Only psychopaths kill without compunction. We have seen in the ethics of trolleyology that most 'normal' people are content to do utilitarian maths [killing one person to save five] if they can do this by pulling a lever to switch the run-away trolley to the other line. But far fewer are prepared to seize a fat chap by the lapels and heave him over the parapet to achieve the same trolley diverting solution. We should really make ourselves responsible for the consequences of our actions: it helps if we're forced to do distasteful things ourselves rather than pay someone else to do it for us. Make a total mess of a public toilet - hey, it happens to the loosest of us - but don't walk away from it expecting the poor [minimum wage poor] janitor to tidy it up. That's the difference between being an adult and an incontinent infant. Out of kindness, the adult/child rules should be bent for the sick, the demented, the dying. Being drunk doesn't count.
In 1981, Roger Fisher, a Harvard law professor had a neat idea for reducing the chance of starting WWIII. On inauguration day, an aide to the incoming President would have the nuclear codes surgically implanted next to his heart. If a Strangelove Armageddon situation developed, another aide would hand a butchers knife to The President and invite him to go get the codes. It would concentrate the President's mind on what an innocent death was about.
I was thinking along these channels because the red states in the USA are at the death penalty antics again. In particular, the state of Nebraska wishes to kill Carey Dean Moore, who was convicted of a double murder in Omaha in 1979. Jesus, Mary & Joseph that's forty years ago when Mr Moore was only a kid. Of the 15 perps who have been offed in the USA this year, the shortest time between conviction and execution is 10 years. It costs $35,000 a year to keep a body encarcerated in Nebraska each year; more for the deluxe accommodation of death-row.
Moore is scheduled to die by a lethal injection protocol Tuesday 14th August 2018 [NYT]. But now Fresenius Kabi, a German pharmaceutical company, is in court for a stay of execution: citing reputational damage if its healthcare products are used for such a foul purpose as judicial execution. Their global reputation is the provision of i.v. solutions and dialysis products. It will be their contention that the vials of potassium chloride to be used as the final step in the Nebraska dance of death, were manufactured by Fresenius. They will also claim the manufacture of the muscle relaxant atracurium. Both drugs were distributed on the strict proviso that they could only be used in healthcare. Nebraska must, therefore, have obtained their supplies in a protocol with a muddied audit trail. That is not good for reputation of the state government. STOP PRESS: the stay of execution was denied by the US District Court on Saturday 11 Aug 18 [CNN]
I've ranted before about the sciencification of the death penalty under the ludicrous hunt for a humane way to terminate a human life. As if banging up a human being in a cage for 40 years is somehow more conscionable? If you tried that on a horse, however bad-tempered, the local branch of the SPCA would be down to you pretty damn quick. That's Nebraska State Governor [L] he's a Republican, wants to keep the right to bear arms, is vehemently For the death penalty and is not above going down to the Tecumseh State Penitentiary to talk to state employees and also inmates. He seems like a man who talks the talk on correctional policy. Do you think he has it in him to cut through all this super expensive bureaucracy and legal quibbling about German reputational damage? Could he go down to death row with a butcher's knife and quickly and cleanly dispatch Mr Moore? Save the state $1,000,000!?
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query death penalty. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query death penalty. Sort by date Show all posts
Monday, 13 August 2018
Monday, 6 July 2015
Look the evidence in the eye
In deciding Glossip et al. v. Gross et al. [PDF 127 pages] on 29 June 2015, the Supreme Court has found, again, that the death penalty as currently
implemented in, say, Oklahoma is not a cruel and unusual punishment. The majority (it's 5:4 again) opinion starts with a rather ambiguous statement "Because capital punishment is constitutional, there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out". The ambiguity hinges on 'must' which could mean that allowing CP is a purely theoretic construct unless the several States and their death-techs can find a method that is also constitutionally sound OR it could be read as because CP is constitutional there has to be out there a method by which it can be carried out. It's a burden of proof thang: in the first interpretation there may not be any method of which the imagination of man can dream which is not repugnant to the Constitution.
The process is so replete with double-speak and hypocrisy that George Orwell could have written it. When Clayton Lockett was offed in April 2014, they draped his exposed genitals with a towel in the interests of [his?] 'dignity' thereby hiding a technical disaster that was going on with the IV [not] inserted into his femoral vein. Probably the draping was to protect the sensibilities of the observers - Americans are far more prudish at the exposure of [male] genitals than, say, Germans with their freikörperkultur who are easier with a sight of the uglies [cue Des Bishop]. And what are the families of the victims doing the other side of a glass wall? If the death penalty is the final sanction to tidy up people whom we don't want to have on the planet anymore than victims don't have a locus standi. And ditto with victim impact statements: you may be able to articulate your grief better than me but that doesn't make your pain worse than mine and therefore it shouldn't affect the sentencing. If doesn't affect the sentencing it has no place in court but may by all means be given on the court house steps.
The SCOTUS judgment last week hinged on whether midazolam was capable of inducing a coma so deep that the paralytic and KCl which come after, and are acknowledged to be painful and distressing, cannot be felt by the departing perp. When death by lethal injection was brought in to replace [constitutionally repugnant] hanging, electric chair and gas chamber, the drug of choice was pentobarbital, a barbiturate which seemed to do the trick. Indeed it will do the trick on its own if euthanasia is deemed desirable. Then the Danish manufacturers of Nembutal the barbiturate of choice refused to supply the drug if it was to be used for CP. So the thanatotechs, primarily in Florida, cast about and started using another class of drug: benzodiazepines in particular one called midazolam which is marketed by Hoffmann La Roche as Dormicum/Hypnovel/Versed: which should give you the consumer a clue about what are its effects. But lookit [L above], midazolam doesn't look a bit like pentobarbital! And its effects are pharmacologically quite different although perhaps superficially the same - zzzzzzz.
The law as practiced in the US, and in Ireland, is inherited from English jurisprudence which effectively descends from trial by combat. The judge and jury act as impartial listeners to arguments by the two opposing sides. The team that offers the best arguments in this 'adversarial' system is deemed to have won. There is no need to achieve such nebulous concepts justice or fairness or truth. The inequity and iniquity of this system is borne out by the fact that the deeper pockets can hire the best players on the court's stage and so Megacorp usually trounces Joe Employee. Continental systems rather have a bench of judges who try to winkle out the facts and interpret them according to their legal experience. Judges as impartial is also called into question when their individual prejudice is well known, statistically supported and predictable enough to bet on.
In the end Justice Alito claimed it was up to the poor, black, dispossessed, death row inmates to come up with a better alternative. Until then midazolam would have to do [because death row was filling faster than it could be emptied?]. The best defense of this drug of choice was so bereft of evidence that would satisfy, say, a scientist as to be a mere anecdote. According to the same source, [which shd be salt-pinched because they can't be bothered to spell midazolam/midazalom consistently] the company which bottles the drug has requested and required Oklahoma to return all their purchased supplies [R Akorn gets conscience] because it is not fit for that [fell] purpose. There is a niche market here. Surely there's a little chemical company in Tallahassee or Tulsa which is capable of making a suitable barbiturate and selling each dose for $10,000, all legal of course.
The idea, implied by Alito's reasoning, of à la carte death penalty being extended from the macabre charade of a last meal [extra fries and really big bowl of ice-cream please] is compelling. "Sheeeut, I'm not going like Clayton, Governor, I've made me a noose in the machine-shop". Then if it all goes horribly wrong, everyone can blame the victim. No surprises there.
Are you still there? This is getting drawn out . . . but I have two more end-of-life points to make from items that have been circulating on the blogosphere recently. Back in the days of the Cold War, the USSAR had to make sure that the red button wasn't pushed on a whim. A suggestion was made that the POTUS should be accompanied at all times by a personable young naval officer who had volunteered to have the Codes for Armageddon placed on a ceramic chip close to his heart: link TYWKIWDBI. Before the Supreme Leader of the Free World could wipe out the million inhabitants of Красноярск [Krasnoyarsk] he'd have to rip open the chest of a nice boy from Annapolis like an Aztec priest-king. Try a bit of judicial killing yourself Mr Justice Alito et al.? Indeed, the sanitisation of judicial killing is making it much easier to accept by civilised people. A case could be made for bringing back public executions and forbidding attendance by anyone who wants to be there. You'd get a summons like for jury duty. And yes, the same rules of engagement could apply for those of us who eat meat. If you want lamb chops you should at least once whack the sheep to qualify.
4th July was the 39th anniversary of Operation Entebbe. A week before, the PLO with help from a couple of German radicals had hijacked the Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens. They finished up in Uganda having been welcomed by Idi "Bonkers" Amin the Ugandan President. One of the passengers, an elderly Israeli woman with a UK passport called Dora Bloch, fell ill and was taken to hospital in Kampala for treatment. With extraordinary logistical efficiency and daring the Israeli Defense Forces IDF put together and executed a rescue plan which involved landing four C-130 Hercules transports in the middle of the night at Entebbe airport in a surprise attack. 100 Israeli commandos burst into the airport building where the hostages were held, shooting all the hijackers and a few dozen Ugandan soldiers who returned fire (and three hostages who stood up when told to lie down). They refueled, disabled all the MIG fighters on the ground, bundled the hostages into the planes and returned home via Kenya. The whole operation was over in less than an hour. Mrs Bloch was murdered later in her hospital bed. The humanitarian gesture had unintended and fatal consequences. There were also fatal consequences for a few hundred Kenyans who happened to be in Uganda but none of them were white, so none of them have names.
The process is so replete with double-speak and hypocrisy that George Orwell could have written it. When Clayton Lockett was offed in April 2014, they draped his exposed genitals with a towel in the interests of [his?] 'dignity' thereby hiding a technical disaster that was going on with the IV [not] inserted into his femoral vein. Probably the draping was to protect the sensibilities of the observers - Americans are far more prudish at the exposure of [male] genitals than, say, Germans with their freikörperkultur who are easier with a sight of the uglies [cue Des Bishop]. And what are the families of the victims doing the other side of a glass wall? If the death penalty is the final sanction to tidy up people whom we don't want to have on the planet anymore than victims don't have a locus standi. And ditto with victim impact statements: you may be able to articulate your grief better than me but that doesn't make your pain worse than mine and therefore it shouldn't affect the sentencing. If doesn't affect the sentencing it has no place in court but may by all means be given on the court house steps.
The law as practiced in the US, and in Ireland, is inherited from English jurisprudence which effectively descends from trial by combat. The judge and jury act as impartial listeners to arguments by the two opposing sides. The team that offers the best arguments in this 'adversarial' system is deemed to have won. There is no need to achieve such nebulous concepts justice or fairness or truth. The inequity and iniquity of this system is borne out by the fact that the deeper pockets can hire the best players on the court's stage and so Megacorp usually trounces Joe Employee. Continental systems rather have a bench of judges who try to winkle out the facts and interpret them according to their legal experience. Judges as impartial is also called into question when their individual prejudice is well known, statistically supported and predictable enough to bet on.
The idea, implied by Alito's reasoning, of à la carte death penalty being extended from the macabre charade of a last meal [extra fries and really big bowl of ice-cream please] is compelling. "Sheeeut, I'm not going like Clayton, Governor, I've made me a noose in the machine-shop". Then if it all goes horribly wrong, everyone can blame the victim. No surprises there.
Are you still there? This is getting drawn out . . . but I have two more end-of-life points to make from items that have been circulating on the blogosphere recently. Back in the days of the Cold War, the USSAR had to make sure that the red button wasn't pushed on a whim. A suggestion was made that the POTUS should be accompanied at all times by a personable young naval officer who had volunteered to have the Codes for Armageddon placed on a ceramic chip close to his heart: link TYWKIWDBI. Before the Supreme Leader of the Free World could wipe out the million inhabitants of Красноярск [Krasnoyarsk] he'd have to rip open the chest of a nice boy from Annapolis like an Aztec priest-king. Try a bit of judicial killing yourself Mr Justice Alito et al.? Indeed, the sanitisation of judicial killing is making it much easier to accept by civilised people. A case could be made for bringing back public executions and forbidding attendance by anyone who wants to be there. You'd get a summons like for jury duty. And yes, the same rules of engagement could apply for those of us who eat meat. If you want lamb chops you should at least once whack the sheep to qualify.
