Health care

This is the best article on health care reform I've ever read:

How American Health Care Killed My Father, in The Atlantic.

It's big (six long pages), but it's very accessible, and spot on.

An excerpt:

I’m a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America’s lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won’t do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.

Unfortunately, I don't think that our political system is capable of effecting the type of fundamental change that is necessary to really improve the situation. But if it were, this guy has the right idea.

All

I've noticed an interesting trend in email. Lately I've seen a lot of emails like this:

From: Somebody
To: a bunch of people
Subject: something important

Hi all,

blah blah blah

or this:

From: Some dude
To: more people than probably necessary
Subject: (something vague)

All,

mumble mumble...

or maybe this:

From: Another person
To: a mailing list
Subject: Proposal

Dear All,

I'd like to propose...

The use of "all" to address a group seems to be increasing. I'm not sure if it's actually becoming more common, or if I just perceive it that way because I'm in a new environment (work). Either way, every time I see someone address an email to "all", it just looks weird. It seems like we (the English speaking world) have developed more natural, time-tested ways to address everyone—like, well, "everyone". Or "everybody". Or even "y'all" (which can become quite natural if you live in Texas for a while). But "all"? That's just awkward.

(On a slightly related note, someone at work yesterday sent an email to an internal mailing list addressed "To Whom It May Concern". Seriously?!? The 1700's ended a while ago.)

Time

This quote, from C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, has been one of my favorites for a long time:

I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.... If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.

I love the idea that we should sacrifice our means to help others, but I sometimes struggle to know how to apply it. I have a lot more money than I need, and it seems imprudent to give away so much money that it impinges on what I can do, since that would preclude saving. Where's the happy medium?

Today in church a guy named Dave shared a thought that made me think about this idea in a new light. He mentioned the story of the widow's mite, recorded in Mark 12:41-44:

41 And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much.

42 And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing.

43 And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury:

44 For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.

Dave then made the point that most of us don't want for money, but we do want for time. Our poverty isn't financial, but temporal. The obvious parallel is that sacrificing our time to serve God and others, especially when we're short on it, is of great value.

Maybe this is the modern version of C.S. Lewis's sentiment:

I am afraid the only safe rule is to spend more time serving than we can spare.... If our service does not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say it is too little. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our service to others excludes them.

Food for thought.

Dreams

I listened to The Alchemist audiobook on my drive out to California on Saturday. I chose it because someone had told me that it was good, but I didn't know much about it. It turned out to be the perfect book for the occasion.

My life has changed a lot recently. I graduated from college, moved a couple of states away, and transitioned from 8 years (on and off) of being a college student to an indefinite period of being a working professional. I've done a lot of thinking about life recently, especially about my goals and dreams.

The Alchemist is about a Spanish shepherd boy who follows his dreams. It's an interesting story, but it's told to teach. Its message is to follow your dreams, and to do what's noble, rather than what's easy.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book.

On motivation:

It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

On gratitude:

...when each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives everyday as the sun rises.

On following your dreams:

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."

"Every second of the search is an encounter with God," the boy told his heart.

"When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because I've known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I've discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve."

I love that last quote. I've really made an effort over the past year or so to follow my dreams, even when it's hard. It's been a rough ride, and I've been bruised a time or two, but I've grown a lot more than if I would have led a safer, more mundane life.

At the beginning of October, I ate one of those little chocolates that has a fortune cookie-type quote on the inside of the wrapper. It said simply, "Be fearless.". It's been in my wallet ever since. Whenever I'm tempted to take the easy way out, it provides a little reminder that the easy way isn't always the best way. It's better to dream.

Christmas break

Christmas break this year was unexpectedly great. I mean, I expected it to be good, but it was a lot better than I ever could have expected. I got to hang out with great people, eat great food, and do great things. Here are a few highlights, although most of the highlights are more journal material than blog material.

It snowed a lot, so lots of our activities were snow-related. We went sledding down our street:


...and Kristy and I built a snow woman. Brian and I got a little action:

She (the snow woman) wasn't quite as good at standing up as she was at kissing, though:


Not too long after that picture, she splatted over. Poor thing.

I decorated the driveway:


We took a little break from the snow to stay inside for Christmas. Dave and I were looking pretty fine on Christmas morning:


Here are all of the kids (plus Evan, who's one of the kids too, these days):

After our outdoor hiatus, we ventured back out for some more activity. We built pop bottle rockets and launched them with the launcher we made last year:


We headed up to Mt. Hood before New Year's to go snowshoeing. It turned out that the trailhead we planned to go to was buried by plowed snow, so we had to go to a different place, where it turned out that we didn't even really need snowshoes at. It was fun, though:


Of course, we had to do the obligatory (yes, that was redundant) jumping pictures.

