Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A friend was complaining about Ronald Reagan yesterday, not completely mollified by his death.  What had Reagan done to bother her, I asked?  She was upset by Reagan’s appointments to the Supreme Court, by his inaction on AIDS, and a variety of other domestic issues.  How could she hate Reagan more than Bush?   “Bush is out there messing up foreign countries instead of our own.”

Despite not having voted for either man, I discovered a strong personal preference for Reagan over Bush II.  Reagan was an American working on American problems.  Maybe he didn’t do as good a job as we would have liked, but at least he was trying.  Bush, on the other hand, projects an image of spending all of his time and energy thinking about Iraq and Iraqis.  The only explanation that makes sense is that Bush is actually an Iraqi.  Who other than an Iraqi would be so interested in Iraq?  When W. is not talking about Iraq he is often talking about Jesus so probably he is an Assyrian Christian, one of the groups that lived in Iraq before the Arab invasion (background).

Perhaps Kerry and Edwards have a chance after all because they are running against a foreigner.

[Note:  there is some chance that Bush is Kuwaiti or Saudi rather than Iraqi.  The owners of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were badly inconvenienced by Saddam.  There was a New York Times article right after the 1991 Gulf War where they talked about how the Emir of Kuwait would marry a 13- or 14-year-old girl every Friday night and then divorce her on Saturday and that this was the kind of lifestyle that American troops were supporting by giving Kuwait back to the Emir–you could understand why the Emir, even with $billions in foreign bank accounts, was so anxious to have his country back.  Still, there were never too many Christians in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia so evidence points back to W. being an Iraqi]

Full post, including comments

A recent New Yorker magazine story on Egypt (full text online from link) contains the following passage:

Ibrahim taught Arabic literature at Berkeley in 1998, an experience that evidently did not suit him. “I despised the total individualism, the control of multinationals, the manipulation of the media over the ordinary person, the values of life, just living to eat, drink, fuck, have a car, and that’s all,” he said. “There are no moral values, no broad-minded attitudes toward life in general or a sense of what is happening in the world, no sense of the role America is playing in trying to control the resources of the world.” Perhaps what irked him most, he said, was “the genuine stupidity of the normal American citizen. He is ignorant. He doesn’t know what his own country is doing in the world. The U.S. is following the same policy of racism as the Nazis. Do I really have to explain something to you that is so well known everywhere?”

Ibrahim’s “genuine stupidity” observation certainly adds some weight to the Bell Curve thesis (see below).  But suffering through the horrible weather here in Boston as I do mostly it cheers me to find out that there is anyone who manages to resist the lures of California.

[The very last part of the article is also worth reading, about an Egyptian kid who believes himself involved in a “clash of civilizations” where the West is trying to destroy Islam.  A big fan of September 11th and Al-Qaeda, he is confident that Islam will destroy the West first, which seems odd.  The belief system holds simultaneously that (a) the U.S. is completely immoral, (b) the U.S. is involved in a kill-or-be-killed war to the death with Muslims, and (c) the U.S. won’t simply unload its warehouses full of nuclear weapons on the heads of Egyptians, et al.  If the U.S. were truly as evil as these guys say, W. and Co. would just use our leftover nukes to kill all the people in every country where Al-Qaeda recruits and then come back a few years later to pump out the oil.  And yet the fact that they are still alive and well in Cairo would seem to demonstrate that the U.S. is not completely immoral.  You would think that, at a minimum, the U.S. and W. would get credit from “the Arab Street” for the continued existence of “the Arab Street.”]

Full post, including comments

Driving back and forth to Nashua, NH yesterday I listened to The Bell Curve as an abridged book on tape (picked it up for $5 in a used bookstore in San Diego).  This book created quite a stir in 1994 because of its discussion of average IQ differences among races but I had never read it.  It turns out that even if you leave out all the controversial stuff about race the book is potentially very relevant to our times.

The Bell Curve starts out by talking about how we live in an era where people get sorted by cognitive ability into socioeconomic classes.  In 14th century England if you were a peasant with a high IQ or a noble with a low IQ it didn’t affect your life, reproductive potential, or income very much.  In our more meritocratic and vastly more sophisticated economy a smart kid from a lower middle class might make it to the top of a big company (cf. Jack Welch, who paid himself $680 million as CEO of GE) or at least into a $300,000/year job as a radiologist.  For the authors of the Bell Curve the increasing disparity in income in the U.S. is primarly due to the fact that employees with high IQs are worth a lot more than employees with low IQs.  They note that we have an incredibly complex legal system and criminal justice system.  So you’d expect people with poor cognitive ability to fail to figure out what is a crime, which crimes are actually likely to be punished, etc., and end up in jail.  (A Google search brought up a report on juvenile justice in North Carolina; the average offender had an IQ of 79.)  If they stay out of jail through dumb (literally) luck, there is no way that they are ever going to be able to start a small business; the legal and administrative hoops through which one must jump in order to employ even one other person are impenetrable obstacles to those with below-average intelligence.

