Author Archives: R.E. Buxbaum

About R.E. Buxbaum

Robert Buxbaum is a life-long engineer, a product of New York's Brooklyn Technical High School, New York's Cooper Union to Science and Art, and Princeton University where he got a PhD in Chemical Engineering. From 1981 to 1991 he was a professor of Chemical Engineering at Michigan State, and now runs an engineering shop in Oak Park, outside of Detroit, Michigan. REB Research manufactures and sells hydrogen generation and purification equipment. He's married with 3 wonderful children who, he's told, would prefer to not be mentioned except by way of complete, unadulterated compliments. As of 2016, he's running to be the drain commissioner/ water resources commissioner of Oakland county.

Every food causes cancer, and cures it, research shows.

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Statistical analysis, misused, allows you to prove many things that are not true. This was long a feature of advertising: with our toothpaste you get 38% fewer cavities, etc. In the past such ‘studies’ were not published in respectable journals, and research supported by on such was not funded. Now it is published and it is funded, and no one much cares. For an academic, this is the only game in town. One result, well known, is the “crisis of replicability”– very few studies in medicine, psychology, or environment are replicable (see here for more).

In this post, I look at food health claims– studies that find foods cause cancer, or cure it. The analysis I present comes from two researchers, Schoenfeld and Ioannides, (read the original article here) who looked at the twenty most common ingredients in “The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book”. For each food, they used Pub-Med to look up the ten most recent medical articles that included the phrase, “risk factors”, the word “cancer”, and the name of the food in the title or abstract. For studies finding effect in the range of 10x risk factors to 1/10 risk factors, the results are plotted below for each of the 20 foods. Some studies showed factors beyond the end of the chart, but the chart gives a sense. It seems that most every food causes or cures cancer, often to a fairly extreme extent.

Effect estimates by ingredient. From Schoenfeld and Ioannides. Is everything we eat associated with cancer? Am J. Clin. Nutrition 97 (2013) 127-34. (I was alerted to this by Dr. Jeremy Brown, here)

A risk factor of 2 indicates that you double your chance of getting cancer if you eat this food. Buy contrast, as risk factor of 0.5 suggests that you halve your cancer risk. Some foods, like onion seem to reduce your chance of cancer to 1/10, though another study say 1/100th. This food is essentially a cancer cure, assuming you believe the study (I do not).

Only 19% of the studies found no statistically significant cancer effect of the particular food. The other 81% found that the food was significantly cancer-causing, or cancer preventing, generally of p=0.05 to 0.05. Between the many studies done, most foods did both. Some of these were meta studies (studies that combine other studies). These studies found slightly smaller average risk factors, but claimed more statistical significance in saying that the food caused or cured cancer.

0.1 0.2. 0.5 1. 2 5 10
Relative risk

The most common type of cancer caused is Gastrointestinal. The most common cancer cured is breast. Other cancers feature prominently, though: head, neck, genetilia-urinary, lung. The more cancers a researcher considers the higher the chance of showing significant effects from eating the food. If you look at ten cancers, each at the standard of one-tailed significance, you have a high chance of finding that one of these is cured or caused to the standard of p=0.05.

In each case the comparison was between a high-dose cohort and a low-dose cohort, but there was no consistency in determining the cut-offs for the cohort. Sometimes it was the top and bottom quartile, in others the quintile, in yet others the top 1/3 vs the bottom 1/3. Dose might be times eaten per week, or grams of food total. Having this flexibility increases a researcher’s chance of finding something. All of this is illegitimate, IMHO. I like to see a complete dose-response curve that shows an R2 factor pf 90+% or so. To be believable, you need to combine this R2 with a low p value, and demonstrate the same behaviors in men and woman. I showed this when looking at the curative properties of coffee. None of the food studies above did this.

From Yang, Youyou and Uzzi, 2020. Studies that failed replication are cited as often as those that passed replication. Folks don’t care.

Of course, better statistics will not protect you from outright lying, as with the decades long, faked work on the cause of Alzheimers. But the most remarkable part is how few people seem to care.

People want to see their favorite food or molecule as a poison or cure and will cite anything that says so. Irreplicable studies are cited at the same rate as replicated studies, as shown in this 2020 study by Yang Yang, Wu Youyou, and Brian Uzzi. We don’t stop prescribing bad heart medicines, or praising irreplaceable studies on foods. Does pomegranate juice really help? red wine? there was a study, but I doubt it replicated. We’ve repeatedly shown that aspirin helps your heart, but it isn’t prescribed much. Generally, we prefer more expensive blood thinners that may not help. Concerning the pandemic. It seems our lockdowns made things worse. We knew this two years ago, but kept doing it.

As Schoenfeld and Ioannides state: “Thousands of nutritional epidemiology studies are conducted and published annually in the quest to identify dietary factors that affect major health outcomes, including cancer risk. These studies influence dietary guidelines and at times public health policy… [However] Randomized trials have repeatedly failed to find treatment effects for nutrients in which observational studies had previously proposed strong associations.” My translation: take all these food studies with a grain of salt.

Robert Buxbaum, April 4, 2023

Vaccines barely worked, lockdowns seem to have made it worse.

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The first 15 months of the pandemic were grim periods of lockdown, except in Sweden where the health minister declared that lockdowns would not do anything except delay the inevitable. They chose to protect only the most vulnerable, and kept everything else open. By May, 2021, it looked like that was a mistake. Sweden had a seen a sickness and death rate that was fairly average for the world, but high compared to more locked down nordic countries, like Norway, Finland, and Germany. And now vaccines were here that were supposed to be 100% effective, both at stopping the sickness and the spread. We were at the end, opening up, and Sweden had blundered. They had ‘ignored the science,’ as Fauci put it.

