A grounding in basic electricity

A while back I posted an item about static electricity. The idea was to lay some basic groundwork leading up to a discussion of power generation and distribution for nontechnical people. In what follows I'll assume that the material in that earlier post is familiar.

Static electricity is comparatively simple to analyze - it's about electric charges that are not moving. Start moving those charges around and entirely new phenomena emerge.

A faucet provides a familiar analogy for these phenomena. It provides a connection to a supply of water that is under pressure, in what for our purposes is a limitless quantity. The electrical analogy for this pressure is the potential, or voltage. And just as water flows from where the pressure is higher to where it is lower, electric current flows from higher voltages to lower voltages.

Alright, go find a sink with a working faucet, and open the drain. You want to make sure that that water has some place to go once you turn it on. The electrical analogy for this is a "ground" - either way you are establishing a place where the flow can go without accumulating or "charging up".

Now turn the water on very slowly. Does water come out immediately? No, it takes some time to fill the spout before the water comes out. In an electric circuit, we have an analogous phenomenon called "capacitance" - you have to charge up the wires before you can deliver any power.

Now turn the faucet more wide open. You get more flow. That's because the faucet internals are positioned to ease the flow of water, which is analogous to electric current. Electric current is measured in units of charge passing through per second - the most commonly used unit is the "ampere" or "amp".

Now turn the faucet wide open. You're delivering as much flow as you can. That's because you have minimized the amount of flow resistance in your water "circuit". In an electric circuit the corresponding phenomenon is called "resistance".

The water flowing through the faucet is at a higher pressure (say 40 pounds per square inch, or psi) on the inlet of your faucet. Where it leaves the faucet it is at the same pressure as the rest of the room, or 0 psi. What happened to the pressure? The relevant energy was consumed by fluid flow friction inside your faucet, or its "resistance". In electric circuits the resistance of a device tells you the ratio of how much your voltage will drop across it to the amount of current that is flowing at the time.

Now shut off the faucet as quickly as you can. Depending on how your plumbing is designed, you might have felt a "water hammer" caused by forcing the water moving in your pipes to come to a sudden stop. There is an analogous phenomenon in electric circuits called "inductance".

Hmm, that's strange. Electricity is a bunch of moving charges which are almost massless, and I never see wires jump when I flip off a switch. So where is this inductance crap coming from?

Well, this post is getting king of long, so I guess I'll cut it off here. So you'll just have to sit on pins and needles for the next thrilling installment...

Post abortion stress syndrome?

Fortunately the closest I have come to an abortion (to my knowledge) was once when I was the designated driver.

I know several women who have had abortions, and I don't know a one who wants to talk about it. And it's not like they're not out there - allegedly 43% of all women in the US have had an abortion by age 45.

So I stumbled upon this site which speaks of "post abortion stress syndrome". It seems consistent with my observations - that this is a bigger deal than militant feminists would have us believe.

Feminists have been quoted as saying that this condition does not exist, and the site acknowledges that there is no formal recognition in medical literature. Maybe it was created by anti-abortion activists, whether by outright fabrication or by establishing an environment where women who get abortions are driven to it by their activities.

I don't think so. IMO abortion has been trivialized medically and psychologically. You can give the kid up for adoption and be through in 9 months. You can raise it and be through in 20 odd years. Or you can abort it and deal with it forever.

Make your money greener

It's been a while since I've heard anything about George Washington Carver. IMO he can't be mentioned often enough.

Why? Because we could use thousands of others like Carver in any color we can find them in. He showed farmers in the South how to rotate their crops with peanuts and sweet potatoes to enrich the land, and then created the products that created the demand for these crops. The resulting bounty to Southern agriculture was incalculable, and it was all from a man born a slave.

Our new Carvers could work on industrial processes that cause pollution, such as burning of fossil fuels, production of chemicals, disposal of solid waste, or handling of vast quantities of livestock waste from factory farming. Today a landfill, tomorrow a mine.

Or they could develop more products from corn or cane sugar, giving us hope of ending the ethanol boondoggle and ridiculous price supports.

The way to deal with pollution is to create new products, processes and markets. That means educating more engineers and managers to create and implement the industrial and other changes needed to make things cleaner.

You'd think Big Green would be right on board with this. But does anyone think we'll ever see the "Greenpeace School of Engineering", or "Sierra Club School of Business", or "Working Assets Venture Capital Fund"?

Hell no. They're too busy buying lunches in Washington, mugging for photographers, blowing smoke for journalists, exploiting cheap labor by college students, cutting trees for fundraising letters or hassling working people trying to make a living.

They're social pollution. And they don't deserve a dime of your money.

Field guide to the North American watermelon

As noted before, the name of this blog is a reference to people who cloak their political goals with environmental initiatives (they look green, but they're really red on the inside. Or else they're what Lenin called "useful idiots"). So how do we know who the watermelons are?

For one, they speak of "anti-environmentalists". No, there's no such thing. We all live on the same planet, drink the same water, breathe the same air, eat the same food...we're all in this together. Everybody wants a good environment - we just disagree about what one is, and how much we'll put up with in exchange for other benefits. And we have these people to thank for the fact that many of us now are conditioned to be suspicious of environmental initiatives - they've created divisions where none need exist.

They want you to give money to professional bitchers like Greenpox Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. Have these groups ever done anything besides pushing for bigger govt to solve problems? Would you rather spend your money on, say, developing a more efficient engine, or on buying enough Congressmen to raise CAFE standards?

They object to capitalism and private property, preferring govt control. There are problems to be addressed with resources subject to "the tragedy of the commons". But they should note that for truly deadly pollution, it's hard to top places with huge govts and/or nonexistent property rights, like Mexico or the former Soviet Union. Obviously neither capitalism nor private property are necessary.

They object to local control. If a community is satisfied with, say, the level of arsenic in their water, then why should anyone butt in? Why should automotive exhaust in Nebraska be regulated the same way as it is in Los Angeles? Why should some New Yorker who wants to see wolves in Yellowstone National Park on his vacation be able to force locals to live with them all year?

They demonize their opposition, presenting issues in terms of good vs. evil rather than your values and interests vs. mine. You cannot oppose them without having your motives questioned, and nothing is more questionable than being wealthy.

And further environmental progress in large measure will depend on kicking these people out of the leadership of environmental groups.

Blogrolling

The highly evolved James Rummel tells us about the Chinese navy, image manipulation, lunar colonies and teaching women how to shoot.

David Janes offers deep thoughts.

Myria has some history with solar photovoltaics (PV), and lots of other stuff too.

Of my permanent links on the left, Dave Tepper is the one most likely to point me to something I haven't seen before. Just don't ask him any embarrassing questions.

Attention older women - (over 35)

Hey, that's not my definition - I just heard it on TechTV. Personally I prefer "crone"...

Anyway, I'm still ripping off TechTV, which tells us that y'all are flocking to GameHouse. (Have you ever seen a popup ad for "Depends"?). It has a number of games for sale, or you can play them there if you're not spending enough time reading charming blogs like this one.

Handy utility

I've lived in a bunch of places where I couldn't or wouldn't have cable TV or a satellite dish around, which deprives me of TechTV. When I think of all the poor souls out there with Internet access but no TechTV - oh the humanity! So as a public service I'll tell you about some of what you're missing.

IMO the best show is The ScreenSavers. It's a 90 minute bull session for geeks with product demos, short interviews with people like Willie Nelson and Kevin Mitnick, news, polls, user call-in, babes whose names give me Google hits in conjunction with "nude", and occasional fights among people dressed in Star Wars outfits.

Tonight Megan Morrone demonstrated this neato toolbar I'm experimenting with now. You put it on your Win98 or higher toolbar and it gives you a text entry box and an icon to click for a menu.

Enter some text and instantly it fires up Google with the results. Enter an equal sign and a mathematical expression and it'll calculate it. Enter a period (or cnn) and an expression and it'll look for that keyword on CNN. And so on for dozens of options such as Ebay, Merriam-Webster, Amazon, weather, the Bible, Daypop, Jeeves, the CIA World Factbook, AIM, ascii conversions, hex conversions, alarms, timers, program launching, phone lookups and even a word unscrambler for cheating at Scrabble. You can download it here, and it's open source, so you can finagle with it if it suits you. I'm not through reviewing it yet but it looks terrific so far - check it out.

Call me "George"

Again the limited size of comments fails me, so I'll address this here.

Now Mr. Den Beste takes issue with me, aka "George". Why?

Two posts down you'll see a post entitled "Snuffing the candle at both ends". This is the original version:

You'd better not disagree with Steven Den Beste. You'll find yourself in elite company, such as with the creeps that killed Daniel Pearl.

The only real solution for such people is to have their faces rubbed in the reality implicit in their attitudes. Anyone who opposes fetal cell research should spend a day helping to care for someone who suffers from advanced Parkinson's disease, for instance. Anyone who opposes physician-aided euthanasia should watch the documentary prepared in the UK which showed what Diane Pretty's life was like before she finally died the horrible death she most feared.

