Smart Guns, Dumb Humans

Image credit: Armatix GmbH

Don't mean to go off too far on this topic, but it seems to be in the news. Everyone form Mark Shea to my dentist has been telling me that "just make everyone shut up and buy one." It's not that simple.

First off, what is a gun? The main stream media wants you to think it is an evil thing, made for destroying families and children. They want you to think the primary use for a gun is crime, and that millions of children killed playing guns each year.

However, gun owners see them as lifesavers. A gun shifts the balance of power. It can make a 90 pound young woman able to stand off a rapist. It can make a 90 year old man stand off a gang of young punks. It can stop the armed home invader, or carjacker. But in those situations it has to work, and work quickly and work reliably.

Fighting Fires
In  lot of ways, a gun is like a fire extinguisher. It's something that you hope you never have to use, but if you need it, you need it, and it can save your life. And that's an analogy worth exploring further.

You see, a fire extinguisher does a simple job, and it is made to be the simplest device that can do the job, and as simple to operate as possible, because when you need it you are panicking, and possibly injured, and not able to operate complex equipment.

Who in their right mind would design a fire extinguisher that required the owner to be wearing a special watch on their right wrist, and enter a 5 digit security code before they could use it? Who in their right mind would design a fire extinguisher that couldn't be used by their wife, neighbor, etc.? Nobody, of course. And yet, that's what the purveyors of "smart" guns want to impose.

Impose? Merely having a product in existence is not "imposing," is it? Sadly it is. First off, in New Jersey there is a law on the books that says within 18 months of the first "smart" gun being available, not "non-smart" guns will be legal to sell in the state. How many ways is this legislation bad? I don't have enough electrons here to go into all the details. Suffice it to say that the law is bad for citizens, for gun manufacturers, and even for smart gun makers (since it guarantees that recent events will repeat themselves whenever someone wants to bring the technology to market).

New Jersey Senate majority leader Loretta Weinberg (D) says that they will rescind the smart gun law if the NRA will stop opposing smart gun technology. No, sorry. You don't use bad laws a weapons to beat people into submission. Realize that the NRA is not some corporation like Apple, or even a group representing gun manufacturers. It is a group representing law abiding citizens who legally own legal guns legally. If the NRA is against something it's because millions of their members are against it. Besides, we know she will reintroduce the law as soon as the next thing comes along that the NRA opposes.

Saw Stop
But even if you don't live in New Jersey, smart gun technology is scary, because it might keep your fire extinguisher gun from working when you need it, and because we know it will become mandatory. Consider the case of Carlos Osorio. He defeated all the safety devices on his table saw, then cut himself. And as sad as that is, it gets worse. A court ruled in his favor and said that because saw stop technology existed and the saw didn't have it, it was the manufacturer's fault.

For those who are not wood workers, a table saw has a spinning circular saw blade sticking up out of a table (hence the name). The blade is covered by a guard to keep your hands away from it, a splitter or riving knife to prevent unexpected kickbacks, and the saw is generally plastered with other safety features and warning labels. There is one brand that has a proprietary technology called "saw stop" which electronically detects when flesh contacts the blade rather than wood, and slams a chunk of aluminum into the blade, stopping it instantly (and destroying it in the process).

Now, there's nothing wrong with saw stop technology, if you want to worry about an accident that can really only happen if you are defeating all the other safety measures and relying on it to save your fingers. But saw owners no longer have that choice, because all manufacturers will soon have to have the feature, which will add hundreds of dollars to the retail cost of the saws, and add nothing to saw owners who actually follow safety instructions.

And so it will be with "smart gun" technology. even more so. Of course when your saw stops working, you may be inconvenienced. If you need it for your job you may lose a day's pay while it is replaced or repaired. But you won't die like you will when your fire extinguisher stops working.

"But if it saves just one child..."
62 children (14 and under) died of accidental firearm discharges in 2012. That's 62 too many , but does it indicate a safety problem with the guns themselves, or with the owners? Because no matter how smart the gun is, it will still fire if the owner pulls the trigger (and does whatever the heck else he needs to do). And it will still fire if the user defeats the safety mechanisms (like Carlos Osorio).

But to put that in perspective, 390 children drowned in swimming pools. Considering that about 9 million homes have swimming pools, vs about 35 million homes that have guns, the pool is about 24x more dangerous to have than a gun. And yes, there is smart pool technology, but nobody's forcing all pool owners to buy it. Why? Because pools are not scary.

To be Fair
To be fair, there are smart gun technologies that are not as offensive as the Armatix gun. NJIT is working with dynamic grip recognition, which senses how you hold the gun. Sounds like a good idea, but even that has its unknowns. Under extreme stress you may no hold the gun the same way you do at the range under calm conditions. You may be running for your life, firing at an odd angle from behind something, and you may have to hold the gun in an unusual manner. I heard of a gun owner practicing holding the gun upside down, with his pinky on the trigger, to simulate taking a gun from a holster that was facing the wrong way. It could happen and unless the owner trained his smart gun to recognize that grip I guess he would be out of luck.

Shhhh
And aside from worrying about the gun legitimately failing, we have to consider all the ways someone could make it fail. We have only recently learned that the government has been secretly forcing computer and communications technology manufacturers to put in features to let them eavesdrop. And we know they want to (or perhaps already have) put in technology to let the government turn off the internet when they deem it necessary. Should we give them the opportunity to turn off all the guns as well? Realize that's what the second amendment was supposed to prevent.

[UPDATE: Breaking news - Armatix has filed a patent for a device to remotely disable their guns via commands from a satellite or other signal. There's the government kill switch. I thought it would take longer before that came out.]

But we don't even have to go that far. For technologies like the Armatix gun, it is trivial to buy an RFID jammer, and thereby disarm everyone within range.

But Safety™!
I realize that the intention of the smart guns is to make firearms safer. And one strategy used by anti-gun groups is accusing the "gun nuts" of not wanting their guns to be safe.

But does technology really make them safer? There were around 600 accidental deaths from firearms in the US in 2010. That's out of 300 million guns, used defensively over a million times (and I don't know how many times a year guns are used for hunting or target shooting). That's really an incredible safety record. Anything that makes the gun less reliable, even a tiny bit, is going to have a negative impact on gun safety. For instance, let's say the smart gun works 99% of the time. Out of the 11,000 criminal uses of a gun each year (excluding suicides, who will just pull the trigger a second time), 110 times the gun will not work, and in some percentage of those cases the shooter won't have time for a second shot. So we have saved something less than 110 lives. But in the million defensive uses of guns, the gun will fail 10,000 times, and in some of those cases the defender will be killed by their attacker. Net result is more lives lost.

Then we have the issue of people growing to rely on technology. In this article on smart guns we see a video of one of the smart gun inventors showing the gun to a reporter. Note that he points the gun at her! He "knows" his technology is safe, and so he handles the gun in an objectively unsafe manner. How many people will assume the smart gun will take responsibility for keeping people safe, and disobey the four rules of gun safety (FYI they are (1) treat every gun as if it is loaded at all times, (2) never point a gun at something you don't wish to destroy (3) keep your finger off the trigger until you have decided to shoot and (4) be aware of your target and what's beyond it).

It may surprise you to know that most hand guns have no "safety" to speak of. Yes, they have safety features, but pull the trigger and they will fire. It may also surprise you to know that until recently most police did not carry semiautomatic pistols at all. The reason in both cases is reliability. It took close to 100 years for semiautomatic pistol technology to be reliable enough to not be a detriment. Likewise, the safety lever adds enough unreliability to make the gun less safe. These decisions were not made by "gun nuts" who want to cling to their weapons in the face of logic, or by gun manufacturers hell bent on profits at any human cost, but by the people who keep us safe, and the people who train the people who keep us safe - people who spend their lives analyzing criminal and defensive gun use and calculating how to save the most lives.

