Phone home if you dare

Chances are that once in a while your cell phone cannot project its tiny radio signal to the nearest relay tower.

So, it's not like you're holding a 50,000-watt transmitter against your head. You're holding a thing the size of a pack of gum.

Yet researchers in Australia have concluded that using a cell phone (against the ear) for 10 years doubles the risk of brain cancer (for you, not them). Aside from the fact that dozens of studies of the same hypothesis have found absolutely no link, 60 Minutes, the Australian version, apparently, decided that a man with brain cancer must have developed it because he used a cell phone.

This guy is a farmer. Who was he talking to? Anyway, the report, by a hyperventilating Aussie, would be enough to make you throw away your LG unless you think about it for a fraction of a second.

First off, we are constantly bombarded through and through with FM, AM, shortwave, emergency band, and other sources of radio waves. If you could see radio waves, your room's walls would be glowing furiously. Not to mention television, computers, and everything else that creates electromagnetic radiation.

Remember: 20 years before cell phones there were cordless phones. Now almost everyone has a cordless phone, even though it seems to old fashioned. Cordless phones work by -- you guessed it -- radio waves, from your phone to your base station.

So we should have seen the doubling of brain cancer by now. And yet we haven't. Just to get to the heart of this, some electromagnetic radiation is sufficiently energetic that it can knock apart atoms and molecules. This is called ionizing radiation, x-rays for example, and they are not good for you.

Radio waves, on the other hand, have far longer wavelengths, and consequently, they are way less powerful. Radio waves do not ionize. Microwave ovens do not ionize. Gamma rays ionize. Cells phones, no.

This business with cell phones is worse than Paul Brodeur and his fantasy about carcinogenic electromagnetic fields around power cables. There may actually be something to that. Probably not, and if there is, it is so rare that it is impossible to pick out from the epidemiological noise.

The opposite of, say, working in a coal mine and developing black lung disease.

Just to be on the safe side, hold the cell phone at arm's length and yell into it. Especially while on public transportation.

A billion is way bigger than a million.

Okay. Here's a little math for people who are livid about $165 million in "bonuses" to employees of the corporate carcass once known as American International Group.

AIG received $30 billion from the Federal Reserve to somehow rid itself of insane insurance policies on a sliced and diced mixture of below-prime-rate mortgages. Or, what we now call "toxic assets."

How galling is it for a Greenwich millionaire cum-crook to get a million or two or three dollars for sabotaging the company while becoming filthy rich, causing untold misery to everyone else?

Pretty high on the Gall Scale. Right up there near the top.

But people want the money back as recompense for the $30 billion. Let's consider the numbers 165 million and 30 billion.

One million is 1 followed by 6 zeroes One billion is 1 followed by 9 zeroes. Three additional zeroes, or you might say, three orders of magnitude. Now, think about it.

Since Earth's population is about 6 billion, then 30 billion would be the number of people on five Earths. By contrast, 165 million is about the populations of the 10 largest cities on Earth.

Or, to put it another way, 1 million seconds is 13 days. One billion seconds is 31 years. A million hours ago it was 1855. A billion hours ago humans did not exist.

One more. There are about 10,000 grains of rice in a cup. Sixteen cups equals 1 gallon of rice. So, 1 million grains of rice would be 6.5 gallons. One billion grains of rice would be 6,500 gallons.

Consequently, $165 million is about half of one percent of $30 billion. It's chump change.

Of course, $165 million would make us chumps pretty rich -- but paupers compared to a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet.

By the way, 1 trillion seconds ago Neanderthals were hunting mammoths and trying to stay warm.

Earmarks for dummies

Many trivial-sounding "earmarks" are criticized as a waste of money, usually by people who don't understand the value of basic research.

Earmarks have faded from the news, pushed into the background by enormous bail-outs that are orders of magnitude larger than the supposed pet projects in the proposed federal budget.

