Author: philg

Here’s a bit of inspiration: http://canonfieldreviews.com/7d-1-weather-sealing/ (guy subjected Canon 7D and 5D Mk II bodies to a lot of water/snow abuse and they survived (Canon doesn’t guarantee rainproofing except for its professional 1D bodies, which are the same price and weight as a Hyundai sedan)).

So don’t let the cold weather, snow, slush, and freezing rain keep you from getting out. I will be cheering you on from my friend’s house here in Napa, California!

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Driving from Sonoma to Napa, California this evening, I asked my passenger if she would like to listen to OPR on the car radio. “What’s OPR?” she responded. “Obama Praise Radio,” was my explanation. She disputed this characterization of National Public Radio but agreed that we could turn on All Things Considered. Daniel Schorr was talking about Paul Krugman‘s description of the decade 2000 through 2009 as “the big zero” in which nothing good happened. Schorr contradicted Krugman by citing a stellar achievement: “This was the decade that gave us our first African-American president, Barack Obama.”

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I won first prize in a United Airlines contest: a Christmas week in Sacramento (second prize was two weeks in Sacramento). The succession of televised basketball and football games on the television here has been interrupted with news of Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of a Northwest Airlines Airbus bound from Amsterdam to Detroit. The incident has brought the U.S. government’s “no-fly” list into the news. When Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father dropped a dime on his son and told the Feds that young Umar was preparing to wage jihad, this was not sufficient to add his name to the list (due to fears that many frequent flyers with the same name would be inconvenienced?).

This prompted our host to note that he himself was on the “no-fly” list for four years. Whenever the 65-year-old U.S. Army colonel, with a Top Secret security clearance, showed up at the airport, the Tray Stacking Agency (TSA) would detain him for about an hour to call Washington and make sure that he was not the guy on the list. What were the clues available to TSA? Our colonel is black. The guy in the database was listed as white. Our colonel was 65 years old; the guy in the database was 40. Eventually the young white guy was dropped from the database and our colonel was able to fly commercial with only the usual amount of hassle.

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This Christmas season has prompted some reflection on the phenomenon of cars simultaneously bearing Christian fish symbols and bumper stickers proclaiming that a child has been elevated to honor student status at a particular school. Is such a bumper sticker truly consistent with Jesus’s teachings on humility? I couldn’t find good statistics on what percentage of public school students are on the honor roll, but this article reports 15 percent in one school district. Let’s say the average honor student is roughly at the 93rd percentile. As the Chinese population is 1.34 billion, if we assume that the distribution of intelligence and diligence is the same in the U.S. and in China, perhaps a more humble bumper sticker would read “My child is almost as smart and hard-working as 94 million people in China”.

Anyone else have a good idea for a humble bumper sticker?

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The Collapse of 2008-? has resulted in many employers having a lot of extra office space. What to do with the cubicles of the fallen? Why not turn the aggregate vacant space, at least 15 percent in most cities, into nurseries for babies?

Currently a majority of U.S. college students are women. A significant and growing proportion of people in the U.S. with advanced degrees are women. Let’s look at the investment in a typical woman with a master’s or professional degree. Figure 12 years of public school at $15,000 per year and 7 years of university education at $80,000 per year (tuition plus the foregone income). That’s $740,000 of capital paid in from a combination of public and private sources.

Now let us suppose that our example woman gives birth to a child. At a minimum, she will want to be with her child every two or three hours to breastfeed. What are her options? She can choose career and leave the baby with a nanny or daycare center for a solid 9-hour block every day. She can choose the baby and quit her job. She can try to split the difference by working part time. In any case where the mother gives some priority to the baby, society loses some of its return on that $740,000 investment. This reduces GDP and, more critically right now, the government’s tax base.

Why should the mother have to choose? We have literally skyscrapers worth of empty office space in every major American city. Why can’t part of the average white collar workplace be set aside for an infant nursery? The mother shows up with her nanny and spends 10-11 hours at work (still being paid for a standard 8). The nanny stays with the kid in the nursery; the mother walks over when the nanny notifies her that the baby is ready to nurse or whenever the mother feels that she wants to see the baby. Thus the mother will have spent 2 or 3 hours during the course of a working day over in the nursery with her baby. She has still worked a full 8 hours but not in one stretch.

