Cheerful Curmudgeon

I love the inconvenience of airport security. The fact that I am paying for the privilege of being inconvenienced, in lieu of having my security enhanced, makes the whole experience all the more charming. Recently, Jeffrey Goldberg took all of these goodies through airport security at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Read Goldberg’s entire article on airport security at The Atlantic’s web site.

Technology is challenging enough when we really know what is going on. The situation deteriorates rapidly as we progress through only thinking we know what is going on to being completely clueless. My step-mother just started using a computer, the first computer that has been solely hers, the first one where she can do whatever she likes with it and no one is going to tell her to keep out of their work. It is also her first computer (other than a WebTV) on which she can get to the world wide web.

She bought a copy of The Internet for Dummies and that has been helpful but even this book assumes she knows too much. She has had questions for me like, “When do I press on the right side of the bar?” She is using a touch pad on an Asus Eee PC so her question translates to, “When should I right-click?” That’s a good question and the answer, “When you want a pop-up or context menu” means nothing to her.

Then she asked, “When do I click twice on the left side of the bar?” This was a little easier. To be non-technical, I advised her to single click and, if that does not do what she wants, try double-clicking. The jury is still out on whether this helps.

Finally, she described a real corker of a problem. Neither Candy nor I had any real advice for her, other than to check her manual for a Num-Lock key. The problem, as she described it, was that whenever she typed the “3″ key, she would see an asterisk. Since she lives 850 miles away, I cannot see her screen. I am dependent on her descriptions. I assume she accurately describes what she is seeing and she assumes that I understand what she tells me.

Bad assumptions all around.

At first, it sounds like she is getting shifted characters, or at least the asterisk, all the time. Then it develops that the problem only happens in Firefox, not in OpenOffice.org. Then she tells me that it only happens when trying to enter her password into a new web site, not when doing anything else in Firefox. Ah ha! It turned out that she was typing her password and the browser was obfuscating it, completely correct behavior. But she is so new to the whole computer “thing” that even this behavior, which we take as much for granted as getting water from a sink when we turn the tap on, was baffling.

It’s easy to forget how much we know. That forgetfulness makes teaching all the more difficult.

I just read a letter to the editor in my local newspaper. It begins,

Are you kidding me? Jefferson Middle School says that no kids can bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch because there are kids with peanut allergies?

Peanut butter is dangerous to the 1.3% of Americans who have peanut allergies. We should certainly protect the kids from dangerous stuff, especially since about 125 Americans die every year from allergic reactions to peanuts.

While we are at it, let’s protect our little darlings from a few other things which are also likely to kill them:

• School buses – Though not as dangerous as peanuts, we still might seriously consider keeping kids away from machines which kill an average of 20 of them every year.
• Water kills 8x as many children per year as peanuts – About 1,000 kids die every year by drowning in residential swimming pools. Better outlaw them.
• Schools – Of the 22,000,000 children injured in the United States each year, about 10% to 25%, or 2,200,000 to 5,500,000 children, are injured at or near school! Clearly, peanuts are an insignificant risk compared to the school itself.

Perhaps a little more analysis of the scale of the risk is in order before banning something. Peanut butter certainly comes to mind, as do other things like:

• Parents watching middle school children until they board the school bus.
• Playgrounds without swings or teeter-totters.
• GPS tracking of children’s cell phones.
• Helicopter parenting, in general.

Remember, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

Remember, too, that just because something is dangerous, does not mean that you necessarily need to do anything more than educate your children.

We all know that distractions make driving significantly more difficult and dangerous. Cell phones top the list, at least from lawmakers’ perspectives, and we now have laws in several states which limit cell phone use while driving. Sadly, lawmakers have not found a way to make children stop bugging their parents during car trips. “She’s breathing my air!” and “He’s looking out my window!” make every parent cringe and enhance family outings in immeasurable ways.

Science News, in Shifting Priorities at the Wheel, reports on a new study which demonstrates that simply listening to conversation severely reduces a driver’s ability to safely maneuver a car.

Even a simple form of multitasking — driving while listening to someone else talk — disrupts the ability to navigate a car safely, a new study finds.

An intriguing neural response underlies vehicular mishaps associated with such distractions, say neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues. Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior.

This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit.

Pilots know how distracting simple chit-chat can be. When I am taking off and landing my plane, I ask everybody else on board to stop talking, even to each other; I need to concentrate. If I am flying with several children and they won’t keep quiet, I use the “isolate” switch on my audio panel so that I don’t have to listen to them.

This is a significant enough issue that the FAA formalized it into the Sterile Cockpit Rule in 1981. Wikipedia summarizes it nicely,

The Sterile Cockpit Rule is an FAA regulation requiring pilots to refrain from non-essential activities during critical phases of flight, normally below 10,000 feet. The FAA imposed the rule in 1981 after reviewing a series of accidents that were caused by flight crews who were distracted from their flying duties by engaging in non-essential conversations and activities during critical parts of the flight. One such notable accident was Eastern Air Lines Flight 212, which crashed just short of the runway at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in 1974 while conducting an instrument approach in dense fog. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that one probable cause of the accident was distraction due to idle chatter among the flight crew during the approach phase of the flight.

It is worth being aware of the biological limits to what our brains can do. When hurtling down the road in a two ton missile, with innocent bystanders on foot nearby, and women and children blithely motoring along in their own cars next to yours, pay attention to the most important task at hand: arriving alive.

Our country is founded on several key values and two of the most important are the right to vote and the belief in presumed innocence. Several school districts in St. Charles county, Missouri, seem determined to teach some important lessons to their students vis á vis these rights:

1. United States citizens of voting age are presumed dangerous to students.
2. United States elections are so dangerous that students of any age must not be allowed in the building while voters are present.

