David Bamberger on 60 Minutes Tonight

My friend David Bamberger—who has been working since 1969 to restore the worst piece of land in Blanco County, Texas (and maybe the rest of the Texas Hill Country) in order to prove that what's good for the environment is good for the rancher, and vice versa—will appear on “60 Minutes” tonight as part a of piece on “hunting ranches in the U.S. that offer exotic big game species.”

David’s ranch offers deer, and maybe turkey, hunting in season, and it is scrupulously supervised. It’s an important source of income for the ranch, and, of course, keeps the deer population within the land’s carrying capacity. No exotic big game species are hunted on the ranch, but there is such a species present: the extinct-in-the-wild Scimitar Horned Oryx, a type of large antelope that once lived in sub-saharan Africa and is said to have been able to kill lions (when you see their horns, you’ll understand). When he heard, many years ago, that zoologists were looking for land where the surviving remnants of otherwise extinct species could live in reasonably familiar, and reasonably wild, conditions, David offered them a square mile of his ranch, and the zoologists decided the Scimitar Horned Oryx was a good fit. The herd has been there for a long time now, bred to exact instructions from the zoologists in order maximize genetic diversity, and thereby give the species the best possible chance of survival if it can ever be reintroduced to its native wilds.

I think I can guess at the rest of the story, as least as it concerns David, the ranch and the Oryx, but to go on I’d have to start speaking for David (we’ve discussed the matter in some detail, but I’m sure I don’t know every part of it, and few people can tell a story like David can, in any case, so best not to try). Suffice it to say, I agree with David. What remains to be seen is what 60 Minutes makes of it all.

Tune in tonight to find out.

Watch the Solstice Approach (and Recede)

As an equinox or a solstice (in this case) approaches, my year clock starts indicating the time of the event with increasing precision, using indicator arrows like the one shown below (each equinox and solstice has a unique arrow; this one is for the winter solstice).

While such arrows are visible year-round in the clock’s year ring, as the month of the event is entered an arrow appears at the exact point around the month ring’s outer circumference that corresponds to the time of the event. As the week of the event is entered, same thing … and so on for the day, hour, and minute rings. So, the approach (and retreat) of the event can be observed in real-time, if you happen to be of a mind to do so.

(If you only want to know the times of equinoxes and solstices, see my perpetual table of them.)

The year clock requires any version of Firefox, or the WebKit-based browsers like Safari and Chrome (WebKit currently has the better SVG engine, IMO), that have been released since about 2008. The latest Internet Explorer can probably handle the clock, too.

Check Your Drug Interactions, Avoid Rude Surprises

I recently found myself in a situation in which an over-the-counter pain medication prescribed by one of my doctors began to poison me, and, given enough time, probably would have done permanent damage to some major organs I've come to depend on over the years. I didn't realize what was happening at the time, I just lost feeling in a section of one hand, as the pains that were supposed to be treated by the drug rose to entirely new levels.

What allowed me to diagnose the problem, and realize that I had to stop taking the pain medication immediately, was a combination of the National Institute of Health's MedlinePlus drug data, and an automatic drug interaction checker that I found about a year ago: Medscape Multi-Drug Interaction Checker. (That's a link to the web version of the checker, but there is also a free iPad/iPhone app. The app has the virtue of remembering the medications you've previously entered, among other things.)

Just enter the name of every drug, supplement, etc. that you're taking, or being told to take, and see what the interaction checker comes-up with. Interactions are classified by their severity, and their effects are described.

If an interaction turns-up, there's a good chance that the description will be very specific, like a reduced ability of the kidneys to eliminate some medication. However, it won't tell you what effects you may experience as a result. In a case like that, logically you know that a build-up of any drug could lead to an overdose situation, but you'll need the NIH's Medline Plus data to learn what effects you might be experiencing as a result. Therefore, neither service is necessarily sufficient by itself, but, together, they can let you ask specific and important questions of your doctors, and maybe spare you some serious nastiness. Of course, when you have to catch a problem yourself, following-up with a good doctor as soon as possible is prudent.

Now, ordinarily, I won't use dot-com sites for health information, because there's no reason to assume they are remotely objective, employ quality controls, keep material up-to-date, etc., but this interaction checker was unique, as far as I could tell, when I found it. Since then, it's done me very good service. So, this is the exception to my rule.

If you know of something even better out there, leave a comment or drop me a line. If you don't, I recommend getting in the habit of using the interaction checker, even if you never take anything other than supplements, over-the-counter meds, caffeine, etc. Forwarned is forearmed, as they say, and since some doctors can't be bothered to gather basic patient histories (like what drugs you're on), to check for drug interactions, or to otherwise demonstrate even rudimentary competence in their fields, you're going to have do that for them, just to protect yourself.

