It was surprising how much I did not know about Lavoisier; and of how little importance it was. He is Saint George killing the dragon of Phlogiston in this account. Father of modern chemistry, &c. Student of heat and respiration; improver of gunpowder; hyper-efficient tax collector in the bureaucracy of the French Old Regime; academician; weekend geologist; dreamer in agriculture and economics; aristocratic gardener whose works around his Château de Frechines might plausibly be described as an experimental farm; social climber and assiduous self-promoter, whose fame could not hide him from the glinting blades of Robespierre.
A very clever man was our Lavoisier, the more charming the farther one got away from him (often I read between the lines); whose pleasure, once he took offices in the Arsenal at Paris, with a budget to do largely as he pleased, was to conduct violent experiments on anything that was lying around. His revolution in chemistry consisted of quantifying it all.
When a child, I had the evil of Phlogiston brought to my attention. It was, not from the Dark Ages as popularly supposed, but only from the end of the seventeenth century, the prevailing “settled science” on the combustible principle in the air, and other substances. It was pure theory, and surprisingly easy to kick over with a few methodical tests; notwithstanding the scientific establishment of the day kicked, screamed, and desperately resisted every attempt to displace it. Lavoisier (and Priestley in England) burnt or blew up one thing and another until Lavoisier had discovered and named Oxygen.
And so we advanced from Phlogiston to Oxygen, and incidentally to ascending in hot air balloons. Good show!
David Warren, “Phlogiston”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-05-31.
April 22, 2019
QotD: Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier
April 18, 2019
QotD: Roadblocks to deregulating the US healthcare market
One problem America has is simply that our government administration isn’t very good. That’s not true across the board — our government statistics are, IMHO, the finest in the world. But there’s stuff that other countries can do that we can’t, either because our government is more decentralized, or because our civil service just isn’t as prestigious (and therefore as full of competent, motivated people) as those in other countries. And our regulatory approach — rules rather than principles based, and highly adversarial — is also suboptimal, and hard to change.
Given how much the government now interferes in health care, that’s a big problem. Given our lack of administrative competency, our first step should be pulling back where we can — trying to push more ordinary expenses onto consumers, for example, who can manage those the same way they manage their aspirin and antacid purchases now. And eliminating the tax deduction for employer sponsored health care would be major. But I fear, politically impossible.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 17, 2019
QotD: “[E]valuating food by its calorie count is like evaluating literature by the number of pages in a book”
… calorie-counting is an ineffective approach to eating. Calories are a crude metric that takes into account nothing about the properties of foods other than the total energy they contain. The value of activities can’t be reduced to a number, and nor can foods. Still calories are listed everywhere, enumerated in enormous fonts on food packaging and across menus and ads for packaged products with nothing to recommend them but a lack of calories.
A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. The “calories” we talk about in food are the amount of energy released when that food is burned. Of course the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, so if you take in less energy than you use, it’s impossible to store that energy (as body fat). But the factors that go into energy balance are many. The body burns and stores energy from different foods in different forms at different times in different people in different ways.
That crudity leads to mistakes, like the idea that 200 calories of Skittles are in any way equivalent to 200 calories of salad. In that way, calories have been weaponized by marketers to claim their ingestible products are innocuous. As Coca-Cola has advertised, for one, drinking soda is fine as long as you exercise enough to burn off those calories. That’s reasonable if it weren’t also true that constant exposure to high-sugar foods changes the way our bodies store energy. It’s like saying it’s fine to insult someone as long as you follow it with a compliment.
Worse still are the loudly advertised “100-calorie” packs of sugar-based edible products. They cause insulin levels to surge, affecting nutrient absorption and subsequent hunger in ways fundamentally different from eating 100 calories of almonds or spinach. That’s so much spinach. It would fill your stomach and please the microbes of your bowel.
James Hamblin, “It’s True, Hot Baths Burn Calories: Why calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading”, The Atlantic, 2017-04-13.
