He has erected a multitude of New Offices,
and sent hither swarms of Officers
to harrass our People, and eatouttheirsubstance
I am told that I must treat the TSA "officers" with respect, for they
are only doing their jobs. See last week.
For reasons not clear -- I kept asking what I had done -- I was selected
for numerous indignities as a condition of boarding my airplane home from
Salt Lake City. My ticket had been purchased by Brigham Young University,
which apparently expects good sense from the TSA.
I am told to quit whining about and get on with life; it was no more than
inconvenience. Is that not a small price to pay for the increased security?
Is there a rational person in these United States who believes the TSA
procedures cannot be circumvented? But one woman who said, "If I had hidden
a bomb you would not find it," was shown they would have: they blew up
her luggage. This AFTER the flight was completed, to the cost of
delaying everyone on an airplane that had safely landed. Can anyone doubt
what the real purpose of that stunt was? Is there anyone who supposes that
all of us are safer as a result? Yet I have readers who said, "Well, yes,
but she got what she deserved." A truthful remark deserves that treatment.
But we were born free.
Tons of heroin are smuggled into the United States each year, much of it
on commercial airline flights. Does anyone doubt that the same techniques
could be used to introduce explosives onto the airplanes? Or that al Qaeda
is insufficiently endowed with intelligence as to be able to find out how
drugs and other substances are smuggled? Is there anyone past first year
chemistry unaware of how to construct impermeable barriers to the effluvium
of explosives (as well as of alkaloids)? I leave out the
specifics as I left out the specifics of making war gasses in Lucifer's
Hammer since I suppose there may be one person intelligent enough to
read this but unable to discover how such things are done; but for each of
those there are surely many who know exactly what I am talking about. Yet to
say so will get your luggage blown up.
The fact of the matter is that there is no way to thwart someone
intelligent and determined to destroy an airplane in flight if he does not
care if he is killed in the process. Think upon smuggling by mules, emetics,
and airplane restrooms.
The fact of the matter is that the procedures on September 10, 2001, were
nearly sufficient to prevent what happened: the taking over of airplanes and
the use of them as cruise missiles to destroy specific secondary targets. If
the goal is to prevent THAT we do not need a multitude of New Offices and
swarms of Officers to harass the people and eat out their substance. What
we need is to prevent the potential kamikaze pilot from getting into the
cockpit of the airplane. That requires strong doors, and a change in the
rules of engagement: even if they are cutting the throats of your passengers
and passenger service crew members, do not surrender control of the airplane
to anyone, and admit no one into the cockpit; and secondly, tell the
passengers they must defend themselves.
But that encourages VIGILANTISM! And vigilantism is the worst possible
thing. Self government must never extend to the notion of self defense. If
there is no Air Marshal or other designated Professional Law Enforcement
Officer with The Proper Credentials aboard the airplane, then of course you
should meekly submit to the terrorist, as you must meekly submit to the
honorable Officers of the TSA who protect you.
And you must congregate into small and narrow places which are not
protected, and which would be the targets of any rational terrorist effort.
Make people afraid to go near airports and you can even more effectively
cripple the airline industry in these United States. We must not think about
the fact that someone can wheel a large carryon full of anything into the
milling crowds meekly standing in line to get aboard airplanes in Los Vegas
or Salt Lake City. Or have I given away a secret?
So. Honor the TSA, which consists of people who need the work, and think
they are doing a good job of protecting us. Intentions are far more
important than the actual result, which is to make us fit to be Imperial
Subjects rather than self-reliant Citizens of a free Republic.
And Patrick Henry ought to have stopped whining. The King's forces were
here to protect us from the French and Indians, and people like Mad Dog John
Adams, and Patrick Henry, were whiners who just didn't get it.
And with that I will drop the subject. There is a good
article on autism in the Sunday
mail and I encourage you to read it. It presents a different view of that
important subject.
========
There is a break in the rain and Sable needs a walk.
