Usefully Useless

So I’m eating a bag of “Kettle Chips”, with “sea salt and crushed black pepper”. Proudly on the front of the bag is “absolutely nothing artificial”.

Now I wonder, did these crisps come from a salt and pepper crisp tree? Let’s check those ingredients.

Select potatoes, sunflower oil, potato maltodextrin, potato starch, sea salt, black pepper, yeast extract, citric acid from sugar beet molasses, black pepper extract

How many of those are natural? Answer is not too many.

Potatoes are an artificially engineered version of a nightshade family plant once native to South America. They bear little resemblance to their natural ancestor and do not exist in nature.

Sunflower oil? You need to specially and artificially process sunflower seeds to get it.

Potato maltodextrin is made in large steel reaction vessels by the partial hydrolysis of potato starch. It is entirely artificial.

Potato starch is extracted from mashed up potatoes using solvents.

Sea salt is specially treated to remove all the things in seawater which will, given a chance, make you very ill. So again, it’s artifically refined.

Black pepper, for a change, is actually natural. Well, after we artificially process it. The berries of the pepper plant piper nigrum are dried in large factories which use giant fans to blow hot air over them. Once dried, they’re peppercorns ready for use.

Yeast extract is used because it contains massive amounts of monosodium glutamate and glutamic acid, two nutrients essential for life and good tasting. Flavourings, basically. It’s made by either hydrolysis or autolysis: Kill the yeast, filter off the cell walls and the contents of the yeast cells are the “yeast extract”.

Citric acid from sugar beet again requires extensive refinement to filter off the vegetable matter and the sugar. Artificial citric acid is much purer, as is citric acid from citrus sources – Sugar beet is just far cheaper.

Finally, black pepper extract. This is probably some piperine or some concentrate of it. Piperine is the slightly toxic chemical in black pepper that gives them their characteristic heat. This is used because it’s dirt cheap and means that less actual black pepper is needed to give it the same hot taste. It’s a cost-cutting measure, that’s all.

On the back of the pack are even more bold statements:

We don’t add MSG

Yes you do. What on earth do you think’s in that yeast extract? Yep, the exact reason you’re even using yeast extract – Because it contains huge amounts of MSG and that’s a flavour you just can’t get any other way.

We never use artificial flavours or colours

Calling cultured, processed and refined yeast “natural” is rather like calling a steel bar natural just because the iron ore was. Yep, that’s a flavouring.

We don’t use hydrogenated fat

I’m sure you don’t use diamonds either. Why are you telling us this? Hydrogenated fats would be unsuitable anyway!

We know the origin of all our ingredients

So what? As long as they meet quality standards, does it matter if they come from Surrey or Scotland? Better yet, why aren’t you telling us the origins?

We only use sunflower oil

Because it’s cheaper than the other suitable oil, olive oil.

The colour of our chips is determined by natural sugars in the potatoes we use

Same with everyone else’s.

Exactly how abstracted from nature do we need to get before something becomes artificial? Kettle Foods seems to think that drying, washing with solvent, filtering off the solvent and all different kinds of refinement means the resulting chemicals are still “natural”? Indeed, processing potato feedstock until it no longer contains any naturally occuring components means the end product is still natural?

By that logic, a car is perfectly natural. The aluminium came from natural bauxite, the steel from natural iron ores, the plastics from natural oil.

After being published in Lancet in 1998, Dr Andrew Wakefield caused one of the biggest health scares in years. His finding was that the MMR vaccination was closely correlated with, even caused, autism spectrum disorders.

It causes vaccination takeup rates to plummet and caused the deaths of hundreds of children from easily preventable diseases.

Dr. Wakefield failed to disclose that he was being paid by lawyers looking for someone to blame autism on, failed to disclose that he’d paid children £5 at a birthday party for blood samples (hardly clinical accuracy or professional integrity) and carried out invasive tests on children “against their best clinical interest”. The General Medical Council ruling that Wakefield had acted with “callous disregard for any pain they might suffer” and considered the case proven on both counts in a ruling made public yesterday (27th Jan).

