Coyote Blog

After several more days and locations (Florence, Cinqueterre via Portovenere) I am left with one question:  Why is it that even supposedly elegant European hotels charging many hundreds of Euros a night for a room are oblivious to the quality of their beds?  I am getting tired of paying tons of cash for rooms with bed linens whose quality is measured in “grit” rather than “threadcount.”  The beds are uncomfortable and the pillows are awful.   The blankets are sick polyester jokes that Motel 6 would be embarrassed to offer.  For the price of just one night’s room rent I could go to IKEA and outfit the rooms better.  It’s not like I am some spoiled princess-and-the-pea sleeper — I stay in a lot of cheap hotels and I tent camp, for god sakes.  My camping equipment is more comfortable than these beds.  I routinely stay in $70 hotels in the US and never get beds or linens this bad.  Do they not care, or is this what Europeans all sleep on at home?

OK, rant over.  Florence was as great as it always is.  There is way too much stuff to do there ever to get bored, all within just a few minutes walking.   Unlike past visits, we entirely skipped the Uffizi and hit a lot of historic buildings we had missed before (e.g. Medici Palace).  I enjoyed it but if you are on your first visit, the Uffizi is a must.  Also saw a bit of above-average engineering, like this:

Seriously, I wonder if I could have — without a)  any kind of materials strength data base; b) no structural steel or modern concrete; c) no CAD facility — designed and built such a thing in the 1400s, even with the Pantheon as a go-by to copy.  Really remarkable.

In Florence, there is a famous bridge called the Ponte Vecchio which is actually covered in buildings:

You can’t tell from this picture, but the bridge (open only to pedestrian traffic) is lined with at least 40 jewelry stores.  Seriously, each storefront has bout 6 feet of space, and every one had a window with zillions of gold trinkets.  It got me thinking about the paradox of choice.  It’s not hard to buy into the economic theory that too much choice may inhibit purchase while walking along this bridge, though I am told most of these folks do very well (I have never bought into the paradox of choice as social theory — the one that says people would be happier with fewer choices.  If this were true, we would all be emigrating to North Korea).

Speaking of pedestrian streets, one important takeaway from Italy has been that one should never assume a road is too narrow, even if it is no wider than your pantry door, for a vehicle to come racing through any second.  The other day I was in a really narrow alley I thought was foot-traffic-only when a bus(!) came screaming down the lane like a piston through a cylinder.  Only a well-located doorway got me out of the way, and even then the bus’s mirror clipped my arm.

The last few days we have been staying at the port town of Portovenere on the Italian Riviera.

The town itself is attractive with a fair amount to explore for its size.  I experimented some with night photography from my room

I have some other exposures that I want to try with HDR software to try to bring out a bit more of the buildings.   The town was kind of fun on a Saturday night — in addition to a couple of rowdy weddings, there were also a lot of BIG boats that came in for dinner in the evening.  Very nice (except for my bed).

Portovenere is a convenient gateway to the Cinqueterre, five absurdly picturesque downs laid down in about 1100 AD by Walt Disney to attract American tourists.  You may have not heard their names, but you have likely seen one or all of them the last time you were at an art fair in one of the photo exhibits — here is one example (though they had the patience to wait for a time of day where the lighting was better, presumably in the early morning).

More than the towns, I enjoyed the walking trail in between, which is an attraction in and of itself.  It winds through wilderness and vineyards along the coast.  All through the vineyards I kept seeing what looked like a guide rail for some sort of gear-driven device.  The rail wound up and down the hills and through the vineyards.  I had assumed that it was some sort of irrigation system where the sprinkler moved along the rail (though I could not figure out how the water supply would work).  Then I found this absolutely awesome piece of steampunk-style tech:

It is hard to tell, but its a little one-person monorail that rides on the rail and pulls a couple of carts behind the “engine.”  This is why I could not find any roads or really many trails in the vineyards — they use these cool things to move about, do maintenance, and bring in the crop presumably.  And the rail does not run on the ground, but 4-5 feet in the air, so one can see over all the vines and brush.  Totally awesome.  And not a seatbelt to be found on it, which made me love it all the more.   I loved it so much, here is another shot head-on (sorry it is overexposed, I don’t have the energy to edit it right now).

