Schierer Space

No, this is not the recipe for an exotic (and very large) magical potion or a reference to a new play called the Merchant of Ft. Lauderdale. I am referring to two entirely unrelated random events that occurred today.

First, I heard on the breaking news section of NPR’s All Things Considered that there was a ship collision reported today involving a tanker carrying orange juice. “Huh?” my brain said. I immediately began pondering the environmental disaster scenarios involving a giant orange juice spill a la Exxon Valdez. I’m sure that would be a pretty rough pH change for the local sea creatures, but I can’t imagine it would be terribly catastrophic over the long term. In case you’re curious, ShipTechnology.com (yes there is such a site) has a nice description of the Carlos Fischer, a tanker capable of carrying 37,000t* of orange juice.

Second, today was Red Cross Bloodmobile day at work so I donated my pint of A+ as usual. However, as a publicity promotion, Dunkin Donuts is giving ever donor a coupon for a pound of Dunkin Donuts coffee. As is explained by the old English expression “A pint’s a pound the world around” a pint of water (or essentially, blood) weighs about a pound**. So in one sense this is a pretty fair trade. Of course, several of you readers probably consider coffee more precious than blood, but I don’t generally drink it. It also occurred to me that this is sort-of a reverse divine transformation (apologies to the Roman Catholics in the audience) that my blood, freely given, is transformed into an equivalent quantity of an addictive drink. Or something like that.

So in a not-so-typical free moment, I was talking with one of my coworkers (Hi Jeremy) about the now famous internet/email message about the supposed impossibility of Santa’s magical Christmas Eve trip.

You know, the one that you can read here, or here*… and umptien bazillion other variants.

It occurred to us though that in the modern era, Santa is far more likely to make use of the services of hundreds of thousands of delivery workers distributed throughout the globe as part of his multinational corporation (think FedEx). Here’s how it works… (more…)

So I’ve observed a trend in my peer group (and probably quite a few of the folks who read this blog) towards increasingly severe acts* of vigorous exercise. I have begun pondering whether this is a Generation X response to midlife crisis in our own married-late, parent-late way. Or perhaps do we have better things to spend our DINK** incomes on than flashy cars to attract younger mates, so instead we invest in our own attempt at youthful immortality?

In any case, my pondering in this direction was further reinforced by a single sheet of paper posted in the restrooms at my employer (the local sponsored gym puts them up to remind us computer geeks to get healthy). I cannot quote the “Factoid” directly, but a paraphrase will do:

For every hour of vigorous exercise, life expectancy increases by two hours.

Huh. So of course I was forced to find some online reference to verify this claim. The closest to a real attribution came from this wellness presentation from Weber State University. This presentation says:

Dr. Paffenbarger conducted a study on 16,000 Harvard alumni. His research showed that the alumni who exercised regularly had only half the death rate from heart disease compared to those who never exercised. He also determined that, on the average, for every hour you exercise, life expectancy was increased by two hours. Exercise is certainly a good investment in time and health!

A further search revealed this citation: Hsieh Cc (1986) Physical activity, all-cause mortality, and longevity of college alumni, RS Paffenberger Jr, RT Hyde, AL Wing - N Engl J Med

Ok, so we’ll assumer the claim is at least based by research, but what I don’t get is why this should encourage me to exercise. “What!?” you say, “Why wouldn’t you want to live longer?” Let’s think about this for a moment…

So if I spend an hour of my current good health exercising (vigorously!), some great actuarial table in the sky will add two statistical hours to the end of my existence. Nice, one hour makes up for the hour I spent exercising so we break even, and then I get an hour to do with as I please. But wait… if I would have just spent that middle-aged hour doing something I wanted to do… I pretty much break even, right!? Only NOW I get to spend that hour in the prime of my life (or shortly thereafter) rather than having an extra hour of old age. Hmmm… makes you think doesn’t it. I suppose to be fair, if vigorous exercise is actually FUN to you… then maybe this is a different story. Of course, if it IS, then you don’t really need the extra hour incentive, because your FUN past time would be the (vigorous!) exercise.

My friend Bill is creating a new website. I’ve never seen it. In fact I’m not even sure what it’s going to be about, although considering the trend of the current site I suspect traffic or some other road-geek related field. I could be wrong, but I think I’m right. Why? Because I had a vision of Bill’s new website in my dreams last night. Yes. Really.

So to Bill if you think my website vision is cool, feel free to use it, that way I get to say I foresaw it in a dream. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all. If anybody else wants to use it, well it’s going to cost you.

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My 1997 Acura Integra LS rolled over 100,000 miles today. Being the geek that I am, I synchronized my driving such that the odometer would roll over exactly as I pulled in the driveway. Now for a Honda based product, this mileage only marks reaching middle age even though the car is 10 years old.

I have always liked watching various milestone mileages roll over, and the big 6-digit rollover is the granddaddy of them all. I’ve never known a car to make the million mile mark. It’s sad in a way, because this is quite possibly the last car I’ll ever own with a mechanical odometer.

I drove home tonight in the dark.
I drove home tonight in the dark and the rain with the headlights on high.
I drove fast.
The rain sparkled on the asphalt as each drop hit.
And shattered.
To flash briefly and disappear.

Some bounced.
Not hail, but rain.
The strange physics of water bouncing on water.
And asphalt.
And flashing light.
Arcing briefly.
So fast as to not be seen.
Except they are.
And then gone.

The splashes revealed.
Always there.
Only seen by the passing car.
The moving car.
The fast car.
Thousands of fans doing the wave.

Nice one Jim. The Physics is Phun blog recently identified the silliness of the Washington Post with regards to listing voting results sorted by - yes, can you believe it - astrological sign.

