Month: November 2014

This post is a couple of weeks late, but I feel like it’s important for people to understand just what an enormous waste of time the whole Daylight Saving Time concept is.  It has literally zero good or useful qualities and everything it touches turns to total garbage.

I’ve read a lot of blog posts (OK, I’ve read a couple (OK, I’ve heard about some)) criticizing the modern practice of DST begin by saying that it made sense when we were an agrarian society and most of the work and production in the country took place on farms.  This argument makes exactly zero sense — farmers are known for getting up at the crack of dawn.  That’s sorta their thing.  Did you know that the crack of dawn doesn’t magically shift forward and backward by an hour every spring and fall?  Same thing with sunset — I’m not making this up, you can look it up.  It’s probably in books somewhere.  Whether a farmer gets up at 4:30 and goes to bed at 9:00 or gets up at 5:30 and goes to bed at 10:00 is completely immaterial to the farmer, who is beholden to the daylight.  He’ll get up no matter when it happens.  And before you say, “Ah, but the [grain | cattle | wegetable] market opens at a certain time each day,” I would remind you that those markets are beholden to the farmers, and therefore also to the daylight, so there’s no reason they wouldn’t open earlier or later as the daylight grows and fades.  Maybe this is why historically, farmers have opposed the practice.

The other main argument for DST — and the reason it was extended in the Bush administration — is that it somehow saves energy.  The idea here is that a large portion of our electricity still goes to lighting the home (accounting for around 14% of residential energy usage and 3.5% of total US energy consumption), and we expend that energy disproportionately while we are awake after sundown.  So the reasoning goes that if we make the sun set an hour later, but keep our schedules the same, we’ll effectively be going to bed an hour earlier, using an hour less energy to light our homes.  This also seems ridiculous to me.  Not only do recent studies suggest that we’re probably not actually saving any energy by doing this, but the whole concept of only doing this for 8 months out of the year makes no sense.  Why not always be on DST?  Or better yet, why not just… move our schedules back an hour?  From now on, we work from 10-6 instead of 9-5.  Problem solved.  Go home.  Keep your lights on or don’t, I don’t care.

Right now you’re thinking, “But Mysterious Internet Authority, what about that weekend where we get an extra hour of sleep?  That’s a pretty great weekend!”  First of all, it’s “Mr. Ious Internet Authority” to you, and secondly, what about that weekend where we get an hour less sleep?  We reap what we sow, and in this case it’s a day of traffic accidents and lost money from sleep-deprived laypeople trying to navigate a world in which the very concept of time has magically skipped over an hour they normally would have spent resting.  The only good that DST ever did for us — making it dark earlier so we could trick-or-treat at 5:30 — has been stolen from us, since fall back was moved out of late October and into November.

OK — so I’ve “conclusively” “proven” that DST has little-to-no upside.  But what about its downsides?  Check this guy out — it’s basically a list of crazy things that happened because of DST!  Mixed in are hilaaaarious cases of, for example, a terrorist plot foiled by the terrorists failing to know what the time on the bomb meant, along with more innocuous stories of twins where the older one is actually born “after” the younger one.  There’s also stories about how one year there were 23 different DST events in Iowa alone, all of which needed to be kept track of for things like train schedules, which cost an estimated $12 million more per year to maintain than if DST had not existed at all.

These problems are neither problems of the past, nor limited to terrorists or Iowa.  For me, professionally, DST is a nightmare.  In my line of work, it is important — actually, it is essential — to be able to store information with what is called a “primary key.”  This key is used to look up data; a key (hahaha) component of a primary key’s effectiveness is its uniqueness, which allows the user to specify a primary key value and return exactly one entry.  This is so key (hahahaha) that the software used to store data requires primary keys to be unique.

As a concrete example, let’s say that I’m storing information about what the temperature was in Baltimore at a given time.  The reasonable primary key for this data is time.  Now let’s say I want to know what the temperature was in Baltimore on, say, Sunday, November 2, 2014, at 1:30 AM.  Looks like I’m SOL — there were two 1:30 AMs on November 2.  So now I either need to include an additional piece of information in my key — “was this hour the DST duplicate hour or not,” which will be “not” in 8,759 out of 8,760 entries in that table — or I need to pick a single time zone to put the data in (EST or EDT, rather than EPT) and then keep track of that every time I want to tie that out with another piece of data (this problem is actually largely solved, but my company is so far down the path of not-best-practices that we actually choose to just ignore the extra hour and store everything in EPT).  This leads to a huge number of problems for the company as a whole (how do we treat the extra hour for products that trade on an hourly basis?  Can we tie out our data to the point where we can even have a view on that hour?) and me personally, as I spend probably ten hours every fall fixing things that were written back when time didn’t suddenly and inexplicably duplicate itself — you know, 99.98% of the year — and the fix is almost always to ignore any duplicates in the primary key of the data, which means if there are real duplication errors (e.g., they post two completely different temperatures for Baltimore at 2:30 AM on Sunday, Nov. 2, and we need to figure out which one is correct), we completely miss them.  Then of course there’s the data that gets posted on an hourly level — what do you do when one of those says that the hour is “hour ending 25” or “hour ending 2_2” …

