Snake oil that bites, or who wants an oily snake.

Snake oil that bites, or who wants an oily snake.

I am sorry for the lack of posts, but I hope that this dubious quality makes up for quantity.

I am a believer in the placebo effect and think that it's perfect way to practice ANOVA techniques. You can now get any number of devices that use “science” or “science buzzwords” for placebos. Copper bracelets are of dubious effect, but I am certain that they will keep barnacles and wood worm from attacking your wrists. You can also get magnetic bracelets and healing crystals, that will heal you of various ailments, or so you can believe. I remain scheptical.

This post is about using “science” for health benefits, but instead of the placebo effect, specifically about a class of product which, rather than healing their users, actually killed them.

I got the idea for this post from a recent Wired article that I found in a doctor's waiting room. It focused on the interesting case of Eben Byers (1880-1932). Since then I done a fair amount of researh on Mr. Byers. He was a very prominent man in his time; in addition to being a wealthy socialite and prominent sports figure. A casual search on the New York Times archive revealed 74 articles, most of them about his golfing status – in 1906 he was the US Amateur Golf Champion. In a way when I think of him, he brings to mind, the poem and song about Richard Corey [1].

In 1927 Eben fell off the berth in train that had been chartered for the Harvard-Yale game and injured his arm. He had recurring pain and went to his physician, Dr. Moyar [time]. Dr. Moyar prescribed a patent medicine for his “cure.” The prescription was for Radithor. Radithor, according to a later investigation by the AMA had been marketed as a cure for "anemia, leukemia, boils, blackheads and pimples." [NYT], but not for bone ailment/shoulder pain.

As I alluded, there are a number of placebos with only psychological benefit. Unfortunately, Radithor had an extreme deleterious health effect. Radithor could be purchase in a case of 24 2-oz bottles for $30[2]. From 1927 until his death in 1932, he is said to have consumed two bottles a day. There were a number of quack radiation medicines at the time; many of them, thankfully did not contain radioactive material, or radioactive materials with short half-lifes. Radithor was extremely dangerous, it contained 1 microcurie of radium (226 and 228) and 1 microcurie of isothiouranium[3].

Radium is not a very pleasant element. ²²⁶Ra has a half-life of 1600 years, undergoing an alpha decay resulting in Radon[3]. ²²²Rn is more pleasant, although a cause of a major source of radiaton exposure in the world (especially true for folks who live in well insulated houses in stony areas and smokers). ²²²Rn has a half-life of 91.2 hours and undergoes an alpha decay into ²¹⁸Po(lonium). In short, the decay process of Radium, although slow, results in unpleasant isotopes.

An alpha decay involves the evolution of an alpha particle (42H2+). Alpha particle are heavy and do not have a high penetration and can be blocked by a sheet of paper or penetrate up to 40 microns into the body from external exposure; As a comparison, the diameter of a human hair is approximately 30 microns.

The danger of alpha emitting isotopes comes from ingestion, say for example, by drinking Radithor. Radium is especially insidious because when ingested, it substitutes for calcium in the body and concentrates in the bones. ²²²Rn is used medically, due to it's affinity to calcium and its short half-life, for tests, such as bone density[4].

As stated above Mr. Byers died in 1932 after ingesting Radithor for 5 years. Did it kill him? I believe the response is an indisputable “yes!” The Wall Street Journal wrote a headline for him --"The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off."[5]. The effects of the radium on his body were horrific; The New York Times said:

"Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive operations in which his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull."

At death, his bones were estimated to contain 36 micrograms of Radium, corresponding to a radioactive dose of 37 microCuries[5][6]. I hope that Mr. Byers was not cremated.

The lesson to be learned from this case is to be careful about what you put into your body and thank god for the few people and dollars that are spent on the

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Corey

[2] Using the inflation calculator at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current purchasing power of $30 in 1932 is currently equivalent to $467.

[3] The activity of the contents are from wikipedia (Radithor). They do not provide any information on isothiouranium, so I can not verify the activity, the half life and the decay processes.

[4] This is a factoid that IIRC with the caveat IANAD

[3] Radium has a number of isotopes and I was unable to find a percent abundance of ²²⁶Ra.

[5] I would love a copy of the headline and obituary. The Wall Street Journal, 61 words
Apr 1, 1932

[6] The current federally allowed concentration of radium in drinking water is 5 picocuries per liter. Each bottle of Radithor was equivalent to drinking 40,000 liters (40 cubic meters) of water at the maximum allowed rate. At 2 liters per day, it would take 50 years to drink that much.

