Two talks at MIT this week have been thought-provoking in similar ways. The first was by a physics professor, Frank Wilczek, who recently won the Nobel Prize for his work on the Strong Force, which holds together quarks to form atomic nuclei. Wilczek showed some impressive drawings from the latest European particle accelerators in which subatomic particles are smashed together until the quarks start flying out. (This lecture is available at http://web.mit.edu/nobel-lectures/.) John Grotzinger, a geology professor, gave a talk about his experience with the Mars Rovers, which found evidence for flowing water on Mars in sedimentary rocks. The Rovers communicate with an orbiter and can also communicate directly with stations on Earth. In Grotzinger’s more than one year with the project they’ve never had a communications problem.
So… if human minds can get together to make ever-better particle accelerators, why can’t anyone build a reliable inexpensive nuclear power reactor? And if the Mars Rovers can call Pasadena, how come nobody with a T-Mobile phone can make a call from most spots on the MIT campus or along Memorial Drive?
In the 1970s people would ask questions of the form “If they can put a man on the Moon, why can’t they do X?” What would be the modern equivalent? The one great human achievement of our current decade that can be compared to the lack of accomplishment in most bureaucracies?
…search eight billion webpages in a fraction of a second?
Or for example, how come I live in the internet capital of the world, the Dulles/Herndon/Reston corridor, but I cannot get DSL because the convoluted way in which the phone systems here are laid out. And yeah, we got those weird cell coverage issues too.
In a similar veign, perhaps apocryphal, Bill Gates asked :
“If I can search the web in under a second why does it take so long to search my c drive ?”
cheap nuke: http://www.alaskajournal.com/stories/122604/loc_20041226003.shtml
a $20M 10MW nuke the size of a water tower from toshiba with fuel life of ~30 years.
dc
cheap nuke: http://www.alaskajournal.com/stories/122604/loc_20041226003.shtml
a $20M 10MW nuke the size of a water tower from toshiba with fuel life of ~30 years.
dc
The state of available products is determined by profit potential, not what is technically possible by trained engineers. Virtually all of the existing situations which elicit the “If we can do X, why can’t we do Y?” are fully possible from a technical standpoint.
This article explains that not only we (“we” in this article being the chinese) can, but also why we don’t. Interesting read. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
I agree with Peter. Technical feasibility itself is almost never the limiting factor for “why can’t we do Y?” scenarios. Money is certainly one factor. Sometimes the management or logistics are the limiting factor. My favorite, though, is political will. I think it’s interesting to look for “if we can do X” scenarios that reflect political will. For example, “if we can spend over 4 billion dollars a month in Iraq, why can’t we provide adequate school supplies for all our elementary schools?”
Oddly enough, the “man on the moon” comparison itself isn’t even reasonable. We could not put a man on the moon today without duplicating the entire work of the Apollo program, so much knowledge has been lost since then.
If enron can spead income across 250 companies and never pay income taxes then why can business leaders not find adequate justification to invest in technology research.
Consider the dissipation index. It relates inversely to the amount of time people have actively been using the bi-products of a technology, and determines the degree to which that technology will be applied directly at the present moment. The dissipation index for technologies for all Apollo programs is 1; there is nothing left to gnaw on that bone. Event the Saturn V blueprints have been lost. But the upside is that NASA’s communications technology is supreme. Meanwhile, the dissipation index for cellular technology is 8.75. This still relatively new technology has yet to spin out a majority of its bi-products, let alone all of them. Much left to chew out of this juicy bone; the teeth roam for more new marrow and all possibilities are left incomplete.
Every time I hear someone say, “If we could put a man on the moon we should be able to do X” I say, “The moon landing cost many billions of dollars. Would you pay that for X?”
What is at the essence of that question is with enough time and money – especially money – we could do X. But who’s going to pay for it?
The fastest way to get supplies for elementary schools is to abolish teachers unions.
Teachers love to hide behind the “but what about the children” sheild but collectively teachers are paid very well. Every district in the US has a drivers education teacher being paid $115K per year plus vacation plus benefits.
If you look at the past five years teachers have recieved raises every year per their contracts. I bet that most people working in corporate american have not seen a raise in the same time frame.
Get rid of the teachers union and you will free up money for the children.
My cord is struck everytime I hear someone defending teachers not being paid enough or children not having supplies in elementary schools.
Frank,
What a fantastic whopper! “Every district in the US has a drivers education teacher being paid $115K per year…”
Well, in my city there are 24 elementary school districs, I am willing to wager that none of them employ a drivers education teacher, at any wage.
As a matter of fact, my father used to teach drivers’ ed, on top of general business and physical ed. When he retired, he was making half of what I make now.
To make things even more interesting in the face of your “facts”, I have to send my son to private drivers’ ed, because not even the high school districts carry that course.
Where exactly do you get your information? AM radio?
I think that Dave Noble makes an excellent point, and it is worth every americans attention to wonder what exactly we could do with the hundreds of billions of dollars (think domestic programs) that are currently being spent on foreign military actions that have a debatable effect on us domestic security.
On the upside, surely there must be some civilian application for an anti-missile defense system…
I was going to suggest Google, looks like someone beat me to it.
Gary,
It is a good thing that your district does not have a “drivers ed” program paid by public funds.