I don’t promise posts every day or even any other day of the trip, but since I have a quiet moment, and my wife is writing in her diary, I thought I would post a few thoughts.

• Milan is way underrated as a tourist spot, at least for a day or two.  It has the reputation of being a cold industrial town, and much of it may be that way, but the center of the city is quite nice to visit.  It was a legitimate rival to Florence and Venice in the Italian Renaissance.  Lots of good shopping, some good tourist sites, and the streets, particularly at night, are great to walk around.  The weather is wonderful, which helps.
• Single impression I will hold from Milan:  Very attractive women dressed to the nines in chic outfits wearing 5-inch heels — all while riding a bicycle.  They are all over the place.  And as for the overall rating for the lady-watching, I don’t think any spot will surpass Buenos Aires in my book (with Beverly Hills probably as a #2) but Milan very much held its own in that department.
• Stayed at the Park Hyatt on points (thank God because it is really expensive).  This is one great hotel, in a fabulous location with the best service I have ever received.
• If you are coming to Milan, fly into Linate rather than Malpensa if you can — the difference in time to the center of town is about an hour.
• Milan is a great place to start your trip in norther Italy.  One can fly here from about any where in the world and they have fast, cheap trains that go everywhere in Italy.
• Speaking of trains, don’t ever, ever buy a Eurail pass for Italy.  I bought one out of habit (the Swiss pass is awesome) and because last time I drove in Italy my car was hit 3 times in 1 week.  But train travel in Italy is so cheap that the pass is not worth it, and almost every good train requires a reservation (and reservation fee) which defeats the “just walk on the train” advantage of the pass.  Also, as an American, the Trenitalia web site is endlessly frustrating, and won’t accept most American credit cards, so the only way you can reserve a train in advance (which you must do) is to trudge to a travel agency or train station in Italy.  You can do it from a few US web sites but they add on huge fees.
• The Cathedral (Duomo) in Milan was right next to our hotel and is the 3rd or 4th largest in Europe.  I found it kind of unexceptional, except for its size (and perhaps the beautifully sculpted front doors).  The interior highlight is probably the large stained glass windows (OK and the body of the saint lying in a room whose design looks like it was pulled right out of the haunted mansion ride at Disneyworld was interesting too).  However, there is one other thing unique about the Duomo that was fun — you can go up and walk on the roof.  Not just go up in a tower, but walk all over the roof and in between the flying buttresses.  Great view and enjoyable

• The Sforza Castle, for all its history, is about the bleakest and most overtly military building I have ever seen produced by the Italian Renaissance.  But probably appropriate for their history, given that the Sforza’s were top generals to the Milanese Dukes before they took over the succession, and Milan was really home for the Renaissance era defense industry.
• The Galleria Vittoria Emanuele is is a great Victorian-style glassed arcade near the Duomo.  The structure is cool but unfortunately there is not really anything inside to do it justice.

• Took a lot of 3-shot photo series with a bracketing of low to high exposures so I could play with some new High Dynamic Range imaging software. This kind of scene above, with lots of texture in the buildings that gets washed out by the sunlight from the glass dome, hopefully will work well.  I will report on results.
• On to Florence today, where we have a beautiful deck overlooking the Arno and Ponte Veccio and views from the rooftop restaurant all around Florence.  At least if the goofball in the black shirt would stop jumping in front of the camera.

I am heading for Italy for two weeks.  No blogging planned except perhaps some photo-blogging.  I expect you guys to have this country straightened out by the time I get back.

