Morning Addendum: The Olympics

Over at Salon, King Kaufman disagrees with me on NBC's Olympics coverage. (Well -- he doesn't disagree with me personally; in all likelihood he doesn't even know I exist.) Of course, King (I can call you "King," can't I?) presumably gets paid for total immersion in the thing, including the cable feeds and daytime coverage, whereas I'm confined to the prime-time network broadcast, so he's having a very different experience. Still, he makes good points, in his usual entertaining style. (My favorite quote: "I've always suspected that in any group of 1,000 Americans who complain about U.S. Olympics coverage focusing too much on Americans, you'd be hard-pressed to find one who'll sit through a Burkina Faso-Kazakhstan judo match.")

Still, King is suspiciously silent on the beach volleyball question -- viz., whether there's been, um, too damn much coverage of this quasi-sport, which dominated the first however-many nights. Is Kaufman's silence on this pressing issue coincidence, or something more? We report, you decide. (In fairness, I seem to be about the only one outside of Britain who's bored by beach volleyball, as these recent news items attest. But that's OK -- different drummer and all that.)

Science Friday

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers press on in their lonely journeys across the martian landscape, according to the New York Times -- and they continue to find "signs that Mars was once awash in water." The biggest news here seems to be the discovery by Spirit of chemically altered rocks at Gusev -- significant because, until now, Spirit has found relatively little evidence of water there. Opportunity, meanwhile, has stumbled across some appealingly mysterious-sounding, lumpy rocks unlike anything it's seen until now. Another nice write-up of this on Space.com. The little buggers just keep on chooglin' -- they've already more than doubled their intended mission lifetimes.

Nice little paper published online in Science today; it's written up on New Scientist. The paper deals with the Pirahã, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Brazil whose language has a "one, two, many" counting system -- that is, they don't have words for numbers greater than two. The big surprise of the study: for adult speakers of this language, the system seems to cripple their performance on simple numerical tasks (like duplicating a line of batteries) that involve quantities greater than three. The result adds weight to the notion of "linguistic determinism" -- the very controversial idea that, in essense, what you can say determines what you can think. You need to subscribe to Science (or purchase the paper individually) to see the full text, but the abstract is available free if you register.

A few other notables:

--A senior epidemiologist at the U.S. FDA concluded in 2003 that antidepressants are too risky to be prescribed for children, based on a welter of studies that suggest that kids given antidepressants are twice as likely to commit suicide as those given placebos. The FDA brass, however, kept his findings under wraps. Now a second lab has confirmed his findings, and the FDA brass has some explaining to do. (New York Times)

--Occupational and Environmental Medicine releases a study (from France) suggesting that children who live near gas stations are four times as likely as controls to develop acute leukemia. (New Scientist)

--An upcoming paper in Physical Review Letters argues that for tiny objects such as carbon nanotubes -- touted as the building blocks for a range of minature devices that will stoke a nanotechnology revolution -- the concept of temperature is meaningless. Says Peter Atkins of Oxford University: "If you're down to a scale where temperature is not relevant, the fluctuations in physical properties of that system could be unpredictable, and that is potentially bad for any device." (news@nature.com)

Morning Ramble: Parsing the DHS Barber Pole

Lately on the Metro I've been seeing a lot of the Homeland Security alert stack -- that barber pole of five colored bars that has become so familiar to all Americans. In ads on the train, the stack is prominently featured, alongside the TA's own oracular counsels of vigilance and fervent hopes that passengers will do the right thing when terrorism strikes.

It got me to thinking about the DHS's barber pole itself, and how useful it really is. I will grant you that the ordinal stack of colors -- green on the bottom, yellow in the middle, and red at the top -- does work; one has the gut feeling that Code Red is . . . well, bad. But the actual words, the labels and legends that are set out to "explain" these color bars -- that's another story. Code Green is about the only one that lacks any ambiguity: a "Low" risk means exactly that. But what about the shades of meaning we're asked to parse for anything above that? (This seems like a reasonable question to ask, since it's unlikely, at least in this administration, that we're going to ever see anything lower than Code Yellow.)

