More OCBP News Coverage

I just got back from a great week of working on the Ocean City Beach Patrol. I spent the week working with the Inlet crew which is always a fun experience both because that section of the beach offers some challenging surf conditions and many of the people who come to that section of the beach have limited swimming experience. Over the course of the week I made seven rescues and had to work pretty hard warning many other people about dangerous conditions.

While I was in Ocean City, the CBS Early Show ran a segment about the dangers of digging holes in the sand that featured the the OCBP. Every parent should watch this video because it highlights the dangers and potential deadly consequences of a seemingly safe activity. In addition to Captain Butch Arbin, the video features Lt. Wes Smith warning a kid that his hole was too deep.

The danger of digging holes in the sand recently gained a higher profile when Dr. Bradley Maron and his father published a study on the topic in the New England Journal of Medicine. Here is a Washington Post account of the story.

In other recent Ocean City News, here is a podcast featuring Jesse Houston, Ocean City's Planning Director.

Look at Your Neighbor!

This past Sunday's Liturgy, we heard the story of the Good Samaritan - the man who stopped on the road to help a victim of robbers when everyone else just passed by. Lori and I went to St. Clements so Fr. Peter gave the homily. I really admire the way that Fr. Peter just strips away all of the extraneous information and comes straight to the point in his homilies. This one was no different.

Fr. Peter began by relating a complement that he had received from a person in the neighborhood about why he is such a good gardener. The person said that Fr. Peter was a good gardener because he looked at his plants. He looked at them to know if they needed water or had too much. He looked at them to know if the soil was too hard or too soft. He looked at them to know if they had too much sun or not enough. Only by looking at his plants could he find out what they needed and fix it.

Now the point of the Good Samaritan, according to Fr. Peter, is that probably only the Good Samaritan bothered to look at the robber's victim. The other travelers on the road probably did not stop because they simply did not take the time to look at the victim. Since they did not take the time to look at him, they could not feel sympathy or compassion for him and thus it did not even occur to them to stop and help. Only the Good Samaritan bothered to look.

Living in the city, I think that this message really hits home for me. How often do I just blow by panhandlers on the sidewalk because I just do not take the time to look at them? How callus do we become when we do not take the time to look at our neighbor?

Cambridge at Dusk

Here is a neat picture that I took on Friday night from our roof deck. I was actually a little late snapping this picture and it should should have been exposed a little more, but I think that the lighting on the roadway came out nice.

"Feed My Sheep"

This is a nice story about a couple who created an innovative way to help others. Eight months ago they opened a restaurant with good food and no prices. Each of their customers pays what they think the meal was worth or if the cannot pay they do some work after they finish their meal.

"If Jesus ran a restaurant, would he use this model?" asked Brad Birky. "We'd like to think so. Not that we're comparing ourselves to Jesus or his work. We're just inspired by him and his work."

Dan Savage: Smokin'

I always get a kick out of reading Dan Savage's weekly Savage Love columns and his relatively new blog entries are usually pretty good as well. Today Dan goes off on the Seattle Times for running a cliche report on Federal Agents raiding a number of marijuana grower. Really Dan at his best.

Truth in Carbon Taxes

The other day the New York Times reported that that Representative John Dingell planned to introduce a bill to raise gasoline taxes to combat global warming. Apparently Representative Dingell, who is from automobile producing Michigan, wants to illustrate that the public and specifically Democrats in Congress will not support an increase in gas taxes.

But Mr. Dingell, in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on C-Span, suggested that his goal was to show that Americans are not willing to face the real cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. His message appeared to be that Democratic leaders were setting unrealistic legislative goals.

“I sincerely doubt that the American people will be willing to pay what this is really going to cost them,” said Mr. Dingell, whose committee will be drafting a broad bill on climate change this fall.

Today the Wall Street Journal weighed in with an editorial praising Representative Dingell for his his honesty relative to others who would prefer to combat global warming through increased regulatory standards on fuel efficiency, but coming out as opposed to increased fuel taxes nevertheless.

Speaking for ourselves, we don't favor a carbon tax. In theory, such a tax might make sense if it were offset by lower taxes on income tax rates and capital investment--which would be a net plus for economic growth. However, there's not a chance in melting Greenland that the current Congress would offset any new carbon taxes; it would merely pocket the extra revenue to permanently increase the government's share of GDP.

Although I certainly do not trust anyone in Congress to immediately refund any additional gasoline tax revenue, I do support increased gas taxes, although I support them primarily on national security grounds. The Islamic Fundamentalists and the Iranian regime receive the majority of their funding from oil sales so reducing their revenues should be a key component to our strategy. While we cannot immediately cease all foreign oil purchases we can slow the rate of our oil consumption by imposing additional taxes and then use a portion of that money to oppose our enemies.

