Walt at Random

We used to like Longs Drugs pretty well, as chain drugstores go. (For those outside California, the rest of the Pacific Coast and Hawaii, Longs was a regional chain of about 400 stores, headquartered in Walnut Creek. The name still exists in Hawaii, although it’s just a name at this point.)

It took us a while to warm up to CVS after it acquired Longs. Seemed like lots more booze, lots more store brands, lots more tchotchkes and “seasonal” crap–but the stores were convenient, and at least they didn’t have the vaguely creepy “I’d rather be at 7-11″ feel I used to get from the ubiquitous tiny CVS stores in the eastern half of the US.

And, of course, we signed up for the ExtraCare card–after all, 2% back is 2% back.

Coupons Galore!

You get coupons with the ExtraCare card. Lots of coupons. $4 off a $20 purchase (with various exceptions), printed at the bottom of most receipts. Emailed coupons for 20% off (with an asterisk), good three days only, or whatever.

Last week, there was a 25% off coupon–good for one shopping trip, three days only. We took advantage of it: I was running low on multivitamins and glucosamine/chondroitin, my wife needed some photo albums, and more. The subtotal was about $85. The 25% discount was $8.54. Hmm. That’s funny…

Asterisk time: Well, the vitamins and glucosamine were already buy one, get one free, so you don’t get the discount. OK. We were still short about $2, but there was apparently some other explanation. Ah well…we’d be more careful, since the “buy one get one free” price was not much cheaper than Target’s or Trader Joe’s regular price, but what the heck.

Then came the 30% coupon

That’s right! 30%. Good for three days only, on one checkout. After groaning about the fact that CVS had tempted us with a less-valuable coupon that we used for most things we wanted, and reading the asterisk paragraph more carefully, well… there were still some things we could use, and 30% is 30%. (CVS is right next to the Safeway we use, even though we’re using Safeway less and less, what with farmers’ markets and the walking-distance Lucky, but still…) Although, even then, when my wife looked at their price for Polysporin, compared to Target’s non-sale everyday price, she noted that 30% off still wouldn’t make it a good deal.

Nonetheless… Some low-sodium house-brand cashews ($5.79 each, 2/$10, not marked as a sale price; a small photo album; two greeting cards: $18.49 total.

And we got $1.20 off. Which, by my calculations, is 30% of $4.

This time, we went back to the checker and complained.

The response? “It’s not good on sale items.”

The small photo album? “If you’d gotten a second one, the second one would have been half price.” But we didn’t get or need a second one. “That’s OK; it’s still a sale price, so no discount.”

The cashews? “$10 for 2 is a sale price.” So if I put one back, we’d get 30% off the other can (30% of $5 being roughly twice the 2-can discount)? “No–because if you get two, then it’s a sale price, even if there’s no date on the “sale” and even if you don’t buy two.”

In other words, if it’s in any way potentially under some circumstances currently sold for less than CVS’ highest marked price–which covers a pretty substantial percentage of a “sale!”-heavy place like CVS–then the 30% doesn’t happen. Even if they have to stretch “sale” pretty hard.

“Oh. So it’s a Macy’s coupon.”

That was pretty much the reaction my wife and I both had as we left the store–that and my wife’s comment, “Don’t bother saving any CVS coupons from now on.” There is one exception: The 2% “ExtraBucks” is a pure cash rebate on your next purchase–as clean as, oh, Kohl’s occasional $10 coupons.

We had long ago figured out that Macy’s Big Discount* coupons had an asterisk that basically excluded anything in the store you might actually want to buy or that Macy’s had reduced from its “We never actually *sold* any for this supposed list price, but doesn’t it make the sale look great?” phony list prices.

Net effect of the 30%-off coupon? Well, there’s a RiteAid store that’s not much further away… In practice, I suspect we’ll cut our CVS purchases by a lot more than 30%.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Trader Joe’s manages to make a lot of shoppers happy without coupons–or sales, for that matter. We use Safeway’s Club Card; the chain has lived up to its no-third-party-identification pledge, and the discounts are legitimate ones on things we’d be buying anyway–and, as we found when a coupon did ring up wrong, Safeway’s customer service errs on the customer’s side when there’s an ambiguity. Target’s coupons are pretty much always legitimate–and, unusually, the chain lets you use both a manufacturer’s coupon and a Target coupon on the same item. Kohl’s–well, so far, we haven’t learned to love the merchandise, but the coupons are 100% legitimate, period. $10 off any purchase of $10 or more means any. I can’t say enough good things about Office Depot’s practices, especially the store in Mountain View we used to use. The list goes on…

Lesson for Libraries?

Maybe, maybe not. I suppose it might be this:

If you claim to be offering something and it’s a phony offer, you’ll sour your intelligent patrons/users/customers badly. Doing that is much worse than not making offers at all.

In this case, RiteAid’s likely to gain through CVS practices. (Geez, I wish we still had local/statewide/regional drug chains–are California and the Pacific Northwest really too small a market for such a chain to be profitable?)

Heck, it probably hurts CVS even more than losing some of our business. After all, this blog has at least 900 readers…

The light bulb, that is–all glorious four watts of it.

Which wouldn’t be particularly interesting except for one item: One hundred ten years.

That’s how long the bulb has been burning–in various Livermore fire stations, starting in June 1901 and continuing through today, when there was a four-hour celebration of the “Centennial Light Bulb,” as it’s now known.

One hundred ten years? One light bulb?

That’s the history, and it seems to be reasonably well documented. Here’s one story filed this afternoon; here’s the website (grammatical errors and all) and the webcam.

