I told MFH the other night that it seemed like things were starting to crystallize a little; a couple of little things suddenly came clear for me. Well, once crystallization starts, it can take off very rapidly.

One of those little seed crystals was that I made a more substantial writing journal–MFH long ago settled on one particular style of notebook that he always carries around, but I used random frugally-acquired notebooks, or loose paper. But somehow the cover from an old altered book I had started a long time ago, and old paper left over from my grandmother’s teaching days, came together in some quick-and-dirty bookbinding, and now I have a book-shaped journal, with lots of pages, and room to paste things in. And I think that it is a style that I will stick with.

Stale: not up-to-date, item used to be true but now is not.

Incomplete: some items unknown.

Inaccurate: some items are wrong; “noise” or “static”.

Imprecise: information present, but fuzzy.

Trivial: true, but not useful.

Uneconomical: costs too much to find out, or too much to filter.

Out-of-range: answer didn’t really match the question.

Yesterday I did skim through their preprint on Arxiv, and was happy to discover that they were at least somewhat meticulous in eliminating or limiting sources of error–which is never easy, particularly at the scales they are working at.

Possible sources of error include the distance and time measurements. They think they have the distance pinned down to within about 20 cm, over 739 km. At that distance, they have to account for tidal forces (pull of the moon’s gravity).

For time, the clocks are very accurate, but I wonder if the position of the clocks is as precise. One criticism of their work is that they haven’t accounted for relativistic effects in the relative motion between the GPS satellites and the Earth. It is small, but probably enough to have to be taken into account. And what if the satellite wobbles a little?

(NYT article)

1. Look for opportunities in unlikely places. SBIR opportunities are distributed over a wide variety of federal departments. You can also partner with another company on a SBIR proposal, or with a university researcher on a STTR proposal.

2. Leverage existing technology for your proposed solution. This helps build confidence in your idea. But there does need to be a significant amount of innovative research, you can’t propose to just re-invent the wheel.

3. It is vital for the proposal to tell a good story. The story line: There’s a problem, an unfilled need out in the world, your employees are the best ones to fix it, and this is how you propose to go about it. Have a logical progression of ideas throughout the proposal.

4. Be realistic about what you can accomplish for the money. Have a well-thought-out, detailed budget for the project, and reasonable deliverables. If you win the proposal, you will be expected to perform the promised work for the amount of the proposal award.

5. Back up your proposal with passion–have enthusiasm for the project. If there is a contact person for your proposal topic (depends on the offering), call them, put out feelers for what they are looking for, and start to sell them on your idea and your small business.

6. Write it to be read. Initially, reviewers will sift through a large number of proposals. Later on, they will read a few of them them very closely. Your proposal needs to read well at both levels. Have some helpful, uncluttered graphics to illustrate the basics of your approach and visually relieve large chunks of text.

7. Follow the submission directions to the letter. I personally know of one case where the proposal reviewers measured the text in proposal printouts with a ruler, to make sure that a smaller-than-allowed font hadn’t been used. Keep the budget close to, but under, the maximum allowed for the proposal. The proposal should include all the sections that they ask for, and in the right order. Dot the i’s, cross the t’s, spellcheck, and submit it in the right file format.

8. Submit your proposal a little early. Sometimes servers bog down as the deadline approaches and everyone is trying to submit their proposal at the last minute.

9. Work hard, but don’t put all your eggs into any one proposal, and….

10. Be persistent. Odds are that you will have to submit a number of proposals before you win.

Work $1.23
Church $9.43
Grocery stores $0.41, $1.23
Library $1.23
Garden $1.64
Arboretum $2.46
Co-op $1.64
Grandma’s house $24.60
Rest of the family (vacation) $307 and up

MFH tells me that the car is getting much better gas mileage since the transmission rebuild.

The cost calculation is simple:
Divide the cost ($) per gallon by the car’s miles per gallon, then multiply that by the miles to drive.