Sunday’s shirt at Teefury.  Pointed to me by my daughter, who was convinced I was geeky enough to want this.   Shirts only sold one day so if you click tomorrow you will see something different.  This is the image from the front:

I second Alex’s nomination – this is one of my favorite documentaries as well.  The book by the same name is very good as well and covers more of the math history.  I actually watched it just the other day in a home double feature with a A Beautiful Mind, mainly showing my kids the scenes shot at Princeton**  but it turned out to be a great essay on math and the human mind.

** I suppose I could have thrown in Transformers 2 as a Princeton triple feature but it seemed somehow out of place in terms of tone.  Also, seeing all the ASU girls walking around the Princeton campus was almost weirder than the hallucinations in A Beautiful Mind.

Why playing around with complex numbers is more than just wanking.

Onion News Network:  Are Standardized Tests Biased Against Kids Who Don’t Give a Shit? Via Carpe Diem.  The Onion is brilliant because in some ways, this is absurd and some ways it cuts way too close to reality.

Glen Reynolds linked this gallery of 30 awesome college labs.  My favorite at Princeton was our Junior year mechanical engineering course which was basically interfacing micro computers to mechanical devices  (which was a non-trivial task in 1983).  There were two one-semester courses.  The first was mostly software, and involved programming an s-100 bus computer in assembly language to do various things, like control an elevator.  My final project was a put one of the first sonic rangefinders from a Polaroid camera on a stepper motor and built a radar that painted a blocky view of its surroundings on a computer monitor.

But the really cool part for me was the second semester, when it was software + hardware.  We had to build a complete electronics and mechanical package to perform an automated function on … a very large n-scale model railroad.  Well, readers of my blog will know that model railroading is my hobby anyway.  My team built a coal loading facility where the train was stepped forward one car at a time and a hopper filled each successive car to the right level with coal (or actually little black pellets).  We had sensors to be able to handle certain problems the professor might throw at us, like a car that was already full, cars of different sizes and lengths, etc.  That lab with the big model railroad was easily my favorite.

In retrospect, I almost miss programming in assembler code, trying to cram the code into 4K EPROMS, etching my own circuit boards….  Almost.   Now my only use for circuit boards is to shear them into strips to act as railroad ties when I hand-solder track work and my only use for etchant is weathering scale sheet metal to make it naturally rusty.  Pictures of the latter in a few weeks.

The rise of the American corporate state is the theme of my most recent column at Forbes.

Apparently, legislators in California can’t get away with just passing a law that says something like “no damn foreigners can build trains for us.”  So they repackage their protectionism by finding a way to disguise it, in this case with a truly screwball piece of fiddling-while-Rome-burns legislation:

A bill authored by Assemblymember Bob Blumenfield (D – San Fernando Valley) requiring companies seeking contracts to build California’s High Speed Rail system to disclose their involvement in deportations to concentration camps during World War II gained final approval from the state legislature today. AB 619, the Holocaust Survivor Responsibility Act, passed the Assembly on a vote of 50 – 7 and was sent to the governor, who will have until September 30 to act on it.AB 619 would require companies seeking to be awarded high speed rail contracts to publicly disclose whether they had a direct role in transporting persons to concentration camps, and provide a description of any remedial action or restitution they have made to survivors, or families of victims. The bill requires the High Speed Rail Authority to include a company’s disclosure as part of the contract award process.

Apparently they have in mind specifically the SNCF, the French national railroad.  Its loony enough to blame current corporate management and ownership for something the entity did three generations ago, but the supposed crimes of the SNCF occurred when France was occupied by the Nazis.   Its like criticizing the actions of a hostage.  And even if there were some willing collaborationists, they almost certainly were punished by the French after liberation, and besides the US Army Air Force did its level best to bomb the SNCF’s infrastructure back into the stone age, so I am certainly willing to call it quits.