4th July was the 39th anniversary of Operation Entebbe. A week before, the PLO with help from a couple of German radicals had hijacked the Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens. They finished up in Uganda having been welcomed by Idi "Bonkers" Amin the Ugandan President. One of the passengers, an elderly Israeli woman with a UK passport called Dora Bloch, fell ill and was taken to hospital in Kampala for treatment. With extraordinary logistical efficiency and daring the Israeli Defense Forces IDF put together and executed a rescue plan which involved landing four C-130 Hercules transports in the middle of the night at Entebbe airport in a surprise attack. 100 Israeli commandos burst into the airport building where the hostages were held, shooting all the hijackers and a few dozen Ugandan soldiers who returned fire (and three hostages who stood up when told to lie down). They refueled, disabled all the MIG fighters on the ground, bundled the hostages into the planes and returned home via Kenya. The whole operation was over in less than an hour. Mrs Bloch was murdered later in her hospital bed. The humanitarian gesture had unintended and fatal consequences. There were also fatal consequences for a few hundred Kenyans who happened to be in Uganda but none of them were white, so none of them have names.
Saturday, 23 May 2015
Death - the final frontier
While participating passively in an amputation the other day, I reflected briefly about how anaesthesia in the sheep was not an exact science. That required that I go and find out something about it. But the idea was ringing distracting alarum bells along two threads in a disturbing skein of news from across the Pond. The Boston Marathon bombing had particular resonance for me at the time: that story has been wrapped up a few days ago with Dzokhar Tsarnaev being sentenced to death. He may hope that the federal authorities in Massachusetts make a better fist of it than Oklahoma did for Clayton Lockett [long-form article in The Atlantic] The sciencification of our lives can get a little wearing - having the right iKit to communicate is far more important than actually communicating with another person: the medium is the message. But the sciencification of death is an offense to science.
Somehow, the medical profession have managed to claim that terminal anaesthesia is nothing to do with them: they have all dressed up in medieval gowns and chanted the Hippocratic Oath "primum non nocere; primum non nocere; primum non nocere" when they got their licence to practice. So they couldn't possibly help to off the sweepings of their society. This high moral ground trembles with irony given that US medicos manage to kill between 50,000 and 100,000 of their fellow citizens each year from 'medical misadventure' aka a cock-up by Hippocrates or one of his minions. If the best teaching hospitals manage to achieve a costly adverse drug event for 2/100 of their admissions, what can be the rate in Bohunk County Hospital, Backwoods, Appalachia? If the doctors won't do executions, a different class of people must take on the task and where do they get their training? Even the US States most gung-ho for the death penalty only get through a few every year, so where is the poor thanatotech going to build up the experience? The most recent public scandal in Irish healthcare involves a statistical excess of neonatal deaths in the maternity ward in a regional hospital (Portlaoise, as you ask, but it could be any similar place). The preferred solution is to close such small throughput entities and consolidate maternity care in a few centres of excellence where the midwives and obstetricians can meet all the rare-but-challenging presentations and know what to do the next time. That seems logical from the perspective of minimising death, but is a royal pain in the tits for all the mothers and babies who will be required to deliver their babies 100km from home. Maybe that's okay: mothers-and-babies get shoved out of hospital within a very short space of time nowadays: let the unsupported uteruses fall where they may. The centres-of-excellence argument is more burdensome for long-term cancer or diabetes treatment: its hard to visit every day if it is a 200km round trip to bring tea-brack and love.
The sciencification of deathing [let us mangle the language to draw attention to the mangling of logical thought here] is being driven by a curious statement in the 8th Amendment to US constitution which they lifted from the Bill of Rights of a century earlier 1689 in England "That excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted". Somehow a high-tech solution has become synonymous with 'humane'; although we are quite happy to by-pass this with other creatures that we feel the need to terminate: from thorough-bred horses (who have the misfortune to break a leg) worth upwards of $10,000 to a 40kg spring lamb which might fetch $100 at the factory. These animals are offed with the >!klunk!< of a captive-bolt human-killer to the brain-stem. They don't feel anything for very long. In contrast Clayton Lockett took 100 minutes to die as a scarcely competent and inadequately trained technician was unable to find a vein (in the arm, the neck, the thorax or the groin) and the doctor who was there on an over-sight boondoggle wasn't able to help her either. The serial cocktail of drugs sodium thiopental [barbiturate general anaesthetic], lidocaine [local anaesthetic], midazolam [sedative], vecuronium bromide [paralytic] and finally potassium chloride [which will upset the salt balance of the cardiac muscle so badly that the heart stops] were eventually administered in sufficient quantities to kill Mr Lockett. And I should add that he was woken up and tazed more than 12 hours before he finally died so he had a whole day to reflect on his crimes. This is what passes the test for nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted in Oklahoma and 31 other States.
In 2014, 35 people were judicially killed in the USA, all by lethal injection. The average difference in age between the time of the offense and them time of retribution was 20 years with a range from 10-39 years. Dzokhar Tsarnaev is off to a secure federal holding unit where he will be confined, alone for 23 hours a day for the next several decades, in a cell 2.1m x 3.7m with a concrete bed, as his appeals work their way up and down the courts. That isn't cruell and unusuall Punishment either. Between 1972 and 1976, the US Supreme Court had declared the death penalty unconstitutional. Science has not served execution well, there is a very long list of botched executions [harrowing reading alert] since they became constitutional again in the USA in 1976.
For a nation with such a high proportion of gun-nuts, it's a wonder there isn't more active advocacy for death by firing squad, a method preferred in Utah and allowed in Oklahoma. Although the sample size is tiny (N=3 since 1976), this is the only method method that has a 100% track-record of successful administration. In the interests of 'transparency' most of the States allow journalists and even the families of victims to sit in to witness the last minutes of the perpetrator. I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers to make up a firing squad: submit CV with evidence of at least 2 dozen clean kills on deer and other large mammals? The 'paramedic' [as above, I prefer my coinage thanatotech] who terminated Mr Lockett got $600 for his pains, the firing squad might well be happy to divvy that amount up amongst themselves. Talking of money, three days ago the Irish Department of Justice released the figures for the cost of incarceration = €86,000 every year. It can't be cheaper in the US, so Justice is costing on average 20 x $90K = $1.8million before execution - and I haven't yet found out who pays the defense lawyers.
Somehow, the medical profession have managed to claim that terminal anaesthesia is nothing to do with them: they have all dressed up in medieval gowns and chanted the Hippocratic Oath "primum non nocere; primum non nocere; primum non nocere" when they got their licence to practice. So they couldn't possibly help to off the sweepings of their society. This high moral ground trembles with irony given that US medicos manage to kill between 50,000 and 100,000 of their fellow citizens each year from 'medical misadventure' aka a cock-up by Hippocrates or one of his minions. If the best teaching hospitals manage to achieve a costly adverse drug event for 2/100 of their admissions, what can be the rate in Bohunk County Hospital, Backwoods, Appalachia? If the doctors won't do executions, a different class of people must take on the task and where do they get their training? Even the US States most gung-ho for the death penalty only get through a few every year, so where is the poor thanatotech going to build up the experience? The most recent public scandal in Irish healthcare involves a statistical excess of neonatal deaths in the maternity ward in a regional hospital (Portlaoise, as you ask, but it could be any similar place). The preferred solution is to close such small throughput entities and consolidate maternity care in a few centres of excellence where the midwives and obstetricians can meet all the rare-but-challenging presentations and know what to do the next time. That seems logical from the perspective of minimising death, but is a royal pain in the tits for all the mothers and babies who will be required to deliver their babies 100km from home. Maybe that's okay: mothers-and-babies get shoved out of hospital within a very short space of time nowadays: let the unsupported uteruses fall where they may. The centres-of-excellence argument is more burdensome for long-term cancer or diabetes treatment: its hard to visit every day if it is a 200km round trip to bring tea-brack and love.
The sciencification of deathing [let us mangle the language to draw attention to the mangling of logical thought here] is being driven by a curious statement in the 8th Amendment to US constitution which they lifted from the Bill of Rights of a century earlier 1689 in England "That excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted". Somehow a high-tech solution has become synonymous with 'humane'; although we are quite happy to by-pass this with other creatures that we feel the need to terminate: from thorough-bred horses (who have the misfortune to break a leg) worth upwards of $10,000 to a 40kg spring lamb which might fetch $100 at the factory. These animals are offed with the >!klunk!< of a captive-bolt human-killer to the brain-stem. They don't feel anything for very long. In contrast Clayton Lockett took 100 minutes to die as a scarcely competent and inadequately trained technician was unable to find a vein (in the arm, the neck, the thorax or the groin) and the doctor who was there on an over-sight boondoggle wasn't able to help her either. The serial cocktail of drugs sodium thiopental [barbiturate general anaesthetic], lidocaine [local anaesthetic], midazolam [sedative], vecuronium bromide [paralytic] and finally potassium chloride [which will upset the salt balance of the cardiac muscle so badly that the heart stops] were eventually administered in sufficient quantities to kill Mr Lockett. And I should add that he was woken up and tazed more than 12 hours before he finally died so he had a whole day to reflect on his crimes. This is what passes the test for nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted in Oklahoma and 31 other States.
In 2014, 35 people were judicially killed in the USA, all by lethal injection. The average difference in age between the time of the offense and them time of retribution was 20 years with a range from 10-39 years. Dzokhar Tsarnaev is off to a secure federal holding unit where he will be confined, alone for 23 hours a day for the next several decades, in a cell 2.1m x 3.7m with a concrete bed, as his appeals work their way up and down the courts. That isn't cruell and unusuall Punishment either. Between 1972 and 1976, the US Supreme Court had declared the death penalty unconstitutional. Science has not served execution well, there is a very long list of botched executions [harrowing reading alert] since they became constitutional again in the USA in 1976.
For a nation with such a high proportion of gun-nuts, it's a wonder there isn't more active advocacy for death by firing squad, a method preferred in Utah and allowed in Oklahoma. Although the sample size is tiny (N=3 since 1976), this is the only method method that has a 100% track-record of successful administration. In the interests of 'transparency' most of the States allow journalists and even the families of victims to sit in to witness the last minutes of the perpetrator. I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers to make up a firing squad: submit CV with evidence of at least 2 dozen clean kills on deer and other large mammals? The 'paramedic' [as above, I prefer my coinage thanatotech] who terminated Mr Lockett got $600 for his pains, the firing squad might well be happy to divvy that amount up amongst themselves. Talking of money, three days ago the Irish Department of Justice released the figures for the cost of incarceration = €86,000 every year. It can't be cheaper in the US, so Justice is costing on average 20 x $90K = $1.8million before execution - and I haven't yet found out who pays the defense lawyers.
Sunday, 25 March 2018
Bits n Bobs 250318
Sunday rolls round again. this one called Palm Sunday when I was growing up in the Church of England. The week before Easter Sunday, Jesus arrived in Jerusalem a few days before Passover and this supporters spread palm fronds in the street hence Palm Sunday. If it's ever concerned you that he was crucified on Friday and rose again, 48 hours later, on the third day, worry no more. It's because the Romans counted their dates inclusively. Each of their months started = 1st with the Calends and the 8th was called Nones for the same inclusive reasons. The Ides, of March, and other months was more moveable but occurred in the middle of their 30/31 day months.
Did someone mention the death penalty? We don't put people to death in this country, not since Michael Manning was hanged on 20th April 1954. In the USA they do and they get themselves all tied in knots about the method by which they terminate their prisoners. The lawyers have a field day over it but the functionaries who actually do the deed seem to be barely competent to carry out the 'humane' method decided upon by each state. Manning was hanged 22 weeks after his arrest. In the US, people can languish on death row for 22 years, which seems intrinsically less humane than any method of judicial killing. In any case, Oklahoma have now approved a new method: asphyxiation with Nitrogen, the inert gas that makes up 80% of our atmosphere. I am a little teed off with the sciencification of the death penalty: there are plenty of quick, brutal and efficient ways of killing that don't involve science. There are also unquick, distressing and messy ways of killing that do.