So I of course propose that we eliminate DST entirely.  However, if we’re going to look at DST, we might as well look at time zones generally.  I further posit that these, also, are misleading and confusing (though not to the same degree as DST), and should be eliminated in favor of a single universal time (say, a Coordinated Universal Time).  There’s exactly zero reason that 12:00 PM has to occur in the middle of daylight (and in fact, it doesn’t — we already shift that by an hour in DST, and near the borders of time zones by up to two hours), and as already discussed there’s no reason that we have to operate on a 9-5 schedule.  In Virginia, we’re (currently) 5 hours behind UTC; why not go to work on a 2PM-12AM schedule?  We’d wake up when the sun rises at 12:00 PM and go to bed after it sets at 1 AM.  Midnight would be 5AM and noon would be 5PM.  The key is that it makes no difference what time the clock says — the only thing that matters is that everybody agrees on its meaning.  In today’s global marketplace, if the entire world can agree on a calendar*, the entire world should be able to agree on a time.

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* It’s surprisingly hard (not to say that it’s actually all that difficult — I googled a bit and didn’t find much, but I expected it to be very easy) to find data on who all uses the Gregorian Calendar, but the wikipedia page on New Year claims the Gregorian calendar is in “worldwide use,” and this page cites the Wiki page on the Gregorian Calendar (which doesn’t currently appear to have a list of countries using it) in its calculation that over 96% of the world population currently observes the Gregorian Calendar.  Of course, the Gregorian Calendar has its own problems — even if we all agree that the best way to keep track of dates is to have 12 months and an extra day every four years (but not … every four years…), why have a month with only 28 days ever?   Why not make every month either 30 or 31 days and have it be 7 / 5 for three years and then 6 / 6 for the leap year?

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Note: for a (presumably) less biased and more fact-based discussion of the goods and bads of DST, you can check out the wikipedia page (duh), which has a section devoted to this discussion.

I think I frequently annoy my girlfriend.  Let’s be honest, that’s not really a surprising statement — I think I annoy pretty much everyone.

As a biologist working to address climate change (and with a quite a passion for doing so, I might add), I think I really get on her nerves whenever I try to put myself into the shoes of skeptics.  To be clear, I 100% believe that the earth is warming, that it’s caused (or at least aided) by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that those increased levels are manmade.  There is no doubt in my mind that humans are causing the climate to change in ways that may be difficult to predict, except for this: it will have catastrophic consequences for people and ecosystems.

However, I also think that some level of skepticism is essential — blindly accepting science just because it’s called “science” doesn’t make you any smarter than rejecting all science outright; after all, think about the supposedly causal link between vaccines and autism — that was “science” at one point (though quickly and thoroughly disproven — hooray, science!), and if we had looked at the outcome of that one study, collectively thrown our hands in the air and accepted what some “scientist” had to say…

Obviously, compared to climate change, the anti-vaccine “science” is a wildly different beast — that paper was directly contradicted by dozens of other research papers, and almost immediately a scientific consensus was built that there was no causal link between vaccinations and autism.  That’s how we do science — we look into relationships, we find something compelling, and we generate a theory — a model representing the real world — that says “A is probably caused by B, but it could perhaps be influenced by X, Y or Z.”  Subsequent studies explore the relationship between A and B to confirm what the first study found, and others explore X, Y, and Z to confirm that they are not major influences on the causal relationship between A and B.  Every subsequent study increases the probability that, in real life, B causes A, and we increase the degree to which we believe our models are accurate predictors and explainers of real world outcomes.  This is exactly how the major scientific theories and laws were developed, from gravity to evolution to climate change, with varying degrees of certainty.  There happens to be a pretty high amount of certainty in both the climate change and vaccination-autism models currently employed.

