John F. Raffensperger

I'm the Dalai Lama

2012-01-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

Google has a tool called "Google Correlate", related to their "Google Flu Trends" tool. If you click on this "Google Correlate link", you'll see it open to the phrase "tea party".

What search phrase best correlates with "tea party"? Answer: "firearms dealers"! Ewwww!

Correlations with "republican" came up "celebrity republicans". Here are a few, e.g., Chuck Norris and Mel Gibson, not the brightest sparks, but beloved by firearms folk.

For comparison, here is a list of celebrity democrats, e.g., Natalie Portman and Tom Hanks. Overall, I like the people on this list better than the celebrity republicans, and that's mostly without knowing their politics a priori. Hypothesis: Portman & Hanks are smarter than Norris & Gibson.

For correlations with "democrat". the second highest term is "am i a democrat". Of course, the phrase "democrat" will correlate with "am i a democrat", lest you wonder whether democrats don't know they are democrats. I searched on "am i a democrat", and found a test at The Political Compass. In a passing moment of humility, I decided to check whether I am a democrat. The results of my test are below.

JFR's alleged political compass

Famous people's political compasses

As you can see, the Political Compass website's test puts me squarely with the Dalai Lama! And right next to Nelson Mandela. These people are not bad company.

But they've got my economic (left-right) direction wrong. Having graduated from the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, I should have certified neo-liberal credentials. I would guess that the error is in the test's questions about regulation of business. I believe in the power of markets, but I also think that government must regulate businesses, to ensure they operate within the law, to prevent their misleading consumers, and to protect third parties and the environment from the drive for profit. A belief that markets should be well-regulated is hardly the same as being a communist. I think the political compass needs a third axis about justice.

Update. Here's a beautiful example of how government intervention can improve an economy: the Indian government's program to provide identification to poor people will allow the government to greatly reduce corruption and slash market-distorting subsidies. The modern American tea party libertarian firearms-toting Republican would cry that this is a ghastly bloated government intervention in the private market. The job of government is, in part, to make markets work better. If you want kids to play well together, you have to keep them out of the street and watch the bully.

Update 2. Read President Obama's interview for Time Magazine. Note particularly his comments about regulation.

The Republican vow of loyalty to Grover Norquist

2011-12-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

I saw Casino Jack last night, nice movie with Kevin Spacey, about Jack Abramoff. The movie was entertaining, despite the foul mouths of the main characters, but the Republican corruption was depressing. Grover Norquist figured briefly in the film, involved with Abramoff's dirty money, as one who got away scot free.

But Republican corruption is not what I want to discuss right now. I want to discuss formal pledged and signed Republican disloyalty to American welfare.

Grover Norquist has conned a large number of American lawmakers (nearly all Republican) into signing the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge", which is a promise never to support any proposal which will either increase taxes or reduce deductions. Such a proposal is obviously detrimental to America's welfare, and you can easily see why.

The optimal tax level is something that must change over time, because economic conditions change over time. Further, tax levels should change differently for different types of tax payers, sometimes rising on one type, and lowering for others, and then later changing. Shouldn't congressman be open to whatever was necessary to improve America, as opposed to whatever was necessary to obstruct whatever was necessary to improve America? And surely a major change in America's welfare would strongly motivate a change in the tax policies from those of the Bush Administration?

Ask your congressmen if they have greater loyalty to American welfare than they do to Grover Norquist. If your congressman is on this list, http://s3.amazonaws.com/atrfiles/files/files/091411-federalpledgesigners.pdf, please vote them out!

Follow-up: The Washington Post has an interesting set of graphics. Make your own judgements on them. I think we need a straight Democratic ticket in the next election: we need good government, not a pledge to obstruction.

A comment on some of the current public debate

2011-10-16T10:49:00.001-07:00

Some people don't seem to be understanding this post, at least not correctly. So let me be obvious.

Many government regulations are designed to protect the public from rapacious businesses. The screeching Republican calls for "less regulation" are caving to a very few very wealthy people, who very much do not like anyone watching their operations. When those people are told not to steal, they scream that the rules are bad for the economy and un-American.

Clear enough now?

Two views on the budget battle

2011-07-15T00:04:00.002-07:00

Karl Rove, that genius of Republican spin, thinks "Obama owns the debt-ceiling fiasco".

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winner in Economics, thinks that it's the GOP that has gone insane.

Have you tried it yourself? Can you do it without raising revenue? Do you want to do with without raising revenue?

Would I lie to you?

Two views on the budget battle

2011-07-15T00:04:00.000-07:00

In Honour of Khan Mohammad

2011-05-25T03:44:00.001-07:00

"He was killed because he wanted to run the school."

This man was courageous and good. The world, especially Afghanistan, is worse without him.

Republicans repent!

2011-05-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

"Arithmetic has a well known liberal bias." - Paul Krugman

" 'Republicans = delusion.' " -John Quiggin

"Expertise is evidence of error" - Jacob Weisberg

See the Quiggin article for the best overview of current politics. I so hope he is correct! Krugman is more pessimistic, if not cranky (in his words), but at least he gave us a nice video.

Ben Franklin's sister and "Republican values"

2011-04-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

Friends, I urge you to read this excellent essay in the NY Times by Jill Lepore. Prof. Lepore writes of Ben Franklin's impoverished sister Jane, pointing out the irony of the current Republican proposals to cut care for the poor, women's health, and education.

Image from http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/24/opinion/24leporeimg/24leporeimg-articleLarge.jpg

Dieting: "Don't tell anyone"?

2011-04-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

CNN has a typically chatty entry about a woman who lost a lot of weight.

Her doctor gave her these four tips:

1. Eat 8 ounces of food every 3 hours.
2. No sugary drinks.
3. Do not skip meals.
4. Do not tell anyone what you're doing.

The first three make sense, from what I've read of the scientific literature. But the last? How does not telling anyone help me stay on a diet? Maybe this turns dieting into a personal vow? It seems to contradict many reports that say having a buddy system and being accountable to someone else is effective. For myself, I've found it much easier to stay on task when I share the task with someone else.

I've designed Wagmu to be private information. You can't easily share what you're doing with other people, and neither can other people see what you're doing. So it fits with not telling anyone, the personal vow approach. But I'm not sure that's the right thing. Comments welcome.

"Arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias"

2011-04-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes on the Ryan budget proposal. The Republicans seek to sell out American to the corporations. At what point do we say "Stop"?

Google's perfect translation

2011-04-03T03:37:00.000-07:00

This YouTube page has Richie Valens with "La Bamba".

The user wrote the words to the song as:

Para bailar la bamba, Para bailar la bamba, Se necesita una poca de gracia. Una poca de gracia pa mi pa ti. Arriba y arriba Y arriba y arriba, por ti seré, Por ti? seré Por ti seré. Yo no soy marinero. Yo no soy marinero, soy capitan. Soy capitan. Soy capitan. Bamba bamba...

Just for fun, I put his text into Google Translate, and got back this, which I think is absolutely perfect:

Want to dance, To dance the Bamba, You need a little grace. A little grace pa mi pa ti. Up and up and up and up, for you will be, For you I will For you I will. I am not a sailor. I am not a sailor, I'm captain. I'm captain. I'm captain. Bamba bamba ...

If you love the earth, then kill your cat

2011-03-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

An NY Times article re-iterates a conclusion I've heard before: cats are bad for the environment.

Ecological disaster. Image from NY Times.

I dream of a future where we are all Japanese

2011-03-20T13:36:00.001-07:00

Beautiful NY Times article

Repeal the Price-Anderson Act!

2011-03-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

Nuclear energy is often hailed as the solution to climate change. Of course, before that, it was the solution to the oil crisis. I think nuclear energy might be a solution to these problems, possibly with the new reactor designs that people are thinking about. But we need to get the price signals right.

In their article “Environment & Energy: Catastrophic Liabilities” (in Measuring and Managing Federal Financial Risk), Geoffrey Heal and Howard Kunreuther point out that the Price-Anderson Act puts the cost of nuclear catastrophe squarely onto the taxpayers. It's well worth the time to read their article. Without this subsidy, the nuclear industry would not be commercially viable. Think about that: the financial viability of nuclear energy requires that you personally pay for the catastrophic risk.

Should a restaurant put the cost of sickening a customer onto the city government? Should the local town pay for the long term care of someone injured by a surgeon's malpractice? Should you cover me when I smash up someone else's car? I don't think so. I think we should each be required to buy the appropriate insurance to cover our own business liabilities.

Again, I think nuclear energy might be a solution. But at least let's have the nuclear power companies bear all the costs.

Chocolate and the PMS diet?

2011-03-03T17:01:00.000-08:00

My good friend Maria asked whether chocolate is suggested for the PMS diet. She has a knack for this sort of straight-to-the-mark intuition.

As far as I can tell, based on the data from Wagmu and the Brazilian study, just 3 grams of 70% dark gets the oleic acid you need! Add 15 grams of walnuts for your alpha-linolenic acid, and 45 grams of dry-roasted sunflower seeds for linoleic acid and vitamin E. A teaspoon of cod liver oil supplies your omega-3 fatty acid.

To re-cap:
- 3 grams extra dark chocolate (that's just one little square),
- 15 grams of walnuts (a heaping tablespoon),
- 45 grams of dry-roasted sunflower seeds (3 tablespoons should do it),
- a teaspoon of cod liver oil.

The above list will go a long ways toward sorting out your essential fatty acids. By the way, I eat all that every day.

However, the study also included omega-6 18:3 n6 ccc gamma-linolenic fatty acid (GAL). Unfortunately, I can't find a good food source of GAL, other than Canola Harvest brand margarine. You would have to eat 5 tablespoons of the stuff to get what was in the study pills. And I can't figure out how that brand got so much of it in their product, because GAL does not seem to be in the separate ingredients. They must have processed it somehow.

GAL is not widely available in foods, which implies we shouldn't need it. Indeed, your body produces GAL, but apparently not enough sometimes. If you really want to duplicate the study, I think you'll have to add primrose oil or borage oil (neither of which is in the USDA food database, and therefore not in Wagmu).

The PMS Diet?

2011-03-03T00:46:00.000-08:00

Back when the Iraq war was beginning, Bush's aides gave him daily updates on the conflict. One time, they told him that two Brazilian soldiers had been killed. "Oh, my God!!!" he exclaimed, "That's horrible!!!" His aides were taken aback. "Yes, Mr. President, it is horrible. But why are you reacting so much more strongly than usual?" He paused, then said, "Oh. Well, how many is a Brazilian?"

Quick segway to premenstrual syndrome. I've never had it and won't ever get it, LOL! However, four Brazilian researchers, a great many, recently wrote an article, "Essential fatty acids for premenstrual syndrome..." They showed that consumption of several essential fatty acids probably helps reduce symptoms of PMS.

What did those women take, and how can you get it? The key bit is this: "...each 1-gram capsule contained a mean of 210 mg of gamma linolenic acid, 175 mg of oleic acid, 345 mg of linoleic acid, 250 mg of other polyunsaturated acids and 20 mg of vitamin E." The paper also says, "Improvement in symptoms was higher when the 2-gram dose was used." So as far as I can tell, here's what you need:

- 420 mg of gamma linolenic acid,
- 350 mg of oleic acid,
- 690 mg of linoleic acid,
- 40 mg of vitamin E.
- 500 mg of some other unspecified polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Now you could run out to your local pharmacy to seek a pill with those ingredients. You may get lucky and find something from Hebron Farmaceutica. You would pay a lot of money for it.

Or you could fire up Wagmu, and change your Nutrient Settings to include:
- Fatty acid ω6 18:3 n6 ccc γ-linolenic. That's gamma-linolenic acid.
- Fatty acid 18:1c oleic. There's more than one isomer of oleic acid, and the Brazilian paper doesn't which say kind they used. But the USDA SR 22 database documentation, page 19, indicates "oleic" means the 18:1c isomer.
- Linoleic acid. Watch those spellings, as linoleic acid is different from linolenic acid.

While you're at it, you may as well add

- α-linolenic acid" (that's alpha-linolenic acid), and

- "Fatty acid ω3 22:6 n3 DHA" (that's your omega-3 fatty acid).

Set the quantities as you please. If you don't know what to enter, have a look at the official report, "Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, ...", maybe focusing on pages 1324-1325. (A gram is the same as a thousand milligrams, 1g=1000mg, which makes me think of my dad's MG sports car, which I cracked up into a 1000mg pieces when I was 16.)

Sorry, I can't make the quantities easy for you yet. In the next month or so, I hope to load appropriate default values for some of these nutrients to all Wagmu members' Nutrient Settings. The Wagmu disclaimer applies here.

