I’m old. I grew up wandering around record stores trying to decide whether to buy albums based on one or two songs I might have heard on the radio, cover art, and what I knew about the band. These were big decisions when I didn’t have much money and cd’s were $15-17 each.

Today’s online music world couldn’t be more different. Kids these days think about albums like they’re rotary dial phones–they download gobs of music for free (e.g., BitTorrent) or they just listen to whatever they want through Pandora or Spotify. And when they do actually shell out cash, it’s 99 cents per song.

But I live in the past and still agonize over album purchases. Prices have gone down and my income has gone up a little, but I like owning my music legally and I still like listening to the set of songs an artist chose to package together as an album. Over time though, I’ve developed a few rules to guide me in the decision process.

1. Learn from previous purchases if the band produces albums with a few good tracks and filler. Madonna and Metallica both produce tremendous quality throughout while Katy Perry is more up and down. The younger the artist, the more careful you have to be (Yes I’m looking at you Justin Bieber!)

2. “Best of” albums can be a treasure trove (e.g., Electric Light Orchestra or Heart) if original album quality is spotty.

3. Beware of bargains–it’s those dreaded filler albums that are most often on sale.

4. If you can restrain yourself from the impulse purchase, listen to the album a couple times through on Spotify first. A minute and a half sample often isn’t enough.

5. iTunes has deluxe versions of many albums that contain remixes and the occasional music video. With YouTube, the video’s not much of a draw, but I never regret the remixes which are often better than the original versions.

6. Just because it’s a concept album doesn’t you shouldn’t cherry pick the best tracks. Judas Priest’s Nostradamus just isn’t that good even though the second track (“Prophecy”) rocks.

7. As bends enter the twilight of their careers, albums get worse and worse even though they can still produce individually good songs. Metallica and Depeche Mode are great examples. This is the bright side of a great band breaking up mid-career like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or The Smiths.

Bottom line: The album may be dying, but it’s not dead yet. At least not in my little fantasy world.

Messenger bags have been getting a lot of flack on Ben Brooks’ blog lately as he has made the complete switch to a Tom Bihn Smart Alec backpack. He raves about the ergonomics and pockets and even makes a case that it looks kinda cool. Maybe this set up works for him, but I’m very happy with my decidedly non-hipster plain vanilla blue and black Timbuk2 Classic Messenger.

It’s almost all one cavernous compartment which gives me maximum flexibility. It’s is perfect for any combination of books, folders, iPads, or my MacBook Air in it’s Zero Shock sleeve. I leave the sleeve unzipped so it’s easy to take the MBA in and out and if I don’t need it, the whole sleeve/MBA combo stays home. I love the simplicity of never having to remember what’s in what pocket. I’ve even used it to transport pretty big boxes– they can stick out if need be and the flap can partially cover them but be secured by the strap.

It’s super-fast to open and close since I don’t have to take it off my back or loosen any straps. I can keep my bike lock there when I’m out and about and it’s trivial to pull it out and put it back in as needed.

It’s perfect for cycling–the weight is on your hips instead of your back/shoulders and that makes for much better stability. Just make sure you use the strap that attaches to a belt loop so it doesn’t swing around unexpectedly.

The ballistic nylon show almost no wear. My bag is six years old and I’ve put it through the laundry maybe three times. And it’s not like I’ve babied it–it’s with me outdoors every day rain, shine, or even the arctic conditions of last winter in Connecticut.

The bottom line: Six years from now I’ll probably be using exactly the same bag. And it’ll still look great.

You may have noticed that I hardly ever write posts that just link to something good I’ve read elsewhere on the web. That’s what most people use Tumblr for, but my main goal here is to write and share original content. It doesn’t mean I don’t run across things I find interesting and want to share through other channels. I also like to save good stuff in the cloud where I can easily access and search it. I hate remembering I saw something and then not being able to find it again later. These two related goals (sharing and archival) have led me to a somewhat unique system that I think satisfies both pretty well.

I do most of my reading of web content in a browser, an RSS reader (Reeder), or Instapaper, and want to be able to share and archive easily in all three. If all I wanted to do was share, I’d probably hold my nose and just tweet everything. Twitter is well-integrated into all three apps and my friends could just follow me or visit the Twitter website as needed. But I want to be able to archive and share in a single step.

Pinboard is an almost free service that stores bookmarks and lets you search them by tags you assign. I pay a little extra ($25/yr) and they save the full text of the pages and let me search that too. They provide a bookmarklet that lets me tag pages from almost any web browser and the same functionality is built into my RSS reader. If I think my friends might also find a page interesting, I just add a “like” tag.

