That's no way to kill an elephant

It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression.

wrote George Orwell in Shooting an Elephant

I read Orwell's essay ages ago and figured it pretty much had the elephant execution story covered. Looking back I was amazingly naive about quite how many bizarre possibilities for dispatching pachyderms existed.

1. Hanging. Erwin, Tennessee thought it was a good idea to hang Mary the elephant.

2. Electrocution. In order to show that his DC current was a great idea Edison decided to show AC was really dangerous. So he got Topsy the elephant and electrocuted her. Which is a massively dick move anyway you cut it. He also invented and sold the electric chair to execute criminals as a similar negative publicity campaign against AC current. The video he produced is here

3. Shooting. Tyke (elephant) Police fired 86 shots at Tyke, who eventually collapsed from the wounds onto a blue car and died. This video is of Tyke's attack and later shooting. I am not going to embed it as it is frankly horrifying.

4. Harpooning. Chunee "Kneeling down to the command of his trusted keeper, Chunee was hit by 152 musket balls, but refused to die. Chunee was finished off by a keeper with a harpoon or sword". Having to harpoon an elephant has to be the definition of a hard day at work.

Not execution but still weird

5. Lethal Injection of LSD. Tusko was a 14 year old who weighed 32000kg. Some scientists decided to give him enough LSD to get 3000 people off their mash. This mammoth dose killed him under two hours later. The scientific paper that came out of this mess is "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: Its effect on a Male Asiatic Elephant."

6. Lightening "Norma Jean, struck by lightning, c. 1972, during a circus parade in Oquawka, Illinois. She was buried where she died, and a marker now lies on this spot."

7. Drowning (ish). Dan Rice was a sort of PT Barnum character. He ran loads of stunts to advertise his various travelling circus events. One of these for one poor elephant was "In August 1860, Rice had Lallah Rookh swim across the Ohio River in Cincinnati, Ohio to drum up publicity for his new "Monster Show." It took her 45 minutes to swim across the river. A month later, Lallah died of a fever brought about by her swim".

While on this elephantine swimming subject my favourite theory about the Loch Ness Monster is that it was a swimming circus elephant. And once the mistake was made the circus owner used the publicity to drum up business 'In 1933 a circus promoter in the area—acting perhaps on inside information that the monster was really a big top beast—offered a rich reward for Nessie's capture'

8. Burning. In 1681 an elephant was burned to death in Dublin. How the poor creature got to Dublin at that time is difficult to imagine. But then to have your crate set on fire is just tragic. The autopsy revealed information that later helped show elephants had evolved from an aquatic animal. "An anatomical account of the elephant accidentally burnt in Dublin on Fryday, June 17 in the year 1681" is Allen Mullen's description of the autopsy

And the weirdest one, and I realise that is saying something, is not an execution of elephants but by elephants. Most of the elephants killed listed above had killed a person. But elephants were once a really common. Apparently death by Nelly was wildly popular from prehistoric times up until the late 1800s. Execution by elephant is an incredible wikipedia page, hard to extract from but worth reading through.

Because elephants are so easy to train and because an elephant standing on your head was such a gruesome way to die most south Asian countries seemed to practice it.

I do not know what the wide an varied history of death of and by elephant tells us. They are all pretty tragic tales. Recently an elephant escaped in Cork . Then later crushed one of the circus workers. It seems the same sort of issues that killed Chunee, Mary, Tyke and many people who have been killed by performing elephants still exist and that more than these historic stories is a tragedy.

Memorising Books

"All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there." Granger in Fahrenheit 451. In Fahrenheit 451 there is a group of men who memorise books because they want to preserve them if all the physical copies are burned.

This was the natural state of books before the printing press. The Iliad, the Táin Bó Cúailnge and other epic poems were designed to be memorised and recited rather than read. But what books do people memorize now? I have included the text file size to give some idea of how long the book is.

The Bible 4.2 MB
I have never heard of anyone who memorized the bible but it does seem oddly popular. A Plan For Memorizing The New Testament In 5 Years. The New testament is 996 kB in size. I have never met anyone who has memorised the bible. How many people have?

Milton: Paradise Lost John Basinger did this in his 70's. 12 books, 10565 lines and 60,000 words in 8 years. The filesize is about 495 kB.

The Qu'ran 1.1 MB People who have memorised this have a special name of Hafidh. 'The total number of hafidh and hafidhas currently alive in the world has been estimated in the tens of millions.'

'But becoming a hafiz is also believed to bring rewards in the hereafter, guaranteeing the person entrance to heaven, along with 10 other people of his choosing, provided he does not forget the verses and continues to practice Islam.'

