Monica

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hlinspjalda

I talked with the vet today. The test of Baldur's liver function came back normal. As we were discussing next steps (the ones that could produce answers are dangerous), she asked me just what he eats. There's dry food out all the time and its rate of consumption hasn't markedly changed in recent months, but of course I don't know who eats how much. Baldur has ready access, though. He gets tiny amounts of tuna and canned food; basically he gets to lick the spoon when I feed such to Erik. Baldur wolfed down half a can of food in about 15 minutes at the vet's on Thursday, so my vet suggested giving him real amounts of canned food. I've generally avoided that because it's unhealthy, but y'know, he's 17 years old now -- am I really worried about him picking up bad dietary habits at this point? So I'll give that a try; he enthusiastically ate most of a can of food today (between morning and evening), so we're off and running.

I see that the post office wants to cut a day of mail delivery to save costs. I don't mind the cut, but I think it would be much better for us customers/taxpayers if they chose a day in the middle of the week, say, Thursday, instead of choosing a schedule that sometimes means four days between mail deliveries. I assume that giving up all their Monday holidays isn't on the table. (There actually is a segue from the previous item to this one: this morning I refilled a mail-order prescription for Baldur.)

Dani recently ordered some Israeli CDs, and the MP3 tagging has been strange. Two or three different two-disc sets tagged one disc in English (transliteration) and one in Hebrew, for instance. Sometimes song titles will be one way and performers the other. In one case we got gibberish, presumably a unicode failure or something, and Dani typed stuff in by hand. Any one of those cases wouldn't have surprised me, but mixing it up on the same recording is bizarre.

The back-story is that the woman (age 18) beat her previous record by a noticeable margin and has a masculine build. So just to make sure, somebody wants to check. There's a rather straightforward way to do that, but that's not what they're doing so they must not believe it would answer the question. So what's going on -- do they suspect that a teenage athlete might have had major surgery in order to win a race?

This got me thinking about gender and sports more broadly. It's common to have men's and women's divisions, presumably out of a belief that men and women are sufficiently different that it's not fair to make them compete. Does this mean that the division is intended to be by birth status, that a transsexual person would compete in the "wrong" (by appearance) category? In which category does a hermaphrodite compete? When these kinds of sporting events were being invented these would have been deemed frivolous questions, but I imagine that some people have had to wrestle with these issues by now.

Is gender segregation the best way to achieve balance among entrants? I would think that, all other factors being equal, in a race a woman who's a foot taller than me would have much more of an advantage over me than a man of my height does (longer stride). Isn't it time for the short-person division? (Ok, now I'm being frivolous...)

This is based on the end of parshat Emor, Lev 24:10-23.

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Via Slashdot: daylight "saving" time actually increases energy usage. ("Saving" is a misnomer; we should call it "daylight shifting time", which is all it accomplishes. There are not, after all, storehouses in which we collect excess sunlight for use during lean times; nothing is saved.) The researchers were handed a great data-collection opportunity: they did their work in Indiana, where until recently some counties did DST and others did not. So they not only had before-and-after data, but also a control group nearby to factor out weather and the like.

A few days ago a house in Plum (near Pittsburgh) exploded, apparently from a gas leak. (I actually saw this on national news before I saw the local news.) This made me wonder whether it's possible to build a detector (other than the human nose) for household use. We have smoke detectors and carbon-monoxide detectors; why have I never heard of a gas-buildup detector? Granted that such incidents are extremely rare, but they are potentially much more devastating than fires and CO buildup, so if an inexpensive household gadget could provide some potential warning, that'd be great.

In lighter news:

You know that "who do you want to answer the phone at 3AM?" ad the Clinton campaign is running? The little girl in the ad was stock footage; she's now an adult and working on the Obama campaign (via insomnia).

Headline of the day, from thnidu: Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo.

We can take as given the riff on parental responsibility, right? It's not Toyota's fault if your kid gets left in the car, but that's clearly where the suits will be directed when one of these systems fails. That's not what this post is about.

I suspect that most of those 61% don't care about the difference between worst-case cost and expected cost. While leaving a kid in a hot car for an hour is much much worse than leaving your headlights on for an hour, I submit that the probability is much much lower, or there'd be a lot more news stories about it and a lot fewer calls to AAA. The expected cost of the headlights is higher and carbuyers care, and that's why that alarm is standard equipment. No one but the market requires that makers put it there.

Speaking personally, the expected cost over, say, the next decade of my leaving a kid in my unattended hot car is 0. The expected cost of my leaving my headlights on is some positive fraction of $100 for a new battery and several hours of my time, at least one of which comes at a time when I, demonstrably, wanted to be somewhere else. 61% of poll responders would say "tough noogies" to me and wouldn't care if adding this device costs me hundreds of dollars. (I don't know what it costs.)

