It wasn’t long after I bought my house that I started plans for wiring it with cat5e cable so I could have an in-house gigabit Ethernet network. I made my first cable run several months ago and then got distracted by other things and never got around to finishing it. (Literally – I never terminated one end of the cable). With a long weekend coming up, and someone around to watch Aliza (that being my long lost wife), I’ve decided to do more work on it this weekend.
My method of making the cable runs has been to use the existing phone lines (which for some strange reason are run on RJ21 cable) as guides by tieing my Ethernet cables to them, and then pulling. This of course means that when I’m done there would be no more phone lines in the house, but I figured I’d just run two ethernet cables to each room and wire the second one to a standard phone jack. (Using cat 5 cable for interior phone wiring is apparently standard these days anyway). While we do not currently have a landline phone, it is possible that we will eventually, and I figured at the least I want it to still be there if/when we ever sell the house because future owners might consider copper wiring to be a necessity. However I’m starting to rethink that. When Aliza is old enough to demand a phone will we get a landline phone or just go for a VoIP phone for the house or a cheap cell phone for her? If we sell the house in 5-10 years will anyone care about the phone wiring or will everyone be on VoIP phones for houses by then? Add to this the fact that AT&T has apparently told the FCC that it’s time to set a deadline for eliminating all land-line phones. One fifth of US homes have no land line phone, and that number is only growing. So is it worth the effort to rewire the house for traditional phone lines or is it just a waste of time?
Yesterday while I was playing with Aliza I flipped on the Giants-Panthers game. The Giants scored a touchdown, and hearing the announcement from the TV Aliza promptly said “touchdown!” and then broke in the first line of “Fly, Eagles Fly“. Later as I channel surfed over to a different channel as Star Trek: Generations was on. Aliza saw Jon-Luc Picard on the screen, pointed and said “Daddy!”
The real reason I bought a house was so I would finally have something to wire up into the ultimate nerd-home. I’ve been slowly assembling the home theater. The TV has been in place since the beginning of football season. I got a blu-ray player on sale after thanksgiving, and recently set up a Home Theater PC to watch internet video on. The best part? I can now watch my entire star trek collection on the big screen TV. My entire collection of divx discs will play on the blu-ray player, and CBS Video has the original series online for free. (Which ties nicely into Windows Media Center). Now, every night can be a star trek night.
Since facebook includes a “status” field people can edit, it becomes natural that some people want to update it as soon as their relationship status changes. Some people take that to the next level. Seriously – just watch this video.
I just finished The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman about centralized and decentralized organizations. In it he relates a funny anecdote from the early 90s. It seems that Dave Garrison, the then CEO of Netcom, was meeting with some venture capitalists in France to try and raise money. Since it was the early 90s he spent a lot of time explaining what the internet was. One of the investors asked him who the president of the Internet was. He tried explaining that there was no one in charge – it was a decentralized system run on a set of standards that everyone simply had to conform with to join. The French investors didn’t get it. Dave tried every metaphor and explanation he could think of – a network of networks, all the shoppers in a store reorganizing themselves, and everyone sharing the burden of communication. The French investors, convinced that either Dave was withholding information from them or that their message was being lost in the translation kept pressing – who decides?
Eventually Garrison, not wanting to offend the investors (whom he was trying to convince to hand him millions of dollars), gave in. He admitted right then and there than he was the president of the Internet.
This morning in shul I was playing with Aliza in the kids room, and she brought over “Hanukkah ABCs” for me to read. I obliged and was promptly met with the following:
A if for Antiochus, the Syrian king who….
Say what? Antiochus was a Seleucid Greek, not a Syrian. I don’t think there even was a place called Syria at that time. I also remembered back to my younger days – ancient history isn’t really taught at the elementary school level, and I remember never being really sure who exactly it was that the Maccabees fought against. Was it the Greeks? The Syrians? The Romans? The Borg? To that end, I now provide you with a very short answer to the question of just who was it that the Maccabees fought, and how it fit into the larger historical context of the time.
Alexander the Great was a Macedonian Greek who conquered a huge empire – from mainland Greece to the edge of India. When he died in 323 BCE, he had no obvious successor. After a few decades of fighting amongst the various attempted successors, his empire eventually fell out into four stable pieces – The Ptolemies, Seleucids, Pergamon, and Macedon. (map here). For our purposes the Ptolemies and Seleucids are the most important ones. The Ptolemies controlled modern day Egypt and parts of Africa, and the Seleucids controlled the area made up of modern day Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. These two powers did fight numerous wars with each other, with Judea caught in the middle. Antiochus III was the Seleucid king who conquered Judea, and was actually a pretty nice guy to the Jews. It was his son, Antiochus IV, who ultimately outlawed Jewish ritual and tried to force the worship of Greek gods in the temple. This angered the Maccabees, and the whole Hanukkah story occurs. As a postscript to the story, the Seleucid empire didn’t have too much longer to live, and just a few decades later it’s power was negligible, although they continued in independence until Pompey the great decided to turn them into a Roman republic in 63 BCE.
