Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A must-read from this week’s New Yorker magazine:  “What I’d Say to the Martians” by Jack Handey.

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Africa came up at last night’s Port and Stilton party.  It has been two months since our last blood donation party at Children’s Hospital and a few of us were planning a return.  One woman who expressed interest is married to a South African Jewish emigre.  I reminded her that she would be disqualified because they now ask “Have you ever had sex with an African or a person of African descent?”  Her husband observed “Well, at some level we are all of African descent.”

Another guest had been working in public health in Tanzania for nearly three years.  Tanzania has about a 10 percent HIV infection rate, which is enough that they are setting up special clinics to give drugs to those who test positive.  Despite mortality due to AIDS and emigration of the talented and educated to Europe (people leave Tanzania at about the same rate that they arrive in the U.S.) the country’s population is still growing at a vigorous 1.83 percent according to the CIA Factbook and its 36 million people will soon have plenty more company.  What are the economic growth prospects for these new Tanzanians, we asked?  Tourism is doing nicely on Zanzibar, which was once owned by the Sultan of Oman and has interesting architecture from its 19th century position as the world’s most active slave-trading port.  The Italians are investing massively in building beach resorts.  Otherwise, she noted, things were tough and she thought it was immoral for the U.S. to continue to operate its space program when the $billions could be sent to save lives in countries such as Tanzania.

It would seem like a great time to be a poor country.  Commodity prices are high.  Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore have demonstrated a foolproof method for economic development (stable government, learning English, getting educated, working hard).  And capital is cheaper than it ever has been.  The after-inflation return on a low-risk investment such as a U.S. T-bill is about two percent.  If capital is cheap and there is a surplus of labor Africa should be booming (and maybe it actually is; the CIA Factbook shows that the economic growth rate in Tanzania is larger than the population growth rate and much larger than the U.S. economic growth rate).

In the 1990s an investor could get a fabulous return by rounding up some nerds, buying ping pong tables, and renting an office in Santa Clara.  Now that same investor is desperate to find any outlet for capital that will earn more than a few percent above inflation.  Could it be that over the next generation this wellspring of cheap capital will bring labor-rich Africa out of poverty even if the foreign aid industry withdrew from the continent?

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Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan was a disturbing and painful book to read back in 1998.  I hadn’t caught the movie version until very recently on DVD.  Both book and movie start with an aviation angle.  A botched hot air balloon landing leads to the death of a passerby who tries to help. The main character in the book is a science journalist who is plagued by the attentions of an intense guy whom he meets during the balloon crash.  The filmmakers apparently didn’t think audiences would be sympathetic to a scribbler about nerds.  So the main character has become a college professor spouting off about love to a rapt audience of undergrads.  It could be literature or philosophy course.  We’re not really sure.  But most definitely the character has been stripped of his association with science and math.

I recommend the DVD if you missed the movie in the theaters.  It is almost as disturbing and more painful and intense than the book.  There are good tips in there if you want to stalk a stranger and drive them crazy.  Start by being gay and talking about God’s love.  When you do run into the stalkee say “I think you know what I’m talking about.”

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The news today is full of reports that George W. Bush is quietly suggesting that our public schools teach some sort of creationism alongside evolution.  Journalists from big cities love writing about creationism and the hayseeds who believe in it because it reinforces their sense of superiority for having chosen to live in a $1 million two-bedroom apartment choked by smog and surrounded by gridlock.  One problem with these reports is that if one actually travels to small towns and rural areas across North America it is almost impossible to find people who espouse creationism.  On the contrary these areas are in my experience much more likely than cities to contain people who want to bend your ear about local geology, fossils, etc.  If you survey people coming out of a church and ask them “did God create the Earth” they might indeed say “yes” but then if you ask them how old those mountains in the distance are very few indeed would say “5000 years”.

It is unclear why the President of the U.S. saying something about education is news.  Public schools are run at the state or local level, though with an increasing level of federal interference.  And in any case the students don’t seem to believe or remember much of what the teachers say.  A kid who is unfortunate enough to be stuck in public school for 12+ years has more serious problems than a teacher blathering on about “intelligent design” for a few hours out of those 12+ years.

