The eighties are not known as a time of soul bearing honesty (see Iran-Contra), but eighties music is full of cheesy earnestness about love in its various messy forms. Eighties singers told the hard truths even when it made them look weak. Here are four great examples of eighties guys who weren’t afraid to play the victim:

• Everything She Wants (by Wham, 1984): George Michael is having a rough time with a no-good money-grubbing girlfriend. I smile every time he finds out she’s pregnant and says “If my best isn’t good enough, how can it be good enough for two? I can’t work any harder than I do!” Maybe this was the incident that turned him off women forever? Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

• I’ve Done Everything For You (Rick Springfield, 1981): Based on my analysis of his catalog, this guy seems like he was just a bad boyfriend. He lusted after his friend Jessie’s girl. He told his girl not to talk to strangers. And here he says “I’ve done everything for you; you’ve done nothing for me!” At least he was good looking!

• Don’t You Want Me?(by The Human League, 1981) This is another case of a guy who did everything–“I picked you out, I shook you up, and turned you around” and she’s got the nerve to dump him. What’s unique in this song is that she gets the opportunity to tell her side of the story.

• The Rain (by Oran Juice Jones, 1986): Here’s where we see that eighties male victimhood crossed race lines. The best part of the song is when we listen in on Mr. Jones confronting his cheating girlfriend and telling her “You gotta get on outta here with that alley-cat-coat-wearing, punch-bucket-shoe-wearing crumbcake I saw you with. Cause you dismissed!”

This post has moved to Teach Better.

I like Paul Krugman a lot–we’re both liberals and believe strongly in the value of big government and thougtful regulation. Unfortunately, he sometimes has strong opinions about things he hasn’t thought through. That’s my only explanation for his recent article on the “cruelty” of raising the Social Security retirement age–a policy I think is smart on almost every dimension.

The Social Security system was designed after the Great Depression to do two things: keep old people out of poverty and insure against disability that prevents people from working to support themselves. The disability insurance part of Social Security is less well-known than its retirement benefits but is very important and I have nothing to say about it today. You’ll note that I didn’t mention a third objective: funding a long retirement for most people after they’ve worked a sufficient number of years. The Social Security system is expected to provide this now, but it certainly wasn’t at the beginning.

In 1930, the average white 20 year old male could be expected to live to age 66 (source). If he made it to age 40, he could expect to live to age 69, and if he made it to age 50, his expected age of death increased to about 72 years. During the bulk of the years he contributed to Social Security, he was expecting a fairly short (1 to 7 year) period after age 65 when he could actually retire with full benefits. Even FDR didn’t see the goal as funding people’s “golden years”:

"We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against
one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we
have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection
to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job
and against poverty-ridden old age."

-- President Roosevelt upon signing Social Security Act ([source](http://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html))

Contrast this with the experiences of people in 2004 (the latest year I could easily find data). A 20 year old expected to live to 77 years, a 40 year old to 78 years, and a 50 year old to 79 years. The expected duration of retirement ranged from 12 to 14 years. Krugman is right that the expected length of retirement upon reaching age 65 has not changed all that much (from 14 years to almost 20 years), but that’s irrelevant to people’s expectations during working life.

Other things have changed since the Social Security was enacted too. While original benefits were high enough to keep retirees out of poverty, modern levels replace a much larger fraction of income. Jobs are a lot less physically demanding today. In 1940, 26.7% of those employed worked on farms or did miscellaneous forms of physical labor relative to just 5.9% in 1990. And in 1940, only 21.3% of workers were managers, officials, clerical workers, or professionals. This ballooned to more than half the work force by 1990. (More detailed breakdowns here). Finally, I’m pretty sure physical health of those who do survive to 65 is better now than it has been in the past though I couldn’t easily find data to back that up.

