Category: From the Old Server

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/2003-fall/friendster contains ideas for improving Friendster collected from students in this semester’s 6.171.  Given how much press attention Friendster received last summer I thought folks would be interested.

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Our home state of Massachusetts has been in the news recently for a positive decision on gay marriages.  It would seem that the next natural step would be state recognition of other types of alternative unions.  Apparently we don’t think heterosexuality is worthy of special legal treatment anymore.  Why should duality be favored then over plurality?  Why can’t a voluntarily polygamous family or polyandrous family apply for a marriage license?  The cultural and cross-cultural precedent for polygamy is certainly much stronger than for gay marriage.

My friend Richard and I were flying to Bradley Field in Connecticut today (excellent airplane museum) and it occurred to us that this could solve America’s health insurance problem.  Consider 50 uninsured people.  They could all get married in one big union.  One of the 50 could take a job with really good health benefits, e.g., for the government.  The other 49 would then get spousal health benefits.

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On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin ushered in an era of government-operated manned space flight.  In the intervening 42 years we’ve seen the following:

• several accidents in which NASA flight accidents have killed off government employees who had become public heroes, a popular schoolteacher, etc., causing widespread international grief (plus a bit of euphoria in the Palestinian world after the crash of the Columbia)
  
• an inability by NASA to take the risk or massive expense out of manned space flights
  
• improvements in technology have led to various private groups (see http://www.xprize.org/) deciding that personal space travel has become practical

Perhaps it is time to ask the question “Why should NASA operate manned space flights?”  I.e., is sending a human into space an inherently governmental function?

In some ways it would appear that the U.S. government must be involved.   No private individual or company can afford to set up a worldwide tracking and communications network.  No private individual or company can afford to invest in fundamental research and development on new kinds of jet and rocket motors.

Yet the same arguments could be made for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).  It makes sense to have the government fund infrastructure that facilitates flight.  The FAA pays weather briefers and air traffic controllers.  The FAA funds airport design, construction, and maintenance.  The FAA researches instrument approaches to airports and publishers procedures that it believes to be safe.  The FAA certifies airplanes, pilots, and airlines.

But the FAA doesn’t buy the planes or have its employees fly them.

When the U.S. government goes flying it is extremely risk-averse.  Army helicopter pilots train in expensive Bell Jet Ranger turbine-powered helicopters ($600/hour).  The Black Hawk helicopters have airbags to lessen injuries to occupants in the event of a crash.  The Feds look at a piston-powered Robinson R22 ($150/hour; the standard private sector trainer) or a homebuilt helicopter with horror.  They’d never want to be responsible for an 18-year-old Army kid going into one of those death machines.  Roughly half of the crashes of homebuilt airplanes supposedly occur on the very first flight.  The FAA is well aware of the dismal statistics but they’re happy to check your work, give you an Experimental certificate for your new kitplane, and wish you good luck.

Conclusion:  there are plenty of activities that the Federal government facilitates but considers too risky to undertake.  They don’t want a Federal employee doing it but if Irving Goldberg, a divorced retired dermatologist, wants to do it they will actually facilitate his risk-taking.

Why not do space travel the same way?  NASA can fund all of the infrastructure, do research, sell rockets cheap, and then shake the hand of any adventurous folks who want to head up beyond the Wild Blue Yonder.  In the small airplane world we have Angel Flight in which private pilots volunteer their time and airplanes to transport medical patients and their families, to the tune of approximately 15,000 missions per year.  Similarly in the private space travel world the government could ask these adventurers “Say, as long as you’re going up into space, would you mind conducting this experiment for us?”

It was a national tragedy when Christa McAuliffe died on the Challenger.  It is only a minor local news event when an adventurous soul crashes his or her small aircraft.

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http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/200311-mexico-city/ contains some snapshots from the recent trip to Mexico City.  I’m trying to travel light these days, which means no laptop and no camera.  For this trip I borrowed a Casio Exilim EX-Z3, a truly tiny 3 MP camera.  As you can see the results are fairly dismal.  I attribute the poor results to the lack of a decent viewfinder in point and shoot cameras.  You can’t see what you’re photographing.  The little viewfinder window is tiny on the Casio and highly inaccurate.  You don’t know whether or not the camera has focussed properly.  Plus of course there are a lot of weird modes in which you can get the camera.