We got to the four-hour celebration (noon to four) around 3 p.m.; there were still at least a hundred people there, more arriving all the time. Several beautifully-restored old fire engines; some well done displays on the Shelby company (makers of the carbon-filament lightbulb in question), the lightbulb, early Livermore and the like; a similar Shelby bulb available for close-up views; the authors of two children’s books on the bulb signing copies; and, of course, the bulb itself–up high near one wall, serving as a nightlight as it has continuously since 1976 (when it came to the current location). They had birthday cakes (mostly gone), free ice cream sandwiches (still available), free water…and, too loud but fortunately out in back, the usual live music.

Yes, there’s even a documentary DVD about it, premiered last night at Livermore’s local non-multiplex movie theater, the one that sells wine & beer and delivers food from the next-door restaurant. (No, we didn’t see the documentary and aren’t buying the DVD.)

This may be the longest-burning light bulb at least in America, although it’s not the only one with at least a century life. (Apparently, thick carbon filaments didn’t give off much light…but lasted a LONG time.)

Interesting little local celebration.

Seeing today’s news story of raising the floodgates on the Morganza spillway (on the Mississippi River in Louisiana) brought to mind one of the riverboat cruises we took back in the day–probably the one that reached the confluence of the Mississippi River and the Mississippi Atchafalaya River–in which a lecturer informed us of the great work the Army Corps of Engineers was doing to prevent an “ecological catastrophe.”

The nature of that “catastrophe,” and the grotesque misuse of the word “ecological” to describe it, was clear at the time–and the crossout above says that almost as clearly as the map in the news story does.

To wit: The ACE has, for the last five decades, prevented the Mississippi from being the Misssissippi–from flowing along the course the river carves. That course, at this point, is called the Atchafalaya. The only reason Baton Rouge is a navigable port and New Orleans is effectively a seaport is because the structure at Morganza has fought mightily to prevent the Mississippi from being a river and turn it into a managed waterway.

Updated: As noted in the first comment on this post, I’ve apparently confused Morganza with a larger upriver control structure that’s almost failed once in its attempt to prevent the Mississippi from being a river. I think the rest of the post still stands, though. End update.

Eventually, that effort had to fail. It’s a damn shame for the Cajuns and others within the Atchafalaya basin, whose livelihoods depended on their belief that people are more powerful than nature and, thus, willingness to live and work in a flood plain–more specifically, the natural course of the Mississippi. It’s fortunate for the people of New Orleans, who’ve had more than enough bad luck (aided by bad flood-prevention measures, bad planning, bad…well, if it wasn’t for bad luck…) to last them a while. And yes, I’m very much looking forward to ALA Annual: if it wasn’t in New Orleans, I might not be going.

It is sad–but it was also pretty much inevitable. I’m sure that, post-flood, the powers that be will try to reassert man’s dominance over nature along the Mississippi, and work really hard to move its flow back to the old path, the path the river wanted to abandon some decades back. And, for a while, they’ll succeed. Until the next time around.

Slight background. My father was a civil engineer and also the irrigation engineer for the Modesto Irrigation District. I rarely saw him as angry as when people were encouraged to rebuild in flood plains following floods, and were able to buy subsidized insurance to do so….and, to be sure, when government then had to spend enormous sums either “preventing” the recurrence of absolutely natural phenomena or rescuing the fools who knowingly rebuilt in flood plains.

Oh, those riverboat cruises? Thanks to several factors–9/11 for one, corporate arrogance and overreach for another, the sheer costs of running U.S.-flagged cruises for a third–the three overnight authentic steamboats that used to cruise the heartland rivers are all out of business. One’s for sale; one–the most authentic, the Delta Queen, originally built for the Sacramento Delta–was briefly a hotel and is also for sale; one’s being broken up.

I was originally going to include this with the previous post, but forgot…

After seeing some of the year-end posts offering summaries or lists of the books people read during 2010, I thought I’d keep track this year, which I’ve never done in the past. So I started a spreadsheet, booksread.xlsx.

I didn’t (and don’t) have an actual goal, but given that I normally check out three books at a time from the library, and that Livermore has a 28-day loan period (for most books, at least), I figured “maybe 39″ would be an informal target–that is, three books every four weeks.

In fact, so far, I’ve been reading considerably more (no, I don’t include reading my own stuff, I don’t include “book equivalent” magazines, etc.) than that target. As of yesterday, the spreadsheet shows 23 books read–really 22.2, as I abandoned one partway through. And, let’s see, we’re about 17 weeks into the year.

I suspect my reading rate will slow down somewhat now that I have book projects for the next 11 months. I could be wrong–fact is, nearly all my book reading is after dinner, anyway, and I don’t do serious work on the computer after dinner.

So: I’ll stick with 39 as an informal target. Might make it, might not. Incidentally, so far I’ve only rated three books “Meh,” one abandoned book “Fail,” and four books “So-so.” I’ve enjoyed 15 of the 23 books I’ve read so far. Not a bad track record–or maybe I’m an easy grader.

A remarkably important (or remarkably silly, as the case may be) discussion has been going on for the past five years, beginning with a July 2006 post at Disruptive Library Technology Jester, continuing with comments on that post over three years, then recommencing with a June 2010 post at DLTJ and another June 2010 post right here.

All of these having to do with contemporary updates for the old internet adage, “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.”

I pondered the bandwidth of a 747 full of Blu-ray Discs (yes, Blu-ray Discs were around in 2006). Peter did some calculations, assuming the bulk of jewel boxes as the limiting factor. Over the years, this was refined and another person offered an Airbus A380 as an alternative factor. In every case, we concluded that the effective bandwidth for transcontinental data transmission of very large datasets was much higher on a 747 than on any known network–although latency was, and is, a bitch. (Still: If you want to ship 50 Terabytes of data from one place to another…well, you know, that’s only ten spindles of Blu-ray discs or, these days, 17 internal hard disks weighing about 30 pounds.)

