Will this winter ever end?

We are having an unusually wet, cold, and seemingly endless winter this year, and I've never been so sick and tired of winter. It's always either raining, or threatening snow, or clear and cold with a 20-mph wind. Normally, by now we would have had some warm days, and even the cold days would have little wind.

And now they're predicting snow on Tuesday, March 2. Recall that our all-time record-breaking snow was on March 1 of last year. Apart from that, though, last winter was mild.

The weather explains, inter alia, the lack of astrophotography for the past two or three months!

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First sign that credit cards may die off

Odd financial news of the week: Chase is turning down customers, basically saying, "You pay your balance off every month and we won't be able to collect interest from you." (As if they didn't make any money from interchange fees.)

This could be how credit cards die off. I'm one of many who pay them off every month. If I'm not "profitable" because I don't pay interest, lenders may stop giving me credit cards. An intermediate step would be to start charging an annual fee — which I'll be unwilling to pay. As long as I have one or two satisfactory credit cards without annual fees, I'll gladly say goodbye to any that want to charge me.

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A culture of repair?

I hope that our new economy will include more emphasis on repairing and preserving our possessions rather than just throwing them away. We used to throw away our cars every couple of years. Not any more. Let's apply the same notion to other material possessions. I think that, beyond its economic benefits, repair is good for the soul.

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Windows PC loses Internet connection upon rebooting

To be precise, loses DNS addresses, although it took me a while to figure that out.

The symptom was that my Windows 7 64-bit PC would lose its Internet connection (while retaining some LAN access) when rebooted or freshly booted. For a long time I thought I needed a new Realtek Ethernet driver, but several new versions didn't fix the problem.

I found I could regain Internet access by disabling Local Area Connection and then re-enabling it.

On close examination (using ipconfig /all), I found that when in the malfunctioning state, the computer thought it had two gateways (0.0.0.0 and 192.168.1.1; only the latter was correct) and no DNS server. It could still do nslookup if I gave the IP number for the DNS server.

It is DHCP-served by a Linksys router, which is supposed to give it the DNS information obtained from the ISP.

At the moment, all I have is a better workaround — I've hard-coded the IP address, netmask, gateway, and DNS server addresses, and have turned off IPv6. The problem has gone away, but this isn't totally satisfactory because my ISP will eventually change the DNS server addresses and then I'll have problems again.

Solution, anyone?

Note: Doing an ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew did not fix the problem. Turning off IPv6 by itself did not fix the problem, but did cure the computer of the odd delusion that it was connected to two LANs.

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Economic recovery? Of course not...

As people bewail the failure of new-home sales to recover, we need to remember that America needs to stop trying to make twice as many houses and automobiles as anyone wants. (Especially houses — you can't export them.)

My point is, no, the housing and automobile industries are not going to "recover" to pre-recession levels, and we shouldn't try to make them. If "recovery" means continuing to make things people don't want or need, it's a futile goal. Let's put people to work in new jobs making things that are actually wanted.

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What is an application compatibility update?

Windows Vista and 7 have just had a big application compatibility update. What's that?

It's an update to make older software run better with today's Windows.

Crucially, not because there's anything wrong with Windows, but because there are things wrong with the software.

If software actually meets Microsoft's technical requirements, then it runs under the current version of Windows and almost forever afterward.

The trouble is, though, programmers don't follow specifications. They try things and use whatever seems to work. In so doing, they create software that only runs under one particular version of Windows, or even software that relies on a bug in Windows and will quit working as soon as the bug is fixed.

And Microsoft gets all the blame, of course. So they put a tremendous amount of effort into testing old software and making new versions of Windows emulate whatever quirks of old ones that the software might have been relying on.

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Freedom!

I invite all parents of college students to rejoice with us...

We have just filled out our very last FAFSA and CSS Profile!

Sharon has only one year to go, and this is the paperwork for it.

Need-based scholarships are a good thing, but entirely too much like income tax, both economically and in terms of paperwork.

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Mars again

The air was much steadier on the evening of the 20th than the previous evening, and with Mars high in the sky, I got a surprisingly sharp image despite its great distance from earth.