April 16, 2019
‘Tis Eastertide, and so the professional miserablists are going after Easter Eggs, of course
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall tells the worried environmentalists that no, it does not make sense to ban Easter eggs — for their “wasteful” packaging — on environmental grounds:
One of the more silly of the current environmental concerns is the worrying about the quantity of packaging that goes into – or around – Easter eggs. There’s an underlying mistake being made here, one which none of the proponents of action have bothered to recognise, let alone think about. Which is, well, what’s the purpose? The point of all this human activity we call an economy?
As any economist could and would tell you we’re after the maximisation of human utility. Given the constraints placed upon us by reality – the availability of stuff with which to do things, technologies we know about to do things to stuff with – we want humans to be as happy as they can be. We want, in short to maximise the amount of joy in the world.
At which point, packaging. Sure, no doubt there’s a certain harm that befalls us all from the creation of packaging and its disposal. Why not? There are costs and benefits to everything of course. But that’s the point, while there may be costs there are also benefits. So, yes, OK, there are costs to packaging.
[…]
At no point is even consideration given to the idea that the packaged egg might produce that joy. Which, given that we do indeed go buy these things each year to give to each other, is odd, isn’t it? Why are we giving each other expensive – as opposed to cheap – chocolate? Because, obviously enough, the dressing of the chocolate is something that produces that joy.
We can even have a stab at quantifying matters.
The cost is 3,000 tonnes of packaging. We know what that costs us, the value of the landfill tax. Around £80 a tonne. So, call it quarter of a million pounds. Spending upon Easter eggs is some £400 million a year. The joy produced must be of greater value than that £400 million otherwise we’d not be spending it in the first place. And yes, £400 million is more than £250,000.
We thus have our answer to the prodnoses worrying about the cost of Easter egg packaging. Piss off matey, you’ve missed the point entirely.
April 13, 2019
April 10, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on obesity
His latest in the New English Review:
It hardly requires me to point out that obesity has become a greater threat to the health of the human population in most parts of the world than famine. There was a wonderful cartoon recently in the British magazine, The Oldie, which captured this perfectly. A mother is taking a plate of food away from her child, who is protesting. “Think of the obese millions!” she says to him. When I was young, of course, we were told to finish what was on our plate and to think of the starving millions. Being a precocious little brat, I used to ask how eating what I did not want would help them. Let us just say that the reply was seldom well-reasoned, either in form or content.
It has now become an almost unassailable orthodoxy, at least in medical journals, that obesity is an illness in and of itself: that is to say, it does not merely have medical consequences, but — even without those consequences — is a disease. To be fat is, ipso facto, to be ill, in the same sense as to have Parkinson’s disease is to be ill.
Nor, according to the modern orthodoxy, is obesity to be considered the natural consequence of bad or foolish individual choices, a lack of self-control. That would be to blame the victim. The fat person is in effect the vector of forces that play upon him or her, without any contribution on his or her part.
This is an idea of long gestation. Reading an old text on obesity, published in 1975, and edited by one of my medical mentors, I came across the following quote from a paper written in 1962:
I wish to propose that obesity is an inherited disorder and due to a genetically determined defect in an enzyme: in other words that people who are fat are born fat, and nothing much can be done about it.
This is like saying that addicted people are born to be addicted, and until doctors discover a technical means of stopping their addiction, they might as well make no efforts on their own behalf. No doubt the people who adhere to this view – that obesity and addiction are illnesses simpliciter – think they are being generous but in fact they are forging psychological manacles. No doubt the fat woman in the bakery was at some level trying to prove to herself that obesity was a fatality and not under any possible individual control.
But is the theory in accord with the scene I have described above? In fact, the scene might lead us to a more nuanced or less categorical view of the problem of obesity (and, by extension, of other social problems) than we might at first adopt.
April 8, 2019
QotD: Why does US healthcare cost so much?
This is a hotly debated question in health care policy. Here’s my rough stab at it: the 1970s inflation interacted particularly badly with two pre-existing policy choices: the tax deduction for employer-sponsored health insurance, and Medicare.
