The coltan controversy

The gaming internets were buzzing the last few days about a widely-publicized report from Toward Freedom that civil war and ongoing militia activity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have in part been fueled by the demand for coltan, a source of the tantalum powder that is necessary for capacitors in consumer electronics. Of course, this isn't a new issue, just a new press release, in which the Playstation 2 in particular is singled out as a cause of conflict. This would be an excellent reason to dislike gaming consoles were it not inflammatory nonsense.

It would be foolish to deny the destructive effects of coltan demand, of course. Although the civil wars in the DRC had political origins, the conflict was sustained in part by demand for this mineral resource. Neighboring countries used militias in the DRC as proxies to ensure access to coltan, which they then sold to a number of foreign companies, which then resold it to various manufacturers, including many American makers of capacitors. Prices for tantalum spiked significantly in the years 1999-2000, providing an even stronger incentive for the DRC's neighbors to seize its rich reserves of coltan. Conflict and deficiencies in infrastructure have at times limited industrial mining of coltan, meaning that it is often mined using less safe artisanal techniques, and often by children. While many responsible companies have taken steps to ensure that they do not use any coltan illegally seized from the DRC, monitoring any supply chain of this kind is very difficult and there are strong incentives for bad actors to lie. Moreover, the greatest damage was done by the '99-'00 price spike; adopting supply controls now can't undo what happened. The Toward Freedom article attributes the spike (and ongoing demand) to the Playstation 2. This is at best a highly selective interpretation of history.

Consider that as of 2007, the total number of cellular phone subscriptions worldwide was estimated at 3.3 billion, while the total number of PS2s sold to date is something like 150 million. According to statistics found at the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association website, the number of cellular phone subscriptions in the United States in 2000 was more than 100 million. By 2003 the number of cell phone subscriptions in the United States alone exceeded the number of Playstation 2 units sold worldwide in the entire production run to date. Keep in mind that those cell phone users are changing their phones regularly: the number of used and discarded phones in the United States (which has a low cellular penetration rate) substantially exceeds its human population. As such, we should expect that the actual number of cellular phones used by human beings since their introduction is significantly higher than the number of subscriptions, perhaps by a factor of two or more. Why blame game consoles for the coltan demand, then, rather than the far more prevalent cellular technology?

Of course, the demand for coltan doesn't end with game consoles or cellular phones. Tantalum is used in virtually every modern piece of electronics equipment, including pagers, laptop computers, digital cameras, and inkjet printers, as well as artificial joints, film, and various tools. Why blame game consoles for the ongoing conflict when their sales and usage are completely dwarfed by these other applications? The turn of the century saw a massive expansion in the use of all manner of electronics, all over the world. All of these factors contributed to the tantalum price spike. Yes, the 2000 shortfall of PS2s played a role, but the 6-fold change in price that year could not have happened without an existing huge demand for phones and laptops, and serious structural problems in the tantalum market.

How, then, did this conflict come to be known as the "Playstation War"? Reporter John Lasker doesn't provide any answers. He certainly doesn't quote anyone on the subject and it's not clear to me that the words "Playstation War" were used in reference to this conflict at any point before he did so in this article. In a fit of fairness late in the piece, Lasker acknowledges that the spike in tantalum prices that provided incentive for neighboring countries to interfere in DRC affairs was the result of multiple concurrent technology booms, but any good journalist knows that readers remember the lede. I don't know why Lasker made the choice to put the console reference so high up in the story, but doing so was inflammatory, irresponsible, and counterproductive.

The world does not have vast and plentiful reserves of tantalum, and existing electronics that contain tantalum are, in general, not properly recycled. Continued strong demand for consumer electronics and the still-increasing penetration of cellular phones in the global market are combining to bring the price of tantalum back up. Thus, a rejuvenation of resource warfare in central Africa is becoming increasingly likely. The best defense against this scenario is for consumers to keep strong pressure on manufacturers and regulators to prevent "blood coltan" from making its way into consumer goods. The typical purchaser of a cell phone doesn't know anything about tantalum or its uses, and in fact the typical American probably couldn't tell you what continent the DRC is on. Awareness, then, is a precious commodity, especially for an advocate-journalist. However, awareness is diminished when you make game consoles into a scapegoat.