Excess mortality January 26 2020 to March 1, 2023, from Our World in Data. I focus on excess deaths here, rather than COVID specifically, because death is a metric that is hard to fudge.

Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the vaccines were far less than 100% effective. The current estimate is that 2 shots are 24% effective at preventing the disease and 0% effective at preventing the spread. This is a problem in much of medical science these days: successful results tend to be irreproducible, I discuss the reason here. The disease had evolved, and somehow the experiments had not noticed. What’s more they had side-effects (all drugs do). People were dying at a faster rate than before in the US, and in many European countries (see graph below). There was no flattening of the curve suggesting that the vaccine didn’t work. By last year, I had noticed that US COVID deaths did not decrease with the advent of vaccines. Strangely, deaths did not increase as fast in Sweden. By 2022, Sweden was doing better than its lock-down peers. As of today, it’s doing much better. So, what have we learned?

The results of the 6 month Pfizer trial already suggested there might be a problem -that perhaps the vaccine did more harm than good. The above were the results in the Biologics Licence Application (BLA) report (page 23), submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to apply for vaccine approval, November, 2021. The vaccine decreased COVID but increased other cause death even more. Suspicious.

The fact that the death rate did generally not go down when a majority were vaccinated and the most vulnerable were already dead suggests that vaccination does not help much. That excess death increased in some countries (Norway, Finland, Germany) suggests that either the side-effects of the vaccine are worse than the disease itself or that some other aspect of the treatment (lockdowns?) were worse than the disease. The vaccine still may be shown to have helped, but it doesn’t look like it helped much. The fact that lock-down countries are doing worse than Sweden suggests that lockdowns actually hurt. This is significant. One thing to learn is that you have a right to not trust medical science: you have a right to be wrong. Mr Spock never trusted Bones’s medicine. You have a particularly strong right to doubt when you have evidence as strong as the map below (excess deaths in Europe as it stood in December 2021). Already Sweden was doing well and the experts were looking very wrong.

A map of excess deaths in Europe as of December 2021. Already many countries had passed Sweden. Eastern and Southern Europe were particularly hard hit.

I can now speculate on the mechanism; why might lockdowns hurt or kill? I suggested it’s loneliness. Perhaps it’s inaction, or mental distress. People would rather get an electric shock than sit a think without doing anything. It might be that lockdowns prevented other medical treatment. Whatever the mechanism, you’d think that our government would have acknowledged, by early 2022, that lockdowns were not working. Instead virtually every state continued lockdowns through a good chunk of 2022 with school closures, limited seating, etc.

I suspect that “long COVID” may be a form of lock-down depression plus associated noxious behaviors: increased drug and alcohol use, lack of exercise, and avoiding treatment for health problems. I suggested iodine hand wash (and gargle) to stop the disease spread (I imagine it’s on surfaces), and still think it’s a good idea. Iodine is cheap and it definitely kills all germs. Other anti-isolation nostrums include exercise, lithium, aspirin, letters, and hydroxycholoroquine. There was reasonable statistical evidence for several of these things helping, though Fauci denied it. Perhaps they only helped via ‘the placebo effect’. But placebo cures are real, especially for mental problems.

Robert Buxbaum, March 30, 2023. As an add-on (April 2, 2013), I’d like to show the decline in life-expectancy in the US compared to other countries. Isolation is a killer. A lot of the blame goes to Fauci for continuing to push socially isolating solutions as “the science”, while blasting any who say otherwise. We’ve lost 3 years of life-span in 3 years — preventably avoided — when other countries have lost zero or one. There could be no greater inditement of the health management.

This is from the Financial Times. The US is doing worst of all in terms of lives lost to the pandemic and it continues. Isolating people is torture. We then blame them for feeling distrust. I blame Biden and Fauci.

Rotating sail ships and why your curve ball doesn’t curve.

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The Flettner-sail ship, Barbara, 1926.

Sailing ships are wonderfully economic and non-polluting. They have unlimited range because they use virtually no fuel, but they tend to be slow, about 5-12 knots, about half as fast as Diesel-powered ships, and they can be stranded for weeks if the wind dies. Classic sailing ships also require a lot of manpower: many skilled sailors to adjust the sails. What’s wanted is an easily manned, economical, hybrid ship: one that’s powered by Diesel when the wind is light, and by a simple sail system when the wind blows. Anton Flettner invented an easily manned sail and built two ships with it. The Barbara above used a 530 hp Diesel and got additional thrust, about an additional 500 hp worth, from three, rotating, cylindrical sails. The rotating sales produced thrust via the same, Magnus force that makes a curve ball curve. Barbara went at 9 knots without the wind, or about 12.5 knots when the wind blew. Einstein thought it one of the most brilliant ideas he’d seen.

Force diagram of Flettner rotor (Lele & Rao, 2017)

The source of the force can be understood with help of the figure at left and the graph below. When a simple cylinder sits in the wind, with no spin, α=0, the wind force is essentially drag, and is 1/2 the wind speed squared, times the cross-sectional area of the cylinder, Dxh, and the density of air. Multiply this by a drag coefficient, CD, that is about 1 for a non-spinning cylinder, and about 2 for a fast spinning cylinder. FD= CDDhρv2/2.

A spinning cylinder has lift force too. FL= CLDhρv2/2.

