Listening to NPR this morning. Someone was ranting about CAT scans, excessive Xray exposure from. The ranter did not, as is typical of ranters, have any numbers on the amount of radition (number of REMs) in a scan. Journalism school graduates are innumerate. This one slipped up and let out that 72 million CAT scans were billed last year.
Wow. The population of the US is only 300 million, that means nearly a quarter of the population was CAT scanned last year. That's a hell of a lot of CAT scans. If each scan cost $1000, that's $7.2 billion worth of scans.
Are all these scans necessary? I doubt it. Would they have occurred if the patient had to pay for them? I doubt it.
Note: I used to design CAT scanners many years ago.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (movie)
Well, the movie made it to DVD the other day. My little low speed video store had a whole wall of copies ready to rent. Didn't seem like all that many had been rented. So I rented one, mostly 'cause they didn't have anything better.
Half Blood Prince is the weakest of the Harry Potter movies. It suffers from the curse of the sound man, you can't understand the dialogue. Poor mike placement, score overpowers the dialogue, and the actors mumble. The plot is difficult to follow, even for someone who has read the book. The scene jumps from here to there and back again in a pseudo random manner. For instance in a dramatic scene Voldemort's followers attack Harry. They throw a ring of fire around the house and Harry goes tearing off thru a head high field of some-thing-or-other, wand out, in hot pursuit. Lots of zap flash bang, but at the end of the scene you can't tell what happened. Did Harry get Bellatrix? Did someone scare her off? Did Bellatrix kill someone? The scene fades out leaving me wondering what happened and what was the point. The final quest with Dumbledore for the Horcrux is unclear. How did Dumbledore know to search this wave swept rock? Why does Dumbledore incapcitate himself drinking from the font? How does Harry fight off the cave monsters and drag Dumbledore back to Hogwarts? And why does Dumbledore send Harry away and let the bad guys kill him? In short, the movie ends on an unsatisfactory note, Dumbledore dead for no good reason, the Horcruxes still at large, and Harry vowing to leave Hogwarts and pursue his anti-Voldemort quest.
Finally, the camera work is poor. Dark unlit scenes, low contrast, and you can't figure out where you are. A lot of "fade out the color to black and white" effects which are irritating to this viewer who thinks his color TV is dying when the color goes away. Shots of the Hogwart's Express steaming across an open midwest prairie, rather than English countryside. How did the train get onto the prairie from lush green England?
Too bad. And no wonder it doesn't seem to be renting all that well.
Half Blood Prince is the weakest of the Harry Potter movies. It suffers from the curse of the sound man, you can't understand the dialogue. Poor mike placement, score overpowers the dialogue, and the actors mumble. The plot is difficult to follow, even for someone who has read the book. The scene jumps from here to there and back again in a pseudo random manner. For instance in a dramatic scene Voldemort's followers attack Harry. They throw a ring of fire around the house and Harry goes tearing off thru a head high field of some-thing-or-other, wand out, in hot pursuit. Lots of zap flash bang, but at the end of the scene you can't tell what happened. Did Harry get Bellatrix? Did someone scare her off? Did Bellatrix kill someone? The scene fades out leaving me wondering what happened and what was the point. The final quest with Dumbledore for the Horcrux is unclear. How did Dumbledore know to search this wave swept rock? Why does Dumbledore incapcitate himself drinking from the font? How does Harry fight off the cave monsters and drag Dumbledore back to Hogwarts? And why does Dumbledore send Harry away and let the bad guys kill him? In short, the movie ends on an unsatisfactory note, Dumbledore dead for no good reason, the Horcruxes still at large, and Harry vowing to leave Hogwarts and pursue his anti-Voldemort quest.
Finally, the camera work is poor. Dark unlit scenes, low contrast, and you can't figure out where you are. A lot of "fade out the color to black and white" effects which are irritating to this viewer who thinks his color TV is dying when the color goes away. Shots of the Hogwart's Express steaming across an open midwest prairie, rather than English countryside. How did the train get onto the prairie from lush green England?
Too bad. And no wonder it doesn't seem to be renting all that well.
