Category: Uncategorized

I’m going to talk statistics. My wife recently took an advanced statistics course as part of her Masters program, and we ended up talking about what she learned. A lot. In particular, we spent a lot of time talking about how people misunderstand statistics. Common examples:

1. Statistics apply only to large numbers. If you don’t have a large enough data set, you can’t get anything meaningful out of the statistic. For instance, if I poll just ten people, I have too small a sample set to come to a decent conclusion.
2. Statistics apply globally, not locally. For instance, a woman has an 13% chance of getting breast cancer if she lives to age 85. This doesn’t mean your five-year-old daughter has a 1 in 8 chance of having breast cancer right now. Take a group of people over the span of 85 years, and you end up with that stat.
3. Drawing statistics from a small sample set, without looking at a similar larger sample set, leads to incorrect conclusion. If 97.7% of prison inmates eat meat, one might assume a correlation between eating meat and likelihood of becoming a prisoner until you measure the general population and find that 2.3% of the US population are vegetarians. The statistic has no particular meaning in a more limited context, it just reflects the similar statistic of the overall population.
4. Correlation does not equal causation. Just because two statistics tend to have some sort of relationship to one another doesn’t mean one causes the other. It does mean, however, that there is some sort of relationship there which might be worth exploring.
5. Discarding data that goes against your hypothesis. This is called “counting the hits and ignoring the misses”. For instance, people will often blame the weatherman for mis-calling a forecast, ignoring his 90% three-day-forecast success rate* the rest of the year. People remember the days he flubbed it, and forget the days things went as planned.
6. Choosing one point in a data set. Psychics often point to a single or a few tests in an examination that support their claim to be psychics. Although those exceptional results are outliers on the bell curve of probability, since they were not repeatable, they are not exceptional in the overall arc of testing.

Now to my specific complaint:

If I hear one more person say “if scientists can’t even predict the weather, how can they predict global warming?”, I’m going to scream. Ongoing climate change, including the current upward temperature trend, isn’t a hypothesis based on weather forecasts!

The weather forecast in your home town is a teeny, tiny part of an enormous chaotic system. That chaotic system, however, is a self-contained ecosystem, and the overall ecosystem can be measured — and statistics drawn — many different ways to come up with accurate global statistics that have precisely jack to do with weather you should carry an umbrella tomorrow.

For more information on how people misunderstand and abuse statistics, read How to Lie With Statistics.

* Note: Of course, that success rate has its own sub-set of ranges of temperatures and weather conditions where it might be considered a hit or a miss. The forecast for the coming weekend is going to change a lot between Monday and Friday. However, three-day forecasts are currently pretty accurate most of the time, particularly if you look at aviation charts. The moral of the story: three-day forecasts are really useful to plan your weekend, and mostly accurate. Beyond that, anything can happen because it’s a chaotic system.

It’s the 9th annual Sysadmin day today. You know… sysadmins? The people without whom your entire computing network would come crashing down in flaming ruins? According to the System Administrator Appreciation Day website, “on this special international day” you should “give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication.” And don’t mess up your damn PC by fiddling with it, for once.

After a day at work wishing I were riding, I spun the bike around the neighnorhood again, found a parking lot, and practiced entries and exits on turns at speed, plus panic braking, good turn signaling, and looking where I want to go. It makes me realize how lazy of a car driver I have been!

At the end, I was very concerned that I had no tach or idiot lights. I fixed the tach with some solder, shrink wrap, and adjusting, but the computer driving the non-functional LCD display might be beyond saving. The idiot lights should not even be in the same circuit, but they don’t light up when I turn the key.

Anyway, the instrument console is in pieces, and I picked up a new fork seal and fork oil. Figure the bike will be on its stand a few more days while I do a few minor repairs.

This will give me time to find a helmet that fits my XXL, very square head appropriately. I have always known I had a really big head. Trying to find a size helmet that doesn’t make my eyes bug out in pain confirmed this.

My poor, poor children. The wife has a large, square head too.

No pictures, I just wanted to talk about my experiences with my first day of motorcycle ownership.

On Day 0, I had gone with a very experienced riding friend to take a look at the eventual motorcycle I would own: a 1984 Honda VF1100S Sabre V65. It’s an 1100 CC motorcycle, but at a price of $900, it was cheap enough that I could pay cash and own the pink slip on the bike, and thereby keep my insurance rates incredibly low ($75/year). Spent several hours doing all the paperwork and chores to be able to ride legally in Utah.

I had spent several preceding weeks reading instructions, watching videos, and making sure I knew the relevant laws and best-practices regarding riding a motorcycle. But I recognized the same feeling that I’d had prior to trying to fly my first airplane: an unfounded confidence that I would be fine without practicing.

