In looking through old writing, I ran across this letter I wrote to the city after receiving the second in a series of tickets. The topic of the letter is of less than earth shaking importance, but there are serious issues on the function of government and freedom versus order.
After writing the letter I did some research. I discovered that the level of injury and death caused by dogs is almost exactly the same as that resulting from baseball, and the most common victim in both cases is children. It also turns out that dogs are most likely to cause trouble in or near their homes and least likely to cause trouble in public places. In addition to normal animal control my city (through its Natural Resources department) spends on the order of a quarter million dollars a year enforcing leash laws. The leash law applies to all animals including cats, but there is a specific exemption for birds under voice control.
In the end, the city had its way. The fines double on every ticket and I could no longer shoulder the burden. I made some attempts to change the law, but could find no leverage point. I no longer spend much time at the park. Other dog owners have also been driven away. When I do go by the park the dogs are gone, and so are many of the people. I was genuinely surprised at how important the simple pleasure of running the dog at "my" park was to me, and how betrayed I felt at having local government stop me. When my dog running disappeared, so did my pride and sense of responsibility toward the city.
The Letter
This note is about a bad law that has been badly applied. On September 29, 2004 I received a ticket for having my dog off leash in Spring Creek Park (animal at large). This is my second ticket. Each ticket was issued by park rangers I had never seen before and have not seen since. Each of them said they had no discretion in issuing the ticket. The second ticket was issued in what looked like a concerted effort by the city to crack down on unleashed dogs in the park. There were at least two rangers, one of them driving a pickup truck through the park to make sure lawbreakers did not escape.
Over the past nine and a half years I have come to Spring Creek Park at least twice a day virtually every day: rain, snow or shine. I spend between ten minutes and half an hour at each visit. That makes about 7000 visits to the park or about 1400 hours. I think it is accurate to say that over the past ten years I have spent more time in Spring Creek Park than anyone else. Until receiving this latest ticket, it was my intention to create and publish a photo essay book showing daily views of the park over an entire year.
The purpose of those 7000 visits to the park has been to run my dog. She is an impeccably trained border collie. If you have ever been around a border collie, you know that they are active dogs that need to run. I have trained Josie to run laps around the ball fields. She is getting old now and has slowed down. In her prime she would routinely run 20 or so laps around the ball-field as a warm up. After the laps she generally has the energy to do other training exercises. Her record is 50 laps, or about eight miles, at a full run. I have taken her to the dog parks, but there is nothing there that can provide the flat out running that she both enjoys and needs. She is completely disinterested in other dogs and humans.
I stopped bringing a leash to the park years ago. I can honestly say that, in all our visits, not once has my dog been a danger to any person in the park. By training and temperament, Josie rarely acknowledges that there are people in the park. As a border collie, she is all business and her business is running in the patterns that I tell her to.
Josie is a fixture at the park. She is known by the workers and the neighbors. She is admired for her ability and her training. I have received countless compliments on this dog. The number of complaints can be counted on the fingers of one hand. On the rare occasion someone looks nervous or says something, I take Josie out of the park. Periodically, either in Spring Creek Park or in other parks, an animal control person will stop by and tell me about the law. Without exception, those folks have complimented me on Josie's obedience and asked me to take her out of the park. To make life easier for all of us, on those occasions I leave the area. One animal control person said they were responding to complaints about dogs in that particular park. He suggested other places where he would not be patrolling that day.
The animal control workers and the visitors to the park have understood something the city ordinance and the park rangers do not. My dog running in the park is an innocuous and safe activity that improves my life, the dog's life, and is largely a joy to other park visitors.
While I am at the park, I pick up more dog waste than Josie leaves. I collect and throw litter away. Every couple of years I find a stray that has wandered away from home. I track down the owners and return the dog. One time I found and returned a wallet that had been stolen from a truck in the neighborhood. The owner didn’t even know it was missing. When teens rolled one of the trash barrels out onto the frozen lake, strewing garbage along the way, I recruited a couple of fire-fighters from the next door station. We retrieved the trash barrel and picked up the garbage.
Of course, the fact that my dog is well behaved does not make the law bad nor does it excuse me as a lawbreaker. What makes the law bad is that it worsens rather than betters the community. I have spent a lot of time researching human behavior, particularly in cities. We know a lot about what makes good, vibrant communities. One of the most important factors is that neighbors know each other, are aware of their surroundings, and take responsibility for the community. Parks can be marvelous places, but many towns have the problem that their parks are dangerous, particularly in off-hours. One of the major differences between a safe park and a dangerous one is community use. Crime and trouble avoid public view. When good people are near and watching, trouble moves away.
Over the years it has been interesting to see how people use the park. Almost no one simply walks through the park enjoying it. People come because they have a reason. They do what they planned to do, then they leave. Parents who bring their kids to the park stay very close to the playground. The more adventurous will walk over to the ball field to play for a couple of minutes. Ball players stay on or next to the playing field. Walkers and runners tend to either walk in a straight line through the park or they travel the perimeter. Sunbathers invariably pick a spot away from these main uses. Except for dog runners, most of the park is simply unused other than as an attractive backdrop to the other activities. People with dogs off lead almost always stay away from other park users and run their dogs in the open, unused spaces.
I seem to be pretty typical of the people who take their dogs to Spring Creek Park. These are neighborhood people who care about the neighborhood and take care of the park. I know this because I see them every day. I see them talk with each other and pick up after themselves and others. Some of the dogs are on leash, most of them are not. The difference seems to be in the temperament of the owner and the dog. If someone has a dog that will not obey or is flighty, they will only take the dog off lead once or twice. The adventure of screaming at your dog while chasing it through the public park or nearby neighborhood is a powerful deterrent to letting untrained animals off lead. People with leashed dogs behave more like walkers. They move through the park rather than spend time in it.
I am sure the Parks Department receives complaints about dogs running wild through the park. Many people feel threatened by dogs on the loose and many people simply do not like the idea that others violate the law. If the city banned blue flowers, I am sure it would receive many calls about the law violators with blue flowers in their yards.
In terms of actual danger or harm, I cannot speak with authority because I do not have the figures. I can speak from my experience and observations. Fossil Creek Park just opened. It is a beautiful park and heartening in terms of its design. For some time parks have been dumbed down to make sure that no visitor can be injured. Fossil Creek Park seems to have very thoughtfully constructed play areas, but ones where the users must take responsibility for their actions. The skate park at Fossil Creek is marvelous and seems to be heavily used. Even without seeing the figures, I can guarantee that there are more injuries in that skate park in a single week than dogs have caused in Spring Creek Park in the past ten years. Of course there is a difference between me falling off my own skateboard and being accosted by a strange dog. One I control, the other I do not. Whenever a skateboarder lets his board fly and it hits someone else or a dog owner has a dog that is out of control, they should be held accountable. But control is the problem, not the activity.
The Parks Department is in an awkward position. There is a law on the books. Until the law is changed, they must either ticket the offenders or turn a blind eye. I would prefer that the law is changed, but this is an area where emotion runs high. Not many politicians will stick a neck out for a fight that will gain them nothing but animosity, regardless of the facts. We, unfortunately, live in a time where many areas of civil behavior have been written into law. Most of them are well intended, but many of them are violated routinely. If a policeman decided to ticket every lawbreaker he saw, he could never get to a violent crime scene. He would spend all his time ticketing speeders, jaywalkers, and litterers along the way. When laws are numerous they are, and always will be, selectively enforced. I suggest that the Park Rangers would be better employed by spending more time getting to know the neighbors who do the real policing in the parks and less time driving them away by ticketing them for harmless activities.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Bad Smells and Complexity
I work with software. A few years ago a couple of influential folks, Kent Beck and Martin Fowler, started using the term "bad smell" to describe a situation where something doesn't seem quite right. When you pour a glass of milk, you may catch an odor. Everything may be fine, but you probably don't want to gulp it down until you have investigated a little further. The notion of bad smells can be used in any complex human endeavor. Experienced people quickly recognize when something is off, even if they cannot express exactly what it is.
Sometimes it is hard to figure out whether something is just complex or if the investigators are simply lost. Migraine headaches are a good example. A few years ago I started getting occasional migraine auras though, thankfully, not the headaches. When I researched the topic I found that there were several proposed causes and any number of proposed treatments or ameliorations. Sufferers look for triggers of the headaches. Different people have proposed different triggers. Trigger lists include: changes in air pressure, bright light, smells, foods including meat, wine, chocolate, beans, cheese, pickled or marinated food, nuts, herring, figs, raisins, citrus, tea, coffee, chicken livers. Of course the old standby "stress" is included in the trigger list.
Lists like the migraine triggers are a bad smell. If you stop any person on the street, you will undoubtedly find they have been exposed to one or more of these triggers in the past 24 hours. It may be that triggers are quite individual and that different people have a small set of different triggers. I find it more likely that people in pain are grasping at straws to find something that might enable them to avoid the pain in the future.
Sometimes complexity is not a bad smell, but just complexity. For a long time I have been interested in questions that different people answer differently. I live in a place without a lot of crime. A number of years ago I asked folks whether they locked their doors when they were in their house. I thought the answer might give an indication of risk tolerance. Sure enough, some people answered always, some answered never. One person said he only locked the doors when he was home because he cared about his own safety, not that of his possessions. I don't know if this was a truthful answer, but it was an interesting point of view.
It is an open question whether we can use some relatively small set of traits to characterize our behavior. Even identifying traits that influence behavior is problematic.
