hrrf nemo saltat sobrius

Owen and ?

By my count, I have thirteen Calvin and Hobbes books. When I was younger, I read every volume I got from front to back, multiple times.

I think we all go through those phases as kids, or at least that's what I'm telling myself. I remember from first grade on, when in the school or public library, I'd always try to find comic book compilations. Usually those books were horribly lame, like Garfield or Beetle Bailey - but when you're a kid you don't know any better. Comic strips are funny, even if you don't fully understand them. I think my parents were happy to see me reading, and were more than happy to help me along on this endeavor. I believe they bought me every single Calvin and Hobbes book that I own. I've got them all within eyesight, and I plan on giving every single one to my son.

It was by far my favorite comic strip as a boy, even though I didn't always understand the humor. Clearly it was being aimed at more than kids, which I understand now and couldn't have understood then. I think that's part of the reason my parents encouraged this particular fandom. These were smart comic strips that related to a broad audience. I go back now and read particular strips that made no sense to me when I was younger - and now they're hilarious, while the ones that I thought were hilarious when I was younger are also still hilarious. I never get sick of the snowmen gallery. I like that he took time to hand-paint his Spaceman Spiff or dinosaur fantasies of Calvin's. The details on his Sunday comics were amazing, and it was obvious he cared about newspaper print comic strips as an art form.

I remember being very, very sad when it went away - in as far as one can be sad about something like that at that age. I was probably inconsolable for about four minutes until something else came along to grab my attention. I couldn't quite understand it, why it had to end, when things like Garfield are still around.

Well, now I understand. Garfield hasn't been funny in years - while Garfield Minus Garfield is hilarious. I rate it slightly higher than Fred Basset. Bill Watterson went out at the top of his game, and he knows it. That link goes to his first interview in many, many years. He had a great comic strip that appealed to many in that it depicted a boy being a uncaring, completely free child - and still kept it intelligent and edgy so as to be appealing to adults.

Watterson is a recluse much like Salinger was. He very much so had his own beliefs about things, society, tradition. He was obviously quite intelligent, and bemoaned loudly through the voice of Calvin that traditions of yesterday were slowly fading. I also think his message was very Ferris Bueller:

I read about him indirectly in some publication recently. An author was trying to assemble a history of Watterson and his famous comic strip, and while he never managed to get an interview with Watterson, he wrote about his mystery and his message in Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip. While I haven't read this book yet, it is on my list for the local library.

Every once in a while, I toy with the idea of purchasing The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, but I figure that I have thirteen of the books already. What can this have that I don't have, other than an interview with the humble creator?

New Material

My brother-in-law Matt got us My Two-Year-Old Eats Octopus: Raising Children Who Love to Eat Everything as a Christmas gift.

It's an interesting book, written by a lady who worked extensively in the food lobbying industry. It's pretty well researched, and she is pretty passionate about the subject. I'm three chapters in, and it's a good read, but it's rapidly boiling into a "my kids are so awesome and I'm probably the best parent ever" narrative. I can deal with that if I learn something.

What I don't quite understand is that she very quickly and thoroughly pisses off anybody who formula feeds their babies. Her argument, which is observational and not at all backed up by actual scienticians, is that marketing and laziness is what ultimately drives parents to use formula. The hospital gives you free formula and coupons for formula, and the FDA-approved and well marketed iron-fortified, algae infused dried cows milk "lays in wait" for moms who may have a hard time with breastfeeding. She sees it as an easy way out for moms who can't or won't take the time to properly breastfeed their child. And she links it to an invariable diet in children today, and to a lifelong pattern of "taking the easy way out" for parents.

I don't fully agree with her position on why women stop breastfeeding. I'm no expert, and we've managed to keep one child alive nine months - he's currently chewing on a remote control, and wearing this shirt for the record. It's not as simple as she paints it. I do believe that it has been made easy to give up, and is made easier by a giant industrial food complex and implicit endorsement by hospitals who give the stuff away for free. But her puzzling as to why people quit is very ... unforgiving. Just because a mom chooses to use formula doesn't necessarily mean that in future challenges, such as getting a child to eat broccoli, a mom is going to quit and feed her child chicken nuggets/macaroni and cheese/pizza for every meal because it's the easy way out. That may be true for a subset of all formula-feeding mothers. I won't believe it applies to all of them.

Anyway, this was only the third chapter - and it's kind of amazing how quickly she's alienating a large percentage of any parents who picked up her book. What's interesting is that you can tell that her rant against non-breastfeeding mothers was heavily edited - but it is still very harsh. I guess by that point, though, you've already bought the book and she no longer cares!

It's worth reading, at least so far. I'll keep at it and let you know.

More Economic Asshattery

I'm reading another book about macroeconomics and economic fallacies.  It's called... Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell - a decidedly center-right author.  He writes like a ruthless machine of logic and facts, and it works.  Sometimes there are details that get ... forgotten or too easily discounted, but it's still a very smart book and a good read, even if the title initially lulls you to sleep.

