Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One of the tidbits that I learned at Burning Man was that medical care is provided during the event by roughly 300 volunteer doctors and nurses (link). The on-Playa facilities include an X-ray machine and are backstopped by helicopter airlifts to Reno (there seemed to be a handful each day). About 2,800 Burners, out of a population of roughly 70,000, seek treatment each year. The primary maladies are dehydration and soft tissue injuries, the latter hardly a surprise given the amount of rebar that is sticking out of the Playa and not always clearly marked. As far as I know, only one of our 70 campers was treated in 2015. He applied his 25-year-old windsurfing skills to the challenge of windsurfing on wheels. It turns out that rolling resistance on the Playa is lower than water, thus resulting in higher speeds, and it also turns out that falling on the Playa results in a significant road rash.

One challenge is figuring out where Burning Man would fit into the Worldbank’s table of health care spending as a percentage of GDP. Since the medical professionals are volunteers, is it below Singapore’s 4.6 percent of GDP? Or since the rest of Burning Man is a gift economy and sometimes the clinic folks call in a $5,000/hour helicopter would it be above the U.S.’s 17.1 percent?

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“I have one of the best jobs in academia. Here’s why I’m walking away.” answers the question What if someone who cared about student outcomes got a job as a professor?

Here are some choice excerpts:

Liberal arts programs, and the humanities in particular, have become a place to warehouse students seeking generic bachelor’s degrees not out of any particular interest in the field, but in order to receive raises at work or improve their position in a crowded job market.

Once upon a time, in a postwar America starved for middle managers who could file TPS reports, relying on the BA as an assurance of quality, proof of the ability to follow orders and complete tasks, made perfect sense. But in today’s world of service workers and coders and freelancers struggling to brand themselves, wasting four years sitting in classes like mine makes no economic sense for the country or for the students — particularly when they’re borrowing money to do so.

online education isn’t a solution — it’s a Band-Aid on an infected wound. In place of thought-provoking video chats and genuinely creative software applications the theory promises, most online students get Blackboard — a cumbersome and inefficient program that only a bureaucracy could love.

The most questionable statement within this epic rant is “there’s no time to worry about the fallen when your own pay lags well behind the national average.” What does this means for a humanities professor? The national average for a poet? http://philip.greenspun.com/book-reviews/higher-education is a review of a 2010 book whose authors concluded that a liberal arts professor earns about $242 for each hour of required work ($265/hour adjusted for the inflation that politicians assure us does not exist).

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Technology Review is MIT’s alumni rag. I’m secretary for the Class of 1982 and part of my job is getting alums to write in regarding their recent activities. To spur discussion I asked them to comment on the September/October issue of the magazine. But now I think that it would be fun to open things up to readers here. The message to my classmates:

Who wants to eat food that has been doused in RNAi? And, more importantly, can spray-on RNA for crops improve spray-on tans for pale MIT grads?

How about the MIT battery nerds who left American taxpayers and investors with a $500 million hole in their pockets via A123? (who could have known that Chinese lithium-ion battery manufacturers were also capable of innovating?) Is their new company, 24M (page 21), going to prove the old adage that “this time it is different”?

How about Amazon’s new robot-stuffed warehouse? As U.S. labor costs rise (health insurance increases, more complex regulation, litigation costs to defend against various employment-related lawsuits, $15/hour minimum wage), do robots give big companies a further edge over small companies? How will your workplace change in response to higher labor costs? What about your household? (see $15 minimum wage and Obamacare impact on home siding for some ideas)

What about the page 88 article on solar that says rooftop solar isn’t competitive even if solar cells were free? (due to the cost of other stuff) Does that mean we must limit our solar use to Burning Man? (see http://tinyurl.com/2015BurningManPG for my slideshow from the event or youtube if you want to learn everything important about Burning Man in 2 minutes, 45 seconds) Does this change the way you think about rooftop solar or do we still love it for the showing-off-to-the-neighbors value?

Tech Review has told us a lot about driverless cars. How would they actually change the economics of your enterprise? How would they change your personal life?

What do you all think about the articles in this issue of Tech Review?

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Readers:

Here is a dumb question about Ahmed Mohamed, the student who has been in the news lately for “making a clock” and bringing it to a public high school.

MIT has admitted this child to the PhD program in Physics (let’s hope he doesn’t figure out the difference in pay between working as a Physics post-doc and as a medical doctor (see “Women in Science” for what happens when people do figure this out)). Barack Obama has invited him to the White House. Google invited him to come hang out. Twitter offered him a internship.

The one thing that no journalist has tried to explain, however, is what Mohamed actually did. Did he go to the beach, melt sand into silicon wafers, create discrete transistors and solder them together to “make a clock”? That would be challenging even for a grown-up. Did he get a clock kit, sort of like the old Heathkits that every American child was previously assumed competent to build (but now everyone is too busy on Xbox?)? Did he design a clock from scratch, and then build it from TTL chips or burn a PAL, then wire-wrap everything together? Did he find plans for a clock online and buy the parts from DigiKey to assemble it? What does “make a clock” mean in this case?

Can readers help? What did Ahmed Mohamed actually do, expressed in terms of schematics, components, soldering, wire-wrapping, etc.? (And I guess a separate question is why does nobody care enough that journalists would write about this? Is it truly impossible to explain 1960s technology to an American layperson?)

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I’m not a Catholic so I don’t think too much about the Pope. However, I do read New Yorker magazine and a recent article made me wonder why the Catholic Church doesn’t treat divorce lawsuit plaintiffs and defendants differently. As noted in the History of Divorce chapter, an American divorce in the old days typically meant that both spouses had negotiated and cooperated, possibly traveling together to a divorce-friendly jurisdiction such as Nevada. Today, however, the one thing that a defendant in a no-fault jurisdiction (nearly all U.S. states) knows is that he or she will lose the divorce lawsuit, regardless of how much is spent on defense (i.e., the divorce will go through, even if no wrongdoing by the defendant is alleged or proven).

