Four-Eyes

About six months or so I took the Adrenaline Junkie in to get her eyes checked, as one of those innumerable routine doctors' appointments that seem to come all the time when you have three kids.

And, of course, the kids always ask the big question every time you load them up to take them to the doctor: is there going to be a shot today? Well, this time the answer was no. But she was going to get some drops in her eyes, and judging from the volume level of the unhappy victim, that was nearly as bad.

Basically the doctor threw a whole bunch of images up on the wall via projector, and had the Junkie try to identify them: house, airplane, etc. They have to do this with the youngest kids, since they don't necessarily know their letters well enough to tell you that the top line says "E".

And... the results were that the Junkie was developing a little near-sightedness in her right eye.

Thus the drops; the doctor wanted to dilate them to take a look inside and see if there was anything wrong.

His diagnosis at the time was that the left eye was fine, but that the right eye was borderline myopic--just over the edge from what is considered "normal". But he did say that kids are born myopic and often grow out of it; so we scheduled a six-month follow-up appointment to see if her eyesight would spontaneously fix itself.

Well, last week Tonya took her back in. The good news was that it hadn't gotten any worse. But the bad news was that it hadn't gotten any better, either.

So the doctor prescribed glasses. Basically, at this point the goal isn't so much to help her to see better; the goal right now is to get the eye working harder, in hopes that it will correct itself as she grows. So this set of glasses are basically reading glasses--the kind that would be used to help a far-sighted person see better.

Now, we have a bit of a fashion problem here.

The trouble is that in our family, we all have really small heads.

No personal jokes in the comments, please. There's nothing wrong with having really small heads that a well-adjusted family can't handle. And, as they keep telling us, it's not the size that counts, it's what you do with it....

Ahem.

But start with a three-year-old, and then figure that this three-year-old has been skimming the 5th percentile (or less) for head circumference ever since she was born.

Now try to find a pair of glasses that fits her. Good luck with that. Practically everything they tried came out looking horn-rimmed.

Ultimately they picked a pair of frames that was just about the smallest that they offered without having to be special ordered. (And they were pink. They had to be pink. Even three-year-olds take their accessories very seriously.)

Well, today the glasses were ready. What do you think?

Here's what I think.

Most of us, when seeing a picture of a kid, can make a pretty good guess how old the kid is. And even if you're not able to get it to within a year or two, you can at least tell that this one is a toddler or this one is in late elementary school or this one is in high school. To do this, we pick up on age clues. The most obvious of these is, of course, height.

But in a photograph, that clue often isn't there, and our guess of the age of the kid relies much more on the shape of the face, and the bodily proportions. In particular, large heads and tubby bodies tend to be more typical of younger kids; heads that are proportionally smaller, and bodies that are leaner, and legs that are proportionally longer, tend to clue us in that the subject of the picture is older.

The trouble is, our kids are:

1. Tall for their age. The Adrenaline Junkie is about 85th percentile for height; and
2. Slender. The Adrenaline Junkie is about 30th percentile for weight, and that's counting the fact that this weight is distributed on a taller frame; and
3. Small-headed. As I said above, the Junkie is 5th percentile on a good day, and often measures less.

Basically, they have the bodily proportions of much older kids. I sometimes wonder what they'll look like when they get to be teenagers; I suspect they'll have the build of magazine models, much like their mother did.

Now. Put a pair of glasses that's almost too wide on such a face, and it makes the face look longer and thinner, and thus--when you're dealing with a preschooler--much, much older.

Well, when I first saw my three-year-old daughter in glasses today--and especially when I took those pictures and looked at them without all the size context--I nearly freaked.

That three-year-old girl looks like a teenager to me. Especially in this one:

I'm thinking I need to get that shotgun now rather than later....

Boy, This Sure Takes A Lot Of Time, Doesn't It?

So I've discovered the problem that no doubt millions of bloggers have discovered before me.

You write a post.

Someone comments.

You respond to that comment. The response is a little longer than the comment.

The commenter comments back about your response. The commenter unpacks your response, and answers it one paragraph at a time. This comment is longer than the first.

So you respond to that comment. And you answer some points-of-order in the latest comment, then you do a little more exposition, then you do a point-by-point rebuttal. This response is longer than your previous response, longer than either of the comments, and (often) longer than the original post.

Then your Doppelganger decides to drop in, or some of those guys whose ego you stroked last month. And then they start dropping big, long meaty comments. And then you have to respond to those too.

And before you know it, it's 11:20 at night, you've been ignoring your wife, kids, and pets, and you haven't even blogged yet! This is a minor tragedy, if you've been trying to keep to one post a day. (Ok, not so much of a tragedy. I've missed many days this month so far, and the sky hasn't fallen. Yet....)

Solution?

That's right: try a little Meta-blogging!

So. In the absence of other stuff to write about, be it known that I've done a couple of post-length comments tonight on my Good News for California Homeschoolers post and my economics post, The Enemy Is Us.

I've got some good conversations going in the comments sections of both of these posts. Be forewarned, however, that if you post a comment, you might get a response. And then you'll have to answer it.

And you, like me, might wind up with no life.

I think we're all going to need group therapy....

Good News for California Homeschoolers

For those of you in the homeschooling world who haven't heard the news yet--especially those of you who homeschool in California--some very good news came out last Friday.

