How to...prevent the prevention of cancer

Well you may have heard the word about the 'tubes' several months ago about a vaccine for Human papillomavirus (HPV) and how this will lead to a reduction in cases of cervical cancer.

Well it has been recently announced here that the government intends to fund it for preteens (I remember hearing 12 year olds mentioned on the radio this morning- have not been able to find much recent information on the web to follow up this). Religious groups (mostly with "family" in the name) are up in arms about this since HPV is a sexually transmitted infection and so promotion of this vaccine, is seen (by them) as a free pass for young girls to have sex.

Mostly this ranting by religious groups is done in relation with the promotion of abstinence only sex education which has been shown in studies to not work. So unsuccessful is the idea of abstinence only sex education, that some regions have experience higher STI rates, higher teen pregnancy rates (and abortions), and most importantly lower ages of first sexual experience.

Even if the abstinence only education programs worked, that would still not be a reason for the fallacious argument being made here. Unfortunately whatever you do teens will have sex mostly when they want to rather than when you want them to, largely because they are trying to be adult and have some control over their own lives. A lot of young teens will regret experiences that that try, such as having sex, but for them to have to deal with cancer as a possible repercussion of that, when they can be protected against it, is cruel and unusual.

Now I am in agreement that young teens are not ready to have sex (in fact some older teens aren't either) it is a complex mental and emotional development issue which tends to run contrary to the physical development and urges of puberty. But what is the best way to get some one to do something - forbid them to do it, and then provide no further information.

If you are going to teach adolescents responsibility you have to give them all the information about it and let them be responsible. Teach them about safe sex practices, and tell them about the consequences and counsel them so that they know when they are ready.

So whatever high horse the religious groups are on they should get off it before they fall. Of course this would not have been a problem in the days when girls where married off at 13 (or younger), no need to worry about premarital sex then.

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How to ... disobey the second law of thermodynamics

OK well this post is very late, it was due up a week or so ago, but things have been hectic and since my laptop died working from home has become impossible, but I am endeavouring to catch my self up with these posts

Well the second law of thermodynamics (SLoT) gets quite a bum rap from all sides of the anti-science. For starters there is perpetual motion, infinite amounts of free energy, but the is also a horrible use of the SLoT as an argument about evolution.

One reason I suspect as to why SLoT is so mis-understood is that while it conveys a fairly simple physical law, when it is applied to different situations it tends to need to be stated in very different ways. To quote P.W. Bridgman

There are almost as many formulations of the second law as there have been discussions of it.

For example:

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

Heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body.

A transformation whose only final result is to convert heat, extracted from a source at constant temperature, into work, is impossible.

The first two statements are from Rudolf Clausius, and the last one from Lord Kelvin. And they are all equivalent, but generally phrased to high-light what the law means with reference to a particular situation. For example Lord Kelvin's statement above is a very mechanical one, essential stating that while we can use heat to do work we can never covert all the heat to work, so there is always some energy lost as heat.

The other difficulty with SLoT is that it is a statistical law, it is based on probability. Essential every system is in a certain state (macro-state) that is comprised of all the states of the atoms (micro-states) that make up the system. The more atom states that correspond to a particular system state then the more likely that system state is to exist. Naturally there are many more disordered (macro-) states than ordered (macro-) states, so systems will tend to wards disorder (an increase in entropy).

The big caveat to this statement is that all this applies only if you do not start adding energy to the system. In other words the law only applies to isolated systems.

So the Earth is not an isolated system, it receives a lot of energy from the sun. So the Earth and everything on it does not obey the SLoT, however if we take the Universe to be our system then this is clear isolated (it is all there is by definition) then the SLoT is obeyed.

And our magnetically levitated spinning top in the foyer of the lecture theatre next to the Physics department here will only spin perpetually if the power is plugged in other wise the interaction of the magnetic fields (and some air resistance) will cause to stop spinning and fall.

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How to ... "Design" a Car

OK so yes you may have noticed a certain anti-ID theme appearing in this series of posts, well science education is something that I take seriously, and one of the anti-science themes that is prevalent in my readings at present (such as Robyn Williams' Unintelligent Design) and hence giving me my ideas for this is ID so that is where I am going but I promise I will diversify (at some point).

I digress, this is somewhat of a response to the "Watchmaker" argument that has been put forward at various times. Essentially it states that something that complex cannot have occurred naturally and hence has to have been designed as a whole. In particular this is a response to the idea of "Irreducible Complexity" (IC) that underpins the the ID arguments.

Essentially if a car was IC then if you removed a bit of it, then it would no longer work. And this is approximately the case (well at least if you consider a very basic car model) especially if you fail to account for other uses of the components - in other words if you take away everything but a wheel you no longer have a car or anything that works as a car does but you still have a wheel which is useful in its own right - which seems to be something that has happened from the IC proponents.

