Thoughts from this week...

I spent most of this week at our company summit meeting at Lake Monomonac, in Winchendon, MA. (It's near Leominster, which is pronounced Lemon-ster.) We're a small "virtual" company-- a total of just 8 employees, and we all work from home. Up until now, I had only met 3 of my coworkers in person, so I got to meet the other 4 this week.

I started calling our meeting a retreat, because the cell phone reception was pretty sketchy, but I'm pretty sure that our retreat didn't cost $440,000 because we were staying at my boss' 3-BR / 2-Bath lake cottage and one of my coworkers brought his camper. (Wall Street should take business frugality lessons from us!)

The Tip of the Iceberg

I know that our software does some complicated engineering analysis, but this week I realized that the expression "tip of the iceberg" is a gross understatement. I would guess that probably 99% of the software is "underwater" or behind the curtain of the user interface.

Maybe that's true of every product to a certain extent. I'm sure that surgeons never stop to think about all of the analysis and testing that go into the development of the devices that they use, which is what I used to work on.

But this week I realized that now I'm on the other side, sneaking a peak at what's happening behind the curtain, and I'm feeling a little sheepish because I'm out of my element. I have written computer programs to crunch data through equations, but I am not a programmer.

My coworkers spent several hours talking about graph theory, Dinic algorithms, valency, and supernodes. They did their best to explain some of these concepts to me, but I still have only the foggiest clue of what those terms really mean.

Airport Aggravation

Am I the only one who feels bullied by airports that don't offer free WiFi access?

I mean it's bad enough that you're holding me hostage for hours with crummy overpriced food, uncomfortable seating, and noisy announcements repeated over-and-over-and-over again. (Most airports banned smoking decades ago. Do we still need announcements to remind people of this fact?!?) Couldn't you please just let me check my email and surf the internet for an hour for free, to help take my mind off of how tired and miserable I am?

I really don't feel like I'm being unreasonable here.

I suspect that most people are like me-- They boot up their computer to see if there is a free connection, but when they find out that they have to pay for access, they just shut everything down again. (I actually use my iPod touch to test the waters first, so I don't have to deal with the hassle of waiting for my computer to boot up.) Because it's not worth paying $8-10 just to get online for 45 minutes. And if the cost isn't really the issue, then there's the hassle of having to submit the credit card charges for reimbursement on an expense account.

I just wonder how much revenue is actually being generated by the exclusive partnerships between airports and the internet service providers for "pay by the hour" access?

On that note, I just have to say that Dayton is a nice little airport. Free WiFi access, reasonable parking, quick security lines, and much cheaper flights than Cincinnati. I just wish they were closer to my house. I had to get up at 2:45am on Monday morning so that I could leave my house at 4am, and I was still a little bit rushed catching my 6:10 flight. So my busy week got off to a very early start!

I'm a Mac

I love these commercials, and I think The Bean Counter is especially great.

Maybe it's just fun to cheer for the underdog, but seriously, Microsoft has made themselves such an easy target with Vista...

You know you've really screwed up when you have to disguise your product as something else (i.e. the "Mojave" commercials) in order to get people to even consider taking a look at it.

My coworkers (i.e. brilliant software developers) have struggled with serious problems installing Vista on their computers, so I have a hard time believing that Vista is ready for prime-time.

Quoi?

Tell me how this makes sense:

The government put itself four-square into the country's banking business Tuesday, resorting to what President Bush conceded was the unwelcome choice of a partial nationalization in order to loosen paralyzed channels of credit.

...

Nine major banks will participate initially including all of the country's largest institutions, he announced, in a move that sent stocks soaring on Wall Street.

Some of the nation's largest banks had to be pressured to participate by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who wanted healthy institutions that did not necessarily need capital from the government to go first as a way of removing any stigma that might be associated with banks getting bailouts.

...

