Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

At the same time that I finished a book on my Amazon Kindle, which cost $400 and has a high speed Internet connection via the Sprint network (about 50 times faster data than an Apple iPhone), my Infiniti M35 had an all-systems meltdown. What happened? The AWD warning light comes on; car begins to apply brakes randomly, BRAKE warning light comes on; SLIP warning light comes on; “Service Engine Soon” light comes on; gauges go up and down crazily; managed to limp back to driveway. I called the Herb Chambers Infiniti service department and got voicemail (it was 10:15 am on a Friday). Eventually I got hold of Infiniti road service and they towed the car away. On Saturday, Herb Chambers called to say that they had no idea what the problem was and would be keeping the car indefinitely.

It had been one year and 8,000 miles since I purchased the car and it got me thinking about the ownership experience. Nearly everything that I don’t like about the car would be fixed if it had an Internet connection and a little bit of software intelligence (oxymoron?). The car doesn’t close its sunroof automatically, unlike my old Toyota minivan. The remote control has an unfortunate feature where it asks you to press and hold a button to release the trunk. Pressing and holding an adjacent button, however, will roll the windows down. If you lend the keys to someone else and ask them to fetch something from the trunk, you will invariably walk up to the car a day or two later and find the windows rolled partway down. Naturally this only happens when rain and snow storms are rolling through New England. If the car had Internet and a clock, it could email you to say “Do you really want to leave your windows and sunroof open?” If the car had a little more brains, it could check the weather itself and send you some more urgent messages.

With Internet, the car could get updates on traffic and road construction. The car could also update its navigation and points of interest database, especially if the Infiniti guys had been thoughtful enough to use a tiny flash card ($50 retail) instead of a huge DVD player and disk to store the database. The DVD player hogs most of the space in what would have been a nice glove box. A lot of the time the navigation system can’t boot up because of “disk read error”. So… with Amazon having shown that they can negotiate a deal with Sprint and get high-speed wireless to a cheap device, how come no car company has been able to do the same?

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Flush with property tax dollars harvested from the Great American Real Estate Bubble, Cambridge set aside $50 million to build a new library building for the town. The old library closed three years ago, in March 2005. A friend and I walked by the construction site the other day. A steel skeleton is visible and the building is taking shape, occupying what was once a lovely park where people sunbathed and dogs played. “Maybe it will be finished in time for the complete irrelevance of the paper book,” I noted. “People like to visit the library,” my friend said. “They can borrow DVDs.” I responded that the money spent on the project could probably buy every household in Cambridge a lifetime subscription to Netflix. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Cambridge had 42,615 households in 2000. Let’s figure that the ultimate cost of the project will be $80 million (typical overrun for government and non-profit org. construction). So that is $2,000 per household. The interest on $2,000 isn’t quite enough to pay for standard Netflix at retail rates, but if you assume that (1) you’d get a discount for a group order, (2) not every household would need or want a stream of DVDs, and (3) the new expanded building will consume a lot more in heating and electricity, I think the numbers would work out.

How could we have survived with the old building? It was perfectly functional. It was never crowded. Thanks to byzantine zoning laws, there is essentially no new residential construction in Cambridge and the population is not growing substantially (we had 120,000 residents in 1920; there are 100,000 residents today). Did the old building have enough space for tens of thousands of new books? No. Could some of the old books have been scanned and thrown out? Yes. Could tens of thousands of new books been made available to residents of Cambridge through electronic services? Yes.

[My friend is apparently a good Cambridge liberal because she said that maybe the money should have been spent to improve the adjacent high school, one of the worst performing in the state, albeit one of the most lavishly funded. We didn’t have any fiscal conservatives on our walk (do we have any in politics anywhere in the this country?) because nobody suggested that when nominal housing prices doubled the property tax rate be cut so that the total dollars paid for the city budget remained constant and too-exciting-not-to-spend surpluses of $50 million did not pile up.]

