Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

Berkeley Morning Coffeeshop Blogging

Sign in Brewed Awakening:

All Occupied Seats Must Be Justified by a Purchase

I have heard of justification by faith, and justification by works, but...

Record Prius Parade!

Five--count them, five in a row, red, green, silver, silver, red--proceeding north on Oxford Street...

Sunny Wednesday June Afternoon People in Their Forties Drinking Iced Coffee at Starbucks Midlife Crisis "Wilma!!" Blogging

Adeimantos: I don't know. Back when I was a teenager, I thought that I would grow up and that in my forties I would have a house and a family and an important job and would be--well, would be kind of like Stilgar, Lord of Sietch Tabr, in Dune...

Akhilleus: And?

Adeimantos: And that's not how it worked out! People don't look at me like they would look at Stilgar at all! They look at me as if...

Akhilleus: You were Fred Flintstone?

Adeimantos: Exactly.

Akhilleus: I'm with you. I've been there. I am totally there.

Khelona. Huh. Is that better or worse than dreaming when you were a teenager that you would grow up to marry Stilgar, and finding in your forties that your husband more closely resembles...

Glaukon: Fred Flintstone?

Khelona: Exactly...

Akhilleus: I'm going to deal with this like a man. I'm going to go buy a Kindle and a 3G iPhone.

Khelona: You're not going to have your mother commission a shield from Ogoun? You prefer an iPhone?

Adeimantos: Ogoun? Who is Ogoun?

Khelona: You know, the god of fire and metalworking...

Akhilleus: You're mixing up your pantheons again. That's Yoruba-Haitian voodoo.

Khelona: Who do I mean then?

Adeimantos: Hephaestos...

Things Middle-Aged White People Do (Flooring Edition)

One of the things that middle-aged white people do is that they gradually, room by room, pay someone to replace the 1980 wall-to-wall carpeting that came with the house with stained oak floors. And then they have to buy oriental carpets to put on top of the new oak floor to render the overwhelming bulk of it invisible.

"Why not just put oak down around the edge of the room?" I asked. "And leave plywood where the rugs are going to go?"

"You think you are funny," said one of our floor guys, "and I laugh because you are paying me. But if you ever buy new construction, check--especially it the rugs are tacked down, and especially always check if there are runners on the stairs."

Oh.

So we journey to the Macy's Furniture Warehouse Outlet at 1200 Whipple Road in Union City:

View Larger Map

And we discover that in the past five years the number of handmade oriental carpets at 1200 Whipple Road has greatly shrunk--instead, they now have lots of very attractive (and attractively priced) machine-made Karastans. Nevertheless, we return with 220 square feet of carpet: a "Ziegmahal" and a "Khyber"--and no real idea of what tradition the rugs come out of: to my knowledge "Khyber" is not a rug-making tradition, and I can find no trace of "Ziegmahal" anywhere.

But making them took a lot of work http://www.jacobsenrugs.com/effort.htm, and they should wear like iron.

Summer Is Icumen in!

The dog has beggun--as she does every year--spending her nap time downstairs in the foyer, on the cold marble floor...

Sunday Morning Upper San Leandro Reservoir Kings Canyon Cattle Drive Blogging

Sunday Morning Upper San Leandro Reservoir Kings Canyon Cattle Drive Blogging: We--that is, two monkeys and a Labrador Retriever--just drove 20 head of cattle 6 miles down one side of Kings Canyon and back along the Rocky Ridge trail. I am telling you: these aren't the ancient fearsome aurochs of the Eurasian forests. The only sticky point was when the cattle we were driving met head-on at a narrow place on the trail two quants from Barclay Global Investments and their ancient Golden Retriever coming the other way...

listen

---

Now is this a good job or a bad job of voice recognition we have here?:

Sunday morning, Upper Family(?) Reserver King Canyon cattle drive(?) logging. We, that is two monkeys and a Labrador Retriever just drove 20 head of cattle 6 miles down the one side of the King Canyon and back along the Rocky Ridge Trail. I am telling you these are no longer the ancient fearsome ora rasion(?) forest. The only sticky pipe was where the cattle we were driving met a head on a narrow pass in the trail to quants(?) from Barkley(?) global investors and agent golden retrieval coming the other way. listen

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The Singularity Will Be Blogged...

I think they are getting ready for the Economics Department spring skit party. Whatever they are.