Wagmu will already have vitamin E listed for your needs as recommended by the U.S. government, but you may wish to change the amount.

Then in the Food Plan, type in what you ate today. You'll almost certainly see that you're short of many nutrients, not just these fatty acids.

Finally, you can use the Suggest button to help you adjust your food quantities, and add new foods, to get what you need. Click the pumpkin! You will have to change your diet!

Supposedly a Brazilian can improve your life. I wouldn't know. But maybe four Brazilians can improve your life. Good job, Edilberto Filho, José Lima, João Neto and Ulisses Montarroyos.

Better Bittman Bars

2011-03-01T18:07:00.000-08:00

I'm a fan of Mark Bittman. Brilliant chef, a great writer, and even an entertaining actor in his videos.

As part of a string of articles, he recently gave a recipe for a Almond-Apricot Granola Bars. In the comments section, I wrote:

I took the time to type this recipe into my nutrition website, www.wagmu.com. It is recipe #13592 Bittman's Almond-Apricot Granola Bars. Wagmu indicates that the recipe costs about $1.68/serving, when divided into 8 servings. That's a modestly-priced granola bar.

However, if you add this to a food plan in Wagmu, and click the "Suggest" button, Wagmu tries to take it out. That implies that this recipe, however yummy, is quite expensive relative to the nutrition it provides.

In contrast, Wagmu will encourage consumption of plain oats ("Cereal, oats, regular and quick and instant, not fortified, dry") and milk. It's all the embellishments which make the oats both yummy and expensive!

Perhaps a less expensive (for the nutrition) recipe could be had by trading the almond butter for peanut butter, using sunflower seeds and a few walnuts instead of almonds, trading the apricots for raisins or dried currants, and reducing the honey. It probably won't taste as good!

Here's an update on this. I developed another recipe, #13593 Peanut Butter Granola Bars, specifically to find a recipe that was both cheaper and more nutritious. Today's experiment with this was quite successful. Yum! (He says to wait 90 minutes 'til they cool, but I couldn't wait that long for mine.) And only $0.62 per 71.7 g serving, versus $1.68 per his 73 g serving. A dollar a bar less! Next, compare the nutrients. The Peanut Butter Granola bars have more of almost every nutrient. Far more nutrient bang for your buck.

Nutrient profile for Bittman's almond apricot bars ($1.68 each), compared to Raffensperger's peanut butter bars ($0.62 each).

Wagmu's powerful optimizing Suggest function will rip the Bittman bars right out. But add the substitute, and you can make a complete day's plan:

#7522 Coffee with milk, 3 servings.

#13593 Peanut Butter Granola Bars, 2 servings.

#7526 Egg on toast with herbs, 2 servings.

Spinach, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 190 grams.

Peppers, sweet, green, raw, 100 grams.

Fish oil, cod liver 4.3 grams.

Milk, reduced fat, fluid, 2% milkfat, with added vitamin A and vitamin D, two 300 gram servings.

Apples, raw, with skin medium (3" dia), one.

Here's the nutrients for this food plan. I rounded the food quantities, so the potassium is a bit short, and energy a bit high. But just about perfect!

You can force Bittman's bars into a diet, but it will be more expensive.

Regulation versus "free" markets

2011-02-27T19:40:00.000-08:00

I like markets. I like being able to go to the store and buy stuff. I'm glad that I don't have to own a cow to get milk. But problems with markets arise when some people's behaviour imposes costs on others.

I don't like thieves in any guise. Those folk looting Christchurch phone generators after the earthquake are bad. Of course, the looters don't care until they're caught, and then they bear the force of the law.

What about those folk looting America's water for natural gas? They are like other thieves, except that they've managed to influence law-makers, so their behaviour is ignored. But these people are imposing costs on hundreds of thousands of other people.

The Chinese currency intervention is among the most epic abuses of the commons, almost as terrific as global warming in terms of sheer cost imposed on others. Their behaviour is clearly anti-market.

"Free market" to me means "anything goes". People are free to operate their businesses in any way they like, without regard to the costs imposed on others. Think John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, James Inhofe, anti-regulation. The destruction of American watersheds and the Chinese currency intervention are "free market" because those people have the freedom to behave as they wish, without regulation.

Surely the economy would be better off if those costs were eliminated! This is not "pro-regulation" or "leftist" or "Obama-mania". It is simply about lowering the total cost to society. We would all be richer if the market, and the commons, were properly regulated. That takes good government, not "less" government.

What's the best way to regulate the commons? Here's a recent blog post, though, by one of the best minds on the problem, Robert Stavins. Note the link to his full article.

I am an American and I don't need a gun.

2011-01-27T00:47:00.001-08:00

Beauty in print

2011-01-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

The NYT has an opinion article about peace in the Middle East. It's beautiful. Made me feel good.

Here's an NYT article on calcium and vitamin D. Well-done, but lacking the emotional bang of Mid-East peace.

It's not too late to start training

2010-11-25T13:27:00.000-08:00

Another brilliant NY Times article, this one on exercise and the elderly. Wanna live longer and be healthier? Then exercise, and exercise hard! The article admits that motivation is the big problem.

Motivation! Ugh. I believe strongly in exercise. I want to exercise. I imagine my self as fit as my mountain-climbing colleague Paul. Then when it actually comes time to go to the gym, I'm too tired, I've got finish this chore, it's raining,... LOL!

Can you solve the U.S. deficit problem?

2010-11-16T21:24:00.000-08:00

The NY Times has a nice "Budget Puzzle". I saved $1.612 trillion, but dare not say how! In any case, I think it's a nice example of journalism and information technology. Well done, NYT!

Yet another update on the earthquake

2010-09-08T00:56:00.000-07:00

Hang in there, everyone. The land beneath our feet is quieting.

This graph shows estimated energy by 4-hour period. To create the graph, I first converted the Richter scale to energy as energy = 31.6^Richter_value, then summed those values by 4-hour block, and then took the base-10 logarithm of the total. Based on my friend Stephen's point that, in August, Christchurch had earthquakes averaging Richter 2, I cut the vertical axis at the corresponding energy level of 3.

Updated quake intensity

2010-09-06T16:18:00.001-07:00

Last night was bumpy - looks like we had the second worst shock since the first.

Modest good news on Christchurch quakes

2010-09-06T00:54:00.000-07:00

The after-shocks of Christchurch's big quake have been making me nervous. They didn't bother me yesterday, but this afternoon, I was anxious.

So I thought I'd look at the data. I got this from GNS's Quake Search database. Irritating interface, with the data 12 hours off, but I got there in the end. I graphed the intensity of the earthquakes over time, and here's what it looks like. On the left, you can see the big one, above 7. On the right, you an see the high 4's that made me jump today.

New Zealand should add vitamin D to milk (U.S. readers can ignore this)

2010-08-03T02:56:00.000-07:00

Since Wagmu 2.0 has been up, I've been actively logging and optimizing my daily menu. I put in a so-so food plan, and Wagmu Suggest helps me turn it into a great food plan, even though I've limited my energy intake to about 1,250 calories.

There's just one exception: Wagmu keeps telling me to eat salmon, sardines, or cod liver oil, because I can't get enough vitamin D! And I need it. Here's a recent article on it, from the NY Times.

It's mid-winter here in Christchurch, and the grey drizzle is depressing. So I'm not getting vitamin D from sunlight.

In the U.S., milk is fortified with vitamins A and D by law. If I tell Wagmu that I'm drinking milk with A & D, then I can get my vitamin D. Conclusion? New Zealand should require milk fortification with vitamin D!

On a trivial matter, I created a recipe for cabbage soup, (Wagmu recipe #13583 Cabbage soup), and built an optimized diet around it. Try it yourself. But it's not the "Cabbage Soup Diet" anymore!

A modest suggestion for Ground Zero

2010-07-31T14:54:00.000-07:00

The NY Times (my favorite paper, I guess) has an article about a proposed Muslim center at the foot of the new World Trade Center complex. I'm truly torn myself about the idea. On the one hand, terrorists might feel like they triumphed by replacing the WTC with a mosque. On the other hand, it would demonstrate America's tolerance.

My solution: put two mosques there, little tiny ones, one Sunni and one Shiite. I mean really tiny, like a good-sized closet. And put two tiny churches there as well, one Catholic and one Presbyterian. Add temples for Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Bahá'í. Make room for a few more, and even a couple of spaces that could rotate through the smaller religions on a monthly basis.

Put these mosques, churches, and temples in a circular courtyard, facing each other, with a shared entrance. Put in big clear windows on the courtyard side, so worshippers can see the people of other religions worshipping, too.

And on 11 September each year, let the WTC religious groups join together in offering each other and all passersby blessings and a modest free breakfast.

Announcing Wagmu 2.0!

2010-07-12T20:23:00.000-07:00

Wagmu 2.0 is now online! Save your health, save your wealth, and save the world!

Wagmu is a powerful food planning system, designed to help you get 100% of your nutritional requirements while saving you money. Wagmu food plans naturally tend to use less meat, sugar, and processed foods, so your menu will be better for the environment, too.

We've just released a new version. The most exciting new feature is Wagmu Suggest. Wagmu Suggest will save you money and improve your diet. After logging your foods for a day, you'll probably see that you were short of some nutrients, and had too much of others. Click the pumpkin on the toolbar, and Wagmu Suggest adjusts your food quantities to get a better nutrient score.

Often, even with Suggest's power, the foods you've selected can't make a good food plan. So Suggest loads the Wagmu Suggest Dropdown, right on the existing food dropdown. The Wagmu Suggest Dropdown recommends foods which improve your nutrients and lower your costs. Pick a food you like, and click Suggest again. You can control how Wagmu Suggest behaves with radio buttons, such as to prevent Suggest from giving you too much broccoli, or not enough chocolate. I've found Wagmu Suggest to be a lot of fun, and I like creating food plans which are both nutritious and inexpensive.

We've added thousands of new foods, from the U.S. government's FNDDS database. Better still, Wagmu 2.0 knows about the cost of food in approximate U.S. dollars. While not perfect, no other diet website shows costs at all. (In Wagmu 3.0, we hope to let you customize your food costs, and Wagmu 3.0 will also have exercise planning and grocery lists.) Wagmu Suggest tries to help you lower the cost of your diet, while also improving your nutrient profile.

Wagmu 2.0 has search features. You can search for recipes, rate them, and see their cost. Even cooler, the new Food Plan Search lets you find entire food plans, and sort them. You can sort by Pumpkin Rating (everybody's rating of how good that plan is), by cost, and by % nutrients scaled to your own custom nutritional requirements. You can then copy those food plans to your own calendar, and edit them as you wish.

We've been playing with the website for a couple years now, moving slowly. The technical problem is to have you select one food at a time from a restricted set of 15,000, and that seems to require a somewhat complicated interface. Please be patient in getting started. We have posted some help pages, with more on the way. I'd be grateful for feedback. Just click on the Wagmu comment link.

I still haven't worked out a business model for this website, despite having spent a lot of money on it. I don't want ads, because the relevant ads are food and health related, and the point of the website is to short-circuit that marketing! Eventually, Wagmu will probably require a subscription, but until then, enjoy the powerful advice for free.

Letter to Mitchell Rogers, Lincoln High School, Lincoln, New Zealand

2010-05-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

This post is a response to "The role of coal in sustainable energy solutions for New Zealand," by Mitchell Rogers.

Dear Mr. Rogers:

I was interested to read your prize-winning essay propounding the use of coal in New Zealand.

You made quite a strong final statement:

"I believe coal mining in New Zealand is sustainable because the footprint is very small overall and the economic return per hectare is huge compared with other land uses. The role of coal in sustainable energies is to produce a long lasting, efficient energy source to provide all humans with access to electricity, steel and other industries and to continue living our lives around the world and in New Zealand as we are accustomed to."

Please have a look at recent comments by 255 of the world's leading scientists, "Climate Change and the Integrity of Science." Please also have a look at Michael Specter's presentation, "The danger of science denial."

Make a note to yourself to re-read those sentences in twenty years. See if those words still makes sense. Coal use is brutally unsustainable, the dirtiest energy we have. And we can't keep living as we've been accustomed. We have to change.

I note that the contest was sponsored by Solid Energy, a leading producer of coal. You've been used to produce pure New Zealand greenwash.

Wagmu 2.0 & Decisions on The Menu

2010-04-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

We watched "Julie & Julia" on Friday night. It's a lovely cheerful film about Julia Child and gorgeous food. It reminded me of our fabulous meal over Easter weekend at the Quickenberry Lodge.

Attracted by Meryl Streep and her character's obvious delight in cooking and eating, I spent much of this weekend looking at Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Aside from being hopelessly intimidated, I see some discouraging issues with this kind of cooking.

