The Razor

Cool stuff. Watch the short video below to see small objects levitated and moved using sound waves.

A long time ago I wrote a fiction novel. 120,000 words whittled down from about 175k. It turns out it wasn’t any good although looking at it now some 20 years later it does have its moments. A nice turn of phrase here, an interesting description there. Although it was never published it was written and stands complete. For a week I outlined the novel, sometimes working on chunks then arranging those into a puzzle with pieces missing. I then added scenes to link these chunks together to create a narrative that I thought made sense. After another week or so of arranging the outline, I sat down and every day wrote 2,500-4,000 words, starting at one in the outline and ending at the next. By following the outline and writing from one element to the next, focusing only on the goals laid out in the outline while avoiding detours caused by tangents that weren’t relevant to the plot or the characters, within eight weeks I had completed a rough draft of the novel. I then spent the next four years editing and revising it, reviewing and rereading and re-everything , doing anything I could think of to make the novel shine. But it never did. It was still terrible. Hackneyed and predictable plot. Unbelievable characters who would be complimented by being called “two dimensional.”

Fast forward two decades and I’ve achieved my dream of being a paid writer. Sort of. As a systems analyst in the financial industry I am paid to write requirements documents and detailed software specifications. I have put together specs longer than my novel that could be measured by their thickness in inches if anyone dared print them out (people stopped doing that about 10 years ag0.) I have also put together specs that could fit into a PowerPoint presentation with enough space for goofy stick figure clip art. What differentiates the two is not my writing skills or even the size of the project: it’s the software methodology used by the institution.

Basic software design follows this process: People get together and decide on a solution to a problem they have and create a set of business objectives. A typical business objective that I deal with might be, “Let’s cut down the time it takes to report on delinquent accounts to senior management.” These objectives then determine the business requirements (the “what” of the project) which determine the functional requirements (“how” the business requirements are achieved), followed by the detailed design specs which tell the developers and coders what they need to build. The coders then code following the design spec and afterward conduct basic tests on their code to make sure it functions. The testers then work backwards, creating a test plan based on the functional requirements, then actually test what has been coded to make sure what the developers and coders coded actually matches what was laid out in the functional requirements specifications. Wrap the whole thing in a traceability matrix that ties the project objectives to the business requirements to the functional requirements to the tech specs to the testing documents, add in issues tracking for the inevitable bugs found and corrected before rollout, and you have a software project.

In software design there are two fundamental methodologies: “waterfall” and “iterative.” Waterfall methodology uses the metaphor of a series of waterfalls with one waterfall feeding another downstream. This requires all the project objectives to be clearly defined at the beginning of the project, the “waterfall top.” It assumes that you know everything there is to no about your business environment and needs up-front. The objectives cascade down to the business analysts who develop the business requirements before passing the documentation to the systems analysts, who produce the functional specs. Each team member does his or her assigned task without input from those who created the documentation “up stream” and is not involved in the consumption of the spec s/he creates  by “downstream” developers, coders and testers. Once you produce your delivery artifact, the requirements document or functional spec for example, your role on that project is complete and the documents you created are expected not to change.

The iterative methodology starts with the business objectives, but instead of defining them all so that they can be codified into requirements, the expectation is that they will change and be added to throughout the process. In contrast to the waterfall methodology, the expectation is built into the process that you do not know everything about a particular system or business process at the project’s beginning, and you will learn as you go along. Documentation for these types of projects tend to be brief with lots of edits and versioning.

There are several different types within each methodology. Common iterative approaches are “Agile“, the first true iterative methodology developed in the early 1970s and “Extreme Programming,” developed in the 1990s but based on lessons learned during the Apollo space program. Some try to combine aspects of both methodologies. For example Scrum, an iterative methodology, takes what I consider a more waterfall approach by breaking up business objectives and spreading them throughout a project. This provides a more flexible approach to meeting a particular business requirement without changing the business objectives set at the project beginning which do not change through the project.

Most  software projects fail. The reasons for these failures depend on who you talk to. As an analyst I often blame poor requirements documentation and questionable analytical techniques as well as spaghetti coding by developers who never invested time in reading the requirements and testers who were more concerned about ticking off check boxes than they were in actually using their brains and finding errors. But by far the greatest source of project failure is upstream with the decisions made by the business at the project’s inception.

What got me thinking about all this was an excellent piece by Clay Shirky on the failure of the Obamacare website. He cites Waterfall methodology. “The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.”

Waterfall methodology has its place, although where that place is eludes me right now. The problem I have with waterfall is that it’s great for simple projects with a small set of clearly definable project goals and requirements. But complexity demands too much from the methodology which is why I find its pure form so rarely used in design these days. Most projects I’m involved are huge project impacting numerous business lines, data warehouses, and outside vendors. It is impossible for management to know all there is to know about their own business processes and systems, and the smart managers don’t even try. They speak in very broad, general terms and leave the impacted technical teams to hash out the details. That “hashing out” usually requires in depth analysis and reverse-engineering of the impacted systems designed by developer no longer with the institution from poorly detailed and written specs that were stored on someone’s hard drive that got wiped once they quit.

Shirky continues, writing, “By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.”

This is a particular conceit of the Obama administration and bureaucrats in particular. One of my core beliefs is that the Law should leave a “light footprint” on a free society. It is impossible for legislators to write laws that are capable of responding to every circumstance, therefore laws should be written carefully to give the citizenry the benefit of the doubt, and give prosecutors and judges latitude to decide violations of the law on a case-by-case basis. It’s one reason why I oppose mandatory sentencing rules and making abortion illegal even though I recognize it as murder. Unfortunately legislators and bureaucrats don’t see their job that way. They strive to make new laws and write new regulations instead of making those that exist more effective and less onerous on the citizenry.

