Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Starting reading an interesting book this Labor Day:  Shadow Divers.  The journalist author chronicles the adventures of a group of guys who find a sunken WWII German submarine off the coast of New Jersey in 230′ of water.  This was in the early 1990s, when deep divers were mostly still using compressed air and therefore getting nitrogen narcosis and risking decompression illness.  None of the divers using the then-experimental trimix of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen got sick but three guys using compressed air died trying to figure out the identity of this wreck, which was not known to either German or U.S. authorities.

One of the main characters of the book is John Chatterton, who had been a medic in the Vietnam War, and in the early 1980s he was considering using his G.I. Bill benefits to learn computer programming:

“I can’t become a computer programmer.”

“What are you saying?” [his wife Kathy responded]

“I can’t spend the rest of my life sitting under fluorescent lights.”

Chatterton went on to become a commercial diver and visited offshore wrecks on weekends for recreation.  Bill Nagle was a legendary diver and charter boat captain.

One day Nagle paid [Chatterton] the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”

That’s one way to pick a career…

[Last night I finished another interesting book, Snowball Earth, about life on Earth at the end of the Pre-Cambrian, which seems to have consisted of runaway glaciation (ice reflects sunlight thus breeding more ice) followed by CO2 greenhouse warming.]

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Alex, the bitch from Hell (Roxanne, mine all mine until September 6), and I were in Harvard Yard tonight and ran into a Mexican family that had moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts for one year in order to improve their English.  The kids had enrolled in the public middle school, transferring from a private school in their provincial Mexican town (a couple of hours from Mazatlan).  In subjects where they were able to compare, such as math and science, the school in Wellesley is a full year behind the school in Mexico in terms of what they expect from and what they are teaching to kids of the same age.  Students of globalization will find it interesting that Wellesley operates one of the most demanding public school systems in the state of Massachusetts.  The Wellesley high school is rated the #2 public high school in the Boston area by the September 2004 issue of Boston Magazine (full rankings available on their Web site, http://www.bostonmagazine.com/), with annual per-pupil spending of $9600 and an average teacher salary of $59,577.  For American workers who hope to earn more than Mexicans in an efficient globalized economy this seems like bad news.

[The news is far worse for graduates of the City of Cambridge public school system.  Our high school was rated #56 by Boston Magazine despite maxing out the spending column with $14,840 per year per kid and an average teacher salary of $56,450 (if you work the numbers a bit it would seem that Cambridge has more teachers per student and also more administrators than Welllesley).  The average SAT score of a Cambridge kid is 954 and only 67 percent go to a 4-year college so the bottom third of the class might not even take the SATs (92 percent of Wellesleyites go on to college so presumably their average SAT score, 1190, is more representative).]

I suggested to the kids that they take photos of the brand-new McMansions dotting their town, the splendid green lawns, and the quaint Wellesley town center then go back home and tell their friends that “everyone in the U.S. lives like this.”

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A group of us, aged 33-44, all enjoyed The Girl Next Door, which was last week’s best-selling DVD nationwide.  This was one of my cousin Harry’s smaller ideas, nurtured over the years and eventually spun off to a group of younger folks while Harry himself went to Omaha to make About Schmidt.  Harry likes quiet, subtle movies like Breaking In, which he did with Burt Reynolds at the end of the 1980s.  Hollywood, however, and the public to a large extent likes to pour youth and excess into even the quietest ideas.  It is the director who has the final say over what goes into the script and what goes into the film.  The young director of the Girl Next Door, Luke Greenfield, seems to have larded a lot of freight onto Harry’s small cart.  Some of it is loud, some of it is confusing (esp. when it touches on the bank), much is unrealistic, and none is really necessary.  Still we couldn’t understand how this movie was abandoned so quickly in the theaters.  I don’t remember even seeing an ad for the movie anywhere.  It seems like the sort of movie that could have been very successful with a young audience.

