For the lazy Skiier

I love Gizmodo.com because it's full of random gadgets, and I like gadgets. I don't own many, but I really like knowing they exist. Gadgets are all futuristic. But in this case...

Here's a gadget for the lazy skier. The Skizee is a four stroke that you put behind you, which pushes you along like a snowmachine track. But the Skizee (that's the link to their company webpage) looks horribly awkward, and the stance for that looks just plain unnatural. And more importantly, why would you? I can't think of a use for the gadget that isn't better suited by something else.

Scenario 1: You're using it as a skiier. That means you need to haul around a 4 stroke engine and that contraption on your back, or on a polk. In the case of the former, you don't get to carry anything else. In the latter case, what are you going to do with the sled after the fact?

Scenario 2: You're using it fulltime, as a snowmachine. You're going to have shorter range, it's going to be harder to service it, and you don't have any cargo space. Standing's got to be a pain, vs sitting. And it doesn't really have a smaller footprint than something like an Elan, so you're not likely to get into anywhere that you can't get with a snowmachine. The weight savings can't really be enough to make up for the float of a real mountain snowgo. And I can imagine the first time you stumble and the machine goes up between your legs is going to be preeeetty dang uncomfortable.

So... what's the point? Who, exactly, are they trying to sell this too?

photos via gizmodo.com

Not a reccomended Mfg Method

The sign allegedly translates to "Dependable handling of chemical products" (Sadly, I don't speak Dutch). Hat tip to Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline and Keeees (comment #1) for the link to the picture and translation.

Snowmachine HUD

One thing I've always disliked about riding my snowmachine is that I have no idea how fast I'm going. I have a general feel for things, sure, and I divide it into two speeds - safe, and not safe (but fun). But the problem is that my speed gauge frosts over, and I can't actually read it all winter long. My snowmachine never gets hot enough to thaw the frost off the watchglass.

That's got me dreaming about a snowmachine helmet that's like a fighter jet helmet, where important information is projected directly on the visor of the helmet. That way you can see speed, fuel, oil, and GPS location without having to look down from the trail at the dashboard. I've found that when I'm riding in the interior (where I do the bulk of my riding now), you can't really take your eyes off the trail for very long at all, because most of the time you're in some very closed forest. Your snowmachine won't blow up like in True Lies if you hit a tree, but it's generally very un-fun to hit one.

Well, via Gizmodo, it looks like a company called Recon is going to produce goggles with integrated LCD screens. They're looking to sell these to skiers, but I think some things, like an HUD GPS, would be a godsend to snowmachiners. Of course, like everything else, a GPS isn't a replacement for good old fashion knowledge of the trails around you, and a map and compass never have dead batteries, but it'd be a really cool toy to have for riding!

Dubious headlines

From the Tundra Drums:

Troopers: Villages grateful for recent crime-sweep

Published on December 29th, 2010 12:20 pm

By MEGAN A. PETERS, ALASKA STATE TROOPERS SPOKESWOMAN

In other news, the IRS says that tax payers love them, and are grateful for audits.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't have law enforcement, but you can't have an objective story on police action if the story is written by the police. Objectivity doesn't work like that. 

Shame on Tundra Drums.

Vik'ipitiyamun igarluten!

There's now a yup'ik language wikipedia over at http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/esu/Main_Page It's still in the early stages, and is in need of content - most of what's up there are single lines with a picture or two. Alngaksaitua im'umun mernurama.

Complexity and evolution

Here's a neat little video that explains how complexity can come about in through evolution. The animations on this are very well done! I enjoyed the bit about the sundew.

How Icy is Fairbanks?

Just how icy is Fairbanks right now? Here's a gem that I found via Alaskan Dave (who is not dead, judging by his twitter account) Down Under: http://yfrog.com/mgyv5pj

Goldstream is better than that. Marginally. Just stay away from Ballaine.

Massive duststorms... in Alaska?

When you think of a massive dust storm, if you're like me, you probably don't think about South-East Alaska. I'm more likely to think of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait than Alaska's Banana Belt. And yet, there it is:

That's a photo from NASA. So, what on earth are those massive plumes streaming off the coast from? Give it a guess, and then check out Phil Plait's answer. :) NASA does an awful lot of Earth observing, and generates a whole bunch of critical data. That's not bad for an agency who's entire budget costs us much less than one percent of the federal budget.

