MarkPNeyer.com

I filed my tax return this afternoon, and I soon got an email from the federal government. At least they’re being direct.

– Begin Email —

Dear Mark P Neyer,

Congratulations! The IRS has accepted your federal tax return. There’s nothing else you need to do. We have decided to give back some of the money we took from you, although we still plan to spend the rest of the money we took on stupid shit that doesn’t matter, because we can.

Lest you think we are providing important services with your hard earned money, we remind you that education is largely handled at a local level, and we pretty much have monopoly on that, so we have little incentive to improve education in any way. As far as the roads go, we’re already making way more money from the gasoline provided by the oil companies than anyone else involved in the process of delivering that oil to you, more than enough to pay for the roads. We don’t plan on lowering the gas prices, however – we need that money. How else are we supposed to fund parties costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for ourselves?

Please note that because some of the money we steal from you is indeed used to pay for highways, we reserve the right to withhold your own money from you if you don’t do what we say, even if what we say happens to be patently unconstitutional.

On top of all that, we plan to continue  depreciating the value of your saved assets by exercising an overly inflationary monetary policy, as well as by printing money to give to large financial institutions.  These policies are great for people who like to gamble with large sums of money, but they aren’t very good for anyone else.   So why do we do it, then? Fuck you! That’s why!

Hahaha,

United States Federal Government

The cost of a university education in America has increased significantly in the past decade.  As usual, our government’s plan is to subsidize college education.  When you subsidize the purchase of a good or service, you don’t drive the price down, you drive it up, because people will consume more of the good or service being subsidized.  Increasing college subsidies will only make the problem worse, because colleges will simply raise their tution rates even more.

I  propose a simple solution to the problem of increased tuition: Any school that takes federal funding is required to let  anyone who wants to sit in for whatever exams they would like, as long as they pay the university a nominal fee,  perhaps $50 per exam. If a student can pass the final examination for a course, the school must give that student credit for the course; if the student has obtained enough credits to graduate, then the school must issue that student a diploma, just as if the student had paid whatever ridiculous amount the school would normally charge students for tuition, room and board, and a million little fees for this or that.

Intelligent, motivated students could learn what they needed to on their own time, by teaching themselves or paying private tutors who would work for a fraction of the cost of tenured professors with Ph. D’s. A degree from Harvard or Stanford would no longer be something only available to those privileged enough to afford it, and it would be possible for students to work to put themselves through college, rather than relying on financial aid from the government.

Who would gain from this new rule? Millions of people with the intellect and personal ambition but not the means to afford a college education would be able to better their lives and their futures by obtaining college degrees from reputable institutions.  Businesses looking to hire top talent  would have a much wider pool of empoyees to choose from.   Increasing the number of people trained in practical fields would do wonders for the economy.

Who would be hurt by this new rule? Universities would lose some of the money they gain from tuition, but for institutions like Harvard, this wouldn’t matter, because they get most of their money from their endowments.   Tenured professors might find themselves out of a job, as people who are capable of teaching themselves would simply pay the $50 fee and take the exams.  The people who would lose the most from this system, though,  would be those rich enough to afford a degree from Harvard who would now be forced to compete with people who are more intelligent and more ambitious than they are, but who couldn’t afford to go to Harvard because they weren’t lucky enough to be born into a family wealth enough to afford it.

Imagine a world where being born into a family with money no longer meant that you only required modest social abilities to succeed in life, and where the only thing required to attend a prestigious institution would be a sharp intellect, a strong work ethic, and a hunger for success, instead of the ability and willingness to pay $200,000 for a college degree.

I’ve been studying global climate change a lot lately.  I  just can’t make up my mind. It’s basically a fight between my rational/logical brain, and my intuition.

My rational, logical mind understands the basic physics behind the theory that all the Carbon Dioxide we’ve put into the air has altered (and will continue to alter) the climate. The theory has been around a long time and has been experimentally verified.  There are a lot of really smart people who think the earth is getting warmer due to human activity.  They couldn’t all be wrong, could they?

My intuitive mind, on the other hand, has a hard time believing that climatologists have gotten it all correct. I have a lot of questions about their methodologies and the results they have found. I figured the best way to answer these questions would be to talk to a climatologist, so that’s what I decided to do. I’ve emailed several climatologists with questions I had about global climate change. I’ll post the answers when I get them back.  Stay tuned!

