The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Before:

Gilchrist, Texas before Hurricane Ike, from Google Maps via WunderBlog

Gilchrist, Texas after Hurricane Ike, National Geodetic Survey via WunderBlog.

Google Map of Gilchrist, Texas

This is Gilchrist, Texas. (hat tip to Wunder Blog for the pictures) Or, at least, it was. Now, it’s completely gone. No structures, no wreckage, no anything. Swept into the sea.

Putting aside the completely wrecked bridge, look at the places that used to be beachfront walkways. Where those houses were is *underwater*. I guess this is the risk you take when you build on a sandbar, but I can’t imagine losing my home in that way. I hope most of those people evacuated, and that they were summer homes with relatively little property left in them, but I bet some of them didn’t and some of them weren’t. I like the Jeff Masters’ idea of buying that land (where there is land, anyway) from the homeowners and making it a park (a la the Fire Island National Seashore). I think that’s a much safer way to help these people who’ve lost their property—without setting up the bad incentives which will cause it to be repeated in the next hurricane.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy all of NOLA and turn it into a park…

AT&T operates a casino. You bet on how many minutes you’ll use. If you use less, they keep the extra money. They win. If you use more, those cost 50 cents per minute. The house always wins. It’s a great business model if you can keep it up.

Last month, I went way over on minutes. AT&T’s staff switched *last month* to a different billing plan. The house gave up its edge. Yes, this is also evidence that they win enough either way.

Zimbabwe announced today that they will shift their currency denomination by ten places. I am told that quite recently their greatest denomination was fifty billion. That note is now worth five new Zimbabwe dollars.

Schmap has my picture of Dockweiler State Beach in Los Angeles!
(They sent me a note on Flickr telling me they used it.)

This is what Creative Commons licenses are for. Unfortunately, some people are unhappy with having allowed commercial use—Virgin Mobile in Australia is using Flickr photos in an ad campaign that portrays some of the subjects rather poorly. They’re attributing, but they didn’t contact any of the photographers or anything. Some of the subjects are quite upset, like this girl. I suspect I’d be upset, too.

When storms cross the Midwest, American air travel falls apart. When storms cover any territory, it doesn’t do well. It used to do better. What changed?

The FAA changed its regulations on when airlines are responsible for a delay. Today weather doesn’t cause any airline responsibility; anything else is the airline’s fault, or at least the airline’s to pay for. If mechanical failures cancel a flight, the airline buys you a hotel room or a seat on a different flight. If weather can be blamed in any way, they’re off the hook. This sets up incentives for them to move as much suck as possible to those passengers already inconvenienced due to weather.

They already have your money and don’t have to give you much of anything. Reroute you, swap crews out, cancel the in-flight beverage service or replace it with Mr. Pibb, there’s nothing you can do.

In most of the Denver area, there are no diners. There are Einstein’s Bagels, Village Inns, Dennys’, IHOPs, and so on. There are no chains smaller than large regional. There are few independent restaurants. As we drove last week from Denver to Kremmling, we saw many Starbucks and few local coffee shops. Boston is similar: lots of chains, though a few local businesses thrive. In New York, independent shops and restaurants are very common. There are certainly chains too, but enough independent restaurants that most people do business with them regularly. Why?

Most readers know that I’ve been looking for good diners in Boston for a long time. The Deluxe Town is nice, but its menu is thirty pages too short to really count. Now I think I’ve figured it out: big chains have figured out marketing and memetics enough to capture lots of market. But they can only be so dense before they overload people. A Starbucks every few blocks is one thing; heavier concentrations draw complaints. If there’s a McDonald’s on this block and a Burger King next block, people will be turned off to see a McDonald’s on the next block further. As a result, there’s a maximum concentration of each big chain.

Further, there’s only enough national population to support a certain number of national chains. When each of those are at their maximum sustainable density, but there’s still enough population to support more business, then something like the thriving diner culture I’m looking for comes into being. In New York, under the further influence of particular immigrant communities, that became diner culture itself. New York City is the densest population center in North America. The diner culture grew there and has spilled over into the surrounding suburbs.

As the number of supportable big chains increases, and as big chains diversify (each with a burger place, coffee/milkshake place, burrito place, etc.), they’ll find ways to pack more densely and attack the remaining diner space. They’ll also find ways to support more national chains. I don’t hold out much hope that the diners I love will come to Boston. But at the other end of the spectrum, Kremmling had no visible chain businesses. With only a thousand people, franchising doesn’t make sense: people do their own thing. The local coffee shop looked pretty good.

We’ve heard much these last few years about polarized politics: Bush Derangement Syndrome, anti-Clinton Malaise, Reagan Froth, the Carter Jitters, etc. I’m suspicious that this is an entirely new trend. But more and more, our civil discourse dies in favor of a drive to win. Peter Neumann points to an article about the terrible consequences in The Nation.

And everyone who reads this has heard of Arrow’s paradox. One interpretation of Arrow’s work is that good elections can’t be about winning. Elections are about consensus—we all agree that whoever wins this semiformal game will govern the country. Primary elections are even more so. I wonder how to shift from our winning-focused system to one that does favor candidates and strategists who focus on persuading the whole group.

What a fun article:

iPod sales sales have slowed considerably. They were up only 8% in the quarter. to 10,644,000.

This use of statistics serves as a wonderful idiot detector. The idea seems to be that if any derivative of a function is negative at any time, the entire function will soon be zero. In other words, any function that grows more slowly than e^x is doomed. But, as I know I’ve seen somewhere, probably applied to the housing market:

Anyone who believes in continued exponential growth in a closed system does not understand the problem.

This is the funniest thing I’ve read today. A space geek and a skeptic attended a conspiracy-theorist’s press conference, and wrote about it.

That’s not the funny part. (Though it is funny.)
The funny part is him talking about the hate-mail he got afterward from *other* conspiracy theorists.

Another writer speculated that because I referred to movies and videogames in my article, I must be under 40 years old. Well, you see, I used to refer to vaudeville stars and Victrola artists in all my writings, but then I realized that this did not make me, you know, groovy, as the Generation Y kids say these days. So I started adopting references to contemporary movies and video games to seem more “with it” and “hip,” by jiminy.

and

Some of the messages accused me of being pompous and assuming that I’m superior to them. To which my response is: I do feel superior… to them. I mean, there are lots of people I don’t feel superior to: my mom, Stephen Hawking, my parents’ dog (smart dog—she just knows stuff), and, well, a whole bunch of people. But if you believe that Nazis and Freemasons run the space program and have been covering up extraterrestrial structures on the Moon, or if you believe vastly complicated conspiracy theories that are based upon no evidence that would pass peer review by a panel of fifth-graders, then, yes, I have my doubts about your intelligence, or at least your reasoning abilities. And I wouldn’t trust you with my car keys.

Anyway, rather than me reposting large chunks of his article here, or sending them to a friend in IM while trying not to laugh out loud in my office and upset my officemate, y’all should just go read his article. Have fun, and don’t give the monkey your car keys.

Science Blog has a funny article today about why we don’t really worry about nuclear holocaust anymore. I thought this quote was worth passing on:

“Why aren’t we as worried about [Nuclear Holocaust] anymore? For starters, we aren’t fighting with Russia anymore (at least not seriously), Pakistan can’t hit us and China would want us to repay all of our loans before destroying us.”

Mutually-assured-destruction replaced with mutually-assured-defaulting. Welcome to America.