts that don't have souls. Hardly edifying, if you ask me. Yes, Ecclesiastes asks us to be humble and realize that we are all stardust, but by and large the Christian Bible asks us to see the world as a gift of God--and relieves us of our responsibility to the environment.

Granted, this "responsibility" is a social construct. We don't really have a responsibility to keep the world in shape. God knows, if walruses were the dominant species, we'd have been f*cked a long time ago. As it is, humans are the dominant species (in terms of effects on the planet, I know we are woefully outnumbered by six-legged creepy crawlies), and for better or worse, we are the ones calling the shots about where water goes, what gets built on which land, what trees get cut down, what animals get shot and eaten, what plants get put where, and so on.

There's nothing new about that--we've been modifying our environment for ages. But what's changed is our awareness of how our modifications affect the environment around us, and eventually, us, again. Evidence is mounting against the Christian view that "God made the world so we could use it", and for the view that we are the stewards of our own future.

The optimist in me likes to think that the decline in religion marks a new type of environmentalism, one that has nothing to do with "living in harmony" and all that hooey, but rather one based on the fact that we're all stuck on this floating rock together, and the Big Guy in the Sky isn't going to hand us a shovel when we dig ourselves in over our heads in our own sh*t. Admittedly, a ten-percent decline in the number of self-proclaimed Christians isn't going to make a hoot of difference in the grand scheme of things, but then again, every little bit helps.

Ugly dogs, Dutch tulips, Heirloom tomatoes

2009-03-31T21:08:00.006+02:00

I'm sorry if I offend any pug/bulldog/squish-faced dog lovers out there, but my personal opinion on dogs with squished faces is that they're ugly. Even more so than poodles, whose coats (when not cut ridiculously and floofed into enormous afros) are at least functional. And ditto for cats. I don't doubt that such dogs are just as loveable and lovely as my parents' Doberman (adopted from the animal shelter), but I don't think I'd ever willingly acquire one. I'd never be able to deal with all the respiratory and skin issues--if you aske me, a breed that needs a c-section to give birth simply has no business existing.

Now, most dogs are the product of either human need or human vanity, but few are such an extreme case of vanity as the bulldog. Originally bred for the bloody business of bullbaiting and dogfighting (those who think it's some kind of ghetto thing and gangsta-cool need to read up on the history of this atrocity), and then later prized for its tenacity and guarding nature, the breed, like many others, fell victim to the whims of kennel clubs which heaped praise on the very features that make the dogs inherently unhealthy.

Why do we prize diseased flowers and sickly tomatoes? Why do we breed cats that can't move (in a way that my cats would call "moving"), and goats that "faint"?

There is no purpose to any of the modifications these creatures have undergone, except to give us pleasure. We choose to keep these traits around simply because we like them. They are often detrimental to the survival of the individual; indeed, one must wonder, if it weren't for humans, would there be any bulldogs left? In this context, one must question how splicing a fish gene into a tomato plant so that it can survive a frost could possibly be "inherently evil".

Hard choices: part 2 of a series of posts on Energy

2009-03-30T21:47:00.004+02:00

It says a lot about how young (or old, to some) I am that I can't recollect a single time when a politician has asked for a sacrifice by the American people. Obama has asked for patience while his administration sorts out just how hard a line they can take with the autoworkers while remaining politically likable, but that's hardly the same as asking people to cut back on gasoline consumption to thwart terrorists (something which Bush might have pulled off to great effect post-9/11, had he tried).

When we think of hard choices in terms of the environment, it usually comes down to human versus planetary interests: logging, or saving the spotted owl? Save the farmers, or the save the elephants? Big, safer, SUV, or dinky little Prius? There usually is a middle ground in most of these issues, if we care to look for it.

But when it comes to human versus human interests, things get a lot stickier: pro-life or pro-choice? Respect for individual cultural beliefs, or imposing a standard that's known to work? Or, the point of this post: energy, or water?

We need energy to move water. We need water to create energy--most electricty is generated by steam turbines, in which a wire is turned between two magnets. And we are fast using up both (80% of the electricity in the US is generated by coal-burning plants). The link above is to an excellent article, one well worth the read.

The additional complexity is that individually, reducing our water consumption doesn't really help matters, except in semi-desert/desert areas such as the California coast, or Phoenix. Reducing water use only has an impact if it's done collectively. But even collectively, conserving water doesn't necessarily safeguard the future either, since water flows and evaporates, and not always dependably, either. Droughts and floods happen in the best of times, though they're often helped by the insipid ideas of mankind.

So you might be thinking what's the point to taking shorter showers? Increasing the likelihood that water will be there when we need it. The United States is blessed by the Great Lakes, and Europe has an abundance of rivers, but neither are guaranteed in the face of incessant use. Saving money might be another, if water prices actually reflected the trouble it takes to move it. (Eight cents a gallon? No wonder nobody realizes how much a dripping faucet can waste)

And we might have to accept that the choices we make today might not actually make a hoot of difference in the future. For all I know, in 2020, aliens could spirit the Great Lakes away to Mars. But it was humans who put farms over former desert land in California, and golf courses in the desert outside Las Vegas. We've grown to accept these notions as part of the fabric of our national identity, but can we give them up if we have to? Sometimes putting off a hard choice like that is really the best we can do.

One Question

2009-03-29T16:45:00.009+02:00

Yesterday I was in the thrift store, looking for a sugar bowl--which we actually use, because my boyfriend likes sugar in his coffee in the mornings and the normal bowls we had been using were breeding grounds for lint and baby-dust-bunnies--not the kind of stuff you want in your morning cuppa. The lid to ours had broken, and I sure as all hell was not going to pay a good 6 euros for a piece of crockery that cost less than half that at the thrift store (provided I could find it).

I didn't find it, but I did come upon a BEEEYOUTEEFULL crystal bowl, the sort of simple, elegant LOVE item that I really wouldn't mind dropping 15 euros on.

And then I asked myself: "What would we do with this?"

It was too big to be used as a sugar bowl (sigh), too small for a service bowl, much too large for cereal, much too small for something to let my bread rise in. It was a beautiful bowl, but there was no...point. It couldn't hold it's own, aesthetically, in our apartment (unlike the pitcher-basin set), so I couldn't even pretend it was decent decor.

I get the feeling that, if everybody asked this one question of whatever it was they were going to buy, we'd all be buying a lot less stuff. Cluttering up our lives, and our landfills, with far less stuff.

Pollution: part 1 of a series on energy

2009-03-23T23:22:00.009+01:00

The creepy thing about pollution isn't so much that we make it, but that it seems to get into everything. Air pollution from the US, Europe, and China floats up to the Arctic, phthalates from our plastics end up in our organic veggies, and soot from smokestacks blackens white marble buildings. "Creepy" really is the only word to describe a plastic bottle that's navigated all five oceans--twice, once inisde a whale--and turns up on the very shore where it was tossed in, completely unharmed.

The old reason for not polluting was that it's bad for the earth--and it is, to have so much crap lying around, breeding bacteria and being eaten by turtles which go on to starve to death. The new reason: this shit really does come back to bite us in the ass. Nobody likes to think that they're getting schizophrenic meds from their trout, or that their "boys" are shriveling because of the plastics in their new carpet (the latter is still a matter of debate; I would err on the side of caution and reduce one's use of plastics). To hell with global warming--what is in the air these days, and how can it possibly be good for us?

Coal power plants are amongst the worst polluters. The problem begins with coal itself; mining techniques are generally not kind to the land, and the groundwater can become heavily contaminated with heavy metals. Burning coal unleashes floods of sulfuric and nitric compounds, contributing to acid rain and air pollution, rendering lakes sterile and damaging marble buildings--and possibly killing people.

The technology to "scrub" the smoke from coal power plants exists, but so far only 40% of the power plants in the US have them installed, despite the fact that scrubbers have been around since 1977. The main contention with scrubbers is what to do with "sludge"; there have been proposals to make something out of it, while regulations call for it to be buried. Either way, the power plants end up ponying up for the disposal--is it any wonder that most of them don't care to have these?

But what if I told you that there was a way to supply electricity in such a way that would have almost zero pollution? And on the scale that could power whole cities? Dependable electricity, the kind that doesn't depend on weather, can be made just about anywhere? Where the waste that's generated actually stays where you put it? Where, unlike coal, the regulations of the fuel are in place, and extremely strict?

You might be wondering what science fiction book I'm reading (Pandora's Star, by Peter F. Hamilton). But the truth is, this kind of power already exists: nuclear power.

Now, I realize that advocating nuclear power is, in the minds of most, like being an animal rights' activist (I hate PETA, by the way) who wears fur. And really, once you start looking at mining uranium and the enrichment process, it's actually not as green as many nuclear advocates would have you believe. Mining is usually open-pit mining, where it's basically a huge hole in the ground. Then the metal has to be leached from the soil, and that involves trickling a weak acid or alkaline liquid through the slag and catching it and the uranium, a process that can be "leaky". The enrichment process consumes massive amounts of electricity, though it's hard to say whether it's more or less than refining gasoline from crude.

But all of the pollution produced can be contained and dealt with. The technology and regulations already exist to ensure that uranium can be mined safely (as safely as mining anything can be done). Incidents that result in pollution stem more from the lack of oversight and individual incompetence rather than flaws in the methods that are used, problems which could be mitigated by giving the EPA some real teeth and letting it shut problem plants down. Theoretically, radioactive substances are tracked with an insidiousness that makes it almost impossible to lose any to pollution (in my lab, like most, we have to log every microliter we use)--it's more a matter of convincing individuals that it is, in fact, worth their while to play by the rules.

Containing pollution is, in my book, half the battle. If we can contain it--if we know where it is--then we can also know how much there is, and see if methods to reduce it actually work, as opposed to guesstimating if the methods make a difference.

Great tits*

2009-03-22T17:07:00.003+01:00

The perfect day, for me, would be to get up just before the sun rises, have a cup of tea and feed the cats, pack my optical gear and bird guide, and go somewhere. Anywhere. Just as long as it's out of the range of your average outdoor house cat. There's a reason why small birds are seldom seen in cities, and it's not because of the air pollution.

The Millingerward nature area lies about 11 miles from where I live--a reasonable pedal for some of the best wildlife around. I've seen deer (dameharten), hare, storks, wildfowl, and songbirds there. It's truly amazing, the number of species that can coexist in such a small area--for it is a small area:

As a tributary of the Waal, Millingerward comprises of 2 large ponds/small lakes, and several wooded areas that are either woody or boggy, depending on the state of the Waal. Parts of the preserve are above the water line, even the high water line, and are open fields pocked with tussocks. The vegetation is kept in line by herds of cows and horses that roam "wild" over the ground (and are indeed seen all over the Ooijpolder**). The grazing habits of these beasts are critical for maintaining the health of the plants, which in turn affect the health of the wetland environment.

It is a prime example of wise ecological management. The Dutch are renowned for their water management (1953 says it all) but it was only in recent years--during the building of the Delta Water Project--that they realized that another dike isn't always the answer. Rather than focus on keeping water out, it became "redirecting the water" to where it could be useful. In this case, maintaining the wetland environment.

Wetlands have critical ecological functions, most of which benefit human activity as well. Primarily, they act as filters for nitrogen and phosphorous, the primary ingredients that lead to algae blooms (although it is true that only phosphorous is required for blooms). Because they have such a large capacity for holding fresh water (being wetland, after all), they are able to store huge quantities of fresh water--limiting the damage by flooding, and keeping streams and the ground water flowing when weather conditions might dictate otherwise. Furthermore, by slowing the flow of water out of the river, they decrease soil erosion.

Water control is not only a Dutch issue. The Mississippi River Valley is prone to issues of flood, drought, erosion, with expensive consequences--and never mind the continually-expanding Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which has basically rendered the ocean sterile for 60-100 miles beyond the Mississippi Delta. What's the big deal about the Mississippi River? Only the breadbasket of the United States. Most of the farmlands in the world are concentrated around major rivers, the health of which depends on these "bogs".

Conservation efforts like the one in place along the Ooijpolder are not conceptually any better than, say, protecting the elephants. But a smelly bit of bog isn't nearly as cute as polar bear cubs, and let's be honest--the Konik horses aren't much to look at. It's sad, really, that conservation has to be linked to something cute in order to convince people that it's worthwhile. Most often those animals aren't even the ones that are that critical to the health of the environment. And fixating on the numbers of a particular animal in existence detracts immensely from the real issues at hand: hanging on to the lands that we still have.

*The bird photographed is actually a long-tailed tit, at least, as far as I can tell.

Fecal content warning

2009-03-20T20:25:00.004+01:00

I swear I'm not a shill for Invitrogen, the source of this (in my opinion) very cute picture. The company which sells these lists this particular specimen as Shigella dysenteriae, as in "the bug that gives you dysentery" (where you bleed out of your...er).

There's a fine line between a healthy respect for the organisms that, until this past century, have kept the human population at bay (well, that, and our propensity for killing each other) for millenia past, and outright paranoia, and many people, it would seem, verge on outright paranoia. Those little alcohol-gels (don't blame me if you don't like what you read at this link)? There's a reason they sell so well.

We feel threatened by "airborne bacteria", so we spritz our bathrooms with Lysol, even though the "aroma" of our offering to the porcelain god is due to mercaptans and hydrogen sulfide, and trace quantities of other gases that can't be killed and the perfumes leave us (me) gagging. We are terrified of the germs that could be infesting the average seat on a public bus, yet we'll happily put together a salad from an open salad bar. And what is up with triclosan in everything? I'm not one to buy the conspiracy-theorist-like claims that triclosan causes cancer (and supercancer and chronic fatigue and Lyme disease and it's mother), but soap by itself is actually pretty damn antibacterial, and adding triclosan doesn't do anything--plus we don't know yet whether it actually does harm the environment or provide the boot camp that turns regular strep into MRSA.

I'm quite aware that germs can be quite nasty: the flu, while for many of us is merely an inconvenience, is occasionally deadly, and there's nothing quite like a bird flu "pandemic" to remind us that we are but one hop, skip, and jump away--mutagenically speaking--from another Spanish Flu. E. coli, particularly the nastier strains, hospitalizes and even kills--and yet, it is a ubiquitous member of our bodily fauna. But I'm not convinced that religiously bleaching the toilet is going to do anything other than make the cats high and give me a headache.

Nor am I convinced that you kill germs any more effectively with a harsh cleaner than you do with plain old soap and water. Germs, after all, are basically goo encased in biological membranes, which are highly soluble in soaps. Once you pop the bubble, so to speak, the germ is dead.

At least until the next one comes along. And that's the other thing to keep in mind: we've only been here for an evolutionary fraction of a second. It's really the bugs' world; we just live in it. They were there when the dinosaurs ruled the earth, and they'll be there when our species crashes and burns the planet.

My environmental pet peeves

2009-03-17T20:57:00.004+01:00

I wasn't going to post so soon, as I'm busy hammering out the details of a series of posts that I'll be making shortly, but this article on Crazy Sexy Life basically contains every last pet peeve I have against the Green movement.

I'm not anti-green. We recycle. We conserve (saves on our utilities bills). We bike everywhere, use public transit, make homemade cleaners, and I'm working on getting a bunch of newspaper to try for a batch of homemade kitty litter. I believe in doing what we can, but I also believe in common sense and science--not in any religious way, but as a guide to point us towards what is possible and why.

Alas, science and common sense are lost amidst the moralizing grandstanding of the morons who write articles like the one at Crazy Sexy Life. Even if the guy is absolutely correct on all of his scientific points--that genes bleeding into the environment could be catastrophic (something I've not seen reported anywhere)--there is still one major reason why research on GMOs and using them can NOT be allowed to stop: 6.1 billion people, and the shrinking acreage of arable land. If you forbid the usage of GMOs (assuming, of course, that you can even define them), you essentially condemn farmers to pre-Industrial Age technology and breeding methods--and the poorer parts of the world to death by starvation. And that is a true moral travesty.

I also abhor the shoddy reasoning concerning his ideas on evolution: on the one hand, he suggests that old-fashioned selective breeding is best, since it allows life to exist along it's "evolutionary reality" (I shit you not, this is a phrase he uses). On the other, he bemoans the mutations that are arising in heirloom crops, which he blames on GMOs (even though he doesn't give a source for it). Surely, he didn't think that evolution could occur without mutation?

Science is not a system of morals, and I understand that. Common sense is not a system of morals, either. Science builds us a gun, but it can't tell us not to bust a cap in our neighbor's ass, that sort of thing. But "bad" and "good" are not reasons to be against GMOs. The reason why the Green movement against GMOs will lose (and it will) has nothing to do with money, power, or politics. The reason why the Green movement will lose this fight is because they insist that GMOs are bad, rather than giving reasons for why they are so bad.

Y'know, just for fun, one of these days I'll come up with an post or two with real reasons to be against GMOs. Ones that are actually backed up with evidence (and not wishful thinking).

What do you spend money on?

2009-03-14T00:02:00.006+01:00

Every other week or so, I stop by the windmill (yes, the typical Dutch windmill) and spend way too much money on some way-too-good whole wheat flour. Unlike your average whole-wheat flours, which are uniform, the stuff has little flecks of bran and a taste that we both love.

With the recession weighing upon everybody's minds (the newspapers here are all gloom-and-doom), tactics on saving a few bucks abound on most personal-finance sites. I find them interesting/helpful, though I tend to fixate on the DIY parts because I like doing things myself. But I think what's even more fascinating is reading about what people are spending money on. Hint: it's not porn.

There are some articles pointing to a slight increase in personal spending, but most of the finance news is, again, about how people are cutting back.

So I would ask you: what are you still spending money on? I still buy olive oil soap, which is a bit costly, but one I'm willing to put up with in order to not be up half the night scratching myself out of my skin. We still feed our cats a raw diet. We still buy boxes of candles, though we only light them when we have guests (still, 30+ candles going at once can put a serious dent in your wallet).

This exercise is not meant to be a bragging session about what we can still afford. It's more about realizing what we still have. It's so easy to be miserable when you can't eat out or go bar-hopping at the drop of a hat. But it's much easier to realize just how rich you truly are when you realize just how much the things you still keep in your lives, recession be damned, make you happy.

On education

2009-03-07T16:43:00.004+01:00

One of the things I wish my parents had done when I was little was take us out to the state parks, or some dark corner of the 'burbs where we lived, and point out the stars. The one time I've even come close to seeing the vast expanse of the galaxy we live in was on a night-time road trip to Virginia for a fencing meet, but I have never forgotten how the stars glittered in the sky--and, more to the point, how many there were.

I've always maintained a passing interest in stargazing and astronomy, but my abilities with calculus precluded me majoring in the deep spaces. Still, the night sky is not without its wonders--it's a pretty cool experience to realize that you can see Venus, that Beetlgeuse (Beatle Juice) really is red, and watch a lunar eclipse occur right before your eyes. But it was not until this weekend, when I finally bought what birdwatchers call a "spotting scope" and pointed it at the moon, that I realized, "Gee, I've got a lot of childhood to catch up on." (And no, I did not pay top-dollar for mine)

My parents, like most parents, placed a lot of value on getting good grades in school. I can't help but think that they got gypped into the belief that having an education means that you've learned a lot. I mean, I have learned a lot--but not on the things I was educated in. I've learned about proper soil composition for growing things, the names of all the major waterfowl in the Netherlands, how to feed a species-appropriate diet to cats, and which herbs to use in a tomato sauce. Amongst others. Don't get me wrong, I've also gained a lot through my education--I got my job solely because I was educated in pharmacology--but if you were to ask me which set of knowledge gives me more satisfaction in possessing, it's not the one that involves curves and data points (unless the data points are individual birds, and the curves are Gaussian distributions).

I don't claim to know the "best" way to educate kids. But I don't see how starting with their own interests could lead you too far astray. I sometimes wonder if I could have been an ornithologist, or an ecologist--given my dismal attempt to give a crap about molecular pharmacology, I wonder if I'd start feeling the same way about ecology. I don't think I would have gotten funding. I don't think I would have gotten a job. I don't think I'd be any better at writing papers. But I do think I would have learned a lot more for all my education.

Stuff of life

2009-03-06T20:56:00.004+01:00

"Bread" and "dough" are the stuff of life in more ways than one. We eat one, our society runs on the other. That both are critical to our well-being speaks volumes about the metaphorical power of leavened dough.

We make our own bread, mostly. It's not to save money, though we do: each loaf costs us around 1.5 euros, including the electricity to run the bread machine. Now, while 1.5 euros can buy you a decent loaf of fluffy stuff, odds are it won't have the delicious little yummies I usually add to our loaves, things like olive oil and flaxseeds.

We make a lot of things ourselves: my boyfriend is brewing his own mead, and in the summer, I'll pick blackberries so we can have blackberry wine. Our laundry detergent is homemade--but only because neither of us can understand the sense in paying a company extra money to leave out perfumes and coloring, which I'm allergic to. I make our own tomato sauce. He makes our jams and jellies. I make clothes (mostly mine, but I finally have a pattern for a man's shirt, so we'll have to see how that goes), he makes furniture.

Doing these things doesn't necessarily save us a lot of dough, though we usually do come out ahead, especially when blackberries are involved (I will never understand how a nation reputed to be as stingy as the Dutch pass up free fruit). It's questionable whether it's worth the money to make a perfectly-fitted pair of pants, when you can find a reasonably good pair for 15 euros, though. We do them because we enjoy crafting things--the process of bringing an idea into fruition is a rather addictive one. One begins to understand why God was not content to stop with creating the heavens.

I would argue that the stuff of life is not the bread itself, but the process of creating the bread. You can call it "mindfulness" or "engagement" or whatever New-Agey term tosses your cookie, but the fact is, when you make stuff, you can't just sit back and expect it to happen the way you do when you consume stuff. I.e., consider Starbucks, the penultimate symbol of consumerism gone rampant. You go to Starbucks, pay your money, and a frappumochacinolatte is set in front of you to guzzle. You don't know (and probably don't want to know) how it's made, what goes into it, whether you can make it better. You just enjoy it. Kind of.

Making your own things, be it food or clothing or other consumables, forces you to become aware of the processes involved in the creation of said thing. You know what went into your brownies, you know how they're made, and you can think on how to improve the flavor (a little Armagnac goes a long way in chocolates). You become involved, and when you finally get to enjoy it, you really enjoy it.

Living = being involved in life.

Seeds!

2009-03-01T18:04:00.004+01:00

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to start a balcony garden. That was in January.

Of course, a balcony garden doesn't just come together. It takes a lot of prep work, and that's something that's kept me busy this past month--too busy, in fact, to make those pants I've been wanting to make. Because our space is so limited, starting a balcony garden isn't as simple as putting a seed into a pot and hoping something grows. If you want to try something similar, take a look at what I've done so far.

