A Curious Statistical Anomaly

I’ve known about the problems of wind energy and the current power grid for quite a while.  I found this article on The Energy Challenge — Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid Limits in the New York Times (you’ll need to login to read it). To clearly state the problem. In part:

The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.

“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

While the United States today gets barely 1 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, many experts are starting to think that figure could hit 20 percent.

However, to achieve that 20% figure, the United States must upgrade its power grid. Over the past several years, more and more people have come to realize that our national power grid is just not up to snuff. In fact it may not even be up to a sniffle. One of the problems with wind generation is that it isn’t generated evenly throughout the day. Wind changes direction, gets stronger, lighter, and sometimes dies completely. Scientist have been working on teaming the turbines with generators that smooth out the power that is generated. However, while that solves one problem it still doesn’t deal with the fact that you still have to get the power from where it is generated to where it will be used effectively or efficiently — and that means upgrading the grid.

Part of Obama’s recovery plan, and a source of new jobs, was to upgrade the nation’s power grid. Many people complain that it isn’t necessary because we all have power, don’t we? Well, no — not all of the citizens of this country have power. But, yes most do. The problem is that for years people have been ignoring the fact that coal, oil, and carbon based power generation is relying on finite resources — folks, we’re going to run out of these raw materials. We need to switch to greener renewable energy resources — wind, solar, whatever… To do this we need to have the technological grid that can handle what we can throw at it to power our homes, factories, and tools. Upgrading the national power grid is a necessary first step.

I’ve often wonder how people know things or how information spreads from one person to another.  Not so much in an educational classroom sense but those things that you pick up in daily life.  Then, the other day I ran across this article on Evolution and Facebook’s “25 Random Things”. The results of the questionnaire showed that the spread pattern of the “25 Random Things” has the same histogram chart as the spread of an infection disease.

It many ways that’s not surprising. You get the 25 things letter and it asks you to spread it to your friends who are supposed to post 25 things about themselves and forward to their friends and so on. It’s very much like the old chain letters — remember them? Well, even considering that some people don’t post their 25 things or do post and don’t forward — the spread pattern approximate that of a disease.

When you think about it. If I have a cold and then visit several friends, some will get the cold and some won’t. But those that do will visit or otherwise come in contact with other people who will either get the cold or not and so on. The same pattern of spread as an internet meme.

Richard Dawkin’s wrote about The Selfish Gene which a lot of information on memes and how they interact and work. I’ve now bumped that book up on my reading list. Soon, very soon — I’ll know more. Meanwhile, I’ll keep wondering how we pick up and process information.

Today an article in National Geographic News reports that liquid water was recently seen on Mars. Phoenix, which landed near Mars’ north pole, has taken several photos of itself and a recent series of photos seem to show water droplets on the lander’s legs that are clumping together and running downward. If it’s not water, it’s a pretty good approximation, and definitely looks like a liquid of some sort. Scientists report:

This substance is probably saline mud that splashed up as the craft landed, study leader and Phoenix co-investigator Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan told National Geographic News. Salt in the mud then absorbed water vapor from the atmosphere, forming the watery drops, Renno said. The water can stay liquid even in the frigid Martian arctic because it contains a high amount of perchlorates, a salt “with properties like the antifreeze used to melt snow here in Michigan,” said Renno, who will present the work next month at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Finding liquid water under these conditions carries possible implications for Mars’s habitability, the scientists say.

Personally, I feel like I do at Christmas — all excited and expectant and jittery with glee. Imagine the possibilities. This is exciting news. It’s great news because water, even if it’s mud-salt water, is critical for supporting life. However, it also means that unless life can manage the huge amounts of salt in the liquid — well, it’s unlikely. But it does raise the chances that a human expedition to the planet for research purposes might be able to survive (after all technology could probably deal with extracting the water for use.). Meanwhile, these pictures are just amazing.

Sometimes when I read the results of a new scientific study, such as this one on “Loss of Height Linked to Breathlessness in the Elderly“, I wonder why they didn’t know that already. One researcher said:

“The results of the study were far more profound that we expected, given the relatively small number of subjects involved,” Tan said. “We postulate that this loss of height results in reduced lung volume which then results in shortness of breath.”

I’ve put Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as the image for this post. His sketch shows that a person’s reach from side to side is approximately the same as that person’s height. As you grow older the bones in the spine often compress or lose mass and the height of a person decreases. The study found that as the ratio of width of arms (reach) to height increased, that the elderly person was losing height and often that loss of height was related to shortness of breath.

Let’s think about that a second. I’ve still got all my organs but I’ve got less height so those same organs are now compressed into less space — which means my lungs have less space to expand. Wouldn’t the logical deduction, without a study, be that as the elderly person loses height they’d lose lung capacity? I just don’t understand the surprise at the findings.

It seems to me a forest/tree problem (i.e. can’t see the forest for the trees) or you look so much as the individual items that you lose sight of the big picture.

Was the research necessary? In my opinion it probably was since they were so surprised by the outcome. It’s one of those cases where if they had stopped to think about it, they’d have known what the results would be without actually having to run a study. But, in the scientific community if you don’t run a study and get quantified/verified/certified/reproducible results then all you have is intuition, folk lore, or theory. A theory that’s unproven isn’t really accepted. So, while you’d think one could figure it out intuitively, it is necessary to run a study to verify the belief that’s this is what’s happening.

It seems that a lot of things lately look like simple concepts being verified that you’d think would have been, by now, accepted facts. If all your organs now have to fit in less space — some of them are going to have problems working correctly. Now that it’s been tested maybe we can move on to how to help those who have lost height to adapt or alleviate the symptoms that loss of height has caused.

