Science Ain't So Bad

BOTULISM BAG?

BAGS

Mister ScienceAintSoBad loves resuseable grocery bags. They’re just nice. They have logos. They don’t fall apart. You can haul yer pet to the groomer in one. And they’re good for the environment, right?

What if they’re not good for the environment? Does that mean the concept of reusable bags blows up?

Before I go on, I should say I hope I’m not trying to be mean. I don’t LIKE discouraging people who are trying to do good but I signed up for science and technology.

My job.

So – the facts.

Let’s start with a widely read journalist who specializes in this stuff, Bob Lillienfield (Use Less Stuff report), who says that even if EVERYBODY used reusable bags, it wouldn’t much matter:

The bag is not the environmental bogey-person that everybody thinks it is,” he says. “If you look at the entire grocery package that you bought, the bag may account for 1 to 2 percent of the environmental impact.

1 or 2 percent? And, maybe 12% of shoppers use ‘em? Gee. Let’s look a little deeper into this environmental miracle.

How long do they last?

Maybe MISTER ScienceAintSoBad’s not as careful as he should be but reusable bags seem to wear out  in as little as 15 uses (holes in the bottom) and since the bags are much heavier and fatter than regular plastic bags, they take more space in a landfill and more space in the trucks that carry them (which then  use more fuel per bag). They’re designed to be degradable and that could be a good thing. But we know that even paper bags don’t degrade significantly faster than their plastic cousins in a landfill. Not enough info on reusable bags yet but MISTER ScienceAintSoBad isn’t real optimistic about them, either.

Then there’s food poisoning.

Which only happens if you let yer bags get nasty.

By reusing them.

Karen Hawthorne (National Post) says we should wash ‘em with bleach each time to minimize the chances of getting sick. She describes a study by Sporometrics in Canada. Most of the bags were contaminated. Some were pretty bad.

Wash them? Bleach? EACH time? Electricity, detergent, and bleach? HOW much energy did you say these bags save?

And what about your time? That’s worth nothing?

IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA

These bags’re good for all kinds of things. But, if you’re motivated by environmental concerns, they’re a bust.

FINAL NOTE

You’re mad at me?

I’m not surprised.

My wife, best friend and, (she’ll be surprised to learn) editor, hasn’t let me run with my religion article yet. She says I gotta tone it down. Too edgy. Easily misinterpreted. Which really surprises me since it’s very supportive of religious belief and believers (it says, mainly,  that the clash between science and religion is overplayed and overly simplistic).

Well, if you think religion is a touchy area, how about environmentalism?

Screw with those guys and out come the tar pots!

I know it isn’t nice to diss the sacred renewable bag and MISTER ScienceAinSoBad wishes he could be more positive.

You want to register your opinion, here’s a good resource for tar. Feathers are available lots of places, but you can try this one.

Our rating for reusable shopping bags: ScienceAintSoBadRating = 2

(And  that’s generous).

CHEAPER THAN MEDICAL SCHOOL

I guess you’ve been watching all the smuggies with their smartphones.

You can live without one, right?

Till now.

Here’s an app so good you gotta buy a phone to carry the app around.

I think I’m serious.

Healthagen developed this thing called iTriage

Stunning!

iTriage’s brilliance is the way it puts a simple interface over medicine. Your phone becomes your Startrek Tricorder. The pain’s in the biceps? All the time? Just at night?

Click “look up symptoms” to search an ordered list of likely symptoms.

Once you think you know what’s causing the problem, you can “Find Medical Treatment” or “Learn About Procedures”.

You can even “Find A Doctor”.

If you don’t understand a medical term you can look that up.

I was chicken to try the “Emergency” button . Was it gonna make an entire team of paramedics materialize right out of the phone? What would I tell ‘em? Just looking?

ONE SMALL STEP FOR.. UH.. ER..

NASA TO DUMP HUMANS FOR BIG MISSIONS?

Got a letter from one of my fans.

MisterScienceAintSoBad, you wrote that the manned space program is “stupid”. I think YOU’RE stupid.  - GottaBeHonest41

OK for you, GottaBe. I appreciate your candor. I guess I have been kinda rough on the manned space program. Quoting myself, quoting myself, I did say (talking about a Mars mission):

I don’t want to sound like a broken blog, but this isn’t the first time I’ve discussed the expensive conceit of sending humans to Mars. Quoting myself, “Throughout NASA’s history, there’s been considerable tension between those who believe in the symbolic importance of getting our human butts out there and those who feel that the astronomical (good word here) costs and barely manageable risks aren’t justified when robots are proving themselves so capable.”

