Category: Uncategorized

“Why (almost) no one wants to host the Olympics anymore” (Vox):

Pyeongchang, South Korea, built a brand new Olympic stadium to host the Winter Games this year. The 35,000-seat stadium cost $109 million to build. And it will be used just four times before it’s demolished.

The cost of the stadium will come out to an astonishing $10 million per hour of use, according to Judith Grant-Long, a scholar of sports at the University of Michigan.

The 2004 Games garnered bids from 12 cities around the world. For the 2020 Games, the pool shrank to five bidders. Then the 2022 Winter Olympics and 2024 Summer Olympics managed to get only two bidders each.

In fact, for the 2024 Games, the International Olympic Committee decided to do something unprecedented: Instead of choosing between the only two bidders, Paris and Los Angeles, it decided to award Paris the 2024 Summer Olympics and give Los Angeles the 2028 Summer Olympics. Experts say the IOC decided to give them out at the same time for a simple reason — it was afraid no city would want to host the tournament by the time the 2028 bidding started.

Wikipedia says that there are fewer than 3,000 athletes that absolutely needed to gather at the 2018 Olympics. You could house them all, plus coaches, in a medium-sized university’s dormitories (adjust the academic calendar to give the students three weeks off!).

How about the spectators? There are a lot more people who want to signal their virtue by attending Hamilton than can fit into the current theater. Do the producers build a $200 million monster venue? No. They show their commitment to social justice by raising ticket prices to $1,150 per seat (Variety) and have a small, but satisfying, gathering of the righteous.

Let’s consider security:

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the cost of security at the Olympics skyrocketed. The first Summer Olympics held after the attacks were the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. Those games cost more than $15 billion, and a big part of that was because the city spent tons of money trying to protect the games from a potential terrorist attack.

Sanderson says that post-9/11 security “adds between $2 and 5 billion to the price tag to start with.”

If Olympic ticket prices were tripled so that small venues were not overloaded, fewer people would show up and therefore fewer people would need to be screened.

[Separately, note the drag on economic growth; a world that spends $5 billion on security screening is precluded from spending that $5 billion on machine tools, education, etc.]

Since it is mainly a TV event, what would be wrong with using pricing to keep the Olympics gathering to a manageable size?

Readers: What have you enjoyed most about these Olympics? I began to appreciate curling for the first time, though the kids ran out of patience after about 30 minutes. And it is fun to have a 4-year-old demand fast-forward when half-pipe competition is being shown (“I don’t like back-and-forth”).

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Digital computers and software supposedly change fast. Therefore it should be more challenging to predict how they will evolve compared to other parts of society and technology. New Yorker magazine looks at this question by cracking open a book from 1968 about the world of 2018.

It turned out to be easy to predict where computers would take us:

What “Toward the Year 2018” gets most consistently right is the integration of computing into daily life. Massive information networks of fibre optics and satellite communication, accessed through portable devices in a “universality of telephony”—and an upheaval in privacy? It’s all in there. The Bell Labs director John R. Pierce, in a few masterful strokes, extrapolates the advent of Touch-Tone to text and picture transmission, and editing the results online—“This will even extend to justification and pagination in the preparation of documents of a quality comparable to today’s letterpress.” And it’s Ithiel de Sola Pool—he of the free love and controlled economies—who wonders, five decades before alarms were raised over Equifax, Facebook, and Google, how personal information will be “computer-stored and fantastically manipulative” in both senses of the word: “By 2018 a researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records),” Pool predicts.

Writing just a year before arpanet went live, the Harvard information scientist Anthony Oettinger envisions “a kind of gargantuan version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex”—a hypothetical electromechanical text and audio-visual reader—which is about as good a summary of the Internet as you can find from 1968. But Oettinger, a veteran of U.S. intelligence-panel work on information overload, was no Utopian: his essay is titled “Electronics May Revolutionize Education, But Is Unlikely to Solve Problems of Human Frailty.” He’s particularly skeptical of how well governments would adapt to this mega-Memex: “Putting broad-band communications, picture telephones, and instant computerized retrieval in the hands of such an organization is like feeding pastry to a fat man.”

