Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The latest Chroncle of Higher Education has a report on research by Hungarian experimental psychologists on dog intelligence:  “Clever Canines”.

Full post, including comments

Life with three Samoyeds can be unexpectedly eventful.  Today I walked Alex, Roxanne (his 1-year-old cousin, staying with me for one week), and Samuel (the rescued 9-month-old from Norfolk) around Harvard Square for 1.5 hours.  On the way back to the apartment I thought it would be safe to tie them up outside a sandwich shop with Sammy near a bicycle.  When I came out with my sandwich the bike had been knocked over and he was chewing on the plastic brake lever housing.

Full post, including comments

Eating lunch outdoors(!) in Harvard Square we ran into a facilities manager who told us about his visit to http://www.replacements.com/, a company that sells expensive china and crystal.  He said that every third cubicle was home to a dog.  Apparently the place is well-known throughout North Carolina as a dog-friendly work environment despite the fragile nature of the product.

Full post, including comments

Lisa (skinny), Alex (husky), Sammy (skinny), and I (still trying to get down to 180 for flying the R22 helicopter) were walking today around Harvard Square and wondering why pedometers weren’t built into cell phones.  A Web search upon returning home revealed just one such phone and it was available only in Japan back in 2003(http://walking.about.com/b/a/036931.htm).  As our nation gets fatter and we don’t even have to get off the couch to answer the phone, wouldn’t this be a natural addition to the one electronic gadget that almost everyone carries?

Full post, including comments

Today’s New York Times carries an article “Falling Fortunes of Wage Earners” noting that “Even though the economy added 2.2 million jobs in 2004 and produced strong growth in corporate profits, wages for the average worker fell for the year, after adjusting for inflation – the first such drop in nearly a decade.”  This is a theme in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed, which I recently finished listening to while driving back from Virginia.  Ehrenreich did her research in the boom economy of 1998 and 1999 when labor was in short supply yet wages barely rose for the unskilled.  Ehrenreich took service jobs in Key West, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis to see if she could make ends meet after one month.

Ehrenreich notes that the official poverty line was defined in 1964 as a multiple of the cost of food (see http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/defs/poverty.html) and has barely been revised since then.  The marketplace, however, has changed.  Real estate and rents have become much more expensive and food has stayed relatively cheap.  Thus it is easy to envision a family whose income is 3X the cost of eating at McDonald’s but who can’t afford rent.  Ehrenreich finds that almost no unskilled worker would be able to afford rent plus a car at the same time.  If they can’t team up with a spouse and they need the car to get to work they are forced to live in the car.

Ehrenreich’s conclusion is that this can’t last.  The workers will rebel and demand their right to at least an efficiency apartment plus some means of transportation to a job.  She predicts a Proletarian Revolution.  Six years have elapsed since Nickel and Dimed was written and yet the Walmartians and hotel and restaurant slaves seem as docile as ever.

What did Ehrenreich overlook?  Immigration!  There are plenty of people from poor countries who think that working 60-70 hours per week for $7.50/hour is acceptable, especially if there are opportunities for their children to do better.  As long as the immigrants are streaming into the U.S. it seems unlikely that wages for the unskilled will rise.

One might ask “Why do we have such a welcoming immigration policy?”  Countries that value quality of life restrict immigration.  To get into New Zealand, for example, you need to demonstrate some combination of youth, education, and wealth.  The New Zealanders don’t see a need to clog their neighborhoods with development and their highways with traffic unless the newcomers are bringing something interesting.  The U.S., by contrast, is happy to grant visas and green cards to people who don’t speak English and who in some cases are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S. government (the September 11th terrorists, for example, most of whom had official U.S. INS blessing).  The U.S. government puts GDP growth as its #1 priority because GDP growth enables the government to collect more in taxes and the extra tax revenue enables the government to expand.  If the population growth that is required to generate the GDP growth means that young people have to work two jobs in order to rent an apartment that’s not Uncle Sam’s problem.  High housing costs and the lack of guaranteed health care are both desired spurs to keep potential taxpayers getting up and going into work every day.

The best predictions available today show the U.S. population rising from its present 295 million to 500 million within our lifetimes.  With wages for low-skill workers set according to wages in India and China the living styles of many unskilled workers in America will have to be more like those in India and China.  Ehrenreich’s idea that a worker is entitled to an efficiency apartment does not apply in India or China.  I visited Agra, home to the Taj Majal, a few years ago.  Statistics showed that 2 million people lived there, subsantially smaller than the population of Boston and its closest suburbs, yet there were essentially no buildings taller than one story.  If a family of 8 people ran a little shop by the road they would roll down the shop door at night and sleep there as well.  A friend recently returned from living in Shanghai and reported the same system there.

