Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A 17-year-old polo champion is visiting us from Argentina and today was my day to give her the grand tour of Boston.  Naturally the MIT campus was on our agenda.  MIT’s new president, Susan Hockfield, rather than doing something interesting like starting a medical school, has made her first public action beating up on Larry Summers for his musings on why there aren’t an equal number of women and men in super nerdy academic jobs.  Hockfield says that “The question we must ask as a society is not ‘can women excel in math, science and engineering?’ but ‘how can we encourage more women with exceptional abilities to pursue careers in these fields?’”  I felt proud to be doing my share.  I had brought a 17-year-old girl who can do anything she wants to with her life onto the MIT campus to be inspired.  What happened?  Just downstairs from Hockfield’s office we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT.  What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old?  “I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get any job at all.  There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants.”

[Spending the day with a young person is fraught with potential for humiliation.  She looked at my collection of 2000 LP records and asked “What are those?”  When I explained that they were records, she asked “What are records?”  It is too bad that the Supreme Court won’t let us execute 17-year-olds anymore…]

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Just back from seeing Merchant of Venice on the silver screen.  It is amazing how badly behaved nearly all of the characters are.  Shylock, mostly referred to as “the Jew” and addressed as “Jew,…”, is bitter and unwilling to forgive all the times the Christians have spit on him.  Shylock’s daughter is ungrateful for all of his loving care and trust and happy to run off and never see the old man again for the rest of her life.  The young Christian gentleman is typified by Bassanio, who squandered his fortune on high living and who decides to find a rich chick to marry so that he can pay his debts.  The rich chick Portia impersonates a judge so that she can help the rest of the Christians cheat Shylock out of the 3000 ducats he lent for the fortune-hunting expedition plus the rest of his wealth.  The only person in the entire play who behaves creditably is Antonio, the actual Merchant of Venice in the title.

It is tough to argue with a cast that includes Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons.  Teenage boys will also want to feign an interest in classic theater in order to get into this film, which covers a period in history where all women displayed either beautiful cleavage or entirely bare breasts.

[Those who complain that Shakespeare painted the Jews in a negative light should be reminded that Shakespeare almost certainly never met a Jew.  The Jews were expelled from England in 1290, with their property confiscated by the king.  Shakespeare finished Merchant of Venice in 1597.  Jews were re-admitted to England in 1655.]

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At the Ralph Lauren car exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which opens to non-members on March 6, a plaque next to a 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder contains the following:

“In September 1955 legendary actor James Dean … crashed his new 550 Spyder and was killed.  This tragic event immortalized the Porsche name and transformed a relatively small company into a very big business.”

So… if it worked for Porsche with James Dean, how come it didn’t work for Piper when JFK, Jr. crashed his Saratoga?  If anything you’d expect the truck-like family man’s 6-seater Saratoga to have fared better than the rear-engined Porsche, which was notorious for hard-to-handle oversteer.

[Don’t rush down to the MFA to see this exhibit.  There are much more interesting car collections at a lot of the U.S.’s car museums, including the one 30 miles west in Stow, Massachusetts at the Collings Foundation.]

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I’m considering a trip to Portugal on Friday March 25.  A friend is coming with me and she has to return on Sunday April 3.  I have more flexibility and could stay on.  Some questions for Portugal veterans…

• Is the end of March a nice time of year to be in Portugal?


• Can one stay the whole eight days in one hotel in Lisbon and make day trips or would it be better to stay in several different places (and, if so, what are one or two favorite places)?  I don’t want to spend too much time in transit.


• If we are going to be moving around, is it best to rent a car?

Thanks for the help!

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I ordered a Cirrus SR-20 yesterday, to be shared with a friend.  I’m still looking for the ideal Malibu to purchase but this gives us something fun to fly around New England, is very cheap to operate, and I may want to use it to do flight instruction.  I’m currently working on my CFI/CFII ratings and think it would be fun to teach instrument flying on 14-day cross-country trips with guys who want to buy a Cirrus but lack the instrument rating or the time in type that will comfort insurers (the Cirrus has a terrible fatal accident record, which is ironic because it has been marketed from the start as an especially safe airplane with its emergency parachute, etc.).  So the question becomes how to equip this airplane.  It will probably be resold after 3 years so that I can always be teaching in a plane that has comparable avionics to the new ones.  Therefore we don’t want to go overboard on cramming this simple airframe with Boeing 757-grade avionics that won’t earn their value back on a resale.

We were thinking of the following options:

• leather seats (the dog needs his comfort)
  
• 3-blade prop (smaller diameter ergo lower tip speeds ergo lower noise for the dog, who doesn’t wear headsets)
  
• MFD upgrade to 5000C so that we can get the weatherlink
  
• weather datalink
  
• Emax engine monitor
  
• 3rd year extended warranty including avionics

This leaves us with a plane that is $260,000.  We decided against the Stormscope because we don’t intend to fly anywhere near thunderstorms and the NEXRAD datalink should be good enough.  We decided against the Skywatch system because it is $21,500 and we think that in the long run we can swap the transponder for a Mode-S unit for maybe $2000 (Cirrus doesn’t currently offer this option) and get the TIS feed from the FAA RADAR.  We decided against the $11,500 ground prox warning system because we think that the Garmin 430 will give this to us by mid-2005 with a cheap upgrade.

The open question is whether to spend $19,000 extra for the double Garmin 430s and the fancier 55X autopilot and flight director.  The stock SR20 comes with a backup Garmin 250XL GPS that is VFR-only and has no VOR or ILS receiver and only a 5-watt radio transmitter.  Its autopilot does not have altitude preselect and can’t fly an ILS approach.  With the upgrade you get two identical GPS/VOR-ILS/COM units and don’t have to learn a different user interface.  If you do get stuck by yourself in ugly weather you can have the autopilot fly an approach while supervising and adjusting power.  And the flight director is awfully nice for when something goes wrong with the autopilot’s servos but you’re still in the clouds.

Thoughts from more experienced pilots?

[Update:  Thanks for the advice from all commenters.  We decided to go for the dual-430s, the fancy autopilot, and flight director.  Cirrus tells us that the plane will be delivered in mid-May, i.e., about three months after we placed our deposit.]

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A young friend is starting a career in Los Angeles.  His goals are the following:

• fun to drive
  
• favorably impress superiors at work
  
• appeal to single women
  
• spend less than $60,000 and ideally much less

What should he buy?

[Update:  I hadn’t wanted to prejudice anyone so I withheld my suggestion… the new Ford Mustang convertible.  He will be in California, where driving on the backroads in a convertible can be a lot of fun.  The fanciest V6 convertible lists for only $25,000.  There is a small back seat for a Golden Retriever.  The solid rear axle isn’t an issue considering that California has no potholes.  He doesn’t need the big V8 engine because California traffic is generally so heavy that he’ll be lucky to hit 30 mph.  To me this is a fun car that doesn’t say “I’m trying to impress you with my wealth” (which is always a failure in LA because there is always someone richer in the next lane with a $100,000+ car).  What do folks think of the Mustang idea?  Am I totally out of touch with youth?]

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This article on the founder of IKEA reveals some interesting tidbits…

• one can move to Switzerland and negotiate a fixed income tax rate related to the value of one’s house


• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is richer than Bill Gates now, partly because of the slide of the dollar and partly because Billg has been giving money away; the 77-year-old guy is worth roughly $50 billion


• like our local hero George W., Mr. Kamprad has had trouble with alcoholism (perhaps we need to encourage young people to drink more?)

Alcohol is supposed to be so bad for brain cells, productivity, etc.  How can we explain the fact that so many hypersuccessful people are or were alcoholics?

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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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