Did someone mention the death penalty? We don't put people to death in this country, not since Michael Manning was hanged on 20th April 1954. In the USA they do and they get themselves all tied in knots about the method by which they terminate their prisoners. The lawyers have a field day over it but the functionaries who actually do the deed seem to be barely competent to carry out the 'humane' method decided upon by each state. Manning was hanged 22 weeks after his arrest. In the US, people can languish on death row for 22 years, which seems intrinsically less humane than any method of judicial killing. In any case, Oklahoma have now approved a new method: asphyxiation with Nitrogen, the inert gas that makes up 80% of our atmosphere. I am a little teed off with the sciencification of the death penalty: there are plenty of quick, brutal and efficient ways of killing that don't involve science. There are also unquick, distressing and messy ways of killing that do.
- We got off light with Storm Emma. Holyhead the ferryport in North Wales got hammered.
- Update on the Florida ABC bridge collapse
- An 'ot meat pie made out of 'is Dad
- Propaganda for Ireland Inc.
- Lumberjacking in the 1950s.
- Forgetfulness an animated poem by Billy Collins
- Instant shelters with Concrete Canvas Inc. "Just add water".
- Girls do science. Well at least one girl does science.
She's invented a lead Pb monitor to test the water. - Queen for the deaf - Don't stop me now in mime.
- The other day at work, I saw that the electricians had come to the end of their cable drum and asked for the discard. They make handy tables for garden tea-parties: and even look nice if you paint them. The drum never made it home because I recognised envy in the eye of a colleague who has two small boys at home, and I gave it to her. Later she sent me a photo of the lads doing rowdy boy things with their new toy. I sent her this link to an educational video about how cable drums are made.
- Interesting essay about George "AND/OR/NOT" Boole, Cork's most famous mathematician.
- A bit obsessive about fairer ways to decide who wins the Olympic Games.
- Bloboprev on Ranking Universities
- Blovoprev on aknowledgeing the limits of accuracy in Sports.
- Kodaline - Follow your fire
Tuesday, 16 June 2015
Long drop
Civilised people of the current time tend to be prissy about death and particularly about doing people to death. If we think that somebody or some animal needs to be terminated, we want this done 'humanely'. We'd like to think we've come a long way since 1209. In that year, during the Albigensian crusade, the siege of Béziers was finally ended in an assault by the Catholic army. When asked how the sacking-and-pillaging soldiers were to distinguish between the heretic Cathars and the innocent Catholics, their commander Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, replied "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" [Kill them all, for the Lord knows them that are his]. And everyone in the city was slaughtered. Today we reserve that casual 100% solution to cattle, especially in the face of foot&mouth, TB or BSE, in our crusade for more hamburger. We don't go wholesale at people with a captive-bolt humane killer because that wouldn't be humane . . . except for race-horses and crippled sheep and animals in the chute on the way into the abattoir.
I've recently deprecated the sciencification of the death penalty in Oklahoma and other US states and suggested that the American justice system might build on one of the country's strengths and use a firing squad to expedite the final moments. At least that won't allow a poorly researched and hard to administer 'scientific' practice to demean science. It won't be the first time that science has been brought in to make being pushed across the Final Frontier more humane. Fade to 21 December 1821, Burrin Street, Carlow in the Irish Midlands . . .
Samuel Haughton was born just before Christmas 1821 in the family home near the bridge over the River Burrin. He was a clever young Protestant chap and in due course went to Trinity College Dublin to read Mathematics but he excelled in a quite embarrassing range of scientific subjects [R from his obituary notice]. He was indeed one of the great Victorian polymaths. He was made a Fellow of TCD almost immediately after he graduated, was Professor of Geology for 30 years, but took advantage of his easy teaching load to study medicine for his own MD and held the post of Registrar for the University Medical School. I could blog for the next two years about Sam Haughton and his contributions to science but I'll just talk about the 7th item on the list [R above]. “On hanging considered from a Mechanical and Physiological point of view.” which was published in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science in 1866, a journal that will not win prizes for the snappiest title.
Haughton wasn't the first to recognise that you could finish felons off quicker if you dropped them from a great height than if you threw a noose over a tree and hoisted the strange fruit up until their feet were no longer in contact with the ground. In his paper, Haughton offered some mathematics about kinetic and potential energy, inertia, momentum, force and foot-pounds to show that he could understand physics [not me!] but knew that hangmen across the empire, not being Fellows of TCD, would need a simple formula. He suggested to divide 2240 by the weight of the perp in pounds and use the quotient as the length of the rope in feet. This works out at 10ft 5in or a little over 3m for a man weighing 180lb = 80kg. Heavier chaps get a shorter rope and women and children need to fall further - James Short, a child of 14 was hanged in 1783 in Dublin. McCartney and Whitaker were clearly asleep at the switch when they wrote "Haughton drop is measured in feet and is the weight of the felon in ounces divided by 2240" in Physicists of Ireland: Passion and Precision. That would give 180 lb (80kg) me a drop of 14 inches (35cm) barely enough room to fit my enormous head under the gibbet.
You might well ask why 2240 should be used in the equation - why not 2000? It's because 2240 is the number of pounds [lb] in an imperial ton of 20 hundredweight [cwt] each of 8 stone [st] each of 14 pounds [lb] . . . each of 16 ounces [oz]. Haughton wanted to keep it simple as the Imperial system of weights and measures construed 'simple'.
Haughton's paper was widely read (at least in London, Edinburgh and Dublin) and two years later Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868 was passed which required that all executions were to be carried out within the ground of prisons rather than as a raree show outside. Out of sight put out of mind the disposal of the undesirable elements of society and so allowed the death penalty to be employed for another 100 years on these islands. The first 'private' execution after the Act was carried out in Dublin on Andrew Carr. The local hangman, against advice suggesting 8ft, thought that Andrew Carr needed 14ft to die quickly. Mr Carr's head was ripped from his body which made a bloody mess of the proceedings. But those Utah firing squads must also take a bit of clean up.
No harm in a bit of gallows humour. The official executioner for about 20 years after 1868 was an ex-cobbler called Marwood which allowed for the riddle:
I've recently deprecated the sciencification of the death penalty in Oklahoma and other US states and suggested that the American justice system might build on one of the country's strengths and use a firing squad to expedite the final moments. At least that won't allow a poorly researched and hard to administer 'scientific' practice to demean science. It won't be the first time that science has been brought in to make being pushed across the Final Frontier more humane. Fade to 21 December 1821, Burrin Street, Carlow in the Irish Midlands . . .
Haughton wasn't the first to recognise that you could finish felons off quicker if you dropped them from a great height than if you threw a noose over a tree and hoisted the strange fruit up until their feet were no longer in contact with the ground. In his paper, Haughton offered some mathematics about kinetic and potential energy, inertia, momentum, force and foot-pounds to show that he could understand physics [not me!] but knew that hangmen across the empire, not being Fellows of TCD, would need a simple formula. He suggested to divide 2240 by the weight of the perp in pounds and use the quotient as the length of the rope in feet. This works out at 10ft 5in or a little over 3m for a man weighing 180lb = 80kg. Heavier chaps get a shorter rope and women and children need to fall further - James Short, a child of 14 was hanged in 1783 in Dublin. McCartney and Whitaker were clearly asleep at the switch when they wrote "Haughton drop is measured in feet and is the weight of the felon in ounces divided by 2240" in Physicists of Ireland: Passion and Precision. That would give 180 lb (80kg) me a drop of 14 inches (35cm) barely enough room to fit my enormous head under the gibbet.
You might well ask why 2240 should be used in the equation - why not 2000? It's because 2240 is the number of pounds [lb] in an imperial ton of 20 hundredweight [cwt] each of 8 stone [st] each of 14 pounds [lb] . . . each of 16 ounces [oz]. Haughton wanted to keep it simple as the Imperial system of weights and measures construed 'simple'.
Haughton's paper was widely read (at least in London, Edinburgh and Dublin) and two years later Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868 was passed which required that all executions were to be carried out within the ground of prisons rather than as a raree show outside. Out of sight put out of mind the disposal of the undesirable elements of society and so allowed the death penalty to be employed for another 100 years on these islands. The first 'private' execution after the Act was carried out in Dublin on Andrew Carr. The local hangman, against advice suggesting 8ft, thought that Andrew Carr needed 14ft to die quickly. Mr Carr's head was ripped from his body which made a bloody mess of the proceedings. But those Utah firing squads must also take a bit of clean up.
No harm in a bit of gallows humour. The official executioner for about 20 years after 1868 was an ex-cobbler called Marwood which allowed for the riddle:
"If Pa killed Ma, who'd kill Pa? Marwood!"
Marwood is credited with the practice of putting the knot of the noose just under the left ear and he maintained that jerking the head sharply to the right was more effectual to the killing than the length of the drop. Execution is not tidy but I don't see how hanging is less 'humane' than what they did to Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.
Wednesday, 13 August 2014
Cruel and too usual punishment
Hello readers from far-flung parts of the globe. Do they still tolerate judicial killing where you live?
13 August 1964 marked the end of that era in the Western European Archipelago WEA. Fifty years ago was our last outing for capital punishment. At 0800hrs on the morning of that day, two rather inept murderers Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen were hanged simultaneously one in Liverpool and the other in Manchester. The last execution in the Republic of Ireland had occurred 10 years earlier; the Irish authorities had to borrow a hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, from the UK. Pierrepoint officiated at the end of 450 people over his 20 year career. But after he retired there were so few hangings in either country that there wasn't enough work for a full-time position. Harry Allen (no relation) who terminated Gwynne Evans was a bus driver and then a publican for his day job. Jock Stewart the other executioner on that day in 1964 was an airline engineer.
In Ireland, The Criminal Justice Act 1964 reduced the circumstances which allowed capital punishment to treason, murder of police or prison guards and some battlefield situations for soldiers. Charles Haughey, later controversial prime minister, was the Minister of Justice at the time. There were no cases where even these limited circumstances were deemed appropriate for judicial killing and the death penalty was abolished by the Criminal Justice Act 1990. The sky hasn't fallen. There are some who claim that the rate of murder convictions has increased significantly since 1990 but I don't think that's to do with the final abolition of the death penalty. The rate of murder held steady for 10 years after capital punishment was in practical terms abolished by the 1964 act. I think the rise to a new higher plateau in the last 20 years is more to do with internecine feuds among Dublin and Limerick drug barons than the removal of the ultimate sanction from the statute books:
from www.cso.ie. There is also evidence that murder increases when more lethal weapons are available (NRA in USA please note!) - data from:
13 August 1964 marked the end of that era in the Western European Archipelago WEA. Fifty years ago was our last outing for capital punishment. At 0800hrs on the morning of that day, two rather inept murderers Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen were hanged simultaneously one in Liverpool and the other in Manchester. The last execution in the Republic of Ireland had occurred 10 years earlier; the Irish authorities had to borrow a hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, from the UK. Pierrepoint officiated at the end of 450 people over his 20 year career. But after he retired there were so few hangings in either country that there wasn't enough work for a full-time position. Harry Allen (no relation) who terminated Gwynne Evans was a bus driver and then a publican for his day job. Jock Stewart the other executioner on that day in 1964 was an airline engineer.
In Ireland, The Criminal Justice Act 1964 reduced the circumstances which allowed capital punishment to treason, murder of police or prison guards and some battlefield situations for soldiers. Charles Haughey, later controversial prime minister, was the Minister of Justice at the time. There were no cases where even these limited circumstances were deemed appropriate for judicial killing and the death penalty was abolished by the Criminal Justice Act 1990. The sky hasn't fallen. There are some who claim that the rate of murder convictions has increased significantly since 1990 but I don't think that's to do with the final abolition of the death penalty. The rate of murder held steady for 10 years after capital punishment was in practical terms abolished by the 1964 act. I think the rise to a new higher plateau in the last 20 years is more to do with internecine feuds among Dublin and Limerick drug barons than the removal of the ultimate sanction from the statute books:
The blue trend line imposed on the graph by the Crime Council is only one way of interpreting the data. My crude green steps suggest that the availability of lethal weapons bleeding down from The Troubles in the 1970s caused a 3-fold increase in lethal violence. But with fuzzy, stochastic, small-sample data it is easy to put whatever spin you fancy on that sort of information. Capital punishment is all too common in other countries, we don't need it here. Do you, there?
