Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I seem to have inspired myself with that last posting.  This blog posting and its comments section will serve as a Dutch auction for a helicopter ride.  The terms of the ride are as specified in

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/charity-helicopter

with the exception that I need another 45 hours or so before I can take students to satisfy an insurance requirement in this particular Robinson R22.  I.e., I can do a photo flight, I can and have instructed in other helicopters, I can take friends around, but I can’t leave the left side controls in and let you fly.  (I do have a commercial helicopter license, a helicopter instructor license, and about 255 hours of total helicopter time).

Let’s do this as a Dutch auction, with 100% of the donations to www.sarasanctuary.org.  People bid in the comments section (include email address please in the cleartext of the comment; this wonderful Manila software does not provide any way for me to recover your email address from your registration info).  I will give people rides in descending order of bid amount.  Students, bless their impoverished hearts, will get a 2X factor applied to their bid (so a student who bids $100 will go before a working person who bids $199).  When I hit the magic 300-hour mark, I’ll stop giving rides (will be busy instructing customers of East Coast Aero Club then), unless there are unsatisfied bids of at least $250 ($125 for students).

I will pay for all of the gas, maintenance, and other expenses of the helicopter.  The dogs at SARA will get all of the money that you donate (give it directly to them via their Web site please; I don’t want to handle any checks).

So… for the comments section… please provide your name, phone number, email address, amount of bid, good times to fly (if you are a 9-5 slave, say so).  If you want to bid anonymously, send me email with the same info with the subject line “helicopter dutch auction bid”.

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I’ve been donating rides in my airplane and helicopter to charities with good results (between $400 and $1200 raised for each ride).  I’m wondering if anyone among the readers has a local Boston charity and would like to auction some rides in my aircraft.  If so, please contact me via email.  I have prepared some pages that explain the rides to donors:

• http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/charity (for the airplane)


• http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/charity-helicopter (for the two-seat helicopter)


• http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/charity-helicopter-r44 (four-seat helicopter; not available until June)

Thanks.

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Here in Cambridge, the discussion about Larry Summers just won’t die, so I’ve completed a draft of a new article…

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Please comment/correct.  Thanks in advance.

[Update:  The Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting a discussion on the departure of Summers.  Visit http://chronicle.com/colloquy/ tomorrow (Thursday) at 2 pm.]

[Update 2:  An MIT professor reminds me that these thoughts are not entirely original…. http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20050614 ]

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I’ve completed a draft of a Canon EOS 5D body review: http://philip.greenspun.com/photography/canon/eos-5d

Please comment.

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Recently, I’ve done three kinds of teaching:

• how to fly airplanes on instruments and helicopters VFR
  
• third grade mathematics (to 11th graders at the local high school)
  
• software engineering for Internet applications

I’ve got an S.B. in math from MIT and I’ve built dozens of RDBMS-based Internet applications, so my comparative advantage is largest in teaching math and teaching software engineering.  Yet I enjoy flight instruction the most, even though I can give any of my students a list of 10 better flight instructors.

Why?

I figured it out today.  The students at the local high school aren’t interested in math.  They don’t care that an equation corresponds to a set of points in the x-y plane; they just want to graduate and/or pass some sort of test.  Most computer programmers, including a fair number of my students, aren’t that interested in a code review from an expert.  They are satisfied with mediocrity, a warm cubicle, and a steady salary.

Pilots, on the other hand, want to be better.  They understand that being better means staying alive, they recognize that they could do better, and they are eager for feedback and suggestions.  So even if I’m not a great flight instructor, the students’ desire to learn makes it a great experience.

I can understand why high school students don’t care.  Having looked at the curriculum, it is hard to imagine why they would care given that the unionized civil servants (teachers) don’t bother to motivate the material in any way.

Why doesn’t the average CS major or software engineer care, though?  Confronted with an expert such as Jin S. Choi, author of http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/webmail/ (a one-month part-time project), you’d think they’d say “I will work day and night until I am as good as that guy.”  But they seem to think that they can get by on 1/10th of Jin’s capability, which has historically been true though with offshoring might not be anymore, and they are more resentful than grateful if you try to push them in Jin’s direction.

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Harvested the February 27, 2006 issue of TIME magazine at the MIT gym (as nice as you’d expect given that it cost more than $50 million, but with surprising shortcomings such as the lack of soap in the showers).  TIME does a good job covering the happiness news.  Some statistics:

• 34 percent of Americans report being “very happy”
  
• 45 percent of Republican Americans report being “very happy”
  
• only 30 percent of Democrats report being “very happy”

This could be explained by the fact that our current rulers are Republican.  People have been told that we have a democracy and expect to have some input, but in a country of 300 million people none of us is likely to be consulted or to have any way to influence the federal government.  When Clinton was in power, Republicans were bitter and angry.  Maybe it is W’s existence that rains on Democrats’ parade?

