Social Engineering

Faces of Math

2008-04-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

It's been called the silent killer. It's socially acceptable, even lauded in some circles. At one time the government even ran public service announcements praising it. It's a subculture with it's own language, style and lexicon. It's been called social suicide on the installment plan. The effects are plain, as shown in the pictures below.
What did this to these men? On the street, it's known simply as math. Short for Mathematics, this deadly killer claims the social lives of thousands of high school and college students every year. When their roommates are out pledging frats and having fun, those hooked on math are hiding out in their dorm rooms, doing things like trigonometry, algebra, and in extreme cases, calculus and differential equations. These things are shocking to some, but parents must be aware of the signs. If your child begins skipping sports, hanging out with other math users, using slang like "Maple" "Derivative" or "RPN", or has steadily rising grades, be aware that your child may be getting hooked on math. Talk to your kids. Help them understand the dangers of math. Keep them safe.

China into Aircraft Business

2008-04-02T15:44:00.000-07:00

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/04/china-gets-into.html
Looks like China is getting into the aircraft business. Apparently they expect to start selling aircraft by 2020. I'm not sure what I think of this. The objective factors are against it, but I never count the Chinese out. China's industrial infrastructure and human resources are entirely against it. They are good at lots of cheap stuff with relatively low quality standards, but right now they don't even make a car that would stand up against a Honda. The quality standards that are required of an aircraft make a car look like a cub scout whittling project. Honda took 10 years to get a prototype for a 2 + 5 private jet. And a small jet like that is tinker toys compared to a full airliner, and the HondaJet is in very, very limited production.
It looks like China has a fuselage but no wing, so they've got the easy part started. I think it's telling that they don't have a wing yet. That's the key to the whole project. The fuselage is just an aluminum tube in comparison. They also have a ton of work to do in fatigue life assessment, which is a black art that has to be learned the hard way, and Boeing isn't helping them there. Every single part has to be tested and a maintenance cycle established and documented. For millions of individual parts. And any change in any part forces a reevaluation for that part and anything nearby.
Much will be made of the fact that they've been making parts for Boeing and Airbus. That's irrelevant. Boeing is smart enough to teach the Chinese as little as possible and hold back the important stuff, and manufacturing from plans isn't designing from scratch by a long shot. At this point they know what the machines look like and that's about it. The 2020 date is smoke. They'll probably pull it off eventually, but it's going to take longer and it will depend very strongly on how the rest of china's economy goes over the next 10 years.
The biggest challenge for China is that in 12 years Boeing will be in full production of the 787 with its ultralight composite structures and high efficiency engines, and looking at rolling out the next generation. China will be lucky to be producing a 757 clone by then. For this to work, they'll have to sell these things for below cost to compete and get market share and keep playing catchup for a few product cycles. That's a horrifically expensive proposition. Again, it all depends on if their economy can handle that kind of negative cash flow. I'll watch with great interest.

War- A Failure of Diplomacy?

2008-03-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

I heard the "failure of diplomacy" line yesterday, and it got me thinking. I immediately jumped (mentally) to the standard counter example- Hitler & WWII. Hitler was going to attack and only force was going to stop him. At one point a mere platoon of French soldiers would have meant an instant rebellion of Hitler's generals, but even so, that's still force, albeit a small one. So the argument goes. But I backed up a bit further, to the end of WWI, when the Treaty of Versailles was put into effect. The strong economic sanctions virtually guaranteed financial ruin for all of Germany and paved the way for Hitler and his "master race" drivel. So a more reasonable post-WWI policy toward Germany (i.e. the Marshall Plan) would have prevented the economic ruin and left Hitler as a failed painter that nobody ever heard of.
A second counter example is the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Saddam wanted more oil, and only force could stop him. And this is quite true. It's a stronger example than WWII. But backing up further, Saddam gained power in the vacuum after the Brits left, so a better post-colonial (or no-colonial-at-all) policy on the part of the Brits might have allowed a peaceful transition to a stable democracy, with all the historical implications that go along with that. If the US hadn't supported Saddam (and other dictators) throughout the Cold War, things might have been different. But this is where the problem with the "failure of diplomacy" line appears. The law of unintended consequences begins to take effect. If we hadn't supported the dictators, could we have won the cold war? Or having won it anyway, would we have a whole mess of little Cubas all over Latin America and the Middle East? Would that be better than the current situation? How could anyone have predicted the War on Terror back in 1950?
The problem is that those who propound that war is always a failure of diplomacy immediately jump to the conclusion that diplomacy will always be sufficient in practice to prevent war, if we'd just give the diplomats more time. That conclusion is not warranted. In practice, the correct diplomatic move is not at all clear. France could not have known that a single platoon to contest the German militarization of the Rhineland would have prevented the war. It could have just as easily started one, and they had to make a call based on limited information. So they did what they did and the rest is history. And more time for diplomats is more time for rape rooms, concentration camps, murdered Buddhist monks and further military buildup on the part of the aggressor. Sometimes peace costs more than war.
The problem is that people make mistakes. They fail. Failure of diplomacy is a reality. It always will be. It doesn't always lead to war, but sometimes it does. That doesn't mean that the war shouldn't be fought. Life is what it is, and decisions are made now, not a year ago. How a war started isn't nearly as important as how it ends.

Treatments and Cures

2007-11-26T12:41:00.000-08:00

My wife and I were talking about stem cell research and an interesting topic came up- the distinction between a cure and a treatment. A cure eliminates the underlying problem while a treatment just mitigates the symptoms. Naturally the patient prefers a cure. In the absense of a cure, a treatment is the next best thing. We were also talking about how drug companies haven't invested in stem cell research, and why that might be. My wife made the excellent point that stem cells are a cure, and cures don't make money the way that treatments do. A cure is administered once, while a treatment is administered indefinitely. Hence, drug companies and anyone else who makes money off of people being sick (doctors, hospitals, etc) have a strong financial disincentive to find cures for diseases. Notice how crowded the market is with blood pressure medications, antidepressants, and other treatments that don't solve the underlying problems.

Hello World

2007-11-19T20:35:00.000-08:00

void main() {
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}