This 2 month paternity leave has been a huge help. I think everyone should get a chance at it. The civilized thing to do would be for every father to get 3 months and every mother 6 (even 9) months. However, it's not fair to make employer's foot the bill for something like this; it's good for us all, so we should all pay for it. My half-baked idea is to have the checks come for the government. They'd be on a sliding scale, so that someone who makes $20,000 on an annual basis gets their full pay, while someone making $60,000 gets three-quarters, and all such pay is capped at (an annually-adjusted) $50,000. Those numbers are just for illustrative purposes; actual numbers would depend on a number of factors, not least of which is real data.
Where would the money for this come from? Simple: eliminate the child tax credit. At $1000 per child, the child tax credit is worth approximately $18,000 until the child reaches majority. Average annual household income in the United States is about $45,000. In the simplest case, where the mother and father earn equal amounts, 6 months pay for the former and 3 months pay for the latter works out to about $16,000, which is roughly the same. Obviously, the present value of the child tax credit isn't $18,000, but the numbers are in the same ballpark.
One oversight in this scheme is what to do when only one parent works outside the home, especially in the case where one parent decides to stay home. There are other details I haven't worked out, but I'm confident such problems are relatively minor and could be worked out easily.
The Payphone Project aims to document the locations and numbers of the (fewer and fewr) pay phones in this country. Along the way, someone decided that Post Office drop boxes would be a good thing to keep track of too. I have to drop off my taxes, the post office is out of the way, and I don't want to leave them in my own mailbox with the flag up 1 since it is, you know, tax information. What to do? Payphone Project mailbox locator and Google Street View:
Totally cool.
1 A benefit to an older house/neighborhood is that each house has its own mailbox, but that also means no local locked drop box
I like it when writers sneak hidden obscure jokes into movies and TV shows. By "hidden" I mean the sort of thing that doesn't even register for someone who doesn't get it, as opposed to making them feel left out. "The Simpsons" are consistently good at that. "Shaun of the Dead" had at least two. Early in the movie, the background music was the late 90s trance hit "Zombie Nation." Nobody who didn't recognize the song would have noticed anything beyond background music, but it added a little bit if you did recognize it. There was also a passing reference to a character named "Ash," which was also the name of the Bruce Campbell character in the "Evil Dead" movies (that one I only barely caught, since I never got into those movies). It makes me wonder how many I missed, in that movie and in other works. Seems like there's a web niche that needs filling.
Now there are four Yellow-Crowned Night Herons. Or maybe five. There's now a pair building a nest in the neighboring tree in my neighbor's yard. There are at least two that hang out in my tree; there may have been a third one chilling out in the nest in my tree; it's hard to tell from 40 feet below 1. That also makes hard to take good pictures. It looks like there's a second nest under construction in my tree. It's not clear to me whether that's another pair or whether the birds just didn't like the first nest they built. I've also been hearing curious honking squawks at night, and disturbingly large bird poops decorating my driveway and the sidewalk in front of my house.
As exciting as that is, it wasn't the only bird action around my house. We've been leaving the door from the patio to the backyard propped open so the dogs can get in and out easily. A couple of Small Brown Birds built a nest over the door in the last month. I decided to let them be. Unfortunately, Sadie didn't get the memo. One of them banged into the window, and in its post-concussive stupor was vulnerable to our fierce predator 2. I did get the bird away before she ate it, but it was dead dead dead. It got a hasty "burial in the air" (thrown over the fence). Later that day, the other dog, somewhat less fierce and less predatory (hapless, really) managed to have a go at the other one. This one survived, but it might be permanently crippled. Over the fence with that one, too. I'm going to have to see if the nest has small residents; I heard a lot of little cheeping last night while I was trying to sleep (the boy was having none of it).
1 I wonder if I need a permit from the city to build a blind on my roof...
2 She's the sweetest dog in the world if you're not a small animal. She killed a squirrel last week, too.
I've been seeing sale ads for telephone poles and shipping containers pop up on the Austin Craig's List. Not just one, either; one guy posted today that he had 17 telephone poles. Maybe I can use those to build a bird blind... I'm not sure I could find a use for 20' or 40' shipping containers. As much as I liked reading a book about them, I don't exactly have the space. Still, it might make someone an inexpensive, large shed or something. Ugly, too.
