Category: From the Old Server

Items imported from Manila, one of whose many bad features was a lack of categorization.

Philip and Alex fly down the East Coast

by philg

In the unlikely event that anyone cares and/or wants to get together…  Alex and I are flying Diamond Star N505WT down the East Coast this week.  The plan is as follows:



  • Sunday:  Bedford, MA to Teterboro, NJ for lunch with cousin Lynn and family, proceeding to Gaithersburg, Maryland to see parents, siblings, and friends
  • Tuesday:  to Norfolk, VA to see friends
  • Wednesday: to Gettysburg, PA to visit Matthew Amster, professor of anthropology at Gettysburg College
  • Thursday or Friday:  back to Bedford

I don’t expect to be able to get Internet access so if you want to get together in one of these places call 617-818-1256 (the cell phone).


[Oh yes… for those who wonder about the safety of letting a dog fly the airplane… I passed my Commercial pilot’s certificate checkride two weeks ago and now am working on the Certificated Flight Instructor (CFI) rating.  So it is good practice to fly from the right seat and let a student try his/her hand/paw at the stick…]

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Who would hire Michael Eisner?

by philg

In this interesting New York Times editorial, Nicholas Kristof looks at CEO pay from the perspective of “what would this guy do if we didn’t pay him $200 million per year?”  (the $200 million/year is what Michael Eisner earned during some of his better years at Disney (oftentimes those were bad years for stockholders and employees but that’s another story)).  Kristof points out that



“There is a huge supply of would-be C.E.O.’s and negligible demand from companies for new ones, so their price should be cheap — if boards would use their leverage. When Jack Welch retired, General Electric held a contest among three underlings to succeed him. Each was desperate to get the job. If G.E. had done its usual tough bargaining, it could have signed Jeffrey Immelt on a 15-year contract for a mere $750,000 a year in salary, plus reasonable incentives for long-term success.


“Except for turnaround experts, C.E.O.’s have few transferable skills and are in little demand elsewhere. The average 63-year-old head of a plastics company has almost zero chance of finding a better job elsewhere. One study found that of 77 cases when a major company had to find a new boss, only twice was this because the C.E.O. had left for another corporate job.


“Think about it. If Mr. Eisner, who turns 62 on Sunday, wanted to switch jobs now, what other public company would hire him as its new chief executive? Frankly, Mr. Eisner is so desperate to hold on to his job that Disney should try to charge him for the privilege of remaining in his post.”


Eisner has transferred at least $1 billion from Disney’s shareholders’ pockets into his personal checking account over the years.  So he probably could afford to pay quite a bit to keep his job!

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Mel Gibson and the Passion movie again…

by philg

A man goes to see Mel Gibson’s new movie, The Passion, and is inspired to take his family to Israel to see the places where Jesus lived and died.  While on vacation his mother-in-law dies.


An undertaker in Tel Aviv explains that they can ship the body home to Wisconsin at a cost of $10,000 or the mother-in-law could be buried in Israel for US$500.


The man says, “We’ll ship her home.”


The undertaker asks, “Are you sure? That’s an awfully big expense and we can do a very nice burial here.”


The man says, “Look, 2000 years ago they buried a guy here and three days later he rose from the dead. I just can’t take that chance.”

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Brutal article on declining computer science enrollments

by philg

Today’s New York Times carries an article entitled “Microsoft, Amid Dwindling Interest, Talks Up Computing as a Career” about Bill Gates going around to universities encouraging young people to major in computer science.  The chairman of EECS at MIT worries about the decline in enrollment (10 years ago his predecessor fretted about the explosion in enrollment; sic transit gloria major).  All too close to home…

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comments on the Mel Gibson/Haiti posting

by philg

Hmm… this Manila software that Harvard runs seems to have mislinked all the comments posted.  I’m cutting and pasting some manually and please feel free to use the comments button underneath this posting to comment on the original (below).


From Zoran Lazarevic:



Two hundred years in a history of a nation is a short time to change human behavior without force. For one example, think that slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865, but the first black generation that grew in freedom and equality was born in 1970s.