'The children, ages 7 to 14, are full-time students, in class 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, even in the summer. But they are not studying math, science or English. Instead, they are memorizing all 6,200 verses in the Koran, a task that usually takes two to three years.'

that is three years of full time work? Over 5000 hours or over half way to Gladwell's 10000 hours theory. Presumably once you spend 5000 hours memorising the Qur'an you would spend a considerable amount of time thinking and discussing it. Which means there are millions of near genius level experts in the Qur'an in the world.

I can think of things I would rather be an expert in but it is worth considering what it is about the Qu'ran that devotes this level of commitment to it.

Mao: The Little Red Book 273kb

One of the most read books ever. It still seems remarkably popular given it was written by the man who killed the most people ever.

'Acknowledging that she had never memorized Mao's quotations, Chen Di said the indoctrination of Mao, which was still inscribed on a few school walls today, was impressed in her mind as a primary school girl.' I cannot find a figure on how many people memorized all of this book but at 900 million copies 'sold' and many of them expected to memorise large passages it must be in the millions.

The Torah: Memorizing the Jewish holy book seems to have an important place in the religion but I cannot get any figures on how many people today have done this.

Can you think of any others? Dr Seuss' 'Cat in the Hat' has probably been memorised by many adults just from reading it to their kids a thousand times.

Books designed to be memorised, like the iliad, have tricks involving characters, meter, rhyme and rhythm. I have gotten two books recommended by Josh Foer, The Book of Memory and Memory in Oral Traditions that examine these methods. So hopefully I will blog about these tricks again.

The effort people must go to to memorize a book is incredible. We can now buy books for the cost of a few hours work. Or a kindle that we can get thousands of books on gutenberg for under sixty euro. Books are 0.2% of the average Americans spending. To think that we have such a low cost per hour worked on a physical or digital book now but people will still spend thousands of hours memorizing one is amazing.

We have reached Peak Baby

When will we reach peak babies? In what year will the most children be born? I bet last night a shiny pint that we will reach peak babies in the next three years. That the most babies ever born will be in a year before 2015.

Now I accept that we could never actually know how many children will be born in the future. The bet will end when I present enough evidence to convince those I am betting with rather than with a proof. Demographics is regarded as one of the most predictable of social sciences but some possible future invention could drastically increase the number of babies. We could have brave new world style artificial wombs of some such that vastly increases the birth rate for example.

Hans Rosling the statitician tweeted recently.

I looked up the UN data on this here. In detailed indicators look in births and in select country look in world. The highest birth number in the world was 1985-1990
Period Births per year
1950-1955 97 769
1955-1960 102 894
1960-1965 110 280
1965-1970 118 200
1970-1975 121 715
1975-1980 120 676
1980-1985 129 088
1985-1990 137 207
1990-1995 134 960
1995-2000 132 473
2000-2005 131 644
2005-2010 134 072
2010-2015 135 775
2015-2020 135 396
2020-2025 133 800
2025-2030 132 452
2030-2035 131 991
2035-2040 132 099
2040-2045 131 926
2045-2050 131 127
2050-2055 129 904
2055-2060 128 785
2060-2065 127 998
2065-2070 127 402
2070-2075 126 725
2075-2080 125 823
2080-2085 124 775
2085-2090 123 753
2090-2095 122 837
2095-2100 121 992
Now it could all of a sudden rise up and any prediction for the future is unlikely to be as accurate as historical estimates. Still I think I win the bet.

This does not mean that population will drop. As we are living longer world population is still expected to grow. But it does mean we can say that Malthus was wrong. Human numbers will not grow exponentially barring some disaster.

The Kilbrittain Whale

I love weird crap. I have loads of holiday photos of my wife looking bemused outside some odd tourist destination. Here is one of my wife outside the udderly brilliant Cork Butter Museum last Sunday.

But last week I think I may have reached the Zenith of weird tourist destinations. This acme of travel strangeness is the Kilbrittain Finn whale. This specimen of the second largest species of whale is mounted in the middle of a town several kilometers inland.

How did it get here? The Channel 4 whale autopsy provides some of the answers about this poor animals beaching in 2009. Three minutes in (or 20 seconds in the video below) you see the frankly unbelievable result of a bad autopsy of a whale. Exploding entrails all over the Denmark beach is the sort of image that stays with you.

 


What this pathological investigation misses though is the Machiavellian intrigue that lead to this particular resting place for the whale. When it landed in 2009 various locals tried to make off with the 50 ton pile of putrifying Balaenoptera physalus. "Apparently, an attempt was made on Saturday night under cover of darkness to steal the jaws but their bulk proved too much for the perpetrators. "

There are stories of a beach based stand off between the communities of Kilbrittain and Courtmacsherry. "Shortly after it died two men from Courtmacsherry, also known as a drinking village with a fishing problem, approached with a chainsaw. Their plan was to saw off its head and mount the jaw bones in the village. However, they were confronted by Kilbrittain residents who told them they were claiming the carcass." Presumably at some point in these tense negotiations two large groups of adults both armed with heavy machinery both realised that they were fighting for control of several dozen tons of rotting whale carcass.

