Female 1960s computer nerd defrosted for the Gender War Age

by philg

TIME has an article on Margaret Hamilton and the software for the Apollo 11 mission. The journalist is quick to point out that “she was successful in the pre-women’s lib era in a field that remains tough for women to crack.” Being an Ellen Pao-style gender warrior was apparently secondary in Hamilton’s mind to achieving a successful landing on the moon, but the present-day journalist is quick to fill in the gaps: “Hamilton says that she was so wrapped up in her work that she didn’t notice the gender problems of the time…”

What kind of discrimination did Hamilton actually face? Wikipedia notes that this female graduate of Earlham College was hired for some of the most advanced computer system projects of the day, e.g., SAGE at MIT, and weather simulation for the professor who popularized modern “chaos theory.” Hamilton was promoted to “director and supervisor of software programming for Apollo and Skylab.” Then she was founder and CEO of her own software company, apparently successful enough to survive for at least eight years. For about the last thirty years she has had her own company as well. Her writings are published by the IEEE (example), one of the two most prestigious societies in computer science.

These are the facts that support the present-day journalist’s conclusion that the software industry was unfriendly to women in the 1960s and remains so today.

[Hamilton may have used her gender to advantage via Massachusetts family law. She married a Harvard Law School graduate who went on to found a Boston-area law firm (Boston Globe). The article says that there was a divorce lawsuit but it isn’t clear what alimony and child support profits, if any, Hamilton earned.]

Separately… what do we think of the ideas in that IEEE paper? Plainly big software systems need to be more resilient and to have some learning capabilities. But is this Universal Systems Language an important step in that direction?

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The crazy gusty Boeing 777 landing in Schipol (Amsterdam)

by philg

Friends are asking me about a video of a KLM Boeing 777 landing at its home base in Amsterdam. “We Asked A Pilot About The ‘Terrifying’ Landing Going Viral” is a Huffington Post article where they ask an airline pilot for his opinion:

“It looks fairly dramatic, but it was not dangerous,” he reassured us. Videos of landings tend to look a lot more dramatic than they actually are. Those judders and swerves? Just normal reactions to gusty crosswinds.

“For the passengers on board, I’m sure there was some jostling, but the plane didn’t come anywhere close to crashing,” he says.

For example, you may have noticed that the plane tilts to its right just before it touches down. It looks like it comes close to flipping over into a fireball of death. Actually, Smith says, that’s a deliberate correction to the crosswind. Pilots are trained to land at an angle, so the wheels closest to the wind land first. That helps stop the wind from pushing the plane sideways across the runway.

“That landing was well within the capabilities of the pilots and also the aircraft,” Smith stresses.

Pilots are trained to abort landings if they feel unsafe, and they don’t lose face among the crew for doing so, he says.

What do readers think? Were they close to scraping a wingtip or engine nacelle? That would not be a sign of prudent planning in the airline world (since you can always choose to land somewhere else and send the passengers onward via bus or train and/or wait a day).

The idea that they could have aborted the landing at the point shown in the video seems questionable. The engines on a 777 take a long time to spool up and then pilots seem not to handle these well (see my explanation in this posting about landing the CRJ, a much lower-inertia aircraft; also see this NTSB report of damage to a Boeing 747 after a low go-around at the very same airport)

What do pilot readers think? Was landing in the worst July storm in a century just another day in the front office or a case of get-there-itis? Did we watch awesome skill or questionable judgment and a bit of luck?

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F-16 crash into Cessna 150 (South Carolina) follow-up

by philg

James Fallows has written an interesting Atlantic piece about the F-16 fighter jet that ran over a little Cessna 150 in South Carolina in beautiful clear VFR conditions (NTSB), killing Michael and Joseph Johnson. One technical oddity seems to be that these crazy expensive and heavy F-16s don’t have the standard traffic advisory or TCAS systems that are standard in higher-end civilian airplanes (about $10,000 and 10 lbs.). They are even available as portable electronics for less than $1000 (i.e., when you buy the certified (legal-to-install-permanently) box you are paying about $1000 for the circuitry and $9000 for regulatory compliance).

