Thoughts: Miscellaneous

moving to a new blog

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 05:07:22 GMT

I'm finally giving up on Windows Live Spaces. It's hard for people to post comments here, it's hard to embed photos, and other small things. I will miss a few things...but not many.

Please join me at my new on-line home.

old friend (almost) arrested in Pakistan

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:07:28 GMT

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule a few days ago, "rounded up hundreds of opposition and human rights activists and introduced tight media regulations" (source). If you look at this article on the situation from the UK newspaper The Guardian, the human rights activist being arrested is my old classmate Aasim Akhtar, who works organizing poor farmers to achieve basic human rights. Apparently he somehow managed to escape the attempted arrest in the photo and is now in hiding.

I hope that the international community will put serious pressure on the Musharraf government to end the "emergency rule" and hold the planned elections in mid-January.

i learned it from watching you! (picky eating = drug users)

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:14:39 GMT

The title of this New York Times article (Picky Eaters? They Get It From You) piqued my interest. It disappointed me, but this one paragraph was useful:

People who study children prone to flinging themselves on the floor at the mere mention of broccoli agree that calm, repeated exposure to new foods every day for between five days to two weeks is an effective way to overcome a child’s fears.

It appears we've migrated away from the marathon sessions (you can't leave the table until you eat those cooked carrots) that I credit with making me a very unpicky eater.

I hoped the article would have something to do with this absolutely classic TV commercial.

moving

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 13:35:35 GMT

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be driving across the country with my family, so I may not be posting much. Meanwhile, here's my favorite dialogue of late:

- Don’t stand next to any big magnets.

- Why would I stand next to a big magnet?

- Well, I don’t know what you do in your personal life.

from "Flight of the Conchords" Episode 2. You can see the beginning of Episode 1 (and all the other episodes) on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN59lpFmvbc or you can download it free on itunes. This show is wildly funny.

[Note: a little bit of language]

the garment district

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:33:08 GMT

My wife and I are reading aloud Magic for Beginners, a short story collection by Kelly Link (featured on NPR's books not to miss). On the first page is a wonderful description of The Garment District, a wonderful thrift store in Boston:

We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. It’s kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world – instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world’s largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses – all the blues you can imagine – and then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds and exit-light reds and candy reds.

ten worst jobs in science

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 07:19:29 GMT

Popular Science has published a list of the Ten Worst Jobs in Science (thanks Freakonomics). The article wittily describes each job, but here is the short version:

10. Whale-Feces Researcher - They scoop up whale dung, then dig through it for clues
9. Forensic Entomologist - Solving murders by studying maggots
8. Olympic Drug Tester - When your job is drug testing the world’s top athletes, there’s no way to win

7. Gravity Research Subject - They’re strapped down so astronauts can blast off
6. Microsoft Security Grunt - Like wearing a big sign that reads “Hack Me”
5. Coursework Carcass Preparer - They kill, pickle, and bottle the critters that schoolkids cut up
4. Garbologist - Think Indiana Jones— in a Dumpster

3. Elephant Vasectomist - When your patient is Earth’s largest land animal, sterilization is a big job
2. Oceanographer - Nothing but bad news, day in and day out

1. Hazmat Diver - They swim in sewage. Enough said.

dolphins, fishing birds, and Parker Posey

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 19:07:57 GMT

This morning I sat on the beach and, as I meditated on holy words, I watched dolphins swimming and birds repeatedly diving for fish.

AND I just got complementary tickets to see Parker Posey (I'm a fan) discuss a movie she has coming out (plus a screening of the movie) tonight.

Score.

best t-shirt I saw in China

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:00:49 GMT

THE COMPANY WHO LOOKS

DURING THE NIGHT TRAFFIC

CAMPAIGN

LIKE LOST CHILD'S KITTEN

This kind of t-shirt was very common, covered with nonsense English (or maybe it's secret code!).

quick political quiz

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:41:13 GMT

I just took the quick (3-5 minutes) political quiz that I saw on Greg Mankiw's blog. It evaluates your stances on economic issues (left vs. right) and on social issues (social libertarian vs. authoritarian). It places me in the moderate economic left and as a moderate social libertarian [click the graph below for my precise placement]. Sure.