The trend that the decade-old Bell Curve book misses is telecom and outsourcing.  The authors assume that an American with high IQ will have a higher income and better standard of living than an American with low IQ.  That’s the sorting function of an advanced economy.  They don’t get into the question of whether it is sustainable that an American with low IQ should have a higher income than someone in India or China with a high IQ.  Statistically, due to their sheer hugeness, you’d have to expect that there are more really smart people in India and China than the total population of the U.S.  If the sorting-by-IQ process were efficient across international borders you’d expect that an American with an IQ of 100 should be making less than an Indian with an IQ of 120.  Given that a lot of brilliant well-educated people in India are getting paid less than $5,000 per year, this is a bit worrisome those of us here who are fat, dumb, and happy.  [Imagine that you were running a company.  Would you rather employ a local high school graduate with an IQ of 90 or an Indian college grad with an IQ of 130 via Internet link?]

For us oldsters, one unexpected piece of cheerful news from this book is that younger Americans are getting genetically dumber every year.  Even if you ignore the racial and immigrant angles of the book that created so much controversy back in 1994 it is hard to argue with the authors’ assertion that smart women tend to choose higher education and careers rather than cranking out lots of babies.  As a middle-aged (40) guy whose own cognitive abilities are beginning to fade due to neuron death I felt sure that there would be no place me for in the America of 2050.  Our population is predicted to reach 450 million or so, i.e., the same as India had back when we were kids and our mothers told us about this starving and overpopulated country.  An individual person’s labor in India has negligible economic value–the American firm Office Tiger gets 1500 applicants, many of whom are very well qualified, on a good day in Chennai.  It would seem that no enterprise would need an old guy’s skills in a country of 450 million; why bother when there are so many energetic young people around?  And how would we be able to afford a house or apartment if there are 450 million smart young people out there earning big bucks and putting pressure on real estate prices?  But if the book is right most of those young people will be dumb as bricks.

[Update:  The Sunday New York Times has a long article in the Business section “Hourly Pay in U.S. Not Keeping Pace With Price Rises” about how American workers in jobs that don’t require high IQs are losing ground compared to the middle class and compared to inflation.  Raw labor isn’t worth very much right now.]

Full post, including comments

I’ve recently finished up the school year doing volunteer tutoring in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s most expensive (and one of the worst-performing) public high schools, right across the street here in Cambridge.  Simultaneously I’ve been reading some articles about the most expensive high school ever built in the United States, the $286 million Belmont Learning Center in Los Angeles (background article).  I’m beginning to wonder if the idea of a local public high school isn’t just a leftover habit from the 19th century when international travel was expensive and time-consuming and telecommunications did not exist.

Suppose that you had a 16-year-old named Johnnie and the $14,000 per year that the local school district will spend to keep him occupied for a year.  If there were no Boeing 747s, cheap telephones, or Internet you might want to send him to a nearby school.  But for less than $2000 we can send that kid anywhere in the world and bring him back for Christmas and Spring Break.  For a few cents per minute we can pick up the phone and talk to our kid regardless of where he happens to be.

Hmm… maybe we can send Johnnie to China for one year.  He will go to an elite private boarding school and learn Mandarin, probably the most useful language for business, aside from English, for the foreseeable future.  With the money left over from the $14,000 after subtracting for airfare and school fees we can send Johnnie on a backpacking tour around Australia during his summer break.  Next year, because Johnnie was never that great at math, maybe we’ll send him to India to be tutored 1:1 by a math PhD (compare to being one of 25 students in a classroom led by a teacher only slightly ahead of the better students).  The $12,000 we have left over after paying for airfare is more than the salary of a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, one of the world’s finest universities.  So Johnnie can also learn how to manage a few servants and maybe play some polo.  For Johnnie’s last year before college maybe it would be good if he learned fluent Spanish and got to know our neighbors in Latin America.  So we send him off to Argentina or Mexico to attend one of their finest private schools.

Wouldn’t Johnnie be a lot better prepared to distinguish himself among college applicants with such an education?  And better prepared to get a job in a global economy?  Maybe the best option to settle the debate over what kind of high school is best is “no high school”.