Things to learn

Yesterday was a day of lasts:

• I went to my last undergrad class (CS 431, compilers, with Dr. Mercer).
• I turned in my last undergrad homework (a EE 380 problem set on the z-transform).
• I turned in my last undergrad lab (a EE 380 lab on elliptic filters).
• I turned in my last undergrad project (a peephole optimizer for my compilers class).

Next week I'll take my last undergrad final ever, and, with that, I'll be done with college.

I feel like I've just started learning, though. There are lots of things that I'd like to learn but haven't had time to because of school. Well, now's my chance.

Here's a sampling of things that I'd like learn about:

• Global poverty and public health, and ways to improve things
  
• Programming stuff: Cocoa programming in Objective-C, Android development, Haskell, AVR programming, MapReduce
  
• China, India, and Africa
  
• Spanish. I think I might take a class. I'm getting rusty.
• Trad climbing
  
• Medicine. I'd like to become an EMT or wilderness first responder.
• Algorithms (especially graph algorithms) and algorithm analysis.
  
• Maybe join a search and rescue team. Maybe.
  
• Child development
  
• Literature. I've learned a lot in college, but I've been too busy to read as much as I'd like. Time to get back to the books.
  
• Cooking
• Psychology
• Probability, Bayesian statistics, and graphical modeling
• Economics

That should keep me busy for a while.

Pilots

I went to an African Children's Choir concert in Idaho earlier this month. The choir is composed of kids from Africa, and it gives them a chance to see the world and realize that life can be better. At the end of the concert, all of the kids in the choir came out on stage, and, one by one, each of them said what they wanted to be when they grew up. It was moving to see that these kids who grew up with nothing, many in refugee camps, had high hopes for the future. Many wanted to be doctors, a few engineers, some teachers, and one cute kid said he wanted to be an optometrist. However, by far the most common aspiration was to be a pilot.

Last night I watched a documentary about Iraq (Iraq in Fragments). One segment focused on a fatherless boy who worked at a mechanic shop in Baghdad. At one point someone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said he wanted to be a pilot.

These are just two anecdotal experiences, but it is interesting that so many of these kids who grew up with little aspire to be pilots. Perhaps for them flying is not just a respectable profession, not just a way to make money, but a symbol of freedom. Flying means control; it means hope. Flying means being able to soar to new personal heights. I hope that these kids—and the millions of others like them—reach their aspirations. I'm thankful to have grown up in an environment that has provided me the freedom to choose my future.

Perspective

The last couple of months have been a pretty rough ride for me emotionally, and there have been several times when I've felt pretty empty inside. I often focus too much on the moment and lose sight of the bigger picture. Today was one of those days.

As I was walking home under heavy skies that looked about as gray as I felt, I decided to listen to the "Sunday" playlist on my iPod, which contains religious and other uplifting music. This hymn, which has long been one of my favorites, randomly came up:

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise him, for he is thy health and salvation!
Join the great throng, Psaltery, organ, and song, Sounding in glad adoration!

Praise to the Lord! Over all things he gloriously reigneth.
Borne as on eagle wings, safely his Saints he sustaineth.
Hast thou not seen How all thou needest hath been Granted in what he ordaineth?

Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy way and defend thee.
Surely his goodness and mercy shall ever attend thee.
Ponder anew What the Almighty can do, Who with his love doth befriend thee.

Praise to the Lord! Oh, let all that is in me adore him!
All that hath breath, join with Abraham's seed to adore him!
Let the "amen" Sum all our praises again, Now as we worship before him.

—Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, by Joachim Neander (listen)

These lyrics struck me powerfully today and brought some much-needed peace. Sure, my life isn't perfect right now, but my trials are "but a small moment", and I have been abundantly blessed. Although I'm certainly weak, God, who loves me, is all-powerful, and he will certainly bear me up, sustain me, prosper my way, defend me, attend me, and befriend me. What more can I ask for?

I, like Nephi, sometimes forget who is on my side. I am grateful for inspiring words and uplifting music that reminded me today. Today's heavy skies will clear, and the future is bright.

A couple of footnotes:

• BYU has an excellent recording of this and other songs on their Echoes of the Sabbath album.
• It turns out that the LDS version of this hymn includes only part of the original poetry. The full version (heads up: obnoxious auto-playing music) further develops the theme. It's worth a read.
  

I voted

Since voting in Oregon is done completely by mail, I've never had the pleasure of wearing an "I Voted" sticker on election day to advertise my civic responsibility. That's OK, though, because vote by mail encourages participation, decreases costs, and makes the process run more smoothly. I mailed in my ballot last week.

