The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

The rumors were true

It looks like I might fly this afternoon:

I've had to postpone my annual flight review four times because of weather. Finally, today, the forecast calls for what you see above: clear skies, light winds, cold temperatures. (It's 0°C this morning.)

Airspace changes over the Hudson

Pilot and author James Fallows is thankful for the reasonable and minimal changes to New York City airspace the FAA announced last week:

When regulators and security officials address a problem through minimal rather than excessive rule-setting and interference or panicky over-reaction, that is worth our thankfulness too. Building toward a crescendo of things to be thankful for at this time of year.

By the way, it's a very fun trip for private pilots:

(From a flight I took in March 2000.)

New time-wasting blog to follow

Not Always Right, vigniettes that demonstrate how customer stupidity is an absolute limit on customer service:

Me: "Thank you for calling ***. How may I help you today?"

Caller: "I'm having problems with my computer and–"

(Suddenly, what sounds like an air raid siren sounds off in the background.)

Me: "Ma'am, I apologize. I was unable to hear what you said."

Caller: "Stupid tornado warnings! They always make it hard to talk on the phone."

Me: "Oh...should I let you go?"

Caller: "Nah. This happens all of the time."

(In addition to the siren, I hear a door slam and the sound of someone else entering the room. I hear a male voice who I guess is the caller's husband.)

Caller's husband: "D*** it woman, are you crazy?! Get to the basement!"

Caller: "Oh, I guess I should go..." *hangs up*

There are 275 more pages of them. Lovely.

Oh, sad day for NPR

Carl Kasell is retiring December 30th:

Kasell will, however, continue as official judge and scorekeeper of the Chicago Public Radio-produced quiz program, "Wait Wait … Don't Tell Me!," "the show that turned him from a newsman into a rock star," as noted in a memo to staff Monday from David Sweeney, NPR's managing editor for news, and Margaret Low Smith, its vice president of programming.

Sigh.

Misuse of science in autism

The Chicago Tribune today has an in-depth article about the misuse of autism research in therapy:

In his letter, obtained by the Tribune, [Florida family physician Dr. Dan] Rossignol justified the unorthodox treatment in part by writing that "a recent study out of Johns Hopkins has shown that children with autism have evidence of neuroinflammation on autopsy and (cerebral spinal fluid) evaluations."

It was [Dr. Carlos] Pardo's study.

Rossignol did not mention that Pardo's team had written in its online primer, using capital letters for emphasis, that intravenous immunoglobulin "WOULD NOT HAVE a significant effect" on what they saw in the brains of people with autism.

"THERE IS NO indication for using anti-inflammatory medications in patients with autism," the team wrote.

There's a word for doctors who offer treatments to desperate people without any evidence that the treatments will work. Or, to put it another way, if it walks like a duck...

I have some experience dealing with the allure of long-shot treatments for diseases that no one actually understands. Fortunately my mother was a solidly rational person, so when she volunteered for an experimental treatment, she understood the possibility—one in three, in fact—that she would only get a placebo, and the bigger possibility that the drug wouldn't work anyway. And the experiment was conducted by an actual science team with actual experimental methods and an actual study-review board.

Quacks are dangerous because desperate people don't usually think rationally. Undergoing dangerous, not to mention costly, treatments that come from shaky foundations and incomplete research do far more harm than good. The hope these treatments bring has a cost that many families don't understand until, much later, they regain their rationality. Then they find that only the quacks have really benefitted.

Today's Daily Parker

Field trip to Noethling Park (a.k.a. Wiggly Field) today, with a ball and a Chuck-It:

Everyone had a blast until Sadie, a beagle, got tired of waiting for Parker to give her his ball. After some snarling and snapping, both humans decided the dogs were done with the park for the day. Here's Parker saying "nyah nyah" to both Sadie and me:

Smarter than a cat

IBM has created a supercomputer with more cerebral capacity (as measured by neurons and synapses) than a housecat:

The simulator, which runs on the Dawn Blue Gene /P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144TB of main memory, simulates the activity of 1.617 billion neurons connected in a network of 8.87 trillion synapses. The model doesn't yet run at real time, but it does simulate a number of aspects of real-world neuronal interactions, and the neurons are organized with the same kinds of groupings and specializations as a mammalian cortex. In other words, this is a virtual mammalian brain (or at least part of one) inside a computer, and the simulation is good enough that the team is already starting to bump up against some of the philosophical issues raised about such models by cognitive scientists over the past decades.

...[B]uilding a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn't mean that you'll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don't understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don't understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.

On the other hand, I've met a number of cats in my day, and as cute as I think they are...do your really need that much computing power to outsmart one? I've seen gerbils do it.