Nobrainer’s Think Tank

• My reading of Innumeracy [my review here] represents a pause in my reading of Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman. My mid-book review is that Free to Choose is so good, important, and valuable that it is hardly worth reading because it is so widely read and regarded by economists that I’ve already absorbed most of the book through them. However, the amazing thing about this book, which was originally published in 1980, is how well it reads in 2008.
• Two huge solar plants are being built in California and something smells fishy.
  

  The plants… in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store.

  I’ve never seen power-consumption related on a per-Wal-Mart basis. It’s like the Times is trying to say something about Wal-Mart without saying something about Wal-Mart.

  Of course, skip a few paragraphs and we get to the first reality check:

  Though the California installations will generate 800 megawatts at times when the sun is shining brightly, they will operate for fewer hours of the year than a coal or nuclear plant would and so will produce a third or less as much total electricity.

  And then a WTF moment.

  The companies said they were forbidden by contract terms to talk about price, and a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas & Electric said her company was trying to obtain the best possible deal for ratepayers by not telling other suppliers of renewable energy what it was willing to pay.

  A huge utility building two big power plants and nobody is saying what the cost is? Yikes.

  We all love big deals where no one has any idea what the cost will be. Although when the deal is being made to conform to a government mandate, good deals are going to be off the table anyway. So good luck with that, California. If you want to (foolishly) subsidize the development of solar power for the rest of us, then who am I to complain?

After seeing a reference to it, I ordered a very cheap, used copy of Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos. Innumeracy is a somewhat useful, easy-to-understand, relatively short, and fun to read book that is only moderately worth reading because I don’t believe it to be particularly unique (although it is more worth reading if you’ve never been exposed to something similar).

I did enjoy some of the examples and useful demonstrations of certain ideas. However I was most amused by parts of his blaming the educational system for the society’s Innumeracy problem. Paulos remarked that he became determined to be a mathematician at the age of 10. That year he had calculated the ERA of some, apparently horrible, pitchers for the old Milwaukee Braves. Ten year-old Paulos found that his ERA was 135. When he described this finding to his teacher, his teacher had him explain this to his class. His teacher then explained that little Paulos was wrong because everyone knew that ERAs couldn’t be higher than 27. The teacher of course was wrong. But this explains part of why Paulos, and I, think that math is not given its due in education: teachers are afraid of being shown up by bright 10 year olds.

[Side note: I’ve frequently held the belief that my success in life came despite, and not because of, the efforts of many of my primary school teachers who, no doubt, would like to be able to claim a supporting role. My secondary teachers, on the other hand, were quite fantastic.

It dawned on me this last week why I skipped class so much in college. Its because I learned how to in elementary school. I was rarely an absent student. I probably averaged 0.5 absences per year between grades k-12. However, in grades 4-6 I was in an art program which met 1 day each week and was hosted at a different school; I missed almost an entire day of school each week. To compensate I simply learned to teach myself.]

For the numerate, the book is perhaps a decent review of some types of problems of that have been long-ago learned and since forgotten. I’m optimistic that the information in the passages I highlighted will, in the future, be useful to me and my career. However, it seems like I could have gotten a similar review of material that was much shorter and more to the point.

For the innumerate, Innumeracy may serve as a decent wake up call that, ya know, math is kinda important. And if you don’t know math or aren’t good at even some of the simpler concepts, it will be used against you (in a court of law?).

Overall Innumeracy was a pleasant read. However, the 2nd half of the book left me disappointed by failing to add any value to the first half. It deserves 3 stars out of 5.

Addendum: Having read through some of the reviews on Amazon, one, which gave the book 2 stars, makes an important point. (more…)

I have yet to review the 4th book I read, It’s Not News, It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News, written by Fark.com founder and operator Drew Curtis. The title of the book actually does a pretty good job of summarizing things. Curtis has created specific categories of “news” that aren’t news that we are subjected too. Among the categories are things like “advertising masquerading as news” and “article contradicts title”. He runs through the descriptions, provides some examples, and then includes some of the more humorous commentary from fark commenters. It’s a decent but not earth-shattering book. I recommend it as a good bathroom book. The takeaway, is that of course the media has to publish a lot of crap: if they want to be around when the real news happens, they have to fill space and make ends meet in the mean time.

Speaking of filling space. The geniuses at ForbesAUTO (WTF?) via MSNBC bring us How you can ease the pain of car ownership - Ways you can ease driving costs besides downsizing and driving less. Halfway through the article they write,

[b]esides downsizing and driving less, there are other ways to curtail costs, some of which have little to do with prices at the pump.

I only add that quote here because the first half the article explained the cost of car ownership how to ease it by downsizing and driving less. When they finally do get around to their point, all they really suggest is spending less on maintenance, ya know, by doing things like not-fixing things that aren’t broken and finding a mechanic who doesn’t rip you off. That’s it. That’s their advice. And then they spend the last third of the article explaining other costs that drivers can’t really control.

4. My traps have killed 4 mice in my shed in the last 2 days. My only regret is that I let the problem go on for too long. My 5 traps are reset and waiting silently for another night’s catch.

