Spring coming!

This has been a weird winter. We've had very cold stretches, and some warmer days. According to the monthly summary in the Globe today, February was warmer than normal. I wish we still had the paper for January, because it certainly seemed colder than usual, but using the year-to-date figure in addition to the February number it seems that even January was warmer than average.

Here's my measure of where we are. Usually when we get back from our February vacation in Florida I notice that the snowdrops on the north side of the house are blooming. And I have to admit that usually I forget to check before we go on vacation, but this year I remembered. Just before we left I went and looked to see if there was any sign of snow drops - nope, nothing at that time. The day after we got back I checked, and sure enough there are snowdrops.

If you had asked me about this winter, I would probably have said it's been colder than usual, so cold we've had little snow (it's all gone south of us!). My snowdrops are telling me that it's certainly no colder than usual. I'm just glad to see them because it means spring is on its way.

Dye Transfer Print

My favorite photography blog (The Online Photographer) recently had a fundraiser. They were selling dye transfer prints by Ctein, a photographer whose work (and writing) I really enjoy. I ordered one. It came the other day, and it looks wonderful.

I did some dye transfer printing many years ago at the VLW. It’s a fascinating process and the results are amazing. You start by creating 3 or 4 color separations. These are full size negatives which have each been created with a color filter. They’re kind of like the channels of an image in Photoshop. You then process these so that the light areas are soft and porous while the dark areas are hard and shiny. Each negative has a couple of pin holes on one side so that you can get them lined up perfectly.

Next you take a piece of paper with a soft gelatin surface, get it damp, and fasten it down with a clamp with pins in it. You take the first of your negatives and soak it in a dye solution. Then you place it on to the paper, clamp it down, and roll it. The dye gets transferred from the porous parts of the negative into the paper. You do this for each of the negatives in turn.

In many ways, this process is more like printmaking than photography. You work with the lights on for everything except creating the separations. You can reapply a separation to the paper to add more of that color. You can paint areas with solutions which make the negative transfer more or less color. You even have choices about what color dyes and what separations you use. On the other hand, it is very labor intensive. You can see some pictures of the process here.

And the resulting prints are amazing. The dyes are very pure, and there aren’t any unstable silver compounds in the process, so the prints are very stable. And they have kind of a magical depth to the color.

Kodak stopped making the materials for this process in 1994. Ctein bought up all that he could get his hands on. He also bought a big freezer to store it in. Here’s his description of the process.

The actual print I ordered (the bottom one on this page) is of some ferns growing in a lava field in Hawai’i'. It reminds me of our trip there. Dye transfer is a perfect process for this image because most of the detail is in the darkest range showing the texture of the black lava. But there are also iridescent details which have subtle colors way up in the highlights.

 

Since I’m mentioning Ctein, I should point out that many readers of this blog would probably enjoy his photos of the space program (link1, link2, link3). This image of Columbia is a perfect example of the sort of thing that dye transfer is really good at, if you’d like to order one of your own.

 

You might also enjoy his book on restoring old photos. I have a copy of the 1st edition, and I’ve gotten a lot of good use out of it.

Top Down

The rain in Boston this week has been truly biblical. Chris and I were downtown last night. Every building we entered had buckets scattered around to deal with the leaks. Walking outside, the rain was coming down in sheets, things were flying down the streets, and the wind noise was varying between a subway train like rumble and a high keening. I heard that they measured sustained winds of 50 MPH with gusts to 67.

Then this morning the wind stopped and the sun broke through the clouds. I put the top down and drove the back roads to work - dodging downed limbs all the way. The sun glinted off the flooded fields. It started to look like spring might just be possible someday.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert is writing some of the best stuff on the web at the moment. For a good example check out this article about the hotel he used to stay at when he was in London. You might also want to check out this wonderful profile of him in Esquire.

He just posted a wonderful rant on the privatization of government services. You really need to read it. It’s one of the best condemnations of free market fundamentalism that I’ve read recently.

Punta Gorda Eagles

A pair of bald eagles have been nesting in downtown Punta Gorda for the last few years. Their nest is right in the park next to the historical society.

