Author Archives: Ponderer

About Ponderer

Ponderer also writes science fiction and science-inspired rhyming poetry. Check her out at katerauner.wordpress.com/ She worked at Rocky Flats for 22 years - you may know her as Kathy London.

New French Fries Won’t Cause As Much Cancer As Before

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Mr-potato.svgGMOs (genetically modified organisms) are back in the news with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent approval of Simplot’s new potato – the Innate. Simplot has inserted additional fragments of the potato’s own DNA – nothing from bacteria or other organisms. You’d think this would reduce the “ick factor” that bedevils other GMOs. The new potato offers advantages to the consumer, not just to farmers and seed companies, so perhaps it has a better chance of being accepted that other GMOs.

Simplot began selling precut frozen French fries and hashbrowns to fast-food chains back in the 1950s, but they want to create a new consumer product: the fresh pre-cut potato. Unlike most potatoes that turn brown quickly, the Innate stays fresh and white much longer. Whether consumers will embrace this new convenience, and pay a bit more for it, will determine if Innate succeeds.

Another happy outcome is that Innate produces less acrylamide. Acrylamide has been shown to increase the risk of cancer in lab rats and mice, but studies in humans so far have not shown a clear increase in cancer risk in humans. One of Simplot’s biggest customers will not take advantage of the change:

“‘McDonald’s USA does not source GMO potatoes, nor do we have current plans to change our sourcing practice,’ a company spokesperson” said.

The Mother Jones article rings true:

“When you think about it, that cautious attitude makes perfect sense. McDonald’s has been beset by declining sales and questions about the quality of its food. Its customers don’t care about the Innate’s anti-browning quality because they buy their fries cooked. The only potential sales pitch would involve the lower dose of acrylamides. But saying ‘Our new fries might be less carcinogenic than the ones we’ve been selling you for 50 years’ doesn’t have much of a ring to it.”

I also ran across some commercial information on a website supported, in part, by the European Union. Innate isn’t mentioned, but French fries are not the potato’s biggest market:

“Only one in four potatoes grown in Europe actually gets eaten by people. Almost half end up being fed to livestock. The remaining one quarter are used as raw material in the production of alcohol and starch.”

It seems “sticky starch” is used as paste, glue, or lubricant. Currently, the different forms of starch found in a potato must be separated, so plant breeders are working to develop potatoes that produce only one type. More GMO potatoes are doubtless on their way.

Reducing a chemical (a natural chemical found in all potatoes) that may-or-may-not cause cancer seems like a small gain. And, personally, I don’t find cutting my own potatoes a big imposition. But on this blog, we’ve offered cautious support for GMOs and I don’t see Innate as changing that position. We’ll keep watching.

Read more on GMOs here:

GMO labeling 2

GMO labeling 1

GMOs Food Safety and Golden Rice

GMOs Science and Morality

GMOs vs Hybrids

Slavery in America: The Half Has Never Been Told

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half has never been toldEdward E. Baptist has written a book about slavery in America. It may seem surprising, but despite being much-studied, slavery and the Civil War that ended it are still controversial.

Baptist wants to present the “beating heart” of slavery. He uses many sources. Notarized sales records and “certificates of character” provided a lot of data on slaves. During the Great Depression, WPA historians were paid to collect personal histories from freed slaves. Baptist “draws on thousands of personal narratives” and often uses evocative language. Slaves as a group were “this trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America’s torture zone;” a particular slave who “survived six weeks of marching in shackles… was thin, made of knots of starved, scarred muscle, draped in rags.”

Baptist states that Americans have a “sanitized” understanding of slavery and the Civil War that “insist[s] that the purpose of the war had been to defend [the South’s] political rights against an oppressive state… that slavery had been benign and that ‘states rights’ had been the cause of the Civil War.” Baptist writes that the “enslavers” insistence on extending slavery into the American West,” where they “pushed too hard,” was the final straw so that, “at last, whites came to take up arms against each other.”

Through the 1800s a profession of entrepreneurial slave traders came to dominate over small, local slave-trading. Slaves were taken farther away from their homes and families than ever before. The price of slaves tracked the price of cotton, and cotton production was increased through torture, especially whipping. Slavery was not dwindling away on its own, as some of the Founding Fathers had hoped and predicted. It was an important part of America’s economy. Cotton was vital to the industrial revolution and slavery helped America become an economic power. Continue reading →

Warts and All

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I recently read an interview with magician James [The Amazing] Randi. He said: “You know the expression, ‘warts and all?’ Oliver Cromwell, I believe, was supposed to have said that.” I decided to take a look.