Seeds: I drew up a quick 'n dirty map of our little balcony, and decided which plants would go where. Needless to say, a lot of our initial plant ideas (eggplants, bell peppers) had to get the axe as I prioritized which veggies I wanted and which ones we'd actually eat. Once I knew what I wanted to plant where, it was just a matter of picking out the seeds. I know most of the plants, especially the herbs, are available as plants, but I can't help it if I like the challenge, though--and besides, once the days start getting shorter again, in October, the plants all die. This way, I could conceivably get two or even three years' worth of plants out of one packet of seeds.

Space: Because we live in an apartment, we don't have much space for plants, not to mention that some plants, especially tomatoes, are rather stinky as they grow. Fortunately, we do have a (small) balcony, and fortunately, I'm pretty handy with power tools:

The top shelf will be for the tomatoes, and the bottom shelf for zucchinis and cucumbers. I'd also built a little raised platform for holding the carrots, and the strawberries will go into a planter that will hang on the balcony. The herbs will be kept inside--the cats seem to enjoy them, and they do make the apartment smell nice.

Fertilizer: I've always wanted to try composting. Alas, I'm finding out that composting doesn't work so hot when you start in the middle of February--it goes, but slowly. But the weather is warming up, so hopefully by the time the hypothetical seedlings are ready to go into their real homes, we should have some nice, rich dirt. There are some excellent sites out there that explain balcony composting. Also check out Simple Makes on my blog roll.

Starting up the seeds: I made a bunch of newspaper seedling cups, and managed to fill about 2/3 of them before I ran out of potting soil. Then I set them in the windowsill, and now it's just a matter of waiting. I'll get another sack of dirt next week, and seed the rest of the plants--a week won't matter that much.

There are some conflicting opinions as to whether you should take off the newspaper. I will, because I'll be using pots and not actual ground--I'm pretty sure that, in the ground, the worms and all those other fun things will chomp up the newspaper pretty darn quickly, but I've discovered that even in the compost heap, newspaper lasts a surprisingly long time.

So there you have it: four afternoons' worth of work to prepare for a whole summer of harvest. It's not really that much work. I chose to spread it out during the whole month because I have other things to do, amongst them spoiling my cats.

Pedal power

2009-02-27T13:40:00.002+01:00

You can't get much cheaper transportation than a bike. Or a more natural one, either--ah, muscle power! In the Netherlands, the national mode of transport is the bicycle. Not surprisingly: the cities are flat (where I live is considered "exceptionally hilly"), the streets are small, and the taxes for gasoline are painful. But I've been using a bike long before I became an ex-pat. My main mode of transportation in Philadelphia was also a bike, and public transit for meteorologically terrible days. I've since drawn some conclusions about bicycling in general, and hope to pass on some words of advice:

Conclusion #1: Jackasses are everywhere. You know who I'm talking about--the guy who rides on the wrong side of the street. Or the jerk who shoots through red lights like they don't exist. Don't be a jackass--ride on the right (unless you're in England) and at least pause to make sure there's no oncoming traffic before you ride into an intersection.

Conclusion #2: Parking your bike in front of doorways is a guaranteed way of getting it removed. Most cities in the Netherlands have regulations stipulating where you can park your bike, how long you can leave it there, what lock you should use, and when those parking hours are available. The rules are in place to prevent bike mobs from taking over sidewalks and entrances, and are enforced without mercy. In Philadelphia, which has no such rules, bikes which are left blocking the entrance of doors would just be shoved aside, but also sometimes taken, if the perpetrator were stupid enough not to have taken the hint. Please don't be a jerk and park your bike in front of a door. Any door.

Conclusion #3: Drivers are jackasses, too. If you assume every driver will be a road-hogging menace to bicyclists, you can't go wrong. I've met drivers who, in reverse, simply chose not to see me. Drivers who, in spite of there being three extra lanes with which they could use to pass me, chose to brush by with just the barest of space. Drivers who simply don't look before they make a turn (I was actually hit by one of these, fortunately it was a jam-packed street and I wasn't hurt beyond a scraped elbow). In other words, never assume the driver that's pulling up to the intersection will yield. Assume that he won't, and you'll stay alive.

Conclusion #4: Hand signals actually work. Hand signals are mostly dismissed by cyclists on both sides of the pond, but they actually work pretty well, provided you start using them before you make the indicated turn. This is especially critical for left turns on a two-way street, as the opposing traffic will usually slow down to enable you to make the turn.

Conclusion #5: Blind spots are bigger; or, just turn your head and look! This may seem strange, but the truth is when you're on a bike and you have to check behind you, you MUST turn your head. Especially when it's dark--most of the time, I can get away with a quick glance to the left and count on my peripheral vision to see the car, but when it's dark, I have to look over my shoulder. I can't tell you how many times I've been surprised by a car I could've sworn wasn't there when I looked.

Conclusion #6: Mom was wrong. When we were little my mom used to tell us to hug the curb, so that cars wouldn't hit us and we wouldn't obstruct traffic. When I started riding in Philadelphia, I quickly learned not to: people don't look when they open their doors. Not only that, riding as close to the curb as you can actually decreases your visibility to cars, and it forces you to take a snaky, windy, runaround around parked cars. A driver might lose sight of you, figure you've parked, only to be completely surprised when you pop out from behind a parked car (and in no position to stop in time). When you're on a bike, visibility counts most for your safety. Stay visible. Riding in front of a pissed off driver is better than popping up like a whack-a-bike in front of a nice one.

Conclusion #7: Helmets won't save you from yourself. I'm a bit on the short side, and this is doubly so in the country where women are regularly 5'9" and my 6' boyfriend is considered "short". Most of the bikes here are therefore made for significantly taller people, which means I have "issues" staying on mine when it's stopped (therefore I try not to stop). Helmets may save you from a crash with a car, but they probably won't do much if you're a klutz.

Conclusion #8: Headphones + Bike = Darwin Just. Don't.

Conclusion #9: Proper air pressure is a much bigger issue when you're the one doing the pushing. I know people who can't be bothered to check their tire pressure at all, unless the tire is visibly flat. I'm pretty sure they would do it religiously if they were the ones providing the energy, though--properly inflated tires make life a hell of a lot easier on wheels.

Conclusion #10: You don't always get what you pay for. It's generally true that a more expensive bike will be better than a cheap one--except in the secondhand bike market. You do have to sift through a lot of crap, but there's a lot of good stuff out there and it doesn't have to cost a fortune. My best bike was found in the trash room of my apartment building--I paid $35 to have the flywheel fixed.

Genetically modified, part 2

2009-02-27T12:29:00.002+01:00

The fact is, we know that pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers (even natural ones) are poisonous to the environment. We know that fertilizers cause algal blooms which decimate aquatic fauna. We know that arsenic is a deadly environmental toxin. We know that herbicides have unintended side effects when they spread beyond the neatly-defined borders of farmland.

What we don't know is what the genes of genetically modified organisms do once they're out there. Bacteria readily take up "excess" genetic material and happily swap plasmids with each other, but that doesn't mean they have to actually use the genes. Genes, after all, take energy to maintain, so if there's no need for a bacteria to possess a gene against rice fungi, it'll probably discard it eventually. Even if the gene does persist in the bacterial pool, the mere presence of it is not enough to do anything; a gene that remains quiescent for all eternity may as well not be there, as far as we're concerned. To put it another way: cars are noisy, dirty, pollutants of city streets. But if it just sits there in your driveway, it's not being noisy, dirty, or polluting (I'm not going to go into the idiocy surrounding the "carbon footprint" question). In fact, from the environment's point of view, a car that just sits in your driveway may as well not exist.

We also don't know how these rogue bits of genetic material will affect the surrounding wildlife--indeed, whether or not they will have any effect at all. They could render some plants inedible to wildlife, or increase their abundance to the point where there's a population explosion of herbivores. They could enable a plant to spread far beyond its native territory, and become an invasive species elsewhere, or they could drive it to extinction.

But we just don't know. The Law of Unintended Consequences has made quite clear that overlooking the smallest detail can lead to the biggest f*ck-ups; the corollary to that law is that the detail that's overlooked is the one that nobody knows about until it's too late.

On the other hand, what we do know is that using chemical fertilizers, poisonous pesticides, and herbicides is a) bad for us, b) bad for wildlife, and c) uses unsustainable technologies and produces tons upon tons of chemical waste. You can't have your cake and eat it too: either have farmers use conventional methods to farm but poison themselves and the world, or increase their capacity for going organic by allowing the unbridled sale of GMOs.

It is my belief that life can handle a few new genes being tossed around. Life is, after all, 3.5 billion years old. It's handled mass extinctions, to levels we can't even begin to fathom, the build-up and breakdown of millions of species, over millions of years. We're not going to inadvertently cause the next mass extinction by the accidental release of a few plasmids.

As Sherlock said to Watson, "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." But if one has data and chooses not to act on it, isn't that even worse?

Genetically modified

2009-02-24T21:33:00.002+01:00

Mushroom

I'm usually pretty frugal when it comes to grocery shopping: I go for generic chocolate, for instance, and I follow the prices of basic staples (flour, milk) at the two grocery stores nearby with a zeal that borders on religious fervor. I tend to buy in-season produce, and store fliers get perused thoroughly should there be a sale item that we need (which is rare).

But I shell out for Braeburn apples. If I'm in the weekly farmer's market, it'll be Royal Gala or Fuji apples. Granny Smith apples will do in a pinch--it's more about the crunch, though I'll confess to having a sweet tooth.

Braeburn apples are only 50 years old, discovered as an accidental seedling in New Zealand, and hypothesized to be a cross between a Granny Smith and a Lady Hamilton. Most of the apples we know today, such as the Golden Delicious, Royal Gala, and Jonagold, are comparatively recent additions to the apple family tree, arising mostly as accidents or freak mutations in established orchards in the twentieth century. Cortlands, Romes, and Granny Smiths are amongst the few that have been cultivated since at least the nineteenth century.

I mention this because it seems that public opinion is still largely against GMOs--Genetically Modified Organisms. HRH the Crown Prince of Wales is still actively campaigning against them, and most people recoil at the thought of "Frankenfoods". Their fears aren't entirely unjustified: I still remember scientists marveling (completely oblivious to the horrible PR spin) that they were thinking of inserting a gene, "borrowed" from deep sea fish, into tomatoes so that the plants could withstand the frost better. The gene encodes a protein that prevents ice crystal seeds from forming--pretty nifty, if you ask me--and thereby keeps fish blood liquid.

But really, there's no difference between genes that have been modified by selective breeding and genes that have been modified by a scientist hovering over a petri dish. The only difference is time. And money. Lots of both, if you want to do it the old-fashioned way; lots of one if you want to pay a scientist to develop a strain of corn that will make a better popcorn.

So to suggest that my favorite Braeburns aren't genetically modified and the apples that have their own insecticides "built in" are, is to be completely oblivious to the fact that civilization would not exist were it not for people genetically modifying plants and animals since the dawn of time. (Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel makes this abundantly clear) Humans have been making cows bigger, chickens lay more eggs, dogs more friendly, horses faster, grains heavier...you get the point. None of what you see in the supermarket exists in the wild, from whence it came.

Next: GMOs and the organic agenda

Crazy

2009-02-21T20:29:00.005+01:00

In 2006 I was kinda sorta hijacked into psychiatric treatment. By "kinda sorta" I mean that the psychiatrist actually came up to the medical school where I was doing my PhD research at the time and dragged me all the way to the psychiatric hospital, where I then proceeded to spend an hour every week, talking about life, the universe, and everything.

The diagnosis was major depression, and I was also put on Lexapro. It worked, though I don't think I'll ever be completely out of the woods--I still "crash", for lack of a better word, but far less often than I used to, and for far shorter times.

But sometimes I have to wonder: where would I be without having gone through treatment, and knowing what it's like to be well and truly okay? Is it "real" if I'm only well and truly okay with the aid of prescription medications and/or St. John's Wort? What's better for you in the long run--to be unmedicated and so distraught you spend the entire day in bed (or worse--I've never gone much farther than sleeping all day), or to rely on pills for the rest of your life? Am I really who I am now, or is it just the meds talking?

You can go crazy thinking about questions like that. For me, I've decided that sometimes functionality, rather than "naturalness", is the best measurement of "better".

Here we go again...

2009-02-18T20:47:00.003+01:00

Sometimes I feel like I should title this blog "Everything the Greenies tell you is wrong". Except that, well--I actually do care about the environment. But what bugs me most about many green blogs is that they simply don't make sense.

Today's MSN article about conventional versus soy candles is a case in point: the idea is that burning conventional, paraffin-based candles are more toxic than burning candles made of soy wax. At first glance, this seems plausible--after all, paraffin is derived from petroleum, and we all know how it feels to be stuck behind a diesel truck inhaling the noxious fumes.

But then, ask yourself: what exactly is wax? All waxes are collections of long-chain alkanes and esters, varying only in the details of structure and the lengths of the chains. Soy-based wax, for that matter, doesn't even exist--it has to be manufactured, from soybean oil, using the same hydrogenation process that produces trans-fats.

(And here, I must digress for a moment on the lovely irony that the very people who say that eating trans-fats are terrible for you, would advocate burning them)

In other words, the chemical composition is more or less the same, and if we're talking about combustion, the end products are--wait for it--exactly the same. In other words, you'll get a lungful of chemical smoke no matter what you burn. In other words, if you want to avoid toxins in the air, don't burn stuff.

The only valid point the article makes is that there could be lead in the wick. According to some, 30% of candles have a lead wick (lead in the center of the wick). That would be very bad. But the study that the statement was based on makes no distinction between the usual paraffin candle and the plant-wax based candle. So to assume that all 30% of paraffin candles contain lead wicks, while all plant-wax based candles do not, is still a logical fallacy.

Ex-president Bush was often criticized loudly for ignoring the science and sticking to his agenda, especially on environmental issues. This just goes to show that the knife cuts both ways...

Two random discoveries

2009-02-15T16:51:00.003+01:00

I made two random discoveries this weekend, although in hindsight neither were that remarkable. The first one isn't really mine; it was a tip from Wise Bread that was just simply irresistible: using bar soap to clean your bathroom (and, I suspect, anywhere else that needs it). It does, in fact, work the way Myscha says it does. It really is that quick and simple and wonderful, and AMAZING. I'd post before-and-after photos of our sink, but you probably don't need to know what we keep around it.

The other random discovery arose as I was building this:

It's two shelves for the balcony garden; the top one will hold the tomatoes, and the bottom one will hold the zucchini and cukes. It's pretty big; it's almost 3 feet tall and 3 feet wide (not exact dimensions), but it's almost finished--not bad for an afternoon's worth of work.

Anyway: because it's going to sit outdoors, the (cheap-ass yellow) pine* needed a water-repellent stain. Now, if you're like me, you tend to avoid projects that involve a lot of brushwork, because you're an absolute klutz with a brush, and worse than a pre-schooler when it comes to getting paints everywhere. But this couldn't be avoided, and so, with a heavy heart, I started staining the wood.

Needless to say I did, in fact, get the stain everywhere. However, our balcony really doesn't look any more stained than it did when I went in, thanks to...sunflower oil.

Organic chemistry is about two things: carboxyl groups and "like dissolves like". I honestly don't have an application for carboxyl groups yet, but I've used the "like dissolves like" to great effect, especially when cleaning. Generally speaking, the rule is that water-based compounds require an aqueous medium to remove, and oil-based compounds require--you guessed it--an oil-based medium.

Strictly speaking, the solvents in oil-based stains are not oils, at least not in the typical structure. But they are certainly hydrophobic enough to be mostly dissolved in oils.

So, for this project, if I saw a fresh drip, I'd dribble a little sunflower oil onto it, and watch it come right off. It doesn't work as well once the stuff is dry, though, so you still have to be vigilant. But it smells tons better than turpentine, and you don't have to feel terrible about the environmental effects--though, make no mistake, huge quantities of whatever oil are bad for the environment, but small quantities of turpentine are definitely more detrimental than small quanitities of sunflower oil

*Pine comes in two types: yellow and white. Yellow pine is notorious for: knots, splintering, and cracking. Try to avoid it if you can.

What's your version of "happy"?

2009-02-09T21:38:00.003+01:00

According to most people, I'm deranged:

I don't want a big house. I don't want a pool. I don't want a fancy hi-fi set. I don't want a fancy car (at this rate, I'll be lucky to get my license), or lots of shoes.

I want a small farm, in the middle of nowhere, where we can keep chickens and a cow or two, and perhaps a goat to take care of what the chickens and compost heap can't handle. Where I have a writing career and can sell the occasional photograph. There are other details, but you get the picture--quiet life in the country.

It took me a long time to come to this conclusion, because I like so many things: I like living in the city, having places to go and things to see and restaurants to eat at. I liked my room when I was living with my parents; I liked their house, and the neighborhood it was in. I like being close by the train station and just a hop, skip, and jump away from a city like Paris.

But I love making things grow: I see it as a special challenge, to coax and wheedle a tiny speck of seed into a plant--which I did manage, for several plants (I maintain that it was not my fault that the cats killed them). I enjoy raising and caring for animals; I love being surrounded by nature.

The point is, happiness is not something that's easy to find. It's not something that's easy to get, either. You'll know it when you figure it out, because it'll be something you're willing to suffer hell and high water to get.

Why not?

2009-02-08T00:58:00.004+01:00

One of the blogs that I follow, Science Based Medicine, is quite interesting and very informative. It is also surprisingly pathetic, in that the very people who write about how wonderful science is and how stupid complementary and alternative medicine is (CAM), have absolutely zero inclination to just try things and see for themselves what happens. I.e., the bloggers on that site seem to completely lack the intellectual curiosity that, in my opinion, basically defines science. Or perhaps they don't, but you wouldn't know it.

A particularly memorable argument involved breathing techniques. I don't particularly care for what they claim to do (energize, refresh, or whatever), but it is perfectly reasonable to assume that how you breathe can influence your state of mind. It's why we tell angry people to "take a deep breath" and calm down. It's why nervous and jittery runners tend to get stitches more often. I listed a few of the exercises--which basically induced a mild state of hyperventilation, which as anybody knows makes you feel a tad loopy. The truly pathetic thing? The person wouldn't even try it. Breathing!

Which I find kind of ironic: you blog about science, and yet have no curiosity to investigate plausible claims?

I'm almost always willing to try new things. I have my limits, of course--the things have to make sense, at least. Just the other day I read that newspaper is a great glass cleaner. Guess what I'm going to do this weekend?

I've tried going vegan (didn't work out, though I'm still a vegetarian), making my own cat food (still doing this) and laundry detergent (this, too). I've tried different furniture polishes on our pseudo-antique furniture, settling on olive oil (Pledge for when the stuff needs a really good shine). I've experimented with ways to kill aphids, and how to keep basil alive. I've tried several different things on cuts--honey is my favorite.

Science is all about systematically trying out what's only slightly plausible, within reason. Right now, I'm currently running an experiment which, according to the current paradigms used, shouldn't work, but since the actual experiment has never been done before, we'll just have to wait and see what the evidence says (actually, I didn't want to run the experiment, but since I'm just the tech, well).

If you don't try something, you'll never figure out what works, why it works, and how to make it better. I'm always looking out for tips and tricks to: save time, save money, save effort, do things better, do things faster, eat healthier. Most of these tips and tricks are useless to me--no such thing as coupons, here--but every now and then, I find things where I think, "Hey, that might work."

It's why we now have the Heap, our affectionate nickname for a box of potting soil and kitchen scraps which will hopefully turn into compost over these next few weeks, and I'll be raising tomato plants well into the summer. There's a first time for everything, and the first step to the first time is having an inquiring mind.

Pets au natural

2009-02-01T16:19:00.007+01:00

I've never been able to understand why people who think about GMOs, certified organic produce, free-range eggs--people who drive Priuses, use canvas shopping bags (ours are made of something like Tyvek), recycle, and have programmable thermostats, will think nothing of feeding their pets Purina.

I'm talking mostly about dogs and cats, of course. But the same is true for most other pets: why do people feed generally-species-inappropriate diets?

You don't see wolves at the zoo being fed kibble, which should, in my opinion, ring a few bells--if wolves are, essentially, wild dogs, then why shouldn't they be fed kibble? If they're not, could it be because kibble isn't actually a good food for dogs? And ditto for cats, and tigers.

Links here and here deal with raw diets for cats and dogs--it's all been written, and I'm not going to go into the supposed benefits for them, in part because I myself do not believe many of the claims. I do believe that raw diets have dental benefits--Shadow's teeth are still as pearly white as they were the day I got her--and that they are healthy and at least as good as if not better than prepared foods, when done right. I do not believe that a raw diet will cure diseases such as renal failure, although I do believe that they can mitigate the effects for quite a while. I am skeptical of claims that it helps mitigate behavioral problems, but willing to give the benefit of the doubt in most cases--but not because of "toxins" or any of that crap. I do not believe that feeding a raw diet is without risk--for me, with my biochemistry background, it's pretty much a practical application of my undergraduate degree, but for others, who have not bothered to look up things like the urea cycle online, it can be difficult to separate the information from the misinformation out there.

But I do believe that feeding a species-appropriate diet, or as close to it as one can get, is, in fact, what is best for one's pet. We humans have come a long way since the days "food safety" meant "let the other monkey eat those berries first", so it's hard to say exactly what a "natural" diet is for us. This is not to disparage the modern diet--nutritious and plentiful--but to point out that for humans, culture and environment are far more important dictators of what we eat than they are for animals, who not only are completely dependent upon their environment for their food, but also cannot be said to have any culture.

Pet food companies make a killing out of selling "Natural" stuff, but if you look at the ingredients' list, well--good luck finding any of that stuff outside of a chemistry plant. Some of the better companies actually do sell pet foods made of meat--and I don't want to know how much that costs, especially when the cost of adding one portion of meat to the weekly grocery list is so low.

That's the other thing: feeding a raw diet doesn't have to take a lot of money. It can, if you like buying those hamburger patties filled with "wholesome goodness". But my cats get mostly chicken, or whatever's cheap that week, and a bit of canned food if the drumstick is unusually small. It works out to about 1 euro/day to feed them, which is actually less than feeding them a brand name cat food.

If done properly, I do believe that feeding a raw diet is better than any brand of dog or cat food out there. Going natural, for them, makes as much sense as it does for you.

Disclaimer: I do not make any money from any of the pet food websites that I have linked to. They are merely the most prevalent brands that I can think of, and most likely to be universally available.

New Year's Resolutions Update

2009-01-22T20:37:00.002+01:00

This is the Tweeb; I adopted her from a rescue two years ago, and occasionally I'll send her foster "mom" an email titled "State of the Tweeb". Now, though, she'll get to headline the state of my New Year's resolutions. Follow me as I track my ups and downs:

1) Switching to CFLs: I've only managed to switch out 3 bulbs so far. More are coming, but we've recently decided to look into buying lamps for our bedroom, so I'll hold off on switching the bedroom lights until we do.