Executives of the country's biggest banks were summoned to a remarkable meeting at the Treasury Department on Monday to be briefed on the plan. Paulson basically told the bank CEOs that they had to accept the government stock purchases for the good of the U.S. economy.

...

After the purchase of preferred stock in nine large banks, the new program is expected to be expanded to many others. Among the initial banks participating will be all of the country's largest institutions, including Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Morgan Stanley, said one official, with each institution expected to receive billions of dollars in return for the sale to the government of preferred shares.

The advantage to the taxpayer is that if the rescue plan works, then the shares can be sold for more than the government initially paid, providing a profit on the transaction.

I just don't understand why we're buying shares in banks that aren't even in trouble. I really thought the whole point of a bailout was to rescue the financial institutions that are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, not to invest in a private industry for the fun of it.

These organizations systematically destroyed their own reputations and undermined our entire economy, and we're stuck bailing them out. And now they're going to divert extra money to "remove the stigma" from their failure?

Seriously?

And then there's that tiny little word "if" hidden in the last paragraph:

...if the rescue plan works...

And what if it doesn't?



Does anybody know where I can find Galt's Gulch? I'm ready to move!

You know you're an adult when......you suffer through a Thirtysomething Crisis.

I spent an hour or two on the phone with my friend J---- last night. She's having a Thirtysomething Crisis. She loves her job, but she's also under more stress than any human being was meant to carry. Having been through this sort of thing myself, I can empathize completely with what she's going through, so we both wound up sniffling and crying while we were talking on the phone.

I have several friends who have suffered through this type of crisis in the past couple of years, and I can only wonder why Life has chosen to haul off and punch us in the gut at this particular age.

It can't be called a Midlife Crisis, because we're only in our thirties. And it's not an Existential Crisis, because it's NOT triggered by a search for significance, but rather by an external voice telling us that we're failing at the one thing that we thought was our purpose in life.

Being an adult is really hard sometimes.

The Joy of Skiing

They've implemented a new online registration process for getting season passes at the ski area.

You know, when you put it this way it doesn't sound like fun at all:

I am aware that the sport of skiing/boarding/sliding involves numerous risks of injury or death, including, but not limited to, injury due to loss of control; falls; the failure of skiers/snowboarders/sliders to ski/ride/tube within their own abilities; use of ski lifts; collisions with or falls resulting from trees, rocks, lift towers, fences, snowmaking equipment, snow vehicles, signs, other skiers/snowboarders/sliders and other manmade or natural obstacles.

[I have to say that the bit about "failure of sliders to tube within their own abilities" is especially ridiculous. You sit on a tube, and gravity does the rest. How is there any skill involved in that?]

I understand that I may encounter obstacles that are inherent in the sport, including but not limited to, bare spots, variations in snow, ice and terrain including bumps, moguls, terrain features, stumps, forest growth and debris, rocks, and other slope hazards or obstacles whether they are marked or unmarked, manmade or natural, or a result of slope design or modifications. I understand and agree that ------- ----- ------ shall have no duty to warn me of or to remedy any natural or manmade risks, dangers or hazards.

[I'm only surprised that they didn't mention any other natural hazards, like running into a deer, for example... which actually happened to someone at our ski area.]

I agree that, as a skier/snowboarder/slider, I have responsibilities to myself and to others to ski/ride/tube safely and in control.

[I'd guess that 90% of all injuries in skiing and/or snowboarding happen because people ignore that one little sentence.]

I also understand and agree that it is important to my safety to pay attention while loading, riding and unloading ski lifts, and I agree that I will not attempt to load, ride or unload a lift unless familiar with the proper way to do so.

I understand that I am voluntarily choosing to participate in the sport of snow skiing/boarding/sliding at ------- ----- ------ with knowledge of the aforesaid risks of injury or death involved and hereby expressly agree to accept and assume all such risks of injury or death associated with the sport of snow skiing/boarding/tubing.

