GLOBADOM

One of my posts to the metblog (and my accompanying photo) got a nod at Gridskipper. I shall add it to my collection of ego-gratifying compliments.

And now all the world shall know the glory of The Red Onion!

That was The Lovely One’s one-sentence reaction after seeing an ad for a KFC Hot Bowl.

So after previous rants on the subject of how much movie theatres suck, what was I doing in one a few weekends ago?

Watching Mission: Impossible III.

Why? Someone in my household has a sentimental attachment to the last remnants of joy in the theatre-going experience, and that was the movie playing as a Saturday matinee.

It could have been worse! Seriously, I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone go to a movie theatre ever again, but I was not distracted by lousy projection artifacts, and the movie itself went well with popcorn. There were some places where the plot was paper-thin (our hero trains his wife to be a deadly pistol shot in about a minute; the secret villain’s motivations are pretty stupid), and it was a formulaic action movie, but an acceptably satisfying one.

It is much better than you would expect, considering that off-camera, the lead actor is completely crazy.

As one of my minor hats at work, I’m a Floor Warden, which is a nice term for the people who wear colourful vests and order others out of the building in an emergency. This meant I got to attend an interesting presentation Monday on planning for emergencies and disasters (for the uninitiated, there’s a difference: emergencies happen in the context of the rapid arrival of external professional help. In other words, the fire department will be there shortly. Disasters are that class of problem where services are overwhelmed (hurricanes, earthquakes, geography-spanning stuff like that) and there is an expectation you’ll be on your own for a while.

The stuff stayed with me. I liked the succinct summary of disaster management: “nobody else dies.”

Rather than talk about the very sensible guide to emergency and disaster procedures we got–and more particularly, the rationale behind those procedures–I was inspired to muse on what I might call “marginal risk management.” That’s a clever way of saying “put your effort into avoiding the most likely dangers.” I suppose you could also make a case for cost-benefit analysis: it’s worth dealing with relatively low-risk hazards that can be mitigated with little effort.

The real trick with marginal risk management is figuring out what the real dangers are. And although it was peripheral to the talk, our speaker mentioned the key one in passing: try not to die in a traffic accident.

Not all of the risk of car crashes can be avoided, except maybe by shut-ins. But you can do a few things when you get in a car that make your risk of death much less: seatbelts, don’t be impaired or fatigued at the wheel (or, as in the fatal case of one of my high school classmates, take a ride from a drunk), don’t drive like an idiot. Seatbelts and not being drunk are pretty boringly proven safety tricks, but most people already know that stuff and put it into practice.

Oh, brief aside: I’m not sure if it has real marginal value in saving lives, but electronic stability control (ESC) seems to be proving itself as a crash-and-fatality prevention device. ESC is basically a system where your car can sense certain patterns of acceleration and relative wheel motion (usually using accelerometers built into the car, and the ABS sensors on each wheel) that mean your car is sliding out of control, and then can either reduce engine power or apply the brakes (often one wheel at a time) to bring the car back into line. Surprisingly, anti-lock brakes themselves have shown no measurable benefit in reducing crashes or fatalities.

What’s the next marginal danger? This page seems a good place to start, though note that figures on obesity as a cause of death are in flux.

The National Safety Council has a very interesting page on the odds of dying by a particular cause. That table is very interesting, because this seems to be about the rawest way of expressing causes of death one can get, but it is also very deceptive, in that it doesn’t separate causes of death by “participation” level in these activities (“participate” is in scare-quotes because while one can assume that all people who died as “motorcycle riders” were participating in motorcycling, I am at a loss as to how to specify participation levels for “ignition or melting of nightwear” (though I’ll bet that’s primarily a smoker’s death) or “contact with hot tap-water” (cold showers save lives? Or do they just increase deaths by “Excessive heat or cold of man-made origin”?)

What one really wants to know, odds-wise, are the odds for one’s personal risk profile: Given that I drive X km/year in conditions Y, ride my bicycle Z km/year and always use blinky lights, and eat A pounds of sugar in my diet, have B history of diseases C, D, and E in my family, live in a house at risk due to natural disasters F and G, but not H, swim in the lake J times a year, and drink K glasses of alcohol every night, what are my chances of dying of a particular cause? Knowing that, what are the marginal changes I can make to my life, my activities, and the way I do them that will make the biggest difference for the least cost? How much risk does my lifestyle put me at? Even if The Big One hits Vancouver, is it very likely I’ll die in it? What is the difference in the chance of survival if I am fully prepared, complete with food, water, and first aid for a week or so, or completely unprepared and reduced to drinking toilet tank water and draining the hot water heater (the two primary sources of potable water, by the way, if you have nothing else in the house)? What is my life worth? Four million dollars? One more drink before closing time? Worth giving up motorcycling?

Let me phrase it another way: is the car trip I make to the store to buy a first aid kit, water, and survival rations more likely to kill me than the emergency supplies are likely to save my life during a disaster? Note that even in a disaster, most people survive despite their level of emergency preparedness. The trick is you can improve your odds by preparation and planning for the during and after parts, so you don’t end up surviving the earthquake, and then dying because you got hit by falling glass afterwards.

“Nobody else dies.”

Maybe I’ll have those emergency supplies delivered for me. I’m much less likely to fall and die in the house than to die in a car.

Risk calculation and disaster mitigation is complicated, but the questions brought up are not only creepy, they’re interesting!