I could go on...
...but I won't. I could talk about the (un)reliability of computers in general, and how the arguments for accepting safe technology are being misused, but I'll spare you from them.

Suffice it to say that the smart gun issue is a complex one. In a world where everyone wants sound bites and quick fixes with high technology. On the one side, lawmakers and the public need to trust that when someone owns a gun they are still capable of making rational decisions. On the other side, gun owners have to stop couching every response in terms of the second amendment and explain how laws mandating untested technology are dangerous to the public safety.

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Armatix "review"

So, the whole internet, it seems, is talking about this new technology that will save countless lives with no down sides. It is the Armatix iP1 pistol. A lot of people are coming out on both sides of the issue. Not surprisingly "anti-gun" people want this to become mandatory safety equipment on all guns. In fact, New Jersey, at least, already has a law on the books requiring that all guns in the state must use this technology within three years of it becoming commercially available. Also not surprisingly, most gun owners do not want this technology.

So who's right and who's wrong? I thought I'd take an unbiased look. Well, to be fair, I should disclose that I do live in New Jersey and I do own a gun. On the other side of the equation I am a computer geek who loves new technology. So let's look at the objective factors and see where it gets us.

I think we can all agree we'd like to make guns safer. So let's look at numbers. There are an estimated 310,000,000 firearms in the US. The number of accidental deaths due to firearms in 2010 (according to the CDC) was 606. That's pretty darn good, considering there were over 35,332 deaths from car accidents that same year (again according to the CDC). That indicates to me that firearms are pretty safe already, much safer than cars.




In addition, legal firearms are used somewhere between 60,000 and 2,500,000 times a year to prevent a violent crime. The reasons for the uncertainty is that it depends on how you define using a gun and preventing a crime. Some would suggest the numbers are higher because if I scare away a would be attacker with a gun I'm not going to go report it. But let's take the lowest possible number, and round it.


Rounding, we have about 600 accidental deaths to avoid and 60,000 potential deaths to avoid. That means that any safety device which prevents a gun from firing unintentionally that also prevents it from firing when intended more than 1% of the time is not making it safer, but resulting in more loss of life. That's a pretty tight tolerance, and a fact which is at the forefront of concerns for people who may have to rely on a firearm to save their lives.


Rather than relying on news articles, I went straight to the Armatix web site to find out what this pistol does, and I discovered that the problems they are trying to solve and have solved are not really relevant to law enforcement or personal defense. Well, sort of.


First off, Armatix makes a whole system of gun security products. Their web site stresses the technological capabilities of their employees, but nowhere is there mention of firearms expertise. Most firearm product companies boast of that kind of experience. Not a problem, but just "odd". So let's look at their products.

The Quicklock is designed for shipping a gun such that it cannot be diverted and used by a third party. The lock consists of a device that inserts through the barrel into the chamber. Pulling it out without unlocking it mars the barrel, making the gun unusable. A very cool and useful product for shipping guns. This could also be used for long term storage, but a gun locked this way would not be in a position to fire in an emergency, as it would not have a round in the chamber. This is not an appropriate solution for a home defense weapon, though.



The Baselock is a similar system designed for multiple guns to be locked in a rack and unlocked simultaneously with a single keypad. I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve with this product, because if you look at the pictures, especially the ones showing it in use, the only exposed part of the gun is the trigger guard, and the gun is removed by pulling on that part of it. Yikes! Talk about dangerous. In most retention situations, the only part of the gun you absolutely want covered is the trigger guard, to prevent accidentally firing the gun when removing it. I would suggest redesigning it to cover the trigger guard area and leave the grip exposed.


The third product is the "Smart System." This consists of the iP1 semi-automatic pistol, iW1 active RFID watch, and TRS targeting system. This appears to be designed for target shooting only. The reason why I say this is that the TRS system is designed so that the gun will only function when aimed at a target. The gun cannot be used against people or other objects. There's no information on what indicates to the gun that it is on target, but there is a gun which cannot be used in self defense.

Assuming we purchase the iP1 gun without the TRS targeting system, we still have a .22LR pistol, which is not generally considered a usable round for self defense, due to its lack of stopping force. The gun costs $1399 and the watch required to operate it is sold separately for $399. So about $1800 for a gun that is nor useful for self defense. End of discussion.


But let's get past that and assume at some point down the road they make a 9mm version, or even a .45 version. Would it be safer?

Let's talk about existing technology. I can, today, buy a biometric or RFID controlled gun safe. With it I can keep my pistol loaded and ready, and with a touch of the RFID chip or finger have it in my hand ready to fire in seconds. While it is in the safe my kids can't get at it. I can program the device with multiple RFID chips or fingerprints so that my wife or adult children, who know how to use it responsibly, can access it.

Cost - This gun safe technology costs $200 and up. The gun safe can be used with any model gun, and a larger one can hold multiple guns. A reliable home defense gun can be had new for $350 and up. So if I want to have firearms available in multiple locations in my house I have to buy a separate gun and safe for each location, at a cost of $550 per location. The iW1 watch can be used with multiple iP1 pistols, so I only have to buy one. However, I have to purchase an iP1 for each location, at a cost of $400 + $1400 per location. But wait, there's more. If I want my wife and adult children to be able to use the gun for self defense in my home I need to buy more watches, at $400 per person in the household.

Access - The gun has safety features which it will take me time to activate, and which make it safe (right?), so this gun is not to be kept in a safe or case. Keeping it in a safe would add yet another layer of security to go through which would take time when seconds count. Therefore I can only assume this gun should be kept in a drawer. My kids will have access to the gun, and I rely 100% on the safety mechanisms built into the gun to keep them safe. The gun is made with sweeping lines and LEDs so it is very attractive to children, and looks somewhat like a toy. Attractive nuisance is the legal term, I believe. I'm sure kids will spend hours playing with the gun, pulling the trigger to watch the red LEDs light up.

Watch - The watch must be within 10" of the gun for it to fire, which means I need to buy wear the watch on my right hand. In fact, given that in a home defense scenario I might need to hold the gun in either hand, I need to wear two watches, so $800 per person, plus the annoyance of wearing a watch on the wrong hand, or wearing two watches. In fact, I'll want to be wearing these watches 24/7 because an intruder isn't going to wait for me to put on my watch. Oh, and if I like my existing watch, perhaps because it is a smart watch or has extra alarms or some feature, I have to wear yet another watch. Perhaps I should duct tape the watch to the grip of the gun...


Not only do I have to wear the watch, but before I use the gun I have to activate it by entering a 5 digit code on the watch. Doing so will enable the gun for 1 to 10 hours (which I can preset somehow). Pressing little buttons on my watch with my left hand is not something that will be easy for me to do in a high stress situation like realizing there is an intruder in my home. So perhaps I need to set an alarm every 10 hours to remind me to re-enable the watch so the gun is ready to go in an emergency.


Visibility - if I haven't made it through all these steps, my gun won't work, but I can still try to scare the bad buy away, since he doesn't know it, right? No, because the gun will have a cheery red LED glowing on it. Red or green, that LED will be shining toward my eyes, by the way, reducing my visibility in the darkened rooms of my house. and giving away my position to the bad guy.