There is no simile that really can convey the logic here. No metaphor can quite sum up the Irish ability to fight over possession of something that no one would want. But if I had go for one description it would be "like a stand off over 50 tons of festering cetacean".

Now having 'won' the whale, some lads from the local abattoir spent 18 months rendering the stinking baleen bag. This year and a half long job is shown in a frankly horrifying pictographic montage beside the the spoiled beluga that now rests in the middle of Kilbrittain park.

There was a great moment on redneck roundup (as nationwide is known inside RTE) about the whale where one of the guys who spent the lifespan of a hamster hacking at the pile of rancid blubber admits they may have gotten the order of some of the bones wrong.

One thing words cannot convey is the stench coming off this attraction. Some flesh still seems to cling to the head parts resulting in an overpowering odour of death.

It was so bad we could not eat the ice-creams we brought to the park. I advise you to go see the Kilbrittain whale while it still has this stench. There is nothing like the smell of dead whale to make you wonder about what some people will go see/fight over.

Bad Taxidermy

I have had a frankly morbid interest in taxidermy since I was a child. I particularly like bad taxidermy.

My absolute favorite form of taxidermy is when naturalists in the past attempted to reconstruct animals having never seen them. The weird mistakes they made should make raise serious epistemological questions. If animals we know that are quite similar to ones we see are gotten wrong how wrong are our reconstructions of Dinosaurs? More generally miscontructed taxidermy shows how our our ignorance and presumptions can distort our world.

My competition for the best misconstructed animal is between the Horniman walrus and King Fredericks lion.

With the Horniman walrus naturalist were sent the skin of the animal. Not realising it had wrinkles just kept stuffing the skin until it bloated up like some sort of zeppelin.


And the lion of King Frederick I of Sweden in 1731 where they had no idea what a lion looked like. The reconstruction has these weird old persons false teeth and lolcat eyes.


Paris for some unknown reason has particularly excellent taxidermy using shops

1. Deyrolle on rue du Bac.
2. Aurouze which they used in Ratatouille
3. The catacombs these freaked the bejasus out of me.

While I am on the subject I also recommend 'Stuff the World' a documentary on the world taxidermy championships.

The best crap taxidermy animatronics I have seen. And it is not a big category was in Strontium in Scotland. The wildlife museum there has a tunnel you crawl through where various crap animals on rails roll toward you. Strontium was on our travel list of places elements were discovered but that is a whole other blogpost.


If you also like appalling stuffed dead animals "crappy taxidermy" blog is a goldmine. If you know of any animals stuffed by people who have never seen the animal please post it in the comments

How much is technology worth?

How much would you have to be paid to give up your mobile and your computer? How much is reading these pearls of wisdom, viewing pictures of amusing cats and forum fighting with idiots worth to you?

The brilliant Barking up the Wrong Tree blog it looks like mobiles are worth about 10% of income.

Keeping life satisfaction constant, we subsequently derive substantial GDP per capita estimates equivalent to a 10 percentage point increase in broadband and mobile phone penetration.

Median wage wage in US is about $32,000. So mobiles probably worth about 3 thousand dollars a year to the average American.

The value of the internet seems to vary from $1700 to $3800 according to this slate article

a model based on the value of people's time, ultimately estimating that Internet access is worth 2 percent of full income. Thus, they estimated the value of the welfare gain provided by the Internet ranged as high as $3,800 per person.

This means that in the 15 years that the internet and mobiles have become ubiquitous we are something like $5000 richer per year because of them.

Search Engine Deoptimization

Take a company you have a problem with

1. Imagine you hate Ryanair. I do not btw they are just an example of a company this would work on.

2. You decide you want to harm them commercially

3. You go to their terms and conditions here and see they do not allow linking to their website

"Links to this website. You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at Ryanair’s own discretion."

There is a list of other companies that do not allow linking listed here. That where I heard of this T&C clause.

4. Now spider all the websites that do link to them. This is easy to do and you now should have a list of many websites. Either from a whois or just from scraping the website get an email address for each site.

5. Send all these linking websites official looking notices that remind them that "You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair" including a link to the official Ryanair terms and conditions. You would have to be careful here. You would not claim to be Ryanair for legal reasons. You do not want to break any laws or threaten anything. Just say you are from some official sounding company "John Smith and associates business compliance coordinators" and remind them of what the companies own policies say. It is not like you are lying.

6. Watch Ryanair drop down search rankings as people delete links to them. Search rankings are mainly based on how many (and what sort of) sites link to you. As they drop down the search engine rankings they will suffer commercially. With my google of "cheap flight dublin london" Ryanair comes up as the third site. Which implies they must get a fair amount of traffic from search engines.

I think this attack should be called Search Engine Deoptimization.