For about a century western society has been very interested in measuring "intelligence" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_testing). A Welsh friend of mine used to say that people in the United States have a peculiar fascination with reducing complex phenomena to a single number. Certainly intelligence testing fits this pattern. It is not clear what "intelligence" is and how many aspects of it there are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences), but that doesn't stop us from measuring and assigning a single number.
There have also been attempts to measure both moral beliefs (Moral Judgment Test) and religiosity (The internal structure of the Post-Critical Belief scale). As it turns out, these may not be correlated (Religiosity, moral attitudes and moral competence).
Psychologists have tried a number of personality characterizations. There are classifications of pathologies and personality disorders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorder). Some of this is clearly cultural. For example, homosexuality was listed for a time as a personality disorder. There are tests, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory for example, to help diagnose these disorders.
There are also more general classifications. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator test is based on Jung's analysis of perception (sensation and intuition) and judgment (thinking and feeling). Based on this, four dichotomies were established: Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/iNtuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving. I always joke that Myers Briggs test is much better than astrology because astrology has only 12 categories to explain us, but Myers Briggs has 16.
The "Big Five" model comes from linguistic analysis. The thought is that essentials of personality are expressed in language so an analysis of language can lead to a understanding of personality. The big five are: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
In looking at all of this I don't detect that much bad science or even many bad smells. I come to the conclusion that people are just complicated. The theories project this complexity onto a number of different spaces, but none of them fully encompass us. We are just too complicated for simple analysis.
Sometimes it is hard to figure out whether something is just complex or if the investigators are simply lost. Migraine headaches are a good example. A few years ago I started getting occasional migraine auras though, thankfully, not the headaches. When I researched the topic I found that there were several proposed causes and any number of proposed treatments or ameliorations. Sufferers look for triggers of the headaches. Different people have proposed different triggers. Trigger lists include: changes in air pressure, bright light, smells, foods including meat, wine, chocolate, beans, cheese, pickled or marinated food, nuts, herring, figs, raisins, citrus, tea, coffee, chicken livers. Of course the old standby "stress" is included in the trigger list.
Lists like the migraine triggers are a bad smell. If you stop any person on the street, you will undoubtedly find they have been exposed to one or more of these triggers in the past 24 hours. It may be that triggers are quite individual and that different people have a small set of different triggers. I find it more likely that people in pain are grasping at straws to find something that might enable them to avoid the pain in the future.
Sometimes complexity is not a bad smell, but just complexity. For a long time I have been interested in questions that different people answer differently. I live in a place without a lot of crime. A number of years ago I asked folks whether they locked their doors when they were in their house. I thought the answer might give an indication of risk tolerance. Sure enough, some people answered always, some answered never. One person said he only locked the doors when he was home because he cared about his own safety, not that of his possessions. I don't know if this was a truthful answer, but it was an interesting point of view.
It is an open question whether we can use some relatively small set of traits to characterize our behavior. Even identifying traits that influence behavior is problematic.
For about a century western society has been very interested in measuring "intelligence" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_testing). A Welsh friend of mine used to say that people in the United States have a peculiar fascination with reducing complex phenomena to a single number. Certainly intelligence testing fits this pattern. It is not clear what "intelligence" is and how many aspects of it there are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences), but that doesn't stop us from measuring and assigning a single number.
There have also been attempts to measure both moral beliefs (Moral Judgment Test) and religiosity (The internal structure of the Post-Critical Belief scale). As it turns out, these may not be correlated (Religiosity, moral attitudes and moral competence).
Psychologists have tried a number of personality characterizations. There are classifications of pathologies and personality disorders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorder). Some of this is clearly cultural. For example, homosexuality was listed for a time as a personality disorder. There are tests, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory for example, to help diagnose these disorders.
There are also more general classifications. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator test is based on Jung's analysis of perception (sensation and intuition) and judgment (thinking and feeling). Based on this, four dichotomies were established: Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/iNtuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving. I always joke that Myers Briggs test is much better than astrology because astrology has only 12 categories to explain us, but Myers Briggs has 16.
The "Big Five" model comes from linguistic analysis. The thought is that essentials of personality are expressed in language so an analysis of language can lead to a understanding of personality. The big five are: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
In looking at all of this I don't detect that much bad science or even many bad smells. I come to the conclusion that people are just complicated. The theories project this complexity onto a number of different spaces, but none of them fully encompass us. We are just too complicated for simple analysis.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Heart Rate Monitors and Training
This is something I wrote some time ago, originally to help my daughter who got a heart rate monitor. Periodically I change it slightly and send to someone. I post it here because it may be of more general interest.
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How you train depends on what you want to accomplish. Genetically people tend toward a predominance of one or the other of two muscle fibers: Fast twitch or slow twitch muscles. The ratio of these is not fixed. Slow twitch fibers can be recruited to be fast twitch, but there is a genetic diffference that tends people toward one or the other. Those who have lots of fast twitch fibers tend to be sprinters. Those with lots of slow twitch tend to be better at endurance. Related to the sprinter/endurance dichotomy are several metabolic pathways for producing energy. There are aerobic (with oxygen) and anaerobic pathways. The anaerobic pathways tend to be good for very short duration activities, a few minutes or less. I have never been tested, but I am the anti-sprinter, so I suspect I tend toward the slow twitch. At any rate, my goals tend to be fitness, endurance and speed (strength) over periods of about an hour. I choose an hour because that tends to be the amount of time I can manage for exercise on any given day. This puts me in the aerobic, endurance camp. I have no idea how sprinters (or their cousins, weight lifters) train.
Several things limit athletic performance. One of them is oxygen. A second is Lactate buildup. Another is muscle strength. In a sense, muscle strength is the simplest to train for. Muscles get stronger as they adapt to stress. To make your muscles stronger you stress them to the point of minor damage, then allow them to recover. Both stress and recovery are important. No stress, no need for adaptation. No rest, no chance for the damage to be repaired and the muscles to get stronger. In addition to simple strength there is also technique. Every activity can be done more or less efficiently. The more efficient you are, the less energy is required for a given result. This is good.
The oxygen/lactate systems are more complicated because there is so much going on. Every person has a maximum rate at which oxygen can be absorbed through the lungs into the bloodstream, pumped by the heart to the body and utilized by the muscles and other organs. This can be measured as your VO2 max. If you exceed your VO2 max value, by definition you can’t provide enough oxygen to support the work you are doing and something either has to stop or go anaerobic. The point at which you start going anaerobic is called your anaerobic threshold. The best thing you can do to improve your VO2 max is to choose your parents well. However, even the genetically ungifted can improve their VO2 max through training.
When you produce energy anaerobically, one of the by products is lactic acid. If the lactic acid accumulates in the muscle it changes the PH and the muscle loses the ability to contract. Of course none of this is black and white. Even when you are exercising mainly aerobically, some lactic acid is produced. You should be able to increase performance by improving your capacity to get oxygen to your muscles, improving your ability to remove lactic acid from your muscles when it occurs, and by making your muscles more tolerant of lactic acid when it is present. Lactic acid itself is burned oxidatively by mitochondria to produce energy. That is one of the ways that lactic acid is removed. See http://home.hia.no/~stephens/lacthres.htm.. Since this post was originally written I have spoken to some exercise physiologists. What happens when lose our ability to continue at a given level of exertion is not clear. It is NOT a simple matter of lactic acid and no particular metabolite has been identified. There may even be a mental control designed to protect the organism.
Two other factors in oxygen transport are your maximum heart rate and your resting heart rate. There is a speed past which your heart will not beat. The maximum differs from person to person and is also dependent on age. You lose roughly one beat per minute per year as you get older. Your resting heart rate serves as an indicator of heart efficiency. Take your resting heart rate while lying down, preferably in the morning before getting up or right before bed. At rest, your body still demands a certain amount of oxygen. The fewer heart beats needed to satisfy this requirement, the more efficient the heart is. As you get more fit, your heart simply delivers more blood per beat.
What does this have to do with training with a heart rate monitor? Your heart rate roughly corresponds with the amount of oxygen being demanded by your body. This, in turn correlates with the energy your body is putting out. The harder you work, the faster your heart beats. In an endurance sense your heart rate is limited on one end by your resting heart rate and on the other end by your anaerobic threshold. The range is expanded by making your heart pump more per beat (lowering the resting heart rate) and raising your anaerobic threshold (increasing oxygen delivery and lactate removal).
As long as you aren’t "overtraining", a heart rate monitor allows you to judge just how hard you are working. Surprisingly this can be more useful on easy days than on hard days. Using the monitor you can get a sense of your real anaerobic threshold (it hurts and you can’t sustain for long). You can gauge effort by finding how close you are to either your anaerobic threshold or to your maximum heart rate. This is usually expressed as a percentage (90% of maximum heart rate). Be aware that these measures are different because your anaerobic threshold is below your maximum heart rate. However, your anaerobic threshold is something you can figure out. Your maximum heart rate is difficult to determine. I knew my predicted one was wrong when I looked down at the monitor one day and saw a number above my "maximum".
Conventional wisdom is that training should be a mix of stress and recovery. Recovery does not mean inactivity. It means activity at a level below that which stresses you. Most of your time should be spent in recovery. Exercise at a recovery level can be performed for a longer duration than exercise at stress levels. This recovery not only allows you rebuild your stressed muscle, it increases endurance and gives you a chance to work on efficiency. Although technique is critically important, efficiency is not synonymous with technique. I believe some of it is a physiologic adaptation.