The California Second District Court of Appeal published its final decision on the In Re: Rachel L. case, which was the case that threatened to outlaw homeschooling for parents not possessing teaching credentials. According to my reading of this story from the L.A. Times, it looks like the court decided that the status quo--that parents are permitted to file the paperwork to establish private schools consisting of their own households--has been affirmed. And since state law does not require teaching credentials for private school teachers, the court affirmed that it doesn't require teaching credentials for homeschool parents who have done the paperwork to establish their private schools.

I was particularly struck by this passage the Times quoted from the decision:

It is important to recognize that it is not for us to consider, as a matter of policy, whether home schooling should be permitted in California. That job is for the Legislature. It is not the duty of the courts to make the law; we endeavor to interpret it...

Now, I happen to think that this judge gets it here--at least on this point. There are plenty of judges in this country who relish the chance to rule on policy.

However, while this is rightly considered a great victory for the homeschooling movement, I still think there are some storm clouds on the horizon. It's pretty obvious from some other quotes that the judge thinks the lack of homeschooling regulations in the law is a problem, and that the Legislature needs to address it. From the Times story:

"Our first task, interpreting the law of California, is made more difficult in this case by legislative inaction."

To that end, the court said additional requirements for home-schoolers in other states such as standardized testing or home visits should be considered by the California Legislature.

And you know, there are plenty of people in this state who are going to be chomping at the bit to get the Legislature to do just that. So continued vigilance on the part of homeschoolers is definitely called for. (Especially since Tonya and I--who between the two of us, have a Minor in Music, a Bachelors in History, a Bachelors in Computer Science, a Masters in Library science, a whole bunch of experience in our fields, and a whole bunch of other coursework in miscellaneous classes--have no intention at this time of going back to school to get credentials.)

And there's still an open question about those who homeschool under the umbrella-program paradigm, where parents enroll in a school that provides some minimum of oversight while the parents teach the curriculum at home. My understanding is that the litigants in the In Re: Rachel L. case were homeschooling under this arrangement.

(Quick background: in California, all children must attend public schools unless they meet one of three "exemptions:" they must either attend a private school, or they must have a credentialed tutor, or they must belong to a school that assigns the curriculum and does the testing, but allows the parents to teach the curriculum at home. Most homeschooling falls under the first of these: the parents file the paperwork to establish private schools. But there are a substantial number of homeschooling families that operate under the third of these exemptions. These are often called "umbrella" programs. One of the arguments in the In Re: Rachel L. case is that the Sunland Christian School, which administered their umbrella program, was allowing the Longs too much freedom, with not enough oversight, to be kosher under the law. This argument doesn't appear to have been decisively settled; the court that originally made that argument is now no longer involved with the Longs.)

Nevertheless, even with all the above caveats, this ruling is still good news.

A PDF file of the text of the decision, courtesy of the LA Times story, is here.

Calvin as a Teaching Tool? With Egyptians?

You know, it's weird how occasionally you'll start to see some theme, some concept, muscle its way into your life from many different unrelated directions at once.

Here's what I mean: you have a conversation with a family member about, say, Monarch Butterflies. And then, that evening, you flip on the TV to the Discovery Channel, and there's a show on about Monarch Butterflies. And then the next day, you go out in your yard to do some yardwork, and a Monarch Butterfly lands on your nose.

And you wonder whether the universe is trying to tell you something, and if so, what.

Well, our cosmic trajectory has just intersected with Calvin and Hobbes several times in the last few weeks, in ways that make us think that God is trying to tell us something. Could be worse, I suppose; he could have had our cosmic trajectory intersect with that of The Family Circle or something. And as much as I liked it, I'm not sure I'd want to start seeing in my life signs of The Far Side become immanent.


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It started with the Pillowfight Fairy, as so many things do these days.

She has developed an absolute love of Calvin and Hobbes. And we have both The Complete Calvin and Hobbes--containing every strip ever written--and The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, which contains much of Bill Watterson's commentary on his creation. So the Fairy has been known to wander over to the bookshelf, pull out Volume One (which is almost as heavy as she is), hoist it up on the table, and read it for hours--to herself or to anyone who will listen, punctuated by fits of 5-year-old giggles.

And we've noticed something of a problem. For one thing, she has started sassing back to her Mommy and me in much the same way that Calvin does to his parents. Now we've tried explaining to her that much of the humor in C&H comes from the fact that Calvin says things that we all think, but would never say because it's completely inappropriate; but first-graders never listen to reason (as you'd think we'd understand, given how much Calvin and Hobbes we've read ourselves...). Calvin is not known for his tolerance of authority. So when the Fairy starts emulating him, Mommy and I start thinking: This. Ends. Now.

Furthermore, we've noticed certain new phrases entering the Fairy's vocabulary that we never taught her. I mean, when she declares over her dinner: "This stuff smells like bat barf!"; when she calls her siblings "Booger Brain"; when she tells her Daddy, "That's what you think, Bucko...." We know that we weren't the ones who taught her that.

That, and she keeps trying to transmogrify the Adrenaline Junkie into a slug.

So a funny thought crossed our minds. One of these days, we're going to introduce the Fairy to the wonders of Shakespeare. If she keeps this up, she'll wind up going around addressing everyone, "Thou vile pig-born strumpet!" or somesuch. And hopefully, those who are literate enough to understand her will be too amused to be insulted....

But for now, we figured we had to set some boundaries. So we banished Calvin and Hobbes for the rest of the month, and let her know that it was because she was starting to act a wee bit too much like him.