Jammers - RFID jammers can be had for $200 and up. If (as New Jersey State law mandates) every home owner has to have an RFID activated gun, a criminal can buy (or steal) a jammer and walk into a home knowing that he has effectively disarmed the homeowner. The jammer's effective range is 30 meters, which is more than the effective range of the homeowner's handgun.

Hackers - one might assume that if the gun were stolen it would be useless without the watch. I have not seen a schematic of the gun, but I have to assume that, just like the "analog hole" in digital copyright protection, there is a place where one could bypass the circuitry involved and activate the gun directly by applying a voltage to a solenoid (or similar actuator), and then permanently fix the solenoid in the "active" position. After all, the interlock is mechanical at some point.

Disarmed - Now let's examine the other scenario that this gun is supposed to deal with. The bad guy has come into my house, rushed me, and is wrestling the gun away from me. Well, if I try to hold onto the gun, my watch is near it and it could shoot me. My only recourse is to throw the gun away, or give it to the bad guy, and try to stay out of range. At worst he will get close to me and when I raise my hands to defend myself the gun will activate and he will shoot me. At best, I have armed him with a metal club with which he can beat me to death.


Reliability - I haven't talked about the reliability of this technology, because there is no data on it. A lot of people are saying it would make their guns unreliable, and perhaps it will. But I have no knowledge of what kind of stress testing the system has been put through or what the results are, so I won't comment on it.

So in what way does this technology  make (already safe) guns safer than existing technology does? Have I completely missed something? I realize that some of these issues are due not to the technology itself but to a poor implementation. But from every angle I can see, there is no "problem" being solved that isn't already solved in a better way by existing technology. In other words, the technology in its present state would lead to more deaths, not fewer.

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Due Process and Due Diligence

I know most people are posting stories today about the liberties we enjoy as Americans. But I came across this story today. As you may be aware, our government has decided it has the power to spy on us in this country with aerial drones, to "keep us safe", just as they do in other places. But of course, Constitutional arguments aside, is this even good technology? Not according to the news story.

Todd Humphreys and his team at the University of Texas at Austin's Radio Navigation Laboratory have just completed a successful experiment: illuminating a gaping hole in the government’s plan to open US airspace to thousands of drones.

They could be turned into weapons.

With his device -- what Humphreys calls the most advanced spoofer ever built (at a cost of just $1,000) -- he infiltrates the GPS system of the drone with a signal more powerful than the one coming down from the satellites orbiting high above the earth.

Initially, his signal matches that of the GPS system so the drone thinks nothing is amiss. That’s when he attacks -- sending his own commands to the onboard computer, putting the drone at his beck and call.

Humphreys says the implications are very serious. “In 5 or 10 years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” he told Fox News. “Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”

There's so much I could say about this, from the failure of modern technology to replace people to the failure of a government to protect the interests of its people. Neither due process nor due diligence are being practiced here.

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Monsters

A short while ago on plurk my friend Adoro started a discussion about zombies. My friend Christie posted her theory of zombies:

Zombies are people who have succumbed to mortal sin. They are spiritually dead, devouring others in their selfish self gratification. They infect others and make more like themselves. We really are in a Zombie Apocalypse if you think about it

...which will be the topic of today's post. There are a lot of zombies out there. People who have given up their free will and mindlessly follow wherever their "natural" instincts lead them. From the idea that homosexuals are unable to control their impulses (and shouldn't try) and likewise for heterosexuals who are encouraged to "just do it." I think the attempts to redefine marriage in terms of sex instead of sacrifice are part of this zombie apocalypse.

But of course zombies are only one kind of monster. What else is out there? There are vampires. Vampires are people who have sold their soul for the promise of eternal life on Earth. They kill young innocent human beings, taking their life's blood in order to keep themselves alive longer. Although embryonic stem cells have yet to add one minute to anyone's life, they are taken in the name of longevity, and are being used increasingly in ways to "help benefit" people, from vaccines to cosmetics to artificial flavor enhancers to lasers!

Then there is Frankenstein's monster. He was created by Dr. Frankenstein, who took organs from executed criminals without consent. Monstrous, and yet we have it being used to support euthanasia in Belgium. Just as troubling are the presumed consent laws, which basically give the state de-facto ownership to use your body unless you "opt out" and, of course, unless they make a mistake or fail to find you on the list, etc. In those cases, you have no legal recourse but to be chopped up for the greater good.

There's the werewolf. Once a month this person looses control of their body and becomes only partially human. Women today are encouraged to use "the pill", which interrupts their monthly cycle and suppresses one of the natural functions of the human body - the giving of life. Just like the werewolf slowly becoming less and less human, they lose their desire and desirability, and the ability to love and be loved, and perhaps risk their lives as well.

There are monstrous chimeras, as depicted in the classic horror stories The Fly and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Consider the actual chimeras produced in labs today, such as the cows that give human breast milk or the man/mouse hybrids being used in research.

Those were all the monsters I could think of. Feel free to chime in if I missed something important. Eugenics and IVF are staples of sci-fi distopian stories as well, but I'll leave them for another post, since they are not typically thought of in the "monster" category. Scarily, unlike the monsters in books, movies, and TV, these are all real world things.

One other thing struck me as true about all the "traditional" monster stories. They are all afraid of the Catholic church, and can all be defeated by it. Some things never change. I find comfort in that.

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This is so sick

I have to post this, even if it is only a link to another site. The excellent blog Mary Meets Dolly has this post about the "euthanasia coaster". According to the designer it is a roller coaster (I kid you not) that kills 24 humans at a time for "dealing with overpopulation or when your life becomes too long". And this is produced by a site called "science gallery". Makes me want to think about removing the word "science" from my degrees.

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PepsiCo responds

...with a canned email that shows they did not read what I sent them.

Thank you for contacting us to share your sincere concerns. Please know that we take very seriously the issues you raised. PepsiCo has a strong set of defined values we strive to live up to.

Unfortunately, there is some misinformation being circulated related to research techniques that have been used for decades by universities, hospitals, government agencies, and private companies around the world. These claims are meant to suggest that human fetal tissue is somehow used in our research. That is both inaccurate and something we would never do or even consider.

It also is inaccurate to suggest that tissue or cells somehow are being used as product ingredients. That’s dangerous, unethical and against the law. Every ingredient in every one of our products is reviewed and approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

We hope this information is helpful and reassuring. Thank you again for reaching out to us and allowing us to clarify the situation.

Note that they do not mention Senomyx nor their relationship with companies that do use fetal tissue. They merely claim they don't themselves use fetal tissue, which of course was not what I wrote them about. My reply to their email bounced, so I started the process again with another communication to the effect that their response was neither helpful nor reassuring. Let's see what they say...

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Frankencows

Straight from a Michael Chrichton novel, scientists in China are making transgenic human/cow chimeras. What the heck does that mean? A chimera in Greek mythology was a monster composed of parts of different animals. In the modern version, DNA from different species is combined to make a new creature of niether species. In this case, human DNA is inserted into cows to make an organism that has characteristics of both species. The goal is to make cows that produce human breast milk.

I can't begin to describe on how many levels this is just wrong (and I shouldn't need to). From a human rights standpoint this research is a violation of the dignity of the human person. From an animal cruelty standpoint, these animals are suffering (26 of the 43 animals created have died so far) and subject to various diseases and cancers because of messing around with their genetic makeup. While the goal of this research may sound good

The scientists behind the research believe milk from herds of genetically modified cows could provide an alternative to human breast milk and formula milk for babies, which is often criticised as being an inferior substitute.

the real reasons are more mercenary. The goal is not just to replace baby formula but to replace cow's milk in general.