Anyone see this in the theater?  If so, what was the crowd reaction?  My friends were laughing out loud in the living room.

[Personally some of the stuff in the movie that struck me as odd:  (1) the school photographer was using a Hasselblad rather than a long-roll camera to do senior portraits [opening credits], (2) all the high school boys had their own VCRs and TVs in their rooms and were watching porn movies [maybe kids really do this these days], (3) substantial usage of VHS tape, both for watching porn and as a master tape of the final production even though the kids were clearly shooting using mini-DV.]

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My cousin Harry Gittes’s latest movie, The Girl Next Door, is out on DVD.  I will be showing it to some friends on Friday evening and then we can have a discussion about this important milestone in American cinema.  Perhaps other folks who read this blog can rent the movie on Friday night and we can host a discussion on Saturday?

[p.s.  After the movie I’m going to stop living like a slob with a huge TV in the living room.  I have put all of my living room video gear up on eBay: the 36″ Sony XBR TV, the HDTV tuner (broadcast HDTV is so strange and consumer-unfriendly it really deserves its own blog entry), the DVD player, the VCR.  This monster TV was supposed to go up in a little loft area but it wouldn’t fit so for several years I’ve had this in my living room and none of my friends would agree to take it.  It will be interesting to see if eBay works for items that must be picked up locally.]

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According to this NYT story, the management of Hollinger International took home 95 percent of the company’s profits for themselves over the last 6 years.  I.e., these guys were looters par excellance.  Yet graphing the price of HLR versus the S&P 500 shows that the company’s stock has outperformed the market as a whole.  How to explain this phenomenon?  Could it be that HLR has extraordinarily high profits and therefore 5 percent for the shareholders is still pretty good?  Or that the rest of the S&P 500 has managements that are looting more than 95 percent?

Let’s hear from some MBAs who can explain this to us.  You’d think this would make a great B-school case study.

[Addendum: It looks as though if we go back just a few years more the stock has underperformed the S&P: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=HLR&t=my&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=^GSPC]

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This just in from a married-with-kids-in-the-suburbs friend of mine (names changed to protect the guilty) …

I  am in a pickle that involves color processing of a roll of 24 color prints — ASA 400.  The issue involves developing a roll of color prints.  My family (including our 8 year old son, Billy, and our 6 year old daughter, Susan) just got back from 3 weeks in Maine.  It was great fun. We had some friends visit for a few days with their 6 year old daughter.  One night while the adults were hanging out the kids were playing in their bedroom and got naked. Then a little while later, they called me in to see.   “Mom, come see!” I went in and found Billy, my son, naked, and the girls had tied him to the bunk bed ladder and put a pillowcase over his head.  VERY stupidly and totally without thinking, I snapped a picture (#20 on roll of 24 color pictures) just to capture the visual moment because it struck me how innocent they were while creating such an awful vision.   Of course, this was totally done in fun and the kids have no idea why I told them to stop. 

My problem: I’d like to develop this roll of color prints —— because I want the other pictures on the roll but I do not know how a camera store would receive that one shot of Billy naked and tied up.

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I signed up to www.lingo.com and dumped my wired phone line, saving (in theory) about $20/month in the process and picking up unlimited calling to North America and Europe, voicemail, caller ID, and the ability to ring another number or two simultaneously with the home phone.

After about one month Lingo was able to transfer over my old home phone number.

