The Austringer

I just got an email from Michael Zimmerman about the recent United Methodist Church convention. The UMC has incorporated proposed accepting acceptance of evolutionary processes into the Book of Discipline, endorsed the Clergy Letter Project, and opposes religious intrusions into the science classroom.

“Therefore be it resolved that the General Conference of the United Methodist Church go on record as opposing the introduction of any faith-based theories such as Creationism or Intelligent Design into the science curriculum of our public schools.”

(Apparently, the early report is jumping the gun a bit, as the acceptance of evolutionary science one is passed by the committee but not yet acted upon by the plenary.)

Zimmerman notes:

This is fabulous news and we owe a debt of gratitude to Daniel Oertel, Al Kuelling and the Kansas East Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, respectively, for making these three resolutions possible. Please help spread the word about this good news.

Thanks Daniel, Al, and my fellow UMC folks in Kansas. That news brightened up my morning.

World first: researchers develop completely automated anesthesia system

My first science-related full-time job was in the Anesthesiology Department of the College of Medicine at the University of Florida. My job required me to be at the continuing education lecture series the department held, those starting promptly at 7 AM each weekday. While I didn’t have the benefit of medical school and residency in anesthesiology, there was quite a bit of information appreciable to the lay audience as well. For one thing, anesthesiology is a very demanding specialization in medicine. As various lecturers made clear, a person under anesthesia is about as close to death as medical practice allows, notwithstanding whatever surgical procedure might be going on. Another thing oft repeated was to choose your anesthesiologist with care, but surgeons… hah, they’re a dime a dozen.

One of the large projects going on in the lab toward the end of the time I was there was a study on vigilance. Residents participating in the study were given several hours of a video to watch, after they had completed one of their usual mind-numbing marathon shifts on duty. The video was of monitoring equipment used for anesthesiology, and at points within it would be fluctuations that could indicate a problem. The residents were supposed to note these. Of course, their performance was neither perfect nor was it close to what they could do if well-rested before starting to watch.

The result of the linked article is a computer-automated anesthesia system. It sounds like they have incorporated something very much like an expert system in software, as well as sensors and actuators such that precise dispensing of anesthetic agents can be delivered and results monitored. This is something that may be the harbinger of a means to help reduce the vigilance problem that I got acquainted with back in the early 1980s. It sounds like a good step forward, in any case, though it seems that the initial notion of the market for this system is to fill in for an absent anesthesiologist. I’m thinking that it is more likely to help reduce the strain on anesthesiologists on the spot.

Real Trekkie Tricorder Invented - Yahoo! News

Forget the hyperbolic title, what’s there is cooler stuff anyway.

The researchers took a look at what you need for doing something like ultrasound and used good old reductionistic reasoning. You need a transducer, data acquisition, data processing, and image display components. By coming up with a transducer and data acquisition components that plug into a cell phone, they were able to offload the data processing part to a remote central computational facility. The cell phone’s LCD display itself provided the image display part.

What this means is that being able to use ultrasound in the field can come down to a relatively inexpensive (more like ~$1000 than ~$70K), portable plugin device, plus I’m assuming some recurring charge for use of the central computing facility, and you can use this and get results wherever one has cell phone access.

There are rather a lot of diagnostic techniques that could be provided using this model, that given a generic audio-visual communication device, one can leverage that capability to provide specific services in remote locations. Going back to the Star Trek analogy, think back on how many of the plots depended upon depriving the protagonists of the use of their “communicators”. That’s a hint of just how important instant, reliable communication can be for even hypothetical situations. I think we’re just beginning to realize the real-world benefits that the technology makes possible.

Thanks to Skip Evans of Big Sky Penguin, I’m able to host the video of the press conference held on April 14th. This is still critical information to spread as the Senate considers the two antievolution bills before it.