“We aim to commercialize some research in this area in coming three years. For the “human-like milk”, 10 years or maybe more time will be required to finally pour this enhanced milk into the consumer’s cup.”

China is now leading the way in research on genetically modified food and the rules on the technology are more relaxed than those in place in Europe.

Aside from concerns of what effects this milk will have on humans, there is the risk of the genes "escaping" into the wild population, as has happened with genetically modified crops in the US.

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Dear

Remember my post Soylent Green? Well, I have more information. According to LifeSiteNews, the watchdog group Children of God for Life reports that the aborted fetal tissue is used to test artificial food flavorings used by several large companies. The company using the aborted fetal tissue, Senomyx, is partnered with Kraft, Nestlé and Pepsico. Two other food companies, Campbell Soup and Solae were also partnered with Senomyx, but have severed ties because of letters written by people like you and me asking them to stop.

And so I sent the following letters. Please join me. You can make a difference. You can copy these, or use your own words. You can send the letters online or on paper. Paper mail is probably more effective, but whether or not you send paper mail please take a minute to send it electronically. It just takes a minute and costs you nothing.

Dear ______,

I was shocked to find out that you are partnered with a company, Senomyx, that uses aborted fetal tissue to test its products. I am writing this letter to ask you to immediately sever all ties with Senomyx. My support for your company depends on it.

If you are unaware, Semnomyx is using HEK 293 – human embryonic kidney cells taken from an aborted baby - to produce their proprietary taste receptor-based assay system. They could have easily chosen COS (monkey) cells, Chinese Hamster Ovary cells, insect cells or other morally obtained human cells expressing the G protein for taste receptors to produce these assays, but instead chose to use cells obtained by the death of a child.

I urge you to drop all ties with Senomyx unless or until they change their methodology to an ethically sound one. I would appreciate a response.

Sincerely,
_________

The letters are for
Paul Bulcke, CEO
Nestlé USA
800 North Brand Boulevard
Glendale, CA 91203
Nestle 818 549-6000
Email form: http://www.nestle.com/Common/Peripherals/Pages/ContactUs.aspx?country=United States of America

Jamie Caulfield, Sr.VP
PepsiCo, Inc.
700 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10577
(914) 253-2000
Email form: http://cr.pepsi.com/usen/pepsiusen.cfm

Irene Rosenfeld, CEO
Kraft Foods/Cadbury Chocolate
Three Lakes Drive
Northfield, IL 60093
847-646-2000
Email form: http://www.kraftfoodscompany.com/Investor/investor-contacts/investor_contacts_form.aspx?ft=invest&subj=Investor+Center

While we're at it, let's thank Campbell and Solae

Dear ______,

I was pleased to learn that your company severed ties with Senomyx, a company that uses aborted fetal tissue to test its products. I am writing this letter to thank you for doing the right thing.

Sincerely,
_________

This one goes to

Edmund M. Carpenter, Chairman
Finance and Corporate Development
Campbell Soup
1 Campbell Place
Camden, NJ 08103-1701
1-800-257-8443
Feedback: http://campbellsoupcompany.com/Feedback.aspx

Mr. Torkel Rhenman Chief Executive Officer
Solae
4300 Duncan Avenue
St. Louis, Missouri 63110
Kraft Food:
800-325-7108
Email form: http://www.solae.com/About-Solae/Contact-Us

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Jim

Lorigen Engineering from JimTheFilm on Vimeo.
This movie looks very interesting to me (H/T Mary Meets Dolly). From the plot:

Being steadily crushed under the weight of debt, unemployment, and increasing isolation, Jim reaches a breaking point. Over a game of solitary Russian roulette he contemplates an unspeakable act of violence as a way of leaving his mark. He is stopped short by a vision of his deceased wife who convinces him that he should instead focus his remaining resources into an act of creation. Armed with his wife’s frozen eggs and a new resolve, Jim secures the services of a large biotech firm to help him create an heir who will be engineered to overcome the obstacles of common men.

Meanwhile in the distant future Niskaa, the leader of a group of genetically modified beings, controls a race of worker clones in a super-industrialized, post-human Earth. As he tries to restore his decrepit empire he comes face to face with a young clone that shows an unprecedented capacity for reason and empathy. Somehow connected to Jim via dreams, the clone manifests secrets of Nature that Niskaa has not accounted for…

Here is the web site for the movie, and the trailer. Caveat - I have not seen this movie, just what I present here.

I think clones connected through dreams is a bit off-beat, but still, the trailer looks good and it has the potential to be a decent cautionary tale genre sci-fi thriller. When I first heard the title of the movie I thought of Huckleberry Finn (which has sadly, or humorously, been in the news lately) and it would have been a potential theme if only the child had been named Jim instead of the father.

If you are interested in similar films until this comes to a theater near you, try the excellent movie The Island and Gattaca. Know of any other similar films worth watching?

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We (won't) take Manhattan

If you recall my earlier post The Manhattan Project, Apple pulled the Manhattan Declaration app from its iTunes app store over Thanksgiving vacation. Appropriately, it is over Christmas vacation that they respond to the inquiries by the authors of the Manhattan Declaration. The response is not promising. From the page:

Apple is telling us that the apps' content is considered "likely to expose a group to harm" and "to be objectionable and potentially harmful to others." Inasmuch as the Manhattan Declaration simply reaffirms the moral teachings of our Christian faith on the sanctity of human life, marriage and sexual morality, and religious freedom and the rights of conscience, Apple's statement amounts to the charge that our faith is "potentially harmful to others."

It is difficult to see how this is anything other than a statement of animus by a major American corporation against the beliefs of millions of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox citizens. It is our sincere hope that Apple will draw back from this divisive and deeply offensive position. The corporation's leaders must be made to understand that they do the country no good service in capitulating to efforts to stigmatize, marginalize or defame people on one side or the other in important moral debates.

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Not that there's anything wrong with that...

Remember Seinfeld? That was his mantra when discussing homosexuality. There was a whole episode, "The Outing" that featured the line over and over. Today I came across this article in the Washington Times on a new pill which can help lower the risk of a gay man contracting HIV from an HIV-positive partner. The numbers are interesting. the article states

Research subjects who took a pill called Truvada every day — plus used other AIDS-prevention strategies — lowered their risk of getting HIV by about 73 percent.
Men who failed to take the pill every day had only a 21 percent lower risk of getting HIV
It also was only effective with men who are confirmed as HIV-negative and who practiced additional prevention strategies such as consistently using condoms, getting treatment for other sexually transmitted diseases and reducing the number of sex partners.

Only 21% lowered risk? Compared to what? One would assume lower than not using the pill. But why then do they say that the effectiveness requires consistently using condoms, etc. Just what is the reduction in risk afforded by condoms?

I recall reading somewhere that condoms reduced the risk of contracting AIDS by 60%, but I didn't have a source. So I went googling. I visited literally dozens of sites that claims that condoms were "highly effective" but didn't give numbers and didn't quote a source that gave numbers. I finally found Worksop Summary: Scientific Evidence on Condom Effectiveness for Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Prevention from the National Institutes of Health. The results are not promising.

In general, the Panel found the published epidemiology literature to be inadequate to definitively answer the question posed to the workshop participants. Most studies reviewed did not employ a prospective design, which is the optimal method to assess the effectiveness of condoms in preventing infection.

The "highly effective" numbers seem to come from a laboratory study of condoms, which was then assumed to apply to actual use. The first assumption was that since the FDA specifies that no more than 1/400 condoms fail a water leak test that 399/400 condoms will not leak in actual use. Then they assessed virus passage through a "perfect" condom using a liquid with a high concentration of virus. assuming that the chosen liquid behaved like semen and that a high concentration behaved like a low concentration of viral particles (which is a known false assumption - I can't find the paper, but at higher concentrations, multiple particles jam small holes and so they are less likely to pass through than at low concentrations).