(You could argue that you wouldn’t want the TAS or TCAS in a fighter jet because they often fly in formation, but I think it would still work because what is typical in formation flying is that only one airplane has its transponder on.)

For me as an engineer this is the saddest thing about the accident. It could likely have been prevented with a small box of electronics.

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Boring but important: State Pension Funding Gap Analysis

by philg

Pew Charitable Trusts released this month a report on U.S. state pension funding gaps. The report is current only through 2013, a measure presumably of how tough it is to get real numbers. The missing $1 trillion represents “historically high levels as a percentage of U.S. GDP” but, if you think about it, isn’t actually that bad against a U.S. GDP of nearly $17 trillion.

There are some interesting points in the report. Chris Christie’s New Jersey moved in the wrong direction, from 68 percent funded in 2011 to 63 percent funded in 2013. Illinois is a joke at 39 percent. Massachusetts has a larger percentage gap than California’s, which is constantly in the news. Wisconsin and South Dakota are 100-percent funded. Don’t they know how to cheat?

One issue with the Pew report, I think, is that it accepts the assumptions built into these funds, e.g., that investment returns close to 8 percent can be obtained every year, that public employees who retire to the golf course at age 50 will drop dead on the actuarially predicted schedule, etc. Generally the economists who have analyzed public pension funds using returns that are actually available in the bond market, for example, have concluded that the gap is closer to 3X the stated gap, in which case states need to scratch up roughly an additional $3 trillion for pensions plus whatever additional they’ll need to pay for promised retiree health care (a worker who retires at age 50, for example, needs 15 years of free health insurance to bridge the gap until Medicare eligibility).

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Ode to the Microsoft Office team

by philg

I just finished writing a 749-page Microsoft Word document containing some illustrations so that it works out to about 5 MB of data. This went through about 100 versions. There was never a single crash of Word (version 15.0.x, part of Office 365, on Windows 8.1, itself crash-free). All of the automatic cross-references worked.

So here’s a public thank-you to the Microsoft Office team. It is tough to imagine that a monster C program like that can be as reliable as it is!

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Frontiers of biking with toddlers: Yepp Mini

by philg

One of our household members is not quite ready to ride his own bike. I am playing around with Yepp Mini and love the concept:

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What you don’t see in this picture is me having to ride bowlegged in order to avoid whacking my knees on the bottom of the seat. Nor do you see my chest hitting the back of the seat when getting on or off the bike. The top tube of this Schwinn/LL Bean XL frame is about 23.5″ long, which is longer than my existing Specialized XL hybrid bike. I’m thinking that maybe the solution is a bike with a crazy long top tube and handlebars that swoop back so that one isn’t reaching very far forward. But who makes a bike with that geometry? And note that it has to have an old-style headset and threaded fork so that there is a stem sticking out of the top front for attachment of the Yepp bracket.

It seems as though the obvious answer would be a “cruiser” bike, but do those one-size-fits-all bikes work well for taller riders? (I’m 6′ tall but my legs are slightly longer than average, so I ride bikes sized for a 6’2″ tall person.)

[Mission spec: neighborhood riding on quiet smooth roads. Bike spec: can’t be crazy heavy like the cargo bikes.]

 

 

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Divorce litigator on the Bill Cosby mess

by philg

I was chatting with a divorce litigator and asked what she thought about the Bill Cosby situation.

“It will turn out to be all about getting cash from the old man,” she said. But what about the fact that the statute of limitations may have run? “These women are represented,” she continued. “People don’t hire lawyers and go to court unless they want cash.”

Is Cosby a rapist? “He would be if I were representing one of the women,” she responded. Can there be any doubt when there are more than 40 women complaining of at least one form of misconduct? “You’re talking about a guy who had sex with maybe two women a week for 30 years,” she replied. “That’s about 3000 women in a business relationship with Cosby but with no written contract so the terms weren’t precisely stated. That 40 out of 3000 [1.3%] ended up being upset with what they got in exchange for spreading their legs does not surprise me.”