As lawful consideration for being permitted by ------- ----- ------ to participate in the sport of snow skiing/boarding/tubing, I hereby agree to release from any and all legal liability and agree not to sue or make a claim against, and to indemnify, defend and hold harmless ------- ----- ------, all of the owners, officers, members, agents and employees for any and all claims for damage, injuries, death to myself or any person or property, including all defense costs, attorney's fees, and other expenses of any type, caused by or resulting from my participation in the sport of snow skiing/boarding/tubing or other alpine activities while on the premises, whether such costs, damage, injury or death was caused by their negligence or from any other cause.

I authorize ------- ----- ------ Ski Patrol to administer treatment in the event of an injury to myself or to the the minor for whom I am signing.

And that's why they pay us the big bucks!



Oh, wait...



Actually, we're a volunteer patrol, which means that we don't get paid.

But our ski area gives us free family & guest passes, they offer discounts on food & gear, and they pay for first aid supplies and equipment for the patrol, which more than most other ski areas do for their patrollers. We pay for our parkas and our annual membership fees to National Ski Patrol, but we get to ski for free, we have lots of fun, and we help people.

Seems like a good deal to me!

Random Vices

Random thoughts on the Vice Presidential debate tonight:

• Isn't "a team of mavericks" an oxymoron?


• When did candidates start referring to their opponents by their first names during debates? I'm hearing a lot about "Joe believes X," "Barak voted for Y," and "John's plan is Z."


• You know that there has been a major upheaval when a Republican candidate starts talking about big, bad corporations (specifically, Banks and Oil Companies) taking advantage of average people. I really thought that was a Democratic platform...

Quality of Life

I've been doing a lot of blogging recently, when I really ought to be doing real work. But I've got something personal to share, so I hope you'll stick with me here...



In the past few days, I have been processing through several seemingly disconnected concepts, and they just kind of congealed into a consistent theme this morning.

Here are the three motives, and also two figures that fill the spaces in between them:

• Motif - The Giant Pool of Money - How the Subprime Mortgage Crisis became the Global Financial Crisis.


• Figure - United States of Appetite - "Is the middle class ensnared in a culture of consumption?"


• Motif - Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey


• Figure - Between the Scary and the Monastery - "We don't need to live through a disaster to know there's a more human way to live."


• Motif - Quality - "The race for Quality has no finish line--so technically, it's more like a death march."

A Global Financial Crisis has occurred because the world no longer has faith that America can make good on its debts. And I'm starting to think that they're absolutely right not to trust us--As a country, we are upside-down, deep underwater, drowning in debt, and it's entirely possible that we can't be resuscitated. As this article in Time magazine puts it:

Japan and Germany make cars. Saudi Arabia pumps oil. China supplies the world with socks and toys and flat-screen TVs. What does the United States produce? Lots of stuff, but in recent years this country's No. 1 export--by far--has been debt.

When you look at things this way, it becomes clearer what the frenzy in New York City and Washington is all about. There are major quality issues with our nation's flagship product.

I'd like to hope that we're just facing a mild recession, but realistically, if we're going to prevent a profound Depression, we have give the rest of the world a reason to have confidence in us. We need to pay back our debts (personal and national) and start living within our means.

So while today's crisis management makes a certain amount of sense, returning to the borrow-and-spend status quo afterward seems like a disastrous idea. If the U.S. is to have a future as an economic power, its long love affair with borrowed money has to end.

And so our race for a bigger and better Quality of Life has become a death march.



Two weeks ago, we had a huge windstorm in Cincinnati. Most areas lost power for days. But I've heard a lot of people talking about the good things that came out of it--Neighbors got to know each other; families played games together; we were all forced to slow down and interact with people, instead of wasting all of our free time in front of televisions and computers.

Maybe McMansions, SUVs, and HDTVs aren't the secret to happiness after all.



I believe that there's a better way to live.



About two years ago, I lost my job, and we lost 50% of our household income. I immediately rushed into another job, earning less than half of what I had been making.

