Trip to New York

Olympia and I headed up to New York Monday and came back Tuesday. We took the train up there, stayed in a hotel in SoHo, went to dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant on 6th Street, and went to a play in the evening. While waiting for the play's showtime to come around, we went into Joe Allen's, another restaurant on Restaurant Row, which is 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues.

We had a minor brush with celebrity there as we were seated at the bar, in that Harvey Keitel was seated with a few other people at the table closest to where we were sitting. Olympia started grinning her face off, as she thought about his lines from Pulp Fiction, especially the one where he cautions the other characters not to, well, start congratulating one another quite yet, only put much more graphically. If you've seen the movie, you probably know the line I mean, and if not, that's probably okay.

Tuesday, we stopped at the Toys-R-Us in Times Square, which is utterly huge and has a ferris wheel right in the store, roughly three stories high. Apparently, nowhere on the east coast is there a store with an Xbox for sale between Christmas and New Year's Day, which is just awful, since I was going to buy one. It seems like certain companies (*cough* Microsoft, Sony *cough*) seriously underestimated demand. After Toys-R-Us, we went back to Penn Station and headed south again on the train. There was little point in doing much else, as Olympia was whining horribly in a pitiful and weak way (can I fit the word "petulant" in here, too?) about the cold every second we were outside. What a weather lightweight!

Gotten

It's painful to even entitle a blog entry with the word "gotten." That's a word that I think is just so ugly. It's used in place of the proper verb that the speaker or writer hasn't bothered to learn or use. There's an ad I hear on the radio every once in awhile that uses it, saying, "Thousands of people have gotten great value from these tapes, and you can, too." It would be so much better to use "found" or "received" in place of gotten, or just use an entirely different construction such as, "Thousands of people have benefited from these tapes...."

The real irony of that particular ad is that it is for tapes designed to enhance your vocabulary.

Fellow Travelers

I met a couple in the airport waiting for my much delayed flight from Seattle to D.C. The wife, Mattie, went off to see if the airline people were calling her (they weren't, but with the last name of Smith, you probably end up going to see if it was you calling a lot more than people named, say, Musachakathalazan.) So, I chatted a bit with the husband, Ben. It was clear that he does a lot of traveling and hiking and such, as he had that kind of clothes on, that kind of backpack, and was reading an outdoor adventure magazine. We ended up talking about how people really need to take the time to travel if that's what they like while they are younger. He was telling me that his father, who hiked from tip to tip of New Zealand when he was 70, had said that the worst part about getting older is not that you can't do the traveling, but that your desire to travel goes down.

As we talked about some places we'd each been, it was clear we had the same appreciation for the outdoors and adventure. I've seldom met anyone who was enthusiastic about travel stuff as Ben, and his enthusiasm was infectious. As I headed for my airplane, I was actually sorry to say goodbye to him. I told him we would meet again. In the walkway to get on the plane, I thought about that and of course, it's terribly unlikely I'll just randomly meet the same guy somewhere. I stopped, wrote my email address on a scrap of paper, and went back out to the waiting area. I gave him my email address and told him that this would make it at least a little more likely. I'm really hoping I'll hear from him.

Airline Travel - What is it Now?

It seems like every time I fly, there's something else that goes wrong and keeps my flight from going as scheduled. This time, the plane we were scheduled to be on was, as the pilot called it, "broke." I guess they didn't feel they needed to go into the same detail as last time. I called Olympia to tell her and when she answered, I said, "So..." and her immediate response was, "What part of the plane isn't working this time?"

Two hours later than scheduled, we finally took off.

BodyWorlds

I mentioned BodyWorlds in my last post.  I see that it's coming to the United States at last!  (Maybe it's been here before, but if so, I'm not aware of it.  Last I'd read, nobody over here was willing to host the exhibit.)  It's going to be in Chicago from February through September.  I think I know what I'm going to do for a weekend trip as soon as I can get a chance.

 

Stiff

In about six hours of reading, I started and finished another book.  This one's called "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" and can be found on Amazon for those that are interested.  I just couldn't put it down!  The author, Mary Roach, visited a bunch of places where people deal with other people who happen to be dead to find out what's quietly happening behind such closed doors.  She takes the reader through an embalmer's lab, a crematorium, anatomy labs, a forensic farm where they study decomposition, a vehicle crash-test research facility, and more.

 

Despite what could easily be seen as a truly ghoulish and macabre subject, she adds humor and a sense of lightness to the subject without taking away from the dignity of the subjects.  One theme that she carries through the book is what she would like done with her own body after her death, and one by one she rules each potential post-mortem use out as she finds out the details until she finally settles on plastination.  In that, I have to agree with her.  The BodyWorlds exhibit that's causing such a ruckus in Europe is one I would really like to go see.