flying China: sweet in-flight entertainment

Mon, 28 May 2007 02:54:11 GMT

Last week I mentioned I'd be flying China Eastern from Los Angeles to Beijing. The flight was 3.5 hours late because they couldn't get the lavatories to work (Take your time, make sure those babies are fully functional!), and when we got on board, we were informed that the in-flight entertainment system was broken (keep in mind the flight was over 12 hours long). Since then, I've flown within China three times (Shanghai to Beijing, Beijing to Xian, Xian to Beijing), and on two separate Chinese airlines I've encountered an awesome in-flight innovation. Soon after departing Shanghai, an enthusiastic Chinese narrator (with subtitles in English) begins describing the plot of Monster-in-Law (J-Lo and Jane Fonda): he explains, Jane Fonda thinks J-Lo is not good enough for her son, after which we see one scene of the film demonstrating this point. He continues moving the plot forward and showing us a representative scene until he asks, How will it end? And then we see the climactic wedding scene. We saw everything we needed to see of Monster-in-Law in ten minutes. AWESOME! On the trip to Xian (and the trip back, with identical entertainment), I got a summary of Notting Hill and of Elizabethtown. As the narrator said (per the English subtitles), "The perfect ending will satisfy audiences. They was together at last." as we watch Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts walk down the aisle. Golden.

Stop the bus! It's Burger King!

Fri, 18 May 2007 23:46:54 GMT

Yesterday morning I took the bus to work; I was the last passenger, and a few blocks before my stop, the bus driver pulled over and said, “I need to run across the street for a minute. Do you mind?”

“No problem, I’ll just walk the last couple of blocks.”

“Now you’re making me feel bad!”

“No, really, no problem.”

So I set off on foot and glanced back to see my bus driver slipping into Burger King for what I’m sure was a great-value breakfast.

It all worked out, as by walking I passed a booth where people were giving out free donuts.

p.s. Tomorrow I leave for two weeks in China, so you may not hear from me much.

Statler and Waldorf evicted from their retirement home

Tue, 15 May 2007 22:34:54 GMT

You may remember Statler and Waldorf, the two wisecracking old dudes in the balcony on The Muppet Show. I just read this funny letter from the Executive Board of their retirement home. Read the whole thing; here is an excerpt:

Here now is a mere sampling of your antics from a single day, May 13, 2006, as recorded by your fellow residents.

7:30 a.m.

When Mr. Nichols was stretching
before his morning laps.

STATLER: Do you think it's right for a man of his age to be swimming?

WALDORF: Sure ... with the fishes!

9:42 a.m.

As Mrs. Needlemyer was floating in the pool.

STATLER: Waldorf, quick! Call Sea World! One of their whales is swimming in our pool!

WALDORF: That's not a whale! That's Mrs. Needlemyer. Can't you tell the difference?

STATLER: Of course. Silly me. Whales aren't nearly that big!

an unhealthy diet

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 01:39:56 GMT

This morning, as I jogged to work, I stopped to say hello to Bill the Sand Castle Man. He asked me if I was still running and shared that he lost 60 pounds without exercise and without building sand castles. How? Thirty pounds after a heart attack and thirty pounds after a bout of pneumonia.

That reminded me of what I used to call my personal diet: I’d eat whatever I wanted all school year, go to east Africa in the summer, get diarrhea, and lose weight. Just like this line from Helen Fielding’s Cause Celeb: “You could spot the field-workers because they had all had the runs so often that their clothes were too big for them” (p133).

I’ll stick with jogging.

great ideas scribbled on napkins

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 05:39:28 GMT

This week's The Economist has an obituary of Paul Lauterbur, the man who developed MRI technology and subsequently won part of the Nobel prize for medicine.

His core discovery, of how to get spatial information about atoms in a magnetic field, was scribbled on a paper napkin over dinner in a Big Boy restaurant in Pittsburgh, between two bites of a hamburger.

