A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
The media told us that flooding in Houston after Hurricane Harvey destroyed up to a million cars (example: WIRED). Yet I recently booked a rental car at DFW and Orbitz showed prices for cars ranging from $13-15 per day (compact to full size). If a million cars actually were destroyed and people in Houston do need cars to get around, how can that be consistent with the low rental prices and ample supply?
Full post, including commentsDxOMark has spoken. Samsung put in a bigger sensor than Apple did. Tim Cook was unable to continue Steve Jobs’s revocation of the laws of physics (at least in the eyes of Apple customers) and therefore the indoor performance of the Samsung is better. Samsung also put in a better/faster autofocus (AF) system, according to DxOMark.
What kind of phone owner wants to take pictures of subjects that move around, thus stressing the AF system? And the phone owner is often indoors with these subjects? Parents!
The tests:
Full post, including commentsOne of the entertainers on our recent cruise was a magician. He played around with some variations on Three-card Monte. Of course none of the passengers (average age: 70) had a chance of figuring out what was going on, but I wondered if another magician, or perhaps a computer vision system, would have been able to track the money card.
What do readers think? Suppose that one were able to retrieve a Google Glass device from Africa or an improved successor whose camera was impossible to spot. The device is then connected up to LTE. A professional magician, or perhaps just software, watches the game and, at the end, indicates via pocket vibrations which card to select. Would this end the era of Three-card Monte? (Or maybe it will end sooner if countries abolish cash?)
Full post, including commentsI’m not a TV-watcher so I’ve been shielded from a lot of the sadness around the recent Las Vegas shooting. This seems as though it will be a significant shock to our society. After we recover from the immediate grief, I wonder what readers think will change.
Due to our Constitution and a lack of consensus to restrict gun ownership, I am not expecting a substantial change in gun laws.
Despite the shooting occurring in the middle of a downtown area and therefore in an area served by roughly 5,000 police officers (Wikipedia: “Metro is the largest law enforcement agency in the state of Nevada, and one of the largest police agencies in the United States.”), it was more than one hour before the shooting stopped (the shooter killed himself). Will this lead to a change in police equipment or tactics? [Correction from Bill Swersey in the comments below: “the shooting lasted less than 15 minutes”]
After 9/11 there was a reduction in mass gatherings. We had a population of 282 million back in 2000 and now we’re up to 325 million so, absent social change, there should be more crowded events in 2017 than there were in 2001. Will the government be reluctant to issue permits for gatherings that could be easily attacked? Or will Americans shy away from being in crowds?
Separately, what do folks think about this CBS lawyer fired for expressing her lack of sympathy for any Republican gun owners killed? (Daily Mail) She had previously been an “outspoken critic of Republicans [who] also helped organize a block party for the Hillary Clinton last year.” I’m troubled by this, especially if it was a private (friends-only) Facebook thread. There are a lot of people suffering on Planet Earth and Americans demonstrate no sympathy for most of them (i.e., despite any fine words we might utter we don’t take any practical steps to assist the sufferers). This firing seems like a move in the direction of mandated hypocrisy. The lawyer can be unsympathetic and keep her job, but she can’t admit the thoughtcrime of lack of sympathy.
Note that I will actually be in Las Vegas next week for NBAA.
Readers: I hope that none of you were personally affected by this shooting. Feel free to share your thoughts via the comments. I’m kind of stunned at how destructive seemingly obscure humans can be. This one guy killed roughly the same number of people as Hurricane Maria. That’s sobering.
[I’m aware that, statistically, the U.S. actually experiences less gun violence than we did in the 1990s, despite a much larger population (Wikipedia). But I still think that the shooting in Las Vegas will have a big impact because Americans are driven by emotions more than numbers.]
Related:
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A pilot friend invited me to see American Made. There is a lot to love in this movie about, um, informal transportation networks from Colombia up through Central America and into the U.S. One of the stars is the Piper Aerostar, a fast piston twin. There is also a beautiful AStar helicopter. Progress in aviation is so sluggish that the filmmakers probably worked much harder to find 40-year-old cars than they did to find 40-year-old aircraft. All of the types being flown in the late 1970s and early 1980s are still flying today and some are even still being made!
The movie is realistic when it comes to single-engine procedures in a piston twin, short-field takeoffs, airline crew checklist procedures, etc. Barry Seal refers to a sectional chart and uses an E6B. The attention to detail and accuracy is better than in Sully, for example.
Non-pilots may appreciate the family scenes; what would it be like to be married to someone involved in some dangerous and plainly illegal activities? Also you’ll learn that you should bring in Colombian drug lords to plan your next party. If the movie is realistic (and why wouldn’t it be?), those guys really knew how to have a good time! (not using their own product, of course)
Readers: Did you see this movie? What did you think?
Related:
One of the sad things that happened while I was away on the cruise ship was the Google Heretic fading from the news. His spirit lives on, however, in the September/October 2017 issue of MIT Technology Review, our alumni magazine. The cover story is “35 innovators under 35 who are shaping the future of technology” with the additional tag of “Meet Tech’s Rising Stars.” (Certainly it would be a painful waste of time to read about anyone older than 35, unless perhaps the topic were technology for nursing homes.)