Most people who reach 65¹ are strongly enouraged by the incentives in the Social Security system to retire even though they are perfectly capable of being highly productive members of the work force. I believe their experience is a huge untapped resource for the economy. But what of the people that Krugman is worried about: Those who worked physically stressful jobs for years and at age 65 don’t expect to live all that much longer. I have a heart and I worry about this group too. Suppose we let people retire at age 65 but capped their benefits at a relatively low level. This constraint would be unbinding for those who worked low paying (and more likely physically demanding) jobs. At the same time, it would encourage relatively wealthier (and healthier) folks to work until they were, say, 70 years old. If wealthier people really want to retire earlier, they can save more during their working lives and rely on Social Security for what it was designed: insurance against poverty in old age. We all win!

benefits at 62 and higher benefits if they wait until the “full retirement age” of 65. The amounts are designed to make the people fairly indifferent between the two dates. In the next few years, the full retirement age will be going up to age 67 (details here).

About a week before Halloween, R and I raided the library’s selection of Halloween-appropriate picture books. I’ve felt guilty before about skimming the cream but hopefully sharing what we learned will balance out the karma. Before I start, I know what you’re thinking: “It’s the middle of November! Who cares about Halloween? How about sharing something useful like the top 10 Thanksgiving picture books?” Don’t worry, that’ll be here before Christmas. In the meantime, bookmark this page and put a note on your calendar to check back on October 15, 2013 and then head to your local library. On with the show!

• Franklin’s Halloween (by Paulette Bourgeois, illustrated by Brenda Clark) Franklin is one of my favorite recurring lovable-yet-flawed characters. He’s just a regular kid (turtle) who usually gets in some sort of minor trouble and learns from his mistakes. He’s kind of messy, not very athletic, and has even been known to tell a fib or two. In this book, he just has fun making his own Halloween costume and going to a party. There’s a great spooky twist at the end and he’s even generous to a sick friend. Hurray for Franklin!

• Brooms Are for Flying (by Michael Rex) and Humbug Witch (by Lorna Bailin) Spoiler Alert! These two books are simple and cute. One is about a witch who turns out to be a girl at the end and the other is about a girl who turns out to be a witch at the end!

• The Witch Who Lives Down the Hall (by Donna Guthrie, illustrated by Amy Schwartz) The mostly black and white illustrations (with touches of orange) are a great complement to a story about a boy who lives down the hall from a “strange” lady and her black cat. He’s convinced she’s a witch. Clever and funny to both kids and adults. Reminded me a lot of Mrs. Muffly’s Monster.

• That Terrible Halloween Night (by James Stevenson) This is about as scary as you can get and still be appropriate for a three year-old. I loved it and R is still talking about it. Last night she told me our basement floor was covered with frogs! I liked the pen and pastel comic book layout too.

• Cake Girl (by David Lucas) David Lucas is so good–all his books have such sweet characters, surreal stories, and pretty illustrations. This one is about a witch who learns about friendship.

Two of my favorite bloggers (Marco Arment and Ben Brooks) recently published passionate love letters to the Panasonic WhisperCeiling bathroom fan, and in Marco’s case, a Leviton electronic timer switch. Since our downstairs bathroom has had no fan at all for more than a year, and our upstairs bathroom fan sounded like a jet engine (and took 20 minutes to de-fog a mirror), I took this as a sign that it was time to upgrade. It was harder than expected to find an electrician to install them, but today was the big day. It’s worked out pretty well for our upstairs bathroom, but not so much for the downstairs bathroom. In fact, I was surprised by three issues that were unmentioned in the “reviews” I read:

1. The Panasonic WhisperLite fan/light combo unit is approximately square and it doesn’t fit in our downstairs bathroom because we have a cast-iron drain pipe running 8.5” away from the stud where the fan has to be mounted. Drat.

2. The bulbs in the WhisperLite are compact-fluorescent and they send out a very white light. I like it, but my wife calls it “institutional” and she says it reminds her of a public restroom. This isn’t exactly where anyone wants to be taking a shower, and if she doesn’t acclimate, I’m hoping we can just change the bulbs to something a little softer.