I’m particularly pleased the the old school wood and wire snap traps. The two I own have accounted for all the fatalities. I’m disappointed by the newer, jaw-like traps which are still waiting for their first KIAs. I’m extremely disappointed with the live trap I set which clearly caught and let go one of the varmints.

I’m even considering expanding my efforts. I may purchase some rat traps and start going after the tree rats furry little squirrels. Normally I like the little guys. But today… Today one of the smug bastards stole my first tomato of the season right off the vine. And then, just to piss me off, he merely nibbled on my little green tomato before carelessly discarding it.

My recent run ins with rodents have me rethinking my hatred toward cats. Maybe it’s okay to have some neighborhood cats with owners who “take care of them” by letting them constantly roam through and piss and shit in other people’s yards who can serve as judge, jury, and executioner of the local Varmint-Cong population. Or maybe not. I’ve definitely seen cats in my yard. Unfortunately I have mostly caught them lounging comfortably on my deck furniture. Perhaps they are on strike from rodent-hunting since I chase them away.

Anyway, this all brings me to my brief review of the 3rd installment of my recent reading series. The book? The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden. In short, the author, William Alexander, recounts humorous stories about and pertaining to his garden. The book is well put together, and I liked the author’s sense of reality. Alexander was able to take his gardening seriously without mindlessly preaching about urban sprawl and other crap as some single-minded gardener are wont to do. Right now I’m reminded of his writing about the deer that came after his plants. He very clearly wanted them dead. His wife, however, at first liked the cute little woodland creatures. Eventually, the reality of deer hit her and she apparently recommended that the best deer repellent was a good gun. This attitude shift actually ties in well with the rational irrationality model that was discussed in the first book in my recent reading series; being idealistic and pro-deer was fine… until reality hit and the costs associated with the pro-deer stance became clear.

Overall, The $64 Tomato is the one book of the 4 I read that I most recommend simply because I think it appeals to the widest audience and because, unlike Everything Bad is Good For You, it pretty much is what it says it is.

UPDATE 2008-07-15 07:30AM: Add 2 more to the list, both caught with traditional snap traps. All death-traps have been redeployed.
UPDATE 2008-07-15 07:30PM: Add on one more. The total is now 7.
UPDATE 2008-07-16: Two more this morning. Make it 9.
UPDATE 2008-07-17: Up to 10. Things are slowing down.
UPDATE 2008-07-22: Got two more the last couple mornings. Both with the old-school traps. I’ve now re-deployed both traps and one of the new traps to the recent “hot-spot” of activity.

Part 2 of my review of recently read books covers Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You - How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. I picked this up when I was in Portland last summer and figured I might need some reading material for the rest of my trip. The book looked intriguing and the subtitle really hooked me.

Unfortunately, the first several pages were boring enough that the book ended up collecting dust for a year until I picked up again recently.

Also, unfortunately, the book woefully over-promises and under-delivers. Johnson spends 60% of the book arguing that today’s pop-culture (video-games, TV, the internet, and to some extent movies) requires more brain activity than did pop-culture of 30 or 40 years ago and that, contrary to many claims, it doesn’t cater to the lowest-common-denominator. The 2nd part of the book begins with the citation of a study which shows that Americans have been getting smarter for the last 100 years or so. He spends about 2 pages explaining why other hypothesis for intelligence increase are wrong, then spends 70 more pages repeating arguments from the first half of the book and explaining why his hypothesis is right by throwing shit against the wall to see if anything sticks.

Overall the book is far longer than it needed to be. It looks like Johnson’s editors demanded a full book from what should have been an essay and then tried to sell it off as something that it really wasn’t. I don’t recommend going out of your way to get a copy of it. If you find yourself with access to it, it can help kill a few hours and it won’t be the worst thing you’ve ever read. You might even enjoy it. [note to self: I need to start a list of the worst books I’ve ever read.]

What has gotten into me? I’ve finished 4 books within the last 2 weeks, if not the last 8 days. The good news is that I have fewer unread books lying around. Also, because I’m going to review those books, you’ll get to benefit from my experience. The bad news is that 2 of the books were received in the mail just this week, which means that my pile of unread books is still not much reduced. I’ll try to keep the reviews short and concise, because one thing worse than overly-long, boring book is an overly-long, poorly-written, boring review.

Today I’ll review my favorite of the 4, Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Caplan basically argues that, taken as a whole, people are biased, people are irrational when voting (which contradicts most modern theories), and that human irrationality is a function of cost. This seems like it should be common sense, but it is not. It then follows that since there is practically no cost to voting any given way, that democracies make bad decisions. Caplan compares the situation, to that of Oedipus; people want both programs that will lead to bad results as well as good results, which means that politicians are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. From this, among other things, it comes out that it’s a really bad idea to let encourage stupid people to vote.

All in all, I liked this book the most of the 4 because I feel it taught me the most. It has given me some things to think about. The book is somewhat dense which makes for slow and thoughtful reading. If your not just a nerd, but a nerd like me, then I recommend that you get your hands on the it, and quickly. Otherwise, I definitely don’t recommend buying a copy and warn you that you might just fall asleep reading it if you find it in your possession.