December 27, 2009

  • Changing tires

       My mom called me this afternoon. “My two left tires are flat! Come here and lend me your spare.”
       I thought that driving on two spares was a bad idea. For one thing, she drives a Volvo and I drive a Nissan. I told her that I’d find a tire store that she could get towed to.
       I called her back a few minutes later and she said, “Everything’s fine, Mark! I canceled the tow. My friend’s Volvo is here and I’m going to borrow her spare.”
       I groaned and eventually persuaded her to accept a tow. Later, my friend speed observed that if Mom insisted on driving, at least we could have put both spares on the front. She would tilt to the front, but at least she wouldn’t drive in a circle.

       Anyway, the incident reminded me of the following joke (as told by E. Yudkowsky).

    A motorist is driving past a mental hospital when he gets a flat tire.
    He goes out to change the tire, and sees that one of the patients is watching him through the fence.
    Nervous, trying to work quickly, he jacks up the car, takes off the wheel, puts the lugnuts into the hubcap -
    And steps on the hubcap, sending the lugnuts clattering into a storm drain.
    The mental patient is still watching him through the fence.
    The motorist desperately looks into the storm drain, but the lugnuts are gone.
    The patient is still watching.
    The motorist paces back and forth, trying to think of what to do -
    And the patient says,
    “Take one lugnut off each of the other tires, and you’ll have three lugnuts on each.”
    “That’s brilliant!” says the motorist.  “What’s someone like you doing in an asylum?”
    “I’m here because I’m crazy,” says the patient, “not because I’m stupid.”

July 20, 2009

June 28, 2009

  • What I’ve been reading

    I’ve been reading more than usual lately, thanks to my broken foot!

    1. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Bryan Caplan. Its thesis is compelling, but few of the policy recommendations are politically feasible. One lesson is that high voter turnout implies increased participation by uneducated and irrational voters. So I’m a new fan of voter apathy.

    2. The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs. I’ve heard so many diverging opinions on the efficacy of foreign aid that I don’t know how to evaluate his ideas — except to say that he’s more optimistic than any other expert that I know.

    3. Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl. The former NY Times restaurant critic chronicles her experiences eating while in disguise. This book made me hungry.

    4. The Price of Everything, Russ Roberts. This is a fun and surprisingly moving didactic novel. Its theme is spontaneous order — the magical ability of the price system to coordinate the efforts of millions of strangers.

    5. The Unthinkable, Amanda Ripley. Full of gripping stories of plane crashes and natural disasters, this book persuaded me to pay attention to every flight’s safety spiel and to count the number of rows to the emergency exits.

June 25, 2009

  • Garment workers in Bangladesh

       Rich-world protesters… should support increased numbers of [sweatshop] jobs, albeit under safer working conditions, by protesting the trade protectionism in their own countries that keeps out garment exports from countries such as Bangladesh…
       On one visit to Bangladesh, I picked up an English-language morning newspaper, where I found an extensive insert of interviews with young women working in the garment sector. These stories were poignant, fascinating, and eye-opening. One by one, they recounted the arduous hours, the lack of labor rights, and the harassment. What was most striking and unexpected about the stories was the repeated affirmation that this work was the greatest opportunity that these women could ever have imagined, and that their employment had changed their lives for the better. [emphasis mine -- Mark]
       Nearly all of the women interviewed had grown up in the countryside, extraordinarily poor, illiterate, and unschooled, and vulnerable to chronic hunger and hardship in a domineering, patriarchal society. Had they (and their forebearers of the 1970s and 1980s) stayed in the villages, they would have been forced into a marriage arranged by their fathers, and by seventeen or eighteen, forced to conceive a child. Their trek to the cities to take jobs has given these young women a chance for personal liberation of unprecedented dimension and opportunity.
      The Bangladeshi women told how they were able to save some small surplus from their meager pay, manage their own income, have their own rooms, choose when and whom to date and marry, choose to have children when they felt ready, and use their savings to improve their living conditions and especially to go back to school to enhance their literacy and job-market skills. As hard as it is, this life is a step on the way to economic opportunity that was unimaginable in the countryside in generations past.
       Some rich-country protesters have argued that Dhaka’s apparel firms should either pay far higher wage rates or be closed, but closing such factories as a result of wages forced above worker productivity would be little more than a ticket for these women back to rural misery… Virtually every poor country that has developed successfully has gone through these first stages of industrialization.