 

All-in-all, a great book and a nice break from the more serious material I've been reading of late.

 

My Book on Amazon

Wow!  It's all the way up to 571,833rd best selling book on Amazon!  I should write more books.

 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1893681017/qid=1103426306/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/104-0669821-9117505

Apparently, Watermelon Contains Watermelon

I was at the supermarket in the fruits and vegetables area getting some salad. There was a display with cut watermelon in halves and quarters. Since they were cut, they were wrapped in plastic and had labels on them. I happened to read one of the labels. It read, "Cut Watermelon Quarter." Under that, it read, "Ingredients: Watermelon". Thank goodness they let me know that.

Of course, since I have a hard time seeing something that funny without sharing, I picked up one of the cut watermelon quarters, turned to a supermarket employee that was nearby, and said, "Excuse me, can you tell me what's in this? Oh, sorry, never mind - it has it right here. Ingredients: Watermelon."

Odd look, nervous laughter. I get that a lot.

24

I don't have cable at the moment, so when I get in front of the TV it's either to play an Xbox game or to watch movies or series that been put on DVD.  I'm trying to do less of that, because it can really suck up a lot of time and I have plenty of other things I could spend that time on, but I've seen some interesting stuff lately.  I watched over a lot of nights the first season of 24, the Kiefer Sutherland series.  It turns out the dev lead for our team at Microsoft is a big fan of the series, too, and he tells me season two is fantastic.  We were talking about how cool it would be to watch it in real time, which is how it's presented in the series and part of what makes it so intriguing.

 

So Tuesday I'm going to Michael's house and we're going to watch all 24 episodes back-to-back, starting at 8am.  Since the commercials are removed and we can skip past open titles, that's about 16 hours of video, but not only will we watch a very cool show, that's something to talk about!  A couch potato fantasy!  Talk about sucking up a lot of time!

 

I can hardly wait...

 

More on Undocumented Expectations

Undocumented expectations, the topic of an earlier post that has been the post that has generated the most subsequent feedback and discussion from readers, has proved to be a great way to describe a common pitfall.  This has not, however, prevented me or people around me from falling into it anyway.

 

Recent stressful situations at work lately have culminated in discussion with management and certain peers.  It's become clear in the discussion that everyone in a room of five people had a different understanding of one of my peer's roles and responsibilities.  In fact, one manager in particular has already taken responsibility for not making expectations clear much earlier, that is, for not documenting expectations and sharing it with everyone involved.

 

Over the next three weeks, our whole department will become a ghost-town with almost everyone out of the office for some or all of the time, so this issue will likely remain open, but then I'll be off for two of those myself, so I'm hoping that awareness of the problem will at least limit the aggravation it can cause.  Then, in the first week of January, I think we'll get clarity around the situation and be able to move forward more effectively.

 

In the meantime, I plan to take my earlier post, remove the more personal aspects of the anecdotes, and expand on the remaining thoughts to create an article for Microsoft's internal Engineering Excellence Center, a group that publishes a whole library of great articles on topics ranging across all the disciplines represented at the company.

 

Let's hope the end result is good enough for them to publish.

Population Density

The other night as I was driving home, I was listening to George Noory's Coast-to-Coast show on KVI.  It's an odd show that talks about aliens, conspiracy theories, ghosts, and all kinds of other stuff that I mostly think is ridiculous but I can't help but listen to when I happen to be in the car at that time.  He had on a guy that was talking about a bunch of things that would happen if the events described in the Biblical Revelations ever happened.  One of the things he said is, "God plans to dry up all the oceans, because that's the only way you could fit everyone that ever lived back on the planet."

 

That got me thinking, since I had once seen a documentary that mentioned roughly 1 in 10 humans that ever lived were still alive.  When Philip Jose Farmer wrote the Riverworld series, he'd apparently heard the same statistic, as Riverworld was populated with everyone who ever lived (plus a few aliens who were on the planet during a final nuclear holocaust) and that came to about 65 billion people.

 

When I think about how I spent about five hours hiking in a canyon alone without seeing anyone else except for in helicopters and on boats, the idea you'd have to dry up the oceans to fit every one seems like an overestimate of how many people there really are.  If you were walking at rush hour in New York, I could see how you might believe it, but the land area's just so little.

 

So, I did some research.

 

I found this article: http://www.prb.org/Content/ContentGroups/PTarticle/0ct-Dec02/How_Many_People_Have_Ever_Lived_on_Earth_.htm  Since I saw this referenced in a few other articles and the article seemed pretty sensible and cautious about how semi-scientific it is, it seems like a reasonable place to take as a baseline for total human population ever.  The author, Carl Haub, puts the total number at a little over 106 billion people, or some 17 times today's population.

