GLOBADOM

Not saying where I saw that one.

Didn’t stay around to meet the self-deprecating driver.

This is the post where I hope all my doctor friends don’t read my blog. Or perhaps that they do read my blog, but don’t take it personally.

Colby Cosh, editorialist for the National Post, posted a little note on his blog about an outbreak of C. difficile in Quebec hospitals.

That’s a classic iatrogenic disease: the usual mode of transmission in hospitals seems to be doctors bringing it with them from patient to patient.

His editorial is pretty hard on the doctors involved in that case (and similar “forgot to sterilize the instruments” fiascos elsewhere in the country), but it should be.

Medicine, sadly, probably is in need of a bit of procedural clean-up. Rather than rehash the work of others, I’ll let the incredibly smart Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution do the rest of the writing for me:

In Praise of Impersonal Medicine, on using procedural checklists to improve diagnosis and treatment, because process control is better than instinctive doctoring.

Why is Medicine so Primitive?, on how we need to make medicine much more mechanistic and procedural than it is now, because it would save more lives.

The only personal note I’d inject here is that one of my doctor friends, a bone-surgery guy deep into his career, was telling me that he’s at the point where he basically specializes in one surgical operation, and he does it well.

This is probably how more doctors should be, and surgeons especially: take one operation, get very very polished at it (maybe do it for ten thousand hours?), and away you go.

This article, which I was directed to by the seriously poker-faced Terrence “Johnny” Chan, details some rather unpleasant design errors with the new cards being used in the World Series of Poker.

And outside, I’m watching the oddly silent sheet lightning.

Somebody at work asked me about a joke I made: that I was going to turn a profit on my cycling to work by selling the carbon offsets.

That led to a long digression about the nature of emissions trading and carbon offsetting (Al Gore was discussed), and I promised to write a little post about it.

As it happens, Wikipedia (surprise) has already got a very good article which would say most of what I was going to say as a primer on the subject.

All I’d add to that is if you’re not sure what I’m on about, carbon offsetting is a way of compensating for the carbon-dioxide deficiencies of your current lifestyle by paying to have your actions “offset” by carbon-reducing activities (mostly tree-planting at the moment).

There’s controversy about this for reasons of practicality, verifiability, efficacy, and even ethicality. The article has the details.

Indeed, my joke about selling my cycling commute was a joke on several of those issues: how can you tell if you buy my carbon offset that I won’t drive to work anyway? How much does my commute really save, carbon-wise? Wouldn’t I probably take the bus to work instead of my bike if I wasn’t getting paid to offset?

Hey wait, don’t I ride my bike regardless of whether I get paid or not?

In principle, I should say, the questions of verification is not long-term fatal. Eventually there will be sufficient certification in the industry to establish some reliable providers of the advertised service. The ethics of offsetting don’t disturb me much. But I think evaluating effectiveness (and the right quantity to assign to the offset) is going to be a bit hard and forever controversial.

Just as a mostly silly example, how about I sell not my current offset, but the threat that I will start driving my car to work again? As long as I am sincere in my willingness to carry out the threat (and my willingness to not carry it out if I’m paid…), paying me for not doing so is functionally equivalent to any other carbon reduction.

Today’s vital new skill for you to learn is frame respacing. You do this to bike frames because, for one reason or another, frames come with a lot of different widths between the rear dropouts, and rear wheels come a lot of different widths too. Go read Sheldon’s article on this; indeed, much of what you see here is a mere restatement of his superb primer.

But since I seem to not post here much, I thought I might as well do a bit of show and tell. Rather than restate Sheldon Brown’s guide, I’ll just tell you what I did. Assuming you’ve read the article above, this will all make sense, and show you a real-world example.

0) NEVER RESPACE AN ALUMINUM OR CARBON FRAME. They don’t respace nicely. Ti should be doable, but I know little about messing with that material. Classically, you’ll be doing this to an old steel frame, and you will probably do it to take the frame from something like 120 or 126 mm spacing to the modern road standard of 130 mm. That’s what the goal is in this frame job I did today.

1) take some initial measurements to know where you’re going. In this case, the bike in question is a Brooks frame previously owned by my friend Peter. He raced this frame in the 1970s. Brooks was one of the many small-time frame makers of the era: he worked in Ontario, made a few frames, and like many of his ilk, apparently found something more lucrative to do with his life. This is a typical top-of-the-line frame of the era: Reynolds 531 tubes and fork, Campagnolo dropouts, and nice but unadorned lugs. A top frame from another builder might substitute a different set of lugs, maybe Columbus or Vitus’ best tubes instead of Reynolds, and possibly another brand of dropouts, but this is indisputably a world-class racing frame of its day. Eddy would have ridden no better a bicycle.

This particular example shows typical wear and paint chips for a frame that has spent more than 25 years in regular service. You could restore it, but possibly excepting unique (or nearly so) artifacts, my inclination is always to use a tool, not mount it on the wall. So when Dave (the current caretaker of the frame) asked me to modernize it, I was glad to take on the task.

This frame measured out at 118 mm between the dropouts, which means it was actually a little narrower than the 120 mm spec it would have been built to. I also took some frame alignment numbers using a bit of string. The measures (these aren’t really comparable to other frames in most cases; you just use them to establish relative differences) were 47 mm and 42 mm on either side of the seat tube. That’s a pretty big difference.

2) bend some frame. I use a long piece of wood (and a sock to protect the frame) for this job, but I ended up doing most of the bending with my bare hands and shod feet. The technique is to stand on one dropout and pull the other side of the rear triangle upwards. Flip frame, repeat, until everything is in the right place.

3) align frame and dropouts. I did a pretty bad job of aligning the frame. It’s about as bad as when I started. The dropouts are straight, though.

For several reasons:

Remember kids, these are trained lunatics: real humans should not ride in traffic without a front brake, et cetera.

But oh wow.

Music and Lyrics is the worst dumb romantic comedy I have ever really really liked. It distinguishes itself by not introducing the Intractable Relationship Problem until late in the second act, long after a rather entertaining series of sequences between the romantic leads. Also, the creators of this movie got the tropes of 80s music videos and pop bands so bang-on that almost any other lameness in the movie was forgiveable.

Oh yeah, and it may be worth seeing for the nearly-charitable (and thus more interesting) send-up of teeny-pop chanteuses in the persona of the character “Cora.”

And as for Spider-Man 3, it was much better than the reviews had led me to believe. TLO and I went out to see it at the Twilight Drive-In, and it was a treat.

For those of you who remember this drive-in’s previous incarnation as the Hillcrest, the new one is out in Aldergrove, and the snack bar and bathrooms are very nice, and they still use the same great intermission animations. Here’s one of them:

Best. Autographed baseball. Ever.

Random Reviewer reviews automatic light switches in Public Restrooms.

As bad as you think. Maybe worse. A wonderful misuse of technology.