First issue: this kind of cooking takes a lot of time. The top chefs think nothing of taking 20 minutes simply to carmelize the onions or reduce a sauce to concentrate the flavour. Don't get me wrong - I love fine food. But I can't fit that kind of prep time into my life 7 days a week.

Second issue: this kind of cooking has a lot of fat. What are the three ingredients to French food? Answer: butter, butter, and butter. The typical French recipe for a super-food like cauliflower, cheap and high nutrient, has a half cup of cream per serving, plus the butter and Parmesan cheese. I'd love it! But, despite Dr. Atkins, those of us who need to reduce our waistlines are not going to succeed very well on that much fat.

Third issue: this kind of cooking is expensive. The recipe for beef bourgignon, for example, calls a full bottle of wine. Yum! Bring it on! - just don't make me pay for it, at least not every day. A modest look at the forums and comments around the web show that people are worried about the cost of food, especially in the current economic slowdown. Not everybody can afford a lot of wine, cream, and Parmesan cheese.

But I'm so attracted to it, nonetheless! I wanna eat the good stuff! But these decisions have tradeoffs.

Here's a chart of the tradeoffs. I've put the good stuff, palatability and nutrition, on the vertical axes, and the bad stuff, prep time and $ cost, on the horizontal axes.

Our ideal diet should look like Meryl Streep - tall and thin. Wouldn't it be great to find a nutritious diet that tasted great, but was quick to make and cheap, too?

Unfortunately, our actual diets tend to look like Danny DeVito, short and with a big belly. Not really all that good, not really all that cheap, but fast. And not too nourishing.
On the bottom left, I put raw cabbage: not really all that tasty, but low cost, great nutrition profile, and no prep time. Just buy, pull off a piece, and stuff it in your mouth. I guess you can buy it organic if you're worried that it might need washing first. Let's call this the Linda Hunt profile. (Great actress, but still the wrong character for the boss on "NCIS LA", which is not nearly as good as the original "NCIS".)

Now look at the bottom right, the Cauliflower Gratin. Huge on prep time, huge on palatability, huge on cost, and pretty good nutrition. I gave it a slightly lower nutrition rank due to its fat. But this profile is a Julia Child profile. She was a huge woman, 6 feet, two inches. She loved cooking, and she loved eating. I'd love to eat like that, but I really shouldn't!

So there's this whole confusing issue of what we want to do, what we should do, what we are able to do, and what we actually do.

I want Cauliflower Gratin. I should probably eat plain blanched cauliflower. I'm not able to make Cauliflower Gratin, at least not very well, because the broiler on our ancient second-hand stove isn't working, and I don't have the cream and Parmesan cheese anyway. What will I actually do? Dunno yet. I was planning the Gratin for lunch, but ended up with toast. LOL!

Somewhere among the infinite set of recipes, surely one cauliflower recipe out there is reasonably easy to make, doesn't have too much fat, and tastes good.

What I really want is a system that helps me with the search. I want to find those Meryl Streep diets. Google's great, but not enough, as on-line recipes never cover all four of palatability, nutrition, prep time, and cost. Enter Wagmu 2.0! Stayed tuned for the big launch sometime this year.

Intel pinched my cool idea

2010-04-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

I recently proposed the idea of a "consistency checker", a computer program to compare two sets of text (e.g., Sarah Palin quotes here and here, to the New York Times, or Bin Laden quotes to the Koran). The program would report the degree of agreement between the two texts.

Well, Intel and UC Berkeley have done a pretty close approximation with "Dispute Finder". While still early days for their code, it's a great start. It's an easy Firefox add-on. Then try a search for "global warming hoax", and see how much text turns up highlighted pink in your browser.

I'll tag this post under "corruption", as I think Dispute Finder, and a thousand similar programs to come, will bring a new level of transparency in governance. Watch out you Wachovian beauty queen!

Horrid, Horrid, and Hope

2010-03-26T15:19:00.000-07:00

Two depressing CNN articles on water pollution: California's Salton Sea and Indonesia's Citarum River.

Here's something that business hasn't quite worked out yet: when one business spews on the commons, other businesses are injured. With the Salton Sea, a thriving beautiful community - making lots of good money - has been destroyed by the bad behavior of other businesses. Why not sue those other operations for the real injury?

In the Citarum River, the problem is more obviously Big Bad against Small Victim, though many of the victims are causing some of their own problems. Still, people know how to run textile plants without destroying the environment. It's not that hard nor expensive, and certainly much cheaper than the cost of poisoning an entire region.

At some point, we have to realize that we all (business included) could be much wealthier if we would stop business from getting a profit of $1 by imposing a cost of $100 on everyone else.

Then I read a NY Times article on the demise of cap and trade for carbon emissions. I always thought cap-and-trade was the way to go. It would be great if the permits were auctioned, but realistically, I thought that giving out a few credits as a sop to industry would at least make the thing work.

But apparently the proposal got mired in the special interests. Eventually, the conservatives killed it. As I read through that article, I got more and more depressed, thinking that we would never solve the carbon emissions problems.

These days, any time that conservatives kill something, I have a knee-jerk reaction that something good was lost. It's not a good reaction, I guess, but understandable with the current irrational Republican strategy.

Then I got to the end of the article, which explained that a bill much like Obama's original plan for a carbon auction is now on the House agenda. A carbon auction is, for the most part, the same as cap-and-trade, but with no free credits. The two allocation methods should have the same carbon reduction (though some economists think an auction motivates more innovation). But the cash flows are different. With no free credits, government makes all the money, and can offset taxes with it! No give-aways to industry!

So the oil industry got too greedy with the previous cap-and-trade and has shot itself in the foot. They're going to have to pay a lot more now, money which will be returned to the American people. Write your representatives and urge passage of the bipartisan Cantwell-Collins plan.

Solving global warming is cheap! And the solution is much cheaper than the costs of global warming.

Are we too far gone to save?

2010-03-12T19:53:00.001-08:00

Just attended the beautiful Ellerslie Flower Show at Hagley Park, here in Christchurch. Pictured here is a a mask from one of the competitions.

Near the exit from the Countdown food tent, I saw a lady putting a plastic cup into the recycle bin.

"Are you sure that's recyclable?" I asked. Asking the question was my first mistake. I'm not the recycling cop.

She said, "It doesn't matter. Mankind is already too far gone. We may as well use up what we've got and get it over with."

My second mistake was trying to reason with an irrational person. "Hang on, don't spoil it for the rest of us. Better to work to keep things going."

Then she got annoyed. "Have you got a car? Huh!? Do you own a car!?" But by then, I'd caught on. I clammed up, not wanting to say I drive a Prius, that I'd taken the bike to the garden show, and I've committed a huge part of my energy to finding solutions to environmental problems. Whatever I do, she would see hypocrisy in it.

The world environment is in bad shape, and it's our fault. The solution, though, is to pull together, and tell our government to pull the big levers required to make the big changes. Fatalism is an excuse for a tragically depressed person to act stupid. Hope calls forth creativity and hard work.

FIRST AID STUNNER

2010-03-09T21:55:00.000-08:00

So a little excess superlative in the title.

For the past two days, I've been doing one of those obligatory safety training sessions brought on by the big institutions. All very corporate, until I actually turned up to the first session (late of course).

Our instructor, Miriam (pictured here), was a brilliant teacher. In a single ballet move, she explained how to put on a triangular arm support. Plastic mannequins became real people who we wanted to save. In hilarious role playing, we made mistakes - I put out flames with my bare hands - and in doing so, learned the right way. She threw us scenarios where people had multiple injuries, and gave us the confidence to know which to manage first, and why.

Bravo, Miriam! Thanks for the excellent teaching.

Health economists support Obama's health plan

2010-02-26T13:59:00.000-08:00

The NY Times printed a letter to the President and Congress, from a long list of distinguished economists who support Obama's health plan. Here's an excerpt:

The President’s proposal incorporates many of the best ideas proposed by Democrats and Republicans, patients, clinicians, and researchers. It combines and strengthens many elements of the House and Senate bills and repairs their deficits. It offers a strong foundation for comprehensive reform.

So let's please just do it? But in the mean time, here's an Aretha Franklin treasure.

Better balance in 3 months, no time per day

2010-02-20T14:45:00.000-08:00

Feeling creaky? Feeling fragile? This tip won't make you infallible, but it'll reduce the chance of a fall, and you won't spend even an extra minute doing the exercise.

I thought I'd relay a successful experiment I did on myself. When I turned 50, I decided I wanted to improve my balance. I saw a web page somewhere which described three increasingly difficult balance exercises: standing on one foot, standing on one foot with your eyes shut, and standing on one foot with your eyes shut on a soft surface.

Step 1. All I did was to put my socks and shoes on while standing on one foot. Zero extra time per day. I couldn't do it very well at first, but after a few months, I could do it easily.

Step 2. Now I put my socks and shoes on, while standing on one foot, with my eyes shut. That's all! Zero extra time per day. This was harder than standing on one foot with eyes open, because sight gives a lot of balance cues. I had to pay a lot more attention to my legs and feet. But after a few more months, I could do it pretty well. Not perfectly ever day, and not very well if I'm feeling poorly. But this is such an easy exercise for the gains.

What next? I'll move on to Step 3, also standing on the bath mat.

Stay young with better nutrition?

2010-02-13T01:22:00.000-08:00

Aksenov et al studied the effects of a well-rounded nutritional supplement in engineered mice. Helped 'em (the mice, that is) stay young. Your mileage may vary.

And Rucklidge et al found that a lot of nutritional supplements can help people with attention deficit disorder and severe mood dysregulation. Just to see how much extra was being given to people in her study, I did the sums:

               Dose     Max    Min  % Dose/Min
Vitamin B-12   902.4      -    2.4  37600%
Vitamin B-6     37.3    100    1.3   2869%
Vitamin E      320.4      -   15     2136%
Thiamin         19.2      -    1.2   1600%
Riboflavin      14.8      -    1.3   1138%
Copper, Cu       8.025   10    0.9    892%
Vitamin D     1640     2000  200      820%
Vitamin C      690     2000   90      767%
Zinc, Zn        59       40   11      536%
Pantot acid     26.75     -    5      535%
Selenium, Se   259      400   55      471%
Folate, total 1840     1000  400      460%
Iron, Fe        21.875   45    8      273%
Magnesium     1020      350  420     243%
Calcium, Ca   2320     2500 1000     232%
Phosphorus, P 1540     4000  700     220%
Niacin          35       35   16     219%
Vitamin A     1745     3000  900     194%
Manganese        2.42    11    2.3   105%
Potassium, K  4940        - 4700     105%

This is really a lot of extra nutrient! I'm inclined to believe that simply ensuring that you get 100% of what you need should do the trick. Trouble is, we don't.

If you wanted to find the lowest-cost diet that matched all that, it would look something like this:

341.2 grams, Cereals ready-to-eat, KELLOGG, KELLOGG'S ALL-BRAN COMPLETE Wheat Flakes,
351.1 grams, Cereals ready-to-eat, GENERAL MILLS, Whole Grain TOTAL,
1.8 grams, Tea, instant, unsweetened, powder,
923.8 grams, Beef liver, fried.

That's pretty much two boxes of fortified cereal and two pounds of liver. Oh, yeah, and a cuppa tea. Eeeeewwwwww! Again, your mileage may vary.

Is Nutrition Business Journal one of the bad guys?

2010-02-09T17:47:00.001-08:00

A recent post in Nutrition Business Journal comments on Senator McCain's introduction of a bill to increase the safety of food supplements. Here's a quote.

"If passage of the bill resulted in the immediate removal of one or more popular ingredients—similar to the 2004 banning of ephedra—the sports supplement category could see a retraction of 30% or more in sales. If the removal of products were to expand into weight loss and other related categories and remove one or more herb or botanical extract ingredients from the market, the impact could be even greater as that segment of the industry is almost twice as large as the sports supplement category. The retail component of the bill could cause some retailers to stop selling certain dietary supplements if they felt overburdened by the obligation to ensure product safety."

To me, this makes NBJ look like the bad guys! They mourn the ephedra ban in the name of profit. But people got sick from that, and some died.

Safety is a hallmark of good business. Anything less should be prosecuted. Tag this with "ethics" and "nutrition".

Note to Trijicon, Corp.

2010-01-19T12:36:00.000-08:00

This company is putting Bible references on American military gunsights!

Somebody needs to break the news to Trijicon exectives that they can't save souls with messages of love on the barrel of a gun.

