Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The Australians once again demonstrate superb taste in the photo illustrating this story about dogs.

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After four years and a few drops my 500 MHz IBM Thinkpad seems ready for retirement.  This posting and associated comments are intended to produce a collaborative ideal configuration for a new laptop.

The mission:  Use exclusively when traveling, often for weeks at a time.  I would like to play music in my hotel rooms, ideally from built-in speakers but possibly from little portable speakers that are packed separately (I have a weird little AAA-powered Creative speaker system now that is sort of okay for background music).  I would like to copy large high-res photos from professional digital cameras, usually by pulling a CF or SD card from the camera and plugging it somehow into the laptop.  I want every possible means of connecting to the Internet, wired and wireless, except for telephone (don’t have an ISP and life is too short for dialup).  Battery life is not very important as I’ll usually be using the machine some place where power is available.

Here’s what I think I want

• 120 GB (or larger) disk drive.  I upgraded my current laptop with a 48 GB drive nearly 2 years ago and am dismayed to discover that the largest 2.5″ drives available right now are 80 GB.  Was Moore’s Law revoked for notebook drives?  Anyone with inside knowledge know when/what the next step in disk drives will be fore notebooks?  I don’t want to bother re-installing all my old software onto a disk smaller than 120 GB.
  
• TrackPoint nubby pointing device in the middle of the keyboard, as popularized on the IBM Thinkpad.  I was never able to adapt to those pad devices that are most common for laptops.
  
• analog video/audio output to enable playback of DVDs on hotel room TVs, some of which have A/V inputs
  
• reasonably high quality built-in speakers
  
• as many USB 2.0 ports as possible (at least two because I’ll want to use an accessory mouse that will chew up one)
  
• a built-in Webcam and microphone suitable for video conferencing.  Supposedly MSN Messenger contains a reasonable quality video conferencing feature.  Would also be nice to be able to make phone calls from the laptop in cases where a hotel provides high-speed Internet but expensive voice calls and/or the cell phone isn’t working in that area.
  
• built-in sockets for CF, SD, and other digital camera memory cards
  
• built-in 802.11b for sure, Bluetooth?, maybe something for mobile phone Internet would be nice, e.g., a GSM radio
  
• at least two PC card slots for expansion and the weird little card burner that I must use to keep my airplane’s GPS databases up to date
  
• mid-size screen and keyboard to keep the weight below 5 lbs. and the size compact
  
• Windows XP operating system (most aviation software is Windows-only)

It might be fun to play with the TabletPC software in order to add sketches and other personal annotations to emails, documents, photos, etc.  Is this software ready for prime time?  And does having a TabletPC interfere with the other goals?

Ideas anyone?

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Nicholas Kristof complains about the treatment of women in Afghanistan in a story in today’s NY Times.  Here’s an excerpt…

Consider these snapshots of the new Afghanistan:

• A 16-year-old girl fled her 85-year-old husband, who married her when she was 9. She was caught and recently sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment.

• The Afghan Supreme Court has recently banned female singers from appearing on Afghan television, barred married women from attending high school classes and ordered restrictions on the hours when women can travel without a male relative.

• When a man was accused of murder recently, his relatives were obliged to settle the blood debt by handing over two girls, ages 8 and 15, to marry men in the victim’s family.

• A woman in Afghanistan now dies in childbirth every 20 minutes, usually without access to even a nurse. A U.N. survey in 2002 found that maternal mortality in the Badakshan region was the highest ever recorded anywhere on earth: a woman there has a 50 percent chance of dying during one of her eight pregnancies.

• In Herat, a major city, women who are found with an unrelated man are detained and subjected to a forced gynecological exam. At last count, according to Human Rights Watch, 10 of these “virginity tests” were being conducted daily.

… Yet now I feel betrayed, as do the Afghans themselves. There was such good will toward us, and such respect for American military power, that with just a hint of follow-through we could have made Afghanistan a shining success and a lever for progress in Pakistan and Central Asia. Instead, we lost interest in Afghanistan and moved on to Iraq.

… Even now, in the new Afghanistan we oversee, they are being kidnapped, raped, married against their will to old men, denied education, subjected to virginity tests and imprisoned in their homes. We failed them. 

The unspoken assumption in Kristof’s piece is that the U.S. has almost unlimited capabilities to effect social change in distant lands.  Is this realistic?  Consider our own nation.  A lot of Americans enjoy marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs that are tough to buy.  Many of the rest of us seem to like drinking alcohol and then driving cars.  Despite a lot of effort and money spent over the decades these behaviors persist (see http://www.drunkdrivingdefense.com/consequences/bush-dui.htm for a fun article on how our leaders would have some trouble getting into Canada legally).