That information was used to form a hypothetical risk model. The results appear to be nonsense. There are too many obvious things wrong with this model to go into here (I have to wonder who approved the "research"), but suffice it to say that if this model were true, then condoms would be nearly 99.399196% effective at preventing pregnancy (yes, that's the level of accuracy claimed by the model), and they are not. Real world studies show that about 16-20% of couples who use condoms regularly experience pregnancy within their first year of use (the paper uses the number 14%).

When a model doesn't predict real world data, the model is wrong.

There were several studies done on actual people for HIV, however. They considered only passing HIV between men and women during vaginal intercourse, not transmission among gay males, but one would hope the results were similar, or at least it's less of a stretch than the hypothetical model. The results look more realistic.

Overall, Davis and Weller estimated that condoms provided an 85% reduction in HIV/AIDS transmission risk when infection rates were compared in always versus never users.

This means that condoms are as effective against HIV as they are against pregnancy, which is still not very effective, considering the number of unintended pregnancies for condom users. A 1-in-6 chance of contracting a deadly disease for which there is no cure doesn't seem "highly effective" to me.

So condoms are not the answer they are claimed to be. Let's hope this new pill is not only effective as effective as claimed, and that it doesn't lead to more resistant strains of HIV if it is used as prophylaxis.

However, that's not what I intended to blog about. The thing that struck me most about the article was the rate of infection.

Men who have sex with men (MSM) represent "nearly half of all people living with HIV in the U.S., and the rate of new HIV diagnoses among MSM is more than 44 times that of other men," the CDC said.

We are living in a country that's considering regulating eating habits because overweight people have a 40% higher chance of contracting cardiovascular disease. Why don't we consider lifestyle choices that result in a 4300% higher chance of contracting HIV? We just repeat the mantra "not that there's anything wrong with that" and ignore the suffering of these people.

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Making a list, checking it twice...

If you're coming to town this Christmas (or whenever), you'd better be nice to the TSA, because president Obama's taking names. According to an article in Canada Free Press (of course the American media wouldn't carry this). [italics are from the article, bold emphasis mine]

I was contacted by a source within the DHS who is troubled by the terminology and content of an internal memo reportedly issued yesterday at the hand of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Indeed, both the terminology and content contained in the document are troubling. The dissemination of the document itself is restricted by virtue of its classification, which prohibits any manner of public release. While the document cannot be posted or published, the more salient points are revealed here

The terminology contained within the reported memo is indeed troubling. It labels any person who “interferes” with TSA airport security screening procedure protocol and operations by actively objecting to the established screening process, “including but not limited to the anticipated national opt-out day” as a “domestic extremist.” The label is then broadened to include “any person, group or alternative media source” that actively objects to, causes others to object to, supports and/or elicits support for anyone who engages in such travel disruptions at U.S. airports in response to the enhanced security procedures.

For individuals who engaged in such activity at screening points, it instructs TSA operations to obtain the identities of those individuals and other applicable information and submit the same electronically to the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division, the Extremism and Radicalization branch of the Office of Intelligence & Analysis (IA) division of the Department of Homeland Security.

So, for expressing an opinion about TSA policy in this blog post, I can be reported to the extremism and radicalism branch of Homeland Security to be tracked and analyzed. A wonderful use of my tax dollars. Of course I am already on president Obama's "extremist" list for being pro-life and for publicly opposing some of Obama's policies. And since Obama has given himself the right to assassinate Americans whom he accuses of being terrorists, with no trial or other process, perhaps I should be afraid.

But shouldn't we submit to a TSA scan to keep us safe? According to physics professor Peter Rez of Arizona State University in an MSNBC story (I guess he and MSNBC are on the extremist list with me), the probability of dying of cancer as a result of  TSA scan is about the same as that of dying in a terrorist attack on a plane. His research results are outlined here and available in full here. In other words, the scanners are as physically dangerous to the American public as the terrorists.

So we have a failed government policy instituting unconstitutional searches of American citizens, and the response of our president is to target Americans who point this out. I've in general been a skeptic of the "police state" alarmists, but this is troubling.

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Soylent Green

If you're like me you're a fan of classic Sci-Fi (aka SF for the younger generation) movies. Movies like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" have been long time favorites. Both were great movies with horrible remakes. Another classic movie is due to be destroyed in a remake in 2012, "Soylent Green".

"Soylent Green" is a 1973 movie about a future New York beset by overpopulation. There is a tremendous food shortage. Each day garbage trucks come around and collect the dead from the previous day, and also distribute the government-provided food, the eponymous soylent green. We are told that soylent green is the answer to the world's hunger problem, that it contains everything a body needs. But where does it come from? One man finds out, at the spine chilling conclusion of the movie. I'd like not to spoil it for you if you haven't seen it, but since from the rest of this article, you will probably figure it out.

I recently read what may be the most horrible thing I have ever read. It was on a natural foods blog. I couldn't find the original article at first, but google turned up not only it, but dozens like it. It seems there is a company, Senomyx, that is manufacturing a new type of artificial flavor. The flavoring technique is so unique it is the subject of a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, "Small Molecule Activator of the Human Epithelial Sodium Channel". It seems that, rather than provide a chemical that your taste buds sense, it provides a chemical that makes your taste buds think they're tasting something that isn't actually there.

Very interesting, but what's the horrible thing? The horrible thing, and the connection with soylent green is what this new flavoring agent is developed using - aborted fetuses. I thought this was too horrible to be real, but it seems to be. Where can this stuff be found? According to the articles, Nestle is already selling this in other countries. From "Is it real or is it Semonyx?" (emphasis mine in the following):

The company notes on its website that they have entered into "exclusive or co-exclusive product discovery and development collaborations" with Ajinomoto, Cadbury, Campbell Soup Company, Firmenich, Nestle, Pepsi, and Solae.

Solae? No, I had never heard of them either. But that company's website tells us "Solae was formed in 2003 as a joint venture between DuPont and Bunge." DuPont, yeah, I've heard of them. Solae provides soy protein ingredients, but interestingly, their website specifically doesn't mention product names, although they do say their products are in a host of items easily found in any store: meat alternatives, soy milk, energy bars, edamame, soups, chili, the list is impressive, and frightening for most of us who use soy for vegetarian reasons. 

...There's more, unfortunately. I left out part of the earlier quote from Senomyx about their goals; here's the missing piece: "The goals of our high potency sweetener program are to allow for the reduction of calories in packaged foods and beverages and to enable our collaborators to use product labeling referencing "natural flavors." Senomyx is currently permitted by the FDA (gotta love 'em because, well, we don't actually have any choice) to list their products as "artificial flavors," even though they're not technically flavors at all. But their goal, as they say, is to be able to call them "natural flavors," as well. Let me ask you a question: How many times have you seen the words 'natural flavors' on a label and thought, whew, good. Nothing bad there! Yeah, me too.

To recap, a fast-growing company developing flavor "technologies" is collaborating with the world's largest food and drink producers, which will then (now?) add those (human embryo-derived) substances to pretty much anything and we'll think it tastes just dandy.

To be fair, it is unclear from Senomyx' published information whether the final product contains human remains (as the articles about it state) or is "merely" made using human remains, but either way it is scary. So what can we do? We could try contacting the FDA. Dr. Margaret Hamburg is the Commissioner. Of course, the FDA is part of Health and Human Services which is run by Kathleen Sebelius, who is an avid fan of the abortion industry. As governor of Kansas, Ms. Sebelius was known for "fixing" criminal charges for late late term abortionist George Tiller, while receiving massive campaign donations from him.

