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Exercising authorial privilege, I deleted the boring notes about the economy
that were briefly posted here, in order to bring you, instead, this exciting
picture. To be precise, this is the least work I've ever done,
and the least specialized equipment I've ever used, to get a
successful deep-sky picture.
This is a 5-second exposure (in moonlight!) with a Canon 40D on a fixed tripod with a
Sigma 50-mm f/2.8 lens wide open, at ISO 1600, with in-camera noise reduction.
The image was subsequently processed with Photoshop and Neat Image, but heavy processing
was not required — what you see here is very close to what came out of the camera.
Omega Centauri is the most spectacular globular cluster in the sky, but seen from our
latitude, it barely clears the southern horizon. It is the fuzzball at the lower right.
The defunct brands
Circuit City and
CompUSA are back,
and they are both basically
TigerDirect
under other names.
(Which is good; TigerDirect is a good company to deal with.)
Lots of new software to test: Windows 7 RC, Visual Studio 2010 Beta, and Windows Vista SP2 are all out. I haven't
installed any of them yet.
A thought about school vouchers: If public colleges operated like public schools, you would be assigned one
college to attend and couldn't apply to any other; the quality of your education would be strictly tied to where your
parents live; and public-college administrators would gripe about the very existence of private colleges. Thank goodness none of
these is the case. In fact, Georgia has the equivalent of a voucher program for college — the state
HOPE scholarship program will pay your state-college tuition or, if you choose, a substantial amount toward
your private-college tuition.
An odd byway of church history: During the Middle Ages the story came in from India of a saint who had been
raised in isolation by his father, a king, but who became a Christian anyhow. He was given the name Josaphat
(initially given as Ioasaph or Iodasaph,
and then remodeled to resemble Jehoshaphat in the Old Testament).
Knowledgeable people eventually realized that this was the story of the Buddha, mistaken
for a Christian saint. The name Ioasaph came from Greek via Arabic, where it was something like Yodasaf,
and in Arabic, Y and B are easy to
mix up; the word is actually a corruption of Bodhisattva.
Now you know. This is, by the way, uncontroversial;
it is not a new discovery or speculation.
Note: Once the name Josaphat became well-known, it was
given to other people, one of whom became a (real) saint (in 17th-century Lithuania).
So there was a real St. Josaphat as well as the legendary one.
I was experimenting with a PIC16F690 microcontroller on the PICkit-2 demo board.
Following one of the example programs, I set PORTC to output and then did a
BSF PORTC,0
to turn on the lowest-numbered LED. It worked fine.
Next, I decided to turn on three LEDs, so I changed that line of my program
to three lines:
BSF PORTC,0
BSF PORTC,1
BSF PORTC,2
Only the first and third LEDs came on. Why?
Important clue #1: I had no trouble turning on all three LEDs with the instructions
MOVLW B'00000111'
MOVWF PORTC
This ruled out incorrect TRISC settings and various kinds of hardware problems.
Important clue #2: The MPLAB simulator also gave anomalous results, but not
quite the same as my anomalous results. This puzzled me.
The solution:
BSF is a read-modify-write operation.
It tells the CPU to read the contents of a memory location, set one of the bits to 1,
and write it back into the same location.
And PORTC is a memory location, but not a normal memory location.
Since it can be used for output, digital input, and even (on the 'F690) analog input,
PORTC has separate circuits for reading and writing. The value you read in is
not going to be the same as the value you've output.
And that's why each BSF turned on one bit, but often failed to preserve the bits
turned on by previous BSF instructions.
Now you know.
The latest MPASM assembler does not use the old .COD file format, so it no
longer bumps into the old 62-character path length limit.
There are other good developments. The latest MPASM is easier to use than its predecessors;
it steers you toward generating relocatable code (so the "wrong" way of doing things is no longer
the default); it comes with a C compiler that looks good; and it supports PICkit-2 as a programming
device.
I haven't tested any of this exhaustively, of course. More news soon.
The new credit-card legislation, in final form, is now on line
here and,
in elegantly typeset PDF,
here.