1. There might not be anything better to do. Where I come from, local economic opportunities for females are basically limited to babysitter, cook, and serf. At least I got to use my intellectual gifts in graduate school, and I was paid slightly more than minimum wage for it (so I got a Ph.D without any student loan debt at all).

2. Get your parents’ tax dollars back. Many science grad students are supported by federal research funding, as I was.

3. Contributions to science. Graduate students (i.e. cheap, educated labor) are doing most of the hands-on scientific research at universities these days. At least one of my graduate projects produced results that are still useful today.

4. Lifestyle. If you pick the right university (not a top-ranked one, and one that’s in a nice place to live), and the right advisor (one that’s not a slave driver), you can live pretty well, at least in your off hours.

5. Bragging rights for life. A Ph.D in a hard science is definitely an accomplishment.

6. Valuable austerity training. Five and a half years of living on an income only slightly above the poverty line was good practice for building a family on a single income. I feel relatively wealthy now that we’re debt-free again and have an income roughly double the federal poverty threshold for our family size.

7. Economic versatility. From my experience, it appears that large companies automatically reject any resume that lists a Ph.D degree. It is their loss more than mine; I’ve worked for a dynamic small company and for myself instead, and have learned a lot that I would never have learned in a large organization.

Many of the BoingBoing commenters essentially used this argument: Vaccines come from Science, Science is Good, therefore people who don’t get themselves or their children vaccinated must be Stupid, Ignorant, and/or Evil! Only a few demonstrated any understanding beyond this level. So much for real scientific literacy.

The Vox Day commenters, on the other hand, demonstrated a much better understanding of the scientific and political issues behind current vaccination policy, and brought actual scientific evidence into their arguments.

In my book, I based my discussion of vaccines on information from the Centers for Disease Control website. I used their healthcare provider information pages, because their parent information pages are dumbed-down to the point of being painful for me to read. Straight from the CDC (which is thoroughly in favor of vaccination) I learned:

1. Some vaccines are only 80-90% effective. That’s a 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 chance of receiving absolutely no benefit from the vaccine.

2. Vaccines can have serious adverse effects in some individuals, and if there is a severe reaction, further vaccination with that vaccine should be avoided. (With so many vaccines being given at a time, and in combination shots, it’s basically impossible these days to isolate which vaccine caused a bad reaction.) So it is well known that vaccines are not 100% safe. The federal National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out over $1.8 billion, over about twenty years, in claims and legal costs.

3. The vaccine schedule is constantly being revised and extended. One of the goals of the schedule is to maximize vaccination rates, so most of the shots are stacked up in infancy, when doctor’s visits are more frequent.

Since it can take several doses of a vaccine to build up full immunity, often an infant ages out of the danger zone for a disease before they are fully vaccinated for it. I’ve read, but not confirmed to my own satisfaction, that the whooping cough vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission of the virus, but only provides enough immunity to take the whoop out of the cough.

No one has done any real research into the effects of the full vaccine schedule on infants. It is known that children’s immune systems are not fully developed when they are born. Vaccines have been linked to various auto-immune disorders, but there has not been nearly enough research on this.

There is some scientific and medical bias in favor of vaccines, which probably tends to exaggerate the benefits, and underestimate the risks. There are definitely cases where severe vaccine reactions have been pooh-poohed by doctors, and never reported to the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System.

I have a Time-Life Health and Disease book from 1980 which admits that it’s simply not practical to vaccinate for every disease under the sun, and particularly not for diseases that mutate easily and have many strains in circulation.

As Vox Day points out, vaccination is as much a political issue as a scientific one. Vaccine manufacturers are protected from litigation. Use of their products is practically mandated for the mainstream; guaranteed customer base and profits for vaccine manufacturers. So the trend has been to create vaccines for more and more diseases, and to hype the risks of these diseases to boost vaccination rates. There is also the issue of individual rights versus public health, and whether vaccination should be an individual choice or not.

