Shots Across The Bow

Right to Die, and Terri Schindler-Schialvo

This is a tragic situation where a family has been divided by a calamity. Terri Schindler-Schialvo collapsed in 1990, and in 1998 her husband sued for permission to remove her feeding tube. His request was granted, and the only reason Terri is still alive is that her parents are fighting tooth and nail to keep the order from being carried out.

It looks like they are about to lose that battle. Despite evidence of purposeful movement, attempts to speak, recognition and reaction to family members, despite the diagnoses and written opinions of physicians and therapists, the courts have agreed with Mike Schialvo and his lawyer that Terri is in a persistent vegetative state, and a candidate for removal of life support, which in her case, consists of a feeding tube.

The feeding tube is the only reason that Terri is at risk for court ordered euthanasia. If she could be fed by spoon, she could not be allowed to die. Unbelievably, in March of 2000, the judge in the case, Judge Greer, denied her parents and doctors the right to test her ability to swallow, or eat from a spoon. This is simply incredible, since she doesn't drool, controlling her own saliva by swallowing.

For more about the case, including video of Terri responding to family and friends, go here.

There's something seriously wrong here.

First of all, if we're going to kill this girl, then why make her suffer through 10-14 days of thirst and starvation? Be merciful and kill her quickly with a lethal injection. Both actions will certainly cause her death; why make her suffer?

Squeamishness.

The right-to-die crowd has quite correctly assessed the mindset of most Americans. We don't like killing somebody just because they're sick, but as long as we can maintain the fiction that we are "allowing them to die", we can live with it. If we don't act, but through inaction allow her to die, somehow we believe that no moral burden falls on us.

It's bullshit.

Whether death comes from withdrawal of treatment or a lethal injection, the intent to kill is there, so if you're going to kill her, dispense with the hypocrisy and don't let her suffer. Dragging it out over 2 weeks is certainly the les moral of the choices, adding torture to murder.

And it is murder, make no mistake.

That squeamishness reveals the second problem, and identifies why this is murder. Terri left no clear instructions on what should happen in the event of her incapacitation. We have the statment of her husband, which is contradicted by her parents. That simply isn't enough to go on. Making the decision to end a life should only be taken when the evidence is overwhelming, and that isn't the case here. If this were a capital punishment case, the sentence would be thrown out on appeal in a heart beat. Why should a convicted felon have more protection than an innocent victim? So why would this judge allow the removal of the feeding tube under such shaky pretenses?

I can only assume it is because he pities Terri Schialvo, and feels like he needs to put her out of her misery. He may have looked at her, and seen himself, and decided that since he wouldn't want to live that way, she wouldn't either. The problem is, that shouldn't be the basis of his decision. If she can be fed by a spoon, then she can't be allowed to die. Why not allow that test? granted, if she fails it, that won't stop her parents from trying to save her life, but if she passes it, it would prevent a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Isn't that worth the time?

Harrison Ford: Hypocrite

OK, he thinks our foreign policy is going in the wrong direction. He thinks we shouldn't have used military force in Iraq. He thinks we need to restrict the availability of guns in the US. He regrets what we've done in Iraq so far.

OK, these are his opinions and he is entitled to them, but how seriously whould we take them? He's just an actor after all; I'm not aware of any study he's done in foreign policy, or on interpretations of the Bill of Rights. Is this another case of a celebrity trading on fame to forward a political position?

You betcha!

But read the following bit from Harrison, to see just how seriously we should take him:

Ford said many of today's films "are more akin to video games than stories about human life and relationships."

"It seems everybody is only going for the big hit, for the most return," he said.

The veteran actor announced he will revive the role of adventure-hero Indiana Jones in the fourth installment of the series, scheduled for release in 2005.

Hey, he's just going with the flow, right? Getting his while he can. Which is fine, but he probably shouldn't criticize everybody else for doing the same thing.

Speaking of the Undead

It's football time in Tennessee, and the Vols are ready to take the field.

Maybe.

The weather forecast is for rain on Saturday, and we all know how well Casey performs when it's wet.

The offensive and defensive lines should be much improved, which will help, and Banks provides a breakaway threat at wide receiver, something we lacked last year. Of course, Banks won't make much of a difference if Casey can't get the ball to him, or if Sanders calls his usual conservative game.

This is the last chance for Sanders in my book. I was hard on him last year, but there's no doubt that injuries caused some of his problems. But a good Offensive Co-ordinator needs to be able to react to those injuries, and work around them. Sanders didn't do that. It will be interesting to see how he does this year.

Fulmer has to take a lot of heat for last year as well. He allowed a couple of hot shots to destroy the team. That cannot happen again. The team is saying the right things coming oput of practice, but I'll have to see how it translates on the field before I become a believer again. Apparently I'm not alone, since, for the first time that I can remember, the season opener still had not sold out 3 days before kickoff.

The biggest obstacle facing the Vols this year is their schedule. Even a squad which improved greatly over last year's effort could still wind up with 4 or 5 losses.

Saturday's game against fresno State will be a real test for the team. Do well, and the season promises to be an exciting one, win or lose. Falter, win ugly or lose, and it will be a long frustrating season.

Again.

Vols on top 24-14

The Living Dead

There’s one scene that’s in every zombie movie ever made. I think it’s required by law or something. It’s the scene where one of the kids running from the zombies has been caught, eaten, and now returns to chase his former friends. Though recognizable, mainly by his/her clothing, they are ghosts of their former selves, brain dead, shambling monsters whose only goal is to feed off the living.

Which pretty much sums up how I feel about 100.3 The River in its new incarnation. The life is gone, but the corpse refuses to lie down and be quiet.

I can still recognize the body of my old friend; the call letters are the same; they still call themselves “The River,” and they’ve even kept a couple of the DJ’s. But there’s no heartbeat in this new incarnation, no soul, probably because there’s no heart in corporate radio.

Morning and afternoon drives are the two peak times for a radio station. That’s when they get most of their listeners, and that’s when they establish a voice. WOKI’s drive time shows are canned, and have all the personality of a trash compacter. They’ve recycled news and traffic announcers from other Citadel stations in Knoxville, a move that saves money, but one that robs the station of the last vestiges of a unique voice.

They claim to have kept the same format, but the mix has changed. I’m hearing more pop music, and less blues, Americana, and reggae. When they let their Music and Program Directors' go, the station lost its direction, and the music lost its focus. Instead of an edgy, eclectic mix of new and old, of songs you wouldn't hear anywhere else, we’re now getting the standard Greatest Hits mix. Before long, I expect ratings will drop off, and Citadel will use that as an excuse to officially change the format to whatever they want to call what they’re playing now.

