| Help J.R. get his Master's Degree |
[Apr. 15th, 2009|09:04 pm] |
Below you should see a survey I posted to Google Docs to help gather requirements for my Systems Engineering Master's project. If you don't see the embedded survey, you can fill it out here.
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| No longer a rocket scientist |
[Jan. 31st, 2009|11:42 am] |
Over the next few weeks I'll be transitioning from my job as a rocket scientist to being the team leader for a software development project. I'm still working for the same company, just a total change of duties. This is the kind of opportunity that doesn't come along very often, and it just fell into my lap... the timing was unbelievable. Now I just have to finish up my master's in Systems Engineering so that I can have some paper to prove that I know what I'm doing. |
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| My plan for the US Auto Industry |
[Nov. 18th, 2008|07:39 pm] |
So the biggest problems facing the US Auto Industry are labor costs and a horrible business strategy... but the horrible business strategy of "More SUVs, More Trucks!" is actually part of the labor problem. The US Auto Industry's labor rates are so high that they can't afford to make low-margin cars unless they can also pad their books by selling trucks and "light trucks". I propose two solutions:
1) The Federal Gov't offers to buy out any UAW member's health benefit by putting them on a pilot program based on Obama's new healthcare plan. This would give the Obama administration a chance to test their program on a very small scale -- mostly in a single region -- so that any macroeconomic downsides would be correctable. The Dep't of Public Health would also provide safety-net emergency coverage via DoD's semi-successful Tricare Prime coverage (i.e. a Union Card is as good as a DoD ID for getting health care in Michigan) during the transition to ensure that the UAW members don't die because they were the first Federal guinea pigs. Using FEHBP is another option here.
2) 50% of Federal vehicle purchases in FY09 shall be hybrid vehicles made in America. 75% of FY10 vehicle purchases, 100% of FY11 purchases. Hire extra temporary Federal workers (or contractors) to administer the mega-purchases, if need be. Break the buys up by cabinet department over the Big Three -- that is, divvy up the pie into three roughly equal pieces, and give the biggest piece to the automaker that has the best proposal. Exceptions for Park Service vehicles intended primarily for austere or rugged environments (Park Police Clown Vics get replaced), or any other vehicle where the batteries are a safety hazard. This purchasing decision may cost slightly more up front, but the money is going to US companies and will reduce Federal gasoline consumption (money which ends up overseas).
This two-part strategy forces the automakers to build a capacity for hybrids, while drastically cutting their labor costs. Boosting capacity will stretch the market for hybrids, cutting the costs for specialty parts and boosting the supply of inexpensive hybrid options. Labor costs drop as well, making other US auto products more affordable. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 13th, 2008|04:56 pm] |
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Taking Ben to Yappy Hour (dogs!) then after he goes to sleep, I'm going to go catch Food Will Win the War at 10 North Ave, Baltimore MD - 8PM, no cover (I think). |
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| The Palin Train Wreck |
[Sep. 3rd, 2008|11:10 pm] |
I heard an energy policy that was cribbed from Obama, a fascist approach to law enforcement, a unilateralist approach to foreign policy, and outright lies about the two parties' tax policies. I heard a fairly long-winded biography that was heavy on family and pretty light on her public service. I did hear two examples of reform but I'm pretty sure that one was patently false. I heard her empathize with a torture victim, which may be the first time a Republican has dared to use the "t" word in public in the last year. I heard some calls to class warfare, and a crowd that would have been perfect for pro wrestling cheering her on, but I'm not sure what exactly they were cheering for. I saw stars and stripes, a New York City skyline, and a politician kissing an honest-to-god baby, who was being passed around like a trophy for the cameras.
I missed the part where she explained why she was even remotely qualified to serve in any public office, let alone the Vice Presidency.
Edited to add:
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| Benjamin's first birthday! |
[Aug. 12th, 2008|06:20 am] |
Lots of parties to go to, but a quick update for posterity. As of his 366th day, Benjamin is not quite walking, but cruising very eagerly. He will do "up-down" (stand/squat) holding the edge of a piece of furniture, and he will also do something similar to up-downs but faster and with more wiggle -- this is in response to the word "dance" or "dancing".
His spoken vocabulary is pretty limited: Mama, Dada, Bottle, and Bird are all distinct. Duck and Dog are distinct to me and Erica, but nobody else. Truck/Bus (any large vehicle) is not yet distinct but he's trying out the same sounds whenever he sees one. Hat is another one that is distinct to me and Erica but just sounds like a vocalized laugh to everyone else ("Haaa!"). Ball means any football, and Book means he wants a story, but these two are very hard to tell from random "BA" sounds. Oh, and if he falls or something crashes to the ground, or if there's thunder, he'll say "KABOOM".
Sign language is coming along well - we mostly use it for body parts, or to signal that an event is going to happen. For example, he can sign Change (for changing a diaper), Eat, Birds (waving hands around), and point to his ears, nose, toes, belly, head, and (sort of) his shoulders. The most important sign in his vocabulary is, of course, MORE.
