Month: November 2012

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried an article calculating the federal government’s liabilities at approximately 550 percent of GDP:

The actual liabilities of the federal government—including Social Security, Medicare, and federal employees’ future retirement benefits—already exceed $86.8 trillion, or 550% of GDP. For the year ending Dec. 31, 2011, the annual accrued expense of Medicare and Social Security was $7 trillion. Nothing like that figure is used in calculating the deficit. In reality, the reported budget deficit is less than one-fifth of the more accurate figure.

Why haven’t Americans heard about the titanic $86.8 trillion liability from these programs? One reason: The actual figures do not appear in black and white on any balance sheet. But it is possible to discover them. Included in the annual Medicare Trustees’ report are separate actuarial estimates of the unfunded liability for Medicare Part A (the hospital portion), Part B (medical insurance) and Part D (prescription drug coverage).

As of the most recent Trustees’ report in April, the net present value of the unfunded liability of Medicare was $42.8 trillion. The comparable balance sheet liability for Social Security is $20.5 trillion.

The authors are Chris Cox and Bill Archer, former Congressmen (Republicans pitched out by voters angry about hearing the bad news?). They say that the federal government will need an additional $8 trillion per year in tax revenue in order to stay current with accrued costs. In 2011 the federal government collected just $2.2 trillion in total taxes, so we all need to be paying roughly 4X what we currently are.

I’d previously seen a New York Times article calculating our debt at 500 percent of GDP, but I’d thought that it included liabilities of the 5o states as well as the federal government. If Cox and Archer are right, the Federal government owes 550 percent of GDP and state pension and retiree health care liabilities will be additional. The states’ liabilities are plainly enormous, with government workers here in Massachusetts retiring as young as age 41 and 51-year-old retirees in California receiving more than the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Maybe nobody knows the real number?

Perhaps this is a big source of political disagreement in the U.S. Half of the voters look at the cash books, which show that we’re spending only $1-2 trillion beyond our means every year, a cruel burden for our children and grandchildren. The other half of the voters look at the accrual books, which show that we’re spending closer to $10 trillion beyond our means every year, an impossible burden for our children and grandchildren.

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I recently finished People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo–and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up by Richard Parry, a journalist. I’m not generally a crime/mystery reader (found this among Amazon’s “best non-fiction books of the year”), but this true story about an English girl who disappeared in Tokyo in 2000 should grip anyone who is a parent and interested in Japanese society. I don’t want to say more for fear of spoiling the suspense. Lucie Blackman’s disappearance was a media sensation at the time, especially in Britain, but I don’t remember hearing about it previously.

Practical advice for young women: Don’t agree to be alone with a man unless you have met his friends (and verified that he has real and close friends). We are wired from the old days of small populations and limited travel. Our brains are set up for a world in which it is practical to know each new acquaintance by family background going back several generations. A friendless person who still has a sex drive is a very dangerous creature in our modern world of 7 billion souls and overnight travel across oceans.

[There are hardly any photos in the book and no maps so it works well on an electronic reader such as the Kindle.]

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I got hold of LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future and learned a bunch of stuff that I didn’t know about LED light bulbs.

Many of the bulbs sold are not lighting the room via LED. The LED blasts a phosphor with a harsh narrow spectrum of (fairly blue) radiation and then the phosphor re-radiates a broader spectrum. Partly this is because the phosphor radiates more broadly than an LED and partly this is because it enables all of the electricity-to-light conversion to be done by a blue LED. A blue LED is about 30 percent more efficient than an LED of a redder color. The warmer the bulb desired, the less efficient it will be, due to the fact that more red phosphor must be used and the photons coming out of the red phosphor don’t have as much energy as those from yellow phosphor.

LED bulbs are not especially energy-efficient. They produce approximately 50 lumens/watt, which is the same as compact fluorescent bulbs.

The traditional color rendering index (CRI) to measure the extent to which a bulb puts out a broad spectrum of color is being replaced by Color Quality Scale (CQS). To some extent, this new standard is intended to make LED bulbs measure better.

Haitz’s Law says that every 10 years we are supposed to have a 10x drop in cost-per-lumen and a 20x increase in light from an LED. It is unclear how much more efficiency can be wrung from LED bulbs. This article says that someone the laws of physics have been bent by an LED in a lab at MIT, with more light output than energy in. Other sources say that LEDs are already about 80-percent efficient.

LED bulbs depend critically upon heat sink design. The bulbs don’t radiate waste energy in the form of infrared light so any inefficiency needs to be dealt with by a heat sink especially due to the fact that if the LED gets hot it will produce less light. On the other side of the spectrum, LEDs don’t put out ultraviolet light either and therefore supposedly don’t attract insects.

