Like many of you, I’ve been closely following the developments at the Fukushima reactor complex. Below is a set of links to articles I’ve written for the Stranger, as the events have unfolded.

3/12/2011
Explosion at Fukushima Nuclear Plant, Cesium Detected

3/14/2011
Don’t Panic

Geiger Counter Readings Rise in Tokyo

3/15/2011
What’s on Fire at the Fukushima Reactor?

Will Radioactive Particles from the Leaking Reactor Reach Washington State?

The Fukushima Fifty

3/16/2011
“We believe that radiation levels are extremely high” (A discussion of acute radiation injury)

3/17/2011
Video from a Helicopter Flyover of the Fukushima Plant

The Health Effects of Radioactive Isotopes from Fukushima

3/20/2011:
Radiation from Fukushima, in Seattle

3/24/2011:
How Radiation Is Measured

3/27/2011:
Radiation From Fukushima, in Seattle, Tells the Story

What’s going on here? Let’s talk macroeconomic theory!

Money, as an abstraction, represents a sliver of the total productive ability of the economy. So, the value of the $20 bill in your pocket is ultimately determined by the productive ability of the economy divided by the total amount of money available at the moment.

Let’s assume that the productive capacity of the United States is stable. If North Korea manufactured a million $20 bills and handed them out to people on the street, the value of your twenty dollar bill would decrease. The term for this–when the growth in the supply of money exceeds the growth in the productive capacity of the economy–is inflation. If you have a wallet thick with $20 bills (you have lots of savings), inflation is working against you. If you owe money, inflation is great. Paying off the same debt (in dollar terms) requires less productive effort.

Assuming again the intrinsic productive capability of the economy is stable, let’s think through what would happen if trillions of dollars were suddenly evaporated–say by a gigantic retail bank failure obliterating checking accounts. Now, the $20 in your pocket represents a larger share of the economic output. That’s deflation. The winners and losers are opposite from inflation. The more savings you have, the better deflation is for you. If you’re indebted, you’re doomed.

Borrowing and saving are both critical for the health of the economy. Inflation discourages saving, deflation strongly discourages borrowing. Therefore, keeping a stable relationship between the productive output of the economy and the total money supply in the economy is the goal.

Here’s the rub: The productive capability of the economy is constantly in flux, and affected by an astonishing multitude of factors: New technologies, the availability of resources, monopolization of supplier companies for other companies, the weather, the overall enthusiasm of entrepreneurs, the number of work-capable people, the amount of labor each person can produce, the number of new ideas worth investing in, the state of infrastructure and on and on and on. Observing this, objectively, is beyond a difficult task; predicting the future productive state of the economy is even more difficult.

The old way to deal with this problem was to ignore it. Under the gold standard, the amount of money is fixed to be equal to the amount of gold in reserve. You could, at any time, exchange your crumpled dollar bill for a fixed amount of shiny metal. Therefore, the growth in amount of money was determined by how fast this one metal could be mined and refined from the earth. You can’t eat gold. You can’t make a home out of gold. And gold clothing is just tacky. The gold production rate is a poor correlate for the growth of the overall economy. The result–particularly during periods of rapid technological advancement in areas beyond metallurgy–were repeated cycles of catastrophic crashes. When an advancement dramatically increased the productive capacity of the economy, the money supply stayed relatively fixed–resulting in sharp, rapid deflation. The deflation stopped borrowing, stopping investment in new endeavors, crashing the economy over and over again. It was a terrible system, whose success depended almost entirely upon luck and faith in divine providence. Of course, Beck loves it.

Instead, we now attempt to measure as well as we can the state of the economy, and forecast how fast it is growing, and then ‘print’ enough new money (or, in theory subtract enough money) so that the ratio of the two stays roughly the same. While not perfect, it’s the far more rational way of dealing with the problem–harnessing mathematics, economic theory and plain-old empiric data.