In the case of Obamacare the Obama administration thought it understood how to design software. It is a typical show of arrogance coming from the administration who brought us the “Reset with Russia” resulting in a new Cold War, supported the Arab Spring which has resulted in everyone in Egypt hating America instead of the two-thirds of Egyptians who hated us prior to the Obama administration,  and now the Iranian Nuke Deal which results in Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Giving this administration power was like giving hookers, cocaine, cars and guns to a group of teenagers. It’s going to take decades to undo the damage this administration has caused.

But in the meantime we have Obamacare. As the one lemming said to the others, “Forward!”

 

Ever since the government shutdown I have been thinking long and hard about the very nature of government. Are we doomed to become slaves to an increasingly bureaucratic centralized state? The complexity of our society suggests to me that we cannot have no government at all. Although I consider myself a libertarian, I like well-maintained roads and since I live on a river and derive my water source from a well I value clean air and water. Does this mean that I have to give up my freedom to some bureaucrat hundreds or even thousands of miles away?

I have started reading up on the Swiss. One doesn’t hear much about them unless you are in the banking business or are a World War 2 historian, but the more I learn about their government, the more I like. The Swiss pride themselves on having a weak central government with most power residing at the local level. The Swiss also directly participate more in government than any other people. But as the Greeks discovered, direct democracy has limits when government becomes so large and complex that citizens would spend all their time managing the affairs of state and doing nothing else.

As an IT geek it’s easy for me to imagine a technical solution for this situation.

Software vote proxies.

Imagine: Each citizen fills out a questionnaire, quizzing him or her about their attitudes towards topics of the day. The survey would be amendable at any time, and surveys would expire every four years. These surveys would act to create a rules-based engine that would act on behalf of the citizen on existing legislation. Legislation could be proposed by the citizen at any time, and would have to garner support from other proxies before being considered by the entire group. Once reaching that threshold, the legislation would be put to all voters, and the proxies would vote on it based on the rules built from the questionnaire answered by the citizen it represents.

Legislation would have to be simplified. There would be no ““But we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it…” excuses from Nancy Pelosi. Legislation would have to be simplified and formatted in a way that would help the proxies act on it.

Algorithms already control  73% of trading volume in the US. This means that software is making the vast majority of the day-t0-day decisions that impact the health of your company and your 401k. One could argue – and many do – that computers already control Wall Street and therefore our economic lives, so why shouldn’t we trust them to manage our political lives? The difference is that each one of us would have our own algorithm – making split-second decisions in favor of us, not Goldman Sachs or a hedge fund.

Would there be problems? Of course, just as there are with using algorithms to manage our economic destiny. Yet these problems haven’t curbed their uses by banks and other financial firms. Additionally it will be much harder for lobbyists to influence policy. Instead of treating a congressman to an all-expenses paid “fact-finding” junket to Aruba, the firm would have to try to sway thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions. It wouldn’t be feasible for all but the largest interest groups to pull off.

Judicial oversight would remain, and perhaps judges could develop their own proxies eventually.

The biggest problem with this system isn’t technological or even political; it’s social. We have outsourced our political responsibilities to a ruling class, one that we believed was more intelligent and savvy than we are. The problem with this is that this class now acts in its own best interests and not in the interests of those who elected it. By doing away with this ruling class each citizen would have an increased responsibility to become more knowledgeable and aware of the world around him or her. That’s a lot to expect at a time when “sheeple” has entered the lexicon of public discourse to describe the supporters of one’s opponents, and when Americans are shown to be statistically as dumb as a box of blocks compared to the citizens of other nations. And it’s also ironic, I suppose to be discussing a software solution to a problem at the same time the government can’t design software to enroll people in health insurance.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. If Americans aren’t willing to pay attention to what’s happening around them in their communities, then we deserve to lose our freedom. Software vote proxies are the means to gain it back.

 

 

There are so many “teachable moments” in the Knight Capital’s software role out that nearly sank the firm in 45 minutes for those of us in software development. Note also successive failures also known as the “alignment of the stars” any of which could have been avoided and saved the firm from the disaster. Everyone who knows what SDLC means should study this disaster.

After spending the weekend troubleshooting my own tech gear I’m not sure things have gotten better since my first PC purchase in 1988. That computer lasted until 1997 and could have survived longer if I had access to spare parts in Japan.  The 4 year old PC that I put together using quality enthusiast parts will be lucky to make it another year. And if someone had told me in ‘88 that I would be troubleshooting system interrupts a quarter century later, I think I would have become a Mac fanboi in an instant. I’ve noticed that many of my tech friends have given up on the Wintel platform because of issues like this, and I’m wondering if I should too. Then I look at the cost of a new Mac vs an upgrade to my existing rig and well it looks like I’ll be troubleshooting my kit for another 25 years. Not only am I penny-wise, pound-foolish but I have boxes upon boxes of cables, software and other wintel gear that I’d have to recycle if I ditched the b***h and made the switch.

If I send you a lengthy email, chances are it’s important and chances are even better that it involves tech. I don’t spam people, and if I need to reach out it won’t take more than a line or two. When I send a multi-paragraph email rest assured that I have spent at least 45-60 minutes writing it and another 15-30 reading and rewriting it, condensing it down to the barest amount of information that is necessary to convey my point. When it’s a reply to your email, it means the answer you are expecting is quite complex. I will do my best to explain that complexity to you in a straightforward manner, but it will take time. The least you can do is read what I’ve written before penning a reply that shows you haven’t read my email at all. There’s a circle in hell awaiting developers who do this to analysts.

