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Daily Notebook
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2008 September 8 |
Thank you, Caplugs!
Is all economic news bad? Have you noticed that no matter what happens to the economy, the news media report it as a misfortune? Housing prices go down, and all of a sudden people have lost their personal wealth. Housing prices go up, and housing is unaffordable. The dollar goes down, and our nation is becoming worthless. The dollar goes up, and some kind of investors are in dire straits (I'm foggy as to exactly who). No matter what happens, it's bad for the people who were betting it wasn't going to happen.
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2008 September 7 |
Static-sensitive USB ports We have two computers with USB ports on the front panel. Both of them have the following quirk: If you walk up to the computer and plug in a USB device, the static electricity makes the computer crash and reboot. If you touch the front panel and then the shell of the USB jack with your finger first, you're OK. This is in a home office area that is not very static-prone. We certainly don't see sparks or hear pops as we go about our business. We've even used some anti-static carpet spray recently. For what it's worth, both computers have Asus motherboards and the front-panel USB port is wired to the motherboard. On one of them, I ran an additional ground wire from the shell of the USB jack to the computer case, and it reduced but did not eliminate the problem. Does anybody out there know more about this than I do? Any cures available? Economic notes Why the culture of thrift is anti-inflationary: Very simply, people are not borrowing money to spend, which means that (as Milton Friedman would say) there's less money chasing the same amount of goods and services. The effective money supply is smaller.
Non-economists often don't realize that lending creates money.
Suppose I find a $100 bill on the street and deposit it in the bank.
Clearly, I have $100. And suppose banks are allowed to lend out half of
what they have on deposit. Then the bank can lend you $50. At that
point you have $50 in your pocket but I still have $100 in the bank.
Somehow that $100 bill has turned into $150. And so on... You could
deposit the $50 and someone else could borrow $25, etc. And you thought the government controlled the money supply. They do it only indirectly, by setting interest rates and regulating the banking system. Sometimes, even if you offer a low interest rate, people don't borrow much, and that's what's happening now. I think I've figured out why Zillow no longer has an opinion about what my house is worth: there's too much variation in the value (per square foot, etc.) of the comparable houses. There are houses on the market around here that ought to be comparable to mine, but the prices differ widely, and of course the price doesn't really mean anything until a house actually sells. Questioning the American Dream The post-WWII "American Dream" is for everybody (or at least every married couple) to own their own home. Public policy has been strongly slanted toward favoring this, through agencies such as FNMA and FDMC as well as general economic policy. After 60 years, the post-WWII expansion is ending, and we've been suffering through a "housing bubble." And at least one economist, Robert Shiller of Yale, is pointing out that putting all your wealth into just one thing — a single house — may not be wise. It's certainly contrary to two well-known principles of investing: (1) investments should be diversified; (2) you shouldn't invest borrowed money. If you can be sure house prices are going up, then buying one on margin — that is, investing borrowed money — can be very profitable. You borrow $10,000, buy for $10,000, sell for $15,000, pay off the loan, and pocket the difference. That was the early-1950s road to financial security. Everyone on that road got help from the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s, which increased the dollar value (not the true value) of the house. But if you invest borrowed money and the price fails to go up, you have a problem. All investors know this about all other types of investments. Somehow, houses, as "the American dream," are supposed to be exempt. There's another angle to the American dream: home ownership keeps people tied down. This is good for employers. If your workers have mortgages, they can't just pick up and go off to another town when they get another job offer. You have them captive, or as employers like to put it, they're "stable." And that is what is causing misery in the de-industrializing Northeast. When Kodak downsizes, house prices in Rochester plummet, and all those workers' American dreams turn into nightmares. Schiller has an idea I'm not sure I completely understand, the "continuous workout mortgage," where, in essence, you are buying a steadily increasing percentage of your house from the bank, rather than a steadily increasing dollar value; when the value of the house changes, the bank takes the risk along with you but also shares in the profit. It looks to me as if this would make home buying safer and easier but less valuable as an investment.
