PSA: Things As Scary As Guns

PSA:
In light of recent events in the media, I've decided to run down a short list of things that should scare you (if you're a statistically average US citizen) as much as civilians with guns. I'm not espousing any particular agenda with respect to guns-- I just wanted to calibrate my sense of damage done by guns against other causes of death, so I went and looked up some numbers. All numbers that follow are US figures, not world figures (sorry rest-of-world!).

First, let's get a baseline. A number of sources, including the CDC (where I've gotten most of the data for this post) peg the annual number of deaths from gun homicide at about 10,000. Deaths from mass shooting are a negligible contributor to this total, even with fairly liberal definitions (one of the standard definitions is an incident in which 4 or more people are injured or killed by a gunman).

So, what should frighten you as much as other people with guns?

1) Yourself with a gun. Technically, this should, statistically speaking, scare you twice as much as other people with a gun. Close to 20,000 people die annually by suicide with gun. I wanted to start with this one to prime you to be a little suspect of the statistics I'm going to present. Just because you should be scared of something "statistically" doesn't mean you should actually be scared of it. (For a numerically-better comparison, 10,062 people died from suicide by suffocation in 2013.)

2) Coal plants. Estimated premature deaths from coal usage are around 10,000/year. Most of these deaths are from respiratory disease exacerbated by particulates and other stuff produced by coal plants. This, by the way, is about 1/20th the per-kilowatt-hour rate of death caused by coal in China and most of the rest of the world, largely thanks to the Clean Air Act. This is also HUNDREDS OF TIMES more deadly per kilowatt hour than nuclear power, even including incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Also, it produces comparable amounts of radioactive waste. Basically, coal is worse than nuclear in every respect except price -- nuclear power costs about twice as much, on average. (Also, for the record, oil is about twice as deadly as coal, natural gas is about 1/4 as deadly as coal, and wind and solar are both much safer than those but still not as safe as nuclear because of worker accidents.)

3) "Malignant neoplasm of the stomach". CDC's wording here. In 2013, 11,261 Americans died from malignant neoplasms of the stomach. So, if you stay up at night worrying about gunmen, you should stay up slightly more worrying about stomach cancer.

4) "Certain other intestinal infections". Yeah, ok, cancer's bad, but it turns out that all of the intestinal infections that don't get their own category add up to being just about as deadly as stomach cancer. Yech.

5) "Congenital malformations, deformations, and chromosomal abnormalities". How many people do you know who died from congenital malformations? How many do you know who died from gunshots? Those numbers are probably pretty close. Again, a reminder that nobody is the statistical average.

6) Flu. Sort of. The annual death rate by flu varies pretty wildly due to differences in strains and differences in the length of flu season. I decided to take the geometric mean of the minimum and maximum numbers of deaths in one flu season (usually a good way to find a rough estimate when you only have the minimum and maximum possible values of a quantity), which comes out to about 12,000.

I hope this helps!

Facebook Ad Settings, Imagerial Discs, and Early Life

Today I Learned:
1) Facebook keeps track of what it thinks you're interested in, obviously, so that it can post ads to you that it thinks you'll be interested in. Well, today I learned that you can view and modify those stored preferences! You can find them under Settings, in the Ads tab on the left, then "edit" on "Ads based on my preferences", and I'm not going to give more detail about how to find it because that's the kind of thing Facebook changes all the time. You may be able to URL-hack your way there at "http://ift.tt/1ODtC09" It will show you a list of topics Facebook thinks you're interested in. You can delete and add (sorry, pun) interests as you want.

This seems like an awesome feature that Facebook should advertise more (again, sorry). Yeah, Facebook is going to give you ads, but you get to pick what stuff it shows you! You can, in fact, make Facebook's ads work for you and be relevant to you, and the beauty of it is that this is exactly what Facebook wants. Every ad Facebook shows you that annoys you lowers Facebook's profit. Every ad Facebook shows you that you go "oh hey, that's actually kind of cool" and click on is money in the bank for Facebook. So why don't they advertise ad customization more? Do they think their automated algorithms are better at finding you relevant things than you are? Or maybe they just don't have a great PR department or UI. Or maybe they don't want to mention it because they think people will be creeped out by Facebook keeping track of their interests.