One classic joke on "The Simpsons" was in the episode "Much Apu About Nothing," where Apu reminisces about coming to the United States and attending the fine Springfield Heights Institute of Technology. If the joke isn't obvious, think about what we call the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. It was a completely optional joke; if you got it, you laughed, but if you didn't get it, you didn't even know it was there.
I've always found it awkward to describe ratios as "n times fewer." Having a multiple when describing a smaller value doesn't seem right. For example, if one value is 2 and the other is 8, one might describe the first value as 4 times fewer. I've always preferred saying it one fourth as much, or describing the second value as 4 times more.
Actually, I don't like that either because of the use of "more" and "fewer." Those seem additive and subtractive rather than multiplicative. Consider "20 oz more." That means adding 20 oz to whatever the base amount is. "4 times more" implies you have your base to which you add 4 times the base, for a total of 5 times the base. I'm sure that is at least occasionally the intent, but it doesn't appear to be the usual meaning when using that phrase.
I prefer using "as much" instead, which is multiplicative rather than additive. "4 times as much" is clearer. That's another reason why "4 times fewer" seems awkward; you take 4 times your base and subtract it, leaving -3, which usually makes no sense at all.
Over time, familiarity and fluency in certain areas has become increasingly essential to functioning in society. There was a time when only a minority needed to be literate or numerate, but today, everyone must be. I am hardly objective on this topic, but I am increasingly convinced that familiarity with the principles of computing. Devices are becoming more sophisticated and more pervasive. Barring some awesome leap in artificial intelligence or the like, that means people are going to have to adapt. That doesn't mean everyone's going to have to learn how to program, but people are going to have to know more than they do now.
Right now, many people have a superficial degree of familiarity. They know how to touch-type, use a mouse, and the WIMP interface metaphor. That's not going to be enough. We need the familiarity with computing that we have with cars. While there certainly are people who get by just knowing how to use the shifter and steering wheel in a car, they're are the exception. Many people have at least a vague idea of how internal combusion engines work, or what a transmission does, or the importance of the alternator, even if they can't build a car themselves.
Obviously, actually knowing how to program would be best of all, though even that is no panacea; there are surprisingly many people who are capable programmers who nonetheless know very little about the machines they work with and are disturbingly incurious about them. Naturally, I'm going to have to follow through on this and try to teach Uma and Kieran how to program. We'll see how that goes.
It is generally accepted that the best way to learn a foreign language is to start early and immerse yourself. In spite of that, people will look at you like you have two heads if you suggest children learn foreign languages. At least, they've looked at me that way, and I'm mostly certain of my head count. Many people seem to think it's something to put off until high school, even college, which seems nuts to me. The dissonance between what people know and what they do is appalling. I'm hoping I can find some way to get Uma and Kieran started learning a foreign language 1 around the age of six.
I also have opinions on which languages to learn. It's a simple formula based on maximizing your odds of being able to communicate with a randomly chosen Earthling. Take all the people in the world. Eliminate the ones you can already communicate with knowing languages you and they have in common, even if neither is native 2. Pick the language that would enable you to communicate with the largest number of the rest. Rinse and repeat.
Naturally, you should tweak the formula based on your personal circumstances, goals, and interests. For instance, if you live in Texas, Spanish is going to be more important than if you live in Ougadougou. If you're pursuing a career in vocal musical performance, Italian won't be useless. I also add a small bias for how widely spread the language is; lots of people speak Bengali, but they're basically all in Bengal (East or West). As a result, I figure native Bengali speakers will be likely to learn another language anyway. That doesn't apply to Chinese because there are so freaking many of them.
Based on that, my list of most useful languages to learn is as follows:
English - most of the Western world speaks it either natively or as a second language, plus it's pretty good for India, too.
Mandarin Chinese - 1 billion people. The next superpower?
Spanish - the Western hemisphere south of the Rio Grande, except for minor pockets like Suriname, Belize, and Brazil.
Arabic - it'll serve you in a swath from Morocco to Iraq
French - after English, it's the language spoken in the most countries. French is especially good for West Africa.
Each of those languages will give you the ability to speak to at least a couple hundred million people more than you'd otherwise be able to. With those five languages, you should be able to communicate effectively with something like 35% to 40% of the world population. After that, each language will add less and less to your linguistic reach. I also like this list because it represents 3 major language groups, so learning all of these languages will seriously warp your brain (in a good way).