That’s kind of neat because you can go down to the park and sit there for a while watching how they behave. While we were watching them the other day, one of them flew in and they both got excited and started screeching and jumping around. I know it’s not a good idea to anthropomorphize animals, but it sure looked like the female was chewing the male out for not bringing a fish home for the juvenile.

After some of that, they calmed down and sat quietly.

Then the juvenile poked its head up out of the nest.

Shark's Teeth

We're visiting my parents in Florida this week. One of the places we like to go when we're down here is Englewood beach. We go there to collect shark's teeth. This was a good year for them. There's been a lot of big storms this year. That seems to knock them loose from wherever they come from offshore.

Finding the first tooth of the year is always the hardest part. Once you find that first one, you start seeing them everywhere.
Shark teeth aren't the only things you can find, Tom found several large pen shells, and there were tons of fish scales.

What Personality is that Blog?

I just ran into Typealyzer. You point it at a blog and it tells you the Myers-Briggs type indicator of the author. It thinks we’re INTP, which is probably a pretty good approximation of the four of us.

Try it out and point it at your favorite blog.

Keep Your Crises Small

I mentioned Ed Catmull the other day in this post. Yesterday, in this post, I talked about Andrew Lo’s thoughts about planning for failure and containing it. So here’s Ed at Stanford Business School talking about the same thing. He’s talking about the history of Pixar and how they kept failures from becoming major disasters.

It’s an interesting talk. He emphasizes the importance of transparency. It was important that everyone in the company showed what they were working on early. That way mistakes were handled before they got too large.

He also uses the phrase “success hides problems”. That has some resonance with the recent financial crisis, doesn’t it? The problems were there during the boom, but nobody had any incentive to fix them because everything was going great.

He also has some great ideas on doing post mortems successfully. That’s something that we’ve been getting pretty good at at work. We actually learned the whole RCA process from Toyota. I bet they’re pretty busy doing post mortems right now.

 

I also like his points about not being able to repeat success. Every successful product is unique. If you boil what you did right down into a recipe and try to it again, you won’t get another success. On the other hand, there are successful teams, which can create successful products over and over again. I ran into this talk from Jeff Atwood’s recent blog post about how a great idea isn’t enough to create a startup. Startups are a great example of teams being more important than ideas, although most outsiders think that the idea is the key to a successful startup.

 

Be sure to watch the Q&A at the end. He makes some good points there about how to actually make his ideas work in practice. He also has some comments about why politics doesn’t work lately. He phrases it in terms of trust. In a successful team, the team members trust each other, even if they don’t agree. Our politicians definitely don’t trust each other. It’s hard to see how to make progress without solving that problem.

Andrew Lo

I recently attended an interesting talk by Andrew Lo of the Sloan School. He does research on how human behavior factors into economics and the limitations of the classical economics model that people are purely rational entities.

He gave a good introduction to the “how” of the recent financial crisis. The key point is that there was an assumption built into all of the models that risks in the debts being securitized weren’t correlated. That was true historically, but it is not true when a housing bubble collapses. Everyone knew that we were in a housing bubble, but forgot to go back and check the effect of that fact on the assumptions in their models. He used the classic basketball video to explain why that was neglected. Once finance professionals had built this complex system based on these assumptions, they started thinking about the system at this higher level and neglected to pay attention to the underlying assumptions. This is human nature.

These details are interesting, but not terribly important. His argument (based on the work of Charles Perrow) is that any complex, coupled system is going to have failures. In this case, the complexities underlying the financial system were coupled for a few reasons. The first reason is that the banks were able to use high leverage ratios to maximize their profits, but this amplified any unexpected effects. Another reason is that there was a small number of very large companies involved. For example, many banks thought that they were safe from correlation risk because they had insurance on their positions. But they all had insurance from the same company; AIG.

Even if someone at one of these banks realized that there was going to be a problem when the bubble burst, it’s not clear that they could have done anything about it. He gave examples of people recognizing the warning signs in 2005. Then he pointed out that if you had shorted real estate in 2005, you would have lost a fortune that year, and in 2006, and in 2007, … You would have been out of business by the time the crash actually happened. Even if you know the current behavior can’t continue forever, you can’t make a prediction of when it will stop that is accurate enough to act on.

