I have a leftover invite. Please check e-mail at tnh@... for details.
Be warned: Google says they have "lots of stamps to lick", so it may take a while to actually get the account.
I've dug up two interesting papers on bike helmets and traumatic brain injury.
- A review of early work by RS Thompson, FP Rivara, DC Thompson. These researchers are responsible for many widely-reported statistics about bicycle helmets, including the claim that helmets reduce head injuries by 88%. The problem: Several of their papers have been heavily criticized by other researchers, and one of their best known review papers may have never gone through peer review. I would strongly recommend reading the criticisms of their work before quoting the "88%" statistic.
- Impact of Mandatory Helmet Legislation on Bicycle-Related Head Injuries in Children: A Population-Based Study. This study is based on medical data from the Canadian health system, and it's designed to correct for factors such as decreased bicycling. The conclusion: Mandatory helmet laws do decrease head injury (relative to other types of cycling injury), but the effects were limited: "The bicycle-related head injury rate declined significantly (45% reduction) in provinces where legislation had been adopted compared with provinces and territories that did not adopt legislation (27% reduction)." That's a relative improvement of 18%. Note that this study tends to error on the side of caution, so the actual effect may be bigger.
In other words, mandatory helmet laws almost certainly cause some reduction in injuries to children. Obviously, this needs to be weighed against equally ambiguous studies which claim that helmets may (or may not) discourage cycling.
There's a lot of other studies at the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute, a non-profit cyclists' organization which sits on several helmet-related standards committees. Unfortunately, flipping through these studies strongly suggests that there's little consensus in the field. In fact, many pro- and anti- helmet organizations may have been cherry-picking statistics which confirm their pre-existing beliefs.
TNH @ 65: [Y]our two most effective safety measures are to not have loose kipple lying around in your car, and to insist that everyone else buckle up.
Thank you. These are both excellent pieces of advice.
abi @ 67, referring to cycling safety arguments: Indeed, it may not be safe to cycle at all, what with going over the handlebars and such.
I certainly wouldn't make this case, despite having been over the handlebars a couple of times. For road-bikers, going over the handlebars is a pretty rare event unless you get doored or struck by car.[1] For mountain bikers, it's a bit more common. But the two times when I have gone over, a helmet was certainly a welcome companion on my journey.
A young, healthy human body seems to survive most falls when moving at or below running speed. But above running speed, the odds of serious injury increase beyond my personal comfort zone. So I use a little bit of supplemental padding (and common sense) to make up for my evolutionary limitations. :-) And I try to avoid traveling at speeds where the safety gear becomes completely ineffective. My maximum acceptable speed on a bicycle is somewhere under 30–35 mph, under absolutely optimal conditions. I've exceeded 40 mph twice, and hope to never do it again.
[1] One of my friends in Cambridge, MA ran into an illegally-turning car, did a somersault over the hood, and landed on his feet. The impact of the landing left him partially disabled for weeks, IIRC.
Correction to my comment @ 52: The alleged 12.5mph impact speed for bike helmets was mentioned in the comment thread, not in the article. So I don't know if it's an accurate figure. However, I do recommend the article itself. It claims that (a) some studies suggest than bike helmets prevent up to 80% of head injuries, but that (b) helmet laws may nonetheless have a net negative effect on public health.
TNH @ 53: I'm not sure that I'd have the courage to cycle if I were similarly vulnerable to a fall. Once something crosses my physical risk threshold, I tend to stop suddenly, and for good. As for your comments about helmets and car accidents @ 52, I need to think about those for a while. Perhaps I really ought to start. :-)
I'm an enormous fan of bike helmets. I've gone over the handlebars twice in my life[1]. Both times, I walked away completely uninjured, and replaced the helmet. I also have a set of badly-abraded knee and wrist pads from my inline skating days. Again, no injuries whatsoever. So, based entirely on anecdotal evidence, I tend to assume that appropriate safety gear is a Good Thing. And if anybody has studies suggesting that wearing a helmet in a car or on the sidewalk is equivalently useful, I'm actually prepared to listen.[2] :-)
Now, anecdotal evidence doesn't justify PSAs with pictures of crushed skulls, or obnoxious public moralizing. And the article mentioned above does raise some interesting questions about helmet laws and the number of cyclists on the road. So I'm perfectly happy to listen to the evidence.
But there's no way that I'm giving up on any of my safety gear. It has served me well over the years, and—all other things being equal—I prefer to avoid unnecessary pain.
(On a political note, I wish Vermont would get even more serious about drunk drivers. And it wouldn't hurt to put 18" of paved shoulder on certain heavily-used roads. This would make me a lot more willing to cycle into town.)
[1] Once thanks to youthful stupidity (and a badly-parked car on a blind private drive), and once thanks to a rental mountain bike with a badly-tightened headset.
