So bad its...good really, really bad.

How could a tagline like this produce a bad movie...

Ali (Christina Aguilera) is a small-town girl with a big voice who escapes hardship and an uncertain future to follow her dreams to Los Angeles. After stumbling upon The Burlesque Lounge, a majestic but ailing theater that is home to an inspired musical revue, Ali lands a job as a cocktail waitress from Tess (Cher), the club’s proprietor and headliner. Burlesque’s outrageous costumes and bold choreography enrapture the young ingenue, who vows to perform there one day.

Soon enough, Ali builds a friendship with a featured dancer (Julianne Hough), finds an enemy in a troubled, jealous performer (Kristen Bell), and garners the affection of a bartender and fellow musician (Cam Gigandet). With the help of a sharp-witted stage manager (Stanley Tucci) and gender-bending host (Alan Cumming), Ali makes her way from the bar to the stage. Her spectacular voice restores The Burlesque Lounge to its former glory, though not before a charismatic entrepreneur (Eric Dane) arrives with an enticing proposal.

Such an original script definitely deserves my movie patronage!


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Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go drool at a movie screen for a few days.


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Antibiotics, Pesticides, and the War on Terror?

It seems to me that a weird paradox has emerged in science, where people are now advocating that less is more when it comes to antibiotics and pesticides. Carl Zimmer issues this worrying blog post in Discover magazine about rapid methods weeds are developing to circumvent death-by-Roundup.

For a while, it seemed as if glyphosate would avoid Melander’s iron rule. Monsanto scientists ran tests that showed no evidence of resistance. Glyphosate seemed to strike at such an essential part of plant biology that plants could not evolve a defense. But after glyphosate-resistant crops had a few years to grow, farmers began to notice horseweed and morning glory and other weeds encroaching once more into their fields. Farmers in Georgia had to cut down fields of cotton rather than harvest them because of infestations of Palmer amaranth.

What’s striking is how many different ways weeds have found to overcome the chemical. Scientists had thought that Roundup was invincible in part because the enzyme it attacks is pretty much the same in all plants. That uniformity suggests that plants can’t tolerate mutations to it; mutations must change its shape so that it doesn’t work and the plant dies. But it turns out that many populations of ryegrass and goosegrass have independently stumbled across one mutation that can change a single amino acid in the enzyme. The plant can still survive with this altered enzyme. And Roundup has a hard time attacking it thanks to its different shape.

What I find interesting is how this seems just like worrying documentation of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It seems every time I turn on the TV I see news of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, or staph, and how more and more diseases need stronger and stronger antibiotics...the old guard has failed.

Many are calling for organic farming, suggesting that diligence and hard work can produce farms as productive as farms gassed with massive doses of Roundup (these are mostly people who have not worked on a farm). Many (who have never had to take care of a child with severe fever) also call for reduction in antibiotic use, suggesting that people should just "tough it out" when they get a non-lethal infection (see here and here). The argument, as Melander put it over 100 years ago, is that by letting the some of pesticide-susceptible bugs live, some of the time, then they spread their genes out and pesticides work better.

It's funny, really. In the War on Weeds, and the War on Bacteria, more and more people think that we should just let the weeds win. Let the bacteria win. Unless, you know, things get really bad. Then we should step in with our antibiotics and herbicides and show 'em who's boss.
But somehow this doesn't really play out when it comes to terrorism. You just don't see people on TV saying "the smarter we get in the War on Terror, the smarter the terrorists get. We should give up the fight and let as many terrorists come to our country as want to. We'll deal with the really dangerous terrorists...but let most of the low-key, Times Square bombing-level terrorists do their thing. They really aren't a threat to the majority of America."
For some reason, the "surrender to win" thing doesn't really work in this case.

But then again, it doesn't work with antibiotics either. Did you know that in Africa, places without clean water have an appalling literacy rate below 25%? Give those areas clean water, and studies show the literacy rate jumps above 90%. Why? Because kids aren't missing school with water-borne illnesses.
The same is true for antibiotics. How many kids would miss school, even here in America, if they were down with a 100+ fever that lasted weeks? How far behind would kids be if they missed a month of school with whooping cough? Maybe only a few people would die if they didn't get their antibiotics...but our society would inevitably fall behind.
And could you afford to miss two weeks of work due to your upper respiratory infection? Do you have that luxury? Most don't, and so they need antibiotics so they can bounce back in just a few days.
No, we just can't put down the War on Germs. Surrender here does not mean victory, it means setbacks, suffering, and slowdown. Instead of lamenting bacterial resistance, we should be ever more aggressively searching for new and stronger medicines.