And people who try to claim moral equivalence between the US and the Islamic Fundamentalists we face should watch the video of Daniel Pearl having his throat cut and then being brutally decapitated. Then they should be asked to explain just how it was really America's fault that he died.

Do people who oppose fetal stem cell research cause Parkinson's disease? His parallel doesn't hold otherwise - it's between them and the guys who cut Daniel Pearl's throat on videotape. That is totally out of bounds.

Yeah, let's put euthanasia in play, so you can browbeat possibly curable people into suicide because Junior wants all of his inheritance ("Here Doc, I'll split it with you"). Let's put pressure on doctors to contain costs by pulling more plugs. Let's establish a market in human life ("But honey, if you say OK, the insurance company offered us a lot of money!"). Let's start down the mother of all slippery slopes...

I have a better idea. Let's start with an apology for one of the most asinine parallels ever. And I'll challenge Mr. Den Beste to see if he can identify any potential downside to euthanasia.

I have a problem with drawing parallels between those creeps and people who oppose euthanasia (between cold-blooded killers and those who oppose it no less), just like some people don't like constant invocations of Hitler. Anyway, although I've seen him here from time to time, I sent an email to Mr. Den Beste as a courtesy.

But the original post was more heated than what I usually write, and I took another look after I had sent the email. Then I recognized the faulty parallel, which had been my inspiration for proposing an apology. So I took the post back down, noted it as having been changed to what you see in the previous post, and reposted it. Whoops, I guess I shouldn't have sent the courtesy email.

Then I checked my email. SDB had written a calm, reasoned email that noted a couple of things I had written. Crap - he'd already seen the original version. I replied that I had revised and reposted, and but for an innocuous title change (I think the original was "Let's put this one to rest") the post has remained the same since.

I went on to something else, then about 10 or so I picked up email #2 asking me who I was to ask for an apology, etc. Yes, the tone had changed. What I didn't know at the time was that subsequently he had also replied on his blog at greater length.

In reply I noted that we had crossed in the mail and I had already told him about the recall. Then I got his 3rd reply, which directed me to his post without comment. I had just come back from that when I saw the comment to the previous post where Godless Capitalist figured out who "George" was.

I leave it to the reader to determine the accuracy of Mr. Den Beste's characterization of my initial post, which in any case had been withdrawn well before his post appeared (note that he's in San Diego, CA, 2 hours behind me), and he had also been notified of this.

I must say, I learned a lot about myself. For one, I'm pretentious. Also, I'm trying to suppress alternate points of view (where have I heard that line before?).

On the other hand, who else can claim that Mr. Den Beste has mentioned their bodily orifices on his blog? Do you suppose I could sell pictures of them?

C'est la vie. We've all learned something new now, haven't we?

The real story on radwaste

But for one minor quibble, I can give this no higher compliment than "I wish I had written it".

Snuffing the candle at both ends

I take issue with the following from Steven Den Beste:

The only real solution for such people is to have their faces rubbed in the reality implicit in their attitudes. Anyone who opposes fetal cell research should spend a day helping to care for someone who suffers from advanced Parkinson's disease, for instance. Anyone who opposes physician-aided euthanasia should watch the documentary prepared in the UK which showed what Diane Pretty's life was like before she finally died the horrible death she most feared.

And people who try to claim moral equivalence between the US and the Islamic Fundamentalists we face should watch the video of Daniel Pearl having his throat cut and then being brutally decapitated. Then they should be asked to explain just how it was really America's fault that he died.

Do people who oppose fetal stem cell research cause Parkinson's disease? If the cure already exists, give it to them - if it doesn't, then how do you know it ever will? All we know for sure is that embryos are being consumed (a nice word for it) prospectively while there is much unheralded promise in adult stem cell research.

Yeah, let's put euthanasia in play, so you can browbeat possibly curable people into suicide because Junior wants all of his inheritance ("Here Doc, I'll split it with you"). Let's put pressure on doctors to contain costs by pulling more plugs. Let's establish a market in human life ("But honey, if you say OK, the insurance company/guy who needs the liver/hospital administrator/VA bureaucrat will give us a lot of money!"). Let's start down the mother of all slippery slopes...

I'll challenge Mr. Den Beste to see if he can identify any potential downside to euthanasia.

(This post has been modified)

Republish!

This morning I checked this blog and got "page not found". I checked Instapundit and he said "republish". I did, and now you can see this.

So who likes Cornerhost? Any other recommendations?

More urban legends

Nobody but a knee-jerk say-anything liberal believes this crapola about advance knowledge of the events of 9/11. If you believe it, go away - I don't have time for you.

Unless we're talking about Bill Gates... Look at this too.

Wanna waste an afternoon? Conjure the Sage of Seattle! (just don't call him the oracle). Just fire up the Windows Notepad, WordPad, Word, or some other GUI editor. Try writing your name, your blog's name, your Email address, etc, in a big font, then change the font to WingDings or WebDings. Try it in all caps too. Add in the recreational chemicals of your choice, wrap a rag around your head and let the spirits speak!

I like what you get with Yasser Arafat's initials. Use all caps with WingDings.

Tennis ball cannons

Do.

Overdo.

Don't.

But it can't hurt

Here I thought I was doing something good for my health.

Changing your Blogger password

From Ev's help system:

Question

How do I change my Blogger password?

Answer

To change your password, from the Blogger home page, sign in, and click on one of your blogs. Then click the Team button.

Then click on your name, then click [Edit My Profile]. From there, you can change any of your user information, including your password.

I own James Lileks

What's more, it was easy. All I had to do was put some money in his tip jar, and now he dances to my tune.

You don't believe me? Explain it to the campaign-finance reform crowd. They'll tell you at great length that I would only have left money because I have nefarious designs on his site.

They're right of course. Jasperwood? My idea. That matchbook thing? I outdo myself sometimes. The Gnat movies? What else could have inspired him? And he's powerless to protest - he's under strict orders.

Just to prove it to you, I'll even make a prediction - he'll write something clever about the Middle East in the next few weeks. Remember, you heard it here first...

Under the logic of campaign finance reform, I couldn't possibly have done it because I like Lileks's writing or his site. Never mind the hard link that has been here since day 1 of this blog - I'm still one of the few who hasn't ever linked to one of his Bleats or Screeds.

Suddenly I got an even better idea - what if I send some money to the campaign finance reformers and just tell them to drop their campaign. Surely they will - if they don't, they'll disprove their entire program.

About those priests

I've been trying to look some of this stuff up with little luck. Maybe some of the rest of you can help.

1) How often are priests busted for messing with girls?

2) We're calling these creeps 'pedophiles', which implies desiring sex with children. But these 'children' appear to be exclusively boys.

3) Do gays and non-gays sexually abuse children at the same rates? For instance, if straight men are X times more common than gay men, then I would expect that roughly X times as many girls would be sexually abused by men than there would be boys sexually abused by men. Is this true, or is one kind disproportionately more prevalent than the other?

4) Are there differences in reporting rates? That is, who's more likely to tell - the boys or the girls?

Controlling drugs and governments

Perry De Havilland gets it right.

And while you're there, check out this.

Problems with Blogger/Blogger Pro

If you have posted recently with Blogger Pro, take a good look at your site. See if it didn't foul up in rendering something about your posts. It did for me, and I think I've seen at least one more example. Check it now!

It's a dirty job, but...

Charles Austin can channel Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D., Saudi Arabia). Does that mean we can get rid of the original one?

At least let's make sure she doesn't breed with Richard Cohen.

WORLD EXCLUSIVE - until Gato wakes up

We had the First Irregular St. Louis Blog Bash or whatever you might call it. Scarcely ever has any venue been blessed with such an array of luminaries (and me too, semiconscious as I was). And if Pat and Leo from TechTV couldn't make it, it was their loss.

Oh yeah. If you ever go to TNGs in Webster Groves, that's a fairy on the waitress's hip, not an angel. But don't take my word for it.

Porn and me - The Early Years

I once heard a joke about three kids wandering around in a park when they stumbled upon some lovers in the bushes. The 4 year old said "They're fighting". The 6 year old said "They're making love". And the 8 year old said "And badly".

Do kids learn more about sex at an earlier age nowadays than they did, say, 30 years ago? I don't think anybody would argue against that. My own experience stands in sharp contrast - I was a bookish smalltown Midwestern kid with a set of encyclopedias and 3 TV channels.

Now this isn't a "True Confessions" blog, but IMO my own experiences running into porn when I was a kid might be amusing. And it's from a geeky kid's perspective, where the book learning was far ahead of any practical knowledge.

Breasts I figured out bright and early. I knew what they were and allegedly even drew some pictures of them at a very young age, but I don't remember how I found out what they looked like. It was probably from a calendar at an auto repair shop or something like that, and probably wasn't a photograph. I didn't know what the big deal was about them though, although somehow I liked looking. Maybe it was just the fact that they were usually so ostentatiously covered (except for that June or July 1967 Playboy I found, with Lisa Baker, DeDe Lind and Sherry Jackson, the girl from "Make Room for Daddy" - I can't believe I still remember that, but at least it proves that I really did read it). Anyway, I found out what they were for biologically speaking from a book, and later on I learned of other applications and expressions like "first base".

