PETPEAVES

Every day during graduate school, I would park at the agriculture experiment station and walk the half mile or so to the Agriculture Building where I spent most of my days. Just across the street from the building where I worked was an attorney's office, and on the back of one of the cars was a bumper sticker I noticed every day and remember very vividly still now. It said, "Thou shalt not kill: go vegetarian".

I have often marveled on the irony of this statement. Here I was, a biochemistry major, studying in the agriculture college under the life sciences program, and this attorney thought plants weren't alive. Yes, I know plants don't seem to have feelings, but like I told some students a month or so ago, even they have blood. You just don't recognize it even though you lather your waffles in it at breakfast. It's called 'syrup'. The students were immediately grossed out by the notion.

For most of my life, I have been fully aware that plants are alive. If I am wrong, then everything I learned in college was a complete lie. I think what we really need in this nation is PETPEAVES: People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants Eaten After Violent Extraction from Soil. Plants cannot speak for themselves because they have no mouths or defend themselves because their weapons are not terribly useful against a predator with eyes (except for some cacti which are very good at dissauding any attempt at predation). Nobody represents their interests, and apparently some lawyers are active in the campaign against their rights. Without plants, all animal life on earth would cease.

Save the plants. Save yourselves. Join PETPEAVES.

**This post is mostly tongue in cheek, just for your information, but all the details are true as well as I understand truth**

Ripeness and Refractometers

One of our anatomy professors just informed me that he passed on something I taught him. While testing the specific gravity of their urine, a student asked him if a refractometer was useful for anything else. He remembered a conversation we had and pulled up a picture of someone using one in the wine industry, which is basically what I did in graduate school.

Refractometers can be used to tell ripeness of fruit. Indeed, I sometimes will use one at the market to test produce. Where I live there are a lot of foreign markets with produce of initially dubious value. I don't really know why they are selling 5kg of limes for $1. Are they bad? Did they buy too many? If I ask them in Italian, will they be able to explain it to me in Spanish? I just trust the refractometer.

Now, imagine what they see. A bearded male of Saxon ancestry pulls a refractometer and some plastic pasteur pipettes from his jacket. He squirts some juice on this lightsaber-looking thing and looks into it as he points it towards the light. Some fruit, he takes. Others he passes. It must look like something out of science fiction to them.

Well, it certainly is science. Using a refractometer to measure the Brix ratio (one degree approximates 1% sugar content and is relatively reliable as an indicator of sweetness), and pH paper to measure acids, one can tell almost exactly when fruit is at the perfect ripeness. As fruits mature, the sugars cease to be reducing, and the total amount of acids diminishes while sugars accumulate in the fruit. At an optimum range of sugar to acid ratio, a fruit is ripe and ready not only for harvest but for consumption.  Delicious!

As a practical matter, since you know I like practical science, this is a putative business model. You buy fruit if you live in the west hemisphere only once a week or more. You hope it will last on the counter until you need it and then only as much as you need to be ripe when you need it. With a refractometer, you could establish fruit in bins at various degrees of ripeness and classify fruit as 'ready now', 'ready within the week' and 'ready in more than a week' and thereby assist shoppers in planning their consumption without waste. Would it sell? I don't know. Could it? Most definitely. We have all seen people smelling mellons and scouring over berries, touching them all. No need for that. Science to the rescue!

You too could be like the wineries and know exactly when your fruits are ripe. Wouldn't that be nice?

For What Your Research Dollar Pays

I try to keep abreast when time permits at work with advancements in medicine and research. Partly, this was spurred because one of our electricians came to ask me about some stuff I did in graduate school. I was kind of taken aback, but not as much as I was about how completely unnewsworthy this research was.

According to the Journal "Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research" people who tailgate are more likely to get drunk than people who do not. Did they really need a study for that? Who got a PhD for this?

Don't even get me started on their 'scientific method'...

We conducted BAC tests of 362 adult attendees following 13 baseball games and three football games. We ran multivariate analyses to obtain factors associated with the risk of having a higher BAC.

Your tax dollars at work help some kid get an advanced degree. I could have told you this without collecting any data, but it's nice to know I'm right.

Bad Premise=Bad Science

I am not honestly surprised to read that the study linking autism to MMR vaccines is a fraud. The assumption is often made that the subjects are 'normal' when that is either a complete fabrication or when what we assume normal to be is far from it. Face it, there are really no 'normal' people. They might be 'normal' for something, but that's not necessarily the case.

I have seen a lot of people exclude outliers because they're too far from the normal. They might be the most interesting subjects.

When I worked in industry briefly, we had this 'standard' that we used in our R&D work. This person was supposedly normal, but the sample was for Factor V bloodwork, not for Trisomy 21. We assumed that the person was normal, but we really don't know.

In this case, the authors of the study purposely deceived people and used subjects who were not 'normal'. Besides that, they only studied 12 children? Please.

Don't accept their premise. It is useless to theorize until you collect the facts. Otherwise, you start bending the facts to match the premise, which is basically the underlying fault of all scientific endeavors of which I am aware. They start with a premise and then look for evidence. Too bad. People plan their lives around these findings, many of which prove false, and so we alter things that were just fine before we began.

Conventional Wisdom

I haven't written on here in a while, and it's really mostly a placeholder to prove that I came up with the idea first in case someone else tries to copy my idea.

However, I was reminded today of something from graduate school, and so I hearby invite you to join me as a member of the ASPCDSF: the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Salad Fixings.

Across the street in graduate school was a small lawyers office. One of these lawyers had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said, "Thou shalt not kill- go vegetarian."