Here are the questions I asked:

1. From what I’ve read, there are a bunch of weather stations around the world, and the temperature measurements from these weather stations are mathematically combined to form the global average temperature. How can climate scientists be sure that the mathematics they are using to combine the temperature measurements together are correct? A theory which proposes an experiment can easily be validated – you simply perform the experiment and see if the theory holds up. How do you validate something that is purely a measurement, and makes no direct predictions?
2. I have a similar question about paleo-climatology. I don’t see how ice core measurements, tree ring data, and other proxies for temperature that are used before the mid 1800’s could give any degree of accuracy. Wouldn’t you need to measure tree rings all around the world and then combine them together, again using some complicated math?  Are there statistical confidence intervals for the accuracies of historical climate reconstructions? Where can i find those?
   
   
3. The changes in the earth’s average temperature are measured to be on the order of 1 degree Celsius over 100 years. That doesn’t seem like much to me. The only explanation that I have come up with for the reason that such a small change puts us in danger is if the climate system is a chaotic system.  Is our climate a chaotic system? If so, my understanding of chaotic systems is limited but it seems unlikely to me that a computer simulation could ever have much hope of predicting much about a chaotic system, because you’d never have an accurate understanding of the initial conditions, and even slight errors in the initial conditions would cause the climate’s actual behavior to diverge wildly from what our models predict [see question 5]. If the climate system is not chaotic, then how does such a small change in temperature cause so much damage?
   
4. Mathematically, the temperature of the earth has to exist, but it seems to me that it would change so fast and fluctuate so much that talking about changes of fractions of a degree doesn’t make much sense. My understanding of atmospheric models is that they usually treat the atmosphere as having different layers, each with different thermodynamical properties. If the average surface temperature increases, but this increase is offset by a decrease in the average temperature of one layer of the atmosphere, I should think the climate would definitely change even though the ‘average global temperature’ would remain unchanged. Is it ever useful to talk about a “global average temperature”? Can we get a more complete picture by looking at the temperature distribution function over time? I’m curious to know what that function would look like, but I have been unable to find it.
   
   
5. The best thing about science (in my humble opinion) is that it’s usually pretty easy to tell who’s right; if a theory is repeatedly verified experimentally then there’s a good bet that the theory is accurate. It’s my understanding that the theory of Carbon Dioxide trapping some radiation into space and thereby increasing the temperature of the stratosphere has been repeatedly experimentally verified. I’m very curious, however, about the historical accuracy of climate models. So far, all I have been able to find is a comparison of James Hansen’s 1988 predictions of the change in temperature anomaly and the actual observations made up to 2006. It looks like the models accurately predicted the real change in temperature, but in his paper “Global Temperature Change,” Hansen says that “Close agreement of observed temperature change with simulations for the most realistic climate forcing is accidental, given the large unforced variability in both model and real world.” Maybe I’m misreading him, but it sounds like he’s saying ‘the models were right, but that was a fluke.’    How statistically accurate were climate models from the 90’s in predicting the climate variability we experienced over the past decade?

I have heard many different predictions about the effects of anthropogenic global warming, ranging from incredibly bad (the demise of many species, potentially including the human race) to mildly good (improved crop yields in the northern hemisphere, fewer deaths due to extreme cold.) How much danger do you believe global warming poses for the human race? Is it true that some countries might actually benefit from global warming?


6. I read that even if we stopped all CO2 emissions immediately, the earth’s temperature would still rise at the same rate (~1 Degree Celcius / Century) for some time, because it would take a long time to remove those gases from our atmosphere. Some people have proposed geoengineering as the solution to the problem of global warming, arguing that cutting emissions would be “too little, too late.”  Do you think any geoengineering approaches are a viable solution to the problem?

The BBC is reporting that thousands of Britons are now calling upon their government to posthumously pardon and knight Alan Turing. If you don’t know his story, you should.

Alan Turing is one of the founders of the field of Computer Science, which is the study of the mathematical laws underlying computation.   He proved, among other things, that there are some problems that cannot be solved by a computational device. Not only was Turing’s work theoretically impressive and groundbreaking, it was also of incredible importance to the allied effort during the second world war.  The British intelligence ran an outfit called Bletchley Park, whose sole purpose was to intercept German and Japaneses messages, break open the encryption schemes, and use the gleaned secrets to help the Allies.  The Germans had a complicated encryption computer called ‘Enigma,’ which they believed to be unbreakable.  There was a herculean effort on the part of the allies  to break open this encryption system, and it succeeded.  Alan Turing devised a machine called ‘the Bombe’ which could reverse engineer the settings on the enigma machine, to help decode its messages. It is entirely possible that without the efforts at Bletchley Park,  the war might have lasted a long longer or ended on an entirely different note.