[2] Bike helmets seem to be most useful for low-speed head impacts, such as going over the handlebars.[3] Clearly, they're less useful if you're a pedestrian who has been hit from behind by a truck.
[3] According to this excellent article on helmet laws, standard helmets are designed for impacts at less than 12.5mph. Both of my "over the handlebars" incidents probably happened below this speed.
Steve C. @ 30: Right now, our wars are fought by members of the US military, who put their own lives on the line.
<sarcasm>It's going to be so much better when our wars are fought by the kind of people who love the glory of war, but who would never put themselves in harm's way.</sarcasm> Just imagine a 2004-era warblogger with an "ethical" UAV and a video game controller.
Meanwhile, Obama's NH campaign is very much open for business. If you count just the people doing data entry in our local office, they outnumber the paid staffers 4-to-1. The canvassing teams are the biggest I've ever seen.
On November 3rd and 4th, they hope to run the largest Get Out The Vote operation I've ever seen in NH. (Volunteers, of course, are still eagerly welcome.)
The Obama campaign is much better-organized than the Kerry campaign. The plan is more intelligent, the paid staffers are more dedicated, and the volunteers have more training. For some background on how Obama and his team built this organization, see this article in the Huffington Post.
Personally, I do not want to wake up on November 5th and see President McCain and Vice-President Palin.
As noted by several people upthread, this is trivially crackable by anybody who has your book of numbers and a computer. In this case, "trivially crackable" means "well under a second."
Assume there are 500 pages in your book, and each page contains 100 lines of numbers. That's 50,000 possible keys to try.
For each key, decode 10 letters of the ciphertext. Compare those 10 letters to a table of English letter frequencies. Do you get "zqadtv.mlp"? It's not English text. Try the next line. At a billion instructions per second, this won't take long. English text is incredibly distinctive, so your computer will have no problem recognizing it.
If you're impatient, sort the lines of numbers, and store them in a trie. Decode the first character of the ciphertext using the digits from 1 to 10. Pick whichever digit decodes the first letter to "E", and walk down that branch of the trie recursively. If that results in nonsense, try the other branches in order of letter frequency: "EATOIN SHRDLU".
With a reasonably large database, you will be able to decrypt the message as fast as you can type it into your computer.
What if you don't have an electronic copy of the table of numbers? First, see if you can find out what book is in use. (This is left as an exercise for the reader.) If that fails, just pick the 200 best-selling books of numbers, and run them through an OCR system like that of Google books. You'll have a ton of OCR errors, but that's OK--you can adapt the algorithm to work with error-filled tables; it will just take longer to run.
If you want a reasonably strong pencil-and-paper cipher, follow Bruce Schneier's Solitaire link upthread.
Heard from a retired naval aviator: "The three most useless things in the world are (1) the runway behind you, (2) the altitude above you, and (3) the fumes of gas in your tank."
I’ve written both in-house and shrink-wrapped software, and the shrink-wrapped software is almost always much better than the in-house software. There’s a good business reason for this.
Let’s say that adding a particular new feature to Frobnix 2.0 will save each user one hour per year, but that the feature will take me 100 hours to implement. If Frobnix is in-house software with 20 users, then paying off this feature will take five years. But if Frobnix 2.0 is shrink-wrapped software with 100,000 users, then paying off this feature will take under half a day.
So for very pragmatic business reasons, shrink-wrapped software (and popular websites) will always get more love than your average in-house order-taking application.
There are several ways to ameliorate the pain, however. First of all, you should never build an in-house version of anything that you can download from SourceForge, or that you can purchase on a departmental credit card. So there’s no excuse for not having wikis, decent bug trackers, or anything else like that.
But what if you could buy the software, except for the fact that it costs more than (say) your departmental manager’s $1000 discretionary limit for commercial software? In that case, the build-versus-buy distinction gets tricky. Let me recommend two interesting articles:
Camels and Rubber Duckies, by Joel Spolsky
Notice the gap? There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the Ritz Carlton. And with all this, the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you're sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than $75,000, you're losing money.
But once you start paying $75,000 for a software package, the quality drops tremendously. There’s two reasons for this: (1) As before, the expensive software is amortized over a smaller number of users, and (2) the decision to purchase the software is made on the basis of PowerPoints (and maybe a golf game or two), not on the basis of quality.
How to Start a Startup, by Paul Graham
It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it. And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can't outsell an Oracle salesman. So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers.
So if you ever have to make a build-versus-buy decision for in-house software costing more than a couple grand, you’re basically going to lose either way. If your programming team is good enough, you can get something nice and shiny—but still not as good as software developed for a larger user base.
I suspect that Obama does do research online, based on an hour and a half he spent talking with Marc Andreessen:
[Obama and I] were able to have an actual, honest-to-God conversation, back and forth, on a number of topics. In particular, the Senator was personally interested in the rise of social networking, Facebook, Youtube, and user-generated content, and casually but persistently grilled us on what we thought the next generation of social media would be and how social networking might affect politics -- with no staff present, no prepared materials, no notes. He already knew a fair amount about the topic but was very curious to actually learn more.