Contrary to the carefully selected sound bites they’ve been running, most of the River Rats are dismayed with the changes, and are leaving The River. As one former River Rat said, “If I have to listen to crap, I’ll listen to the original crap, not an imitation.”

The River has lost its voice, its edge, and it won’t get it back. According information in the guestbooks on Save 100 The River.com, they don’t want it back. Apparently, the new management is going after a female audience to supplement their male audience at WIVK. I guess that leaves the River Rats who liked the format before, who drove the Station from 11 to 5 in the rankings, out in the cold.

We’ve tried petitions, e-mail campaigns, talking to advertisers, and even talked to the some of the people in charge. We were told we were heard, that our voices made a difference.

We were lied to.

But revenge is sweet, and I get to do my small part to ensure that the newest Citadel venture falls flat on its face. Not by this column; 100 readers or so won’t make a difference, but guess who was chosen as a radio Arbitron family for this week? Yep, that’s right. I’ve got 5 radio logs in my house, and for the past week, not one Citadel station has appeared on any of those logs. WUTK, WETS (Johnson City), WDVX, and 93.1 all show significant time though. I imagine they will be greatful to the new management at The River.

Just my small way of showing the folks at Citadel how much I appreciate them turning my favorite station into a pale imitation of every other mediocre station out there.

You know, I'd be happier if they would go ahead, be honest for a change, and rename the station to something that more accurately reflects the new outlook, like, The Ditch, The Stagnant Pond, or The Cesspool. Let the dead corpse finally rest.

Enough is Enough!

Checking out SayUncle, I found that Fumento is still commenting about our little dust up. Bigwig has this to say:

If you're going to denigrate the size of a man's equipment in public, no matter how much of an ass he may have been, fair play demands that you be willing to expose your own to the gaze of the same crowd.

Was I an ass? I don't think so. Far from defending the Atkins Plan, I simply pointed out errors in Fumento's argument, errors of logic and errors of fact that nobody who'd actually read the book could have made, unless they were attempting to distort the truth. I pointed this out to Mr. Fumento, and challenged him to correct the record. I also pointed out that his misrepresentations and distortions were very similar to those he accused Gary Taubes of committing. What I got back was a blast of venom and personal attack, which, while not answering any of my criticisms did succeed in changing the terms of the debate from his erroneous reporting to his boorish behavior, and from there to an argument about readership. When you're losing a debate, it's always a good tactical move to change the focus of the debate, and that's what he did, both in his email to me, and in entries on his site. Both site traffic and his insults were irrelevant to the discussion we were having, but that's all anybody will remember.

My view on this is simple, and documented; the guy is fundamentally dishonest. Just a few examples from Advise section:

First, he introduces errors into a quote from my page, then attributes those errors to me.

Second, he copies a picture, changing the aspect ratio to make it look worse than it is. When called on this by Glenn Reynolds, he fixes the aspect ratio, yet later claims to another reader that he didn't doctor the image.

Third, he uses another picture from an Atkins site to "prove" that all Atkins supporters are fat. He changes the filename, and provides no link to the picture, making it difficult to verify his claim. I took the time, and found the following:

The picture (Scroll down to Betzi) is indeed an "After" shot from Betzi, who claims to have lost 102 lbs, down from 435 to 333 lbs over about a year. She's lost a quarter of her body weight, and this pompous ass has the gall to use her picture to claim that all Atkins followers are fat!

"Sick vicious bastard" springs to mind.

And that's my final word on Mr. Michael Fumento.

The Essential Survival Kit

Forget what you read in Bomb Shelters Today or The Survivalists's Digest, SayUncle has the lowdown on what you really need to survive when the SHTF.

Week 3

Hit the scales this morning and was very happy to see 262 lbs. That's 20 lbs in three weeks! I've gone from size 44 jeans to size 40. I raised by carbs to 20 grams/day, and my daily caloric intake fell to just under 1900 calories. The calorie reduction wasn't intentional; my youngest som was suffering from shingles, which threw off my daily routine. I literally forgot to eat!

Since things are going so well, I'm going to add another 5 grams of carbs this week. I'm adding some extra veggies, like asparagus, spinach, and green beans, as well as some fruit, mostly berries. I've also been exercising 4 times a week, doing aerobic photography. I walk just under 2 miles everymorning, taking pictures to document job progress. Combining exercise with work helps me get around my lack of spare time.

For next week, my goal weight is 257 lbs.

A couple of weeks ago, I was accused of being an Atkins cultist, and what kind of cultist would I be if I didn’t try to gain a few converts to the cause? So, beginning with this update, I plan to bust a few myths about the Atkins Plan, put out some correct information, throw in a recipe or two, and annoy an ill-informed skeptic or two along the way.

As you are seeing, Atkins works for me. It gives me a comfortable framework to control my eating. However, no diet is a magic bullet. All diets require a long-term change in eating habits, and that’s difficult to maintain, regardless of the approach you take. My personal belief is that different people will respond better to different dietary approaches. We all know people who can eat anything they want and never gain an ounce, or the guy who gains weight by just looking at a piece of chocolate cake. Since we respond differently to food, it stands to reason that we would respond differently to diets.

Now, if you’re skinny, or you have no interest in losing weight, just skip right along to the next entry. If you’ve tried low fat dieting, and it works for you, then God Bless, and have a wonderful life. However, if like me, you’ve tried the low fat approach and had no success, or couldn’t stay the course because of the stringent diet, then come along with me; low carb may be the approach for you.

Atkins myth #1: You can stuff yourself and lose weight, as long as you keep the carbs low.

This is one of the most popular myths people use to attack Atkins and other low carb plans. How can you stuff your face with high fat foods and lose weight? I t doesn’t make sense.

Of course, they’re right. If you gorge yourself on fatty foods, no matter how low your carb count is, you’ll gain weight. It just makes sense. But here’s the catch: The Atkins Plan does NOT call for gorging yourself with high fat foods. In fact, Dr. Atkins specifically and repeatedly writes that the Atkins Plan does not allow for unrestrained binging on any foods, not even low carb ones.

From Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, paperback, pg 123

When hungry, eat the amount of food that makes you feel satisfied but not stuffed

Again on pg 138

I encourage you to eat until you’re satisfied. Just don’t confuse being satisfied with being stuffed.

And again on page 143

Although there is no need to count calories, they do matter. Gaining weight results from taking in more calories than you expend through exercise, thermogenisis (the body’s own heat production) and other metabolic functions. Research has shown that on a controlled carbohydrate program, more calories are burned than in a low-fat/high-carb diet, so there is a certain metabolic advantage to the controlled carb approach. But understand that this does not give you a license to gorge.

So much for Myth #1.

One quick question

Part of the left's mantra for the past few decades is that the root cause of crime is poverty.

"Poor folks have few options," the argument goes, "so they feel they must turn to a life of crime in order to survive."

