You Have A Great Idea That Will Save Many Lives - But No One Listens

This blog, deep down, is about how we know what we know.  And how people know things that are simply wrong and believe their wrongs deeply.  WHY?

NPR this morning had the story of Ignaz Semmelweis,  a Hungarian doctor in Vienna in 1846  who wondered why five times more women in one clinic got a fever and died after childbirth than in another clinic.

 In the deadlier clinic, the birthing mothers were treated by all male doctors and med students.  In the other clinic they were treated by female midwives.

The story emphasizes that doctors were just beginning to have science education and Semmelweis started gathering data.  He began with the death statistics that showed the big difference between the two clinics.  Why the difference?  What caused it? 

Hypothesis 1:
In the women run clinic, women birthed on their sides, not on their backs as they did in the male run clinic.  When they changed that in the doctors' clinic, it didn't have any effect. 

Hypothesis 2:
The priest who walked through the doctors' ward ringing a bell, terrified the women and caused them to get the fever.  But they still got fever when they changed the priests route and got rid of the bell.

Semmelweiss took a break.  When he came back a doctor had died after he did an autopsy.  From the NPR piece: 

"This often happened to the pathologists," Duffin says. "There was nothing new about the way he died. He pricked his finger while doing an autopsy on someone who had died from childbed fever." And then he got very sick himself and died."

Before this, they thought the fever was restricted to birthing women, but Semmelweiss realized the doctor died of the same things the women were dying.  A big revelation.

Semmelweiss then realized another difference between the two clinics:  the doctors were all doing autopsies, but the midwives weren't.  Was it something about the autopsies?

Hypothesis 3:

"So Semmelweis hypothesized that there were cadaverous particles, little pieces of corpse, that students were getting on their hands from the cadavers they dissected. And when they delivered the babies, these particles would get inside the women who would develop the disease and die.  If Semmelweis' hypothesis was correct, getting rid of those cadaverous particles should cut down on the death rate from childbed fever."

Semmelweis got the doctors to wash their hands and instruments with chlorine water and the deaths dropped dramatically.

Victory!?  Unfortunately, not.  As the piece continues:

"You'd think everyone would be thrilled. Semmelweis had solved the problem! But they weren't thrilled. For one thing, doctors were upset because Semmelweis' hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women. And Semmelweis was not very tactful. He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies. Eventually the doctors gave up the chlorine hand-washing, and Semmelweis — he lost his job."

This doesn't dissect the resistance too deeply, but gives us two factors:

1. ego - the doctors didn't like being seen as the cause of the problem
2. public relations - (and this one is also ego related)  Semmelweis didn't do a good job of marketing his finding

In fact, things didn't go well for Semmelweis after this.

Stories like this tend to make readers smug.  Oh this is terrible!  How could those doctors be so stupid and selfish?  

It makes listeners/readers feel so superior.  But my interest is in the truths all of us listening to this story are rejecting just as the doctors rejected the truth facing them.  Without introspection about what I should reevaluate in my own life, this story has no value.  In fact it could cause harm by making me think I'm superior to those doctors.  I'm not.  We're not.  We all reject inconvenient truths.  Some rejections are trivial.  Some mainly hurt ourselves.  Other rejected truths cause other people serious harm, even death.  

"BP president disputes governor's claims on oil tax"

That was yesterday's (Saturday) headline in the Alaska Dispatch.

I want to note it here, because under Sean Parnell, the oil companies never had to dispute anything with the governor.

I don't know yet that it means anything substantive, but it's refreshing.

There's been a lot of talk about Public Private Partnerships.  So much so that some people just say P3.

Governments have always bought goods and services from private companies.  Partnerships tend to go further and tend to mix governmental and private sector roles.  Theoretically, this can work out well.  Often though, this can be a ploy for the private sector to acquire government assets at low prices, chanting the mantra of the private sector being more efficient than the public sector, and then raising prices and profiteering from the arrangement.  The privatization of parking meters in Chicago seems to be a good example.

Government has a role to perform those functions that the private sector can't or won't perform.

When two people, two businesses, or a government and a business, decide to go into partnership, both sides need to vigorously guard their interests.  The term 'trust, but verify' has been used in diplomacy a lot lately, but it's also a good term for business relationships.