His comprehension vocabulary is solid. Mostly animals: bird, dog, horse, camel, zebra (and yes, he can tell the difference), and sheep. He has a little stuffed toolbox with plush tools so he can identify his screwdriver, drill, and hammer (hammer is sometimes vocalized mimicking daddy's "bang bang" sound). He knows a few kinds of sentences, mostly questions like "Can you bring me X" and "Where is X".
And today, for the first time, he stood up on his tiptoes and used the doorknob to open a closed door.
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| Name a song with a livelier pedigree... |
[Aug. 7th, 2008|08:26 pm] |
Bob Dylan's It's All Over Now, Baby Blue was inspired by a song by Gene Vincent. Van Morrison's band Them covered the song in 1966. 31 years later, Beck heavily sampled the Morrison cover version (basically a cover itself) in his song Jack-Ass. Then Beck re-arranged and re-recorded the song without the sample, added a mariachi band (Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cana), and translated the lyrics into Spanish, and released it as a B-Side called "Burro".
So "Burro" is a cover of a re-imagining (remix?) of a cover. You could argue that a techno version of U-2's All Along the Watchtower would come close, being a remix of a cover of Jimi Hendrix's version of the Dylan classic... but does any such version exist?
Mental note: take Benjamin to see a mariachi band sometime soon. |
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| Ben's YouTube Debut |
[May. 1st, 2008|06:29 pm] |
Please ignore the commentary from daddy, who is apparently channeling DuffMan. |
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| Baby Pictures |
[Apr. 10th, 2008|11:30 pm] |
I have been incredibly remiss in posting. I have a kid now and he is adorable! To remedy my lack of posts, I will now post a cute baby picture.
You can see more on Ben's web album. |
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| Home at last - major belated update |
[Jul. 8th, 2007|02:37 pm] |
So here it is, the first post from the new house. We've got a great location, facing north to the B&O Railroad Museum (Google Maps link here). Three bedrooms: one for me and Erica, one for the Nugget*, and one for grandparents and/or guests. When you walk in there's a sitting-room-slash-library with all of our bookshelves, a big comfy couch, overstuffed chair, and a pappazan. Through the first-floor hallway (which opens on the one-car garage) there's a study with a desk and a cubby wall. The study has a sliding-glass door that opens on the parking pad. The second floor is a living room with two sofas -- one sleeper sofa -- a TV, the two PCs, and then a kitchen and dining room that open onto a porch. We're getting a glass-top table for the porch soon, but the best thing is that we're allowed to grill again! There are also a small powder room and a large pantry tucked away on the second floor. The third floor has all the bedrooms, a guest bathroom, the over-under laundry closet, and the master bath and walk-in closet. There's an attic, but storing things there is against the fire code. Argh!
Now that we've been here a month, Comcast got our internet hooked up and I wrestled the router into submission, so life is almost back to normal. Erica and I spent the last week down in Bethany Beach relaxing in the sun, watching the parade on the 4th, and showing off her huuuuuge BabyBellyTM to my folks. Dad and I poured some concrete, put together a few woodworking projects, and helped out the Czechs and Lithuanians who are down for the summer. Mom and I did some cooking, and of course everyone did lots of kayaking! I saw a few dolphins and caught some phenomenal waves. Couldn't have asked for a better holiday.
Picture post coming as soon as I can find the cable that connects my camera to the PC.
* - The Nugget is due in August, but we don't know its gender yet, so it's Nugget until we can see it. Then it will either be Benjamin Alexander or Ava Victoria. |
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| Operations Research |
[Mar. 8th, 2007|11:02 am] |
How would you like to have, on your resumé, the following bullet:
- Optimized FrappuccinoTM production for 10,000+ SBUX locations, increasing Q3 frozen drink throughput and profitability by 7.3%
Somebody out there has that job now. He or she probably has a masters in operations research, the art-slash-science of coming up with the best possible way to do things. It sounds like a fun way to make a living, but I bet you'd be surrounded by people who make my little OCD quirks look like small potatoes. I also suspect that an office of Ops Research people would each figure out the very fastest (or cost-effective) way to work, and then they'd spend the first 20 minutes of work discussing how much time they saved. Anyway, on to my point. From a Reuters story:
Last July, Starbucks posted its weakest monthly same-store sales rise since 2001 as heavy demand for cold drinks like Frappuccinos slowed service during busy morning hours. On Wednesday, [product development head Michelle] Gass said she was "pretty confident" that such an event would not happen again. "We've got people locked in a room working on this," she said, but declined to give specifics.
Hm, yes, that sounds fun: a locked room full of OCD engineers hopped up on triple lattes. I bet those are some really bitchin ideas they're getting. I wonder what they have to come up with to earn a bathroom break? |
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| Questions for Baltimoreans and/or homeowners |
[Mar. 2nd, 2007|05:41 pm] |
Do you have any experience with Harkins Builders?
If the city of Baltimore and UMBC are both buying up land in a neighborhood and offering great tax incentives to buy new construction, would you expect the value of those homes to go up over the next (oh, say) five years?
Once you go west of Martin Luther King Blvd. in Baltimore, it is a commonly-held belief that you're in a bad neighborhood, but how far south does this extend? South past Pratt? Further?