Thanks to a commenter, the short story from Omni that was so reminiscent of the China traffic jam was “The Great Moveway Jam.”  The blog Cedar Posts and Barbwire Fences found it online:

Part One is Here

Part Two is Here

From the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, eventually struck down by the Supreme Court:

Whenever the President shall find that destructive wage or price cutting or other activities contrary to the policy of this title are being practiced in any trade or industry or any subdivision thereof, and, after such public notice and hearing as he shall specify, shall find it essential to license business enterprises in order to make effective a code of fair competition or an agreement under this title or otherwise to effectuate the policy of this title, and shall publicly so announce, no person shall, after a date fixed in such announcement, engage in or carry on any business, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, specified in such announcement, unless he shall have first obtained a license issued pursuant to such regulations as the President shall prescribe. The President may suspend or revoke any such license, after due notice and opportunity for hear ing, for violations of the terms or conditions thereof. Any order of the President suspending or revoking any such license shall be final if in accordance with law.

With this law, all commerce was to be conducted only at the President’s pleasure. The law also instituted code authorities, modeled on Mussolini’s economic system, that would set prices, wages, production quotas and nearly every other business practice in an industry. To some extent, I would argue that the recent health care bill is the first modern American code authority.

Via Glen Reynolds, from Keith Jurow at Business Insider

There is a far-reaching change occurring now which threatens housing markets around the country. A survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the National Apartment Association in May 2010 found that 76% of those surveyed now believe that renting is a better option than buying in the current real estate market, up from 71% in 2008.  Especially sobering was the fact that 78% of those surveyed were homeowners.

David Neithercut, CEO of Equity Residential, the nation’s largest multi-family landlord, believes that there is a “psychology change” in the mind of consumers.  In a June address to an industry conference, he declared that there is “a change in one’s thought process about the benefits or wisdom of owning a single-family home.”

When an author uses the word “threatens” to describe a trend, you know he doesn’t like it.  While a home may be  a good place to put excess cash for some people, as a leveraged investment it is insane.  It is a dead asset, producing no cash flow or future value.  While the land under it may be a scarce asset, particularly in some areas with strict growth limits and zoning laws, the house itself is a depreciating asset as much as your car is (trust me, I just replaced an air conditioner and spent weeks repairing dry wall cracks).

Renting pays a lot of benefits, not the least of which is the mobility it adds to the labor market.  Individuals with leases are less tied to a certain spot, so have more flexibility to leave a given area to seek better opportunities elsewhere  (this actually triggers a thought I had not had before — I wonder if government promotion of home ownership, particularly at the state and local level — can be seen as a modern form of serfdom, with politicians attempting to tie people to the land so they cannot move and take their tax money elsewhere).

So home ownership is a fine option for many (I own a home and prefer that status in my present circumstances) but there is no law that says it has to be the norm or the default.  Many people have switched from whole life to term, from buying individual stocks to mutual funds, from defined benefit pensions to 401k’s.  The way we achieve goals evolve over time, and there should be nothing surprising about a change in how people wish to access housing.  And certainly nothing in this trend which should occasion government intervention to prevent.

Like many libertarians, I am tempted not to vote each election, though I usually do.  However, choosing between whatever lesser evil exists in the Coke or Pepsi party gets tiresome.  Given that, I have never voted in a party primary, until yesterday when I voted in the Republican primary simply to vote against Andrew Thomas for state Attorney General.  Thomas has for years been Joe Arpaio’s chief enabler and of late as County Attorney has spent his time launching frivolous lawsuits against his political enemies, from County supervisors to judges.  When attorneys from adjacent counties would not support his suits, he sought criminal charges against them.

Most recently, it was revealed that a series of grand juries, which typically will indict an inanimate object, not only refused to indict in several of his cases but ordered him to shut down the investigation entirely.  This useless prosecution of a County Supervisor turned out to be part of a plan.  When Thomas decided to vacate the County Attorney position to run for state DA, he disagreed with many of the County Supervisors as to who his replacement should be, and as narrated in this letter, began filing charges against Supervisors to deny them a quorum  (apparently some quid pro quo discussions, of the sort “we will drop the charges if you vote how we want” were actually recorded and turned over to the US Attorney, so if Thomas should win his election we be following the NY/Spitzer path of having our top state legal officer facing felony charges and disbarment.

