January 7, 2007
Another Criminal Off The Streets
Brothel in High-Dollar Atlanta Suburb Busted
For years, Lisa Ann Taylor’s neighbors suspected something was going on behind the doors of her white-columned, million-dollar mansion in one of suburban Atlanta’s most exclusive neighborhoods.
Scantily clad women were seen posing for photos in the driveway. Cars and trucks came and went at all hours. And there were loud parties.
Despite repeated calls to police about the suspicious goings-on, there was no evidence of a crime. That is, until six weeks ago, when authorities were tipped off to a Web site showing Taylor — a former Penthouse Pet of the Month — sprawled topless on an ottoman and brazenly advertising services ranging from 300-dollar one-hour photo shoots to “dream dates” that included a one-hour “show.”
Police raided the red-brick mansion Wednesday and found what they described as a high-class brothel and the headquarters of a call-girl ring whose customers received favors limited only by their imaginations and their ability to pay.
Yay! The morals of Atlanta are safe! No more dirty hot former models crawling the back alleys high-end real estate looking to corrupt our morals engage in a victimless consensual sex act for money.
Sheehan Can’t See Forest For The Trees
Sheehan in Cuba to protest Gitmo prison
American “peace mom” Cindy Sheehan called for the closure of the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as she and other activists arrived here Saturday to draw attention to the nearly 400 terror suspects held at the remote site.
Sheehan is among 12 human rights and anti-war activists who will travel across this Caribbean island next week, arriving at the main gate of the Guantanamo base in eastern Cuba on Thursday — five years after the first prisoners were flown in.
“Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not afraid of anything,” Sheehan said when asked about the possibility of U.S. sanctions for traveling to communist-run Cuba, which remains under an American trade embargo.
“What is more important is the inhumanity that my government is perpetrating at Guantanamo,” she told reporters.
I’m sure after this, these “human rights activists” will continue their trip by protesting Castro’s continued oppression and subjection of the Cuban people to his communist dictatorship. I wonder, are the conditions at Gitmo better than those foisted upon opponents of the Castro regime?
Of course, she’s not going to do that, because— while she may not be scared of potential American sanctions— she is definitely scared of what Castro could do to her if she aims her ire at him.
January 6, 2007
Engineering
I’ve written a few times about engineering. But never have I seen engineering, and more specifically, a description of what makes a person an engineer, more clearly explained than over at Chris Byrne’s blog, The Anarchangel. In a post aptly titled Engineering, he asks the fundamental question: “What makes a good, or great engineer?” Some excerpts below.
On being an engineer by personality rather than education:
I’m an engineer, because it’s what I am, mind body and soul. It’s wired into me at the very base level of my intelligence and personality. Sure I could have chosen to do something else, some other profession; and I’ve certainly held jobs that had little (on the surface) to do with engineering; but an engineer is what I am, no matter what I do. Even serving in the Air Force, and doing security work; I’ve always had an engineering mindset and method, because it’s simply who I am…
This couldn’t have described me more accurately. I think I was born an engineer. I think I was an engineer when I was 5 years old and took my Fisher Price tape recorder apart “just to see what was inside”. I was an engineer when I was a teenager and built a battery pack and shock-mounted a CD player and speakers onto my bicycle in order to be able to pump tunes while I rode. And I’m an engineer today, whether it comes to building my own DVR, trying to brew better beer, or simply trying to understand how to better arrange my yard and planting so that my grass grows well in the low-sunlight backyard. What does it come down to? A question of how a thing works and how I can make it work better, as Chris explains below.
On what engineering consists of:
A great engineer is a great engineer, no matter what their discipline; no, not all knowledge and experience transfers, but if someone makes great mechanical engineer, they most likely could make a great aerospace engineer, or nuclear engineer with the proper motivation, training, and experience; because great engineering requires three fundamental drives or abilities in edition to training, education, and experience:
- 1. The innate understanding of how components, systems, and methodologies interact with each other; and the ability to distinguish and determine causation, correlation, and effect.
- 2. The absolute drive to figure out the “how” of everything around them.
