A revealing dialogue

I've taken the names out, but I will describe the players:

JMB: A Professor I used to work for, a really smart and fair guy who is unsurprisingly pretty liberal politically.

BG: When I knew him, a grad student working on his PhD, which he got--really smart and really cool.

dbp: Me

It started with a Facebook post by JMB:

JMB ‎"Globally, June was the 316th month in a row that had a higher temperature than the 20th century average." Five myths about extreme weather www.washingtonpost.com Let’s start with this heat wave.

dbp: If we define the 20th century average as ideal, then this could be a problem.

My point here, unaddressed by the other commenters, is that the headline seems alarming until you unwrap the assumption contained in it. That assumption is that the climate in the 20th century was perfect. Any change is therefore bad. there could be other interpretations of why one should be alarmed by the headline. None of the commenters could be troubled to point out why one really should be alarmed. It is assumed that any sensible person would be troubled by the headline and doubts or reservations are not taken as signs of healthy skepticism but rather are: Knave! Heretic! Fool! See>>>>>.

BG: But of course, global warming is a myth

I didn't even remotely say that, but what the hell, let's just put words in the mouth of the unbeliever.

Okay, I'm just fanning the flames here.

dbp: They call it "climate change" now, just to make sure all bets are covered.

JMB: Sadly, modern medicine does not yet have a cure for craniorectal inversions.

Let's not bother defending the point made by your original post or casting doubt on the logic of the comments which followed it. dbp has outed himself as a fool and therefore does not deserve a formal rebuttal. Anyway shaming always works: When a full Professor of Science says that you have your head up your ass, he might as well have been wearing a black mask and said, "I find your lack of faith disturbing."

The only sane response here is to play the martyr: It is not as if I am equipped to convert a person smarter than I am, who is nonetheless mired in dogmatic thinking on this subject. Rather, I will hark back to what science is really about, in the hopes of touching some inner core of a guy who must at one point (like all good scientists) have had more doubts than certainties.

dbp:

‎"We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain."

Link

Update:

There was further dialogue, though I could not help but notice that each one came with a dig.

JMB: Feynman is correct, but he is not advocating inaction in the face of objective reality. When my house is on fire, I'm gonna grab a hose and call the fire department, not have a long discussion with my neighbor about whether to call it a fire or a conflagration. Especially when my children will have no other place to live.

dbp: This is an excellent point John! The question is, do we have the same level of certainty here as in the house example? I would say, "not even remotely". This climate which we are in has been good to humanity, even as it has varied somewhat in human memory. Prudence would favor this over some different climate. Large and expensive projects should demand a high degree of certainty that they will provide more good than they cost.

JMB: The global-warming-is-good argument does have some limited validity, if you choose not to consider the lives of a few billion poor people in low-lying coastal areas, and can pretend that their fate has no bearing on yours.

(I should add here that I was making the opposite argument that warming is good. I was saying that change should be presumed to be bad, but any expensive project to preserve the status quo must meet a cost/benefit analysis. This kind of analysis demands a very high degree of certainty as to what will happen with and without the remediation effort. That we have anything approaching this level of knowledge is laughable.)

dbp: I am more-or-less in the Bjørn Lomborg camp on this: We could do far more good for more people by focusing on proximate concerns such as AIDS, malaria, nutrition, clean drinking water etc. Resources are finite and we should spend them where we get the biggest bang for our buck.

MK (I don't know him): Much of Lonborg's argument--which he's backed off on a bit himself--separates out short-term gain and overvalues it compared to long term gain, partially using the economists' notion of opportunity costs.

dbp: @Michael: I hadn't heard of Lomborg backing down from anything. The assignment of discount values is always somewhat arbitrary, though I think it is fairly non-controversial to value current costs and benefits more highly than future ones. As to how much? You kind of have to estimate what future interest rates will look like, so there is certainly room for disagreement.

