Ed’s corner of the web

A tennis buddy of mine gets season tickets to BC basketball.  He’s kind enough to share the games with a few friends.  This last season I had the opportunity to watch, among other games, BC vs. Harvard.  It wasn’t a hyped-up match for obvious reasons, but boy was I ever glad I went.  I had the privilege of watching Harvard’s senior guard, Jeremy Lin, light up BC for 25 points in a 74-67 win for the Crimson (the second straight).  This was just a couple days after Lin shot for 30 points against UConn (UConn!) in a close loss that wasn’t supposed to be close at all.

BC basketball fans are tepid when winning, but this night they were downright listless and grumpy.  They had to watch a less-talented, barely noticed, underdog Harvard team put on a clinic of teamwork and scrappiness that put the Eagles to shame.  Despite my MIT roots, Lin’s personal display of excellence had me cheering and hooting loudly for Harvard from the stands.  I damn near rushed the court (and would’ve been all by myself had I done so) when the final buzzer rang. 

A few days later, I looked up some info on the kid.  No less than ESPN.com had a really nice piece on him.  Son of a 5’6″ Taiwanese immigrant who came to the States for a PhD in computer engineering.  Hours of practice in the local YMCA.  Lauded high school player who led his Palo Alto High team to a Division II state championship, followed by multiple player of the year honors.  Somehow overlooked by collegiate Div I teams offering scholarships.  Whispered questions about the role his race played in this snubbing.  Enters Harvard, which doesn’t offer athletic scholarships, for the opportunity to play Div I ball. 

It’s hard not to root for a story line like that.  You can imagine my pleasure, then, when I found out via Carisa that the Golden State Warriors declared that they would sign Lin.  Apparently he’d kicked a fair bit of butt during summer league games, even showing John Wall a thing or three.  Congrats, Jeremy – I’ll be rooting for you.

This is the last part I’m posting.  As in other parts, there is some particularly incisive sociopolitical analysis.  I also get the impression that the Facebook crowd has a particularly skewed view of this situation.   

On Monday I vacated my premises and moved in with a family friend on the outskirts of Bangkok. Wednesday, Bangkok burned. Last minute negotiations failed and gov’t troops started their crackdown at dawn. The protestors didn’t really have a chance against the armored vehicles and by noon security forces were just 100 meters away from the main protest stage. The remaining red leaders decided to save the lives of the protestors and turned themselves in, asking the crowd to go home. Many of them were in tears. And then all hell broke loose. Hardcore elements vowed to fight on and they initiated a well organized arson attack on Bangkok. Major shopping malls in downtown Bangkok were set ablaze; firefighters and medics were shot at to keep them from helping. Protestors took refuge in the nearby temple and rumors spread they would be shot if they left. Anti government protestors from around the country than came out of the woodworks, far from the center of Bangkok, vandalism and arson spread to beyond the red zone. Things have finally quieted down and I just have too many thoughts to share.
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The peak of the action in Bangkok is old news now, but the perspective that my friend provided on the whole situation is – I think – still very interesting.  Read and ponder:

I got out this afternoon, details of my exit below for those not on my Facebook. To answer [redacted]‘s questions. The streets are empty at night as the Army and unknown snipers shoot indiscriminately. But thats mostly south of where my condo is. The street I am on is actually fairly quiet, it parallels the main red camp, but there’s minimal action on the road, its sort of, the eye of the storm. As for the US Embassy, they are notoriously useless for any such matter, much complaint for their cold, bureaucratic handling of the Boxer Day Tsunami, plus they bill you massively for anything they do. On the utilities front, the Thai gov’t has ordered the telecom agencies to shut service to the central protest zones, but only 2 of the 4 operators have complied. This is a major source of irony as the two who shut down service are the companies bought by foreigners a few years ago, while the two still in service are Thai private and gov’t owned. One of the services that shut down was AIS, which was Thaksin’s telecom conglomerate that he sold to the Singaporeans (a deal I am not proud to be apart of) which sparked the coup that ousted him. The yellow shirts caused a public outcry that Thaksin was selling a strategic national asset to a foreigner and has threatened national security (ignoring the fact that 6 months prior, DTAC, owned by a Bangkok elite family was sold to the Norwegians). The gov’t also tried to shut down water and power, but due complaints of local residents, that order was rescinded. And that pretty much sums up the Thai gov’t, they announced measures that are poorly thought out, only having to retract them hours later.
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Since 1932, Thailand has had something like 17 different constitutions.  As one can imagine, if you take your eye off of Thai politics for a second, you fall behind.  The last few years have been especially tumultuous, with coups, dissolutions of government, accusations of corruption, airport sit-in’s, and what-have-you.