Dr. Christina Romer on Meet the Press
She is a middle aged woman, blond, bright red suit, no jewelry and little makeup. She is on, or head of, the presidents council of economic advisors. This is the first time I even heard her name. Host David Gregory pressed her to explain how Obama could do yet more economic stimulus without going deeper into debt. In the course of this discussion she said "The administration has down everything possible in the health care bill to reduce the cost of health care". Gregory let her get away with this spin/lie/whopper/untruth/what-do-you-call-it. In actual fact, health care cost reduction means malpractice reform, selling insurance across state lines, and allowing the import of drugs from all first world countries.
None of which is in the healthcare bill. She knows it and so does Gregory.
None of which is in the healthcare bill. She knows it and so does Gregory.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Getting charts out of Excel
Like many, I use Excel for charting nearly any kind of data. And, if I need the chart in any other MS Office application (Word, PowerPoint etc) I just cut and paste. What about moving an Excel chart to a non MS application or the web?
It can be done but the how-to is non-obvious. You have to do "Save as WebPage" from the file menu. This produces TWO files on your disk. The first file has the extension .HTML which is a wrapper of HTML code, and a second .gif file which is the actual graphic file of your chart. The .gif can be uploaded, merged or even edited with a graphics edit program.
It can be done but the how-to is non-obvious. You have to do "Save as WebPage" from the file menu. This produces TWO files on your disk. The first file has the extension .HTML which is a wrapper of HTML code, and a second .gif file which is the actual graphic file of your chart. The .gif can be uploaded, merged or even edited with a graphics edit program.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Excel plots of world temperature.
On top is the Excel plot of the raw temperature data from NOAA file v2.mean. Notice, no hockey stick. It's just a wiggly line rising from say 9 degrees in the 1700's to 14 and a skosh in 2009.
The lower plot is adjusted mean temperatures from NOAA file v2.mean_adj. The NOAA readme file says that v2.mean_adj was computed by adjusting the data from v2.mean for various things. They didn't say what those things might be. Notice the adjustments trashed all the data from 1701 to 1838. After 1838 the adjustments flatten the temperature curve, and the last ten years show a small decline, supporting those who say world temperature has declined since 1998. The downward glitch in 2006 might be explained by a drastic reduction in the number of temperature readings that occured in 2006.
I lack faith in NOAA's adjustment process. I have not yet found an explanation of what the adjustments might be. Trashing the record from 1701 to 1838 is not a confidence builder. The 2006 glitch has got to be an error. I remember 2006 and it wasn't that cold.
Color me confused. The raw mean temperature says the world have been warming since 1701. The adjusted mean temperature says the world has been about the same since 1838. Who you gonna believe? I don't believe the science is settled.
The lower plot is adjusted mean temperatures from NOAA file v2.mean_adj. The NOAA readme file says that v2.mean_adj was computed by adjusting the data from v2.mean for various things. They didn't say what those things might be. Notice the adjustments trashed all the data from 1701 to 1838. After 1838 the adjustments flatten the temperature curve, and the last ten years show a small decline, supporting those who say world temperature has declined since 1998. The downward glitch in 2006 might be explained by a drastic reduction in the number of temperature readings that occured in 2006.
I lack faith in NOAA's adjustment process. I have not yet found an explanation of what the adjustments might be. Trashing the record from 1701 to 1838 is not a confidence builder. The 2006 glitch has got to be an error. I remember 2006 and it wasn't that cold.
Color me confused. The raw mean temperature says the world have been warming since 1701. The adjusted mean temperature says the world has been about the same since 1838. Who you gonna believe? I don't believe the science is settled.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Thermometers thru the ages
After Climate gate broke, I got interested in seeing what a real plot of historical temperatures might look like. I found the NOAA data files at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/. Net rumor from the various global warming sites says the NOAA records are the primary sources, the temperature records at other institutions, like the recently hacked Hadley CRU, are said to be derived from the NOAA files.
This is an FTP site, Firefox will take you there but it can only download files one at a time. Filezilla, a free ftp program, can be told to download them all in one fell swoop.
NOAA stores the files zipped, and after FTPing them onto my computer and unzipping, I found the main file, v2.mean, is 44 megabytes of "mean" temperature records. The file is oldfashioned, showing its IBM punch card ancestry. It's what you get for reading boxes and boxes of punch cards onto a 9 track magnetic tape, and later posting the tape on the web. It's in ASCII, and each record is exactly 76 characters long, a 12 character station number, four character year, and 12 five character fields for each month's mean temperature. No spaces, comma's or separators between the fields, which is old fashioned punch card style.