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2008 September 6 |
Farewell, Eos; hail, Skinfaxi Last night (Sept. 4), we came home to find that our file server, Eos, was inoperative. Melody and Cathy bought Eos at a super-early-morning Wal-Mart sale right after Thanksgiving 2002 — one of those "line up at 6 a.m. and we'll sell you a computer for $300" deals. Because of the hour at which it was bought, they named it Rosy-Fingered Dawn, or Rhododaktylos Eos as Homer put it in Greek. The failure is on the motherboard and is not the RAM. Accordingly, Eos has been scrapped, although I may try to get part of it working. We were about to go to Wal-Mart and buy a Dell refurb, or something, as an emergency replacement, but Cathy generously gave us Skinfaxi, the computer she had bought right after high school and was no longer using. Its name means "shining horse" and comes from Norse mythology. I moved Eos's operating system license (XP Pro; it validated just fine) and some hardware components into Skinfaxi, and it is serving us well. Eos's hard disk, which is undamaged, is now Skinfaxi's secondary disk. Thanks, Cathy! Too much ventilation While working on Skinfaxi, I found that the inside of its case had gotten very dusty despite being in an ordinary, clean, household environment. The culprit was too much ventilation. Skinfaxi was built in a "gamer" case with three case fans and lots of ventilation. And of course a lot of dust was sucked in. I deactivated some fans and covered up some vents, and Skinfaxi is not only cleaner, but also quieter. And the CPU is running at 93 F versus the original 80 F — not a problem. Electrical engineers know (even if "gamers" don't) that with ventilation, you only need enough, not too much. This is a computer, not a vacuum cleaner! Uploaded from Skinfaxi, 9:35 p.m. September 5.
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2008 September 5 |
More astrophotos In between stints of UFO-gazing on Sept. 3, I also did some traditional astrophotography with my 8-inch telescope in my driveway. Here's Jupiter, the best 1500 out of 2400 or so video frames, stacked and processed with RegiStax:
Then, using my steel-plate gadget from last month, I was able to reach the far southern sky with a piggybacked Canon EOS 20Da, 300/4 lens, and ×1.4 teleconverter. Here's Ptolemy's Cluster (M7), with a small globular cluster (reddish) to the upper right, and star clouds in the background: 
And here's M16 (the Eagle Nebula or Pillars of Creation). This is not a very good picture; much more exposure would have helped.
Each of these is a stack of just two 4-minute exposures at f/5.6, corrected with dark frames and flat fields. We got busy observing the UFO. Two observations about the economy (1) Our new culture of thrift is strongly anti-inflationary. Even the people who are earning more are spending less. This makes it possible for interest rates to stay low without fueling inflation. So although I expect the inflation rate to be higher than the target (2.5%) over the next few years, I'm expecting interest rates to stay moderate. Putting this a different way: The demand for loans has dropped so much that loans are going to remain cheap, with interest rates not much higher than the rate of inflation. (2) It has been observed that mortgage interest rates appear to be artificially high right now. Lenders lost so much money on bad mortgages that now they have to price their products high in order to stay in business. Expect this situation to change.
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2008 September 4 |
The Athens UFO While doing some astronomy in the driveway last night (Sept. 3), I saw the Athens UFO, which people have been seeing intermittently since July 4, and so did Melody and Cathy. Either there were three of them or it came over three times. It was a very bright (-8 magnitude), very compact red light; through binoculars I saw a hint of someting above the light momentarily reflecting it, and at times the UFO dropped small luminous objects that quickly ceased to glow. On one occasion the red light itself apparently fell to the ground.
This is a 30-second time exposure as the UFO moved gradually to the left against the stars of Ursa Minor (Polaris at right, Kochab at left). It dropped a small white object near the end of the exposure. I think these are probably small, expendable, unmanned balloons launched by a prankster. I'm a bit puzzled by the bright light, though. It resembles a hue seen in fireworks, but it burns with the steadiness of an electric light and must be extremely bright. The light is not directional — the UFO moved in different directions but the light did not dim very much as it moved around. We didn't think of determining altitude by parallax. As I walked around, I didn't notice any parallax, so the object was probably at least a couple of thousand feet off the ground. Brook Monroe writes to say it's a safety flare (like the kind used on the road) tied to a black plastic bag inflated with helium. That sounds right. The brightness and color are consistent with this, as the absence of a visible balloon (because it's black). Bowman Austin calls my attention to sky lanterns, which are traditional Asian candle-in-a-paper-balloon gadgets, but these are not as bright, nor red-colored, nor is the balloon invisible.
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2008 September 3 |
Who ever would have guessed? For years I've been saying that the credit card industry was neither ethical nor prudent. Now, guess what? Reuters says: Weak economy set to hit credit card companies hard U.S. credit card delinquencies are rising and the credit card issuers could be in for a lot of agony. Expectations that cash-strapped consumers and businesses will default on their credit card balances in greater numbers are forcing lenders to reduce consumer credit lines, cut back on signing up new customers and raise fees. But even these, in some cases drastic moves, are likely to be too late to save the credit card issuers from substantial credit losses...
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2008 September 2 |
$20 buys a lot of calculator these days A couple of years ago I standardized on the Casio FX-115 MS Plus scientific calculator, bought three of them (one for each of the desks I work at), and even wrote a reference card for it. Well, the other day I needed another one, but now it's the Casio FX-115 ES and has even more functions. It will even do numerical integration!