Full post, including comments

A friend who blames Jews for all of the ills that he perceives in American society asked me if it was a Jew who started using “BCE” (“Before the Common Era” rather than BC or “Before Christ”) for dates of events that occurred more than 2004 years ago.  Being a techie rather than a historian he had only recently come across this coinage and was convinced that it was part of a contemporary Jewish plot to deestablish Christianity as America’s default religion.

My response was that I believed BCE/CE instead of BC/AD was a bit of 19th century academic pedantry from Europe or England.  I remember seeing the term on yellowed labels next to objects in museums that had been gathering dust for 50+ years.  Given that Jews had only recently escaped from their ghettos in the 19th century and that most classics or Bible scholars would have come from wealthier families, I thought it highly unlikely that a Jew coined the term.  Most likely I thought it was Christian scholars who wished to employ a bit of jargon to make their professional work appear more scientific.  The only etymological reference that I could find was this Word IQ article, that talks about the appearance of the term “Common Era” in a 1908 encyclopedia published by the Roman Catholic Church.

Anyone have a better source for settling this question?  The Oxford English Dictionary and first Supplement don’t contain “BCE” or “Common Era”.

Full post, including comments

A trip to an expensive hotel/restaurant on the Eastern Shore revealed some trouble for American automakers.  The customer parking lot contained not a single American-brand car.  Jaguar, Ferrari, Porsche, Volvo, Mercedes, and Audi are apparently able to sell cars to people who have enough money to buy what they want.  There were a couple of American-made pavement-melting SUVs, including a Hummer H2, that made me wish I’d had some “I’m funding Al-Qaeda one tankful at a time” bumper stickers printed.  But slightly smaller Japanese SUVs such as Acura and Lexus were more popular.

There were some shabby old American cars in the adjacent staff parking lot.  But basically if the fad for monster SUVs dies down it looks as though the American automakers will be slugging it out in a pure price competition with Hyundai and Kia.  This is going to be brutal for their shareholders.  Perhaps the shakeout will hasten the debut of the $3000 Chinese car.

Full post, including comments

My trip to Maryland included a cruise in the Chesapeake Bay on my brother’s sailboat.  Afterwards I encountered an administrator from Howard University medical school (“the oldest black med school in the country”) who said that he was trying to figure out whether to take up boating or flying as a weekend activity.  Boating seems like a more sociable activity.  Everyone with a boat in the Washington, DC area heads east toward the Bay on Friday evening or Saturday morning (those government jobs are fantastic but they result in terrible beach traffic jams because nobody ever has to work on a weekend).  The marina is packed with boats and people, some of whom are hanging out on their boats without even bothering to leave the dock.  Once on the water there are dozens of boats within sight at all times and the captain must exercise constant vigilance to avoid colliding with a fellow weekend enthusiast.  If one’s boat is equipped with a VHF radio one is required to monitor Channel 16 at all times.  This channel is a non-stop chatter of hailing and emergency messages.

The drive to a general aviation airport, by contrast, is usually free of traffic.  Airplanes are big and need to be spaced apart from each other.  Nobody wants to hang out inside his tiny Cirrus or Piper unless the plane is about to depart on a trip.  You’re likely to run into someone you know at the airport but not likely to run into any particular friend.  One in the air and above the traffic pattern altitude you’re unlikely to see more than a handful of airplanes even on a 300-mile trip.  Until September 11th there was seldom a need to monitor a radio frequency for a trip in clear weather and even in these times of paranoia and strife there might only be one transmission on 121.5, the emergency frequency, every 10 minutes.

Flying seems like a better way to keep mentally young.  You are challenging yourself to think and react quickly and rationally despite a sometimes frightening environment.  I ran into a former MIT professor at the helicopter school in Nashua, NH.  He is 69 years old, has been flying airplanes for years, and is now taking up helicopters with the intention of buying a Robinson R44 (on my wishlist of airplanes).  I was shocked when he said that he was 69 because he doesn’t seem older than 50.

Thoughts from those who are both boaters and pilots?

Full post, including comments

… if he’ll let us fly his Boeing 757 for a couple of hours.  Taxiing off Runway 11 this evening at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts I noticed that Kerry’s personal airliner had been updated with a “Kerry-Edwards” graphic.  The plane has always looked fabulous and though all of my pilot friends are terrified of Kerry winning (because of the inevitable airspace restrictions around New England that would ensue) those of us with multi-engine ratings have agreed that we would definitely vote for the man if he would let us fly his 757.

