Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

This interesting Harper’s story should make us all feel good that we don’t have to live in Baghdad, where a house rents for nearly $5000 per month and DSL is $750 per month.

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We had a full house last night for an Oscar’s party of sorts (TV is upstairs in a little loft area so people weren’t forced to watch).  I was sad because Titanic couldn’t win again; it was such a great film that they really ought to give it Best Picture every year in perpetuity.  I was confused when a neighbor sung the praises of the movie Rushmore and its genius director, Wes Anderson.  The movie was fun but if there were profound ideas in it, I’m not sure what they were.  Books, on the other hand, have been much more thought-provoking for me.  Is there any reason to expect that books are a better source of serious thinking than movies?  One possible theory is that people who have profound thoughts shy away from the committee and group work characteristic of filmmaking.  Even if Joe Director finances a film himself and has 100 percent authority he will still spend a tremendous amount of time and effort communicating his ideas to subordinates, many of whom will misunderstand what he says.  Thoughtful writers, by contrast, tend to be solitary figures who stay at home in the Connecticut woods (Philip Roth, Edward Tufte).  One of our friends is a truly brilliant and original scientist (i.e., more or less average for Cambridge).  This tenured professor says “I don’t like to read, write, or teach.”  What does he enjoy doing?  “I like to think.”

Would anyone like to take up my neighbor’s position that Rushmore is as profound as any book?

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Professor John Grotzinger is giving a talk at the MIT Faculty Club on March 8 on “Evidence for Water on the Surface of Mars”.  If you’re an MIT alum I can recommend this talk highly as Grotzinger is an outstanding scientist and teacher.  The event is run by the MIT Club of Boston and includes drinks and dinner starting around 5:30 or 6 pm.  The talk itself is at 7:30.  Doug Robinow and I are going.  Register at http://bostonclub.mit.edu/events/050308.html

(If you’re not an alum you might be able to talk your way in.)

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The only thing that attracts more New England women than a Larry Summers hatred rally is the IKEA furniture store in New Haven, Connecticut.  Inner minivan harmony was achieved by stopping there on the way back from New York City last night.  In ancient times I ran a small company and hired an architect to set up our new building.  He chose systems furniture (cubicles) that cost $3000 per employee.  When delivered the desktops were so shallow that they couldn’t hold a 20″ CRT monitor.  One of our customers had a similar big open office.  They bought each employee a desk and a table from IKEA for $300-ish.  Their office looked a lot better and was more functional with more work surface per employee.

One thing that struck me as odd about IKEA: many of the carpets for sale there are labeled as being from “central Persia” or “east Persia” and smaller tags say “Land: Iran”.  IKEA is importing carpets from Iran!  How do they do this?  My impression was that we had a trade embargo against Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

[Within about six months Bostonians won’t have to drive to New Haven for their complete-with-plumbing-and-appliances $2000 kitchens.  IKEA is opening a store in Stoughton.  It is unclear why they didn’t pick sales tax-free Nashua.  Maybe Scandinavians aren’t comfortable unless they are being sufficiently taxed.  IKEA tried to open a store in the Assembly Square slum/highway area of Somerville but various community groups objected (this is one reason that residential property taxes in Somerville are about 2X as high as in Cambridge; there are few business taxpayers).  Meanwhile, Somerville thrives on conceptual art projects.]

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Driving down to Manhattan on Friday we made the obligatory stops in Hartford (Rein’s NY-Style Deli at Exit 65 on I-84 and the Wadsworth Atheneum art museum) and picked up the local newspaper.  One of the lead local stories..  “Students Protest On Yale Campus–Object To Silence By President Levin”:

“More than 100 Yale graduate student teachers marched to the university president’s office Thursday to protest the university’s treatment of women and minorities.

“Even after the graduate students were told that President Richard Levin was not in his office, they remained in the building and speakers took the floor to air their grievances.

“The march, … was prompted, they said, by Levin’s failure to join other university leaders who have denounced remarks made by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers at a conference last month.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a job where one’s most important responsibility was to throw rocks at someone in an unrelated organization in another state?  Or a job where you got to spend all afternoon hanging out with friends complaining about the top manager of your organization not spending enough of his time complaining?  Thanks to the magic of generous donors, a tuition price-fixing cartel among the Ivies, and the IRS not taxing the $billions in wealth accumulated by the Ivies, all of this is indeed possible!

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Four of us arrived at the Museum of Modern Art this morning at 10:15 am, placing us about 1000th in line.  The place was closed for a few years while $858 million was pumped in for renovation and expansion.  Before the renovation MoMA was white walls, bright lights, crushing crowds, one amazing painting out of every 20, $10 to get in.  After the near $1 billion project?  White walls, bright lights, crushing crowds, one amazing painting out of every 20… $20 to get in.  We made it into the museum by 11:15 but claustrophobia made us all anxious to leave by 12:15.  One native Manhattanite said that it was the most crowded place he had been inside during the preceding 12 months.