I predict that the next hot financial issue will be interchange fees,
the 2% to 5% charges that merchants pay in order to process credit-card transactions.
The new law includes a section commissioning a study of interchange fees.
Most of us don't realize that the merchants are often required to keep the fees secret
and forbidden to charge extra for taking a credit card.
Since a retailer's whole profit (not markup, but profit, after all business expenses)
is typically something like 4%, those interchange fees can't just be absorbed.
Indirectly, they are a substantial part of our cost of living.
Nobody minded interchange fees as long as they could assume that credit cards make
people spend more money. But now that all of America is getting on a budget,
that assumption no longer holds.
As often happens, what I'm seeing in the economy is different from what the
news media are reporting. Supposedly, before the new laws take effect, credit-card
companies are going to raise everybody's interest rates sky-high and lower their
credit limits.
Well, out of the blue, Chase has just lowered the interest rates on two
credit cards that I use occasionally. They are leaving the credit limits alone.
I have two thoughts about this.
(1) Do I lead a charmed life? Or is it just that I pay my bills? The world
seems to be full of people who don't actually make the payments (even minimum
payments) on time. Some of these are genuine hardship cases, and some aren't.
I put some of the blame on the lender if they didn't verify ability to pay.
But not all of it. Word has gotten out that credit-card issuers will
settle unpaid debts for reduced amounts of money, and you should hear the people
calling financial radio and TV shows asking how to get out of paying their bills.
(2) If the credit-card issuers actually did what they were threatening last week, they would
simply put themselves out of business. Raise all the interest rates? Lower all
the credit limits? OK, we'll just go away! That's not actually what they want.
Maybe we're heading into a world where
not everybody can get a lot of credit.
You need income and evidence of responsible behavior.
I remember that world. We lived in it until about 1990, didn't we?
Everything old is new again. Unexpanded cellulose sponges are in the grocery stores
again as a special "biodegradable" product.
They are about 3 mm thick when taken out of the package, and they expand to about 12 mm
when wet.
In their thin state, they're easy to trim to fit a soldering station,
and because they're not plastic, they don't melt onto the hot iron when you wipe it.
(They're used damp, of course.)
These sponges had become a hard-to-find specialty item. Not any more!
My graduate student David Robinson had a spooky experience the other day while trying out some
simple circuits on a Radio Shack educational kit (apparently one that is no longer made).
He had two circuits on the breadboard at once. One was an LED and resistor. The other one,
more complicated, did not concern us:
When he turned the power switch off, the LED continued to glow dimly!
After a while, we figured it out. The power switch on this very low-cost kit does not actually
switch all of the batteries out of the circuit. Instead, it switches the ground wire, and then:
When it's turned off, you can have a kind of backflow problem that is ordinarily more
familiar to plumbers than electrical engineers!
In our
last exciting episode,
we established that, if a Windows Forms application needs to busy-wait,
it must do this:
while (some condition)
{
Application.DoEvents();
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1);
}
in order to handle Windows events while waiting, without tying up the CPU excessively.
Also, the programmer must prevent the user from doing things that are incompatible
with the background thread, like launching the same computation again.
Today, let me contrast two paradigms of multi-threaded programming.
Let me also make it clear that I'm only talking about Windows GUI applications.
A console application, with no GUI that needs to remain responsive, can indeed
simply launch threads and Thread.Join() them
with no further ado, because it's OK for a console application to stand still
while waiting.
Suppose you have a button
that launches a long computation which you want to do in the background.
The two paradigms that I have in mind are the following.
Paradigm 1:
The button's event handler
disables the button (so it won't be pressed redundantly),
launches the background process,
busy-waits until it finishes,
re-enables the button,
and exits.
Paradigm 2:
The button's event handler
disables the button (so it won't be pressed redundantly),
launches the background process,
and exits.
The background process:
runs, and,
when it finishes, raises an event.
The handler of that event:
re-enables the button,
does anything else needed,
and exits.