===
"I hate to advocate alcoholism, drug abuse, bizarre sex,
and insanity, but they've always worked for me!" Hunter S. Thompson
Last night I made the dumbest mistake a Husky owner can make and got my left
ring finger bitten. The dog is more upset than me. All's well but I am back
on tetanus shot and antibiotics and aspirin, so a lot of typing doesn't get
done.
Don't try to take things away from a wolf-dog when she
has retreated under a table. Order her to come out and surrender it. It
takes a bit longer but is much safer... And any idiot knows this.
Color me idiot.
=======
The cable modem is
out. TV cable is all right so it must be the cable modem service. The
satellite continues to work if a bit infuriatingly.
F. M. Busby, Jr., RIP He sent
me my first fan letter. Fan and pro, and long time friend from Seattle. Go
with God, old friend.
=============
I don't listen to music while walking, but I would like to listen to the
George Mosse
Lectures. Now I need a device to do this with. I presume the
Creative Zen would work, and that I can download those lectures and put them
on the device. By tomorrow I ought to be smart enough to figure that out,
but today I just don't feel up to it.
============
Jerry,
Remember the "domino effect" in southeast Asia? Well,
maybe there's another domino effect -- this one working for us:
"'It's strange for me to say it, but this process of
change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,' explains
Jumblatt. 'I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting
three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.'
Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. 'The Syrian
people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin
Wall has fallen. We can see it.'"
That is one view. Another is that we will have Iraq and Iran as Muslim
Axes of Evil whereas Iraq was once a secular part of the Axis of Evil.
My guess is that Bush wakes up in the middle of the night shouting
"Donald Rumsfeld, Give me back my $250 Billion!" but perhaps not, and I may
be unduly cynical. We can hope the first view is correct. If they can get
the oil pumping and world oil prices to no higher than before the war, we
may yet be glad. May. But the price of oil drives much in this world. I wish
I had $200 billion to spend on other energy sources.
=========
Summers is rumored to have said while apologizing "Eppur si muove."
We also have from another conference,
"It is rumored, in response to the assault upon his good name by
proponents of mathematical sexual parity, that Lorenzo Estati was heard to
murmur: "Eppur non si muove.""
I should write a longer epitaph for F. M.
Buzz Busby, Jr., but it is exceedingly hard to write just at the moment due
to a painful injury to one finger; and, I admit, I am weary of writing about
dead friends. One by one, the people I knew are going. Buzz was 84, and that
is a long life. If we do everything else right we get old, and when we get
old we see first our elders, then our contemporaries, vanish one by one.
Buzz was a good man, and thought I do not suppose I thought of him more than
twice yearly most years, I will miss him.
Fred has some observations which,
as he says, will astonish no one. I do like the pithiness of one of his
early observations: that we cannot ensure that no child is left behind, but
we can make sure no child gets ahead, and we prefer that anyway.
Over in mail there is also some note of the new invisible epidemic,
raising the question of how do we bring up children? We cannot keep them
oblivious of the world. We probably cannot protect them from evil companions
(my wife has thought of a character so boring that even the evil
companions want nothing to do with him, but that is hardly insurance
either). We can perhaps, warn them of some of the things that are
irreversible, which means that we can't pretend that the reversible is
irreversible. That first pot or cocktail may, for some, be irreversible, but
it will not be so for most. I think there is an essay in there but I am not
up to writing it.
====
Afternoon Jerry,
I just read your comment about listening to lectures,
and wanted to throw my two cents in: iPod and iTunes. Any of the three kinds
(shuffle, mini, or regular) should work for what you need, and all of them
just simply create customer delight. Apple got it right. So much so, that a
*lot* of Microsoft folks use them, to the point that the company has started
writing memos:
And Roland asks why I think I should consider anything else.
Will RealPlayer files work with an ipod? Or is there anything that will
make them portable? The very fact that I have to ask should tell you my head
isn't working.
(with the mandatory Canadian feelings of inferiority)
David Paterson
Quote of the day:
To announce that there must be no criticism of the
president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not
only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American
public.
- Theodore Roosevelt
On the day after Porto Rican Independence terrorist shot up the White
House and killed a guard, Harry Truman prepared for his morning walk through
the streets of Washington. When the Secret Service complained Truman told
them they didn't have to come. As for himself, "It comes with the job."