Ben Mathis-Lilley tried to warn me. But did I listen? No!

Do Two Recent Novels About China Obscure the Looming Robot Threat? Yes: The Times review of Alex Berenson’s The Ghost War gave us déjà vu. The novel depicts an imagined war between China and the United States triggered by an idealistic but scheming Communist Party official. It seemed familiar because it reminded us of the other book the Times reviewed recently whose plot is driven by Chinese chicanery, Colin Harrison’s The Finder. In Harrison’s novel, a Chinese immigrant poses as a janitorial worker in midtown in order to steal corporate secrets for her brother’s firm in Shanghai.

Frankly, this threatening-Chinese theme worries us. Not for political reasons; neither book is said to be jingoistic. Rather, it’s because we’re concerned that “the coming war against the Chinese” is going to replace “the coming war against the machines” as our leading fictional-future-war trope.

The inevitable apocalyptic battle against machines has long been a fruitful topic in books (Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov), film (The Terminator, The Matrix), and shit-shooting bar discussions. (We personally believe that simple machines pose an underrated threat; how are we going to lift and move heavy objects when the automaton rocket-blasting helicopters, appealing to intra-machine solidarity, convince levers and pulleys to turn against us?) And this business with the Chinese is a dangerous distraction — a second front, if you will, in a time when America doesn’t have the resources to fight two imaginary future wars at once. In fact, we suspect “Alex Berenson” and “Colin Harrison” are actually Undercover Models AB-246 and CH-391, robotic novelist-simulating fifth-columnists.

In summary, the Times book section is actively working toward a future in which humans are kept alive only so robots can imprison them in cages and harvest their fingernails, which they use to make decorative chess pieces. Need more proof? The Times has resolutely refused to review How to Build a Robot Army, by Daniel Wilson, Ph.D., which — if not solving the problem of an eventual robot uprising — does at least offer humans guidance in co-opting the violent tendencies of robots for our own purposes. Review this worthy book, New York Times, and then we can talk about "balanced coverage" and "not letting our robot masters drive the agenda."

Please share this information with everyone you know. —Ben Mathis-Lilley

Lazy Easter Sunday Blogging

The first of the three copies of Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm that I had loaned out comes back: from Tom Kalil, who wants a reputation as the kind of man who returns books...

Sunday Easter afternoon in Tom Kalil and Maryanne McCormack's backyard: 81F...

Meanwhile, in central Maine the judging of the Easter ice sculpture contest begins...

The Equinox:

Unfortunately, it appears that the time from local sunrise to local sunset tomorrow is 12:12:

Lafayette, California - Sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk times for the whole year - Gaism: +1 day 07:10 19:22 12:12

So the Equinox is not an equinox.

Home Exercise Machine Blogging

We are finally using the last Christmas present--the Waterrower.As is the case with all fitness equipment, it is hugely expensive,grossly overpriced, and frivolous--if we do not use it. It is remarkably, sober, cost effective, and cheap if we do.

The edge of the Waterrower compared to other rowing machines is that you actually row through water--pull blades through a tank.

But there is no chance of catching a crab and getting thwacked by the oar. No smell of the sea or seamist in the air. No chance of a wave sloshing over and leaving you sitting in a puddle and soaked. No cries of seagulls.

I suggest we hire the kids to stand by with a hand mister and a bucket, and that we play whale sounds on the stereo...

Hazards of Picnicking at the Valle Vista Staging Area

I am always amazed at the number of effectively wild places in Greater San Francisco: six million people live within sixty minutes of the EBMUD Valle Vista Staging Area and the Kings Canyon Loop Trail, and yet we see nobody...

We Should Go See Carrie Fisher...

Edward Guthman of the Chronicle:

Carrie Fisher tames her demons in solo show: Carrie Fisher has a phrase to describe the low points in her life: "Bad reality, good anecdote." It applies equally to her parents' scandal-sheet marriage; her problems with bipolar disorder and addiction to painkillers; her failed marriages to musician Paul Simon and talent agent Bryan Lourd; the morning she woke up and found a friend, 42-year-old Republican operative R. Gregory Stevens, dead in her bed.

It applies as well to "Star Wars," the empire-building franchise that made her wealthy but identified her forever with a hideous, matching-cinnamon-buns hairdo and turned her character Princess Leia into a doll, a shampoo bottle and a Pez dispenser.

