5 Years

Five years ago tomorrow I started this blog. I was working at a job I didn't particularly like nor found mentally fulfilling, and the blog was intended to be a creative outlet. Blogging took a little getting used to. Honestly a sizable chunk of my first entries were blatant plagiarism of Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column. But it was something fun to do and I got better at it over the years. A couple or three entries had pictures of DIY projects I'd done, which gained traction on Google Image search and I get a pretty regular stream of 200-300 people a week to those particular posts. The other posts get about 20 readers.

But it was never about traffic for me. Or revenue. It was about writing. I'm sort of a weird engineer because I like writing. I like practicing it. And after 5 years of honing my writing, I'm ready to be done with blogging. My current job is incredibly exhausting, but I love it. My family, since I started this blog, has grown by two children and two dogs. I've bought a house (and everything that goes with it). My wife finished school and got a full-time job. My daughter starts Kindergarten in a few weeks. Life is just really busy.
And I committed myself to writing a book, which is coming along pretty well. And I'm trying to learn Spanish.

But the busy-ness isn't the reason I'm quitting. I'm quitting because I feel done.

I want to direct you to pretty much anything Freddie deBoer is writing. That guy can cut through B.S. like no one else on the internet.

Thanks to all my readers, I hope you found something on here you liked once or twice. I plan to leave this up and not archive/delete any posts, because there are several entries I am hoping my children will find and read one day.

And if you should never hear from me again, because you do not know me personally, cannot find me somewhere else online, or for any other reason, please go from here with the words of William Safire:

Our charge today is to value the goal of discovery that drives questing humans to take great risks.

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If A, Then B

WSJ Headline 1: Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard

 WSJ Headline 2: To Follow the Money, Study Engineering

 The conclusion isn't hard to draw.


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The Influence of Andrew Sullivan

Ross wonders if Andrew Sullivan is the most influential political writer of his generation. I humbly submit that my grandmother, who votes in every election, has never once in her life heard of Andrew Sullivan.

I'm not going to argue that Sullivan hasn't been influential. Douthat and Tyler Cowen rightly point out that Sullivan's crusade for gay rights has been both effective and important. And in general terms he obviously is a popular writer, Obama even reads him.

But outside the beltway...Sullivan's name and influence start to wane. And I have to wonder if all these writers and political journalists and political bloggers, all having their parties together and hanging out in their swank apartments where they all talk with and about each other...they have a skewed notion of what influence is.

I remember in high school there were these two kids that were really popular: Ky and Cameron. In fact they were so popular that even at the other high school in town they were respected. But go any further away than that, and no one had ever heard of Ky or Cameron. Nor did anyone feel it necessary to respect them.

Andrew Sullivan has his moments. Even at its worst, his blog is entertaining. But how can Ross et al. call Sullivan the most influential political writer in his generation if he can't even get enough subscribers to support his site?


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America, June 2013 Edition

Never has the quote "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" been more aptly applied.


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The Long Arcs of Human Existence

Imagine me, 16. I'm a junior in high school, this is October 1998. I'm on the sideline of a football field, in the blue and gold uniform of the Olathe South Falcons. It's a Friday night and we're playing our town rival, the Olathe North Hawks. And we're losing badly.
Of course, I didn't normally dress varsity. I was a junior at a large school, so the odds were stacked against me just due to the sheer amount of talent available to the coach. But also I was pretty small, and not especially good at football. I played defensive back, along with about 15 other guys, so my chances of getting playing time at the Varsity level were pretty slim. Which was fine. I wasn't 100% obsessed with football. There were guys that would go ballistic when our team would score a touchdown, running up and down the sideline screaming their heads off and I would not at all understand this kind of ferocity. And I got knocked on my ass a lot.

But I'd had a particularly good week at practice, and combined with a couple guys getting stomach flu, I'd eased my way into backup backup backup varsity free safety for a night. So I stood on the sidelines as Olathe North absolutely demolished us. By the 4th quarter, we were miserably behind, and our chance of winning was gone. So I sidled up to the coach and asked to be subbed in. I figured this might be my one and only chance to ever take the field at a varsity football game, why not seize it? So I fired myself up and told the coach "sub me in, I want to turn the game around!" and the coach kinda smirked and sure enough he subbed me in.
So there I am, trotting out onto the grassy, lined plain. There's something magical about a Friday night football game. As soon as I got on the field I understood better why people liked playing football under lights. I eased up about twenty yards behind the D-line, watching the Olathe North offense work. Most of their starters had been pulled - they too understood the concept of a foregone conclusion. But their starting runningback, a sophomore phenom, was still in. His name was Darren Sproles.
Their quarterback took the snap and I saw him duck low as he moved to hand it off. Other defensive players began to shout "RUN" to as they recognized the play evolving. I kept my feet moving, quickly pulling in towards the defensive line to intercept their runner if and when he came through. My head was moving left and right as I wildly scanned the field. If the runner got through the line, I was the last defense stopping a touchdown.
And just like that a white and red blur went past me. No human being could move that fast. Some sort of projectile had been launched by the offense. I whipped my head around and watched Darren Sproles absolutely torch me for a touchdown.

That was my one and only play at the varsity level. Coach, after turning a funny shade of cherry red, pulled me off the field and I was promptly sent back to JV the next day. And shortly after that, I quit football. Not because I didn't like it, or because I felt ashamed that I wasn't especially good, but because I treated extra-curriculars in high school like a buffet, sampling as many as I could. Football was replaced with some other sport. I tried tennis, track, theater, Science Olympiad, marching band...the list is long to tell.

Off I went to college. Years passed. I neared graduation, and had applied to several graduate schools. On April 24th, 2005, I was sitting in the living room of the house I was renting. A letter had arrived from a graduate school and I was nervously opening it. It was the school I wanted to attend most. As I read, with a great, glowing satisfaction, their acceptance letter, on the television the Paul Tagliabue was on stage at the NFL Draft and he said "With the 130th pick of the NFL draft, the San Diego Chargers choose Darren Sproles."

Off I went to graduate school, then to a job, then another job, then to my current job. And last night, wife and two kids in tow, I headed over to have sandwiches at Chick-fil-a. There was a strange line outside the restaurant. Apparently people were waiting to meet some celebrity that going to be there signing autographs. My family went inside, we ate, and came back out. And as we were leaving I saw the celebrity had arrived. The people in line were wearing K-State Jerseys, or holding San Diego Chargers memorabilia for him to sign, or New Orleans Saints memorabilia. And as we walked past the little booth they'd set up for him, he looked over at me. Its been 15 years but I recognized Darren Sproles immediately.

15 years of life, and two humans who could not have possibly taken more different paths, who met as kids on a football field for 10 seconds...meet again in the parking lot of a Chick-fil-a for 10 seconds more. I'm not sure what sort of conclusion to draw here, other than that the arcs of our lives are impossible to predict. Where we'll be a year from now...five years from now...fifiteen years from now...is surely a wildly different place than what we think it will be.


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Bill of Rights

First Amendment - Justice Department Secretly Obtained Phone Records of AP Journalists

Second Amendment - Obama Administration Ignores Justice Department Researchers That Show Assault Weapons Ban Won't Decrease Gun Violence

Third Amendment - FBI Uses Drones For Surveillance On U.S. Soil

Fourth Amendment - UN Torture Chief: Treatment of Bradley Manning Was Inhuman, Cruel

Fifth Amendment - Obama Signs NDAA 2013: U.S. May Still Detain U.S. Citizens Indefinitely Without Trial

Sixth Amendment - John Walker Repeatedly Asked For Lawyer, Was Not Given One

Seventh Amendment - U.S. Citizens May Be Assassinated Without Jury Trial According to President Obama

Eight Amendment - Drone Assassinates U.S. Citizen Without Trial or Charges

I could keep going, but I'm too embarrassed to do so right now.


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Electrical Engineer Unemployement Soars

My stance on immigration has always been one of open arms and open mind. That's all been tempered in the last couple years, as it became clear to me that many companies in the tech industry are pushing for the expansion of the H1B visa program solely so they can bring in cheaper workers and undermine the wages of degreed engineers already in the USA. R&D labor is expensive.

So here's an interesting little article from Computerworld (back in April) talking about a recent surge in unemployment among electrical engineers. The article also mentions the very low unemployment among "software developers." And finally, it touches on the IEEE-USA's attempts to inhibit random expansion of the H1B visa program.