Stress levels for your heart lung system are right around the anaerobic threshold. To work on raising the anaerobic threshold, lactate recovery, and increasing VO2 max, intervals are the prescribed medicine. To stress the aerobic system rather than just using your sprint abilities, the intervals should be at least a couple of minutes long. These are very painful and it is recommended that you not do this more than about once a week.
A step below intervals is a hard workout. Ignoring my own advice about recovery, these are typically what I do on the bike. For a hard workout I basically work for an hour at just below my anaerobic threshold. For me on the bike this is around 90% of my predicted maximum heart rate. My excuse is that I am not an athlete and don’t have enough time to recover as an athlete would (easy days). I recover through inactivity. There are many days where I simply don’t get any exercise and it is uncommon for me to have the same exercise activity two days in a row.
For athletes and sensible people who actually schedule easy recovery workouts, the heart rate monitor is most useful. The trick is to set a level before you start. It is very easy to have a recovery workout turn into yet another hard workout. The heart rate monitor gives you a number. If that number goes too high, you ease off regardless of how you feel. I find this to be very difficult. Several sources give target recovery workout rates of about 70% of your max heart rate. I find it hard to give advice that I don’t follow, but conventional wisdom would probably have you do as many recovery workouts as you do hard workouts and intervals. Hard days should be followed by recovery days. I do not know much about recovery time. For example, I don’t know how long it takes muscles to heal from the micro-tears induced by a hard workout (but I think it is on the order of one to two days). This is probably what should govern your recovery schedule for any given muscle set.
My goal is general health and fitness, so I don’t tune my training toward any particular event or activity. I’m on maintenance and (I hope) gradual improvement regime. If you are tuning toward an event or season, there are longer cycles (weeks and months) of buildup and relaxation you should use. At that point you should find a coach.
All this assumes that your heart is a pretty good gauge of effort. For the most part it is. After using the heart rate monitor for some time on the bike and blades, I find that it correlates pretty well with perceived effort, that is, how hard it feels that I’m working. This isn’t always true though. It is not true when I’m boosting or dropping my heart rate. For example, increasing exertion to go from a heart rate of 150 to 155 can feel worse than a steady state of 165. Dropping from 170 to 165 can feel like heaven.
A second factor that can change heart rate is over-stressing. When I measure my resting heart rate after a hard workout day, it tends to be high. I think this is part of the normal recovery. If you over-stress for days or weeks, your resting heart rate will remain high and your total capacity to work will be reduced. Resting heart rate is both an indicator of general fitness (low is good) and of "overtraining" (goes up and stays up over a period of days). I think resting heart rate also goes up during illness.
--------
How you train depends on what you want to accomplish. Genetically people tend toward a predominance of one or the other of two muscle fibers: Fast twitch or slow twitch muscles. The ratio of these is not fixed. Slow twitch fibers can be recruited to be fast twitch, but there is a genetic diffference that tends people toward one or the other. Those who have lots of fast twitch fibers tend to be sprinters. Those with lots of slow twitch tend to be better at endurance. Related to the sprinter/endurance dichotomy are several metabolic pathways for producing energy. There are aerobic (with oxygen) and anaerobic pathways. The anaerobic pathways tend to be good for very short duration activities, a few minutes or less. I have never been tested, but I am the anti-sprinter, so I suspect I tend toward the slow twitch. At any rate, my goals tend to be fitness, endurance and speed (strength) over periods of about an hour. I choose an hour because that tends to be the amount of time I can manage for exercise on any given day. This puts me in the aerobic, endurance camp. I have no idea how sprinters (or their cousins, weight lifters) train.
Several things limit athletic performance. One of them is oxygen. A second is Lactate buildup. Another is muscle strength. In a sense, muscle strength is the simplest to train for. Muscles get stronger as they adapt to stress. To make your muscles stronger you stress them to the point of minor damage, then allow them to recover. Both stress and recovery are important. No stress, no need for adaptation. No rest, no chance for the damage to be repaired and the muscles to get stronger. In addition to simple strength there is also technique. Every activity can be done more or less efficiently. The more efficient you are, the less energy is required for a given result. This is good.
The oxygen/lactate systems are more complicated because there is so much going on. Every person has a maximum rate at which oxygen can be absorbed through the lungs into the bloodstream, pumped by the heart to the body and utilized by the muscles and other organs. This can be measured as your VO2 max. If you exceed your VO2 max value, by definition you can’t provide enough oxygen to support the work you are doing and something either has to stop or go anaerobic. The point at which you start going anaerobic is called your anaerobic threshold. The best thing you can do to improve your VO2 max is to choose your parents well. However, even the genetically ungifted can improve their VO2 max through training.
When you produce energy anaerobically, one of the by products is lactic acid. If the lactic acid accumulates in the muscle it changes the PH and the muscle loses the ability to contract. Of course none of this is black and white. Even when you are exercising mainly aerobically, some lactic acid is produced. You should be able to increase performance by improving your capacity to get oxygen to your muscles, improving your ability to remove lactic acid from your muscles when it occurs, and by making your muscles more tolerant of lactic acid when it is present. Lactic acid itself is burned oxidatively by mitochondria to produce energy. That is one of the ways that lactic acid is removed. See http://home.hia.no/~stephens/lacthres.htm.. Since this post was originally written I have spoken to some exercise physiologists. What happens when lose our ability to continue at a given level of exertion is not clear. It is NOT a simple matter of lactic acid and no particular metabolite has been identified. There may even be a mental control designed to protect the organism.
Two other factors in oxygen transport are your maximum heart rate and your resting heart rate. There is a speed past which your heart will not beat. The maximum differs from person to person and is also dependent on age. You lose roughly one beat per minute per year as you get older. Your resting heart rate serves as an indicator of heart efficiency. Take your resting heart rate while lying down, preferably in the morning before getting up or right before bed. At rest, your body still demands a certain amount of oxygen. The fewer heart beats needed to satisfy this requirement, the more efficient the heart is. As you get more fit, your heart simply delivers more blood per beat.
What does this have to do with training with a heart rate monitor? Your heart rate roughly corresponds with the amount of oxygen being demanded by your body. This, in turn correlates with the energy your body is putting out. The harder you work, the faster your heart beats. In an endurance sense your heart rate is limited on one end by your resting heart rate and on the other end by your anaerobic threshold. The range is expanded by making your heart pump more per beat (lowering the resting heart rate) and raising your anaerobic threshold (increasing oxygen delivery and lactate removal).
As long as you aren’t "overtraining", a heart rate monitor allows you to judge just how hard you are working. Surprisingly this can be more useful on easy days than on hard days. Using the monitor you can get a sense of your real anaerobic threshold (it hurts and you can’t sustain for long). You can gauge effort by finding how close you are to either your anaerobic threshold or to your maximum heart rate. This is usually expressed as a percentage (90% of maximum heart rate). Be aware that these measures are different because your anaerobic threshold is below your maximum heart rate. However, your anaerobic threshold is something you can figure out. Your maximum heart rate is difficult to determine. I knew my predicted one was wrong when I looked down at the monitor one day and saw a number above my "maximum".
Conventional wisdom is that training should be a mix of stress and recovery. Recovery does not mean inactivity. It means activity at a level below that which stresses you. Most of your time should be spent in recovery. Exercise at a recovery level can be performed for a longer duration than exercise at stress levels. This recovery not only allows you rebuild your stressed muscle, it increases endurance and gives you a chance to work on efficiency. Although technique is critically important, efficiency is not synonymous with technique. I believe some of it is a physiologic adaptation.
Stress levels for your heart lung system are right around the anaerobic threshold. To work on raising the anaerobic threshold, lactate recovery, and increasing VO2 max, intervals are the prescribed medicine. To stress the aerobic system rather than just using your sprint abilities, the intervals should be at least a couple of minutes long. These are very painful and it is recommended that you not do this more than about once a week.
A step below intervals is a hard workout. Ignoring my own advice about recovery, these are typically what I do on the bike. For a hard workout I basically work for an hour at just below my anaerobic threshold. For me on the bike this is around 90% of my predicted maximum heart rate. My excuse is that I am not an athlete and don’t have enough time to recover as an athlete would (easy days). I recover through inactivity. There are many days where I simply don’t get any exercise and it is uncommon for me to have the same exercise activity two days in a row.
For athletes and sensible people who actually schedule easy recovery workouts, the heart rate monitor is most useful. The trick is to set a level before you start. It is very easy to have a recovery workout turn into yet another hard workout. The heart rate monitor gives you a number. If that number goes too high, you ease off regardless of how you feel. I find this to be very difficult. Several sources give target recovery workout rates of about 70% of your max heart rate. I find it hard to give advice that I don’t follow, but conventional wisdom would probably have you do as many recovery workouts as you do hard workouts and intervals. Hard days should be followed by recovery days. I do not know much about recovery time. For example, I don’t know how long it takes muscles to heal from the micro-tears induced by a hard workout (but I think it is on the order of one to two days). This is probably what should govern your recovery schedule for any given muscle set.
My goal is general health and fitness, so I don’t tune my training toward any particular event or activity. I’m on maintenance and (I hope) gradual improvement regime. If you are tuning toward an event or season, there are longer cycles (weeks and months) of buildup and relaxation you should use. At that point you should find a coach.
