Without any warning at all, you're suddenly a fat bastard.

29 March 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

How does muscle turn to fat?

Aren't muscle cells and fat... cells... (is there even such a thing as a fat cell?) different? But boxers and bricklayers and weightlifters and other huge muscly men, when they retire, are famous for turning into giant lardasses and then maybe putting their name on a fat-free grilling machine. How does this occur, biologically?

Reijo

Muscle doesn't turn into fat. As you say, they're different kinds of tissue; muscle is one kind of cells (subdivided into further categories), whereas fat, or adipose adipose, tissue is composed of quite different cells, chiefly adipocytes.

Also as you say, though, there's a common phenomenon in which big strong men, and the somewhat less common big strong women, turn into big fat men or women as soon as they, for whatever reason, stop exercising all day. Their muscles give up, they wave a little white flag, and without any warning at all they're suddenly a fat bastard.

The reason for this is simple enough: They've stopped exercising, but they haven't changed their eating habits. Or, at least, they haven't changed them enough.

As I mentioned in the ice-cube diet post, it's quite difficult to burn enough calories in exercise to make up for a rich diet. It's possible, though. Fairly strenuous work can easily burn about 500 calories, or about 2100 kilojoules, per hour. Very strenuous exercise can double that, but even if your job involves digging ditches, carrying couches or running after teenagers while waving rusty gardening tools you're unlikely to actually manage a thousand calories an hour for very long.

Even 500 calories an hour, though, means you can eat one standard meat pie, or one Big Mac or large fries (but not both!) per hour, and more or less break even.

If you suddenly transition to a fairly sedentary life, though, you'll now be burning far less energy. An average desk job, for instance, uses only about a hundred calories an hour. So even if the retired boxer halves his food intake, he'll still end up with a big energy surplus, which will in due course make itself visible as fat, even as his muscles atrophy from lack of exercise.

(The quote from the title.)

Psycho Science is a regular feature here. Ask me your science questions, and I'll answer them. Probably.

And then commenters will, I hope, correct at least the most obvious flaws in my answer.

Posted in Psycho Science. 4 Comments »

OK, but does Grandpa's knee ache, too?

27 March 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

This page (via this page via this page via this page...) says that if it's going to rain, the surface of a parallel-walled cup of strong coffee will be slightly convex, with the bubbles in the middle. If it's not going to rain, the bubbles will be around the edge. Apparently this has something to do with atmospheric pressure. I am skeptical.

Matthew

I'm skeptical, too. I can't imagine how this is supposed to work.

Any ordinary liquid (which is to say, not liquid helium, supercritical carbon dioxide or other such substances not easy to find at the supermarket) has surface tension, which causes it to form a meniscus, a curved surface, when put in a container.

If the molecules of the liquid stick to each other better than they stick to the material the container is made from, the meniscus will be convex, higher in the middle. If the liquid molecules stick to the container material better than to each other, the meniscus will be concave, lower in the middle and higher around the edge.

Water in most kinds of household cup or glass forms a concave meniscus; water in a silicone cup forms a convex one. Coffee behaves much the same, as far as I can tell; foam or crema or whatever could be piled up in different ways, and really strong coffee might be oily enough to give a concave meniscus in almost any container, but that's the extent of the differences as far as I can tell.

Weather is definitely related to atmospheric pressure, and to relative humidity, for that matter. Falling pressure and rising humidity generally indicate a higher probability of rain. But pressure and humidity won't have any effect on the behaviour of a liquid in an open container, unless the pressure is so low that the liquid starts to boil at the ambient temperature. If the liquid is water then it'll evaporate faster when the humidity is low and not at all if the humidity is 100% (or higher).

One thing definitely does affect the distribution of bubbles on top of a cup of coffee, though; it's called a teaspoon. If you stir your coffee round and round, the bubbles will pile up in the middle. If you don't, they'll probably stick to the edges.

I think the bubbles ending up in the middle when the liquid is spinning is analogous to the behaviour of similarly spun flames. If you make an apparatus that can spin candles on a platter or arm while shielding them from the wind of their movement...

MIT Tech TV

...their flames bend inwards. Centrifugal force makes them bend in, not out, for the same reason the undisturbed flames go up, not down; the hot flames are lighter than the air surrounding them. Helium balloons behave the same way, but the rig to demonstrate it is more cumbersome.

(The above is an unusual version of this classic physics demonstration, which is usually done with a two-candle apparatus that looks more like this.)

