Free Energy...Well, Maybe Not!

“The energy in the air turbulence behind cars could be harnessed to power cell phones or other electronics inside a vehicle, says a Discovery News report citing City College of New York researchers. The scientists are working on a device that uses strips of piezoelectric material, which generates an electric current when compressed. The flow of air around the device causes it to vibrate, producing electricity.”  At first glance the above news release sounds like an incredible idea. The basics of piezoelectricity have been known for years and are as close to us as the igniter that fires up your propane grill or the electrical pickup inside your acoustic/electric guitar.   But, the thought of using an existing technology to create a new, clean, and very inexpensive source of electricity is certainly worth our attention. Could this be the energy “Holy Grail?” I don’t think so.   After a few moments considering what this could mean the thought struck me that, what’s the big deal? Why do we need another means to recharge our cell phones, IPods, etc. while driving down the highway? Doesn’t our car’s alternator provide the same opportunity via its cigarette lighter receptacle? I don’t know enough about such things to fully understand the potential of this scientific research but I certainly hope the potential goes further than what has been reported.   Possibly the science dudes will come up with a piezoelectric generating device that is both large enough and efficient enough to recharge an electric car’s batteries while it is quietly swishing down the Interstate. Voila, perpetual motion!  Maybe one of you engineering types out there can shed a little piezoelectric powered light on all this. In the meanwhile, I’m just going to sit here scratching my hair and trying to recharge my IPod from the static electricity it generates. Here kitty-kitty!

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The Sears Wishbook Lives

It has been a number of years since I was last in a Sears’ store. However, last week I was in Chillicothe shopping for a new vacuum cleaner and remembered that at one time the Sears Kenmore sweeper had a pretty good reputation.   So, I drove into the mall and found a parking space in front of H.H. Gregg. Deciding to do a little comparative shopping I went into the vulture’s lair to check out their offerings and prices. I had done my Internet consumer homework before leaving home and Gregg had what I was looking for.   Armed with info I walked over to the Sears store and found a much larger selection including the model I had just seen at Sears’ competitor. Sears was $2 higher but their return policy was ninety-days versus two weeks. For a couple of bucks I went with Sears and the better customer satisfaction policy.  They gave me a receipt and instructed me to drive around to the side and the new vacuum would be loaded into my van. While I was waiting for the warehouse dudette to come out with my new Hoover I noticed a rack of Sears catalogs, one being the 2009 Christmas Wishbook.   I hadn’t seen a Wishbook in many years so I picked one up and began thumbing through it. Somehow I must have expected a return of the thrill I experienced as a child when the Sears-Roebuck Christmas Catalog appeared in our mailbox.   Instead of being a reminder of my past it turned out to be a reminder of just how much has changed in the last 50-60 years. Sears is no longer in the serious toy biz. There are no more pages of Lionel or American Flyer electric train sets, Gilbert chemistry sets, Erector sets, Silvertone guitars, J.C. Higgins camping gear. Roy Roger’s cowboy pistol sets, nor lots more. You’ll find a few pages of toys but they are of the Fisher-Price kind and aimed for a much younger audience. In fact, I doubt kids young enough to be interested in these toys would even be capable of understanding the concept of a catalog.   I don’t know who today still orders from the Sears catalog but obviously there are enough shut ins living on remote Utah goat ranches to justify the cost of printing them.   Somehow though, I’m glad that Sears still prints an annual Wishbook. Maybe it’s just comforting to know that there is still a constant in my life.   So, now that I’ve written this little essay, I’m going to fix myself a mug of hot chocolate, grab a couple Christmas sugar cookies, lie on the carpet in front of the TV, wear out the pages of my Wishbook and dream of Santa’s arrival.   Merry Christmas everyone!

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Holiday Traditions

Holiday traditions – everyone has a few.  Some are quirky, some are new, and some simmered in the love of generations.   Twas the Night Before Christmas appeared in the newspaper of my hometown every Christmas eve.  Annually during my childhood  it was read to us, first by our parents, later by an older sister, eventually by an older brother, and after all of them had moved on or passed on, my brother and I read it to each other.  The tradition was our tie to the past.  When my children arrived, the tradition continued.  Other traditions began with them.  There was the annual countdown paper chain.  Thanksgiving evening the boys would cut and assemble paper rings to represent the number of days from Thanksgiving to Christmas.  Each day in between, they removed one link.  This worked especially well when they were learning to count.  Both chose to continue this throughout high school.  Then there was the Christmas cookie bake-off.  Everyone participated, decorated and ate lots of cookie dough without getting salmonella.  Somehow, I was the one to clean up. There is a tradition I wish we could replace!  The last few years have found all of us far apart.  Initially this was a sad situation.  Jobs, school, and outside obligations made us miss each other during the holidays.  Two years ago, we hit upon an idea – and started a new tradition.  At a prearranged time, we all fire up our computers and webcams for a live, almost in person Christmas.  With the right equipment, you can connect everything to your television and sound system.  We can see each other as we talk and open gifts.  There is not the inconvenience and insanity of airports and highways to deal with.  Later, we relax knowing that everyone is well, happy and safe.   Technology scores a hit with new traditions!

