vttoth — April 25th, 2010
So a few days ago, I wrote a blog entry about Ontario’s new grade school curriculum. The one that has since been withdrawn due to objections by conservative groups. I have to concede: they may have a point. I used no words in my blog post that were not used in the curriculum itself, yet the result was apparently too strong for Facebook; their automated software did not pick up and paste the entry onto my Facebook page.
Still, I stand by what I said: after I looked at the actual curriculum (as opposed to the sensationalized headlines about it) there really was nothing in it that a sane person could possibly object to. It’s not about sanity, of course, it’s about politics, which is why Ontario Liberals decided to abandon the updated curriculum after all. They can only fight one battle at a time, they say, according to the Toronto Star. I just wish that the battle they chose to keep fighting was this one, as opposed to the astonishingly braindead idea of messing up pharmacies by blocking payments to them by generic drug companies. Or the HST… which would have been a good idea back when the GST was introduced, but now, it’s just a badly disguised tax grab.
Categories: Canada, Education, Health, Politics |
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vttoth — February 10th, 2010
About ten years ago, my gall bladder was removed. (To anyone who never had gall bladder cramps: you don’t want to know.) I knew that no surgery is trivial, and that even famous people, like Russian rocket designer Korolyov, may have been killed by botched gall bladder surgery, but hey, we live in modern times, and laparoscopic surgery isn’t quite the same as it used to be in the old days when they cut your abdominal cavity open with a machete. Indeed, six hours (!) after I was rolled into the operating room, I was sitting in my own chair at home, and I haven’t had a complaint since.
Congressman John Murtha, a leading opponent of the war in Iraq, had the same surgery a few days ago. Unfortunately, he was returned to the hospital two days later, and was pronounced dead not long thereafter… apparently a result of botched surgery, as they may have cut one of his intestines, resulting in a deadly infection.
I’m glad I didn’t know such things can happen back when I was going under the knife! Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.
Categories: Health |
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vttoth — November 6th, 2009
I was channel hopping a little this morning, which is how I happened upon a health news segment on CBS, “CBS Healthwatch”, and caught this sentence as part of a discussion about headache triggers:
“Anything that’s not… American cheese that you can by right over the counter.”
I didn’t realize that in the US, one needs a prescription to buy some blue cheese or Camembert.
Categories: Food, Health |
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vttoth — August 2nd, 2009
Someone wrote to me about inkblots. Apparently, the topic has become hot, in response to the decision by Wikipedia editors to make the Rorschach blots available online. Attempts by some to suppress this information using, among other things, questionable copyright claims, are of a distinctively Scientologist flavor (made all the more curious by Scientology’s rejection of conventional psychoanalysis.) They do have a point, though… the validity of the test could be undermined if test subjects were familiar with the inkblots and evaluation methods. On the other hand, one cannot help but wonder why such an outdated test is still being used in daily practice. It certainly gives credence to those who consider psychoanalysis a pseudoscience.
I am also wondering… suppose I build a sophisticated software system with optical pattern recognition, associative memory, and a learning algorithm. Suppose the software is buggy, and I wish to test it. Would I be testing it by running the recognition program on meaningless symmetric patterns? The behavior of the system would be random, but perhaps not completely so; it may be a case of ordered chaos with a well defined attractor. Would running the recognition program on a few select images reveal anything about that attractor? Would it reveal enough information to determine reliably if the attractor differs from whatever would be considered “normal”?
More importantly, do practitioners of the Rorschach test know about chaos dynamics and do they have the correct (mathematical, computer) tools to analyze their findings?
I am also wondering how such a test could be conceivably normalized to account for differences in life experience (or, to use my software system example, for differences in the training of the learning algorithm) but I better shut up now before my thoughts turn into opinionated rantings about a subject that I know precious little about.
Categories: Health, Programming |
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vttoth — June 11th, 2009
I was channel-surfing for news this morning, and I caught a segment on CTV’s morning show about “dirty electricity”.
I shall refrain from calling the gentleman being interviewed using a variety of unflattering names, because it would not be polite, and in any case, it’s not the person but the message that I take issue with.
Basically, he put a bunch of electronic devices like cordless phones, baby monitors, Wi-Fi routers or even fluorescent light bulbs on a test bench, plugged them in, and then held a contraption with an antenna and a speaker close to them. The contraption was making loud noises, from which this gentleman concluded that these devices “emit radiation”, and “send dirty electricity back through the wires”.
So then… what? The whole Universe is emitting similar radiation at radio frequencies. Any warm object, including the walls of your house, emits radiation at such frequencies and higher. And why should I care?
Of course, it helps dropping a few scary phrases like, “skyrocketing rates of autism”. Oh, he wasn’t saying that they are related. Why should he? Merely mentioning autism while he’s talking about “dirty electricity” is enough to suggest a connection.
Just to be clear about it, almost all electronic devices emit radio frequency radiation that can then be picked up by a suitable receiver and converted into loud and scary noise. When I was 10 or so and got my first pocket calculator, I had endless fun holding it close to an AM receiver and listening to its “song”. Later, when I had my first programmable calculator, I could tell by listening to the sounds on a nearby radio if it was still executing a program, or even if it displayed the expected result or just showed an error condition. Modern calculators use so little power that their transmissions cannot be picked up so easily, but does this mean that the old calculators were a health threat? Of course not.