As the medical world geared itself up for another ‘thalidomide’ type case in 1999, researchers around the world started to discover that they weren’t able to reproduce Dr. Wakefield’s results. If there was a link between MMR and autism, they couldn’t find it. Nobody could. Only Dr. Wakefield and the lawyers paying him were able to find a link. How surprising is that?

After numerous independent doctors called into question Wakefield’s study, Lancet came out and admitted it didn’t meet standards of integrity and accuracy and should never have been published. Lancet’s reputation took quite a beating in the aftermath.

Even a newspaper got in on the story, The Times of London, bringing up clinical abuses and inconsistencies in the way Wakefield had conducted the study and demanding he be held to trial for it.

The end seems in sight for the corrupt doctor’s career, as he seems certain to be struck off by the General Medical Council as the two and half year investigation draws to a close, with a verdict of “serious professional misconduct” being almost predetermined at this point.

In this case, it was greedy lawyers who bought off a corrupt doctor, but it wasn’t just the lawyers. Wakefield also had financial interest in a company who was trying to market an alternative to the MMR vaccine. However, the alternative vaccine was less effective and hadn’t been adopted anywhere. If Wakefield could discredit MMR, then he stood to make a fortune. The end result of their greed has been dead babies.

In the end, science roots out bad eggs due to its distributed, competitive and independent nature. But there’ll always be bad eggs in science or any field of human endeavour. Ill-informed or outright ignorant parents are just as much to blame, however.

Jim McCormick, director of the company ATSC, was yesterday (Friday 23rd) arrested on suspicion of fraud by misrepresentation.

For around £30,000, he would sell you an “explosives detector” (Iraq spent about £52 million on them) which worked using the “body’s own static electricity” for power. The device had a wand on a loose hinge and “detector cards” would slot into the base to make it detect different things, in ATSC’s claims anything from TNT to semtex to elephants with the ADE-651 (the device in question). I didn’t make that last one up.

Except that BBC’s Newsnight got hold of one of the cards, one for TNT, and had it analysed. It turned out to be nothing more than a simple retail anti-theft tag. In essence, the device is a dowsing rod, which have never been shown to work any better than dumb chance in any trial. Iraq has ordered an investigation, the UK has banned their export and Mr McCormick is looking at time behind bars.

I’d like to know what the hell Iraq was thinking of? The FBI had had warnings out since 1995 not to use “bogus explosives detectors”, the ADE-651 had never passed a single effectiveness test and James Randi offered McCormick his $1 million USD prize for proof of paranormal power should the ADE-651 pass a controlled effectiveness trial.

All the warning signs were there, yet Iraq still blew £52 million on a piece of plastic, a few clothes tags and a bent coathanger which was even claimed by its own vendors to operate in a “non-scientific” way.

Two more members of the ACMD have resigned over political interference in the scientific process. Alan Johnson, Home Secretary, is increasingly in an ever more beleagured position after his blundering reaction to Prof. Nutt has disturbed a hornet’s nest.

But that’s not why this post is here. This post is for the most hilarious, backwards, reality-denying piece of “journalism” I’ve ever read. Yes, it’s the Daily Mail.

Go on, read it.

It essentially boils down to “The problem with science is that it’s based on facts”.

At no point does the Daily Mail tell us why we shouldn’t trust facts, indeed about half way down it Godwins itself by pointing out that the Nazis used facts too.

So then, Daily Mail, if we are not to use facts, then what are we to use? Hunches? Wild guesses? Chicken entrails?

Do people really fall for this blatant propoganda?

As many of you are no doubt aware, the former Home Secretary, one highly oppressive woman by the name of Jacqui “That’s Terrorism!” Smith upgraded cannabis from its class C (lowest class) to class B last year, as well as upgrading ecstacy from class B to class A. Say what you like about ecstacy, but is it really in the same category as heroin and methamphetamine? As well as creating new offences at a record-breaking rate, against police advice, she also went against medical and scientific advice withe cannabis upgrade.