=============
Still a bit under the weather. Roberta went to San Diego to the beach
house to plot on our new technothriller she is doing research for. I'm here
walking the dog...
So they are going to let Terry Schiavo die of thirst and starvation, that
being a legal way to kill people. It would be illegal simply to blow her
brains out or give her morphine, or whatever they use to kill prisoners in
Florida. Perhaps they could activate Florida's electric chair known as Old
Sparky as a more humane way to kill her? Leave out giving her husband, who
has spent the proceeds of her insurance policies and now lives with his
other significant other and the children of this extra-marital relationship,
the right to say she dies. It's such a waste!
Of course keeping her alive is expensive, and the public must pay. The
state legislature with one vote cast against it made a law forbidding her
husband to kill her, but judges have held that the people of Florida have no
say in the matter other than to pay if judges decide to keep her alive.
Still do they not have a fiduciary responsibility as lawyers are fond of
saying?
Me, I would wall the husband and those judges into a room and brick it
around and leave them there until they come to some decision regarding the
use of thirst and starvation as a means of killing someone who is now
inconvenient. God knows they are inconvenient, at least to some. Leave a
small hole big enough for them to throw out a judicial decree and check back
in a week or two to see if they have had anything to say. I bet when we get
around to tearing down the wall they would have changed their minds and
specified some other means of execution. I suggest a better way to kill her
below.
Makes me proud to be an American with a Constitution that allows judges
to order someone starved after the legislature has voted life. If they will
do this to someone whose crime is to have had "a chemical imbalance" that
put her in a coma (does anyone know how she got that "imbalance"? what is a
chemical imbalance, how does one acquire it, and did she have any help
getting it?) -- if they will do this to an innocent what may they do to
someone who deserves punishment? If the legislature cannot prevent someone
from being put to death by dehydration and starvation, presumably on
television, what can it do? And who owns the video rights to the murder of a
Catholic woman on television? Perhaps we could outsource the murder to al
Qaeda or a Saudi executioner with a sharp sword? Bring back the guillotine?
Surely Florida can think of a more humane means of execution of someone for
the crime of being inconvenient and only minimally responsive? They finish
off full brain dead people for their organs by means less lingering than
starvation and dehydration.
But I have a way to satisfy everyone! Auction off her organs. When
they go to remove them, they will make it a lot quicker, so better for her,
and meanwhile she will have been kept comfortable until the surgeons begin
their work. And think on those who will benefit! The money can go to the
Florida Treasury to compensate for having kept her alive all this time. We
can sell the TV rights separately, and use the proceeds to promote organ
donation advertisements.
Save Terry from a painful death. Join the movement to Auction Terry's
Organs now!
=====
I am told that Terry's husband is not the villain here. I can well
believe that. One does get on with one's life. Let him. He need do nothing
but abdicate... He may feel she wanted to die but she didn't make that
clear; and I would bet money that few have ever said they want to die by
dehydration and starvation, possibly on national TV.
None of which relieves us of the problem: why death by starvation
and dehydration? And why waste perfectly good organs?
Yesterday's ramble --
it's not structured enough to be called an essay or even a disquisition --
on Terry Schiavo seems to have generated passions, but part of it was
misunderstood, probably because I was not as clear as usual.
First, one of the oldest maxims in legal theory is that no man may judge
in his own cause. Schiavo has a financial stake in the outcome. That appears
to be the only stake he has now, since he is married to Terry only in the
legal sense. Why is he given the life and death decision power? He may be a
saint, he may not be, he may be her murderer and he may be a hero, but he
has a stake in the outcome. It is not a decision most of us would want.
Still, he is legal next of kin, and the law usually makes, even requires,
that decisions regarding treatment of comatose persons be made by next of
kin, many of whom do have financial stakes in the outcomes, so that argument
does not hold unless we want to reconsider all of family law; in my judgment
a task well beyond my competence, and one we need not undertake.
