Children and airplanes, another view

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about children on red-eye flights — and got quite a few hate-mail-like comments about it. At the risk of more of the same, I’ll point my readers at an opinion piece from last week by Amy Alkon, “Screaming kids and airplanes: Mayday! Mayday!” Ms Alkon, a non-parent, as I am, doesn’t like having children’s behaviour inflicted on her in inappropriate places... and she thinks of airplanes as about as inappropriate as they get:

Root was appalled when a flight attendant told her something to the effect of “We just can’t tolerate that [screaming] for two hours,” reported the San Jose Mercury News. Root insisted Adam would be “fine once we take off” — which, in my book, means either “He’ll be fine” or “It would be a serious pain in the butt to be stuck in Amarillo another day.”

[...]

Southwest sent the right message in yanking Root and her screaming boy off the plane. Unfortunately, it lacked the corporate courage to stand its ground, probably fearing a public relations nightmare from the Mommy Mafia. Yet, almost every day, I encounter parents who need to get the same message Root initially did. Trust me — should I long to hear screaming children, I’ll zip right past my favorite coffeehouse and go read my morning paper at Chuck E. Cheese.

I know, I know — because I am not a parent I cannot possibly understand how hard it is to keep a child from acting out. Actually, that probably has more to do with the way I was raised — by parents I describe as loving fascists. As a child, I was convinced that I could flap my arms and fly, but the idea that I could ever be loud in a public place that wasn’t a playground simply did not exist for me.

I hear claims that some children are prone to tantrums no matter how exquisitely they are parented. If this describes your child, there’s a solution, and it isn’t plopping him in a crowded metal tube with hundreds of people who can’t escape his screams except by throwing themselves to their deaths at 30,000 feet.

Ms Alkon, soi-disant “Advice Goddess”, is known for her humorous and blunt, over-the-top manner, and the L.A. Times piece has well over 200 comments, as I write this, both for and against.

I’ll only say that I’m glad to have had two peaceful, quiet flights to and from Japan, on my recent trip.

Ahhhhhh....

[Thanks to Lisa Simeone for pointing me to the item.]

Saturday at the ButterBall

The ButterBall is a really wonderful twelve-hour contradance that’s held in northeast Philadelphia on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This year’s schedule had Rick Mohr calling with the band Rumpus, Susan Taylor calling with the Avant Gardeners, Beth Molaro calling with Giant Robot Dance (see the first video below), and George Marshall calling with the Clayfoot Strutters. Between bands, there’s waltzing (see the second video).

It’s tiring, yes. And it’s a lot of fun!

 

Update, 8:30 p.m.: Ha! I just phoned Mum, and it turns out that the building we danced in is just a few blocks from where she lived when she was a teenager. Who’d have imagined?

Friday night at the Dinosaur Bar B Que

Telephone etiquette

There are some things that we remember for a long time. Some of them are the good things; some are the bad things. Sometimes, it’s just something neutral, but it just happens to be sufficiently remarkable to embed itself in the neurons of long-term memory, to come to the surface now and again.

One has just surfaced, and I thought I’d share it with y’all.

Around 25 years ago, I got a phone call at the office. I picked up the handset, and said, “Hi, this is Barry Leiba.”

“You called me?”, said a brusque^[1] female voice from the other end of the line.

“Um. I don’t know. Who are you?”

“Jane Smith,” she said, retaining her abrupt tone. No, it’s not her real name; that long ago took its leave of my grey matter.

“I’m sorry: that doesn’t ring a bell. Do you know why I called you?”

Adding exasperation to her abruptness, she explained, “I’m in Personnel.”^[2]

Ha! Now I got it. Three days earlier, I had called the general Personnel office number, and had left a message asking someone to phone me back about a particular issue, which I introduced briefly in the message. I had not called Ms Smith directly, nor should I have known who she was, and I had said what my call was about. None of this, naturally, had come through in this bizarre exchange.

It turned out well, though: now that I knew that Personnel was returning my call, I explained my problem. Ms Smith was able to help, and it all got resolved.

But... what a strange way to start a business call.
 

---

^[1] I love that word, “brusque”.^[3]

^[2] That’s what we used to call the Human Resources department, back before people became “resources”.

^[3] Perhaps my favourite usage of it is on the Monty Python and the Holy Grail soundtrack album. At the beginning of side two of the original LP, Michael Palin shouts an announcement: “This is side two! If you want to play the record from the beginning, please turn over! Do not play this side, if you want side one! This is side two!”