If that's what those voters truly believe, then they do not go far enough. If the goal is to prevent the deaths of those who can't see the danger or get out of the car themselves, then clearly it's not just about kids. Some adult passengers are unable to care for themselves and could die in hot cars too. I think it's actually more likely that an adult suffering from dementia would be ignored by passersby than that a kid would be. We don't think it's unusual for adults to sit in parked cars. Isn't gramps at least as important as an infant?

I predict that I'll get few takers from among the 61%; they would rightly say "you can't prevent everything". Yes, exactly. And given that, you have to cost-justify, and not just emotionally justify, the burden you would place on everyone else. Here's an idea: if you want a requirement, require that the device be built into the car seat, not the car. It'll be more expensive to do right (and be amortized over fewer buyers), but, well, it's the price we pay for safety, right?

Am I missing a sound argument in favor of requiring unattended-child alarms in all cars, or do all arguments boil down to "a possibility of one child's death is worth the certainty of $X in increased cost for everyone"?

I've got a lot of stuff accumulating in browser tabs on a wide variety of topics, so...

The (spam)bot wars heat up, by jducoeur.

I'm a little behind in my tech news. siderea posted a helpful summary of the news about cracking the DRM code on DVDs and the subsequent firestorm on Digg.

merle_ on the true reasons behind the bee population problem.

Why programmers should never become ministers, link from aliza250. Satan is a MIS director who takes credit for more powers than he actually possesses, so people who aren't programmers are scared of him. God thinks of him as irritating but irrelevant.

insomnia on the new military rules that significantly limit participation in blogs, mailing lists, and so on. I saw an article that quoted an anonymous military source saying "we didn't mean that; use common sense". I don't know enough yet to have a handle on what's really going on, but it bears watching.

South Park Mac vs. PC, link from bkdelong.

Unconventional greeting cards, like "your painful breakup has made me feel less alone" and "your cell phone ringtone is damaging your career". Link from thatcrazycajun.

In light of my recent post about kippot in synagogues and elsewhere, I found this post on hair-covering by katanah interesting.

Cached for later reading: Clay Shirky: A group is its own worst enemy. (He's talking about online fora.) Link from Geek Etiquette.

And, for those in the SCA, what looks like a thoughtful and fascinating conversation about staying in-period at events versus talking about your computer, and why people go to events anyway, and what changes we might want to make. This post by msmemory has an overview and links to several other posts I would have mentioned here but now don't have to.

Some days the news raises more questions than it answers. CNN reports: "Three climbers who fell from a ledge on Mount Hood are huddled in their sleeping bags with a Labrador retriever to keep warm as they await rescue, according to an official with the rescue team."

I read the whole story. It does not address my primary question upon reading the opening paragraph: where'd the dog come from? Do people really go mountain-climbing with dogs? (How?) Or was it just a lucky coincidence?

The child, four years old and accompanied by his mother, bypassed one four-foot-high barrier and then put his hand through a larger chain-link fence. The article didn't say, but I assume there were plenty of "keep away from the bears" signs too, in case two fences didn't make that point. The child got bitten (not badly enough to require stitches). Mom couldn't identify the biting bear, so both of the bears in that pen were killed.

Rabies is an unpleasant disease, but it is treatable. The treatment is painful, but many people have to undergo it because they have no choice. Sometimes you do something stupid and have to suffer the consequences; sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time and, yet, you still have to suffer the consequences. Life isn't fair, and sometimes no one is at fault.

Accidents happen, and the kid here is not to blame. For all we know, neither is the mother -- there are conflicting reports about whether she helped him climb the first barrier or looked away for a moment and he did it on his own. But that doesn't matter (except for settling the tort); even if this was completely an accident, a fluke, people have to accept some personal responsibility. It appears that someone made a decision to test the bears instead of treating the kid just in case; I think that decision was wrong.

There was clearly no fault on the part of the park or the bears themselves, so the child's discomfort is not adequate reason for killing the bears. The child, and the mother, could have gotten a valuable lesson about personal responsibility here, but they didn't. It probably didn't even occur to the parents, because we increasingly live in a world where the meme is "protection over everything, and when that doesn't work find someone to take it out on". But that doesn't help kids grow up into responsible adults, and you can't child-proof (and idiot-proof) the world anyway.

We are becoming, and raising, a nation of spoiled brats, who think that if they're unhappy, there must be someone to punish -- as if that makes anything any better. Punishment should be reserved for willful acts (including negligence). When there is clearly no fault, we need to minimize the overall damage, not our personal damage.

By the way, the bears tested negative.