Ann Lumsden, biology professor at Florida State University, makes opening remarks and then introduces the rest of the speakers. Vic Walczak of the Pennsylvania ACLU and attorney in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District then notes how the legislation proposed will be a lawsuit magnet. Maryann Fiala of the Florida AeA talks about how failing to treat science seriously in Florida’s schools will make it harder for businesses to find talent in Florida or recruit it from elsewhere. Sir Harry Kroto, chemistry professor at Florida State University and Nobel laureate, also speaks to the issue of business and specifically the biotech industry being put off by anti-science getting a privileged entrance into the science classrooms in Florida. I then talk about how the terms “academic freedom” and “critical analysis” are misuses and how they each have a known history of such misuse by religiously motivated antievolutionists.

The video itself was taken handheld on a consumer camcorder, so the video part is shaky. The audio is mostly good due to the amplification of the PA system used. Here’s the about 20MB version in WMV format. (I’ll look into embedding and a getting a larger version up later.)

Florida Citizens for Science/Florida ACLU Press Conference, 2008/04/14

Remember the “GetExpelled Challenge” kickback scheme? If that is working, we should see some mid-week action in the gate statistics, since weekdays are the likely times for mandatory school trips.

My prediction: Christian private school administrators are likely in general not as stupid as the “Expelled” promoters think, and won’t be significantly bumping up the so-far dismal returns “Expelled” has been getting: nowhere close to the 2 million tickets or the $23.9 million opening weekend figures fantasized by the “Expelled” producers.

Update: It doesn’t look like Monday was a “field trip” day for “Expelled”. Here’s the data for Monday the 21st:

$238,804

-68.8% / -

1,052 / $227

$3,209,652 / 4

Tickets down over two thirds… yes, weekdays aren’t a patch on weekends for movie going, so I decided to look at what other releases show.

Here’s the stuff for “Forbidden Kingdom”. It was released Friday, like “Expelled”, but it’s in Number 1 position now. Its sales slacked off by 70%.

$1,692,767

-70.1% / -

3,151 / $537

$23,093,888 / 4

Let’s not forget “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”. It’s down almost 66%.

$1,679,100

-65.6% / -

2,798 / $600

$19,404,430 / 4

Those bracket the slack-off “Expelled” experienced. There doesn’t seem to be any sign here of a “field trip bump”.

Update: Tuesday’s numbers are out, and “Expelled” again neither falling nor rising faster than the rest of the recently released movies. Its decline is slightly less at 4.8% than the 6.6% average of the top ten. I’m estimating that difference from the average amounts to a bit over 500 tickets. So if that represents a “field trip bump”, it’s pretty anemic.

Troy Britain has a pair of terrific articles showing the parallels between the “Leader Guide” for “Expelled” and pre-Johnson “creation science”. So when Ben Stein tells you “Big Science” is keeping “new ideas” out of the discussion, ask him, what exactly are these “new ideas”? There seems to be a lot of recycled content to “Expelled”, and very little in the way of “new ideas”.

Over on William Dembski’s “Uncommon Descent” weblog, there is an uncommon moment of dissent as weblog moderator David Scott “DaveScot” Springer actually disagrees with weblog owner Dembski over the “Expelled” argument that Darwinism was a necessary element for Nazi genocidal policies. Springer has engaged the claim with a number of criticisms and is not, so far, backing down. I usually wouldn’t have anything positive to report about Springer, so I think that when I do, I ought to take advantage of that.

William Dembski is complaining about the people who have stated publicly that they would attend a showing of Expelled at a multi-screen theater, buy a ticket for a different movie, then just slide into the theater showing Expelled instead. Bill has a point, as that does deprive the producers of money from their share of the ticket price and also reduces the reported number of seats sold as a measure of performance of the film. I won’t bother to engage in any relativistic stuff about how such ticket purchase shenanigans are less wrong than lying to people to get them to participate in a project.

Myself, if I do go to see the film, I’ll just buy a ticket for it straight up. That’s the right thing to do. I may wait a couple of weeks, though; by all indications, it is pretty transparently propaganda to all but the IDC cheerleading contingent, who would never find fault with it anyway. Of course, I’ll be running a big risk that there will be no theater within a reasonable driving distance showing it after a couple of weeks. I may just have to wait for it to appear on DVD. I’m assuming that would give me a delay of an extra couple of weeks.

