I didn’t watch the debates on Friday night, but I did hear pieces of it on C-span radio while running errands this morning. The pieces I heard reminded me of everything I hate about the presidential debates. The leader of the country should not be picked based on one-liners, looks, or the ability to reduce a complex issue into a 20 word sound bite. Yet elections in this country are a sport, and the debates are one of the venues of competition. (The election itself and the polls being the other main venues). This is why we spend so much time worrying about who “won” the debate and the handlers try to convince the public that their candidate “won”. One would think that the public would decide whose positions they liked better and the polls would reveal who won, but we can’t watch a sporting event without a scoreboard, and we need to have someone tell us who won before we can know who to support. (The winner of course – who wants to support a loser?)

In terms of the debate itself, I heard more of the same stuff I abhor. McCain has clearly realized that nice guys finish second (as he did in 2000 when GWB and Rove used an insanely dirty and underhanded campaign to stop him). McCain initially tried to reject what he called the “politics of destruction” but in desperation it looks like he’s reversed course. McCain spent a lot of time distorting Obama’s record, and Obama, rather than retaliate in kind, spent an approximately equal amount of time refuting those charges. (for example, Obama and the dems tried to push an Iraq war bill that included a timetable, while the Republicans and McCain pushed one that didn’t. Each voted for their own bill and not the other. McCain accused Obama of “not supporting the troops” because of this.) This of course means that McCain “won” those sections of the debate because he was on offense. (Perhaps PBS can keep track of the time of possession for us). Should Obama lose he’ll probably turn to the same tactics next time as well.

On a related note, I do like technology which allows you to visualize inherently non-visual information. To that end C-span has a debate hub which shows all sorts of useless statistics to help you decide who won the debate based on statistics like which candidate used which words most. (So let’s see, Obama is winning in Afghanistan but McCain is winning in Iraq. How did they do with runners in scoring position?)

We all know six flags got it’s name from the six flags that have flown over Texas. (Spain, France, Mexico, The Republic of Texas, The Confederate States of America, USA). Want to guess what the three flags are that have flown over France?

Thank you woot for being so freakin cool.

I don’t know why Sept 19 isn’t on my calendar. Shouldn’t it be under “national holidays”?

link

All stats from wikipedia, the second greatest use of the internet ever (right behind email). I’m also just assuming that all the projections pan out because it’s too hard to assume otherwise.

The federal government this year will run a deficit of 240 billion dollars. If we could just find a way to cut 240 billion in spending, or raise 240 billion in income, we could actually have a balanced budget. Looking through the government spending numbers I see something just right – we spend 261 billion every year just to finance the national debt (which currently stands at about 9.7 trillion). Now if only we didn’t have this massive debt in the first place, we would actually have a budget surplus! The choice is clear – is we continue to let the debt grow it will do so exponentially, continuing to restrict what our government can do, continuing to place limitations on our spending, and forcing higher taxes. The other option is to start paying it down, which, while painful in the short run, will make us money in the long run. No politician will tell you this of course, because politicians are only focused on their short term election cycle that they simply push the problem to the next generation. Things will only continue to get worse unless the American people wake up and tell their politicians that a little discomfort now is better than a lot of discomfort later.

I just got an email from a recruiter which began with the following line:

In working with well respected industry professionals like yourself over the years, I certainly understand the concept of time. 

That’s awfully…… reassuring? I mean seriously, you didn’t have a concept of time before you started working professionally? Now that you have a sense of time, are you working on understanding the concept of cause and effect or is that too advanced?

Today is the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks which destroyed the world trade centers. The blogosphere is filled with tributes and remembrances. I don’t have anything worthy of adding to what’s already been said on that front, so instead I would like to focus on what we’ve done in the seven years since the destruction of the WTC.

We’ve lost our freakin minds!

