Mid-week misanthropy, vol. 37

Et enfin encore, nous sommes de retour.

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I’m used to having the occasional libertarian tirade countered with something along the lines of “But if you get rid of government*, who’ll ensure that our drugs are safe and effective?”  My usual riposte involves terminal cancer patients who can’t get experimental drugs because they’re in the middle of interminable FDA approval processes, but Dr. Lowe gives me another option:

• Sheesh (In the Pipeline)

Yes folks, it turns out that the people making sure that clinical trials are run properly are about as competent as the people who were making sure that credit rating agencies were run properly:

Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., criticized Health and Human Services officials for failing to catch the fictitious IRB and registering it despite numerous red flags. “Nobody picked up on names like Phake Medical Devices, April Phuls, Timothy Witless and Alan Ruse — in the town of Chetesville, Ariz.?” he asked department reps.

Your tax dollars at work.

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We move north of the 49th for another story of health-care idiocy:

• Hospital staff call ambulance for man outside ER (Vancouver Sun)

Ken Olson, a Saskatoon contractor, was on his way to a meeting Monday morning when he noticed a man in a hospital gown lying on his back “less than 10 feet” from the entrance to the ER.

“I parked and ran in through the emergency doors and said, ‘You’ve got someone in hospital clothing outside your doors unconscious,’ ” he said.

Olson said he was stunned when staff responded by phoning 911 for an ambulance. He says they told him policy prevents hospital staff from attending to patients found on the grounds.

“Policy”.  The very word invokes images of oily, coiffed, smarmy dipshits in cheap suits, doesn’t it?

Oh, look, here’s one:

“When something happens to an individual on our grounds, it is our policy that we do call 911,” said Patti Simonar, director of emergency and critical-care services for the Saskatoon Health Region. “And in this instance, it would seem that policy was followed.”

I’d like to shake the hand of the gutless motherfucker who decided that adding extra verbs to perfectly good sentences — “that we do call 911″ — was a good idea.  I’d like to shake his hand so that when I kick him in the nuts I’ll be able to pull him into the blow.  But back to the matter at hand: Why do you suppose that this policy was put into place?

“We don’t always know what’s wrong with the patient, we don’t always know if it would be safe for our staff and our medical equipment is not mobilized,” she said.

The health region believes trained paramedics or first responders with the proper equipment are better able to treat patients found outside the hospital, Simonar said.

Um.  So a hospital ER doesn’t have the proper equipment to treat patients, but an ambulance does? I know single-payer health care isn’t the panacæa Michael Moore painted it to be, but I didn’t realize we were fucking the dog that enthusiastically.

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Of course, every time one of its erstwhile colonies imposes idiotic restrictions in the name of “policy”, Great Britain sleepily raises a metaphorical eyebrow and mumbles, “I can top that.”

• Firefighters told to use poles to test fire alarms as stepladders ‘are too dangerous’ (Daily Mail)

Yeah, really.

The move has been blasted as ‘ludicrous’ by firemen who say they are trained to climb ladders as part of their job.

One said: ‘It is preposterous. Climbing a ladder safely is an integral part of being a firefighter. It is what we do and we receive expert training to ensure we do it properly.

‘To now be told we are not to be trusted with a set of step ladders is ludicrous. We will be banned from tackling fires because they can get quite hot.’

This is the same place where fire extinguishers were banned because we grubby untrained masses might try to use them.  Colour me skeptical.

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It’s not that we new-worlders aren’t doing our best to catch up to the old country in terms of ridiculous regulations for the ostensible advancement of public safety:

• Wisconsin hopes to protect kids from Capitol nuts (Earthlink News — who knew, Earthlink’s still around)

No, they’re not talking about figurative nutcases prowling the Capitol grounds for prepubescent prey.  They aren’t even talking about the nutcases within the Capitol.  They’re talking about honest-to-balls nuts.

Wisconsin is asking people to refrain from feeding squirrels at the state Capitol because they might inadvertently harm a child with a peanut allergy.

The tragedy here is that no-one gives a fuck about adults with peanut allergies.  Oh, sure, you might suppose that allergic adults would have the sense to avoid things they know could kill them, but given the sort of dipshits they’ve voted into office I rather doubt it.  Oh won’t someone PLEASE think of the poor precious ADULTS?

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And speaking of ex-British colonies with asinine public-safety regulations, we find this story from Australia where the tenebrous menace of the blasphemous firearm is getting, um, rather creative in its many forms:

• Arrested for wheel lock “gun” (CourierMail.com.au)

No, not this kind of wheel lock:

He was dragged out of his car and tossed to the ground for this kind of wheel lock:

*facepalm*

That cop has great potential for a career in California politics….

