Suffocated by Bush

Group: Less air pollution nationwide

The association attributed the dip to cool and wet weather in the years studied, government controls on Eastern coal-fired power plants and improved vehicle emissions standards. Areas of the Southeast accounted for much of the drop in pollution.

Wait... Didn't Bush say something last week about looking to replace our dependence on oil with a dependence on coal? And didn't he just give a huge tax break to vehicle manufacturers so they could continue to use the oil that the power plants would save? Isn't that exactly the wrong thing to do? This policy stuff is confusing.
 

Sex is Overrated

Yet another reason to hate kids: Official: 3rd-grader stuck 19 schoolmates with needle

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- A third-grader stuck 19 schoolmates with her mother's diabetes blood-testing needle this week, and one pricked student tested positive for HIV on a preliminary test, officials said.

Health officials said the virus could not have been contracted from the needle stick, and they noted that preliminary tests can yield false positives.

The risk to students who were stuck after the possibly infected child depends on factors including the depth of the stick, health officials said.

[ The juxtaposition of those last two "paragraphs" sorta gives reason to hate the media (or, perhaps, health officials?) too... ]
 

Scientists Confirm Earth's Energy Is Out of Balance

I got this NASA press release today:

Scientists Confirm Earth's Energy Is Out of Balance

Scientists have concluded more energy is being absorbed from the sun than is emitted back to space, throwing the Earth's energy "out of balance" and warming the globe.

Scientists from NASA, Columbia University, New York, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif. used satellites, data from buoys and computer models to study the Earth's oceans. They confirmed the energy imbalance by using precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years.

The study reveals Earth's energy imbalance is large by standards of the planet's history. The imbalance is 0.85 watts per meter squared. That will cause an additional warming of 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) by the end of this century.

To understand the difference, think of a one-watt light bulb shining over an area of one square meter (10.76 square feet). Although it doesn't seem like much, adding up the number of feet around the world creates a big effect. To put this number into perspective, an imbalance of one-watt per square meter, maintained for the past 10,000 years is enough to melt ice equivalent to one kilometer (.6 mile) of sea level, if there were that much ice.

There are some neat images and animations on that page.
 

Another Seminar: Andy Teel, today

Andy Teel came to OSU today. He is a huge name in nonlinear control and has contributed an enormous amount over the last 15 years. It was a big deal that Professor Serrani convinced him to come and speak for us.

It was a good lecture. The topic was "Hybrid Dynamical Systems and Nonlinear Feedback Control," so he talked about these Lyapunov-like aggregate functions we can use in nonlinear systems that have both continuous and discrete counterparts. One good example was a bouncing ball -- it's continuous in the air, but every time it touches the ground it becomes discrete.

He used the development in this area to change how to approach some more classical problems. In particular, he addressed the problem of swinging up a pendulum so that it balances up vertically on a sliding cart that ends up in the same position it started in. This was fun. However, he had a really fun example dealing with HAART treatment of HIV patients.

One of his doctoral students was interested in this application, so they dived in. You see, (I'm going to screw this up) the HAART treatment reduces the number of infected cells. However, the body manufacturs Killer-T cells at a rate proportional to the product of the number of infected cells and the number of Helper T cells. So while you want to treat the patient, it would be nice to convince the body to produce more Killer-T cells so that the patient could be taken off treatment.

This, at first, suggests an open-loop control method, and this method has been tried and has some success with models. If you get the TIMING just right, you can take someone off treatment for a short period of time, allow the infected cells to accumulate, and the body will start producing large numbers of Killer-T cells. Then you start treatment again and the Killer-T's combined with the HAART treatment are very effective at lowering infected cells. Eventually, you remove the treatment completely and the Killer-T's keep the patient from needing treatment again. You haven't cured HIV, but you've treated it to the point where the body can take over.

However, this open-loop method isn't very robust. You simply don't know what timing is right for each patient.

So you "sample" each patient's blood every week and treat this as a hybrid dynamical system. And you know what? This feedback system was effective with up to 100% of sampling error (there's a lot of noise with those blood samples) and up to 15% of parameter error (as in, different patients, etc.). It was pretty sweet. I wonder if anyone's actually trying this? It was great to see controls applied this way.

And on top of this, Teel is just a regular American guy. It's not common to see a regular American guy giving an advanced engineering seminar. Kinda made me ... hopeful.

So that was fun today. I enjoyed it much.

Joan Roughgarden, May 2 and 3

So I found out today that Joan Roughgarden, of Stanford's Department of Biological Sciences, will be visiting May 2 and 3 to give two lectures:

"Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity of Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People"
Monday, May 2, 2005
4:00 PM
Faculty Club
main dining room (free and open to public)

"Reproductive Social Behavior: Cooperative Games to Replace Sexual Selection"
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
12:30 PM
Hamilton Hall
Room 107 (EEOB seminar series)

That should be fun. I hope I can get out of ECE858 (scheduled to get out at 3:48) on Monday to make the first lecture, but the second lecture is the one I'm most interested in.
 

Stop saying "up or down vote"

No compromise in filibuster fight

White House press secretary Scott McClellan, traveling in Texas with Bush, said "our view is that Senate Democrats need to stop playing politics and give all judicial nominees an up or down vote."

"It's unprecedented, the steps they've gone to to prevent highly qualified judges from receiving simply an up or down vote on the floor of the United States Senate," he said.

When you say, "up or down vote," you imply that you'll be okay with that nominee being rejected by the Senate. You imply that you'll back off and take the hint. You imply that you'll use the extra debate period in the Senate to convince Senators in the minority to give an "up" vote.

