Category: From the Old Server

Having recently read Path Between the Seas, I’m considering flying down to Panama next week to have a look at the Canal.  I’d appreciate it if any folks who’ve been to Panama recently can use the comment server or email to philg@mit.edu with hotel and sightseeing recommendations.  Once down there I’m considering continuing on to Belize to snorkel on the coral reef (what kind of shape is it in right now?  A lot of Caribbean coral has been dying recently I think) or maybe to Honduras to visit the Mayan ruins at Copan or maybe to Ecuador and the Galapagos.  I’ll also be stopping for a few days on the way down and back in South Florida.

[Oh yes… does one really need to take anti-malarial drugs to visit the San Blas Islands this time of year?  Those have some nasty side effects.]

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JetBlue recently started flying from Boston.  At $69 each way to Florida it is tough to resist so last week I hopped on a plane to Tampa.  The people who run this airline are geniuses.  In Boston they fly from the brand-new international terminal (E).  All of the flights to Europe leave in the evening.  The JetBlue flights leave in the middle of the day.  Thus there are no security lines and all of the shops, including a Borders bookstore, are empty.

The in-flight experience is comparable to the best Coach flight on a big airline.  You are moderately cramped on a new Airbus.  The 25 channels of DirectTV are depressing.  There is nothing interesting on, unless you want to keep up with the latest news in the Laci Peterson case.  There are no movie channels.  There are no music channels unless you count VH1.  Bring an MP3 player and noise-cancelling headphones.

Overall verdict on JetBlue:  brutally tough competition for the unionized airlines.

How about Florida?  Is it true that, as my neighbor says, “You have to regard every day spent in Florida as having been subtracted from your life”?

St. Pete is a lovely little town, close to a 50-mile bicycle rail-trail (Pinellas) at which you can rent a hybrid or recumbent bike.  Tampa has a good public aquarium and a fantastic steakhouse (Bern’s).  The Gulf Coast beaches ought to be nice but last week they were plagued with red tide, which means that dead fish wash up on the beach and you get an irritation in your throat.  Not too nice if you’ve booked your wedding at the $300/night Don Cesar Hotel.  It was also fun to go to Orlando for a day of theme park action.  The locals tend to dislike Disney theme parks, except for kids.  Everyone’s favorite seemed to be Universal’s Islands of Adventure, which has several world-class rollercoasters (The Hulk and Dueling Dragons (Fire and Ice)).  A day at a theme park is very loud and it was nice to spend the next day at some beautiful gardens in Orlando and Lake Wales, then visit the world’s largest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings at Florida Southern College (http://www.flsouthern.edu/fllwctr/index.htm).

While down in Florida I reflected on the fact that good weather is much more important when you don’t have a job.  If you’re going to sit in an office all day anyway, what difference does it make that it is cold or grey outside?  But if you’re retired any day that the weather is bad is stealing a day out of your life that could have been enjoyed outside on a bike, in a garden, in a small aircraft, etc.  When I pointed this out to a Floridian he said “Yes, that’s why God put all the Third World countries near the equator in warm climates so that people don’t mind not having a job.”

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Flip on the television these days and instead of an entertaining comedy one will often find news coverage of the Democratic Presidential primaries.  Should we pay attention to the speeches and commentary?  Must we read the newspaper?  Perhaps the Web Age has relieved us of the need to sit and watch these men in real time, month after month after boring month.

Here is a chronicle of a personal look at http://www.deanforamerica.com/, for example.  Let me know if I would have developed a deeper appreciation for Howard Dean had I watched him on TV or read the newspaper…

His “job creation plan” (under “economy”) proposes to make sure that broadband Internet access is “available” in rural areas.  I thought that, at least for the last several years, it was possible to get two-way high-speed satellite Internet at a reasonable cost ($70/month, a touch more than the $50/month that urbanites pay for cable modems) anywhere in the Lower 48.  I’m in favor of the government funding things that private enterprise won’t, e.g., a wireless Internet that covers the entire U.S. and that is free for low volume usage (helps poor kids in ghettos, rich people with fancy Internet-enabled cars, etc.).  I guess I’d be in favor of the government subsidizing high-speed wired Internet or encouraging competition in high-speed wireless Internet in order to cut prices enough that everyone had it.  But basically Dean’s proposal sounds like a plan to shift money from people who live in cities to people who live on farms… just like every other American politician.  Already I’m beginning to doubt his claim that he is somehow different from Business as Usual in Washington.