“Warts and All” means to show something in its entirety, even its unattractive aspects. Phrase Finder says the saying is attributed to Cromwell as his instructions to Sir Peter Lely, who was painting a portrait of him. However “there doesn’t appear to be any convincing evidence that Cromwell ever used the phrase ‘warts and all’. The first record of a version of that phrase being attributed to him comes from Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England, with some account of the principal artists, 1764… We can only assume he was indulging in a piece of literary speculation.” Somerset Maugham used the same phase and attribution in his 1930 book Cakes and Ale

English for Students reproduces the same origin almost word-for-word as Phrase Finder. I didn’t find any source to dispute this, but it does illustrate one problem with looking for word origins. Many sources are not independent.

Lightning Never Strikes Twice

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Most sayings apply in some instance, even if sayings often contradict each other. A stitch in time may very well save nine, but haste often makes waste. “Lightning never strikes twice in the same place” means an unusual event will not happen twice to the same person or in the same way. Despite this gut-level intuition, unusual events do repeat. One person sometimes wins the big lottery prize for a second time; or take a random selection of twenty-three persons and you’ll find there’s a 50 percent chance that at least two of them celebrate the same birthdate. Who hasn’t been surprised at learning this for the first time?

But lightning frequently strikes over and over in the same place – the Empire State Building is hit an average of 25 times per year, according to a state website, and other sources give higher numbers. Surely, even back in whatever day sayings were created, people noticed the same lone tree or hill top was struck repeatedly.

Accuweather simply lists the saying as a myth. Phrase Finder reports the first written reference “in the United States in ‘The Man in Lower Ten’ by American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958)” but suggests the “old superstition” had been around before then.

Expect the Unexpected

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Our review of a book on the safety – or lack of it – for nuclear weapons, got me thinking. One of the book’s points was that complex, interconnected systems are inherently difficult to predict and control. Many of our nuclear weapons were designed without thought to how they would eventually be decommissioned and destroyed. It reminds me of a saying I had posted over my desk on my first “real” job out of college: if you design only for steady state, you’ll have a system that cannot be started-up, shut-down, or maintained.

Our modern society has many complex systems where failures are serious – for example, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, the electric grid, and commercial airlines. Also where people make up a large part of the system – for example, hospitals, pharmacies, and emergency response. We seem determined to insist people in these systems should be infallible, and many highly-skilled people strive to achieve this level of perfection. When something goes wrong, “blame was placed on human error, but ‘the real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems… what appeared to be… a one-in-a-million accident was actually to be expected. It was normal.'” Continue reading →

Nuclear Weapons and Safety

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command and controlSchlosser states his goal for Command and Control: “This book assumes that most of its readers know little about nuclear weapons, their inner workings, or the strategic thinking that justifies their use… It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.” The book works very well this way. If you wonder “why would anyone want to blow up the world?”, this book shows the premise of that question is wrong. You will learn the “whys” behind the nuclear arms race. This is a long book: 448 pages of text, with 229 pages of notes, bibliography, and index. So even if you’re familiar with the Cold War, you’re bound to learn something.

Schlosser’s book covers efforts to ensure American nuclear weapons don’t “go off by accident, [or] by mistake.” Schlosser uses an accident with a Titan II missile as the frame for the book. He covers the accident in great detail from the view point of many of those involved, so stringing the chapters together would have been an information overload. Instead, he intersperses chapters on the accident with history of the Cold War, political battles among military and scientific factions, biographies of some of the people involved, and other accidents – especially with airborne warheads.

Schlosser shows how “trivial events in non-trivial systems” can lead to significant problems. Some of these incidents sound ridiculous: a janitor cleaning the floor in a nuclear reactor caught his shirt on a circuit breaker, tripped the breaker and shut the reactor down for four days; a plane on an aircraft carrier inexplicably rolled off the deck, sending the pilot, plane, and its nuclear warheads to the bottom of the ocean, never to be recovered.

In many of the accidents, blame was placed on human error, but “the real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems… what appeared to be… a one-in-a-million accident was actually to be expected. It was normal.” Continue reading →