Numerical lift coefficients versus time, seconds for different ratios of surface speed to wind speed, a. (Mittal & Kumar 2003), Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

As graphed in the figure at right, CL is effectively zero with sustained vibrations at zero spin, α=0. Vibrations are useless for propulsion, and can be damaging to the sail, though they are helpful in baseball pitching, producing the erratic flight of knuckle balls. If you spin a cylindrical mast at more than α=2.1 the vibrations disappear, and you get significant lift, CL= 6. At this rotation speed the fast surface moves with the wind at 2.1 times the wind speed. That is it moves significantly faster than the wind. The other side of the rotor moves opposite the wind, 1.1 times as fast as the wind. The coefficient of lift lift, CL= 6, is more than twice that found with a typical, triangular, non-rotating sail. Rotation increases the drag too, but not as much. The lift is about 4 times the drag, far better than in a typical sail. Another plus is that the ship can be propelled forward or backward -just reverse the spin direction. This is very good for close-in sailing.

The sail lift, and lift to drag ratio, increases with rotation speed reaching very values of 10 to 18 at α values of 3 to 4. Flettner considered α=3.5. optimal. At this α you get far more thrust than with a normal sail, and you can go faster than the wind, and far closer to the wind than with any normal sail. You don’t want α values above 4.2 because you start seeing vibrations again. Also more rotation power is needed (rotation power goes as ω2); unless the wind is strong, you might as well use a normal propeller.

The driving force is always at right angles to the perceived wind, called the “fair wind”, and the fair wind moves towards the front as the ship speed increases. Controlling the rotation speed is somewhat difficult but important. Flettner sails were no longer used by the 1930s because fuel became cheaper and control was difficult. Normal sails weren’t being used either for the same reasons.

In the early 1980s, there was a return to the romantic. Famous underwater explorer, Jacques Cousteau, revived a version of the Flettner sail for his exploratory ship, the Alcyone. He used aluminum sails, and an electric motor for rotation. He claimed that the ship drew more than half of its power from the wind, and claimed that, because of computer control, it could sail with no crew. This claim was likely bragging, but he bragged a lot. Even with today’s computer systems, people are needed to steer and manage things in case something goes wrong. The energy savings were impressive, though, enough so that some have begun to put Flettner sails on cargo ships, as a right. This is an ideal use since cargo ships go about as fast as a typical wind, 10- 20 knots. It’s reported that, Flettner- powered cargo ships get about 20% of their propulsion from wind power, not an insignificant amount.

And this gets us to the reason your curve ball does not curve: it’s likely you’re not spinning it fast enough. To get a good curve, you want the ball to spin at α =3, or about 1.5 times the rate you’d get by rolling the ball off your fingers. You have to snap your wrist hard to get it to spin this fast. As another approach, you can aim for α=0, a knuckle ball, achieved with zero rotation. At α=0, the ball will oscillate. It’s hard to do, but your pitch will be nearly impossible to hit or catch. Good luck.

Robert Buxbaum, March 22, 2023. There are also Flettner airplane designs where horizontal, cylindrical “wings” rotate to provide high lift with short wings and a relatively low power draw. So-far, these planes are less efficient and slower than a normal helicopter. The idea could bear more development work, IMHO. Einstein had an eye for good ideas.

Abortion and Childbirth in the US vs China

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There are a lot of abortions in China, and not many births. Last year, there were about 9.7 million abortions in the major clinics and almost 12 million live births. That’s about 8.5 live births per 1000 Chinese population and 79.7 abortions per 100 live births. If you include the minor clinics and the abortion pill, it’s likely that there are more abortions than live births in China. It’s the preferred method of birth control. In the US, the ratio of abortions to births has grown but we have only about 1/4 as many abortions as births.

Births and abortions per year in China to 2020, from The Economist, 2023. The biggest change is decreased births, not increased abortions.

The birthrate in China is low and decreasing. China had pushed for one-child families as a cure for overpopulation and a route to a richer China with abortion promoted as a safe, painless way to end an unwanted pregnancy. Billboard ads continue to show happy women who are leading their best life now that they’ve had an abortion. Of course, during the one-child years, if you had that extra baby, the state might take your baby him or her. Condom ads were forbidden, and remain so to this day.

China seems to have succeeded too well. The population has leveled out, and has began to decline this year — likely too fast. Meanwhile the economy has grown by an average of 10% per year for 40 years, so that China is now, likely the second largest economy on the planet, but has such an old population that this is unlikely to continue. One down-side of the heavy reliance on abortion is that it’s produced a severe sex imbalance. The Chinese chose to abort mostly girls. It’s also resulted in an active sex trade. I’ve claimed it will lead to war, famine, or an economic collapse in the next ten years.

Add for a Chinese abortion clinic. See how happy the lady is. Chinese ads have English because it’s cool — it suggests that this clinic serves Americans and British too.

In the US, there were 3,664,000 births in 2022, 12.012 births per 1000 people. That’s 1.5 times the birth rate of China, and a 1% increase from 2020, but significantly below the birthrate of the boomer generation. In the last year, there were 928,000 abortions, see graph below, or 25.3 abortions per 100 live births. Our population is as old as China’s, but the additional children suggests that our society will continue longer.

In America, the case for abortion is that it’s a woman’s right, see ad below. Anti-abortion is presented as slavery and a Republican plot for male domination. Politically, this has been a winning argument for Democrats; helping them win big in elections. They made good on the argument and amended the Michigan constitution to allow abortion till birth with the father having no say. The legal and religious establishment has gone along. They may want some limitations, but there is no consensus on what the limitation should be.

Abortions per year, US, Guttmacher Inst. report, 2022.

It’s been suggested that a good way to lower the abortion rate would be higher taxes to provide more healthcare and child benefits. That may be, though I’m not sure it’s the direct, sure route. China has free healthcare and benefits. I suspect that the preachers should do more personally to deal with the vulnerable. Another thought is to promote is rural living. In the US and China, rural areas have higher birth rates, while the cities have low birth rates and high abortion rates. The highest abortion rate in the US is in Washington DC.

