Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

This struck me as an example of how statistics can be used to reach any conclusion, especially if we don't pay close attention. Yesterday's Associated Press had an AP Impact story about the missteps of the Cash for Clunkers program. Titled Clunker Pickups Traded for New Pickups, the scandalous exposé reveals some dirty laundry from the now-discontinued government stimulus program. In particular, the report focuses on transactions where the new vehicle purchased got the same or only marginally better gas mileage (and, in a few cases, worse mileage) than the "clunker" being traded in.

The most common deals under the government's $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, aimed at putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road, replaced old Ford or Chevrolet pickups with new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by The Associated Press.

The opening statement "The most common deals…" implies that most of the transactions of the program failed to yield an improvement in fuel mileage, one of the intentions of the program (in addition to trying to boost the economy and assist the ailing auto industry). But another report, this one citing a Washington Post summary of the program, states: "The average clunker traded-in, the Post reports, had an EPA fuel economy rating of 15.8 miles per gallon. The average new car purchased, 24.9 - an improvement of 9.1 miles per gallon."

Going back to the AP Impact report, the press release continues:

In scores of deals, the government reported spending a total of $562,500 in rebates for new cars and trucks that got worse or the same mileage as the trade-ins — in apparent violation of the program's requirements. The government said it is investigating those reports and said in some cases they were probably entered incorrectly by dealers or based on outdated fuel economy figures.

This is a program that involved some 690,000 transactions (according to US News and World Report) and nearly $3 billion in government disbursements. It seems to me that "scores" (a score being roughly 20) of transactions involving just over half a million dollars out of $2.88 billion is a fantastic success rate; it's the exception that proves the rule.

But the reporter has his teeth in the issue and will not be swayed:

The new data, obtained by the AP under the Freedom of Information Act, include details of 677,081 clunker trade-ins processed by the government through Oct. 16. More than 95,000 of the new vehicles purchased under the program — or about one in seven — got less than 20 mpg, according to the data.

Yeah, this hard-hitting investigation dug deep, having to invoke the Freedom of Information Act to get at the sordid truth! But to my almost innumerate brain, that sounds like six out of seven purchases were of cars getting more than 20 mpg. That sounds like success to me. And there is no mention of the composite mileage of the clunkers traded in on the sub-20-mpg cars. A 14 mpg truck traded on a 19 mpg truck would be something over a 30% improvement while still earning a berth on the AP blacklist.

I don't want to rush to support the yahoo who used the program to buy a new Hummer or who drives a big 4WD pickup for no apparent reason, but it seems short-sighted to assume that everybody trading a pickup for a new pickup is doing so for illegitimate reasons. My brother, for example, works in construction and needs a pickup. Had he purchased a new one under this program he would be among those lynched by this AP Impact report.

It's absolutely proper that the program be scrutinized and reported upon, and I'm pleased to hear that there is some government follow-up on those transactions that do not appear to meet the program guidelines. But this all seems very routine; meanwhile, the AP Impact report seems like an exercise in reverse-think, like a journalism school assignment where one is asked to take facts and make them convincingly say the opposite of what they conclude. It's reality TV in print form: a story specifically tailored to push people's angry buttons, a tactic that amounts to the core operating principle (if you can call it that) at Faux News.

We've had far too much fear- and hate-mongering masquerading as journalism; a misleading dispatch like this --from the AP of all sources--only panders to frothing and willfully misinformed troglodytes who already exert entirely too much influence over our news coverage.

(PS: I remember a similar-toned story in the tabloid USA Today from a decade ago. Showing a large graphic automobile fuel gauge with the needle on E, the headline shouted "Flying on Empty?" The story went on to tell--shockingly!--that in something like the preceding nine years 10 or 12 aircraft had "pushed back from the gate without enough fuel to get to their destination... and four of them took off!" No crashes, no fatalities, no injuries. Just a desperate Glenn-Beck-like attempt to sell papers by appealing to base fear and personal safety. I remember thinking that that statistic was, in reality, an amazing endorsement of the safety measures currently in place; few industries could boast such a performance--think of the number of departures in that time!--yet here was "The Nation's Newspaper" finding terror in a sunny day. I realized then that we have no reason to think they're doing a better job on subjects with which we are unfamiliar than the butchery I routinely see them perform on subjects where I DO know a thing or two. I've not purchased one since.)

The Meaning of Words

Courtesy of Sam Harris:

The core of science is not the mathematical model; it's intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

Scott Adams has a post up today on his Dilbert Blog asking what qualifies as a mental problem. The question arises, evidently, from a vigorous hurling of shit in the comment section of one of his recent posts. His standard practice is to say something interesting or provocative and then let the comments fly. Myself, I can't imagine anything less gratifying than having to read three or four hundred comments from the unfiltered internet. (It's not sour grapes: I'd love to have 300 comments, but I know they won't but a few of them be thoughtful comments; the rest is just stupid noise.)

This past week or so I was commenting on several atheism-related posts on Cyberkitten's blog, and there began the usual slide which, left unchecked, would have soon found us in a fit of junior-high name calling. Jeffy (very rightly) emailed me to gently inquire, in effect, what possible outcome I was expecting from this interaction. He himself was quite tempted to respond to the other commenter, to a pretty forceful statement of a quite unsupportable argument. But he was able to realize that no argument, no matter how logical or air-tight, could possibly change the commenter's mind. Indeed, the whole motivation of the commenter was to protect and defend their faith. In this case, with this commenter, the very discussion was absolutely pointless.

He's 100% correct, I know. I can see this quite clearly when it's laid before me. But I guess I have enough stupid debater in me that it's still almost impossible not to want to make an answer to these comments, to try and show this person where their logical errors lie. I've seen a zillion times people descend into name-calling and silly invective, the emotional lashing-out in a desperate bid for supremacy--or even to just have the last word. It's a colossal waste of time: if reason was not used to reach one's conclusions--and if reason is pointedly not needed to retain one's beliefs; indeed, if reason is looked upon as insidious and harmful!--then no reason will change that person's mind.