Tuesday, 25 June 2013
All's fair in love and soccer
Not!
I was at a pizza cookout at Chris del Bosque's place last night and I forgot to ask him about measuring tons of timber per hectare - sorry, I promised! But there were rather a lot of blokes around the earthen pizza-oven that Chris and pals built in his yard three years ago, and the talk turned to footie. In particular a famous 1986 penalty by Zico where Brazilian effortlessly out-psyched the goal-keeper. It was part of a quarter final penalty shootout against France. It's on youtube.
In soccer, as in other sports and indeed other aspects of 'real' life, when an arbitrary decision has to be made between two opponents: who kicks off the first half, whether to play the East or West end of the pitch in that half - it is decided by tossing a coin. At the end of a game if the teams are score-equal, there is a penalty shoot-out with each team taking turns to fire a penalty from the spot 11m from the goal line. If the score is still equal after that ordeal, then the first team to score a goal wins the match. Who fires first is decided by coin-toss.
But as mathematicians Steven Brams & Zeve Sanderson point out in an article put up in May while the odds may be even at kick-off, they are definitely not even in penalty shoot-outs. The sudden death after 5 shots each is the obvious advantage. But being science trained they went off and got some data and found that the team that gets first penalty kick wins 60% of the time - that's a 60/40 = 50% advantage. That's not an arbitrary decision, so Brams and Sanderson hold that it should not be decided by coin-toss. It should rather be decided by auction. Each team bids to go first by saying that they'll take their penalties from a spot further from the goal-line to obtain the 50% advantage. The odds are then, by definition, perceived to be fair by both sides. If you think the other side has an unfair advantage you can out-bid them.
I liked that a lot. It shows that even the rock solid certainties about our world and how it ticks can yield interesting insights if you question your assumptions. The + plus magazine where I found the article is a nifty trove for all sorts of recreational math.
I was at a pizza cookout at Chris del Bosque's place last night and I forgot to ask him about measuring tons of timber per hectare - sorry, I promised! But there were rather a lot of blokes around the earthen pizza-oven that Chris and pals built in his yard three years ago, and the talk turned to footie. In particular a famous 1986 penalty by Zico where Brazilian effortlessly out-psyched the goal-keeper. It was part of a quarter final penalty shootout against France. It's on youtube.
In soccer, as in other sports and indeed other aspects of 'real' life, when an arbitrary decision has to be made between two opponents: who kicks off the first half, whether to play the East or West end of the pitch in that half - it is decided by tossing a coin. At the end of a game if the teams are score-equal, there is a penalty shoot-out with each team taking turns to fire a penalty from the spot 11m from the goal line. If the score is still equal after that ordeal, then the first team to score a goal wins the match. Who fires first is decided by coin-toss.
But as mathematicians Steven Brams & Zeve Sanderson point out in an article put up in May while the odds may be even at kick-off, they are definitely not even in penalty shoot-outs. The sudden death after 5 shots each is the obvious advantage. But being science trained they went off and got some data and found that the team that gets first penalty kick wins 60% of the time - that's a 60/40 = 50% advantage. That's not an arbitrary decision, so Brams and Sanderson hold that it should not be decided by coin-toss. It should rather be decided by auction. Each team bids to go first by saying that they'll take their penalties from a spot further from the goal-line to obtain the 50% advantage. The odds are then, by definition, perceived to be fair by both sides. If you think the other side has an unfair advantage you can out-bid them.
I liked that a lot. It shows that even the rock solid certainties about our world and how it ticks can yield interesting insights if you question your assumptions. The + plus magazine where I found the article is a nifty trove for all sorts of recreational math.
Monday, 20 February 2017
Incentives work
When I was writing last week about the middle ground of effective politics, I treated taxes as necessary to provide the infrastructure on which civilisastion depends. But there is another side of taxation: it serves as an incentive for citizens to Do Right - as that is determined by the current ethics of society. Those ethical values are not set in stone: time was when slavery and thumping children was okay but homosexuality wasn't. That's important because recognising those changes gives licence to push against our unconsidered certainties like right-to-life [the old rather than the unborn]; the desirability of depillating (female) oxters; that owning a car, a TV & a cell-phone and having access to broadband is a Right.
Every budget here in Ireland, the tax on booze and cigarettes is likely to increase. This generates enough money to pay for the armed forces, the justice system and all the zimmer frames the country currently requires. But, insofar as the cost of booze has an impact on consumption [not so much apparently: alcohol consumption being price elastic], taxing the stuff also reduces the rate of liver disease and drunk driving. In the 1990s we were all repelled by the drift of cheap carrier bags all over the streetscape and landscape. In March 2002, the Irish government introduced a levy of 15c on each plastic bag at point of sale. The effect was amazing, lots of people acquired canvas bags and everyone eschewed the tawdry 'free' bags and were able to empty a kitchen drawer full of the repellent sacs. Folks like me don't ignore speed limits (so much) now that speed camera vans are hidden in random dips and curves of the road network. Disincentives seem to work.
Incentives work as well, if you can write off part of your mortgage payments against income tax, then you will be encouraged out of rented accommodation and into owner-occupier land. We bit into this cherry cake in 1986 in England and have become absurdly rich as a result of getting on the 'property ladder' early. Because we had bought cheap in a rising market we had more disposable income. We didn't want to get rich but we did buy into the idea of home-ownership. Enough to take maximum advantage of the SSIA scheme in 2001-2002, a cunning plan for catching votes put out by the same government that dealt with plastic bags. SSIA allowed citizens with disposable income to save part of it regularly for 60 months and get a 25% bonus from the government at the end of five years. €254 (the max monthly) * 60 is more than €15,000 without including any interest payments. When this became accessible in 2007, the government added another €3,800. It was like the lotto! The rich (well, the hard-pressed middle) did very well out of this so long as they didn't invest their windfall/savings in property . . . in 2007 . . . at the top of the bubble. My pal K, 30 years younger than me, paid €320,000 for a new-built, shoddy-built, 2-bed flat in Outer West Dublinia where there were neither buses nor shops nor schools. The poor couldn't ante-up for a deposit [some refused on principle] so they stayed poor and because the SSIA gravy-train had left the station, they effectively became poorer. Mortgage interest relief and SSIA were among a raft of measures which pleased the middle-class voter but drove a deplorable wedge between the haves and the have-nots. K will die in debt simply because he's a generation younger than me but, even with my pension contributions in rag-order, I'll be comfortable in my old age.
Here's an interesting article about perverse incentives and unintended consequences during the birth of Australia. As everbode kno, white Australia was started as a dumping ground for undesirables after governments started to get squeamish about the death penalty for stealing a pheasant or a handkerchief. The first fleet left England on 13th may 1787 and arrived in Botany Bay 36 weeks later. The 11 ships brought more than 600 male and 172 female convicts having sustained a mortality of 5.4% on the long long voyage. We lily-livered moderns whinge on when London-Sydney takes 22 hours in tourist class. The convict transports Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship, Prince of Wales, Scarborough and Lady Penrhyn were contracted by the government on cost-plus basis. William Richards the contractor was paid for the use of the ships for the service but could also claim allowable costs - provisions, rum, water, storm damage, a flock of chickens for the officers - up to a maximum amount. Lime juice for the scurvy probably wasn't on offer although it was 'in the air' following the advocacy of Captain Cook, and became standard issue on Royal Navy ships in 1795. Richards wanted to make money but he also wanted further contracts and so had an interest in doing a good job in delivering all the cargo that he'd shipped.
Transportation was thus deemed a success and let's have more of it. But the cost made people gasp and stretch their eyes: it came in at Oz$100 million in today's money, which made it seem like the convicts had been on an all-you-can-eat cruise-liner. In 1790, a second fleet was assembled by a well known slaving company Camden, Calvert & King who had a wide experience of shipping people across the ocean but rather fewer scruples than Cap'n Richards. They also had a different form of contract - fixed-price per head loaded - which was considerably cheaper than cost-plus. There was no penalty if the cargo didn't arrive at the other end and the vessel's captains were free to sell surplus provisions at the other end of the world. The consequence of the costing system was a mortality rate of 27% on the voyage and a further 15% on delivery. The 600 desperately sick and lousy folk that survived had to be looked after carefully by the local government.
I picked up the sorry tale when it was flagged on metafilter.The comments there make numerous comparisons to current economic practice w.r.t. health services etc.
Every budget here in Ireland, the tax on booze and cigarettes is likely to increase. This generates enough money to pay for the armed forces, the justice system and all the zimmer frames the country currently requires. But, insofar as the cost of booze has an impact on consumption [not so much apparently: alcohol consumption being price elastic], taxing the stuff also reduces the rate of liver disease and drunk driving. In the 1990s we were all repelled by the drift of cheap carrier bags all over the streetscape and landscape. In March 2002, the Irish government introduced a levy of 15c on each plastic bag at point of sale. The effect was amazing, lots of people acquired canvas bags and everyone eschewed the tawdry 'free' bags and were able to empty a kitchen drawer full of the repellent sacs. Folks like me don't ignore speed limits (so much) now that speed camera vans are hidden in random dips and curves of the road network. Disincentives seem to work.
Incentives work as well, if you can write off part of your mortgage payments against income tax, then you will be encouraged out of rented accommodation and into owner-occupier land. We bit into this cherry cake in 1986 in England and have become absurdly rich as a result of getting on the 'property ladder' early. Because we had bought cheap in a rising market we had more disposable income. We didn't want to get rich but we did buy into the idea of home-ownership. Enough to take maximum advantage of the SSIA scheme in 2001-2002, a cunning plan for catching votes put out by the same government that dealt with plastic bags. SSIA allowed citizens with disposable income to save part of it regularly for 60 months and get a 25% bonus from the government at the end of five years. €254 (the max monthly) * 60 is more than €15,000 without including any interest payments. When this became accessible in 2007, the government added another €3,800. It was like the lotto! The rich (well, the hard-pressed middle) did very well out of this so long as they didn't invest their windfall/savings in property . . . in 2007 . . . at the top of the bubble. My pal K, 30 years younger than me, paid €320,000 for a new-built, shoddy-built, 2-bed flat in Outer West Dublinia where there were neither buses nor shops nor schools. The poor couldn't ante-up for a deposit [some refused on principle] so they stayed poor and because the SSIA gravy-train had left the station, they effectively became poorer. Mortgage interest relief and SSIA were among a raft of measures which pleased the middle-class voter but drove a deplorable wedge between the haves and the have-nots. K will die in debt simply because he's a generation younger than me but, even with my pension contributions in rag-order, I'll be comfortable in my old age.
Here's an interesting article about perverse incentives and unintended consequences during the birth of Australia. As everbode kno, white Australia was started as a dumping ground for undesirables after governments started to get squeamish about the death penalty for stealing a pheasant or a handkerchief. The first fleet left England on 13th may 1787 and arrived in Botany Bay 36 weeks later. The 11 ships brought more than 600 male and 172 female convicts having sustained a mortality of 5.4% on the long long voyage. We lily-livered moderns whinge on when London-Sydney takes 22 hours in tourist class. The convict transports Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship, Prince of Wales, Scarborough and Lady Penrhyn were contracted by the government on cost-plus basis. William Richards the contractor was paid for the use of the ships for the service but could also claim allowable costs - provisions, rum, water, storm damage, a flock of chickens for the officers - up to a maximum amount. Lime juice for the scurvy probably wasn't on offer although it was 'in the air' following the advocacy of Captain Cook, and became standard issue on Royal Navy ships in 1795. Richards wanted to make money but he also wanted further contracts and so had an interest in doing a good job in delivering all the cargo that he'd shipped.
Transportation was thus deemed a success and let's have more of it. But the cost made people gasp and stretch their eyes: it came in at Oz$100 million in today's money, which made it seem like the convicts had been on an all-you-can-eat cruise-liner. In 1790, a second fleet was assembled by a well known slaving company Camden, Calvert & King who had a wide experience of shipping people across the ocean but rather fewer scruples than Cap'n Richards. They also had a different form of contract - fixed-price per head loaded - which was considerably cheaper than cost-plus. There was no penalty if the cargo didn't arrive at the other end and the vessel's captains were free to sell surplus provisions at the other end of the world. The consequence of the costing system was a mortality rate of 27% on the voyage and a further 15% on delivery. The 600 desperately sick and lousy folk that survived had to be looked after carefully by the local government.
