The Blog of Harald

“I linked”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2005/07/25/out-of-context/ to a “Joel on Software”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ “article”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html about the difference between average and best in software developers.

I finally tracked down “an article”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041206fa_fact I read months ago, on the difference between average and best in healthcare (specifically in Cystic Fibrosis clinics, since they collect enough data to measure the difference).

It’s a fascinating read.

“The Bell Curve”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041206fa_fact by “Atul Gawande”:http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/AtulGawande.html appeared in “The New Yorker”:http://www.newyorker.com/ .

Since I mentioned it last week, I should also mention documentation *for* child restraint use. The news page references a recent paper proving that child booster seats are 59% safer than seatbelts alone…

Keeping kids safe during car crashes: every child a safe ride | Partners for Child Passenger Safety – Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

I guess as a parent the bottom line is: for $80, why take chances?

In “an article about the difference between the best programmers and the mediocre”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html, this paragraph made me laugh out loud:

bq. In some other industries, cheap is more important than good. Wal*Mart grew to be the biggest corporation on Earth by selling cheap products, not good products. If Wal*Mart tried to sell high quality goods, their costs would go up and their whole cheap advantage would be lost. For example if they tried to sell a tube sock that can withstand the unusual rigors of, say, being washed in a washing machine, they’d have to use all kinds of expensive components, like, say, cotton, and the cost for every single sock would go up.

So it may not be as cut and dried as everyone thinks; car seats (over age 2) may not actually make any difference. Good luck finding a politician who is _against_ car seat and booster seat legislation, though; that would be political suicide. Proving once again that government often doesn’t work in our best interests? (There have been other examples of dumb gov’t safety laws recently, based on zero _real_ deaths or injuries; I’ll see if I can dig some of them out of my memory).

The Seat-Belt Solution – New York Times

bq. Perhaps the single most compelling statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one: ”They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.”

bq. But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child’s riding completely unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile, that doesn’t cost $200 or require a four-day course to master: seat belts.

bq. Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result: among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat belts. There are many reasons, of course, that this raw data might be misleading. Perhaps kids in car seats are, on average, in worse wrecks. Or maybe their parents drive smaller cars, which might provide less protection.

bq. But no matter what you control for in the FARS data, the results don’t change. In recent crashes and old ones, in big vehicles and small, in one-car crashes and multiple-vehicle crashes, there is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat belts in saving the lives of children older than 2. (In certain kinds of crashes — rear-enders, for instance — car seats actually perform worse.) The real answer to why child auto fatalities have been falling seems to be that more and more children are restrained in some way. Many of them happen to be restrained in car seats, since that is what the government mandates, but if the government instead mandated proper seat-belt use for children, they would likely do just as well / without the layers of expense, regulation and anxiety associated with car seats.

Followup material can be found at “Freakonomics”:http://freakonomics.com/times0710.php

Apparently, “American Pizza Boxes are Teflon coated”:http://www.pmq.com/cgi-script/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=news.db&command=viewone&id=642&op=t

Global Warming: This Time It’s Personal

bq. By now, you have to be a fucking idiot not to believe in Global Warming. […] It’s like not believing in the sunrise.

Go read…

Greg’s posted an article derived from “his pragmatic programming book”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974514071 over at O’Reilly:

O’Reilly Network: Top Ten Data Crunching Tips and Tricks

Go read it. Go buy his book. :-)

Small World sidebar:

“Andy Hunt”:http://www.toolshed.com/blog (of “Pragmatic Programming”:http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ fame) and I used to work together! We (Alias Research) bought a company where he was the sysadmin, and he and I spent many idyllic hours debugging !%#&%) email connectivity problems…

Eureka! I finally understand :-). The picture at the bottom, with the men reördered by height, did the trick for me.

defective yeti: The Twelve Man / Thirteen Man Problem

So my daughter was excited about today’s Da Vinci Google logo; apparently they were talking about his birthday in art class today.

Should I be afraid that my 6-year old knows how to “Google”:http://www.google.com/ ?

Everyone else has blogged about this by now, but what the heck:

New Scientist 13 things that do not make sense – Features

My favourite:

bq. 1 The placebo effect

bq. DON’T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

bq. This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

Who woulda thunk it? An interesting twist on the usual “mind over matter” explanation…

Dummies::Dungeons & Dragons For Dummies:Book Information

Next they’ll be letting just anyone play on the Internet…

For 22 years, pundits have been predicting the demise of Apple (and in particular, of the Macintosh), because Apple never be #1 against Intel, Microsoft, and HP+Compaq/IBM/Dell.

I’ve been trying for almost as long to convince people that there’s nothing wrong with being content “owning” 10% of the marketplace (Apple’s consistent share of the personal computer space). But it’s a hard sell.

Now people are starting to talk about one factor contributing to Apple’s success:

Seth’s Blog: Thinking about the Long Tail (part 1)
“Seth’s blog: Where is the rainbow? (long tail, part 2)”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/where_is_the_ra.html

There are perfectly reasonable business models out in the Long Tail. And in the long run, I think companies working out in the tail will be more successful than those searching for the next “big hit”, or competing to stay on top of the puppy pile…

I knew it was bad over in Africa, but “this stunning graph”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/02/the_african_cli.html really drives it home. Check it out.

(via “Antipixel”:http://www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2005/03/04/the_african_cliff.html)

When you’re as braindead as I am these days, “Tetris 1D”:http://www.tetris1d.org/ will appeal to you.

For a slightly harder time, try “Notepad Invaders”:http://robmanuel.blogspot.com/2005/02/notepad-invaders.html

“It’s Back! Yay!”:http://geourl.org/near?p=http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/

The debate over women in technical fields (in school) summarized:

bq. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.

Well, I laughed…

via Philip Greenspun

I’m not your damn search engine
“I’m someone’s fetish”:http://www.nonzerochance.com/index.php?p=buypage&design=fetish&style=kshirt
“polyamory is wrong!”:http://www.cafepress.com/captainwhimsy.16788296?zoom=yes#zoom (read the back :-)

If you’re having trouble understanding why wikis are so useful, or having trouble explaining it to other people, try this story:
Monkeymagic: The architect and the wiki

bq. The moral of the story (which doesn’t really need saying): its better to start with a load of old crap than aim for an idealised version.

(via “Cutting Through”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/infosential/cdIB?m=130)

It’s a small, lightweight webserver that speaks IPv6. But that’s irrelevant. I’m just in it for the “file not found error page”:http://leahhttpd.sourceforge.net/screens/screen3.png.

:-)

MSNBC – First Amendment no big deal, students say

bq. The way many high school students see it, government censorship of newspapers may not be a bad thing, and flag burning is hardly protected free speech.

bq. Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

Wow.

bq. They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. — Ben Franklin

or even better:

bq. I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it. — Voltaire