The Guardian now is now keeping track of people killed by the police in the USA. Commercial news media thrives on this sort of thing, especially when there is any doubt about whether it was justified or not, and of course, there is always some doubt in someone's mind. For instance, if they killed me I would be absolutely certain it wasn't justified.
A fair number of the people killed by police can be classified as 'suicide by cop'. It might be a sin to commit suicide, but a significant number of people find life unbearable for one reason or another and choose to leave. Some of them want to die without having to actually kill themselves, and suicide by cop is one alternative. All you need is a gun, most any sort will do, and the ability to act determined. The cops will take care of the rest.
From the table above you can see that gun deaths are way down on the list. Homicide isn't even on the CDC's list of leading causes, I added it so we could compare. Note that almost half of the suicides are done with guns.
And then there is 'Other', which kills more people than any other cause, and what are we doing about that?
Guardian link via Detroit Steve. Gun death numbers are from the Wikipedia page and are probably not for the same year as the CDC numbers. All other numbers are from the CDC, except 'Other', which was calculated.
Ever wonder what the state of the art in Computer Science was back in 1964? Me neither, but Jack sent me a link. I glanced at it, but geez, if they aren't exactly dinosaurs, they are more like American cars from the same era, big, expensive and flashy. Then Jay notices that there is a Control Data 6600 in the list, which brings back some memories
We had a CDC 6600 at the University of Texas when I was there (1978-80). It was installed in a room under the patio in back of the (infamous) tower. There was a hallway alongside the room separated by glass. It was slightly elevated so you could walk by and gaze down upon the great and terrible Oz. It was some kind of yellowish color. Burnt ochre? Almond?
When I started my Computer Science classes there our jobs were limited to like 7 seconds to compile and run. When I got to upper division classes the reigns were loosened a bit. I wrote a program to process a small image (like 50 gray scale pixels square) and I didn't really plan it out very well, I just sort of hacked it together. It seemed like a trivial problem. It ran, but it used something like a couple of minutes of time which almost consumed the entire class's allotment for the semester. I got dinged for being inefficient.
Some time later I came across some old CDC controller cabinets for sale. They were pretty cool, about four feet high, they had a pair of cast aluminum doors on the front with a series of dark green glass windows. I would still like to get my hands on one. They were right out of a science fiction movie.
Another thing that was cool was that the operators console had a little bar in the bottom left corner of the screen for status messages. It would had some kind of swirly/barber pole thing going on. This was in the days when all you normally got on the screen was text.
Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.
Update November 2017 replaced dead link
E. B. Misfit's post prompted me to tell this old-ish story. It has been told many times before, perhaps even by me, but evidently it's worth repeating because every day there are new people showing up who have never heard of, much less seen, a punch card. So I'll tell it again.
I studied Computer Science at the University of Texas in Austin from 1977 to 1980. This was in the days before the PC. All your programming assignments were run on the mainframe. The mainframe was a giant CDC machine in a glass walled basement room in the administration building. You had to search it out if you wanted to see it. You could do all your programming without ever knowing where it was. Everything ran on the mainframe: student programs as well as University business applications. Well, everything except for a few projects being done on a mini-computer by graduate students. Note that was a mini-computer. There were no micro-computers.
Student programs were run in batch mode. In the computer science building there were two rooms: a keypunch room and the I/O room. The keypunch room had maybe eight keypunch machines. They were usually busy, sometimes you had to wait for one to open up. In the I/O room was the card reader and the printer. The I/O room (I don't think that's what we called it, but for the life of me I can't remember just what we did call it) was divided roughly in two by a counter. You took your stack of punched cards to the counter and handed them to the operator, who fed them into the card reader, and when they had been read, handed them back. Then you stepped back and waited for your program to run. Actually, you waited for the results of your "job" to be printed.
Turn the volume way up to get the full effect.
The printer was always busy, hammering away from dawn to bedtime, spitting out a continuous stream of green bar printer paper. The printer operator would watch for job headers to appear, tear off the preceding stack of paper and file the output in a folder hanging in a rack. The rack was accessible from two sides. The operator put the output files in on one side and the students pulled theirs out from the other side. The folders were arranged alphabetically by user code, so you waited and watched for your printout to be deposited in your folder.
