Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

When this U.S. presidential campaign began, there was a lot of discussion about race. Could Obama win despite his darker than average skin? The assumption in many news articles was that white voters were prejudiced against blacks and would prefer a white candidate. My personal theory was that voters would ignore skin color. My experience with Americans is that they often have opinions about a racial or religious group but that they are nearly always willing to put those opinions aside and consider an individual. I’m wondering now if maybe both opinions are wrong. Perhaps being black is a big advantage with the average American voter.

Consider the average white guy who has been accustomed to seeing white medical doctors. In his experience, all of the doctors who have treated him have been extremely competent and qualified and all of those doctors were white. Should you present a black doctor to this patient, he might wonder “Is this guy going to be as competent as the white doctors I’m accustomed to? Did he get into med school because he was black, not because he was as smart as other students?” (see this British Medical Association article). Maybe it would be safer to stick with white doctors.

Ask the same white guy who has liked his white doctors what he thinks about the politicians who represent him or govern him. The answers would probably range from “Uninspiring, plodding, mediocre, wasteful” to “Incompetent, corrupt, embarrassing.” What color are these politicians? Almost always white. The less that a candidate physically resembles incumbent politicians, the better he or she should do, all other factors being equal.

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Folks here in Cambridge were euphoric when the hated Mitt Romney was replaced as governor by Deval Patrick, who, like Barack Obama and Cory Booker, falls into the young, gifted, and black category. After a year in office, nobody can point to any concrete achievement by Patrick, who has been in the news mostly for use of the state police helicopter, extravagant spending on redecoration, married gay teenage sex, and advocacy of casinos in Massachusetts.

Now it seems that Patrick is trying to revive the sales tax on aircraft and aircraft maintenance (story). The tax was repealed in 2002 in an effort by a Republican state legislator, Cele Hahn, to make Massachusetts competitive with surrounding aviation tax-free states such as New Hampshire and Connecticut. Companies that had a choice would base their airplane, along with its hangar and maintenance jobs, in a nearby state in order to save $millions in taxes on an expensive plane. Ms. Hahn’s plan has been largely successful.

Maybe “young, gifted, and black” translates to “try to tax things that can move at 500 mph; send jobs to states governed by old, boring, and white people (example).”

[According to www.celehahn.org, Ms. Hahn is no longer a taxpayer here in the Commonwealth. She moved to New Hampshire.]

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Alpha Omega Jewelers seemed to have everything going for it: prime locations, including one in Harvard Square, a Rolex dealership, and a bunch of other fancy watches and other stuff. I walked by the store today, however, to find that they were having a bankruptcy liquidation sale. A sales guy explained that the owner had fled the country, a lender had seized the assets, and the bank had decided that it wasn’t profitable to continue selling $5000 watches to yuppies.

Harvard Square retail seems to be going through a slow patch. Amazon.com and high rents forced Wordsworth books out of business in 2004 and their prime location has yet to be rented to another store.

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I attended an election results party last night here in Cambridge. Most of the attendees were reasonably rich biotechies or computer nerds. Having predicted a victory for Obama, I was gratified to learn that nearly all had voted for him. A recent New Yorker magazine carried an article (abstract) on Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, NJ. He is often lumped together with Obama in the “young, gifted, and black” category (Nina Simone). The article is not available online, but the magazine does serve a video interview with Booker. Booker was voted in with high hopes, which have been mostly disappointed. Newark remains crime-ridden and poor.

Neither the article nor Booker ever states Newark’s problems clearly, choosing to talk about incremental fixes. It seems to me simplest way to characterize Newark’s problems is that its citizens have a Third World level of education and skill while its city employees are paid a First World salary. With citizens capable of competing only for the lowest wage jobs and public employees drawing above-average salaries, the inevitable result is a crushing tax burden. To some extent welfare payments from the federal government can supplement local income, but that doesn’t seem sufficient to pay a standard city employee bureaucracy, not to mention pensions for city employees hired during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Newark sits at a transportation nexus and is close to New York City, but there are plenty of nearby towns with lower taxes and crime that are more attractive to employers and residents.

It seems that being young, gifted, and black is not sufficient when an economy has structural problems…

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The Boston real estate market has seemed immune to the collapse of the real estate bubble. The asking price for a nice single family house in Cambridge is about the same as an old-but-airworthy Boeing 737. How can prices be so sticky, friends are asking?

My personal theory is that high housing costs discourage consumption, but the discouragement is much slower than for any other product. If the local movie theaters put up prices to $20 per ticket, demand would fall within weeks. If the landlords insist on a huge rent increase, however, they will almost always get it and come to believe that the new high rents will stick. Moving is a huge endeavor that people will try to put off as long as possible. If a couple is sharing a house or apartment, they may both need to find jobs in a new location, for example, which could take a year or more.