However, I assert that the debate is still important.  One of the really cool things about the way we build our scientific models is that we constantly get to revise them in the face of new evidence; we should always be pushing to find new evidence to revise our models.  When people who don’t know what they’re talking about say things like “Well evolution is just a theory,” and people who do know what they’re talking about then say, “Well, so is gravity!” no one learns anything.  However, directly engaging the uncertainties could potentially lead to a meaningful discussion (although a model based on past experience states that it probably won’t…).  Educating people about the scientific process and drawing comparisons between something they believe in (e.g., gravity) and something they don’t (e.g., evolution) may be a more productive avenue forward: “It is true that evolution is just a theory; however, many of the scientific theories and models that we take as fact today exhibit the same weaknesses that the theory of evolution does.  Consider the theory of gravity; the current model suggests that any mass exerts an attractive force on other mass.  This mechanism has been empirically observed on Earth and can be used to explain the movements of planets in our solar system, stars in our galaxy, and galaxies in our universe; most recently it was instrumental in allowing us to land a probe on a comet traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour after a journey of over 3 billion miles.  However, one of the weaknesses of this theory is that some of the gravitational movement of the universe is unexplainable due to a lack of visible mass; empirically, it is much more likely that this mass exists and cannot be observed (so-called ‘dark matter’), than that the theory of gravity is non-universal or flat out wrong — but there are still other possible explanations.  Similarly, evolution is widely agreed upon to be the most likely manner in which the ecological diversity we see today came into being; however, since we cannot physically go back in time to watch it unfold, we can only say that it is extremely likely — though not certain — that the processes and mechanisms that we see today, including radioactive decay used in carbon dating and random genetic mutation and speciation that we have empirically observed, behaved the same way in the past as they do now.  In the absence of other evidence, this theory works as an excellent model going forward, and has been instrumental in HIV/AIDS research, ecology, and the selective breeding of animals and plants, enabling us to feed a population that is five times higher than it was when the theory was first proposed.  I would encourage you to look for evidence that supports or disproves these assumptions, so that the scientific community can update its models, and we can do even more — after all, the theory has been constantly refined and changed over the last 150 years in light of new evidence, and it was those refinements that enabled those breakthroughs.”

However essential skepticism may be, there is no room for flat-out deniers.  Anyone unwilling to engage with the theory at all should be left out of the conversation entirely, and that goes especially for people controlling policy.  This makes it utterly terrifying that the presumptive head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has published a book called The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.  Meanwhile, the governor of Florida — a state that will be hard hit by rising sea levels — is on the record as saying he’s “not a scientist” when asked about climate change.  Congratulations Rick, neither am I.  That’s why I listen to them when they tell me your state will be under water in fifty years.  This is like a chef walking into his five-star restaurant and declaring “I’m not a food safetyist,” then serving raw chicken to the diners.

Except it’s so much worse than that.  Because when a chef gives people salmonella, he’s held responsible.  His restaurant is closed, and he can be charged with criminal negligence — or worse, if he did it on purpose.  If people die, he can get charged with manslaughter or homicide.  When Florida floods, Governor Rick Scott will be remembered for his presidential run or his time in the senate.  He may be long dead by the time the true damage is done.  In short, he won’t be held accountable for his actions.

So here’s my solution: let’s hold climate change deniers (and for that matter, anti-vaccinators) accountable for their deeds. Every parent whose child dies from a preventable, vaccinate-able disease should be tried and convicted of infanticide.  Climate change deniers making policy should be held accountable for the future destruction of life and property that they will have caused.  A White House paper estimates that seeing global temperature rise by just three degrees Celsius would incur a penalty of .9% of global GDP ($74 trillion in 2013, or over $650 billion per year).  The cost in human lives might be large as well — one estimate suggests as many as 300,000 per year due to malnutrition and severe weather, and those will come disproportionately from developing nations that will have the hardest time adapting to the changing climates.  World War II cost an estimated $1.3 trillion and killed an estimated 50 million people — while the cost in human lives might be smaller in the short term for climate change, we would hit that damage total in only two years at current GDP levels, making climate change three times more destructive than a constantly-waging World War II.  If these predictions come to fruition, any policy maker who prevents climate action should have their names permanently smeared by history as the mass murderers and belligerents that they are, with their pictures next to Hitler’s on history’s Wall of Shame.  Schoolchildren should be reading about them by name in their boiling hot schoolrooms for the next millennium; their families should have to live with the shame of what they did for generations.  And they should have no trouble agreeing to this plan — after all, iIf what they believe is true and climate change is not manmade or isn’t even happening, there won’t be any deaths or destruction, and they’ll go down as lone visionaries bucking the conventional wisdom and saving us all the hassle of living in a cold world.