So what if the expelled premise worked, but in the opposite direction of what the movie claimed? Turns out that’s what actually has happened. In response to all the fake “lost their job” sob stories in the movie, NCSE has produced a video on YouTube that discusses a real firing, but of Chris Comer of the Texas Education Agency for not “staying neutral on creationism”. The antievolutionists play hardball.

The folks over at After the Bar Closes just keep coming up with great stuff. Here’s an instant classic from “midwifetoad”: The Expelled Paternity Test. It presents a number of graphical representations of kinesin moving a vacuole around a cell and asks which seems to be the daddy of the view seen in the “Expelled” movie. Check it out.

I’m somewhere near Dade City, and I just got email that Diane’s weblog had been cracked. So I just upgraded Wordpress there and figured I might as well upgrade it here.

The upgrade worked without a hitch there. Here, I had a hitch. My customized theme doesn’t play nice with the new Wordpress, and my battery is just about dead, so until I get back to somewhere with 110 volt power, it’s just going to be using the default theme.

Picture banner and other features to return later.

Update: Apparently I hadn’t gotten around to copying the theme, which goes a long way to explaining why Wordpress wouldn’t work with it. There was a further bit with most of the sidebar disappearing due to the “sideblog” plugin; I’ve removed sideblogging, which I hadn’t been using lately, and it looks like the rest of the theme is doing OK.

Update 2: OK, I didn’t notice that my pre-2.5 widgets didn’t transfer to 2.5. That may have to wait a bit.

Here in my hometown of Lakeland, Florida, the headline taking over the front page of the paper concerns the vicious beating of Victoria Lindsay. Lindsay is a teenager with a MySpace page. Something that she put on her MySpace page, what exactly I haven’t managed to find out, triggered eight of her fellow students to take violent action. Six girls aged 14 to 17 and two boys of 16 and 18 years attacked Lindsay at the house of one of them, where Lindsay was staying after a falling-out with her parents. The six girls spent about thirty minutes beating Lindsay, while the two boys kept lookout against them being interrupted. They then put the wounded girl in a car and drove her around Lakeland while threatening her with more bodily harm if she tried to squeal on them. Lindsay had a concussion, eye injuries, and lacerations from the beating. The teenage attackers are all charged with kidnapping, and various are charged with battery and witness tampering. They are being tried as adults, so they can all collect life sentences for the kidnapping charge.

Oh, I forgot to mention… the girls videotaped the beating to release it on MySpace. I’m not sure how exactly they thought that they would escape consequences in this affair, or even whether they gave much consideration to consequences other then trying to threaten Lindsay some more.

William Golding had to place his youngsters descending into tribalism and violence in an artificial setting of a remote island to make his fictional account have that ability for the reader to suspend disbelief. (Though I have to admit that encountering that book at age ten myself I wasn’t all that discriminating on such issues.) It seems that the alienation Golding established by physical distance from other sources of civilization has been achieved with no physical distance required at all in real life.

If you were a child in the 60s and 70s, or a parent, you likely have had contact with “Highlights” magazine and their feature, Goofus and Gallant. Goofus was an archetype of a boorish, self-centered child, and Gallant was just too nice to be an archetype of anything in this world. Though one would have to admit that meeting and interacting with people who occasionally lapsed into Gallant-like behavior would be generally more pleasant.

Today, I arrived in Florida at the Sanford-Orlando Airport and my mom met me there. I drove on the way home. We used the Florida Turnpike system of toll roads, with a brief bit on I-4. We exited I-4 for the Polk Parkway, just west of “Fantasy of Flight”. That first segment of the Polk Parkway is a two-lane road, and there’s a toll plaza of sorts a couple of miles south of I-4.

As we approached the toll plaza, we noticed about two dozen vehicles backed up and not moving much. I’m not sure exactly why there was a delay there, other than only having one attendant on duty for southbound traffic. In any case, we spent about fifteen minutes getting to within two vehicles of the toll booth.