- 3. The ability to generalize knowledge, experience, and insight gained on one system, component. or methodology; to other systems, components, and methodologies; similar or dissimilar.
We call the synthesis of these things, ingenuity; and it’s what makes engineers something other than technicians or scientists.
“How” is the question of the engineer. I don’t think I go through a day where I don’t ask “how” about something. Even at my job, when I get a result back from our R&D engineers and they say “well, if you remove this resistor, it will fix the problem”, I don’t trust the answer unless I can figure out how that resistor caused the problem and how it’s removal solves it. “How” is all-consuming. And there’s a reason for this. You can’t understand “why” without “how”.
For example, beer is a pretty simple liquid, when you really think about it. Combine barley, hops, yeast, and water, and you get an alcoholic beverage called beer. But it’s not really that simple, because the same barley, hops, yeast and water can create an absolutely beautiful brew, or it can create something not even worth drinking, and the results are all tied up in the “how”. Often new homebrewers know what they want as a result, and know the ingredients it takes to get there, but there’s a big roadmap in between. Understanding the “how” is important, because without knowing the “how”, you may end up with something great, or you may end up with something disgusting, but unless you know “how” you don’t know “why”. Beer is a lot more than the sum of its parts. And as Chris describes below, it’s the sum of the parts that needs to be understood, not simply the parts themselves.
On how engineers see the world and the systems within it:
Now, take what I’ve just said makes a great engineer; and stop thinking about mechanical systems like cars, and computers.
Engineers are not just mechanics, or machinists, or programmers; they understand SYSTEMS, and by that I don’t mean computer systems, or tooling systems or anything else normal people think of when they hear the word system.
A system, is a set of inter-related and interacting components, actions, decisions, behaviors, results, inputs, outputs, and feedback; be it a machine, or a busy intersection, or a city, or a society, or a person; they’re all systems.
Normal people look at the world and they see people and places and things going about their business; engineers see something entirely different. We see systems interacting at every level; every action, reaction, result, behavior… they’re all interconnected.
This is why an electrical engineer like myself can look at beer and learn to understand it, or look at a car and learn to understand it, look at a production line and learn to understand it. I don’t look at a computer as a collection of parts, it’s a system in itself. When you understand the rules of a system, you inherently are able to deal with that system as if you created it. I want to brew better beer, so I do everything I can to understand the process, from start to finish, of creating beer, which is a system of interactions within itself and with the outside world. When I said I wanted to open a school, I said I didn’t want to teach kids how to fit into the system, I wanted to teach them how the system works. It’s because every day, I look around me and try to figure out how the system works, because I can only give myself the best chance to benefit from it by understanding its workings.
Part of my writings about politics are a desire to figure out and improve the system. I don’t say government doesn’t work because we have the wrong people running it, I say government can’t work because the system has flawed incentives that cause it to fail. It doesn’t matter all that much who we elect unless the system itself changes. My recent dissatisfaction with the Republicans is largely because they promised to change the system, but instead simply said “plug me in”. Of course, understanding the “How” of a political system doesn’t necessarily allow it to be changed, because often the “How” is highly linked to ballot choices of people who refuse to even question or investigate that same “How”.
In that respect, Chris also points out that any political or human system is complex, and based upon some people acting unpredictably or irrationally. He uses that as a suggestion that trying to understand and fix that system is bound to make an engineer like myself unhappy. That’s true to an extent, but if you build that irrationality and unpredictability into your model of understand the system, it’s not as depressing as one might think. Engineers, by nature, understand the difference between “working perfectly” and “working well enough”. Nothing works perfectly, and while you want to get close to it, you only need to get close enough to meet your requirement, which is usually short of perfection. You can’t expect irrational people to behave rationally, but if you can modify the system such that they’re largely irrelevant to its continued operation, it’ll work “well enough”.
I didn’t necessarily go to Purdue to “become an engineer”. I went to Purdue to get the education I needed to get a job as an Electrical Engineer. The desire and the aptitude for engineering were always there, and come out in everything I do, not just from 9-5. There are a lot of people who never went to school for an engineering degree, and wouldn’t consider their job title to be “engineering”. But some of them will understand what Chris described as applying to them, because they’re still engineers, even if the title isn’t there.