This year, for the first major election in my history as a voter here, the state of Virginia conducted elections under two controversial legislative measures aimed at preventing electoral fraud (a problem which, by the way, is almost 50 times less likely than you, personally, getting struck by lightning this year). The first requires voters to display photo identification at their polling place to confirm their identity.  This seems pretty straightforward; you are required to prove who you are so you don’t vote under someone else’s name.  However, opponents of the law claim that it disproportionately affects the poor (and due to demographics in the US, this in turn disproportionately affects minorities), acting as a potentially preventative poll tax due to the high prices of photo IDs, especially in cases where a birth certificate is unavailable.  This law, typically championed by conservatives, therefore could be seen as a way to decrease or even restrict minority turnout in elections, which is especially pernicious considering minorities tend to vote for liberal candidates.  In fact, it appears voter ID laws may have reduced voter turnout in the election this week, which saw conservatives gain an enormous majority in the Senate.

The second law has been around much longer, and prevents voters from registering to vote on the day of the election (in the state of VA, you must be registered 22 days prior to the polling date).  Here again the logic seems straightforward; if you make people register prior to the election, it gives you plenty of time to confirm that they are registered in only one place and prevents people from registering at multiple polling stations and casting multiple ballots.  However, proponents of same-day registration have pointed out that it dramatically increases voter turnout and that it is not a burden on poll workers, as its opponents claim.  Movements against the practice are again often considered another method that conservatives employ to restrict voter turnout in key demographics that typically vote for liberal candidates.

Below is the very “real” story of how a member of a key conservative demographic, white upper-middle-class males, was disenfranchised in a battleground state by a measure aimed at decreasing the non-existing problem of voter fraud and, ironically, led him to commit voter fraud.  Feel free to share it with your local (likely Republican) senator or congressperson.

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Like every good American, I checked my voter registration long before the election, in mid-October.  This was well in advance of the 22 days required by the great battleground state of Virginia.  I found what I had expected: I was still registered to vote.  I checked that off of my list of to-dos and continued to monitor election news and events as a well-informed voter.

Fast forward a month, to this past Monday evening (November 3, 2014).  In planning to perform my civic duty the following day, I checked my polling location.  I had moved about a mile and a half down the road in July, so I assumed it wouldn’t be the same location it was the last time I had voted, but I was surprised to see that it was.  Being just the type of hard-working, no-nonsense white, upper-middle-class man that built this country, I investigated further.  I found that, while I was registered to vote, I was registered under my old address.

“No trouble!” thought I, “I’ll just change my registration now, or perhaps tomorrow at my new polling station.”  I checked the registration deadline and found that it had long ago passed.  I thought that perhaps my polling station would be the same for my new address as my old one, such that I needn’t re-register.  I was disappointed to find that my new address did indeed have a different polling location.  I was stuck.  In order to perform my civic duty and exercise my God-given right to vote — in one of the tightest senate races in the country, only decided yesterday — I would have to do something that runs completely counter to the American ideals of freedom and democracy: commit voter fraud.

In the end, my duty to contribute to the governing of this great nation trumped my law-abiding nature.  The ballots at the two polling locations were identical; I live in the same county and the same district that I moved from, so I was not misrepresenting my eligibility to vote for any candidates.  The poll workers were unfazed by the different address on my driver’s license; a small amount of paperwork indicating that I currently lived at my old address was all it took.

In the end, I was able to participate in this election.  But at what cost to its integrity?  To my own integrity, as a man?  Nay, at what cost to the integrity of this great nation?  Help end voter fraud — support same-day registration in Virginia and in all states.

My company recruits in the fall, and I typically get to spend some time traveling to schools or meeting recruits in their senior years at top-notch east coast academic institutions.  As part of the recruiting schtick, I tell them that I graduated from Duke with a mechanical engineering degree to illustrate that, at our company, we’re not really looking for people with any particular background in finance or energy, but instead we want people who are good with numbers and like to solve problems.  Frequently, people will ask me how I enjoyed Duke or what I think of it.  That’s a simple question with a complicated answer.

I’m a firm believer that, in the end, it’s the people who you go to school with (or work with — another part of my schtick) that ultimately shape your experience, and that at any sizable institution you’ll be able to find a niche and connect with people who share similar values and facilitate whatever personal growth you seek.  Whether you’re at a 60,000 person state school looking to spend your evenings expanding the horizons of homemade wearable tech or at an Ivy hoping to spend weekends smoking pot and like, really finding yourself, man, you can find people to do it with, and you and they will determine the quality of your educational experience.  Duke was certainly no exception, and my friends from Duke are some of the smartest, most self-aware, humble, and all around best people that I know.