We could argue about the merits of globalization and U.S. immigration policy but these factors are unlikely to change.  Better to think about how best to deal with the implications.  Low-wage workers in America won’t be able to afford housing constructed with currently prevailing methods.  In Third World countries this has traditionally resulted in shantytowns springing up (cf. Mexico City).  Perhaps with innovations in prefab housing we could provide shelter in the exurbs at a cost affordable to unskilled workers.  If not and if we have to accept the idea that a low-wage worker with a car will never be able to afford an apartment maybe the solution is an inexpensive car that is comfortable for sleeping.  If the Chinese can make a cheap car they should be able to make a cheap small RV.  If the Chinese can make a sleeping van for $10,000 (new) a low-wage worker could have transportation and minimal shelter at the same time.

Karl Marx thought that the Industrial Revolution would end scarcity, i.e., that everyone in the U.S. would be living in a McMansion and driving an S.U.V.  That was one of his main reasons for concluding that Communism would be the natural end-result of economic development.  Marx did not count on a world population explosion, however, and the simultaneous stagnation in construction technology resulting in tremendous pressure on housing costs.

Full post, including comments

One of the sad things about aging is that one’s fantasies shift from sex to real estate.  My personal suburban Boston fantasy has long been to move to Lincoln, Massachusetts and live in a house up against the conservation land where I can bike and cross-country ski with what seems to be a growing population of dogs.  People pay $2 million for the privilege of living in an environment free of Republicans, people of color (as the good liberals of Lincoln would call them), or generally anyone who can’t afford a 1-5 acre chunk of property a 20-minute drive from Harvard Square (and conveniently just five minutes from Hanscom Field where one can keep an airplane or helicopter).  One of the side benefits of being in a 100% rich community is that all of the dogs running around the conservation land are friendly to people and mostly quite playful with other dogs.  Because there is no white trash there are no white trash dogs, unlike trying to bike through the Lynn Woods, for example, where the first few hundred yards can be a gauntlet of Pit Bulls, Rottweilers, etc., all bristling for a fight with any newcomer.  The typical dog met in Lincoln, by contrast, is a tail-wagging Golden Retriever or Lab.

Paradise was lost during my trip to the South, however, and it seems that there are now signs around the Mt. Misery conservation land banning off-leash dogs.

Full post, including comments

We spent the weekend in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with an anthropologist friend who has two 3-year-old bitches (Lab and Husky) and 4 acres of land on which Alex and Sammy could play with them.  One of the nice things about colleges located in areas where real estate is cheap is that the professors live close to the campus and are available to students for informal dinners and shared extracurricular activities.  Thus over the weekend we encountered a few other Gettysburg College professors.  I asked one of them whether faculty could bring their dogs to work.  She replied “The college’s Affirmative Action lawyer, before she left, made up a lot of new rules.  One of them was that junior and senior faculty could not sleep together.  Another was to ban dogs in the buildings.”

This is a good measure of how desperate PhDs are for jobs as college professors.  The college pays lower salaries, to people of the same age, as the public high school down the street.  The high school teachers were able to go to work at age 22 without suffering through a long period of starvation wages as graduate assistants.  The high school teachers are union members who ever have to worry about losing their job, compared to the college professors who live for 7 years in fear of being tossed out as a middle-aged has-been (“denied tenure” is the polite term for this event).  And now these poor souls are expected to get through their day without a dog at their side and without the possibility of an interlude with a more senior professor.

[Note to parents:  if you want to know why tuition prices have risen so fast, consider that a very small liberal arts school was paying a full-time lawyer to work on affirmative action; Walmart has a “Chief Diversity Officer” but they had $billions in revenue over which to spread the cost.]

Full post, including comments

Alex and I are working out way up the East Coast now with a new companion:  a 9-month-old Samoyed puppy named “Sammy”.  He wore out his welcome with a family in Norfolk, Virginia and is coming to Boston under my “No Samoyed Left Behind” initiative.  Samoyeds are unpopular for fairly good reasons.  Most people who want a big dog want one that will be aggressive and attack other humans.  Hence the Top 10 American Kennel Club breed registristrations include German Shepherds, Rottweilers, etc. (Pit Bulls are not an AKC breed.)  A second category of popular big dog is the obedience champ, e.g., Labs and Goldens.  These breeds are smart and make an owner feel good by hanging on his every word.  The Arctic breeds are big and smart (as measured by their ability to solve puzzles that reward them with things that they like, e.g., food) but they don’t see any particular reason to listen to most humans and they aren’t interested in attacking humans.  Samoyeds are easily bored.  Especially when young they seem to need constant companionship and entertainment, either from a person or another dog.  If they get bored they find ways to entertain themselves.  Unfortunately what is entertaining to a Samoyed usually is not entertaining to his or her owner.  Digging and chewing are popular pastimes as is destroying the rugs and furniture.