As of last June, I concluded that weight was always the limiting factor–a 747 cargo freighter actually full of either hard disks or Blu-ray spindles couldn’t take off, as it would be way over its cargo weight limit–and that Blu-ray spindles won the actual bandwidth war, because 400 Blu-ray discs on four spindles (50 GB each, or 20 TB for the lot) weigh less than 10 two-terabyte hard disks (using Western Digital Black Caviar specs). In either case, the bandwidth was at least three orders of magnitude greater than the highest known network transmission bandwidth (160 Terabits/second as compared to 110 Gigabits/second).

Hard disks take the lead

Ah, but now the standard for everyday hard disks–ones produced by the millions at low, low prices by name-brand companies (specifically Western Digital) is 3 terabytes, not two terabytes.

And the Western Digital Green Caviar 3TB drive is a little lighter than the Black Caviar 2TB drive–0.73 Kg (1.61lb.) rather than 0.75 Kg (1.66lb.)

Net result: Using the full carrying capacity of a 748 freight configuration, which in this case is considerably less than 10% of its actual cargo volume, you could load a 747 with something like 169,390 WD 3TB drives, each holding 3TB or 24Tb (Terabits).

The net result: The effective bandwidth from New York to LA comes out to just over 250 Terabits/second–a little higher than the 232 Tb/s you can get with dual-layer Blu-Ray discs in 100-disc spindles. Either figure, to be sure, is more than 2,000 times the best internet bandwidth.

So what?

Mostly, this is for amusement. “Of course,” latency makes this meaningless–that is, the fact that the first byte transmitted arrives 16,200 seconds after it’s sent.

But is that always the determining factor? Let’s take a more modest real-world possibility:

You want to send me 60 historic movies at Blu-ray data quality–that is, 3TB worth of movies. You can send them to me over my DSL at an average 1.5Mb/s (that’s bits, not bytes). Which would you choose?

Hmm. 1.5MB/s = 187.5 kilobytes/second or 5.333 seconds per megabyte. Three TB = three million megabytes (this is disc capacity, so 1,000KB/MB, not the 1,024 you’d expect for RAM). Assuming no interruptions, entirely smooth performance, and nothing else using that line, it will take (calculate calculate) 185 days to send me the movies over the internet. Or, given that the hard disk weighs 1.6 pounds and fits in a 6x4x1.1″ package, you could ship it to me using USPS Flat Rate Small Box pricing, for $5.20; it would reach me two days later.

Sure, I could get faster broadband (no FIOS here), but I don’t think Comcast will let me stream three terabytes of data at anything like, say, 5MB/s guaranteed rate with no capacity caps or surcharges. If they did, well, that changes the picture: It would take a little less than two months (55.5 days) to send me the movies. Of course, if Comcast imposed a $5/GB surcharge once I passed the first 50GB, well…never mind that.

So, yes, there are real-world circumstances in which the net is the slow way.

Update on real-world example: If, say, the MPAA wanted to send 60 screeners to Oscar judges (thus, 3TB of data at Blu-ray resolution), they’d really use an external 3TB drive, costing a little more for postage and the drive…but still less than $170 total and 2-day shipping.

Lifehacker has a story entitled “Why It May Make Sense To Reach for the Cheaper Wine.” It references a BBC report based on blind taste tests among 587 people at the Edinburgh Science Festival, tests indicating that people were only about 50% successful in deciding which of two wines was more expensive, based only on the taste.

The BBC report has a misleading title–”Cheap wine ‘good as pricier bottles’ – blind taste test”–and a highly questionable concluding paragraph:

Lead researcher psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman said: “These are remarkable results. People were unable to tell expensive from inexpensive wines, and so in these times of financial hardship the message is clear – the inexpensive wines we tested tasted the same as their expensive counterparts.”

Without seeing the full study and what wines were involved, it’s impossible to provide a full critique, but right off the bat a couple of things should be obvious:

• As stated, the test was not whether people could tell a difference in the taste of two wines. It was whether they could accurately say which one cost more. Those are entirely different things.
• On the other hand, this paragraph is almost certainly correct–but also almost certainly blindingly obvious: “University of Hertfordshire researchers say their findings indicate many people may just be paying for a label.” Wow! Some people buy more expensive X because of the label, not the quality (or think that because X2 costs more than X1, it must be better). I can think of dozens, probably hundreds of values for X where that’s true; that it might be true of wine as well should come as no surprise.

There’s another related story at StackExchange, and I link to it not so much for the text as for the comments, which are relatively few and in some cases fairly interesting (even if the first one is flatly wrong–some of France’s most expensive and best-known wines are blends, as a fast response points out).  Come to think of it, the third and fourth comments on the Lifehacker story–as I write this–are also worthwhile, if somewhat less formal. (Also the fifth and sixth if you expand the comments.)

I labeled the story and study “silly” in a Friendfeed thread. I did so because, at least as reported, the study doesn’t really lead anywhere.

Why? Because we should know this, and it’s true not only of wines but of many, perhaps most, products that engage subjective evaluation. It boils down to this:

Different people have different tastes and different sensitivity levels–and for many people, subjective response is based on more than a narrow objective reality.

I believe that’s exactly as it should be. I’m occasionally offended by reviews where I believe the reviewer is overstating objective differences because of subjective preferences that may have nothing to do with actual performance–thus, my occasional My Back Pages comments on some high-end stereo reviews.