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Happy birthday, Cathy!

Short notes

Anti-intellectualism in Alabama: The lawyer appointed to defend Amy Bishop (the Huntsville shooter) has said some odd things and I'm afraid he's going to argue that people with high IQs can't be trusted. That's something I encountered as a child, but I thought it had disappeared from our popular culture as the educational level rose. He is quoted as saying "the high IQ in my opinion is sometimes not good for people." Evidence to support this opinion? None.

To be lucky, keep your eyes open: People who have "good luck" are attentive to their environment and look at things besides what they've been told to look at. Another way of saying this is that they cast a broad net. Have you ever encountered people who seem determined not to know, learn, or notice anything not strictly required? They don't have "good luck" because they miss opportunities right and left.

What went wrong with the American Dream: From about 1915 to 1975, the American standard of living rose because of rising worker productivity (mechanization and rising educational level). After that, people kept it rising by simply borrowing money. And that got us where we are today, according to Kevin Leicht. Or at least, it's the motive behind McMansions — "I've got to have a house bigger than the one I grew up in."

How hard should I try to avoid an IRS audit? Plenty of advice is being given out to tell people how to avoid being audited. To which I say: Stuff and nonsense! I am not going to refrain from legal, productive activities just because they might raise my odds of being audited. I file an honest, if fallible, tax return. If the IRS wants to audit me, let them. If the find that my tax was calculated incorrectly, either I'll pay them or they'll pay me — an honest error could be in either direction.

Lesson? You can lose much more freedom from worrying and listening to rumors than from actual restrictions. Or as C. S. Lewis put it in one of his humorous poems, "Stone walls do not a prison make / half so secure as rigmarole." How much is our economy distorted, not by the way taxes work, but by the way people imagine taxes work?

Just in case you thought Visa was a credit card company, billboards are going up in Washington, D.C., reminding us that Visa is a payment processing system and does not, itself, lend money. I gather they're trying to wash off the scent of the loan sharks...?

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Mars

Here's Mars, which has just made a close approach to the Earth, though it is twice as far away as during its exceptionally close approach in 2003. With an 8-inch telescope, I recorded over 3500 frames of video and stacked the best 3000, then enhanced the detail, using RegiStax software.

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Recursive joke?

"Either be consistent or be inconsistent, but stop switching between the two." — A German computer scientist quoted by E. W. Dijkstra.

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Trivia

(1) If you are reading today's economic news, note that "Treasuries extend losses" doesn't necessary mean anything bad is happening. What it means is that the yield (interest rate) on Treasury bonds is going up — which means that the bonds sell at more of a discount from face value. It's bad news only if you have bonds that you have to sell before they mature. Usually, when bonds go down, stocks go up, and that's what's happening now.

(2) For the first time in a decade I've had to explain to someone that, even on the Internet, "freedom of speech" does not mean that someone else is required to publish your ravings on their web site.

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What we've all wanted to say...

What we've all wanted to say, at one time or another, probably in an online discussion:

"I know there are people who aren't smart enough to understand what I just said. You don't have to offer yourself as proof."

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Econo-miscellany

Mankiw critiques Obama's budget. Key idea: It is not necessary to eliminate the national debt, but it must be kept constant (or shrinking) relative to GDP. Expect more taxes.

I said people would be wanting inflation, and indeed they are.

Credit card delinquency rates are leveling off.

And J. P. Morgan Chase is facing an interesting lawsuit.

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Bad taste award of the day

All day (on the 15th), the Athens Banner-Herald, which is in financial straits, has been running, across its online front page, a big banner ad for an "adult emporium" which I will not describe further here so that my own web page doesn't get blacklisted.

They have thereby rendered their page "not safe for work."

This is a matter of taste, not morality, because I don't actually know what the "emporium" is selling — they don't say much on the ad itself. But they are sending a very loud signal that our newspaper is hanging out in the slums.

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Overheard...

The following conversation allegedly took place in a business law class at Emory University.

Professor: "Who can name some great industrialists of the 19th Century? Think of the names of the colleges we compete against..."

