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Engineering ethics, from both directions.

I recently discovered a blog that's new to me but has been around since 2006:  Engineering Ethics Blog, written by "Kaydee," whose profile states that he teaches engineering courses at Texas State and that he has worked in industry and as a consulting engineer.  

Engineering ethics is a great interest of mine, coming at it from two directions -- the conventional one, and a different one as well.    

The first and common understanding of "engineering ethics" would be the professional ethical standards of practicing and teaching engineers.  Engineering organizations have their own published codes of ethics (for example, here is the code of ethics of AIChE, in which I briefly held membership before switching my job description to "never worked a day in her life"*).   Engineering colleges routinely offer courses in engineering ethics to their students, although the courses are not always required.  Here is an online, uncredited course in engineering ethics offered through MIT OpenCourseWare.  (I have not reviewed this course and this link is not a recommendation.)

In that sense, "engineering ethics" encompasses questions of serving public safety, of truth-telling in public statements, of refusing to take part in bribery or corruption, of accurate self-representation, and of working within one's own sphere of competence.  

There is another sense in which I, personally, like to think of "engineering ethics."  That is the special perspective and specialized knowledge that engineering training brings to the consideration of ethical questions in general.

Such questions confront all human beings above the age of reason.  They include questions that societies face in balancing diverse interests through public policy; questions of evaluating costs and benefits, risks and rewards in the workplace and in our personal lives; and how specific ethical questions ("case studies," if you will) refine and sharpen the broad principles of moral philosophy.

What do I mean by the "special perspective and specialized knowledge" of engineers?  Emphatically not that the engineer, or any other kind of scientist, has a specially privileged moral sense.  Scientists and engineers are no more likely to make good interior ethical judgments than anyone else.  We are just as likely to be selfish, corruptible, or arrogant.  If all our policymakers were scientists and engineers, we might have more technically informed policy, but we would not necessarily have policy that better served the public good.  There is precious little about "what one ought to do" in an engineering education -- and what there is, appears in the engineering ethics courses.

Part of what I mean by the relevant perspective and specialized knowledge is our expertise in technical matters that may inform ethical decisions.  

• We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to mandate such-and-such an adaptive technology to better accommodate the disabled in public buildings.  But we can tell the public how much the machines will cost, how soon they could be installed, which places they would be more difficult to implement, and how frequently they would require maintenance.  
• We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to ban a particular type of gadget that has fallen out of favor because of some impact its production or disposal has on the environment.  But we can provide a list of feasible substitute gadgets, count up how much the substitutes would cost, estimate how soon new technologies might come to market, consider whether there are alternative means of dealing with the old gadget's problems, and try to predict whether the substitute gadgets will bring worse costs and risks than the old ones.   

My husband, the other engineer on this blog, says about his responsibilities giving technical advice at work:  "I never tell them that such-and-such an idea is impossible, or that it is a bad idea.  That is not my job.  I always tell them how much their idea would cost, and let them make the conclusions."

But another aspect that the engineer brings to ethical problems is our trained approach to problems in general.  It's sometimes maddening for the people who have to work with us and live with us, but we can be accused of treating every problem, from public policy to household budgetary dilemmas to difficult childrearing decisions to friends' marital woes as an engineering problem.  

What are the constraints?  Make a list.  What are the available resources?  Tally them up.  Which pieces of information do we lack?  Take a measurement, go get advice, or make an appropriate assumption along with the necessary caveats.  What are the conceivable courses of action?  Plot them out.  Where are the critical decision points?  Identify them and identify the possible decisions.  

How much could each path cost?  What are the possible benefits?  Who benefits at each stage?  What are the risks -- and what is the probability of each projected undesirable outcome?  Can we live with those possibilities?

It's not that we don't take into consideration people's feelings about their problems.  It's just that the potential effect of feelings  have to be factored into the cost-and-benefit structure.  If you're going to have an irrational reaction to one potential outcome of this decision, then I have to factor your irrationality into the potential negative costs.

We tend to drive nontechnical types a little crazy when we import our approach into nontechnical problems.  But I think it's a good way to approach problems of all kinds, and is one reason why I'm grateful for my engineering education, which has shaped the way I look at all kinds of things, even though (as noted) I haven't worked a day in my life.  At least not recently.

Anyway, here is a sample of posts from Engineering Ethics Blog.

On the unintended consequences of the ethanol-in-gasoline mandate ERISA:

At the time, ERISA was passed, ethanol was the only biofuel that had any reasonable chance of making it into the nation’s gas tanks in a reasonable time frame....

The not-so-advertised reasons for the law have to do with the strength of the agricultural lobby.  The E10 mandate was a tremendous windfall for everybody who grows corn.  While some ethanol from corn was being used voluntarily as a fuel additive before 2007, the mandate caused this use to skyrocket.  By 2011, according to the Mosbacher Institute report by economist James Griffin, 37% of the entire U. S. corn crop went toward ethanol production.  And corn prices soared from $2.50 per bushel up to as high as $7.50.

If the only people hurt were U. S. food consumers (not everybody drives a car, but everybody eats), it would be bad enough.  But the U. S. grows and sells more corn than any other nation, and much of it is exported to poorer countries, where it is a staple in many diets.  While the rise in corn prices was not solely responsible for the worldwide inflation in food costs that led to food riots in many nations in recent years, the timing is suspicious, and there is no question that the ERISA law led to hardships for many poor people around the world who were now even less able to afford to eat....