There's a problem with that thesis. According to the same liberal songbook, we're in the worst economy in history; the people are suffering terribly; there are no jobs, no hope, and frustration is mounting.

Why then are the crime rates falling?

Violent and property crimes dipped in 2002 to their lowest levels since records started being compiled 30 years ago, and have dropped more than 50 percent in the last decade, the Justice Department (news - web sites) reported Sunday.

Either times are not as bad as some would have us believe, or the correllation between poverty and criminal behavior needs to be re-examined.

Blow it out your A**!

A while back, there was an artist who created a buzz in the art world by his, shall we say, rather unusual painting style. His name was Keith Boadwee, and he got his 15 minutes by loading up his butt with a paint enema and blowing it out onto a canvas. (Why am I telling you this? Patience, Iago, patience.) This combination of performance and conceptual art excited the avant garde art crowd to no end, proving once and for all that art, no matter how full of crap, will sell if packaged correctly. (In this case shoved right up the old wazzoo!)

The problem is that it isn't art.

Now some will call me parochial and small minded, but art should be intentional. It doesn't have to be beautiful, and it doesn't have to have some deep philosophical or political message, but it should be on purpose, and should provoke or convey some emotion. Some guy farting paint on a canvas just doesn't cut it. It's too random, no different than inking the paws of my cat and letting her walk across a canvas.

In a way though, what we bloggers do is not very different from what Boadwee did. With certain notable exceptions, bloggers react in real time, from the gut. We read some bit of news or commentary, and instantly jot down our thoughts, analysis, or opinions, hit a button, and BANG! we share them with the world, with out really taking the time to organize our thoughts into some logical order. Heck, many of us don't even take the time to spell-check. (Note to Ben and Mena: You want me to pay money for an MT upgrade? Include a spell checker with a customizable word list, and I'll send you a check tomorrow.)

Now there are exceptions of course. Some of us carefully research our posts, build a case, and craft each sentence with care, determined to let the air out of some pompous windbag. Others of us can execute beautifully written prose on the fly, composing, editing, revising and posting the final version in less time than it takes me to decide on a title. But what most of us do compares to real writers about as favorably as Enema Boy does to Jackson Pollack. Both create abstract paintings, but with Pollack, you see a sense of purpose. The seeming randomness is actually controlled chaos, building to convey or provoke a visceral response. Enema Boy's paintings are colorful crap smeared on a canvas.

Am I saying that bloggers are full of crap?

Yes , partially, but that's not a bad thing.

According to Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap, so why should the blogosphere be any different? So yes, the blogosphere is full of crap, but we also have to look at Hailey's Corollary, codified about 20 years ago when a young lady friend of mine was going through a very rough time, and needed some encouragement. Hailey's Corollary says that while life is full of crap, crap makes good fertilizer; you should grow something.

Bloggers are creating an extraordinarily fertile garden, where information transfer and personal self expression are cross-pollinating, creating an entirely new medium. Right now, nobody knows how blogs will affect traditional media, only that they have already made an impact, not only in how stories are covered, but in which stories are covered. To return to the Fumento flap as an example, a minor dustup with a "nobody" whose readers number around 100 has now become fodder for the entire blogosphere, seen by tens of thousands of people, simply because the story resonated with a few people, and was picked up and amplified by some of the big players.

It certainly was an unpleasant surprise for Mr. Fumento, but a nice illustration of the way the blogosphere works.

In that fertile environment, even the smallest kernel of an idea has the chance to grow. Blogs are very egalitarian; today's buzz could come from one of the big timers, or just as easily from some obscure guy posting about what pissed him off this morning. If the story resonates, it will spread throughout the sphere, until it is picked up by one of the big boys, which gives the little guy a huge boost.

We all get excited when one of the big guns takes notice of us, and our traffic spikes, but what are we really getting excited about? Take last week for example, where I caught an SDB-lanche from my dust-up with Fumento. My traffic skyrocketed, and I enjoyed the ride, but that enjoyment was tempered by the knowledge that the links that brought in the traffic weren't for me; the people that followed the links weren't looking for my writing; they were eager to see a puffed up science writer show his ass in public.

And they got what they were looking for.

But when this story dies, how many of those 4000 or so readers will still be here? 10? 20 maybe? Who knows?

What I do know is that those 10 or 20 repeat readers are more important than the short term flood of visitors. They are the ones who've looked through my archives and liked what they saw enough to come back, to bookmark or even put up a permanent link. They are the ones I get excited about.

On the other hand, I also got an Insta-lanch last week (Yep, it was a good week!) when the professor linked to my post on the power grid, a link which did bring people here specifically for something I wrote. That was an affirmation I could enjoy without reservation.

So while 90% of what I produce may truly be crap, I keep writing to get to that other 10% that's worthwhile. Who knows; with enough practice, I might be able to knock that 90% down to 85%.

Blogger's Bash!

The RTB has grown so much that it's time for another get together. Heck, any excuse for a party!

We've met at Barley's in the past, but some members prefer a location where more adult beverages are served. Since I live in a dry county, I've got no suggestions there, so I'll throw the location open to y'all. Leave suggestions in the comments, or e-mail me.

As for date and time, football season is open, which means Saturday's are out, since I will be rooting for the Northview Cougars. I've tried a couple mid-week get togethers, with modest success, so it looks like Friday is the best day.

So, I'm shooting for Fri., Aug 29, around 6:30PM. Again, let me know via comments/email if that time or date doesn't work.

I'm looking forwrd to meeting all the new members, and seeing some familiar faces.

UPDATE: Every response I've gotten so far says that Friday the 29th is a bad day. How about the next weekend, Friday the 5th of Sep?

Week 2

Ok, for those of you interested, on Monday, I completed two weeks of induction. I've lost 13 pounds on an average of 2060 calories per day, and a carb average of 14 grams per day. For the next week, I'm adding radishes, tomatoes, cucmbers and mushrooms to my salads, plus almonds and macadamia nuts as a snack.

First time around, I went from 305 to 227 in about 7 months. My mistake was thinking that since I lost the weight so quickly, I wouldn't gain it back. I quit the plan, thinking I could eat normally without falling into the same patterns that lead to the 305 pounds in the first place.

Yeah, right.

Chocolate milkshakes and french fries are from Satan.

I gained just over 50 lbs during the year after I left the plan. Fortunately, I wised up before I gained it all back, and I'm back on it. I kept a diary last time, and to try and duplicate that success, I'm doing it again. Feel free to skip these entries if you'd like, but if you want to follow along and see whether I can lose it and keep it off long term, as well as get a few facts about the Atkins Plan, come on along for the ride.

Light blogging, but with a heck of a good excuse.