It was not a good job. It was juvenile and frustrating, but I stuck to it. It took a couple of other life crises to bring me to the point where I was broken enough to quit.

The thought of being unemployed terrified me. I was afraid of fighting with my husband about money, I was afraid of losing our house, and I was afraid that my career was in a downward spiral, circling the drain. My sense of self-worth was totally tied up in the idea of earning a six-figure income.

I have to believe that the past two and a half years have been God's way of showing me that that's not what my life is supposed to be about.

You know what? Saying "God has a Plan" is just too glib, too simplistic. These two and a half years have been SO hard. I had been worried about a financial crisis, but I wound up in a crisis of faith.

I felt like every single time I got back on my feet and started moving forward, another door would be slammed in my face. I said that to my husband several months ago, and a few of weeks later, I found a couple of quotes from C.S. Lewis saying exactly the same thing:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be--or so it feels--welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, 'So there's no God after all,' but, 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'

He's talking about the death of his beloved wife. I was grieving for my personal goals and dreams. (How crazy is that?) Fortunately, the story doesn't end there:

Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: You are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

The analogy is perfect. You have to be so exhausted, so very nearly dead, that you stop struggling and go limp, and that's when God can finally start to turn things around. That's exactly what a crisis of faith feels like.



So in the meantime, my husband and I had to cut back on ways that we were spending money. We had to give up going to Hawaii and the ski trips out West that we had been doing every year. We ate out less, and we didn't buy new clothes. I started getting books from the public library, instead of spending hundreds of dollars at Barnes & Noble. My husband deferred a lot things that he wanted to do--taking a sabbatical to finish the basement, buying woodworking equipment, purchasing an HDTV, etc.

But here's the crazy thing: We didn't really miss most of those things. And we didn't fight over money, and we didn't have to sell our house. (My husband deserves full credit for that, because he's the one who insisted on using conservative estimates for our income when we first established our budget for building the house five years ago.)

And three months ago, I wound up with a job that is a hundred times better than anything I could ever have imagined. I'm only earning about a third of the salary that I was making before, but I'm not wasting my life feeling tired, and anxious, and stressed out all the time.

I'd love to say that the story ends here. "And we lived happily ever after." But that would be glib and simplistic too.

I still have hopes and dreams that may go unfulfilled. I still struggle with thoughts like, "God, if you love me, why won't you give me the one last thing that I so desperately want?" I still have bouts of self-pity and depression. And it's still really hard for me to accept that I'm not the One in control of the Plan for my life.

So I guess you'll just have to stay tuned...

The How's & Why's of the Financial Crisis

There's a fantastic story on NPR about the process that caused the current credit crisis. I highly recommend reading the entire transcript, or you can go to this website and click on the "Full Episode" link to listen to the piece online.

In a nutshell, here's how it goes:

1. The "Global Pool of Money" essentially doubled from 2000 to 2006. Global investors were looking for safe ways to make a reasonable profit on investing this money. Since the US government was keeping interest rates low on treasury bonds, these investors started looking for other places to invest that money.

Adam Davidson: How does the world get twice as much money to invest? Lots of things happened, but the main headline is all sorts of poor countries became kind of rich making TVs and selling us oil: China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia. Made a lot of money and banked it. China, for example, has over a trillion dollars in its central bank, and there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses-- real math geniuses-- looking for a place to invest it. And the world was not ready for all this money. There's twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not twice as many good investments. So, that global army of investment managers was hungrier and twitchier than ever before. They all wanted the same thing: A nice low risk investment that paid some return...

Think how attractive a mortgage loan is to that 70 trillion dollar pool of money. Remember, they're desperate to get any kind of interest return. They want to beat that miserable 1 percent interest Greenspan is offering them. And here are these homeowners, they're paying 5, 7, 9 percent to borrow money from some bank. So what if the global pool could get in on that action?

