Surplus words

I am really good at not throwing things out. One could consider me a pack rat, at last for some things. I was looking for a 15 foot Firewire cable yesterday, and found angled brackets from 3 years ago when I built a table for our printing press… Why was I looking for a Firewire cable, you ask? Easy to explain…

We got a new computer.

Costco, the one store aside from B&H that has no problem separatng me from my money and uniting me with large amounts of various stuff. Mostly foodstuff[s], but not always. Like yesterday, I could not pass up a $499 for a G4 Mac Mini. Nicely loaded, for a mini, with the 3-year warranty, a wireless mouse and keyboard, and the superdrive. It is exactly the same at the >$1,000 one currently for sale at the Apple store, but 4-5x times slower. That should cover the discount, would not you say? However, when upgrading from a 1998 1st generation G3 running un-upgradeable OS X (10.15) due to its lack of a DVD drive, it is a nice upgrade. More importantly, it leads to the next paragraph which contains embarassingly youthful gushing.
Every time I get next to a Mac, I really wish I could just switch to one. How do they manage to make Windows-based machines look lame each time, I am not sure, but they do. It probably starts with a lack of poster-sized instruction sheet, continues with a 5 minute setup that discovers everything there is to be found in a pleasant and logical manner. It builds from there with fast and accurate searching, the iLife suite, and the general feeling that “things work as they should.”

I am not a huge fan of iTunes or iPhoto - as specialist applications for music or photography they lack a lot of features ,and are not particularly fast or comfortable for advanced use. As general applications that should come with your computer - they are marvelous. I have only spent a couple of minutes with iWeb to see that it again, manages to deliver 90% of functionality in an easy-to-use package. Sure, Dreamweaver had many of the same features for years - but who used it and when? Same can be said about iCal - the calendar program, and other programs.

I think Apple has finally pefected, or has come very close to it, the mix of building proprietary software for a core audience that it understands, closely controlling the user experience by providing the hardware to OS to application level layers, yet truly supporting open standards where it is important for power users. It took me all of 2 minutes to add my google calendar feed to the iCal application. It is important, to a critical segment of users, that underneath OS X is a Unix BSD foundation. Apple is able to walk the straight and narrow in giving its users standard power and easy of use in one package. In my case, the package is about 6.5″x6.5″x2″

I really thought this little guy had character. He should - his parents certainly do :)

I know there are a number of companies that try to trawl the web and search for patterns. There are also companies and organizations that track and compile all sorts of statistics for researchers to pore over at a later date, and at a price. Even I have been tempted to write about leading indicators of different kinds and what they could mean. Mostly, that desire is driven by my aging white male’s fear of things changing. Changing, naturally, for the worst.

And so I get worried about torrential rains with lightening that actually hits people, and heatwaves, but mostly I worry about power outages. I am sure there is a strong correlation between bad weather and power outages. As of this writing, the power is still out in parts of Queens, NY, St. Louis, Missouri. It was recently out in portions of California and UK. Most of the outages are due to inclement weather, so one would hope that as soon as a particular heat wave or storm subsides, the service goes back to normal.

Still, would not it just make a great beginning to a sci-fi story of how people came to think of power - to move things, to move themselves, to provide light and heat as a given, and the historical events in this post were some of the first signs (since august 2003 at least) of the inevitable collapse of the non-animal powered civilization? I am curious whether anyone tracks MTF (mean time between failures) for US electrical grid and distribution systems and makes the data public…

ps. and of course, there is someone with a fine paper on the topic titled “Complex dynamics of blackouts in power transmission systems” with the following statistics,

“…The average frequency of
blackouts in the United States is about one every 13 days. This frequency has not changed over the last 30 years. Also the probability distribution of blackout sizes has a power tail; this dependence indicates that the probability of large blackouts is relatively high. Indeed, although large blackouts are rarer than small blackouts, it can be argued that their higher societal cost makes the risk of large blackouts comparable to or exceed the risk of small blackouts…”

and the following chart showing the distribution of blackouts:

Read two articles today, one about a strike by crane and other heavy equipment operators that has stopped all major construction projects in NYC - including the WTC rebuilding, and another about a billionair hedge fund manager complaining about the lack of US-born and educated Ph.D’s to use in his quantitative funds…

Obviously lack of Americans getting graduate degrees in science and math has been a topic beaten to death by every pundit out there. Examples of payscales for medical practitioners and laywers vs. scientists have often been used to explain the disparity. How about payscale for unionized workers?

