Category: From the Old Server

A friend was asking me about some of her colleagues who had joined Mensa and I said that anyone who hangs around a decent college is already effectively a member because you only need a fairly low SAT score to get admitted to Mensa (turned out to be 1250 if you took the pre-1995 test and the new wimpy test for today’s youth is not accepted at all; see http://members.shaw.ca/delajara/criteria.html).  Then I tried to figure out what average SAT scores prevailed at colleges today and the Web search brought up this interesting page from a 1998 Brookings Institution report.  What I found most striking was the discrimination against Asian-Americans at the elite old-line universities.  Harvard is the 2nd worst offender in this regard.  An Asian kid has to have an SAT score 65 point higher than a white kid to get into Harvard.  Maybe this explains George W’s illustrious career at Yale?  (not listed in the table but presumably similar to Harvard)

[Page 438 of the same study is also interesting.  It concludes that being black or hispanic rather than white at the “most selective colleges” is “comparable to the effect of having … a total SAT score of 1400 rather than 1000”.  So if you are a generic white family and want to get your kids into college it might be time to go down to the courthouse and change your last name to “Hernandez”.  The college admissions staff don’t get deeply into geneaology, do they?  Just learn enough Spanish to say “Here is a check for $40,000 to cover the first year of tuition, room, and board.”  Then your kids could change their names back right after graduation from their last degree, in order not to suffer discrimination from employers who might think “they got in just because they were Hispanic” and to conceal themselves from pesky Alumni Association donation demands.  With a system this heavily based on race and name changes as economical as they are I’m surprised that more families don’t game the system.  Perhaps there is a business opportunity here…]

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Friends of mine have a child afflicted with a kind of autism.  A parent of an autistic child has developed some free software (Windows-only) that teaches kids by asking them to perform tasks and showing them short video clips if they perform the task.  My friends own a collection of DVDs that they would like to transfer to the PC and chop up into 10-second segments.  I’m pretty sure that they can handle the chopping once they get their DVD into a standard Windows video format (.avi?).  As I understand it, Hollywood tries to make this as difficult as possible.  How can my friends work around the various encryption and other format conversion issues?  This would be on a WinXP machine.

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Catching up on the mail I read through the latest Technology Review, MIT’s alumni magazine.  Things are far worse than feared.  One letter calculates the cost of the $283 million new computer science building as $17 million in 1916 dollars.  The main buildings, which are enormous by comparison, were completed in 1916 at a cost of $7 million.

Much more depressing than the backwards slide of the American construction industry in terms of efficiency is an article about Chuck Vest’s 14 years running MIT.  The article touches briefly on Vest’s achievements in increasing research funds between 1990 and 2003, which sound very impressive due to the lack of inflation-adjustment (the actual increase in 2003 dollars was from $430 million to $472 million).  Nothing having to do with innovation in research or education is mentioned.  If the article is accurate, Vest’s major focuses turned out to have been

1. fighting with the Federal Government over MIT’s price-fixing arrangement with the Ivy League colleagues.  This agreement was predicted to be illegal by Stanford, which refused to join the cartel, and deemed illegal by a Federal District Court Judge but we ultimately beat the rap in the Court of Appeals (see my tuition-free MIT article for more)
   
2. studying the extent to which female faculty members had less lab space than male faculty members and whether this was due to discrimination
   
3. pursuing sex- and race-based discrimination in student admissions and faculty recruitment and promoting such discrimination nationwide in briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in affirmative action cases

I guess Phil Sharp, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist who turned the job down is feeling pretty good about his decision to stay in the lab.

The only encouraging news in the magazine concerned Erika Ebbel, MIT Class of 2004 in Chemistry, who as Miss Massachusetts will compete in the Miss America pageant on September 18.

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Manila, the software from Userland that sits behind Harvard’s Weblog server, has recently been enhanced with a feature that makes it easy to moderate the comments.  This should make it tougher for spammers to abuse a Manila-hosted Weblog and maybe also to improve the overall interest level of the comments.  Oftentimes the comments tend to be abusive, which satisfies the (angry) person who posted them but not other readers.  The result is emails like the following, from one of my former students at MIT:

“P.S. Your blog’s comments section continues to amaze. It’s like some kind of zoo, but with idiots instead of exotic animals.”

