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Category: science

Friday, 22 July 2011

08:55 – Following the crisis summit, there’s lots of joy in the EU. The feeling among people who don’t understand much about economics is that Greece is saved, the Euro is saved, they’re all saved. Economists and market analysts know better. What the crisis summit accomplished was necessary, but by no means sufficient. All that it really accomplished was to put off the reckoning for a short time, perhaps 90 days or less.

In one very ominous sign, Bulgaria announced that it was putting its plans to join the Eurozone on hold indefinitely. In effect, Bulgaria said that it believes its own currency is stronger than the Euro. And it may well be right. This vote of no-confidence in the Euro will not go unnoticed by investors.

And, of course, Fitch has already declared Greek debt to be in default, with Moody’s and S&P no doubt soon to follow. We’re assured by the Euro authorities that this default is “partial” and “temporary” and “selective”, but as far as investors are concerned, default is default. Nor are investors stupid. They did notice that the crisis meeting left the EU bailout fund at its current level, when it actually needed to be at least tripled in size to have any hope of propping up Spain and Italy as their debt comes due. Investors also noticed that the crisis meeting did nothing to address the critical liquidity problem among European banks. In fact, it worsened it by demanding that the banks “voluntarily” take a hit to their balance sheets on Greek debt, albeit concealing the damage by allowing the banks to continue carrying essentially worthless Greek debt instruments at face value rather than market value.

As hundreds of billions of Spanish and Italian debt matures over the next few months, it’s going to become abundantly clear that the crisis summit accomplished nothing but delaying the problem for a few weeks. Even Keynesian economist Paul Krugman gets it.

Nor is it certain that Merkel and the other leaders of the wealthier northern European countries can deliver what they promised at the summit conference. They have their own legislatures and voters to worry about. German voters almost universally perceive past and future bailouts as simple transfers of money from their own pockets to profligate southern countries, and they’ve had about enough. In Holland, this whole fiasco has accomplished something previously thought impossible: Dutch political parties, from far left to far right and everything in between, are united in their opposition to these huge transfers of their money to southern countries.

So Merkel, Sarkozy, and other leaders are walking a very fine line. Supporting what was needed to actually solve the problem would end up with them and their parties being routed at the polls. That solution, beginning with Eurobonds and ending with full fiscal and political union, is simply unacceptable to voters in Germany, Austria, Holland, and Finland. And rightly so, because the inevitable result would be a united Europe as the world’s newest third-world country.

Anyone who works with plasticware in a lab should keep the chemical resistance of various types of plastics in mind. If it weren’t for the high cost, the various Teflon plastics would be ideal. They’re resistant to almost anything, and anything they’re not resistant to is something I probably don’t want to be using anyway. Polypropylene (PP) and the polyethylenes (LDPE and HDPE) are, with some exceptions, pretty resistant to most chemicals. Polyethylene terephthalate, PET, is most familiar as softdrink bottles. It’s transparent, while PP, LDPE, and HDPE are translucent or opaque, depending on thickness and type. PET is also resistant to most dilute chemicals as well as alcohol and some other organic solvents. What it’s not resistant to, among other things, is concentrated strong acids.

So, yesterday I was down in the lab, making up 2 liters each of various chemical solutions. I was using 2-liter PET Coke bottles as mixing vessels. Among the solutions I was making up was 0.1 M iron(II) sulfate. Like most iron(II) salts, iron(II) sulfate has a nasty habit of spontaneously oxidizing to the iron(III) salt, with the spare iron ions reacting to form insoluble iron hydroxide and iron oxides. The result is a cloudy mess. The way to avoid that is to have sulfate ions present in excess, which is most easily done by adding a small amount of concentrated sulfuric acid to the iron(II) sulfate solution. So there I was, with about 1.5 L of distilled water in a clean 2-liter Coke bottle. I started to add 8 mL of 98% sulfuric acid, and realized as I started to pour what was going to happen.

Yep, as I trickled the concentrated sulfuric acid into the bottle, it ran down the inside of the bottle and instantly started depolymerizing the PET. My pretty transparent bottle turned cloudy white as the PET went from the transparent amorphous form to the opaque semi-crystalline form. I quickly dumped the contents of the bottle down the drain before the PET depolymerized completely. I don’t often have do-overs when I’m making up solutions, but this was one of them.

09:27 – Here’s a pretty amazing video of a group of people in a small boat, at considerable risk to themselves, saving a young humpback whale that had become entangled in a gill net. Even a juvenile humpback could have capsized their boat or turned it into kindling. But the humpback seemed to realize that these humans were trying to help it, and it docilely allowed them to do so. At about 6:30 in, the whale is free. She puts on an incredible display of joy, or perhaps thanks to her saviors. (H/T to Jerry Coyne)

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Monday, 18 July 2011

08:34 – As expected, the Euro is getting hammered this morning. Yields on Spanish and Italian debt have jumped by about 0.2 percentage points already this morning, with worse to come. The EU authorities made a major blunder with their feel-good “stress test” results. They released the actual data, which means that investors could and did plug in their own assumptions and run them against that data. And the results aren’t pretty.