Essentially the same is true for herbicides. Can you really look a farmer in the face and tell him that he should only produce 2/3 of his potential crop because he shouldn't use herbicides? If I told you that I wanted you to work at your job just as hard (or harder, given you'd have to go back to walking beanfields), but from now on you only got paid a fraction of your former wage...would you be upset? Would you tell me to screw off?
How can anyone honestly tell farmers to intentionally be less productive? America's very foundation was built on the concept that innovation allowed more and more productivity from farms...which allowed more and more people to move to the cities and innovate.
No, less herbicide (and subsequently less crop) is no answer to the War on Weeds. Smarter herbicides, smarter crop plants is the better answer. The same is true for pesticides. Do you think that if farmers stop using Bt corn...the corn borer will agree to stop eating corn?

It just seems to me that although humans and evolution seem locked in an eternal arms race, laying down our weapons would not solve the problem. Nature does not negotiate, Nature does not sign treaties. And so we cannot blink first.


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Dear Kansas Senate

Dear Kansas Senate,

It is hard enough out there right now. Really. I got laid off last year, for Christ's sake. My family scrapes by now, choked to the hilt with debt and student loan payments. My retirement funds are just now starting to recover from the recession, my wife is still trying to get through college, and my daughter, poor thing, has to wear used clothes we buy at garage sales.

And now you want to make it harder for me to be fat.

It's not enough that you take away my right to have my car's suspension be destroyed with your constant and diligent road maintenance, not enough that you provide and maintain gorgeous public lands upon which I successfully caught catfish two weekends ago, not enough you forced me to endure top-notch schools...now you want to incentivize healthiness too? You bastards.

This is America! In America we're supposed to be rotund, fat behemoths! We need those sugary, death-hastening, acidic drinks in order to stay awake and work the long, stressful hours required to make enough money to buy all the fast-food we eat! You can't take that away from us!

Everyone knows that when government increased the tax on cigarettes, the number of smokers went down. Increasing the tax more, decreased the number of smokers more. It's science. Same thing is true for alcohol. But I know deep down that that wouldn't apply here!

Look, we know you are arguing that you are doing this to shore up the state deficit. And I know that the deficit was caused by the recession. And I know the recession was mostly not the fault of Kansans. But you're politicians! Don't we pay you to magically fix the budget every year despite changes in the taxes levied? Doesn't part of that assume you will always be able to lower taxes, no matter what the national fiscal situation is?

And just because the $90 million dollars you would raise from the soda tax would save thousands of government jobs, keep many schools open, and help Kansans statewide, what's more important than any of that crap is saving the jobs of the three to five hundred Coke and Pepsi employees who would be laid off as a result of this tax! You just can't do that to good people. To hell with the hundreds of teachers that would be laid off, the hundreds of road workers that would be laid off, and the multitude of others that would be laid off as a result of a state deficit.

Look, if you want to tax something, tax lipstick. You could make a lot of tax revenue because lots of people use it. But, since I don't personally use it, I don't really care much if you tax it.


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Quote for the Day

"It's just like if I fed you a nutritionally incomplete diet of Hershey chocolate bars and then stressed you by loading your hive on a semi-truck and hauling your 3,000 miles and unloading you and putting you in contact with herbicides and pesticides, it would be like my spraying your face with Raid every day. Then if you have a big blood-sucking mite on you, you’re going to get sick!"

-Jerry Hayes, Florida Dept. of Agriculture, in reference to why the Honeybees are disappearing.


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Writing About Wine

Impossible to do without sounding like a total snob/douchebag.

My own favorite form of self-experimentation has to do with wine. It's pretty clear that we expect more expensive wines to taste better. (This expectation is visible in an fMRI machine.) But it's also clear that, at least for amateurs, this expectation is mostly false: when you give people bottles of wine without any price information, there is no correlation between the cost of the wine and its subjective ratings. A $8 bottle is just as enjoyable as an $80 one.

Every few months, I conduct a blind taste test. (In general, I think the most useful forms of self-tracking will be the tracking of our innate biases.) I trek to Costco and my local wine store and pick up several bottles at various price points. The wines are poured into cheap decanters. And then I taste the wines over the course of a lazy afternoon, being sure to eat lots of crackers in between. I smell, swirl, sip and swallow. (I like my wine too much to spit it out.) I'm no Robert Parker, but I take a few notes and render my judgement. What have I discovered? Mostly I've learned that my ratings are woefully inconsistent. The same $18 pinot that I loved last year might get low marks at a later date. A Tuscan blend that seemed so generic now seems like it would be a perfect foil for pasta with tomatoes.