The smartest folks of 1968, however, were terrible at predicting anything involving “nuclear.” Nuclear breeder reactors for electric power did not become popular, as predicted. Folks in 1968 couldn’t see that the U.S. was about to discard the nuclear family in favor of alternative means of child production and rearing (see Real World Divorce for statistics on how the U.S. became the country where children are least likely to live with their two biological parents).

A reviewer on Amazon says “This book is really a remarkable document of how huge the technological changes were in the period from 1918 to 1968; they merely assumed the rate of change would remain unchanged. Well, as it happened, progress slowed down rather a lot.” So maybe the toughest thing to predict is the rate?

Related:

• Amazon shows a new copy available for $2,340(!)

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… why not change America instead of the Constitution?

As has happened after every mass shooting, my Facebook feed is saturated with virtuous anti-gun sentiments. Some of them squarely attack the Second Amendment, e.g., by citing this New York Times Op-Ed (interesting because the article’s first example of a current Constitutional right is immigration). The handful of Deplorables among my friends are outraged and defend their beloved freedoms with statistics showing a downward trend in U.S. gun violence. An AR-15 doesn’t kill people; a pissed-off American with an AR-15 kills people. The Deplorables assume that their attackers are rational and ask questions such as “If the population doubles, would you expect the number of mass shootings to go up, down, or remain the same” (Harvard-educated liberal arts majors respond “the same”! Also, “think of the children”).

Apparently all options are on the table now. Although I am not a gun owner myself I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler to reengineer the U.S. instead of changing the Constitution so that the gun nuts could be deprived of what is currently their right.

We could start by assuming that any mass shooting will result in a media frenzy and national despair. Thus we need to reduce the absolute probability of a mass shooting anywhere in the U.S., not try to comfort emotional folks with “as a statistical percentage of our current population of 1 billion, this wasn’t as bad as back in the supposedly good old days.”

Mass shootings should scale at least linearly with population growth. If there were 1 person in California and 1 in New York with an empty territory in between it wouldn’t be possible for there to be a mass shooting. With 100 million people the probability should be 2X that compared to 50 million, assuming everyone’s mood stays the same given the higher density. Right now we’re at 327 million residents, mostly in cities packed like rat habitats in a cruel academic experiment. How about a goal of cutting population back to 180 million, the 1960 level? So we eliminate existing cash payments to Americans who have babies and also eliminate low-skill immigration.

Traffic makes people angry. Just last week my regional neighbor Graciela Paulino got angry and shot a fellow user of the collapsing road network (Lowell Sun). How about congestion pricing for the road system so that there is never a traffic jam?

School makes young people angry, apparently. Why not offer the angriest the opportunity to learn in some other environment other than the one-size-fits-all public high school that motivates some to come back with guns?

Criminality is heritable (example: Swedish national adoption study). Why not offer criminals and children of criminals cash incentives to live in a serene environment where criminal tendencies won’t be triggered (so to speak)? And, if we believe the research eggheads, we wouldn’t want to accept immigrants from any society where violence is common or immigrants whose relatives had been criminals.

Suburban isolation seems to be unhealthy for everyone. In the non-profit ideas page that I wrote for my crazy rich Google friends I proposed that, instead of shipping barrels of cash to Africa (like Melinda Gates is doing with the money that Bill earned!), American billionaires could fund “Latin American-style Towns for the U.S.” Then we could all go down to the town square every evening and chat with friends and, ideally, not shoot any of them.

Having a lot of time on one’s hands seems to lead to mental health problems and mental health problems lead, in some cases, to mass shootings. Why not terminate all of the government programs that enable Americans to be idle and brooding for years or decades? (High school itself could be considered one of these programs! It is not intellectually demanding for anyone of above-average intelligence (i.e., 50 percent of people) and therefore gives students plenty of time to brood and plot.)

