I’m sure that the folks on American Samoa are comforted

Tsunami in South Pacific islands kills nearly 100.

But, …

And, here’s a bit about what happened, from New Scientist: What caused the Samoa islands tsunami?

Wait. What?!

BONE, according to The Free Dictionary, is shorthand for B-1 (B-One). There. I’ll be you feel a lot better.
You folks in or near Bangor. You might want to, um, keep an eye on the skies and, um, be prepared to, oh, I don’t know, run away.

Pirate radio stations in Worcester

No, not that kind.
When riding around the city today, I picked up a couple of radio stations that are not listed in the radio-locator.com database for licensed full-power radio stations. (There are 71 radio stations that may be within distant listening range of Worcester, Massachusetts. (42° 16′ 08″ N, 71° 48′ 14″ W)).

102.9

This is a new one for me. The broadcast that I heard earlier today included an extended bit of west African music, but with a lot of background talking. Then, at the top of hour (9AM), it mentioned something about “94.7FM talk.” At first, I thought it might be a rebroadcast of Asempa 94.7FM. I’ve not been able to sync the online stream with what’s coming over the air, so I can’t confirm. radio-locator.com lists this frequency as unused:

105.5

These folks, Flava 105.5 – FM, have been around for a while. Their format is reggae/Caribbean, with some pretty wild preaching on Sunday. The signal is ok around the city and, almost as if there was a wire fence, drops off completely at the city line on the north and east. 105.5 is located in Easthampton and is a rebroadcaster of Boston’s WEEI.

A check of Scan New England shows some mention of both broadcast frequencies, but not a lot of detail. I welcome any further information.

OntheCommon.com – Why Holden needs three pharmacy chains

OntheCommon.com – Why Holden needs three pharmacy chains

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Is that a … in your pocket? Oh. It is. Well, have a seat, friend.

Some of us don’t need reasons to stay out of bars, but here’s one more, just in case one is in Arizona.
Guns allowed in Arizona bars starting Wednesday.

Finding true north

Research is confirming what we’ve demonstrated empirically, that people who are lost will walk in circles, all the while convinced that they’re walking in a straight line.
Recently, my wife’s car, a 2000 Avalon, needed a new alternator, requiring that the battery be disconnected while the mechanic worked on the car. As a result, the cool dashboard display widgets needed to be reset. Setting the date and time wasn’t much a problem. We drove away, everything fine until we noticed that the on-board compass was off by about 110^°. We’d be going north and the compass read southwest.
After mucking around with the controls for a very long time, we finally reached the end of the line, the bleak wilderness of unknowing that brought us to the next desperate step – we read the fine manual. (For the record, Sandra and I have a combined 60 years of technical writing experience.)
Here’s what we found:

Drive in circles. That’s what they tell us to do. Drive in circles until the car figures out where magnetic north is located.
A 10-year-old car with 150,000 miles can find north by going in circles. As humans, we go in circles and all we find is more circles.
Oh, and did you like the nice way that Toyota suggests that we obey traffic laws and run into or over people or things during this calibration drill?

On risk and the news

We’ve seen the ads, made the jokes, and then said, you know, it’s probably not a bad idea to have one of these gadgets. My mother had one during the last months of her life. We didn’t have to use it, but she and we were more comfortable because of it.
And then comes this news:

A further search shows that the headline writers amp’d it up a bit.

It’s not too frantic, but it’s also a reminder how poorly we assess risk. This story, after all, talks about six cases of serious injury or death since 1998. For the people who experienced these injuries, the risk was 100%.
Statistically, though, it’s much, much more dangerous to have a cat. The CDC estimates that cats and dogs cause 86,000 nofatal falls per year. The number of deaths associated with per-related falls hasn’t been reported, but, given the number of falls overall, we can infer that the number of deaths is greater than six.
Not only that, but canes and walkers cause 47,000 fall injuries.
Just as an aside, the Centers for Disease Control has an elaborate set of recommendations regarding fall-prevention. Their definitive document, Preventing Falls: What Works A CDC Compendium of Effective Community-based Interventions from Around the World. ( 14.5MB, 102 pages)
, doesn’t mention canes, walkers, or pets at all. Lots of stuff about exercise, community programs, and ‘multifaceted intervention.” Nothing about Poochy lying on the floor in a darkened hallway.
Anyway, this is all a reminder that we often miss simple, abundant, and major risks because we concentrate so much on the rare but spectacular. Psychology Today describes 10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong. For example,

After 9/11, 1.4 million people changed their holiday travel plans to avoid flying. The vast majority chose to drive instead. But driving is far more dangerous than flying, and the decision to switch caused roughly 1,000 additional auto fatalities, according to two separate analyses comparing traffic patterns in late 2001 to those the year before. In other words, 1,000 people who chose to drive wouldn’t have died had they flown instead.

If you want to play with some numbers about mortality risk, take a look at this site: Death Risk Rankings.
In sum, be careful. but remember that your risk of dying from lightning is much greater than from your emergency call necklace.

Look out, Princesses, here comes the Estrogen Express

Five years ago, we took the family to Disney World and Miss Cassie, who was not yet born, has not let us forget it. She wasn’t impressed with the explanation that she got to go on all the rides while inside her mother’s tummy. Nope, she wanted the real deal, Princesses on every street corner, talking crabs and crickets, water slides, fireworks, and some mouse named Mickey. And, did I mention Princesses?
So, in a confluence of milestone birthdays and a bit of money left to us by my thrifty father, we decided that it was a good time for another trip. Further, we decided that we’d match Disney’s princesses with princesses of our own. So, Sandra, our daughters-in-law, Lynn and Jennie, and granddaughter, Krista, Tess, Lily (whose 10th birthday is today), and the aforementioned, one and only, Cassie, are in Disney World this week.

Mike and I drove the gang to Logan this morning. At this writing, noon on Monday, they have landed safely and are at the park. They’re scheduled for a late Princess Storybook Dining lunch.

Say what you will about Disney’s marketing mojo with the whole Princess brand thing. There’s one four-year-old who is so happy that she’s about to hit her resonance frequency.

Fix it in documentation – prescription drugs

Consumer Reports and other outlets are reporting that Diabetes drugs Januvia, Janumet may pose dangerous risk. The article notes that there have been reports of 88 cases of acute pancreatitis in patients taking these drugs.
And, so how does the FDA tell the pharmaceutical manufacturer to deal with this dangerous side effect. By updating the documentation, of course.

I hope that my fellow students are smarter at the end of the semester

In the parking lot at Quinsigamond Community College. These are cellphone pictures because I was on my way to take the first quiz of the course.
First, these don’t look 15-passenger vans to me: