Rusty's Blog

No, I’m not reporting bad news, just talking about the idea.

There’s an old adage or two related to bad news. First up is ‘no one likes bad news.’ Well, that’s obviously not entirely true. News organizations thrive on the stuff. But what the adage is getting at is not the people bearing bad news, it’s the people ‘receiving’ bad news. I’ll be getting to a bit more on that later, but for the most part I agree. No one really likes to hear bad news, especially when it impacts them directly.

The next adage about bad news is related to the messenger. Specifically it’s “Don’t shoot the messenger!” The idea is that in many cases the person who is messenger is simply a carrier of the news, and has nothing to do with it. There are some very important cultural reasons for paying attention to and publicly acknowledging the rule. At the same time the messenger needs to be careful not to appear to be taking joy at carrying and delivering the message.

When news carriers appear to be being rewarded for delivering bad news, they can be perceived as having an interest in the news as part of their job. The perception becomes that as a beneficiary of the bad news they are tainted and become suspects of generating bad news.

I’m going to go on the presumption that most of the bad news that is provided has little to do with the actual bad news.

Now back to the “no one likes to get bad news.” adage. If we exclude the thought of “bad news about someone else” the fact remains that it does depend on the possible responses to the news.

There are three basic types of bad news to work with then. There is the bad news where you can’t do anything about it yourself at the moment. Thousands dead from the earthquake and Tsunami in the Indian Ocean leaves you with the realization that there isn’t a whole lot that you can do about that situation. Oh you can donate to the Red Cross, or pray for the survivors, but once you’ve done that, you’re left with not all that much more that you can do. The scale is pretty much just too big for you to keep up with.

The second variety of bad news is stuff you can do something about. Perhaps you are in a position to take food to people in the aftermath of a natural disaster. You may not be able to help everyone affected but you’re going to do your part. While this is bad news, it is often news that people are OK with receiving. Some have been preparing for it for a while and are actually excited about finally getting to do Their part to help out.

Beyond that though is the worst of the bad news. Bad news that you could have done something about, or that you may even have been able to prevent in the first place.

Could the Corp of Engineers have prevented the disaster that has almost completely destroyed the 9th ward of the city of New Orleans. Perhaps. Oh sure if they had unlimited resources including people, materials, and time. But they didn’t. And while they are being taken to court over what they didn’t do, it should be remembered that they did do what had been asked, which was to provide protection form a storm as powerful as the one they last saw.

However in many cases people do feel a responsibility for something that they very well may have been able to prevent or contribute to the reduction of suffering that others are experiencing.

Really the worst of these situations are where someone knows what can be done to prevent a disaster from happening, and works for a significant part of their life to have that ounce of prevention be put in place, only to be rebuffed at every attempt. And when the final disaster does come in, are accused of not doing enough, and are handed punishment by the pound for that failing.

Perhaps it is justified to blame the Corps of Engineers for the failings of structures that lead to the flooding of New Orleans 9th ward. They are after all responsible for the structures that have been built to protect those people, their upkeep and improvement. But just as guilty are those who looked at the funding that was needed to pay for that upkeep and those improvements, who for years delayed or rejected the requests for those funds.

Part of that is fiscal management. And we do need to be responsible for where the funds we spend go. However equally a part of it is the recognition that while New Orleans has missed many major hurricanes over the decades, it has been hit, and will be hit again. Levies may not be the best protection for the population. It may be that the only viable protection for the area is to bring in enough fill that the ground will stay above sea level and river flood stage for the next hundred years. But we know that is not going to happen, there just isn’t enough money to fund that much earth moving. Note that that much soil moves past the city every year at no cost to the residents, simply because it is being carried by the Mississippi, but there would be costs involved in extracting the soil, and while now would be almost the perfect time to fill that area with the recovered soil as the majority of the property involved is essentially abandoned, I’m reasonably confident that such a decision will not be made. If only because someone will claim that the cost of rebuilding, again, one of the houses that has been rebuilt in the intervening years would be too much. Oh, and the cheapest way to perform that fill? redirect the Mississippi to flow through the area during flood stage, and when the waters recede bulldoze the fill that has settled to the edges. Within 10 years the entire area will have been re-filled except for a channel down the middle that will take less soil to fill than the levies along the Mississippi already.

When it comes down to it, ‘bad news’ falls into one of three categories: Unavoidable, get old and have accidents which will end lives; Avoidable, this is the ‘don’t do stupid stuff people’ option where many things belong; and Preventable, but we didn’t bother to set up or involve the prevention.

We’ve gone through several ‘preventable’ bits of bad news, even since the Katrina hurricane. While there are many that can be identified as design flaws, the vast majority of engineering disasters have more to do with failing to maintain the equipment, or failing to heed safety policies. There are a host of preventable pieces of bad news however that have nothing to do with engineering, and everything to do with public policy. Some of those are things that get pointed back at engineers and engineering.

Failure to maintain what has been built is almost always a policy issue rather than a poor design or poor understanding of the structural issues. The I-35W bridge collapse was preventable. In fact safety reviews of the bridge had shown that the inspectors were concerned with the fitness of the structure. After the bridge collapsed there was a change in policy regarding the results of bridge inspections, and we have seen several bridges deemed unfit that had no difference between their inspections before, and after except the policy on how to treat those results.

Unfortunately all too many ‘preventable’ bits of bad news will continue to come in. Some may say that the financial collapse both recently and that is still to come, is preventable. Perhaps. Global warming may have been preventable. That I don’t know. Yes we are responsible for a huge increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 300 years, but there are other oddities about the way that the environment has behaved since the end of the last global ice age. And ‘the science’ which is not ‘in’ wasn’t ‘in’ 300 years ago when we started this age of development.

We will have more bad news. Of that I have little doubt. People have been known to suggest that humans don’t do anything that can ‘impact’ the weather of the whole world, or cause disasters on the scale of the Christmas day (or Boxing day depending on where you live) Tsunami, or Katrina.

However we are doing things on a scale that will have an impact. The earthquake in China a couple of years ago has recently been suggested to be triggered by the change in the shape of the crust due to the creation of a lake in the area. Compared to that lake, the lake created by the Three Gorges Dam will be small. Whether there is a crustal plate boundary or fault line that will be affected by that change in mass remains to be seen, but there are many unmapped fault lines that have been idle for long periods of time. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be activated.

