According to a top doc in Britain, smoking in the car with children is child abuse. Well, that’s what the article’s title says but the article doesn’t quote him as saying that. I am actually not entirely unsympathetic to this argument as such. It seems to me that smoking in a car with young children does present a health hazard and while in the absence of laws banning smoking in restaurants (for instance) that adults can avoid, the children are captives. Cars are pretty small and can get really smokey really quickly if the windows aren’t more than just cracked open. When I was a kid, Mom would open the windows unless it was raining outside in which case the car would just get really, really smokey.

The doc goes a bit further, though, in arguing the same is true for parents that smoke at home in front of their children. This has got me thinking about some of Sheila’s recent post about the CPS and pot and makes me wonder when we will approach the day when smoking inside the home or in front of the children will be considered some sort of abuse. I think we’re a long ways off from that, but as smoking becomes more and more something that poor and dysfunctional people do, I could genuinely see it happening. Even if the smoking itself isn’t considered so terrible (for the kids), it could be one of those things that gets the CPS’s attention. And it seems that as I learn more about the process, the best way to deal with the CPS is to avoid their attention in the first place.

But I found this comment to be bizarre:

“Evidence from the US indicates that more young children are killed by parental smoking than by all other unintentional injuries combined.”

Errr… by what measure, exactly? Smoking isn’t one of those things that kills you on the spot. Generally speaking. Second-hand smoke even less so. So how is it killing young children? How is it doing so more than all other injuries combined? The only way I can think of this being remotely true is if you count deaths that occur later by conditions incurred when they are young children. Or maybe smoking when the child is in the womb making the infant’s life a very short one. Even so… all others combined?! In the first case, how do you control for other variables such as the fact that children of smokers are more likely to become smokers themselves (due not only to parental example, but genetics)? All others combined?! I have to think that swimming pools, sports injuries, and (these days) extreme food allergies would be larger threats.

Maybe I’m missing something, but without elaboration it strikes me as a number of other “health facts” that I heard growing up that were and are transparently false. I remember being told in the 5th grade that second-hand smoke was actually more dangerous than first-hand. That could only be true if you’re looking at second-hand smoke affecting more people, but that did not seem to be what they meant. Besides which, I am willing to bet in a household of four where one party smoked and the other three did not that the first is more likely to die from tobacco-related illness than the other three combined despite the 3-to-1 ratio. There is a world of difference between breathing something in the air and sucking it straight into your lungs. It, like the doc’s quote, strikes me as one of those things you say to reinforce the point that smoking is not a strictly private behavior. But it does not have the benefit of being credible. At least not without a thorough explanation of how you’re assessing comparative danger.

Via Newsome, an article about a new case that specializes in keeping PCs quiet:

I ran into no problems or glitches moving the guts of the computer into the new case. The whole process took me less than an hour. When I was done, I reconnected all the cables to the rebuilt machine, plugged in the power cord and hit the On button.

And I could barely hear a thing.

At first, I thought something was wrong, because there almost was no sound to be heard from the PC. I could see the blue power indicator on the front, and my monitors showed the bootup process proceeding, but there was almost no fan sound at all.

I’ve been doing some computer building lately, and I know what Silverman means about thinking something was wrong. Other than monitor-output, which seems to take a few seconds, the only ways I know the computer are on are the LEDs and that the fan is running. But I can’t hear the fan, only see it. And this is in an open case!

Loud computers have been a bane on me for a while now. Mostly because Clancy is not as hard-of-hearing as I am and she notices these things far more than I do and I want to keep things quiet for her. Even so, she has pointed out the noise and it’s oddly started bothering me more since. I actually replaced the computer hooked up to the television with a laptop primarily (though not solely) for noise. I replaced the fan first and the new fan was quiet for all of two days before it started making the same racket. Not long afterwards, though, the laptop started getting loud. Now I am using a different laptop.