So since you don't mean any of that, then stop saying "up or down vote." Instead, tell it like it is. You want to change the STRUCTURE of government to allow the executive branch to have complete control over the appointment of justices into the judiciary. You want to allow Senators to debate on everything EXCEPT for items involving the separation of powers. (and who knows, eventually you might get rid of all debate in the Senate)

When Dixiecrats filibustered civil rights legislation, they didn't get rid of the filibuster. Instead, they compelled the Dixiecrats to back down so the civil rights legislation would pass. And you know what? That was the right thing to do.

If you're convinced that your nominees are the CORRECT (and not just "right") choices, then convince the Democrats who don't agree. Despite what Karl Rove tells the rest of the world, Democrats aren't evil, and if you have a rational argument, then they'll back down. People voted for those Democrats. Respect Democracy and allow those Democrats to do the job that their constituents wanted them to do.

And *THEN* ask them for an "up or down vote." It'll make your nominees look much better to the rest of us (the public) if you can convince Democrats to vote for them without these nuclear tactics.
 

Spaghetti-Ode

Many years ago I would often prepare SpaghettiOs for lunch over the electric stove. I liked the zesty cheesey taste of the non-meatball variety's sauce, but I really liked the meatballs too. However, that was as far as I thought about it. Yeah, I knew the heating procedure. I knew that with the meatball variety I had to turn the heat down to low for a little bit before I took it off the stove, and I was told this had something to do with keeping the meatballs warm, but I didn't really understand this. I just followed orders.

Now, I don't find myself making SpaghettiO's that often. However, every once in a while I visit my parents' place, and mom will often keep SpaghettiO's on hand for the grandkids (as in, my nephews and nieces), so sometimes I indulge myself and make a can of it. However, now I actually appreciate that the meatballs heat up differently than the rest of the sauce, and you need to keep the stove on low for some time after the sauce is done in order to make sure the meatballs are nice and warm.

It actually goes a lot farther than that. You see, mom has one of those fancy shiny surface stoves that doesn't have any metal exposed. It actually has a closed-loop control system controlling the electric. As a result, rarely do things boil over. As I cook something on it, the on-off controller pulses the burners (like HVAC turning off and on to keep a house warm or cool) and I think about "DC" component of this waveform and the RMS power being delivered to the SpaghettiO's. I think this is pretty exciting.

And then, after I dump the SpaghettiO's into a bowl, I take the saucepan over to the sink and fill it with cold water. Magically, when I dump the cold water out, the water is still cold, but so is the saucepan. When I was a kid, this was just some magic of water. However, now I understand things like heat capacity, and I do know it is some "magic" with water, but I understand that magic (and how it relates to the steel in particular), and that's pretty exciting too.

Richard Feynman used to discuss how his understanding of the physical world enhanced all of the observations he made during the day. When he looked at a flower, he would be taken by its beauty just like anyone else, but he had an added respect for the cellular processes going on within the flower. He had an added respect for the material characteristics that gave the flower its texture and color and made it behave in the way it does as the season evolves. When he looked at the flower, he saw an inner-beauty as well.

Brian Greene had similar things to say. To him, the existentialist who says that an examination of the physical world is just masturbation is missing the point that a real examination of the physical world is an examination of reality itself. It's not proper to to evaluate why someone should refrain from suicide without first really understanding the physical world that gives that person a contextual reality.

And I think all of that comes back to my SpaghettiO's and the magic ability of water to cool red-hot steel in a short amount of time without itself heating to a boil. Life is "better" knowing these things. I mean, sometimes it's scarier. If you think about it, your body is fighting cancer every day as it, like some giant parliametentary government, tries to convince ALL of your cells simultaneously to resist the temptation to reproduce out of control. I mean, in that case, isn't it better to be ignorant? I dunno. It's kinda neat that it works. That's beautiful in itself, and if we appreciate that it can be done, maybe we can forsee a human population that is able to regulate its own reproduction in a similar way. That's a neat thought.

Yeah, so that's not quite an "Ode," but I couldn't resist the temptation to use the title...

People make me so mad...

Meteor shower sparks flurry of calls to police

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- A meteor shower Sunday night sparked a flurry of frantic phone calls to police departments across New England from people who saw bright lights moving in the sky, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said.

Someone is making the American public really really stupid and really really afraid, and that person needs to put behind bars. If we can finance a war on drugs to fill up prisons more than any other crime, we can put fear and stupid mongers behind bars too.
 

Girls (not women) are abusing steroids, too

Well, isn't this fascinating?

Girls are abusing steroids, too

TRENTON, New Jersey (AP) -- An alarming number of American girls, some as young as 9, are using bodybuilding steroids -- not necessarily to get an edge on the playing field, but to get the toned, sculpted look of models and movie stars, experts say.

One day girls will have no access to birth control or condoms but complete access to steroids. America, land of the brave and home of the fertile pretty baby factories. Somewhere, someplace, Jesus has a hard on.
 

I'm so damn clever and funny and cute...

Yay! I won Jenn's contest for a second time.

Results: What's So Funny?

The contest was to describe what Jenn was thinking in this picture:

I made several entries, but the winning one (inspired by John Stewart and his America: The Book (The Audiobook)) was:

"So Hamilton thought the only way the separation of powers could be defeated is if one party takes ahold of the executive and legislative branches and gets their own justices appointed to the judicial? Oh, gosh, that could NEVER happen!"

Aren't I cute?