Volcanologists run into this issue as well. How can you determine ahead of time what the results of an eruption will be. We can’t even predict earthquakes. We know that a large number of volcanoes on the west coast of the US are active, though they have not had an eruption within human experience in the area. The question then is how can one predict what the outcome of an eruption will be? The best you can do is look at the geologic record of events and try to figure out what the current sequence of events is suggesting will result. Unfortunately you don’t generally have any evidence for things like tremors leading up to eruptions, whether out gassing is an indicator that the eruption is imminent, or if it is, what imminent means for that volcano. Is imminent 2 months from now, or 200 years?

That doesn’t stop scientists from trying to identify what is important, and trying to make predictions based on their model of the world. The model will go through change though, and if you made a prediction based on your understanding of volcanoes 50 years ago, it’s probably a good idea to review and revise those results.

One of the outcomes of the flooding after Katrina is that we learned a significant amount about problems with the current design of the protections that had been in place in New Orleans. While there had been designs in place at the Corps of Engineers for improving the levies and protections for the city, which had outstanding requests for funding that had either been postponed or denied, how much of those updates would have been effective? We learned a substantial amount about what can make a levy fail during the 1993 flooding in the upper Mississippi and Missouri river systems, and some of that was undoubtedly being considered, but it appears that not all of the failures that occurred in New Orleans were of the same nature. It is likely that some of the failure points would not have had modifications done that would have helped.

At some level I suppose it is a good idea to summarize this. We know that bad news will continue. The important part is not the actual bad news, it is how we respond to it. We need to recognize that the reason it is considered bad news is that people care about the people or things that were affected by some event. This is actually a very good thing. We also need to recognize that just because things went wrong before, does not mean that knowing about them will prevent similar or worse events from happening in the future. But we do want to learn from them. And we want people to understand that just because some people seem to thrive on bad news from a ‘news’ perspective, should not detract from the fact that there are a lot of people who care and are affected at various levels, including some of those same people who are looking to the presentation of the news as their own life blood.

We do care, and that is one of many things that makes us human.

Every one of us can look to something our family does, and note that it’s a tradition that we follow. About 5 years after the Christmas tree was introduced to England from Germany, families were writing in their diaries, and letters ot others, about how they put up the Christmas tree just like they always have,

Dvorak complains about how magazines and publishers create ficticious lists of the most important inovations, or people where the list is created by someone at a meeting saying ‘”I think so and so was the most influential, beautiful, creative, something or other, person this year. Let’s make a list of other people and put them at the top.” They then publish the list, and no matter who they select, someone will write in asking what on eart were they thinking, This other person did so much more that it makes the published choice look like an also ran.

Tradition is really What we do, not simply because we personally think that it has meaning, but because as a group we find value and comfort in the activity.

I would like to say that ‘of late’ there has been a hew and cry over how commercialized Christmas has gotten. How stores are now starting to set up Christmas displays earlier and earlier. We can point to the Charlie Brown Christmas Special as just about the only thing that shows up on TV that isn’t a highly commercialized advertisement for some store or product. (The first year it wasn’t true, but compared to some of the other programs, the commercialization there is small potato.)

Up until this year, one of the ‘traditions’ I followed was to spend thanksgiving with my sister and her family. Or at least make the trip down and back. Many times this was also a trip back and forth for Christmas. Almost always I would be working within a day or two of the holiday, but I could get the day off for the celebration. However when I look at the people I work with, I see at least some people who have families that almost have never seen them on either day, and I would like them to have the opportunity. So this year I waited until after the change in schedules had happened and only then decided whether I would even ask for one or the other days off. When I checked both had already gotten all the people who were going to get vacation submitted, and I have taken different times for vacation.

Traditionally many people write a Christmas letter that the send to family and friends. I remember many a Friday night when my dad had come home from doing audits on the road, and we would all sit around the table and read the letters and Christmas cards that came in that week. I think the most consistent letter was from someone who had started otu as a neighbor and whom through those letters we watched to through relocating, changing jobs, watching their children move off and take jobs both near and far. We saw their marriage fall apart, and how he found new love and … well, their story goes on but I haven’t been following it for a few years because I’m no longer at home either.

Since Compuserve and AOL, families have used various e-mail solutions to electronically communicate some of the same things. Some have started being creative and putting together a ‘Christmas DVD’ of the many things that they have been involved in through the year. And in a way I’ve done some of that as well in that I switched from buying calendars and planners for family to printing up my own calendars based on pictures I’ve taken, and sending those.

No matter what though we each have stories to tell. Since the only ‘immediate’ family I can report on is myself and my dogs, I could relate events there, but once I point out that I’ve already writtne about several of the things that have happened here in this blog, there isn’t much else to say. As a summary, Nick is getting older, and at times a bit too shy of attention, and after watching Mindy lose weight and start to lose the ability to walk well, through the year, in late November I ended up putting her to sleep. She is not suffering any more, but it does leave a hole that really nothing but the love of God can fill.

That sort of leaves talking about myself. I can do that all day I suppose, but I’m not really interested in doing that. I’ll try to keep things a little bit brief.

Around the beginning of the year I made sure that people understood that this was the last year I was going to be the head of the Volunteer department for CONvergence. I’ve been involved with the Volunteer department for 7 or 8 years, and had been essentially a figurehead for the department for the past few years. Even with a good friend co-heading the department this last year, I was both in a position of power, and at the same time not. For various reasons I was actually OK with this. What it gave me though was experience at managing people, and making sure that things got done, without some of the administrative costs that often goes with the territory. A few years back I had my face slapped with regards to being an effective leader at a job where I had responsibility but no authority. In this case I had authority and I’m hoping that the people who were involved think that I acted responsibly, though there are things that I know I could have done better.

In April I was asked at work if I owuld be willing to take on the roll of learning about the networks that were being merged and the management of trouble tickets and issues for both. I was part of the first group of people doing this, and over the following months we learned about the tools each part of the team used, how to work with each group of vendors, and more. The primary goal of my involvement was to be there as a resource for both teams to be able to draw knoledge either of what was already in place for stuff that I have worked on over the years, to helping ease the transition for people I had been working with over the years as they learned the new platforms as well. All the while procedures on both sides going through changes and alterations as management learned what was, and wasn’t working. I hope that I’ve done a respectable job at that process. Time and changes to the environment will tell the true story of course.