 Linda Fugate, December 4, 2009, Submit a comment.

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 Read the Labels, Please!

For a number of years my wife has kept a supply of coffee flavored hard candies around the house. They were made by a small century old candy company in Chicago. A year ago she went to reorder and discovered the company was ceasing operations because of foreign competition.   While in the city one day she found another similar candy and bought a pound. From a wrapper she got the maker’s name and found them online. A phone call later and she order a year’s supply.  Well, the year’s worth ran out and the new shipment arrived this past Friday. While opening up the box I noticed that this candy was, “Made in Indonesia.” It was made in Indonesia by possibly the very company that had put the Chicago candy makers out of business.   On occasion I also see something coming into the house called, I think, Teddy Bear Cookies. They come in various flavors, none of which taste good to me. My wife buys them for the grandkids to munch on.  The kids love them as much as we adults like online bingo.  .One evening, while helping store the groceries, I read the label on a pack of these snack cookies and discovered they were baked in India.  While I have always been concerned about buying American first, I have become even more aware of labels in recent years. The reason is simple, while buying T-shirts made in Mexico or cars made in Korea puts our jobs at risk, buying food products from foreign sources puts our physical health at risk.   One of the local chain stores had a sale on whole beef filets this spring. Great price and they would cut it to your specifications. I decided to stock up on grilling beef but discovered at the meat department the beef was a product of Mexico. It is at times difficult to maintain my faith in the USDA Inspected stamp, I have no faith in a cow raised and butchered in Mexico.   Fish is another food item that is becoming more difficult for me to purchase. Pick up about any pack of frozen fish or other seafood and look for the country of origin. Most will be labeled “caught in the wild” and “Product of China.” If we can’t trust the Chinese to sell their own citizens milk that isn’t tainted why should we have faith in any of their food exports? Hell, their children’s toys aren’t even safe for little kids to gnaw on.   Recently I came across a new and humorous labeling scheme for trying to skirt consumer concern. The Chinese are now labeling some fish as, “Caught in American Waters, Product of China.” Somehow, for me, that is no more comforting than the old product of China label. Matter of fact, isn’t that telling me they are infringing on our natural resources? Why are Chinese fishing vessels in American waters competing with American fishing boats?   This column came about because of two things. First, believing that all Carhartt clothing was American made I picked up a new pair of their jeans last week. I didn’t read the label and discovered yesterday they were made in Mexico. The second stimulus came from an email I received.  It was from a woman who had discover two instances where the named brand product she had been using for years was being made offshore while a discounted “no-name” version, selling for “half the price,” was made in America. Her claim also included the statement that each performed just as well as the higher priced brand name version.  So, if some outfit in Cleveland, Ohio can make light bulbs and compete, while selling at a discount, why the hell can’t I buy Teddy Bear shaped cookies made in Buffalo, New York or a pair of blue jeans made in Greensboro, North Carolina?   I suppose one simple answer is, not enough of us look at any label except the price label or the brand name. Certainly that is not the only answer but, if increasing numbers of American consumers began considering where their tangibles come from it may begin to have an affect on fostering increased manufacturing here at home.   P.S. The American colonies began life as a source of natural resources for the manufacturing giants of Europe, especially England. There is evidence that we are returning to that lowly status. Increasingly labels are showing up that read, “Made in China of American Materials.” Didn’t we fight a revolution once to change all of that? P.P.S. My wife came in from the grocery with a box of Bud's Best Teddy Bear Cookies. Box proudly states, "Proudly made in the U.S.A." Matter of fact, Alabama, U.S.A.!

Larry Chapman, October 6, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com

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Nature is Complex and Dynamic 

