Minor Thoughts from me to you

Megan McArdle writes a very nice defense of kitchen gadgets.

If you really think that laborious food prep is that elevating, you should go back to the methods of your grandmother. Buy whole nuts and crack them by hand, picking out the meats and hoping you don't accidentally get a bit of shell. Throw out the powdered gelatin and use calf's foot jelly. Make your own confectioner's sugar with a food grinder or a rolling pin. Pluck your own chickens. Render your own lard.

If you think that doing these things would be ridiculous--which it would--then why is it ridiculous to have a machine chop your onions or make your bechamel? There's no particular reason to assume that we have reached some sort of technological plateau where the things that we happen to do by hand right now represent the best possible methods for accomplishing those tasks.

In other words, the "one knife, one pan", "I don't need kitchen gadgets" snobs aren't a better, purer sort of cook; they're just ignoring most of the contents of their kitchen. How many of them cook over an open fire, rather than using one of those high-faluting fancy stoves with their automatic temperature regulation and their electric lights? Why are they storing all their food in a cold box rather than shopping for each day, the way people do in India? Who needs a special pot for coffee when your great grandparents just boiled it up in a saucepan and settled the grinds by dropping eggshells into the resulting brew? Why own a blender instead of putting the food through a grinder and then a chinois? Wouldn't the dishes get cleaner if you boiled up water and washed them by hand? And hey, what's that toaster doing there?

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In a study that provides provocative support for a new approach to treating obesity, a drug that kills a particular type of fat cell by choking off its blood supply was shown to cause significant weight loss in obese monkeys.

After four weeks of treatment at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, obese monkeys given daily injections of the drug, called adipotide, lost an average of 11% of their body weight. They also had substantial reductions in waist circumference and body-mass index and, importantly, striking improvement in the ability to respond to insulin, researchers said. The drug didn't have any effect on weight when given to lean monkeys.

Results of the study, published online Wednesday by the journal Science Translational Medicine, confirmed a 2004 report from the same research team showing marked weight loss in mice treated with the agent.

My first reaction was: "I want to take this drug". My second reaction was "I should invest in this drug. Everyone is going to want to take it."

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Do you want to live for a long time, in decent health? If the rate of innovation in medical science doesn’t slow down, you just may be able to.

If Aubrey de Grey's predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.

A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" aging -- banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

"I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution academy of science.

"And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today."

De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular "maintenance," which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.

Who says we don't make anything anymore?

What's most impressive is that the U.S. produced almost as much manufacturing output as the manufacturing sectors of Germany (#4), Italy (#5), France (#6), Russia (#7), U.K. (#8), Brazil (#9) and Canada (#10) combined ($2.44 trillion).

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Georgia Governor Nathan Deal recently signed a bill that removed state regulations that prevented small business owners from buying out of state insurance. Giving business owners more choices will do a lot to provide healthcare competition and help to bring down prices. More states should pass legislation like this and Georgia should open this up to all state residents, not just small business owners.

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Brown was living in Berlin, Germany back in 2007, dealing with HIV and leukemia, when scientists there gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant that had astounding results.

“I quit taking my HIV medication the day that I got the transplant and haven’t had to take any since,” said Brown, who has been dubbed “The Berlin Patient” by the medical community.

... Both doctors stressed that Brown’s radical procedure may not be applicable to many other people with HIV, because of the difficulty in doing stem cell transplants, and finding the right donor.

“You don’t want to go out and get a bone marrow transplant because transplants themselves carry a real risk of mortality,” Volberding said.

He explained that scientists also still have many unanswered questions involving the success of Brown’s treatment.

“One element of his treatment, and we don’t know which, allowed apparently the virus to be purged from his body,” he observed. “So it’s going to be an interesting, I think productive area to study.”

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Division of labor, specialization, and mass production. The result: complex heart surgeries for $1,800 and the head doctor wants to bring the price down to just $800. Now that's healthcare reform.

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I love the internet. Love, love, love it. I find so much there.

For example, I read a book many years ago. I was visiting my grandparents as a young teenager and checked out a bunch of books from the Cuyahoga County Library. I really enjoyed one of them and it's stuck in my mind for years as something that I'd like to re-read. Except that neither the title nor the author stuck in my mind. Just the plot. Something about Science Fiction, teenagers, summer vacation, a game, an island, and something to do with space -- or a pig. Or both.