In "Wishful Drinking," the one-woman show she wrote and is now performing at Berkeley Rep, Fisher spares no one in her will to spill...

Rainy Grey Afternoon Female Vocalist Blogging

Rainy grey afternoons are so rare around here, they must be savored appropriately:

Rilo Kiley, "Silver Lining":

Bonnie Raitt, "Angel from Montgomery"

Alison Brown, "Angel"

Liz Phair, "Divorce Song":

Department of Things I Wanted to Go to But Didn't Because I Didn't Find Out About Them Until After They Happened

Waterboarding Demonstration:

Rally Wed,. 11/14 @ Noon, Sproul Plaza, UC-Berkeley. World Can't Wait! http://myspace.com/sfbaycantwait

Berkeley Sentence of the Day

Berkeley sentence of the day:

Let's go to Espresso Experience next to Musical Offering: Foucault always liked to go there...

Green Mileage Auto: Prius Parking Edition

Clearly the second person to swing into the Dwinelle parking lot this morning in a silver Prius decided it would be amusing to park right next to the first.

Who am I to buck a trend?

Our Furnace Crashed Last Weekend...

Don't laugh.

"Why not simply reboot it?" you ask.

It appears--I'm not sure I fully understand it--that we had a power outage last weekend that fried the ROM that the furnace boots off of.

This means that--until "Ralph" arrives tomorrow to save the day--that because we are having a cold snap it is 58F degrees here in the family room, which means that the nineteenth-century English professor clothes--the wool pants, the long-sleeved broadcloth shirts with the button-down collars, the heavy tweed jackets, et cetera--actually, finally make some sense.

But I'm going into the kitchen, where it is 64F right now.

Yet more evidence that the Singularity already happened. I have no idea how I would explain this to ancestors like Priscilla Mullins...

King Lear Blogging

King Lear at the California Shakespeare Theater. Very well done.

There are, of course, the Berkeley moments: the announcement beforehand that there is a silver Prius in the parking lot with its interior lights on, and four men (including me) get up to check...

Were I Berkeley law professor John Yoo, I would never agree to take part in the production and come on stage to waterboard and then blind the Earl of Gloucester. And I would never agree to make Gloucester confess not just to conspiring with Cordelia and the French but also to being the twentieth highjacker...

Green Mileage Auto: Grizzly Peak Prius Edition

Three--no, four observations:

1. This is an amazingly popular video game. Of the eighteen vehicles I passed on Fish Ranch, Grizzly Peak, and Panoramic, six were playing it...

2. There appears to be a serious bug in the graphics module of my copy. Today the extraordinarily beautiful hi-res graphics of San Francisco Bay were replaced by a featureless grey background. I must figure out how to reboot...

3. The key to winning going toward Berkeley appears to be to use a light foot on level 1--coming down into Orinda center form the west--and then a heavy foot on level 2--Orinda center to Fish Ranch. That starts the process of discharging the battery so you arrive at the top of Grizzly Peak with enough spare capacity.

4. Winning going away from Berkeley is child's play: you cannot climb from the campus up to the Lawrence Hall of Science without a nearly complete battery discharge.

Amongst our observations are...

Green Mileage Auto: Grizzly Peak Prius Edition

Green Mileage Auto: Grizzly Peak Prius Edition

Jeebus! That was totally lame!

Still 100 vertical meters above the Berkeley campus, and the battery is showing full.

That is 100m x 1000kg x 10m/a/a = 1000000 useful joules that could have gone into the battery it I had managed it properly that were instead dissipated as heat. That is 300 watt-hours gone.

Entropy wins another one.

Sigh.

Miniclimate iPhone Blogging

I am wearing long sleeves, a tie, a tweed jacket, and I am cold: it is 58F out here at 5 PM.

It is mid-September, for Jeebus' sake!

The Pile Grows...

The pile of things to read grows:

• Susan Faludi (2007), The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Henry Holt: 0805086927).

• Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg (2007), Imperfect Knowledge Economics: Exchange Rates and Risk (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 0805086927).

• Arthur C. Clarke (1992), How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village (New York: Bantam Books: 0805086927 ).

• Alan Greenspan (2007), The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin: 1594201318).

Yet More Prius iPhone Blogging!

How does one rack up a high score playing Prius: The Videogame?

