I have a good friend, Erica Lloyd, who is a science writer. She’s on her way to the North Pole, accompanying a science expedition to explore the sea floor up there. I’ve been following the daily photo updates on the mission’s website: http://divediscover.whoi.edu/expedition11/daily/index.html (apparently there is internet access on the North Pole – who’d of figured?). Fascinating stuff – I’m envious of Erica. She’s actually seeing the North Pole while there is still ice.

BTW, someday you’ll be able to hear Erica’s reports on the NPR show Radiolab.

The topic of climate change is, naturally enough, a hot one right now. But most people who are not climate scientists have a hard time grasping even the meaning of the word climate, let alone the implications of climate change. In conversations with friends and acquaintances, climate is invariably confused with weather (one of my favorite sayings when the temperature outside is too cold for my liking: “Where is global warming when you need it?”)

Climate and weather are very, very, very weakly related. Here is my favorite analogy: The weather is like how much change is in your pocket. The climate is like how much money you will earn in a life time. Of course these two quantities must be related in some way, since I did earn the money that’s in my pocket. But on any given day there is essentially no correlation between the two. And if I want to estimate my future earning potential, I won’t go counting the change in my pocket for clues. So let’s wise up and stop asking the weather man for his opinion on climate change, and don’t even bother asking the climate scientist if he thinks it will be a hot one this weekend. Besides, I live in Austin, so I already know the answer to that question.

I am writing late at night from Washington DC, where I am not following the advice of my lawyer to retire early. Tomorrow I am being deposed as an expert witness in a lawsuit – an experience, so I am told, unlike any other. But I’m not interested in talking about that, nor politics, nor the various memorials to famous dead people that I visited today. Instead, I want to talk about a bar.

I have just returned from the Brickskeller, a fairly famous local joint that is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year (it’s been a fixture of Washington life longer than most, but not all, of the politicians that tend to hang out it much more upscale bars than this one). What’s so special about this bar? It’s a cool little dive in an interesting part of town, not too far from the action but far enough to be a true neighborhood bar. The bartenders are friendly, carrying on conversations and knowing the city in Wisconsin where the beer you are drinking came from.

Oh, and they have a thousand beers to choose from.

Not on the order of a thousand, but actually one thousand beers. The menu goes on for pages. The number of beers on tap, of course, is much more limited, but I was still able to enjoy draft beers from Lyons (Colorado, not France), Wisconsin, Vermont, Oregon, Canada, the UK, and Russia.

In case you are wondering, the Brickskeller does not own the world’s record for beer selection at a bar. That honor goes to the Delirium Café in Belgium, which is reported to have 2,500 beers available (and so has earned the pink elephant that is their mascot). The Brickskeller, however, holds the record in the US, and the record in terms of bars I have been to. It almost makes me want to visit DC again soon.

Almost.

So who was Murphy, anyway? You know, the guy who said “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” the succinct statement of the philosophy of overengineering. I’ve always wondered, but never heard anyone tell the story. Until, that is, I was perusing some back issues of the Annals of Improbable Research, and came across an article by Nick Spark, “The Fastest Man on Earth: Why everything you know about Murphy’s Law is wrong.” It’s an absolutely fascinating tale – something anyone who has ever related to Murphy’s Law, or used Murphy’s name in vain, should read.

This week, my next-door neighbors, Martha and Carroll, celebrated their seventieth wedding anniversary. What can you say other than “Wow!”

They are great people – sweet, kind, caring, sharp as a tack, and not self-absorbed. And not only that, but they are interesting, too. They’ve lived in their house since 1942 and are the unofficial neighborhood historians. Since they don’t get out much, their focus is on what is happening along our street. And they’ve drawn me in to their attitude. Instead of not knowing who my neighbors are, I know them and actually care about them – kind of a throw back to an earlier, pre-television and internet blogging way of life.