As you can imagine, it's rather hard to find a book based on such sketchy information. I'd tried once or twice over the years but my attempts mainly revolved around browsing the stacks, hoping to find something familiar looking. I didn't have much success and I'd pretty much given up on the attempt.

And then, out of the blue today, I found it. Art Carden wrote a post for Division of Labour entitled "The Kids Are Alright". He included a brief comment that triggered a memory. Well, a partial memory. Okay, more like the half remembered smell of a forgotten scent. It just felt familiar in a way that I couldn't quite define.

We then talked about books I enjoyed when I was younger (William Sleator). One of my favorite Sleator books was Interstellar Pig; I was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of these burgeoning movie-makers has it.

And, sure enough. Interstellar Pig is the book that I read all of those years ago. Amazing. Thank-you internets, with your plentiful, bounteous tubes. And thank-you, Art, for mentioning not only your favorite author but also the book title.

I finished listening to an old EconTalk podcast, during my commute this morning. Russ Roberts was talking to Karol Boudreaux about her fieldwork on property rights and economic reforms in Rwanda and South Africa. They spent the first half of the conversation talking about Rwandan reforms and the second half talking about South African reforms. I was most fascinated by the South African portion. (It starts at about 30 minutes into the podcast.)

Karol talked about Langa township in South Africa. It was established as a place for blacks to live, but they weren't given any rights to the properties whatsoever. They had to get permission from the city government even to paint or repair their homes. By 1994, the government had started to turn over ownership to the people who lived in the homes.

I was thrilled to hear the story of Sheila, a very entrepreneurial woman in Langa township. (Her story starts about 39 minutes into the podcast.) Sheila had been a domestic helper in Capetown when she saw a receipt for two glasses of wine and a plate of cheese. She was stunned to see that that sold for more than she got paid in a month. She knew she was worth more than that. So, she decided to prove it.

After a few false starts, she hit on the right business plan. Tourists had been driving through Langa Township for years, to see the results of apartheid. But they never got out of their tourist buses. Sheila decided to give them an opportunity to start getting out. She opened up a restaurant in her house (after she'd received the title to it). She now serves meals to tourists, while telling them the story of her life and her experiences under apartheid. Her restaurant is well known for "authentic" South African food. It's primarily advertised through word of mouth and bloggers (how great is that?). The restaurant doesn't just support Sheila. She also employs five other people to keep things humming along.

Does South Africa have more economic freedom than the U.S.? In some ways, it does. Try opening a restaurant out of your home and see how long it lasts before the local authorities shut it down. But, in South Africa, Sheila was able to use her home to create a living for herself, create income for others, create something for tourists to see and do, and educate many people along the way. And it all happened because she had the economic freedom to use her property in the way she saw fit. Her tourist guests use their freedom to eat where they see fit and her desire to keep her restaurant's reputation protects her customers as they eat.

Sheila's story is a perfect example of the win-win results that come from letting people make their own economic decisions and bear both the profits and losses that they generate. It's also an example of how far you can go if you decide to change your circumstances instead of complaining about them.

Michael Lynch, the former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, debunks some of the claims surrounding peak oil, in an op-ed at the New York Times. Here's a few of the highlights:

On the claim that oil companies are extracting increasing amounts of water instead of oil:

But this is hardly a concern -- the buildup is caused by the Saudis pumping seawater into the field to keep pressure up and make extraction easier. The global average for water in oil field yields is estimated to be as high as 75 percent.

On the claim that we're only discovering one new barrel of oil for every 3 or 4 that we pump:

When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don't report that additional recoverable oil as "newly discovered," the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.

Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent -- another 2.5 trillion barrels -- in an economically viable way.

Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk

A 21-year study finds that moderate coffee drinkers are much less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

Well, no hope for me then. I can't stand the taste of coffee.

Is Alzheimer's disease caused by cold sores? Possibly.

The virus behind cold sores is a major cause of the insoluble protein plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers, University of Manchester researchers have revealed.

They believe the herpes simplex virus is a significant factor in developing the debilitating disease and could be treated by antiviral agents such as acyclovir, which is already used to treat cold sores and other diseases caused by the herpes virus. Another future possibility is vaccination against the virus to prevent the development of the disease in the first place.

Most people are infected with this virus, which then remains life-long in the peripheral nervous system, and in 20-40% of those infected it causes cold sores. Evidence of a viral role in AD would point to the use of antiviral agents to stop progression of the disease.