In the US, abortion is presented as a right, and as a Republican anti-woman plot.

My overall sense is that Children are good: Admittedly, they are expensive hobbies, but they are worth it, for the parents, for the nation, and in particular for the child. Children are a beautiful part of life and a beautiful part of any environment, IMHO. They like to grow amid sunshine and fresh air.

Robert Buxbaum, March 14, 2023

Germany is the biggest loser in a long Ukraine war

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Early in the Ukraine War with Russia, Poland sent 200 T-72 battle tanks to Ukraine. Most other NATO members joined in, sending tanks, missiles, guns, supplies and technology. Germany sent nothing and have continued to avoid helping Ukraine as much as possible while the war dragged on for a year. Germany seems to have hoped for a quick Russian victory leading to a quick return to the pre-war, state of affairs. That’s not likely. Even early on, the war looked like a slow, long slog. Reluctantly, this month, Germany promised to send 18 Leopard tanks to Ukraine, requesting as replacements, mothballed tanks from Switzerland.

Germany is currently the 4th largest economy in the world, just behind Japan, and ahead of India (for now). They also have the 3rd oldest population. Their place as the leading economic and political power in Europe rests on a close relationship with Russia that is fading, bringing Russian goods west and manufacturing with them. Before the war, Germany imported most of its oil and 65% of its natural gas from Russia. Much of the gas came via two direct pipelines, Nord Stream, that bypassed the rest of Europe. Well into the war, while the rest of Europe disengaged, Germany is still buying from Russia and funneling it west: steel, aluminum, titanium, ammonia and platinum. Germany is still buying some Russian natural gas by way of Poland. The German economy is based on turning these materials into cars, high tech machines, and chemicals for export to the US, the EU, and China. Despite the very old population, Germany counts on cheap labor from low wage EU nations. These transient, long term. workers do not get citizenship or retirement benefits. The current war has presented Germany with more potential workers, Ukrainian refugees, but far fewer Russian supplies. The German economy is shrinking, and so far, the Ukrainian refugees have been mostly left unemployed.

Ex German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, with Putin. He’s now head of Nordstream and Rosneft.

German industrial production is down by about 4% this year leaving its GPD at about $4T/year, about where it was in 2018. The US economy and the rest of Europe has grown. For an explanation, consider Germany’s ex-chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, shown at left with Putin. Schroder remains a leader in the ruling SDP party, the party of Ms Merkel and of the current chancellor. He is also the chairman of the board for Nord Stream AG and of Rosneft, (Russian aerospace). He also sits on the board for Gasprom (Russia’s energy conglomerate), Rothschild, a prominent International bank, and is chairman of the board of the Hannover 96 football club. He is symbolic of Germany’s attachment to Putin and Russia. But the rest of the EU, along with the rest of the developed world, has come to hate Putin and Russia (they’re not too fond of Rothchild either). Europe is unlikely to tolerate Germany’s Russian imports, including titanium (65% of Airbus titanium comes from Russia) or natural gas. Germany has asked for a titanium exception (and been denied). What’s more, three of the four Nord Stream pipelines have been blown up (by whom?) leaving Germany to buy natural gas from its NATO allies: Norway, Britain, France Holland, and the US. Gas purchases are expensive for Germany while helping its NATO neighbors — Germany has asked to be subsidized for energy too (unlikely, imho). It has also restarted old coal-burning power plants, an insult to the EU given how hard Germany pushed them on climate change.

Germany is now near recession. Much of Europe is close, but Germany is worse-off since they are buying from the rest.

Percent of population over 65, CIA Factbook.

Much of the EU can sell gas and food to Germany, and Russia can export to China, India, and Iran. German inflation averaged 8.5% last year (9.2% in January). That is not hyperinflation, but a shock for a country that’s averaged 1% inflation over the last 25 years. US inflation, by comparison was 7.5% last year — due to excess spending by the Democrats (imho), the so- called “inflation reduction act,” but at least the US economy grew, along with the US population. It seems to me that, without Russian supplies, Germany will continue to slip versus the world and versus the EU.

Excess mortality for European countries has been very high for the last 6 months, especially in Germany. Death rates are up by 25% or so. Much of it is heart-related. Perhaps it’s COVID, or long COVID, or air pollution, or vaccines, or depression.

The German population is dying too. They too among the highest percent population over 65, see map. The death rate has spiked 25% over the last 6 months, too. Europe and much of the EU saw similar spikes earlier in the pandemic, partially from COVID, the rest is alcoholism, drugs, the vaccine, pollution, or a psycho-somatic response to isolation and the war. Sweden has largely avoided these problems so far.

Germany has been propping up its inefficient industries with low cost loans. The idea, presumably, is that things will go back to normal soon, and the companies will make good. So far, the war goes on, and the loans discourage competition and modernization. It becomes ever more likely that these inefficient German companies will default. If so, they could take down their lenders as happened in Japan in the 90s, and as happened to Lehman Bros. in the US. The same seems likely for China.

It becomes ever more likely that these inefficient German companies will default.

Even if the war ended tomorrow, it’s not clear that Germany could go back to its pre-war status. The blown Nord Stream pipelines will need a year or more to repair. And may never restart, as sanctions might remain long after the fighting ends, as with Cuba or North Korea. Russia seems to have recognized this possibility, and has begun sending titanium, gas, and oil elsewhere, mostly to Iran, India, and China. Iran has become a major customer of Russian aluminum, and food, and is a major supplier of drones and consumer goods to Russia. In the last two years, the Iranian GDP has doubled to about $2T/year. It is now nearly half the size of Germany’s GDP and growing while Germany shrinks.