If the weather-predicting coffee is meant to operate by mystic unknown forces, like the much weirder "storm glass", then of course observing that normal atmospheric pressure variations have no effect on coffee is irrelevant. The burden of proof is on the claimant, though, and this is a pretty extraordinary claim; I'd like to see someone actually test this peculiar alleged phenomenon.

Psycho Science is a regular feature here. Ask me your science questions, and I'll answer them. Probably.

And then commenters will, I hope, correct at least the most obvious flaws in my answer.

Posted in Psycho Science, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

Clang!

27 March 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

Following on from your tweet yesterday, and this awesome dude you also tweeted about, I've been watching a lot of more or less realistic sword fights on YouTube.

Something occurred to me, though. If you're armored all over, including gauntlets, how can you hold a sword?

Wouldn't covering your whole hand with metal make it really easy for the sword to just slip out, or twist so you're whacking people instead of cutting them? How did/does that work?

Juan

Gauntlets were, and are, not steel gloves. They cover the back of the hand and wrist, which is the part your enemy can actually hit, not the gripping surface on the inside. Sturdy gloves were usually standard equipment too; they went along with all of the other padding and covering that went under and over your armour, to help soak up the shock of impacts and stop your mail from ripping your nipples off.

There were many kinds of armour gauntlets, some of which probably had plates and/or mail permanently attached to a glove. And there may actually have been full-coverage metal gauntlets, for some reason, too; many odd kinds of armour have been made, and many of the most impressive pieces were for display or ceremonial purposes, and so didn't need to be practical.

(Whenever you start talking about this stuff you tend to end up with a giant comments-thread argument among a bunch of people who know an awful lot about historical weaponry, or think they do because they've read a lot of Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks.)

But, in general, gauntlet armour was for the backs of the hands.

Today, most things called "gauntlets" are whole tough gloves - motorcycle gauntlets, welding gauntlets, et cetera. They'd probably work well as undergloves for armour.

(The abovementioned Nikolas Lloyd's site has a page about armour he's made, but he's only done mail and hoplite armour. But on the mail page he uses the term "preventing over-much beflapment", and that should be good enough for anyone.)

Posted in Handicrafts, Nerdery. 5 Comments »

Tiny computer or huge PDA: $25!

24 March 2012 — dan

Alphasmart Dana

The Alphasmart Dana, which I've written about in the past, is about ten years old now. But it's still quite a brilliant little machine.

Alphasmart are in the portable-word-processor business. Every portable word processor back to the legendary portable TRS-80 has looked much the same; full-size keyboard, letterbox-slot monochrome LCD screen, and power usually from AA batteries, which last a startlingly long time.

Alphasmart Dana diagram

Most of these things run some sort of proprietary operating system and only have a few built-in programs that you can't change. The Dana is different, though, because it's actually a Palm III with a keyboard and a wide touchscreen. The screen is only 160 pixels high, like those old Palms, but it's 560 pixels wide. (It also has the standard Palm green electroluminescent backlight, which works well enough but eats batteries.)

Anything that'll run on a Palm III (or IIIx) will run on a Dana, but only specially tweaked programs will use anything but the 160-by-160 middle of the screen. The built-in word processor does, of course, use the whole screen, and makes a dandy note-taker.

Alphasmart made a Dana with Wi-Fi, but mine is the version that lacks it; it has IrDA, though, for what little that's worth. Transferring text to a normal computer really couldn't be easier, though. You can save files to an SD card and plug that into a PC reader, but all you actually need to do to shift plain text is plug the Dana into a computer via USB, whereupon it reports itself as a USB keyboard (like that footswitch thing). Then just make sure you're in some text-edity sort of program on the computer, and press the Dana's "Send" button, and it'll "type" out the contents of your document. No special software needed.

The "typing" isn't terribly fast, so this isn't very practical for transferring a large document. But for everyday note-taking and journalism and such, it's great.

[Update: If you've got a Dana but no software for it, I mirrored a few files, including the stock software bundle.]

Oh, and the Dana also charges through the USB cable. Danas come from the factory with a plugpack charger as well, but if you're often near a normal computer you won't need one. (Note that the Dana won't charge from a power-only USB socket, like you get on those gizmoes that convert mains power or a car cigarette-lighter socket into USB power.)

I was moved to write this post by three things. One, the Dana deserves to be more widely known. Two, there are currently quite a lot of affordable Danas on eBay, as we'll see in a moment. And three, I am avaricious. I'm signed up for eBay's Partner Network now, and so can get a few pennies when people click on my links to said Danas.