I’m sure that the above ideas only scratch the surface, but the posting is really about floating an idea: rather than having a huge Constitutional fight and increasing the overall level of hatred that Americans with different political views have for each other, why not try to redesign our way out of this situation?

Readers: What do you think? Could we reengineer U.S. society so that substantially fewer people are motivated to become mass shooters?

[Here’s a post from a Facebook friend who works as a teacher in California, plus excerpts from her follow-up comments:

Why do so many people think gun control is the answer to the problem. That’s as preposterous as the war on drugs. Guns and weapons are nothing new under the sun, but anger seems to be rising in the youth and in the world. We need to heal our broken people and gun control just is a band-aid to the real problem.

[in response to a proposed ban] That’s just it though, u think they won’t have access suddenly. That’s just not reality. Drugs are illegal yet…

Making something illegal is not gonna make the problem disappear. Who here was able to get alcohol before they turned 21? Buy drugs? Make drugs? Pretty sure no law stopped you. Even if they banned all fire arms, do u think that fire arms would disappear??? You’re wasting your time with this argument. Don’t criminalize good people for owning a gun. It’s just gonna create more problems. We don’t live in a country where guns don’t exist so stop pretending. I don’t even eat animals because I hate violence obviously I’m not one to want a gun, but reality is reality.

]

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Stellar evolution:

1. protostar
2. main sequence
3. red giant
4. white dwarf

I’m wondering if it would be fair to say that cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is transitioning from red giant to white dwarf.

Human energy output these days can be measured by Twitter. Let’s have a look at Professor Krauss’s feed:

May 10, 2014: I will echo Michelle Obama: Bring back our girls! And add: bring back our girls everywhere from the shackles of religious tyranny.

Aug 30, 2014: To Progressive Atheists in Melbourne and Radical Women. Thanks for inviting me to be a part of your protest event.

October 2, 2014: Texas continues its attack on Women.. especially poor women. Will it never end?

Nov 1, 2016: Here goes fuel for the hate mongers. I am pleased to support Hillary Clinton for President. She is very capable & will be a fine President. [i.e., the state government employee supports the candidate who promises to expand government]

Nov 1, 2016: Women’s rights, and climate change. Two reasons Trump needs to lose, and hopefully Democrats gain senate majority.

April 14, 2017: Trump proves that beyond grabbing them, he doesn’t care about women’s health and welfare. No big surprise.

May 28, 2017: Even without the pussy grabbing one look at this and you know this is the kind of creep you would want your daughter to stay away from.

June 1, 2017: All bad. Not content to attack the environment, the administration joins religious fanatics to attack women’s rights

As he was a media darling during the above output, I think it is fair to say that this was the professor’s red giant phase. What about after a star exhausts its nuclear fuel and can no longer support itself against the weight of its outer shell? Then it will collapse catastrophically, a victim of its own brilliance.

“He Became A Celebrity For Putting Science Before God. Now Lawrence Krauss Faces Allegations Of Sexual Misconduct.” suggests that is it now white dwarf stage:

Lawrence Krauss is a famous atheist and liberal crusader — and, in certain whisper networks, a well-known problem. With women coming forward alleging sexual harassment, will his “skeptic” fanbase believe the evidence?

“I didn’t care if he flirted with me, I just wanted to be around somebody important, and I also wanted to get a job in this field,” [Melody] Hensley told BuzzFeed News. “I thought I could handle myself.”

he asked her to come up to his room while he wrapped up some work …

When he pulled out a condom, Hensley said, she got out from under him, said “I have to go,” and rushed out of the room.

Krauss offers the scientific method — constantly questioning, testing hypotheses, demanding evidence — as the basis of morality and the answer to societal injustices. Last year, at a Q&A event to promote his latest book, the conversation came around to the dearth of women and minorities in science. “Science itself overcomes misogyny and prejudice and bias,” Krauss said. “It’s built in.”

How does the scientific method work when it comes to evaluating private sexual activity?

Krauss’s reputation took a hit in April 2011, after he publicly defended Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier who was convicted of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl and spent 13 months in a Florida jail.