Unintended consequences show up all the time in considering engineering ethics, and the ERISA mandate has plenty.  The parties who appear to have benefited are:  growers of corn and producers of corn-based ethanol (a lot), the U. S. driving public (a little), and the U. S. overall, from the viewpoint of slightly improved energy security.  The losers include refiners (who have had to fool with the mandate and change their processes), anybody who buys corn (U. S. food consumers, U. S. livestock growers, and millions of foreign food consumers, many of whom are poor), and the U. S. public in the sense that they have had to pay the 45-cent-a-gallon subsidy through the U. S. treasury.  Quite a mixed bag, to say the least.

On the Air France 447 crash of June 1, 2009:

While we will never know why co-pilot Bonin (the one with least experience) did what he did, the fact remains that at 2:10, he pulled the stick back and basically kept it there until it was too late to correct his mistake....

In older aircraft, the two pilot sticks are mechanically coupled together, so only one message goes from the cockpit to the ailerons. If two pilots disagree on what to do with such a stick, they find themselves literally fighting a tug-of-war in the cockpit, and most reasonable people would react by at least talking about what to do next. 

But even in the autopilot-off mode, the Airbus sticks could be moved independently, and the plane responds to the average of the two sticks’ motion. To my ears, this sounds like a software engineer’s solution to a human-factors problem. In the event, even though the senior pilot eventually did the right thing with his stick, the computer averaged it with Bonin’s all-way-back stick, and the stall continued. 

... I hope the software and hardware engineers working on the next Airbus rethink their strategy of independent sticks and averaging. While human-machine communication is important, this accident emphasizes the fact that interpersonal communication in a crisis is vital. That single additional channel of communication through a mechanical link between sticks might have been enough to avoid this accident. 

 

On the show Mythbusters:

Hyneman and Savage are really doing what used to be called “natural philosophy,” back when philosophy really meant the love of knowledge, and not some arcane specialty that you have to get a Ph. D. in to understand, which is mostly what it means today. Before about 1800, most science was done simply because people were curious and wanted to know whether a thing was true or not. There were no huge funding agencies, no boards of proposal review or journal referees—just a few curious guys (it was nearly all guys then) who got together in coffee shops and wrote each other letters about their experiments. And because there was almost no organized industry producing scientific instruments, they had to build almost all their equipment and experiments themselves.

Hyneman ran a special-effects shop before getting involved with MythBusters, and so the very hands-on demands of that type of work (especially before digital technology took over movies to the degree it has) gave him a set of skills that fits very well into the kind of things required by the MythBusters shows. So his lack of formal scientific training isn’t really a disadvantage—instead, he goes about things the way the average guy with time on his hands might look into them. 

Somewhat to my regret, I noted that the Wikipedia biographies of both stars list them as sympathetic with the skeptic or atheist turn of mind. While such a philosophy may be an advantage in their particular line of work, it is by no means a necessity....

The MythBusters people deserve credit for popularizing both science and how to do dangerous things safely. Their latest mishap, although attention-getting, could have been a lot worse, and I’m sure they will be more careful in the future while investigating questions from the past, such as whether a cannonball could really breach a stone wall. And I’m glad they are continuing a long-established tradition of science for science’s sake—even if they are interrupted by messages from their sponsors.

 

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*This joke is the property of MrsDarwin.

I take it back, that on-off habits thing.

All right, I said I was going to handle weight maintenance in a certain way, and I'm officially going back on my word.  

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So when I first got near my goal weight, you may remember, I was going to chart my weight on a little chart that Mark made for me modeled after a statistical process control chart.  Cue the theramin music as we go back, back in time to early 2009...

Mark made up the chart, and the "rules" at the top.  

It's like this:  I am supposed to begin doing something to bring my weight back to the middle whenever any of the conditions described in the rules are met.  I cannot return to normal behavior until the running average of five measurements in a row crosses the midline again.

This is great, except that I have not gotten around to defining "normal behavior," nor the positive and negative types of "doing something."  Right now "normal behavior" is "more or less eat what I want" and "doing something" is "eat less than I want."  (I have only slipped into the land of underweight-must-eat-more once.)

Yes, that was the plan.  Watch the weight wiggle back and forth between the control limits, and if it creeps up too far, add "habits" until it creeps back down again.

After many months of frustrated struggling at an average weight a few pounds higher than my target, I am now officially renouncing this strategy.

It looks too much like "going on a diet" and "going off a diet" and "going on a diet again."  It messes with my head.  

On the surface it seemed like a good idea:  toggle habits on and off, to turn the balance one way or another, and keep the weight under control just exactly as if I were a manufacturing process.  But I, unlike a collection of heat exchangers and reactors, have a psychology, and you know what?  It kind of sucks to tell myself, "Well, I won't have any wine, or desserts, until I get five weight readings in a row below such-and-such a weight."  It makes me feel deprived and dejected, and do you know what?  Once I got the five weight readings in a row, and toggled my "habits" back to "maintenance level," the weight did not stay down.   I was not aware of it, but I must have been overreacting in the other direction:  indulging to pay myself back for the deprivation.

This is not the way I want to do things.

And anyway, the terminology should have been a clue.  Hello -- "toggle" habits on and off?  If you do that with a behavior, it isn't a habit!  I don't want to be in an endless cycle of deprivation and indulgence.  That's what I tried to give up.  

I want sustainable living at a sustainable weight.  

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So, right around Thanksgiving, I abandoned that approach (though I'm still making the weight chart, and it's still important, as you will see.)  And remarkably, as soon as I did, my weight returned down to the target level, and I've been maintaining it with much LESS effort since then.

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Here's my new strategy:

Watch the scale, and if the weight begins to creep out of the comfort zone, re-evaluate habits and eating behaviors, through trial and error -- one or a few at a time.  But adopt and evaluate habits as potentially permanent lifestyle adaptations.  If I do not think I could sustain a habit for the rest of my life, it probably is not a good habit for me.

No more of this "I only have to do it until my weight comes back under control."  Only:  What I do, I do from now until it doesn't make sense for me anymore.

