Things I Know I Know

This isn't necesssarily new information (published July, 2001), but Capitol Roundup cites two reports from the non-profit consumer group, Public Citizen which say:

In two reports made public yesterday (Monday, July 23), Public Citizen, citing drug industry and National Institute of Health data, reported that drug companies actually pay about $110 million in research and development costs per drug rather than the $500 million touted by the industry.

Additionally, the group maintains that at least 55 percent of the research projects that led to the discovery and development to the top five selling drugs in 1995 were conducted by taxpayer-funded scientists.

The drug companies (in the guise of PhRMA) say this is so not true.

Public Citizen says, yes it is.

Posted by debco at 04:15 PM | Permalink

Manhattan under 400 feet of water

I have no idea why, I just like it.

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 03:26 PM | Permalink

All Consuming has a list of the Top 100 Books mentioned on Weblogs in 2002.

Posted by debco at 03:24 PM | Permalink

Okay, listen up. Torture doesn't work. It is pure punishment culture of the worst kind. First of all, why would it work? Just think about it. You're hurting me. I have two options--1) do anything to make it stop, including lying my head off about anything you want to know or 2) shut down completely, in which case you might as well kill me now because I'm done.

You may get information, but you have no way to know that it's accurate. After all, you might be torturing someone WHO DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING!

What do I mean by punishment culture? Well, we're living in one. We're completely caught up in the idea that people doing wrong must know they're doing wrong (it's never enough just to Stop Doing Wrong Forever), that pain is important and inflicting it is 'tough,' that humane treatment is weak, and that the only reason anyone ever Does Good is because they're afraid they're going to be punished (you can see how well this last bit works by observing how few people are currently in our nation's jails, she said sarcastically).

Calpundit has a really excellent, passionate post on torture from a alightly different and critically important perspective:

...Alan Dershowitz, who has gotten a bunch of press lately for his suggestion that torture is sometimes permissible, uses as his basic example the "ticking bomb" scenario: if a bomb is about to go off and someone knows where it is, it's OK to torture the person in order to extract the information.

This is profoundly wrong, and a perfect example of an intellectual being too clever for his own good. It's one of those situations where you need to turn off your higher intellect and just let your basic sense of right and wrong guide you.

Is it OK for a doctor to torture prisoners if the end result is a medical therapy that could save thousands? No.

Is it OK to torture a scientist's family in order to coerce him to work on an invention that could predict earthquakes and save millions? No.

Is torture ever OK in a decent society? No.

Still not sure? Just ask yourself this: would you be willing to perform the torture yourself? After all, it's easy and requires no technical skill. If you approve of torture but your answer is no, then you are a coward and a hypocrite. If your answer is yes, you are a barbarian. In either case, I don't want to know you.

Posted by debco at 03:50 PM | Permalink

John Ikerd, Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri has written a number of highly interesting papers on the state of American farmers and sustainable agriculture.

In one of these papers (they're all pretty good) he talks about The Case for Common Sense:

American farmers have been told they must specialize, mechanize, and manage their farms like a business – it’s the logical, reasonable thing to do. But, this logic and reason has led to fewer farms, larger farms, and increasingly, to corporate control of farming. Being logical and reasonable has brought the demise of family farms and now threatens the food security of the nation. Maybe it’s time to try something else. Maybe it’s time for farmers to rely on their common sense.

...

Our common sense today tells us something is fundamentally wrong in American agriculture. We are told we shouldn’t be concerned about the current farm financial situation. The current crisis is just a normal economic adjustment, and the free-market ultimately works for the good of all, so they say. We are told we shouldn’t be concerned about the natural environment, that we have no proof we are damaging the natural ecosystem, and after all, we can find a technological fix for any ecological problem. We are told we shouldn’t be concerned about what is happening to family farms and rural communities, that rural people want the same things urban people want, and thus, they must give up their rural ways of life. But, our common sense tells us that something is fundamentally wrong in rural America – economically, ecologically, and socially.

I once had a major revelation at the annual Pork Congress. Specifically, that, mostly, there are no villians, that everyone (or nearly everyone) is trying their hardest to Do Good, to make an honest living, to help others when they can, to leave their mark in the world. And when you look at things that way--that everyone is doing the best they can--it doesn't necessarily change where you want to go, but it may change the means you use to get there and who you enlist as your allies.

