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You might think that a school that offered its first classes in 1865, after the end of the Civil War, didn’t have a dog in the “which college can be guiltiest about slavery” fight. But you’d be wrong!

This week I got a letter from Rafael Reif, the president of MIT:

At MIT, we face facts, and we turn passionately toward the future. Today, however, we must attend to some newly uncovered facts from our past. A distinguished member of our history faculty, Professor Craig Steven Wilder is the leading authority on how the emergence and growth of American colleges and universities is entwined with the history of slavery. Last spring, I sought Craig’s advice on how MIT could best explore its historical connections in this realm. Based on our conversation, SHASS Dean Melissa Nobles and I immediately endorsed his proposal: to develop an ongoing undergraduate primary-research course, to be called “MIT and Slavery.”

Already, they have uncovered a range of evidence showing how MIT’s early decades were shaped by the post-Civil War process of reconstruction … Perhaps the most jarring finding: an 1850 Virginia census document, which shows that before William Barton Rogers moved to Boston to found MIT, he and his wife, Emma, held six human beings as slaves.

In the 157 years since MIT’s founding, we have often celebrated William Barton Rogers for his creative vision as an educator and his tenacity in pushing to establish MIT. With this new evidence, and our ongoing commitment to learn more about the links between the institution of slavery and technical institutions like MIT, today we must start thinking together about how to tell a more complete version of our history.

One “bad fact,” as the litigators say, is that the no-longer-known-to-be-neighborly Mr. Rogers’s name is engraved in stone (concrete?) on the main MIT building (funded by George Eastman about 20 years prior to his suicide).

Tomorrow at 1 pm the self-flagellation begins at the MIT Media Lab, 6th floor. The event will be streamed live as well and folks can ask questions, e.g., “How big a memory hole do you need for stuffing in a dead guy like Rogers?”

[In other news, MIT will be hiring professors to teach “Christianity before the birth of Jesus” and “Scientific results from NASA robot exploration of the Planet Vulcan“.]

Related:

• The President of MIT emailed me

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The New York Times assembled a committee of “30 experts” to come up with ways to “solve the opioid crisis” (report) by spending $100 billion in tax dollars.

None of these folks offered the idea of “stop creating new addicts by buying opioids with tax dollars”! They don’t like opioids, but they want the U.S. government to keep buying them.

I find this interesting as an insight into the cognitive processes of Americans.

Related:

• Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.

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Happy Valentine’s Day.

What could be more romantic than an operatic love story? A friend’s daughter is singing in La bohème soon. What if we were to update the story for the 21st century? Suppose that Bro culture meets Puccini: La Broheme.

La bohème	La Broheme
Marcello is painting while Rodolfo gazes out of the window. They complain of the cold. In order to keep warm, they burn the manuscript of Rodolfo’s drama.	Asher and Beckett complain of the cold. In order to keep warm, they turn on the Xbox.
Benoît, landlord, arrives to collect the rent.	Asher and Beckett text their parents, reminding them to pay the rent.
The girl says her name is Mimì and describes her simple life as an embroiderer	The girl says her name is Juno and describes her simple life brewing craft beer.
As the men and Mimì dine at the cafe, Musetta, formerly Marcello’s sweetheart, arrives with her rich (and elderly) government minister admirer, Alcindoro, whom she is tormenting. It is clear she has tired of him. … Alcindoro leaves to get Musetta’s shoe fixed, and Musetta and Marcello fall rapturously into each other’s arms. … The sly Musetta has the entire bill charged to Alcindoro.	As the men and Juno do shots at the bar, Zora, who formerly hooked up drunkenly with Beckett, arrives with Fenton, whom she met when adopting a pit bull.
Alcindoro returns with the repaired shoe seeking Musetta. The waiter hands him the bill and, dumbfounded, Alcindoro sinks into a chair.	All five of the young people charge the bill to their parents.
Mimì hides and overhears Rodolfo first telling Marcello that he left Mimì because of her coquettishness, but finally confessing that his jealousy is a sham: he fears she is slowly being consumed by a deadly illness (tuberculosis) … Rodolfo, in his poverty, can do little to help Mimì and hopes that his pretended unkindness will inspire her to seek another, wealthier suitor.	Juno hides and overhears Asher telling Beckett that he can’t remember why he left Juno because he was too plastered. Asher says that that he hopes Juno can get a good Obamacare policy on the exchange because she has a really nasty-sounding cough.
Marcello and Rodolfo are trying to work, though they are primarily talking about their girlfriends, who have left them and found wealthy lovers.	Asher and Beckett are trying to talk, but they keep getting interrupted by Instagrams from college classmates.
Musetta suddenly appears; Mimì, who took up with a wealthy viscount after leaving Rodolfo in the spring, has left her patron. Musetta found her that day in the street, severely weakened by her illness, and Mimì begged Musetta to bring her to Rodolfo.	Zora suddenly appears. Juno has been bitten by her pit bull.
To Mimì’s delight, Rodolfo presents her with the pink bonnet he bought her, which he has kept as a souvenir of their love. They remember past happiness and their first meeting—the candles, the lost key.	To Juno’s delight, Asher presents her with the Apple Watch, which he has kept because, though useless, it was too expensive to throw out.
Schaunard discovers that Mimì has died. Rodolfo rushes to the bed, calling Mimì’s name in anguish, weeping helplessly as the curtain falls.	Shamed by Ellen Pao‘s tales of debauched conversations aboard Gulfstreams, Asher and Beckett declare that they are “woke feminists” and spend the rest of the opera weeping helplessly. Juno and Zora wander off in search of powerful men with whom they can have sex and then later complain of a “power imbalance.”

