Karl Gallagher's Journal

The Atlantic has an interesting article on the issues surrounding influenza vaccinations. Makes a pretty good case that the flu shots don't have much effectiveness in keeping people from dying. There's a rebuttal out, of course.

The scariest part for me is the poor quality of the data on flu deaths. Diagnoses are based on symptoms, not tests of the virus, so we don't actually know how many people have been getting sick or dying from influenza. No one's doing well designed experiments to test the effectiveness of the vaccine and one of the big arguments (herd immunity) would be damned hard to test in any case.

I suspect we're not going to have a real grasp of the effectiveness of medical treatments until we give up on the privacy of medical records. If we get to the point where everyone's records are searchable, and detailed to the point where you can tell if a swab test was H1N1 positive or the doc just wrote a prescription to make the patient go away, there's going to be a lot of patterns discovered that'll make irrelevant all the watch-36-patients-for-six-months microstudies that policies get based on now.

Does there exist a fanvid of Miss Piggy singing "It's Raining Frogs! Hallelujah!" ?

. . . or rather I soon will be, once the last of the insignia arrive in the mail.

On Saturday I was sworn into the Texas State Guard. I'm in the 4th Civil Affairs Regiment, exact assignment still to be determined. Our normal mission is disaster relief, such as helping out folks hit by wildfires. We specifically train for operating shelters. Helping house refugees in the wake of Katrina boosted the reputation of the TXSG. Currently they're trying to double their size to pick up more missions the National Guard is too busy to handle with it's deployments.

I'd read about the State Guard but hadn't thought they'd take me until I met a couple of members recruiting at Lockheed's "Preparedness Fair." I spend way too much time in front of a computer cranking out paperwork just to feed the bureaucracy. Now I have a chance to get out in the fresh air (or smokey air if we're dealing with wildfires again) and help people in need. It's also a form of military service, something I've been wanting to do since 9/11. Finding out that the Air Force's take on my reserve obligation is roughly "we'll call you if we get invaded by aliens" has been damn frustrating when there's a war on. Now I can serve, if not anywhere near a combat zone, at least picking up the tasks of the people who are getting deployed.

The "back" part of being back in uniform is a bit ironic, as nothing is usable from my old uniforms. After 14 years the pants don't fit any more. The AF promoted me while I was in the reserves, so the rank can't be recycled. I'm getting ACUs instead of BDUs. My specialty badge has been replaced by Buzz Lightyear's belt buckle. And I changed my name a decade back so the nametag can't be reused either. So my uniform is starting out from scratch.

I'm also going to need some new icons . . . the beard is gone.

Implied Spaces
It's rare for me to feel the "sense of wonder" from an SF novel today. I've read enough that most books are exploring niches or playing with variations on stuff I've seen before. Implied Spaces isn't the first SF novel I've read on Singularity-level societies either but it does it better. The inhabitants think of themselves as having come up to the Singularity and stopped just before it, but by my definition they're well into it. Not least of their powers is effective immortality--for someone to die for real the sun would have to blow up and destroy all his backups. That raises the question of what people want when they have it all, which the characters refer to as the "Existential Crisis." The author finds one answer in the Most Ambitious Villain Ever. Seriously. Next to this guy Sauron is shaking down kindergarteners for lunch money. What he wants is too big a spoiler for me to ruin for anyone. Highly recommended to all SF fans.

The March Series (aka Empire of Man)
At first glance this series fits nicely into the Military SF blood-bath niche. Bunch of guys dumped on a dangerous world, slaughtering wogs in piles and taking casualties so heavy that not even a name will keep minor characters alive. If Weber's outline had been handed to a lesser writer that's probably what we would've gotten but Ringo found more in it. The dominant theme is Prince Roger's growth from a spoiled, sheltered child to a man and a leader. It's not easy--the only thing in the book more dangerous than walking point is being a father figure to Roger--but he rises to the responsibilities forced on him. The more subtle theme, driving the second and third books, is how religion works as part of society, both driving behavior and being used as a tool. Having a practicing Satanist Priestess as part of the Marine unit makes it easier to illustrate some of those points.