Start with employer-sponsored health insurance, which is, as everyone knows, tax advantaged relative to salary, because your employer can deduct it as an expense, but you don’t have to show it as income on your taxes.
This was an incredibly dumb decision, but in the defense of the folks who made it in the 1940s, at the time, health insurance wasn’t very expensive, because the health care system couldn’t do all that much (and the female labor that ran hospitals was cheap due to discrimination, or in the case of nuns, basically free).
Come the 1970s, inflation started causing a problem called “bracket creep”. Back then tax brackets weren’t indexed for inflation, so as inflation went up, folks got pushed into higher and higher tax brackets, even though the buying power of their salary had stayed the same, or [had] gone down. This was great for the government (and is a big reason our deficits were not disastrous in the 1970s), but it was terrible for people, and led to the tax revolts that helped put Reagan in office.
But I digress. The point is that bracket creep made non-taxed benefits much more attractive relative to salary, so insurance started getting more generous. That process has continued for decades. Insurance used to be “major medical” that covered big ticket items like hospital stays. Now we expect it to cover the cost of going to the doctor for the sniffles. Well, if you insulate people from those costs, they will incur more of them.
Effectively, this raises demand for health care services. But the US system, decentralized and litigation-happy, is very bad at controlling the supply side. End result: high costs.
The other thing that happened is Medicare. The original legislation called for reimbursing services at “reasonable and customary rates”. This was a gold mine for doctors and hospitals. In New York, for example, doctors used to be forced to do charity care as the price of their admitting privileges at prestigious city hospitals. Once Medicare came into the picture, there was no need for that! Or to economize on beds; you could always find someone to fill them. Eventually, Medicare tried to crack down (http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/13/medicare-whac-a-mole), but by then, it was damned hard to cut physician and hospital incomes, in part because they had made decisions based on their — like building new hospitals with all private rooms — that couldn’t be undone. Our cost base is permanently higher, and politically, we have shown no will to slash provider incomes. So even though our growth rate is about average for the OECD, we’re growing from a much higher level.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 5, 2019
QotD: Debunking the “MSG is harmful” myth
The story of MSG is a true tragedy. The negativity associated with this delicious amino acid is due to a spurious study from 1968 that linked MSG with the “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.” This study connected that gut-bomb feeling you sometimes get after eating Chinese food to MSG, despite the fact that the typically cheap Chinese food prepared in American restaurants is fatty and served in large portions, and (like any restaurant), the food can be spoiled. My mom theorizes that lots of MSG was used to cover up the fact that, say, shrimp was a day past its prime, and that the sick feeling was due to the food but got blamed on the MSG. There’s never been a scientifically rigorous study that’s linked MSG with any negative effects. MSG should be used frequently and added to anything that needs the flavor drawn out, especially soups. But it enhances virtually anything it touches: Once, eating pizza at home, a friend scanned my spice rack and saw a jar with white powder whose label, in my grandfather’s messy scrawl, read what looked like “MS6.” He sprinkled it on his pizza and came to find me, telling me that whatever MS6 was, it was the most amazing thing he’d ever tasted. Yes, MSG makes even pizza better.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog, “Salt grinders are bullshit, and other lessons from growing up in the spice trade”, The A.V. Club, 2017-04-06.
April 3, 2019
QotD: Veganism has its drawbacks
Evangelical vegans will tell you that following a purely ‘plant-based’ diet is not only morally commendable, it’s also much better for your health. But if my experience is anything to go by, the opposite is true.
I felt absolutely fine for the first few days. I didn’t miss meat at all, certainly not in terms of taste or flavour. The only thing I really felt an absence of was eggs. Since I embarked on my mammoth weight-loss project, eggs have become a dietary staple for me: nothing fills me up as well or gives me quite as much long-lasting energy as an egg.
I also found I had to eat larger portions to feel full — and I felt hungry again after a shorter period of time. But even that didn’t bother me, since what I was eating was so wholesome.