So I broke out my mountain bike during the week my wife was away and spent some time getting used to riding on two wheels again. I loved it; I was reminded why I’d bought the bike in the first place. I had read about counter-balancing and counter-steering on a motorcycle, and realized I did this naturally on my mountain bike. My experience with many years in a stick-shift car had also taught me the necessity of having a soft touch on the clutch to ensure smooth acceleration.

Day 1: My friend drove the bike back to my house, we had a few words regarding operation and what all the switches and buttons do, how to shift properly, and then I took him to lunch at a local Irish-themed restaurant to thank him.

Once I got home, I got over my fear, and sat down on the bike for only the second time. I re-acquainted myself with the controls: clutch, front brake, rear brake, gearshift, neutral, first gear, horn, lights, emergency kill, choke, turn signal… all good. Turn the key. Beep the horn. Play with turn signals. Fiddle with high/low beams. Verify turns signals are all in working order. Break out the PSI indicator and make sure the inflation matches the recommendation in my owner’s manual. Check the suspension… hmm, looks like the left front fork has a bit more oil/dirt than the left. Need to plan a fork pressure/leak check, maybe before I hit highway speeds.

Back it out. Turn it around. Face toward my gravel cul-de-sac down the driveway. Full choke. Squeeze both levers. Go to neutral — all clicks down, half-click up. Huh, neutral is easy to miss. Try again. OK, press start. 30 seconds on full choke, 60 seconds on half-choke, then no choke.

Eased it into first. Remember to brake with the back wheel for slow-speed maneuvers. Begin a gentle left circle around my cul-de-sac.

I’m not breathing.

Stopped the bike. Killed the engine. Paused. Took several deep breaths. Went back into the house, got a drink of water, talked with the wife.

Went back and got on again. Now let’s do right-hand circles. Remember to use the rear brake in slow-speed, not the front. Don’t dump the bike! Let out the clutch a bit, hey, look, it straightens itself out just like the book said!

OK, my circles are getting better and tighter. My cul-de-sac is fifty feet wide. Feels big enough to do figure-eights. OK, right-hand figure-eights are fine. Left-hand? OK, try it slower. Use the rear brake and feather the clutch to keep RPMS up while making a really tight turn.

The gravel is pretty slippery in a tight turn. Probably best not to try to go any tighter until I get some experience on asphalt.

Took another break. Total time on bike: 90 minutes so far. Unfortunately, I live on a cul-de-sac attached to a main road. The only way to get any asphalt driving is to cross the highway. Well, nothing to be said for it.

Rode to the intersection. Chickened out, duck-walked to turn around because I wasn’t confident of my U-turn ability yet. Went home. Had dinner. Waited for rush-hour traffic to die.

Tried again later. Chickened again, went back to my cul-de-sac and practiced not stalling out the bike when moving into first gear. Finally got up the gumption, waited for a HUGE gap in traffic, and crossed to the 25MPH neighborhood streets across the way. Kept the speed down to around 15-20MPH, played with the speed bumps, found a parking lot. Practiced hard stops and starts. Imagined an obstacle, practiced a weave, realized I still suck at it and won’t be ready for the highway for a while yet.

Left the parking lot, found the right road back to my house. Virtually no traffic, easily rode back and parked it in my garage.

Total time riding: 3 hours. My hands ache. I’m very sweaty from my thick leather jacket and gloves.

Stayed up until 1AM reviewing motorcycle safety and instructional videos. Watched crash videos and analysis. Realized that there are a bunch of ways cars can kill me that aren’t much under my control. Resolved to work more on SEE techniques, swerving, and hard braking tomorrow. Riding an 1100CC motorcycle is decidedly different from riding an human-powered mountain bike.

Today is tomorrow. Stuck at work, and all I want to do is go ride 🙂

The comet Swift-Tuttle left an enormous trail of debris in our solar system, and each August our little spacecraft Earth flies through this trail again. The meteors are beginning to be visible, and will peak between August 8 and 12.

The falling stars are most visible from 11PM through dawn, increasing spectacularly a few hours before dawn. Schedule some time with your loved ones and watch this beautiful annual event.

Cohen: I have no quarrels with my wife! In the case of BIG issues I am the decision-maker, in SMALL ones my wife is. This was our arrangement from the first minute on. Gruen: Does it work? Can it work? Really? Cohen: Yes. There were no big issues in our marriage in the last forty years.

Most memorable scene of the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight”: The Disappearing Pencil Trick. Not a doubt in my mind. One of the most memorable and subtly gruesome scenes ever.