Which is to say: There’s nothing wrong at all with a wealthy person paying $25,000 for an amplifier with badly substandard frequency response and low wattage because they like the way it looks, or they love the warm glow of tubes, or they like the maker, or they just like having a rare amplifier. I’m mildly offended by reviewers asserting that the $25,000 amplifier is Clearly Superior to a $500 amplifier, and worth every cent, when it appears from the article that they’re as much influenced by their friendship with the manufacturer as by the actual sound. Understanding that blind testing of audio products, as with many other products, is inherently flawed, I’ve always wondered what a “Radio Shack test” would yield–that is, a testing regimen in which the reviewer can take as much time as he or she wants, but the device being tested is encased in a cabinet that makes it indistinguishable from the cheapest device sold by Radio Shack.

The general case: Sensitivity and acuity

On one hand, it should be obvious that most of us aren’t terribly sensitive to differences in most areas of daily life, and that’s probably as it should be.

Would most beer drinkers–or, even worse, most non-beer drinkers–properly guess which was more expensive (or which was “better”) if served Brew 102 (if it still exists) or Fisher and, alongside, the most expensive beer of similar style in the world?

I suspect most people who don’t drink high-end Scotch wouldn’t be better than random chance at determining whether a $10 Scotch or a $250 Scotch was “better” or “more expensive” or even different–I don’t think I would be able to make those distinctions, and if I did, I might well prefer the simpler character of the cheap Scotch. (This may not be a fair comparison–it appears that the price differentials in the wine test were as small as 2:1, not 10:1…or in the case of sparkling wine, only 1.7:1. I suspect I couldn’t reliably tell you which of two sparkling wines, one costing $29 and one costing $46, the dollar equivalent of the stated pounds prices, was the more expensive–that’s a price range in which I’d expect the wines to both be excellent with subtle differences. Given that our favorite sparkling wine, Schramsberg Blanc de Blanc, is in the $24-$27 range, I can comfortably state that I wouldn’t expect to reliably tell whether a $46 blanc de blanc was better or more expensive.)

It’s not just drink. Can you really tell me that most people could tell whether a pair of shoes cost $75 or $150 based on how comfortable or well-constructed they are? (Or, let’s say, a good pair of Rockports vs. a pair of designer shoes costing four times as much.) That most people could tell whether a painting is worth $10 or $200 based on nothing more than the image? That most people hearing a stereo costing $2,000 and one costing $1,000 can tell which is which or which costs more? (Especially if the only difference between the two is in either a digital frontend or the amplification…tell me that the average listener can tell which of a $12,000 CD player or a $200 CD player is more expensive, given only audible clues!)

The specific case: Price in wine is a complex proposition

That’s true in many other fields as well. If you think there’s a direct ratio between cost and either quality or “driving experience” in automobiles, I’d beg to differ. A VW Golf is a 50% better car than a Honda Fit? A BMW 750LI will give you three times the driving pleasure of an Acura TSX and 4.5 times the pleasure of a Hyundai Sonata? Really?

With wine–as with many other products–the price involves a whole bunch of things, all of which can affect worth for some consumers: Rarity (size of producer, size of production), complexity, time spent in production, deliberate marketing decisions…

There are lots of California red wines priced at $75/bottle and up because the tiny little wineries that make them have based their business plans on such high prices. I’m not likely to try any of them, and not worry about what I’m missing. In many cases, those pricey wines are also very high alcohol because that’s what Robert Parker and some other wine critics seem to like; if I was to taste one of these 14.5-15% $75 wines vs. a decently-made $12 wine with 13.5% alcohol, I’d probably prefer the “cheap” wine–and might even assume it was more expensive.

There’s a reason Two Buck Chuck is so popular. It’s not terrible wine. It’s simple wine without lots of pretension. That makes it preferable to more expensive wines for many buyers. I don’t buy it these days, but I don’t disdain it.

I do buy $4 Chardonnays at Trader Joe’s, and $5 Chardonnays and $6 Chardonnays. In general, I find them to be better values and better wines than quite a few $8-$12 name-brand Chardonnays, partly because they’re usually 12.5%-13% alcohol, partly because they’re well-made with no marketing budget. But we also picked up a $26 Chardonnay at a Livermore winery; it’s probably worth the money–but I’d rarely want to drink a bottle that expensive. I’ve certainly had $12 and $15 wines that simply didn’t taste as good as $4 wines–and I’ve tasted $30 and $40 wines that I wouldn’t serve on a bet.

There’s no accounting for tastes–and there’s very little accounting for taste sensitivity. That makes most studies of these sorts not terribly useful, except for those who want to convince themselves that there really aren’t any differences between different products. Sometimes, even that’s true–but not generally.

You love your high-end Cognac? Good for you. I simply wouldn’t appreciate the difference between it and E&J. I might or might not be able to tell the difference but I wouldn’t appreciate it. So, for me, it’s not worth the substantial extra cost. That’s partly because cognac and brandy don’t interest me (same with most booze, actually). It’s also partly because it’s not a sensitivity I’ve chosen to cultivate, and might not have even if I did so. Doesn’t mean there are no differences.

Oh, and as to cars? There’s a reason I’ve never owned anything but Honda Civics, and if that changes, it would change toward a Fit, not a Mercedes or Lamborghini…even if I won SuperLotto.

So far, April 2011 in Livermore is (as, I think, in many other places) turning out to be one of those “if there was such a thing as normal weather anymore, this wouldn’t be it” months. We’ve had hail (which is really rare hereabouts), driving rain and wind, and–not here but elsewhere in the Bay Area–even small twisters, I think.

