A month (or two) with Fi

There are lots of reviews of Google's Project Fi out there.  This is from the perspective of someone who:

• Is switching from a dumb phone
• Makes extremely few calls away from a WiFi hotspot

... so, naturally, it's a great deal for me compared to Verizon (which AFAIK is the only real alternative in the Green Mountains).  I haven't had a chance to test Fi in the Northeast Kingdom, but it's done well in the Champlain Valley.

Things I've learned so far:

• On long car trips, if I'm going to use it to provide directions, I need a car charger.
• Incoming calls appear to continue be routed through Google Hangouts.  Thus, my laptop rings, my tablet rings, and finally my phone rings.  This isn't really a bad thing, but I could wish that it rang my phone before it rang my tablet. 
• I can send texts with the Messenger app, and they are received by the other party, but return texts are routed through Google Hangouts; that is, they never appear in Messenger.  This is actually a Good Thing (tm) IMO, because I like Hangouts and want all of my SMS history there along with my hangout history, but it's a little weird.

Vermont college graduates staying in Vermont, sort of

This is an old report from VTDigger on Shumlin asking college graduates to stay in Vermont for jobs, but it's been rattling around in my head.  

Typically, the concern in Vermont is that our young folks raised in the state are leaving the state.  The study being done at St. Michael's doesn't really help with that question, because only 20% of their undergraduates are Vermonters (see last paragraph in the article).  The fact that 40% of the 2015 graduating class stayed in Vermont means that we have a net gain to the state population.

The key here is that this is among graduates of St. Michael's.  Does UVM collect this kind of data, and does it show a different story?

Star Wars openings

John Kovalic posted memories of his viewings of the previous 6 live action Star Wars movies, so of course that got me thinking.

Star Wars (1977).  I saw this the summer it was released at the Eatontown Drive-In Theater (RIP).  I was 5 and my only memory of this viewing is that when Princess Leia declared, "Darth Vader, only you could be so bold," I thought she said "bowled" and wondered if they were going to Asbury Lanes (back when it was "just" a bowling alley).

Empire Strikes Back (1980).  I have no idea where I saw this first, but the likely suspects are Middlebrook, Seaview Square, the Shrewsbury 3, or maybe Red Bank.

Return of the Jedi (1983).  Stood in line outside the Seaview Square Cinema for what felt like an entire showing in order to get in.  This was the first, and only one of a handful, of movies I've seen twice during their original run.

The Special Editions (1997).  Seen at the Carmike 15 in Durham, NC, with a bunch of Duke grad students.

The Phantom Menace (1999).  Seen somewhere in Chicagoland with a bunch of Northwestern grad students.

Attack of the Clones (2002).  We were furniture shopping in Hickory, NC when Killer Clones from Outer Space opened.  Went to the local megaplex hoping to get in and the place was empty. 

Revenge of the Sith (2005).  We had a 1-year-old and knew we didn't want to pay a babysitter in order to see this, so we took turns going out to the Essex Cinemas.

The Force Awakens (2014). TBD

The meaning of "fidelity" and cultural dissonance

Finished Katherine Pancol's The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles today, which in three sentences sums up the gulf between my understanding of fidelity and what seems to be acceptable elsewhere.

And behind Minar's bohemian facade you'll find a faithful husband.  He's completely absorbed in his work, doesn't screw around.  Oh, maybe the odd bit of crumpet -- you know, a quickie with a script or makeup girl -- but nothing to hurt his relationship with his wife.

Innumeracy in the work of Jonathan Safran Foer

... or, specifically, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  I feel like I know this narrator, but then:

Page 40 of the 2005 hardcover states

"More than 9 million people live in New York (a baby is born in New York every 50 seconds)".

Even without looking it up, I know this is obviously wrong.  9 million is very roughly 1/700 of the world population, so if the NYC birthrate is 1/50sec (and roughly equal to the worldwide birthrate), then more than 10 people are being born worldwide every second.  Last I checked, it was more like 1 every 4 seconds or so.

But we can get the right numbers.  See https://a816-healthpsi.nyc.gov/epiquery/Birth/, for example, and we see that there were 122,937 births in NYC in 2002.  That's (122,937/24)/60 = about 14 every hour, or one every 4 minutes and 16 seconds.

I know that the narrator is a child, but a child's mistake (in particular, *this* child's mistake) is to calculate 18 as the number of locks per person in NYC and then assume, as part of their calculations on how quickly he could try every lock in NYC, that 18 new locks come into being every time someone is born in NYC.  *This* child would not make a simple error in arithmetic, or fail to look up readily available facts.