Believe it or else, five languages isn't too many to learn. My dad knows 4 (Marathi, Hindi, English and German3), as does my mom (replace German with Kannada). Jessica's "step-father" knows at least 4 (he's a man of many layers): Spanish, English, German, and Thai. I managed to be pretty fluent in German at age 6, learned French reasonably well in high school, could have spoken to Julius Caesar if it wasn't for that dastardly Brutus, reacquire some basic ability with Marathi every time I return to India, and have a passing familiarity with English. In many parts of the world, knowing multiple languages is normal.
There are some omissions from my list that may seem to be oversights. Strictly speaking, Russian may have more speakers than French or Arabic, but Russia's a demographic timebomb, and I doubt people are learning Russian today at the rate they were when the USSR ruled 300 million directly and a couple hundred million more indirectly. Hindi and Urdu are related. Counting them as one, which may be a bad thing to do, would get you a hundred million or so Pakistanis, and maybe a couple hundred more Indians. However, it's likely that a lot of Hindi and Urdu speakers also know English, so learning those languages won't add 300 million potential conversation partners if you already know English. Portuguese, Bengali, Japanese, and German all have substantial populations of native speakers, but they're not widely spoken outside just a few countries.
Of course, learning just about any foreign language is better than learning none. It stretches your brain and opens your mind. If the top 5 languages above are uninspiring, there are certainly many middle-weight languages with 50 million to 200 million speakers. Besides the ones dismissed from the top tier previously, there are also Bahasa Indonesia (~200 million), Cantonese Chinese (~70 million), Persian (~70 million - ~130 million), and Thai (~60 million). Those 10 might not be as useful as the top 5, but there's still pretty useful, and they're all associated with interesting cultures and places.
I put Mandarin above Spanish in my list because that's what would be most generally applicable, but being in Texas, for us Spanish would be better. That's the language I'd want Uma and Kieran to learn first. It also helps that I want to learn Spanish, too, so it might be easier to get them motivated about it. Chinese would be the next one, assuming I can find somewhere that teaches it. The schools don't look to be much help; even the better school districts in the area wait until 7th grade, and none of them do Chinese.
2 Flying back to Houston after my first Christmas break, I earned a United Airlines voucher by assisting the flight attendants with an elderly Vietnamese passenger who didn't speak English. It will come as no surprise to you that I don't know Vietnamese, either, but since she was older, I took a stab with my (then decent) French and was able to convey the essentials.
Uma was born in a wave of about 9 babies born to people I knew all in a 6-month span (not counting the people in the Bradley class, of course). Kieran's part of a wave of 6 or so 1. It's not that all these people are about the same age, either. I guess it's just coincidence.
Here's another Sesame Street that's gotten stuck in my head. It's really hard to sing along, but I've been practicing all morning, and I'm getting pretty good.
Suppose you're given a list of people and the languages they speak. How do you find the three (or two or four or...) languages such that you're able to communicate with the most people? You can't just pick the most popular languages. Suppose you have 90 of 100 people speaking Finnish, 85 out of 100 speaking English, and 10 of 100 speaking Tamil, and you want to choose the 2 languages that will enable you to communicate with the most of the 100. If the 85-English speakers are all Finnish speakers, then there's no point in trying English; it won't get you any more listeners. Even though Tamil is the least popular, it's more useful than English. This problem is the a version of the one with 6 billion people and thousands of languages that I suggested a 5-language solution for the other day.
My intuition suggests to me that the general version of this problem is a variation on a well-known problem in computer science called the Knapsack problem. That problem is about how to fit the most of a number of objects into a single bag. It's in a class of problems called "NP-complete." These are (roughly) problems that get exponentially harder to solve as the number of objects you're dealing with increases, but it's relatively easy to check a candidate solution for correctness. NP-complete problems are something theoretical computer science spends a lot of time on. The knapsack problem is probably one of the most readily understood one to the lay person. The canonical example is called the "travelling salesman problem:" given a list of cities, find the route that visits each of them while travelling the least total distance. An interesting characteristic of NP-complete problems is that a method to efficiently 1 solve one of them can solve all of them.
