Rosio Pavoris

The CFL mercury nightmare

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

CFL being those coily bulbs some places are making their citizens use now (and in the future; I seem to recall the EU will be moving towards them as well).

The problem is that the CFL bulbs contain some mercury, and the woman called in an environmental clean-up firm. A bit of an overreaction (PDF warning; page 2 has what you’re looking for), but kudos to that lady for not taking any chances, I guess.
The rest of that article, though, is basic right-wing scaremongering over that mercury, claiming it constitutes a pollution time-bomb and, of course, calling environmentalists hypocrites.

I don’t know why I keep expecting journalists to check their sources. I really don’t. Clearly I’m an idealist.
It took about half a second to find this graph, on Wikipedia.

So yes, mercury is a dangerous substance, and there is a slightly more localised threat of contamination with those new bulbs, but the new bulbs are sturdier than the old ones and quite hard to break anyway. People will need to be a bit more careful about disposing of them (though the bit about it “tak[ing] 16,667 cubic meters of soil to “safely” contain all the mercury in a single CFL” doesn’t take into account that those are in regards to places used for living or growing food, which landfills don’t tend to be, and the article conveniently fails to mention that the older types of fluorescent bulbs and tubes, which are widely used pretty much everywhere, contain much, much more mercury), and perhaps getting a new subdivision of 911 to deal with this sort of thing at little cost to the individual (or just expanded insurance policies, of course) would be a good idea, but come on.
The new bulbs aren’t perfect, but they’re definitely an improvement. This article is just misleading bullshit.

The National Post (of which the Financial Post is a part) is a Canadian newspaper. They’re supposed to be better than this, even if they were founded to counter an “over-liberalizing” of Canadu’s newspapers.

(Incidentally, regarding the guy who wrote that article:

Steven J. Milloy is the “Junk Science” commentator for FoxNews.com and runs the website Junkscience.com, which is dedicated to debunking what he alleges to be false claims regarding global warming, DDT, breast implants, passive smoking, ozone depletion, and mad cow disease, among other topics

Just saying.)

(Via Slashdot, obviously.)

Zeitgeist: Shifting Morals is only a horror movie to bishops and Republicans~

Imagining Numbers (Particularly the Square Root of Minus Fifteen), by Barry Mazur, is about the history and mathematics of imaginary numbers, and how mathematical imagination lines up with the more classic, “poetic” imagination.
That’s quite an ambitious undertaking, and I don’t think the book quite lives up to it.

Maybe I just have a really idiosyncratic way of looking at poetry, but most of the poems he brings into play don’t seem very interesting to me at all, and his interpretations of them strike me as too personal to be of much use in this general kind of topic. I could be wrong.

Either way, the bit I bought the book for was, of course, the history of mathematics, and the mathematics itself.
It’s possible there just isn’t a lot of history to imaginary numbers, but I was disappointed to find he only talks about a handful of European mathematicians, and never even mentions similar concepts in other civilisations. Maybe there just aren’t any.
The mathematics themselves are kind of all over the place, too. It’s like Mazur either couldn’t decide between an entry-level book and a “proper” work on mathematics, or he just got tired of explaining things somewhere along the way. He devotes most of a chapter to very tediously explaining the associative and distributive properties of addition and multiplication, and later on just breezes past important concepts with a simple “Here is an exercise for you”.

The various exercises throughout the book are pretty interesting and fun to do, though, but it does mean it’s hard to read it between classes and on the train and whatnot, which I tend to do.
Still, figuring out what equals (and what that means), while not particularly hard, is the type of mathematics I haven’t been able to do in a long time, and it’s a nice change of pace.

So, on the whole, I thought Imagining Numbers was a pretty good book, though I doubt most people would enjoy it much. It’s not as good as some other popular science type mathematics books I’ve read, but still.
I do think it could have been much better if it had been twice as long, though. It’s about 230 pages (not including notes), and it feels kind of superficial and rushed in places.

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

I’ve probably linked an article like this before. I’ve certainly had the discussion often enough.
A lot of people—Americans, mostly—seem to have knee-jerk reactions immediately dismissing any comparisons between the Bush administration and various fascist(oid) regimes as hyperbole, but it really isn’t as far-fetched as all that.