Here are a few projects revealed earlier this month by New York Time columnist Maureen Dowd:

+$2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. There's nothing funny about this to the growing U.S. wine industry. There are roughly 600 varieties of grapes, 54 of which comprise the main ingredients in most wines around the world.

Genetics are very important to wine.

Phyllorexa, a plant louse that loves grape leaves, appeared in the 18th century, first in America and then in Europe. Ultimately, after some back and forth, America began to provide phyllorexa-proof roots to Europeans, who graft on local grape varieties.

The point is, resistance to rot, insects, fungus, nematodes, etc. lies in genes, and the more we understand about grape genes, the safer the wine industry. California's wine industry alone is worth about $20 billion a year. So $2 million to assure its safety seems like a n0-brainer.

+ $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Texas. Bees are essential to pollinating many crops, and bees are mysteriously disappearing. If the factory helps figure out what's going on the money will be well-spent.

+ $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa. Big joke, except that pig poop could be a source of biofuel, either by collecting the methane it gives off as it rots, or through some other biomass process. Do you want to live next to a pig fuel plant? No, because of the odor. So this grant has a serious purpose.

+ $2 million to develop and promote astronomy in Hawaii. Part of the reason that astronomy is conducted in Hawaii is because the mainland is wasting prodigious amounts of light, lighting up the night sky and obscuring stars, galaxies, and possibly even some planets. The skies over Kitt Peak (near Tuscon, Arizona) are way clearer than the skies over the East Coast. But Arizona cities are spreading like phyllorexa.

What's important about astronomy? Are you curious about the origin and future of the universe and the solar system; life on other planets; or the possibility of colonizing Mars or predicting asteroid collisons? That's astronomy.

There's more, but you get the idea.

A couple of centuries ago, how ridiculous it would have seemed to study why apples fall to the ground. That story about Isaac Newton may be apoccryphal, but you never know where a simple question will lead.

House Rules

This is an obvious question, but why does no one really know how to put the economy back together?

If an airliner crashes, experts can find the faulty part or parts and correct them. If a bridge collapses, building a new, safer, bridge is not a mystery.  Should a new bacterial or viral pathogen emerge, researchers have some idea how to cope with it. 

But the U.S., economy, is different. Iceland went under. They're no less intelligent than we are. How could they not stop that from happening? People are being cast out of their homes, jettisoned from their jobs, and left living in cars, and fixing the whole mess is an inexplicable mystery.

Incompetent executives are rewarded with truckloads of money. The people who seem to have created this disaster are now collecting billions or trillions of dollars. Those two problems are clear, but somehow impossible to fix. 

Sure, securities, and credit markets and the fed, mortgages and loans are complicated. But are they really so complicated that no one knows how to wrestle them back into order? Is our economy like a nuclear power plant that's so complicated that its operators will be faced with crises they do not recognize?

Everyone knows: write off the useless securities cobbled together with sliced and diced mortgage loans to people who could not afford to pay them. Who pays? The cobblers, slicers and dicers, with money borrowed from the treasury.

How could there be more than one opinion on how to proceed? Is righting the economy like choosing between a suspension bridge and a truss bridge? That does not seem to be the case, because such an issue could be solved relatively easily by comparing cost, durability, capacity and  longevity.

Why should we suppose that economics is rational? Because there is a Nobel prize in economics. People study economics. Is it a branch of mathematics, philosophy, or psychology?

Or is economics a spongy discipline like sociology?

It's hard to tell because economics is both abstract and immaterial.  There seems to be no applied economics. It's all just bits of symbolic data flowing through computers, and apparently, no one really understands it.

Or, some people understand economics but they keep everyone else in the dark so that they can make fortunes, at others' expense. 

Trilobites redux mea culpa, ipso facto

As readers -- if there are any -- of this thing know, I am very partial to trilobite fossils.

The first ones I acquired were at the Peabody Museum. An Elrathia Kingii,  I believe, a few Ptychagnostuses, (they're small), and a bunch of Diacalymenes, many of which are found in Morocco. 