Compare today Serbs living a couple of miles away: across the river Danube which marked the border between the Austro-Hungarian empire (north) and the Ottoman empire (south). In the north, they live in neatly painted houses lined along geometrically straight roads, behind tall walls keeping the privacy of their property. Villages just south of Danube are hectically built around worn-out curvy roads, having short transparent fences displaying property in slight disarray. The north prides itself with culinary craft and the taste for fine arts from Austria and Hungary. The south takes pride in warriorship and macho attitude, and jokes about its own widespread bribery.


Serbia proper was liberated from the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s, and united with the north in 1918.  There is absolutely no question, that if separated, the two regions would have very different economies. Just like there are vast differences between other ex-Yugoslavia states. And that is all after a century of common life, mostly under communism which tried to kill out (pun intended) all differences in religion and nationality.


From Fazal Majid:



You could blame Lazare Carnot (d. 1823) for fathering Sadi Carnot (d. 1832), the inventor of thermodynamics, and thus leading to global warming…

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Mel Gibson, the Jews, Haiti, and blaming it all on people who died 175 years ago

by philg

People are blaming all of the Jew-hatred in Mel Gibson’s new movie on the visions of a German nun, Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824).  According to this article from Newsday:



The bedridden visionary, who is said to have borne the stigmata and the wounds of the crown of thorns, is a particular source of contention for Gibson because of her depictions of Jews as bloodthirsty and venal. In The Dolorous Passion, for instance, she “sees” Jewish priests passing out bribes to get people to offer false testimony against Jesus and even tipping the Roman executioners. She also describes seeing Jesus’ cross being built in the courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem.

And Emmerich’s 19th-century biographer, the Rev. C.E. Schmoe’ger, wrote about how she had one vision of an “old Jewess Meyr,” who confessed to her “that Jews in our country and elsewhere strangled Christian children and used their blood for all sorts of suspicious and diabolical practices.”

Gibson, who carries a relic of Emmerich in the form of a faded piece of cloth from her habit, vehemently rejects characterizations of the nun as anti-Semitic.


In other news… I was listening to NPR news a couple of days ago.  All of Haiti’s current troubles were being blamed on things that the French did in 1825 and this proposition was discussed seriously for 15 minutes.  Haiti does seem to be in rather tough shape, at least going by the CIA Factbook page:



“About 80% of the population lives in abject poverty.  … The economy shrank an estimated 1.2% in 2001 and an estimated 0.9% in 2002.  Literacy rate is 53%.”


Despite an HIV infection rate of 6.1% and a lot of deaths from AIDS the population is still growing at an annual rate of 1.67%, i.e., there are an ever-increasing number of Haitians to share an ever-smaller pie.  (cf. Malthus)


Perhaps there are more problems in our world of 2004 that can be blamed on those French and Germans who died circa 1825…  Anyone care to suggest some dead Europeans to blame in the comments section?

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Fog of War

by philg

A bunch of us went to see the movie “Fog of War” on Friday night.  This is a very interesting documentary by a local director consisting almost entirely of an interview with Robert S. McNamara who was Secretary of Defense during the first half of the U.S. war in Vietnam and subsequently president of the World Bank.  The film concentrates on McNamara’s efforts in bombing Japan and Germany during World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.


The first depressing take-away from the movie is that our intelligence efforts are almost worthless.  The CIA assured JFK that the Russians did not have nuclear warheads in Cuba at the time of the crisis.  The missiles were in place and the warheads on their way.  In fact it seems that the warheads were already in Cuba at the time of the dispute.  Not only that but Fidel Castro met McNamara face-to-face in the 1990s and said that he’d recommended to the Russians that they use them even though he knew that Cuba would be destroyed and all of its citizens killed.  (N.B.: Personal ownership of a third-world country is a beautiful thing!)


The second conclusion from watching the film is that the U.S. has never won the hearts and minds of foreigners or even succeeded in changing foreigners’ minds.  We won WWII by using our industrial power to destroy the capacity of the Japanese and Germans to carry out their objectives, not by convincing the Japanese or the Germans of anything or changing their minds or objectives.

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