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* Note: I’m a libertarian, not an anarchist.  This distinction is lost on many people.

Out of cake…

…time for beer.

Paper’s in.  (Kudos to Eurographics for their impressively usable web-based submission system.)

I’m going to spend the rest of the evening drinking porter, listening to Motörhead, and possibly watching John Woo and Michael Mann films.  Angry frothings will return tomorrow once my hangover has dissipated.

We thank you for your patience.

I’m doing science and I’m still alive

A conference deadline’s taking over my life at the moment, so what little blogging you get is obvious Portal references.

Derek Lowe is also doing science, and also still alive.  This is a more impressive feat for him than it is for me because he’s an organic chemist, and works with things that scare me, like hydrogen fluoride.  But he has a list of things with which he won’t work:

• In the Pipeline: Things I Won’t Work With

Devastatingly good writing, deadpan humour out the jacksey, and compounds that will cheerfully set sand on fire.  What more could you want?  Go read.

Higher-order benefits of hosting the Olympics

(Sorry ’bout the dearth of posting lately; a conference deadline’s taking over my life.)

I’m somewhat more than a little bit skeptical about Vancouver’s enthusiasm for hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics.  Tyler Cowen links to a paper which suggests that even an unsuccessful (yet plausible) bid for the Olympics indicates a vibrant economy and boosts trade, but voices some skepticism of his own:

• Trade and the signaling benefits of hosting the Olympics (Marginal Revolution)

From the paper:

Economists are skeptical about the economic benefits of hosting “mega-events” such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, since such activities have considerable cost and seem to yield few tangible benefits. These doubts are rarely shared by policy-makers and the population, who are typically quite enthusiastic about such spectacles. In this paper, we reconcile these positions by examining the economic impact of hosting mega-events like the Olympics; we focus on trade. Using a variety of trade models, we show that hosting a mega-event like the Olympics has a positive impact on national exports.

Tyler’s comments:

Could it be unobserved heterogeneity, namely that up-and-coming nations (and there is no perfect way to control for that) are the ones who apply to host the Olympics?  [...]  The simpler model is that winner’s curse holds, overbidding for the games results, bidding is also driven by rent-seeking and special interests, but since the bidders are up-and-coming cities in the final analysis the complaints don’t sound so convincing.

In other words, cities (or nations) bid to host the Olympics because they’re growing; they don’t grow because they bid to host the Olympics.  Still, if there is a bit of a feedback loop between hosting the 2010 Olympics and trade growth, it’d make me a little less irritable about filing my provincial taxes this year.

Victims in everything: social networking edition

In my last year as an undergraduate, I took a course in existentialism.  Our second reading was Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, where the preacher-philosopher undertook a detailed examination of Abraham’s motives in doing his damndest* to sacrifice his son to God.  Our first reading was Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, where the decidedly atheist philosopher undertook to explain responsibility in clear, concise, and terrifyingly stark terms.  Looking back, that course is probably where I stopped being a grass-eater.

Clearly, not enough people are reading Kierkegaard and Sartre.

• Social networking fatigue: are you a twit if you don’t want to Twitter? (Pantagraph.com)

(Lest you think I’m complaining about Pantagraph.com, the article itself is from the Associated Press.)

Mike Nourie, a student at Emerson College in Boston, says he feels a little relieved to escape social networking when he works summers at an inn on Cape Cod where connection to the wired world is spotty.

“It gives me a chance to relax and focus on other things like music, work and friends,” says the guitar-playing 20-year-old.

…

…you’re “escaping social networking” to “focus on friends”…

Pardon me, I’m at a bit of a loss for words.  If only there was a visual method for conveying information… here we go:

(Blunt Object’s Giveafuck Bay operations are under scrutiny from the EPA for overuse.  Sorry ’bout that!)

So, let me get this square in my head.  You’re a shiny scrubbed twenty-something, presumably bright and talented in your unique-precious-snowflake way.  You choose to establish a Twitter or Facebook account.  You add whichever personal details you choose to that account, the whole point of which is that they’re visible to a lot of people.

Then you complain when lots of people want to chat with you.

Um.

Is there a part here where I’m supposed to give even half a shit about your artificial self-inflicted so-called problems?