Lots Of Very Nice Russian Legs

Picture from here (number 19 in the slide show), but they didn't make it easy: I couldn't just copy the picture, but it would let me "print". So I printed to pdf, opened the pdf and selected the picture. Then I pasted it into Paint and then saved as JPEG.

If I Was A Numerologist

Which I am not! Today would have been significant somehow:

I ran during my lunch break, per normal and my time came out to exactly 32 minutes. A one in 60 chance of that happening. This was 4.15 miles in case anybody cares.

Later, I went out to get milks and got a few other things which caught my eye: The list, from memory: One gallon of 1%, half gallon of whole milk, a pineapple, some mushrooms, a wedge of brie, a half gallon of apple juice (not from concentrate) and a bag full of Hood's version of popcycles. The total was $32 exactly. A one in a hundred chance of this happening.

The combined probability is just 60 X 100 = 600, so it is pretty rare, but not like getting hit by lightning.

Barefoot

I have been running barefoot most mornings for the past couple of weeks, so what went wrong today?

The morning runs were with my 14 year old daughter and so we went slowly, it was cool out and we never went more than 2 & 1/2 miles at a time. Today I went on my own and so at a much faster pace, it was over 90F out though most of the road was in the shade. I had these blisters by the two mile mark, so the distance alone cannot account for it.

The two miles after the blisters set-in was--actually not so bad. Sure, my feet hurt, a lot. But the rest of me was enjoying the slower pace in the heat and barefoot running is really easy on the joints if you do it right.

I will be doing precious little of running or walking for a while though!

I Don't Normally Wear Eye Protection

Yesterday when I was mowing the lawn and doing weed whacking I wore these sunglasses. I am glad I did!

The end of the race at the start of the 4th of July day

It was the start to a very full day:

After the race I checked my phone and the message on the phone indicated that out of town guests had arrived at our house. Dahlia was home alone and playing possum, so I called her and told her to let our guests in. I got home 15 minutes later, incidentally I realized on that trip that my car will travel at least 110 MPH.

After a quick shower, we all set-out on the bike path for town. I was hoping to see my wife and the other two daughters finish the 2-mile race from Drum Hill to the town center. Our guests, who live in Tokyo, marveled at how woodsy and natural the terrain surrounding the bike path is. They may have just been polite, but we really are lucky to live so close to it. We found all the girls at the finish area and then they drove home to take cool showers, it was really hot and humid that day, using our truck which was pre-positioned close by the finish. The rest of us found a good spot to watch the parade. It is not much by the standards of what big cities do, but it had a small-town charm of its own. After the parade, I called my wife and she swung around in the truck. All of this leaving cars at the end, walking and calling to be picked-up is due to the popularity of the parade: Tons of roads are closed and nearly every possible parking spot is taken.

After the parade, we got some lunch going: A pot of rice, grilled fish (salmon, sword and scallops) grilled shish kabobs, grilled corn and fresh fruits. Plus some really great sangria--which was my wife's first such attempt. Ah, yes and some fresh baked cookies.

After this, their daughter, who got along well with all three of ours, went to the pool club to swim. While they were swimming, we were invited to come in with our guests to Boston for the fireworks. Since they were staying there, their hotel would provide a place to park. The two ladies went before us to drop off their rental car, my wife was there to help navigate--stop laughing! Later, my friend and his kids plus our three ventured into town. The route I planned out turned out to be closed and so we had to improvise our way from roughly North Station to Kennmore Square. It all went fine and so I didn't feel so bad about not predicting that Storrow Drive would be closed, I mean--Duh!

Our friends took us to a place walking distance from their hotel and we had a family style meal of wildly diverse courses. Then we went to the Mass Ave bridge and waited for the fireworks. It was a long wait, but we all sat in a circle and played word games and told stories.

