A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
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).
Full post, including commentsA 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.
Full post, including commentsAt 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?
Full post, including commentsThe Australians once again demonstrate superb taste in the photo illustrating this story about dogs.
Full post, including commentsAfter 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
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?
Full post, including commentsNicholas 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?
Full post, including commentsIf 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.
Full post, including commentsHere’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.
Full post, including commentsPeople 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.”
Full post, including commentsComputer 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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