Assessing and predicting the current and future state of the dollar-based economy is the primary mission of the Federal Reserve. Based on these predictions, the Federal Reserve adds (and theoretically subtracts) from the total money supply–in an attempt to keep the ratio of productive capability to money stable. Hence, the Beckian feverish repetition of, “…. how much money we’re printing at the Federal Reserve.” They (the Fed) are ‘printing’ money to replace that lost by catastrophic (entirely abstract) investments and reflect growth in the productive capability of the nation.

In it’s arsenal–to accomplish this herculean task–the Fed collects data on almost every aspect of the economy. Among all this data is a calculation of the inflation rate of the economy. A basket of goods (representing a cross section of productive output of the economy) is priced out in dollar terms on a regular basis. The rate of change in the price for the collection of goods is used as a measure of the inflation rate. This measure is probably the best sign of how well the Fed has done their matching job. High inflation rates mean too much money supply, low rates of inflation (or negative rates, reflecting deflation) represent too little money is being ‘printed’. Since the economic crisis that started in 2008, the rate of increase in this measure has been historically low–despite the historically large increases in the money supply by the Fed. Based on this measure, the Federal Reserve hasn’t printed enough money, to replace that lost by bankers in their spreadsheets.

There are reasons to be concerned about run away printing of dollars by the Fed–but it’s worth noting that the Fed is a quite conservative organization. At a baseline, the Federal Reserve tends to err on the side of too little growth in the money supply–fitting with the catering to the needs of the wealthy before the needs of the working that dominates US leadership generally. For now, there is no reason underlying the hysteria of the right-wing commentators.

There really isn’t much to debate.

The US healthcare system, in its present state, is a failure. It fails those with and without coverage. We spend more, care for fewer and are sicker than the citizens of any other industrialized nation.

We’ve studied it. Americans of all socioeconomic strata are less healthy on every measured basis than their UK counterparts–before or after adjusting for the less healthy lifestyles of Americans. Putting it even more bluntly, the richest Americans, lavished with the finest private health insurance our nation can muster, in the epicenter of global medical and biological research, have more diabetes and higher blood pressure than the poorest of English citizens. Even within our country, Americans within the Veterans Affairs system, a little socialized corner of our healthcare system, are similarly healthier than their privately insured doppelgangers.

As far as the uninsured in this country, an unprecedented phenomenon in the industrial world, allow the independent Institute of Medicine to state the case:

Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States. Although America leads the world in spending on health care, it is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage.

The case for socialized medicine in this country has been made, and it has won. Back in June of this year, an overwhelming supermajority of Americans were in favor of a public health plan option. After the long summer–filled with hideous farces of Town Hall meetings, Teabaggers and endless anti-reform propaganda–support remained at supermajority levels. The Senate vote on the package seems to be a fait accompli.

The core of the opposition is an all out appeal to selfishness. Think of the taxes you’ll pay. Seniors, think of what you’ll be forced to share with those younger than you. You might have to wait in line for care if anyone can get it. The hideous core throbbing at the center of all this summer’s hysterics is the toddlerization of Americans as selfish and self-centered consumers–relentlessly stripped of any sort of adult notions of empathy, responsibility for others, investment in the future or delayed gratification. The whole movement has been lead by paid-for shills for the moneyed interests endangered by healthcare reform.

The mob of mooks compelled by these appeals to selfishness–capable only of braying about ‘socialism’ and ‘the constitution’ with no sense of what either really represents–are the rhetorical equivalent of suicide bombers. This summer’s protests reminded me of nothing less than Kermit Roosevelt‘s handiwork, undoing Mosaddeq’s attempt to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. The intent was to drive terror into the hearts of the elected representatives Democratic supermajority–to generate the illusion of mass discontent. The absurdity of the arguments posed at the Town Halls–Death Panels! Marxism! Obama is Hitler for trying to provide Americans with healthcare!–was the entire point. The feeling of being strapped to a bomb generated by having these cretinous and credulous fools
as countrymen is best diffused by ignoring it as bad theater.