I picked up the sorry tale when it was flagged on metafilter.The comments there make numerous comparisons to current economic practice w.r.t. health services etc.
Wednesday, 16 August 2017
I am become dumb
I've done I am become Mark where I cited J Robert Oppenheimer's "I am become death". I have toothsome tales today about two generations of my family. At The Institute I have a useful classroom exercise to reflect upon the [wonderful] diversity that is part of the human condition. It provides an opportunity to critically evaluate a 'fact' that everyone knows to be true, but isn't. The fact being that adult humans have 32 teeth. Counting actual teeth is real human heads reveals that N=32 is not even the majority condition: most of us have at least one 3rd molar which fails to erupt.
Me, I have only 3 visible 3rd molars; or wisdom teeth as they are commonly called. The upper left M3, although apparent on X-ray, never showed its head above the gum-line. That's okay, my two lower M3s, however, didn't have enough room in my lower jaw and so came out crooked with the occlusal face pointing forward at the adjacent M2. This condition is common enough to feature in Wikipedia as impacted wisdom tooth [whence x-ray R]. My offspring Dau.I and Dau.II have half their genes in common (with each other and their father) and manifest a similar dental problem. As they crossed into adulthood and their wisdom teeth started to erupt wonk, they went to a dental surgeon and had some of them removed. Part of the argument was that by decluttering the jaw, the remaining teeth would shuffle about in the remaining space and straighten out.
That option was never suggested to me at the appropriate time, so I've had to soldier on with an awkward diastema on both sides at the back of my lower jaw. My dentist [prev], let's call him Bill, is mildly eccentric as dentists go: prone to homeopathy, over-enthusiastic about dental floss, sporting a peach-coloured dentist's chair, and convinced that amalgam fillings are the cause of most of the evils in the world. I like him because he's quite non-interventionist and over the years we've talked about my wisdom teeth and then done nothing about them. One persistent argument which muddied the waters was that he'd rather remove the adjacent M2s which both have [amalgam!] fillings in the belief that the wisdom teeth would then turn face up and shunt forward and serve their turn at the chomp. All Spring this year I had a succession of transitory toothaches and infections which resolved themselves with a few days of vigorous brushing - or just resolved themselves in time. I figured that, getting older, my immune system wasn't dealing with crud build-up in the subtle, nuanced way of a younger chap and that I was looking at similar problems more often and more serious as senility progressed. Bill and I had a forthright discussion and he agreed to refer me to his current favorite among dental surgeons in Dublin with the imprimatur "maybe it is time".
Anyway, I went at the end of last week. You've got admire the efficiency of healthcare professionals; they don't piffle about when they are working at the rate of €900/hour. The sports car needs to be paid for. The X-ray of my dentition was produced with a chef's "this one was done earlier" flourish and we discussed whether the top right M3 should come out too because it would have nothing to bite on after its lower partner was gone. I said "Take it"; she sent me out to pay anther €100 and when I returned she gave me two paracetamols, 1 aspirin and an IV shot of midazolam "it's like valium only 20x stronger". The next 30 minutes was a most peculiar out-of-mind experience. A distant aethereal part of my mind registered a lot of crunching and drilling but I couldn't feel a thing because, while I was in a dream-state, the d-surgeon had localled up my gums with lidocaine. Less than an hour later (so the d-surgeon and her assistant had time for a cuppa tea before the next patient?) I was being escorted across the road to my waiting car lighter by 3 surplus teeth and the bones of €1,000.
If the quality of The Blob seems to shift down market over the next few weeks, it's because I've lost my wisdom teeth. "I am become dumb" [that's what passes for a joke here]. Actually I was literally dumb for the first 40 minutes after the midazolam wore off: my tongue and lips felt so thick that I could only mumble. I'll add that, the night after the operation, I woke up at 0230hrs [two-thirty = tooth hurtee, geddit? It's the Chinese dentist joke, to which I so rarely get a chance to give an airing in these right on times].
But there is a serious sensory investigative outcome from this because midazolam is the first player in the current US lethal injection protocol which I've covered before and indeed before. From my experience last week, you could have hacked off my leg with a rusty saw and I would have been frankly, midazolam, I don't give a damn. In that sense alone, the death penalty is not a cruel or unusual punishment as forbidden by the US Constitution.
That option was never suggested to me at the appropriate time, so I've had to soldier on with an awkward diastema on both sides at the back of my lower jaw. My dentist [prev], let's call him Bill, is mildly eccentric as dentists go: prone to homeopathy, over-enthusiastic about dental floss, sporting a peach-coloured dentist's chair, and convinced that amalgam fillings are the cause of most of the evils in the world. I like him because he's quite non-interventionist and over the years we've talked about my wisdom teeth and then done nothing about them. One persistent argument which muddied the waters was that he'd rather remove the adjacent M2s which both have [amalgam!] fillings in the belief that the wisdom teeth would then turn face up and shunt forward and serve their turn at the chomp. All Spring this year I had a succession of transitory toothaches and infections which resolved themselves with a few days of vigorous brushing - or just resolved themselves in time. I figured that, getting older, my immune system wasn't dealing with crud build-up in the subtle, nuanced way of a younger chap and that I was looking at similar problems more often and more serious as senility progressed. Bill and I had a forthright discussion and he agreed to refer me to his current favorite among dental surgeons in Dublin with the imprimatur "maybe it is time".
Anyway, I went at the end of last week. You've got admire the efficiency of healthcare professionals; they don't piffle about when they are working at the rate of €900/hour. The sports car needs to be paid for. The X-ray of my dentition was produced with a chef's "this one was done earlier" flourish and we discussed whether the top right M3 should come out too because it would have nothing to bite on after its lower partner was gone. I said "Take it"; she sent me out to pay anther €100 and when I returned she gave me two paracetamols, 1 aspirin and an IV shot of midazolam "it's like valium only 20x stronger". The next 30 minutes was a most peculiar out-of-mind experience. A distant aethereal part of my mind registered a lot of crunching and drilling but I couldn't feel a thing because, while I was in a dream-state, the d-surgeon had localled up my gums with lidocaine. Less than an hour later (so the d-surgeon and her assistant had time for a cuppa tea before the next patient?) I was being escorted across the road to my waiting car lighter by 3 surplus teeth and the bones of €1,000.
If the quality of The Blob seems to shift down market over the next few weeks, it's because I've lost my wisdom teeth. "I am become dumb" [that's what passes for a joke here]. Actually I was literally dumb for the first 40 minutes after the midazolam wore off: my tongue and lips felt so thick that I could only mumble. I'll add that, the night after the operation, I woke up at 0230hrs [two-thirty = tooth hurtee, geddit? It's the Chinese dentist joke, to which I so rarely get a chance to give an airing in these right on times].
But there is a serious sensory investigative outcome from this because midazolam is the first player in the current US lethal injection protocol which I've covered before and indeed before. From my experience last week, you could have hacked off my leg with a rusty saw and I would have been frankly, midazolam, I don't give a damn. In that sense alone, the death penalty is not a cruel or unusual punishment as forbidden by the US Constitution.
Thursday, 10 March 2016
Guinea worm gone
I got a real good education in Graduate School in Boston. It was partly the formal courses which I sat on "subjects" that we didn't know existed in TCD back in Dublin: a whole semester on 'evolution' with Lynn Margulis, ditto 'mammalogy', ditto 'physiological ecology', ditto 'multivariate statistics'. But I also learned a lot from my fellow students: eating ice-cream & loading a salad bowl, for example. My boss, a man of wide interests, recommended that I read his old Parasitology text-book, which was on the shelves down in the basement where I was living. He was an aficianado of Dracunculus medinensis the Guinea worm. You can hardly admit to loving this parasitic invader, but you can nevertheless be fascinated by its life cycle and the peculiar methods used to rid patients of the adult worms. Dracunculus lives part of its life in tiny copepod crustaceans which swim about in tropical fresh water. When they are consumed my mammals, including people, who drink the water, the copepods get dissolved by the stomach acid and the Dracunculus larvae burrow through the wall of the intestine and develop into adults among the wobbly bits over the next 3-4 months. When a female worm meets a male, they love each other very much, the male sinks back exhausted and dies from his exertions, the female begins a slow shoving journey through liver and lights, muscle and fat, until she comes to rest just beneath the skin. Somehow this creature, knows where the legs are and tends to come to rest in the lower legs. But occasionally she gets blind-sided by other low hanging appendages and heads for the hand or <eeeuuuw> the scrotum. Her journey is exquisitely painful to the unwilling host.
Evolution has shaped the female Guinea-worm's behaviour to facilitate the continuation of her life cycle. If the skin above the lurking female gets wet, then she burrows rapidly to the surface and sheds thousands of eggs into the water in the hope that some of them will encounter a copepod. This sensitivity to water can be used to start a cure: wrap the leg in a wet towel then when the end of the worm breaks the skin surface you can seize it and e v e r s o s l o w l y draw the whole worm out. As she can grew to 80cm in length, this pulling can take several days. You wrap your winnings round a twig or pencil to stop the whole thing slithering back into the flesh. If you pull too hard then the bloody worm breaks and you have a serious case of septicaemia on your blistered legs. I'm sure that there were experts at these delicate extractions in many sub-Saharan villages.
I use the past tense advisedly, because at more or less the same time I was reading about Guinea-worms in Boston, retiring President Jimmy Carter was thinking about what he was going to do for the rest of his life. His existential solution was to endow the Carter Centre on some derelict urban blight in Atlanta, Georgia. This institution was established with the brief "to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering". Grand for a mission statement but What to do next in detail?
And it was so. Tuberculosis, Malaria, HIV/AIDS were left to other groups [Gates Foundation for example] with far deeper pockets. Along with election watching, the abolition of the death penalty and conflict resolution, the Carter Centre decided that they would take on the dreaded Guinea-worm which at the time in the mid 1980s infected 3.5 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. The map shows countries in which the worm was endemic in 1985, the hatched countries are those that still had worms 20 years later. Now I read in Nature 10th Feb 2016, that Dracunculus has almost gone the way of all smallpox. A combination of Carter Centre monogrammed winding-pencil distribution [kidding!]; water filters, education and political barracking has reduced the disease Dracunuliasis to a mere 22 cases in four countries for calendar year 2015: an astonishingly effective 100,000-fold reduction. At one point, President Carter bluffed his opposite number in Ghana that with his clout he could persuade science to start calling Dracunculus the Ghana-worm. “There isn’t a Guinea worm left in Ghana now, Carter told journalists with a grin . . . " The remaining four benighted nations - Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and South Sudan - are beset with civil wars that not even Carter's mediators can stop. Civil war rides with pestilence and makes it really difficult for health-care workers to get where they are needed.
Evolution has shaped the female Guinea-worm's behaviour to facilitate the continuation of her life cycle. If the skin above the lurking female gets wet, then she burrows rapidly to the surface and sheds thousands of eggs into the water in the hope that some of them will encounter a copepod. This sensitivity to water can be used to start a cure: wrap the leg in a wet towel then when the end of the worm breaks the skin surface you can seize it and e v e r s o s l o w l y draw the whole worm out. As she can grew to 80cm in length, this pulling can take several days. You wrap your winnings round a twig or pencil to stop the whole thing slithering back into the flesh. If you pull too hard then the bloody worm breaks and you have a serious case of septicaemia on your blistered legs. I'm sure that there were experts at these delicate extractions in many sub-Saharan villages.
I use the past tense advisedly, because at more or less the same time I was reading about Guinea-worms in Boston, retiring President Jimmy Carter was thinking about what he was going to do for the rest of his life. His existential solution was to endow the Carter Centre on some derelict urban blight in Atlanta, Georgia. This institution was established with the brief "to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering". Grand for a mission statement but What to do next in detail?
- First build a complex of offices and auditoria, a library and museum, all set in lovely parkland,
- Then appoint a Board of Trustees packed with the great and the good and capable of networking their way to solutions.
