There was a presentation at the Austin Maker Faire by the author of Kluge. He pointed out that 6% of skydiving fatalities are experienced jumpers who just plain forget to pull the rip cord. This is a mistake that beginners never make.
P J,
When I see how much science fiction is written by people who don't have a grasp of what is contained in Principia Mathematica I have no problem at all with starting with the basics. Remember that Principia is also Netwon's introduction to integral calculus. The Fundamental Theorem of Integral Calculus is the dividing line between the great mass of the population that is scientifically illiterate and the smaller percentage that have a clue.
What is taught in physics class is not just physics but experimental science. The physics is trivial if you understand it---the experimental science is a world view that most people never grasp. I think most people could learn it given the proper tutelage.
As an analogy, think about learning music. Most young music students get wrapped up in playing the notes. It is much more important to learn to play the music and it is quite a different skill.
#35 ::: heresiarch
Did China loan us the money for the rope with which we have hung ourselves?
My dad, who died in 1969, was sure the US was working its way toward the depression to end all depressions. He couldn't have imagined this.
We are sitting here near 290 east of Manor, about 10 miles east of Austin, watching the cars coming from the Houston area. For the past 36 hours they've kept coming. Sometimes the traffic is fairly light and sometimes bumper to bumper.
I hope the Bishop's Palace on Galveston survives. In 1900 it was the nearest building to the shoreline still standing. It is one of the most finely crafted houses I have ever seen.
I agree with Charlie that trust is not a problem to be solved by the application of a computer. The issue that gets the voting machines in the door is accessibility for disabled people. They should hand printed ballots to everyone who can use them and provide a machine for the disabled that will mark their ballot for them and give them feedback, in the form they need, that it has been done properly.
guthrie's question about market failure is on target. I worked for a company that built SCADA systems about 20 years ago. We sold to cities and counties and the amount of back scratching and fine dinners provided to help the officials make up their minds was unbelievable.
At the national level we see a Republican administration pass the Help America Vote Act to buy products from companies that are all owned by Republicans. All this to displace voting systems that were more reliable that the equipment that replaced them.
Here in Texas the Secretary of State certified the Hart Intercivic machines after a test that was nothing but a dog and pony show put on by the vendor's marketing people.
My wife worked at the polls and saw that the most common error was that people forgot to push the button to register their vote after they had set their choices. The poll worker was not allowed to press the button. They were required to clear the inputs so the next voter could use the machine.
Hart Intercivic here in Austin uses the Precise real time operating system from ARC in its machines. It is a point in their favor but they also are in denial about the need for outside scrutiny of their source code. All other voting machines use either Windows CE or Windows.
I saw a presentation, four years ago, by a professor from Rice University who had analyzed the code for the Diebold system. Among other astonishing defects: the password was hard coded in the source code. Once you knew that password you could access any Diebold voting machine. There was no way for the user to change it!
He also described the handshaking between the card and the voting machine. It was simple minded beyond belief and easily circumvented. I asked him what grade he would give the programmer if the code had been handed in for a class assignment. F.
Sadly, I think incompetence is adequate to explain the poor design of voting machines. Much of the embedded code produced in this country is produced by EEs who are generally poor programmers. CS majors, on the other hand, frequently don't have enough hardware background to do good embedded work. The job really requires someone with both hardware and software chops and company management that values people with the necessary skill set.
Vito,
You miss the point. Laura is not Hillary. She would cut George's balls off if he messed around. These women are obviously infatuated with George. They all seem to be arrested at about the emotional level of a 13 year old girl waiting for the cool guy in class to notice them. Why are these late middle age women stuck at this emotional level? They all have had enough exposure to the world and have acquired enough skills to be attractive to some reasonably competent man. If George were single we could believe that they were each hoping to be the lucky one to catch him but he is taken.
As for working with George. George doesn't work. When he was governor here in Texas he had reached his ideal position. The governor doesn't have any real power and he was free to come in at 9:00 and leave at 3:00. He has never accomplished anything by his own effort. This is why George is so enamoured of going with his gut. He has no skills to draw on. How many times has he told us what a hard job he has? Can you imagine Bill or Hillary whining about what a tough job it is?
Vito,
There isn't any sign of George working professionally with these women. They are obsessed with him in a way that has nothing to do with the job they are ostensibly doing.
George is noteworthy for the incompetence of the people attracted to him and the inappropriate roles in which he places them. A competent person of either gender would refuse to be placed in the position Harriet Meyers found herself in.
My comment is made in the context of being involved in a singles program for 15 years and seeing the unerring skill with which some people established the worst possible relationships, time after time.
I find Bill's kind of infidelity much more human and understandable than the creepy horde of women that hangs around George Bush. Condoleezza, Harriet, Karen Hughes and the others. I don't know how Laura sleeps at night.
They are close to his age and old enough to know better rather than being the horny young intern with stars in her eyes. It is the unfathomable mystery of why some women are drawn to alcoholics and abusive men. Shudder!
Herschel Shanks, the publisher of Biblical Archaeology Review, uses controversy to sell magazines. The articles in the magazine are written by reputable, recognized scholars of the field. It happens there is enough built in controversy that he doesn't need to do much to keep the pot boiling.
If you read the magazine long enough you will develop a feel for whose work you trust and who you do not.
The range of opinion runs from the minimalists who believe that the Pentatuch was written during the Persian period to traditionalists who believe that it was written fairly early with information embedded from the time periods described in the text.
No reputable scholar believes the Pentatuch was written by Moses and this leads to frequent cancel my subscription letters from fundamentalists who think that only their point of view should be allowed in print.
My daughter attends the annual scholarly meetings of the SBL, ASOR, etc. and she assures me that the field is every bit as contentious as Shanks makes it appear in the pages of his magazine.
Exclusive OR or Exclusive NOR. Exclusive AND and Exclusive NAND are oxymorons. I do love the incursion of electronic hardware into poetry. I used to give interpretive readings of Atmel AVR assembly code at some of our engineering meetings.
I'm too lazy to Google it up but not long ago a group of religious scholars got together and created an acceptable curiculum for a class on religion to be taught in public shcools. The Georgia legislature (or some other southern state) proposed to add it to the state curiculum. The Fundies went ballistic. The last thing they want their kids to do is actually study the Bible.
Teresa has gotten at the root of what I have been saying for years about the school prayer issue. The very people who don't want the government telling them how to raise their kids never-the-less want the government to impose prayer on public school children.
Whenever I get into a discussion with a prayer in schools advocate I ask them if they pray with their child/children every morning. I've yet to have one say yes.
Even more interesting are the conversations I have with believers when I mention that my son-in-law has a PhD in systematic theology and my daughter has one in Hebrew Bible. Most Christians have no idea what systematic theology is. Hebrew Bible they can sort of grasp though not the level of intellectual discipline involved in the study.
Lizzy,
Sounds like she has gastroparesis caused by neuropathy. This impairs the emptying of her stomach and causes an unpredictable delay as to when food will affect her blood sugar reading.
I'm surprised her doctor is still using NPH for her basal dose. Initially I used Lantus and switched to Levemir as soon as it became available.
Lantus and Levemir are touted as 24 hour insulins. Don't believe it. I shoot half my basal dose every 12 hours. I use Novolog for my short term insulin. Lunch is my main meal of the day and I shoot an hour and again at a half hour before I start to eat. My post-prandial number seldom gets above 100 if I manage my dosing properly.
The cost of all this is that I never eat anything spontaneously and this level of self care requires a lot of attention and emotional energy. The results are worth it.
Lizzy,
You have my sympathy. I manage my own diabetes with insulin and I have a diabetic cat I care for. I live by my meter and the low-carb diet. Caretakers who are not allowed to adjust the amount of insulin given have a hopeless task. With careful monitoring and control over what I eat I keep my blood sugar between 80 and 100 with only an occasional excursion slightly higher or or lower.
Champagne our cat ranges between 20 and 500 despite blood sugar checks 4 times a day and careful adaptation of insulin doses to his needs. It is tough to manage someone else who cannot cooperate in their care. I can understand how frustrated you are watching your mother's physical condition deteriorate because of the poor control.
I feel special sympathy for the parents of diabetic children. Their children will live their whole lives with the consequences of any inability to keep the blood sugar stable.
My greatest fear in life is that I will someday be in the circumstances that your mother is in. Unable to care for myself and left to the mercies of a system that cannot care for me properly.
Bruce,
It looks like I read your mind. I've been a fan of Buchla's instruments all the way back to the Buchla 100. The controller that comes with the Wii is based on silicon accelerometers made by Analog Devices. A Lightning like device should be well within the hardware capacity of the Wii. I rate this as something that is highly likely to be undertaken.
I'll make a note of your email address in my projects file. When I see any projects underway that look adaptable for this purpose I'll let you know.
Bruce,
You can count on it that someone will port Linux to the Wii. What sort of application do you have in mind? From the descriptions I've read of the wireless controller that comes with it the hardware hacking community will have a field day.
It would be simple to repurpose the Wii as a sound synthesizer. It is a PowerPC processor and it would be easy to port James McCartney's Supercollider synthesis language. You could then equip a modern dance company with one per dancer and they could generate their own accompaniment as they danced.
Hacking will begin as soon as the system is actually on the market.
I donate blood every 8 weeks. I was truly hooked on donating blood the day I was called in to donate for a neonate who was going to undergo open heart surgery.
Those of us who are diabetic can also contribute by caring for ourselves so well that we don't ever need that kidney transplant. That will leave the limited supply of kidneys to the most needy.
Sometimes it is not so simple. My cousin, the family historian, went to work on tracing down our English ancestors. He found a family in Pennsylvania who looked like probable relatives. With the miracle of genetic testing he proved that we were related. We have in common the M3 haplotype. We are descended from some Mohican boys who were adopted by an English family in the eighteenth century. We have buried the bones of our ancestors in the earth of this continent for 13,000 years.
The amazing thing about this thread is the civil tone that everyone has maintained. I have participated in the Usenet diabetes support newsgroups and they are perpetually infested with trolls and much rudeness. Diabetics tend to have a great deal of emotional investment in their mode of treatment and there is a lot of harrasment of people with different ideas and experiences.
This is particularly ironic since the appear to be a large number of subvarieties of diabetes.
I'm a Type 2 who is not insulin resistant, who excercised a lot, and was only slightly overweight. My native American genes seem to influence my health out of proportion to the percentage they make up of my genome.
There are two attitudes I have found among diabetics that are particularly puzzling to me. The first are those who refuse to deal with their condition. They seem convinced that if they ignore it it will go away. It will, when they die. The second are those who are convinced that their doctor is infallible and if they do what he says and he says everything is fine then they will be alright. These people defend the ADA standard of care as the golden standard for diabetic treament rather than acknowledging that it is the bare minimum you can get by with.
Both of these points of view strike me as ways of whistling past the graveyard rather than dealing agressively with the problem.
Jim,
The reason I point out the lab test results that are precusors to developing diabetes is because with the current mode of diagnosis, half of all diabetics have suffered permanent damage before they are diagnosed. I am displeased to be among that half.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 2 |
| 2008 | 8 |
| 2007 | 3 |
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2005 | 3 |
| 2004 | 5 |
| 2003 | 14 |
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