You’re not gonna like this much, GottaBe, but  Sara Yin describes (PC Magazine)  a 1000 day project to send an astronaut-like mechanical gizmo to the moon, inspired by the practical reality that we can’t AFFORD to send humans up there during an economic recovery that most people seem to think is still a recession.

Don’t get me started.

In the past, the human or “manned” program had two things going for it:

1. No other choice since, at the time,  robots weren’t good enough.

2. Very dramatic since death always lurked round the corner.

Kept up the public’s interest, it did. A good thing since politicians could leverage the heroics of astronauts to win more public funding for pet space projects. But not much money in the pot these days and new missions are even more dangerous and problematic. Is it even possible to survive a Mars trip? Politicians are being forced to act (relatively) rational. Skip the heroics. You wanna do space? Here’s what I got. What can you do with it, pal?

NASA, it seems, got the message and it’s up with the hardware, down with the fleshware (hence NASA’s humanoid robot). The robot they came up with looks like a spaceman.spacewoman. A dead ringer for a person that’ll be able to use tools designed for human hands.

Plug.

Play.

So. MisterScienceAintSoBad says we should give the robot a name and enough personality for the public to identify with. Big doe eyes too, okay?

I guess I AM kinda pleased to read that NASA has decided to send a robot to the moon all dressed up like an astronaut. There’re about 76 good reasons to do space explorations with robots instead of people at this point.  It’s cheaper, it’s safer, and it advances the art of robotics.

Must be 73 more.

ScienceAintSoBadRating for robotic space missions in lieu of human ones? Why a 10. Of course.

By Walké (Image crée à partir de Image:Bote Boas Vindas2.png) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

FBI CAPTURES A PRINT

FINGERPRINTS

No two people have the same fingerprints.

That’s how come we get to put people in jail or stick ‘em in the lectric chair based on fingerprint evidence. It’s “incontrovertible”

How DO we know that fingerprints are unique? That no two people have the same ones?

Well.. see.. that’s the thing.

Experts such as Simon Cole (New York Times) say its’ a lot of hooey. It’s just “folk wisdom”. Fingerprint matching, says Cole, isn’t nearly as reliable as we grew up thinking it was.

How many whodunits have you read where the bad guy left prints on the wine glass? If they matched, he’s catched.

Period.

You’ve always accepted that this was completely true. You don’t want to get into an argument with your own brain, do you?

But..

from an article in Wikipedia about fingerprints:

“Despite the absence of objective standards, scientific validation, and adequate statistical studies, a natural question to ask is how well fingerprint examiners actually perform. Proficiency tests do not validate a procedure per se, but they can provide some insight into error rates. In 1995, the Collaborative Testing Service (CTS) administered a proficiency test that, for the first time, was “designed, assembled, and reviewed” by the International Association for Identification (IAI).The results were disappointing. Four suspect cards with prints of all ten fingers were provided together with seven latents. Of 156 people taking the test, only 68 (44%) correctly classified all seven latents. Overall, the tests contained a total of 48 incorrect identifications. David Grieve, the editor of the Journal of Forensic Identification, describes the reaction of the forensic community to the results of the CTS test as ranging from “shock to disbelief,”..

Not so good, eh? Get yourself a mediocre fingerprint technician and who KNOWS what fate has in store. (Latents, by the way, are prints that don’t show up till you “dust em”).

EAR IDENTIFICATION (SERIOUSLY)

Maybe there’s a better way.

Dr. Mark Nixon (and others) at the University of Southampton say that  the little swirly thing in the ear,  the helix, is durn good for telling us apart with close to 100% accuracy. That’s what we’re looking for, right? 99+ %?  Will “earprints” replace fingerprints at Scotland Yard?

Not likely, according to A Wild at the University of Rhode Island (That’s as much identification as your gonna get; he’s one of Mister ScienceAintSoBad’s best kept secrets). Wild reminds us that accuracy isn’t enough. Criminal types, he says, would have to start scattering photos of their own ears around crime scenes or, perhaps, begin pressing the sides of their heads against corpses, for ear detection to have any forensic value. Whereas it is hard to avoid leaving fingerprints and DNA behind, your average perpetrator can probably figure out how to keep his ears off the walls.

OTHER APPLICATIONS

To be fair, Dr. Nixon and his colleagues probably had different applications in mind for the ear identification technique such as biometric screening. For that purpose, with further development, it may well turn out to be useful.

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