Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Heard on the Boston Tower frequency today:  “Your gear is only half down.  The mains are at a 45-degree angle.  Or maybe you want to call it ‘half up’.”

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Anne, Mallory, and I visited the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on Sunday.  This is a striking modern building, designed by I.M. Pei, on a low-rent section of the Boston Harborfront.  Your visit starts with a film about JFK’s life up to the 1960 Presidential campaign.  Despite the Kennedys’ Irish-Catholic origins, the early years of yachting and touch football in the family compound could have come straight out of the movie “Wedding Crashers” (a must-see for Christopher Walken’s definitive WASP lifestyle portrait).  One is struck by how much more interesting and intelligent JFK seemed before he went into politics.  With every year that he spent in political office, he was more prone to uttering sound bites and less prone to speaking out complete thoughtful ideas.

The Kennedy-Nixon debates were remarkable for how good Nixon looked and how much like Ronald Reagan he sounded.  Kennedy wanted to make the entire world safe for democracy, whatever the price that might be payed by Americans.  Kennedy wanted federal tax dollars flowing to alleviate every domestic problem.  Nixon wanted low taxes and to ensure that the government didn’t spend “one dollar that might be better spent by the people.”  Instead of expanded federal ambition, Nixon promised more jobs and higher income through economic growth spurred by lower taxes, pointing to high G.N.P. growth during the Eisenhower Administration.

There are rooms devoted to the Peace Corps (created by Kennedy), the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the dinner parties hosted by Jackie.  Nerds will appreciate the room devoted to the Space Program.  Kennedy asks Johnson, in a memo, “why aren’t we working 24 hours per day, with three shifts, on this?”  American fears of being overtaken by the Soviets are palpable in the documents in this room.

[The room shows the economic benefits of having the right enemy.  We sent our children to study Physics when we were afraid of the Russians.  We sent our children to study engineering when we were afraid of the Japanese.  Now we are afraid of the Muslims and we send our children to study Arabic and medieval Islamic history.]

Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy, supposedly the brains of the Kennedy family, gets a room with a desk devoted to his impressive achievements in enforcing laws guaranteeing equal treatment of black and white Americans.  Bobby’s 1968 assassination isn’t covered, but it would make for an interesting exhibit.  JFK worked hard to shift American immigration policy away from giving preference to northern and western Europeans.  Sirhan Sirhan, a “quiet and polite” Palestinian-American from Pasadena, California, was exactly the kind of immigrant JFK wanted to encourage.  Sirhan Sirhan, safely ensconced in a California prison, seems destined to outlive all of the Kennedys.

The gifts interspersed throughout the museum demonstrate the value of befriending Third World dictators; they can have some amazing stuff made, usually out of solid gold.  The pictures of officials, reporters, and dinner guests demonstrate the value of being a white male from a good WASP family in the early 1960s.  There wasn’t a lot of competition for the plum jobs.  There are no exhibits devoted to the Vietnam War, perhaps the most important legacy of the Kennedy Administration.

JFK’s assassination is covered in a dark hushed corridor with some television images from the time rolling on multiple small screens.  You walk out from that into the enormous glass-paneled lobby overlooking the water and one of JFK’s sailboats.

Summary:  A vivid evocation of an era that passed almost 50 years ago; not a thoughtful exploration of policy alternatives.

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A friend brought an iPhone to a party last night and we admired the box and the feel of the phone itself.  The phone wasn’t activated, so it could only do “emergency calls”.  We found the big Earth photo behind the virtual keypad distracting.

A long-time Unix and Mac OS user down in Manhattan wrote me the following email:

I played around with a friend's new iphone for 1/2 hr today. 
Impressions, from positive to negative: 

User interface: superb.  Graphics/icons/menus are tasteful and 
informative (as expected).  Transitions from one "mode" to another 
are natural and transparent.  The really new elements are the 
scrolling (a finger drag, with "inertia") and zooming ("pinch", or 
"spread"), which are both intuitive and surprisingly responsive. 
Addictive - once you try it, you won't want to go back! 

Photos/movies/tunes: interface for all of these is excellent, better 
than ipod, and way better  than other phones. 

Calls: sound quality seems noticably better than average, speaker 
phone too. 

Battery life: Despite their abysmal track record with laptops and 
ipod, Apple seems to have done well on this.  Only drawback is that 
the battery is not user-changeable. 

Connection speed: roughly dialup speed when on the cellular network 
(i.e., when using it without wireless access), which is fine for 
email and web pages that are mostly text, but tiresome for images/ 
video.  Google maps is reasonable. 

Typing: manageable, but the keyboard felt pretty small  for me 
(although much bigger than blackberry et al). 