An alternative theory is income-based.  People become happier as you stuff their pockets with money, though supposedly the effect becomes quite small once people have enough for a basic lifestyle (far below the current American median income).  Typing “median income Republicans versus Democrats” into Google doesn’t yield any conclusive answer.

A theory that gets better support in the psychology literature is faith-based.  People who believe in God are happier.  People who believe in God supposedly tend to vote Republican.

Finally there is the “fat, dumb, and happy” theory.  Republicans don’t notice all the problems that beset us.  They fight global warming by turning up the A/C in their monster SUVs.

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I’m in love with the Rhapsody music service.  A friend was having a birthday party and wanted “old-style lounge music” by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, and a couple of other crooners.  We typed these names into Rhapsody and it made us a custom radio station playing songs by these folks.  With one username/password it is possible to run Rhapsody on multiple computers, so I plugged my laptop into a stereo and we had the desired music for the entire party.  So painless that you’d wonder why anyone would want to collect, inventory, and manage a music collection from iTunes or on physical media (unless you are a sound quality snob, in which case SACDs are nice).

Rhapsody is also good for serendipitous discovery of new music.  Today, for example, I stumbled upon a track by “Nitty”.  Rhapsody describes him as follows:

Nitty makes family-friendly rap music that can be enjoyed by little kids and older listeners alike.

The first sentence of his song (for little kids) contained the words “nigga” and “fuck”.

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This from the February 27, 2006 New Yorker Magazine, an article on happiness research:

Layard cites a study, by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, reporting that people’s top four favorite parts of the day feature sex, socializing after work, dinner, and relaxing. Their bottom four involve commuting, work, child care, and housework.

The article opens by explaining many folks’ predisposition to unhappiness.  The happy-go-lucky cavemen all died from eating poisonous plants and attacks from which they did not bother to take precautions.  We inherit our genes from the timid fearful cavemen.

Now to write a Nobel-prize winning article finding that people are happier when eating chocolate and walking Golden Retrievers than when using Microsoft products…

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This for the Internet app nerds among the readers…

The student teams in 6.171, the software engineering class that I’m teaching this semester at MIT, are required to document their servers.  By the end of the term, they are supposed to have something more or less like http://philip.greenspun.com/doc/ (doc dir for my personal Web site; rather bloated because it is based on a toolkit that is much more powerful than the features I’m using).  I would have expected them to write their documents in HTML.  One team has chosen to do their documentation in LaTex output to PDF.  I personally hate it when information is only available in PDF, but can’t really say why.  They don’t need equations or anything fancy.  HTML would suit them fine, but they apparently find it easier to write in LaTex.

I always think that if a Web developer can’t write HTML by hand in his or her sleep that he or she probably isn’t very good.  So the use of Microsoft Word or some other tool to author is a telltale sign of incompetence.  Is this just prejudice?  On what grounds can I tell these folks that a Web site should be documented in HTML?

[Fun experiment:  Do a Google search for “latex” and compare the pages returned with the ads on the side…]

[Update after a few days of reflection:  I think I finally figured it out.  The first and most obvious answer is that documentation for Web systems need a lot of hyperlinks, and therefore HTML is better than PDF.  The deeper answer is that the students don’t realize that they are supposed to be software engineers and not students.  The student turns in a paper.  It will never be updated.  LaTex is great for that, as it was designed for journal papers that were never updated, except maybe by the author.  Internet applications are fluid, however, and they get updated frequently, which requires corresponding frequent updates to the documentation.  The students who decided to use LaTex are implementing their service in Microsoft ASP.NET.  Eventually it will be taken over by some Microsoft certified programmer.  Even supposing that they provide the LaTex source (right now they just have the PDF on the server), what are the chances that this person will have heard of LaTex or know how to use it?  By contrast, if you document a Web service in HTML, you know that whoever takes it over will be able to edit it because nobody ignorant of HTML would be touching a Web service.  (Of course, if the HTML was originally authored in Microsoft Word, the person needing to edit it would curse you because there would be so much extraneous garbage to wade through.)

So… LaTex/PDF good for a student turning in an assignment.  Hand-authored HTML good for documentation that you expect some future programmer to take over and edit.]

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