I got nothin’ today, so you get a picture.

Via Fark: Primary drops ’school’ from title.

The decision was defended by headteacher Linda Kingdon. She told The Sheffield Star: “We decided from an early stage we didn’t want to use the word ’school’.

“This is Watercliffe Meadow, a place for learning. One reason was many of the parents of the children here had very negative connotations of school. Instead we want this to a be a place for family learning, where anyone can come.

I find self-euphemism particularly interesting, since it can only come from an acknowledgement that something is wrong but that, usually, the conclusions has been drawn that the terminology, and not the underlying reality, is the problem.

There is a revolving door of euphemisms for people with one kind of disability or other: in the case of physical disability, we have gone from crippled to handicapped to disabled to differently-abled — and there’s probably some new term that I’m unfamiliar with. The problem, though, isn’t the term but, you know, the actual inability to do something that most people can do.

At least those do have subtly different meanings, though. Better are the euphemisms for mental handicaps, where, for example, we’ve gone from retarded to developmentally delayed, which is simply a substitution of English for Latin. Kids will soon be calling one another ‘developmentally delayed’ on the playground just as they once called one another ‘retard’; and the ‘place for learning’ will acquire the same ‘negative connotations’ that now attach to the term ’school’, unless the people in charge thereof actually solve the underlying problem.

And that doesn’t seem too likely, given that they appear to be the kind of people who can’t resist the urge to self-euphemize. A strong and successful institution, group, company, etc. doesn’t need to introduce new terms, because they set the evolving definition of the old one. The National Association For The Advancement of Colored People has not found it necessary to change its name as successive waves of euphemism for what we currently call ‘African-American’ have come into use. Referring to ‘Colored People’ in general will get you shouted down these days (though, mysteriously, ‘people of color’ is currently not only not seen as rude, but in fact as extraordinarily ’sensitive’), but the NAACP does not need to change its name because the organization defines what the name means, rather than letting the name define what the organization means.

Bellwether, Connie Willis, 1997:

“[...]I don’t care if I am breathing in second-secondhand smoke.”

“Second-secondhand smoke?”

“That’s what Flip calls the air smokers breathe out.”

The New York Times, 2009:

Parents who smoke often open a window or turn on a fan to clear the air of second-hand smoke, but experts now have identified another smoking-related threat to children’s health that isn’t as easy to get rid of: third-hand smoke.

[...]

Doctors from MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston coined the term “third-hand smoke” to describe these chemicals in a new study that focused on the risks they pose to infants and children. The study was published in this month’s issue of the journal Pediatrics.

“Everyone knows that second-hand smoke is bad, but they don’t know about this,” said Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

‘Everyone knows this’ despite the fact that lots and lots of studies have failed to actually, you know, prove that second-hand smoke is anything but annoying. The newspapers are full of references to studies that have proven that second-hand smoke is oh so terrible, but in fact the best you can legitimately claim is that most of the studies don’t show that exposure to second-hand smoke is actually beneficial.

“When their kids are out of the house, they might smoke. Or they smoke in the car. Or they strap the kid in the car seat in the back and crack the window and smoke, and they think it’s okay because the second-hand smoke isn’t getting to their kids,” Dr. Winickoff continued. “We needed a term to describe these tobacco toxins that aren’t visible.”

Or detectable in significant quantities.

“The central message here is that simply closing the kitchen door to take a smoke is not protecting the kids from the effects of that smoke,” he said. “There are carcinogens in this third-hand smoke, and they are a cancer risk for anybody of any age who comes into contact with them.”

Remember that quote: it’s going to be the one you see, a lot, in the coming campaign to ban all smoking, everywhere, any time. It’s the one you’re going to see, a lot, in the endless lawsuits that will result from this. Every building that everyone has ever smoked a cigarette in, ever, is now a toxic tort waiting to happen.