January 5, 2007
Is Inflation Helping Me (in a Relative Sense)?
I’ve never claimed to be an economics whiz, but I know a few of my readers are. So I was hoping someone would be able to tell me whether I’m right or wrong.
My understanding is that in the long run, inflation is pretty much a bad thing for everyone. However, in the short run, it can be beneficial to some people and detrimental to others. The conventional wisdom is that the first people to get their hands on that “new money” get the most benefit, because they get the buying power before the currency has weakened. This would seem to me to benefit [fixed-interest] borrowers, because borrowing money before interest rates have raised with inflation means that your soon-to-be-inflated wages will make it easier to pay off that dollar amount.
Conversely, the people who would be most hurt by inflation would be fixed-interest lenders and investors. Lenders lend money at a low interest rate, then find the inflation rate to quickly start approaching that interest rate, making their real rate of return flat or negative. The same occurs to investors. As inflation increases, you need to get higher and higher rates of return to keep your real rate of return high enough to make it worth investing.
So here’s where I sit. I bought my house with 0% down just under 2 years ago, when interest rates were low. By my understanding of fractional reserve lending, the “new money” is created in the lending process by banks, which means that I got the new money. A little bit of inflation will inflate my wages as well as the value of my house, but given the low interest rate, may actually reduce how heavy the home ownership burden rests on my shoulders. Since I’m young, I have started investing, but the amount I’m earning in interest isn’t really that much of an issue right now, so I’m not getting behind on investments. In fact, though, liquidating some investments to pay down variable rate (i.e. credit card debt) may actually be a very good decision in the long run.
By my understanding, it seems to me that I’m actually the beneficiary of some inflation right now. After a good 5 years or so, I’d love to see it come to a halt, but it seems like right now it actually helps me. Am I right?
January 4, 2007
My Educational Dream
I’ve said before that I’m an engineer, I enjoy being an engineer, and for the money, there’s little better. But what if money weren’t a worry anymore?
Well, I’ve a had a few thoughts on that. First, my dream of writing a book would take a more central role in my life. And there’d be some travel, and some other enjoyment. But sometimes you need to be doing, and without a purpose, I’d go crazy. One of my options would be to open a brewpub with my wife. I could take care of the beer side of things, she could handle the menu (being a great cook), and it could be a heck of a lot of fun.
But I have one other nagging idea… I think about starting a school. There’s something rotting in our system of public education, and I think I know what it is. One of these days I need to read a bit of John Taylor Gatto, because I think he figured it out long before I did. But I think about why so much of my own public school education didn’t work for me, and how it doesn’t work for people like me. I see people who get discouraged and disillusioned. I see an entire educational system reduced to the lowest common denominator, not only in educational standards, but in behavioral standards as well (i.e. “zero tolerance”). I see a system where we’re teaching kids to “do”, but not to “think”.
I was struck when visiting my brother last month about some of the ways that Marines talk. He’s a Marine pilot, and the dream for a lot of military pilots is to make your way out to the airlines, where the real money is. Many of them look at the civilian world like it’s a machine. And you know what they say? “Plug me in!” I think something about being stuck in an outright machine, where are things like “orders” instead of “suggestions”, and “commanding officers” instead of “supervisors and managers”, tends to clarify the world a bit. Of course, the Marine Corps is a machine, and the corporate world is a machine, retail and the restaurant business are machines, and even life as a dependent of the state is a machine. Many of us look at our goal in life to make sure we plug into the “right” machine. I think our educational system is designed simply to make us want to plug into the machine, and to properly fit in that machine.
But that’s not good enough. I want to teach kids to design, build, operate, and maintain the machine. I don’t want to teach kids to fit into the system. There are enough of those kids around. They don’t wonder about the world, they don’t question the world, and the idea of individual rational thought terrifies them. I simply want to teach kids to ask “Why?” and then teach them how to answer their own question. I want to teach them that the answer to any question, and by extension the world, is within their grasp. But it goes one step further. I want to teach them that they don’t need to simply trust the answers provided to them, whether it be from friends, family, clergy, their boss, or their elected official or bureaucrat. If the answer given doesn’t seem right (and often also when it does), its their own responsibility to make sure they can find the right one. I don’t know if it would even take all that much effort. Once people wake up, they rarely choose to lull back to sleep. I think with enough effort to show them how badly others are trying to control their lives, they’ll learn the desire to control their own.