There were some interesting items on the ballot this year, aside from the one that everyone's been talking about:

• Measure 58, which would prevent teaching students in a language other than English for more than two years. That's a horrible idea! I think that bilingual immersion education is a great idea—in fact, I would love it if all students were educated in bilingual classrooms. And what happens to the students who don't pick up English in two years? No education for them? Bad idea.
• Measure 26-95, which would allocate over a third of a billion dollars for Portland Community College. I voted yes on this one. I'm generally pretty fiscally conservative, and this was by far the largest single price tag on the ballot. However, I think that education is vitally important, both for society and for business, and there seems to be a lack of good education in the Portland area. PCC seems to be doing a good job now, so I'm hopeful that they will be able to use additional funds effectively.
• Measures 57 and 61, which are both "tough on crime" bills. Both would institute mandatory minimum sentences for many crimes, and measure 61 would spend a bunch of money to build new prisons. Measure 57 requires addiction treatment for some offenders, which I think is a great idea. While we do need to lock up some people, I think that the "Department of Corrections" should do more correcting and less carcel-ing. I also think that it's better to let judges decide sentences depending on circumstances, rather than require them to issue one-size-fits-all mandatory minimum sentences. Finally, I don't think that it's worth diverting the government's resources away from education and healthcare to fund more prisons. Interestingly, if both of these measures pass, then only measure 57 will be enacted. Some people who aren't fans of either one are voting for measure 57, just because they think it is the lesser of two evils. I decided that I want no evil, so I voted against both.
  
• Several positions (mostly for county judges) that looked like this: "(Position): Vote for one: (1) Person A. (2) Other: __________". Those ones were easy.
  

I thought a lot about most of the 15 positions and 19 issues that I voted on, and it ended up taking me about six hours to finish. Voting took a lot more time this time around, since I haven't been living in Oregon. I wasn't familiar with a lot of the issues, so I had to do a bunch of research on them.

I ended up voting for five democrats, three republicans, and a guy from the Pacific Green Party.

One of the republicans I voted for was Gordon Smith, the incumbent senator. I've been really impressed with his moderate, bipartisan record in Congress. It's too bad there aren't more politicians like him.

One of those democrats is probably the one that you're wondering about: I voted for Obama. (I know, I know! Heresy! A BYU student voted for Obama!) Here's some of my reasoning:

• I've been appalled at the lack of fiscal restraint that has swept over the Republican party during the last several years, and I think that they deserve a slap on the wrist.
  
• I don't think that Sarah Palin is prepared to hold high office, despite her popular looks. Can you imagine her negotiating with Vladimir Putin? It wouldn't be pretty. There's a non-zero chance that McCain will die during his term, and the thought of President Palin doesn't leave a good feeling in my stomach.
• Obama seems to genuinely care about improving life for common Americans. While I'm economically pretty conservative, I'm rather socially liberal, so Obama and I agree on many issues.
• Obama will do great things for our international relations. Bush and Cheney have been an absolute disaster, and we need someone who can restore our good name in the world. When I was in Europe this summer, every European I asked supported Obama. The rest of the world cares a lot about this election. They want to like the United States, but we haven't given them many reasons to do so for the past few years. Our actions have spurred anti-Americanism across the globe. I think terrorism is largely a boogeyman that has been blown out of proportion, but if we want to reduce our risk to terrorism, I think it's more valuable to quit making everyone mad than to send our military around harassing everyone we don't like.
• I'm impressed with his energy policy, despite his stance on ethanol (see below). Energy is going to become a huge issue—perhaps the issue—over the next decade, and Obama has a much better plan than McCain to deal with it. I like the idea of an Apollo-like program to catalyze the nation into solving this immense problem, because private industry doesn't seem to be doing enough. The space program resulted in huge advantages to our economy, and I think that a similar energy-related program will also pay off.
  
• I think that Obama takes a more reasoned approach to decision making. I'm a fan of leaders who think.
• I think that Obama is a good person with good intentions.
  

There are also several things that I don't like about Obama:

• He wants government to solve a lot of society's problems. I think there's a legitimate role for government, but I think his idea of its role is bigger than mine.
• Having a democratic president and a democratic congress produces too little governmental friction. The idea of separation of powers runs deep in American government for good reason. I would prefer to have a little more tension between the executive and the legislative branches.
• He supports ethanol, perhaps because he's from corn-rich Illinois. That's a bad idea for many reasons. It's not sustainable, it increases food prices, and the subsidies for it cause problems for agricultural exports and imports in developing countries.
• He lied about fundraising for his campaign. He told McCain that if McCain accepted public funding, Obama would too. McCain went ahead with public funding, and Obama went back on his word. He's since been able to outspend McCain by immense margins. Not cool.
  

For a more detailed explanation of some of the reasons that I voted for Obama, see David Bassett's analysis.

Although I didn't get an "I Voted" sticker, thanks to the magic of technology, I'm now able to self-issue myself a virtual one:


I voted... and you should, too!

Global poverty

There's a big news story today that no one is covering. The story is that much of the world is living in poverty.