What’s in my wallet? Not a Capital One credit card. Alec Baldwin has made a career shilling for these jackals yet sympathizes with the Occupy Wall Street crowd, even penning an article in Huffington Post in support of the anti-capitalism movement. Capital One feeds off the subprime crowd and was sanctioned as recently as last year to the tune of $165 million for deceptive marketing practices. No word if Baldwin’s poor acting skills were part of those practices (I much prefer the Vikings; the goat is particularly a better actor than Baldwin). So I appreciate the delicious irony of Baldwin’s MSNBC show where right out of the gate he deep-throated RCP candidate for NYC mayor, Bill de Blasio. The cognitive dissonance required by Baldwin to hold such leftist positions while being the face of everything they hate should cause his head to explode – but it hasn’t, likely because Alec is not the Baldwin with cognitive functions.

So McCain and McConnell are in negotiation with the President over the debt ceiling and federal government closure. Seems to me it’s the moderate wing of the Democratic Party negotiating with the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party. It just makes me wonder how the Obama administration could be so vicious in domestic politics and such pussies in foreign policy. Either Obama is Machiavellian at least when it comes to domestic politics or the GOP house leadership are the pussies; I’m starting to think its the latter.

That reminds me. Liberals like to talk about the Tea Party “extremists” in the Republican Party, but make no mention of the extremists in the Democratic Party. I hear this everyday from my liberal friends, as does the Wife. With Obamacare the Democrats lead by President Obama subverted the legislative process, using reconciliation, a procedural gimmick used to reconcile bills between House and Senate, to push through it through without a single Republican vote. Had Bush done this I’m sure he would have been impeached, yet this doesn’t strike any Democrats as being even the slightest bit extremist? Then there’s the unprecedented  usage of the IRS to attack administration opponents. Even Nixon avoided using this tactic, but not Obama. Using the IRS as one’s personal assassin isn’t an extremist act? Let’s also remember that prior to the 2010 there were no Tea Partiers in Congress. They didn’t exist until Obamacare became legislation and began to be rammed through Congress. It seems that it’s easy to be an extremist these days: all you have to do is question authority. It wasn’t that long ago when dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now that a liberal is in the White House, dissidents are extremists.

Speaking of idiots, the survey I received from the RNC is in the mail. In it I ask why Reince Priebus and the other geniuses in the RNC haven’t committed seppuku after their continued failures starting in last year’s election. Amount enclosed? $0. The money that would have gone to support the RNC went to this candidate instead.

Finally, China is calling for a de-Americanized world. Fine with me and most Americans. Isolationism is in our DNA, and we’re not keen on being the world’s policeman. But I find it hard to take a government seriously that gets its knickers in a twist over this guy and this guy and this bunch. Don’t you have some islands to invade, or cheap Chinese crap to send our way filled with these bugs in the packaging?

 

David Gerstman has an interesting piece up at Legal Insurrection about the IT panacea for Obamacare. He notes an op-ed by Thomas Friedman that received an endorsement by Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that paints a glowing picture IT investments made under the act will have at providing better and cheaper medical care. Gerstman then follows up Friedman’s breathless piece with another that asks a simple question, if the impact of IT on health care is so wonderful Why Is Your Doctor Typing? Forbes’s Steve Denning writes about his experience at his doctor’s office where he watches his doctor typing on a computer during his exam.

Surely, I said, computerized medical records generate benefits. They are easily retrievable. They can be transferred from one practice to another and accessible to the many different service providers—hospitals, laboratories, specialists, radiology and so on—that might be involved in any one patient.

“In theory, perhaps,” he replied. “But in practice, it’s a horrible and costly bureaucracy that is being imposed on doctors. I spend less time with patients, and more time filling out multiple boxes on forms that don’t fit the way I work. Often I am filling out the same information over and over again. A lot of it is checking boxes, rather than understanding what this patient really needs.”

What about retrieving information? Isn’t that easier?

“Again, in theory, retrieval should be easy and quick,” he said, “But you can’t flip through these records the way you do with a paper file and easily find what you want.

I mentioned the articles to Dr. Wife and she said, “The only thing EHRs have done is make it easier to read a doctor’s handwriting.” Since the US is projected to spend $6 billion on EHRs by 2015, that’s a lot of money spent trying to make up for the failure of primary education to teach penmanship.

Being married to a doctor and an IT professional specializing in “big data” in the financial industry, I have watched the Wife’s experience with various EHRs with levels of amazement and dismay. It’s as if the lessons learned by the financial industry in the 1990s, such as poorly designed software that is incompatible with other software will cost more money to replace than it did to implement in the first place,  have been completely lost by the lemming-like rush towards electronic health record (EHR, also known as electronic medical records EMR) systems.

The basic problem is that EHRs are not designed to suit the ways doctors practice. This is complicated by the fact that the way doctors practice varies between specialties, an orthopedic surgeon doesn’t practice medicine the way a primary care physician does, and by the additional complication that how doctors practice varies within the same specialty, often the same office. Even the same doctor will treat patients differently depending on what he feels works best for each patient. Yet these variances between specialties are only rudimentarily addressed within EHRs, and handle variance within specialties one of two ways, providing either a set workflow that dictates to the doctor the way she should practice, or one that provides so much flexibility that she is lost trying to get basic tasks.