The Post aritcle about the strike contained a table, missing in the online edition, listing the average salary for a “nuclear scientist” (however defined) at $32/hour or so. That’s around $65,000 a year. Nice, but that’s nothing compared to $80/hour for crane operators. Why would anyone want to get a math Ph.D when they could make twice as much money operating a backhoe or a construction crane?

I do not see why MIT math Ph.D is not going to be good enough for Simons’ office, but it is easy to imagine that there just are not enough MIT, Cal.Tech. and similar Ph.D’s awarded to feed the US Market. By contrast, someone like Pavel Volfbeyn or Alexander Belopolsky (discussed in the Simons article) with degrees from a Russian MFTI (MIT equivalent) cannot possibly make as much money in Russia as here (requesting 3-4 miliion per year), at least legally.

As any other self-respecting blog-head, I have a proposition. If indeed the demand for mathematicians and scientists is so great, their prospects so bright, then why does not Simons and other people who hire them give every US-born or -eduated Ph.D a 2 or 5-year contract to work in their firms. Let them make enough money to go back to being professors or high-school teachers. In fact, you could make it a condition. I do not know if it is going to change the reality of how many people can graduate from MIT and the like, and that other countries will have bright graduates from their countries’ top schools who will come to US to make their millions because they cannot do so in India or Russia or China. I do know that you are not going to get more people to study math when one can make twice as much money working for a union that would go on strike when offered a contract like this:

The workers, who run cranes, backhoes, compressors and other pieces of heavy equipment, earn $73 to $82 an hour, including benefits.

They’re among the highest paid blue-collar workers in the city.

They rejected an offer that would have given them 6 percent raises annually over five years, with a guarantee of no layoffs.

signing off…

It was nice, refreshing, slightly wierd.

Such things are always easy to spot, since there is a small crowd of tourists milling around, trying to photograph the landmark this way and that. So did I.

I get asked whether this is photoshopped. It is not. Strangely, I have had trouble finding its exact provenance on the net. I know the original fountain is called the Medici Fountain with a sculpture of Galatea by Auguste-Louis-Marie Ottin, but I could not figure out who put the “face” there, and why.

I have been blogging, under various semi-transparent nicknames for over two years now. Two years ago, it was pretty simple to get started - not too many people blogging, sharing their intimate thoughts for everyone to see. Still, the key to success has aways been to post continuously, according to some easily discernable schedule. Stick to the topic you know something about, etc.

To gather search engine rankings I should now declare that there are 7 rules of blogging guaranteed to make you a success.

(amazingly google does not find any entrees matching that string. yet.)

(more…)

One of the reasons I sometimes feel like writing is to express my old-timer’s dissatifaction along the lines of “worst website ever.” I am sort of an old-timer for the Internet, and increasingly it feels that way. How do I know? Well, when I see the same idea making rounds for the third time, having ignominously died twice before, and pitched by different people but never anyone over 25, I get a strong sense of deja vu.

Sometimes, however, I feel like this whole Web thing might work out after all. I still (sometimes) get the same thrill from using Amazon as I did in 1996. Then it was the sheer exhiliration of ordering a real book through virtual ether. Now, it is the quiet happiness of a parent who can find and order four different books and have the receipt for it in under one hundred seconds and truly expect them to show up at the house in three days. Sure, I handed over all sorts of information to the good folks in Seattle. They have my birthdays, addresses, even credit cards. But then I can order four books in one hundred seconds (I warned you about deja vu) and go have tea after a stressful day.

Tomorrow is another one. See you then.

… Allow me to introduce myself. This is definitely is not going to be a witty post (just look at the time) or an informative one. In fact, I would be very surprised if anyone ever read this post. Based on my previous experience, it will take a year or so before this content is “authoritative”, meaning stale, enough to be pushed up in any kind of search by Google. Still, I will list some things I expect to be true of this weblog.

• I hope to gain publicity by mentioning names of other bloggers and well-known books
• I may transfer some of the better, IMO, posts from my other blogs here in order to fool readers into thinking I am writing new content
• I am a serial blogger-starter-upper. Every other time I have failed to post continuously, and have let the site die a slow, twitching death. (Actually, one of them is doing better the longer I do not post…) . I am hoping that I will have more luck updating my own website than I did unrelated URLs. Perhaps shame will spur me to more action.

I am new to WordPress, and hopeless in Web design, so I apologize for the look of the side-bar. I installed a nice template but then screwed it up by trying to customize. The “subscribe to feed” form is particularly heinous. The “LinkedIn” profile button is not much better.

Interests… Right, this is a personal site now… I am avery amateur photographer and so expect to see pictures of children, flowers, and streets. Or not. The photography page on this site contains some basic links for my photographs.

Welcome & Enjoy.