Blessed by the Potato

At the beginning of the year, I set a few goals for myself (though I wasn’t quite brave enough to make them public on the blog). In addition to things like making progress on my thesis, I had two major goals. The first was to educate myself about money matters, and to take a more active conscious/purposeful role in monitoring and managing my portfolio. That one I have met in spades, and if anything have gone too far in dabbling in the stock market this year. I think I’ve driven off at least two regular readers because they were bored to tears over the personal finance posts.

My performance in the market has not been great. For a large part of the year I was down, but down slightly less than the major indexes (go go active management!)… until one of my holdings dropped 99% on very bad news… I’m now down 38% on the year (counting savings through the year as cash at the beginning) which is just about the same as the indexes.

The other goal was to lose weight and get in shape. My long-term goal is to get back to the weight I was at at the beginning of grad school. At the beginning of the year, I was 40 pounds over that target weight. Of course, it would be unrealistic and unhealthy to lose all that weight in a single year, so my goal for the year was to lose the first 20 pounds. Sadly, I only lost about 15, and then regained 5 so that at the end of the year, I’m just down 10 pounds. Still, that’s progress, and more importantly, I’m in much better shape than I was this time last year. My heart rate and blood pressure are down, and my stamina is up. So overall, I’m pretty happy with how the year has gone.

I’m keeping my weight loss goal at 20 lbs/year again for 2009, and that’s in the Wii fit now, so no backing down. As long as I continue to make progress I think I’ll be happy (I figure I’ve got at least three years where I can convince my self-esteem that muscle weighs more than fat).

Well, the Halloween party is over and it went off fairly well. Our neighbours’ party was much bigger than ours, and lasted longer, too, but they managed to keep things fairly well under control — we could barely hear them inside in the room closest to their house, and not at all from the bedrooms; best of all, no broken glass in the parking lot! One issue though, was public urination. At least two guys came around the fence into our parking lot to pee, and were shameless about it. One guy I saw make a bee-line for the fence, and I shouted “hey, it’s not a washroom!” and he just bashfully waddled 3 steps away and then peed anyway. Another guy came over while we were out in the parking lot, and, came around the fence, looking right at us, went pee. He was seriously just two parking spaces away, something like 10 feet, peeing. And there were girls there.

Now, as those who know me well (I mean really well) know, I understand the urge to pee sometimes frequently. That panicked, painful need to pee, whether due to a small bladder, overactive kidneys, or both. There have been several times when I’ve been stuck in traffic or out on a walk and been sorely, sorely tempted to just go out in the wild. But I don’t, because I’m civilized; I hold it until a washroom is available, I try to plan ahead, and I buy a lot of donuts I don’t really want so I can use the Tim Horton’s without guilt. Somehow though, there are a large number of guys around here who just don’t seem to care at all. There are a few alleys down Richmond here (where all the bars and clubs are) where on a weekend, those alleys will reek of piss. Walking down at prime drunk time, you’ll almost invariably see someone there, peeing, in full view of all the people walking down the street (it’s an alley, not a stall). The sidewalk will be wet with this little river that mysteriously starts six feet down the alley, springing from an apparent leak in the wall.

What could possibly possess these people, in the age where we pick up after our dogs, to just urinate in public, and to do so with so little shame? For the Halloween example, these guys were at a party in a house, a house with washrooms — how long could the line up have possibly been? And how callous do you have to be to pee on the neighbours of your hosts? While they watch? Of course, Wayfare has told me that there are much worse things they could be doing, such as breaking bottles, or breaking into our house… but relativism doesn’t make the smell go away the next morning when I have to get my car (and having my house broken into was probably better than getting mugged, but it still fucking sucked).

I don’t think I’ll ever understand that mindset, one that I think goes along with breaking bottles in the street (and my parking lot) for no reason. I don’t think my lack of comprehension is in any way a bad thing, either, but aside from tasering wayward urinators, is there any way to keep them at bay?

I picked up a new chinup bar a few weeks ago from the fitness source (? — can’t remember the exact name of the store, but it was on Doncaster across the street from Cayne’s). I had gone in there planning to buy one similar to what Netbug has: something that screwed into the doorframe, since 6 screw holes is a lot less damaging and secure than those compression-fit bars can do. The guy ended up selling me on this one though, a Forza Door Gym, $50 with a $10 off sale. It’s kind of neat: it has handholds sticking out so you can position your hands in different ways in the pull-up, and supports itself partly on the top and partly across the door frame. Chin-ups, I’m finding, are a lot harder than they used to be. I think that’s got a lot to do with the fact that I used to be 120 lbs.

