Boiron bullies blogger

I don't know if anyone happened to see the article in the British Medical Journal, but the international maker of homeopathic . . . things, Boiron, threatened an Italian blogger.  The blog in question, B-log(0), had a couple of posts talking about Boiron's successful product, Oscillococcinum and it's lack of any active molecules.  With a name like Oscillococcinum, it's hard to imagine why this stuff hasn't caught on in the states.  Well, when a big company has a few snarky comments made in their general direction by a small blogger, what's the natural things to do?  Shoot them a threatening letter saying their blog was untrue and derogatory and is tarnishing the reputation of the company.  I guess ignoring them and not drawing attention was too much to ask for.
Well, on behalf of threatened bloggers the world over, let me say that homeopathy in general lacks active ingredients and is little more than a mechanism for taking advantage of the placebo effect, not to mention naive consumers.  Sorry, but a legion of layers writing mean spirited letters isn't going to change that.

Student protests, Utah needs more of these

When I heard that Skyline high school was the subject of a protest carried out by between 75 to 100 students, my first thought was good, if you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention. So what were they protesting, pointless wars for empire, endless political bickering in the nation's capitol, petty bigotry and intolerance at home? No, it was an asinine tardy policy at their school. Still, you have to celebrate what few signs of life you can find coming out of the suburbs.

So, what about a tardy policy could be so annoying as to cause such an uproar? Well, the granite school district thought it was appropriate to impose fines on students who are tardy for class. Three bucks the first time and five dollars for each subsequent tardy. To me, that sounds rather excessive. From my time as a student in Utah high schools and later as a student teacher and substitute teacher, I can tell you that the logistics of getting from point A to point B in an overcrowded Utah school makes being late inevitable at times. Certainly there are some students who are just being jerks, but charging a student with a five dollar fine for what was most likely a potty break in just mean spirited.

But the school district must have thought there was some sort of problem for there to be such a policy in place. According to local news coverage, the school district claimed that there were 25,000 tardies in the year before they implemented these fines and now that there are about 11,000 tardies per year. Well, that sounds like a lot of students being late for class and they have reduced the number by more than 50%, but let's take a closer look at the numbers. According to the numbers I was able to dig up, Skyline high school graduated 415 student in 2010. If we assume all the students graduate (which they don't) and the enrollment numbers at the school stay constant (again, probably not true) that means there are about 1,245 students at the school. To get the lowest number of class periods possible, let's also assume the school is on the block schedule and the students attend four 90 minute classes a day over a 180 day school year. That gives 896,400 total student class periods in the school year. 25,000 tardies per year gives about a 2.7% tardy rate. So, on any give class period, approximately 97.3% of the students will be on time. To put it another way, the average student will be late to class four to five timer per school year. These numbers represent the highest percentage I was able to come up with. If Skyline instead has 2000 student going to 7 classes per day, 25,000 tardies is less that a 1% tardy rate, or 1 to 2 tardies per student per year.

To me this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. I know Utah school districts don't have that much administration, but if this is the kind of stuff they have time to come up with, it's time to trim some fat from the administrative budget. Tough economic times call for hard decisions, time to bounce a spokesperson or two to the curb.

To any Skyline students who happen to stumble onto this blog, it seems that next week is your school district's spring break. That gives you a whole week to network with student at other schools in the Granite district and organize a much wider disruption of classes when school resumes a week from Monday. Bear in mind that stepping out of line in any way, shape or form can subject you to attest, fines and never getting anything higher than a B for the rest of your secondary education. Still, it is your school and your education, may as well stand up to the petty tyranny of sad little men when you have the chance.

To any Granite school district administrators who have managed to read this far, lighten up and ditch the negative policy.  You have more important things to worry about, at least, one assumes you do.

The Utah state legislature never fails to be weird

The Utah state legislature usually leaves one with plenty to be skeptical about.  On the upside, they did repeal H.B. 477, which would have limited access to government records.  On the downside, they also passed H. B. 477 in the first place.

