Ernistine's Revenge

If you're more of a baby boomer than a Gen XYZ you may remember the lady pictured here - "Ernestine the Operator" played by Lily Tomlin. Her short skits lampooning the monopolistic phone company of the 1970's were hilarious - in part because they resonated with viewers who had been frustrated getting decent customer service. With the breakup of ATT Ernestine got a pink slip as - theoretically - competition among the baby Bells would deliver an attitude adjustment towards customers if they had a choice.

But I'm beginning to think that Ernestine is alive and well at ATT/Cingular, and is just having a blast dissing all the cell phone customers. Case in point - about four months ago Deb's phone went on the fritz so she went in and picked out a new one. There was, as usual, a rebate that you could have if you extended the contract. And the representative actually cut out the barcode, filled out the form, and dropped it into an envelope for us to mail. So imagine our surprise in about four weeks when we get a note saying that they're sorry but no rebate because there was no barcode enclosed. How do you prove it was in there? Guess next time we need to photocopy it before sending it off.

Then the bills start coming. Aren't cell bills fun? It is positively painful to try to assess one for why your bill has jumped by $20, especially if you have 3 phones on the account like we do. After wading through comparisons I finally figured out that they had increased the "family plan" base rate - a facet of extending our contract that the saleswoman conveniently omitted. But then looking further there's also a "multi-media" charge for this new phone - again, a feature not asked for (Deb is not about to be sending & receiving pictures with her friends). So Monday I'll be at the ATT store dealing with the latest incarnation of Ernestine. I'd switch companies but somehow it always seems that right as we're near the end of the contract somebody's phone gives out - and besides, would it really be any better over at Verizon? Nahhh....

If That's True, Why Bother?

So I'm reading the Examiner today and see the story about the annual crack down on drivers not wearing seat belts. Knowing me you might assume that this blog will be a commentary on how a law that was sold to voters as a "you'll only get a ticket if you're stopped for some other infraction" has morphed into what it's become today - but you'd be wrong! No, what has my ire is the opening line of the article, "In Maryland, 52 percent of drivers killed at night last year failed to wear sear belts."

This is supposed to be a compelling statistic that makes the case for wearing a seat belt - that nearly just as many people wearing their seatbelt are killed as those who blithely disregard the law? Forgive me, but in the words of Dick Cheney, "So?"

Does anyone read these articles? I know we're not talking about an article for a peer reviewed journal but my rant today is that the article is really nothing but a press release and probably should have been paid for as advertising (wait - maybe it was....). The article then goes on to state that seat belts could have saved an estimated 180 lives, but then I'm wondering if we could also say that 170 lives could have been saved if people didn't wear them.

What's missing here of course is information on the percentage of people that routinely wear seatbelts. If the article had stated something along the lines of "while it's estimated that only 10% of drivers fail to buckle up they accounted for over half of the nighttime fatalities last year", then you have compelling statistics for buckling up. So while pouring resources into this enforcement campaign is not a great ROI in my opinion, what troubles me more is the lack of critical writing (which probably comes about from a lack of critical thinking).

For the record:

• I wear my seatbelt religiously
• I make all human passengers wear their seatbelt

The Real Climate Crisis

We went to see Ben Stein's movie Expelled over the weekend. The film is basically a documentary that explores how academic circles have reacted to the idea of Intelligent Design (ID). For those who are not familiar with it ID basically says that certain features of the universe and life are better explained by an intelligent agent than an undirected process. If you consider the ever unfolding complexity of cells and the second law of thermodynamics (things naturally become more chaotic in the absence of an external force) it certainly seems a rational hypothesis that something intelligent (God, Zeus, Martians) had a hand in setting up life.

It is natural and appropriate that educators and academia guard against bogus science that has a religious agenda. But Expelled exposes that scientists who desire to explore the validity of ID are meeting a firestorm of PC that is costing them credibility and in some cases their jobs. It seems that ID is being viewed as an attempt to bring Creationism into the classroom. While an instructor with a creationist agenda could possibly use ID to promote it, that should not be reason to brand anyone researching the topic as a religious zealot to be ostracized. In short, scientists should be able to explore the theory and publish their findings for peer review in an environment that is free of reprisal. That is the heart of science - making observations and determining how well a theory predicts them.

Of course ID is not the only arena that is suffering from this stifling of scientific discussion. Our current study of global climate changes is a critical point in case. Climate science, like cell biology, is an incredibly complex field in which our understanding is far from perfect.

If you get the chance I'd recommend that you see Expelled. We need to have an open academic climate where scientists can present their findings for review so that, through debate and review, we can hopefully arrive at the best decision. PC has no value in science.

Saturn Refined

For some time now, perhaps a decade or more, the Internet/PC revolution has been doing some amazing things for amateur astronomers like myself. One of the biggest advances has been in the ability to take a video image of a planet and then refine that into a picture of surprising quality. The rational is that the video is grabbing images at the rate of about 30 per second, so over the period of a couple of minutes you've taken thousands of images. Of these, some are taken during moments of split-second steady seeing, those sort of moments that the observer is trained to take a mental snapshot to record those fleeting details. From there running the images through a software program allows you to align the images and retain only the most clear, stacking them into a final result that certainly seems greater than the sum of its parts!

At this point I am pretty much a hack, having purchased a simple B&W surveillance camera and aligning it behind the eyepiece of my venerable 6" Criterion reflector telescope. What has been really motivating is the results (above) from the new release of the software RegiStax. I have not been out to take images in a couple of years, partly because the results were "OK" but hardly special, and partly because it does involve some effort to get everything out and set up. The image above (a single frame on the left, final result on the right) comes from an AVI I created back in November 2003 when Saturn's rings were pretty open (they're closing up now). I never even came close to approaching this sort of detail in any of my conventional (film) astrophotography off and on over thirty years. Not only is the result very pleasing - readily showing the rings' shadow play and the gap between the A ring and B ring - but to think that it's data that's five years old! How cool is that - simply keeping the data on CD or DVD disks will allow me later to tease out images, even when my days of lugging around telescope, video camera, and tracking mount are behind me.