At this point, we could see clearly over the little convertible just ahead to the pickup truck that had just arrived at the toll booth. Now recall that our hero in the pickup truck (license plate FL ‘E58 OCD’, “Window and Shutter Designs Corp.”, 727-523-8914) has himself just spent fifteen minutes awaiting this moment. One would expect the window to go down and the driver to hand over the $1 toll post-haste and be on his way.

One would be wrong.

The driver and passenger suddenly come out of whatever haze they were in until that point, rather like the final finger-snap of a hypnotist releasing a subject. We can see them checking various nooks and crannies in the truck. They take a bit over a minute, but they apparently came up with something for the toll at last. The driver hands something to the toll-taker. They start having a conversation. The toll-taker disappears into his booth. He’s out of sight for several more minutes. What can possibly be up? Did the driver request a receipt, and the printer’s jammed? Is our toll-taker suffering a sudden stroke or bout of narcolepsy? Maybe a small sinkhole has dropped the bottom out of the toll booth and taken our hapless toll-taker with it. (It’s Florida, that sort of stuff does happen from time to time, like the guy who bought a new Buick, parked it in front of his apartment, then comes out the next morning to find his car at the bottom of a curiously Buick-sized sinkhole.) The toll-taker reappears and talks to the driver, then disappears back into the booth. More time passes. I notice somewhere in there that the LCD display has changed from “$1 Toll Due” to “Change Due: $99″.

Our hero the truck driver, taking into account the long wait of everyone behind him in line, has decided that now is the time to break that $100 bill he’s been carrying around. If he’d have popped out and asked for someone to contribute a buck, I’d have done it. As it was, there was still more time needed for the toll-taker to apparently locate enough change to do the job and count it out to the driver. And, finally, one more pause for the toll-taker to take down the license plate number on the vehicle.

Between the original wait and the one enforced by Goofus from “Window and Shutter Designs Corp.”, we spent somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes waiting to get past that one toll booth. Goofus, may I suggest that you not plan to do much driving in Texas. “Don’t mess with Texas” drivers was pretty much standard procedure long before the litter-control people hit upon that slogan.

By the way, we were using EPass, and our actual transit through the toll booth was under twenty seconds. I hear Gallant uses EPass, too.

Amazon has been looking for more ways to market content, and they’ve come up with one. Amazon’s Kindle is a device that provides e-book content, but goes one step further: instead of cartridges or downloads to your PC that have to be transferred to your Kindle device, Kindle comes with its own wireless connectivity. This means that you can order and receive content for Kindle right from Kindle. That’s based on EVDO, so pretty much anywhere you get a digital cell phone signal is Kindle-ready. Here’s something they got right in this: the wireless access back to Amazon’s Kindle store is not billed, nor is browsing Wikipedia. Now, they do want about $400 for the Kindle reader and $10 each for downloads of New York Times bestsellers, so certainly they don’t plan on losing any money in this proposition.

Speaking of not losing money, the following Amazon Associate link will not only provide you with a way of ordering your own Kindle, it also nets me a 10% referral fee. So if just ten of you buy one via my link, I will be able to afford one of my own. (Currently it is sold with free two-day shipping.)

The Amazon Kindle page has various video endorsements and a 30-inch drop test to watch, as well as listing various books, newspapers, and weblogs that can be delivered to Kindle. The user reviews mostly are in the positive, but you’ll probably want to have a look through several before making a purchase decision.

Spring has arrived on the calendar. Here in Michigan, what arrived was a heavy snowstorm dropping about four inches of new snow on things.

Ed Brayton came to Lansing this evening for a performance by a friend of his, Don Reese. I got invited to tag along. We met for dinner at “Smokey Bones” at the Eastwood Town Center. I was unfashionably late, having left in time to get there — if the roads were clear and dry, which they weren’t. It took the better part of an hour to make the trip I usually do in about fifteen minutes.

Don is a stand-up comic who has appeared on A&E, MTV, and worked with Adam Sandler. Don is about my height and weighs, I don’t know, somewhere in the upper 200 pound range. Don’s response to male pattern baldness was a razor. Ed and Don engaged in a batch of shoptalk plus discussion of various things about the entertainment industry, but mostly things to do with the stand-up comedy business and people they knew. I couldn’t aid that much at all, so I primarily applied myself to a beef brisket sandwich.