Here's an eBay search that finds, as I write this, fifteen Dana auctions, some of which have several units available. (The search is supposed to "geotarget" to international eBay sites, but doesn't seem to be doing it for me here in Australia, so here's the same search on eBay Australia, here on eBay Canada, here on eBay UK.)

This seller is probably the one you want. They currently have two multi-item Dana auctions running. This one has six units, without batteries or a stylus, for only $US19.99 each; international shipping would more than double this, but it's still a bargain. And this auction is for "more than 10" Danas, this time with a stylus but still without batteries, for only $US24.99 each. Presuming these Danas do actually work, you really can't go wrong for that price.

The lack of a battery is a bit of a nuisance. When new, you see, the Dana came with a rechargeable battery pack which sits in the AA-cell battery bay but connects with a little two-pin plug, not the contacts on either end of the battery bay. These used Danas don't come with that battery pack (because it's no doubt long since worn out), so the easiest way to power them is with three alkaline AA batteries.

You can run a Dana from rechargeable AAs as well, but it won't charge them if they're not connected like the original battery was. And, just as with the Palm III, taking the batteries out of a Dana for more than 30 seconds will cause the internal memory to go blank. (This isn't actually a big deal unless you've installed your own applications or saved stuff in the internal memory, as opposed to an SD card.)

I made a new battery pack for my Dana by soldering up three low-self-discharge NiMH AAs, and stuffing them into the battery bay. My three AAs with soldered-on tabs connecting them together are bit longer than the original battery, and wouldn't fit in the bay, so I did a bit of butchering that has made my Dana unable to run from normal AAs any more. (There is a better way I could have done this.)

But my Dana does charge via USB, which, I repeat, is really neat. As is just about everything else about this thing. And if you don't want to monkey around with battery-pack building, you can just chuck some alkalines in it and go.

(If you'd like to know more about the Dana, you can download the PDF manual from Alphasmart here.)

Posted in MiniReviews, Nerdery, Toys. 12 Comments »

Tiny amps and huge speakers

18 March 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

I have a quick question regarding speaker sensitivity as I'm somewhat confused. I've always liked nice sound, but it's not a big passion of mine, recently a read a review on a small tube amp and thought that might provide me with a good starting point to sit and listen to some albums at home rather than just listen to things on the train/bus.

Anyway, this small tube amp is cheap and cheerful, putting out a beastly sum of 3.5 watts/channel @ 8 ohms.

So I started to look for speakers to match the amp. If you want something with a high sensitivity, as they recommend, you start running into some big dollars, which to me kinda negates the cheap amp! Reading around people recommend a 90db+ @ 1m set of bookshelf or similar speakers (Even as far as 97db @ 1m!). I happened to come across these large 3 way tower Jamos for a mere $500 delivered, offering a sensitivity of 89db @ 1m, which is better than say bookshelf speakers such as the AudioEngine P4 which are 88db @ 1m!

I guess ultimately I want to know can this tiny amp power such large tower speakers and still be listenable in my small lounge room (in my small apartment)? Also am I right in saying if you got both sets of speakers (Jamos and the AudioEngines) the Jamos would be noticably louder given the same wattage inputted?

Thanks for your assistance and hope you can help!

Travis

First up, I implore you to spend less money and get a proper transistor amplifier. Not because the little valve amp you're looking at has feeble output power - which it does, but that's really not very important - but because tube amps do not actually sound better.

Tubes in guitar amps, that are meant to be driven into distortion, sound very different from transistors, and you may well find yourself turning up a tiny tube amp far enough that it goes into clearly audible distortion, but this is a bad thing. Hi-fi amps are not meant to have any audible distortion, and at normal volumes for normal amps this is the case for all of them. In this situation, tubes and transistors sound exactly the same. Various golden-eared audiophiles insist that this is not the case; none of them score better than chance in blinded tests.

Speaker design can make a huge difference to the sound of a hi-fi system; amplifier design does not, unless there's something terribly wrong with the amp (which doesn't mean audiophiles won't still insist it's awesome).

OK, lecture concludes.

As regards getting decent listening volume from a weedy amp, your room and how close you are to the speakers matters more than the raw loudspeaker efficiency numbers (which are measured with a 1kHz test tone, and so don't take bass or treble response into account; you may prefer quieter speakers if they have a flatter response curve). In your little room in your little flat, you'll probably be able to get away with just about anything.

It's perfectly possible to get room-filling audio from a few watts per channel. That's all that most listening actually ever needs, because of the logarithmic response of the human ear - you need something like ten times as much power to make the music sound twice as loud. Extra wattage is nice to have for parties, or extraordinarily low-efficiency speakers, and an amp with high burst current capacity can make sudden crescendos, the cannons in the 1812 Overture, et cetera, sound better. But low output power is not a big deal for most purposes.

