Does not compute

An article in today's AP news feed claims that 1 in 5 four year-olds are obese. Sure, obesity is a problem in our populace and it's no surprise that this is reflect in our children.

However, the definition they're using is suspect:

Children were considered obese if their body-mass index, a height-weight ratio, was in the 95th percentile or higher based on government BMI growth charts.

If they're using the 95th percentile, then only 1 in 20 (5%) of children are obese by definition.

What they really meant: "95th percentile or higher based on historical government BMI growth charts." In other words, a category which used to constitute 5% of four year-olds now represents 20% of them. Or, heck, quit with the political correctness and just set a number: obesity in four year-olds is defined as a BMI or 18 kg/m² or higher. Save the percentiles for justifying how you decided upon using 18 as the magic number.

Weekend chores and pranks

It was dark and snowy on Wednesday. Today, it was sunny and in the upper 60s. Such a dramatic change injects a lot of energy into people, and we were no exception.

The kid's room is now ready -- wallpapered, all electrical sockets have been childproofed, drapes are up, and all other adornments are adorned. The attachments needed to mount the used bike rack we got for my car have been obtained and the rack is successfully attached. We even cleaned up the yard a bit -- mowed the grass, ripped out a lot of blackberries, and mulched it all. I also got some mounting hardware for my traffic signal and painted it all (Ace Hardware appliance paint -- spray paint mixed with epoxy -- is excellent stuff).

I also got a small bike ride in and did a bit of swimming in Port Orchard. No distance; this was more of an acclimatization exercise -- the air may have been 68°F, but the water is still around 47°F. I can definitely feel the difference since last November. Back in November, it would take me about 3 minutes to acclimate myself to the cold; now, it's up to 8-10 minutes and the cold is still noticeable.

Anyway, while riding back from Port Orchard on my bike, I thought of an interesting prank. North Korea claims that it successfully launched the Kwangmyongsong-2 satellite, though everyone knows that it was really a failed missile test. They claim that it's orbiting every 104 minutes and broadcasting patriotic songs on 470 MHz (that's UHF TV channel 14, should you want to try picking it up on your rabbit ears). Alas, nobody has actually heard anything on this frequency.

Which got me thinking...

What would people do if I set up a transmitter on this frequency and blasted "Song of General Kim Il Sung" and "Song of General Kim Jong Il" on it, fading it in and out every 104 minutes? What kind of rationalizations would folks make? How quickly would the hoax be discovered?

On that last question: my guess is fairly quickly, but that wouldn't stop a new group of conspiracy theorists from forming their own cute new clique.

The solution to the energy crisis

It's donuts. Who would've thunk it?

Carnival commute

How many of you can claim you had a carnival in the vehicle you commute in?

Well, that's what happened today on the 6:20 Seattle-Bainbridge ferry. Jugglers, musicians (including two accordions), face painters, and clowns. I wish my cell phone had a camera. I'll have to keep an eye out on Flickr and other sites to see if someone posts their pictures.

Freud's field day

First, for those who haven't heard: I'm going to be the proud father of a bouncy baby girl this July!

This process, though, has resulted in some very bizarre dreams for me. The first notable one was your typical adequacy anxiety dream: I was at work, looked at a clock, and realized I had forgotten to go to the hospital for the delivery. Nobody could drive me there, either. Apparently buses and taxis didn't exist, so I was panicking.

A few weeks later, a dream finds me and Tamara at the hospital for a checkup. Upon leaving, a nurse comes out with a three year-old girl and two year-old boy and happily pronounces, "Congratulations! Here are your kids!" I try to explain that my wife is still pregnant, that these could not possibly be my kids given that they're nowhere close to being newborns, that we'd be willing to go through tests to prove this, but to no avail. She condescendingly tries to reassure me: "A lot of new fathers have problems at first and are in denial, but these are most definitely your kids. Off you go!"

Last night, my girl was just born and the doctors tell me, "She's unusually advanced, mentally, for a newborn." This turns out to be a bad thing. Mentally advanced means she's already acting like a teenager. A day later, she's wearing eye shadow, has a nose ring, and is trying to get into all kinds of things that teenagers do, but in an infant's body. She finds this incredibly frustrating, as do I, but for different reasons.

Freud could retire early and comfortably if he had me as a patient.

Femtocells

I don't understand the economics behind femtocells. A femtocell is a device you plug in at home, expanding a cell phone company's coverage by using your internet connection. This allows you to have a better signal and takes a load off the cell phone company's towers and networks.

Great, I say. How much of a discount will they give me from my bill for doing this?

Answer: None, and they may actually charge you for this "service". Sprint wants $10-$20/month. Verizon will let you have it for free, but still deducts your minutes even though you're not using their network!