But there are also increasing signs of spring, and I find that we can spot seasonal timemarks (like landmarks, but temporal) in more than one way.

Take yesterday, for example. One sign was that it was over 70 degrees for much of the afternoon. But that was also true in some days in February.

The other sign: We hit 16kWh (kiloWatt-hours) from our solar (photovoltaic) system, for the first time in 2011.

We’d gotten ever so close on three other wholly-sunny April days (15.94 in one case), but yesterday we made it.

Here are the milestones for 2011*–noting that we’ll get better than 9kWh on a reasonably sunny day even in December:

• January 20: 10 kWh
• February 1: 11 kWh
• February 22: 12 kWh
• March 12: 13 kWh
• March 28: 15 kWh
• April 15: 16 kWh

With luck, and assuming very little loss in efficiency from last year, we should hit 17 kWh in late April. I don’t believe we ever got to 18 kWh last year; at some point, very hot days cause a drop in efficiency.

Why no 14 kWh? It was cloudy enough during most days March 13-27 to dampen generation.

Yes, the meter’s “spinning” backwards (OK, so it’s an LCD readout with no physical manifestation)–overall, we average about 11 kWh/day electrical use, with considerably less on days we’re not drying laundry. So, typically, from mid-March on, we start generating more power than we use–and, for PG&E, that’s most useful in June-August, when we’re generating most power during the hot middle of the day, when there’s also peak demand for electricity.

Does photovoltaic and other renewable actually mean anything? In California, absolutely: The two big utilities didn’t quite hit the 20% goal for 2010, but they came close (more than 17% of PG&E’s electrical generation last year was from renewable sources, which doesn’t include big hydroelectric facilities)–and the new goal is 33% in 2020.

Now, to wait for the fruits of spring to arrive at the Farmers’ Market…as my wife said, especially for folks who don’t eat apples (she can’t eat them, I don’t care for them) but love fruit, April really is the cruelest month.

*No, I don’t obsessively write down our generation each day. Our SolarCity installation includes its own wifi and a custom web page for us, with half-hour data points each day and daily data points on weekly and monthly graphs; it took me five minutes to determine those timemarks.

So far, starting out to be a better day than yesterday–and this is just a little miscellaneous post, one that could go on FriendFeed.

• Yesterday got even stranger on multiple counts, as I was inclined to say “What the hail?” in the early evening. That’s right: Hail, and a significant amount of it, in Livermore, in the second week of April, after a sunny morning and afternoon. (Sunny enough that we got at least 15kWh photovoltaic generation–and we have yet to hit 16kWh per day this year, although Wednesday was short by only 30 watt-hours.) Apparently throughout much of the Bay Area, and enough to cause damage in other places (not here). This morning? Sunny, with just a few puffy little clouds.
• Checking Lulu (as I do once a day), I see that four books were purchased yesterday–the most in one day in a very long time. Including, for the first time in months, two of the C&I annuals (2009 & 2010). Not sure if it’s one buyer or several, but I’m grateful. (Financially, more grateful for the two C&I annuals than for the others–Open Access and Libraries is priced to return almost nothing to me, intentionally, and But Still They Blog‘s current price doesn’t yield all that much return. But financials aren’t everything.)
• So far, I haven’t caught any more flack for various things.
• Our recently-dental-worked cat is sleeping again and seems to be doing fine.

So, at least things are starting out better.

If you’re a FF person: No, I’m not boycotting FF. I’m just being, well, a little more cautious as to what conversations I choose to engage in and how honest I am in those conversations. That probably won’t last for long.

Oh, and responses so far re a possible F2F@NOLA4C&IPPL? (Wow. I wouldn’t have imagined I could do something quite that ugly.) So far, none. It’s early.

By the way: If you’re interested in some of my books (including most or all of the C&I annuals) but don’t want to set up a Lulu account–most or all of them are also available on Amazon, typically at the same price.

I lost a lot of sleep last night reconsidering scenarios and situations, to no good end.

And, eventually, found myself agreeing that–and this is the only way I can put it without getting a sudden headache:

In the Monty Hall puzzle, as discussed in this post (see below “Original Post”), in two-thirds of all possible scenarios, the contestant will gain by switching doors when the host makes the offer.

In other words, the post itself is wrong–which means I was wrong. Period.

The whole situation still gives me a headache. I’m not willing to use the wording that “the remaining door you didn’t choose has a 2/3 probability of being the right door”–that makes me want to scream. If a second contestant shows up, sees the two doors and is told which door the original contestant chose, I’d still assert that the second contestant is equally likely to win by choosing either door.

But I’m wrong as to the facts for the original contestant. Hell, I’ve been wrong before.

Note: I wrote this as the very first thing I did on my computer this morning–before reading two additional comments. Now, after pasting this same text into the original post, I’ll go read the comments and add another one, admitting that Seth (and others) were right and I was wrong.

And then maybe go take some aspirin.

New section added April 7, 2011; go to Original Post for the original post and earlier additions.

I lost a lot of sleep last night reconsidering scenarios and situations, to no good end.

And, eventually, found myself agreeing that–and this is the only way I can put it without getting a sudden headache:

In the Monty Hall puzzle, as discussed in this post (see below “Original Post”), in two-thirds of all possible scenarios, the contestant will gain by switching doors when the host makes the offer.

In other words, the post itself is wrong–which means I was wrong. Period.

The whole situation still gives me a headache. I’m not willing to use the wording that “the remaining door you didn’t choose has a 2/3 probability of being the right door”–that makes me want to scream. If a second contestant shows up, sees the two doors and is told which door the original contestant chose, I’d still assert that the second contestant is equally likely to win by choosing either door.