Of course we would also see some environmental benefits. Benefits that would be much more tangible than those obtained through increased fuel efficiency. Nonetheless, the reason to increase gas taxes is national security not the environment.

OCBP in the News

Here is an interesting article in the Washington Post featuring Butch Arbin who is the captain of the Ocean City, MD Beach Patrol. The article is apparently one of a series of articles about the interesting things that teachers do during the summer months. Before joining the beach patrol, I would never have guessed that so many teachers work as lifeguards during the summer months but it actually is a great combination.

Businesses Thank Government

Here is an interesting advertisement that I noticed the other day when spending a little extra time at Philadelphia International Airport. I love how these businesses are trying to capitalize on the restrictions that the TSA places on what travelers can and cannot bring with them on the plane. What do you think the chances are that these restrictions will ever be relaxed even if the terrorist threat abates? Not likely, especially now that the TSA has created a built in constituency to keep the restrictions in place.

Energy Honesty

Charles Krauthammer comments on how the Senate hopes to hide the true costs associated with increased energy efficiency in the recently passed energy bill. Money quote:

I have no objection to paying more to reduce our dependency on foreign energy. But it is hard to conceive of a more politically dishonest and economically inefficient way to do it than with mandates that make private industry do Congress's dirty work, hide the true cost of energy efficiency and perpetuate the fantasy of the tax-free lunch.

To me the really sad thing about the current debate on energy policy is the complete lack of discussion of the costs associated with increasing fuel efficiency the use of renewable fuels. Unfortunately, these costs will impact the poor the most because they represent a higher portion of a poor person's income than a rich person's income. In my view it is best to deal with these costs openly rather than to try to hide them in the hopes of appearing to offer a free lunch.

I Passed 8th Grade Science

Click on the picture above to take an online quiz to see if you can pass 8th grade science class!

June 24th 2007

On June 24th, I was exactly half as old as my Dad. I was 30 years and 24 days and he was 60 years 48 days. So we celebrated by playing golf at the Lake of Isles. The course is probably one of the most challenging that I have ever played, but some of the holes are absolutely breathtaking. We had a great day of golf! Take a look at the pictures below in the new Picasa slideshow embed.

Quote of the Day

"For my part, I believe Jesus had no politics, let alone the big government politics of our time. And the attempt of both right and left to coopt his truth corrupts faith and politics simultaneously." - Andrew Sullivan

Senators: Not Serious on Ethanol

A couple of days ago, the Club for Growth blog mentioned that the Senate had rejected an amendment to eliminate the 54 cent tariff on imported Ethanol. This strikes me as completely disingenuous at a time when the same Senators are concerned about price gouging for gasoline. Just for fun I used Google Maps to create this map showing how the Senators from each state voted. Now we have a visual representation of where the real price gougers live!

Update: A picture of the map is now included below.

Fingerjig - Flash Fun

For the past couple of days, I have been playing around with Fingerjig, which is a typing game done in flash animation. The game consists of a series of seven typing test using random words out of the dictionary - the first two focus on relatively short words, followed by a test of individual letter, then come two tests of words that use only one hand, and finally two tests that use long words like communicativeness.

Based on the final scores, it looks like I am basically an average to slightly above average typist - I am typing in the mid forty words per minute, after accounting for errors and have a high score in the 700,000's. Interestingly, I am better with my left hand even though I am right handed. If you are looking to test your typing with a fun online animation, check out Fingerjig!

Sad News from Ocean City

Sadly, Ocean City had its first drowning of the year this past weekend and at least as of the time of the linked article the victim's body had not been recovered. Our hearts go out to the family members who now have to cope with the loss of a loved one on a day that was supposed to be filled only with fun.

Here is another link with a picture of the attempted search and recovery.

Remember to always swim near a lifeguard and to swim parallel to shore when caught in a rip current.

Update: Here is a link to a blog post with additional pictures.

Now On Skype

Update: So I also tried out Youtube's new Remixer feature to create the version of the video below. I guess the issue with using the quick capture uploader for webcams is that you cannot cut out the beginning and end of the video so I think that is a key application for the Remixer. Remixer uses Adobe's technology so it has the same look and feel as Premier Elements, which I use on my PC. It was really easy to edit out the portions of the video where I was not looking at the camera and I even added a neat border. It looks like Remixer videos have a slightly different play box from regular videos, which is king of interesting. My only gripe is that Remixer creates an entirely new video and does not give the option to replace the original so I guess I would have to manually delete that if I wanted to do that. I am not sure that I am going to use this feature a ton, but it is still kind of fun.

Update 2: Interestingly enough when I embedded the video in this webpage, the edits remain but the border is not there. You have to click through to see it. I wonder if this is intended or not...

Green Day for Darfur?