Russia’s trade with India and China has grown too. They are working to improve the Trans-Iranian railroad that would allow easy shipments from Russia to India and China via the port of Tehran. The first direct shipment of this sort was completed in July 2022– Caspian Sea containers to an Iranian train to ship to India and China. If the war goes on, Iran, India, and China will benefit at the expense of Germany, it seems. India, in particular. India’s economy is already approaching the size of Germany’s, and will probably pass it with the help of Russia’s energy and raw materials. Meanwhile, Germany is left with an aging population and aging industries; with few suppliers, and no obvious competitive advantages. Europe is almost as badly positioned, but they can still sell to Germany. As for Ukraine, it seems to be doing well, despite the war — or because of it. They still grow and export food and energy, and they are holding their own in the war, for now. There is destruction in the east, but Ukraine might come out stronger, as happened with South Korea and Vietnam. Russia too seems to have found new customers and might come out OK. It is hard to see how Germany comes out well. This, at least, is how I see things today.

Robert Buxbaum, March 8, 2023.

Yiddish newspapers and talking cows, a case for Jewish education

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Jewish education is a mess according to the Times. Most anyone outside it, who’d look in would agree: Ancient books, pre-science outlooks, anti-inclusive, and taught in a garble of languages, Yiddish, English, Aramaic, Hebrew. The New York Times has runs regular editorials claiming that Jewish education robs children of a future, or an entrance to society, producing adults who know nothing of geometry or higher math, or modern history, incapable of voting intelligently in today’s elections (they often vote Republican). The Times’s experts, are often the products of this education, but claim to have risen above it, only because of extra work. As a proof, they often cite the Talmud as a source of useless knowledge of ancient Jewish law, rejected Bible history, and only the most basic views of math. By way of a response, I’d like to quote something I’d heard in synagog a couple of weeks back:

“I’m so glad that I learned geometry in school, and not taxes. It’s really come in handy this parallelogram season.“

The speaker was an accountant, and the point of the joke is that there is no parallelogram season. There is a tax season, though, and tax law follows a bizarre logic that is not geometric, but is somewhat talmudic. As for the useless languages, they are all in use, both as spoken languages and written languages, no less useful than Latin, and certainly more alive. There are currently 5 yiddish-language newspapers being published in New York alone, see below. They compete with each other for readers, while competing also with the Times, the Post, and with another ten or more Hebrew and English journals, several of them Jewish, either published on paper or as web-journals. People read them, though the Times prefers to ignore their existence.

There are five newspapers published currently in Yiddish in New York. The Forward (Tony Curtis and duck) and the Vort are left-leaning, the Algeminer, the Blat, and the Zeitung, are more right and center. There is a readership. Why a duck?

And that brings us to the subject matter, Talmud. Much of Jewish learning is Talmud, either distilled or pure, study of a set of books written between 1000 and 2000 years ago in Israel, Babylon, and France mostly, with commentaries from Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Germany, and Poland. Those who learned talmud tend to find it useful. The legal organization and approach resonates to them in the understanding of taxes, contracts, building, damage assessment, marriage, ethics, even in dealing with alcoholism. Talmud is so useful that it’s common for working, orthodox Jews to continue their learning it throughout their lives. A common practice is to learn a page every day in synchrony with other Jews. Today’s page, when I started writing this post, was Nazir 10. It includes a talking cow, just the sort of section that the Times likes to cite to show the uselessness of it all. I’ll forgive their lack of understanding, but not their laziness for not even bothering to try to understand.

Nazir 10 begins by saying: “If a cow says, ‘I will be a Nazir (that is, I will give up wine for a month) if I stand up’. Then, if it gets up, one school of rabbinic thought (Bais Shammai) says he is a nazir. Another school of thought (Bais Hillel) says he is not a nazir.” The page goes on to speak about taking doors, but I’ll stop here after the first 2 sentences and will try to explain what the Times does not care to examine.

Notice that cows are female, and they typically don’t speak, but here you find a “he” who might have to give up wine. This “he”, this male, is understood to be a person looking at the cow, likely a person with an alcohol problem. He sees a cow lying on the ground (in the mud figuratively) and identifies it to himself. That is, he sees himself lying in the mud. He thinks it’s impossible for the cow to get up because he imagines that he himself can not get up. (This is just the Talmud’s way of discussing things). According to Bais Shammai, the person is understood to have said to himself, “if that cow can get up, I will take it as a sign that I can get up, and I will take it on myself to avoid wine and wine products for a month.” Now, according to Bais Shammai, if the cow gets up, the man is obligated to stop drinking for a month.

“I love television, and find it very educational. When someone turns it on, I go read a book.” G. Marx

Bais Hillel says he is not obligated at all. They say that a drunk who wants to change, must do more than be inspired, he must make a real verbal commitment. He must verbally obligate himself to give up drink. We follow this latter opinion, but learn Bais Shammai’s view too, because there are important ideas about self-identity.

Those are just the first two lines of the page. In secular school, you learn stories too, sometimes stories with talking animals, but these are usually modern stories, where the challenges are external, bullying say, but in a sense such stories are sanitized. The internal demons are removed, and these are often the hardest to battle. Even dealing with external problems is often pushed on an external authority, a teacher usually. You are considered to be too weak to deal with a problem. Sometimes that’s true, usually there is at least some part you could deal with. The lack of self-obligation leaves modern school stories flat. Few kids enjoy them, or feel they get anything from them. A result in Detroit is that schools have <50% attendance. Kids leave barely literate with appalling math skills. We blame the teachers and the subject. It’s the book: Sally has 15 tomatoes and wants to give 4 to a friend, how many will she have left? is this relevant? Does this excite?