Just like black people don't need white liberals (or worse, white conservatives) telling them what they can and cannot care about, farmers don't need 'city folk' telling them what they can and cannot do with their land. What we (all of us) need instead are to find ways to work together, to understand each other, to honor one another's values, and to make a difference for everyone. Small farmers are getting hammered in the new industrial, global landscape. Environmentalists, people concerned about the food supply, and even just folks who like a good tasty meal should be allies, if not friends, of farmers and other rural citizens in working against corporatization, conglomeration, and industrialization.

Posted by debco at 03:40 PM | Permalink

Time Magazine's Persons of the Year are all whistleblowers: Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins who brought forth important information on WorldCom, the FBI, and Enron, respectively.

...also via BoingBoing (really you should just go there and read everything...)

Posted by debco at 02:33 PM | Permalink

Defective Yeti proposes a new money system using Legos instead of, well, cash:

...Great Idea #57709: the US should make the four pronged square Lego the standard unit of US currency. The bigger Legos will be worth more, and the smaller Legos will be like coins, and those huge Lego plates will be, like, $1000 bills. We'll also outlaw those stupid "Mindstorm" Legos because they are new-fangled and I don't understand them.

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 02:25 PM | Permalink

Smart mobs, the use of wireless networks, mobile communication, and ubiquitous computing to bring about some kind of collective action is described in detail in Howard Rheingold's new book, Smart Mobs

It's likely, according to Rheingold (via correspondence from Korea), that smart mobs, played a role in the recent South Korean presidential elections:

The Saturday, the Hangyore newspaper in Seoul Korea carried a front-page article entitled, "Youth Politics of the IT Generation Won," on the role of network connectivity in the recent election. Young supporters of No Mu-hyon flooded the internet with e-mails and saturated text messaging services with calls to get out the vote for No Mu-hyon. The article noted claims by information technology columnist Sin Tong-nyo'k': that information and power in the mass media and representative democracy were in the past vested in a minority, but have been conferred on the majority by the internet.

...via BoingBoing

Posted by debco at 02:23 PM | Permalink

I'm really only blogging this so I can include this description from BoingBoing:

Laid-off New York executives are enrolling in charm school to learn how to treat with the little people without coming off as badly socialized, overly entitled assholes.

Posted by debco at 02:13 PM | Permalink

An interesting article in The New York Times on explosives- and drug- detecting.

All in all, it's a pretty good article and covers well the critically important issues that dogs doing scent work can have.

I do have to comment on this, though:

Creatures of habit, dogs also can become stuck in their ways. For example, a dog might become fixated on a particular object or smell, Dr. Myers said, citing a police dog in Alabama that began alerting its handlers to Ziploc bags because the police stored drug training samples in them.

This is not being a 'creature of habit' or 'fixating on a particular object.' This is insufficiently explaining what you wanted. The dog was correctly indicating Ziploc bags. It was the handler's mistake for not understanding what the dog was learning. It's like playing those games--which object am I thinking of--the dog keeps picking Ziploc bags and keeps getting rewarded. Gee, what's it supposed to think?

Dogs know how to scent (compared to them, we have No Idea). They're incredibly good at it. But they only know what we want them to scent and to detect by scenting by what we teach them. If we're not clear, if we don't understand what they're telling us, if things happen quickly and both handler and dog get confused, there will be false results.

I agree with the article that false reports of explosives are better than missing real explosives. Increased accuracy and skill are even better.

Posted by debco at 02:11 PM | Permalink

Beth Bartel is blogging from Antarctica. Check out Iceblog!

Including the The Iceblog Photo Gallery

What's she doing in Antarctica? There's a good detailed explanation here:

In a nutshell, I study volcano geodesy. Or volcano deformation. Both of which are confusing terms. Both mean that I study how the surface of a volcano moves, presumably in response to things that are happening inside. A change in pressure within the volcano, if large enough, should result in measurable deformation at the surface. Deformation means a change in shape. For example, a magmatic intrusion from deep within the Earth to a shallow magma body (i.e. chamber) should result in inflation of the volcano, like a balloon. If we can measure this deformation, we can make guesses about what's going on within the volcano.