(Old joke: "Did you know that 50% of all doctors graduated in the bottom half of their class?" Unfortunately, the joke's on us patients.)

Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer, not a doctor. I have a better grasp of logic, rudimentary statistics and the basics of the scientific method than some of the doctors I've dealt with over the years, but not one, single medical credential. Don't trust your health to me, please.

Be well, folks.

Wolfram|Alpha: How it Came to Be, What it Does, How it’s Done, How it Grows

I’ve been sending this link to people for a year or more. I think I’m overdue to make it available to everyone:

Making the World’s Data Computable

Personally, I found it fascinating and illuminating after being left clueless about what Alpha was by the industry press.

Need some specific examples to understand how to use Alpha? See their examples page.

And if you try Alpha and it doesn’t meet your needs now, try it again in a week; a new version is put into production every week (or that was the case at the time the blog post referenced above was written).

Maintaining In-House Technical Skills

From Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions by Robert C. Seamans, Jr., pg. 84:

When conducting advanced technical efforts, it’s imperative to maintain in-house technical skills of a high order. But high-grade technical personnel cannot be stockpiled. They must be given real rabbits to chase or they will lose their cutting edge and eventually seek other employment.

The “Glass Teletype”

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 131:

Early computers used printers as their sole output. When programmers at various large traditional computer companies were first given monitors, they immediately duplicated the printer interface on their green, glowing screens, giving rise to the term “glass Teletype.” With this lavish investment of more than 20 minutes of design time behind them, they saw no need to update the interface for the next thirty years.

The Intuitive Person vs. Western Education

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 103:

Western education is heavily biased toward intellect over intuition: Intuition is endowed with a perverse habit of delivering results most slowly when the need for speed is greatest. [....] Telling a bunch of kids to “think about it for a couple of hours, a day, a week—whatever it takes—then get back to me” just doesn't fit into our lock-step educational process. Betty Edwards (1989): “The right brain—the dreamer, the artificer, the artist—is lost in our school system and goes largely untaught. We might find a few art classes, a few shop classes, something called ‘creative writing,’ and perhaps courses in music; but it’s unlikely that we would find courses in imagination, in visualization, in perceptual or spatial skills, in creativity as a separate subject, in intuition, in inventiveness.”

While I admit to having no idea what classes in “imagination” or “creativity as a separate subject” would amount to, and therefore no idea what benefits might be expected from them, this quote otherwise summarizes one aspect of my dismal school experiences better than any other statement I’ve come across, especially the notion of intuitive people going “untaught.” Am I an autodidact by nature, or necessity?

When I signed-up to take shop classes in Junior High, I was hauled before some school authority and lectured that people on the “college track” couldn’t take shop classes. I couldn’t, and still can’t, imagine why any college in its right mind would care about anything that happens in Junior High, or hold it as anything other than a virtue that you know how things work and how to build them, but the view in my Junior High was definitely that people on the “college track”—a track I’d never imagined existed, because it’d never occurred to me that the school was excluding anyone from it—didn’t need to, and shouldn’t, know how to produce anything. Needless to say, I signed-up for the shop classes anyway, and only wish they’d been better and more numerous. There’re still a lot of questions I’d like to ask my shop teachers; none at all that I want to ask of my other pre-college teachers.

As an aside, as far as I can tell, white kids from upper-income families were automatically on the “college track,” and everyone else was apparently disposable. Was that a hold-over from the traditional, strictly stratified southern social structure, with a dose of probable racism thrown in for good measure? This happened in Houston, Texas at a time when school officials still quivered in fear (or anger, depending on their viewpoint) at the prospect of forced-bussing, and, yeah, I think it was all those things.

Also, the general insight that intuition operates least effectively when speed is most demanded, rings true well beyond my school experiences. (Put another way, telling people who are meant to be operating in a creative capacity: “Create! Create now! Faster, faster, faster!” …is not a formula for success, yet organizations that depend on creativity do it all the time, apparently oblivious to how creativity works, or doesn’t.)

As to the issues of pedagogy as I experienced them at all levels of the educational system (well, up to and including undergraduate college, anyway) and what I call the doctrine of “disposable people,” I have a great many thoughts and criticisms, but that’s for another time. (However, if anyone can recommend a good book summarizing modern thinking on pedagogical techniques, please let me know; a comment to the blog will be fine, or you can email me at any of my well-known email addresses.)