In Paradigm 2, Application.DoEvents() is not needed
because the window's own event handlers are never blocked from working.
Paradigm 2 corresponds to the BackgroundWorker class
in C#. It's entirely event-driven. Further, if the background process needs to report
anything to the calling process while it's running,
it can raise a ReportProgress
event and pass one argument of any type.
That's how intermediate output can be written to the screen
and progress bars can be updated.
Fans of my vintage 1995 Oldsmobile will be pleased to know that all its
quirks were repaired today. The horn switches were replaced (without
replacing the air bag); the turn signal reset mechanism was replaced;
the air conditioner blower motor was replaced; and a crack in the inside
left door panel spontaneously healed itself (by re-engaging a clip that
had come loose). Now, somebody please buy a few hundred
books to pay for this...
The Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights has passed the Senate, and
already the banking industry is whining that they're being deprived
of their livelihood.
To which I say, Nonsense! Credit-card issuers collect about 3% on
each transaction when it takes place. This ought to be enough to sustain
them, even if they never collect any interest or late fees at all.
After all, they willingly run the debit-card system, which is interest-free,
on much less than 3%.
(Credit expert John Ulzheimer is on TV right now, also saying Nonsense very loudly.
His message:
If the banks downgrade the credit-card system
as much as they are threatening to,
the customers will just go away, and then where will they be?)
I'll have more analysis of the legislation later.
In the meantime, you can read the text
here.
(The absolutely final version wasn't there yet, as this is written.)
The other day I had an interesting talk with one of the architects of the
nationwide credit-card processing system. (I won't name him because he came
by to talk about another confidential project, not financial in nature.)
Based on what he hold me, and other sources, here's what I think happened.
The original idea of risk-based pricing was a sound one.
There is some combination of interest rate, annual fee, and credit limit
that will make it profitable to issue a credit card to anyone. You just
have to set them correctly. It's like insurance policies.
This is counterbalanced by a principle of ethics: Some offers are so bad
that people will only take them if they've been tricked. No matter
how much you believe in a free market, do you really think people understand
the 29% universal-default rate when they sign up for a Visa card? It's
hidden in fine print, and there are even bank executives who don't know about it.
Back in the 1980s, banks didn't have to worry about ethics because
regulators did their worrying for them. Credit-card issuers grumbled
about usury laws, which made part of the risk-based pricing system impossible
(if you calculated that someone needed a 20% interest rate, you couldn't
issue him a credit card at all). They didn't seem to appreciate why
the usury laws existed.
All of a sudden, the Supreme Court did away with state regulation of
credit cards, and (until today) comparable federal regulation was not put
in place. Meanwhile, my impression is that the real brains of the credit-card
system had moved on to other things, leaving the whole industry in incompetent hands.
Bizarre things started to happen.
Somehow, credit cards were issued without verifying ability to pay.
"Penalties" became a major income stream.
Today, regulation is back, and we are being warned that credit cards are going
to become harder to get. Some people won't be able to get them at all.
Yes — you heard it here, folks — money will no longer be lent
to people who can't pay it back. Will wonders never cease?
When I was but a lad of 45, I often used Application.DoEvents() in C# programs
to make the program respond immediately to mouse events, keystrokes, etc., which it would otherwise ignore
during a long computation.
There are several reasons why this is not a good idea.
(0) It's usually more than you need. If all you want to do is make sure the form updates,
see if something like this.Update() or
textBox1.Update()
will do what you need.
Instead of performing the update event, this merely places it in the queue
for the event-handling loop to handle, and a well-tested Windows subsystem
makes sure it behaves reasonably.
(1) It's CPU-intensive. If you're "busy-waiting" for an asynchronous change of some kind, and you
do this:
while (some condition)
{
Application.DoEvents();
}
the current application thread will go to 100% CPU. At the very least, if you must busy-wait,
do this:
while (some condition)
{
Application.DoEvents();
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1);
}
and the CPU load will be much more reasonable.
(2) It can create re-entrant messes.
(See a lucid explanation in JFO's Coding.)
