Safetogototown

  My Medals (yes I am bragging) Unfortunately a blog tends to become a series of random thoughts and musings.  Despite of my efforts to avoid this my last couple of blogs have tended to a level of randomness that I am not comfortable with.  So it is back to the beginning.  This weeks entry I am going to discuss decisions and why they are important.  I hope to tie in the previous blogs and provide a framework for the remaining blogs.  I would also like to discuss a few items that I am not trying to promote. Starting with my final thought, the things I am not promoting.  As I mentioned in my previous blog I am not providing a framework to support or refute a particular point of view.  In making a decision to do assess the validity of information.  If we determine that certain information is inaccurate we simply move on to other sources.  One important element of this is the motives of the person or persons supplying the information.  ...

  Random Graph In my last post I identified one asset that we all share when wading into fields of knowledge that we are unfamiliar with.  We all have the capacity to understand a great many things.  We can understand many more things than we give ourselves credit for.  Even though we are not experts in a particular technology we can use our experiences to understand a situation well enough to make an informed decision.  This ability to understand things in no way implies that we know everything.  That is why we need to do some leg work.  This leg work allows us to understand the different elements of a field and how they affect us. I listened to Jon Stewart's pod cast with Steve Hanke today.  After 10 minutes my head was about to explode.  Here is the link to the you tube site: Jon Stewart, Steve Hanke Steve Hanke is a professor of economics from John Hopkins University.  His input provides many examples of the issues we all face when t...

My Town McKinney, TX  My original theme for this blog and as the title indicates is deciding if it was safe to go into town.  Unless one has been under a rock for the last 3 years this has been a question we have all asked ourselves.  Today I am going to discuss how to understand scientific information when one is not a scientist.  More and more we are forced to make decisions based on technologies that none of us a trained in.  Even if we are not making life or death decisions we are constantly assessing information and generating thoughts and conclusions.  Just watching the national news we are exposed to physics (Ukraine and weapon systems), microbiology (covid and Monkey Pox), and climatology (hurricanes/tornadoes/heat waves etc.).  These examples are more to the definitive side of the technology spectrum.  They can be tested and the data used to support or deny a claim.  What about economic data?  Anyone got that figured out?  ...

 I have not posted for a couple of weeks due to some emergency surgery.  I started Sunday afternoon after lunch with some stomach discomfort.  It did not worsen until after dinner.  The stomach pain rapidly increased.  I got to the point where I could not control the pain.  I did a quick check of my pulse and blood pressure and decided it was imperative that I get to the hospital.  Thankfully my heart checked out ok, I was not having a heart attack.  The pain was more in the abdomen and not in the upper chest.  I went through several tests and it was determined that my gallbladder was the cause of the pain.  This all started around eight PM Sunday night and the testing was finished sometime around midnight.  The pain medication I was given made it difficult to remember specific times and associated events.  The worst test was a 2-hour MRI where I had to remain as still as possible for the entire time.  I spent the next 6-7...