Growth of Obesity in the US: an Animated GIF

From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fairly self-explanatory.  More than a third of adults are now obese in this country (and over half are overweight, meaning that for the first time, over half of Americans respond to the term "Lardface").  Could this be in part because we are eating 60% more added oil and 40% more added sugar than we were 60 years ago

Volume of People

A coworker recently texted me from a conference asking the volume of a sphere that would contain the world's population.  xkcd's "What-if?" has already addressed the area that would be required for everyone to stand (Rhode Island), but now we can stack people.

My question for this was how comfortable the people in my sphere are. There are some seven billion people in the world. In New York City, apartments must be at least 400 square feet, although new "micro-apartments" will be 300 SF.  Let's assume each person on the planet lives in a 300 SF studio. With 8-foot ceilings and two feet of structural floor, that's 3,000 cubic feet per person.  For all seven billion people, we'd need nearly 150 cubic miles of building, so our giant sphere apartment building would be 6.5 miles in diameter.  Let's say 7 miles if we allow for elevators and hallways.

Like the Technosphere, only 100 times as wide

What if the sphere was instead a future spaceship making some trip to another planet or star system? Cruise ship cabins get as small as 85 SF while Amtrak's sleeper rooms are about 50 SF, and both of these can sleep two.  We'll also cut the floor height to 8 feet (with 7 foot ceilings).  Depending on the luxury of travel, our sphere needs to be 2.6 to 3.1 miles across now.  Maybe a little more if we have life support and engines.

Like a Borg sphere scout, but 6 times as wide. Slightly larger volume than a Borg cube, but definitely smaller than a Death Star.

What if the people didn't need to be alive? Instead, let's build a spherical hearse for our 7 billion.  People are all different sizes, but on average, our caskets will be 6' by 2' by 1'.  Now we're really saving room, and can fit everyone on the planet 0.57 cubic miles. Our sphere is just a hair above a mile in diameter.

Like if Harold Chasen got a hold of these concept cars, and also made them 500 times as wide.

"No," my coworker said. "He says it's less than a kilometer."  What??  I've stuffed the people about as tight as I can get them. The only way I can pack them tighter is... oh god.

 Only not with ice.

The volume of a person is about 66 liters, or 2.33 cubic feet.  If you liquefy the human race and pour them into a spherical tank, all of humanity will fit in a diameter of 0.6 miles -- like from the White House to the Washington Monument.

Now we just need to fill that sphere.

I still don't know why my coworker needed this answer.

Income by Subway Station

In April, the New Yorker ran a piece about income inequality along each of the subway lines, in which they made an interactive graphic portraying the median household income (from census data) at each of the subway stops on the line selected. For example, this is their graph for the F line.

It is an interesting exercise and produces some potentially informative graphics.  However, in determining household income, the New Yorker used a... I'll be polite: "unusual" technique.  They simply used the income value for the census tract in which their coordinates for the subway station lay.  This results in a number of problems.

Census tracts must be between 1,200 and 8,000 people, and most in New York seem to be mostly in the 2,000 to 5,000 range.  They vary in size as population density changes, but in New York are generally 1/16 to 1/4 square mile -- on the order of 8 blocks.  Many of the subway stations, like Columbus Circle or Carroll St have entrances 3 blocks apart from each other and in two different districts.  This means that the New Yorker's analysis would produce different income values based simply on which stairway they chose to mark the station.  The amazing thing is that they celebrate these statistical artifacts:

$142,265—The largest gap in median household income between two consecutive subway stations on the same line (between Fulton Street and Chambers Street on the A and the C lines, in Lower Manhattan).

As a first correction, we should at least average all of the census tracts that actually have subway stairs in them.  But what about other nearby ones?  How far out should we go?  Should neighboring tracts count in our average the same amount as slightly more distant ones?

In my analysis (you can argue with me if you want), I created a linearly decaying income weighting function, out to 1/2 mile (2.5 avenues or 10 blocks in Manhattan).  What this means is that tracts with a center on top of a given station get full weight, those 1/4 mile away get half weight, and those 1/2 mile or more have no influence.  It is important to note that the weighting values in the average for the tracts are relative to the values for all other tracts for a given station.  So for example, if a station is surrounded by 6 tracts, all with centers 1/4 mile away, all 6 would count equally towards the station's average income.  If there's two at 1/4 mile and two at 3/4 mile, the closer ones will influence the average by three times as much as the farther ones.

Thus, I get a map with the following median incomes. I have not created a line-by-line graphic like the New Yorker, but the data's all there if someone wants to be clever (see borough names below).


You can also explore a full screen version of the map.