"I don't have to wonder for a nanosecond how the American public would react if citations from the Koran were being inscribed onto these U.S. armed forces gun sights instead of New Testament citations," said Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Christmas caroling experience

2009-12-23T18:07:00.000-08:00

From time to time last year, my son Pete had been assisting with a little Sunday evening church service. Last night, he took us to the service to sing Christmas carols.

It was a twenty minute drive from our house to the country. We drove through the little town of Templeton, turned right off Main South Road, and went up Kirk Road, to The Chapel of the Holy Family. Sounds Catholic, I thought. Apparently, it's Presbyterian. It had a modern logo that looked to me like two lungs, a sternum, and a couple kidneys. Anyway, the Chapel was a small place off a small contry road, on the south island of a very small country at the bottom of the world.

In the parking lot, a woman was helping people in wheelchairs get out of a van. Inside, almost everyone was handicapped in some way, mainly intellectual disabilities. It dawned on me that this service was for handicapped people. Well, that was okay. Marilyn's spent a lot of time with people with disabilities, and she greeted some of them. I think there were thirty or forty people there.

A man named Allen lead the service. An older lady sat ready at an electric piano. After a few words from Allen, we began singing. I think the first song was "Oh Christmas Tree" . In between songs, Allen said some words. "What's the important part of Christmas?" The singing was uneven, with quite a few random noises and motions from the congregation. Peter, tall and beautiful, ran the PowerPoint slides.

I haven't been into church much of late, but for some reason, I found myself at ease. And with each passing song, I was having more fun.

After 35 minutes or so, Allen indicated that it was going to end. This was way too soon! Someone asked for "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer," so we did that. Then I asked for "Joy to the World," and we sang that. And for a few moments, the place became a King's front hall filled with a majestic choir.

Then it was over. The congregation slowly trickled out, a few with assistance, to get a piece of Christmas cake and a chocolate truffle (with rum essence) in the foyer. I asked Pete whether this was the same audience he had been serving all year, and he said yes.

I shook Allen's hand, and thanked him for the nicest caroling I'd done in at least a dozen years.

Here's the place on Google Maps.

To give you a sense of what the music felt like, try this:

Merry Christmas.

First diet from FNDDS

2009-12-20T18:48:00.000-08:00

To start my study on the economic value of nutrients, I've created the first minimum cost diet based on data from the USDA Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies.

Unfortunately, their cost data is years out of date. If you wish, you can multiply the costs by some appropriate inflation factor, say, 2. Even then, I suspect that typical prices have changed with respect to each other. Still, this should be an inexpensive diet.

Only 2,000 kilocalories in this computer-generated diet. It meets all the nutritional requirements for a male, 30 to 50 years old. No warranty on palatability.

153.6 grams, $1.5/kg, Milk, dry, whole, with added vitamin D.
0.8 grams, $6.8/kg, Cereals ready-to-eat, KELLOGG, KELLOGG'S ALL-BRAN COMPLETE Wheat Flakes.
26 grams, $3.2/kg, Tomatoes, sun-dried.
190.3 grams, $0.2/kg, Mixed vegetable and fruit juice drink, with added nutrients.
49.7 grams, $0.3/kg, Rolls, dinner, rye.
445.6 grams, $0.2/kg, Tortillas, ready-to-bake or -fry, corn.
1.1 grams, $3/kg, Chicken liver, braised.
189.8 grams, $0.4/kg, Pinto, calico, or red Mexican beans, dry, cooked, fat not added in cooking.
21 grams, $3.4/kg, Peanut butter, vitamin and mineral fortified.

Editorial comments. If you drop the All-Bran and liver, you haven't lost much nutritionally. The sundried tomatoes and tortillas look way too cheap, like a factor of 20.

I'll post more diets, as I get them. Bon apétit!

The Economic Value of Nutritional Supplements

2009-12-09T00:20:00.001-08:00

Help! I have been asked to write a book chapter with the above title. I can write a technical document that will be correct, and maybe even interesting. But what would you want to know about this question? Leave comments please!

The New Climate Change Debate

2009-12-08T23:36:00.000-08:00

When the big guys come out swinging, it makes sense to learn what the fight is about.

Dr. James Hansen (NASA) wrote an NYT op-ed against carbon cap & trade. Hansen was among the first to sound the alarm about global warming, and has done much, often heroically, to help make the case. In his op-ed, he said that carbon cap & trade won't work, and that taxes should be used instead. I thought his op-ed was badly thought out; Dr. Hansen seemingly hasn't studied much economics. So I was glad to see that Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman agreed with me, in his NYT op-ed rebutting Hansen. Krugman also believes that global warming needs to be solved, but came out strongly in favour of cap & trade.

So the debate isn't about whether we need to limit emissions. The debate is about how to limit emissions. Thank heavens! We need to implement cap & trade quickly, then start reducing the cap.

In the meantime, I've started a modest experiment in carbon negative gardening. I ground up and buried 2 kg of charcoal in a new garden patch, dug out of the grass, and planted potatoes, pumpkin, basil, onion, and kale. Why? Biochar! See this excellent article from Cornell, in which Figure 36.1 shows 100% to 300% improvements over a control crop. I am so bad of a gardener that I need all the help I can get! Plus this is carbon negative. Maybe I'll buy a LuciaBBQ Grill, so I can have carbon negative cooking.

Other news: Sudan will stay poor for a long time. They're not willing to submit to international law. Good luck getting them to sign onto emissions reductions!

Finally, if you're a blinking idiot, and still think disbelieve that we need to reduce C02 emissions, look at this frightening video.

Blink! Blink!

You'll get it if you're an operations researcher.

2009-11-29T16:54:00.001-08:00

Falling on the sidewalk. Dick Cheney. Eggplant. Excel crashing every couple minutes. Sarah Palin. Fingernails on the chalkboard. And Frontline System's "Solver".

What do Jon Voight and Sarah Palin have in common?

2009-11-21T13:32:00.000-08:00

We watched Mission Impossible last night, with Jon Voight as the bad guy. (He betrays his country and kills his wife for a few million dollars.) In another almost-as-fictional world, he lost a lawsuit against a couple kiwi producers, and somehow that lead him to make policy pronouncements about New Zealand health care: "We would be no better off than the European countries and Canada and New Zealand who suffer greatly from a poor healthcare system. Their rationing system creates many deaths."

We suffer greatly? Whose paying for your acting in Washington, D.C., Mr. Voight? I'm an American, and I've lived here for 11 years, and believe me, the NZ health care system is streaks ahead of the U.S. system. The NZ system suffers only from being small, and therefore lacking strong competition in areas such as retail pharamacies. Rural areas are short doctors, but that's true everywhere. We pay a fraction of what the U.S. has to pay - I mean a fraction - and we have world class health care. In John Key's words, Voight has "the views of a protesting actor" rather than someone who understands health care.

Fox "News" "reporter" Bill O'Reilly had this first line in a recent column about "fact checking Sarah Palin" (an oxymoron if ever I heard one): "Once again, I'm going to keep this very short because we have a major policy interview with Sarah Palin this evening." This is hilarious! - first, that he would do a major policy interview, and second, that it would be with an ignorant whiner who does no policymaking , but is on a book promotion tour! Sarah Palin is doing incredibly well with her book promotion, even getting on Oprah Winfrey's show. I don't know why Oprah gave her that time, as Oprah was a strong supporter of Obama, and should have had more sense.

It's time to shut out Palin. I remember a couple years ago when Paris Hilton was in the news so steadily that I thought my browser had a bug. Eventually, a reporter refused to report on Paris Hilton. We need reporters to do a better job filtering. Note to the media: SHUT OUT PALIN.

Cool software idea: a consistency checker. Imagine software which could parse an input text A into a set of assertions, e.g., "Kiwis suffer from poor health care." Next, the software compares those assertions to assertions from a given body of canonical text B. The software scores each assertion in A for consistency against the assertions in B, with a scale of s = -100% to 100%. A score of -100% implies pure contradiction. A score of 0% implies neither contradiction nor agreement. A score of 100% implies pure agreement. We'd get a matrix where the columns are the assertions in A, and the rows are assertions in B. Most of these entries would be a score of 0%, as many assertions have nothing to do with each other. We could do even better if we tie the comparison system into a logic engine which checks for implications of a given assertion, and subsets of assertions.

This code would change the world! Imagine checking Al Qaeda's statements against the Koran (lots inconsistent), the Koran against the Bible (highly consistent), or Sarah Palin against the journal Science (whoa!)! Imagine a video of a politician speaking, and you can select your canonical text B to check the politician's statements in real time!

Wolframalpha.com is a start at this type of system. We should be able to ask it questions like, "What is the rate of global warming?" But it's not quite there yet, and we don't have control over which canonical text it uses. Its responses are assumed factual. With the system I'm proposing, we would have a continuous score of agreement. With the global warming issue, we would have to choose the canonical text, which should be a set of scientific journals, and we would expect imperfect agreement with any assertion, because the scientific literature is inconsistent itself. That's the nature of science - it changes over time. But we would learn whether recent science tended to agree (-100% to +100%) with "the earth's climate is getting warmer," or "unchecked carbon emissions will raise the earth's temperature by X degrees C by 2050."

An organisation could declare which canonical texts it uses for fact checking, and then people could decide quickly whether they're willing to trust that organisation, but such declarations would not be needed, because people could always just compare the body of statements of, say, the Cato Institute, with their own preferred canonical text, say, the body of refereed literature published by Nobel Prize winners in economics. I think the Cato Institute would come up decidedly mixed!

Maybe the ideal system is "mission impossible," but something like it could be built on the cheap by programming up some heuristics to match what human fact checkers actually do now. Somebody please give me a billion dollars to make it happen. We so need this to shut out the noise.

File this under education.

Why I like operations research

2009-11-13T18:03:00.000-08:00

Google is quoting Abraham Maslow, "If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." If you only have a pneumatic hammer, then you tend to be alert for big problems, and you aren't be put off by them. Of course, if you only have a computer-controlled high-precision 3-dimensional milling machine, you might see a lot of problems as potential opportunities.

My main tools are all in operations research. The training has taught me to look at the possibilities, and how the world could be, and then find the best route there.

National Troubadour Day - HURRAH!!!

2009-10-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

Friends!

I write to you in greeting for This Great Day. "Find a new song, and whether you sing it high or sing it low, follow your heart, and remember NATIONAL TROUBADOUR DAY!" Allow me to assist with basic New Song skills. Simply find a fitting line, and repeat until you find the next. Example:

The Duke of Trout he tweak-ed
The Duchess of Trout's derriere.

There's a great many directions to take this. In the shower this morning, I added the Royal Queen, the Royal King, and the Royal Jester, eventually concluding with the Jester regretting his copycat tweaking.

A buffoon in the news: would somebody please get Dick Cheney to shut up? Isn't it obvious that we need to know who we're partnering with, before we develop a strategy in Afghanistan?

Still more buffonery: the cookie diet. Eat cookies to lose weight. This can't possibly give you all your required nutrients. You'll end up malnourished, and you can prove it - just enter your cookie diet into Wagmu. There's the extreme opposite silliness going on here in New Zealand, with the food industry calling folic acid supplementation "mass medication". Fortunately, the scientists have pushed back.

Beauty - send them crumpets - stunning wildlife photography.

And This Doesn't Include The Cost Of Climate Change

2009-10-20T17:09:00.000-07:00

The National Academy of Sciences has estimated the external costs to American of energy production: US$120 billion. This is the bill for the costs you don't see at the pump or meter, like worse health, worse farm yields, and damage to buildings. This $120 billion doesn't include the effect of toxic air pollutants, effects on non-grain crops, or effects on climate change (!). Ars Technica has a nice article about the report.

This problem of externality - the costs we impose on others without their consent - needs to be addressed in a coherent way by governments. Since commerce began, society has allowed business to spew for profit, meekly swallowing costs imposed on us. Now, as the world's sustainability limits are pushed to breaking, we are discovering just how serious those costs are.

Here's an interesting example of an externality. A clothing firm retouches a photo to make the subject appear more attractive. Then a hundred million young women look at the photo, believe in a fictional ideal of beauty, and abuse themselves trying to fit that ideal. The clothing firm makes a profit, but does not bear the cost of the bad health that their marketing imposes on others. I guess I'm not too impressed with marketers, not even the funny ones. I see a hypocrisy and deceit that I find frightening.

The NYT writes about Nantucket's success in recycling. There, the connection between a person's waste and the externalities has been made clear, and they've found that reducing the externality was easy.

We have to push back. Write to your government representatives and tell them to support a strong climate change bill.

