Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The New Orleans tragedy highlights the need for some better measures of national well-being.  If our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is rising we tend to think that the national well being is rising.  Some of the problems with assuming this direct correlation are subtle.  Mexicans are happy even though economically poorer, perhaps partly due to their strong family ties.  An American who moves from his pleasant home town in the Midwest to the sprawling wasteland of Southern California is probably earning more and generating more economic output but perhaps his enjoyment of life has been reduced.  It would be tough to adjust for these subjective factors.  Calamities such as New Orleans or 9/11 might be worth adjusting for.

Consider a less emotionally charged example.  In Case 1 you decide that your Jeep Grand Cherokee isn’t big enough to carry pretzels and walnut oil back from the Trader Joe’s.  You give the SUV away to your sister and buy a Chevrolet Suburban.  In Case 2 you get distracted listening to NPR complain about the cruelty we are inflicting on our Afghani guests in balmy Guantanamo Bay, skid on the ice in the subfreezing depths of a Massachusetts February, and crash that Grand Cherokee into a tree.  You buy a Suburban as a replacement and the local tree company is hired to remove what remains of the tree.  In Case 2 the GDP will be reported as higher.  In addition to a new SUV being bought a tree company was paid.  Never mind that in Case 2 your sister is still walking everywhere and people who had enjoyed shade from that tree are getting skin cancer (their treatments will further inflate GDP).

In New Orleans a tremendous amount of money will be expended on getting us back to where we were before.  The same people will be living in substantially the same housing and working in substantially the same office buildings and yet $billions will have been spent to pump out water and shore up foundations.  In New York at least $10 billion will be spent on rebuilding the World Trade Center site.  It might be a little nicer than what was there on September 10, 2001 but functionally will be similar in terms of office space square footage.  This $10 billion will be recorded as an addition to GDP but it won’t have the same positive impact the World Trade Center remaining standing and $10 billion of entirely new office space constructed in growing regions of the U.S.

What’s the point of this analysis?  When you look at decades of GDP growth and can’t figure out why there are still so many poor people ask yourself what percentage of that GDP was spent on replacing stolen car stereos, reglazing broken windows, hiring extra security personnel after terrorist attacks, and other similar “get back to where we were” projects.

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A friend of mine is a singer/songwriter who gives concerts that attract mostly between 100 and 300 people.  He has a new CD that he has made himself and can sell at any price that he wishes.  So the question becomes what would be perceived as a fair price for this product and induce people to buy it?  The record companies seem to think “whatever we charged in 1980, adjusted for inflation, is good” but their declining sales seem to indicate otherwise.  The younger folks whom I’ve talked to mostly report that (a) they have no money because it is all going to mobile phone and cable TV/Internet, (b) they have no space to store CDs because they are paying $750/month for one room in a cramped Somerville apartment, and (c) they don’t think of CDs as representing a good value compared to alternatives (I just signed up to Rhapsody as part of my Sonos whole-house music system experience and for $10 per month it is pretty impressive how much stuff one has access to).  The old folks report that (1) they already have XM or Sirius satellite radio in their fancy new cars, and (2) they already have CDs of the music that they like best (will there ever be another band as great as ABBA?).

The question I asked was “You go to a concert with about 150 other people and enjoy the music.  The moderately successful artist is selling CDs after the show.  You don’t think that any of your friends already have the disk and therefore you won’t be able to borrow and rip it easily.  How much would the CD have to cost before you would definitely buy it?”

Answers so far:  27-year-old female: $5; 40-year-old male medical doctor: $5; another 27-year-old female: $5; 29-year-old female: $5; 41-year-old multimillionaire male $4-8; 30-year-old male: $9; 36-year-old multi-millionaire male: $9;  32-year-old male $10;  35-year-old female medical doctor: $10; 39-year-old male: $10; 42-year-old male $10 [if no data on wealth provided, assume comfortable middle class or above]

What do the readers say?  Please comment and include your age and sex.  If your income level is unusual please indicate with “student”, “multi-millionaire”, “medical doctor” or similar.  If your occupation is somehow related to the entertainment business, please indicate.

Thanks!

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When you’re a kid you feel secure imagining that the people who manage critical government functions are old, wise, and well-qualified.  There comes a sad point in many lives when the cruel facts shatter this illusion.  You wake up and realize that folks running multi-$billion programs are younger than you and, objectively, no better qualified to do their tough job.

