thoughts on health care in america

In the immediate aftermath of yesterday's controversial court decision, saying that the health care plan requires unconstitutional control over private citizens' pocketbooks, there seems a very widespread sense that the single payer plan would have circumvented this legal problem. However that alternative falls afoul of the reactionary impulse toward smaller government at all costs. It seems to me that this is less a case of the white house and congress kowtowing to industry, but another in a series of poor but necessary compromises with a strong right wing. This is part of the larger breakdown in american political life between what I would call modernists and antiquarians. It is simply not feasible or realistic to have a 'small' federal government in a huge highly industrialized country. Our system of checks and balances is still the best way to control the excesses of power, even when it works poorly or slowly. The alternatives, too much central power or too little, lead separately to police states or to gross economic inequity. I suspect that hundreds of years from now when historians consider the 21st century, that is the major conflict that they will see.

GM foods

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of a particular author's argument against genetically engineered foods, in particular GM corn expressing high levels of bacillus thuringiensis toxin to target particular pests. Here's my response (some points may not make sense without reading the original, but you'll get the picture):

Unfortunately, my motto these days is trust nobody. I don't automatically trust any company. There are plenty of people in companies (including most of their scientists) who are honorable and do their best to make a useful safe product. There are also obviously completely amoral people in companies who don't care about anything whatsoever except money. I also don't trust anti-corporate luddites because they typically indulge in shoddy thinking (as indeed you note multiple instances in this guy's rant against BT). On the other hand, I don't like the idea of eating corn containing large amounts of any bacterial protein as a result of overexpression in the corn cells themselves. I also don't like the idea of eating corn sprayed with neurotoxins, or corn covered in fungus containing neurotoxin because it was not sprayed or engineered. As long as we grow food on huge farms, some kind of technology will be used to keep pests off, and it's all at least somewhat dangerous. The alternative is to watch a big chunk of the world starve to death. As long as human beings are trapped in their genetically evolved "Have to make exponentially more copies of myself" mindset, these things are inevitable.

2012 not

Wow, I really did not blog at all in 2009, what's wrong with me? Anyway, having just seen 2012 I am inspired to point out a few of the more obvious scientific either blunders or at least tremendous unlikelihoods. First and foremost, I can't imagine any way that alignments of the planets would have an effect on the sun's activity. The planets have negligible mass compared to the sun's, so I don't think general relativity would predict any variation in solar output based on position of planets. Secondarily, I'm not aware of any obvious alignments in the planets coming up any time soon. This is more speculative, but I'm not sure whether the mayans actually knew of the planets, in the sense of recognizing that they move differently than other "lights in the sky" and predicting their patterns mathematically moreover.

The exact nature of the solar event is not specified in the movie (lucky for them! I can't pick it apart) but the claim is that it generated a lot of neutrinos. The sun already generates a lot of neutrinos, almost all of which go right through the earth, us, and all regular matter without effect. One thing that does generate bursts of neutrinos is supernova explosions - neutrino detectors place around the earth all saw the burst that preceded the visible appearance of supernova 1987a in a nearby galaxy. By the by, this was a wonderful validation of solar physics theory. I think we would have noticed if the sun had gone supernova. But in the movie these were not ordinary neutrinos, they "mutated" into some other kind of particle that could heat up the earth's core. Well, anything is possible, but I would expect something that could heat the earth's core to fry pretty much everything on the surface first. The core is mostly iron and nickel we think, so maybe these mutated particles just heat up metals. But we have a fair amount of iron in our bodies (all those red blood cells and hemoglobin, for example, plus lots of muscle myoglobin) so we should have heated up too.

Some new kind of solar wind that could do that to the earth's entire core would certainly have fried all communications systems. But tv and cell phones were working in the movie all the way through, as were cars, planes and other metallic engines and motors using electromagnetic induction fields.

More realistically, solar physicist expect the sun to expand into a red giant in a couple (5-10) of billion years. That is a real problem, the sun will grow probably to larger than the earth's orbit, and the earth (plus venus and mercury) will either melt or vaporize. We'll have to do something by then - leave the earth, move the earth, or learn how to control the sun. None is even remotely in our reach today, but a billion years is a long time. The average survival of any species on earth has been about a million years, and we humans aren't even halfway there yet. I myself doubt we'll make it that long, but maybe we will smarten up sometime.