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A caveat:  A habit "for the rest of my life" doesn't mean "every single time."  If I am in the habit of not having bedtime snacks, it doesn't mean that I never choose to have one.  It's more of an "almost always."  Let's take it as a given that occasionally I will splurge.  But not often enough to make a new, not-so-good habit.

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Another thing that's kind of weird about this is that it requires a little bit of double think.  Because I have to be open to changing the habits if necessary.  See, my environment constantly changes:  my children are growing, the seasons are turning, my schedule is different every semester, my own body is aging from year to year.  It stands to reason that the helpful habits of today might be less helpful in a future time.  So I know that it's not really true that any given habit is being adopted "for the rest of my life."

But I cannot work with a habit that I wouldn't be okay with "for the rest of my life."  If it's too hard to do "for the rest of my life" then it's going to make me suffer, and long for release, even in the short term.

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So what did I do back then around Thanksgiving?  Well, this sort-of-New-Year's post about the turkey roasters and the puppies is getting at the distinction:

Here is my husband's idea, which has merit: "Make a list of habits that you can add or subtract as necessary. Put them in order from the easiest and most painless to the most difficult and annoying. Then, if your weight spikes up, start adding habits in order, only one or two at a time. If that doesn't help, add more until your weight goes down again, and then you can stop the habits, starting with the most annoying ones."

The idea of ranking behaviors by annoyance level was a new one, and I thought I would give that a try. I started making a list of things like "don't eat sweets" and "keep the serving dishes in the kitchen" and "put a stick of gum by my plate at dinner" and "one egg is enough eggs for breakfast" and the like.

But as my list of former and current and potential weight-controlling strategies grew longer, I began to feel uneasy about calling them all "habits." And as I began to shuffle them around to figure out which ones I enjoy the least ("no wine with dinner" and "pre-count every calorie" are two examples of behaviors that work extremely well but that exemplify the life I do NOT want to lead), I became even more sure that "habit" is absolutely the wrong word for many of these behaviors.

What Mark is suggesting is not a ranking of habits, but a hierarchy of compensatory deprivations.

A habit is not like a toggle switch; it is more like a houseplant or a tropical fish or a puppy. It requires care. Yes-no choices do go into it, though. Choose often enough to feed it and it thrives; choose often enough to neglect it and it withers. Useful habits are habits to live with: not necessarily permanently, but for long periods. They can be tried for a while to see if they are pleasant to live with and if they have desirable effects, but this is not the same as toggling them on and off; it is more like a temporary adoption, to see if an attachment will deepen.

Compensatory deprivations are less like a companion pet and more like a spare folding table or a turkey roaster: an unwieldy, occasionally used piece of furniture or appliance that you get out of the basement from time to time when necessary. (e.g., at the holidays.)

What I've decided is that I'm done with turkey-roaster dieting, for the most part. 

Anyway, I went on the next day to spell out some of the habits I was thinking about trying on:

I think a lot of people slip up by resolving to deprive themselves permanently or indefinitely of something they really enjoy that is ordinarily harmless, or at least it is harmless in moderation. It would be better to identify habits that are really desirable, and try to set yourself up to fall into them, so to speak.

As for me, my biggest problem right now is that I have slipped into an indulge-gain-deprive-lose cycle, and I really need to get out of it and into a more balanced pattern. That calls for a look at habits I would like to re-establish for the new year: permanent changes that I really want to have.

So I made a long list of potential behaviors, and then I carefully considered each one. If I found it appealing, I put it on my list of "habits to try." If I didn't, I put it on the list of "compensatory deprivations" -- and I don't intend to touch those except on rare occasions, such as the morning after a day full of bad food, or as a needed kick start.

The three habits I started trying were very simple:

• "Half a sandwich is enough sandwich for me."  When faced with a sandwich, only eat half.
• A normal portion of sweets is a two-thumbs-sized rectangle, or (if it's scoopable) 1/3 cup.
• Have only a small portion of alcohol with dinner; have more only after I've pushed my plate away.

I quit trying to deprive myself based on the scale numbers plotted on the chart; instead it was more like, "Well, the chart shows me that my current habits aren't keeping my weight well in control; I need to adopt a different set of habits that will, indefinitely, keep my weight well in control.  When I find them, I will keep them, not quit as soon as I see happier numbers."

And when I stopped the panic, stopped depriving myself of all manner of things, and switched instead to reinforcing those three habits, I noticed, other habits became easier.  For example, it became easier to stick to one plateful at dinner, rather than helping myself to unnecessary seconds.  And the half-sandwich reminder made it easier for me to have balanced meals when I ate at restaurants.

A month later, my weight is back in control.  It's in better control than it's been in for the last YEAR, I think.  (Maybe I'll post the data later to show you.)

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Permanent, not temporary, change.  That is what it is all about.  Why do I have to keep learning this over and over again?

Science "curricula."

I frequently get questions from other homeschooling parents about how I teach science.  I suppose this is not terribly surprising.  Most people (including most elementary school teachers) don't have heavy specialization in science and math.  I can make the analogical leap:  I don't have much education in art or music, and so I am often interested in how truly creative and knowledgeable people train their children in these fields.  

(Although sometimes I avoid asking, because I periodically feel guilty about how little art and music we do in our homeschool.)

When it comes to science curricula, I'm afraid that I suffer from Expert Paralysis.  That is, I know enough science to hate every elementary school science curriculum I've ever seen.  NONE OF THEM ARE ADEQUATE.  There.  That is my opinion.   They all dumb things down.   They are all nonrigorous, insufficiently mathematical, and generally artificial in the way they set up so-called "experiments."  Probably they dumb things down in entirely appropriate ways.    But I can't bear to teach from them.  So I don't.