[Darwin was actually grossly wrong about the speed at which evolution occurs.  The Beak of the Finch is an excellent book about year-to-year natural selection and evolution among finches in the Galapagos.  The book also covers more rapid evolution in populations of guppies in aquariums with varying quantities of predators (guppies in a more dangerous environment evolve to be plainer in coloration; guppies in a safe environment evolve to be more attractive to the opposite sex) and, most terrifying, yet more rapid evolution of drug resistance in viruses.]

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This New York Times article about the U.S. military trying to get Hollywood to write scripts with sympathetic characters who are engineers or scientists doesn’t seem too realistic about how tought this will be.

Let’s consider a recent work of fine art cinema:  Flight of the Phoenix.  The pilots are fun-loving incompetents who pile all kinds of heavy but worthless industrial equipment into the back of an early 1950s cargo plane (C-119).  They seem to be able to get off the ground with their passengers and all of this junk but somehow don’t bother to climb to a cruising altitude higher than 500′ above the ground for a trip of many hours over the Gobi desert (filmed in Namibia, actually).  A big sandstorm kicks up and they lose one of their two engines and control of the plane and crash in the middle of nowhere.  They were all angry with each other to begin with and spend most of their time squabbling until a peculiar little guy named “Elliott” suggests building a one-engine airplane out of the wreckage of their two-engine airplane.  He claims to be an aeronautical engineer.

Elliott turns out to be a prima donna.  He has a Che Guevara-like desire to be the one who gets to execute prisoners/traitors/etc. and shoots a captive Mongol smuggler in the head.  Elliott is devious and drinks more than his fair share of the limited water.  He generally abuses everyone and reminds them of how screwed they would be without him.

So at the end of the film people would say “Wow, if I actually thought about engineers I’d realize that I needed them for some of the things that make my modern lifestyle possible but on the other hand wouldn’t it be more pleasant never to meet or think about an engineer?”

Can anyone think of a movie where a character could have had any old job but they chose to make him or her an engineer or computer programmer?  And then they showed some of the work in a flattering and/or exciting light?

[Don’t see the movie if you’re not willing to suspend a lot of disbelief about aviation and physics.  None of the flying bears any relation to a plausible in-flight emergency.  At the end of the movie they are trying to get off the ground while being chased by angry Mongols on horseback.  The horses are able to run nearly as fast as the plane, which is a rather small remnant of the C-119.   So we’re asked to believe that the plane, despite its Wright R-3350 engine (over 2000 horsepower), can’t go faster than a horse and can’t fly even in ground effect.  Yet after it runs off the edge of the cliff it somehow manages to fly and develop a good climb rate in free air.]

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In the mid-1990s when I started building online communities I didn’t understand why publishers like Amazon pre-moderated all user-contributed content such as comments.  The vast majority of users were intelligent and well-meaning and only a small fraction of material had to be deleted.  It seemed like it wasn’t worth interrupting the flow of conversation and exchange to ensure that an off-topic posting never saw the light of day.  It would be intercepted within a day or so and deleted in any case.

The Manila software that Harvard runs behind these blogs shows the foolishness of my point of view.  More than 90 percent of the comments posted to this blog are link spammers trying to increase their Google rank by adding comments to old and forgotten postings.  Manila makes it impossible to delete this spams except one by one, each one requiring a several page process of confirmation.  In the old ArsDigita Community System we had a “delete all from this user” and “delete all from this IP address” option that made it a lot easier.  But in the Age of Spam what we really need is pre-moderation.  Maybe there should be an option for a vibrant interactive discussion that content goes live for 24 hours without being approved but otherwise given the small percentage of useful non-spam content it seems that the only answer is that nothing goes public without approval.

Another reason to program in pre-approval only is that eventually the moderators of every online forum find other things to do with their lives.  The server doesn’t realize this and soldiers on processing postings.  Spammers discover a happy home and the database fills up with crud.  Software should be robust to the moderator disappearing and in an Internet that is mostly spam that means approval-required-before-going-live.

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Friends have been asking me for an explanation of the Air France Airbus crash in Toronto yesterday.  It is tough to say without a full accident report.  Whatever the report concludes the accident will underscore the important point that a pilot should never commit to a landing.  There is a temptation in aviation, especially after a long flight, to conduct the approach and landing as though it is inevitable that the plane must continue to descend and stop on the runway.  Unless you’ve run out of gas or suffered some sort of catastrophic engine failure in a single-engine plane, however, there is nothing inevitable about continuing the approach and landing.  A pilot can at any time make the decision to add power and go around.