Immediately following that, Graham Chapman, in a soothing voice and with pleasant music in the background, says, “We would like to apologise to purchasers of the executive version of this record for the peremptory nature of that announcement. The brusque tone was intended for buyers of the cheaper version.”^[4]

This is one of the only cases I can think of where something is actually lost in having the whole of a recording on one CD, and not having to turn the LP over. The announcement was retained on the CD version, from which I transcribed the text above, but, of course, it makes little sense there.^[5]

^[4] There was only ever one version, the “executive version”; that was one of the running jokes on the record. And, by the way, the “soundtrack album” actually has a good deal of material that’s not in the movie, so it’s well worth owning even if you have the DVD of the film. Follow the Amazon link above.

^[5] Arguably, the whole of Monty Python makes little sense, so one doesn’t fret too much. One just laughs.

Thanksgiving dinner

Before and after...

Giving thanks

Tomorrow I’ll be being thankful, as will most Americans, over plates full of far too much food, glasses too full of wine, and desserts too plentiful to contemplate.

I’ll be thankful for all the things in my life that continue to be good, year after year. I have plenty of good friends. I have a good place to live. I’m safe and sound and healthy, despite my now having to deal daily with pills for blood pressure and cholesterol — stuff happens when you pass 50, and I used to think that was just a joke. I’m able to enjoy the things that I enjoy, and that’s very much worth being thankful for.

I’ll be thankful, even, for the things that have changed this year. The economy is awful, and I lost my job, as did many others around me. But I’ve found new work that makes me happy, and I’m thankful for that.

And people sometimes ask me to whom or what I’m thankful. As an atheist, I’m not thankful to God, to a god, to gods. I don’t thank any deity or other entity for what I have (or, as many would put it, for what has been given to me). What does it mean, then, for an atheist to “be thankful,” when there’s not someone to be thankful to?

This atheist, at least, treats this kind of thankfulness as a combination of introspection and contemplation of the state of the world. I understand, as I think about all these things, that there are many who don’t have them. There are people who are alone, people who are ill, people who are hungry, jobless, homeless, oppressed. I look at what I have that makes me happy, and I think about how I can help others be happy as well.

There’s plenty to think about, there, and plenty to contemplate doing about it. It does no good to “pray” for others less fortunate, because there’s no one to hear those prayers nor to answer them. But if my contemplation moves me to contribute in some way to helping them, that will be the real blessing. And there don’t need to be any gods around for that one.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I hope you all have much to be thankful for.

Faulty logic: Argument ad hominem

We’ll resume normal blogging after the Japanese break with the next in the series on logical fallacies. It’s time for...

Arguing ad hominem

From Latin for “to the man”, an ad hominem argument is one that attacks the speaker, rather than the issues. We all know this one; we see it all the time. We likely use it all the time ourselves, even though we try not to. “Oh, don’t listen to him; he’s a {kook | liberal | wing-nut | Nazi | moron | ...}.” C’mon: tell you’ve never said anything like that.

In a way, arguing ad hominem is the opposite of appeal to authority. In that, we’re asking the listener to accept someone’s argument because she’s especially deserving of attention. In this, we’re asking the listener to reject someone’s argument because she’s not worth our attention — but in both cases, we’re not addressing the content of the argument.

Colloquially, we’ve taken to generalizing the sense of ad hominem, pulling it out any time someone says something bad about her opponent. From the point of view of reasoned argument, though, we only hit the faulty logic when we use a personal aspect instead of addressing the substance of the arguments being made. I might or might not be bothered to have my interlocutor call me a crazy bastard, but questions about my sanity or parentage are irrelevant to whether or not I’m right.

Impolite, but logically sound: “He’s a crazy bastard! He’s wrong for the following reasons: (1) [...etc...]”

Impolite, and unsound, employing argument ad hominem: “He’s a crazy bastard! I don’t know why anyone bothers listening to him.”

Now, this fallacy brings us to a sticky point: if we say that ad hominem arguments are never valid, we’re pretty much saying that everyone is worth listening to and arguing with. If we can’t dismiss some people as “crazy bastards”, we leave ourselves open to denial-of-service attacks, having to fend off one opponent after another, each of whom should have been dismissed summarily, as Barney Frank did in August:

On what planet do you spend most of your time?

[...]

Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.

Ad hominem for sure, but... I agree with him, and I love the way he did that. What to do?

Sticking to the argument helps. It might seem that there’s little difference between “You’re an idiot, and you’re not worth responding to,” and “Your argument is so idiotic that it isn’t worth responding to,” but there really is quite a significant difference between them. But it’s still best to refute the arguments when you can.

Tasers again: this time, a study

New Scientist reports on a study that shows that “[u]sing a Taser to subdue a violent suspect is safer than police batons and fists.”