Alan Turing was not only a genius who worked tirelessly to save the free world, he was a homosexual living in an age when homosexuality was illegal. In 1952 he was charged with having a homosexual relationship, and he accepted a sentence of chemical castration via estrogen injection.  His security clearance was stripped, he was forbidden form working at Bletchley Park, and a year later, he killed himself. Now, I suppose an apology on behalf of the British government would be nice, but it wouldn’t accomplish much.  After reading the story of Alan Turing, I realized that there is an entire class of people who live as second class citizens. If we would like to honor the memory of Alan Turing, the best response is to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and to stop treating a group of our fellow citizens as if there were something wrong with them. I am not homosexual and I do not really understand what causes some people to be so, but to me the reason is irrelevant -  there’s simply no excuse for discriminating against someone because of whom they happen to be attracted to.

I wrote this macro for work and thought other people might be able to use it.

Public Sub MakeAllRefsCopyLocal()
    For Each aproj As Project In DTE.Solution.Projects
        If (aproj.Kind = PrjKind.prjKindCSharpProject) Then
            Dim vsProj As VSProject = CType(aproj.Object, VSProject)
            For Each ref As Reference In vsProj.References
                Try
                    ref.CopyLocal = False
                Catch ex As Exception
                End Try
            Next
        End If
    Next
    MsgBox("All References Made To Copy Local")
End Sub

In my last post, I discussed a simple mathematical model of happiness. I made quite a few assumptions in building the model, and I thought I’d revisit one of them. In my model, people traveled through a world with one spatial dimension, and were either happy or sad depending upon their location and the time. It was quite a simple model, but it still yielded what I believe to be reasonable advice – listen to other people’s experiences and try to use that information to form a more complete picture of the world, in order to make yourself happier.

The strategy I proposed in the last post was to simply maximize the sum of the happiness you experience at each individual moment.  Let’s call this the SumOfHappinesses strategy. Is that a reasonable strategy? Despite my last post, I argue that it actually is not a good strategy to pursue.   My reasoning follows.

Suppose you live in a universe where you have 100 coins, and you have a device which flips them all at the same time. You’ll be very happy if they all come up ‘heads’. As happy as you possibly could be.  That happiness will last you for the rest of your life, too. In this universe, What do you do?  The SumOfHappinesses strategy says to keep on flipping as often as you can, in order to maximize your happiness.

Think about this for a second, though.  You spend your life doing nothing but flipping coins? I don’t care how happy it makes you, waiting your whole life for one extremely unlikely event to occur can’t be worth it.  Every time the event doesn’t occur, you’ll get upset, and most likely you’ll never reach the event.  The odds of all coins coming up heads are 1 in 2¹⁰⁰, which is about one in 1.26 x 10³⁰ . If you flipped the coins ten times a second, nonstop, for the age of the entire universe you’d still be very very unlikely to ever reach that ultimate happiness event.

You might argue that I’ve created an absurd universe – who would really be that happy if they flipped 100 heads in a row? It turns out that there are plenty of things that happen in the real world that are similar to my coin-flipping example.  The lottery is one thing that comes to mind – even if you could get one free lottery ticket each day, it wouldn’t be worth it to go out and pick the thing up, because your probability of winning is so small.

What are some other examples?  Becoming famous works perfectly here.  Let’s suppose your goal is to become the next rock superstar. You’d have to practice really hard, meet the right people, and be extraordinarily lucky.  If you put all your life’s effort and energy into becoming a rock star, the overwhelming probability is that you’ll end your life no more famous than you began.   The same is true in any other field that has ’super stars’  which is pretty much every field I can think of.

Does this mean you shouldn’t “shoot for the top?” Absolutely not – it just means you shouldn’t make “getting to the top”  your only source of happiness. If you like playing guitar, then by all means shoot for stardom, but make sure you don’t forget to derive happiness from your daily practicing.  If you focus only on the goal and not the process of getting there, you’re going to be unhappy. No matter how happy extremely unlikely events could make you, the fact that they’re extremely unlikely means that they’re really not worth pursuing unless you enjoy the act of pursuing them.