The series is supposed to go for seven books. Right now there's no date for the fifth one--Ringo is waiting on an outline from Weber--and I'm fine with it ending where it is. At the end of book four Roger's completed his personal journey. There's room for plenty of stories in the setting but Roger would be off-stage for the best ones. If he does his job well he'll never have blood on his sword again.

Cotillion
Of all the heroes of Heyer's romances Freddy has to be the least romantic. It's made very clear that he's not handsome or witty or commanding. The only classic romantic hero trait he has is dancing skill. What he does have to offer is practical competence. Not in the fixing plumbing way, that's nothing a Regency gentleman would even think of doing. What he does is solve the problems faced by a lady of his own class dealing with the complexities of Society. Something that, after a while, is more appealing to our heroine than cutting a dash or striking Byronic poses. As a guy who's more practical than romantic myself that makes me like the story.

One of the minor flurries in Washington DC right now is a line item in the defense budget an alternate engine for the F-35. Not something I'd care that much about if I wasn't working on that plane. The idea is that having a second company making engines for the plane will provide a back-up against problems and cost savings from competition. Given that both the current and previous administrations have tried to kill that piece of the program it's not that widely held an idea. The case against it is pretty simple--why pay for two designs and production lines when you only need one to get the job done?

So various op-eds are appearing extolling the virtues of competition and offering the historical precedent of the competing F-16 engines. Yes, both companies would have a better incentive to improve on cost and quality as they vie for each year's batch of engines. But everybody offering that argument seems to be just fine with the engines going into a single fighter design produced by one partnership. If competition is such a great thing wouldn't more of it be better? In the absence of those arguments it feels like a typical effort to defense Congressional pork barreling.

I'm not even hoping for someone to question whether it's a good idea for a single plane to replace the F-15, F-16, F-117, F/A-18, A-10, and AV-8.

There's a hypothesis floating around that we may not be living in the "real world" but are part of a simulation. Setting aside the massive assumptions in that argument, how would we go about checking to see if we are in a sim instead of reality?

For a Warcraft character there's a lot of clues that they're in an arbitrary rule set. Horses vanishing when they go through a door . . . being able to hand someone an object but not set it on a table . . . not being able to drink milk without some lessons in the school of hard knocks . . . they're all clues. Then there's the random problems that come from errors in the code. Sometimes you can move across a flat surface . . . sometimes there's a little wrinkle and you're stuck. People or animals you've dealt with before act in bizarre ways or freeze. You can be moving down a ramp and suddenly fall through the solid ground. The bugs are a bigger giveaway than the deliberate design omissions.

So what bugs make it look like we're in a simulation? Well, there's light. Sometimes it's a particle. Sometimes it's a wave. Nobel prize winners wave their hands and gibber trying to resolve this. But that's exactly the kind of glitch you get when developers steal legacy code from two different applications. Verse A had light-waves, Verse B had photons, and our world behaves according to which one a particular piece of code came from.

Then there's the speed-of-light limit. Integral to physics? Or just a simple barrier the devs threw in to keep us from peeking at under construction areas? ("Nerf light!"

celticdragonfly says to this.)

Biology is full of bugs, no pun intended for once. The boot process for life is hard to explain. Evolution keeps producing errors despite millions of iterations. And human psychology . . . well, is that a bug or a deliberate design feature?

I mean, if you have two possible explanations for how the human mind works:
1. A product of evolution intended to maximize healthy offspring
2. A scenario generator optimized to produce entertaining conflicts for spectators and role-players

. . . which one fits the observed data better?

Fencon is this weekend and I'll be there. Haven't scheduled any gaming sessions, but if anyone's interested let me know and we can probably find some time for a game. For folks who haven't run with me before, this would be a Firefly RPG with GURPS Lite rules. I've got pre-generated characters and a bunch of scenarios ready to go.

I needed a configuration change for my account on our main database. After a few calls they decided that I wasn't asking for this because I'm too lazy to search on narrow criteria but actually need need to do large pulls like I said. So I got a call telling me that they were emailing the instructions but "it's a long, drawn out process" and feel free to call if I need more help. I felt pretty wary about that--I was expecting "get your manager to fill out form A and then get the Vice President for IT to fill out form B" and such.

