PPT: Parts Per Trillion

Our local water department sent out a big full color brochure this week talking about what they were doing and what all was involved in delivering water.

One of the things they are looking at is detecting chemicals with a presence in the range of parts per trillion.

Seems like I heard something once that said there were about a trillion atoms in a cell in a human body, a trillion cells in a human body, and a trillion stars in the galaxy. It may not have been a trillion, it may have been more or less, but the idea was these numbers were all on the same order of magnitude.

The brochure gave some examples of what one part per trillion would look like, but I didn't particularly like any of them, so I worked up a little spreadsheet to try and generate my own example. One part per trillion is like one teaspoon of your mystery substance in square field two and a half miles on a side flooded with water to a depth of one foot. I suppose the question now is how many molecules are in that teaspoon?

Addiction

Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas

It used to be that gambling was against the law, then governments figured out they could raise money using it and now it's everywhere.

From the movie "Goodfellas" I got the bit about how the mob boss provides protection for all those people who can't go to the police. They pay him a cut and he protects them, after his fashion.

When I was in school I had a class where we were studying old civilizations. The teacher told us about warlords providing protection for farmers and other peasants, and he asked the question: how much did he charge? People made various guesses, but no one got the right answer, which was half. One half of everything they produced. I don't think much has really changed. If you add up all the taxes you pay these days, I would not be surprised if it came pretty close to 50%. You've got your state and federal income tax, your social security, medicare, property taxes, taxes on beer, wine, liquor and gasoline. You probably also have sales tax. (I don't, I live in Oregon, neener, neener, neener.) Anyway, it's a bunch and it adds up to a big chunk of your income.

The mob makes their money off exploiting people's weaknesses. Gambling, prostitution, drugs, are all things people engage in, but they don't do it for any good reason. It is something innate with people that causes them to engage in these behaviors, not because they have decided that this would be the best course of action.

I heard something recently that said that the bulk of the profit from gambling casinos comes from the small percentage of people who are compulsive gamblers, and that makes some sense to me. Most of what you hear about casinos is that the games are setup so that, on the average, the house makes some small percentage on every game. What doesn't get mentioned as often is the flux.

If you are playing for small stakes, it doesn't make much difference, but if you are playing for large sums of money, the flux can make a big difference. On average, the house makes a small percentage, but sometimes you may get on a streak that can make you or break you. That is the flux. If you don't have enough money to stay in the game through a long losing streak, the house will break you. The house wins, and you have to go make some money somewhere else, probably by working at a job.

So every time the flux goes against someone to the point where they are broke, the house wins big time. And if you have someone who is compulsive, someone who can't stop when they are on a losing streak, the house wins easily. This is were the enormous profits come from, not from Grandma playing the nickel slots day in and day out. She might end up paying for the rent on her chair and the machine, but that's about it.

Now if compulsive gamblers were content to simply lose their own money and then go back to work, that would not be such a big problem. The problem is that they are similar to heroin addicts: they will do anything to get their next fix, beg, borrow or even steal. How many embezzlement cases have we read about where the culprit had a gambling problem? So maybe the Puritans had the right idea. Prohibit everything and maybe they will be able to survive even when the wolves are trying to seduce them into poverty.

So what, if anything, can we, or should we, do about any of this? Well, I don't think you are going to stop it. Gambling has been around as long as there has been money. Prostitution and drugs probably even longer. One thing we could try would be to try and identify those individuals who suffer from compulsive behaviors and try and help them learn to cope. This would be one of those expensive, feel good, liberal programs that the Republicans are always arguing against, and it would be very difficult to show any positive results for a long time. One measure of success might be the reduction in the number of embezzlements over a period of ten or twenty years. Of course, lax accounting or lax prosecution could have the same results. Many embezzlements go undiscovered for years, and who knows how many are never discovered?

Or maybe we should do nothing and let every man look out for himself. If you are so oblivious that someone can be robbing you blind for years, maybe you deserve to be relieved of your financial responsibilities, and more power to those who can exploit human frailties.

Update November 2015. Replaced picture with different one.

Helmets & Statistics

There has been a great deal of debate about the use of helmets by cyclists, both the pedal type and the motorized type. There have been large numbers of statistics quoted, but I have never seen a really good statistical picture of the situation.

However, even without the numbers there are some questions we might want to ask, like: What is the cost associated with a person who ends up permanently crippled because they were were involved in a cycling accident and were not wearing a helmet? Or maybe we don't want the answer to that question, and that's why we argue about the statistics.

Death is easier to deal with in some ways than a crippling injury. If you die in an accident your life is prematurely over, but so are all your problems. People you leave behind will grieve for you, but they should eventually recover enough to get on with their lives. The financial burden is finite, unless you were the chief provider for others and failed to make provisions for them.

Severe injuries can go on forever, and so can the associated costs. You may be unable to work or you may require on going medical care. You may not even have enough brain function left to maintain any kind of relationships with your family or friends. For me that would be the very worst scenario. I think I would rather be dead, but at that point you don't have even that option. I suspect that anyone with a severe brain injury will die prematurely. That is bad when that is the best you can hope for.

Silent Air Compressor

I have two air compressors and both of them are very loud and noisy when they are running. One is a two horsepower home-shop unit and the other is small fractional horsepower inflator. Why can't they build silent, or at least quiet, air compressors? I mean what is making all that racket anyway? It's not like there is combustion or any other intrinsically noisy operation going on.