The full study is available here. It should be noted that the study’s object was not to determine whether ‘thirdhand smoke’ is at all hazardous — this is explicitly presented as a given in the article. Rather:

The objective of this study was to assess health beliefs of adults regarding thirdhand smoke exposure of children and whether smokers and nonsmokers differ in those beliefs. We hypothesized that beliefs about thirdhand smoke would be associated with household smoking bans.

So they spent a lot of money to determine whether there was a correlation between people who had strict no-smoking policies in their homes, and the belief that ‘thirdhand smoke’ presents a hazard. They found that people who have extreme views about how hazardous smoke is tend to also have strict no-smoking policies in their homes.

This is worthy of an article in a peer-reviewed journal, apparently, and it’s important enough that the New York Times feels it necessary to write a story about it.

Oh, and the very first sentence in the study article is ‘There is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke’ — even though this is patently absurd. Alarmist TV news people don’t understand this, but there’s a safe level of exposure to everything; you can inject a rat with 10 µg of Plutonium without apparent ill effect. Just so you understand the position of these ’scientists’: they believe that it is safer to mainline Plutonium than to be exposed to any tobacco smoke at all.

The Pediatrics article contains, and the Times repeats, this list of terrible, terrible chemicals in ‘thirdhand smoke’, along with examples of their uses which are meant to frighten you:

Among the substances in third-hand smoke are hydrogen cyanide, used in chemical weapons;

But which is also found in cherries, apricots, apples, and almonds

butane, which is used in lighter fluid;

and in deodorant, but in any case butane is, you know, a gas at any temperature and pressure you’re likely to find inside a house, and so doesn’t ’settle on surfaces’ as the study suggests

toluene, found in paint thinners;

and in gasoline and in the production of Coca-Cola; it evaporates extremely easily and blows away

arsenic; lead; carbon monoxide;

which are found in just about everything on Earth, but which are apparently scary enough on their own that they don’t need some special frightener added; and as everyone knows, CO is also a gas

and even polonium-210, the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006. Eleven of the compounds are highly carcinogenic.

Litvinenko! Jesus Christ, Litvinenko! Don’t smoke in a room that children may ever, ever, ever inhabit in the future: just remember Alexander Litvinenko! Once upon a time, I would have said that this story jumped the shark with this line, but these days it seems to be impossible to jump the shark with alarmism. I am certain that within a few weeks, if not days, some S.O.B. somewhere will be pounding his fist on a lectern and talking about Litvinenko and smoking.

Good thing that nobody blew tobacco smoke in Litvinenko’s face; there’s a safe-exposure level for Polonium-210 (though it’s measured in picograms).

The airport in St. Louis doesn’t have big signs announcing that you are at the airport, and apparently this is a problem. From the story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The signs are part of a multimillion-dollar initiative to make the airport more inviting.

One would think that it’s the airplanes that go places that make the airport inviting. And where else in St. Louis are people going to get on a commercial airliner?

“We don’t have any (signs) now,” said Airport Director Richard Hrabko. “Other airports all over the country have monument signs that designate that it is the airport. Any other company with a large complex would have a sign out front.”

Except that you aren’t a ‘company with a large complex’. The companies you speak of are in competition against other companies that do the same thing, or much the same thing. Part of that competition involves making people aware of your existence, and aware of the fact that your company has ‘a large complex’. As a major metropolitan airport, you don’t really have that problem. People who live in St. Louis, or who want to come to St. Louis, have to use your airport, or own their own little airplane, or charter a plane to another area airport, or take the train or bus, or drive, or walk.

And on top of that, you already have one of the coolest, most architecturally distinctive airport terminals in the world, a real gem that could itself serve as a ‘brand’ for the airport. Too bad you people have built so much garbage in front of it that it’s nearly invisible from the outside.

Two of the monument signs would feature entry sculptures towering about 40 feet, with a painted aluminum replica of the airport’s logo — an airplane flying past the Arch. The airport’s name would appear on an accompanying sign.

