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.
Sunday, May 12, 2002
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?
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, May 11, 2002
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.
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.
Friday, May 10, 2002
Thursday, May 09, 2002
Wednesday, May 08, 2002
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?
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?
Monday, May 06, 2002
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, May 05, 2002
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...
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...
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.
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.
Thursday, May 02, 2002
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.
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 #$%^# Jews. Sheesh, they cut the foreskins off their own kids - imagine what they'd do to yours.
Alright, I'm kidding. But really, what's with anti-Semitism? Why is it that out of all the groups out there, Jews have been picked on so universally?
I could theorize about the Jews in particular, but the point is about hatred in general. Is it natural? That is, do we have a propensity built in? Or must it be cultivated?
I can understand having strong feelings about somebody for good or ill. About groups? - well, I think the Democrats should be taught how to blush, but I suppose we can spare them. Eco-radicals? I think they should be forced to live as they would have the rest of us live, but other than that and maybe hosing them off now and then I suppose I can leave them alone. That probably does it.
Except for those #$%^# 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?
Wednesday, May 01, 2002
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...
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...
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
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.
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.
Sunday, April 28, 2002
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.
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.
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