Professor Lo argues that we have to design complex systems around the assumption that failures like this will occur, and that we should simply try to localize the resulting damage. He compared this to planning for hurricanes and earthquakes. His recommendations included things like:

• Breaking up too-big-to-fail institutions.
• Create exchanges for exotic financial instruments to provide some transparency.
• Create a “financial NTSB” to do post mortems on crashes.
• Impose leverage constraints on banks.

He also argued against the idea that these complex financial instruments should be banned. Instead, he thinks we need to do a better job of educating people in business and the government. He proposed having the federal government fund financial research the way that they currently fund medical and scientific research. His analogy for this was a story about his son’s 8th birthday party. He asked his son what gifts he wanted to get for the guests. His son said “chainsaws!” Giving chainsaws to a group of 8 year olds is probably a bad idea. That doesn’t mean that chainsaws should be banned though. They’re exactly what you want if you’re clearing brush. He thinks that technologies like securitization aren’t yet idiotproof, but that they will be at some point. But we can’t just ban them in the meantime.

Professor Lo’s talk was very interesting. But one thing that was kind of scary though was that, while he thinks we will get improved financial regulations, he thinks we’ll get them after the next crash. He compared it to Glass-Steagall getting passed in 1933, not after the initial crash in 1929. He thinks that the initial recovery we’re currently in reduced the pressure for reform, but he doesn’t think it’s over yet. He expects another crash to happen. Perhaps because of commercial real estate; perhaps because of Spain & Greece. So hang on…

Testarossa

Peter thinks we need more Ferraris around here. This is the hood of a 1961 Testarossa we saw at the Lime Rock vintage races a couple of years ago. Isn’t it pretty?

Whole Earth Discipline

I’m currently reading Stewart Brand’s latest book, Whole Earth Discipline.

It’s basically about how he has changed his mind on the environmental effects of:

• Urbanization
• Nuclear Power
• Genetically Engineered Crops

I’ll talk about the first in a future post (because I want to read Shadow Cities first), but I found his thoughts on nuclear power and genetic modification particularly interesting.

Brand obviously knows a lot of people in the environmental movement, and he seems to have a very clear understanding of why so many of them are against these two things.

Brand sees the environmental movement as composed of three types of actors, which he calls:

• Romantics
• Scientists
• Engineers

He describes the three categories like this:

Romantics love problems; scientists discover and analyze problems; engineers solve problems.

When he describes the romantics, he uses terms like purity and contamination. Many people feel that any radiation is bad, even though we’re constantly bombarded by a fairly substantial background radiation. In the same way, they’re concerned about foreign genes contaminating a species, even though we’ve been performing all sorts of genetic modifications for millennia, and current research shows that genes are constantly being swapped between species.

He doesn’t mention Jonathan Haidt, but these descriptions sound exactly like one of Haidt’s five intuitive ethics. Haidt argues that people have unconscious disgust for things which violate one of these intuitive ethics, and that their rational mind then makes up a reason why it’s bad.

Specifically, this sounds like the Haidt’s purity/sanctity ethic. In general, this is associated with conservatives:

but Haidt does mention that you also see it in liberals with respect to food. This is very closely related to what Brand is talking about.

Haidt has some thoughts on how to use his theories to change people’s minds, and as he said in his Ted talk:

A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people.

Haidt has suggested starting out with conversations about unrelated problems in which you and the other person both see the problem in terms of the same intuitive ethic. Once you’ve done that, you’ve primed the pump for them to see a different problem through that same lens, and can use it to make progress on a subject which they see through one of the other lenses.

Brand seems to have come to a similar conclusion. He talks about malnutrition in the developing world. That’s activating the intuitive ethic that Haidt calls Harm/Care. Then Brand is talking about GM projects like Golden Rice, and how they can help. That’s move the Harm/Care ethic into a domain that people were used to viewing through the lens of the purity/sanctity ethic.

 

One funny thing that Brand talks about in his book is iGem. Have you heard of that? It’s a project which grew out of one of MIT’s IAP courses. It is:

… the premier undergraduate synthetic biology competition.