Now, many of you are probably thinking I’d like to indoctrinate some future libertarians. But that’s not my intent. Trying to create a generation of free-thinking individuals may have that result, but the wider result is an increase in the number of people who can do good in the world. It’s an increase in the number who may become entrepreneurs. Or it’s an increase in the number who may become scholars, scientists, and inventors, increasing the worlds supply of knowledge. At the very least, it’s a group of people who aren’t led by whim; it’s a group of people who know how to intelligently choose those who will lead them.
But it’s not only a positive action, it’s a defensive action. It’s a line in the sand. It’s a declaration that “I will not stand idly by while another generation becomes mindless drones in service to State and Corporation.” But it’s still only a dream, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Maybe someday I’ll take the time and effort to realize it.
The Unrepentant Individual linked with Engineering
January 2, 2007
Bobby Knight
Today, Bobby Knight has made history. He’s passed Dean Smith’s record for career Div I-A coaching wins in NCAA Basketball:
Bob Knight has been the game’s orneriest coach forever. Now he’s the winningest, too. Knight earned career victory No. 880 the hard way when his Texas Tech Red Raiders blew a 20-point lead but withstood a 3-point miss at the buzzer to beat New Mexico 70-68 on Monday in a game lacking the fanfare of his first attempt.
But to myself, and the rest of the people who endured his temper and his constant presence on opinion pages all through the state of Indiana, he’ll be remembered a different way:
Knight – whose temper got him relieved of his duties at Indiana in September 2000 after he grabbed a student on campus who had greeted him with “What’s up, Knight?” – is the last of the great bully coaches. And while some decry his methods as crude and outdated, many who have played for him wouldn’t have it any other way.
…
The greatest cost, of course, was the loss of his job at Indiana. Knight, who was so popular in the Hoosier state that he could have been elected governor, was fired after 29 seasons. Though it was his run-in with a student that precipitated the firing, the university saw the incident as the final straw in what had been a series of embarrassing incidents that involved Knight’s losing his temper. The most egregious of those was when he was caught on tape trying to choke guard Neil Reed.
I was a student at Purdue back in September 2000, when the story at IU broke. A student who saw Knight on Campus asked him “What’s up, Knight?” as reported above. Knight lost control and accosted the kid, grabbed him roughly for “not respecting his elders”, and ended up losing his job over it. At the time, the student involved, rather than being seen as the victim in the situation, started receiving death threats from angry IU fans. At the time, I sent off a snarky letter to the editor to Purdue’s student newspaper, suggesting that if that student was having trouble at IU, we’d gladly welcome a transfer to Purdue. The letter was printed and was available on the Purdue Exponent’s web site up until recently, but unfortunately now even the Wayback Machine can’t find it.
This incident, of course, wasn’t the beginning. Knight’s temper is legendary, and he’s been caught on film several times comporting himself in a manner far from professional. In addition the the choking incident reported above, and the recent furor he caused for smacking a player in the chin, few can forget the sight of him throwing chairs around the court.
Knight may have entered the record books, but his personal record will never be clean.
January 1, 2007
Rose Bowl Prediction — Michigan vs. Southern Cal
Purdue (Big Ten #2, 11-1) @ USC (Pac-10 #1, 10-2)
Vegas Says: Michigan -2
It seems to me that Vegas seems to know something that us bettors don’t. The line opened as a Pick’Em, and has slowly moved towards Michigan. It’s now ranging from Michigan -1.5 to -2.5, but most bettors think Michigan will take this one away.
And I’m among that crowd. For the USC/UCLA game, I said that the key for UCLA would be harassing John David Booty, but that I didn’t think they’d be able to get it done. Well, they did so, they stuffed the run, and they got to the QB. Michigan’s front seven is much better than UCLA’s, so I expect them to do so even more. USC hasn’t been able to run against strong defenses, and while they’ve got two incredible receivers, I don’t think they’ll have quite the passing success on Michigan that Ohio State was able to have.
