Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

About halfway across the country now in Oklahoma City.  The general aviation airport here, Wiley Post, has an 8000′ runway, longer than many of the major airports back East.  Avgas is ridiculously cheap:  $2.20/gallon at the self-serv pumps.  A quick drive in a brand-new Ford Taurus borrowed from the Millionair FBO brought me to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, formerly the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

The paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Russell, and Remington were fantastic as expected.  The outdoor koi pond underneath a statue of Buffalo Bill was a pleasant surprise.  The volunteer docents were a good source of entertainment.  For example, according to the Death Penalty Institute of Oklahoma the state has the second highest per-capita rate of executions in the U.S.  This fact had come to the attention of some German tourists and they asked the volunteer how he could be happy living in a state that executed convicted criminals.  He responded “Different countries have different justice systems.  We Oklahomans execute murderers.  People in other countries execute their Jewish neighbors.”

Just next door to the museum is County Line Barbecue.  After serving up some brisket and black-eyed peas, Terri explained how the old gun culture documented at the museum lives on today:  “Generally I don’t shoot at animals but we get too many alligator turtles in the pond behind our house and I don’t want them getting at my 3-year-old daughter.”  What kind of gun works best for turtles?  “Oh I generally use a 12-gauge shotgun.”  Isn’t that rather unsporting?  “That way the turtle is divided up into lots of little pieces that sink to the bottom for the fish to eat and he doesn’t go to waste.”

People in Cambridge, Massachusetts often complain about the apparent lack of intellectual and academic achievement displayed by our top politicians.  A Harvard PhD in an appropriate field ought to make one more qualified for any job.  Why then do Americans elect to high office people who sound as though they were strangers to the world of the university?

A glimmer of an explanation emerged when a friend told me about the loud argument she’d had with her father, a humanities professor at a university here in Boston.  Professor X, an immigrant from Europe, stated that Osama bin Laden was one of his heroes because he was a champion of the working man.  Daughter X asked for some clarification as to how a Saudi who had inherited $250+ million from his daddy could be said to represent the interests of the average worker.  Professor X noted that Americans deserved to be attacked on September 11th because the U.S. exploited workers in poor countries and that Osama represented those workers.  Even those who believe that Professor X is correct will admit that his opinions are out of sync with those of the average American voter.

How about the students?  An increasing number of graduate students, especially in technical and scientific departments, are foreigners.  A kid who grows up in a Muslim country where the mood is relentlessly anti-American can’t be expected to abandon his antipathy to the American government and the American lifestyle merely because he is so excited to be studying here at U.S. government expense.  If you wanted to attend an anti-Israel rally 10 years ago the local university would have been the most likely place to visit.  Those rallies turned into anti-Jewish events 5 years ago and are today places to denounce the current U.S. government and the millions of Americans who voted for it.

For better or worse American universities have become our main local venues for displays of anti-American feeling.  Perhaps this is one reason that our most successful politicians don’t sound as though they’ve spent too much time on campus.

[I’m off to Oaxaca, Mexico now and will be there on November 2 during what, no matter who wins, promises to be something of a national tragedy.  I managed to be away for all of September 2001 in Nova Scotia and am beginning to feel lucky to have escaped our nation’s most painful moments.]

At a dinner party last night hosted by an artist her daughters shared tales of the severity of their upbringing.  No sugared cereal.  No gun toys.  No coloring books because they stifle creativity; kids should draw freehand.  It was just like our family, I responded!  We were always envious of our cousins who got to eat Fruit Loops and enjoyed coloring books to their hearts’ content.

How did the experiment work out in our family?  My cousin Douglas, raised on a steady diet of coloring books, got his first full-time job at Walt Disney as a character animator.  His credits include Scar in the Lion King, the Hunchback in Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc.  I, by contrast, used the superior drawing skills and creativity acquired in a coloring book-free childhood to become… a computer programmer.

[Where is Doug now you might ask?  He would be working at Disney still if the executives had not looted $2 billion from the company into their personal checking accounts when the economy was booming.  As soon as the economy stopped booming, however, the executives were shocked–shocked!–to discover how depleted the corporate checking account was.  So they said “We can’t afford to do animation in Los Angeles anymore” and shut down the studio founded by Walt Disney himself in 1923.  Doug moved up north to Pixar.]