Even if you manage to heighten awareness of mineral wars in Africa with a piece like this, no good is done if the reader doesn't make the proper connection with his own life. Can you imagine a person reading the lede paragraph on his laptop or cell phone and cursing those darn gamers for carelessly supporting resource wars? I can imagine nothing else. Calling the conflict a "Playstation War" allows the non-gaming reader to shift the blame onto those darn gamers and ignore his own contributions to resource scarcity and conflict.

Are gamers to blame for the sustained conflict in the DRC? Sure they are — to precisely the same degree as anyone who owns a cell phone, laptop, digital camera, artificial joint, anti-lock braking system, etc. All of us should try to be conscious of the origins (and destinations, you non-cell-phone-recycling jerks) of the materials in our electronics, and pressing the companies that make them to ensure that our sale price doesn't subsidize war in Africa. Inordinately emphasizing the importance of game consoles in the financial origins of war in the DRC, however, lets non-gamers think they are off the hook, and amounts to little more than blaming the "other" for the sins of all. A putatively progressive organization like Toward Freedom should be capable of recognizing that, and ought to feel ashamed at having done so.

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It really isn't

"I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president."—Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.)

I'm finding it difficult to see why this statement is considered to be at all controversial, despite the firestorm it has ignited in the conservative set. It is not an attack on John McCain's service nor is it a smear against him. I could almost find the outraged Republican blowback on this quote to be funny, if I didn't have a memory. Instead, I find it positively revolting.

It amazes me that anyone has to defend this quote at all, as our history has amply demonstrated that military service has no bearing on Presidential quality. Yes, the Army gave us Washington and Eisenhower. It also gave us such perennial entries on the shortlist for worst President in U.S. history as Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant. Even successful leadership at the rank of General does not indicate that one will perform admirably as a President. For Clark, a military man (and former Presidential candidate) himself, to point this out hardly qualifies as a smear. It's fair to say this comment is unnecessary, but absent any additional context, the histrionics of the McCain campaign are just unwarranted foolishness.

However, we are not without additional context, because in an amazing coincidence, one of the men delivering those histrionics was Bud Day. Yes, the very same Bud Day who was a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and appeared in one of their commercials. This man, who through ignorance or foolishness attacked Clark's perfectly sensible statement, had the gall to follow it up with a defense of the Swift Boat smears as "the truth".

That's why I can't just dismiss the McCain response as a good laugh. The outrage, feigned or not, of conservatives is positively revolting in light of the Swift Boat campaign. To see those who winked at the SBVT's outright slander of an American serviceman treat Clark's statement as some kind of blood libel is a repellent display of hypocrisy. For McCain, who claimed to repudiate the SBVT tactics, to employ SBVT members and take their money in this campaign only heightens my disgust. The maverick, the straight-talker, the man for whom I felt a good deal of respect all seem to have perished in the pursuit of the Presidency.

McCain's experiences in the Vietnam War, heroic as they were, have no bearing on his qualifications for the Presidency. His reaction to Clark's statement of this obvious fact, however, has me more firmly convinced than ever that he lacks the judgment, the restraint, and the integrity to lead this nation.

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Merck HIV vaccine trial fails

Bad news today from the fight against AIDS: the Merck STEP trial has been discontinued due to evidence that the vaccine neither prevents nor attenuates HIV infection. This is a serious setback, as the trial was utilizing a new strategy and had sufficiently promising results two years ago that it was actually expanded. While this doesn't mark the death-knell of the CTL approach by any means, it is certainly a major disappointment and will probably send a number of approaches in development back to the drawing board.