The first thing you'll notice is that the income along the lines is much smoother in this analysis. The Fulton-Chambers difference is now $50,000, not $142,000.  The really big differences that remain are for stops actually separated by large distances.  The 4 largest (I believe) are the 4/5's 86th-125th St difference of over $100,00; The 2/3's Chambers-14th of $65,000; the A/D's Columbus-125th of $65,000; and the F's York-E.B'way of almost $60,000 across the East River. The greatest change for stops that are actually near each other is on the Upper East Side, when the income drops from $158k-$133k-$91k-$43k-$29k on 77th-86th-96th-103rd-116th Streets.  And poor Sutter Avenue on the L remains $12,000 less than any of its neighbors or anywhere in Brooklyn.

Since this technique involved comparing the distance between every station to every census tract (using data from the American Fact Finder), I broke the analysis down by borough to avoid creating a truly gigantic matrix.  For Manhattan and the Bronx, this is fine because no one walks across the East or Harlem Rivers to catch a train.  In Brooklyn and Queens, there may be some loss of accuracy along the border, since for example, no Brooklyn tracts are counted in the Seneca Ave M station, but there are few stations where this could really have an impact, and the data do not seem unusual.

I will not claim that this is the best way to analyze.  Maybe I should have a larger or smaller decay distance than 1/2 mile.  Maybe I should have used a different decay function than linear.  Maybe no decay function at all and simply give every tract with centers within 1/2 mile of the station full weight.  Maybe I should have even divided the map up into Voronoi polygons with one station in each and assign each census tract to exactly one subway stop.  But at any rate, this analysis produces more realistic and informative result than the technique used by the New Yorker.

South Korea Turns Off the Lights

One Wednesday a Month, offices in South Korea will shut off their lights early in the evening. No, they're not trying to look like North Korea when viewed from space. Instead, they want all their office workers to go home.

Why? Well, I've written how some countries have high birth rates that lead to food and resource shortages. South Korea has the opposite problem, with the world's lowest birth rate. At only 1.2 kids per couple, their population is actually in decline. This means that a comparatively large portion of the population are elderly, and there will be greater pressure on people of working age. And of course with less workers, the country has less manufacturing capacity. Therefore, the Ministry of Health hopes that by getting people out of the office, they might go into the home and make babies.

In order to make this truly successful, I think that the government also needs to shut down all TV broadcasts on those same evenings, at least based on the Indian government's assumption that getting people to watch television at night will stop them from making babies.

Personal Carbon Trading

Yesterday I saw Yael Parag from Oxford University present on a plan the UK is looking at for "personal carbon trading" (Oxford description here). The UK, like lots of cities and countries, has all these grand plans for 30% reduction in Greenhouse gases by 2030 and 80% by 2050, but no real plans to accomplish this, and minimal progress. This cap-and-trade type of idea might be able to accomplish the goals. Here is how I understand the plan from the talk:

The UK is generating some amount CO2 each year. Of this, 40% is directly used by individuals in the form of non-business transportation, home heating, and home electricity. The rest is used by commerce, industry, and agriculture for similar purposes, plus manufacturing.

The presenter mentioned, though I can't find any reference of this on the website, that the 60% would be auctioned out to all non-individual users.

More interestingly, the 40% would be distributed evenly among all people. Each person would then have some monthly (or yearly) balance of Carbon. Whenever people buy things that actually produce CO2 when used, they enter their Carbon card number, and their account is debited. An important point is that there wouldn't be that many of these transaction, since the only things counted would be

• Gasoline/diesel
• Monthly heating bill (gas/oil)
• Monthly electric bill
• Air travel

The carbon credits could of course be bought and sold, and I bet eBay would just be the beginning. I can see entire companies emerging to manage, loan, invest, and speculate on credits.

Although Fat Knowledge prefers taxes to permits (and in general I do too), there are a few points that speak in favor of CO2 credits.

• Energy is a fairly inelastic commodity: that is, the demand is not especially affected by price. In summer 2008, gas prices rose something like 75% from the previous year, but vehicle miles traveled dropped just 5-10%.
  
• People respond to social norms. Just like the California electricity users who cut back consumption to be closer to that of their neighbors, Britons may alter their behavior to use closer to what the average citizen uses, for social norm reasons as well as economic.
• Caps are good for controlling things that should be, well, capped. Taxes are good for things that the government wants to discourage, but doesn't care if a specific amount are used. For instance, the high cigarette tax (in theory) reduces demand, but it doesn't limit the number sold. But if scientists say that the amount of CO2 generation shouldn't increase, it is difficult to estimate what tax level will accomplish this, whereas the cap dictates the amount and lets the demand set the price. And the amount of credits could slowly be ratcheted down to meet that level that the government/scientists believe is sustainable.
  