2. Banks and mortgage brokers discovered that they could bundle mortgages together and sell them as securities.

Adam Davidson: There are problems. Individual mortgages are too big a hassle for the global pool of money. They don't want to get mixed up with actual people and their catastrophic health problems or debilitating divorces, and all the reasons which might stop them from paying their mortgages. So what Mike [Francis] and his peers on Wall Street did, was to figure out how to give the global pool of money all the benefits of a mortgage-– basically higher yield-- without the hassle or the risk.

So picture the whole chain. You have Clarence. He gets a mortgage from a broker. The broker sells the mortgage to a small bank, the small bank sells the mortgage to a guy like Mike at a big investment firm on Wall Street. Then Mike takes a few thousand mortgages he’s bought this way, he puts them in one big pile. Now he’s got thousands of mortgage checks coming to him every month. It’s a huge monthly stream of money, which is expected to come in for the next thirty years, the life of a mortgage. And he then sells shares of that monthly income to investors. Those shares are called mortgage backed securities. And the 70 trillion dollar global pool of money loved them.

3. The demand for these mortgage backed securities became huge, and brokers got creative in finding ways to supply Wall Street with new mortgages.

Alex Blumberg: So Wall Street had to find more people to take out mortgages. Which meant lending to people who never would’ve qualified before. And so Mike noticed that every month, the guidelines were getting a little looser. Something called a stated income, verified asset loan came out, which meant you didn't have to provide paycheck stubs and W-2 forms, as they had in the past. You could simply state your income, as long as you showed that you had money in the bank.

Mike Garner: The next guideline lower is just stated income, stated assets. Then you state what you make and state what’s in your bank account. They call and make sure you work where you say you work. Then an accountant has to say for your field it is possible to make what you said you make. But they don’t say what you make, just say it’s possible that they could make that...

Then the next one came along, and it was no income, verified assets. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don’t have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then, the next one, is just no income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. You just have to have a credit score and a pulse.

Alex Blumberg: Actually that pulse thing-- Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.

4. The mathematical models for the mortgage-backed securities said that they were safe, but the models were based on historical data, from previous decades when banks didn't give mortgages to people who couldn't afford them.

Adam Davidson: As we now know, they were using the wrong data. They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that foreclosure rate is generally below 2 percent. So they figured, absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate may go to 8 or 10 or 12 percent. But the problem with is there were all these new kinds of mortgages, given out to people who never would have gotten them before. So the historical data was irrelevant. Some mortgage pools, today, are expected to go beyond 50 percent foreclosure rates.

Alex Blumberg: To be fair, they knew there were risks. But investors have a system to assess those risks. They’re these special companies. Credit rating agencies. Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, Fitch. Their job, their main job, is to assess risk for Wall Street and the global pool of money. They rate every kind of bond according to its risk. Triple A is the safest, then there’s double A, single A, all the way down to single B and below. And that’s all most investors look at-- the letter grade. They trust the credit rating agencies. And these agencies blessed most of these mortgage-backed securities. Gave them AAA ratings, which means they were considered as safe as a US government bond. This was the magic of this whole system. You could take a pool of thousands of risky mortgages, and create a security that was called money-good, as safe as any investment out there. At least that's what people thought. But now we know those agencies relied on the wrong data. That same historic data that had nothing to do with these new kinds of mortgages.

5. And as if the mortgage-backed securities weren't risky enough, someone found a way to integrate even more risk into them by creating something called a Collateralized Debt Obligation.

Alex Blumberg: Let’s translate some of that. A mortgage-backed security, you remember, is a pool of thousands of different mortgages. These are all put together and divided into different slices. Jim [Finkel] used the word tranche. Tranche is just French for slice. Some of these slices are risky, some are not. OK, a CDO is a pool of those tranches. A pool of pools. And Jim and most companies like his weren’t buying the top-rated tranches-- the safest ones, the AAAs. They were buying the lower-rated stuff. The high-risk stuff. Jim’s company was buying tranches that came from Glen Pizzolorusso’s company. The guy who hung out at nightclubs with B-list celebrities. The guy who said he was selling mortgages to people who didn’t have a pot to piss in.