I have a feeling that this could be improved substantially with suggestions from a young person who is actually familiar with Bro culture!

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“Success of Russia’s Female Figure Skaters Takes a Toll in Injuries and Stress” (nytimes) raises some questions.

First, is it any more punishing on the body to train to a world-class level in Russia compared to in the U.S. or anywhere else? The answer within the article seems to be “no”:

Johnny Weir, a retired, two-time Olympian from the United States who trained with Russians during his career, said that while there was always danger in overtraining or attempting jumps a skater was not ready for, Russian coaches and officials were systematic and careful in their approach.

“There are far more injuries to the Americans, I find,” he said.

Second, is it so bad to take the risk of injury given that most Americans are essentially crippled by middle age? We don’t need to skate to fall apart. We just need to eat and sit and then eat some more. If we’re going to be decrepit by middle age, why not strive to be in great shape for at least a few years in our youth?

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We have Verizon FiOS, an all-digital phone/TV/Internet service. We use the TV part of the service once every year or two. I tried the DVR for the first time this year to record the Olympics, starting with an 8-11 block on the local NBC channel. NBC decided that things were too exciting to quit precisely at 11, but the DVR quit exactly at 11 nonetheless. Thus we missed the part of the show that NBC deemed most interesting.

How is this possible? If the TV guide is all digital and the DVR is part of the cable box, how can it not know that a show is continuing? Does this happen in general? If a football game is scheduled for 3 hours, but goes into overtime and takes 3.5 hours, does the DVR miss the most important part of the game? If so, how is it possible that this kind of system engineering has persisted?

Back in the late 1980s some friends and I built a system to monitor the broadcast of TV commercials. A digital ID code was inserted into one of the unviewable lines of the analog signal and we designed a board populated by PALs to run a phase-locked loop that synced up to the NTSC signal and pulled out the information. By distributing these boards around the U.S. and equipping them with modems, we were able to have a server with a record of which commercials had been aired in which markets and when. If it was possible in the 1980s to identify a broadcast and do something reasonably intelligent, why isn’t it possible today for the Verizon set-top box?

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Karl Marx talked about a world in which there would be no scarcity so we’d be able to transition from socialism to true communism. Maybe Amazon back by the Chinese factory state has finally delivered that world? See “A small leak in the Amazon pipeline: A true fable of the Internet.”

(Note that Henry Minsky, the author, is the son of Marvin Minsky, who was moderately successful as a futurist.)

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Folks: Not everyone on the planet is cool enough to use Google Analytics. What if you have an old-school HTTP server log and want to get more information about users, especially hostnames and geolocations? What are the most reasonable tools these days, either desktop Windows apps or Unix server-based? I don’t need something scriptable that can run every night.

Alternatively, given a list of IP addresses, what would you do if you wanted to turn that into a CSV file of IP, hostname, location?

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“Before There Was #MeToo, There Was Mary Cunningham” (nytimes):

Ms. Cunningham, one of the first women ever to hold a leadership role at a Fortune 100 company, became the subject of a media frenzy in the early 1980s amid speculation and innuendo that she had slept her way to the top of Bendix Corporation, the auto parts manufacturer that Mr. Agee then helmed.

People assume “that must be a very unhappy couple that started out all about sex in the workplace,” Ms. Cunningham Agee said of her marriage. The house, she said, and the friends who filled it in the days after Mr. Agee died were a testament to “the beautiful marriage we had.”

One of the great things about the U.S. is that we can litigate the extent to which a marriage was “beautiful” even after the death of one spouse:

In October, less than two months before he died, a frail Mr. Agee, who suffered from scleroderma, a degenerative disease of the immune system, reconnected with his first family. Legal documents show that he gave Suzanne Agee power of attorney (along with his 32-year-old daughter with Ms. Cunningham Agee, Mary Alana Kurz), filed for divorce and rewrote his will to divide his assets among Ms. Cunningham Agee and his five children. (Previously, the will had left everything to Ms. Cunningham Agee.)

Ms. Cunningham Agee said that until those final weeks, her marriage had been blissful, but people close to the family said the couple had been living in separate wings of their St. Helena home, comparing the arrangement to the 1989 movie “War of the Roses.” Ms. Cunningham Agee confirmed that they lived on different floors, but said it was because Mr. Agee, whose illness had taken its toll, walked with a cane and couldn’t climb stairs.