In 1987, the U.N. designated today, October 17, as International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. While the New York Times covers how much Barak Obama is spending on ads, and CNN covers a new archaeological site in Rome, I can't find a blip today about poverty on their web sites. I bet I know which story is more important to the billions of people wondering what they're going to eat today. (At least the BBC wrote something.)

To give you a sense of the situation, are a few statistics:

• There are about 6.7 billion people in the world.
• About half of those people live on less than $2.50/day.
• 26,500-30,000 children die each day due to poverty (source). You think school shootings are bad? Try annihilating two or three average-sized elementary schools—every hour.
  
• 1 in 6 people in the world are illiterate (source).
• 2.6 billion people lack basic sanitation.
• 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to water.

Excluding China, things have improved some, but not much, over the past few decades:

(Image from Anup Shah, Poverty Facts and Stats, GlobalIssues.org. Used with permission under a Creative Commons license.)

If you're reading this post, chances are that you're not part of the population that we're talking about. The fact that you have electricity and internet access bumps you out of that group. However, that means that you probably also have a lot of capacity to help.

Christ taught that "unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required". This principle certainly applies to both you and me as individuals, as well as the countries where we live. We have a lot to do as a world. People and countries that are well off (that's you!) have a responsibility to help those who are struggling.

The way that we help is important, because some help actually hurts. For example, food aid can actually cause more problems than it solves, since it can depress prices below what local farmers can compete with. (Agricultural subsidies in developed nations have the same effect.) The result is that instead of having local farmers supply nutritional needs and build the local economy, the farmers are themselves forced into poverty and their country becomes even more dependent on foreign aid. Real solutions must be sustainable.

As part of Poverty Day today, the U.N. released a book called Turning Rhetoric into Action. Its motto, "With us not for us", is a good summary of how to make real progress.

So how do we solve this problem? I'm not an expert, but it seems like these things might help:

• Reduce barriers to trade for poor countries. Providing a broader market for poor people to sell their wares would cost us little and help them a lot.
• Get rid of farm subsidies. Artificially pricing one of the most viable economic activities in developing nations out of the game just isn't cool.
• Help people in developing nations learn how to lift themselves out of poverty. We can't just do it for them, or else things will return to how they were when we leave. People and nations need to become self-sufficient.
• Relieve debt for poor countries. This would free up resources spent financing debt for more productive uses.
  

"OK," you might say, "but what can I do? I can't just eliminate tariffs by myself or forgive Madagascar's debt." True. Fighting poverty requires big changes that no one can effect alone. However, you can still help. Spread the word. If everyone knew and cared about this issue, things would change. Contribute to organizations that promote sustainable solutions to world problems. Influence the legislative process to promote helpful policies and laws. Pray for change—and then do something.

For more information on Poverty Day:

• U.N. Secretary General's message about Poverty Day
• U.N. press release
• Amnesty International press release

(As a side note, the U.S. doesn't do so hot with poverty at home, either. Fourty percent of us have been below the poverty line in the last ten years, and around 15% are currently below the line.)

Pride and Prejudice

I read Pride and Prejudice while I was in Europe this summer. Contrary to my expectations, I really enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that John wanted to read it too. The characters were vivid, the story was interesting, and Jane Austen is an excellent writer. I had to watch the BBC movie production of the book in high school, and couldn't stomach it; the book was much better. Who knows—maybe I'd even enjoy the movie now.

This isn't a well-conceived essay on the book; rather, it's a few quotes and words that stood out to me while I was reading. Maybe something will stand out to you, too.

First, some new words I learned:

• supercilious: disdainful
  
• profligacy: extravagance
  
• querulous: full of complaints
  
• panegyric: a formal public speech
  

And now, a few of my favorite quotes:

...more than commonly anxious to please, she naturally suspected that every power of pleasing would fail her.

—the narrator, on Elizabeth

"You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner."
"A man who had felt less, might."

—Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, on why he didn't do more earlier to win Elizabeth

I was happy to find these two quotes, because they very eloquently describe how I feel so much of the time. It's easy to be myself around everyday friends, but it's hard when I'm around girls that I'm interested in—which is when I most want to be myself. Cruel irony, isn't it?

It is a compliment which I never pay to any place if I can avoid it.

—Mr. Darcy, on dancing. He and I agree. :)

To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.

—Mr. Darcy, on agreeing just because a friend wants you to.

It was not in her nature, however, to increase her vexations, by dwelling on them. She was confident of having performed her duty, and to fret over unavoidable evils, or augment them by anxiety, was no part of her disposition.

—the narrator, on Elizabeth. I wish that I were more like her.

Her father captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humor, which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind, had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence, had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.