So Green Day has dedicated their music video for Working Class Hero to raising awareness of the horrific situation in Darfur where allegedly government backed militias are systematically eliminating the local population. We have heard about the horrible problem in Darfur for a few years now, but finding a solution remains elusive. In the video, one of the people who fled Darfur states that he does not want military might, but that he just wants UN peacekeepers to protect the civilians. Come on, what does he think UN peacekeepers are other than military might? I would even go so far to say that peacekeepers are ineffective at best. In my view the better approach would be for the people, like Green Day, who care about the people of Darfur to contribute money to arm them so that they can defend themselves. The problem in Darfur is certainly ugly, but the solution is equally ugly. Thinking that there could possibly be a clean solution borders on fantasy.

Stick with the marketing message...

... only if you want to turn off the customer.

Here is an interesting article by Charles Green at Trust Advisers commenting on situations where the marketing message does not help the sales process. I think that the real issue here is that after almost a century of mass marketing broadcasts, consumers and business decision makers can easily discern which marketing messages apply to them and which do not.

As consumers we constantly find ourselves inundated with marketing messages and sales pitches. Many actually apply us and our situation, but many more do not. If we were not able to weed out the messages that apply from the ones that did not we would never be able to make any decision due to information overload. That is where sticking to the marketing message, particularly the wrong marketing message, can absolutely destroy the credibility of a salesperson in the eyes of the customer.

Assessing Risk

Daniel Bonevac at Right Reason asks a question about how likely a terrorist network is to detonate or even try to detonate a nuclear device in a US city in the next five to ten years.

Overall I believe that there is some risk of a nuclear or other spectacular attack by terrorists on the United States, but to try to go much behind that and to assign say a low, moderate, or high risk so such an attack is beyond the scope of my ability to obtain and process information about the threat. In fact it is probably not possible for any member of the general public. Nonetheless I think that it is reasonable for me to take a shot at discussing some of the risk factors that I have to consider when assessing the risk. Listed below, in roughly descending order of importance are some of the factors that contribute to the threat.

My assessed risk of a nuclear or other spectacular attack on the United States:

is higher now than before 9/11, the Bali bombing, the Madrid bombing, and the London bombing due to the terrorists' demonstrated ability and will to execute these attacks.

is higher to the extent that our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan encourage more individuals to engage in terrorist activities, but is lower to the extent that terrorists focus their efforts and resources on attacking US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I view the net result of these to effects as lowering the threat of an attack on the US, but that assessment is open to interpretation.

is higher due to the presence of both terrorist networks and nuclear weapons in Pakistan.

is lower to the extent that incidents like the Virginia Tech shooting illustrate the ease with which individuals could carry out this sort of small scale attack. Why do we not see more of this type of attack?

is lower due to the extent that the predominant terrorist network,Al Queda is Sunni Muslim and that Sunni versus Shitite conflict in Iraq illustrates lack of cooperation between the two groups - assuming Iran as a source for a nuclear weapon.

is higher to due to the demonstrated terrorist abilities of Shiite organizations like Hezbolla - again assuming Iran as a source for a nuclear weapon and that Hezbolla would gain the ability to target states other than Israel and Lebanon.

is higher to the extent that natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina illustrate ineffectiveness at various levels of government.

NBC Online Video

Last week I watched the final episode of The Black Donnellys, a fairly mediocre organized crime drama that premiered on NBC in January. The noteworthy thing about this is that NBC actually canceled the show after the first few episodes, but still made the show available on their website. This is the first time that I have been able to continue watching a show via the Internet after the network canceled it from their prime time lineup, which makes me think that this could become an increasingly popular entertainment delivery mechanism.

NBC actually made a few bucks from my watching the episodes on their website. In place of the regular commercial breaks, they played a single 15 or 30 second commercial and all of the commercial breaks were for the same company. Although the commercials certainly do break up the show - it is not quite like a DVD - I found that the commercials really did not bother me because they were so short. Actually I found it a better viewing experience than skipping through the commercials on a DVR with the benefit that the advertiser actually has a chance to get a message to me.

In addition to the website that I linked to above, NBC also offers episodes of the show for download on iTunes. Each episode costs $1.99 so I assume that NBC probably charges their website advertisers something less than that.

Given that NBC decided to cancel The Black Donnellys halfway through the season I assume that the series was probably a loser financially, but the fact that NBC was able to make some of their money back through online advertising sales and through iTunes. This probably changes the equation for new episode launches to some extent because the network does not automatically have to forfeit all revenue from the later episodes when they cancel a show. My guess is that networks will probably try to launch more new series to try to find winners because they now have an additional option for monetizing a show that does not pick up a following large enough to justify keeping it in their regular lineup. Hopefully this exciting development will encourage networks to take more risks on innovative programs.