(The citation is William S. Pease (1991). “Chemical Hazards and the Public’s Right to Know: How effective is California’s Proposition 65?” Environment 33 (10), pp. 12-20.)

I don’t really know anything about Jim Manzi. But on this particular blog the level of discourse was pretty high and the latest post was fewer than four hours old. Plus I had just attended the Gordon Research Conference on Industrial Ecology (about which I can tell you nothing or I’d have to kill you– well, let’s say, “sequester” you). So I felt both qualified and compelled to respond.

I used my real name and linked to my blog, so I decided I had better go ahead and own up.

Here are my comments, which stand alone pretty well:

A lack of understanding of an incredibly complex system (in this case, we’re talking about the whole and entire actual world) is not a legitimate argument against prudent action. In fact, it is precisely the opposite— an urgent call to action. You talk about “what a reasonable and informed person would believe to be a legitimate danger;” I counter, while you may be reasonable, you are not informed. Like it or not, climate change is not a social issue. The welfare of the world’s poor does not enter into the question. It is a physical issue, and the tools we use to understand the physical world are scientific tools.

The modern economy depends on ultraspecialization of knowledge, and the vast array of intelligent people critically studying climate have converged on what is essentially an unassailable consensus. Media-savvy crackpots notwithstanding, the people who have dedicated their lives to understanding biogeochemistry don’t have a doubt in their minds. CO2 emissions now exceed the IPCC’s 2001 worst-case scenario; ocean pH is measurably falling; and entire ecosystems depend on the integrity of coral reefs. These are not projections, they are facts.

We are effecting change on a massive scale and CANNOT predict its effect. The only responsible answer is to change our behavior. To pretend to hem and haw over the “economic costs” of changing our behavior is asinine. It adds hubris to irresponsibility. Moreover, to sugarcoat rationalizations about doing nothing with talk of the world’s poor (which don’t figure into any economic calculation by any fossil fuel user in the developed world) is as disingenuous as it is self-serving. It’s worth mentioning that SOx emissions were cut at a fraction of the projected costs; and anyway economic models are far more uncertain than physical models. So why let the economic models call the shots?

In a free world, the only way to effect change while preserving liberty is with economic force. This is a market problem with a market solution: a price on carbon. Why is that so hard to understand?

In retrospect, I don’t think I particularly raised the tone of the debate. Rather, I’m kind of shrill and whiny. The conclusion, which can be paraphrased as “why are you so stupid?” is clearly obnoxious. It’s also deliberately simplistic, as I reject economic arguments, which goes directly against some very good advice delivered at the above-mentioned conference. I do use complex sentence structures, though, which is true to form. I should probably have sat on the post for an hour or so and re-read it. But now it’s done.

Eh. Welcome to real life.

NEW YORK — Bank stocks shot higher Friday after an agreement on a financial regulation bill reassured investors that new rules won’t devastate financial companies’ profits.

Banks outdistanced the rest of the market after congressional negotiators agreed on a bill that increases the regulation of financial companies, but that doesn’t include some of the harshest provisions that the government originally proposed. The legislation imposes new rules on the complex investments known as derivates, but the rules aren’t as strict as investors feared. It also includes a far milder version of what’s been called the Volcker rule. That rule, named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, would have banned commercial banks from trading simply to increase their profits, a practice known as proprietary trading.

Analysts said the deal removes a huge cloud that has hovered over the financial industry for much of this year. Investors have feared that intense regulation would devastate bank profits. Now, the market seems to believe that financial companies would do well even with the new limits on their business.

“They come out of this big-time winners,” Bob Froehlich, senior managing director at Hartford Financial Services, said of financial companies. “Two years later, people will look back and say ‘My gosh, nothing really changed.’”

Anyway, the SIPs for “Principles of Combustion” are entertaining. I particularly like “kth species”:

Key Phrases – Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
detonation and deflagration waves, detonation cell width, diffusion flame jets, limiting tube diameter, detonability limits, spin detonation, liquid fuel droplet, premixed laminar flames, reaction zone width, unconfined detonations, premixed gases, confined mixtures, detonation structure, detonation limits, fuel species, laminar diffusion flame, thermal and transport properties, burner rim, kth species, burner inlet, mass burning rate, j mwj, quenching distance, combustion problems, detonation wave

Here’s the abstract:

We present a material flow analysis (MFA) for polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a synthetic polymer, in the United States for the years 1996-2007.  We model the industrial metabolism of PET as a network of flows linking stocks and processes.  The most common worldwide use of PET is in textile production, but in the US it is increasingly used to make disposable beverage containers for transporting water, carbonated soda, and other beverages. Bottles made from PET are the most-recycled plastic product in the US by mass and by recovery rate, and thus the PET material flow system constitutes an ideal case study of polymer recycling. We find that total consumption of PET resin grew at 2.7% per year over the period of the study, reaching 5.01 million metric tons in 2007. This growth was driven largely by the beverage packaging market, which accounted for 55% of consumption in 2007. About a quarter of PET bottles are collected for recycling, a number that has fluctuated widely but kept pace with consumption.  However, domestic capacity for reclamation of post-consumer PET has not grown as quickly, leading recyclers to export increasing amounts of post-consumer material. Manufacturers have also imported secondary PET in increasing amounts. Reclaimed PET accounted for 6–9% of total resin demand throughout the study. While polymer recycling appears to be viable, efforts to improve material efficiency are confounded by low collection rates and a lack of reclamation infrastructure.