So Obama is actually able to have an interesting Internet-related conversation with Marc Andreessen. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that he reads a lot, either--Obama seems to be fairly well-informed on a wide range of issues, and you can't achieve that just by listening to staffers.
Tim @ #41: "French comedy video of the priest complaining about thirds"
Oooh! That sounds amusing, but Google doesn't seem to help me find it. Do you have a link? Thank you for any leads you can provide!
I hate having to argue that "torture doesn't work." There's something unclean about the very words. If we speak them, we acknowledge that we can no longer appeal to human decency or common morality. It should be enough to say that, "Torture is wrong. If anything is a work of the devil, it is breaking a man, tormenting him until he would eagerly forswear his children or his God."
In Orwell's 1984, O'Brien threatens Winston with a cage of rats. And Winston breaks, begging O'Brien to torture Winston's lover Julia instead:
The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then--no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment--one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.
"Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!"
The torture-mongers tell us that we must become O'Brien, breaking men in hopes of saving our own lives. They ask us to measure out pain and sadism scientifically, applying no more than necessary, for we are not a cruel nation. But if we wish to live, they say, we must do these things.
What an honorable man or woman could buy their own life at such a price? Better to die, and save one's soul.
Martin @ 17: Jim Henley asked that same question. I remember his article because it contained an especially memorable bit of snark: "We are hard men for hard times, and we want hard make-believe conundrums."
Leaving aside such carefully constructed hypyotheticals ("But what if was an alien nova bomb, and it was going to destroy planet Earth?"), I do miss the days when the tough guys were people who said things like, "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure maegen lytlað."
It takes more courage to die honorably than it takes to apply electrodes to a restrained prisoner. But somehow, our contemporary political discourse is based around the latter definition of "toughness." We live in a world of Serious Men of Washington, where people go around saying things like, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
I long for a time when our national heroes were people like Nathan Hale and Patrick Henry. Dirty Harry and Jack Bauer just aren't the same.
[Oops. Looks like I made the same recommendation in last October's Diners in New England thread. My apologies for the duplication, and please feel free to delete #8.]
I've had my share of late-night dinners at the Fort. They added a lot of excellent menu items when they were owned by Lou's.
But if you ever feel a craving for some excellent bacon, you should definitely drop by The Farmer's Diner over in Queechee. Their breakfast meats are uniformly amazing, and the chocolate milk is the best I've ever had. (And if bacon isn't your thing, go for their maple sausage.) Much of the menu comes from local Vermont farms.
They claim that they're 9 minutes west of the I-89/I-91 intersection, which sounds about right.
And thanks for the head's-up about "Book 'Em." It's sounds like an excellent event.
AFAIK, sugar metabolism is fairly complicated, and not entirely understood. Fructose--whether from HFCS or table sugar--is metabolized via a different pathway than glucose. At one point, diabetics were encouraged to consume fructose, on the theory that it reached the bloodstream more slowly than glucose. But recent research suggests that this may not be such a good idea, for reasons mentioned by Jakob @ 11.
Here's a survey paper, with lots of pointers to other studies. The author is not a fan of fructose, FWIW.
Diatryma @ 20: I have not been convinced that high-fructose corn syrup itself is distilled metabolic evil, not compared to a similar quantity or equivalent sweetness of sucrose.
From my (very limited) understanding of the research, HFCS and sucrose cause the same sorts of problems.
ajay @ 21: As for humans not being supposed to consume it - not really, unless you think humans aren't supposed to eat fruit.
Well, actual fruit tends to have a reasonable amount of fiber. So it's entirely possible that our bodies can handle an occasional piece of fruit better than they can handle a lot of sugary junk food.
Im in ur Xanadu,
eatin ur laudanum.
Oh noes! Doorknock!
What Patrick said in #53, re: Bernie. He may be a proud socialist, but he's also a fixture of Vermont politics, and draws considerable support even from conservative voters. He's a competent executive (or so Burlington residents say); he's a tireless tilter at the windmills of idiocy and corruption; and he campaigns his heart out in every tiny town, even when he's 30 points up.
In other news from the northeast, Peter Welch (D, VT-AL) won Bernie's old seat, his first victory in several statewide elections. Credit where credit is due, however: Rainville ran a clean campaign (one of the few Republicans do so), and lost honorably.
In New Hampshire, it was a great night for the Democrats. Hodes beat Bass (a 12-year incumbent) and Shea-Porter won a surprise victory in the south. The voter anger was palpable--in the city of Lebanon, the Democrats swept every single race, typically by 2:1 or better. You hear about "nationalizing" elections, but I've never seen it happen for the registrar of deeds.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2009 | 7 |
| 2008 | 6 |
| 2007 | 6 |
| 2006 | 3 |
| 2005 | 4 |
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