Dean has an extensive section on K-12 education.  Whenever a federal politician talks about what he is going to do for America’s schools I immediately think that he is lying.  The federal government pays only about 7% of the cost of K-12 education in this country and therefore has almost no control over what happens in our classrooms.  I pity the poor teacher in her classroom.  She has to answer to the vice-principals and principal of her school.  She has to answer to the superintendent of her city or county.  She has to answer to a skyscraper full of bureaucrats in her state’s central education administration.  And then all of them have to answer to the federal U.S. Department of Education, all of whose employees answer in turn to their Secretary who answers in his or her turn to the President.  There are more layers of management above a K-12 teacher than above an assembly-line worker at GM or Toyota, which makes sense until you reflect that it takes $billions in capital investment to build a car whereas the best education is usually one-to-one or done at small private schools that aren’t beholden to larger bureaucracies.  Honest politicians that I’ve seen over the decades generally start from the position that the federal Department of Education should be abolished.  Then they show up in Washington and find that this isn’t political acceptable so they try to curb its growth.  The dishonest ones make a lot of promises about what they are personally going to do, sitting at their desk in the White House, for a kid in a classroom in Peoria, whose school is almost entirely funded by local taxpayers.  Here again Dean seems a lot like the average political hacks whom he proposes to replace.

On foreign policy Howard Dean complains that the Bush Administration has “disengaged” from meddling in the 55-year-old war between the Arab nations and Israel.  His proposed solution?  “The Israeli government will have to work to improve the living conditions of the Palestinian people”.  The U.S. meanwhile will “have to take responsibility with its international partners for helping the Palestinians establish a middle-class democratic society in which women fully participate in economic and political decision-making.”  I feel that Israel and the U.S. are being set up for failure.  On the “improved living conditions” front, a peoples’ living conditions are only going to improve, in the long run, if economic growth exceeds population growth.  The Palestinians have a 5% annual population growth rate, one of the highest in the world.  Unless they all decide to learn to read, learn English, and study semiconductor fabrication, it is tough to see how the living condition of the average Palestinian is going to improve.  So the Israelis will fail to achieve Dean’s goal for them (in fact the U.S. is unable to achieve a 5% annual economic growth rate for itself).  As for the U.S. “taking responsibility” for installing democracy and women’s rights, that sounds vaguely like what we’re trying to do in Iraq and the locals aren’t reported to be happy about it.  One of the readers of this blog posted a comment referencing http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001793273_honorkilling17.html , which gives some insight into the status of women in present-day Palestinian society.  After reading that article and Dean’s Web site I can’t see Dean as a realist when it comes to the situation in Israel.

Under Energy/Clean Air, Dean says “To reduce oil consumption and global warming emissions, Governor Dean believes we should increase the average fuel economy standard to approximately 40 miles per gallon for all automobiles, including SUVs and minivans.”  This makes me think that we might see some effect on the environment circa 2020 but I don’t see how it would encourage people to buy and drive Toyota Priuses right now and/or ride a bike instead of taking their monster SUV to the 7-11.  Career politicians love elaborate regulations and Dean seems to be one of these folks.  Economists like to address the problem of externalities (pollution, congestion, funding Arab terrorism with every turn of the key) with taxes, then let the market sort out the response.  The Europeans don’t have too many monster SUVs; they have expensive gas and efficient cars.  I’d rather see a $10/barrel tax on oil, a $20/barrel tax on imported oil, and some sort of tax on pollution.

Okay… after less than 30 minutes at his Web site I wrote off Howard Dean as a non-entity.  I wouldn’t bother to leave the house to vote for him and it is inconceivable to me that a majority of Americans would vote for Dean over George W.  Perhaps this process can be repeated for the other candidates, thus freeing up several days of time between now and November.  Are there any Dean supporters who would care to use the comments section to note brilliant ideas from the Howard Dean campaign that I’ve overlooked?  And would I have been more likely to discover these ideas watching Dean on TV or reading newspapers and magazines rather than looking at his Web site?

[Note:  I revised this fairly heavily on January 23 so I’m going to delete the comments that were responsive only to the old version.  Hmm…. it looks like Manila recorded many of the comments as a response to a response and deleting one left the others as orphans.  So now all of the comments are gone 🙁 ]

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Continuing the theme of immigration… we can blame immigrants for making us the fattest country on the planet.

Personal observation:  Nearly every time I visit a foreign country for any length of time, I lose weight.  I lost 5 lbs. on a recent trip to Argentina, a country in which food is available almost any time of day for ridiculously low prices.