Cost-benefit analysis on Obama's emission scheme

2009-09-26T15:39:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I cited Paul Krugman's column. Apparently, the Congressional Budget Office says that the Waxman-Markey bill will cost taxpayers $160/year. I tried to work out the benefits of spending that much money, and I thought of Hurricane Katrina, which was fueled by global warming, and cost taxpayers about $81.2 billion.

Suppose each family spent $160 per year to avoid the $81.2 billion Katrina cost. Would that be smart? Yes! $81.2 billion / (112 million American households) = a whopping $725 each! Yes, yes! For heaven's sake! And that's just Katrina! What about the droughts, the wildfires, and flooding from rising seas? We'd save a lot of money.

If you're a climate change skeptic, are you sure enough that you're willing to play this bet? Are you also confident that you're not simply swayed by the statements of vested interests? "In short, while some are interested in sound bites, we’ll keep going about the serious work of providing clean coal, energy solutions and environmental improvement." - Vic Svec, Senior VP, Peabody Coal.

It's cheap to be green

2009-09-25T19:50:00.000-07:00

Friends & colleagues, please read Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times today, "It's Easy Being Green."

Last June, I gave a decision tree on global warming. The distinguished economist says my numbers are wrong - that it's much cheaper to avert disaster than I had assumed. Skepticism of global warming is like smoking. It's socially unacceptable. We have to fix this earth.

If you want good news on the subject, read up on biochar. It would be cool to merge a simulation of a region's farms with a transportation problem, to see if biochar would do against petroleum, examining requirements and emissions for water, nitrate, and carbon. I bet the farmers would come out ahead from all that transportation saved. But I'm too busy with the water market work to get to it this year.

America: still intact

2009-09-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

The NY Times has a brilliant article about water pollution. Highly recommmended. This is outstanding research. If I were to do such work in academia, I would need a half million dollars and three to five PhD students. This must have been a huge investment on the part of the NYT. Kudos! Kudos!

The NYT also has an article about the recent conservative rallies in Washington, DC. The Huffington Post article on those rallies has a somewhat different spin. I quote Jane Devin here on the subject (though her article is supposed to be a film review!):

In the fantastical world of fundamentalist religiopolitics, it is acceptable for Glenn Beck to call Obama a racist, but not acceptable to question the racial motives behind the continuous, frivolous, and often frighteningly ignorant attacks on President Obama. It was acceptable when a Republican President put the country into trillions of dollars of debt, lied to the American people, advocated torture, kept prisoners without due process, and allowed companies like Halliburton and Blackwater to fill their coffers with tax money -- but it is unacceptable that Obama works towards health care reform, and speaks to school children about working hard and not giving up. It was unpatriotic to criticize war and torture under Bush, but it's perfectly patriotic to bring a gun to a protest against health care.

All great rhetoric, with which I am inclined to agree. I was upset by those horrible photos of the rallies in DC. And for a few moments, I got quite depressed about the state of America. Here in Christchurch, New Zealand, the water is perfect and the health care system is inexpensive and brilliant. Christchurch is just going into its usual fantastic springtime - you can see the daffodils in the photo. (That's my wife Marilyn, at twilight; image from a cheap cell phone camera.) For a moment I caught myself wondering whether I ever wanted to return to the United States.

We might ask our conservative fellow citizens what they think about the water pollution. Do we want a government that is big enough and tough enough to stop it? Or do we want a libertarian world with corporate freedom to poison us and our children?

Suppose a scientist stripped away all the politics, and abstracted the whole discussion down to the driest mathematical problem. Then the scientist solved the mathematical problem, and subjected the proof to scientific review, and suppose the mathematical proof passed this test, and was eventually published. Suppose further that the scientist were a Nobel Prize winner, and one of the reviewers was also a Nobel Prize winner, just to make sure that the work is well vetted. What you get is a proof that we need government. Here is one such proof: Baliga, Sandeep & Eric Maskin, 2003, "Mechanism Design for the Environment," Handbook of Environmental Economics, Kenneth Arrow & Michael Intriligator (series eds.), Karl-Goran Maler and Jeffrey Vincent (vol. eds.), vol. 1, Netherlands: Elsevier Science.

And then I remembered that the American people elected Barack Obama. The lunatic far right is the minority.

I've never really liked an American president before Barack Obama - I mean really liked, the sense that I might truly grieve if he were to die. I remember when John F. Kennedy died. I was only 3-1/2 years old. I walked into our Glen Ellyn dining room to find my mother sitting at the table crying. I asked why she was crying, and she told me it was because President Kennedy had died. I wondered why she would feel so sad about the death of someone so far removed from her. Now I think I understand.

O.R. in the news, and, apologetically, also economics

2009-09-04T11:55:00.001-07:00

An operations researcher, Yuko Hatoyama, becomes prime minister of Japan! That is so cool! (Gotta fast forward some of my crazy ideas for a sci fi novel.) Hatoyama did a doctorate in "managerial engineering" at Stanford. If he can get his wife to stop talking, I think he'll be fine. To the extent that he does well, Japan will produce a bumper crop of operations researchers, as the discipline will receive a higher profile.

Some British scientists have improved the practicability of quantum computing somewhat. Have a look at Shor's algorithm on Wikipedia, and here, if you want to test the limits of your ability to pay attention. This stuff is wonderfully abstruse, and fantastically important. People are creating new ways to solve problems, and problem-solving is good.

Paul Krugman wrote a fascinating article in the NY Times about the state of economics. I have to say that I'm a Keynesian. Society generally prohibits a person from entering another's house and taking the contents without permission. But we do not prohibit a person from promising absurd investment returns, and we do not prohibit a person from gaining money through poisoning public water, and we should. Markets require regulation, because people require regulation. Even with regulation, something as simple as pair-wise trading is provably sub-optimal. The "invisible hand" has imperfect aim.

ISMP Chicago

2009-08-31T10:38:00.000-07:00

I attended the International Symposium of Mathematical Programming in Chicago last week. It was lovely hanging out with people who love this fantastic abstruse and important subject. Mostly I attended presentations on electricity markets, as I am interested in smart markets generally, but I enjoyed best the presentations on column generation. (We could make complicated inside jokes. "I think your presentation should be called 'Cut, Branch, and Price in Decomposition Algorithms' rather than 'Branch, Cut, and Price...'" Discussion. Somebody says, "Which came first, the primal or the dual?" Laughter.) So I am a real math programmer at heart.

My dear old PhD advisor, Linus Schrage (pictured with me here), presented some cool tools for stochastic programming. He recently co-authored a brilliant paper on retail inventory management, which took the M&SOM Best Paper Award.

United Airlines revenue-managed me nearly to death. Their check-in kiosk asked if I would to pay extra to avoid the queues in security, which means that UA has incentive to ensure that queues are long. And the queues at LAX last Friday were murderous. Very bad, United Airlines! (Plus the sandwich I bought on board had a long hair in it.) On reflection, I wonder if the long lines are due to an uptick in the economy.

For my trip to the States, I got my first cell phone SIM card, using an old cell phone given to me by my friend Ross Bellette. (Thanks, Ross! I'm a little embarrassed to be entering the 21st century this late.) The T-Mobile activation took ages in their Evanston store, and somehow didn't get done correctly, requiring a return trip. Further, it's incredibly expensive! Nevertheless, I think I am now a cell phone addict. Being connected is wonderful. It was lovely to be able to call a friend en route to Indiana, while I was on the CTA train. Revenue management again - the phone companies know we value this connectivity, and charge us for it. I confess it's worth it! Ultimately, though, all these different types of networks need to go away, so we simply connect without thinking about how. Bring on 4G!

Other thoughts on the big trip to Chicago. Tipping feels wrong (no tipping needed in New Zealand). Starbucks is entrenched, expensive ($2.20 for a cup of mostly ice), bad for you (hundreds of calories in those confections), and bad for the environment (freak out the staff by asking them to fill your own cup). Chicago is beautiful.

Note to big oil

2009-08-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

The NYT has an article describing the oil industry's deceitful tactics in opposing emissions cap & trade. The article ends with this quote:

“I experienced Carter’s war against the industry, and I’m tired of being pushed around,” said David H. Leland, a geological map maker for NFR Energy. “We provide a product for a reasonable price, and we’re going to be punished for doing a damn good job.”

Mr. Leland, at the time of "Carter's war," your industry was operating a cartel which artificially raised oil prices worldwide. Sure, you do a damn good job, but in addition to screwing the world for profit, your product is causing devastation to the entire planet, of a magnitude not seen for millenia.

Another reason to avoid sugar drinks

2009-08-01T17:58:00.000-07:00

Researchers at Georgia State have shown that fructose disrupts memory in rats.

Besides the obvious, another point struck me: "Fructose, unlike another sugar, glucose, is processed almost solely by the liver, and produces an excessive amount of triglycerides — fat which gets into the bloodstream. Triglycerides can interfere with insulin signaling in the brain, which plays a major role in brain cell survival and plasticity, or the ability for the brain to change based on new experiences." Whoa! Dr Atkins would be pleased.

When we think of Coca Cola, what comes to mind? It's all bikini-clad girls, dancing, sports, and good times. Fantastic marketing! What actually happens to us when we drink the stuff? We get health and brain problems, our teeth literally dissolve, we get fat, we get diabetes, we get dementia. And we've wasted a lot of money, which incentivizes environmental damage.

I've written about this problem before. If you drink sugar drinks (or worse, low-cal chemical drinks), ask yourself, "Am I suckered by the marketers? Why don't I just drink water or milk, which are cheaper and healthier?"

File this one under agriculture, corruption, diet, environment, greenwash, nutrition, and obesity. Why all those tags? Because agriculture is taking massive subsidies to give us pseudo-food that makes us sick, while the marketers do their part to hide the facts.

Dental image source.

Make money with "Google Profits"?

2009-07-31T18:14:00.000-07:00

I don't think so!

Try a search for "Google Profits". Seems to come up heavily associated with "scam". See, for example rantrave's comment on this.

Your scammer alert system should buzz when you see articles like this one, saying "Get Google Profits, only pay the $0.99 for shipping." What is getting shipped? Google wouldn't do that - they'd give you a secure web page, as with AdSense, or a free download at worst.

"We are ungovernable"

2009-07-30T18:36:00.000-07:00

In early July, I attended the 2nd International Conference on Water Economics, Statistics, and Finance, in Alexandroupolis, Greece. Along the way, I visited Athens with my lovely daughter, Becky.

First impressions of Greece were that it's a poor country. I live in New Zealand, which is not top of the economic heap, but it certainly feels wealthier than Greece. Why is this?

One disturbing bit of graffitti that I saw in Athens said, "We are ungovernable." I wish I'd taken a picture of it, but the Wikipedia image here gives the right impression. On a previous trip to Greece, I'd seen similar graffitti, and found that the university students are outright radical. Why is this?

To unwrap these double questions, first note Greece's relatively low standing on the Corruption Perceptions Index. Young Greeks know their country is too dishonest, and want change. Strangely, though, it is the people in power whose own corruption is the problem; these are the ones who are ungovernable.

Second, examine where rich countries get their wealth: from better institutions and governance. New Zealand is wealthier than Greece because New Zealand is more honest and has better government. Kiwi students have no desire to revolt. They want to graduate and get jobs.

As for Greek governance, if you remain ungovernable, you will remain poor.

Electronic manufacturers must recycle

2009-06-29T22:15:00.001-07:00

The New York Times has an article about recycling of electronics. Now, electronics manufacturers must recycle their own products. This is so good! It puts the disposal cost where it belongs. This will incentivize the manufacturers to make products that have less toxic materials, and that are easier to recycle. One point for Planet Earth (but still behind in the score).

Image from http://www.globalwarmingsolutions.org/wp-content/uploads/e-waste.jpg.

No give-aways to spew!

2009-05-15T16:07:00.001-07:00

Here's what the American Petroleum Institute has to say about Congress' carbon emissions bill: " "its inequitable system of allocations will have a disproportionate adverse impact on consumers and producers of gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, crude oil and natural gas. Those who drive, fly or take the bus or train to work will shoulder a disproportionate burden and this must be rectified."

Of course! Duh! Those who spew shoulder the burden of spewing! To the ordinary playground kid, that would be the correct and most fair solution! This should not be "rectified". This needs to be strengthened and sharpened. You spew, you pay.

Your health and Star Trek

2009-05-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

I took my beautiful wife out on a date last night to see the new Star Trek movie. I was surprised to see Winona Ryder and Jennifer Morrison (confusingly named Winona Kirk) in the credits - they weren't too recognizable. The movie's a blast, highly recommended, great entertainment. But drop all logic at the door.

