Tag Archives: Science

economic value in terms of pie: an analogy for communism, capitalism, prosperity and social justice

The best kind of science science serves to advance some aspect of human endeavor (e.g. health, understanding, wonder). It is a contribution. The same can be said for art, engineering, or commercial enterprise. Work done in this manner will create a world far better than one where there is a perfect cornucopia of material prosperity. In fact, a culture of service is more idealistic than a utopic vision of material prosperity. And I believe that it’s achievable, while state-sponsored universal material prosperity isn’t.

Why do I say this? It comes down to pie. Would you rather have a disproportionately small piece of a very large pie (and get more pie), or a equal share of a small pie (and get less pie)? I think, ultimately, a lot of people would rather take the lesser quantity of pie as long as it was ‘fair’.

That doesn’t make rational sense, but we are not rational creatures. We are spiteful, semi-domesticated primates. Monkeys will do the same thing: they will give up their own small treat to see a rival denied a large one.

The maximal economic condition would be capital highly concentrated in the hands of those who continually invest it in labor-saving technology. This is the ‘trickle down’ notion. The workers are paid the minimum viable amount, since they will fail to invest wisely any excess. This produces a huge surplus of economic goods, but the world is divided into two groups: those who can afford to have any/all of the goods that they want, and those who can afford just enough that they are motivated to work very hard for just a little bit more. This assumes, of course, that there is a good way to catch cheaters: people who end up with a large slice without making any pie at all.

Here’s the crux: under these idealized conditions, the most people get the most pie possible (that’s good) but the distribution is not fair (and that’s bad). Even the people who are working really hard for a disproportionately small piece get a lot more than they would if the pie were smaller, but they feel disenfranchised because they have relatively little. So what do you want: a fair slice, or a large pie?

That has been the central economic question of the 20th century: communism (fair slice) or capitalism (large pie)? Could there be a third alternative? I think there is. I think that it’s possible to see past the total numerical economic value and see more fundamental needs. I think we can work on those. And that can co-exist with either system. The big upshot is this: I see the world arguing over the big pie versus the fair slice but what I want to see is people wondering if maybe they would like a different sort of pie altogether.

-Peter

green politics, chemistry, utopia and simplistic economics: greenwashing

Green is fashionable now, and that is great. “Green chemistry” is becoming a buzz word, and that is great, too: “green is the new nano!” Nanotechnology, as we all know, is derived from the Greek root meaning “successful grant application.”

If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you all about the Future when we would do away with material scarcity and people would have “enough“. I was young and naive. There is enough right now. And I’m not a communist: I don’t think the solution is taking it away from those who have in order to give to those who have not. The solution is not try to make more stuff, but to try to live a happy life. The solution is not to satisfy more wants, but to want good things. The solution is not for the rich to have less, but for people to see each others’ needs instead of their own desires. A happy culture is one that values service over material prosperity.

Where does Green fit into this? It’s hubris to think that we can grab the world by the carbon and shake the prosperity out of it. “Better living through chemistry,” is only half of the issue. We can make more stuff (e.g. chemicals, beef, plastic, homes, anything), but it has to be directed by a culture of service or it is just that: stuff. For it to be wealth, it has to represent substantive connections between people. Green can be just more stuff, or it can start to recognize the interdependent nature of the scientific game we are all playing. Our research means better living not through chemistry, but through the contribution we make to a safer, cleaner world – a goal that is only definable in terms of our connectedness to it and to each other.

The big upshot is that green is good, but look out for “greenwashing.” Greenwashing is where an organization cashes in on the Public Relations benefits of going green without making changes that reflect the rhetoric. It’s the same with the term ‘organic.’ It’s fine, but be careful that it represents what you think it represents. As Mark Bittman tells us in his TED talk while chilean farmed salmon fed organic chicken bones flown on ice in a huge freight plane from south america to your doorstep may be technically organic, it doesn’t represent the ideals. It’s elitist and unsustainable and the green sticker doesn’t change that.

-Peter

ideas can ‘hijack’ a person’s mind and make them do things

I think that some people are uncomfortable with the memetic perspective because it presupposes that an idea can ‘hijack’ a person’s mind and make them do things. Dan Dennett speaks at length about this notion. A meme is a semi-autonomous thing: it is an idea that spreads through minds as if it had a will of its own. People don’t like to think of ideas as things that control them. For most people who think of “ideas” in the abstract, they are like items in a catalog, not programs resident in memory. A post over at meme-weaver gave me an interesting example of exactly the hijacking that poeple are afraid of (and that fear is not without reason).