The main problem seems to be that people don’t understand what fascism was, having some mental image of a giant, nation-sized concentration camp somewhere halfway between 1984 and Latveria.
Once you start discussing actual features of fascist regimes (things like ridiculously strong nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, corporatism, &c.), and the steps that led up to them, the situation suddenly becomes much scarier.

Of course, half the people I’ve talked to then just shifted the goalposts and said the problem they had was that talking about the US in those terms wasn’t helpful, even if it were true, which is bullshit. How are you going to contain a problem if you’re unwilling to discuss it frankly?

Almost everyone gets today off because tomorrow is Labo(u)r Day and four-day weekends are more awesome than two-plus-one day non-weekends, except for us.
Unfair. ;.;

Here.
He’s both more and less insightful when he’s not trying to be funny. Apparently he still has “great respect” for John McCain, though. That’s sad.
It’s kind of long, but worth watching. The most interesting bits are about Iraq, of course.

But I, also, in my head, thought, I would love to do an interview where it’s just sort of de-constructed — the talking points of Iraq — sort of the idea of, is this really the conversation we’re having about this war? That if we don’t defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, they’ll follow us home? That to support the troops means not to question that the surge could work. That, what we’re really seeing in Iraq is not a terrible war, but in fact, just the media’s portrayal of it. So, I wanted to just go through– like, is this really the conversation that we’re going other be having about something as significant as this war?

And that particular interview, probably the last one he’ll do with McCain in a long time, can be found here. Watch it if you haven’t yet.

(Via lolife.)

Everyone saw this picture (and the explanation of it here), right? It was on Slashdot a while ago, but I thought I’d post it anyway, in case anyone missed it. There are prettier visualisations on the guy’s blog (small gallery here), but this one gives a nice overview.
The Livejournal part (3, on the image) in particular is pretty interesting.

Come to think of it, I really don’t know any “respectable” (that is, mostly non-personal) blogs that use Livejournal. Mostly it seems to be people who aren’t bright enough (or don’t care enough) to get a proper blog (either self-hosted or with a real blogging service), or people whose self-importance predated most real free blogging services (not too many of those, though I think I have one or two of them on my friends list), or people with a lot of friends in the first category. It’s like Xanga or Myspace blogs in that respect.
I’m tempted to rant about exactly why Livejournal sucks as much as it does, and why everything halfway decent it offers is done better by some other service, but I guess that might alienate some readers~

My mom has recently been going on a rationalism trip, delighting in pointing out superstitions and telling me about morons in our circle of acquaintances. At lunch just now, for example, we were talking about that Dutch ark idiot, and were lamenting the fundification of the Netherlands together.
Then, after lunch, she pulled out these, because “someone told her they help”.

This is the fourth time I’ve had to explain the placebo effect to her. It’s getting old.

Incidentally, somewhere in between, my dad was talking about how Noah’s flood was actually inspired by the flooding of the Black Sea. I didn’t want to discourage or confuse him by pointing out the flaws in that or mentioning other floods and other cultures’ flood myths, since he seemed to be so certain, but at least he’s trying. This is a good sign.

And this is a kitty.

I like this proof. It’s simple and easy to follow, but it still gives an idea of the power of mathematics. It’s the sort of thing most people probably saw in high school, but most people forget.

What we’re trying to prove is that the square root of 2 (1.4142135623&c.) is an irrational number. A number is irrational if it cannot be expressed as a fraction; that is, the ratio of two whole numbers.
To prove this, we’ll use a reductio ad absurdum—we’ll assume √2 is rational, and we’ll see if this leads us to a contradiction.

If it is rational, the expression

,

where A and B are integers without common divisors, must be true.
Squaring both sides, we get

.

Let’s also multiply both sides by B².

So, we clearly see A² is even, and since the square of an odd number is always odd itself (right?), it follows that A itself is even as well.
So A is the double of a whole number, let’s say C. Let’s substitute C in the equation.