I'm not sure when it was that I figured out that girls and boys had different plumbing. It was probably fairly late, because the rest of the family was much older and didn't wander around nude. The little girls in the neighborhood weren't helpful (but they made up for it later, believe me). That Playboy wasn't any help - I think it was about 1970 or so when pubic hair started showing up ever so coyly in mass-market men's magazines. National Geographic didn't go there either. The best information I had was the paperwork from a box of tampons mentioned a few posts ago, and that was a black and white cross-section of a woman's pelvis.

But hey, that picture made me think - if THAT'll fit in there... So even before I learned about it on the streets I deduced the ins and outs of coitus. The ins, anyway - the practical details needed work. I definitely didn't appreciate the reproductive significance, and it sounded kind of gross. I figured people probably didn't do stuff like that - what for? For all I knew, if you were into stuff like that, you'd do as well with an ear. Hey, I was little...

Then I was snooping somewhere and discovered some porn. My analytical mind went to work immediately and I examined the women closely. It was kind of frustrating though, because a lot of the photography was grainy and small, and the women were downright shaggy. It definitely wasn't up (!?) to Larry Flynt's highly-groomed brightly-lit speculum-friendly photographic standards, so I still had more questions.

I saw some practices that hadn't occurred to me either. I already knew a name for one of them too (the one you might free-associate with "Monica"), and from context I realized it was an epithet. But I hadn't associated the word with the act, and I hadn't heard it often enough to know it was considered a bad word. Until, frustrated as a faster kid eluded me in a game of tag, I hollered "you @#$@!" at him at the top of my lungs.

My parents heard (along with everybody else for blocks in those pre-AC days), and I was called on the carpet. Did I know what it meant? "No", I answered honestly. But you can bet your bottom dollar I started thinking about it. I realized it was a compound word, and eureka! - there's even a term for what was going on in those pictures! I was probably about 9 at the time.

I kept learning more things. I knew what condoms were, but called them "rubbers". I knew the machines that dispensed them (usually in a rest room of a cheap diner or bowling alley) always said "for the prevention of disease only". I didn't know what diseases those might be, but I wanted to find out. Secondhand.

(There were other machines there too, containing such novelties as a "pecker stretcher". There were also tiny topless playing cards sold one suit at a time, which I furtively acquired at a quarter or so each until I got all four.)

We kids had arguments about what certain words meant, especially the F word. We also knew the number 69 had some sort of significance, and you couldn't pour a sidewalk in town without a kid inscribing this in it. (Later I learned 68 - you do me and I'll owe you one).

Sometime around this time the Supreme Court decided that something wasn't porn if it had "redeeming social value". That explains what I found about this time. There would be a long narrative section running through it, often with some Masters & Johnson type descriptions of sex and arousal. It would be accompanied by no-holds-barred smut that had utterly nothing to do with the narrative. The performers did seem to be having a good time though.

But I didn't think of any of this as anything anybody I knew would ever do. I sure hadn't caught anyone in flagrante delicto. Or even dogs...it must have been the water.

I ran into some literary things too. I wound up reading "Studs Lonigan" out of desperation, but much of it was lost on me. In particular, I asked an 80 year old relative what a "whorehouse" was. She didn't need her Ex-Lax that day.

I guess that takes me to about age 10. It's been a long time since then, a few things have changed, and I might even have learned a thing or two. I guess I'd have to conclude that the worst effect of porn that I recognize was a cultivation of unrealistic expectations - as I ran into real women later they set me straight right away.

But then this exposure didn't take place in a vacuum. Somehow I got opposing ideas about sexual continence and norms in sufficient quantity to keep me out of trouble at a time when herpes, AIDS and other treats were running amok.

I'm not sure where those ideas came from. I wasn't a churchgoer then either, I don't recall any discussion about sex with anybody but other kids, and this was before sex education. Readily available books were coy. And retrospect, I had some really bad examples. So all I can figure is that somehow it was simply subliminally built into our culture, including the understanding that those examples were bad.

I see few signs that that culture I grew up in still exists. Meanwhile porn has become pervasive, and while performers are not necessarily on the A list they aren't pariahs either. And Larry Flynt - good grief.

So although I might conclude that I didn't suffer anything I couldn't deal with, I'm not sure a modern kid has the same countervailing influences. With the result that....

Two managers

American Heritage is featuring an article inspired by Enron about "why the boss needs a boss". Henry Ford was used as an example.

Some years back I read David Halberstam's book "The Reckoning", which compared the histories of Ford Motor Company and Nissan. It described some of Henry Ford's management practices, which were, uh, unconventional (which is no surprise if you've read much about Ford).

For one, he hated accountants. He was known to go to the accounting department and just fire everybody there. It got to the point where people would stack invoices on a scale and weigh them to get an idea of how much was owed. You know, to balance the books.

Then Alfred P. Sloan arrived at General Motors. He proceeded to invent much of modern management as Peter Drucker watched and took notes. The result was some of the best management literature ever seen, and each man gave his name to a prominent business school.

Tech TV hosts in St. Louis this Saturday

Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton of TechTV's Screen Savers will be in Ballwin, MO at the CompUSA store from 11 AM to 1 PM.

To kill a mockingbird?

If you've seen or read "To Kill a Mockingbird", you'll recall a moral dilemma that arose at the end, and how the characters dealt with it.

Stephen Den Beste gives us this case from the UK. As he puts it:

A film crew has spent the last month filming at the home of Diane Pretty, the British woman who is horribly crippled with motor neurone disease and who has been legally prevented from a merciful, rapid and painless death by British law.

It's going to be broadcast tonight, in just a few hours, on British television. Anyone who opposes euthanasia, who states sanctimoniously that "every life can still be a source of joy," should watch the program and see what a living hell her life had become.

Plenty of people die unpleasant deaths, in hospitals or elsewhere. But we don't all have film crews around for the last month and get on the BBC. That's what I find interesting about this story. IMO this woman became a pawn of someone with bigger fish to fry, just as Norma McCorvey (aka Jane Roe) became Sarah Weddington's stepping stone.

I certainly wouldn't trade places with this woman or her husband. But I've also heard the old legal maxim "hard cases make bad law". It's a little much to expect our entire society to change the rules so radically based on one tragic overexposed case.

I'm against euthanasia, but that's another post. What I'm interested in for now is in better ways for this to be handled. SDB referenced an article with this quote:

His wife always said she wanted her husband to help her commit suicide because she feared the choking and asphyxia often caused by her disease.

and this one:

"Diane had to go through the one thing she had foreseen and was afraid of - and there was nothing I could do to help."

SDB says "It was the death that anti-euthanasia activists condemned her to." You'd think they had given her the condition.

I see things a little differently. It's easy to say what I might have done or counseled. But FWIW if someone begged me to help them commit suicide, and I didn't have to flip the switch myself, and I didn't have to stick around and watch, I think I might just do it. Given a choice between throwing the doors wide open to euthanasia, or being a hypocrite, give me hypocrisy every time.

Then what? I suppose I'm guilty of something or other depending on the jurisdiction. So it's up to the investigators, medical examiners and prosecutors what happens next.

If they chose to prosecute, what do you think the opportunists at the Voluntary Euthanasia Society would have done? If they gave two cents about Diane Pretty's comfort they would have counseled her husband to help her commit suicide, then offered to defend him against any prosecution. But then they wouldn't have their film, and might not have had their test case. What's one miserable death when you have a chance to reform society?

Does life imitate art? We know what happened in "To Kill a Mockingbird". Suppose her husband had helped her commit suicide, and she did it. What should happen next?

The best idea yet

James Miller scores on EconoBlog.

Jane Galt, Mindles H. Dreck and Arnold Kling contribute there too, so what are you waiting for?

Reality check

Alright, how many of you actually knew someone else who had a blog when you started?

I sure didn't. A reference to Instapundit from the Weekly Standard got me reading blogs last fall. After a couple of months looking around at various blogs it seemed that some of my favorite subjects weren't being covered, or maybe weren't getting my own perverse spin. Combine that with a long-suppressed urge to learn more about the Web and this is what you get.

As a result of this I've learned a tremendous amount and been exposed to some really terrific people. But in real life? - ha! I work among a bunch of late-20s to 50ish professionals, about 99% college grads, and I haven't run into one yet who knows what a blog is. And for the most part these people are IT professionals - I have to wonder what it's like among less-technical people.

We're reading all about Pim Fortuyn. I have yet to run into anybody who has heard of him. Jenin? Oh yeah, she's that porn star. Yasser Arafat? Well, you're not so skinny yourself.

So I'm looking forward to the Midwest Blog Bash this weekend in St. Louis. I haven't met any of the people there and I have no idea what any of them look like. But I'll have more in common with them in the first 5 minutes than I have with some people I've worked with for a year. Come see us!