The instinctive strategy is to try to minimize the percentage of the time the gasoline engine is on.

But that cannot be right.

My Backpack May Be too Heavy

The Prius thinks it is a passenger, and needs a seatbelt.

The Nirvana of Cultural Self-Parody Attained!

Is there anything wrong with driving down out of the Berkeley hills to the UC Berkeley campus in one's Prius, watching regenerative braking fill one's battery and the mpg indicator go to lazy-eight, looking over San Francisco Bay in the warm (but not too hot) summer sun, while listening to Feist pumped from the iPhone through the car's speakers?

Could any higher degree of post-industrial twenty-first century techno-enviro left-coast lifestyle self-righteous enlightenment possibly be attained?

Captain Blythers, First Street, Benicia

Capitain Blythers: "Do you want a table with a downstream view of Carquinez Strait and the bridge or a table with an upstream view of the Martinez refinery?"

"We have a dog with us..."

"You'll be wanting the upstream view, then..."

Both the cioppino and the mixed seafood grill were excellent. The dog appreciated scraps of Icelandic cod and broccoli.

Adagia, at the Corner of College and Bancroft, April 30 2007 12:00 Noon

Eight Berkeley economics professors wanted to have lunch with Alan Taylor of U.C. Davis today. I attribute this to a combination of effects: an end-of-semester effect in which people have given up on completing all the projects they hoped to complete before the end of the semester, and as a result are no longer keeping their heads down and are willing to go out to lunch; and a we-like-Alan-Taylor effect; unfortunately, identification is not achieved.

"So if Britain with its structural trade surpluses could run up net foreign assets equal to twenty months' GDP by 1913, could the U.S. run up a net foreign liability balance equal to twenty months' GDP by 2023?"

"By symmetry, that would mean that the rest of the world would have to play the role of pre-World War I Britain. Yes, it could happen."

"And somebody would have to play the role of pre-World War I Argentina. Would that be the U.S?"

"Usually in international finance the role of Argentina is played by Argentina."

"Doesn't Dani Rodrik say that Argentina is doing very well now? That this time its boom is not led by government or consumption spending, but by investment?"

"Dani is a contrarian."

"Twenty months' GDP in 2023 would be what, $45 trillion?"

"$45 nominal trillion in 2023; about $30 trillion real at today's prices."

"And the current net foreign asset and liability position of the U.S. is?"

"We don't know. It's the difference between two large and poorly-measured numbers, gross foreign assets owned by Americans and gross American assets owned by foreigners. Subtract them and you get a number that is small in context--perhaps two months' worth of GDP, perhaps $2 trillion--and very, very poorly measured."

"And the capital income flows are still in balance?"

"Perhaps not. You've looked at the data much more closely than I have. And there are problems."

"Cash payouts by American-owned subsidiaries abroad are about the same proportion of book values as cash payouts by foreign-owned subsidiaries in the U.S., but earnings retained and reinvested by American-owned subsidiaries abroad are a much higher proportion of book values than earnings retained and reinvested by foreign-owned subsidiaries in the U.S."

"Which means?"

"Either that Daniel Gros is right, and that the standard statistics simply miss a great deal of factor payments from America to foreigners, or Dooley and company are right, and due to American managerial expertise Americans earn much higher rates of return on their investments abroad than foreigners do on their investments in the United States."

"'Dark matter'."

"Yes, dark matter--the source of the extraordinarily high profits of Eurodisney."

"There are too many physics metaphors in this subfield. We should have stuck to metaphors from theology."

"That was not a success."

"Not a success? I counted six mentions of 'original sin' in the Economist in one eighteen-month period."

"Not a success in that it was too often misinterpreted. People read Eichengreen and Haussmann to mean that countries that couldn't borrow in hard currencies--countries afflicted with 'original sin'--had sinned. They had done something bad--and deserved what happened to them."

"But wasn't that Augustine's point?"

"No. Augustine's point was that Adam had done something bad--eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As a result you were destined for Hell, even though the sin wasn't yours."

Justina Golden's Flos Regalis

My wife's college friend Justina Bradford Golden (one of Dar Williams's voice teachers) gave us a copy of her early music album, Flos Regalis, when we went through Amherst. It's truly excellent. And my favorite his her... unusual version of the Ellington/Russell standard "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" as it might have been performed for Richard III York...

Flos Regalis, a CD by Justina Golden and friends!

