There's a fair amount of annoying absurdity associated with the cotton swab.

The traditional use for these things is, of course, cleaning-out one's ear canal. Probably that's not a good idea, though. The back of the Q-tips® package at which I'm looking says

If used to clean ears, stroke swab gently around the outer surface of the ear, without entering the ear canal.

WARNING: Use only as directed. Entering the ear canal could cause injury. Keep out of reach of children.

(Emphasis theirs.) A swab could push cerumen (ear wax) deeper into the canal, and pack it more tightly. With or without the cerumen, the swab could be pressed hard enough to rupture the tympanic membrane (ear drum). And the swab might even promote infection.

But, though there may be some tiny number of people with such odd convolutions to their outer ears that a cotton swab would be helpful in cleaning them, most of the rest of us could get better or faster results with a cloth or tissue. If we're not going to put the swab in our ears, then it probably just shouldn't touch our ears at all. Granted that the box merely says If used to clean ears, but I remember a commercial from Cheesebrough-Ponds featuring Orson Bean, cleaning his outer ear with a Q-tip®, and advising us Never put anything in your ear, except your elbow. (Someone get that man a tissue.)

When doctors and medical advice columns tell their audience not to use these things in the ear, they frequently use a formula which gets my back up. Formally, it's Not-X. When X, then Y. which is to say that they claim something doesn't happen, and then tell us what to do when it happens. Jeez! More specifically, they tell us

The ear canal does not need to be cleaned, because it's a self-cleaning organ. […] When the ear canal needs to be cleaned, one should see a doctor.

Okay, the ear canal does need to be cleaned, because it is an imperfectly self-cleaning organ; let's not pretend otherwise while we're trying to keep the swabs out. And, as far as this see a doctor business, while it may seem like a mighty fine idea to the doctors, most people don't want to pay the cost of seeing a doctor. Even where medicine is socialized to the point that there would be no pecuniary cost in seeing a doctor, there will be the cost of waiting (which will typically be significantly higher where medicine is socialized). People want their ears unclogged quickly.

A better alternative to the swab for cleaning the ear canal is the syringe. For a few bucks, most druggists will sell you a syringe that's basically a rubber ball with a nozzle. If you went to the doctor, then he'd probably use a more impressive syringe, made of metal and with a plunger. You could order one of those for yourself for about US$20, but it's unlikely to be more useful for you unless you start syringing not only the ears of everyone in your household but also those of all your friends and neighbors.

If you read the instructions on the syringe package, it will basically tell you to dribble water into your ear. You will probably find this dribbling signally unhelpful unless you've used other fluid to dissove the cerumen and are now just rinsing the mess out. You can buy expensive fluids from your druggist, or you can use the dilute hydrogen peroxide that he'll sell you for much less, or you can use a mixture of vinegar and baking soda, each bought from the grocer. In all three cases, that's going to tickle maddeningly.

I once had my ear canals cleaned by a Doctor Villavecer, in Westerville, OH. He used one of those impressive metal syringes. He didn't dribble the water into my ear; he blasted it. That worked pretty well, though I might have felt differently had a tympanic membrane ruptured. In any case, subsequently, this blasting is how I clean my canals, except that I use a rubber ball syringe, as I am leaving the ears of my friends and neighbors clogged but unmolested.

Backing-up, let's return to the warning on that Q-tips® package:

Keep out of reach of children.

Now, unless we're prepared to tell people to keep lollipops and twigs out of reach of children, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put the Q-tips® with the pornography and assault rifles. We can instead tell junior not to put anything into his ear, and reälize that a swab would be less terrible in disobedience than many other candidates. I reälize that Cheesebrough-Ponds is not really to blame for this specific bit of nonsense (responsibility lies in the hands of lawyers, of state officials, and of the fools who empower them), but nonsense it is, none-the-less.

Towards my next paper, I've been thinking a lot about decision-making where one has uncertainty but not quantified probabilities or even necessarily a total ordering of possible outcomes by plausibility. Most recently, I've tried to formalize the notion of when, without quantified probabilities, one lottery may be said to be fairer than another, and of a simple rule for selecting the fairer of two coins (as in my previous paper I have made considerable use of orderings of coins by entropy).

Yester-day, in the context of such ponderings, I arrived at some interesting, simple complementarity rules. Consider two actions, each paired with one considered outcome. Between these, various plausibility relations may obtain — the first pair may be more plausible than the second, the second may be more plausible than the first, they may be equally plausible, their relative plausibility may be unknown, or the relation may be a union of two or three of the aforementioned (eg one pair may be more-or-equally plausible). In any case, whatever that relation, the same relation will hold if we reverse the order of the pairs and take the logical complement of the outcomes. Here's an example of the formal expression of one of these rules where I'm using the same notation that I did in in my entry of 19 August, and represents the relationship of the left side being more plausible than the right side.