Something we shouldn't drop at the door, though, is regard for our own health. Movie theatres are about great entertainment - and eating. The stuff they sell is awful! Sugar drinks and popcorn loaded with sodium. My wife bought some popcorn, and I couldn't have more than a handful, as I was overwhelmed with the saltiness. A couple seats over, an obese young man was drinking from a 2-liter bottle of generic cola, and chewing on gummy worms.

I wish the theatres would sell healthier food, but they do what they do as they have honed their profits to the tee. They are giving their customers what the customers demand. If anyone has an answer out there, sing out.

Another great food plan from Wagmu

2009-05-08T20:24:00.000-07:00

Breakfast

Bread, whole-wheat, toasted, 50 grams.
Coffee with milk, three 282-gram servings.
Milk, nonfat, fluid, 1 cup.

Lunch

Cabbage, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 200 grams.
Seeds, sunflower seed kernels, dry roasted, without salt, 75 grams.
Peas, green, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 280 grams.
Milk, nonfat, fluid, 2 cups.

Dinner

Cheese, cheddar, 30 grams
Carrots, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 20 grams
New Zealand spinach, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 120 grams
Broccoli, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 90 grams
Milk, nonfat, fluid, 1 cup.
Alcoholic Beverage, wine, table, red, Merlot 6 fl oz

This has about 7,060 kjoules (1,690 kcals), so you'll probably lose weight on this. This plan is naturally vegetarian (depending on whether you include cheese and milk as vegetarian). And it's cheap! The expensive bits are the wine and coffee, of course.

This has all required nutrients for a middle-aged guy (like me), except it's short choline. A few years ago, the U.S. government specified an adequate intake for choline, but it's got me scratching my head, because I don't see how my diet can have enough choline, unless I'm willing to eat a lot of lecithin, liver, eggs, or broccoli. So I'm disclosing the choline deficiency in this diet. This is not a fault of Wagmu, but rather what appears to be an overly high Adequate Intake set by the U.S. government.

Saving the world costs almost nothing!

2009-04-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

I am a student of smart markets, including electricity markets. The U.S. Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission has a nice series of articles about national energy, including this one on green house gases. It says that the price per metric ton of carbon for 2012 emission is US$3.05. Per gallon (gotta change units for the imperialists), that US$3.05/ton would be only [$3.05/ton]*[metric ton/2,204 pounds]*[16 pounds/gallon] = $0.022 per gallon. Two cents per gallon to save the world! Why is this a problem? It's only a problem to the vested interests, who have been lying to the world.

First Food Plan from Wagmu Suggest

2009-04-23T02:48:00.000-07:00

Hello, friends!. I have done quite a labour of love on my diet web site, Wagmu. You can log your diet and work out whether you're getting all your nutrients, and whether you're exceeding your calorie limits.

The feature I'm working on now, Wagmu Suggest, will allow you to optimize your daily food plan. It provides simple controls that will help you create a daily food plan, ensuring that you get all your nutrients without exceeding your calorie limits. If Wagmu Suggest proposes something you don't like, it's easy to put limits on foods.

Wagmu Suggest is not yet available, as we're still working on it. But I couldn't wait to show off an early result. So here is my first food plan, which I ate today!

Breakfast

Egg, whole, cooked, fried 2 large
Bread, whole-wheat, commercially prepared, toasted 50 grams
Coffee with milk 1 282 g serving
Parsley, raw 20 grams

Lunch

Pumpkin, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 250 grams
Seeds, sunflower seed kernels, dry roasted, without salt 45 grams
Corn, sweet, yellow, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 150 grams

Snack

Bananas, raw 1 medium (7" to 7-7/8" long)
Coffee with milk 2 282 g serving

Dinner

New Zealand spinach, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 120 grams
Bread, whole-wheat, commercially prepared 50 grams
Cauliflower, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 100 grams
Broccoli, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 10 grams
Carrots, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 100 grams
Alcoholic Beverage, wine, table, red, Pinot Noir 6 fl oz
Milk, reduced fat, fluid, 2% milkfat, with added nonfat milk solids, without added vitamin A 1.5 cup
Candies, semisweet chocolate 10 grams

I'm trying to lose a little weight, so this is only 1,600 calories (6,700 kJ). You'll note that I included some wine and chocolate - I'm not a masochistic ascetic. Even so, this diet will not be for everyone. It won't satisfy everyone's dietary needs. But it was just about perfect for me. I found it filling and satisfying.

One other thing: it was designed taking cost into account. The most expensive bit is the wine, of course, which is pretty much a complete waste nutritionally. Except for that, most people should find that this is an inexpensive food plan.

The complete nutritional profile is available on request, but you could just type it into Wagmu yourself and see!

FOUR PER CENT PRICE RISE TO SAVE THE WORLD!!!

2009-04-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

The New Zealand power sector is "warning" that a carbon emissions scheme would raise power prices by four per cent. That's less than a year's ordinary price rise!

"Warning"?!! We can solve the problem of global warming for a 4% increase in power prices?!! If it can be done so cheaply, why in the world didn't we do it in 1998, when we knew there was a problem? Are we crazy? Is the whole planet lunatic? And still the "undeveloped" countries like China and India are whinging that they they'll be held back!?

The oil and coal companies must have an absolute head lock on governments all over the world. Why are we tolerating this?

The water crisis - man-made via bad policy

2009-04-11T03:15:00.000-07:00

Time Magazine has three interesting articles about water, in Mexico City, Nevada, and Ohio.

Of these, the latter is ugliest: from pure racism, Zanesville government employees denied water hook-ups to people who were willing to pay. I hypothesize that Zanesville water must be grossly underpriced, so racism filled the incentive gap missing from correct pricing. Perhaps this is naive, though, as foolish business people have foregone revenue out of racism for ever.

The Mexico City case is sad in that water is obviously underpriced there, and the problem could be solved so easily. Pricing it correctly would bring supply into line with demand, and incentivize users, suppliers, and the pipeline managers to act much more efficiently. But Mexico is stuck in this self-immolating "We can't hurt the poor people" mode. Until they're willing to get the economics right, they're not going to get their water reliably. So everyone continues to get hurt, especially the poor people. I remember visiting Puerto Escondido, where the water was so bad, that I was sure Coca Cola had to be paying off the city fathers to keep the supply system broken.

Nevada's water situation is just inexcusable. People understand markets. No one there is going to die by having to pay a bit more for water. That it remains subsidized is appalling. They can't have it both priceless and free.

Senator McCaskill, please support President Obama's emissions auction system.

2009-04-09T18:44:00.000-07:00

Suzi Kerr and Peter Cramton have written a helpful article about design of the carbon permit market. Briefly, giving away rights to spew is a bad idea; auctioning the rights to spew is much better, and lower cost for the economy as a whole.

The stakes are high (though not nearly as high as most people fear), about 3% of GDP. (Repeat this after me: we can save the planet for only 3% of our income!) And how it is done matters. We can give the money away to the corporate polluters, or we can spread it around to everyone - i.e., those of us who are injured by the spew. If done right, we can get a boost for the economy.

Why does the method of allocation matter? Giving away the rights to the polluters will produce a massive fight over the pie, which would take time to resolve, and would give the spewers a windfall profit. By instead auctioning the rights, government could use the revenue gained to offset income taxes. It's much better to tax people for the resources they use, rather than their labor: incentivize people to conserve resources and work hard, rather than to burn resources and slack off.

The NY Times has a predictable article about Missourian reaction to carbon cap and trade.

“We can barely afford [the electricity bills] we have now,” despite central air conditioning, a double-door refrigerator, a washer and dryer, six televisions, and three computers.

They want Washington to fight climate change, but "Don’t hurt the rural farmer and rural America to do it.” Three teenagers, a four-year-old six-bedroom house, and seven televisions.

“We want to help our grandchildren. My problem is that the brunt of the improvement is going to be put on the backs of those who can’t afford it.”

America! America! God shed His grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to rising sea!

Car use in the future

2009-03-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

I bought a used 1996 Prius back in August 2005. It is the first generation hybrid which Toyota didn't intend for export. I bought it here in Christchurch from a fellow who imported it. He owned a Toyota parts importing business.

To help us keep some kind of internal discipline on costs, my family has maintained a system of "internal charges" to use the car. If any family member wants to use the car, he or she has to put $4 pocket money into the "Taxi" box. When the car needs petrol, we have the cash on hand. The $4 doesn't cover the full cost per ride, which by my calculations is about NZ$6.60, but the $4 does make us think about taking a bike instead.

Much of the cost of a ride is tied up in the capital cost of the car, which incentives greater use of the car, to lower the cost per ride. It's strange to take a bike, with this expensive car sitting in the drive.

The solution is to spread the use of the vehicle over more people. The NY Times has a lovely article which explains that some new businesses are putting shared cars in neighbourhoods, and charging per use. People who use these systems drive much less, use public transportation more, and save a lot of money. It is something I've always wished we had. Time-shared vehicles will work in big cities, where most people live.

What are the implications for society? First, we're going to need far fewer cars - Zipcar has 50 members per car. That means the car industry is going to shrink. Second, we'll need fewer parking spaces. That means that city living will become denser, as garages are turned into living space. Cities will also have more green space, as some parking lots are turned to parks. Third, cars will be nicer, because the capital cost is spread over more people.

As a fourth impact, since we will have fewer cars on the road, we won't need such big roads. That would be great, but as these effects occur only at the margin, it will take decades for such changes to occur. Too bad! At least we're going in the right direction.

There is an interesting implication for operations research. The NYT article points out that people who use shared vehicles plan their travel much more carefully. That suggests that people will want GPS units with better routing algorithms.

It's just calories...and cost.

2009-02-25T17:09:00.000-08:00

CNN reports on a study of diets. The study examined high carb, high fat, low-fat and high protein diets. The researchers found that any will work, as long as the diet is nutritious, and as long as calories are reduced. You can get the press release from Havard here.

"The key really is that it's calories. It's not the content of fat or carbohydrates, it's just calories," said study co-author Dr. Frank Sacks.

So if one as good as another, let's think about cost, too. My own research showed that low carb diets are very expensive. To prove that, I used linear programming models. Requiring less and less carbohydrate makes a diet cost more and more. And if you want to constrain fat, too, the diet will be very expensive, and also much harder on the environment.

Green wash with green tea

2009-02-24T15:13:00.000-08:00

Today I got spam with the line, "Your friend Jennifer Richardson has sent this message." I don't know this person, and I did not want the message.

Jennifer wants me to buy Salada tea, and is offering me a free bottle, with the notion that this new bottle will substitute for the disposable containers I have supposedly been throwing away.

So I should consume more and get another bottle to improve the environment? This doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I suggest drinking tea from a cup. If you need a closed container, wash out a disposable container and re-use that.

Balintfy made the world better with OR.

2009-02-20T14:43:00.000-08:00

Joseph Balintfy has died. He was a professor of Management Science and Operations Research at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. What did Balintfy do that was so cool? Balintfy studied using O.R. to improve nutrition.

Back in 1945, George Stigler tried to calculate the minimum cost of subsistence. He found a good low-cost diet, but he could not prove that it was the cheapest, which also satisfied all nutritional requirements. A couple years later, George Dantzig set about solving this problem, inventing the simplex algorithm to so. This is all well-worn history to the legion of operations researchers.

What is also well known is that Dantzig's solution was awful: liver, cabbage, corn meal, evaporated milk, lard, peanut butter, potatoes, spinach, and wheat flour. And if we update all the nutritional information, Garille and Gass showed that it's not going to get much better.

Balintfy added palatability. Rather than finding the minimum cost of substistence, Balintfy studied the cost of decent subsistence, with considerable implications for national policy. Balintfy wasn't the first person to study this, as Benson at Rutgers was also researching this as early as 1960. (Balintfy even gave credit to Benson for this.) But Balintfy did a great job of it, studying computerized menu planning, food preference over time, and even subtle issues like the food mix for best bioavailability of nutrients, and the probability of satisfying nutritional constraints, given a random distribution of nutrients in a given food. He also studied food price indices, noting that existing fixed weight indices do not allow for substitutions as relative prices change.

Balintfy wrote a complete menu planning system called CAMP. With regal foresight and generosity, he put his program in the public domain. He saw that his program could help the world eat more nutritiously and more cheaply, so he gave it away! How cool is that! How cool is that! (In stark contrast to the breath-taking chutzpah and greed of Anjan Ghose.) According to Balintfy's 1975 article, the program has been used to feed over a million people, and that was 34 years ago. Because he put it in the public domain, others have picked it up and put it in a variety of commercial programs, and the number of people who have benefited is now countless.

However, I am not aware of it being used anywhere now. Also, I haven't been able to find Balintfy's code, but have started to ask colleagues about it. It might be a nice addition to the open source COIN-OR initiative, which was started by IBM; all the more elegant as Balintfy released his code through IBM's Contributed Program Library. It must have been one of the very earliest "open source" programs!