I did a little search on Google, and there are silent air compressors available. One guy made a hobby unit using an old refrigerator compressor. Those are certainly quiet enough. You often don't even notice if it is running or not. Compressors for dentists offices seem to another popular item. Of course they are more expensive.

It looks like manufacturers of regular air compressors are starting to realize how obnoxious their products are and are starting to do something about it.

Gyro Balanced Dirt Bike

I have seen the recent proliferation of 4x4 ATV's with displeasure. I'm wondering why people are buying these things when there are perfectly good motorcycles around? Motorcycles, I like to think, are superior in almost any situation. Simpler, less stuff to break. Larger wheels enable them go over bigger obstacles. Narrower means they can get through smaller openings. So why are people buying all these ATV's? I think the answer is slow speed handling. Balancing a motorcycle at any speed below about five miles per hour can be a tricky business, especially if you are trying to manouver around obstacles or over uneven terrain. Skill can help, but even a skilled rider can get into messy situations that result in falling over. This is not good.


A four wheel ATV is very hard to upset at slow speeds. Of course people succeed at upsetting them at high speeds, but that's the nature of people, not the machine.

If we could mount a small but powerful gyroscope somewhere within the limited confines of a dirt bike, we might have the best of both worlds. It has been done for that over priced two-wheeled abomination, the Segway. The Gyrohawk has managed it for road bikes, so it should be possible to adapt one to a dirt bike.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Embedded Calculator

Every so often I come across some math in an article or story, and more often than not I have some doubt about their results, so I want to check it. This means punching the numbers into a calculator and comparing the results. Since we have all these fancy schmancy computers, I was thinking it would be helpful if someone could come up with a calculator that you could embed in your web page that could verify the writers calculations on the spot. Of course you could still fudge the figures, but you would have to supply your own bogus calculator. And it could be a great help for writers too by giving them a standard format for displaying numerical data and performing the actual computation as well. Something like a miniature spreadsheet might be just the thing:



To be useful, you should be able to change the input value and it should compute the result. This one does not do that. To be really useful, you should be able to change any of the calculated values as well and have it recompute the other values, i.e. it should run forward or backward. The constants and the operations would have to be locked, and somehow the operation that is being performed would have to be shown. A web search for "Embedded Calculator" turned up some results, but they all got rather complicated rather quickly. There is definitely room for improvement here.

Update December 2016 'fixed' embed html.
Update April 2020 evidently I deleted the spreadsheet that was embedded above.

Radiation

Syaffolee put together a bonfire of science writing called "Tangled Bank" and I submitted a piece I wrote some time ago. After I sent it in, I realized that maybe it wasn't really about science, maybe it was just about technology. I think the reason I originally classified it as science is because it was about radiation, which every one knows is really scary and dangerous and only scientists are allowed to mess with it.

There used to be a lot of science going on regarding radiation, and there may be some still going on. We don't hear much about it any more because all the physics news is about particles and particle accelerators. Radiation has pretty much been reduced to technology, though it is still controlled by the government. Even microwave ovens need to have some kind of government authorization.

I grew up working on cars and farm machinery. I would never take a car to a repair shop, I would fix it myself, or junk it. Many of them were real beaters, but I always had wheels. Back then you didn't need anything more sophisticated than a test light to diagnose and repair just about any problem. If something didn't work, you could take it apart until you found the broken part. You replaced the broken part and then put it back together and it would run. Abstraction was pretty limited: what you saw is what you got.

Then along came computers. Now you can no longer tell when something is broken by looking at it. A part that does not work can look just like one that does. Now our level of abstraction has increased. If you replace a part and the machine starts working, then the part you removed must be broken. It becomes much more of a hand waving operation than real diagnosis and repair. It is even more so when the problem is with the software. No physical parts are replaced. The repairman just waves his hands and everything starts working. Just like magic!

Radiation is even more abstract. There are some kinds of radiation that we can generate by using electricity, like X-Rays and microwaves, and electricity is fairly well understood in our culture. People grow up with it and are taught that it can be very dangerous. How well they learn is a matter of conjecture. Power lines are pretty well insulated, and access points are pretty well restricted. So radiation that is generated by a machine that runs on electricity is not too bad: you can always stop the radiation by turning off the electrical power.

Radiation that comes from radioactive material is another matter. You cannot turn it off. It is in the nature of the material. This is scary stuff. You can't see the radiation. Material that generates ionizing radiation, like high speed neutrons and gamma rays, looks just like ordinary material. You can't feel the radiation. Only after you have been exposed and accumulated a fatal dose are you likely to notice any effects. You cannot control it, that is you cannot turn it off and on. You cannot detect it except with special instruments whose operation is so arcane as to be considered voodoo. All you can do is protect yourself from it with shielding.

So we have different levels of complexity and abstraction. The industrial revolution was achieved mainly by things whose operation could be seen and felt. Then came electricity and the electronics revolution. Here we have things whose action can only be detected indirectly, but were under our complete control. Now we are trying to deal with nuclear power and we are not doing too well. Part of the problem is that we do not have a real solid understanding of what we are dealing with. Another is that it requires belief in something that can neither be seen or touched. It is almost like a religion that way. You have to believe in some abstract concepts in order to have any hope of being able to work with this stuff successfully, which includes not killing yourself.