I think of it this way:  The academic goal of teaching elementary school science is to ensure that they are prepared for high school science, which can be rigorous and not dumbed-down.    And this is what I think kids need in order to be prepared for high school level science education (physics, chemistry, biology):

• Strength and comfort with mathematics. 
• Memorization strategies and skills.
• Strategies for acquiring unfamiliar vocabulary.
• Practice in making direct observations and accurately describing them in writing.
• Logical thinking, especially in classification and identification of cause-and-effect.
• A grasp of the scientific method and why it represents an ideal process for learning from observation.  (A historical approach can work for this, I believe, even better than an experimental one.)
• Wide-ranging reading and/or documentary film viewing on topics of the natural world and of human technology (again, a historical approach can work for this), to build a broad base of information and vocabulary.
• Deep interest in any one aspect of the natural world, or a few, and the opportunity to have developed it freely.
• An understanding of the value of scientific inquiry among the various fields of human endeavor:  its powers and limitations.

None of this requires a science curriculum.  None.  You can certainly borrow units from textbooks; probably there's something out there that does a great job of teaching the scientific method, for instance.  And you could certainly use textbooks to help a child develop his or her deep understanding of a subject that is dear to him or her.  And of course most people will choose a math curriculum of some kind.  Some will choose a logic curriculum, or will rely on some other subject (say, Latin grammar or proof-based geometry) to develop logical skills.

My kids aren't in high school yet, so I can't say whether my approach is "working" or not.  (I'll define "working" as "they succeeded in high-school level chemistry, physics, and biology.") But this is the form my approach has taken:

• Lots of books around on various science-type topics.
• The kids are encouraged to watch nature documentaries and other similar videos -- pretty much freely.
• I do pick a topic or two each year -- but I have taught it by getting living books out of the library, reading aloud from them, and talking about it.  I'm a scheduler by nature, so I tend to plan ahead what books I'll check out and what topics to discuss, but there's no reason why this couldn't be done more spontaneously.
• Science kits are great, but I think that unless you have a fairly methodical kid, then the sort of thorough learning that I consider to be school-worthy won't happen on its own.  (It's fine to use science kits as free-exploration toys.  I'm just saying that I wouldn't necessarily count that kind of play as "school.")   So I use science kits but assign the projects from them in a specific order.

I need to get ready for my co-schooling day, so I have to stop here, but I will make another post with a detailed description of one "electric circuits" unit study I did for a third-grader using the Snap Circuits kit and some other resources.

Hazard handling: corn syrup alternatives edition.

Mark pointed something out to me this morning about high fructose corn syrup that I hadn't thought about.

I am what you might call a skeptic about HFCS.  

• Yes, its availability as a cheap sweetener probably increased its use in packaged foods over the last thirty years.  
• Yes, there's some dumb politics involving international tariffs and agricultural subsidies entangled with its production.  
• Yes, obesity rates are correlated with HFCS rates.  
• Yes, corn monoculture is an environmental problem and demand for HFCS is part of that.  
• Yes, I'd rather eat "real food" on principle and so when I have the option to buy, for example, cane-sugar-sweetened ketchup, I typically do.  

But I'm not strongly convinced that HFCS is really a root cause of the obesity epidemic, I am not strongly convinced that overconsumption of HFCS is significantly different from overconsumption of other sugars, and I don't treat the stuff as a special kind of poison.  I think the jury is still out on it (which is reason enough for many people to avoid it altogether; fine with me; that's how I feel about soy phytoestrogens, so I get it).

Of course, right now there is a sort of a trend for companies to market "HFCS-free" stuff -- I assume that consumers are getting warier of HFCS, and seeking "natural" sweeteners (like sucrose), otherwise I wouldn't be able to buy national brands of ketchup with "No High-Fructose Corn Syrup" splashed across the label in big letters.  I view it as a marketing phenomenon, mostly.

So, Mark was talking to an engineer who handles pneumatic transport of dry materials, and he commented that the switchover from HFCS-sweetened products to sucrose-sweetened products is hugely, hugely expensive from a capital standpoint because of safety precautions and associated regulations.   Thirty years ago when food packagers and processors decided to save money by switching from cane sugar to HFCS, the change would have been significant; but a lot has happened since then in safety regs, and surely it would be far more expensive now to switch back.

I hadn't even thought about that, but when Mark explained the conversation to me, I instantly knew what he meant. 

Automated liquid handling of sugar syrups is pretty tame.  You can hook your tanker truck up to a pipe and pump it right into a food plant.  The stuff can sit around in tanks and be delivered via ordinary food-grade piping, controlled by fairly ordinary food-grade valves.  An operator in a HFCS-handling facility isn't necessarily going to have to take extraordinary materials safety precautions when working among these pipes and valves.  Whatever the risk that HFCS poses to his endocrine system when he sits down in the employee cafeteria, at least the stuff doesn't explode.

Crystalline sucrose, on the other hand, has a much more colorful history.

When you handle dry sugar, you create aerosolized sugar dust as the crystals sliding past each other knock micron-sized corners and edges off each other.  Not such a big deal if you are a batch operation and your workers are slitting open bags and dumping them into a vat.  But if you have automated lines and the sugar is moving by means of, say, screw conveyors or conveyor belts or pneumatic systems -- as there were at the Imperial Sugar plant explosively profiled at the link -- there is the potential for quite a lot of sugar dust to enter the air.  Combustible, high-surface-area material + oxygenated air + equipment spark = kaboom.

So when you switch from HFCS to dry sugar, there are going to be layers of safety precautions that have to be installed to prevent your plant from blowing up, and to document that your plant is not likely to blow up.  All these things cost real money -- mostly capital money, since it goes into the buildings and the machines and the duct work, but also some ongoing regulatory and operating expenses. (I was  going to link to some of the relevant regulations, but can't figure out how to read it without paying $37.)