So how have we designed (or perhaps evolved would be closer to the truth) a car:

• we started with the development of using trees as rollers to aid transporting heavy objects (such as one often sees in depictions of the building of the pyramids in Egypt).
• later these we modified to a pair of wheels linked by an axle and a bed on which to put things to be transported, so now the wheels stayed with the load instead of being rolled over and then moved.
• Of course something needs to move this simple cart, and we have had plenty of option in terms of man power (or slave labour) or beasts of burden (horses, oxen etc).
• Wheels are simplified so that instead of being solid wood they now consist of a rim and spokes radiating out of the centre to that rim, this reduces weight of the wheel and allows for greater speed (for example chariots).
• A two wheeled cart is not a stable platform, if left to its own devices it will tip forwards or back wards so we will add another set of wheels and now we have a stable platform that does not need to be constantly hitched to something.
• Brakes can help in the situations where you need to stop.
• In addition to being pulled wheels can also be ridden on lo and behold we have a bicycle (or at least the fore runner to a bicycle)
• Pedals and maybe some gearing might help with the riding of the bicycle as it comes towards its modern form.
• An ability to steer (normally the front wheels but rear wheel steering works too) helps you get more accurately to where you are going.
• Of course for those of you tied of pedal power or with a lame horse why not power it with a steam engine (trains and tractors are good examples of how this was done).
• If steam is not your thing then why not try the new fangled internal combustion engine.
• Multiple gearing that is easily switched between will of course help speed up travel.
• Oh and don't forget the Pneumatic tires.

And of course now you have a car - although you might want to think about adding a stereo so you can listen to your tunes, maybe 4WD for going off road, GPS for when you get lost etc etc etc.

As you can plainly see that a car did not come fully assembled in one foul swoop, but gradually evolved over thousands of years.

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How to ... sweep almost all science under the rug

In the "culture wars" with ID (intelligent design) I have always found it amusing at the big tent attempts of the IDists to encompass such a wide range of creationists into their folds.

We know that all creationists try to sweep good science under the rug by ignoring, denying or misrepresenting it, mostly in biology and related fields such as anthropology and palaeontology. But some take their anti-science to greater and greater heights, particularly YEC (young Earth creationists) who manage to be not just anti-evolution but anti-every-thing-else-in-science as well.

The YEC seems to be the most vocal proponents of ID, but why then are other groups such as OEC (old Earth creationists) backing the completely anti-science stance of YEC when they are more intellectually consistent with the rest of us?

This is something that I cannot answer, maybe some one else can for me, but what I want to look at here is just what science exactly does the YEC position deny? (WARNING: this could be a very long list) In brackets I have listed some examples of our understanding of which exactly is undermined by YEC. The ones with * are also in common with all IDists.

1. Microbiology* (antibiotic resistance)
2. Botany* (breeding plants)
3. Zoology* (breeding animals)
4. Ecology* (co-evolution of plants and animals)
5. Biochemistry* (protein synthesis)
6. Medicine* (Germ theory of Disease)
7. Anthropology* (Descent of Man)
8. Palaeontology* (fossil records) - Note that YEC also has issues with the dates of fossils
9. Chemistry/Atomic Physics* (cause of mutations in DNA and hence their effect)
10. Nuclear Physics (radiometric dating)
11. Cosmology (age of the universe)
12. Particle physics (since it goes hand in hand with cosmology)
13. Geology (formation of rocks and fossils)
14. Tectonics (the movement of tectonic plates)
15. Physical Geography (the shape of the land)

Hmmmm well I think my list is not as long as I thought it was going to be, but then again I think that I have pretty much covered the whole spectrum. And if I have forgotten anyone's speciality please tell me. I also realise that I could have made this list longer by including more specialities that I have lumped into generalities (eg medicine). And while the list is longer in the section that is ID general rather than YEC specific those YEC specific areas are rather broad.

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How to... yo yo diet

If you are at all conscious about your body, and lets face it most of us are (not as much with the guys but still), then at one point or another we have been at least tempted to try some sort of fad diet.

The idea behind most of these (apart from making lots of money for their creators) is that be eating only certain things (ie no carbs, or no fats) or eating in certain ways (only raw food) or by substituting "supplement shakes" for meals one can lose weight.

Of course there is one other method by which people often try to lose weight and that is simply by starving themselves. And it is this rather than the others that I want to focus on today.

Our bodies are wonderful mechanism - in times of plenty we store the food for times where food is rather scarce, however one other thing is that in times of scarcity our bodies will also slowdown so that the stores we have can be made to last as long as possible, this is especially useful if you do not know when more food will be available again.