In hope of having great ideas like that, I almost always carry with me a little notebook and a pen. As I glance through my current book, I see such inspired notes as "There'll be no butter in hell!" (a quote from Ian McKellen in Cold Comfort Farm) and "Calculate diff elasticity for poor" (related to a paper I'm writing). Nothing intellectually worthy of Dr. Lauterbur, I'm afraid, but there have been a number of good ideas to call people, and the notebook helps me to come closer to the counsel of my great aunt, Camilla Eyring Kimball: "Never suppress a generous thought." I'll keep waiting on that Nobel-worthy breakthrough, just one step up from "do laundry."

nocturnal nightlife on my evening commute

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 06:56:05 GMT

Tonight I was jogging home from work just after 11:30pm, and I encountered two bits of local wildlife. First, I stepped on a rat. Thankfully, she got away, neither lingering under my foot nor running up my leg.* Second, a raccoon started to cross my path, then returned from whence he had come. I also saw a surprising number of people hanging out in the park for this hour on a Monday, but ¿qué sé yo?

* I was kind of freaked out after stepping on the rat. It reminded me of the time, as an adolescent, that I went out to feed our family dog, reached into the big bag of dogfood with his dish, and a hiding rat jumped on my hand, ran up my arm, and jumped off my shoulder to freedom. Traumatized, I went in and told my mother, whose immediate reaction was to ask, "So did you feed the dog?" No nonsense. Lots of love, but no nonsense.

what i'd have become if not an economist (just for the name)

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:18:43 GMT

otorhinolaryngologist: noun a specialist in the disorders of the ear or nose or throat [syn: ENT man]

want to save money? use cash

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 05:54:51 GMT

A friend recently shared with me that he doesn't have a credit card in order to avoid spending excess money. (He builds credit by paying the mortgage on his house.) When he needs to go to the grocery store, he gets cash out of the bank and goes to the store with it. Apparently, there is something to this strategy:

Visa thinks a contactless digital transaction takes less than half the time of a cash one and that people liberated from what happens to be in their wallets spend a fifth more.

from this week's Economist article, "The end of the cash era".

learning to love clouds

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 06:01:45 GMT

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry,

and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at

cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the
atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of
a person’s countenance.

Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked.
They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save
on psychoanalysis bills.

And so we say to all who’ll listen:
Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!

from the Cloud Appreciation Society

castle in the sand

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 04:25:02 GMT

This morning, on the way to work, I saw a man building a sand castle. We chatted, and I learned that Bill has been building sand castles for 30 years and that he loves to gamble (that has nothing to do with sand castles per se, just something he shared). Below is a low-quality picture of Bill with his high-quality handiwork (click the picture to enlarge).

how much would Michael Scott's antics REALLY cost the company?

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 23:32:03 GMT

In the American version of the television show "The Office," Michael Scott makes insensitive blunder after another. A labor and employment attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, has sought to estimate the potential litigation value going along with each episode. It's pretty sweet, if you're a fan. Here's the link.

Thanks to OfficeTally for the tip.

best internet "radio" station EVER...and it's free

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:29:08 GMT

A few years ago, some musicians and technologists joined forces to create the Music Genome Project. They have characterized over 10,000 songs based on hundreds of musical characteristics or "genes." If you identify a song, they can identify about 100 songs that are similar in terms of "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony."

They then set up Pandora.com, in which you do exactly that: type in a song and then listen to your own radio station with music based on that song. Or you can type in a music group and it will base a radio station on music similar to any song ever played by that group (obviously a much larger set). It's awesome. The selection is massive and it's free with almost no commercials. I like it so much that I often plug my laptop into our stereo and listen to this in place of radio and CDs at home.

Some of my favorite stations (that I've created) are one based on Tracy Chapman's song "The Promise," one based on Julieta Venegas's song "My Voy," and one based on Alison Kraus's "Down to the River to Pray."

celebrity economist sighting & planes falling from the air

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:49:32 GMT

Yesterday I was in a DC airport and, Who did I see walk past me to a pizza place? Larry Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary, ex-president of Harvard University, and noted economist. I was amazed that no one seemed to recognize him, no crowd of paparazzi harrassing him. I guess economists aren't quite as sexy as Lindsay Lohan.

A little later, while sitting on the tarmac, waiting for my plane to take off, I read this great passage:

The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet...Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was head on the intercom: "We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!"

(from Don DeLillo's White Noise) Thankfully, life did not imitate art.

california cracks down!