(The argument of cos(X) here is in degrees. Recall that cos(6.28°+2°) is very close to 1, so the integral is very close to 6.28.) Actually, the older FX-115 MS will also do numerical integration, but without the handy notation for it. What impresses me about the new one is that it uses enough standard mathematical notation that I don't have to look up how to do things. More useful to computer geeks like me is the logN function, which makes it easy to calculate log2 and find out how many bits are needed to represent a value. The most noticeable difference from the earlier model is that numbers, by default, are displayed as exact fractions (and, when needed, radicals) whenever possible:
Woodworkers will find this kind of thing handy. Divide 11 in half, and you get 5 1/2. There is a key for entering fractions, but I find it quicker to enter 16 3/4 as 16+3÷4 (that's what it is, after all). At the touch of a button, you can convert this to an improper fraction (67/4) or a decimal (16.75). Instead of the multi-layer MODE menu, there are two menu keys, MODE and SETUP. If you go to SETUP and choose LineIO instead of MathIO, you only see decimals on the screen, and the overall behavior is a lot more like the earlier FX-115 MS.
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2008 September 1 |
Point of English: "As" does not mean "When I was" Why would anybody think that "as" means "when I was"? Recently I've been coming across sentences like this one: As a child growing up in Florida, my father had a well-equipped workshop... That's perfectly good English and means, "My father had a workshop when he was a child." But as I continued to read the magazine article, it dawned on me that the author meant, "When I was a child, my father had a workshop." And that's not what he said! There are also plenty of sentences like this one: As a child growing up in Florida, there was nowhere to go... At least this one doesn't come out and say something other than what the author meant. Instead, it merely never tells us who was the child. These are what English teachers call dangling modifiers — descriptive phrases that fail to say what they are describing — and that calls to mind my all-time favorite, from a high-school English book long ago: Walking down Michigan Avenue, the Wrigley Building loomed up ahead. Chicago is an amazing place, but how fast does the Wrigley Building walk? I think I've put my finger on something the schools weren't teaching people about ten years ago. But at least the 1970s are past — the days when everybody claimed to be a "bad speller" and told us that if we wanted the words spelled so that we could recognize them, rather than according to the writer's self-centered creative whimsy, we were some kind of fascists. My writing style In one of the sentences I just wrote, Chicago is an amazing place, but how fast does the Wrigley Building walk? you see a classic example of my style — a sentence whose main point is delivered right at the end, with hints but no clear advance indication of what it is going to say. This is a similar to what rhetoricians used to call a periodic sentence except that periodic sentences are defined by grammar rather than meaning. It is also an example of the natural word order of human language: "topic, comment." That's what linguists call it. You set the context first, identify what you're talking about, and finally deliver new information. Rhetoricians define a periodic sentence as one that's "grammatically incomplete" until the end, but I don't think periodic sentences are difficult for the hearer to process. Quite the opposite: descriptive phrases are delivered, and can be understood and disposed of, one by one without interrupting the main sentence, which hasn't started yet. If you don't want people to understand you, use involute sentences with the optional descriptive elements inserted in the middle: How fast, even in Chicago, which is an amazing place, does the Wrigley building walk? The effect is to get "How fast" and "walk" as far apart as possible so that the hearer has to make an effort to connect them. Of paint and searchlights Searchlight follies: Those searchlights have been traced to their source; see this update. I don't appreciate being done out of my hobby (astrophotography) by a self-important local business. Nor do I understand why they want to attract people to their place of business late at night, when it's closed. Ceiling-paint saga: Some time back, we had a smoke detector on the ceiling of our kitchen. We moved it and I spackled the holes. The other day I decided to paint over the spackle using Kilz Upshot, my usual ceiling-spot cure-all. Well, although Kilz Upshot is tinted to match aging ceilings, if you put on more than a very thin coat, it is glossier than ceiling paint. In this particular place, the light catches the ceiling at a low angle and you can really see the sheen. Amazingly, it took 3 coats of flat ceiling paint to get rid of the shiny spot, but now the repainted patch is too light-colored (even after adding some brown and gray to the ceiling paint). It's not just age; white paint in the 1970s didn't have the super-white pigments of today. So I'm still experimenting and will apply a slightly darker coat today. And that leads me to an invention wanted: a low-cost hand-held colorimeter to carry to job sites. What I want is the same functionality as the paint-matching machine at the paint store, but portable. I'd like to either buy one or be able to rent it from the paint store for half a day in order to go around and measure some colors in my house that I want to match. Is anybody doing this? I could design and built it myself if I weren't so busy with other things — but I'd probably have to license patents, and anyhow, there is surely something like this already out there. Where? For that matter, could I add an adapter in front of a digital camera to do this? Control the lighting and exposure, of course, and include a test target of precisely known color.
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Entries are most often uploaded around 0000 UT on the date given, which is the previous evening in the United States. When I'm busy, entries are generally shorter and are uploaded as much as a whole day in advance. Minor corrections are often uploaded the following day. If you see a minor error, please look again a day later to see if it has been corrected. |