For me, one of the highlights of reading a material flow analysis is the sankey diagram, a flow diagram in which the lines representing flows have widths proportional to the magnitude of the flows.  Creating sankey diagrams has puzzled and intrigued many, because they are both a very good way to convey information and difficult to create in an automated fashion.  I used LaTeX and PS Tricks, of course, to make my sankey diagrams, about which I’ll post more soon.  But for now, here is a sneak preview of the output.  This document is programmatically generated using a data file to indicate the widths of certain primary flows.  The remaining flows are computed arithmetically by TeX.

The hard part, of course, is laying out the figure.  But I’ve convinced myself that the fruits of the hard manual (well, emacs-based) labor are worth the hassle. Click on the figure to download the PDF.

There’s obviously an element of inferiority-complex here.  In a world where everyone is known by his google ID and it’s all but impossible to acquire a static IP address, I am in the extreme (maybe even six-sigma) minority to be administrating my own e-mail server.  I hold a physical copy of all my emails on my home server (and Abbie’s, too) and I never see ads.

But lately, particularly since moving from a DSL connection to a Cable connection (hosted by Cox Business), I’ve started to notice that emails from my domain were frequently spurned, often winding up in spam folders or being rejected altogether, particularly by Yahoo servers.

This is a question of net neutrality: Yahoo, being an email provider, has a business incentive to harrass small-time service providers such as myself, which, if our numbers suddenly multiplied, would pose a threat to its email revenue stream.  Of course, such a thing is extremely unlikely to happen, because people don’t even know how to keep their antivirus software up to date, much less operate a standards-compliant mail relay.  I take pride in this accomplishment, even though it’s somewhat akin to the accomplishment of writing an entire parametric, interactive feedback-control and data acquisition system in PIC ASM, which is something else I take pride in having done, even though it’s not something that very many people would mistake for being useful.

And so I take it personally when my logs report something like:

Feb 25 19:16:18 ocean postfix/smtp[98301]: 0F7E6B826:
host a.mx.mail.yahoo.com[67.195.168.31] refused to talk to me: 421 Message from (24.249.152.92) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html


I filed a help request with their abuse-admin service and received a canned response, from which I learned about DomainKeys.  The concept is quite elegant.  I modify my server’s DNS record to include a public encrpytion key, and store the private key secretly on my mail server.  I then stamp every message I send with a signature which is encoded with the private key.  The recipient can check my DNS record, use the public key to decode the signature, and verify that the message is legitimate.  DomainKeys were invented by Yahoo, but are now an accepted open standard.

Following this howto (and adapting to FreeBSD), I managed to convert my Postfix install to use domain keys in just under three hours (specifically, the hours from 11 PM to 2 AM on February 24-25), thus demonstrating that I am still qualified to operate my own mail server. It remains to be seen whether Yahoo will take its own medicine: at the time of writing, it’s still deferring my messages, even though they are now possessed of DomainKey signatures.

For what it’s worth, I never get false-positives in my Spam folder.  There is a single exception in the past year, and that was due to an embarrassing goof on the part of the SpamAssassin maintainers.

You can view my DKIM public key with the following command:

dig -t TXT 301south._domainkey.301south.net


if you use a computer with access to dig(1).

This can be corroborated with CO2 measurements from around the world and is really not contested.

However, some people seem to still believe that this change could not be caused by human activity.  Here I present a simple, back-of-the-envelope computation to measure the total weight of CO2 in the atmosphere, compared to the total weight of CO2 released by burning fossil fuels.

First, the easy part: the weight of CO2 in the atmosphere.  This page has a nice description of how to quickly estimate the weight of the air we breathe.  Basically, atmospheric pressure at sea level is a direct measurement of the weight of atmospheric air.  Multiply it by the surface area of the globe and you’ve got your answer (in Newtons).

The partial pressure goes with the mole fraction, so CO2 specifically accounts for 320 parts per million of that (in 1970) or 380 parts per million (in 2010).

for a net gain of about kg CO2 (also known as 300 billion tons).

Where could all of that carbon have come from?

(images link to source) These numbers have been converted to “tons of oil equivalent” for energy purposes, which is convenient for us because a ton of oil, when burned, releases a pretty reliable amount of carbon dioxide.  Coal is an inferior fuel: since its heat of combustion is much lower you have to burn almost twice as much to get the same amount of energy, which means you release twice as much carbon.  Since this chart is showing energy-equivalence and not CO2-equivalence, we can assume that it is a significant under-estimate for coal (slight over-estimate for natural gas).  But rather than tease that out, we’ll assume we had gotten all of the energy from oil.