They are inspirational. I want to be like them. I don’t think I’ll see my 70th wedding anniversary (I didn’t following the first rule to having a long marriage – marry young), but I have hope for seeing, and enjoying, my 50th. They are what growing old should be like.

Here’s to you, Martha and Carroll. Congratulations!

Round-off errors – not the kind of thing the average consumer spends much time worrying about. As an engineer, I was always taught to avoid round-off errors. While developing numerical modeling algorithms (hey, it pays well!), I had to be very careful to make sure round-off errors didn’t unexpectedly bite me in the butt when I wasn’t looking (though sometimes they did anyway). So I was a bit surprised (and a bit disappointed) to see a creative use of round-off error in my own kitchen – a use designed to misinform the average Joe.

Or Jane. The kind of person who thinks statistics are just for sports fanatics and fantasy football freaks. I was using a can of Pam – you know, that spray-on oil for the few people left who don’t own Teflon pans. Now Pam (or any of the many similar products) has exactly two ingredient: vegetable oil and propellant. The propellant is of negligible quantity, so basically it is a can of 100% oil. So I was surprised to see on the nutritional label that a serving of Pam contains 0 calories, 0 grams of fat, and 0% of its calories from fat. So how can a product that is effectively 100% fat be, in fact, fat free?

Round-off error. It seems that the people who regulate these labels decided that it is OK to round to the nearest 1 gram. Thus, if a serving has 2.3 grams of fat, they can just say 2 grams on the label. 12.6 becomes 13. And if the amount of fat, measured in grams, is less than 0.5? Well, you round it down to zero. So if the product is 100% fat, how can the amount of fat be less than 0.5 grams? Why, just make the serving size less than 0.5 grams! By rounding, it has exactly zero of everything! One serving of Pam is a 1/3 second spray, which makes the serving size conveniently less than 0.5 grams.

One-third of a second. I tried this, but I think fast Pam sprays are a young man’s sport. I couldn’t move my finger up and down fast enough to get less than a 3/4 second of spray. Maybe there’s a technique. But anyway, you can see how, through creative rounding, the label was allowed to say 0 grams of fat. That’s bad enough, but what REALLY gets me is the claim that Pam has 0% of its calories from fat! What is zero divided by zero, anyway? According to many high school math students, and ConAgra Foods, the makers of Pam, the answer is zero. Of course, some of us were taught that math works a little differently than that (I won’t go into L’Hopital’s rule, or that you should round your answer only after you have completed all of your calculations). You don’t need a math degree to see that the correct answer, in this case, is 100%, not 0%.

So there you have it. Round-off error biting the average consumer in the butt (which, by the way, may get a little bigger if you take the nutritional label of Pam at face value). I’m glad I paid attention in math class.

I have a cousin named Kevin Russell. He’s about five years younger than me, but we grew up close to each other (in lovely Kalamazoo, Michigan) and spent a lot of time playing at each others’ houses as kids. I remember one day he gave my brother and I a Time magazine, pointing to paintings of naked women is the art review section. I was probably 10 years old at the time, and thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Kevin kept asking why we were laughing, but that just made us double up and laugh even harder. That quizzical look on his face is how I will always picture him.

I moved away when I was fifteen, but have heard about what Kevin has been up to, seen him at family gatherings – the usual stuff. He did well in college, even better at law school, clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and then went to work for the Justice Department. When he couldn’t stand another day there, he started his own practice.

Yesterday, Kevin argued his first case before the Supreme Court. Wow. It was a pay discrimination case, involving the Civil Rights Act, statue of limitations, and other legalistic stuff that I’m sure is important but don’t quite understand myself. My little cousin has done well for himself, and of course his whole family is proud. But that doesn’t mean I won’t always think of him as that little five year old with the innocent question-mark-of-a-face looking at me as if I were the fool that in fact I was.

Congratulations, Kevin. Keep doing the right thing – we need people like you.

It’s time to go to the poles and cast your vote. And be glad you can.