So:  It's not just the difference in cost-per-pound of corn syrup vs. sucrose.  Handling the stuff, and meeting regulatory requirements, have different costs too. 

And still, even with perfect compliance everywhere (as if!) there will be a nonzero risk every year, created by a switch from HFCS to sucrose, that some food plant somewhere will explode and kill an operator or even a bystander.  Unintended consequences are everywhere, if you only look.

I would guess that the medium-sized processors have the toughest row to hoe.  The giants can afford to absorb the costs of ensuring safety compliance.  The small producers are morelikely to be using batch operations and are handling sugar in bags, not pneumatic transport systems.  It's that "sweet spot" in the middle where it will be hard for processors to change over from HFCS to sucrose without going bankrupt or skirting anti-dust-explosion regulations.

Still, though, there's a silver lining in this for people who are eager to see the demise of HFCS.  If Big Food is spending the money to switch over the lines, and is touting "HFCS-free" product on supermarket shelves, then Big Food (some of it anyway) must see the writing on the wall, or at least in the focus group, and they are betting that consumers believe there's a significant difference between the two.   If you've been wondering why every food producer isn't doing the same, then maybe this is one piece of the puzzle. 

"My client is not in a hurry."

Said architect Antonio Gaudí about his life's work.  National Geographic this month has a pretty good article about an interesting (and I think, beautiful) building, well over a hundred years in the making:  Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona.

In 1883 Gaudí inherited the Sagrada Família from another architect, who had laid a traditional neo-Gothic base. Gaudí envisioned a soaring visual narrative of Christ's life, but knew that the massive project could not be completed in his lifetime. For more than 12 years prior to his death in 1926—he spent his last year living at the site—he rendered his plans as geometric three-dimensional models rather than as conventional drawings. Though many were destroyed by vandals during the Spanish Civil War, those models have been vital to Gaudí's successors.

"They contain the entire building's structural DNA," explains Mark Burry, an Australia-based architect who has worked on the Sagrada Família for 31 years, using drawings and computer technology to help translate Gaudí's designs for today's craftsmen. "You can extract the architectural whole even from fragments. The models are how Gaudí met the architect's challenge: taking a complex, holistic idea and explicating it so others can understand and continue it after your death."

I can see why the style is polarizing, why many people don't like it.  (Gaudí's style superficially resembles flamboyant Gothic, in my opinion, while taking inspiration from natural forms.) But unlike the pared-down modernism that's so common in recent church building, the style (though new) strikes me as recognizably, richly, traditionally Catholic.  And I love the story of how it's being built so slowly, the job passed on from generation to generation, much like the cathedrals of old.

Wish my doctoral thesis had been this cool on video.

The hydrodynamics of how cats drink.  

But recent high-speed videos made by this team clearly revealed that the top surface of the cat's tongue is the only surface to touch the liquid. Cats, unlike dogs, aren't dipping their tongues into the liquid like ladles after all. Instead, the cat's lapping mechanism is far more subtle and elegant. The smooth tip of the tongue barely brushes the surface of the liquid before the cat rapidly draws its tongue back up. As it does so, a column of milk forms between the moving tongue and the liquid's surface. The cat then closes its mouth, pinching off the top of the column for a nice drink, while keeping its chin dry.

The liquid column, it turns out, is created by a delicate balance between gravity, which pulls the liquid back to the bowl, and inertia, which in physics, refers to the tendency of the liquid or any matter, to continue moving in a direction unless another force interferes. The cat instinctively knows just how quickly to lap in order to balance these two forces, and just when to close its mouth. If it waits another fraction of a second, the force of gravity will overtake inertia, causing the column to break, the liquid to fall back into the bowl, and the cat's tongue to come up empty.

You really must check out the videos at the link.

With these videos slowed way down, the researchers established the speed of the tongue's movement and the frequency of lapping. Knowing the size and speed of the tongue, the researchers then developed a mathematical model involving the Froude number, a dimensionless number that characterizes the ratio between gravity and inertia. For cats of all sizes, that number is almost exactly one, indicating a perfect balance.

So cats' tongues have a Froude number of near-unity.  That is pretty darn cool.  Now I'm just trying to figure out whether it makes sense that they modeled the tongue as an impeller tip, or what.

Sequelae.

I live far, far away from the Gulf of Mexico.  I have never walked its beaches and have not seen its waters (unless you want to count a single airplane flight into New Orleans for an American Chemical Society conference some years ago).

The kind of natural getaway that's within a day's drive of my family is the north woods of Minnesota.  Also beautiful and fun for the family, but not much like a beach.

So I appreciated this:   a brief, wistful description of the immediate effects from the BP oil disaster, on a family with kids, much like mine.

Noticed this at the bottom and thought it was worth repeating:

We plan on still supporting our beach towns by returning here throughout the year. Although we may not have been able to prevent the ecological destruction caused by BP, we can prevent the economical fallout and keep our beach towns alive. If you live nearby, I encourage you to do the same.

Answering questions: How we chose home birth.

I got an email in my box a little while ago from a reader who wanted to know how Mark and I decided to plan home births:

 I was really interested in finding out that you have homebirths. I was born at home, and would love to have my baby at home, but I have had no luck convincing my husband of it....He's a Navy guy with an engineering/risk assessment background, plus doctor & nurse family members.  But I'm more worried about being pushed into unnecessary interventions anda c-section in the typical hospital setting which is my only option where Ilive. ... My question is basically, how did you and your husband come to decide on homebirth? Having your scientific/engineering background, Ithought maybe whatever convinced you might also be helpful...