It sounds kind of cool and intimidating, but what does it mean? To a mathematician, a physicist, or a computational scientist calling a system complex, or calling it dynamic has some very specific implications. I've spent the last several years being all three, so this sort of meaning is really attached to how I think. (No narrow expressions of geekdom for me. I'm a polyfunctional geek.)  Start by defining a system. Simply thought about, a system is the thing you are trying to study, including all of the parts that are required to provide a sensible description.  So, if you are looking at the crash that happens when one car runs a red light and hits another, the system is the two cars. The bent metal and broken glass  on one car is hard to understand if your description doesn't include the second car. However, there is no need to include the police car that arrives on the scene later to file a report. The police car had nothing to do with the crash or the damage, so it isn't important to describing the crash and damage. If the goal changes and you want to describe the process of filing an insurance claim and getting the car fixed, the police car becomes part of the system. The claim will require that a police report is filed, and the police car is part of how that step happens.  The system is always defined after you decide what to describe or explain. It is the core of the descriptive process. Doctors treat diseases in the context of different body systems; mechanics fix cars in terms or different automotive systems; diplomats develop international agreements to mesh the penumbras of different governmental systems. In fact, for each blog entry I have written, I have defined a system and built the descriptions and explanations in the context of that system. So, at least for me, the use of a system is much broader than just in the physical sciences.  One simple way to classify systems is by telling whether they change in time. In reality, as Shelley pointed out in the poem Ozymandias everything changes over time. However it is often OK to say that something doesn't change much in the time you care about. For example, the tectonic plate that most of North America is sitting on is moving to the West all the time. If you live a fairly average life span, Greenfield will be a few inches farther West on the globe when you die than it was when you were born. I have never taken that into account when driving to town, and I bet no one else does, either. Greenfield isn't really stationary on the globe, but it is close enough for anything I ever do. Many simple systems are the same. They don't change enough over the time of interest for a description to make the change matter.  Contrasting with that is a dynamic system. Dynamic systems change quickly enough that the change matters. Try an example. Go outside and get a big rock - about the largest you can pick up - and lift it high in the air. Stick your foot out so that your toes are right under the rock. Now let go of the rock. Keep reading once you get back from the Emergency room.  When you let go of the rock, it became a dynamic system. Its position was changing quickly enough that you couldn't explain what you saw without including the change. You also found out that the rock was not the whole system when the rock landed on your foot. Any description of the system that leaves out your foot will not help your doctor understand why you are at the Emergency room.  A different way to classify systems is using the terms simple and complex. This classification is much fuzzier than that into static and dynamic. There is no single test you can apply and know if the system is simple or complex. In many systems it is an almost aesthetic distinction. In most cases it boils down to mathematics, and what kinds of problems humans have figured out how to solve in detail.  However, the behavior of simple systems is much easier to describe than that of complex systems. A simple system does something that is fairly easy to predict. (More accurately, it is easy for someone with the right skills to predict. If you don't know what you're talking about, nothing is easy.) A pool game played on a good quality table is simple. Any decent physicist can calculate the strike of the cue stick on the cue ball, the motion of the cue ball along the table (including things like English), the cue ball striking other balls, the bounce of a ball off of a rail: the whole game can be calculated to within millimeters or less if someone wants to do the work. That does not mean that most physicists are good pool players. I've spent time at pool tables in bars with several other physicists and most of us do not play well. However our problem is that we don't practice enough to control the cue stick well enough to do what we want. It is not that we can't figure out what to do. Pool is a simple game, and calculating a pool game is a simple problem.  Complex calculations are a different matter. In a complex system, there is no known way to produce an accurate enough answer that the errors won't come to dominate the answer. It may be possible to produce a short term answer that is good enough, but it is not possible to produce a long term answer that is anything better than a guess. The long term details are not accessible with any known technique. Even worse, in many situations it is possible to prove that the long term answers will never be accessible. This is because in some systems even the tiniest errors blow up over time and become bigger than the answer. Effectively the calculation loses the ability to tell you any details about reality.  The best known example of this is the weather. As I write this, central Ohio is under a high wind advisory until 2 AM tonight. No one can tell what the gusts will be like at my house at 7 PM this evening. That is only a few hours from now, but the details are lost in any attempt to calculate what the winds are going to do. I could improve any calculation by collecting more data, and using more precise equipment to do the collecting, but this is not enough. I can imagine measuring the wind every 5 feet, across the entire Midwest. (No one could afford to do this, but I can still imagine it.) Combined with other weather measurements made at the same stations it might seem like this is enough to predict details for a few hours into the future. Put aside the computational problems of processing all this data fast enough to matter and the answer is still no. The tiny errors in a measurement close to Wilmington are enough to make predictions close to Greenfield for a half an hour later pretty sketchy. Projecting conditions close to Bloomington, IN out far enough to reach Greenfield is almost pointless.  