Taking a quick-and-dirty average, I’m going to go ahead and say we’ve burned an average of 3000 million tons of oil, 2000 million oil-equivalent-tons of coal, and 1400 million oil-equivalent-tons of natural gas per year since 1970.  I’ll even be generous to the denialists and call them short tons, and round down, to get about 5,500 million metric tons of oil or kg.  Burning a barrel of oil (about 140 kg) releases about 430 kg of CO2 – that’s roughly 3.08 kg CO2/kg oil.  Let’s round down and call it 3.  Same as pi.

So we’re talking about kg of CO2, directly from anthropogenic sources, per year for the last 40 years.  This is just from burning fossil fuels, not from land use change (deforestation and development).  That’s over 600 billion tons in 40 years, more than twice the observed increase.  The difference between what we spew out and what sticks around in the atmosphere is, of course, getting soaked into the oceans, among other sinks, where it is converted to carbonic acid, lowering the pH of the sea with detrimental effects on sea life.

We clearly don’t fully understand the biogeochemical dynamics of carbon circulation, but it is abundantly clear that anthropogenic emissions are far more than sufficient to account for observed changes.  Face it: we are messing with the atmosphere on a grand scale.

In order to do conventional least-squares fitting to you need to determine .

Step response of NIH 3T3 fibroblasts to ionomycin

For instance, the figure above shows the fluorescent intensity of some 3T3 cells to ionomycin.   The traces are normalized to the initial values.  Notice that the cells don’t recover to the levels at which they began.  I wanted to know the time constant of the decay on the tail of the trace.

I solved this problem by performing the fit inside an iterative minimum-finding function.  First I identified the point of fastest decline and selected that as the point.  Then I iterated to find the value for which minimized the norm of the error:

for best-fit A and .

y0_fit = fminbnd( @(y0) ...
                 norm( y-y0 - exp( polyval( polyfit( x, log(y-y0), 1), x))) ,...
                 -10*y(1), y(1) );

This, along with other analysis:

For a population of cells (Showing mean and standard deviation for each test point. numbers in parentheses indicate number of cells in the sample.):

TeX source

Figure [above] shows how hazards, risks, and costs are considered together in an alternatives analysis.  A successful alternatives analysis should develop and evaluate several different approaches for solving the problem at hand.  The analysis should make conspicuous consideration of hazards, the sources of hazards, and opportunities to avoid hazards, thus ensuring a precautionary footing.  The risks presented by unavoidable hazards should be analyzed using conventional methods.  Decision analytic tools should be used to compare the resulting options and weight the relevant criteria.  The results of the analysis should be reported to the public in a manner that enables informed decision making by consumers while encouraging responsible innovation by industry.  The process should be ongoing and the analysis should be improved continuously.

TeX source

Since large-scale manufacturing processes are highly integrative, with each stage depending on the output from the prior stage, the functional requirements of a single manufacturing stage can be extremely specific and large changes can be disruptive to the manufacturing chain.  An analyst considering a single manufacturing process (limited scope) may have limited flexibility in selecting alternatives.  On the other hand, an analyst considering an entire product system (broad scope) may be able to envision a much wider array of alternatives. Figure [above] shows a generic product life cycle and compares the minimal scope for an alternatives analysis to the maximal scope, which is the entire product system.

So I come down with a salvaged Sempron 3800 box running Ubuntu Jaunty (total cost: $0) and quickly put that in place of my mom’s dinosaur.  Using VMWare Player (total cost: $0) we installed a bootleg copy of Win2k (total cost: $0, but not legally) in order to support her Quicken habit (GnuCash, my personal (though reluctant) choice for personal finances, sadly does not rise to the level).  On John’s end, the ancient CRM database program Q&A doesn’t run under Windows 7 but it does under dosbox; and Outlook express did not seem to be capable of transferring settings to regular-old outlook under Windows 7 (I didn’t work on this at all, but John assured me he spent a good bit of time) but Thunderbird imports it just fine… and finally, an old Agfa Snapscan e-20 is not yet supported on Windows 7, but the binary driver is still usable by xsane if it is extracted from the WinXP self-extracting executable (with a little help from wine; thanks to this post).

The only disappointment of the day was in how complicated it is to transfer a thunderbird profile from one computer to another- requiring showing hidden files and editing configuration files.  I could do it just fine, but it’s too complicated for John to do for someone else.  There is a ‘managed’ way to do it, but it requires installing another application (which is windows-only, by the way). Why is there [still] not an “export profile” option? It could just store the profile folder in an archive which can be imported elsewhere.  Maybe there’s a good reason for not doing this but I can’t think of it.

So minor config issues notwithstanding, OSS is finally reaching the level of being generally usable by the broader public.

UPDATE 2009-12-28

More good news: my Dad and his fiancée will be using my Wordpress installation to host their wedding page, which will be found at monaandron.com and hosted (presently) by FreeBSD.

Then some bad: Thunderbird 3.0 has another big FAIL: clicking “get mail” doesn’t get mail??  The configuration interface has also changed in subtle ways that make it very difficult to troubleshoot problems for non-tech-savvy family members over the phone.  Very frustrating.