2) Eating more organic produce: Unforunately, this is winter, and produce is normally priced higher. Organic produce, doubly so. But I have made the switch to free-range and/or organically-raised eggs. The labels here are kind of confusing, but I've decided that free-range is more important than certified organic, because less stressed chickens means less salmonella. Plus I've always felt that humane treatment is more important than not using chemicals.

One thing I have been doing is taking note of where the produce is coming from. Eating locally and non-organic is probably better than eating organically but not locally.

3) Not buying clothes: I've succeeded so far in avoiding the purchase of all things clothing, but I'll need new socks soon.

4) Balcony garden: Our balcony has been cleared. It awaits but a few shelves and stuff that I'll tack together over the next few months, and spring should see the start of a beautiful crop. Assuming that I don't kill any of the plants...

5) Photography: Still haven't resumed this to the extent I would like. In part, this is because we've been busy remodeling the kitchen. In part, this is because the recharageable batteries I've been using have been charged one time too many and have decided to quit, and I've yet to bite the bullet and pay for new batteries and a new recharger (grr).

6) Selective use of chemistry: Yep. So far, so good. Except today, when I had to get new laundry detergent--I hadn't anticipated running out of the homemade stuff in the middle of starting a second load. Well, we'll make more tonight, and keep the store-bought stuff for emergencies...

7) Maintenance: Kind of. Our record for cleaning out the dishwater trap is abysmal, but I've been taking careful note of the pressure in my tires, and I've patched up a pair of pants.

8) Turning things off: Got power strips that can be turned off for the TV, lights, DVD player, sound system. Getting better at nagging :-)

9) Canning stuff: This is actually the boyfriend's forte. He loves doing it. Now, it's mostly marmalades, as oranges and grapefruits are in season.

10) Yoga: Yes and no. It's actually remarkably easy to get up at 4:30. Slightly less easy to do yoga. But I've found that going from M-F is about as much as I can take of it.

Pitchers and basins

2009-01-19T15:46:00.002+01:00

We're remodeling our kitchen. Yesterday we took out all of the cupboards and shelves. Today we've patched up some of the walls. Tomorrow we'll give it a paint job and remove the fridge and stove, and Wednesday the appliance guys move in and put up a new kitchen.

When we took out the cupboards, we had to turn off the water to the entire apartment (like all decent plumbing systems, it's now refusing to come back online all the way), which meant that for the better part of the day we had no running water at all in the apartment, which makes washing hands rather tricky.

Or rather, it would, but for a pleasantly fortuitous home decor item I purchased a few weeks ago: an old pitcher/basin set, the kind that farmhouses without running water used for sinks.

I bought it because it was beautiful--simple, aesthetically pleasing, if an armload to carry back. But it got its turn to function this week, as a supplementary sink, for when the bathroom sink just won't do.

It's quite interesting to muse upon the fact that, years ago, you couldn't see a house without a pitcher and a basin set. And now, you can hardly find a house with one.

Bring your own lunch--without plastics

2009-01-13T21:05:00.003+01:00

Living green and living cheap are not always one in the same—to whit, organic produce. Easily costs twice as much at the supermarkets, here, which is why I prefer to hit the farmer’s market instead. Except at this time of year, not only are the prices still exorbitant (it’s winter, and the produce at the organic stands are not only organic, but local, too), there’s also very little else that’s affordable except mushrooms and herbs. Which make a fantastic combination, but one does not live on mushrooms alone (although they do taste great stir-fried).

But living green and living cheap are, for the most part, mutually compatible goals: bringing your own lunch, for instance, is a great way to save the environment and tighten your financial belt. You can choose what you’re eating, and most likely you’ll have a hard time coming up with worse crud than what’s served up at the local fast food joint—which is none too green itself, if you believe Eric Schlosser’s reporting.

There is, however, one point of contention with going green by packing your own—the plastic. It bugs the living daylights out of me to have to use plastic sandwich baggies when everything else I do (going vegetarian, reusing and recycling what I can, turning off the lights, etc) attempts to be as environmentally friendly as possible. And I’m none too fond of Tupperware or its ilk, either—inadvertent liquid sculpture is only an art form if it doesn’t set off the fire alarms.

Most days I bring sandwiches, anyway. Not for any lack of imagination on my part—simply because at 5:30 in the morning there’s not much time for very much else. And while I know there are Tupperwares specifically designed to hold sandwiches, I simply abhor the thought of having to go out and buy it—it means yet another plastic box cluttering up our cabinet, and it’s anybody’s guess how long it’ll take my boyfriend to lose it, as he’s done with the last two lunch boxes I bought for him. Besides, our kitchen is getting renovated soon enough, and having more crud in it is the last thing we need.

I’ve come up with two solutions, one for sandwiches and other things that have to be wrapped, and one for a Tupperware analog for foods that must be heated:

1) Tupperware analog: glass jars. I personally use peanut-butter jars (which are still made of glass in this neck of the woods) but there’s no reason to think of that as the one-and-only. If you can’t stand the thought of eating out of a jar, keep a plate/bowl and spoon/fork in your workplace, and wash those as soon as you’re done.

2) Sandwich baggie substitute: butcher paper. Obviously this won’t work quite as well with things like tuna salad (which, in my opinion, you’ve got to be nuts to bring, anyway—salmonella, anybody?) But this should be.

We can’t ever completely oust the role of plastics in our lives, but minimizing its use is just good sense. You’ll help reduce our dependency on foreign oil, reduce your exposure to phthalates (which are de environmentalist rigeur at the moment) and toxic compounds (given off when plastics are heated to melting), and maybe save yourself a couple bucks in the meantime. Besides, glass jars are essentially free, extremely durable (as long as you don’t drop them), completely unstainable, and infinitely reusable.

Homemade goodness

2009-01-09T08:57:00.002+01:00

I do most of the baking in our home: cookies (every other week, thereabouts) cakes for special occasions and just-because, and bread. Actually, the bread machine makes the bread, but it still means I have to decide when and what to add to it. There’s a windmill nearby that carries all kinds of interesting flours, nuts and seeds (and pet food)—it’s always a fun trip, and I never come back empty-handed.

I don’t know why people say homemade is healthier. I suppose that’s mostly true, but then again you don’t see that many morbidly obese folks wandering the too-narrow aisles of Whole Foods all that often (come to think on it, you don’t see too many people at all wandering through WF these days). People who have that kind of money usually eat right to begin with, exercise, and if they prefer fancy gourmet breads because it’s “healthier”, then it’s a small wonder that people who eat all-natural things are healthier. I haven’t heard of any studies about this, so I doubt these two are causal.

So it’s not for any reasons of health that I bake and the boyfriend cooks, but because it’s tastier. Even after factoring out the cost of the bread machine, we’ve made up for it by the “exotic” breads that I regularly make with it—flaxseeds appear regularly in our loaves, as do whole wheat flours. But that doesn’t mean our homemade things are necessarily any healthier—yes, you miss out on lots of chemical preservatives and gain a ton of taste. But you also gain tons of fat. The cookies I make usually require 125-250 g of butter (that’s ~4-8 oz), and untold amounts of sugar (this gets cut back—I don’t like sweets to be too sweet).

The moral of the story is that homemade is only as healthy as the stuff you use to make it. One of the complaints against jarred tomato sauce is that it contains (gasp!) sugar. Well, if you make your own (and it’s not that hard), adding a modest lump of dark brown sugar greatly improves the flavor. Whining about the amount of salt in prepackaged chicken soup? Make your own, and you’ll find that you need a surprising amount of salt to get it to taste the way we’ve come to expect chicken soup to taste—I’m not sure how much, as it’s been eons since I’ve made it, but I remember being surprised at how much I had to dump in. Granted, if your tastes run towards the mild end of the spectrum you’ll probably need less sugar and salt than the amount going into prepackaged foods. Although you probably won’t have access to food-grade tocopherol or any of the other additives and preservatives added to prepackaged foods, just because you make it yourself doesn’t mean it’s any healthier than something out of the freezer aisle.

Out, out, damn spot!

2009-01-05T17:52:00.002+01:00

*Bonus points to whoever knows where the title comes from*

This post is mostly inspired by this MSN Money post. In my mind, fewer things garner more irritation than "frugal hacks" which aren't. Okay, saving a buck on laundry is good. But wouldn't saving mega-moolah--while being good to the environment and NOT killing yourself one molecule at a time--be better?

I've made my feelings about chemicals known, what wasn't so clear is that I actually dislike using powerful chemical cleansers. If you've got to wear chemical protection against it, why the hell would you spread it around on your floors? On purpose? This isn't just a rhetorical question. If you've got small children or pets running around, they'll eventually put their hands and feet in their mouths, eating the dirt--and whatever chemical poison hasn't been degraded by time or light exposure. People who want to blame vaccines for autism would have a better case against Dow and Johnson & Johnson (not that I think cleaning products cause autism, but if you've ever taken a deep breath in a shower that was just sprayed with one of the stronger products, the harm is quite obvious).

Getting things clean is really all about chemistry, anyway. Once you understand a bit about soaps, acids, and bases, it's just a matter of tinkering until it's done.

Everything that matters can be cleaned with:

Hand soap
Washing soda
Baking soda
Borax
Water
Bar soap
Salt

Laundry detergent: I use this recipe from Trent Hamm. It's great because even if I use an expensive, olive-oil based soap (I'm very sensitive to perfumes and coloring), I still come out ahead. Save up empty milk jugs or keep the containers of your old laundry detergents around. The sole disadvantage of this is that it has a tendency to separate. I've found that using olive-oil based soaps decreases this tendency, but if a jug has been sitting around for a few months it'll need a bit of shaking up.

Wine stains can be pretreated with salt (I'll bet you were wondering where this one came up). It's the tannins in the wine that set the stain, and salts disrupt this process. Just set the item aside, and pour on a copious amount of salt, enough to cover the entire stain. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes (I prefer 1-2 hours). Then rinse off the salt--in COLD water--and dab a drop of hand soap on it, and rub it in. You can repeat this a few times; depending on the wine, the stain may get lighter, or it may not. In the end, launder as usual. This is not entirely foolproof on white items--it seems to depend on the fabric type and the wine involved. The other bit of advice is to drink cheap reds--well, at least, young reds. They contain fewer tannins and are less complex (both in taste and chemical structures). Unless you have a sommelier for dinner, odds are nobody will know. :-)

Sweat stains are nigh inevitable in white shirts, but you can get them out and get a few more wearings out of them if you soak a lightly-stained shirt in baking soda and VERY hot water (be generous, 1/4 cup to a gallon). Let it sit for a few hours, and then wash (with other whites) in bleach. You'll have a sparkly-white clean shirt by the end.

Blood stains are surprisingly easy to get out. Soak in COLD water, and use a dab of hand soap to get out the most stubborn of stains. The only downer is that the soak has to be overnight for it to be completely effective. You can get away with shorter soaks, but you may have to soap the stain for a little longer.

We don't have a dryer, but if you do and if you use one, toss in a tennis ball. It'll act as a fabric softener AND decrease static cling. It does the same thing as those expensive dryer balls, but tennis balls are cheap.

Vinegar also acts as a great fabric softener, if you use such things (because we hang everything out, softeners would be defeated).

Nothing I've mentioned (not even the tennis balls) would cost more than a box of OxyClean. Everything is multipurpose--you can use baking soda or vinegar to clean lots of other things--and they're SAFE. These are, by far, a most effective way of going natural.

Slow

2009-01-02T09:50:00.003+01:00

I come across articles like this one frequently on the Internet, articles which purport to explain how relationships work and when you should be hitting "milestones", as if every couple develops according to some as-yet-unknown Piaget. If not even kids follow the rules all the time, why the hell do we expect adults to do the same thing?

I think a lot of discontent comes from the fact that we don't take relationships slow enough. When you're "supposed" to make out on the third date or it's a bust--when you're "supposed" to start thinking of moving in together after a year--waiting for months for your first kiss can certainly make you feel like either a freak, or that you're dating one (I am almost certain Peter did, as I freaked out every time he tried--for months).

But like the Supremes sang, "You can't hurry love". Lust and infatuation are easy, but being in love and Loving someone are, in my opinion, very different. And sometimes, your Nerve Growth Factor just takes a while to come up to that level associated with Love. Mixing neuroscience and pop psychology is, admittedly, a leap of logic, but no more so than subscribing to the popular opinion that dinner and a movie, guy-pays-for-all, is the "right" way to date.

I'm thinking about this because 2009 will be the eighth year that my boyfriend and I have known each other; the second year that we will have lived together. We didn't share a kiss until almost three years had passed, though I suspect that things might have moved a little faster if we'd been on the same side of the Atlantic. A little, but not by much, I think. In terms of Relationship Development, this would put us at "cretin".

But I don't think that's a bad thing. Certainty and stability are hard enough to come by in this life, and if you're going to get through life together, then you've both got to be certain, and stable.

New Year, New Life?

2008-12-30T20:25:00.002+01:00

New Year's is a great time to make some resolutions, to start a new diet, to get a new haircut, begin (or finish) that damn novel*, or be a "better person", whatever the hell that means.

I'd like to propose that we use the New Year to start living greener. As in really, truly greener. Environmentalist thinking isn't just cool, it's also a money-saver, which is a nice bonus in these uncertain days.

Below are ten things I've resolved to do this year, things that are both green and frugal--I'll keep you all updated as the year goes on, about once a week.

1) Change the incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent ones: Unbelievably, we still use incandescents. For some of them, like the overheads in the bedrooms, it can't be helped--they simply don't make CFLs in the size that will fit into the sockets. But most of the lights here are incandescents for only one reason--my boyfriend can't stand the thought of using CFLs. Which, if you ask me, is a silly one, especially since the lights that I want to switch are shaded by yellowish shades, which will soften the glow considerably.

2) Eating more organic produce: This is kind of tricky because organic produce is expensive and I've got a limited budget. But I figure that I can cough up once a week for ingredients to make a nice dinner.

3) Not buying clothes: Actually, I've been very good about not buying from mass-produced lines, mostly because I can't afford €15 for a delicate t-shirt that'll rip after its first wear. But this year, I plan on going just a tad farther--I'll either buy secondhand or make them. Well, not socks or underwear. I suppose I could learn to knit my own socks, but I can't count for the life of me.

4) Start a balcony garden: We couldn't do this for the past year because the boyfriend has a load of crap that he can't get rid of. But we're getting a new kitchen, so along with the destruction of the old kitchen, we'll get rid of the crap that's cluttering our balcony, and hopefully be able to put in some spinach plants, basil, cucumbers, tomatoes, and zucchini this year.

5) Photography: I've kind of fallen off the wagon a bit as the days have gotten shorter and my time has been occupied by measuring and cutting and stenciling and what-all (presents for 16 people for around €200 means a lot of homemade stuff, and homemade stuff takes a lot of time). But photography is a cheap hobby--at least, it can be--and at the same time, documenting the beauty of nature really reminds you of what there is to preserve.

6) Better living through chemistry: I will freely confess to being a toxic-chemical-phobe here. Well, actually, not so much--I am quite happy to use chemical-laden shampoos and conditioners, the difference being that shampoos and conditioners generally aren't strong enough to take out the lining of your lungs if you breathe it in for long enough. Broadly speaking, my rule of thumb is that whatever you're using to clean shouldn't feel like it'll kill you if you're locked in an elevator with it. There are few chemicals that we really need to keep an apartment spic 'n span. Between spiritus alcohol (the kind that you put in alcohol lamps), plain vinegar, bleach, baking soda, washing soda, and a bit of borax, there really shouldn't be anything you can't clean. The resolution? Not using any pre-fabricated cleansers.

7) Maintenance: We do a terrible job of maintenance. That is to say, I've not once checked over my bike since I bought it--secondhand--last June. There are probably hundreds of things we could check--the weatherproofing, for instance. We could insulate the hot-water pipes. Take a moment to dust out the computers, vaccuum the refrigerator coils, etc. But also things like fixing holes in clothes before they become irreparable, cleaning out the trap in the dishwasher more often, and things like that--they also need to be done.

8) Turning things off, aka letting my pet peeve out to play: My peeve is leaving things on. I'm okay with forgetting to turn off the light occasionally (happens to us all) but constantly leaving lights burning is a frightful waste of energy (and money). Furthermore, we have things like the DVD player which is never truly off, and my boyfriend's seldom-used stereo system is never turned off, either. It irks me that we have so many power vampires in our apartment, and this year, the plan is to get rid of them all, one room at a time.

9) Learn to can stuff: The summers are rife with blackberries and elderberries. The markets are chock full of muscat grapes and fresh tomatoes: what better way to preserve the flavors of summer for the dead of winter? Not to mention that homemade preserves make excellent gifts.

10) Start yoga again: The reason I haven't is because getting up at 4:30 in the morning just isn't fun, no matter how you cut it. But I miss yoga more, and with the impetus of a New Year coming on I'll be motivated to start. Maybe I'll even start running again, who knows? Though with my ankles in the shape that they're in, I'll probably be better off buying a used stairmaster, instead...

With the exception of the last one, everything here is something that you, too, can do, to live a happier, and greener life. Actually, you, too, can start yoga. But I wouldn't recommend getting up at 4:30 am to do it.

Actions and reactions

2008-12-29T10:07:00.003+01:00

It's not exactly a surprise that partying too hard on New Year's Eve leads to hangovers the next day. Or that pigging out at the all-you-can-eat leads to an unpleasant surprise on the bathroom scale. Or that "taking advantage" of all those pre- and post-Christmas sales results in a guilt-ridden statement, from either your credit card or your bank.

Which is why it's not exactly a surprise that the market for credit has scrunched down. It's a natural reaction to excess.

Economists tend to project the image of the economy as pure math, where people's actions are based on what will make them the most money. But really, it's mob psychology, both the bubbles and the inevitable pop. People tend to do what everybody else is doing. If everybody else is living on credit cards to pay for the lifestyle of the Joneses, well...

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T08:15:00.002+01:00

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

I realize that I've kind of drifted from the original tack of this blog, so the New Year will bring some changes in the type of stuff that gets put up here. And hopefully, I'll be able to update more regularly.

Our tree is a real tree, about 3 feet tall, blinged out in red and gold. Those are the colors we use as our main decor, too.

Real Greenies Don't Recycle

2008-12-07T21:50:00.003+01:00

We recycle only about half the glass that comes into our apartment--mostly the wine bottles, and then only if I can't use them for a vase (some of them are really fugly).

The other half does not get thrown out. It gets put to good use--holding screws, blackberry jelly, acting as pseudo-tupperware, holding things like corks and pencils and beads, as containers for stock, etc. I sometimes wonder how I ever got along with virtually no glass jars.

Why do we recycle at all? There are only two good reasons to recycle:

1) Essentially nonrenewable resources: paper, for instance. Yes, I know, trees are grown in specially manicured forests etc etc, but the fact is they grow at a much slower rate than our current need for paper. Hence the "essentially".

2) To decrease the amount of crap going to the landfills. Especially the nonbiodegradeable crap. Like glass. And styrofoam, too--but that one might actually degrade, given enough gasoline.

From some points of view, recycling is a terrible waste of resources. You have to drive a special truck to pick it up. The crap gets sent down lots of conveyor belts--using tons of electricity from what is most likely going to be a fossil-fuel burning plant. People get paid to sift through it. More resources are used to reconstitute the crap into its original form.

Is it worth it? When you consider how much crap we throw away on a daily basis--coffee filters, coffee grounds, small paper scraps, food scraps, broken things, food containers--one must wonder exactly how much of a difference a single can of Coke is going to make to the net amount of crud going to the landfill.

But then consider how many resources are devoted to, say, quarrying aluminum, hauling the raw ore to a refinery/smelting plant, smelting out the metal from the slag, shipping it to companies who bang on it and make nuts and bolts and cans, etc.

Recycling is worthwhile. But it should not be considered Green, but rather as the lesser of two evils.

Why conserve?

2008-12-07T00:07:00.002+01:00

Water is too cheap, which is why people don't care about wasting it.

There is also the fact that if you don't use it, it just evaporates, floats around as a cloud for a while, and then drops back to earth again, as rain. The water cycle, believe it or not, still works in the same way it did when you were a kid in elementary school. So really, there's no real shortage of water.

Except when there is:

It is impossible to predict which year will be a drought year. In the 1990s, when I lived in/around Philadelphia, there were at least two summers where you could be forgiven for wondering what happened to summer, because everything was brown. It didn't rain for three weeks straight, once--and given the average temperature of a Philadelphian summer, that's a big strain on plant life.

It is becoming even more difficult thanks to the weird climate changes we are all experiencing. Drought and famine in Africa. Drought and famine in India. Glaciers melting, Venice under water. Northern Europe caught in a web of freezing cold. More powerful hurricanes.

The problem is not that water actually runs out. It is that it runs out where people live. But it's not like you can keep it, either--evaporation occurs, no matter what.

So why "save" water?

1) Why not? If you're not using it, why run it? It's a profligate waste of money and resources.

2) Those "just a few bucks" you save--any little bit helps if you're struggling. Turn off the faucet, fix those leaks, and you'll breathe just that much easier.

3) Peace, quiet, and no green streaks. When I was in college I lived in an apartment where the bathtub's faucet leaked all the f*cking time. Eventually we were able to summon a groundskeeper to fix it, but by that time there was an irremovable scum of green stuff staining the white tub, marking where algae had grown along the trace of the water. Dripping faucets drive me nuts in general.

4) Water damages. See #3 about green scum. But a drippy pipe can cause floorboards and cupboards to rot, and those cost a helluva lot more to replace than calling the plumber to fix the leaks.

5) Save your skin. Washing too often dries out your skin, and washing your hair too often sucks the natural oils that give it shine right out. I wash my (long) hair every other day--it's oily--which is just about right.

Bailing out!

2008-11-20T22:45:00.006+01:00

The latest talk around the economic round table is on bailing out the auto industry. Don't worry, this won't turn into a long rant about the auto industry and how unions screw things up. The human cost if the Big Three went under would be tremendous--not necessarily catastrophic, but definitely painful--but at the same time, one must wonder whether the environment would see it that way.

If we go by the standard 10,000 miles driven per year, 15 mpg (we're talking SUVs, not Priuses), and 23 pounds of CO2 gas emitted per gallon, that adds up to almost 8 tons of carbon dioxide in the air per SUV, per year. Multiply that by however many millions of SUVs are idling in parking lots (er, I mean freeways) not just in the US, which is by far the biggest consumer but by no means the only one, China, and Europe, and it's a wonder that the oceans are still able to keep up.

This doesn't even take into consideration the acts of finding oil, drilling for it, shipping, and refining it, all of which produce their own small environmental catastrophes (and larger social ones, but I'm not up to dealing with things this complicated this late at night). Or the effects that roads have on the landscape--and how they shape the movements of animals, and the effects that has on conservation efforts. It's enough to give even an environmentally-inclined blogger a headache.

