I feel like a total idiot

I am here at my laptop reading the usual daily dose of posts on science, technology, medicine genetics, food science, etc. that make me the eternal optimist that I am. Earlier I finished my daily reading of geopolitics, global economics, Grexit, Iran, ISIS, Middle East, oil shortages, famines, US Presidential Elections, etc. that sorely test my belief in optimistic outcomes.

Along the way, with whatever I read, I code posts for subject, interest, and whatever keywords may help me find the post at some later date. I've done it for years. Unable to remember correctly all details I encounter, I resort to coding all I read for retrieval to recall and quote correctly. Some friends think I have a great memory - I wish. I just have a retrieval system designed to support my curiosity of virtually anything that the internet provides. That's a lot. But, I just found a simple system that helps my mediocre memory look smart to those that do not look behind the curtain.

A Simple View of Greece and Grexit

This was originally written for my grandchildren to explain the messy world we live in, It's a terribly simplified view, but why not see what the world thinks.

Who pays for Greece's past follies? To greater or lesser degrees we all will. The farther we are from Greece the smaller the impact. Just as waves that hit us coming from a pebble dropped in a pond. In the US, we are far from the pebble, in Europe the waves will be bigger. To the citizens of Greece they will be monstrous, crushing and their personal pain will be long lasting. But INFLATION is the ultimate solver of tragic imbalances between countries and the world and it will handle this one too. How?

We live in a global financial world that could be finite, but is not. It could be finite if all governments stopped printing currencies. Inflation would be 0 but we'd have difficulties to adjust to trade imbalances and making economic adjustments because "the pie" is getting bigger. We need tiny inflation for slack and room to grow.

Janus and Vision

Janus was the Roman god with two faces: one faced forward to see the future and one faced backwards to see the past. Seeing was clearly a big focus of Janus'. I always found the image of Janus intriguing, perhaps because vision has been a big part of my life. Vision, the kind that describes imagination has been a big motivation for much that I have tried to do, but here I am looking at Vision, the kind that lets us physically see things.
The former moves us to imagine and pursue whatever we imagine - one former US President called it "the vision thing" and everyone knew instantly what he was talking about. The latter, the ability to see our surroundings is considered the most complex and most important development in the history of animal evolution.

Most people do not give vision much thought unless they lose it to some degree or completely. Throughout my life however I have repeatedly dealt with serious vision issues and have stayed ahead of disaster only thanks to a few wizards and the just-in-time evolution of technology. So here is my chronology of dodging the bullet and my reason for wanting to spread rose petals in front of my eye surgeons.

 Troubles started in my teens needing eye glasses like many other kids. By the time I was 19 and finished three years in the Italian Navy, my condition, keratoconus (in both eyes) had deteriorated enough that I could no longer be in the military since vision correction could be done only with special contact lenses. In 1970 I moved to the US and was rejected for the then compulsory draft for the same condition, A young optometrist at Indiana University, Barry Gridley, took my case as a mission and became a wiz at hand grinding my hard contacts to custom fit. Without him I probably would have never finished my MBA and started my career. That was the time when I started being a "special case" that students would come and look at to see the "real thing" described in their textbooks.

A Great Ski Season (despite the snow)

For all the years I can remember skiing in Park City the 2014-15 season has to be the worst. We seemed to live through an eternal Spring that sent little natural snow and temperatures high enough that our snow-making-wizards at Canyons were seriously limited in performing their magic. Despite all this, we are closing as planned on April 12. So a few closing thoughts

Skiing comes in many forms

My mother was fast in the GS on the Italian Olympic Team in 1938

I am slow but l can dance

Skiing - A continuing Quest

My passion for skiing has been documented in prior posts. It is stoked by the fact that after 60 years, I am still learning in the quest of better technique.
Over the years PSIA has helped me improve with its requirements for Instructor Certification (now Level 2), and the theory it publishes in its Technical Manuals . The Canyons Ski School (Park City UT), where I teach, provided me great training opportunities. So, to share the gifts I received, here is my Summary of Technical Skiing and the graphic below that shows what happens when the activities in the Summary are performed correctly.
Do you have questions or need to know how to read it? Book a lesson at Canyons (877-472-6306) and let's go play together.