A few thoughts:

1) In this modern app/software era, it is very possible that many electrical engineers have simply migrated from hardware to software. Typically an electrical engineer can program too, so its not that uncomfortable of a switch. And apps is where the money is right now. I have a friend who worked for Honeywell as an electrical engineer but he's now doing Indie games for iOS and making a killing.

2) It's interesting the IEEE-USA refers to the cohort as "software developers" and not "computer scientists" or "computer engineers" or "software engineers." My guess is that this group includes all the above and more: people doing software development that don't have a 4 year ABET degree.

3) This H1B visa thing reminds me so much of the old days when bosses would try to break the union worker's strike by bringing in foreign labor. And yet the idea of bringing in more STEM is generally lauded. What a strange paradox where bringing in foreign tech labor boosts the American economy while simultaneously driving down wages in one of the last high-paying wage sectors.

You can read more I've written on the STEM controversy here, here, and here. And I already linked to it above, but this is the most important article I've written on this subject.

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Competing Interests in Environmental Friendliness

Bike lanes encourage cities to be more environmentally friendly. So do driverless cars. But to me they seem competing in interest. A city with bizarre bike lanes set ups will be inherently much more difficult for a driverless car to navigate. Further, a flow of bikers will represent a complex and fluid array of potential hazards the car's computer system will need to avoid.
On the other hand, driverless cars, by their very nature, are way more fuel efficient than manually-controlled cars. And thus a city interested in protecting the environment would want to create a road system that was driverless car-friendly. Which might mean moving bikes as far off the road as possible in order to eliminate hazards to the cars.


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The Hypocritical Failings of Andrew Sullivan

OMG Andrew Sullivan. The worst kind of person is the one that when proven categorically wrong doubles down on his position. This is exactly what Andrew Sullivan openly loathed about right-wing pundits circa 2008-2011. This sociopathic behavior was one of his strongest criticisms of Sarah Palin. And thus, he has become exactly what he most loudly hated. But then, isn't that how it always goes?

Seriously Andrew, can ANYTHING make you disappointed with Barack Obama?



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Privilege

Sully posted a link to this video of Tim Doner, a 17-year-old polyglot who can speak (to varying degrees) nearly 20 languages.

It is barely mentioned in the video, but Tim attends The Dalton School. And to me that was the singularly most important detail about this boy, and we can draw so many conclusions from it.

While its easy to celebrate Mr. Doner's accomplishments and truly I would be a jackass to not acknowledge that the kid is obviously brilliant, what would be equally egregious is if I didn't ask just how many languages he would have learned if he had grown up in Kansas City Public Schools? Or in East St. Louis? Or anywhere other than a posh prep school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that regularly matriculates a vast number of students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton?

Ask yourself, as you watch that video, two questions. The first is the one I've spoken above...how would Tim Doner have done without all that privilege?

The second, vastly more important question, is what our society would look like if every teenager had access to the education quality found among ultra-rich Manhattan prep school attendees. What if every school was a Dalton School? What if every American student could be taught Mandarin by a native-speaking Chinese teacher in a class with a student/teacher ratio of 3/1?

I think there's a deep cynicism in America right now, evidenced by Federal and State budget cuts to education. It implies that humans are no longer something the Government thinks of as a good investment. I realize crony capitalism and lobbying and what have you tend to drag government dollars away from things like education, but nevertheless many Congresspersons are parents and therefore have to realize by cutting state education budgets they are crippling the ability of future generations to create a productive and vibrant society and economy.
Or...they are secure in their own privilege and subsequently their children's privilege allows them to attend a local Dalton School analogue, making the state education cuts meaningless to them personally. Nevertheless this indicates cynicism, because it means those Congresspersons believe that state education will not produce anything but bad apples and chaff, so why bother spending state money on it, and the students within it.
Or...they are simply so cynical about the future of American society that they'll throw it away in favor of a hedonistic, cronyism-filled present.

Because unless you are cynical about the future, you'd be throwing everything you can at the kids. They're our salvation. You'd be shoving free biology textbooks into their hands, begging them to find cures. You'd give them unfettered access to high-performance computing facilities and climate data and beg them to solve anthropogenic climate change. You'd install gigabit internet in every school, give every student a laptop, maybe an iPad. You'd demolish old schools and build new ones with big north-facing windows and ask the kids to sit there for an hour a day and dream up a brighter future. You'd pay the best teachers a small fortune to go into the slums and teach kids there. And in places where kids left school everyday and had to go to an unsafe home, you'd open cutting-edge boarding schools where they could learn in an environment of trust and security. And you'd not give two shiny shits what any of this cost because you'd realize the cynicism should be turned back on your generation, and not projected forward onto the children. You broke the world. But the kids can fix it. That is, if you just stopped knee-capping them the day they're born.

Honesty is necessary, too. We can't have a world where 100% of children turn into Tim Doner at age 17. The reality is that a bell curve exists. Someone else might learn as hard as he can and achieve the best he can achieve: Air Conditioner Repairman. But at least he will have come to that profession honestly, as opposed to now, where a privilege pyramid exists and honest, good service professions are looked down upon from above by those who were born into a caste that would never have had to do that work anyway.

There are few things that annoy me more than state budget cuts to education. When you cut education funding, only the rich get educated.


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Parenthood

Is way more fun than blogging.

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American Capitalism

Capitalism is sort of like a game of poker, where people are all competing against one another. Everyone gets five cards, and if you are skillful and know how to bluff when you need to - and you get a lucky hand every now and then - you can win out.

Now, American Capitalism is a little different. In American Capitalism, whoever comes to the table with the most money almost always wins. This happens because you can pay the dealer to give you extra cards. Or you can pay the dealer to withhold cards from your competitors.

In American Capitalism, if you win a hand and it is discovered that you cheated by peeking at your neighbor's cards, you are only fined a small percentage of your winnings.

In American Capitalism, if you complain to the dealer that you only got 4 cards and your competitor six, you are chastised for being lazy, and you are expected to overcome the seemingly unfair odds.

In American Capitalism if you get a bad hand you can just buy new cards. If you cannot afford new cards, you must play the hand you're dealt.

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The Daily Dish - Andrew throws in the towel

Sullivan, this morning: "it remains unlikely that we will reach our target of $900,000 by the end of the year"

He goes on, ironically: "But I didn’t start this blogging thing to be rich. I started it to be free."

That's just the thing, Andrew. The internet wants to be free. When you enacted your paywall, you committed Internet Original Sin: you thought people would pay you for something they could get elsewhere for free.


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TAE's Iron Man 3 Review

Obviously, don't read this if you don't want to be spoiled.

First off, I was entertained. I'm not one of those pretentious people who expects The Best Movie Of All Time every time I walk into a theater. I rarely go to movies, and when I do I intentionally set a low bar so that I don't feel like my precious time and money were wasted. With that in mind, I very much enjoyed Iron Man 3 from start to finish.

(stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled, last warning...)

But....

First, a bit of history. Since Tony Stark/Iron Man was debuted exactly 50 years ago this past March, he's had hundreds of enemies. But the four greatest are (arguably) these: The Hammer family (Justin and his daughter Justine), The Stanes (Obadiah and his son Ezekiel), The Mandarin, an Doctor Doom. At least that is my opinion. So when Iron Man 1 featured, Obadiah Stane, and Iron Man 2 featured Justin Hammer, I was on board. Rumors began flying, before Iron Man 3 filmed, that the primary villain would be Mandarin, so I was pumped. Mandarin had been an on-going nemesis of Iron Man for the last 49 years, so there was plenty of source material!
Another bit of history. The "Extremis" storyline in the Iron Man comics was written by Warren Ellis in 2005-2006 and is consistently ranked amongst the top 3 Iron Man storylines ever (Armor Wars and Demon In A Bottle are the other two). In this storyline, Aldrich Killian, a scientist at A.I.M., commits suicide, leaving a note for his colleague Maya Hansen that he has let Extremis loose on the world. One man, Mallen, is given the Extremis serum, and when Tony Stark tracks him down Mallen beats him to within an inch of his life. In the critical moment, a dying Tony Stark realizes he must take the Extremis serum himself in order to survive and defeat Mallen. Stark takes the serum, recovers, finds himself able to communicate directly with his suit as the Extremis serum has turned him into a cyborg, and he goes and defeats Mallen.

And then we have , Iron Man 3. Look, I get it. There's no rule that says "thou shalt follow the comics dutifully." And with that in mind, I am willing to look past the fact that Iron Man's oldest foe was instead 'Ben Kingsley pretending to be Russell Brand'. I was willing to not care that Tony Stark doesn't get the Extremis serum, Pepper does. I was willing to let it slide that War Machine is rebranded "Iron Patriot" even though "Iron Patriot" is actually a villain (Norman Osborne) in the comics.