...found via The Rittenhouse Review

Posted by debco at 10:59 PM | Permalink

reading (among other things) Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station. And boy, is Mrs. Pollifax in some trouble this time!

Posted by debco at 08:25 PM | Permalink

like Lilo and Stitch a lot, though I haven't figured out exactly why yet. It may be the screaming, the growling, the slit-eyed silent resentment or, you know, the whole Ugly Duckling thing.

But it's probably the wrecking things and the explosions....

Posted by debco at 08:24 PM | Permalink

the kind of person who nitpicks movies or who cares how possible a premise is if it's carried out with style and verve, but Reign of Fire has to be one of the top stupidest movies of all time.

Posted by debco at 08:21 PM | Permalink

Online journals designed to make peer-reviewed scientific discovery papers available to the widest possible audience are in the works by a group of scientists pursuing a non-profit model for reviewing and publishing the research material. According to an article in the New York Times:

A group of prominent scientists is mounting an electronic challenge to the leading scientific journals, accusing them of holding back the progress of science by restricting online access to their articles so they can reap higher profits.

Current scientific print journals say they have very high standards, which can be costly, but they also have reaped huge rewards according to the Times article:

The Dutch-British conglomerate Reed Elsevier Group, the world's largest academic publisher, posted a 30 percent profit last year on its science publishing activities. Science took in $34 million last year on advertising alone.

Me. I wish them well. One of the sources quoted in the article says that only experts care about this stuff anyway and experts already reside in places that buy subscriptions. I'll go on record here. I care.

Posted by debco at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I forgot to mention in the last post that I've also been reading Mrs. Pollifax. I was cleaning out a closet last week and found six Mrs. Pollifax books in a bag. I have no idea where they came from, but I thought, what the heck, and read three of them:

The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax
A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax
Mrs. Pollifax on Safari

Written by Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax is a grandmother who lives a quiet life growing night-blooming cereus and visiting with her friends, children, and grandchildren. Except...she is occasionally called upon by the CIA to do little jobs for them. Reading three Mrs. Pollifax books in a row causes them to suffer somewhat from series sameness, her karate skills are a little unbelievable, and I never did figure out where the 'palm' figured into A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, but I like her character. Mrs. Pollifax pays attention wherever she goes, asks questions, makes diverse friends, helps people in trouble, enjoys the moments there are to enjoy, is resourceful, doesn't mind how other people treat her, and thus has totally unexpected resources at her disposal when crunch time comes.

Posted by debco at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A couple of books I've finished lately:

Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology by James R. Chiles

This is a book about catastrophes, mostly technological, and some of the reasons they happen. It was originally published in 2001, but this edition has a new introduction that talks about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The author does a terrific job of describing the details of disasters like Three Mile Island, Apollo I, the Hubble Space Telescope, Chernobyl, the Texas City explosion and many others. It's not about 'who the bad guy is' as much as it's about how these things happen and why. It's sobering to realize that so many big disastrous moments had much of the information available, just waiting for someone to use it.

And it's vastly sobering to me to realize that while there are certain crises I'm very good at, in the something-goes-wrong-that-doesn't-seem-important-at-the-time category, I'd be so the person that ignored the warning signs or jury-rigged a temporary solution because a deadline was looming or something equally bad in retrospect.

The book sums up well in this paragraph:

Even the best-run systems always have something off-line or running out of tolerance, out there in the wilderness of high-pressure piping, wires, and cable trays. No force on earth can get everything to stay in balance all the time. To insist on perfection is to shut the whole thing off. And the people who run the systems wouldn't pay attention, anyway. As sailors say, this would be seen as another stupid order from "the beach," meaning from people who don't know how the machine works out in the theater of action and haven't the courage or will to master it.

There's no such thing as perfect safety and pretending that there is can get us in much deeper trouble than facing up to the issues at hand in the first place.