The 2014-15 Ski Season Is Almost Here

News from Park City:

Deer Valley announced purchase of SolitudeThe resorts will operate separately this year, so there is no shared lift ticket or integration of lift systems or terrain.  Deer Vally reports no current plans for integration even next year.

Vail bought Park City Mountain Resort (PCMR)
Vail already operates The Canyons resort (since last winter season), so by joining the two reorts it is now one of the largest in the US. Tickets are interoperable and a shuttle service will join the resorts making for a great ski vacation. Next year a new lift will integrate the properties making it truly a huge  resort.

Looking for a great vacation? Canyons/PCMR is the place. At an altitude of 7000 feet visitors from sea-level will easily tolerate the environment with no loss of skiing days to acclimatize, At 2000 feet lower altitude than most Colorado resorts, ambient temperatures will be nearly 10 degrees higher and the snow is still Utah's pride: "the greatest snow on earth".  The skiable terrain is huge and with a guide or instructor (moi?) you'll have an epic vacation whether a beginner or an advanced back country skier. Call me to learn more 602-677-1306 or book me at Canyons Ski School - I teach in English, Spanish, Italian, French with over 40 years experience and 60 years of worldwide skiing adventures to tell.

Memories from the 2013-14 Seaon
If you are one of my students last year, look for your photo. I hope to see you again this year.

A new author joined our team

Editor's Note 1 - Anyone can see that I have been remiss posting on this blog. To remedy this matter I decided to hire a freelance writer, my grand daughter Mandy Hansen (age 7) to contribute her stories.

She is also an artist so I bought ($4.50) the worldwide copyright to one of her paintings for publication here.


Fishing with Grandpa

And here is Mandy Hansen's debut as a freelancer. Her newest story was purchased at the rate of cents 1 per word.

A Day with Granpa (7/13/2014)

One morning I siad to my grampa how bout we go plases like Smith's and gite ickereem and walmart so we went smisth and got iscrim and then we wentto walmartand on the way bake (back) I fel of my bijicl bot it was only a little scrach so we still went to the pserve (the Swaners' Nature Preserve in Park City UT) and we did not no that we were going on varee long grass so we went home and grama was sleeping so I plaid the peeanow and grapa went on the computer.

The end.

Editor's Note 2: Since the writing quality is definitely college freshman level the original was published as written by the author.

Why I am afraid

From The Atlantic

The Single Best Overview of What the Surveillance State Does With Our Private Data

Oct 9 2013, 6:00 AM ET theatlantic.com

Even though the people being spied on are often totally innocent, the government stores their information for a very long time.

The U.S. surveillance debate is constantly distorted by the fact that national-security officials hide, obscure, and distort so much of what they do. Occasionally a journalist is able to expand the store of publicly available information, most recently thanks to Edward Snowden's indispensable NSA leaks. But even public information about government surveillance and data retention is difficult to convey to a mass audience. It involves multiple federal agencies with overlapping roles. The relevant laws and rules are complicated, jargon is ubiquitous, and surveillance advocates often don't play fair: They use words in ways that bear little relation to their generally accepted meaning, make technically accurate statements that are highly misleading, and even outright lie, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper did before Congress.

Twitter Facebook and Questions with Unintended Consequences

Last night I worked very late, so late that I fell asleep at my desk. I found myself walking into a huge building by the sea, a convention center.  Admission was free, inside there were many rooms.  On the doors there were what appeared to be subjects of interest: Politics, Business, Poetry, Religion, Internet Services, Sustainability, Global Warming, etc. I entered one that appealed to me.  In it I found thousands of people standing elbow to elbow, people of all sizes and colors, speaking many languages, but English for the most part, many with interestingly English-as-second-language sentence structures and words. Their attires reflected the world, and activities and lifestyles ranging from poets to explorers to programmers to marketing consultants to business managers and entrepreneurs just starting new internet ventures. Those you could single out from the raggedy clothes and visible optimism and excitement in their faces.