Also in April I attended Anime Detour for the third time, and was involved in the main stage opening ceremonies. I decided that this was a good time to see what I could do to help out with this convention, and since then I have been going to the planning meetigns, and I expect to be involved in a couple of departments for AD 2010. While I really do enjoy the work I have done in Volunteers for CONvergence, I decided that getting involved at the Volunteer department level at AD may not be the best place. They have an effective Volunteer department already and already know that if they have any questions that they are welcome to talk with me. I’m not sure that I have the value add opportunity there that I can provide for some other departments. So I am going to help out in Communications, and Photography.

In July we held Convergence 2009. I had a great time, spent good quality time with people who are going to be taking over the Volunteer Department for this next year, and was involved in a few things that I think have developed very nicely. There is of course room for improvement, but then I think that will always be the case. If it stops being the case, I’m not sure I want to be involved anyway. But the important thing for me was to get involved at a lower level than I had before. I happen to think that I will probably continue to be ‘as’ active, but I hope to be involved in a broader variety of things at the convention.

August is probably as close to a ‘relaxed’ month as I think I saw this year. And even there I got out to Renaissance Festival in a Kilt and Beret. After picking up a white period shirt at a shop at the fest, I was basically doing my Jamie act in a variation of period attire. I went back Labor Day weekend and took a couple hundred pictures. Unfortunately that may be the last time I get to do that as 2 weeks later my new work schedule cut in and I no longer have Saturday nights off so that I can spend Sunday at the fest. There are all sorts of reasons that may not be an issue this next year, but for the time being I’m not planning on doing things on Saturdays or Sundays if they are going to take a significant amount of energy on my part.

As noted in September my job schedule changed. Management decided that they had the ideal schedule to put everyone on, well except for middle management. Now before someone suggests that I’m being bitter about the decision, I’m not. I know that middle management is on a schedule that may initially seem to be more ‘relaxed, (days, 9-5 or something like that) but the reality for the business that I’m involved in those managers are always on call. I know people who complain about getting calls in the middle of the night on the week that they are ‘oncall’ but what they seem to be ignoring is that in pretty much every one of those cases if they get called to an issue, their manager is probably already on the call ahead of them, will be on the phone for an hour or so after the issue is resolved, and will be working their regular day the following day. I don’t envy them, but I still think that the schedule that was created that I’m working now is poorly thought out. We’ll see if things change.

Perhaps the most devastating thing that happened to me during the year was not having to put Mindy to sleep. A friend that I care about a lot was diagnosed with breast cancer this year. As many people know there really isn’t a ‘recovery’ from any cancer, though you may recover from some of the damage done. There is a very important side effect however to that cancer being breast cancer in a woman. Most women attach a significant part of their sense of identity to having breasts. Big or small, they are a very personal part of themselves that they experience pain as they grow, are inordinately sensitive compared to much of the rest of their bodies, and are one of the few outwardly recognizable characteristics that give meaning to them. The loss of a breast due to cancer is a result that leaves many women feeling they are less of a person, less important, and less valued than the women they see around them.

No matter what a guy may say about the issue, it does impact how we think of and respond to a woman. And she knows that as well. She knows it going into the procedures that will result in a mastectomy and she knows it coming out of the mastectomy.

Worse for many women is that this cancer is specifically involved in things that make a woman feel she is a woman. That doesn’t mean that men are not susceptible to breast cancer as well. We are. And there have been some celebrities who have gone through mastectomies as well. But it is a cancer that is firmly linked to women. It is a cancer that essentially takes a part of what each of us think of as part of what it is to be a woman, and it tries to, and entirely too often is successful at, killing her. I know several women who have had effective treatment for breast cancer who are in remission today, but it will always be there, and I know some people who have experienced the loss of a loved one to breast cancer.

Late this year my friend had her mastectomy. While she may recover from the damage the cancer has done to her body, it will always be there. It had already migrated to her bones, and while it responded well to chemotherapy, Environmental conditions prevented some of her family from being there to provide support. And while I am not as close of a friend as I have at times wished I could be, I pretty much would do anything that I could to help her.

This next year I hope to see many positive effects of decisions and activities that I’ve participated in come to fruition. But I do know that as with what has gone before, there will be challenges, frustrations, and trials and tribulations that I can expect to learn from, and hopefully pass on some of what I learn from the experience to those around me.

This posting has probably gotten deeper into some things than some people were expecting, and I’m sure that for some other people it does nothing to explain what all I’ve seen and done over the past year. May this find you thinking about the ones you love with fondness and care. May you have found one gem of an experience you can share, or find enlightenment in. Remember that the point of the season is to remember that there are many things that are greater than any one of small group of us, and that the people around us are valuable to us in ways we often do not recognize. The tradition is not in the getting, or even in the giving, it is in the being part of something greater, and sharing that with those we love.

Merry Christmas.

I honestly don’t expect anyone reading this to be affected by the policies I set forth, but then one of the things I’ve noticed quite frequently is that people who are affected by policies all to often don’t know that the policy exists in the first place.

I’ve instituted a three strikes policy with respect to callers leaving voice mail.

For the past few years all calls to my home number have been simultaneously ringing my cell phone. I’ve done that because while I am more than happy to pick up the phone at home, I figure if someone is calling me there then it just may be important enough that if I am away from home I should probably take the call there as well.

I work ‘odd hours’ which means that a lot of the hours that people want to talk to me, I am either asleep or at work. That doesn’t detract from the importance of calls, but it may mean that I will be in no mood to talk to someone at 1 in the afternoon, any more than they would be interested in talking to me at 1 in the morning.

Because the possibility exists that a family emergency may crop up that needs my attention, I use caller ID to see who calls are from. The system I use also announces via a text to speech capability who is calling. It’s actually interesting to try to puzzle out who the text to speech program was announcing at times. Often it sounds nothing like what the person’s name is.

I’m not a big fan of getting on the phone to just talk. A few friends can attest to the fact that I don’t randomly call people, and I don’t always respond to a voice mail that does not leave a sense of urgency in my mind.

For some reason of late I’ve been getting calls from ‘phone numbers’ rather than people or businesses. Sorry, your call will roll to voice mail. In fact most calls I receive will go to voice mail, but if you block caller-id, or have set up numbers from your business so that no company name is provided, it’s pretty much a certainty. I will happily review and as appropriate respond to voice mail from you, but even if you are going to gift me something more valuable than the net worth of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined, I won’t take your call directly.