[7] http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_8/8-4/terms.html

Cites:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,743525,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor

The image below was taken from http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/quackcures/radith.htm

and used with permission by the copy write owner (http://www.orau.org/ptp/museumdirectory.htm)

Beatrix Potter -- Girl geek

Like most people of my age, I was raised on the diminutive copies of the works of Beatrix Potter. The stories were okay, albeit skimpy on the prose, but the colored plates were (and continue to be) enchanting. We have a freebie Showtime gracias a DirecTV and I recently watched Miss Potter[1].

Anyway, getting back to the point of this trabajo -- Thanks to a Natural History article in the 1980's, I had known that Potter had done more than just children's books[2]. During my morning perigrinations, I came upon a site which had some of her original illustration studies. This sparked me into doing a bit more research into the remarkable woman. The movie stated that she left 4000 acres of land in the Lake Region of Northern England to the National Trust, which was founded by a priest, whom she might have had contact with when she was a girl, vacationing in the area.

Just found a link to her scientific illustrations.

As a scientist (or whatever the hell I am), I was surprised that, in addition to her work as a scientific illustrator, she also was active in the field of mycology and was one of the early proponents of lichens being a symbiotic[3] relationship between funji and alga [4]. She also was a published author, although, as a woman, she was prevented from presenting her article at the Linnean Society[5].

I also looked for her original purchase in the Lake Region, Hill Top Farm. If you have an interest, you can look at it at 54.3517°N, 2.970453°W, in nearly high resolution[6].

In her latter life, she was a great proponent of preserving the Herdwick sheep[7], I only mention because of the shepherds use of the Yan-Tan-Tethra counting of sheep. I was first introduced this in Sir Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching Novels (It appears that he was using a mix of regional dialects).

So, forthcoming are planned trabajos in Portugese, yurt canvas, and lichens.


[1] I am a bit ticked that my verison of FireFox no longer has the IMDB search tab, but I have provided a link to the move that I had to go through google to obtain. Grumble.

I enjoyed the movie, even though I watched it over a period of over a week. 'S strange thanks to Bridget Jones', I had thought that Renee Zellweger was a Brit, rather than a Tejana.

[2] http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/ . I subsribed religiously and would read the magazine cover to cover the day that it arrived -- A welcome break from technical reading related to my major at the time. I resubscribed for a year, but after the death of Stephen Jay Gould and Raymond Sokolov leaving the magazine, it was never quite the same. The magazine did allow me to talk intelligently about biology and natural history and one of my professors in Ecuador would ask me, "Do you know?" A great ego-bost for a Latin American Historian.

[3] I originally called this a comensual relationship -- I guess that the alga gets something from the lichen. Trace minerals?
[4] A subject truly worth it's own post.
[5] I tried to find full text copies of the articles, but the Linnean Society does have a page listing her contributions. Sigh -- not everything is on the web.
[6] Unfortnatly Google Street View has not made it to Sawry on the B5285.
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herdwick_sheep

.....

I have been doing some work modeling the door frame for the yurt. It is 8 pieces and I will eventually have to decide whether I want to use dowels (or steel pins) or screws. The size that I have chosen is 4 khar mod spacings, or 51." The total height is 54.5 inches. This means that you'll have to bend over to enter. The first frame shows the door installed around some segments of the khana. I probably am missing something, because I had to manually insert a cutting plane to trim the lengths of the khar mod.

This frame shows where the khana segments fit into the door frame. I have highlighted the place where they fit in red. In real, rather than CAD'd yurts, there are groves cut out for them to fit -- An excuse to get a 3/4 router bit! As you can see, it is not the best of fits. I am sure that they can be persuaded to fit in the grooves. The youtube videos that I have seen indicate that this fiddly bit is not the easiest part of the assembly.

This last frame is an exploded view of the pieces of the door frame -- the total thickness is 4", so there will be room to install the door inside the frame, with maximum dimensions of 50" high by47" wide (minus hinges and door thickness).

I guess that I need to mock it up in cardboard for a better view, but this is pretty much a fixed/no wiggle room allowed set of dimensions.

You might want to click the exploded drawing to get a better idea of the way they fit together. The four upright boards are 1" by 3" and the 2 upright supports are 2" by 2".

Chao!

