Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

According to this New York Times story, a B average in high school is very rewarding…

“Finally, my parents told me if I got a 3.0 G.P.A. or higher on my report card, they’d buy me any car I wanted, within reason.”

Daddy’s Little Girl is now driving the 2004 Cadillac Escalade EXT (5700 lbs.; 12 mpg; $53,000) that she got for her 16th birthday.

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A man goes to see Mel Gibson’s new movie, The Passion, and is inspired to take his family to Israel to see the places where Jesus lived and died.  While on vacation his mother-in-law dies.

An undertaker in Tel Aviv explains that they can ship the body home to Wisconsin at a cost of $10,000 or the mother-in-law could be buried in Israel for US$500.

The man says, “We’ll ship her home.”

The undertaker asks, “Are you sure? That’s an awfully big expense and we can do a very nice burial here.”

The man says, “Look, 2000 years ago they buried a guy here and three days later he rose from the dead. I just can’t take that chance.”

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Today’s New York Times carries an article entitled “Microsoft, Amid Dwindling Interest, Talks Up Computing as a Career” about Bill Gates going around to universities encouraging young people to major in computer science.  The chairman of EECS at MIT worries about the decline in enrollment (10 years ago his predecessor fretted about the explosion in enrollment; sic transit gloria major).  All too close to home…

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Hmm… this Manila software that Harvard runs seems to have mislinked all the comments posted.  I’m cutting and pasting some manually and please feel free to use the comments button underneath this posting to comment on the original (below).

From Zoran Lazarevic:

Two hundred years in a history of a nation is a short time to change human behavior without force. For one example, think that slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865, but the first black generation that grew in freedom and equality was born in 1970s.

Compare today Serbs living a couple of miles away: across the river Danube which marked the border between the Austro-Hungarian empire (north) and the Ottoman empire (south). In the north, they live in neatly painted houses lined along geometrically straight roads, behind tall walls keeping the privacy of their property. Villages just south of Danube are hectically built around worn-out curvy roads, having short transparent fences displaying property in slight disarray. The north prides itself with culinary craft and the taste for fine arts from Austria and Hungary. The south takes pride in warriorship and macho attitude, and jokes about its own widespread bribery.

Serbia proper was liberated from the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s, and united with the north in 1918.  There is absolutely no question, that if separated, the two regions would have very different economies. Just like there are vast differences between other ex-Yugoslavia states. And that is all after a century of common life, mostly under communism which tried to kill out (pun intended) all differences in religion and nationality.

From Fazal Majid:

You could blame Lazare Carnot (d. 1823) for fathering Sadi Carnot (d. 1832), the inventor of thermodynamics, and thus leading to global warming…

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People are blaming all of the Jew-hatred in Mel Gibson’s new movie on the visions of a German nun, Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824).  According to this article from Newsday:

The bedridden visionary, who is said to have borne the stigmata and the wounds of the crown of thorns, is a particular source of contention for Gibson because of her depictions of Jews as bloodthirsty and venal. In The Dolorous Passion, for instance, she “sees” Jewish priests passing out bribes to get people to offer false testimony against Jesus and even tipping the Roman executioners. She also describes seeing Jesus’ cross being built in the courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem.

And Emmerich’s 19th-century biographer, the Rev. C.E. Schmoe’ger, wrote about how she had one vision of an “old Jewess Meyr,” who confessed to her “that Jews in our country and elsewhere strangled Christian children and used their blood for all sorts of suspicious and diabolical practices.”

Gibson, who carries a relic of Emmerich in the form of a faded piece of cloth from her habit, vehemently rejects characterizations of the nun as anti-Semitic.

In other news… I was listening to NPR news a couple of days ago.  All of Haiti’s current troubles were being blamed on things that the French did in 1825 and this proposition was discussed seriously for 15 minutes.  Haiti does seem to be in rather tough shape, at least going by the CIA Factbook page:

“About 80% of the population lives in abject poverty.  … The economy shrank an estimated 1.2% in 2001 and an estimated 0.9% in 2002.  Literacy rate is 53%.”

Despite an HIV infection rate of 6.1% and a lot of deaths from AIDS the population is still growing at an annual rate of 1.67%, i.e., there are an ever-increasing number of Haitians to share an ever-smaller pie.  (cf. Malthus)

Perhaps there are more problems in our world of 2004 that can be blamed on those French and Germans who died circa 1825…  Anyone care to suggest some dead Europeans to blame in the comments section?