For me this moment came about seven years ago at a friend’s house in Cambridge.  Another guest was a high official in the Clinton Administration charged with supervising $billions in health care expenditures.  She was about my age, pleasant, a friend of Bill Clinton’s, and had absolutely no relevant experience for the job.  She was not a medical doctor, had never worked in a hospital, had never managed a large business or budget.

For much of the rest of the country the moment seems to be now, upon learning that the federal government’s $6 billion/year emergency management capability is being managed by Michael Brown, a guy whose last job was running a horse show association.  One would naively have expected a retired military logistics expert to be chosen to head up FEMA.  Instead we get the lawyer/horse guy.

A lot of folks in Latin America remain convinced that the Man (Uncle Sam) is keeping them down.  Considering that the Man is actually mostly guys like Michael Brown they ought to be really embarrassed that they are such pushovers.

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I’ve noticed a wide variation in how disturbed friends and miscellaneous New Englanders feel about the situation in New Orleans.  Some are very emotional while others don’t seem profoundly affected.  I have started asking folks “how much TV news coverage of the event have you seen?”  Feeling distraught seems to be correlated with watching TV.  Those who’ve read textual descriptions of the suffering in newspapers or on the Web aren’t anywhere near as upset as those who’ve seen video clips of people suffering.  Reading the lines “hundreds of people were screaming” isn’t as disturbing as seeing one person scream.

This seems to jibe with something a public TV producer once said:  “Television is useless for conveying information.  If you print out the script for the 20+ minutes of nightly network news it is only a few pages that you could read in a minute or two.  Very few facts are communicated during that newscast.  Television is good for making people feel a certain way.”

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

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http://philip.greenspun.com/images/tools/slide-shows-spec.txt is a spec for the software that I’d like to run on my personal site for doing slide shows.  The core of this requires either some JavaScript or DHTML programming.  I’m looking for advice from those readers experienced with these tools as to the best way of doing this and possibly for some good open-source starting points.

Thanks in advance.

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I posted a shopping list the other day and have actually gotten motivated to buy most of the stuff.  Here’s a report so far on how everything is working.

The Infrant 1 TB network-attached storage (NAS) device came pre-configured as RAID 5 spread across four 250 GB SATA disk drives.  The actual amount of available storage is only around 630 GB because of the RAID 5 overhead and 32 GB reserved for journaling.  It took about fifteen minutes to plug in and set up the Infrant, which sells for about $1200; the Windows XP desktop machine automatically recognized the newly available shared folders served by the Infrant.  The Infrant is very quiet (Net wisdom is that this is quieter than the competitive Buffalo NAS), producing about 10 percent as much noise as the desktop PC, which was custom-assembled supposedly as a “silent PC”.  I copied all of my music files over to the NAS using a new Netgear 16-port gigabit Ethernet switch.  Sadly I think that the Infrant is the only devicein my house that is actually capable of gigabit Ethernet.

Step two was to plug in a Sonos whole-house music system.  This also required about 15 minutes of set up.  I pointed it at the Infrant’s “media” share and the Sonos software automatically indexed my entire music collection, which was in two separate trees.  Each Sonos “zone player” box has the following components:

• 802.11 Wifi receiver
  
• wired 10/100-baseT four-port Ethernet switch (so that if you have a single Ethernet drop in a room you can plug in the Sonos Zone Player and then plug the PC into the Sonos)
  
• 50 watt/channel power amplifier so that you can use the loudspeakers of your choice
  
• audio line input that can digitize a signal from a home audio system or television
  
• audio line output to drive a standard home audio system’s preamp or television
  
• enough hardware and software to convert MP3, WMA, AAC, and WAV streams into 44.1 KHz CD-style digital audio and then convert that to analog to play over the loudspeakers

You can drive all of the Sonos zone players from software installed on a Windows PC or Macintosh OS X machine or from a nifty big-screen wireless controller that has lots of clearly labeled buttons, three soft keys, and an iPod-style wheel.  My plan is to plug one zone player into my legacy home stereo (so old it has vacuum tubes in the preamp!).  This way if I’m playing a Super Audio CD or LP record I will be able to broadcast that to other rooms and if I have a playlist of salsa music on MP3 I can play that on the fancy power amp and speakers (currently B&W 803s).  The other zone players can go into other corners of this miserably chopped up 2BR apartment (http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/house-design/ talks about what I really want for a house).  I will leave the system in “party mode” so that all of the players are playing the same file at the same time.