Unfortunately, corporations have a record of gaining leverage in their government partnerships through their support of candidates in elections.  Throughout the world, including the US, large corporations buy key decision makers who then give away government assets and interests.  I have no doubt that banker Frank Murkowski, as governor, was a willing partner with the oil companies and not a strong, cautious, demanding partner.  For whatever reasons, Sarah Palin was much more adversarial with the oil companies.  But her running mate Pat Parnell had been a Conoco -Philips attorney.  Instead of bargaining for the best deal for the state and people of Alaska, Parnell gave the oil companies what they wanted.  Whether he knew he was doing this or whether he has lived in the oil world so long he believed the narrative, I don't know.

But I do know that when businesses work with each other, it's like playing poker.  Each side wants to get the best deal it can from the other.  There's bluffing, there's careful calculation, there's distraction, and eventually there's an agreement, or not.  The positive spin of the word partnership may be the ideal, but competent government representatives know that the other side is out to get the best deal and if they can do it at the expense of the government they will.  Often, government partnerships happen when the private sector companies aren't willing to take the risk themselves and want the government to cover their losses.  The State of Alaska has a history of funding such risky operations - from dairy deals to barley to fish processing, just to name a few.  It was hard for legislators to say no when money was flooding into Juneau.

So this headline brings a little hope that our new governor is willing to stand up to the private sector.  It's only an early sign.  We have to see what the follow up is.  There will be a lot of pressure by the private sector to play the anti-government card.

The Dangerous Machine And Other Distractions

I'm trying to be faithful to my blog, and I have a list of unfinished posts, but I also have other distractions in my life.  As we left Seattle I stopped to empty my pockets right before going through security next to the "Dangerous Machine" credited to Cappy Thompson, Dick Weiss, and James Lobb of Pottery Northwest.

Dangerous Machine - Cappy Thompson, Dick Weiss, James Lobb 

Cappy Thompson created the stained glass window at the south end of Seatac and Dick Weiss has a big one at the north end.

Which leads to another project - organizing my photos so I can find old ones, because somewhere I have a picture of the north stained glass window.  Can you tell I liked the dangerous machine?  It enlarges a little bit if you click on it.  And I still have to learn photoshop's tricks for getting rid of the reflected lights.  The tips I've read are fairly tedious and time consuming.  The best one is use a polarized filter when you take the picture - but that's not an option (to my knowledge) with my Powershot.  I did play a little with the background.

Other Distractions

I'm preparing to teach the capstone class for the public administration MPA this spring.  It's the class where the students find organizations in the community who could use them on some sort of organizational/management analysis project that will allow them to apply the things they've learned in all their other classes.

I'm going through last year's blog posts to see if there is anything good enough to submit to the Alaska Press Club's contest.  Last year's submissions got lost and they sent me my application fee back.  I had good stuff in 2013 - I was still finishing up the redistricting board and I'd covered the Kulluk press conferences.  2014 doesn't have anything quite that substantial.

from the book

And I'm working on a book for my granddaughter's 2nd birthday.  That still has a ways to go and the birthday is coming up soon.


Today I was at the Citizens Climate Lobby meeting and we heard from Shell Oil's climate change advisor, David Hone, who called in from London. (Here's a link to his blog.)  He basically said that Shell knows that climate change is an issue facing earth and is already factoring in a carbon fee into their financial planning.  He said they know there will be action to limit carbon and they prefer a straightforward fee or a cap and trade (their preference) approach to regulation.  These approaches, he claimed, would be equitable for all carbon producers.  (I'm still thinking about that, since one of the maxims I've picked up in my life is that every change has winners and losers.  Is his claim limited enough so that 'carbon producers' would be the 'losers' and the winners would be in other sectors?  Still thinking that through.)  I felt good because the momentum for a carbon fee has grown hugely since I joined CCL a few years ago and CCL has been a key player in changing the political climate for a carbon fee.  One of the stats that I heard that struck me was that CCL local chapters now cover - and I can't find the exact number in my notes - 80 or 90 percent of congressional districts.  That's a key number because the whole strategy of CCL is to have members of congress lobbied by their own constituents.

There had been some protests, we were told on the conference call, to having the Shell guy there.  But the response was that we have to be willing to talk to everyone as human to human if we're going to get things done.  He's message, to a degree, overlaps ours.  But I also blogged the Kulluk fiasco last year and I know that the Shell spokespersons told us as little as they thought they could get away with and in some cases outright lied - such as whether they left Dutch Harbor when they did to avoid paying a tax.