What does this lead to? Undoubtedly… campaign ads:

Coming to your TV soon:

Perhaps this ’service’ by the Washington Post is being provided to allow us to analyze how voting preference is completely NOT functionally related to astrology. It might be fun (in a data-geek sort-of way) to see if particular signs favor membership in Congress, or in a particular party.

SO since I’m pretty much a data-geek, I decided to dive into the pseudo-science:
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K recently saw a squirrel jump from high atop one of our maple trees to land in the snow nearby. At first we thought this was a fluke, but this morning we spotted these tracks which clearly show that this is a habitual practice. You can clearly see the squirrel track approach the tree, and a sort-of squirrel print followed by tracks leading away from the tree. The snow in between isn’t deep enough for a tunnel. We’ve seen this pattern several times since then.

You can see a larger image (and other shots) in the gallery if you want to check my tracking skill.

So as mentioned a few posts ago, I have been gathering data to determine whether Bush made any attempts to rein in Medicare spending when he and his Republican cronies controlled all three branches of government. As expected, he did not… or more specifically:

Despite the media gnashing about the president’s ’slashing’ of medical coverage (which will only help his party with their base), in reality the cuts are token relative to the signifcant growth achieved by this president (and his Republican congress) 5 years ago. Don’t take my word for it, I’ve included the data below!

For those who may wish to investigate other Federal budgetary matters, there is an archive of budgets and related documents at the US Government Publishing Office (or GPO). Unfortunately US budgets can only be browsed online as far back as 1996 (probably because 1996 is when then Vice President Gore invented the internet). Historical summary records can be viewed as far back as 1789 (probably because 1789 is when then President George Washington invented the Federal budget).

So what does it mean to ‘cut Medicare’? Looking at a news article or two and the actual budget data, I have deduced that this means that the expected spending over the next 5 years is declared to be less than the expected spending over the same 5-year period as stated in the previous budget. What it does NOT (necessarily) mean is that the spending for next year will be less than this year. So in the case of a growing expense like Medicare, the rate of growth is decreased (or perhaps the baseline). But by how much?

At the risk of emulating H. Ross Perot, I have included a chart. (This graph was made using OpenOffice:Calc and the GIMP proving that data and graphics analysis can be performed on completely free products… but I digress.) You may download my Federal Budget Spreadsheet if you wish.

First an overview. Each line series represents the actual spending and the estimated future spending which were reported in a particular budget document. The budget documents run about 2 years ahead, so the 2008 document (released last week) contains actuals for FY 2006 and predictions through 2012. As a result, each document contains 7 years of numbers (at least during the Bush administration, the Clinton administration provided considerably more data in their summaries).

There are several features of this graph that I wish to call your attention to. The first is that the FY2008 budget (blue squares) does in fact represent a decrease from the budget of FY2007 (maroon rhombus). With the exception of a few points, FY2008 represents a reduction from the budgets of FY2006 (yellow triangles) and FY2005 (light blue triangles). So far, the media is correct and the Republican base should be cheering. The president has controlled the evil entitlements.

But like an infomercial, there’s more! What I find MOST interesting is the huge leap in expenditures for the years 2004 - 2008 relative to the budgets presented in 2003 and 2004 (pink and purple triangles respectively). So what happened in 2004 that caused such a dramatic ‘knee’ in the spending curve? And why doesn’t anybody talk about the explosion in spending that occurred in a fully Republican government on a massive government entitlement called Medicare? Interestingly enough, it is in this EXACT period that the predictions of spending from earlier years (2005 & 2006 budgets) almost exactly match the ‘actuals’. So Medicare grew faster during those years and this was no accident. In fact, the growth in those two years completely eclipses any token reduction achieved in the last 3 years.

Conclusion: All the rhetoric in D.C. can not change the fact that any presidential attempt to ‘reduce’ Medicare spending now will not compensate for the growth that was allowed during this administration.

As the news has been busy reporting, the President’s federal budget proposal was sent to congress today. One of the major points that is being stressed is the significant reduction in Medicaire/Medicaid spending. On the surface this is being advertised as an attempt to rein in “Mandatory” spending on these programs. What I found most interesting is that there have been 6 years of Republican lead Congresses for the President to forward this agenda, why wait until the Congress is in Democratic control to make this move?

I’ve been trying to find past Presidential budgets for the last 6 years to compare, but in the process came across a set of charts by the Heritage Foundation (a generally regarded right-leaning organization). Although the final slides, make (IMHO) fairly bizarre claims that retaining the tax cuts will somehow fix the future tax problems, the rest of the discussion is fairly interesting. On one hand this set of charts explains how much the budget has grown in the Bush administration and how debt is reaching record levels. On the other hand, it discusses how Medicare/Medicaid spending are growing faster than any other budgetary area. Strangely the ‘cyclic’ nature of the defense spending is used to explain the exponential growth in recent budgets, yet the extrapolation for all other spending grows linearly 40 years into the future.

Of course, regardless of who’s extrapolation one uses, there is clearly a budgetary problem that will grow with the various social programs.

I especially like Section 4 which shows the discretionary funds (read as ‘pork’) and how the President has failed to exercise his veto (even less than his predecessors) with his party fellows in the Congress. It will be interesting to see if this remains the case (not that it would be so bad to have some of the pork projects tossed in the grinder). Of course the total outlay for this pork spending is in the noise compared to any number of other budget areas ($29 billion in this category in 2006 vs $2.9 trillion budget this year)

Its interesting to see how the most recent Democratic administrations have been the only ones where revenue has exceeded spending. I suppose one can argue that this is due to exorbitant taxation, but who will pay for the debt we are accruing.

So I haven’t answered my original question, but I’ll leave that for another day of research.