- Have the Board appoint Effectives to do committee work and decide how the substantial, but not infinite, endowment can be most effectively leveraged.
- Launch some specific projects: preferably those that will yield tangible results within the life time of the soon to be ex-President.
- It's also important to have projects that can be written up in a headline + 600 words by the Washington Post.
Wednesday, 2 January 2019
Chick sexing down the tubes
There are strong evolutionary pressures to have an equal 1M:1F sex ratio. Disagreeable British geneticist RA Fisher explained the algebra of XX = XY embryos in the 1930s. In the wild this sex-ratio is the best solution for ensuring success in the natural selection next generation lottery. Agricultural practice does not always find this the best for efficiency or profit. As we saw in cattle: bull calves are better for beef [testosterone makes muscle quicker] but completely useless for dairy. But in a dairy herd half the calves are male unless you use sexed-semen or some other way of subverting the natural order. At least the surplus male calves have some residual value at the mart.
Not so in the chicken industry. Here the competition is fierce and the margins are really tight in the relentless drive for cheaper goujons. Particularly in industrial hatcheries, where the product is 300+ eggs a year from each laying hen, male chicks have no capacity for making money and are disposed of before they literally eat into the profit. Problem is that, to you and me, male and female hatchlings are impossible to tell apart. When we had chicks we had to wait weeks until the adolescent males betrayed themselves by their obstreperous bullying and we could send them off to René for the pot. No commercial operation could tolerate so many useless mouths for so long. Since the 1930s, by careful scrutiny of the rear-end of 100s of hatchlings, it was realised that males have a pimple in the vent that is reliably larger than in females. In most females no 'eminence' is discernible. But there are a significant number of edge-cases where there is a small bump. The company wants to sort these difficult cases with as much accuracy as possible because errors either way will cost money. Enter >!ta-RARRR!< the Korean chicken sexers.
For some reason, traditionally Koreans and Japanese have this job-specification sewn up. Although as there are non-Japanese sumo wrestlers, I'm sure that other nationalities have shouldered there way into the profession. Here's a chap from West Africa = 10.5 chicks in 37 seconds. I guess the main thing is to prevent repetitive strain injury as each chick has to be picked up, turned over, poked with the pinkie and cast into one of two output streams. If you say Selektion in German it will bring up a welter of WWII associations. The casual ruthlessness gets a bad press among sensitive consumers - although they like eating cheap chicken and don't want to look too closely at their complicity in the process.
There are other methods for sexing chicks. In some "slow-feathering" strains the wing feathers develop at different speeds in males and females, so trained operators can sex the chicks by comparing the lengths of the primary and covert feather stumps. And the Silver gene S is carried on the sex-chromosome, so if you cross an S female with a ss male you'll get a) a 50:50 mix of silver and gold chicks b) which are exactly consonant with gender c) in a way that a child of six can tell the difference. But adding these genetic markers to the breeding mix may impact on direct economics of chick production. The standard now is an astonishing 41 days between hatching and packing for broilers.
Now Prof Dr Almuth Einspanier at U. Leipzig has developed a consumer sensitive pre-hatching biotech diagnostic to accurately determine the sex of chicks 9 days after fertilisation and so 12 days before hatching. The stoutly maintain that, at that age, chicks don't have the neuronal capacity to feel pain. The German market, like the American death penalty market, is all tied in knots about this aspect of the process. It would be uncontroversially humane if those sensitive-flower German consumers just stopped eating chicken then they wouldn't have to implement a high-tech solution to clear their conscience. Einspanier's test hinges on the fact that estrone concentrations are higher in the allantoic fluid of female chicks. A coloured anti-body test for hormones is well-established - think pregnancy tests - but there were other logistical problems to overcome. These mainly dealt with methods to remove a sufficient quantity of fluid from the egg without compromising the internal sterility and also minimising the time out of incubator. It came down to lasering a 300μm = 0.3mm hole in the shell and the inner membrane and squeezing out some drupples of fluid:
Blokes may sub-consciously accept the fate of the cocklets: "high quality feed"? that sounds okay because it glosses over the fact that the discarded eggs are the feed. Eggs produced in this way are now on the shelves in at least one German supermarket chain. They are selling well. But it's another layer of uncertainty to try to incorporate into our clear-conscience shopping. In Aldi you can buy eggs OR organic eggs OR free-range eggs. But not as far as I can tell organic & free-range eggs. Is free range better than organic? For me? for the pullets? for the planet? And where do you rate pain-free eggs?
Not so in the chicken industry. Here the competition is fierce and the margins are really tight in the relentless drive for cheaper goujons. Particularly in industrial hatcheries, where the product is 300+ eggs a year from each laying hen, male chicks have no capacity for making money and are disposed of before they literally eat into the profit. Problem is that, to you and me, male and female hatchlings are impossible to tell apart. When we had chicks we had to wait weeks until the adolescent males betrayed themselves by their obstreperous bullying and we could send them off to René for the pot. No commercial operation could tolerate so many useless mouths for so long. Since the 1930s, by careful scrutiny of the rear-end of 100s of hatchlings, it was realised that males have a pimple in the vent that is reliably larger than in females. In most females no 'eminence' is discernible. But there are a significant number of edge-cases where there is a small bump. The company wants to sort these difficult cases with as much accuracy as possible because errors either way will cost money. Enter >!ta-RARRR!< the Korean chicken sexers.
For some reason, traditionally Koreans and Japanese have this job-specification sewn up. Although as there are non-Japanese sumo wrestlers, I'm sure that other nationalities have shouldered there way into the profession. Here's a chap from West Africa = 10.5 chicks in 37 seconds. I guess the main thing is to prevent repetitive strain injury as each chick has to be picked up, turned over, poked with the pinkie and cast into one of two output streams. If you say Selektion in German it will bring up a welter of WWII associations. The casual ruthlessness gets a bad press among sensitive consumers - although they like eating cheap chicken and don't want to look too closely at their complicity in the process.
There are other methods for sexing chicks. In some "slow-feathering" strains the wing feathers develop at different speeds in males and females, so trained operators can sex the chicks by comparing the lengths of the primary and covert feather stumps. And the Silver gene S is carried on the sex-chromosome, so if you cross an S female with a ss male you'll get a) a 50:50 mix of silver and gold chicks b) which are exactly consonant with gender c) in a way that a child of six can tell the difference. But adding these genetic markers to the breeding mix may impact on direct economics of chick production. The standard now is an astonishing 41 days between hatching and packing for broilers.
Now Prof Dr Almuth Einspanier at U. Leipzig has developed a consumer sensitive pre-hatching biotech diagnostic to accurately determine the sex of chicks 9 days after fertilisation and so 12 days before hatching. The stoutly maintain that, at that age, chicks don't have the neuronal capacity to feel pain. The German market, like the American death penalty market, is all tied in knots about this aspect of the process. It would be uncontroversially humane if those sensitive-flower German consumers just stopped eating chicken then they wouldn't have to implement a high-tech solution to clear their conscience. Einspanier's test hinges on the fact that estrone concentrations are higher in the allantoic fluid of female chicks. A coloured anti-body test for hormones is well-established - think pregnancy tests - but there were other logistical problems to overcome. These mainly dealt with methods to remove a sufficient quantity of fluid from the egg without compromising the internal sterility and also minimising the time out of incubator. It came down to lasering a 300μm = 0.3mm hole in the shell and the inner membrane and squeezing out some drupples of fluid:
Blokes may sub-consciously accept the fate of the cocklets: "high quality feed"? that sounds okay because it glosses over the fact that the discarded eggs are the feed. Eggs produced in this way are now on the shelves in at least one German supermarket chain. They are selling well. But it's another layer of uncertainty to try to incorporate into our clear-conscience shopping. In Aldi you can buy eggs OR organic eggs OR free-range eggs. But not as far as I can tell organic & free-range eggs. Is free range better than organic? For me? for the pullets? for the planet? And where do you rate pain-free eggs?
Sunday, 10 June 2018
Sunday backstory 100618
Few loose ends or threads need pulling
- Stop action film showing the marvellous diversity of the insect form.
- I've been on before [cruel and unusual - punishment] about the shameful medicalisation of the death penalty to make it humane. I've witnessed the gas-chamber option with mice and carbon-dioxide which is definitely not humane and practiced cervical dislocation myself which at least is quick[er]. I more or less equated asphyxiation with carbon-dioxide and ditto with argon in that first link. This essay into new methods of humane judicial killing points out my error: we have physiological responses to excess carbon-dioxide but haven't bothered evolved a way of dealing with absence of oxygen. BBC is suggesting that asphyxiation by nitrogen, or argon if you can get it, is painless and quick enough.
- Sing It
- Grace Davies from Wales writes her own stuff and gives it SOCKS.
- First failed escape - W!ld
- Making :
- a caravan in 6 hours. 32 a day out the door
- artisan salami in NYC
- Kashmiri parathas - they BIG
- slapping a chapatti to life
- Anthony Bourdain on eating in India "You say Bolognese, I say Vector"
- Winging It. Frank "Catch me if you can" Abagnale talking about the rehabilitative power of fatherhood.
- You'd be lucky to get out of Iris Peavoy's shop, in Kinitty Co. Bookdocks, with only the thing you came in for.
- Hammer time! Mind over matter. Remember Legless in Kampuchea from The Blob?
Saturday, 7 June 2014
Jeremy Bentham
I was listening to a repeat of Sean Moncrieff on Newstalk FM this week as he interviewed Caitlin Moran. She was, as ever, both funny and provocative and made a telling point: if you ask a sufficiently young child what they think about how society treats women (or blacks) they cry out "That's not fair" with the implication that, just as soon as they are able, they'll go and do something about this manifest inequity. As someone who never properly grew up, I start to get all het-up when I hear people saying that homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to get married. It's the mirror of making jews live in a ghetto, or that if women are not exactly the property of their husbands all their property is. Tsk tsk, that's all in the past you may say but The Boy told me yesterday that a more or less equally qualified woman in his engineering firm unaccountably brings home about 20% less than him. When you discount the utility of, or dispossess, women, blacks, wheelchair-people, homosexuals you prevent them contributing to society in creative ways. Moran floated the idea that countries with the most repressive regimes are, for this reason, stupider countries - less creative, less productive, less affluent and more preyed upon by multi-national capital. We have so many planet-fakkin' problems to deal with globally and nationally which have developed under the watch of straight white males, that it is squandering the resources for a possible solution if we SWMs fail to enable and empower everyone.
This reminds me of a recent visit of Nobel laureate James "DNA" Watson coming yet again to Ireland to be presented with another honorary degree. During his speech, Watson proceeded to make so many sweeping, disparaging & offensive remarks about large swatches of humanity (women, chinese, blacks, children, pensioners, handicapped, gays) that the smart boys at the back started to compile an impromptu Venn diagram to see if there was anyone left who hadn't been dissed.
I think I'm probably a Utilitarian, because I'm quite superficial in the efforts I'm prepared to put in to teasing out difficult philosophical problems. I'm straight utilitarian in my answers to trolleyology problems - when presented with the, rather artificial, dilemma about whether it is ethical to pull a lever which kills one man remotely to save the lives of five people then I come down on the side of the greatest good for the greatest number. Yes, and I do so even in the more immediate case where you are only able to save the Five but seizing a fat man by the lapels and tumbling him over the parapet of a bridge to block the trolley-track. Many people baulk at doing violence directly but are happy enough to press a utilitarian button.
In following the logical without being squeamish about the actuality, I am trying to walk in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). He developed the Principle of Utility: Act so as to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Governments do this all the time when they attempt to allocate the limited resources that we the tax-payers are prepared to stump up for their common-good schemes. Most governments are are actually a long way from the utilitarian principal because rich people, white people and male people get better access to things than the poor and the dispossessed. Worryingly, rich 'people' includes corporate persons like MegaCorp Multinational.