But I’m wrong as to the facts for the original contestant. Hell, I’ve been wrong before.

Note: I wrote this as the very first thing I did on my computer this morning–before reading two additional comments. Now, after pasting this same text into the original post, I’ll go read the comments and add another one, admitting that Seth (and others) were right and I was wrong.

And then maybe go take some aspirin.

Original Post

Reading one of the last issues of Wired before my freebie print subscription expires, I ran across another use of the so-called Monty Hall Brainteaser, which I’ve previously seen in Marilyn Vos Savant’s column (I think) and probably elsewhere.

If you don’t know the thing, here’s a version:

You’re on Let’s Make a Deal. The host shows you three doors. One of the three has a car behind it. The other two have goats. You choose one of the three (let’s say Door 1). The host, who knows what’s behind each door, opens one of the other two (let’s say Door 3) and shows you a goat. Now he offers you a chance to change your choice (that is, to Door 2). Should you change your choice?

The supposedly-right answer is Yes–that the odds of Door 2 being the right one have increased from 1/3 (when no doors were open) to 2/3 (because one door is clearly wrong).

That seems counter-intuitive. That’s because it’s nonsense. It’s using trick mathematics to make something appear to be the case even though it isn’t.

Let’s reframe the situation:

• There are three doors, but you really only have two choices. Either you’re going to choose the door with the car or you’re not.
• Whatever door you choose, there will be a door with a goat behind it, a door that you didn’t choose. Therefore, that door–which could be either 1 or 3–really isn’t part of the equation.
• The odds of the door you chose being the one of the remaining two doors that has the car were 50% before the host opened the third door, and they’re 50% after the host opens that door.
• Therefore, there is no advantage to changing your choice.

Essentially, from an odds perspective, one door with a goat is simply irrelevant. There are three doors: One door-with-a-goat-that’s-going-to-be-opened, one door with a car, and one door with a goat that’s NOT going to be opened. You can’t choose the first door.

Yes, I know, some statisticians/mathematicians and The Woman With The Highest IQ (And The Tiniest Weekly Column) In The World will say I’m wrong. I don’t think so. Fact is, the host’s decision to show you a door–and there is always a door with a goat behind it that you didn’t choose–cannot change the location of the car, and thus cannot give one of the two remaining doors an advantage over the other one.

Even in WiredWorld.

Update 4/6: I’ve now been pointed to a lengthy Wikipedia essay explaining in excruciating detail just why I’m wrong and the counterintuitive answer is right. To which I can only say: I guess this is one of those cases where I must be dumber than a pigeon, because I’m still not buying it. If the game’s fair, with the car behind one door and the host knowing which door is which (and always opening one non-car door), then the fact that the host opens a non-car door cannot change where the car is. The car doesn’t move because the host opens a door. In which case it can’t change the actual probability of whether you’ve chosen the right door, which remains 50% after the host has opened a door, whether you switch or don’t switch.

I rely on computers. I used to make my living from computers–as a systems analyst/designer/programmer. I still rely on computers for whatever little earned income I do have: Sure, I could write with a pen and notepad, but I wouldn’t even be able to read some of what I’d written, much less make it readily available to others.

That said…

It’s been a more interesting week than I’d really hoped for; I hope it’s settling down. These are all trivial little upsets and very much firstworldissues, but hey, this is a random blog.

Scene 1: The Toshiba comes unhinged

My wife has a Toshiba notebook that’s about 3.5 years old. She likes it just fine. Even when the case stopped closing fully, she lived with it. Until last Thursday, when the left hinge broke–that is, the screen section came out of the hinge. No way to get it back in.

The notebook still worked (and works), but that was clearly not a good sign, and from what little we could figure out, a fix would cost a little more than a new notebook.

So, after a little checking, off we went to Office Depot–not nearly as convenient as OfficeMax, but after my experience with the local OM not living up to its own promises, I’m not shopping there–so my wife could try out various notebooks, keyboard feel & touchpad characteristics being very important to her. Oh, and since the old notebook had a 14″ 4×3 screen, she probably needed a 17″ screen to get the same vertical resolution (since nearly all contemporary notebooks have 16×9 screens).

She found a unit that was to her liking–another Toshiba, as it happens, on sale at a really excellent price. That solved one outstanding issue: When she’d move from Vista to Windows 7. And, since I’d been ready to move to Office2010 soon anyway, it made sense to get Office2010 for both of us at the same time–there’s a new-machine discount, and OD offered to load her copy as a free extra.

Scene 2: I decide to upgrade to Office2010

My wife still hasn’t actually moved to the new notebook–she spends a lot of time on her primary online interest (Unclaimed Persons, a closed volunteer group currently using Facebook that assists coroners in locating next of kin for those who die without someone to claim the body: a great pursuit for a retired librarian!), and the weekend had various other issues. Maybe today; maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I upgraded to Office2010. Which brought me up short on one thing. I was using Office2007, but still using Access2003, since I didn’t lay out the big bucks for the full Professional version of Office2007. (Remember when Office Pro was bundled with computers?) And, unlike Office2007, Office2010 just won’t install when it sees what it considers a damaged version of an earlier Office.

So…

Scene 3: Undoing Access and Finishing the Upgrade

I was really only using Access for two fairly simple little databases and one slightly more complex one–one for a summary budget of household expenses by major categories, one for a list of books & authors to use when getting books at the local PL (so I didn’t get the same title twice), and one–the slightly more complex one–a summary database of wines, helpful when shopping for new vintages.