It’s worth considering why American doctors are so expensive, where the costs of drugs and medical devices arise. Healthcare reform is, astonishingly enough after nearly a century of struggle, about to happen. These are the points we should be debating and struggling with as the end details are being written.

It’s a pretty clever idea. Nobody has been able to make it work. Tumor cells seem to know the trick, and have potent means of telling the immune cells “back off, guys. We’re cool.”

Dendreon, focusing on prostate cancer (very common in older men), figured it out. In this most recent trial, they demonstrated efficacy of this new treatment to the satisfaction of the FDA. Since this therapeutic method is so new, the trial and standards were more stringent than for a more typical chemotherapy drug.

Not only is this really good news for prostate cancer patients, it’s also good news for the local economy. The intellectual property generated by the company should be applicable to other forms of cancer. Prepare for billions of dollars to start flowing into the state, as we are now the global leaders in a new way of tackling cancer.

Let’s look at the bios of the CEO and scientific leadership team:
Dr. Mitchell Gold: President and CEO.
“Dr. Gold is a former urologist at the University of Washington and currently serves on the boards of the University of Washington/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Prostate Cancer Institute and the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association.”

Dr. Urdal: Chief Scientific Officer.
“Dr. Urdal received a B.S. and an M.S. in public health and a Ph.D. in biochemical oncology from the University of Washington.”

Huh. UW. You know, the highly productive public research University that brings in a billion dollars a year (or so) of out-of-state funding and is the largest employer in the city of Seattle. Also, the same University facing a 25-35% budget cut from the State and is planning to lay off 1000 people in a couple weeks, while jacking up tuition and cutting student rolls. After these cuts, Washington State will be 42nd out of 50 in State funding for higher education.

Who needs higher education? Taxes are baaad for the economy. The Republican superminority in State government tells us so. We already have a raging state economy. Raging! Sure, Boeing needed billions of dollars of state-funded life support during the boom years, has a commercial aviation division that can’t build aircraft and is facing cuts in orders to its most profitable aircraft, and a military division still reeling from the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. It’s not like China is going to figure out how to build aircraft! Never! And Microsoft’s monopoly is firmly entrenched, with no serious competitors on the horizon. Businesses are snapping up Vista and cannot wait for Windows 7. XP is long forgotten. Nobody wants that stuff. Nor is piracy of Microsoft products a serious problem, certainly not in the future markets of Brazil, Russia, India or China.

And our high tech economy has no need for well-trained employees. None at all. Sure, public universities are incredibly efficient at generating superbly trained and prepared staff for companies. But, why would Boing, Microsoft or other tech companies want to hire Washingtonians? If UW is gutted, all it’ll take is more H1B visas. With all the tax dollars we’ve saved, we can make our kids happy in the burger-flipping and car washing jobs that are the future.

Yes, our governor and democratic supermajority in the state legislature are faced with an impossible set of circumstances: a gaping budget hole caused by ill-advised earlier tax cuts and subsidies for failing industries, one of the world’s largest collections of idle wealth residing in the state, and an antiquated and ultra-regressive sales tax based revenue structure. What possible solution could be crafted from this raw material? Mysterious clues have been found in a yet-indecipherable code: aiseray axestay onay ichray. To help them in their quest of balancing the books, the governor has crafted a website where you can cut funding, and pick exactly which seed corn we should feast on now.

Should be a smashing success. Thanks, UW spinoff Dendreon, for showing us what we won’t miss at all.

Darwin’s major accomplishment was to condense a lot of thought on the origins of life into two basic concepts: new traits arise randomly (mutation) and the most adaptive of these new traits would become dominant in the population (natural selection)–forming the first cohesive theory of evolution.

For proof, in these early days, we had Darwin’s observations on the Galapagos Islands and the fossil records showing the rise of new traits in the living population to match changes in or introductions to new environments.