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Who won? I dunno

Today is election day in the US. The polls predict a huge swing against the democratic party, for reasons the democrats don't seem to understand. I can tell them what it is, at least according to everyone I know. They have taken their majority as a mandate to push a social agenda, rather than what it was, a dissatisfaction with the previous administration. The mandatory insurance law they call health care "reform" was wildly unpopular, yet it was pushed through despite the will of the people. Likewise for appointments to offices, such as supreme court justices and federal judges. Likewise for economic policies which, rather than checking the spending of the previous administration, greatly expanded spending and taxation. My hope is that whoever gets elected today doesn't take their election as a mandate to follow their own agenda, but to bring America back to economic sanity, and to restore individual freedoms that have been trampled on in the last 10 (or 50) years.

But I digress. There is a bigger problem with this year's vote. I don't have confidence we'll know who won. Yet another victory for inappropriate technology!

Remember hanging chad? Imagine that times a million. Because this year 33 states will allow "Internet voting". What the perceived need for this is I can't imagine. But I do know it's a bad idea. From "Is it Secret? Is it Safe?":

...Washington, D.C., conducted a pilot project to test its new electronic voting system for the collection of overseas and military absentee ballots. The system was opened to the public to test how secure and usable it was.

Within 36 hours, a team of University of Michigan computer students and teachers had taken it over. They changed votes, "elected" a Star wars robot chairman of the City Council, and installed the school’s fight song, “Hail to the Victors,” which would play 15 seconds after someone voted.

“Without the hacking of the District of Columbia system we would never have known how vulnerable Internet voting systems are,” said John Bonifaz, legal director of Voter Action. 

“It showed that it wasn’t just a domestic problem of vote security but a matter of national security,” he said, referring to a second problem the U. of Michigan hackers discovered as they took over the system.

According to J. Alex Halderman, the professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the hacking effort, they weren’t alone inside the system. They tracked two other computers trying to hack in -- one that originated in China and another in Iran.

“Internet voting is a crazily insecure and unreliable system that most rational computer scientists think is an absurd way to vote,” Boniface [sic] said. [emphasis mine]

I have to disagree with the statement "...we would never have known how vulnerable Internet voting systems are" however. A quick search of just one site yielded dozens of articles, like this one from 2006 "How to Steal and Election by Hacking the Vote". Of course, this article deals with hacking a voting machine at a polling place, but think for a minute. If we can't guarantee the integrity of a vote on a machine that is in a physically secure location, with monitored access and physical human verification of each voter who enters the voting booth, what chance do we have with a machine that is open to the Internet, with no human able to monitor who is doing what to it?

The general public is led to believe that their Internet transactions are secure for purchasing and for banking (they are not), so why not voting? Voting is a much more difficult problem, because not only  must the transaction be secure, it must be secret and tamper proof. If somebody purchases a TV with my credit card online it is detectable and correctable, and in the worst case, I dispute the bill at the end of the month and the credit card company "eats" the cost (e.g. takes it our of profits and adjusts rates accordingly). Similarly for my bank. This is not possible with my vote, however, because (in theory) nobody know which vote is mine, or who it was for. Nobody is going to call me and say "we got a suspicious looking vote from you for the communist party - can you verify it please?"

As the aforementioned article says "I've yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are". I will predict in advance that controversy will ensue from anomalies in this election, and further predict that they will ultimately be ignored.

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Light Banter

My post "The end of the EZ Bake Oven" got several bits of feedback on Facebook that I would like to share here. I also would like to elaborate on some of the points made that I didn't in my original post, and correct some points that appear to be in error.

 First, the feedback. Paul notes that according to Snopes:

TRUE: CFLs contain mercury, a potentially dangerous substance.
TRUE: While mercury stays safely contained in intact CFLs, it escapes from broken CFLs into the immediate surroundings.
FALSE: The amount of mercury contained in one CFL bulb poses a grave danger to a home's inhabitants.
TRUE: The breakage of a CFL bulb needs to be handled with care and certain procedures should be followed in removing the broken bulb and its contents from a home.
FALSE: The mercury dispersed by one broken CFL bulb needs to be dealt with only by an environmental clean-up crew.

If you follow the link to Snopes you will see they recommend an elaborate 16 step cleanup process, which includes shutting off the heat or AC in the house and leaving windows open for at least 15 minutes.

 

I replied: I never claimed you needed to call in a hazmat team, but while the snopes statements may reflect EPA information, how many families are going to follow the 16 steps, or even know about them? Who's going to shut off their heat and leave the windows open for 15 minutes in a winter storm? The EPA guidelines for safe levels of mercury in a home are 20 micrograms/m^3. The 5 milligrams from one bulb will go far beyond that in a room.

Andy commented: http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/news/4217864 good article on the subject. pretty clear that the electricity needs of the old bulbs cause much more mercury (e.g. from coal power plants into the air) to be released into the environment. good info in any case.

I replied: Sorry, Andy, it is not clear at all. In fact, the opposite is clear from the link you provide.

From the article "...an incandescent would still contribute 4.65 more milligrams of mercury into the environment over its lifetime." But that assumes 100% of that electricity is produced by coal (the article itself states the real number is 50% but then they assume 100% coal for their calculations). Counting the non-coal power plants, instead of comparing 13.16 with 3.51 + 5, we should compare 6.58 with 1.75 + 5.

In other words, the amount of mercury released is similar. The difference is in the CF scenario the mercury is released in landfills around the country, and in the incandescent scenario it is at a power plant, where we can employ scrubbing technology or switch to a less polluting generation technology.

Incidentally, residential lighting accounts for 212TW of the 3873TW of electricity produced in this country, so even if it did save mercury, the largest amount of mercury that could possibly be saved is 3.6% of the total produced. Improving the power plants even slightly would save much more.

I still give CFs a big FAIL. 

To which Andy replied: cool. Still, have to figure in HVAC loading too. now if only the guys changing all those tubes in offices would quit tossing the big tubes in the dumpster breaking them in the process ;-)

Both Paul and Andy have some good points, but I don't think either is a good argument in favor of CFs. While the mercury in one CF bulb does not present a "grave danger" (in the sense that you will die) mercury poisoning is cumulative, and if the 16 step procedure isn't followed the residual mercury may sit in the room for may years until it is eventually absorbed.

 

I also noted that according to the EPA (more readable article is at the Sierra club site), US Mercury emissions from power plants must be reduced to 38 tons by the end of 2010 (25% reduction) and to 15 tons by 2018. Factoring the power plant improvements into the mercury equations above yields 4.94 for the incandescent,  1.3 + 5 or 6.3 for the CF in 2010. So the CFs actually introduce more mercury into the environment over their lifetime. By 2018 that number will be 1.98 vs. 5.53 in favor of the incandescent.

The second point Andy brings up is HVAC cooling. Every watt used by these bulbs eventually becomes heat that has to be removed if your house gets too warm. So, how does that affect things? According to Mr. Electricity a 2.5 ton AC uses 3500W of power (this is a reasonably sized central air system for a residence). 2.5 tons is 30,000 BTUs, and each watt our light bulb consumes generates 3.41 BTUs. Doing the math, each watt of heat generated by our light bulbs takes another .4 watts to remove.

