LifeItself

Our society, like a novel lunatic, needs bad ideas, so that our collective craziness can have shape and direction.  Biofuels are one of such brazenly bad ideas that have crystallized a bunch of lunatic government policies and attracted other, completely unrelated lunatics. All these lunatics became friends of biofuels. "Ideas on Earth," observed Kilgore Trout, "were badges of friendship or enmity.  Their content did not matter.  Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness.  Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity."  And so it goes. Unfortunately, there were more bad news for the imaginary "advanced biofuels."  These no doubt miraculous, but yet undiscovered substances seem to fall into the domain of dot-con ventures sponsored by the fabulously well-to-do ventriloquists.  [Ventriloquy, is an act of stagecraft in which a person (a ventriloquist) manipulates his or her voice so that it appears that the voice is...

Barely three days have passed since I posted " Lies, health, hunger and biofuels ," hoping that this sore subject would go away for several days.  Today I opened the Business Section of NYT, rubbed my eyes, and cried: "This cannot be!" I just read that madmen inside a federal government agency are trying to usher a new era of self-decomposing food supply in the U.S.  Can you imagine?  Your cereal, bread, corn flakes, anything, will be self-digesting and liquefying on your table if you wait a little, regardless of how well you keep it?   These madmen are attempting to introduce the U.S. public to a practical lesson in enzymatic chemistry:  just 1 genetically modified corn grain with the alpha-amylase enzyme in it per 10,000 other grains will make corn flour and its products go soft and unappetizing.  That's 1/100 of 1%! One could hardly think up a better allegory for the intellectual rot and moral decay blowing from Washington. What happens when t...

"Cowardice is the worst vice of men," Yeshua Ha-Nozri said softly to the fifth Procurator of Judea, the cruel knight Pontius Pilate, when they met at the Herod's palace on that fateful, unbearably hot 14th day of Nisan. If you do not believe me, please read the crown jewel of all literature, " The Master and Margarita ," written  some 80 years ago by a Russian doctor and writer, Mikhail Bulgakov. Yeshua is of course Jesus. But what does His quiet remark have to do with food, biofuels, poor health, hunger, and politics as usual by the rascals who have Jesus' name smeared all over their campaign slogans, even when they try to eat our souls?  We are cowards because we loath to resist the more powerful in our lives, even when we know they are wrong. As importantly, we are cowards because we are afraid to think for ourselves and draw our own conclusions.  Since we are cowards we are eager to accept half-truths, or blatant lies, if they sooth us and make us av...

Here is a nice followup to my January 6, 2011, post on patents as a measure of U.S. productivity and creativity.  Now Big Pharma is getting ready to throw their towel into the ring and call it quits of sorts.  It seems to me that they were pursuing a wrong paradigm in their research and their colossal blunder was called by the unforgiving Mother Nature.  The mistake they seem to have made is a simplistic belief that one or few unique genes are responsible for each major illness.  Identify the genes and, voila, appropriate therapy presents itself.  Well, hundreds of billions of dollars later, they seem to have discovered that gene expression is context-dependent, and the environmental influences (epigenetics) are stronger than genetics.  This may be the best example of a seriously misguided huge research effort that essentially broke a whole industry.  So now federal government is stepping in with another corporate bailout plan, this time an $1 billion...

So, we had the WSJ raving about applying good science to evaluate the undeniable benefits of GMOs, and we also had little shreds of evidence to the contrary. In India, for example, they found a couple of tiny, irrelevant problems with a GMO eggplant designed so marvelously  by Monsanto. Nonsense, I say!  But here is what those pesky Indians say. Oops! And Monsanto's Roundup, what a God send it has been for our hard working farmers and consumers! Or is it ?  Is it, really ?! I say, I am getting confused.  But my liver, and heart, and kidneys, and lungs, and hormones seem to know something.  And they all refuse to accept the GMO blessings.  They are wrong, I say! The science I don't like is junk science. And WSJ confirms.  What a relief...

On January 10, 2011 - 11:49am, the Oildrum posted an article by  Luis de Sousa  Peak Coal: the Olduvai perspective . It is an interesting article and we appreciate the author's arguments against the peak of global rate of coal production.  However, here are a few facts on the ground recorded by Greg Croft and me: Last year, China imported 150/690=22% of all seaborne steam coal traded worldwide in 2010, and projections are that China will try to import more this year.  China also has firm plans of of limiting energy use and shutting down 2,000 coal-intensive industrial facilities.  In short, it seems that China's coal production has peaked.  China produces roughly 1/2 of world's coal. The Oildrum article does not seem to address the ever-increasing mine depths that will ultimately curtail and stop coal production from these mines. Mozambique is going to become the second biggest exporter of metallurgical coal, which is not the same as the second ...

Recently, 1/2 of US patents was granted to foreign residents, whose numbers are at below 1/10 of the US population. This trend has been growing almost monotonically since 1947 and reflects the ever-increasing majority of graduate students in science and engineering, who are foreigners. Foreign graduate students are currently at 80% or so in math and petroleum engineering. The US Patent Office does not count naturalized American patent holders. Given that roughly 50% of engineering and science professors are foreign-born, patents given to foreigners in the US dominate. Fraction of all US patents granted to foreign residents. Note that the total foreign-born fraction of US population has hovered between 5 and 15% of the total population. Also note that since 1947 foreigners have received an almost monotonically growing share of US patents that is now at least 5 times their share of the US population. (I say at least, because I am adding naturalized citizens to the foreign fract...