The silliest bill passed may very well be the official state firearm being named the Browning M1911 handgun.  Since John Browning was from Utah, it does make some sort of weird sense.  Another odd bill passed was H.B. 317 which recognizes gold and silver coins issued by the federal government to be legal tender but does not compel a person to accept such coins as tender.  Reading the fine print, it sounds more like a sort of tax dodge for people who speculate in gold and silver.

It is pretty easy to just verbally beat up on the legislature, and while I plan to do plenty of that, I do want to point out at least one thing that they did do that was positive.  They did not pass H.B. 109. This bill, which is called, "Religious Liberty Recognition," is more like a feel free to discriminate against homosexuals if you can possibly construe a religious justification for said discrimination.  Well done in not passing that piece of hate legislation guys.

Debunkatron.com and the Dunning-Kruger effect

For those of you who haven't heard about debunkatron.com you should surf on over there and take a look, after reading my blog post of course.  While the site doesn't have much original content, it has more links than a suit of chain mail.  There are hundreds of links in the section on debunked subjects.  The concepts for your debunking toolbox section is smaller but still pretty impressive and worth a look.  The last section of links is resources and communities. There are a number of them in there I was not previously aware of.  So, debunkatron.com, not only is it fun to say, there is a lot to link to from there.

A concept I stumbled upon while looking through the overwhelming number of links on the site was something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.  In short, this is a phenomena where incompetent people overestimate their ability and seem unaware of the extent of their ignorance while skilled individuals underestimate their ability, relative to other people.  The upside is that if an individual can acquire some degree of skill in an area, they will become aware of their previous ignorance.  While this information doesn't make the world a better place it does help one to understand how some debates/arguments they have been in ended the way they did.  You have a discussion with someone, in the process you refute all their arguing points, pick apart their reasoning and build up your position through reasoned arguments and information.   After all that, the person walks away, thinking you are an idiot and still clinging to their belief in dowsing, anti-vaccination nonsense or that the moon landing was a hoax for example.  That could well be described as the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.  It's kind of like reading Max Weber writing about bureaucracy, it may not make it any easier to deal with, but at least you understand it better.

Do people really support this?

Sometimes you find yourself far out of step with the mainstream of American thought, or so recent polling data had led me to believe. CBS news released the results of a poll that, they claim, shows that 81% of Americans support the use of full body scanners in airports. Really, are we talking about the same invasive, creepy, perverse scanners that produce those disturbing naked images of people? That's what an overwhelming majority of Americans support? Well, kind of, sort of, not really, if you take a closer look at the polling question CBS news used, you find that they used the term, "X-ray machines," in their question. I think they skewed their results by using X-ray machines instead of scanners. One evokes images of a doctor's office and images of people's skeletons while the other makes people think of Star Trek tricorders and the security screening thing from Total Recall. If they had used different terminology, they probably would have found less support for the TSA's use of invasive technology. If you really wanted to get a different result, ask people if they think the TSA needs to be taking naked pictures of everybody who gets on an airplane. Okay, that would probably bias responses too much in the other direction, but you see the point.

In case you haven't guessed, I don't believe the American public is as supportive of the TSA and their knee-jerk, poorly thought out attempts at airport security as recent polling data would indicate. One serious problem with the TSA is that they are always reacting to the last attempted attack and not preparing for the next one. I guess the flying public should be glad that they were not forced to, "go commando," after the attempted attack by the underwear bomber. I will take an even more cynical stance and say that preventing an attack on an airline is only tangential to the TSA's two main missions. The first is to make people feel safe enough to purchase airline tickets. This is the mission that is tangentially related to preventing attacks. It is also the mission that creates the whole dog and pony show designed to make it look like they are making people more secure. Gee, doesn't everybody feel safer now that they only have 3 ounce liquid bottles with them in their carry on bags? The second mission of the TSA is to make people scared enough to justify their continued existence and their chipping away at people's civil liberties. If these Orwellian nut-jobs continue to have their way, how long before everybody has to fly naked and handcuffed? Maybe the TSA is a repository for government workers with weird fetishes.

