A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Continuing in the category of reviews-of-round-the-world-sailing-trips-by-someone-who-gets-seasick… I watched Maidentrip
Note: the movie is available for streaming from Netflix.
Related: my posting about Wild Eyes (Abby Sunderland’s round-the-world attempt) and All is Lost
Full post, including commentsFor people who are quarantined in their houses or apartments due to the fear of contact with Ebola, how about a service called “e-shutin.com”? With one click you register and get
Any other ideas?
Full post, including commentsIt was Head of the Charles this weekend in Boston. Here was a conversation on the Weeks Footbridge:
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The Guardian notes that this month marks the 20th anniversary of the Weblog (article on Dave Winer).
The standard HTTP/HTML Web was and is great for 3-30-page ideas. Winer was perhaps the first person to see that the world needed some different technical standards to deal with three-paragraph ideas.
[I owe Winer a personal debt of thanks for it was his arrival at Harvard’s Berkman Center that resulted in me trying out the Weblog.]
Full post, including commentsHaving spent a childhood with Spaghetti-O’s in the pantry closet and Velveeta in the fridge I tend not to worry too much about industrial chemicals in my life. The same cannot be said for the distaff side of our household. Thus a trip to Crate & Barrel to find a sleeper sofa turned into an education regarding flame retardants. It seems that the wise politicians and regulators in California back in 1975 essentially forced furniture buyers nationwide to bring toxic, yet ineffective, flame retardants into their households. Now, 40 years later, the wise politicians and regulators are forcing furniture manufacturers to go in the opposite direction. See this NRDC page for a summary history.
How does this affect a Massachusetts shopper? Just try asking a retail clerk if a particular sofa was made with particular chemicals…
[And separately, maybe this explains Americans’ lackluster performance in school and stagnant wages. The NRDC page says “Americans carry much higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies than anyone else in the world” and “Children exposed in the womb have lower IQs and attention problems.”]
Finally… the government seems to want me to go back to my Velveeta-eating roots. The FDA has banned French cheese, such as Roquefort, made according to 1000-year-old recipes (CNN).
Full post, including commentsHarvey Silverglate has published an interesting article on whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, previously welcomed by one U.S. government agency with fast-track citizenship and now being prosecuted by a different government agency, should be tried in the Boston area or elsewhere.
Full post, including commentsOne of the top economic writers of the New York Times and his editors have published an article entitled “The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century”. There is no mention of the fact that there is a global market for labor. Here’s a comment that I posted in response:
Why the narrow focus on the U.S.? “The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century” is certainly not a headline that would make sense to someone in China or Botswana. The pool of money for wages worldwide has grown dramatically in the 21st Century and people all over the world are enjoying dramatically better lives as a consequence. If I am not getting the share of this pool to which I feel entitled, perhaps my resentment just proves the adage “When the market gives you an answer you don’t like, declare market failure.”
Could it actually be that one reason we don’t get our former share of global wages is that we are unable to think globally?
[And, as a minor point, if employers provide health insurance to employees and the cost of that insurance has gone way up, isn’t that itself a substantial increase in compensation? Perhaps there has been wage growth in the U.S. but it isn’t noticeable unless we have to go to the hospital.]
Full post, including commentsA friend is going to be giving a TED talk soon. He asked me what it cost to get a family portrait done in the 1850s and guessed “In today’s dollars I expect it was >$1000?” He didn’t say why he was interested but I am assuming that it was part of an argument about the wonders of technological progress.
That set me to searching and I found this page on daguerreotypes, which was the first photographic process that was practical as a consumer product. It turned out that $2 was the price to have a family portrait done by Mathew Brady, whose work today is sought after by art museums. Adjusted for inflation with http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ that’s about $55 today, i.e., about half what you’d pay to have a 19-year-old do a portrait session with a few prints at your local J.C. Penney.
Full post, including commentsOne of my MIT grad school classmates bought a decrepit beach house in Beverly, Massachusetts, the renovation of which ran afoul of various town committees. The Boston Globe ran a story on October 5, 2014 about how the multi-year approval process will end: “Beverly’s historic Loring House set to fall; Roomba co-creator eyes demolition”.
Most of the argument seems to have concerned stuff that was going to happen inside the house.
[The historic commission guy’s use of the term “nouveau riche” was inappropriate in my opinion, though I guess it makes it obvious that he doesn’t like Helen (we all liked her back in grad school! So I guess this is evidence that success breeds envy/enemies). The term makes sense in a country such as France or England with a nobility, but not in the U.S. The people who built that house were lawyers, according to the article, not dukes and princesses. Being an inventor in 2014 is not somehow crass compared to being a lawyer in the U.S. in the mid-19th century.]
Full post, including commentsThe other day I was driving out to the drug testing facility to surprise myself with one of the random drug tests that are required of single-pilot charter operations (see this 2011 posting). It was about 11:00 am on a sunny day in a low-crime area. A young woman was stalled in the middle of the road in an old Volkswagen Golf. I would have stopped to help her except that I saw that a local police officer was already in the process of doing so. Then I looked a little closer and saw that he was approaching her car with one hand on his gun (presumably concerned about being one of the 30 American police officers shot and killed annually (Economist), though on average being a police officer is not very dangerous and most of the risk is from transportation accidents (BLS; TIME magazine)).
Given that not every situation is as unambiguously safe as this one (daylight, no rain or mist, no obvious reason why you’d want to stop in the middle of the road before shooting someone) and the fact that the guy was at all times just a second or two away from shooting his gun I wondered why incidents like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri aren’t more frequent. (I did a quick Google News search for “police shoot unarmed” and discovered this article about Levar Jones being shot in South Carolina on September 4 as well as a few others.)
Newspapers after Ferguson seem to be asking the question “Why are so many citizens shot by police?” Given the 780,000 police officers out there (source: BLS), if most are armed and trained like the one that I saw approaching this disabled motorist, wouldn’t a better question be “Why are there so few shootings of unarmed people by American police?”
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