Government corruption

I have a million and one beefs with Democrats and modern-day liberals, both philosophically and in particulars. But what is really aggravating is watching how they'll bray ever onward about something needing a solution, while ruling out every form that solution might logically take.

Let's consider corruption in govt, for instance. Nobody likes it. Democrats in particular should be outraged, because govt is their chosen vehicle for delivering so many social goods - their cries should be the loudest as we run the corrupt out of town. But no, they were the guys who defended Bill Clinton to the end, demonstrating that it's all about partisanship, not good govt.

Regarding corruption, what should we expect of govt employees, including our Senators and Representatives? We trust these people with our liberty, our treasury and our economy. Clearly they will be subject to solicitations for favors. What if they are compromised?

This isn't exactly hypothetical. "Charles Dodgson" writes "So the corporations are buying the laws they want."

But why does he focus on the corporations? If they're "buying laws", who are they buying them from? There's only one source of supply - the govt. So it should be clear that such corporate malfeasance (if in fact that's what it is) cannot occur unless the govt is involved. And arguably the most corrupt govts on earth exist where there are no corporations - nobody with any knowledge of history can support the idea that govts need outside influences to cause corruption.

So how do we attack this problem of govt corruption? Do we focus on the millions of people who might conceivably benefit from rule-bending or -breaking? Or do we focus on the one party that must be present to all acts of corruption, ie, the govt itself?

IMO it seems clear that the most socially efficient way to approach this is by putting more responsibility on the govt. That of course is a major undertaking, made the more complicated by the fact that the body that must implement the changes has an interest in preventing their implementation. (which is one more argument in favor of smaller govt).

But in the meantime Mr. "Dodgson" can help us by dropping this focus on corporate demonization and acknowledging that none of this could happen without the govt.

Creating a theory, part IV

I have dynamite intentions of keeping this blog from turning into The Evolution Forum, but duty calls for at least one more post.

I had hoped that this was clear by now, but let's make it even more explicit - this isn't about supporting any particular religion or theory other than evolution. And even in that, the question is limited to consideration of what I called The Theory in this post - that's my definition of "evolution", Mike Gannis.

I haven't defended religion generally or in particular, and religion is not relevant to this discussion. Thus invocation of religion is out of order.

MG: I'm not advocating anything in particular, so I can't be advocating anything that's "demonstrably false". I'm asking for support of evolution on its own merits, but you keep injecting references to others. We don't prove scientific theories by default. And when you drag religion in in disparaging terms, that IMO is "picking a fight".

MG: In #36 you said "who needs species?" (then gave me this roses/leeches thing that I'm still scratching my head about). When I responded that you needed to take the species thing up with the feds and biologists you responded as if I were avoiding the issue. No, I'm just noting that without the species you've removed the entire frame of reference. It's not for nothing that Darwin named his book "The Origin of Species".

PO: how about saving us a trip to the community college and telling us if an individual's genome remains 100% identical over its lifetime? Do we know? And if it varies, doesn't that let Lamarck back in the door?

Extrapolations

Do men who extrapolate ever have erections?

I have to wonder. It must be terrifying - if the rate of growth were sustained long enough, Paul Ehrlich's phallus would exceed the volume of the known universe. And when it receded! - it could continue to grow smaller and smaller, perhaps forming a black hole and sucking in the entire planet.

If there's a Stupid Example Hall of Fame, the above could be a finalist. But really, some phenomena are self-limiting, and others come and go with changing conditions. And we can't say that we know what's happening beyond those most extreme data points we have available.

Take boiling, for instance. You might think that the hotter the fire you have under the pan, the faster the water in it will boil. That's true over a range, but then at a certain point the higher temperatures actually make things worse. This phenomenon must be taken into account when designing nuclear reactors, among other things. (Test it yourself with a hot frying pan - flick drops of water on it as you heat it. As the temperature rises, the drops will spread out and evaporate instantly. But at some point before you ruin your pan, the drops will form a ball and skate around the surface.)

Then there's freezing. Liquid water gets more dense the colder it gets, until just a few degrees above freezing. Then it starts to expand, so much so that by the time it freezes the ice has a lower density than the liquid around it. Which is why ice floats.

There are plenty more examples. Compressible fluids behave differently as their velocities approach the speed of sound. It's well known in medicine that "the dose makes the poison", and you can die from drinking too much water. Extrapolate biological responses to radiation doses down from Hiroshima levels to zero and the resulting predictions turn out way high. Tax receipts can actually decrease as you increase tax rates. And calculations involving subatomic particles must take quantum-mechanical and relativistic phenomena into account - simple Newtonian mechanics don't work anymore.

So we have to be careful when we extrapolate. We're familiar with the phenomena that I described above, but I dare say that we haven't seen everything yet. Especially under the extreme conditions that are found in stars or other remote parts of the universe.

Yet it is popular to presume that the laws of physics can be extrapolated all the way to their singularities or beyond. Having done so, some claim that the universe resulted from a "big bang". Who knows, maybe it's true. But the fact is, we haven't seen a big bang. So we can't know if our extrapolations have led to situations like the above, when the rules change.

Hmm. Why would scientists persist in formulating such predictions, even pushing them to be taught in our schools? Ask Bryan Preston.

Eddie Stanky, all time great

Some of you have no idea what that title is about. Heathens! (In case that results from a Y-chromosome deficiency, I'll refer you here.)

Those of you who are hardcore baseball fans might be smirking at this title. Eddie Stanky, the Brat? A guy who retired almost 50 years ago with 29 career homers and a .264 batting average? Well, bear with me.

I'm a red-blooded American who's interested in history of all sorts, so I find baseball history irresistible. You can fill shelf after shelf with baseball books (even George Will has written two) and there's still always something new. There are plenty of websites too, like the "Baseball Reference" one used earlier and permalinked on the lower right side of this page.

I'm also a numbers kind of guy, and no sport generates them like baseball. There are plenty of raw statistics, and then there are guys like Bill James who are everlastingly concocting new ones. It's to the point where they've even had to coin a new name for the field - sabermetrics (where the "saber" comes from the Society of American Baseball Researchers).

Bill James is an opinionated and prolific "sabermetrician". He released "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract" earlier this year, in which he provides his ranking of the 100 best players of all time for each position. What's more, he provides anecdotes about all of these.

James's big thing nowadays is something he calls "Win Shares". It's some sort of uber-statistic which attempts to rank a player's overall value to a team in a way that transcends eras, stadiums and positions. Was Ty Cobb better than Pete Rose? James will determine the answer for all time...

James ranks Eddie Stanky 34th all-time among second basemen. Joe Morgan is #1, Jackie Robinson is #4, Craig Biggio is #5, Ryne Sandberg is #7. Want more? Buy the book, tightwad.

James isn't the only one with an opinion though. Now we have "Clearing the Bases" by Allen Barra. Barra complains that most sports point to fairly recent players as the all-time greats, but baseball points to long-dead heroes like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner. Barra argues in favor of more contemporary players, noting changes in the number of competitors, the impact of integration, and the accumulated wisdom of experience in their favor. So he throws out a lot of old-timers who played in days when the batter could specify the pitch, or fielders didn't wear gloves. He also scoffs at a lot of traditionally revered statistics like batting average and RBIs in favor of newer ones like on-base average.

OK, let's take a look at on-base average. After you pitch the old old-timers Barra's way, long retired players still dominate the list, with Williams, Ruth and Gehrig in the top three slots. But next comes Frank Thomas, Edgar Martinez is 7th, and Jeff Bagwell, Wade Boggs, Barry Bonds and Jim Thome all show up in the top 25.

Back to our hero. Eddie Stanky retired in 1953, years before I was born, so all I knew about him were anecdotes or quotes something like "He can't hit, he can't throw and he can't run, but the little guy sure does kill you". It turns out that Stanky is 27th all-time in on-base average at .410, tied with quite respectable company - Harry Heilmann, Charlie Keller, and Jackie Robinson.

I'm sure we're not through coming up with innovative baseball statistics. OBA is actually kind of dated by now - Barra says Branch Rickey used to argue that it was superior in his time. Nowadays SLOB is getting more popular, and it'll be interesting to see how well Bill James "win shares" work.

Hero Street

You probably haven't heard of Silvis, IL. Back around the 1930's the locals didn't think too much of it either. When a bunch of Mexican section hands moved to the area to work on the Rock Island Line, this is where they were moved after city fathers determined that they could no longer live in boxcars in the railroad yard. So the boxcars and all went to unpaved Second Street.

The erstwhile Second Street is a block and a half long. But it contributed 84 men to WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. 8 of them didn't come back, and 1 won a Silver Star. No street of comparable size can boast of such a record of military service. That claim has stood up to rigorous research and been verified by the Department of Defense. Which is why, in 1967, it was renamed Hero Street.

The official web site goes into much more detail, especially about a monument they're raising money to build. Let's give these guys the recognition they deserve.

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John Weidner has it all figured out.

Find the Apricot

Probably not be suitable for work. From methodshop.

This is tamer - check it out.