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But like some kind of hideous alien zombie that keeps coming back even when you zap it, Calvin and Hobbes keeps popping back into our lives from weird dimensions. This next time, it sneaked up on us via the latest Carnival of Homeschooling. Barbara Frank submitted a post about the way that schools are depicted in C&H. Now, granted--the entire comic strip is written from Calvin's point of view; nevertheless, this post pointed out that there's not one positive depiction of school in the entire run of the comic strip. School is depicted as slavery, as torture, as something through which heroic adventurers demonstrate their heroism by escaping. Dramatically.

And Ms. Frank made the observation that C&H has become particularly beloved among homeschooling circles precisely because of its view of traditional, institutionalized schooling. Of course, it's a great comic strip for many other reasons; but given that many, many homeschoolers have had bad experiences with the public schools--either during their own childhoods, or with their own kids' schooling--the depiction of the schools in C&H resonates with many of them.

And it was also pointed out in the comments that Calvin and Hobbes is a great tool for teaching reading. It's funny, for everyone from the youngest kids up to the oldest grandparents, even though it uses really big words. You introduce young kids to it, and they will learn to read specifically so they can enjoy the humor in it.

(Incidentally, while I haven't been reporting on the Carnivals lately, there continues to be a lot of good stuff in them. This post is about the neurological processes associated with language and with reading, with a brief exploration of how this happens in Asperger's kids. And there are two posts, here and here, about the differences between gifted kids (and adults!) and their more "normal" peers, and how these differences need to be approached and handled. Gifted kids often have it tough, in many ways. This stuff is worth a look.)


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Well, even though we banned Calvin for a month, the Fairy still has Calvin on the brain.

Wednesday we took a bunch of art supplies with us to the singing practice we were holding at Church. The idea was, of course, that Daddy would sing with the group (in preparation for Sunday's service), while the girls quietly, peaceably doodled.

(Of course, these ideas never quite work out as nicely as we hope. This may be related to the Fairy's affinity for Calvin, after all, but it doesn't explain the Adrenaline Junkie. She is explained by the fact that she's three....)

Well, one of the teen girls present was sketching out a profile of a very Manga-styled character, and was lettering a very stylized title for her creation down the side of the page. The Fairy saw this, and thought it was a great idea, so she pulled out her crayons and doodled....

Matching the layout of the Manga-inspired work of the other young lady. And then, before she ran out of time and we had to go home:
Yeah, she loves Calvin and Hobbes. I was pretty impressed, actually.


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Now, in our homeschooling, we're following the scope and sequence recommended in The Well-Trained Mind, by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. And in this sequence, History of the Ancient World is covered (the first time) in the First Grade. So the Fairy has been learning about the Ancient Egyptians now for the last couple of weeks (since we decided to start our school year in July). And today, Tonya read for her from a (very old) library book entitled The Art of Ancient Egypt. Now, Egyptian art was of course very stylized. The book mentioned that there were several rules that this art had to follow (particularly when depicting people with social status):

One rule was to paint a clear outline and fill in with color. Another was to paint the head and legs from the side, and the shoulders and eyes from the front. That is why you see parts of the front and side of the figure at the same time.

Very interesting, of course; but a bit abstract if you're only five. Tonya tried to have the Fairy narrate back what she had heard; but it hadn't stuck.

So Tonya had a sudden flash of genius. The best way to teach the rules of Egyptian art, is to make the Fairy do a picture (she loves drawing) in which she has to obey the rules of Egyptian art! And Tonya let the Fairy choose the subject of the portrait.

Guess whom she decided to draw in the Egyptian idiom?
Let's see... shoulders viewed from the front, check. Feet viewed from the side (pointing the same way), check. Head from the side view, check. Almond-shaped Eye, viewed from a frontal perspective, check. Hips and legs from the side, check. Strongly outlined, fully colored in, check.

I think she got it. This image is ready to go on the inside of a tomb, with Anubis balancing his heart on the scales before Osiris to see whether he's ready to enter the afterlife. (Although my foreboding tells me that something really weird is about to happen in the next frame....)

Anyway, to lock in the lesson, Tonya had the Fairy do a written narration. These are the instructions on how to do an Egyptian-style drawing, as understood by the Fairy:

(Side note: We are having the Fairy use lined paper with each capital letter about 1/2 inch tall. We started using the new size of paper when we began her first-grade year in July. Prior to this, the paper we used had lines spaced about twice as far apart, giving letters that were a full inch tall. We noticed that, the moment we started using this paper, her writing became much more neat, much more regular, and much prettier. We can only conclude that writing smaller letters, for one who has mastered basic pencil skills, is much easier than writing the big stuff. It's faster, too.)

The Enemy Is Us

Ok, I've been duly baited. In a post where he shares some good personal news, Roger Z takes a little digression and gives me a little shout-out:

First, a quick shout out to Chris and another hello to Tim- thanks Tim for blogging me I've now quadrupled my readership this month (you, Chris, and me... twice). Chris apparently lives down in the mountains of north Georgia, which I've been through once and are a beautiful, enchanting place, as is most of the southern Apps. Glad you stopped by and I'll be checking out your blog from time to time to make sure you're getting your economics straight. :)

Well Roger, just so happens that I've been mulling over some economic thoughts, so I think I should put them out here and let you grade them.


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We've all been hit hard by the recent spike in fuel prices, and as has become traditional in our society, our first response to this--even before we try to find solutions--is to figure out whom to blame.

That's right! If we can find out who's behind this mess, who's benefiting from it, and just make them pay, we can get back in control of the situation with a just solution.