If I think about these things for very long, I inevitably find myself down at the bedrock of words and language and meaning. I want to believe that "truth" is an unambiguous word, that "evidence" and "proof" are not malleable terms. Yet both sides of any debate on religion use these words as properly in their domain. Can this be correct? I'm not really asking seriously, I guess. I know that what a religious person calls a "truth" does not pass muster in a scientific way, that truth is often confused with hope, evidence with desire. This is a corruption of these words, a misuse if the words are to retain their most basic meaning. A scientist rarely uses these terms, since science deals in provisional knowledge. While there ARE truths, more often there are supported, provisional conclusions. The scientist learns to be content with this.

When I listen to a person making religious arguments, I know that there is an aspect of debate going on, an element of semantic skill and maneuvering about the gray areas of language. Discussion is rarely conducted in a level way with an eye on simple logic and on examination and weighing of evidence. (This differs fundamentally from a discussion between science folks.) Rather, we necessarily enter the realm of opinion and advocacy; there is a sense of strategy and cunning, of tactics being employed toward some kind of victory. Big, unknowable things are assumed and the ball is run from there. There is an overwhelming, foundational sense of people wanting to preserve and protect what they believe and think. On the unmoderated forums of the internet, you find this stance on both sides, which is exactly what makes it so pointless. But the whole thing is pointless if either side is mired down in this way. Emotional involvement and attachment is something unavoidably human, and the great value of the scientific method is that it divorces our knowledge of our world from our desires and needs. WANTING a thing to be true is an impediment to our LEARNING what IS, in fact, true.

This should be Axiom No. 1

The Colonies At Night

(Disclaimer: This photo is not Philadelphia. This photo is San Francisco. The post is not about SFO. But the only photos I could rip off find of PHL were not germane to this post. This photo of SFO is not really germane to this post. The post itself is not germane to much of anything.)



I noticed on our descent into PHL last night that the view out the window here is markedly different from what we see around, say, Chicago. At night, big geographical features--lakes or rivers or steep hills or whatever--are always visible because of their impact on the patterns of lights from the civilization on them. But in the Midwest, the lakes are an aberration, a break from an established, large-scale grid to which everything else conforms. This is especially visible from 35,000 feet on a clear night, where major freeways and the towns they connect can be seen extending off for a hundred miles. Out East things are different. Apparently, somewhere between the layings out of Philadelphia and Omaha somebody discovered the compass and surveying. Last night we began our descent into Philly with a cloud layer beneath us, obscuring everything; then at about 15,000 feet we emerged from the clouds, and I was suddenly aware of the complete randomness of everything that meets the eye.

(Still not PHL. Istanbul stands in for old school)

The major roads do not align to any cardinal compass point--hell, they don't even go in a straight line for more than a short distance. The minor roads do not show any pattern whatsoever. It's like looking into a formicary. The patterns of lights, big and small, appear almost entirely random. The towns themselves often reveal a grid pattern, but the grids are much less regular than one sees in the Midwest; blocks have more irregular shapes, and the whole business almost never aligns N-S / E-W. Or worse, there are little grids for different sections of the same town, and each section's grid does not align with the adjacent grids, leaving sections between them where everything is katty-wampus. It's evidence of planning, but not planning with an overseer. It's like each section was designed with its own little chieftain in charge.

I have often fantasized about what it would be like to see the world age backward 10,000 years while we were flying overhead. Of course, if we were flying at night we'd quickly see the light patterns shrink and evaporate, seeing less and less until there was nothing to see at all (except maybe the occasional witch-burning pyre). But I suspect that in daylight we'd see that these modern roads followed roughly the same paths 200 or 300 years ago, which is why it all looks so unplanned today. And that makes me think of what it was like to navigate from place to place in colonial days (and before), what it was to travel. One walked long distances, or rode a horse or carriage (which moved at a walking pace), and presumably one followed a two-track or, at best, a gravel path. You would have little assurance that you had not wandered off course, except for hand-printed signs nailed to a tree, or the occasional inn where you could ask directions. Even the business of running an inn without electricity or food service would be another world from our modern experience. Without phones, travelers were simply out of contact most of the time, and getting assistance while traveling would be quite another matter from today.

(Minneapolis to about NYC. PHL is in there near the photo's center)

And, to complete my little digression insanity, we can step back further yet and try and decipher what an alien intelligence could glean from the light patterns we see at night from high above. We generate power; we are constantly on the move; we are social; we cultivate; we spread and conquer (and, probably, we're fucking up our planet). The front office of a jet is the perfect place to contemplate these things, because the scope of what we can see is so vastly beyond anything we experience on the ground. On a clear night we can take in hundreds, maybe thousands, of square miles with a sweep of the eyes. It's like being on the 5,000th floor.

I've often wanted to take pictures and post them, but it would really take special equipment to capture the view--a video camera panning from side to side, and then something wide-angle and high resolution. My little camera phone has its limits (to say nothing of company strictures about such things).

Requiem For Classical Music

Tower Records is dead. Long live Tower Records. I'm in Philly for the week (well, I'm starting in PHL, we'll see where we end up by week's end), and our hotel is right near Broad Street, where there is a large, two-level Tower Records. I'm accustomed to supplementing my CD collection on each visit to PHL, as I so rarely get to a place where one can buy classical music (and until somebody finds a better interface, it sucks to shop for classical music online). This place has a world-class orchestra, and the population to support it, and so conditions for the proper care and feeding of decent classical music stores are right.

But I made a bee line there this morning, and the store is... gone. Well, it's actually being converted to an FYE store, with big banners in the windows boasting what will be the area's largest selection of used CDs. Given the character of the FYE that just closed in our mall in Appleton, I'm just not getting a good vibe from this. There's a Borders books & music across the street, with no better a classical selection than what I find in the Barnes & Noble in Appleton. Now my Tower Records locations in New York, Chicago AND Philly have gone dodo. So maybe I should have titled this post "Requiem for Tower Records."

But I fear the phenomenon is larger than the demise of one retailer.

I understand that web shopping has made it difficult for the average CD retailer to keep anything like a decent selection of classical recordings on hand. The catalog, first of works themselves, and then of recordings of those works, is absolutely daunting, and it's a rare recording that might be called high-volume. Indeed, most of these recordings, even in a busy store, will collect some dust before limping off the shelves. So it's a niche market.

But I would have thought that these three cities--NYC, Chicago, PHL--would have had exactly the concentration of classical music buyers to make keeping physical stock a viable business proposition. I mean, they're not shipping many copies of Jeanne Demessieux's Choral Preludes to, say, Crawford, TX; the buyers are in the big cities where the orchestras and ensembles and concert series are.