The key decision in any software development is to address who the software is for and the key needs it is meant to address. Judging by the current EHR systems available none were designed for doctors. Instead they were designed for the employers of doctors such as large health systems, insurance companies and the federal government who are interested in aggregated data in order to answer questions such as “How many patients are uncontrolled diabetics?” or “How much is being spent on obesity-related illness?” These are questions which might be of interest to a doctor in general, but they are not what he’s thinking about when he’s facing his patient, say a morbidly obese, uncontrolled diabetic medicaid patient. Instead he is interested only in that particular patient’s problems. Is her agoraphobia contributing to her obesity, or is it the result of it? How can he wean her off HFCS soda and begin to move and diet when getting her into his office requires so much effort? Most of all, how can he encourage her to take an active role in her own medical care and help him treat her?

Current EHR systems will be very good at picking up his patient as an uncontrolled diabetic, and the data can be used by medicaid to threaten to cut his reimbursement for her treatment as is under discussion to control health care costs. But his patient’s needs and his attempts to deal with them will be lost in the sea of data the EHR generates because current systems are modeled on existing software developed in the financial industry which was the first to successfully integrate the technology with its existing business. Even that integration wasn’t painless, occurring over decades after many fits and starts, adoption of dead-end technologies and gargantuan piles of wasted money.

A key difference between the medical and financial industries is in the nature of the data itself. Financial data is transactional, meaning that money is traded for a good. Transactional systems are repetitive. For example, a store will sell a loaf of bread for $2.59 to every person who comes into the door and asks for it, but a doctor seeing a sore throat today knows 99% of the time her patient likely only has a viral condition, and that remaining 1% can present with a sore throat but have much more serious, perhaps even fatal, underlying conditions. Doctors are taught in medical schools to “think horses when you hear hoof beats, not zebras,” but the problem is that in reality zebras are not limited to the Serengeti Plains: they are mixed in with the horse. So while a doctor should think horses when he sees an 8 year old with a high fever and sore throat, he always must rule out he’s hearing a zebra. This is why when you see your doctor complaining of head and neck pain she makes you touch your chin to your chest: doing so rules out meningitis, a rare but very serious infection, a zebra running with horses.

The equivalent of this repetition and poor data is handling would be going to the store and buying a loaf of bread with your debit card. This bread would be tailored to your specific needs on site. Prefer no crusts? The crusts would be removed. Like thicker slices? The store would slice the bread to your exact specifications. The cash register would report the sale to your bank via fax. A person at the bank would read the fax transaction and key it into the bank’s debit card system which would then debit your account for the payment to the store. Since the store’s financial records are kept at another bank, your bank would then email the credit to the store’s systems, and someone at that bank would open the attachment, read it and add the amount to the store’s bank account. Such a transactional system would be costly to run, inefficient with the same task performed multiple times, and time consuming. A similar system already exists today with check processing, but that is limited to a handful of data elements such as the bank, amount paid and the account number of the person writing the check, and the name, the account number and bank of the payee depositing the check. That’s six pieces of data that costs banks billions to process every year. Banks hate checks which is why they have backed the current system of debit cards working to replace them.

From a physician’s perspective, what should an electronic medical records system do? It should provide her with the treatment plan from the previous encounter. Most systems hide this information from a doctor, making her search for the notes from the last visit. The system should provide lab work and test results directly from the laboratory providing the test results. Currently labs do not have set data standards, and electronic medical records systems do not have the capability to receive these records directly. Instead the records are either faxed or sent via email where they are “attached” to a patient record. This is akin to attaching a picture to an email, meaning that the contents of the picture remain completely unreadable by the system. The email system doesn’t know if the picture is a snap from your trip to the beach, whether its of a sunset or a personal portrait. Data in a picture or as commonly sent PDF format cannot be read and translated into a data record directly. Instead either the doctor, mid-level or medical tech must look at the results in the attachment and physically key them into the system.

Dr. Wife tells me her current system, one of the top used in the US, can only report weight and BMI results from last visit. Lab values and other pertinent information is hidden in attachments or non-indexed patient notes. Prior to the EHR she would open a patient’s chart and look at the lab result for a patient’s hemoglobin a1c result. Since the labs were in a separate section of the paper chart she could open it up then flip backwards through the stack to immediately find the results of previous tests. Similarly she could open the chart and see the notes from the patient’s last visit to see what recommendations she had then, or flip back further to see how the patient’s condition had changed with time. To do this in her current EHR is much more difficult than flipping through pieces of paper. Instead she has to search for and find lab result attachment which may not only be located in the lab result folder, but which may have been filed mistakenly by a medical tech into the fax folder because the lab result may have arrived via fax, and was scanned and added as a patient communication. Since the information is not indexed, there is no way for the physician to type in a search box “hemoglobin a1c” and have all documents that contain the phrase pop up. Instead she has to open each attachment to determine what it is and whether it’s the lab result she is looking for. Since EHRs are rarely known as fast and responsive, opening each attachment takes 5-15 seconds depending on size and EHR file complexity, making a search which would have taken three or four seconds flipping through a paper charts several minutes to complete. When a doctor is allotted 15 minutes per patient, anything that makes a doctor’s job harder for no benefit to him or his patient whatsoever will not be appreciated. Yet hospital administrators and software companies wonder why medical practitioners loathe electronic medical records systems?