And it would appear that the favorite bogeyman in the present crisis is Big Oil. After all, the accusation goes, just look at the revenue they're bringing in! We're getting reamed at the pumps, and they're seeing record profits. Obviously they're profiteering, making a killing at our expense!

Now, they aren't the only targets. There's also Congress; and there are the oil speculators; and there's OPEC; and so on, and so on. But the oil companies seem to come in for the worst criticism.

Now, I'm going to say something that will probably make some of you think that I'm an idiot, or that I'm "In the Pockets of Big Oil" (as if--we could certainly use the money): Big Oil isn't the problem here.

We are.

That's right, we--those of us who use the gas, are the ones who (in the current circumstance) set the prices so high.

But before the flame war starts, let me go back to first principles and give an explanation.


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Imagine a traditional auction. Say a long-lost Van Gogh has just been discovered in someone's attic, and the discoverer has taken it to Christie's to have it auctioned off. The thing sells for the ridiculously high price of seven million dollars.

First question: who's responsible for setting that ridiculously high price?

If you said "That greedy seller did," you owe me a kewpie doll. ;-)

The correct answer, of course, is that the price was set by the wealthiest and most desperate buyer. In a traditional auction, the would-be buyers are in fact competing with each other; whoever is willing and able to bid higher than all the others, is the one who sets the final sale price. And the more desperate the buyers are to win, the higher the bidding goes. In this instance, the seller is not responsible for setting the final sale price; the buyer offered to pay seven million dollars, and all the seller did was agree to the buyer's price.


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Now imagine a commodities market. In a much-simplified sense, they should be considered two-way auctions: There are numerous sellers--oil production companies, oil export companies, government producers, and the like. And there are also numerous buyers--retail gas companies, refineries, militaries, manufacturers, etc.

The buyers are under pressure to secure the oil they need for their operations; after all, if they don't get everything they need, they may have to scale back operations and cede market share. They'd like to get a low price, obviously, but they may not be able to hold out long enough for those low prices, or they will get outbid by the other buyers and not secure the supplies they need.

There are two ways that a buyer can make a trade. A buyer can look at all the asking prices that the various sellers have posted for their product; and if the lowest asking price is low enough, the buyer can say, "I'll take it." Alternatively, the buyer can decide that none of the existing asking prices are good enough, and can post a lower bid, in hopes that some desperate seller will come along and accept it--which is by no means guaranteed.

The sellers are under pressure, as well. They have oil, but they need money. Now, they would obviously like to get the highest price they can, but if they set too high an asking price, they run the risk of being undercut by one of their competitors who's just a little more desperate to trade.

As with the buyer, there are two ways that a seller can make a trade. A seller can look at all the bids that the various buyers have posted; and if the highest bid is high enough, the seller can accept it. Alternatively, the seller can decide that the bids are all too low, and can post a higher asking price in hopes that some desperate buyer will come along--again, which is not guaranteed.

Thus, a two-way auction. The buyers are competing against each other for the supply. And this competition among the buyers tends to push the prices up, as each buyer has to top the others' bids in order to make the trade. Likewise, the sellers are competing against each other for the demand. And this competition among the sellers tends to push the prices down, as each seller has to undercut the others in order to make the trade.

So who determines the final sale price in a commodities market?

Answer: Whoever is most desperate to make the trade. If the buyer is more desperate than the seller, the buyer looks at the lowest available asking price--whatever it is--and says, "I'll take it." If the seller is more desperate than the buyer, the seller looks at the highest available bid--whatever it is, and says, "I'll take it."

So if you're trying to figure out which way the price of oil will go (which, according to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, is a fool's errand), what you would need to know is whether the Buyers or the Sellers are going to be more desperate to make the trade. If the buyers are more desperate, they will bid the prices up, as each tries to secure its own supply before the other guys get it all. If the sellers are more desperate--like they were in the mid-eighties, when Iran and Iraq were desperately flooding the market with oil to bring in the cash to finance their war efforts--they will start competing against each other on price, and the buyers can pick and choose among them, bringing the prices down.


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Ok. So how do the prices work their way through to the pump? Well, it is the fear of every gas retail outlet that they will wind up running out, and have to place a "No Gas Today" sign on their pumps. Not only is that really bad PR, it winds up losing them both revenue and market share. So if they expect to sell x gallons, they must first secure a supply of x gallons (or the oil needed to make x gallons). That means, when supply is short in the markets, they must fight all the more desperately to get their supply.

Short supply causes desperation in the buyers; desperation in the buyers causes the price of oil to go up. This gets passed on to the end user--us.

If they can't get enough supply to meet their needs, they do the next best thing: they raise their prices even more. This, of course, drives some of their customers away to their competitors. It reduces their market share; but it also reduces the amount they have to supply, so it means they don't get to the point where they run out. And meanwhile, now the competitors have to figure out how to get that much more supply on the markets.

This, simply stated, is the first half of the law of supply and demand. When there is a glut, the buyers get to pick and choose whichever deal they want; the sellers are competing against each other, and this dynamic pushes the price down. When there is a shortage, the sellers get to pick and choose whichever deal they want; the buyers are competing against each other, and this dynamic pushes the price up.

The price of gas has gone up, because we the buyers are more desperate to buy than the oil producers are to sell. By competing against each other, we the consumers pushed the price up.


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Now, the second half of the law of supply and demand is just as important as the first, but is often overlooked. It's this second half that makes the Free Market the most efficient form of economy ever developed by Man.