The classic approaches to vaccination in humans have failed for HIV for a variety of reasons. Part of the difficulty is that HIV has such a high degree of variation. There's no guarantee that any single vaccine could protect against every strain for any length of time. Moreover, vaccination using the virus itself is incredibly risky — even a virus that is missing the essential Nef protein from its RNA can damage the immune system. Experiments in SIV show that a damaged or attenuated virus only confers protection if it reproduces at low levels in the host, but at the same time this gives it a greater opportunity to revert to pathogenic status. For this reason, chemical inactivation, which truly kills the virus, doesn't produce a viable vaccine because the virus does not stimulate sufficient antibodies to protect the patient.

The Merck vaccine used a different approach entirely, based on the idea of activating cytotoxic T lymphocytes. Rather than using inactivated HIV, the Merck team transplanted three HIV genes into an adenovirus (one of the viruses that produces the common cold). The idea was that these genes would get expressed into protein and displayed on the cell surface in the major histocompatibility complex. This would train T cells to attack any cell that the HIV virus had infected. Thus, the approach would not be to immobilize the virus with anitbodies, but rather to destroy any infected hosts cells before virus production really swung into gear. Even if it failed to prevent infection per se, it was hoped that this approach would arrest the development of an HIV infection into AIDS.

Unfortunately, this clever tack seems to have failed, at least in this application. It may take some time to understand why things did not work out, and maybe there was just an unfortunate choice of which HIV proteins were used or some other idiosyncratic issue with Merck's particular formulation of the approach. Until a detailed post-mortem is complete, however, CTL-stimulation approaches will have to be evaluated in a harsher light, with a little less hope.

NOTE: IAVI probably won't have the study status updated until Monday.

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Stew and circuses

Recipe for "Bolivarian stew":

6,600 pounds of chicken
4,000 pounds of beef
tons of vegetables
1 evil motherf***er

In an effort to prove that there really are no food-supply issues in his country, Venezuela's soon-to-be dictator for life Hugo Chavez has cooked the world's largest pot of soup. At a hefty 3,960 gallons, Chavez' effort has outdone the previous record by 2,500 gallons. A spokesman estimated that the enormous vat held enough to feed more than 60,000 people, surely a relief to those Venezuelans facing a shortage of basic staples that has led to protectionist measures while the currency falters on the global market. Chavez also took the opportunity today to warn private schools that they must either submit to government control or be nationalized. Soon, too, he'll be meeting with his 'communist' compatriots in FARC, ostensibly for the purpose of negotiating the release of their hostages, but maybe he's just going to buy them a beer. Truly a banner day for the leading lord of South America.

The soupvat is only part of a larger celebration to prove that Venezuela's economy is in good shape, even though the nation's oil boom is playing out like a bust for the average citizen. Of course by now I should be getting used to examples of Chavez' royal intentions, and to the fact that they're apparently invisible to the masses in his country. On the other hand, the arrogation of regal authority by the Bush administration in response to the terrorist threat was met with far too little and too faint protest until only recently. Other examples include Putin's Russia, which has clearly returned to Imperial ambitions (he's even anointed a successor), and the disastrous state of affairs in Zimbabwe under Mugabe. Almost everywhere, it seems, legislatures of nations facing real or perceived threats have abdicated their authority in favor of the executive, with uniformly disastrous effects.

This demonstrates both the key strength and the major failing of republican governments. A republic only ever works because the corrupting influences and petty concerns of individual representatives are held in opposition to the corrupting influences and petty concerns of other representatives. For every Tom DeLay there is a Barney Frank, so to speak. Unfettered from this secret system of checks and balances, you get screwballs like Chavez and Mugabe running their countries into the ground, or Bush and Putin draining their treasuries on pointless military development and adventurism.