Missing clipboard: can't copy things (e.g., photos, text) from web 
pages.  In fact, I don't think there's copy/paste in any apps. 

Memory: problematic.  8Gbytes is plenty for the phone, but tiny if 
you're going to fill it with movies, photos and tunes. 

Bottom line: it's not perfect, but it is the first PDA/phone 
interface that doesn't suck.  Seems great for reading/responding to 
simple emails, and surprisingly good for google-mapping and basic web 
browsing.  If I were a train commuter, or a yuppie with a fast-paced 
street life, I'd buy one tomorrow.

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The good news:  A 23-year-old pilot, Barrington Irving, completed his round-the-world flight in a Columbia 400 single-engine piston airplane, becoming the youngest round-the-world solo pilot (http://www.experienceaviation.org/).  Irving showed excellent judgment by waiting for good weather, resulting in a trip length of three months rather than the planned one month but presumably greatly enhancing safety.

The bad news:  His final destination was Orlando, Florida.

In other news, a bunch of us had planned to see the Eclipse very light jet today at Hanscom Field.  This is kind of a Microsoft spin-off company, based in New Mexico.  The machine was promised for 2003 at a cost of $900,000.  It is finally limping off the assembly line in 2007 at a cost of $1.8 million.  It was supposed to fly 1,800 n.m. through the clouds and then above them.  After some problems with the jet, the FAA now limits the Eclipse to daylight visual conditions (day VFR) and operations with two pilots in front.  Without being able to get an instrument clearance, the plane is limited to 17,500′ and probably can’t make it more than 600 n.m.  Nonetheless, we were excited to sit in the plane.  Sadly, when we arrived at the airport, the plane wasn’t there.  Mechanical problems had grounded the machine in Ohio.

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An article combining exotic travel and a debate on linguistic theory: “The Interpreter,
Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?”

An article for historically minded nerds on an ancient Greek brass machine:  “Fragmentary Knowledge”.

From the July 2, 2007 issue:  “Hedge Clipping” (an exploration of hedge funds and whether it is possible to replicate their results without paying 20 percent in fees).  Also, an analysis of Barack Obama’s undergraduate poetry by Harold Bloom, who says the poetry is “not bad”.  Looking at Jimmy Carter’s 1994 book of poems, Bloom says that “Jimmy Carter is in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States.”

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Aircraft owners at Hanscom Field divide up into doctors, techies, and “money guys”.  One of the money guys mentioned that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, one of the largest private equity (buyout) firms, has performed about the same as the S&P 500 over the years, if you account properly for leverage.  In other words, if KKR had borrowed money to the same extent that they have and, instead of carefully selecting and managing businesses to buy, had simply put the cash into the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, they would have returned just as much to investors.

If their selections don’t outperform the S&P 500, where is the genius of KKR?  In the fee!  Their investors could have borrowed some money and leveraged up the S&P for fees that would have been a fraction of 1%.   Instead, they gave up 20 and 30% of their gains to the managers at KKR.    So the real genius of the private equity firms was, we thought, to deliver similar results to those of public companies, if you’d bought additional stock on margin, but to collect fees that are 100X larger than the fees charged by indexers such as Vanguard.

[KKR also offered a full partnership to Ken Lay, the Chairman of Enron, shortly before Enron’s meltdown and after more savvy Wall Street analysts and funds were predicting a collapse and shorting the stock.]

Now the news stories are all about the favorable tax treatments received by employees at hedge funds and private equity firms.  Ronald Reagan cut the capital gains tax in order to encourage folks to invest in risky young companies in hopes of keeping more of the rewards if a company succeeded.  It was one of the most spectacular economic growth policies in U.S. history.  It is tough to see why it should apply to hedge and private equity employees.  These folks put no money at risk.  If the fund goes up, they take 20-30% of the upside.  If the fund goes down, they lose nothing.  They certainly don’t need any incentive from the government to continue to go to work under these conditions.  What they take home as a management fee looks like ordinary income and yet it is taxed as though they had made an investment in a stock and waited patiently for 5-10 years before cashing out.

After all of their talk about class warefare and inequality, you’d expect the Democrats who control Congress to eliminate tax preferences for guys who take no risk and yet receive a salary of $50 million/year.  The newspapers seem to be predicting otherwise, however.  It may be that this falls under the general principle that there is no point in trying to tax rich people more than 20%.  If you try to hit a rich person with a tax of more than 20%, he or she will come up with an exotic, possibly offshore, way to avoid paying the tax.