Those prices themselves cause changes in production and consumption patterns, that tend to eliminate both the gluts and the shortages--so long as well-intentioned politicians don't get in the way.

When a shortage causes prices to soar, as they have done over the last two years, two things happen. First, the consumers of the commodity--out of a desire for financial survival--try to figure out how to cut back, or how to utilize alternatives. In the case of gas prices, if they stay high enough for long enough, people start thinking about how they can get through their days while using less fuel. They start tuning up their cars and fully inflating the tires; they start catching rides from friends and carpooling instead of going alone; they run several errands in a row instead of lots of little ones; they walk and bike more; they use mass transit. If the prices stay high a bit longer, people start changing their car-buying habits--going with economy cars, or going diesel or hybrid. And if it goes on long enough, it can make alternative fuel sources attractive--such as fuels derived from coal, or algae, or natural gas. The net effect of all of this is to reduce the demand side of the equation, eliminating part of the shortage.

Second, the producers of the commodity are faced with huge profits, and a simultaneous opportunity to grab market share--so long as they can beat their competitors to market. The high prices give the producers both the money needed to expand their operations, and the motive to do so. It also gives producers of alternatives an opening; that is, if the big players can't or won't boost their production, occasionally alternate technologies come along that become very attractive. (I think of how the Cable monopolies, who were slow to respond to public upset about their service, wound up losing a huge chunk of their market share when regular satellite TV service came on the scene.) In the case of our current fuel woes, there are a bunch of alternate technologies on the horizon--from plug-in hybrids, to biodiesel, to coal-to-liquids technology--that will be ready to step in to the gap in just a couple of years if OPEC fails to see the light. Anyway, in sum: the high prices set processes in motion that increase the supply side of the equation, eliminating the other part of the shortage.

Given enough time, the high prices cause changes in both supply and demand that eliminate the shortage, which causes the prices to settle to a new equilibrium point.

(And a similar process works to eliminate gluts and excess capacity; if there's more on the market that is needed, the prices go down. This both spurs consumption and reduces production, until the glut is resolved; then the prices rise back to a new equilibrium point.)


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So if we want to lower gas prices, how do we do it?

Basically, we have to make the consumers less desperate to trade than the producers. We have to get to the point that the producers are concerned about whether they'll be able to sell all their product at good prices, as opposed to the consumers being concerned about whether they'll be able to get what they need. To get the prices down, we have to get the producers trying to undercut each other again, instead of the consumers trying to outbid each other, like we have now.

And the way to do this? Supply and Demand.

On the demand side, this means doing those things that we all know we should be doing--conserving what fuel we can. Inflating our tires will help a little (though not as much as some famous politicians think); trip-linking will help some; carpooling; looking for more efficient vehicles; all of that will help.

Some. But I'm convinced that this isn't really enough. Our country is growing in population, after all. And we are competing for our oil against the massively growing economies of China and India, which are consuming ever-increasing quantities of the stuff. I think conservation is a good thing; but I don't think that our conservation efforts will be enough over time to supply our reasonable demands.

In the long term, I would certainly expect to see technological advances providing us alternatives to fossil fuels. We already have hybrids; soon we'll start to see plug-in hybrids which (for many of us commuters) will be able to reduce our gas consumption by an order of magnitude. Tesla Motors is out with an all-electric performance car. And there's been plenty of research lately into fuel cell technology. And then, there is all the research being done into cellulosic ethanol, coal-to-liquids, oil shale (which for the record Roger Z doesn't like), biodiesel, and a bunch of others. I see some combination of these eventually becoming standard in our transportation infrastructure.

But that won't happen immediately.

In the medium term, we've got to get more supply online. The good news is, we have enough resources within the US and off our coasts that we can at least make a decent-sized dent in our import needs, if we decide we really want to get at it. And given that the price of oil is highly non-linear, a decent-sized dent is probably all we really need to bring the price down to reasonable levels, at least until more long-term alternatives come online.


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Here's the trouble. This was stated very eloquently by Robert A. Heinlein's character, Lazarus Long:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

While long-term high prices set in motion the structural changes that eliminate the shortages over the long term, they are very unpopular. This often causes us to look to our politicians to give us "solutions" that punish the "bad guys" (who aren't), ignore the underlying supply-and-demand problem, and short-circuit the solution the Free Market would bring us if only we would let it. As I said in my previous economics post:

The trouble is, these solutions are quite popular, precisely because they are intended to alleviate suffering. Politicians win elections by running on platforms containing these solutions. It is probably to be expected then, that long-term, continuous, unimpeded economic growth is likely to be rare in human affairs; there are too many incentives for people in power to do precisely those things that derail the train.

So the price goes up, and who do we blame? The Oil Companies! What do we do about it? Well, we need to teach them a lesson, and let them know that avarice does not pay! Especially when they are taking money out of the pockets of the little guy!

Well....

Turns out, the reason their profits are so high is not that the oil companies are charging so much; it's that they're selling so much product. They actually have quite modest profit margins, compared to many other industries, in part because they are the ones paying those exorbitant prices to import all that oil on our behalf:

In the first quarter of 2008, Big Oil had a profit margin of 7.4 percent. Over that same period, the pharmaceutical and medicine industry earned a 25.9 percent profit, the chemical industry earned 15.7 percent and the electronic equipment industry earned 12.1 percent.

...