What is really annoying is that the full body scanners, or pervert scanners if you like, may not even work. In March, the Department of Homeland Security released an evaluation of their high tech toys. the unclassified version, is a sad document all of 7 pages long. It has a coversheet, a one page preface that is mostly irrelevant and then less that 2 pages of actual content about the audit and it's findings. There is scarcely a mention of the effectiveness of the full body scanners in the report. The lack of any specifics leads one to believe that the findings were not positive. To wrap it all up, full body scanners, they are invasive, creepy and they probably don't even work. Happy flying.

Bright objects in the sky, and the digital cameras that capture them

First of all I just want to put up this first picture without too much introduction, I'll just say I took it outside in the wee hours of the morning back in June:

Okay, so what does it look like to you? Is it a picture of an aircraft, a street lamp, or maybe a UFO? Alright, given the amount of information in the photograph, calling the brightly lit object in the frame an Unidentified Flying Object is pretty fair. I don't know how you would be able to identify it from this one picture. Now, to make it more interesting, let's take a look at another picture, taken a few minutes later, with the assistance of a tripod:

Good job astronomy fans, it's a picture of the moon, taken during the partial lunar eclipse on June 26th. I was impressed by how much shaking there was in the picture, taken by my digital camera, of an object that is relatively stationary in the sky. I bring this up not to highlight my poor photography skills, but to illustrate how digital cameras capture images in ways you might not initially expect. I didn't expect my camera to catch such a shaky image of an object that looked stationary in the sky from my vantage point. The idea is that if you think you have caught an orb, a rod or a UFO with your digital camera, the anomaly is more likely to be within the camera and the way it works, than it is to have come from the world at large. Also, you shouldn't underestimate the utility of a decent tripod.  Digital cameras are great, you can take a hundred or more pictures and you don't have to get them developed if you don't want to, quite an improvement over using film like we did back in the twentieth century. Just be aware of how your camera captures images in it's different modes before you get too excited about the weird image you caught on one of your photos. As the great Captain Disillusion might say, "Love with your heart, use your head for everything else."

Moving Halloween

I hope everybody had a happy Halloween. I know I enjoyed the holiday, but living in Utah, there was an annoying aspect to the whole thing. All the little trick or treaters here were sent out on their quest for candy on Saturday, October 30th. This was done on the assumption that somebody might object to anything interesting happening on a Sunday. This is annoying on a number of levels:

First, who made this decision? Was there some public meeting that I missed where there was a town hall style vote that decided to move trick or treating back a day? I think that this was a reactionary decision made behind closed doors without much, if any, public input. Lighten up people, it's only a Sunday.

Second, it creates an environment where one religious denomination is seen to dominate the scene. You don't see holidays that fall on a Saturday rescheduled to accommodate Seventh Day Adventists or Jews, and I don't think anybody asked the Islamic community if they wanted Friday to be immune from the intrusion of holidays. This is Utah, so I don't need to call out the religious majority by name, you know who you are. Unfortunately, there is a significant portion of this state's population that would be very comfortable with the implication that the state is set up to accommodate a single religious denomination.

Third, rescheduling a holiday implies that it is unimportant. While a lot of people might feel alright with Halloween being moved back a day, it is an entirely different matter when a holiday like Independence Day, is moved around to accommodate the whims of a single group of people. Moving the July 4th celebrations to a different day sends the message that the reason for the celebration is not important. Forget the founding fathers, the revolutionary war and all the people who have fought and died to preserve the freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of the United States, some people don't want to be inconvenienced.

One lighthearted observation related to the rescheduling of Halloween. By sending the trick or treaters out on October 30th, the good residents of Utah are sending their children out on Devil's night, happy Devil's night kiddies. Of course, a great number of those children don't get to go door to door, they get shuffled off to a trunk or treat event. Ah yes, trunk or treating, yet one more xenophobic thing further deteriorating what little neighborhood cohesion still exists. Forget going door to door and having at least some interaction with your neighbors, have a specific invited group of people show up in a parking lot and only let their children interact with those people. I know parents have a fear of stranger danger, but it really is an irrational fear. The children are in more danger on the drive to and from the trunk or treat event than they are from any candy they might receive from strangers going trick or treating, old school style. In summary, a once a week event should not trump a once a year event and your neighbors are good people, let the kids go trick or treating.