There are, by the way, many perfectly-fine low-wattage amps in the the Class D or "Class T" categories, which even many audiophiles appear to like, possibly because of some warped sense that these amplifiers have as little output power as a frou-frou tube amp, and so they must sound good. There's no pressing reason to get a Class D amp instead of an ordinary one if you're not short of space or want an amp that'll run from 12 volts, but there certainly are a lot of super-cheap 12V Class Ds on eBay these days.

As a general rule, sealed-box loudspeakers have terrible efficiency of about 1% at best, but even they can be OK from a few watts per channel if the room's small and/or the speakers are close to the listener. Ported (or "bass reflex") loudspeakers still only have an audio efficiency of a few per cent, but they beat the heck out of sealed boxes for loudness and can be tuned to have a response hump down around the bass-drum area, which is why practically every low-end speaker these days is ported. There are other designs - transmissions lines, horns, electrostatics and several more - but they're all in the pretty-darn-expensive-unless-you-build-it-yourself category.

You definitely can connect a tiny amp to big speakers, by the way, and that's actually a good way to get plenty of sound from a small amplifier. As a general rule, the bigger the speaker, the higher its efficiency. This is why the best way to upgrade a cheap-'n'-crappy plastic department-store midi system is to replace the standard speakers with much, much bigger ones. You can actually blow up big speakers with a small amp, if you turn it up way past the audible-distortion line and it starts sending some really nasty waveforms to the speakers; generally, this happens at parties when everyone's too drunk to notice how awful the music suddenly sounds (and how it gets progressively worse, as the tweeters die first, then the midranges...). As long as you know that, though, there's no down side to pairing big speakers with a small amp.

If you know which end of a screwdriver is which, I recommend you check out nearby loudspeaker-kit companies; you can get great speakers very cheaply if you do just a little bit of screwing and gluing. Also, remember thrift shops and garage sales; most of the speakers you'll find there will be pretty awful or need significant repairs, but you could just as easily find some nice full-sized three-ways from 1985 whose only problem is that some kid poked the woofer and put a dent in the dust cap. (Which, by the way, won't hurt the sound. If the speaker's been poked so hard that the voice coil scrapes on the magnet, or if it's a fragile little dome tweeter that's been crushed, that's bad. Damaged or missing dust caps on bigger drivers don't matter, though. It's also possible to replace rotted or ripped roll surrounds around big drivers, either with a repair kit that comes with surrounds the exact right size, or more annoyingly with a reel of straight roll surround.)

Try eBay, too, avoiding surprise expenses by searching for speakers within whatever distance you find acceptable of where you live. I'm up in the mountains without a whole lot of nearby options, but searching for used speakers within 25km of my mum's house in the Sydney suburbs shows me some awesome Seventies Technics monsters in good condition, various little brand-name surround-speaker sets that can be perfectly fine even without a subwoofer, some Tannoys that'd be great except some loony will probably bid them up to a zillion dollars, some odd-looking little Mission bookshelf speakers, some nice little Gale bookshelfs too (Gale are sort of the very top of the off-brand mountain; good designs, low prices), and the list goes on.

Above all, don't think that you have to get something with a Major Hi-Fi Brand on it to get decent sound. The Jamos you mention look very nice for the money (not so nice for their much higher alleged list price), but they might not be great for a small room, because they have a rear-firing bass driver and port, so you can't push them hard up against a wall at the back without losing a lot of bass. But there really are a lot of other options.

I dunno - maybe I just enjoy shopping for used speakers in the same way many blokes enjoy shopping for used cars!

And now, let the argument in the comments about valves and transistors... commence!

Posted in Electronics. 8 Comments »

Horniness

13 March 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

Why do horns make things louder?

I mean, I accept that they do, on gramophones and megaphones and PA speakers at the train station and brass instruments and so on, but what's actually going on there? Why does the sound of your voice get louder just because you're holding a conical thing in front of your mouth? Is it just making it more... directional?

Dennis

The great problem of audio production, and audio reproduction too, is coupling the sound-producing thing to the sound-transmitting medium, which is usually air.

Air is very light. Most things that make sound are, in comparison, very heavy. The moving parts of loudspeaker drivers, the strings of a violin or piano, the lips of a trumpet-player who's blowing a sort of highly controlled raspberry into the mouthpiece of the instrument; all very very heavy, compared with air. All not good at moving lots of air, which is what you want your sound-making thing to do. Wave a brick around in the air and you'll invest a lot more energy in accelerating and decelerating the brick than you manage to impart to the air.