Unfortunately, Thomas (and Arpaio) have somehow become folk-heroes among lame-brained Arizona voters, who tend to accept any sort of civil rights violations by officials as necessary measures to maintain the peace in the face of the dreaded Mexican immigration wave, so their re-election chances are not necessarily hurt by near Louisiana or Chicago levels of abuses of power.

I was tempted not to vote — you know, one vote won’t matter — because I felt downright icky actually voting in the Coke primary.  But in AZ, the Coke primary is pretty much the election since the state is so full of Coke voters, so I did it.  As it turns out, my vote may matter.

99.7% of Precincts Reporting
(2232 of 2239 Precincts)

Don’t know a thing about Tom Horne, but I eagerly voted for him as not-Thomas.  Here is the lock of the week:  with a vote this close, Thomas will keep this in the court for months, perhaps years.  If he gets the wrong decision, he will go after the judge, and if that doesn’t work…..

Update: Apparently, Arpaio got his guy elected in the race to fill Thomas’s county attorney seat, so I suppose once we get rid of one Arpaio-enabler we just end up with another.  I took Arpaio’s list of people he endorsed yesterday and the only votes I cast were for whoever the challenger was to team Arpaio.

Update #2: This is a depressing quote (emphasis added)

Oddly, the truth-telling was attributed to our own local Pinocchio, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in regards the decisive victory of Bill Montgomery over interim Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley.

“That’s going to make my job very easy,” Arpaio said of Montgomery’s win.

You need the sound on for this.  Stick it out for the final stretch.  Trust me.

Abbot and Costello meet horse racing

I have stayed away from the story about Hollywood producer/director James Cameron backing out of a climate debate at the last minute, a debate he demanded and previously had thumped his chest that he would win going away.  The event in Aspen was being run and attended by folks totally sympathetic to Cameron and completely hostile to the skeptic’s position.  The event’s founder and producer Chip Comins is almost defamatory in how he talks about skeptic Mark Morano, who was to debate Cameron and was actually on a plane flying to the event when Cameron backed out.  Its amazing that Morano would agree to debate in such a hostile environment with a biased organizer, but in fact it was Cameron who chickened out.  This statement by Comins tells you all you need to know about Hollywood culture:

“Morano is not at James Cameron’s level to debate, and that’s why that didn’t happen,” Comins said. “Cameron should be debating someone who is similar to his stature in our society.”

This is an analysis from Denmark’s Labor Market Commission. There are many people who simply stay on unemployment as long as they can.

Here is a chart I ran a while back on auto sales, showing how the cash for clunkers “stimulus” program simply spent a bunch of money to pull forward car sales by a month or two

Here are housing sales — I don’t have time this morning to annotate the chart but the housing stimulus program expired in May

Yes, I am among the geeks who miss Omni magazine.  Is there anyone who remembers a short story in that magazine about a traffic jam so bad they eventually just paved it over, people and all?  I am reminded of that given this story from China.

I had not realized that some Federal employees did not have to participate in Social Security.  Intriguingly, this fact was raised by people who were defending government pay as not being excessive — they said something like, “well, some workers don’t even get Social Security.”  Via Bryan Caplan

Some government employees don’t participate in Social Security. How does that change the benefits picture?

[T]hat’s irrelevant because they’re neither paying nor receiving benefits. If you follow Social Security, you know it pays a low rate of return… [N]ot to participate in Social Security is actually a benefit, because they’re keeping more.