It started very innocuously. Luke complained after football practice that his skin was hurting underneath his hip pads. I looked, and there was a little redness, but nothing major. I figured he had sensitive skin, and that in a day or two, it would go away.

Wrong.

The next day, the red had turned into a small rash, and hurt worse. His coach and I figured he might be allergic to the pads. He switched from a half T-shirt to a full shirt, and kept that between the pads and his skin. The coach said he had seen rashes like that before, and to put baby powder on all of the pads.

The next day, the rash began to blister, and Luke told me that his skin in other places was beginning to hurt. I started to worry at this point, and checked him out again. The rash was still localized to under his hip pad, but a new one started under his butt pad, and there were red patches starting on his leg. I knew it wasn't an allergic reaction, but it looked so much like poison ivy that I thought maybe he had gotten some underneath his pads, but it didn't itch, it hurt.

His mother looked at it, and mentioned that it looked like shingles to her, but it couldn't have been shingles because that's an adult relapse of chicken pox, and Luke had never had chicken pox. We looked it up on the web, and his symptoms matched perfectly. he was standing with us while we were talking about it and mentioned that a boy on his football team was recovering from chicken pox when practice had started 2 weeks earlier.

Case closed. We had the culprit.

I called the doctor's ofice first thing Monday morning, and couldn't get an appointment until this afternoon. They told me to give him ibuprofen for the pain and make him comfortable for the night.

Easier said than done.

It's a very helpless feeling when your child is hurting and there's nothing you can do about it. You want to take the pain for them; you ask God to spare them and give it to you, but it never works that way, and the best you can do is be there for them. The poor guy was in a fair bit of pain, but he handled it better than I would have. He cried a little, but didn't whine or gripe, facing the pain with a smile for the most part, and that's more than you can expect from most men. I did what i could; we did find that soaking a paper towel in cold water and putting it gently on the rash helped, and so did cool baths.

We made it through the night and left the house to go to the doctor's office. As soon as the sun hit the rash, it started burning him again, so he wasn't very happy until we got into the office and out of the heat. The nurse got his height and weight and took us back to the exam room and asked what the problem was. Luke pulled up his shirt and showed her.

She immediately gasped, and started saying "You poor thing," and other things nurses say to try and make kids feel better. She seemed a little rattled, but I what really surprised me was the doctor's reaction when he walked in.

He looked at Luke's back, stuttered for a moment and said, "That must hurt like a mother-f....a lot!"

He regained his composure, took a blood and urine sample from Luke and gave us a prescription for an antiviral. All the while, he kept saying how bad it must hurt. Luke kinda laughed a little and said it did hurt, but he was dealing with it.

I got misty.

Anyway, we headed for the house, and I went and got Luke's medicine, so we should be on the road to recovery now. He's sitting here beside me and wants to show y'all what we've been talking about.

WARNING: The image at this link
is nasty. It hurts me just to look at it. You've been warned!

More on the blackout

Sparky, over at Sgt Stryker, has posted a very detailed analysis of the blackout, using power plots from the areas involved. He comes up with some surprising information. Go check it out.

Power grids and blackouts

Yep, the lights went out for 50 million people yesterday, and we still don't really know why it happened. Canada blames a fault in our system; we blame a fault in Canada's system, or a bad transmission line in the Midwest, but we're all sure it wasn't a terrorist.

Why? Just because nothing blew up?

Let's try a little experiment, change the word terror to sabotage. Sound any more likely now?

The leading theory on the root cause of the failure, at least, the leading theory as I rode in to work this morning, was the simultaneous failure of multiple transmission lines in the northern Mid-West US.

Hmmm. When I learned to trouble shoot, they taught us that multiple faults are very rare, and to look for a single fault first. If you seemed to be chasing a multiple fault, step back and look again. You probably missed something.

Here's a scenario to consider: Some idiot with an axe to grind and no sense of self preservation decides to die gloriously for Allah or whoever. He shorts two high tension transmission lines together, vaporizing himself while causing a cascading overload which shuts down power to 50 million people.

That's "simultaneous failure of multiple transmission lines."

This is offered as a possibility. I have no evidence, not even a hunch. Possibly a short occurred naturally, I don't know. But I'm getting a bit tired of the first words coming out of every politico's mouth when something happens being "It wasn't terrorism" when in truth, there's no way to know.

Don't lie to me.

OK, rant over. Now to the informative portion of this post.

There are a lot of folks griping about the collapse of the power grid, and the predictable voices are blaming the President, as if he had something to do with the design and construction of the grid. First of all, the thing wasn't designed; it grew. Second, it's not a monolithic system with some control room out of Star Trek. It's grunches of smaller, local systems interconnected, co-operative but independent of each other. Third, the complaint that "Somebody ought to do something" is easy; determining what to actually do is the hard part.

To give you some idea of how hard that question is, I have to take you into the complexities of the power grid, give you a tour of how it operates, and why it is set up the way it is. My knowledge in this area is based on my Navy career as Nuclear Reactor Operator. I didn't deal directly with the power distribution system, but through extensive cross training, I am familiar with the principles and techniques involved. And if I make any mistakes, I'm sure Sparky will correct me.

A simple power grid has three components:

• A generator
  
• Transmission lines
  
• Distribution centers

  The generator converts physical energy, ie movement, into electrical energy. The transmission lines carry this energy from the plant to the distribution center, where it is routed to the loads. If any of the three components fail, the grid goes down and the lights go out, and Auntie Eunice can't watch her stories.

  Deciding that this was a bad thing, some fairly smart people decided that if you put two small generators instead of one big generator in the grid, if one failed, you could still handle most of the load with the one that was left, and Auntie wouldn't miss finding out if Jim and Suzy got married, even though Suzy was pregnant with Ralph's baby.

  So that's what they did.

  Now it gets interesting.

  Two generators carrying the same load are said to be operating in parallel, like two horses pulling the same wagon. Now there has to be some way of controlling how much of the electrical load each generator is carrying, so that the system will be stable. Like our horse and wagon, if one horse is pulling harder than the other, not only is the off horse not doing his share of the work, but the wagon is also harder to steer. Unbalanced loads on parallel generators have a similar effect. Fortunately, it turns out that electricity is pretty cool, because it will automatically distribute the load based on the voltages the generators are putting out. The higher the voltage, the more load the generator will carry, reducing the load on the other generator. So we can control the output voltage of each generator to match the loads. Remember this bit, because it becomes very important later in the discussion.

  So what we've done is increase the reliability of the system by building in backup generating plants, which adds both spare capacity, and redundancy. The problem is that building plants is expensive. There's a constant battle being fought over how much spare capacity the system needs, and how much redundancy is cost effective. Spare capacity costs money, but doesn't generate revenue, so plant owners want the minimum amount necessary to ensure reliability. Plant managers on the other hand, like to maximize spare capacity to be prepared for outages or overloads.