The two major phony assumptions made for the official bank test results were that no sovereign default would occur and that a 5% core capital requirement was sufficient. In reality, of course, there will be a default. In effect, Greece has defaulted already, with Portugal and Ireland teetering on the edge and Spain and Italy not far behind. Even without a default, using a more realistic 7% capital requirement puts the majority of European banks in bankruptcy and a so-called conservative 10% capital requirement puts all of them in deep, deep trouble. With a default, they’re toast.

Meanwhile, the higher yields on Spanish and Italian debt threaten their immediate solvency. For the Italians, for example, a 1% increase in yield costs them about €8.5 billion per year, so it doesn’t take much to wipe out the effects of the recent Italian so-called austerity measures. The EU authorities continue kicking the can down the road, most recently by delaying the crisis summit from last week until Thursday of this week. I was about to say that they’re running out of time, but the truth is that they’ve already run out of time. This will play out now no matter what they do Thursday.

This is devolving into a fight between the richer northern countries, which perhaps not coincidentally are all secular, and the poorer southern countries, which are all Catholic. I think a breakup of the Eurozone is a foregone conclusion, with the richer, productive northern countries refusing to continue to subsidize the poorer, unproductive southern countries. German citizens were never happy about the Euro to begin with, and there is now strong sentiment for abandoning the Euro and returning to the Deutschmark.

Meanwhile, Greece has begun uttering threats, including floating the idea of withdrawing from the Euro. Some threat. Greece reminds me of that scene in Blazing Saddles, where Bart takes himself hostage and threatens to shoot himself in the head unless everyone backs off. It worked for Bart, but it’s not going to work for Greece.

11:10 – Here’s a fascinating graph from Calamities of Nature of GDP versus belief in evolution that makes very clear just how much an outlier the US is.

13:24 – Geez. Talk about inflation. I was ordering some chemicals from one of my suppliers, but the website was misbehaving, timing out and dumping the contents of my cart. So I emailed the purchase order to them and called to follow up. As usual, we got into a discussion about stuff unrelated to the order.

He verified that everything on my list was in stock and ready to ship, but mentioned that he was having terrible problems restocking some chemicals. One of them is silver nitrate. All of his suppliers have plenty of it, but none are willing to sell any because the price of silver just keeps going up and up. And the potassium iodide situation is nearly as bad. Back when the Japanese reactor problem occurred, you couldn’t get potassium iodide for love or money. Every bit of it was being made into KI tablets. Everyone expected sanity to return once the Japanese scare was over, but it hasn’t. Since that event, the price of potassium iodide has literally quadrupled to quintupled, and there’s no relief in sight.

None of that really surprised me, but some of the chemicals in short supply and/or experiencing major price jumps are so commonplace and cheap that I had trouble believing there is actually a shortage. For example, ammonium acetate. Ammonium acetate? Geez. You make the stuff by neutralizing glacial acetic acid with concentrated ammonia, both of which are cheap and available literally by the tanker load, and evaporate the water. There’s no possible way there should be a shortage of ammonium acetate, and yet there is.

14:15 – Oh, my. Things are suddenly even worse, with evidence that the “contagion” is now extending to France and even Germany. The price of CDSs for both nations jumped today, with France jumping from 114 to 123 basis points, and Germany from 60 to 64.

A CDS (credit default swap) is basically an insurance policy against a debtor defaulting, at which point the debt holder is paid the face value and in return signs over the (bad) debt to the CDS issuer. The premium for a CDS is specified in basis points, or one one-hundredth of 1%. Right now, Greece CDSs are at 2500+ basis points, or more than 25%. In other words, insuring €1 billion of Greek debt involves paying premium of €250 million. Does that mean that Greek debt is currently worth 75% of face value? Not at all. The CDS premium reflects the fact that CDS issuers are still expecting some sort of bailout for Greece. Absent that, the current CDS premium on Greek debt would probably be at 9000+ basis points and possibly 9900+ basis points. Essentially no one outside the EU authorities really expects Greece to survive this mess. They’re treating Greece as though it had already defaulted, and rightly so.

The scary thing right now is that CDS prices on French and German debt are increasing substantially. They’re still relatively small, at only a few percent of CDS premiums on Greek debt, but they’re increasing rapidly in percentage terms, and that indicates that investors are at least somewhat concerned about the likelihood of a French or even German default. As someone commented, if investors start looking with concern at France, it’s game over for the Euro.