Now, head of the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a Professor David Nutt, has spoken out against the Government’s stance. In a scathing lecture, he revealed how ministers had deliberately distorted evidence, ignored hard facts and fallen for the “skunk scare”, where a “highly potent” form of cannabis was rumoured to cause mental illness.

In truth, the “highly potent” cannabis had been available two decades or more (it was commonplace and overwhelmingly more common than other forms when I was 15, I’m now 28) and all evidence – the Government’s own figures included – shows that from its introduction in the late 1970s to proliferation throughout the 1980s and later had actually seen a small decline in schizophrenia.

to prevent one episode of schizophrenia, we would need to stop about 5,000 men aged 20 to 25 years from ever using the drug
- Professor Nutt

Yes, you read the good professor right. One in five thousand. On a per-capita basis (so that alcohol and tobacco are not hopelessly skewed upwards by their ubiquity), this makes cannabis about eighty times less harmful than cigarettes and about equal to alcohol. The problem which Nutt also explored was that of correlation not equalling causation. In many “cannabis linked” schizophrenia cases, the patient had a genetic pre-disposition to mental illness. It could be that people who are prone to anxeity, schizophrenia and so on are also more likely to use cannabis as a result of those mental conditions.

Those using cannabis frequently, according to just one study which is cherry-picked here as to be most negative to cannabis use, were 40% more likely than the general population to develop psychotic conditions. Another study I have to hand here shows that art and music students at two universities are 52% more likely than the general population to develop mental illnesses. Does studying art cause mental conditions, or are those predisposed to mental problems drawn to art?

At least I hope the Home Office doesn’t read this blog. If they did, we’d see arts and music banned from universities and the professors imprisoned.

Many food manufacturers are now prominently displaying “low”, “medium” or “high” glycemic index on their labelling and saying that low “GI”, “Gi” (g-ee) is better and makes you feel fuller for longer. For example, the text that Tesco uses is:

Low to medium GI foods help you feel fuller for longer.

Is there some truth to the marketing or is it yet another passing craze?

Glycemic index is a measure of the insulin response to a food and was originally important to diabetics and those treating diabetes. It’s all about carbohydrates, the body’s primary energy supply (unless you’re on a suicide-diet, such as Atkins), which are long chains of various sugars, usually glucose, fructose and lactose. A food with a high GI releases sugars into the blood faster and so provokes a greater insulin response. Part of appetite is blood sugar level, so a steady and slow release of carbohydrate is better, right?

Now it’s very important to note that foods high in carbohydrates (even simple sugars such as fruit) may well have quite a low GI because they tend to be acidic, the presence of acid in the food will lower the GI by making the sugars more difficult to absorb. Also foods very low in carbohydrates (meats, etc.) will have a low GI, but will not make one feel fuller for longer, as they have little effect on blood sugar chemistry.

Complicating things further, GI is a calibrated scale, so needs a fixed point of reference. Manufacturers disagree on what to use as a reference, some using white bread, some using glucose. If using glucose, then a GI of 100 is the highest possible, because 100 is glucose and nothing has a higher GI than the simplest of sugars. If using white bread as the 100 point, then glucose is about 145, which complicates things. This means that labels are usually relative as “high”, “medium” or “low”.

Diabetics should avoid high GI foods, but what about everyone else? What harm could a bit of sugar have? Well, it turns out quite a lot. The blood sugar spikes after a meal cause some stress to the body, both by oxidative and insulinic means, so a smaller spike with a longer release lowers the stress. This is associated in many studies with a considerably lower risk of coronary heart disease and type-2 diabetes.

So have we finally found a food-fad with a bit of truth? Not so fast. All food-fads start off with a little truth taken either out of context or out of proportion and this one is no different.

The GI’s effect on blood sugar is modulated from one person to the next by insulin and how well the person responds with insulin. Diabetics respond very poorly (this is why they’re diabetic!) and is only one extreme of an entire spectrum. GI added to insulin response gives the glycemic response (GR), which has the real benefits…

…But with many caveats. Your GR varies wildly over the course of a day and from one day to the next. It depends on your level of activity, your weight (overweight people have extremely poor GR, overweight diabetics have almost no GR worth mentioning) and foods with a low GI may actually contain huge amounts of carbohydrates, such as fruit, which has a terrible effect on blood sugar for much longer. For example, a fillet of fish has a low GI because it has very little carbohydrate. An orange has a low GI because it digests slowly. These two foods have extremely different effects on blood sugar levels, the fish will raise blood sugar very little, but the orange will raise it and keep it high for hours.