This would be good, as it would let the traveller know that he is, in fact, at the airport in St. Louis, and not Cleveland or something. Since they wouldn’t be aware of that anyway.

It would also help get the word out about the little-known fact that St. Louis has a giant arch. Incidentally, if you attempt the stunt depicted in the logo, you are in violation of FAR 91.119 (c), which prohibits flying closer than 500 feet to any ‘person, vessel, or structure’.

“This will be very distinguished looking, very professional,” Hrabko said. “It will put a branding type of situation on the airport, which it does not have right now.”

Again, Mr. Hrabko seems to misunderstand the business he’s in. St. Louis has two airports capable of handling airline traffic, and another two that could be made to work if you needed to. Only one of these airports has scheduled passenger service. What’s the branding for? It almost sounds like the intended audience here isn’t the public, but the people who attend the Large Airport Manager’s Convention.

The chief irony here is that the St. Louis airport is actually a pretty good airport, at least from a passenger’s perspective. It’s dingy and shows signs of hard wear, and the roof leaks in places. But parking is convenient and I can pretty reliably show up 20 minutes before a flight and walk right on to a plane.

The airport management, though, doesn’t really see the airport as a passenger does, i.e. as just a place where you get on an airplane. The airport managers are there all day, every day, and so see superficial things like the lack of fancy signs as more important than they are.

I think that new year’s resolutions are a good thing. January 1 is just an arbitrary day, but then the determination to change a habit is itself pretty arbitrary.

You could pick any day — your birthday is a good choice, probably better than January 1 when you think about it — but in practice January 1 always seems to be less arbitrary than it might initially appear, logically. In January, the days are lengthening, snow on the ground makes everything brighter, and the disassembly and packing-away of Christmas decorations gives a general boost to the whole out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new-ism.

I am still working on Having Fewer Crap Experiences and Dressing Better, resolutions from previous years, but have made some progress in each case.

This year’s resolution is simply to make more of the Tinotopia blog, specifically to the point of having something up here every day. I say this with the full knowledge that I’m not going to do it; there will undoubtedly be some days when I’m too busy, or disinterested, to post even a picture. With things like this, though, it’s good to have a clear definition of success, and in this case I’m saying that success will be 365 entries between now and December 31. If I actually achieve 80% of that, I’ll be happy.

I plan to do this, in part, by resurrecting some of the 91 drafts that Wordpress tells me I already have on the hook; by posting short things about meals I’ve eaten and places I’ve visited without getting in to 5000 words about what’s minutely wrong with the customer service; by posting links to news articles with a single bitchy sentence about what’s obviously idiotic there; and so on. 5000-word screeds are better, but they get bogged down and abandoned at least as often as they get posted.

A lot has been said about the iPhone’s ability to locate the user; the new 3G iPhone actually uses GPS to do this, while the original iPhone just uses triangulation from cell-phone towers to figure out where you are.

The triangulation method should work reasonably well for most purposes (i.e. ‘what town am I in?’ at the very least), but my experience lately has been that this isn’t the case.

The other day, I hit the Locate button and got this result. Click on the picture for a bigger version:

Where I was standing, the terrain is such that there’s no signal at all from the south and west. Where I was standing, the elevation is 700 feet, and the mountains are about 2300 feet. You can see the problem (if you squint) in this view looking roughly south. Click for a bigger version:

There’s also a low ridge between the airport (where I was standing) and the town of Front Royal itself. It’s not enough to really notice, but it’s enough to block cell phone signals. My guess is that the phone could get only one signal, and that this was from a cell site on or near Mouth Weather, which is just NE of the identified (wrong) location. All the system could tell was that I was somewhere on a line roughly 210 degrees from that tower.

The lesson: cell-phone triangulation location information can be ridiculously inaccurate when in areas with interesting terrain and poor coverage. More importantly and less obviously, the locator system appears to be unable to reliably determine when this is the case.

The AP has the story now; Tinotopia had it almost two years ago.