I am not totally opposed to vaccines. I don’t know enough about the Wakefield case to know whether his research was fraudulent or not. There are definitely some authors and lawyers who benefit financially from opposing vaccination. Not every case of getting sick after getting a shot was caused by the vaccination itself; doctor’s offices are full of very nasty germs.

Like Vox Day, my preference is for selective vaccination, based on potential benefits and risks. That’s not easy when most of the information provided to parents is vastly oversimplified, and strongly biased in favor of vaccines (to the point that some doctors will drop patients for not vaccinating).

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Now transitioning to thinking about more mundane illnesses like colds….

I’ve read a few accounts recently of people living in total isolation. They were remarkably healthy until outsiders came to visit. In the case of the discovery of the New World, the outsiders brought smallpox and other diseases that decimated the population. In the case of the suburban family who went to live in the Canadian wilderness for a year, contact with civilization reliably brought colds and sniffles. And a similar story for modern small-island populations…when a ship comes, it brings the latest cold viruses, and everyone gets sick. Then somewhere yesterday I read a comment from an old guy who said, “I haven’t had a cold in years, because I had them all when I was younger!”

I’ve begun to suspect that our family schedule of staying home during the week and going out and about on weekends is suboptimal. I’ve had to practically plan my weekly schedule on the assumption that some of us will be sick by Tuesday or Wednesday. I think we’d be better off either going out every day and taking in a more constant bombardment of germs (since one generally only gets sick with one bug at a time; the ramped-up immune system disposes of the rest more easily), or staying home for longer periods.

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to outline the surprising benefits of not paying attention. Sometimes, too much focus can backfire; all that caffeine gets in the way. For instance, researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity—people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. Other studies have found that employees are more productive when they’re allowed to engage in “Internet leisure browsing” and that people unable to concentrate due to severe brain damage actually score above average on various problem-solving tasks.

It parallels something that I said in my book about how creative frugality requires some priming of the brain: first in loading it up with seemingly irrelevant information, and then in taking time to just play and put ideas together in new ways. (I also advocated for Sabbaths and feasts as breaks from physical and financial routines.) To quote myself: “Downtime is just as important as up time; this is one of the secrets of the highest achievers.” (The whole book is a product of many years of goofing-off reading, actually.)

There was also something in the Make: issue that just arrived (vol. 25), about “The Art of Productive Procrastination” that I’ve found to hold true for me:

I gave up on trying to do exactly what I was meant to be doing in favor of always doing something. Frankly, I’m not sure we’re designed to focus on only one thing for eight or ten hours in a row. I’ve always found that it’s useful to have something else to be doing when you’re too burnt out to face the next thing on your list. That way, flipping back and forth between the two projects prevents focus fatigue.

And that reminds me of this old post from Joel on Software:

What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I’ve realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding. When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I’ve found the same thing to be true. I feel a little bit guilty when I see how hard everybody else seems to be working, and I get about two or three quality hours in a day, and still I’ve always been one of the most productive members of the team. That’s probably why when Peopleware and XP insist on eliminating overtime and working strictly 40 hour weeks, they do so secure in the knowledge that this won’t reduce a team’s output.

When I was working, I found that thirty hours a week was more than enough to capture all of my potential productivity.

Dawkins, and many of the BoingBoing commenters, assume that Christian faith and science are so incompatible that Christian scientists (small s) must be practically insane from the cognitive dissonance. They are wrong.

It is perfectly possible (and reasonable) to proceed with scientific research under the working assumption that no supernatural entities will interfere, while simultaneously believing that that assumption does not hold generally true. In my personal experience, God’s interventions in the physical universe almost always consist of making events that are highly improbable–but not physically impossible–happen at suspiciously appropriate times.

The atheists’ attitude also does no justice to Christians who are honestly trying to reconcile the facts of their faith with scientific facts.