That leads to the second problem. A number of people are not leaving messages. That’s fine. I figure it’s because they are telemarketers, or possibly pollsters. Perhaps it’s someone who just needs to hear from a human voice though. that’s fine, there are other people around who will very likely take up those calls. In any case it’s clear that getting me to call back was not of any significant importance to them.

My cell phone does have a log of the calls that have come in, and as I add numbers to my list of contacts, if there was no caller ID to begin with, it gets tagged with a caller-ID. Calls from people in my contact list are handled under rules defined within the contact.

So here is the three strikes policy. You have three chances to call my number and leave me a voice mail from a ‘phone number.’ If I don’t get a message that I can understand as one or more of those three calls, I will add your number to a currently very small list of numbers that rolls directly to voice mail.

Now there may be other reasons that a call rolls directly to voice mail. If my cell phone has a dead battery, or I am out of service (say I’m at work) the call will roll directly to my voice mail as well. And as noted above there are a lot of reasons that a call may end up in voice mail, even after ringing my phones.

I figure that people who end up in voice mail where the system says ‘The person you are calling is unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone.’ can figure out that they need to leave me a message. I may modify the message though, it might be a good idea to let some people know that failing to leave a message is telling me that their call is of no importance to me.

A reasonable message will consist of who is calling by first and last name, if they are calling representing a business then the business information is additional and not a substitute for a first and last name. A brief explanation of the nature of the call, and a number I can call back if I need to follow up with someone. If there is a reason that the call should be between certain hours, then include the hours that someone will be available to take my call.

The voice mail system I use does let me know that I have a message via an e-mail, and I can get that message almost any time of the day or night. I don’t get, or want transcriptions of my voice mail, though the service can provide that as an added cost item. I won’t give logic behind not using a transcription service, beyond saying that I don’t think I really need it at this time.

First and last names for people working at a business do not need to be the actual first or last name of that person. They do however need to be something that when calling back will get me to the person who called, or possibly to someone who can address the item being called about. I’m not interested in calling someone at home for a business issue. There are other reasonable reasons not to leave me an actual first and last name, and I respect them.

We’ll see if that helps.

Well, it’s time to have my calendar assembled and ready to ship out for family members. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better.

The source file for generating the calendar takes a bit of work every year. In the output are several different varieties of events. The lunar calendar is maintained separately. Personally I think that should be true for a couple of other sets of data, but it doesn’t quite work that way.

Most of the content is of the variety , month, day, text. I’m not expecting most of that to change from year to year, but there are exceptions.

Holidays get an asterisk ‘*’ after the day. or at least before the text.

Next in complexity is stuff that is related to our trip around the sun, that doesn’t quite fit a month day format. Equinoxes, solstices and meteor showers end up being in the same format as ‘events’ but may change from year to year. For example the vernal equinox was on March 19 in 2009, and will be March 20 in 2010.

Then comes ‘national holidays.’ Not all are actually holidays for all people, but that’s not the worst of it. Holiday’s ‘Observed’ is either the Monday before or closest to a date, or the closest working day. When the 4th of July falls on a Sunday, it is ‘observed’ on the 5th. On a Saturday it is observed on the 3rd. Memorial day is observed on the last Monday of May, and so on.

Every year the Jewish holidays move around, because they are part of the Jewish calendar which is based mostly on the lunar month rather than a solar month. There are additional complications based on the fact that observance of most of them begins at sunset the previous day, which also affects when some of them get set. More on that later.

Worst though is the Christian calendar. The easy ones are Christmas, and All Saints Day. The fall on the same days of the same months every year. Next up come things like the Sundays of Advent.

Easter poses a bit of a problem though. If you grew up going to Sunday school, you probably recall that Christ was crucified on Friday because the Saturday of passover was considered holy by the Jewish faith, and they could not allow him to be hanging on the cross on that day. So Easter Sunday is axiomatically tied to Passover. The rule for deciding when Easter is, is The first Sunday after the first full moon after the first full day of spring. So if the vernal equinox is at 11 pm on the 19th of March, and the full moon is at 2 pm on the 21st, then Easter would be on the following Sunday. That could be as early as the 29th of March.

Based on that you would expect passover to be observed the same week. Right? Well, not really. Remember that the Jewish set holidays based on sunset rather than midnight. So if the vernal equinox is at 11 pm, which is after sunset, on the 19th, it is treated as if it happened on the 20th. So the first full day after the vernal equinox is not the 20th, but the 21st. If the full moon happens at 2 pm on the 21st, it is not the Passover moon, but the full moon before the passover moon. Passover does not start for another 29 days. So while I can calculate both events, the actual calculation will depend on different parameters, and as a result will end up pointing to different days or periods of time. Of course there are a number of events on the christian calendar that are directly related to when Easter is set. Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Ascension day, etc.

I’ve also completely glossed over ‘where’ the time has to be compared for determining sunset, and midnight. The Vernal Equinox is at a specific UTC time, but may be posted to a calendar as a local time. For Christian calendars the comparison is likely to be against the local time for Rome which is UTC +1, vs. Jerusalem at UTC +2.

A minor addition is that in addition to the commonly recognized observance of Christmas and new years, there are also orthodox Christian observances which are not the same days as appear on the western calendar because they are based on the Julian calendar observances and not the Gregorian calendar dates.

There are potentially hundreds of additional calendars I could add. For example there are all of holidays recognized in India. I have not added the events in the Islamic calendar, or posted things like various Asian new year and other holidays important to the region. In theory there are over a hundred different country calendars with different holidays being designated. If someone wants to throw together and comment to the page a list of holidays or events that they think should be on a calendar, and would like a calendar created for them, feel free. Eexamples of the calendars that can be created are at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/Calender2010/2010-Calendar_pub.pdf and http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/Calender2010/2010-Calendar_pub_p.pdf

As I stated in the begining, I may have a few of the items wrong. In any case, enjoy.

There is a bit of an issue of balance for people who are diabetic. For people who are not aware, a bit of an explanation may be in order. If you know what diabetes is and how it works, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs.