Seen the movie yet?

This morning I dropped my oldest child off for Oakcrest summer camp at a LDS “stake center”. There were hordes of 12 and 13-year-old girls about. My daughter had some trouble locating her stake leader, but eventually figured it all out and settled down on the lawn to chat with her fellow camp-goers. It looks like she’s going to have a fun week.

I am reminded of similar camps when I was a youth. There was the school-run sixth-grade-camp I went to, from Darnestown Elementary. One night I was woken up, convinced it was morning and that I had KP duty, then locked out of the dormitory with a leering, red-headed kid named Kevin sticking his tongue out at me. He turned off the lights, and left me screaming at the top of my lungs while pounding the door for Mr. Yoxheimer to eventually wake up and, grumpily, let me back in.

That Kevin kid was a jerk.

I am reminded also of the stark contrast such camps were to the religious campouts I went to as a youth. Similar to sixth-grade camp, there was no shortage of peer-on-peer cruelty. For instance, at Goshen Scout Camp, one of my camp-mates thought it would be funny to crack a rotten egg on my sleeping bag while I slumbered therein. Those kinds of shenanigans are painfully well-remembered. I learned what it meant to be the new kid in a school full of children who’d known each other all their lives. To this day, I sometimes have difficulty figuring out when someone is having a laugh along with me, or ridiculing me.

On the other hand, the religious camps had the trappings of traditional summer camp, with a relentless focus on drawing moral or religious lessons from each activity. I would be pulled aside regularly for one-on-one interviews in which I was pressured by an adult to talk about my most private experiences and have that used as a lever to get me to go along with whatever the doctrine du jour was. The one that stands out most, actually, wasn’t at a LDS summer camp: it was a Methodist summer camp that I attended with my girlfriend (we were trying to convert one another), where the counselors were aghast that I had no interest in “surrendering” to Jesus.

My logic at age 16 went something like this: “What’s the point of surrendering when there was never a war to begin with?” Using the word “surrender” to describe one’s relationship to a deity implies there was some sort of conflict that you’re giving up. If you feel you are living your life in harmony with your god’s wishes — despite a few failings — what need is there to surrender? Why not use the word “negotiation”, or perhaps “subsume”, or “obey”?

The camp counselor pounded me on this for around fifteen minutes, then gave up, saying “Well, I understand where you’re coming from, but until you are saved and surrendered to Jesus, you won’t understand.”

Similarly, I was pulled aside for a several-hour seminar on the evils of masturbation at Priesthood camp. In particular, the counselor focused on “mutual masturbation” — the male-LDS-1980’s euphemism for homosexuality — and cautioned us not to give in to peer pressure to do that while at camp. We were then pulled aside for individual interviews with our priesthood leaders, and the only thing I remember getting asked about was whether or not I wanked, at what frequency, and what mediation plan we should come up with to stop it.

The other facet of summer camp that was part of the mind-job was the isolation. This lack of outside contact provides a fertile ground to enter a reality-distortion field, where you can be convinced of many things. I recall another Scout camp where a boy had a broken leg for hours before they finally took him to the hospital, then only after they had him all put together again did they bother to inform the parents.

I understand that it’s nice to get away from it all and unplug for a week. But at summer youth camp you should be swimming, playing, and telling scary stories around the campfire, not being quizzed on your sexual practices, pressured into signing an instrument of surrender on the religious version of the USS Missouri, or hiding serious injuries from parents.

I have some concern that Utah, with a Greater-Reality-Distortion-Field surrounding it already, might amplify the weird and coercive influences I experienced as a child.

As I handed my daughter her blue information sheet to help her locate her leaders, I asked her if she had her cell phone. She replied, “No, Dad, we’re not allowed to bring our cell phone.”

I was briefly taken aback, and responded, “Sara, I don’t want to be a subversive influence on you, but please, remember who you are this week. Just because someone is an authority does not mean they are right. Some leaders and peers take advantage of summer camp to try to advance their own agendas. Have fun, but be willing to say ‘no’.”

“I’ll be OK, Dad” she replied.

And I think she will.

What’s something you could do, would be within your current means and time, but you just haven’t gotten around to it?

For me? I would book a flight back to the East Coast, rent a car, and see the home where I lived up until age twelve. I don’t know why, it’s totally irrational, but it’s almost like I just need to see the place to remind myself that it’s not the same as when I left it, wild in a swamp.

What about you?

I cringe to look at these pictures (not explicit, not gross, just the implications): http://basia.blog-city.com/tykes_on_bikes.htm

Entire families riding on a single motorcycle. Life is cheap in India, I guess.

Sample photo: