The Tin Lizard

The Parable Of The Fatted Calf - A Math Problem

The latest non-news on this evening's ABC-TV "news" was a fluffy report on an already-known topic:  How outward indications on your body (your fingernails, for example) may reflect certain things about your health.

In this case, Daffy Diane was all agog over a physician's "revelation" that certain external features may reflect a greater danger of heart disease.   According to the helpful diagram presented, if your calves are less than thirteen inches in diameter, it could be an indication of greater heart attack risk.

Wait.... diameter?  Did that say diameter?   I played it back.  Yes!  Diameter!   I tried to imagine a 13-inch-diameter calf.   To help me feature it, I took a photo which I am also sharing with you, dear reader, if you have the stomach for it.  Here:

In the photo, 13 inches is the distance from the left end of the ruler to my thumb.  Gee, I must be at really severe risk!  How counterintuitive!  I would think that anyone with calves that huge would be the one who's got a serious risk of heart attack.

Well, of course, it's just a little math problem.  They didn't mean diameter, they meant circumference.  And that's what they say in the accompanying voice-over:  "calves less than 13 inches around."   So I guess I'm OK after all; mine measures nearly 16 inches.

Still, my ninth-grade geometry teacher (whose calves were surely no more than maybe ten inches in diameter) would be appalled; and she probably would thwack the ABC news editors with that ruler to lay down a marker about the deterioration of basic education.

Can Christmas Survive In A Multicultural Society?

The end of the year is rife with holidays, from Veterans Day to Thanksgiving, and on through Christmas and New Year's Day.   But all is not well in holiday-land.  People (one of us anyway) are beginning to reject the idea of a triple holiday honoring veterans, and Thanksgiving is under attack from Sears and others (see yesterday's Tin Lizard). 

Now, Christmas is under predictable pressure, as other religions begin to push for having their own religious holidays marked as "official."  Muslims seeking no-school days for their religious calendar in Montgomery County, Maryland, are but the tip of an iceberg that - unlike the typical iceberg - won't melt away, but will grow ever larger.  It seems entirely fair, yet it's something we obviously can't afford, at least not until robots are doing absolutely everything for us, kids no longer need to learn, and humankind no longer needs to be productive.

It seems an ideal time to revisit the Morning Fog revised holiday plan, which offers a solution for exactly this sort of problem.  This idea was too far ahead of its time when first proposed a couple of years ago, but with Republicans and Democrats now looking for something on which they can agree, it may be just the ticket.  There's something to like (and dislike) for everyone. 

 

Thanksgiving Attack

In only a few days now, Americans will be celebrating that most American of holidays, Thanksgiving, the one holiday in which we all share equally, regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or the number of fingers on our hands; and also the one that has remained remarkably untainted by commercialism.

Until now.  Some major retailers (Sears, Target), with others sure to follow, are opening stores to shoppers on Thanksgiving evening.  No more waiting until midnight for those bargains!  The motivation is pure greed:  Stores want to get more of your money, sooner.  No waiting until tomorrow to acquire your dollars if they can have them today!  And they'll gradually expand hours in coming years so that Thanksgiving can be just another day to go buy something.  (Pity their poor employees.)

The stores offer the justification that consumers want to shop on Thanksgiving, nobody's doing much of anything Thanksgiving afternoon anyway.  They're probably right about that:  I'm sure there are people - lots of them - prepared or even eager to dash out that evening to acquire a fantastic bargain on a television the size of a football field, or other such essential merchandise.  

If you're not among that group, you can stay home (and boycott these stores for the season if you like); but your holiday will still be different if your wife, or even your uncle Harry, plans to rush out to the nearest mall.

 

 

 

Newtech Becomes Oldtech Rapidly

Our standard wall plug for appliances, lamps, and the like in the U.S. has two simple  flat-blade prongs, with one prong broader than the other.   This form prevents improper polarization, which is a danger in some types of electrical devices. 

It wasn't always that way.  Plugs used to have two flat blades of equal breadth.  I still think of the current configuration as the "new" style plug, and in the back of my mind, I harbored the impression it was introduced perhaps ... 20 years ago.   Lately, though, I found out the big change in wall plugs was actually introduced in 1962, exactly fifty years ago.

How time flies!  Other changes, too have sometimes escaped me.  Care to guess about the chimsel (CHMSL - "center high mount stop lamp,") better known as the brake light in the center of the rear window on your car?  I've just checked and that's only been around since 1986.  But old habits die hard, and I remember having a devil of a time when my 2003 Volvo was telling me I had a brake light out ... yet I'd go to the back of the car and look, and they were "both" working!   I replaced both bulbs but the dashboard continued to insist a light was out.   Embarrassingly, it took a visit to the service center before I realize my problem. 