This is a common feature of complex systems. Long range detailed predictions are not possible, no matter what measurements are made or what facilities are available to process the data. What can be done? Trends and averages are available in many systems. So, even though no one can tell you what the temperature and other weather conditions in Greenfield will be like next June 17, I can easily tell you that the temperature will almost certainly be higher than it will be on February 15 of the same year. I can also tell you with near complete certainty that the average temperature for June will be higher than the average for February and that the total precipitation will probably be higher in June than in February. Those are examples of averages and annual trends. Longer term trends are also possible. For example, if I compare the average temperature for June of 2010 to that for June each decade since the founding of Greenfield a little over 200 years ago I find that the average for the month is going up quite clearly.  Complex dynamic systems are hard to talk about usefully, so why should I bother? Because almost everything in the world that is important is a complex dynamic system. The weather is one example. Other examples are the operation of the human brain, genetic development in a real environment, any ecological system, clean winter availability, the orbits of the planets around the Sun, the local, regional, national and world economies, pollutant dispersion, a properly functioning car, and almost anything else you can think of that is important in the real world. As we recall from my blog on quantum mechanics the goal of science is to talk about the real world, so if the real world is complex and dynamic then science must try and describe such things as well as possible.  Arguing from utility, one reason for science is to understand systems well enough that we as humans can use them to our advantage. (This is not, in my opinion the only reason.) We study the properties of building materials so we can build better and safer houses, cars, bridges and other constructs. We study plant biology with an eye toward what the plant can provide to improve the human world. We study human physiology to improve human health. Every branch of science has as one goal developing a means to control systems and provide benefits to humans. So, it is reasonable to ask about how to control complex systems. (Hold off on the dynamic part for a moment.)  The answer is that there is no simple answer. First, you have to define what you think is a good behavior. For health care, I would suggest long, healthy and active typical life span. For the environment a simple measure is harder to come by. Growing more crops to feed more people would be good, but it implies destroying more plant and animal species that have no currently known value toward feeding humans. That could backfire. In any case, imagine we come to a consensus on what we want and call that "efficiency." We have decided high efficiency is good, and low efficiency is bad.  It is only possible to know what to do to control a system if you know the details of how the system works. Some systems, called self organizing systems, are best controlled by leaving them alone. They achieve high efficiency without intervention, and the net effect of any intervention at any scale is to reduce that efficiency. Some systems respond well to intervention at a small scale. So any changes are made in small sections of the system while leaving the rest alone, and that is the way to improve efficiency. Yet others are best controlled on large scales - changes that affect the whole system at once.  There is also the problem of whether the changes made should be small and incremental or large and sudden. For example, is it better to cut down cigarette consumption a little bit at a time or to quit cold turkey? Again, this varies by the system. Each answer is correct in some circumstances.  So, there is no single best answer without knowing a lot about the details of the system. And getting the details correct is important because the boundary between the different types of preferred control is not in any way simple. An entire field of abstract artistic expression relies on how complex this boundary is. One way to derive objects called fractals is by plotting such boundaries. (Look up images of fractals, the Mandelbrot set, and Julia sets for thousands of examples of this.) The pictures are pretty, but they are also complicated at every level of detail. There is no way to view them that avoid the fact that a very small change in the system can easily cross a boundary and change the best way to control the system.  Even worse, natural systems aren't just complex, but they are also dynamic. (I told you this was coming back.) So, the conditions that define the system are constantly changing. The details of your body change every second throughout your life. What is happening as you read this has never quite happened before and will never quite happen again. Some of the details will be different. When your body is working well it is common not to even notice these small changes, but when you need medical help with something this variation is important. A drug that worked the last time you had a back spasm might be better, worse, or about the same this time. Allergies you have never displayed before might flare up, or old ones might fade. Each of these changes makes the best actions to control your health a little different. In some cases, a change in your body makes the best way to regulate your health change radically. Regular strenuous exercise is a good thing for most people, but if you develop a small clot in a blood vessel close to your heart that exercise could kill you. Exercise is still good, but it has to be regulated in a very different way.  So, what do we get when we put this whole picture together?  Complex dynamic systems are hard to work with but since they include almost everything important in the real world we have to do so, anyway. When the interest is controlling the system there is no easy way to know how it should be done, but doing it incorrectly could be disastrous. The only ways to determine how to control such a system is to either perform such detailed measurements and calculations that we can identify the preferred control system or to proceed by guess and check to find a method that works for the moment. The conditions will change, so something that works today might not work tomorrow. However, a clear eye on what has worked gives the best available information on what might work in the future.

