After the Strom

I saw it on CNN today, on my Cable TV. I could not believe it. They were talking about how the rains this weekends combined with the snowstorm last weekend would cause floods. The caption on the bottom screen read: "After The Strom". That's right, after the strom. They were calmly talking about the storm and the flood dangers while the screen script warned viewers of what could happen after the strom. Did they mean Strom Thurmond? I can tell you what they meant then: Trent Lott lost his majority leader in the Senate. But they did not seem to be talking about that. It seems that they need to check spelling and grammar of captions before they show them.

A New Blogger

I have been blogging with Blogtrek for some time now, using as my blogging host Blogger. Now I hear that my favorite search engine, Google, is buying it. This can only mean good things for Blogger, says the Blogger site. But what do we have now? Glooger? Bloggle? The possibilities are mind-bloggling. In any case, when you now search in Bloggle for something, you may very well bloggle to my gloogling site, Blogtrek (no, I am not going to name it Googlek.).

This what can't be displayed?

Many times when you try to reach a web site you get the reply "This page cannot be displayed." Such happens when you try to access http://www.methinksnopage.com. There follows a set of instructions to help you find what's wrong. This week, however, I found a page that says something else instead. Try http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/. It seems that something else can't be displayed, or at least that seems to be the case in one prominent area of the world right now.

Interesting week

This week had four disasters in it. What's happening here? Is this because a war might happen? First someone uses pepper spray in a nightclub and 21 people die trying to trample out of the place. Then an airplane crashes in Iran killing 302 people. This morning the pyrotechnics got out of control in a Providence, RI, nightclub and the flames spread to engulf everyone inside in minutes. A barge being refueled on Staten Island explodes, producing scenes from Manhattan that looked eerily like Planeattack.

In particular, there has to have been lots of nightclub violations in the past few years in the US, but no disasters. Then all of a sudden we get two at once. Perhaps the nightclubs will clean up their act.

Close the School or Not?

Along with much of the East Coast, the Great Snowstorm of 2003 has caused poor roads around here and resulted in some of the local public school systems being closed for several days. Today, the temperature went to around 50, causing a lot of melting. Therefore, most of the school systems are opening tomorrow. But not School System H. SSH decided to remain closed tomorrow, and the local talk show host on radio ridiculed the situation. He says if that if we do that, then we need to send kids home when it rains because they might get wet, or not have school in the autumn because the falling leaves could attack the students. He said that ice is not melting at 56 degrees F in SSH. A caller said that she spun around 180 degrees twice when navigating roads in H. So which is it? Does H close the schools tomorrow or not? Note that if H does close the school, five days will be permanently lost.

To me this looks like a decision between opening the schools and having the kids become injured intellectuals, or keeping them closed and having them become safe idiots. So which is it, H? Injured intellectuals or safe idiots? I don't think I could decide that one.

Cat on the Door Step

This morning I saw a cat on our back yard deck steps. Our cat was on the sill glowering at it. The cats look much alike, blotchy white and tabby with some orange, more on that cat than on ours. The other cat stares at the squirrels in your yard. With the cat around there is not a bird in sight, even though we have filled the bird feeders. I click my fingers on the bay window pane. The cat turns its head around and glowers at me. It is staring at me with a couple of big fat beautiful green eyes. Then it goes to the back of the yard and disappears. The birds return.

Skyjacking and carjacking

In the book Predicting New Words, by Allan Metcalf, the nonword skyjacking is mentioned. This word was coined about two to three decades ago to describe the hijacking of aircraft. We almost never use the word anymore. However, we do use carjacking a lot. What's the difference? According to Mr. Metcalf, it is because skyjacking has a cute pun, sky versus hi, making light of a serious subject. According to Mr. Metcalf, "cute" or "clever" words almost never survive. Words need to settle in the language unnoticed. Carjacking has survived because there is no such pun; it simply describes the objectionable practice of forcing someone out of a car and taking their car. If so, then what's wrong with planejacking? Why hasn't that appeared in our language?

If it hadn't been for France

Some people are saying the French are being ungrateful because they oppose the upcoming war against Iraq. They say that we saved the French from German occupation iin World War II and now they are being ungrateful by opposing the US. That is a specious argument if I ever saw one. The French has given us a favor. If it weren't for the French, we'd be depositing our paychecks at Benedict Arnold National Bank. Viva la France!

Fire Department Effectiveness

How effective is the fire department? Do you measure it by the number of fires it puts out? If so, the people of the fire department will set fires, and then put them out. Similarly for bioweapons experts. How many bioattacks do they successfully counter? Measure them like this, and they will set an attack, and then counter it. In this case, though I believe the goal was to bring attention to bioweapons research.

