Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One of the delights of Valparaiso is visiting La Sebastiana, one of the houses owned by Pablo Neruda.  In addition to his fondness for Communism, Stalinism, Stalin, Castro, and accumulating property (the guy owned a lot of prime real estate throughout Chile), Neruda asked that a rooftop heliport be incorporated into the design of his 1961 Valparaiso house.

p.s.  Happy New Year to all!  The fireworks display last night in Valpo/Vina was the largest that I have ever experienced and filled the harbor across a stretch of several miles with rockets from maybe 20 barges.  Chileans know how to throw a good party.

I’ve arrived at the Hotel Fundador in Santiago, Chile (free wireless in the lobby).  It is difficult to fault Chileans in the department of hospitality.  One of this Weblog’s readers, Jorge Tambley, picked me up at the airport on Sunday morning and dropped me off at the hotel.  Then he came back a couple of hours later to invite me to lunch with his wife and kids.  Then he took me to the small airport to hunt for flight schools and onward to the various neighborhoods of Santiago.  Jorge provided some insight into the world of the Chilean computer programmer.  Things seem to be done on a somewhat smaller scale than in the U.S.  The programmer needs to be more in contact with the client, with the users, and more aware of business problems and how to solve them.  Consulting rates and real estate prices are in a more favorable ratio than in the U.S.  A top programmer might earn $70/hour and a newly constructed small condo in Santiago sells for $25,000.  A reasonably nice house is $100,000 and a Las Vegas-style McMansion is $225,000.

With some very kind assistance from Cristian Levy of Amity Tours (http://www.amitytours.cl/) I’ve begun to sketch out a trip to Valparaiso (Dec 30) and La Serena plus environs (Jan 2-8). 

It is 8:30 pm now.  Only about one more hour of daylight…

On September 12 I posted an entry here asking about Perl scripts to spam friends with party invitations.  My young genius friend Will Crawford was over for lunch today and we implemented the proposed improvements to Ryan Tate’s original design.  The final script is available at http://philip.greenspun.com/software/brunch-spam.pl.txt and enables you to populated a structured text file with email addresses, full names, an affiliation reminder, and keywords (so you can have a mass invitation or one just to poker friends or one just to friends with young kids).

[Update:  Ryan posted an improved version of the feature-enhanced script at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ryantate/brunch-spam2.pl.txt]

Even if you’re a pilot it is tough to recommend the new movie The Aviator.  Despite its ponderous length the story seems told in a very sketchy manner.  Hollywood seems to have forgotten what Homer demonstrated in the Iliad:  Epic works best when told in medias res (“in the middle of the thing”).  Attempting to cover decades of events in 169 minutes results in raising more questions than can be answered.  It might have been a better film if it had covered just the years in which Hughes lived with Katherine Hepburn, for example.  The flying and engineering scenes were not very accurate.  One thing that was horrifyingly accurate was the crash of the XF-11 reconnaissance plane (background).  If you have a multi rating this will bring back some memories of your instructor cutting off the fuel to one engine and the resulting yaw.  In the case of the XF-11, however, it was designed so that a loss of oil pressure would result in one of the props going into reverse pitch and producing so much drag that one couldn’t hold altitude on the remaining engine.  It would be interesting to know why the plane even had the ability to reverse pitch; a recon plane wouldn’t have needed to land on short runways and use the engines for braking.

Airplane nerds will enjoy http://www.planeandpilotmag.com/content/2005/jan/howard_hughes.html, which makes it clear that nearly all of Hughes’s crashes were due either to failure to preflight/plan or failure to “plan the flight and fly the plan”.

On Saturday a friend showed me a fabulous book: The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker. This is a huge monster of a coffee table book that comes with two CD-ROMs that contain every cartoon every published in the New Yorker (68,000 cartoons).  A painful $60 list price but discounted to $36 at Amazon.  If you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas gift idea, I think this is a safe one.

After a prolonged struggle with scripting Photoshop to process Olympus RAW format images, my review of the Olympus E1 digital camera system is available at http://philip.greenspun.com/photography/olympus/e1.  Enjoy!

I know a high school senior with 1600 on his SATs.  His parents were not sufficiently loving to change their last name to “Rodriguez” so he is not a shoo-in affirmative action candidate at America’s most elite colleges.  Nonetheless with his perfect SAT scores he ought to get into some pretty good schools.  The question is where should he apply and attend?

After observing the behavior of MIT and Harvard faculty compared to professors at small town liberal arts schools I’m beginning to wonder if the biggest name schools represent a good choice even for a kid with infinite money.  In the old days you had to worry about whether faculty at research universities would pay attention to undergrads amidst the distractions of applying for grants and supervising graduate students and postdocs to perform on those grants.  Nothing has changed there except that competition for grants has become ever more fierce, forcing the professors to spend a bit more time applying and writing up results.  For an undergrad who actually wants to see and do research it might make sense to choose a school like MIT where there are substantial opportunities for undergrads to get into labs.  The professors might ignore the undergrads in the classes that they teach but they won’t ignore the motivated undergrads helping with their funded research.

The big change compared to the 1960s and 1970s is the affordability of housing close to the campuses of some of the top research schools.  A Harvard or MIT professor who wants to live in a family-sized house will either need to spend two hours per day commuting from the exurbs or two days per week consulting to pay for the $1.5 million house in Cambridge.  In the old days a junior professor hurried from the classroom to the lab.  Today she hurries from the classroom to the lab and then tries to depart the campus by 4 pm to beat the traffic out to the exurbs.  She won’t spend the evening taking her students out for dinner; if she is socializing it will be with folks unrelated to the university who live near her house.

For personal attention from the faculty it would seem that one should restrict one’s college search to schools in areas where real estate is still cheap enough that professors live close to campus.  Brown would be good.  Harvard would be bad.  Some schools are near cheap housing but are still bad due to the fact that they are in crime-ridden ghettos (Yale and Penn?).  Amherst and Williams should be good.

What else should matter to the young male applicant?  How about girls?  The 17-year-old boy with 1600s on his SATs probably hasn’t had time to become captain of the football team and do the other things that appeal to high school babes.  Why then subject oneself to four more years of rejection and frustration by attending a college where girls are in short supply?  Fifty-seven percent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded to women in the U.S.  Why not choose a school where women are at least 57 percent of the students?  Remember that if 40 girls pair up with 40 boys that leaves 17 single girls for every 3 single guys!

Finally I guess we should tell the kid that if he and his parents don’t have infinite money he should go wherever is cheap.  A motivated student can learn at most of the better colleges in the U.S.  A friend of mine was a brilliant high school student.  She went to Tulane in New Orleans as an undergrad where they gave scholarships for smart kids and where she could have a good time.  She went to MIT and got a PhD in physical science.  People sometimes do ask where she did her PhD work.  No potential employer would care where she was an undergrad.  For any field in which a graduate degree will be required it doesn’t make sense to spend family $$ on a fancy undergrad degree that nobody will care about (not even the grad school; they always ask “was this your best student in the last 10 years?” and no honest teacher at a top school is going to be able to say “yes” because being smart is so cheap at a place such as Harvard or MIT).

So… where do we tell young John Q. Nerdly to apply?  He has the good test scores and public high school grades.  He is considering majoring in Biology (smart kid!).  He likes to climb rocks.  He hasn’t been doing that great with the ladies as far as I can tell (the best vehicle that he can generally muster is a dented 10-year-old Ford Taurus station wagon, which might explain some of this lack of success).  His parents could suck it up to pay for an Ivy League no-merit-scholarship cartel university but they’d rather not.