Detour

The wsj.com has a great article that sheds some light on the magnitude of the coming pension crisis for union shops. In essence, the FASB is changing its rules regarding pension plans so pension liabilities are actually accounted for.

…GM shows a net asset of $30.2 billion from its pension plans on its year-end 2004 balance sheet, even though the plans were actually underfunded by about $7.5 billion at that point. FASB’s plan would essentially take the positive $30.2 billion figure off GM’s balance sheet and replace it with the negative $7.5 billion.

I wish this accounting change was done 30 years ago, it would have had a tremendous impact on union negotiations, and possibly saved the steel pensions.

Definition of babymoon:
ba·by·moon (bÄ·bÄ“-mÅ«n) - n.

1. A holiday or trip taken by a couple that just found out they will have their first child.
2. An early harmonious period for that couple, before the full realization that life has dynamically and seriously taken a turn towards permanent adult status.

Laura and I have just taken our babymoon to Mendocino, California. I will write more tomorrow after we get unpacked and settled.

Russian Gultch Overpass

Mendocino Beach After A Wicked Storm

Laura Taking A Break After A Long Day Of Hiking

Point Cabrillo Light Station

In line with my co-blogger’s recent post on spying, Scott Adams (The creator of Dilbert and co-owner of the most wonderful restaurant Stacey’s a stones throw from my apartment in downtown Pleasanton) has a few questions about the usefulness of torture.

I can’t help thinking there are three bits of information I need to know before making up my mind.

First, why is torture so widely used if it doesn’t work?…

Second, is torture ineffective for EVERY type of question, or just the kind where you can’t tell if the guy is lying?…

Third, apparently we are successfully getting information from captured terror suspects. Are they giving us this stuff because we played annoying music near them and made them stand up for a long time? Has doing a “little extra” ever speeded things up?…

I think that it would be hard to argue that torture isn’t an effective means to some ends….even John McCain thinks torture might be helpful in the ticking time-bomb scenario where a person knows of an imminent threat to human life is located and refuses to give any info about it. I believe torture shouldn’t be routinely used, for humanitarian purposes, but at some stage in the statistical tails of what can be expected, when multiplied by the possibility of large loss of life, I just don’t see how torture can be ruled out in all circumstances. How is greater respect for civil rights and human dignity shown by not torturing one person while hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands die?

If you are against torture in all circumstances I would love to know why? What is the motivation? Do you truly believe that never works? I am truly curious.

More on this subject can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Update: Scott Adams asks more questions in a follow-up here.

Here are two more that confuse me.

If you think that torture doesn’t work, why does interrogation work? No one doubts that plain old interrogation (torture lite) often works. Does it make sense to you that additional discomfort would make interrogation work slower or less often?

If you think there’s no moral justification for torture, would you accept the nuclear destruction of NYC (for example) to avoid torturing one known terrorist? (No fair extending my question to more ambiguous hypotheticals.)

Update II:Thanks for the link Swap Blog.

I am still forming my opinion about the Bush spying scandal, but Ars Technia has a technical perspective into why Bush and congress chose to keep the NSA activities quiet. I find it fascinating how in conflicts technological advantage is enhanced by the informational asymmetry created by the advance.

Anyway, I think most people would agree that in a time of war the President should be given considerable constitutional leeway to take advantage of technological advantages given sufficient congressional oversight. As I see it, the real controversy right now is that some of us believe this is a time of war while others don’t.

My brother in law will be taking a beginning programming class next semester. I’m excited for him because I remember how much I enjoyed my first programming courses. Unfortunately, good programming instructors are very rare and in large part students are expected to teach themselves.

With that in mind, I started thinking about how I would recommend people learn to program and I remembered a old IBM research project called Robocode that was fostered in their Alphaworks program for years. I was quite pleased to see it was released into the open source community last May and has made quite a bit of progress from when I first saw it.

In a nutshell, Robocode is a Java framework where you can program your robot to fight other robots. Once you’ve coded your robot, you let it compete against others and see how you did. All sorts of sample robots are included in the download and you can download other robots online. The source of every robot is readable so as you learn how to read Java code you’ll notice that some of the more sophisticated robots learn from their mistakes and alter their strategy accordingly.