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In an effort to fight a local epidemic of obesity, and to hide from a pouring rain, I visited the MIT gym yesterday and ran into a guy wearing an “ailerons make the world go ’round” T-shirt.  He is a pilot at an airline that operates quite a few 37-passenger Embraer regional jets.  These have become uneconomic as airliners in a world of expensive fuel.  Thirty-seven average Americans simply can’t afford to pay enough to keep the thing in the air with oil at $100+/barrel.  The efficient way to run an airline when fuel prices are high is to operate fewer flights per day, each flight in a larger plane such as a Boeing 737.

How is the airline going to survive what seems to have been a very unlucky business decision, i.e., buying all of these 37-seat jets?  It turns out that the planes are in very high demand and they are selling them quite easily on the used market.  Who wants them?  Rich people who feel the need to spread out a little.  The planes get new interiors with just a handful of seats and gold-plated seatbelts, then get shipped overseas to wherever there is someone who wants to travel in comfort.  What about the pilots?  They are going overseas too.  One of this guy’s colleagues had worked only 8 months as a airline copilot on the Embraer.  He now works out of Kuwait at triple his old salary.  He pays no income tax or living expenses.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html is an interesting story on a new charter school in New York City.  Using only the standard per-pupil budget from the city, the school is going to be able to pay its teachers $125,000 per year.  How can they afford to pay more than the neighboring public schools?  The article explains that they have no assistant principals, no “attendance coordinators”, and no “discipline deans”.  The principal is paid $90,000 per year, less than the teachers, an idea that the head of the unionized public school principals said was “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

These are similar ideas to ones presented in the 1970s in the book A Pattern Language.  The architects and anthropologists behind the book said that the way to improve public education was to get rid of the physical school buildings.  They claimed that large schools ended up requiring a lot of bureaucrats to administer and it was better to have the money available to spend on teachers.

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Folks:  Pittsburgh is the last big city in the Northeast that I’ve never visited.  Looks as though Thursday evening, March 20 will be when that changes (driving in from the Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater house).  The current plan is to stay three nights and depart early in the morning on March 23 for Cincinnati (lunch in Columbus, Ohio, in case anyone has brilliant ideas for a restaurant there).

So… suggestions for what to see in Pittsburgh?  (beyond the obvious art and natural history museums)  What to do in the evenings?  The symphony seems not to be performing, unfortunately, during this visit.  What’s the best way to find out about good theater or other concerts?

Anything strange to photograph? 

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I found a place to stay in Cincinnati: Ashley Quarters, which is right near the airport and also walking distance from PetSmart.

I’ll have Alex with me, but am planning to escape for at least a few weekends back to Boston. I’m wondering if anyone knows a good boarding kennel in the Cincinnati area. Alex has never been commercially boarded before; he has always stayed with friends or neighbors. It would be nice if he could stay with a small group of other dogs in a place where there is a lot of personal attention and human contact.

I’m also looking for a good bicycle shop in Cincinnati. I need to get a Thule bike rack for my car (and have them install it!) and also want to buy a good cross bike. Suggestions?

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Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard’s professional school for government bureaucrats, has been in the news recently for having called Hillary Clinton “a monster”. The imbroglio forced her to resign from Barack Obama’s campaign. I was a bit saddened by my neighbor’s fall from grace because (1) “monster” would be a fair characterization of nearly any national politician, and (2) Samantha Power has written some interesting articles, such as this New Yorker piece on a UN bureaucrat who died in Iraq.

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A Lufthansa crew has been in the news lately (link).  They attempted to land an Airbus A320 at Hamburg in a strong gusty crosswind, failed to stabilize the approach, touched a wingtip, added power and went around for another try.  Here are excerpts from some news stories:  “pilots avert major crash”, “saved the lives of 131 passengers”, “The aircraft’s pilot, referred to simply as ‘Oliver A,’ has now been branded a ‘hero,’ for ensuring that the plane landed safely the second time around and for averting what could have very easily turned into a truly fatal disaster.”

