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Bird Tale

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Maybe there’s someone out there who can explain this. As I mentioned a few days ago, we spent the weekend in Vermont. Yesterday morning, I went out onto the deck of the house where we were staying and there was this little bird, sitting on the deck, who didn’t move a muscle when I approached. It looked like it was in a bit of a daze. This picture was taken from approximately 3 inches away from it.

We were afraid that a funeral was in store. The bird sat there for half an hour; then suddenly gave itself a shake and flew away. We later saw a bird of his/her description eating from the bird feeder, looking perfectly chipper. One of our friends speculated that he may have stunned himself by slamming against the window or house.

Anyway, I was ever so glad it was not a terminal case, since I could see I would be designated to dispose of the corpse.


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Numerical illiteracy

Monday, July 20, 2009

We get the Boston Globe daily, so I was generally aware that there is a movement afoot to relieve us geezers of our driver’s licenses as we get older. Yesterday, an article in the Day, at least on the surface, seemed to imply that there was little evidence that the elderly driver was a threat.

The headline read: “Elderly drivers in fewer accidents than others“. The sub-headine, if that’s what it called, pointed out that “Statistics don’t change push to change law”. The clear implication was that elderly drivers are statistically less likely to get into accidents than others.

But as has been said, there are three kinds of liars, the last of which is “statistics”. The first 17 paragraphs of the story make a compelling case, if you are numerically illiterate, that the elderly driver is not more likely to get into an accident than others. According to statistics, elderly drivers account for a smaller percentage of accidents than drivers in other age groups because while licensed geezers over 75 were 7 percent of those holding a license, they were only 3.6 percent of those involved in crashes.

These and other meaningless statistics lead some clueless experts, such as Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, to say that “there isn’t much evidence that elderly drivers are a big menace to other people on the road.”

Well, I’m not yet in the older than 75 category, but my mother is. She owns a car that is over 20 years old, which she bought new. It has less than 40,000 miles on it. These days, she might average 10 miles a week. I drive at least 10 to 20 times as much as she does. If she is one licensed driver, than I should count as 10 to 20 drivers in any reasonable comparison. Lots of elderly people have licenses but don’t drive at all. They should count as zero licensed drivers. It seems fairly obvious that simply looking at the percentage figures for various age groups tells you almost nothing.

Sure enought, in the 21st paragraph, long after most readers have moved elsewhere, we get to the nitty gritty:

[O]n the basis of miles driven, which the state does not track, the GAO found that drivers age 75 or older are more likely than all other drivers to be involved in fatal crashes The GAO report did not track nonfatal crashes.

So, the long and the short of it is that if you look at the only statistics that matter, the statistics disprove the headline. Geezers may be in numerically fewer accidents than others, but if they drive, they are more likely to get in an accident.

I’m not suggesting any particular course of action regarding elderly drivers. It’s a complicated issue, particularly in our car-centric society. I am merely pointing out that we can’t debate these issues in any reasonable fashion if we don’t understand basic math. I don’t know if this inability to understand basic mathematical or logical propositions is a peculiarly American phenomenon, but it is certainly not amelioriated by newspaper articles that misread statistics to prove a point that is simply not proven by the numbers on which they rely.


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Art on Groton Bank-hiatus for me

Saturday, July 18, 2009

A few pictures from the Art on Groton Bank Exhibit today. An overview, with our historic Monument in the background.

Cows.

A collaborative effort, made on the spot. Is this a case of too many cooks?

Though not strictly part of the show, there is a piece of art in that vicinity that we take for granted. The BIll Library is an architectural gem.

We didn’t buy a painting this year, but I got a great deal on a piece of pottery.

Tomorrow morning my wife and I take off for a mini-vacation in Vermont. We’ll be back Tuesday. My guess is that we’ll have no internet in the meantime, so this site is probably closing for a few days.


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Merrick Alpert doubles his contributions

Saturday, July 18, 2009

In for a dime, in for a dollar. Merrick Alpert donated almost twice as much to his campaign as all his other contributors put together.

At least Merrick is putting his money where his mouth is.

It’s sometimes forgotten that Merrick isn’t the only Democrat seeking to primary Dodd. According to Opensecrets.org, Roger Pearson has more money on hand than Merrick, but it’s obvious that they don’t have the latest information on Pearson’s finances.


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Health Care

Saturday, July 18, 2009

For reasons I can’t fathom, one of my reader’s comments are being blocked. I certainly didn’t do it, and I can’t figure out how to stop it. He emailed the comment to me after it was blocked, so I’m reproducing it below. If anyone else has had this problem I would appreciate it if they could email direct to me. If I have to disable the spam blocker, I’ll do that.

Here’s the comment, which is on the health care debate.

One element of the debate is, rarely, if ever, mentioned in specific terms is our current inventory of skills and hospitals. Do we have a sufficient supply of Doctors and if more are needed, where would they come from and where would they go? As a model, I think the local Pequot clinic is ideal in conjunction with larger hospitals. Is this model suitable for other parts of the country? If we could suggest some details, the debate would have more meaning.