Talmud teaches some logic, some math, and some geometry, but only for measuring distances and volumes, the application that geometry was named for (geometry = measuring the earth). They learn the rest as needed, and often learn quite a lot.

As Groucho Marx said: “My education is self inflicted.”

The products of Jewish education become successful, often in business, hiring their better-educated brothers. Some become lawyers, accountants, writers, businessmen, or psychologists — more than our share in the population — or mathematicians and scientists. Some even excel in academics or journalism. The Times does not mention this.

Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl Marx

My three children all went to Jewish, religious school and got the education that the Times calls abuse. So far, my son (31) has two masters degrees, both in artificial intelligence/ computer science. My older daughter (28) is getting her PhD in Psychology, and my younger daughter (23) is working on her masters in epidemiology. I suspect they benefited from the education. My suggestion to the Times, is in another Marx quote: “If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.”

Robert Buxbaum, March 1, 2023. “History may not think with its feet, but it certainly doesn’t walk on its head.”– Karl Marx, the less-funny, Marx brother. Jewish educated, he became a journalist.

Our Jail Minimums are Huge, or non-existent

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The United States has more people in prison, per-capita, than any other developed nation, see graph below. Our rate is double Russia’s, and barely below Cuba’s. About 38% of our prisoners are black. That’s a sign of cultural differences or systemic racism; perhaps both.

A major reason for our high prison rate is our huge minimum sentences. In Michigan, as most states, if you possess a firearm when committing a felony or an attempted felony, two years minimum are added to your sentence. The judge’s only allowed input is to add time, or to drop the felony charge. By law, two years minimum have to be added before (not during) the sentence for the underlying felony. It increases to 5 years minimum if you have a prior conviction, and 10 years if you have two or more prior convictions – on top of whatever the Judge decides for the crime. Typically, for a repeat offender, the judge will sentence zero for the felony, because 10 years is enough. Or he will drop the felony charge. The standard penalty, is either the huge minimum, or zero. About 25% of those in Michigan prison, are serving this minimum. Many others who should have gotten a month, or a year, were let go with nothing to avoid giving the minimum -crazy.

Countries with the highest prison population per 100,000 as of January 2023 (from statistica). No country in Europe makes this chart, Russia included.

These laws are specific to guns. No other deadly weapon is treated this way. A knife assailant serves the sentence for the assault only with adding 2 to 10 years minimum. We could go a long way to reduce the prison population if this add-on were moved or severely shortened. I’d like it shortened to 3 months, and broadened to all deadly weapons.

Minimums serve a purpose, I think, preventing violent felons from going free with a good sob-story. But our minimums too long to prevent crime and now only prevent rehabilitation. After ten years in prison, released felons have no life to return to, and no family. The only life they have is crime. It’s been speculated that our huge minimums make felons more violent. Saint Thomas Moore theorized this in the 1500s: A criminal facing a long prison sentence might as well kill the witnesses and hope to escape.

The Michigan State shooter,who killed 3 last week was a felon whose charge was dropped to avoid sending a mentally unstable black man to prison for 2 years. Anthony McRae, had a history as “a hell-raiser,” and was known to be mentally unstable. He had been shooting his gun outdoors near his home, and upon arrest was in possession of a concealed, loaded gun with no permit. These could be changed as firearm felonies, punished by 2 years minimum, or the Judge could drop the case, leaving McRae with his gun. The judge dropped the case, and returned the gun. McRae went on to kill with it. If the minimum were lower, 3 months say, I believe the judge would have convicted Mr McRae’s to that minimum, and taken his gun.

As it was, the judge was faced with the choice of ordering 2 years or nothing.

Our drug sentencing minimums are too high too, especially for “bad drugs.” These carry a 5 to 10 year minimum sentence with no chance for parole. But “dad drugs” are often the ones black people take: LSD, Crack, Heroin, and Methamphetamine. The drugs white politicians take are treated leniently, e.g. mayor Ford of Toronto, or Hunter Biden. I think we’d do everyone a favor by reducing drug minimums, even for bad drugs; for this, too, 2-3 month minimums should do with the judge having discretion to add.

There should be a maximum sentence too, I think, to stop hanging judges. And there should be rehabilitation, but it’s not clear we can manage that. The unions have opposed work-rehabilitation, calling it slave labor. Leader Dogs for the Blind allow prisoners to train guide dogs; it does wonderfully, but something bigger is needed. Lacking good rehabilitation, the smallest sentence that serves as a deterrent is what we should aim for.

Robert Buxbaum February 22, 2023. The original design of Sing-sing included work-rehabilitation in many crafts. The unions complained, and rehabilitation was stopped. Sentencing is a tough balancing act.

Plans to Raise-the-Dead-Sea

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The Dead Sea in Israel is a popular tourist attraction and health resort-area. It is also the lowest point on the planet, with a surface about 430m below sea level. Its water is saturated with an alkaline salt, and quite devoid of life, and it’s shrinking fast, loosing about 1 m in height every year. The Jordan river water that feeds the sea is increasingly drawn off for agriculture, and is now about 10% of what it was in the 1800s. The Dead Sea is disappearing fast, a story that is repeated with other inland seas: the Aral Sea, the Great Salt Lake, etc. In theory, one could reverse the loss using sea water. In theory, you could generate power dong this too: 430m is seven times the drop-height of Niagara Falls. The problem is the route and the price.

