Lab Monkey

Well, it looks like Amazon played hardball with Diapers.com and won.

This is a pretty awesome text, courtesy of the Google Books project. Hofmann was one of the early great titans of organic chemistry in the 19th century, and this set of lectures is a terrific snapshot of the field of chemistry at one of the most interesting points in its history.

This was published only a few decades after John Dalton hypothesized that atoms existed, but decades before the ideas of electrons and protons. It was contemporary with the time that Dmitri Mendeleev was formulating the periodic table. The discoveries of chemistry at this time were taking advantage of key theoretical developments in thermodynamics and physics, and setting the stage for some of the most famous discoveries in physics of the 20th century, including quantum mechanics. Chemistry was driving the creation of some the great industrial developments of the 19th century, including synthetic chemicals, which would eventually result in the spectacularly successful organic chemistry research of the mid-twentieth century. It really was a revolutionary time for chemistry.

Two conclusions:

1. Controls are crucial to good science.
2. Kenji Lopez-Alt is consistently one of the best food writers I’ve seen. See also his articles on making perfect french-fries and replicating In-n-Out burgers.

(h/t Bill Jusino)

Quintiles, a clinical research organization (i.e. a for-profit company that runs clinical trials/analysis, ostensibly as an impartial, independent entity), has started to invest in drug development themselves. David Kroll points out that there’s an troubling conflict of interest there, but I’d say that this isn’t a new problem, since we’ve always been scrutinizing trials funded and analyzed by pharma companies. The true problem might be if large companies like Quintiles dominate so much of the clinical trials market that academic medical institutions can’t fund or recruit patients for independent clinical trials of their own. Although we do have the NIH for things like that, the NIH is woefully underfunded, and independent trials are crucial for trying to reproduce results; that’s one of the key pillars of the scientific method.

The firefighters (from another jurisdiction) stood by and allowed a house to burn because the man hadn’t paid a $75 annual firefighting fee. There was no local (and hence tax-funded) firefighting unit. This is bad, because the firefighters weren’t doing their job.

I think the homeowner was completely irresponsible; what’s $75 a year for fire protection? Far less than his property taxes or insurance, that’s for sure. The actual cost of fighting that fire is most likely much, much more than $75 (if we estimate 5 firefighters, 3 hours to fight the fire thoroughly, and $15 / hour average wage, that’s $225, which doesn’t include wear on equipment, water supply, and the cost of not being able to fight a fire somewhere else), so the $75 is just an insurance payment, not a fee-for-service. If the firefighters were to charge him then and there, I’d say that something like $500 would be the bargain-basement price (and the firefighters are clearly in a superior bargaining position). So although I’m sympathetic to the man who lost his house, he really pulled the roof down over his own head. He tried to get a free ride off his neighbors, took a risk, and got burned. He was completely and utterly irresponsible to himself, his home, his pets, and his family.

But then why am I not happy with the firefighters? Well, as a result of the firefighters standing by, a neighbor, who had paid the fee, had his field catch fire from the house. The firefighters put it out, but imagine if the fire had burned out of control and resulted in massive property damage? They stood buy to punish the freeloader, but that’s not good for the consumer (i.e. the neighbors). The dearth of firefighting is directly related to the presence of freeloaders.

Although I’m very much in favor of letting private companies provide many services to society, in this case there are negative risks and consequences for having a private fee-to-firefight service that excludes non-paying neighbors. That means it’s extremely easy for nonpayers to essentially mooch off their paying neighbors if the firefighters really did do all they could do to protect their clients’ property. The government should be providing services like these that aren’t working well within the market. These are the kinds of public services governments are made for providing. International defense, police, fire, and law. The classic four services are classic for a good reason.