How To Do a Demonstration

By chance, NARA had this as document of the day:  

The boomers did do some good demos.

She Won't Be Mother of the Year

Not this year.  She asks these questions:

Why? Why does David have to work so hard to do what comes easily for most? Why does he still sometimes struggle even to call us by name? Why does he sometimes have to make things so difficult?

Why? Why does he take such joy in things that most people don't even notice? Why is he so easy to please? Why is he almost always happy? Why does he work so hard each and every day?

The Advantages of Animals Over Technology

I'm generally favorable to technology, but as my mother used to observe, there were advantages to animals. For example, when field work for the day was over, you could pretty much let the team of horses find their way to the barn.  And, according to her though I never experienced it, if you took a load of potatoes from her folks' farm to the city (Binghamton) to sell, once the load was disposed of the horses would take you home with little or no guidance.

I'm reminded of that when I read a recent post on Ricks' "The Best Defense".  Earlier I'd seen the progress people were making on developing a pack robot, four-footed, self-powered, capable of crossing irregular terrain carrying 1-200 pounds.  It looked impressive. Then there was Sgt. Reckless, a war horse in the Korean War, who carried 5 tons in 51 trips.  I bet she was a lot quieter and a lot cheaper to develop.

The Definition of Wheat

What's fun is to watch a bunch of academics and city folk at Volokh.com try to understand the AAA of 1938 and the Wickard v Filburn case (excess wheat), representing the furthest stretch of Congressional power under the commerce clause of the Constitution.

Either they don't understand the Act, they don't understand farming, they don't understand current farming, or they're just off on tangents.  There's 240+ comments on a post several days old, so I didn't read them all.  Towards the end some of the nonsense gets weeded out.

The Decline of Standards

How do scholars expect to get respect when they don't dress the part:

Beyond the conference, as some commenters note, we almost never teach in suits.  The men in my department tend to wear long-sleeved shirts and ties when they teach, but most of the men professors in other departments wear jeans or khaki pants with a fleecy vest and hiking boots.  (That’s the preferred look around here, anyway, but it’s probably more casual on average than other parts of the country might be.)

In my day the professors wore suits, when they didn't wear corduroy sports coats with the leather elbow patches.  Things have gone to the dogs.

Building Our Infrastructure: The Unseen Bits

Lots of discussion these days about the need to reinvest in our infrastructure, by which people often mean the transportation industry: roads, rail, airports, FAA control systems. The civil engineers are pushing this, and they are getting traction.  But yesterday as we traveled back to Reston on some interstates (most of which seemed in as good shape as I can remember, though the rest stops had their problems) I was struck by the thought that we're actually improving our infrastructure in unseen ways.

For example, I noticed the emergency call phones along the side of some roads.  And notices for getting emergency information by tuning the radio to a given frequency.  Surely those auxiliary portions of our transportation infrastructure are going to fade away, replaced by smart phone apps.  Rather than the expense of maintaining separate physical systems, our investments in cellular networks and the development of smart phones will provide more information faster at minimal cost. (Just as the PC was able to replace the dedicated word processor and the desk calculator.)

Consider the past: when I was a child each gas company put out a line of road maps, with some competition from Rand McNally and AAA. The maps weren't all that great, but they were all we had. Then the turnpikes came along, followed by the interstates, and the individual states started issuing maps.  Gas company maps went the way of "full service".  With the concentration of traffic on interstates, things like the emergency call phones and the radio information networks were economically feasible.  For trip planning, you could be a member of AAA and get "tripticks" (or something close), assuming you wanted to pay the money and wait for it to be delivered,

Then came the Internet and things like Google maps, which could plan a route in seconds and give alternatives in a way AAA never could.  Since we don't travel much, I was surprised for our recent trip that Google maps now gives updated information on construction and repairs, not to mention weather conditions and traffic flow.  All of this added information is free.

A final thought: having more information available means faster travel and fewer delays which means greater economic productivity.  I'm not sure how the economic statistics are going to capture those effects.

Ron Paul and the Farm Programs

Ron Paul released his budget outline, calling for a trillion dollars in cuts.  Looking at the details, Rep. Paul either proposes to continue farm programs unchanged, or considers them so unimportant as to ignore them.  For USDA he eliminates Food for Peace, FAS, WIC,  and research and education, and whacks food stamps. But no mention of FSA/CCC/NRCS.

Front Page of the Times

That's where an article on the proposed replacement of the direct payments program with something like ARRM finds a home. One knows the article won't be favorable to farm programs, even though it begins thus:

It seems a rare act of civic sacrifice: in the name of deficit reduction, lawmakers from both parties are calling for the end of a longstanding agricultural subsidy that puts about $5 billion a year in the pockets of their farmer constituents. Even major farm groups are accepting the move, saying that with farmers poised to reap bumper profits, they must do their part.

The author focuses on the Thune-Brown bill and opposition from EWG. 

Slow Blogging

Wife and I are traveling over a long weekend, so blogger will be slow or nonexistent.

Jobs and Proportional Spacing

In his famous commencement speech Steve Jobs took credit for bringing proportional spacing to the personal computer, claiming that Microsoft wouldn't have had the vision to do so.  It's possible his claim was tongue-in-cheek, but Mr. Manjoo at Slate took it seriously in his appraisal of Jobs. " If he hadn’t brought proportional typefaces to the Mac—if the Mac had never existed—it’s difficult to think of anyone else who would have. Microsoft? Dell? No way."

I beg to differ.  Several lines of development came together on the personal computer.  IBM in 1948 announced the IBM Executive Typewriter, which provided a proportionally spaced font.  To the best of my knowledge, such typewriters were always a class symbol, used for "executives". A second line was preparation of copy for photo-offset printing, with the Varityper and later the IBM Selectric Composer.  A third line started with the mainframe with the creation of typesetting.  These separate lines stemmed from the realization that print is just easier to read and prettier to look at if it's proportionally spaced, which then gets you into the details of font design, serifs versus no serifs, etc. etc. It didn't take Steve Jobs for people to realize this.  He didn't create the demand for it from scratch.

My own exposure to the issue came in the early 70's, when we were using IBM mag tape/selectric typewriters for directives. We were looking for replacement systems, which got me looking far afield at the minicomputers of the day.  The monitors on these were limited:; they could form letters with maybe a 6x9 dot matrix.  And their output was limited to the dot matrix or daisy wheel printer.

Another way to discuss this is to focus on the final product, which is "what you see is what you get"--WYSIWYG, both on the monitor and on the output device.  The Executive typewriter, Varityper, Composer all used hardware to provide the output.  WYSIWYG on the monitor required getting enough pixels on the screen to model different type fonts. WYSIWYG on the output device required a device which could vary the output under software control: inkjet, dot-matrix, or laser printers.  And, of course, you needed a software package between the monitor and output device.

What Apple did do by the mid-80's was package the three elements (monitor, software, laser printer) together in a package which could enable desktop publishing.  Once that was in place the doors opened wide and demand rushed in.