An article reports that scientists have mapped a first draft of the Neanderthal genome.

Highlights of the article:

Researchers used DNA fragments extracted from three Croatian fossils to map out more than 60 percent of the entire Neanderthal genome by sequencing three billion bases of DNA.

The analysis showed it is highly unlikely that much interbreeding occurred as there was “very little, if any” Neanderthal contribution to the human gene pool, said lead researcher Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute.

But it also revealed that our Neanderthal cousins may have been closer to us than we thought: they share a gene which plays a key function in speech and language.

I notice that no matter what they find out about Neanderthals, that it is continually stressed that Homo Sapiens are somehow much much better. I’ll grant that we’re different. I’ll even grant that our genetic makeup is different enough that there may have been little interbreeding. But that only means that they differ from us, not that we’re better, or they’re less because of it.
After all, it’s believed that we shared a common ancestor about 300,000 years ago. And, lets face it, genetically we’re not really all that different.

Look at the picture. If we put a tanned modern man next to him in the same clothing and with the same spear — would they really be that much difference between them other than the forehead?

We, as a species, are reaching out to the stars hoping to meet other sentient species out there. But what would we do if we had a first contact with another species? I don’t think we’d do very well, personally. Here on earth every time we find that a species meets our criteria for sentience, we change the criteria rather than admit that the species just might be intelligent. If we met aliens and they didn’t look like us would we just figure they were the intelligent species equivalent of a bird in a mining cave and ignore it, or try to kill it? I don’t know.

Watching my species over the last few decades, I have my doubts about our ability to logically think, find solutions to problems without resorting to violence, or even to act together for the good of our planet rather than the bottom line of a corporate spreadsheet. So, my opinion of our ability to actually make first contact and to correctly assess the intent or intelligence of the alien species — is not very high at the moment.

However, I’m excited by the new information that geneticists are making in finding our how our and other species genomes are put together and how they work.

I came across this interesting article on EarthFirst and followed the link to a similar announcement on WorldChanging. Basically, the city of Oslo, Norway is going to start running their buses on biomethane. The WorldChanging article says:

In Oslo, air pollution from public and private transport has increased by approximately 10% since 2000, contributing to more than 50% of total CO2 emissions in the city. With Norway’s ambitious target of being carbon neutral by 2050 Oslo City Council began investigating alternatives to fossil fuel-powered public transport and decided on biomethane.

Biomethane is a by-product of treated sewage. Microbes break down the raw material and release the gas, which can then be used in slightly modified engines. Previously at one of the sewage plants in the city half of the gas was flared off, emitting 17,00 tonnes of CO2. From September 2009, this gas will be trapped and converted into biomethane to run 200 of the city’s public buses.

To me this sounds like a great project. I mean really, we (meaning humans) spend billions of dollars treating our sewage and trying to find ways to make it disappear and Oslo has come up with a way to use it. It’s essentially free energy — in that the basic beginning material (and you know what it is) is certainly not going to disappear anytime soon and you have to do something with it anyway. It’s a resource that is abundant, not owned by anyone, and every city, town, village, has to come up with some way to treat it and handle it anyway. This adds a different step and violá power to run buses and other automobile.

I think every level of government that has to deal with sewage treatment should be keeping an eye on this program to see just how well it works and to begin plans to implement a similar program in their own area.

Thank you Oslo for thinking outside the box.

I don’t know about you but I’m always interested in new gadgets that will be better for the environment and greener to use. I’d never heard of this contest before but it’s their second year.

The people at Core77:

We invited designers to explore the concept of “Greener Gadgets.” Designs sought to minimize the environmental impact of consumer electronic devices at any stage in the product lifecycle. Areas of sustainability to consider included energy, materials/lifecycle/recycling, social impact, and educational development. Designers could focus on a particular area of human enterprise (learning, playing, communicating, etc.) or a particular context (work, home, school, etc.), a particular material, or a specific device. Entries could also seek to create new paradigms for products and services.

You can check out the designs and vote on your favorite. I’m still working my way through the list of green devices. Some are outstandingly clever, some are ho-hum, some are WTF, but show some interesting solutions to the problem of how to do some activity in a new, novel way with less of an environmental impact.

I’d love to hear what your favorite gadget from this list was and why — as much as the Core 77 people. Each gadget has its own page and there are comments on the gadget below the description. Another reason it’s taking so long to go through this list.

Core77 deserves a round of cheers for sponsoring this effort.

Irreversible. That’s what a new study reported by NPR says:

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world’s top climate scientists.

I’ve heard that mentioned for a long time. There were several times over the past thirty of forty years where significant changes might have made a difference. But, once we reach the tipping point there’s no turning back. Things will change and we have to adapt to those changes.

“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years,” Solomon says.

This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet’s excess heat — and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds of years.

Do we still have to make changes to the way we pollute the environment and cut back on carbon emissions. Yes, we do. Because we can continue to make things worse. It’s about the only thing we can be sure of — we can make it worse. So, why not try to adapt, change and learn to protect our environment as much as we can.

Dr. Solomon, a scientist at NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) also said:

If we continue with business as usual for even a few more decades, she says, those emissions could be enough to create permanent dust-bowl conditions in the U.S. Southwest and around the Mediterranean.

So, we should be doing everything in our power as citizens of the planet to help contain the damage we’ve already done to our planet. It’s not like we have anywhere else to go — at least not right yet. Since this is the only planet we have to live on we can’t afford to make a worse mess of it. So, do your part to reduce the damage — recycle, reduce your carbon footprint, look for ways to live a greener life.