I’ve put it up in the doorway through to the kitchen, which is a good place for it because it means I do a chin-up or two every time I go in for a snack (I’ve heard it said that abs are made in the kitchen, so hopefully that placement will help). It’s very picky on how thick the door frame can be though, so this is also the only doorway in the whole house that this will work on! The other doors in the house are either too wide so it’s at too much of an angle for the part that goes over the top of the door frame to be at a good angle, or the top trim pieces are too tall: notice in the pictures that on this particular doorway, the wood piece over top of the door is smaller and plainer on the kitchen side (where the chinup bar is going over the top) than on the living room side, where the bar is. The bar only fits on this one doorway and only in the one direction: that fancier wood trim piece on the living room side is too tall for the supporting piece to hook over. I think I would recommend it as a neat, very easily removable chin-up bar (though I don’t remove it since it’s high enough that I don’t fear hitting my head, and will actually use it if it’s out all the time), but you should definitely check your doorways to see if it will fit. My parents’ house, however, seemed to have a lot more doors that fit. For reference, that doorway where it does work is 7″ thick, and the top trim piece is 2.5″ tall. A doorway 9.5″ thick is too much for it to fit, and likewise a top trim piece of 6″ was too big.

Note that it is not completely damage-free: after just about a week of use, there is some damage where the ends have dug into the trim (partly due to the trim coming out at that point so it takes a lot of weight on one small spot). I don’t think that our landlord will get too pissed off about that minor damage though, and it’s still less than I’ve seen compression-fit bars do.

Not too long ago, there was a considerable political stink raised when the NRU in Chalk River went down for maintenance and was found to not have the proper emergency power supplies, etc., in place. The outage caused a significant ripple in the medical community, as the NRU provides about half of the Tc-99m used in the world, the most commonly used isotope in nuclear medicine. Indeed, it was pressure from patients and the health care community that made the government take the incredible step of over-ruling the nuclear safety watchdog.

The restart and upgrades to the NRU are really just stop-gap measures though: that reactor is a bit of a dinosaur, and due for replacement. Long in the works, the twin MAPLE reactors were supposed to be that replacement, but recently it was announced that their continued development was going to be cancelled. They had been almost completed, when it was found that their reaction characteristics were not as expected, and years of tinkering and experimenting were not able to find or fix the design flaw. For now, things will muddle on: the NRU has a license to operate until 2011 and can probably continue operating for a few years beyond that.

But the simple fact remains that Canada has no long-term plan for the supply of isotopes for nuclear medicine. And that means, essentially, that half the world doesn’t have a long-term plan for medical isotopes. One thing we can say for certain is that nuclear medicine is about to become a whole lot more expensive. All along, the costs of the NRU have not, AFAIK, been passed on to customers. Money was not being collected to fund the construction of MAPLE reactors. The Canadian government was essentially subsidizing the cost of nuclear medicine the world over. I’m all for subsidizing it in Canada, don’t get me wrong, but my understanding is that our exports of nuclear material did not fully recover the true costs (granted, including money sunk into research in the 50’s/60’s).

An alternative option for many (but not all) present nuclear medicine scans is the use of PET. PET is not currently paid for by OHIP, largely because it is seen as too expensive, even though it offers advantages for some types of imaging (e.g.: cancer). However, that cost disadvantage is partly artificial: a PET scanner requires a ~$10 Million cyclotron facility within about 2 hours of driving distance, which adds up to a fair number of cyclotrons needed across the province. However, traditional nuclear medicine requires a billion dollar+ reactor, which just happens to be subsidized by the Canadian government.

It’s hard to say at this point what the future will hold for nuclear medicine. Maybe it will get more expensive, as a private group (or another country, like the US) builds a reactor to replace the NRU, and tries to run it at a profit. Maybe it will change quite rapidly over to PET imaging if the end of the NRU is seen with no replacement in sight. Or perhaps nuclear medicine will go away, except for a small number of truly needy cases who might warrant bringing isotopes across the Atlantic.

I don’t really get it — there is a lot of fear and doubt out there about hybrid cars, a lot of people saying things to detract from the new technology. Some of it is pure bullshit, like the CNW study or the crap about the Sudbury moonscape. Some of it is selective accounting looking at the purely financial side of things, such as comparing a nicely equipped mid-sized car like a Prius to a bare-bones compact, or assuming that the price of gas won’t go up over the next 15 years, or that you’ll only own your car for 7 years at which point it will be worthless.

I can understand why some companies (cough, GM, cough) who are losing out on sales to hybrids might have an interest in sowing FUD, but I’m surprised that so many people out there seem to take it up without a second thought (how many times have I heard “oh, but the batteries will have to be replaced every 5 years”?!). Hybrids are a very promising technology and a vital step on our path to electric cars, and while rare until very recently on the ordinary streets of Canada, aren’t really all that new.

One of the latest rounds of fear-mongering focuses on the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produced by hybrid cars, getting international attention in a recent New York Times article “Fear but few Facts on Hybrid Risk” which was linked to by the Consumerist. To quote from the article:

Kent Shadwick, controller of purchasing services for the York Catholic District School Board in York, Ontario, evaluated the Toyota Prius for fleet use. Mr. Shadwick said it was tested at various speeds, and under hard braking and rapid acceleration, using a professional-quality gauss meter.