But what I can't abide are plot holes. I jokingly told a friend once that what Hollywood needs is a profession where you just read screenplays and point out the flaws. All screenplays should be required to get a pass from this person before the movie can be filmed. In Iron Man 3, the plot holes were not hard to find...

Late in Iron Man 3, the game is clear: Killian and Hansen have kidnapped Pepper and injected the Extremis serum into her so that Tony will be forced to fix Extremis and save Pepper from exploding. If this is true, why then did earlier in the movie Killian have a squadron of attack helicopters shoot missiles into Tony's house while Pepper, Stark, and Hansen are all inside?! At one point during that early helicopter attack, a goon is firing a gatling gun directly at Stark and only the fast acting Mark 42 armor saves him from being shot in the back. At another point, Stark, in the armor, is pulled deep into the ocean, and the helicopters seem to leave, presuming him dead. Please someone explain why Killian was attempting to kill Tony (and Pepper and his co-conspirator Hansen) all at once!

The ENTIRE plot of Iron Man 2 hinges on the idea that the arc reactor is the key technology that makes Iron Man a superhero. Whiplash replicates the tech and suddenly Iron Man is vulnerable. In Iron Man 1, the arc reactor is a key plot point, as Stane needs it to power his Iron Monger suit (and no other Stark Industries engineer can replicate it) so he literally steals it right out of Tony's chest. Please someone explain then why Tony is seen in Iron Man 3 charging his armor with a car battery? Ignoring the fact that car batteries are actually really bad at charging things (they are high current so they can crank your engine, but they drain after an hour of running your headlights), why doesn't he just plug his arc reactor into the armor to charge it...you know, like how the armors were powered in literally every instance on film before this moment?

Going back to Extremis...Hansen and Killian have injected it into Pepper to force Tony to fix the serum so that he can save Pepper. He refuses, and...yet...Pepper doesn't explode...

Tony has an anxiety attack at one point and the 10-year-old, Harley, suggests he fix his anxiety issues by "building something." Tony appears to have a Eureka moment and says "okay" and builds...a Nintendo Power Glove? The source of, nor the solution to, Tony's anxiety is never really explained.

What, exactly, was Pepper doing as a day job? At the end of Iron Man 2, she tells Tony she will absolutely not be CEO anymore. But clearly (and Kevin Feige confirmed it) she is still CEO of Stark Industries. Okay, fine. Then why is she in California? Didn't Stark Industries build a big, tall, shiny, environmentally friendly corporate headquarters in New York City that was a key plot point in The Avengers? If Pepper Potts is CEO of Stark Industries, why is she...in fact why are any Stark employees...in Malibu? Consistency, Marvel! Come on!

When Killian comes to Stark Industries to ask Pepper to invest in his project, she clearly knows him...but from where? She wasn't at the 1999 scene in Bern.

Will someone please explain to me how the Extremis girl immobilizes the Iron Patriot armor (just by touching it) with Rhodes still inside it, yet its internal computer systems still work, Iron Patriot/Rhodes is transported instantaneously to Miami, and then after Killian blasts his Extremis heat onto the Iron Patriot armor's tummy, somehow the goon, Savin, is able to make it fly and shoot and stuff? Who at A.I.M. is technologically capable of fixing the Iron Patriot armor (in under an hour)?

Multiple heavily-armed terrorist helicopters moving up the Pacific Coast Highway, then firing missiles and guns, and there's no military response? Suspension of belief can only go so far...

Killian: "We need to capture Pepper Potts so we can use her as leverage to force Tony Stark to fix our Extremis serum."
Hansen: "Okay, she drives herself places with absolutely no security, let's use some of our helicopters and our limitless supply of goons and just grab her when she's alone in her car."
Killian: "Woah woah woah, this is a summer blockbuster! We need a MUCH more elaborate kidnapping plot than that! And I need to be there personally, and then back in Miami minutes later."

All that being said, in terms of plot holes, this movie was SO much better than Prometheus.


And now for the good things.
Tony's interaction with the boy, Harley, were very good. While I thought the anxiety attack/NYC PTSD character development was weak, I really enjoyed his interaction with the kid, and I thought the dialogue was pretty genuine. Tony's interaction with the news van technician was also great. In fact generally the dialogue throughout the whole movie was really sharp.

Holy Hall of Armors, Batman! So many awesome armors. I felt a little cheated that we only got to see about a dozen of them up close before Tony blew them all up.

In general, I thought the movie's overall plot was really good. The character Tony Stark is at his best when he has to face human problems, and can't just hide inside his armor and blast things. And generally, this entire fracas was created by Tony Stark in 1999 he simultaneously blew off Aldrich Killian and also arrogantly provided evidence on his nametag to Maya Hansen that he could fix Extremis. Put another way, this movie did a great job of showing that Iron Man's greatest foe is always actually Tony Stark.

Who have you trampled in your past? I am a smart guy, I walked out of the theater wondering who I have wronged in the past that might hold a grudge against me. Or what opportunities I might have missed because I was arrogant.
Had Stark helped Killian/Hansen with Extremis, how much better would the world have been? In this movie version, Extremis is a serum capable of regrowing limbs. In Iron Man 1, Stark has a crisis because he's spent his life building weapons...what if he had funded and worked with Killian/Hansen on Extremis? Stark Industries might not have been just a weapons manufacturer by 2008.
This is why I will give this movie good marks. It simultaneously entertained me as well as made me retrospective about my own decisions.

All in all, I recommend this movie to all audiences.

A couple parting thoughts:
Am I the only one that thinks Jon Favreau randomly showed up on set dressed as John Travolta from Pulp Fiction, everyone laughed, and they let him stay in that outfit...and that it was NOT planned? He looked completely ridiculous and it was distracting.

Having seen all three Iron Man movies, Thor, Captain America, all four X-Men movies, Wolverine, both Fantastic Four movies, both Hulk movies, Daredevil, Elektra, all four Spider-Man movies, and The Avengers, I have to say: there is only one Joss Whedon.


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I promise to stop writing about STEM soon. Just not yet.

Imagine you are a tech company that makes widgets. You've gotten a factory in China to make the parts for the widgets for a tiny amount. You've got laborers working for minimum wage assembling the widgets. You've got salespeople making minimum wage selling the widgets.

How can you possibly make the widgets cheaper?

Perhaps the most obvious way is to pay the people doing R&D on the widgets minimum wage. Think about it: the R&D folks are still demanding $50-60k or more for their time. That's really expensive compared to a minimum wage assembler who makes $16k.
But you can't just cut these people's pay by 75%, because they'd leave and go work somewhere else, obviously! There's lots of high paying jobs for widget R&D specialists!

Unless, of course:
1) Foreign nations over-produce huge quantities of just-good-enough R&D laborers to drive down the cost, coupled with a strong domestic immigration policy to get those low-cost R&D laborers to the U.S. to replace their high-priced counterparts.

2) Domestic colleges create a surplus of scientists and engineers to make the R&D labor supply pool crowded, and drive down wages. This is coupled with an aggressive domestic student loan policy to maximize the number of humans economically (but not necessarily otherwise) qualified to go to college.

Look folks, there's no law requiring companies to pay engineers and scientists lots of money. And if demand were really high for these people, then wages would be going up. Instead, engineering salaries have been decreasing since the 1990's (Scroll down to Figure R. Engineering salaries are up 25% since 1998, while over that time inflation is up roughly 43%).

Which indicates to me that the labor pool is moving from demand driven to supply driven. Now, I'd never try to pitch this as a giant global program to drive down wages...because that's never happened before. No one has ever done that. Right?


I've written more on the STEM "shortage" here and here.
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STEM Graduate Surplus, Infighting Amongst Engineers

So I posted the Atlantic article on Reddit in an engineering sub, and the backlash was palpable. One /u/ in particular went after the data, pointing out that the "53.7% of engineering grads that found a job in the first 12 months after graduation" was from 2009, and "of course things were bad in 2009!"

My response was "I'm not sure what would have occurred economically since 2009 to provide a STEM labor market correction? Unemployment nationwide has only ticked down a bit, it seems logical that other economic indicators would also have remained relatively underwhelming."

In response, this graph was pointed out to me, from a Bay Area Economic Council report published in December 2012.