Building off of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection and mutation generating new traits came Mendel, and his conception of genetics, a systematic way by which traits are passed from parents to children. Mendel’s genes passed unchanged from parent to child cause traits of living things. An individual has two copies of each gene, one from each parent. If you have a mixture of genes for a trait, one of these genes can dominate over the other, hiding the weaker recessive gene’s trait for the generation.

Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin‘s discovery of the structure of DNA in the 1950′s gave genes a physical manifestation—understandable with fairly simple chemistry. The central dogma of biology followed shortly after, in which DNA encoding for genes is transcribed into messenger RNA and in turn proteins that cause the traits first observed by Darwin hundreds of years before.

Human understanding of life has come in these spurts, separated by decades of consolidation and grappling with new data or new ways of thinking about biology. We’re, right now, in midst of another spurt in our understanding of life.

Until about a decade ago, we only really knew DNA–the long ordered strands of the four basic letters of life–in patches and spurts, with little sense of the overall map of any living thing. With enormous effort and cost, we sequenced the human genome–the vast majority of all the DNA in a human cell. We discovered that a human being has about twenty-thousand pairs of Mendel’s genes.

In the past few years, sequencing DNA has become shockingly less expensive. What once cost four billion dollars can now be done for a few thousand. And the price is dropping dramatically every few years. As a result, we now have sequenced the genomes of many other organisms–fish, cows, dogs, mice, opossums, frogs, chickens, chimps to name just a few.

If we think about Darwin’s traits as tasks a living thing must accomplish–eating, carrying oxygen and so on–and Mendel’s genes as means of accomplishing these tasks–a beak, a histone protein to wrap DNA around, hemoglobin in red blood cells–by comparing the DNA sequences for given traits (a gene’s locus) in different organisms, we can see how evolution has adapted each organism to its environment and lifestyle.

Storing DNA should be little different for a fish, frog, mouse or human. The task is as ancient as eukaryotic life. Let’s look at the genetic locus coding for a protein responsible for this DNA-storing trait, comparing how close various other organism’s DNA is to human’s sequence.

(click for a larger version)

Each row represents the equivalent gene in another species (zebrafish, xenopus frogs, chickens, opossums, mice, dogs and macaque respectively.) The higher the blue, the closer the DNA sequence matches that of humans; given that our common ancestor with these organisms were millions, hundreds of millions for the majority, of years ago, this is a very high degree of sequence conservation. The task hasn’t changed (the goals of the trait) so the gene hasn’t changed much either.

Now let’s look at the gene responsible for the trait of carrying oxygen in our blood, the beta-chain of hemoglobin. For a fish or a frog, the demands of the task of capturing and carrying oxygen are dramatically different than those for a purely land-dwelling animal; we’d expect the DNA sequence for the equivalent gene in these animals to be quite different from human’s.

Indeed, that’s the case:

Today, on Darwin’s 200th birthday, I encourage you to browse around, comparing human genes to those of our distant and close relatives in the animal kingdom. (Check out Opsin 1, for color vision, or the NMDA neurotransmitter receptor for some other fun genes.) You are living in a golden age of biology, in which our understanding of life is jumping by leaps and bounds every year. Within your lifetime already, we’ve gained astonishing abilities to peer into the nature, structure and function of life. Despite the centuries of advancement, Darwin’s (and Mendel’s) carefully crafted ideas of evolution and genetics have not only endured, but provided an invaluable map to understanding this vast new collection of data. Be proud.

The optimistic among us assume that, eventually, new technology or new political movements will stop carbon release into the atmosphere. One of the comforting assumptions about climate change is that the effects of humans putting carbon into the atmosphere can be reversed. Plants remove carbon from the atmosphere, right? So, if we just stop adding more, eventually carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere should drop, and the adverse climate changes should reverse.

Nope, at least not according to Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions in this week’s PNAS.