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:22:36 GMT

From the local AAA magazine:

During 2006, the California state legislature approved several new laws of interest to Auto Club members and motorists... AB 1850 makes it unlawful for a person to knowingly drive a motor vehicle while another person is riding in the trunk; riding in the trunk is also illegal.

I guess we'll need to buy a bigger car or move to Tijuana.

changing the world by buying the Right Food

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 00:22:08 GMT

The Economist had a fascinating article in last week's issue ("Voting with your trolley," 7 Dec 2006) about various movements to help the world through what you buy. The three movements they look at are (1) buying organic food, (2) buying fair trade food, and (3) buying local food.

What's the matter with buying organic?

Norman Borlaug, the father of the “green revolution”, winner of the Nobel peace prize and an outspoken advocate of the use of synthetic fertilisers to increase crop yields...claims the idea that organic farming is better for the environment is “ridiculous” because organic farming produces lower yields and therefore requires more land under cultivation to produce the same amount of food... The more intensively you farm, Mr Borlaug contends, the more room you have left for rainforest.

Alternatives?

The most environmentally benign form of agriculture appears to be “no till” farming, which involves little or no ploughing and relies on cover crops and carefully applied herbicides to control weeds. This makes it hard to combine with organic methods (though some researchers are trying).

Okay, but what could be the matter with buying Fair Trade? Surely that helps the banana farmers in Costa Rica!

The standard economic argument against Fairtrade goes like this: the low price of commodities such as coffee is due to overproduction, and ought to be a signal to producers to switch to growing other crops.

BUT

Mr Bretman of FLO International disagrees. In practice, he says, farmers cannot afford to diversify out of coffee when the price falls. Fairtrade producers can use the premiums they receive to make the necessary investments to diversify into other crops.

Another objection to Fairtrade is that certification is predicated on political assumptions about the best way to organise labour. In particular, for some commodities (including coffee) certification is available only to co-operatives of small producers, who are deemed to be most likely to give workers a fair deal when deciding how to spend the Fairtrade premium. Coffee plantations or large family firms cannot be certified... Limiting certification to co-ops means “missing out on helping the vast majority of farm workers, who work on plantations,” says Mr Wille of the Rainforest Alliance, which certifies producers of all kinds.

Perhaps the most cogent objection to Fairtrade is that it is an inefficient way to get money to poor producers. Retailers add their own enormous mark-ups to Fairtrade products and mislead consumers into thinking that all of the premium they are paying is passed on. Mr Harford calculates that only 10% of the premium paid for Fairtrade coffee in a coffee bar trickles down to the producer.

Okay, and what about buying local food (to use less energy flying your bananas in from Central America)?

Research carried out at Lincoln University in New Zealand found that producing dairy products, lamb, apples and onions in that country and shipping them to Britain used less energy overall than producing them in Britain. (Farming and processing in New Zealand is much less energy intensive.) And even if flying food in from the developing world produces more emissions, that needs to be weighed against the boost to trade and development.

So what do we do? None of these arguments is iron-clad, but they're worth weighing in the balance. I'm very much pro-activism, but I'm only pro reasoned activism.

my commute: photo shoots, dogs driving cars, and smiling oranges

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 23:59:17 GMT

This morning I jogged to work a bit late, and my commute was busy. I passed a number of travelers still snoozing in my town's cheapest hotel (the beach), saw a photo shoot, saw a women taking photos of oranges with faces on them, and saw a couple shooting movie footage of a dog in shades driving a car. Good times. Poor quality but amusing pictures from my camera phone here. A teaser below (click to enlarge - a little).

important news (for me)

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:26:03 GMT

By far the most blogworthy event of late is that my wife and I welcomed a new baby. Details here.

the truth about vampires

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 23:20:30 GMT

Today, LiveScience.com and other news sources reported on the work of a University of Florida physics professor which supposedly demonstrates that vampires are "a mathematical impossibility." Here is the gist of his argument as stated in the news piece:

On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on.

This is, unfortunately, flawed logic: it assumes that vampires behave like deer. It is entirely possible that vampires have some kind of self-regulating mechanism to ensure that they don't run out of mortals to drain. It could be that the strongest vampires kill off the others (through appropriate methods, such as decapitation or the stake through the heart). Alas, the subject of Elizabeth Kostova's boring novel may still be lurking.