—the narrator, on Mr. Bennet

I think this last quote is one of the saddest, and yet most insightful in the book. The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet is obviously humorous, but it's also obviously emotionally dessicated. They survive together, but there is an invisible wall between them. In contrast to Mr. Bennet, I want to marry someone amazing—someone with a vibrant mind, self-confidence, insight, and compassion. Youth and beauty may catch the eye, but thoughtfulness, maturity, happiness, and spirituality catch the heart. Perhaps more importantly, I want to be that kind of person for my wife.

Noisy eaters

I'm usually a pretty easy-going guy, but for some reason, loud eaters absolutely drive me crazy. It's like there's a direct link between the sounds of people eating and the pain center in my brain. Sometimes I have to plug my ears or leave the room because it bugs me so bad. Sometimes it makes me irrationally angry.

I'll leave analysis of my warped culinary auditory psychology up to the experts, but maybe this will help you understand how I feel:



I don't usually read the comics, but I saw this one today in the newspaper, and it made me laugh out loud.

Fifteen facts

I've been trying recently to be a little more introspective, and my friend Cindy's recent blog post suggested a good way to do that. Here's the idea: list three joys, fears, goals, current obsessions, and random surprising facts about yourself. Some of these categories were pretty easy for me; others were pretty difficult. Each made me a little more aware of who I am. Here's a little glimpse into my head:

Joys:

• Making someone else happy.
  
• Accomplishing something difficult that's worthwhile.
• Seeing a child grow and learn.
  

Fears:

• Doing things that will limit what I can do in the future.
• Social rejection (but only by certain people).
• Disappointing people I care about.
  

Goals:

• Marry someone amazing.
  
• Become more culturally literate (music, movies, literature, history).
• Develop greater charity.
  

Obsessions:

• The outdoors.
• Technology.
• Language.
  

Random facts:

• I'd really like to live and work in another country for a while.
  
• I really like soft things, like the hamster I had in third grade, fuzzy blankets, and my hair.
  
• I've always thought that I would marry a girl with brown hair. This isn't a requirement (after all, my last girlfriend had blond hair), but for some reason that's what I think.
  

Things I'm thankful for

Here are some things I'm thankful for (in no particular order):

• My family. There are seven people in my family, and each one of them is amazing. I was definitely blessed to be born into such a good group of people. Going to college with two of my siblings (and being roommates with one of them) has been a lot of fun.
  
• Good friends. I don't live with my family right now, so having good friends is really important. I'm thankful for having some great friends.
  
• Difficult experiences. Sure, they're hard, and I don't always like them in the moment, but they have made me a better person. Doing hard things (and often failing) also helps to keep me humble. I've found that it's important to ask "what can I learn?" rather than "why me?" when trials come.
  
• Mountains. It's no secret that I like mountains. I'm thankful for the beauty, tranquility, and serenity of being high on a rugged peak—especially a pristine, snow-covered one in the early morning. Moses went into the mountain to talk to God; I think he was onto something. For me, the mountains are an escape from the grind of everyday life—a place to step back, feel small, and think about the bigger picture.
  
• Telephones. These days we take it for granted, but if you stop and think for a minute, the telephone is an amazing invention. I'm thankful to be able talk to people I care about, even when they're far away.
  
• Cereal. No really. I'm serious. I've eaten cereal for breakfast about 99/100 days of my life. It's quick, nutritious, and yummy. What more could I ask for? :)
  
• God. I know that God is real, that he loves me, and that he has a plan for me. That gives everything else in my life meaning and purpose. I'm thankful to know about him.
  
• My talents. I'm certainly not the most talented person you'll ever meet, but I'm thankful for the talents that I have. I'm especially thankful when I can use them to bless others' lives.
  
• Freedom. I'm thankful for the freedom to think, say, and go where I want. Depressingly few people in history have been so privileged.
  
• Snow. I still get excited and giddy like a little kid when it snows. It's pure, quiet, and beautiful. (It also provides the setting for some of my favorite activities.) One of my favorite memories is riding my bike home from work in the dark late one night when I was a freshman in college. A few inches of fresh snow glittered under the yellow glow of the streetlights, and snowflakes gently swirled around me as I pedaled down a deserted street. The snow muffled the sound of my tires, and it felt like I was the only person in the world.
  
• Frisbee. Tossing a frisbee is a great way to have fun, have a good heart-to-heart, and exercise, all at the same time!
  

Love

...but only sometimes.

The trip that wasn't

For almost three years now, two of my former roommates and I have been planning The Man Trip, to take place during summer 2008. The idea was to do something really manly (like smashing rocks together or grunting a lot) for a week or so. Erik couldn't make it (due to marriage and graduation and other grown up stuff), but Hyrum and I decided to go backpacking this week in the Trinity Alps in northern California. (You can read his account of our trip.)

Since internet access isn't something that normally comes with a weeklong backpacking trip in the middle of nowhere, you might be wondering how I'm writing this blog entry. Well, the truth is, our trip had some problems. Here's the main one:

(source)

Those little red flames are forest fires. The big red arrow is where we were planning to hike. You may notice a problem with that situation. We did too, actually, but we figured that there would be other nearby options if the fires were too bad where we were planning to go.