At such low frequencies, electromagnetic radiation does not interact with our bodies in harmful ways. To cause genetic damage, for instance, much shorter wavelengths would be needed, you need to go at least to the ultraviolet range to produce ionization and, possibly, damage to DNA. At lower frequencies, most emissions are not even absorbed by the body very effectively. The little energy that is being absorbed may turn into tiny currents, but those are far too tiny to have any appreciable biological impact. Note that we are not talking about holding a cell phone with a, say, 0.3W transmitter just an inch from your brain (though even that, I think, is probably quite harmless, never mind sensationalist claims to the contrary); we are talking about a few milliwatts of stray radio frequency emissions not mere inches, but feet or more from a person.
As to “dirty electricity”, any device that produces a capacitive or inductive load on the house wiring will invariably feed some high frequency noise back through the wiring. Motors are the worst offenders, like vacuum cleaners or washing machines. Is this a problem? I doubt it. House wiring already acts as a powerful transmission antenna, continuously emitting electromagnetic waves at 60 Hz (in North America); so what if this emission is modulated further by some higher frequency noise?
But even if I am wrong about all of this, and low-frequency, low-energy electromagnetic radiation has a biological effect after all… study it by all means, yes, but it is no excuse for CTV to bring a scaremongerer with his noisy gadget (designed clearly with the intent to impress, not measure) on live television.
Categories: Health, Physics, Television |
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vttoth — April 30th, 2009
According to CNN, the government of Egypt began slaughtering pigs; according to RFE, Tajikistan banned the import of pork and poultry from certain countries.
Are these politicians really this bone dead stupid, or are they playing politics? Have they not heard that just because it’s swine flu, you a) cannot get it from eating pork, and b) it’s an imminent pandemic not because it’s carried by pigs (it isn’t, never mind the origin of the virus), but transmitted from human to human?
When an entire country acts in such a boneheaded way, I begin to wonder how long before a politician somewhere manages to make a really bad decision and wipes us all out. It might happen yet!
Categories: Health, Politics |
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vttoth — March 26th, 2009
A new study, showing a strong correlation between circumcision and decreased rates of AIDS and genital herpes in males, is now touted as an argument in favor of circumcision here in North America.
There’s only one problem. The study was conducted in Uganda. I mean no disrespect towards the personal habits of Ugandan men, but Uganda is a third world country where most people do not necessarily have easy access to hot showers (or indeed, running water.) Before such a controversial recommendation is made, should a study not be conducted that properly takes into account the standards of personal hygiene here in North America?
Categories: Health |
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vttoth — February 25th, 2009
Every time I hear American politicians warn their citizens about the dangers of a government-run health care system putting in the hands of government bureaucrats health care decisions that should be left to patients and doctors, I feel outraged.
I have experienced the government-run health care system in several countries. NOT ONCE was a government bureaucrat in any way consulted… on the contrary, all health care decisions were made by me and my doctor.
Indeed, the only country I know in which health care decisions are routinely scrutinized by (insurance company) bureaucrats is the United States of America, with its privately run health care system.
So I think I can tell with full confidence to my American friends that if what they are looking for is a health care system in which decisions are made by patients and doctors with no bureaucrats involved, a government-run health care system may be the very solution they’re looking for.
Categories: Health, Politics |
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vttoth — January 15th, 2009
When I was learning to fly, one of the first things I was taught was the use of checklists. Checklists contain trivial things that are supposedly self-evident. Stuff like this, for the Cessna 172 that I used to fly:
| Aircraft position |
INTO WIND |
| Brakes |
APPLY & HOLD |
| Doors |
CLOSED & LATCHED |
| Flight controls |
FREE & CORRECT |
| Fuel selector valve |
BOTH |
| Elevator trim |
TAKEOFF |
So who in his right mind would forget to close the doors, you might ask, or open a fuel valve? But the fact is, people do, and people died as a result. Pilots, gung-ho folks that they are, were nevertheless humble enough to realize this, and the use of checklists has been common practice pretty much since the dawn of flying.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for hospital operating rooms. It seems that surgical death rates can be cut by up to one third through the simple use of a checklist… so why hasn’t this been done before? Is it ignorance, arrogance by the medical community, or a combination of both?
In any case, introducing checklists in operating rooms is a no-cost improvement that can save billions of dollars a year not to mention a number of lives.
Categories: Health |
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vttoth — December 22nd, 2008
This is not what I usually expect to see when I glance at CNN:
CNN and integrals
It almost makes me believe that we live in a mathematically literate society. If only!
The topic, by the way, was a British Medical Journal paper on brain damage caused by a dancing style called headbanging. I must say, even though I grew up during the disco era, I never much liked dancing. But, for what it’s worth, I not only know how to do integrals, I actually enjoy doing them…
Categories: Health, Mathematics, Pop culture, Television |
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