The measure of a bridge

Measure twice, cut once, woodworkers say.

Accurate and precise measurement are the keys to 90-degree square corners, even legs, and generally, pieces fitting together properly. On a small project it's usually possible to correct errors  by cutting, planing, sanding, gluing, or using wood putty.

Now imagine you are building an enormous bridge, highways, and on and off ramps over New Haven Harbor to replace the old bridge.

The materials are way too big to measure with a tape. Can a steel fabricator guarantee that a 50-foot girder will be within 0.001 inch of the blueprint girder?  When construction workers pour concrete into stories-high wooden molds,  how are they able to make the finished product exactly the right size? Also, all of the angles have to be correct, because the bridge and associated sky ways are curved.

Who is out there with a yard stick making sure the project is built according to specifications? A cursory inspection does not reveal anyone with prospecting tools, and you do not see the workers looking at plans. Maybe this all takes place in a trailer somewhere.

Still, who determines the correct height of the mold and how is this applied in practice? How do they make the towers plumb?

Sure, there are project engineers, bridge engineers, and all of those people. You ever see them measuring anything?

Maybe they are doing the equivalent of drawing out a tape measure and marking a spot, but using unrecognizable equipment. Infrared or laser beams? Global positioning systems? 

But even if an engineer can determine that a particular support needs to be 35 feet, six and half inches tall, how do the workers possibly fabricate something that big and with such precision?

It's not easy to make six two-by-fours all exactly eight feet long, for example. However, in theory, the job is straight forward. What theory do builders use when six pieces of concrete have to be exactly 50 feet long?

Maybe all highway support columns and other construction elements are a standard size, and so all of the fabrication equipment is automatically gauged properly.  That does not seem plausible. 

Or maybe the crews just eyeball the whole thing and modify as they go. That doesn't seem plausible  either.

Same holds true for skyscrapers, dams, stadiums,  oil tankers, and all enormous man-made things.

Suppose 100 men and women are working at a site, and each one is accurate down to a hundredth of an inch. At the end, won't whatever they're building be off by at least an inch?

Murder most foul...Yawn

Why are so many television shows and books devoted to murder?

Collecting forensic evidence, looking for fibers, and unravelling complex subplots and meta-plots. Some homicides are fascinating. Serial killers are morbidly interesting, and occasionally someone does something really bizarre like puts his wife through a wood chipper.

But all of those twisting and turning plots and big surprises and shoot-outs? Life's not like that at all. You mean what we see on television is not perfectly accurate? Afraid not.

If a spouse turns up dead, the prime suspect is always the husband or wife. That's about as complicated as it gets. 

Most murders are solved through confessions, or by people who overhear other people talking about how they killed someone, or by people with information seeking to lessen their own prison time. 

Also, the ranks of police departments are not filled with beautiful women who wear low-cut plain clothes. Female detectives look like regular women. 

Moreover, there are so many more interesting topics than murder. But finding them is not as easy. Materials physics, quantum mechanics, robotics, fishing for crabs, logging, gun smithing, and history are all available on cable. Way more entertaining to see Bear Grylls eat insects or make himself a seal-skin vest, than one of the proliferating Murder She Wrote shows. 

How common objects are made, bridges are designed, ore mined, the Panama Canal widened, all more interesting than "murder."

Despite Agatha Christie and her ilk, murder is tawdry, mundane, messy, miserable, and kind of boring --  unless you're the murderer or the murdered.

Snow fools the eyes

Time to clear up some misconceptions.

We may not get any more snow now that April is here, but remember the big drifts of this past winter? The snow started out white and then after a few days, snow plowed to the side of the road turned gray and was dotted with pieces of dirt.

The typical explanation for the gray color is either "dirt" or "pollution" or dirt resulting from pollution.  However, if pollution were falling so fast that it could discolor snow in two or three days, we would notice it everywhere -- on cars, sides of houses, clothes, shoes, statues, and so on.  

Besides, the air pollution around here is tiny particulates (too small to see),  and ozone smog. Acid rain would not color snow, would it?

The drifts' gray appearance is optical. True, there are motes of dirt and assorted garbage in the snow, but the gray is the result of melting. Take a look at the ice cubes in your freezer. They are not snow white, they're gray. Snow that melts and refreezes is the same.

Snowflakes, incidentally, are clear, but very reflective. Catch a flake in your hand. It's not white. 

Ponder the color differences between rain clouds and fair weather clouds. The water-filled rain clouds are gray and the cumulus clouds are composed of zillions of clear droplets and appear white. 

Yale research has also found that some bird feathers and insect wings are colored not by pigments, but by refracted light. Same thing with snow. 

Now you know. 

The electric toothbrush jive

Just for fun, and to see how social networks function, start this rumor: Urinating while simultaneously using an electric toothbrush can cause electrocution.

This seems almost plausible if you don't think about it very hard, and is just weird enough to be true, if you don't think about it too hard.

Spreading rumors, or hoaxes, is hard work. You'll need to repeat the rumor to everyone you know, and have them repeat it ad nauseum.

What would all of this prove? That there's a reason the United States' ranking in science education is 48th out of 50.

I see jail and tidal waves in your future

Romania is considering punishing witches and fortune tellers if their prognostications do not come true.

Why bother fortune tellers, you might ask.  For one thing, the proposed law is aimed at  Roma, or the people who used to be called "gypsies." 