Five (or six) semi-attractive routes have been mapped out to bring water to the Dead Sea, as shown on the map at right. The shortest, and least expensive is route “A”. Here, water from the Mediterranean enters a 12 km channel near Haifa; it is pumped up 50m and travels in a pipe for about 52 km over the Galilean foothills, exiting to a power station as shown on the elevation map below. In the original plan the sea water feeds into the Jordan river, a drop of about 300m. The project had been estimated to cost $3 B. Unfortunately, it would make much of the Jordan river salty. It was thus deemed unacceptable. A variation of this would run the seawater along the Jordan in a pipe or an open channel. This would add to the cost, and would likely diminish the power that could be extracted, but you would not contaminate the Jordan.

A more expensive route, “B”, is shorter but it requires extensive tunneling under Jerusalem. Assuming 20 mies of tunnel at $500 MM/mile, this would cost $10B. It also requires the sea water to flow through the Palestinian West Bank on its way to the sea. This is politically sensitive and is unlikely to be acceptable to the West Bank Palestinians.

Vertical demand of the northern route

Two other routes, labeled “C” and “D” are likely even more expensive than route B. They require the water to be pumped over the Judaean hills near Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem. That’s perhaps 600m up. The seawater would flow from Ashkalon or Gaza and would enter the Dead Sea at Sodom, near Masada. Version C is the most politically acceptable, since it’s short and does not go through Palestinian land. Also, water enters the dead sea at its saltiest point so there is no disruption of the environment. Route D is similar to C, somewhat cheaper, but a lot more political. It goes through Gaza.

The longest route, “E” would go through Jordan taking water from the Red Sea. Its price tag is said to be $10 B. It’s a relatively flat route, but still arduous, rising 210m. As a result it’s not clear that any power would be generated. A version of this route could send the water entirely through Israel. It’s not clear that this would be better than Route C. Looking things over, it was decided that only routes that made sense are those that avoided Palestinian land. An agreement was struck with Jordan to go ahead with route D, with construction to begin in 2021. The project has been on hold though because of cost, COVID, and governmental inertia.

In order to make a $5-10B project worthwhile, you’ll have to generate $500MM to $1B/year. Some of this will come from tourism, but the rest must come from electrical power generation. As an estimate of power generation, let’s assume that that the flow is 65 m3/s, just enough to balance the evaporation rate. Assuming a 400 m power drop and an 80% efficient turbine, we should generate 80% of 255 MWe = about 204 MWe on average. Assuming a value of electricity of 10¢/kWh, that translates to $20,000/ hour, or $179 million per year. This is something, but not enough to justify the cost. We might increase the value of the power by including an inland pond for water storage. This would allow power production to be regulated to times of peak load, or it could be used for recreation, fish-farming, or cooling a thermal power station up to 1000 MWe. These options almost make sense, but with the tunnel prices quoted, the project is still too expensive to make sense. It is “on hold” for now.

It’s not like the sea will disappear if nothing is done. With 10% of the original in-flow of water to the Dead Sea, it will shrink to 10% its original size, and then stop shrinking. At that point evaporation will match in-flow. One could add more fresh water by increasing the flow from the sea of Galilee, but that water is needed. When more water is available, more is taken out for farming. This is what’s happened to the Arial Sea — it’s now about 10% the original size, and quite salty.

Elon Musk besides the prototype 12 foot diameter tunnel.

There’s a now a new tunnel option though and perhaps these routes deserve a second look: Elon Musk claims his “Boring company” can bore long tunnels of 12 foot diameter, for $10-20 MM/mile. This should be an OK size for this project. Assuming he’s right about the price, or close to right, the Dead Sea could be raised for $1B or so. At that price-point, it makes financial sense. It would even make sense if one built multiple seapools, perhaps one for swimming and one for energy storage, to be located before the energy-generating drop, and another for fish after. There might even be a pool that would serve as coolant for a thermal power plant. Water in the desert is welcome, even if it’s salt water.

Robert Buxbaum, February 14, 2023.

Social science is irreproducible, drug tests nonreplicable, and stoves studies ignore confounders.

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Efforts to replicate the results of the most prominent studies in health and social science have found them largely irreproducible with the worst replicability appearing in cancer drug research. The figure below, from “The Reproducibility Project in Cancer Biology, Errington et al. 2021, compares the reported effects in 50 cancer drug experiments from 23 papers with the results from repeated versions of the same experiments, looking at a total of 158 effects.

Graph comparing the original, published effect of a cancer drug with the replication effect. The units are whatever units were used in the original study, percent, or risk ratio, etc. From “Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology,”
Timothy M Errington et al. Center for Open Science, United States; Stanford University, Dec 7, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601.

It’s seen that virtually none of the drugs are found to work the same as originally reported. Those below the dotted, horizontal line behaved the opposite in the replication studies. About half, those shown in pink, showed no significant effect. Of those that showed positive behavior as originally published, mostly they show about half the activity with two drugs that now appear to be far more active. A favorite web-site of mine, retraction watch, is filled with retractions of articles on these drugs.

The general lack of replicability has been called a crisis. It was first seen in the social sciences, e.g. the figure below from this article in Science, 2015. Psychology research is bad enough such that Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, came to disown most of the conclusions in his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. The experiments that underly his major sections don’t replicate. Take, for example, social printing. Classic studies had claimed that, if you take a group of students and have them fill out surveys with words about the aged or the flag, they will then walk slower from the survey room or stand longer near a flag. All efforts to reproduce these studies have failed. We now think they are not true. The problem here is that much of education and social engineering is based on such studies. Public policy too. The lack of replicability throws doubt on much of what modern society thinks and does. We like to have experts we can trust; we now have experts we can’t.

From “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” Science, 2015. Social science replication is better than dance drug replication, about 35% of the classic social science studies replicate to some, reasonable extent.