Speaking of that calculation, on the next page it states,

"I figured out that if a baby is born in New York every 50 seconds, and each person has 18 locks, a new lock is created in New York every 2.777 [with a vinculum over the 7s] seconds."  

That is fine as far as it goes, since 50/18=2.777; (hah, turns out it was easy to add the overline with HTML markup) however, it then goes on to say

"So even if all I did was open locks, I'd still be falling behind by .333 [with vinculum] locks every second. [under the experimental evidence that it takes 3 seconds to open a lock]"

But 3-2.777 is .222, not .333.  Again, not a mistake *this* child would make.

This is me becoming increasingly disappointed with the physical world.  I had to stop reading this and go back to Fool Moon last night because I didn't want to lose this page before writing this post, and Fool Moon was the only other book on the bedstand.

Someone left their shoes outside, or fun with optics

Came downstairs and saw a pair of shoes outside...

...but it was just their reflection in the glass.  Then the sun went behind a cloud, and the shoes were gone.

#projectfi #vt Update

The good thing is that I an invite a month ago.

The sad thing is that it's arriving the day after I leave for IBM Insight for the week.

Queen City population follies

Apparently, if you don't send the U.S. Census Bureau accurate information, they may underestimate your city's population!  

This article raises a few questions:

1. Has the City put procedures in place to respond to the Census Bureau's surveys in the future?
   
2. How does Burlington's underwhelming population growth rate since 1970, relative to its metropolitan area, compare to other U.S. cities?  Is this unique to Burlington, or part of the general flight from downtowns to suburbia?
   
3. Renters are spending 44% of their income on rent?  That's dangerous to your population.  It's one thing to do this as a graduate student temporarily living on teaching and research assistantships, but it's not sustainable as a paid professional trying to raise a family.  The 2014 Downtown Housing Strategy Report has some great recommendations, but can they be implemented on a reasonable timeline to make a difference?

Uprooted; Naomi Novik; 2015

Do you love Robin McKinley's stories of Damar?  Do you have a secret longing to read Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle rewritten in the style of one of McKinley's retold fairy tales and updated for a 2015 audience?  [Do you also secretly wish the sex scenes were slightly more explicit?]

If so, then get a copy of Uprooted IMMEDIATELY and start reading.  This has easily been my favorite book so far this year.

Ooooh, boy! #projectfi #vt

'nuff said

A deeper dive into the data

The other day I was annoyed that the Chronicle of Higher Education doesn't understand basic statistics.  In the face of the Chronicle's "study", Jokerst called for "a deeper dive into the data, and Merlise is the right person to lead that."  This statement shows a similar lack of understanding that the original Duke study already delved as deeply as the available data would allow. 

A proper deeper dive into the issue of salary equity would require more historical data, with an eye toward determining whether salaries in departments that became "feminized"** kept pace with salaries in departments that remained mostly male; however, it's not clear there's anything to find.  See, for example, salary concerns in psychology.

** that is, saw larger proportions of women join as faculty, relative to other departments.  

"We took an average, j'accuse!" (Chronicle of Higher Education edition)

LinkedIn helpfully reported that one of my contacts was "in the news!" and pointed to this article that is mostly about Duke's Academic Council chair; it's the section on salary equity that has the person of interest.

In short, Duke admins are worried because the Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting a gender salary discrepancy that is at odds with the University's own study, and Merlise Clyde will investigate.

The problem with the Chronicle study is pretty simple to understand.  It simply took the average of male salaries and the average of female salaries and compared them, despite the fact that salaries vary greatly from discipline to discipline.  If you account for department-to-department variation in salary, as in the Duke study performed by the University's own Statistics department, there isn't a measurable difference in salary.

The reasons behind this apparent paradox are taught in the first weeks of Stats 101 at Duke**.  Perhaps the writers at the Chronicle would do well to attend.


** Statistics, or at least the 2nd edition, by Freedman, Pisani, Purves, and Adhikari that was used in some Stat 101 courses in the mid-90s, specifically mentions the famous UC Berkeley study in the 70's where, overall, about 44% of the men and 35% of the women applicants to grad school were admitted.  It looks like a clear case of gender bias until you break down the admission rate by department, and find that the admission rates by department were roughly equal, but more women were applying to departments that had lower admission rates.

Irresponsible acts of arachnophobia (U.S. Midwest edition)

Within days of each other, an Indiana woman jumped out of a moving vehicle in which her child was a passenger and a Michigan man set a gas station pump on fire when faced with a live spider.