Cellphones and Cancer again?

There's a book out there by the name of "Disconnect" by Dr. Devra Davis, of U. Pittsburgh, that has been making rounds in the lay print due to the sensationalist claims it makes about cellphones and cancer. You've all probably heard about the alleged link between cellphones and cancer where people claim, on the thinnest of mechanistic argument, that cell phones can cause brain tumours. Various research groups have then been looking at whether or not there's a cancer risk primarily through observational studies, since it's very difficult to tell someone how much they should talk on their cellphone for the next x years, and the results have been the messy mix of results that you typically find if either there is no real effect, or if the effect is so subtle as to be nearly negligible.

Personally, I'm inclined to the "No Effect" camp a little more. Here's why: It's all about mechanism. It sounds dangerous when you hear about EM radiation and all that, but realize your toaster gives off EM radiation. So does the sun. And light bulbs. And... well, about everything in the office, these days. You, right now, are giving off radiation! But it really, really doesn't matter. The wavelength of the EM radiation needs to be the right length to excite chemical bonds and cause them to break, form, etc. We'd call such wavelengths "ionizing radiation," and cellphones do not give off ionizing radiation. The best they could do is make your head slightly warmer. This is in contrast with something we know gives off ionizing radiation - the Sun.

The Dr. Davis harps on how "Industry Knows," like there's some massive cover-up of the topic, and points to disclaimers in the fine print of cell phone manuals warning not to keep the phones too close. Ever heard of a CYA? The legal evidence of effect in a law suit is a far lower bar than the rigour demanded by scientist. Companies can be, and have been, sued for things that were later shown to be totally harmless upon actual study. All Nokia needs is to be sued for an ungodly amount by someone who has a brain tumour from another source to really ruin their day, and the fine print lets them say, "Well you didn't use the phone as we instructed."

One other thing I would like to note - the news stories are coming off making Dr. Davis look like some sort of cancer expert. This is interesting, because to the best of my google scholar abilities, as well as looking at her public CV, I can one peer reviewed paper on cell phones and cancer. It looks like she's spent most of her time recently tilting at aspartame (which to be honest, sends up a whole lot of red flags in my mind). Now, I won't begrudge her the right to write a book - I have zero publications on cell phones and cancer - but the Times and other journalists should know that one study does not an expert make.

Photo credit.

Winterize yourself

It's starting to get cold over here, although we haven't really plumbed the sub-zero °Fs yet. But with the days getting shorter, and the temperature going down, winter is definitely here for the season. This much really hit me Saturday when I woke up after sleeping for nearly 12 hours. Don't bother me, I'm hibernating! In that vein, I want to share this surprisingly accurate list of ways to winterize yourself from lifehacker. Just like you winterize your truck, and pull your boat out for the season, you should take good care of yourself, too!

My two cents would be "don't feel the need to hold onto your really warm gear until later." Lots of people are walking around campus in light jackets like they're in denial, and they're clearly shivering. Well that's silly! Just put on your warm stuff when you feel cold. Don't over dress or you'll get hot, but it's the opposite that's the bigger problem.

Also, "Get out an do something!" So many new students here hole up for the coldest months, which is precisely when they should be getting out and being active. Being active helps with the mood, and you also get more sun exposure. Keeping the indoors brightly lit helps too.

This one will be counter intuitive, but "turn down your thermostat." If you keep your home slightly cool, your body will better acclimate to the cold. There's good science to back this up, too. I see tiny cabins with massive woodstoves, and I have to shake my head. Some of them get so hot, you'd think we were in the jungle!

What are your tips for staying winterized?

Does your doctor have a conflict of interest?

This morning, I was listening to KUAC when I heard a story about Doctors who had been disciplined in the past, but were now receiving money from pharmaceutical companies. You can read the original ProPublica story here. I think most people are vaguely familiar with this happening - or at least I hope most people are - but along with that story came a wonderful utility to find out if your doctor had reported income from the drug companies. Immediately, I checked for a doctor that had behaved very strange and found that their strange behaviour was all their own (or is hiding their pharmaceutical income). But perhaps you'd like to check your own too; I've gone ahead and linked the entry on Alaskan doctors here.