Why does one lose weight in a foreign country?  Most countries, especially in their smaller towns, only offer one type of food.  Argentine restaurants tend to offer grilled meat, steamed vegetables, potatoes of various sorts, and salad with oil and vinegar.  The menu will tend to list the ingredients by name and what you order is pretty much what you get with no extra sauces or spices.  You might have a delicious steak sandwich with cheese, lettuce, and tomato for lunch.  If you’re not really hungry at dinner time you don’t bother ordering a lot of food because the only choices are things that you had at lunch or maybe the day before.

Japan is a country with a high culinary reputation.  Yet after being there for a few days you can understand why McDonald’s and Italian restaurants are so popular.  The thought of “Japanese food yet again” is not very appealing and yet you’ll probably end up in a Japanese restaurant.  So you order a modest amount of food and devote your attention to the conversation rather than stuffing your face.

Contrast this with life in an American city.  You’re with friends and propose going to a Chinese restaurant.  They say “No, we had Chinese food last night.”  You eventually agree on Indian food, which nobody has had for awhile.  Delighted with the novelty of all the tastes you order one or two more dishes than your group would require merely to sustain life for another day or two.  The next day you have Mexican food for lunch and go to a Greek restaurant for dinner.  Because of immigration we always have the opportunity to open our mouths to alleviate boredom rather than hunger.

(This ties back to the August 25, 2003 posting “Lose weight by eating every meal at McDonald’s”.)

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Hmm… the immigration piece below seems to have triggered a bug that we’ve seen before in Manila, the software that Harvard runs for its blogs.  Comments go into the database somewhere but they aren’t linked.  So I’ve cut and pasted a couple of my favorites here and anyone who wishes to comment on the piece below can do so here…

Matthew T: A more significant difference that will prevent the US from going into Argentine-style collapse in the near term is that US debt is designated in the US currency. As the dollar falls, US foreign debt doesn’t grow, the trap that Argentina fell into. In the longer term, foreign trade will be conducted in a strong currency from a large economy: if the domestic plan is to inflate away the deficit, the Euro will usurp the dollar’s central role.

John: According to Philip’s logic, the great depression should have never happened. Was the US substantially different in 1929? It had tons of smart immigrants from all over the world, and yet the economy suffered a total collapse.

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On my way back up towards Boston from Miami I sat next to an Argentine who had been living and working in Washington, DC for many years, lured by a plum job at an international organization.  We talked about the parallels between the current U.S. economy and the Argentine economy circa 2000, i.e., just before their currency collapsed 3:1.  Both economies had been losing manufacturing jobs as goods were imported from China and other centers of cheap highly skilled labor.  Both economies therefore had been running large trade deficits.  Both governments had been pandering to voters with massive spending programs and paying for them with budget deficits and therefore borrowing.  What would, she asked, save the U.S. from suffering the same fate as Argentina?  Esp. now that so many white-collar jobs could be exported to India?

My answer was “People like you! Smart immigrants.”  The U.S. has the world’s brightest academics, many of them who are themselves immigrants, in its universities.  This lures the brightest young people here to Stanford, Harvard, University of California, Caltech, et al.  Once they’ve spent 6 years in the U.S. getting a PhD they find that the U.S. offers the best opportunities for building a company or a group within a university and they stay, thus luring the next generation.  Susumu Tonegawa is a good example of the process.  Born and educated in Japan, one of the world’s most sophisticated nations, he nonetheless chose to come to the U.S. for a postdoc.  He eventually ended up as a professor of biology at MIT and won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1987.  Tonegawa remains at MIT and any young Japanese biologist who wants to learn from him must come to the U.S.  A country that has collected all of the world’s smartest people should always be able to do something new, interesting, and profitable.

(A somewhat funnier way to look at the issue is Greek syllogism:

1. every American president must be native-born
   
2. Americans are smart and therefore always choose the best person to be president, from among the pool of qualified people
   
3. ergo, George W. Bush is the finest example of a native-born American

And that’s why we need to bring in foreigners…)

A sadder way to look at the issue is one that I’ve brought up before in this blog.  We don’t bother fixing inner-city neighborhoods and schools or trying to integrate the poorest Americans into our economy because it is cheaper to bring in immigrants who already have a good education and work ethic.  George W. Bush seems to be expressing this idea in a proposal discussed in today’s New York Times:  “Bush Would Give Illegal Workers Broad New Rights”:

“… Under Mr. Bush’s proposal, which effectively amounts to an amnesty program for illegal immigrants with jobs in the United States, an undocumented worker could apply for temporary worker status here for an unspecified number of years, with all the employee benefits, like minimum wage and due process, accorded to those legally employed.

“Workers who are approved would be permitted to travel freely between the United States and their home countries, the officials said, and would also be permitted to apply for a green card granting permanent residency in the United States.