All this assumes that your heart is a pretty good gauge of effort. For the most part it is. After using the heart rate monitor for some time on the bike and blades, I find that it correlates pretty well with perceived effort, that is, how hard it feels that I’m working. This isn’t always true though. It is not true when I’m boosting or dropping my heart rate. For example, increasing exertion to go from a heart rate of 150 to 155 can feel worse than a steady state of 165. Dropping from 170 to 165 can feel like heaven.
A second factor that can change heart rate is over-stressing. When I measure my resting heart rate after a hard workout day, it tends to be high. I think this is part of the normal recovery. If you over-stress for days or weeks, your resting heart rate will remain high and your total capacity to work will be reduced. Resting heart rate is both an indicator of general fitness (low is good) and of "overtraining" (goes up and stays up over a period of days). I think resting heart rate also goes up during illness.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Blog Comments, Families, Us and Them
I started this blog not because I expected anyone to read it, but because the act of writing clarifies thought. I had been meaning to do more writing for some time, but didn't have an excuse or outlet.
If you look through the posts, at least so far, the comments are made by a small set of people. These folks are my immediate family, the clan for which I am the "Pater Familias". That title does not come from the Roman honor, but from a line in the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou". The title of that movie came from a fictional book in another wonderful movie, "Sullivan's Travels".
I am finding out that the comments are an interesting part of the blogging experience, even if they mostly come from my own family. The comments themselves usually have something to say. They are also touchingly protective. They announce "See, I'm reading this. I care". This protective attitude is amusing because, when my children were little, they assumed I was indestructible. To this day I am often mistaken for a trampoline. On an emotional level, one of the favorite pastimes of the family is putting me in humiliating situations. For example, when I had some friends over on Halloween to help in building a fence, my clan insisted I spend dinner dressed up in drag as a beauty queen, complete with toilet paper sash announcing my title "Miss Evil Colorado".
This is part of what I call the hierarchy of social identification. Most of us identify with a whole set of groups that extend from family to peers to school/work, community, nation... This is one of the most powerful forces in human society and sets the stage for collective action. On the dark side, it separates "us" from "them" and allows our collective action to be unspeakably cruel. A family, as with most social groups, has plenty of internal friction. But facing outward, will present a united front and protect its members.
It is demonstrably true that humans band together into trust groups. Innate traits like skin color or epicanthal folds are easy markers. As a regrettable consequence, each of us tends to exclude those with innate differences as not part of our group. This is natural, but not inevitable. For example, imagine a room with two black and two white men. If one white man and one black man both have gang tattoos and one black man and one white man are both wearing expensive business suits, they will initially pair up based on clothing rather than skin color.
None of us belong exclusively to a single group and all of us are capable of forming strong associations with almost anyone. Put a group of musicians from around the world in a single room and in short order they will be forming new associations based on their shared passion for sound.
The identification with social groups and antipathy toward outsiders seems to be a base human trait. I know of no social group without some degree of this. The positive part of this tendency is the ability to come together to work toward a common goal. On the negative side, the separation between us and them allows “us” to treat "them" without any consideration other than our own aim.
Separation of "us" from "them" is often justified because “they” are different from “us”. Biologically, this is hogwash. Each of us has parents and there are familial traits. Some of us are blonde and some have black hair. Some groups of people have lived with enough isolation to show adaptation to their surroundings. For example, groups living farther from the equator tend to have lighter skin. These differences are marked enough so that pathologists can identify human groups from these physical traits. That said, humans are also nomadic and relatively recent. This underlies a remarkable degree of genetic homogeneity. I liken the differences between humans to the differences between brown spotted and black spotted Dalmatian dogs. As a species, we have so little genetic diversity that some scientists postulate that the species was reduced to a very small number of individuals in the not so distant past.
Because there are physical differences between human groups, it is interesting to ask if there might be analogs in other areas. For example, some groups of humans might be more or less capable of mathematical reasoning or eye/hand coordination. I think this is unlikely. Variants like skin color give an advantage in a particular region. Mental and social advantages have no such geographic constraints. People with the advantage will quickly spread the genetics outside their own group. Only extreme geographic isolation could keep advantageous adaptations out of the general gene pool. Human history is filled with tales of travel, conquest, and stranger's babies. Unjustified claims of essential differences between groups of people have been used to justify genocide. To counter this tendency, the standard of proof for assertions of fundamental differences between groups must be extremely high. I know of no evidence that there are physical differences between human groups that elevate the fundamental capabilities of any group. This is especially clear when we look at genius. Genius is characterized by some capability that is far greater than normal. Think Leonardo da Vinci, Mahatma Gandhi, or Michael Jordan. Genius springs up around the world and cannot be characterized by family, "race" or any other factor I know of. There are musical families, but to paraphrase Aaron Copeland : there was nothing to indicate that Leonard’s parents would produce a Bernstein.
Our upbringing affects who we are, not just emotionally, but physically. There is evidence, for example, that people brought up speaking a tonal language tend to respond differently to sound than those brought up speaking non-tonal languages. In those cultures, a higher percentage of people perceive absolute pitch. Our bodies change based on our environment, but are especially malleable before adulthood. There are some abilities, like language acquisition, that fall off as we grow older.
Humans are genetically pretty homogeneous, but in values, and hence behaviour, we vary greatly. Because we learn behaviour from each other, values and behaviour tend to be cultural. The biggest influence is family followed peer groups and finally the culture as a whole. Some societies are monogamous, some have men with multiple wives and some have women with multiple husbands. In some societies butchers are respected and prosperous. In others they are outcasts. Food taboos are so strong that it is difficult to imagine violating them. Culturally forbidden foods include fish, insects, dogs, and pigs.
Even in groups with strong cultural mores, there will be rogues. Every society has outcasts and criminals. Some people, gangs, clans, and governments are dangerous to outsiders. That is one of the reasons that we look for cultural allies. They may help protect us from the dangerous humans. But the tendency to bond in groups is more than a need for protection. We also have a need for acceptance by others in our group. The combination of fear and the need for acceptance and protection is very powerful. A social group can manipulate individual humans to do literally anything. They will rape, torture, and murder neighbors with whom they have lived peacefully for years. They will kill themselves and their own children. That is, the very groups we rely on for protection from the dangerous humans can also transform us into those dangerous humans.
Everyone thinks they have things they will do and things they will not do. However, the power of circumstance and persuasion move these lines. Totalitarian regimes recognize this so they create programs to make everyone complicit. Right now you would not think of killing the Jew/Black/Korean/Armenian shopkeeper on the corner, but in light of the past actions of people like him, would you be willing to keep an eye on him and report suspicious activity? Would you if there were a payment? One thing leads to another. Lines are drawn between us and them. They are clearly threatening. You are one of us. You have shown it by your actions – even accepting favors or money. But your status is provisional and must be earned by showing your commitment to us. You must show your commitment to us by acting more strongly against them.
We are all susceptible to these forces, but we can also recognize them. It is up to each of us to recognize both the danger and the opportunity in the strangers among us. Some wariness is important for self protection. But given a chance, that person who is currently part of "them" may be a valuable part of "us" in the not distant future.
If you look through the posts, at least so far, the comments are made by a small set of people. These folks are my immediate family, the clan for which I am the "Pater Familias". That title does not come from the Roman honor, but from a line in the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou". The title of that movie came from a fictional book in another wonderful movie, "Sullivan's Travels".
I am finding out that the comments are an interesting part of the blogging experience, even if they mostly come from my own family. The comments themselves usually have something to say. They are also touchingly protective. They announce "See, I'm reading this. I care". This protective attitude is amusing because, when my children were little, they assumed I was indestructible. To this day I am often mistaken for a trampoline. On an emotional level, one of the favorite pastimes of the family is putting me in humiliating situations. For example, when I had some friends over on Halloween to help in building a fence, my clan insisted I spend dinner dressed up in drag as a beauty queen, complete with toilet paper sash announcing my title "Miss Evil Colorado".
This is part of what I call the hierarchy of social identification. Most of us identify with a whole set of groups that extend from family to peers to school/work, community, nation... This is one of the most powerful forces in human society and sets the stage for collective action. On the dark side, it separates "us" from "them" and allows our collective action to be unspeakably cruel. A family, as with most social groups, has plenty of internal friction. But facing outward, will present a united front and protect its members.
It is demonstrably true that humans band together into trust groups. Innate traits like skin color or epicanthal folds are easy markers. As a regrettable consequence, each of us tends to exclude those with innate differences as not part of our group. This is natural, but not inevitable. For example, imagine a room with two black and two white men. If one white man and one black man both have gang tattoos and one black man and one white man are both wearing expensive business suits, they will initially pair up based on clothing rather than skin color.
None of us belong exclusively to a single group and all of us are capable of forming strong associations with almost anyone. Put a group of musicians from around the world in a single room and in short order they will be forming new associations based on their shared passion for sound.
The identification with social groups and antipathy toward outsiders seems to be a base human trait. I know of no social group without some degree of this. The positive part of this tendency is the ability to come together to work toward a common goal. On the negative side, the separation between us and them allows “us” to treat "them" without any consideration other than our own aim.
Separation of "us" from "them" is often justified because “they” are different from “us”. Biologically, this is hogwash. Each of us has parents and there are familial traits. Some of us are blonde and some have black hair. Some groups of people have lived with enough isolation to show adaptation to their surroundings. For example, groups living farther from the equator tend to have lighter skin. These differences are marked enough so that pathologists can identify human groups from these physical traits. That said, humans are also nomadic and relatively recent. This underlies a remarkable degree of genetic homogeneity. I liken the differences between humans to the differences between brown spotted and black spotted Dalmatian dogs. As a species, we have so little genetic diversity that some scientists postulate that the species was reduced to a very small number of individuals in the not so distant past.