Dividing both sides by 2, we get

So B is an even number too!
We’ve said that A and B didn’t have any common divisors, and if they’re both even they have 2 as a common divisor, so this is clearly a contradiction. It follows that √2 cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole number.
As such, √2 is irrational. Quantum electrodynamics Quod erat demonstrandum.

By posting this, I’ve probably done someone’s homework for them. Oh well.
Another interesting thing about √2, and really the square root of any positive integer, is that it can be expressed as a periodic continued fraction.

In a sense, they are the simplest of the irrational numbers. This is rather beyond my ability to prove at the moment, though.

I’d watch that.

(Via PZ.)

That’s about 95 F, apparently.

I managed to sleep through the hottest part of the day, but it’s still far too hot now. And my room is designed to trap heat, because the heating doesn’t work properly and it was cheaper to install triple glazing than to get the room properly climate-controlled, like (most of) the rest of the house, and my computer easily adds another five degrees when it’s been on for a few hours.
I do have an electric fan, but it’s keeping my computer cool.

It’s supposed to get colder next week, but the projected temperatures are still about what I’d expect in July or August, not in April. It also hasn’t rained anywhere in Flanders in weeks, which doesn’t help.

Keep in mind Belgium is further to the north than the US/Canadian border. It’s not fair.

I’m not going to post cattens every single Caturday, but I wanted to today so I could link to this post on lolcat grammar on Language Log. It’s interesting and worth keeping in mind, should you ever have the urge to launch a new meme. Most nubies seem to get it wrong.

Before I start this post, which is mostly bitching, I think I should remind people I’m a Socialist. I have no problems with trade unions; quite the opposite. The right to unionise is, and should be, the most basic of workers’ rights. It’s important that workers have some leverage over their employers to avoid blatant exploitation, and in many ways, that fight still has a long way to go. Strikes are an obvious way to get there, and people should have the right to strike, with little fear of consequences for the individual worker.

What many Flemish unions seem to have forgotten, though, is that

1. strikes are a last resort, after negotations fail, and
2. the primary target of strikes should be the employer, since the consumer can’t do anything about your situation. The fact that the easiest way to get to your employer is by targetting his customers doesn’t give you the right to do that.

The particular case I’m talking about, of course, is the one where 47 employees of Brussels Airport went on strike and essentially stopped all flights from and to Brussels Airport for a day, causing huge losses for both the airport and the individual airliners. And of course, every single traveller to and from Brussels. Some were redirected to Charleroi, most were sent to Schiphol, in the Netherlands.
Many of the airliners went out of their way to accomodate travellers, often with great expense to themselves, and the airport itself responded by letting those airliners use the airport for free on all Fridays of May. Apparently this’ll cost them about half a million euros, which is considerably less than most have lost, but whatever.

The important part is that an ever-growing number of travellers is now suing the workers who went on strike.

Personally, I don’t think people should be able to sue the individual workers, but apparently the reason they’re doing this is because the union they belong to isn’t a legal person, and so can’t be sued.
Since the travellers are essentially innocent victims here, they should be able to sue someone, so I guess this is the next best thing. The union involved believes they don’t really have a case, since “the right to strike is absolute and fundamental”, but has promised that they’ll pay in the stead of the workers, should they lose. In protest to the lawsuit, they considered… going on strike.

These people give unionism everywhere a bad name.
They had the gall of talking about people “holding the workers hostage” in this lawsuit, which is brilliant, considering that they essentially held tens of thousands of paying, innocent customers (and hundreds of equally innocent airline companies, I suppose) hostage for a very minor pay raise. These people should have some legal recourse.
If the strike was justified, the damages they claim (or reasonable ones, anyway; in this particular case, they’re asking for a total of 100,000 € so far, which strikes me as very reasonable given the damage the strike has done) should be paid by the airport. If it wasn’t, it should be paid by the union, and that’s all there’s to it.

At some point, this sort of abuse of the right to strike crosses into domestic terrorism, and laws being the way they are (and having become that with the best intentions, of course), these abuses are only being encouraged.
Most unions in Belgium today seem to have forgotten how to negotiate, or at least how to reach reasonable compromises. They’re acting like petulant children, and I think it’s gone on for long enough. Most of Europe already has laws in place to prevent these abuses, and it’s time we followed suit.