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A bunch of us went to see the movie “Fog of War” on Friday night.  This is a very interesting documentary by a local director consisting almost entirely of an interview with Robert S. McNamara who was Secretary of Defense during the first half of the U.S. war in Vietnam and subsequently president of the World Bank.  The film concentrates on McNamara’s efforts in bombing Japan and Germany during World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.

The first depressing take-away from the movie is that our intelligence efforts are almost worthless.  The CIA assured JFK that the Russians did not have nuclear warheads in Cuba at the time of the crisis.  The missiles were in place and the warheads on their way.  In fact it seems that the warheads were already in Cuba at the time of the dispute.  Not only that but Fidel Castro met McNamara face-to-face in the 1990s and said that he’d recommended to the Russians that they use them even though he knew that Cuba would be destroyed and all of its citizens killed.  (N.B.: Personal ownership of a third-world country is a beautiful thing!)

The second conclusion from watching the film is that the U.S. has never won the hearts and minds of foreigners or even succeeded in changing foreigners’ minds.  We won WWII by using our industrial power to destroy the capacity of the Japanese and Germans to carry out their objectives, not by convincing the Japanese or the Germans of anything or changing their minds or objectives.

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My friend Brad, a jet pilot with heroic flying skills, graciously agreed to help me with the Commercial maneuvers and precision landings today.  We hauled N505WT out of its hangar and headed out to Worcester with the GPS turned off and the gyro-stabilized compass covered up.  Flying along at 2500′ it was actually a bit tough to pick out landmarks from the VFR chart.  After 10 landings we decided it was time for some of the free cookies that they bake at the Worcester FBO (airplane gas station) so we taxied into the ramp.  The scene was one of utter desolation.  The main terminal building looked empty.  The last scheduled airline flights from Worcester ceased about one year ago.  The general aviation area contained a small collection of cheap piston-powered airplanes (like mine!).  At Bedford, N505WT’s home airport, there is always at least $300 million of private jets on the ramp, waiting to take hard-working public corporation executives from golf game to weekend house.  The woman behind the desk confirmed that not a single jet had landed at Worcester all day.

As we were starting up N505WT a good-sized business jet was taxiing in.  A van drove up to meet the passengers at the side of the $10 million twin-turbojet-powered plane.  “What luxury!” we thought.  “This is the only way to travel.  They’re probably just back from a resort in Mexico.”  A couple of guys got out of the van and walked around the plane wearing guns.  Security for someone important!  The one passenger got out, a teenager wearing a rather plain jumpsuit.  Then we noticed that his legs were chained together…

Yet another thing that America’s richest and poorest citizens share:  traveling by private jet.

Oh yes, speaking of guns.  A friend from the MIT Media Lab sent around a home video yesterday.  It seems that he has put the filmmaking skills that he learned there to good use and has made effective use of the Internet in distributing his creation.  Click right on the following link and then “Save Target As” before playing from your own hard disk in a separate player window (100 or 200% size is best): boyhood dream.

Twenty years ago people talked about Arpanet/Internet leading to an explosion in video creativity and distribution but it just wasn’t practical with the available bandwidth and percentage of consumers hooked up.  Today all the pieces are in place.

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Just another day in the Boston suburbs with the family SUV… (story).

This SUV story from Qatar shows that ours is a global culture.

Finally there is Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article with stats showing that drivers are vastly safer inside a minivan than inside an SUV (not to mention the fact that people outside the vehicle are much more likely to be harmed by an SUV).

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A recent posting on the subject of Panamanian married couples who drive older cars but hire live-in nannies to help with their children sparked quite a few comments.  Alex Chernavsky sent in this newspaper story about research done by social psychologists, the conclusion of which was that if you’re going to spend money you should buy an experience, e.g., dinner out with friends or a vacation trip, rather than a new car.  The full paper is an interesting read as well.

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At brunch today one of my friends looked tired from all the babies that she’s been delivering lately and the long nights on call.  Always keen to make guests in my home feel comfortable I asked Anastasia whether it wasn’t reasonable to conclude that modern medicine was almost worthless because Christian Scientists seem to live about as long as anyone else.  Anyone have a good reference to a study comparing the life expectancy of Christian Scientists with those who avail themselves fully of the American health care system?

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