Smile, it gets worse:

“Being exposed to details, from someone’s painful breakup to what they had for breakfast — and much more sordid details than that — feels like voyeurism,” says [Alex Slater] the 31-year-old public relations executive in Washington, D.C. “I’m less concerned with protecting my privacy, and more concerned at the ethics of a ‘human zoo’ where others’ lives, and often serious problems, are treated as entertainment.”

Y’know, the thing about voyeurs is that they seek out other people’s private lives.  If you’re uncomfortable reading what other people choose to post on their Facebook pages, quit fucking reading.  If your conscience is nagging at you, if you feel like a voyeur, then you’re doing something wrong, and it’s up to you to cease and knock it fucking off.  And if they choose to post it, it’s by definition not private.  Cut the sanctimonious “human zoo” bullshit and sack up.

(Yes, I’m aware of the irony of blogging about the shallow failings of social networking.)

Unbefuckinglievable.  We’re at the point where so-called adults feel the need to apologize, not for not having a Facebook account, but for not checking it every fucking hour.  We’re at the point where “public relations executives” feel victimized by the personal details that they choose to read, which some other person chose to post, and this is somehow Facebook’s fault.  If Sartre ran into any of these thin wispy man-shadows, he’d beat them to death with the stub of a Gauloise, and probably be able to smoke the rest afterwards.

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* That was not meant to be a pun

Getting there from here

(Previously, with a libertarian bent.)

I’m an environmentalist.  I don’t get particularly eschatological about it, but there’s a certain logic to the edict of “don’t shit where you eat” that I find compelling.  (I also like the idea of oil independence, if only because it makes people like Hugo Chavez cry.)  But societies and circumstances mostly change — in good ways, at least — at a slow, steady pace, even though we rarely notice the changes until they’re dramatic enough to seem game-breaking.  Before the breathtaking space race of the ’50s and ’60s, Wernher von Braun had been building solid- and liquid-fuelled rockets for going on thirty years — and orbital mechanics has its roots in Newton’s development of calculus.  Cheap software and the “microcomputer revolution” goes back to Ada Lovelace in the mid-19th century.  With that in mind, I’m not impressed by the flights of fancy to which popular environmentalist thinkers are given.

Sure, I think it would be fantastic* if we could harness wind and solar power for residential electricity; transmission costs being what they are, I think we’ll end up with some form of local power generation sooner or later.  But we don’t have the technology to get all of our juice from sun and storm just yet, and even if we did, we don’t have anywhere near the infrastructure we’d need to store it against times when it gets calm or cloudy.  We could (and should) build a big whack of fission powerplants — sure, the waste is scaaaaawwwy, but unlike coal-plant exhaust it can easily be kept in one place — but a CANDU reactor, say, isn’t exactly something you throw together over a weekend.  Local solar and wind plus enough large-scale fission to make a difference is a glancingly plausible medium-term strategy: we know how to do it; it’s just an engineering (or in the case of fission, testicle-finding) problem at this point.  I’d bet that honest-to-balls fusion power becomes practical before large-scale solar and wind does.

But well-understood engineering problems aren’t exactly rhetorical scaffolds suitable for grandiose demagoguery, now are they?  So instead we get wild pipe dreams about “solar farms” pumping compressed air into abandoned mines and beaming “energy” across the country with the magical power of benevolent unicorns.  That’s nice and all, but if we can’t get there from here it doesn’t do the rest of us a fuck of a lot of good.

Audi Sport’s head of engine development, Ulrich Baretzki, has a pretty good grasp of  how to get there from here.  (He has, after all, been designing high-performance endurance-racing engines for an ever more fuel efficiency-conscious racing series for a decade or more.  Oh, and they’ve been winning the 24 Hours of le Mans every year.)

• The Way It Is: Grappling with the fear of technology (Gordon Kirby)

Baretzki’s team built the Audi R8’s 3.6l V8, the Audi R10’s more powerful and more efficient 5.5l diesel V12, and most recently the Audi R15’s 5.5l diesel V10.  Their engines have to be more and more efficient year after year, because the sanctioning bodies under which they race keep reducing engine restrictors and available downforce in vain attempts to slow the cars down.  Their steady incremental changes have produced startling results.  This anecdote (from the above) makes my point rather well:

“We are saving the world more than we are killing it,” Baretzky declared. “I made a presentation last year about the R10 and its efficiency and when we were finished a young girl, an ecologist, came to me and said, ’How can you sleep at night with all the CO2 your engines are producing?’ And I said, ’I’m sleeping extremely well and I can tell you why.’