Well, it must be horrible to subject oneself to the humiliation of buying wines and not knowing expensive from cheap. Probably similar to the humiliation one feels when misidentifying a Lamborghini Countach as a Lamborghini Diablo. Or mistaking the jet you are flying is as a Gulfstream III when in fact it is a Gulfstream V.
Perhaps Jonah could spare himself from humiliation and just drink Yellow Tail like the rest of us.


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Where Does Iron Man Get His Strength?

Last week I outlined the four technologies that a high school student entering college could focus on in terms of their career path if they wanted to be part of a future in which Iron Man was feasible.
Of those four, we've covered power supplies and control systems. Today I want to focus on the 700 lb. gorilla in the room: the artificial muscle.

As a mechanical engineer by training and a biomechanist by preference, I've become intimately aware just how incredibly well-designed skeletal muscle is. Frankly, if it didn't work so well, why has the entire animal kingdom adopted it as a locomotive method? Muscle, as it turns out, is elegant in its complexity of construction while being simple in its purpose: to pull as hard as possible. Most people don't realize just how strong muscle is; during your hardest muscle flex, only about a third of your muscle fibers are firing at any given moment...much more than that and your muscles would literally rip themselves off your bones. Muscles come in a wide variety, from quickly-tiring fast-twitch to endurance slow-twitch. They, at some point in history, captured some bacterial precursor to mitochondria and enslaved them into their own built-in energy factories.

A quick math lesson: typing 120 words a minute, with an average of 6 letters per word, takes about 2,500 individual muscle actions a minute. And that's just to sit there and type!

But the real marvel of muscle is how energy dense it is. Muscle can produce about 0.35 MPa of stress, roughly 50 psi for us Americans. So a muscle with a one inch diameter can pull with about 40 lbs of force. Want to be stronger? Add muscle thickness.

Creating an artificial version of muscle, however, has been thwarting scientists and engineers for decades. Mechanical actuators, driven by motor/gear sets are promising, especially as brushless permanent magnet motors get smaller and stronger. But those assemblies trade speed for strength. Pneumatic actuators work really well at the same strength as muscle, but suffer from control issues due to the compressibility of air. Futuristic materials like "electroactive polymers" and "shape memory alloys" require high voltage, high temperature, or suffer from short lifespans.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory seems to have thrown their weight behind "mesofluidics" which is their term for hydraulic pistons the size of human muscles. They report hydraulic systems that can basically mimic human muscle in energy density in this paper. The researchers suggest the artificial hand could be used for telerobotic disassembly of roadside bombs in war areas.

TAE suggests a more likely use for these systems: powered exoskeletons. Here's two reasons why it would be better for exoskeletons: auxiliary systems and danger.
Unlike a standalone mechanical servo actuator, a hydraulic piston requires valving, pumps, and a motor assembly. These are all heavy. The ORNL team waxes over the fact that their prosthetic hand will require these systems, instead focusing on how light the actual hand it. Of course, if any artificial muscle technology could have auxiliary systems of unknown weight elsewhere, those AMT's would look amazing too!
But imagine instead, the mesofluidic actuators used as a powered exoskeleton...giving the user 3-5 times their normal strength, and the system would carry its power generator, pump, reservoir, filter, valving, and control systems on itself somewhere, unloading it from the user. This is essentially what the SARCOS/Raytheon exoskeleton intends to do; the exoskeleton is a hydraulic system that carries the weight of the auxiliary hydraulic components on its back.
The second problem with hydraulic actuation, as opposed to some of the other actuation technologies, is danger. Personally, I don't know that I want to have a mechanical component intimately attached to my body that has 3,000 psi compressed parts in it. The last time I got in the way of a power-washer (at ~200 psi), I found the sensation a little unpleasant. I can't imagine getting blasted at 15X that intensity.
Once again, though, I turn to exoskeletons. It would be a relatively simple process to plate the exoskeleton wearer with light plastic or carbon fiber that would protect that soldier/user from exposure to failed hydraulic components. Those protective plates, however, are unsuitable for an 80-year-old who lost his hand in the war.

What ORNL and SARCOS have hit on here is that really, if we are honest with ourselves, hydraulic pistons are the only things capable of producing the power, pound for pound, that muscle does.

That's not to say Tony Stark uses hydraulics in his Iron Man armor. Given that he invented a new power source for it, invented a new control system technology, and is responsible for inventing all the weapons in his company and on the suit...it wouldn't be a leap to assume he invented a novel artificial muscle too.


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