I wonder if maybe home birth types have a reputation for not being of scientific/engineering background?  Most of the home birth couples I know IRL include at least one engineer or scientist, although I admit there is a significant sampling bias in that, um, that is the kind of person we tend to hang out with.  Engineers and the people who marry them.

It has been a long time since we were deciding whether to try a home birth or a hospital birth, and I had to go to Mark and ask him:  "Remind me again, back before I got pregnant with Oscar, when I brought up the idea of having a home birth, did you agree right away?"

"Not right away, no.  I figured we would do the 'normal thing' and have the baby in the hospital.  And then you showed me what you'd been reading and I decided that home birth made sense."

Here's a slightly edited version of what I emailed back to the reader.

My first thought is that there isn't anything about BEING an expert in risk assessment (or statistics, or possibly even perinatal medicine!) that ought to make a person more or less likely to choose homebirth. I would hope it would make a person more likely to assess the risks accurately and dispassionately, but that doesn't mean he or she would come to a different conclusion. 

I know that Mark and I, after gathering some information, came to agree that homebirth probably had a higher-than-hospital, but still small, risk of death or serious injury to myself to the baby; but that the hospital had a MUCH larger-than-home, and in fact, quite large risk of many, many comparatively less serious problems and not a few moderately serious ones. The research I've seen since then seems to have borne it out. 

• In both homebirths and hospital births there is a small risk of neonatal death, and this small risk seems to be greater in homebirths.  (Some homebirth advocates deny this, but at least what I've seen over the past few years whenever I've looked has given me a strong impression that the evidence supports it.) 
• There is a hugely increased risk, in hospitals, of many annoyances and lesser-to-moderately-severe complications.For example, hospital births carry higher risks of infection, and enforced policies like fetal monitoring and things can slow labor which can lead to induction which can lead to distress, yadda yadda yadda. None of these things are likely to be fatal, but they can and do create smaller problems.

 A more serious risk, to me, was the risk of winding up with an unnecessary Cesarean section. Giving birth in an American hospital, you're looking at a 20-40 percent chance of a C-section depending on the hospital. That to me is unacceptably high, because I do not take the complications and side effects of C-sections lightly, especially as a mother who hoped to (at the time) and now has gone on to have several pregnancies. VBACs are difficult to get, and the riskiness of C-sections increase exponentially after the second.   (A mother who expected to have only one or two children might rate the riskiness of Cesarean section lower, and be more willing to have one even if it were possibly unnecessary.)

I also take very seriously the proper onset of the nursing relationship, which is more difficult to establish in the hospital environment, once you add up the effects of drugs, maternal discomfort in the environment, and hospital policies (and assuming that the homebirth team provides better lactation support than the hospital lactation support, an assumption which may or may not be true depending on the available options).  

People brush these things off -- Cesareans, nursing difficulties caused by hospital policies -- because they're so common. But looked at objectively they are quite serious and it's sad that they are so common.

Nevertheless, it's still a judgment call that in my view is personal -- whether to choose a small increased risk of something truly catastrophic and tragic, or  whether to choose a hugely increased risk of a whole lot of lesser but still significant problems. And that's just the "risk assessment" end of it, from statistical thinking.  There are many individual considerations -- have you found a home birth attendant that is satisfactory to both of you?  how fast can you get to a hospital should an emergency occur? -- that may change the calculation for your family.   Once you start considering your own feelings about the situation, it  gets even muddier. It isn't necessarily good to be in a place where the statistics say you are "safe" but where you don't FEEL safe -- that could be hospital or it could be home -- but FEELING safe, believing you are safe, is biochemically  important in giving birth. It's harder to do if you're stressed and fearful, which is at heart a hormonal response.

(And of course both father and mother need to come to some kind of agreement.  Including discussing the possibility of your worst fears coming true, in either situation.  Because when you face birth, you face death, too.  Best to face it together.)

OK, that aside.  I was also influenced and reassured by joining a mailing list -- not sure if it still exists -- about unassisted childbirth. Even though I didn't intend to "go UC," and have always opted to be well supported at home including with an experienced and compassionate midwife, I was inspired and given confidence by reading story  after story of births that happened at home, with no attendant at all, by choice. (Plus it made me feel less like an extremist by comparison!)  I was influenced by friends who had planned home births. 

I was influenced by Henci Goer's book Obstetrical Myths versus Research Realities:  A Guide to the Medical Literature.  Another book, Active Birth by Janet Balaskas (the latest version, which I haven't read, is here), gave me confidence with regards to natural pain management.  

I read other books, too, once we had made up our minds; and those tended to be the "crunchier" sort, which helped me understand what we were in for once we chose midwifery care.  Things like Heart and Hands:  A Midwife's Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by Elizabeth Davis.  When it came to general-info pregnancy and childbirth books, I tried to avoid those that took hospital birth for granted, and went for the ones that included homebirth as a birth choice.  Books by William and Martha Sears (The Pregnancy Book, The Birth Book --I didn't actually read that one-- and  The Baby Book) and Sheila Kitzinger (The Complete Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth) are good examples.   

As for breastfeeding books, my two favorite are the LLL one (The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding) and So That's What They're For by Janet Tamaro, which is a little more lighthearted and thus good for lending to people who think La Leche League is a club for fanatics.  

Since I don't use contraception and want to get through lactational amenorrhea to regular cycles before becoming pregnant, I used Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing by Sheila Kippley (she has a couple other books on the same subject); the publisher, CCL, doesn't carry it anymore, and so these days the equivalent information is probably available in CCL's Art of Natural Planning:  Postpartum Student Guide (available here).  I continue to support CCL's work and one of these days I will have to sit in on the new NFP classes, which have been revised significantly since I took them years ago in marriage prep.

(Perhaps my readers know of some more books I've missed, especially some that have come out in the last few years -- I haven't done much "how to have a baby" reading since my second.)