Here’s what Dr. Wife described as her dream medical records system. First, the entire encounter would be recorded to protect her from future litigation or in case anyone needed to review or document anything from the patient encounter later. Next she would be able to choose from a set of predefined dropdowns or checkboxes the treatment plan for the patient. Lab values would be available on the right side of the screen, and she would be able to click on any one of them to see details or trends. These would be automatically populated by the labs themselves without any input from the doctor or practice staff, and could be signed off by the doctor simply by clicking the value. It would be a simple app that would run on an iPad. Suri would be used to transcribe a brief note after the visit, which would allow Dr. Wife to spend more time with her patients and doing what she is paid to do, diagnose illnesses and develop treatment programs, instead of typing, filing and other busy work skills that is so devalued in today’s workplace that much of it is offshored.

Another alternative would be to hire scribes, medical technicians who are trained to enter data into the EHRs. Many optometrists who must use their hands and eyes in concert use scribes already to notate lens dimensions and other key patient facts, so their presence in the exam room wouldn’t be completely new. Such positions would pay $12-15/hour with benefits, about what medical technicians commonly earn today, and would offer advancement thanks to the coding skills and familiarity with the software developed with experience. Of course adding a scribe for each physician would increase personnel costs, but ask yourself, does it make sense to pay someone $75 an hour to do a job that can be done by someone making $15 an hour? And from the patient’s perspective, would they rather pay an extra $4 a visit to have the undivided attention of their doctor for 15 minutes instead of watching him divide his attention between them and his computer?

 

I read and subscribe to the New Scientist because I consider myself an amateur scientist of sorts and like to keep abreast of everything from dung beetles navigating by the Milky Way (seriously, the idea of these critters wearing tiny hats to block their view of the sky warms my heart and contrary to what you might think, increases my support of such esoteric research) to the idea that our reality is a computer simulation. But New Scientist still manages to drive me crazy and to the keyboard where I bang out letters to the editor in complete futility. Science should be a non-partisan effort, and scientists should reflect the political leanings of the general population as a whole, but it doesn’t and they don’t. Scientists are inevitably leftists, and New Scientist is about as left wing as Mother Jones, the only difference being that latter doesn’t claim to be non-partisan while New Scientist believes it is and that those of us on the Right who point out it’s leftward bias are “anti-science.”

So imagine my surprise at reading the leader of this issue of New Scientist, “Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source.”

Berezow and Campbell further claim that progressives who endorse unscientific ideas get a “free pass” from the scientific community. The suspicion must be that this is because scientists themselves lean towards the left, as does the media that covers them. (Both friends and critics of New Scientist tell us we lean in that direction.)

NewScientist then prints Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell’s oped, “Lefty nonsense: When progressives wage war on reason,” in which they point out that today’s liberals are not liberal in the Lockian sense but social authoritarians. “Unlike conservative authoritarians, however, they are not concerned with banning “immoral” things like sex, drugs and rock and roll. They instead seek dominion over issues such as food, the environment and education. And they claim that their policies are based on science, even when they are not.”

This has dangerous implications as when the Left champions the anti-vaccine movement that has killed unvaccinated children, and its war against GM foods has contributed to malnourishment and premature death in the Third World. And don’t get me started about Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” which killed millions indirectly through malaria by banning DDT.

As Berezow and Campbell note, “But conservatives don’t have a monopoly on unscientific policies. Progressives are just as bad, if not worse. Their ideology is riddled with anti-scientific feel-good fallacies designed to win hearts, not minds. Just like biodegradeable spoons, their policies often crumble in the face of reality and leave behind a big mess. Worse, anyone who questions them is condemned as anti-science.”

I always get a Generation X irony-high whenever global warming alarmists equate the anthropogenic cause of global warming hypothesis to evolution, as if the former idea is as proven as the latter theory, then try to paint AGW deniers like myself using the same brush as they do creationists. Of course that doesn’t stop them from exhibiting the same anti-science attitudes towards fracking, where science backs the safety of the practice against concerted and deeply entrenched Green opposition, the result of which is that Germany is about to blow it’s CO2 emissions sky-high by resorting to coal to replace nuclear instead of clean burning natural gas. Oh, and if you didn’t know it, fracking is why the USA is on track to meet CO2 goals unlike the anti-fracking Europeans. I’m even so sure of the safety of the practice I’d welcome it on my property where we rely upon a freshwater well for our drinking water. Unfortunately there’s no natural gas in these parts (now gold? Maybe…)

So why are scientists lefties? The terminology used by Berezow and Campbell provides a hint. “Social Authoritarians” implies a more realistic and nuanced view of one’s political belief system, showing the dichotomies between authoritarianism and libertarianism, and socialism/capitalism aka “Left” and “Right” as shown in the diagram below.

In this view the Moral Majority and the environmental movement would appear in the upper right and left quadrants, both showing a keen affinity for authoritarianism. While the current Chinese government calls itself Communist, is is far more neo-liberal or Capitalist than it will admit. In fact one could make the case that is much more capitalist at this moment than the USA, and certainly more than Europe.

Scientists often are employed by large institutions in government, healthcare or academia. These institutions tend to fall on the upper side of the chart towards Authoritarianism. The bottom of the chart is sparser for a reason: it is the area where individualists, entrepreneurs, artists and philosophers live and these tend to fly under the radar. But for scientists there isn’t much money or opportunity on the bottom of the chart. The days of the experimenter or the Amateur Scientist are for the most part gone although the ideal lives on today with amateur astronomers who do much of the heavy lifting in their field including the tracking of near-earth objects. The recent approach of asteroid DA14 had NASA using live feeds from amateur run telescopes in Australia for example. But most of the jobs for scientists today are with large institutions who can afford the equipment and relatively high salaries scientists demand, and that can only be found in the upper half of the chart. When you add in the fact that scientists today are highly educated, and academia itself is an authoritarian institution with deep ties to Communist and Leftist ideals, it should be no surprise that scientists find themselves in the upper left quadrant of the matrix.