The team examined over 24,000 cases where police had used force, including almost 5500 incidents involving a Taser. After controlling for factors such as the amount of resistance shown by the suspect, they found that Taser use reduced the overall risk of injury by 65 per cent.

Despite the cases of deaths and serious injuries from Tasers, I have no doubt of the conclusion here: beatings are obviously likely to cause injury or death also, and are probably harder to keep under control.

But the key phrase here is “to subdue a violent suspect.” Not to coerce an uncooperative person. Not to quiet someone who’s being loud or boorish. And certainly not to punish someone who has, well, you know, just annoyed the officer, nor because the officer can’t figure out how to non-violently subdue a ten-year-old girl.

We see Tasers used over and over for those other purposes, purposes for which they aren’t meant. I would hate to see someone read an article about this study and conclude that such uses are, therefore, justified.

Carnivals!

Four years ago yesterday, Penn Jillette — show partner of Teller (just “Teller”), father of Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette, and all-around bullshit-warrior — gave us one of the best entries in the This I Believe series, presented on NPR. “I believe,” says Jillette, “that there is no God.”

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #124.
• EduCarnival V2 #12.
• EduCarnival V2 #13.
• Math Teachers at Play #20.

Farewell to Japan

The Hall of Remembrance

From the beginning of the trip:
The Hall of Remembrance in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park (広島平和記念公園). The wall shows the names and pictures of the dead. Nearby, you can search for specific people by family name.
Click to enlarge.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial

From the beginning of the trip:
The Atomic Bomb Dome (原爆ドーム) in Hiroshima. The building, despite being very close to the center of the blast, was one of the few to partially survive the bombing.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Click to enlarge.

Science museum

The Geo-Cosmos exhibit at the Miraikan (未来館) Tokyo’s
National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation.
Click to enlarge.

Ginza

A street in the Ginza (銀座) shopping district in Tokyo.
Click to enlarge.

Mount Fuji

A view of Mount Fuji (富士山) from the Shinkansen train to Tokyo.
Click to enlarge.

Himeji Castle

Himeji Castle (姫路城), in the city of Himeji.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Click to enlarge.

Itsukushima Shrine

The gate of the Itsukushima Shrine (厳島神社) on Miyajima (Shrine Island).
A UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Click to enlarge.

IETF meeting over...

...and it’s time to tour.

The IETF t-shirt was a really great one this time! (Click to enlarge.)

Thanks to the sponsor, the WIDE Project, for the design.

Executive vs representative

Last week had many of us in the U.S. going to the voting booth in “off-year” elections — elections in a year that has no federal voting, where we vote mostly on local issues and candidates. These elections usually suffer from low voter turnout, and usually have little of broad importance in them. Notwithstanding that, there were a few important ones this time around: the passage of proposition 1 in Maine was a setback for gay marriage rights, the election of a Democratic representative in New York’s 23rd congressional district told the Republican Party that they can’t shove right-wing extremists on everyone if they expect to stay relevant, and the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey got national and international news coverage.

As did the mayoral race in New York, in which Michael Bloomberg won a third term as mayor, after having gotten the city council to approve a waiver in the two-term limit rule. His opponent, New York City Controller Bill Thompson (himself barred from another term as controller, due to term limits), based most of his campaign on the unfairness of the waiver, and on the slogan, “Eight is enough!”

Mr Thompson was interviewed on a local radio news segment that I listened to on the way to the airport. In a reference to the closeness of the race — it was much closer than anyone (except, it seems, Mr Thompson) had expected — he said, “When you’re representing New York City, you can’t just represent 51% [who voted for Mr Bloomberg]. You have to represent the whole city.” We hear the same thing when a president promises to represent all the people, even the ones who didn’t vote for him.

But how much sense does that make?

A mayor, a governor, and a president are chief executive officers, elected not to represent people, but to run a government. Isn’t there a difference between an executive and a representative?

We blur that distinction, of course, when candidates for executive office make promises they can’t keep, because the promises go into areas that are not under their control. The president doesn’t make law, yet all candidates promise laws “they” will pass if they’re elected.

And, yet, what we really need them to do is to run the government, the city or town, the state, the country. We need them to make executive decisions, and we want them to decide in the best interest of the entity they’re in charge of. But we don’t want them to be representing any particular population, and calling it that is distracting. A particular executive decision might, in fact, be wildly unpopular when it’s made, but is, nevertheless, the best choice.