Plumbing and water leaks -- my bane

Recently, I had the misfortune to have a leak in the drain valve on my hot water heater. It was a steady drip drip that we were convinced was coming from the condenser in our A/C unit. I finally found it and fixed it -- just a simple gasket in the (insert expletive) ball valve (the valve was made of nylon no less).

Water leaks have been a constant struggle in my work life -- We used water for cryopump compressors and the every-day plumbing you encounter in your average research lab. It got so bad that I had to buy and install moisture sensors and have security hook them up to campus police. Oh, the 3 am phone calls.

My family made a trip to Belize and we stayed at this really nice lodge near San Ignacio (which has/had a wonderful Indonesian restaurant)[1]. This lodge, if this is the best word, had bungalos with hot water heated with gas (propane?) in line water heaters. I have decided that if I build, or have more leak issues, I am going to get an in-line heater.

I was recently surfing (remember unemployed = time on your hands, as Monster/Careerbuilder/Physicstoday/Chronicle of Higher Education don't add a hundred jobs in my field every day) I came across a manufacturer of these devices -Bosch. A quick web search gives the prices as roughly $1100 for a unit that can support two appliances at once (washing machine and shower, for instance) or 20 liters per minute[2]. They are sold for either natural gas or propane at the same price.

As they only have the pilot light lit constantly and don't fire up the burner (in contact with the heat exchanger), they are more energy efficient. This site also says that they are eligible for a $300 tax credit on your 2009 taxes. I see them as win-win and for energy effiency and price.


[1] San Ignacio is close to the Guatemalan border (specifically the Peten), but it was the rainy season, so we were unable to go to Tikal, which was a major disappointment.
[2] A quick search discovered that a replacement for our H/W heater would be ~$500-$600.

More, well, you know

Here are my latest efforts using Sketchup. I am rather happy with the results. The problem I had with the previous post's model was the size of the circle. Once I got that corrected, I got a much more realistic appearance. There are still some issues with this model, however. I used Sketchup to calculate the rotation angle. It said ~7.7°, which is not precise enough. You can see the cumulative error as the khar mod are spun copied around the center. I need to get my calculator out and suffer through the geometry to get a better fix on the angle.

The other issue is the age of my computer. My desktop was pretty smoking 4.25 years ago, but now, it just doesn't cut it. The model had ~70,000 entities with XYZ coordinates. It took about a minute to do the last rotations. Sigh.

More yurt

Here's my first try to model the separate khar mod. I rotated them in, but from the bottom, rather than the mid section, so it bows out.

It does show the bend in the walls, though.

Got some unbleached canvas. More later.

Another Yurt update

I have been doing some work on my yurt planning, but most of it has been learning to use a 3D CAD program.
The images that I have included where done using Google SketchUp, which is a good program that I am still learning how to do things, but I have been able to do some reasonable modeling.

...It looks like the images are in a reverse order. The first two images are for a possible semi-permanent foundation; composed of half sheets of plywood, 2 by 4's, and cinderblocks. I am certain that it is over-kill. I will ask architect friend for suggestions.

I am reasonably fond of how the uni and the tono came out in the scale mock-up. The tono crown is based on the golden mean of the diameter. The mid height support is just put on without any special idea.

One issue with the model is the khar mod[1]. They should flex as they rotate around the circle. Flexing of the segments is a little advanced for my poor Sketchup skills. It can probably be done with some kind of move function on the top of the khar mod.

I have also been working on other hands-on (i.e. non-computer based) related projects.
I got some 3/4 inch square pine boards and tried to make the uni attachments. What I discovered is that my plan to insert the steel pins into the tono and uni was a bit optimistic. I will probably want the pins to be about 3.5 inches long. And I am sure that it will be a bitch to use a hand drill to drill perfect longitudinal centered holes in an 8 foot hunk of wood.

I tried making the knots to form a loop to hold the uni to the khana using 4 mm nylon cord. It came out okay, but each of the knots has to be melted and smushed so that they won't pull through. I also tried to connect two khar mod together -- 3/4 is going to be thicker than I'll use[3], but putting the cord through two boards, knotting, and melting/smushing is a lot of work, especially when you consider that you need to do it nearly a thousand times.

I got a copy of Sewing for Idiots to learn how to use the sewing machine and see if I can use it to make the seams in 12# canvas. My local fabric store has 10# -- I'll start with that, if just for learning and testing the waterproofing recipe (remember - turpentine and soy oil).


[1] The laths that make up the khana[2]
[2] The rectangular lattice wall sections
[3] I am planning now to make them 1/2 inch thick.