It’s Time For a Pointless Quiz

Sometimes I like taking those stupid quizzes that you find online.  A friend of mind who I trust not to waste my time posted a decent one.  What’s your Social Attitude?  It asks you about some general and some specific political/philosophical/economic topics and then ranks you.  Here is my result:

Radicalism    96.75

Socialism    62.5

Tenderness    53.125

These scores indicate that you are a progressive; this is the political profile one might associate with a university professor. It appears that you are skeptical towards religion, and have a pragmatic attitude towards humanity in general.

Your attitudes towards economics appear socialist, and combined with your social attitudes this creates the picture of someone who would generally be described as a political centrist.

To round out the picture you appear to be, political preference aside, a centrist with several strong opinions.

I think I broke it.  I’m a progressive centrist socialist university professor.  Is that possible?  And are the last two redundant?  Ooooh, university professor slam!

Why Are Chemical Weapons A Red Line?

I am well into Things I Don’t Understand™ territory here so forgiveness ahead of time if I’m talking out of my ass.

President Obama said a month or two ago that the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the Assad government was a “red line” that could not be crossed.  It wasn’t specified, but people have rightly taken this to mean that the use of chemical weapons would be the deciding factor in U.S. intervention in Syria.  Well, chemical weapons have almost certainly been used in Syria now and the Obama administration is, thankfully, hedging and saying that we don’t know for sure if chemical weapons were used and, if they were, we don’t know who used them.

That’s all fine and dandy, but why the “red line” on chemical weapons to begin with?  Why is a chemical attack so greatly reviled while a 2,000 lb bomb is not?  It seems completely arbitrary to me.  Do chemical weapons produce more secondary casualties than cluster bombs?  Do the effects of a chemical attack linger longer than depleted uranium ammunition?  Do chemical weapons cause massive infrastructure carnage on top of the loss of life?  Do chemical weapons produce much larger amounts of casualties than conventional weapons?  Is losing a loved one more devastating because they died from a chemical weapon?

The only thing that I can think of is that chemical weapons are more psychologically devastating to those of us 10,000 miles away.  What little we see from the devastating effects of conventional war can be written off in our minds;  oh, that person had his limbs ripped off and suffered a massive head wound, of course he’s dead.  The same can’t be said for many chemical weapons.  The body is intact, often whole.  Large groups of perfectly formed dead people causes a mental block in our heads; these people shouldn’t be dead, they look so whole.  Dead is dead, though.  How they got that way is immaterial.  The fact that the dead most likely didn’t deserve death is all that matters.

Math Comedy Gold

No, really!  You need to read this.  What happens when five math experts try to split a check?  I think my favorite part is this:

Economist: I mean it! If there were no taxes, I would have ordered a second soda. But instead, the government intervened, and by increasing transaction costs, prevented an exchange that would have benefited both me and the restaurant.

Engineer: You did order a second soda.

Economist: In practice, yes. But my argument still holds in theory.

*snort*

Oil To Plastic, Plastic To Oil

We all know that oil is used to create plastic.  Well now there is an invention to turn plastic back into oil.  Watch:

What a goldmine for developing countries!  They will get free oil that can be used for heating or cooking all while saving them money and reducing their garbage footprint.  I guess this would also come in handy for those industrialized areas that still use heating oil, but small scale stuff like this seems pretty pointless for urban areas.  I’m sure there’s a larger scale equivalent that major cities could use to collect the plastic and save on their own electric bills or sell off to someone who is willing to convert the plastic.

The video is, unfortunately, a little vague on details.  For instance, what is the byproduct?  It can’t all be oil.  Regardless, this has the makings of a revolutionary product that may become commonplace as resources get scarcer and scarcer.

Movie Review: The World’s End

Jean-Paul’s Rating 5/5 stars

I generally reserve five stars for movies that I could see myself seeing again and again.  “The World’s End” is such a movie.  It is the third movie in the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, the other two being “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”.  That the trilogy is named after an ice cream treat that figures pretty much not at all in each film should tell you a lot about what kind of comedy we’re talking about here.