Because there are physical differences between human groups, it is interesting to ask if there might be analogs in other areas. For example, some groups of humans might be more or less capable of mathematical reasoning or eye/hand coordination. I think this is unlikely. Variants like skin color give an advantage in a particular region. Mental and social advantages have no such geographic constraints. People with the advantage will quickly spread the genetics outside their own group. Only extreme geographic isolation could keep advantageous adaptations out of the general gene pool. Human history is filled with tales of travel, conquest, and stranger's babies. Unjustified claims of essential differences between groups of people have been used to justify genocide. To counter this tendency, the standard of proof for assertions of fundamental differences between groups must be extremely high. I know of no evidence that there are physical differences between human groups that elevate the fundamental capabilities of any group. This is especially clear when we look at genius. Genius is characterized by some capability that is far greater than normal. Think Leonardo da Vinci, Mahatma Gandhi, or Michael Jordan. Genius springs up around the world and cannot be characterized by family, "race" or any other factor I know of. There are musical families, but to paraphrase Aaron Copeland : there was nothing to indicate that Leonard’s parents would produce a Bernstein.
Our upbringing affects who we are, not just emotionally, but physically. There is evidence, for example, that people brought up speaking a tonal language tend to respond differently to sound than those brought up speaking non-tonal languages. In those cultures, a higher percentage of people perceive absolute pitch. Our bodies change based on our environment, but are especially malleable before adulthood. There are some abilities, like language acquisition, that fall off as we grow older.
Humans are genetically pretty homogeneous, but in values, and hence behaviour, we vary greatly. Because we learn behaviour from each other, values and behaviour tend to be cultural. The biggest influence is family followed peer groups and finally the culture as a whole. Some societies are monogamous, some have men with multiple wives and some have women with multiple husbands. In some societies butchers are respected and prosperous. In others they are outcasts. Food taboos are so strong that it is difficult to imagine violating them. Culturally forbidden foods include fish, insects, dogs, and pigs.
Even in groups with strong cultural mores, there will be rogues. Every society has outcasts and criminals. Some people, gangs, clans, and governments are dangerous to outsiders. That is one of the reasons that we look for cultural allies. They may help protect us from the dangerous humans. But the tendency to bond in groups is more than a need for protection. We also have a need for acceptance by others in our group. The combination of fear and the need for acceptance and protection is very powerful. A social group can manipulate individual humans to do literally anything. They will rape, torture, and murder neighbors with whom they have lived peacefully for years. They will kill themselves and their own children. That is, the very groups we rely on for protection from the dangerous humans can also transform us into those dangerous humans.
Everyone thinks they have things they will do and things they will not do. However, the power of circumstance and persuasion move these lines. Totalitarian regimes recognize this so they create programs to make everyone complicit. Right now you would not think of killing the Jew/Black/Korean/Armenian shopkeeper on the corner, but in light of the past actions of people like him, would you be willing to keep an eye on him and report suspicious activity? Would you if there were a payment? One thing leads to another. Lines are drawn between us and them. They are clearly threatening. You are one of us. You have shown it by your actions – even accepting favors or money. But your status is provisional and must be earned by showing your commitment to us. You must show your commitment to us by acting more strongly against them.
We are all susceptible to these forces, but we can also recognize them. It is up to each of us to recognize both the danger and the opportunity in the strangers among us. Some wariness is important for self protection. But given a chance, that person who is currently part of "them" may be a valuable part of "us" in the not distant future.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Flying Has Gotten Really Bad
US air travel says a lot about people and organizations, some of it not so nice.
The conditions on most airlines approach that a cattle car filled with refugees fleeing for their lives. While on the plane we are expected to stay almost completely motionless and quiet for the duration of the flight. Our bodies are built for motion. Even while sleeping, people constantly change position. On an airplane this is impossible. The conditions are so unnatural that people actually die from the experience due to deep vein thrombosis. The airline rules enforce this motionlessness with ruthless efficiency. The aisles are narrow, the galley off limits, and a cart is pushed back and forth to both block and clear the aisles. The seat positions limit human interaction. In the unlikely event that you converse with another passenger you are likely to end up with a neck ache from the strain of trying to actually see them. Conversation is unlikely partly because the chance of two strangers having both the same need for interaction and the same interests is small. Contact is made even less likely by the stress induced by the experience. I say this as someone who likes the high vantage point that air travel provides.
There are periodic instances of people snapping on planes. Sometimes they get drunk and assault another passenger, sometimes they just become delusional in one way or another. It is true that people fall apart in lots of ways and in lots of places, but I believe that being crammed on a contemporary airline approaches the limits of human endurance.
Of course each airline differs somewhat. Southwest has a single class of seats and somewhat more reliable pricing. United is perhaps the worst of the worst. Most airlines seem to be rushing toward the United end of the continuum so that end is discussed here.
The time on the plane is only one part of the dehumanizing experience. The whole system is inhuman. I mean literally inhuman. That is, there is very little true human contact involved. The basic corporate motivation is money and the current competitive environment largely removes all other motivations from both selling and buying decisions. Passengers are higher paying, but more inconvenient, cargo.
It is a general truism that interaction with paid employees decreases over time. The cost efficiencies of automated systems move us in this direction. I find that a well designed automated system is more effective and more pleasant than trying to explain my intentions to a stranger I will never see again. However, the automated systems lead us to evaluate on a small number of criteria and these criteria generally reflect airline corporate needs. Most airline systems tell you about flight times, duration, stops, and (immediate) price. Consumers tend to fly on the cheapest flight. The flight is something to endure and surely the big contract or time with Grandma is worth a few hours of pain. Might as well save the money to use on something more worthwhile. Given these conditions, the airlines have competed almost exclusively on price. Occasionally one will try larger seats or better food, but those efforts do not seem to pay off enough to be sustained. The reservation systems turn these into intangibles that do not enter the flyer's decision making process.
I heard a prediction that in the future all prices will be instantaneous. The vending machine that gives you a soda for a quarter in the dead of winter will charge a buck fifty on a hot summer day. Airlines have been the vanguard of this for many years. They have been willing to invest in a wide variety of profit maximizing devices. I do not want to paint the airline companies as uncaring blood sucking vampires seeking the last drop of blood from their unfortunate victims. Wait, I do want to paint them that way. However, as with any good vampire story, you have to have some sympathy for vampire who may not have wanted to become what he did. Many airline companies have lost unimaginably vast sums of money for year after year. A few dollars more per customer may mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy (which they regularly enter). Ok, enough sympathy, let's look at what they have done to us.
If you can manage it, it is an interesting experience to compare fares with the people around you. Because of the ways fares are managed and the multiple outlets for selling, everyone pays a different amount. The person sitting in the seat next to you, even if it is a middle seat, may have paid close to ten times more than you did (or vice versa). The same thing holds for all airline transactions. I was on a business trip with two colleagues when our plans changed and we had to rebook flights. The three of us had the class of tickets on the same planes. We sat across a table from each other and each called to make changes. I fared the worst (charged two hundred dollars), one person did not have to pay at all and the third, for unknown reasons, was given a credit of forty dollars.
The techniques to make sure the planes are more or less full, but that you pay more than you would like are interesting. Here is my naive and uniformed guess at some of the techniques. My information comes from lightly tracking the topic in my general reading and my direct observations.
The airlines would love to sell all their seats at the highest price, but a full seat (some money) is always better than an empty one. This is particularly true because many of the costs (fuel, labor for pilots/attendants...) are fixed. The best flight for the airline is a completely full flight. This is easiest to accomplish if you can sell more tickets than there are seats. A certain percentage of people will miss their flight. Those customers will likely lose the cost of the fare. If you have someone at the gate ready to sit down in the seat of a passenger who missed the flight, two people have paid for one seat. What could be better for the airline. If the airline overbooks too much, it risks losing the little goodwill that is left with the traveling public. Too little overbooking and there could be empty seats.
To get the most money from each person, the first goal of the airline is to split the herd. There are at least four types of passengers I have identified from the fare structure: fare indifferent passengers, forced passengers, flexible passengers, whim passengers.
The first class of passengers are the first class passengers. These are people less constrained by money. They are willing to pay high prices for the added comfort of first class. First class passengers pay dearly for their comfort. Of course, the worse the conditions behind the flimsy first class curtain, the better the first class seats look. Sometimes there are not enough people willing to pay the high fare. If the rest of the plane is full, a desperate passenger may be forced to pay a higher fare "economy sitting in first class". This is usually less than full first class, but much more than any other seat on the plane. If no one can be forced into a higher fare, the first class seat can be bought by frequent flyer miles. This is a zero cost way for airlines to reduce their frequent flyer miles debt load.
Forced passengers are those whose travel plans are completely determined by outside forces. Those who must travel on a fixed schedule (generally business travelers) are forced to pay more. Common tricks to identify these travelers include: unwillingness to stay over a weekend, short notice for travel, a desire to keep an option open for last minute changes, and a desire for short travel times. Once identified, the airlines charge these passengers a higher rate.