Affirmative action in practice

There has been some discussion elsewhere about John McWhorter, a professor at UC Berkeley. He dared to question affirmative action, and immediately he was pounced upon with allegations that he benefited from it.

So what if he did -may we not evaluate his statements on their own merits? "Well, he said 1+1=2, but can I trust him?"

Racial spoils systems are offensive inherently, but they become pernicious too when standards are bent to accomodate. I'm not sure that was the case with McWhorter. (It was true with Alan Bakke, though - his alternate, Patrick Chavis, has been maiming or killing his patients.)

Some years back I worked for a company with a highly placed black executive in the engineering department. After the Bakke decision and numerous others, I knew that this might not have anything to do with his talents. So I discreetly asked a few people who weren't known for parroting party lines. They were unanimous in their praise for him, and noted he had worked his way up from the control room. Belated apologies, Mr. Reed.

In the early 90's I went to the personnel office at the University of Illinois. I wasn't there to research social justice, but eventually I noticed that of the dozens of people I saw, I was the only white male there. Sure, it could have been a statistical anomaly....

Sometime in the 80's a relative sought a job as a state trooper in Illinois. He took a test and did fine relative to traditional standards. But he wasn't good enough for a white guy, and minorities with lower scores got in instead. Are they fine cops? Maybe so.

But when considering the propriety of affirmative action, you have to consider that this is a zero-sum game - you're creating losers. Is it just my imagination, or is this just never discussed?

Comment snafu

I understand that at least one person has discovered he is banned from my comments. I'm not sure how that happened, because to date I have not deliberately banned anyone. Nor have I intentionally deleted comments, but I know of at least 3 that are gone.

I could have fatfingered it, or it might have something to do with YACCS upgrades. In any case, I'm working on a fix, and my apologies in the meantime.

UPDATE: It should be fixed now. Upgrade your YACCS to get more control over stuff like this. I still don't know what happened to the 3 comments, and can't be sure I didn't lose more.

Doing my part

Tonight I'm going to go home, grab my guitar and kick out the jams for peace in the Middle East.

Creating a theory - part III

If you've been following this succession of posts, several of us have been discussing the theory of evolution on its own merits, without reference to religious alternatives. It can be awkward to follow, because the comments I am addressing below are found under another blog item here.

I must say, I admire Paul Orwin's faith in things unseen when he says "I think intelligent design theory is another incarnation of the 'God of the Gaps' theology, which will die a slow and painful death as the gaps are closed". This looks like antipathy to me - why?

Doug Turnbull notes that bacteria adapt to antibiotics, showing characteristics that weren't there before. And how does that happen? Is it totally dependent on random changes in the genome? That would appear to offer an infinite number of possibilities, which even bacteria are not prolific enough to generate. But if these mutations are not totally random, what guides them? How can a cell zero in on the most effective mutations in a finite time in order to survive?

I don't agree with DT's assessment of astrophysics under my criteria. Science deals in what is useful, not in what is true, and astrophysics has generated some useful results. What's more, much of it works with phenomena well known here on earth, such as relativity, red shifts, gravitation, etc. And the consequences of being wrong are not great in any case, with the possible exception of predictions of the life of the sun, or the paths of objects that might collide with the earth.

But on the edges, when it uses a century or two of observation to predict what will happen billions of years from now, it's dodgy and should be recognized as such. It's as if you were given a minute to observe a species unlike any on earth and expected to be able to tell how old it was and how much longer it would live.

As for the videotape comment, we'd ask for something like that for about anything else in the hard sciences. Don't tell me this reaction occurs, show me, and then another lab had better be able to duplicate it too. If I tried to beg off saying the process took too long, you might rightly think me a charlatan, or at best you might withhold judgment. Perhaps such standards are inappropriate in this setting, but there's nothing unfair in asking for demonstrations per se.

DT says this: "If you really think it's reasonable to believe that every species on earth now has always been present as it is to believe in the theory of evolution, then I'm not sure any argument is really possible." Maybe so, but that's not because I'm being unfair. I believe that those who postulate that some species weren't here from day one implicitly assume the burden of demonstrating that that is true.

As for extrapolation, I will dedicate an entire post to this later.

DT also says that evolution is the only testable hypothesis that explains said data. OK, what other hypotheses were tried and found wanting?

DT notes that certain sections of DNA don't seem to code for anything, and thus can be used as a timer of sorts based on rates of accumulations of mutations over time. How do we know that these sections don't code for anything? Genomes are very complex and we don't understand them yet. Are we now prepared to say that no use will ever be found for these sections that don't seem to code for anything under our present knowledge, and that these mutations don't serve some subtle determinate function unknown today?

I have read various books about chaos theory and have been amazed at some of the complex emergent behavior arising from unexpected places. I have to wonder what yet is to be found in the genome, and if it's possible that the diversity and resilience of life results from the emergence of behavior encoded in DNA from day 1.

The arguments that really floor me are the ones that attempt to use what could be called design features to disprove design arguments. As I see it, this amounts to postulating an omniscient, omnipotent Creator, and then arguing with Him - "ya shoulda done it this way!". I can be an arrogant SOB, but if I thought such a being existed, I'd happily defer to His judgment and would hope to learn from it. And I'd do a lot of experiments to figure out how He did things in hopes of staying on His good side or guessing what He might do next - science would be an essential part of my religious practice.

I'll ask religious people to abstain from commenting on this post (send me email if you want). I respect your beliefs, and you're welcome to comment elsewhere. But I have found that your presence in such discussions leads in unproductive directions, and I ask for your indulgence in this. Thank you for your understanding.

Static electricity basics

I've been trying to come up with a blog-item length approach to this for a while. Let's see if this does any good. It will be simplified, perhaps too much - I'm sure people can find something to disagree with.

What is electricity? For our purposes today, we'll say it's a means of transmitting energy via electric charge differences.

OK, what's an electric charge? Physicists don't attempt to define this really. They just note that the smallest units of charge are protons and electrons, with arbitrarily labeled "positive" and "negative" charges respectively. Since electrons are easier to shake loose than protons are, for practical purposes electricity results from moving electrons.

Charged particles have their own electric fields, which exert forces when they interact with the electric fields of other objects. These forces are inversely proportional to the square of the difference between the particles - they get stronger rapidly as the particles get closer together. They tend to repel objects of like charge, and attract those of opposite charge. A result is that protons and electrons tend to stick together tightly into aggregates which as a whole carry no net charge, and getting electrons concentrated takes some "pressure".

If you've ever been zapped by static electricity, you have evidence that it's no big trick to get electrons loose. There will always be some running around, and this rate increases with temperature. But they are randomly distributed such that we can't take advantage of them for electric power.

It also makes a difference what substance we're talking about. The freedom of electrons to move within a particular substance varies over a broad range. The substances in which electrons move freely can be called "conductors", and are usually metallic. Substances that hold on to their electrons tightly are called "insulators". There are substances with intermediate properties known as "semiconductors", but that's another post.

The trick with electricity is to get these movable electrons directed and packed together long enough to make the resulting forces to do work for us.

A measure of the "packing" is the electric potential. This is sometimes called "voltage" because it is measured in volts (named for Alessandro Volta). Volts are a measure of the amount of energy stored per unit of charge.

These forces created by "packing" these electrons are significant. One of the reasons why electricity must be used as generated is that the demand is so large relative to the size of the devices it is practical to build to hold the electrical energy. Such devices, called capacitors, can literally blow up from the stresses if misused, and they're expensive in very large sizes. Thus when energy must be stored, it stored in a form other than electricity, then turned into electricity upon demand.

So how do you "pack" the electrons, and how do you get them to go where you want and do work? That'll be another in a series of blog items that'll be sure to thrill you. Stay tuned...

Fun with trojans

A relative of mine gets a little too crazy with her PC. Despite repeated warnings, she'll still open email attachments with alacrity. So I just spent the last 20 minutes on the phone figuring out how to deal with the consequences.

It was a Trojan. She doesn't have a firewall, but a recently updated virus scanner caught the thing in an email from a friend of hers. I don't use Norton AntiVirus myself, so I don't know the details, but apparently the software "quarantined" the trojan. (Backdoor.Autoupder). This trojan supposedly is not widely spread, but it's loose in central Illinois for sure.

You might wonder what the firewall would have done. This trojan apparently contacts external machines to load more objects, which can be used for much mischief. Unlike many others, products like ZoneAlarm test outgoing traffic along with incoming, so if a mysterious program looks for access to the Web, you can deny it. In that way, even if a trojan gets installed, it can't call back to the mother ship and announce its presence. Then your PC can't be used for such things as distributed denial of service attacks like this.

If you have a broadband and don't have a firewall, kindly post your street address and a picture. That way we can all find you and knock you silly until you get with the program. ZoneAlarm is a freebie. Get it. Now!

UPDATE: I'm getting a disturbing number of Google hits on this one. It's fairly new, so make sure your antivirus program is up to date. Or else Quana and I will come and get you...

Hypothetical attack on a nuclear power plant

From Jane Galt's blog, the question has come up about what might happen if a US commercial nuclear power plant were struck by a 747 loaded with a fertilizer-type bomb as was used in OKC by Timothy McVeigh (who might have had ties to al-Qaeda via Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef).