No, the real issue became apparent after the third or fourth day. Not to put too fine a point on it: wind.
My stomach was, quite literally, in ferment. All those legumes and pulses and generalised vegetable matter appeared to have turned into a giant internal compost heap. It wasn’t too bad in the mornings; but by early afternoon I was like a cow who had overdosed on clover.
At first, I palmed the outcome off on our three dogs. But after a while the problem became so severe that even they could not be expected to account for the frequency and potency of aromas emerging from my lower digestive tract.
One of the key arguments of vegans against livestock farming is the harm animals cause to the planet through the amount of methane they produce; if my experience was anything to go by, a vegan human is capable of producing just as much, if not more. I was a one-woman global warming hazard.
My children, of course, thought it was hilarious. But from my point of view, it was not only unpleasant and occasionally embarrassing, it was also incredibly uncomfortable. I felt bloated, soggy and sluggish, and began to dread meal times.
Following the advice of the nutritionist, I took to soaking nuts, oats and seeds overnight. But it made no difference. If anything, the problem began to get worse. The more healthy vegan food I put into my body, the worse my stomach problems became.
As for the much-vaunted ‘vegan glow’, no sign. Instead, my skin felt dry and dehydrated, and there was a distinctly greyish tinge to my complexion. But still, I persisted.
Sarah Vine, “Going vegan sent me off my trolley! Exhausted, irritable and don’t even start of the tummy troubles – SARAH VINE’s bid to join the health revolution left her VERY green around the gills”, Daily Mail, 2019-02-22.
April 2, 2019
James May’s Things You Need To Know – Series 2 – Episode 5 – Engineering (S02E05)
Uninsulated Crimp
Published on 10 Apr 2013James May gives a straightforward guide to some of science’s big ideas, explaining everything from evolution and Einstein to engineering and chemistry.
The not-so-ancient extinction of Madagascar’s megafauna
At The Conversation, Nick Scroxton, Laurie Godfrey, and Stephen Burns discuss their new theory on the megafauna extinction in Madagascar just over a thousand years ago:
Giant 10-foot-tall elephant birds, with eggs eight times larger than an ostrich’s. Sloth lemurs bigger than a panda, weighing in at 350 pounds. A puma-like predator called the giant fosa.
They sound like characters in a child’s fantasy book, but along with dozens of other species, they once really roamed the landscape of Madagascar. Then, after millions of years of evolution in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the populations crashed in just a couple of centuries.
Scientists know that over the past 40,000 years, most of Earth’s megafauna – that is, animals human-size or larger – have gone extinct. Woolly mammoths, sabre tooth tigers and countless others no longer roam the planet.
What’s remarkable about the megafaunal crash in Madagascar is that it occurred not tens of thousands of years ago but just over 1,000 years ago, between A.D. 700 and 1000. And while some small populations survived a while longer, the damage was done in a relatively short amount of time. Why?
Over the last three years, new investigations into climate and land use patterns, human genetic diversity on the island and the dating of hundreds of fossils have fundamentally changed scientists’ understanding of the human and natural history of Madagascar. As two paleoclimatologists and a paleontologist, we brought together this research with new evidence of megafaunal butchery. In doing so we’ve created a new theory of how, why and when these Malagasy megafauna went extinct.
Many of the forests that originally existed on Madagascar are now replaced by more open, human-modified landscapes, like this palm savanna at Anjohibe.
Laurie Godfrey, CC BY-ND
March 31, 2019
Irish Potato Famine – Lies – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 30 Mar 2019Writer Rob Rath talks about all the cool stories and facts we didn’t get to cover in the Irish Potato Famine series.
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
From the comments:
Extra Credits
1 day agoRecommended reading:
The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith
The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People, by John Kelly
Podcast: Irish History PodcastSay hi to Rob’s newest family member!
4:43 – what exactly was the blight?