I suppose it's an easy enough proposition to look at classical CD sales. This figure seems a better indication to me than orchestra endowments, which have a novelty and social (and "society") aspect to them, whereas the CDs are how a modern person will immerse themselves in this repertoire. But there's little succor to be gained in this search. I didn't find the figures I was looking for in my brief search, but just asking the question was like lifting the corner of a tourniquet to see if the bleeding has stopped. The rush of blood spurts out sickeningly.

I've been aware of the Grim Reaper's shadow on this corner of my passion for years, but it's nipping rather close now when my favorite outlets are evaporating before my eyes. And it all raises questions which I am nowhere near able to answer. I've always known that there's something stagnant about an immersion in thinking from 300 years ago. It's not that Bach is not brilliant, nor even that he's not relevant, exactly. On the contrary, I'm thrilled and moved and amazed by the workings of his mind on a daily basis. But there's no escaping that he was the best of his age, and that music has moved on to other things, to other great minds, to new horizons. He died in seventeen-frickin'-fifty.

I don't know; maybe currency has nothing to do with it. A great idea is no less great for having been dreamed up a long time ago. And music is abstract, so maybe the whole idea of currency kind of flies out the window here (or should). Our ear is never just our ear. The "ear," of course, is really our brain. And classical music as a field of study is really just the human intellect applied to our collected knowledge about composed (as opposed to spontaneous) music. I think it's this consideration, this working-out of ideas that draws me to this music. There's a history involved, with its parallels to other artistic fields and to the rest of human history. We have basic rules that have been codified and amended and evolved over several centuries to bring us to our present day, and we can immerse ourselves in this history and find it moving and enriching and gratifying as a study of human thinking.

My musical mind --my ear--is able to process music from a century or two before Bach up to about the middle of last century. There are plenty of present-day movie scores that parade 19th Century music around in late 20th Century clothing, but I don't think anyone considers this a leading edge of MUSICAL evolution. But it does demonstrate that mine is not the only ear that has not been trained to deal with newer musical milieux. But there it is. I'm on board with Debussy and Ravel and Hindemith and bits of Shostakovich; I can get along very well with early Messiaen; and organ-specific composers like Vierne and Duruflé and Widor I adore. But along comes Schoenberg and Berg and Messiaen's forays into birdsong and I'm just not able to enthrall at these as musical phenomena. Guys like Rachmaninov were derided as having been born in the wrong century, his popularity be damned. Real innovation was going on elsewhere. And so at some point the leading edge of intellectual concert music left behind the predominant intellectual background of its listeners, and became a field of specialists--not just for music production (which has been a specialist endeavor for a long time), but for music consumption as well. The masses were left with the digestible conservatism of rock and roll--mostly mundane music which made its innovation in social fields: parading around in androgynous clothing with the bludgeoning dazzle of pyrotechnics and great volume. (If you're REALLY conservative in your tastes you get the suffocating inanity of... country!)

I'm joking, of course. Kind of. There have been undeniable expressions of human greatness and emotional vitality in many fields of popular music, and maybe we all just need to embrace what we've moved on to--where we are NOW (indeed, that's what pretty much all of us have done). But it's not the same thing; it doesn't tickle the same region of the brain, sometimes not anywhere near it.

Is it just my bad fortune that I happen to value having a part of my brain tickled that (almost) nobody else gives a damn about?

Farewell, Tower Records. I did what I could to keep ye afloat.

(I'm listening to a lush and haunting choral piece of Alexander Gretchaninov as I write this, and he understands me perfectly!)

I Wanna Crya

When I look at my sitemeter, I find a large proportion of the barely-double-digit visitors I have each day have found their way to the hallowed halls of Journal Wunelle by way of a Google search for "I wanna singa."

What the fuck?

I have never, prior to this present post, written the words I wanna singa. On this blog or anywhere else. Ever. It seems that a commenter of old wrote the words in response to this post a year ago about Looney Tunes, and that now seems to be the handle by which the great unwashed masses have found their way, two-by-two, Noah's Silly Ark style, to our door.

After all the posts about Douglas's fabulous DC-8, about all the angry W-bashing, all the bad cameraphone photos of architectural detritus strewn about the country, it appears I will go down in a sub-footnote of internet history as the guy who let someone else write "I wanna singa" on his blog.

(Now I'm really gonna get the hits.)

You Know What Gets My (pet) Goat?

OK, I suppose it's my conceit to think with any given post that I've brought some unique perspective to bear upon whatever trifle caught my attention. And I suppose I might just as often be an ignorant horse's ass. But this time I'm admitting to being an ignorant horse's ass up front. I'm about to spout off about something of which I admit PREEMPTIVELY I know not a damn thing.

There, I said it.

I was listening to NPR's "Marketplace," a daily show about financial things, and the host, some slick, 30-something dude named "Kai," was pontificating about the day's stock market performance (which they call, with self-congratulatory swagger, ...wait for it... "doing the numbers").

I'll try to paraphrase: "The Dow was pretty flat today on news of the government's pending third quarter productivity reports, which are expected to come in somewhere around half a percent below expectations; that caused an early rally to run out of steam, though some strength was regained at the end of the day after news of Kirk Kerkorian's sale of additional GM shares..." And on and on in similar fashion for the whole hour long show.

And the whole time I was thinking: You know what, dude? You don't know SHIT about what those stock market numbers mean. OK, I don't know shit about any of it, but I don't think you do either, and neither does most everybody else that dabbles in this bullshit. Who gives a fuck about productivity figures (or whatever the hell it was)? What does it even mean in a way that translates to anything human? Who even knows about the existence of these reports except a small group of people telling each other what they should or shouldn't like? One can hear, night after night, this stupid program interviewing one brown-nosed "analyst" after another about what this bevy of arcane flotsam means--because it's all so far from obvious to the rest of us--and it all sounds like a bunch of salesman-slick doubletalk, a mumbling wad of pseudo-speak. One would do equally well to read tea leaves or to gaze into a crystal ball. The whole setup seems like a grand, ritualized, business-suited circle-jerk, a kind of ongoing orgiastic, self-referential congratulatory frat party that appeals to a certain kind of money-grubbing lower tier mind who is convinced that he and his ilk are "players" and are responsible for making the world go round (and should be compensated accordingly).