Diabetes is the inability of the body to regulate it’s blood sugar level. Humans are not the only creatures susceptible to diabetes, Pretty much every animal that derives energy from glucose being distributed through the blood stream. The mechanism of allowing the cells in the body to take in that glucose to use it as an energy source is a hormone called insulin which acts as a key to allow the blood sugar through the cell membrane. Insulin is generated by stem cells in the pancreas. There are two fairly well known mechanisms that show up that cause issues with the generation of insulin. The first is an auto-immune disorder which happens around the time that the body goes through puberty. Essentially the immune system detects the cells that are generating Insulin as a health hazard, and destroys them. This is called Type 1 diabetes, and the onset is often associated with a flue or cold that the immune system is also fighting. Detection may be weeks or months after the event when several major symptoms of high blood sugar are recognized, and a blood sugar test is performed. The other well documented variety of diabetes appears to be the results of overstimulating the creation of insulin and tends to strike later in life when the t-cells essentially say ‘Hey, enough is enough. You’re over working us, and we’re not going to take it any more.”. There may be symptoms that can be pointed at earlier, such as low blood sugar, but the only way that can provide a significant early indicator is to test for high insulin levels. The problem with that is that the tests to detect high insulin levels are very expensive and at this tome are not as well understood as we would like. About the only time it is performed is when the potential diabetic is known to have a family history of diabetes and is showing signs of being hypoglycemic while eating what appears to be a normal or even high sugar diet. The real problem thous is that what appears to cause Type 2 diabetes is that fat cells in the body are working to reduce the effectiveness of insulin in the first place. The part of the brain that detects high blood sugar, as well as low blood sugar, sends a chemical message to the pancreas saying, “Hay get up off your lazy butt and kick some insulin into the system.” Sort of a bit of a slave driver there.

With most Type 2 diabetics the most obvious hint that the person is may be diabetic is that they are significantly and obviously overweight. In fact some people suggest that it is a result of being overweight. As with most things, the reality is not quite so simple. But if you like the power trip you get from being able to criticize someone for being over-weight, it seems to be as good of a candidate for exploitation as any other I guess. The flaw in the ointment is that there are many people who recognize that Diabetes is something they may acquire, and they work very hard to avoid it. I know several people who if you met them on the street would say that they look to be in very good health, fit, etc. but who I happen to know are diabetic. I’ve even been in that situation.

So back to the premise. Treating diabetes is a bit of a balancing act. On the one hand you have several very bad things that happen over time when your blood sugar gets too high. Kidney failure, neropathy, blindness, etc. There are even some things that happen that don’t take quite so long to manifest themselves. As an example if your blood sugar level is high, scratches and bruises take longer to heal, and may just seem to linger for months when they should clear up in days or weeks. Gangrene can set in, and it’s not at all unusual that people loose appendages. So it’s pretty obvious that you don’t want to have those things happen. The other side of this coin is that if your blood sugar level gets to be too low it can seriously affect your ability to think, react, or even move. Low blood sugar can put you into a coma, and can also kill you. Generally not a desirable situation either.

Insulin dependent diabetics, which can be either Type 1 or Type 2 have to get insulin introduced to their body in response to the food they eat. This may be either through insulin shots, a pump that regularly introduces insulin a combination or some other means. A potential treatment is to replace the cells that generated the insulin in the first place. This has not been an easy process for most people. There have been a few cases where people have had pancreas transplants, usually for other reasons, and have stopped being diabetic, but those are very rare situations, and in most of those cases the imuno-suppressants needed to prevent rejection of the transplants are as much of an issue for ongoing medical care as the diabetes that is no longer the major issue.

Many Type 2 diabetics are not insulin dependent. And in some cases type 2 insulin dependent diabetics do loose the dependency if they respond well to other treatments. There are a few solutions which Type 2 diabetics may respond well to treating. The first is to reduce the uptake of sugar from the consumed food. Some drugs seem to do this reasonably well. We may see some alternatives in the fairly near future though as it appears that there are two varieties of organisms in our gut that deal with the food we consume differently, one of which makes uptake easier and also leads to obesity. The other seems to reduce the uptake of carbohydrates and calories from the food we consume, or at least does not make it easier to convert. I suspect that we will see more research and treatments investigating that in the near future, both because there is a large population of people who would like to loose weight that this might help, and because it does affect how the food we eat is processed.

Another attack on the problem is to address the other major method of introducing blood sugar to the system. That is the conversion of fat into glucose. This process is actually done in the liver. The vast majority of the glucose that is converted from the food you eat is transfered into your blood stream within 4 hours of eating. There are a few complex proteins that are handled later on, but for most of us that is not a significant portion of our diet. Since most of us spend between 6 and 8 hours of every 24 hours asleep, and onset is often several hours after we have eaten, you would expect that overnight our blood sugar levels would drop significantly. That is where our lives kick in and convert some of the stored fat we all carry around into glucose. On the off chance that this is entirely too efficient at working, some drugs try to suppress this function.

Another variety of treatment for Diabetes is to induce the pancreas to generate more insulin again. There are several medications that do this in one way or another. There is also a third fairly new attach which attempts to suppress the insulin resistance mechanism. Because of the reduced effectiveness of the insulin generation process in the first place, it is not uncommon to combine the treatments in various ways.

What turns into a fairly significant issue over time though is that people who finally find a way to manage their blood sugar, also end up setting up a situation where it becomes very easy to gain weight. The ‘working’ cells are not the only ones that make use of insulin to let glucose in. Fat cells do the same. As a result if you combine the increased capture of glucose by the fat cells and convert it to fat, with the suppressed conversion of fat to glucose enabled by the Liver, you set up a situation where it is easy to gain a significant amount of weight.

Balance in this case is not limited to keeping your blood sugar ‘controlled’ it is also a matter of figuring out what is the right amount of food you should be taking in in the first place.