Assuming we run our air conditioner 3 months of the year (yes, in the south it will be more, but in the north we may not use AC at all, and some bulbs will be outdoors or in non-air conditioned areas), I estimate each watt of lighting consumes another 0.1 watts on average. Factoring this into the above equations, we get 5.4 vs. 6.4 in favor of incandescents in 2010, 1.98 vs. 5.58 by 2018.

As I noted originally, improving power plants even slightly makes a much bigger improvement. Plus that improvement is carried across all electrical usage, not just residential lighting. All of the comparisons I was able to find use the flawed logic of the Popular Mechanics article to justify the use of CF bulbs. The fact is that these bulbs increase the amount of mercury released into the environment, even in the USA, which has more coal fired electrical production than any other nation.

Thanks to all who have responded with feedback, both here and on Facebook and Plurk. I hope these articles have been informative. They certainly were for me.

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A New Hope

If you recall my award winning blog post, "The end of the EZ Bake oven" about the evils of compact Fluorescent (CF) bulbs, things looked pretty beak at the end.

However "there is another". In fact there are several others. According to the article quoted in my last post:

General Electric Corp., the world’s largest maker of traditional bulbs, said that by 2010, it hoped to have on the market a new high-efficiency incandescent bulb that will be four times as efficient as today’s 125-year-old technology. It said that such bulbs would closely rival fluorescent bulbs for efficiency, with no mercury.

How can you improve on what is essentially a piece of wire? Well, according to this article, the filament can be pitted with a laser to make it more efficient. Additionally, reflective coatings inside the bulb can direct infrared photons back to the filament, requiring less energy to keep it hot. Well, here it is, the end of 2010 and we haven't seen these bulbs hit the streets, but there are other promising technologies.

Plasma bulbs have very high efficiencies, approaching 14%, but it is difficult to make them operate at low enough power to operate in the home. For instance, the lowest power plasma bulbs made are 100 watts, which in light output is like a 1000 watt incandescent bulb! In addition plasma bulbs require quite a bit of electronics to operate. The bulb is essentially a microwave oven, heating a noble gas until it becomes a plasma.

Most other technologies have bigger problems that make them unsuitable. The two really promising technologies in development right now are LED and OLED lamps. Note that these are "lamps" and not "bulbs", since they are solid, not hollow. Despite the fact that both have "LED" in their name, they are quite different in many respects.

An LED, or Light Emitting Diode is, well, a diode that emits light. A diode is a device that passes an electric current in one direction only. Because of the nature of semiconductors, all diodes emit some light, but it takes some tweaking to do it efficiently and make that light visible. And LED is about 15-20% efficient in emitting visible light, making them far better than either incandescents of CFs. However, that light is monochromatic, meaning one color. Because of this, they are perfect for applications where the light is supposed to be colored, such as auto tail lights or traffic lights (or perhaps not).

There are two ways to get usable (white) light for household use. One is to use several LEDs of different colors. In fact, by manipulating the brightness of three or more LEDs we can make a lamp that can change color to fit the homeowner's mood. A simpler (though less efficient) way is the so called "white LEDs" that are used in flashlights. This is an LED that emits ultraviolet light, coated with phoshors, just like the fluorescent tube. It is superior to a fluorescent tube in that the LED is more efficient, doesn't contain mercury, isn't breakable (under normal circumstances) and lasts pretty much forever (50,000 hours or more).

So why don't we see them used everywhere? Heat. Ironically, although an LED produces very little heat compared to an incandescent bulb, since it is monochromatic the heat isn't being given off as infrared radiation. It sits inside the LED and can destroy it if it gets hot enough.

OLEDs, or Organic LEDs, are a newer technology. Yes, they are LEDs, but instead of using semiconductive crystals of materials like Gallium Arsenide Phosphide the use thin films of polymers (plastic), as thin as 50nm (a human hair is about 100,000nm thick). Because they are so thin, there is a high ratio of surface area to mass, meaning the light doesn't have to travel far before it is out of the LED and free to go out and light up the room. It also means there is more surface to cool off the device.

Unlike LEDs, OLEDs do wear out. They have a life span of about 14,000 hours before they degrade to 80% of their original brightness. On the other hand, they are up to twice as efficient as LEDs (or 20x as efficient as incandescents), which is why they are often found in cell phones, where battery life is important. One OLED technology, Phosphorescent OLEDs (PHOLEDs) claims it can reach up to 50% efficiency. And of course they are made without mercury or other toxic substances.

So when can I buy my OLED light bulb? According to this post we should see them starting to hit the market within the next year or two. However, if this roll out is like most in the tech industry, don't hold your breath. I'm sure they will be very expensive at first, but the technology can be printed with inkjet-like printers, which means once factories are tooled up they have the potential to be much cheaper than CFs. So perhaps the best course of action for the environment is to stock up on incandescents to make it to 2014 or so.

In researching these two posts I learned a lot about lighting technologies, the problems involved, the innovations taking place and tradeoffs in various designs. It was illuminating. No doubt I'll be posting more on the subject.

One final note. I'm sure "green" people and government will be touting how their regulation produced this lighty goodness. However, it should be known that OLEDs have been aggressively developed since before this legislation, and not because they would "save the Earth" but because they would increase the battery life of cell phones and media players. Here's a case where market forces alone produced innovation.

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The End of the EZ Bake Oven

Congress hath decreed that we must all give up incandescent light bulbs by 2014. That led to the recent closing of the last light bub factory in America. We will now be importing all our incandescent bulbs. Yay us.

My first thought was to stock up, so I can keep my EZ Bake over going if the bulb in it fails. Seriously, this is yet another case of inappropriate use of ("green") technology. Let's take a look at the technologies involved.

The old standard incandescent bulb is very similar to the bulb Thomas Edison invented in 1879. Prior to that the "best electric light bulb was the carbon arc lamp, which had been invented around 1800. The carbon arc was more efficient, but wasn't very appropriate for household use, and only lasted 100 hours (Edison's original bulbs only lasted 40, but were soon improved to last longer, with modern bulbs lasting about 1,000 hours).

An incandescent bulb works by passing an electric current through a filament made of tungsten until it glows from the heat. Tungsten is used because of its properties at high temperatures. The filament is encased in a glass bulb filled with argon, to prevent the filament from burning, which it would do in air. Argon is a chemically inert gas, and the third most common gas found in our atmosphere (after nitrogen and oxygen).

The down side of the incandescent bulb is that it only emits about 2% of the energy it uses as visible light. The rest of the energy is emitted as infrared radiation. That is a plus if you are trying to keep your chickens warm in the hatchery, or baking a cake in your EZ bake oven, but is a nuisance in a factory, where the waste heat must be removed by air conditioning.

Because of this most offices use fluorescent lighting. Fluorescent light bulbs are about four to five times as efficient as incandescent bulbs (about 9% of their energy is turned into visible light) at first. I say at first because they begin to degrade very quickly in use to about 75% of their original light output. That still makes them about three times as efficient as incandescent bulbs.

Fluorescent bulbs work by passing a high voltage through a low pressure mixture of mercury and a "noble" gas (argon, krypton, neon or xenon). The gas becomes a plasma and emits ultraviolet radiation, which causes a coating on the inside of the tube to fluoresce (hence the name) and emit light.

Until recently, fluorescent bulbs haven't been very popular in the home. First off, the bulb does not emit a "full spectrum" of light (even bulbs that say "full spectrum" on them), but emit certain colors only. So even a bulb that appears white to the eye (because it emits the right amount of red, green, and blue colors) will make colors look "odd" (because the color of the object doesn't match the color the bulb emits). The result can make food look unappealing (a boon for dieters), skin tones appear wrong, colors that appear to match in their light will look wrong in daylight or incandescent light, etc.