As I’ll be out and about for the next few weeks with spotty Internet access it seems as though it is time to turn over the blogging to others.  Here then is a guest submission from an anonymous-for-the-moment philosopher queen hailing from the beautiful farm country just north of the Mason-Dixon Line…

In October, the President’s Council on Bioethics (www.bioethics.gov) released a 400+ page report on biotechnology, entitled “Beyond Therapy.” The report rings of Luddism, arguing that our unbridled pursuit of individual happiness in the form of “mood brighteners” (read: Prozac and other SSRI drugs) is turning us into a society of shallowness and solipsism. Psychiatry is transforming into “cosmetic psychopharmacology” (Peter Kramer’s phrase). If we find ourselves unable to mingle well at parties, or we tend toward melodrama thus irritating our companions, doctors now have a diagnosis for us that entitles us to a prescription for little green tablets that will remake us into more congenial and thereby socially rewarded selves. Melancholy is decidedly passé.

What the report misses is that 70% of SSRI prescriptions are written for women. Moreover, most advertisements for SSRIs feature shiny happy “soccer moms,” better able to juggle the demands of work and family. Prozac, it seems, is really mother’s little helper, especially in a service-economy that relies on women participating in the work force. Kramer proposed that Prozac was a “feminist” drug, making women more assertive, less sensitive to rejection, and thereby far better employees in traditionally male-dominated fields (Listening to Prozac). Prozac makes women more like men.

So what’s wrong with this? After all, feminism fought to get us in the door. But, we didn’t realize we were still a bit too feminine to make it in the marketplace. Isn’t the President’s report just another case of male anxiety over women’s liberation? After all, feminism will have succeeded once women can be just as solipsistic and shallow as men, right?

[Editor’s note:  We were watching Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades the other night (Herman starts off the opera by talking about how he is going to kill himself because he is in love with a woman whom he’s never actually spoken to and finds out that she is engaged to a prince).  One of our friends remarked “These opera characters wouldn’t have done any of this stuff if they’d had Prozac back then.”]

Just got my bill for next year’s airplane insurance.  This is a vehicle valued at $200,000 and a typical minor accident, e.g., striking the propeller on an obstacle or the runway when landing badly, costs about $30,000 to repair.  You can’t pause or pull over when flying an airplane.  A few clouds in the sky and you can find yourself disoriented and plunging toward the water like JFK, Jr.  Now that I’ve got 550 hours of experience in this type of plane and 750 hours of total time AVEMCO has cut my rates to… $1737 with a $1000 deductible and $1 million of liability coverage.

If I were to get a new minivan here in Cambridge, despite my lack of claims and tickets I expect that it would cost about the same to insure, with much lower liability limits.  The minivan costs just over $30,000 with every conceivable option.  A minor accident costs $1000 to fix.  Many people are able to operate an automobile safely despite never having had any formal training.

Conclusion:  To come to a situation where these vehicles are equally costly to insure, we must really be driving like idiots.

[Update:  Okay, I answered my own question by driving to Mt. Wachusett today for some skiing.  Rolling along the familiar ground in a quiet comfortable minivan, belted in and protected by airbags as well, it never crossed my mind that we were moving at a potentially lethal velocity and that death could be just around the corner.  Whereas in the airplane I’m always scared and therefore cautious.]

Apropos the mournful postings below on the state of IT… On Wednesday May 19 Harvard at 12:30 Eastern Time is hosting a debate on the question “Does IT Matter?”  I plan to attend (via telephone).  Because it is the business school the debate is priced for those who are already rich and/or work for the rich.  And because it is the business school the focus of the debate is probably going to be “does IT matter to profit-seeking corporations?”  I might try to get a few words in edgewise about how IT might be more transformative for poor countries than for rich countries.  In the U.S. we have magnificent roads, stores everywhere, and seemingly 3 SUVs per citizen.  So being able to do a transaction electronically isn’t that much of a time-saver.  Someone in the Third World who has to ride a chicken bus over a terrible road for an entire day is going to appreciate being able to do a transaction from his local Internet cafe a lot more than someone who only saved a 10-minute ride in his Cadillac Escalade.