In Illinois you can look teachers and administrator salaries at:
http://www.thechampion.org/schools/salaries.asp
This website is supported by private funding. Your state goverment and national teachers unions will never publish this information.
In regards to your fathers situation in the profession of teaching: He did not move across the magic line into “administration.” Once you move into admistrative status your pay and benefits, retirement will shoot upwards. The entire systems needs people like your father who do not want to make moves: This allows the unions to keep the teacher salary average low while moving more and more funds into the pot for distribution into the administration.
Nice jab at me with the AM radio comment. Do you really believe your school district is being run efficiently?
Why can’t “they” intercept a primitive ballistic missile flying on a predetermined trajectory sans countermeasures?
This is regarding Frank’s comment about Teacher’s salaries. In California elementary schools, there is no union. The teachers’ salaries are not adequate for the cost of living in the bay area. Every elementary school teacher spends on the average $2500 out of their own pockets to cover class room supplies. So I think that there is definite need of investment in the public education system.
Gary, Thanks for the eye opener. I bookmarked it. I live in Illinois and can tell you that a “vocal teacher” in my school district makes $91.5k per year. This is bad, but not as bad as seeing 6 administrators all making $105k on up in my small suburb. Must be nice only working 160 days or so a year, plus all the benefits. Makes us software guys look like fools. Lucky for them, the Chinese can’t teach our kids. 😉
Frank and Johnny,
I think that you are making serious logical errors when you equate administrators salaries with teachers salaries. Let me try and enumerate them.
1. Teachers are in the teachers union, administrators are not. There is no logical connection between high administrator salaries and the actions of teachers unions.
2. In an efficient school system, a small number of administrators will leverage their services against a large number of schools. In the business sector we reward executives that leverage their skills against a large number of businesses (think Buffet).
3. In my fair city, there are 24 grade school districts and 5 high school districts. This is grossly inefficient, but it is kept in place bu the residents of wealthy districts that want to isolate their tax money from the poorer school districts.
4. In california the legacy of prop 13 (tax reform) has been the near destruction of the public school system. Aside from giving us ‘street culture’ what else has prop 13 done but isolate the wealthy from the poor.
5. Any political party that seeks to take funds away from the public school system is one that benefits from an ignorant electorate.
And that leaves me with:
If our society can educate the entire baby boom generation, why do the baby boomers refuse to provide a free public education to the generations that follow.
Kalifornia should actually be a more fair system than any other. The state ends up funding the education instead of the localities. In fact they have another “prop” that says schools budgets cannot be cut. ;-). They want the cake but don’t want to pay for it.
In Illinois and most of the country the wealthy areas spend much more per pupil than the poor areas. Illinois students rank #1 in standardized test scores. And this includes the city of Chicago, so I don’t mind too much that teachers make that much money. At least here they are delivering results for it. Meanwhile in the last 20 years California has gone from being #1 to near bottom in scores.
In a quick browse of the comments, I notice some posters bring up good-seeming points (when skimmed quickly on the way down to the textarea where I get to type this, anyway) about it not really being a question of technology or advancement, etc., but when I read Philip’s question, the response I had was: “If they can sequence the human genome, how come they can’t X?”
Not sure I would necessarily let that go without argument if someone used it on me, though. Still, I think it works.
Johnny,
That is exactly my point. Prop 13 was passed in 1978. Since that time, california schools have gone “from first to worst”:
http://www.pbs.org/merrow/tv/ftw/prop13.html
We should all beware of tax reforms that target some unspecified or fallacious waste.
Dan, how about; If they can sequence the human genome, then why can’t federal money be used to advance technology for organ replacement?
The school teachers make up fake receipts totaling $2500 so they can get a write off on their taxes. These teachers tend to itemize their deductions because they have two houses: one for the winter and a summer “cottage.” Go look at your public tax records and see the salaries of the teachers in your district. Again, teacher and administrator salary records are not very accessable unless a private individual makes the effort to collect and distribute this “public” information. Teachers and school administrators are hiding behind the “its for the children” excuse.
Frank – I doubt the California teachers have both winter and summer homes.. But certainly in the Midwest they could. Only job more cake than teaching is fire fighting. Or being a pilot for the majors. Now that is *real* cake.
Gary – A lot of Calis problems also come from all the illegal immigration and the social services to support them.
They do make a portable phone that can get coverage not only anywhere on the MIT campus, but anywhere on the planet. The first one of these was called Iridium. Now there are a number of satellite phones. I frequently hear them on the news as journalists phone in reports from many a desolate location with no phone service.
RE T-mobile – my friend has service with them. He has taken to calling it tenuous-mobile due to the frequent drops and no service areas. I don’t think he will renew when his contract expires in 6 months.
all these comments overlook one essential fact : They have NEVER Put a man on the moon ! !@ !
The greatest hoax of the 20th Century .
I don’t think there has been any equal to the effort that went into the moonshot; the massive deployment of men and money that went into placing 2 men on the moon’s surface is probably still without modern parallel. Maybe the cracking of the human genome could be regarded as close, in the modern equivalent of effort expended, but “if they can crack the human genome then why can’t they get the OSX iPod Updater under 66Mb?” doesn’t really have the same ring to it.