“Administration officials said that Mr. Bush would also propose increasing the number of green cards issued each year, which is now about 140,000, but they did not provide a specific number. …

“Mr. Bush’s proposals apply to all illegal immigrants in the United States, which officials estimate at 8 million to 14 million people. About 60 percent are thought to be Mexican. No one is certain how many undocumented workers there are among all illegal immigrants, but Mr. Fox has said that some 3.5 million of the workers are Mexican.”

So circling back to the original question…  We can be sure that our currency won’t collapse because all the world’s smartest people live here and also many of the world’s hardest-working.  So we can rest easy and take a vacation even.  But perhaps not in Europe where their currency has become 50% more expensive in the last 1.5 years for those of us who hold dollars…

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I’m thinking of writing a tutorial on how to use the Windows XP file system as a photo database.  My theory is based on the following premises:

• people need a database method that will last 30+ years


• very few software products have a 30+ year life


• ergo, one cannot rely on a proprietary photo database and even reliance on a standard relational database management system (RDBMS) such as Oracle may be risky


• the average consumer photographer does not have time/inclination to write computer programs nor to maintain an RDBMS


• the Windows file system seems likely to outlive many of us


• if you create a document using Notebook and click right on the file icon then select Properties you get to a page where a “Summary” tab is an option.  You now have the opportunity to edit Title, Subject, Author, Category, Keywords, and Comments fields.  These fields are searched if you use the built-in Windows file search mechanism and look for “a word or a phrase in a file”


• ergo, Windows seems to have the capability of recording a photo caption, extra keywords, and indexing those

If you look at the properties of a Word document and click “Advanced” from the Summary tab you find a whole lot more properties and they are editable.  There is also a Custom tab on a Word document in which you can create your own property name/value pairs.  However these property values don’t seem to be searchable using the standard Windows search tool.  If you look at the properties of a JPEG taken with a digital camera and choose Advanced you see a huge list of “Image” properties separated from the default Windows file system Description and Origin fields.  Some but not all of these fields seem to be searchable.

So… to the questions:

1. where are these file system features documented?


2. is it possible to add, on a system-wide basis, an extra default property that will appear in the simple or advanced dialog boxes?


3. how does one add extra properties to an individual file that wasn’t created in Office?  Is it possible through menus and dialog boxes?


4. any other comments from an expert on the viability of using the Windows file system and its full-text indexer as a photo database?

Thanks for helping!  Posting ideas in the comment section is most welcome but email to philg@mit.edu would also be appreciated.

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Argentina is a fabulous place for people from the northern hemisphere to enjoy a vacation from our cruel dark winter.  Here are some good reasons to visit Argentina:

• 15-17.5 hours per day of sunlight in December and January
  
• incredibly friendly people, enough of whom speak English that you can get around reasonably well without Spanish skills
  
• beautiful unspoiled scenery, one of the only parts of South America that still has some wilderness
  
• less rain and wind than Chile–Argentina is on the eastern side of the Andes and therefore in their “rain shadow”
  
• ridiculously low prices ever since the 2001 devaluation; hotels and restaurant meals are 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of comparable services in the U.S.
  
• families traveling with children will find the little ones welcomed everywhere

Days 1-3:  Buenos Aires.  Most of the domestic flights within Argentina leave from the downtown airport.  You, on the other hand, will be arriving at Ezeiza, a 45-minute trip from the center of town.  If you’ve already got your luggage and are in a taxi you might as well spend a few days exploring B.A.  rather than attempting to catch a flight somewhere else.  B.A. is a lifestyle city more than a tourist city so try to get some introductions to friends or relatives of friends.

Day 4-6:  Iguazu Falls.  A 1.5-hour flight to the NE brings you into subtropical jungle and the world’s most powerful waterfall.  The falls are best explored from the Argentine side.  If you are a U.S. citizen you need to get a visa in advance and fork over $140 to visit the Brazilian side, which really isn’t worth the trouble unless you’re desperate to take a scenic helicopter flight (banned in Argentine airspace).  If you’ve got the Brazilian visa it might be worth adding an extra day.  Once in Brazil you have the opportunity to proceed further across the Paraguayan border and visit a big hydroelectric project upstream, sadly one that inundated a waterfall of a similar size and beauty to Iguazu.