Then I get the instructions. Pull file X out of the database. Put in this directory. Doubleclick (it's a .bat). Log off and back on. Done in a couple of minutes.

I shudder to think what kind of users the tech support folks have had to deal with if they're describing that as "long and drawn out."

Our goal was for this to be a quiet weekend at home, getting a bit of extra housework done before

celticdragonfly has some downtime so we can relax afterwards. We actually got a little of that done . . .

The fun part of the weekend was having Tom come over for gaming. Probably did more talking than gaming, and Maggie was in as many games as any of the adults. She roped me and

celticdragonfly into the American Girl game. Not a bad game for kid stuff, you actually had to make some resource decisions instead of mindlessly rolling and moving. Tom introduced her and

fordprfct to Zooloretto while I grilled dinner. Afterwards we had a round of Race for the Galaxy for the guys, where I proved that getting the right cards in the right order greatly reduces the amount of skill you need to win.

Maggie'd been feeling a bit off through the day and was feverish by evening, so we punted on church. She was hot enough we decided to have her seen, so I took her to the "Minute Clinic" at the local CVS. The nurse discussed various possibilities, then took her temperature, and said "She needs to be worked up." Okay. A new ER not connected to a hospital had opened up nearby so we headed over. The "FirstChoiceER" folks are efficient. Only one form to fill out, and I was still working on it when the doctor came in to see her. Symptoms matched influenza so they did a nose swab. Results came back positive for H1N1. Oink. So Maggie is on Tamiflu and the rest of the family is getting a prophylactic dose of the same. Jamie can still go to school unless he has symptoms.

I'm happy with the First Choice folks. The paper work guys were efficient, the nurse was gentle with Maggie doing an unpleasant task, and the doctor discussed possibilities and what he'd be able to find out from tests instead of pretending omniscience. Good facility, too. Nice mural for the kid room though Maggie was too wiped out to appreciate it. Now part of this is that it's a new outfit so there weren't many other people clogging up the system. But they are clearly trying to do a good job rather than go through the motions.

During a boss fight

drwex warned of an attack with a "vicious frontal cone."

celticdragonfly: "That'd be a great band name."

fordprfct: "A Madonna cover band."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
You'd expect a novel focused on the nuclear standoff between the USA and USSR to age poorly. This one has been improving over the past twenty years. The discussions of the continuity among the Mongol, Czarist, and Soviet governments of Russia are useful guides to Putin's regime. The comments on American culture ("Don't try to sell them parachutes, just have the splints ready") also hold true. The space development story line holds up, more because the lack of progress we've made than any prescience on Kingsbury's part. The best reason for rereading is the characters--they're real, and I like them, even when they're being idiots (a small portion of the time).

Rainbows End
Professor Vinge wanted to write a monograph on user interface design given the technology of 2025, but didn't think anyone would read it. So he gave us this novel instead. It'll probably look bad ten years from now but it's a good extrapolation from now. On first read I was put off by the very unsympathetic protagonist. He's another variation of the SF trope of the guy from the present brought to the future so all the characters have an excuse to explain the things they're used to. Instead of freezing him or throwing him through time, Vinge rescues Robert Gu from Alzheimer's-induced senility. He becomes our guide to a very strange--but believable--world. Telepresence, virtual reality, and data overlays over our view of the real world are constant. A big political event is the equivalent of Warcraft and Pokemon fans clashing over whose imagery will be used to decorate a library. Terrorists are empowered even more by the new technology, while the good guys scramble to stay a step ahead of them. The book's biggest danger comes from someone seeking to control us all for our own good.

Highly recommended to everyone planning on living another fifteen years or more.

Watchmen (the comic)
I read Watchmen after the movie came out. Ugh. Comics fans are more nihilistic than I'd feared if this is one of their revered classics. It's an example of Lois Bujold's comment on Ser Galen: "the anguish of making the hard choices always appealed to the romance in his soul." Given Dr. Manhattan's powers there's multiple ways to avert nuclear war if anyone can convince him to bother. Ozy was in a perfect position to convince him, but wanted to reserve playing god to himself. Moore would rather write about horrid situations requiring brutal choices than make the effort to find a solution that doesn't need millions of innocents killed.