...speaking of which, if, unlike me, you're creeped out by Facebook keeping track of your interests, this post is for you too. From the "ads" tab in settings, you can also delete all of your interests, if you like, and you can also disable the use of ads based on site usage (yeah, Facebook does that too) and automatic ad-like sharing of your social actions. Just be warned, based on Facebook's track record, you may need to re-set these from time to time, so if it's something you're interested in, I would recommend checking up on your settings every once in a while.

In the meantime, I was quite entertained by Facebook's list of my "interests". Here's a semi-curated list, with some commentary.

Amazon.com (no lie there)
University (makes sense)
Education (being a University lover, I can understand that)
Sales (???)
Student
IFTTT (I guess it's been reading my TILs)
NBC (....)
Facebook (Should Facebook really be advertising for Facebook on Facebook?)
Psychology
Biology
Internet
meme
HowStuffWorks (Yes, this is the kind of thing I want to see more of!)
Philosophy
Family
Friendship
Child
Love (For these last four... what human *isn't* at least somewhat interested in these?)
Cycling (uh no. I don't know how to ride a bike, Facebook. Nice try.)
Crying (ok, 1) what? 2) Why is this under "Fitness and wellness"?)
Coffee (again, fail)
Food (...what human *isn't* at least somewhat interested in this?)
Dogs (eh)
Gardening (Sort of, I don't do it though)
Millennium Falcon (This I can get behind. (BTW, it's classified under "Hobbies and Activities"))
Dance (Thanks a lot, Mengsha and Michael!)
Reading
Arts and Music
Son (...?)
Image
Fan
Concept (????)
Hogwarts
Republican Party (United States)
Democratic Party (United States)
Religion Rebel Alliance
Life Fictional Universe
(Not going to put it down here, but Facebook nailed exactly which phone model I have....)
Gmail users (yup, I tend to like those)
League of Legends (I've barely played, not sure where that's coming from)
NPR (yup)
Chewbacca (Ok, how the heck did it know that???)
i fucking love science (that explains why I get so many "i fucking love science" posts)
Bernie Sanders (interesting...)
George Takei (I'd vote for *him*)
Don McCullin (I don't know who that is)
Girls (band) (I don't know who that is)
Why? (American band) (I don't know who that is)
Cosmetics (?!?!)
Shopping and Fashion (?!?!?!?!?!)
Wand (?!?!... what?!?!?)
(five tags under "sports". It really doesn't even matter what they are, it's just hilarious that there were any)
Wait (system call) (Has facebook been profiling my software?!?! =P)

2) Imaginal discs are found in all insects! I'd previously heard of imaginal discs in the contexts of pupating caterpillars. In case you don't know, caterpillar metamorphosis is kind of creepy, quite mysterious, and really, really cool. Once ensconced in a cocoon, a caterpillar essentially melts into a goop of loose cells and nutrient broth, from which the butterfly is reformed whole. The caterpillar doesn't *completely* break down, though -- small clusters of cells, called imaginal discs, stay intact, and it's these clumps of tissue that form the seed for the new butterfly's organs.

Today I learned that imaginal discs are common to... I think all insects? They control development of insect body parts. In ants, for example, caste differentiation is driven at least in part by differences in regulation of the different imaginal discs to achieve different body plans. This goes some way toward explaining how butterfly metamorphosis evolved -- it's one of the more complex components to the metamorphosis, and this means that it would have already been present in the earliest proto-butterflies.

3) This one's going to be an unusual TIL in that it's not a fact. It's more a realization and a change of interpretation. Quick question -- when would you say was the birth of the modern land biome? Think about that for a little bit.