We need a labor law reform.

While he was never as influential as some of the other people who died recently (thank goodness), I think it’s still important to take a moment to remember him.

Karel Dillen was born in Antwerp, in 1925. When the war broke out and Germany invaded Belgium, he, like many Flemish nationalists at the time, tended towards collaborating with the Nazi occupiers, for the greater good: Flemish independence. Apparently he wasn’t influential enough to be a proper collaborater, but he still called himself a “passive black”, and regularly attended New Order meetings.
With the fall of Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg trials, most Flemish collaborators pretended they never had anything to do with the occupying forces, of course, but not Dillen. From 1947 on he was involved in Vlaamse Concentratie (”Flemish Concentration”), a political party whose main goal (besides the common Flemish nationalist stances) was to prevent punishment of Nazi collaborators, and in 1951, he even went so far as to translate Maurice Bardèche’s Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise, an infamous pamphlet denying the Holocaust, into Dutch.

Vlaamse Concentratie having fallen apart in 1954 and a few other pet projects of his not really going anywhere, Dillen decided to get involved in the relatively new Volksunie (”People’s Union”, another Flemish nationalist/separatist party) in 1957.
The Volksunie being a fairly large and fairly moderate party, it eventually managed to win a few elections, and as a result became more progressive, which Dillen strongly opposed. In 1971, he left the party.

In 1977 he was a founding member of Protea, a Flemish/South-African “friendship movement”. Naturally, it was pro-apartheid.
Also in 1977, the Egmont Pact was signed, and the Volksunie was a co-signator. This left Dillen completely without a home party, so he decided to found the Vlaams Nationalistische Partij, or Flemish Nationalist Party. He was made president for life.
A year later the VNP more or less merged with another far-right party, the Vlaamse Volkspartij (”Flemish People’s Party”), and became Vlaams Blok (”Flemish Bloc”).

From there on everything should be known to most people my age in Flanders. Vlaams Blok managed to just hang on, with Dillen ending up in parliament for a number of years (in Vlaams Blok’s only seat), and later going on to the Europese parliament, embarassingly.
In 1996 he ceded presidency of the party to Frank Vanhecke, an early member of the VNP, because of health reasons. In 2004 the party was disbanded for inciting to racial hatred and was reformed as Vlaams Belang, and that’s the name it still has.
The party is still all about far-right nationalism and Flemish independence and xenophobic (particularly islamophobic) immigration laws and closed-minded social conservatism, and its membership is still mostly drawn from lower-class racists.
This is the face of the Flemish extreme right, and it’s gaining strength.

Karel Dillen was an intensely hateful little man, and Flanders would be a better place today if he had never existed. He took every lesson we should have drawn from WW2 and pissed on it. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Flanders is now one of the most racist regions in Europe in large part because of his efforts to keep his toxic brand of Flemish nationalism alive.

Good fucking riddance, I say.

That’s enough book reviews for a bit.

If you prefer comics, amuse yourself by reading this.
It makes sense that an evil genius would be an atheist, and I guess making him a non-practicing Jew is somewhat logical (some of the most intelligent people in the past two centuries have been largely non-religious Jews, after all). I don’t know where the Episcopalian bit would come from, though. Possibly brain damage on the part of Smallville writers.

Innumeracy, by John Allen Paulos, is about (surprisingly) innumeracy, or mathematical illiteracy. Distinct from the more pathological dyscalcia, it instead implies something closer to functional analphabetism: an inability to grasp simple mathematical concepts, not because one isn’t smart enough or the concepts are too arcane, but simply because whatever mathematical skills the person once might have had have eroded from lack of use.

Most of the book deals with simple probability and how misunderstanding it is both quite harmful (both to individuals and to society as a whole) and extremely widespread.
The problem, as Paulos sees it, is that it’s harder and harder to get away with being (functionally) illiterate, but society almost encourages innumeracy, with a lot of people seeing no shame in declaring they’re “not a math person” (even taking some perverse pride in it, sometimes), in part because so many people see mathematics as dry and boring, and not a good avenue for creativity. Much of the blame falls on shitty education, of course (and it’s getting worse).