My strategy in moderating the comments here will be similar to the strategy that I employed on photo.net 10 years ago.  Alternative perspectives on the same topic are welcome.  Anything that seems like a review of the article or posting should be deleted.  A review is useful in the hardcopy world because you might want to learn about a 300-page book before investing $20 and several hours reading the actual book.  A review-comment is not useful in the Internet world because it is generally only accessible to someone who just finished reading the article in question.  If you’ve read Article X and liked it, what difference does it make to you that someone else liked or did not like it?  Similarly a comment praising or condemning the author as a person is not interesting to other readers who presumably have already formed their own opinion about the author.

If moderation attracts more thoughtful comments perhaps I’ll hire a kid in India to continue moderating according to these guidelines.

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An Associated Press story about MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield, devotes a lot of space to her sex and the sex ratio among MIT faculty members.  What is more interesting to me is Hockfield’s background as a life scientist.  Her last research and teaching position was at Yale Medical School.  She is not an engineer.  She was never a computer programmer.  MIT’s current president, Chuck Vest, was a mechanical engineer.  His predecessor, Paul Gray, was an electrical engineer.  His predecessor, Jerry Wiesner, was an electrical engineer.  (See http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/histories-offices/pres.html for more detail.)

Hockfield has a good opportunity to realign MIT with the national mood.  Harvard University, for example, nearly a century ago was host to the world’s #1 department of civil engineering.  The president of Harvard at the time looked around and decided that civil engineering wasn’t going to be important to the United States.  He shut down the department and fired all the faculty members, including those with tenure.  There are plenty of things that folks at MIT do that (a) attract reasonable research funding, (b) are among the best projects of their kind worldwide, and (c) are things that nobody cares about anymore or that are done just as well by Industry.

After she has cleared out some space on campus what new initiatives might she push?  How about a medical school?  MIT has one of the world’s best biology departments but, except for some ties to Harvard Medical School, very little in the practical side of medicine.  MIT could probably do better work in biology if there were medical colleagues close at hand with whom to collaborate.  MIT’s engineering research would take on new relevance if it were tied to challenges in patient care.

Starting a medical school will be a huge challenge, of course.  Despite the growth in the U.S. population the American Medical Association has generally opposed new med schools due to the fact that more doctors might lead to lower average salaries.  But if there is to be a new medical school in the United States where better than at MIT, where a random door in the bio department might very well open into the office of a winner of the Nobel prize for “physiology or medicine”?

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A magazine article about American Indians has some rather disturbing information for folks who hope for a resolution to the AIDS epidemic via a vaccine.  Starting with the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century the American Indians began a steep decline in numbers due to their lack of resistance to European diseases, notably smallpox.  A vaccine for smallpox was developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner in England.  Five years later, in 1801, President Jefferson ordered the nationwide immunization of American Indians.  Yet as late as 1836-40 there was a terrible smallpox epidemic among Indians along the Missouri River, apparently sparked off by an infected riverboat passenger.

The U.S. in the early 19th century probably had better roads and communication than many African countries do in the 21st century.  So even if we had a working vaccine against all the different strains of HIV (and any future strains that might evolve) it seems that the eradication of AIDS could take many decades.

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Itinerary:  Narita-Nikko-Sendai-Northeast Coast (Matsuhima-Shizugawa-Taro-Kuji-Mutsu)-ferry from Oma to Hakodate-Toyako-Sapporo-Asahikawa-Sounkyo-Ikeda-Kushiro-Akanko-Mashuko-Otaru-Niseko-ferry from Hakodate to Aomori-Hirosaki-Morioka-Hiraizumi-Ichinoseki-Utsunomiya-Tokyo Akasaka

Favorite roadside attractions:

• 70m-high statue of the Buddhist bosatsu Kannon in Kamaishi on the NE coast of Honshu
  
• Snow Museum, which could easily have been designed by Liberace, in Asahikawa (Hokkaido)
  
• two enormous Japanese Cranes having a late lunch in a farmer’s field on the SE coast of Hokkaido then taking off, circling, and landing in another corner of the farm; there are only about 800 of these birds on the planet
  
• underground public aquarium in Kuji, the Mogurampia, built into a coastal oil storage facility

And now onto some themes that recurred in my mind…

This trip impressed upon me how deep is the Japanese love affair with concrete.  They’ve really become the poets of this most modern of building materials where a guy such as Tadao Ando can find many peers.  Some of the most beautiful minimalist artworks were the concrete mesh nets that stabilize hillsides.  These comform to the waves and bumps of the hill and are anchored by enormous pins of steel or concrete.  The mesh size is about 6′.  My favorite concrete building was the Iwate Museum of Art in Morioka.