None of these could possibly justify laying out the money for Access.

I exported the primary tables (two for Books, two for Expenses, three for Wines) as Excel spreadsheets, figuring I could work with those if necessary. And I thought OpenOffice–which I won’t use instead of Word, but which I had–might provide an acceptable substitute.

Then I deleted what was left of Office2003 and installed Office2010. (Unlike earlier versions, there’s no “upgrade version”–and, at some point, I think that’s sensible. When you’re upgrading from an upgraded version of an upgraded version…well, sooner or later, you’re not going to be able to prove you ever owned the original. I think my original was either Office2000 or OfficeXP.)

The install went fine. I haven’t explored the nuances of Word2010 and Excel2010 much yet; I do like the new File/Backstage replacement for the frankly failed “hide print & file options under an Office icon” button, and I’m aware that there are some interesting typographical options in Word if I actually had any OpenType typefaces with suitable extensions. (Oh, and having the Styles list display as a simple list instead of attempting to show the formatting: What a sensible step back!)

All in all, I think I’ll like it just fine. Later this week, maybe, I’ll explore a bit more to see what typefaces besides CalifornianFB have been added, whether I want to use them, and what else is new and interesting. (I accepted a default installation. I’m never sure whether that’s the right choice…)

Step 4: Trying to use OO Base as a Replacement for Access

Actually, that’s not quite right. I did do an initial attempt–creating .ODB files that link to the MSOffice .MDB files–and verified (a) that I could open all three databases, (b) that the reports had either disappeared or turned into tables, (c) that cross-table linkages had disappeared in the process.

Before attempting to resolve those issues, it was suggested that I switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. After discussing the reasoning, I concluded that just having less to do with Larry Ellison was reason enough, so I downloaded LibreOffice 3.3, deleted OpenOffice, and tried again.

Yesterday, despite some frustrations, I managed to build a report for the Expenses database that provides the same summary by category and grand total that’s the whole reason for having the database. It’s not as pretty and it was clunky to build, but it works. What I cannot get to work, so far at least: having the “category” column within the Expenses table limited to, and prompted by, values within the Expense Category table, a linkage that was in the Access database. Maybe it’s because this particular Base database is really acting as a connector to the .MDB database, but there seems to be no way to do this, at least within existing tables.

I can live with that, at least for this table.

Before lunch today, I made a typical every-three-weeks library run to take back three books and get three more–as usual, one non-genre fiction, one genre fiction (mystery this time, since it was SF/fantasy last), one nonfiction. For nonfiction, I’m cheating: the library had a book on OpenOffice 3. Aha! Maybe that will help.

Then came home and, after lunch, sat down to work on this. When I’d gone to put the computer in Sleep mode before running the errands and having lunch, I got a Windows Update, which meant shutting it down entirely. That’s OK.

Step 5: Something goes very wrong–fortunately, temporarily

Turned the computer back on. The background came up, as did all five items in the tray (W7 is much better than Vista in this regard), all six icons on the toolbar (some standard, some I’ve added), all 29 shortcuts and icons on the desktop (which I really should trim some day, but I guess 29 isn’t terrible).

Clicked on FireFox. The little circle spun for a couple of seconds. Then nothing. Did same for Windows2010. Same non-result. Well, let’s open TaskManager…whoops, same result.

Restarted the system. No luck.

Powered down. If it had come up one more time with the same results, I would have hit F10 during startup and gone to the previous restore point. Fortunately, the third time was the charm. Slowly, at first, programs came to life. Everything seems back to normal now. (Well, I haven’t tried *everything*–but if non-MS programs, MS contemporary programs, and 15-year old programs all work, chances are it’s good.)

So, then, taking the book in hand and trying to modify tables to use links…

No luck. Maybe I’m dense, maybe I’ll try again later, but so far, it looks as though compatibility with MSAccess databases is limited. That’s no great surprise.

In one case–the most complex database, probably not for very good reasons–it turned out to be most sensible to combine the exported Excel tables into a new and simpler Excel database, which–among other things–allows me to use typefaces I like while entering and updating data (I can’t see how to change LO Base’s table typography; again, maybe I’m missing something). In the case of the expense database, losing the category prompt list is a nuisance but not fatal. In the case of the books database–well, it never really amounted to anything anyway.

So there’s an afternoon pretty much shot, with no real progress…but hey, I could afford to waste an afternoon.

Step 6: Profit!

I know, that’s supposed to be Step 3 or Step 4, and in this case it’s nonsense–almost. If one proposed project is approved, I’ll need OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and I’m pleased to see that its import of Word files is a whole lot better than it used to be (last time I tried this, OO threw away major portions of style-based formatting).

Otherwise? Back to writing, browsing, being grumpy on FriendFeed, virtual slot poker, all that good stuff. And maybe reading the OO book in more detail and seeing what I’m missing. Which is probably that I can only *add* a new field that’s based on a set of values from another table, not *restore* a table linkage lost in the so-so “compatibility.”

Hmm. My Gateway notebook–my only computer, used as a two-screen setup with my old-but-beautiful Sony 19″ 4×3 LCD display–is probably 2.5 or 3 years old. Hope it holds up a little longer…

For those of you who don’t already know (which, among my readership, may amount to almost nobody):

• After a mere three years, Judge Chin reached a decision on the Google Books settlement. He rejected it.
• Some commentaries are already appearing–here are three for starters. (There are lots more, but those three should all shed more light than heat.

As of now, I have 204 items flagged “gbs” in Diigo–going back two years or more.