Is Vegas laying odds on Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, or Minneapolis being next?  (I think I know where the Onion would lay its bet)

Another alias; or, the desperation of AAA

My credit report is full of "aliases" that I have never gone by, but are the result of confused corporate entities in search of new customers.  This will be a new one when TransExperFax do their next refresh...

Operation Shutdown

(extracted from the Art for Dummies description of "the Raft of the Medusa")

the most compelling
       remarkable work
    gazed for hour after hour
looted from public opinion

the contemporary tragedy
    hints
of mutiny and cannibalism
when one
          survivor
waves frantically at the far, far distance

This is actually from months and months ago, but I'm just getting around to posting it now.  We did an exercise at a PTO meeting where we created a poem by extracting words from a randomly selected page of a book.  Mine was about the spectacle of the possibility of the federal government shutting down.  It seemed particularly appropriate, given the source material.

Wait a minute, it'll change

Two days ago, weather forecast was sun, sun, sun, so we bought tickets for the July 4 VSO concert at Shelburne Farms.  This afternoon, the forecast went to 50/50 possible rain in the evening.  At 5:30pm, the gates opened for picnicking before the concert.  6pm, the skies opened, thunder and lightning, torrential downpour.  6:30pm, concert canceled.  7pm, rain stopped, sun out.  7:30pm, drizzling lightly.

Sigh.

My William Sadler / Robert Patrick confusion

...or, Why I'm Once Again Thankful to Live in the Age of the Internet.

When Terminator 2 was released, I remember being told that the actor who played the T-1000 had been in Die Harder.  Naturally, I took this to mean that the T-1000 was the same actor as the colonel whathisname doing naked calisthenics in his hotel room, and not some redshirt who is offed early on in the luggage sorting room (or wherever the hell that scene is set in the airport; I'm not rewatching any of the Die Hard sequels; one way or another, he's gone in the first 20 seconds of that clip)**.  They didn't really look alike, but this was back in the dark ages, before I could look this up on the IMDB or compare movie clips on YouTube.

Anyway, this is why, when we rewatched Iron Man 3 the other night, I said, "Hey, it's President Robert Patrick!" before realizing a minute later, "Aw crap, no, that's... that's William Sadler.  We loved him in Wonderfalls."  I don't have this problem with movies made in the last 20 years.


** This was an entirely reasonable assumption, IMO.  If someone had told you that same summer that the main villain in the upcoming Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves movie had been in Die Hard, you would have assumed (correctly) it was the actor who played Hans Gruber, not Heinrich.

Water shaming in CA

You can now look up which urban water districts are using the most residential water, courtesy of the LA Times (thanks FlowingData for the link).  

It just so happens that I have data on our monthly water bills for the last 14 years; our utility reports in terms of cubic feet, so our average of ~11 cubic feet per day for a 4-person family is ~20 gallons per person per day, compared to the average of 83 gallons per person per day for California.

I will offer my usual complaint that while averages are informative, I would really like to see distributions of water usage by district.  LA Times, show us some side-by-side boxplots so that we can see whether the average is due to a generally high usage in the population, or whether that average is pulled up by a few citizens with their own private Sea Worlds.

Acacia; David Anthony Durham; 2007

[[spoilers]]

For Game of Thrones fans looking to pass the time between the releases of A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, Durham offered the Acacia trilogy.  Book One: The War With the Mein** is itself broken into three parts which are, unfortunately, called "books" so that at the start of the story you are reading Acacia, Book One: The War With the Mein, Book One: The King's Idyll.  That's on the publisher; shame on you, Doubleday.

Book One of Book One is about King NedLeto Starktreides, who is prescient enough to know that it's wrong to allow the Spacing Guild to push melange on the population of the Seven Kingdoms, but does not have the wherewithal to stop it.  Worse, Sting is leading the wildlings south to avenge their banishment 22 generations ago, and they're bringing the mummified corpses of all their ancestors with them***, along with an army of cannibal giants riding woolly rhinos (who, for their part, had been banished to the Icy North**** by the Enemies Who Will Be Appearing Later in the Trilogy).  Maybe the Starktreides should have built a Wall to keep the wildlings out!

Book Two of Book One follows NedLeto's four amazing children as they scatter to the four winds:

• RobBran, the eldest, communes with spirits and raises an army to avenge his father;
• Sansa, the elder sister, is a bit of a wet blanket and spends her time as a captive of the family's enemies, but eventually proves to be more capable than we are originally led to believe;
• Arya, the younger sister, becomes a badass with a sword, a killer without remorse;
• Rickon, the youngest, goes off to be the Dread Pirate Roberts

Book Three concludes Book One, and sees NedLeto's children work together to end the war with the Mein.  I don't want to write any major spoilers, but there was something here that jerked me out of the story in this stage.  Durham has been a feminist, introducing us to female soldiers as a matter of course in chapter 3.  However, when it comes to the succession and the children discuss what should be done if, Giver forbid, something should happen to RobBran, it seems to be assumed that Rickon will become King, with no thought at all for Sansa or Arya.  That flies in the barbaric Westeros, but feels totally out of place here.