The main issue of course is Antiochus. He was part of a line of Seleucid kings. The Seleucid empire was clearly Hellenistic, and was a direct descendant of Alexander the great. Calling anyone at that time a Syrian seems to be a bit of s stretch as Syria is a far more modern construct. I really have no idea how the whole Syrian thing crept into the elementary school curriculum. (Subversive anti-Syrian propaganda perhaps? :-)). The Jews were fighting against one of the Hellenistic Greek empires that existed at that time.
update: In the comments Yehuda points out that Herodotus used the term Syrian as early as 5th cent BCE, so my initial comments above may have been somewhat overstated. Thanks for the correction.
Every so often Google maps and streetview find some of the most interesting things. They are usually posted to the internet, and then removed from Google within minutes (killjoys). This one however, may be one of the best ever. (Google already took it down, but you can see remnants from here and here and the original people took screenshots).
It is frequently alleged that American’s don’t understand math, and our constant failure to grasp health related statistics is usually held up as a primary example. I am of the belief that it is not our ability to grasp the math that is at fault, but the inability to accurately present the data that gets the public in trouble. Take, for example, the hysterical (and somewhat politically motivated) backlash against the new breast cancer screening recommendations. Even as someone who is deliberately and delightfully unaware of the political BS that surrounds me, I couldn’t help but hear misty-eyed women on the radio claim that “I am not a number” and “the mammogram saved my life”. (This is why I hate politics – in politics one individual’s anecdotal evidence carry more weight than a scientific study thousands of times larger). Nowhere however did I hear a single piece of science or math. The rate of cancer in the population, the false positive and false negative rate of mammograms, and other basic facts where all missing from the reporting. When I set about to find these number on the Internet a few hours ago, it took a shockingly long time because almost no media source bothered to cover it. (Instead I got lot of emotions – relief, anger, shock, ecstasy, disbelief, sadness, etc.). What follows is my attempt to do what the media should have – explain why this decision was made using that little thing we like to call “evidence”.
The old advice for women was to begin getting annual screening mammograms (regardless of personal risk) at 40. Since the new advice is to start at 50, I will be focusing on women in the 40-50 range. The odds of a women in her 40s getting breast cancer are 1 in 69, or 1.45%.1 (This number includes those in high risk groups). Mammograms, as I found out, are shockingly inaccurate. False positive rates over the course of 10 mammograms (so, a women who followed the old advice in her 40s), has been shown to be 56%.2 To put that shockingly bad number in perspective, flipping a coin once yields only a 50% false positive rate. So what does this tell us – if 69 women get mammograms over their 40s, one of them will develop cancer. Of the other 68, 38 of them will have something detected on a mammogram, despite not having cancer. (68 * .56 = 38.08). That means if you have something detected on a mammogram in your 40s, you still only have a 1/39 chance of actually having cancer. This is why, in a recent UK trial showed “there was a reduction in breast-cancer mortality… which did not reach statistical significance.”3
Some of you are probably already convinced once you realize that a positive mammogram in your 40s still means you have only a 3% chance of having cancer. However there are a lot of people in this country who seem to think that an infinite number of medical tests for everyone is a good idea with no repercussions. While I cannot find the mortality rate for unnecessary surgery or a biopsy, suffice it to say that they are greater than zero. In a 10 year retrospective study, 631 mammogram false positives resulted in 128 unnecessary biopsies and 1 hospitalization for complications during the unnecessary biopsy.2 All procedures have risks, and increasing the number of unnecessary procedures also increases the amount of harm that they will cause. Studies have also shown incredibly high levels of anxiety, morbidity, and other forms of mental distress stemming from false positive mammograms.1,2 One study even showed that 17% of women with a false positive mammogram reported it affected their daily activities months after the fact.4
Lest I accidentally convince you that mammograms are completely useless, you should know that mammograms become more effective with age as the breasts age and become less dense. Also since age is still the number one indicator in whether or not a woman will develop breast cancer, their usefulness does increase with age.5 This is why the new advice is still to have regular screenings from age 50 and onward.
