Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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?

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… 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′.]

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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.]

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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.]

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Just back from a trip to New York City.  Richard and I flew back from Teterboro airport in his fire-breathing turbocharged Mooney.  It was JFK, Jr.-style haze all the way to Boston and a fair amount of time inside actual clouds.  I’m studying to become a flight instructor so I did 30 minutes of instrument flying from the right seat, craning my neck to see the instruments that are placed in front of the left seat.  As we drove back to my apartment it was nice to see how much progress Harvard is making on a $100 million construction project two blocks from where I live.  They tore down two 30-40-year-old faculty and research office buildings and are rebuilding them exactly the same size but more opulent.

After I’d carted my purchases from New York’s Strand Bookstore upstairs I turned on my PC, still wondering how an organization could grow so rich that they could afford to tear down buildings every 30 years.  Waiting in my inbox was the following email:

“As many of you know, I’ve been entertaining the thought of moonlighting this summer as a stripper to earn more money to pay for school in the fall…”

Our friend will be writing Harvard a check for almost $33,000 in September (tuition plus “health fees”).

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I’m just back from four nights in Naples, Maine.  This town is in the Sebago Lakes region northwest of Portland and it provides a vivid demonstration of the power of urban planning.  Nearly every small town in Latin America is built around a central plaza where the citizens gather at various hours to meet friends, play chess, etc.  Small streets radiate from the plaza and hold additional shops and restaurants.  Any highway with heavy traffic is typically at least 5 or 10 blocks from the plaza.  In Naples and all of the surrounding towns, by contrast, there really aren’t any streets except to provide access to private houses.  A “town” is defined by the intersection of two busy state highways.  All of the public facilities of the town such as shops, schools, hotels, and restaurants are built along the highways near the intersection.  Thus if you’re not in a private home you’re within 25 feet of a 18-wheeler truck going 50 mph.

The handful of locals whom I met reported that despite living in the area for 20 years or more they’d not made too many friends and had a hard time meeting people.  You very seldom ran into a friend serendipitously.  If you belonged to the Lions Club or had a kid in the school you might meet at a planned activity but that was about it for social life.

(In case you’re curious as to why I wanted to spend four nights at the intersection of two busy state highways it was to add a Single-Engine Seaplane rating to my Commercial pilot’s certificate.  The process consisted of about 100 practice takeoffs and landings on various lakes in a 1946 Piper Cub on floats, followed by a checkride with an FAA examiner.  Sadly I won’t be able to do much with this rating.  Due to the fact that seaplanes combine all of the hazards of boats and airplanes in one machine the insurance is almost 10X the cost of what you pay for the same plane on wheels.  A rental seaplane is an uninsurable risk and therefore there are almost no places in the U.S. where you can rent a seaplane and head off without an instructor.)

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Fifteen of us gathered last night for a screening of the 1992 Tim Robbins political satire Bob Roberts.  This mockumentary of a folksinging conservative Wall Street trader turned politician has held up surprisingly well.  In the background of the movie, President Bush is in the White House and American troops are about to invade Iraq.  Gore Vidal does a great job playing a Ted Kennedy-style career senator.  The songs are fun but sadly the soundtrack has never been made available.

My favorite part of the movie is when Bob Roberts closes a letter to a 7-year-old girl in Vermont with the admonition “Don’t do crack; it’s a ghetto drug.”

This is the perfect movie for an election-year party.

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Google is supposed to be going public soon at some sort of fantastically high valuation.  A friend asked “How can they possibly grow into that?  What can they do besides search?”

If Google is to reach and sustain a Microsoft-style valuation perhaps the best way for them to do this is by providing alternatives to what Microsoft provides.  Microsoft is the kind of desktop applications.  You buy software from a store and install it on your machine.  If a new version comes out you figure out how to buy and install an upgrade.  If you get a new computer you spend several days reinstalling all of your applications, probably buying new copies of the ones whose installation CD-ROMs you can’t find anymore.  If you’re traveling and need to edit a document or spreadsheet, tough luck.  All of your data is trapped on your home or office computer.

In the Internet enthusiasm of the 1990s various people predicted that desktop applications would be replaced by Web-based applications  For most users this has come true in the case of email.  If you’re a Hotmail or Google Mail user you can read email from any Internet-connected computer in the world.  There are a fair number of Internet-based photo sharing and database services.  What is then left on one’s PC?  Word processing, spreadsheet, and PowerPoint documents.  If Google were to offer a private database service and a suite of reasonably powerful application programs usable from a Web browser, this might be a serious competitor to Microsoft Office.

So that’s my prediction:  while Microsoft is trying to replace Google with MSN Search, Google will be trying to replace Microsoft Office with Google Web-based Office.

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On Sunday I attended a block party hosted by a friend up in Newburyport.  He had hired an English circus family to perform and afterwards I served some food and drink to the 13-year-old and 16-year-old members of this family.  Unlike the typical sullen American teenager they had exquisite manners.  It turned out that they had never been to school.  They’d lived their whole lives traveling around with their parents and siblings, oftentimes in a smallish RV (they started calling themselves “the Sardine Family” because of these cramped quarters).  All of their education came from their parents and from older siblings.

Could it be that going into a community of thousands of teenagers (i.e., school) is bad for a kid’s manners?   And that spending time with a high percentage of adults (i.e., home school) is good for a kid’s manners?

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While driving up here to Naples, Maine for some seaplane training I listened to a lecture on political theory by Dennis Dalton, a professor at Barnard.  One interesting point was that Aristotle did not approve of voting except by middle-class or richer people.  His theory was that a poor person is likely to be illiterate and that, without having much property, won’t have any stake in stability.  Thus if Aristotle were remaking Iraq only perhaps 10 percent of the population would be entitled to vote.  In the U.S. maybe 80 percent of us would get to vote (though of course only 40-some percent bother).

Dalton talked about how the U.S. illustrates all of the ills of Capitalism predicted by Karl Marx.  In particular Dalton cited the percentage of children living in poverty here in the U.S. (“living in poverty” means in a family whose income is less than the Federal Poverty Level, a number determined by trying to figure out what the minimum necessary income is for a normal American life).

If the quantity of children in the U.S. were fixed it seems obvious that the higher the percentage of kids living in poverty the worse the situation.  But the quantity of children is not fixed.  People decide to have an extra child based on their perception of how easy it will be to take care of an extra child.  Perhaps a high percentage of children living in poverty means that poor people feel comfortable with (a) the  level of government support to be expected for that child (e.g., Medicaid, AFDC), and (b) the ultimate career prospects for that child once grown up.

What would stop a Reagan-style optimist from saying “look at all the children that our poor people are having, confident that their future will be bright” and citing that as an example of what a fantastic country this is for a poor family?

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