Are gas stoves dangerous? This 2022 environmental study said they are, claiming with 95% confidence that they are responsible for 12.7% of childhood asthma. I doubt the study will be reproducible for reasons I’ll detail below, but for now it’s science, and it may soon be law.

Part of the replication problem is that researchers have been found to lie. They fudge data or eliminate undesirable results, some more some less, and a few are honest, but the journals don’t bother checking. Some researchers convince themselves that they are doing the world a favor, but many seem money-motivated. A foundational study on Alzheimers was faked outright. The authors doctored photos using photoshop, and used the fake results to justify approval of non-working, expensive drugs. The researchers got $1B in NIH funding too. I’d want to see the researchers jailed, long term: it’s grand larceny and a serious violation of trust.

Another cause of this replication crisis — one that particularly hurt Daniel Kahneman’s book — is that many social science researchers do statistically illegitimate studies on populations that are vastly too small to give reliable results. Then, they only publish the results they like. The graph of z-values shown below suggest this is common, at least in some journals, including “Personality and social psychology Bulletin”. The vast fraction of results at ≥95% confidence suggest that researchers don’t publish the 90-95% of their work that doesn’t fit the desired hypothesis. While there has been no detailed analysis of all the social science research, it’s clear that this method was used to show that GMO grains caused cancer. The researcher did many small studies, and only published the one study where GMOs appeared to cause cancer. I review the GMO study here.

From Ulrich Schimmack, ReplicationIndex.com, January, 2023, https://replicationindex.com/2023/01/08/which-social-psychologists-can-you-trust/. If you really want to get into this he is a great resource.

The chart at left shows Z-scores, were Z = ∆X √n/σ. A Z score above 1.93 generally indicates significance, p < .05. Notice that almost all the studies have Z scores just over 1.93 that is almost all the studies proved their hypothesis at 95% confidence. That makes it seem that the researchers were very lucky, near prescient. But it’s clear from the distribution that there were a lot of studies that done but never shown to the public. That is a lot of data that was thrown out, either by the researchers or by the publishers. If all data was published, you’d expect to see a bell curve. Instead the Z values are of a tiny bit of a bell curve, just the tail end. The implication is that these studies with Z= >1.93 suggest far less than 95% confidence. This then shows up in the results being only 25% reproducible. It’s been suggested that you should not throw out all the results in the journal, just look for Z-scores of 3.6 or more. That leaves you with the top 23%, and these should have a good chance of being reproducible. The top graph somewhat supports this, but it’s not that simple.

Another classic way to cook the books, as it were, and make irreproducible studies provide the results you seek is to ignore “confounders.” This leads to association – causation errors. As an example, it’s observed that people taking aspirin have more heart attacks than those who do not, but the confounder is that aspirin is prescribed to those with heart problems; the aspirin actually helps, but appears to hurt. In the case of stoves, it seems likely that poorer, sicker people own gas, and that they live in older, moldy homes, and cook more at home, frying onions, etc. These are confounders that the study to my reading ignores. They could easily be the reason that gas stove owners get more asthma toxins than the rich folks who own electric, induction stoves. If you confuse association, you seem to find that owning the wrong stove causes you to be poor and sick with a moldy home. I suspect that the stove study will not replicate if they correct for the confounders.

I’d like to recommend a book, hardly mathematical, “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff ($8.99 on Amazon). I read it in high school. It gives you a sense of what to look out for. I should also mention Dr. Anthony Fauci. He has been going around to campuses saying we should have zero tolerance for those who deny science, particularly health science. Given that so much of health science research is nonreplicable, I’d recommend questioning all of it. Here is a classic clip from the 1973 movie, ‘Sleeper’, where a health food expert wakes up in 2173 to discover that health science has changed.

Robert Buxbaum , February 7, 2023.

Use iodine against Bad breath, Bad beer, Flu, RSV, COVID, monkeypox….

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We’re surrounded by undesired bacteria, molds, and viruses. Some are annoying, making our feet smell, our teeth rot, and our wine sour. Others are killers, particularly for the middle aged and older. Despite little evidence, the US government keeps pushing masks and inoculations with semi-active vaccine that does nothing to stop the spread. Among the few things one can do to stop the spread of disease, and protect yourself, is to kill the bacteria, molds and viruses with iodine. Iodine is cheap, effective even at very low doses, 0.1% to 10 parts per million, and it lasts a lot longer than alcohol. Dilute iodine will not dye your skin, and it does not sting. A gargle of iodine will kill COVID and other germs (e.g. thrush) and it has even been shown to be a protective, stopping COVID 19 and flu even if used before exposure. On a more practical level. I also use it to cleanse my barrels before making beer — It’s cheaper than the Camden they sell in stores.

Iodine is effective when used on surfaces, and most viruses spread by surfaces. A sick person coughs. Droplets end up on door knobs, counters, or in your throat, leaving virus particles that do not die in air. You touch the surface, and transfer the virus to your eyes and nose. Here’s a video I made. A mask doesn’t help because you rub your eyes around the mask. But iodine kills the virus on the surface, and on your hands, and lasts there far longer than alcohol does. Vaccines always come with side-effects, but there are no negative side effects to sanitization with dilute iodine. Here is a video I did some years ago on the chemistry of iodine.

Robert Buxbaum, February 1, 2023. I don’t mean to say that all bacteria and fungi are bad, it’s just that most of them are smelly. Even the good ones that give us yogurt, beer, blue cheese, and sour kraut tend to be smelly. They have the annoying tendency to causing your wine to taste and smell like sour kraut or cheese, and they cause your breath and feet to smell the same. If you’re local, I’ll give you some free iodine solution. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy it through REB Research.