Is this a good thing for Science as a whole? Berezow and Campbell don’t think so and neither does the New Scientist. It’s candor surprised me, but I don’t expect it to let go of the bias and the dogma that compels it to support large, authoritarian schemes to find solutions to problems from Global Warming to Cancer any time soon. Still it was refreshing, and I hope that more than a few readers realizes that Science ultimately should be a non-partisan effort. But I’m not holding my breath…

Growing up in the Midwest during the 1970s and 1980s was like living in a musical desert. St. Louis had a pop music station, a hard rock station, a classical music station, a black music station, a country music station and a smattering of adult contemporary stations playing Air Supply and Captain and Tenille. That was about it. If your tastes varied from that menu, then you were pretty much on your own. There was a single college radio station run by Washington University, and most of its programming was devoted to classical music and jazz. But for an hour or two a week it played what was then called new wave and punk rock. The show was called Pipeline, and on that show I was exposed to a veritable smorgasbord of alternative genres, from the punk rock of the Sex Pistols to the synthpop of Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. The first time I ever heard Madonna was on that station, and Pipeline provided a taste of The Specials, Siouxie and the Banshees and the Cure that sent one scurrying to the local record stores like Vintage Vinyl, West End Wax and Euclid Records to buy what was heard or even something similar recommended by one of the knowledgeable hipsters behind the counter.

It wasn’t until I moved to San Diego that I could tune into a radio station that played music I liked, and even that came from south of the border, 91X based in Tijuana. Things actually got worse when I landed in the Philadelphia area. Philly didn’t even have a classical station, and the rock stations could often be found playing the exact same song at the same time. There was little variety in that market, so as soon as I could afford it I purchased a CD player and pretty much never looked back. Today I have switched to MP3s loaded on a USB stick, 16 GB of everything from the hard-rock of The Cult to seizure inducing Skinny Puppy mixed in with lots of electronic dance music from DJs like Christopher Lawrence, John 00 Fleming, and DJ Apsara.

Several months ago The Kid introduced me to Pandora. For those who don’t know, Pandora is internet radio that plays music based on the selection of a particular band one likes. As I understand it, Pandora then plays songs by similar bands or bands liked by listeners who share interest in the band. For example, I have a Frankie Goes to Hollywood “channel” (I’m too old to be embarrassed). It loads up and might start with the band’s greatest hit, Relax, but then might follow with a song from The Fixx or Duran Duran, bands that are also liked by 80’s nostalgia freaks like me. I have several stations for African music, ska, industrial, techno, and hard rock. Pandora is streamed to my smartphone across Verizon’s 3G network, and I connect my phone to the car stereo. It’s like having your very own radio station but one for any particular mood you find yourself in.

It is a customized radio experience, and it is one of the ways I know I’m living in the 21st century. 30 years ago I couldn’t have even conceived of such a thing, but here it is, and what’s even crazier is it’s free. It’s paid for through advertisements targeted at the demographic of people who like a particular artist, so I end up getting a lot of Home Depot and Over 50 Singles ads directed at me.

Congress of course is still stuck in the 20th century, and tries to regulate internet radio in ways favorable to Clear Channel, the dominant force in dinosaur radio. But once you hear new music that appeals to you on your very own radio station, why would you go back to listening to dinosaur radio where you only hear what the record labels pay to be played? It doesn’t matter what your tastes in music are, or even your taste in music at this moment, Pandora and it’s competitor Spotify, will provide you with music. Welcome to the future.

Awhile back I wrote about the logistical challenge and potential profits of mining the moon. It’s nice to learn the idea has fallen on much more fertile ground. Google’s founders have teamed up with James Cameron and a bunch of other liberal billionaires to form a mining company with plans to mine asteroids.

Freakin’ cool.

Space enthusiasts have struggled to get their bearings after the demise of the Apollo program and the disappointment of the shuttle program. They’ve had to content themselves with government funded missions with increasing costs and decreasing utility as taxpayers have demanded Apollo-like bang for pennies of what the program costs.

It’s well past time the exploration of space became the prerogative of private enterprise, and if it takes flaming liberals like Sergey Brin, Larry Page and James Cameron to do it, so be it.

James Delingpole lays out the case against anthropogenic global warming hysteria and other environmentalist dogma’s in his book, “Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing The Planet, Destroying The Economy And Stealing Your Children’s Future.” He writes about his experience in this article in The Daily Mail.

“As someone who loves long walks in unspoilt countryside and who wants a brighter future for his children, I’m sickened by the way environmental activists tar anyone who disagrees with them as a selfish, polluting, anti-science ‘denier’.

The real deniers are those ideological greens who refuse to look at hard evidence (not just pie-in-the-sky computer models which are no more accurate than the suspect data fed into them) and won’t accept that their well-intentioned schemes to make our world a better place are in fact making it uglier, poorer and less free.”

Rachel Carson and her ilk have blood on their hands. Millions of Africans and south Asians died because of their fear-mongering in the West. It’s a dirty secret that isn’t discussed by the mainstream environmental movement. In fact it’s a shame but it seems those who care about the environment aren’t associated with environmental groups anymore because even the Sierra Club and other so-called moderate organizations have been hijacked by zealots.