Yes, its Java but the robots are simple enough that very few (if any) concepts unique to Java are introduced to the user. Additionally for those of you who wish to learn different languages, Java syntax is similar enough to C++ and C# that switching will not be difficult.

There is a new version that the open source community is working on called RobocodeNG (next generation). It introduces some cool elements such as team play and is compatible with the newest version of Java (1.5). Also the explosions are way cooler! Since it is still in beta (and lacking good documentation), I recommend writing your first robots using the original, then migrating them to NG once you have the hang of it.

IBM developer works has a pretty good (but old) article that gives you a general overview of Robocode.

My friend Ian told me of his latest obsession last week and in the process has infected me with the same disease. Amazon wishlist searching! Go to Amazon.com, click on wishlists, and input a name or email address. If that person has a wishlist, you will be able to see it.

There are lots of uses for this obsession. Want to know what an old college friend is interested in…type in Ian’s wishlist

Most interesting request: 30 HP Nortrac Bulldozer – It must be snowing very hard this year Ian.

Want to know what research an old college professor is interested in…type in Tapan Mitra (Prof. @ Cornell)

Expect future research on traded funds, closed-end mutual funds, and some kind of fixed income mathematics.

However, my favorite wishlist finds would have to be the faux wishlists. As expected, President George W Bush has many made-up wishlists my two favorites are here and here

Most interesting request: Hooked on Phonics: Learn to Read Kindergarten System – I think it might be too late for George to improve markedly at this point in his life.

Runner-up request: Rold Gold Special Sourdough Pretzels….funny.

Not to be outdone John Kerry has his own faux list as well here.

Most interesting request: New Soldier…by John Kerry

Runner-up request: How To Marry A Millionaire

Tell me if you find more interesting faux wishlists.

Looks like I am going to be a dad. Yeah.

In yesterdays Wall Street Journal (12/14/2005 Page A21) Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes a scathing op-ed about misconceptions of Toyota Prius owners. Anyone with half a brain and exposure to elementary school level math knows that the purchase of a Toyota Prius is not justifiable in purely economic terms. At over $9,000 above other conventional high mileage cars (such as Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla) a Prius owner would have to drive 66,500 miles a year or gas would have to rise above $10/gallon. Both scenarios are highly unlikely for the normal driver under normal circumstances. Mr. Jenkins expands his criticism to ideas the normal consumer would not normally consider…

Now, as an economic matter, overpaying for the privilege of saving gasoline is simply a subsidy to other gasoline consumers…

But doesn’t saving oil have benefits beyond the dollars saved — for instance, postponing the doom of civilization?

No: If Prius owners consume less, there’s less demand, prices will be lower and somebody else will step up to consume more than they would at the otherwise higher price. That’s the price mechanism at work. Oil is a fantastically useful commodity. Humans can be relied upon to consume all the oil they’d be willing to consume at a given price.

In short, Prius owners reduce their consumption of gas, this lowers the demand for gas, which (since gas is a normal good) decreases the price of gas. This means driving a Hummer has just become that much more affordable for the marginal consumer, ceteris paribus (All other things being equal).

Maybe you just want to have a clear conscious and clean up after yourself. I can respect that. In that case, go buy a Terrapass.

When you buy a TerraPass, you sponsor a guaranteed reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. They use the money to for projects such as:

• An entrepreneurial wind farmer receives funds to expand his plant.
• A small dairy farmer gets capital to install digesters on his farm to control methane emissions.

Using financial instruments such as carbon credits, your funds result in guaranteed reductions.

Terrablog (the blog found on the Terrapass website) justifies the purchase in a recent post by stating…

Nor is our goal to vilify the much-maligned S.U.V. driver, however much we might wish that fuel efficiency played a larger role in her purchase decision. A quick spin of our carbon calculator shows that a driver who clocks 40,000 miles a year in a hybrid Prius puts just as much CO2 in the air as someone who drives 12,000 miles in a Ford Explorer.

I input information for a 2005 Ford Explorer and a Toyota Prius and received the following data:

Your 2005 Ford Explorer 4WD automatic transmission
emits 13,812 lbs of CO2 per year.

