Category Archives: natural-world

Energy Storage

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This chart show various possible solutions to a problem.  If you can create energy in one location how do you store it?  For example you might charge up a battery or spin up a fly wheel.

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The upper right corner is suggestive of how dense and hot fuels are, i.e. oil and it’s friends.  But it’s hard to make an entire energy cycle out of them.

This post doesn’t really have point.  Just something I’ve been thinking about.  Triggered, to a degree, by discovering that natural gas is cheaper than pellets for your pellet stove and the associated  fact that people heat with corn in parts of the midwest.

I lifted that out of this presentation (pdf).

Black swan over the horizon

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Nor-easters are called that since the wind comes out of the north east.  Noel is beautiful example.    This storm dropped two feet of rain on some islands in the Caribbean.  Today at the vegetable market people were peeved.  They order on Wednesday morning; at which point we were forecast to have reasonably nice weather today.  The forecast had it a bit more to the right.  Slightly stronger, slightly to the left, it would have been worse.  .

Hybrids make you fat!

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Sometimes a scientific paper makes me giggle.  The paper by Charles Courtemanche which I’m skimming this morning has a few examples of this.  For example it says that people tend to under report their weight and over report their height; but more the former than the latter.  It also includes this phrase “the food variables are left-censored at zero” – which means to say that the French fries don’t come out of your mouth, they only go in.  This formula where on term is aproximately salads and another term is meatloaf is a hoot.

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I don’t know were this guy get’s off announcing that meatloaf isn’t health!  The author took two large data sets, one for prices (that’s gas price in the formula) and one for health behaviors.  The health behavior data he used is collected by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System of the CDC.  It’s a telephone survey conducted by state health departments.  That survey is full of interesting facts, for example here is a map showing the states and metro-regions where people lack health insurance.

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In anycase, he was looking to see if there was some corrolation between gas prices and obesity; and yes cheap gas makes us get fatter.  Given that the next question is “How so?”  The behavior data has lots of info about various things people are doing he can look for patterns there too.  Thus we can can learn the valuable and amusing fact that “A rise in gas prices appears to increase the frequency of hamburger consumption…” and “a small increase in salad consumption”.  From now on when ever I see that the price of gas has gone up I’m going to think “hamburger?”  Generally higher gas prices don’t lead to healthier eating.

People lost weight when gas prices rose for two reasons.  Where they ate changes; they ate more at home.  And they walked more.  I.e. higher gas prices reduced driving; displacing driving to the resturant and increasing walking as a substitute.

His conclusion:

In this paper, I provide evidence of a causal link between gasoline prices and body weight. Using data from the BRFSS, I find nd that a $1 increase in gas prices would, after three years, reduce U.S. obesity by approximately 15%, saving 16,000 lives and $17 billion per year, a  magnitude which offsets 16% of fuel consumers’ additional expenses. I also estimate that 13%  of the U.S.’s rise in obesity over the period 1979-2004 can be attributed to falling gas prices  during that time. Finally, I find that a rise in gas prices increases exercise and decreases the amount people eat out at restaurants, explaining their effect on weight.

This paper is actionable on a personal level.  Lose weight, buy a gas guzzler! But then it is probably twice as effective to buy a car you hate.

The paper is here (pdf), and a nod to the ever facinating Paul for his post about it.

Colony Collapse

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There is some deeply disturbing data about the decay of human social networks (pdf).
Meanwhile bees, a social insect appear to be in big touble too; something really bad is happening to the bee populations, Colony Collapse Disorder (Wikipedia).

“It is very frightening. We don’t know the cause. … The bees are quite strong. … A week later the colony has dwindled to nothing. … It’s a mystery. … We don’t know where they are going. … Fifty to ninety percent of the colonies. …” – U of Penn (podcast)

They (pdf) are very early in the process of puzzling out what’s going on, mostly just guessing at this point: mites, fungus, contamination, stress, a combination – who knows?

I wish I thought similar resources were being brought to bear on the breakdown in human social networks.

Foreclosure Tracking

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The RealtyTrac web site shows real estate foreclosure data for the US. It’s thought provoking to look at places your familiar with thru this somewhat specialized lens. What you want to do here is get to their maps quickly. To do that you:

  • enter a zipcode
  • select a house at random
  • on that house’s abbreviated listing page click on the interactive map button

Then browse around the neighborhood you’ve selected. When you want to look at another neighborhood, start over. Be sure to take a look at good and bad neighborhoods, places your friends and relatives live, and at places you’ve lived over the years. I really hadn’t appreciated how there some seemingly pleasant neighborhoods where it appears that one out of 20 homes are owned by the bank.

ice storm

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Look (update: opps, we used up all his bandwidth) at this unbelievable photo from this set about the recent ice storm in the high plains. Those are individual stems of stray covered in ice thicker than your two fists!