Edit: There will be no further discussion of Watchmen here, because it's unpleasant and I've already spent more time thinking about it than I want to.

Bill Whittle celebrated the Apollo XI anniversary by dropping politics for a bit and visiting XCOR Aerospace to look at their rocket-powered aircraft. Part One of the video looks at XCOR's success in converting conventional aircraft to fly under rocket power. Part Two looks at their Lynx suborbital design. I'm a serious fan of XCOR. I'd met Jeff Greason before he started doing professional rocketry and got a chance to present to his crew in Mojave once. They're taking the best approach to developing new technology--incremental steps, getting a working system they can test and operate at each step. The next step is a custom-built vehicle that'll actually exit the atmosphere. I'm looking forward to seeing it fly.

10,000 Year Explosion
Some folks have the idea that human evolution ended with civilization. With no predators or starvation we don't have the selection pressure weeding out the weak genes so our genome will be static. That would be true if we bred randomly. Given that people tend to be very selective there's a lot of opportunity for new genes to propagate through the population in a few generations. This book tackles the evidence of recent changes in the human genome and tells their stories.

The Box
Anyone who reads a book about the history of shipping containers must be a compete geek, right? Well, I wasn't keeping it a secret. But there's a lot more to this book than boxes. Shipping your freight in a container that doesn't have to be opened from factory to customer can by a great savings in time and money. IF, and here's the big if, the whole system is set up to handle 40 foot boxes on ships, trucks, and trains. Without that it's just a box so heavy the longshoremen refuse to handle it.

So we have a history of how companies, vehicles, communities, and government agencies had to change for containers to be effective. Except they didn't change. Almost every company doing ocean shipping before containers went under or was forced to merge. Old ships were converted, then replaced by purpose-built containerships. Ports were abandoned, their traffic taken over by new ones built up from the marshland. Felixstowe became Britian's largest port starting from a minor facility so small the union hadn't bothered to organize it. Unions went from dominating their communities to a handful of crane operators. New York City's longshoremen once could tip a mayoral election. Now the piers hold restaurants and the ships go to New Jersey. Whole systems of government regulations and industry cartels collapsed. The Interstate Commerce Commission wound up being abolished. How often does that happen to a government agency? So there's a heck of a lot of drama in there for a story about boxes. I'd strongly recommend it for anyone interested in how technological changes are resisted by social, commercial, and government forces.

Space Doctor
Harry Stein writing near-term science fiction in 1981. This sort of thing usually ages very badly as technology overtakes it. Well, this one holds up well. Stein wrote a description of building a solar power satellite system from the view point of the doctor treating construction accidents and other aliments of the work crews. There's a few dated moments ("Behold, the marvelous invention of CAD software! And new medical databases you can access over the net!") but all the parts in space hold up just fine. That's because we've made effectively zero progress toward actually building large-scale structures in space since Stein wrote the book. Entertaining reading (as long as you weren't expecting much detailed characterization) but got me brooding a bit on the implications.

Watching Disney's Robin Hood got 7-year-old Maggie onto the subject of honeymoons and where to go on them. I figure that's a decision to make together with the spouse-to-be. So next time this comes up I'm tempted to say "You should decide that with your husband. So when you meet someone, ask him where he'd want to go on a honeymoon so you can get to know him better."
Poll #1417869
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 30

View Answers

Good advice.
6 (20.0%)

Bad advice.
3 (10.0%)

Bad advice which will drive off most boys. Do it.
21 (70.0%)

Latest questionnaire, via

soldiergrrrl.

1. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE?
My father's friends Karl and Otto. My mom wanted Kevin but gave in to the argument about the three friends vowing to name their first-borns after each other. As I understand it there aren't a Karl Frank and Frank Otto out there so the other two didn't hold to it as forcefully.
( Next 46 cut )

I finally got to see Star Trek last weekend. Overall a fun movie. Tossing the existing continuity overboard leaves things open for them to tell whatever stories they want. I'd like to see more good SF movies. But I still have complaints.
( Just in case anyone's still worried about spoilers. )

"The boat is sinking and you are the only one who can help me out. By the time you get this message I may have drowned but please try to call me anyway."

You'd think I could go to one meeting without someone panicking.