The overall security of Japan presents a startling contrast to the U.S.  I didn’t notice it that much on previous trips, all of which were before September 11, 2001.  Except in Tokyo and on the Shinkansen (bullet train) there doesn’t seem to be any thought given to terrorism or even crime.  There are hardly any foreigners in Japan to begin with so a group of 19 Saudis wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere without being watched.  There are no ID checks even on the Shinkansen.  You can park your car at the airport curb, even Narita, and walk away for 10-15 minutes without anyone complaining.  You don’t see gun-toting thugs near public buildings.  People carry $1000+ in cash in their wallets without a second thought.  Every car has a $2000 navi system ripe to be stolen and yet there aren’t car alarms.  Luxury hotels don’t bother with electronic key cards.  You can eat in almost any restaurant (except the ones listed in Lonely Planet) and not get food poisoning.  The Japanese can even enjoy the rich social life described by Paul Theroux in Africa without worrying about dying as the AIDS infection rate here is around 0.02% (source).

America really is the land of luxury when it comes to space and consumerism.  From my house in Harvard Square I can drive 20 minutes and get to miles of trails through semi-rural woods, lakes, and farms in Lincoln, MA.  To get similarly away from it all in Japan would require flying to Hokkaido, renting a car, and heading into a national park.  Real estate prices here remain savage, a good warning perhaps to Americans as we head for a population of 420 million in the year 2050, nearly all of which will be concentrated on the coasts.  A CD is $22, a DVD is $35+.  For a tourist here only a few weeks it isn’t so bad.  Your wallet suffers death by paper cuts ($4 for parking at a temple, $8 to go in, $40 in expressway tolls to get to the next temple) but you know that you’ll be heading home soon to your spacious apartment and nearby Walmart.  The Japanese just have to resign themselves to being bled for the rest of their lives.

The Japanese are able to overcome almost all of their natural limitations with hard work and competitive drive.  The Olympics are going on right now and the Japanese are currently in third place for the number of gold medals, which is remarkable when you consider the lack of genetic diversity in the population.  Craftsmen in various small towns could get by selling average-quality goods to average tourists but instead work late nights to win competitions.  Shamisen players compete and at concerts the people sitting next to me would periodically whisper “Grand Champion” when a certain artist came on stage.  A chef in the tiny provincial town of Ichinoseki could have had a nice little rice dumpling restaurant but instead worked like a demon until he became famous throughout Japan for making the best rice dumplings (he spoke pretty good English too but I learned of his fame only from other tourists).

Economically this is a country that should be nowhere.  Japan is famously lacking in natural resources and space.  The nation was closed to the West and modern technology until the mid-19th century.  Japan lost more than 3 million people and nearly all of its physical assets during World War II.  Yet by dint of nearly every worker trying his or her hardest the country is almost as rich as the U.S.  An American engineer working for a Japanese automaker has been over here for a year.  The mechanical engineers working for his company back in the U.S. are among the best, brightest, and hardest working American engineers.  “I hate to admit it,” he said, “but the guys here in Japan are even better.  They’re older and they know more and I thought they they would slack off but they work even harder and are more dedicated to getting it right.”

Most disturbing part of the trip:  watching an old movie of an Ainu (the native people of Hokkaido, related to Mongolians) community event in which a bear was chained to a pole and then shot with arrows.  The bear would roll around trying to get the arrows out and then would be shot some more.  Maybe not that different from the bullfights beloved by Spaniards but just horrible to see.

Best hotel room:  Akasaka Prince Hotel, 18th floor, sweeping corner windows, comfy sofa underneath the windows, huge bathtub, architecture by Kenzo Tange, across the street from the 400-year-old Japanese garden in the New Otani Hotel, adjacent to a public park with koi pond, and 2 blocks from the Suntory Museum of Art (fantastic Daimyo show right now).  All for $115/night thanks to (a) being on my own (double rooms are often simply 2X the price of a single), and (b) orbitz.com.

Best hotel surprise:  Hotel-onsen Kanyo in Shizugawa on the NE coast of Tohoku.  Stopped the rental car at sunset to tank up and asked the gas station manager where to find a hotel.  He said “just one kilometer farther up” and an enormous concrete hotel appeared.  The staff spoke not a word of English, the room was Japanese style, the hot spring bath was outdoors, and the pool was big enough to swim laps.

Memorable scenic views:

• Mashu-ko, a crater lake in eastern Hokkaido.  In general the Japanese have heavily developed their seacoast (“the sea is where you go to get dinner”) but left lakeshores alone.  This lake is a lot like Oregon’s Crater Lake but not nearly so high in elevation.
  