When some of us reviled George Bush for what he did in his presidency, it wasn’t so much for the decisions he made (which certainly didn’t represent at least half of us), as it was for the questionable ethics, legality, and constitutionality of those decision. It was for the secrecy and lies around the decisions. We didn’t expect the president to represent everyone, no more than we expect President Obama to do so. What we expect is sound executive decision-making.

We have others — city council members, assemblymen, congressmen, senators — who represent their wards, districts, and states in legislative bodies, and it’s they who are expected to fairly represent the needs of their constituents. And, as sense would have it, that’s why we have a bunch of them working together to make the compromises necessary when one is looking at representative government.

But there’s only one chief executive for a reason.

Dreamination

Hiroshima Dreamination (web site in Japanese) is an electric-light display that runs from mid-November to early January. They build frames shaped as various things — trains, boats, castles — and illuminate them with coloured lights, in the manner of American Christmas decorations (only without the Christmas theme). The street in front of the meeting hotel is the center of it, so I’ve had a chance to check it out and photograph it. Very nice, and very impressive.

(Click, as usual, to enlarge.)

Ennio Morricone is 81 today

Most of you have probably not heard of Ennio Morricone. And, yet, he’s one of the most prolific film composers ever, having written music for almost 500 movies and television programs since assisting on his first effort in 1959.

A good friend of Sergio Leone, the composer has worked with the director in many films. He’d already worked on almost 20 movies before really kicking off his career in 1964 with Leone’s Per un pugno di dollar (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), following that up with Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965) and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966) — the trio of “spaghetti westerns” that also set Clint Eastwood’s career going. He scored other foreign-made westerns, including Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970).

And he worked on Hollywood films, as well. His score for Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) won the Golden Globe for best score. Maybe you know his work in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (1991) and Disclosure (1994), or Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998).

The Untouchables and Bugsy scores were nominated for Academy Awards, as were three others of his scores, and in 2007, Morricone was given an honorary award for his lifetime of work.

Check out Clint Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire (1993), and Phil Joanou’s crime drama State of Grace (1990), starring Sean Penn, Ed Harris, and Gary Oldman.

And now, in his 80s, Morricone is still working, scoring a few movies and TV shows every year, even after 50 years of it.

Viva Ennio Morricone, e buon compleanno!

Travel thoughts

Some arbitrary (not to say “random”) thoughts from Friday/Saturday’s travel to Hiroshima:

The description of the power outlets in the airplane says that they’re 110-volt outlets that accept two-prong plugs. “These 110v power outlets accept plugs from the U.S. and other select countries.” Now, the adjective “select” does not mean “certain ones, as opposed to others.” In fact, it has the connotation of something special, better than other, non-select ones. As American Heritage puts it, “Singled out in preference; chosen: a select few.” Or “Of special quality or value; choice: select peaches.” I know we think the U.S. is “of special quality or value,” but, really, should we be shoving that in the faces of all travellers?

People who are allowed to board before most others are still “boarding” the plane, despite the airlines’ insistence on calling it pre-boarding. There’s nothing “pre-” about it. “Early boarding” would be a better term, but I’m afraid we can’t defend ourselves against the marketing juggernaut. But... who decided that “pre-boarding” sounds better than “early boarding”?

This is my first trip to Asia, which also makes it the longest trip I’ve ever taken: 14 hours in a plane, and 5 more in trains. I noted that five hours into the flight, the equivalent to a flight to California, I still had longer still to go than I’ve ever flown before.

It’s also the first time I’ve flown over Alaska, and, despite flying over Anchorage, not Juneau (nor Wasilla), I had images of us as a bird leaving droppings on Sarah Palin. OK, you had to be there, and maybe it was a result of already being too long in a metal tube more than seven miles up.

-88 degrees F (-67C) outside at 39,000 feet (12,000 meters). Yow, that’s cold!

My first real exposure to Japanese culture was something I hadn’t been told about and wasn’t expecting: when train personnel left one Shinkansen car at the front, to go to the next one, they opened the door, turned to face the passengers, and bowed, before turning again and going through the door. The conductors did this, and so did the young women pushing the food carts. Every time.

The Shinkansen trains are very cool, fast, quiet, and comfortable. And on time.

The meeting is at the ANA Crowne Plaza hotel in Hiroshima, and I was told to tell the taxi driver, “Ana ho-teh-ru,” which I did. He confirmed, “Clown Pra-za Ana ho-teh-ru?” “Hai,” said I, “Arigato.” I find the apparent reversal of the “l” and“r” sounds to be interesting: in fact, it’s not a reversal, but a blending of the two into one. To our ears, because neither is “correct” in the borrowed words, they sound reversed. (There’s also the vowel addition going on there, in “ho-teh-ru”, but maybe that’s a separate post all its own.)