Let's take a look at where each dollar spent at the pump goes. In the first quarter of 2008, the majority – 70 cents – was spent to purchase crude oil, 17 cents was spent on refining and retailing, and 13 cents on paying taxes.

Yeah, the oil companies are unpopular. But this is one of those cases where if we decide to punish them for their alleged perfidy--especially given that we are the ones who drove up the gas prices in the first place--it will be a textbook case of "biting the hand that feeds us". I think this cartoon has the right take on the whole thing....

If we really want the price to come down, the best thing Congress can do is open up federal lands for exploration and drilling. The worst thing Congress can do is demand its pound of flesh from the companies that will be doing this exploration and drilling.

It all comes back to Supply and Demand.

Introducing the Next Backyard Project

Well, we decided that things had been a little too quiet around here lately.

[Insert sound of record scratching....]

Well, we decided that summer was wearing on, and there were some projects we needed to finish up in the backyard before the rainy season starts. So on Friday, we ordered twelve cubic yards of cedar bark.

Why so much? Well, we did a simple calculation: get a sense of the surface area that we want covered, multiply by three inches deep, convert your units properly (very important!), and pray that you didn't carry the two into the wrong column, or you'll wind up with enough bark to fill your yard up to your knees. Tonya's initial calculation would have done just that, by the way; it was high by at least a factor of three.

It was delivered on Saturday in a decent sized dump truck. Trouble is, the dump truck was too big to fit back into our RV pad; there's a roof overhang that just gets in the way. So we had the truck dump the stuff right in the middle of our driveway (and yes, we did think to move our cars out of the way first).

And then I started moving it. One... wheelbarrow-full... at... a... time....

My daughters had been watching a VeggieTales video earlier in the day. So when the Pillowfight Fairy came out and saw what I was doing, she remembered the moral message of the video and helpfully pointed out: "You need to use Perseverance."

No kidding. Ya think?

So what does twelve cubic yards look like? Well, this is slightly less than that:
That is not, as it would appear, a slightly obese Horta. That is my load of cedar chips, after I'd spent a good three or four hours (in hundred-five-degree heat) moving it, one barrow at a time, up our driveway. I had used Perseverence! And as a reward for exhibiting this virtue, by the time I was done I had an intensely crimson sunburn on both arms and my neck, I was covered with grit, dust, and sweat, my back and arms hurt (they still do), and my boogers were jet black.

Whoever said virtue is its own reward? ;-)

...

So, what are we going to do with this stuff?

Well, when we're done, much of our backyard planter areas will look something like this:
Under all that, Tonya first laid out some water-permeable ground-cloth, which hopefully will keep the weeds from getting too established. Then I dumped several loads of bark on it, and Tonya and the Fairy spread it out with rakes. The Fairy was being about as helpful as a five-year old can be; which is to say, the bark was getting shifted into big lumpy mounds. It probably would have been quicker for Mommy to do the raking by herself. But her help was still appreciated. We like getting the kids involved in work like this; the more we do it, the sooner we'll get to the point where the kids' help is actually helpful.

...

Of course, it was at this point that we discovered that the bark is much, much dirtier than the underlying, um... dirt. The moment the kids discovered the changes to their backyard, they were all over the stuff, and they came back inside a little later looking like coal miners. We suspect that it'll take a few good rainstorms to come along and wash the dust down to the ground, before the kids can play on it for three minutes without earning an automatic bath. And that big glandular Horta on the RV pad is just too much temptation to resist for anyone under the age of ten (and for a whole bunch of us above the age of ten too, I might add).

But it's a good kind of dirty.

And our backyard now smells like a cedar forest floor. I'll bet heaven smells like this. Without all that dust, of course. Or the black boogers....

Every Dad's Nightmare

So I was playing outside yesterday with my kids, and my eldest daughter (age 5), without a trace of presumptuous or mischief in her voice, matter-of-factly announced that:

I'm the kind of kid who disobeys.

Hoo boy. The more I thought about it, the bigger the cold shiver that ran down my spine....

If This Ever Happens, I'm Ready...

So I mentioned back in June that I got myself a Rubik's cube, and I learned (from the instructions) how to solve it.

But! Over the last month or so, I've figured out a few "algorithms" on my own. These are sequences of moves that produce a specific effect on the orientation of the squares. In particular, I figured out an eight-move algorithm that swaps the positions of three edge squares--two on opposite sides of the center face, and the third on the far back edge of the top face.

Well, having figured out this algorithm, I've been able to create my own solution sequence. Not that I claim that it's original; I suspect zillions of people have discovered it before me. And to be fair, my solution incorporates a couple of the algorithms from the solution sequence in the instruction booklet. Nevertheless, it has removed at least a smidgen of the shame that I mentioned back in June.

I own this cube.

...

Enter today's XKCD comic strip, which is probably Not Safe For Work.

I tell you, if my wife ever gets stuck in one of those, I'm ready for it. ;-)

Ok, Maybe Not That Icky

Update: Broken link fixed.


Well, after that post I did about the need to read the Icky Bible stories (not just the pleasant Bible stories), we've decided that we've reached the limit of our Ick tolerance.

The story?

Sodom and Gomorrah, 'natch.

Not the whole story, of course; the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is certainly one that every Bible student needs to learn, even the young ones. However, we've pretty well decided to leave out the parts that describe the wickedness of the two cities--specifically, the events that happened when the two messengers from God arrived at Lot's house.