Eventually we parted ways with Don, who needed to go change wardrobe for his appearance. Ed and I went out to our cars and performed the ritual of brushing off snow and scraping off ice so common to early spring here in Michigan. Then we were off to Connxtions Comedy Club in Lansing. There were three acts, and Don may kick me next time I see him, for though Don made it part of his act to bring up the tendency for audiences not to remember the names of the people who just made them laugh, I am not at all sure that I have remembered the names of the first two comedians up on stage. As near as I remember, they were Andy Badinga and Marvin Todd. I’m sure Ed can correct me, and I’ll update this once I do get that correction.

Ed and I somehow got the front center table. Usually I prefer being more inconspicuous, especially where live comedy is concerned, but this didn’t have any untoward consequences this evening. Andy’s set was pleasant, if a bit rough on the delivery. Marvin Todd had an edgier routine, often playing off the mismatch between his skin color and the preponderant white-bread appearance of the audience, but handled with an experienced delivery. Todd also went between some self-deprecation and some bits where, thank goodness, another part of the audience came in for attention. A group had wandered in late and were fairly noisy in rearranging tables and chairs to suit them. For the rest of Todd’s routine, he would intersperse some vocal sound effects mimicking the moving chair noise, eliciting a “Sorry!” from one of the girls in the group.

Don Reese’s routine was thoroughly professional and while it was clear that Andy and Marvin have talent, Don certainly brings talent and polish to an act that is nonstop laugh fest. Don’s brand of humor ranges from some medium raunchy stuff common to a lot of comedy to allusions that challenge the cultural literacy of the audience. For instance (on the allusions, not the raunchy stuff), there were the references to trying to keep from offending an audience of senior citizens and having to skip his material on the Hindenburg and the Teapot Dome Scandal. Quite a bit of Don’s humor concerns his imposing physical appearance that Connxtions describes thus: “Looking like the illegitimate son of Uncle Fester and G. Gordon Liddy…”. Since he’s shaved off the mustache, I think the G. Gordon Liddy thing can be retired. But a part of Don’s routine that I particularly enjoy is his exploration of a common science fiction B-movie dialogue cliche’, having a scientist exclaim at some point, “Why, that’s fantastic!” This he folds into making the phrase relevant to more common experience, while defending the exclusivity of it. “Raspberry vinaigrette is salad dressing. It can be delicious, but it isn’t fantastic. Fantastic is having a Viking materialize in your living room because of a botched time-travel experiment.”

But I think a short summary of Don’s performance with, “Why, that’s fantastic!” isn’t really a stretch.

Diane had it, and it looked like a misery. Rob, my boss, has it now, and he certainly doesn’t look comfortable. I got a flu shot a couple of weeks ago, and until last night I had no symptoms. But within the space of a couple of hours, I went from nothing to severe shivering coupled with muscle and joint pains.

The clinic said they had a treatment to help shorten the course of this stuff, so I need to drag myself to the clinic today.

I celebrated my 48th birthday a little over a week ago. I got a package from Jeff Shallit, whose avocation is minerals. Diane and I have met up before with Jeff and his family in the desert southwest, a destination he enjoys particularly for the opportunity to apply geological knowledge and find minerals for himself. Last fall, I accompanied Jeff to a mineral and gem show in Detroit. I had expressed some interest in a couple of types of minerals, and Jeff kindly sent along a couple of samples.

First up is a piece of pyrite, FeS2. This one comes from Navajun, La Rioja Province, Spain. It is a cube, 19.03×19.20×19.31 mm in size. (Electronic readout calipers are cool.) The surfaces are almost mirror-like, and it is somewhat challenging to show any surface texture on the pyrite at all.

And the second is a sample of fluorite, this one from the Rogerley Mine, Frosterley, County Durham, England.

But the real attraction of fluorite isn’t evident until you hit it with ultraviolet light. I took apart a UV light keychain LED bob and a cheap Garrity LED flashlight, and replaced the Garrity white LED with the UV LED from the keychain bob. (Actually, I’ve brought the leads out to a two-place screw-in terminal. I can swap out LEDs for the light of choice.) This gives me a handy UV source I can use in close-ups.