So what do I know about this? I'm an engineer who spent 10+ years working on 4 different US commercial nuclear power plant sites (7 units - 2 PWRs and 5 BWRs, out of ~100 units). So I know a little about the hardware, the people, the procedures and the regulations. I'm a bit out of date because I haven't worked in the business for a while, but you'll pardon me for assuming that regulations haven't been lightening. And no new sites have begun construction since I was starved out. There's no conflict of interest because I no longer work in the business and I don't even own any stock, and as a mechanical engineer I can profit no matter what form of energy we use. Enough disclosures, let's get started.

Returning to the question, no Updated Final Safety Analysis Report that I have ever seen addresses planeloads of fertilizer bombs explicitly. I think you can guess why. There are provisions for "missile protection", such as uprooted trees, but these would not have the energy of the postulated planeload of fertilizer bombs.

I could go into a long discussion of this, as I'm sure you know by now. Nuclear power plants are not built like office buildings or even the Pentagon. You're talking at least a foot of reinforced concrete for the primary containment building, with a steel liner inside that. Outside that there's the secondary containment which is far less substantial but would soak up some shock.

And then what would happen? Possibly just an indefinitely long shutdown of the reactor while damage is assessed and repaired. They'd have to detonate the bomb just right before the crash dispersed it, and they'd have to hit a target that's substantially smaller than the WTC.

If primary containment were breached, then the reactor would have to be shut down, and hopefully the piping would be intact to do so. That is likely, because that piping, electrical and instrumentation systems within primary containment are built to handle nasty things like earthquakes, pipe whip, and internally generated missiles. And they are subject to "environmental qualification" for steam, high radiation levels, temperature, etc..

Control and power systems are required to be redundant and physically separated such that the same event (fire, explosion, whatever) is not likely to disable both divisions. That physical separation is a lot more concrete, fire barriers et al.

Ordinarily the containment buildings are on the opposite end of the plant from the power lines, so one would expect that there wouldn't be much physical damage to these. That suggests that offsite power would still be available. But let's shut it off anyway. And let's assume that any other units onsite are shut down, so they can't provide any power either. Then what?

There are still two redundant trains of onsite power, most likely diesel generators. They'll be sitting in separate seismically qualified buildings of reinforced concrete some distance away from the containment, with about 7 days worth of fuel in tanks that are probably buried in reinforced concrete underground. They're tested at least monthly to show that they'll pick up plant loads in a prescribed order to make sure that essential plant motors and controls receive power as necessary for a shutdown.

Back to the containment. Let's say it's Osama's lucky day and we've breached secondary containment, primary containment, and a few more feet of the reinforced concrete that makes up biological shielding, the drywell, or whatever other such facilities an individual plant might have (I can't speak for every design out there, but there's quite a bit of standardization because only 4 companies have reactors running and they're all regulated by the same Federal agency). We've breached the primary loop so severely that the reactor cannot be brought to a cold shutdown and we have a partial core meltdown a la TMI.

The bad news is that this will be worse radiologically than TMI. The good news is that TMI wasn't that bad. We're not talking Chernobyl here - the reactor internals don't contain tons of graphite to stoke a huge fire and form immense clouds of particulates (and we don't have a government that will tell everyone that nothing happened when an accident is visible from outer space. ) You'd be talking steam, short half-life isotopes of nitrogen, gaseous fission products generated inside the failed fuel rods, and possibly other radioactive nasties that can become airborne (I can't think of any, and they're probably so dense that they wouldn't go far).

Meanwhile the emergency plan is running balls to the wall. It's highly likely that some plant personnel might be lost in the initial explosion, but most of the essential personnel would be inside seismically qualified reinforced concrete buildings on the far side of the stricken containment building. Experienced operators, engineers and fire brigade personnel are evaluating the damage and responding, and relief shifts are coming in. Subject matter experts from around the country are a phone call away. Alarms are sounding, local, state, and federal authorities are notified, radiological experts scatter to measure the radiological impact, emergency personnel identify shut-ins and arrange to escort them out of the area, iodine pills will already have been distributed and will be available upon request, and then there's whatever the state itself might do in addition to the above. Emergency planning was one of the worst problems with TMI, and led to requirements to perform the above. And it's not pure window-dressing - the plants conduct drills with Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors onsite to evaluate them, and they'd damned well better do well unless the plant manager wants a black eye or worse.

So what happens to the environs? It'll take some cleanup, and there will probably be some lost life expectancy due to high radiation exposure to staff. Milk will be thrown away as a precaution. Offsite there could be more lost life expectancy, but that will take years to show up.

So where's the body count? Where's the symbolic value? IMO they'll hit something else because these plants just don't have the marquee value. They passed near Haddam Neck, Beaver Valley, Susquehanna, Peach Bottom, TMI and Indian Point the last time.

I'm sure I've left something out, working off the cuff like this - it's worth what you're paying for it. Questions are welcome.

Creating a theory, part II

Another post below led to a number of comments, and I really can't do them justice in the space YACCS provides. So I'll address them here.

First a note: my scientific background is in the "hard sciences". I'm used to being able to whip something up in a lab. I understand that that commonly causes conflict of sorts, as John Maynard Smith noted in one of his books - he came from a hard science background to the study of evolutionary biology. If biologists must settle for lower standards of proof than I am used to, so be it.

Notice that my claims have been very modest, as noted here. I certainly didn't claim that no evolution of any form had ever occurred. What I wrote was "But until those discoveries are made and successfully peer-reviewed, claims that evolution progressed from the first life forms and culminated in the development of modern man remain speculation, which places them on par with creationism." That last clause might be controversial, but I don't see any problem with the rest of the statement. I will refer to this below as The Theory. And it's no straw man.

One problem I have with The Theory is in another post, about "what is a species?". Some of the definitions of species in the links (which no one has questioned) sound a lot like the Supreme Court definition of pornography - "I know it when I see it". Biologists may be trying to get a handle on something very slippery, but then that should tend to moderate claims, causing you to shy away from The Theory. Because if you can't even come up with a solid, universally applicable definition of a species, how can you ever say when speciation has occurred? If you're allowed to change the rules as you go, you can create circumstances in which evolutionary theory becomes unfalsifiable.

Mike Gannis asks several questions, one regarding the age of the earth. I'm agnostic. I really don't care much about the age of the earth, and I fail to see that it has much impact on my life or that of schoolkids. I'll just note that proof that the earth were fairly young would be bad news for The Theory, because it needs lots of time to work.

As for species in the fossil record, this goes back to the species definition problem again. We have found various fossil evidence that is found nowhere else in particular strata of the earth's crust, and various dating techniques give us an idea of how long ago these strata were deposited. If these species did not occur in earlier strata either, that would suggest that they had to have developed in a time period between that of the earlier strata. Or it might just mean that you haven't looked in the right places. That they haven't been found doesn't mean that they don't exist. I'll bet you a coelacanth that you'll find that some of those species were around if you look long enough.

We don't need The Theory to explain extinctions.

Apparently emergent species might be explained by migrations. I suppose if you looked in the Great Lakes and didn't know that sea lampreys already existed somewhere else, you might think that they had evolved there over the past century. Likewise for Corbicula, the obnoxious little clams that foul up heat exchangers and sprinkler systems.

The bottom line is that the claims for The Theory appear to have outrun the evidence. If you can't establish by exhaustion that certain species didn't exist before a certain point in time, tough luck - you don't have all the evidence you need. If it happens on long time scales, again, that's a problem for the proponents of The Theory to deal with before they make exorbitant claims - don't blame the rest of us.

Paul Orwin states that evolution is obvious on the scale of insects and microbial life. Other exceptional things happen to those critters too that cannot be applied to higher species, and again, what about that definition of species? Changes in color distributions, markings, etc, don't necessarily mean anything - they might just be expressions of other previously unsuspected capabilities of existing genotypes, and nobody is going to claim we have that figured out yet.

Incidentally, I'm not working from some sort of cheat book. I own books on all sides of this issue, and I've even read some of them, but I'm doing my own thinking and surfing here.

I would like to thank the participants for generally keeping the noise level down - I was prepared to cut messages ruthlessly if necessary, but that never became necessary despite the controversial subject.

Just asking...

What would happen if we quit teaching evolution in public schools? Besides the media circus?

Is hate natural?

Will Rogers once said "I never met a man I didn't like". I don't know if he ever went to the Middle East or not.

I can understand having strong feelings about somebody for good or ill. About groups? - well, I think the Democrats should be taught how to blush, but I suppose we can spare them. Eco-radicals? I think they should be forced to live as they would have the rest of us live, but other than that and maybe hosing them off now and then I suppose I can leave them alone. That probably does it.

Except for those #$%^# Jews. Sheesh, they cut the foreskins off their own kids - imagine what they'd do to yours.

Alright, I'm kidding. But really, what's with anti-Semitism? Why is it that out of all the groups out there, Jews have been picked on so universally?

