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When a mobile phone camera used in between sips of a latte does not indicate a sufficient dedication to the craft of photography, one may wish to emulate Aaron Gustafson. He has published a series of photos taken with a head-mounted 4×5″ film camera while skydiving. Check out the guy’s Web site (the HTML design is so advanced it doesn’t work with Google Chrome or Microsoft Internet Explorer) or this Youtube video.

[For young readers: 4×5″ sheet film was the standard negative size for high quality photography from just after World War II until the advent of the digital age. It was typically used in a view camera, equipped with a bellows and a dark cloth. Each sheet of film was developed individually in a tank. More: see the film chapter of my online photography textbook.]

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I enjoyed brunch today with a family whose boys have attended the elite Cambridge Friends School (about $23,000 per year). The kids were saying that they did not enjoy a full day event celebrating Gay Pride and did not understand why a teacher was telling her coming-out story to the entire assembled school, including pre-K. I asked the 10-year-old “If I told you that I was gay and was going to marry my boyfriend and move to Greenwich Village, would that raise or lower your opinion of me?” [this is why parents usually don’t let me near their kids] He replied that it would lower his opinion. His mother, shocked at this prejudice despite so much well-intentioned indoctrination at school, said “What about Dan [a gay family friend]?” The kid said “I would like him better if he were straight.”

The older boy said that he had no interest in any teacher’s opinions about politics, sexuality, personal philosophy, tolerance, race relations, etc. “I only listen to them when it is educational,” he said. A good student, he wanted to get skills and facts from adults. But he was not influenced by the teachers’ attempts to mold him into what he called a “politically correct human being.” [He did say that the school overall had lowered his opinion of gays by harping on the subject constantly; he did not think that he’d been prejudiced to begin with, but the 1000th appeal for more tolerance was “annoying”.]

Perhaps a lot of the arguments about what should be taught in school rest on an overestimate of kids’ interest in what adults have to say. They respect us for knowing more math than they do; at least by age 10 they don’t necessarily naturally follow our lead in politics or religion.

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In Edward Tufte’s books, he stresses that one should never present a number in isolation. The question that one should answer, as a writer/presenter, is “compared to what?” For the number of jobs in a country, you’d think that the relevant comparison would be to population (ideally working age population) and population growth. If Chile were to add 1 million jobs, that would be a very different experience for the population than if China were to do the same.

I just did a Google News search to see how many reporters compared the latest jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department to the U.S. population growth rate. The answer was “none”. This New York times story was typical. It reported that 20,000 jobs were lost in January, but did not say anything about how the number of Americans had changed. In less than one minute the reporter could have discovered that the U.S. population is growing at 0.98 percent (source). The population clock says that there are 308.6 million people living in the U.S. Without leaving Google, one can calculate that 252,000 people were added to the U.S. population in January. So we have 20,000 fewer workers and 252,000 more people. To me that is a much more interesting story than simply “we have 20,000 fewer workers.”

Given that Tufte’s books are perennial bestsellers, why the reluctance of journalists to present any kind of context or comparison?

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http://cafehayek.com/2010/01/keynes-vs-hayek-rap-video.html

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Mark Hurst, the user experience expert, has weighed in on the iPad, and included a funny video.

Separately, a friend said that he wouldn’t buy an iPad because it didn’t have a camera. He wanted to be able to use it for Skype-style video chat.

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Tasked with a shopping list for a Mexican dish, I went to the supermarket to look for some dried pinto beans. I couldn’t find them, so I asked the 17-year-old girl working the information desk where they might be found. “Dry beans?” she asked. “Do you mean canned beans?” I replied that canned beans are typically pretty wet. “Is it a new product?” I replied that I thought dry beans had been available in the Americas for roughly 5000 years (Wikipedia says 6000). She said “We have some soup beans, but I’ve never heard of dry or dried beans.”

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This aero-news.net report says that intra-Asia air travel, with 647 million passengers in 2009, has surpassed the North American market, which carried 638 million people. Can Asian airlines celebrate? Maybe not; they collectively lost $3.4 billion last year.