This little snitty personal moment of mine led me, after breathing deeply from a paper sack, to ponder a reacquaintance I made a few days back. This acquaintance--not a friend, but somebody I kind of knew second-hand thru a close friend--had recently gone in a short span of time from the very edge of bankruptcy to renewed prosperity, a kind of riches-to-rags-to-riches-again story. Last I had heard, a couple years back, he was about to lose everything to a series of shady dealings by which he had backed himself into a corner. When I inquired now about how the fall had come, I was only a little surprised to hear that the phoenix had risen to even greater heights, somehow (yet again) bypassing that inconvenient ashes stage altogether.

This person has always struck me as the quintessential business type, the kind of person who listens to this above tripe and uses the information to bilk somebody. The guy had always been the proponent of the Big Deal, someone who deals with big debts, big risks and big payoffs. And when things went sour, well, the genius was in getting someone else's money to go down the drain, in getting someone else to take the fall. Instead of a pair of striped pyjamas, our hero is suddenly in possession of several impressive new personal properties scattered about the country (including shiny new wheels and strategic investment properties for each of the kids) and a renewed, jet-setting lifestyle. And not surprisingly, I learned that his super-lucrative new job involves titles and duties which are probably arcane and gaseous to Joe Consumer. He is some kind of Portfolio Manger now, some Asset Allocation Blah-Blah Specialist Whatever, whose work commanded an impressive salary.

In my bottomless pit of cynicism, I couldn't help but decide I'd been duped not to expect this all along: the guy whose contribution to society is least comprehensible--and, I might argue, would be least missed if he vanished--is most grotesquely compensated, compensated in a way that breaks entirely from any reality a working stiff could comprehend. During the business downturn of the past five years, story after story finds the top brass making huge salaries and obscene bonuses for heading companies which are losing vast sums of money. Failing executives are let go, punished with cumbersomely bloated severence packages. The guy throwing bags at United Airlines is just shit out of luck.

This all dovetails nicely with my utter incomprehension about the sanctity of stockholders in our present business model (a sanctity reinforced again and again during the hour of "Marketplace"). The stock price--which, near as I can tell, is merely an indicator of the general public's view of the merit of a company (after, that is, the huge initial fund raising of the IPO)--seems to have become the bottom line for business here; everybody--manager and peon alike, though the managers seem to have a nice insulating layer of blubber--appear to be in the service of supporting the stock price. Unless to add an additional set of smoke & mirrors between voting stockholder and overcompensated executive, I have yet to figure out why this business model has taken over from a simple supply-and-demand marketplace.

Is this naive of me? Would a jumbo jet ever get built without this kind of self-proclaimed mover & shaker? Would there be skyscrapers? Is there some seminal dreamer buried in there who has brought us medicine and advanced technology? Or is it just a slice of bell curve mediocrity playing a game of "Make Your Mark"? When the incomprehensibility (to me) of it seems to blur with the line between Have and Have Not, I fear the worst.

Variations on a Theme of Solitude

I read an article in today's Milwaukee paper about some recent study which shows that we are, as a society, becoming, well, less and less social. We tend to have fewer people than even 20 years ago to whom we can unburden ourselves about sensitive or personal issues. The study said, I believe, that whereas in 1985 we averaged three close friends per person, that number has now fallen, on average, to two. And 25% of us now identify ourselves as having no one to whom we can talk about big things. A full quarter of the population. Then, as I drove down to KY, I heard a story about this same study on NPR, and the guest said that these average numbers were arrived at by some rather appalling extremes. The populations of the South-central United States, for example, identified themselves as being friendless--as being alone in the world in the most personally-impactful way--to the tune of nearly 50%.

As always, this story tended not to spark in me some meaningful contribution to the subject per se, but rather to raise a bunch of tangential questions in my mind, questions which I then spent the next couple hours mulling over.

I have lived in Appleton now for something like seven years. And while I have become quite close to Susan's parents, and I have made casual acquaintances with my neighbors and various merchants and service people with whom I have regular contact--post office employees and my dry cleaners and so on--I still don't know anyone that I would hang out with when, say, Susan is out of town. When she is occupied, I chat on the phone and spend time around the house by myself. This is a bit odd, even to me. I've never been a casual acquaintance kind of person, tending rather to have a small number of very close friends. And I have four or five quite close friends whom I've known for years and with whom I remain in contact. Our relationships tend to ebb and flow depending on life's circumstances, but there is this small group of people I feel confident will always be there for me should I need them--and vice-versa, of course. And, obviously, my wife is great monkey wrench in this particular equation: my job keeps me away from home a lot (and I count my roommates in KY among my closer friends now), and so I tend to spend every available minute, when I'm at home, with my wife (lest I make it sound like I have no reason to be in Appleton whatsoever).

But for whatever reason, be it my personality or my job or some indefinable thing about Appleton, I'm aware that I have a rather odd social life. My dad has a "coffee club" that he attends most days in the small town in central Minnesota where they live. There are a couple little greasy-spoon cafes in town, and this regular group of guys tends to collect there each late morning like dust bunnies aggregating under a piece of furniture on a hardwood floor. These are all guys he has ridden snowmobiles with over the years, or guys with whom he belonged to the local Lion's club--things of this sort. And his is one of several similar groups that are meeting off and on during the day.

There's a little scene in My Fair Lady where the sun comes up on the bustling market the morning after Eliza Doolittle has her first encounter with 'enry 'iggins: and there among the flower sellers and produce vendors and assorted & sundry peddlers, a community takes shape as people begin crowding into the square to begin their workday. And a group of women are seen gathered around an immense pile of green beans, I think, gabbing and chatting while they clean the veggies for sale. This is fiction, of course, but it mirrors something real in our social make-up. It's like a much-stylized version of simian social grooming. This sitting on front porches or gabbing after church or even gathering around the workplace water cooler serves a vital purpose in exchanging social information. It is an exchange of some currency vital to our functioning as social animals in deep-seated social structures.