So I haven’t been posting enough here, partly owing to my yeoman work at Metroblogging Vancouver and partly because I have been busy with projects.

Right now, just for fun, I’m keeping secrets. Maybe you’ll get to hear some of them later, maybe not.

Here’s a good one: if I had recently learned of a tool that made my ability to search obscure eBay auctions much more effective, should I share it?

The answer is no. So there’s one secret for you (though it’s not much of a secret if you read digg.

Oh, here’s a nice non-secret project:

What you’re seeing is The Lovely One’s laptop connected to The Good Thing, our occasionally evil New Beetle. I’m using a cable bought online to read the trouble codes off the car. This was cheaper than getting the dealership to do the same thing. Problem is with my secondary air injection system, an annoying emissions component. Guess I’d better fix that.

Oh, and here’s something bugging the azelea in our front yard:

insecting it, really. But then it will fly away.

Stupid green snot! You’ve been coming out of my nose for three weeks! Go away! Nobody wants you!

Argh! I’m sick of being sick! I’m sick of feeling 80% effective! Anger!

Ahem.

And a Good Friday to you too.

Thanks to Mr. Coop, I got to read about Turbonique, purveyors of the craziest technology ever to grace 1960s hot-rodding.

Independently powered superchargers. Direct-drive 1000-hp auxiliary turbine motors for cars. Rocket-powered go-karts capable of sub-9-second quarter miles with 160+mph trap speeds.

It makes me weep with joy just to know this stuff ever existed.

Sometimes high-end particle science is a little bit weird, and sometimes it is very weird indeed.

These wild and crazy guys are drilling into Antarctic ice to use it as a neutrino detector. That’s what you sometimes have to do, I guess: drill up to 2.5 km deep into the ice at the South Pole and drop a few thousand detectors into the holes to see if any neutrinos are coming by.

Oh, and they’re hiring (danger: PDF). Not too often you see a unix admin job with preferred experience like this:

Experience with the RedHat Network software management tool.
Experience working at Polar and high altitude sites.

I also play video games.

My brother Mike asked about the new TV, and I sent him a summary too good to hide in email. Some of this was covered in previous posts, but what the heck.

It’s a Digimate 37″ TV.

We got it at Future Shop for $1500. It was sort of an end-of-the-line deal for a TV they
apparently brought in for the Boxing Day sale. It doesn’t seem to be available, at least from Future Shop, any more.

There’s some really good things about this unit, and some other things that aren’t so good.

The really good things: true 1080i (1920×1080) resolution (surprisingly, there’s a lot of supposedly “high-end” TVs that have a lower native rez, and downconvert). Lots of inputs, including ones that let me use it as a really good computer monitor. Super cheap. Big enough for our room (we sit, maybe a foot or two closer to the TV than you guys; no more).

The bad: no built-in HD tuner (minor issue). No easy way to use the 1080p glory of the panel (mostly a potential issue, and the DVI and SVGA inputs will pass an effective 1080p). no HDMI (minor issue). Two sets of Component inputs, but can only do HD signals on one of them (pretty annoying issue, but fixable for $60). Can’t scale letterboxed standard-def pictures in two dimensions to fill the screen (picky issue, but would be really nice for viewing shows on TV channels like TCM, where they regularly show movies letterboxed) no HDCP on the DVI interface (major issue! Hulk smash!!)

HDTV buying is a morass of crazy details right now, and probably will be for about 12 months. There’s also fun hidden costs, like having to buy a box and possibly a subscription to use your fancy new TV. So far, I think I could fix all of the issues I’m having, but it would be pricey. I’d like to buy a computer to hook up to it as an in-line scaler ($100-400), a shady box to fix the HDCP issue ($400), a component switchbox to let me mux a bunch of stuff into the component HD input ($60) and an HD PVR box ($700 instead of $200 for my lowly non-PVR box).

I think it’s important to think very clearly about what you want to hook up to your TV, and to buy accordingly.

If I had to do it again, I might still buy the same unit: the picture is great, and the HD stuff just works. but my dream TV would be this one, but with maybe three full-HD component inputs, an HDMI input, that scaling feature I talked about, and HDCP on at least one of its inputs. The HDCP thing is a fairly big deal in the long term, but minimal practical effect now. The scaling thing is annoying part right now. I should probably just suck it up and buy the $60 switch box to fix the HD input thing.

Sorry I didn’t put in too many links, I’m on day three of being home sick, and, well, I don’t feel like it.

So here I am, home sick, trying mostly not to infect my co-workers. So I have a lot of time to watch TV.

You know which TV station rocks HDTV? Really does it right, with nearly full-day programming that I love watching? PBS.

Yep, that’s right. Most of the “HD” feeds from the major networks, including CBC and the sports networks, are purely part-timers. I don’t think TSN-HD shows anything in Hi Def except the occasional hockey game. Even their evening sports show isn’t in HD.

Fox is very nearly as bad: a few prime-time shows in HD, and that’s it.

You know what I’m watching on PBS right now? The Nova show on the Darpa Grand Challenge in glorious wide-o-vision. Aw yeah!

They even got John Lithgow to narrate.

Do you know how much it argues against interest for me, an instinctively libertarian hater of publicly-funded arts, to admit this? But I have to say it: PBS-HD is what I hope every “HD” service looks like in a year.