“In 2001 we introduced [fuel-stratified injection] technology at Le Mans. The benefit was an increased performance and reduction in consumption by ten percent. In 2006 the VW Group introduced this technology over all its gasoline engines and 3 million of these engines have been sold each year. If you calculate that the average car goes 10,000 kilometers per year with a reduction in consumption by ten percent thanks to FSI then in three years more than 3 billion liters of fuel have been saved. So now you know why I sleep well.”

Funny how much you can get done when you have the imagination and tenacity to make incremental improvements on what you already have, rather than simply inventing magical** solutions and whining when “the market” can’t provide them.

Then you get General Motors.  I hate to bag on them in this context, because the C6.R GT1 programme was a really good (and well-executed) idea, but this electric-car-Real-Soon-Now thing has got to stop.  Jalopnik explains:

• Making electric cars is really hard

What we aren’t so great at yet is batteries. At least, not batteries that can provide high power draws with a 100% duty cycle in extreme environmental situations without catching on fire and blowing up without warning — that’s what the engineering and scientific community is feverishly working on right now.

From a technological perspective the only barrier between now and an EV future is a battery that’s cheap, reliable, able to charge quickly and last a very long time in environments ranging from the humid Central American jungles to the frozen tundras of Canada.

(Apropos of nothing, did anyone else see Kimi Räikkönen’s KERS battery blow up and catch fire during practice at Sepang last weekend?  That looked exciting… in a bad way.)

Anyway, this battery issue — and many like it — hasn’t stopped GM from announcing yet another Car Of The Future.  Only this time they’ve partnered themselves up with Segway.

Segway.

(Image link goes to Jalopnik article)

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

The interesting thing here [is] its vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Not only does the P.U.M.A. talk to other units, but it can detect the presence of other types of vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists; using that info to avoid collisions. It can also join together with other P.U.M.A.s to form high-speed (if you can call 35 MPH high speed) cross-city trains capable of using special lanes for uninterrupted travel.

So, the only thing that makes this more useful than a bicycle is predicated on (a) massive consumer adoption of the things and (b) ubiquitous specialized urban infrastructure?  That’s clever.

I guess now that GM’s effectively owned by the federal government we should get used to ideas like this.

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* In both the literal and the colloquial sense

** By Clarke’s Law, any technology sufficiently advanced to solve the world’s energy problem subject to the constraints of a typical upper-middle-class environweenie would be indistinguishable from magic

Miscellaneous Monday motorsports mumblings, vol. 14

I almost feel sorry for Bernie Ecclestone these days.  The sweeping rules changes from 2008 to 2009 have certainly shaken up the running order and seem to make for much more close racing than the last few years, and with BrawnGP doing what it’s doing Formula One has a compelling fairy-tale storyline.  His sport should be doing so well — but, uh, it isn’t.

First we had this nonsense about Toyota’s, Williams’s, and Brawn’s high-volume diffusers and their notional “unfairness” stealing the show before the Australian GP.  Then after Melbourne, when everyone was supposed to be talking about the BrawnGP 1-2, the new powers at the front of the grid, and the odds of a Ferrari and/or McLaren comeback, we were instead chattering about Vettel’s ten-spot penalty for racing too hard against Kubica (about which The Bernie was decidedly not amused) and all this nonsense about Hamilton passing Trulli under the safety car, then Trulli passing Hamilton, and so on.

Now we get to Malaysia, where Ecclestone insisted upon a late start time to make things easier for European television audiences… and the late-afternoon rainstorm that everyone had predicted, the sort that “always happens” in Sepang this time of year, shut down the race just over halfway through.  Button got his second win — not with a bang but with a soaked-through whimper — after a lot of close racing all up and down the order and some tire strategy that would give a NASCAR crew chief pause.  Now we’re all caught up in the “what’s going to happen to McLaren?” game with a side order of BMW’s interminable protests about high-volume diffusers.

Two weeks of this shit and we’re off to Shanghai International Circuit, possibly the dreariest example of Hermann Tilke’s art with technical challenge out the wazoo but not an ounce of character.  This does not bode well for The Bernie.

——

In any case, we should focus on the bright spots from the Malaysian Grand Prix, and there were several.  Nico Rosberg showed amazing pace — both his own and his car’s — in the Williams’s first stint.  That puts him right up there with Sebastian Vettel as a dark-horse contender for the title this year, in my opinion.  The Williams is awfully quick and seems to be reliable enough to run a full GP weekend without difficulty (pissing off the diffuser gods out of T4 at Melbourne obviously excepted).  Once they get KERS up and running — if they can do so without sacrificing reliability — they’ll be tough to beat, at least until Adrian Newey gets a high-volume diffuser under the RB5.