The team discovered that the HSV1 DNA is located very specifically in amyloid plaques: 90% of plaques in Alzheimer's disease sufferers' brains contain HSV1 DNA, and most of the viral DNA is located within amyloid plaques. The team had previously shown that HSV1 infection of nerve-type cells induces deposition of the main component, beta amyloid, of amyloid plaques. Together, these findings strongly implicate HSV1 as a major factor in the formation of amyloid deposits and plaques, abnormalities thought by many in the field to be major contributors to Alzheimer's disease.

A genetic mutation may hold an AIDS cure.

The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.

The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.

"I was very surprised," said the doctor, Gero Hutter.

The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Hutter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isn't an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patient's bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Caveats are legion. If enough time passes, the extraordinarily protean HIV might evolve to overcome the mutant cells' invulnerability. Blocking CCR5 might have side effects: A study suggests that people with the mutation are more likely to die from West Nile virus. Most worrisome: The transplant treatment itself, given only to late-stage cancer patients, kills up to 30% of patients. While scientists are drawing up research protocols to try this approach on other leukemia and lymphoma patients, they know it will never be widely used to treat AIDS because of the mortality risk.

This is cool. It's amazing how far and fast medical technology is developing. I can't wait to see what will be available by the time I need serious medical help.

In 2001, the FDA approved the use of capsule endoscopy, which uses a capsule size camera [1.2 inches long by 0.4 inches in diameter]. These are passive systems. There is work to make smaller robotic systems and systems that can perform more of the capabilities of regular endoscopes. These capabilities include therapeutic and diagnostic operations such as ultrasound, electrocautery, biopsy, laser, and heat with a retractable arm.

Scientists at the Technion University, teamed with a researcher from the College of Judea and Samaria, have developed a miniature robot that can move within the bloodstream.

The miniature robot has been planned and constructed (2007), that has the unique ability to crawl within the human body's veins and arteries," said Dr. Nir Shvalb of the College of Judea and Samaria. The Israeli robot's diameter is one millimeter.

The researchers stress that the project is an "interesting development, but it has a long way to go before it is used in medicine." Solomon says that the tiny robot could be controlled for an unlimited amount of time to carry out any necessary medical procedure. The power source is an external magnetic field created near the patient that does not cause any harm to humans but supplies an endless supply of power for it to function. The robot's special structure enables it to move while being controlled by the operator using the magnetic field.

Next Big Future: Pill-size to bacteria sized robots for surgery and in-body therapies:

Meet some high school students that are working their way through school:

Almost every weekday, 14-year-old Tiffany Adams rises before 6 a.m. in the Newark, New Jersey, home she shares with her grandmother and sisters. She dons her school uniform and catches two New Jersey Transit buses across the city, arriving at Christ the King Preparatory School, a Catholic high school that opened in September 2007, at 8. Most days she goes to the standard ninth-grade classes: algebra, Spanish, Western Civ. By all accounts, she excels at them. She is ranked first in her class. Her favorite subject is math, she says, "because it challenges me."

But five school days a month, Adams skips the uniform and dons business attire. On those days, after a morning assembly, she bypasses the classrooms and hops instead into a van bound for Essex County College. There Adams works in the human resources department from 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. or so, scheduling résumé appointments, doing clerical work, and generally keeping the place functioning. Far from being a distraction, this opportunity to work while going to school is what drew Adams to Christ the King in the first place. "I thought it would be a good school for me to learn about business," she says. "I would like to be an entrepreneur."

Few teenagers are so concretely focused on their future careers. But Adams' attitude is not unusual for the 89 freshmen at Christ the King Prep, part of a recently formed national network of Catholic schools that combine school and work. In the process, these "Cristo Rey" (Spanish for "Christ the King") schools have stumbled on a new business model for private urban education -- one that asks students like Adams to largely pay their own way.

At the 19 schools in the network (three new ones are opening this fall in Brooklyn, Detroit, and the west side of Chicago), four-student teams share entry-level clerical jobs at area employers. In exchange, these companies pay the schools $20,000 to $30,000 for each team. The subsidy of $5,000 to $7,500 per student keeps tuition low enough (usually around $2,500) that a prep school education becomes feasible for poor families.

This business model was born of necessity. But as the Cristo Rey Network has discovered in the 12 years since the first school opened in Chicago, the benefits go beyond financial sustainability. Introducing inner-city children to corporate America shows them the jobs they can have if they study hard and go to college. And that's what the vast majority of Cristo Rey's predominantly Hispanic and African-American graduates do.