Here’s how it has worked…

• when they transferred my home phone number they did not make that my caller ID so if I call people from my Lingo phone they get some weird new number that I was assigned and don’t recognize the caller as me; emailing customer service regarding this issue resulted in, 1 day later, a response that I had to call tech support; after waiting in the 15-minute queue for tech support the guy said that he needed to escalate the issue
  
• incoming caller ID is displayed without an area code, i.e., just the 7-digit local phone number, and no name is displayed, only a phone number
  
• many 800/888/877 numbers are unreachable from the phone, including Lingo’s own tech support phone number; a recording says that the number is out of service but calling the same number from a wired or mobile phone results in success; this reduces the cost savings from Lingo if you have to wait on hold in various 800-number queues because you’ll need to buy an extra 100+ minutes of wireless air time every month
  
• some calls come through with very low voice volume and I have to crank up the volume on the phone
  
• no problems can be resolved via email or Web support; you really have to call their tech support phone number (from your cell phone) and wait in queue for 15+ minutes

Speaking of IP telephony… sitting in Japanese business hotels with my free high-speed Internet I wondered if I could have gotten a headset to plug into my laptop that would have enabled me to make phone calls back to friends in the US at a reasonable price.  Anyone have any luck with a computer-based telephone service that bridges the calls into the traditional phone network at the end?

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This AP story about California local governments suing Microsoft for monopoly pricing in their sales to city and county governments is interesting.  It is not clear why any of these plaintiffs need Windows.  A lot of their desktops are probably still running Win98.  One can argue the relative merits of GNU/Linux versus WinXP but it is obvious that GNU/Linux and the free OpenOffice suite are more powerful than older versions of Microsoft products.  In a state with thousands of unemployed programmers you’d think that these governments could have cooperated to hire 100 programmers to port some of their Windows-only applications to Web-based or GNU/Linux apps.  Instead they cooperated to hire 100 lawyers so that they can shackle themselves to Microsoft for another 10 years but at a slightly lower price.

[Back in 1997, I proposed that the Federales hire Linux developers instead of using Microsoft Word to write anti-Microsoft complaints.  It has been seven years and still our government prefers to hire lawyers rather than programmers.  Can we blame children if they decide to go to law school rather than doing something that will add to the G.D.P.?] 

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A friend was asking me about some of her colleagues who had joined Mensa and I said that anyone who hangs around a decent college is already effectively a member because you only need a fairly low SAT score to get admitted to Mensa (turned out to be 1250 if you took the pre-1995 test and the new wimpy test for today’s youth is not accepted at all; see http://members.shaw.ca/delajara/criteria.html).  Then I tried to figure out what average SAT scores prevailed at colleges today and the Web search brought up this interesting page from a 1998 Brookings Institution report.  What I found most striking was the discrimination against Asian-Americans at the elite old-line universities.  Harvard is the 2nd worst offender in this regard.  An Asian kid has to have an SAT score 65 point higher than a white kid to get into Harvard.  Maybe this explains George W’s illustrious career at Yale?  (not listed in the table but presumably similar to Harvard)

[Page 438 of the same study is also interesting.  It concludes that being black or hispanic rather than white at the “most selective colleges” is “comparable to the effect of having … a total SAT score of 1400 rather than 1000”.  So if you are a generic white family and want to get your kids into college it might be time to go down to the courthouse and change your last name to “Hernandez”.  The college admissions staff don’t get deeply into geneaology, do they?  Just learn enough Spanish to say “Here is a check for $40,000 to cover the first year of tuition, room, and board.”  Then your kids could change their names back right after graduation from their last degree, in order not to suffer discrimination from employers who might think “they got in just because they were Hispanic” and to conceal themselves from pesky Alumni Association donation demands.  With a system this heavily based on race and name changes as economical as they are I’m surprised that more families don’t game the system.  Perhaps there is a business opportunity here…]

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Friends of mine have a child afflicted with a kind of autism.  A parent of an autistic child has developed some free software (Windows-only) that teaches kids by asking them to perform tasks and showing them short video clips if they perform the task.  My friends own a collection of DVDs that they would like to transfer to the PC and chop up into 10-second segments.  I’m pretty sure that they can handle the chopping once they get their DVD into a standard Windows video format (.avi?).  As I understand it, Hollywood tries to make this as difficult as possible.  How can my friends work around the various encryption and other format conversion issues?  This would be on a WinXP machine.

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