News and Views

Starting January 1, 2014 it is now illegal to manufacture or import incandescent light bulbs in the US.

Actually, the law (signed by George W. Bush) doesn’t specifically state incandescents. It just sets a maximum wattage to produce a given amount of light, from 40 to 100 watt equivalents, and there are many loopholes for appliance, 3-way, reflector, rough service and decorative bulbs. There are also incandescent halogen bulbs that meet the standards, but given price, longevity and performance it probably makes more sense to go with CFL or LED bulbs for most applications.

I’ve started converting my whole house to LED bulbs, gradually replacing the incandescent and CFL bulbs as they burn out. The data I have collected over 15 years shows that CFL bulbs actually do last much longer than incandescent bulbs, and my early data shows that LEDs last at least as long (I won’t know for sure until some burn out). CFLs continue to be cheaper than LEDs, but LEDs come on instantly to full brightness, contain no mercury and I like the color better. The one advantage of CFLs is the relatively soothing ramp up in brightness in the early morning that lets my eyes adjust.

I’m sure some will complain about the “nanny state”, or government tyranny, but I think the improvements in energy conservation will be worth the inconvenience. The American Council for Energy Efficient Economy states that the average household uses 5 – 10% of their electricity for lighting, spending $50 – $150 per year, and that doesn’t include the added air conditioning costs in the summer to remove the excess heat (though admittedly some of that heat will reduce heating costs in the winter).

GE has some good information about the change here.

A recent Harris poll indicates that belief in God is steadily declining in the United States. In 2009 82% believed in God, while in 2013 it was down to 74%.

As might be expected, Republicans are significantly more likely to believe (87%) vs Democrats (72%); independents were at 70%. Belief rose from 64% for those under 35 years old, to 83% for those over 68. People in the South believed more than people in the West. Blacks were significantly more likely to believe than Whites or Hispanics. Belief steadily decreased with education: 60% of those with High School or less were “absolutely certain” there is a God, but only 37% of those with graduates degrees were so certain.

To me this decline is a welcome sign of increased rationality, but I’m sure that the religious majority will consider it a sad sign of the moral decay in the country.

I have to admit to mixed feelings about Edward Snowden. On the one hand, a government needs to keep some secrets, and betraying those secrets can cause great harm to the country. On the other hand, it looks like our government has been participating in some illegal and immoral actions, and from that perspective Snowden is doing the right thing as a whistle blower.

Whatever his intent or the morality of his actions, it certainly took a lot of courage.

After returning from Taiwan I finally signed up for new health insurance, and found the healthcare.gov website working well. I ended up buying a policy that costs about $100 more than my current policy and has a higher deductible ($5500). There’s no copay for doctors; I pay everything until I reach the deductible, then the insurance company pays 100%. This will likely end up costing us more per year, but it has the huge benefit of eliminating any pre-existing condition waivers, and eliminating the “lifetime maximum”. I did have the option to keep my current policy, but feel the extra cost is worth it to get the improved coverage. And there was also an HMO option that would have been a couple of hundred dollars cheaper, but we like our doctors and prefer a PPO plan. Anyway, Medicare is only 2 1/2 years away.

While in Taiwan we talked with Gisele’s brother, who has lived in both the US and Taiwan. He much prefers healthcare in Taiwan. He describes friends who have live in the US but have dual citizenship. When they have major health issues they find it cheaper and faster to buy a $1000 round trip ticket to Taiwan and get healthcare there. Waiting times for diagnostic tests and surgery are generally much shorter there, and the doctors are excellent. On the other hand, income taxes are much higher.

While we were there, Devon had some congestion problems so he went to see an ENT specialist. With no appointment, he walked into the clinic, took a number, and in about 5 minutes he was called in. 20 minutes later he walked out with medication, all for about $1, including the medication. For the rich, and for cutting edge technology I’m sure the US has the best healthcare in the world. But for most people and most situations, many other countries are far superior.

Climate change deniers like to take graphs of surface air temperatures for the last 10 years and claim that they disprove that the earth is warming. This is “cherry-picking” the data.

Look at the following graph from NASA. If you only focus on the past 10 years, you might think that things have stabilized. True, the graph has several dips, but the overall trend is upward. In 1970 you might have thought that things were stable, but in retrospect it was only a long pause. It’s like having a cool week in May and saying that the “Summer is Coming” theory is wrong.

Another problem is that this graph only shows surface air temperatures. There is a lot more to the earth than the surface air. The following graph shows ocean water heat content, which has continued to rise in the past decade. You could dishonestly show a graph starting with the outlier in 2004 and say it shows that ocean temperatures are stable, but any scientist can tell you that outliers happen. Events such as El Nino and volcano eruptions can have significant short term effects on the climate. Disregard the one high point in 2004 and the one low point in 2001 and the trend is obvious and undeniable.