John Phillips, October 1, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com  

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Janny Brizius Offers a Little Family Genealogy

Larry, this is in response to your piece about having someone famous in your family tree. Regarding having famous people in your family, while not as famous as his cousin, Daniel, Ratliff Boon was my husband David’s great-great grandfather. He was the first legislator from the state of Indiana and I think he was their 3rd governor. He was also an Indian fighter even more brutal than Daniel. He was more famous in his day than Daniel and Boonville, Indiana was named for him and his father, not for Daniel as many folks believe. He chose not to use the “e” at the end of his surname.   In my family the doctors who came to this country with William Penn and his Quakers were Judkins. There was at least one Dr. Judkins in every generation until my generation. It is interesting to me that the Boones were also Quakers and ended up in the same community of Pennsylvania as the Judkins. Seems logical they probably knew each other, even then.  

Janny Brizius, September 22, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com

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Our Problem is that You Don't Make Sense

In any activity where more than one person is involved, there is a problem. Things work best when cooperating individuals can coordinate actions effectively. To use a sports analogy, consider an offensive line in football. Having strength and athleticism along the line isn't enough. The other requirement is that the players on the line develop an understanding of the skills, weaknesses, and tendencies of each other. A good line adapts to changes in the defensive scheme even when there is no way to call out the changes. Each player knows what the others will see, and how the others will respond to what they see. Each adjusts his own response with the other responses in mind, so they work to improve each other. Of course, I'm a lifelong Bengals fan, so this is something I hear about instead of something I see on Sundays.  In other settings it is still true. Who always gets the best job reviews at work? (OK - first eliminate relatives of the owners and people sleeping with their supervisors. Now answer the question.) It is the employee who recognizes what the boss wants to see, and who is always part of that. It is not always the most valuable member of the team, or the one who works the hardest. It is all about understanding the desires and actions of someone else.  That seems like simple advice for how to get ahead, and anyone who would read my opinions probably needs simple advice in life, so why doesn't everyone follow this simple advice?  Determining what your boss, your spouse, your best friend, or anyone else wants isn't always easy. Showing them something that convinces them that what you are doing is what they want is even harder. It all falls apart because we all want other people to make sense, and they don't.  Look all around, in whatever room you are in. Not a single person you see makes complete sense. The guys usually come closer than the girls, just because a guy's thought process is simpler. (No guy ever has a thought that originates above the belt, after all. But how can they believe some of those ideas would ever get anyone into bed?) The question is, can we understand why no one does or thinks the sensible things?  Lets start with the simple. Each of us experiences the world in a way that is mediated by the senses. I know nothing of any "real" world. I know what my senses report. You are in the same boat. My senses could be wrong in any number of subtle or profound ways. For example, from neurophysiology we learn that processing recognizing faces is done is one small part of the visual cortex of the brain. If this area is underdeveloped (because of a birth defect) or damaged (due to an accident), then the involved person can't see faces. That is, the brain registers and reports no information at all about the face. Such a person can't tell you what color their own eyes are, or the shape of the nose of the person they are married to has. They get no visual queues at all from looking at a face, not even their own. Such a brain is incapable of recognizing anyone based on facial features, no matter what questions are asked or what visuals are presented. However, the same person is average in recognizing and remembering all other visual details. Tested for visual processing of anything other than a face, there is no detectable difference from the rest of the world.  Synesthesia is a more common condition, estimated to naturally affect about 1 in 23 people in the world. (So, if my number of readers increased a lot, to 23, then we would expect about 1 of them to experience synesthesia.) It is an involuntary connection between sensory stimulae and/or cognitive responses. This might be someone who experiences words as having an innate sense of location, or hears colors. Such experiences can be induced with various different psychoactive chemicals, but there are hundreds of millions of people who have them all the time with no pharmaceutical assistance. In some cases, such sensory distortions are advantageous. It is likely that most people with a perfect sense of musical pitch have synesthesia: frequently a form where the person sees colors associated with every sound and even very small variations in the pitch change the color noticeably.  It is possible to have an experience of this even if it is not your normal condition and without the cost of illicit drugs. Take a friend into a very dark and quiet room. Wait about 15 minutes while your eyes adjust to getting no light, but make sure the room is dark enough that you still can't see after your eyes have had time to adjust. Without warning, you friend makes a very loud noise. Most people not only hear the noise, but also see a burst of bright color at the same time. This is a normal experience for some synesthetics. Every sound comes with colors.  There are physiological explanations for these and many other interesting sensory distortions. However the interesting point for this discussion is that there is extensive clinical evidence showing that we do not all have the same sensory experiences. How I experience the world is probably unique to me, as your experience is unique to you. We can talk about it and try to find a common ground, but it probably doesn't exist.  Even if we had the same sensory responses to the same life experiences, we don't have the same life experiences. Some of the people who might read this essay have known me for most or all of my life. We have spent hundreds, or even thousands of hours together and shared various adventures. You might have been the only other party to some event in my life, or I to something in yours. Yet, I'm 46 and a half years old. That is about four hundred thousand hours (or nearly 1.5 billion seconds, if you prefer), so the hundreds or thousands of hours we spent together is a small fraction of my life as a whole. It is probably a similarly small slice of all of your time. In all, we haven't shared very many of life's experiences, even if we both experienced them the same way.  My different experiences and the ways my senses and cognitive faculties responded to them shaped my current personality to some extent. It is unclear what personality traits may be genetic and what may be developed by interaction with the environment, but it is likely that my obnoxious personality can be blamed on some of each. One important aspect of that personality is a description of my personal values. My tendencies are left of center, and a strong tread of personal liberty and responsibility. I value education and thinking very highly, while placing little value on bullying or closed mindedness. I think hard work is a core step to meaningful success and that anyone willing to do the work should have a reasonable opportunity for the success. My Christian faith also tells me that I am supposed to be my brother's keeper and the way I treat the least and most unworthy in the world is the way I am treating God.  So, is this exegesis enough to let everyone understand me? Should I just ask for the same from everyone else, and then we could all understand each other? We could cross beyond the gulf of different experiences and different sensory responses and work together in a way that brings peace love and happiness to the world.  Sorry, but no.  Human beings are sometimes irrational. An example will help.  One of the first detailed studies of group decision making was conducted during the Nixon - Kennedy election of 1960. The two had clear ideological differences, but the country was fairly evenly divided, so it was a good election for such studies. The study was a polling place exit poll that asked three simple questions.  Which one do you think will make the best President?  Which one do you think will win the election?  Who did you vote for?  The answers were surprising, and the surprise has nothing to do with the candidates. So, call the two candidates A and B.  Many voters agreed on the three answers. "A will be a better President, A will win, I voted for A." (This could have been Nixon or Kennedy, but the three answers agreed. The second largest group could be called the pessimists. "A will be a better President, B will win, I voted for A." (In the days before emo bands, people still needed a way to say that uncontrollable forces doom life to failure and frustration.) The third group I call the front runners, or bandwagon voters. "A will be a better President, B will win, I voted for B." The interesting group - between 10 and 15% of all voters polled - was just confused. "A will be a better President, A will win, I voted for B." There is no clear reasoning for what these folks were thinking.  Subsequent studies have tried everything from more elections, to business decisions, to simple card games and gotten a similar result. More detailed questioning of poll respondents support it even more strongly. In any given decision, about 10 to 15% of the people making the decision choose in ways that make no sense. This percentage holds true whether the decision is important or trivial, simple or complex. It has no respect for possible consequences.  There is no evidence that it is the same people making all of the nonsense decisions. In fact, it appears that everyone makes them sometimes. But, in a large group all making the same decision a consistent fraction of the group chooses nonsense. So - even if we shared every moment and every sensory experience, I would still think you make no sense 10 to 15% of the time.  This should ring a death knell for all attempts to claim that the actions of others are all rational. In fact, what we see is that the opposite is true. Some decisions are irrational and even for those that are decided rationally there is no way for me to know enough about the experiences that shaped the decision to be sure I understand.  As a closing aside, you might wonder why irrationality seems built into all of us. A recent study of traffic flow offers an interesting hint. The study used computer simulations of traffic flow under different driver behaviors to try and better understand what causes problems. It found that the best traffic flow did not happen when everyone followed the rules. It worked best when 10 to 15% of drivers broke some of the traffic laws while driving. Everyone acting rationally was less efficient.  So, translating this hint, group cooperation in at least one case works best when a small fraction of the population acts contrary to the rules. If this hint carries over into more and different examples we might find that we should be grateful for not understanding each other.