It seems that on the whole, fans have gotten a lot better than they used to be. I couldn’t find a quiet fan for my (2001) PCs, but all of the (CPU) fans on my new computers seem quiet. This came as quite a surprise as they sort of make a racket. I have since discovered that the offender is the little tiny fan on my video cards. Both of them! They make 100x more sound than any of my PC or case fans do. You can unplug the fan on these video cards, but they respond with reduced functionality (most inconveniently, at the moment, no multi-monitor). The entire notion that video cards should have their own fan is surprising to me, but it does seem that’s where a lot of the heat is generated these days. I know on some of my louder laptops, it’s the GPU’s (graphic processor unit) temperature and not the CPU’s that is causing the fan to go into overdrive.

I made sure that my new video card was fan-free. I would rather be able to buy my own case fans and whatnot to try to keep it cool. And I don’t really game, so I don’t need a particularly good video card (not sure what I’m going to do when-if I next want to capture video, though). This is complicated a bit by the fact that our computer room is hot, hot, hot. The previously mentioned laptop (a 2003 model) that was too loud in the living room in Cascadia apparently kicks into a racket-making overdrive in this room even when the computer isn’t doing much.

The case that Silverman got cost somewhere near $100, which as far as a specialty case goes isn’t all that bad. My large cases for housing lots of hard drives cost $80, though it did include a decent power supply. But it seems to me that with the necessity of increased speed and dexterity mattering less and less, quality-of-life issues like sound ought to be getting more attention and they should be making fans quieter (rather than having to have better insulation). The good news is that if my new PCs are any indication, they are.

Over at Half Sigma, a discussion on two different types of poverty.

Apparently, if you live in Europe or the US/Canada, being poor makes you fat and malnourished.
But if you live in India, or Africa, or South America, or so on, being poor makes you thin and malnourished.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that in the “developed” countries of the world, much of the problem is simply with the fact that individual people no longer – to the large extent – know how to cook and, further, have the desire to do so. I’ll admit I am as guilty of this as the next guy; I tend to eat prepackaged meals (canned soup, canned noodle dishes, frozen pizzas) more times during the week than I make my own meals. Making my own meals is reserved for occasions when I have a female guest (they seem to love finding out that yes, guys can cook and cook well) or during the weekends when I’m not reaching home tired and wanting to relax.

The reality is, of course, that some of the prepackaged foods I eat are clearly not as good for me as if I made something vaguely equivalent from scratch. Just about everything is likely to be higher in sodium than it needs to be, though being a borderline supertaster, I tend to want more salt to counteract the bitterness in certain foods that other people miss, unless I’m in a mood for something bitter.

At the same time, however, the “western” diet has changed over the past few decades. At one time, “pure meat” – that is to say, a chicken leg, or steak, or burger – was something people had 2-3 times per week. Lunch counter food looking back 4 decades or more was much fresher and less unhealthy as well. To what degree HFCS causes troubles, or the overabundance of Gluten as cheap filler, I can’t say, except that HFCS was barely noticed back then, and didn’t even get to “GRAS” (“generally recognized as safe”) status by the US FDA until 1976.

At the same time, poor neighborhoods tend to lack healthy options. Comparing “poor” and “middle class” neighborhood grocer’s produce aisle, for instance, will give one a remarkable perspective: there are two versions of one particular chain that I tend to go by on a regular basis. The first, in the midst of the “poor zone” surrounding one side of Southern Tech, devotes less than 1/20 of the store’s floor space to produce, and what they do have tends to be wilted or otherwise unappetizing. On the other hand, the “flagship” version, a few miles south of my house, devotes approximately 1/8 of their floor space to produce and tends to have very fresh, clean and appetizing produce for purchase. Given that produce is listed for the same price at each store, I find myself wondering how much of the difference is because the poor around Southern Tech don’t buy it (and so it sits around and wilts), and how much of it came off the truck half-wilted as the “last pick” from the delivery truck.

It’s also true that the number of fast-food restaurants and crappy little corner stores increases with poor neighborhoods. So by the same token, the neighborhood grocery’s produce is unappealing, the Popeye’s Chicken just outside the tenement door smells really good, and why walk the four blocks to the neighborhood grocery when you can buy (for a suitable markup) the same can of Chef Boyardee Overstuffed Ravioli at the corner store on your own block?