Getting back to Afghanistan.  The problem of which Kristof complains is basically that half of the population of Aghanistan views the other half as personal property and is supported in this view by tradition and religion.  Our military can perhaps prevent Afghanistan from being a military threat.  We could also plausible chop the place up and give each resulting piece to a local leader who was friendly and/or beholden to the U.S.  But given our spotty record of achieving social change within our own borders is it realistic to set ourselves the goal of turning Afghanistan into a land of sexual equality?  If so, how would we do it?

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If you stay in a lot of hotels, as I do, it seems odd that after reaming you out of $150 per night they also need to charge you $7 for a short phone call, $7 to wash a T-shirt, $20 for breakfast, $13 for Internet access, etc.  A friend who owns hotels explained what is happening…

A standard travel agency sells you a hotel room for $X and takes a commission, usually 10%, passing the remaining 90% on to the hotel.  Thus 90% of what you pay can be used by the hotel to make your stay pleasant, invest in high-speed Internet, put in a phone system.  Some online services such as Orbitz and Travelocity act as travel agents, finding the best rooms that they can and taking a fixed percentage commission.

Expedia, a company spun off by Microsoft in 1999 but presumably still substantially owned by Microsoft and Bill Gates, uses its dominant market position to arrange favorable deals with hotels.  The deal might be that Expedia gets to buy up to 50 rooms per night for $75 each, for example.  If the market is soft Expedia can resell those rooms to consumers for $100 per night.  If the market is tight Expedia can resell those rooms for $200 per night, pocketing the $125 difference between what they charge the traveler and what they pay the hotel.  If things are so bad that nobody wants to pay $75 on a particular night, Expedia dumps the vacant rooms back on the hotel.  Much of the profits that hotels formerly earned and invested back in their properties is now being captured by Expedia.

So if you book via Expedia and have to pay $20 for breakfast, have some sympathy for the hotel owner.  He might have gotten less than half of what you paid Expedia for that room.

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Here’s a story from Canada’s leading newspaper about the surprising connections between the tropical region around Iguazu Falls, which I visited in December, and Canada, where I’ve been since Friday.

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People said that London was a center of theater and music but this is my second night here and there doesn’t seem to be much action in town.  Perhaps it was not London, Ontario to which folks referred.  Anyway, in between test-flying Diamond Star N505WT, I’m reading The Pencil by Henry Petroski, 354 pages that demonstrate conclusively that at least one area of history has been justifiably ignored.

It turns out that, before setting off for Harvard College, Henry David Thoreau devoted quite a bit of time to figuring out how to blend graphite powder and clay into a pencil that could compete with the best English and French products.  He and his father were very successful pencil merchants in the 1840s.  As cheap German imports made the business less profitable the Thoreaus moved into supplying graphite powder for electrotype printing.  In 1853 Thoreau’s friends asked him why he’d stopped making pencils.  He responded “Why should I?  I would not do again what I have done once.”

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Computer nerds are stereotyped by the public as a bunch of meek cubicle-dwellers who sit quietly staring at screens, taking orders from MBAs 6 levels up in a bureaucracy, until their jobs get outsourced to some villagers in India.  Though we might regret the U.S. government’s decision to grant citizenship to people who hate Americans we can be grateful to Maher Mofeid Hawash, the Intel programmer sentenced today for his efforts on behalf of Al-Qaeda (Mr. Hawash was attempting to enter Afghanistan in 2001 and fight directly against American troops… imagine Rambo with a copy of K&R).  Mr. Hawash picks up the struggle to reform the public image of computer nerds taken up by Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida computer engineering professor who was, in addition to a naturalized American citizen and member of the American Muslim Council, a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A few more guys like this and Hollywood will start making films about action heroes with day jobs coding Java.

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Looking out the windows of the Boeing 757 taking me away from Panama it remains hard to believe that the railroad (1850-55) and then the canal were built.  They had no aircraft and therefore could not perform aerial surveys of a roadless unknown country.  They had no insect repellant in a place swarming with mosquitoes, sand flies, and other sources of nasty bites (so perhaps it was for the best that, until the Americans came along, nobody believed that mosquitoes caused malaria and yellow fever).  The development of this country is a remarkable tribute to the triumph of energy over natural caution. 

Most of that energy came from the American West.  The California gold rush of 1849 provided the impetus for the construction of the railroad and most of its initial revenue.  When the French effort failed two citizens of Medora, North Dakota played key roles.  The best-known is
that of one-time rancher Theodore Roosevelt.  As president of the United States in 1903 it was Roosevelt who encouraged Panamanians to secede from Columbia and subsequently approved taking over the French concession in the isthmus.  Canal historian David McCullough in Brave Companions writes about another Medoran in his book Brave Companions.