Perhaps the military should be the same way. Measure the effectiveness of an army and its government by the number of wars that it wins? If so they will purposely set wars to show everyone how well it can win them. I read somewhere that the fire department is best rated by the number of fires it prevents. Maybe the military and government should be rated by the number of wars it prevents. But I don't see much war preventing except from places like "old Europe".

Snowstorm caused a meltdown?!

Tonight I heard a reporter on CNN saying that the huge snowstorm that we had this weekend caused the transportation system in the Northeast US to experience a meltdown. That's right, a meltdown. This is yet another hyper word that has been worked up by the hypermedia ever since the Three Mile Island incident of 1979. Well, they really made a boner this time. That's exactly what I want, a meltdown! I want all this sleet, freezing rain, and snow to melt down and give us back our transportation system. Fortunately, the weather people predict a meltdown this week, with temperatures in the 50s melting all this stuff off the roads.

The Blizzard of 2003

I saw it coming on the weather reports; in fact, from the GFS model, I had seen this one two weeks in advance. This does not mean I like it in any sense. This storm came in with rain, then it started sleeting for two days. They predicted 12-18 inches of snow, but we got only about 2 inches of ice and sleet. It was not the easiest thing to shovel. It was like a steamroller, wiping out one event after another that I wanted to go to, a telescope open house, a valentine dance, a church service, and a board meeting of an organization where I am an officer. It made it a lonely, cabin-fever weekend. I did get out to shovel snow and run to the main road to see what condition it was in. These events (except for the church service) have been rescheduled, are now going to crowd my next two weeks to the hilt.

The Board of Supervisors Problem

This is the case involving having to wait a long time for an event to happen. It can be for a haircut where you are told only that it will be a long wait, a place where you select numbers for waiting in line, or a court case or government body case which is in a huge docket of cases. Let's take the last one for an example. Suppose your development is concerned about a developer next door building lower cost homes and your neighborhood is afraid of plummeting market values of its homes. So your development is going to challenge their petition at the Board of Supervisors meeting to change the zoning to apartments, say. It is schedule for some night, but you are afraid that it will take a long time before the case comes up. Let's say it will come up sometime between 7 pm and midnight. So you say, I won't come at 7. I'll come in at 10 and save some time. But you are afraid they may pull a fast one on you and bring it up at 9. Then you'll miss it. What should you do?

It depends on your attitude to the supervisors. You could observe the past history of cases similar to your own and find out what the most likely time is for your case to come up. If it is 10, then you will arrive at 9:45. But suppose you don't have such a history, or you have had bad luck with situations in the past and believe that the system is out to make things the most miserable on you as it can.

In that case it is a 2-person zero-sum game. The theory of such games was worked out about half a century ago. Some of these games have what is known as saddle points, or Nash equilibria (mentioned in the beautiful movie A Beautiful Mind, which came out in 2002). In these equilibria, if you deviate from the solution, you will do worse. Well is there such an equilibrium in this case? You come in at midnight, because you feel that the system will make you wait a long time and delay the thing as much as it can. So then it decides to make it at 8 o'clock, to make you miss it. Seeing this, you want to come in at 8. But it decides to make it 7 instead to make you miss it. So you come in at 7. So then it makes it midnight to make you waste 5 hours of your time. And this thing goes on indefinitely. It is clear that this game has no saddle points.

In such a case, game theory says you should use a random device to determine what you are going to do. That keeps the other side guessing. But with what probabilities should you make the times to be? There is a well-known procedure for solving this, using linear programming. I set up the problem using 33 discrete times on an Excel spreadsheet and solved for it. The solution is this: with some high probability, come in on time. In the above example, arrive at 7; that is, on time. If you draw the other probability, then draw completely at random from all the possible hours, making the later hours more likely. How high a probability should you come on time? It depends on how much you value not missing the case versus wasting your time. Roughly speaking, how long a wait in hours must it be before you are indifferent between waiting that time and missing it? Say it is H hours. Then with probability H/(H+1), arrive on time; else draw completely randomly an arrival time. It turns out this is not a good game to play; missing the event is too likely, and you are apt to wait a long time. But this is the best you can do.

Now suppose everyone in the neighborhood follows this rule. Then a huge bunch, maybe 2/3 of the development, will come in on time to support their cause. While the other cases are going on, other people from the development will dribble in a little at time, with the frequency increasing as the night wears on. A few will miss it, when the case comes up and those who selected later times lose out. The last time I went to such a hearing, I did indeed observed this type of behavior to some extent. So game theory in this case had the power to predict accurately what people will do.