There’s a Washington Post story today about Jimmy Justice, the ‘video vigilante’ who records cops and other NYC official vehicular malparkage and posts the results online. The story also discusses the crowded genre of videos of cops beating the crap out of people. The police commissioner in New York has said that the department will be setting up a way for people to send these videos directly to them, the better to sniff out rogue cops. Sounds like a good idea.

Predictably, the police union doesn’t like this idea; the union isn’t content with protecting the rights and jobs of its law-abiding, non-slimeball members. I’m sure that this isn’t actually the case, but to my eyes it looks like a lot of big-city police unions must have a whole department dedicated to defending the right to be a sociopath with a badge.

However, the police union cautions that videos do not always give the entire picture, and officers worry about a flood of citizen videos by people who might not understand that police work is sometimes a messy business.

“The use of force sometimes looks violent,” said Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

The use of force is violent. I mean, that’s the point. Look up ‘violence’ and ‘force’ in the dictionary. I don’t have anything against the police occasionally being violent; if miscreants only needed to be asked nicely to stop whatever they’re doing, we wouldn’t need the police at all. Anyone could ask nicely.

We have the police because a lot of people won’t stop when asked nicely, and so we need guys with guns and clubs and Tasers to use force (or at least the threat of force) to get them to stop.

“Pieces of video don’t tell the whole story.”

This leaves it a mystery, then, why the police unions fight so hard to keep always-on cameras out of police cars. Presumably they would want ‘the whole story’ on tape, no? Or maybe the cops are just being disingenuous.

With the police commissioner openly asking for citizen videos, Lynch said, “he’s going to have to be very careful not to bow to public pressure and not bow to emotion.”

Nope. Wouldn’t want an allegedly democratic government bowing to something like public pressure. If you did that, the next thing you’d know, those civilians would wind up thinking that they were in charge of the police!

It still baffles me as to why the NAACP or some similar organization hasn’t spent a couple million dollars giving out video cameras that transmit their take back to some central server (so the video isn’t lost when a rogue cop steals and destroys the camera) to people who live in the ghetto.

I haven’t had any problems since I moved to the boonies, where people are more relaxed; but I can personally testify that city and suburban cops are quite willing to fuck with law-abiding, white, middle-class guys. That experience, plus the fact that they argue so vehemently against their own video surveillance, leads me to believe that pretty much everything that poor black people say about cops’ behavior toward them is true.

Why do the good cops put up with this?

Since the 2.0 firmware upgrade, it’s taking my first-gen iPhone 35 to 40 minutes to sync — with nearly all of the time taken up with iTunes performing a backup of the phone.

Here’s the process, speeded up 2400%:

The time it takes suggests that the system is backing up all the data on the phone, including movies, music, etc. — which is nuts, because after you restore an iPhone backup, you still need to separately sync all the music etc. you want on there.

It’s also nuts because the backup directory on the Mac contains 114.5 MB, which shouldn’t take anything like that long to transfer. I know the USB connection is working properly (and not falling back to a slower speed) because the transfer of media files takes place at the same speed as always.

That 114.5 MB is made up of 2,815 files, though, which could be part of the problem. If the files originate on the iPhone (rather than being split out of the stream on the Mac side), opening all those files and sending them individually could definitely account for some of the time. But 35 minutes? I doubt it.

Not everyone has this problem — Nicole doesn’t have it, and a few times my phone has synced without a lengthy backup process first — so it’s got to be something with my configuration of the phone, which means that there must be a workaround. I haven’t been able to isolate the cause myself, though, and of course there hasn’t been a peep out of Apple despite many complaints.

Most British people, when they attempt to do American accents, generally wind up sounding like movie cowboys to my ear. Actually, just one movie cowboy: It sounds like they should be addressing everyone as ‘pilgrim’.

The guy in their ‘master class’ recording likes to say ‘Louisianer’ when doing what I assume are Texan and southern redneck accents — I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard anyone say that.