A little over a week ago, Jeff was moved from an intermediate care room to a regular hospital room – a sign of his continued progress in healing. Last night he was moved out of the hospital all together and into the Texas NeuroRehab Center. This is a facility that specializes in providing physical and neurological therapy for people who have suffered spine and brain injuries and is considered the best such facility in the area. So Jeff’s care has moved from a focus on healing his body to a focus on healing his head. Doctors expect a long road ahead for Jeff and his wife, Carita.

On Friday I was in New York for some expert witness consulting work. I had the pleasure of being deposed (my favorite thing to do, save having a root canal). Strangely enough, though, the good thing about this job is the lawyers.

IP lawyers, especially those that might be working on a case that would require the services of a lithographer, are not your normal breed of lawyers. Most of them started out as engineers or scientists. And even after decades of wearing suits and working in New York high-rises with views of the Statue of Liberty, it only takes a little encouragement for them to show you their true geeky nature. So on Friday, a high-powered lawyer in an expensive suit told me this Limerick from memory:

Concerning the nature of light,
It is hard to know which is right.
Is it particle or waves?
In both ways it behaves,
But we know it is absent at night.

How can you help but like a guy who has that poem at the tip of his tongue?

I like philosophy, especially arguments about philosophy. And if you throw in a little religion or politics, things really get fun. But in the end, I’m a practical kind of guy. I can’t be bothered with any philosophical musing that can’t be brought to bare on how I live my life. Here is a very simple example.

There is an oft repeated quote about the size of government: “That government is best which governs least,” attributed to Thomas Jefferson though it appears in none of his writings. What exactly does this mean? The least amount of government is no government; thus, it literally extols anarchy. Assuming that most who repeat this quote are not promoting anarchy (it is, after all, a part of the Republican Party oath), what is meant by this phrase? It is akin to saying “I believe in small government” without having to be bothered with defining what is meant by “small”. Thus, it claims to represent a philosophy, but without committing the adherent to any course of action. If no government and an all consuming government are both bad options (and surely all rational people must think that they are), there must be some optimum size of government, so that more or less government than this optimum is detrimental to the general welfare of the populous. It should be our goal to find the optimal level of government. How is this optimum to be determined? How, in fact, is the size of government to be measured? What criteria are best used when defining the benefits and detriments of government? These questions are not answered, and in fact not even asked, when one simply repeats the fine sounding but meaningless phrase “That government is best which governs least.”

It is not the shortest business trip I have been on, and it is not the longest. But somehow it feels like both.

After spending about 24 hours to get here from Austin, I arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday night. I’m here for a trial – I’m an expert witness in the case. But when I checked into the hotel, a note was waiting for me – the two sides had settled, so there was nothing for me to do. I changed my flight back to Saturday, and another 24 hours of travel time later I will be home. Thus, a very long, short trip.

But I did have a half-day free, and remarkably I managed to find a brew pub (go figure). The Hong Kong Brew House was in Lan Kwai Fong, the bar district of Hong Kong. While none of the beers were outstanding, they were all good (or at least acceptable). And you have to like it that someone in Hong Kong is trying.

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.