Because the people who can be forced to pay more are identified by certain characteristics, the people who get lower prices are those that don't share those traits. These are the flexible passengers. Because of the way forced passengers are identified, flexible travelers flights will generally be longer and less direct. They will be staying over a weekend and, with some notable exceptions. Their fares are also non-refundable with a charge for changes (even to a "cheaper" flight). Earlier booking is a double edged sword for the airlines. On one hand, they are assured a fare. On the other hand, that fare is less than they might get if they waited for a more desperate person. Some of this can be handled by overbooking, but not enough. So, the airlines play intricate games with the prices that take into account the history of the flight and the actual booking numbers every point in time.
If a plane is truly under-booked, the airline may sell seats through discount sites on the internet, but that is a last resort. To discourage use of these services, they must be somewhat unreliable. That is, you cannot be sure whether you will be able to make it to Mabel's wedding on Sunday. These tickets are sold to whim passengers. A typical whim passenger is someone who has a lover in another city and would like, if it is cheap and easy, to take a last minute flight for the weekend.
Everyone who travels frequently has stories about how late they were and still got the plane. Many of us have missed a flight or two. I have known people who left a rental car illegally parked in the departure zone. I have left a car with the keys under the mat in close parking and called the rental company to pick it up. For business travelers someone else is usually picking up the tab, so we are a little more cavalier than personal travelers. My ideal for the airport is to walk up to the gate exactly when my row is being called for boarding.
Reliable time planning is impossible because of several choke points in the process. The lack of reliability is why you are asked to be at the airport a couple of hours before boarding. That extra time for uncertainty reduces the number of trips for which it is worthwhile to travel by air. For me, the crossover is about 450 miles. For any trip less than 450 miles, it is just as fast and usually cheaper to rent a car and drive. Driving has other drawbacks (I hate to drive, more susceptible to weather problems...) so sometimes I fly anyway, but that crossover point is a longer trip than you might guess. The crossover point is different for everyone, mine is increased by the fact that I have an hour drive to the airport.
The main choke point in the process are checking bags and security. At any given airport you may know the average wait, but the times are extremely variable and you may be caught in a long line on any given trip.
Let's also get this out of the way at the beginning. Airport security is a huge joke. Unfortunately, the traveling public is the butt of the joke. Airport security costs vast amounts of money and disrupts the travel of every single passenger to protect against attacks that are both unlikely and stupid.
Here is an uncomfortable fact. Planes crash. Not very many of them and not very often, but they crash. In this inherently risky business of flying, your biggest worry is not terrorists. Less than 10% of all air fatalities have resulted from sabotage (http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_crash).
Governments conceal many of their security operations so we will never hear about them. On the other hand "Terrorist Caught with Bomb at Airport" makes an irresistible headline. What better way to build support for the current airport security efforts. I have been unable to find a single instance where airport security has detected and stopped a terrorist attack from occurring. I have found numerous cases where governments have stopped attacks in the planning stages, but none where airport security has done so.
Here is a simple example of misplaced security. I always carry a pocket knife (swiss army tinker). I use it every day. Every few months I either have to mail it back to myself from the airport (if I have time) or throw it away (if I do not have time). No airliner can be hijacked with a box cutter, or a knife, or any other sharp object.. It has not been possible to hijack a plane this way for years. There are two reasons for this. Before the September 11th attacks, the best way for a passenger to survive a hijacking was to cooperate with the hijackers. After September 11th, the best way for a passenger to survive was to actively eliminate the threat. We have seen this numerous times in the past few years. When a passenger on a flight is perceived as a threat, the other passengers attack him and eliminate the threat. You and your fellow passengers are the first line of defense. In the unlikely event that someone with a knife starts killing passengers, the plane will not go down. The doors to the cockpit are reinforced and no matter what happens in the passenger cabin, the pilots will not open the door.
Reinforcing cockpit doors and educating pilots never to open them are probably the most effective defenses against a September 11 style attack. If hijackers cannot get control of the plane, they cannot use it as a missile. If planes cannot be used as missiles, their value as a terrorist target is greatly reduced. The most someone bent on destruction can hope for is a crashed plane with a few hundred dead. There are other, more attractive targets.
We are mostly kept safe by the fact that there is a vanishingly small number of people who wish to crash a plane and governments are trying to find monitor those people. Of course the best way for governments to monitor these folks is for ordinary citizens to be aware of their neighbors and be willing to report people who seem to be threatening. This requires the trust and goodwill of the people toward their government. Goodwill is hard to feel at the end of airport screening.
Security at airports will never be relaxed no matter how useless and illogical it is. No one wants to be blamed for something going wrong. Governments also have a vested interest in fostering a certain amount of fear. Fear of outsiders unites us behind the government and makes us willing to follow instructions, even when they go against our self interest.
Checking in used to serve the function of telling the airline that you were at the airport and ready to catch the plane. Now that you can do it online, check in serves to get you through airport security. A primary goal of airline management is to reduce labor costs. The ideal for management is for no human interaction with airline personnel at all. For passengers without luggage, they have almost accomplished this. You buy your ticket from an online system. Check in is either on line or, if you don't have baggage, an electronic kiosk. To board the plane, you hand your boarding pass to the only human you will interact with before boarding the plane.
Luggage is inconvenient for airlines in a couple of ways. First, human labor is needed to get it on to and off of the correct plane. Second, it takes up room in what could be a cargo hold. A natural discouragement is knowing that airlines are neither careful nor reliable with luggage. Airlines have recently found some excellent (from their point of view) workarounds to the luggage problem. This first is to charge for checked bags. This makes your luggage ordinary paid cargo. It also increases the ticket price in a way that does not show up when you make your reservation. Businesses love the hidden fee. It allows them to compete on the basis of a deceptively low price. See http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/01/how-red-tape-be.html. The danger for the airlines is that people will try to carry on even more than they already do. For this, security takes the hit. At the same time the airlines announced luggage charges, the security folks said they had to limit the amount any single person can take through the line.
Most people on a plane are not in First Class. The airlines mantra is "pack em in". There was a time when you could put down your tray table, open a laptop and do some work. Those days are long past. The seats are so close that if the person in front of you reclines, you must have your laptop half closed. I have spent time typing reports without viewing the screen, my hands inside the half closed clamshell of the computer. There are a few seats with, very slightly, more legroom. The airlines are mandated to put these in so that you can reach the emergency exit in case of a crash. Many airlines charge more for these seats. They do not, however, charge less for the seats in front of the exits that cannot recline.
The closeness of the seats is one of the reasons movement is so difficult in planes. If someone by the window wants to get up, the passengers between him and the aisle must exit the cramped space to let him by. The aisle is just wide enough for a food cart. "Watch your elbows" is probably the flight attendants most common phrase. Once the passengers between the window seat and the aisle are up, they must march single file up the aisle so the window sitter can escape. There is not enough room for people to pass each other in the aisle so if the people in the aisle and center seats head the wrong way, it is a chinese puzzle to get everyone in place.
Inter-city busses have the reputation of being uncomfortable and dirty. Inhabited only be the undesirables who cannot afford another means of travel. I would say that airlines have become the inter-city busses of the sky, but I have never been in a bus that is as uncomfortable as a "modern" airline. Just as with busses, you can expect nothing from the company but a seat. For a long trip on either, everyone knows they must bring their own food and drink. The vestige of past food and drink service, the cart going up and down the aisle, serves almost no function but to keep the attendants busy with a moving battering ram to keep people out of the aisles.
I joke that if a completely safe anesthetic is created, the airlines will dose all the passengers and stack us like cord wood.
I have no real complaints about traveling once I am out of the airport. Often when I get off the plane, there is no real public transportation. Car rental companies use new cars which are, on the whole, quite reliable. All the car rental companies I use have worked pretty hard to make the experience easy even as they have reduced the amount of human interaction needed. Sure, they try to gouge with insurance, gas, and upgrade charges. If you rent a few times, you get used to the three or four "no"s it takes to avoid these standard traps. In the cities where there is public transportation, it is usually pretty good. I expect some inconvenience when traveling to a city that is not my own. Pretty universally, people are helpful, and transportation systems work well.
The conditions on most airlines approach that a cattle car filled with refugees fleeing for their lives. While on the plane we are expected to stay almost completely motionless and quiet for the duration of the flight. Our bodies are built for motion. Even while sleeping, people constantly change position. On an airplane this is impossible. The conditions are so unnatural that people actually die from the experience due to deep vein thrombosis. The airline rules enforce this motionlessness with ruthless efficiency. The aisles are narrow, the galley off limits, and a cart is pushed back and forth to both block and clear the aisles. The seat positions limit human interaction. In the unlikely event that you converse with another passenger you are likely to end up with a neck ache from the strain of trying to actually see them. Conversation is unlikely partly because the chance of two strangers having both the same need for interaction and the same interests is small. Contact is made even less likely by the stress induced by the experience. I say this as someone who likes the high vantage point that air travel provides.
There are periodic instances of people snapping on planes. Sometimes they get drunk and assault another passenger, sometimes they just become delusional in one way or another. It is true that people fall apart in lots of ways and in lots of places, but I believe that being crammed on a contemporary airline approaches the limits of human endurance.
Of course each airline differs somewhat. Southwest has a single class of seats and somewhat more reliable pricing. United is perhaps the worst of the worst. Most airlines seem to be rushing toward the United end of the continuum so that end is discussed here.
The time on the plane is only one part of the dehumanizing experience. The whole system is inhuman. I mean literally inhuman. That is, there is very little true human contact involved. The basic corporate motivation is money and the current competitive environment largely removes all other motivations from both selling and buying decisions. Passengers are higher paying, but more inconvenient, cargo.