I like Bentham for exposing fuzzy wishful thinking in his rejection of Natural Rights. When Jefferson started off his US Constitution with "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .", Bentham thought "Whoa! Do we?". He famously critiqued La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789 as "nonsense on stilts", at least partly because he recognised that our ideas of what is correct, ethical and moral behaviour is hopelessly constrained and massaged by the family and society in which we grew up. Darwin, for example, saw the natural world as a metaphor for entrepreneurial capitalism, because that was how everything looked to him, not least because he married a Wedgwood of the megarich multinational pottery family. Bentham's position was that any statement about what rights were was in reality a claim about what rights should be.
What Bentham proposed instead was an extension of legal rights and he was years ahead of his time on the necessity to legislate for universal suffrage (including women!), freedom of written and spoken expression, free of sexual expression, freedom (as in anti-slavery). He wanted to abolish the death penalty which, in his time, was handed out like visiting cards at a Japanese business meeting. He was also repelled at lesser examples of physical violence all the way down to smacking a child. For an insight into how totally off the wall these his ideas seemed to his contemporaries, when he suggested that it would be meet and proper that his body should be stuffed and displayed in a cabinet in University College London, that idea was added to the list. Indeed it was implemented (R) decades before most of the rest of his cranky ideas which we are only now getting to adopt.
In contrast with Louis Brandeis, of whom I treated two days ago, Bentham was not big about privacy. Indeed he rated transparency, not only the virtue of, say, a journalist exposing the shenanigans of a public servant, but also in everyone of us being scrutinised by our neighbours to ensure that we are working for the common good. Whoa, not me thanks Jeremy! Whatever about that Big Brother nightmare, Bentham invested years of time and money promoting the spanopticon, a prison were the perps were to be kept in a goldfish-bowl perpetually under the gaze of their warders.
You can make the philosophical conundrum one-dimensional by setting Bentham's morality of actions determined by their consequences against Immanuel Kant's idea that we should be guided by some extrinsic ideal Right to determine what we do, regardless of the actual consequences. It is wrong to tell lies because honest dealing is the basis of any functioning society therefore we should never tell lies; that is the sort of Kantian authoritarianism that, for example Michael Sandel thinks is probably a good idea. I loath Kant, insofar as I understand what he has to say: his black-and-white world of moral rectitude lacks both sense-of-reality and compassion. Bentham wanted us to be kinder to the dispossessed but recognised that we couldn't always achieve good without doing some harm along the way. Finding the balance between these competing claims is hard work but ultimately more forgiving than when it is claimed that X has an inalienable right to Y.
This reminds me of a recent visit of Nobel laureate James "DNA" Watson coming yet again to Ireland to be presented with another honorary degree. During his speech, Watson proceeded to make so many sweeping, disparaging & offensive remarks about large swatches of humanity (women, chinese, blacks, children, pensioners, handicapped, gays) that the smart boys at the back started to compile an impromptu Venn diagram to see if there was anyone left who hadn't been dissed.
I think I'm probably a Utilitarian, because I'm quite superficial in the efforts I'm prepared to put in to teasing out difficult philosophical problems. I'm straight utilitarian in my answers to trolleyology problems - when presented with the, rather artificial, dilemma about whether it is ethical to pull a lever which kills one man remotely to save the lives of five people then I come down on the side of the greatest good for the greatest number. Yes, and I do so even in the more immediate case where you are only able to save the Five but seizing a fat man by the lapels and tumbling him over the parapet of a bridge to block the trolley-track. Many people baulk at doing violence directly but are happy enough to press a utilitarian button.
I like Bentham for exposing fuzzy wishful thinking in his rejection of Natural Rights. When Jefferson started off his US Constitution with "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .", Bentham thought "Whoa! Do we?". He famously critiqued La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789 as "nonsense on stilts", at least partly because he recognised that our ideas of what is correct, ethical and moral behaviour is hopelessly constrained and massaged by the family and society in which we grew up. Darwin, for example, saw the natural world as a metaphor for entrepreneurial capitalism, because that was how everything looked to him, not least because he married a Wedgwood of the megarich multinational pottery family. Bentham's position was that any statement about what rights were was in reality a claim about what rights should be.
What Bentham proposed instead was an extension of legal rights and he was years ahead of his time on the necessity to legislate for universal suffrage (including women!), freedom of written and spoken expression, free of sexual expression, freedom (as in anti-slavery). He wanted to abolish the death penalty which, in his time, was handed out like visiting cards at a Japanese business meeting. He was also repelled at lesser examples of physical violence all the way down to smacking a child. For an insight into how totally off the wall these his ideas seemed to his contemporaries, when he suggested that it would be meet and proper that his body should be stuffed and displayed in a cabinet in University College London, that idea was added to the list. Indeed it was implemented (R) decades before most of the rest of his cranky ideas which we are only now getting to adopt.
In contrast with Louis Brandeis, of whom I treated two days ago, Bentham was not big about privacy. Indeed he rated transparency, not only the virtue of, say, a journalist exposing the shenanigans of a public servant, but also in everyone of us being scrutinised by our neighbours to ensure that we are working for the common good. Whoa, not me thanks Jeremy! Whatever about that Big Brother nightmare, Bentham invested years of time and money promoting the spanopticon, a prison were the perps were to be kept in a goldfish-bowl perpetually under the gaze of their warders.
You can make the philosophical conundrum one-dimensional by setting Bentham's morality of actions determined by their consequences against Immanuel Kant's idea that we should be guided by some extrinsic ideal Right to determine what we do, regardless of the actual consequences. It is wrong to tell lies because honest dealing is the basis of any functioning society therefore we should never tell lies; that is the sort of Kantian authoritarianism that, for example Michael Sandel thinks is probably a good idea. I loath Kant, insofar as I understand what he has to say: his black-and-white world of moral rectitude lacks both sense-of-reality and compassion. Bentham wanted us to be kinder to the dispossessed but recognised that we couldn't always achieve good without doing some harm along the way. Finding the balance between these competing claims is hard work but ultimately more forgiving than when it is claimed that X has an inalienable right to Y.
Monday, 9 April 2018
ethics and ethanol
What do we talk about when we talk about Octopus? [another Raymond Carver ref]
2) What do we talk about when we talk about Hodgkin? I've mentioned Dorothy Hodgkin, Britain's only female Nobelist, but only in passing when talking about other women in science. She was a Hodgkin by marriage not patrimony having wed Marxist historian Thomas Lionel Hodgkin. Hodgkin's lymphoma is named for physician and humanitarian Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866). His nephew was the historian Thomas Hodgkin (1831-1913), and his grandson was Dorothy's husband. Another grandson was Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, of whom we treat. Now go away, breathe deeply and draw a family tree showing how many genes each named person has in common. For full inclusivity be sure to show Alan Lloyd Hodgkin's father-in-law Francis Peyton Rous (1966 Nobel Prize) who discovered that cancer could be caused by a virus, now called Rous Sarcoma Virus RSV. RSV served as a model for laying bare Epstein-Barr Virus EBV which was so important to Denis Burkitt's work on infectious lymphoma. EBV seems to be associated with the development of Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Alan Lloyd Hodgkin won his Nobel for his work with Andrew Huxley. Another huge science family there: Andrew was a grandson of Thomas Henry "Darwin's Bulldog" Huxley, as were his cousins Aldous and Julian Huxley. Hodgkin and Huxley were physiologists who were interested in what makes nerves tick. They figured it was something to do with the electrical charge inside and outside the cell. In my Human Physiology course, I go on and on and on about scale. Some things are much smaller than others and it matters.
The nerve which you can see and trace form one end to the other if you dissect a mouse or a dogfish is made up of dozens or hundreds of cells called neurons [cartoon above]. The axon of a mouse or human motor neuron is about 10µm in diameter. Good luck with getting an electrode in that! But H & H knew that certain cephalopods [squids and octopuses] including Doryteuthis pealeii had giant motor neurons that were 50x or 100x wider and as long as a squid. In 1939 they showed that they could measure, and indeed had measured, the action potential inside these cells. The boys spent their WWII years doing research on the electronics of radar but returned to the lab after the war and worked out the whole electro-physiological system of nervous transmission. If you are a rocket scientist you can read their key 1952 paper here. I'm not: that sort of stuff melts my mind. Hodgkin and Huxley secured the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine; the year after Watson, Crick and Wilkins got it for working out the structure of DNA.
3) Obviously the cephalopod nervous system became a convenient model for all sorts of experiments to explain the mechanism and control of nervous transmission and nobody thought to ask the squids if they minded contributing to science in this way. Physiologists didn't even stop to think whether the poor cr'atures felt pain. Yet we recognised that they were quite intelligent. My generation has seen a transition from being able to do whatever you fancied to 'dumb animals' to having to fill out a ream of approval forms with the Ethics Committee to carry out any sort of experiments on living animals and also to be circumspect in the numbers of animals which are 'sacrificed' on the altar of scientific progress. And indeed commercial progress: lots of rabbits get exposed to cosmetics to ensure that they are safe to apply to human faces. In 1991, at first in Canada and later elsewhere, the ethical protection accorded to vertebrates [mammals, birds and frogs] were extended to cephalopods in recognition of the fact that squids and octopuses could figure things out. My pal P from Boston sent me a neat article explaining the ethical dilemma at the centre of squid research and >!shazzzam!< a solution to our anxieties. Seemingly ethanol [booze to you and me], or indeed magnesium chloride MgCl, is a really effective way to stop cephalopods in their tracks so that scientists can work away on them.
Hmmmm that's convenient but recently the 'horrible spectre' has been raised that, in its cephalos, the poor squid is writhing in agony as its nerves are poked, jangled or bathed in nicotine. We are now primed to be sensitive because of the ethical and economic travails which the killing states have been through to find a 'humane' way of carrying out the death penalty while avoiding anything 'cruel and unusual'. Robyn Crook of SFSU has now laid the cephalopod have feelings boogie to rest. She and her team set up a system that could measure both motor responsiveness and sensory signals to the brain. What you want is a system that a) doesn't have the animals twitching and b) has no incommming signal to the brain which could be interpreted as pain. It turns out that MgCl leaves a 15 minute window of sensation after the end of reactivity while alcohol is obviously annoying to the squids when applied. Another anaesthetic has too narrow a dosage window between I can still feel it and I'm dead. That's nice normal science: chipping away at a problem, having a clear hypothesis, setting up controlled experiments, replicating them in other species and coming up with an answer that has utility in the physiological community. The fact that it makes like easier for a group of animals that some consider to be as clever as a fox that has just been elected Professor of cunning at Oxford University is also all to the good. In particular, and I quote from the Science article: ". . . they're disinclined to stay put—octopuses can escape through minuscule holes . . ."
4) . . . which brought me back to another story about ethics and the octopus. Back in the day when I was working to raise funds for going to graduate school, I had a job in the Afdeling Vissen Diergaarde Blijdorp aka Fish Department, Rotterdam Zoo. My first job each day was to clean the front of all the aquaria with a mixture of dilute acetic acid and a chamois leather. The previous day's visitors had covered the glass with finger and nose prints, and indeed lip-prints and we liked to at least start the day with a clean viewing slate. One of the printiest exhibits contained a single Octopus vulgaris, the same sort of creature as I was to eat in Grañón 25 years later. In lieu of a crevice in the rocks, we'd given it an earthenware land drainage pipe, where it used to retire after feeding time. Well, one night the poor octopus made a run for it; squeezed through a crack between the cover of the aquarium and flopped to the same floor of the service area where I had my near-death experience with a stone fish. The octopus was less fortunate and by morning had expired. What to do? The octopus was unaccountably popular with the visiting kids and it would be some weeks before we could source a replacement. Someone had the bright idea of simply turning the earthenware pipe through 90o. That way we could bamboozle the public into believing that the octopus was, like a Norwegian Blue parrot, merely sleeping. Clearly there were ethical issues about taking money under false pretenses but we none of us lost any sleep over it.
- Delicious and inclusive.
- Another Hodgkin heard from.
- Ethics and alcohol.
- Don't distress the children.