I should hasten to add that I'm not against pharmaceutical companies per se, as I'm a huge fan of new and modern drugs. I'll take a refined and purified analgesic over some willow bark and mashed up porcupine quills any day of the week (or at least those days where I need an analgesic). I am slightly leery of their marketing arms though, which can get up to some... morally dubious things. What really surprises me is that the amount that Doctors have received is so small; 257 million since 2009 seems like chump change. We're talking about 7 massive companies what have far more than that to throw around...

If life was like a political debate...

I can't resist sharing this comic from the always funny, though sometimes NSFW, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

New Toys

Yeah, I know I've been hiding for a bit. Hopefully my situation will change soon, but until then, here's something neat I saw in the Tundra Drums: Someone modified a Polaris 6 wheeler to act as a mini-ambulance. I'm surprised no one thought of the idea sooner - now that I see it, it's pretty obvious. The problem is that ambulances can't really work in most villages because of poor roads, or often no roads at all. How do you get a seriously unwell person to the clinic?
Previously, you'd stick someone in the back of a gator or argo, or in the seat of a bigger ATV. If you can run a truck, maybe that might help out, but that's hit and miss. But this, converting a 6 wheeler into an ambulance? It might have some problems in snow, but this is pretty brilliant.

Okay, speaking of ambulances, I can't help but think of a mildly NSFW monologue by Tim Minchin on the subject of ambulances, taking a cab in London, and lipsycing.

More Economics of Drugs (It's the incentives, stupid)

I've been reading a lot about the economics of drugs lately (again, I don't touch the stuff myself, but this stuff is fascinating!), and it was very interesting to see a blog post by Marginal Revolutions, a wonderful economics blog, discuss the groups most actively lobbying against the legalization of marijuana. Before you click, care to guess?

...

It's the Police and beer distributors. At first you might think there's a crime watch aspect from the police - good health and safety and all that. Instead, the cause turns out to be far more banal:

[...] Police forces are entitled to keep property seized as part of drug raids and the revenue stream that comes from waging the drug war has become a significant source of support for local law enforcement. Federal and state funding of the drug war is also a significant supplement to local forces' budgets.

Legalization means a cut in budget, and less material seized. Any economist would say that life is all about incentives, and in this case all the incentives are for police to oppose legalization. They must have done some form of calculus to find that the amount of money garnered for police budgets through taxation would be less than the amount they achieve from property seized. This is presumably because they would have to share tax revenue with other departments. This raises the question of whether incentives could be reworked to favour police departments (And that, of course, raises the issue of should incentives be re-worked at all, which is an entirely different question).

Croudsourcing consumer expenses.

Very particular consumer expenses. Since I'm apparently in a controversial mood today, there's a neat link I found called priceofweed.com. You can probably guess what it's about. While I don't do them, I find drug economics very interesting. The products are illegal, expensive, and in some cases dangerous to acquire, and yet according to the Author of Freakanomics, crack dealing has much the same business organization as McDonalds.

Anyhow, back to weed pricing: you can't trust police estimates of drug worth, since they have a vested interest in exaggerating the prices both to dissuade use and to make them look like they've accomplished something. When you spent several hundred thousand dollars, you need to justify it by saying you stopped some equal or greater amount of illegal activity, and the greater the estimate of the activity stopped, the more cost effective you can claim to be. "You should fund me, because for every one dollar, we can stop six thousand dollars of drugs." It gets so absurd that on the TV, I once heard police claim they had interdicted something along the lines of 1% of the US's GDP in drugs. 100 Billion dollars worth of drugs is... well... in 2008, it would have been the equivalent of trying to smuggle in the net worth of IBM. I imagined somewhere, an economist saw that on TV and promptly choked in his own spittal over the absurdity of the claim.

The other Air Force Falcons.

Birds and Aircraft don't mix. Just ask Sullenberger about how well his plane dealt with the multiple bird-strikes. This is even more the case in high performance military jets, which are even more expensive to fix. So, what's an Air Force base to do? In the latest issue of "The Wildlife Professional" there was an article (p. 52) with a great number of approaches laid out a bunch of approaches, from Habitat modification to Non-lethal dispersal, and capture and translocation. Well, an Air Force base has an idea I think stands out because it's neat - they're fighting falcons with falcons.