John Phillips, September 21, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com     

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Paradise is Getting More Creepy Crawley

Several weeks ago I saw a news item about a 17’ Burmese python being caught and killed in someone’s Florida backyard. The snake was slithering along a canal and observed by an eleven year old boy playing in his backyard. It weighed in at 207 pounds with a circumference of 26” at the center. A photo shows eight people holding the dead snake all stretched out.   As you may know, by accident or intention, there is a growing population of these and other reptiles taking hold in Florida and threatening great ecological damage to domestic species. They are the result of animals escaping captivity by accident or during storms and from keepers not knowing what to do with their “pets” that have grown too large to care for.   When it comes to reptiles, Florida already isn’t one of America’s friendliest places. They have a couple species of rattlesnakes, lots of water moccasins, no shortage of copperheads, and the extremely dangerous coral snake. Then toss in the indigenous alligator and you’ve got several reasons to stay away from the woods, swamps and waters.  There seems no limit on the numbers of invasive animal and plant species that are showing up in Florida and the same is true all over America. Our own spreading population of Ash Borer is such an example.   Besides several varieties of pythons and boa constrictors Florida is also witnessing a growing population of South American speckled caimans (a small crocodile looking creature) and Nile monitor lizards.  The city of Cape Coral, Florida is thought to have a population of Nile monitor lizards that exceeds several thousand. The lizard can grow to 7’ in length, run as fast as 18 mph, stay submerged in water for over an hour, is very aggressive and will attack and eat anything.  Florida wildlife authorities are taking this invasion very seriously and are mounting attempts to control the spread of invasive species. Once the snake is out of the bag, however, it’s tough to get it to crawl back in. To help sniff out the alien invaders Florida officials are training a pack of snake sniffing beagle dogs to help clean out the Everglades.  Call city officials in Cape Coral about a monitor sighting and they will send a crew to remove it for free. If it’s one of the other two large lizards (iguanas) that have also become common in the area, you have to call a commercial animal control company and pay for removal.   If there is a lesson in all this it could be there is no such place as paradise. Paradise can exist for only as long as the secret is kept. As soon as the word gets out everyone and everything wants to go there and screw it up. It happened in the Garden of Eden and it’s been happening in Florida for generations.    

Larry Chapman, September 18, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com.      

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"There are three kinds of lies in this world. Lies, damned lies, and statistics." 