Now, that’s a provocative title. The authors made such a claim very carefully. (I suggest reading the paper in whole, I’ll just summarize it here.)

First, they only considered climate changes that are:

1. going on now–not predicted for the future in a computer model, but instead directly observable today.

2. by direct evidence, caused by human activities.

3. caused by a basic physical process that is well understood by science.

4. projected by multiple and reliable computer models to worsen with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

That is a very strict set of criteria. As far as irreversible, the authors considered effects that would remain around until at least the year 3000, even if humans totally stopped adding new greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today.

Well, what made the cut?

1. Atmospheric CO2 levels are staying high, no matter what.

When CO2 is dumped into the atmosphere, only about 20% remains in the air. About 80% dissolves into the oceans, becoming carbonic acid in the process.

CO2 (carbon dioxide) + H20 (water) <--> H2CO3 (Carbonic Acid) <--> H+ + HCO3-

This absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans is reversible, but only in the surface water. Since the deep waters of the ocean are only rarely overturned to the surface, this happens very slowly. How slow can be observed by comparing the ratio of radioactive carbon-14 CO2 to non-radioactive carbon-12 CO2 in the air versus the ocean water, giving us a very good sense of the pace.

The results:
If we stopped adding carbon to the atmosphere right now, even a thousand years from now we still wouldn’t return back to pre-industrial levels. In fact, we can expect that carbon levels would only drop by about 60% from the peak. Since human carbon emissions have been growing by about 2% a year since the industrial revolution, this peak is still rocketing upwards.

This is nasty business.

Acidification of the oceans causes a whole mess of problems, including the potential collapse of the entire aquatic food chain, or the loss of all shelled ocean life forms (as acidic ocean water dissolves away shells.)

2. Global surface temperatures are going up.

The persistence of the carbon means global average surface temperatures will remain elevated for millennium after the last bit of human-produced carbon is added. All that carbon keeps trapping solar energy. If you recall from my earlier writing, increased temperatures alone are going to cause serious problems for food crops, regardless of water supply.

3. Ocean levels are going persistently higher

Ocean levels are rising will stay that way, not just by melting of glaciers but just by simple thermal expansion of the existing oceans. Warm water takes up more volume than cold. The expansion in ocean volume we can expect from even very modest increases in average surface temperature are likely to cause serious problems for coastal areas worldwide, with ocean levels staying about 1-2 meters higher long after we’ve stopped adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

4. Precipitation patterns are going to change.

Rainfall is going to go down in the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and parts of southwestern North America and become less predictable everywhere.

This is a damning and bleak report–made all the more so by the obvious care and caution that went into the analysis. I’m taking it seriously. You should too.

It’s not as if we’re lacking in problems needing solutions–climate change, energy scarcity, almost every meaningful commodity priced at historical highs. A vast pool of money and a growing list of problems–why wasn’t the connection ever made? Why didn’t at least some of this wealth go toward solving these problems?

We could be riding high on American ingenuity. But we’re not.

Let’s say you and I start a company with the goal of replacing petroleum-based jet fuel. We engineer a bug that spits out something pretty close to kerosene. Excellent. Since we’re a company, we immediately patent the invention.

Now what? While we’ve just figured out a key step, our invention by itself cannot replace jet fuel. We need more pieces–the technology to refine our proto-fuel into something we could put into jets, the bioreactor technology to grow our bugs, a factory and its land, a distribution network, sales to airlines, and so on.

That’s a lot of pieces; we only own one right now. If we raised the money and assembled all of these to the point where we could actually sell an useful product, we’d be first. We don’t want to be first.

If we show it can be done, what would stop someone in China or India or somewhere else in the world from stealing all of this technology and competing with us? (Our present global economy isn’t exactly brimming with respect for intellectual property.) Without the cost of buying up patents—the costs of developing the technology—they’d easily outcompete us. By being first, we end up broke.