That is, it can allow the user to do things that shouldn't be done while the computation is going on —
even close the form!
Suppose you write an event handler for a button click, and it contains a loop that
executes Application.DoEvents() repeatedly.
What happens if somebody clicks the button again while
the computation from the first click is still going on?
If you hadn't monkeyed about with Application.DoEvents(),
your button wouldn't be listening for clicks yet, and that's the way you want it.
When you "keep the button responsive" you give it the ability to launch multiple copies of its own event handler.
Or, if the user clicks some other button or closes the form, you could yank something out from under the button event
handler that's still running (such as closing a form on which controls are being manipulated).
The moral? "Keeping the window responsive" is a concept that requires thought. You cannot both handle events and
not handle them.
Normally, if you want to maintain responsiveness,
the long computation should be put in a separate thread, which runs asynchronously,
and its communication with the main window should be strictly limited.
You will want to think clearly about what events in the window are possible and what should be disallowed.
I hope to write more about this later.
Melody, who takes pictures almost every day at
her job,
is going to get a lot of use out of the lens I reviewed yesterday.
Here are a couple of her pictures:
The first one was handheld for 1/6 second at f/32.
The second one is more conventional, 1/100 at f/7.
I'm thinking of buying another lens just like it!
Image stabilization has matured — this lens performs better, in published tests,
than much more expensive earlier models — and it does more for the usefulness
of the camera than anything else I've come across lately.
What is unusual about these two pictures? They have
extreme depth of field.
Objects are in focus, at once, at many different distances from the camera.
This is achieved by using a very small lens opening, f/36, in
imitation of Group f/64.
These were taken with a Canon EOS 40D and my new
Canon 18-55 EF-S IS lens, which replaces
an earlier 18-55 non-IS lens.
Verdict? Image stabilization works.
I can take sharp handheld photos with a 1/8-second exposure,
which means I can use really small f-stops for depth of field,
and catering to that need, the lens goes all the way down to f/36.
Of course, at f/36 there is considerable loss of sharpness from
diffraction, but that's the kind of blur that is easy to fix via
digital sharpening.
Here's how
to make a credit card into a plastic bracelet.
The introductory paragraph contains a very apt
economic observation:
"Credit cards are based on the obsolete premise that in the future you’ll have more money than you have today."
Which leads me to think that when inflation comes back, credit cards will, too.
Just three years ago, would it have been chic (or even amusing) to wear
cut-up credit cards as jewelry? Of course not. We've had a cultural shift.
Enough economics — over to electronics for one day.
I've found a
fascinating
Japanese web site
(which I can't read)
about circuits with 12-volt vacuum tubes,
with pictures of a very handy breadboarding setup.
(Index page here.)
It's an interesting circuit — he actually drives a speaker with a 12-volt tube
whose plate current is about 2.1 mA. For an output transformer he uses a 100-volt to 3.15-volt
power transformer, which would give an impedance ratio of (100/3.15)^2 = 1000, turning an
8-ohm speaker into an 8000-ohm load. He might get 30 milliwatts out of the speaker —
I wouldn't expect it to be loud.
For more on 12-volt tubes see
Jeff Duntemann's
12-volt tube page,
which is where I found the link.
Yes, you can build vacuum-tube circuits that run on a single 12-volt supply.
Since breadboards are normally rated for 250 volts, there's no reason
you couldn't build conventional 150-volt circuits this way too.
More things to do after I retire...
(Originally asked by Pete Albrecht:) Why do you think you'll sell
more cars with fewer dealers? Those "deadwood" dealers weren't
selling negative numbers of cars, were they?
Today, your local newspaper is probably reporting
both that prices are up and that they're sharply down.
To make sense of the confusion, I grabbed a couple of
graphs from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics.
Here is the seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index (CPI) since the
beginning of 2006:
Note that this is seasonally adjusted and won't agree with the unadjusted
raw numbers that you see in the newspaper.
Looking at the graph, what do you see? A huge gasoline price spike last summer.