The main failing of republicanism is that it relies heavily on having these same divisions within the electorate. When the electorate unites in confrontation of a threat, a failure of the Republic is likely. Sometimes the danger passes without too much ill effect, as with WWII in the United States, for instance. However, when a threat, real or perceived (like American Imperialism, terrorists, or white people), is exploited by a charismatic leader with popular support, then freedom is almost certain to suffer, as in America, or perhaps perish entirely, as has happened in Zimbabwe and seems likely in Venezuela. There is never any greater threat to liberty than unity of the electorate, particularly unity behind a popular leader. The love affair doesn't even have to last very long... just long enough for the leader to consolidate authority, as Chavez did (and Bush very nearly did). Once the leader is strong enough, he can dismantle his enemies and then even after the situation deteriorates (as in Zimbabwe) he can be relatively secure behind the apparatus he has assembled.

If you think we couldn't go down the road that Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Russia are on, you should ask yourself what would have happened if Bush hadn't made the mistake of attacking Iraq. Without that quagmire destroying his popularity, would Democrats, even moderate ones, have taken power last year? Would the few voices of discontent that were raised against the Patriot Act and the Guantanamo prison have gained any traction had they not been united with those raised against the unjust and wasteful war? Despite the lives and treasure wasted in Iraq, the Republic is fortunate that Bush and the neocons made this mis-step. Otherwise Bush might even now be anointing his successor, while Chief Justice Harriet Miers writes decisions cementing the power of an Imperial Presidency that might take decades to reign in.

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Mr. Deeds goes to town

I hate the idea of submitting a paper to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences because if you get rejected you feel especially bad. Despite its relatively high impact factor, PNAS puts out a fair amount of garbage, and sometimes you feel like you're reading a dumping ground for the bad ideas of big names. Case in point is a paper from the lab of Eugene Shaknovich that just showed up in pre-publication form. Shaknovich is famous for performing simulations of proteins that rely on a reduced or "lattice" representation, and in the interest of full disclosure I'll admit that I'm highly dubious of this method. In this case, however, I'm relatively certain that the simulation produced a correct answer, for reasons that should become obvious as we go along.

Deeds et al. are out to address what seems like a fairly interesting problem of specificity in protein interactions. Most experiments performed in biomolecular laboratories make use of highly overexpressed proteins in relatively pure environments. This allows us to obtain quality information about the details of particular proteins and their interactions. However, what happens when we put these proteins into the cell at relatively dilute concentrations? If we consider a particular pair of interacting proteins, A and B, we know that their specific binding is strongly energetically favored. However, A and B probably have the potential to interact nonspecifically with many other proteins. If A and B are at relatively low concentration, and the cellular milieu is crowded with millions of these potential nonspecific interactions, can we be sure A and B will find one another?

To address this question, Deeds et al. construct their typical lattice models with two "proteins" that have a designed interaction, and simulated a situation in which up to 90% of a 3d space is populated by random "proteins" that have a small potential to interact with the targets. They let the systems equilibrate, and then take a look at the kind of interactions that are occurring. The findings are truly revolutionary, as you can see from the figure below. At low temperatures (A), the random interactions (blue) predominate when nonspecific-binding proteins are the larger component of the system. As the temperature increases slightly, to a point above the 'melting temperature' of random complexes, the designed, 'specific' interactions (black) begin to play a larger role, even at low 'concentrations' of interacting proteins. Finally, as the temperature really climbs, the specific interactions start to dominate the milieu.


So basically what Deeds et al. have discovered is that when the energy available from heat is enough to break random interactions but not specific interactions, then at equilibrium specific interactions are highly favored even if there is an awful lot of opportunity to bind randomly. On the other hand, if the temperature of the system is too low to break up random-binding events, then random binding dominates when most of the proteins are nonspecific binders. This is not a surprise, and hardly qualifies as a conclusion at all, even less so when you consider that this is a simulation (and thus that unsurprising results are likely to result directly from the assumptions used) and not an experiment on real proteins. This seems more like a control for some other experiment using this same system that derives some surprising conclusion.

Deeds et al. go on to make some important predictions from their discovery that energetics dictate binding (who knew kT could be so important?). For instance, they point out that in crowded protein-protein interaction experiments like the yeast two-hybrid screen there may be a lot of false positives, which must come as shocking news to any yeast two-hybrid researchers who have never read any papers or protocols about yeast two-hybrid screens, nor even Wikipedia. They also recommend using techniques that don't rely on overexpression, but the fact is that almost any molecular biologist would prefer it if he could answer questions using experiments that involved no overexpression. None of this is new, and to treat the insight as novel because some simulation showed it is just insulting.