What is the worst thing to know?

Knowledge is rarely a good thing but sometimes it actively reduces your quality of life. Take coffee as an example. Coffee is an accepted addiction, you cannot go around going 'Sorry I am not with it yet, I have not had my Vodka' but the same excuse for coffee is nearly mandatory as so many of us need coffee to function.

Some strange people learn about coffee though and as a result they no longer can cope with Nescafe instant. Next they notice burnt flavours and incorrect coloration in coffee shop coffees and an epic impossible quest for the 'God Shot'. Expresso starts to ruin their lives.

If you are addicted to a drug becoming snobby about that drug is a really bad idea. You don't see crackheads demanding only the finest Columbian devils dandruff in their rocks. Yet coffee addicts get themselves addicted to a drug then try and make sure they are miserable almost all the time they take the drug.

A normal coffee drinker gets a mild amount of pleasure from instant and when they go to a coffee shop get a fair amount. Someone who has gone to the trouble to learn about coffee lives in a constant state of disappointment except the rare occasions the world champion barista they have taken two hours to go to does not do something almost imperceptibly wrong.

The worst thing to know about I think is fonts. I don't even notice fonts but I have friends who can spot the bad font in a street with 100 other signs. You never hear them happy about fonts all they seem to bring is pain. The entire world just seems to become an annoyance to someone who knows how text should look.

America Is F*cked.......(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.

Do you have any nominations for things you are really better off not knowing?

Thoughts on France

Some things I noticed on a recent trip to France. None are earth shattering.

1. The Rise of the robots. The Hotels, McDonalds the Petrol Stations are all computer booths.


I can think of a few reasons for this. The French all seem to have credit cards so that makes it easier to have card run business. It also means that most shops look at you funny if you try pay with a 50 euro note.

I have heard French labour laws make hiring/firing people difficult so maybe using machines is efficient in a high labour cost country.

Eventually the same effects will happen here and many of these sorts of jobs will be automated in the next few years.

2. Desperado beer is inexplicably popular given how much good booze France has.


You see aisles of the stuff, people in queues have six packs of it. The only explanation I can think of is that wine has become stronger recently leaving a gap in the market for stronger beer. still this stuff is only 5.8% so though strongish it does not fill in the 8% light wine gap.



3. Sophie le giraffe. It is like a secret society. Parents around Ireland have been sneaking in this teething aid. Some friends smuggled back 4 for their friends. I was aware of the child minding powers of savanna ungulates. They have a series of creches here but whoever starts importing these into our homes in Ireland will make a few quid


4. "All our beef is French and Irish" Most restaurants had a sign like this displayed. This was the only non local food that was advertised as such. Our farmers tend to come across as EU sponging yokels but if Irish beef is the one food that is displayed as not French they must be doing something right.

5. An active lifestyle is encouraged which is good. There was via ferrata all over the area of the alps I was in and phone numbers to check canyoning conditions for particular rivers. I presume the French avoid getting constantly sued for this sort of fun.


Basically France is a great spot for your holidays.

How many people can pass through a tunnel?

A tragedy happened at the love parade when 19 people lost their lives. This will be investigated by professionals who will come out with detailed analysis on how this incident took place. I want to see what someone in half an hours worth of searching can say about how wide a tunnel you need to fit that number of people.

I worked as a volunteer at the special Olympics some years ago. The job mainly involved making sure spectators could get into and out of the events easily, that emergency services can easily gain access and that spectators and athletes were kept separate. The venues were not huge and the spectators were happy and sober. Still I got some impression of the kinds of things needed to ensure crowd safety at events.

I want to put a figure on how many people could safely fit through the tunnel that was the sole access point to the love parade venue. A 16 meter width is given by most media outlets.

But some say it is 30 meters wide. Most seem to put the number of people there at 1.4 million but others at only 500,000 'an event set up for 250,000 ended up with an estimated 500,000 to 1 million'.

How long does it take to get everyone into a venue? How many people an hour will try enter a venue? I do not think all 1.4m people try enter in an hour. But I would guess most people try to enter a venue in a three hour period. Each hour you could expect over 300,000 people to try and enter through the tunnel. People are unpredictable meaning that you would need to be able to have more than this safely in case loads turn up at the same time.

Who else deals with crowd volumes like this? Every few years during the Muslim Hajj there is a crowd related accident. They are building a new bridge to improve safety. There is a description of this bridge here (pdf).

the new, multi-level bridge structure which will accommodate and ease the flow of 3 million worshippers during a single daylight period. The proposed new Jamarat bridge is a superior structure formed of 4 platform levels... each of the bridge’s 4 floors is roughly 600 m-long, with variable widths (ranging from 60 m to 97 m

The engineers describe these 4 floors as at least 60 meters wide. Each 60 meters in width is supposed to handle .75 million people if scaled linearly to 16 meters that would be 200 thousand people during the day. The new Saudi bridge is designed with a much larger channel to move people than they had in Germany. Pilgrims may act differently to other crowds as they stop to perform religious ceremonies.