3. The Leviton switch requires three wires (including a neutral) and our downstairs bathroom only has two. If I want a timer switch we either spend $200 to run a new line (I’m not that crazy) or we get one of those spring-loaded knobs that screams hotel sauna. For now, we’re sticking with the old manual switch.

To be fair, the new fan is very quiet and is working like a champ–our upstairs bathroom isn’t small and during a leisurely shower the mirror never fogged up. And the Leviton timer is far more reliable than I was about remembering to turn off the fan when it’s done its job. But I think there is a bigger lesson here: Some products that are perfect for some people (or bathrooms) are not perfect for others, and we shouldn’t let ourselves be blinded by the opinions of fan-bois.

Apple’s big October product announcements are now behind us and I’ve read more blogger reactions than I care to admit. Even I’m surprised that I still have a few somewhat original thoughts of my own to share. Instead of simply being an “iPad mini” event Apple announced a whole slew of products. While some folks predicted some of the “extra” stuff, I don’t think anyone expected the sheer quantity we saw. That said, I’m most excited about two products Apple did not announce:

1. A new Thunderbolt display: The new iMac is beautiful and I can’t wait until they translate it into a stand-alone display. Less glare and pixels closer to the glass will be terrific. It will also give Apple a chance to add a few ports that they neglected on the first rev: USB 3 and analog audio out. And imagine how thin it will be when it doesn’t have to also house a whole computer?

2. The Fusion Drive: I know, I know, they DID announce this as an option for the new iMac and Mac Mini, but I’m hoping they will sell it separately so I can stick one in my 2010 iMac. I really like the idea of having the speed of an SSD and the size of a traditional HD without the hassle of managing the pair. We’ll have to wait for the iFixit teardown to see if it has a new interface (and is thus incompatible) and something tells me even if it has standard wiring, Apple will want to reserve this feature as reason for folks to upgrade their old (but perfectly usable) iMacs. I can still dream.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Apple is making a mistake by pricing the iPad mini at $329 and leaving breathing room for the other cheaper small tablets in the market. I think Apple priced the product as high as possible such that they will sell all the mini’s they can make before the holidays. If they didn’t, they would simply be leaving money on the table. When their supply chain gets up to speed some time in the spring, I predict they will drop the price below $300.

I have very mixed feelings about the new iMac. While it’s gorgeous and powerful, I’m not sure I agree with the sacrifices Apple had to make to achieve its super-model-thin curves. Most iMac owners spend the bulk of their time in front of their iMac where they never even see the curves–my own is right up against a wall, and I’d have to lean over and around my desk to appreciate the sides and back.

Apple loves to be first to cast old standards aside: Remember when the iMac dropped the floppy drive? I think they were the first PC maker to stop using special keyboard and mouse ports and just rely on USB. And just a month ago they said goodbye to the venerable Dock Connector. Now they want to do the same thing to the optical drive. For a notebook, this makes perfect sense: In the last year there was exactly one time when it would have been nice to mount a CD on my Air and that is certainly not enough to justify the added weight and bulk of a drive. At my desk, I do rip the occasional DVD or used CD. And I’m certainly not throwing my iMac in my bag when I head out on the town. But maybe Apple’s right. Maybe folks should just keep an ugly old SuperDrive in a drawer for those rare occasions when they need it. Then they can appreciate beautiful design every day. Even if it means leaning over their desks to do so.

Basilisk/Cockatrice

Head and body of a cock,
Its breath cracks rock.

Leather wings--Whish!
Serpent tail--Swish!
A Basilisk--Hisss!
No doodle-head this!

(A Basilisk!--HISSS!
    Is also called--HISSS!
    A Cockatrice.)
 