In the end, this is a paper about a control, and not even a particularly well-written one. Don't get me wrong; it isn't bad for what it is, and I don't blame Shaknovich for trying to get it published in the best journal he could find for it. This is not bad science, but it doesn't tell us anything new, doesn't present a novel technique with wide application, or really provide any other reason to appear in a broad-based journal. I can and do blame PNAS for allowing in something that really ought to have been relegated to a specialized journal. And I will blame Shaknovich for the condescending tone of the discussion, in which he descends from his lofty computational height to tell us poor experimentalists "interesting implications" that we already knew. Too often, simulations get a bad rap from experimentalists, but this sort of paper, which will leave a bad taste in the mouth of anyone unfortunate enough to spend time reading it, makes that attitude seem justified.

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The disingenue

The ingenue in fiction is a sweet young girl who because of her naïveté is often taken advantage of by more worldly members of the cast. Sometimes she is even duped into committing some crime or other offense and made a scapegoat by dastardly villains. It's an enduring theme in literature, enough so that it still has traction in modern society, though in an altered form. I call the many who make use of it disingenues, a word that has been used occasionally by others without definition. By it I mean someone who pretends to be a naïve innocent led astray by people who pretended to be her friends, with the intention of deflecting blame for some misdeed. More broadly, it could be taken to mean someone who is disingenuous generally (like, say, Alberto Gonzales).

The narrow meaning could be applied to any number of misbehaving celebrities. They blame "bad influences" around them and pledge to improve the company they keep so as not to wander down the garden path again. It's a cheap dodge, and one that devoted fans always buy. Thinking seriously, when Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan go out to party, who's in charge of that entourage? They are. They wield the power and authority in their circles, and they make their own decisions. Having the wrong people around them enhanced their opportunity to make bad choices, but those "bad influences" didn't choose for them.

But let's not limit the definition to women; this is the 21st century, and gender balance is at work here in epic proportions. The greatest recent disingenue is in fact a man, Michael Vick, who until this very day made a dedicated effort to lay blame for his own failures and shortcomings on the people surrounding him. From the beginning of this dog-fighting debacle, his position was that he had placed ill-deserved trust in his relatives and acquaintances. He had given them a house and they had betrayed him by using it for these evil purposes. Of course this fanciful tale of Mike Vick, ingenue, eventually unraveled, leading to today's guilty plea. Encouragingly, today he also said, "Not for one second will I sit right here and point the finger and try to blame anybody else for my actions or what I've done." Maybe he has turned the page, but consider how his statement of fact went to great lengths to indicate that the most gruesome act -- the violent killing earlier this year of several dogs that were not "game enough" -- was a "collective effort" involving Vick but not solely carried out by him. This is not materially different from the statements of fact accompanying his cohorts' pleas, but the difference in language is telling; he is still trying to deflect blame.

Literary or not, the disingenue is here to stay. This line of defense is too successful to fade anytime soon. We always want to pity a poor celebrity led astray by the bad influences around him or her. But let us not forget that these people chose to associate with those influences, and moreover, that when those influences offered a turn onto the wrong road, Mike Vick and others like him chose to take it.

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The brass ring is tarnished

News this week from the world of science: impact factor doesn't really match up with research quality. A study by Brown and Ramaswamy of the University of Iowa in Acta Crystallographica D analyzed crystallographic structures that had been deposited in the PDB and came up with a generalized metric to describe several features of a structure's quality. They normalized it to the average quality of the PDB, and then set about to see what extraneous factors were the best predictors of quality.