There’s demonstrably much more benefit from consuming carbohydrates in a controlled manner rather than using a poorly dimensioned measure which gives only a quarter of the story. It’s better to go low calorie than low GI. Rather than work around a poor glycemic response, it’s better to improve the response to begin with. Well exercised people of a healthy weight have the best glycemic responses and will benefit the least from lower GI food. Poorly exercised people of unheathy weights will benefit best from getting off their backsides and eating less burgers, not from eating low GI food.

The end result is that unless you’re diabetic then GI numbers or ratings are misleading at worst and meaningless at best.

It’s August in 2090. You sit on your patio enjoying a glass of 2054 Derbyshire vintage, widely regarded as some of the best wine in the world after southern France became too hot to grow grapevines. While you would prefer a Cornwall champagne, it’s best to be prudent with one’s finances. The Sun is beating down from a clear blue sky as you read a report on the recent wildfires consuming the North Yorkshire moors. The Government’s bungling this year’s malaria outbreak, you notice from another report; 1,700 cases, up 4% from last year. Scandalous!

Why don’t people just not go to the malarial swamps of Norfolk? What’s there to see, a few century old ruins of cities and the Ipswitch Ruin Visitor Centre?

You go back inside after ten minutes, there’s only so much of the 45 degree heat one can take, even with a cool wine. The hum of the airconditioner takes some getting used to, though.

Your children arrive home from school after being on a visit to a museum. “Dad,” one of them calls, “Did we really used to have white bears? They look so funny!”

You reply that they didn’t live around here, but in the Arctic.

“The Arctic?” The child gives you a puzzled look. “Bears don’t live in the sea.”

You tell him that the Arctic used to be all ice, all year round. The child shoots you one of his grins and says “Dad, you’re so silly.”

Does all this come out of some crazy futuristic sci-fi movie? Nope, it comes from the Met Office’s UK Climate Projections 2009 report.

Isn’t that some pagan thing those new-age folks make a bunch of noise about?

Well, no. It’s not. There are two meanings to it, one civil, one astronomical. I’ll do the astronomical one first. The summer solstice is simply when the sun reaches its highest in the sky, the tilt of Earth’s axis pointing directly to the sun. For this year, that time will be 05:45 UTC, June 21st. It’s the year’s longest day and, in places where the seasons aren’t lagged by seas or oceans, represents the height of summer. Of course here in Britain, the seasons are lagged by the Atlantic Ocean and we get the height of summer about a month later.

The sun will rise in the north east and set in the north west. Overnight it will never get truly dark, the northern horizon will glow as though the early stages of dawn constantly all night long because the sun just isn’t far enough below the horizon.

In civil use, it’s Fathers’ Day. It’s absolutely no coincidence that this is the longest day of the year! Fathers’ Day is held on the third Sunday in June, this being a much later Christian addition (early 20th century Unted States) which held that festivals could only be held on Sundays. This is merely the modern adaptation of the numerous summer solstice celebrations.

Not too coincidentally, Mothers’ Day, the third Sunday in some peculiar Christian festival called Lent, is almost on the Vernal Equinox and before the Christians ruined it, it was on the Vernal Equinox.

So if we start at the first equinox and run through the solstices, we have Mothers’ Day on the Vernal Equinox, Fathers’ Day on the Summer Solstice, various Harvest Festivals on the Autumnal Equinox and finally Christmas on the Winter Solstice.

Or you can just think of it as some pagan thing, that’s good too.

Now I’m no clueless amateur with Photoshop but the best artisan is always limited by the tools available. In my case, that tool is a Kodak Easyshare CX6200. Now Kodak’s consumer point and shoots aren’t exactly the greatest snappers and the Easyshare series are fairly close to the bottom. It’s a creaky old 2.0 megapixel (1600×1200) disaster.