As well as that, neighbor-on-neighbor crime is up in those neighborhoods. Why try to go somewhere, even a local little park or a walk along the canal, when you’re likely to have someone try to mug you just for being outdoors?

The impact of mostly-sedentary jobs (when the poor are actually working) isn’t to be underestimated, either. In western nations, the poor are likely to be working “minimum wage” jobs. For a little exercise, perhaps stocking shelves, but they may equally be working in the neighborhood fast-food restaurants, or sitting the counter at the corner store/gas station, or any number of “sit in your butt and watch this” type of jobs. By contrast, the poor in developed nations are walking more to get where they go, and tending to do more physical types of jobs.

Circling back around – when I was in school, there was a requirement that students “choose” between either “home economics”, or a couple other optional courses. Because the other optional courses didn’t interest me, I wound up as one of the 4 boys taking home ec that semester (they wouldn’t let us do wood shop until 8th grade, which I did take when I could). Even looking at the course back then, it was rather a joke; there were 4 weeks of sewing that wound up creating one plush football, 4 weeks of “this is how you make a budget” (which most of the kids failed at), and four weeks of “meal planning” out of which 80% of the class wrote up exactly the same weekly plan based on the very few things they’d been taught to make. Since the home ec room had stoves but we weren’t allowed to turn the gas on to use them, “cooking” was rather pointless, and the most appetizing thing the class ever created were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. As I was given to understand, by the time my brother and sister went through that school, home ec was shut down entirely.

By comparison, looking back a few decades, it was expected that most households – and most individuals – knew how to cook, at least enough to survive. The basics of making a soup, making a sandwich, grilling, baking, broiling… as far as the middle and poor classes were concerned, at least, they were necessary life skills. In an age when one can stock up the freezer with “hungry man” dinners (or even “lean cuisine”, which are anything but), why would one bother to learn to really cook? The phenomenon of the stay-at-home wife also offers at least some option for a leaner, healthier diet inasmuch as having someone who (a) has the time to be at home preparing a meal and (b) handles food preparation and meal planning regularly, definitely was going to do wonders for keeping some of the nastier stuff out of a waistline.

The first song is a hat tip to having spent some time with relatives living and thinking a big about relatives passed on.

Another song by the same artist.

ED Kain reports that we have Jimmy Carter to thank for America’s booming beer industry:

To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening back up to craft brewers.

I am personally positively bland in my beer tastes. My “favorite” beer is a Delosa-based outfit (“Wurzbock”) that’s something of a state institution. I put favorite in quotes because I’m not sure if I actually prefer it to Budweiser. Back when I was going to a lot of bars (for music shows) I made the switch to Budweiser simply because it was cheaper. Having moved away from Delosa, I now drink Wurzbock whenever I get back into town simply because it’s less available outside of the state. I say “less available” because according to Wikipedia it’s actually available in over 40 states. I would periodically see Wurzbock trucks when I was in Cascadia. I was tempted to follow one just to see what bar it was headed to. There was another local beer I sometimes drink instead that costs the same as Budweiser, isn’t as good, but is named after my home state. Home field advantage, I guess.

Most of the time, I am fine with Budweiser (or Miller or Coors)g. I’ll drink any non-lite beer. I have some friends that are beer snobs and try to push this really malty stuff on it. I would periodically order Guinness only because I hate it and therefore one glass would last me all night long. For the most part, I am the opposite of a beer snob. Mostly because I don’t really like beer all that much. I had to force myself to like it in the first place (that I would do so astonished many Delosians Deseretians). I did so by basically taking hot days and instead of drinking a coke like I wanted I would just drink a beer. Eventually my mind began associating beer with refreshment. But the effects have sort of worn off as in Arapaho and Cascadia there were never many really hot days. I used the same tactic with diet coke, though that always wears off almost instantly as soon as I drink a couple cans of the real thing.

So unfortunately President Carter’s contribution is more or less lost on me.