Eventually, however, people discover techniques for consuming less Boston real estate. We have bad weather, very old houses (most would be consider slum-grade in newer parts of the country where flat floors, tight roofs, and uncracked walls are standard), and slow job growth. A lot of my younger friends noticed that apartments in California were about the same price, decided that San Francisco would be a more fun place to live, and found higher paying jobs in the San Francisco area. Others will discover the virtues of moving back home with mom and dad for a few years.

Real estate does obey the Econ 101 laws of supply and demand, but with such a long delay in response that it seems to defy those laws.

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A lot of people email asking “Can I really take an acceptable quality photo with a $10,000 camera/lens combination?” To answer this question for yourself, check out

http://photo.net/equipment/canon/85L/ (review of the Canon 85/1.2 lens)

http://photo.net/equipment/canon/1Ds_markIII/ (Canon’s top-end body)

If you prefer cheaper/lighter equipment, I have recently completed a guide to the Olympus digital SLR system:

http://photo.net/equipment/olympus/

Comments welcome as always.

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When visiting a cultural capital like Washington, D.C., some folks like to visit museums, the theater, and the opera and concert halls. I headed straight for BestBuy to help a friend dig herself out of the sluggish hell of a 6-year-old Dell PC with 500 MB of RAM trying to run Windows XP. The old machine also has a failed USB subsystem and a bad CD burner.

Unable to wait for a custom configured machine, we were limited to what BestBuy stocks. We wanted to reuse her old monitor and it turns out that very few of the systems at BestBuy have DVI output. Nearly all consumers are being sold computers with analog VGA monitor outputs! One machine that BestBuy did have was a $1000 HP desktop (no monitor).

My friend said “this is going to be a nightmare; I’ve heard such bad things about Windows Vista; maybe I should switch to Apple?” I confidently assured her that we would have the machine up and running within 20 minutes.

This top-of-the-line HP includes a keyboard and mouse with the old PS/2 connectors that I hadn’t seen for 10 years. I plugged them in. I connected the machine to the monitor and mains voltage and powered up. After answering a few questions about time zone and language the machine displayed some crystalline graphics and then a soothing uniform blue screen with an error message about “IRQ” and some discussion about dumping core.

I repeated this process a few more times, each time getting farther along before the machined blue-screened. It finally booted and I was able to connect a network cable and open up a Web browser. No Internet connection.

I called HP for technical support. The telephone support voice menus helpfully explained that Pavilion PCs were not eligible for phone support. You had to use the Web to get support via email or chat. This would be a challenge for someone whose new computer wouldn’t boot. After about 20 minutes I got through to a human. They would make an exception for me. The guy told me to type some stuff at the CMD line. Blue screen of death again. The guy explained to me how to do a system restore from the boot options, then hung up because he said it would take a long time. It sure did. The first attempt at a system restore got stuck at 47%. The next one hung at 31%. The third attempt resulted in a blue screen and core dump.

Apparently the old Haiku can be updated.

Windows Vista crashed.

I am the blue screen of death.

No one hears your screams.

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Rather late to the game, I’ve decided that it is time to use the Internet for dating. My first effort is

http://philip.greenspun.com/romance/clarissa/

Comments as to how to make this more effective would be appreciated.

[Comparisons to http://www.stallman.org/extra/personal.html (photo) will NOT be deemed helpful.]

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The December 3, 2007 Newsweek carries the story “China’s African Misadventures” about Chinese-run infrastructure development projects in Africa. You sort of expect passages such as

The Chinese thought they’d come in here and make a killing,” says a Western diplomat in the capital, Luanda, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Now they’re facing the reality—it’s hard to do things here.”

My favorite is the following excerpt:

“They’re gone,” says a scrawny guard at the entrance to Catumbela’s paper mill, as he stares disconsolately at the tracks. “I don’t know when they’re coming back—they ate their dogs and left.”

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Friends have been asking me to guess what happened to the Boeing 777 that crashed while landing at London Heathrow the other day. The preliminary report is that the pilots pushed the throttles forward for more power and the engines did not respond. How is it possible for a $50 million airplane connected to $10 million engines to fail in this manner? The connection is through a collection of software known as a full authority digital engine control (FADEC). There is no mechanical linkage from the cockpit of a Boeing 777 to the engines. If the software fails, the engines cannot be controlled.

Could that ever happen? It happened in 2006, according to
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0UBT/is_39_20/ai_n16766814 . One engine was essentially killed by the software while the plane was trying to take off. The failure was traced to “a flawed software algorithm”. If the software flaked out on one engine and the same code runs on both engines, what is to stop the software from failing on both engines at the same time?

http://www.aaib.gov.uk/latest_news/accident__heathrow_17_january_2008___initial_report.cfm is the preliminary report and the best guess answer at this point might be “nothing stops the software from failing on both engines simultaneously”.

[September 2008 Update: Look as though we won’t be able to blame Windows Vista for this one… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7598267.stm talks about the latest report from investigators and has a video. It looks like the problem was simply ice in the fuel system. Why the ice formed when it shouldn’t have and how the engines were both stopped almost simultaneously remain mysteries. Details: official interim report]

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