And this graph shows historic arctic ice coverage, with the sudden decrease in the past century.

Here’s a graph of recent ice coverage. Note that there used to be a lot more sea ice in the arctic than antarctic. Arctic summer ice coverage in 2013 was barely half of what it was in 1998, when deniers like to say that warming stopped. Antarctic sea ice coverage has been pretty stable over the decade, and it’s not fully understood why. But the loss of total world sea ice coverage is clear.

And noting that the ice is not just decreasing in coverage, but also in thickness, here’s a graph of arctic ice volume. The jiggly up and down reflects the seasonal variation. Rather than stabilize, the rate of decrease seems to have accelerated in the past decade.

A little physics: When you have a mixture of ice and water, the temperature is going to be stable at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. As you add heat, the temperature will not change, but the ice will continue to melt into water. Only after all the ice has melted will the temperature of the mixture begin to rise. The point is that for ice to melt heat has to go in. The heat content of the system continues to increase though the temperature stays the same.

The melting of the ice caps and glaciers around the world along with ocean warming shows that total heat in the earth has continued to increase over the past decade, despite the pause in surface air temperature.

There is a strong vested interest by many corporations and industries to deny global climate change. The acceptance would lead to policies that would decrease their profits. Huge amounts of money go into climate change denial, and it’s become a popular Tea Party position. A lot of the strategy is taken right out of the 1990s Tobacco industry playbook to deny any health impact from smoking; e.g. cherry-pick the data, find the 1 or 2% in the field who disagree and push them as the real experts, and lobby lawmakers. For example, a memo was leaked from the American Petroleum Institute about a plan to “recruit a cadre of scientists … and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases.” They offered scientists $10,000, plus travel expenses to publish articles critical of climate change. Statements were taken out of context from scientists’ emails and published to imply that climate scientists were colluding to fool the public (“Climategate“). Wikipedia lists several other examples of industry and far right groups donating millions of dollars in efforts to discredit the science and influence politicians and public opinion. An example of the results of their efforts are the trumpeting of any piece of data that seems to discredit the theory, such as the recent 10-year surface temperature graph, rather than viewing the data as a whole.

Climatology is not a simple science. I trust the roughly 98% of climatologists who agree that the climate is changing more than television pundits, bloggers and columnists who know nothing more about climate than what they feel when they go outdoors, and who want to keep their corporate sponsors happy. It has nothing to do with “Left” vs. “Right”, it is about science vs. politics, reason vs. profit.

The word “malaria” comes from the Latin for “bad air”. Before the mosquito connection was discovered, people thought that the disease came from exposure to air from swamps. Black Plague in the middle ages was also thought to be caused by exposure to bad air, and the rat-flea connection was only discovered in the 19th century or later.

There are similar examples that we scoff at today, but how about the belief that exposure to cold air causes the common cold? It is commonly accepted that viruses are involved, but there is a strongly held belief that exposure to cold somehow reduces the bodies resistance to the infection or enables the transmission. How often do you hear mothers admonishing their kids to put on a coat so they don’t get sick?

We all know that colds seem to increase in the winter. One theory that the increase is because of crowding indoors during cold winter months doesn’t seem to apply to a place like Phoenix, where people are more likely to crowd indoors during the hot summer months and come outside during the pleasant winter months, yet colds are more prevalent here in the winter too.

The latest research indicates that there may be a connection between the cooling of the nasal passages and the susceptibility of being infected, though of course the virus has to be present. Research also indicates that cooling of the body in general does not seem to have an effect on the immune system, though extreme chilling of the body core itself may be an exception.

My take from this is to only wear a jacket if it truly makes me more comfortable. But of course, medical experts insist that the best way to avoid infection by rhino-virus is to frequently wash your hands, and avoid hand-eye or hand-nose contact. Breathing someone elses sneeze or kissing a sick person are also probably bad ideas, and under no circumstances should you kiss someone while they are sneezing.

It’s been almost three months since my foot surgery (September 16). Two months of extreme inactivity (minimal walking, no bike riding), and then a couple of weeks of some bike riding and three weeks of lots of walking in Taiwan. Our hotel room in Taipei was on the 12th floor (oops — 11th — no 4th floor), and I tried to take the stairs whenever I could, but it still wasn’t up to my previous level of activity.

Today for the first time in three months I played basketball, running with the younger guys. It was better than I expected, in that I haven’t lost my shooting touch. I hit the first two 3-point shots I tried, and ended up 3 for 5 from behind the line. But after a game and a half, less than an hour of playing, I was tired and my legs were weak.

But unlike before surgery, my foot didn’t hurt at all as I played. Before the surgery, I would get shooting pains in my big and second toe, but not today. After I got home my foot was aching a little and I iced it, but it looks like the surgery was worth it. The big toe is still a lot less flexible than the one on the other foot, and I hope that works out too, but even if it doesn’t I’m better off than I was.