Best of Yaz helps with PMS: I love science!

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 23:55:06 GMT

I just saw the following headline on WebMD: Yaz Approved for Severe PMS. I've enjoyed Yaz ever since their song Only You played during the climactic romantic moment of the teen comedy Can't Hardly Wait. Okay, I've enjoyed that song ever since then.

* Make sure you read the WebMD article before you buy the Best of Yaz. The album overall is kind of disappointing. It's just that song that's good.

Full Harvest Moon on Friday night!

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 04:45:02 GMT

It almost looks full tonight (my homepage tells me it's 99% full: that's a gibbous that's really waxing). But tomorrow is the Harvest Moon!

From wikipedia, the Harvest Moon is the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox (September 23 this year). It is also called the Elk Call Moon or the Singing Moon. So make sure you listen carefully for that beautiful singing tomorrow night!

Here is a Harvest Moon for you:

Credit and copyright: Stan Richard

meme

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:31:14 GMT

I don't often do these personal memes, but a friend "tagged" me and I'm in the mood, so...

What do you like most about where you live? It's sunny all year round and I can jog to work.

What's one of your all time favorite music albums and why? There is no album that I listen to with regularity, but I've always enjoyed the Les Miserables soundtrack, combining emotion with a strong message of social change.

Did you have a passion for something as a kid that you still have now? Reading. As a boy, I spent many, many, many hours in our local public library. I would walk there after school and spend the rest of the afternoon there, reading everything. I no longer read everything...but only because I lack the time.

What do you like most about having a blog? Writing about development issues helps me formulate my thoughts and think more thoroughly about the issues.

if you like U2 and ... clever editing of the State of the Union

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 05:02:38 GMT

This is the third funniest music video I've seen: someone diced and spliced one of President Bush's State of the Union addresses to "help" him sing U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday. (Here are the first and second funniest videos I've ever seen: both by The Hoff.)

how to dissuade yourself from becoming a blogger

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 21:50:39 GMT

One of the links on my homepage is to a daily "how to," and the other day my instruction was in How to dissuade yourself from becoming a blogger. The author makes four main points:

1. Don't put anyone through reading the junk that most people post every day.

2. Even if you write good stuff, chances are that no one you don't know will find it.

3. Try writing in a journal: if you give up after 3 days, you probably aren't up for a blog.

4. Why not spend your time doing genuinely interesting things instead like going to a restaurant or building a treehouse (not my examples)?

As I tried to rationalize my own limited blogging, a couple of thoughts came to mind.

1. I recently spent a few days vacationing with close friends that I hadn't seen for a year. Two of them keep regular blogs, and as a direct result of that, it actually felt like I speak with them everyday. We have lively, sometimes intellectual conversation.

2. The goal for many bloggers is not to attract new readers as if we were newspaper columnists, but to principally write for friends but leave the ideas open for others who may wish to weigh in.

3. The blog acts like a sort of journal of what I'm thinking about, and it forces me to vet some of my thoughts more closely than I would if I were just recording them for myself.

This is a wildly unimportant debate in the sense that people who enjoy blogging should go ahead and those who don't shouldn't. But I'm glad I found enough faux justifications to be able to add a few more entries.

tonight: biggest full moon of the year

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:19:04 GMT

At 8 o'clock tonight Pacific Time, the moon will be at its closest point to the earth all year (just 221,938 miles). It will be the "biggest and brightest Full Moon of 2006."

In honor of that, here is a wonderful picture of the moon:

Credit and copyright: Noel Carboni

Thanks to Astronomy Picture of the Day for the link.

away from my blog + fiber fest

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 11:40:54 GMT

I'm off to meet my wife in Paris! We didn't think beforehand to engineer a meeting atop the Eiffel Tower, so instead she'll meet me at my arrival gate: almost as romantic. I'll be away for ten days, and I likely won't post while I'm away. See you soon!