Many of you closely followed the latest goings-on in Bangkok a couple weeks ago.  I watched with particular interest since I have a good friend living there currently.  As it turns out, he was very close to all the action – a little too close, if you ask me.

Try as I might, on my own I wasn’t able to really dig deeper beyond the superficial facts of the protests.  CNN, BBC, and other news organizations were annoyingly undetailed about the political and cultural underpinnings of the protests.  I felt unsatisfied.  The comment sections of the various news sites hinted at the emotions seething underneath the distanced, objective facade of the news, but that taste was all I had.  At least, that was all I had until my friend wrote a sizeable missive that went out via email to a circle of his friends.  With his permission, I’ve pasted his message below, minus elements that could identify him or localize him.  Granted, it’s only one view, but it’s the best I’ve had so far into this whole conflict.  I hope you find it interesting.

Some of you may have noticed Bangkok in the news, and since i’m barricaded in my room, I thought I would send out an update… Continue Reading »

The scales of justice nudged a little closer towards balance last Monday when the British General Medical Council struck Andrew Wakefield – the idiot who launched a thousand anti-vaccine ships – off of the medical register.  It’s a largely symbolic victory, but I’ll take it.  At the very least, this illustrates just how wacko the medical and scientific establishment think this guy is.  Barring someone from practicing medicine is neither a simple nor quick affair.  BBC.

This story and its close cousins have already been followed extensively in the blogosphere, skeptical and otherwise (see here and here for examples), but I’m glad to see CNN picking it up, even if it underplays the huge negative consequences.

What it boils down to is that governments around the world - including Thailand, Mexico, and Iraq -  have been duped into purchasing glorified dowsing rods as bomb detectors.  Apparently, since dowsing for oil, gold, and buried hoards of cash wasn’t proving profitable for the manufacturers of these devices (gee – I wonder why), they have chosen instead to defraud national governments.  I guess it was just easier.

As sad as it is that some malicious groups out there are trying to profit off of people’s gullibility (and don’t get me wrong – these people should absolutely go to jail), it’s just as disheartening that there are national governments falling for this crap.  If you’re Iraq, for example, not only are you tens of millions of dollars poorer from purchasing these carnival gadgets, but you’ve failed to prevent an unknowable number of deaths.  All from placing your faith in a woo-toy to sniff out bombs.  This is the true cost of pseudoscience and stupidity.

This is great news.  It’s a little late in coming – well, actually a lot.  But truth and the self-correcting nature of scientific inquiry have finally won a little victory.  There has still been irreparable harm done to autism research and treatment as a whole, not to mention the fight against vaccine-preventable illness, but hopefully this is a reflection of the turning tide.

Great gutsy opinion piece from Barbara Ehrenreich of the LA Times.

Choice quote:

What we really need is a new women’s health movement, one that’s sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly lifestyle) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments such as chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer’s progression from “early” to “late” stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)?

What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.

Regardless of how you feel about Bart Stupak’s amendment to the health care bill, I think Ehrenreich makes a very valid point about the need for skepticism and reason.

We’re going to continue today’s theme of thanks by sending some gratitude towards Minnesota.  Just like every other state in the nation, Minnesota is faced with a shortage of primary care physicians.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out one of the big reasons: a graduating medical student has little reason to become a family physician if he or she can make two, three, or even more times as much money by choosing a more lucrative specialty, like dermatology or radiology.  This financial disincentive comes even more into play when considering the staggering six-figure debt that most medical school graduates are faced with today.  Part of the solution, Senator Franken realizes, is to provide loan forgiveness to those graduates who choose to enter primary care or work in underserved areas.  It’s a no-brainer that unfortunately hasn’t caught on very well in the power circles.  Here’s some hope that it gains some traction.