They don’t much teach this in our myth-building junior high history classes, but for the first 50 years of this country, only about 15% of the adult population had the right to vote (white, male property owners). Black men nominally recieved the right to vote with their emancipation during the Civil War, but they were largely denied that right until the passage of the Voting Rights Act 41 years ago. Women got the right to vote in 1920. The universal right for adults to participate in American democracy occurred in my lifetime. I don’t take it for granted.

After my last post (about snow in Indiana), my wife made it very clear: “You are a wimp,” she said. Ok, I admit it.

Last week was fall break at Notre Dame (like spring break, but in the fall – an idea that all institutions of higher learning should seriously consider). It snowed in South Bend the day before I left for a week back home in Austin. It snowed in South Bend the day after I got back this week. In Austin, during my fall break visit, it got up to 92F. I may be a weather wimp, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which of those two weather patterns is the more desirable. I’m happy to leave six months of cold to those who are tougher and more fool-hardy than I.

The year was 1981, the place a southern-Indiana Oktoberfest-like event, whose main characteristics were the oft repeated Chicken Dance, a lousy oompah-pah band, and vast quantities of bad beer in a bucket. There were many women present, but none paid any attention to me (I don’t remember this explicitly, but that was the default situation for me and I am quite confident it was true this night as well). It was the start of my senior year of college, and despite over three years of practice I couldn’t hold my liquor worth a darn (a deficiency I have since overcome). And yet in spite of all of these obvious reasons to feel dejected, I had a good time.

For reasons that defy logic, my friend (I’ll call him Z) asked me to retrieve his car at the end of the evening with another friend (nickname: Darth) in tow. The two of us walked the lonely mile through the parking lot and found the car, and my straightforward assignment was to drive it to the fairgrounds gate to pick up Z and whoever he might have picked up. It was a simple task – I had no premonition that things would go terribly wrong.

As we drove through the parking lot, somehow I found myself traveling at a slightly excessive speed. Maybe I was unused to the unbridled power rumbling beneath the hood of Z’s mother’s Dodge Charger. Maybe I subconsciously loathed myself and my excessive geek-prowess, hoping for self destruction. Maybe I was just drunk. In any case, the speed of the car coupled with a patch of wet grass to produce a fishtailing action from the rear half of the vehicle that was stopped only by the unwanted and massive intervention of a nearby tree.

As I mourned the damage and dreaded the undeniably justified reaction of the mighty Z, Darth went back to the fairgrounds to get the others. After what seemed an eternity (time slows for the guilty), a car pulled up with a spotlight shining blindingly in my face. Background note: at college Darth drove a previously-owned law enforcement vehicle for his daily commute, equipped with several of the special features that only cop cars have – a spotlight attached to the driver-side door being one of these. As this large, white towncar pulled up to me with a spotlight in my face, I was less than amused. My delicate psyche, already tormented by the evening’s unfortunate events, was in no mood for Darth’s tomfoolery. I grabbed the spotlight and angrily pushed it away, coincident with a few choice words expressing my extreme dismay and displeasure at Darth’s behavior.

You can imagine my consternation when a deep voice I didn’t recognize politely but firmly said “Sir, please let go of the light.” As my eyes adjusted to the darkness that I was sure would engulf me evermore, I noticed the uniform of the driver and the not-painted-over word POLICE on the side of the car. Damn.

In times of crises, a man acts on instinct. Millions of years of evolution have programmed our unconscious to respond to danger with natural impulses that hark back to our animal origins. I groveled. Much apologizing and promising that I would in no way be driving that night lead to the eventual departure of my blue-clad protector, just as the gang arrived and my real trial began.

That is my story, still fresh in my mind a quarter of a century later. Despite the bad ending, it was an important night for me – the lessons learned have never been forgotten. I have never since chanced driving while under the influence of the devil’s drink. However, twenty-five years of good driving and responsible drinking later, I still have no desire to go to another Indiana chicken-dancing, beer-bucketing, car-sliding Oktoberfest celebration. Call me strange.