I just noticed that near my office is a Fabulous Fiber Fest, which I will miss due to European travels. Talk about poor planning on my part.

the finest music video of all time

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 05:49:33 GMT

A friend of mine pointed me to a very funny David Hasselhoff video (Jump In My Car). It's pretty funny (especially after the first minute), but it can't quite compete with the most awesome music video of all time. I've seen it several times, but watching it this evening brought the laughter once again. You can share the experience here.

serious descendants

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 23:58:06 GMT

My grandmother passed away last week, and our family traveled to attend the funeral. It was a happy occasion: she was a hundred years old, had suffered from Alzheimer's for many years, and passed peacefully.

One fact that really struck me is the sheer magnitude of her family; I quote from her obituary: "She is survived by five children, 40 grandchildren, 145 great-grandchildren, and 10 great-great-grandchildren."

This weekend I'll post photos of the trip on the family blog.

blogs I visit regularly

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 19:32:27 GMT

After a week out of town, my mind is completely blank and so I'll just list some other blogs that I visit with some frequency. (I'm only listing what I call 'topical blogs,' which tend to report on some subject area, as opposed to the many blogs operated by friends and family, which are of less general interest.)

The Center for Global Development Blogs: this has links to their general development blog and their blog on global health policy, both useful in keeping up with current issues in international development
The Private Sector Development Blog: this deals with both private and public sector efforts to eliminate poverty in developing countries. Note, for example, the interesting recent post on conditional cash transfers (which are becoming in development today something like what microcredit was in the late 1990s; okay, not quite yet).
Bookslut: I love reading this site; it constantly updates on interesting or funny issues in the literary world. (Note: sometimes posts here have strong language.)
Marginal Revolution: All kinds of interesting economic analysis and thoughts.

Two other economics-related sites that I visit daily are the Social Econ Blog (which deals with economics of social issues; surprise!) and EconBall (which gives economic analysis of many current issues, especially those related to industry).

please do not leave your baggage unattended

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 14:53:13 GMT

Yesterday afternoon I arrived at the international terminal of LAX to catch my flight to London. While standing in the British Airways line and chatting with an airline employee, she pointed out to me a large, hard orange suitcase looking lonely, forlorn, and very ownerless by the elevator. “I hope we don’t have to evacuate,” she said.

Ten minutes later, we evacuated. Hundreds of passengers, airline staff, and concessions employees very slowed made their way outside to the sidewalk, and then down the street, all the way to the next terminal. There I met an airline employee very happy to share his views on evacuations, the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, and US dealings with Iran. I also met a guy named Brian (aka BT), who composes music for movies (such as Zoolander and Monster). BT told great stories about working with Ben Stiller (apparently not the easiest guy to work with, with something of a deity-complex), Charlize Theron and Madonna (both great to work with), and he graciously diverted some of Happy Airline Employee’s attention.

No bomb, apparently. I made it to my coach flight, sandwiched between a burly gangbanger-turned-minister on his way to Ghana and a nurse-midwife. In a few hours, on to Uganda.

if I had unlimited vacation days...

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 20:25:29 GMT

...I'd go to "Jolie Rickman's Spanish for Activists Camp"!

For the last four years, solidarity activists and friends gathered from across NY State on a beautiful cooperative land trust outside Ithaca NY for a weekend of Spanish (with an activist slant), workshops, networking, music, poetry, good food, great people, and tons of fun! The response has been fantastic and participants unanimously requested an encore this Summer!
This year we're going to do it again, only BIGGER AND BETTER!

Although I suspect I wouldn't come down exactly with the organizers on a number of political and economic issues (amazing what several years of graduate economics training will do to you), I'm definitely in favor of more activism (and "tons of fun").

[Thanks, CE, for the link.]

Freaks and Geeks

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 06:07:45 GMT

This post is completely trivial. Of late, my wife and I have been watching the one-season wondershow "Freaks and Geeks," which aired in 1999-2000. Besides it being a fun show about adolescence, I've enjoyed seeing all kinds of stars show up to make cameos. For example...