We set off last night on the five-hour drive from the Bay Area to Weaverville. I was amazed at the variety of crops that were grown along the highway: rice, corn, wheat, alfalfa, sunflowers, olives, fruit trees, grapes, and more. The sunset over the coast range as we were driving up I-5 was amazing, thanks to a thin layer of hazy smoke in the air.

That haze thickened as we got closer to our destination until it smelled like my car's air conditioning intake was ducted directly from a campfire. That was a little worrying. It was dark by the time we were nearing Weaverville, and at one point we saw a small forest fire blazing through the darkness not too far from the road. That was a little more worrying. We stayed the night in my car in the Long's Drug parking lot. (Word to the wise: don't try that at home, kids. It's not comfortable!).

When we got up in the morning, we headed straight for the Trinity-Shasta National Forest Ranger Station in Weaverville. We were hoping to hear that the fires were dying down and that the winds were blowing the smoke away from our intended route. What we actually heard was that the fires were near our route, they were growing, they were mostly uncontrolled, and the winds were blowing toward where we had planned to go. Uh oh.

As we drove around Weaverville, there were far more fire trucks than regular vehicles on the road. Here's a picture that I took:


The ranger there didn't really have any good suggestions for alternate routes, so we decided to find somewhere ourselves. During the next little while we:

• Tried to go to the Weaverville library to use the internet, only to discover that it didn't open until 1 p.m.
• Called the main Forest Service office in Redding and found out that the ranger who knew what was going on wouldn't be in for over an hour.
• Decided that the smoke was too thick in the Trinity Alps for us to hike there.
• Bought a map of California to help us look for other places to go.
• Made the hour-long drive to Redding.

Here's what the road looked like on the way out of town—and for those of you following along at home, that's not fog:

 

In Redding we:

• Talked to the ranger who supposedly knew what was going on and discovered that she wasn't as helpful as we had hoped.
  
• Tried to find internet access in Redding, only to find that the library had an insanely long wait, and the internet café's phone had been disconnected.
  
• Called almost every national forest and national park in the northern half of California and discovered that apparently the whole northern half of the state is on fire.
  
• Decided to go south to avoid the smoke so that we wouldn't have to drive home even further.
  

We finally decided to drive to Sacramento and go to REI to look at guide books and trail maps. I found a few options that looked pretty good in a guide book and asked Hyrum what he thought of them. He wisely said that he was trying to feel, not think. As I did the same, I felt the same thing that he did: that we should go home.

We had invested a lot of time, money, and planning into the trip, and going home felt a lot like like quitting—a decided un-Manly thing to do. However, we had prayed for guidance, and accepting and following that guidance was more important than following through with our own plans. We drove the couple of hours from Sacramento back through San Francisco and then to Palo Alto, stopping at In-N-Out for dinner.

I'm still disappointed that our plans didn't work out, but I think it's for the best. I've been on interstate trips for the last two weekends, so it's not like I'm hurting for vacation, and this week will give me some extra time to work and finish up some things that I've been putting off for a while (like writing blog entries about those trips). I know that I'll be blessed for following what I was prompted to do.

Our packs, all ready to go, will have to wait for another day. California fires: 1; us: 0.

Bread

On Saturday I went with my roommate to the grocery store. I'm always a little kerfluffled when I move, because I have to answer this question again: how do you pick one of the 117 different types of bread that they have on the bakery aisle? I mean, seriously—how am I supposed to decide what to buy when there are more types of bread than states in the U.S.? My usual strategy is when I'm settled in is "buy whatever I bought last time", but that doesn't work when "what I bought last time" is 800 miles away. I tried the pick-a-random-loaf method a couple of weeks ago, but it molded quickly, so I was in the market for a new variety on Saturday.

Luckily, George, who stocks bread at our local Safeway, was on the job when we got to his row—and who better to ask about bread than the man who puts it on the shelf? George was a friendly looking, middle aged man with a bit of an accent who looked like he might be able to help. Here's my best approximation of our conversation.

"So, how am I supposed to pick what kind of bread to buy? There are so many to choose from!"

"Do you want the cheap bread or the expensive bread?"

"I'm not really sure."

"Well, there are some kinds of bread that never go on sale. This one here, for example [gesturing animatedly at a small, almost-$5 loaf of Oroweat Honey Wheat Berry bread]—it never goes on sale, and yet people buy it. You buy it once, you will buy it again. The texture, the flavor, they are excellent!"

"Maybe I shouldn't buy that one, then. I don't know if I could afford that every week."

"Well, this one [pointing at another kind of wheat bread], it goes on sale—two for $5, two for $4. Some people buy all the loaves when it goes on sale.