 Then I had to have more. A giant Phacops, from I don't remember which store. These shops are around if you look for them.  Many of the fossils were scratched as only Moroccans can scratch them. I bought them anyway.

As I became more serious, I acquired "Trilobites," by Riccardo Levi-Setti, who just found a new species. This book contains photos of some of the best finds, including a few whose soft limbs were preserved in iron pyrite.  These fossils are locked up in the Peabody, along with many other fantastic specimens. 

I collected and collected, and spent and spent, like a lunatic, until I accepted the fact that I could never collect "one of everything" unless I had billions or trillions of dollars, and that my collection would never be as magnificent as Levi-Setti's. 

Almost all of my little buddies (some call them "bugs") are now resting in the attic. I keep four out for show. One has eye stalks (broken off and glued back on), another has small spines, and the third is curled up so that his cephalic spines, cheek bones, if you will, are sticking up like a "U."

The fourth is a very nice mortality plate of a species I have not identified. Either their molted shells were collected by currents, or a living bunch of them were buried under silt.  This one is a Moroccan fossil, purchased by me at the Peabody, and has scratches all over it,  and fissures where the plate broke and was glued together (not uncommon).  It is a very good piece, and probably could have sold for $500 to $800 on the Web. 

It's wonderfully three-dimensional, with trilobite atop trilobite. All together there are about 15 trilobites. I am slowly grinding away at some of the worst scratches. 

I'm only going into this much detail, because I know from Google analytics that perhaps 7 people read this mish-mosh once in a while.

Anyway, the point is that I belatedly heard that some of the Peabody staff were made uncomfortable by the last entry I wrote about Moroccan trilobites made out of Bondo.

 I feel bad about this. I never meant to imply that they were trying to foist fakes off on the public, or were acting in any but the most honorable way.

My feeling is that this country is trilobite-illiterate, and someone, somewhere, has to make a stand.

I think everyone ought to know about trilobite fossils. The sad truth is that some of them are half Bondo, (the fossils, I mean),  but this is not the museum's doing. It goes on all over the place.  Maybe all  sellers of fossils should post little cautionary signs.

 Nothing bigger than an Elrathia. That's all.

And besides, the gift shop is one of my favorite places, and, really, when you get down to it,  I don't know anything about anything. 

Oh, What a Tangled Web

 The jungle under the desk is puzzling.

All of the cables, lines, transformer boxes, hubs and the rest of the connections that keep the computer and all of the peripherals functioning together inevitably turn into a tangle.

And not a trivial tangle -- this morass of copper wire is practically impossible to straighten out.  The reasons are not clear. There must be an applicable branch of mathematics,  topology, knot theory, that could explain how and why the tangle happens, and more importantly, how to resolve it. The Koenigsberg bridge problem, that kind of thing.

Why bother? The tangle makes diagnosis of hardware issues extremely difficult. If a drive disappears from the desktop, is it because it is unplugged, or did the USB cable detach, or is it a more serious problem?

The other issue is fire prevention. Somehow a knot of electrical cords seems hazardous, although circuit breakers would presumably trip before the whole house is engulfed. 

One issue seems to be that the power lines and the cables want to go in different directions. All of the plugs want to go to the power strip, while the cables seek a firewire hub,  a usb hub, the back of the computer, speakers, or the desk top. (The real desk top, the piece of wood holding up the computer).

The other problem is that the cords are too long. This would not be a drawback unless you're working in an room the size of a broom closet and all of the component are on top of each other. A six-foot cable connecting components that are 18-inches apart leaves a lot of extra cord available for a tangle.

The collected wires seem to want to tangle. A straightened out set of wires can turn into a jumble if you look away for a second.

Consequently, the non-tangle strategies involve bundling and shortening. "Bundling" here means wrapping wires into loops and then either putting a rubber band around them, or sticking them inside a plastic cable tube. 

We all remember from physics that moving a wire through a magnetic field generates a current, and that sending an alternating current through a wire creates a magnetic field. This is how electric motors, transformers, and many other devices work. It's called induction.