If my intuition is correct, then figuring out the optimal languages to learn would actually be pretty hard to do. A problem where the difficulty scales exponentially over a data set of 6 billion would probably take longer than the expected lifetime of the universe to solve 2. That's of course assuming you could get a list of all the people in the world and the languages they spoke. You could probably come up with very good but not guaranteed best solutions based on the fact that language knowledge isn't distributed randomly; most people in Sweden speak Swedish, but not many people in Kenya do. I wasn't intending to give a primer on deep problems in computing, but it struck me as interesting that a simple question I had out of the blue could very well could be one of these unsolvable (realistically) problems.
1 And precisely; there are numerous methods for finding good but not guaranteed best solutions.
The manual for our pressure cooker is printed on ordinary paper. Each page is half of a letter-sized sheet, and the manual consists of a number of those sheets stapled together and folded. The PDF version is laid out the same way, which means that page 5 of the PDF is divided into page 5 and page 24. Even better, page 5 is on the right and page 24 is on the left. Page 6 of the PDF is divided into page 6 on the left and page 23 on the right. Then page 7 of the PDF is page 7 on the right again and page 22 on the left. I imagine reading the manual straight through would look something like the giant slalom, assuming that halfway through the event, the hill tipped over 90 degrees and you finished back at the top.
Seems like there's a market opportunity for a pickup truck taxi service. My options for moving heavy things myself are:
Have my own truck - not bloody likely
Mooch off a friend - Hi, John!
Rent a truck - rental period is longer than I want, plus I have to deal with the hassle of picking it up and dropping it off
On the other hand, I could just call someone, have them meet me at my home, drive over to the place I'm getting stuff, load it up, and drive it home. As a bonus, the taxi driver could double as a helper. Home Depot rents trucks at pretty inexpensive rates, but it's not so handy if you want something from Lowe's or some guy named Craig who has this list. I wonder what it would cost to provide such a service. I figure the driver needs to get $12/hour, and it would cost something like $0.60 per mile. Then you've got to amortize a $25,000 crew cab pickup truck over, say, 4 years. So you'd probably charge something along the lines of $40 for a one-hour job. That's basically a guess; does it at least sound right? I think there are probably enough people who'd be willing to pay that. Maybe not in Austin, though; everyone knows somebody who has a truck.
The NY Times summarizes the phenomenal1 earnings of some hedge fund managers. One sentence caught my eye: "Some ... profited handsomely from the turmoil in the mortgage market ripping through the economy." That makes it sound like they caused the collapse, or at least made it worse. In reality, they probably made the collapse less severe.
These managers made their money through short-selling (well, to oversimplify). That means they bet securities would go down. Lots of people dislike short-sellers because they confuse making a profit from a decline to causing a decline, a decline that wouldn't otherwise happen. Consider a simple example. Shares of UDG are currently trading at $10. You're willing to buy them at that price. I think that's too high, so I borrow some shares and sell it at $10. That action pushes the share down to $9. Then your trade goes through, and you end up getting it for $9. If the share price subsequently rises, you make an extra $1 profit, and I get hit. If it goes down, you lose money, and I make money, but you lose $1 less than you would have. Either way, you're $1 better off than if I hadn't sold it short.
That's an example simplified to the point of triviality, but it illustrates the point. Short-sellers smooth out the market. The hedge fund managers who bet against mortgage securities kept the bubble from getting even bigger. They kept other parties in the market from losing as much money because they got better prices than would have otherwise existed. That doesn't mean that their pay is reasonable, only that they can't be blamed for sabotaging our financial system.
1 And excessive, but that's only a problem for the people paying them, i.e., their investors
There are some jokes that just don't work if you have any knowledge of the subject. I saw some comedian make a joke like that. "You know how they have those indestructible black boxes that they dig out of plane crashes? Why don't they make the whole plane out of that?" Because then the plane wouldn't fly. It would be too heavy. Duh. I didn't laugh. Other people did. Ach! Knowledge. Such a curse.
Blog in your native Indic script: Convert English characters to Indic script as you type! Learn more about transliteration on Blogger.
Does anyone else get that? Or are they inferring that I specifically might have a particular interest? I get spam for Indian people, and I figure Google is probably as smart as spammers.