Business relationship? “Let’s go through the three basic ways for a smart woman to make money with her body in this country,” the litigator responded. “She can go old-school with a quick marriage and divorce, getting extra cash by sobbing in court about how the rich middle-aged guy turned out to be a wife beater, child molester, yada yada yada. Doesn’t work with a guy like Cosby because he’s already married. She can give a rich guy a blow job, run to the bathroom, spit into a cervical cap, push it up her cooter, and either sell the abortion or collect a couple of million in child support. Didn’t work that well for anyone until around 1990 when the child support guidelines came in. Wouldn’t have worked with Cosby if he was smart and had a vasectomy. That leaves Way #3: hang out with a married or famous guy and get a continuing stream of cash, gifts, favors, etc. for not telling the wife or the public.”

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Dyson vacuum cleaners: the power of marketing?

by philg

A recent visit to the local vacuum cleaner store prompted me to ask the owner whether he recommended the Dyson products on his showroom floor. “Because they’re bagless they need a lot of service and cleaning,” he replied. “In addition to what you do at home you need to bring them in every two years for about $150 of professional service. Then they die after about five years. Compare that to $20 per year of bags for a Miele.” Consumer Reports rates the cleaning performance of the Dysons as far inferior to competitive products (a $550 “Cinetic Animal” machine scores below a $150 Hoover canister), except for their “Ball Multi Floor” upright ($400, albeit underperforms a $160 Eureka, a $180 Hoover, and a $200 Kenmore (all with bags)). How can they sell any machines at all then? “Dyson puts a huge amount of money into marketing,” said the owner. “Miele puts the money into the product and counts on the fact that once you buy a Miele you will be a Miele customer for a lifetime.”

He had scarcely finished this explanation when a guy walked in with a $500 Dyson upright. He plugged it in and there was an insane amount of noise but no suction. “You’re going to need some new filters and a thorough cleaning,” said the vacuum expert….

What do readers think? Is there anything to like about Dyson vacuums or does their success as a company prove that the best path to success is through superior marketing?

[Disclosure: I have a 20-year-old Miele that still works great.]

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Global douchebag circuit: Aspen Institute, Ellen Pao, and Buddy Fletcher

by philg

In sifting through all of the press coverage around Ellen Pao’s attempt to get $176 million out of Kleiner Perkins, I missed one salient feature: Pao met her husband, the then-gay Buddy Fletcher, at the Aspen Institute (Pao’s profile on the organization’s “Global Leadership Network” section; see also Fletcher’s page).

In case the various investor lawsuits against Fletcher motivate the Aspen folks to edit their site, I am cutting and pasting the most important parts here:

Alphonse pursues an uncommon investment strategy combining traditional investment management, corporate finance, quantitative methods, and social responsibility. Since 1991, Fletcher Asset Management has invested more than $1 billion in dozens of promising companies. In 1996, the company had about 25 employees, and there were days when Fletcher, this tiny company (by Wall Street standards), accounted for more than five percent of the New York Stock Exchange’s trading volume. Alphonse started working in the investment arena after graduating from Harvard in 1987. He first joined the Wall Street investment firm of Bear, Stearns & Co. and in 1989 was lured away by GE’s Kidder, Peabody & Co., a giant in the Wall Street-based investment industry. Alphonse soon became an active philanthropist. The recipients of his generosity have been the NAACP, Harvard University, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, New School for Social Research, and the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival. In collaboration with other groups, Alphonse has launched a $50 million multi-year initiative in education which includes a fellowship program providing $50,000 fellowships to educators, lawyers, scientists, artists, economists, and others who work toward equality. Alphonse was named “Entrepreneur of the Year 1999” by Ernst & Young. He has an A.B. from Harvard University and a Masters degree from the Yale Environment School. Alphonse is a member of the 2007 class of Henry Crown Fellows and the Aspen Global Leadership Network at the Aspen Institute.

I guess we should give the Aspen folks credit for realizing that Fletcher had “an uncommon investment strategy.”

Can readers think of another love story that would be more consistent with going from Harvard to the global douchebag circuit? Here’s my personal entry: “We met at the Aspen Institute and then fell in love at dinner seated between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu at Davos.”

[And separately, if these two are representative of America’s contribution to the current global elite is it any wonder that our economic growth is anemic?]

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