HISSSSSS!
 
                  by Laura Whipple

As you may remember from my last post, my older daughter loves Greek mythology, but the stories are hopelessly age-inappropriate. We’ve been reading them anyway and I try to tone them down on the fly with limited success. What I’ve really wanted was something that could extract the magic and wonder of the creatures and leave the ultra-violence and the mixed moral messages behind. It turns out I owe Eric Carle an apology because he’s published exactly the book I was looking for.

Dragons, Dragons combines Eric Carle’s admittedly pretty collage pictures with poems about 30 mythical creatures from around the world. Many are from Greek myths (e.g., Cerberus, Pegasus, the Minotaur!) but they also hail from Japan (kappa), Africa (Okolo), the Americas (Quetzalcoatl), Australia (bunyip), the Middle East (manticore and roc), and other places. In some cases the artistic representations don’t match the images in my head (in addition to his lion’s head, the chimaera has a goat’s head sprouting out of his back!) but considering we don’t have any actual specimens to determine who is “correct,” I don’t mind.

My favorite part of the book is the poetry. Why should mythical creatures be constrained to prose? To accompany his illustrations, Mr. Carle has chosen work ranging from classic (William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) to poets I’ve never heard of but are a lot of fun (see Laura Whipple’s contribution above). R learns vocabulary when we read them and she definitely appreciates the vivid word pictures and rhymes. She’s already memorized a few of the poems and there’s even one (the Phoenix) that is written specifically for two voices.

I’m still not a fan of all of Eric Carle’s work, but this book is almost perfect.

My 3.5 year old daughter wants to be a minotaur for Halloween. She loves the idea of a person with a bull’s head. She knows that minotaurs live in labyrinths and eat humans. For her costume, she wants to carry an axe. And whenever we play minotaur, she wants me to be Theseus and she often wants to “fight to death!” Someday she’ll know what death is and understand the consequences of a real fight, but for now these are just fun words to say.

It all started more than a year ago when she was in a phase where she wanted me to tell her new stories all the time. And I mean about 25 times per day. I quickly ran out of kid stories and moved on to stories about my old pets and stories about my childhood. Then I remembered the Greeks had some good stories and started telling her about Daedalus and Icarus, Pandora’s Box, and the 12 Labors of Heracles. She thought they were great and I ordered a copy of Greek Myths for Young Children which was age inappropriate (despite the title) but at least jogged my memory for a few more stories.

About a month ago I brought out the book again and she loved it so much she asked for a new Greek myth as her bed-time story every night. She especially loved the vivid characters and creatures, and she can now tell you that Prince Bellerophon rode Pegasus, Cerberus has three heads, and a Chimaera has the body of a goat, head of a lion and a snake for a tail. The stories were violent, but the language was relatively tame.

I was ambivalent about the situation, but then we crossed a line when I picked up a few more “kids” mythology books at the library. Suddenly instead of just eating humans, the minotaur “had a taste for human flesh.” Centaurs were getting drunk and chasing bridesmaids and the sphinx was tearing apart unfortunate travelers and devouring them. I skipped a lot of this, but then the babysitter started reading the stories verbatim. It was bad.

Now some people might wonder what the big deal is. Weren’t old fairy tales really violent too? Didn’t Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother get eaten by a wolf? Didn’t Hansel and Gretel get cooked in an oven? Indeed, they did. And those fairy tales werre written at a time when violence was a normal part of everyday life. Public life in the middle class United Stated is far far less violent today and we run a pretty pacifist household. Violent fairy tales are not “keeping it real” for us. I feel no need to expose my girls to realistic stories of violence until they’ve got the tools to understand and process it. I don’t want to violence to be normal. I don’t want them scared that if they go in the woods they will get eaten by a witch or a wolf. I don’t want them playing fighting games at school even if they seem fun or even funny.

The time will come when all the violence that exists in pop culture on tv, in the theater, at the movies, and in grown-up books will push through our walls and into their lives. And hopefully by that time they will be old enough to know that it’s serious business.