Adam Davidson: There's another term the industry uses, no joke, they call these lower-rated tranches toxic waste. They're so high-risk, they're toxic.

Alex Blumberg: So, a CDO is sort of a financial alchemy. Jim takes that toxic stuff, these low-rated, high-risk tranches, puts them all together. Re-tranches them, and presto: He has a CDO whose top tranche is rated AAA, rock-solid, good as money. If this seems too good to be true to you, you're in good company. Guys like billionaire investor Warren Buffet said the very logic was ridiculous. But back in 2005, 2006, the global pool of money couldn't get enough of these things. And the CDO industry was facing the same pressures everyone else was at every other step of this chain-- to loosen their standards; to make CDOs out of lower and lower rated pools.

6. From 2003 to 2006, more people were qualifying for bigger mortgages, and the increased demand for housing drove prices up, creating a bubble.

Alex Blumberg: The problem was that even though housing prices were going through the roof, people weren't making any more money. From 2000 to 2007, the median household income stayed flat. And so the more prices rose, the more tenuous the whole thing became. No matter how lax lending standards got, no matter how many exotic mortgage products were created to shoehorn people into homes they couldn't possibly afford, no matter what the mortgage machine tried, the people just couldn't swing it. By late 2006, the average home cost nearly four times what the average family made. Historically it was between two and three times. And mortgage lenders noticed something that they'd almost never seen before. People would close on a house, sign all the mortgage papers, and then default on their very first payment. No loss of a job, no medical emergency, they were underwater before they even started. And although no one could really hear it, that was probably the moment when one of the biggest speculative bubbles in American history popped.

7. And now that the bubble has burst, no one wants to take a risk on any mortgage-backed securities.

Alex Blumberg: Tonko Gast estimates that most of AAA rated mortgage-backed CDO's that the industry created since 2006, are now worth less than half their value. Some are worth close to zero. But remember to all the investment managers in the global pool of money who bought them, AAA meant safe as government bonds. AAA was called a cash equivalent, money in the bank. It's as if the global pool of money put trillions of dollars in a savings account, came back one year later, and found out that half was gone. Put another way, it's as if the global pool of money thought it was putting trillions of dollars in a savings account, but really, half of it was going into a furnace. The money is gone, burned up, never to come back. And that's what's led to the new term you've been hearing.

Adam Davidson: Maybe you've noticed that the press and others don't call it a sub-prime housing crisis as much anymore. They call it a credit crisis. The global pool of money still has no idea how much money they lost. How much went into the furnace. And because of that, they’ve totally changed their thinking. They used to be obsessed just with getting some profit, trying to make a slightly higher interest rate return. Now the global pool of money has the exact opposite obsession. It wants no risk whatsoever. It just wants safety. Suddenly, those US government treasury bonds-- still near historic lows of 1 and 2 percent-- are beautifully attractive. Because they're safe. They won't blow up like sub-prime CDOs did. The global pool of money is avoiding anything with even the slightest hint of risk and that affects everybody, no matter who you are. It's harder to borrow money to buy a house, or build a factory, or bring your country boldly into the 21st century...

This freezing of credit all around the world is something new, the world has never seen anything on this scale. When the crisis hit, last August, central bankers and finance economists couldn't figure out how bad things might get. There was this question people would ask: will things get like the 1930s or the 1970s? There was real fear that, just like in the '30s, hundreds of banks would collapse, there would be massive unemployment, there was talk of a new Great Depression.

So that's how we wound up here...



(Thanks to E!! for pointing me to Culture11, where I found the link to the NPR story.)

Facts of the Debate

So I watched the Presidential Debate last night. (Mostly for lack of anything better to do.)