Thanks to the efforts of politicians and activists, working women have all kinds of rights that they didn’t have formerly. In many cases they have the right to be hired preferentially over a better qualified male (“affirmative action”). They have the right to sue an employer for not paying them equal wages to what men doing similar jobs are paid. They have the right to sue an employer for permitting loutish men to run around the office making lewd remarks. Seemingly every right has been secured except for the one that would matter the most to working women: the right to continue one’s career without separating from one’s cherished infant.

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The December 21/28, 2009 New Yorker carries an article (sadly not available online) on Greg Carr‘s efforts at ecosystem preservation in Mozambique. The article relates a story about a politician visiting a small village:

Politician: “I’m here to save you, and we will bring hospitals, schools, …”

A villager stood up and said “We are very happy, very touched, because you came from so far away to save us, and that reminds me of the story of the monkey and the fish.”

The city folks didn’t know the story, so the villager told it.

A monkey was walking along a river, and saw a fish in it. The monkey said, Look that animal is under water, he’ll drown, I’ll save him. He snatched up the fish, and in his hand the fish started to struggle. And the monkey said, Look how happy he is. Of course, the fish died, and the monkey said, Oh what a pity, if I had only come sooner I would have saved this guy.

Speaking of Africa, I’m enjoying listening to A Bend in the River as a book on tape. The prose is so beautifully crafted that one doesn’t mind the slow pace of an audio book compared to reading ordinary text. Based in part on the author’s visit to Zaire in 1975, the book has some themes that will be familiar to those who read newspaper accounts of present-day African life. Naipaul describes ethnic tensions based on white colonialism, Arab slave-trading, and conflicts among native tribes (not least among them the fact that some tribes were employed by Arabs to enslave other tribes). Every now and then the tensions get so strong that neighbors hack each other to death. There is a boom-and-bust economy based on a natural resource. Transportation is arduous and unreliable. There are high hopes for a bright future of sustained development and everything depends on the Big Man who is running the country.

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Reading “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes” in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers inspired me to write an article about foreign airline safety.

Corrections/comments would be appreciated.

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Today’s Zen Koan: If a man yells “YOU LIE” in a room full of politicians, how do you know to whom he’s talking?

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In my days of flying regional jets, if we pulled up to a terminal with a jet bridge (saving customers a trip down the airstair door of our CRJ), one of the more colorful captains would always say “Just like a real airline”. I’m wondering if when we hear about the way that the U.S. government does things, we should say “Just like a rich country.”

I had this reaction when I learned that we spend about $1 billion per year on occasional helicopter service for the President. Then I had it again tonight reading a New York Times article mentioning the cost of running the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay: $150 million per year. The BBC says that there are 215 inmates in the camp, so that works out to $700,000 per detainee per year. We’re spending approximately $2000 per person per day. Just like a rich country…

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Our suburban driveway is about a quarter mile long and features a steep short hill. We currently have a plowing service that does an excellent job, but the plow leaves behind compacted flat sections of snow in various places. After a day or two, especially if it gets above freezing during the day, these compacted sections turn into solid ice. So then I ask the folks who plow to come back and spread out a salt/sand mixture. This melts the snow/ice during the day and then it refreezes at night into more ice.

Would a snowblower do a better job? Suppose that it were possible to remove all of the snow from the driveway. Then there would be nothing to melt and refreeze.

A friend suggested that we get a Bobcat and a wide snowblower attachment. This would cost $12,000, would leave us with a Bobcat to store, and the driveway would be done in 15 minutes. Honda makes some pretty serious walk-behind snowblowers, e.g., this 32-inch wide model. A neighbor has a 28-inch wide Honda that we could borrow, but somehow I think it would be too painful to use on a driveway as long as ours and his has wheels rather than tracks.

From looking at the Ariens Web site, I see that they also make “snow brushes” (example). I’m not sure where the snow would go after being brushed. Wouldn’t it fall right back down on the driveway? Anyway, if the brush idea worked we could use it to clean up after the plow and skip the snowblowing step.

Any words of advice from fellow denizens of the frozen north?

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