The point is that driving with reckless abandon will wreck the world--if you happen to live in Nigeria, then you know firsthand that it does, in fact, wreck your world. I'm not one to put much faith in doomsday prognostications of a world without oil, but let's realize: 1) oil renews itself at a much slower rate than we use it up (think millions of years--unless you're Sarah Palin and your brain can't physically cope with the idea that the world might be older than Genesis), and 2) there are much, much more urgent uses for oil than merely making things go zoom or zap.

It is actually the second that worries me more. It is possible to live without cars (we do). It is possible to deal without central heating, to scrape by on candlelight, and make do with microwaves.

But imagine a life without plastic, or try to--I can't. Most of the the world we live in is plastic. The couch I'm sitting on is plastic. My laptop--encased in plastic. Even the most plastics-averse person (my boyfriend) thinks nothing of buying chicken encased in a plastic box--and doubt anybody would even think of buying meat any other way. Consider how they keep things sterile in hospitals. Consider what rubber gloves are made of. Consider a life without polyester.

At some point in the (hopefully) far future, we're going to have to make decisions about what we can do without. Delaying this particular inevitable is one I think we can all agree on.

Does not compute

2008-11-10T20:27:00.002+01:00

My lab works on proteins. A few of the people run "dry" experiments, meaning they enter equations and run simulations of molecules and how they interact with proteins. Needless to say, being as inept with computers as I am, I normally don't deal with that.

But recently I was giving a box of 32 compounds that I had to test for allosteric activity. According to the computers, they were all allosteric enhancers.

According to my experiments, they're not.

Admittedly, a hit rate of 3-4 out of 32 isn't half-bad. Random screening without using computers to narrow down the list of criteria for our allosteric compounds would have me pulling my hair out of pure stress--when you're testing that many compounds, you have to make sure that the labels on one tube matches the label on the other, or else...

The point of all this is that life doesn't compute well. We can plug data into our computers until we're blue in the face, and get all types of random, seemingly meaningless correlations (rainy weather, autism), or important, seemingly significant ones (cholesterol, heart attacks). But it takes getting your hands dirty--designing the surveys, running the statistics, cracking the math--before you might turn up something useful.

And all too often, you don't.

I've still got a few more tests to run, but at this point they're more for verification of what I already know (most of the compounds are not allosteric modulators) than to get new data.

Bitten by the Bug

2008-10-29T21:15:00.002+01:00

Politics and science are usually separate fields. Certainly, politicians control the money that scientists get, and within the scientific communities you get political squabbles. But mostly, science is a meritocracy and politics is a popularity contest. In politics it doesn't matter if you're as dumb as a rock as long as people like you. You don't have to know what you're talking about as long as you can "connect; as long as people like the way you say it, you could suggest eating babies. After all, if Hitler could get elected...

But every now and then they come together, namely in the election years, when we decide who gets to make the policies for the next two, four, or six years (depending on who's running). Most of the time science gets pushed aside as people discuss the issues more relevant, so they think, to the most people: taxes, health care, and that mythical thing called Reform, during which they swear to end corruption and limit the influence of the very cronies who are paying them to say that.

But I, and most scientists, probably, would argue that the state of scientific research in the United States is critical to the welfare of the country. Not just because Big Pharma makes all manners of lifesaving drugs (well...okay, maybe not), but because supporting the infrastructures that do the scientific research, be it particle physics or grizzly bear DNA, generate their own economies. To say nothing of the knowledge that gets put out there--knowledge that transforms industrial practices, knowledge that increases our understanding of the world we live in. Sarah Palin may mock the grizzly bear study, but won't she be sorry if hunters shoot the last bear?

Several factors contribute to the robust health of the intellectual sphere: The budget of the NIH to fund studies is still, despite cuts, larger than the GNP of many countries. The flexibility of the English language ensures that ideas can be communicated. The diversity of those involved in research guarantees that many ideas will be generated, and the system of peer review helps ensure that only the best succeed.

The problem is that politicans often have no idea what constitutes science. Scientists are already prone to interpreting data along the lines of their own personal beliefs, but politicians will flat-out deny the existence of data.

Basing public policies on what you want to think is the truth is very different from basing public policies on what is actually the truth. The truth is: evolution happens, stem cell research is no more or less evil than abortion, mercury in our water systems is bad, and climate change is a fact. Simply because these are inconvenient to us does not change that tey are, and we need politicians with the balls to acknowledge that we do not dictate how the world runs, the world runs and we deal with it.

Whenever and wehere ideology takes the place of knowledge--be it in tribal Pakistan or the halls of the Senate, in the Supreme Court or sub-Saharan Africa, in money or in medicine--shit happens. Ideology has its place; it gives us a platform from which we can jump off as we learn new things, but it should never replace knowledge. Let's pick a prez who knows the difference.

Feeling Good

2008-10-16T23:30:00.005+02:00

Ups and downs are a normal part of life. In my day job, I'm a scientist/lab tech, and I'd recently mastered the art of a cAMP assay. This is a long, complicated assay involving live cells, lots of clear liquids in lots of clear plates, and calculations and back-calculations. It is, in many ways, the worst kind of assay one can run: expensive, easy to screw up, and completely dependent on how you grow your cells.

Recently my cells have been giving me a lot of flak, and after two weeks of piddling about and hoping that they'd come around, we've finally decided to just use new cells. What a bummer--I've lost two weeks' worth of work.

But oddly, despite the troubles these past two weeks, and the shortening days (anybody who says seasonal depression isn't real has never met me), I'm actually feeling quite good. Probably from a combination of chocolate, love, biking to and from the train stations, and the giddiness from not having eaten enough all week.

Feeling good, according to neuroscientists, is about brain biochemistry: having the right amounts of all the neurotransmitters in all their correct balances. Some people have a harder time of attaining this balance, others are magically "normal".

How do we go about assigning hedonistic values to the aspects of our lives that warrant it?

Science is not scientific: how to tell cells from cells

2008-10-10T00:13:00.002+02:00

I go birdwatching on a regular basis--my favorite birds are waterfowl, and at this time of year there are a lot of migratory species coming through Holland (it's a very good time to have a pair of 8 x 56's). As with any region, you have your native common fauna, which consists of the same old 15-20 species you see EVERY time you go out, your native less-common fauna (the 10-15 species you don't see every time and are excited when you do), the non-native fauna (10-15 species that are SOO COOL! when you see them), and the rare birds.

When you pick up a birdwatching guide, it will contain a long list of field markers, habitats, songs, behaviors, notes about plumage changes, differences between age groups--there is no way to memorize all of the information. Yet I can tell you, sitting in a train whizzing by at 60 mph, that that white-ish goose is a domestic goose and that other white-ish goose is a dark variation of the snow goose.

OK, so compulsively reading my bird guide probably has something to do with this. But more than that is practice. It's how you learn to tell black-headed gulls apart from common gulls (red feet, red bill) during the winter, when they don't have their black heads. I don't check plumage points, behaviors, habitats, unless I'm really uncertain about a new strange bird--and the only reason it's new and strange is because I haven't seen it in the wild before, as most of the time I know where it is in my book and I can turn right to it.

But if you were to ask me how I go about quickly spotting birds and making my identificataions--what thoughts go through my head--I couldn't tell you. Just as I couldn't tell you exactly what makes my cells healthy and what makes them not--why I say they're "not behaving" even though they look plump and otherwise healthy. I don't think anybody who does cell culture can accurately describe what "healthy" cells look like, but they know "unhealthy" cells when they see them.

You might wonder why there's any fuss over the health of cells at all. Turns out that many of the assays run depend on the cells being "healthy"--i.e., not contaminated, in the log phase of their growth, not newly-split, not "hungry" (believe it or not, you can tell when they are), with a slightly-acidic-but-not-too-much media, evenly dispersed--the criteria go on and on, but the gestalt picture is that the cells just look "healthy".

When you work in science, you eventually acquire a feeling as to what should work and what doesn't. The minutiae of your system become intuitive--you know that's not a pigeon, even if all you can see is a black blob against a blue sky. You know your cat isn't feeling well, even if it's not doing anything other than what it normally does. You know that even if the protocol says nothing about gently stirring your reaction mixture, you'd better do it gently if you want results. You know that some equations are better than others.

This is the daily in-and-out of experimental science, ladies and gentlemen. It is predicated on a long list of assumptions, some of which only may be true. It is not very scientific at all.

Weight loss secrets, revealed!

2008-10-05T07:52:00.004+02:00

One of the "hot research" areas I've been following for the past few months concerns the melanocortin receptor (I'm a pharmacology geek, what can I say?) and the regulation of appetite, the cooperation with dopamine receptors for pleasure, and the nebulous (so far) link with the hormones that are thought to regulate appetite: ghrelin, leptin, CCK (cholecystekinin), NPY (neuropeptide Y), and so on. Briefly, researchers are finding that melanocortin receptors cooperate with dopamine receptors to produce the hedonistic pleasure brought on by food. Exactly how the cooperation occurs and the effects of it are more technical matter that I will not get into here.

The article in question is, unfortunately, a closed one, meaning that you either have to be at a university library or pony up $32 to view it, unless Google has archived it somewhere.

But the main point is that this essentially debunks the "genetic set point" that irritates the hell out of me. The set point refers to a range of weights in which your body will fall, given an endless amount of food and constant metabolism. For most people, alas, this set point is not at the waif-like weight of what is being sold as beauty, but substantially above it.

There is no question that one's weight is naturally predisposed to falling at/around a certain point, and that for everybody, this point is different. For a society trained to find pixie sticks beautiful, this point is much heavier than what they would like it to be.

Allow me to digress a moment to point out that the pervasiveness of the diet industry is unique to the United States, and I would venture to guess that its success is largely unique to the US. Undoubtedly there are diet companies in Europe, but aside from an occasional flyer advertising a gym, there are few ads for apple cider vinegar pills, dietic green tea drinks, or body wraps. There is no media pressure to conform to a slender physique, though there is plenty of social pressure--for starters, cars are expensive, fuel even more so, and the stores catering to expansive waistlines are few and far between.

Anyway: it should come as no surprise, then, that one's weight tends to be a function of one's daily habits. Eating, drinking, sleeping, and all that good stuff. The operative words are "daily habits"--patterns of learned behaviors and thought that circumscribe everyday operation.

Behavioral experts say that it takes 2-3 weeks of sustained effort to create a new habit, and if my nail-biting is an accurate indicator, and old habits can never be fully destroyed--they can be overridden, but never vanquished.

What does this have to do with the set point?

My problem with the idea of a genetic set point is that it assumes that your body is entirely independent of your brain. If you've got a lifetime of, say, comfort eating (guilty) behind you, it is going to take much more than six weeks of bikini-body-dieting to break you of the habit of responding to emotional triggers with food. And, most likely, you'll find that no matter how long it's been, you'll probably relapse occasionally (guilty, too). When you go about "remaking yourself", not only do you have to learn a new habit to override the old one, you have to learn a new way to activate the pleasure centers to get that sense of achievement. This is hard. Very hard.

That young children have remarkably plastic brains is no surprise. Kids can learn to speak perfect French or Chinese if they start early enough, while adults might be able to if they persist at it for a decade or two. But what we have yet to appreciate is the full spectrum of plasticity of the adult brain. We, too, can train ourselves to like broccoli and delight in string beans. We, too, can teach ourselves new habits. It is hard. It takes a damn long time, and not only does it take a long time, it often involves pushing ourselves out of our comfort limits.

But it's not like we don't have that choice.

Science is not scientific

2008-10-03T08:17:00.004+02:00

My background is scientific: I've got a BS in biology and biochemistry, and I've worked in pharmacology and/or molecular biology ever since I started working. Even my hobbies outside of work are more or less scientific; readers of my personal blog will probably wince in recollection of my birdwatching lists, and I prefer reading nonfiction (Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos is one of my favorites, while The Elegant Universe is on my reading list) to fiction.

So it always astounds me when people believe that science is scientific--that is, precise, exact, where the proof is irrefutable and the data conform to nice and pretty graphs. It's not. Science does allow you to answer the most mundane questions ("How do we taste?") in the most amazing ways, and if it's done properly you'll even be correct. But it's not math--that is, there is always uncertainty, there is always room for error, and different interpretations, and you may find that a solid, well-thought-through hypothesis is shot to hell when you do one more test as an afterthought.

Good science is not about doing good experiments as it is about asking the right questions. That is, the clinical trials that the people at Science-Based Medicine love to espouse are really just demonstrations of safety and/or efficacy, rather than actually uncovering anything new. One could argue that the science that led up to the development of drugs ready for clinical trials is good science, and I would have to concede that point--but few studies actually purport to change the way we think about the human body, or anything else, for that matter; the studies that actually add to our body of knowledge are usually not of social interest. I.e., you don't see membrane-protein crystal structures making the front page of anything except Science (which is a very remarkable feat and one that rightfully deserves all of the attention and praise that it gets, but I don't think mobs of girls are going to be swarming over to the Scripps Institute begging for autographs). If you don't know why crystal structures of membrane proteins are so important, that sort of proves the point--that the good science simply doesn't engender social interest.

Allow me a moment to rant about the science that does interest people: dieting and weight loss, drugs against obesity, and drugs against drug addictions (funny how the phrasing works out). For the most part, these studies are flawed, some more than others--the ones that are less-flawed tend to be the basic-science ones, where they find that Molecule Zed makes a mouse skinny or fat and then elucidate the pathway by which Molecule Zed works. They tend to rely on statistics and epidemiology, which in turn make the assumption that the people answering the questions are honest, or that there's no other compounding factor. I always read these studies with a skeptic's eye (though I don't always disagree with the findings), but it's ironic, in my book, that the studies that interest people are the ones that are the most lax in how they are controlled.

What I call "good science" is less a question of method and more a question of...well, questions. Methods can be improved--someone who wants to study the effects of acupuncture could do worse than stick random needles into random people--but you can't get more basic than asking whether acupuncture works, and how (answer is probably not, in case you're wondering). Asking the right questions makes good science far more than running the most rigorously-controlled experiments; asking the right questions usually requires a divergence from the state of reality as we know it today.

Aside: I am afraid my posts will continue to be sporadic. Suffice it to say that life is crazy.

Urgh, Firefox

2008-09-17T21:59:00.002+02:00

I must apologize for the delay: not only is my job keeping me busy as hell, but the days are getting shorter here fast. Night now falls at 8:30 pm, which means that I tend to get sleepy at around 9 pm. The upside to being solar-powered is that during the summer I quite literally do not have to sleep more than 5 hours a day. The downside is that during the winters I practically hibernate. Furthermore Firefox 3.0 is having some issues loading the "Edit blog" part of this site. Safari doesn't work quite as well, and I hate firing up my boyfriend's desktop and generally avoid doing so because it sucks power like a Hoover, amongst other things.

Anyways, with all that out of the way...well, it's not really out of the way, is it? Because all the stressful things in my life haven't been fixed: my job is keeping me busy as hell, the days will continue to get shorter until the winter solstice, I still have no idea what's up with Firefox, and there are two cats and one boyfriend that demand their fair share of my time and attention.

That's the thing with stress--it's always there. If you're not under some kind of stress, then you're dead.

How you deal with it, on the other hand, is another matter entirely.

Ah, stress! Part 1 of 3

2008-09-09T20:39:00.005+02:00

I'm going through a rather strenuous time right now--one consequence of doing your job a bit too well is that you suddenly get heaped with tons of work. Added to this is a four-hour commute and my usual life and it's no wonder I've given up on trying to get the recommended 8 hours of sleep (I might almost get there on the weekends).

Stress, strictly speaking, is anything from the outside world that affects you. It is not, by definition, a bad thing: if tomorrow you won the lottery, that too is stress.

In the days of yore, when we hadn't yet earned the genus Homo, stress was running from a jaguar--and fighting like hell when it caught you. The release of epinephrine and norepinephrine enables the muscles to work much harder. Pain responses get blunted. Blood is shunted from organs that don't need it (your gut) to those that do at this moment, as your entire body is devoted to one thing--getting the hell out of there, or beating the crap out of whatever's trying to beat the crap out of you.

Nowadays, we have a more evolved brain, and far more involved lives. Social interactions are no longer limited to who gets pickings at the termite mound. Being able to think means that what we make of a scenario can greatly affect our body's response to it. Someone who has a breakdown on I-95 can panic, get angry, rant at an angry God, or call AAA. These days, very few of us will ever encounter stress of the sort our ancestors did, unless you're unfortunate enough to fall into a den of lions. But the evolutionary mechanisms by which we deal with stress--open the floodgates for epinephrine--have remained the same.

Is this a good thing, or not? Stay tuned.

The Skinny: Part 3 of 3

2008-09-05T22:17:00.002+02:00

Women are supposedly neurotically insecure about their bodies. I'll admit that I am, though I conceal it better than most (I think--does this confession count?). We think our boobs are too big/small and our asses are too this or that and the glossies have a ball every summer before bikini season when we're supposedly at our wits' end about looking like a walrus. But you know what? It really doesn't matter--if you have boobs and an ass, you'll get hit on--only not by that cute artsy guy in the cafe (who is, of course, taken), alas. Men, it seems, really don't see much else--at least, not if my observations of ogling behavior along Kelly Drive is correct.

At this point I'd also put in a statement about what physical features about men attract women, but in this respect there's perilously little consistency. Women are far more slick about how they ogle men, and their tastes are far more divergent: the Chippendales would have you believe that the ideal man is 200 pounds of pure muscle, but the variety of body types available amongst the Hollywood elite would suggest otherwise (personally, I go for the more slightly-built, like Eric McCormack, but I have to admit, seeing Daniel Craig in Casino Royale took my breath away).

All of which suggests that there is no one true body type that's universally beautiful. Some characteristics are appreciated, undoubtedly--ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, one nose--but if you're reading this odds are you meet someone's expectations of beauty.

So why all the pressure to be thin? Or rather, why, in spite of Marilyn Monroe and the zaftig figures of previous generations, and a resurgence of more normal figures, are women still airbrushed to "perfection" and the figure of a prepubescent boy still considered desirable?

Actually, the real question isn't even why we're still told that we need to look a certain way to be "beautiful". It's why we fall for the line that our bodies, as they are, are not enough--that they must somehow be modified to be beautiful. If you think about it, this is a puzzle: female apes don't feel the need to don high heels and strut their stuff in couture--but I betcha they would if another did it and won the ultimate Darwinian prize: a male.

Which gender self-modifies is irrelevant from this point on. In most species where sexual dimorphism occurs, it's usually the male that gets decked out like a drag queen. Sexual selection is certainly a powerful force when it comes to designing traits that the other gender "likes". But it's not the end of the story. I would suggest that a somewhat more subtle psychological need to be assimilated, especially in social animals (like humans) also plays a key role in why we get gussied up.

That is: women dress up because it makes them more attractive to men. But it also unifies them with other women. Assimilation is not just for the Borg. It makes civilized life possible. And leads to an interesting array of neuroses, like that involving bikinis.

Beast: part 2 of 3

2008-09-04T21:55:00.002+02:00

Collagen. Copper. Alpha-hydroxy acids. Petrolatum. Retinoic acid.

You can be forgiven if you thought I was talking about a chemistry course. Beauty is as much about looking young as it is about looking, well, beautiful, and today's beauty products promise to reduce wrinkles and cover up age spots and protect from UV rays and do all but wash out the kitchen sink.

There is, alas, no real way to stop looking older. Collagen creams are a hot item, but if you stop and think about it, it's highly improbable that they work the way the ads say they do. It is true that, as you get older, the collagen levels in your skin decrease. It is not true, however, that collagen creams work by "replenishing" collagen levels in your skin. Perhaps they will temporarily, thanks to the addition of retinoic acid. Even more depressing is that simple, inexpensive moisturizers are just as effective at temporarily reducing the appearance of wrinkles than the $30/jar stuff sold at cosmetics counters.

There is sad news for anti-aging diets, too: they don't work. That's not to say that eating tons of fruits and veggies are bad for you--au contraire--but rather, that the aging process is more genetic than anything that you can control.

But what about the magic of calorie-restriction diets? I would posit that, if you're eating tons of fruits, vegetables, and nuts, you're probably not eating as many calories as the person who dines regularly at Big 'n Fatty. I would also posit that, because most healthy foods--such as those found in Japanese and Mediterranean cuisines--tend to be high in fiber, you'll probably get full eating less of it. But neither of these truly illustrate a calorie-restricted diet, which is cutting your caloric intake to 1000-1200 cal/day.

What happens to your body--and, perhaps more importantly, to your mind--when you drop 25-50% of your regular caloric intake (I tend towards the low end, at around 1600/day--it's usually recommended that a man take in 2000 cal/day)? Epigentic changes are almost inevitable when the body takes punishment long enough; there is nearly indisputable evidence that most, if not all, psychiatric illnesses are due to how the genes are changed in response to environmental stressors. It only follows that the body's responses to constant near-starvation would be to go through some changes, too. The science is still terribly convoluted as to exactly which genes get turned on and off and to what extent, but epigentic changes in response to calorie restriction happens, in yeast and mice, and, presumably, humans.

It is unlikely that calorie restriction will ever enter a clinical trial on the scale that would be required to produce meaningful results. Not only do humans tend to live an inconveniently long time, the genetic backgrounds of the participants would need to be far better understood than they are today if we are to avoid the devestating effects of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. While most of the men came though the experience intact, it's a gateway to anorexia in those who are prone to it. Anorexia, with it's 20% mortality rate, is by far the more deadly, whereas even if you're doing everything right with a calorie-restriction diet, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow.

How long you live matters far less than what you do with your life, and how you look while doing it matters far less than whether you enjoy doing it. If you're paying for your wisdom with age, you may as well get the most for your time.

Beauty: part 1 of 3

2008-08-29T21:36:00.006+02:00

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is only skin deep. It is also a multi-billion dollar industry that thrives on never delivering what it promises and telling beautiful lies.

Is there any truth to claims of antioxidant prowess against aging? Any truth at all to the 8-glasses-of-water myth? Do collagen creams really work?

And that's not even touching on the "new and improved" versions of makeup. I'll grant you that today's powders and mousses and mattes are probably substantially safer than white lead paint in in the Roman days. But I don't think most women would care if tomorrow their makeup were named as the Cause of Cancer--my sex was willing to put poison in their eyes; I wouldn't put it beyond us to suffer cancer as the price we must pay to look good.

The cultural aspects of beauty make for interesting divergences as to what constitutes beauty, but less so, in my opinion, than what constitutes universal features of beauty. There is some speculation that there is a "perfect ratio" of features that beautiful people--or rather, women--possess: large eyes, small chin, clear skin, and so on--pick your favorite supermodel/actress.