When the lights go out

Groklaw announced its own termination as a blog, another light going out following Lavabit and others.  I can't speak for Lavabit, which I never used because I never thought that my banal communications needed hiding.  Only occasionally I read Groklaw, but from my limited use its existence was proof that the web is not just for porno, lightweight thinking and Facebook chatter.  It was insightful and interesting, in its own way as TED conferences are.  It made me think.

In its closing post it made me think, a lot. I could feel the pain of its author Pamela Jones, her bewilderment at what we have become as a nation and where we are going, how we are losing our basic right to be left alone, the psychological independence of solitude.

57 years in the making

We never achieve anything totally on our own.  Somewhere along the way someone planted the seed of whatever accomplishment we may check off our "bucket list".

One item on my list, long in the making was "become a ski instructor".  I am not sure I know why it was important, but it was.  Perhaps I wanted to have at least one thing in my life that could be "certified" top in class.

On Health Care Reform Try KISS

With any luck, ObamaCare will be defeated in the courts.  Ten we'll have to hope for the next attempt to bring the US into the ranks of civilized wealthy countries that have a minimum of moral backbone to provide for humans at minimum of care as PETA advocates for animals.  Perhaps then we could try a simple a solution with little or no opportunity for "pork" deals: here is a proposal that requires no monumental or structural change and tests an alternative with a failsafe provision:

1. Open Medicare basic coverage to anyone above age 50 who wants to participate


2. Charge for that minimal level of coverage the price that would be charged by the California Public Employees medical plan or the Federal Employees plan or any other similarly sized plan. Those plans have no exclusions for pre-existing conditions and by their size should have a customer base similar to the participants to be added to Medicare in 1. above.  Their price would have to be adjusted to reflect the limited coverage  only for Medicare basic services


3. Set a sunset law that forces re-approval of the plan in 5 years.  At that time if the plan is successful it can be reapproved and potentially extended to include participants over 40 years of age or even participants regardless of age.  If the plan is not re-approved, participants  no longer elegible will have to find private insurance as they do now.

What is to be gained?  Lots:

1. Put pressure on private insurers to offer more competitive rates (without exclusions for pre-exsting conditions)


2. Offer what is essentially a national mutual insurance option for basic medical care where proft making is taken out of the equation.


3. Move the country toward a single medical payments processing system that can be gradually improved to weed out processing inefficiencies.  Medicare already has the system in place and it is the only such system that all medical services providers are already set up to be paid by. Enhance the system with centralized medical records as most other developed countries have. We could save clinics and hospitals millions in administrative overhead and patients the pain of dealing with records transfers and billing.


4. The insured that want to never fill out another insurance application wil have that option.


5. The insured that want additional coverage can buy it from private Medicare Supplemental insurance suppliers already in the market


6. The insured that want only private options will be free to shop as they please and change from plan to plan as they do today.


7. The indigent can be covered through a system already equipped for  that purpose.  What they pay or what credit they receive for it can be handled the same way as now is done for indigent Medicare recipients.


8. Employers can be taken completely out of the business of shopping for insurance for third parties (their employees).  They would however cotinue to process payroll deductions just as they do for taxes (the system for all this is already in place).  Citizens should also be able to handle their own payments as they do for other matters in their lives.


9. The level of minimum services would be finally managed not by sticking ERs with unpaying patients, but based on nationally debated and set budgets and voters preferences as voted at the ballot box. If, as a nation, we want to offer little beyond "stopping the bleeding" or "preventing epidemics" we surely can.  If we want to provide more we can, but it would all be determined by an open debate and allocated budgets.