I've been studying problems of nutrition and diet for some years, and my nascent Wagmu site is part of the result. It doesn't have all the tricks that Balintfy implemented, and may never. I'm simply not as clever (nor as well funded) as Balintfy was.

Free Excel-to-Outlook task scheduler!

2009-02-19T18:42:00.001-08:00

Life got you overwhelmed? Don't know what to do next? Like playing around with obtuse spreadsheets? Try my Task_Scheduler.xls. This spreadsheet is designed to help you use Excel and Outlook to (1) schedule your long-term work, to ensure that you have enough time to meet your deadlines, and (2) schedule your current week.

Briefly, you type in your tasks, how long you think they'll take, some kind of value for importance, and optional "Start after" date and an optional "Due date". The spreadsheet then creates a schedule, trying to meet your deadlines, and schedule work with highest value/hour first. You can then optionally import the next week of tasks into Outlook, and rearrange further.

So you can be reasonably sure that you can get your work done over the next three months or so, without having to enter all of that into Outlook, and you can import into Outlook the next week of tasks that you plan to do.

No support whatever is provided and use at your own risk.

How to solve the world water crisis

2009-02-19T17:03:00.000-08:00

With my colleagues at the University of Canterbury's Water Markets Research Group, we've worked out a way to solve this horrible problem. I've put it on my academic web site: Why and how to set up a water market that is physically, economically, and environmentally correct.

This work depends on operations research, hydrology, economics, and basic information technology. Thus the title for my blog.

We've named this approach the Forever Fair Water Market System. I created a logo for this work that is meant to look both like an infinity symbol and two waves sharing water.

Antibacterial soap is like bottled water.

2009-02-18T00:12:00.000-08:00

Antibacterial soaps are bad for the environment, tend to create superbugs, and are ineffective! Cool! We've been sucked in by the marketing campaigns (again).

From the abstract by Aiello, Larson & Levy, "Soaps containing triclosan within the range of concentrations commonly used in the community setting (0.1%–0.45% wt/vol) were no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms and reducing bacterial levels on the hands. Several laboratory studies demonstrated evidence of triclosan-adapted crossresistance to antibiotics among different species of bacteria."

But even apart from the antibacterial gimmick, soap has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Isn't this something we put on our skin? It's going to get absorbed into our bodies. Why do we use stuff that contains so many chemicals, perfumes, and colorants?

I've always had bad skin. My family used Dial soap, which probably made it worse. When I was in college, a friend suggested that I used Neutragena, and I switched completely to that, even for shampoo. For years, Neutragena was the best thing I'd found for my skin. Neutragena is expensive, though, so I'd occasionally try other soaps, but they freaked out my skin.

The cost of Neutragena really started to bother me, though. Here in NZ, it costs NZ$5/bar, way too much, and the stuff melts so easily that it was going down the drain too fast.

I found a cheaper New Zealand made "eco-soap" that had even won some kind of prize from the Ministry for the Environment. This did seem okay for my skin. On inspecting the ingredients, I noted that the supposedly "natural" soap contains EDTA, which is toxic. So why are we putting this on our skin? What does it mean to be "sustainable"? What is a "sustainable" soap? Certainly not something with antibacterial chemicals that persist in waterways.

As a somewhat desperate experiment, I tried making my own soap. I spent a lot of time researching soap making. Eventually, I found that making soap is easy, and the result is wonderful, at least as good as Neutragena if not better. Here's the recipe:

1. Go outside for this. Put 3/4 cup cool distilled water into a stainless steel pot. I don't use distilled water, just Christchurch's perfect tap water.

2. Pour in 1/4 cup sodium hydroxide (also called caustic soda or lye). Now you'll smell why you're outside - the fumes are nasty. Plus it will get hot. With a steel spoon, stir the lye until it dissolves.

3. Get a second pot. Put in 2 & 1/2 cups rice bran oil (which naturally contains lots of vitamin E). Now pour in the dissolved lye. Stir aggressively for 15 minutes. It really does take about this long. If you have an egg beater or electric stirrer, it will go faster. You'll see the mixture change in character and appearance, from translucent to opaque. Sometimes I heat it on a very low heat for a few minutes.

If the soap is crumbly, you need to add more oil, maybe a quarter cup at a time. If the soap is oily, add more lye, maybe a half-teaspoon at a time.

4. Tip the goo out into a mold. I use a plastic ice cream container. Score the soap with a knife, so it's easy to cut later. Wait two weeks, and use. It needs some aging, to ensure that the lye is fully used up.

Cost per bar: mainly the oil, about NZ$1, or US$0.50. No EDTA. No ineffective super-bug causing marketing-driven antibacterials. Just oil and caustic soda. No perfumes or colours. Even counting my own labour at an appropriately exhorbitant rate, I come out ahead.

Disclaimer: make and use at your own risk, etc. The recipe is mostly pinched from here.

Plant, Krauss, and ... Toth.

2009-02-17T16:18:00.000-08:00

Whoa! Cool video. Maybe the world can still make cool music.

More importantly, here's another lurch toward saving the world with O.R.: my smart colleague Sandor Toth at University of Washington won the "Best Presentation" prize in forestry for "Optimal Reserve Selection Subject to Contiguous Habitat Requirements." The work aims to find the best way to connect plots of land into larger contiguous regions in order to improve ecological functions. Hard stuff - graph theory, economics, computer programming, algorithms, but this work and similar research will eventually show us how to improve ecology on a continental scale, and at least cost.

Here we are, nerds plodding along with our computers and algorithms, and few people see the impending revolution in the environment. Engineers and scientists don't get the visibility of the rock stars. Saving the world won't be easy, and undoing all the environmental damage we've done will take the best talent we can find to solve these problems, and political will, too. These problems are solvable, and the political will is starting to be there. But, again, we do need talented folk to help us. Then we have to raise the profile of these solutions sufficiently high that society can buy into them.

Save the economy by losing weight.

2009-02-16T18:24:00.000-08:00

CNN iReport has a post titled "Won't you join me?" This is a surprisingly well-done posting about our health and our economy.

I successfully lost weight using DietPower. I hugely improved my health. I remember some fantastic days, when I went to bed feeling great, slept soundly, and woke up feeling energized. Amazing!

Eventually, I was sufficiently dissatisfied with DietPower that I have started developing my own, Wagmu.

While I have not regained the weight, I am now very much out of shape, partly because I've had a painful case of shingles for the past month, but more because I wasn't going to the gym for months before that. Perhaps being out of shape weakened my immune system, and allowed entry to the shingles.

So it's time I went back to the gym! We can improve our health and improve the economy (through better productivity and lower health costs) if we diet and exercise. We can also reduce our dietary impact on the earth by eating less sugar, less dairy, and less meat. So I'll join Alison Victoria on this, and I hope you will, too.

Update: So I went to the gym, and despite my weeks of discomfort, finished supercharged! I felt fantastic. I wanna do that again!

Obama to solve the dead ocean problem?

2009-01-21T01:20:00.000-08:00

A hearty congratulations to my fellow U.S. citizens on Mr. Obama's inauguration! I've never been excited about a president before. What a great day!

I've been studying President Obama's proposals about water. Here is a quite interesting remark: Regulate CAFOs: Strictly regulate pollution from large factory livestock farms, with fines for those that violate tough standards. Support meaningful local control. Wow! That would have multiple benefits for the environment and America's health.

Further, President Obama seems to be in favor of water pricing: "First, prices and policies must be set in a ways that give everyone a clear incentive to use water efficiently and avoid waste." Again, wow! If he has the nerve to implement water pricing, he would solve a long list of problems in one go.

Education for the 20XX generation

2009-01-17T18:02:00.000-08:00

Cake

2009-01-10T16:55:00.001-08:00

If you give a boy a cake, he celebrates for a day. But if you teach a boy to make a cake, he celebrates for a lifetime.

2009-01-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

I commissioned my talented niece Florence Kerns to create this image that represents some of my interests: the impact of business on the hydrological cycle; the interactions of water, energy, and nutrition; the impact of cities on ecology.

Agriculture produces demands of energy, water, and soil, and supplies of energy and food. These demands and supplies interact in complex ways. Agriculture’s supply of food also affects transportation, inventory management, and nutrition. Consumers' choices of foods produces demands on the food supply chain. Consumers' choices of habitat and transportation also produces demands on agriculture and the environment. It's a complex world!

How can we sending price signals to get commerce to back off its environmental impact? My research is to find ways to gently press business away from its environmental impacts. Toward that end, here is our proposal to solve part of the world water crisis.

If you use this image, please reference me and Florence.

Bad Sci at Sci Am

2009-01-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

SciAm has an article titled "Diet Diary Double Weight Loss." The article is a transcription of a podcast. The article refers to a study that shows that those who keep track of their food intake lose twice as much weight as those who don't log their food. The SciAm article notes that the speaker referred to the wrong journal, and they give the correct journal in the text. But they don't give any more of the reference! Another cause of naughty journalism, something we wouldn't tolerate from a grad student.

Here's the full reference: Hollis, et al, "Weight Loss During the Intensive Intervention Phase of the Weight-Loss Maintenance Trial," American Journal of Preventive Medicine, v35, n2, Aug 2008, pp 118-126. Sorry, that's just the abstract. I got full access via my university.

I was interested in this article, because my Wagmu site is in part a diet diary system. The Hollis study also included exercise and group meetings. From Table 4 of the paper, it seems that of the three factors, exercise was most important, then maintaining a diet diary; group session attendance was helpful too, but least important.

Okay, it's not really bad science, but the headline is terrible journalism: Scientific American has an article titled "Does Exercise Really Make You Healthier?" The answer is, yes, of course, absolutely. The list of benefits from exercise is amazing. So why raise the question? Pandering to people's sense of uncertainty just to get more views is low, especially from SciAm.

Good news & bad

2008-12-27T14:34:00.000-08:00

1. Bad. Best to get the bad news out of the way. Burning coal at home is making a comeback. Here is a suggestion for high school science teachers: get kids to analyze coal for its toxicity. Let them find out for themselves. From a business point of view, people are working for short term profits without thinking about the obvious mid and long-term risks.

2. Good. International law comes down on Mugabe. The rule of law is civilization's way forward. Somebody seizes power then starts stealing. Then someone else seizes power and starts stealing, plus revenge. The cycle breaks only by intervention, local or international, which installs democracy.

3. CNN has a video of a human-powered car. I've been thinking of this for ages.

Now if we can just get a cheap Chinese-made clone of it!

Proverbs should come in threes.

2008-12-25T22:49:00.000-08:00

Leave room for hypocrisy.

Black is slimming, especially if you exercise while wearing it.

Those who seek perfection attain it. Those who claim perfection fall short.

The cost of a day's food

2008-12-23T15:55:00.000-08:00

When money is tight, junk food beckons. That NY Times article says that the average American eats $7 worth of food per day. I had the impression that the average American is spending that much on Starbucks alone! As I've written before, we need to change how we eat, to save our own health and to save the health of the planet. The NYT article has links to related pages, in particular an article about a couple trying to live on $US1/day (despite wasting money on Tang).

Here in New Zealand, it's not possible to eat for $NZ1/day. Based on my computerized diet models, even if a person were willing to eat a drab diet specified by the computer, it's hard to get below $NZ2.50/day. Of course, a person could grow some food, which would help some.

Somone commented on the NYT article that some posters were complaining of not enough money for food, but clearly had internet. It raises a good point: we need to change our lifestyles, as well as our eating habits. If we spend less on petrol and plasma TVs, we'll have more for food.

Here's an NY Times recipe for cabbage and potato, which looks great. Kudos to NYT! Well done! More like that! I just loaded that recipe into my Wagmu.com diet & nutrition site, and it has a great nutrient profile. Try adding carrots and broccoli.

Have you tried the Wagmu Challenge? (1) Did you get all your nutrients today? (2) Can you create a diet (without pills) that does give you all your nutrients? I hope to add a powerful new "Wagmu Suggest" feature in the next few months.

The image of irrigated fields in El Gezira, Sudan, from NASA.

A final measure of justice in Rwanda

2008-12-20T21:08:00.000-08:00

The world got some good news today, as Theoneste Bagosora was convicted of genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Watch out Robert Mugabe & Kim Jong-il.

Communism of carbon

2008-12-14T15:48:00.000-08:00

Iowa State Daily has an op-ed, "EPA proposal could cost millions". I kind of let off steam on the comments there. The article mentions Sens. Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley. I can only hope that those two men - despite their funding from Big Ag - understand the issues better the author.

A better society via breaking the law?