“Oh, well, I’ll just exercise more.” some might suggest. Actually, it doesn’t work out quite that way. Getting to humans, there are three things our bodies are very clearly designed to do, and do with efficiency. The first is to run. No, we don’t run all that fast when compared to other creatures. In fact most other creatures can outrun us for a good distance. I’ve considered adopting a greyhound over the last couple of weeks. Within 3 strides, less than 40 feet, a greyhound can go from a standing stop to 40 miles per hour. Buffalo at full gallop are over 30 miles per hour. Horses, deer, antelope, goats, and so on. Try to keep up with a cat. Humans on the other hand can run for very long periods of time. If you train to run, you soon learn to leave your dog at home. They make wonderful sprinters, but if you are going to run a 5k, you will run them into the ground. Even if you are not ‘fast.’ The fact that most of your run is a controlled fall, and you are simply using two legs and feet to do that with means that you can do that more efficiently over long periods of time. How much more efficiently? A marathon runner who completes a marathon in about 3-4 hours, which means not usually an elite runner, burns up about 1000 calories during the run. Sounds like a lot eh? McDonald’s has been selling an Angus Burger sandwich that is alone 720 calories. Add in a medium fries at 300 calories, and before you’ve added a drink you’ve got more calories on your plate than a Marathon runner burns off in an event.

The second thing that humans are absolutely great at is using tools. When it comes down to it, this is more of an indication of our fine motor abilities in our hands than anything else. And a significant part of that is our very flexible thumb. That’s not really all that great for consuming calories however.

The third thing that really takes the cake though is our brain. Fully 20% of our daily calorie usage is devoted to brain functions. The average human consumes roughly 2500 calories a day. Highly active people, say recruits in basic training may be up over 3500 calories, but that’s not most of us. So looking at that 2500 calories, just sitting around, thinking all day, and being moderately active, our brain uses as many calories a day as a marathon runner uses running the event. Most of us are not aware that our brains are working that hard, but they are.

So, what does that mean for someone who wants to loose weight? First of all, you want to achieve that moderate level of activity or better. I won’t go into whether most of us do that or not, iI doubt if we do. How many of us can identify with the guy who gets up to go get the mail out of the mail box, and realizes on his way back that he’s winded, and he didn’t get any mail today? Moderate activity is there to help you. Go for a walk. start slow if you need to. (If you get winded going to the mail box, you need to.) Talk to your doctor and find out what a ‘moderate’ level of activity for you is. For a lot of people it’s about an hour of activity that increases the heart rate into your aerobic zone, for over an hour a week. 3 days of 20 min walks is a good start. Go further if you would like, or increase speed. It’s up to you. If you would rather dance, do that. If you have seen those ‘magic sticks’ and want to give that a try, then by all means try it out. It may look easy in the hands of the guy selling the things, but it will take time to learn. For that matter learning to Juggle will very likely change your activity level.

However by doing that you are adding ‘moderately active’ to your self description. That doesn’t change the fact that you are going to have to do something to reduce the calories taken in. If you are consuming 3000 calories a day, and have a moderate level of activity of 2500 calories consumed daily, that’s a 500 calorie surplus every day. 3500 calories every week. If you like those Angus Burgers at McDonald’s, that’s less than 5 of those a week. The added weight will pile up fast.

So the idea is to do what you can to helpfully affect that balance. And you are probably aware that if you drop to under 1500 calories you actually induce a new effect in the human body. You introduce the body to starvation mode. I won’t go into the details, but in summary, you don’t want that.

Balance. Take your time, and do it ‘right.’

Oh, and one guy who realized that he was wonted when he went to the mail box, addressed it by developing a program which took him from the couch potato he was, to a 5k runner in about 9 weeks. He now runs marathons.

A lot has been said on the topic. A significant portion of what has been said is subject to interpretation.

First of all I’ll probably upset some people by saying that yes the globe is warming. And I will further upset some of those people by pointing out that humans have had something to do with that situation.

Gerry Pournel pointed out on TWiT a week ago or so that if you went to school in the United States in the past 50 years, that you very likely were taught in grade school just about everything you need to know to confirm the first of those assertions. What you may not have been taught, you can easily look up.

During the Revolutionary War, General George Washington very nearly lost the war on the shores of the Potomac river. What saved him was a contingent of cannons that were delivered across that river. Cannon. They were not delivered by boat, they were horse (or oxen) drawn on their road carriage across a river frozen over with enough ice to support them.

“So what,” you say, “rivers freeze every year.” Well the bit you get to look up is when the Potomac last froze solid enough for a man to walk across where those cannon were carried over it. As a hint, it’s been over 100 years since it last happened.

Yeah, well, OK, the world has been warming. Turns out it’s been warming something like a degree a century over at least the past 2 centuries. So what you ask. These things go in cycles. Yes they do. There are a variety of cycles involved.

Lets look at at least one of those cycles. The sun has a reasonably predictable 11 or 22 year cycle. From a ‘counting’ perspective we use an 22 year cycle and the cycle that we should be seeing sunspots increasing now is the 24th cycle since we started counting sunspots at all. That means about 500 years of data, give or take a bit, and of course up until we started using some fairly modern techniques, we very easily could have missed about half of the sunspots, as they can be of short duration and only appear on the far side of the sun. However we can use the data that has been gathered to look at other environmental records and perhaps learn something more.

Within the past 400 years or so we have things like the little ice age, the Maunder Minimum, the United States’ Revolutionary War, and more. So we know that there have been fairly major climate events in that time, and we can corelate that perhaps to sunspot numbers. It turns out that there is some correlation. During the Maunder Minimum, a 50 or so year period when there were very few sun spots, we saw what has been called the little ice age. Art from the period shows people having carnivals on the Thames river, and more. Now there are a lot of people who will point out that correlation does not mean causation. They are right. There are several other events that may have had a global impact in the years of the Maunder Minimum.

One of the things that we can show however is that years with a lot of sunspots tend to encourage trees to grow thicker rings. And years with fewer sunspots tend to have thinner rings. Again correlation does not suggest causation, however we consider that, along with snow fall records in ice cores, and the sedimentary record in the existing seabed as showing enough correlation that we can use them to give us a picture of what we believe the solar cycles have looked like going back about 11,000 years, or to the end of the last major ice age.

Obviously there are other cycles at work over a period of 11,000 years. For example the north pole precesses in a 26,000 year cycle. What we call Polaris or the North Star was tens of degrees away from the stellar pole at the end of the last ice age. Additionally looking at the orbit of the earth it varies a bit as well. However the periods involved do not match up as clearly as people who are pointing at them would like. Likewise pointing at the history of Hurricanes in the US has issues, as there are only about 300 years of any history, and less than 200 years of good records. Up until about 100 years ago a hurricane that hits Florida, then Mississippi may have been counted as two separate storms.