That’s right, a group of undergrads (180 teams this year) compete to make new life forms with interesting characteristics. They’ve come up with things like bacteria which add flavor & color while they make yoghurt, microbes which change color to mimic Mexican soccer fans performing the wave, and my favorite: E. coli which smells like wintergreen, but changes to a banana scent when it’s ready for processing.

 

Anyways, that was pretty rambling, but like all of Stewart Brand’s books, this one is bubbling with great ideas. You should check it out. One nice thing he’s done with this book is put all of the footnotes and sources online.

Corporate Personhood

Based on the Supreme Court’s recent decision that corporations have the same rights as individuals, a PR firm in Maryland has announced that it is running for congress.

From the NYTime's Economix blog.

 

Steven Seidenberg has some fun explaining where this is headed in McSweeney’s.

Nethack

The kids have a bunch of fancy video game hardware. But one of the games they’ve spent the most time playing recently is one that I used to play on a VT100 almost 25 years ago.  It doesn’t require any graphics support fancier than curses.

It’s called nethack.

It’s surprising that the game has had this kind of staying power. It’s just your basic dungeon quest game. There’ve been many of those since, but nethack endures. The picture above shows one level of the dungeon. The ‘.’ and ‘#’ characters represent places you can walk. The ‘%’ character represents food or a dead body. You move your character around the level, battle monsters, and pick up items.

Nethack was one of the first big open source projects. Anyone can fix a bug or add a feature. And they have added features. The number of characters, monsters, items, and quirky features is pretty overwhelming at this point. Keeping it all straight is pretty difficult. This guidebook will give you a bit of a feel for it all.

Budgets

It’s that time of year again. The President has rolled out his budget proposal for 2011. That’s the beginning of a fairly drawn out process. In a couple of weeks the CBO will add their estimates and it all heads off to Congress. With luck, they pass the basic resolution in April and the various appropriations bills follow in June.  We’ll see how it goes this year.

The next couple of years are going to be pretty tricky. While the economy is in a liquidity trap and monetary policy has limited effect, you want federal spending to be relatively high. But as soon as the economy crosses into the plus side, you want to start working on reducing the deficit. And of course revenues are going to be low as the economy slowly recovers. It’s going to be a pretty tricky maneuver, especially because we racked up so much debt during the boom years. The current political climate is going to add plenty of degree of difficulty points too.

Speaking of the deficit, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has this nice chart of the contributors to the deficit over the next few years.

 

There’s been an awful lot of sound and fury recently about items that don’t look very large on that chart, hasn’t there?

One of the most interesting parts of the budgeting process is the forecasts of future income and expenditures. These numbers are critical to making the budget work, but they’re notoriously hard to get right. The New York Times had this interesting interactive chart today.

It shows the forecasts which were used during earlier budget processes and how they ended up comparing to reality. You can scroll through and watch how the sudden turns took the forecasters by surprise.

The Times also has a nice treemap view of the budget proposal.

A good, non-partisan resource for learning about the budget is The Concord Coalition. This is a group that was started years ago by Warren Rudman, Paul Tsongas, and Peter Peterson.

A more entertaining resource for learning about the federal budget is Jess Bachman’s Death & Taxes poster.

Mark Morris

We went to see the Mark Morris Dance Group last night. They were performing a set of dances based on Mozart piano pieces.

Morris always seems to listen to the music more than most choreographers. He doesn't just use it to invoke an emotion. He's actually paying a lot of attention to the structure of the music and reflecting that in the structure of his dances. This was particularly effective with the Mozart pieces. Mozart’s music is pretty, but it also has great bones. There’s a lot there for someone like Morris to bring out.

It’s also nice to see a dance company where the dancers don’t look like they were stamped out with a cookie cutter. This is particularly true of the women dancers who represented a wide variety of body types, but applies to the men as well. There are places in the Mozart pieces where it sometimes seems like it would be nicer to have dancers who were more matched in size and build to complement the symmetry of the piece, but this seems overwhelmed by the strengths of seeing a company who work together and have dancers with a wide variety of skills.

Afterwards, we went to the Indian restaurant Tantric for supper. All in all a nice evening.

 

Here's a promo clip for the performance, but it's not terribly effective because the music and the dance aren't in sync. The actual performance was much more interesting than this.