Sambal

Ric Pashley, an Australian chemist, has demonstrated that oil and water can mix.

If confirmed, the finding could provide clues to one of chemistry’s most puzzling phenomena. This is the so-called long-range hydrophobic force, which causes oil surfaces to attract one another over what to chemists are remarkably long distances.

Effectively, Pashley’s claim is that dissolved gas is necessary for the action of the so-called long-range hydrophobic force. In the absence of dissovled gas, water and oil spontaneously mixed. (Unfortunately, the summary article doesn’t say how hard they were pumping.)

Although this is exciting for physical chemists, and in a distant way interesting to biologists (after all, there are very few biology samples that you can repeatedly freeze and evacuate), it’s earth-shattering for theoretical chemists.

Any simulation that purported to show spontaneous separation of oil and water is now known to be garbage. The paper-and-pencil crowd will have to figure out how to work dissolved gas into their models. If Pashley is right (his results haven’t yet been reproduced), it means that we have to throw away most of our liquid theories.

It almost makes me wish I were back in grad school, doing liquid theory, for the chance to work on these problems in a relatively clear field. Unfortunately, the other structural problems of theoretical chemistry remain: low relevance and intractable computing problems.

And although accounting for dissolved gas is now known to be necessary, there’s nothing to say that it’s the last factor that needs to be accounted for in theory. Very likely it’s not. Water is messy stuff, full of dissolved ions, gases, small organic molecules, and we’re not really very good at modeling it.

Britain surrenders; commercial business jockeys for position in the “cannabis user” market, The Guardian reports:

The Government has announced that cannabis will be ‘downgraded’ to a class C drug next summer making arrest and prosecution for possession less likely. The move follows a controversial experiment in Lambeth, south London, where police attention focused on hard drug users and suppliers rather than cannabis smokers.

My first irrelevant thought was: Does any user really call it cannabis? Reporters and bureaucrats, sure, but real users? All the pot-smokers I know called it weed, but that was in Southern California.

And my second irrelevant thought was: will Colby Cosh object? If justifying Christmastime spending sprees as being “good for the economy” is anathema to him, how about the Guardian’s line “Could cannabis smokers be the unlikely saviours of the British economy?”

Don’t buy government bonds — smoke a bowl for our GI’s!

I’m not sure these are the freedoms they died to protect.

So Colby thinks that the retail sector is more important than the entertainment sector “only to retailers” — this when retail accounts for 4 times as many jobs as entertainment — and that’s in California. In 1997 across the U.S., retail receipts were 28 times those of enertainment (actually “Arts, Entertainment and Recreation”); retail paid 10 times as much in total payroll. (1997 US Economic Census). Wow. First time I’ve ever caught Colby being provincial, if only in a technical sense. He’s Alberta-focused.

Retail, wholesale, and services are the backbone of a mature economy, which Alberta manifestly does not have. Here in Alberta it’s still about the oooiiiil. If the oil (and the coal, and the tar sands) disappeared, Alberta would become a right-wing Saskatchewan; Canadian Nebraska.

But mature economies aren’t like that. Nobody goes to New York for the farms, or the mineral wealth, or the docks. They go to New York because it’s New York — the economy is huge, it’s self-sustaining. Like LA’s economy: in LA the economy is not about oil or movies or the defense industry or software or real estate or construction. The LA economy exists because three million people live in LA. A major component of the economy is the provision of basic goods like food and clothing. And that is retail.

I don’t want to talk about the working conditions in retail jobs, which are reportedly horrible. Part of the reason retail gets a bad rap is that nobody wants to work in retail. Fine. I’d probably enjoy retail, because I’m a contrary person.

No, I want to talk about value creation in retail. I think that’s part of the distaste people feel for retail — it’s distaste for crass commercialism, mercantilism — fundamentally, distaste for the bourgeoisie. (Great: first I call Colby provincial, now I’m calling him a communist. Sorry, old chap.) Retail looks like a business enterprise based on taking money from the consumer by marking up the price of goods.

It’s easy to see that value is created in a retail operation. If it makes a profit, then value must have been created somewhere, right? But it’s hard to point a finger at when. And until recently it was a silly question to ask.

In my line of work — computer programming — it’s easy to see when the value is created. We sit down and one of us types and the other watches for errors and between the two of us we just, y’know, create value. The same is true for writers, animators, singers — all intellectual property creators — they just create value all day long. If you watch you can see it happen.

But when does it happen in retail? When the wholesale order comes in? When it’s broken up and stored? When an item goes on the shelf? When the customer comes into the store? When the item goes in the basket? The value is realized when the customer pays. But when is it made?

It surprises me, that in all the furor raised over Al Gore’s announced support for socialized medicine, no-one has pointed out the constituency most likely to be pleased by Gore’s statement.

I am speaking, of course, of the U.S. health insurance industry.

I believe that Al has taken stock of his chances wnd knows that he is racing towards the event horizon of political oblivion, which will come in the general election of 2004. Knowing that his speaking fees will never approach Clinton’s, Al has decided to sell out in every way possible.

He has sold out to the insurance industry. When Al Gore goes down, his defeat will discredit the single-payer health care plan he championed.

Who else will buy a piece of Gore’s loss? The pro-choice lobby? Pharmaceutical manufacturers (go ahead Al, promote generics!)

Oh, I know politics is never really this simple. But I can dream, can’t I?

Prostrate this morning with stomach flu. Up around noon, moving slowly, I was able to hold down food, so I did some work and read the paper.