So far the strongest evidence of a correlation between something and the climate has turned out to be volcanic dust and CO2, and the global temperature. The pattern is very much an appearance of significant volumes of dust in ice cores, followed by a spike in CO2 of nearly 100 ppm, followed almost immediately by a jump of 10 degrees C. For those of us in the US, that amounts to a change of 18 degrees or so.

100 parts per million translates to a change of .1% keep that in mind.

Looking at the history of global ice ages we see that the tempreture, dust, and CO2 changes, appear in roughly a 80-100 thousand year cycle. That’s between 5 and 10 times the amount of time since the end of the last ice age. So we should have a good ways to go before the next major ice age sets in. Right? Not so fast.

Looking at the history, we see that after each of these spikes we see a drop of 4-5 degrees over the next 10-20 thousand years. There is also frequently a drop of 8 degrees followed by a rise of 4 degrees or so over the 30 thousand years following a temperature spike. In any case once the temp has settled to about 5 degrees below the spike it begins a gradual decrease over the next 40 thousand years or so.

There are a couple of variations to that pattern. The temperature spike previous to the one that just passed about 10-20 thousand years ago shows a longer period of significant dust in the air before CO2 and temperatures spiked. There was significant amounts of dust in the samples for about 40 thousand years rather than the 5-10 thousand years that previous cycles show. Additionally the temperature drop off after the spike was a bit slower. At about the end of the last ice age we see a return to a 5-10 thousand year period of increased dust, but the volume of dust is almost half again the volume of earlier cycles.

“So,” you may be noting, “it looks like we can attribute super volcanoes to the end of ice ages, Eh?” Well, perhaps. Here’s the thing. The last major super volcano eruption we can date at this time is the eruption of Toba between 70 and 75 thousand years ago. The amount of dust in the samples after that event and the apparent duration of those samples, pale in comparison to the amount of dust in the air at the end of the last Ice age. Toba actually happened in the middle of the last ice age. Starting about 20,000 years ago the amount of dust in the samples rose from about .2 parts per million which is what things settled down to after Toba, to over 1.2 parts per million over 25-30 thousand years, then hung out there for between 8 and 12 thousand years. After that it dropped to what appears to be less than .1 part per million today.

If we limit the view of what causes global ice ages to end to being an increase and drop off in the amount of dust in the air, then about now we should be between 2 and 4 degrees lower in temperature than at the end of the last major Ice age.

We are not. In fact we are about half a degree Celsius below the peak. And depending upon who’s data you look at, or more accurately where it was sampled from, the temperature has risen over that period by as much as a degree.

The other interesting characteristic of what we see since the end of the last ice age is that global CO2 count has not dropped off. In fact it has increased. Looking at the chart for the past 4 major ice ages, the CO2 volume went from about 260 ppmv 10-15 thousand years ago to between 280 and 300 ppmv today.

Now before someone suggests that I am going to tie a cause to this, and say that we are at fault, I’ll say I don’t know that we are, or are not. We’ve enjoyed 10,000 years of very warm weather, and human civilization has flourished over that time as well. We’ve gone from fairly small communities in the golden triangle and what appears to be disparate communities in what is now Egypt to what is almost a global civilization.

So why do I think we’ve had an impact on CO2 counts? Well other than the obvious growth of our population and civilization which needs more energy every year, we can look at three sets of numbers that show our impact on resources as well. First up is wood and grasses. Our burning of these has reduced per person over the past 500 years. Most of us do not use wood burning stoves as our means of cooking or heating except when we do things like going camping or otherwise ‘living off the land.’ For centuries one of the most effective means of herding and hunting was to set fire to wide swatches of grassland. However over the past 200 years we have changed our herd management procedures significantly. Some discrepancies to this statement can be seen in the way forest fires have been handled in the continental US, and the fact that large swaths of amazon forest have been destroyed by burning for farming. Additionally these all have some impact on CO2 levels as a result of the fact that not only do the fires release significant quantities of CO2, but they also reduce the ability of those resources to capture CO2 and convert it into O2 for breathing and Carbon within those plants.

Next up is Coal. Prior to large scale smelting of iron into steel, coal was widely used as an alternative to wood for heating and cooking. However the largest use of coal today is for the production of electricity. In that capacity as well as in high temperature manufacturing other than Aluminum, we are using more coal every year to the tune of 3.5 billion tones of coal in 2008. While there are swamps and marshes that are developing what will very likely be coal millions of years from now, there are not a lot of people suggesting that this process is keeping up with the volume of coal that we are burning. Additionally we may have a 50-200 year reserve of coal that appears to be recoverable. According to BP we used more energy as the result of burning coal in 2008 than we did in the combined oil and natural gas usage. This is significant in that it shows a change over previous years. Our current growth rate for coal consumption is between 2 and 3%

Oil and Natural Gas are our other major contributors to CO2 in the atmosphere. As can be seen by the BP report, the consumption of Natural Gas and Crude Oil is about the same as for Coal consumption. Something to consider though is that a significant percentage of that consumption is not burning. Other uses of Crude Oil that count as consumption, but which do not release significant volumes of CO2 to the atmosphere include the production of plastics, and things like the use of the heavier distillates for road and roofing surfaces.

So yes we are seeing global warming, and I happen to think we are contributing to it. “Ah ha!” you declare. “You’re one of those ‘carbon credit’ fans.” Actually I’m not.

What are the likely scenarios for the next say 200 years. Well, it looks like we are going to run out of crude oil and coal. At least the easily recoverable resources will be depleted. For almost a century Japan was mining coal from the sea floor, and we may find that there are significant resources for that that can extend the deadline, but I’m not going to suggest that it’s a reasonable method of extending our energy needs. I suspect that in 200 years burning coal will be pretty much limited to artistic usage. Showing how we once made these things. If you look at how we once fired ceramics, and compare it to our methods these days I suspect that you will see some of what I mean.

Over the next couple hundred years I suspect that we will see two significant sources of energy developed. The first will be a resurgence of nuclear power plants. Whether that will include Fusion power or not I don’t know, but the interim stop gap will be an increase in the wind and solar power gathering, and very probably some novelty wave and thermal incline power generation. There really is enough power in wind, solar and water to support our needs for the next century, however everyone will point out that where that power is most available, and where the demands for it are, don’t tend to be the same locations. So I suspect we will use Nuclear power in addition.