Natural family planning influenced us in another way  -- we sort of were in a mindset of avoiding "interventions" in our intimate life, of generally trusting our bodies to tell us what we needed to know, and giving birth at home was a sort of natural outgrowth of that. There was a sort of weirdness to the idea that we should need medical assistance for something that ought to work fine if  we just left it alone. 

That's sort of a combination of "gut feeling" and logic -- truthfully, the species wouldn't have survived if it didn't work most of the time, and if you read a bit about the history of birth in America, you'll see that a lot (not all) of the improvements in maternal/neonatal outcomes are from simpler things like antibiotics, nutrition, and prenatal care/screening, not so much from medical attention surrounding the birth itself. Obviously this isn't true  for functionally impossible vaginal birth, e.g. with complete placenta previa, but it's possible to rule out that kind of thing before birth if you want to get an ultrasound.

One thing we did the first time we went through it, is I doubled up on prenatal care -- I had my homebirth midwife appointments, and I also had the full spectrum of prenatal appointments with a "standard" CNM practice.  (Except I declined the glucose tolerance test and the routine ultrasound). We felt  we were keeping our options open. But we never bothered with the regular doctor thing at the other births after that. With this my fourth pregnancy I chose to get a midterm ultrasound to rule out any musculoskeletal deformities or placental problems that might indicate I should consider a hospital birth.  I'm older now, and my babies tend to be large with sticky shoulders; it seems reasonable to me to check for extra problems that could exacerbate that.  I've already made up my mind based on my own birth history not to attempt a vaginal birth should the baby present breech.

That illustrates another belief of mine, that it's important to keep an open mind about the appropriateness of medical interventions (taken individually) and be willing to adjust your approach as information comes in about your physical health, the baby's physical health, and your own tolerance for different kinds of risk. Sometimes a C-section is a good idea, sometimes it's not. Sometimes an ultrasound is a ridiculous, expensive, unnecessary intervention; sometimes it answers questions that need to be answered. Same thing goes for glucose tests, fetal heart monitoring, epidurals, GBS testing and IVs, all that stuff -- they are powerful tools that can be used or misused, they're not good for every individual or bad for every individual either.

If you're going to have a hospital birth, my standard two pieces of advice (especially to first-timers) are

• consider hiring a doula for your hospital birth, or else bringing along a  knowledgeable friend who can help advocate for you, or at least bringing along a close female friend who's given birth before and isn't scared of it.  The mere presence of a female support person (not part of the medical staff) in the delivery room significantly lowers your chance of a section. See here, here, here, and lots of links here.
• Do what you can to prepare yourself and your husband to advocate strongly against unnecessary cesarean section. This is, to my mind, the single greatest risk associated with giving birth in American hospitals. Understand why it's NOT a "no big deal" to have a cesarean, and why it's so important to try to avoid that "first" cesarean if you possibly can. Know the positive indications for a truly necessary section, know alternatives to non-necessary c-sections in advance, and know what you can do to avoid interventions that sometimes cause an apparent need for a c-section. 

I think that covers it.  Comments from readers are welcome as usual.

Bland and cautious: Two posts that say something I meant to say.

First, from Darwin, a few weeks ago.

[T]here are a good many people who know me in real life who read the blog. More than that, after writing a blog for four-and-a-half years, you get to think of a number of your long-time readers and commenters are friends. The blog becomes like a corner coffee house or bar where the same characters assemble regularly -- with the occasional stranger dropping in as well -- and discuss a range of topics, with everyone knowing the basic terrain of who everyone else is and where everyone is coming from.

The way in which a blog can serve as a combination magazine and coffee shop is, to me, one of the most appealing elements of the medium. It's more personable than simply sending one's words out into the void, knowing that someone out there is reading them but seldom sure of what others think about them. 

At the same time, however, this community element to blog writing makes one particularly aware of the difficulties of writing within a community. As the number of people I know (whether locally or online) who are blog readers increases, I increasingly find myself thinking, "If I write about that, so-and-so might be offended."

Next, from Betty Duffy, and indirectly Pentimento, more recently.

On one of the shelves in the bookstore, I picked up a book for grown-ups that looked interesting. I read the back cover, absorbed the synopsis, then looked for an author bio. “Well what do you know,” I thought, “It’s that angry man on the internet,” and re-shelved the book. I’d recently happened upon the author’s blog, on which he peeled apart the writings of some bad Catholic with whom he took issue.

The author bugged me, not because of his lack of charity. Mean people are a curiosity. He bugged me because his self-appointed Catholic gate-keeping functioned as a sort of literary terrorism, scaring anyone who writes with a “Catholic” next to his or her name out of writing anything interesting.

As Pentimento suggests in a recent comment here:

“If your Catholicism is an openly-stated aspect of your writing and your consciousness, you may find that some of your equally open and self-conscious co-religionists are standing by waiting to judge the way you express your faith and tally how well you live up to it…. I was surprised a year or so ago to receive deeply hurtful criticisms in my comboxes from some who thought my writing was inappropriate, and from others who called my faith into question and even slandered me in the comboxes of a friend. My best friend in real life… took me to task after that because she thought my writing had become bland and cautious.”

Who wouldn’t write cautiously when our writing about our personal experiences as a member of this Catholic Community faces such vicious scrutiny? 

...Here then, is one Catholic blogger who will say without shame, I write this blog only because I enjoy doing it. It is not my apostolate. I might lead you astray. I might cuss. 

I've been a little stilted lately. Like Darwin, I don't conceal my identity terribly hard on my blog. I'm not trying to shield it from friends and family. But I recognize the signs of hesitation sometimes when I write about politics, morality, sometimes even the petty arenas of judgmentalism that arise from parenting style, schooling style, liturgical preferences. No wonder I take refuge in posting so many recipes.