On the plus side the Casio is only about the size of a Palm organizer and barely heavier so you truly can take it with you everywhere.  I don’t think I’ll buy one, though.  The smallest Canons are larger but seem less compromised as photographic machines.

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In traveling around the US and Canada Microsoft Streets and Trips has been very useful (the program is kind of a copy of DeLorme’s Street Atlas).  You can type in an address or find a museum and then ask “show me the airports within a 20-mile radius”.   It seems to have all the general aviation airports in the U.S. at least.  Sadly, however, this program runs out of data when you get beyond North America (and coverage of Mexico is thin).  Does anyone know of similar software that covers Europe?  Central and South America?  Asia?

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Any digital artistes out there care to share their expertise?  I’d like to find software that is good for preparing a photo collage.  I’d like the software to keep track of each collage element separately so that it can be repositioned or rotated but in the end I’d like to smash it all down to one huge digital file for printing on a 48″-wide printer.  PhotoShop was my first thought but it seemed to me that this would be cumbersome.  Perhaps it is the right answer, though, keeping each element of the collage in a separate layer and collapsing them all down at the very end?

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Made it back from Mexico City this afternoon.  The only unhappy event during the trip was finishing reading the massive Peloponnesian War and failing to find a good English bookstore.  I ended up settling for an Agatha Christie novel: Lord Edgware Dies (1933).  A married Peruvian woman sitting next to me disagreed with this discourse by Hercule Poirot, bachelor detective:

“Often I have observed that it is a great misfortune for a man to have a wife who loves him.  She creates the scenes of jealousy, she makes him look ridiculous, she insists on having all his time and attention.  Ah!  non!  it is not the bed of roses.”

And combining the earlier themes of MIT students and ghetto humor, this just in from a 6.171 student…

“Yo Mama so stupid, she took a rigid body mechanics class because she wanted to meet hot guys.”

(We will leave this contributor anonymous so that the MIT administration does not begin disciplinary proceedings…)

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Like Los Angeles Mexico City is blessed with a near-perfect natural environment.  It is almost always a pleasant temperature outside and usually sunny.  And like Los Angeles the city has nearly ruined itself with growth that led to sprawl that led to traffic that led to smog.  Fundamentally, however, it is tough to wreck paradise.  Homes, art museums, restaurants can all be open to the air outside without even bothering with screens as there are few insects up at this high elevation.  You don’t have to be a prisoner in your house against hot, cold, or mosquito-infested weather.

Besides this fundamental enabler there are the standard tourist things to love, i.e., great museums, spectacular public art and architecture, lively streets, lots of music, and cheerful people.

Going to public school in the 1970s in the U.S. we were taught to fear three things:  Communism, drugs, and Mexico.  If you’re still carrying a lingering fear of Mexico it shouldn’t stop you from spending at least 4 or 5 days here in Mexico City just once in your life.

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I had dinner here in Mexico City with a reporter who was about to return to Iraq, where he has already been twice in 2003.  The impression that I’d gotten from following the news in the U.S. is that the situation in Iraq is improving very gradually.  The progress is hard to see like the rising of an exponential function near 0 but eventually it might take off sort of like the diode equation around 0.6 volts even though actually the curve is the same.

The reporter, who’d spent a couple of months on the ground in Baghdad already, was much more pessimistic:  “Iraq isn’t a country; it is three countries:  a Kurdish north, a Sunni center, and a Shiite south.  These people all hate each other and would like nothing more than a civil war so that they can all kill each other.  The only thing that is stopping them right now is the fact that 95% hate Americans, maybe 10% enough to try to kill Americans personally.”

He was not looking forward to returning.  “I’m afraid, to tell you the truth.  I’ve worked in Kabul and been in the middle of skirmishing warlords in Afghanistan but Iraq is a lot scarier.”

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This item comes to you from an Internet cafe in the capital of a country that is

• oil-rich
  
• still smarting from the pain of a U.S. invasion
  
• throughout its history has seldom enjoyed a government elected by the people
  
• lacking in basic physical security, except in a handful of areas patrolled by guys wearing body armor and toting machine guns
  
• not somewhere you can turn on the kitchen faucet and expect drinkable water to come out

Does this sound like a crisis?  Actually it is normal everyday life in Mexico City and somehow nobody seems to mind.

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