It may be too much to hope for. The wage controls instituted in WWII, as an unintended consequence  gave our nation the only employer managed health care system in the world.  It was an accident, not a reasoned policy.  Quality regardless of cost became part of the system and now we find we cannot afford it indefinitely.  Any variation that is based on the same unreasoned premises will only continue to benefit the vested interests that have perfected milking the current system.

School Bullying - There IS an EASY fix

School bullying has becoming a near obsession to the point of Anderson Cooper making a national campaign against it and CNN reporting endlessly on it along with other media. There is reason for it if children lose their lives to it.

However, to a person raised outside the US it is surprising that for all the research on victims and aggressors, mea culpas by talking heads and school administrators the dynamics and the solution are so difficult to understand.  I can already hear the chorus of dissent and dismissal for lack of complicated paradigms and formal research papers.

Nonetheless there is a simple remedy that could be tested at minimal or no cost with virtually no lead time.  It is probably too simple to be credible to many, but let's look at it just in case.

Premises

Most would agree that bullying, in its many manifestations, reflects a fight for social dominance and status within a group and may be acted out by individuals or groups.  I will leave it to researchers of primates to explain why humans have such a need. I accept that we do to varying degrees and give various displays of it.

The first notable thing to a newcomer to this land (40 years ago) that enters a US middle school or high school is the strong social dynamics of popularity. In American schools popularity is the all absorbing priority of students except for those contrarians that on purpose reject it and create alternative counter cultural groups with varying degrees of alienation.  Popularity can be built by many means from the jersey of an athlete-jock to the pom-poms of a cheerleader to the wallet of a big spender and by the kid that has easy access to the family's medicine  or bar cabinet.  Looks and clothes and the right vehicle (including the one a parent drives them to school in) are key components to the social climb.

So, just as for everything in society, there are the haves and the have-nots.  As in any group from social and sport clubs, to greek houses, to trade unions to military elites, exclusion and limitation of membership is the means to increase the value of the membership and its benefits for those accepted: thus hazing rituals, separate and exclusive gatherings, country club fees, special handshakes, etc.

In schools the same group dynamics evolve and are fed by differences in economic means, athletic skill, gift for jokesterism, access to drugs and transportation.  Group membership is further amplified and managed by social media tools, cell phones, etc.  as tools of inclusion, exclusion and social attack.

The Fix

To that same newcomer that went to school abroad in a country where students attend from 8am to 1pm, then go home, never eat lunch at school, and study on their own in he afternoons, the fix is obvious.  School group dynamics are driven not only, but heavily by the ability of kids to group (read include exclude others) at lunch time.  In the cafeteria and in the school yard the whole population can see who belongs where and with whom building the necessary envy, desire for membership, superiority by exclusion. Just as for primates violence, psychological or physical,  enforce the group membership and relative dominance.

So an easy fix is to test in schools is to break up or weaken the cycle of group creation and control by  inclusion/exclusion: Require students to sit at assigned (randomly drawn and periodically rotated) seats at every opportunity in classes in cafeterias,  auditoriums, etc.

Forced one on one contact is not as desirable as voluntary contact, but it would teach tolerance for societal rules (for sure and also need) and eventually tolerance for people that one would have not chosen to come in contact with.  Initially such school requirement would be most unpopular, but discovering that people outside a chosen group are not dorks or geeks or dumb or poor or useless would eventually prevail.

Similarly, school uniforms have for ages demonstrated their ability to unify a student body by minimizing  aesthetic and economic differences.

This whole idea is probably anathema to a population and culture that for the last 50 to 100 years has been schooled in the American way of school cafeterias and schoolyards.  But there is reason for optimism: school uniforms have started making a come back in many public schools, with great results, for similar reasons a despite the best efforts of vested interests intent in commercializing our children into ever changing fashion objects (sidebar: Anderson Cooper and CNN  might research how many countries that score above the US in middle and high school achievement require uniforms in their schools - care to bet?).

