Category: Uncategorized

Readers have been sending me pointers to articles about the Motorola Atrix, a mobile phone with a laptop dock, and saying that it is similar to my 2005 article “Mobile Phone As Home Computer”. I don’t see the similarity because the Motorola dock has no hard drive and isn’t necessarily different than using a bluetooth keyboard and bluetooth display (does that work?) with any other smartphone. My idea of the dock was that it had its own monster CPU and graphics chips, unconstrained by power considerations, plus a hard drive for storing near-infinite video (the one form of data that a typical consumer might accumulate that is too large to be stored inexpensively in the cloud) and a removable hard drive mirror for backup.

Even if Motorola has not implemented my pet idea, this would seem to be a useful tool for travelers. Use the laptop dock when in a hotel or an office; use the phone by itself while walking around. Don’t carry any extra chargers or cables or extra weight from the full hard drive and circuitry of a typical laptop. I don’t like this for replacing a home PC because the 11″ screen on the laptop dock is so small. A $550 Dell home PC includes a 24″ “full HD” monitor with 1920×1080 resolution. That’s enough to view two pages of text side-by-side, a critical ability for students, certainly (one window for Wikipedia, from which to cut and paste into the other window, which holds the term paper).

Thoughts on the Atrix? Anything else from CES strike folks as interesting? There were a lot of tablet announcements, but I didn’t see much in the way of pricing. If a Netbook retails for $300, I would think that a $249 Android tablet would drive consumers truly wild, though this February 2010 analysis of iPad manufacturing cost makes it seem as though a high-performance $249 tablet is at least another year away.

Full post, including comments

I recently rented a 2010 Nissan Altima Hybrid and drove it for about 250 mostly highway miles. When I topped it off for the return to Hertz, I found that it had averaged 28 miles per gallon, i.e., hardly better than the 7-passenger 1993 Dodge Grand Caravan that I owned. The Altima seated four in comfort and five if they didn’t mind getting friendly. The trunk could hold one standard suitcase plus a carry-on bag or two ; much of what would have been the trunk was apparently being used to hold batteries. I learned what 17 years of progress from the automotive industry looks like: going from 25 to 28 mpg while reducing the interior volume of the vehicle by half.

[Typical indicated highway driving speed was 70 mph, with the air conditioner on roughly 60 percent of the time. The trip included about 30 minutes of traffic jams due to an overturned vehicle (how would Southern Californians manage on the icy potholed roads of Massachusetts if they are flipping their vehicles over in broad daylight on perfectly dry and smooth Interstates?) and weekend traffic on a state highway going through what had been a small town and is now part of the endless strip mall sprawl.]

Full post, including comments

A few interesting articles from the December 18, 2010 Economist magazine…

“Is it worth doing a PhD” notes that in Britain a man with a PhD earns 26 percent more than a man “who could have gone to university but chose not to” (i.e., a high school grad). In theory that extra 26 percent might make up for the 10+ years of lost wages during bachelor’s and graduate programs, but a man who gets a master’s degree earns a 23 percent premium. I.e., the difference in ultimate salary is nowhere near enough to make up for the lost wages of extra years in grad school and, in fact, in math and CS the premium does not exist. The economic damage of PhD programs is not limited to graduates, however. There are a huge number of dropouts and they tend to drop out after wasting many years in school (clinging “like limpets before eventually falling off”). As this is the Economist, the question of whether the PhD graduates might have had a lot of compensating fun during graduate school was not addressed.

In Economics Focus “Exploding misconceptions”, Barack Obama is quoted: “extremely poor societies…provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism and conflict.” The article cites studies by Alan Krueger of Princeton and Claude Berrebit of the RAND Corporation as well as surveys by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. Jihadists, including suicide bombers, turned out to have higher incomes and more education than average within their societies, e.g., in Lebanon or among the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The surveys of Muslims found that those with the most education were more likely to agree that suicide bombing against Western targets in Iraq was justified. As far as producing terrorists go, “citizens of the poorest countries were the least likely to commit a suicide attack”. (This dovetails with my November 2009 post “Who finances the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? We do.”)

Iceland, which let its banks fail, is compared to Ireland, which took on government debt to bail out its banks. Iceland had a painful brief period of adjustment and now is doing better than Ireland. (story)

The cover story “The U-bend of life” is about how average human happiness varies with age. Old people and young people are happy. The middle aged are miserable, with a reduction in happiness that starts around age 25, dips to a nadir at 46, and begins to rise again around 60. These data were adjusted for the presence of children and other responsibilities, supposedly. Tying this back to the first article discussed in this post, better educated people are happier, but the effect disappears when adjusted for income. A plumber or electrician who earns the same as a Ph.D. will be just as happy. [I guess one could argue that plumbing skill is in fact a “better education” than an abstruse Ph.D.]