Buying the Ticket
It is a general truism that interaction with paid employees decreases over time. The cost efficiencies of automated systems move us in this direction. I find that a well designed automated system is more effective and more pleasant than trying to explain my intentions to a stranger I will never see again. However, the automated systems lead us to evaluate on a small number of criteria and these criteria generally reflect airline corporate needs. Most airline systems tell you about flight times, duration, stops, and (immediate) price. Consumers tend to fly on the cheapest flight. The flight is something to endure and surely the big contract or time with Grandma is worth a few hours of pain. Might as well save the money to use on something more worthwhile. Given these conditions, the airlines have competed almost exclusively on price. Occasionally one will try larger seats or better food, but those efforts do not seem to pay off enough to be sustained. The reservation systems turn these into intangibles that do not enter the flyer's decision making process.
I heard a prediction that in the future all prices will be instantaneous. The vending machine that gives you a soda for a quarter in the dead of winter will charge a buck fifty on a hot summer day. Airlines have been the vanguard of this for many years. They have been willing to invest in a wide variety of profit maximizing devices. I do not want to paint the airline companies as uncaring blood sucking vampires seeking the last drop of blood from their unfortunate victims. Wait, I do want to paint them that way. However, as with any good vampire story, you have to have some sympathy for vampire who may not have wanted to become what he did. Many airline companies have lost unimaginably vast sums of money for year after year. A few dollars more per customer may mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy (which they regularly enter). Ok, enough sympathy, let's look at what they have done to us.
If you can manage it, it is an interesting experience to compare fares with the people around you. Because of the ways fares are managed and the multiple outlets for selling, everyone pays a different amount. The person sitting in the seat next to you, even if it is a middle seat, may have paid close to ten times more than you did (or vice versa). The same thing holds for all airline transactions. I was on a business trip with two colleagues when our plans changed and we had to rebook flights. The three of us had the class of tickets on the same planes. We sat across a table from each other and each called to make changes. I fared the worst (charged two hundred dollars), one person did not have to pay at all and the third, for unknown reasons, was given a credit of forty dollars.
Getting That Last Penny
The techniques to make sure the planes are more or less full, but that you pay more than you would like are interesting. Here is my naive and uniformed guess at some of the techniques. My information comes from lightly tracking the topic in my general reading and my direct observations.
The airlines would love to sell all their seats at the highest price, but a full seat (some money) is always better than an empty one. This is particularly true because many of the costs (fuel, labor for pilots/attendants...) are fixed. The best flight for the airline is a completely full flight. This is easiest to accomplish if you can sell more tickets than there are seats. A certain percentage of people will miss their flight. Those customers will likely lose the cost of the fare. If you have someone at the gate ready to sit down in the seat of a passenger who missed the flight, two people have paid for one seat. What could be better for the airline. If the airline overbooks too much, it risks losing the little goodwill that is left with the traveling public. Too little overbooking and there could be empty seats.
To get the most money from each person, the first goal of the airline is to split the herd. There are at least four types of passengers I have identified from the fare structure: fare indifferent passengers, forced passengers, flexible passengers, whim passengers.
The first class of passengers are the first class passengers. These are people less constrained by money. They are willing to pay high prices for the added comfort of first class. First class passengers pay dearly for their comfort. Of course, the worse the conditions behind the flimsy first class curtain, the better the first class seats look. Sometimes there are not enough people willing to pay the high fare. If the rest of the plane is full, a desperate passenger may be forced to pay a higher fare "economy sitting in first class". This is usually less than full first class, but much more than any other seat on the plane. If no one can be forced into a higher fare, the first class seat can be bought by frequent flyer miles. This is a zero cost way for airlines to reduce their frequent flyer miles debt load.
Forced passengers are those whose travel plans are completely determined by outside forces. Those who must travel on a fixed schedule (generally business travelers) are forced to pay more. Common tricks to identify these travelers include: unwillingness to stay over a weekend, short notice for travel, a desire to keep an option open for last minute changes, and a desire for short travel times. Once identified, the airlines charge these passengers a higher rate.
Because the people who can be forced to pay more are identified by certain characteristics, the people who get lower prices are those that don't share those traits. These are the flexible passengers. Because of the way forced passengers are identified, flexible travelers flights will generally be longer and less direct. They will be staying over a weekend and, with some notable exceptions. Their fares are also non-refundable with a charge for changes (even to a "cheaper" flight). Earlier booking is a double edged sword for the airlines. On one hand, they are assured a fare. On the other hand, that fare is less than they might get if they waited for a more desperate person. Some of this can be handled by overbooking, but not enough. So, the airlines play intricate games with the prices that take into account the history of the flight and the actual booking numbers every point in time.
If a plane is truly under-booked, the airline may sell seats through discount sites on the internet, but that is a last resort. To discourage use of these services, they must be somewhat unreliable. That is, you cannot be sure whether you will be able to make it to Mabel's wedding on Sunday. These tickets are sold to whim passengers. A typical whim passenger is someone who has a lover in another city and would like, if it is cheap and easy, to take a last minute flight for the weekend.
Getting to the Plane
Everyone who travels frequently has stories about how late they were and still got the plane. Many of us have missed a flight or two. I have known people who left a rental car illegally parked in the departure zone. I have left a car with the keys under the mat in close parking and called the rental company to pick it up. For business travelers someone else is usually picking up the tab, so we are a little more cavalier than personal travelers. My ideal for the airport is to walk up to the gate exactly when my row is being called for boarding.
Reliable time planning is impossible because of several choke points in the process. The lack of reliability is why you are asked to be at the airport a couple of hours before boarding. That extra time for uncertainty reduces the number of trips for which it is worthwhile to travel by air. For me, the crossover is about 450 miles. For any trip less than 450 miles, it is just as fast and usually cheaper to rent a car and drive. Driving has other drawbacks (I hate to drive, more susceptible to weather problems...) so sometimes I fly anyway, but that crossover point is a longer trip than you might guess. The crossover point is different for everyone, mine is increased by the fact that I have an hour drive to the airport.
The main choke point in the process are checking bags and security. At any given airport you may know the average wait, but the times are extremely variable and you may be caught in a long line on any given trip.
Security
Let's also get this out of the way at the beginning. Airport security is a huge joke. Unfortunately, the traveling public is the butt of the joke. Airport security costs vast amounts of money and disrupts the travel of every single passenger to protect against attacks that are both unlikely and stupid.
Here is an uncomfortable fact. Planes crash. Not very many of them and not very often, but they crash. In this inherently risky business of flying, your biggest worry is not terrorists. Less than 10% of all air fatalities have resulted from sabotage (http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_crash).
Governments conceal many of their security operations so we will never hear about them. On the other hand "Terrorist Caught with Bomb at Airport" makes an irresistible headline. What better way to build support for the current airport security efforts. I have been unable to find a single instance where airport security has detected and stopped a terrorist attack from occurring. I have found numerous cases where governments have stopped attacks in the planning stages, but none where airport security has done so.
Here is a simple example of misplaced security. I always carry a pocket knife (swiss army tinker). I use it every day. Every few months I either have to mail it back to myself from the airport (if I have time) or throw it away (if I do not have time). No airliner can be hijacked with a box cutter, or a knife, or any other sharp object.. It has not been possible to hijack a plane this way for years. There are two reasons for this. Before the September 11th attacks, the best way for a passenger to survive a hijacking was to cooperate with the hijackers. After September 11th, the best way for a passenger to survive was to actively eliminate the threat. We have seen this numerous times in the past few years. When a passenger on a flight is perceived as a threat, the other passengers attack him and eliminate the threat. You and your fellow passengers are the first line of defense. In the unlikely event that someone with a knife starts killing passengers, the plane will not go down. The doors to the cockpit are reinforced and no matter what happens in the passenger cabin, the pilots will not open the door.
Reinforcing cockpit doors and educating pilots never to open them are probably the most effective defenses against a September 11 style attack. If hijackers cannot get control of the plane, they cannot use it as a missile. If planes cannot be used as missiles, their value as a terrorist target is greatly reduced. The most someone bent on destruction can hope for is a crashed plane with a few hundred dead. There are other, more attractive targets.
We are mostly kept safe by the fact that there is a vanishingly small number of people who wish to crash a plane and governments are trying to find monitor those people. Of course the best way for governments to monitor these folks is for ordinary citizens to be aware of their neighbors and be willing to report people who seem to be threatening. This requires the trust and goodwill of the people toward their government. Goodwill is hard to feel at the end of airport screening.
Security at airports will never be relaxed no matter how useless and illogical it is. No one wants to be blamed for something going wrong. Governments also have a vested interest in fostering a certain amount of fear. Fear of outsiders unites us behind the government and makes us willing to follow instructions, even when they go against our self interest.
Checking In and Luggage
Checking in used to serve the function of telling the airline that you were at the airport and ready to catch the plane. Now that you can do it online, check in serves to get you through airport security. A primary goal of airline management is to reduce labor costs. The ideal for management is for no human interaction with airline personnel at all. For passengers without luggage, they have almost accomplished this. You buy your ticket from an online system. Check in is either on line or, if you don't have baggage, an electronic kiosk. To board the plane, you hand your boarding pass to the only human you will interact with before boarding the plane.