I agree. Not participating in Social Security is a huge benefit.  The implicit return on “premiums” paid by you and your employer is typically below zero.  In other words, if you took your social security taxes and stuffed them in a mattress, you would get a better return.  As I wrote in the link above

as a retirement program, [social security] is a really, really big RIPOFF.  Ever worker in this country is being raped by this retirement plan.  In fact, it is the worst retirement program in the whole country:

• As we see above, it pays a negative rate of return
• It is not optional – you go to prison if you choose not to participate
• Unlike a private annuity contract, the government can rewrite your benefits level any time, and you have to take it.  In fact, my statement says “Your estimated benefits are based on current law.  Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time.  The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2040, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 74 percent of scheduled benefits.”
• There are no assets backing this annuity!!  An insurance company that wrote annuities without any invested assets backing them would be thrown in jail faster than Jeff Skilling.  The government has been doing it for decades.

I must say that I am not much of a fan of trying to find spurious relationships between long-term economic trends and the political parties who hold office at various times.  But I must say I kind of liked this one from Mark Perry:

PS-  I was around a dinner table this weekend with a group of Republicans, including some activists.  I asked them what exactly they thought Republicans would do next term if they won real gains in Congress.  None of them, many hard-core activists, could name anything except divide government and slow the pace of growth.  Which I suppose is better than we have now.

Maybe its because I live in Phoenix, but the local food movement has always seemed silly to me.  To somehow argue that food grown in our 6 inches of annual rainfall is better for the environment than trucking product in from more suitable growing regions has always struck me as crazy.  Russ Roberts links several good articles on the local food movement, one of which included this nice snarky observation:

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

The government terminology that tends to tick me off the most is calling commerce a “privilege” that can only be granted to the state and therefor must be licensed with appropriate tribute paid to the state for the “privilege.”  Here in Arizona our sales tax is called a “transaction privilege tax.”  Here is a story about licensing bloggers in Philly:

Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To [Marilyn] Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.

In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.

Selling one’s labor, and conducting commerce to the mutual interest of two parties are fundamental rights rather than artificial constructs granted by the state.

One substantial problem with the TSA that is seldom discussed is that in the switch from using private security to government agents to screen passengers, there was always going to be a temptation by the Feds to expand the airport screening from narrowly a search for weapons that might endanger an airplane to a catch-all crime search point.  Here is an example of the latter:

That same screener started emptying her wallet. “He was taking out the receipts and looking at them,” she said.

“I understand that TSA is tasked with strengthening national security but [it] surely does not need to know what I purchased at Kohl’s or Wal-Mart,” she wrote in her complaint, which she sent me last week.

She says she asked what he was looking for and he replied, “Razor blades.” She wondered, “Wouldn’t that have shown up on the metal detector?”

In a side pocket she had tucked a deposit slip and seven checks made out to her and her husband, worth about $8,000.

Her thought: “Oh, my God, this is none of his business.”

Two Philadelphia police officers joined at least four TSA officers who had gathered around her. After conferring with the TSA screeners, one of the Philadelphia officers told her he was there because her checks were numbered sequentially, which she says they were not.

“It’s an indication you’ve embezzled these checks,” she says the police officer told her. He also told her she appeared nervous. She hadn’t before that moment, she says.

She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. “That’s my money,” she remembers saying. The officer’s reply? “It’s not your money.”

At this point she told the officers that she had a good explanation for the checks, but questioned whether she had to tell them.

“The police officer said if you don’t tell me, you can tell the D.A.”

Patrick at Popehat observes how a media outlet probably missed the fact that they were hearing sarcasm.  But there is a very good explanation of why sarcasm does not work on the web.  Think of a couple of sarcastic comments, like “Boy that Joe Arpaio is sure a friend of civil rights” or “wow, that Cynthia McKinney is one sharp legislator.”  The problem is that on the web, there are likely any number of people arguing, quite seriously, that Arpaio is the greatest friend the Constitution ever had or that McKinney is a bastion of well-reasoned, sober deliberation.  We are getting to the day that without regularly reading an author on the web, it is virtually impossible to be sure a given remark is sarcasm.  I mean, if I didn’t know where he stood politically, I would have initially pegged Kevin Drum’s assertion that Tip O’Neil cut a deal to have poor people pay the taxes of rich people as some sort of clever joke.