I think I have tended for years now to discount this side of myself, and of human nature generally, and this report makes me think about this. I fancy that my own interaction with my very small group of friends is of an altogether more substantive nature than what I'm quick to dismiss as an idle exchange of innuendo and hearsay and useless bullshit. And, for a couple reasons, this tendency of mine has been only exacerbated by my decade and a half in aviation. First, while I genuinely love what I do (and, if I am honest, I place far more stock in being a pilot than I tend to admit, at least to other pilots), I find that most gatherings of pilots involves endless talk about airplanes and swapping of "there I was..." stories. Now, I can join these conversations with the best of them, but I always avoid this. It honestly becomes too much of a good thing to spend all one's work time dealing with airplanes only to then spend one's time not working ALSO talking about airplanes. There are way, way more things in heaven and earth than shiny flying metal tubes, however cool they are. As it is, I give airplanes plenty of time. But also, there is this business of accuracy: I don't know much about much, but I know a thing or two about the field in which I work. And I have found with great consistency over the years that 90% or more of pilot talk turns out to be utterly without foundation. 90+%! So we not only spend all our off-time blabbing about airplane / company / contract stuff, but the huge bulk of this can be counted upon to be untrue!

But maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees. Maybe the value of these gatherings is not to do with the admittedly worthless exchange of factual information: the value is really about forming a community, about making human connections. And while I don't think any revelation that might come to me in this regard will push me over the edge and make me want to snuggle up to this particular group of angry conservative white guys, it does make me think I ought not to turn down my next invitation to a friendly neighborhood card game.

Technology Woes

It's some kind of disease to lust after toys & goodies and then lament all the headaches they bring. But there it is.

So I've spent this week in the self-flagellation of transferring of all my shit from one computer to another. I've done this a few times over the years, and each time it's a bit like reinventing the wheel. But this time I seem to have reached the point where the sheer amount of information being transferred makes it like moving one's household from one place to another--there's just a lot of stuff to rummage through. And none of the moving seems quite as straightforward as it ought to be. I'm very fond of Apple's simplicity generally, but one is reminded again and again that any modern computer is a hydra-headed beast and opportunities to screw up are manifold. Plus, a sojourn down the wrong path is not necessarily rectified by simply turning around and retracing one's steps--a lesson I have learned several times over the past couple days.

Turns out Apple has a nifty little utility called the "migration assistant," which is intended to address exactly these kinds of things. It takes from one computer every setting, every program, every permission, every username and password, and it transfers this stuff to a new computer so that on first power-up it's as comfy as an old pair of slippers. But of course I knew nothing about it, and the new computer's attempt to lead me down the primrose path initially (without identifying the process as "migration assistance") was rejected by me since I was not in the presence of my old machine when I first powered the new one up, and the options presented initially were a) do it now, or b) do everything manually. I learned about the migration assistant from computer guru Jeffy (who also told me that I was quite allowed to use it at a later time) after I had spent two days' worth of flailing about--like walking through a gigantic corn maze--trying to do the same business longhand.

My biggest single item to transfer is my iTunes music file, which adds up to about 45GB, or about 9,000 songs. Part of my reason for getting a new computer (apart from the obvious fun new toy angle) was to get a larger hard drive so that more of my music collection could be put onboard, and thus travel with me. Where I used to listen to music primarily at home or in my car, nowadays my listening is almost entirely on the computer. These 9,000 pieces represent my favorite 25-30% of my total music collection and probably about 50% of what I'd like to have ready access to from my collection. The remaining third or so I'm glad to have as part of my collection, but I listen to only very rarely and don't need to carry it with me.

Well, I've learned the hard way that transferring a file of this size is not simply a matter of dragging an icon (perhaps representing as much data as the entire contents of my high school library) from one place to another. And each misstep takes two or three hours of data transfer before I even realize that it was a misstep. On my first attempt I managed to actually get the music files transferred, but none of the preferences--none of the playlist titles, none of the original download dates, none of the play counts, etc. On my second attempt I somehow transferred an older backup copy of the file, one with only about 3/4 of the music files. And while this was happening my iPod gleefully updated by tossing out all but the most recent 1,000 files.

But that wasn't all. Oh, no. It wasn't enough to learn that I was finding the hardest and least effective way to accomplish the task: I was actually about to learn that my entire effort was for naught. Somewhere along this do-it-myself process I managed (naturally) to screw something up so that I found myself locked out of the new computer altogether. I couldn't do anything but turn it off and on. That's it. It asked for a username and password before it would grant me access to ANYTHING, and no combination I put in would work. I spent half a day with this issue. Eventually, in order not to spend any more time rushing toward a debilitating stroke, I decided to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.

At exactly the same time I was rubbing my skin raw about this issue, I was also trying to transfer our checkbook from an old home computer--a seven-year-old iMac; a machine so old that this was its only function anymore, to hold the checkbook--onto my old laptop, which would become the new home machine. And the iMac chose this exact moment--literally, the very instant I was opening the checkbook for what was to be the final time--to crash irretrievably. We tried several things to resuscitate it but in the end it was dead and it took our checkbook with it. And to top it all off, the morning that all this was pounding its electronic shards of bamboo underneath my fingernails was the same moment that Yahoo's email server went down for a couple hours. I could neither send nor receive email from my last functioning computer or from my phone.

It's hard to verbalize exactly the degree of frustration this engenders. Have you ever peeled the cover off a golf ball and seen what is underneath? I did this when I was a kid, and I was amazed to find a hundred million windings of fine rubber band around a rubber core filled with some highly toxic Superfund liquid. Once you started to unwind the rubber bands, the whole thing would snap and thrash about like a hamster that just hit paydirt while chewing on an electrical cord. Well, I felt like that liquid-filled core with a buzillion rubber wrappings around me. I felt as though my head was in a vise and was going to squash like a walnut. I felt at risk to do something that might earn me my very own Law and Order episode.

But Jeffy came to the rescue and all now appears well. I took out my frustrations on a bag of peanut M&Ms, and everybody lived to tell the tale. No dogs were kicked, no spouses yelled at, no old iMac computers smashed into a billion pieces on the concrete of the driveway just as an act of catharsis.

No, really.

More Random Flying Thoughts

After an hour hurling through the inky blackness, with endless acres of farmland and a succession of little villages passing five miles below, we begin descending and Louisville appears on the horizon, just a faint glow at first, but gathering dimension and detail as we near. Finally we are told to slow and the controllers maneuver us over the city, over people sleeping in their thousands beneath us, the cockpit now glowing from the lights of the city below. The radio crackles over the captain's overhead speaker (he doesn't like the earpiece we typically use), the controller talking almost continuously, pausing only for readbacks.