1. Ben Foster (Angel in the new X-Men movie) plays an ultra-nerd obsessed with "Three's Company."

2. David Koechner (Todd Packer, the boss's best friend in the American "The Office") plays a waiter.

3. Jason Schwartzman (Max, the star of Rushmore) plays a guy who can get fake IDs.

4. Ben Stiller (in everything) plays a secret service agent.

5. And most importantly, Thomas F. Wilson (Biff from Back to the Future) plays the gym and health teacher.

Furthermore, a supporting character is James Franco (Peter Parker's best friend in the Spiderman movies), and one of the lead characters (Linda Cardellini) had a supporting role in Legally Blonde. Good times.

in praise of wikipedia

Sat, 27 May 2006 00:18:41 GMT

I recently needed to identify various provinces of Burkina Faso on a map, and after some searching around I ended up at Wikipedia. There I found a map with every single province identified, as well as information about the departments within each province. What a resource!

In case you've never heard of Burkina Faso, I've attached a map from the Wikipedia entry, and here is a little paragraph from The World Factbook (another handy resource):

Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) achieved independence from France in 1960. Repeated military coups during the 1970s and 1980s were followed by multiparty elections in the early 1990s. Burkina Faso's high population density and limited natural resources result in poor economic prospects for the majority of its citizens. Recent unrest in Cote d'Ivoire and northern Ghana has hindered the ability of several hundred thousand seasonal Burkinabe farm workers to find employment in neighboring countries.

[On another wiki note, I recently needed to uncover the meaning of a word in Indonesian and was able to simply type it into Wiktionary and there it was! Here is a list of all projects Wiki.]

COTR

Wed, 17 May 2006 23:10:35 GMT

I was reading a government document and came across the acronym COTR. Not knowing what it meant, I googled COTR and this is what I came up with:

1. College of the Rockies (in British Columbia)

2. Church on the Rock. "Here you will find big smiles, warm hugs and new friends."

3. Golden Triangle Church on the Rock. "Non-denominational, family oriented, mission minded church."

4. Children of the Revolution. "a world rock band that believes that there can be unity in the world through music."

5. Carnival of the Recipes. "The art of cooking is the art of balancing. Yin and yang, sweet and sour..."

The meaning here seems to be Contracting Officer's Technical Representative. I'll stick to the world rock band or the big smiles.

A little more on Spelling Bees

Thu, 04 May 2006 17:09:02 GMT

A few days ago I posted about three spelling bee movies. Apparently, they're having an impact. According to one news source, ABC will air the final rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on June 1, from 8 to 10pm. Usually the Bee is just on ESPN, so this is a big promotion.

A drop at a time

Wed, 03 May 2006 05:38:21 GMT

Last week, John Kenneth Galbraith - certainly one of the most famous and most influential economists of the 20th century - passed away. I got to meet Galbraith a couple of years ago (well into his nineties), and my grandfather also met him when they were both working in India. The New York Times published an obituary here.

When I read an Associated Press piece about Galbraith over the weekend, a colleague mentioned that Galbraith would take time to write every morning. As a result, he published 33 books over his lifetime. That reminded me of this line in Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption": "Think about what a man can do if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time." If you've read the story or seen the film The Shawshank Redemption, you can imagine the convict Andy Dufresne and what he accomplished, a drop at a time. I'm fascinated by the idea of what you can accomplish by doing a tiny bit each day. When I was younger, I learned how to juggle on a consistent five minutes a day. In recent years, I've tried to do many things on a few minutes a day (learn a kind of shorthand, learn other languages) but have generally lacked the perseverance (with the exception of certain spiritual observances). But reading about John Kenneth Galbraith renews my desire to consistently dedicate myself to those things that I wish to accomplish.

I was just glancing through the notebook that I always carry with me, and I was surprised to see a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith that I must have copied down from someplace: "When people are less sure, they are most dogmatic." An unfortunate truth.

More on alcohol

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 22:04:13 GMT

A friend asked me, If this study is so good, why is it in Addiction Research and Theory instead of the Journal of the American Medical Association? I went to the paper and found a couple of reasons: first, the original hypothesis that the beneficial effect of moderate alcohol intake was due to misclassification of former drinkers was published twenty years ago in this article in the Lancet, so this isn't a completely new idea. Second, in the seven studies the current study finds that classify people correctly, light drinkers still have slightly lower average mortality but the difference isn't "significant" (which means that we can't be sure the difference isn't just random noise). So this study isn't totally earth-shattering: but it does add to the case that this beneficial effect of alcohol is, as the Lancet article authors write, "likely to be ill founded."