Now, it's not so much the Ick factor here. Rather, it's that we'd have to explain a whole lot of interesting facts-of-life stuff to our five-year-old before she could even understand what's going on in this story--what it was that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were actually telling Lot to do, for instance. (Not to mention the really icky response that supposedly-righteous Lot gave them.)

Fact is, even though my oldest daughter is only five, my wife and I have been tossing around ideas about how and when to do the "facts-of-life" discussions with her--when she reaches an appropriate age and developmental level.

Presenting these ideas first in the context of a discussion of Sodom and Gomorrah? Let's just say that this is not the "how", and now is not the "when."

Incidentally, we've decided to hold off on the bit about Lot's daughters for much the same reasons.


...


As a side note, I've noticed something ironic about the translation that we're using. The New International Reader's Version, in trying to put things in such a way that a third-grade-level reader can understand them, is actually a bit more explicit in its language than those hoary old translations with the high-sounding language. Where the King James Version (some of the other old translations) use terms like "Lay with" or "knew" (as in, "He knew his wife, and she begat a son..."), the NIrV just comes out and says things like "have sex with" or "make love to."

This seems a little ironic to my mind, actually; the language of the KJV and other old translations obscures the meaning to the point that the Icky stuff doesn't sound quite so Icky. You can't actually understand what it's saying, but it sure sounds good....

Whereas the NIrV, aiming at beginning readers, puts the stuff in terms that anyone can understand (so long as they've already had the whole facts-of-life thing explained), and that Ick just sits out there--blatant, unavoidable, and festering. These stories just sound more disgusting in a translation intended for young readers, than they do in the translation that exists as a cornerstone in the Canon of English literature. Go figure.


...


Of course, it's not just the Bible. The Pillowfight Fairy has been learning about Ancient Egypt as part of her history and literature studies as well, and part of this involves regular reading of some of the Egyptian myths. Tonya decided to ixnay the next story on the list.

Basically, the story involved all the Egyptian gods getting angry with each other and nearly getting in a fight--which almost provoked the sun-god and chief of all gods, Ra, to blow his stack and wipe out the lot of them. But his daughter Hathor, who normally was known as The Destroyer (and who was so dangerous that even the other gods all feared her tremendously), decided to do something to get them to calm down. So she went out in their midst and did the ancient Egyptian version of the Dance of the Seven Veils. This made all the other gods quite happy. Even Ra (Hathor's father) poked his head out to see what all the cheering was about, and saw his daughter, Hathor The Destroyer, dancing naked; which gave even him a bit of a chuckle.

Yeah, now that story is a good idea. Let's read to our little girl about how dancing naked makes everyone--including your Daddy--really, really happy!

Ummm...

(Incidentally, Arby's got a very good story along these lines here).


...


Ok, so I realize that these decisions totally contradict much of what we decided in that earlier post. Oh, well.

But you know, I suspect this is just part of what it means to be a parent. There are times when X makes sense; there are times when X would be utterly foolhardy; and there is no hard and fast rule that can tell you which is the right thing to do right now. Kids can't be raised as though they were robots; and robots aren't capable of raising kids either. There are very few set rules in parenting, except among those parents who haven't been parents very long.

So, we'll keep flipping forward through these books. We'll save the gratuitous nudity until they're a little older, and in the meantime we'll flip forward to those stories that have somewhat more child-friendly topics.

Like Beheadings.


...


By the way: coming up soon in my daughter's readings of Genesis?

The Covenant of Circumcisison.

Hoo boy.

The Trouble With New Computer Games

I've noticed a bit of a pattern here.

Ok, Shortly after my wife and I first got married, one of our first purchases was a new computer. We made this purchase back in 2000 or 2001--can't remember which--and, in order to save some cash (just starting out, you know), we didn't get the top-of-the line machine.

Which was just fine. For the kinds of things we did with it, we didn't need all that much power. Still don't, for the most part. It's not like we're trying to simulate nuclear implosions or anything. Simple spreadsheets, Internet access, the occasional game--and most of these games are the strategy games, not the really graphics-intensive 3-D shoot-'em-ups.

So we were content.

That is, we were content for about five years or so. And then our computer started hiccuping. First, our DVD drive began to give up the ghost. This was an absolute tragedy. You see, we don't keep a TV around here, and we don't subscribe to cable; so if we want to watch something, we have to have it on disk. And the drive must work. So when that drive died, our kids thought the world had ended.

It hadn't, of course. We would have been fine. But! We parents sometimes succumb to the temptation to use the 'tube as a babysitter, and while we try to keep this to the minimum around here, it sure is handy to be able to pop in a disk and get just a little time to ourselves to get something done. So we tried buying and installing a new DVD drive, and that worked--sort of. It frequently hung in the middle of our disks, which caused much wailing among our kids....

Off topic. So about this time we saw the game Pirates! in the store. Now, I very fondly remembered the earlier version of this game from the late '80's. It was addicting. One could play that game all night--and I'm afraid I came close to doing so on occasion. And it did wonders for one's knowledge of Caribbean geography. So of course, we made an impulse buy.

And we couldn't get it to run on our system at home. The our then-six-year-old video board wasn't beefy enough to handle it.

Well, we figured that our computer was old enough anyway. With all the glitches it was having, and the fact that it wasn't quite powerful enough for all the new software that was coming out, we figured it was time. So early 2006 we plunked down the moolah and bought our current system.

Finally, we could watch videos again! And we could play Pirates! And it was every bit as addicting as I remember.