Sammy was living with a family in Norfolk.  It sounded like an ideal environment with a stay-at-home wife and kids aged 6 and 3 plus a backyard with pool.  Sammy, however, wanted to wrestle with the kids non-stop and they were really too young and small to deliver the required pounding to 45 lbs. of solid puppy muscle.  The wife had her hands full with the kids.  So Sammy was left alone in the backyard and would dig (“they did in the winter to keep warm; they dig in the summer to keep cool; they dig in the fall and spring to keep in practice” George’s breeder used to say).  He was sent to sleep-away obedience camp for two weeks and came back with a good report and knowledge of some commands, though not necessarily a lot of interest in obeying them.

So… now he is coming up to New England where I am going to let Alex wear him out for a month or two and then find him a home either in the suburbs where there is a big fenced yard and some other dogs or in the city with someone who works at home and can keep the dog with him or her at all times for mutual companionship.  No Samoyed should live in the South and no Samoyed should be left behind…

[The question of naming arises.  I like “Ralph” better than “Sammy”.  And there is a terrier in Manhattan named “Sizzler” whose name could be well applied to this little bundle of energy.  Any other ideas?]

Full post, including comments

Here are some photos by David Rafner, who grew up in my old neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland and now lives in Richmond.  He rode in the back seat with a camera while Kevin Peterson and I flew Sky 12.

We start off with Sky 12, a 15,000-hour Bell 206 Jet Ranger sitting on its dolly, my nemesis at the end of every flight.

Part of the preflight process involves climbing on to the top of the helicopter to check the nuts and bolts holding the rotor system and flight controls together.

Beautiful downtown Richmond (actually Richmond is all office buildings and highways; anyone with money has fled to the western suburbs though the Fan district near the art museum shows some signs of revitalization if you don’t mind living right next to some truly bad neighborhoods)…

Richmond, Virginia from Sky 12.  Pilot: Philip Greenspun; photo: David Rafner.

“>

I watched more TV news in the last week than in all of 2004.  The camera monitor includes a little inset window showing the actual broadcast, complete with commercials.

The monitor in the right front of Sky 12, Richmond, VA, which shows the pilot (1) what the Wescam in the front of the helicopter is beaming back to the TV station, and (2) what the TV station is currently broadcasting to the public.  Photo: David Rafner.

“> Full post, including comments

Driving down here to Richmond, Virginia I was listening to an audio version of Barbara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed, a book about how tough it is for the unskilled laborer in the U.S. and how many of these folks must work two jobs to make ends meet.  Upon arriving here, I found one of my teachers, Rob Roberts, working five jobs simultaneously and having done so for nine years.

In a big metropolitan area the TV station helicopter is a monstrous Bell 407 with four blades and enough horsepower from a single turbine to move the Queen Mary.  The 407 carries a pilot who worries only about flying the aircraft and talking occasionally to Air Traffic Control, a camera operator who points the camera at interesting events on the ground, an engineer who makes sure that the camera and video/audio communications links to the station are working properly, and the “talent”, a person with a good wardrobe and make-up whose voice and image skill out into viewers’ living rooms.

Richmond is a smaller city and only Channel 12 (NBC) even has a helicopter.  In the afternoons Rob Roberts fires up the HeloAir Jet Ranger and does all four of the jobs that are being done by four separate people in a big city Bell 407.  On days when he is unlucky some neophyte like me gets in and he now has to add a fifth job: flight instructor.

This is one of the things that I like about aviation.  One is very often pleasantly surprised at the supercompetence of the people involved at every level.  The mechanics are craftsmen.  The pilots usually have an impressive range of other skills.  The young ladies at the front desk of Richmond Jet Center are smarter, friendlier, kinder to a wayward Samoyed, and better looking than people working service jobs anywhere else in the city.  How many other fields can we say this about?  The one with which I have the most experience is software engineering.  Despite the higher pay, I would say that the average denizen of the software world is not supercompetent, though often he views himself as such, and the customers are not typically pleasantly surprised.

Full post, including comments