Consider a woman who testified at a recent Massachusetts family law hearing (previous posting). As noted in the previous posting:

the one woman who testified about losing her children; she was a yuppie identified by the court as the family “breadwinner” while her husband, a firefighter whose full-time job consisted of just two 24-hour shifts per week, was anointed the “primary parent” (the “breadwinner” was ordered to keep supporting this guy, and presumably any young hotties he hooks up with, until the kids turn 23))

Suppose that the father had educated himself about family law in advance, married her purely for the cash, and then sued her as soon as she had generated his desired number of children. She was an unwitting participant in a purely mercenary arrangement. She did nothing to cause the divorce, other than failing to educate herself regarding Massachusetts law and, before agreeing to a marriage or child-bearing, move to a jurisdiction that provides fewer financial incentives for mercenary marriages and/or child-production. Once sued there was nothing that she could have done to prevent becoming divorced. Why does the Catholic Church now want to block her from entering into what might be an enduring marriage? (Let’s hope that she is smarter next time and settles in a different state and/or marries someone who earns more than she does and/or quits her job and thus doesn’t present her partner with a continuous financial incentive to file a lawsuit.)

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Following every Burning Man, the organization conducts a census. Here are some highlights from the 2014 numbers:

• the male/female ratio is 58/41 (plus 0.9% “fluid”)
• 69 percent of Burners identify as “heterosexual”
• 47 percent of Burners are from California and roughly 13 percent come from outside of the US/Canada
• Democrats outnumber Republicans in a 43:6 ratio with “76% of unaffiliated BRC citizens [saying] they last voted Democratic”.
• median income is about $55,000 per year
• median age is 34

The media has been excited lately about the racial composition of attendees at Burning Man. Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man, was asked a question about the overall whiteness of Burners at a press conference during the event. He responded “We are not a Utopian society. I will believe in Utopia when I meet my first perfect person. Unlike our liberal critics, half of my family is black. We’re not going to set racial quotas or judge people by wealth. I’m unwilling to impose change from outside. We have to generate change from the inside.”

[My own explanation? A plurality of Burners come from Silicon Valley or the East Bay, plus some techies who live in San Francisco proper. Mother Jones says that the Silicon Valley workforce is approximately 1.8 percent black. It should not be a surprise that Burning Man reflects the mixture of people you’d find in Silicon Valley. If Silicon Valley employers ever decide to offer wages high enough to recruit and retain qualified black employees then presumably Burning Man will become less white/Asian.]

Related:

• “Your Playa Name is ‘Moon Pony'” (“until next week, when you return to your desk job”)
• my photos from Burning Man 2015
• my photos from 2014

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The Playa is too harsh for the typical dog. But if others in the family get to go there, shouldn’t the dog also have a Playa name? What do readers think a good Playa name for Mindy the Crippler would be? “Sirius” is one idea. (After watching this video I can’t get “Moon Pony” out of my head.)

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New Yorker magazine has an extensive profile of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev‘s lead defense attorney, Judy Clarke. She is apparently one of the nation’s leading criminal defense lawyers, whose fees were paid by your tax dollars (the woman who writes those checks, from her desk at the Justice Department in Washington, was actually at Burning Man this year!).

Amidst the puffery about how great this woman’s career has been (and Sheryl Sandberg would no doubt want us to point out that, had Judy Clarke been a man, she could have truly been successful) are a lot of interesting details regarding the defense strategy. Sadly for this graduate of the Cambridge Public Schools tolerance and diversity programs, it seems that nothing works well when you are a young jihadi and every member of the jury is wearing a “Boston Strong” T-shirt.

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Our local public housing authority puts out some figures in its draft FY15 annual report. It looks as though there is a huge amount of inequality. The “about page” says that 5,500 families and individuals receive government-paid-for, government-built-and-operated, or government-subsidized housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These housing units include luxury rental apartments with a market value of up to about $60,000 per year (equivalent to more than $100,000/year in pre-tax income).

The annual report (page 36), however, shows that there are 10,442 distinct families and individuals on the waiting list. Thus out of about 16,000 people, approximately one-third receive something worth, on average, perhaps $50,000 per year pre-tax. The remaining two-thirds receive $0.

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It is annoying to pay the nation’s highest taxi fares here in Boston, which is why we love Uber so much. But it is presumably even more annoying to pay 6 percent to a realtor to sell a condo in Cambridge that, thanks to the Federal Government’s free money policies and the traffic gridlock that makes commuting from the suburbs ever more possible, will be gone within a few days.

There are a limited number of dwellings in the U.S. Zillow and Google already pretty much have complete databases of where dwellings are. Why do realtors still exist?

The New York Times ran an editorial yesterday “How Segregation Destroys Black Wealth” about how realtors, in addition to driving up our housing costs by 6 percent, also discriminate on the basis of skin color (but not in the positive right-thinking way that the New York Times suggests in other situations). The wise members of the Times Editorial Board (themselves nearly all white, but of course that is not a sign of discrimination) suggest that relief from this pernicious discrimination will come via the intervention of the Great Father in Washington following a “federal housing discrimination complaint.” There was no suggestion of simply banning realtors. If Amazon.com (happy to sell to everyone, regardless of race, but the Times still hates them) or a similar neutral server farm were doing the selling instead of prone-to-bias humans, wouldn’t that help us achieve racial justice? (and also save us about 5 percent!)

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