Instapaper is a service that saves content that I find on the web but don’t have time to read in the moment. When it’s more convenient, I bring up the Instapaper app on my iPhone or iPad and it’s turned all my saved pages into beautifully formatted highly readable ad-free text. If I like what I read there, I just mark it that way by clicking on the heart icon. I have my account configured to then automatically send the link to Pinboard for archival.

There are several ways for you to see what I’ve found interesting:

1. Follow me on pinboard; my username is dmckee. You’ll see everything I tag, including stuff I’m archiving but not necessarily recommending.

2. Visit my pinboard pages:

   What I like: https://pinboard.in/u:dmckee/t:like

   What got sent over from Instapaper: https://pinboard.in/u:dmckee/from:instapaper

   I wish these could be combined in a single page. If Instapaper would tag items I like with “like” when it sends them to Pinboard, you would only have to visit the first one. My system is good, but it’s not perfect.

3. Subscribe to my Pinboard RSS feeds:

   http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:dmckee/t:like

   http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:dmckee/from:instapaper

4. Follow me on Instapaper (dmckee@ucla.edu). You only get a subset of the stuff I’m sharing, but it’s a good subset. I wish things I share directly through Pinboard would automatically get liked and archived in Instapaper so this would be complete. But not even ifttt.com can take care of this.

A few of the blogs I read publish an about-weekly list of their very favorite recent links. Maybe I’ll do that someday, but for now we’re going with this.

  All men play on ten,
  Never gonna turn down again.
  All men play on ten,
  Never gonna turn down.
 
           "All Men Play on 10" 
           Manowar, Sign of the Hammer, 1984

Songs that celebrate rock and roll are a dime a dozen. I mean, I love Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” and Ozzy Osbourne’s “You Can’t Kill Rock and Roll” and even Huey Lewis’ “Heart of Rock and Roll” as much as anyone, but the idea is a little played out.

On the other hand, songs that literally demand to be played loud and explicitly proclaim the band’s love of loud music are tremendously under-appreciated. It’s a much smaller genre, but I can (and do) listen to these songs over and over.

Here’s a list of my favorites (Ping version):

1. “All Men Play on 10” Manowar
2. “Turn Up the Radio” Autograph
3. “I Love It Loud” Kiss
4. “Shout It Out Loud” Kiss
5. “Louder than Hell” Motley Crue
6. “We Like It Loud” Rough Cutt
7. “Turn It Up” Ted Nugent
8. “The Right to Rock” Keel
9. “I Wanna Rock” Twisted Sister

The first track, “All Men Play on 10” by Manowar is not the most popular, but definitely has the most testosterone. Everyone has probably heard “Turn Up the Radio” by Autograph as it got tons of airplay during the eighties, but Kiss has to be the undisputed king of the category with two contributions: “I Love It Loud” and “Shout it Out Loud”. “Louder than Hell” from Motley Crue wasn’t one of their hits, but it’s always been one of my favorites. Rough Cutt’s “We Like it Loud” and Ted Nugent’s “Turn It Up” are more obscure, but still classics.

The last two songs on my list are honorable mentions because they’re really more straight up rock anthems than only tangentially suggest that music shouldn’t be turned down. Keel’s “The Right to Rock” says

  Don't let anyone tell you
  How to live your life
  We won't turn it off
  We won't turn it down
  'Cause it's our way of life

while Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock” says:

  Turn it down you say,
  Well all i got to say to you is 
  Time and time again i say, "no!"
  No! no, no, no, no, no!

I’m absolutely certain I’ve left out some important tracks. So any suggested additions will be much appreciated!

Update:

I asked for help on Classic Rock Forums and got some great suggested additions:

1. “Loud” Sammy Hagar
2. “Shout” Grand Prix
3. “Blow Your Speakers” Manowar
4. “Loud and Clear” Autograph
5. “Play It Loud” Diamond Head
6. “Play It Loud” Saxon

I can’t believe I forgot to include “Blow Your Speakers”, but the other five tracks are new to me. Every one is worth a listen–cranked up all the way of course!

My friend Julian is a pretty nice guy. He’s generous with his time and tolerant of most social behavior. He honors his commitments and is honest in his communication. But at the same time, he chooses not to participate in the US democratic government by voting. For those of us who see voting as a moral obligation, this is somewhat disturbing. Julian recently posted a clear statement of why on his blog (which makes for a good read in general BTW). Since he is economic theorist by training, he makes his argument by laying out a fairly standard economic model of voting and pointing out how it is perfectly rational for him to vote and many other people not to.

In Julian’s model, people benefit from voting in two ways: the (slight) chance they will personally influence the election and the “warm glow” (WG) they get from the experience. If the sum of these outweigh the costs of missing work and traveling to the polling place, then people will vote. Julian justifies his personal decision by saying that most other people must get a warmer feeling inside when they vote since the chance of any one person changing the election is tiny. As models go, this one is pretty empty (as Julian admits) since so much of the action happens in WG and it says nothing about where WG comes from.