Beyond that we are pretty much going to have to move to space for additional energy. This will be in a couple of different processes. Initially we will see power collection and transmission to earth. The advantage of working with solar power in space is that you never have to deal with a cloudy day. Hail is never going to be an issue. You never have to go and clean the snow off the solar panel to let the sun in. You are not spending 12 hours on average out of 24 with your solar collector sitting in darkness. It almost sounds wonderful, doesn’t it.

What is the problem? Well, how are you going to get the energy from where you collect it to where you need it?

What are the problems? First of all it’s not like you are likely to be sending up a power cord from New York up to a geostationary orbit 23k miles up. That’s a lot of copper to begin with, and New York isn’t exactly positioned well for something in geostationary orbit. Your bes pet there would be a equatorial receiver of some sort that then redistributes the power to where it is needed. Can we say ‘land grab’? The second problem is that geostationary orbit is not a great place to put power collection. At the moment there are something like a thousand satellites sitting in that orbit. Some ‘parked’ others actively being used for television and other communications. Now a significant percentage of that usage is going to be eliminated and replaced with the global fiber optic grid, but we will still be using the majority of those, and other than providing a ‘stable’ point to potentially host a space elevator that may be used for power carrying as well,. I’m actually thinking not but that’s simply because I don’t see the materials that are expected to be used for space elevator as a good means of also carrying power. So we will very probably see a combination of space elevators near otherwise populated equatorial locations, and power conduits at a few other locations. We are back to our problem of distributing the power. Equatorial sounds wonderful, but we already know that transmitting power over long distances introduces a significant amount of loss.

Beamed power sounds like it might be an effective alternative. If you use a Maser to beam power you can focus it to provide a significant amount of it to specific spots. This can be used to provide an alternative to running electrical conductors out to space, and hopefully would help with the problem of serving some place like New York or Moscow, but I do think you will very quickly run out of space in GeoSync orbit, which introduces a new problem.

There are a collection of places in space around the earth relative to the moon, called ‘Lagrange’ points. These are points where the gravitational influences of earth and the moon are such that you can put something into one of those spots and it will remain reasonably close to where you left it relative to the moon and earth. Not all of these spots are ‘perfect’ in that some of these spots are a bit like balancing a ball on a fingertip. Yes you can do it, but gravity is working to move what you put there off of that spot. Some of the spots are ‘stable’ though in that they act a bit more like a bowl. it takes energy to get things that you put into these spots out of them again.

If we just deal with the earth/moon platform we have two things to take into consideration. I’ll leave out the Lagrange point on the far side of the moon, as I don’t think it seems like a great place to be collecting power for the earth. There’s this rather large object in the way of getting the power back. So we have two issues. The period of the orbit for these spots. Call it 29 days (and a bit more.) The other issue is the speed of rotation of the earth itself. At the equator (which currently isn’t a very high demand area for power, the surface is moving about 1,000 miles per hour. As you move away from the equator to higher latitudes, you can use trigonometry to calculate what the surface speed is at each of those locations. The important part to remember though is that from an L# spot, any given power destination is a moving target. Well, except for two of them. The North and South poles may very well be good down link sites for space gathered solar power. But then again, neither is exactly positioned well for power distribution.

So the question becomes how much power do we need to beam to these locations? Well, if we continue to use the power in the same way we do today, then let’s presume that the demand is equivalent to the amount of energy that we derive from coal and oil combined. Or do we need to do that? If we are collecting power in space, that means we have the means to do work in space. Why smelt steel on earth when you can do the same in space? Well steel is probably a bad example. but you get the idea. There really are far more resources to work with already in space than we are likely to ever make use of. Everything from asteroids that are as old as the earth, to satellites that have outlived their usefulness and are potential navigational hazards. Except where things work better in a gravity field, there is a lot of potential for manufacturing and refining in space. (by the way, distillation does work better in a gravity field, which doesn’t change the fact that it will be done in a zero or reduced gravity environment as well.

Long term, what is the fly in this ointment? War.

While much of Opec will see a decline as a result of oil field depletion, many are in a great position for gathering solar power. Of course there’s that distribution issue, but I don’t think that’s where they are going to see the biggest problem. The actual issue is that they have to convert from one energy resource to another. And that variety of conversion has never been easy. As a population we tend to avoid major changes if possible. There are people who will never read this post, not because they are not computer literate, or can’t find it, or even have no interest in the topic. There are people who will never read it simply because it is on a computer some place and these people view computers as tools to do calculations, and any other use is silly. I know people who look at Windows as a way to get to DOS where they can do the things they want to do on a computer. Note that these people were the early adopters of their time in that they made use of new tools to do something that would have taken years to do with previous methods but now take seconds of minutes.

At some level there will have to be a global regulating government. Not because people are rebellious, but simply because we will need to have common understanding in how things function together. We’ve already ‘fixed’ some of our infrastructure issues. There are still two primary power systems in use, 110 v 60 hz, and 220v 50 hz. There are some variations on this but those are the two primary solutions. If I buy a computer today in the United States, will I have an issue using it in Germany? Probably not. The switching power supply in use on the computer may need a different AC plug to attach to the local power, but that will cost me less than $10 or the Euro equivalent once I get there. I will probably be able to borrow one from the front desk of the hotel, or get one from my companies on site tech support person. The same is true pretty much anywhere you go on earth. And that tends to apply to other technologies as well.

How is this possible? The International Standards Organization has documented standards for each location, and manufacturers build their equipment to work with those standards. There are exceptions of course, but there always will be. An example from the world of mortars is the 81 mm mortar. It doesn’t exist because it is technologically better than an 80 mm mortar, or can deliver a larger explosion, etc. It exists because the opposing army was using 80 mm mortars. Using an 81mm mortar meant that if we over ran the opposing forces mortar supply lines, we could use the 80 mm mortar shells. If they somehow came into possession of our 81 mm shells, they are pretty much useless to them, as they won’t fit in the mortar tube. This is an example of building a technical platform so that your opponent can’t take advantage of you the way you can take advantage of them. Those same techniques are being used around the world in many fields.

How does this lead to war? We are going to continue to treat resources as scarce, and as a result we will end up attempting to force other people to make those resources available to us, and they will continue to try to make our resources available to them. We’ve been pretty much fighting one war or another for over 10,000 years. I don’t think anything we do now with the peace process is going to change that.