The hard drive on my laptop met an untimely end about three weeks ago.  There were no warning signs, no ominous clicks.  Instead, the machine refused to finish booting into Windows one day.  I tried rebooting a few times, and each time the machine would get less and less far into the booting process.  Not good.  I chilled the drive and tried getting into safe mode, which only was stable for about 15 seconds.  Still not good.  Finally I got into a command prompt and got all my data out on a thumb drive.  Whew!

The real circus began when I called up Lenovo support.  Ostensibly it’s in Atlanta, Georgia, but I ran into just as many hard-to-decipher accents as I do when I call tech support in Mumbai.  But that was just the beginning.  Turns out my warranty had expired a mere six days earlier.  I shook my little fist at Shiva and was transferred to warranty sales, where I was offered a $149 extended warranty.  It was more than I would have liked, but I bit, figuring that purchasing a new hard drive and going through the reinstall process would be at least as costly in terms of time and money.

The warranty dude said that I should be able to use my warranty to get service on my laptop in 24 hours.  I called back the next day, only to find that the warranty wasn’t invoiced yet.  I had been misinformed, the new rep told me; warranties don’t invoice for 2-3 business days.  I called back again 4 business days later – still no dice.  This time I was told that it takes 10-14 business days for a warranty to become active.  Flustered, I requested that the extended warranty be canceled.  I couldn’t wait that long to get service on my laptop.  The rep apologized and said that he would expedite the warranty invoice process so I could get warranty service within 2 business days.  I hesitated (why couldn’t they have done this in the first place?!?) but eventually said ok, asking for some sort of email confirmation of the warranty being ready.  Of course, I never got that email confirmation.  I called back a few days later, thoroughly peeved, ready to cancel my warranty order for sure this time.  Guess what?  My warranty order had been canceled already, back at the time of my last phone call!  Gah!  It’s enough to make a guy go Mac…

So after a couple purchases at Newegg and an afternoon of installing software, I’m back to blogging on my laptop.  I’ve got a blacklog of stuff I wanted to write about but probably won’t have a chance to get to.  Fortunately, one topic has continued to be current enough for me to comment on: the “birther” movement.

Unfortunately, you’ve probably heard about these yahoos already.  The internet allows for the creation of an infinite number of echo chambers in which fringe lunatics can congregate and convince themselves that their ideas aren’t pure drivel.  The internet also allows for easy dissemination of these ideas, with the end result being that whackjob claims that would’ve been completely unheard in the pre-information age now have the capability of amassing a larger audience.  The birther crowd – those who believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus not qualified to be president – is just one sad, deluded poster child of this trend.

Two weeks ago I listened in on an NPR show in which Tom Ashbrook, the moderator, tried to host a discussion with Orly Taitz, one of the leaders of the birther movement.  I’m not the biggest fan of Tom Ashbrook’s style, but if anything he’s a very capable, experienced moderator.  I don’t think I ever heard Tom Ashbrook as not-in-control as he was that night.  Since Tom typically has very reasonable, intelligent people on his show, I think he may have made the mistake of assuming that his usual conversation-control tools would work on Taitz.  Then again, I don’t think anything short of a Tazer and injectable tranquilizers would have worked on Taitz that day.  Her careening, shrieking, disjointed commentary made my brain hurt, and any shred of credibility I might have afforded her (admittedly, not much to begin with) vanished instantly.

People like Taitz don’t go away, though.  And now, with the release of an image of a document purported to be Barack Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate, she continues to dig a deeper hole for herself.  This (pretty clear forgery) is now the smoking gun, the unassailable proof that Obama is the centerpiece of a vast left-wing, Communist, Zionist conspiracy designed to take over the world.  I’ll let snarkier minds lay out the details for you.

I could despair that such a ridiculous issue has wasted so much time and energy, that such rabid lunatics can steal the nation’s attention for such a long time.  And I do, admittedly – just  a little bit.  But outwardly, at least, I’m laughing.  I’m laughing in mockery of the stupidity, close-mindedness, and downright lunacy of these whackjobs.  I can at least get a little entertainment out of them.