Here is the example. What Derren Brown implants into his mark’s brain is not a meme per se, since it does not spread. But it does show that an idea can be implanted in such a way that it hijacks a person’s brain rather than becoming a passive item within it.

Here is one explanation for how this was done. Based on neurolinguistic programming

There are a bunch of tricks that D. Brown has played that expose deeply the vulnerabilities of our minds. He’s a magician; he doesn’t want his memes to spread. A magician never reveals the trick. But the tricks are out there, spreading by inducing people to spread them. The marketing magicians know it. I think we should too.

-Peter

prions, mad cows and memes

Years ago, when I was in school, there were two sources of transmissible disease: bacteria an viruses. This idea was so well entrenched that it was very hard to suggest that there might be a third category. Of course, congenital disease and poisons cause disease, too, but these are nottransmissible. In the last 10 years, a new kind of disease-causing element was isolated: the prion. Even 5 years ago it was a contentious issue, but my sense of the landscape is that the consensus has been reached: there are proteins that mis-form and then cause other proteins to mis-form.

It’s known that these proteins get from one animal to another through cannibalism. If a mad cow eats another mad cow, it spreads the disease. How the mis-folded proteins get from the gut to the brain remains a mystery as best I have heard. I’d be really interested to learn of new findings in that area. In any case, there were some rumors in 2004 that there might be a more virulent form of prion disease in caribou, but I never heard any more about it. Interesting trivia, prions and some spider silk proteins are both amyloids.

I ramble on about this to illustrate a point: extremely unlikely things (flukes) can have a strong impact if they are in an environment that is “propagative”. I’ll illustrate with a flower analogy then talk about prions again. Let’s say I have a hundred acres of fresh, beautiful, irrigated, tilled soil. It’s ready for seed, but it’s in the middle of a desert and there are no seeds. It’s isolated. The event of a single seed (the size of a grain of sand) falling in that huge hundred acres would be impossible to notice. If you looked for seeds with a magnifying glass, you could look for your whole life and never see one land. But if you just wait and look for flowers, you have a much better chance of inferring that a plant has landed. Probably if a seed lands you won’t notice. You might not even notice the first plant. But given a few growing seasons, you will see a whole patch of earth covered with all of that one seed’s great grandchildren. The event was rare, but its consequences grow very quickly in that fertile ground.

Now let’s return to prions. The seed is a single protein molecule mis-folding. It causes other proteins to mis fold. That means that the fertile ground upon which this seed has fallen is the cow’s brain. And the plant that grows is madness. If cow’s brains are isolated, that’s not a big deal for anyone but that cow. But if the cow’s brains are brought into proximity to other cow’s brains, then that one seed (no matter how rare) will take up the whole space eventually.

Eventually, I’d like to talk about memes on this space. Memes are like flowers and prions and seeds. Given fertile space, they spread. The consequences of that are entirely dependent on the type of meme. Some are beneficial and some are detrimental; some are slow to grow while others spread quickly. They are ideas that jump from one mind to another. As humans, we can choose the memes for which we make our minds a habitat. That is one of our greatest gifts.

More to come.

-Peter

spider silk proteins, microfluidics, and cool stuff that is small

A pair of German groups collaborated to produce an artificial spinarette. They made very small tubes (called Microfluidics by those in the business) into which they injected engineered spider silk proteins produced in bacteria. The obvious cool tings aside (e.g. arachnoweave armor) there are several interesting scientific oddities. The first is in the aggregation of protein eADF3. According to the article, at low concentrations it forms aggregates. But if you add shear flow (like forcing it through a small channel or a spinarette) it makes fibers instead of particles. That’s pretty strange.
Here’s something else. The protein aggregates in salt water under static conditions into tiny particles. These particles unfold and dissolve in pure water. The the fibers made of the same stuff in the same conditions stable in pure water. Something pretty drastic has changed about how those proteins are structured when they assemble under the shear conditions in the flow of that microfluidically confined stream. Indeed, spectroscopy shows a high beta-sheet content of the fibers, although I didn’t see anything about the beta-sheet content of the particles.
But these authors go one step further. A two part mixture of two silk proteins, both found in spiders (the above mentioned eADF3 and another, eADF4) produce a twisted fiber of higher strength and similarity to the natural product of a spider. If you’ve ever watched a nature show and seen a spider at work, you’ll know that they have to pull the silk tightly when they are spinning in order to make it strong; this explains why. The shear forces of the fluid moving through the spider’s little orifice are really important. Maybe that’s another step toward that arachnoweave armor. That and that d3o stuff (like a d3o Hat to protect your head) would make a product fit for Batman.

It’s not recombinant spider silk, but the D3O videos are worth looking at, if you have not already.

-Peter