I'm not too far into it, but something in it was pretty smart and I wanted to share it with you.

Think of roads as a resource that is consumed.  When people are driving on a road, they are consuming a resource, usually quite poorly in my experience.  If it's one car on one road, the time spent on the road is very low, and thus the cost to the person on the road is low - in terms of time spent on the road, gasoline consumed, wear and tear on the car, stress, etc.

Not sure, but probably?

I think I want a Kindle.

Not in its current, $399 iteration - but I've always liked the idea of having an e-reader.  I hope that this thing sells horribly well and gets some great reviews, so that way the demand goes up and causes the market to explode and compete for some good e-readers.

I haven't actually read a real book in forever - been too tied up with schoolwork.  But it's neat to think that if I had a Kindle, I could queue up a bunch of books in the reader, and just have them all in one little doohickey, instead of having a stack of books to go through.

I Read a Book Once

I don't like when people read a book and then become experts on a subject because they read one book on a topic. For instance, I didn't fancy myself as knowledgeable on economics because I read one book on the subject. I fancied myself smart enough at it after I read about three books. So there's my threshold. Why am I telling you this?

At Virginia Tech, George Mason, and now at Colorado Tech I've taken statistical modeling courses. A model is something you generate based on old data. Based on this old data, it can make predictions on what will happen with similar data in the future. Generally you can use these for system failure rates - like if you've got a system that's been running for some period of time, and you know how long it has been between each failure, you can use that date to predict when another likely failure can occur.

Another useful model could be any grocery store logistics chain. They get their food from somewhere, in a timely manner. Using sales data they can predict when certain things will be in a higher demand. For instance, on the 4th of July, I bet you couldn't avoid hot dogs, sodas, potato chips, and ketchup in any grocery store you went to. The statistical data they keep using from those club membership cards allow them to model their stocks to be stuff they know that the majority of their customers will buy. Pay attention to when turkies start showing up - they usually show up about three weeks before Thanksgiving, because statistical data has shown that a significant portion of shoppers will buy them that early. There isn't as much clam juice on the shelves 'cause people don't buy it. It's not because the store doesn't like clam juice!

Same for Halloween candy, and other seasonal items. They don't come out with Valentine's day stuff right after Christmas stuff just because they're trying to make money - statistical data has shown that, within a degree of certainty, people are buying all that stuff that early!

Models depend on the data and depend on limiting variables to a reasonable amount. The more variables in a model, the more likely it is to be incorrect. If my system that I'm trying to predict has 100 points of failure, it gets a lot harder to predict which point could fail. 1000 points of failure? You'll need a good computer. 10000? You'll need a super computer.

Weather models are a whole different animal. If you put a sensor at every corner of every square mile of the earth, you've limited your variable set to... what's your best guess as to how many particles of air are in a square mile? How many of those square miles are over oceans or ocean currents? How much wind does it take to move one air particle, and when wind moves an air particle, how does it collide with other air particles while it's moving, and how do the particles that are being collided into get moved by the wind, in a 360 degree space? Imagine the variable space of one square mile of the earth's surface! I'd say there are at least thirty.

Worldwide, I think there are twelve models that are scientifically accepted as being able to predict weather patterns. On average, they are tolerably accurate. This was information passed on to me by my professor at CTU (my professor was not Jack Bauer) for one of our exercises, and I can't find the reference to the article we used, and I probably won't try again. One of the modeling systems came up with a result that shows the global temperature going up alarmingly. This is the one being bandied about in An Inconvienient Truth and used by the UN in their climate panel. They picked the worst set of data from this one particular model - and compared to the other modeling systems, this one is like the Jerry Falwell (bless his soul) of climate models - it gets way spun up but nobody knew why.

Turns out they used bad data to feed their model. Or they misinterpreted the data - one of the two. This link explains how the data got warped, and why the graph has gone from "oh shit" to "oops". The author of that blog post has more time to go and find/check references than I do, and he's a much better writer - it's an interesting read if you're bored at work. If you're not, go look at some furry pictures or something more entertaining.

Most other models are much more normalized. And even then - these models don't have the benefit of sensors at every square mile of the earth's surface. So the fact that they're even 75% accurate could be because of blind luck - real science is just that picky. The way to learn about this phenomenon of "climate change" is to look at the numbers yourself, and not just regurgitate whatever the people you already agree with tell you.

Then, read this, 'cause it's funny. And then take solace in the fact that the planet will be fine. We may all be dead! But the planet, it'll be fine. This is also funny, and so is this. Warning - the link has the word conservative in it, so if that doesn't pass your confirmation bias filter, you might not want to click on it. That means you'll automatically get angry or disagree with whatever is said in there!