Meanwhile here in Boston it’s 70 degrees and doubling amazing the sky is perfectly blue. In the winter warm usually comes with wet, very disconcerting.

No-knead Bread

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The New York Times has brought all the food blogs into sync with an article posted last Wednesday for a no-knead bread. It’s been fun reading various news groups, mailing lists, forums, and blogs as they take the recipe out for a spin. It’s a fun technique.

I think the most amusing posting though was the one pointing out that the New York Times wrote a very similar technique, giving credit to the same baker and bakery back in 2004.

Jim Lahey, who owns Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan, recommends placing an enamel-covered cast-iron pot and lid in the oven at 500 degees for an hour (creating plenty of ambient heat), then lowering the dough into the pot on a parchment sling and covering it. — Proper Tools for a Perfect Loaf by Kay Rentschler, New York Time 25 May 2004

Though in that version the bread is dropped into the iron pot on a sheet of parchment. Which strikes me as a better approach; since the dough is so wet it’s almost impossible to keep it from soaking into the towel you rest it on for the second rise.

Control of Appetite

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i’m enjoying reading “Breakdown of Will” by Ainslie. One name his work goes by is pico-economics. If that name is not intended to be sarcastic then it’s at least ironic given that Economics is currently king of the social sciences and Ainslie’s model underminds the king’s legitamacy. The market stalls of pico economics are set out inside your head. The market participants negotate for your attention, slices of your time. I recorded a bit of audio from the market floor in an old blog posting.

Re-negotiate your cable contract once a year. Oh, and your long distance service. Rebalance your investments annually. Keep an eye on your mortgage rate and refinance at appropriate times, but not too often. Consider having a health savings account. Clip coupons. Keep track of those rebates. Join frequent flyer programs as appropriate. Be sure you have a will. Check that your love ones know your end of life desires. Eat more vegetables. Take regular breaks to avoid typing injuries. Get plenty of sleep.

Here, let me quote a fragment from the book:

I have described a model of learned interests that compete freely on the basis of timeframes over which of their rewards will be prefered. … a person is a population of these roommates each clamoring for control of the room … to continue to exist each interest must be the highest bidder at some time or it will be extinquished …

But pico-economics is not like classical economics. Not at all! The math that governs in the attention marketplace of your head is taken straight out of bizzaro world. It might as well be non-linear. We don’t respect the future; even if you think you do. You don’t.

At the heart of this bizzaro math is deeply hardwired preference for immediate gratification over longer term goals. This evil math is time scale free so we will scratch an itch in preference to eating some ice cream, and eat ice cream that’s at hand in preference to a fine meal with friends in half hour, and that we will go off to long lunch rather than finish that deliverable the team needs to make progress next month, etc. etc.

The preference for short term ones v.s. long term is so pervasive that we tend to gloss over how odd it is. Would you like to stop what your doing and have some ice cream? How do you decide that turning your attention to the fun of a bowl of ice cream is worth it? The utilitarian answer is that you weigh the alternative and if it’s better than what your doing then you switch. What’s curious about living in the bizzaro world of pico-economics is that this calculation is radically different depending on how close at hand that ice cream is. Going out to get it? Going into the kitchen? Plucking it off the desert cart? Dipping your spoon the bowl? Each step closer and in the competition for your attention the ice cream becomes vastly more likely to seize control of your scarce attention. So much so that it makes no economic sense at all.

From animal experiments they know exactly how out of wack your internal calculator is. If the pleasure of ice cream is 2, 20, or 200 seconds away for the spoon, the desert cart, and the kitchen respectively then you will treat see the fun of ice cream as 66 units, 8, or 1 unit respectively. If we replaced ice cream with a financial reward this implies that people have to struggle to avoid accepting a dime in two seconds v.s. $6.60 in few minutes later. Rationally this makes no sense; since I could make a mint moving ice cream closer to my customers.

That our attention is so badly behaved creates a problem what we struggle with continually. For example we all know not to buy the ice cream and bring it home; i.e. to avoid the temptation. Ainslie reports a delightful experiment involving pigions. Pigeons have the same bizzaro internal marketplace. So if you put them in a cage and give them some buttons to peck you can show that they will peck a button that gives smaller rewards sooner over a button that delivers significantly larger rewards later. Amazingly this setup annoys the pigion. He knows that he is making bad choices. Apparently there is a rational market regulating pigion in there scolding the his irrational free market animal pigion. How do we know? Well they can augement the experiment to add a third button pecking that will disabled the short term reward button. The pigeon will use that third button to lock in his commitment to the longer term reward.

Avoiding temptation and using external devices to make binding commitments are both means to force your internal bizzaro attention economy to behave better. We don’t trust ourselves anymore than we trust other parties. We engage in lots of these strategic games in an attempt to keep the bizzaro internal economy from doing more harm. Most of these work by reducing our options. We lock in our savings in long term investments, we don’t buy the ice cream, and the pigeon pecks that third button.