The tiles in the bathroom are nice, non-slip tiles. On the other hand, the tub is very slick, and there’s no rubber mat. If I don’t make it home, there’s a good clue why.

I want this at home: a shower control calibrated in degrees C. I wonder how accurate it is. In any case, 37C (nominal "body temperature", though mine tends to be closer to 36) feels uncomfortably warm, and 33 to 34 seems about right.

They’re quite serious, here, about reducing waste. The soap, shampoo, and hair conditioner in the bathroom are in large (300ml, 12 oz) refillable bottles with pump tops, so there’s no throwing away half-used bars of soap or half-full mini-bottles of shampoo when a guest leaves (or, as some hotels do, during the guest’s stay). Great!

Yes, the toilet seat is heated, and it has a “shower” built in. It does not appear to be one that dries you after it cleans.

Carnivals!

I was in a wine store recently, and was looking at a bottle of French red wine. It was a variety I didn’t know, from a region I didn’t know. I was curious about what its character might be. I picked up the bottle and got the attention of the proprietor.

Barry: Hi. Do you know anything about this wine?

Proprietor: Um. I think it’s a French red.

Barry: In other words, “No.” OK, thanks.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #123.
• Carnival of the Liberals #98.
• EduCarnival V2 #10.
• EduCarnival V2 #11.
• Math Teachers at Play #19 (the numbering has been corrected).
• Carnival of Mathematics #59.
• Carnival of the Godless #129.

Hiroshima bound

I’m en route to the IETF meeting in Hiroshima, Japan. There will be blogging in the coming two weeks, but it may be intermittent. Check back periodically, and I’ll definitely be back to normal by the 23rd, if not before.

Faulty logic: Appeal to Authority

Continuing the series on faulty logic, today we’ll look at:

Appeal to Authority

In our society, we hold various people up as authority figures, those we’re inclined to pay attention to. It’s not always clear why we have some folks on that list, really. Political leaders, such as presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, senators, and governors are obvious. Educators and other academics — professors, scientists, and the like — also make sense. I’m never sure why actors and sports figures are there, but they do seem to be.

And so we have things like the 1970s advertisements for Mr Coffee, where former baseball player Joe DiMaggio told us what a great cup of coffee it made. Or more recently, when former Senator Bob Dole hawked Viagra.

Ads such as those are quintessential examples of appeal to authority: basing an argument on the support of an authority figure, without regard to the actual issue at hand.

• Joe DiMaggio likes Mr Coffee, so it must be good.
• The president said it; it must be true.
• That guy has a PhD; he must be right.

A key point, though, is that the speakers credentials are often not irrelevant, and it’s often proper to cite them. When a doctor tells you about a medical issue that falls within her specialty, you should consider that along with other data. The appeal to authority hits us as a fallacy when the credentials aren’t relevant to the issue at hand (if DiMaggio had told us which baseball mitt to buy, that would have been great, but he wasn’t authoritative about coffee), or when they’re used to claim that other evidence is unnecessary (even a cancer specialist will support her statements about cancer treatment with real data).

Arguments that something is so because it’s in the Bible (or the Koran, or the Talmud, or other religious writings) are also faulty appeals to authority — mixed with other errors that we’ll get to later in the series.

We’re seeing the effects of appeal-to-authority arguments with the many “celebrity spokesmen” who stand behind pseudoscience and pseudomedicine. Oprah Winfrey, Jim Carrey, Robert Kennedy, and others contribute to a false fear of vaccination. Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil are among those who use their real credentials as medical doctors to promote bogus “medicine”, talking about “removing toxins” and “boosting the immune system”, with no clinical data to back it up.

Of course, the “good guys” trot out authority figures as well. Musician Bono toured Africa in support of AIDS prevention and treatment. Former Senator and former Vice President Al Gore made a movie about global climate change. The difference is that these guys showed the data to back up what they were saying. An Inconvenient Truth is full of charts and figures and photographs that make the arguments clear. There’s no false appeal to authority there.

To err is human; to explode, divine

Interesting article in Tuesday’s New York Times. Apparently, the Iraqi security forces have taken to using divining rods to search for explosives, against the advice of U.S. trainers and advisors.

The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq. But the device works “on the same principle as a Ouija board” — the power of suggestion — said a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, who described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod.

Still, the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles.

“Nothing more than an explosives divining rod,” of course, presupposes that divining rods aren’t effective. The Iraqis think otherwise:

The Iraqis, however, believe passionately in them. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,” said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives.