Get your own copy of Flos Regalis:

John Stifler says: http://www.justinagolden.com/oldies.html

Checking that Space-Time Is Locally Pretty Flat...

6:47 AM: the reported time of sunrise in Lafayette, California, on April 6, 2007.

6:59 AM: the moment the sun first peaked over the top of Mt. Diablo on April 6, 2007.

Mt. Diablo has 3,750 feet on us, and is about 15 miles x 5000 feet/mile = 75,000 feet away, for a sine value of 1/20, which is an angle of 1/20 radians. The earth rotates 1 radian in 12/π hours, so the sun travels 1/20 radians in 3/5π hours = 11 minutes.

So, yes, locally, space-time around here is pretty flat so that plane trigonometry approximately holds...

Morale Is High!

The sun rises at 7:11 AM this morning--which means that I have enough time to see the sunrise from the top of the ridge and then get back down in time to get the kids to school. It's much better to see the sunrise than not to see the runrise. The past three weeks, since the early start of Daylight Saving Time, have not been good for morale.

America's Silliest Dog^TM agrees. She commences vertical leaping as soon as the first bead of real sun appears.

Another Sign of the Impending Apocalypse

At the Ferry Building at the bay end of Market Street, Peet's sells a "Scharffenberger mocha freddo" for $4.30. Can the fabric of the universe sustain the existence of the $5 coffee drinks that are clearly only a year or two away?

Being Omnivorous

We turn left coming out of the driveway, and we are immediately confronted with: quail, seventeen adult quail, and deer, two adult does. The quail do not quail at the car: instead, they run aimlessly in rapid circles as the car approaches, and then take wing with a whir. The deer stare at us, as if wondering whether or not to approach the car for food. And then they amble off toward the lawns. In the distance there is the gobbling of turkeys--refugees seeking sanctuary from the retirement community of Rossmoor, where sharpshooters are hunting them with silenced rifles. My wife tells of once being in the car and running into a male turkey on the driveway, which looked at her and spread its tail feathers in a testosterone-crazed dominance display--thinking that it could drive off a Subaru, and thus preserve his exclusive sexual access to the hens. Truly a bird of very little brain...

Ever since my wife learned that I was on a committee with Michael Pollan, author of the truly excellent if slightly Berkeley twee The Omnivore's Dilemma, she has been pressing me to invite him to dinner. I have resisted, being scared that she would greet him at the door with a net, and say: "We're having quail this evening. Would you please catch us a dozen? They're under the blackberry bushes" or "Here's the dried corn, the mortar, and the pestle: would you please make us some masa?" or even worse, "Would you please evolve us some maize via selective breeding from this teosinte plant?"

But do go read The Omnivore's Dilemma. It is truly excellent.

Berkeley vs. London

A high of 80F today in Berkeley. Strada at College and Bancroft didn't turn on its heat lamps until after dark. The first sunbathers of the year appeared.

I remember the... second time I ever went to London. It was the last weekend in May. We got there, and it was 65F or so at the high, with scattered clouds, and people were sunbathing in Russell Square. "Why are they doing this?" I wondered. "Don't they know the weather will be much better for sunbathing in a month?"

I was wrong. It wasn't. That was the best weekend of the summer.

Glad to Be Back in the Islas Encantadas...

When I got out of the taxi in front of the New School in Manhattan on Friday morning, it was 13F. 13F! And back here in California, the ice cream truck came by our house on Wednesday afternoon...

I Know People Are Looking at Me Strangely...

Is it very wrong to use my laptop and my copy of John Scalzi's You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop (9781596060630) to engage in a little Lockeian appropriation--to reserve a table at a full coffee shop while I wait for my drink?

Or is it very right to do so?

Sorry, John, but I have no galleys to use to serve the purpose and must do what I can. All I have is a .doc file that has been marked-up by the editor, and I need caffeine before my coauthor shows up...

Dawn Patrol with America's Silliest Dog Gets Risky...

If we head out at dawn, go up the driveway, turn right on the fire road, and cross Burton Ridge, we enter... the woods of Rossmoore:

ContraCostaTimes.com | 02/17/2007 | Residents cry fowl, bring in hired gun: A Walnut Creek retirement community is using a new tactic in the escalating suburban struggle to rein in wild turkeys that damage landscaping and cover sidewalks and decks with bird poop. A hunter is shooting the birds with a silencer-equipped rifle.... Rossmoor in Walnut Creek is believed to be the first Bay Area community to call in a hired gun with a license to kill, state and federal wildlife managers say....