There were several interesting results here. The first was that the quality of crystal structures has not generally improved over time, despite advances in technique and equipment. The authors attribute this to the increasing use of crystallography as merely part of an experiment, so that the focus is less on the quality of the structure as a whole and more on making the structure good enough to answer a specific question. One can also imagine that the democratization of crystallography has contributed to this effect. Early structures solved with more primitive techniques only led to a solution if the researcher was qualified and careful. As the tools have become better, more widely available and black-boxed, more people can do crystallography, but these tools have encouraged less-qualified individuals to model structures, and perhaps also encouraged sloppiness among the better-trained researchers. There is also the vacuum-cleaner effect to consider. As the tools for modeling structures have become more robust, individual crystallographers are expected to produce more structures. As a result, the time spent on each individual structure has declined, perhaps more so than the improvements in technology have justified.

Another important result is that structural genomics consortia generally produce slightly better structures than the PDB average. This is certainly reassuring to the government entities that have dumped millions of dollars into these initiatives, but it also bears thinking about why it is so. Certainly one reason for the improved quality is formalized screening and the highly trained people that are doing the structural genomics work. Moreover, these efforts are really focused on getting a good structure, without any direct emphasis on experimental utility. It stands to reason that if your goal is to get a good structure, then it is more likely that those structures you personally consider a success and therefore deposit in the PDB will be good structures. This assumes a certain competence on the part of the researchers, but this is a property that structural genomics researchers manifestly possess. An additional consideration, however, is that these consortia are explicitly oriented towards solving the structures of well-behaved proteins. The high degree of automation used by the consortia is not generally compatible with poorly-behaved proteins or any need to squeeze a model out of troublesome data. A willingness to leave troubled proteins alone is probably part of the success of the consortia in this regard.

The most troubling result from the paper came when structures were analyzed based on the journal of primary reference. Ramaswamy and Brown discovered that more crystal structures initially reported in high-impact journals like Nature, Cell, and Science had below-average quality than structures reported in lower-impact journals like Biochemistry, Proteins, and Eur. J. Biochem. Because the metrics used by Brown and Ramaswamy are not intrinsically sensitive to novelty, this cannot be blamed on the simple "newness" of structures reported to these high-impact journals. The authors of this study attribute their problematic finding primarily to the fact that the structures reported in these journals tend to be (as above) part of a paper, not the whole thing. Moreover, the reviewers for these papers may more often be something other than expert crystallographers, and even when they are, the extreme space constraints may prevent reporting in the paper of the relevant structure factors and raw data.


That the reviewers are important might also be supported by the data. Consider the figure above (my own creation from Table 5 of the paper). This graphs the aggregate quality score for a journal against the number of structures therein - remember that a lower aggregate score is better. There's clearly no linear correlation between quality (lower numbers are better) and the number of structures reported. But it is interesting to see that with two exceptions the 'bad' journals (positive quality score) have a number of structures between 100 and 1000. Inside this range the quality varies significantly but outside of it the quality is almost always good. Maybe this means nothing, but it also may mean that journals who have a significant stock in trade in protein crystal structures also have experienced editors and reviewers who know how to properly vet them. It's interesting to note that the only journal containing more than a thousand structures that has a positive score is Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a journal which has a strange and inconsistent review policy. Similarly, journals where crystal structures are a rare event may have editors who react to them with caution and seek out expert reviewers. By contrast, in the middle range, no trend is discernible except a roughly inverse relationship between impact factor and structure quality.

The more disturbing implication, and one that the authors do not deeply address, is that an external property of novel structures causes them to be published with lower quality: namely, their very novelty makes quality more of an afterthought. This is not just the idea of rushing papers to publication causing trouble. Rather, I mean to say that the editors and reviewers of these papers are flat-out willing to accept lower quality of data in exchange for novelty and impact. In, for example, the recent high-profile pentaretraction by Geoffrey Chang, the reported features of the structures alone should have raised serious questions about publishing them, even without considering that they were contradicted by biochemical data. That these errors somehow did not rise to the level of alerting Chang to find the elementary error in his own software indicates that the reviewers and editors were as sloppy as Chang himself. And why? Because these structures were novel and potentially revolutionary. Good copy outweighed bad modeling.

