Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

As I’ll be out and about for the next few weeks with spotty Internet access it seems as though it is time to turn over the blogging to others.  Here then is a guest submission from an anonymous-for-the-moment philosopher queen hailing from the beautiful farm country just north of the Mason-Dixon Line…

In October, the President’s Council on Bioethics (www.bioethics.gov) released a 400+ page report on biotechnology, entitled “Beyond Therapy.” The report rings of Luddism, arguing that our unbridled pursuit of individual happiness in the form of “mood brighteners” (read: Prozac and other SSRI drugs) is turning us into a society of shallowness and solipsism. Psychiatry is transforming into “cosmetic psychopharmacology” (Peter Kramer’s phrase). If we find ourselves unable to mingle well at parties, or we tend toward melodrama thus irritating our companions, doctors now have a diagnosis for us that entitles us to a prescription for little green tablets that will remake us into more congenial and thereby socially rewarded selves. Melancholy is decidedly pass

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Just got my bill for next year’s airplane insurance.  This is a vehicle valued at $200,000 and a typical minor accident, e.g., striking the propeller on an obstacle or the runway when landing badly, costs about $30,000 to repair.  You can’t pause or pull over when flying an airplane.  A few clouds in the sky and you can find yourself disoriented and plunging toward the water like JFK, Jr.  Now that I’ve got 550 hours of experience in this type of plane and 750 hours of total time AVEMCO has cut my rates to… $1737 with a $1000 deductible and $1 million of liability coverage.

If I were to get a new minivan here in Cambridge, despite my lack of claims and tickets I expect that it would cost about the same to insure, with much lower liability limits.  The minivan costs just over $30,000 with every conceivable option.  A minor accident costs $1000 to fix.  Many people are able to operate an automobile safely despite never having had any formal training.

Conclusion:  To come to a situation where these vehicles are equally costly to insure, we must really be driving like idiots.

[Update:  Okay, I answered my own question by driving to Mt. Wachusett today for some skiing.  Rolling along the familiar ground in a quiet comfortable minivan, belted in and protected by airbags as well, it never crossed my mind that we were moving at a potentially lethal velocity and that death could be just around the corner.  Whereas in the airplane I’m always scared and therefore cautious.]

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Apropos the mournful postings below on the state of IT… On Wednesday May 19 Harvard at 12:30 Eastern Time is hosting a debate on the question “Does IT Matter?”  I plan to attend (via telephone).  Because it is the business school the debate is priced for those who are already rich and/or work for the rich.  And because it is the business school the focus of the debate is probably going to be “does IT matter to profit-seeking corporations?”  I might try to get a few words in edgewise about how IT might be more transformative for poor countries than for rich countries.  In the U.S. we have magnificent roads, stores everywhere, and seemingly 3 SUVs per citizen.  So being able to do a transaction electronically isn’t that much of a time-saver.  Someone in the Third World who has to ride a chicken bus over a terrible road for an entire day is going to appreciate being able to do a transaction from his local Internet cafe a lot more than someone who only saved a 10-minute ride in his Cadillac Escalade.

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Friday, March 26:  BED to GAI plus some training.  Stop at TEB for lunch with Lynn and Olivia.  Stay in Bethesda with parents.

Sunday:  GAI to Oklahoma City (KPWA has the cheap gas)

Monday, March 29: to http://www.cowboyhalloffame.org/ at 0900 to see the Bierstadt paintings, in the afternoon to KABQ, stay with Susie Atlas

Tuesday, March 30: to Sedona (KSEZ), 5000′ high with a 5000′ runway, rent car, maybe we can see the Roden Crater?  Andy says that Jerome, AZ is an interesting town.

Thursday, April 1: to Los Angeles (KSMO), visit new Frank Gehry concert hall, see Harry Gittes

Friday, April 2: can tour the concert hall 9-3 either today or Saturday, all performances sold out but call (323) 850-2000 to check last-minute tix.

Saturday, April 3, 8 pm:  scored tickets on Craigslist (thanks to the kind folks commenting for this idea) for Shostakovich concert at LA Phil.

Sunday, April 4:  to Catalina Island and then at sunset to KMYF in San Diego, dinner with Christopher

Monday, April 5: tour of www.salk.edu (Louis Kahn building, call in advance to reserve, set for 12:00), dinner with Gittes family

Tuesday, April 6:  to Marfa, Texas (http://www.chinati.org gives tours Wednesday-Sunday); stay http://www.hotelpaisano.com/

Wednesday, April 7: tour of Chinati, fly to Huntsville, TX

Thursday, April 8: talk at SHSU.edu, fly to Ft. Worth, TX (KFTW)

Friday, April 9: visit Tadao Ando Modern Art Museum and Japanese Garden, fly to KCHA?

Saturday, April 10: fly to GAI

Sunday, April 11: fly to BED

Open questions for readers:

1. what’s a good place between GAI and KPWA to stop for fuel and maybe an airplane museum or something else interesting and close to the airport?
   
2. where to stay in Sedona, AZ and also a good hotel in Ft. Worth close to the art museum and botanical garden?
   
3. is it practical to fly to Catalina Island for the day and do anything?

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Nerds only might find this article interesting in which Jaron Lanier laments the fact that most of the open source effort has gone into making “another Unix”.