We are back from Taiwan, as you may have inferred from my previous “Global Entry” post. Here are a few items I found interesting on the trip.

First, it was nice traveling “upper class” in what United calls “BusinessFirst”, implying that it’s between a normal Business class and a normal First class. The lie-flat beds were very nice, and we slept a lot on the trip home. I sleep a lot better on my side than on my back, but with any recliner that isn’t totally flat it’s very hard to lie on your side. These beds allowed that. Jet lag was reduced and we arrived fresher than normal. The food was also pretty good. The only complaint is that Gisele sitting by the window had to climb over me to get out when I was lying flat, and there isn’t much room to store items within reach. But I’ll take the trade-offs.

Since I switched to T-Mobile I was able to use my Android phone in Taiwan, just needing to install a SIM from the local phone company. That wouldn’t have worked with a Verizon phone, since their system is not compatible with most of the world. I paid about $15 for a month, including up to a Gig of data, which was more than I needed. It helped that I was on Wi-Fi in the hotel.

Here is a simple example of community cooperation in Taiwan. When riding the escalator, 95% of the time those who want to stand will all stand to the right, so that those who want to walk have a clear path on the left. Ever try walking up or down an escalator in the US? Unless you are the only one on it, you are almost always blocked by people standing two abreast.

(Sorry how poor the picture is — I took it from the top of the escalator just before it came to the end. But you can see the clear path for walkers.)

We took a ride on a cable car (gondola?) at Sun-Moon Lake. Devon and I found the following sign inside the car hilarious. The English just says “Keep your kid away from the window”, which is a reasonable warning, but the Chinese translates to “Watch your child, and don’t let him climb out of the window”. As if anyone would! Usually it’s the English translations that brought laughter, but this was an exception.

We spent a couple of nights at a hotel in the mountains of central Taiwan. While out for a walk in the morning I came across the largest spider web I have ever seen. It was at least 20 feet high, attached to a power line, and extended at least 20 feet wide. There were at least 50-100 large spiders on the web, varying from an inch in diameter to 4 inches or so (including legs). The following picture doesn’t quite do it justice, but you can click on it for a larger version.

We think they were golden silk orb-weavers. Wikipedia states “Species from Taiwan have been known to reach over 5 in (130 mm), legspan included, in mountainous country”. That’s where we were.

I’ll finish this rather lengthy report with a picture of the toilet in one of the hotels we stayed in. See the buttons on the panel? They control a spray of water. The left hand blue button is labeled “Stop”. The second, green button has a drawing of a butt on it, and is labeled “rear”. The third, red button has a drawing of a woman’s head and is labeled “front”. And the fourth, black and white button is just labeled stronger and weaker. I did try the green button a couple of times. Interesting, but I don’t plan on installing one in my house.

A few months ago Gisele and I signed up for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Global Entry program. On our recent trip to Taiwan we were able to use some of the benefits.

Global Entry is a program US citizens can apply for, where the CBP does a background check on the applicant, and then allows reduced security inspections when traveling.

At participating airports we can pass through reduced security checks, leaving our shoes and jackets on, though they still scan carry-on luggage and have you walk through a metal detector. Lines are generally much shorter and move faster. We were able to use this program in San Francisco on this trip, but Phoenix has only implemented this “TSA Pre-check” in some terminals and not the one we used.

The other major benefit we used on this trip is that we were able to bypass the long lines at immigration when arriving back in the US. Generally after getting off the plane, before collecting your checked luggage, you wait in a long line to be questioned and have your passport checked. The line can take a half hour or more. With Global Entry, you walk past the line to a bank of automated kiosks. Walk up, scan your passport, place your hand on a glass pane for fingerprint reading, take the printed receipt and be on your way in less than a minute. You don’t even need to fill out the customs form that they hand out on the plane — the kiosk asks the same questions.

Traveling is still not as convenient as it was pre-911, but this program sure helps.

Just before coming to Taiwan I bought a tablet computer — the Nexus 7 from Google. It’s a 7″ Android tablet. Small, but perfect for traveling.

Now here in Taiwan, I found a compatible Bluetooth keyboard, and plugged a mouse in to the USB port (this could also be Bluetooth in a future iteration) and now have a “micro book”. Smaller than a netbook, and somewhat limited, but really not bad. I am writing this post now with it. Much, much easier than using the on screen keyboard. And when I’m not using it, it folds up smaller than the tablet itself.

By the way, with T-Mobile’s new free tablet connection plan, I can use the tablet in the US and get free internet, up to 200Mb per month wherever T-Mobile has coverage (no jokes about T-Mobile’s coverage, please!). Where available it will connect with Wi-Fi as usual.

Kind of cool!