This is only a small step that probably would take some years to have serious impact on the culture, but rivers change course according to one small grain of sand being displaced one way or another. This is one grain that would require very little to test.

Marco Messina

10/11/11

A National Disgrace

I just confronted yet another instance of how the US is losing the war for innovation, green technologies, sustainability and energy independence to countries like India and China despite the fact that the inventions put in play are American Inventions.   See Smart Planet - China to develop a greener nuclear reactor

How can that happen?  The usual suspects could be fingered: disrespect for science and engineering, focus on easy answers, industrial vested interests, etc.  I propose that perhaps the worst is "Failure To Communicate" and this is the most blatant example I ever found.

Background

During the Manhattan Project a process to use nuclear materials (nuclear cycle was identified that could generate nuclear power but was not good enough for the explosive reaction needded for nuclear bombs.  Given the objective of the Manhattan Project, it was naturally sidelined.

During the 1950's and 1960's the "less efficient" process was revived, as an option for peaceful power generation. in what became known as the Thorium Nuclear Reactor. It was demonstrated capable to avoid all the most negative aspects of a high pressure nuclear reactor (e.g. meltdown, explosion, highly 1000-years radioactive waste, etc.), but gained little attention.

From the 1970's until today nuclear power developed evermore the popularity of "the turd in the punchbowl" for a variety of legitimate and other reasons.

Today it appears that the media and the voters would prefer confronting an ice age with candles than considering nuclear power generation in the US.  But what if there were an option that avoids many or all of the risks, costs less, produces more and was already tested sixty years ago?

Well,  for that option to go anywhere we'd have to publicize it so that voters would come to understand it, develop confidence in it, accept it and allow construction of this  "new" variety of nuclear plant.

The national tragedy

As it happens, that option appears to exist in the Thorium Nuclear Reactor (TNR)

• The TNR was designed and tested in the US in the 1960's


• Our TNR technology is now being test deployed by India and China


• In the future, when it becomes fully commercial, we will buy it from India and China just as we buy oil from Canada and OPEC today

How can it happen?

Smart Planet reports these facts (hats off to them for reporting at all)

BUT

at the bottom of their report there is also a video surely intended to help the reader better understand the process and the inherent opportunity.

The combination of the report and that video is the disgrace I am talking about.  It is the clearest example of scientists' and science reporters' inability to effectively communicate and make a good case even when all facts appear to be in their favor:

• The video is 16 minutes long.  Challenge yourself to listen to the end.  It will become a blur, but you'll get key relevant pieces any way.


• Is the audio in the video speeded up to suit the internet attention span?  Hard to tell.  If it is, shame on the editor, if it is the speakers's natural pace, shame on them.


• Did all the presenters speak at the same time?  I doubt it.  Shame on the editor.


• The message is clearly educational about the advantages of the TNR, but you would not know it. The positive technical  details are buried in an alphabet soup and cacophony that hides it all.


• The speakers in the video, one guesses, are knowledgeable presenters at professional conferences, but sound like drug advertisements disclaiming potential side effects.


• Comments such as  "no one knows anything about TNR any more because all the original scientists are dieing" would dissuade any politician from going to bat for this technology.

In 1993 Michael Crichton took the media to task (speech at the National PressClub) warning that superficiality and lack of quality in reporting would eventually have disastrous consequences for the media, which undoubtedly it is having.

I suggest that by framing important issues poorly, sloppy, if well intentioned, reporting can have more disastrous consequences than no reporting at all.  We all depend on the media to make informed decisions, to support or obstruct national policies.  On a subject as urgent as the one above, and not particularly popular with the populace, the damage may well exceed the benefit.

When that happens an opportunity the voters and for the nation to stay in the lead is wasted.  India and China move ahead and we are left to wonder why.  As Crichton said, there are no easy answers, but surely bad information or badly framed information will lead us to lousy outcomes.

And that is a national tragedy.