Author Archives: Ponderer

About Ponderer

Ponderer also writes science fiction and science-inspired rhyming poetry. Check her out at katerauner.wordpress.com/ She worked at Rocky Flats for 22 years - you may know her as Kathy London.

Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

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appleThe Washington Post did a piece on this saying, quoting author Caroline Taggart,  saying it was first used in the 1860s as a longer rhyming couplet that has become more succinct over time. A phrase from the 1860s is recent to Taggart, though “The fruit also pops up in traditional Ayurvedic medicine, dating back about 1,500 years in southern Asia,” though the word “apple” could mean any round fruit grown on a tree.

Skeptics SE mentions an Italian version of the saying. The UK’s Phrase Finder specifies the source as the1866 edition of Notes and Queries magazine which quoted this as a Pembrokeshire proverb, so the phrase was already in use.

The Power and Fun of Mathematical Thinking

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How Not To Be WrongHow Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg is a fun book to read; perhaps surprising since the topic is mathematics. Ellenberg begins by saying the seemingly pointless drills primary school students complain of are akin to practice in sports. This hooked me immediately, since I think too many people believe you somehow “understand” math when you read a textbook and then can “do it”.  Ellenberg says “if you want to play soccer… you’re going to be spending lots of boring weekends on the practice field. There’s no other way.” It’s the same with math. An ability to perform basic operations is important to thinking since, as he observes, it would be hard to write a sonnet if you had to look up the spelling of each word as you worked.

Ellenberg does object to some of the way math is taught. Calculating “is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense – or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place – requires a guiding human hand… A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.”

His engaging style is evident throughout the book. I laughed out loud several times, and I urge you to read the footnotes – they’re often funny. For example, when introducing Leonard Jimmy Savage, a pioneer of decision theory and Bayesian statistics, Ellenberg adds this footnote: “Savage… at one point spent six months living only on pemmican in order to prove a point about Arctic exploration. Just thought that was worth mentioning.” Continue reading →

Rocky Flats Benefit Changes – Another in a String of Reductions

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This blog was started to document the truth about the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Rocky Flats Plant, which purified and fabricated plutonium and other parts for nuclear weapons at a relatively small site sixteen miles northwest of Denver. Last week, RF_Alum posted on changes to retirement benefits for these “Cold War Warriors”. This week I will explain how I lost my retirement benefits, despite twenty-two years of service at the plant.

At the time, the retirement calculation used at DOE sites considered both years of service and age of the employee, so when I left in 2003 I would have qualified for a full retirement package except for one problem: Twenty months short of earning my retirement, I was laid off from the prime-contractor and shifted to a job with a subcontractor (or “third tier” company).  Time with such a subcontractor didn’t “count”.  The day I was laid off, the Human Resources representative handed me my twenty-year service award, thanked me for my loyalty, and held her breath hoping I wouldn’t explode.

I thanked the nice HR lady (it wasn’t her fault) and left her office shaking my head.  The next day I reported to my subcontractor job.  The DOE still wanted my labor, but they didn’t want to follow through on the promise of retirement benefits that had been part of my compensation package for twenty years.

The DOE had wanted to keep turn-over rates low. The promised retirement encouraged employees like me to stay at the Flats, and this benefited the nation since hiring, paying for security clearance investigations, and developing employee expertise cost a lot of money.

America’s needs changed when the Cold War fizzled out.  Continue reading →

Freakonomics Thinking

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FreakI quickly devoured this short book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  Freakonomics “relies on data rather than hunch or ideology to understand how the world works.”  This appeals to me since I try to make decisions based on evidence, and get a kick out of discovering that what I think I know ain’t always so.  Readers should not feel alone in holding mistaken assumptions; Levitt and Dubner note that many of the “experts” we hear from in the media are more noteworthy for confidence than accuracy.

Think Like a Freak offers to teach anyone how to solve problems.  “Solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it.” So we need more people who can find root causes of problems.

The book is easy to read, filled with delightful examples of their method, and only occasionally bumps into controversial issues that elicit strong emotions.

They concentrate on problems that are entertaining. For example:

  • Why a kicker in World Cup level play might choose a strategy that leads to fewer goals,
  • How they blew their chance to offer a future British Prime Minister advice,
  • Why medieval trial-by-ordeal often identified the guilty, and
  • Why demanding venues provide M&Ms with the brown candies removed was a practical move on the part of a rock band.

They emphasize that conventional wisdom is often wrong and correlation does not equal causality.  This leads to a controversial issue that they have addressed in greater detail before.  Continue reading →

Eat Crow

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A friend recently made a mistake and had to decide whether to admit his error.  It reminded me of the expression, to “eat crow”.

According to Wikipedia, this “is an American colloquial idiom, meaning humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proved wrong after taking a strong position…  crow is one of the birds listed in Leviticus chapter 11 as being unfit for eating,” perhaps because it eats carrion.  They note the expression first appeared in print in a humor piece in 1850 (reference Comments on Etymology, October 2003).  WorldWideWords also mentions a usage in 1850, where it appeared as “eating boiled crow”.  I found some references to a story of an American forced to eat a crow by a British soldier, and though the story is set during the War of 1812, it was published in 1877, according to WordWizard.

The full expression my friend’s dilemma brought to mind is something I read (and now I can’t find the source – does anyone know where this came from?): if you’re going to eat crow, it tastes better when it’s fresh

The Rubber Hits the Road

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The phrase “the rubber hits the road” means when something begins, gets serious, or when an idea is put into practice.  Its source, I think, is obvious – it must refer to where an automobile tire contacts pavement and, therefore, has traction.  But I wondered how well it was documented.

Know Your Phrase reports the earliest written usage was in a 1956 newspaper article, where the phrase was stated as “when the rubber meets the road” and notes The Modern American Usage: A Guide, first published in 1966, mentions “the rubber hits the road” was gaining popularity.

Wiktionary lists a book from 1928, How to Avoid Automobile Accident: “Even 500 feet probably wouldn’t allow you to brake to a stop, because it’s ‘where the rubber meets the road‘ that counts.”

American Culture Explained (now there’s an ambitious website) states that racing is the source, though they offer no reference.

One thread of comments mentioned a recent version: “when the rubber hits the sky“, used for a humorous, purposely-mixed metaphor meaning “where practicality meets pie-in-the-sky visions.”

Since the first mass-produced car – the Ford Model T – was introduced in 1908, it seems that the phrase didn’t take long to become popular.