Day 7-14: fly from Iguazu to San Martin de los Andes, in northern Patagonia (might be a little tough to arrange, at least without an overnight in B.A.).   Try to find a rental car that you can drop off in Bariloche and/or take a “Seven Lakes route” tour bus at the end of your stay in San Martin.  Be aware that even in the middle of summer Patagonia can be a chilly 10-20 degrees C and windy.  At 41 degrees south the latitude here is comparable to Boston in the Northern Hemisphere.  However, there isn’t a big continental land mass to generate hot summer temps.  Patagonia is like a little finger poked into the cold Southern Ocean.

Day 15-17: Calafate.  Unless you’ve seen a lot of glaciars in Alaska or New Zealand, the sight of a thick glaciar calving icebergs into a lake should make Calafate worth the stop.  You have to stop here anyway if you’re flying from Bariloche to Ushuaia so you might as well get off the plane.

Day 18-20: Ushuaia.  At 54 degrees south this is the southernmost city it the world (comparable to Edmonton, Alberta or Manchester, England).  Go hiking in the Tierra del Fuego National Park.  Take the all-day Rumbo Sur cruise that visits the sea lions, penguins, and Harberton ranch.  Enjoy the snow-covered mountains behind the city.  Be prepared for cold temperatures, at least a bit of rain most days, and some wind.  A typical mid-summer temperature here is 12C.  Warning:  Ushuaia is a bit like Alaska in hospitality as well as scenery.  People move here because they don’t really like other people… then they get jobs in hotels and restaurants.  On average the welcome you receive in Ushuaia is better than in most parts of the U.S. but the quality of services and friendliness is lower than in the rest of Argentina.

Day 21:  You can get a direct flight from Ushuaia to Ezeiza (EZE).  Hang out at the airport Internet cafe and write to your friends about what a fun trip you had.  Then catch an overnight flight to NY (10+ hours) or Miami (8 hours).  The First Class seats on the American Airlines 777s to Miami fold completely flat for sleeping.

For the next trip….

• take the ferry to Colonia, Uruguay (tiny colonial town) or Montevideo, Uruguay (the capital)
  
• visit the northwestern provinces, which have more colonial and Indian influence
  
• tour the wine country of Mendoza and then head through a pass in the Andes to Santiago, Chile

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Watched fireworks in 15 towns at the same time, from Flight Level 330 (approx 33,000′), over northern Argentina and western Paraguay (New Year’s Eve, American Airlines 908 from B.A. to Miami).

Stood at the top of the world’s most powerful waterfall, Iguazu, where the Parana, a river second only to the Amazon in volume, drops nearly 100 meters.

Ate dinner at 10:30 pm at an outdoor cafe and watched families arrive, with their young children, after I had sat down (very comfortable T-shirt temperatures in December evenings in Buenos Aires).

Walked to Chile from the Tierra del Fuego National Park, just west of Ushuaia.

Took a ferry boat across the Rio De La Plata, world’s widest river, to Colonia, Uruguay.

Observed Rockhopper and Gentoo penguins and the Southern Sea Lion from a luxury catamaran in the Beagle Channel.

Received a friendly welcome from all of the staff at a $7/night hotel in Bariloche (northern Patagonia).

Got two bent wheels repaired with a sledgehammer on Christmas Eve and put back on the comically tiny Hertz rental car for US$6 in Tolhuin, Tierra del Fuego.

Took a flying lesson in a Piper Archer in a region of the world where it isn’t legal to fly unless you speak Spanish or have an interpreter in the airplane (over mountain passes in Tierra del Fuego and low over a lighthouse and sea lion and penguin colonies).

Saw a Chevy Chevette 5-door hatchback, circa 1976, in excellent condition with a Bush/Cheney ’04 bumper sticker on the back (Northwest Washington DC, near my cousin Donna’s house).

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It was 10 years ago this month that I began to build my personal Web site, which eventually grew into photo.net and philip.greenspun.com.  In December 1993 hardly anyone cared about the Internet or World Wide Web.  Hal Abelson, one of our professors, thought the Web was interesting.  My friend Brian LaMacchia got motivated to set up an HTTP daemon on our Unix file server.  Our classmate Jonathan Rees built a CGI library so that we could write Web scripts in Scheme (a dialect of Lisp).  I began playing around in the hopes that I’d be able to write collaborative networked computer applications without having to build user interface code for every possible operating system.  Zak Kohane, a professor at Harvard Medical School and doctor at Children’s Hospital, taught me enough SQL that we could build a Web interface to the Children’s Oracle clinical care database.  Nearly everyone to whom we mentioned our little obsession said that we were wasting our time and that nothing especially interesting was going to come out of the Web protocols.

And now, after just 10 years, there are 30+ Internet cafes in Ushuaia, Argentina, the capital of Tierra del Fuego and the southernmost city in the world (54 degrees south latitude)…

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