The show was amazing! and the walk back to their hotel was short. After recouping for a bit, we bade our goodbyes and set-out for home. The traffic was gridlocked in the direction of 93 so we took Commonwealth Ave along the marathon route until we got to 128. The green line trains travel on the surface between the on-coming lanes and two things were apparent: Those cars were packed! Even had there been parking at a T stop, riding those cars would've been hellish! The view of the trains as we traveled along in the same direction was quite picaresque, with all the passengers looking tired, crowded, hot and attired in Summer outfits and well-lit in the dark night by the fluorescent lights inside the train cars.

We stopped along the way home to pick-up the Saab at Drum Hill, the girls took it there to get to the start of the race. It seemed like the race was already many days in the past.

Finally, home! Doggy was happy to see her people again.

Swing Set

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Around 7 years ago, I put up a swing set. It was little more than a 16' beam strung between two trees and the swings, trapeze and rings bolted to the beam and hung by chain.

There were several things I did, which in retrospect I wished I had done differently but I figured that it was good enough. Certainly too good to justify tearing it down and re-doing it. One of the things I did was to use regular framing wood. I didn't like pressure treated wood and thought that if I coated the regular wood with preservatives then it would be fine. Not so. A week or so ago, serious rotting was detected via Surenna pulling a chain, associated hardware and some wood down from the structure when she tried to use the trapeze.

Last weekend I put up a new structure with the following changes:

--I used pressure treated wood.

--The beam is made from 6 2X6X8 boards. Last time, I bolted the boards together and I staggered them by having two intact pieces on the outside layers and one full length piece in the middle of the center section, a board cut in half made up the rest of the center section. This time I cut two of the boards in 1/3 and 2/3 lengths and staggered the pieces so that no place along the length had more than one junction. The boards were held together via industrial adhesive (liquid nails) and regular nails. The regular nails are essentially only clamps to hold the boards together until the adhesive set, though enough nails were used to hold the structure together all by themselves.

The old setup lasted 7 years with many design flaws. I expect to never have to change this one. This is a good thing since I seriously doubt I will be strong enough (in 10 years or so) to replicate the efforts of this past weekend. Each board of the pressure treated lumber weighs around 26 lbs and there was additional weight from the nails, glue and other hardware bolted on. The total was around 160 lbs, which is a bit more than the author of this blog weighs. I got the thing in place roughly 10' up, but I was at the limit of my strength and at the tail-end of my 40's, I'm not getting stronger.

Added: For one reason or another, even though this is a relatively uninteresting post, it accounts for about half my blog traffic. Rather than fight this, I have decided to adapt and post additional pictures and whatever other items I like into this one post. A sort of blog within a blog.

Some flowers that are growing around the house, arranged as "artfully" as I can manage.

A cherry coffee table, fabricated a couple of months ago.

Dusting

Every once in a while, you might notice the dust and cobwebs in the top corners of every room. The problem is that you notice it when you are laying in bed just before turning off the bedside lamp and going to sleep. By morning the issue is long-forgotten with the demands of the new day.

This weekend, it being rainy and unsuited to any other pursuit, I finally got this job done. Not with an auspicious start, per usual. I looked in our broom closet for the fox tail and it was not there. So, I figured it might be down in the basement because I use it there to clean sawdust off of woodworking projects. I spent around half an hour in the basement poking around and eventually gave up and thought of looking again in the original closet, but more thoroughly this time.

It still wasn't there. I finally gave up and was in motion to shut the closet door...there it was, hanging from a hook on the inside of the broom closet door!

Progress was rapid until I came to a ceiling fan. The amount of dust and grime was shocking. Even worse was a bathroom ceiling vent grille. That had to be disassembled and cleaned in the kitchen sink. The three regular ceiling fans were so bad that the floors, which had already been vacuumed and mopped, had to be redone.

Most satisfying was the girl's bathroom. It had had specks on the ceiling ever since the day I repainted it (a while ago). These spots were, I believe, some small insects who had landed and somehow got stuck there. They wiped away easily and that bathroom looks more pristine than it ever has since we've been here.