Then I caught a ride over to the library to pick up a book I had on hold (No Land's Man by Aasif Mandvi).  Anchorage legislators were holding a community meeting in the Assembly chambers so I stuck my head in and listened to a teacher talk about the new teacher evaluation system ASD is using after opting out of No Child Left Behind.  She was an award winning teacher who got very emotional as she explained that the new system made it impossible for a teacher to be rated highly.  But she didn't go into enough detail for me, so I followed her out and asked her for more detail.  I've got that on video and so that makes one more post in my line up of unfinished posts.

And then I enjoyed the warm (for Anchorage) 38˚F (according to a bank message board) sunny weather as I walked home.

"Two things I’d never written: a love story and a science play. So I wrote THE ICE-BREAKER."

So writes playwright David Rambo on his website.  Two things I've blogged about are plays and climate change, but I've never written about them in the same post.  Rambo's notes go on:

"Following the success of Randall Arney’s production of GOD’S MAN IN TEXAS at the Geffen Playhouse, I was offered a commission from the Geffen and A.S.K. Theatre Projects. We kicked some ideas around, but nothing stuck – until I read a New Yorker article by the marvelous writer Elizabeth Kolbert about discovering the history of climate over millennia through drilling into the Greenland ice cap. I gave Randall the article with a note, “I think there’s a metaphor here I can’t resist.”
Thus began a year of research about climate science. I sought out geologists and climate specialists, read everything I could find on the Arctic and the logistics of ice core drilling. My initial sense was that the play should be intimate, about people more than science.
To let all the research settle in my mind, I gave myself a retreat: a drive through the southwest in the summer. My route was chased by wildfires, the desert sky turned purple and threatening with hailstorms, I went for days without having to speak to another human – it was an extraordinary couple of weeks.
The play took shape. I loved it, but the Geffen didn’t. Happily, The Magic Theatre in San Francisco did. Director Art Manke introduced it to them and we got a Sloan Foundation grant to help mount a premiere, along with the National New Plays Network. Art later staged it at The Laguna Playhouse, which was about as perfect a realization of the play as I could have hoped for.
THE ICE-BREAKER isn’t produced as much as it should be; maybe some theatres feel climate science is too controversial. That’s a shame; it’s a lovely, heartbreaking, thought-provoking visit with to people as strong and as vulnerable as the planet."

 He ends with this note:

THE ICE-BREAKER isn’t produced as much as it should be; maybe some theatres feel climate science is too controversial. That’s a shame; it’s a lovely, heartbreaking, thought-provoking visit with to people as strong and as vulnerable as the planet.

Well, it's not too controversial for Cyrano's and opening night is tomorrow  Friday at 7pm.
And the opening night proceeds go to Citizens Climate Lobby Anchorage chapter which I've written about now and then.  CCL is the most efficient and organized and no-nonsense group I've ever seen close up.

They will have their international call in meeting Saturday morning after the play at 8:30am at UAA Rasmusson Hall 220.

Quick Seattle Stop

Got to spend a couple of hours with my little shark on the way home.  Including a quick look around at the aquarium.  The octopus was putting on quite a show, I was fighting low light and reflections on the glass.

We left early from LA and it was clear until just before Seattle.  We were in the cloud until a couple of seconds before landing.


Not sure what promotion this plane was about.

Fare enforcement checked tickets and he spent a long time talking to the lady in the center who had just barely gotten on with her stroller and baby.  I was thinking, she was happy when she made the train, but maybe not so much now.  But they seemed to settle whatever it was amicably.  She did have to show id.  

By 3pm the fog was gone, the sky was blue, and the air was clean and not really cold.

So I was busy today and only have a short time to post a little bit before boarding.  But I did see the front page of the ADN and hope to comment on the Pierre McHugh's new job as well as the governor's telling Gasline Commissioners not to sign the non disclosure agreement.   

Inside The Disney

Sunday we went to a concert at the Disney Concert Hall.  I've loved this Frank Gehry building from the first time I saw it, but we'd never been to a concert there.  Here's an earlier post with more pictures of the exterior.








A Sunday afternoon concert also gave us an opportunity to try the
Expo line from Culver City to downtown for the first time too.