OK, so now I am psyched - I've got to get my 10" scope on that tracking mount so I can get some more shots this summer!

Can't vote? Too bad...

February 12th 2008 - primary day here in Maryland and, forgotten in today's modern pc-obsessed world, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. I did my homework in preparation - mainly changing my affiliation from independent so that I could participate since it's a closed primary. Left for work about 6:10 a.m. so that I could depart no later than 4 in the afternoon, more than enough time to get home and to my polling precinct.

When I went to the car it was an omen that there was ice on the door and windshield. The ground was fine but clearly the drive home might be tricky and long - what an understatement that would turn out to be. Traffic heading up Crain Highway came to a crawl just past Route 50 - and proceeded to inch up the road. An hour and fifteen minutes later I had gone about one mile, my car was beginning to overheat, and I was beginning to need a comfort stop. For the life of me I can not understand why people just don't "get it" when the weather's atrocious, nor why the police can't make more of an effort to move damaged vehicles off to the side to allow at least one lane to get by. If misery loves company then it was a love fest yesterday afternoon on northbound Rte 3.

Turned the car around and spent another 25 minutes retracing my route back to the office where I hung out until quarter to eight. After a pit stop for dinner I turned on WBAL to hear them talking about how the polls had been ordered to stay open until 9:30 p.m. rather than closing at the scheduled time. Traffic had thinned nicely and I was buoyed by the thought that I could probably easily make it back home by the new closing time, so I'd get to vote after all. As I'm making my way home, however, the calls start coming in from all over to the radio station from people who are being turned away from the polling places or not allowed in!

I get back to Towson and immediately go to the Towson Presbyterian Church where I vote. It's 9:10 p.m. as I pull in to the parking lot, and the place is dark and locked up tight as a drum. Nothing to do at that point except head home and email my protest to the election board. While I'm disappointed that I lost my opportunity to vote there are some elements here that really irritate me even more than the idiot drivers I contend with every commute:

1) I can empathize with the polling judges. It's got to be a job that you do out of civic devotion more than the cold cash you get, and the weather was pretty lousy. So after a long day I can understand not wanting to stick around. And if I had my guess it'd be that the board of elections didn't contact them to inform them of the judge's decision. Hell, I'll bet that the board really had no plan whatsoever to handle this scenario other than the OMG plan. But it was predictable that bad weather in February could occur and that extended hours might be mandated. So in this day of instant communication, what's the excuse? Furthermore, what’s the penalty for your malfeasance?

2) Even more amazing is that from what I could see on the local television this morning no one's talking about it. It clearly didn't happen just to me - there were multiple callers from around the state relating similar incidents last evening. And without exposing the problem it will certainly be repeated. Maryland, my Maryland - where the bureaucracy reigns supreme and unchallenged.

So primary day has come and gone and my voice went unheard except in the blogosphere. Guess I'll change back to independent and do an absentee ballot in the fall just to be safe.

This Works Great - Let's Stop Using It

A de facto standard is where you create something that meets with wide ranging acceptance. For many companies it's a coveted if unstated objective. For example, Adobe PDF has become a standard for viewing documents - make something available in a PDF form and most anybody can access it.

The folks at Intuit, makers of the checkbook software Quicken, had that going for them with their QIF format. Basically it was a way to export and import information into your electronic checkbook. It was pretty simple and worked very well - so well in fact that many financial institutions began to offer their customers the ability to download their account data in this format. So well that Microsoft made it available in their own checkbook program. It was a de facto standard for importing or exporting checkbook transactions.

So imagine my surprise when I bit the bullet and did a Quicken upgrade a few months ago only to discover that QIF was no longer supported by the folks at Intuit. They have elected to support only the OFX (Open Financial Exchange) standard. While a more broad and useful method for exchanging financial it is also more complex - and as a result most financial institutions are not about to expend money to implement this new standard. Perhaps even more amazing is that Microsoft Money continues to support QIF as well as OFX, even in their "bare bones" product (which I'm running a trial version of now - and like so far as I really do not need a ton of bells and whistles).

Anyone want to buy a used copy of Quicken?

Why Can't Our Presidential Elections Have These Sort of Contestants?

Monday my alma mater, Johns Hopkins, met Duke University for the NCAA Division I lacrosse championship. Now while a lot of folks get damn near rabid when their college is in a championship game I'll confess that I'm not quite that excitable. Yet when I stumbled across the game on cable I had to stop to witness the drama.

Hopkins was in the lead by 1 point with under 5 minutes to go. A penalty put them a man down, then another penalty put them down yet another, and the Blue Devils took advantage scoring a goal to tie things up. Fate seemed on Duke's side but to their credit Hopkins went right back up the field and reclaimed a one point advantage. Some heart-stopping shots by Duke that careened off the goal followed, and it was not until Duke's last second shot went wide that Hopkins could say they'd claimed a second title in three years.

I had to feel good about JHU coming through - not just because I attended the place but because this team was pretty well written off by everyone a few weeks back after losing a few games. They showed great perseverance and were definitely a classic case of the underdog coming out on top. But had one of those Duke shots been a centimeter closer to the goal and the outcome different, I'd have been truly happy to see Duke wear the crown. They have had their own story of overcoming adversity played out on the national stage over the last year, and it would have been seemingly devine providence had they gone all the way.

So congrats to the Hopkins guys and three cheers for the Duke players - two great teams that gave us a fantastic championship game.