(a) "The market has peaked."
or
(b) "That's what they said five years ago." |
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| BWI : HSV (72hrs) |
[Feb. 19th, 2007|08:50 pm] |
Depart tomorrow afternoon for two days in Huntsville Alabama. I haven't been there since I got to climb all over the SCUD. Before that, the last time I was there was for Space Camp. This time promises to be much less exciting: I'll be briefing a room full of people who don't want to admit that what I'm bringing is going to eventually become a requirement on their contract. They are upset about this and will desperately want to shoot the messenger. If life were not a joyous concatenation of wondrous tiny miracles, I think I might be up for that plan.
To those not in the know: Huntsville offers a depressing lack of variety in arrivals, departures, and rental cars. All aircraft pass through Atlanta with hour-plus layovers. All cars are already rented, so I get a cab, and dinner within walking distance of my hotel. No laptop, no interweb, no wheels. I have a biography of Benjamin Franklin and will purchase The Economist at BWI. If I see or speak to you with any regularity, you may assume that I am cut off from civilization for the week. I will return Friday! |
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| Maybe the real reason we fought the Cold War |
[Feb. 7th, 2007|09:36 am] |
...was to keep the various Soviet states from discovering capitalism. We had convinced them that it was evil and decadent and then we went ahead and took the lead in the world economy. Turns out that the Russians absolutely understand the concepts of capitalism.
Here, for example, is an article about how holograms that certify "authentic" products are now being counterfeited. Anyone who's taken microeconomics knows that if the profit margin is high enough on a product, your competition can use that margin to compete against you. In this case, the Russian mafia invested in technology to duplicate holograms so they could affix them to cheap knock-offs and sell them for a higher price. The price difference made the investment worthwhile. From the article (emphasis added):
Law enforcement hasn't shown much enthusiasm for going after fake holograms. The FBI lists three cases involving counterfeited holograms since 1997, and when contacted, was only able to say the agency "is aware that there are individuals and/or criminal enterprise organizations that are actively involved in the production of holograms. These fraudulent holograms are being used to effectively produce false passports, driver's licenses, tax stamps and credit cards."
The bureau continues to actively investigate these matters, spokeswoman Catherine Milhoan notes.
The U.S. Secret Service sees and recognizes counterfeit holograms more regularly, but usually finds there's little they can do to prosecute. That's because a lot, perhaps the majority, of fake holograms are coming from overseas, mainly China, Korea, India and Russia.
"The Russian mob is a very, very entrepreneurial group," says Mitch Dembin, a former security advisor for Microsoft. "It's tough to enforce U.S. law against counterfeiting overseas, especially in countries where there's not much enthusiasm for intellectual property rights."
One of my biggest rays of hope for Iraq is how quickly (anarcho-) capitalism has sprung up in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. For years, the commonly-held belief was that Communists/Socialists/Reds just couldn't understand capitalism. Compare that to today's commonly-held belief that Your Ay-rab Types Just Can't Grasp Western Democracy, and you'll maybe understand why it gives me a little hope. Yes, I know one situation is brushing off a century of government-imposed economics while the other is trying to change centuries of deep-rooted culture. Still, I think it could work.
Question for debate (if you feel like it): can any country populated primarily with adherents of a religion which insists that it is the highest law establish a democracy or a republic that includes the separation of mosque and state? |
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| Ends and Means |
[Feb. 4th, 2007|11:16 am] |
One of Iran's top nuclear scientists has reportedly been assassinated by the Mossad. The cause of death was reported as "gas poisoning." I guess when you're in the Mossad, the whole ethical question about "would you kill Baby Hitler" is puzzling because you can't figure out what the dilemma is supposed to be. Israel's foreign policy -- their brazen ability to do pretty much anything in the name of state sovereignty -- makes the U.S.'s ham-handed bellicosity look like amateur hour. They're a state after the European model with all of the niceties of post-WWI diplomacy, but they are also surrounded by countries that want to erase their asses off the map. To this end, they've developed a chilling ability to do the math. At some point, they just skip over the whole diplomacy thing and do what they feel they need to do to survive.
Note, for example, their 1981 strike against the Osirak reactor in Iraq. They were worried that Saddam intended to produce weapons of mass destruction, so they crippled his reactor. We (the U.S.) condemned that surgical strike as inconsistent with "the norms of international conduct." The "norms" are apparently "if you don't like how Saddam is running the country, invade it and ineffectually referee a civil war," but I digress.
Israel's foreign policy and especially their military operations are elegant, aggressive, ruthless, crippling, and evil1. They understand realpolitik like nobody else on earth except possibly the Swiss and the Russians.
Can the murder of one citizen of another state be justified if the goal is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon? If the assassination of key personnel is acceptable, what makes the assassination of heads of state unacceptable? Is it that heads of state are the ones who make the rules, and they have declared that murder is okay, as long as it's not one of us getting killed?
1. I'm using "evil" here in the GWB sense of the word, to mean a violation of Judeo-Christian morals and the ethics that often get packaged with them. |
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