  That's what a local system looks like. Now let's zoom out a little and look at the regional picture. We've got several local power grids, all working to supply power to their communities, all wrestling with the need to grow to meet demand, and to maintain enough spare capacity to handle outages. At some point, a couple of these systems got together, and realized that if they connected their power systems, they would increase their available spare capacity, and redundancy without having to build new plants. It was highly unlikely that a problem would strike both systems simultaneously, which meant that each system could rely on their own spare capacity, and the spare capacity of the other system to handle any outages.

  The plant owners were happy with this arrangement, because now they could sell their spare capacity to another system, turning an overhead item into a revenue generating item. The plant managers were happy, because now they had enhanced redundancy, and massive spare capacity.

  This is how the power grid came to exist. Discrete power systems interconnected to share both the load, and spare capacity.

  "Now this all sounds great, but if the system is so stable, how come we still get massive blackouts?"

  Well, there are two factors operating here. Many major cities do not generate anywhere near enough power to supply their loads. They depend on shared power from outside the city to meet their needs. The recent energy crisis in California was a perfect illustration of this. Due to outages, maintenance and other factors, the state could not generate enough electricity to meet its needs, and had to buy energy from other states. If a large city loses its access to that shared power, through a fault in the transmission or distribution system, it will not have enough power to sustain its load, and there will be a blackout. The second factor is that demand for electricity is outstripping supply. The grid has a fair amount of spare capacity under normal use conditions, but when power demand hits a peak, like it did this week due to the hot weather, spare capacity in the region is almost nil. Any outage at that point is extremely likely to cascade, spreading far beyond the initial blackout.

  "That's the second time you've talked about a cascade. What do you mean?"

  Well, let's go back and look at our parallel generators. Remember that voltage controls the load sharing. When we take a plant off-line intentionally, we slowly lower the voltage, allowing the remaining plant to pick up the load gradually. When a plant trips off-line on an overload, the load is transferred immediately. When this happens, the increased load causes two things to happen to the remaining plant. Electrical current flow goes way up, which drives voltage way down. This condition can cause the generator to overheat and burn up. Literally burn up, with sparks, and flames and whatnot. Since this was something that everybody wanted to avoid, being messy and very expensive, safety systems were designed to shut the generator down on low voltage conditions.

  So, if one portion of the grid goes off-line suddenly, the generators adjacent to it on the grid will see a sharp rise in current demand, resulting in a voltage drop. If there is enough spare capacity, the remaining generators will absorb the load, and return voltage to the normal level. If not, the voltage drop will be more severe, and the adjacent generators will trip on a low voltage.

  So, the parallel operation is a double edged sword. It greatly minimizes the chances of an overload causing a power failure, but if there is a power failure, there is an increased risk of the overload to spread throughout the grid.

  Now, there was another factor at work during this blackout as well. Nuke plants must have a stable source of local power to stay online. While the plants can be run in a self sustaining mode, federal law requires them to shut down if they lose local power. When the blackout hit, 9 nuke plants lost local power, and were forced to shut down, resulting in additional strain on the remaining grid.

  "But my power goes out during thunderstorms all the time. How come it doesn't take down the entire grid?"

  The answer to that question lies with in the power distribution centers. Electrical substations take power from the system, and route it into a smaller area. Each substation is protected with voltage and current limiters, which trip the substation in the event of a problem, like a lightning strike, or Elroy Barnes ramming into a power pole at 85 mph. These limiters are very similar to the circuit breakers in your house. When something goes wrong, they trip, isolating power until the problem is fixed. These breakers take that section of the load off of the system, keeping it from affecting the rest of the grid. These substations are small enough that they can be reset without a major impact on the system.

  "So why not install the same things on the grid?"

  We do, but the problem is that the grid is so interconnected, that tripping an overload protection in one place may result in another overload down the line because grid level trips cut off generators as well as loads. Also, the magnitude of the loads means that, unlike the local substation, you can't just flip a switch to bring the load back on. If you did, you would cause more undervoltage trips.

  "But my power is usually back on in a few minutes, why is it going to take hours/days to recover from this blackout?"

  Two reasons. First, the magnitude of the outage. There are literally thousands of switches and breakers to reset in order to bring everything back online. Second, the process of bringing loads back onto the grid is a little more involved than resetting a breaker in your house. In order to bring large sections of the grid back online, first you have to isolate a down section, connect it one piece at a time to a bank of generators, also isolated from the grid, then match voltage between those generators, place them in parallel for load sharing, then match the parallel group to the grid, then connect the bank to the grid. Once the load is shared, you can transfer load to the grid, isolate the generators you need for the next group, and start all over again.

  It takes time, and is a pain in the ass, particularly for the folks without power, but the alternative is an overload that turns all the power station in the northeast into a smoking pile of slag.

  OK, so now you know a little bit more about how the light turns on when you flip a switch, so let's get back to the issue of "Somebody has to do something!

  The obvious answer is "Build more power stations!"

  We are, but there are questions:

  Coal, gas, hybrid, biomass, nuclear, solar, or hydroelectric?

  And where? NIMBY nuts have ruled out building anything as nasty as a power plant anywhere near where they live, so real estate is very limited.

  How are we going to pay for it? Utility price hikes? Federal tax money? State tax money?

  These are questions that are fought over every day when utilities decide to build new plants. Lawsuits, protests, changing building codes, environmental impact statements, establishing infrastructure, etc all slow the process.

  Another idea is to dismantle the grid. That would certainly keep blackouts from spreading, but at a tremendous cost. Local blackouts would become far more common; utility prices would skyrocket as utilities would be forced to build more plants to maintain a safe margin; cities would collapse as there simply isn't the room available to build the power plants needed to sustain them. All in all, it isn't a viable option.

  That's really it. Most proposals boil down into one of the two categories above. Until we come up with a truly distributed power system, the grid will remain vulnerable to this kind of widespread blackout. I'm sure that we'll add a few more engineering controls to try and minimize the spread of future overloads, and I'm fairly certain that they won't do a bit of good.

  What can be done, particularly in the cities, is to ensure that emergency backups are widely available. Hospitals, emergency services, communications services should all be required to have back up generators with enough fuel to last for 3 days. This is an area where fuel cells may really fit the bill.

  Posted by Rich at 4:08 PM | Comments (52) | TrackBack

The Last Bit on Fumento

First, thanks to all of you for visiting, and leaving your comments.

• Evan, I'm not worried about a suit, he gave me permission, remember? "Tell it to your two readers, etc." It's not my fault he underestimated the blogosphere!
  