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Thursday, 14 July 2011

08:55 – I’m still working heads-down on the biology book. Right now, I’m entirely rewriting a lab session on DNA analysis by gel electrophoresis. The original lab session was all for real: real DNA, real restriction enzymes, real agarose gel, real gel electrophoresis setup and power supply, and so on.

The problem was, doing it for real is expensive, time-consuming, and takes a lot of page count to write up. It simply wasn’t worth the costs in terms of money, lab time, and page count for the educational benefits it provided. So I decided to rewrite the lab session to separate dyes rather than DNA fragments on a food-grade agar gel bed, and to use a home-made gel electrophoresis apparatus with 9V batteries instead of a $400 commercial apparatus. The concepts are the same, the learning experience is quite similar, the resulting gels are extremely colorful, and all of the specialty items needed are inexpensive enough to include in the kit.

The gloves have finally come off, with the Democrats and Republicans making it clear that they really, really hate each other’s guts, as if that wasn’t already clear to anyone who was paying attention. The Republicans refuse to budge on increasing taxes–which is bad enough; they should be insisting on reducing them–and want to make actual spending cuts, but only small ones. The Democrats insist on increasing taxes and increasing spending. They’re both our enemies, but the Republicans are slightly less our enemies, at least economically, than the Democrats.

We are currently taxing at a rate of 15% of GDP, and spending at a rate of 25% of GDP. Obama cynically promises $3 trillion in spending “cuts”, all of which are in the future, constitute reductions in proposed spending increases rather than actual cuts, and will never take place, in return for “only” $1 trillion in tax increases, all of which will certainly occur, and sooner rather than later.

The fundamental problem is that the federal government spends an incredible $125 billion per month more than it takes in. That’s more than $400/month for every man, woman, and child in the country. And when you consider that half the population pays zero (or negative) federal income taxes, that means that the average actual taxpayer’s share of federal deficit spending is probably more than $1,000 per month. Every month.

Meanwhile, Obama cynically warns that the government may not be able to pay Social Security recipients if the borrowing limit is not increased, and claims that we won’t be able to pay interest on our debt, thereby damaging our credit and setting off an economic apocalypse. The reality is that the US won’t be able to pay all of its bills, but which bills we choose not to pay are still within the control of the government. So, as usual, the government threatens not to pay the important bills. Sound familiar?

Every time money is tight, government threatens to cut spending on the things people want to spend money on, while leaving untouched the things that people don’t want to spend money on. When municipal budgets are tight, for example, the mayor and city council cut fire and police and garbage service–the things that people really want–while refusing to cut costs in areas that the taxpayers don’t much care about.

Meanwhile, the federal spending categories that should be cut with a meataxe aren’t even mentioned. Why, for example, are we wasting many billions of dollars every month on completely useless items such as the UN, foreign aid, the IMF, NATO, TSA, and so on, not to mention the huge costs of maintaining military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan?

As someone said, we don’t have a tax problem, we have a spending problem. It’s long past time that we decided how much we can afford to spend, and then prioritize what to spend it on. The problem is that it’s in neither party’s perceived interest to address the problem seriously. The Republicans want Obama and the Democrats to be crushed at the polls in 2012, so passing any kind of increase in the borrowing limit that puts off the crisis is the last thing they want to do. The Democrats can’t afford to make any serious spending cuts, because their core constituency is made up of government employees and union members, both of which will suffer badly if rational steps are taken to address the spending crisis.

This is not going to end well. So far, the war is one of mere words, but it could easily devolve into real class warfare. Both sides perceive this issue as existential. And in a fight for survival, things can get very ugly very fast.

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A day in the life

Here’s a wonderful post from Abbie Smith, AKA ERV. You probably need to be a working scientist to appreciate it fully, but Abbie gives a great description of her working day as a grad student down in the pits of bench science, where everything is easy but even the easy things are difficult.

Incidentally, don’t let Abbie’s LOLcat prose turn you off. It’s just how she writes blog entries, with various affectations such as refusing to use apostrophes in contractions. I’m not sure why she does that. When we exchange email, she writes fluent and literate English prose. Perhaps it’s because Abbie likes to be underestimated by creationists and other anti-science folks. When they do that, which they do regularly, they are making a serious mistake. Abbie has a first-rate brain and the heart of a pit bull.

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Rinderpest is no more

The New York Times reports that, for only the second time in history, humans have eradicated a disease in the wild. The first one, of course, was smallpox, which now exists only in a few government laboratories. This one is rinderpest, a plague that affected cattle and related animals, sometimes with 95% or higher mortality rates.

Like smallpox, I’m sure government labs have kept rinderpest specimens, both as a potential bioweapon and as a counter to its use as a bioweapon. And, of course, “extinct” is a matter of opinion. Many species thought to be extinct have since been rediscovered in the wild, and scientists have sometimes been surprised by how good some viruses are at finding new vectors. Let’s hope there’s no reservoir of this virus remaining in the wild.

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