Imagine a private spacecraft launched from near the equator. It’s mission? To visit the moon, land on it, gather a kilogram of moon rocks and dust, then send that payload back to earth where it eventually reenters the atmosphere and is captured. Why do it? Why does anyone do anything these days: to make money. In 2003 NASA estimated 285 grams of moon rocks as being worth $1 million. That’s roughly $3,500 a gram. Would it be possible to make it to the moon and back with a kilo of the stuff for less than it’s value of $3.5 million? If not, how much of the lunar soil would make it worthwhile? Who knows, after the success of Discovery Channel shows like Gold Rush maybe they’d make a show out of it.

The mission could be broken down into the following stages: launch, travel to the moon, orbiting the moon, descent to the moon, landing on the moon, soil acquisition and storage, lift-off from the moon, return journey to Earth, atmospheric reentry, final collection. 10 stages – a nice round number.

1. Launch – Piggy back on an existing launch of a larger satellite, assuming that the entire vehicle could ride as a microsatellite weighing less than 100 kg. I assume this would be the bulk of the investment outlay.
2. Travel to moon – Disposable stage to send payload on its way to moon. Propellent could be conserved to lower launch weight in exchange for lengthening the mission. Six months there/six months return seems reasonable. But how to track the rocket both to and from the moon without a world-wide network of receivers?
3. Lunar orbit – It would be nice to skip this stage completely.
4. Descent – Since the moon has little atmosphere to speak of, parachutes could not be deployed. Therefore it seems the mission would have to rely upon rockets at some point to slow descent. That adds weight to the launch.
5. Lunar landing – Since humans aren’t on board a feather-like landing isn’t necessary. A controlled crash landing at some survivable speed would be preferred.
6. Soil acquisition and storage – It would be nice to combine soil acquisition somehow with the landing – say by having the craft land on an open ice cream scoop with a door that snaps shut once the craft has embedded in the soil. Alsoa sensor that confirms the payload isn’t empty would be critical. The last thing we would want to do is send back an empty craft.
7. Lunar ascent – Escape velocity of the moon is 2,400m/s. It’s significantly less than the earth’s of 11,200m/s but even that speed would be a challenge. Since my physics skills are laughable I can’t calculate what it would take to lift a 100kg craft off the the moon’s surface. I expect it’s more than I think.
8. Return to Earth – Anything that made it this far would probably generate world-wide headlines.
9. Atmospheric reentry – The heat shield would most likely have to survive the crash-landing on the moon. If the heat shield was opposite the soil collector (e.g. on “top” of the craft) the craft would have to orient itself to the proper trajectory to avoid becoming an expensive flaming shooting star across the sky.
10. Cargo collection – Would there be enough precision to insure the payload is returned to earth where it can be easily retrieved – such as the American desert southwest?

Which if any of these stages could be combined? For example, would the ship have to go into orbit around the moon before it dropped down to the surface or could we plot a course that would essentially crash it onto the moon’s surface? The Apollo mission relied upon two docking maneuvers. Would it be possible to simplify the mission to avoid these complex actions? That would entail sending the heat shield used for reentry into earth’s atmosphere on the last leg of the journey to the moon’s surface and back.

So you launch your spacecraft to the moon and a year or so later you pick up a parachute package containing 2.2 lbs of moon rocks and dust outside of Albuquerque. The next thing would be to parcel the dust into 100mg vials and sell them on eBay for $600 a pop. Larger specimens would go for less, of course. How soon would it take for the feds to arrive at your door arresting you for violating some international space treaty or federal law that wasn’t written with this mission in mind but that some governmental bureaucrat wants to throw at you? So on top of eBay and Paypal fees, be sure to add high power federal attorneys. Oh, and those profits? Rest assured that Obama and crew demonize you as being part of the 1% with enough balls to do something that no one has ever thought of.

 

Sometimes I’m a little slow about these things, so please ignore this post if you are already familiar with Google Reader . Up until last week I wasn’t familiar with that little app from Google, and as an avid blogger I did things the old fashioned way: I typed out or bookmarked the URLs of my favorite websites. Inevitably I would focus more on the aggregators  like Instapundit or Drudge, but I wanted something more personal – like an opinion section of my own newspaper. I also wanted to expand my universe of the blogs I followed. I’ve been writing this journal for almost 10 years and during that time I’ve found some very good blogs – but inevitably something new and shiny distracts me and I forget them. The Internet fat-tail enough, and I’ve gotten tired of the usual suspects quoted by Glenn Reynolds. After searching around for RSS readers, I discovered Google Reader – and it’s exactly what I needed.

Simply sign in to your Gmail account, then type the URL of your favorite blog. It then does the rest. It even has an app for Android, so following your favorite blogger is easy – even if she only posts once in Blue Moon, come that day her post will appear in your own personalized “opinion section.” Welcome to the 2000’s! Now if we could only get Bush back into the White House somehow…

There are sexy planes like this graceful-looking machine.

And then there’s the Warthog.

Dave Weinbaum pays homage to the A-10, the ugliest plane in our arsenal that everybody loves.

This is the first I’ve written about the earthquake that hit the Tohoku region of Japan on Friday. It’s not because I haven’t been thinking about it – it’s always in the back of my mind thanks to my history and ties to that country. It’s more because writing is a synthesis of ideas, and as the magnitude of the disaster grows with each passing hour, there aren’t many ideas to be had. What more can be said about a wall of water that wipes away an entire city, leaving behind such indelible images as a house on fire floating out to sea or ocean freighters floating through neighborhoods? This is the kind of disaster that sticks in your throat and leaves you at a loss for words, and after decades of writing I’ve learned that sometimes you just have to forget the words and simply let yourself experience the event. Writing about it and understanding it will come later.