We quickly rode along Exposition past USC and the Coliseum and various museums at Exposition Park and were in downtown in less than 30 minutes.  Here's the Pico stop at the Staples Center.  We got out at the 7th St. station and walked around downtown.















I just liked this address.  They're big.  And 8's are  good luck in Hong Kong.

We walked by the LA Police Department - the sign says

#BLMLA Demands:

1.  The immediate firing of the the officers who killed Ezell Ford
2.  The Immediate filing of murder charges by DA Jackie Lacy

The curb says “Trees Matter - this concrete is illegal - Let us grow."

Eventually we were inside the Disney.  I loved the hall and the acoustics were great.  I wasn't expecting too much from the concert - a New Year's Concert Salute To Vienna - which seems now to be a syndicated package of concert entertainment, piggy backing off the live concerts from Vienna.  The program lists groups of singers, dancers, and conductor going to various US cities.  One group to Philadelphia, New York, New Brunswick, Scranton, and DC.  Another to Coral Springs, West Palm Beach, and Miami.  Yet another to Florida - Clearwater, For Myers, and Sarasota.  One to San Diego and LA.  And one concert in Austin.  But the music in the hall sounded good and I was particularly taken by the voice of baritone Thomas Weinhappel.

Here's the orchestra warming up before the concert.

Then we left and took the train back to Culver City and drove home.


Can you tell I'm rushed?  I've got a bunch of posts and other tasks open but not finished.  The cold LA weather has changed to hot again.  And we're getting ready to head home.  Lots to do.

Jonathan's Lemon Tree

We drove out to San Bernadino the other day to visit former Alaskans Jonathan and Mary Anderson.  Jonathan's now chair of the public administration department at Cal State San Bernadino.

Here's Jonathan picking us some lemons from his very loaded lemon tree.  Their house is on land that long ago was a lemon grove and the neighborhood has lots of citrus trees.

This is their orange tree.  And no, that isn't snow.  It's white rocks.  But they had had a freeze the night before, and Jonathan thought we needed to go for a drive up to the mountains - a quick half hour up to about 4500 feet above sea level.

Southern California isn't always clear.  Sometimes it's just moisture from the ocean and other times it's smog.  It seemed to be a combination of both.

He found us some snow.

There wasn't much to see in the arboretum at this time.

Headed back home.

Something To Chew On While Squeezed Into Coach When It's A Toasty 0˚ Out

A few things I ran into or got sent my way lately that are worth thinking about.


1. Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer  BY TIM WU

"JetBlue distinguished itself by providing decent, fee-free service for everyone, an approach that seemed to be working: passengers like the airline,  and it made a  consistent profit. Wall Street analysts, however, accused JetBlue of being “overly brand-conscious and customer-focussed.” In November, the airline, under new management, announced that it would follow United, Delta, and the other major carriers by cramming more seats into economy, shrinking leg room, and charging a range of new fees for things like bags and WiFi."

Wu argues that it pays airlines to make you suffer so passengers have to pay to suffer less - buy food, buy an aisle seat, buy a digiplayer, etc.  With all the flying we've been doing to visit my mom, we've enjoyed the benefits of 'elite status' on Alaska Airlines.  But that will end eventually and we'll become cattle again.  And Alaskans don't really have the options like driving,  or taking  buses or trains.  A key point in the article is the lack of competition.  Probably the most evil aspect of all the airline charges for me is the change fee.  It's totally gouging the flier.  If you change online, it costs the airline nothing (or practically nothing.)  And since most flights are full anyway nowadays, changes won't cost them seats, especially if they graduate the fee from nothing to something the week before the flight.  And the anguish they cause people who want to change, but would take a big financial hit if they did, is real.  It's one of those "just because we can" fees.


2. S sent me this long Outdoors article on how fake meat is going to revolutionize eating, save energy, and reduce global warming.

"I dumped meat a few weeks ago, and it was not an easy breakup. Some of my most treasured moments have involved a deck, a beer, and a cheeseburger. But the more I learned, the more I understood that the relationship wasn’t good for either of us. A few things you should never do if you want to eat factory meat in unconflicted bliss: write a story on water scarcity in the American Southwest;  How much shit is in my hamburger?'; watch undercover video of a slaughterhouse in action; and read the 2009 Worldwatch Institute report 'Livestock and Climate Change." [UPDATED Jan 23, 2020:  Thanks to reader Lisa for alerting me that this link was no longer working and supplying another place to find the report.  Link fixed for now.]