I remember when I was first learning to fly, another student and I would go and sit along a service road at the Minneapolis airport and watch the Northwest jets and listen to the air traffic control chatter on a scanner plugged into the cigarette lighter of my car. Maybe it's that I'm an aural person, maybe it's a verbal thing; but I was fascinated by this job-specific language, this highly-evolved shorthand that made the aviation world go round. When we began getting our instrument ratings, we had to learn this communication, clumsily trying our hand at the radio calls under the tutelage of a flight instructor, like a child who is lovingly corrected again and again and again until he finally gets it right. We had learned the basics of radio communication during our private pilot rating, since communication with ground and tower controllers is part of flying in and out of any midsized or large airport. But that's a small part of an airline pilot's radio work.

Once you are in the IFR system (for Instrument Flight Rules, as opposed to VFR--Visual Flight Rules), the radio becomes a huge part of your world. Airline pilots live entirely within this IFR system, and in a large airplane, the pilot not flying will keep quite busy with radio communications, often busier than the pilot flying. At first the rapid-fire techno jargon seemed completely incomprehensible, but as we learned the system it became clear that the shorthand is very specific, and at any given moment there is a pretty limited range of things a controller might say to us (and a limited number of specific responses we might be expected to make). Nearly everything we do in an airplane under IFR is monitored by a radar or visual controller, and permission must be sought for almost anything--changes in routing or altitude, significant changes in airspeed, on down to clearances to take off or land, or even to taxi. Most of the time it's them instructing us about what they want or need from us to keep us on happy terms with the other flights populating the sky. Whatever the reason, it's an aspect of the job I've always loved (not as much as flying the airplane, but it's a close second).

As we approach Louisville, there is an expected flow to things: follow a prescribed routing in toward the airport, and expect to be broken off this arrival at a certain point by the controller and given "radar vectors" (literally, compass headings to fly), airspeeds and altitudes, which will maneuver us onto an instrument approach procedure, which will in turn lead us in three dimensions right down to the runway surface. It's my radio from Philly to Louisville, and I talk to probably 15 different people, from company people on specially assigned company frequencies to instrument clearance people to ground and tower controllers at both ends, as well as terminal radar controllers who monitor us and keep us separated from other airplanes in the airport vicinity, and finally "center" controllers who deal with the high-altitude enroute phase of the flight.

Clear skies, calm weather, a happy airplane, it's a beautiful night for flying.

A series of support vehicles meet the airplane as we taxi in, a van to shuttle us to the Air Services Center, a mechanic's truck, someone on a tug with a ground power cart in tow, an off-loading team, sometimes a fuel truck. In the van I call crew scheduling: no further assignment for me tonite.

It's about a fifteen minute walk out of the complex to my car to go back to the crash pad. There is a succession of shuttles which will ferry me out, but on a nice night like this it's good to walk through the buzz of people and vehicles and watch the airplanes landing and taxiing in. This is the closest I get to feeling a part of all that goes on in a huge company where my contribution is small and specific and one of hundreds of different job descriptions.

Interesting how different the landing looks from outside versus inside the airplane. Outside, it's a bit surreal to see something so large (and body-shakingly loud) floating in the air and settling its weight on the ground with a huge puff of blue tire smoke. Inside, we are occupied with our procedures and callouts and with watching the instruments, and lastly with executing the landing flare and touchdown. Every now and then I'll have a little out-of-body JAY-zuss moment on short final where I realize that we are 200,000 or more pounds rushing headlong toward the tarmac, at something like 170 miles per hour, and the yoke and throttles and pedals in front of me will determine the outcome of the meeting. So I know what is going through the mind of each flight crew as I watch airplane after airplane come in and touch down, their landing lights spaced at three or four mile intervals along the glide path for 20 or 30 miles out.

I'm tempted to sit, like old times, and watch the airplanes.

Look, I've Invented the Ocularly-Administered Sleep Aid!

(This is a post--rated "G" for "Geek"--which those squeamish about flying maybe ought not to read.)

More simulator work. One of the things we worked on today (it's a regular item on this year's recurrent training for all DC-8 crewmembers) is an onboard fire. We don't actually light anything on fire in the simulator, but it's scarcely less torturous for this fact. Quite apart from the difficulty and discomfort involved in trying to work the checklists and fly the airplane with an oxygen mask and goggles on (and this is much more difficult than it might appear at first thought), there is the problem of the checklists themselves. There are separate checklists for smoke or fire in the cargo compartment, for a suspected electrical fire, for air conditioning / heating pack smoke, and for unidentified smoke or fumes evacuation (and these are all separate from fires involving an engine). Each of these checklists takes one to a different remedial place, and the consequences of not getting on board with the correct checklist can be serious, even dire. This is one of the reasons, of course, that we do regular training on these things.

But the actual symptoms of a fire, and the process of identification of the source of that fire, to say nothing of the adrenaline-filled, pressure-cooker situation that a fire will naturally engender, these things are not really adequately addressed in a simulator, in spite of the excellent and diligent efforts of some very dedicated people on the training staff. This exercise is all very instructive, but it only takes us about 30% of the way home. That 30% may easily turn out to be the margin needed for survival, but it leaves an awful lot to our discretion and to chance. To luck. So this is most valuable training, but it's a sobering subject; a fire in flight is, well, serious.

Today's scenario dealt with an unspecified electrical fire, and had us run the initial parts of the checklists in real time, but then the instructors delivered us from the misery of the masks & goggles so that we might learn something from the lengthy procedures that followed. Part of the reason the trainers do this is because the act of troubleshooting an electrical malfunction--that is, one that is not specifically and obviously connected with a particular piece of electrical equipment (which one might simply turn off, maybe)--involves a very long and disruptive checklist that, as it progresses, kills off regular and needed equipment, always when the guy flying (me) doesn't quite expect it. It's instructive, maybe, to run the whole works under the pressures that can be mustered in the simulator, but it's probably more instructive, in this case, to be able to pause and contemplate what these checklists are actually DOING, and to see the consequences of things with enough breathing space for some correlation to occur in one's frantic brain. Habits get formed, experiences stored away, for use on that rainy day.