Given a cursory glance, yes, STEM jobs are doing better than "Total Occupations" in that total unemployment since 2000 is up 10% or so (important note: this is since 2000, not year over year percentage changes). And yes, since 2009 there has been an uptick of STEM hiring and it is more pronounced than the Total Occupations category. And so I was about to concede the point until I actually read the report.
And lo and behold, Figure 8:

They conveniently broke down the Stem Occupations category into sub categories. And wouldn't you know it: engineers are in the shitter. Not only are engineers net negative jobs since 2000, we are actually doing worse than the population at large.


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There is no STEM graduate shortage.

High school seniors: consider yourself warned.

- In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year.

- Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels.

- Percentage of Engineering graduates that have a job within 12 months of graduation: 53.7%

More here.
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Rampant Sexism in America IS Still A Thing

You need not go far to find a good example. Here's Business Insider's list of "30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech"

Good luck finding a fat woman, or a pimply-faced woman in there. Which, while being obviously sexist, is DOUBLY so when you remember that this is "in tech".


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Polytheism, Monotheism, Atheism, and Space Aliens

What if, later this afternoon, an Intelligent alien race lands here on Earth and makes contact with us. What if they contact our leaders and after exchanging business cards, they ask "how advanced are you?"
We humans interpret this as we can and respond "currently we can control nuclear fission but not nuclear fusion."
"No, that's not what we mean," replies the Alien. "How advanced are you, as in are you polytheistic, monotheistic, or atheistic?"
We respond "the majority of humans are monotheistic."
"Oh, okay," replies the Alien. "See you in another 200 years."
"Wait, what?!" we ask.
"Well, you see," replies the Alien, "there are more than 2,000 Intelligent species in the Universe that we've cataloged so far, not including you 'humans'. And of them, all 2,000+ followed this exact same socio-developmental pattern: polytheism, monotheism, atheism. And it turns out, interestingly, that when an Intelligent species reaches a plurality of atheists, that milestone means they're usually socially, mentally, and emotionally ready to join the interstellar community."

The question I have is this: given this information, that 2,000 out of 2,000 Intelligent species had all followed our species current religious trend, and it had ended in planetary atheism...how many monotheists would drop religion?
My guess is many would, but not nearly all of them. More likely is that new membership would massively plummet, as the young hoped they'd get to join the interstellar community once they shed the suddenly-archaic-seeming belief systems of their elders. But many Muslims, Jews, and Christians would die believing that they were right, and 2,000+ Intelligent species of Aliens were wrong. Earth Exceptionalism.

The case can be flipped around. What if the Aliens arrived and reported that of these 2,000+ species of Intelligent star-explorers, pretty much all of them (except the cyborg race of Planet 95C2) had a strong monotheistic religion on their planets. The belief in One God wasn't just a plurality on Earth, it was literally Universal. How many atheists would take up a religion, in this case? I bet some would, but most would just argue that obviously Faith isn't just an Earth construct but rather a universal construct of Intelligence...all Intelligences in the Universe share this flaw.

My guess is this: it is much easier to strip monotheists of their beliefs than it is to convince atheists to believe.


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Modern Bomb Making In America

I don't condone blowing up innocent people. I don't recommend anyone build explosive devices. I hope the world is a peaceful one, and that my children grow up in comfort and security and without the fear of terrorism.

That said, I want to correct something going around. Federal authorities and the media are latching on to the idea that the bombs used in Boston were "sophisticated" because they used "a battery pack and a circuitboard." I feel that I should point out that a Furby has a circuitboard and batteries. A solar-powered LED patio umbrella has a circuitboard and batteries. The watch on your wrist, if not hand-wound, has a circuitboard and battery. Circuitboards aren't this holy object that only a tiny cadre of madmen are capable of producing.

The bombs in Boston, unless authorities dramatically change their tune, probably had less than $2 of electronics in them. It's likely the only thing on the circuitboard was a SPST relay (costing less than a dollar) and a timing mechanism ($1 or less depending on type). Once again, I do not want any innocent lives ended with bomb making, but people need to realize that any engineer worth his or her salt could put a 'pressure cooker bomb' together in about a day.

The point I want to make is that all day, almost every day, hundreds of thousands of people all over this country who are perfectly capable of making bombs freely choose not to do so. Rather than be scared that there are so many potential bomb makers in America...can we stop for a second and realize that 99.9999% of those of us capable of easily manufacturing bombs choose not to do so? America is a really, really safe place.


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An Update

True to my word, I've been writing. The word count stands at 32,158.
For those keeping score, I've completed 4 of 15 planned chapters.


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David Merrick

So there I was, 14 years old, at Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center for church camp. Which was hilarious because I didn't believe in all that God crap. I went because I was sent. I didn't need to believe in God; I had Science, and that was way better. Science I could explain. Science I could understand.

Each evening we'd have a late service in the outdoor chapel. At each of these, one of the campers would give a testimonial. So I'm sitting there, about 8 pm on a hot summer night, bored out of my mind, packed onto a pew next to a couple friends. I remember swatting at mosquitos and thinking about girls.

Up at the front a girl about my age was giving her testimonial. Turns out she'd been riding the "Timber Wolf" roller coaster at World's of Fun and her friend had plunged off to her death. That got my attention. What happened was at the time the Timber Wolf only had a lap-belt safety system, and because you sat in pairs on a flat bench seat, it became a big thrill for teenage kids to try to swap spots with each other real fast at the top of the coaster before it plunged back down. See the Timber Wolf cranked you up about 100 feet in the air, then there was a plateau as it turns 180 degrees, then there was the first drop, so you had about 5-10 seconds up on the top of the plateau to try to swap with your seat-buddy.
The girl giving the testimonial and her seat-buddy had swapped successfully. In front of them, however, the two girls did not execute the maneuver in time, and one girl was thrown out of the car as they dropped.

So as this kid is telling her story she's getting all choked up and I'm rolling my eyes, because Darwin, right? All around me people are sniffling at this horrible sad thing that happened, oh boohoo and I'm just writhing with sarcasm, cynicsim and borderline schadenfreude -

- and then all of sudden something washed over me. It was like...well it's hard to describe. If you've ever been in a hot, sticky summer day and then descended into a cave, it was sort of like that. If you've ever been outside on a Spring day when a storm front is coming and the dead warm stillness suddenly becomes breezy and you feel the temperature drop, it was sort of like that. Or if you've ever been standing up to your waist in the ocean, facing the shore, and a slow wave pushes into your back, covering you up to your shoulders and shoving you towards shore, it was sort of like that. If you've ever gone to a movie in the early afternoon and after sitting in near darkness for two hours you walk out of the theatre into bright sunshine, it was sort of like that.
And yet it was nothing like that because the sensation was completely emotional and not physical at all. But something - and I emphasize the word something - washed over me. It was supernatural.

And so I just break into sobs, wracking, heaving sobs, and I stumble out of there and back to my cabin and I'm sobbing into my bunk and the kid who had been sitting next to me comes into the cabin and he's sobbing too and we realize that we both felt that same crazy supernatural weird thing hit us and what the hell was it and all of a sudden David Merrick is standing there and my God if he wasn't the most comforting presence on planet Earth. He told us to relax, enjoy it, and not worry about trying to figure out what happened. "Just take it in, and remember it." It was, for the first 25 years of my life, the single most poignant moment I had experienced. "I feel like I just got punched in the face by God," I told him, laughing through my tears.

David Merrick was there the day God found me.

Because, you see, it wasn't necessarily God that made that weird thing happen to me and the kid sitting next to me. But I couldn't explain it. And as soon as that inexplicable thing created a tiny chink in my Science Armor, God started creeping in.

David is dying of cancer. His Facebook wall has become a deluge of well-wishing and people pouring their hearts and stories out just as I have. "David has been there for my family for 20 years," and "David has been like a father I never had," and "I was so blessed to know David." It is pretty overwhelming to read. The sheer volume makes it seem like a celebrity's facebook wall.

But he isn't a celebrity, he's David. Humble, brilliant, weird, lanky, loving, brotherly David. And I will have words with anyone who ever speaks ill of him.

The world is going to miss you, David. I am going to miss you.

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The Most Important Sentence In An Article About Robots

Is this:

Nowadays when we see productivity increases, [the financial benefit] ends up at the top; it goes to the CEO, to the shareholders, but workers don’t get any of it.

Read the rest, here.

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Young Idealism is Not Misguided, Ctd

Will MacAskill, please respond.


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The Flow Becomes A Trickle

My dear, dear readers,

I have decided to write a book. Or at least try my hardest to write a book. It's a hard science fiction novel about wealth inequality and the Technological Singularity. Subseqently, much of the time I've spent in the past writing blog posts (or reading other blogs for things about which to rant on my blog) will now be devoted to long form. I'm not gone; I'm sure a blog post will pop up here and there. But my time is elsewhere.