7:35 – flags, flags, flags
9:20 – difference between “British” and “English”
10:26 – the psychology behind low-balling numbers
18:52 – we couldn’t do an episode on the Battle of Mrs. McCormick’s Cabbage Patch 🙁
22:57 – what’s next on Extra History!
23:27 – Walpole fact!
March 30, 2019
QotD: Organic spices are a racket
There’s a whole other piece to be written about organic spices, but the short version is that demanding organic spices is never going to be good for the farmers growing them. The U.S. standards for organic products amounts to ridiculously expensive and oftentimes unnecessary practices for small farmers who just don’t have the resources to do it. There are plenty of ways to arrive at ethical treatment of animals and land that are not part of our complicated organic laws. And that’s not to mention the people who demand organic products but will also freak out at the sight of a bug or won’t buy something that’s even a little bit misshapen or with a tiny brown spot on it. You can have pesticides or you can have pests.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog, “Salt grinders are bullshit, and other lessons from growing up in the spice trade”, The A.V. Club, 2017-04-06.
March 26, 2019
QotD: Salt
My grandfather used to say this all the time, and it’s true. Salt brings out the flavor of the food, full stop. There are a great variety of salts, but the reality is they’re all the same mineral. Coloration in salt comes from the minerals near the salt as it forms. There’s nothing inherently better about colored salts, but the marketers selling you that stuff will try to convince you otherwise. I’ve seen pink salt promoted as an “alternative” salt that doesn’t cause blood pressure issues. That’s a lie. My advice is to buy kosher salt or the chunkier white salt if you like the crunchiness. If you really like the mild flavoring of gray salt, that’s fine, just know that it’s sold at a higher cost for what comes down to the same thing as my box of salt I can get for a couple bucks. And one more thing: All salt is sea salt.
Salt grinders are bullshit
I’m not done with salt yet: Don’t put your salt in a grinder. All you’re doing is making your salt smaller than it was before. Unlike pepper, which is actually processed in the grinder, salt does not need to be ground and is not fresher after coming out of a grinder. It’s just smaller. Use a shaker.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog, “Salt grinders are bullshit, and other lessons from growing up in the spice trade”, The A.V. Club, 2017-04-06.
March 24, 2019
Trust in scientific findings decreasing among the general public
In Scientific American, Louise Lief discusses the problem of rising public distrust of science:
We live in a moment when preventable infectious diseases like measles are spreading because parents distrust vaccines, and scientists at government agencies are being told not to use terms like “evidence-based.” The president dismisses the findings of a National Climate Assessment by more than 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies that warns of massive economic and environmental damage totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, crop failures, disrupted supply chains and multiple threats to human health, saying, “I don’t believe it.”
But when I argued in favor of the proposition (Resolved: “Science writers are responsible for building public trust in science”) during a debate at the National Association of Science Writers’ 2018 annual conference last fall, the majority of science writers and science journalists present voted that building public trust in science was not the responsibility of science writers.
[…]
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication also tackled the science trust question at the NASW conference, and researchers at Cardiff University have traced credibility and accuracy problems to press releases from scientists’ own academic institutions.
If a problem is discovered or a study is retracted, said Jamieson, the scientist or scientific journal needs to explain to journalists and the public how the error was discovered, what the problem is, and what steps are being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Scientists often make it hard for journalists to cover these three interrelated issues, she says. Scholarly journal publication protocols may cause scientists to write one article on the problem they’re investigating, and a second or third article on processes and solutions, resulting in coverage that emphasizes problems and shortchanges corrective action.
For their part, researchers at Cardiff University found that press releases from scientists’ own academic institutions about their work were a significant source of exaggerated claims and spin, even though most scientists can approve their wording.
Their study of press releases from 20 leading British universities on health-related science news found that when the press releases exaggerated, it was likely the news stories would too.
An analysis of 41 news articles on randomized controlled trials based on 70 press releases showed only four articles that contained exaggerated claims not included in the press release or journal abstract. Interestingly, they also found the hype and spin intended to tempt the media did not result in more news coverage.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