I could theorize about the Jews in particular, but the point is about hatred in general. Is it natural? That is, do we have a propensity built in? Or must it be cultivated?

You can do what?

When I was little I came across the paperwork that came with a box of tampons. I was an early reader but in other respects was another clueless little kid. So I thought they must be pretty cool - with them, you could swim, ride horses, climb trees.... I was disappointed when I found out more details, and I quit playing with those cool little cardboard telescopes too.

You're expecting a terrific segue here, I can tell. Well, lately I've been reading a bunch of resumes and interviewing the people. And they're not performing per my expectations.

By now I'm a reasonably experienced interviewer. I've been on the other side of the table many times as a contractor, so I can sympathize with the candidates. I've often interviewed people as part of a team, occasionally in the lead, without adverse comment. I do tend to talk fast, so I temper that, especially with people whose native language might not be English. I do what I can to loosen people up. I don't believe I am unfair or unrealistic.

I do expect command of technical material, however. Details, not generalities - the position in question is for an experienced contractor who's ready to go NOW. Nobody will ever be an exact fit, but if we want trainees we'll specify them.

You don't have to be able to recite manuals - I can't do it either. But if I ask you to, say, give me a SQL query to show me all the fields and records from an Oracle table named X (select * from x), I expect a snappy answer without prompting. After all, the position calls for knowledge of basic SQL, and we wouldn't even be talking if that hadn't been claimed on the resume, so what's the problem?

Another candidate did much better on those core skills, but tried to tap-dance past us on some more advanced skills. Hint - if you claim to know something about advanced statistics, have a clue about fundamentals like Χ². If you claim Unix, I shouldn't be able to trip you up asking you how to list the files in a directory. Ad nauseam.

Candidates from contract firms should ordinarily be pre-screened or "teched" before a prospective client sees them. I had a really winner of one the other day - it's possible I was dealing with someone having a bad day, but I've never seen one that bad. This individual claimed significant experience with a special purpose Web information delivery tool that commands a substantial premium, but couldn't even tell me what it was for. Other topics were more of the same.

So do I have any interview tips? Relax. Don't try to snow me - if you don't know the answer, say so. Don't get rattled if you can't answer a question - we don't expect an exact fit, and we might well be asking you questions that go well above and beyond minimum requirements. Don't put anything on your resume/in a portfolio that you're not prepared to discuss in detail with a practitioner who might know it far better than you do. If I ask you for details, give me details, not generalities. If you can't remember the details, brush up on them before you show up - you want the job, don't you?

I suppose it would be cool to end this post with a tie back to the beginning, but I'm fresh out of tampon stories. But if you feel like sharing...

Bye bye Bernie

Bernard "Bernie" Ebbers has resigned as CEO of WorldCom. It's been an interesting ride.

Mr. Ebbers was a Canadian who went to Mississippi to go to college as I recall. Later he wound up getting involved with a small company called LDDS, which he built into today's WorldCom.

He fought mightily to maintain high stock prices, then used the stock to acquire firm after firm, including MCI ("money coming in"). Then the regulators nixed his purchase of Sprint, and it's been downhill ever since.

I suppose the stock price will recover a little in the short term, but the next CEO has a lot of work to do.

Born to be gay?

Gays are made, not born. Or are they?

Near as I can tell gays are divided on this one. If gays are born, then that seems to be nature's imprimatur - they're 100% natural. This accounts for a gay anti-abortion group that fears that if the relevant genetic conditions are ever identified, that these will be used to identify gay fetuses - and abort them.

Anybody who has been watching blogs for a while has seen some fluidity in self-classification. Of those, my favorite is "bisexual celibacy". As if being straight couldn't be frustrating enough...

I believe that gays are made, not born. I suppose we could find some genetic component, but it's difficult to see just how something like this would be transmitted genetically. And but for "turkey basters" or other approaches (don't miss this one), it's kinda hard to gays to breed to carry on the relevant genetic configuration.

Alright, let the rumble begin.

Creating a theory

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

You could insert "science" instead of "philosophy" and be equally accurate. But science has been politicized, and shoddy science has sometimes been tolerated because it happened to offer comfort to a particular political outlook.

Today's case involves the theory of evolution, which provides comfort to antireligious people and is presented dogmatically as if there were no possible alternative. They may be right, but they shouldn't tolerate shoddy science in the process. To do so is to elevate dogma above science.

My experience in discussing evolution is that its dogmatic (as opposed to scientific) defenders claim that it explains the entire world of biology. But when I ask for examples of species changing from one to another, they can't deliver anything convincing.

Now Doug Turnbull has pointed out this and this to me as demonstrating that speciation has occurred. I suppose it's arguable by someone with a stronger biological background than my own, but I'll take it as a given.

Does this demonstrate evolution? Not yet. The only examples discussed for vertebrates are based on "morphology", which could well have put Chihuahuas and Rottweilers as different species. None of the examples were more than one step. The theory isn't complete until the entire chain is assembled.

And it gets harder toward the top as species are more complex and less prolific. The new species, which presumably cannot mate with their parents or siblings, must occur often enough so that they can find each other. And this must occur for enough generations to establish the new species. (whatever a species might be, that is).

And we've seen fraud here before, such as Piltdown man.

Perhaps these links will be discovered. But until those discoveries are made and successfully peer-reviewed, claims that evolution progressed from the first life forms and culminated in the development of modern man remain speculation, which places them on par with creationism.

Old time expressions

Much of my family goes a long time between generations. I'm a trailing end Baby Boomer/leading edge Gen X, but my father was about the right age for WWII, and his father was about right for the Spanish American War. Another generation back fought on the Yankee side of the Civil War, and there's only two more before you get to the Revolution when a forebear showed up from Wales.

One result of this is that the family has some fairly ancient expressions. Older uncles and aunts used to listen to Amos 'n' Andy or saw Al Jolson, and they would make reference to old pop culture like Fibber McGee's closet. But best of all were the folksier things I'd hear from my grandmother.

Consider "your tongue runs like the clatterbone in a goose's ass". Sometimes it was a duck, but the idea was that the person in question was loquacious. (she was right about the geese - you can look, I won't tell)

She had 8 kids at the time of the Depression, and most were still at home. Times were tough, but she always had an ace in the hole - "we can all get tin bills and pick shit with the chickens".

She usually lived in small towns where everything was everybody else's business. So I learned that, with respect to babies, "the first one can come anytime, and the rest take 9 months".

I was the youngest grandchild and lived nearby, so I spent a lot of time with her while I was little and she was still competent and mobile. She taught me how to play cards, like Dirty 8, rummy and canasta. She never gave up, either - I could be way ahead, but she'd say "I've seen sicker dogs get well". Little wonder the tough old girl lived to be 100.

Sexual harassment at Mitsubishi

Blogging generally isn't original reporting, and what I have to offer is hearsay. But I find it credible because I know my source very well, and it's consistent with my experience. And to my knowledge, no "name" journalist has ever investigated it from this side.

The Mitsubishi plant was built in the mid 80's northwest of Bloomington, IL just off I-74 on the way to Peoria. I'm from the general vicinity and they hired a number of engineers, so I made it my business to meet people who worked there.

Then came the sexual harassment suits. I was morbidly curious and wanted to hear the scuttlebutt, so I called my best source.

He said a number of the women involved were unproductive and had been in trouble for that reason. What's more, some women at the site were known to offer BJs or other favors to men who would cover their work for them.

Again, it's hearsay, and not much at that. But if it leads someone to do an honest substantial investigation it's worth something. I suspect that the real crime was that Mitsubishi didn't donate enough money to the Democratic Party.

Justice is...

You know what last week's anti-globo protest needed? A homicide bomber. But it couldn't have happened, because all the suicidal losers are on their side.

Personally I favored a chemical approach. Spray them all with soap.

Just asking...

Does Planned Parenthood observe "Bring your kid to work day"?

Attaboy

More adult stem cell successes, from NRO.

IRS vs. Hollywood?

Among the most fantastic things ever produced in Hollywood are their financial records. Practices are outrageous, and this isn't exactly unknown.

But has anyone ever heard of a studio being audited by the IRS? Maybe it has happened and I missed it. It sounds like it could be fun though, watching disgustingly rich people poormouthing, claiming that they're not making any money.

It would be politically dangerous to take on movie studios though. These guys put on elaborate fantasies for the public for a living, and politicians wouldn't stand a chance against them. We'd hear braying about the 1st Amendment too, charges of being "politically motivated", etc.

So for practical purposes, Hollywood is probably above the law.

Don't forget a spoon

K will be 10 next week. God help us...

In honor of her birthday I started hunting down kid stuff like elephant jokes. And I had to know the rest of that obnoxious song that starts with "great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts". Heavens, we can't lose such a priceless piece of heritage die out.

I'm thinking...

Neat stuff is incubating, but it's not ready for posting yet. Obviously that didn't stop me from posting some of what you see below, but we'll see about doing better. Anyway it'll probably be slow until Thursday night.