Hm. “I don’t care whether it’s magic or scientific,” certainly sets a skeptic’s BS-dar beeping wildly. Has anyone looked at this seriously? Well, yes, the U.S. government’s explosives-detection experts have:

Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs, which does testing for the Department of Defense, said the center had “tested several devices in this category, and none have ever performed better than random chance.”

Our Iraqi explosives minister, though, dismissed such studies with an appeal to authority — his own:

“I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,” General Jabiri said. “I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.”

And that settles that.

The company that’s selling these “devices” to the Iraqis, of course, has nothing to say to the Times:

Jim McCormick, the head of ATSC, based in London, did not return calls for comment.

...but here’s what their brochure says:

ATSC’s promotional material claims that its device can find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies and even contraband ivory at distances up to a kilometer, underground, through walls, underwater or even from airplanes three miles high. The device works on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,” ATSC says.

Human bodies, distinguishing dead ones from live ones, it seems. And truffles; that’s handy. But isn’t it interesting that the list of things it “finds” are all things that we want to find. The list is so diverse that it would certainly have to also include a lot of things we don’t care about that would throw its false positive rate through the roof. But maybe it’s only certain illicit stuff that has magic fairy dust magnetic ions.

OK, so... what do we know about divining rods?

Well, we know that they were debunked so long ago that there don’t seem to be recent peer-reviewed papers on them. Nature has this study from 1971. It’s behind a paywall, but the summary isn’t:

Experiments organized by the British Army and Ministry of Defence suggest that results obtained by dowsing are no more reliable than a series of guesses.

But there’ve certainly been lots of controlled tests since then, even if they weren’t peer reviewed. And every credible test shows that divining rods are complete bunk. There’s no validity to them at all. And, in fact, the James Randi Educational Foundation made a statement about this very device last year:

No one will respond to this, because the ADE651® is a useless, quack, device which cannot perform any other function than separating naïve persons from their money. It’s a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud. The manufacturers, distributors, vendors, advertisers, and retailers of the ADE651® device are criminals, liars, and thieves who will ignore this challenge because they know the device, the theory, the described principles of operation, and the technical descriptions given, are nonsense, lies, and fraudulent.

That seems clear.

What studies have shown about divining rods is that they likely “work” through a form of cognitive bias. The length of the rod, along with how it’s held, amplifies the results of small arm movements. Those movements are largely involuntary, but they can inadvertently — and without the knowledge of the user — direct the rod to something we’re expecting to find. Of course, when we don’t know whether there’s really anything there, we’re either directing the rod randomly, or we’re guessing (which amounts to directing the rod randomly as well).

Or, perhaps put another way, we’ve been well trained. We’ll give General Jabiri the last word here:

During an interview on Tuesday, General Jabiri challenged a Times reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Despite two attempts, the wand did not detect the weapons when used by the reporter but did so each time it was used by a policeman.

“You need more training,” the general said.

Yeah... more training. That’s the ticket.

Visitors

As I said yesterday, when I was a child I would watch anything to do with science fiction. I don’t now, but, well, I still lean in that direction. I watch very little major-network television, and don’t really want to get hooked on a new series, but if it’s science fiction, I’m more likely to give it a try.

In that vein, I tuned in last night to the pilot of a new series on ABC, called “V”. The V stands for “visitors”, and the show opens, after a few minutes of introducing major characters, with the arrival of spaceships hovering over major world cities. After some initial panic, the apparent leader of the Vs, who is in the spaceship that’s over New York City^[1], projects her image worldwide and reassures everyone that it’s a peaceful visit. They’re thrilled to find intelligent life, they want to share with us while they refuel and do some maintenance, and then they’ll be on their way.

As a pilot episode needs to do, this one set up main characters, the story’s premise, some conflicts, and a couple of plot threads that will continue as the series progresses. I actually quite liked it, both for the story and for the way it was presented. The spaceships arrive with terrible rumbling and shaking, which gets people in something of a panic. But for our first visual glimpse, director Yves Simoneau, the Canadian who also directed the pilot of The 4400, gives us images reflected in the glass of the buildings, before showing us the ships directly. The effect works well.

I also liked that once the Vs have started having meetings with Earth’s world leaders, they set up tours of their spaceships for the people of Earth. “Yes,” I said when I saw that, “Isn’t that just what friendly visitors would do, if they could?” I thought back to when I would give tours of the computer center to grade-school students, when no one their age had ever seen a computer face to face before.