Full post, including comments

Here are my ideas for last-minute Christmas gifts, almost all of which are available at Amazon.com:

cheap

• book for food/diet/photography nerds: What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets
• book for nature lovers: Natural History (big grids of nicely printed photos of dozens of different animals or plants on each page)
• book for dog owners: 101 Dog Tricks
• toy for young kid: Plush Border Collie (very realistic except that it doesn’t bite you 50 times daily, eat your shoes, and display other signs of criminal insanity)
• for the kid who graduated in June and remains unemployed: The Book of U.S. Government Jobs
• for investors: A Random Walk Down Wall Street (the classic, updated to reflect the Collapse of 2008)

expensive

• mother of all toaster ovens: Breville BOV800XL (way faster (due to convection) and more convenient (due to integrated timer) than a standard oven)
• best all-around compact camera: Canon S95
• mobile phone with the best screen for viewing photos: Samsung Epic 4G (Organic LED screen, unique among smartphones; real keyboard; order with two extra batteries and three chargers unless recipient lives in a very good Sprint coverage area)
• tablet computer for someone who wants to carry it in a pocket and listen to music: Creative ZIIO 7 (half the price of an iPad; should also run any Android application)
• great sound in a small convenient package: Bowers & Wilkins iPod Dock (same concept as the Bose systems, but engineered by the world’s leading speaker company (B&W is an English company that makes most of the $10,000 monitors used in recording studios))

aviation-related

• book for helicopter nerds: The Helicopter: Thinking Forward, Looking Back (some real aerodynamics)
• for a pilot: an ebook reader for viewing approach plates, either the Kindle (cheap, very sharp screen, near-infinite battery life) or iPad Tablet (expensive, screen slightly blurry due to color LCD technology, shorter battery life, more flexible and capable than Kindle)

Folks: please use the comments section to post your best Christmas gift ideas.

Full post, including comments

A U.S. Navy officer sent me the following video illustrating U.S. Air Force promotion procedures: youtube.

I’m not sure if they will blame WikiLeaks for this one…

Full post, including comments

When we started doing helicopter charter flights we imagined that it would be taking rich people to their backyards on Martha’s Vineyard. Business of that sort has been, uh, rather lean. Therefore we were grateful to have the opportunity to operate a charter flight yesterday from Hanscom Field to the Billerica High School with Santa Claus (a.k.a. “Harvey”) on board:

[I took these photos with a Samsung Epic 4G phone (Sprint). Note that I did not wear an elf or reindeer costume, though I did consider trying to find some of those antlers that people attach to their car doors. I wore my usual jeans and T-shirt and welcomed the children for photos in the helicopter while “Santa” worked a separate line of munchkins.]

Full post, including comments

I was on the phone last night with a friend I’ll call “Susie”. She talked about how angry she was with her husband for not doing enough of the work associated with their two children. “I probably do 85 percent of the work,” Susie noted, “and in any case there is nothing that Bill could do now to make up for a year of lost sleep. I’m still angry about things that happened 10 years ago.” Did she imagine that other American women were getting more help? “No, all of my friends are in the same situation.” If her husband was no worse than others, why then was she angry? “If you were born into slavery and everyone you knew was a slave, it would still make sense to be angry about the situation. Maybe every woman being angry is the first step towards justice.”

It then occurred to me that perhaps Americans with kids would be happier if all couples got a divorce when the kids were about 10 years old and did not need too much hands-on child care. If a woman desired “the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex” [Isabel Archer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady] she could remarry a man who’d wronged some other woman by not doing his fair share. Every married woman would still be stuck with a slacker, but it wouldn’t be the same slacker who prevented her from enjoying a full night’s sleep when her children were young.

Full post, including comments

Last week I met David and Rob at Hanscom Field to prepare David’s airplane for a trip up to Lebanon, New Hampshire. The trip started when Rebecca Burkes in St. Louis wanted to donate a kidney to her fiance but they did not match, while Cathy Richard in New Hampshire wanted to donate a kidney to her sister-in-law (it might be that women are disproportionately donors worldwide, e.g., in Switzerland, Nepal, and the U.S.) but they did not match. To minimize transportation time, the St. Louis kidney would be flown to Pittsburgh and we would do the exchange there, then rush back to Dartmouth medical center where the same team of surgeons that had removed a kidney in the morning would be waiting to install the St. Louis kidney in the afternoon. If all went as planned, this would be the very first nationally-coordinated kidney swap (registry). Similar paired donations have occurred, but they have been done regionally and never over as great as distance.

The forecast was for gusty winds, cold temperatures, and snow showers, but we expected David’s six-seat twin-engine business jet to be up to the task. The main risk in the winter time is icing and dry snow does not tend to stick to the wings and form ice. The plan was for David and I to serve as the flight crew and Rob, an experienced and capable turboprop pilot, to handle cabin safety and assist with ground handling. David, Rob, and I had all previously volunteered for Angel Flight (press release), but this was our first involvement with an organ transplant.