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A friend who is originally from India is coming by this weekend for a farewell-to-the-U.S. visit. He has a Ph.D. from an American university. He has a good job on Wall Street. He owns a condo in the NYC area. He owns a car. He has no wife or kids. His U.S. visa has run out and he and his employer and all of their lawyers can’t figure out how to get it extended. He’s moving to London and will continue his work for this bank from there.

So… even as we welcome uneducated refugees from the world’s trouble spots, we’re deporting a person who consumes virtually no government services. The guy is not in school, is not old enough for Medicare, has no kids to dump off on the state for 6 hours a day, has never been convicted of a crime or imprisoned, and has never collected unemployment insurance. Meanwhile he pays federal income tax, city income tax, state income tax, social security tax, medicare tax, unemployment insurance (tax), tolls, car sales tax, gas tax, car registration fees, property tax on his condo, sales tax, meals tax (those Wall St. guys eat pretty lavishly).

How do we do stuff like this without eventually running out of money?

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Tomorrow is going to be one of the nicest days to fly during this entire Boston winter. The weather will be sunny and the winds calm. It should be a perfect day for flying, collecting some money from students and renters, and paying taxes to the Commonwealth so that Obama’s Aunt Zeituni can continue to live in state-funded housing (at least until February 4, when her next deportation hearing is scheduled (source)). Except that we won’t be flying because Barack Obama has decided to spend the whole afternoon in Manchester and Nashua, New Hampshire (story). Hanscom Field falls within the 30-nautical-mile “no flight training” zone (TFR).

The cost to the taxpayers and economy of this speech would probably be sufficient to build several hospitals in Haiti. Aside from whatever productivity is lost from having the president not working at his desk and local businesses shut down, we’re looking at getting a Boeing 747 to and from the Manchester airport. Then there are helicopters, limos, and SUVs to take the president and his Praetorian Guard from Manchester to a high school in Nashua (Nashua has its own airport, completely with instrument landing system, control tower, and 6,000′ runway suitable for corporate looters in their monster Gulfstreams, but it isn’t big enough for a Boeing 747 plus whatever other aircraft come up from Washington, D.C.).

What could he be telling these folks that they didn’t hear in the state of the union speech last week?

[Perhaps we should adopt a “glass is half full” outlook. Nancy Pelosi isn’t joining Mr. Obama. According to this aero-news.net piece, Pelosi and her entourage consumed $101,000 in food and alcohol while using U.S. Air Force planes to commute home, visit foreign countries, etc.]

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A friend asked today how to make sense of Barack Obama’s proposed plan to have the federal government spend $3.8 trillion per year (nytimes). The traditional way to look at this is divide it by U.S. GDP of $14 trillion and come up with 27 percent of GDP. Today, though, I wondered if it made more sense to look at it as a percentage of the private economy, which is the primary tax source. Ignoring state and local government spending, the federal government would need to collect 37 percent of private GDP in taxes. But if we add in state and local government spending, total government spending is trending towards 50 percent of GDP. If private GDP is truly the source of U.S. wealth, the government would have to tax nearly 100 percent of it in order to feed itself. As taxes are plainly not 100 percent, this way of looking at the numbers can’t be right.

So we have to circle back and look at government itself as a source of GDP. If the government redistributes money to Social Security recipients, for example, that cash is spent pretty much in the same way as it would have been by the people from whom it was taxed (though obviously they might have preferred to keep it and spend it themselves!). If the government pays interest on debt to U.S. bondholders, does that contribute to GDP? What if the government pays interest to a Chinese bondholder?

I’m wondering if it will get ever more challenging to compute GDP as the government grows. Certainly we had a tough time figuring out the Soviet Union’s GDP and even the Soviet economists couldn’t quite figure it out due to a lack of market prices for many goods.

Circling back to the $3.8 trillion… how do we make sense of that number?

I’ll start: the Haitians have asked for $3 billion to rebuild their wrecked city of 2 million souls. So the U.S. government proposes to spend enough in one year to build new cities, complete with infrastructure, for 2.5 billion people.

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