One way of solving this problem is to make your speaker driver very light too. Electrostatic speakers use a big flat sheet of super-thin plastic as a driver; the sound-producing element in a plasma speaker is made out of ionised air (or other gases, if you're a big wuss who doesn't want ozone poisoning).

Horns are a simpler way of solving, or at least reducing, the coupling problem. When you put a heavy-compared-with-air vibrating object at the small end of a horn, the only air it can move is the air right in front of it at the small end. Moving this air is still pretty easy, but the restricted air's mechanical "impedance" is nonetheless quite a bit higher than it'd be if it were unconfined.

As sound pressure waves move down the horn, the gradually widening shape of the horn (for loudest results, an exponential curve) allows the small amount of higher-pressure air next to the driver to transfer its energy to a large amount of lower-pressure air. The end result is that more of the energy of the driver ends up as sound waves.

A sealed-box loudspeaker has an acoustic efficiency - the amount of the input electrical energy that comes out as sound energy - of about one per cent, at best. Horn speakers can manage thirty per cent without much trouble, and quite a bit more if you design them for loudness rather than fidelity. Take the horn off a phonograph and you'll have to put your ear right next to the diaphragm to hear much of anything, but with a big horn on it, a wind-up phonograph making sound by scraping a needle over a disc of shellac can legitimately be described as quite loud.

(Some phonographs let you remove the horn, or never had a horn in the first place, and allowed you to listen through one or more rubber tubes that went to a headset of some sort - essentially, primordial headphones. This allowed you to listen to your records in privacy, albeit with weird stethoscope-y sound colouration on top of the lousy fidelity of the phonograph system in the first place.)

Outside of Physics Experiment Land, acoustic horn design and implementation has many engineering tricks. For instance, modern horn loudspeakers usually have a horn throat that starts out much smaller than the diaphragm of the actual driver, which may be in its own actual rectangular speaker box stuck on the small end of the horn. There are also horn loudspeakers, like the legendary Klipschorn, that use various workarounds to fold something that acts somewhat like a horn into a speaker that can be mainly built out of flat wooden panels.

Also, the lowest bass frequency a horn can reproduce is determined by the size of the mouth of the horn; that's why public-address and hand-held megaphone speakers always sound tinny. Speakers like the Klipschorn have their horn mouth on the back of the enclosure, and are meant to be shoved into the corner of a room, so the walls behind them can provide a bit more effective horn size. Horn loudspeakers are also deliberately designed to be further away from an ideal horn shape than is strictly necessary, to balance the efficiency of the horn with the hard bass cut-off that a "pure" horn, with a mouth small enough to fit in a room, has at low frequencies.

The old phonograph horns have been reborn, too, as "amplifiers" for MP3 players and cellphones. The phone, MP3 player or ear-bud headphones plug into the small end of a horn, and suddenly the tsss-tsss-tsss of someone else listening to their iPod on the bus turns into actual music.

Some of these devices are very fancy and very expensive, but if you search eBay for "amplifiers" for MP3 players you'll find lots of cheerful-coloured horn doodads among the actual electrical amplifiers. The going rate for a combination iPhone stand and horn "amplifier" now seems to be about two bucks delivered.

Psycho Science is a regular feature here. Ask me your science questions, and I'll answer them. Probably.

And then commenters will, I hope, correct at least the most obvious flaws in my answer.

Posted in Music, Psycho Science, Science. 1 Comment »

An exciting new thing to worry about

5 March 2012 — dan

Australia, or at least Victoria, is getting "smart" electricity meters.

Unlike the old spinning-disc or slightly newer digital meters, smart meters can report power usage in real time, to the customer via a display inside the house and to the power company as well, without any requirement for legions of meter-readers. Smart meters can do various other tricks, too, like for instance changing the cost of electricity by time of day, to make it more expensive when there's high demand and deter some people from turning on the air conditioner and adding their own little electrical vote for a new coal-fired power station.

Heck, the smart meters may even be able to measure power factor, and theoretically create a need for those zillions of "power saver" gadgets. Which the power saver gadgets will not actually fill, of course, on account of how they usually don't do anything at all, but you can't have everything.

The Australian meters seem to report every thirty minutes, via radio.

So, naturally, people think they cause cancer.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was delighted beyond human comprehension to discover a one-stop shop for Aussie smart-meter opposition, stopsmartmeters.com.au. Actually, I was first pointed to this page on "Holistic Help", but I only made it to the oddly popular claim that smart meters somehow kill nearby plants before I went somewhere else, lest I burst an important blood vessel.