We landed uneventfully in Lebanon where the guy running the front desk eyed us suspiciously. He kept noting that usually these organ flights are paid for or “commercial” and those folks paid various landing or ramp fees. He apparently failed to note that our plane did not have any of the required signage for a Part 135 charter aircraft, though from his point of view David’s willingness to donate five hours in a plane whose operating cost is too painful to calculate probably did border on insanity. We were saved from further scrutiny by the arrival of Cathy Pratt, a nurse who has served as Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s transplant coordinator for many years. She carried a cardboard box about 1.5’x1’x1′ in size with an elaborate label on the side. Rob briefed and settled her into the back while David and I fired up the plane and departed Runway 36. With a call sign of “Angel Flight 1WL”, Air Traffic Control cleared us more or less direct to the destination airport, KAGC. I was mildly disappointed because the GPS RWY 28 approach contains an initial approach fix called “HOMEE” and I wanted to hear the controller say “cleared direct HOMEE”.

Despite some wind shear from the 22-knot gusts, we landed uneventfully and parked at Corporate Air around noon. The temperature was about -4C and it felt much colder. Since David is from Montreal, I decided that I should go inside to make myself some hot chocolate and leave him to install the engine covers.

The turboprop coming from St. Louis wasn’t due until 2 pm, so we borrowed a car and drove to a Greek restaurant where Rob treated us all to the gyro plate special and Cathy answered our questions about transplants (kidneys can survive at least 24 hours packed in ice; they have never lost a kidney in transit, even when entrusted to a taxi courier; it costs $20,000 to remove a kidney and $60,000 to install one; they would not have done this particular donor swap if we had not volunteered to fly, since the commercial airline links are too complex and the cost of charter is too high; Medicare pays for all costs even when the recipients are younger than 65; they do about 100 operations per year at Dartmouth). When we got back to the Allegheny County Airport, the inbound kidney had shown up on the flight tracking Web services and was about 30 minutes away. We got the airplane ready. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a King Air land on the runway and taxi off towards another part of the airport. Snow was blowing sideways down the ramp and I thought “there can’t be that many King Airs who want to come to this airport in this weather; our kidney is on that plane and somewhere else on the field”. I had the front desk gals at Corporate Air call up their counterparts at Voyager and ask “Do you have any kidneys there?”. The answer turned out to be “yes” so we borrowed the crew car again and drove to the other side of KAGC where Cathy hugged the nurse from Barnes-Jewish (Rob and I did not hug the King Air pilots), labels were carefully compared, and we rushed back to Corporate Air. As we were taxiing out we heard the King Air pilots talking to ground control and preparing their own departure to St. Louis.

Rob assisted Cathy with the Iridium phone to update the folks back at Dartmouth and we landed about 1.5 hours later to find a car waiting for her and the kidney. We wished them well and departed home for Bedford just as the sun was setting. It was -3C and gusting 25 knots when we landed. Cathy followed up with us the next day to let us know that all four individuals were doing well.

A friend in the hangar asked how the day had gone. I replied “We managed to get lost at the Allegheny County Airport”.

Separately, here’s another news article about the intersection of medicine and aviation: “Pilot duped AMA with fake M.D. claim”.

[Update: Some photos… http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20101206-kidney-transplant/ ]

Full post, including comments

Software and electronics enthusiasts have long predicted the day when airliners will fly themselves from Runway A to Runway B without any human pilots screwing things up. When the standard airplane was going from four crewmembers (pilot, pilot, flight engineer, navigator) to two (just the pilots), the joke was that one day it would be a single pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job was to feed the dog and the dog’s job was to bite the pilot if he touched anything.

The quest to build an automated airliner has been significantly set back by the engine failure on the Airbus A380. Here’s an interview with one of the pilots, which makes it clear that the software, left to itself, was not able to pick the serious problems out of the crowd of warning messages, nor was it able to make reasonable estimates of landing capability.

This was the newest and most advanced airplane from the company with the most advanced software and most sophisticated automation philosophy. Admittedly the engineers and programmers had to deal with regulatory authorities and designed the system with the knowledge that human pilots would be up front, but anyone wishing to argue against fully automated airliners need only point to this incident.

Full post, including comments

Today’s New York Times carries a story about Chinese university graduates not able to get the high-paying jobs that they expected. Is this news? On page 272 of A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World,Gregory Clark notes that “from 1760 to 1860 real wages in England rose faster than real output per person. The innovators, the owners of capital, the owners of land, and the owners of human capital [what economists call skill and education] all experienced modest rewards, or no rewards, from advances in knowledge.” According to Clark, knowledge workers became comparatively cheap during the Industrial Revolution while farm laborers and unskilled workers enjoyed the biggest increases. Common sense tells us that the more advanced an economy is the more valuable skills should be, but history suggests that the relationship is not simple.

[Real estate enthusiasts will enjoy figure 14.2, graphing real farmland rents per acre in England, 1210-2000. “Real farmland rents peaked in the late nineteenth century, but they have declined since. The rent of an acre of farmland in England currently buys only as many goods as it did in the 1760s. Indeed the real earnings of an acre of land are little higher than in the early thirteenth century.” Think this is distorted because the valuable land in England is all urban now? The total share of land rent of the English economy has declined from 25 percent in 1750 to about 4 percent today.]

Full post, including comments