If it's more scientific stuff you're after, you can't go wrong with Stephen Den Beste, Rand Simberg, Jay Manifold, Charles Murtaugh, Paul Orwin, Derek Lowe and occasionally Douglas Turnbull.

Later...

Practical home energy conservation

Summer is coming, and with it comes a change in power demand. Say what?

Yes, it's your problem. Although can vary from place to place, the summertime is usually the peak season for electric power consumption. That means that unless all of us help to back off on power consumption, rates can go up significantly and we might even have brownouts or blackouts.

Fortunately it really isn't that hard to reduce. I'm not some left-wing anti-globo idiot trying to save the world - I just want you to try some simple things that will reduce your expenses and increase power reliability with minimal effort. Deal?

Let me start by noting that some of you have broadband vs. dialup Internet access. Here information is analogous to energy, and your bandwidth or data rate is analogous to power.

However, they behave differently at high load - broadband will limit you to the data rate you have paid for (or else some idiot downloading streaming porn video could bring down the Internet from an overload). Power lines OTOH will attempt to maintain line voltage in your wiring beyond ratings until problems occur, which is why we have breakers and fuses. And our white-knuckled porn fiend can record his favorites, but your power has to be "live" (forget about batteries - you can't afford it).

Breakers and fuses are designed to avoid fire hazards, not to control your power consumption. You don't want nuisance trips, so the power demands that they react to are significantly higher than what you are expected to use. If you trip a breaker, investigate now, and don't put pennies in fuseboxes in any dwelling you intend to continue living in.

Alright, a little science. Energy is what you are being billed for, and it is billed in kilowatt-hours (kWh). Power is the rate at which you are using energy. It is how many kilowatt-hours you use per hour, which works out to kilowatts (kW). A watt (W) is 1/1000 of a kilowatt. A lot of times calculations are simpler if we use watt-hours (Wh) - 1 Wh = 1/1000 kWh.

The amount you are charged per kWh will vary substantially, but is probably on the order of a dime a kilowatt-hour - $0.10/kWh, or $0.0001/Wh. Put another way, divide the total number of watt-hours of power you use by 10,000 and that's roughly your bill in dollars. If you can count to four and know your left from your right, you can handle this calculation - just scoot the decimal point to the left 4 places.

Alright, back to your consumption - how can you know what it is? Let's start with light bulbs. Every one has a watt rating. So to determine the power consumption of a bulb, multiply its watt number by the number of hours you run it in a month (which gives you watt-hours, or Wh), then slide the decimal point over 4 places to the left. Add all of these up and you know how much you're paying for lighting.

If the above is too much effort, at least realize that in the summertime you are paying for that light bulb's juice twice - once to light it, and once to suck out the added heat. So if your circumstances permit, use lower wattage bulbs for replacements in the summer, because you'll save power.

Other low effort things to do are to close the drapes - you might like the light, but you don't need it when you're not in the room, and you'll protect the carpet and furniture. Eat later and cooler - sandwiches, salads,... Cut your hair shorter, and trim or cut off your beard. Make sure your dryer is vented properly. Dress lighter. Cheat the thermostat up a little each week to see what you can stand. Soak in a tub. Drink more liquids. Cook outdoors on the grill - you pay for this power twice too. Shut off the TV and unnecessary lights. Take shorter and cooler showers, and generally avoid adding humidity to the air.

Or just go outside - your body is like a 100W light bulb or thereabouts in terms of the heat it adds to the room. Visit your neighbors and let them pay for the power...

I haven't hunted lately, but James Dulley has good website for practical information on energy conservation, and he's permalinked with the geek stuff to the lower right of this page. Check it out.

What is a species?

This must be an easy question, right? Don't we teach this to high school kids everyday? Not so fast.

First let's start with the definition of a species at this link The point to be made is that the definition of species is incredibly muddy, even now that we're basing federal laws with nasty penalties upon it.

One popular definition of species that has been used in other blogs is Ernst Mayr's definition, from the link above:

Mayr (1940) defined species as "groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups." Dobzhansky (1950) defined species as "the largest and most inclusive ... reproductive community of sexual and cross-fertilizing individuals which share a common gene pool."

Hmm. This is convenient for those who would want to call a spotted owl distinctive enough to warrant Federal protection via the Endangered Species Act (ESA). (note-this is a PDF).

But it would also seem to tell us that Laplanders, Eskimos, Arabs, Nigerians, Maoris, Yanomamo and others are in fact distinct species, and that's about as unPC as you can get. We dare not suggest that there is even such a thing as races, much less different species of humans.

OK, we can dance around this by insisting that the populations be able to breed successfully with others and have fertile offspring. All of the above can and do interbreed when they can get at each other, so that pulls all of us humans back into the same species again.

But what about the spotted owls? Has anyone ever tried to breed them with other owl species? Are they just another example of one larger owl species that happens to live in a particular type of environment? If so, why do they merit protection?

What do the feds say? From the PDF above:

(6) The term ‘‘endangered species’’ means any species which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range other than a species of the Class Insecta determined by the Secretary to constitute a pest whose protection under the provisions of this Act would present an overwhelming and overriding risk to man.

So it is no help.

Do we get to pick and choose definitions depending on whose ox is gored?

UPDATE: From the comments, the ESA definition of "species":

(16) The term ''species'' includes any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature."

Thank you Mr. Logan. I guess that's why I'm not an attorney.

Count on the feds to muddy the waters further - now a species is a subspecies et al. OK, now what's a subspecies?

Blog bash envy

Here in flyover country I've had to read about blogganalia in NY twice, LA once or twice, SF, DC, the UK, and I think some Houstonians got together. Sheesh, I think even Knoxville got into the act with Glenn Reynolds hosting somebody.

I had to cancel a couple of weeks ago when I might otherwise have met some local talent (I'm in St. Louis for now). There are a few of us - Charles Austin, Christopher Johnson, Juan Gato, and Mark Nugent, and Stephen Green is in exile. But you can't expect so much from us - we're a much smaller market, and in periodic discussions with NY-based coworkers you'd think I was in Podunk.

What's Chicago's excuse? Surely there are enough bloggers, although the ones I can think of offhand are either away from home or aren't natives. Time it right and I might even be able to make it - surely nobody would want to miss that.

Geeky jokes

For statistics, engineering, accounting, and economists. I could do lawyers, but where would I start?

I'm killing time waiting on something, so the above was intended to keep me busy without losing too much stomach lining. What am I waiting on? I'll keep my opinions to myself, but I'm glad I'm not a kitten.

PDA ramblings

I got my first PDA about 4 years ago or so. The gadget freak in me was crying out for one, but I made several trips to the store to convince myself that I really could write into it directly. It turned out to be easy to learn, so I was hooked and got a Palm III.

Supply definitely created its own demand here. All of a sudden all of the stuff I needed to remember could be tracked with minimal effort, and backed up with a few keystrokes. The memory volume was such that I kept about every address, phone number, or other trivial bit of information in it fairly effortlessly. Bye bye Day-Timers.

Then I met somebody who had a better one, and a camera to work with it. Shortly thereafter I dropped my Palm III and it never recovered. I took this very well because it was my excuse to make a beeline to the electronics store and buy the next one, with more RAM and more apps. And of course, the digital camera module.

The camera led me into sin because it was so easy to take candids - you could point it and nobody would know. But the resolution wasn't so great, and although it took color pictures, you couldn't display them well on a grainy grayscale screen before downloading. They took a fair amount of RAM too. That was an older technology though - I might have to take another look.

Then about a year and a half later the alarm function acted flaky on the new one. A saner person would have spent more time investigating, and eventually I figured out what the problem was - I had changed a setting inadvertantly. But no, I had lusted after the color devices and I wanted rechargeable batteries, so it was a Visor Prism for me.

I've only had it for a couple of months now, but now the Treo has come out. What do you know? - I just had some trouble with the Prism after dropping it...

Actually I really did - the charging system was acting funny. But a little surfing on Handspring's website and an in-charger soft reset fixed the problem, so my baby goes back on the road again. The worst thing about the Prism is that it's fatter and doesn't have the built-in flip cover, so it lives more dangerously in my shirt pocket - I make sure the screen faces my chest. But the battery recharges rapidly, and although the screen isn't as sharp as the ones on certain Sony Cliés, it's ok. The next gotta-have features are probably vibrating alarms, higher screen resolutions, and better printing/syncing capabilities.

Nowadays you can get shrinkwrapped apps easily - BugMe, PocketQuicken, a spreadsheet, AvantGo...life is good. If you want hardware some is probably available at a Best Buy or CompUSA. You can get phones, modems, GPS, Ethernet, barcode/mag card readers, games, electronic books (dictionaries, PDR, Bibles...), even a massager and power-napper. There are also full-sized foldup keyboards or the little thumb-keyboards like on a BlackBerry. I suppose a full-blown docking station can't be far off.

I've never tried the non-Palm alternatives. The day could come. But I expect the devices will be far more trouble-prone, and you don't want trouble with a PDA. It's just supposed to work flawlessly when you whip it out until it becomes second nature.