Your 2005 Toyota Prius automatic transmission
emits 4,226 lbs of CO2 per year.

A Terrapass for the SUV is $79.95, while the Terrapass for the Prius was $29.95. The problem with this is that the price is not proportional to the emissions of CO2. The ratio of emission between the two cars is

4,226/13,812 = .30597.

The ratio of cost between the two cars is

29.95/79.95 = .37460

Pound for pound the Toyota Prius owner pays almost 7% more for there carbon emissions reduction then the Ford Explorer owner.

Under what assumptions can a Prius purchase be justified?

More on this subject can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Update: Adam Stein at TerraPass wrote me to say…

You’re right that the price per carbon varies between our various purchase levels, although your math is slightly off. A purchase of an SUV TerraPass results in a guaranteed reduction of 20,000 lbs of CO2, regardless of whether you drive an Explorer or a Hummer. And the purchase of a Hybrid TerraPass results in a guaranteed reduction of 6,000 lbs of CO2, regardless of whether you drive a Prius or an Insight (or a Hummer). We provide the carbon calculator as a tool so people can estimate their own environmental impact, but the results of the calculator don’t change the purchase levels.

But even using these adjusted numbers, your basic result is still the same: Prius owners pay slightly more per ton of CO2. Why did we do this? Are we attempting to punish Prius owners?

Nope. The reasons are two-fold: first of all, there is a transaction cost associated with trading in carbon markets. This transaction cost doesn’t really change depending on what kind of car you drive, so it isn’t entirely valid to simply divide the price of the TerraPass by the number of tons of carbon remediated.

The second — and far more important — reason we set our purchase levels the way we did is that TerraPass is all about making it easy for consumers to clean up after their cars. If you reread the earlier part of my comment, it’s nerdy gobbledygook — not the type of stuff that makes your average driver want to dive into the carbon markets.

We strive to make it easy: four simple purchase levels at four standard price points. (Fact is, even this is rather complicated, but we didn’t feel we could get it any simpler.) We’re offering a basic value proposition that we hope consumers will respond to.

So, yes, one result is that the price per ton of CO2 fluctuates a bit between purchase levels. But in absolute terms the difference is only a few bucks — and hey, we don’t even make people pay for shipping!

A: Racist Sexist Anti-Gay, Right-Wing Bigots Go Away!

At least that is what they were chanting on the evening news.

How do they know the political persuasion of pro-death penalty supporters? According to a March 5th, 2004 Field Poll a majority of Democrats support the death penalty….and what does your position on the use of capital punishment have to do with your feelings on racial, gender, or sexual choice issues?

I abhor the death penalty…but I have little patience for most of the active anti-death penalty movement. Chants like the one above yelled outside of prisons at death penalty supporters do little good, and probably harm the movement immeasurably. When you make outrageous and, at-best, barely credible allegations with little merit you taint all logical arguments that come after it.

Unbelievable.

More here, here (caution graphic pictures), here, here, and here…

Update: Thanks for the link Ryhmes With Right.

I like to scan my email spam box to make sure wanted mail is not accidently getting placed in the trash. Today while cleaning out my Gmail spam box I noticed that near the top Google has a collection of recipes for spam.

(Click for larger picture)

French Fry Spam Casserole anyone? Cute. I like the attention to detail and the freedom that google gives its employees to add fun features like that.

French Fry Spam Casserole

Title: FRENCH FRY SPAM CASSEROLE
Categories: Main dish
Yield: 8 servings

1 pk Frozen french fry potatoes - thawed (20 oz)
2 c Shredded Cheddar cheese
2 c Sour cream
1 cn Condensed cream of chicken - soup (10 3/4 oz)
1 cn SPAM Luncheon Meat, cubed - (12 oz)
1/2 c Chopped red bell pepper
1/2 c Chopped green onion
1/2 c Finely crushed corn flakes

Heat oven to 350′F. In large bowl, combine potatoes, cheese, sour
cream, and soup. Stir in SPAM, bell pepper, and green onion. Spoon
into 13×9″ baking dish. Sprinkle with crushed flakes. Bake 30-40
minutes or until thoroughly heated.