You wouln't believe me if told the truth of why I thought of this song...

Ozymandias

By, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Here is a more up-to-date version.

Sunday, the whole day spent watching the French Open

Saturday I got burned: I intended to watch the woman's final, but between my wife having to leave early for a girl scout encampment and having to procure goods from the store for breakfast and having to make said breakfast for the other two girls. I turned the TV on at around 10:30 and the match was OVER!

Sunday, I got the match on in time and watched the first two sets. Incredible tennis! We planned to go to Mt. Monadnock and hike it since it was a rare weekend day when nobody needed to be anywhere. Surenna needed to get some homework done, so I got to view the first two sets and I had the DVR record the rest for later.

6 hours later: 1 hour each way to the mountain and four hours of hiking and we were home. The plan was for everybody to get cleaned up and then we would go out and grab some dinner. I showered last and managed to see Federer make a good run at the third set, though it was not over when I had to tear myself away again. Federer had been up early in the first set but then lost game after game to loose that set, then set number two came down to a tie breaker. Really, he could have won both of those sets and now he was up in the third. So what could I think? He could still blow the 3rd and the Open is done, or he is finally seeing his efforts pay off and he could take the whole match.

Dinner took a while, but the delay did not dampen my desire to see how it all came out. Federer did go on to win the third set, but he was really never in the fourth and Nadal wrapped the match up in good order.

It was a great match, but somehow it wasn't that aspect of it that made such an impact. On a very eventful Sunday, the match intervened between each part so I was sort of mulling it over or actually watching it all day long. It became the unifying theme for the day.

Great pix from the hike, but I will post them once I get the chance.

Metal, old and new, put to use.

Memorial Day: I was getting the grill ready by scooping out the ashes, when I noticed that the ash pan was rusted and ready to give out. This would not do. Without the bottom piece; ashes, grease and hot coals would exit onto the deck while air would rush in unimpeded. Luckily I had a piece of leftover galvanized sheet metal laying around. It turned out to be the perfect size once it was folded in half and the edges turned up to form a new catch pan.

Earlier that weekend I finally got new tires for my bike. I have had the thing for 30 years. It was a high school graduation present--which meant that I only had to kick-in half of the price. My brother had gotten a bike for his graduation too. His was a grey/silver Motobécane while mine was a beautiful light green Peugeot. I think mine was both prettier as well as more sporty looking, but his was a thing of mechanical beauty. When I would move the bikes to clean the garage, I could just set his bike in motion and it would roll along--perfectly balanced and fantastically light.

Slightly shocked at the cost of new tires and inner tubes, I decided to make a point of using my bike. I brought clothes up to work earlier in the week so that I could ride in without wearing a backpack full of gear (there are showers at the office). Today I made the commute, which took about 35 minutes each way. MapMyRun made the distance as about 9.5 miles, but my car odometer gives slightly more than 10 miles. Maybe next time I will use my GPS watch and let it be the deciding third vote.

Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin

The LORD has counted the number of your days and brought them to an end.
You have been weighed on the scales and found lacking.
Your kingdom is divided and given to your enemies.

The Old Testament explanation is here:

Two versions of Dahlia at Barnes and Noble

The TenThousand

This blog has been going since 2004 and I am on my second counter. The first one crapped out when I had several thousand hits, so this occasion is certainly dubious. Still, I hit 10,000 today. This counter has been going since July 3rd 2008, so it took almost three years and gives me an average of nine or ten hits per day.

From the land of miscellaneous tasks...

--Emptied the dishwasher.

--Roasted Coffee

--Fixed the Mac Mini: It would not boot but the hard drive was fixable via the utilities disk.

--Took the wife to lunch. Not really a task, but still something done.

--Filled the pepper grinder which has been empty for a while because it is the one which holds a lot but is hard to fill.

--Put a new blade on the chainsaw, got it running and then chopped up two trees which were already on the ground Also felled and chopped-up, the bottom 30' of the tree whose top had blown-off and taken-out our power a couple of months ago.