We started a trial subscription to the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago (right before Karen got sick), and we’ve been trying to cancel it ever since.

It’s not just that it’s a bad paper (though it is). It’s not just that it’s a bad paper with no coverage of Alberta (though it is). It’s headlines like these:

Fed says rate cut should work

Desire for power lures CEOs to troubled firms

Canada won’t be cowed by threats, Manley says

Really, what do you expect [deputy Prime Minster of Canada John] Manley to say? “Canada will be cowed by threats, Manley says.” “Canada backs out of Iraq war due to Al-Qaida threats, Manley says” “Canada waiting for Osama bin Laden to shout ‘Ollie ollie oxen free’ before coming out of hiding”.

Sheesh.

UPDATE:

Iraq sees trouble ahead

The other day I caught my mind in the act of rewriting history. I was driving and I had a sudden memory — that is, the memory of a situation suddenly came to my mind. The memory was exquisitely detailed, of me riding in a car and being yelled at by one of my parents.

Later on, recounting this to my wife, I realized that I had falsified the memory. I had swapped the roles. The actual memory was of riding in a car and yelling at one of my parents. Unfortunately, that memory is much less useful for blaming some or all of my current behavior on parent-inflicted childhood trauma.

I’m happy that I caught myself in the act of lying to myself, but of course it’s never pleasant to have such a personal reminder of Man’s fallen nature.

But this brings to mind something I heard this weekend in St. Louis. We were at the wedding of a couple of college friends, and therefore the old gang (such as it was) was all together again. On the whole we are skinnier, drink less, and go to sleep earlier than we did in college. In a word, older. But just as liberal. You see, my wife and I are the token conservatives among our college friends.

Which brings me to the unbelievable comment one of our friends made.

This friend is a native (liberal) Californian who now lives in Missouri. Missouri, you will recall, was where John Ashcroft used to be a senator before he was defeated in 2000 by Mel Carnahan (deceased, D-MO). In Carnahan’s place, Democratic Missouri governor (Bob Holden, D) appointed Mel’s widow Jean Carnahan to the Senate, leaving the Senate split 50-50 until Jim Jeffords took his fateful leap.

The comment was, “If I’d known then what I know now, I would have voted for Ashcroft. He’s the devil incarnate, but I’d rather have him as a Senator than as Attorney General.”

My immediate reaction was, Yeah, right. You would have voted for Ashcroft, thus giving the Republicans a Jeffords-proof majority in the Senate. In 2000, there weren’t any other conservative AG candidates in the entire country. If not for Ashcroft’s Senate defeat, Bush would have been forced to ask Janet Reno to stay on another four years.

I believe I said, “Hmmm.”

Self-deception is never pretty.

Medicinal pot growers are suing a newspaper for disclosing too much about their location.

Apparently, violence is involved in the illegal drug trade. This according to the allegedly injured grower, one Michael Maniotis:

“What happens to locations in Vancouver that are known to be cultivating cannabis, legal or otherwise? The doors get kicked down, people come inside, there’s home invasions, people sometimes get killed.”

Gee, then, why don’t you not invite the media to your grow-op? Especially after already getting into trouble with the cops:

Maniotis has been charged with trafficking in marijuana at the Merlin Project’s Marijuana Tea House, which was shut down by police in January after only a few weeks in operation. Police said people without Health Canada licences were smoking pot and that equipment was being set up to grow plants.

Medical officers of health are free to speak on Kyoto, confirms Ralph Klein, premier of Alberta. The Palliser Health Authority plans to meet today to reconsider the firing of David Swann.

But perhaps David Swann wasn’t fired for his unpopular views on Kyoto? Was he perhaps fired for inappropriately using his public position to air his political views? After all, when he gave a speech titled “Genocide In Iraq”, he was identified only by his University of Calgary affiliation.

(The Iraq genocide Swann is concerned about is caused by UN sanctions, not Saddam. And according to this Globe and Mail reporter, the 1.5 million body count Swann attributes to sanctions is made up.)

Doesn’t anyone else find it strange that the Ayn Rand Institute is a non-profit organization?

Copyright

So I was going to watch my favorite unemployed New Yorker just now; but I’ve been asked to ‘keep it down’. So I’ll rant instead.

Hewers of wood and drawers of water are rare in our hydrocarbon-based economy; rare enough that we can forget the origins of the term. But they’re not rare in the world.

Last December my wife and I had the privilege of visiting Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world. Mali is where you can find Timbuktu, or if you prefer the colonial misspelling, Tombouctou. It’s also where you can find my mother, working as a Peace Corps volunteer, which is why we were out there almost a year ago.

My mom is stationed in a village with no electricity or running water. If you want water, you have to draw it yourself from the water table — at least 5 m below the surface, sometimes more. If you want heat for comfort or cooking, you have to gather wood from en brousse to burn in your fireplace. Drawing water and gathering wood are necessary life-sustaining activities that must be attended to each day.

Think about what it means for us, here in the West, to have solved the heat and water problems. None of us spends time worrying about personally obtaining fuel or water. It’s delegated and forgotten. Pay some money at the end of the month for hot and cold running water.

The original meaning of “draw” (akin to drag) has even atrophied out of our language. Not so in Bore, the language of the region where my mother lives. The words for “draw water” are le nyu, and the words and concept are very much alive.

We have eliminated whole categories of mentally unrewarding physical work from our world. Isn’t that inspiring?