Herewith, a response to Smart Meters in Victoria: Information and Concerns.

There are some valid complaints on that page. Apparently some smart meters have overcharged customers, for instance. And there've been some typical government-program deployment boondoggles - cost blowouts, the possible need to spend more money to change the radio frequency band the meters communicate on because of interference, and so on.

There are also privacy concerns about the every-30-minutes communication of household electricity use, and whose hands this information could get into. I'm having a hard time figuring out a way in which selling of this data to marketing firms could be a major problem, beyond just contributing its own particle to the mountain of privacy-damaging things in the modern world. But if the data isn't encrypted well enough, and meter IDs can be converted into addresses relatively easily (possibly even if you need a directional antenna to do it), then it might become possible for one burglar in a van to quickly figure out who, nearby, seems to have gone on holiday.

There are also concerns about coupling of the radio-frequency output of the smart-meter antennas to household wiring, possibly damaging appliances, though I don't think anybody's done a proper study to see whether the rate of appliance failure is actually any higher after the new meter's installed.

And then there are some real, but not necessarily valid, complaints. People object, for instance, to power being made more expensive at certain times of day, which they say is unfair, though I'm not sure exactly how. If it's unfair to charge more for peak-period electricity, then it's also unfair if you're only allowed to park your car in some particular location for half an hour during the day, but can legally occupy the same space all night.

There's a claim that consumers don't benefit from the new meters. OK, that's a reason to object, I suppose, but consumers don't benefit when, say, petrol becomes more expensive, either. This is an argument against silly PR from the electricity companies that tries to make you think the new meters will make your life better, especially since the stingy buggers don't even seem to be providing any indoor display units. But that's all this complaint is. Just because you want to keep paying low prices for something doesn't give you a right to do so, especially when that "something" is electricity which previously sold at an artificially low price because the cost of warming the damn planet wasn't factored in.

And then there are feeble complaints, like the possibility that the meters will not be installed safely.

And then, there's the bulk of the lengthy page, which is proudly devoted to ridiculous complaints.

To start with an easy one, the notion that coupling radio energy to household wiring could cause fires betrays a serious misunderstanding of the amount of energy the meter emits, and how well it could be received by household wiring. You could pump that one whole watt of high-frequency RF directly into your wall wiring, and I swear to you upon my beloved Necronomicon that no wires would get hot and start fires. If the only way in is the fraction of one per cent of the energy that the household wiring will manage to receive... well, it's good of Stop Smart Meters to so quickly make clear their opinion of mere "knowledge" and "logic".

And, of course, now we're off and racing with good old mobile-phones-cause-brain-cancer claptrap. The smart meters broadcast in the same 900MHz band as our GSM mobile phones here in Australia, so clearly they pose a similar risk, right?

The World Health Organisation say it's "possible" that mobile phones cause cancer. People who relay this information are generally less eager to make clear that the WHO has categorised this possible risk, from "long-term, heavy use" of mobile phones, as being in the same "Group 2B" class as traditional Asian pickled vegetables, and coffee.

The Stop Smart Meters page is at least aware of this, and points out that there are plenty of straight-up poisons on the Group 2B list too, like for instance lead. But then the author erroneously tries to claim that since lead is poisonous and phone radiation is now on the same possible-carcinogen list as lead, phone radiation should be treated as something similar in danger to lead.

This is, to be frank, stupid. Yes, lead is poisonous, but there's only feeble evidence that it's a carcinogen, which is why it's on the 2B list, and not for instance the 2A "probably carcinogenic" list, or the Group 1 "definitely carcinogenic" list. Phone radiation is self-evidently not a poison like lead. None of the IARC carcinogen lists are lists of poisons. Phone radiation is on the same list as lead because there's only feeble evidence that it's a carcinogen.

Stop Smart Meters go on to claim that "a significant proportion of Victorians refuse to use devices such as mobile phones or baby monitors because of sensitivities or concerns about future health implications". This not only uses a rather stretched definition of the word "significant", but also pretends that science is a democracy. Which it isn't. It doesn't matter how many people think baby monitors cause cancer, if they don't. Likewise, it doesn't matter how many Koreans think having an electric fan in your bedroom is very dangerous, if it isn't.

Trundling down the extra-big Stop Smart Meters page, there's a fine example of the kit-and-kaboodle routine of collecting supporting quotes from as many people as possible, without paying any attention to the reliability of the sources.