Depicted on the cover as the “first among equals” of the 35 is “Software engineer Tracy Chou,” whose LinkedIn page reveals that she no longer does technical work, having left her coding job at Pinterest to join Ellen Pao in “Project Include.” Page 43 of the issue explains that this is “an organization designed to help CEOs implement diversity and inclusion strategies at their companies.”
Chou is being celebrated by the editors of Technology Review for gathering some data on the gender IDs of people who work in various Silicon Valley enterprises (but in a world where gender is fluid, how can we rely on data more than one day old?). In other words, her specific technical achievement is kind of similar to the first-week-of-September work of a high school student in AP Statistics.
[You might ask… What are the most interesting-sounding technical projects described in this issue? My personal theory is that better solar cells and batteries are the most critical items, so I pick the following out of the 35:
]
Anyway, I thought it was interesting that the U.S. has reached the point that the most notable people in technology are no longer technologists.
Full post, including commentsOne of the things that I like to take pictures of is people taking pictures. Now that arguments about gender equity are consuming our society I paid some attention during a recent two-week trip (cruise with mom) to the apparent gender IDs of the photographers and subjects.
First, an astonishingly high percentage of tourists seem to be assembled into heterosexual cisgender couples. Reading the last couple of years of the New York Times led me to believe that same-sex and transgender romance is blossoming worldwide so I’m not sure what accounts for the preponderance of apparently male/female couples wandering around Portugal, the Atlantic islands, and Morocco.
Second, when one member of a couple is taking a picture of the other it is usually the man taking a picture of the woman.
Readers: Do you know of any studies of these phenomenon? I’m wondering if what I observed anecdotally is consistent with data.
Full post, including commentsMom and I finished our cruise trip with a TAP Portugal flight from Lisbon to Boston. In every other country that I can remember visiting the people who check passports are unarmed. If there is a perceived likelihood of armed conflict with deplaning passengers there might be one or two specialist soldiers or police officers walking around. At Logan Airport, however, every immigration or customs official was armed with a pistol. Thus there were roughly 100 people with guns confronting the arriving passengers. If this situation is replicated all across the U.S., I wonder why there aren’t more shootings. Presumably it is unlikely that an arriving passengers will actually have a gun, but why wouldn’t there be at least occasional shootings of unarmed passengers by officials saying “I thought he was pulling out a gun”?
[Separately, if you ever do fly TAP Portugal, make sure that you sign up for specific seats towards the front of the aircraft. It seems that TAP operates a three-class service, but the middle class (where you probably want to be) was apparently unknown to our travel agent (Frosch). TAP sells Business for crazy $$. They have a regular Economy for which you pay the Economy fare and then go to their site and pay an extra 25 euro or so to get a seat with a normal amount of legroom (maybe like JetBlue’s worst seats). Then they have a Steerage class in the back for people who are 5′ tall and/or desperately poor and unable to afford the 25 euro. We let Frosch handle everything and of course ended up in Steerage.]
Related:
Full post, including commentsLast year Mom and I were cruising on Royal Caribbean, whose slogan could reasonably be “cheaper than staying home and a lot more organized.” This year it was Crystal from Lisbon to the Azores, Madeira, Canary Islands, Morocco, and back to Lisbon. Crystal Cruises is a higher-end operation, about $1,000 per day for two people in a balcony room, and therefore attracts a wealthier demographic.
Median age of a passenger was probably close to 70 years and median wealth was “sufficient to blow $20k+ for a little over two weeks, including airfare and maybe some hotel stays on either end.”
A common concern and source of disappointment for many of these financially successful 70-year-olds was the comparatively unsuccessful trajectories of now-adult children. The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications says that we should expect a lot of correlation in success through multiple generations of a family, but the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean is not revoked. So if the Crystal passenger had been the most successful member of his or her family, Gregory Clark’s research suggests a significant probability that the children of that passenger would achieve at closer to the mean level for the extended family. The still-married-to-their-original-sweethearts parents also fretted about how their children hadn’t been able to replicate that stability. The explanation for the divorce lawsuits and children raised by just one parent was generally a change in character quality. Young people had inferior characters compared to old people. Nobody mentioned the updates to U.S. family law as a possible reason why a 50-year-old American’s domestic life might have unfolded very differently from that of the 80-year-old parents. The mother of a physician, for example, talked about how a young woman had lied about being on birth control and was now harvesting child support from her son. She never looked at the question of whether or not the 1990 child support guidelines made this a rational economic strategy. Although both she and her son live in a state that provides for potentially infinite child support revenue, the choice of becoming a child support profiteer was seen as a sign of bad character, not evidence of economic rationality.
Most of the passengers were organized into apparently heterosexual cisgender couples. There was a bimodal distribution in age gap among the couples. The first marriages typically involved a gap of less than 5 years. For those men against whom a divorce lawsuit had been filed, the second marriage seemed to be to a woman roughly 10 years younger. “The wives are a lot better looking than the husbands,” said one first-time Crystal passenger.