Epstein was one of the Origins Project’s major donors. But Krauss told the Daily Beast his support of the financier was based purely on the facts: “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”

Some scientists do not respect Hawaiian culture:

In April 2016, an Origins staffer angrily posted on Facebook about how Krauss “suggested that I should dress up like a hula girl while advertising for an event.”

Skeptics have become skeptical of skepticism:

“I’ve just become so disappointed and disillusioned with a group of people who I thought at one point were exemplars of clear thinking, of openness to new evidence, and maybe most importantly, being curious,” philosopher Phil Torres told BuzzFeed News. “This movement has tragically failed to live up to its own very high moral and epistemic standards.”

Certainly this is an astrophysics lesson for our time!

[Update: “Lawrence Krauss banned from Arizona State University campus following misconduct allegations”, which notes “ASU stated that the university had not received any complaints from ASU students, faculty or staff about Krauss.”]

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I’m heading out to Seattle today. A recent news story out of the city concerns the Amazon series Transparent. Example: “Jeffrey Tambor ‘Profoundly Disappointed’ with Amazon Following Transparent Firing” (Variety) The subtitle of the article:

“I can only surmise that the investigation against me was deeply flawed and biased toward the toxic politicized atmosphere that afflicted our set,” the actor said.

Only 2.5 years ago, the actor had a different perspective. “Jill Soloway Reveals Why Feminism Is the Secret to ‘Transparent’s’ Success” (The Wrap):

Rather than give explicit direction and forcing her cast to meet her expectations, Soloway said that she prefers a “feminist” approach, standing back and letting the actors “play.”

“I bring to work a feminist and feminine style of leadership,” Soloway said. “I’m here to pump air into the balloon and let this thing rise … everybody knows that the most important thing is that we have fun.”

The result, says the cast, is that there is no fear of making mistakes on set. They are free to try anything without worrying about being shot down. “You cannot make a mistake on this set. Nothing is ever wrong,” said Light.

The attitude starts at the top, but it continues all the way down, said Tambor. The entire cast and crew is committed to Soloway’s way of thinking.

“I’m telling you, people are dedicated. People are really getting this on every single level,” Tambor said. “And there is no reason it has to be otherwise. Except fear, male superiority, and horse shit.”

So the story-behind-the-story is arguably interesting as a demonstration of how human attitudes can evolve in a short period of time. But what about the story? What was interesting about this show that people wanting to keep watching? Also, if a show is about one transgendered person, how does it work to substitute a different actor or character in season 5?

[Separately, the dust-up proves that saying “I am not a predator.” is roughly as effective as a defense as saying “I am not a child molester” in family court!]

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The U.S. is supposedly populated by folks who adhere to “Judeo-Christian” values.

Gossip is prohibited by Leviticus, a book purportedly followed by both Jews and Christians (see Lashon hara for a summary of what Leviticus says about gossip).

Yet U.S. media is filled with gossip about President Trump and women who might have had sex with him (example from the New York Times).

I don’t remember this kind of article back in the 1970s, except perhaps in some supermarket tabloids. Can we infer from this that Americans have given up any goal of following the rules set forth in the Hebrew Bible?

Maybe one could argue that this is somehow actual “news” and not merely gossip? Good Housekeeping says “Only 48% of married women want regular sex after four years.” Thus roughly half of married Americans, unless they have decided to give up on sex altogether, would be candidates for an article on the subject of “Married Person X is having sex with Person Y and Person Y is not the spouse of Person X.” How can something be considered “news” when it is this common?

A journalist who describes himself as a “conservative Christian” recently posted one of these articles about Trump to Facebook: “Understanding Conservative Christian Silence on Donald Trump’s Porngate” (National Review). I responded with “Which part of the New Testament requires a Christian to keep track of others’ sexual activities? The Hebrew Bible specifically prohibits gossiping about other people. (See “Gossip, Rumors and Lashon Hara” for example.) As with most of my questions on Facebook, nobody answered! What is the answer? Are Christians allowed to gossip freely?