However, it is interesting to note that there is no such universal standard for men--there is no psychological equivalent of the "perfect man", the way that there is for women. If you read books from the nineteenth century, authors tend to drivel endlessly about the set of the lips or the shape of the eye. It is especially interesting to note that although heroines are all depicted in more or less the same fashion (clear porcelain skin, liquid eyes of a light hue, gently arched lips), the heroes have a far greater variety in their appearance. Rather, it is their manners and their high "moral code" that makes them desirable.

Which sex has it more difficult? Women, because they must torture themselves to appeal to the fancies of men? Or men, because they must possess the right behaviors to attract the attentions of women?

Where the Sidewalk Ends: part 2 of 2

2008-08-27T21:52:00.002+02:00

Where we draw the line for what's acceptable and what's not poses an interesting conundrum: For instance, one study shows that recycled paper products contain lots of toxic "goodies", but I seriously doubt that any public-health-naysayer (a la Jenny McCarthy) is going to advocate not-recycling. Yet if you think about it, considering how much recycled plastic and paper is in our lives, the odds of those being the "cause" of autism (if there even is an environmental cause) would technically be much greater.

So why do we cling to erroneous beliefs in the face of good science showing that they're false? I think the answer is two-fold: first, that scientists can be "bought", and secondly, that people simply don't know enough.

The idea that Merck and Pfizer and Eli Lilly and all the big pharmaceuticals juggle the data in order to get their drugs out on the market is most likely false. I say "most likely" because undoubtedly someone will point to Vioxx and sneer, but if you look at the statistics--at the actual numbers--for the incidence of cardiovascular events of patients on rofecoxib (generic name for Vioxx), they don't vary between Vioxx and placebo.

"But those scientists are paid consultants! Of course they have a vested interest in keeping Vioxx on the market!"

Okay--well, then, another study, far less friendly towards Vioxx, says pretty much the same thing: no increase in cardiovascular events. What they do note is a slight increase in the number of annual myocardial infarcts in the Vioxx group--a difference of less than 1%. Yes, the difference is real. But less than 1%? You have a higher chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident, but nobody's suggesting that we ban cars.

Regardless of which side you believe, the outcome of this was hardly a picnic for Merck. But it also illustrates our f*cked up way of deciding what's worthwhile and what's not. To whit: parents who are terrified that vaccines can cause autism apparently have no fear of measles outbreaks, and with the way they're being portrayed as heroes, we can only surmise that children dying of easily-vaccinated diseases are acceptable casualties in a war against a disease that has no known cause.

And I though George W. Bush was insane when he decided to invade Iraq.

The problem is that people know enough to be skeptical, but not enough to know how to discern truth from smoke. Even today we're still terrified about radiation, so much that we treat foods that have been irradiated as though they've been poisoned. Yet we have no problem microwaving a can of soup, or basking in UV rays, or sitting in front of a TV--and if I'm not mistaken, there's a lot of TV-sitting.

Kinda makes you wonder how we ever made it this far.

Where the Sidewalk Ends: part 1 of 2

2008-08-25T12:17:00.003+02:00

There's been a lot of fuss in the press about bisphenol A, that cancer-autism-hormone-imbalancing-everything-horrible compound that's added as a stabilizer to plastics. Europe has declared it safe, although they've set limits to exposure to allay consumer fears (not being sworn to protect liberty lets you do a lot of things, apparently). Consumer advocates in the US want it banned, swearing left and right that it causes cancer and acts to disrupt male hormones.

So. Which side to believe?

On the one hand, consider that companies do not necessarily have the health of the consumer in mind when they peddle their wares. We read about formaldehyde in milk and sawdust in potted meat (I love that phrase) in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. The fast-food industry has long been plagued by the image of their restuarant as a hotbed for food poisoning, an image not entirely unearned--think Jack in the Box in the 1980s. Today, flavorists are paid exorbitant sums to come up with ways to flavor food "naturally", even though there is really nothing natural about grinding dead bugs into strawberry yogurt, and still less about how the yogurt is flavored, even if it is organic*.

On the other hand, consumer advocate groups have been wrong before. As important as Erin Brockovich-like figures are in keeping people from sticking knives into electric sockets and slapping warnings about letting your kids play with a meat grinder (it saddens me to think that some people actually need these warnings), they do a great disservice when they pick the wrong causes to run with (the link is an example of what's wrong--I strongly advocate vaccines, though I'm less certain about following booster schedules to the letter).

In scenarios like this, an outside observer can't win: if you go with the science (both bisphenol A and vaccines are safe) you get labeled as a pawn for the industry; if you go with the consumer groups (both bisphenol A and vaccines are dangerous) you have to ignore pages upon pages of research and you get labeled as a rabid emotionally-invested moron.

Even if you try to take the middle of the road (vaccines, but titer before boosters; accept that plastics are needed, but try to use less--a stance that any environmentalist should agree with irrespective of the health risks) then you get called out for being indecisive and John Kerry. Which is just as bad, because most of the time the middle of the road is the most logical place to be.

Skimming through PubMed produces lots of studies that show BPA is safe. At ridiculously high dosages, of course, it's dangerous, but then again, so are carrots, so that's almost a non-argument. Most of the studies that demonstrate causality were done in rats or mice. If anybody cares to remember the saccharine saga, the moral of the story is that mice =/= humans.

But oddly, despite the studies, I still have misgivings about BPA. I don't doubt the science saying it's safe. I have a higher chance of being run over than I do of getting cancer because of my exposure to it. But...

That's the puzzling part about this whole thing: that we should have all the information pointing to the facts, that we should have all of these studies indicating that we don't have to give up plastics or change our way of life--and yet. And yet we continually question whether it's true. Why does the sidewalk end? Where do we get off the train of reasoning and board the Pseudoscience express?

*Let me tell you right now that unless you've had real homemade strawberry ice cream--and I'm not talking about the stuff you can get out of a Breyer's box--you cannot understand how false commercial strawberry ice cream is. There is a cloying sweetness about the commercial stuff that is replaced by a richness in taste and an element of tartness that makes true strawberry ice cream phenomenal.

What you can do

2008-08-24T10:00:00.003+02:00

There's not much more to be said about what you can do to reduce your contribution to our collection of greenhouse gases. Not using electricity when you don't need it, eating local, eating organic, reduce, reuse, and recycle, etc etc. You can find all of these hints and more at sites like the National Geographic's Green Guide, so there's not much of a point in rehashing what's already out there.

But let's not kid ourselves: even the most eco-sensitive and frugal in the First World use a LOT, and we waste a lot. Just yesterday I bought almost 100 euros' worth of clothing--to be fair, a lot of my clothes were looking a bit ratty and I did set aside that money for the express purpose of clothes shopping. Even though my clothes were still serviceable, many of them looked worn and it was starting to get to the point where I looked a lot worse off than I am (maybe I'm a lot worse off than I think?). Still, if pressed, I'd have to say that no, I didn't really need new clothes.

I don't have a functional cell phone, something that most of us think is a necessity--my cell phone is basically a clock, because I still haven't managed to buy myself a nice watch yet. Most people today would rank Internet connection and a computer as necessary. They would probably also put down a washer/dryer system, a microwave oven, and cable TV as necessities, too--something that always baffled me when I volunteered to sign people up for food stamps was that the government apparently did not consider basic cable a frivolous expenditure, but a gym membership was. Other necessities-that-aren't include makeup, pets, any sort of entertainment expense (including books!), and most food.

To be absolutely clear: of course there are things you can do to minimize your impact on the environment, but you can't get away from the fact that if you're putting your organically-grown produce in a plastic bag of course you're using more resources than someone who puts his organically-grown produce in a fifteen-year-old canvas bag. If you make a phone call from a cell phone, of course you're going to be using more resources than waiting to see the person and tell them what's soooo vital in person (seriously, how many cell phone calls are actually of the "OMG I HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS OR ELSE SOMEONE DIES!" nature?).

In the Western world, we have a lot of resources to exploit, be they natural or man-made (which are dependent on natural resources), and most of us don't think about how we use them. It's not that we should feel guilty about using them--after all, what's the point of having resources if you don't use them?--but we should be more aware of how much we use and how we use them.

Awareness is, I think, 90% of the environmentalist's battle. Being aware of how much trash you generate, how much plastic is used, what you can reuse (even if you don't think you can), where you can reduce (and there is always more) requires reaching beyond your current comfort levels and exploring just how low you can go.

Life is hard

2008-08-21T22:18:00.003+02:00

It's hard being at the bottom of the food chain. You get absolutely no respect, not even from wildlife protection agencies. The only way anybody even realizes you're there at all is when you disappear--i.e., die off, go extinct.

Yet the bottom feeders are one of the key players in maintaining the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Or rather, more correctly, the oceans are. The WWF and other similar organizations make a huge hullabaloo about saving the whales and pandas and other fuzzy, photogenic creatures, but to be completely and brutally honest I don't think the planet would miss them if the whales disappeared. We humans certainly would, and that goes double for the Japanese and Icelandic whalers as well as for anybody who makes a living giving whale watches. The Operation Cat Drop Principle prohibits me from stating this as a fact, but the fact still remains that there are many superfluous species in the world. Honestly, how many different types of bunting does an ecosystem really need?

The oceans are the biggest carbon sinks, absorbing 90 trillion tons of carbon dioxide every year, and releasing 88 trillion (I'm not entirely certain that I trust the link the numbers came from, but suffice it to say that the oceans sequester a lot of carbon dioxide). The oceans absorb carbon dioxide in two ways: the first is that carbon dioxide is naturally soluble in water and gets dissolved. The solubility increases as it gets colder, so the farther down you go, the colder the water, and the more carbon the water contains. The second is comprised of those trillions upon gazillions of plankton that float around. Plankton are essentially microscopic plants, which use carbon dioxide and make oxygen.

The disaster at Lake Nyos is a dramatic example of what would happen if the carbon sinks were to fail. Granted, the Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun incidents are unique, in the sense that these are volcanic lakes--some geologists believe there is a fissure that leaks carbon dioxide into the water. Because the water is so deep--and therefore, so cold--it contains a lot of carbon dioxide. Anybody who's opened a bottle of soda or a can of beer knows that carbon dioxide is not happily contained in water, and any kind of disturbance--some geologists speculate a deep-lake mudslide--will set the carbon dioxide free.

Even though the Lake Nyos tragedy is singular, the weakening of the oceanic carbon sinks should give us cause for concern. Plankton and many forms of aquatic life live within a very limited range of temperatures. Plankton are also limited to the surface layer of the ocean because they require sunlight. The increase in ocean water temperatures by a scant few degrees can affect the health of the plankton, and, by corollary, all of the animals that live on them.

It is not, therefore, for the sake of the whales that we must protect the oceans, but for our own sake. The oceans provide fish, and therefore an income and an industry's existence. The lives of farmers depends on the climate that is affected by these great bodies of water. Even in the first world, the dependence of farmers on the beneficence of the weather is important to the health of the people and the economy--when you consider that less than 1% of the people in the US farm for a living, it's obvious where a bottleneck would be if the weather were to be any more insane than it is now.

Tomorrow: what we can do. And don't worry, it won't be sappy.

Love one another right now

2008-08-18T21:04:00.002+02:00

Eco-terrorists are to the green movement what fundamentalists are to religion--radical morons who pervert some pretty wonderful causes and make other people suffer for it.

But if Ayan Hirsi Ali is correct about Islam (at least, the more fundamental versions of it), at the very least the green movement is open to debate as to what's reasonable for most people to do in order to do their part to slow down the pace of global warming*.

How far would you go to be green? Comment below with the numbers on the list below. List first the ones you actually do, and then the ones you would do if you had the means. .

1) Cut back your driving mileage by 25%
2) Cut back your driving by 50%
3) Give up driving
4) Limit flight travel to once a year
5) Eliminate flights entirely
6) Use "green" laundry detergent
7) Use green personal hygiene products (toothpaste, shampoo)
8) Use "green" makeup
9) Give up makeup
10) Go vegetarian
11) Go vegan
12) Go freegan
13) Eat organically-produced meat
14) Eat organic produce
15) Eat local organic produce
16) Eat local organic meat/eggs/dairy products
17) Give up fast food
18) Carry a piece of trash an extra block until you find a trash can
19) Pick up litter
20) Switch to fluorescent lights
21) Better insulate your house
22) Use all-natural products to do the insulation
23) Live in an all-natural house (mud walls, thatched roof, power by windmills)
24) Give up electric lighting for candles/torches
25) Buy organic-cotton clothing
26) Buy secondhand clothing
27) Take up dumpster diving
28) Milk your own cow
29) Give up coffee
30) Give up tea
31) Give up vanilla, pepper, spices
32) Farm your own food
33) Make your own clothes
34) Butcher your own meat
35) Take shorter showers
36) Use a bidet instead of toilet paper
37) Give up chocolate
38) Reuse old jars and plastic bottles
39) Compost
40) Reuse plastic bags
41) Rinse and reuse sandwich bags
42) Rinse and reuse aluminum foil
43) Walk away from a relationship if the person bought a Hummer

*Global warming--at the very least, odd climate--is real. Whether it's manmade, and whether anything we do will make a whit of difference is debatable.

Carbon feet

2008-08-16T15:20:00.002+02:00

The language of global warming is fraught with moral connotations, which is unfortunate because such language automatically divides things and actions into "good" and "bad". As we've seen, such language is neither helpful nor good for the causes they purport to further, because any free-thinking mind with half an ounce of logic can come up with cases against the both the good and bad sides. But what rankles me most about global warming is how imprecise the language is, and how slovenly the words are tossed around. To whit: carbon footprints.

I don't have carbon feet, nor do I walk on graphite or diamonds--but the most abstract definition of one's carbon footprint refers to how much carbon dioxide one generates throughout the course of one's life, day, year, month...and this is the first of the problems related to the words surrounding global warming. If I have a Hummer that I only drive once a year (I don't, nor would I ever get one), technically my carbon footprint would be smaller than that of a Prius that gets driven every day. But on the one day that I do drive it, yes, it leaves a major footprint behind--but I'm willing to bet that it's less than the impact of an everyday Prius.

This calculator has a nifty little feature that enables you to calculate how big your carbon footprint is, and then it gives you tips to "offset" it. What exactly is meant by that, I don't know--unless you can magically remove all of the carbon dioxide that your actions have emitted, you're not offsetting anything. You can, obviously, engage in activities that use fewer or no fossil fuels, but that's not taking out the carbon dioxide from leaving your TV on all day when nobody's home to watch it. The whole idea that you can offset your carbon footprint is absurd. Certainly, you can and should minimize the amount of emissions your day-to-day activities involve. But there's no magic carbon quota that you can't exceed, so there's no logic in saying "Well, if we take the SUV, we'll have to hang our laundry out for a month to dry instead of using the dryer to offset our carbon footprint." The carbon dioxide from the SUV is still going to be there irrespective of how you do your laundry.

This is not to say that we shouldn't take steps to minimize our reliance on fossil fuels and all of the activities and items that stem from them--electricity, plastics, cars (obviously). But we need to quit deluding ourselves that driving a Prius could possibly be good for the environment. Most of the "offsetting" activities are, ate best, merely not bad, or not as bad, for the environment.

Our own carbon feet are pretty small: we don't own a car--we have bikes. We reuse plastic bags. We recycle. We don't eat organic all of the time, but I'm starting to get my in-season produce from the organic farmers' stall in the farmer's market. Appliances, for the most part, get turned off when they're not used. This blog is written from a laptop, which uses less energy than a full-sized desktop. Most of our furniture was acquired secondhand or built. We do these things partly by choice, but mostly by economics.

Environmentalism: global warming edition

2008-08-11T20:58:00.003+02:00

Global warming is the cause du jour these days, and no serious science magazine or blog can exist without at least some mention of it.

But there's more to the reason for starting this next series than mere vanity or an overinflated sense of import (which I assure you, I do not have any more than the next man). Part of it is the frustration that's grown out of following the environmental news--what the hell is a "carbon footprint", and does buying a Prius really cancel out the impact of buying your clothes from a sweatshop in Bangladesh? Part of it is the headsmashing idiocy of pro-environmentalist movements in failing to grasp the bigger picture--hello, humans have to live on this planet, too! Part of it is sheer curiosity--which is worse, a Hummer or an Aston Martin?

And part of it will be my take on how to solve the problem--well, at the very least, keep it from getting worse. No, it does not involve ethanol from corn--something I've never believed in.

Those topics will all be addressed this week.

Dope

2008-08-09T21:37:00.002+02:00

Anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, erythropoeitin, albuterol, caffeine--all illegal (caffeine is limited to certain levels), barring a doctor's prescription for some of the fancier drugs. In the sports world, a positive test brings disgrace, and possibly ends a career.

The International Olympic Committee has laid out a rather extensive set of anti-doping rules in the hopes of having a clean Game. The Prohibited List is a veritable pharmacy of just about every drug ever conceived--even if there's no reason why it should work as a performance enhancer (alcohol? really?). The reasons for the anti-doping stance are that the athletes would suffer, and that it wouldn't be fair.

Since the Olympics are about the achievements of the human body, then only humans, unenhanced and undoped, should be allowed to participate. But the same arguments for not doping apply throughout the world of sports: it's not fair, and the athletes might kill themselves.

The latter is unquestionably true. People do crazy things for glory--shoot themselves up with anabolic steroids, train themselves to the point of collapse and death, go for 96 hours without sleep so they can run 100 miles, etc. There is also a tendency, unless you know better (and most don't) to think that if a little bit of XXXX works this well, then a lot should work much better. Well, yeah--snort a line too many of cocaine and you die. And there's no reason to think that education will help matters much. When it comes to feeling good, even if there's a bad reason for it, people will want to feel good (actually, the principle of positive reinforcement applies across most species of animal life).

But is it truly not fair? If golfers can have LASIK done to improve their golf games, baseball pitchers can have tendons grafted, swimmers can buy thousand-dollar shark suits, tennis players can have the latest in materials for their rackets, then what isn't fair is that others who can't afford these procedures or equipment should be forbidden to take performance-enhancing drugs so that their performance can match the ones who can.

Yes, I was being a tad facetious. But in all seriousness, what is the difference, philosophically, between taking a performance-enhancing drug and having the latest equipment? As a matter of fact, one could almost suggest, given the extensive list of prohibited drugs, that it would be more fair to allow athletes to use drugs (which they can get anywhere) than it would be for them to use top-of-the-line equipment (which they can't). Both confer unfair advantages when compared to a person who's not using either--or they could confer no advantage. Dependence on either drugs or technology is a dangerous position to be in for any athlete.

The difference, I suppose, is that technology does not guarantee success--you'd still have to a hell of a player to beat Roger Federer, latest racket be damned. But then, neither do steroids, or other drugs--the price exacted for temporary success comes later, though, and most people can't wait that long.

Yummy! Chemicals!

2008-08-08T21:35:00.002+02:00

1) Carnitine: Carnitine (or l-carnitine, if you care to be that specific) is a fatty acid transporter. It basically helps fat move from one side of a mitochondria to the other, where it can be broken down, like a crossing guard helping kids across the street. Because fat yields 9 kcal/g of energy (as opposed to the 4 kcal/g in proteins and carbohydrates) it stands to reason that having plenty of carnitine should allow you to burn lots of fat, and either lose weight faster or, for athletes, get more energy--for the first 30 seconds of sustained physical effort, the muscles go through the glycogen that they've stored. For the next 4-6 minutes, they go through the sugar that's already in the blood. After that, they begin to utilize fat as an energy source as well as the sugar that the liver releases--hence, carnitine.

But does it work? First, let's consider the following: the kind of athlete who would most benefit from carnitine would be an endurance athlete, since they have taxed their muscles to the point where they would need fatty acids. So why, in most of the trials where they've studied carnitine, do they use "resistance-trained" subjects (resistance training referring to weights)?. And if carnitine does, in fact, help with weight training, does the condition of the athlete prior to the study matter? Given the current lack of evidence and a good study to look at, I'd have to venture NO on this one.

2) Carbohydrate loading This was first cooked up in 1957, by Gunthar Alvorg. The premise goes like this: you deplete your glycogen stores completely for about three days, going on long runs and not eating a single carbohydrate. Then, for three days, you replenish your glycogen stores by eating lots and lots of carbohydrates. And on the big day, you run forever, because your body has somehow "soaked up" the glycogen.

It's a very nice theory. And there is some merit to it--after all, endurance athletes go through carbohydrates like a chainsaw through butter. This article gives an extremely detailed account of how carbohydrate loading is supposed to work, but the science shows otherwise. In study after study, they've shown no significant between performance or glycogen storage capacity between those who were carb-loading and those who were not.

So the verdict on carb-loading is, again a NO. However, given that it is, for the most part, harmless and doesn't require spending a fortune on sugar pills, and that many of us feel better for it, go ahead and enjoy that pasta dinner before your marathon.

3) What are the protein requirements of athletes? Protein is what makes a body a body--amino acids are the molecular building blocks for the impressive biceps of gymnasts and the massive thighs of a cyclist. Muscles are constantly being broken down and rebuilt, and it is this sped-up cycle of break-down-build-up that makes the protein requirements of athletes higher than those of us ordinary mortals. Given that ordinary, relatively sedentary people require only 50-70 grams of protein a day, or about 10 ounces of meat a day (meat is mostly water, and only 10-20% protein), it is surprising, really, how little protein athletes really need: 90 g for a male triathlete is plenty. Obviously, if you're growing, or trying to grow muscle, you'll need to eat relatively more protein But again, like carbohydrate loading, this is more a question of personal opinion. I never paid much attention to how much protein I was eating, because I assumed that eating a varied vegetarian diet would suffice. And it did, for the most part. But others have to watch their protein intake carefully.

Breakfast of champions: part 1 of 2

2008-08-07T20:12:00.005+02:00

Huh--this series is turning out longer than I thought...

A normal, balanced diet (whatever the hell that means nowadays) will suffice if you are your average Joe, working out three, four, five times a week and otherwise keeping fit. But every four years, we get inundated with patriotic voyeurism as the lives of the athletes that are competing in the Olympics gets scrutinized as the celebrities they are, even if it is for the fifteen minutes, fifteen seconds, of fame, and we start to wonder--what the hell is in the water?

The science of sports nutrition is as old as the Olympic tradition itself, beginning in ancient Greece. Of course, they didn't have electronic treadmills and sensors to gauge their autonomic responses, nor lab notebooks to record the athletes' responses to various diets, so the "recommendation" of meat and wine must be taken with a grain of salt (perhaps an entire saltshaker). Obviously, these days, our understanding of physiology and nutrition are much better. The athletes are told to go easy on the alcohol and the best athletes have their carbohydrate, protein, and fat intakes carefully calibrated for them.