"And then there is the cheap bread. It is cheap, but what do you get? What is in this bag?"

At this point, he grabbed a loaf of 2-for-$3 white bread and handed it to Hyrum. "What is in there?"

"Air."

"Yes! Air! This loaf is cheap, but you are just buying air. There is nothing in it! Much better to buy something else."

At this point, George told us to ask him if we had any questions, and then he went back to stocking the shelves.

George impressed me. He just works at a neighborhood grocery store, and all he does is stock shelves, which is a pretty menial job. At least, that's what you'd think if you hadn't met him. However, George reminded me that you can be excellent at what you do, no matter what you do. He delivered with gusto and zeal a three minute exposition on bread, of all things. Not only did he help me pick a loaf, but he brightened my day with his enthusiasm for what could easily be a pretty plain topic.

I bought the $5 loaf.

The internet is broken

My passage of a small milestone today points to a not-so-small problem with the internet at large. That image over there isn't a joke: I really passed the 50,000-message mark in my Gmail spam box this morning. Gmail deletes spam messages after 30 days, so that means that I have received 50,000 new spam messages since March 10.

Let's look at a few stats on my spam:

• Spam conversations in the last 30 days: 50,000
• Other conversations in the same timeframe: 745
• Percent of conversations that are spam: 98.53%
• Percent of conversations that are legit: 1.47%
• Average time between spam messages: 51.8 seconds
  

I should note that my email setup is a little different than most people's, since I relay mail through brucec.net before forwarding it on to Gmail. However, even with my somewhat unique configuration, 50,000 spam messages in 30 days is ridiculous!

I'm glad that Google has such an amazing spam filtering system, or else email would be completely unusable for me. (As an aside, I'm taking a class on machine learning right now, and it's cool that Google uses advanced machine learning techniques to implement their spam filtering. All of that nerdy computer science stuff I'm learning about is quite useful in real life.)

How did we get to this point? After all, back when I started using the internet in 1995, Spam was almost unheard of; today I have received 37 spam messages since I started writing this blog post. It all boils down to two things: motives and methods.

Motives

For spammers to be successful, they need a market of people who will buy their products. If no one ever clicked on a link in a spam message, it seems pretty obvious that it wouldn't be worth it for spammers to continue. However, there is unfortunately some small, clueless proportion of the population who are in the market for "Male enhancement", "New collection of Swi$$ R0lex", or "Mic.rosoft Win.dows Vista U1timate" and think that responding to spam is a good way to get what they want. I have yet to meet one of these clueless people in real life, but they must be out there, or I wouldn't be receiving spam. It's simple economics.

So what has changed since 1995?

• More people use the internet now, so it's a larger, more attractive target to potential spammers.
• The average internet user is less computer-savvy (and maybe less everything-savvy) now than in 1995.

Back in 1995, the only people who used the internet were scientists, professionals, and nerdy early adopters like me. Everyone who was on the internet spoke computerese pretty fluently. Also, most of them were pretty smart people who recognized that there were better ways to lose weight or get a discount mortgage than by responding to some spammer scammer's email.

These days, your grandma, Joe Sixpack, my baby brother, and everyone else in the developed world is on the internet. Now, instead of marketing to a group of scientists and engineers, spammers are marketing to a pretty broad cross section of the population. Both the size and the gullibility of the potential market have increased.

Let's do a little cost-benefit analysis to look at the economic incentives for sending spam. Let's estimate how much the bandwidth to send all of that spam might cost. We'll focus only on the top 3 web mail providers (Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google), ignoring the vast number of other email accounts out there.

• There are about 600 million web mail accounts in the world.
• If every one of them receives spam at the same rate that I do (which I admit is probably a little high), that's about 30 trillion messages per month, or an average of about 11 million spam messages per second.
• If each spam is about 1KB in size (seems about average, looking through my spam box), then that's about 85 gigabits of spam per second.
• A quick internet search found a site that lists wholesale internet connection lease rates. They charge $15,000/month for a 622Mbps OC-12 line.
• Even if we assume a 50% discount on line lease rates since the spammers would be using such massive amounts of bandwidth, that still comes out to 138 OC-12 lines, which would cost $1 million/month.

Let's estimate that it costs another $1 million/month to maintain the network equipment and servers to send all of that spam. Finally, let's assume that spammers make only $1 for every message that someone responds to. What response rate do they need to break even?

1 message in 15 million.

In other words, if one person in 600 responds to one of their 50000 spam messages a month, they provide an economic incentive for spammers to keep spamming.

Methods

Even if spammers have an incentive to do their thing, they still need a way to do it. They won't be able to walk up to most respectable internet providers and say "I'd like to flood the internet with 30 trillion messages a month. Can I buy a little bandwidth from you?". So how do they send spam without being blocked?

They use your computer.