Another terrible crowd incident was the Hillsborough disaster where 96 people died. A quick search about football crowd safety found this document. It is a very interesting article and well worth a read

The document states
"the safety limit for crowd density is defined as 40 people in 10 square metres for a moving crowd" the tunnel at 16m wide and 100 meters long should only hold 6400 people. Walking at 38 meters per minute. 100 meters would mean it would take 156 seconds to get through the tunnel. 6400 people every 156 seconds is 147,000 in an hour. This means it would take ten hours for 1.4 million people to safely travel through.

Reuters here states
"Authorities have not yet been able to explain how exactly the tragedy happened -- near a tunnel that led to a ramp into the festival grounds. Most of the victims were found dead on the ramp and none in the tunnel, authorities said"

The football document also in Section '2.8 Wembley Complex Station' gives this equation
No. of Units of Exit Width = Number of Persons (1)
required (each width = 0.55m) Flow Rate (2) x Evacuation Time (3)

"Where number of persons (1) means the maximum number of people that could be expected to be on a platform at any time. Flow rate (2) means 40 persons per minute for escape routes incorporating stairs, and 60 persons per minute for level escape routes (without stairs). Passenger walking speeds should be assumed to be 38 metres per minute for horizontal circulation."

Using the Wembley equation above 16 meters *.55 meters means 29 people can safely span across the tunnel. 40 flow past a minute if the escape route has a stairs and 60 if it is flat. The ramp sounds like it would hinder flow in a similar way to a stairs.

Once again this is all back of the envelope and as more facts come out a much better estimate of how many people could safely negotiate the site will emerge. A reasonable estimate of the number of people who could travel through the tunnel in an hour is (tunnel width/person width)*number or people per minute * 60 minutes
which in a 16 meter wide tunnel with a stairs at the end is (16/.55)*40*60=70,000
Best case scenario with a wider tunnel and no stairs 30 meters/.55 meters *60 people *60=200,000 which is less than the expected number of people.

This calculation indicates that a cursory look at at the venue entrance would give someone grave concerns about safety for a smaller crowd than turned up on the day.

Science grows 2.5% annually why doesn't the economy?

What causes economic growth? Much of the world still lives in grinding poverty, figuring out a way to get them out of this is important. The best way seems to be for their economy to grow.

There are many theories as to what causes economic growth. The founder of Google claims
"Virtually all economic growth (in the world) was due to technological progress. I think as a society we're not really paying attention to that," Page said. "Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem."

If technological progress causes growth there should be a link between the amount of scientific progress and the amount of growth. Here is a very interesting article about the rate of the increase in scientific knowledge.

'What I found, using this simple proxy for difficulty, in each field — biology, astronomy, chemistry — was a curve with the same basic shape. In every case, the ease of discovery went down, and in every case it was a curve called an exponential decay ...[I] discovered asteroids get 2.5 percent smaller each year. So while the ease of discovery drops off quickly as early researchers pick the low-hanging fruit, it can continue to “decay” a long time, becoming slightly harder without ever quite becoming impossible"

Say science increases in the level of knowledge by 2.5% a year.

What is the rate of economic growth? 'Since 1820, world development has been much more dynamic. Per capita income rose more than eightfold, population more than fivefold.' 190 years growth 8 fold increase is a growth rate of about 1.1% per annum. Or for two specific countries the UK from 1830 to 2008 had average real GDP 1.97%. The US 1830 to 2009 real GDP of 3.62%.

Other things cause economic growth

-Demographics more people of working age means more stuff gets made.

-Institutions. The rule of law matters. If people think anything the build will be plundered off them they wont build much.

-Governments. Some ways of running a country seem to result in more economic growth than others. Communism was never that good at creating economic growth for example.

-Taxation. At a certain point if you tax people too much they wont work anymore. If you dont tax people enough you might not be able to afford schools. Knowledge of what level of taxation is beneficial to economic growth should improve over time.

-Financial innovation. By getting capital to the people who best use it financial innovation is supposed to help economic growth. If it doesn't we should not spend money bailing out investment banks.

-Foreign aid: Aid to developing countries seems to have a mild positive effect on their economic growth rate though in specific areas it seems to have a negative effect

What else can affect economic growth and how great an effect does it have?

How scared should you be of nut allergies?

The wife today was selling nuts and parents kept telling her that nuts were banned in their kids school to prevent deaths from nut allergies. How many life years are saved from banning nuts in schools versus those lost through not eating nuts?

I will look at American figures as they are available and have a large sample, which are both handy. "about 150 people die annually from serious allergic food reactions" which compares with "2,000 children drown each year" according to here. So 150 people out of the 2.5 million who die each year in America die from some food allergy. Imagine all these people had 80 years left to live. You have lost 1200 human years.