What a wonderful business model -- if you're a cell phone company. Charging customers to subsidize your business. And you don't even have to break any kneecaps or hire mafia thugs.

IBM's glaring omission

I just saw IBM's "What is a Petaflop?" commercial. In it, they state that this computer can be used to "redesign our energy grid; cure diseases in our vascular system; simulate the big bang; we can build smarter cities; cut down on crime, disease, gridlock, global warming; it can help us make the world work better."

Alas, they omit the most widely used application for supercomputers: designing nuclear weapons. The TOP500 list has a number of IBM installations at Department of Energy sites; you can probably guess what they mean when they list the application area as not specified.

On the positive side, at least this means they're not testing actual weapons on people.

Wintry island pictures

Yep, it's still coming down! Have some photos:

Let it snow?

We're supposed to get up to 10 inches of snow tonight, which would give even Pittsburgh a bit of a run for its money. Bainbridge Island? I pretty much expect it to be shut down tomorrow.

I did go for a walk to the road end where I swim from just now. I've never seen snow extend all the way to the edge of seawater and even a bit beyond.

We're not getting the 50-90 mph winds they were predicting; in fact, there's not even a light breeze. They've also changed tomorrow's forecast from freezing rain to more snow. This gives me hope that I'll still have power tomorrow.

Winter update

I haven't updated in awhile, but that's mainly because I've been busy with activities which I can't blog about. Heck, half of the work-related stuff couldn't even be written up in my company-internal blog (which I never use; I don't understand the point).

Instead, I give you a picture of my front yard. I still find it weird to live on an island where it snows.

Pravda

I've been browsing international papers online to see the international response. I was surprised to see that Pravda, that good ol' Soviet-era paper, still exists.

Needless to say, they still don't bother with trite details like journalistic integrity when they write their stories. :-)

McCain's concession speech

McCain's concession speech was gracious, honest, and from the heart. That was the McCain I supported back in 2000. Had he run his campaign in that tone, I suspect the outcome could have been different. Reminded me a fair bit of another Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater.

Added later: This blog entry by Joe Gandelman sums up my feelings rather accurately (especially since I was a McCain supporter -- and contributor -- in 2000 who voted for Obama):

But, most strikingly, the speech was vintage 2000 John McCain — and it was perhaps a bit bittersweet to some of McCain's 2000 supporters who voted against him this year as they most likely wondered: "Why didn't he talk like this during the campaign? Why didn’t he run using this same tone and persona?" McCain's speech made it seem as if a long lost twin brother had suddenly reappeared. It was one of the finest moments of his long, troubled campaign. This time he wasn’t worrying about the reaction of his party’s base — only what he felt needed to be said. Just like in 2000.

Something's afoot in Utah...

Check out the CNN results. Apparently they use a different definition of "majority" there. :-)


(Not that I expect the final result to differ, mind you... just thought the current tally was funny.)

Sandwich Nazi

I had lunch at Seattle's sandwich Nazi today, aka Bakeman's Restaurant. As recommended, I had the turkey. Yes, it was good, but not worth the abuse.

I got berated for telling him I had cranberry on my sandwich (which costs an extra 25¢).

If you enjoy abuse, it's a great place. Otherwise... meh. I get abuse all day long at work.

If the polls are skewed...

There's been some concern about the accuracy of polls -- are people telling the truth? Is there a skew towards Obama because people are afraid of appearing racist? Is there a skew towards McCain because polls exclude non-land-line owners (who tend to be older and more Republican)?

Well, I can't answer the "accuracy" question with any certainty. However, being the database geek that I am, I can crunch numbers.

I took the poll data from RealClearPolitics and tossed them into an SQLite database; you can download the database itself here. Taking the latest poll data, here's what the election results look like if the percentage points are skewed in one direction or another.

Skew	Obama	McCain	Undecided	Result
McCain +6	263	276	0	McCain
McCain +5	263	215	61	No winner
McCain +4	324	182	33	Obama
McCain +3	357	182	0	Obama
McCain +2	357	182	0	Obama
McCain +1	357	182	0	Obama
No Skew	357	168	14	Obama
Obama +1	371	168	0	Obama
Obama +2	371	168	0	Obama
Obama +3	371	168	0	Obama
Obama +4	371	168	0	Obama
Obama +5	371	158	10	Obama
Obama +6	381	132	26	Obama

In case you want to play with the database:
ELECTORAL_VOTES contains a mapping from state to number of electoral votes for that state (state, votes).
POLLS contains a listing of each poll; the rows contain: state, poll_date, poll_name, obama, mccain.
LATEST_POLLS is a view containing the latest polls from POLLS.
SKEW is a table containing the integers from -6 to 6.