Crystal structures have a useful feature in that their quality can to some degree be assessed quantitatively, without needing to ask subjective questions (say, whether a structure is consistent with some mechanistic model). That is, this kind of large-scale analysis of research quality is possible. The quality of structures in these journals isn't disastrous, but it is cause for concern. And it raises serious questions about other research published in these journals, data for which the quality is less quantifiable and objective. I won't say that Science and Nature are not to be trusted, but in light of this large-scale trend and recent data-falsification woes in other areas, it would be naive in the extreme to approach reports in these journals without a healthy skepticism.

Brown E.N., Ramaswamy S. "Quality of protein crystal structures" Acta. Cryst. D. 63 (2007) p. 941-950

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HDTV

This story begins back in March, when I got an amazingly crappy hetNOE spectrum from our 500 MHz spectrometer. The hetNOE is always a low-sensitivity spectrum, but for a 1 mM sample the signal I got was simply unacceptable. At first, I didn't think much of this, for the simple reason that I thought the HX probe was in, and I'm used to getting poor signal-to-noise from that thing.

Except... except that everyone else was getting low-quality spectra too, no matter what probe was in. Finally one day Chris and Janice got almost no signal at all from an HSQC of a 1 mM monomeric protein, and that was the end. We had Sara test the magnet, and she found we had a four-fold reduction in signal to noise. To put things into perspective, we would have to take 16 times as many scans as before in order to achieve the same signal under these conditions. For a 1-hour HSQC, this is marginally acceptable. For a 2-day triple-resonance sequence, it is not. The new noise, strangely enough, came and went at odd times.

Al, because he knows all, immediately suspected a television signal, which he attributed to a rogue broadcaster somewhere out on Bear Hill. You see, an NMR spectrometer is really two things. It is a giant magnet, yes. But it is also a radiofrequency transmitter and receiver. The RF pulses induce a signal that the transmitter/receiver coil picks up. For our 500 MHz spectrometer, the primary signal we pick up is the proton signal at 499.75 MHz. This frequency is in a TV band.

Al was deflated, however, when Wlad tried to check the spectral band on his TV and found nothing. The search for the cause continued, with suspects ranging from the Brandeis student radio station to the construction crew radios to various parts of the magnet to secret government transmissions.

In the end, Al turned out to be right, and Wlad turned out to have a cheap TV. There was a channel broadcasting in this frequency range, but it was HDTV channel 18, a signal Wlad's cheap TV cannot decode. Our spectrometer can't decode it either, but we can sure see it. It knocks our signal down to an unrecoverable level. You can lose 75% of your signal for a small molecule and still be OK, but with proteins it's a different story. The spectrometer is essentially useless to us in this condition.

And the worst part, the very worst part about this is that it's a terrible channel! WMFP digital channel 18, broadcasting in the 494-500 MHz band, airs infomercials and "Gems TV"! Yes, that's right, our scientific research has been derailed by a display of cubic zirconium jewelry in glorious high definition. Their antenna is located just south of us and we're right in one of their strongest broadcast regions. Natural cures and cash-at-closing real estate ads are screwing us badly.

Hopefully, we'll be able to boost the spectrometer's frequency out of the channel 18 broadcast band to something like 500.13 MHz. However, there's a Channel 19 (WGBH) broadcasting in the 500-506 MHz band as well; the spectrum analyzer shows a little gap between them that we can hopefully hit, and the WGBH signal is only half as strong as WMFP. Still, we may be screwed even if we boost the frequency. And there's no way to shield the magnet, except maybe in the basement, but we'll need to renovate the basement area in order to do that. So basically, we are screwed.

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USAir... begins with you!

And ends with me, as far as I'm concerned. My trip down to Charleston was a comic travesty of airline mismanagement. I don't mean to say that it was the worst flying experience ever, or even that it was my worst flying experience ever. It was just a classic example of the pathetic failures of modern airlines.