Now if you happen to be the one with the allergy you would want some reasonable precautions taken. My argument here is a guesstimate on how the over anxiety about how nuts might affect us.

“We try to relieve anxiety about nut allergy by signs saying, ‘this is a nut free zone,’ which suggests that nuts are a clear and present danger,” Dr. Christakis said. “But in doing so, we increase the anxiety.” So imagine this sort of fear of nuts made everyone stop eating nuts. How many life years would be lost? "those eating nuts daily had up to 60% fewer heart attacks than those who ate nuts less than once per month". Given four hundred and fifty thousand people die each year from heart attacks. Preventing 60% of these would be 270 000 lives. Say you only saved one year off each of these that is 270000 life years as opposed to 1200 from banning nuts. This 60% figure seems really high but other studies show massive improvements here and here says '1 ounce of nuts more than 5 times/week can result in a 25 to 39 percent reduction in coronary heart disease risk among people whose characteristics match those of the general adult U.S. population'.

Now just because people who eat nuts don't get heart attacks does not mean the nuts stop the heart attacks. But the googleable studies take this correlation versus causation problem into account. Also banning nuts in schools and telling kids they might kill people wont stop all nuts being eaten. But its not hard to imagine these warnings will severely curtail nut eating.

Not many kids have nut allergies. So a blanket ban without good reason wont save many lives. There is good evidence eating nuts is very good for your health. It is reasonable to assume telling kids nuts could kill them wont encourage them to eat them.

I think this nut fear illustrates a problem many of us have with comparing sudden risks with long term risks. For example when schools ban running by kids because they might be sued but they ignore the long term health effects of kids not exercising. There are risks everywhere but when someone wants to minimise one it is worth asking how dangerous that risk is and what consequences minimising it will have.

Eurovision Voting Fraud

Forget hanging chads in Florida. Some really important vote rigging is about to happen.

I was investigating the Eurovision Song Contest last week as a prediction problem. No really it is an area of major research into how corruption agreements implicitly develop between countries. There are papers here, here and here.

But then I saw the odds for this year and there is something really odd happening. The odds from Paddy Power are here
Azerbaijan 11/8
Germany 4/1
Israel 9/1
So Azerbaijan a country that no one can spell is hot favorite. Which would not be too suspicious if they had ever had a song that wasn't entirely made up of goats being strangled before. The singer Safura and her Drip Drop has her obvious talents on display but is there something odd going on here?

Wikipedia says

After the conclusion of 2009 Eurovision, it was reported in Belarusian media that unknown people had allegedly paid and bribed students from Belarus to vote for Azerbaijan in the contest, and had even transported them to the Belarusian-Lithuanian border in 10 buses. The cost of this alleged action was claimed to be about 55 million rubles. They purportedly voted for Azerbaijan using Belarusian SIM cards, and then received Lithuanian cards to repeat the process. The Azerbaijani entry "Always" received 10 points from Belarus and 5 points from Lithuania.

So why does an old soviet country, with a pretty dodgy political system, that is 95% Muslim want so badly to win the worlds gayest contest? Turns out its a giant fight with Armenia. There is a war going on between them using the Eurovision as a battleground. I cannot wait till they get Johnny Logan in as a peace negotiator.

The Azerbaijan state broadcaster blocked out the voting number for the 2009 Armenian entry like some corporate logos in a rap video. Then and you can only read this in a full Borat accent "in August 2009, a number of Azerbaijanis who had voted for Armenia's entry during the 2009 Contest were summoned for questioning at the Ministry of National Security in Baku, during which they were accused of being "unpatriotic" and "a potential security threat". One of those summoned, Rovshan Nasirli, said that he was told by his interrogators that they had the names and addresses of all 43 Azerbaijanis who had voted for Armenia".

What is the cause of all this? According to the over 2000 word wiki article on the "Armenia Azerbaijan relations in the Eurovision Song Contest" it is Nagorno-Karabakh an area they both claim.

So it looks like Azerbaijan are willing to buy masses of fake simcards, bus people to other countries, bribe students and track down a few dozen people who voted the 'wrong way'. I wonder what is going to happen this time now that they seem to take the eurovision seriously?

Influential Books

Marginal revolution has an article on the 'books that influenced the me most'. There is a follow up article of others lists here.

No one in these lists seems to mention the Bible. And few the Odyssey and Iliad. Aesop and the brothers Grimm also seem to be ignored. Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, little red riding hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin all come from one book. They are pretty much ubiquitious in the lives of children of my age even if they did not read the original.

Is it naive to think that these stories we heard as children probably influence our thinking far more than books read after our teenage years?

I seriously doubt there are many westeners who don't consider the three little pigs as a moral lesson more often than those from anarchy the state and utopia.