In her version of the story, she was the consummate caregiver, bestowing on Mr. Agee chocolate milkshakes and foot massages in the middle of the night.

According to Wikipedia, Ms. Cunningham retired from the world of business and parked her MBA following her second marriage (to the rich guy) at age 31 (the family and probate court litigation, according to the Times, keeps her from “lunches she regularly organized with girlfriends or from working on the charity causes she supports”).

Separately, note that the (happy?) couple were smart enough to live in California, where the state constitution prohibits the imposition of an estate or inheritance tax (they still would have to pay federal death taxes, of course).

 

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“The Fiscal Cost of Resettling Refugees in the United States” says that U.S. taxpayers spend roughly $80,000 per year per refugee resettled in the U.S.: “The cost per refugee to American taxpayers just under $79,600 every year in the first five years after a refugee is resettled in the U.S.” Demonstrating American commitment to innumeracy and illiteracy, the authors later say “This totals $15,900 per refugee, annually, or just under $79,600 per refugee over their first five years in America.” So they’ve calculated the cost… to within a factor of 5X.

Given a fixed budget and a desire to help as many people as possible, I never understood how it made sense to settle people in one of the world’s most expensive and inefficient (in terms of use of natural resources) countries.

If we assume the refugees arrive, on average, in a family of 4, that’s $320,000 per family per year at the high end of the article’s estimate. That’s $6,154 per week. The Club Med web site shows that typical prices in Caribbean or Mexico are about $125 per night per adult or about $4,300 per week for two adults and two older kids. For Muslim refugees who might prefer an Islamic environment (do they really want to read about Erica Garza and her lifestyle choices, hang out with opioid addicts, or put their children at risk in the society where kids are least likely to have two parents?), Club Meds in Morocco, Tunisia, and Senegal are available for about 20 percent less.

For refugees who don’t want to swim, windsurf, snorkel, and play tennis at the same resort year after year, Carnival offers cruises for $59 per day per person. Even if there is no discount for children, that’s $86,140 for a year for a family of four. In other words, for a given budgeted amount, it looks as though roughly 4X as many refugees could be rescued by putting them on cruise ships rather than bringing them into the U.S. to live?

Is it obvious that a permanent vacation is better than a standard American lifestyle? The same report says that “approximately 54 percent of all refugees will hold jobs that pay less than $11 an hour” (presumably this is limited to those refugees who actually do work). Low-wage jobs actually are worse for mental health than being unemployed. (Atlantic)

So… even if there were no discount for long-term vacations, taking the higher estimate of cost from the article, both refugees and the U.S. taxpayer would be better off financially and emotionally if refugees were given lifetime vacations at all-inclusive resorts and on all-inclusive cruise ships rather than being settled in the U.S.

What about at the low end of the article’s estimate? What if a refugee family of four costs only $63,600 per year in taxpayer cash? That’s not enough for Club Med and not quite enough for permanent Carnival cruising, absent a discount for buying five-year blocks. On the other hand, there are plenty wonderful countries for tourism where budget travel for a family of four costs less than $63,600. A refugee family could be on a permanent holiday in Thailand, for example, for about $24,000 per year ($18,000 per year is the estimate for a “couple” in budgetyourtrip.com).

(Note that I think that any estimate of the cost of immigration understates the true costs. The U.S. is incapable of building new infrastructure. Therefore the result of larger population is traffic jams, delayed or packed-beyond-useful public transport, etc. Americans lost 6.9 billion hours and $160 billion (ABC) from traffic jams in 2014, and trashed the planet by burning up an extra 3 billion gallons of fuel. See How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?)

Potential issues: the cited report lumps together “refugees” and “asylees” such as the Tsarnaev brothers. (the Tsarnaevs collected welfare in Massachusetts, e.g., housing subsidies to live in Cambridge, otherwise one of America’s most expensive places to live, while hunting down the un-Islamic in Waltham and planning jihad); the report tracks the welfare consumption of refugees/asylees over a 5-year period and therefore we don’t know if they all decided to leave public housing, pay full price for health insurance, shop for food without an EBT, etc., starting in Year 6.

Related:

• “FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered.” (nytimes), in which the government awarded a $156 million contract to a company with one employee.

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YouTube has the Aerobatics lecture that we hosted for our ground school at MIT. Our young heroine wishes to remain anonymous due to friends and family members who would be frightened by her hobby if they knew about it. We had a USAF F-22 pilot who was great, of course, and a Brazilian Air Force F-16 pilot. But I think when bringing new folks into the fraternity/sorority of aviation it is better to have someone newer and more junior talk about what flying aerobatics means to her and show it happening in an aircraft that they might reasonably rent within their lifetimes.

[Actually I realize that “the fraternity/sorority” reflects a binary gender assumption/prejudice. What’s another way to say this? “brotherhood of aviation” is plainly out. The FAA’s “Airmen” designation is unhelpful.]

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