 

This article at about.com: http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa012599.htm puts the world's population density, excluding Antarctica from consideration as land space because of it's zero population density, at about 114 people per square mile.

 

That means that putting everyone that ever lived back on earth at once would generate a population density of about 1938 people per square mile.  Turning to the Census Bureau's numbers here: http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027.html we find that this is roughly comparable to the population density in 1990 of Indianapolis, IN (2000 per square mile), more that twice that of Jacksonville, FL (800), but less than a tenth of New York, NY (23,700).

 

While that would mean Indianapolis' population density over the entire planet, including some pretty inhospitable areas, we're talking mostly previously deceased people who have been resurrected and should probably be able to take it, and that's really not that crowded.  Thank God, He won't have to dry up the oceans if He ends the world anytime soon!

 

The Economic Role of Government

Again, referring to Thomas Sowell's book, Basic Economics, I've been able to study his materials to get much greater clarity as to what kinds of activities should be government regulated or managed and which should not.  It's interesting that there are relatively simple economic tests that can be used (and seldom are) to determine this.

 

Sowell uses as an example of where government intervention makes sense the idea of mudflaps on cars.  There's no economic incentive for a person to pay for mudflaps on their car because mudflaps on your own car provide no benefit to you, but rather provide their benefit to the person behind you on the road.  Since it's not practical to gather compensation from everyone that every drives behind you for their share of your mudflaps, and since mudflaps provide greater value to the overall society than they cost, government regulation to require mudflaps on all cars puts in place a benefit both shared and paid for by the entire group of car owners to their collective advantage.  This seems so obvious once the principle is explained.

 

On the other hand, seatbelts (not Sowell's example) represent an area where government intervention is not required because the person that gains benefit, that is, the person that would otherwise be catapulted out a car window to their death in a crash instead of simply walking away unscathed, is the same person that pays for it.  That incentive means that seatbelts availability and usage is inevitable without the government mandate to install them in all cars.  This is borne out by the fact that in the U.S., car manufacturers were already beginning to increase safety features before the government ever got involved in defining the standards.  They were catching on to the idea that people would pay more or would buy more at the same price if cars were safer.

 

With this principle in mind, it becomes clear that at least to some extent, governmentally run postal services, education, and toilet tank capacity requirements are largely unnecessary while governmental regulation on environmental pollution, at least until gains in value fall short of marginal costs, are appropriate.

 

This principle doesn't apply to the military, though, as that's covered by a different principle, that of activities which provide value to more than just those willing to contribute and is beyond the scope of what I want to talk about here.

 

When Yes Means No

Today, I asked a coworker, "So, does this makes sense?" His response was, "No!" But, what he meant by that was, "Yes!" That means he answered in the negative to mean the affirmative. "No" was apparently short for "No Problem!"

Trevor had mentioned this to me weeks ago, but I hadn't seen it happen so clearly until now.

What I Like in Board Games

I like board games a lot and own quite a few now.  Amongst my favorites are Puerto Rico, Power Grid, and Settlers of Catan with the Cities & Knights expansion, but there's a lot of them that I enjoy.  The new ones I've played recently are La Strada, Keythedral, and Pirate's Cove.  Playing Pirate's Cove was enlightening because of what it turned out that I didn't like, which was the highly random nature of fighting between pirate ships that could leave you devastated and take you several turns to recover from.  In a game that only has 12 turns, that's very bad.

 

Not surprisingly, it seems my favorite games and the subject I'm talking about a lot in this blog right now intersect with one another.  I like the economic games.  Puerto Rico, Power Grid, and Cities & Knights are all games about economics with carefully balanced trade-offs regarding what you can do with your scarce resources, which Thomas Sowell would quickly point have alternative uses.

 

For example, in a recent game of Puerto Rico, I had a choice between waiting another round to acquire a couple more doubloons and buying a guild hall that would give me at least eight victory points or buying a university that would give me three victory points and free colonists with buildlings.  Since I picked the university, then was unable to buy more than one relatively useless building that only gave me one more victory point.  So I missed proper evaluation of opportunity costs and lost out on four to six victory points.  Since I only lost the game by four victory points and had made one other mistake of which I'm aware that cost me two victory points with respect to the winner, I basically killed my game in that one move.

 

While that's very sad for me, it was still one of the more exciting games I've played, ever, and it's all because it's about managing your economy.

Journalistic Sensationalism

Of late, every year at Christmastime, we hear stories of this town or that public library or the other school choosing not to hold an event or put up a sign relating to Christmas.  The media often picks it up and the churn begins as the story gets around as an assault on our country's foundations in Judeo-Christian tradition.  While this is very distressing to the large number of Christians in the country and for good reason, it's important to keep in mind that the media benefits more when the story creates more outrage.  An example presented itself today, but because it happened at Lake Washington High School, just across the lake from where I live, I got an opportunity to contrast the media version and the hype with the real story.