Chiles tells us that Admiral Rickover, who was responsible for developing, testing, and deploying the Navy's nuclear submarines, had seven principles for the safe operation of reactors and they apply pretty well to a lot of other things:

1. Have a rising standard of quality as time goes on, well beyond the minimum required for licensing or permitting
2. Have highly capable people trained for all conditions by people who've actually 'been there'
3. Face bad news when it comes
4. Have a healthy respect for the dangers
5. Train constantly and rigorously
6. All functions--repair, quality control, safety, and technical support--must fit together (and, like, you know, talk to each other)
7. The organization must have the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes of the past.

Too bad we can't put him in charge of the 9/11 investigation.

Also read:
The Introvert's Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World by Marti Olsen Laney

I have always been the introvert's introvert. In fact, a few years ago, I realized that I am much smarter when I've been in a cabin by myself for a week, with limited contact with other people. In fact, toward the end of the week, I'm damned brilliant.

There's a science fiction short story (which I'm sure someone out there knows the title of) where an astronaut heading to Mars discovers that parasites have been sitting in his brain. They drop out when he leaves Earth's (atmosphere?, gravitataional pull?) and he's delighted and astounded at how easy it is to think with them gone, how clear everything seems. He's planning how to transform all of Earth by getting rid of these brain leaches when he enters the influence of Mars and discovers these parasites live on other planets too.

That's how I feel when I get time alone and how it feels when I come back--like I was brilliant for a little while, but can't be brilliant any more.

The Introvert Advantage talks about the 'why' of this, about the need for energy renewal that extroverts get from other people and introverts get from not-other-people. It also explains to me (finally) why I can't answer questions like, 'what's your favorite movie,' or 'name three things you like about Christmas.' There's not a lot that's totally new to me here, though I found the theories about different brain workings in extroverts and introverts very interesting.

Introverts need a lot of 'down time.' Laney says, "If you feel any of the sensations listed below, take time out to restore yourself."

• Anxious, agitated, irritable, and snappish
• Unable to think, concentrate, or make decisions
• Confused and discombobulated, as if you are dashing from thing to thing in a blur
• Trapped and wondering what is the meaning of life
• Drained, tired, put-upon, and pooped
• Disconnected from yourself

I say--Ha, ha, ha! Welcome to my life, baby!

Posted by debco at 08:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Creative Commons has released version 1.0 of their Licensing Project

The purpose of the Creative Commons is to allow creators more flexibility in the rights they grant for using their intellectual property. Among the licenses possible under the Creative Commons are:

Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing says that he's releasing his new novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, under a Creative Commons license on January 9th, simultaneously with the hardcover release.

Posted by debco at 03:25 PM | Permalink

The Pocket Calculator Show

...to collect and celebrate personal memories of all integrated circuit-based consumer products from the electronics revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

Balloon Hats around the World

Two guys touring the world, taking pictures of people in balloon hats

Stewardess Uniform Collection

"Most of my uniforms were obtained between 1993 and today. At the moment my collection contains almost 220 different uniforms from various airlines worldwide."

Posted by debco at 02:41 PM | Permalink

Why do they call it The Original Chex Party Mix, when it isn't? I mean, there's no way they had little garlic bagel chips when Chex Party Mix recipes were first printed on boxes.

I'm equally suspicious of the inclusion of garlic powder....

Posted by debco at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The final week of tracking class took us two weeks because it was a holiday weekend and some people couldn't make it. The final lesson involved students laying tracks for each other. The tracks consisted of 75 and 50 yard legs with one wide-angle turn. We tracked in town at the soccer/softball sports complex, which is huge.

At this point, the handlers are still learning how to handle the line and haven't really started paying attention to what their dogs are doing at all. All the dogs in this class have learned to start, to get their heads down, to make a turn on short grass, to find the glove at the end. They've got the very basics that they need to track and now need practice, length, age, different conditions (rain, snow, warm, cold, hills, tall grass, woods, short grass.....)

Things I wish I could cover in more detail include tracklaying, tracklayer's responsibility, reading your dog, line handling, map drawing, analyzing this week's track and planning for next week.