• the city of Hakodate (Sapporo) from the top of the ropeway (cable car) and also the surrounding mountains and coastline at sunset
  
• cliffs and rocks of Rikuchu-kagan National Park, a not-very-developed coastline in NE Tohoku
  
• cliffs in the Geibikei Gorge (near Hiraizumi) viewed from the flat-bottomed boat while beautiful koi swam alongside and begged for food from the tourists
  
• various spots along the highway in Daisetsuzan National Park (Hokkaido)

Places in Japan that I’d like to visit next time:  Nara, Shikoku, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa (plus repeats to Tokyo and Kyoto to see friends and familiar sights–see http://www.photo.net/travel/japan/ for some snapshots from earlier trips)

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After nearly 2000 miles of driving the rental car here in Japan I’ve passed quite a few electronics and household goods stores, my favorite being a chain called “Big House”.  This has gotten me thinking that it would be fun to buy a super high tech toilet seat with at least 10 buttons labeled only in kanji.  After I install this at home it should give friends something to think about.  I know that some simpler “washlet” seats are marketed by Toto in the U.S. to U.S. specs.  But these have labels in Roman characters and English explanations.  I want it all to be in Japanese.

One thing really troubles me, however…  line voltage here is 100V.  The electronics in the highest tech seats might have a switching power supply and therefore be indifferent to our higher voltage of 117V.  But the washlets also contain a water heater, a fan, and maybe some other stuff that is run directly from the AC power.  Will it fry if I plug it into US power?  Have any of the readers tried this?

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I’ve long been curious to visit Africa as a tourist.  Theroux’s Dark Star Safari seems to have some practical value for trip planning.  Theroux reports the following facts relevant to the sightseer:

• travel by road is extremely slow and uncomfortable
  
• conversations with typical Africans can be interesting but only for guys like Theroux who speak several local languages
  
• interaction with Africans can result in severe illness and/or becoming a victim of crime

Why not address these issues by renting a small airplane?  Here’s my tentative plan for a beginner’s trip to Africa:

1. fly to Cape Town, South Africa and spend a few days poking around what sounds like Africa’s only livable large city (learn something about the old colonial culture in its last bastion)
   
2. during the time in Cape Town pick up a South African pilot’s license so that I can legally fly a South African-registered airplane
   
3. rent a workhorse of an airplane such as a Cessna 182 and load it up with bottled water and packaged food
   
4. fly over all the interesting landscape, stopping only at public airports and exclusive private game reserves with their own strips
   
5. venture onto roads and into towns only in thinly populated and orderly regions (Namibia?)
   
6. return home after 3 weeks

Even in countries where crime and disorder are rampant the public airports are usually very well protected.  Governments like to keep track of who is coming and going, which is essential if they are to maintain their monopoly on weaponry.  In Mexico, for example, even the most out-of-the-way airport is staffed with multiple officials and an Army guard.  I remember landing on a sand-and-dirt runway owned by a litte hotel in Baja.  As soon as I landed three soldiers toting assault rifles came over to inspect the airplane.

One can’t see everything in a first trip to such a big place so why not start by staying mostly 500′ above the heads of all the guys who cause trouble for tourists?  There is always Trip #2 for getting deeper and/or lower into things.

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The worst book that I’ve read during this trip around Japan is William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.  I finished it only because it is difficult to find English-language books in rural Japan.  I’m confused because I think that I bought it because of some positive reviews in newspapers or magazines and I’m wondering if I missed something.  Here’s the review that I posted to amazon.com:

This is like one of those trashy “sex and shopping” novels but without the sex.  And the shopping isn’t very interesting either, being mostly for stuff that was worth buying in the early 1990s such as a Machintosh laptop computer.  The main premise of the book seems pointless.  Some people make videos that they want to release anonymously on the Internet.  Instead of doing the obvious thing of transferring from camcorder to PC and offering on some peer-to-peer network they hire the one company in the world that can add some coded info down in the noise and then stick the filmmaker’s email address into the footage.  Ignoring the fact that this idea goes back about 50 years, why would someone who wanted to remain anonymous do this?  Gibson never explains that.

The book also talks about traveling to London, Tokyo, and Moscow.  None of this seems relevant to the story, all of which could just as easily been set in Indiana.  Maybe putting it in enabled the author to deduct some airfares and hotel stays.  There is a lot of stuff about brand names in the book, some of which might impress a peasant who had recently moved to Shanghai to work at Pizza Hut.

Any fans of the book want to educate me as to what I missed?

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