Before today, I probably would have said something like the Triassic (the first geologic period with dinosaurs), or maybe before then, sometime around when fungi evolved the ability to break down wood and we got the first carboniferous forests that we would recognize as forests, rather than giant piles of dead, unrotted wood covered in plants. Today I realized that a *lot* of the macroscopic life most important to our modern land biomes actually didn't evolve until the Cretaceous (the last age of the dinosaurs, a warm period lasting 80 million years, ending with the mass-extinction that offed the non-bird dinosaurs). The cretaceous saw the early evolution of birds(!), mammals(!!), eusocial insects(!!!), and flowering plants(!!!!). That's... really a lot of important groups, at least on land. It puts into perspective just how alien this planet was a hundred or two hundred million years ago -- no birds flitting from branch to branch, no bees buzzing from flower to flower and no flowers for bees to buzz between. Not a rat or mouse or vole or shrew. There might have been ants... but they weren't colonial yet. Just single ants, wandering about. No pollen allergies... because there was no pollen.

Sometimes I think that if you want to be a xenobiologist, you should study plants. Maybe archaeology would be just as good a substitute.

(Also, while double-checking facts for this fact, today I learned that in the Cretaceous, corals were not the dominant reef-builders on Earth -- check out rudists!)

Likes, Graphite Crucibles, and Amoeba Culture

Today I Learned:
1) You can "Like" your own posts on Facebook. Seriously?

2) Graphite makes a really good crucible material. It won't meld to your metal while it's molten, and it's very resistant to warping at high temperatures. Relatedly, insulation for things like crucibles include a kind of ceramic that feels like styrofoam -- it's light and porous and seems a little crumbly. Apparently the space shuttle is heat-insulated with stuff kind of like that.

3) Culturing amoebas is really cool. There's this interesting dynamic you get growing protists that you don't have with bacteria or mammalian cells... involving contamination. See, amoebas eat bacteria, so the way you feed them is to co-culture them with E. coli or some other standard bacteria. The trouble is, if there are too many bacteria, they outgrow the amoeba and take over the culture. So you have to keep it at a sort of low-level contamination, which can apparently be... tricky. Also, amoeba need more air than most lab bacteria. Some species also can't swim very well, so they tend to settle to the bottom of any culture they grow in. That's bad, if they grow quantities such that the form a sediment and choke each other out. The solution: bubblers! Also also, amoeba pellet weirdly when you centrifuge them -- they make a tiny normal-looking pellet, then a giant, totally clear pellet on top of that. I didn't learn why.

Fish Yawns, Gun Defense, and Runoff Reactions

Today I Learned:
1) Fish are generally believed to yawn (they do a thing that looks like yawning, which is usually but not always interpreted as a yawn). Fish sometimes use yawns as an aggressive or territorial signal, but they also seem to just... do it, sometimes.

2) Guns are used a LOT in self-defense in the US. This is a big, politically-charged topic, so reading Wikipedia is probably not giving me the full story. Furthermore, different groups have come up with WILDLY different estimates of defensive gun use, but they're pretty much all far above what I would have guessed. Technically, the range of possible rates of defensive gun use range from 127/year (not a typo) to 33.1 million/year. That's about the highest variance I've seen in any estimate not involving things like Dyson spheres and bagels.

33.1 million per year seems ludicrously high -- I'm pretty sure fewer than one out of six Americans uses a gun in self defense each year -- but even the more accepted lower estimates are pretty high. One of the lowest was an estimate by a professor at the Harvard School of Law at 55,000-80,000/year. For reference, that's 5-8 times higher than the annual number of *deaths* caused by guns in the US. Another interesting statistic: in cases of defensive gun use, the gun is actually fired somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the time.