Gizmodo is calling doom on the Blackberry front:

Research In Motion needed a miracle. It needed a fresh-faced BlackBerry and an operating system that made people say “whoa.” Yet when it took the stage to unveil the BlackBerry Torch and the BlackBerry 6 operating system, one thing became clear: These were not heaven sent. This could very well mean the end for the BlackBerry.

If you’ve been paying attention to RIM lately, you’ll know two things: 1) That it sells more smart phones than anyone else in the United States, and is second only to Nokia worldwide. And, 2) it is experiencing slowed momentum and increasing consumer indifference in the face of dazzling competition. In short, RIM’s in a mid-life crisis.

The BlackBerry’s saving grace used to be its physical keyboard, something no iPhone would be caught dead with. But now that Google’s Android platform has taken off, it provides plenty of options that meet that simple requirement. And while businesses still buy BlackBerrys by the truckload, they don’t always buy premium models, and they don’t upgrade them every year.

This article may be right, depending on how you define “doom.” More on that later. Right now, though, I have a couple of points to make. First, be very, very cautious before ever saying that a market leader is “doomed.” They really have a margin of error that everybody else doesn’t have. By most accounts Nokia’s Symbian ought to be smithereens by now since almost nobody likes it, and yet they remain the market leader. That’s likely to change, but only because it’s so mediocre that Nokia itself is trying out new things. Second, the Blackberry’s physical keyboard is not its saving grace. Windows Mobile has had physical keyboards for years now. And Windows Mobile, unlike Android, has proven itself as a capable business device. That’s not to pump up WM, which itself is sort of being abandoned by its owner, but rather to point out that having a physical keyboard is not what made the Blackberry great.

What did make the Blackberry great? It’s relatively simple utilitarianism. It’s an outstanding communications device. The iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and others try to be all things to all people and as communication devices are lacking in comparison to the Blackberry. Of course, Blackberry’s limitations in other areas is causing Research in Motion (the makers) some headaches. As time progresses, it will likely to cause them to continue losing market-share. But I suspect that they actually have a pretty high floor. I also suspect that a lot of the people that are going to look at other options will discover that a lot of what they do (or, more importantly, want the employees they are getting these devices for to do) they do very well. It’s not unlike my experience with Windows Mobile. I was all set to switch until I discovered things that it hadn’t occurred to me that other phones don’t do as easily. But mostly, as the article points out, a lot of Blackberries are purchased by third parties. Usually an employer. Whether or not their employee’s phone has a new app that can order pizza for you is not something they are concerned about.

Research in Motion opens the door to these sorts of criticisms, though, the more they try to branch out. It’s something I am seeing a lot when it comes to OSes. They don’t stick to the fundamentals. The upheave this or upend that when they mostly need to work on the fundamentals. Windows Vista is perhaps the most classic example. Windows XP was a great OS but also an OS that could use some improvement here and there. Rather than simply improve the parts that needed improving, they changed everything. Windows Mobile has done the same thing, adding new feature after new feature without changing the dreadful user interface. RiM’s chief liability is the difficult web-browsing. They should focus their energies on that.

So is RiM doomed? Like I said, it depends on what you mean by the word. If you are asking if they could lose their position as market-leader, that’s quite possible. But when you have a good niche, you don’t need to be a leader. That’s how Apple survived long enough to cash in on the iPod and the like. If you want a consumer toy that makes phone calls, the iPhone is hands-down better. If you want a handheld appliance that can maybe play audio, you go with Blackberry. That’s not a knock against the iPhone, which I would buy before I would buy a Blackberry, but it’s nonetheless how I would advise somebody choosing between the two of them.

On a sidenote, I have to comment on this:

And the screen? At 360 x 480, it isn’t even close to the baseline. Apple calls its 960 x 640 iPhone 4 screen Retina Display, since it has pixels so small the eye can’t see them. The BlackBerry Torch’s display has one third as many pixels in almost the same space. As All Things D’s John Paczkowski said on Twitter, “They should call it Cataract Display.”