I can also recall returning from assignment in Yugoslavia in the mid-1970s and being puzzled by the electronic gas pump, which by then was common in the U.S. but not in Yugoslavia.  I had no idea how to get gas out of that thing the first time I saw it!  But try to find one of those old-fashioned mechanical pumps now.

The lesson I take from this is ... I'm old!  Well no, that is true but it's not the lesson.  The lesson is that minor technological changes in the way we do things can seem troublesome or costly at first (the CHMSL was very controversial when first introduced because it added to the cost of cars), but very quickly become second nature.  The "new" can take over from the old to the point that the "old" hardly seems to exist any longer.  This is self-evident in the case of high-tech like cell phones, but I like these examples because they demonstrate the same is true for much less esoteric changes.

It;s good news for those who advocate burying power lines to reduce outages.  If we had begun burying lines even two decades ago, in every new development and in every installation that was razed and replaced, we'd have the job more than half done by now.  We need to start somewhere.

Will The Real Holiday Please Stand Up?

Which statement is correct?

Last Sunday was Veterans Day in the U.S. 
Last Monday was Veterans Day in the U.S.

They both are.  When Washington calendar-manglers decided, in the early seventies, that nearly all our national holiday observations should always take place on a Monday, Veterans Day was included in that sweeping proclamation, to occur on the fourth Monday of October.

But it wasn't long before veterans' groups pushed to retain the original date, November 11, because of its historic significance as the date of the armistice that ended WW I).  That move was duly approved, and Veterans Day was officially restored to November 11.

Or not.  This year, we have the confusing situation of two Veterans Days, for no better reason than that November 11 fell on Sunday, so nobody got the day off.  Call me old school, but it seems sensible to me that a holiday with a specific date should be observed on that date.  If it happens to fall on a Saturday or Sunday, that's too bad.  Particularly since veterans specifically requested it be observed always on November 11. 

Moreover, in the case of Veterans Day, the things we normally do to observe the day can be accomplished perfectly well on a Sunday (maybe better):  parades, observances, and the like.  And even moremoreover, we already have another day honoring veterans -- Memorial Day, in May. 

The push for all these Monday holidays is/was commercially driven.  For retailers, any day off is a day that people should devote to shopping.  In all cases, it cheapens the meaning of the holiday by turning it into a fire sale.  Let's restore integrity to Veterans Day, and productivity to our economy.   

Do Telephone Polls Have A Future?

Today's news had an interesting review of statements by various pundits whose predictions about Tuesday's election had been flatly wrong.  It makes for fun reading, but all it suggests to me is that it's difficult even for the most objective observer to predict outcomes without factoring in his/her own personal biases.   If I had had time to write anything the day before the election, I'd have forecast that Obama would win, and that his electoral-vote total would be much less close than was generally forecast.  It turns out I would have been right, yet how could I assure myself that it wasn't biased thinking on my part?

The pollsters largely proved themselves correct, though:  The electorate was indeed narrowly split, eight or nine states were key to the election, and most of those were showing "too close to call" but generally giving Obama the edge. 

That seems to me to be a greater feat of prediction than it appears at first glance.  Despite our sometimes desperate and frenzied attempts to suss out beforehand what we'll learn in due time anyway, it's getting harder and harder to do election polling. 

Pollsters have usually said the most reliable results come from telephone interviews, yet as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, wired phones are becoming rarer, especially among the young, and cell phone numbers are not so easily accessible as land-line ones. 

On the other end of the scale, lots of us geezers who still have landlines have caller ID; we added it at my house a year or two ago, and it's been a godsend, especially in this election season, when we were besieged as often as 20 times a day by "private" or "unavailable" phone numbers seeking contributions or wishing to learn our views.  All those calls went unanswered. 

So who, exactly, are the pollsters reaching?  That they came up with such an accurate picture is quite amazing.

Storm Tech

We're just emerging from the aftereffects of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Sandy.  We were lucky to be on the southern edge of the storm's track so we suffered nothing like the damage inflicted on New Jersey and New York, mainly about 12 hours of high winds, some downed trees, and about 6 inches of rain.

The downed trees, as always, knocked electric power out for a day or two, but we've almost got used to that (in fact authorities were actually predicting outages), and kudos to our utility, Dominion Virginia Power, for restoring power quicker than expected.

One thing we observed during the three outages we have experience this year, though: With power out, you're actually more disconnected than you used to be.  Your fiber-optic phone line doesn't stay connected like the old copper lines did; you have battery good for about 8 hours, and then kaput.  Cordless phones in the house?  They'r out of commission as soon as the power goes off anyway.  Your cell phone will need recharging at some point but there will be no power to do so except of course from your car, or if you have bought a generator (which we finally did).  Television and the internet are out (unless you invested thousands in a whole-house generator, which we did not). 

Oldtech works.  The old-fashioned paper newspaper still appeared on the front walk.  The snail mail still came through the mail slot.  No biggie, maybe, for a day or two.  But in the event of a long-term, serious emergency, can we afford to be without these systems.