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine, for instance, claim that smart meters are dangerous, and that claim is mentioned on the Stop Smart Meters page. The AAEM also oppose fluoridation of drinking water (PDF), on the grounds that "fluoride is a known neurotoxin and carcinogen even at the levels added to the public water supplies". This is news to the World Health Organisation that Stop Smart Meters were so enthusiastic about a moment ago.

The AAEM also believe that "mercury in vaccinations constitutes a significant exposure" (PDF), even though the mercury-containing preservative thiomersal is no longer in almost any vaccines that anti-thiomersal campaigners insisted were causing terrible harm to children, and this change has caused no epidemiological effect at all. I refer you once again to the World Health Organisation.

Oh, and the AAEM are really keen (PDF) on that whole multiple chemical sensitivity thing. Which is one of those illnesses that doesn't seem to manifest when a sufferer is exposed to the alleged causative agent but doesn't know it, and does manifest when a sufferer thinks they're being exposed, but they aren't.

The World Health Organisation has little to say about MCS, except to point out that people who believe they have it seem rather like the people who think they're "electrosensitive".

Funny they should mention that. Because Stop Smart Meters believe, of course, that "electrosensitivity" is real. Which it is, in a sense; people who suffer from it really do suffer. There's just no good reason to suppose that this suffering actually has anything to do with "radiation", and numerous studies that show it does not.

Anything a smart meter broadcasts is, apparently, bad. Stop Smart Meters complain that mesh-networked meters broadcast more frequently than meters with long-range radios, because mesh networks need relays to get the feeble signal from each meter to the actual power-company receiver for the area, and the relays are built into the meters. But since this is all because the radios are more feeble, I fail to understand why Stop Smart Meters automatically assume that this is yet another thing to worry about.

People hold mobile phones to their heads, often for extended periods. So if a watt or two of nine hundred and something megahertz radio waves actually can hurt you, it's sensible to presume that heavy mobile phone users would develop these diseases, presumably in their head, and presumably preferentially on the side they habitually press their phone to.

People are not in the habit of leaning their head on their electricity meter all day. And even the mesh meters do not normally broadcast all day. I think the non-mesh meters broadcast for a total of about five minutes a day, but I don't have a strong enough source for that to bet anything on it.

Even if you're sitting in a chair on the other side of the wall from the meter, with its antenna a mere metre from your head, then you'll be exposed to way, way less RF energy per second than you would with an iPhone pressed to your head in a dodgy reception area, and the exposure may be for only minutes, or even seconds, per hour. Arguing that this is a major risk, even if heavy cellphone use is dangerous, is like saying that hypothermia is lethal, so you'd better never eat ice cream.

Stop Smart Meters also appear to think that RF from the meter getting into the home wiring will cause those terrible microwaves to radiate from all of your house wiring. Once again, this completely ignores the concept of "power", how much of it there is in the first place, how much of it can manage to get into the house wiring via a miserably inefficient "antenna", and how much it attenuates with distance from the wires.

I could go on with this, but life's too damn short. Yes, there are reasons to object to the new meters; the new system seems very likely to come with more electricity price hikes, for instance, and you may even be overcharged on top of that.

But the bulk of Stop Smart Meters' argument isn't about that.

Stop Smart Meters appear to be, like many other people, under the impression that anything called "radiation" must be bad. I would not be surprised if they also don't want any "chemicals" in their food. People like this should logically therefore be frozen into a zero-Kelvin lump and stored in a an earthed lead box containing a hard vacuum, but for some reason they seem to be fine with light bulbs and moonlight and the drinking of dihydrogen monoxide.

If you don't know what radiation is, and you don't know what chemicals are, and the inverse-square law might as well be the Collected Proceedings of the Vorlon Linguistic Society for all the sense you can make of it, then I implore you to seek education, and remind you that activist organisations of any kind are much more likely to be in the bullshit business than the education one.

If you don't fancy the idea of education, I suggest you live a life of happy-go-lucky ignorance, taking cues from a housecat, or a domestic dog, depending on your preferences.

Just please don't spend your time worrying about the terrible threat someone says is posed by technologies, cultural changes or particular types of other human whom you do not understand. Every minute you spend worrying about Islamists conquering the world, or commercial airliners spreading mysterious poisons, or electricity meters giving you cancer, does nothing but move you one minute closer to your actual death, and gains you nothing at all.

Posted in Electricity. 19 Comments »

"Sucrosa. It's a pill."

4 March 2012 — dan

A reader writes:

One of your recent posts got me thinking.

Everyone (or anyone who's ever had occasion to read any sort of scientific study), knows about the placebo effect. I'm curious as to whether the magnitude of said effect has ever been studied, in order to determine the extent to which placebo effect is an actual effect, or just the natural history of a disease (or whatever).