I think utilitarian models are great for describing behavior, but lousy for defining what behavior is right or wrong. Just because someone might find stealing to be individually rational if their chances of being caught are low, that doesn’t make it right. Before I go on, I want to be perfectly clear that I don’t know anything about philosophy–I couldn’t even make much sense of this comic book guide to philosphy when I read it a few years ago. That said, Julian’s description of Kant’s categorical imperative really spoke to me. In his (Julian’s) words, “citizens are morally obligated to vote if they prefer a world in which others do”. I translate this to mean “it’s immoral to free-ride on other people’s voting behavior”. This is a statement outside the model about behavior that may or may not be rational inside the model. Julian justifies his own action in this context by saying he wants everyone to act as he would act conditional on the WG they happen to feel.

If Kant were here, I think he would say that WG is BS and that people don’t decide whether or not to vote in order to maximize their utility–they decide between right and wrong. I vote because I want to live in a world where everyone (or at least the informed folks vote), not because it makes me feel warmer than it does Julian. To be more precise, I think WG is almost homogeneously distributed and some people are moral and some are immoral free-riders.

Of course, my statement about Julian being an upstanding moral guy in the rest of his life still holds. :) I just think he’s putting too much faith in the first theorem of welfare economics. Just because there are some (many?) situations where individually rational behavior leads to a socially optimal outcome doesn’t mean all situations are like that.

Jacob Mincer’s 1958 paper in the Journal of Political Economy, “Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribution”, is one of the most well-cited in economics–304 times according to Web of Science. And yet, I would be shocked if more than half the people who’ve cited the paper have even opened it and read the first page. The reason it’s cited so often is that Mincer did indeed write down the famed Mincer equation here, but he wasn’t the first to notice that log wages are an approximately linear function of years of education. What’s special about this paper is that Mincer was the first person to write down a simple utility-maximizing model from which you can derive such an equation.

Wages are not normally distributed. The lower half of the distribution is all clustered together, but the high end is really spread out. And all those one percenters at the high end are making far more than average wages. But physical dimensions like height, head circumference, and forearm length are normally distributed. And though it’s a lot harder to measure, most scholars believe that cognitive ability is normally distributed too. In the early part of the twentieth century, this was seen as something of a paradox–if physical and cognitive ability are the major determinants of productivity then shouldn’t wages (which measure productivity) also be normally distributed?

The average gain in wages that comes from an additional year of schooling increases with the amount of schooling someone has. Expected wages go up by more for the 16th year of schooling than the 12th year of schooling. One of Mincer’s insights was that a big part of the non-normality of the wage distribution is a direct consequence of these non-linear returns to schooling.

Mincer had great intuition. He recognized that a person must eventually be compensated for wages they could have earned during the years they attend school. The more schooling you already have, the more you need to be compensated for getting an additional year of schooling. Mincer shows that in his model, wages must increase multiplicatively for each year and that is exactly what happens when the log wage is a linear function of years of education. In the data, wages are generally associated with about a 15 percent increase for each year of schooling.

Academic economists worship at the altar of the new and technically sophisticated. This means the vast majority of econ papers written before the 1980’s just languish on library shelves. And even though it’s true that most of these older papers aren’t terribly relevant, I think Mincer (1958) is just one of several diamonds in the rough. I’m always on the look out for more, and would welcome any suggestions.

I know I’m not the first to notice that these two musical acts have a few things in common, but I bet the similarities go deeper than you think.

The Obvious

Both groups were young, attractive, and British. In the beginning, they played catchy simple pop songs and were incredibly successful. Both also made fun movies about the band running around getting in trouble and playing music (“A Hard Day’s Night” and “Spice World”).

The Members

The Beatles and the Spice Girls both had nicknames and you can even kind of match them up together. Paul was the Cute baby-faced one–kind of like Baby Spice. George was the Quiet one–kind of like Posh Spice. It starts to break down with Ringo (the Funny one), but we’ll give that to Sporty. And then there’s John (the Smart one) with no obvious counterpart. Ginger Spice left the band (was kicked out??) early on, just like Pete Best, and both events inspired the anger of many loyal fans. I remember reading about “Pete is Best” signs and chants when I was a kid. But then It turned out that Pete and Ginger were each the least talented of the bunch–I’ve tried several times to like Ginger’s (Geri Halliwell’s) solo efforts, but they sound awful even to me.