On the opposite side of the ball, USC has a pretty decent defense, but I don’t know if they’ve faced an offense as complete as Michigan’s. Michigan is likely to ride the back of Mike Hart to control the game, and then go up top to Manningham once USC is focusing on stopping Hart. It’s worked all year, it worked against OSU, and it can work against USC.
I don’t think Michigan will have quite the lopsided success they had against ND, but I don’t see USC being able to keep this competitive. I see the game going roughly the same as what I had predicted for the Purdue/Maryland game, and I’ll be highly, highly surprised if I’m equally wrong.
Prediction: Michigan covers
Predicted Final Score: Michigan 31, USC 17
Final Score: USC 32, Michigan 18
Prediction: WRONG
Happy New Year’s!
Hopefully you have a bountiful 2007.
Below is a picture of the wife and I leaving the hotel on the way to dinner in San Francisco with some friends. We were off to Morton’s Steakhouse, which is usually a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, I drank half a bottle of Arrogant Bastard in the hotel and had a slight relapse of feeling like crap. So I went to one of the finest steakhouses in all of San Francisco and ate about 10 bites of an iceberg wedge salad, and didn’t even get a nice rare bone-in ribeye like I normally would. With some Sprite to wash it down. But, on the bright side, not eating steak or drinking alcohol [the wife hasn't really been drinking recently either] certainly kept our bill manageable!
On the way back to the hotel, we got to listen to a cabbie from Jordan telling us all about how sad it was that Saddam was executed. Only in SF will you find a Jordanian cabbie who happens to be a Saddam apologist. The crux of his argument seemed to be that “sure, he’s a bad guy, but to control a country like Iraq you’ve got to kill lots of people”. He said the 100+ people killed (for which Saddam was tried and executed) wasn’t a problem because they were Iranian spies, the Kurds deserved it because every country (including the US) facing a province demanding independence replies with force, and that Kuwait rightfully belonged to Iraq in the first place, so Saddam wasn’t wrong to try to take it back. I shut my mouth, because there’s not a lot of point arguing with someone who defends brutal dictatorships.
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Some of the criteria you describe, I would say would apply to a scientist. Its interesting, Chris doesn’t think this fit techs. I thought you were talking about the mind set, not the type of education one has gotten.
Comment by VRB — January 6, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
VRB,
I’m not sure what Chris’ response would be, but I would say that some people with a “technician” mindset get an engineering degree and become engineers, and some people with an “engineer” mindset end up working as technicians, not engineers.
There are some engineers who aren’t really useful engineers, they basically find a job where they’re doing technician work. And there are some technicians who learn enough on the job to be an indispensable help as sort of a “junior engineer”, simply because they have the mindset even if they never really went through educational hurdles to get the degree.
So there are gray areas, and if your job title says “technician”, that doesn’t mean you don’t have the engineer’s mindset.
Comment by Brad Warbiany — January 6, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
I am not saying that I have the mind of an engineer, but when you took that quote “We call the synthesis of these things, ingenuity; and it’s what makes engineers something other than technicians or scientists:” I just felt a conceit that I have felt working with some engineers. (I’m a technician.) I just think engineering is a different aspect of the criteria you have described. An individual can have those approaches to life, without ever becoming a scientist, engineer or technician.
Comment by VRB — January 6, 2007 @ 6:45 pm
VRB,
That’s why I said, in the last sentences of my post:
“There are a lot of people who never went to school for an engineering degree, and wouldn’t consider their job title to be “engineeringâ€. But some of them will understand what Chris described as applying to them, because they’re still engineers, even if the title isn’t there.”
However, I did take some things out of context in my reflection of the post, so if you want to see exactly how it all fits together, I’d head to the original post at Chris’ blog.
Comment by Brad Warbiany — January 6, 2007 @ 8:31 pm
I had tried earlier. Problems with loading then.
Comment by VRB — January 6, 2007 @ 11:39 pm