Ellipsis: Category Musings

Oscon 2008 Day One report

Peter Burkholder — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:03:00 -0700

Outbound: Spotted at least two OSCON attendees at Dulles Airport. One carrying a dynamic OLED keyboard (Optimus Maximus) that can display different character set imaginable (well, 113 different ones at least), another hard at work on her OLPC XO. I’m sure there were others, but better camouflaged. The flight was late, and cramped, and I was keenly aware of United’s 33-inch seat pitch versus the 33 inches one gets on Frontier Airlines.

The keyboard bearer was one convivial Jacob coming in from http://www.thinkgeek.com, and we together figured out the Max light rail in towards the convention center.

Monday: At breakfast I got an inkling that OSCON attendees are more sociable than their USENIX/SAGE counterparts. At least it wasn’t pulling teeth to engage in a conversation. Joel Noble of Caring Family described his group’s project to bring social networking to the elderly via simple pen & paper interfaces. Fred Meyer of USA Today was from my neck of the woods, and a fellow bike commuter, and we ended up walking Portland in the evening. As for the sessions….

Mastering Perl: brian d foy got down to some essentials of his book of the same name. Takeaways: Profiling can be useful, Benchmarking is less useful than one thinks (unless done correctly). Configuration is good. As is logging and persistence.

I then succumbed to my passions instead of my rational side—and jumped into the Arduino tutorial “Making Things Blink”. What a trip! Michael Dory, Adam Simon, and Scott Varland took us on a whirlwind introduction of the remarkably intuitive Arduino microcontroller system. Their kit included the Arduino Diecimila board, a interface shield, microbreadboard, LEDs, potentiometers, wiring, and force transducers. Oh, and a copy of “Making Things Talk” by Tom Igoe. Soon I was tweaking their circuit and code examples to implement my own riffs on their tutorial project, and by the end I had completed their digital ‘Etch-a-Sketch’ project

I’m excited to do more—and not for any practical reason. It’s just somehow exciting to get back to hardware, real transistors, resistors and diodes, after a generation of computing advances have made hardware less and less accessible at any level beyond swapping out whole components.

Peter out.

Tornado (but only an EF1)

Peter Burkholder — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:18:00 -0700

On Sunday, April 20, our family joined some friends at a local indoor splash pool. We were expecting nothing but rain, rain, and more rain, and needed to get the kids good and worn out.

The boys had a great time, and had finally gotten up the gumption to go through the giant slide that started up near the facility ceiling, did a figure 8 outside, and landed with a splash into the bottom pool. We were waiting in line for our third run when I commented to Shannen that it looked like it was raining buckets outside. Just then we could see the weather going crazy, with sheets of rain slashing horizontally and the trees doing a crazy dance. I shouted to Shannen to take cover, and we were running down the stairs each with one boy when the lifeguards starting blowing on their whistles to clear the pool.

What I thought was just a severe thunderstorm was an EF1 tornado that missed us by 150 feet.

Here’s a link to local TV report on the Maryland weather. Skip the first half of the story to get to the part about the Chillum, Maryland tornado.

VIDEO

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE REPORT

MY GOOGLE MAP—I went to the splash park today to map this out. Because we left on Sunday through the front, we didn’t see what had happened out on the back parking lot. If you zoom in, you can see the outside loop of the blue tube slide:

Since we were just a few feet below the roof, I shudder to think what would’ve come of us had it been our roof that came off instead.

Set phasers on kill

Peter Burkholder — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:39:00 -0800

The first time I ever used a computer was the Friday after Thanksgiving, 1978, when I got to use the DEC PDP 11/70 system on the campus of Goshen College, where my Dad taught. I was immediately entranced by the power and mystery of the digital computer, and quickly hooked on trek

Today, 29 years later, I’ve found that Trek lives on, and I could obtain C-code for Mac OS X that provided an experience akin to my first experience long ago, without having to bike two miles into campus. It took me about 40 minutes to gain enough competence to win my first game by destroying four enemies.

(S)Icky Urban Moms

Peter Burkholder — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:44:00 -0700

In the last few days I’ve been perusing the DC Urban Moms site trying to track down a childcare situation for my younger son that isn’t as depressing as his current one. Although I try to stay focused on the task at hand, I have a hard time not getting distracted by the gorge-inducing discussions on hiring admission consultants for preschool at Sidwell Friends or today’s doozy on avoiding vaccinations. I couldn’t hold my tounge and had to respond to this:

I know that there is not currently clear scientific support for the autism theory or any other negative effects from the recommended vaccine schedule. But it just seems like a lot to me and with all the anecdotal evidence … I’d rather be safe than sorry, particularly since it doesn’t hurt anything to delay them.

with this:

Doesn’t hurt anything to delay them….unless your child dies.
There are several things that trouble me about this thread. One issue is the weighing of anecdotal vs. statistical evidence (and evaluation of risk), the second issue is ethical.

With regards to evidence and risk, the hesitation seems to be based on unsubstantiated ties to autism, or substantiated but rare adverse reactions. With respect to MMR, note that as recently as the 1989-1991, 123 children died from measles (“http://www.metrokc.gov/health/immunization/compare.htm”). In 1994, and outbreak leading to 294 cases started among skiers at Breckenridge, so it ‘snot just the hoi polloi who are susceptible (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00032422.htm). More outbreaks are listed at http://www.cdc.gov/nip/diseases/measles/history.htm#global

In contrast to the real chances of catching the disease, especially in DC with the large population of people travelling worldwide, the adverse reactions are in the 1 in 1,000,000 range (ibid, metrokc.gov). Frankly, if kids of DCUM aren’t getting vaccinated, then you should list that in your playgroup info so you stay away from each other. The risks from measles alone are real and the evidence is hard to deny.
The ethical issue regards herd immunity. If immunity rates are over 94% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity) then measles won’t be able to spread through a population. In the case where a vaccination poses a remote risk of side effects, it’s tempting to forgo the vaccination and rely on immunity of the herd to protect you. However, if the immunity level falls below a certain threshold (somewhere between 83% and 94%) then all the unimmunized are at risk. By choosing to delay or avoid a vaccine, you risk pushing the immunization rate below that threshold, and you are putting at risk just not your own child, but all those who could not get vaccinated or for whom the vaccine did not provide immunity. And that just seems wrong.