Student 1: "Vanderbilt."

Professor: "Right! Another...?"

Student 2: "Carnegie."

Professor: "Right again! Any more?"

Student 3: "Brandeis."

Professor: "Actually not an industrialist, but that's a good guess. Any others?"

Student 4: "NYU?"

Entire class looks puzzled for a moment and then bursts out laughing.

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Happy Valentine's Day...

Happy Valentine's Day, Melody, Cathy, and Sharon!

In lieu of flowers, here's a pretty snow picture from the morning of the 13th:

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Huntsville tragedy

[Updated.]

Our thoughts and prayers are with the University of Alabama at Huntsville, where there has been a mass murder.

There are reports that the murderer was a faculty member who had been denied tenure. If so, let me suggest that we all need to rethink the tenure system. In my opinion, the academic world gives too little job security to junior faculty (in the first seven years or so of employment) and too much job security thereafter.

The way it works is that, for the first seven years or so, you don't have a permanent job. Then, your senior colleagues have to vote whether to award tenure (permanence) to you. This is a judgment of your performance (mainly in publishing research and getting grants, both of which involve an element of luck) and often creates tremendous pressure, bitter disappointment, and allegations that personal likes and dislikes played too large a role.

What's worse, there may not be a tenured opening for you no matter how good you are, especially now that colleges aren't expanding the way they were in the 1960s. In fact, some colleges never promote their own junior faculty into senior positions.

As a research scientist, I am outside the University of Georgia's tenure system. My job has been renewed annually, based on performance, 25 times.

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Snow...

Heavy snow is rare in Georgia, but we've had it in consecutive years... this time three or four inches, not eight or nine, and no power failures, thank goodness. But the roads are a mess due to refreezing of slush; listening to the scanner, I hear constant reports of cars running into obstacles or ditches.

Fortunately I have plenty of food, very pleasant company (namely Melody), and a lot of work that can easily be done at home.

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Short but non-trivial notes

(Uploaded early. I'm too busy to keep my normal schedule!)

The mid-February work crunch is upon us, but there are some news items worth noting...

Did anyone notice (or understand) the statistical evidence in Georgia's CRCT scandal? As I understand it, grade-school students' standardized tests seem to have been altered, by teachers or administrators, before scoring by machine. The evidence is that too many papers have places where several incorrect answers were erased and changed to correct answers. In real life, if a student erases and changes his answers a lot, the changes won't all be from incorrect to correct. (My experience as a teacher is that it's very often the opposite!)

Meanwhile, I've been looking at the Georgia tax-revenue shortfall and hope to have a graph for you in the next few days. My preliminary impression is that the problem is actually not a lack of revenue now, but simply that the spike of 2006-2007 hasn't lasted, but people must have assumed that it would. The same thing probably happened to most of the other states. More about this later.

How far we've come since 1950: A significant number of employers refuse to hire anyone who smokes — even if they do all their smoking away from the office — and this is verified by blood tests.

This is tangled up with health insurance issues (which it need not be; it would be simple to make the smokers pay the difference in the insurance rates). I suspect there are other issues, including the noticeable correlation of smoking with illegal drug use and other dangerous behavior. That's right — tobacco is the "gateway drug" and people who avoid it are likely to be cleaner-living in numerous other ways too.

Or something. I don't entirely understand it. But remember that everyone under 45 years old today has never lived in a world where smoking was thought to be harmless.

Back into trouble: People are refinancing their houses and getting 5-year adjustable-rate mortgages now. Interest rates are historically low, and your house payment on one of those may triple in five years! What are they thinking? What are the lenders thinking?

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How I teach

A couple of thoughts about teaching:

Any fool can make an easy subject hard. I am trying to do the opposite.

I am trying to educate everyone in the classroom, not just a few of the brightest. My students are not competing against each other, and I'm not trying to flunk some of them out. If there are people in the course who don't have the requisite preparation or talent, they should have been filtered out by the admission and advisement process, and if not, I'll advise them to drop the course rather than fail it.