3) We have a thing in our lab where we prepare extracts from bacterial cells, and one of the steps involved is an 80 minute incubation of the freshly-prepared extract at 37 C. We call this a "runoff reaction", and it's supposed to be the step in which genomic DNA is degraded. Today I learned why that step is called a "runoff reaction". This kind of step is used in other cell-innard-extracting techniques to get rid of lingering RNA strands that might still be bound to ribosomes, which makes them temporarily inaccessible to degradation machinery. The incubation step gives the ribosomes a chance to finish translating out protein, freeing the RNA for degradation... since the ribosomes literally run off the end of the RNA, it's a "runoff reaction". Thanks to Anders Knight for this epipheny!

Python's Name, Icy, and Continuum Analytics

Today I Learned:
1) Python, the computer language, was not named after the animal. It was named after Monty Python's Flying Circus.

2) ...about an alternative to ImageJ called Icy. It's also an open-source, easily-extensible image analysis program written in Java (or at least something that runs on the JVM). It seems to be written with even more of an eye than ImageJ towards linking with other kinds of programming -- you can write scripts for it in Python and javascript, and it has some sort of native compatibility with Matlab. The cutest thing is that it has a tab that appears to be literally an emulated instance of ImageJ, so that you'll always have ImageJ at your fingertips if you want it. Icy does seem quite sluggish and a little rough around the edges, though, so I don't see myself using it a ton.

3) Anaconda, the python scientific computing environment manager, was developed by and is owned by a for-profit company, Continuum Analytics. This despite Anaconda being free and open-source, and being the only major project of the company. It seems Continuum Analytics' monetization scheme is essentially training programs for companies. I hope this catches on, because it's a very nice system (once again, declaring no conflicts of interest here).

4th Order Polynomials, Soviets on Mars, and The First Female President

Today I Learned:
1) There is an analytical solution for 4th-order polynomials! It's a godawful mess, but it exists. Also, there is provably no analytical solution for 5th-order or higher polynomials.

2) In 1971, the Soviet Union became the first organization to put a rocket on Mars. It broadcasted for about 20 seconds before going silent. At least they got it there!

3) The United States has had a female president, albeit very briefly and not an elected one. In 1920, Woodrow Wilson had a stroke during some rather important diplomatic proceedings. Turns out that at the time, there wasn't a formal chain of command, and Wilson's Vice President simply refused to take the position. So his wife stepped up and Presidented for Wilson while he recovered.

Maude Menten, Michaelis-Menten, and Free-Climbing

Today I Learned:
1) The "Menten" in "Michaelis-Menten kinetics" refers to Maude Menton, a Canadian MD from the turn of the 20th Century. From her wiki page, it looks like she was a heck of an interesting person. Quote, "Skloot portrays Menten as a petite dynamo of a woman who wore "Paris hats, blue dresses with stained-glass hues, and Buster Brown shoes." She drove a Model T Ford through the University of Pittsburgh area for some 32 years and enjoyed many adventurous and artistic hobbies. She played the clarinet, painted paintings worthy of art exhibitions, climbed mountains, went on an Arctic expedition, and enjoyed astronomy. She also mastered several languages, including Russian, French, German, Italian, and at least one Native-American language." Oh, and she got her full professorship in 1948, at the age of 70. If that had happened closer to our time, I would have wondered whether it spoke more to sexism in science or to the fiercely competitive nature of academia. Given the time period, though, I'm pretty sure that was mostly sexism.

2) Speaking of Michaelis-Menten kinetics, today I learned that Michaelis-Menten kinetics can be derived from one of two similar-sounding assumptions -- either that the intermediate reaction is at steady state, or that the intermediate reaction has zero flux. Somehow, apparently, the results you get from these two assumptions are slightly different?! Why? Aren't those the same assumption? I would really like to confirm this. Chris Lennox?

3) Free climbers *do* use climbing equipment like pistons and hooks and safety lines, but only as safeguards against slips and falls, not to make the climbing easier. Also, free-climbers often (always?) chalk their hands when the climb. In retrospect, those two facts should have been obvious, but they were not.