After the fact

Looking back, both groups had short but intense careers–the Beatles showed up in the early 1960’s and were gone by 1970 and The Spice Girls released all three of their albums between 1996 and 2000. But after their breakups, every single member went on to release solo albums. Paul McCartney and Emma (Baby Spice) Bunton both produced great work, while John’s brilliant solo career was cut short by tragedy. Victoria Beckham (Posh) also started a promising solo career with her terrific self-titled album (featuring “Not Such an Innocent Girl”), but bowed out of the music business too soon to concentrate on her family with David Beckham. And though most of the solo albums had their bright spots, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts for both bands.

Perhaps the biggest similarity is that even many years after their primes, both bands are still widely considered the best ever of their respective genres. Sure, manufactured-girl-band-pop is less important than rock and roll, but even so, the Spice Girls deserve some respect! Girl Power!

Google’s greatest power is ubiquity. Almost everyone uses Google for search. Google has become the standard place people store their RSS subscription information. And Google Calendar seems like it’s almost there too. That means if you run a small group that has events, you should strongly consider putting together a Google Calendar for it that members can subscribe to. That way the group events can plop right down into the calendar that many members already refer to every day. Classes and weekly seminars are a perfect match.

It’s surprisingly easy and I’m doing it with both my classes this semester. Here’s what my TA and I did:

1. Create a new calendar making sure to check the “Make This Calendar Public” box.
2. Add all the lectures (with weekly topics), exams, and paper due dates as separate events.
3. Go to Calendar Settings for the calendar and click on ICAL next to Calendar Address to get a link for it.
4. Email the group and tell them all to bring up Google Calendar, scroll down to Other Calendars, and click on the little triangle next to it. Then they should select Add By URL and paste in the link that popped up at the end of Step 3.

And that’s all there is to it!

We’re deep into our first winter in the new house and are just now figuring out how to properly control the indoor temperature. On the plus side, we’ve got the ingredients of a fabulous heating system. The brand-new gas-fired boiler is so much cheaper and cleaner than the oil-fueled relic that was here when we moved in. The house was built in the 1920’s and has one or two huge radiators in every room. We even have a programmable thermostat (a Lux TX500B which is nearly identical to the current Lux TX500E) so we can lower the temperature during the day when we’re at work and at night when we’re in bed.

For the last couple months, the thermostat would turn on the boiler at 6:00 am and keep it on until the house reached 68 F. The problem was that even though the boiler turned off, the radiators were still full of hot water and they would continue heating the house driving the temperature up to 71 or 72 and driving me kind of crazy. The same thing would happen in the afternoon when we got home from work.

My first thought was that there must be a setting on the thermostat to account for what I’m calling “radiator heat momentum”. There isn’t. The closest you can get is to lower the minimum amount of time the boiler is on and that doesn’t actually help in most situations. My second thought was that this was a great excuse to get a Nest–it’s the only thermostat anyone has ever described as sexy, but as far as I can tell, its AI smarts are all about saving you 10 minutes of programming. This is especially true if you have a pretty rigid schedule. And it has no special knowledge of radiators. Oh well.

The solution we’ve settled on is imperfect, but good and easy to implement with some semi-creative thermostat programming.

WEEKDAYS: In the morning, we simply set the thermostat to go to 66 and the temperature drifts up to where we want it after the boiler turns off. During the day, the house goes down to 62 and at 4:30 pm, the thermostat goes back to 67. The temperature drifts up a little higher than we’d like, but we don’t want it to drop below 67 before we go to bed and we can only have 4 different temperature settings per day. (Yes, I think this restriction is ridiculous.)

WEEKENDS: At 6:00 am, the thermostat jumps to 66 and drifts up to about 68 within the hour. At 7:00 am, the thermostat goes to 68 and that keeps the house from getting too cold during the day when we are around. We also set the Swing on the thermostat to 0.25 degrees; this means the boiler turns on fairly often for short periods of time but these little firings during the day don’t generate much momentum–it’s really just the big push in the morning and in the afternoon during the week that cause a problem. It’s possible we could raise the Swing and be a little more efficient and still not generate much heat momentum.

I’m don’t know why other folks aren’t complaining about this (since radiator heat isn’t that rare) and why the thermostats don’t handle it more transparently. My best guess is that less than mammoth radiators don’t hold their heat as well and so it’s just not an issue in houses with average radiators. Either that or the solution I’ve come up with is so obvious that no one feels the need to talk about it. My ego tells me it’s the former so I’m going with that.

These three videos are objectively hilarious. I was going to write a pithy insightful post about the humor found in the juxtaposition of the contemporary and the mundane with one of the most evil and destructive dictators of all time. It turns out I’m a little late to the Downfall parody party. If you are too, I highly recommend reading this 2010 BBC article and of course browsing Youtube for hundreds more.