"The turkey population has exploded here, like everywhere else," Donner said, "and in some areas, they left so much defecation that people couldn't get by on the walkways." The federal hunter uses a .22-caliber rifle equipped with a silencer to avoid noise that might disturb Rossmoor residents or scare away the turkeys after the first one in a flock gets whacked.... "It's very unobtrusive and efficient in a neighborhood," said Larry Hawkins, an agriculture department spokesman....

"They're very prolific, and they don't have a lot of predators, especially in these areas around housing developments," said Lt. Sheree Christiansen of the state Department of Fish and Game. She supervises wardens in Contra Costa and Alameda counties....

One wildlife expert at the nonprofit Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek questioned the effectiveness of the turkey shooting. For every turkey shot, the survival odds of others improve because of the diminished competition for food and shelter, said Susan Heckly, Lindsay's wildlife rehabilitation manager...

What a way to go: mistaken for a turkey in the pre-dawn gloaming. Fortunately a 22 is not a very big slug.

This morning at least one large, gobbling flock of turkeys had crossed Burton Ridge going the other way, seeking sanctuary on our property.

When Multitasking Attacks! Video iPods, Deterrence Theory, the Friend-Enemy Distinction, and the Muscles Connecting Your Shoulder to Your Back

Fortunately, now that I have a video iPod I can multitask and watch hearing files from CSPAN and other things while out with America's Silliest Dog in the mornings.

Unfortunately, using the iPod this way in the winter before dawn kills my night vision.

Fortunately, our standard routes are fairly smooth and usually paved.

Unfortunately, I didn't see the skunk this morning until we were twenty feet from it.

Fortunately, the skunk was unclear on Karl Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction: it may have thought we were going to feed it, for it looked at us for a good ten seconds before it turned and waddled away.

Unfortunately, America's Silliest Dog has no conception of deterrence theory, and wanted to charge the skunk.

Fortunately, I was not only holding the leash but had it wrapped twice around my wrist.

Unfortunately, America's Silliest Dog is lean and well-muscled and I am not: the muscles connecting my shoulder to my back are now expressing their displeasure with the management.

Religious-Themed Yuppie Food Products Blogging

We return from Trader Joe's bearing Ezekiel (that's a Hebrew prophet) bread, Maranatha (that's a prayer asking Jesus to come back soon: "Come, Holy Lord), but nothing named after the Islamic or Buddhist traditions--no Imam pistachios or Avelokiteshvara microwaveable rice dishes. This seems vaguely un-Californian...

Yet More Unseasonable California Weather Blogging

It's a Holiday Weekend. We're supposed to laze about outside playing frisbee, hiking to astonishing view points, and eating barbequed marinated shrimp at redwood tables beneath the warm California sun. But are we? Nooooo...

IIRC, when the air is 70F, its molecules are moving only 5% faster than when the air is 25F. But when I feel the 25F air on my skin, do my nerves tell me: "Hey, these air molecules are moving 5% slower than usual. How interesting!"? No. My nerves tell me: "What the f--- do you think you're doing, brain? Get us out of here NOW!"

Mad San Francisco Scientists! (Applied Organic Chemistry Division)

The people at Semifreddi's are mad. Mad, I tell you:

Odessaroggenbrot: We know this is heresy; but this rye bread is better than any New York rye you have ever tasted. It is a long-standing favorite among our European customers...

Family New Years Eve Movie

The quintessential Halloween movie is "Nightmare Before Christmas." The quintessential Thanksgiving movie is "Addams Family Values." The quintessential New Years movie? We're experimenting. I was arguing for "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." The kids have settled on "Red Dawn."

UPDATE: Neither can hold a candle as a New Years Eve movie to "Trading Places."

Scent Trails

But you would need a much longer neck to follow scent trails at speed:

3quarksdaily: A team of neuroscientists and engineers, led by Noam Sobel of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, decided to test this conventional wisdom.

The team first laid down a 10-metre-long trail of chocolate essential oil in a grass field (the scent was detectable but not strong or overpowering). Then they enlisted 32 Berkeley undergraduates, blindfolded them, blocked their ears and set them loose in the field to try to track the scent. Each student got three chances to track the scent in ten minutes; two-thirds of the subjects finished the task. And when four students practiced the task over three days, they got better at it.