All three movies are comedy gold, but “The World’s End” is by far the best.  It is full of gags and giggles and guffaws and genuine laugh out loud moments.  The overarching premise is familiar to anyone who has seen any of the three movies. People living life as normal only to find out that things are far from normal.  “Shaun of the Dead” had zombies.  “Hot Fuzz” had cultists.  “The World’s End” has alien robots.

The most surprising aspect of the movie to me was how good the action was.  It was both comedic and well choreographed.  Lots of exploding heads and flying robot body parts used to maximum comedic effect.

The end of the movie gets a little weird.  Given the general weirdness of the movie in general, that’s saying something.  It was a little bit of a letdown, but not nearly enough to ruin the fun of an excellent movie.

I foresee Three Flavored Cornetto Trilogy viewing marathons in my future.  Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright, and the gang know how to make quality comedies.  I hope they’re not done.

Oh, The Fun We’ll Have!

The 2016 Presidential race has already started.  Which, by the way, really?  Ugh.  And the first bit of fun is already upon us!

Tea Party favorite, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), has been looking to follow the Barack Obama plan of joining the Senate for one term and then jumping straight to the Presidency.  Well, things are probably starting a little more closely to President Obama’s path than Ted Cruz would have liked this week.  It was revealed that Ted Cruz was born in Canada and therefore not real U.S. citizen.  Well, according to Tea Party standards anyway.  Ted Cruz actually has dual citizenship because of being born in Canada.  This is funny in and of itself because of the birther nonsense that surrounded Barack Obama, but leave it to Ted Cruz to make it even more hilarious.  Seeing this Canadian citizenship as a stain on his good name and eliminating his chances of winning the Presidency given the crazies that would actually vote for him, Ted Cruz has decided to renounce his Canadian citizenship.  Canada thanked him.

The Second Dust Bowl Is Already Here

The Dust Bowl was a dramatic and devastating event.  Taking place during much of the 1930s where there was a severe drought after years of large rainfall, its most well known characteristic is the massive dust storms that stripped the earth of its topsoil making it impossible for anything to grow.  Much of the devastation from the Dust Bowl was man made, though.  Soil conservation didn’t exist yet and farmers and governments reaped the literal whirlwind of their actions.

Much of the 2000s, the U.S. has seen droughts equal to or surpassing the droughts during the Dust Bowl.  Thanks to governmental soil conservation projects, there are no dramatic pictures of massive clouds of dust and no mass migration out of the affected areas.  This makes the effects of the drought fairly invisible to those not immediately affected by it.

Things are really bad, though.  Smaller towns in the Southwest are running out of fresh water.  Las Vegas is desperate to get more water pumped in from anywhere.  Water levels in Lake Mead are down 100 feet from normal.  Southern California has had to dig deeper and deeper for fresh water.  Fracking companies are competing with citizens for water.  This is doubly poisonous since not only are they taking fresh water from people who need it, they are also using that fresh water and chemicals to destroy the remaining fresh water.

I’ve been reading this excellent collection of short stories by Paolo Bacigalupi called “Pump Six and Other Stories”.  They are all dystopian future stories that have to do with what happens when natural resources like water and oil run out.  Read “The Tamarisk Hunter” for a frighteningly believable tale of the western United States with scarce fresh water.

Now She’s Playing Mind Games With Me

One of the joys of having a cat companion is getting to clean up cat vomit every once in a while.  Lindy is no exception in this respect.  She’s a long haired cat so hurked up hairballs are a common occurrence.  The noise she makes when barfing up a bezoar is the the stuff of nightmares.  It sounds like HUG-GAHK-HUG-GAHK-GUH-GAHK-BLEAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaach only with more sliminess.  That this occurs 50% of the time at night only makes it more nightmarish.