Once these students have a chance to work, employers love them:

But soon employers were calling to compliment the Jesuits on the most eager temps they’d ever seen. "No one quite expected that the kids could perform to the level they were performing in the work world," Thielman says. "We found tremendous talent and tremendous potential among young people in that neighborhood."

These programs also appear to do a fantastic job of preparing students for college:

These start-ups are all committed to enrolling only low-income kids; network-wide, 72 percent of students qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program. The schools are also committed to sending the vast majority of their graduates to college; of the 318 students who graduated from Cristo Rey Network schools in 2007, 316 were accepted to a two- or four-year college. That’s better than 99 percent. (Nationwide, just 67 percent of students who graduate from high school start college shortly thereafter, and in big cities that figure can be much lower. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley held a press conference last spring to boast that the Chicago public schools had sent almost half of the class of 2007 to two- or four-year colleges.)

And these schools aren't cherry-picking the smart students either:

Many of Christ the King's 89 students arrived unprepared for high school work. James Cochran, a social studies teacher, assigned an essay about ancient Mesopotamia around the third week of school. "I got kids who gave me Wikipedia articles printed out," he says. "They didn't make any effort to conceal the fact that it was a Wikipedia article. It's not like they were plagiarizing and trying to hide it. They just thought that was how you did a report." They didn't understand that they were supposed to generate original thoughts and analysis. "They didn’t know how to think," Cochran says. "I had to teach them how to think." By April, though, his ninth-graders were debating whether Emperor Augustus was better for Rome than the previous republican set-up. (Interestingly, most thought he was.)

This article really gets me excited. (Please do read the entire thing.) It's new. It's creative. It's innovative. Most importantly -- it works. This is change from the old ideas of the past. More please. Much more.

I've been wanting to get back into shape. These new pills could be the perfect solution.

In a series of startling experiments in mice, the drugs improved the ability of cells to burn fat and retain muscle mass, and they substantially prolonged endurance during exercise. Using one of the compounds for just a month, even sedentary, couch-potato mice improved their endurance running by a staggering 44%. Some mice that combined a month of exercise with the other drug bolstered their long-distance running by about 70% over untreated mice.

One of the drugs is already in late-stage human trials for other purposes, and the mouse experiments raise hopes for new strategies to protect people against obesity, diabetes and muscle-wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy.

Anabolic steroids, often abused by athletes, enhance the performance of fast-twitch muscle cells -- those that provide power and speed. The two drugs being researched are among the first compounds shown clearly to improve the slow-twitch muscle cells used in endurance activities. Whereas fast-twitch muscle cells burn sugar, slow-twitch cells primarily burn fat, which means they could help combat obesity.

Now I'm just waiting until I can buy me a 90-day supply.

I cheer globalization, even when American workers lose their jobs to non-Americans. Why? Because the world's poor are always made better off. To be blunt, I feel far, far more sympthathy for the poor of the world than I do for America's newly unemployed. One group of people gets to enjoy fresh food year round, air conditioning, heating, clean drinking water. The other group -- doesn't. So when the have-nots get an opportunity to become the haves, I cheer.

Why do I bring it up? Well, I read a story in the New York Times that demonstrates, again, how things are improving in India: In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism:

"Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers -- the world's poor. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding poverty that surrounds them.

"In Redmond, you don't see 7-year-olds begging on the street," said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob's founder, referring to Microsoft's headquarters in Washington State, where he once worked. "In India, you can't escape the feeling that you're really lucky. So you ask, What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?"

The best-known networking sites in the industry connect computer-savvy elites to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects India's elites to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can view Rajeev's page, travel to the page of Rajeev's chauffeur and see which of the chauffeur's friends are looking for similar work.

Woohoo!

Telecommuting -- the next generation. This is how I need to work from home.

Programmer Ivan Bowman spends his days at iAnywhere Solutions Inc. in much the same way his colleagues do.

He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers' offices, attends meetings and, on occasion, hangs out in the kitchen or lounge over coffee and snacks.

About the only thing he can't do is drink the coffee or eat the snacks -- or touch anything, for that matter.

It's not that Bowman doesn't have hands or a mouth; they're just in Halifax, along with the rest of his body.

In fact, it's not really Bowman in the Waterloo office at all. It's IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues in Waterloo from his home office 1,350 kilometres away.