Friday, March 26:  BED to GAI plus some training.  Stop at TEB for lunch with Lynn and Olivia.  Stay in Bethesda with parents.

Sunday:  GAI to Oklahoma City (KPWA has the cheap gas)

Monday, March 29: to http://www.cowboyhalloffame.org/ at 0900 to see the Bierstadt paintings, in the afternoon to KABQ, stay with Susie Atlas

Tuesday, March 30: to Sedona (KSEZ), 5000′ high with a 5000′ runway, rent car, maybe we can see the Roden Crater?  Andy says that Jerome, AZ is an interesting town.

Thursday, April 1: to Los Angeles (KSMO), visit new Frank Gehry concert hall, see Harry Gittes

Friday, April 2: can tour the concert hall 9-3 either today or Saturday, all performances sold out but call (323) 850-2000 to check last-minute tix.

Saturday, April 3, 8 pm:  scored tickets on Craigslist (thanks to the kind folks commenting for this idea) for Shostakovich concert at LA Phil.

Sunday, April 4:  to Catalina Island and then at sunset to KMYF in San Diego, dinner with Christopher

Monday, April 5: tour of www.salk.edu (Louis Kahn building, call in advance to reserve, set for 12:00), dinner with Gittes family

Tuesday, April 6:  to Marfa, Texas (http://www.chinati.org gives tours Wednesday-Sunday); stay http://www.hotelpaisano.com/

Wednesday, April 7: tour of Chinati, fly to Huntsville, TX

Thursday, April 8: talk at SHSU.edu, fly to Ft. Worth, TX (KFTW)

Friday, April 9: visit Tadao Ando Modern Art Museum and Japanese Garden, fly to KCHA?

Saturday, April 10: fly to GAI

Sunday, April 11: fly to BED

Open questions for readers:

1. what’s a good place between GAI and KPWA to stop for fuel and maybe an airplane museum or something else interesting and close to the airport?
   
2. where to stay in Sedona, AZ and also a good hotel in Ft. Worth close to the art museum and botanical garden?
   
3. is it practical to fly to Catalina Island for the day and do anything?

Nerds only might find this article interesting in which Jaron Lanier laments the fact that most of the open source effort has gone into making “another Unix”.

[And I might add not a very good one.  Ever since the photo.net Oracle database was migrated from Sun Solaris to Dell/Linux the site has been very shaky.  I’m not involved in running the site anymore but as I understand it one of the guys has essentially had to move into the colocation cage to keep poking at Linux.  Maybe Linux really is secretly funded by Microsoft…]

Let’s get depressed two days in a row…  It is the 10th anniversary of the consumer Web.  We have very good mapping services both on- and off-line.  A wide variety of sites are visited by people from all over North America every day.  Yet when people want to sell a house they almost always are forced to pay 6% to a realtor, just as they did 30 years ago before all of this fancy computer technology was widespread.

Has anyone tried eBay House?  Why doesn’t it work?

In buying tickets for movies, plays, and concerts lately I’ve noticed that it is always more expensive to buy tickets over the Internet than in-person and usually more expensive on the Web than on the phone.  If we assume that the prices reflect costs it turns out that it is cheaper to pay a human to sit in a booth all day and/or to pay a human to sit next to a phone all day than it is to write some Web scripts and keep a server running.

Given that the hardware folks have done their share and that bandwidth is cheaper than ever, this is a truly sad commentary on the continued stagnation in the world of software.  The great Internet pundits of the 1970s (and the folks who copied those predictions and spit them out as their own in the 1990s) predicted a world of seamless commerce and lower prices.  How wrong they were.

[Tickets for what you might ask?  Tonight is McCoy Tyner at the Charles Hotel ($3.50/ticket extra); Friday night is the Boston Symphony Orchestra ($10/order extra).  Last night was the Harold Pinter play The Birthday Party at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater ($3.50/ticket + $1.50/order extra).  I’d give you my review of the play but this email review from a friend is much more to-the-point:

“I saw the Pinter on Sunday night, and all I can say is that it made the invasive gynecological procedure I had to have the next day seem pleasant in comparison.”

I guess they won’t be quoting her review in the advertisements…]