Romania must have more pressing problems than cracking down on something so trivial, but apparently Romanians are superstitious. Extremely superstitious.

But the parliament apparently did not figure out that the anti-fortune telling law is a logical riddle.

Suppose a man goes to a fortune teller, who predicts he will get hit by a falling piano. The man, who lives near a piano factory, goes home by a circuitous route to avoid the factory and any falling pianos.  In this case, the man relied on the fortune teller, and took evasive action. 

If a piano did actually fall, he would have escaped harm thanks to the fortune teller -- but then the fortune would be incorrect and she would face criminal charges.  Seems like a paradox.

Or suppose she predicts vaguely  that a client's relative is going to experience health problems. The client  could then take the relative to the doctor for a check-up and thus double-cross fate. The logical fallacy actually works in favor of the people he or she cons.

Unless the fortune teller specifies a certain date, she can always claim that the event is in the client's future. Eventually, decades down the road, the  client will develop a disease and will die.  "Health problems" inevitably happen at some point in a person's life.

It might take decades or centuries for a piano to fall on someone's head.  Would the fortune teller be released from prison if, 20 years later, a piano happens to fall on someone?  Or would that just confirm that she is a witch?

Witches have their own angle. They can defend themselves by blaming the fortune-telling cards. This puts the card manufacturer in a fix. The card maker could then blame the company that made the stock on which the cards were printed, who could then blame the rags that the recycler delivered to make the stock.  This road extends to infinity, or at least, to the beginning of the universe. 

This is sort of a "you can't prove a negative" argument. 

Now ponder Earth's changing climate. Skeptical politicians who refuse to recognize the problem are in the place of the Romanian parliament, and the fortune tellers are scientists.

As the Romanian example shows, the scientists cannot lose. And this is assuming that climate experts are simply guessing. Either the climate does change (it's in the process right now) or it may change in the future.

Maybe the Romanian parliament is just the body to deliver global climate change laws. 

Forget the economy. Let me tell you about a bake sale!

The Torrington Register Citizen, the New York Times tells us, is encouraging the public to visit its newsroom and attend afternoon news meetings.

Why? No one there has a clear explanation, according to the Times' story.  It's possible to sell newspapers. No newspaper has yet figured out a successful or robust way to charge for Internet content.  That's why the few thriving Web newspapers depend on grants from non-profit organizations.

Or, a company can distribute a paper for free to get advertisements into people's homes. 

From all appearances, the reason to invite the public to help produce a newspaper is because the newspaper does not want a long payroll of reporters.

Think of it in this abstract way: Consider a circle including all events, big and small. Newsworthy events are small circles. Other goings on are squares. Events are newsworthy if they provide information about how tax dollars are spent,  information the electorate needs to know in order to make rational voting decisions, or if the event is entertaining. 

For example, a power plant exploding ultimately raises questions about whether the government was maintaining its responsibility to protect citizens.  Tragedies also often provide grisly entertainment. Crime tells you how well your police force is working. 

Sports, movie reviews, advice columns,  local columns, letters, comics, and horoscopes may be informative, but are usually either thought-provoking or otherwise entertaining.

The reporter's job is to travel inside the circle and find the circles among the squares. This requires the skill to recognize a circle and/or the ability to convince officials to help pinpoint the circles. A higher number of reporters makes the task of gathering circles easier. You can collect more circles over a given amount of time, too.

Not all circles are simple. Often, circles are within circles, within squares, within circles. It may take time to find the circle in the middle. If you don't have the staff, those circles remain hidden and unknown.

Bringing "the public" (whatever that means) into the newsroom is casting a huge net and hoping that the people who appear will bring some circles with them. Or, more likely, the public, which is not monolithic, is likely to differ with editors about what constitutes a circle. 

Citizen A, for example, might question the necessity of reporting a murder, or identifying the victims of a car crash. Citizen B could question why the newspaper publishes or posts so much bad news. Why not some good news? Citizen C might complain that the publication is simple-minded, and Citizen D may protest that the writing is too complicated to understand.

The jobs of the reporters and editors is to slog through all of the collected circles and squares, separate the two, and decide on the most important circles. 

How will the public contribute to that process? That depends on who shows up on any given day. Will the editors follow the public's news judgment? If not, what benefits do the individuals accrue?

Another question is, who would be motivated to attend news meetings? Would suspects or crooked cops appear and demand that their stories be told? No. Do you want the mayor helping decide what you read? No. Will business owners reveal plans to lay off workers? No. 

Will anyone newsworthy show up? Only for self promotion. 

More likely, editors will hear about bake sales, scholastic sports, homeowner disputes, and public works complaints. And they may also be treated to the rantings of a few lunatics.

So, what does inviting "the public" into the newsroom accomplish? As far as I can tell, nothing, other than prior restraint.

Will "the public" compensate for a skeleton staff? Unfortunately, no.

Jesus wept

The creepy thing about John Boehner weeping so readily on a variety of subjects, is that the tears seem prompted by self-pity.

Boehner's labile behavior is troubling when you consider other historic wallowers in self-pity.  Richard Nixon, who resigned the presidency after his plot to undermine the Constitution was uncovered; Adolf Hitler, inventor of industrial mass murder to effect genocide; and Jimmy Swaggart, evangelist who sinned. You can think of many more.

Self-pity is not pleasant to watch.

There are plenty of reasons to weep. Being wrapped up in yourself is not a good one to put on public display.