But we'll lighten the tone a bit. How this checklist unfolds is a direct result of the design of the system in question (and we have similar checklists for problems with the DC-8's complicated fuel and hydraulic systems, among others). As an oft-proclaimed machinery geek, I'm endlessly fascinated by this aspect of things. What switches we have, and what they control, are the result of a brilliant engineering effort by the aircraft manufacturer (in our case, a group of slide-rule-weilding, narrow-tied, white-shirted geeks with pocket protectors and birth control glasses from the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California in the early- to middle-50s). Conscious decisions had to be made about what protections were needed, and about the level of human interaction required for the system in question, and these things reflect both the state of technology available or attainable, as well as current trends or accumulated wisdom in the aerospace field at the time of design. A modern aircraft electrical system is a different animal absolutely than what the DC-8 sports, even though both can represent brilliant thinking. A modern electrical system needs virtually no human intervention, and will even troubleshoot itself. Likewise fuel, hydraulic, pneumatic, air conditioning / pressurization systems. (This is, in a nutshell, what happened to the flight engineer as a concept).

(An aside: I rode home yesterday in the cockpit of a Southwest 737, and it's a fabulous little exercise to listen to them run their checklists. The callouts and responses are different from what we say in the DC-8, and those differences reflect the differing design of the 737's systems, systems which exist to solve the same issues as the DC-8 systems address. As I watched, it was like dipping your brain into molasses: you figure out about 10 seconds too late what the question was, what the response meant, and what panel / switch they looked at for verification. This is exactly why each airplane's training is absolutely specific, and why learning one airplane won't really help you with flying another.)

I don't mean to go too far with this (and, shockingly, there's a lot further we might go); books can be, and have been, written about this stuff (and only geeky people buy them). But an introduction might be instructive. Any of us can accept without much difficulty the need for an airplane to have a supply of electrical power. But there is an ocean of questions between that accepted reality and the actual implementation. AC or DC power (or both)? Of what voltage(s)? Generated how? With what redundancy? What backups are needed? None of these questions has an obvious answer, and they represent about 1% of the questions in this vein one might ask about a single system.

The DC-8 represents one proven way to answer these thousand questions. It has an engine-driven generator on each of its four engines, any one of which, if the engine is running, produces enough alternating current to supply the entire airplane's needs (though with some restrictions if you were actually down to a single generator). But it's not simply a matter of an electrical line running from a generator to the equivalent of a power strip into which things are plugged. Or rather, it IS something like this, except there are 10 or 15 such large "power strips" (called electrical buses), which are protected by current limiters and off of each of which spring a bunch of powered items, each item protected along the way by circuit breaker(s). These buses are arranged in a hierarchical manner so as to be redundantly powered by a couple different sources; thereby certain, key things are very difficult to de-power. And to this mix is added a rudimentary brain that seeks, by opening and closing relays, to keep these buses powered with little or no human intervention, so that a loss of a given source of power will tend to be imperceptible except by the clunk of switching relays or to the engineer who now sees a warning light glowing on his panel.

If this seems abstruse reading from one's computer screen, it is decidedly less so when the two crewmembers fighting an electrical fire are throwing switches on the engineer's panel in an attempt to deprive a burning item of electrical power. X piece of equipment is powered by the Y electrical bus, which in turn gets its power from Z generator. But shutting off Z generator depowers virtually nothing (because of rudimentary brain above), and even shutting off power to the Y electrical bus will not necessarily deprive us of X. All according to some grand inscrutable plan. This is really cool, actually. What seems random or haphazard on the surface will, if dug into, reveal a pointed engineering effort behind it. The loss of power to the galley, or certain lights, for example, is unimportant. The loss of the autopilot is rather more serious. Losing the flight instrumentation is really fucking serious. The system is designed accordingly. Cool. The simulator lets us get to know these systems intimately.

Lastly (I've come this far, I might as well wallow in my unabashed geek out), I can't help noticing the similarities between these systems questions & solutions in my DC-8 and what one sees with the spacecraft that were being designed around the same time as these early jet aircraft. Without overstating the point, there are a lot of similarities between the problems faced by aircraft and spacecraft engineers. Much moreso than, for example, between aircraft engineers and early computer engineers. Both need to control a craft that maneuvers freely in all three dimensions; both need flight instrumentation for this control; both must provide an atmosphere under pressure for their occupants; both need instruments and indicators for these systems. And, of course, they had the same technology available for most of these issues. (The similarities were enough that military pilots were chosen for the early astronauts.) I've thought for a long time about doing a book of large format, high-resolution photographs of the early spacecraft cockpit environments, with a detailed discussion about what controls were there and why, and how those controls were actually manipulated for spaceflight. And maybe looking at the actual checklists, which would be instructive in this vein.

Like I said, only geeks buy these kinds of books. My wife, bless her heart, is sound asleep long before I finish explaining this book idea. Each time. I can even make her sleep standing up with this subject. Ambien in pulp form.

The Blog As Punching Bag

I spent the day trying to get a wireless router to work. The whole frickin' day. It's not working now, and I'm taking it as a triumph that the device is not scattered in a billion plastic shards on the tile floor. If I drank, I'd be drunk now.

It's almost unfathomable to me that this should be so difficult. I mean, here is a computer with the ability to talk to equipment wirelessly via some radio protocol evidently worked out to the finest detail; and here's one of those pieces of equipment designed for this purpose. One turns the router on, the computer recognizes it and will talk to it, and that should be the end, no? If only. Two pages download before all data transfer stops. The signal still seems to be there, but everything stops cooperating. Reset, try again. Another two pages or so, freeze. Nothing and no amount of time will get things started again except a depowering reset of the router. 10 hours and about 50 different attempts have not brought us beyond this point.

I was on the phone around noon to some guy in India for over an hour. He was remarkably patient and seemed to be doing things that were focused and purposeful, even if they were things the very need for which required some mental gymnastics on my part to acknowledge--we were dealing with obscure settings on sub-pages to sub-pages of which I had not remotely dreamt. And everything worked for a good 90 seconds after I hung up the phone. Then, two hours later, another half hour on the phone with my computer guru buddy, at the end of which we determined that it almost had to be a defect in the machinery. So a trip back to the store for an exchange, and an hour later we were facing the same dilemma with a different router (or, specifically, a different example of the same router).