Its a well know old quote, variously attributed to many people, including Mark Twain. However if I were placing bets I would say it originated with the Victorian era British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. A grand historical figure and widely known wit, it is just the sort of thing he might have said when confronted with facts of which he disapproved. Its also completely misleading.  Statistics don't lie. People lie, and then they use words that sound like statistics to try and cover up the lie. It isn't really any different from back in High School when you told your parents that you were at your friend's house when you were really parked with your current significant other (or maybe not all that significant, other) engaged in behaviors your freshman health class told you were risky and ill-advised. Your friend's house didn't lie - you did. You just used your friend's house as a detail that you hope makes the lie more believable. Your thought was, "my parents don't know enough about my friend's house to know if I'm telling the truth or not so I can tell them whatever I want."  You were lying, and trying to use your parents' ignorance to support that lie. And, if your parents never checked on what you told them, this strategy even worked. However, if your parents decided to get informed about the events at your friend's house then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down and you were ground for a month. (Plus they had another iteration of "the talk" with you. Everybody hates "the talk.")  The use of statistics in the public forum is similar. Words that sound like statistics are added as a detail to try and make the real lie sound better. The liar depends on ignorance to cover for the lie. One possible response to knowing this is the one the quote suggests. Once anyone mentions statistical reasoning or results, assume they are lying because statistics never really tell you anything. This is the same as having your parents decide you don't really have any friends, so any time you claim to be at a friend's house it must be a lie. Even the least popular kids in the school have some friends (Believe me on this.), and they might really go to houses for some reason. Not being able to visit makes the world a grayer and poorer place. The way to catch the lie is to become informed.  In a practical sense that means that you need to learn the difference between words that sound like statistics, and real statistics. It also means that you have to pay attention to the details.  Real statistics are used in two ways: as a description and to support decisions. Lets look at each type.  The world is big and complicated. There are about 5000 people in Greenfield, and if you have lived there most of your life you probably recognize and know a few things about most of them. There are over 10 million people in Ohio. It is unlikely that you know even 0.1% of them (over 10,000 people) well enough to recognize them on the street. There are about 350 million people in the US, and 6.5 billion in the world. No one knows enough details about enough people in those larger groups to develop any understanding of them. In fact, it would take more paper than is contained in all of the libraries in the state to hold just a few facts each on those 6.5 billion humans. There is just no way to work with the details about large groups of people all at once.  Descriptive statistics take this mountain of information and try to replace it with a small list that contains enough information to be useful, even though it loses many details. If you wanted to talk about the heights of adult males in the US, you can't list each of the approximately 175 million heights. Instead, you might say that the average height is about 5'10", and that 95% of all the men in the US are in the range between 5'5" and 6'3" tall. (This is even approximately correct, in case you care.) So, if you meet a man who is 5'9", or 6'0", then that person is pretty much average height. A little above or below, but still sitting in the range with most of the men in the country. Someone who is 6'6" is just tall, and 5'2" counts as short for anything but a dwarf convention. (Politically incorrect reference aside.)  Many descriptive statistics make strong assumptions about the nature of the information you are describing. For example, the average is expected to describe what a "normal" result would be. So, if the average height is 5'10", then you would expect that many of the men you meet are pretty close to 5'10" tall. You also expect that about the same number are taller as are shorter, and that the difference between the average and the tallest is about the same as the difference between the average and the shortest. For heights of adult US males, this is a pretty good set of assumptions, because it matches the real information pretty well. (This can only be asserted by comparing these assumptions to the real information, but such a comparison has been done.)  What if these assumptions are broken?  If the assumptions we bring along with a descriptive statistic aren't true, then any reasoning we try to do based on the statistic is also flawed. For example, the mean income in the US for people over the age of 15 in 2004 was $35,499. (According to the US Census Bureau. This is individual income, not household income.) However, the assumptions about having as many above as below, and about the biggest being about as far away as the smallest are both not true. Well over half the people made less than this sum (about 62%), and losing money counted as an income of $0, so since the maximum that year was Bill Gates making a couple of billion dollars the maximum is much farther away than the minimum. Reasoning on the basis of this average makes incomes for most of the population look far bigger than they really were because Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and a small number of others made so much money. A better description might be based on half the population. What is the income where half made more, and half made less? (This is called the median.) From the same 2004 data, that was $24,325. So, the halfway point is more than $11,000 less than the average.  The average (also sometimes called the mean) and the median are two ways to try and describe where the middle of a collection of information is. Neither is perfect for all questions with all collections of information. In fact, there are many other ways to measure this middle, most of which are recognized only by statisticians. I don't plan to list and describe them all, only to let you know they exist. Collectively they are known as measures of the central tendency, but a decent intuition is that they describe the middle of the set of information.  The other measure that is often shown is the standard deviation. It describes how spread out the information is. A big standard deviation means that the measured values are very spread out, while a small standard deviation means that they are clumped close together. Unfortunately, the standard deviation also makes strong assumptions.  If you make a picture (called a histogram) showing how many measurements are in each of a set of identically sized small intervals that run from the smallest measurement to the largest, the standard deviation assumes that this picture will look like a "bell curve." (A statistician would call this shape a normal distribution, while a physical scientist would call it a Gaussian distribution. Bell curve is more likely to be a familiar name.) The standard deviation is useful because many real systems have this distribution. (This fact is not obvious, but there are both a mathematical proof that shows we would expect many systems to behave this way and hundreds of millions of measurements that do behave this way.)  Consider again the distribution of incomes in the US in 2004. A histogram of this information looks nothing like a bell curve. So, the utility of a standard deviation when talking about incomes is very questionable. A better choice is to talk about percentiles. (A percentile measurement x means that x% of all the information lies below the value in question, while (100-x)% lies above. If you got 75th percentile on a standardized test at school, then 75% of the people who took it did worse than you, and 25% did better.) It is common for the media to talk about the top 5% or bottom 25% of earners (as well as other specific percentages.) When talking about the bottom x%, x is just the percentile. For the top y%, (100-y) is the percentile. This information is only actually useful if it is combined with a reference to the collected data to tell you what it means.  Using statistics to aid in decision making is often called inferential statistics. It is, in many ways different from descriptive statistics, though they are used together. The goal of descriptive statistics is to take a huge mountain of information and compress it down to something a human can comprehend. The goal of inferential statistics is to determine what the description means, and what it tells us about the whole system.  Whenever someone talks about the chance of an event happening, or the connection of one event causing another, that is a use of inferential statistics. Typically this is the result of one or more statistical tests. Each test provides some information, but that information is never certain. It is always possible that the process of selecting and analyzing the chosen information accidentally covered up something important. The only way to be sure it didn't is to collect every last scrap of related information (a task we already decided was impossible). The more you collect, the less likely it is that you missed something important, but you can not be completely sure, so the results of any test include the uncertainty.  Statistical tests are designed so they select between alternatives. Returning to the male height example, the information collected is not the height today of every adult male in the US. It is some large collection of heights selected in a way that it probably represents the whole male population. So, we might wonder whether the real average (what we would get if we measured everyone, all at once) is noticeably different from the estimated average. So, is the real average above 6'0", or below 5'8"? (We expect we would notice that big of a difference.) Three different statistical tests address parts of this question. We could test whether the real average is more than 2" different from the estimated average. (This test doesn't distinguish between taller and shorter. It only cares about different.) We could test whether the real average is over 6'0". (Testing only for taller.) Or, we could test for under 5'8". (Testing only for shorter.) The process followed, and the meaning of the possible results are different for the different tests. It is impossible to perform or interpret them without making our choice clear.  One possible result might be that there is only a 0.05% chance that the average is really over 6'0". That does not say it is impossible for the average to be so high, but five one hundredths of a percent is pretty unlikely. We can be pretty confident that the average is not greater than 6'0". In physics, results supported to this level are usually considered sufficiently proven to accept and use for other things.  Just as descriptive statistics assume some things about the information, inferential tests also rest on assumptions. Different tests make different assumptions, but every test assumes something. So, for some collections of information, one test might be inappropriate because the measurements don't match the assumptions. The only valid course of action is to use a different test that more clearly matches the characteristics of the data. This is the same problem as we saw in descriptive statistics. If the assumptions don't match the measurements, then the assumptions can't be used.  Look carefully at the previous sentence. It is the key to understanding the difference between words that sound like statistics, and actual statistics. All examples of actual statistics include descriptions of the assumptions made about the data (which are sometimes implicit in the name of the procedure used) and give the reader or listener some way to check the validity of those assumptions. This is the minimum necessary information for an interested and educated reader or listener to check the quality of the work. Arguments against a statistical result center on why the data shows that the assumptions are not true. Other things are just words that sound like statistics.  What are the possible reasons for someone spouting words that sound like statistics?  The most charitable explanation is ignorance. The speaker is trying to provide useful information, but does not understand that the words produced are not useful. They neither describe anything nor provide guidance toward understanding and good judgment. Ignorance is the bane of good decision making, so all reasonable efforts should be made to correct the misconceptions. A less charitable explanation is that the speaker is lying on purpose. In this case, your parents idea might be a good one. Send the speaker to his or her room, and don't let them come out until they learn how to talk to people correctly.