Or do we just add this to the list of stuff in the Bible that Americans don’t care about, e.g., Leviticus on male homosexuality, which has turned into “Gus Kenworthy’s kiss with boyfriend a ‘moment to celebrate'” (CNN). (But if being gay at the Olympics is actually a “moment to celebrate,” why aren’t Blades of Glory-style male-male teams permitted for skating and ice dancing? Why force athletes to promote a heteronormative message?) “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is in the Ten Commandments (Exodus), but in America today the married person who says “I really am enjoying having sex with my neighbor’s spouse” can be rewarded with 50 percent of the partner’s assets and 80 percent of the partner’s income going forward (varies a lot by state, though!).

If adultery is profitable, male homosexuality is celebrated, and we can be proud of our commitment to gossiping and keeping track of another adult’s sex life, what does it mean when someone in the 21st century U.S. calls himself or herself “Christian” or “Jewish”?

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This has been a sad month for the helicopter community. A grand canyon tour EC130 crashed and burned on February 10. The NTSB has issued a report (Las Vegas TV station article with background and full text) suggesting that there was a loss of yaw control as the aircraft slowed down for landing. The NTSB says that there were two left turns before the helicopter crashed. The crash might have been survivable for everyone if the helicopter had the latest “bladder tanks” that won’t burst after an impact (the Robinson R44 got these in 2011 and, to Robinson’s credit, they were sold to owners at zero markup for several years; we retrofitted the East Coast Aero Club R44s shortly after the kits became available).

A standard U.S. helicopter, viewed from above, has blades that spin left. The helicopter will thus want to spin right due to Newton’s Third Law. The pilot uses tail rotor thrust to prevent this spinning (press on left pedal when power is being applied). This is straightforward when the wind is calm, but if a left crosswind is blowing disturbed air back into the tail rotor, it can be challenging to keep the nose pointed stably.

The French-made EC130, however, has blades that spin clockwise (viewed from above). Therefore the natural spinning direction is to the left. To reduce noise and also to enhance safety for anyone standard near the helicopter, the EC130 uses a shrouded fan (fenestron) rather than a conventional tail rotor. These have developed a reputation, perhaps unjustified, for being less effective at yaw control (see Airbus/Eurocopter’s letter on this issue from 2005).

The NTSB-reported wind of 360@12G19 does not sound too scary, but the landing zone is surrounded by terrain that can cause the wind to become chaotic.

The pilot of the accident helicopter, Scott Booth, remains hospitalized with severe burns. A friend and former ECAC instructor is a pilot at the same company. He told me about this GoFundMe page, in case any readers are interested.

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There has been some media discussion about whether the latest Presidential portrait, of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, was actually painted by Chinese artists in China. A 2012 article on Mr. Wiley, “Outsource to China,” (New York), says “These days in Beijing he employs anywhere from four to ten workers…”

This was predicted by a 2009 New Yorker article describing an entire city in China given over to artistic oil painting.

Separately, the New York interview with Mr. Wiley is kind of interesting.

Wiley grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the fifth of six children raised by a single mother on welfare putting herself through grad school in linguistics.

Mom was getting cash from the taxpayer (and maybe from some of the fathers of these six children under California family law?), but she was “putting herself through school”? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that U.S. and California taxpayers were putting her through school? Or possibly one of the men with whom she had sex?

Mr. Wiley displays his knowledge of history:

“Women have always been decorative,” Wiley says, gesturing at the portraits around him. ‘They’ve never been actors or possessed real agency.”

Would it be accurate to say that Catherine the Great did not possess “real agency”?

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It is February school vacation week here in Massachusetts. Those who are most concerned about climate change are flying 4,000 miles round-trip to ski rather than driving 45 minutes west to Mt. Wachusett. Here’s a group Facebook chat::

Friend 1: Met two families from [Happy Valley] on this flight to Utah and two from Wellesley.

Me: Did you ask them about their carbon offset purchases?

Friend 1: One of them is a perpetual complainer about racism (Indian herself) and male patriarchy.