Personal favorite exhibit:  Bell 47 helicopter, as seen in the TV show MASH, hanging near some open stairs.  Strangest architectural detail:  glass half-walls throughout the museum topped with strips of stainless steel.  These are apparently too fragile for anyone to touch but because MoMA most resembles the line for Space Mountain at Disneyland it is hard for people to avoid putting their hands on these rails.  this necessitates the museum keeping dozens of security guards busy at all times walking around telling people not to touch the rails.

[Tip for tourists:  If you can plan at least one day ahead you can buy timed tickets on the MoMA Web site and avoid waiting on line in the cold.]

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We’re just back from seeing the movie Hotel Rwanda at the Angelika in Greenwich Village.  The (true) story is about a Belgian-owned hotel in Rwanda where about 1000 people take refuge from the mass slaughter of Rwanda’s 1994 civil war.  As with Schindler’s List there is a background of killing but hardly any of the people featured in the movie are killed.  Perhaps this is the only way to make a commercially successful movie about genocide.

[Note to business folks who might be thinking of investing in Africa…  the one person in the docudrama who was both competent and honest emigrated to Belgium.  This was a sad echo of Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari travelogue in which any African who developed the skills necessary to help Africa immediately emigrated to Europe.]

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A Colombian friend asked me the other day how Chile was.  I said “It was strange to be in a Latin American country where they don’t blame the U.S. for whatever ails them.  In Chile, instead of bitching about George W., they just quietly go to university, build factories, plant farms, and sell their products worldwide.”  She took this as an implication that other Latin Americans were lazy and, instead of working, preferred to complain about the U.S.  She said that all of the poverty or wealth of nations can be explained by distance from the Equator (more is better) and distance from the sea coast (closer is better).  Bolivia, therefore, is a guaranteed loser.  Most of Africa likewise.  What is it about the Equator that is so deadly for economic development in her view?  Tropical diseases and a difficult growing climate.

How do we like this theory compared to the alternatives?  Alternative 1 is my personal theory, which is that wealth comes from investment and that countries with stable governments and efficient courts are the ones where people feel comfortable investing [this has some troubling implications for the U.S. because corporate managers are taking most of the profits from public corporations home as salary, thereby reducing the amount of capital available to invest and decreasing investor confidence].  Alternative 2 is Jared Diamond’s, put forward in his book Guns, Germs and Steel.  Diamond claims that economic development only works well in continents that are oriented east-west like Eurasia.  This way an agricultural technique that is invented in one place can be spread throughout the continent.  North-south oriented continents such as Africa don’t have this advantage because a technique that works in the plains of South Africa won’t work in the central jungle or northern desert.  The lack of development of North America, which is oriented east-west, is explained by the fact that humans came here suddenly and wiped out all the animals that might otherwise have been domesticated.

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Six of us T’d down to the New England Aquarium’s IMAX theater (not the distorted curved Omnimax of the Science Museum) last night and watched Aliens of the Deep (3D), in which James Cameron, director of the movie Titanic, goes 3000′ to 10,000′ down into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to film the unusual forms of life living next to thermal vents.  Precious few details are offered about the animals in question.  Much time is spent on computer-generated speculation about a mission to the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has a 16-mile covering of ice and below that, some intelligent big-eyed snails who’ve built themselves an underwater brightly lit Indian casino.

Larry Summers should see this movie because nearly all of the scientists shown are women.  In fact they are nearly all young buff women of color (or with Hispanic surnames anyway).  Maybe this is why we are able to hire scientists for $35,000/year.  Sadly for Science, it seems that in a world where all scientists are women no math is done and you never learn anything about the phenomenon studied except “this is really cool” or “this is really beautiful”.

We were all disappointed that Celine Dion was not featured on the soundtrack.

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My friend getting a master’s in public health said that he wanted to do a presentation showing how many tsunamis worth of human life were being lost on a continuous basis because of poor public health in countries such as Mali where the life expectancy at birth is 45 years.  My response was that he should add in a calculation of the equivalent lives lost doing personal computer system administration.  For example, if I wanted to upgrade my desktop PC (vintage 2002) it would cost me a week of time re-installing applications such as Adobe Photoshop and my flight planning tool.  A week lost to sysadmin is actually worse than a week lost at the end of one’s life when one would be less vigorous.

The question then arose “What sorts of activities in a Western society are so boring that they should count as a reduction in our life expectancy?”  Friends at dinner immediately offered “doing taxes” and “sitting in a traffic jam”.  Are there others?  And do we have so many that our useful life expectancy is substantially reduced?  And could it be reduced to the point that some African men might have more hours of actual life available to them than American men?  (Women in Africa are saddled with lots of chores that are as tedious as Windows sysadmin, e.g., carrying water.)

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