(Common-sense examples are easy to generate. For example: If it is more likely that the Beet Weasel will bite than that the Woman of Interest will stay home, then it is more likely that she will depart than that he will refrain from biting. Or: If we don't know whether a given nickle is more likely to come-up heads than is a given quarter, then we don't know whether the quarter is more likely to come-up tails than is the nickle.)

In the context of an irreflexive, antisymmetric, transitive relation, one can identify closeness without measurement. For example, if A is more plausible than B and B is more plausible than C, then B is closer both to A and to C than they are each to the other.

This abstraction of closeness, along with the principles of complementarity, allow one to identify when one coin is more fair than another, without having any quantification of fairness, so long as one can order the plausibilities of outcomes across coins. One simple rule is to pick the coin whose most likely outcome is less likely than the most likely outcome of other coins; an equivalent rule would be to pick the coin whose least likely outcome is more likely than the least likely outcomes of other coins.

BTW, the aforementioned previous paper is still in the hands of the editors of the journal to which I submitted it a bit less than four months ago. I've not had any word from them. But, while this journal did not provide a time-frame, other journals give frames such as six months. (A friend recently had one of her submissions rejected at just before the three-month mark.) It is at least somewhat plausible that, by the time that said previous paper is published somewhere, I will have this next paper ready to submit to a journal.

I have been visiting my parents in Arizona since sometime shortly before Thanksgiving Day.

I'll need to go home soon, at least for a day or so, if only to collect my mail before the USPS sends some of it back to its senders and discards the rest. I would like to come back to be at my parents' home on Christmas Day.

Shortly after I got here, my mother told me that she had an artist's light box that had stopped working and that she had replaced but that she'd been holding on the chance that I'd want to try to repair it. Its fluorescent ballast had failed. I was able to find a replacement unit with the same ratings and form factor at a local Ace Hardware. (The box has used a 15W bulb, the ballast can handle anything from about 14W to about 20W.) Some of the original connections had been made with twist-on wire nuts, so I used these for the extra connections of the repair. The parts came to less that US$10; the actual work on the box took a very few minutes. The restored box is worth about US$200. I offered to return it to my mother, or to trade it to her for the newer box (which lacks a built-in tilt-stand), but my mother insists that I keep it. It will be nice to have.

My brother and his wife now live in the same general area as do my parents, so I have seen a fair amount of them during my visit. Also, one of my cousins (a very nice guy who suffers from some significant cerebral impairment as a result of mishap in utero) has been visiting my mother for the last few days.

Although I've spent a lot of time staring at the computer screen (much as I would be doing if back in Hillcrest), my mother has taken me (sometimes with others) out to see some of the sights.

Although the right sort of job offer would get me to move here, Arizona is very far from what I would consider an ideal place to live. I much prefer the physical geography and most aspects of the culture of the Pacific Northwest along I-5, especially in the area of Portland. (The politics of Portland is to my left, but the politics of Arizona is very much to my right.)

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As a result of strokes, Frank Frazetta lost the use of his drawing hand a few years ago. He lost his wife to cancer just a few months ago. Now this.

Happy birthday, E[lzie] C[risler] Segar!

My latest poll has rather many options, so I'm not placing it in the sidebar.

In my previous entry, I noted that, as the Gallup report of the President's approval rating approached 50% from above, there was an asymmetry in its perturbations, that it skated the 50% line, without blipping below it, for an extended interval. And I noted that, as the disapproval rating approached the approval rating from below, it tentatively seemed to be displaying a complementary asymmetry, plateauing when it might be expected to rise further.

Indeed, that reported plateau was stretched for a full week. If you'll look at the previous reported figures for the disapproval rating, you'll see nothing like it.

The news noted a few days ago that, according to the Gallup Organization, the approval rating for President Obama had fallen below 50%.

I've been watching the Gallup poll (along with other polls) for some time now, and had become increasingly doubtful of its reports. As the rating approached the 50% line, an apparent asymmetry developed in the perturbations, to which I refer as skating. This skating was at its most pronounced when the rating would hit the 50% line; it might blip up, but it would not blip down.

The Gallup Organization has referred to the President's drop below the 50% line as symbolic, but in a nation that likes its decisions made by majorities or by super-majorities, and with the President being of a party that named itself for democracy, having less than majority approval is more than merely symbolic.

The next milestone comes if-and-when the reported share of the population who disapprove of the President's performance exceed those who approve. The Gallup Organization has reported the disapproval rating being as high as 44%, and as generally climbing. But, guess what? For the last few days, even as the President's approval rating has been admitted to have dropped below 50%, the disapproval rating has been reported as plateauing, as if the loss of approval completely translated into indifference or indecision. Perhaps we are now going to see a sort of complementary asymmetry of reported perturbations for disapproval.

(The third milestone would be when the disapproval rating climbed above 50%.)