Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The newspapers are full of stories about the fourth anniversary of our adventure in Iraq and the start of our fifth unprofitable year in this corner of the world.  How do we get out and explain away the fact that we were beaten by the Iraqis, 60 percent of whom are illiterate?

Maybe it is time for Congress to redefine the mission of the U.S. military so that withdrawal from Iraq will be required by the new mission statement.  We can sell our Iraq operation the way that a big company might sell a division after its focus changes.

Suppose that the mission of the U.S. military were defined to be “Shooting and bombing people who don’t like the United States until they are too weak and poor to act on their animosity”.  The first few weeks of the Iraq operation fit this mission statement pretty well.  We destroyed a lot of infrastructure and military hardware to the point that Saddam Hussein was no longer in command of anything very impressive.  The recent U.S. operation in Somalia fits this mission too.  We sent some AC-130 gunships to circle at 5000′ and blow up the cars and trucks of the escaping former government.

Who will take over the nation-building and relief operations that our military has been saddled with?  We have other U.S. government agencies that specialize in development work and we can always pay other countries to do the grubby on-the-ground stuff (as we are in most African conflicts these days).

Once the U.S. military’s mission has been explicitly redefined to a purely military one, our troops can withdraw from Iraq the very next week, saying “this operation is no longer the kind of thing that we do.”

[Note that this proposal is neutral as to the level of belligerence that we wish to apply to the rest of the world.  I am not advocating that we shoot or bomb more or fewer people, only that we say “the military’s mission is exclusively belligerent.”] 

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Just finished North to the Orient by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a tale of flying a great circle route from New York City to Tokyo.  The trip took them through Churchill and along the Arctic Ocean to Barrow, Alaska, then down to Nome and through Soviet Russia.  They departed in a single-engine float plane on July 27, 1931, arriving in Tokyo August 23.  The book should be very interesting to non-pilots, as Mrs. Lindbergh does not dwell on technical matters, but more the details of the hospitality that they received from Eskimos, Russians, and the Japanese.  After a sojourn in Japan, the Lindberghs continued on to the flooded Yangtze River, trying to survey the damage and aid in relief efforts.  They were unsuccessful in this last mission, however, since a hungry mob surrounded the float plane when they were trying to fly in a doctor and some vaccines.  Lindbergh escaped the mob and he escaped all of the perils of the flight, but could not escape the inherently dangerous nature of float planes.  The plane capsized in the turbulent Yangtze while being hoisted down from a British aircraft carrier.

Very well written and as always I am in awe of people who were willing to make a trip like this in the days before GPS.

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Folks:

I’ve drafted a review of the Infiniti M35 sedan.  I would appreciate comments/corrections.

Thanks,

Philip

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The A380 arrived in the U.S. today.  The plane can carry 81,890 gallons of fuel and flies 8000 nautical miles, i.e., it burns approximately 10 gallons of fuel per nautical mile or 9 gallons per statute mile.  The plane can seat 850 people if configured as an all-economy ship, so the mpg per person is approximately 95 (assuming the plane is fully loaded, which most planes seem to be these days).   The Prius gets around 45 mpg in real-world driving and, though it can seat 5, is typically occupied by one person.

[I once saw an analysis of overall per-passenger-mile transportation cost, including capital investment and labor costs.  The Boeing 747 was the cheapest form of transportation, period.]

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I’m attending a meeting at the University of Maryland.  Some of its top bureaucrats reminded us that Maryland was ranked 18th in the world in social sciences and 15th in engineering.  That’s pretty good for a school that gives bright Maryland kids a free ride through their honors program (they even pay for textbooks).

A bigger difference between U. Maryland and schools in Massachusetts is the connection to government.  The campus is punctuated by U.S. military personnel in uniform.  The meeting here is attended by ministers of telecom from diverse countries in Africa as well as officials from the U.S. Department of State and US AID.  A U. Maryland graduate will learn about opportunities in government that would never occur to an undergraduate at a school outside of the Washington, D.C. area.

Warts:  The Quality Inn, College Park (5 kbps Internet access); the post-9/11 security provisions that have rendered the College Park airport essentially useless.

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The New Yorker’s March 12 issue carries an article entitled “The Denialists–AIDS mavericks and the damage they do” about folks, mostly in Africa, who say that HIV does not cause AIDS and is in fact basically harmless.  The article tries to cover all sides of the issue, but leaves out what to me is the most powerful evidence that HIV is something you don’t want to have in your system.

If you know that HIV is harmless and most people think HIV is deadly, that opens up an opportunity to make near-infinite money.  You simply write life insurance policies for the HIV-positive, a group that other insurers shun.  If an African politician says “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS”, all you need to ask is “How come you’re not investing in life insurance for HIV-positive folks?”

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I’ve just posted two jobs:

• aviation summer internship
• helicopter instructor (for someone with a CS background who has decided there is more to life than sitting at a desk)

I would appreciate comments, referrals, etc.

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From the March 9, 2007 Tech. The story is about a Chinese kid, Jian Li, who has asked the U.S. Department of Education to review Princeton’s race-based admissions system. The fun part is from 1998, when Henry Park, a top student from a top prep school, applied to a bunch of high-priced colleges, including MIT, and was rejected. The MIT Dean of Admissions, Marilee Jones, said, never having met the guy, “It’s possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Korean kids… yet another textureless math grind.”

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Conversation turned the other day to Tony Packo’s, the Hungarian restaurant in Toledo, Ohio that Klinger talked about on the TV show MASH.  I only finished about half of my meal there because there were so many corpulent people at nearby tables.

This led to a new idea for a weight loss service:  rent out obese people to those who wish to lose weight.  Every time you sit down for a meal, your new 300 lb. friends will join you at the table.  It won’t be a struggle to leave something on your plate.

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One of the funny parts of Founders at Work is Nathan Myhrvold, paid to be the smartest guy at Microsoft, saying “Search is not a business” to the founders of Excite in 1995 (page 68).  Joe Kraus goes on to say “By 1997, everybody was diversifying into portal stragies, because nobody knew how to make money from search.  Search was viewed as the traffic director to other more profitable businesses…”

More wisdom from Kraus:

I see way too many people give up in the startup world.  … Recruiting is a classic example.  I don’t even hear the first “no” that somebody says. … It’s hard to identify talent, but great people don’t look for jobs, great people are sold on jobs.  And if they’re sold they’re going to say no at first.  You have to win them over.

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