• Toronto Citizen, I see your point. Still, whether or not hindsight tells us more about SARS or not, at the time, with what we knew, and more particularly what we didn't know, I still think it was prudent to react as the WHO did. Better to overreact than underreact.
  
• Pat Berry, thanks for the catch. I've made the correction. Since I'm always a borrower *sigh*, I default to that point of view.*grin*
  
• DougL, clip away!
  
• FredH, draw up a chair and stay awhile if it suits you.
  
• Scott, don't worry about it. I'll answer to almost anything!
  
• Steve Story, there's more to Atkins than lowered caloric intake, but I don't want to be accused of being a cultist, so I'll let it be. The important thing, really the only important thing is to find a diet that works, that is safe, and that you can live with. For me, Atkins fits the bill.

Now to new business. I just found out from my buddy SayUncle, that I have been honored by inclusion in Fumento's Advise and Dissent column. He crows about his "victory" over me, gratuitous insults included. The only reason that this is noteworthy is that either he has not quite mastered cut-and-paste, or he is trying to make me look bad by inserting typos in the quote he uses (without links of course).

From the original post:

By your numbers, SARS had an overall mortality rate of approximately 9%. Since other respiratory ailments generally run at less than 1%, even in the elderly, that one factor alone warrants considerable concern.

From Fumento's piece (linked above):

By your numbers, SARS had an overall mortality rate of approxinmately (sic) 9%. Since other respiratory ailments generally run at less than 1% (sic), even in the elderly, that one factor alone warrants considerable concern.

A journalist, particularly a contrarian like Fumento, trades on his credibility. Lose that, and he may as well pack it in. By altering the quotes of an unknown blogger, Fumento opens himself to charges of misquoting anyone if it serves his purpose. In my eyes, he is the Michael Bellisiles of science journalism.

Now on the lighter side...

SayUncle has an interesting story about a tax resistor who went to court and won. I particularly like the quote from the judge, but you'll have to go to Uncle's place to read it.

Was it something I said?

I just got an e-mail from Michael Fumento concerning my post below, the first portion of which I e-mailed him. Apparently, he wasn't pleased with my response. For those of you who haven't been following along, I've critiqued a couple of Fumento's more prominent pieces. I emailed my critiques to him, which began a fairly pleasant correspondence. Pleasant that is, until now. Here's the text of his e-mail in its entirety:

Methinks we've been through this before but I'll try one more time. A higher
mortality rate is as meaningless without additional information as a higher
interest rate on your principle without knowing what that principle is. By
your reasoning, any disease with a mortality rate of 100 percent is
obviously much more serious than one with a one percent mortality rate. It's
not even comparable. But what if the disease with the 100 percent mortality
rate struck one human a year while that with the 1 percent rate struck a
billion per year? Your uneducated little mind just can't grasp that, can it?
Moreover, the mortality rate in the US and Europe was absolutely zero. Why
do you insist upon using Chinese rates instead of Americans? Easy: It serves
your purpose. You also say I was only right (even though of course I was
wrong) because health authorities took drastic actions. But we saw how
extremely difficult the disease was to spread. You cannot provide any
evidence that quarantines played a major role. It is mere speculation on
your part.

As to Atkins, if it works so well why is it you have such a fat face? Time
and again I've found that those who defend Atkins with a religious fervor as
you do, and ignore all studies, as you do, are nonetheless little porkers.
It doesn't bother you that you have a big fat bow on Atkins so long as you
get to stuff your face with all the lard and cheese puffs you want. Truly
pathetic.

But the nice thing about all this is that you are an absolute nobody who can
publish nowhere outside of his own blog site that I never would have heard
of had my name not come up. I am a weekly syndicated health and science
columnist who is read each week by literally millions of people. One of my
SARS pieces was in the New York Post, with over three million readers alone.
Do you get three million hits in one day? This is not to brag about me but
to say that you are a pissant and your arrogance and ignorance is made clear
in your aforementioned comments. You are a nobody and everybody knows it but
R. Hailey. Have a happy useless life.

Sincerely,
Michael Fumento
www.fumento.com
Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
Medical/Science Columnist, Scripps-Howard Syndicate

Wow! That last paragraph brings to mind a line from Wargames, you know the one where the Dabney Coleman has just called the General a "pig-eyed sack of shit?" The general, played by Barry Corbin comes back with this classic:

Oh, I was hoping for something a little better than that from you, a man of your education.

I wasn't sure whether to fisk this one, since it fisks itself, but there are a couple points in the first paragraph that bear closer examination, before the letter dissolves into a morass of insults and personal attacks.

A higher mortality rate is as meaningless without additional information as a higher interest rate on your principle (sic) without knowing what that principle is.

Regardless of the principal amount, a lower interest rate is better (if you're the borrower). Was he trying to prove my point or his?

Why do you insist upon using Chinese rates instead of Americans?

I was using the global rate, as derived from the numbers in his article. The Chinese rate would have been somewhat higher. Even though the US mortality rate was zero, this doesn't make SARS a non event. Just ask Canada. Or is Fumento suggesting that it doesn't matter how many Chinese die?

You also say I was only right (even though of course I was
wrong) because health authorities took drastic actions.

Nope, I never said he was right. I said his argument only appeared legitimate, not that it was legitimate.

You cannot provide any evidence that quarantines played a major role.

Actually, I can. When quarantines were finally imposed in China, the runaway spread of the disease was halted in its tracks. China makes a perfect test case. No quarantines, rapid spread. Quarantines, no spread. It might not be definitive but it certainly is indicative.

I sent the above questions to Michael, and received his response while writing this post. I'll quote it here, again in its entirety:

Tell it to your two readers, Chunky Monkey Atkins cultist.

Take him seriously folks. He's a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

More hypocrisy on the left.

I know, no big surprise. But this is a particularly nasty case.

Bubba has a new laundry list of complaints about the Bush administration up at his place. Since I dealt with most of these at length before, I'm not going to put y'all to sleep again. My answering post is here if you want to go have a look.

But what set me off was a comment by gttim on this post which reads:

My wife is probably the only first lady that ever killed anybody.

My response was, "That's a new low."

Tim couldn't seem to grasp why I felt that it was a low blow, so I wrote the following comment, reposted here for your entertainment.

I meant 'new low' for this website. Extreme lefties have been all over Laura Bush for that incident since the campaign; I just never expected to see that kind of trash here.

You're smearing the President for something that happened to his wife 15 years before she was even his girlfriend.

Like I said, a new low.

Here's the relevant piece from the AP:
Laura Bush

and the relevant quote:

"An abbreviated version of the report concluded neither Douglas or Bush could be blamed for the accident, the Post reported."

Now left wing loons use the tragedy to score points off the President.

Here's VeryProudDem:
"This is what the Bush family is all about...get away with murder all the time.
Laura, the stepford wife, gets away with murder."

