car keys

The keys to my 2000 Jaguar S type have a little remote control attached to them. Now it is pretty standard but at the time it was a rather new feature.

It has four buttons on it:

The first is a lock button. This one button does what all technology should, it makes my life better. The brilliance of this might not be readily apparent to everyone but it makes it so I never lock my keys into the car. On my old van the easiest way to lock the car was to hit a button inside the car. This made it all to easy to lock the door, close it, than realize you don't have the keys. With this button on the jaguar I am outside the car and have the keys every time I lock
it.

The second button is an unlock button. It is nice but unlocking cars was never hard so the net benefit to my life is only slightly positive.

The next button is a panic button. This is Annoying and has no real use but does nothing worse to my life than make me yell at my car when I accidently hit it. People ignore car alarms but pay attention to people yelling help. So I would never actually would want this feature.

The last button I could easily be talked into paying at least a hundred dollars to disable. It is the open trunk button. Sounds harmless enough, right? Actually it just cost me a few hundred dollars and almost certainly will again. Let me explain. The first thing to understand is that it doesn't actually open the trunk, it unlatches it. The trunk stays closed until someone lightly pulls up on it. The insidious part happens when you accidentally hit it, the trunk is now ready to open but you have no idea. Being unaware you drive away with an unlatched trunk. Then when you hit a big enough bump it opens, often causing you to lose whatever happens to fall out before you
noticed it. This just happened to me on the freeway while going eighty with a trunk full of text books and binders of notes. I spread papers over a several mile section of road

Research supports my laziness

It is nice to see when research supports me being lazy. The research has been getting worse and worse for vitamins. Add to the list of things vitamins don't do, preventing cancer.

Bad Timing

I sure hope I didn't completely miss the boat on energy jobs. After growing by 500% in a ten year period it really does look like the wind power industry is beginning to slow down, so is the solar industry. I suppose I shouldn't worry though, if the Bush administration manages to preside over more growth in Wind power than the Obama administration than it will be one damn strange twist of fate(although alternative energy probably did do better in the Bush administration than the Clinton one so maybe that is wishful thinking on my part).

Some videos

I haven't posted videos in a while, mostly because I haven't been watching them. So, here are a few from people I am impressed by:

Daniel Gilbert giving a talk for TED:



He is a happiness researcher at Harvard who has contributed a lot to my world view




xkcd founder giving a talk at google:

This is just impressive because he is a member of my demographic group: pasty white guys.


I haven't watched this one yet, but Rames Randi is one of my heros:

He is a magician, and one of the best people alive at seeing through bullshit. A shame he is almost 80, the world always needs someone like him around.

Gladwell

I finally gave in and started listening to Malcolm Gladwell's new book last night. While I had heard most of it before, it is still nothing less than stunning. Within the first few pages he managed to convince me of things I don't think anyone else could.

For example there is about an 11% lower college graduation rate for people who are the youngest in their class than people who are the oldest in their class. That is not the age for their college class, it is the age for their elementary school class! The gap between the average test scores for forth graders is huge between those youngest, and oldest, students in the grade (something like ten or fifteen percentile points). That alone convinced me that: either elementary school classes should be split into kids in a 3 month age range rather than a one year range, or any program that selects students based on their intelligence and gives them better education before the age of ten needs to be eliminated. While it is possibly making the smart kids smarter, just as often it seems to be making the old kids smarter. That extra preparation is what seems to be driving the higher college graduation rates for that group. Once they were passed over for GATE programs and the like they are far less likely to catch up to their classmates who were once just older than them and are now actually smarter from the better elementary school education they got.

Probably the better of the two choices is simply making age ranges for elementary school kids in a class a three month range. It would cost almost nothing to do, but for those youngest children not being compared to children a year older saves a great deal of frustration, but I can see the other point. From a fairness, and class mobility standpoint eliminating those programs before the age of ten could do a lot of good. Giving a small number of students a huge institutional head-start does seem unfair. These clearly are the students who already have better parenting on their side, better schooling to go with it seems extreme.

In a way the book is fairly motivational. As best as psychologists can tell the difference between someone who is poor, and someone who is one of the best in the world, at just about anything is simply practice. For example huge studies on musicians have been completely unable to find any world class musicians so brilliant as to get to that level with less than 10 000 hours of practice. That is about 20 hours a week for ten years, so typically it ends up taking a decade to reach that level. Not only that, but when looking at music school students they were unable to find any people who had practiced that number of hours and not reached that level! Consistently the poor musicians were simply the ones who practiced the least. Beyond actual mental retardation there is almost no place for talent whatsoever, those who practiced more beat those who practiced less every time.

Talk about motivation to get off the computer and learn something of importance! Actually though I could argue that what I am doing now is part of the 10 000 hours needed to build some skill. Another 9000 hours and I could actually be a competent writer!

Fusion and Solar

This graph, from this article I found interesting.





It is more interesting when looked at side by side with:





Some environmentalists complain nuclear fission gets so much more money. This complaint seems silly to me, the ratio of subsidies to production is far better for nuclear. A dollar the government spends on nuclear power produces a lot of energy, a dollar spent on solar hardly anything.

The questionable allocation of resources gets really bad when comparing wind/geothermal/water/biomass with solar. We have spent as much on solar research as all of those combined! Yet the second graph clearly shows those three all producing at least ten times as much electricity. Talk about a misallocation of resources. I am not necessarily saying the solar budget needs cut as it, along with fusion, are possibly the best long term solutions, but if geothermal and wind have proven themselves to be so much more capable with so much less money, than shouldn't we be throwing more money at them to see what they can do? This is particularly true of geothermal which has got almost no government funding yet manages to consistently outproduce solar.

What comes up

This figure, from this article, is really quite impressive.




I think that my expectation that housing prices would return to their 2000 levels, and could fall as fast as they came up will not be far from the truth. The only thing I am surprised at is they seem to be falling faster than they came up. Oh well, no one in their right mind will buy into the idea of real estate being the ideal investment for a few years so if I can just get a job and start saving I will be in good shape to buy right at the bottom.