       That’s Jeffrey Sachs writing in The End of Poverty. Those jobs seem abysmal to Americans, but they are a great hope for the citizens of poor countries, and I don’t want to deny them that opportunity. I’d much rather see such factories succeed. They’ll attract competition and their workers will acquire skills, driving up productivity and wages.
       Here’s another problem with fair-trade agriculture: paying farmers above the market rate attracts people into farming rather than factories. And in the long term, agriculture will not be the way out of poverty for these countries. Economic development requires industrialization.

May 14, 2009

  • Cold School

       Last weekend, I visited New York to attend my friend Jim’s wedding. Jim and I attended the same Korean church when we were boys in Ohio, and he grew up to become a law professor. At the wedding reception, I was seated with some of Jim’s NYC friends, and they asked to hear about Jim’s childhood. A few days later, I recalled this story and emailed it to them.

       When Jim and I were in the fourth grade, our Sunday school teacher used a game to teach us about the Cold War. He divided our class into two countries. I was president of one country, and Jim was president of the other. The teacher gave each country an equal supply of nuclear missiles. After a round of negotiations, each country could either disarm or secretly build more missiles.
       At the end, the teacher would reveal the outcome. The country with more missiles would win. In the case of a nonzero tie, both countries would lose. But if both countries completely disarmed, then both would win.
       At the negotiation, Jim said, “I want us both to win, Mark. Let’s disarm.”
       I agreed, and after conferring with my team, I whispered disarmament orders to the teacher. Jim whispered to the teacher also.
       Then the teacher announced the result. “Country A has no missiles, and Country B built the maximum number. Country B wins!”
       Jim let out a loud burst of laughter. And I’ll never forget what he said next: “Mark, how could you be so stupid?” I was so embarrassed.

       Sadly, Jim wasn’t trying to be insulting — he really was confused! But the story just goes to show the difference between a future lawyer and a future engineer.

April 19, 2009

  • Religious differences

    On Monday, the day after Easter, I ran into a coworker in the break room. Joe is Jewish.

    Joe: Hey Mark, how was your Easter?
    Me: It was good. How is Passover going?
    Joe: Uh… it’s going fine.
    (Joe drops a Pop-Tart into the trash.)
    Joe: I just realized that I can’t eat this.

April 15, 2009

September 30, 2008

August 17, 2008

July 30, 2008

  • Insight

       The New Yorker has a good article (see page 41) summarizing the latest research on insight: the sudden and complete flash of understanding that may arise when contemplating a problem.
       An excerpt:

    Many stimulants, like caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, are taken to
    increase focus — one recent poll found that nearly twenty percent of
    scientists and researchers regularly took prescription drugs to
    “enhance concentration” — but, accordingly to Jung-Beeman and Kounios,
    drugs may actually make insights less likely, by sharpening the
    spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles.  Concentration,
    it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity. 
    “There’s a good reason Google puts Ping-Pong tables in their
    headquarters,” Kounios said.  “If you want to encourage insights, then
    you’ve got to also encourage people to relax.”  Jung-Beeman’s latest
    paper investigates why people who are in a good mood are so much better
    at solving insight puzzles.  (On average, they solve nearly twenty percent more C.R.A. problems.)

       The article also notes that insight is driven by right-brain activity and occurs when the left-brain is quiet.
       As a left-brainer, I’m disappointed by that last bit. But I’ll relax.