Speaking of Kerry, does anyone know where exactly in Massachusetts he is supposed to have grown up?  His official biography says that he “returned home” to Massachusetts but doesn’t say anything about which town.  Given how different in character the towns of this state are, I’m surprised that they aren’t more specific.  Anyone know?

[Flying down to the Eastern Shore of Maryland on Friday I got a good preview of what life will be like for New England pilots should Kerry be elected.  Flying over Connecticut on a magnetic heading of approximately 230 I was monitoring 121.5 megahertz, the standard emergency frequency.  I heard the following call “Aircraft heading 230 at an altitude of approximately 4200′:  This is the U.S. Air Force.  You are in a restricted area and must immediately turn to a heading of 360 or you may be fired upon.”  Note that the Air Force did not say where the plane was, not even which state.  I assumed that this was a puny Cessna somewhere near York, Pennsylvania where Kerry and Edwards were doing a tour but could not rule out the possibility that it was my plane.  I was at 8500′ but the Garmin transponder in my airplane has a history of flakiness so conceivably it could have been telling Air Traffic Control that I was instead at 4200′.]

Full post, including comments

My Handspring Treo died for the 10th or 12th time.  It is still under warranty but now that Handspring has been acquired by Palm it takes three weeks to get a replacement phone.  Given that a Treo only lasts an average of about 8 weeks before failing this means that one is using one’s backup phone about one third of the time.  My current backup phone is an old Motorola Triband that won’t sync with Outlook.  Anyone have any advice on a good GSM to buy?  Here are my requirements:

• dual or tri-band for use in foreign countries
  
• sync with Outlook address book including the notes fields and the mailing address fields (need to be able to send postcards!)
  
• sync with Outlook calendar and provide alerts of appointments
  
• would be nice to be able to enter new calendar events and new address book entries and sync them back with Outlook
  
• would be nice to have a built-in camera
  
• cost less than $250 with no service agreement (I already have the SIM and service)

One phone that looks like it might work is the $230 Sony Ericsson T610.  If I can get all of these requirements met I might actually just chuck the Treo.

[Epilogue:  Score yet another victory for this Blog.  One friend offered me his Treo 600 that he isn’t using.  Another his … Sony Ericsson T610 that he replaced with something fancier.]

Full post, including comments

I’ve been listening to Bill Clinton’s autobiography in an abridged book-on-tape version, read by the author.  He talks about his daughter’s pet frog.  He talks about his family and their struggles with obesity and alcohol and cocaine addiction.  He talks about stopping at McDonald’s for coffee towards the end of his morning jog back in Arkansas.  The book demonstrates how far politicians have come since the days of Nixon (no one dares hope that anyone in our current crop will measure up to an old thinker/writer/doer such as Jefferson).  Nixon was the man who struggled with big issues that were important to all Americans.  You’d expect to find Nixon writing about how he started up the Environmental Protection Agency, got us out of Vietnam, and opened up trade with Red China.  Clinton, on the other hand, seems totally unreflective.  He talks about how people cheered when he got Itzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat to sign some sort of agreement in the backyard of the White House but not about why, if this was such an important accomplishment, 12 years later the war between Arabs and Jews continues unabated.  He mentions the dates on which he decided to start bombing people in former Yugoslavia but does not take advantage of the distance of a decade to look at the long-term result (as far as I’ve heard, both the Christians whom we bombed and the Muslims on whose behalf we were bombing hate us now).

Clinton rails against the “conservative media” who misrepresented his proposals, much as our current rulers rail against the “liberal media”.  He expresses genuine confusion that the U.S. contained so many angry little people who harassed him by alleging scandals or imagined that they understood his motivations or marriage.  Speaking of “little people”, Clinton never seems to have harbored any doubt, even as a young man, that he was entitled to their vote.  He believed right from the start that he was the best-qualified person for whatever job he was seeking.  Perhaps this is why we’ve had so many presidents from small towns in obscure states and surprisingly few from big cities.  If you grow up as the only smart person in a tiny school you might subconsciously believe for the rest of your life that you ought to be elected governor, president, whatever.  If, on the other hand, you grow up in Manhattan you might remember “hey, there were a bunch of folks in my old neighborhood who knew a lot more than I did and would probably do a better job.”  This might tend to sap your confidence.

If you want to learn about government, foreign policy, management, etc. the book is useless.  If, on the other hand, you’re exasperated at the mediocrity of our current President, this book is a nice reminder that George W. has no monopoly on mediocrity.

[You might ask why I continue to listen.  I’m driving N to Nashua, New Hampshire every morning for helicopter lessons and then SW to Concord, Massachusetts for English riding lessons in the afternoon and therefore am spending several hours every day in the car.]

Full post, including comments