GDCritter

When I was in college, TJ was one of my friends. He had spent much of his childhood in the Panama Canal Zone. He never liked being in the Zone, and did his best to best to keep himself insulated from it while he was there. He never even learned Spanish, and I mean not any.

A group of our friends came to get me one night. TJ had gotten very drunk, and they could no longer either talk to him or understand him. He wasn’t belligerent. It just appeared he could no longer speak or understand English. And he was speaking what sounded to them like Spanish. That’s why they came for me — they knew I spoke at least some Spanish.

I got to where TJ was, and they were right. Anything said to him in English produced an uncomprehending look, and often a question. In each case, he clearly had not understood what had been said. And he was speaking in a fluent idiomatic Spanish. I can’t be absolutely certain the idiom was that of the Canal Zone, but some of the words he used led me to believe it was. And it was fluent idiomatic Spanish, which he could not speak when sober.

I was able to communicate with TJ, and we were able to get him settled down for the night. The next morning, sober again, he could not believe what we told him about the night before. And he could no longer speak Spanish.

If I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. And yet, there it was.

Is this the sort of thing that happened with Mel Gibson last weekend? I have no idea. But the lack of any history of previous anti-Semitic incidents, and the acknowledged high level of anti-Semitism in his childhood home, suggest to me that it is possible.

Category: “Other”
 

A large earthquake hit the Big Island of Hawaii this morning. The reported Richter magnitude was 6.6. (That’s big.) The news reports say there are no reports of fatalities or major injuries, but there are reports of major damage — and power went out all over the state. (Power was expected to be back on most of Oahu sometime this evening.)

Category: “Other”
 

Rich Galen wrote about the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon Fiesta in his column Friday.

Which made me remember a question called in to KOB radio (now KKOB) a few years ago:

Do you have to be Catholic to go to the Mass Ascension?

Category: “Other”
 

There was a reason I flagged this December 15 article in Canada’s National Post, even though I didn’t manage to read it until today:

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.

Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas. [emphasis added]

...

Their conclusions upset conventional wisdom that Type 1 diabetes, the most serious form of the illness that typically first appears in childhood, was solely caused by auto-immune responses — the body’s immune system turning on itself.

They also conclude that there are far more similarities than previously thought between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes

Diabetes is a disease we thought we understood. And we thought we understood that there was little or no interaction between the nervous system and the endocrine system. This research shows how wrong we were about diabetes. Now the question is, what other surprises does biology have waiting for us?

Twenty months ago, at the start of May 2005, I noted the approval by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) of a then-new anti-diabetes drug derived from gila monster venom. (The Mexican beaded lizard was also noted as usable. The gila monster is the “critter” that is this site’s logo/symbol.) That posting came to mind when I read the National Post article because, like the new treatment, gila monster venom works on the nervous system.
 

... against a worn-out weather satellite in low earth orbit.

Category: “Other”
 

The conventional wisdom is that the federal budget deficit is huge and getting worse, and that any thought of reaching a balanced budget is pure fantasy — or worse, another “Bush deception.” That viewpoint is well expressed in this cartoon.

I’ve opened a new window. Today I opened a new site at blogspot, and will be trying it out for a while.

For the time being, I’ll be putting posts up both here and there. I’ll let you know how it’s going.
 

I like good stories, and I saw a good one from Blackfive a couple of days ago called The Terminal Guardian. It gave me a chuckle -- it's definitely worth a read. Go there now.
 

There's nothing else to say.
 

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There's a reason the Vikings called it Greenland.
 

Bob Clark, the morning host on KKOB Radio in Albuquerque, has a young son. And that son came in all excited at something he'd just learned.

"Dad, did you know Paul McCartney was a musician before he married Heather Mills?"

"Yeah, he was in a band called Wings."

And I bet he had no idea why his father was laughing so hard!
 

Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez has been a big proponent of red light cameras. Mayor Marty said the automated system would enable the city's police officers to concentrate more on crime fighting rather than traffic control. He said having these dealt with administratively would avoid clogging the courts. And they wouldn't perturb the Motor Vehicle Division, either, since the city had no power to cause points to be assessed against drivers licenses. Mayor Marty said the hefty fines ($100, $250, and $500 as compared to a fine of about $20 for this offence on a real traffic ticket) would be a deterrent that would cause infractions to drop and accidents to fall. Mayor Marty said this measure was a safety issue.

Opponents objected to the level of the fines, to the lack of due process, to the city usurping state authority, and to the imposition of this new "cash cow" revenue source for the city. They were also concerned that the city would shorten the yellow lights, as had been done in other cities, to increase the city's cash take regardless of its effect on safety. There was also concern that the company that processes the tickets has a positive incentive to maximize the number of tickets to maximize it's take (and, coincidentally, that of the city as well). Mayor Marty, the city traffic engineer, and others assured everyone this was about safety rather than money, and the city certainly would not be so dishonest as to monkey with the yellow light timings.

Albuquerque radio station KKOB AM's afternoon host Jim Villanucci has now taken up the cause of the red light cameras. After hearing primarily from proponents for so long, how we're hearing some reality. Now we hear in instance after instance how administrative abuse has replaced judicial review, with city administrative officers berating truthful appellants as liars and routinely upholding erroneous citations. It has also developed that citations have been regularly issued and upheld against cars that did enter the intersection after the light turned red, but did so legitimately under the control of a right turn green arrow. The city absolutely denied this ever happened — right up until confronted with video proof on Albuquerque television station KOAT. And that's the good part of the news.

Now it develops that accidents are not down at the intersections with the red light cameras, as the city has been insisting. The actual statistics show that accidents are up at all or nearly all — at some, the accident rate has doubled since the red light cameras started working. And people are out timing the length of the yellow lights, finding that many have been reduced from 4 seconds to less than 3. On KKOB radio last week, the city engineer claimed these signals all had their yellow lights set for a 4 second timing, and challenged his interviewer (Jim Villanucci) to time them himself. Even during that interview, people were calling in reporting their measurement of yellow light times under 3 seconds. The next day Albuquerqueans observed city workers changing the yellow light times from under 3 seconds to the 4 seconds the city traffic engineer had falsely said they were set at — and they got pictures and video of the city workers making the changes.

In other words, it looks like everything the city and its mayor have said on this subject has been a bunch of lies.

This shouldn't be a surprise. A number of studies (some of these, for example) have shown red light cameras do not increase safety or reduce accidents. What does reduce accidents is increasing the length of the yellow light. Indeed, one study cited by Villanucci said increasing the length of the yellow light by 1.5 seconds (to 5.5 seconds) reduced red light violations and accidents by more than 90 percent.

But Albuquerque and Mayor Marty don't care about that. They're really just in the program for the revenue.
 

Here's the blogging update I promised back in March.

Posting items on blogspot seems to be going well. It's easy enough to post to, most of the time, and its quirks don't seem terribly bothersome. As a result, as of now, here's what I'm going to do:

• I will no longer post items in both locations, but will post new items only on the blogspot GDCritter location.
• I will post here a link to each new item (in place of the item itself).
• When/as I have time, I will come back here to convert this main page to a link page providing access to all items.

Another step of progress, I hope. An evolution, for sure.

Please wish me luck.