To run a program first you had to write it. This you printed by hand on paper. When you were satisfied, you took your hand written copy and a stack of blank punch cards to the keypunch room and found yourself a machine. Load your cards into the machine and then type your program in, one line to a card. If you made an error, the card went in the trash. Since programs in those days were about equal parts letters, numbers and punctuation, and errors meant the sacrifice of a card, it was slow going.
In addition to your program you needed a job card. There may have been more than one, and there may have been an end-of-job card as well. These had a cryptic string of characters that the professor supplied at the beginning of the term. I never even tried to decipher their meaning. Writing my assigned programming tasks was enough of a challenge.
So now you have your completed stack of punch cards, your "job", and you can hand it over to the operator and wait for it to run. When you get printout back you find out what became of your job. Most of the time it came back with an error of some sort. You forgot to put in a punctuation mark, or you misspelled GOTO. These were syntax errors, which meant your program did not actually run. Once you got all of these nitpicky little errors fixed, then you could move on to what happened when your program ran. Again, most of the time it didn't. The computer failed to understand your logic and tried to do what you told it instead of what you meant, which resulted in a crash or a nonsensical output. This is when it got interesting.
Now you get to try and puzzle out what happened. Sometimes it was obvious. Once you had gotten to this point (no mean feat), and you actually looked at your program, it became perfectly obvious what you had done wrong. Sometimes you got to repeat this sequence several times:
run the program
read the output
start reading your program
exclaim "Oh!" when your foolish mistake jumps out at you
correct the program
At this point sometimes you got lucky and the program ran as it was supposed to. This happened more in the early days, when your program was a stack of maybe 20 cards. As time went by and I stared taking more advanced classes my programs got longer. Now we start running into logic errors, things that might cause your program to go into an endless loop. This meant your program ran until your allowed time expired, which meant the only feedback you got was a notice that you ran out of time. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. My longest program was about a thousand cards which meant a thousand lines of code. It filled a box the size of a shoebox.
These cards are blank, just waiting for you to engrave the wisdom of the ages.
I wonder how many boxes I went through. A dozen? Two dozen?
The operations room in the Computer Science building (Painter Hall, maybe?) closed up in the early evening. If your program was due tomorrow and it still wasn't running, this meant going down to the street to the engineering building. Things were not quite so hospitable there. For one thing it was full of engineering students whose smallest programs were one box of cards. Some of these guys had programs that comprised a stack of boxes. Also, I don't think they were any keypunch machines there, but that doesn't make any sense. How could you get anything done? In any case, I can picture the operations room but I cannot picture any keypunches there.
I had a couple of job interviews after I graduated with companies (defense contractors) that used punch cards. I was horrified. By this time I had been exposed to video terminals (text only CRT's) and punch cards were obviously going away. Fortunately neither one these companies offered me a job. Actually, one was even worse. You handed your program to the secretary who typed it in using a typewriter. The typewriter was connected to a modem, which was connected to mainframe on the other side of town via a phone line. I think it was an IBM electric typewriter. I think they mailed the results of your job back to you.
Update November 2017 replaced one dead link & deleted another. Fixed problems with picture and video.
Hrayr Karagueuzian on radioactive particles in cigarettes
UCLA
Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about cigarettes, nicotine and the evil CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), a branch of the evil Federal government. It's great stuff, but he left out my favorite theory about lung cancer:
It's the radioactive lead in the fertilizer that is used on tobacco plants in the field. Some dude did a study many moons ago and found that lung cancer lungs were full of radioactive lead.
The post had a couple of terms that I had to look up:
Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are a class of drugs that inhibit the activity of one or both monoamine oxidase enzymes: monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) and monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B). They are best known as effective antidepressants, especially for treatment-resistant depression and atypical depression.[1] They are also used to treat panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, Parkinson's disease, and several other disorders.
Nootropics, also known as “smart drugs” are a diverse group of medicinal substances whose action improves human thinking, learning, and memory, especially in cases where these functions are impaired.
The death of Common Sense begins with the words initiated by the morass of Bureaucracy couched in safety and security. Indeed, and according to past President Ronald Reagan, the most frightening words to hear in the English language are para ‘We’re here from the government and we’re here to help you!’ The underpinnings of such beginnings appear benign and with benign neglect the malignancy storms through, metastasizing arboreally through the veins of the entire system. The world is seeing such a death these days. - CDC vs. Common Sense
I recently realized that were some things you could do with the C library sort (qsort) & search (bsearch) functions that can make them more useful. bsearch will run a binary search on a sorted array and return a pointer to the matching element, if there is one. If it doesn't find a match, all it tells you is that it didn't find it.