2) What do we talk about when we talk about Hodgkin? I've mentioned Dorothy Hodgkin, Britain's only female Nobelist, but only in passing when talking about other women in science. She was a Hodgkin by marriage not patrimony having wed Marxist historian Thomas Lionel Hodgkin. Hodgkin's lymphoma is named for physician and humanitarian Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866). His nephew was the historian Thomas Hodgkin (1831-1913), and his grandson was Dorothy's husband. Another grandson was Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, of whom we treat. Now go away, breathe deeply and draw a family tree showing how many genes each named person has in common. For full inclusivity be sure to show Alan Lloyd Hodgkin's father-in-law Francis Peyton Rous (1966 Nobel Prize) who discovered that cancer could be caused by a virus, now called Rous Sarcoma Virus RSV. RSV served as a model for laying bare Epstein-Barr Virus EBV which was so important to Denis Burkitt's work on infectious lymphoma. EBV seems to be associated with the development of Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Alan Lloyd Hodgkin won his Nobel for his work with Andrew Huxley. Another huge science family there: Andrew was a grandson of Thomas Henry "Darwin's Bulldog" Huxley, as were his cousins Aldous and Julian Huxley. Hodgkin and Huxley were physiologists who were interested in what makes nerves tick. They figured it was something to do with the electrical charge inside and outside the cell. In my Human Physiology course, I go on and on and on about scale. Some things are much smaller than others and it matters.
3) Obviously the cephalopod nervous system became a convenient model for all sorts of experiments to explain the mechanism and control of nervous transmission and nobody thought to ask the squids if they minded contributing to science in this way. Physiologists didn't even stop to think whether the poor cr'atures felt pain. Yet we recognised that they were quite intelligent. My generation has seen a transition from being able to do whatever you fancied to 'dumb animals' to having to fill out a ream of approval forms with the Ethics Committee to carry out any sort of experiments on living animals and also to be circumspect in the numbers of animals which are 'sacrificed' on the altar of scientific progress. And indeed commercial progress: lots of rabbits get exposed to cosmetics to ensure that they are safe to apply to human faces. In 1991, at first in Canada and later elsewhere, the ethical protection accorded to vertebrates [mammals, birds and frogs] were extended to cephalopods in recognition of the fact that squids and octopuses could figure things out. My pal P from Boston sent me a neat article explaining the ethical dilemma at the centre of squid research and >!shazzzam!< a solution to our anxieties. Seemingly ethanol [booze to you and me], or indeed magnesium chloride MgCl, is a really effective way to stop cephalopods in their tracks so that scientists can work away on them.
Hmmmm that's convenient but recently the 'horrible spectre' has been raised that, in its cephalos, the poor squid is writhing in agony as its nerves are poked, jangled or bathed in nicotine. We are now primed to be sensitive because of the ethical and economic travails which the killing states have been through to find a 'humane' way of carrying out the death penalty while avoiding anything 'cruel and unusual'. Robyn Crook of SFSU has now laid the cephalopod have feelings boogie to rest. She and her team set up a system that could measure both motor responsiveness and sensory signals to the brain. What you want is a system that a) doesn't have the animals twitching and b) has no incommming signal to the brain which could be interpreted as pain. It turns out that MgCl leaves a 15 minute window of sensation after the end of reactivity while alcohol is obviously annoying to the squids when applied. Another anaesthetic has too narrow a dosage window between I can still feel it and I'm dead. That's nice normal science: chipping away at a problem, having a clear hypothesis, setting up controlled experiments, replicating them in other species and coming up with an answer that has utility in the physiological community. The fact that it makes like easier for a group of animals that some consider to be as clever as a fox that has just been elected Professor of cunning at Oxford University is also all to the good. In particular, and I quote from the Science article: ". . . they're disinclined to stay put—octopuses can escape through minuscule holes . . ."
4) . . . which brought me back to another story about ethics and the octopus. Back in the day when I was working to raise funds for going to graduate school, I had a job in the Afdeling Vissen Diergaarde Blijdorp aka Fish Department, Rotterdam Zoo. My first job each day was to clean the front of all the aquaria with a mixture of dilute acetic acid and a chamois leather. The previous day's visitors had covered the glass with finger and nose prints, and indeed lip-prints and we liked to at least start the day with a clean viewing slate. One of the printiest exhibits contained a single Octopus vulgaris, the same sort of creature as I was to eat in Grañón 25 years later. In lieu of a crevice in the rocks, we'd given it an earthenware land drainage pipe, where it used to retire after feeding time. Well, one night the poor octopus made a run for it; squeezed through a crack between the cover of the aquarium and flopped to the same floor of the service area where I had my near-death experience with a stone fish. The octopus was less fortunate and by morning had expired. What to do? The octopus was unaccountably popular with the visiting kids and it would be some weeks before we could source a replacement. Someone had the bright idea of simply turning the earthenware pipe through 90o. That way we could bamboozle the public into believing that the octopus was, like a Norwegian Blue parrot, merely sleeping. Clearly there were ethical issues about taking money under false pretenses but we none of us lost any sleep over it.
M
ore women in science
Thursday, 8 May 2014
19 Floréal II
"Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme."
This is the way the French state the Law of the Conservation of Matter which they tend to call, with some chauvinistic justification, le Loi de Lavoisier. Tout se transforme also sums up the state of French politics in the final years of Lavoisier's life. |
| Lavoisier hears doorbell |
Where to start? You couldn't cover all his contributions to science in a trifling 1000 words on a blog. But he remains in the history books because of his discovery of the element oxygen - indeed the name oxygène he gave to this most active part of 'air' - the acid generator - is what has stuck for most of us in science, Although some languages prefer a German rather than a Greek root - zuurstof in Nederland or Sauerstoff across their Eastern border. The story of the discovery is a corner-stone of Thomas Kuhn's iconic 1962 investigation of the history and process of science "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". At the same time as Lavoisier was tricking about in the Royal Arsenal, the great English chemist Priestley was carrying out a similar series of experiments showing, for example, that the respiration common to all living things is chemically the same as burning logs in a fire: "la respiration est donc une combustion," as Lavoisier put it. Priestley and Lavoisier agreed on that; but their understanding of what was happening at a molecular level was diametrically opposite. Priestley held to a theory that combustion involved the release of a substance called phlogiston - which was obvious to all thinking people - you just have to see flames issuing from a log to appreciate this. Lavoisier started out by agreeing with this theory but gradually made a volte-face and twigged that combustion was actually the addition of something (oxygen) to the burning material. This not so o.t.a.t.p because you can't sit on your sofa and watch - you have to get off your arse and start measuring things (temperature, weight), really carefully, and recording the results and meticulously keeping records and repeating and repeating your experiments. Science is Hard. Insofar as people know anything at all about the History of Science, they tend to get snitty about Priestley and his pathetic adherence to an outmoded doctrine. It is easy enough to be smug if you have 20/20 hindsight but in the context of the time and what was known back in 1780, phlogiston explained a lot and in an internally consistent way. Here is a sensible and insightful look at the controversy and its resolution.
It must have been exciting times scientifically. But it was also an interesting time politically, with the revolution in France shaking to the core people's certainties about what was possible socially and religiously. Lavoisier shed his "de" and high-falutin' hyphenated first name, left his house in the Royal Arsenal and tried to look like Citoyen Lavoisier but his embedded association with the Ancien Régime was too much for people who were dwarfed by his intellectual achievements. When he was brought before a revolutionary tribunal, the judge dismissed an appeal that Le Grand Fromage should be let alone to continue pushing the frontiers of science with his experiments: "La République n'a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes". A few years earlier Voltaire had responded to the execution of English Admiral Byng on his quarter-deck with the quip "il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres". History is only as useful as its reflection of what we see in today's mirror. Hands up anyone who can name a republic that would happily incarcerate if not actually execute a scientist today because s/he was dissing the dominant religion.
Antoine Lavoisier was tried, condemned and executed all in the day called Arroche 19 Floréal II, exactly 220 years ago. Every day of the year had been given a name by the logical obsessives of the French revolution: plants, tools, animals and minerals were all commemorated in a vain effort to supplant the idea that every saint had his/her day. 19 Floréal was dedicated to Arroche Atriplex hortensis which we call saltbush or Orache. Saltbush or mountain spinach is eminently edible and you are exhorted to go and find some: it's much more interesting than reg'lar spinach and a fit dish to remember a man who was much more interesting than reg'lar scientists.
As the contemporary brilliant mathematician and astronomer Lagrange put it: "Il ne leur a fallu qu’un moment pour faire tomber cette tête, et cent années peut-être ne suffiront pas pour en reproduire une semblable." In other words: decapitation is forever, which is as good an argument against the death penalty as you're likely to find. What a waste.
Wednesday, 21 September 2016
Project Edward - today!
WORKING TOGETHER TO MAKE EUROPE'S ROADS SAFER AND MORE SECURE.
That is the TISPOL mission statement. Who they? The European Traffic Police Bund. Like Interpol, I guess, with an emphasis on hi-viz jackets and breathalysers. They have designated 21 Sep 2016 as European Day Without A Road Death. When I heard the name, I thought it must have been named for an unfortunate child named Edward who was swiped to oblivion on a road somewhere in Europe and was being commemorated in this way; like the Jimmy Fund raising money at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. But it's not; it is an acronym E.D.W.A.R.D. I've had a bit to say, over the years about road traffic accidents RTAs I - II - III - IV - V. So I'm interested in the aspiration to have NO deaths on the roads this day and I believe that traffic cops are putting in some extra hours enforcing correct practice,
For the day that's in it, RTE wheeled our Dr Gerry Lane, consultant in emergency medicine in Letterkenny hospital in remote Donegal. He gave Ireland credit for reducing the number of road deaths significantly over the last 10ish year. 280 people died on Irish roads in 2008 but only 162 in 2012 - it's crept up since then, regretably. This has been achieved a bit by effective enforcement; a bit by Presence and a bit by better engineering of cars and roads and intersections. But it has ultimately been achieved by changes in people's behaviour. If you've been stopped once, with drink taken, and not been booked then you may embrace the designated driver idea. If you keep seeing the dreaded camera-vans, then you'll think twice about doing the ton on an 80km/h trunk road. You'll get there 3 minutes later but you won't ever get a €80 fine and 3 penalty points which will affect your insurance.
Dr Lane commented on the fact that his patch, Co. Donegal, consistently leads the pack in the road death league table and was at a loss to explain it. It's partly because there is very little public transport in this remote and sparsely populated county, but it's partly cultural. For starters, he objects to road events being called accidents as if they are beyond people's control: the act of a malevolent deity. He witnesses insane behaviour on the roads every day: tail-gaters in his rear-view mirror; txters overtaking; no visible seat-belts; driving just too fast. So education which effects a change in behavious has had a role in significantly reducing the carnage. If you look at the European league table for fatal RTAs, Ireland is mid-range with 41 deaths per million each year. This is the same as Germany at 43/million and much less than Poland at 103/million. But let's not get smug about it because we're median. We're still 50% more effective at killing each other than the Brits 28/million next door. This is surely one case where we'd like to participate in a race to the bottom.
That is the TISPOL mission statement. Who they? The European Traffic Police Bund. Like Interpol, I guess, with an emphasis on hi-viz jackets and breathalysers. They have designated 21 Sep 2016 as European Day Without A Road Death. When I heard the name, I thought it must have been named for an unfortunate child named Edward who was swiped to oblivion on a road somewhere in Europe and was being commemorated in this way; like the Jimmy Fund raising money at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. But it's not; it is an acronym E.D.W.A.R.D. I've had a bit to say, over the years about road traffic accidents RTAs I - II - III - IV - V. So I'm interested in the aspiration to have NO deaths on the roads this day and I believe that traffic cops are putting in some extra hours enforcing correct practice,
Dr Lane commented on the fact that his patch, Co. Donegal, consistently leads the pack in the road death league table and was at a loss to explain it. It's partly because there is very little public transport in this remote and sparsely populated county, but it's partly cultural. For starters, he objects to road events being called accidents as if they are beyond people's control: the act of a malevolent deity. He witnesses insane behaviour on the roads every day: tail-gaters in his rear-view mirror; txters overtaking; no visible seat-belts; driving just too fast. So education which effects a change in behavious has had a role in significantly reducing the carnage. If you look at the European league table for fatal RTAs, Ireland is mid-range with 41 deaths per million each year. This is the same as Germany at 43/million and much less than Poland at 103/million. But let's not get smug about it because we're median. We're still 50% more effective at killing each other than the Brits 28/million next door. This is surely one case where we'd like to participate in a race to the bottom.
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