So what happens when you try to lose weight by cutting calories alone:

1. Your body thinks (rightly) that it is a time of scarcity of food
2. So your metabolism slows down to conserve your food stores -fats, glycogen (stored carbs) and protein
3. Since you are still not taking in enough food to subsist, even with the reduced metabolism you body starts to burn its stores.
4. Your body is used to operating mainly of carbohydrates since these are the easiest to use so you store of these, glycogen, is used first.
5. This leads to a quick loss of a couple of kilos since the break down of glycogen releases a lot of water.
6. Once the glycogen is used up the weight loss slows, and the body now must turn to an alternate fuel.
7. The blood-brain barrier is impermeable to fats, so either that stored fats have to be broken down (a difficult task) or instead protein can be used (what actually tends to happen)
8. The primary weight loss now is muscle wastage as the proteins from the muscles are used in respiration (which is the process of releasing stored energy not the process of breathing in and out, which is a small part of the former).
9. If this continues for some time important muscles such as the heart can begin to degrade, which as you can imagine causes no end of life threatening problems.
10. If at some point you do stop fasting, you body suddenly goes into "time of plenty" mode (which it is at least relative to the fasting) in which the main aim is to restore the used body stores of energy (and of which fat is the most efficient).

Now some people go through this process and are quite pleased with their weight loss, which is why the get to step 10, unfortunately this leads them to put on weight and quite often this is more than they lost so they start again. So it becomes a bit of "Lather, Rinse, Repeat"and of course this can go on and on and on ... Hence the "yo-yo diet" moniker.

Of course the observant of you will have noted that no where did I mention using the stored fats, this is where exercise comes in to the equation, you can only burn fat through prolonged aerobic exercise - ie long and relatively slow (and steady) exercise such as jogging, swimming, and walking that sort of thing

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How to ... Get cancer from a Cellphone

The energy in individual RF (radio frequency) photons (individual photons interact with individual electrons in atoms) is far to little to cause ionisation (when the electron is completely removed from the atom) or any other known mechanism for causing cancer. So if you want to get cancer from your mobile phone or your wifi network or your microwave (outside of 24/7 use) I will outline a method as follows

1. Take your favourite RF device
2. Open up the device and remove the circuitry
3. Depending on the method of oscillation, you will need to alter the capacitance/inductance or the resistance of the oscillator circuit, or by reprogramming the chip.
4. The frequency of oscillation was probably in the range of 10 - 1000 MHz (million of cycles per seconds) this will need to be increased to 100-1000 THz (million million cycles per second) ie from radio/microwaves to visible light.
   
5. This causes an increase of photon energy by a factor of 10 million or so, enough to now ionise some matter and hence be a possible cause for cancer.
6. Put device back together and turn on.
   

OK so a lot of people have concerns about RF radiation, for the most part these fears are unfounded in science, however this does not affect those that are worried. Of course this is not mean that a mechanism may be found in which this frequencies could have a detrimental effect outside of heating.

On the note of heating, as long as the RF radiation is not continuous (ie you have breaks from having you cell phone next to you ear) then the heat rapidly dissipates and is not an issue.

If anyone wants more information about recommended limits that were discussed at the last International Union of Radio Science (URSI) General Assembly, I can provide links to abstracts etc. It was actually a very food and informative session.

Also I would like to thank Jennifer Oullette of Cocktail Party Physics for the inspiration

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How to ... Challenge a scientific theory

As an incentive to regular updates I am forcing myself to have a couple of little weekly series. And this how to guide will be one of them, it will be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek look at various issues that take my fancy, it will also be fairly brief.

In this first issue I will set up a list of rules for what to do if you want to challenge the mainstream - perhaps we could forward it to the DI (and maybe contrarians and denialists of all flavours). So any here we go...

1: Whatever you might think of the prevailing theory, you have to admit that it has become the mainstream position on its subject by virtue of explaining the data better than anything else.

2: Therefore your hypothesis should also be able to reproduce the existing data - and in most cases the existing theory will be a special (or limiting) case of your hypothesis.

3: If there should be some data (actual hard experimental data not just some objection you have) that seems to fall outside the existing theory then your hypothesis must explain this.

4: Your hypothesis must make predictions for the results of future experimental findings (preferably predictions that differ from those of the existing theory otherwise how will anyone be able to tell the difference between them).

5: After much testing by the scientific community at large if you hypothesis has accounted for all of the observed data especially that which cannot be accounted for by any other method - then and only then have you succeeded in your challenge.

NOTE: A very important thing to consider on this process is that if you have to resort to a public relations campaign to overcome your failings at any of the above steps you are automatically disqualified from the process.

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