While I've been teaching this class, I've been tracking Charming Billie. She's doing great, is fast and focused, but is the toughest dog to read. When she loses the track, she moves very quickly to try and locate it and although I can tell when she's really on the track (she settles down deep in the harness and moves in a way that's hard to describe, but recognizable), she's still hard to read when she isn't on the track, but trying things. Because she moves so fast, it'd be easy to get way off track by going with her at the wrong moment and being unable to come back. It's probably time to start doing blind tracks with her (where I don't know where the track goes). She's up to at least three corners, an hour or so of age, and about 300 yards. A full TD (the lowest level of tracking test) is 440 to 500 yards, half-hour to two hours old, 3 to 5 turns.

Posted by debco at 09:54 AM | Permalink

Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly publishing has some salient points about the copyright/intellectual property issue in a column at OpenP2p.com:

• Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy
• Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
• Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
• Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy
• Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
• Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service
• Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it

Posted by debco at 09:42 AM | Permalink

I've been pretty sporadic about posting the last couple of weeks. I know I still have a final tracking class post to get up here, for one thing. I'd like to say I've been really busy, but I don't know that that's true. I am going to try to get things back on a regular schedule though.

More to come...

Posted by debco at 09:37 AM | Permalink

It's a constant source of amazement to me what some people will do for no apparent reason.

I think it's nifty. And keen. And kinda swell, too.

Posted by debco at 08:25 PM | Permalink

There's an article in The Journal of Metallurgy on the making of the weaponry and armor for The Lord of the Ring.

Posted by debco at 08:04 PM | Permalink

I haven't had a chance to write the essay I'd like to write to go with this, but I've decided to start blogging more rural/farming/outside the cities and suburbs stuff because as I read more weblogs and more opinions on what we do and who we are and what's progressive, I'm seeing a great deal of misunderstanding and downright dismissal of those of us in 'flyover country'.

People in rural states can be conservative about some things and downright suspicious of 'big city' doings at times, but don't forget that Harkin is from Iowa, Wellstone was from Minnesota, Hilary Clinton got a lot of votes from rural upstate New York counties (no, she didn't 'win' a lot of those counties, but she gathered 40% of the vote in some places that have been staunchly conservative and Republican for many many years)

Totally unrelated to that, but the thing this blog entry was originally supposed to be about, the Sustainable Agriculture Network has a book onThe New American Farmer who is not surprise, surprise a corporate farmer.

Among the farmers described areDick and Sharon Thompson :

Looking at a 12-year average, Thompson says, his neighbors lose about $33 per acre — before taking government payments into account. By contrast, he generates a profit of $104 per acre. The Thompsons have not received government subsidies for years, yet their diverse farm still supports two families without off-farm employment and without organic premiums.

Posted by debco at 03:37 PM | Permalink

Here's an archive of over 1,200 'ephemeral films (advertising, industrial, educational, amateur). Topics range from beer to industrial theater to civil defense.

I parciularly recommend (because I just saw it today) The House in the Middle, which tells you how to survive nuclear war with good housekeeping and fresh paint.

My favorite line: This house burned 'as if it was deliberatly fired with kindling' as opposed to deliberatly fired with an ATOM BOMB!

Posted by debco at 03:05 PM | Permalink

Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice writes about the new American Freedom Fighters

By and large, these resolutions are similar to the one passed unanimously by the Northampton City Council on May 2, 2002, which required that:"Local law enforcement continue to preserve residents' freedom of speech, religion, assembly and privacy; rights to counsel and due process in judicial proceedings; and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures even if requested or authorized to infringe upon these rights by federal law enforcement acting under new powers granted by the USA Patriot Act or orders of the Executive Branch."

Posted by debco at 07:22 PM | Permalink

Merrill Markoe once observed that the world is run by eighth grade boys. Everyone I have ever mentioned this theory too just nods and says, 'That explains so much!'

The Rittenhouse Review says that journalists are like the Alpha girls from high school (actually some of them are Alpha girls and many of them are wannabe Alpha girls). Alpha girls are the ones who run everything--who gets to be 'in,' who gets to be 'out,' who gets picked on and who gets picked. Alpha girls and Beta girls hate Al Gore for reasons I still don't completely understand, but which seem to have something to do with status and fitting in and making people who aren't Al Gore happy.

Posted by debco at 07:18 PM | Permalink