 

In short, the Attic Group, a non-profit theater troupe, is putting on an interpretation of A Christmas Carol at the high school.  The principal, Mark Robertson, instructed the matinee performance to be cancelled.  The originating news story reported that he cited the fact that the Attic Group planned to charge the students for a performance during school hours as the issue but that even if that wasn't a problem, there would still be a discussion of the intersection of school and religion.  This story was even picked up by Paul Harvey, making it national news that villified Robertson.

 

However, this morning Robertson came on KVI, a local conservative talk radio station.  Interestingly enough, he wouldn't come on the radio show until his pastor was on the line, too.  He clarified his position, repeating the point about charging students, the point about it taking place during school hours, and adding that the original matinee was never approved by the principal's office but rather by an unauthorized subordinate, which itself would have been enough to warrant cancellation.  The show's host, John Carlson (a one-time Republican gubernatorial candidate) asked him about the religious element.

 

As it turns out, the journalist had asked Robertson several times about whether there was a religious aspect to the decision and was told there was not.  The quote that ended up in the new story was actually in response to a hypothetical situation designed to elicit the quoted response.  Robertson had brought along his pastor to attest to his character.  It was very funny to hear his pastor say something to the effect of, "I'm on the line because Robertson's part of my parish and a good friend.  I attest to his character and he knows that if he lies he has to answer to me!"  (The pastor and the principal are both black and it's an Antioch Bible church.  Imagine that statement spoken in a black dialect by a preacher, and it gets even funnier.)

 

In the end, this simple instance of a cancelled performance because of a failure on the part of the performers to meet some basic beauracratic steps and policies was turned into a sensational, national story by a journalist that chose sensationalism over objective reporting with integrity.  Undoubtedly, this happens all the time and we only hear about it if we happen to be listening to the right local show, if it even gets revealed at all.  This proves the value of the adage, "Don't believe everything you read."  Or see or hear, for that matter.

 

Potential Buyers at my House

This house sale thing has been taking so long that I'm now more happy that someone comes to look at the house, not because it means they might buy it, but because it means I made my bed in the morning for a reason.

Economics in Brief

I'm nearing the end of Thomas Sowell's book, Basic Economics.  I will write a (glowing) book review as soon as I'm done and I'm looking forward to moving on to his Applied Economics, the companion book that takes the reader beyond the basics.  There are lots of important lessons in this book, but I think the most important points can be summed up in a few "first principles" from which the rest can be derived.  Of course, I'm glad Sowell did a lot of the derivation for me!  Here are the basics as I got them:

• Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses.
• Trade is not a zero-sum game - in general, both parties to any transaction end up better off.
• Prices automatically adjust to apply resources to the best possible gain when artifical constraints are avoided.

With these three concepts in mind, economic principles prove to be remarkably logical.  I'm finding this personal study of economics absolutely fascinating.

 

Blogging More Frequently

I've always been amazed that there are people that have a new blog entry every day, but are not writing for a living, but rather have some other job.  For example, Raymond Chen's blog has a new, interesting (although for me, sometimes indecipherable) post every day.  Trevor recently pointed me at a post where he describes how he does it.  It's so simple, it ought to be obvious.

 

When he sits down to write an entry, he writes two.  The extra goes into a library of posts he can send later, although I'm sure that as a highly skilled developer he's written himself some kind of tool to do the posting automatically without further intervention.  Apparently, he has enough that he could not write again until the middle of next year and still have a post every day.

 

I don't have a tool to do it, but I've starting writing a few.  As I write this, I have four extras waiting in the wings on a variety of topics, simply saved in a separate drafts folder in Outlook called Upcoming Blogs.  I'm going to look into seeing if I can simply schedule delivery, since I'm using Microsoft's Exchange Server, such that it sends the mail at a given future time without my needing to be in Outlook at the time of sending.  I guess then I'd have a tool!

 

So, if you find I've become remarkably prolific and consistent with new blog entries daily, you'll know how that's happened.

 

Long Hours

I haven't posted for a bit, mostly because I've been really busy at work for long hours, then going home and working on some stuff I need to do there, too. It feels like a truly artificial date we've presented with at work, and the work defined that needed to be done will only be about half complete by that date anyway, but at least we will have managed to build momentum.

What will be interesting to see is if the momentum is kept up after the holidays where most people will be out of the office for two to three weeks. I myself will leave work on the evening of 12/17 and not return to the office until the morning of 1/4. I think that's the longest consecutive number of days I'll have every been off from work while still being paid since I started working full time sixteen years ago.