What makes sports nutrition so difficult to analyze objectively: 1) most theories floating around these days only came about in the last century, which is also when physiology was refined as a science, and materials science developed the stuff that many athletes take for granted--plastics for oars, rubber for running shoes. If there was any improvement by any group of athletes over the years, how are we to tell whether it's from better food, training, or materials? Reason 2) is that anybody who's seriously done any sport for any amount of time has probably worked out his own ideas of what's right and what's wrong for him, and God help the doctor who tries to tell him he's wrong. As irrational as this is, there is a certain amount of sense to sticking with what works, even if it shouldn't. For elite athletes, the win or loss is rarely about ability--at the Olympian level, the abilities of all are pretty comparable--but rather about the head game, what goes on in your head. Psyching oneself up--or out--can be as easy as sticking to your morning oatmeal (and adding raisins for luck).

The biggest problem, though, is that compared to other sciences, nutrition--never mind nutrition and sports--is newbie on the science circuit. Every other day we're told that product X is good for us, or bad for us, depending on which news outlet we follow, which scientist published his results in which journal, whether the journalist has any idea what the hell the paper is about (and many of them don't), whether anybody looks over the statistics, and so on. Science, for the most part, moves in one direction, towards more complexity, but nutrition tends to backpeddle, stagnate, and eventually become even more muddled as we seek to define the roles of genes, diet, and environment.

And undoubtedly, there is a large genetic component to who becomes an elite athlete and who doesn't. Whether diet makes or breaks the deal...?

Tomorrow: a brief glimpse into the (pseudo)science behind

1) L-carnitine
2) Carbohydrate loading
3) Protein requirements

Flying through water

2008-08-06T21:28:00.005+02:00

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Once again, the lack of human subjects in my photograph collection shows itself, as I'm compelled again to substitute another animal (or animals, in this case) in lieu of a swimmer*.

The musculature of any elite athlete is impressive, but perhaps none more so than swimmers, because the range of motion they must achieve and the difficulty of moving through water for non-fish-shaped creatures necessitates acquiring both the strength and/or endurance to push through the water, and the flexibility to ensure that every ounce of your strength is not wasted.

So we begin to see the appeal of resistance stretching. As it's usually described, you resist an applied force as you stretch. Rather than just reaching over and touching your toes, you have to reach for your toes while pulling against an elastic band, for instance. This is what Dara Torres credits for her incredible swim times in the 50 and 100 m, after all, and since she's tested clean, we're led to believe that there must be something to it.

But if you clicked on the link, you'll see a lot of mumbo-jumbo about meridians, personalities, fluff about "empowerment", and not a single shred of how it works--or even a proposistion for how it works, if it is indeed the miracle workout that enabled Torres to do at 41 what she couldn't do at 14. It purports to protect the muscle, but there's not much science to show that it works. In fact, most of the studies that I've seen say it doesn't work--to the practitioner's detriment.

Muscles, as we have seen do indeed undergo lengthening contractions. But the consequences of routinely using lengthening contractions--in muscles where this was not intended as normal function--are less clear. What literature there is on this subject tends mostly towards the opinion that lengthening contractions actually cause damage to the muscle, albeit on the microscopic level. One study purports to demonstrate that stretching a muscle after it's fully contracted results in greater force generated, but that is hardly the same thing.

As of now, the evidence is against resistance stretching being the key to Torres's amazing performance. And so the skeptics look at her doping non-history. Frankly, no, I don't think she's doping, but it wouldn't surprise me if it later came out that she was. But I still think the best explanation for her success is practice. Tons of it. And being gifted with a freak genetic makeup that makes her so damn good at what she does--this blog does an adequate job summarizing a WSJ article that is no longer online--like so many other elite athletes.

There's a saying in the sports world that anybody who wants to make it as a major athlete must choose his parents wisely. As of now, we haven't quite figured out what makes Torres so freakishly good at what she does (maybe it's her telomeres), but that, I think, would be an interesting next step, much more so than the questionable (at the very least!) "benefits" of resistance stretching.

And for what it's worth: if someone could point me to a good study about resistance stretching and how it works, I'd be open to revising my opinion on it.

*Actually, I have some issues with publishing pictures of people online--I know I'd want permission before my photograph went up, and I feel obligated to extend the same courtesy to thers.

Muscle mechanics: part 1 of 2

2008-08-04T20:10:00.003+02:00

I must apologize for the visual pun--I usually try to avoid having a photograph that is tangentially related to the topic, but in this case, I don't exactly have any photographs of hulking bodybuilders or pieces of muscle tissue--I take or have taken all of the photographs myself, and as of this moment my life is lacking in muscle-bound semi-naked men.

So a turkey will have to do: this particular turkey and its chick (what my sister and I like to call "gibblet") happened to land in the backyard of my parents' house last spring. Turkeys have a lot of muscle, most of it in their breast, which is where the prime cut is.

Muscle tissue is basically long strings of protein that slide past one another. The full biochemical story can be found here, and I recommend that you look at the figures (links on the right) in conjunction with the text to get the whole picture.

The human musculoskeletal system is really a very elaborate system of pulleys, where a contraction of one muscle gets transmitted into a movement across a particular joint. Bones, in this case, are more than merely the support structure for the rest of us--they provide the foundation upon which these pulleys are anchored. Nowhere is this more evident than in the hands:

The muscles that control the flexion and extension of our fingers are actually located in our forearms. There are two sets, one to bend the first knuckle, and one to bend the second. Another two sets are on the backside of the hand, to provide extension of the fingers. The tendons must be threaded through a very narrow gap in the wrist (and we wonder why carpal tunnel is such a problem) before they can attach to the their assigned bone, but when you are typing, it is the muscles in your forearm that are doing the work (even if it feels like the muscles in your wrist--which there aren't any).

The hands also serve to illustrate the principle of opposing pairs. Just like Newton's Third Law, muscles work in opposing pairs. The usual example is that of the biceps vs triceps, where one relaxes while the other contracts. While it's a useful illustration of the concept, it's not the whole story, as muscles can also "contract" even while they lengthen. The best example of this is to bend over and pick something up--if the muscles in your back were to go loose as you started to bend, you'd have a very hard time reaching the floor without injury.

Next: Dara Torres...

The Olympic Games

2008-08-03T09:08:00.002+02:00

In light of the upcoming Olympics, I've decided to postpone the planned environmental series in favor of a comparatively short series on the science of sports medicine in general, and possibly toss in a few training tidbits from my own experience in the triathlon sports (not that I'm actually a triathlete, by any stretch of the imagination, but I bike, and I used to run and swim. I'm trying to squeeze running back into my crazy life and looking for a pool).

Sports, more than most fields (even medicine), occupies that gray zone between hard reality and delusional ideology. Athletes do ridiculous things to themselves because they believe a certain regimen or supplement or protein powder works, but these are people in peak condition anyway--does it work, or doesn't it?

And of course, no discussion on sports medicine would be complete without the obligatory post on doping. Again, the lines are fuzzier than you might think.

So this week, gentle readers, you can look forward to pieces on:

1) Muscle mechanics
2) Food and sports
3) Doping

Once again, if there are any topics you'd like to see addressed, by all means let me know.

The Problem of Purpose (part 2)

2008-07-30T22:26:00.003+02:00

If there is no purpose for us to fulfill--if we are indeed here because the survivors of hecatomb after hecatomb (I love Steven Jay Gould) then we must question what all these genetic studies tell us. You know what I mean: the genetic studies telling us that we're "designed" to store fat, destined to get cancer, preordained to suffer mental illness, headed straight for addiction--that the few genetic diseases that we understand (sickle cell, cystic fibrosis) arose as adaptations to a new world order.

I don't mean to question the studies themselves. The studies are, more or less, quite sound: the melanocortin system's role in obesity is currently being teased out; single nucleotide polymorphisms of the MC receptor are believed to be responsible for the abnormal reward signals that lead to overeating. Nobody doubts the role of p53 in cancer--or any of the myriad pro-apoptotic genes. Epigenetics apparently has a bigger role in mental illness than genetics, strictly speaking, but there is definitely a genetic component to mental illness. The science is sound--genes, when they go wrong, definitely cause diseases.

But do they necessarily define who we are?

If you follow the "no purpose" argument to the logical conclusion, then the answer is yes: genes select themselves for the sole purpose of being passed down. They don't really care whether or not we survive the passing thereof. That's why otherwise nice men become assholes the moment a busty bleached blond bimbo walks into the room, why women feel obligated to make peace between warring factions, etc.

Or so the argument goes: genetics provides limitations within which an individual can succeed. Certain environments, certain societies, place certain emphases on which genes are prized, and these get propagated. So free will is really a myth.

Or is it?

You'll notice that, throughout this entire series, I've done my darndest not to justify leaning towards one side or the other (and I stated my bias in the beginning, so if I didn't succeed it wasn't for a lack of effort). The reason for this is twofold. First, if you're reading this, odds are you already have a good idea of where you stand on the whole evolution/creationism debacle and anything I write trying to persuade you that creationism isn't a science is just a waste of my time. Secondly, the goal of this series was never outright damnation of either side--to do that would run counter to my personal belief in God--but to ask why this debate is happening at all. Have I missed something? Undoubtedly I have. So please, comment, and let me know what your thoughts are on this whole thing.

The Problem of Purpose (part 1)

2008-07-29T22:22:00.002+02:00

As humans, we like to think that everything has a purpose. And certainly, nature doesn't contradict that view: peacocks' tails exist to attract peahens, cats have claws so that they can kill mice, birds sing to mark their territories and attract mates, humans have a big brain which enabled the species to develop advanced technologies, cockroaches--okay, maybe those don't have a purpose. The point is that animals exist in certain shapes and forms for reasons, presumably to better fulfill their "destiny", to live out their "purpose".

Except this assumes that some force (the Guiding Hand of God, perhaps?) was directing a small furry mammal to become say, a lemur, and then the lemur to become an ape, and the ape to become a human. It assumes that there was a reason for the animal to evolve along the lines it did.

Scientists make this mistake a lot, actually. Genetic studies purporting to demonstrate why we are genetically predisposed to becoming obese, the link between abnormal proteins here and Alzheimer's/schizophrenia/drug addiction there, and sickle cell anemia and resistance to malaria, must be very careful not to ascribe the selection pressures for a particular gene as the purpose for the gene's existence. Genes exist, solely because the vehicle they are temporally transferred in (living creatures) managed to live long enough to pass it on. No lemur decided, "Hey, this tree-climbing thing is sure getting hard out here on the savanna. I think I'll evolve bipedalism!"

The fact is, there really is no reason for anything to exist, other than the fact that it's not dead already. And this, I think, is one of the biggest problems creationists have with evolution.

It is a stark picture: you exist only because your parents didn't die before they had you. There is no purpose to your life, no "reason" why you were born in the body that you have and with the brain that was given to you. No wonder creationists have such a problem with evolution: it runs counter to everything religious and/or spiritual belief we might have concerning our existence on this planet.

Natural selection is the reason why we evolved the way we did--God, if He's indeed out there, didn't coax anything along except death, destruction, and mayhem. One could hypothetically argue that He, in His divine might, decided that thus would be the vehicle by which He created all life, but that doesn't really change the essence of the argument: natural selection is a harsh and fickle mistress.

Friends?

2008-07-26T13:00:00.004+02:00

Is it possible to believe in both evolution and God? Of course. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that one is a science.

There is nothing wrong with teaching creationism as literature, philosophy, or as an adjunct to history. These things are important to understand why we know what we know--the history of science oftentimes reads like a soap opera replete with test tubes, gun powder, dumb luck, unlikely coincidences, and few happy endings. The history of knowledge can be as instructive, if not more instructive, as the actual knowledge. For instance, the idea that the earth was round was first posited by the ancient Greeks, but the proof of that was only ascertained nearly two millenia later, with Magellan's trip around the world, when, against all odds, they failed to fall off of the edge. The question: why did civilization have to wait for Magellan to sail around the world? Why not earlier seafarers, like Vikings or the Polynesians? What sort of economics, political structures, technology, and belief systemsmade circumnavigating the planet possible to Magellan and not to, say, Arab traders?

Creationism has its place in education, but not in science classes. The objective of teaching science is to teach kids that "this is what we know the world is", "this" being how plants photosynthesize, how proteins are synthesized, what crystal structures are, where the Horsehead Nebula resides (in Orion, visible only during the winter in the Northern Hemisphere). The objective of teaching science is not to teach that "everything in the world is commanded by something we can't see, our instruments can't detect, our best searches can't find, but we know it's out there anyway". As I said yesterday, if you teach the first well enough, the second will fall into place.

So let's quit worrying about our kids turning into blasphemous atheists. Let's point out, instead, how feathers help birds fly, the plethora of properties the humble water molecule possesses, how geese know where north is. Because if you really want to cultivate an appreciation for life, you kinda have to understand what life is to begin with.

Faith and Science

2008-07-23T21:16:00.003+02:00

The entire contents of this page say essentially one thing: science is anything but logical, and anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool.

The scientific method, perfected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by enlightened thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, etc., were really in search of God, or at least looking to get as close to the mind of God as possible. And in the four-hundred years since then, that hasn't really changed. Albert Einstein's more famous quotes reflect this Holy-Grail-like quest to understand what God is all about.

I would argue that faith is science, in that both hinge on the belief--because, let's face it, if there were such things as proof science wouldn't need to exist for us to know things--that there is something out there that will explain what we see here. Where they differ is merely in the tenants of belief: science has textbooks, faith has religious tomes. People have died for both, and just because we're in the 21st century doesn't make us any more immune to the prejudices of ignorance.

Not asking questions simply means that you're not thinking. That's true in religion and it's true in science and it's true in politics (which is partly why I'm leery of Obama--nobody's questioning him) and it's true in life. Evolution has holes in it, which creationists are all too happy to point out, but as far as I can tell, creationism also has holes in it. The big one being, "Why does there have to be a watchmaker?"

And there really is no good reason why there must be a higher power, only a purely internal belief that there is one, and that whatever it is, be it God or Allah or ancestral spirits or little gods of rocks and trees, has some stake in keeping you alive. That's the thing: we can't know anything at all for sure. If gravitational theory could be overturned (or at least, heavily modified), there's nothing to keep evolutionary theory from following the same fate.

But that doesn't mean evolution isn't real. It happens. We live with the consequences of it every day: our pets, our livestock, the MRSA strains of bacteria. We've reshaped the breeding habits of salmon and body lice. Environmental doomsday-ists like to say that so many species are going extinct every year, but I've yet to hear of a single study that purports to find out if there have been any new species arising lately. Part of the problem is that we have no baseline number for the number of species on the planet--a bigger problem, as Richard Dawkins explains, is that we have no real definition for "species", either.

Which, if you ask me, makes the whole creation-evolution debate moot. Whether you believe in God or not has no bearing on the fact that Nature is red in tooth and claw, even if the Sierra Club would rather have you believe it is pretty and fuzzy. Natural selection doesn't give a hoot about your belief in a higher power. Just ask the Darwin contenders.

I would like to end on this note: ironically, the more you study a science, the easier faith becomes. When you don't know much, it's easy to say that everything you don't understand is an act of God and leave it at that. But the more you know, the easier it becomes to believe that there is a God and He is indeed acting on the forces, because the perfection of life is so incredibly miraculous. However, as with all things, such faith must be earned. The difference between learning that God created the world, versus understanding why you believe God created the world, is that if you understand why you believe that, there is no danger that you'll change your mind.

On the road to nowhere

2008-07-21T20:40:00.004+02:00

The question put forth on Sunday was "Why the 'need' for creationism?" but that really leaves out the bigger question, which is why people don't see the discrepancies between their attitudes towards creationism versus their attitudes towards every other science in which fiction seems more normal than facts.

There are hundreds of things we don't understand about our bodies, the world, the universe. We don't fully understand the delay between taking antidepressants and getting better. We haven't found proof of dark matter, but we're willing to spend millions building underground laboratories on a lark to see if it's there. And some people go their entire adult lives never understanding the basics of budgeting. Yet there's not much protest against antidepressants (protests tend to focus more on the correct administration rather than the concepts of depression), underground laboratories--if it doesn't involve anything cute and furry, it's not worthy of protesting--or rewriting the basic tenants of economic theory.

And yet, "There are gaps in the fossil record so that doesn't prove evolution happened at all!"

I don't want to call non-evolutionists intellectually lazy, but at the same time, their arguments for creationism speak of minds which are tired of answering the neverending "why". Can't fathom a few molecules coming together to make a protein? It wasn't so long ago that doctors couldn't fathom the idea of germs, either.

Or perhaps it's not so much laziness as it is an appreciation for the number of coincidences that had to have happened for us humans to be here today. After all, the meteor could have missed, the dinosaurs could still be around, and maybe we'd be eating ornithopter rather than chicken for dinner. There are a hell of a lot of things that had to go right for us to be here now, with all this technology, and that's not counting all of the decisions that could just as easily have gone the other way--decisions that led to wars, recessions, inventions, and discoveries. The miraculous in everyday living, indeed.

But I digress: what "need" does teaching creationism as a science fill? I've racked my brains for two days trying to come up with an explanation as to why people insist that adding a conclusion you'd come up with anyway if you studied any science and evolution long enough--that we don't know everything, that the universe is full of weird stuff we can't explain, that the possibility of a higher power starts looking better and better with every weird oddity you discover--would somehow make a difference in what natural selection means: lots of creatures dying unpleasant deaths, all fighting tooth and claw to pass their genes on to the next generation.

I think the main reason why evolutionary theory has been singled out for scapegoating is because it's not complicated enough. You don't see evangelicals of any religion standing outside CERN protesting their findings, but God help you (literally) if you so much as mention "evolution" in the wrong classroom. The problem with evolution is that it's so simple--and yet here we are, incredibly complex beings, able to divine gods and generals from thin air. Surely there must be something more to it. "Well, there's something called sex--"

"WE CAN'T POSSIBLY TEACH ABOUT THE ROLE OF SEX!!"

Other fields, such as quantum mechanics, physics, and chemistry, remain relatively abstract in our everyday lives. When we encounter them, it's usually as a fun exercise--playing snooker--or as a convenience--using a spray cleaner. We see their development through mad-scientist caricatures and take it for granted that mixing dangerous chemicals is something normal people aren't "supposed" to think about--chemistry and molecular biology are complicated, too complicated to properly understand.

But we all understand sex. Whether it's an immoral act, a source of shame, or pride--we are all reminded of this basic biological need at some point. Grunting like some fell beast in the middle of...is hardly becoming of an enlightened man--after all, we wear clothes and expound upon philosophy and existence. How could we possibly have gotten to where we are today by such a simple, and gross, thing?

Is life too complicated to explain by mere coincidence and sex? We'd like to think, our lives are. For an animal such as moose, sex is something that happens by mere coincidence of being within the known territory of a member of the opposite sex--these things are life. We, on the other hand, like a bit more control, beyond sex and coincidence, but if those are enough, why go further? Elaborate the complexity of life more than it is, and you're going on a road to nowhere, in terms of understanding life.

Slugfest

2008-07-20T18:54:00.003+02:00

Every year it seems as if one state in the United States is hell-bent on getting intelligent design into the classrooms. And every year scientists shake their heads and bemoan the state of science education in the country, and wonder how the hell the US is going to maintain its standing as the place for scientific research.

The debate itself is nothing new--how something arises out of nothing is, admittedly, one of those things that science does a piss-poor job of explaining. The fact that it happened, though, is hardly evidence of divine intervention.

So why do people insist that intelligent design be taught alongside evolution?

Let's take a step back, first, and wonder why it is evolution has been singled out as the one aspect of science that people don't seem to want to believe when the evidence for it is right in front of them, and not, say, the Big Bang theory. Although there are some kerfluffles over the true origins of the Universe, it's not as if science teachers get reamed over teaching the Big Bang--at least, not yet. Or quantum theory, for that matter--being in two places at once? Apparently, it's not a problem for people to stomach, although they'll fight tooth and claw against being taught that small changes over time leads to big changes.

Let's also consider the seemingly contradictory belief amongst scientists that coincidences are just coincidences, even if you get a lot of them: There's a belief that bench scientists like myself like to call "the rule of threes". If you get an odd result once, you examine your protocol and make sure you didn't screw it up. If you get an odd result twice, you go over your methods with your supervisor, check and double check your reagents, make sure the equipment settings are right, make sure your tubes are labeled correctly, and so on. If you get the same odd result three times, you're onto something--possibly something big. (There are other rules of three--washing a beaker three times means it's clean, for instance, experiments performed in triplicate for some reason have more validity than experiments in duplicate. We scientists are not as rational as many people would have you believe)

The questions to be addressed this week include the meaning of divine intervention in intelligent design theory. Why does it hold so much significance to so many people, that we should not be the result of blobs of goo meeting other blobs of goo? That's the topic on the table this week--not so much the what, but the whys of the evolution versus creationism drama (and let's not sugarcoat it with the whole "intelligent design" title, please--it's creationism).

1) Why the "need" for creationism?
2) What is the role of faith in science?
3) Can, and should, evolution and creationism be reconciled?
4) and 5) Genetics, creationism and evolution--something's hitting a fan, and it's not going to be pretty.

For the record, I'm one of those "immoral heathens" who believes in evolution. But that, ironically, doesn't mean I don't believe in a divine entity who guides our lives. Blasphemy, you say? To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." If I'm not the first to believe it, it must be true--and ain't that the truth?

The Interest List

2008-07-20T08:36:00.003+02:00

A rundown of a few websites that I find interesting:

Spirituality - Just because this is a science blog doesn't mean I neglect that other half

Green living - literally

Girly stuff - not strictly for girls, but I've yet to see a heterosexual man daring to try any of this

Check out my recently-added Blog Roll (under Roll Call, because everybody else has a "blog roll" that'd just be borning). Most of my pet interests are under there--writing, science/medicine, personal finance (though I will not be blogging about that).

Phood Filosophy

2008-07-11T19:30:00.004+02:00

This clip from CBS purports to detail the devastating effects of rising food prices on the poor. What came across (to me) was not so much the struggle to make ends meet, but more the sense of panic that somehow the food would "run out". In a way, this does make sense--when you're poor, food and money are more or less interchangeable, and the urge to hoard is especially strong if you have enough of neither.

And so the dutiful cameraman records images of people stocking up with entire pallets of canned beverages (presumably soda), boxes of frozen fish sticks or chicken nuggets, bulk quantities of prepared pancake mix and jars of applesauce and small closets' worth of Froot Loops.

But the point of all this is not to lambast the food choices of the poor. At the far more upscale Albert Heijn (a Dutch supermarket), I see people with far more money buying more or less the same sorts of things: soda and/or beer, frozen meat in stick form, pancake mix, jars of applesauce, loaves upon loaves of squishy bread (cereal isn't nearly as popular here).