Here’s the article:

STLtoday – News – St. Louis City / County
Schools will close for general election

01/29/2008

ST. CHARLES COUNTY — Students in the Fort Zumwalt, Wentzville and Francis Howell school districts won’t have classes on Nov. 4 while the buildings serve as polling places for the presidential election.

St. Charles School District students will be dismissed early that day. The county does not use any schools in the Orchard Farm district, so classes will be scheduled as usual Nov. 4.

Rich Chrismer, director of elections for St. Charles County, said the Election Authority and the school districts were responding to concerns about student safety.

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines paranoia as “a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others.”

Mixed messages confuse and hurt children. They need adults to model consistent, rational rules. Forbidding students and adults from being in the same school building on November 4, when the same students and adults can share restaurants, stores, libraries, and any other public place on that day, or any other day, simply teaches the children that adults make crazy decisions and cannot be trusted.

Kids are bright. They will notice subtle points such as:

• The presence of their own parents and neighbors is a safety risk.
• Eighteen year old classmates become dangerous while voting but magically are safe again the next day.
• Eighteen year old students, sent to the middle schools and elementary schools by the school district to tutor younger students, become magically dangerous one day a year.

If you have a student in any of these school districts, I encourage you to discuss this matter with them. As parents, we already face credibility issues with our children. Ignoring this “close the schools on election day” decision will only reinforce those issues. Better to have your children know how you feel about this than to have them guess your thoughts based on your silence.

You might also contact the school districts:

• Ft. Zumwalt, Dr. Bernard J. DuBray, Superintendent, (636)272-6620
• Wentzville, Dr. Terry Adams, Superintendent of Schools, (636)327-3800
• Francis Howell, Dr. Renée Schuster, Superintendent, (636)851-4000
• St. Charles, Dr. Randal D. Charles, Superintendent of Schools, (636)443-4000

We adults have a responsibility to the next generation: teach respect for other people, not fear of them. Paranoia is not safety.

TO ALL THE KIDS
WHO SURVIVED the
1930′s 40′s, 50′s, 60′s and 70′s !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we
rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because .

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day.

And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down
the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms…….
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays,
made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang
the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law! They smacked us when we were naughty and we did not die nor sue

Social services didn’t take us away

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned

HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

If YOU are one of them . . . CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as
kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives

for our own good

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!

There is a tempest brewing in the Washington tea cup. Congress has to pass a bill that provides funding for the FAA by the end of September or the FAA ceases to exist.

Background

The airlines and the FAA are pushing hard to reduce the costs imposed on airlines while increasing the costs for pretty much everything else that flies: medical flights (both air ambulance and time-critical transportation of organs, blood supplies, etc.), traffic helicopters, air-taxi flights serving regional airports, agricultural flights (crop dusting), pilot training, charitable flights, etc. Other than the airlines and the FAA, pretty much everybody else wants to keep the funding system unchanged.

Interestingly, the existing fuel taxes and airline passenger ticket fees actually provide more money than the proposed user-fee based system.

Safety

There are significant safety issues here which are getting lost in all of the arguments about money. The air traffic control (ATC) system exists to make flying safer, much like traffic lights and street lights and lines painted on highways make driving safer. Right now, all airplanes pay for the system “up front” in fuel taxes. Under the proposed system, airplanes would pay for the ATC system when they use it. This will force pilots to consider financial costs when making safety decisions. And this is very bad because most people are thrifty and most will try to save a few dollars when they can, even though doing so will make flying more risky.

Let me give you three real situations to consider. We know that these safety-related consequences do arise because user fees, such as the airlines and the FAA are proposing, are already in place throughout Europe and we can see how pilots there behave. I will pose each scenario and then bring it down to a personal level. Read the rest of this entry »

Don MacAskill over at SmugMug (my favorite photo sharing site) brought my attention to OpenID, a budding solution to an old computer problem: If you use a computer, you have way too many passwords to conveniently remember. You might use one or two passwords, perhaps a simple one for web sites that you do not care much about and a more complex, carefully guarded one for things like your bank account. The thorny problem pricks you when one site has a policy which prevents you from using your favorite password and you have to create a special one for just that site: how do you remember it?

The ideal solution is simple (as ideal solutions are wont to be): You sign in once and everything just magically knows who you are.

Before we continue this discussion, let me introduce just a couple of technical terms: Read the rest of this entry »

NewLaunches.com brings news that Samsung develops machine gun sentry robot.

Samsung has partnered with Korea university and developed the machine-gun equipped robotic sentry.

Do you remember the scientists who worked on the atomic bombs and later regreted their decisions to do so? I am afraid that we are about to see history repeat itself. One of these days, an innocent person is going to be killed by an armed machine that fails to work right. Machines fail; it is only a matter of time.

When that person dies, who will be responsible?

Tragically, Cory Lidle and his flight instructor died yesterday afternoon when the Cirrus SR-20 airplane that they were flying crashed into a high rise building in New York City. {Added 11/19/06} The New York Times has created a wonderfully informative, interactive graphic showing the flight path.

AVweb’s article, New York City Crash Aftermath, nicely brings together the facts as we now know them, less than 24 hours after the accident. I have my own theories (which I will not share in print) but I am going to take the conservative approach and wait for the NTSB to publish its own fact-based analysis.

The gut reaction which comes up after any small airplane accident is: Is general aviation safe? The answer is yes and we need to keep working to make it safer. Sure, there is risk in flying an airplane. There is also risk in driving a car or walking across the street. Most of us agree that the risk is small and well worthwhile.