That’s funny, because 360×480 is exactly the resolution that the iPhone had until six weeks ago! Meanwhile, Windows Mobile and Android were offering 480×640 as far back as mid-2008 and late last year*. And yet like so many other things, resolution only matters when it’s something that makes the iPhone look good instead of bad in comparison. Don’t get me wrong, I am impressed as hell at the iPhone’s new resolution. The difference is that I care about resolution regardless of who is on top.

* – Actually, Windows Mobile had Pocket PCs with that resolution as far back as 2004, but I don’t count that since it didn’t have phone capability.

Spirit Airlines has officially started its policy of charging for carry-on luggage.

Honestly, I don’t really have a problem with it. I mean, I prefer fewer charges to more charges, but if you’re going to charge for checked luggage, it only makes sense to charge for carry-ons. Failing to do so creates inefficient incentives. I was behind a woman at the Alexandria airport that had three carry-ons/personal-items. Now, we’re only allowed to take two on the plane, but that’s not really security’s business. She just checks her third bag at the gate. That is a courtesy that the airlines provide for those that have something they can’t really check, such as a stroller, or accidentally bring on luggage that they can see won’t fit. It’s not meant to sidestep checked-luggage fees. It ads time to security screening, which is always a process of indeterminable length. It ads time to the boarding process as lines get held up by people trying to cram their bags in overhead bins. It ads time to the security line.

Generally speaking, I think things that discourage people from packing more are on the whole a good thing. I say this as someone that typically packs heavy. When I flew down to Delosa, I actually used the fact that I had two checked bags for free on the flight back because off the kind of ticket I ordered to buy some stuff in Delosa and take it back with me on the plane. Taking advantage of a courtesy, just as the lady with the three bags did.

Along those lines, I think that people that limit themselves to a personal item (purse, laptop) ought to get priority through security. That’s another thing they could do do discourage people like me from taking everything under the sun.

Earlier this week I had dinner with my parents and some of their old friends (The Harrells) from before we moved to Delosa thirty or so years ago. Anyhow, I noticed something odd about the way that the waitress spoke. It was hard to pin down, but it seemed like she might be suppressing an accent. She would start out sounding strange and then within a few words it would come out normal. Sorta normal. Not accenty, but a little off.

After I noticed this for the third time or so, I commented on it to Mr. Harrell, who said that he had noticed something similar. However, he thought it was coming from the opposite direction. As in, she was very American trying to affect a foreign accent. She would slip into sounding normal because she would forget she was in accent mode. For some reason, Dad thought she was a he. Well, not entirely, but he was trying to figure out what was so strange about her.

Mr. Harrell was the one that had the courage to ask where she was from. Turns out that he was right and I was wrong. She was from a place in Kingsland that he used to live. They actually talked about it a little while. She was well-enough versed in the area and the local high school that there was no doubt that she was actually from there and not an illegal immigrant from The Czech Republic.

So he was right. Most likely. I still maintain that I might not have been wrong if the accent she was trying to bury was a southern accent. The pronounced potato “poh-tah-to.” My Aunt Evelyn uses the same sound. Po-tah-to instead of potato. Ont instead of ant for aunt. She was raised in the rural south every bit as much as my mother and other aunt were. But from a very young age, she sought to get out. Out of rural. Out of poor. Out of the south. She still lives in the south because she married a (wealthy) southerner who didn’t want to leave, but she is an anglophile that identifies more with Britain than the US in some ways. Along the way, long before I met her and before I was ever born, she slaughtered her accent.

But I think that just further proves that Mr. Harrell is right, though. Most likely she pronounced po-tah-to for the same reason my aunt did, because that’s the way that Americans think Brits pronounce the word. She faltered between this unidentifiably accented voice and this sort of… I don’t know… chrome… voice, but never slipped into a southern voice that I could determine. The chrome voice came off to me like someone trying to sound like an American by way of watching too many movies. But maybe not.

In any event, the speculation passed the time while my folks and the Harrells talked about a bunch of people they knew before I was born or before I turned four.

Did you know that if you smoke pot, child protective services can take away your kids? And if you don’t provide them with many months of clean, regular random drug tests, and possibly also complete a substance abuse program, parenting class, and individual therapy, they can even adopt them out permanently.