People eat what they eat because it's available, and it's what they know. How we eat is far more a matter of comfort--emotional as well as financial--and availability, and far less a matter of taste and nutrition. It was the case before agriculture arose, and it's the case today. You can see it for yourself--if you go to a supermarket and watch how people shop, most of the time, most of their money will be spent on things that they consider "basics" in accordance with the culture they grew up in. Humans are largely conservative when it comes to their food repertoire.

And if you think about it, it makes sense--the old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. In the days of hunting and gathering, someone who found an edible plant probably ate it while it lasted, knowing that trying other plants nearby might result in nasty poisoning or general unpalatability. The requirements for food were (and still are) abysmally low: enough calories to make getting it a worthwhile effort, and isn't poisonous or rotten. Nevertheless these criteria limit our choice of plants, and the cost-benefit analysis (in the crudest sense of the word) of hunting means that going after deer will probably be more beneficial than wasting your energy hunting mice. Our sense of taste has evolved to facilitate the selection of edibles. Of the five flavors (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), sweet taste signifies sugars, the preferred energy source of cells; sour indicates fermented, and therefore rotten, foods; salty tells us that the food contains the sodium that is so vital to fluid balance; bitter is the taste of many plant alkaloids; umami is the taste of protein, another vital component of our diet.

Most of the cuisines around the world tend to fall in the middle of the spectra of tastes, falling safely within a reasonably balanced combination of the flavors. There is a base flavor, if you will (rice) that gets augmented (lemongrass, lime), but generally speaking, no cuisine is exclusively sweet, salty, spicy, or bitter. I would posit that this has to do with "taste fatigue", whereby eating a lot of one particular flavor results in a kind of boredom with that flavor, and you stop eating it--variety is good. A more scientific analysis has to do with the lateral diffusion of crops (as opposed to longitudinal) means that the same types of food could be smeared across the Eurasian continent that Jared Diamond puts forth. Local variations of a theme (wheat, millet, barely, rice) might arise, but the idea that you could grow up grasses and eat their seeds was everywhere.

This tells us three things: humans are inherently conservative in their food choices. The second conclusion we can draw from this is that health has far more to do with lifestyle than it does with what you eat.

It might sound like I'm restating the obvious, but considering the legacy that Kellogg and Graham left, and considering how many books promise you that if you just follow such-and-such a diet plan you'll get a whole new life, perhaps it's not so obvious after all. The diet of a Mongolian yak herder is simply not healthy to someone working in a cubicle, and the diet of the average cubicle dweller is probably woefully inadequate to lumberjacks working the Siberian winter. You are what you eat, in the sense that the foods you like are a reflection of the culture you grew up in, but you are more what you do. You can see the truth of it especially in cultures that are transitioning from no-car to cars: in China, obesity rates, while still ridiculously low compared to the United States, have skyrocketed if you consider that as early as 15 years ago, nobody in China was fat. I've also observed it in Holland, too--traditional Dutch fare was the food of farmers, designed to fill you up with as many calories as was possible to cram into a bowl, but if you keep eating that when you're living in a city and the hardest thing you have to do is stop by the supermarket on your way home, well, the end shouldn't be so surprising.

The third conclusion we can draw from all this is that from Japan to Spain, the one universal thing about good food is that it's fresh. Whether you're eating Hollandse Nieuwe haring or edamame, fresh food is good food. I don't know what it is about, say, a homemade gelato made with fresh strawberries, that makes it tons better than the pink "stuff" sold in the supermarkets--a more intense, realistic taste, certainly, but there's also something richer and more satisfying about fresh food in general that's hard to place. Je ne se quois, indeed.

I'm tempted to say that there's a moral to all of this, but really there isn't. There can't be: food is such a basic need that any attempt to moralize on the topic would just sound idiotic, biased, most likely both. Still, I would encourage you to try new foods whenever you can. Try cooking old food in new ways. Expanding the horizons of your knowledge is, as I've always maintained, never a bad thing.

Processing power

2008-07-10T21:38:00.005+02:00

The nice thing about writing on eating habits is that the English language is relatively unimaginative towards food: a raw diet is one in which you eat nothing but raw or only partially-cooked foods (heating food above 120 F is not allowed, under the theory that higher temperatures "destroy" enzymes within the food that allow you to better digest and use it. Macrobiotics is much the same, in that the belief is that processing a food in any way beyond cooking (what you would normally do at home) also tampers with the "essential" vitamins and somehow destroys the nutritive value of the food.

There are, as per usual, truths and untruths to this belief. On the one hand, it is known that some vitamins, vitamin C and folate amongst them, are inactivated by heat, and that many proteins are denatured when exposed to high temperatures.

Let's address the protein issue a bit further: proteins are essentially like a ball of tangled yarn. The analogy of dumbbells, joined end-to-end, which I used earlier to describe them, is still true, but rather than one long thread, they snake back and forth, in and out--like a ball of yarn. If you apply heat to them, they may unwind, and look like a long thin thread, but--and this is critical--the order with which they are arranged remains the same (if you have access to a protein lab, you can try this with serum, 8 M urea, and a circular dichroism spectrometer). But it is how the protein is coiled that gives it the specific properties, and furthermore, whether it remains coiled depends on things other than merely heat--the acidity of the environment, for instance, or the presence of salts and sugars. If you consider how food is eaten--seasoned, flavored to taste, chewed, swallowed--even the most raw diet is going to end up denaturing something.

The issue with "killing" the vitamins, is a more valid reason to eat raw food (though, as we shall see, it does not mean that you should switch your oven for a dehydrator). Vitamins, especially the more complex ones, are sensitive to heat, and many of the fatty acids that are touted today as being good for you are also highly susceptible to oxygenation, which turns them rancid.

What is oft forgotten about a raw diet, in the midst of the frenzy about feeling good and being healthy, is that the only reason such things are possible is because our food supply is reasonably safe--and that presupposes that random spinach and tomato contaminations are indeed random and not a sign that our food safety program requires a massive overhaul. There is some speculation as to whether cooking "evolved"--a hominid stumbling across a charred carcass and finding out that burned flesh is actually not that bad--or was invented, but either way, the point remains that humans have been cooking their food for at least 10,000 years, when the first civilizations arose. You don't stick with a fad that's not useful, and killing dangerous germs on your food is infinitely useful.

However, there is one thing that these diets get right: processed food isn't good for you. Making my own lentil soup allows me to tweak the flavors so that I get to taste what I like. Opening a can of lentil soup, on the other hand, means that I have bought into what a chef ten-thousand miles away, has decided I should like, and has added salt, sugar, and flavorings, accordingly. Processed foods are often stripped of their fiber, flavored with "things", preserved with "other things", and even colored and gussied up to look, if you think about it, nothing like food. I'm not really opposed to chemicals in our food--some of them are inevitable, after all--but it's probably better for you to eat less of them. It's the addition of fats, sugars, and salt, and the removal of fiber and vitamins that makes processed food unhealthy.

Or maybe we just need healthier palettes. A raw diet, like any other diet, is what you make of it. If you do your research, and follow good food safety rules, then odds are you won't make the New England Journal of Medicine under "Bizarre cases". I once considered going on a raw diet, and went so far as to purchase a cookbook (using my Borders Cash Back rewards). It was after a failed attempt at making nut milk that I decided that maybe raw is a bit more difficult than it seemed.

It's Not Just Tofu Anymore

2008-07-09T22:32:00.003+02:00

Vegetarianism actually shouldn't be a "fad". Or, if it is, then it's one of history's oldest and most universal, appearing in cultures as diverse as the ancient Greeks (Pythagoras) and intertwining itself into the very social fabric of India. As a practice, it is fairly uninvolved--eat things that don't require shedding blood. Of course, you could debate whether plants "bleed", but the reasons for going vegetarian don't always have to do with animal rights. Actually, many people do so for their health--I am a vegetarian simply because I have never liked the taste of meat. Still others do so out of concern for the environment, and the latest "thing" is to go vegetarian because $4/gallon gas is making meat too pricey to buy.

Veganism is a more recent development. People who are vegans don't eat animal products--not milk, cheese, eggs, butter, and some of the strictest won't use honey. This makes life tricky, to say the least, as recipes have to be tweaked and ingredients substituted, but today it's not too difficult, given the enormous numbers of food substitutes that are available.

Many of the websites on vegetarianism and/or veganism tout the health benefits of eating a diet that has less saturated fat. A vegetarian diet, however, is not necessarily a healthy one, and I will use my own diet the last week as an example of how to be terribly unhealthy while following a vegetarian diet: eating too many candy bars and cookies, drinking too many diet colas, skipping meals, only to buy a cone of French fries on my way home. To be fair, it was because I hadn't had the time to prepare meals in advance (ordinarily I make bean soups, vegetarian chili, and all manners of healthy good stuff to bring with me to work) that week, but it illustrates the point quite admirably: just because you're a vegetarian doesn't mean you're healthy.

Barring such extreme cases, it is true that eating more fruits and vegetables is good for you. But what about the claims, for instance, about protection against cancer and heart disease? There are too many factors to make such claims. The Japanese, for instance, are well-known for their healthy cuisine, but they also eat less, live in cities and not suburbs (thereby making walking a more effecient form of transportation than driving) and have a culture which makes it easy, in many ways, to know where you belong, thereby easing a great deal of stress. Food alone does not cause or cure cancer, though it can determine how your body responds to it. Getting the right nutrition can literally be a matter of life and death.

Today, nutritional deficiencies tend to be rare, thankfully. And for that, we can thank the manufacturers of vitamins and multivitamins, and the government, for mandating that bread be stuffed with extra folate. The food industry, always angling for that butter zone between health and zing, stuffs orange juice with calcium, and yogurts with vitamins A and D.

Which begs the question: is it better to eat some animal products and get your nutrition naturally, or no animal products and depend on vitamin-overloaded soy products and the like? We're not going to go into matters of taste--maybe, if I start a cooking blog.

And on this, the jury is still out. I've informally polled some vegetarian friends--their answers are mostly that "it's just what suits me". A few are lactose-intolerant, some thing eggs are meat and therefore don't eat them. Though there have been some studies suggesting that soy products interfere with hormonal balance, one must wonder if the farming methods employed by modern farmers have anything to do with it, as soy milk has been enjoyed in the Far East for almost 2000 years, and breast cancer rates are still far lower there than they are here.

It's something to think about, that's for sure--but paying attention to one's own health isn't exactly a bad thing. If anything, we've been doing far too little of it.

Laying down the lines

2008-07-07T20:51:00.004+02:00

This is not, by any means, a complete summary of what we know about food and nutrition, nor is it meant to be. For the most part, I am merely defining what I mean when I refer to, say, carbohydrates, because going by what I've seen floating around on the Internet, there are some confused souls, to be sure.

With that in mind:

There are five basic food groups--carbohydrates, proteins, lipids (fats), vitamins, and minerals. (I did consider adding alcohol, but decided against it for expediency)

Not what you were expecting, were you?

The food pyramid that the USDA devised is still valid, for the most part, as a guide for what to eat to stay healthy. But from a nutritional point of view--the view your cells have of that apple you've eaten--all foods are made of these five things, but in different proportions.

I say "for the most part" because, in my opinion (and the opinion of just about everybody else in the world who doesn't drink 3 glasses of milk a day or eat meat) the milk and protein recommendations are still grossly exaggerated. But we'll see what the science has to say about that later.

Carbohydrates are, in a nutshell, sugars. At the molecular level, sugars look like rings--some have five links, some have six. And the most amazing thing is, depending on where they join together--which link of one sugar is joined to a link of another--they can take on different properties. Some are readily assimilated into the body. Others are wholly undigestible (fiber). Some soak up water--the starch that thickens sauces relies on this property.

Proteins are comprised of amino acids, linked together like a set of magnetic dumbbells. It is not the actual linkage that is important, though--it's what's attached to the handle of the dumbbell that makes a protein what it is (the side chain). The side chains play an important role in how the protein gets metabolized.

Lipids are the fats and cholesterol--the greasy bits. They are, essentially, long strings of carbon molecules. Carbon-carbon bonds are some of the strongest in nature, meaning that there is a great deal of energy stored in them. This makes lipids a valuable source of energy.

The most amazing thing about carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins is that the body can convert one to the other. A few steps, a few atoms added here or there, and voila--you have fat from sugar, sugar from protein, protein from sugar. These three groups comprise the main sources of energy for the body.

Vitamins are organic molecules that aid in the function of our body. Unlike the three listed above, they are not a major source of energy--rather, they are like the starter block of the wood fire--they get the fire started, but contribute little to the actual burn. But once the fire is out, and you need a new one, if you don't have enough starter, you might not be able to get it lit.

Minerals are inorganic substances (substances that come from the earth, and are not manufactured by living things). They have a diverse role in the body, too complex to cover here, but suffice it to say that it is amazing that trace amounts of a salt or metal can make the difference between sickness and health. Most minerals are only needed in trace amounts in the average diet of an average person in good health.

If you'd like to learn more about nutrition, you can start here. As I said above, the point of this is not to explain how these are integrated into a seamless picture of metabolism. The point of this is to lay out what I mean when I later say "vitamin" or the like.

Diets: of worms, fruits, and figs

2008-07-06T08:37:00.002+02:00

The topic of the week has to do with diets. Not the kind where you lose weight--although, with some of the ones I'll be discussing, it's kind of hard not to--but rather the stuff you eat every day as part of a normal routine.

For the most part, we grew up being taught to eat a "balanced" diet, to include plenty of stuff from the "four" basic food groups and go easy on the candy and fries. The most extreme idea we might have entertained was going vegetarian, and then it was because we didn't like the thought of eating the piglets we oohed and aahed at in picture books. Then we started hearing about how Gwyneth Paltrow or some other celebrity is eating a "macrobiotic" diet, the benefits of veganism, the Bible diet, and all manners of advice on what we should eat and how we should eat it that will bring us health, propserity, happiness, and possibly that new svelte figure.

Why do we keep falling for this? It's not new--Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg made their names doing exactly this over one-hundred years ago. The phenomena of fad diets is particularly marked in America, but I don't think anybody in the world is entirely immune to the idea that you can make yourself better by changing what you eat: the food we eat becomes a part of us, so if we want to become better people we need to eat better food. In part, this is true, but as with all things that occupy the fringe between science and lunacy, the story is a lot more complicated.

But this isn't about the psychology of diets--this week I'll be talking about the diets themselves, what the science knows and doesn't know, and how our (mis)understanding of food and nutrition can literally reshape ourselves.

1) Crash course in food and nutrition
2) Vegetarianism/veganism
3) Raw diets/macrobioitics
4) What regional cuisines have to offer in terms of knowledge of food and health
5) Diets in history, why we eat what we do

Surprise

2008-07-04T20:38:00.005+02:00

After this week's vitriol and/or blasphemy (if you're truly devoted to the Green movement) it may come as a surprise to learn that I am actually entirely for conservation efforts, protecting ecosystems, reducing pollution, and just generally all of the principles behind it.

What I am trying to get at is that true environmental change will not come from swapping your bleach for a "plant-based ethanol" cleanser (just buy a bottle of bottom-shelf vodka--it's probably cheaper and does a better job). It means, above all, using less. You can't toss out what you don't buy, you can't waste what electricity you're not using, and you can't pollute with what you don't have to throw away. The rest, eating less meat, eating less "crap" (anything that comes out of a package) in general, being more aware of what you throw away, reusing what you can, and recycling, are all just icing on the cake.

It also means getting real about the changes you make in your life. We've swapped out most of the cleansers in favor of a homemade concoction. We make our own laundry detergent, and line-dry all of our clothes (well, that's actually because we can't afford a dryer...). The random-crap closet (I'm a rather artistic sort, so I need to keep my stuff somewhere) is organized using old house-paint buckets, scraped clean. Most of the furniture in our apartment was built, or inherited as gifts/cast-offs from relatives. We ride secondhand bikes. And the biggest meat-eaters around are our two cats.

Now, I don't expect everybody to do the same--though if everybody did the carbon emission problem would probably vanish overnight (relatively speaking, a few years in earth-time). But I think it's safe to say that what we do has a greater impact on the planet than the trendy yuppie who buys organic strawberries in the dead of winter and puts them in the trunk of his hybrid SUV. The environmental impact of that guy is more of a mixed bag, because he's got so many factors going both for and against him. Yes, his SUV is a "hybrid" (in that the battery is used to give more power to the engine), so it gets slightly better mileage. And let's not kid ourselves on how much gas it takes to move those organic strawberries from Argentina, either.

The point is, it all comes down to a matter of less--less stuff, fewer complications. Fewer complications, and the easier it will be to move us to a more planet-friendly place. Less really is more, in this case.

Unintended consequesces

2008-07-03T20:51:00.006+02:00

This post is about cats.

The first cat is the one in the photograph, hours after I picked her up off the streets of Philadelphia. She is one heck of an unintended consequence of my living there.

The other cat story is "Operation Cat Drop", or WHO screws up big time. In a nutshell, in the 1950s, DDT, seen as the panacea against malaria, was applied everywhere there was a mosquito. The end result was that the WHO had to airlift cats to jungle villages in Borneo.

In retrospect, perhaps the connections should have been obvious. But because life as a whole is so interconected, it is hard to figure out which connections make the difference between plans working out, and plans failing miserably. I don't think, short of developing a time traveler, it will ever be possible to foresee every consequence of the things we do to the environment.

However, what we can do is drop the thinking, as much as we like it, that one single cause is the source of our misery, and one single thing can fix it. Ultimately, we can't know everything, and there will be cases where doing nothing is far worse than doing something, as uninformed as the action may be. But for the majority of non-emergent cases, accruing the knowledge of as many connections as possible will help us make better decisions about how to go about doing what must be done.

The other thing we can do is stop trying to "fix" things. Plans for adding changes to an environment usually go more wrong than letting the environment come back to balance by itself. For example, the forest fires in the western part of the US cause as much damage as they do, because more people live there, and because the US Forestry service once made it a point to put out every single fire, despite that the trees in the West evolved in such a way that they required fire to manage their growth. With their growth running rampant, a lightning strike would be like tossing a match on a pile of tinder.

The environment cannot be "fixed" like a car. If you fix your carbeurator, you don't accidentally ding your boss's car, and dinging your boss's car doesn't give your secretary a flat. Unfortunately, this is much the way biology works--or seems to, until we realize that there are connections between the cars that we just haven't seen yet.

The best we can hope for is to minimize our influence--stop polluting inasmuch as it's possible, quit meddling in the affairs of the forests, cease changing the course of rivers, desist with taking the life on this planet for granted. Conservation is essentially a conservative effort, in that the best thing we can do is as much nothing as possible--we don't cut down forests, we don't pollute. Of course, this isn't possible, as people have to eat, food must be shipped, money must be made, life must be lived. But minimizing our impact on the environment is something we can all make an effort at--and should. After all, who can resist doing nothing?

Delusions of Goodness

2008-07-02T21:39:00.003+02:00

One of my favorite scenes is what I call the "Chemical Corridor" down the New Jersey Turnpike. It's captivating in its utter unnaturalness. It jars with every sensibility of mine in terms of aesthetics, stands against everything I believe in (to be addressed on Friday) in terms of natural products and nature, and is just inherently alien. I'd love to photograph it; alas, I've never been in a car standing still long enough to do so.

The Chemical Corridor is where many of the so-called "natural flavorings" are developed. It houses some of the largest companies which manipulate molecules to give you an experience of food which lies in conjunction with your expectations--fries are crispy, cookies are crunchy, chocolate is chocolate-y, and strawberry-flavored anything tastes like strawberries (source: Fast Food Nation). It is the heart of everything synthetic and unnatural.

Which begs the question of what exactly constitutes "natural"? On a molecular level, the vanillin in a vanilla bean and the vanillin extracted from waste wood are EXACTLY the same. The reason why genuine vanilla extract sells at a premium over the vanillin extract? Because it comes from vanilla beans. The example that Schlosser gives in his book concerns almond flavoring--extracted from the pits of peaches and apricots, it has trace amounts of cyanide. Mixing clove oil and amyl acetate, on the other hand, has no cyanide. But the first is a "natural" flavoring, and eagerly consumed, whereas the second ends up in cheap almond-flavored...stuff, for want of a better word.

Another issue with the terms "natural" and "unnatural" has to do with the connotation of purity, wholesomeness, and health. I'm staring at an advertisement for an all-natural body wash (we're going to ignore the fact that deriving some of the ingredients from plants is hardly a natural process) that uses safflower oil as the main cleanser. It has, as a side-by-side comparision, the chemical sodium lauryl sulfate, a chemical that is frequently used in soaps and shampoos. It lists the pros of safflower oil and the cons of SLS, and it's pretty obvious, at first glance, which one is better for you.

After a second glance (this ad really rankled me, and you'll soon see why) it becomes quite obvious that safflower oil is not, in fact, the main cleansing ingredient, as SLS is in conventional soapy products. It is, in fact, merely the agent by which the cleaning agents are carried. And there is nothing to substantiate the claim that someone with sensitive-enough skin wouldn't react to cleansers derived from coconut oil. Lastly, there is nothing to keep you from using the body wash to clean your garage floor, as SLS is. It wouldn't be very cost-effective, but you could, if you wanted to.

Of course, advertisers have to make the product look good--they have to sell a "lifestyle". When you get right down to the molecules, it really doesn't matter where it comes from--you take enough, it'll kill you. Tea tree oil is an effective mold-killer but it's also toxic to cats. I also find it smirk-worthy to note that nobody objects to drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes--the latter pours at least 60 carcinogenic compounds down your lungs. And the greens profess to be irked that the fumes from an occasional bleaching of the toilet bowl are irritating to the lungs....

The point is, "natural" is all in our heads. Sure, cleaning agents might be derived from plants, but does the "privilege" of coming from a plant necessarily make a molecule any more "natural"? The Green Guide recommends using plant-based ethanol as a stain remover--ethanol is ethanol is ethanol is ethanol. It's what gets you drunk; whether it comes from plants or distilling vodka doesn't matter a hoot, the molecular formula is still C2H5OH, and it still works the same way.

Maybe natural products are better for us. But first we have to quit deluding ourselves when we pick up a $5 bottle of all-natural spray cleaner, and realize that what we are paying for is the privilege of knowing that everything in that bottle was somehow derived from plants. It does not mean that the products are necessarily any safer, and it does not mean that the product is necessarily any better for the planet than, say, sodium carbonate (washing soda), which simply dissolves into comparatively simple ions. Let's take a good hard look at what's in the bottle first, before patting ourselves on the back.

The Case Against Organic

2008-07-01T20:54:00.004+02:00

Chemicals are everywhere. Since the dawn of time, we've used salt to preserve our meat, and later, saltpeter. Lye (sodium hydroxide) was once used to make soap--if you read the cautionary warnings, suddenly your average shampoo, laden with "chemicals", doesn't sound so bad. We've been making use of opium for five thousand years, and magic mushrooms ever since someone mistakenly added them to his soup.