We’re better off selling our patent. We could sell this patent to someone who wants to turn it into a product—but they’d run into the same problem we would on that path.

The most likely buyer of our patent would be someone who desires our technology to never be turned into a product—someone who already makes jet fuel from petroleum. Patents, in our post-intellectual-property world, are more valuable as a defensive weapon. To a large extent, this is why all the wonderful scientific knowledge and technical ability pouring out of R&D labs fails to translate to something useful for humanity.

Think of all the companies that would benefit from a competitor to petroleum jet fuel: airlines, airplane manufacturers, hotels, restaurants, theaters… and if it benefits tourism, it benefits governments. For all of these, jet fuel is an economic complement.

The global economy suffers from antiquated complements. Energy sources. Commodities. The markets for many of these tricky complements are highly monopolized. Alternatives require the combination of many different technologies into a chain. By buying up one piece of the chain, the dominant company can prevent the competition from existing.

Broad swaths of the global economy would benefit from the cracking of these monopolized complements–just not the people who would have to be first in actually developing these alternative technologies. So the chains don’t get built. How do we get around this market failure?

I have a crazy idea: Since we’re rapidly socializing our economy–at least the financial industry–we should consider starting a new GSE, the Complement Cooperative.

The co-op would produce financial entities whose goal is to assemble these chains–”alternative to gasoline” or “alternative to jet fuel”–and give the entire chain away. Just like anyone can download Linux and install it for free, anyone could take the technologies in the chain and start a company–secure in the knowledge that someone has already shown that the chain works.

These Complement Co-op funds would take their endowments and contract out to labs to develop the key missing technologies or buy up patents as they enter the market. Throw in some talented patent lawyers, rooting around for prior art to destroy blocking patents. If we want to be really aggressive, the Complement Co-op could be given the right to use eminent domain to forcibly buy blocking patents–paying fair market value for the intellectual property–to promote the public good of new competition.

Combine a government-sponsored Complement Cooperative with a lending agency promoting the formation of new companies based on these given-away technologies, and you have a monopoly-crushing machine.

If the co-op’s entities are giving away the technology, how will they be kept solvent? By raising money from the industries that would benefit from the new technology chain.

In the above jet fuel list of potential beneficiaries, you’d hit them all up. The returns would come not from licensing fees, but from reduced costs on key inputs for their industries. Sovereign funds of governments would be delighted to invest, if the new product could help their economy or serve as a weapon against commodity-based rival nations.

This isn’t “risky.” If you have a sense of the likelihood of success of a given fund–how big are the technological hurdles?–as well as the potential reduction in costs–by breaking up a monopolized commodity market–you could calculate a probable return on investment for these sorts of financial instruments.

It’s a crazy idea, but less crazy than the farce that was our financial industry–the insane financial derivatives that crashed the market this time around. We have to adjust how we think of intellectual property. New inventions are still of use. We need to just help the market feel the value again. Something like the Complement Co-op would do it.

We need to start a new engine behind our economy. One hundred billion dollars–one tenth what we’re contemplating, about on order of what we paid for the tattered remains of AIG–would be more than enough to get something like the Complement Co-op started. We should do it.

The actions began to get under way on Thursday with discussions between the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Congressional leaders on what could become the biggest bailout in United States history, a plan likely to authorize the government to buy distressed mortgages at deep discounts from banks and other institutions….

In a move against traders who have sought to profit from the financial crisis by betting against bank shares, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a temporary ban on short sales of 799 financial stocks, following similar action in Britain on Thursday.

And the Treasury, moving to restore confidence in another financial bedrock, said that it would guarantee, at least temporarily, money market funds up to an amount of $50 billion to ensure their solvency, a startling intervention into what had been considered among the safest investments.

For years, I’ve had to put up with conservatives bitching about the moral hazard posed by FDR’s New Deal. Today’s actions reveal these “free market” proponents as gigantic, hypocritical assholes.