Limitations so far of the Sonos:  for the moment it can’t understand DRM-encoded files, which I think means that it won’t play music from the iTunes store or Yahoo! Music.  The system does support Rhapsody (though Rhapsody itself is a Windows-only product) and gives you a 30-day free trial for that unlimited listening service.

Possible alternative:  If you’re tight on space and enjoy ripping up the ceilings a traditional in-wall system might make more sense.  Each Sonos player is about the size of two bricks and reasonably good speakers are at least the size of a couple of dictionaries.  On the other hand an in-wall whole-house music system is more maintenance-intensive, is hard to upgrade when it becomes obsolete, and will cost $2000+ for professional installation.

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I was prepared to like Broken Flowers, a movie starring Bill Murray as a leftover 1990s computer business guy.  The portrayal of Don Johnston, retired computer guy, is not very flattering.  Johnston sits and/or lies on the same sofa all day watching movies or listening to music.  One could admire him for his monk-like patience and stillness but by American Ben Franklin-style self-improvement standards he is reprehensibly incurious.  Johnston never reads books or seeks to meet anyone new.  Johnston’s only apparent achievement was appealing to women over the years (“I was in computers and girls,” he explains to a young guy).

Johnston receives an anonymous note informing him that he has a 19-year-old son.  This spurs him to take a four- or five-stop commercial airline trip around our great nation.  Unfortunately the film makers lacked either his budget or his energy and stayed firmly within New York and New Jersey.  All parts of the U.S. appear to be right off the New York State Thruway in the fall.  One of my literary-minded friends says that a bad movie is better than a bad play because there is more to look at.  Why couldn’t one of Johnston’s ex-girlfriends have flaked out to Sedona, Arizona or Santa Fe?

One interesting detail was how Johnston’s world was inhabited by attractive women.  If he goes into a store the clerk is an attractive young woman.  When he is walking out of the airport the terminal is filled not with paunchy business guys as you might expect, but with young leggy females.

For a movie with no tragic deaths, characters becoming paralyzed, sex, violence, or special effects it holds one’s attention fairly well.  My companion, the typical overworked Harvard medical slave (she’s an ob-gyn but sadly has not yet bought her Piper Malibu or Turbo Commander like my more established gynecologist friends), did not fall asleep.

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Here’s a snapshot taken in New Orleans in 1994. I was driving out to take a summer job at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Some additional potentially interesting photos:

• http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200504-legoland/new-orleans-funeral.tcl
  
• http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200504-legoland/french-quarter-new-orleans.tcl
  
• http://photo.net/summer94/new-orleans-zoo.html

My one friend down there is safe and sound: http://ernieattorney.typepad.com/

It is worrisome that the zoo and downtown Aquarium of the Americas have not updated their Web site with any news about the animals: http://www.auduboninstitute.org/aoa/index.php (this news story is hopeful, however).

Best wishes to any readers from New Orleans and good luck with the rebuilding.

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http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-6.tcl shows an especially deranged Samoyed.  http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-7.tcl and http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-8.tcl will interest lovers of the breed as well.

We’re off to Montauk, Long Island today in the Cirrus (beach at one end on the runway; restaurant at the other).  Westchester County Airport (HPN) tomorrow for a family 50th wedding anniversary.

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Maybe these guys who say that women have lower IQs are only able to do so because they live in a country where it is tough to buy a gun (“an armed society is a polite society”).  This part seems less likely to get Professor Lynn killed:

“He published a controversial study in 2003 that identified a clear correlation between the levels of prosperity in 60 countries and the average IQ of their populations.”

[Stop the presses:  Countries in which all of the smart people have emigrated don’t do that well.  Actually that sounds like the U.K. (many of whose smartest citizens are working at American universities where the pay is vastly higher, or have emigrated to Australia for a bit of sunshine).]

It will be interesting to read the full paper when it comes out.  One challenge to this research is the fact that women do better in school than men, even at pretty high levels.  Could it be that a slightly lower IQ helps people get A grades at top high schools and colleges?  What would professors have to say about that?

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