I'm thinking that a randomised, NON BLINDED study might be necessary.

Take a bunch of people with the same usually-harmless disease, say a simple cold, or something like Bell's palsy. Tell them that there's a trial of a new wonder drug to treat their condition, and would they enrol in said study. Tell some people that they are getting the 'drug', and tell the others they are getting placebo. Give everybody placebo.

If there's a significant difference between the two groups, then that would be an actual placebo effect (ie thinking you're going to get makes you get better), as opposed to things just getting better on their own.

Has something like this been done? Would there be any problem with it, other than the ethics of telling people they're in one study but actually studying something entirely different?

Ben

Yes, there have been some studies of this sort. Placebo hasn't achieved much.

It's popularly imagined that placebos can do all sorts of amazing things, just as adrenaline makes a tiny woman able to lift a crashed car off her baby, and acupuncture can be used for surgical anaesthesia.

None of these things are actually true.

The reason why the placebo-controlled trial is such a central tool of medical research is that placebos don't do much of anything. If placebo treatment really was effective for all sorts of things, then, one, doctors could save a lot of time and money by just giving patients placebos all the time, and, two, placebo response could be a confounding factor on the non-placebo side of placebo-controlled trials. There's nothing stopping someone from having a placebo response to a real treatment, on top of whatever the treatment itself does.

The reason why trials are placebo-controlled, rather, is so that they can be blinded properly - preventing at least the patients and preferably also the doctors from being able to tell whether they're administering the medicine or the placebo. Unblinded tests are terribly susceptible to all sorts of biases, and a number of practical problems as well, like for instance all of the subjects who discover they're not getting any medicine not bothering to turn up next week.

The placebo effect, insofar as actual empirical science has been able to quantify it, is a delusion. That's "delusion" in the technical psychological sense - a counterfactual belief. But if you're given a placebo as a treatment for pain, or anxiety, or depression, and it works, then you have a delusion that your illness is not as severe. Which, for all practical purposes, is the same as "real" medicine for conditions like this that're all about what you perceive and how you think, rather than empirically measurable phenomena.

This is not the case for most illnesses, though. If you're given a placebo treatment for diabetes, or cancer, or yellow fever, you may if you're particularly amenable to positive delusions sincerely and unshakably believe you're getting better. But you won't be. Just as some dangerously thin anorexic people can literally see a fat person when they look in the mirror, some people undergoing worthless treatment for, say, cancer, can literally feel the lump getting smaller. Until they die.

(The flip-side of this is the not-terribly-well-documented situation in which someone is given a "nocebo", something inert which they believe to be poison or black magic or what-have-you, and then develop real symptoms or even die. There's no very persuasive evidence that people who believe themselves poisoned or cursed in one way or another actually can "worry themselves to death", but it's uncontroversial that someone who sincerely believes themselves to be in a nonexistent deadly situation can worry themselves into a state requiring serious real medical treatment. Note that it doesn't count if the patient just has a fatal car accident while driving frantically to the hospital after, say, being bitten by a non-poisonous spider.)

To really tell how effective placebos are, you need to do a three-pronged study, with one group getting a treatment, one group getting a placebo, and a third group getting nothing at all, if you can persuade that last group to stick around. (Or you can do a two-pronged study with placebo and no-treatment, if you can get such a thing past your Ethics Committee.)

When people do this, testing placebo against nothing at all, there tends to be little difference, and no objectively measurable difference at all.

There are lots and lots of real individual clinical observations (as opposed to friend-of-a-friend stories) of placebos creating real physical changes in real diseases like irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, ulcers and quite a lot of other conditions. These changes are hard to pin down, though; they exhibit the same deadly weakness seen in claims of paranormal powers, in which the harder you look to see if the effect is real, the smaller it becomes.

Useful placebo effects are, at best, highly variable between patients. And, again, you can't really tell what's going on without running a pretty big study of one kind or another, testing placebo versus no treatment at all. This is ethically difficult, and probably not a great use of researchers' time, compared with trying to develop non-placebo treatments that work whether the patient believes in them or not.

I could continue to ramble on here, but I've really got nothing much more to say about placeboes than actual-medical-doctor Harriet Hall says in this excellent article.

(The title of this post is from this Onion article.)

Psycho Science is a regular feature here. Ask me your science questions, and I'll answer them. Probably.

And then commenters will, I hope, correct at least the most obvious flaws in my answer.

Posted in Psycho Science, Science. 3 Comments »
« Older posts
Newer posts »