If you leave out food and energy prices, which are volatile, you get this:
Mr. Bernanke's target is for the CPI to rise about 2.5% per year, i.e., about 5 points
per year on this scale. And that's what it's doing.
Looking back at the first graph,
for the next several months, the news media are going to be reporting an "unprecedented
year-over-year drop" in the CPU.
That's only because there was an unprecedented spike last summer.
We are not in a deflationary spiral just because gasoline is no longer $4 a gallon.
In fact, most of us are glad gasoline is no longer $4 a gallon.
Whether the CPI is a fair measure of the price level is another issue.
Some claim that, due to changes in methodology made more than a decade ago, it reads low;
the real price level increases more than the CPI does.
(One issue is whether to track the price of houses.
I think the current practice of leaving them out
is correct, since houses are investments, not consumables.)
Others, including Mr. Bernanke,
claim the CPI reads high because people change their purchasing habits very quickly to
select goods whose prices are not rising; thus, compared to 1960, we spend more on stereos and
less on shoes.
It turns out my Oldsmobile's horn system
can be repaired more cheaply than I thought.
In a week I will again have a fully functional car rather than a kluge.
CNN remarks on
"weisure," the blending of work and leisure,
which I interpret as the end of the arbitrary, sharp split between home and workplace
that was introduced by the Industrial Revolution. Farmers have always had their work and
their leisure in more or less the same place. So did craftsmen who didn't get swept up into factory work.
One of the reasons I believe in God is that, without
the concept of a supreme being, the world would be
an infinite number of unfathomable mysteries,
and there would be no reason to suppose my thoughts make any sense (not even my
speculations about the nonexistence of God). This is an old thought, familiar
to Augustine and Aquinas, but in modern times lots of people have felt forbidden
to think it. Even people who are far from Christian theology and merely want to
believe in a divine First Cause.
Enter, now,
an excellent review by Stanley Fish
of an apparently good book by Terry Eagleton which I haven't read.
Some choice quotes from the review:
The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer —
such questions [about ultimate value and origins] should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.
And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for
explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not
what they do.
When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of "the telescope and the microscope"
religion "no longer offers an explanation of anything important," Eagleton replies,
"But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place.
It's rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov."
Of course, the very existence of science derives from the notion of a Creator.
Here is another good Eagleton quote (pointed out by my colleague Nathan Gilmour) that didn't make
it into Fish's review:
Because there is no necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the
laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works.
This is the task of science. There is thus a curious connection between the doctrine of
creation out of nothing and the career of Richard Dawkins.
Without God, Dawkins would be out of a job. It is thus particularly churlish of him to call
the existence of his employer into question.
And Fish's last lines, about Eagleton's expression of frustration, really resonate with me:
[Eagleton] is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy
refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like
Hitchens and Dawkins.
I know just how he feels.
So do I.
Dawkins and Hitchens demand our attention by opposing freedom of religion.
If they weren't out to reduce my freedom, I'd ignore them.
I'm against monopolies, in general.
Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to do anything unfair to suppress Apple or Linux.
But I don't understand why the Justice Department feels they shouldn't be
allowed to bundle Internet Explorer
with Windows.
Greg Mankiw argues cogently as follows:
Is it bad for consumers when a company bundles products together? My father bought a primitive car air conditioner and installed it himself in our 1962 Buick. Now, cars and air conditioners are routinely sold together — and consumers are better served. A three-piece suit, a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and a semester at Harvard are all made of components that could be sold separately. Not even the most zealous Justice Department lawyer would try to break up these products.
When a company (Microsoft) has a monopoly over a valuable product (Windows), it appears to have consumers over a barrel, forcing them to buy something they don't want. But why would it? A monopolist does not gain by bundling its valuable good with an undesirable one. The best way for a monopolist to profit is to provide precisely the product that consumers want...
Read the rest.
I think part of what is going on in their muddled heads is that
they think Microsoft is forcing people to buy Internet Explorer
and pay extra for it. Not at all. They're not even forcing people to use it.
I got IE8 free from Microsoft and am using Firefox anyhow.