But what if you want to find an element with a value close to the one you want? The trick I just figured out is you simply add the element you want to use as a target in your search, run qsort on the array to sort it, and then search for that element. That will put you in the ballpark. Now all you need to do is check adjacent elements to see if they meet your criteria.
To delete this fictitious element, simple change it's value to the maximum possible for this item and then run qsort again. It will now be at the top of the list. All it takes to effectively delete it is to reduce the array's element count by one.
All this extra sorting will use some processor power, and if you were having to sort a gigabyte of data more than once a second, it might have an effect on your system's overall performance.
But if this is for any kind of desktop application, the ease of coding it makes it a worthwhile shortcut.
The last time I went down this road I wrote my own search function that would return the element with the closest value to my requested target. I also wrote my own insert and delete routines. I did this because when I went to school everything about computer programming was about saving CPU cycles. Beginning programmers got seven seconds of execution time on the mainframe. I screwed up once in a junior level class and burned my entire semester's allotment before the OS kicked me off. That rated some words from my professor.
I wonder why it took me so long to figure this out. I'm thinking it might because most of the programming work I did involved making things work, and there was no end to it. Well, I guess it did come to an end which is why I am unemployed. Computer companies eventually got their acts together and started building machines that worked when you turned them on, and software companies started producing software that people could use to do something useful. Took a while but they eventually got it sorted.
So I never got to work on anything that might have been more interesting than the nuts and bolts of getting the hardware to behave. Not that it wasn't interesting, but it was interesting in a picayune kind of way, not a cosmic, universe expanding kind of way.
This sounds like our house when my wife and I are trying to navigate medical / insurance websites. The problem with using phrases is remembering the phrase exactly. Was it 'for the rest of your lives' or 'forever'? And then there are the password managers offering to save your password for you. Are they any more reliable than websites that offer to 'Remember me'? Shit, any seriously motivated hacker can steal everything on your computer including your passwords. And why do we have passwords on medical websites anyway? Why? Because of HIPAA, that's why:
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 establishes federal standards protecting sensitive health information from disclosure without patient's consent. - CDC
There must be some people out there who want to keep their medical records confidential, but I ain't one of them, and I don't understand this overarching desire for privacy. I suppose if you are operating in a contentious environment with people who will use any means, fair or foul, to trip you up or bring you down, you could want your medical records secure. Or you might just be paranoid. In the past I have just removed myself from those situations, but that may not always be feasible.
At the end of book he mentions the largest cities in the world and what would happen if a nasty bug got loose in one of those places. Which led me to look up the largest cities (spreadsheet above, taken from Wikipedia).
If COVID-19 was as contagious and deadly as some people claim, I would expect that we would be hearing about zillions of deaths from some of these places. It might be that I have my filters set too high and that is keeping such reports from reaching me, or maybe America is just so self centered that we don't have time to worry about the zillion COVID-19 deaths all over the rest of world. Or maybe the disease is just getting started and later on this year we will start seeing those reports. I don't think that will happen, and in any case I certainly hope it doesn't happen.
Which got me to thinking that this whole lock down, mask wearing paranoia thing is just people showing that they are part of the in-crowd, kind of like standing in line at Starbucks to pay $5 for a fancy cup of coffee, or waiting in line for 20 minutes to get an ice cream cone at Salt & Straw. Dang, I came across a story about this phenomena not too long ago and I thought for sure I linked to it, but now when I need it, I cannot find it.
And now we've got riots going on all over the place. Some people say it's because of the black man killed by the police in Minneapolis. That might have been the trigger, but I think it's because there are a bunch of people who are not happy about the way things are going. Yes, there are some people who are just attracted to social activity, the more active the better. But most people, if things are going well, have better things to do than protest. You put the screws to a large segment of the population, like our fearless leaders did to about half of the people who work for a living, and you're going to get some push back and this is what it looks like.
Problem is we have this fantasy that everyone deserves the same respect and treatment whereas in reality people range from savages to saints. You send a bunch of saints into the jungle to deal with a bunch of savages and you are very likely to end up with a bunch of dead saints.