Of course, Laura wasn't even dating Bush at the time, but we'll neglect that little fact to smear Bush.

Here's cyr330:

"murderous wench
I'm sure she did it on purpose; she murdered him, because he had broken things off with her."

cyr, who has never even met Laura Bush, knows her well enough to attribute motivations to an accident which happened 40 years ago! She'd make an excellent fortune teller!

And SoCalDem:
"It was her ex boyfriend and it was in daylight.. What are the odds of that being a accident?"

Yep, everybody knows that accidents only happen at night. To make things even worse for SoCalDem, he gets the "daylight" bit wrong as well. According to the police report, quoted here, the accident occurred after 8 PM on Nov 6. Now that might be considered daylight somewhere near Antarctica, but not anywhere in Texas.

What truly amazes me is the hypocrisy here. Libs howled over Limbaugh saying Chelsea was ugly, but feel perfectly comfortable calling Laura Bush a murderer for an accident which happened 40 years ago, and using that charge to smear the President, who wouldn't even meet her for 15 years.

Fumento Returns

I just got an interesting comment from Mr. Fumento. You remember him, the guy who said SARS was no big deal, and Atkins doesn't work?

Apparently, he wants me to admit I was wrong on both counts. He's in for a big disappointment.

Here is his comment:

"Fumento Is Wrong!" That's what you wrote about me and my SARS writing. As you now know, Fumento Was Right; Indeed, He Was Essentially the ONLY Journalist Who Was Right!"

http://www.fumento.com/disease/sarsimpact.html

Are you too little of a man to admit that YOU were wrong, and terribly so? It seems that if you were going to, you would have gotten around to it by now. And by the way, Fumento Was Right! about Atkins, too.

http://www.fumento.com/fat/nroatkins.html

I've been writing on epidemiology for 16 years. If you lock horns with me, you're going to be wrong. But it seems you should at least have the guts to admit it. Or is that why your shots go across the bow, instead of actually striking the target?

Sincerely,
Michael Fumento

Michael,

There are many times in the past when I have been wrong, and I have admitted so candidly. This, however, is not one of them.

Here is what I said on SARS:
"If a SARS breakout isn't promptly controlled, it could be disastrous, as we are seeing in China."

It was controlled and contained; that doesn't mean it didn't represent a serious threat. By your numbers, SARS had an overall mortality rate of approximately 10%. Since other respiratory ailments generally run at significantly less than 1%, even in the elderly, that one factor alone warrants considerable concern. Your piece goes on to state that the mortality rate is irrelevant since the incidence was so low. Comparing the spread in China with the rest of the world clearly demonstrates that without the actions of the WHO, the incidence would have been significantly higher, negating your argument.

Your argument only appears legitimate because it rests on the success of the very actions you claim were unneeded.

However, continue to glory in your isolated position of "Essentially the ONLY Journalist Who Was Right!" I'll continue to rely on those who actually practice epidemiology, rather than write about it.

As for your new article on Atkins, you've just rehashed old points without answering any of my questions from earlier posts:

1. If the Atkins plan merely "gives people a framework to eat fewer calories, since most of the choices in this culture are carbohydrate driven," how is that a problem? Don't you go on to say that dietary moderation is key to long term weight loss? If the Atkins Plan gives dieters the ability to reduce calories with minimal pain, where's the problem?

2. In your article, you say,
   

   "In addition to its something-for-nothing weight-loss promise, Atkins also insisted his diet relieves 'fatigue, irritability, depression, trouble concentrating, headaches, insomnia, dizziness, joint and muscle aches, heartburn, colitis, premenstrual syndrome, and water retention and bloating'."

   
   All of these symptoms are associated with health problems related to obesity. If you lose weight on the Atkins Plan, it stands to reason that weight-related problems will be minimized. How then is connecting the two invalid?

   Interestingly, you choose to utilize a similar connection in your own article when you quote Robert Eckel,
   

   "Eckel, who coauthored an accompanying commentary in the NEJM, says one probable reason for improved blood readings in the Atkins cohorts is that they did have greater weight loss, at least part of the time, in both studies. "Generally when people lose weight, both triglycerides and HDL improve," he told me."

   Both Atkins and Eckel are claiming benefits related to weight loss, yet you critique Atkins while giving Eckel a pass.

3. You close with:
   

   "How peculiar when the most you can say for the best-selling fad-diet book of all time is that it probably doesn't kill people."

   The summary of the Seeley study states:
   

   "These results indicate that for short periods of time, a low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet is efficacious in causing weight loss and has no deleterious effects on cardiovascular risk factors."

   Your bias is showing. Based on the studies you quote, the worst that can be said is that the Atkins diet works at least as well as the AHA diet, with none of the health risks you took great delight in pointing out in your Reason article.

Another theme you return to in this article is Gary Taubes, and how he distorts the record to make his point. A careful reading reveals some similar issues you might want to resolve.

This passage for instance:

One, conducted at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Hospital, lasted six months, comprised subjects with an initial average weight of about 215 pounds. The other was conducted at three different centers, lasted 12 months, and comprised subjects with an initial average weight of about 290 pounds.

The six-month study found that Atkins dieters lost weight at about twice the rate as the higher-carb group — for two months. Thereafter neither group lost much weight. By the end of six months, the Atkins dieters, however, had still managed to keep off about twice as much weight as the higher-carb group — for what it was worth. The average loss was a mere 13 pounds from that original 290.

Hmmm. According to the first paragraph, the average weight for the 6-month study was 216 pounds, not 290, which was the average for the 1 year study.

Honest mistake? Maybe.

Then there's this passage:

Worse, Taubes ignored a mass of published and peer-reviewed studies showing low-carbohydrate diets to be ineffective for long-term weight loss, such as a review in the April 2001 Journal of the American Dietetic Association (JADA) of "all studies identified" that looked at diet nutrient composition and weight loss.

It claimed to have found over 200, with "no studies of the health and nutrition effects of popular diets in the published literature" excluded. In some, subjects were put on "ad libitum" diets, meaning they were allowed to eat as much as they wanted as long as they consumed fat, protein, and carbohydrates in the directed proportions. In others, subjects were put on controlled-calorie diets that also had directed nutrient proportions. The conclusion: Those who ate the least fat carried the least fat.

Sounds pretty impressive unless you realize that the Atkins Diet is not an 'ad libitum' diet. Eating a proportional diet does not mean low carb, only that carbs may represent a smaller proportion of calories consumed. Atkins places an absolute limit on carbs, regardless of how much fat and protein you eat. Funny that you fail to mention the difference. An oversight, perhaps?

Or this passage:

But two of those are the ones discussed here. Somehow, "The differences were not significant at the end of one year" doesn't seem to support "lost twice the weight."