Of course, I can't make a hard subject as easy as some people wish, nor will I give you credit for learning what you haven't learned. What people really want from an "easy course" (and get, at third-rate schools) is often a course that just skips the hard parts.

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First type...

From the new Selectric II, a couple of type samples, 10 and 12 pitch respectively, 1.5-spaced. (The older typewriter is only 12 pitch and doesn't do 1.5-spacing.) I'm still trying to decide whether I like or hate Letter Gothic. I think part of what's going on is that styles have changed, and it doesn't look as strange in 2010 as it did in 1970, because we see more of its relatives.

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Short notes

Selectric II No. 2 is here — that is, my second Selectric II typewriter, bought off eBay a couple of weeks ago, is back from the maintenance shop and works fine. Now we can type address labels properly at Covington Innovations.

What if someone lists you as a co-author of a scientific paper and you didn't actually co-author it? Click here for some expert advice about what to do. Believe it or not, this actually happens; a young scientist often wants to pick up prestige by including a distinguished co-author, or believes mistakenly that all the scientists in the lab have to be listed as co-authors. Although I would object to anyone doing this to me, I don't think I would take any further steps unless the misattributed paper either (1) was shoddy work that I didn't think would hold up, or (2) contained opinions that I can't endorse.

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Don't believe everything you hear

Political falsehood of the day: "The government is going to confiscate your retirement savings." This was done in Argentina, but there is no proposal to do it in the United States, and in fact our Constitution does not allow it. Yet it's one of the many falsehoods constantly being dished out by so-called "conservative" talk radio. For some reason, this particular rumor, which first popped up in November 2008, is all of a sudden getting passed along again.

Another example: The other day Rush Limbaugh said, or at least gave the impression, that Obama was trying to do away with the tax deduction for charitable contributions. The Washington Post told me he was just wanting to cap it at 28%.

Also to be distrusted are advertisements that mention Obama, saying that he says you can get "bailed out" of your credit card debts, or the like. There's no reason the president's picture should be in any commercial advertisement.

Future generations will laugh at a lot of what's in the mass media this year.

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Latest addition to the web site

Whenever I gather information about anything, I give it back to the public. So this had to happen, and did. More material will be added.

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Intelligence test

I've seen people express puzzlement about this or declare that the data must be fake. No...

How can it be that job losses are up but unemployment is down?

Click here if you can't figure it out.

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Anatomy of an incendiary blog post

Click here for an amusing (and very classical) piece of classical rhetorical analysis.

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And...

And today there was something worse than a scandal: a stabbing at Georgia Tech (75 miles from us and under the same Board of Regents). Academic life may not be as safe as we thought.

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Two scandals

Today I had to tell my research group about two scandals: an international one about falsified medical research that supposedly indicated that the MMR vaccine causes autism, and a local one about one of our computer security people who got arrested for extortion.

Concerning the first one: England's strict libel laws are keeping The Lancet from saying anything very clear about why they retracted the paper. Other media report that the data were actually falsified.

The whole episode is sad for several reasons: children died because they weren't protected from measles, and for years to come, plenty of people will not be smart enough to stop believing in a hazard for which there was never any scientific evidence, and will continue exposing their children to the real hazard of measles to avoid the imagined risk of autism.

Concerning the second one: Computer security is law enforcement and needs the same kind of safeguards against employee misconduct. And we need to put out the word, very loudly, that the University does not automatically swallow every accusation against a student that it receives from the outside world. Students have a right to due process, and in fact a right not to be bothered at all if there is no credible probable cause. No individual University official will swoop down on an individual student and impose punishment. Ever. That's not how it's done.

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Health insurance reform?

CNN reports: "Democratic efforts to pass a health care bill have stalled a bit, and the immediate focus may be shifting toward health insurance reform instead of quickly trying to pass a comprehensive bill, White House officials signaled Sunday."

I hope so. Here's what I think we need:

(1) To decouple health insurance from employment so people don't lose their insurance when they change jobs.

(2) To give people a wider selection of insurance plans, including the ability to buy across state lines.