I found a weather station just about ¾ miles from my house1. Weather Underground has this deal where you can buy a personal automated weather station and set it to automatically upload information to their site. I'm sure it's not unique to them, since the hardware and software are off-the-shelf, but that particular site has a decent interface with important things like easily linked/bookmarked URLs, maps, etc. The storm that came through last night dropped between an inch and an inch and a half of rain on Austin; Thanks to that weather station, I know that we got just about an inch of rain in our immediate neighborhood. I like precision. There are lots of stations throughout the country; I'm sure you can find one close to you.
1 On Baltus Drive. That sounds suspiciously like Gaius Baltar compressed into a single word.
I had my first significant reaction to my allergy shots earlier this week. About 40 minutes after the injection, I started having an asthma attack. It was unpleasant, though not life-threatening; I've never had a dangerously bad asthma attack. The allergy nurse suggested it was due to the high oak pollen levels in the air combined with the oak serum in my set of vials. I think she was on the right track, but not quite all the way there, as demonstrated by today's oak pollen count:
Science fiction author Charles Stross has a new book coming out. His blog post talks about how little control authors have over the covers and titles of their books. That's a lot of words. I say skip to the punch line. The cover of the UK edition:
The FBI commits shenanigans. To summarize, the FBI got a legitimate subpoena for certain records, withdrew it, issued a National Security Letter 1 even though NSLs weren't applicable to the type of records in question, got refused, got another subpoena, and then went to Congress saying that they needed wider powers because NSLs were inadequate. They shouldn't have even been given that inch, and they're reaching for a mile.
1 An instrument where the FBI can obtain records without probable cause or a warrant.
Don't drink water when you're coughing unless you're coughing because your throat is dry. If you've aspirated food or water, the last thing you need is to try to sneak something else past your airway. I always see people urging coughers to drink water when they've inhaled something, and it drives me nuts.
I have no news or analysis to add to recent reports of dangers from certain kinds of plastics used in food and beverage containers. However, I do have a linguistic contribution to make that I am rather proud of: polydeathylene.
Tomorrow I return to work. I barely remember what I do. I'm very grateful to Bank of America for letting me have this time. I don't understand why they're so nice; the benefit is so far and away beyond what they needed to do to be competitive. Bank of America is not perfect, but they really seem to be trying to do the best for their employees. I like my co-workers, enjoy the environment, and work on something genuinely useful, but I'm dreading going back.
The last 2 months have been the best 2 months I can remember. A long time ago I said (not here) that I wouldn't mind being the one who stayed home. I didn't know what I was talking about then. I spent the last 2 months learning, and I've reached the same conclusion. My paternity leave hasn't been for Kieran. It hasn't really been for Jessica, either. I've been on leave for Uma.
She is such a sweet girl. She's the one I'm worried about. She's going to feel abandoned. I tried to prepare her for my return to work. She started crying. "I'll be sad when you're not here." I don't get it. I'm not very nice to her. Must be biology, I guess. I can't make her understand. In at least this way, it would have been easier of my employer hadn't been so generous. Then we wouldn't have found a regular, stable, Daddy and Uma routine. Now, though, she's going to have to deal with a lot less attention and time. I can make things easier for myself by reminding myself how much better and easier it is for me than for most people, with generous leave and vacation, as well as flexible working hours, one day working from home per week, and good pay. Uma doesn't have that perspective. All she knows is that I'm not going to be around as much anymore. And that will make her sad.
In all the media coverage of the children removed fron the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints compound, I've seen no mention of the sect's history of banishing teenaged boys to make it easier for church elders to have their pick of the young women for wives. These are some scary people. Note also that the link is a few years old 1; these people have been cause for worry for some time. That is not at all a comment on the wisdom and justice of what the state has done recently, but rather a small attempt to rectify the omission by the media of what seems like pertinent background information.
1 And from a British newspaper. I wonder about the journalistic ethics regarding quotes; a man I assume is American is quoted as saying, "But they all want to go back to their mums." Mums? Really?
I had a minor complication with the IRS. They want me to send my response to Rulon White Blvd., in Ogden, Utah. Rulon Jeffs was the prophet (until his death) of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints father of Warren Jeffs, recently convicted for accessory to rape, also a former head of the FLDS (though he seems to say now that he was a false prophet), and all-around fun guy. The FLDS is the creepy cult who were raided recently and whose members saw many of their children taken away by the state. Which state? Texas. What is the capital of Texas? Austin. I live in Austin. And I am sending a letter to Rulon White Blvd. DUN DUN DUN DUN!