Me: Who paid for her plane ticket?

Friend 1: Her husband is a CFO of [medium-sized company]. She is a wantrepreneur/housewife.

[Wikipedia shows that Indian Americans such as the “complainer about racism” have the highest median household income among all Americans; $101,390 per year compared to $59,698 for the average white household.]

Where to stay when the whole family is displaced to the mountains?

Friend 1: [wife] found a great market inefficiency. Those who buy time shares eventually can’t make it to their condos and put them online so you can grab it at a fraction of their cost we have a townhouse right on the mountain – next to a lift ski-in and ski-out essentially right next to Four Seasons.

Friend 2: That is what I am doing [at a New England mountain]. Taking advantage of moron who got time share. $250 for two nights and 2.5 days of lift tickets and I am getting a ride there.

Friend 1: [wife] negotiates hard with these dudes since she knows their cost structure. so we got this 4 bedroom townhouse in Utah for 4 grand for 9 days. We take two bedrooms and our friends from SF take the other two. so it’s 2k for 9 days. Waldorf Astoria right next to it is $700 per night for 1 bedroom.

Readers: How has the skiing been this year?

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One of the best days of my winter was meeting a Ph.D. in Systems Biology from Harvard. Were my dreams coming true? Yes! She had, in fact, overlapped with the Google Heretic, James Damore.

Americans like a world in which bad stuff never happens by chance. If we hear about someone who got lung cancer we want to know “Did he smoke?” Journalists thus dug around at the time that Google was casting out its heretic until they found some people willing to declare that Damore had been unlikable back in grad school. I grilled his former colleague for details. “He’s the last person I would have expected to end up identified as anti-woman,” she said. “We all thought that he was a nice guy.” Had he been interested in differences between the human sexes when at Harvard? “No, not at all. He never mentioned anything on the subject,” she explained.

I wonder if this is more evidence for the research psychologists’ findings that personality is mostly situational. We think that people have stable and certain personalities, but that is mostly because we typically see these folks in the same environment day after day. The “hard worker” who inherits $10 million, for example, may turn out not to have a work-oriented personality at all!

Thus Damore was fine at Harvard, but once he got to Google and received daily homilies from the priests of gender diversity, he hit the academic journals for papers on differences between the (human) sexes and wrote the memo that got him fired.

[Separately, here’s a Facebook posting of mine from the first week of the Harvard class:

Had a James Damore (TM) School of Sexual Dimorphism lesson today. Asked if the room was too warm, all of those born with XY chromosomes shouted “YES” and those with XX then drowned them out with “NO.”

Only two friends were brave enough to click “Like”. Compare to 30-40 who will “Like” a photo of a todder and/or retriever.]

In some ways the most interesting part of my conversation with the Google Heretic’s comrade in Systems Biology was that she with her Ph.D. summarized his 10-page memo, stuffed with academic journal citations, in the same inaccurate way as American journalists: “women are not as good at programming as men.” (I think an accurate short summary would be “on average, women are not as interested in the stare-at-a-screen-all-day-for-30-years programming job as men.” [don’t forget “get pushed out of the industry at age 50-55” in the job description too!]) This should be a good lesson to any future James Damore: Americans are not going to understand what you write, nor will they try to understand, but instead will map it to the simplest concept with which they’re already familiar. Even the best-educated Americans will then tend to adopt the mob view of the uneducated journalists. (Debra Soh, an academic in this area, wasn’t swayed by the consensus view and wrote “No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science,” but she is Canadian.)

Related:

• “The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM” (Atlantic), with a fancy chart purportedly showing that women are less likely to become nerds if a society opens all of the doors (note the differences between similar countries, e.g., Switzerland and Germany, where potential child support and alimony profits are very different (data), so they probably would want to adjust for differing revenue opportunities in marriage and/or out-of-wedlock pregnancy)
• “Facebook uses a Malibu-flying engineering manager to promote careers in engineering” (Facebook inspires young women toward nerdism by using the example of a woman who built her career… as a man)

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