The photo setup is based on a copy stand I made from an old, cheap enlarger. I got rid of the head and simply use the attachment point to mount my camera. The background is a sheet of coarse-grit sandpaper glued down on mounting board. I tilted the whole thing to take the pyrite shot, since with everything flat one sees only two faces on the cube from directly above. The camera is a Nikon D2Xs, and the lens is my old Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 AIS manual-focus lens. I was shooting at 100 ISO, and given the mixed lighting, the exposure was several seconds at a small f-stop.

Back in 2006, we passed on a computer system to a friend of ours who had none at home. Since then, she has gotten interested in digital photography and wants to produce some designs for CafePress, as well as the usual email, browsing, and writing. This is complicated by the fact that she and her husband don’t really care to spend the bucks for broadband.

Yesterday, she was shopping and ran across a sale on a Compaq Presario F750US laptop computer, at $450. She ended up buying it after consulting with Diane and I. She is planning on using some of the free WiFi hotspots in her vicinity, such as the local branch of the public library, in order to use the Internet.

We talked a bit later, and I mentioned that in keeping with the budget she’d like (spend as little as possible), that there were a number of open source or free applications and utilities that she should look into. I’ll append what I wrote to her. Please add other suggestions or disagreements on my suggestions to the comments.

(more…)

Part of the Antievolution.org domain is an online web-based bulletin board system; let’s call that the AE Public BB. It has been operating since about 2002 with the current software, the Perl-based IkonBoard system. IkonBoard has pretty much become a legacy system without much in the way of support or user development, but the instance I have has had various modifications that provide useful features. Back when we were having issues with putting too much load on our old server, the IkonBoard installation was the application that showed the fewest problems, though even it was affected.

The point of having a BBS is to get a good community of commenters, and this the AE BB has done, in large part due to its being the spillover discussion area from the Panda’s Thumb weblog.

Early on, my idea was that threads on the BBS would bring together interesting and useful knowledge about topics, which could then be hosted as resources in themselves. I even made a start then of hand-saving the HTML of some threads to put in the main AE domain space. But at the time the BBS was using a “dbm” style database, and my only access to it lay through the IkonBoard interface. Since then, I’ve switched the database to MySQL and programmed a couple of accessory pages for mining information from it.

IkonBoard, like many other BBS systems, uses an arcane URL structure to specify threads on the BBS. It also insists on inserting a session identifier into its URLs generated dynamically. All of those things tend to make search engine spiders either give up entirely, or for the backends to give little weight to pages that do manage to get indexed. While I’ve added a hack that presents search-engine-friendly URLs to search engines, it still seems like pages don’t get indexed, or at least don’t reliably show up in searches.

So, given the early intentions and the more recently acquired means of doing something about it, I’m pleased to unveil the AntiEvolution.org Public Bulletin Board Archive, a page that presents the content of the AE Public BBS via links with meaningful names (they are taken directly from the topic titles). The procedure behind it will make it simple to update this archive periodically, and I’m intending that to be every month or two. There is a web-interface application in PHP that queries the MySQL database to find all topics that are cleared for public viewing. That application builds a page that has the HTML for a links page, and a set of commands for retrieving each topic as a single (sometimes very long) page from IkonBoard. Because IkonBoard generates each page, all the original links work, and the theme carries over. A user interacting with the pages will be shifted over to the IkonBoard BBS system and its dynamic, up-to-the-minute content.

So I think that this will serve the purpose of saving the sometimes useful, and more often entertaining, exchanges that take place on the BBS. There are definitely things there that should be remembered, and not be treated as evanescent and disposable interchange.

Empire Film Group Announces a Special Theatrical Promotion With PETA for “BLONDE AND BLONDER” Release - MSNBC Wire Services - msnbc.com

Pamela Anderson thinks that donating a cut of the gate for “Blond and Blonder” to PETA, the animal rights extremist organization, will increase ticket sales for the movie. It’s your choice, of course, but my feet will be staying far away from the theaters on this one.