A large percent of spam is sent by organized crime groups. They realize that they can't just go out and buy bandwidth to send spam—after all, who would sell to them? Besides, if they bought bandwidth from one place, it would be pretty easy to block that one place and stop the flow of spam. They would also have to buy millions of dollars of computer equipment to handle sending all of that spam.

Rather than deal with all of those problems, they use botnets to send spam. A botnet is a network of hacked computers, usually running Windows, that is under centralized control. The person controlling the network can have 1000s of computers all across the internet send out spam for them. This offers a couple of advantages to spammers:

• It's really difficult to track and block spam from so many different sources.
• They don't have to pay for bandwidth or servers.

(In reality, many spammers pay a botnet operator for their services, but the general principles are the same.)

If you've ever downloaded and run one of those fun little games someone emailed to you, or if you've ever run a cool screensaver you found on a shady-looking web site, or if you don't run antivirus and firewall software, or if you don't keep your system patched with Windows Update, or maybe even if you do do all of these things, your computer might be part of a botnet and you don't even know it.

The situation is depressing, and there are no really good technological measures for stopping the flood of spam without drastically changing the way that internet email works. At least Google has some good filtering algorithms.

PS—Here's the current count:

Nerds

Tonight one of my friends said that she's the biggest nerd that she knows. As a rebuttal, I'd like to present the first few lines of a paper that I turned in for a class yesterday:

Decision trees are simple models for multi-class classification problems. A decision tree classifies a vector of mixed discrete and/or continuous features by examining the most discriminative feature at each step, narrowing down the classification possibilities until only one remains.

Decision trees can be inferred from labeled data using supervised machine learning. Trees can optionally be pruned to correct for overfitting and thus improve their ability to generalize to unseen data.

So there. :)

Queuing efficiency

OK. It's time for a little venting about something everyone deals with and no one likes: lines, or queues, for you folks across the pond.

A line is a sign of inefficiency that occurs when the rate of demand for a resource exceeds the rate of supply. As an engineering student who is also interested in economics, I look at lines from a practical point of view. I'm always trying to find ways to shorten or eliminate lines, or at least reduce the amount of time that I spend in them.

I often find myself silently wishing that someone would fix the problems with lines so that I wouldn't have to spend so much time standing around. But how do you fix a social problem as big as line behavior? Maybe I should work on getting it introduced as part of the national first grade curriculum. I could probably save the country $500 billion in productivity losses over the next 20 years. Maybe they'd put my face on a postage stamp—one that you would no longer have to stand in line at the post office to buy.

Failing that, I guess I could just blog about the situation instead.

Here goes.

• What's the deal with buffets? They seem to be a magnet for questionable queue practices. For example, why does it seem that most buffet lines go down just one side of the table? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that if the line goes down both sides, it will go twice as fast.
• Also, who puts the napkins, forks, and cups at the beginning of the buffet line? That plugs up the beginning of the line, and it also slows down the rest of the line because you have to juggle all your utensils while you're trying to dish up your food. Put the accessories at the end, folks!
• What's with the social stigma against cutting in a buffet line? You know how lots of times everyone is backed up at the liver (or whatever), and there's a giant gap after that at the rolls, and cookies, and baked beans, etc.? If I skip up ahead to the rolls, it doesn't slow anyone else down, but I feel like everyone will think I'm a bad person if I do. That doesn't stop me, though. (Really, a buffet swarm would be more efficient than a buffet line, but it doesn't preserve the first-in-first-out property.)
  
• Change of venue: the sidewalk. BYU's hallways and sidewalks get pretty plugged up during class breaks. I hate it when I'm walking down a crowded sidewalk and someone just stops in front of me. If they looked around, they would realize that they had disrupted the vast current of students flowing behind them, slowing down hundreds of people. Next time you need to send a text message, be a little more aware of your surroundings and step off the sidewalk first.
• For that matter, if you feel the need to talk to five of your best friends, don't do it right in the middle of a really busy sidewalk. There are better places.
• Back to the buffet: you don't actually have to stand in line—at least not for very long. Most people go get in line right when the event starts, and many of those people have to wait quite a while to get to the front. Why not just wait in your seat where you can have a good conversation with your friends, and go get in line when it dies down? It's a lot more pleasant that way.
• Have you ever been in a class where a bunch of signup sheets (or assignments to be returned, or whatever) have been passed around? If the pile is big enough, it snakes through the first two or three rows, but it doesn't makes it to everyone before class is over. There's a solution to the problem, inspired by a principle from computer processor design: pipelining. Instead of sending everything around in one giant pile, break it up into several smaller piles and send them around one after the other. The total amount of time that any one person spends going through everything will be the same (after all, there are still the same number of things to go through), but since the piles are smaller, they will move between people faster, and thus hopefully make it to everyone by the end of class.

Thanks for indulging me. Watch for this information coming to a first grade classroom near you.