jeff.weblog.ro

Slashdot recently posted a reference to a Washington Post editorial by Hugh Price about a plan to save the world that, apparently, Hugh just pulled out of his imagination. I won’t spend much time analyzing the many flaws in his idea to capture atmospheric carbon by piling up landfills of agricultural waste. The crux of it, however, is that he seems to think that if you don’t aerate ag waste like you do with compost , it would never degrade, because, “Without access to oxygen , bacteria cannot break down plant material.” Price misses the vast majority of all species on the planet: anaerobic microbes. They are quite good at turning organic material into carbon dioxide and methane. This happens in all animal guts, including yours, as well as anaerobic digesters, soils, underwater sediments, bogs, etc. His garbage heap “solution” sounds, to me, like an anaerobic digester. It would transform the waste into carbon dioxide and methane. Methane, by the way, has a green house gas equivalent of about ten times that of carbon dioxide. However, you can capture the methane and burn it to generate electricity. There’s nothing novel about this; we’ve been doing it with our agricultural waste for decades. Especially in Europe where, for example, Germany has ~4,500 cooperative facilities solely for the purpose of anaerobic breakdown of agricultural waste (a combination of plant material and manure) and capturing the methane produced, to be used as green energy.

I am not suggesting that a newspaper editor should know anything about anaerobic digestion. However, there is one extremely key thing he should have learned in some sort of science class (or even in one or two of the journalism classes he may have taken): If you don’t know how something works, look it up.

If he had asked anyone working in agricultural waste, or microbiology, they would have pointed out the many problems with his hair-brained scheme. I’m excited to see journalists getting interested in science, and I’m glad they’re trying to come up with creative articles to engage people in climate change issues. However,rather than spouting off nonsense, it would be preferable if they did some research. My title is not meant to suggest that Price should have taken a class on agricultural waste treatment; rather, any science class should have, first and foremost, given him the critical skills necessary to research his idea before writing a big old editorial on it.

Image: An anaerobic digester for agricultural waste. Image by Alex Marshall, Clarke Energy Ltd, Creative Commons-BY-3.0 license.

Filed by jeff at 4:44 pm under Science
Comments Off

Sadly true. Link: Economist’s View

Filed by jeff at 11:24 pm under Finds
Comments Off

It’s happened — you can now sequence genomes for cheap. This company founded by a 454 Lifesciences person has made a DNA sequencer that you can (correction — will be able to) purchase and run yourself.  Note: rest of this paragraph is shop talk: [ Apparently they will cost about $50k per machine and $500 per run.  (Compare to $8000-$12,000 per run for existing technologies.) I haven't found any info on how many reads, or what read length you would get for that $500. The sample plates, however, can be massively parallelized, meaning it can scale up as much as you want. I can only dream the read length and number of reads per plate might be on-par with 454? (which would make all other sequencing technology obsolete!) And check out their snazzy-looking machine (below).  ]

Sorry for the geek post, but  here is my main inspiration: In the lower right photo, is that an iPhone docked on the DNA sequencer??!?  Why?!?

Filed by jeff at 8:42 am under Finds  Tagged bioinformatics, geek, Work
Comments Off

What I’ve been up to lately:

– Wifey is teaching a class this semester, getting together some grad students to develop UG biology labs; it sounds really cool.

– We’re taking a class from Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services on home repair and upkeep.  Pretty fun, so far.  The teacher told us not to work on electrical stuff, but then showed us how to do electrical stuff (wink wink).

– Just about figured out all the details, and it looks like my family is coming to visit in May!!  Exciting!

– New cat, “The Cheese,” is doing well.  We let him out of his room now, and he plays nice with Whiskey and Soot (other two cats). He let me clip his claws without a single meow or his, and is totally sweet. He has a bottomless stomach and would continue eating as long as there was still food.

– Work is busy! The lab server went down and I had to fix it (argh!), and I’m learning to use machine learning, which is really fun! I can predict the performance of an anaerobic digester based on the structure of the microbial community.

– Mike, my best friend and roommate throughout college , just died.  Mikey, I’ll miss your sense of humor , caring nature and talent for making people happy.