More likely, they're using them to harass prey. Falconry has been around for thousands of years now, and I've always been fond of it. Although there's occasional bird smuggling (primarily to the Middle East), on the whole falconers are a force for good, in terms of outreach and education about bird of prey conservation. Many of them volunteer at wildlife rehab centres. So the idea of using falconry to limit other human-wildlife conflict is appealing to me.

Side note - anyone else notice the B-2s flying around Fairbanks about a week ago? I can definitely see how those could be mistaken for alien spaceships! If you didn't know what you were looking at, you could easily say "That's not from this planet."

Think like an Economist

My BiL  linked a really neat talk about how incentives matter (or don't) that had a neat animation to go with it. I'm not going to link it, because I'm mean like that. I'm not even going to link what I clicked on after that, which is an animation of another talk by Dan Levitt. Instead, I want to share the full version of the talk. It's a talk that's been in social psychology and economics circles for ages: is there such a thing as altruism?

Originally, my training is as a behavioural ecologist. Not as a geneticist, or population ecologist, or whatever. I studied behaviour. From a biological standpoint, altruism doesn't make much sense. Give away what you've worked to earn? If there's a gene for that behaviour, that gene will quickly go away as sure as a gene that results in an animal that tears holes in its side. In fact, for a long time, altruism was raised as an issue against evolution. Well, some very clever solutions show that you can have altruistic like behaviour, where you help your relatives (who have a copy of a gene for helping relatives), thereby increasing your own gene's fitness. An alternative solution, no less clever involves "I help you today, but you help me tomorrow." We call that reciprocal altruism. There's a number of other solutions to apparent altruism, where the giver is really getting something in return.

There's the rub. Is it possible to envision a situation where someone gets absolutely nothing in return? Or their family? Even feeling good about giving something is a benefit (although then you need to explain why one feels good about it). I think there probably is true altruism, but it's a mistake. It's a behaviour that goes off in the wrong context - we express the 'care for family' behaviour towards a total stranger because it miss-fires. But just because it's evolutionarily a mistake doesn't make it bad. After all, some of my favourite body parts don't have any function at all in one gender or another (I'll keep this blog pg-13 by not listing them. ;) ). Mistakes and misfires can be beautiful, wonderful. But that's not to say the whole problem of altruism is foxier than you'd think.

The end all of Traffic Jams

I don't deal with heavy traffic well. I avoid driving in Anchorage or downtown Fairbanks because I find it a mix of scary and infuriating that's hard to describe - When I briefly lived in Utah, the traffic was a bit of a nightmare, and I took the train 9 times out of 10. So, when I read about a 9 day, 100km long traffic jam in China...

I'm very glad I consider College Road "heavy traffic!"

Daily Mail takes a trip into National Enquirerer territory.

A woman in North London claims she is a living magnet, says the Daily Mail. Oh, so many things I could say to that. "She has a magnetic personality?" "I can't see what drew the reporter to write this story." "She's definitely got a large chunk of ferromagnetic material between her ears, that's for sure." See? The possibilities are endless.

Magnets don't work that way. Magnets are definitely not controlled by hormones. But we shouldn't expect better from the Daily Mail, I guess. As someone once quipped - "The Daily Mail - because throwing feces was outlawed as a form of journalism."

Daily Mail:

The Evolution of Mickey Mouse

A while back I wrote about neoteny in humans, and why most of us can't look at a bucket full of puppies without going "Aww!" It's all rooted in the evolution of the human brain, shaped by the millions of years something resembling Homo has been around. Jerry Coyne, author of the wonderful book "Why Evolution is True" (and author of a blog by the same name) gave his own take on the issue, which you can find here. I strongly recommend you give it a read! In it, he has a wonderful picture showing the neotenic evolution of Mickey Mouse. How could I not reproduce it here?

Notice how Mickey's characteristics keep changing. Gradually, he's become shorter snouted, thicker limbed, large headed and more squat. In short, more like a baby human's form. 'Generations' of drawings have been winnowed down to what we find the most visually appealing, and that turns out to be the most juvenilized version!