Here are some points that I can muster as the disaster continues to unfold.

1. I’m already seeing articles out there wondering why the Japanese aren’t killing each other over bottles of water and blankets. This is a common reaction by outsiders who marvel at the social harmony exhibited by the Japanese, especially during times of stress.

The Japanese are unique in the world. They are unlike any other nationality or ethnicity (in fact they should be thought as the latter, not the former. Japanese nationality is by blood, and it’s nearly impossible for a foreigner to get it unless you are a sumo wrestler). There aren’t riots and looting in Japan because the individualism and selfishness that drives those actions have been repressed for centuries out of the Japanese. While this social trait seems exemplary at a time of disaster, it also underlies the high Japanese suicide rate (and declining birth rate), the lack of entrepreneurship or creative thinking shown by young Japanese, and even the reason the Japanese treated conquered peoples and POWs so viciously during World War 2.

To us “the nail that sticks out gets hammered” is a cliche but in Japan it’s a way of life. Japanese society is a pressure cooker that forces people to conform to the norms set by the group. Those that can’t be pressured occasionally leave or more often drift towards the edges of society where the Yakuza and other criminal elements flourish. Most drown their frustrations in alcohol; some even take their own lives. In a disaster Group-think and collective action is good, but the history of Japan is filled with bad ideas that were put into action without anyone defying the group and saying “No.” The Rape of Nanking. The treatment of POWs during World War 2 as exemplified by the Bataan Death March. The sex slaves euphemistically called “comfort women.” Unit 731 experiments on Chinese and POWs.

There is nothing we can learn from the docile and calm reaction of the Japanese to this disaster, and kicking ourselves for not being more like them is a pointless exercise. What we should learn from their behavior is to get relief supplies to those in need within 48 hours no matter what obstacles are in the way. It’s only after the first 48 hours that law and order in our society begins to fray.

2. The Japanese government is weak and incapable of operating effectively in this crisis. After the Kobe earthquake in 1995 I met people who walked from Kyoto and Osaka into Kobe along deserted railroad tracks carrying backpacks of food and water into the devastated city because the central government hadn’t acted. The government needs to be pushed aside (at least in deed if not thought) by the Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF). The JSDF has a history of mounting relief operations, and has only gotten better since the Kobe quake. In 1995 the Japanese central government refused aid from foreign countries including the United States which had aircraft carriers and fully-staffed ships hospitals at its disposal in the area. This was an act of nationalist pride by the government, and the citizenry paid the price. Here again the JSDF has worked closely with the United States armed forces and can access aid offered by the US military much faster than that offered through non-government and diplomatic channels. Although the scope of this disaster is unprecedented, the JSDF is in the best position to lead the relief effort – NOT the politicians in the Diet (and especially not PM Kan).

3. We need a sober and non-biased assessment of our nuclear power plants. I am a strong proponent of nuclear power even as three nuclear reactors are in the process of meltdown. The immediate reaction of the anti-nuke crowd will be “See? We told you so!” and advocates of nuclear power will be on the defensive. Neither Japan in microcosm nor Modern Society as a whole can ignore nuclear power. To paraphrase Professor David Mackay, author of “Sustainable Energy: Without All the Hot Air,” it’s not a choice between wind, or solar, or coal, or nuclear – we need all of them. Our species is a voracious consumer of power, and our demand is going to continue to outstrip supply for the foreseeable future. Nuclear power will remain an important contributor to our power needs, but we must learn from this disaster to determine what went wrong and how we could redesign reactors to withstand even greater disasters in the future. We need to move away from the outright rejection of nuclear power and replace it with a model where engineers learn from past mistakes to improve designs. When the first passenger airliners crashed there were outcries that air travel was too dangerous. But instead of chucking air travel into the dustbin because it was too dangerous we learned from each aircraft disaster to reach a point where we are today when a downed aircraft anywhere in the world makes news because it is such a rare event. The same can happen with nuclear power if a) The anti-nuke lobby isn’t allowed to kill the technology and b) The pro-nuclear lobby is willing to allow engineers to design safer reactors and the public accepts them.

4. We 21st century humans have proven time and again that we cannot predict how bad the worst natural disaster can be. Just off the top of my head I think I’ve heard over the past 38 years the flooding of the Mississippi River referred to as “once in a century floods” no less than four times. Natural events are always stronger than we think they can be, as if Mother Nature consciously resists our pathetic attempts at controlling her by binding her with worst-case predictions. When we design anything that is meant to resist natural forces we should make it so that it “fails gracefully” – not to resist the worst earthquakes or hurricanes we can imagine. Why? Because rest assured, there will be always be worse hurricanes and earthquakes than we can imagine, regardless of whether Global Warming is happening or not. It is better that we control how and when a system fails than to do the impossible: make a system 100% robust.

I have no doubt that the Japanese will survive this calamity and my gut tells me that their nation will be that much better for it. In the meantime all I can do is watch, and hope that the tens of thousands missing are found alive and that relief reaches even the most isolated village as soon as possible. The Japanese people gave me much while I lived among them, and I wish I could do more to give back to them now in their time of need than ask that you to consider a donation to the American Red Cross.

I was changing classes at the Lakefront campus of Loyola. A television had been wheeled out and stood in a corridor showing the explosion over and over. I haven’t forgotten the loss I felt as an American that day with the reminder that exploration is not without hazard, that the roads we drive and the paths we take without a care today were built with the sweat of men and paid for with their blood.

High Flight – by John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.