The trip began with a 5AM phone call telling me my flight out of Boston had been cancelled, but that I had been put on another flight an hour later. At the gate, it became clear that the 12:30 had also been cancelled, and that the (I imagine) sparse occupancy of three different planes had been crammed together to make one very full 11:30 flight to Philly. Of course, it was also worth noting that the plane looked like it was falling apart on the inside - a large number of the overhead panels (with the lights and air nozzles) were pushed out of line with each other, or tilted about 3 degrees relative to the luggage compartments.

The flight from there to Charleston was unremarkable (although my cousin Eleanor was not so lucky and her luggage disappeared when she took the same flight a day later). We all had a good time with the Warner clan, and most of the Lyons and Heinsohn branches were also represented (though cousin Frank couldn't make it). Eleanor disappeared for an hour and a half and freaked out her parents, and I ate way too much of Aunt Peggy's shrimp salad.

On my way back to Boston, my flight out of Charleston got cancelled, supposedly for a mechanical problem. The clerk said the usual spiel about how it was better that they stopped the flight than flew with a bad plane, but this misses the point. In a competent company, the plane doesn't have a mechanical problem in the first place. Planes get serviced, and unservicable planes get removed from the fleet. At the very least, the company should have spares available regionally to pick up the slack. My own suspicion, however, is that the plane was fine except for not being full enough to make the flight profitable. Thus, people were shunted onto alternate routes. I ended up flying to LaGuardia rather than Charlotte and got home 3 hours late. My bags arrived on time, however; they took the 1 PM LGA-BOS flight while I had to wait till the 2 o'clock. This fact was announced only after the later flight's bags had rolled around on the conveyor belt -- a paltry 20 or so bags for a nearly-full flight. I found my bag sitting in front of the luggage office and ran while I still could.

Was anything really awful about this? No. But it's not really awful experiences that convince me to stay away from something. Truly terrible experiences, like wonderful ones, tend to be statistical anomalies and shouldn't be focused on unless they recur. It's the grating, repetitive march of insensitive and unprofessional behavior that really puts me off air travel in general, and now US Airways in particular. I'll probably have to fly with them in the future, but dang if I don't hope to avoid it.
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Who's now? Who cares?

Once upon a time, summer was the most glorious season of American sports. The height of the baseball season used to be the pinnacle of all-consuming athletic interest. Today, however, tainted and lethargic, baseball no longer holds our interest... or at least not enough to satiate the 24-hour demand of America's favorite sports network. Thus, ESPN is broadcasting their searing debate about "Who's Now?" It's an inane question, being seriously discussed on-air by men who are old enough that they should be ashamed of themselves for discussing it. I'm not saying that Fox Sports Net is any angel when it comes to this (the "Best Damn 50..." is also rancid programming), but ESPN is once again indulging its desire to be sports news, not just report on it. It's a desire I understand, and not an intolerable fault in the relaxed sphere of sports journalism -- the ESPY's, for example, follow a rich tradition of news organizations presenting sports awards (AP All-Americans, the USA TODAY/Coaches' Poll). But something less utterly stupid could be used to take up their empty programming time. I genuinely feel affronted that this pathetic "tournament" has been thrust at me as something I should appreciate.

I appreciate thought, and there are issues in sports that can be approached thoughtfully, and discussed without screaming and carrying on, or babbling about how popular some rich athlete is. But apparently ESPN believes its general audience is too damn stupid to appreciate thought -- which is probably why NFL Matchup is scheduled at 8 AM on Sundays rather than folded into the main NFL show. ESPN has long favored hootin' and hollerin' over serious discussion, quality shows like Matchup and Outside the Lines notwithstanding. And sometimes the formula works, especially on shows like Pardon the Interruption, where nobody takes themselves too seriously. But to see the inane treated as a matter of serious import, as it is in the "Who's Now?" segments, just pushes it to the edge for me. I may re-evaluate when football season rolls around, but for now, at least, ESPN is out of my channel rotation and my web digests. Apparently ESPN doesn't want to be watched by people who respect intelligent dialogue, and it won't be any great loss to me to give them what they want.
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