Wish me luck. I've never written anything long before. I've never felt the need.

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Graphene Is Just This Decade's 'Carbon Nanotubes'

Graphene is the 2010's version of 2000's "carbon nanotube."

I swear...I wish I had a dollar for every article announcing a new theoretical game-changing technology that relies on as-yet-unmanufacturable graphene sheets.
In just the last 14 days:
Graphene could make high-efficiency desalinization filter
Graphene could work in transistors in high-frequency electronics
Graphene could transform DNA sequencing
Graphene could efficiently transform light into power
Graphene antennas could yield high-power wi-fi
Graphene could make batteries obsolete
Graphene could make invisibility cloaks possible for the military

I wish I was making those headlines up, but the above popped up when I Google searched "graphene could" and limited my search to the last 14 days. And there were several more but I got bored.
Here's the truth:

Graphene could get a Post-doc some research funding right now, as the DoD, NSF and NIH are interested in it. That's all there is too it. Dream up ridiculous possible claims, build a little press buzz with some preliminary data, and then get a grant and find out that the technological hurdles to move from benchtop prototype to manufacturing are - just like carbon nanotubes - completely overwhelming.

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Liberty Is Like A Butterfly

Once you rub its wings, even just a little...it can fly no more.

Eric Holder won't assassinate me with a Hellfire missile fired from a predator drone while I am within the U.S. border...


...unless he really, really needs to.


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Love.

Says it so much better than I can.

And this:
Thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away. And thine age shall be clearer than the noonday: thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning.
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Young Idealism is Still Not Misguided

The unfortunate truth about the Haiti earthquake is that we can't just throw money at these problems and expect them to get fixed. Aid money went mostly "to bandages," writes Jonathan Katz, author of the new book The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. A friend of mine working as part of the State Department's ongoing effort to rebuild Haitian government tells me that the aid dollars have been in many ways the opposite of helpful. Aid money pays for free food and clothing for the people of Port au Prince. This makes it impossible for Haitians to sell clothing or open restaurants, as the people there have no incentive to pay for what the foreign aid buys them for free. Thus, small businesses fail, local tax revenue drops, and people become increasingly dependent on the foreign aid.

There are a million examples of "throwing money at the problem" being the opposite of helpful. The general consensus - or so I thought - was that what many not-for-profit (NFP) charities need isn't necessarily bigger coffers (though they'd never refuse it), rather what they need are brighter people figuring out how to actually solve problems, and cooperative government entities not impeding their efforts at actual quality change.

Some of you might remember my back and forth with Robin Hanson. His thesis, if I may be so bold as to summarize, was that 'young people' would be better off saving their money and investing it in order to accrue interest and have larger sums later in life than they would to donate smaller sums while they are young. My response was that young people are perfectly suited to participate in NFP work due to their energy and enthusiasm and especially due to the fact that "throwing their lives away" on NFP charity work was low risk...they didn't have a house, a mortgage, two kids in college, a fat 401k, etc. to gamble.
And, ultimately, the idea that we need to wait to be charitable is cynical. I want the world to be a better place now. I don't want to get to work improving it when I'm fat and old and rich.

Enter Will MacAskill (or Will Crouch, not sure what prompted the recent name change). Will contributes at Quartz, which is a spinoff of The Atlantic and he argues that:
1) If you become a banker or investor, you'll make potentially 4 times as much over your lifetime than a schmuck who did something else, like engineering or teaching or plumbing or owning a bakery. You can use all this extra money to finance charities when you are rich and successful.
2) If you go to Wall Street, you can take someone else's job, and because they might have been a greedy bastard but you're altruistic, you'll end up doing better for the world because of 1).
3) If you work at a NFP but need to change jobs, that's tough. But if you're a rich banker making donations, moving your donation stream from one charity to the other based on the charities' efficacy and quality is much easier than changing NFP jobs.

MacAskill's thesis is simply this: if you want to change the world, go become Warren Buffett. Go make huge piles of money through whatever means necessary, then when you're rich you can donate (some of) it and make the world a better place via your increased buying power. This is fundamentally the same argument Hanson made back in November.

The way I see it, there are three problems with the MacAskill/Hanson Theory of Change:
1) The first problem is that the current capitalist system in America is broken. While the bottom 50% of Americans have seen nothing but stagnation and despair the last 40 years, the 1% has seen runaway growth. The whole system has basically become gamed to concentrate ever increasing wealth on a smaller and smaller group of people. The people that are accruing this wealth are using every means necessary to evade the law, evade taxation, and destroy those who want to equalize the playing field.
Until this changes, we live in a world where charity by the rich becomes entrenched because everything of value is owned by them and everyone else is dependent on them. As Andrew Sullivan (surprisingly) put it: "Capitalism destroys the very structure of the society it enriches."

2) It's extremely plausible that the traits required to become the "$500,000/year" Wall street success story are mutually exclusive to the traits of a person who is charitable. Isn't it likely that those with good hearts are combed out of the system by the greedy hucksters that created the system?
It's true in other career fields. The traits that make me a really good engineer would make me a really bad public school teacher. The traits that make a person a great surgeon are typically ones that would make them an absolutely horrid team player. And so it goes. If someone is uniquely suited to concentrating wealth on his or herself, then he or she is probably not going to be very adept at giving money away. And taken to the Nth degree, the better you are at getting rich, the worse you probably are at giving away your riches.
MacAskill seems to think that some altruistic do-gooder could swipe the job of a greedy Wall Street huckster and thereby implant themselves into the capitalist machine (like a wooden shoe). But it seems painfully obvious (forgive my cynicism) that the conniving Puck would be so much better at swiping jobs than the altruist.

3) The idea that investment banking is a viable career path for the next 30 years is hilariously flawed. The idea that everyone can get rich on Wall Street is hilariously naive. Wall Street produces few winners. The idea that wealth can be easily accrued is sadly false. How many thousands of Wall Street types had their jobs disappear in the last recession? How many people had their retirement accounts severely truncated?

People sometimes accuse me of being naive, that my advocacy for young whippersnappers to get out and do good is childish and immature. But I have to say that MacAskill's argument is if anything, immature and half-baked.
MacAskill purports, under the banner of his company "80,000 hours" to provide career guidance to people. If he wants to guide young people to careers in investment and/or banking that is fine. But doing it under the banner of charity and altruism is not...it just isn't helpful at all.

But here's the heart of the matter: everyone is obsessing over how we can each do "the most good" and that is not the question we should be asking. Hanson thinks young people could do the most good by investing and then using later wealth to target charities. MacAskill thinks young people could do the most good by becoming a Wall Street type and making Godzillions of dollars and then donating it as an endgame.
But truly I tell you, the question is not how we can do the most good, but rather how we can simply do good. MacAskill is catering to the incredibly arrogant folks who seem to think that their deeds must be essential in order to have any value. As though the charitable donations of Warren Buffet are to be lauded, but the charitable donations of some Joe Average who tithes 10% are inconsequential.

People need to realize that the measurement of a person's contribution to human progress isn't in the number of commas in their donations, but rather whether throughout the course of their life they participated in individual acts and a larger meta-act that provided a net gain to human progress! If you go join the ranks of Wall Street, leeching and conniving every dollar of profit you can, you may indeed end up donating billions, like Warren Buffet, to charities. And that money will certainly do some good. But in the process, you have aided and abetted a system that crushes the weak, cons the naive, and segregates the unluckily-born so that a fortunate few can amass wealth and power the likes of which humanity has never before seen. You would have been part of the system that is shamelessly destroying our society.
Let's look at another industry. What if MacAskill advised young people to take up corporate farming. A young person, following MacAskill's advice, would farm the bejeezus out of the land, pushing every possible fertilizer and pesticide into it, irrigating where he could, buying up neighboring properties when available. The young person-turned-farmer would amass a huge area of land that was absolutely abused and eventually poor. But by raping and abusing that land for its very last drop of water and soil, the corporate farmer would have amassed a lot of wealth that they could then donate to wildlife restoration charities! Think of the good they could do for damaged wetlands and lost timber!
OR they could go into farming and rotate small sized, highly varied crops. They could work with a local suburban/urban co-op and produce vegetables and a plethora of nutritious foods. They could aggressively reject monoculture. And while their farm might never expand into the tens of thousands of acres, they ultimately would have both succeeded in their small business as well as provided a net good to nature and to the neighboring community.