--Took a girl to ballet lessons.

--Wrote this.

I feel like I must have taken a short cut.

I ran about 10 minutes per mile last Wednesday when I did a 16 miler, so I was not optimistic about Sunday's run. Plus it looked like rain when I left and indeed it did pour about 15 minutes after I started out.

This run has always been one that I have been able to do fairly quickly, so I figured that any PR would belong to the past rather than future. My best was 90 minutes and some seconds. Sunday I did it in 1:28:37 for 7:30 per mile.

It is not Eric Clapton

I so totally thought this was an Eric Clapton song. So much so that when I was in the mood to hear it, I went to my iPod and looked in the song list for Slowhand.

Well, it isn't him at all, though to be fair Romeo's Tune would not be out of place on that album.

Romeo's Tune - Steve Forbert 1979

Five, five minute tasks; one of which took two hours.

I was feeling late-morning onset of lethargy setting in, so I decided to do a bunch of small tasks that needed doing:

--I took the tap out of our sugar maple tree, < 5 minutes

--I coiled up the siphon tube that we used to drain the basement when it floods in the Spring, 5 minutes.

--Added windshield washer fluid to two of our cars (the in-laws have one of the three for a road trip weekend). 5 minutes only because I wanted to explore the engine bay of my new car. It has a horizontally opposed four cylinder engine and so everything is oddly arranged.

--Adjusted the swing set. This is a home made setup which is essentially a 16' beam between two trees. Since trees are not always perfectly vertical, there was some odd shimming needed to make the beam level and true. I won't go into all the details, but due to the decay of some components, a new arrangement had to be made. All in all, it took a dozen tools and two hours to get the thing in shape. While I was up there I noticed some rot in the wood but I think the set will last another few years and the kids will be too old for it by then anyway.

--I took the lawnmower blade out and sharpened it using my electric grinding wheel, slightly more than 5 minutes.

For dessert; a bowl of spicy pork rinds, a beer and a brace of mini-candy bars.

Plus blogging.

Mint Julep

I realized too late yesterday that I should have had a mint julep. We have fresh mint coming up in the garden and it was Kentucky Derby day.

Maybe I will have one today on the theory that it is better, when it comes to delicious drinks, to have one later than never.

Today is Mother's Day and most events were so themed:

I ran the The Medical Center 6K in Nashua NH. The event is held on Mother's day because it raises money for a breast cancer related charity. My wife went for a morning jog today too, she didn't do the 6K because she was taking her mom out for lunch and wasn't sure she would be back from the race in time to make her reservation at the restaurant. It turns out she would have made it since I was home well before she left on her lunch date.

The kids made their mom breakfast while I was out. I helped Surenna charge the coffee maker before I left and showed her where the bacon was, as well as how to open the package. I guess the second part stuck, but not the first: She found a different package in the freezer rather than the fridge and managed to get it open. She didn't cook it because it was frozen.

When I got home, I made a few pieces of bacon, from the package in the refrigerator and a pancake from left-over batter. Tres-good!

Just before my wife left, I gave her the box of Whitman's milk chocolate sampler that I had gotten on the way home from the race.

Now I am waiting for the race results to be posted on line. They had posted paper results at the race up to finish times of 25:36 and less--my time was 25:45. I could have probably waited for 10 minutes to see the official time and place, but I wanted to make sure to see Vaish before she left for her lunch date.

Maybe I should just make a mint julep and chill-out.

Update: 208 50/106 M4049 26:01 6:59 David Pecchia 48 M 442 Chelmsford MA GLRR

The timers did not deduct the 16 seconds it took for me to reach the starting line. As is fairly common in races like this, lots of kids and other slow runners cluster at the head of the starting pack and slow-down all the faster runners behind them. I probably lost an additional 10-15 seconds trying to get around all the slow-pokes in the first 1/4 mile.