For example: Although we can probably tease out what's meant by "Guarded," it seems much harder, in as strict etymological sense, to distinguish between "Elevated" and "High,". And look at the glosses beside each bar: Is a "significant" risk of terrorist attack really less alarming than a "high" risk? And what about the legend beside Code Blue -- "General risk of terrorist attack." A "general risk" sounds pretty significannt to me!

Worst of all, the DHS's current slate has no real normative component -- nothing that tells us precisely what to do or how we should feel when the alert comes in. In an effort to address that shortfall, I offer the slightly revised version to the left of this paragraph for discussion and possible adoption. I point out a number of advantages to this approach. Note first that the brief labels on each of the color bars enable the user to calibrate their emotional reaction to the DHS threat announcement in terms pretty much anyone can understand. And the legends to the right of the color bars provide practical advice on how to respond constructively, as good citizens, to the announcement.

Anyway, just a thought.

Lunch Hour Metablog

Some interesting recent posts on some of the Pinko Leftist Bleeding Heart (PLBH) Weblogs I follow.

Daily Kos offers a nice contrast between the Bush and Kerry approaches to campaigning.

On LiberalOasis, a report on a town-hall-style debate between Kerry and Bush aides in Ohio. Unfortunately, it looks like the Kerry people were needlessly outflanked by the Bushies on a couple of points.

A nifty TPM post on the Swift Boat Liars, prefiguring this morning's Washington Post article. Other SBLies covered on Eschaton.

That's all for now.

Morning Rant: 2004 Summer Olympics

Is it just me, or has NBC's coverage of the 2004 Summer Games been the worst ever? Based solely on the prime-time broadcast network coverage (all I've been able to watch), someone unfamiliar with the Olympics might be forgiven, I think, for assuming that the games consist entirely of swimming, gymnastics, and beach volleyball. (The latter, however much fun it might be to play on the hot California shore, proves the most tedious spectator sport since curling -- though the spectators at the Olympic event evidently have other inducements, as an amusing Washington Post article documents.)

Full disclosure: I have long thought that the Olympics themselves are an enormous quadrennial sinkhole of money, time, and effort. The one thing that, in theory at least, gives them some value is their internationalist component: Bringing together atheletes from all classes and countries to compete in good-spirited etc., etc., bullshit, bullshit. The NBC coverage, however, has one basic theme -- The U.S. Takes On A Bunch Of Other Countries And Kicks Butt. You would have little idea, based on this coverage, that China, for example, is slightly ahead of the U.S. in gold medals (at least as of this writing). The coverage in the New York Times has been far better, at least giving some idea that other countries are also participating and winning.

The only reason I'm watching the games is the interest of my son and daughter. My son and I in particular would have liked to see some fencing -- but that, for the most part, was pushed out beyond the pale, into the wildnerness of cable, where we cannot, must not tread. We did see three minutes of sabre, however, when Mariel Zagunis took the gold medal. This was a bona fide story: First fencing gold medal for the U.S. in 100 years. It raised an excellent opportunity for NBC to broaden its viewers' horizons by exploring a sport they may not have been familiar with. But . . . what did NBC do with this Teachable Moment? They gave us a three-minute "highlights" reel, fully half of which consisted of slow-motion headshots of two of the U.S. contenders, celebrations of the victory, American flags, and the medals ceremony, with full rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Almost no actual fencing. Hmm.

On the other hand . . . last night at the fencing club I occasionally attend (I go there mainly as comic relief for the people who really know what they're doing), the fencing coach who runs the thing thought the network had done "a really good job." And the other club members there were burbling about the performance of the U.S. atheletes -- not just in fencing but in other sports, like . . . well, beach volleyball. (And gymnastics, too, of course.) I was the lonely voice of internationalism -- or, rather, would have been, if I hadn't chickened out and said nothing at all.

So I guess my first working hypothesis is correct. It's just me.

The First Post

Just getting started here. I don't know what will become of this.