I’m not even going to start on TSA and airplanes (security theater), the war in Iraq, the fact that the best intelligence service in the world can’t catch Bin-Laden, the fact that we’ve given up our civil liberties for a warm cozy feeling, the PATRIOT act, torture, Guantanamo bay, changes in immigration laws, the war on photographers, the fact that everyone and their dog has added the phrase “terrorism” to slander their opponents in an attempt to gain attention and grant money, or even the fact that it became unpatriotic to be a Democrat for about 5 years. Nope. Instead I’m going to rant about fire hydrants. Yup, you heard me correctly – fire hydrants. Those small ubiquitous metal things that take up parking spaces and serve as targets for our dogs to pee on. We all assume that in the event of a fire, the gallant fire department will be spurned into action and arrive on the scene with their fire trucks and personnel, ready to save us. They will spring into action, unfurl their hoses, and connect to the nearest fire hydrant (which had better not be blocked by a parked car), and preserve our lives, family pets, and worldly possessions. Apparently this Rockwellian image has gone the way of…. Norman Rockwell. Why? Because in the name of terrorism, it is now common practice in many counties to turn off fire hydrants.

When the fire began, firefighters from around Rockwall County responded quickly.

But when they went to hook hose to hydrant, there was no water.

 

[....] He explains all the district’s hydrants, including those in Alexander Ranch, have had their water turned off since just after 9/11 – something a trade association spokesman tells us is common practice for rural systems.

“These hydrants need to be cut off in a way to prevent vandalism or any kind of terrorist activity, including something in the water lines,” Hodges said.

Un-freakin-believeable. As someone manages and mitigates risk for a living, I can tell that no proper risk assessment was ever done on this policy. There are two factors to consider when trying to quantify a risk – the single loss expectancy and the annualized rate of occurrence. (Officially the formula is ALE = SLE x ARO). This is pretty much the first thing you learn to do when doing anything even remotely related to risk management. It is in the first 2 pages of every book I’ve ever seen on the subject, and is second nature to everyone even tangentially related to risk management. Using the numbers from DHS, the cost of all fires combined in 2006 was about 11 billion. (In addition to lives lost). The cost of the terrorist attacks on September 11 was 23 billion. (I have no idea how they got that number, but it’s the only one I have for now). Terrorist attacks have occurred exactly once on US soil since the end of WWII, (the beginning of what can be defined as the “modern era” – I know it’s arbitrary but it really doesn’t matter in the long run). The ARO therefore is about .02, while the SLE is 23 billion. This yields an ALE of $460 million. Fires on the other hand have an ALE of about $11 billion. In other words, we have about 20 times as much to fear from fires as we do from terrorists, yet some moronic bureaucrat has decided to turn off the hydrants. Brilliant.

Side note: I know this was a very crappy risk assessment – it’s meant to prove a point not give exact numbers. For one thing terrorism’s SLE is far less than 23 billion right now as we’ve added a lot of mitigating controls since 2001. Also the ARO is fairly arbitrary since I could have picked almost anything as a starting point to sample from. Additionally since there have been zero attempts at using fire hydrants for terrorism to date the ARO could be calculated to zero, but past events are also no guarantee of future results. I’m also probably using bad numbers for the fires since that includes things like wildfires which are not affected by fire hydrants. I know that my numbers are way off, but I’m convinced my underlying point would be held out by a strict mathematically based risk analysis – that the person who made this decision has actually endangered us all.

I promise to stop writing about Agriprocessors just as soon as there’s nothing noteworthy to say anymore. (Previous post here). Criminal charges have been filed against Agriprocessors, and the OU has said it will drop it’s kosher supervision if new management is not in place very soon! This is big. Not just because it means that Herzfeld was right, but because the OU has just set a big precedent. I like the decision, although to be honest if I were the OU, I’m not sure I would have had the guts to make it myself. The OU has also been careful not to say or imply that the meat is treif - this is strictly a business decision. In fact they’ve said that if new management is in place they won’t drop their certification. Essentially what they’re saying is that this is a business decision – they, as an organization, have no interest in being associated with these particular individuals anymore.

I was in the grocery store yesterday and had some baby food for Aliza among my purchases.  The friendly cashier asked me how old my child ones and we chatted for a little bit.  Then the conversation turned awkward:

Cashier: So your daughter must be drinking juice now too.
Me: Well, actually we aren’t giving her juice, just milk and a little water.
Cashier (obviously a juice fan): Why not?
Me: Juice is really mostly sugar with very little nutritional content, all kids need is milk and a little water.
Cashier (clearly thinking I’m being ridiculous): Oh no, I mean the Gerber juices, for babies.
Me: I know, they’re better than fruit punch, but not by much.
Cashier (wondering why I hate my baby so much): Have you tried them? They’re much less sweet then adult juices.  I’ve tasted them.