Salt and sodium are commonly blamed for high blood pressure. Do not confuse the two terms. Common table salt is sodium chloride, a simple chemical compound. Sodium is a highly reactive element and is not found free in nature. "Salt" is not synonymous with the term “sodium.”
Salt vs. Sodium A list of conversions for salt and sodium appears below:
1 mmol sodium = 23 mg sodium
1 g sodium = 43.5 mmol sodium
1 g salt (sodium chloride) = 390 mg sodium
1 tsp salt = 6 g salt ≈ 2,400 mg sodium = 104 mmol sodium = 104 mEq sodium
To convert mmol to mg of sodium, chloride, or sodium chloride, multiply mmol by 23, 35.5, or 58.5 (the molecular weights of sodium, chloride, and sodium chloride), respectively. - CDC
mmol stands for millimol, or one one-thousandth of a mole. A mole of a chemical compound has as many grams as the atomic weight of the compound. Sodium has an atomic weight of 22.98976928, call it 23. Chlorine makes up the chloride part of sodium chloride and has an atomic weight of 35.45, call it 35. I don't have a scale that will measure fractions of a gram, and if we're talking about the amount of food you eat, it's not significant. Anyway, one mole of table salt is 58 grams, which is 2 ounces, which is why all the numbers in the list above use the milli- prefix.
The mEq unit label in the last line of the above chart stands for milliequivalence. An Equivalence is one mole of a substance times the valance of the ion in question. Sodium ions have a valance of one, so one mole of sodium is the same as one equivalence. Calcium ions have a valance of two, so one mole of calcium is two equivalences. Wikipedia has an article.The Ohio State University School of Veterinary Medicine also has a page on the topic.
When I was studying Computer Science at The University of Texas in Austin, I had one class where we were allowed to use a PDP computer that was normally reserved for graduate students. The professor who was in charge of it gave a group of us a 30 second instruction on how to boot the machine: flip this switch, flip that switch, and then push the go button. Great, that explains nothing. WTF are all these switches and why does this sequence work? It was rote memorization and my mind balked. I caught him later on and asked him to repeat these instructions and he gave me shit for not paying attention the first time. Effing jerk.
I don't recall what I did with the machine, it was probably just an exercise to familiarize us with working with actual hardware. Everything else we did was done at an arm lengths remove from the giant fricking CDC machine via punch cards and printouts. There was one graduate student there who was mucking about with something and he discovered an undocumented opcode. He played with it for a bit and finally concluded that it was 'jump random and destroy' which doesn't sound particularly useful.
My first job out of school was working with a Texas Instruments DX-10 mini computer (TI-900 was the computer, DX-10 was the operating system). It had a bank of front panel switches much like the ones in the video above. We actually used them a couple of times, but it was such a slow tedious process that almost any amount of software contortions were preferable.
We needed to hook it up to an IBM tape drive (I think it was an IBM, it used those frigging giant IBM channel cables). It wasn't too difficult, just a matter of figuring out which plugs to use and setting some jumpers, but I seemed to be the only one in the shop that could figure it out. I remember thinking the connector was pretty weird because the cable itself was this thick, armored thing about an inch in diameter, but at the end the sheathing had been stripped away and the connector was just hanging on a bunch of loose wires. Alien tech, but it worked.
For one, both physicians and patients were often hesitant to bring attention to cases. “Physicians are not reporting their cases to prevent homes from being quarantined.”21 (Note: At the time of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the separation of the ill from the general population, what is now referred to as isolation, was termed “quarantine.”)
My immediate reaction was "what kind of bullshit is this?" Quarantine was a perfectly cromulant word, one that has a very specific meaning. It's also a word that everyone knows, or should know, and now you want to substitute some mealy mouthed euphemism. Isolate? Really? That's what you do with an engine when you don't want the whole machine to vibrate, or to a variable in an algebraic equation. Even if you restrict the meaning to a person, it's still vague. I mean, take away their cell phone, that will isolate them pretty well. Very irritating.
Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
I'm sorry if I don't see a difference, except if you want to be persnickety, isolate doesn't restrict a person's movements, which seems a tad idiotic. What do you do? Put them in one of those giant inflatable plastic balls? Let's them go anywhere they want carrying their own toxic atmosphere along with them?
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