The ship advertised an LGBT gathering one afternoon and it turned out to be 7 men with an average age of about 55 and all but one traveling in a couple. Our host was the cruise director, a former onboard dancer who had worked his way up in the Crystal career ladder. Readers will be proud of me, I hope, for refraining from pointing out the cruise line’s failure to welcome the transgendered with “all gender restroom” signs” (the public restrooms on the ship were divided simply into “men” and “women”).
[Are you skeptical that I would fit in at an LGBT event? Keep in mind that I was traveling with my mother, listening to Broadway show tunes every night, and looking forward to an Elton John tribute concert on the last night of the cruise.]
I also attended a semi-official “singles” gathering. Nine people showed up, all women. How did they get to be “single”? Most had been successful divorce plaintiffs 10-15 years earlier, which led one passenger to quip “That’s how they’re able to afford Crystal.” This was only partially correct. These plaintiffs had obtained alimony and/or child support orders sufficient to provide them with a luxury lifestyle at the time of their original lawsuit. However, their revenue from the discarded husband had not been adjusted to compensate for inflation in the price of comfortable downtown hotel rooms, three-star restaurants, etc. Therefore their alimony checks were not sufficient to fund a truly luxurious lifestyle by today’s standard. They had thus sought to supplement their alimony and/or child support profits by tapping into the spending power of rich boyfriends. Unfortunately, the guys who met their minimum income and wealth requirements were apparently falling short in terms of personality and age. Thus the singles gathering ended up being a round-table discussion of the shortcomings of these men and why the most recent romance had fizzled.
Not all of the single females on the ship had gained wealth through divorce. One lady of about 60 had been the higher-earning spouse. She got sued by her husband and had been paying him alimony. She was not looking for a new mate. Another had earned her fortune by founding and managing a couple of matchmaking services. The latest has men as the only paying clients because “women are too emotional; they complain that ‘I didn’t pay you to get rejected’ after unsuccessful dates.”
One of the more amusing conversations was between the expert matchmaker and a 40-something career woman who asked “Aren’t men looking for their intellectual equals?” and “Wouldn’t these successful men rather have a somewhat older woman with an education and a successful career than a younger woman with nothing but looks?” The answer was that her clients were essentially indifferent to a woman’s educational and career attainment; they wanted beauty and an agreeable personality. “The more successful the woman the harder it is to find a match for her,” said the expert. “There must be some guys out there who aren’t that shallow,” said the career gal. Of course that was my chance to interject “I haven’t met one.”
[I asked how it was possible to operate a matchmaking operation for truly affluent men. Instead of incurring the risk of not getting picked for a marriage and walking away with nothing, why wouldn’t some women try to get pregnant on the first date and then harvest child support? The matchmaker was intimately familiar with California family law, its unlimited child support guidelines, and the challenge of reaching the 10-year marriage bar in order to collect alimony: “That’s why all of the women dating or married to Hollywood stars try to get pregnant as soon as possible.” Her staff tries to screen out women with mercenary motives via interviews and research into the family background. The goal is to find women who want to get married and stay married, but certainly some of the women labeled “family-oriented” by the professionals have turned out to be more cash- and litigation-oriented. The service guarantees introductions, not a litigation-free long run.]
The worlds of business and real estate have so much volatility that they generate a lot of rich old guys and there were a handful of three-generation groups on the ship, each one funded by a patriarch. The adult children couldn’t imagine being richer than their parents and a few of them, after seeing me and my 83-year-old mother together, said “it is so nice of your mom to take you on this trip” (i.e., they assumed that mom was funding our adventure).
[Separately, you might ask if the extra cost for Crystal is worth it compared to Royal Caribbean. The Indonesian-owned and LA-managed (through this month by CEO Edie Rodriguez; going forward by Tom Wolber) Crystal is an impressive operation, but so is Royal Caribbean. For me the main difference is that Royal Caribbean is like a floating city while Crystal is a small town. On the 2,500-passenger Serenade of the Seas we would run into people we knew a few times per day, but we were typically surrounded by strangers. On the 900-passenger Crystal Symphony we were almost always in a room with someone we’d met before.]
Full post, including comments“Billionaires, Bruised Egos and the Death of a Grand Project” (nytimes):
For Barry Diller, the turning point came at a Sept. 5 settlement meeting with the small band of opponents who had tied up his plans for a $250 million park and cultural center in the Hudson River for more than two years.
Instead, Mr. Diller said, after all the questions, “I ended the meeting so depressed.” He had grown “disillusioned” about the project in the spring, when a federal judge revoked the permit for the pier, stopping preliminary work. When settlement talks began in July, he was “uncomfortable” sitting down with the people who had used the courts to wage a war of attrition against the project.
With that phone call, Mr. Diller ended a six-year saga that had cost $40 million before construction had started in earnest.
Whatever the merits of this project might have been, it should be inspiring to young people that $40 million in revenue was generated for lawyers and bureaucrats.
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