All in all, a good read that starts well (I really liked the early chapters from Leodan's and Thaddeus's POVs -- there's a description of Thaddeus with his cat that's my favorite passage in the whole book; some darlings shouldn't be killed), gets a little lost and muddled for a while (many of the battle sequences feel trivialized, with one side or the other easily swept aside.  Durham's strengths lie elsewhere), finds its stride again and ultimately satisfactorily wraps up this part of the story while setting up the next installment in the trilogy.  Would definitely recommend to GoT readers.


** so in the German translation, it could be called "Mein Kampf"?!  And is this funnier because the Mein are tall, severe, blue-eyed blondes?

*** I was really confused by whose ancestors constituted the Tunishnevre (which keeps getting rearranged in my head as "tushie nerve").  Was it just Hanish Mein's relatives, or the entire Mein nobility, or everyone who ever lived in Tahalian?  Just Hanish's relatives doesn't seem like it would require the grand undertaking to move them described in the book, but everyone who had lived in Tahalian seems like too many, so I'm guessing door #2, but this really isn't something that I should have to guess at.

**** I'd like to see more fantasies set in a southern hemisphere where enemies come out of the frozen south

A tale of two marketing campaigns

Apple watch was heavily marketing to the Daily Show crowd the last few weeks, or, at least, when I watched the Daily Show on a tablet.

Android watch, meanwhile, was heavily marketing to the browser game crowd...

It appears that the Apple watch is for couples going through a rough patch in their relationship who expect to solve their differences almost entirely through emojis**, while the Android watch is for cool single kids who hang out to do interpretive dance together.  Emotionally, I'm drawn to the Android kids, but in both commercials, I still come away with no idea of what you can actually do with a smart watch***, and a lessened desire to buy one.


** yes, I know there are other Apple watch ads, but they played "Us", and only "Us", on the Daily Show website for two solid weeks.

*** I'm pretty sure it will replace the fitbit, but what else?  I'm also pretty sure I can look this up elsewhere, but I should get some ideas from the ads.  It's why they're paying for them, right?

9 y.o. desktop

Our Dell purchased in 2006 decided not to power on yesterday and it appears to be permanently dead.  Nearly all responsibilities had been moved from it to a newer laptop, but it will be strange to not have a desktop computer in the house anymore.  

As I began to unhook its remaining connections, I did notice that the homemade label on the power cord says "New Desktop".  Hee.

Burlington still has a soul, I hope?

There's a street next to my kids' school where parking is prohibited during school hours so that you don't block school-related traffic, like pickup and dropoff.  Generally, parents can also park there when volunteering in the school, or are on other school-related business.  Last week was parent-teacher conferences, and I guess because school was "out", and therefore no one should be parked there, even though they couldn't block school-related traffic because school was out, the police were more aggressive about ticketing people parked on that street, and I got a $75 ticket for parking on a mostly empty street with minimal traffic.

Ironically, I had watched John Oliver the night before...

Fortunately, there were clear instructions on the ticket envelope if you wished to contest the ticket, so I did, and just a couple days after dropping off my letter with the City Attorney's office, I got the good news that the ticket is being dismissed!  Yay!

However, this street is in a part of town where many residents do not have English as a first language, and might be less able to contest a ticket, and less able to afford to pay.  I am worried that the system does not work as well for them as it did for me.

Who Fears Death; Nnedi Okorafor; 2010

There are few black SFF writers, and the ones I have read are grounded in the American experience (Sam Delaney, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison) or the Caribbean experience (Nalo Hopkinson).  So it's high time for an African SFF novel**, but are you, gentle reader, ready for a frank discussion of tribal warfare, female genital mutilation, tribal elders berating teenage girls for making stupid decisions in the absence of information that the tribal elders had withheld from those girls...?  Yep, I want to throw this book across the room every few chapters.  Okorafor has done a beautiful job of helping us to feel Onyesonwu's anger and frustration.


** Yes, it's stupid to talk about "African SFF" as if the entire continent could be encapsulated in a single experience.  Oddly enough, Okorafor's parents are Nigerian, but this book takes place in Sudan, and after finishing this, I began A Stranger in Olondria, which was written while the author was living in South Sudan, but has a different feel.