The objective was to capture noctilucent clouds: Night time photography. This is all but impossible on a point and shoot, they simply don’t have the exposure or the sensitivity. The longest exposure it can do is half a second and the sensor is noisy as hell. A crop of a shot from the session is to the right, but brightened up a bit since this blog has a white background.

It’s a foul mess of noise and hot pixels, and while you can indeed see the clouds, it’s hardly a great image and there’s only so much you can do in Photoshop. Garbage in, garbage out. There had to be some way to give Photoshop more information about the image.

There is. Using a small mini-tripod (that’s why the hole at the bottom of your camera has threads), I placed the camera on the ground and fired off 18 shots, then covered the lens and did another. It’s imperative that the camera does not move and your subject is absolutely still.

In Photoshop, you then load the 19th (dark) image and subtract it from all the others using the Apply Image function. This removes junk added by the sensor such as hot pixels. It’s called darkfield subtraction and commonly used by amateur astronomers for exactly the same purpose.

The next step is to add all these images together. This CAN be done in Photoshop but it’d probably take forever. I use a piece of freeware called RegiStax 5 for it which has an incredibly awful interface. It adds all the images together and averages them, a process known as stacking. Noise, which is random from frame to frame, does not survive the averaging, but the detail of the image reinforces from frame to frame.

You then drop it into Photoshop, pull the curves around a bit and you get an image far better than any one shot could have been with much less noise.

There’s been a lot said lately about generating your own power at home and so it’s time to do an analysis. The average home uses about 3,500 kWh per year (purely electricity – add gas and you get to 4,500 to 5,000). One kWh is enough energy to run a device needing one kilowatt (such as a kettle or a microwave) for one hour or a device needing half a kilowatt for two hours and so on. The going rate is £0.15 per kWh.

Wind Turbines

The basic idea is spin a rotor in the wind via a gearbox to an electrical generator. £1,100 (including a 30% grant) gets you a 1,000 watt turbine (A Windsave WS1000) with a rotor length of just over four feet – quite imposing (and noisy) on a mast. They need 20 mph winds to even start and cannot operate with winds over 55 mph. Peak efficiency is usually at 40 mph. For ours, the manufacturer claims it will provide 500 kWh per year.

The average wind speed for most parts of Britain is merely 20 mph and to make matters worse, wind turbines operate at the cube of the wind speed, doubling speed gets you 3x the energy. As 20 is half of 40, most wind turbines in Britain, certainly residential, would operate at a third of their design efficiency over the course of an arbitrary length of time.

Now if we take the manufacturer’s 500 kWh figure (usually a very optimistic sum) and work out what we’d get if it were running constantly at peak efficiency:
8,760 hours in a year
Generation rate of 1 kW
Peak possible of 8,760 kWh.
Actual generation 500 kWh
Efficiency is then 5.7% which is about right for an urban or suburban area (winds are very poor due to buildings causing drag). An exposed hilly area will do substantially better, but shorten the life of the turbine accordingly. The manufacturer says the turbine is good for 10 years, so we’ll use that figure to see how much money we save.

Most people pay an average of £0.15 per kWh, so if we make 5,000 kWh over the life of the unit, we’ve made £750 worth of electricity. However, we paid £1,100 for the unit! The net loss is £350 over ten years, or £35 per year. Put another way, each kWh made by the wind turbine has cost £0.22, or 68% more than the going rate. To say that’s a bad deal is putting it lightly.

A wind turbine is just like adding £35 a year to your energy bill!

Solar Photovoltaic Panels

Solar panels have been around forever, usually living in desk calculators. They’ve gotten a bit better over the years, so let’s take a look at one. For £874 we can get a 150wp panel capable of 9.72 amps in full sunlight (at just over 15 V). An overcast day, but still bright enough for shadows, will net us just under half that, about 4 amps. Of course direct sunlight isn’t always possible (the sun moves!) and the sun is weaker when it is lower in the sky. On a partially cloudy day, many solar panels operate above their maximum rating, since clouds are brighter than blue sky, so light from the clouds and sunlight combines.