With California’s legal marijuana initiative on the ballot in November (Prop. 19), I figure it’s a good time to discuss the related issues of 1) what happens to parents who get caught using cannabis, and 2) how you can reduce your chance of getting your kids taken if you’re one of them.

I deal with this on a weekly basis. People are usually surprised and really angry to find out what the child welfare laws can do to them for using or possessing drugs, even without any criminal charges or convictions. And it’s not just dirtbags. Sometimes it happens to normal, likeable, responsible people you wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with.

I have to explain to many unhappy parents that a “DA reject” of their possession or dealing charge has no effect on their resulting case in children’s court. Their kids are staying in foster care. Or maybe they never even got arrested. Someone who didn’t like them — like their ex — just called in a referral to the child abuse hotline. Maybe it wasn’t even for pot, maybe it was for coke or meth, and they marched indignantly down to the testing site unaware that they screen for every drug, not just whatever they were accused of. Or, more commonly, the children were removed from the other parent due to something else, and this parent’s use got talked about when they interviewed the other parent. Or maybe not, but maybe when they ran your criminal record — which they always do as part of their investigation — they found a pot ticket from a couple of years ago. Or not a conviction, but just an arrest for possession. Or no arrests, but several calls to the cops from or about your address claiming drug-related activity. (Bet you didn’t know there are records kept of cop calls.)

Any little thing, they’ll use to get you to drug test, long before you get appointed a lawyer who’d tell you not to do it. And once they’ve got a test, with any level of marijuana in it, they’ve got you. And they’ve got your kids, probably for three months at least whether you take it to trial or settle. Don’t think of this like a criminal court case. These courts allow hearsay, the standard of proof is not “beyond reasonable doubt” but rather the same as in civil court, and there’s no way to exclude evidence on a Constitutional basis. Worst of all: You can’t bail your kids out of foster care while you fight your legal battle. This is why the better trial or appellate prospect I think a parent is, the less likely he or she is to want to be my guinea pig. Most parents with a shot at winning a protracted fight don’t want it.

Yet there is no law specifically prohibiting a parent from possessing or using illegal drugs. If you just read the actual law the department uses, you’d mistakenly think it set forth a high standard for taking away someone’s kids. Here it is, Welfare and Institutions Code section 300(b):

(b) The child has suffered, or there is a substantial risk that
the child will suffer, serious physical harm or illness, as a result
of the failure or inability of his or her parent or guardian to
adequately supervise or protect the child, or the willful or
negligent failure of the child’s parent or guardian to adequately
supervise or protect the child from the conduct of the custodian with
whom the child has been left, or by the willful or negligent failure
of the parent or guardian to provide the child with adequate food,
clothing, shelter, or medical treatment, or by the inability of the
parent or guardian to provide regular care for the child due to the
parent’s or guardian’s mental illness, developmental disability, or
substance abuse.

[Emphasis added.] (more…)

When I was a kid, I was raised to believe that everyone should vote. At some point in early college, I suspended this particular dogma as I found out that a lot of people – adults, even, with jobs – didn’t know squat about government and that we were probably better off with them not voting. I wrote a piece in The Daily Packer (my alma mater’s newspaper) to this effect. I’ve been reconsidering that in recent years, though, because of this study. Well actually, not because of the study itself because it hadn’t been run yet. But I knew full well that what it had to say was true after spending years hashing out political differences on the Internet:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

My observation was similar: People who educate themselves on politics and government simply learn how to make more complete arguments for the positions that they held before they educated themselves. I read somewhere a couple of years back that the most educated voters tend to lean strongly to the right or left (or be libertarians, if they were statistically significant). Moderates tend to be the least informed. This, combined with my experiences debating people, lead me to the pretty simple conclusion that not only do people hear what they want to hear, as the saying goes, but they read what they want to read. Only moreso, because it’s hard to accidentally read something that tells you what you don’t want to know and it’s easier to hear it.

In the final seasons of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano’s psychologist comes to a similar conclusion (or is presented with evidence) that psychopaths actually attend therapy not to mend their ways but rather to learn how to better justify their misdeeds. And so it goes with politics.