So please: don't take Will MacAskill's advice. Go work at a NFP. Or become an engineer. Or a teacher. Or a plumber. Open a bakery. Do some good. Give what you can, help others when you can. You might not singlehandedly save the world, but at least after 80,000 hours of working you won't question whether your path was righteous.


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I Love You

Each and every one of you. Some of you are annoying. Some of you are despicable. Some of you are rude, arrogant, narcissistic, or egotistic. Some of you hang participles and some of you serially misuse the word "ironic." Some of you are careerists, and you are the worst of all. Human progress is what truly matters to me, and when you impede it to suit your personal goals you stretch the definition of shameless. And let's face it: most of you are blatant hypocrites.

But I love all of you. Inside you there is the fire of Life, the unchecked ability to imagine, and the power to achieve things that no other species in the Universe could achieve. I may hate your opinions, but I love you for having them. I may hate your immoral career, but I love you for working. I may hate your taste in television shows, but I love you for having tastes.
We live in a world with a million options, and I love you because you create the patchwork quilt of humanity where 7 billion people can exist and not one of us is identical to another.


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This Absurd Flap About Horse Meat

As I sat there, eating a McChicken Sandwich (containing whitish-pink paste that vaguely resembles chicken), I had to wonder why everyone is freaking out over horse meat in the other meat. Is the righteous indignation over the fact that poor widdle helpless horsies are getting ground up into burgers, or is it that we're eating something that is "one thing" but its actually "partially another thing?"

Because let's face it folks, if there was one thing we could say about the First World Diet, it's that deception is the key to success. Nacho Cheese Doritos aren't actually slathered in nacho cheese. The "cheeseburger" at McDonald's contains a cheese-like square of oil on top of a soy-burger hybrid. Subway's menu, though featuring roast beef, ham, and turkey, quietly admits "all meat products are turkey-based".

Let's be honest with ourselves: our food isn't what they advertise it as. Only the blissfully naive really think "burger" is all burger. Only a fool thinks "organic" is really organic.


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That 3D Pen on Kickstarter

So a "pen" that writes in 3D is on Kickstarter right now, and everyone is freaking out because it raised 1,850% of its funding goal in about 24 hours. You can see it here.

As someone with an extensive background in 3D printers, let me just say that the Reddit commenters put it perfectly:
"all the gross, weak, wispy aspects of 3D printing with none of the automation!"
"Spend hours making 'close enough' art that can be completely destroyed by the slightest breeze!"
"so, it's a $75 hot glue gun?"

The fact that "backers" are falling all over themselves to buy this is what really amazes me.


*In the time it took me to write that, they've raised another $10,000. Ridiculous. People are ridiculous.
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Facebook vs Medical Device Companies

As the head engineer at a medical device company, I groaned with chagrin when the government put a 2.3% tax on all medical device sales "to help pay for the PPACA." In addition to what I outlined there, here's the sad bottom line: we'll just increase our price to offset the tax. Don't blame us. We have to make ends meet. We don't have a free 2.3% margin (on gross revenue, not net profit...don't get me started) to give away.

Meanwhile, Facebook appears to be on the other end of the Federal tax table, as they should get a $429 million dollar refund from the government for 2012. I'm not joking. They reported $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits. Which means their effective tax rate for 2012 is -40%. My company gets to pay an extra 2.3% tax, and Facebook pays -40%. What is really baffling about this is that in order for the government to recoup the $429 million it is handing out to Facebook, it would need to tax medical devices companies on revenue of the order of $18.65 billion dollars. Facebook makes $1.1 billion and gets a $429 million rebate check. Medical device companies will have to make $18.65 billion dollars to balance Facebook's little bonus.

Here's the thing: I don't begrudge Facebook for playing fast and loose with their taxes. Everyone would do the exact same thing...in fact we all do. The annual game to get the biggest tax refund possible is as much a part of American culture as baseball. Companies move assets to the Cayman Islands, farmers buy a bunch of new tractors, people dump money into their HSA...everyone has their devices for hedging the smallest possible tax burden to Uncle Sam.
What fills me with rage is that Facebook and its ilk do not produce stable, lasting jobs, nor do they produce strong, lasting economic gains. And the benefit of their 'product' to society is debatable. Whereas small medical device companies are job creators, are producing an obvious good for society, and are working in a high-risk, low reward field that takes intestinal fortitude, cunning, and the ability to successfully complete a very-long-term plan.
If everything, and I mean everything, were to go flawlessly for the company where I work, by 2018 we might have about 20 new medical devices on the market. My engineers would have slogged, day after day for five years, against the impediments of short-sighted investors, an anti-science state government, the FDA, and the extremely adept competition rushing alongside us. And at the end of the day the tax system is actually rigged against us and makes it harder for us to save lives. But Facebook gets a huge tax rebate.

Imagine, for a moment, you are me (lucky you). You're trying to convince a software engineer of appreciable talent to join the company. She also has interviews with Google, Facebook, and some app developer. If she joins our company, she can be a part of producing novel, life-altering medical devices. In five years a few of her projects will be in the market. Or she can go to the app-developer company and make apps. In 3 months, she'll have 2 or more apps. She'll produce an app a month for a couple years, and probably make a decent profit on one or two of them. It is extremely hard for medical device companies to attract talent when you are competing against tax-sheltering social fluffware companies that can produce instant profits.

Imagine, once again, that you are me. You're trying to convince an investor to put in $2 million towards a medical device, in exchange for 25% equity. You tell the investor that they won't get a dime back for 3 years at best, and more likely it'll 5. Then the next guy comes in and pitches to the investor a new cloud-based app that allows facebook-integrated file swapping. Basically its your Facebook Friends List + Dropbox*. For $150,000 the investor will get 25% equity and the ROI will start in 3 months and they'll probably make back 5X their initial buy-in in the first year. How can my medical device company possibly recruit investment when these flash in the pan apps are so profitable?

Now, it is good and right that I acknowledge that this is much more meta than just Facebook. The American Innovation System has become intrinsically skewed towards short-term gains and quick thrills. On the one hand, I understand. Only a fool would forego quick profit for a higher risk long-term profit. But on the other hand, consider this:
In 2010, Instagram, a popular app that applied filters to photos taken on smartphones and then allowed the users to upload them to Facebook, Myspace, Google+ etc, raised $500,000 in seed funding. In 2011 they secured $7 million in Series A venture capital investment. In 2012, they secured $50 million in investment. Later in 2012, they sold to Facebook for $1 billion dollars in cash and stock options. At the largest, Instagram had 13 employees. 
What did Instagram do? What was their product? Their product was a FREE app that applied a  hazy filter that made otherwise clear photos look awful. And VC money rained in. It poured in. Do you know how hard I would have to work to get $57 million in Series A venture capital? The answer is I would have to work infinitely hard; I will never be able to raise that kind of money for cutting edge medical devices that can positively change lives. Why would they? They can make way more money, way faster, on some stupid app. Greed and the desire for quick returns has effectively strangled innovation.

Social networking, (most) apps, its all nonsense. There's no long term value. Few, if any, jobs are created. All we're doing is robbing stable industry of talented engineers and programmers.

Let's give a massive tax refund to Facebook, raise taxes on medical devices, and cut Medicare. America has gone insane.



*This is a good idea, why isn't someone doing this?
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Tesla Model S - NYT, Musk, and CNN

Many of us are now familiar with the NYT story claiming the Tesla S - and its Supercharger network - is not the gas-free revolution in cross-country travel that Tesla Motors had claimed it was. Let me explain. No, that would take too long. Let me sum up: Tesla built a car called the Tesla S, an all-electric car with a ~270 mile range. They have been building "Supercharger Stations" along the east and west coast so that you can recharge your Tesla S mid trip if you want to go a long ways. The NYT tested this and the reviewer, a guy named Broder, claimed in his review that at one point he had to call in a flatbed truck to get his Tesla because the battery had died.
Elon Musk, supergenius, responded exactly like an engineer would: here's the data. Data cannot lie. Turns out the Tesla S has a revolutionary 'black box' that records everything the car does, including GPS, speed, battery power, time spent recharging.The data, indeed, seems to indicate that Broder drove erratically, did not obey speed limits, and potentially flat-out lied in his article about what speed he drove the Tesla S.

Just this morning CNN released their own driving test up the eastern seaboard. Lo and behold, they drove the speed limit, used the cruise control...and had plenty of battery power left at the end of their trip.