The question, then, is, are all of those knots of cable under the desk radiating magnetic fields, and if so, what potential effect could that have on how the hard drives, and all the rest, function. Perhaps the wires are supposed to be in a tangle to prevent this from happening.

One of these bundles will make a cheap compass deflect a little bit.  So the confined wires are creating magnetic fields of some intensity. Is the person sitting at the desk unknowingly bathing in several electromagnetic fields? What if Paul Brodeur was right? 

We know that it is possible to make a fluorescent tube glow if you hold one on the ground under high voltage wires. Is the field from the wires creating a current in the tube? Let's put all of these questions aside for a moment.

Shouldn't there be a formal way of  laying out a configuration of wires in such a manner that you're not inadvertently creating transformers under your desk? Algebraic geometry anyone? Matrices? Functions? 

So, you can see that trial and error is the least complicated way forward. Or so it would seem. 

See all of those diagrams? Or attempted diagrams?

How can you find a solution when you can't even figure out the problem. Let's hope the house doesn't burn down. 

There's no fossil in that fossil

With a heavy heart,  someone  must reveal the secret about the trilobites for sale at the Peabody Museum gift shop.

Otherwise, a visitor may pay hundreds of dollars for a lump of mostly epoxy formed to look like a trilobite fossil.  Or, a few real fossils epoxied onto a piece of Devonian rock.

All of this confusion could be avoided if the merchandise was correctly labelled. For example, "model fossil for educational purposes or display."

For those who don't appreciate a good trilobite, they are long-extinct marine creatures with antennae, lots of legs, shells, and other arthropod features. They also possessed compound eyes.

Trilobites, as the name suggests, are composed of three segments, a central "spine" with rows of "legs" or "gills" on both sides. They lived between 550 million and 250 million years ago. There were hundreds of species, from the tiny to foot-long. 

They are found in sedimentary rock that is 250 to 550 million years old. Such outcroppings occur in the Western United States, New York state, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Basically, everywhere except New England.

Some of the most spectacular specimens are found embedded in rock that comprises the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.  Many of these fossils are laboriously removed from the rock using tiny sand blasting tools and picks. These fossils tend to be expensive because separating one kind of rock from another complex shape of different composition, is time consuming.

Enterprising Moroccans also dislodge fossils from the same areas. They do not have expensive tools or the inclination to spend days slowly removing the matrix rock. Instead, they use screw drivers, nails, and and whatever else is handy to scratch away the matrix. 

Thus, it's possible to instantly recognize most inexpensive Moroccan fossils. They are crudely scratched. Others are unscathed, but sometimes assembled from  fragments of different fossils. They tend to be either tan or black, in gray or rust-colored rock. 

The fossil producers discovered a long time ago that most souvenir collectors cannot distinguish between a real fossil and one made mostly out of the type of  epoxy used to repair automobile bodies. 

Epoxy is hard, like rock, malleable before it sets, and easily scratched. 

The trilobites at the Peabody are from Morocco and some show obvious signs of modification or assembly. Hints: If many fossils are on a quilt-like surface of different shades, chances are that these real fossils were cemented together to form a more expensive plate. The other typical Moroccan fake is the large Paradoxides  of the  Redllichiida order.

The fossils appear to be tooled and outlined and the rock (or whatever that stuff is) is carved with attractive radiating lines. 

A few years ago a lunatic such as myself brought this to the attention of the museum. This guy washed off the Paradoxides he had purchased there. The underlying  "fossil" was suspiciously colored, and the border between colors was a straight line. Our sleuth disassembled more of the fossil and found that there wasn't any fossil in the fossil. 

He brought his findings to the museum's attention, but was brushed off. So today, you can go to the gift shop and still see modified, doctored trilobite fossils.

This is ironic, because the Peabody has one of the best and most significant collections of real trilobite fossils in the world.

These specimens are  beautiful and priceless. Unlike the crude recreations in the gift shop.