At this point I thought about pulling out my trump card (“I’m a pediatrician and you’re wrong!”) but decided that would not be a good way to make friends.  Plus I figured the people waiting behind me in line didn’t want to hear about how juice contributes to babies’ sweet tooth, childhood obesity and bottle caries.  One thing I did find very interesting is how much stronger an objection I got to the idea that juice is bad from this woman than I get from my patients in clinic.  It makes me wonder if they all feel as strongly as she does, and just are not telling me to my face, because I have the stethoscope.

Many of the family’s I see in clinic get nutritional help from Women, Infants, and Children (a great program that supplies food and formula for low-income women from pregnancy to postpartum and for their babies to the age of 5 years).  One source of resistance I often meet to my juice schpeil is that WIC supplies juice, so it must be good for babies.  I brought this up with a WIC nutritionist recently during a site visit, and she reassured me that WIC is currently revising it’s grocery list to include less juice and thus hopefully discourage usage a little more.  Of course, the govenment does not exactly have an A+ record of encouraging good nutrition.

Prepare for a tempest in a teapot everyone – The NY Post is reporting that YU has hired a transgendered professor. Well, not exactly ‘hired’. Two years ago English professor Jay Ladin (biologically a male), announced he was getting a sex change to become a woman. YU placed him on leave, although ultimately YU allowed prof Ladin’s return for “legally motivated” reasons. This semester Joy Ladin returned to YU to continue teaching.

As can be expected, this has gotten a lot of people very worked up. (YU is even worried about alumni donations dropping). What I can’t understand is why. Why are we (20th century American Orthodox Jews) so incapable of discussing these issues? Every time I’ve seen an American Orthodox rabbi asked a serious question about this they usually try to simply dismiss the issue as either irrelevant or in impossible confrontation with Judaism, and therefore not even worth discussing. The talmud clearly has no problem discussing issues related to non-standard sex and gender. There are countless discussions of people of non-standard sex/gender, anal sex, and even technique. (See nedarim 20 for a small sample). On the other side of the pond, none other than the Tzitz Eliezer himself has ruled that a sex change is halakhically valid since it’s the external organs which determine sex from a halakhic perspective. On this side of the pond we get categorical dismissal of the entire situation by simply saying that Prof. Ladin is “a woman with enlarged breasts”. Trying to dismiss or ignore the issue may work in the short term, but in the long term it just doesn’t work.

As a side note, Reform Jews have a prayer for getting a sex change.

I found this very interesting and had never seen it before:

As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican. The gap between rich and poor in Washington is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte, N.C.; and more than twice as great as in Republican-leaning Phoenix, Fort Worth, Indianapolis and Anaheim.

I of course knew that generally places which are less well off are democratic whereas prosperity seems to breed conservatism, but I hadn’t heard the part about equality. It does help to explain why I see so many Obama stickers in the extremely expensive part of Washington DC that Frum writes about.

Like most guys I know, I spent approximately 2×10^-29 seconds thinking about my wedding before I got engaged (this is why so many women are in charge of the wedding planning – they’ve already done it before the guy proposes). Even with that lack of preparation, I like to think that Rebecca’s and my wedding was pretty cool. In the past week two things have happened to make me think “damn, I wish I’d thought of that”.

Last Sunday was Amy’s wedding in the ultra conservative state of Massachusetts. It was good to see Amy and Jon, a couple clearly meant for each other, wedded. It was also practically a mini college reunion. (We look so respectable now, how the heck did that happen?)  When it came time for the reception the tables did not have numbers – instead they were labeled with star trek locations! Deep Space 9, Vulcan, Kronos, Cardasia Prime, The Neutral Zone, Sector 001, etc. (For the record, I was sitting at Rura Penthe. Hmmmmm).

The second thing is that Corey Doctorow is now engaged, and has decided that for his wedding ring he wants… (wait for it)… a secret decoder ring!  He asked master cryptographer Bruce Schneier to help design it. Dang, that is really awesome. Maybe I can get one anyway, then just photoshop all my wedding pictures so make it look like it was my wedding ring.

I know lots of people want children, but don’t want to spend a lot of money. Now there is a solution – buy all your children cheap from www.kidsurplus.com! They buy the extra unwanted children from other name brand stores that are overstocked and pass along the savings to you!