This is a classic engineers vs. druids moment. And there's a good lesson here for you young pup engineers: collect data. Lean on your data. Worship your data. Believe in the intelligence of humans, and that humans will believe your data over a druid's prose. Present your data in an easy to read format. And you'll eventually win.


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The Pope

I heard the REAL reason the Pope is resigning is because he was ALSO duped into thinking his girlfriend was Lennay Kekua.


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About That Medical Device Excise Tax

We have this term that we use in our company and I am sure a lot of other companies use as well: organic growth. I was hired via organic growth: our existing product line had borne enough profit to fund a full-time engineer to oversee the development of the products still in the pipeline. Essentially, rather than pocketing the profits, the company owners pour it into hiring and R&D.

So, yes, Alec MacGillis, the medical device tax is a shitty idea. I appreciate that you found a couple medical device company owners to quote that happened to support your opinion (claiming an opinion has a plurality based on anecdotes, the oldest form of subpar editorial journalism there is). Yes, Alec MacGillis, the medical device tax will cost this country jobs. And yes, it will slow innovation. I am in a position to know. You, sir, are not.

Let's say I launch a product to market that is a new...um...a new instant x-ray machine. It works in the operating room so that surgeons can get a quick peek inside the body before they close it up to make sure there aren't any foreign objects (like bandages, tweezers, etc...this occasionally happens) in the body cavity. I sell it to them based on the idea that the cost of the device will be orders of magnitude cheaper than a single malpractice lawsuit. I manage to sell one per hospital (it's very portable and can be moved from O.R. to O.R. so they only need one) at a price of $35,000. Of that, 30% is profit. Just for the sake of simplicity, let's say I sell 500 of them a year.
Gee whiz! My company just made $5.25 MILLION in pure profit! I am the owner of an organically-grown company though, so I decide to pour $5 million of that into hiring (50%) and R&D costs (50%) to work on expanding and growth. This gives me $2.5 million to spend hiring kick-ass engineers. Each engineer costs about 125,000 a year for salary and benefits. That means I can hire 20 engineers!

But wait, now we have a medical device tax. And by the way they're taxing gross, not net. So long story short I end up with $5.1 million in profit instead of $5.5 million. After holding back the $250k like above, and split in half for R&D and hiring, I now only have enough money to hire 19 engineers. And my R&D budget, obviously, won't go as far either.
So yes, the medical device tax will cost the biotech industry jobs and will slow innovation.

But then there's a second problem. People like Alec MacGillis seem to think that the logic of "adding 30 million people to the healthcare roll will increase sales and offset any medical device tax losses" is completely obvious and irrefutable. But consider the example above again: I can only sell one x-ray scanner per hospital regardless of patient load. The hospital could do 20% more surgeries a year due to more patients having health care coverage, but because my device is awesome and portable and easy to use, the hospital doesn't need a second unit to cover the extra 20% of people coming through their doors...the medical device tax is applied across the board but the offsetting sales aren't.

Certain groups might say it is a small price to pay. They might say that hiring one less engineer is a tiny sacrifice if the medical device tax helps the PPACA bring 30 million people into the wonderful world of healthcare. But it isn't just one engineer. My company is tiny. I'm not Medtronic. They're going to be in the drink for somewhere around 365 million dollars. That's a lot of engineers. My gut is that medical device companies will slow hiring by at least 2.3%. But it'll probably be quite a bit higher than that.


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The Years Are Rolling By Me

It occurred to me a couple days ago that I am now the age that Hugh Jackman was when he filmed X-Men back in 1999.

When did I get that old?


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Engineers vs. Druids

Paul Saffo, at Edge.org (scroll way down):

There are two kinds of fools: one who says this is old and therefore good, and the other who says this is new and therefore better. The argument between the two is as old as humanity itself, but technology's relentless exponential advance has made the divide deeper and more contentious than ever. My greatest fear is that this divide will frustrate the sensible application of technological innovation in the service of solving humankind's greatest challenges.

The two camps forming this divide need a name, and "Druids" and "Engineers" will do. Druids argue that we must slow down and reverse the damage and disruption wrought by two centuries of industrialization. "Engineers" advocate the opposite: we can overcome our current problems only with the heroic application of technological innovation. Druids argue for a return to the past, Engineers urge us to flee into the future.

The Druid-Engineer divide can be seen in virtually every domain touched by technology. Druids urge a ban on GMOs, while Engineers impatiently argue for the creation of synthetic organisms. Environmental Druids seek what the late David Brower called "Earth National Park," while Engineers would take a page from Douglas Adam's planet-designing Magratheans in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, making better Earth by fixing all the broken bits. Transhumanists and singularitans are Engineers; the Animal Liberation Front and Ted Kaczynski are Druids. In politics, Libertarians are Engineers, while the Greens are Druids. Among religions, Christian fundamentalists are Druids and Scientologists are Engineers.

The gulf between Druid and Engineer makes C. P. Snow's Two Cultures seem like a mere crack in the sidewalk. The two camps do not merely hold different worldviews; they barely speak the same language. A recent attempt to sequester oceanic carbon by dumping iron dust in the Pacific off of British Columbia intrigued Engineers, but alarmed Druids who considered it an act of intentional pollution. Faced with uncertainty or crisis, engineers instinctively hit the gas; Druids prefer the brake.

The pervasiveness of the Druid-Engineer divide and the stubborn passions demonstrated by both sides reminds me of that old warrior-poet Archilochus and his hedgehog-fox distinction revived and elaborated upon by Isaiah Berlin. Experience conditions us towards being Engineers or Druids just as it turns us into hedgehogs or foxes. Engineers tend to be technologists steeped in physics and engineering. Druids are informed by anthropology, biology and the earth sciences. Engineers are optimists—anything can be fixed given enough brainpower, effort and money. Druids are pessimists—no matter how grand the construct, everything eventually rusts, decays and erodes to dust.

Perhaps the inclination is even deeper. Some years back, the five year-old daughter of a venture capitalist friend announced upon encountering an unfamiliar entree at the family table, "It's new and I don't like it." A Druid in the making, that became her motto all through primary school, and for all I know, it still is today.

We live in a time when the loneliest place in any debate is the middle, and the argument over technology's role in our future is no exception. The relentless onslaught of novelties technological and otherwise is tilting individuals and institutions alike towards becoming Engineers or Druids. It is a pressure we must resist, for to be either a Druid or an Engineer is to be a fool. Druids can't revive the past, and Engineers cannot build technologies that do not carry hidden trouble.

The solution is to claw our way back to the middle and a good place to start is by noting one's own Druid/Engineer inclinations. Unexamined inclinations amount to dangerous bias, but once known, the same inclination can become the basis for powerful intuition. What is your instinctive reaction to something new; is your default anticipation or rejection? Consider autonomous highway vehicles: Druids fear that robot cars are unsafe; Engineers wonder why humans are allowed to drive at all.

My worry is that collective minds change as a snail's pace while technology races along an exponential curve. I fear we will not rediscover the middle ground in time to save us from our myriad folly. My inner Engineer is certain a new planetary meme will arrive and bring everyone to their senses, but my gloomy Druid tells me that we will be lucky to muddle our way through without killing ourselves off or ushering in another dark age. I will be happy if both are a little right—and a little wrong.

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Accelerando

User "graykat777" posted the image above to Reddit last night (click here for larger version). The user's local utility company is raising rates due to too many people practicing good energy conservation. While this seems psychotic, think of it this way: if it costs X dollars to run a power plant, plus Y dollars per kW/h to burn coal, then you can only cut out Y as usage drops. X is a constant (paying power plant workers, maintaining equipment, servicing power lines, etc). So when earth-friendly folks cut their utility bills, the power company can scale down Y but is stuck paying X no matter what.
On Reddit there was the usual outcry against utility company monopolies, and gnashing of teeth that we can't leave one electricity provider for another when rates go up.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is a good thing.

Here's my logic: everyone starts behaving more energy efficiently by turning lights off, switching to CFL bulbs, using smarter thermostats (and dealing with cooler houses in winter and warmer houses in summer), adding insulation to their attics, etc. and that decreases their electrical bills. Then the utility company raises rates to recoup the lost revenue. This pushes people to do more things that are even more energy efficient to recoup their efficiency savings. The electrical company raises rates again, repeat repeat repeat until you end up with super efficient houses and apartments and utility companies that have their backs against the wall and have no choice but to shut down coal plants.
Far-fetched? Maybe. But the higher they raise their rates, the more cost-effective it gets to do energy efficient upgrades to your dwelling.