It’s a great little book. Despite the very serious subject, Paulos manages to keep a light-hearted tone, and manages to be pretty engaging and funny. He clearly loves mathematics, and manages to convey this love to the reader quite readily.
There are a lot of small math problems interspersed throughout the book, and even though I didn’t have any problems with it (and nobody should, really), I can clearly imagine the average person just not getting it at all. And that, of course, is why everyone should probably read this.

The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene, is a guide to physics in general and superstring theory in specific.

Greene starts out by explaining, in simple terms, the basic ideas behind the theories of relativity and quantum physics, and how they’re increasingly coming into conflict.
Relativity dealing with massive things moving quickly, and quantum physics dealing with tiny things, the theories have managed to coexist for a while, but the discovery of singularities like black holes, which are both massive and tiny, need something to tie it all together without actually getting infinities anywhere (be it infinitely small sizes, or infinite densities or temperatures, or what).
Clearly, string theory is the solution, and the second half of the book is devoted to explaining why this is the case.

Keeping in mind that string theory hasn’t made any predictions yet that can be tested with current technology other than ones that can be explained by other, older theories as well (which Greene openly acknowledges), he makes a pretty good case.
Without going into the underlying mathematics, he manages to explain how the various particles and forces we observe (including gravity and the as yet undetected graviton) flow naturally from string theory, and how it seems to accomodate supersymmetry, which is just pretty, and how the theory is really too elegant not to be true (which, I’ll grant, isn’t a valid argument on its own).

It’s a very interesting book, both for the physics (even if you dislike string theory, the bit about relativity and quantum physics is good enough in its own right) and for the history lessons. The way string physicists approach mathematics is, of course, obnoxious, but even that isn’t too bothersome.
Definitely worth reading, even—or especially—for those with no background in physics whatsoever.

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris, is about humans, from the perspective of a zoologist.
I mostly read it because my mom loves the guy, but I’d been meaning to read it because I’d been told he touches on the neotenous ape hypothesis too. (Turns out he doesn’t say anything new.)

While the zoologist perspective is refreshing even now, forty years after it came out, most of the actual information in it is either very obvious (to anyone with half a brain) or very outdated.
The fact that a lot of religious people were apparently outraged by it, though I really doubt most were because “it places man in nature”. The sections on sex and sexuality were often just gratuitous (and if I noticed, you know it has to be bad), and a much more likely source of outrage.

It really is quite outdated, though, and likely to give inexperienced or casual readers completely wrong ideas about a number of things, including some basic facts of evolution.
My copy was a new edition released in 1994, and the preface made it clear Morris thought everything he wrote still applied perfectly, and wasn’t in need of updating, even though his editor had asked him to, so I’m not inclined to cut him much slack on that account. The Naked Ape just isn’t a very good book.

The Double Helix, by James Watson, is an account of Watson and Crick’s part in the discovery of the structure of DNA, and of the people involved.

A lot of people have called this a brilliant work of non-fiction, and an important step in de-mystifying science for the general public, but to me it mostly demonstrated that James Watson is a arrogant, prejudiced asshole and a condescending sexist, who has a ridiculously poor understanding of his own field, but managed to ride the coat-tails of his betters (almost all of the work had already been done long before Watson turned his attention to it, and he still had to depend on the insights of Crick, Donohue, Franklin, and others to get there in the end) and convince himself that he’s the center of the universe in the process.

It was written fifteen years after the fact, so even it’s factual accuracy isn’t something I’d put too much faith in. If it’s supposed to give people an idea of how “creative science really happens” (as one of the cover endorsements suggests), it’s no wonder most people are distrustful of scientists.

The same book written by Francis Crick (or Maurice Wilkins, or Rosalind Franklin, or anyone besides Watson) would’ve been infinitely more interesting.

Rigorous fact-checking courtesy of /b/.
(Actually just stolen from here, turns out, so it may even be accurate.)