However, my experience with the general culture and population of the university was different.  While there were at least as many decent people minding their own business on campus, the group of students subscribing to the “work hard, play hard” ethos was the loudest and most visible subculture; although only ~35% of students at Duke are involved in Greek life*, the social structure revolved around the typically awful parties and events thrown in their “dormitory sections” (which is where the fraternities are housed, rather than in houses) or at the hilariously awful local club, Shooters II.  It frequently seemed like the only options on a Friday night were to go into some dormitory common room with a sticky floor and cardboard covering the lights, with the sweet, bready smell of stale beer permeating the residence halls as people held boring conversations with red solo cups in the rooms of the section, or to venture out to Shooters and try to grind on a stranger (that stranger would of course end up doing much better than me on our econ test that Monday).  Needless to say, this was not my jam.

The fact that I didn’t enjoy the particular social scene isn’t so much a reflection on Duke as it is a reflection on me; I’m relatively awkward, and I’m terrible at having a good time.  What really soured my perception of the institution was the pervasive culture of elitism.  Those section parties I mentioned earlier?  They get cleaned up by the cleaning staff the next day, who before 8 AM have to come in and scrub the beer-covered walls and mop the floors and throw away the empty cases and cans of crappy beer that a bunch of thankless 20 year olds sleeping off their revelry from the night before left for them to deal with.  This sort of elitism isn’t limited to the selfish acts of a few kids, it’s widespread in the institution.  The Great Coach K actually gave a speech before a game against UNC that can be summed up as, “You’re better than people because you go to Duke.”  Not, “Our basketball team is going to win,” or even, “Our basketball team is better than other basketball teams,” but “Other people are inferior to you.”  Who says that — and more to the point, who cheers for it?  Duke students do.

While certainly a minority, the number of people who went to Duke because it was the best school they got into — but not the best school they applied to — was high enough that the Ivy chip on their shoulder contributed to a defensive sense of elitism perhaps best exemplified with the pervasive “D-U-K-E” / “DDMF” … chant… thing … that freshmen learn on their first drunken bus ride back from west campus.  The funny truth is, Duke really isn’t that special as an academic institution.  Sure, it’s consistently ranked as a top-ten undergraduate institution, but those rankings are based on highly biased criteria like peer perceptions, admissions selectivity, and alumni giving, rather than any measured academic value.  Meanwhile, not a single non-professional graduate program ranks in the top nine (we have three at #10), and the engineering program barely cracks the top thirty.

The truth is, whenever I tell someone I went to Duke, I get one of two reactions.  I either hear, “Oh, you must be so smart!” and I feel the need to correct them (“Actually pretty much none of the people I went to engineering school with are fit to be engineers,”), or I see them immediately start treating me as though I’m some sort of elitist, and I can’t blame them.

On the other hand, most people know that I’m a pretty big Duke athletics fan.  I frequently issue disparaging comments about inferior institutions, and almost always immediately follow them up with a quick “Go Duke!”

How can I hypocritically claim to chafe against the elitism of the institution while simultaneously displaying it, you ask? To start with, Duke does athletics pretty well.  That elitist coach I mentioned earlier?  He’s really good at coaching basketball; while it’s not necessarily great sportsmanship to throw up the #1 sign and sing “We Are the Champions” on the plane ride back from winning an NCAA title game, it’s at least technically true.

But the thing that I really like about Duke’s athletics is that it unites the campus in a way that you don’t often otherwise experience.  Whether you’re in the most exclusive sorority or you’re a founding member of the D&D club or you’re a math professor, everyone is on the same side and rooting for the same thing.  Basketball games were one of the only places where people would leave their own petty elitisms behind and join a group that was larger than themselves; where nobody questions anyone’s decisions to sleep outside on a sidewalk for three nights in sub-freezing temperatures in order to watch Kyle Singler or Jabari Parker dunk on next year’s NBA rookie class.  And nothing, nothing, will ever beat the feeling on campus the week after watching Gordon Hayward’s would-be buzzer beater rim out in the 2010 championship game.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Go Duke!

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*I single out Greek life here not because all Greek life at Duke is “bad” or a “a problem,” but because I’m lazy and it’s loudest, most visible subculture is the same loudest, most visible subculture endemic to the institution.