Also, if you want close racing in Formula One — which presumably means that you’re not a race steward — you’ll be very happy with the multi-lap first-stint battle between Raikkonen, Webber, Glock, and Vettel.  There is really good racing ahead if we can get past all this protests-rulings-appeals chickenshittery.

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In covered-wheel news, Aston Martin have won the Catalunya 1000km — the opening race of the european Le Mans Series — with their new Gulf-liveried LMP1.

• Aston Martin victorious on Le Mans Series debut (Planet Le Mans)

Furthermore, the Patron Highcroft team have won their first LMP1 race in St. Petersburg, FL:

• Patron Highcroft Racing score first LMP1 victory for Acura at St. Pete (Planet Le Mans)

All of these events seem annoyingly like sideshows as Peugeot and Audi focus on Le Mans.  I don’t really expect Aston Martin to challenge either diesel at la Sarthe or Acura to do the same at Petit Le Mans, but spending their time racing their cars rather than jerking off in a wind tunnel ought to put them closer than one would otherwise have any right to expect.

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Let’s finish things off with some car porn.  Here’s the Maserati GranTurismo MC GT4 car:

(Jalopnik)

If you have a large fortune that you’d like to turn into a small fortune and a racing career, Maserati would like to talk to you.  Damn that thing is sexy.

“Equality” is a false god

Liberté, égalité, fraternité has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?  It’s a rather eighteenth-century idea: we’ve pretty much given up on liberty as a guiding societal philosophy, and fraternity has an awfully sexist sound to it, but equality — oh, man, now there’s something we can sink our teeth into.  You can’t throw a stone without hitting some activist or other* crusading for a particular kind of equality for a particular broadly- or narrowly-defined group.  It’s a compelling idea, but a bad one.

[A]ll men are created equal — except, of course, we aren’t.  Some people are born healthy, others with congenital diseases.  Some people are born to well-off, intelligent, loving parents in prosperous western democracies; others are born into misery and despair in, say, North Korea.  The circumstances of our birth affect those of our childhood; the circumstances of our childhood affect our education (or lack thereof); and so on down the line.  We see the disparities produced by this chain of circumstances as unjust, and being by and large a well-meaning species we try to fix it.  Every once in a while our fixes kill ten or twenty million people.

The popular debate isn’t about whether we ought to do something about inequality, however rampant or contained, but about how much we ought to do.  On the one hand, we have some folks — usually on the right-conservative side of the political fence — who agitate for equality of opportunity: the proverbial “level playing field”, where everyone gets the same start and is free to succeed or fail on s/h/its own merits.  On the other hand, we have people — generally on the left-progressive side of that goddamn fence — who insist that only equality of outcome will do, noting that even a glassy-smooth playing field is easier to run on if you were born with long legs.  It’s a distinction without a difference.  Past outcomes determine present opportunities.

So if Equality is a false god, then at whose temple should we worship?  Let’s go back to the Declaration, which more properly insists that all men are created equal insofar as we all have innate rights to life, liberty and property.  (Well, the Declaration mumbled something about “…the pursuit of happiness”, but Locke had property in mind so we’ll go with the original sentiment.)  These are negative rights, and the Declaration goes on to assert that no government has the moral authority to fuck with them.  “All men are created equal” means that no government has special dispensation to fuck with someone based on their circumstances — be they age, race, sex, creed, or anything else irrelevant to the direct situation.  (This is proving to take a while to implement in practice, but if it was easy everyone would’ve done it.)

What we have here isn’t equality — it’s impartiality.  Impartiality is probably just as hard to achieve as equality, but it’s much easier to approximate.  Everyone is permitted to own land these days, not just a hereditary aristocracy**.  On the other hand, driving the kulaks off of their property and collectivizing their farms didn’t work out so well.  We don’t even want such cherished concepts as equality before the law — witness the furore that erupted when “the law” insisted that teenaged girls who send their boyfriends naked photos of themselves are just as much pædophiles as are real online predators.  Instead, we want assurance that no-one will get preferential — or abusive — treatment from the justice system because of their background, or their income, or their seat in the House of Representatives.

It’s impossible to give everyone a seat at the front of the bus.  It’s repugnant to force everyone to stand.  But it’s perfectly reasonable to insist that, if you’re forced to stand at the back of the bus, it’s because the bus is crowded and not because you’re black.

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* And once you have, you won’t want to stop

** Although if you own land in Massachussets and want to put up a wind farm on the coast, Ted Kennedy would like to have a word with you