Debates are known for being full of facts. Unfortunately, facts aren't the same as truths. Here are some basic truths:

• All politicians have voted to raise taxes at some point or another.
(Because...)

• All politicians are in the habit of spending more than the amount of revenue coming in.
(Because...)

• The only way to get funding approved for their pet projects is to approve funding for everyone else's pet projects.


• Everyone supports the troops and wants to bring them home as soon as possible. (Definitions of ASAP vary wildly.)


• No one is especially happy with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Iran, or North Korea.

McCain claimed that he would try to eliminate wasteful spending by the government. I'm all in favor of that. Obama claimed that he would continue Bush's tax cuts for households making less than $250,000 per year. I'm all in favor of that too.

Like Obama, I think we should make changes so that more people have access to affordable health insurance, but I strongly agree with McCain that the government (aka the least effective way to do almost anything) should not be in charge of our healthcare system.

Overall, the debate included a lot of senseless bickering, accusations, and half-truths being thrown around at random, which doesn't help resolve anything. In a nutshell, the debate was exactly what I was expecting it to be.

*sigh*

I was kind of hoping for something different.

Wind Power

Here's a short list of things I've seen in the past week, in approximate order:

• Tornados of mulch, accompanied by the sensation of being inside a very dusty hairdryer


• Traffic lights bouncing like popcorn


• Our patio furniture sliding around the deck


• Trees split in half down the middle, trees broken off at the trunk, trees uprooted from the ground, trees covering houses, tree limbs everywhere


• Lots of houses with siding and roof shingles ripped off


• Broken power lines, draped across streets and lawns like bedraggled party streamers


• A couple of street signs bent over and/or uprooted from the ground


• Gas stations with cars lined up around the corner


• Mounds of tree limbs piled up along every street, waiting for the city trucks to come turn them into mulch

The official weather report and some photos can be found here, and there are plenty of other photos here.

Some basic stats about the effects that the windstorm had on Cincinnati:

• By Sunday night, 90% of the greater Cincinnati area had lost power-- More than 700,000 homes and businesses.


• By Monday night, that number stood at around 580,000 homes and businesses without power.


• On Wednesday night, more than 15% of the homes and businesses in the Cincinnati area still did not have power.


• All of the Cincinnati Public Schools were closed for at least 3 days. Some schools were closed for the entire week.


• As of Friday afternoon, 5 days after the storm hit, 125,000 homes were still without power.

Whoever thought we'd spend a week recovering from Hurricane Ike?

Math, in the Blink of an Eye

As someone who has studied a lot of math, I find this article intriguing.

Be sure to check out the fun little "blink and you'll miss it" counting test that is referenced in the article.

I believe that our ability to do math probably involves several different areas of the brain. I can do calculus, but for me, it mostly just involves following the rules. On the other hand, anything involving geometry has always been very intuitive for me-- I can easily visualize Statics, Kinematics, and Dynamics problems in 2-D, or even 3-D.

SIDEBAR: For the non-engineers in the audience:

• Statics = How loads are distributed through (hopefully) non-moving objects like bridges.


• Kinematics = How mechanisms (like levers and gears) move.


• Dynamics = How things accelerate and impact other things.

My master's thesis involved developing a computer program to calculate the forces and moments generated at the shoulder due to dynamic, 3-dimensional arm movements.

But I can't do basic math in my head to save my life.

My husband can do all sorts of calculations in his head, while I'm lucky to be able to add one two-digit number to another. An average fifth grader could easily beat me in a multiplication time-test.

It only makes sense to say that there must be several different types of "math" which are processed by different areas in the brain. Surely everyone has strengths and weaknesses in different areas.

Unfortunately, lots of kids get turned off by math at an early age. (I hated math in 4th & 5th grades.) Maybe there are people who would have discovered an unexpected gift for calculus, but they gave up after struggling through algebra and geometry? It makes you wonder...