When does it make sense to go around?  The airlines have rules about stabilized approaches.  The plane should be at the right airspeed, at the right position laterally and vertically, at the right descent rate, and configured for landing when it is still about 1000′ above the runway.  If not within tolerances, the pilots are directed to go around and, at least in training, they always adhere to these rules.  A light airplane is more subject to turbulence and has less inertia and therefore is easier to adjust.  The tolerances can probably be relaxed a bit and the deck lowered to about 500′ for a single-engine four- or six-seater.

Suppose that the winds are super gusty over an entire region, as is common here in the Northeast.  Or suppose that you’ve just flown many hours and are tired.  Or suppose that there are thunderstorms and it isn’t obvious where you could go that would be totally safe to land.  The rules get bent.  In general not nearly enough go-arounds are made by either small or big airplane pilots.  Usually the decision to fix a bad approach doesn’t result in an accident.  And indeed in Toronto these guys might have been okay if only they’d been on the 11,000′ runway 23 instead of the 9000′ 24L (the runways are oriented facing magnetic direction 230 and 240, i.e., almost the same, so it is unclear why the Airbus wasn’t assigned the longer runway).  They might also have been okay if they hadn’t been in the famously underpowered A340-300 (the newer versions of this plane have almost twice as much power) and therefore requiring more runway remaining before going around.

The cause of the crash might yet prove to have nothing to do with the pilots’ decisions.  Nonetheless it is probably a good idea for all of us who fly to remember to keep a hand on the throttle and tell ourselves that this is only an approach and that we won’t commit to the landing until we’re very nearly stopped on the runway.

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My new hero is John Kounis, editor of Pilot Getaways magazine.  He made a doggie headset to protect his Lab’s hearing:

“While flying [Woody] wears a special doggie headset made from kneepads, foam, and velcro straps.”

Photos http://www.pilotgetaways.com/behindthescenes/woody/pages/IMG_2367.htm and http://www.pilotgetaways.com/behindthescenes/woody/pages/IMG_5143.htm

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In the Fall of 2003 the idea of Web-assisted social networking, in the form of Friendster and Orkut, was still sufficiently fresh in folks’ minds that we were able to use Friendster as an example for a class (see http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/2003-fall/friendster ).  Going through the email that accumulated during the Alaska trip I noticed that (1) I had one new Friendster request, and (2) a spam email from Friendster noting that I hadn’t logged in for a year or more and inviting me to return.  So I logged in and the site is now pretty responsive but very few of my friends had logged in within the last 12 months.  I’ve not heard anything from Orkut in at least a year.

Do we pronounce Web-assisted social networking dead?  Or is it just that nobody wants to be friends with me?  🙁

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A friend of mine is moving to Chicago and needs a new car.  She is 25 years old, of medium height, and conservative in her tastes.  She wants a four-seat sedan with back seats large enough to carry passengers but very seldom will she have anyone in the back seat.  Cost is not an issue but she doesn’t want something that screams “I am a rich bastard”.  We test-drove the Acura RL sedan yesterday afternoon.  It seemed like it did just about everything that you’d want a car to do.  The RL is big but not huge.  It has great acceleration and reasonable mileage (18 city, 26 highway–not quite as good as the latest minivans!).  All four wheels are driven for better handling, especially in slippery conditions.  The seats are perfectly comfortable and heated (but sadly not air-conditioned; right now with global warming we really need liquid coolant flowing through the seats themselves).  A good navigation system is standard, complete with real-time traffic data for various cities, delivered via the XM radio.  Onstar is also standard.  Operating all of the electronics via the big control stalk/wheel/button/thingy seemed challenging but not impossible to learn.  The RL won Car and Driver’s “Best Luxury Sedan” award (I think they limit this to cars costing less than $70,000). The car lists for $49,000 but right now they are try to get rid of the 2005s at “employee” prices (on the radio in Alaska this proved to be around $43,000 but somehow the dealer in Boston wants $44,000+).

Are there any other cars she should consider?  I liked the Chrysler 300 that I rented in Yellowknife but I think they are selling for list price due to high demand, which would make an all-wheel-drive version almost as expensive as the RL.

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