Luggage is inconvenient for airlines in a couple of ways. First, human labor is needed to get it on to and off of the correct plane. Second, it takes up room in what could be a cargo hold. A natural discouragement is knowing that airlines are neither careful nor reliable with luggage. Airlines have recently found some excellent (from their point of view) workarounds to the luggage problem. This first is to charge for checked bags. This makes your luggage ordinary paid cargo. It also increases the ticket price in a way that does not show up when you make your reservation. Businesses love the hidden fee. It allows them to compete on the basis of a deceptively low price. See http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/01/how-red-tape-be.html. The danger for the airlines is that people will try to carry on even more than they already do. For this, security takes the hit. At the same time the airlines announced luggage charges, the security folks said they had to limit the amount any single person can take through the line.
On the Plane
Most people on a plane are not in First Class. The airlines mantra is "pack em in". There was a time when you could put down your tray table, open a laptop and do some work. Those days are long past. The seats are so close that if the person in front of you reclines, you must have your laptop half closed. I have spent time typing reports without viewing the screen, my hands inside the half closed clamshell of the computer. There are a few seats with, very slightly, more legroom. The airlines are mandated to put these in so that you can reach the emergency exit in case of a crash. Many airlines charge more for these seats. They do not, however, charge less for the seats in front of the exits that cannot recline.
The closeness of the seats is one of the reasons movement is so difficult in planes. If someone by the window wants to get up, the passengers between him and the aisle must exit the cramped space to let him by. The aisle is just wide enough for a food cart. "Watch your elbows" is probably the flight attendants most common phrase. Once the passengers between the window seat and the aisle are up, they must march single file up the aisle so the window sitter can escape. There is not enough room for people to pass each other in the aisle so if the people in the aisle and center seats head the wrong way, it is a chinese puzzle to get everyone in place.
Inter-city busses have the reputation of being uncomfortable and dirty. Inhabited only be the undesirables who cannot afford another means of travel. I would say that airlines have become the inter-city busses of the sky, but I have never been in a bus that is as uncomfortable as a "modern" airline. Just as with busses, you can expect nothing from the company but a seat. For a long trip on either, everyone knows they must bring their own food and drink. The vestige of past food and drink service, the cart going up and down the aisle, serves almost no function but to keep the attendants busy with a moving battering ram to keep people out of the aisles.
I joke that if a completely safe anesthetic is created, the airlines will dose all the passengers and stack us like cord wood.
On the Other Side
I have no real complaints about traveling once I am out of the airport. Often when I get off the plane, there is no real public transportation. Car rental companies use new cars which are, on the whole, quite reliable. All the car rental companies I use have worked pretty hard to make the experience easy even as they have reduced the amount of human interaction needed. Sure, they try to gouge with insurance, gas, and upgrade charges. If you rent a few times, you get used to the three or four "no"s it takes to avoid these standard traps. In the cities where there is public transportation, it is usually pretty good. I expect some inconvenience when traveling to a city that is not my own. Pretty universally, people are helpful, and transportation systems work well.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
The Search for Life in the Universe
Just some small thoughts on the unlikeliness of finding an extra-terrestrial civilization that is not deliberately trying to contact unknown civilizations.
If a civilization is not trying to contact others, we would have to detect their actions. Over interplanetary distances, the only thing we can detect is electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves ...). If we could take detailed photos of a planet surface, we might see cities or other evidence of civilization. We might also detect their attempts to communicate with each other (think radio, TV, cell phones...). In both cases the frequencies we would look for are those that are not absorbed by the planet atmosphere. In all cases, detection involves the recognition of patterns in the signal that indicate intelligence. Planets are next to suns. Suns transmit huge amounts of energy that mask planetary signals. Without traveling close to the solar system, we will probably never get detailed enough information to isolate sources from a particular region of a planet. That is, we won't be able to resolve images that would show us cities.
There is a chance that something like a radio signal might be regular enough and powerful enough to be distinguished from the background, but this is likely to occur only briefly in a civilization's history. Our own experience indicates that communication feeds on itself. The tendency is to try to increase the amount of information transmitted. Over time, all bandwidth that can be used will be used and that every given bandwidth will be saturated. In our case, we have compressed signals, which reduces the direct intelligibility. We have used both time and frequency multiplexing which smears signals together. Finally, we have reduced the power for any given communication to a minimum both to increase the number of devices that can communicate and to reduce interference.
The end result is that our civilization's internal conversations, and likely any other technologically advancing civilization, will be essentially undetectable. There is an infinitesimal increase in heat at frequencies transparent to the atmosphere, but no possibility of detecting intelligible transmissions.
If a civilization inhabits multiple planets or stars, we might detect traces of those signals, but this too is extremely unlikely. Such signals have a known destination and are likely to be highly directed. That makes eavesdropping difficult. Even if we received the signal, we probably could not recognize it as such because, again, available bandwidth will probably be saturated and the signals, in effect, disguised by compression and multiplexing.
That leaves only communications from civilizations that are deliberately trying to contact unknown civilizations.
If a civilization is not trying to contact others, we would have to detect their actions. Over interplanetary distances, the only thing we can detect is electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves ...). If we could take detailed photos of a planet surface, we might see cities or other evidence of civilization. We might also detect their attempts to communicate with each other (think radio, TV, cell phones...). In both cases the frequencies we would look for are those that are not absorbed by the planet atmosphere. In all cases, detection involves the recognition of patterns in the signal that indicate intelligence. Planets are next to suns. Suns transmit huge amounts of energy that mask planetary signals. Without traveling close to the solar system, we will probably never get detailed enough information to isolate sources from a particular region of a planet. That is, we won't be able to resolve images that would show us cities.
There is a chance that something like a radio signal might be regular enough and powerful enough to be distinguished from the background, but this is likely to occur only briefly in a civilization's history. Our own experience indicates that communication feeds on itself. The tendency is to try to increase the amount of information transmitted. Over time, all bandwidth that can be used will be used and that every given bandwidth will be saturated. In our case, we have compressed signals, which reduces the direct intelligibility. We have used both time and frequency multiplexing which smears signals together. Finally, we have reduced the power for any given communication to a minimum both to increase the number of devices that can communicate and to reduce interference.
The end result is that our civilization's internal conversations, and likely any other technologically advancing civilization, will be essentially undetectable. There is an infinitesimal increase in heat at frequencies transparent to the atmosphere, but no possibility of detecting intelligible transmissions.
If a civilization inhabits multiple planets or stars, we might detect traces of those signals, but this too is extremely unlikely. Such signals have a known destination and are likely to be highly directed. That makes eavesdropping difficult. Even if we received the signal, we probably could not recognize it as such because, again, available bandwidth will probably be saturated and the signals, in effect, disguised by compression and multiplexing.
That leaves only communications from civilizations that are deliberately trying to contact unknown civilizations.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Ugly US Money
I think United States money is the ugliest in the world. You can check out money from other countries at http://www.banknotes.com/images.htm. Compare this sample from Papua New Guinea http://www.banknotes.com/pg29.htm with the new five dollar bill from the US. http://www.moneyfactory.gov/newmoney/main.cfm/currency/new5. Honestly, can you think of anything more idiotic looking that those yellow 05s pasted randomly. Oh wait, there is the huge purple numeral five. I am sure these "features" serve a purpose. I am also sure the purpose could be served in an artistic fashion.
When the treasury department announced a redesign of US bills I had great hopes. The US public was extremely resistant to change and it was the threat/actuality of massive counterfeiting that forced redesign. Before that, it seemed that George Washington had produced the designs after 40 days on Mount Sinai.
My hopes have been dashed. As it turns out, the new designs were solely concerned with protecting the currency. Check the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at http://www.moneyfactory.gov/. There is no indication that the engraving bureau thinks AT ALL about the appearance of the money. It is obvious that artists had little influence and no control. In other countries they realize that protection mechanisms can be implemented to create bills that are both beautiful and functional.
I highly doubt that this post will ever be seen by anyone in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing but, just in case, here is a concrete suggestion.
If there are artists involved in the design of US currency, they are either not very good, or they have no real control of the design. For a case study on how currency should be designed see the lecture by Oootije Oxenaar at http://www.rgaros.nl/money/oxenaar/index.html.
At the Engraving Bureau, clearly the wrong people are doing graphic design. Even Antarctica, http://www.banknotes.com/aq16.htm, gets better looking money than the United States.
When the treasury department announced a redesign of US bills I had great hopes. The US public was extremely resistant to change and it was the threat/actuality of massive counterfeiting that forced redesign. Before that, it seemed that George Washington had produced the designs after 40 days on Mount Sinai.
My hopes have been dashed. As it turns out, the new designs were solely concerned with protecting the currency. Check the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at http://www.moneyfactory.gov/. There is no indication that the engraving bureau thinks AT ALL about the appearance of the money. It is obvious that artists had little influence and no control. In other countries they realize that protection mechanisms can be implemented to create bills that are both beautiful and functional.
I highly doubt that this post will ever be seen by anyone in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing but, just in case, here is a concrete suggestion.
Currency should be designed by artists. A single artist should control the design of a single bill. It may be best if the same artist designs a whole series. The controlling artist should be aware of security and usability constraints. Security and usability people should be able to veto a design, but they should never be able to pick up a pen and modify a design.
If there are artists involved in the design of US currency, they are either not very good, or they have no real control of the design. For a case study on how currency should be designed see the lecture by Oootije Oxenaar at http://www.rgaros.nl/money/oxenaar/index.html.
At the Engraving Bureau, clearly the wrong people are doing graphic design. Even Antarctica, http://www.banknotes.com/aq16.htm, gets better looking money than the United States.
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