It has cameo parts by Bill Gates and NY Times food writer, Mark Bittman.  It focuses on Beyond Meat where they are rethinking how to get the taste and texture of meat from plants.  As a mostly vegetarian who believes the meat industry is bad for animals and bad for the environment and for consumers' health, this all sounds like good news.  But there's still a part of me that knows that every solution has its own new problems. 



3.  Another unfortunate layout design in Alaska Dispatch News this week.   Do I even need to explain why I think this photo should not be next to this headline and story?  As a blogger I understand how easy it is to miss this sort of thing.  This is just friendly teasing.  But it's two like this in two months.  
*The screenshot is from the online version of the paper edition that you need a subscription.

4.  And the Los Angeles Times had a front page article on Anchorage's first year with no temperatures below zero degrees.  The title, "Temperatures in 2014 were too toasty for Alaska,"  reflects Outsiders' wit when it comes to Alaska.    Never mind that no one in Anchorage thinks of 0˚F as toasty, except maybe after two weeks of  -20˚, which hasn't happened in many, many years.  The point isn't that it's toasty, but that the warming temperatures, which anyone who's lived in Alaska for 20 years or more can attest to, is changing everything from when we plant in the spring, to the amount of ice we have to deal with on sidewalks and streets, and the wildlife we see, and the disappearing acts of nearby glaciers..  Throughout the state, it's melting permafrost, which, besides affecting roads and structures built on permafrost, also is beginning to release methane.On the positive side, that stereotypical impression keeps people from moving to Alaska.
It's also interesting that while the Alaska weather, cutesy headline and all, was on the front page, a more prosaically titled article, "California was Warmest in 2014" showed up on page 3 of the California section of the paper.  (Actually, the online version I linked to shows that the Times does like the word "Toasty" when talking about weather.)

Parking Ticket Follow Up

I wrote about a parking ticket I got Monday night.  I felt I had done what was reasonable to figure out the parking restrictions on this block with six parking places - all identical curb marking and parking meters- except it turned out the last two were passenger loading only.


We happened to be on that street tonight (Friday) coming home and I thought, let's see if people are parked there tonight.

Well, it's Friday night, and this is what it looked like:

The two parking places that are passenger loading, were clearly marked off with the valet parking sign at the point where the 5th parking space on the block begins.  I've circled the parking meters in yellow.  There's no way anyone would miss this.

Looking back from the parking meter where we parked (circled in yellow again), there's the umbrella and valet parking set up.

OK, with this extra signage, it's clear not to park there.  There were no signs on Monday.  A car was parked in the fifth space and we parked in the sixth space - the two metered spots starting where the valet parking sign is in the street to the umbrella and attendant stand.

So, from the restaurant's point of view - they only intended this for the weekends.  Yet the parking enforcement is ticketing people on other days of the week.  We were there Monday.  There was no valet parking then and no reason for people to avoid those parking spots.  Or any reasonable way to figure it out unless you were OCD or had been burned by the LA Parking Authority before.

OK, before someone writes to explain OCD and why I'm wrong, I'm using hyperbole.  OCD is usually for behaviors like washing hands, locking doors, turning off the stove, etc.  But if someone lived in LA and had to find a new parking place everyday, they too might keep checking to make sure there wasn't some sign on the block that had a special application to the space they were in, even though the signs they did check said it was ok to park.

[UPDATE Jan 28:  The resolution at  this post]

Famous People Born 1915: It Was A Very Good Year 2

I'm going to send you to the original post here  that has video and pictures and a list of 37 folks who were born in 1915 and made names for themselves. I'm afraid the coding for the table was too big for Feedburner to send it to other blogrolls. I tried to make it simpler but after redoing the chart, I did something that screwed up all the formatting.

Image from here.

 This post gives me a chance to add a few pictures and a video that weren't in the original as a teaser.

This quote from Alan Watts (born Jan 6, 1915) seems an appropriate one for a post like this.

Image from Wouk website

And novelist Herman Wouk, born May 27, 1915 and one of three on the list who are still alive.














Or this short video of Anthony Quinn (born April 21, 1915) as Zorba.