The query to produce the above table is:

select skew, sum(obama_votes), sum(mccain_votes), ifnull(sum(undecided_votes), 0)
  from (select skew, (mccain - obama > skew) * votes mccain_votes,
                     (mccain - obama < skew) * votes obama_votes,
                     (mccain - obama = skew) * votes undecided_votes
         from latest_polls
         cross join skew order by skew) group by skew;

Powell's lament

Buddy, I know how you feel. From today's New York Times:

"I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years," Mr. Powell told Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press" on NBC as he made his endorsement of Mr. Obama. "It has moved more to the right than I would like to see it."

I've also been reading a new biography of Barry Goldwater written by John Dean and Barry Goldwater, Jr., Pure Goldwater. My father -- a Goldwater supporter in the 60s -- gave me an autographed copy. I'm only about halfway through it; so far, though, I'm quite enjoying it and am finding him to be a man whose wisdom we desperately need today. At any rate, I think Goldwater would've been fairly disappointed in the Republican party of today, too.

McCain continues to disappoint me. I had hopes that his shift from his 2000/2004 persona was a ploy to clinch the nomination and appease the powers in the party. Alas, as the NYT article points out with his choice of advisers, he's just going deeper and deeper into neocon territory.

I am dead to the Internet

Apparently, the Internet thinks I should be dead, given my current exercise regimen:

• Few people can swim a mile in fifty degree water. Apparently, I'm one of the elusive few who can do two miles.
• An average adult person has a 50/50 chance of surviving a 50 yard swim in 50°F water. Well, given the number of times and total distance I've swum in 50° water, it's a statistical certainty that I should have died.
• This site puts expected time before unconsciousness at 1 hour for 50° water. Dang... if only I could get those two miles in under an hour...
• The chart at the bottom of this page concurs: a "clo" value of 0.06 (nude) means death at just over an hour. Dang, those Speedos I have must be great.

Anyway, this is my new standard workout. I've been swimming in Port Orchard Narrows (which, despite the name, is actually a channel/strait, not a port) from Fletcher Landing (short bike ride from my house) down to the tip of Crystal Springs. Google Earth puts it at 1.18 miles. My thermometer puts it at 50°-56°, depending on the day.

Apples

I didn't get a chance to follow the news today. Why were there so many folks selling apples on the street corners on my ride home?

Actually, right now I'm feeling somewhat lucky; back in July, I sold all the stock I had and took out a loan against my 401(k) when we bought the house. I wish I could say that it was some keen insight, but it was just pure luck. Not so lucky: working in an industry where much of my compensation comes in the form of stock. I suspect a lot of folks, myself included, will max out on the capital loss deduction come next April.

Scary times.

Flight Simulator

There's an Airbus flight simulator on sale over at DoveBid. It won't install on your PC, though; you'll need a warehouse.

Oh, man... this could be a lot of fun...

Hacked

Dammit, someone managed to hack into a couple of my accounts. On the plus side, I was watching them as they did it, so I was able to stem the problem very quickly (within a few minutes), but dang... they're fast. They managed to create ~$400 in fraudulent PayPal charges in the span of 5 minutes. (I was on the phone with PayPal as they did were still fumbling about, in fact.)

I'm still at a loss as to how they accomplished this. I do know that I received an e-mail which caused GMail to spaz out -- text was flowing outside of the places it was supposed to be (so they probably found yet another XSS vulnerability in GMail) and attempting to view this e-mail caused the page to spend a long time loading (i.e., it was phoning home, probably with my GMail login cookie).

However, this doesn't explain how they were able to get into my PayPal account. The only thing I can think of is a keystroke logger, but it's not like I typed any passwords in those 5 minutes. That, or they managed to get into my saved passwords in Firefox (though I don't think I saved my PayPal password in there for this very reason). I guess I'll find out on Monday when I bring my laptop in forensic analysis.

In the meantime, I had my work account locked down (which I highly doubt was accessed, but this is still the prudent measure to take) and managed to change all of my other passwords within 30 minutes, all without incident; this means they probably didn't get at anything else.

The attack itself was quite sophisticated. Not only was it generating PayPal charges as fast as possible, it would intercept and delete the PayPal confirmation e-mails which showed up. I got glimpses of the subject lines and actually managed to click on one (and confirm, to my horror, that it was draining money from my real bank account), but they were being deleted not long thereafter.

Google, incidentally, is of no help here (even though I'm paying $50/year for their "premier" edition of GMail). I called their emergency number only to be told that their offices are closed until Monday morning.

Anyway. PISSED OFF IS ME.