Next, the team tested how the students were following the trails. They counted how many whiffs of air each student took while tracking the scent trail, and tested the effect of blocking one nostril at a time. The scientists found that humans act much like dogs do while tracking a scent, sniffing repeatedly to trace the smell's source. They didn't do so well with one blocked nostril, suggesting that the stereo effect of two nostrils helps people to locate odours in space...

A Cultural Shift in Progress

Mark and Period, "The Vineyard," 4314 Redwood Highway #200, San Rafael, CA invites us to their:

Christmas Special New Shipment Warehouse Sale

Huge selection of: antique and contemporary jewelry, silver, coral, glass, jade beads, Buddha and GuanYin statues, paintings, furniture, feng shui, crystals, cashmere, Italian garments...

Let us all now meditate upon Avelokiteshvara, The One Who Hears the Cries of the World, in her form standing in her reindeer-drawn chariot, and chant chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra--The one that begins: "Ho! Ho! Ho!" and

A Question

When the two children and the dog are fighting over who gets to sit on the family room heating vent on Sunday morning, is this a sign that we have set the thermostat too low?

How Berkeley Can You Be?

Labrador Retrievers at Lake Anza:

"So you had her knees rebuilt?"

"Left knee only."

"We had her elbows rebuilt by Doctor Sam when she was six. There's been no sign of trouble since then..."

Easter Vigil in Berkeley

Easter vigil in Berkeley:

C: Mary and Joseph
R: Pray for us
C: Holy Michael Archangel
R: Pray for us...

Berkeley is the place where you find the following passage in the Litany of the Saints:

C: Holy Julian of Norwich
R: Pray for us
C: Chief Seattle
R: Pray for us
C: Mohandas Gandhi
R: Pray for us...

On the whole, I think the existence of Berkeley is a very good thing.

Recent Earthquake

The classroom thumps, and everyone surfs their laptops over to:

Recent Earthquakes - Map for 122-38: Maps of Recent Earthquake Activity in California-Nevada

Magnitude 3 just over the Berkeley Hills at 11:34 AM PST on March 1, 2006.

Earthly Paradise, Part XLVII

"Why, this is the early paradise, nor am I out of it." Sitting outside in February, basking in the sun, with the temperature in the high 60sF, drinking iced lattes, demanding of passing graduate students that they produce new drafts of their papers, and discussing which are our respective favorite paragraphs in the "Great Contraction" chapter of Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwarz (1963), A Monetary History of the United States.

Does it get any better than this?*

---

*Yes, it does, but not in a manner that can be described on a G-rated family weblog.

Strangers Converse in a Berkeley Elevator

Strangers Converse in a Berkeley Elevator:

Person #1: I'm getting into an elevator. I'm about to lose the connection...

Person #2: An elevator is an admirably effective Faraday cage.

Person #3: Somebody should make a cell phone that works inside a Faraday cage.

Person #1: But surely the laws of physics...

Person #4: It could work via gravitational radiation

Person #2: Two charged, mutually orbiting micro black holes within the cell phone casing...

Person #5: Surely the Hawking radiation would be too fierce?

Person #2: I dunno. How long is the lifespan of a 10 kg black hole, anyway?

Person #1: You'd carry around a 50 lb cell phone just so you could talk in elevators?

Alex Tabarrok Gives Thanks for the Market Economy

He writes:

Marginal Revolution: Giving Thanks : I went to Wegman's less than 24 hours before Thanksgiving and purchased a turkey, yams, cranberries, a pumpkin pie, wine, cranberry cheese, fresh bread, peanut butter and some more wine. Not a single item was in short supply let alone in shortage. I give thanks for capitalism.

He speaks for himself. Over here in Greater San Francisco, there is a sage shortage. The produce manager said that the San Francisco Chronicle's turkey recipe called for lots of sage, and they were unprepared.

Inbox, November 9, 2005

In today's inbox--November 9, 2005--we have:

• George R.R. Martin (2005), A Feast for Crows (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0618134328/braddelong00) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/061813428/braddelong00.
• Garry Wills (1970), Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (New York: Mariner Books: 0618134328) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0618134328/braddelong00.
• Gregory Clark (2005), "The Problem of the Industrial Revolution" http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/GlobalHistory/Global%20History-9.pdf

---

Yes, George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows is excellent. But it is one of the middle books of a series. Finishing this book reminds me why I have sworn an oath not to read any more series-in-progress: much better to wait to begin the first book of a series until you are certain that the very last book of the series has been... staked and encoffined.