The system has the potential to work well. One concern I had was that people would chalk up all the driving they could as "business travel". But if the firms have to bid on carbon pounds, they might not want their employees using them up. And since many of the poor do not drive cars and live in smaller houses/apartments with smaller utility bills, they could earn extra income selling credits, making this a Progressive measure.

Nevertheless, I do have a few things I wonder about.

• If firms bid on credits, why is air travel counted for personal consumption? Wouldn't that count twice? Or maybe the system is set up so that the airline industry can pass on the credit use to consumers, rather than the cost of auctioned credits.
  
• Mass transit is not included (initially) to encourage use rather than cars, and because there is in general far more of these transactions a month, so it would be a pain to have to debit the carbon card every time. Would intercity buses and rail also be exempt, or would they pass on credit consumption like airlines?
• For electricity, would we use the average CO2/kwh of the entire country, or the local company's portfolio? Would (in the US) hydro-happy Washington's electricity not debit much, but a lot of points would come out for a kWh in King Coal states like Kentucky and West Virginia? And if, as you can do, you pay a premium to guarantee that your electric company buys at least your amount of kWh from Wind or whatever, would that make your electricity free of credits?
  
• Should credit allowance be based on the household? Or is the individual better? How should children be counted? Should you be able to merge accounts, so one family member isn't stuck somewhere unable to buy gas while the other has a surplus? And how much would this complicate divorces? (No, those carbon credits should go to me!)

The government still gets some revenue from the non-residential credits permit sales. But this would certainly be much more complicated than a tax. And would people trust the big bad government to have so much control of people? Would it be better if the system was administered by a big bad corporation? Any thoughts?

Mapping the 7 Deadly Sins

Wired reports on series of maps that folks at Kansas State put together to show the distribution of the vices across America. While you may have qualms with their definitions of Gluttony or Sloth (and some Christian clergy are questioning the "science" behind it), it makes for an interesting look.

What I noticed right away was that many of the Devilish spots are simply the densely populated areas, and many of the Saintly regions are the "fly-over states" (well, the northern ones anyway). If I had the data, and was good at mapping software, I would make some sort of map that took into account population density. Instead, I just took a density map and made it alternate with the sinfulness map for each of the vices. (Please check the article first so you know how they define all their sins.)

• Greed - This one is probably the best correlated with density, which makes sense because cities generally have more poor and really rich people than the countryside or suburbs.
• Envy - Correlates pretty well with density, except that the Northeast gets off rather unscathed. And holy crap Pacific Northwest! Is everyone stealing each other's bikes, coffees, and chai teas?
• Wrath - Surprisingly uncorrelated. I was especially surprised at the saintlyness of LA / San Diego and Illinois / Indiana / Ohio.
• Sloth - This one doesn't really tell us much except that the western Montanas really like to go out and see shows.
• Gluttony - The extreme concentrations and lack of saintlyness makes this map kinda suspect. Could San Antonio and Odessa, TX, a select portion of Appalachia, and greater greater Virginia Beach really have so many more fast food restaurants that the differences in the rest of the country don't merit a green-to-white gradient?
• Lust - Another vice unrelated to density. The Deep South and Rapid City, SD have enough STD cases to mask any indication of metropolitan areas.
• Pride - It would be very interesting if some other form of "state pride" or "proudness of being American" could be mapped.
  

Population Control

The Columbia University magazine has an interesting article about overpopulation in this season's issue. On the one hand, population control seems like a good thing:

Now, after decades of unprecedented population growth, the land is running out. In southern Uganda, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, farm communities are bumping up against one another and against dry lands, mountains, and rain forests... Other farmers are subdividing their parents’ land, reducing the typical-sized farm plot in some parts of Africa to half an acre.

“That’s too small to feed a family,” says economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, who directs Columbia’s Earth Institute. The only way to break this cycle of overpopulation and misery, Sachs writes in Common Wealth, is for wealthy nations to provide birth control to the world’s poor.

However, any mention of population control is immediately going to bring up memories of the last time large-scale birth control was attempted, during the '60s and '70s. China's "one-child" policy was one of the most innocuous methods used.

Western family planners in the 1960s and 1970s, in their zeal to slow population growth and to spur development in Asia, supported forced sterilizations, slum demolitions, and other abuses.

The article has a lot of details the sudden population increase in Africa and Asia, the history of the birth control agencies and processes, and how more kindly methods of birth control (for the purpose of slowing population growth rather than focusing only women's rights) may become a major issue again.

In a different news story, India is looking into an untried birth control idea: having Indians watch more television.

In rural India where birthrates are high, many people live in homes without electricity. Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has called the country to redouble its efforts to bring electricity to the rural population so these people can plug in TV sets and watch late-night soap operas rather than have sex.