Filed by jeff at 7:51 am under What is up  Tagged cat, home, Wif, wifey
Comments Off

We have a new cat!  We were trying to catch our friends lost kitty, and a lady called us about a stray cat in her back yard who looked just like him .  So, we borrowed some live traps from friends of ours, and caught him!  Not the right cat, but he’s definitely a young stray cat who has been out on his own for a while.  What could we do?!?  Not many options, so we drove him right to the vet (had fleas, worms, and is not fixed), and now he’s living in our office with the door closed.  I present to you, Cheese:

Current permutations of his name: Cheez, Cheesey, Cheesus, Cheeseburger , Cheesecake , Cheesey Poof, Easy Cheese, etc

He’s a total pacifist–he’s never growled or hissed or bitten or scratched ever in his life, as far as I can tell.  He’s terrified of people, but his only instincts are either to run like a maniac or freeze.  He lets us pet him on the head now, though, which is great progress !

Filed by jeff at 11:08 am under Photos,What is up  Tagged cats, Cheese, home
Comments Off

I’m writing this post in the Google Chrome Browser.  It’s pretty nice, and is fully functional now it seems.  Websites work well, renders quickly, starts up quickly.  It has a similar auto-complete and auto-search functionality in the address bar compared to Firefox .  Only thing missing is plugins, which are still the major bonus of Firefox.  I’m going to use Chrome for a little bit and see how it goes.  One plus: it takes up less screen real estate due to the slick integration of the tabs with the window upper edge.

Filed by jeff at 4:31 pm under Finds
Comments Off

I highly recommend proxying in to watch BBC .co.uk/iplayer through a UK server!  BBC is awesome!  The new David Attenborough series Life is pretty cool. And, they have all kinds of neat cultural programs, like Blas Ceoil (on BBC 2) where they go to a different local pub every show and round up some decent musicians to play some music (Irish traditional ).  Hooray BBC!  Other than that, there are about a dozen shows about antiques (meh).  And, no commercials?  One-up on Hulu.

Filed by jeff at 9:02 pm under Finds  Tagged entertainment, internet, TV
Comments Off

Some bullet points

• I think we’re nearly done with holiday shopping!  (Wifey did most of it.)
• I know five or six songs on the concertina now!
• We still have to do our xmas decorating.  Plan for this evening: set up a tree.  And hope kitties don’t eat it.
• Question for any mathy people out there ( Ryan ? Ben?): if I have two sets of points graphed on an arbitrary number of axes (dimensions), how can I quantify how different the two sets of points are?  I can visualize that they cluster separately, but I want to measure how different the groups are on average (maybe a P- val ?).  I have principal coordinates as well as a matrix of distances between points.  So far, I’ve done a T-Test comparing the distances between groups to the distances within groups, but it doesn’t feel like that’s the best way to do it.

Filed by jeff at 7:03 am under What is up  Tagged holiday, life, Work
Comments Off

Wifey and I just watched an amazing movie, Latcho Drom. I guess you can call it a musical, because there’s no dialogue. It’s all gypsy music, starting in Egypt and winding through Turkey and Europe (Romania, Hungary, France, Spain). The movie plays out scenes of gypsy life as it wanders homelessly across beautiful landscapes. The narration comes in the form of seldom-translated music performed by the characters onscreen. Amazing cinematography and amazing music, but don’t expect to know where you are or what’s going on without looking up a guide online. This next scene is my favorite, and features members of Taraf de Haiduks (a Romanian gypsy band, appropriate since my blog host is Romanian!!), who were the reason I wanted to see the movie in the first place. As the violinist sings about the overthrow of dictatorship in Romania, he slowly pulls apart the strings of his violin (which makes a really cool sound).  This singer/violinist is Nicolae Neacsu , who unfortunately died in 2002 (before the film came out).  I suggest hitting the fullscreen button:

Filed by jeff at 8:14 am under Finds  Tagged music, Video
Comments Off

I’ve been ignoring the internet for a few (many?) months, so it’s time to get this blog caught up to date. Here is a bullet-point summary of everything (after the jump):
(more…)

Filed by jeff at 6:57 am under What is up  Tagged home, music, news, Work
Comments Off