The most embarassing book most of the list writers will admit to is something by Ayn Rand which they now disown. But why is Atlas Shrugged allowable on the road to where they are but Rip Van Winkle and the works of Hans Christian Andersen's are ignored?

By most influential do we mean the book your willing to admit to that you think about while debating people? Rather than the ones that are so ingrained in our lives that they serve as a backbone to how society operates.

How much land do you drink?

Say you drink 35 liters a year of alcohol. 14 liters is the rather high amount the average Irish person does. There is a podcast here where Saul Griffith describes how due to carbon rationing in the future you will have to decide between a shower and a glass of wine each day. So the question of how much effort goes into each brew is important for the future where the amount of land and energy we consume may be heavily taxed and rationed.

What area of land do you need of a crop of apples, barley, wheat, potatoes, grapes or sugar to keep someone in booze for a year? There is a table here of the yield in terms of (kcal/sq m/year) each crop produces

Cane sugar 3500
Beet sugar 1990
Potatoes 1600
Apples 1500
Wheat, cereal 810
Corn 250
Milk 420
Beef 130

So in terms of calories per square meter Cane sugar seems to win. You do have to calculate how efficiently the calories in the crop get into alcohol in the booze you drink.

This guy tries get the alcohol out of sugar beat. "so the theoretical yield of ethanol produced is around 50%alc per weight of sugar"

Each square meter is 2000 kcal according to the earlier table. A kilo of sugar is 4000 kcal. So for 14 liters of alcohol is 28 kilos of sugar. 14 liters is what the Irish person drinks annually. So that is 56 square meters of sugar beat to keep you in (bad) booze for the year.

Now for cider.Say scrumpy is 6.5% abv then one liter of scrumpy is 65 ml of alcohol. So 14 liters is 215 liters of cider. Is that right? Does the average Irish person really drink the equivalant of a pint of scrumpy every day?

Anyway I want about 200 liters of cider which is about 400 kilos of apples. How much area of orchard do I need to get that many apples?

cider and apple juice are both about 400 calories per liter . Growing apples is 1500 kcal per square meter. I estimate 1/2 of that makes it into the juice which is 750kcal. Each liter is 400kcal so 200 liters is 80000 kcal. If a meter is 750 kcal after pressing etc then that is 106 meters squared to keep you in good alcohol for the year.

So back of the envelope it would take about 100 square meters of orchard to keep you in booze for the year.

4.5% Beer seems about 400 kcal per liter. And all grain is to be generous 75% efficient at getting out the sugars from grain. So each liter requires 533 kcal of grain very roughly. Wheat, cereal 810 kcal per square meter per year that is 2/3 of a meter square per liter of beer.
So how many liters of 4.5% beer is 14 liters of alcohol? It is about 310 liters of beer (which is a huge amount!) or back of the envelope 250 square meters of land to keep you in beer if you include malting loses.

Now wine. Each square meter grows about a kilo of grapes. As 1 acre grows about 5 tonnes according to here.

So 112 liters of wine is about 14 liters of alcohol.
3 kilos of grapes produce about 2 liters of wine from looking at various recipes. So 112 liters is about 170 kilos of grapes. So 112 liters is about 170 sq meters of vineyard. So you need about 170 square meters of grapes to keep you in booze for the year.

So in Ireland you could keep you in booze for a year of square meters you would need 56 sugar beat, 100 orchard, 250 barley and in france 170 grapes, roughly.

Drug Delivery Service

I got a pamphlet in the door today offering a drug delivery service. The drugs are advertised as bath salts and plant food. Head shops selling these legal highs have been burned down in Dublin recently so this could be a way to avoid such attacks.

Counting money across cultures

One great bit in the execrable Inglorious Basterds was where someone noticed that Germans and British people make the sign for three in different ways. I love these cultural comparisons that show how arbitrary much of what we do is. I looked at information from laces here

This is a video showing how money is counted in different countries.


How People Count Cash? - Click here for more free videos

I have heard Japanese people ring out clothes differently to the rest of the world but can find no evidence of this in spite of asking a few of them. Do you know of any other cultural differences?

Matchbox Maths Games

There is a great article here on Matches on India. No really read it.

In fact, 97% of rural households purchase matches on a monthly basis. Matches are a unique product because of their high, constant demand and low price point.Their ubiquitous presence provides fascinating insights into India's rural distribution networks, and offer potential ways to inform and interact with India's relatively untouched market.

The article then suggests using the matchboxes to spread public health messages

What if that space was used to relay information? Imagine the possibilities of spreading new health/educational information or advertising to 97% of rural families on a monthly basis. Simple pictorial designs would pique interest and accommodate India's vast differences in literacy rates and languages. Awareness of important topics such as the installation of chimneys to reduce smoke inhalation or cleaning and covering water containers to prevent stomach ailments could be spread to households across India, and potentially save lives

I would recommend selling the glamor of flushing toilets and chimneys and such rather than nagging in your images. But i do not know enough about rural Indians and their diseases to advise on what health images to provide them. There are some interesting studies on what does kill these people here.

