Power Grid

As I am sitting patiently waiting for final word on an electrical engineering job from Southern California Edison I may as well link this article talking about what bad shape the electrical grid is in. It really does seem like a good time to get involved with the subject as it is one of our bigger energy issues in America, yet does not attract the number of interested people that say Solar power does.

They invited me down to Rosemead twice, and the person doing the hiring has done nothing but tell me how amazing I am and how I am almost certain to get the position. But they are making final decisions this week and sending out a letters with the offers. I should hear by the end of tomorrow, Monday or Tuesday at the worst. Until I get something in writing I will be freaking out a little bit though. Everyone I have talked to seems to have a story about a job they were sure they got based on what the people at the company told them, but that ultimately turned them down. As long as he isn't an amazing liar, or they lose funding for the position, I imagine I will have it though.

Portugal Drug Decriminalization

Scientific American had an interesting article on Portugal's experience with drug decriminalization. They had an interesting strategy to the whole thing which seems like a conservative enough one that it might be possible to replicate in the United States. The main premise is stop putting users in jail, but keep the penalties for dealing the same. Users who are caught go in front of a panel that has three options: mandate drug treatment, give a fine, or no penalty. This system seemed to have really good results for them dramatically reducing deaths from both HIV, and drug overdoses.

I see drug dealers as the moral equivalent of liquor store salesmen. Poor guys just trying to make a few bucks who neither make the drugs nor force the drugs upon people. So I am inclined to do something more radical than Portugal, but I can see the political reality. The Portugal model if pushed hard enough just might be viable in the short term here in America. There is even a chance this system would work better than the one I would want. After all it leaves drugs difficult to get while making treatment and clean needles easy to get. That may be the best compromise.

This is a rather interesting talk. I don't entirely agree with some of the premises but she does a really good job at making her point. I am glad that Obama put her in an important position in fixing the financial problems we have.

skip to about 4:50 into the talk.

Single Digits

I don't think I heard anyone in the media mention this, but last month was the fewest American Soldiers killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war. Down from a high of 137 deaths in Nov 2004, the number lost in March dropped to 9. The first time since the invasion that number was in single digits. We haven't had more than twenty deaths in a month since September so this isn't just a particularly good month. It is becoming more and more safe to say that the war in Iraq is over, and we won.

So much for all the Vietnam Analogies, we lost about 55 000 troops there and about 4500 in Iraq. Iraq never got even close to as bad as Vietnam

Stress and Education

I ran into this article in the Economist today. It seems like it could have interesting implications if the concept holds up to further scrutiny. Essentially they are arguing that stress levels decide how intelligent children turn out to be:

That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain. Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the “remodelling” of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.

If true that seems like it may have huge implications for the education profession. If the most important thing that can be done for young children is keeping them in a low stress environment could all that testing actually be causing more problems? I of course would want to see some study on this subject before making any conclusions as the home environment may be the much more stressful place but it could be an interesting line of research.

Buying everything new

At some point in the next year(hopefully sooner rather than later) I will have to buy almost everything new. I have a decent set of silverware, clothes, a car, a computer, and some random hobby gear but that is about it. This means I will have to start buying furniture and kitchen equipment in large amounts over the next year. I also am likely to stay in the same general part of the country for some time meaning that I will likely be able to keep most things I own whenever I move.

Now, my first priority is cheapness. I don't believe in wasting money on stuff like this when I can go spend it on silly hobbies. This however is a complicated question to figure out. Sometimes when you buy the more expensive item you are paying for style, and the total cost will simply be higher if you buy expensive stuff(most cars and clothes are this way). Sometimes however when you buy cheap items it is because they are poorly made and will break. Buying an expensive item that lasts 50 years is cheaper than buying a cheap item every year for that same time period. So I have been reading up on the subject trying to figure out what is actually worth blowing money on.

The real point of that rambling was to pass along this article. I never really understood the physics of why you would want to buy one kind of pan or another. This article does a really good job of explaining why some pans are good and some poor though.

The Banker Who Should be Getting Bailout Money

One of the most annoying aspects of the bailout is that it is giving money to the worst offenders. There were a great many banks that were quite responsible throughout the boom, are not in debt, and in some cases are even using the crash as a time to dramatically expand. If we gave the bailout money to these responsible bankers, and let the less responsible financial entities go bankrupt, they could buy up assets of failing companies putting them in the hands of people who are quite a bit more trustworthy. Instead those few responsible banks are finding that they are eligible for next to nothing, and the irresponsible banks are getting propped up despite their failure.

Here is a great article on one such banker, who pretty much completely stopped making loans for four years when it was obvious the market was irrational, and is now stocking up at assets that are now priced at reasonable levels.