So I’m going to continue watching the series, at least for now, and we’ll see whether it lasts, and whether it continues to be interesting. It’s often disappointing when a new series like this either loses its edge after a few episodes or, perhaps worse, stays sharp but gets cancelled anyway.^[2]

Here’s one thing the pilot episode made me think about:

When the spaceship is hovering over New York City, just before Anna’s soothing image is projected, something on the ship opens up. Most people who are watching it at that point start running away in panic. And I wondered what I would do. If there were an alien spaceship sitting there in front of me — not some fuzzy-blob “UFO” that’s most likely a reflection or some such, but a real, incontrovertible space ship, as in V or The Day the Earth Stood Still — would I be interested enough to check it out, or would I keep away, afraid of what might come out and what its intentions might be?

I have to think I’d stay and check it out, and I’d be eager, when it started to open, to see what was inside. I’d imagine that beings who figured out how to get here from some impossibly distant world would not have come here to kill us. I would want to be among the first to say hello.
 

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^[1] It always seems to work that way: if alien ships appear all over the world, the flagship is always at New York or Washington. A little U.S.-centric, are we?

^[2] The short-lived Journeyman was a recent one in the second category. I liked it, and was enjoying discovering things as the protagonist did, when it was cancelled right in the middle of it all. The series only lasted 13 episodes (and you can see all of them on Hulu).

Chemistry sets and science education

I’ve always been interested in science and mathematics, ever since I can remember; I can’t tell you when it started, because it seems that it started in the womb, and that I popped out with solar systems and quadratic equations in my head. Some of my earliest memories are of my father taking me to the American Museum of Natural History, and the attached Hayden Planetarium. When we moved to south Florida, when I was five years old, we frequented Miami’s Museum of Science and Natural History (now called the Miami Science Museum) and Space Transit Planetarium.

I had little model dinosaurs to play with, and I knew not only the dinosaurs’ names, but the names of the eras and periods and epochs they lived in. I knew most, if not all, of the 88 officially recognized constellations, and I knew the names of many of the major stars: Rigel and Betelgeuse in Orion, Antares in Scorpius, Vega in Lyra, Deneb in Cygnus, and so on, to Spica and Arcturus and Aldebaran and Regulus, and many more. I knew the names of the first seven astronauts, America’s heroes of space exploration, and I followed the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs eagerly.

And I’d watch any and all science fiction movies, even if they’d make me roll my eyes and say, “They have a Stegosaurus fighting a Dimetrodon. That couldn’t happen: Dimetrodons are from the Permian period and Stegosaurus is from the Jurassic. The Dimetrodons were extinct for more than a hundred million years before the first Stegosaurus existed. Duh!”

Yes, even when I was six, I was pedantic.

When I was a bit older, maybe ten or so, I got a chemistry set! While NASA worked on landing astronauts on the moon, I worked on mixing chemicals and heating flasks and test tubes with an alcohol lamp. I loved it!

But I didn’t just love it — I learned from it. I was also interested in collecting things (to a lesser extent, I still am; I think humans are natural collectors), and I collected things from coins and stamps to Matchbox cars and Superman comic books. With my chemistry set, I collected chemicals. Rather than just doing experiments out of a book, I would devise my own, using what I was learning about chemicals and their properties, about radicals and valence and such.

So I’d work it out. I had calcium chloride, and I had sodium sulfate. They both dissolve in water, but I know from what I’ve learned that if I mix solutions of the two, they’ll re-combine to form calcium sulfate and sodium chloride... and the calcium sulfate, which is not water-soluble, will precipitate out. I mixed them, and, as expected, the combined solution suddenly became cloudy. I got out the filter paper, let the calcium sulfate dry, and put it in a new, labeled bottle, one more chemical to add to the collection.

Through many iterations of that, as I amassed quite a chemical collection, I learned a great deal about inorganic chemistry. Yes, I made the occasional mess, when something spilled or bubbled over. My father didn’t know anything about what I was doing, of course, not in any specifics. But he kept aware of what was going on, and talked with me about safety. And when I wanted to buy things like acetic or sulphuric acid, he’d make sure we got a low concentration, and he supervised what I did with those (they were really great for making more chemicals!).

And I was a star student in chemistry class in school, when the time came for that.

Even though I didn’t, ultimately, go into a profession that involved chemistry (and, indeed, I’m sure I’ve forgotten much of what I once knew, as I’ve forgotten constellation names and dinosaur facts), what I learned from my chemistry set fed into everything else I’ve done with math and science: setting up hypotheses, testing them out, collecting and verifying the data, repeating the experiment, and so on.