Crunching the numbers, however, shows a sad tale. 15 hours a day is too dark for a solar panel to work in Britain. For 40% of the time, we’re clouded out – I’ll assume the panel operates at 25% efficiency to account for light cloud and heavy cloud. The remaining 60% of the time I’ll consider the panel works at peak efficiency.

So, we have 8760 hours in a year, we have to subtract 5,475 of those as too dark, giving us 3,285 hours to work with. 40% of those hours are only 25% effective, so we can divide them by four to simplify the mathematics.

3285 – 1314 = 1971
1971 + (1314/4) = 2,299.5; Call it 2,300.

We have the equivalent of 2,300 hours of full sunlight over the course of a year. It’s a huge overestimate, since it doesn’t at all account for the sun being lower in winter or the panel not being able to track the sun, but it’ll do.

At 10 amps and 15V (15V DC is normal), we are back to our 150 W rating for the panel, which gives us a grand total over a year of 345 kWh. That’s even worse than our wind turbine managed and we used extremely optimistic assumptions. The solar panel would provide us with £51.75 of energy per year, so taking an ungodly seventeen years to pay back what it cost to buy, which isn’t even including price for an inverter (so you can actually use the thing!) or fitting, all of which could very easily bump the cost to beyond that of the wind turbine above. The only saving grace is that a solar panel could well last upwards of 20 years, so produding a profit of about £160 if it is not replaced.

Just for the fun of it, if this panel were in direct sunlight constantly (e.g. on a spacecraft) it would make 1,320 kWh per year or about a third of your total electricity demand for that year. It would also make £197 worth of electricity per year, so paying for itself in just four years and five months. Sadly we are yet to get personal space programmes.

A solar panel is a bit better in terms of price effectiveness than a wind turbine, even in Britain, but only in the very long term. Will you really be using the same out-dated solar panel in twenty years time? You won’t be. If we replace it ten years down the line, we’ve only made 3450 kWh out of it, working out to be £517. The solar panel over ten years has cost £357, representing almost exactly the same as the wind turbine: £35.70 more on your electric bill every year.

Solar Thermal

For £2,000 you can install a system which would provide half of your hot water. You use around a third of your total household energy budget each year for heating water, which works out to be around 4,500 kWh (electricity and gas combined) – hence 1,500 kWh per year is used to heat water.

An indirect solar water heater can provide 40% to 50% of all hot water you’ll need, so we’ll take the 50% figure – 750 kWh per year. In 2008, British Gas customers paid £0.073 per kWh of gas. 750 kWh costs, then, £54.75 (which jives well with the yearly energy that most people use to heat water of £120).

Our solar thermal heater saves us £55 (we’ll round up) per year. Or, put another way, it will take over thirty six years to pay itself back. For our ten year comparison, the solar thermal heater generates 7,500 kWh which certainly improves on the figures for wind and solar electrical, but then the thing cost us twice as much! It saved us £550, but cost us £2000 per year, resulting in a net cost of £1,450 or £145 per year. That’s awful!

You know what else can cut your energy use in half for hot water? A £12 jacket around your hot water tank. That saves the same £55 per year, but pays itself back in under three months! The same calculations done, we’d save 7,500 kWh (which costs £550) and spent just £12, a net SAVING of £53.8

Is There Hope For Us Yet?

The bottom line, then, is that you need something capable of at least 300 watts for at least 6 hours per day (1.8 kWh per day or 660 kWh per year) and costing no more than £500. Does such a thing exist?

No. Unless you can get huge amounts of subsidy (and you can’t, the best is a 30% grant, we’d need closer to 70%) then microgeneration is extremely bad fiscal sense. It isn’t “green” due to the materials used to make these things essentially going to waste, it’s basically setting twenty pound notes on fire.

Until we get systems paying themselves back in the ten year timeframe, microgeneration is a fad. A dangerous waste of resources fad.

In summary:

Method         Cost per year (10 years)
Wind           £35
Photovoltaic   £36
Solar Thermal  £145
Tank jacket    £-54