Antoine Amedee-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores, was a French aristocrat married to the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street banker.  Of North Dakota the Marquis wrote “I like this country for there is room to move about without stepping on the feet of others.”  He invested much of his wealth in the North Dakota badlands, in a local slaughterhouse, and in refrigerated rail cars to deliver beef to markets in the East, in competition with the Chicago stockyards.  Roosevelt was frequently a guest in the Marquis’s house in Medora until a cruel winter drove them and their herds out. The Marquis blamed the failure of his enterprise on “the Jewish beef trust” and, upon returning to France, satisfied the French public’s demand to know what had gone wrong with their sea level canal with the explanation that the Jews were to blame.  The Marquis successfully stirred many thousands of his countrymen to anti-Jewish riots regarding the canal and subsequently played an important role in the Dreyfus Affair.  He was less successful outside France. According to McCullough, the Marquis was “murdered in June 1896 by a band of Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa”, where he had been engaged in an effort to “united the Muslims under the French flag in an all-out holy war against the Jews and the English.”

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Today was my 20th and last hour of helicopter instruction in Panama (tomorrow morning I’ll get on an American Airlines flight to Toronto, staying at www.metropolitan.com).  After a couple of autorotations in which one learns how to land the helicopter after the engine quits we proceeded up the Rio Chagres.  This is a national park, established to protect the rainforest in the Canal’s watershed.  In the past few decades Embera Indians have moved up from the remote malarial province of Darien, on the border with Columbia, to this region where the jungle environment is the same but access to health care and tourism jobs is much easier.

Our approach to the little village of grass huts involved flying up the center of the twisting river, about 10′ above the water, at 50 mph.  Steep hillsides with big trees constitute the banks of the fast-flowing Chagres and constitute a bit of a distraction for a beginning student.  Thanks to the lack of development in Panama one is safe from powerlines, those perennial killer of helicopter pilots, but we rounded a couple of corners to find people motoring along in dugout canoes.

The little Embera village that we visited contained 84 people from 17 families, each of whom lived in an elevated grass hut.  A traditional anthropologist might spend God knows how long paddling around looking for this village and then 12 months living here in one of those huts.  The  helicopter anthropologist sleeps in an air-conditioned bed in a modern hotel overlooking the Canal, takes a 30-minute flight into the village, and waits for Johnson, the one resident who speaks English, to come down towards the riverbank as the rotors spin down.  Here’s what we learned…

The Embera sustain themselves by catching fish in the river, killing wild pigs in the surrounding rainforest, growing some crops, and harvesting various wild plants.  They manufacture their own clothing, which is nada for the young kids, a loin cloth for the adults, and a beaded bikini top for women.  They make some cash by guiding cruise ship passengers on package tours and selling them handicrafts.

Technological comforts are limited to three hours of electricity per night and one channel of broadcast television that can be received through a gap in the ridge.  Cable and Wireless, the telecom monopoly that has been restricting Panama’s economic growth (it cost $7 to make a one-minute phone call from my hotel to Canada), installed a pay phone around which the Embera built a thatch phone booth.  It has been broken for six months.

There are no shops.  You can’t buy bottled water, Diet Coke, or any other packaged food.

At the center of the village is a single concrete building:  the schoolhouse.  The Panamanian government sends a teacher out for the wet season so that the children learn Spanish.  Imagine the dedication of this woman, a Latino from Panama City, to live in such a small isolated community in which many residents speak only the native Embera language.

[http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/200401-panama-embera/ has some snapshots from the trip]

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The price of food and reasonable medical care have fallen so much that the world population swells to levels scarcely imaginable 200 years ago.  Whenever you get a bunch of people together in a tropical climate they inevitably seem to say to each other “Let’s go out and cut down all of the trees in the jungle so that we can grow crops or graze cattle.”

The last tropical rainforest left will very likely be the one right here in central Panama for it supplies one thing that is undeniably critical for the operation of the Canal:  rain.  The heart of the 80 km-long Canal is a big lake, 26 meters above sea level.  Every transit of a ship through the Canal requires that 52 million gallons of fresh water drain out of this lake into the Caribbean and Pacific.  The water is replenished from surrounding rainforest.  One thing that people in this part of the world have learned is that when you cut down all the trees it changes the local climate, generally cutting the amount of rain that falls.

Panama is one of the few places in the world where you don’t need a hippie environmentalist to talk up the value of the rainforest.  Here everyone knows what the rainforest is worth… $600 million per year in tolls.

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