Silicon nanoparticles enhance performance of solar cells

Placing a film of silicon nanoparticles onto a silicon solar cell can boost power, reduce heat and prolong the cell's life, researchers now report.

To make their improved solar cells, the researchers began by first converting bulk silicon into discrete, nano-sized particles using a patented process they developed. Depending on their size, the nanoparticles will fluoresce in distinct colors.

Nanoparticles of the desired size were then dispersed in isopropyl alcohol and dispensed onto the face of the solar cell. As the alcohol evaporated, a film of closely packed nanoparticles was left firmly fastened to the solar cell.

Solar cells coated with a film of 1 nanometer, blue luminescent particles showed a power enhancement of about 60 percent in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum, but less than 3 percent in the visible range, the researchers report.

The process of coating solar cells with silicon nanoparticles could be easily incorporated into the manufacturing process with little additional cost, Nayfeh said.

One of the great things about the division of labor -- having each person do one job and do it well -- is the lengths to which complete strangers will go to make each others' lives better.

Take, for example, road signs. We drive by thousands of them each year. Have you ever thought about what it would take to make a better road sign? I haven't. But Don Meeker has.

The Road to Clarity - New York Times

In 1989, after his success with the waterways project, the State of Oregon approached Meeker with a commission to think up a roadside sign system for scenic-tour routes. The problem sounded modest enough: Add more information to the state's road signs without adding clutter or increasing the physical size of the sign itself. But with the existing family of federally approved highway fonts -- a chubby, idiosyncratic and ultimately clumsy typeface colloquially known as Highway Gothic -- there was little you could add before the signs became visually bloated and even more unreadable than they already were. ""I knew the highway signs were a mess, but I didn't know exactly why," Meeker recalled.

Around the same time Meeker and his team were thinking about how to solve the problem of information clutter in Oregon, the Federal Highway Administration was concerned with another problem. Issues of readability were becoming increasingly important, especially at night, when the shine of bright headlights on highly reflective material can turn text into a glowing, blurry mess. Highway engineers call this phenomenon halation and elderly drivers, now estimated to represent nearly a fifth of all Americans on the road, are most susceptible to the effect.

"When the white gets hit, it explodes, it blooms," Meeker, who has the air of a scruffy academic, went on to say.

And, he spent the next fifteen years coming up with a new font for road signs and getting it approved by the Federal Highway Administration. Isn't that fantastic?

Only an economic system that frees people from subsistence living can give people enough freedom and flexibility to spend 15 years designing a better road sign.

Or, take the story of UPS.

U.P.S. Embraces High-Tech Delivery Methods - New York Times

But increasingly, it is the researchers at its Atlanta headquarters, its technology center in Mahwah, N.J., and its huge four-million-square-foot Louisville hub who are asking the questions that will drive the company's future.

What if the package contains medicine that could turn from palliative to poison if the temperature wavers? What if it is moving from Bangkok to Bangor and back to Bangkok, and if customs rules differ on each end? And what if the package is going to a big company that insists on receiving all its packages, no matter who ships them, at the same time each day?

Increasingly, it is the search for high-tech answers to such questions that is occupying the entire package delivery industry. U.P.S. and FedEx are each pumping more than $1 billion a year into research, while also looking for new ways to cut costs.

Customers of both FedEx and U.P.S. can now print out shipping labels that are easily scannable by computers. Meteorologists at both companies routinely outguess official Weather Service forecasts. And both are working with the Federal Aviation Administration to improve air safety and scheduling.

The research at U.P.S. is paying off. Last year, it cut 28 million miles from truck routes "” saving roughly three million gallons of fuel "” in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns. This year, U.P.S. began offering customers a self-service system for redirecting packages that are en route.

And now the U.P.S. researchers are working on sensors that can track temperatures of packages, on software that can make customs checks more uniform worldwide and on scheduling processes that accommodate the needs of recipients as well as shippers.

Absolutely incredible. UPS and FedEx are spending a combined $1 billion -- just to find a way to get a package to your door faster, cheaper, safer. Their researchers don't know me and they'll probably never meet me, but they're intensely focused on making my life better.

Only the profit motive produces that kind of incentive. (When was the last time a motor vehicle or postal employee cared about your time or happiness?) Only the division of labor allows that kind of single-focused effort.

Capitalism may not be a perfect economic system, but it's the only one I ever want to live in.