“The results that we saw were quite concerning,” he said. “We saw high levels in the vehicle for both the driver and left rear passenger, which has prompted us to explore shielding options and to consider advocating testing of different makes and models of hybrid vehicles.”

I sent a message to Kent Shadwick, asking if he’d share his data so I could see what he considered “high” and whether that was a static (DC) field or a time-varying field measured. He did respond, and promptly, but only to say that he hasn’t shared the results anywhere, and that they hired an outside company to take the measurements using a rigourous procedure. He also said that he was looking into shielding solutions.

I have to say that this is really disappointing, and I think it shows the real lack of a decent science education in the general public that the New York Times ran this piece without even being able to say what the fields are or how that compares to the geomagnetic field, let alone whether there’s any risk from that. The field, if you will forgive the pun, of bioelectromagnetics is so controversial and so lacking in standards that it means virtually nothing to have one person say that something is “concerning” without knowing what their threshold for concern is. Some people are concerned by static fields that are weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field; some aren’t concerned about static fields at all until we get beyond the MRI level. Likewise with time varying fields: some people think that virtually any exposure should be eliminated, others think nothing of using microwaves up to the point where they cause protein denaturation or other fields up to the point where they start to heat the tissue. I have no idea what Kent Shadwick might find concerning, so even if he does have a respectable position with the school board (not some random nut falling asleep at the wheel) and even if he did hire qualified people to take good measurements with the proper equipment… his “concern” is not really newsworthy to me unless I know how his threshold of concern compares to mine.

Plus all this concern about magnetic fields in hybrids is really only part of the issue.

The question asked is always about the risks — we know, for instance, that ionizing radiation is something that can cause cancer and other health issues. However, if you have a broken arm or get a nasty bump on the head, you can be sure you’re popping in for an x-ray/CT no questions asked because there is a big benefit to those diagnostic tests that far outweighs the small inherent exposure. It’s really all about risk-benefit ratios.

So for the hybrid car issue, we have the question “what are the fields?” and we don’t even have a good answer to that, from which point some people fall into hysterics (up to selling their car). The real issue is then several steps removed: the Prius may have higher magnetic field exposures than other cars, and those fields have an unknown but probably small effect on human health, and that might outweigh the positive aspects of the technology.

One example used to show that pulsed magnetic fields can effect biology is the FDA-approved bone growth stimulator. I had the pleasure last week of listening to Arthur Pilla’s (one of the inventors of the electromagnetic bone stimulator) plenary talk in San Diego. He talked about the first use of the bone stimulator on a woman who had a fractured tibia just below the knee that hadn’t healed for 9 years, despite multiple bone grafts, etc. They had this theory that an electromagnetic stimulator might be able to stimulate bone growth, but they also knew that the fields would not be restricted to just the break, and that the knee itself would also be exposed. There was a real concern that the bone might grow wildly out of control and completely fuse the knee, but since this woman’s only other option was amputation, they gave it a try. The stimulator only caused bone growth where there was a break. My point is that it’s not quite so simple to say that induced currents will have an effect on tissue; they may have an effect on some tissue some of the time.

So ok, there might be some small risk with hybrids (though probably not). On top of that the benefits have to considered (fuel efficiency, emissions, safety…) One colleague off-handedly said that even if magnetic fields cause cancer, you’d probably be better off with a Prius because you’d be exposed to less gasoline from the gas stations and escaped vapours in your garage… another possible carcinogen. To save less fuel than switching to a hybrid would net, some people will tailgate (draft) semi trucks in their blind spot. That’s a behaviour with a definite and immediate risk — not of possibly getting cancer 20 years down the road, but of getting instantly killed by a tire blowout or sudden stop with zero space for reaction time. Of course, the risk of being turned into a red smear on the pavement is not a new type of risk to drivers.

The benefits of a Prius vs. a comparable conventional car are real and material. The risks are unknown, but probably negligible. Unfortunately people have such a fear of the unknown that they can blow it out of proportion in their decision making, and focus on their fears rather than the overall picture. Back to the York Catholic District School Board: as a scientist, I was a little disappointed that he wouldn’t share his results so that I could come to my own conclusions; however, I understand why he went to the effort of measuring the fields and looking into solutions — for an individual driver, the risk-benefit ratio is pretty clear: just buy the hybrid. For a school board fleet however, there are unions to consider, and a union will fuck up a school board over a perceived threat to its drivers, whether or not that’s a real concern or a valid trade-off (after all, it’s not the union members who are saving on gas in a fleet purchase situation, so in their minds the risk-benefit works a little differently).

The title of the article was spot-on: Fear, But Few Facts.

I don’t know why there is so much misinformation and so much fear being spread about hybrids out there. I wrote Hybrid Cars: The Benefit of My Research (the 2nd link down in the static pages on the bar to the right) to try to distill some of my research over a year ago. Some of that information is starting to get out of date, but I don’t think that anyone has ever read it anyway, so I’m not sure if I should bother updating it with things like this.