Fast forward to early summer 2008. We download the Spore Creature Creator, which I blogged about here. The girls love playing this, and frequently take turns. (Or rather, the Pillowfight Fairy "lets" the Adrenaline Junkie "make" a monster--by dictating the parts that she wants, while the Fairy--with her superior motor skills--actually mans the mouse.) But, we've noticed something weird; occasionally we get buggy graphics--odd shapes that shouldn't be there, garbled bitmaps for some of the icons, that sort of thing. Now, I realize that this software could in fact be buggy. It could be that all us users are actually being used by Maxis as unwitting Beta-testers.

But the fear remains...

Fast forward to this weekend. We pick up a copy of Caesar IV, by Sierra. We've got all the minimum system requirements, so we install it, and it works! It runs! I play a scenario...

Then my wife monopolizes the machine, and plays about a scenario and a half, whereupon the system crashes. So she restarts it from the last Autosave, plays to almost the exact same spot in the scenario, and it crashes again. So I come back, start playing my own game, get to the same spot my wife was in, and... it crashes.

Hangs the system--cold-boot required.

So I look through what troubleshooting stuff I can find, and get the boilerplate stuff:

• Turn off all "unnecessary software", like virus checkers. Right. Uh-huh.
  
• Upgrade your video device driver. I looked into this. First step: uninstall your current device driver. I decided to pass, in case there were some other easier things to do first.
• Go into the game settings, and dial down the detail levels...

I decided to start with this last one. My wife and I noticed that the crashes all occurred just after we had placed fountains in our cities. So I clicked off on the "animate water" option, and tried it again. It crashed.

So I got online to look at the tech support forums. (Forums? Fora? Forae? I think the proper plural should be Fora. This is Rome we're talking about, after all.)

And as I was reading through all the entries from dissatisfied users, the thought hit me: I'm here reading through a technical forum for a game! Does anything strike you as odd about this picture? I mean, most of the time, when I'm reading through technical fora, it's because I'm trying to figure out how some feature of Oracle works; or how Kodo and other Java-Relational mapping systems are supposed to work; I'm generally trying to track down and fix some kind of hairy bug in my software. Here I'm reading through a forum, trying to find the magic bullet that will get my silly game up and running! What's the world coming to?

Oh, there were lots of suggestions, all right. But there were dark forebodings. Seems our graphics card (ATI Radeon X600) doesn't like Caesar IV. But some users with this video board had no problems at all; others could get it to work, but only if they set their game (or Operating System) settings just right; others couldn't get the game to work at all with that video board, no matter what they tried.

Well, I started trying solutions. The first one involved changing the way the OS allocated resources to the system cache. This "solution" caused hard crashes on bootup; we had to start in "safe mode" and revert to the previous state before we could do a normal boot-up.

Ultimately we figured out something that works, which was quite a relief for us. Basically, we turned off water and weather effects, and set the "Master Particle Density" setting (used for rendering fire and water) to its lowest setting. So far, we haven't had any further problems.

But this sort of thing bodes ill for the future. That is, so long as we continue to play new games on our system. (And I am so looking forward to Spore this September...). When you get a new computer, you can generally expect to be able to play any game already on the market. But game designers are motivated to design their games to the newest and best video and audio equipment out there. They want their graphics to look good. They want shadows! They want reflections! They want fire and water! They want fog and dust clouds! They want ray tracing! And so they program their games to make the maximum use of any hardware available. And since the state of the art is always advancing, it doesn't take long before that computer you just bought can't play that new game, and now that one, and now that one...

So for a serious gamer (and I'm not one), it's never enough to buy the new game. You have to be prepared to upgrade your video driver on a regular basis (and often, new versions of the drivers are written specifically because some popular new game comes out that uncovers previously-undetected bugs in the old drivers). More than that, you have to be willing to throw out and replace your entire video board semi-regularly. And by semi-regularly, that may be measured in two-year increments or less. And at the rate new processors become available, and how fast they are improving, it becomes inevitable that last year's CPU is not quite fast enough for this year's game, and the previous year's CPU is hopelessly outdated--so the serious gamer has to replace the entire computer after not much more than two years or so.

Good thing I'm not a serious gamer. I've barely gotten used to our new computer. Have we really already had it for two years?

But when I think about it, it's clock speed alone is nearly a thousand times faster than that of the system I got just out of college, back in 1995--not to mention that puny little pipsqueak of a processor that they used to guide the Apollo astronauts to the moon!


...


I remember back in the '80's when the conventional wisdom was that the dedicated game consoles were likely to go the way of the Dodo. After all, a computer could do everything a console could, and then some.

The conventional wisdom was wrong. The game consoles had an advantage that no computer could match:

They were standardized.

You don't have to worry about whether your Game Cube has a beefy enough video board. You don't have to ask whether your PlayStation has a fast enough CPU. You don't have to worry about whether your WII has gone obsolete. These consoles have standardized hardware and operating systems; if a game runs perfectly on one, it'll run on any of that type. Software testing of these games is much more straightforward, because the testers don't have to test a thousand different configurations of CPU, Motherboard, Video Board, Audio board, and all those driver versions.

You have the console, you buy the game, and it'll work. Period. It only goes obsolete when people stop making games for it.

You don't have to go through the exercise, as I did with Caesar IV, of trying to debug someone else's software.


...


So my system, even at the tender young age of two, is fast facing obsolescence--so far as gaming is concerned. Ah, well, 'twas inevitable, I suppose.

I just hope it holds on until Spore is safely up and running. ;-)