So when the Greens declare a war on chemicals, what exactly do they mean? Gram for gram, the most deadly poisons are found in living creatures. Take jellyfish, for instance--we all know they sting, and that their stings hurt. But when they start "blooming", when massive numbers float through the oceans in packs, they can do serious ecological damage, on the scale of industrial disasters. I would be hard-pressed to seriously consider a ban on jellyfish, though.

This is not to say that pesticides and herbicides are, by any means, harmless. Organophosphates are NOT fun things to play with. But let's examine what chemicals have allowed us to achieve, and then ask whether we are willing to do without them, before we decide to ban them altogether (I know there is no serious talk about banning the use of pesticides and herbicides, but the most dedicated Greens probably wouldn't mind).

One of the main areas that Green folk like to stump about is organic farming, which is farming without any synthetic herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers. "It tastes better" and "It's healthier" are the usual claims; I've never been able to discern much of a difference. And maybe that has to do with the fact that I don't live in, say, California, so the spinach that was fresh off the organic farm has been sitting in the back of a semi for three days, so that by the time it reaches the store it tastes the same as the conventional spinach, grown closer to home (and therefore has no need to sit in a semi for three days). But regardless, it's hard to be against organic farming, until you think about what it means for your wallet:

Until the advent of modern farming (my definition of it can be found here), farmers were largely at the mercy of drought, plague, flood, hurricanes, earthquakes--anything that upset the growing process could be considered a natural disaster. The weather, alas, is neither predictable nor controllable, and that's doubly true now that global warming is such an issue. The fact that we have such an abundance of food and that it costs so little to the consumer, is testimony to the power these chemicals have that enable us to grow so much food at such low prices (farm subsidies help, too). Giving up chemicals would require giving up cheap food. And if you thought prices were high now...

Chemistry has played a role in EVERY aspect of human life, from the indium in your LCD screen that lets you read this, to the semiconductor that makes up the processor, to the tanning process that gives you a soft leather jacket, to the wine you drink and the clumping agent in the kitty's cat litter. Unless we're willing to go back to the Stone Age (because bronze involves smelting, and therefore charcoal, and therefore cutting down trees), we had damn well better come up with a much clearer definition of what we mean when we say "let's get the chemicals out of our lives".

And before I get reamed for this: I am not trying to say that organic farming is bad for the planet, or that pesticides and herbicides are good. Even I don't believe that. But when you start looking at the bigger picture, things get complicated--what if food is priced beyond the range of the poor? Maybe that's not a big deal in the US, where the deal is "food or gas", but it can be a big deal in poverty-stricken areas of the world, where there is no question--everything must go towards food. I am trying to point out that without a clearer definition of what we mean by "chemicals", the logic ultimately takes us to an illogical conclusion.

Chemicals: morally neutral

2008-06-30T20:43:00.005+02:00

The story of penicillin is an interesting one: Alexander Fleming discovered that a mold had contaminated his bacterial culture (legend has it that his lab was so dirty, it wasn't actually a culture). By serendipitous luck, he realized that there was a ring around the mold colonies around which no bacteria grew. Upon filtering the broth, he found that it could kill bacteria, wasn't toxic to mice, and had a broad range of activity, at miniscule doses.

The idea that World War II was the best thing that could have happened to the world has been tossed around by those with a historical bent. It wasn't until the Second World War that, given the success of sulfa drugs, penicillin's possibilities became recognized. By 1943, production was 800 million units of this drug by growing up massive cultures of mold and isolating it from the culture--being able to eliminate infected wounds and pneumonia was probably a powerful morale-booster (source: Napoleon's Buttons).

And then things went wrong. Or rather, they didn't go wrong: life happened. Doctors forgot that bacteria have been around for 3.5 billion years--and if they could survive the PreCambrian Extinction, the KT Collapse, the fall of the dinosaurs, and our nuclear testing, a molecule from a mold that they most likely evolved with over the course of the last 2 billion years would merely baffle them, at best.

Drug resistance to penicillin illustrates the premise that chemicals themselves are morally neutral. They are "good" or "bad" only depending on how we use them. A molecule of DDT has no more of a moral code than a brick. But apply it cautiously, or ruthlessly, and people either praise it, or loathe it depending on what value is at stake.

It therefore makes no sense to malign chemical additives, pesticides, and herbicides because of what they are. But that does not grant free license to contaminate our waterways with mercury and pour sulfuric acid into the air. Just because the molecules are morally neutral does not mean we can afford to be.

And here the problem lies in the fundamental "good" and "bad" of the whole Green movement. Just where do we draw the lines, what are the goals, how can we achieve them in a meaningful way? Any one aspect of the Green movement (fewer pollutants, less greenhouse gas, clean water, clean air, no GMOs, organic foods) ultimately fails to see the big picture, and usually fails to consider the social ramifications of what each one recommends.

For instance, if organic farming were to become the mainstay of food production tomorrow: yields of organic crops are usually lower than conventionally-grown produce (usually about 20-50%, depending on the crop, the farmer, the region, the weather), so an organic farmer would need to produce more in order to get the same amount. He must therefore spend more time tilling his fields with a motorized vehicle, adding more greenhouse gases to the environment than the conventional farmer. Now, of course, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the organic farmer most probably does less harm than the pesticides sprayed by the conventional farmer. But how much more, and if your goal is to reduce greenhouse gases, then the organic farmer loses out.

What the Green movement needs first is to define what it wants to achieve in no uncertain terms. Then it needs to look reality squarely in the eye and accept it for what it is.

And the reality is this: we like our bread soft and unmoldy after a week in our pantry; we like our pet's food in conveniently stored and handled packages. We like that our cars don't rust and our pet don't have fleas, that cleaners work without too much elbow grease and hassle. Chemicals, while they can do a lot of harm, can't be blamed for everything, not when the choices we make concerning them are so selfish when it comes to our own time, energy, and money. These choices lie with us, not with the chemicals.

Environmentalism: chemistry edition

2008-06-29T12:04:00.008+02:00

There is no question that environmentalism is important. But there is little consensus as to what it means to be environmentally conscious, what the impacts of our actions are, and where the ethical boundaries lie. There is even less consensus as to a definition of "reasonable lengths" one should go to in order to be "green".

These are big questions--I could probably blog for the rest of my life answering them (giving my version of the answers). However, having learned that it's better to be able to digest what you've chewed off, I've arbitrarily decided to focus on chemistry and environmentalism instead.

I say "arbitrarily" but my decision was based mostly on National Geographic's latest edition of the Green Guide. I love the National Geographic Society--that they can make the public aware of issues in countries like Myanmar (recently Burma) speaks to the immense power of photographs, and the prowess of the photographers they hire. I'll be frank and say that their articles are somewhat lacking for completeness, in that many of them do not cover the topics in the detail that I would like, but that's excusable, because nobody does, and it's a magazine, not a book.

But what irks me the most about the Green Guide is not the incompleteness, the logical fallacies, or their not thinking through the ramifications of their actions (or doing so in such a limited fashion that they fail to see the bigger picture--systems biolgoy, anyone?). It is, rather, that the language used assigns a moral standard for things that are "morally neutral" (a wonderful turn of phrase by J.K. Rowling). They imply that chemicals are bad for the environment, which is most likely true. But they also assume that natural products are good, which is most assuredly NOT the case.

This week I will be expounding on this dichotomy, in the hope that I might get some of you to think about the Green movement differently. I wholeheartedly encourage embracing the Green movement (in part because I no longer have to feel like the only twenty-six year-old in the Western World without a car*). But the messages that some of the groups tout are...not exactly doing the Green movement any favors.

To be discussed this week:

1) Chemicals are morally neutral
2) The extent to which we rely on chemistry
3) Natural as better--or not
4) Unintended consequences of greenery (strictly involving chemicals)
5) What it means to be green, the chemistry edition.

*Yes, that was meant in jest.

The Art of Connection

2008-06-29T08:47:00.003+02:00

I won't pretend to be a cultural anthropologist--having taken one course, almost seven years ago, in my freshman year, in college, hardly makes me an expert. But I predict that, as with TCM, we will, within the next ten to twenty years, start seeing a resurgence in interest in African herbal medicine, and possibly in the traditional "cures" of South American tribes, as well. After all, if we can derive painkillers from poison dart frogs, it stands to reason that there might just be something behind all the shamanism and "pretenses" of healing.

I've titled this "The Art of Connection" because getting at the right information is an art. Taking a literal translation of the ancient Chinese texts is a mistake, as it turns out--one could say the same about taking the oral histories of African tribes literally, too. It amounts to parsing the meaning, and not just the information, out of the words.

To give you a better idea of what it means: I'm a native English speaker (I know a little Spanish and I'm reasonably fluent in Chinese, but English is my primary language), who moved to the Netherlands last year. I've had to learn Dutch on the fly, so to speak. The words themselves are not that difficult, but the way they are used still drives me crazy and renders my dictionaries useless, because the meaning they convey has (seemingly) little to do with the words that are used. In part, this is because the vocabulary of many other languages is small when compared to English--and therefore they rely on constructions to get the meaning across--but also because there are some words in Dutch that simply don't translate well.

Nowhere is this difficulty in translation more apparent than in the English translations of the Judge Di series. Rumor has it that van Gulik originally wrote it in Chinese, and then it was translated into Dutch, and then that was translated into English. While most certainly apocryphal, if you have a bad Dutch-English translation...suffice it to say you spend more of your time wondering why the translator couldn't do a better job.

And that's just between two languages with a common root (Teutonic). How one begins to approach the art of translating between Yoruba and English is something I can't even begin to fathom.

Still, it must be done. And more to the point, it must be done well. I'd like to think that the West paid for its arrogance when the British lost the Boer War, but that's really a pipe dream, as there continue to be so many shows of blatant ignorance and arrogance about how things "should" be (most notably, the idiotic movie made by Geert Wilders). But biology doesn't give a crap about what "should" be. It just is, and whether you like the treatment has little to do with whether it works, and conversely, whether you think it should work has little to do with whether it does.

I've said elsewhere that you can't win against biology. The whole macho-thing about conquering the West" presumes that life stops once you stop--that once you figure out this, you can solve that. It's only recently that we've realized how connected everything is--dust from the Sahara feeds orchids in the Amazon--and it'll take a while before we're able to fully appreciate those connections. Maybe we should get started now.

Standardized plants

2008-06-28T20:44:00.005+02:00

One of the biggest hurdles to phytotherapy is that plants are, after all, living things. Much like my two black (loveable) cats above, even though two plants may be growing side by side, they may still produce a different bouquet of molecules--and they are very different cats; one of them could be white--they're that different.

Some of the more practical amongst us may wonder whether or not it actually matters. After all, 5000 years of practical application have, essentially, confirmed that these plants work.

On the other hand, standardized medications make dosing and scheduling much easier. Can you imagine the tizzy your family physician/GP would be thrown into if the New England Journal of Medicine suddenly recommended that every patient's aspirin be titrated to the optimal dose? Of course, this sort of individualized therapy is part of what makes TCM so powerful--that each and every patient receives a tailored concoction--but you can hardly expect a harried doctor (who's probably more worried about getting sued) with exactly 10 minutes of time, half of which is spent deciphering his colleague's handwriting, to give the sort of individual attention that personal dosing requires. Add to this the fact that a bad licorice season, or a factory being built within 500 feet of a ginseng field, can drastically affect the quality, growth, and compound within a plant, and you can see how things begin to go disastrously wrong if there is no standardization.

At the molecular level, there simply is no way to guarantee that batches of plant extracts from one plant (much less many) will contain exactly the same components, unless we are after only one compound. This is, in part, why we synthesize Taxol (the other part being that Pacific yew is an endangered tree). The best we can hope for, therefore, is an average of chemical signatures given by a particular plant--a "fuzzy fingerprint", if you will.

And this is what makes TCM so unsatisfying for Western physicians. From the Age of Enlightenment onwards, the philosophy of science and medicine has been that knowing more about how we (human bodies) work will lead us to understanding more about how to fix it* when it gets broken. Now, nobody will doubt that bodies get broken, in terms of the physical, physiological, and chemical. The human race has been fixing physical problems for as long as its history, but the physiological and chemical problems have had to wait for the advances of science before we could understand what the nature of the problem was. The history of diabetes provides a wonderful example of how, even in the face of knowing what was wrong, we were still powerless to do anything about it. We are so used to equating "disease" with "broken"--with one single concrete cause, and one single effective cure--that it's now wonder we are surprised when the magic bullet turns out to be a dud. Contrast that with the view TCM takes, that the body isn't really broken, it just needs help getting to where it should be--and that help can come in many, many forms, and they are not all the same for everybody--and you begin to see how the divergence in thinking begins to cause rifts.

This is not to suggest that any old ginseng or lavender plant will yield the right proportion of effective:noneffective ingredients. Maybe the difference matters, and maybe it doesn't. The fuzzy fingerprint may be as close as we will ever get to standardizing things chemically. But that doesn't mean we can't standardize what we can: the soil content and acidity, drainage and water availability, amount of light and darkness. It is even conceivable that air quality could make a difference.

Allow me to end on a note of conceit and ask, "Is there any better reason to ensure that our climate and environment are not going to go to hell in a handbasket?" Considering how much we already depend on it, how much it costs us when things go wrong, and that the potential to save lives could be floating around in some undiscovered plant (or some already-discovered plant), can we really afford to take the chance that the poisons we spew and the trash we discard doesn't have an effect?

*I usually try to avoid using Amazon.com when pimping books, but the synopsis is so wonderfully exact that I didn't think I could do it any better

Big words

2008-06-26T20:05:00.006+02:00

So far I hope I've persuaded you that TCM and other medical paradigms can only add to our knowledge base, that new ways of approaching the problem can lead to new solutions. We now come to a point where TCM and other alternative medical paradigms cannot help us: the pharmacologic theory of drug action.

Don't worry, I'm not going to start chucking about complicated equations and talking about kinetics and equilibrium. For starters, this is a blog, not a pharmacology course.

But models have their place in our knowledge base, too. Pharmacological modeling enables us to understand drug-drug interactions better, which allows us to better use the drugs that we have. In the case of plant extracts, it allows doctors to understand which drugs cannot be used with what plants. Multidrug pharmacy is already a major component of treatment regimens for a variety of diseases, most notably pediatric cancer. Unfortunately, most of the regimens in use today come about through trial and error--"experimental", indeed. And let's not forget the plethora of drugs being used "off-label", for other than their intended purpose. Anti-histamines, for instance, are sometimes used by desperate parents to get their kids to sleep.

And if you're using phytotherapy (because "herbal medicine" isn't science-y enough) rest assured that in each leaf of a plant there are easily a hundred compounds, most of them more benign than your average stick of celery. The effects of the few that aren't, however, are no laughing matter. St. John's Wort (you may remember me being surprised that it could be sold in a supermarket) actually has a long list of drug-drug interactions.

The development of mathematical models for drug activity really only began early in the last century. Modifications to the theories over the years has given us a powerful way of predicting the efficacy of drugs, but a model for two drugs, much less many, is still lacking. It is a matter of having the computing power, but also recognizing the need for models, and minimizing the damage on our way to new treatments.

Systems biology: everything's connected

2008-06-25T22:15:00.005+02:00

On the second point of TCM, which is the theme of the week

"Systems biology" sounds complicated--hell, biology sounds complicated. It's the study of life, after all, and what could be more complicated? There are massive numbers of articles published on the opioid receptor, for instance, and that's on three different proteins with relatively well-defined roles. If that's one, imaginee how complicated a system must be.

But that's what the big picture is starting to look like: everything's connected. Jared Diamond illustrates this principle very well in the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I highly recommend reading if you like having your brains boggled. Chaos theory's butterfly effect, while formulated to describe a system's dependence on initial conditions, best illustrates the phenomena of a little change blowing up into something big.

Which is precisely what drugs do. You take a pill--by the time it gets into your stomach it's already dissolving. Maybe half of the active molecules make it through the acid bath. Then it gets neutralized, and absorbed into the bloodstream, where it may or may not bind to proteins in your blood, rendering them inactive. It has to get past the liver, which filters out all the crud that's in your blood; it get sloshed around by the heart, possibly ending up however many thousands of miles away from its site of action, all the while being degraded by the heat of the body and whatever enzymes are running rampant throughout your body, hell-bent on destroying any and al invaders. It's a wonder, if you think about it, that any drugs at all work, much less as well as they do.

"Well" might be pushing it--given the very long list of side effects of drugs such as Lexapro (which I've taken for a year) and the very short list of intended actions, let's just say that I don't know of a single boss who would accept that kind of performance from a person. Is this because the drug was specifically designed for the purpose of inhibiting one receptor? Is this why "dirty" drugs, which work on an array of receptors, are currently being explored as therapies?

This is systems biology: you can't touch one without touching everything. And in this respect, TCM, which strives more for "balance" than an actual treatment mechanism, has a lot to teach us in terms of how to view diseases. If you need an example, consider how the treatment paradigm for stomach ulcers has changed: it used to be that you drank milk, or chalk (how else to describe antacids?)--it was thought that the acid in the stomach was the problem, and you had to neutralize it. Or lessen it--I'm sure we all know of at least one person who has been told to "relax" because their ulcers would start "acting up". Then we figured out how to turn off the acid pumps in the stomach--good for the pain, bad for digestion. Then a single maverick doctor from Australia decides that Helicobacter pylori is actually the causative agent for ulcers, proves it by drinking a shot of the bugs. Stomach ulcers are now routinely treated with a course of antibiotics, with acid-lowering agents to manage the symptoms until they heal. But herbalists of all stripes, not just TCM practitioners, have been using licorice to manage ulcers. As far as how it works exactly isn't quite known--there are literally hundreds of active components in licorice, but the main compound, glycerrhyzic acid, is an anti-inflammatory agent--which might help the immune system destroy the bugs, as well as soothe some of the pain.

The point is not to suggest that herbs make for better medicine than drugs developed with a specific purpose in mind. It is merely that focusing on one aspect of the disease (stomach acid) can be counterproductive when trying to find new treatment regimens. It is likely that licorice, because it has hundreds of other active compounds, influences the body in ways that a specifically targeted drug cannot, and therefore "brings it into balance" again. It's like trying to center a tarp over a target using only rope. If you have one very strong rope, you can easily yank the tarp from A to B, but trying to center it can be very difficult. Whereas if you have lots of ropes, you can pull on it in all the right directions, and therefore center it quite easily.

Losing sight of the connections with everything else leads, ultimately, to a myopic view of health and the human body with a knowledge base that is still sorely lacking (ever wonder why we sleep? so do scientists). When you understand the connections, you don't eliminate the holes, but you see other ways to fill them in. Ultimately, nobody can know everything. But knowing more is never a bad thing.

A difference of philosophy

2008-06-24T22:01:00.006+02:00

Yes, I know, this is a Bhodisattva. It was the closest representation of thinking and meditation I could find.

Understanding TCM requires understanding Chinese culture; it is impossible to appreciate the full scope of TCM within the paradigm of Western medicine

This was the first point of the TCM seminar on Monday, that in order to understand TCM you have to understand the culture, or at the very least, the philosophy of medicine that pervades TCM.

When you read Chinese texts, there's a lot of talk about energy channels, "hot" and "cold", "yin" and "yang". Most doctors would laugh at you if you tried to explain your stomach ulcer in terms of "hot" and "cold", and they'd be right to. There's no more of an "invasion of cold" as there is an invasion of Easter Bunnies (well, unless you live in South Park). So if you read the texts literally, it sounds like a lot of hocus-pocus bullsh!t that vaguely resembles the humoral theory of health that was popular during the Renaissance.

The difference? TCM works in a way that the humoral theory never did.

That alone explains the staying power of TCM, even more so than the pseudo-New-Age language it's often surrounded in. And while we're talking about the language, let's just clear one thing up--Chinese is an extremely contextual language. The same word, used in two different sentences, can take on two entirely different meanings. It's an art, for a Westerner, to be able to read the words AND get the meaning right. But also, as anyone who has ever tried t'ai chi or yoga, there is simply no scientific way to explain that flowing sensation you get when you've practiced for a while. Sure, you can call it a supersensitive spell in newly invigorated neurons, but that doesn't make any more sense than a "flow" of energy in the context of how it feels.

And that is what Western medicine lacks--the words to describe the sensations of sickness, the beginnings of imbalances. Without words, it is almost as if these sensations don't really exist. I don't think it's that Chinese doctors and patients are any more sensitive to the sensations of sickness--I think it's that TCM provides a platform for expressing the problem in a common language that both patient and doctor can understand.

I actually do not think the bridge between Eastern and Western medicine is impossible to cross. But it does require that Western doctors stretch the boundaries of their conventional models of sickness and health in order to accommodate the slew of information that TCM (and other ancient medical systems) has to offer.

Traditional Chinese Medicine

2008-06-23T22:05:00.002+02:00

I attended a seminar today on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and integration of that system of thinking with Western medicine. Throughout this week, I will be discussing some of the more salient points.

The highlights of the seminar:

1) Understanding TCM requires understanding Chinese culture; it is impossible to appreciate the full scope of TCM within the paradigm of Western medicine
2) We need to view disease processes through a "systems biology" (or, "everything's connected") point of view; one drug for one receptor will not suffice
3) Better mathematical models for understanding drug-drug interactions (antagonsim and synergy) are needed.
4) Better methods of standardizing plant-derived biologically active compounds, regardless of the cultural background, are also needed
5) Traditional pharmacoepaeia the world over needs to be evaluated for efficacy; this is especially the case in developing nations, where the culture might already have the tools needed to cure their own diseases at fractions of the cost of importing Western drugs.

One of the burning questions that was discussed later was whether TCM medications should be fast-tracked through the approval process. On the one hand, they've essentially been in human clinical trials for 5000 years. On the other hand, nobody knows how they work.

One big idea that got lost in the midst of all the excitement over how awesome these drugs are (and, make no mistake about it, they are drugs) is the fact that European herbal lore also has a rich array of pharmacologically active drugs, and nobody seems to object to St. John's Wort being sold in the supermarket (where I get mine). What's the difference?

New thingum

2008-06-16T20:42:00.002+02:00

I've decided that I need to come up with a better way to update this. In a nutshell, working, a two-hour commute, and needy cats are not conducive to coming up with timely articles, and definitely not conducive to researching them to the degree that I would like.

So.

While I would ideally come up with a new article every day, I'm going to lay off that ambitious goal, because a) I need to sleep, too; b) I have several other writing projects floating around, too; and c) I also need to cook, clean, and fulfill my social obligations.

Furthermore, I've realized that I tend to write a lot. I have big ideas. They require big pieces. Or, lots of little ones.

Meaning: Starting next week, I'm going to start serializing my posts, break them up into bite-sized chunks, easily digestible, and hopefully interesting to read.

That's all for now. Time to cook.