Last night was such a night.  I did what I usually do when she performs her midnight retching ritual, I startle awake, I make sure she’s not on the bed, I listen to the spit up symphony, and I go back to bed.  In the morning, I’ll grab some paper towels and clean up the mess.  Only, this morning, I look and I look and I can’t find vomit anywhere.  Nothing on the floor, nothing under the bed, nothing on the stairs, nothing in the hallway.  Nothing.  Lindy was all innocent like, “What vomit?  I didn’t vomit.”

The way I see it, one of three things is true.  Either I dreamed the whole thing or Lindy has found a special new spot to throw up or my cat is gaslighting me.  Given that she’s a cat and therefore by definition evil, I am leaning heavily towards the gaslighting.  So if I am committed to an insane asylum murmuring about cat vomit and nothing to clean up, you know the reason.  Don’t let Lindy to to me what Charles Boyer did to Ingrid Bergman.

This Study Makes No Sense

The New Yorker has an interesting article regarding medical residents, hours worked, and health outcomes.  Residents used to work ridiculous hours.  We’re talking 30 hour shifts.  That is beyond ridiculous considering that even a little sleep deprivation has been shown to impair cognitive abilities as much as being drunk (which the author of the article both admits and seems to poo-poo as something non-doctors always say).  The shift time was reduced in 2011 to “only” 16 hours.  This resulted in an increase in the amount of handoffs which is what they call it when a doctor has to leave and hands off care to a new doctor.  What they’ve seen is an increase of mistakes related to handoffs not being handled correctly.

To recap, 30 hour shifts lead to doctors making mistakes with their patients.  16 hour shifts lead to handoffs causing mistakes with their patients.  Unless I missed something, the end result appears to be a wash.  Just as many mistakes are being made either way.  But then the author starts talking about how people feel and I just want to roll my eyes.  Doctors feel like they’re not getting a complete education.  Both doctors and nurses feel like the health outcomes are worse.  Ugh.

From my point of view, the 16 hour shift is still infinitely superior to the 30 hour shift even though results so far appear to be the same.  I would argue that part of the problem is that shifts should be even shorter.  16 hours is still an incredibly long time and doctors are expected to create handoff notes before they leave which is the time when they are most likely to cause mistakes due to sleep deprivation.  The only difference is it’s a fresh doctor that’s making mistakes because of the sleep deprived notes of the previous doctor.

The funny thing about the article is there’s no mention of doing something simple like changing the handoff procedures.  To me it’s obvious that’s what needs to be analyzed and changed.  I can’t find a link to it now, but there was a study done about ER patients with heart problems and they studied various hospitals, some of which used a physical checklist of things for the doctor to do and some which just had the doctors just perform like they normally do.  The hospitals with the checklists had a ridiculously higher quality of outcomes than the non-checklist hospitals.  The handoff procedure just screams for something similar to a checklist to be created and used religiously.  To me, the obvious addition is a simple question.  Why?  If the doctor wants to stop a medicine they must both write that they are doing so and the reason why they are doing so with pointers to the tests/observations that made them do so.  They should do this at the time they are performing the action and not wait until the handoff.

The end result should be that no handoff is necessary.  Yes, it’s still good and important for doctors to talk to each other, but relying on it is a recipe for disaster as much as working 30 hours is.

Broken Keyboards

It’s been a few weeks, but Lindy has finally gotten her revenge for my locking her out of the apartment overnight.  When I am on the computer, she is in the habit of sitting in the space between the keyboard and the monitor.  It is not a large space and her girth will push the keyboard slightly off the desk as she settles down into her spot.  It doesn’t affect my typing at all and it’s cute so I let her be.  Yesterday, though, she did her usual and all was fine until I turned away for a moment.  Lindy took that opportunity to full on sprawl in the confined space.  The result being the keyboard went flying off the table and one of the flimsy plastic collapsible stand pieces broke off.

We’re even now, cat.