But we’ve complicated things now. In recent years, we’ve been more worried about accidents (read: lawsuits), about what bad guys might do with the chemicals, and so on, and we’ve gutted the chemistry set. We can’t have highly reactive chemicals any more. We can’t have glass or fire. We can’t have anything that might remotely be turned into something explosive (so, no more making gunpowder or nitrogen triiodide at home). What passes for a chemistry set now is laughable, and will teach little about real chemistry — or about doing science.

That’s a pity. My chemistry set played a big role in turning me from a kid who read science books, into a real scientist.

Homeland security

Via Bruce Schneier, we get an essay by Deirdre Walker, a former Assistant Chief of Police (Montgomery County, MD), about TSA searches and security. Please go read the essay; it’s worth the time.

Ms Walker says a number of important things, but there’s one particular kernel that I want to pick out, that I think is especially important to think about. It’s in these two sentences, which put the whole thing into perspective:

We have asked TSA to find the tools terrorists use and prevent both from boarding a passenger plane. We have unintentionally created an agency that now seeks efficiency and compliance more than any weapon or explosive.

That the first resulted in the second is due to a severe misapplication of basic principles. It comes from a desire to have people see that something was being done, rather than acceptance that the right way to do it is to work barely visibly. This is what happens when we turn what should be serious investigation done backstage... into a showy spectacle. This is what happens when we exchange true protective measures for publicity stunts.

Ms Walker mentions taking off shoes during the airport security check. Now, on the surface, I don’t really mind taking off my shoes. It takes little time. But I mind it because it’s entirely ineffective. It’s useless, and it’s being promoted as a useful tool in the anti-terrorist toolbox. Not one terrorist has been caught, not one terrorist act prevented, not one terrorist weapon found by having us take our shoes off.

The proponents of shoe-doffing, of course, and of our search techniques in general, will argue that we can’t know how many incidents we’ve deterred. How many shoe-bombs might have been used against us had we not scared those wielding them off with our security measures?

And that is certainly a problem with this sort of thing: how do you measure its effectiveness? The absence of a rare event — in this case, a once-ever event, a singleton — isn’t evidence that it’s been prevented. And even if it were, we can’t assume causation. But how can we possibly do any real experiments with security checks? We could certainly make people take off their shoes at some airports, and not at others. We can allow people to carry large shampoo bottles onto some flights, and not onto others. We could accept pocket knives or cigarette lighters on some flights, and not on others. And none of that would tell us anything.

Because apart from the questionable ethics involved, the fact is that all of the threats those mechanisms are defending against are theoretical; none of them has ever happened. No one has ever attacked a flight using the contents of a shampoo bottle, nor with a small pocket knife, nor with a cigarette lighter. And no one has successfully detonated his shoe.

And as the search-supporters say that proof that this is all effective comes from the lack of hijackings, we’re told that proof that the whole system works to make us safer is that nothing like 9/11 has happened since 9/11.

Only, nothing like 9/11 had happened before 9/11 either. And even if we stipulate that our security measures have made it harder to attack airplanes or to use them for attacks, it’s clear that there are many other mechanisms for attack. Taking down two large buildings in a showy manner, and crashing a third plane into the Pentagon, made a major statement. But the real terrorism would come from whittling away at our everyday freedom. It’s not so much a question of fear on entering a large building — which we might have a hope of protecting — but fear that you can’t go into a pizza joint, a deli, or a coffee shop without risking getting blown up. Fear that you can’t ride a bus without taking your life into your hands. It’s not the killing of 3000 people at once that’s truly terrifying, but the killing of 30 people at a time, or even 3, and doing it every day and everywhere.

And that’s not happening here.

It’s a good thing, too, because that, we’re doing little to stop. Because we haven’t created a system for finding terrorists and keeping ourselves safe. We have instead created a system that seeks efficiency and compliance more than any weapon or explosive.

Everybody’s got something to hide, except for me and my monkey

Last Sunday’s episode of Desperate Housewives^[1] included a plot thread in which Gabrielle set up an over-the-top birthday party for her daughter, complete with clown, “jumpy house”, and monkey. The economic recession hasn’t seemed to’ve had much effect at Wisteria Lane.

But, um, the “monkey”? Here’s a screen capture:

Sorry: that, folks, is not a monkey. It’s an ape (specifically, a chimpanzee).^[2] Entirely different branches of the primate tree. No tail.

Of course, some of Gabrielle’s lines wouldn’t sound as good, if “ape” were correctly in them: “No way. I paid for two hours of monkey; I want two hours of monkey.”

Waddyagonnado? Give the lady her monkey.
 

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^[1] Yes. It’s a silly show. But I watch it, OK? Whatever.

^[2] It may be a silly show, but I’m still and ever a pedant.