Household wiring is incompatible with LED bulbs in two ways: the voltage is way too high; the voltage potential rises and falls 60 times per second. LEDs operate at lower voltages and have almost no persistence, i.e., when you take the voltage away the light goes off instantaneously. In order to bring the voltage down and turn the alternating current (AC) into direct current (DC), an LED light bulb is crammed with electronics. Therefore it might not be that much more expensive to add IP-addressability and have all of a house’s light bulbs on the WiFi network.

[I’m not sure if I recommend this O’Reilly book, by the way. The author makes no attempt to explain what an LED is. I’ve found this with most books on technology written for an American audience. The lay person is assumed to be too stupid to understand anything. In this case it might be the author also who has not reached the Britney Spears level of understanding of semiconductors. He says “LEDs and SSL [solid state logic?] can be just as complex as you want to make them, especially if you have a thing for semiconductors [like Britney!] or photmetry. It’s one thing to understand the lighting in terms of heat sinks and LEDs, but it’s entirely another to get deeply involved in the electrical engineering, physics, and material sciences… Many of these elements are outside of our scope and are fully explained in white papers, journals, and textbooks, if you’d like to dig more.”]

My personal experiments with LED bulbs so far have been reasonably encouraging. I spent $38 on a Philips L-Prize Award Winning Bulb in October. It is now down to $30. I installed it in an outdoor fixture that requires a ladder to service. The other bulb is a Mitsubishi Verbatim BR30 at the top of a stairwell. This is a truly challenging destination to reach. The bulb produces a beautiful uniform light. It is rated at 85W equivalent but seems brighter. It impossible to tell whether there are really multiple small LEDs inside and the spectrum seems pretty broad. It was a little more than $30 and I got it from a specialist retailer, http://www.lights-go.com, founded by Rick Regan.

The Philips Web site distributes a calculator that shows the payback period for Massachusetts (average electricity cost 14 cents/kwh) is 3.8 years (26.7 percent ROI) when replacing $1 bulbs with $30 LED bulbs that are used 1000 hours per year. As noted above, given that LED bulbs are not substantially more efficient than CFL, it does not seem as though replacing CFL bulbs makes economic sense, though personally my experience with CFL is that the bulbs fail after a year or two, the light is slow to warm up, and disposal of the mercury-laden product is a distressing operation for a parent. A calculation that I have not seen done is of when it makes sense to buy an LED bulb given how quickly the prices are coming down. Even if one is using incandescents it might make the most sense to continue using them for one more year and then switch to a Philips bulb that is selling for $20 rather than $30 today. Philips says that a standard bulb will consume about $7 per year in electricity if operated for 1000 hours. The LED bulb that I bought has already fallen in price by more than $7 in the past month.

Based on my experience as a shopper it is a good thing that both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama constantly reassured me that America is the world’s most innovative economy. Otherwise it would be disturbing to realize that all of the innovative products that I have encountered were designed by people outside the U.S. The leaders in this market seem to be Dutch, Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese. Does anyone know of a U.S.-based company that will be competitive in this market? General Electric has a 60-watt replacement LED bulb that consumes 30 percent more power than the Philips bulb and costs nearly twice as much.

Finally the advent of these bulbs makes me realize how poorly adapted to the modern world is the wiring in the orgy of new residential and commercial construction that the U.S. indulged in during the last two decades. We spent trillions of dollars building new structures that are wired with the wrong voltage and that have the dumbest possible controls. One would think that every new outlet would have USB power (example) and that every lighting fixture would have a 3.3V or 5V output as well (see this IEEE Spectrum article that explains more of the engineering behind a bulb).

[Separately, I have been shopping for retrofit power strips that contain USB power outlets. Despite the supercharged price and size of some of these devices (up to $50), they often put out a feeble 0.5 amps of power rather than the 2.1 amps required by popular tablets such as the iPad. Monoprice.com has some that are spec’d at 2.1 amps but the typical name brand surge protector is down at 0.5 to 1 amp shared between two USB outlets. Monoprice retails a four-port charger with a total drive capability of 2.1 amps for $7.80. Why can’t a $50 surge protector include the same capability?]

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… guarding rocks. Here’s a photo of one of the security guards hired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to stand outside and guard a big rock (Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass). She has a graduate degree in philosophy and says that her main task is to discourage people from climbing on the rock.