This year I am, thank goodness, not "out for the summer."
As commonly happens when I have a research grant, I'm full-time with
the University all summer long. And in fact we're quite busy right now,
so please pardon my lack of responses to e-mail.
But, for the first time in several months, I am in a position to take
new consulting jobs,
at least if they're not too big. I'm allowed to consult up to a total of
8 hours a week while working full-time for UGA.
I'm a bit sad to find that the University's official style manual says
University of Georgia is abbreviated UGA, not UGa.
One of the main reasons, I suspect, is that Microsoft Word's spelling checker
won't let you type UGa.
Of course, U.Ga. clearly stands for "University of Georgia."
Without punctuation, this is UGa, and without lowercase letters,
UGA.
But please don't call it U.G.A. — "University of Georgia A...what?"
The name of the university is not "University of Georgia at Athens" as some people think.
There is no University of Georgia anywhere else.
Although we do have some extension sites, we do not have complete universities
under the same name in other
towns. The other University System institutions have their own names, such as
Valdosta State University, not like the University of California at Berkeley,
Los Angeles, San Diego, or what have you.
Modern DSLR lenses, even low-end ones, are sharp.This is part of the same picture I posted yesterday
(the full-resolution version of it, of course, not the downsampled
image that I put on the Web).
Canon 40D camera body, low-end Canon 18-55mm (USM) zoom lens,
exposure 1/200 second at f/10, ISO 800, zoomed to 39 mm.
No tripod, of course.
Standard Photoshop editing was done, including contrast adjustments
to the face area and the diploma and sharpening of the diploma.
We could never have done this with Tri-X Pan.
Nowadays, a DSLR sensor is sharper than most lenses.
Back in the film era, almost all lenses were sharper than the film.
Sharon is the first of her generation to get a college degree.
(Cathy is farther along with her studies, but the University of
Georgia does not give a diploma after just two years.)
Several more college degrees are coming in rapid succession
in the next few years.
I've just been told that a short snippet of one of my recent speeches
is
on YouTube.
It's only 37 seconds extracted
from this.
Most of the speech makes more sense than that...
The Daily Notebook will resume in a couple of days. We have a lot going on,
including Sharon's upcoming graduation from
Emory-at-Oxford
with an associate's degree (two-year degree, half of a B.A.).
Since this is only the first half, Cathy is wishing her "Hap Gradu".
I now belong to
LinkedIn,
FiledBy,
and
Facebook
and will be glad to accept network requests ("friend requests") from friends and correspondents.
(Especially long-lost old friends — I'd be glad to hear from you!)
President Obama is rapidly beefing up federal spending on scientific research.
As a scientist, I stand to benefit directly from this, so I should be in favor of it.
And indeed I'm in favor of basic research. But think about what might go wrong.
As one of Obama's own
economic advisors has pointed out,
the supply of scientists is inelastic — it can't grow or shrink rapidly.
So the most immediate effect will be higher pay for the scientists who are already there.
(Good for me!) Numerous university professors will get to work 12 instead of 9 months per year.
The second effect is that in five or ten years, there will be plenty more scientists.
That's how long it takes to recruit bright students into Ph.D. programs and educate them.
As they come onto the job market, the initial boom will be over and salaries will moderate.
Third, in ten or fifteen years, funding will be cut back again — politics being
what it is, we won't keep up extraordinary funding levels forever — and then
scientists' careers will be sacrificed to downsizing.
And the worst thing about it is, nobody will see it as downsizing.
Most research scientists aren't federal employees and don't have civil service jobs. They work for universities,
where competition for tenure is ruthless.
Their employers will say
that some scientists are being let go because they are "not as productive" as their colleagues —
productive meaning successful and/or lucky at bringing in grant money.
I've seen this happen before as research funding fluctuated through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Particularly in the biological sciences, there are platoons of Ph.D.'s whose entire careers
are contingent on grant money — meaning they could be wiped out by a sudden shift in the political wind.