However what if all you put on the boxes was games? Many people have a ludic philosophy of life. You see a love of games in maths nerds in particular. This love of games I believe adds a cognitive richness that aids intellectual development.

There is a great book called "everything bad is good for you". That claims the increase in IQ in recent decades is due to increased complexity in our culture. I have not studied the Flynn effect enough to be sure it is not caused by nutrition or even to be sure it is important. But I will assume it is and that intellectual challenges improve general cognitive abilities. I will go further out on a limb and claim that such improvements in cognitive abilities would aid rural Indians. Never having been a rural Indian this really is a big assumption.

So what intellectual challenges could fit on a matchbox and be read by an illiterate farmer? How about puzzles and games?

There are some face meltingly brilliant match puzzles here(pdf). Other then puzzles there are games like NIM, dots and boxes, chomp and loads of others you can play with matches. I would imagine if a brand of matches has a game on it that keeps the kids from bothering you this would be a popular feature.

So can you think of some way to explain a puzzle or the rules of a game on a matchbox without using text? Do you think it really could be useful to put mathematical games and puzzles on matchboxes?

Boy in Balloon, did the balloon have enough lift?

I love this story, it reminds me of the time myself and my dad nearly burned down the house. We made a tinfoil hot air balloon with a gas camping cooker to power it. The cooker was tipped onto the lino and the melting began. It was my mums fault for leaving us alone in the house together. In general I love these homemade balloon stories, like Larry Walters across California.

Could we have told in advance it was a haox? "Few had raised the issue of whether such a balloon could even lift off with a 50-pound kid inside, and then float the way it did"

So how big was the balloon? "Authorities said the silver balloon, 20-feet long and 5-feet high, at times reached 7,000 feet above the ground while adrift. It was found more than 90 minutes later in a field near Colorado Springs."


Then it would have a diameter of 6 meters and a height of 1.5m high. Taking the balloon as a cylinder then according to here would give it a volume of 42.5 cubic meters.



Gross Lift (Helium) = Volume (cubic meters)*1.05kg
So 42.5 * 1.05=44.625 kg lift.

Now that seems just within the bounds of possibility as the kid weights about 20 kilos and the balloon itself should be light. But could the balloon have gotten to a height of 2000 meters? There are all sorts of tables for these I might work it out later

Another site gives "Helium provides about 9.8 newtons of lift per cubic meter, at sea level and room temperature. That's enough to lift 1kg". So 20 kilos would require 20 meters squared to lift it. Same result as before.

Thanks to the best program on Television we know how many balloons it takes to lift a small child.
"It would require such a large number of balloons (3,500) to lift an average four-year-old girl of 44 pounds (20 kg) just a few feet off the ground that there is no way the myth could have happened unintentionally."

Update: Wired have an article here about how people should have realised the balloon was empty. Their estimation of the carrying capacity of the balloon is similar to mine. they point out that the balloon does not move like it has a heavy weight hanging from the bottom of it.

NAMA, how much is 54 billion euro?

Nama, the Irish governemts agency to take on bad loans, is paying 54 billion euro to buy property. How much money is that? There is a great visualisation here about how much is a trillion.

So lets picture Croke Park. Its pitch is 144.5 m x 88m. That is much bigger then a soccer or rugby pitch. A 20 euro note is 133 × 72 milimiters. So to pave Croke Park pitch with 20 euro notes requires. So that is 1087 notes long 1223 wide or 1,329,401 notes are needed to pave croke park pitch in 20 euro notes. So that is roughly 2 layers of 20 euro notes being 54 million and paving it two notes deep. A billion is a thousand million so 54 billion is 1000 times this. So 54 billion is paving Croke Park in 20 euro notes 2000 deep.

So if your looking at the game on Sunday imagine there is a 20,000 euro pile of cash on the pitch that you now owe. That is 54 billion divided among the people who pay tax. So you and the person sitting next to you owe a 2000 deep 20 euro sized chunk of the Croke Park pitch.

A comment vaguely asked how much euro coin is this? "Did you know its also enough Euros placed end to end to reach the moon". According to here a 2 euro coin has
Thickness (mm): 2.20
Weight (g): 8.50

So 27 billion 2 euro coins are needed. So in weight that is 229.5 million kilos.
"The maximum gross mass for a 20 ft (6.1 m) dry cargo container is 30,480 kg" so that is 7540 containers full of 2 euro coins.

How long would the stack be? 2.2 * 27 billion millimeters = 59 400 kilometers. Or enough to go around the earth one and a half times. But less than a fifth the distance to the moon.