Second, and perhaps the deciding factor: leaving out all ethical and
moral considerations, if we purport to make decisions of life and death on
the grounds of following the comatose person's wishes, is it not important
that we have unambiguous evidence of those wishes? If there were a
signed document on file stating Terry's wishes regarding treatment in this
circumstance, there would be no conversation. Those with moral scruples
might want to talk people out of leaving such documents, but that does not
concern us (and no, I am not arguing that we should talk people out of such;
I merely wish to settle the supposed moral issues as irrelevant to this
discussion). If the wishes of the person affected are unambiguously clear,
that is the end of the matter.
However, in this case we are back to Point One: the only evidence we have
of the victim's wishes come from the husband, an interested party; and the
parents, not entirely rational; and her religion, which is ambiguous since
the doctrine of the Church on heroic measures is not entirely clear to me:
it forbids suicide but not risky actions, and the usual summary for others
is "thou canst not kill but needst not strive, officiously to keep alive."
Now why is it important to determine the wishes of the affected person?
Because if we do not insist on that, then we are all at the mercy of those
who find us inconvenient. "Ol' Gramma didn't want to live if she got
Alzheimers. Told us so a dozen times. Then she got it and it come on fast
and now she isn't competent to decide. She wants to die but can't tell us."
And the physicians, prompted by the Hospital Administrator and HMO Board of
Directors, begin preparing the needles. (One presumes that by then we will
not longer starve the old gal to death.) Now that may be the Enlightened way
to treat people, but it is clearly a slippery slope: from comatose to barely
conscious to responds to stimuli but is a living vegetable to non compos
mentis to clearly unable to make rational decisions on this matter is a
continuum with few sharp dividing lines. At least let us insist on
unambiguous evidence of Gramma's wishes before starting our work.
Enlightenment rationalists do not see any problems here. She's no use to
herself or the world, so turn her off for her (and our) good. From there to
harvesting organs as waste prevention isn't anywhere near as long a path as
you might think. Niven's Jigsaw Man was prediction as well as
warning. And why not? Particularly if we are dealing with disease free
healthy organs, of which there is always a shortage. Isn't it the rational
position? Waste not, want not. Take the case of a 28 year old comatose
traffic victim, good health, rare blood type, prime of life, organ donor
card signed but no Living Will giving someone else the decision to pull the
plug. In 90% of such cases she will never wake up, and the organs will
deteriorate to uselessness. In the 10% of cases where she does wake up, most
of the time she will not really recover and be a burden to her relatives and
the society. What is the reasonable thing to do here? And who should decide?
In Terry Schiavo's case, different observers see different things. Few
put her chances of recovery above "miraculous" level ( < 1% is a miracle,
no?). Her parents see it differently. And anyone watching the tapes sees
that she avoids pain. Earthworms do that, of course.
If she could swallow -- and some physical therapists think she can be
taught to do so -- so had to be spoon fed, would we be content to watch her
die of starvation? Her husband won't authorize the physical therapy that
might or might not work (or might or might not have worked years and years
ago). Is this relevant? If she miraculously learns to swallow -- I presume
the court order doesn't forbid her parents to try feeing her -- what then?
Finally: the unthinkable, which prompted this subject. If we are going to
let people die, but we want to avoid the responsibility -- "it's in God's
hands now that we have removed the tubes" -- then -- then -- why? Is there a
difference between starving someone to death (and allowing dehydration? or
will they inject saline intravenously to keep that balance? or is that
forbidden lest someone sneak in some glucose? -- is there a difference
between starving someone to death and simply pumping in the morphine for one
last rush and oblivion? And if there is such a difference, will someone
explain it to me? Be certain you do not let religious arguments creep into
your explanation.
I fear there is a decided lack of clear thinking on these matters. Which
is not surprising. Victor Frankenstein would have understood. As did Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Clearly if we take equal quantities of hot and cold water, take their
temperatures, pour them together, and measure the temperature of the result,
the result will be pretty nearly the mathematical average of the measures we
had before we started. This assumes that the two buckets were well
stirred just before we took the temperatures: let them sit a while and where
in the bucket we had the sensor can be important.
Now what is the temperature of the Earth? To 3 significant digits, .1
degree C, please.