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Friday Night Music-Double Header

Friday, July 17, 2009

My younger son is visiting this weekend, and I asked him to recommend some music for tonight. These videos don’t quite qualify under my usual guidelines, as neither are live performances, but rules are for breaking, or at least bending.

Rather than choose between his suggestions, I’m posting both.

Yo La Tengo:

And Pearl Jam


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Joe Courtney on the “Ed Show”

Friday, July 17, 2009


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The argument in a nutshell

Friday, July 17, 2009

Stephen Colbert and/or his staff of writers is brilliant. Here he precisely summarizes the anti-Sotomayor argument from the right.


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Lost Rivers

Friday, July 17, 2009

Today’s Times reports that there’s a world wide movement to liberate the rivers that flow through many of the world’s cities. Over the course of the last century many were covered with concrete.

When I was a kid there were sections of the Park (or Hog, depending on your taste) River that were still running free in Hartford. By the time I graduated from High School, the river was gone. Mark Twain built his house to evoke a riverboat, with one section resembling the pilot house facing the river, which flowed by his home. The house survives, but the river is gone, except in memories.

There was a brook that flowed near our house on Bulkely Avenue in Hartford, which is also now completely covered. It’s hard to understand the mindset that led to the burying of all those rivers. No doubt it’s part of our compulsion to try to control by brute force.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Hartford recaptured its rivers and streams, or at least some of them. When we made the city more livable for the automobile, we made it less livable for people. In Hartford, the burial of the rivers was only a small part of the overall plan to drive people out of the city. The river that used to split the city was covered with concrete, and at the same time the city was split anew, with dire results, by the interstates that cut the city off from the Connecticut River and split the city in two from the east to the west. If there had been a conscious plot to destroy the city, it wouldn’t have had to change the Hartford Redevelopment plan a bit.


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Do not get a Blackberry

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

A product review. This is by way of venting, so feel free to ignore.

Last month I mentioned that I got a Blackberry, through my place of employment and “free” to me. Having had the device for a month I think I have enough experience to ask this question: What is wrong with all those Blackberry fans? Can they really be addicted to using this piece of crap?

I actually have a theory about that, which I will explore briefly at the end of this post.

First, some background information for anyone who doesn’t know what a Blackberry is.

A Blackberry can do anything an Iphone can do, only worse. It can synchronize with your office email and calendar, if your IT person can figure out the settings to make it function. Otherwise, like us, you will find that you can’t enter an appointment on the Blackberry with any confidence that it will show up on your computer. My wife’s Iphone, by contrast, synchronizes perfectly through Apple’s MobileMe service.

There are scores of third party apps for the Blackberry, which you can find at Blackberry’s impossible to use app store. Downloading is an absolute pleasure. All you have to do is choose to download the program of your choice and then answer a series of questions querying whether you really want to grant the new app permission to access various functions on the Blackberry. Naturally, the consequences of any given answer are not explained, and the function names are indecipherable. Of course you always answer yes, so the point of the exercise is lost on any sane mind, except, no doubt, that of a corporate lawyer.

You can play music on a Blackberry, if you don’t mind the fact that it can’t seem to manage to keep track of the music you’ve put on it. Tracks disappear from the media player for no reason. Periodically, I’ve noticed it refreshing itself, and the tracks re-appear, only to disappear again shortly thereafter. The music is there, but you can’t find it to play it.

Finally, as I mentioned in a previous post, application memory is limited to 128 mb, despite the fact that my Blackberry comes with 1 GB of on-board memory and an 8GB mini-SD card. I’ve added three apps, which I use rarely. For whatever reason, and my web wanderings lead me to believe this is a common problem, application memory fills up simply with use of the product. Yesterday I couldn’t make a phone call because the application memory was full. I verified that fact in the “Options” program. I rebooted the device, and checked again. I now had 26 mb of free application memory. That’s not a memory leak; it’s a memory gusher. And how did I manage to re-boot? Is there a reset button or a key combination that does the trick? Of course not. The only way to re-boot is to remove the battery, replace it, and wait an interminable length of time for the device to come back to life. How can something so elementary as a reset process be left out? I’ve had Palm Pilots and Ipods; my wife has an Iphone. They all have simple reset methods.

When PCs first came out, IBM machines took a commanding lead among the corporate crowd because IBM was a safe choice. It’s machines were rarely as good as those of its competitors, but no one was going to get fired for buying IBM. The Blackberry is a corporate favorite, and I’m now convinced it’s for similar reasons. It was the first device down the pike, and it’s considered the safe and right choice for corporate America.

As I said, my wife has an Iphone. Downloading apps is simple. It plays music. The web browser works well. She has never experienced memory leaks. She could load a thousand programs on it, if she was so inclined. She’s never had to wait to make a phone call while she watches a little clock face circle endlessly while the device desperately tries to find available memory that’s been filled with God knows what. And, if something does go wrong, she can re-boot it with an easy key combination, and in a few seconds, she’s back in business. My guess is that the Pre, from Palm, works just as well.

So, you are probably asking: Okay, John, tell us what you really think. Would you recommend a Blackberry to a friend?

No, but I might give it to an enemy.


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