2008-12-13T15:02:00.000-08:00

Scott Adams seems to be saying that we can solve our transportation laws by breaking the law. He suggests that everyone start their own taxi company, which will reduce the need for cars.

"It will happen because people start doing it on their own in such numbers it will be impossible to prosecute". Hmm, this could be an interesting idea broken by bad implementation. I don't think we can improve government by encouraging people to break the law. The article reminds me of Adams' 30 Nov 2008 comic strip.

We face an obesity crisis and a budget crisis, and we subsidize bacon?

2008-12-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Kristof has a nice op-ed titled, "Obama’s ‘Secretary of Food’?"

Nice quote from Michael Pollan, “We’re subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket — high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we’re doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food.”

A second nice quote from Robert Martin, “They look profitable because we’re paying for their wastes.”

These quotes point out that government subsidizes agriculture in two ways. First, government gives agriculture money directly, with a variety of excuses. Second, government allows agriculture to damage the commons far beyond what is good for society.

Disclosure: Kristof recommends that Obama appoint someone from www.fooddemocracynow.org. One person on the list, Fred Kirschenmann, is my brother-in-law. This organization has an impressive list of supporters. After some thought, I signed the petition. It's time to take away regulation of America's ecology from agribusiness.

California cuts diesel spew

2008-12-13T13:23:00.001-08:00

A "well done" to the California Air Resources board for toughening rules on diesel exhaust.

This problem should be viewed as business' over-use of the commons. We can tolerate some diesel exhaust, but when there is so much that third parties are injured, such as asthmatic school kids, then business must be restricted in some way.

Government should not be viewed as anti-business for this. It is true that business will be hurt, but the rest of society will be better off. The new restrictions should be viewed simply as good government.

Interim climate pact approved

2008-12-13T12:11:00.000-08:00

International negotiators have made some progress toward replacing the 1997 Kyoto agreement.

Each country has many voices - note the different points of view of Sen. Kerry and Paula Dobriansky at the end of the article. But Chatterjee of the World Wildlife Fund and Hedegaard of Denmark indicated that the building blocks are in place. Progress is measured in nuance, but there does seem to be progress. Beyond that, we'll have to wait for the Obama administration.

Cleaning up the oceans of plastic

2008-12-10T17:49:00.000-08:00

Every time I get a new idea, I get annoyed. I have so many ideas that I don't have time to implement all of them.

To get you in the right mood to hear this idea, please refresh your memory of the age-old classic hymn by the Ramones.

The Romantics - What I Like About You
Uploaded by soulpatrol

What I like about you, you hold me tight.
Tell me I'm the only one. Wanna come over tonight, yeah.
You're whispering in my ear.
Tell me all the things that I wanna to hear, 'cause that's true.
That's what I like about you!

What I like about you: you really know how to dance.
When you go up, down, jump around, think about true romance, yeah.
You're whispering in my ear.
Tell me all the things that I wanna to hear, 'cause that's true.
That's what I like about you,
That's what I like about you -
That's what I like about you.

What I like about you, you keep me warm at night.
Never wanna let you go, know you make me feel alright, yeah.

You're whispering in my ear,
Tell me all the things that I wanna to hear, 'cause that's true.
That's what I like about you!

That was the appetizer.

Now here's the problem: how to clean up the oceans of plastic. From the NY Times article, “ 'As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,' Moore later wrote in an essay for Natural History, 'I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.'”

And here is a potential short-term fix: put a thermal depolymerization system (e.g., the Changing World Technologies system) on a ship, pick up the plastic with oil skimming vessels, and periodically haul away the diesel in an ordinary oil tanker. Picking hydrocarbon off the ocean surface would be cheaper than drilling oil wells.

Some months ago, I submitted this idea to the CWT blog, which moderates comments. It never appeared. Maybe Brian Appel is too busy lobbying for subsidies. Brian! Cut that out! More subsidies for anything won't reduce consumption. Eliminating the fossil fuel subsidies is a very good idea, however, and I'm with you on that.

This proposal is not a permanent solution, as it has no prevention. Prevention will come about only through banning man-made unnatural materials that do not decompose safely and quickly. All waste should have be either compostable or recycled. Anything else is a debt that we leave to future generations.

We don’t care what you say about the economy. If you don’t recycle, our planet will be dirty.

2008-12-07T21:22:00.001-08:00

The New York Times has an article about the downturn in recycling. Since commodity prices are falling, the value of recycled materials is now below the cost of landfilling.

“At Ruthlawn Elementary School in South Charleston, W.V., second-graders who began recycling at the school in September were told that the program might be discontinued. They chose to forgo recess and instead use the time to write letters to the governor and mayor, imploring them to keep recycling . . . ‘They were telling them, ‘We really don’t care what you say about the economy. If you don’t recycle, our planet will be dirty,’ ’ ”

Wisdom from 2nd graders! Of course, the proper solution is to charge more for the materials and energy in the first place, until business produces less of it, and the demand for the used material is high enough to recycle.

"There was no running water Monday In Harare"

2008-12-01T12:54:00.000-08:00

CNN reports on Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic. In the image here, children are carrying containers to fetch water in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital.

Some people read this article, and tag it with "water crisis". That would be wrong. It's a crisis of bad government. Tragically bad government.

But business might be hurt!

2008-11-28T19:38:00.000-08:00

Yet another polluter complaining that regulation will hurt him. This time, it's the poultry industry. “This will absolutely kill anyone coming into the poultry industry,” and “It’s not farmland without farmers.”

Once again, we have the commons damaged by business. Can't the chicken growers get it through their heads that we don't want the commons damaged, and we don't want the environment to serve as a spew pot? Why don't the fisherman go sue them, for heaven's sake?

Special note to Ranga Prabodanie: we need your work to get done! My student Ranga is developing a smart market for nitrate. It would allow problems like that in the Chesapeake Bay to be solved at least cost to society. But in the meantime, the caps have to be put in place.

Ignore science to get a tragedy of the commons (again)

2008-11-27T01:38:00.000-08:00

Winston Churchill said that a young person who is not a liberal has no heart, and an older person who is not a conservative has no head. I must be truly middle-aged. Anyway, I seem to be getting more liberal as I age.

I used to be a real free market type, and still am for the most part. But that part of me that isn't a free marketer anymore really wants to see business constrained to prevent damage to the commons.

The NYT has a sad article about destruction of the tuna fisheries. The EU is going forward with continued over-fishing. What is so strange about this is that destruction of the commons affects business, too. When rivers are polluted, when human-induced drought and flood occur, when tuna is difficult to catch, business is injured, as well as the environment and everyone else. With fish as an excellent example, fishing companies could have a lot more profit if they would fish sustainably. I don't understand their disastrous short-sightedness.

Special note for Owen McShane

2008-11-25T21:16:00.000-08:00

Please read CNN's article, "Carbon dioxide levels already a danger."

NZ emissions trading scheme

2008-11-25T01:04:00.000-08:00

Owen McShane (a "touch typist" and underwear salesman) managed to get an essay, "Why emissions law should be scrapped," into the NZ Herald. He makes a few valid points, but the article smells bad overall.

Climate change raises very high business risks that must not be ignored. Farmers want certainty! Yet as the central parts of the country dry out over the next few years, business risks increase dramatically. Climate change is increasing the severity of floods, storms, cyclones, hail, and drought. We will have to pay out considerable amounts in insurance, ACC, and support to damaged communities, even with Kyoto emissions reductions.

The IPCC says that emissions have to peak by 2015 at the latest. If we're late into the game, New Zealand could become an international pariah very suddenly. The clean & green image could be lost in a moment.

The probability of Owen's car getting stolen this year is 2%, and I bet he has insurance on it. The probability of global warming is about 92%, but he wants us to go without insurance. And he's got an MBA!

McShane's "three issues" are outright red herrings. "First, that there is a real problem." Skepticism of global warming is badly misplaced. Yo, Owen, please have a look at An Inconvenient Truth. This stuff is controversial only in the popular media, and it is made controversial only by illiterates such as yourself. If you're going to say, "There are scores of papers in peer-reviewed journals challenging the hypothesis that ...the burning of fossil fuels, are causing dangerous levels of global warming" then you might at least reference a few (preferably recent) ones.

"Second, that all relevant alternative solutions have been identified and considered." The suggestion to tax carbon rather than use an emissions scheme is right, but politically naive. A tax would be easier to implement. If we taxed all resource use and lowered the income tax, we would incentivise conservation and productivity. But the quid pro quo for restricting emissions is trading. This is all very well understood economics. Asking to consider more alternatives is obviously just a petro-dollar induced delay.

"And third, that the proposed law will solve the problem better than all the alternatives, and its benefits will exceed its costs." Ignoring your self contradiction, we all know that benefits will not exceed costs in the short run. You can't add a constraint and do better. This is about disaster avoidance. Now, the cost is quite cheap, if we let the market do its job.

The Enron reference is a cheap shot, and a similar argument as the red necks did in saying Barak Obama and Adolf Hitler were both democratically elected. Passively waiting for Australia to act on climate change is just plain silly.

If the Emissions Trading Act was not passed properly, sure, let's have another look at it. But let's not delay it anymore. No additional science needs to be done. It's only political will that's required.

False eco-friend

2008-11-15T20:58:00.000-08:00

You know how it is when a person wants to be your friend, and you realize after a while that this person has a hidden agenda? Maybe that this person wants to use you to get at someone or something else?

This is what came to mind when I read about Ricoh's "econ-friendly" billboard. The thing cost $3 million, and has a rent of around $1 million/year. On a net present value at 5% over 20 years, that's about $15 million. Hey, Ricoh! How about if you spent $15 million on Amazon rain forest, then put up a very small plaque on your New York building, "We have put $15 million of our advertizing dollars into the Amazon rain forest." I bet people would appreciate that.

5 bad solutions for the US Southwest’s water problem

2008-11-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

Popular Mechanics has an unusually bad article, "6 Radical Solutions for U.S. Southwest’s Peak Water Problem."

I'm disturbed by PM's lack of good science here. Since agriculture uses 75% of the water, the solution must start there, and the easiest fix is to eliminate agricultural subsidies, especially those for water.

Desalination plants have to unload the salt somewhere, so they have heavy environmental impacts. They're expensive to build, just as more pipelines and water imports. These ideas are really straining for plausibility.

Conservation is by far the cheapest solution. A properly implemented pricing system would relieve the bulk of the problem, and be better for the environment.

Double jeopardy, two part solution?

2008-11-14T12:50:00.000-08:00

For those of you who read my polemic, you may be surprised to read that I've not seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" until last night. None of it was surprising to me. I was aware of most of the data. I was very glad, however, to see it put so clearly for a broad audience. Please see it, if you haven't.

In the news, the EPA Appeals Board just indicated that the EPA should be regulating CO2. The real shocker in that report is the number of new coal plants due to come on line. What are those business people thinking? Have they not thought through the business risks associated with operations that emit so much carbon? A coal powered generator is not something I would want to invest in.

Just now, I read Paul Krugman's article of today in the NYT, "Depression Economics Returns." Regarding the current economic crisis, he says, "Under current conditions, however, caution is risky, because big changes for the worse are already happening, and any delay in acting raises the chance of a deeper economic disaster. The policy response should be as well-crafted as possible, but time is of the essence."

Of course, the same thing could be said of the environment: any delay raises the chance of a deeper disaster. Of the economy and the environment, the environmental issue is far more serious, far longer term - and probably the cheaper of the two to solve!

So here is a two part solution: impose a carbon tax, and reduce income taxes. This dual policy discourages carbon output and encourages people to work. It encourages conservation while giving people more flexibility to manage their own income.

On an unrelated matter, here is a gorgeous web site about watches, which raises the bar on web site design. (Try the French language version.) Unfortunately, it's conspicuous consumption that few people can afford now. Money talks, and a lot of money can afford to speak elegantly. And in the case of the fossil fuel industry, a lot of money can afford to speak in massively parallel cynical deceit.

Cynical Greenwash ("CG") Department

2008-10-22T23:39:00.000-07:00

Kids, you many not want to read this, 'cause it's ugly. Bottled water is a dead weight loss on the environment. But here we see Crystal Geyser ("CG") MAKING A DIFFERENCE by sponsoring tree-planting. Hey, CG! You would MAKE MORE OF A DIFFERENCE if you would please stop selling bottled water.

A civil engineer recently told me that many of his colleagues view bottled water as a professional insult, because it implies that America's urban water supplies are somehow deficient.

Have you got any examples of CG-type cynical greenwash ("CG")? Leave a comment and let me know.

A side issue: I apologize for the lack of pictures on my blog. What's the web for, if not for text and pictures?