If vegetables are not alive, then why are agriculture and plant physiology and similar majors considered part of Biology, the Life Science?

The lawyer probably saw himself as a crusader. I don't buy the premise. Lettuce is alive too, at least until I transfer it to the saline resistance chamber...

Marvel: Human Brains

This is an original article today from a colleague that I wish to repost here.

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It ain't much to look at.

Two, maybe three pounds of grayish-white goop. It's not even solid in a living person. More like Jello that floats around in it's vault.

But it's amazing. From that sloppy goop has come remarkable stuff. It's sent a robot to land on a moon of Saturn. It's explored the bottom of our deepest oceans. Built the Taj Mahal. The Great Wall of China. Painted the Mona Lisa.

Go listen to the remarkable Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor". Not just the famous opening 30 seconds or so, but the whole 9-10 minute thing. That all came from the goop, long before it was heard or played on an instrument, it was just a series of electric signals jumping from nerve to nerve. The piece is over 300 years old. The mind that created it has been dead for over 250 years. And humans will likely be listening to it long after my great-great-great-grandchildren are dust.

The soul is there. The heart is amazing, but for all our romantic beliefs about it, who we really are is floating around in the goop. It's where hate, love, and everything in between comes from.

It's capable of terrible evil, such as the Holocaust, and remarkable good. Look at the outpouring of altruism that follows disasters. I love my dogs, but if something bad happens to a dog on the next street, they're not going to care. Yet the goop wants to help people who we've never met and have no direct impact on our own lives

My regular readers know I'm interested in maritime history. Why? I have no idea. It's just been a subject I've loved as long as I can remember. I've never been in the navy, or lived near the ocean. The family military history consists of grandparents who served in the army, but never were sent overseas. I can only assume there is some particular molecular structure in my goop that makes me interested in it. Or that made me want to treat other people's goop for a living.

Twin and biological studies have shown that most of who we are is how we came here. Yes, life experiences and background count for something, but the goop is most of it. People with conservative beliefs raise kids who turn out to be liberals, and vice versa, now matter how hard they may try to pass on their beliefs.

Coke vs. Pepsi. Dogs vs. Cats. Mac vs. Windows. I suspect whatever makes us fall on one side or the other of these great philosophical issues is 95% or more in the goop, and we just come that way.

Everything you are, have been, and will be. Have desired, dreamed of, and done. Have felt. It all comes from a few pounds of goop.

And this fascinates me. Because, let's face it, we're just another part of the planet. A collection of complex molecules, electrical impulses, and chemical reactions. That's all people. Anatomically, all humans are pretty much the same. And we're not that different from other mammals. The difference in our genetic sequence vs. that of a mouse ain't much.

And yet that small amount of difference has led to amazing results. The ability to think beyond our own biological needs and to see the world around us for the beauty it contains. To watch a sunset and be in awe, even though we understand the science behind it. And to look up at the night sky, and wonder.

And that never bores me.

Coincidence and Causality

In recent days, we've heard lots of editorials masquerading as news. They tell us that the economic rebound, the successful rescue of the captain of the Maersk Alabama, and housing starts are due to the president's economic plan, which hasn't even hit the ground yet. We hear from DHS that subversive militias are recruiting former members of the military in an attempt to overthrow the government. We hear that the world hates America because we are greedy.

What we don't hear should shock you. What we don't hear is that the pirates are attacking convoys of food and earning $150 million per year in ransom money. What we don't hear is that the Commander of the USS Bainbridge gave a split second decision command to fire that saved the captain of the Maersk Alabama. What we don't hear is that compared to last quarter, housing sales are actually down, but it seems up because fewer homes are going on the market so the percentage is down (my realtor gave me the stats herself on this).

Last night in class, we discussed one aspect of bad science- the ipso facto logical fallacy. They assume that because certain things are concurrent that one causes the other. You can't say that. At best, evidence suggests a link, but on further experimentation we can easily dispell this. One example in class deals with a woman whose flashlight doesn't work. She changes the batteries and it works. What if it hadn't? What other things could it be? We ignore so many things because we do not think of them. My students came up with some good ones: corroded connections, burnt out bulb, batteries inserted incorrectly, etc. Just because new batteries don't fix it doesn't mean they're bad either. Sometimes it's a matter of compounding variables.

Another powerful example, since I live in Nevada, is the roulette wheel. Many novice gamblers assume that because black has come up ten times in a row that it's red's "turn" to get a shot and they bet on red. Truth is that on the next spin, there are the exact same chances of black turning up again, and they don't have abetter chance of being right about red. Unless you remove a number when the ball falls on it, it doesn't change the chances of subsequent draws. It is mathematically possible on an unaltered roulette wheel for a ball to land on 17 black EVERY SINGLE TIME, however unlikely that might be.

See one other problem lies in differences between circumstances and operators. Every person performs experiments differently. A coworker called me yesterday to ask me how I innoculate a specific culture because it only works 50% of the time for her and it has so far always worked for me (most things don't work that frequently). Variations and variegations influence outcomes. We cannot predict the future because the circumstances are NEVER the same in subsequent trials. Things unseen and unknown change all the time, so no matter how well we try nothing is ever an exact replicate. Not even identical twins share everything.

I spent probably 75% of my time in laboratory troubleshooting to pin down unexpected outcomes and link them to unaccounted variables. About half of the rest of the time, I had to explain differences between trials to justify omission of results. Some scientists get excited apoplexy when they "discover" something new, when more often than not they are ghosts and not a result of our manipulations. Just because two things coincide does not mean they are linked. Just because they are linked doesn't mean one is causative. Sometimes things just happen and there is no real good reason.