This is much worse than depending on a fluctuating business market whose fluctuations can be
foreseen. The Congressman from Podunk doesn't care about giving you a soft landing
when he and his colleagues decide that
they don't understand your research,
so it ought not to be funded.
All my own recent research grants have been from industry, not government, so I've been somewhat
insulated from this. I'm glad I'm not a newly minted biomedical Ph.D. who needs 30 continuous
years of NIH grants from now until retirement!
I can confirm at first hand
(if only anecdotally)
President Obama's observation
that
the overgrowth of the financial sector drew too many Americans away from professions
such as science and engineering.
When I was at Yale, it seemed that every mathematically inclined undergraduate
wanted to be an "investment banker," whatever that was
(only the cognoscenti had heard of it).
By the mid-1980s, I was at UGA and it seemed that everybody wanted to major in "business"
(except for the thousand or so who wanted "computer science" until they found
out it wasn't just word processing and spreadsheets).
Business-school students printed a T-shirt showing
a BMW in front of their college. Salve lucrum...
The notion became current that financiers are glamorous and drive BMWs, but engineers
and scientists (and even real economists)
are dorks who wear crooked ties like Dilbert.
And behind it was the notion that real work should be done in Japan and India —
we Americans would just manage and finance it. Weren't the British saying such things
just before they lost their prominence in the world economy?
To this day, plenty of people maintain that the state of Georgia needs hundreds of colleges
offering degrees in "business," but that the two engineering schools that we had in 1885 are still
enough.
My 1995 Oldsmobile is now officially a jalopy — it has had an improvised repair.
The horn switch failed and the horn started honking spontaneously as I drove along.
I yanked a fuse and took the car to
Car Craft,
where Bob Richards, the mechanic I've known and trusted for 20 years,
advised that a full repair would cost $800 because it involves an air bag module.
[He continued digging for information and later found
out that this is not the case.]
Instead, Bob cut a wire and left it to me to install my own horn button.
So I got a marine-type horn button, spray-painted it to match the dashboard,
contact-cemented it to the top of the dashboard
(no screws — I want to be able to undo this later),
and (on Saturday afternoon) finally completed the wiring.
If the engine and transmission continue to hold up well, I'll probably have a fully
authentic repair done in a year or two.
Not one of you wrote in
to tell me that, when initially uploaded,
yesterday's entry was dated May 10 instead of May 2.
Fixed now...
I see definite signs of the recession ending, or at least bottoming. Go to your favorite stock market
site and
compare
the S&P 500 with the Volatility Index (.VIX).
(Note to people reading this in the future: When you click there, you'll get a current chart,
not necessarily the chart for the day this was written.)
Declining volatility, not just rising stock prices, is what convinces me things are returning to
normal. (We could also think about the volatility of the volatility...) Then there's improving
consumer sentiment, and no deflation if you
don't count food and energy, i.e., mostly gasoline.
The New York Times
has an interesting think piece about the efforts to rescue Chrysler Corporation.
It's a strange episode no matter how you view it. But the most interesting observation?
"This may come to be seen as Mr. Obama’s 'Nixon in China' moment.
Just as it took a conservative Republican to open relations with the largest
Communist country in the world, it took a liberal Democrat to break the U.A.W."
(Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
In other financial news,
the
interest rate on Series I Savings Bonds has dropped to zero.
That's because the inflation rate has gone negative (about -5% annualized for the past
six months, due to falling gasoline prices). The bonds pay a fixed rate (fixed for life,
depending on when you bought them) plus the inflation rate, and the sum of the two is
guaranteed never to go below zero. No matter; I'm going to hang onto my bonds and
wait for the inflation that's coming. Because I bonds are linked to the non-seasonally
adjusted CPI, we tend to have alternating half-years of high and low rates.
Much-needed credit-card regulation is marching toward enactment,
but it
won't cover "business" credit cards. Sole proprietors should continue
using personal credit cards for business expenses.
Finally, read about
how John D. Rockefeller
saved the whales (by making kerosene cheap enough to kill off the market for whale oil for lamps).