I wrote a short program in C to sort the temperature readings out by year and compute the average temperature for each year. I compute the plain average (the one we learned in grade school) of all temperatures for each year. The earliest year is 1701, the last 2009. In the early years there are only 30 or 40 separate readings, by 1989 the number of readings swells to 100,000 per year, and then declines to about 14,000 in 2009. Either the NOAA funding for data entry ran short, or someone stopped recording (or removed) temperatures from stations he deemed unimportant or inaccurate. Some net commentators have claimed that stations in cold locations and higher altitudes were deliberately removed to make the warming trend more obvious.
I plotted the results in Excel, and sure enough, the rather fuzzy plot shows world average temperature at 9 or 10 degrees Centigrade in 1701, rising to maybe 14 degrees Centigrade in 2009. 1701 is deep in the little ice age. Plus, in the early years, the 30 to 40 reading come from temperate-to-chilly locations like Britain, Germany, France and the American colonies. By the peak in 1980 there are a lot or readings from steamy hot places like the Sahara desert and the Amazon basin.
We see maybe 4 to 5 degrees warming over 308 years, call it 1.5 degrees Centigrade per century.
There is a lot more to do. There is a max temp and a min temp file to be plotted, and then there are files of "adjusted" data. It will be interesting to see what they look like. I ought to convert the temperatures to Fahrenheit which has more juice for Americans. I ought to compute the standard deviation of the temperature readings, and add some error checking code to spot way out of whack ridiculous temperatures.
This is an FTP site, Firefox will take you there but it can only download files one at a time. Filezilla, a free ftp program, can be told to download them all in one fell swoop.
NOAA stores the files zipped, and after FTPing them onto my computer and unzipping, I found the main file, v2.mean, is 44 megabytes of "mean" temperature records. The file is oldfashioned, showing its IBM punch card ancestry. It's what you get for reading boxes and boxes of punch cards onto a 9 track magnetic tape, and later posting the tape on the web. It's in ASCII, and each record is exactly 76 characters long, a 12 character station number, four character year, and 12 five character fields for each month's mean temperature. No spaces, comma's or separators between the fields, which is old fashioned punch card style.
I wrote a short program in C to sort the temperature readings out by year and compute the average temperature for each year. I compute the plain average (the one we learned in grade school) of all temperatures for each year. The earliest year is 1701, the last 2009. In the early years there are only 30 or 40 separate readings, by 1989 the number of readings swells to 100,000 per year, and then declines to about 14,000 in 2009. Either the NOAA funding for data entry ran short, or someone stopped recording (or removed) temperatures from stations he deemed unimportant or inaccurate. Some net commentators have claimed that stations in cold locations and higher altitudes were deliberately removed to make the warming trend more obvious.
I plotted the results in Excel, and sure enough, the rather fuzzy plot shows world average temperature at 9 or 10 degrees Centigrade in 1701, rising to maybe 14 degrees Centigrade in 2009. 1701 is deep in the little ice age. Plus, in the early years, the 30 to 40 reading come from temperate-to-chilly locations like Britain, Germany, France and the American colonies. By the peak in 1980 there are a lot or readings from steamy hot places like the Sahara desert and the Amazon basin.
We see maybe 4 to 5 degrees warming over 308 years, call it 1.5 degrees Centigrade per century.
There is a lot more to do. There is a max temp and a min temp file to be plotted, and then there are files of "adjusted" data. It will be interesting to see what they look like. I ought to convert the temperatures to Fahrenheit which has more juice for Americans. I ought to compute the standard deviation of the temperature readings, and add some error checking code to spot way out of whack ridiculous temperatures.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Snow is over?
Hard to tell how much we got. TV is saying 6-8 inches but you couldn't prove it by me. Had a vicious wind thru Franconia Notch all day, which blows the snow off my snowgage/porch railing. Also blows it off the ski trails. Snow stopped a couple of hours ago, the sun came out. It's warmed up above freezing now. If we get more precip, it will be rain (boo).
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