Day of the Catalogs

Today's mail consisted of nine catalogs. Nine. Not a scrap of other mail. Nine catalogs.

Do we really look like people who would pay $99 for a sheaf of wheat?

(Don't answer that.)

Things That Shouldn't Work But Somehow Do

Strangely successful:

WAKE THE DEAD : Welcome to the WAKE THE DEAD website -- home of the World's First Celtic All-Star Grateful Dead Jam Band. The way this hot Northern California septet blends Celtic traditional music and the songs of the Grateful Dead is delighting Deadheads, folkies, jam band fans, and adventurous music lovers alike around the world.

Too Much Linear Algebra

You know too much linear algebra when...

You look at the long row of creamer pitchers at Peet's--soy, skim, low-fat, whole, and half-and-half--and think: "Why so many? Aren't soy, skim, and half-and-half a basis?"

Our Revels Are Now Ended

Shakespeare in the Berkeley Hills at night on October 15.... Well, come to think of it, it's no colder than Shakespeare in Regent's Park in London in mid-June...

America's Silliest Dog Strikes Back

Reactions to America's Silliest Dog^TM, Rancho Laguna Park, October 15 AM. America's Silliest Dog^TM is five years and three months old:

4: What a cute Lab puppy!
3: How old is your Lab puppy?
3: Off. Off! Down!!
2: How do you get your dog to run like that? I wish my dog would run.
2: How did your dog get so muddy?
1: Where did she find that branch?
1: No jump! No jump!
1: It must be nice to have a puppy.
1: When she grows up, you should get her a companion dog to play with to keep her active.

UPDATE: For some reason, nobody said: "I see your dog likes to roll in horse urine-soaked hay."

Eighteen Turkeys

Have we no coyotes? Have we no mountain lions?

There are eighteen turkeys--all now adult-sized frolicking by the pipe where the (seasonal) creek goes under the driveway. We have never seen this before.

How far is their range? Are these the same turkeys that we see from the Lafayette-Moraga trail as they forage for half-rotted pears in the abandoned pear orchards?

Brrrr...

August 19, and too cold to go to the pool after work. We have two ranges of hills between us and San Francisco Bay, which almost always shields us from the afternoon fog and makes it warm enough to go swimming.

Not today.

In Berkeley proper, however, they broke out the hooded sweatshirts and the gloves today as the fog spit drizzle.

The Message Must Be Meant for Los Angelenos...

It weirds me out to hear the PG&E announcer's voice over the radio, telling me to "To conserve energy, please don't turn your thermostat below 78F."

I mean, the outside temperature is 65F.

This is northern California, after all.

John "Bug Food" Muir

John Muir called Crescent Meadow "the gem of the Sierra."

John "Bug Food" Muir.

It's true that it was the wettest winter-spring in a hundred years. And it is the hottest day of what looks to be the hottest summer in the memory of California Man. But these mosquitoes are absolutely amazing. And the gnats! Never have I seen such large dense clouds of gnats in my life!

Make that John "Bear Bait" Muir. There's an adult black bear 200 feet ahead on the trail on the west side of Crescent Meadow.

Well, that certainly gets the adrenaline flowing...

Canon del Rio de los Reyes

Kings Canyon is absolutely beautiful. How come I have never been here before?

I do have one reprogramming request to make of the Universe. It seems that whenever we head for the mountains, hot weather follows us--so that we are far hotter at 6000 feet than we are at our 250-foot-above-sea-level house (where we did not even get air conditioning until 2003). Last time we went to Lake Tahoe it was 97F in Truckee. When we went to Yosemite it was 95F at the Merced River Bridge (and boy did yesterday's snow melt feel good!). When we went to Banff it was 90F--and when we dipped down onto the plain to go to the Royal Tyrrel "More Albertosaurus Skeletons Than You Ever Imagined Existed" Museum it touched 97F.

And now 93F here at Cedar Grove.

One more reprogramming request: the trail from Road's End to Mist Falls is indeed lovely, but Mist Falls generates insufficient mist. More mist!