John Phillips, September 2, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com

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Hate, a Four Letter Word

Hate. Long ago, old man Webster defined it as, “To have a great aversion to, with a strong desire that evil should befall the person toward whom the feeling is directed; to dislike intensely; to detest; as, to hate one's enemies; to hate hypocrisy.” 

We all employ the word hate and we have all experienced the emotion/s associated with it. Usually, however, we really don' mean anything as severe as Webster describes. I suppose when most of us say we hate someone or something we're really saying we're a little angry with someone or we really don't enjoy shopping or we really don't like eating our spinach. Chances are we really don't detest spinach or are wishing harm on our fathers for not allowing us to borrow the family car on Friday night.

The word is simply used as a modifier to express a stronger dislike or to be a little more dramatic or descriptive. But there are those who, upon observation, really do hate. They really do intensely dislike others to such a degree that they actually do wish evil to rain upon that person's head. I can't explain those people and I wonder if it is something they were wired for at birth or, acquired from their developmental experiences. I do know that it is hard to imagine the innocence of an infant lying in a crib being predisposed to hate.  

We're witness to a lot of hatred in today's America and too often it seems more inline with that defined by old Noah's dictionary. Usually I can fluff it off and get by it. Occasionally, however, it comes from a place or a person you weren't expecting. You make judgments about people and often tone down their rhetoric in an attempt to give them the benefit of the doubt and to retain your objectivity and ability to tolerate those who think differently. 

However, the death of Senator Edward Kennedy has reached into some and brought forth a degree of hatred that cannot be overlooked. The day he passed I was witness to a friend, someone who I don't always agree with but accepted nevertheless, say something that went straight to Webster's definition of hate. They made the comment that Christmas came early this year and the death of Ted Kennedy had given us all a present.