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I’m trying to finish up shopping for a cheap desktop computer for the hangar.  Dell has a compact C521 machine with a dual-core CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a DVD burner.  The price is a flight instructor-friendly $399.  The top of the page says “Dell recommends Windows Vista Business”.  Underneath, the shopper is offered a choice of two operating systems:  Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional.

[Since the only thing that we will use this machine for is running a Web browser and maybe an ssh client, it seemed like a safe way to try out Vista.]

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I upgraded my desktop computer with Adobe Photoshop CS3. It comes with Bridge, an application for sorting and captioning photos. Opening a folder with a few hundred RAW-format photos takes minutes of processing time gathering statistics and generating previews, maybe twice as long as in Bridge CS2. Selecting an image and moving it to a “rejects” subfolder takes about 5 seconds, about 5X longer than in Bridge CS2 (the same operation in the Windows XP File Explorer is instant). What kind of feeble desktop computer am I using? A year-old Dell XPS with a dual-core 2.8 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM. It is too bad that Cray isn’t around to make supercomputers now that Adobe is going to require consumers to use them….

[It would seem that I owe Adobe’s programmers an apology.  I copied the files from my Infrant NAS box (a cheap RAID 5 connected via 1 Gbit Ethernet onto my local hard drive).  The performance improved by a factor of between 10 and 100.  The Infrant has always been ridiculously slow when serving its Web admin pages, so I probably should have suspected this before writing the posting.  I guess my workflow is going to have to be “keep everything on the local disk until processed, then copy to the disk array”.]

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A friend went to an exclusive private school with China Forbes, who, as a Harvard undergrad, met Thomas Lauderdale, who founded the group Pink Martini in Portland, Oregon in 1994 “to play political fundraisers for progressive causes such as civil rights, the environment, affordable housing, and public broadcasting.”  China Forbes is now the lead singer and the group came to Boston Symphony Hall the other night to play to a full house.

The group itself looks like a prep school Class of 1992 reunion.  The members are all thirtysomethings and have names such as “Phil Baker”, “Robert Taylor”, and “Brian Davis”.  The crowd was remarkably white, even by Boston standards, and averaged around age 55.

A cornerstone of Pink Martini is nostalgia for things that they were all too young to have experienced, e.g., songs from movies of the 1930s and 1950s.  No distinction is made among cultures or languages.  The first half of the concert included songs in Spanish, French, English, Japanese, Italian, Portugese, and Arabic.  The group played one of their own songs, whose lyrics were in French (even the French hardly write songs in French anymore, do they?).

Despite the personal acquaintance and the amazing technical skill of the instrumentalists, my friend became bored with the concert and we escaped at intermission.   A Cuban singing Cuban songs would have been more interesting to us, or a Portuguese singing in Portuguese, or an old person singing old songs, etc.

The white middle-aged crowd loved it, though.  Maybe you have to listen to NPR and watch PBS for a few thousand hours then fret about affordable housing before this music hits home?

[One might note that the Boston Symphony Orchestra players are too young to have attended the premieres of the pieces that they typically play.  What is the difference between the BSO and Pink Martini?  The BSO folks train for decades to work within one continuous musical tradition.  They don’t put on a party hat and say “Now I am a Cuban.”]

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One of my young relatives, who will remain nameless to protect him from the ridicule that he so richly deserves, has decided to attend Harvard College.  He is inclined toward math, science, and engineering.  Had he asked me for advice, which he did not, I would have suggested Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts (“out west” as we Boston/Cambridge folks say).  Harvard, of course, has a great reputation, but it is mostly for research achievements.  It occurred to me to wonder why any high school kid would sign up to be an undergrad at a research university.

Research universities do not bother to disguise the fact that promotion, status, salary, and tenure for faculty are all based on research accomplishments.  A high school kid with an above-average intelligence should thus be able to infer that a professor at such an institution would spend as little time as possible with undergraduates.  Joe Research Professor will want to talk first with his postdocs, second with his graduate students, third with other faculty members.  Any time that Joe spends talking to an undergraduate will reduce his chances of getting tenure, his status within the university, his salary, and his status among peers at other institutions.  Teaching undergraduates or meeting with them face-to-face falls into the same category as watching television or other leisure activities.  Joe Professor might enjoy it, but in the competitive academic world he inhabits is unlikely to indulge.

An Ivy League college would make sense for a rich kid who wants to party with other rich kids.  An Ivy League university would make sense for graduate school, where the professors do have an incentive to talk to the students who are working on their research grants.

It seems surprising that kids, faced with a $200,000 purchase decision, are so dazzled by the Ivy League reputations that they fail to ask the obvious question “Why would a busy professor trying to deliver on a research grant want to talk to me?”

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