Don’t be too shocked.

Want to distill down the New Deal-era financial reforms? If you want our money to bail you out, you have to play honestly and by our rules. If something is important enough to the economy that we’d consider bailing it out, it deserves regulation first, bailouts second.

For example, the Glass-Steagall Acts prevented risky investments from shacking up with the safe–keeping investment banks and commercial banks separate. The same laws created the FDIC insurance of our savings account also limited where and how aggressively insured banks could invest.

Most of Glass-Steagall’s regulatory provisions were written out of law in 1999, setting the stage for our present catastrophe. Today’s “solution” to the present crisis is all bailout, no regulation–the mirror image of FDR’s. It’s going to fail.

“Free market” conservatives–like our current SEC chairman Christopher Cox–for years have been telling us the market will collapse irresponsible companies, relieving the government of the responsibility to actual bother regulating the financial industries. Well, when the irresponsible have started collapsing, Cox and others are right there with our wallet, dumping cash on the table to “restore confidence.” I have an ugly truth for you: confidence shouldn’t be restored in this system.

Want to restore confidence? I have a suggested governmental takeover for you: The entire debt rating industry. If the goal is to calm down global investors, who were burned by “high rated” debt that was anything but good, a public execution of Moody’s and others would be the perfect way to do it.

Take the money we’re now showering on the greatest failures in two generations to pay for a new governmental debt-rating agency. Pay the employees of this agenccy usurious wages–wages beyond any bribe. Grant these employees the right to tear into the books and documentation behind all of the financial derivatives, and give honest ratings to the relative quality of the debt.

With that, I know my confidence would be restored–in more than just the financial system.

For those of you keeping track, we’re not really bailing out US homeowners; we’re bailing out the bondholders of Freddy mac and Fannie Mae. The predominant bondholder? The central banks of Asian nations. How are we financing this bailout? Using US Government Treasury bonds. Who is buying those? The central banks of Asian nations. For now, at least.

If confidence in US Treasury Bonds falters, we’re all doomed. This is not an exaggeration.

The next president, who in turn will set the regulatory environment, really matters. The best, perhaps the only way, to restore investor confidence in US and global financial institutions is through tight regulation. To be blunt: investors are correct. The Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac bonds were far crappier than they were told. Until everyone in convinced things are worth their claimed worth, things are only going to get worse. We need a president who can take on the financial industries, who is above corruption on this issue above all others.

What follows is a cartoon depicting his involvement in the Keating Five scandal–the last big collapse of US financial institutions, that cost taxpayers over $200 billion (in today’s dollars.)

If I were a woman accused of claiming my daughter’s child was my own, and I knew such accusations were false, I’d use science to prove myself right.

Using genetics to test for maternity is no different than in paternity testing, and I wrote about that a bit ago:

Paternity testing is all about mixing and matching.

DNA-based tests work by comparing the recipes—the alleles—you have for a given gene to those of a possible child. For most genes, we get two alleles—one from our mother and one from our father. A child of yours must have one of your alleles for all the paired genes in his or her DNA.

Well, how can we use this to figure out if a baby is from a woman or her daughter? Let’s look at the example for the pair of alleles for one gene:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

In this example, I’ve assumed the most complicated combination–where everyone is heterozygous with distinct alleles. Since we know the relationship between the daughter and her parents, we must assume she received one allele from each parent. Therefore, we have six alleles, giving us 15 possible combinations. (Want to check my math? The formula is 6 choose 2.)

Try to follow the logic yourself. Of the fifteen possible babies, several definitively cannot be the mother’s child–as the baby doesn’t have an allele from the mother. Several are definitively not the daughter’s child (for the same reason.) A few combinations cannot be either of their child (mixup at the hospital)? Most are ambiguous–could be from either potential mother.

Well, how do we deal with the ambiguity? If you look at many genes at once (trivially easy to do with current technology), it become easy to rule out a potential mother.