Scroll to the middle of the page, which is about other good deeds inadvertently done by "evil"
19th-century capitalists.
Bottom line? In a market economy, you can't get rich unless you offer
people something better than what they already have. It may not be as good as they later wish, but
it has to be better than what they already have, or they won't take it. This is related to
Doug Downing's
observation about sweatshops:
If people work in them voluntarily, it's because the alternatives are even worse,
and what we need to do is open up more opportunities rather than forcibly close the sweatshops.
Authorship is coming fast and furious this year — here's my third
new book, and the only intentional one.
(The first two were, respectively, an unexpected reprint of an older book
and a Spanish translation of a recent one.)
This one is a milestone because Cathy is on the title page as an author
(along with Doug Downing, who originated the project; myself; Melody;
and "with the assistance of" Sharon).
As programming languages go, HTML is not only weirder than we imagine,
it is weirder than we can imagine.
Much of the weirdness is concealed by the fact that web browsers routinely
ignore what they don't understand, without giving error messages,
so you can write very bad code and not know it,
especially if you test with only one browser.
Last night I ran into a discrepancy between the way Firefox and Internet Explorer
handled a commented-out section of a web page. And that led me to open Pandora's box.
We all know, or think we know, that HTML comments begin with
"<!--"
and end with
"-->".
That is a dangerous half-truth.
The true (and strange) definition is that a comment begins with "<!",
contains zero or more comments delimited by "--" "--",
and ends with ">".
At least according to one source.
I know from direct experience that not everyone understands it exactly that way.
There is method to their madness.
The idea is to allow you to put comments into declarations like this:
but you probably can't trust web browsers to interpret such things correctly.
The bottom line? A comment should never contain "--" for any purpose other than
marking its beginning or end. This is slightly annoying. Not only can you not
comment out a comment, you can't comment out anything containing two hyphens in a row.
Nor should you ever end a comment with "--->" or anything
else containing superfluous hyphens.
I'm told that in HTML 5.0, sanity will prevail, and comments will simply begin and end
with
"<!--"
and end with
"-->"
the way we always thought they did.
Thanks to several people in the newsgroup
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, I've come up with the best way to adapt
web pages to screens of variable size.
What you do is set a maximum width, so the lines won't get too long on a wide screen,
but let the text rewrap to a narrower width (insofar as the content allows it)
when the screen is very small.
I've implemented this in the Daily Notebook, starting today, and you'll notice lots of
small changes in layout. You may have problems if you are using a browser older than
Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3, but such is the price of progress.
To do the trick, follow roughly this schema, which shows the important parts in boldface:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Title goes here</title>
</head> <body style="max-width:800px; margin:0 auto 0 auto; padding:10px">
...body of your web page here... </body>
</html>
The DOCTYPE declaration is important in order to get all web browsers to act alike;
it declares that you're using HTML 4.01.
The max-width style attribute is not recognized by some older browsers.
Declaring padding:10px is optional but guarantees at least 10 pixels of margin
no matter how small the screen is.
In the Daily Notebook, paragraphs (HTML code p)
also have a max-width rather than a width,
so under some conditions they can rewrap independently of what is around them.
If anybody is reading the Daily Notebook on a cell phone,
this should help.
You will gather that the Daily Notebook is now much closer to conformity to HTML 4.01,
although it isn't perfect because I see no reason to rewrite code that works well.
Econ-observation of the day:
I think I picked up whiffs of the real-estate bubble starting to burstback in 2005, and indeed even earlier,
when people were getting (as Jeff would say) "twitchy" about property values.
In our own neighborhood there was a move to regulate the mailboxes "to improve
property values." Given that hardly any houses were for sale at the time, what
was the point? Trying to make reality keep up with imagination?
Entries are most often uploaded around 0000 UT on the date given, which is the previous
evening in the United States. When I'm busy, entries are generally shorter and are
uploaded as much as a whole day in advance.
Minor corrections are often uploaded the following day. If you see a minor error,
please look again a day later to see if it has been corrected.
If what you are looking for is not here, please look at
previous months.