Does this mean we’re banning Greek myths from house? Not exactly. We’re trying a compromise solution. For now, I edit as I read. Theseus and the Minotaur fight, but not always to the death. Heracles has a simpler young adulthood where he does not “fly into a rage and kill all his children.” And Theseus’ father doesn’t leap off a cliff to his death because his son forgot to fly the white sail. When the girls are older they can read Bullfinch’s on their own and get maximum mayhem. Until then Theseus and the Minotaur can be friends who occasionally walk Cerberus around the block.

So I got my iPhone 5 about a week ago (pre-ordered from AT&T) and have barely been able to brag about it to anyone since most of my local friends aren’t nearly as nerdy as I am. Then I remembered that I had a blog and decided the world needed hear all about my new device.

But first, a little background: Two years ago I started carrying an iPhone 4 and a year ago I was only slightly tempted to upgrade to a 4S. The camera was a little better, the cpu was a little faster, and it had Siri which I didn’t think I’d use much. And I would have had to pay the one year upgrade penalty. I passed. Fast-forward to this year and I was champing at the bit for something new.

And so, without further ado, here’s what I’d say if you saw me on the street and said “Ooh, is that an iPhone 5? How do you like it?”

Big Stuff:

Camera: It’s way better. Low light pictures look a lot better, but the thing I really notice is the speed. It launches quickly (the 4 was a dog), and you can tap away at the shutter seemingly several times a second. It’s a life-saver when you have an older daughter who loves funny faces and chewing on her own hair, but occasionally flashes the most beautiful smile you’ve ever seen.

Maps: I get it that if you live in a place where the coverage stinks, the new Maps app stinks too. But in New Haven, the coverage is fine. And it’s huge upgrade over IOS 5 both in terms of features and UI. Turn-by-turn voice directions are extremely well integrated–much nicer and more functional than either Tom Tom or Navigon. I love that you can flip back and forth between the 2D map of your route and the 3D rendering of where you are on the route. The vector-based tiles are prettier and faster to download too. I’m glad I have the Tom Tom app, which stores maps locally, for when I’m out of cell range, but let’s be honest: that hasn’t happened in years and it will be a while before it happens again.

CPU: It’s way faster. I have a shortcut on my home screen that launches OmniFocus and goes straight to “new task” screen. It used to take about 5 seconds, but now it’s less than a second. All sorts of other stuff loads and runs faster too.

64 GB flash: In this cloud-based age we live in, local storage isn’t supposed to matter since your apps should just be able to pull in what you need from the net as you need it. But as I’ve complained bitterly about already, Apple’s vision of cloud photography is currently Photo Stream. Ugh. With double the room on my device, both my wife and I can stop carefully deciding what pictures and home videos we have space for. Some day Adobe Revel might solve this more elegantly, but for now they don’t do video and they don’t have a Windows app.

Little Stuff:

The physical device: Yeah, it’s nice. But my eyes aren’t good enough to really appreciate the straight lines and shiny camfer. And it’s really thin, especially since I’m going caseless for now compared to my old rubber-clad 4. It feels great in the pocket but it’s surprisingly hard to pick up off a counter or desk! My wife thinks it feels a little like a Nano, and she’s right.

Screen: I can’t tell if the colors are more saturated or if the pixels are closer to the surface but supposedly they are. It’s nice to have more text on the screen in portrait mode, but this is partially offset by the awkwardness of moving my thumb to the opposite top corner. This has become easier with time, so I’m guessing I’ll completely adjust soon. The extra row of icons is useful as my home screen was getting a little cramped. I rarely venture to my other screens now, and that’s a good thing.

Lightning: I like it a lot–it’s durable, tiny, and easy since it’s double-sided. It’s a little annoying that I now need different cables for my phone and iPad, but Apple had to upgrade this connector eventually and I think we’ll have Lightning for a long time.