In addition, the bulb does not stay lit continuously. It blinks on and off 60 times a second with the household AC current. Thus while it appears to be a constant light to the eye, it can cause headaches and visual stress.

But the biggest problem is the environmental impact. In addition, almost everything in the bulb is toxic. A broken fluorescent bulb provides not only broken glass, but various phosphor compounds that are toxic and worst of all, mercury. attempts to clean up the glass and phosphor dust with a vacuum will spread the mercury around. Mercury, being a heavy liquid metal at room temperature, is very difficult to get rid of and will stay in your house until it is absorbed into your body. Assuming you don't break your bulb, when it fails you need to take the bulb to a hazardous waste center - putting it in the garbage, or even recycling is a no no, as most recycling centers don't have the facilities to properly handle the mercury.

Enter the compact fluorescent (CF) bulb. I was once a big fan of CF bulbs, converting most of my household to using them over the last few years.I crowed over the fact that I was saving "40 dollars a year" off my electric bill (um yeah, I don't see that on my bill). I liked the fact that I could put a 27 or 36 watt bulb in one of those cheap "60 watts or less" lamp fixtures and get a decent amount of reading light for my ancient eyes. However, reliability issues have caused me to rethink that, especially for bulbs in unheated areas. They light dimly, if at all, and constantly need replacing. The more research I did the less impressed I was by them.

The compact fluorescent bulb is a fluorescent bulb that has been bent into a "U" shape or a coil so that it takes up less space. It was invented in China, and China continues to produce most of the CF bulbs in the world. The more "popular" ones you see in stores have an "edison base" (they screw into a socket made for incandescent bulbs) and have an electronic ballast that helps with the slow turn on and flicker issues.

However, the electronic ballast does not work at low temperatures, and cannot stand up to weather. Although the bulb claims to have ten times the life of an incandescent bulb (10,000 hours) they often fail to live up to this because of the number of components in the ballast that can fail. The phosphors have been changed to make the bulb appear the same color as an incandescent bulb, but it still has the same problems of unnatural colors as "standard" fluorescent bulbs.

Most importantly, it has all of the ecological down sides of a fluorescent bulb, and more. The electronics contain lead and other hazardous compounds. The production of the bulbs is quite "dirty", using environmentally hazardous solvents. This is the basic reason why the bulbs are made in China.

According to this MSNBC story:

Manufacturers and the EPA say broken CFLs should be handled carefully and recycled to limit dangerous vapors and the spread of mercury dust. But guidelines for how to do that can be difficult to find, as Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, discovered.

“It was just a wiggly bulb that I reached up to change,” Bridges said. “When the bulb hit the floor, it shattered.”

When Bridges began calling around to local government agencies to find out what to do, “I was shocked to see how uninformed literally everyone I spoke to was,” she said. “Even our own poison control operator didn’t know what to tell me.”

The state eventually referred her to a private cleanup firm, which quoted a $2,000 estimate to contain the mercury. After Bridges complained publicly about her predicament, state officials changed their recommendation: Simply throw it in the trash, they said.

So while we are saving some energy we are putting poison in our landfills and homes. In order to save how much? The number look large, but consider that the US consumes 29 PWh, while residential lighting accounts for 212 TWh of that. That means if all of the US residential lighting was incandescent (which it isn't), and all of it was converted to CF, then the US would save 140 TWh/year, or in other words would reduce our energy needs by approximately 0.48%.

To save this 0.48% we will introduce deadly mercury into our homes, and eventually into landfills and waterways. Congress has set the precedent that they can ban a product from the US not because it is dangerous or because it is bad for us, but because they feel like it.

Thus the award for inappropriate use of technology in the home goes to the compact fluorescent bulb.

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Dry Gulching

Ya know what bugs me? When we were in Yellowstone this summer, pretty much the big stink at all the lodges/inns/hotels/cabins/resorts/marinas/camp grounds/etc. was how "green" they were. Every square inch of the landscape was plastered with signs saying how this toilet used less water, the light bulbs used less electricity, the paper towels were recycled. Since I wrote the recent post on acting "green", I wanted to mention my loathing of "faux green" things, and in general the inappropriate use of technology to try to promote something that isn't so.

But there's so much of it around us every day, I don't know where to start. I bet I could find 100 things that fit the category (inappropriate use of technology, usually to make one think something is "green") just around my own home. So I decided to pick a random thing that irked my in Yellowstone to start with. Paper towel dispensers.

At the top of this post is a picture of the standard towel dispenser in use in millions of restrooms all over the world. It's inexpensive, has no moving parts (I'm not counting the door to refill the dispenser, I mean it has no parts that need to move to dispense paper towels), cheap to construct, hygienic (made from easy to clean stainless steel) and kind cute. How could we improve on it?

Add inappropriate technology, of course! Almost every place we went in and near the park had those new fangled "motion sensor" paper towel dispensers, like the one shown at right. Now, rather than easy to clean (and recyclable) stainless steel, we are greeted by germy plastic. Each unit now requires a mercury and/or heavy metal containing battery (or in-wall wiring, but I believe most of these were battery powered, as the bathrooms hadn't been built anticipating that someone would use electricity to deliver a paper towel).

Just to make things better, nearly every one was "broken" like I believe the one pictured is. Rather than deliver a paper towel when you approach it and wave a hand in front of it (like the inappropriate ones I see around NJ), it leaves a paper towel hanging in the air, collecting overspray, germs, etc. When one tears off a sheet of paper, another one immediately descends, in order to catch whatever germs it can before the next hapless user arrives.

Another solution is to forgo paper entirely and use warm air to dry hands. While this may use less energy in the bathroom than it takes to create a paper towel and cart it to the bathroom and then the landfill, it uses electricity which (may have) involved carting fuel to the power plant, burning it, transmission losses (typically 50% of power is lost in the electrical lines) and the inefficiency of blowing the warm air onto your hand.

I have not seen an in-depth energy budget for these things, but I would suggest that if you use waste industrial heat to manufacture your paper towels, and at the end of life burn them in a co-gen facility, the paper towels wind up being "greener". There are just too many variables to make that analysis.

Plus, aside from the green arguments, they are noisy, take a long time to dry hands (relative to a wipe of a paper towel), and as one article I read points out, blow air at the perfect temperature to promote bacterial growth. Add to that the fact that they can't be used to wipe a stain off a shirt, or in fact wipe up anything, and I am not a big fan.

One of the restrooms I was in had an even higher-tech "green" solution, the Dyson air blade. This device vacuums water off the hands, and claims to be faster and use less energy than the warm air drier. You simply insert your hands and the drier activates, blowing and sucking water off of them. Not only can't this device wipe anything, it can't even dry anything other than hands. Admittedly my hands are rather large, but I had a hard time getting them in and out of the slots in the device without rubbing against the germy plastic. I have no data on the reliability of the unit, but I'll note that the unsupported plastic arch sticking out looks like a target for being bumped, sat on, etc. and broken.

Note that, in addition to the above complaints, since most of these device must sense your hands, they uses electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, whether someone is drying their hands or not. I doubt that fact is advertised as a cost by the manufacturer.

All this to save the energy in a paper towel. While I support not wasting paper, is this actually a large enough issue to warrant the time, expense, and sanitary compromises made in order to use these high-tech solutions? Don't we have bigger waster and energy use issues to solve?

Admittedly, some of these technologies have some benefits to offset the disadvantages, but one does not. It delivers the same old paper towel, but with more waste. And so I hereby award the prize for most inappropriate use of technology in a restroom to the motion sensor paper towel dispenser.

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