Nobody is allowed to steal my kidneys

Just got off captioning the Ohio senate, where along with various expansions to concealed carry by convicts they decided to impose a stricter standard on judges who grant abortions to minors who can't get parental consent, requiring the judges to ask whether the minors have been coached and to demand a full explanation of exactly why the minor feels she is ready for an abortion and how well she understands the complications that could ensue. They did this because 92% of judges now grant the minor the abortion.

On the face of it, this sort of seems reasonable -- the language was very "protect this poor child who might not realize what she's doing, or who might be hiding this abortion from a parent who would love her anyway" -- but ultimately it's a twisted view of what is going on. In order to go before a court in this type of case, you have to hire a lawyer, file several briefs, and wait a while. Probably you've already thought about it. You've certainly already talked to a lot of adults, like your lawyer and your doctor and whoever is going to ultimately perform the abortion if granted. Of course most judges are going to grant it -- you wouldn't be at this point if it wasn't really, really important to you. And if there was any chance your parents were going to be on your side, you'd have gone with that.

Abortion is unfortunate and can have medical and emotional complications. That's a reality I'm happy to acknowledge. But for god's sake, childbirth can have medical and emotional complications, especially if you're not ready for it. If you are, for instance, 14. Giving a baby up for adoption has emotional complications. Raising a child has emotional complications. Ultimately, of these scenarios, I would suggest that a first-trimester abortion is less emotionally complicated and less medically dangerous than any other option. By the time you get to abortion, the tragic and emotionally upsetting thing has already happened. It's too late. Why are we putting these kids through this?

Tales From Decrypt

I'm good at math, but I don't have a mathematical mind; I'm a code breaker, not a number theorist. I mean, I'll derive the hell out of your curves, but I'm not really interested in generating my own model. Statistic/econonometric literate, not authorial. I debug; I don't program. I enjoy accounting from a logic puzzle standpoint, but as an auditor I think double entry is stupid.

Point being it is very easy for me to work out the right answer to an equation, but that's not connected to knowing what the equation means. (I hated geometric proofs.) Somebody has to tell me, or I'm probably not going to find out; I have neither the intuition nor the compulsion to know.

By the time I left calculus, I was on higher level stuff called LaPlace transforms. I studied engineering, remember. I knew they had something to do with electricity because they were in the electrical engineering department. But really the variables could have been anything.

Yesterday, I was captioning a FERC conference, and they were talking about stochastic models to estimate the unit cost in a variable power system -- one in which, say, your electrical grid includes a wind farm. We don't have the computational power yet to forecast weather with enough granularity to be sure of how much power we're going to get out of that wind farm on a given day, and we need to be able to guess whether we can take a unit offline for maintenance, and how much to charge customers, and how much energy to reserve and all kinds of stuff we just don't have to worry about with a nuclear plant. So this is the big thing right now and a lot of mathematicians and physicists are working on it. It's exciting.

While they were describing the new stochastic models they're working on, they compared them to older methods we've traditionally used . . . and it dawned on me they were talking LaPlace. It was/is a method of modeling a variable system and using that to describe a range of possible data outcomes. I think. That's what it is.

As an analogy for English majors, this is like spending years thinking that . . . I don't know. It's not really like anything. It's like the five year gap between when I started multiplying matrixes by each other and when I figured out they were coordinates and velocities. I feel very satisfied. It is like being the guy who broke PURPLE but didn't know Japanese, if someone then read him the translated telegram. I never needed to know -- that was never the point for me -- but it sure is satisfying.

In other news, a trip to the periodontist has added another tool to my arsenal, which now means I use no fewer than five seperate utensils each night (sometimes as many as seven) applying to my teeth, three of which are different specialized brushes. Also, my toothpaste is prescription. My teeth are frickin' diva.