Where do I put my sensors? Having placed them, and decided on the weights
to give each measure I take, what happens if someone builds a big city near
one of my measurement stations? There are unusual ocean currents this year?
On what day of the year do I take my for the record measurements, or if I am
averaging over a year, do I average all my dailies? And having got my
temperature for the year 2001, and seeing a bunch of changes in the
landscape and ocean currents, exactly what do I do to get a year 2005
measure that compares with my 2001 temperature?
And then I discover that someone else using a different heat capacity
pattern model has come up with a different average for the year 2001.
Now: I do not pretend expertise in these matters. I do pretend some
expertise in similar problems (what is the average temperature of re-entry?
Does it make sense to combine a bunch of measures into a single figure of
merit, and if so, what does that measure mean?).
There are two things to consider about a global average. The first is the
operational definition of how it was obtained: will two independent teams
get the same number to the required accuracy? If each does it twice will we
have 4 identical (to 3 significant digits) measures? If not, what now?
That is the first definition of an average: the procedures used to obtain
it.
The second is its interpretation: what does it all mean? What, for
instance, does it mean to average the temperature at the South Pole, two sea
level places on the Equator, two high mountain places on the Equator, and at
the North Pole? It's an average in that I can tell you how I got it and how
I arrived at the resulting number. Is it a meaningful average?
Throw in some more. Take the temperature of the ocean in the Marianas
Trench. Throw in the temperature inside and outside Mauna Loa. Throw in
Pinatubo, and heave in a few taken at high altitudes in various latitudes.
Is it meaningful yet? What else might we do to give it more meaning?
And understand that while the absolute number may not be important, the
number's variance from year to year will certainly be.
When people model Global Warming and come up with an average temperature
of the Earth, and I ask how they got it and they don't really explain that,
I get suspicious.
This all arose when Greg Cochran, for whom I have some respect, declared
Essex and McIntyre as not worth listening to because they have said some
things he took to be nonsense. Leaving out the possibility of being
misquoted -- it has happened to both Cochran and myself -- it is not the
case that questions asked are meaningless even when they come from a source
you might not rely on for data? But leave that and conclude with Cochran
that you may safely ignore anything Essex and McIntyre say on the grounds
that anyone who says an RMS temperature is "just as good" as a linear
average can't possibly know enough to be worth listening to. Questions about
the Earth's Average Temperature remain.
Reporting an "average" without some discourse on how it was obtained and
why that particular formulation is worth paying attention to does not
impress me. If you want to tell me the Earth's temperature I want some
assurance that your measure won't change next year because of some random
factor.
We know the Earth's temperature over long periods of time to about 1.5
significant digits simply by history. Crop records, growing seasons, dairy
farms in Greenland at one time and rivers frozen over solid enough to drag
cannon across at another time, and so forth. Getting it closer than that
takes a lot of assumptions. Even with recent measures we must make
assumptions. How accurate were HMS Beagle's measures of ocean and air
temperatures? I think they didn't do globe temperatures: should they have?
(A globe temperature is useful in human factors work: it's the temperature
inside a black copper globe of standard size, and thus is an average itself
of air and radiant environment temperatures.) Globe temperatures change with
cloud cover especially at night. Is that significant? And so forth.
A note on the above: taking an air temperature in a windy place can be
tricky. In Pasadena a few years ago the temperature at the base of the
mountains was exactly the same to 3 significant digits (fraction of a
degree) for, I believe it was 37 consecutive hours. A Santa Ana Wind was
pouring down the slope and the compressive heating produced that result.
Elsewhere in the LA Basin there were variations as winds mixed. What was the
average temperature of the LA Basin that day? Globe temperatures would have
had day/night variations. Would that be important?
I do not envy climate scientists their job. I do wonder at their
assurance when they begin rolling dice down the table in a Congressional
hearing.
This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up
daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column,
8,000 -
12,000 words, depending. (Older
columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.
If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.
If you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front
page of this site, click here for a better
explanation of what we're trying to do here.
This site is run on the "public radio" model; see below.
If
you have no idea what you are doing here, see the What is this
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Boiler Plate:
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