(3) Some kind of tort reform. In dealing with malpractice, compensation of the victim needs to be separated from punishment of the doctor; the latter is largely a matter of licensing. Because of liability insurance, the costs of malpractice judgments are spread across all doctors, not just the bad ones, and do not actually punish the guilty.

(4) A must-have, must-carry system health insurance system, so that everyone can get insurance, and everyone has to do so. This would be totally private but heavily regulated. As I said earlier, this is the only way to get around the "pre-existing condition" problem, and the only way to make it affordable is to require everyone to have insurance, even when they're completely healthy.

Of these, (1), (2), and (3) are "conservative" and (4) is "liberal." But notice that I didn't say the government should go into the insurance or health care business. Not at all. What I advocate is a system like that of Switzerland or the Netherlands, where, in fact, even Medicare is not needed because everybody has private insurance.

Some people argue that the government has no right to require you to buy insurance. Yet it surely has the right to tax you and give you insurance — nobody claims Medicare is unconstitutional. Surely you have more freedom when you're making a required purchase (from a provider of your own choice) than when you pay a tax for a government service.

What isn't possible is what some unsophisticates want: "I'm not paying a penny for insurance until I get sick, and then I have to be able to get it regardless of pre-existing condition." That, folks, is not insurance. You don't shop for car insurance after the wreck. You don't shop for life insurance after you're dead.

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Short notes

How it works: Remember my account of a hat that attracts women? The other day I got a small indication of how it works. I was putting on a somewhat similar hat after lunch in a restaurant, and a 3-year-old girl looked up, pointed at me, and said, with delight, "Oooo! Cow-boy!" Hmmm... Now I know how to impress 3-year-old girls.

The oddest thing I've read about lately: How to hypnotize chickens.

Is it even possible to hypnotize humans? Look at all the skepticism in recent accounts such as the one I just linked to, and especially the now-widespread consensus that stage hypnotism is mostly fake. Apparently, hypnosis is a state of heightened concentration (not unconsciousness or enslavement) into which some people can be put. But it doesn't work reliably. If it did, we'd be seeing it used therapeutically for all kinds of purposes, including anesthesia.

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From the typographical zoo

A couple of unusual Selectric type elements that have recently come my way:

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Short notes

This blog got over 13,000 hits in January. Those are split across all existing material, so I don't know how many people are reading it regularly. But I am again experimenting with Google Ads.

If you like software but don't like programming, consider getting a job as a software tester.

Apparently, last month I stumbled into a cultural phenomenon called typecasting namely creating blog entries on a typewriter and scanning them. I didn't mean to be taking a position in a modern literary movement. I just wanted to show you some typefaces.

(I wonder if they realized that typecasting already meant something else, and also that the contents of a scanned typewritten blog entry are invisible to Google. Hmmm... maybe they're shy about search engines.)

Speaking of typefaces, I recently bought (on eBay, where else?) some curiosities from the liquidation of GP Technologies, an early-1980s third-party maker of custom Selectric type elements. In the next few days I'm going to show you a typographical zoo, including "Olde English" in Spanish, and a typeface that can type smiley faces. And does anybody out there need an OCR type element with a Belgian (Dutch/French) character set?

A ghost in the history of typewriters: Was there ever any such thing as a "Smith-Corona Selectric"? I saw an ad for one, but the advertiser thought he might have mixed up the names. Googling, I find the phrase "Smith-Corona Selectric" scattered here and there, but never with a clear indication of what machine it denotes (or occasional definite misunderstandings). Selectrics were made by IBM; portable typewriters were made by Smith-Corona; and as far as I know, the two never crossbred. But I know that a close imitation of the Selectric typewriter was built (right after the patents ran out) by Remington Rand, and that "Selectric" was a trade name for other things (electric shavers, boat motors) made by various companies.

The weight of the Google evidence, scant though it is, seems to be that some people though "Selectric" was a generic term for "electric typewriter" or something of the sort. If so, we have a clear case of metonymic meaning change as described by Rulon Wells in 1975 paper, "Metonymy and Misunderstanding." Sometimes a word changes meaning when people misunderstand it and get away with it.

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