Separately, photographers will appreciate the Stanley Kubrick exhibit, which includes a gorgeous array of lenses (see these photos from the Sony NEX-6 camera that I am testing). The exhibit will remind you that before computer 3D modeling people were forced to be creative.

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I received one of the first Google Nexus 10 tablets this week and have set it up and upgraded to Android 4.2. With both Android 4.1 and 4.2, the touch screen seems to ignore a lot of touches, especially when inside Google Chrome. One can be stabbing the screen repeatedly with a finger and the screen will actually go to “idle dim”. It is tough to follow links when on a standard Web page. The device seems to respond better to light touches, but is annoying finicky. I had a similar issue with the first generation Amazon Kindle Fire.

Anyone else have usability issues with the Nexus 10? I wonder if my hardware could be defective. I haven’t heard of unresponsive touch screens being due to a subtle hardware defect.

[Separately, the high-res screen is just beautiful (2560×1600 pixels, same as my 30″ desktop LCD; the iPad 3 and iPad 4 are 2048×1536 pixels). Text looks sharper, clearer, and more print-like than on an iPad 3. But due to the touch screen issue, I greatly prefer the iPad, Nexus 7, or almost any mobile phone. Imagine using a desktop computer with a mouse button that worked approximately 40 percent of the time and the rest of the time did nothing (with a random chance of success on every click).]

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A friend recently took over development of a business-to-business site (i.e., one where the number of users will be limited) and faces the challenge of re-architecting the software to run from a standard relational database management system rather than Mongo, a “NoSQL” database. It turns out that the business requirements are most easily met with the flexibility of programming in SQL. He shared with me this anecdote: “a friend of mine, who works at [big company with infinite money], told me about a colleague who decided to use Mongo for something there, only later to change his mind and use Postgres. When asked, the friend said, “well, it sounded really cool at first, until I realized that NoSQL is just another name for what people did before there were relational databases”.

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My trusty Lenovo 13″ laptop has finally taken one knock too many and the screen is very unhealthy. As it has served more than two years for about $600 I won’t complain. I think it is time for an SSD-based machine with at least 320 Gb of disk, 8 GB of RAM, and ideally an SD card reader for grabbing digital photos. Anyone have a favorite machine for travel? I suppose it should run windows 8 but I am not sure about the idea of convertible tablet. I am still recovering from the Tablet PC that I bought 10 years ago. I want it to be cheap enough that I won’t cry if it is dropped.

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Here’s a story that will bring cheer to Yale and Princeton alums…

I donated blood yesterday at Children’s Hospital and then went over to Harvard Medical School to visit a friend. Just outside his office was the following poster:

Underneath a headline of “Learn English at Harvard” the first sentence asks “Ready for a truly unique learning experience?”

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As a recovering audiophile myself, I was heartened to see the spirit alive at Amazon. I’m getting a 6′ optical digital cable to connect a desktop PC with an outboard digital audio converter. This is mostly because the speakers are making some funny noises and I’m too lazy to debug whether the extraneous sounds are coming from the sound card or the old M-Audio powered speakers.

Note that the function of this cable is to transmit 1s and 0s, with an error correcting code (essentially some redundant data) included so that the digital data can be completely recovered by the receiver even if there are some errors in transmission. Asking “is the sound different?” is equivalent to asking if you would get a different version of nytimes.com in a Web browser by connecting via wireless or a CAT5 cable. Yet there are 541 reviews and we learn from one review “Sound quality: The quality of the sound was on par with some of the more expensive cables I’ve had previously. I didn’t notice any interference and it sounded fairly clear.” and that “If you bought this $450 cable [competitive product], I cry for you.” Numerous other reviews refer to the sound quality of the cable.

Speaking of sound quality… what do people like for desktop digital audio converters? I don’t need a headphone amplifier (and probably wouldn’t want one powered by USB if I did), but Audioengine D1 looks pretty good.

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I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed this… whenever I wake up an iPad that has been asleep and unused for, say, a week, it still has substantial battery life remaining and is immediately ready to use. Anecdotally, however, the Android tablets either have dead batteries or have shut down so completely that they need to reboot and aren’t available for about 30 seconds (Google Nexus 7).

Is iOS much better about this than Android?

[Separately, I have two wireless access points in one apartment, separated by a brick wall. They broadcast the same SSID and use the same password. As one walks back and forth in the house, Android devices (Galaxy S3, Nexus 7) are very good about connecting to whatever happens to be the stronger base station (as evidenced by the signal strength bars at the top of the display). An iPhone 4S running iOS 6, however, is much more sluggish and often is struggling to get a handful of bits through an access point on the other side of the house, even if placed almost next to the other access point.]

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