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In Which I Eat Lance-Flavored Crow

Here's what I wrote, back in June, 2012:

As my friend Adam says "Lance Armstrong is either the greatest athlete of all time or the greatest liar of all time." Which is more likely? A ten year long conspiracy that foiled hundreds of blood tests, investigations and video surveillance...or he simply did not dope?

Of course it is clear now that the former scenario turned out to be the right one. Despite the unlikelihood of it, Lance perpetrated a decade-long conspiracy involving hundreds of willing and unwilling accomplices, beat hundreds of blood tests, lied to everyone, consistently, and never once cracked under the pressure of the improbably complicated house of cards he had built.

Going farther back, here's a gushing homage to Mr. Armstrong I wrote in 2009:

But as an engineer, Armstrong is really the posterboy for biomechanical engineering. From wind tunnel testing to adjusting the bike mechanics and aerodynamics, to ergonomics of the bike seat, to aero bars, to his intense training regimen that is, like horses, set up to peak at race time, to his embrace of new technology, the man and the economy that surrounds Armstrong proves that science and technology can coalesce into a superior version of the human condition. Although most of us do not have 6 hours a day to ride and a team of dieticians to provide us with perfectly designed meals, we do get the shake down of technology that has largely been brought about in the last 10 years...a.k.a. The Reign Of Lance.

Ten years ago you just didn't see people on bikes much. Nowadays you see them on carbon fiber bikes with disc wheels. These technologies weren't invented by Armstrong or even his team. But the freakish success of Armstrong in TdF after TdF has proven the success of the technologies.

Yet, its clear now that Mr. Armstrong relied as much on cheating as he did on his technology.

This whole situation makes me sad. I feel betrayed. I feel like a fool. Now, I wasn't a squawking, staunch defender of Lance...the whole situation seemed dubious at its core and I never risked my reputation to defend him. But I assumed he was innocent and idolized him just like everyone else. I dismissed European newspaper article after article because of Nationalistic pride.

So what now? The question I have is whether Lance will go to jail. Maybe not here in America, but abroad. A while back, a newspaper in London claimed that he doped. He sued them for libel, and during the trial (under oath) he denied doping. Will he be arrested on perjury charges? And what of the dozens of other cyclists he admonished and marginalized when they claimed evidence of his cheating? Will he face dozens of libel suits, now reaping what he's sown? I see a fair chance he winds up penniless by the end of this.
What of his sponsors? They probably cannot recoup their losses, but they can blackball him out of the sports world for a long time. When it comes to athletic sponsorships, there is a big difference between a guy who cheats on his wife and a guy who cheats at his game. Remember Pete Rose? Multiply by one thousand.

As for me...I really am just sad. The bike I ride is a Trek 1500 "Team Discovery Edition". I bought it in 2005 after Lance won his 7th Tour. My favorite jersey for riding is my 2007 Team Discovery Levi Leipheimer edition (national road race champion) version. Now, Leipheimer is disgraced too, listed as an admitted doper in the USADA case against Lance.

I have a book I bought, years ago, entitled "The Lance Armstrong Performance Program" written by Chris Carmichael. Perhaps the tagline should read "how to cheat, lie, and manipulate your way into history." The whole thing was a sham. All ten years of it.


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Gun Control

With President Obama's announcement about whatever the administration plans to do in regards to gun control happening in 10 minutes*, the topic is hot on my mind. Especially because I have a five year old.

Friday afternoon, I took off early and headed to a farm north of Lawrence, KS, to hunt deer. The weather was lovely, hot and humid and unseasonally warm for mid-January in Kansas. I hunkered down with a Remington Model 700 bolt-action rifle, chambered in .308 Winchester. Dad put some custom loads together using Barnes TSX 150 grain bullets and 47 grains of powder...the bullets are incredibly consistent and fast.
Dad had volunteered to "push" as in he was meandering through some woods upwind of me. The idea is that the deer run from him right to me. Nevertheless, by about 4:30 he'd sat down next to me, and no deer had appeared in the field full of wheat stubble I was watching. Things got exciting around 5:25, shortly after the sun had set. A couple deer walked out of the woods about 250 yards away. Dad spotted them in his binoculars, but I couldn't see them in my scope due to lens flare (of course they choose to be straight west of me at sundown). Then a few more appeared, about 200 yards away. They walked due North, and despite the horrible lens flare, a large doe (that's a female deer, city slickers) moved far enough up the field I could see her. "Can you see her? Do you have a shot?" Dad asked.
"Yeah. Worth a shot." I actually ended up zooming my scope back to 7 power in order to reduce lens flare. I steadied the rifle. The doe was perfectly broadside to me, head down as she munched wheat stubble.  I inhaled a breath and held it. I clicked off the safety and squeezed the trigger, holding the crosshairs right on the deer's shoulder. The crack of the rifle and the kickback surprised me, as always. The muzzle flash confirmed I had kept my eye open. I gazed through the scope and saw the deer lurch, then run. But it didn't run normal. Another second passed, and another, and it came to a stop. Then it fell.
I saw that one of the other deer in the field had not left the scene, it was hesitating to leave its fallen comrade. The biologist in me knew: this was the yearling child of the doe I just killed, and it wasn't sure what to do without mama leading it. The carnivor in me knew: yearlings taste fantastic. "Should I shoot another?" I asked my father. "Your call. You've got another tag." Repeat of the above. This deer fell immediately and did not run. Two shots. Two dead deer. My hunting season was over in less than a minute.
I unloaded my rifle and gave it to dad, who would go get the truck. Then I headed across the wheat stubble to field dress my deer.
Some people might find it grisly, the act of field dressing. Essentially you split the abdoment open from ribs to anus and pull all the guts out. Then, you cut through the diaphragm and cut the heart and lungs out. The purpose of this is to remove the parts of the deer that would make the meat spoil. Then you hold the deer up as best you can as the blood runs out of the body cavity, and you're done. I did that twice. In the failing evening light, I basically had to do it by feel. Thankfully I have done this for 15 years now.
We headed back to town, and dad took the deer to hang up in his barn overnight. I went home and kissed my wife and daughter and told them all about the hunt.

The next morning (Saturday) the three of us packed into the car and headed to the farm. Dad and I needed to skin and cut the meat off the deer so we could freeze the steaks and ground the rest into burger. The wife and my 5 year-old came out to see the dead deer.
The Abstracted Daughter is no longer squeamish about dead deer. She's been seeing my father and me shoot them since she was born. She'll touch their fur, admire how big they are, and generally just talk rapidly about things. Then she'll lose interest and go back inside.
But her witnessing the death is extremely important, for two reasons. The first reason is that I want her to understand that hunting isn't some sort of atrocity, or an act of cruelty. Hunting is a method of obtaining food, of spending quality time with your friends and family, of using guns in a safe, recreational manner. The second reason is that when she sees these dead animals I bring home, she is learning what the end result of a bullet is. I like to think that gun safety will seem more real to her because she has seen just how dead a bullet makes a creature.

Sunday, we were sitting at the kitchen table. Earlier, I'd heard on the news that a 4 year-old boy had accidentally shot himself in the head while playing with a gun his father had left out. I went up to my room and got out my pistol. I keep it unloaded, safety on, with no clips in it. The ammo is kept nearby but separate, as sort of a balance between me being able to grab it fast and load it should the need arise and my child not being able to hurt herself. I brought the pistol down to the table and showed it to TAD.
"Do you know what this is?" I asked her.
She looked at it. "Your gun," she said.
"And is it okay for TAD to play with it?"
"No," she replied immediately.
"TAD, what is a gun for?"
"For shooting things," she replied.
"And what happens to the things that I shoot?"
"They die," she answered, then went on "is that the gun you used to shoot deer?"
"No, for deer I use a much longer gun. I keep this gun around in case someone were to break in to our house or try to hurt us."
She pondered for a second then asked "has that ever happened before?"
I answered, "No, TAD, not once. And I hope never. I never want to use this gun. But I keep it just in case."
"TAD," I finished, "you must never, EVER play with this gun. If you want to play with a gun or pretend to be a hunter, let me know, and I will gladly buy you a toy gun that is safe. Got it?"
"Got it" she answered.

Whatever your stance is on gun control, whether you are for or against citizens being able to buy high-capacity ammo clips and semi-automatic rifles, one thing is true: with the level of gun ownership in this country we must educate children about the dangers of guns. As a parent, it is my social contract with my child to never leave a loaded weapon where she could misuse it. It is my responsibility to teach her both how to use a gun as well as how to not use a gun. That's gun control to me.

*Correction: Mr. Obama was just having a press conference, the gun control specific stuff happens tomorrow.
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