I appreciate posts like this by Darwin and Betty, whose writing I have admired for its candidness. It's nice to be reminded that others are dealing with the same kind of internal censor. And I am beginning to appreciate the value of the blog as a learning environment for... what -- sensitivity maybe? There is a balance to be learned:  a balance between honesty and truth, and charity to the real people who might see themselves (rightly or wrongly) between the lines.

What is the good and true purpose of this blog? It is not my apostolate, either (though see Betty's followup to her post quoted above). I don't write in an attempt to entertain others -- not much anyway -- nor to have a soapbox -- okay, I do my share of venting, I admit it. Even though I pad it with a lot of fluff and kid-pictures and recipes and "funny things that happened to me" bits, things that would be better suited to Facebook if I was the sort of person to have 293 "friends," there is a "main purpose" belied by the actual word-count I spend on various side purposes.

Once during Christmas vacation midway through graduate school, I sat down with a pencil and a new legal pad and I wrote the date at the top and a title, "On the isotropic and unidirectional compactions of compressible packed spheres" or something like that, and I began at the very beginning and I wrote for hours and went straight through, as if I was explaining to someone with absolutely no background, everything I knew, guessed, and was trying to demonstrate about my thesis topic.  I made few corrections and I drew a lot of pictures along the way.  I filled the legal pad over the course of a few days.  With surprisingly few changes, that legal pad became a large chunk of the explication my doctoral thesis, and I still consider it one of the most viscerally satisfying pieces of writing I ever did.

The reason I want to blog is the same reason I have always used that kind of derivation, and also the reason I have always journaled, and also the reason I have always savored (when I can get them) long conversations over a bottle of something or other: figuring something out, breaking sloppy reality down to its elements and reconstructing it into a model that I can wrap my mind around and say "This much I understand."

Lately I think I have been overwhelmed by the thought of who might be reading, and have lost some of the courage I need to lay out what's on my mind.

Well then.  PASS THE BOTTLE.

Safety analysis.

So I asked Mark what he thought about what I mentioned in my last post, the analysis of that 2007 chemical plant explosion in Florida (summary here; full report including awe-inspiring post-explosion photos is  here).  Bottom line, the owners of that plant -- T2 Laboratories of Jacksonville, Florida -- were seriously, severely, fatally negligent (one, the engineer, paid for it with his life, plus the lives of three employees).  

But we concluded that the board recommendations for increased "reactive hazard awareness education" in the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum miss the point entirely.  Even had the chemist-owner and the chemical-engineer-owner had specific undergraduate training in runaway reactions or in failed cooling systems, I doubt it would have made a difference.

Why do I think so?  Because they didn't follow the recommendations of their own hired consultants, and they didn't make reasonable modifications after experience taught them that their desired reaction had the potential to run out of control.  Clearly the root cause wasn't a knowledge problem, but an attitude problem and a company culture problem.  In fact, the reason they didn't know about the runaway reaction was BECAUSE they ignored a consultant's recommendation.

Consider the following facts gleaned from the report:

• "One of T2's design consultants identified the need to perform a hazard and operability study [HAZOP]... CSB found no evidence that T2 ever performed the HAZOP."
• "The runaway reaction on December 19, 2007 was not the first unexpected exothermic reaction that T2 experienced; three of the first 10... batches resulted in unexpected exotherms [that is, they got hotter than they were supposed to].... T2 did not repeat batch recipes to isolate the problem."  
• "As demand grew, T2 increased batch size and frequency with no additional documented hazard analysis"... and indeed with no other changes to the process.  Scale-up IS something that is included in the standard engineering curriculum and the engineer-owner knew better.
• T2 submitted the reports required by the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, but they left off required information about the chemical they were manufacturing.
• "T2 hired a consultant to analyze regulatory programs that might apply... The consultant informed T2 that it must develop a hazard communication program, which should include employee training, chemical labeling, and provision of MSDSs... The consultant listed other OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] requirements ... the consultant recommended that T2 hire an additional consultant with OSHA expertise... There is no documentation that T2 further addressed potential OSHA requirements."

Because of this evidence, I conclude that it's bulls#!t that the root cause is, as identified by the board, that T2 did not recognize the runaway reaction hazard.  Equally bulls#!t, the idea that adding reaction hazard analysis to undergraduate education would have fixed the problem.  The root cause here was, in my opinion, a corner-cutting culture in which T2 didn't follow the advice of the experts it hired to tell it how to build a safe process --- especially, omitting the HAZOP analysis.  The owners weren't ignorant because their professors omitted to teach them about runaway reactions; the owners were ignorant because they were to cheap to pay for HAZOP analysis they knew they were supposed to have.

* * *

The problem isn't that all undergraduates should receive formal reactive hazard analysis training.  The problem is that all engineers should follow the recommendations of  the experts who HAVE received formal hazard analysis training -- hazard analysis of all kinds, from the hazards of specific chemical reactions to ordinary workplace hazards.  If we need more undergraduate training -- and quite possibly we do -- it should be as general as possible, an attempt to inculcate an expectation of a culture of safety and general hazard awareness in every newly minted engineer, so that we're all always looking for ways to make the workplace safer for everyone.

UPDATE.  Mark pointed out something I didn't catch:  their cooling system was guaranteed to foul and occlude, because it constantly boiled municipal water and vented steam, thereby concentrating minerals inside the system.  According to the report, the owners never did any preventative maintenance, and it was indeed a failure in the cooling system that precipitated (no pun intended) the accident.  

 Now I know that fouling of heat transfer equipment is something that was covered in my undergraduate chemical engineering education!  Could it be that more undergraduate technical education is not the answer?