'Twice the weight' comes from the 6 month study. 'No significant differences' came from the year long study. Another honest mistake?

Or this passage:

A fourth, according to chief author Eric Westman at Duke University, does back Atkins. But then again, Atkins backs him. The Atkins Center has an open-ended commitment to fully support Westman's work.

Ahhhh. Attack by innuendo. Are there any problems with the study? Any irregularities? If so, point them out. Or you could point out that Westman's intent was to debunk the diet, not support it. Or that Westman approached Atkins, not the other way around. But that wouldn't tend to support your thesis, would it?

Or this tossed off comment:

Nevertheless, at least there seemed no evidence that all that saturated fat in the Atkins diet increases the risk of heart disease.

Isn't this in itself a remarkable finding? If a diet that's high in fat doesn't lead to increased risk of heart disease, doesn't that put into question the entire fat consumption-heart disease connection? One of the central tenets of the Atkins Diet is that the increase in heart disease has paralleled the increase in consumption of refined carbs like white sugar and processed wheat. It would seem that the findings of these studies bear this out, or at the very least, exonerate fats. Funny that you fail to follow up on this obvious consequence.

Finally, there's this picture caption:

All-you-can-eat so long as it's low-carb" is a license to gluttony, not a successful method of weight loss.

Find anything in the Atkins books which endorses "all you can eat." Repeatedly when speaking about the Plan, Atkins says to "eat to satiety," and to avoid over eating. Your "all you can eat" characterization is a misrepresentation of the diet.

I think we may have a pot/kettle thing going on here.

To return to the Naval lingo:

He's hulled amidships and taking on water, Captain!

UPDATE I just went back on the Atkins Plan last week. After 7 days on the plan, with no exercise other than routine daily activities, I've lost 5 pounds. Here's the capper: My average caloric intake for the week was 2081 calories per day. Carb intake was 13.5 grams per day.

What have I been up to?

It certainly hasn't been blogging lately.

Actually, it has, sort of.

I've been creating a website for the local booster club. They just brought little league football back to Kodak this year, and I've been trying to help out where I can. The kids have just finished their first week of practice, and I've been there every afternoon getting pictures and information to add to the site. It's been an interesting time, and I've learned a lot about what Moveable Type can really do. This is a pretty powerful piece of software!

Anyway, the bulk of the work is done, but the game season starts in a couple of weeks, which means updates with pictures, game stats, etc. I may be busy over the next 11 weeks.

If you want to check it out, here's the link:

Basic Research on Traffic: An examination of Ettorre's Observation.

Well, the vacation is over and it was great while it lasted.

I didn't look at one newspaper, look at a newscast, or surf the web for a week. Heck, I didn't even know who won the Tour de France until Sunday afternoon (Way to go, Lance!) I admit I missed posting here, and making my daily rounds of the blogosphere, but that's about to change. It's back to the grindstone for your friend and humble narrator.

And I have to go back to work, too.

The drive down was easy since we left on a Sunday morning. Light traffic and good weather, plus children who slept most of the way, let me get from Kodak to Panama City in a cozy 9 hours. The drive back, on the other hand, reminded me why I needed a vacation in the first place. We left Friday, around 10AM and immediately, I knew this ride wasn't going to be as nice.

We hit construction on the two lane highway into Panama City.

We hit rainstorms between Panama City and Dothen, Al.

We hit the lunch rush in Dothen.

And we hit Atlanta at exactly 5:15PM. On Friday.

It wasn't pleasant, but it did provide a wonderful chance to experiment with that odd phenomena, The Slow Line, also known as Ettorre's Observation, a corellary to Murphy's Law (Anything that can go wrong will go wrong) which states:

Ettorre's Observation:
The other line moves faster.
Corollary: Don't try to change lines. The other line -- the one you were in originally -- will then move faster.

Now I'm a logical man; if Ettorre is right, then the Universe holds a persoanl grudge against me, which is a mind blowing thing to contemplate. The entire sum of all that exists is out to frustrate my commute home from vacation.

Kind of an ego boost when you think about it.

But I'm a mechanist by trade; animism makes me nervous, so I decided to run a scientific test of Etoore's Observation, making use of time otherwise wasted playing the "Punch Buggy" game.

I-40 Northbound coming out of Atlanta has 7 lanes. At 5:15 on Friday, those lanes are called (in order of descending rapidity):

• the Merely Slow Lane
  
• the Slower Lane
  
• the Unbelievably Slow Lane
  
• the Lane for the Velocity Challenged
  
• the Agonizing Crawl Across the Desert in Search of Water Lane
  
• the Molasses in Vermont in February Lane
  and
  
• the Becalmed in the Doldrums of the Sargasso Sea Lane.

The tricky thing is that these lane designations change randomly. What might start out as the Merely Slow Lane may metamorph into the Unbelievably Slow Lane without apparent cause. The placement of the lane seems to be rather random as well. The slowest lane might be adjacent to the fastest, both residing in the middle of the group, or they might be on opposite ends of the highway. These observations might provide a nice problem for Chaos mathematicians to pursue, but they made my experimental design problematic. I pondered for about an hour, and finally came up with a solution. Disregarding the 12 feet of pavement I'd covered while cogitating, I estimated that I had at least 7 miles of traffic jam available for use. I determined to spend one mile in each lane and track my relative progress.

I started ina middle lane, 4th from the right, which at the time I entered it was the Slower Lane, but quickly converted into the Becalmed in the Doldrums of the Sargasso Sea Lane. I attributed this seeming confirmation of Ettorre to coincidence, and waited patiently to complete the assigned mile before changing lanes to the 6th from the left, which was moving along nicely as the Lane for the Velocity Challenged. Oddly, shortly after my arrival, it became the Molasses in Vermont in February Lane. While frustrated, at my slow progress, I was also happy that I had a data point which didn't back up Ettorre. My paranoid delusions of grandeur began to fade, until my lane slowed again, and once again became the dreaded Becalmed in the Doldrums of the Sargasso Sea Lane.

I modified my experiment a bit and began changing lines at random, trying to time my arrival to a lane which was about to become the Merely Slow Lane. Other drivers, sensing that my quest had taken on more an air of gladitorial combat than laboratory research, began to support my efforts by honking their horns, shouting, and gesturing wildly. Some even voiced their approval, albeit rather crudely, by telling me of their desire to have sex with me.

Who said no good deed goes unpunished?

Alas, I failed in my quest. Far from disproving Ettorre, my experiences on the Northbound lanes of I-40 not only confirmed his observation, but the correllary as well. However, I can take comfort in knowing that my constant lane switching shared the burden fairly amongst all the drivers in Atlanta that evening. Every lane had their turn as the slowest lane.

I'm nothing if not giving.