Out of the hundreds of newspaper accounts of this incident, none mentioned the fact that nothing required the pilots to attempt to land at Hamburg in this huge windstorm in the first place.  Hamburg has four runways.  Nothing required the pilots to continue on the runway that they were approaching once they realized what a heavy crosswind was involved.  Nothing required the pilots to continue the approach once they realized that they couldn’t keep the airplane stabilized on centerline and on glideslope.  Had this been a light airplane, people would have said “Look at this idiot; he shouldn’t have continued to that airport once he received the weather; he shouldn’t have accepted that runway; he shouldn’t have continued the approach.”  Take the same guy and add 131 passengers and now he is a hero.

Almost everything that happens in an airplane can be predicted 30 minutes prior.  In developed non-mountainous countries the weather does not sneak up on a pilot.  The prudent pilot uses superior judgment so that superior skill is never required.

[I am not putting myself above this Lufthansa pilot.  I made an unnecessary landing in a heavy (for the kind of airplane that I was flying) gusty crosswind because my friend was late for his meeting and I didn’t want to divert to another airport where a landing would have been easy (full story).  I don’t call myself a hero, though.  I call myself an idiot who is lucky not to have scraped a wingtip.]

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While driving into Bethesda from the Gaithersburg airport on Friday, we turned on the radio and found ourselves listening to a U.S. Senate hearing.  Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) was grilling Robert Sturgell, the FAA acting administrator, and Mary Peters, head of the Department of Transportation.  Stevens was angry that Peters had not asked for more subsidies for airline travel to small towns.  Alaska was receiving more than 30 percent of all these funds and they had just been cut.  It upset Stevens that someone living in Kotzebue or Barrow would pay more for an airline ticket than someone who had chosen to live in Dallas or Denver.

Stevens’s next harangued Peters and Sturgell for the FAA’s lack of response to a 15-year-old girl having met a guy on the Internet and purchased an airline ticket out of Juneau to North Carolina.  Stevens said that as a father and a grandfather, he was outraged that teenagers could simply buy plane tickets and fly around.  Peters concurred, saying that she was a mother and a grandmother, and that flying teenagers were a bad thing for all concerned.

Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) attacked the FAA guy for failing to respond to controllers’ complaints about some new departure procedures out of Newark.  A departure procedure is a set of line segments on a map with some default altitudes to fly on each segment.  Sturgell said that the procedures had cost $50 million and 10 years to develop, which included hiring a lot of consultants and getting input from the controllers.  They argued over whether the new procedures put airplanes out of Newark closer or farther away from LaGuardia traffic.  Nobody asked why it should cost $50 million to draw a few lines on a map…

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I will be in Cincinnati for three and possibly four months starting March 24, doing some flight training Monday through Friday 8 am until 3 or 5 pm every day.  The training is right at the Cincinnati airport (KCVG), i.e., in Covington, Kentucky.  This leaves me with some questions for my gentle readers…

1) where to live?  I need to find a house or apartment to rent that is dog-friendly (12-year-old well-behaved Samoyed), reasonably close to the airport, and, ideally, close to restaurants and social/cultural activities (maybe near a university?).  I am planning to spend at least half of the weekends in Cincinnati and it would be nice to be somewhere interesting for friends to visit.

2) where to exercise?  I will be doing a lot of classroom work and nighttime study, so will need to go the gym at least 3X/week.  Would be nice to find a gym with a 25-yard pool.

3) options for entertaining a 12-year-old dog?  He likes people and other dogs, especially females, but is getting somewhat creaky.

I’m thinking that it might be nice to hire a thesis-writing humanities graduate student with a love of dogs to keep Alex company during the day and maybe bring him by the airport at lunchtime for a walk/lunch.  That would be another reason to live near a university.  Any idea how to find such a person?

Thanks in advance for any help.

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