Is it a Mac-vs-PC thing? Shouldn't be, since the local Mac store was selling this exact same unit (at twice the price). Is it a flaw with my Powerbook? No, because the exchange student's PC encounters the same problem. There is a CD of software that comes with the device, but it only runs on a PC. But that's apparently because I can simply talk to the unit directly with my Mac to make my adjustments. After supper, another call to India, and this time they forwarded me to "another level of tech support" who walked me through a router firmware update via Gabi's PC. And we were back in business. For another 90 seconds.

Now, I'm sure as hell not the most tech-savvy person you'll run across. And I'm not, by today's standards, someone who can lay claim to any special computer talents. Indeed, I think part of the reason I love my Mac is because, in an ideal world, I think we ought not to need to know shit to make the machine do what you want it to. But in the overall scheme of things, I always feel like I ought to be able to figure these things out, or at least with just a bit of help. Here it seems that even a couple experts on the subject matter can't help me get across the river. Maybe it's like medicine: you can get things like basic sanitation into the skulls of most people, but the details of biology on which medical science relies is simply beyond most of us. Specialization. What's left to do? Since I can't get someone to point me toward some errant setting one one of the router's pages of software, I guess I'll try a different brand of router.

I'm not soliciting for advice (though I'm happy to hear suggestions just the same), and this isn't even an entertaining story. Nor will the eventual solution be satisfying to anyone but me. But I had to get it all off my chest.

So there.

Holding Up My Hands In Self-Defense

So I'm thinking about body art. I appear to be the only person left on the planet without any piercings or tattoos. Though pierced ears were a commonplace when I was growing up, I've always recoiled at the idea. And now the radical self-adornment business seems to have taken off in an epidemic sort of way. A woman without tattoos might as well be a cyclops. Ears are now pierced multiple times, and when one is privileged to catch a glimpse of other fleshy things they are likely to show glittering signs of adorned ritual puncturing as well. Hell, any bikini'd woman photographed without a belly button piercing is practically held up for ridicule.

What's next? Discs in the lower lip? Earlobes aboriginally-stretched? (Oops, too late!) Facial tattoos? (Too late again.) Decorative scarring?

(I had a nightmare-inducing photo here, chosen from among a zillion on the web, but it was actually making me sick. You should all thank me for removing it.)

So what am I missing? It all seems positively barbaric to me. I just can't see a meaningful line between the little earlobe piercing and the circus monstrosity. But more than my physical revulsion, I'm struck that it suggests a certain desperation to make statements (often immediately upon reaching adulthood) that either cannot be unmade, or at least not without substantial pain and / or effort and / or time. From whence this urgency? (Sorry, I'm reading Pride and Prejudice!) Now, I'm as grateful as any guy that the woman with a prominently displayed ass tattoo is basically giving carte blanche to look and admire (as a confirmed breast man, perhaps I'm simply wishing for the wrong things). But nose piercings? I just absolutely can't get on board with these. What are we, cattle? They're actively repulsive. Why pierce a place that makes a waste product? What's next, anal piercings? (God, don't tell me...)

Is foresight an endangered species? Can we not see that the things which we need so passionately in our youth to make a statement about may not strike us in the same way a few years from now? Or am I assuming that society will not simply change to accommodate the trend? Maybe kids of the generation of my grandkids (if I had any kids to produce them) would find grandma's ass tattoo while she was weeding her garden to be quaint and cool, just like MY grandpa's WW2 tat.

Or it may just look pathetic.

Please, somebody straighten me out!

My Electronic Soap Opera

My computer at home is so old it's like an electrified abacus. The operating system is so ancient it doesn't even really display much web content properly. It just barely has enough memory to simultaneously run its own operating system and a web browser, but will crash if you have more than two windows open at once. It's so old that it doesn't warrant spending any money to update the hardware (or software, for that matter). And, consistency and all, I have only a dial-up connection at home. Paying more than $10 a month for internet service just rankles. I often think of our Brazilian exchange student having to come to America to step back into the Stone Age.

On the road I use a much newer laptop, but I never use dial-up. I typically connect over a to-remain-nameless cell phone network via a bluetooth connection to that phone. Neat, and it works everywhere I travel, albeit quite slowly. (I have learned thru this little trial that my use of said cell phone as a surfing device with my laptop is definitively not what the company intended with the technology; seems I am using about 25,000% of the download capacity they expected. Too bad for them). So I'm not accustomed to what most people think of as normal web relations. I have experienced the 21st Century: my wife has a T1 connection at work, which for me is like what I imagine a maritally-sanctioned trip to a skilled, disease-free prostitute must be like. I recently added a WiFi card to my laptop, which of course increases the speed of things exponentially, but I've found only a place or two that doesn't charge.

So a couple weeks ago I learned that my local Wisconsin ISP is being bought out by Earthlink. They dutifully sent me a disc of stuff to install. In retrospect, I don't know why I installed any of it, since I don't ever use the dial-up. But I did install it, and after I did both my bluetooth connection and my WiFi connection ceased to work. And worse, the screw-up seemed to actually muck up something in the cell phone itself, so that neither the computer nor the phone were now working properly. And, as if on cue, the same day something happened to knock out our home phone service. I believe this is all three strikes from a single pitch. What's next? I cease to have running water and cannot find a bar of soap anywhere in Appleton?

I managed to get the house phone fixed, the repair person summoned from my last functioning cell phone (I have two), and I uninstalled the software from my laptop like it had physically scalded me. But now I learned that my little illicit bluetooth cell phone needs an over-the-wire reprogramming and the provider has neither the cable nor the software to do the job. This particular phone was always under the radar, purchased thru a now-defunct, super-secret special 800 number, and is no longer supported by the provider. Hasn't been for a year. (The kids at the local store stare at the phone as though it were made from Mystery Meat.)

Long and short, I got the computer back working, and the WiFi with it (I think). And now the cell phone is functioning again even without its needed reprogramming. But I have seen the future, and it is bleak and frightening.

And that's the real puzzler. I've only been blogging for a couple months, and this week of not being able to post or read blogs or read comments to my own blog except on the tiny screen of my functional cell phone was much more irritating and traumatic than I expected. It seems silly to feel somehow left out when I'm not able to read the blogs of people about whom, it must be admitted, I know next to nothing. And while none of this prevented me writing with my computer, it suddenly seemed pointless to return to my years of writing only for myself. Funny. I don't know what to think about this.

Anyway, I missed the writing outlet. I missed the validation of my own thoughts by others, strangers or not, and I missed others' writing. Funny how it gets under the skin.