LTE: in some ways, this is the biggest new feature of the phone. When you’re near an LTE tower, it’s crazy fast–the other day SpeedTest gave me 28Mbps downstream and 12 Mbps upstream. That’s 3x and 8x faster than my U-Verse at home! Of course, per byte, it’s expensive and I’m on wifi 90% of the time. And right now, AT&T’s coverage isn’t that great.

Siri: We’re still just getting to know each other, but I like what I hear so far. It’s absolutely the fastest way to enter new appointments on my calendar. Last Friday I asked “What was the score in last night’s NFL game?” and got the box score in moments. I use it to set alarms. I expected to enjoy the novelty of it and then forget about it, but instead my usage seems to be increasing.

Final Thoughts:

This phone did not need a whole bunch of fancy new features (e.g., curved AMOLED display, NFC, giant screen) to be fantastic. The iPhone has been fantastic since they introduced it in 2007. I find it amazing that they’ve been able to make it incrementally better every year by refining and improving what it already does. And yet the tech press keeps wanting the next iPhone to be a quantum leap. That’s not how how it works. Truly revolutionary devices aren’t 5.0’s, they are 1.0’s.

I think of myself as a reasonably creative guy. I’m not always coming up with particularly useful or imporant ideas, but I like to think they’re fairly unique. Unique in a small town or among your friends is one thing, but unique on the Internet is quite another. I thought it would be fun to share some ideas I had for posts that turned out be less original than I first thought.

Is height normal?

Adult height is one of the prototypical examples of a naturally occurring normal distribution, but if you look at real data, it’s not perfectly normal. First off, it’s a mixture of men and women who individually have pretty normal heights but quite different means (by about 5”). Second, the tails of the distribution are fatter than normal. That is, extremely short and tall people are far more common than predicted by a pure normal distribution. All this is explained very nicely explained in two 2008 posts (here, here, and here) by John D. Cook at The Endeavor.

Nietzsche and pop music

There aren’t very many 19th or 20th Century philosophers that inspire pop songs. The Cure turned Albert Camus’ The Stranger into “Staring at the Sea”, but up until a few weeks ago I thought that was it. How wrong I was! Kelly Clarkson’s “What Doesn’t Kill You” has been getting tremendous airplay on pop stations and it’s not much different from Christina Aguilera’s “Fighter” which also talks about how being beaten down just makes her “stronger”, “harder”, and “wiser”. And it turns out tons and tons of songs have been inspired by this Nietzsche quote. I thought it would be fun to see how many more of Nietzsche’s ideas (e.g., the Superman) have been translated into pop music (maybe “Sunshine Superman”?). Turns out Craig Schuftan has written a whole book about this called Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!: The Romantic Movement, Rock & Roll, and the End of Civilisation as We Know It.

The environmental impact of cleaning the Augean stables

The Fifth Labor of Heracles was to clean the Augean stables. They were so dirty and filthy that he had to divert two rivers through them to wash out the manure that 1000 cattle had produced over thirty years. This reminded me of what happened when hurricanes hit North Carolina a few years ago and pushed massive amounts of pig waste into the water supply. Wouldn’t it be interesting to write a quick environmental impact statement for Hercules’ act? A few people have noticed that the effects were probably pretty serious (The Punnery, this homework assignment for a class on Hazardous Waste Management) but no one has actually done any calculations to show how serious. Hmm….maybe I can contribute something here!

A sitcom about a woman with cancer.

Last month I had a strange dream about developing a sitcom that starred a woman who is diagnosed with cancer and goes through the whole treatment process. The story would have a full three year arc with cliff-hangers every year when she (or her new best friend who also has cancer) goes in for testing. The final episode would be her saying goodbye. The show would have lots of funny kids, hair loss jokes, and nausea jokes. She could also start a romantic relationship in the middle of the run. An awfully large number of people have either had cancer by now or had someone very close go through it. I really believe that a show like this would have a big audience of people who want to laugh about a serious thing. Showtime also believed this and started “The Big C” in 2010 and it’s entering its third season now. According to Wikipedia, it’s been very successful since the beginning!