[And I might add not a very good one.  Ever since the photo.net Oracle database was migrated from Sun Solaris to Dell/Linux the site has been very shaky.  I’m not involved in running the site anymore but as I understand it one of the guys has essentially had to move into the colocation cage to keep poking at Linux.  Maybe Linux really is secretly funded by Microsoft…]

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Let’s get depressed two days in a row…  It is the 10th anniversary of the consumer Web.  We have very good mapping services both on- and off-line.  A wide variety of sites are visited by people from all over North America every day.  Yet when people want to sell a house they almost always are forced to pay 6% to a realtor, just as they did 30 years ago before all of this fancy computer technology was widespread.

Has anyone tried eBay House?  Why doesn’t it work?

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In buying tickets for movies, plays, and concerts lately I’ve noticed that it is always more expensive to buy tickets over the Internet than in-person and usually more expensive on the Web than on the phone.  If we assume that the prices reflect costs it turns out that it is cheaper to pay a human to sit in a booth all day and/or to pay a human to sit next to a phone all day than it is to write some Web scripts and keep a server running.

Given that the hardware folks have done their share and that bandwidth is cheaper than ever, this is a truly sad commentary on the continued stagnation in the world of software.  The great Internet pundits of the 1970s (and the folks who copied those predictions and spit them out as their own in the 1990s) predicted a world of seamless commerce and lower prices.  How wrong they were.

[Tickets for what you might ask?  Tonight is McCoy Tyner at the Charles Hotel ($3.50/ticket extra); Friday night is the Boston Symphony Orchestra ($10/order extra).  Last night was the Harold Pinter play The Birthday Party at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater ($3.50/ticket + $1.50/order extra).  I’d give you my review of the play but this email review from a friend is much more to-the-point:

“I saw the Pinter on Sunday night, and all I can say is that it made the invasive gynecological procedure I had to have the next day seem pleasant in comparison.”

I guess they won’t be quoting her review in the advertisements…]

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Spain has been in the news lately, both for her Muslim guests who bombed the trains of Madrid (killing more than 200 people) and her citizens who voted for a new pro-appeasement government.  U.S. media are expressing shock that the instinctive reaction of Christian Europeans was to cave in to the demands of a violent minority.  Sitting here in a country where any attack is met by voters rallying around the government and pressing for a strong counterattack the European propensity toward appeasement seems odd.

But is there anything truly new here?  Even the mere threat of Islamic terrorism has for several decades been very effective at steering European nations’ foreign policy. Going back further consider the Germans in the 1930s and early 1940s.  A small minority of people living in Europe had an ideology and the will to use violence to back up that ideology.  Without a whole lot of effort or actual force they were able to conquer nearly every other European nation and convince those Europeans to accept major elements of their ideology.  European democracies appear strong but apparently are easy to control by anyone who threatens to disrupt the bourgeois comforts of the populace.  Nor do Europeans have the internal strength to dislodge violent minorities who’ve gained control of their societies.  In the 1940s it was the leveling of German cities by the British and American air forces and Soviet artillery that convinced Europeans of the impracticality of Naziism.

It would be tempting to attribute the cravenness of the average European to the climate or their proximity to Muslim countries.  Yet the English have been stubbornly resistant to both the Nazis and various Islamic threats despite being geographically proximate to Europe and hosting a large Muslim minority within their borders.

Even if we can be sure of the answer to what the average European would call Osama bin-Laden (“Sir”) we’ll probably never figure out any way to stiffen the backbone of the average Christian European.  The political scientist quoted in this blog on August 28, 2003 was perhaps correct in his prediction that France and other European nations would become Muslim dictatorships within the next generation’s lifetimes, partly through demographics and birthrate but mostly because the non-Muslim majority lacked the will to oppose a unified minority.

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According to this Washington Post article, the unemployment rate in the DC area is the lowest in the nation.  In the well-educated Maryland and Virginia suburbs unemployment is between 1.6 and 2.2 percent, ridiculously low compared to the national average of 6.6 percent.  Best of all the standards for working hours and difficulty are set by the federal government.  A doctor I talked to said that she went to work for the Food and Drug Administration:  “It felt like a 2-year vacation compared to working in a private practice.  The funniest part was that the people who worked there complained about how hard their jobs were.”

Want a job?  Go East Young Man!

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Norfolk’s standard tourist gem is the Chrysler Museum with its comprehensive collection of glass from ancient Greece and Rome through Tiffany and into the modern era (mercifully there is only one piece by Dale Chihuly).  Karen, Robert, and I visited a newer downtown attraction:  the Wisconsin, an Iowa-class battleship completed in 1944, mothballed in the mid-1990s, and installed in Norfolk harbor in December 2000.  The Iowa class are the largest battleships ever built by the U.S. Navy.  We strolled among the 16-inch guns, festooned with photos of the shells, each of which weighs as much as a Honda Civic, zooming off towards Iraqi military targets during the 1991 Gulf War.  It occurred to me that the Wisconsin represents a stage in a cycle of taxation.

We tax ourselves to create a small government capable of taking actions, some of which make foreigners angry.  We then have to tax ourselves even more so that our government can build battleships that go forth and drop 2700-lb. shells on our new enemies.  After those enemies are all dead and/or cowed the surplus tax revenues are used for more government activity, which angers new and different foreigners.  So we have to raise taxes again to build more weapon systems to attack more foreigners.  And the cycle continues…

[Visitor info:  There is no charge for visiting the Wisconsin and the volunteer guides are very knowledgeable.  You can’t go below decks, however, because the interior is preserved with dehumidifiers.  An oil-powered battleship doesn’t figure into the Navy’s carrier-centric needs right now.  However, the Navy still owns the Wisconsin and may recommission it one day if its capabilities are required.]

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