And here’s my take on the matter:

If it took Chin three years to reach a decision, I can take three months or more to decide whether I have anything useful to say–whether a historical summary makes sense, whether I can synthesize usefully, or whether I should just delete those 204 items.

I am entirely confident that I have nothing useful to add at this point. Meanwhile, there will surely be steady streams of informed commentary and, well, other sorts of punditry from nearly all the usual suspects.

Gee, and here I was counting on the proceeds from the settlement (for the three or four books of mine that have been scanned) for our retirement. In much the same way I was counting on flying pigs to drop off bags of gold.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a long essay about a certain leisure activity that’s proving to be a great way to deal with interstitial time at the computer–the times when something’s taking a while to load or when I need a brief break within a long or boring task, and have already walked around.

That essay included the note that, in my geeky desire to track how long it actually takes to go through 200 coins ($50 of quarters) playing optimally but not playing maximum coins, I found that the third run–actually the fourth–was taking a while.

I finally finished it, in what would have been the equivalent of maybe three years of normal gaming back in the old days, maybe five years now: 29,001 hands, or a payback percentage of 99.31%. Which is less than the theoretical payback if playing maximum coins, but considerably better than the theoretical payback playing one coin (98.4%).

Added a bit later: I forgot one thing–checking up on my belief that I’d been ahead of the game for at least two years of light gaming here and there. Easy: In this run, I was continually ahead for at least 19,000 hands in the middle of the game–which at current gaming rates is probably three years of playing. In the long run, of course, the odds caught up with me. Then again, when a tiny variation can shift things that far, you run into the answer to “In the long run…” — “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

Considerably better?

Yes. Numbers get very strange when you deal with percentages at the edge. So, for example:

• In the third run, I played 11,310 hands for a payback of 98.23%.
• In the fourth run, I played 29,001 hands for a payback of 99.31%.
• The difference in percentage: “trivial”–1.08%. The difference in actual playing: Nearly three times the number of hands.

I also tracked the effects of my “system” of varying bets, which should yield favorable results if I’m getting streaky hot hands (3 of a kind or better) and terrible results if I’m going hot & cold. In this case, the “system” was favorable to the tune of 54 coins–but, looking at actual hands, that really means I would have played about 250 fewer hands without varying bets, or about 28,751 hands (99.30%).

That item also shows the problem with playing max coins if you’re gaming, not gambling: it doesn’t take much of a cool streak to run through $50 at $1.25/hand. Try 92 hands (maybe 40 minutes play in a casino) today, and I’ve seen even faster descent.

This was an extraordinary run, with more than one royal flush (which I’d never had in the past–never) albeit no straight flushes (there should have been about three in 30,000 hands. As for everything else, though, while any given playing session can be incredibly streaky–e.g., seven four-of-a-kinds in 1,500 hands or three in 892 hands–over a long period, you do tend toward the mean (and this long run was maybe my long-term lousy play or lousy luck regressing toward the mean). As in, over 17,800 of the hands (the last 2/3 of the play, mostly):

• 0.19% of hands were four of a kind, compared to expected 0.24%
• 1.14% were full houses, compared to expected 1.15%
• 1.12% were flushes, compared to expected 1.10%.
• 1.18% were straights, compared to expected 1.12%
• 7.34% were three of a kind, compared to expected 7.44%
• 13.22% were two pair, compared to expected 12.92%
• 21.08% were jacks or better, compared to expected 21.46%
• 54.73% were losers, compared to expected 54.56%

If you’d asked me, I’d have said I get more 3 of a kind than I expect, more full houses and fewer straights–which says a lot about expectations! (Those odds also show why the payoff for full houses is so important: It pays much better than straights or flushes but hits just about as often–also why drawing to a non-flush inside straight is always stupid, since the odds are terrible and the payoff’s lousy.)

I’ve made the one “expert play” adjustment based on not playing max coins: Namely, when dealt four to a flush, of which three are royal, I keep the four (where “expert play” would have me drop them). The really agonizing one–where you get a full flush dealt, four of which are to a royal flush–it still, just barely, makes sense to drop the non-royal card, but that sure is painful.

Well, a little less painful since no money is involved.

I think that’s the end of these gaming posts, at least for a while. If I never get a run like this again, which seems likely, this one was still fun, even if it was a minute there, two minutes there, at most five minutes elsewhere…

Another post with no grand meaning–just a few miscellaneous items.

Cheapo movies in color and broken plastic

I gave the five-disc pack of 20 Spaghetti Westerns (really 19 Spaghetti Westerns and Possibly The Worst Western Ever Filmed, but not an SW) to a friend who loves this stuff…and saw Mill Creek’s bigger package, “Spaghetti Westerns”–not quite a 50-pack, but a 44-pack on 11 discs–for about $15 on Amazon. Since I know I want to watch some of them again and enjoyed most of them, I put the pack in a new Amazon wishlist.

And also remembered how much I’d enjoyed, just as pure dumb entertainment, the Hercules-and-friends “hero” movies in one of the Mill Creek megapacks. There’s a whole 50-pack of them, “Warriors,” a 13-disc set (really 12.5 discs). Also put that in the wishlist.

Checked last week. Both were at $11.99. My wife needed a supplement we get through Amazon. So, hey, why not?

They arrived today. I’m sure I’ll enjoy both sets when I get around to them some time in the next few years. But there was one difference, consistent with the smaller sets I’d received free from MCE: Instead of the old cardboard boxes, these came in plastic boxes.

Snazzier, but with one little problem (also true of a couple of the smaller sets): The plastic is brittle. In both boxes, which I opened to make sure the discs were all there, there were broken pieces of the box. Oh, I could send them back to Amazon, but why bother? The boxes are still workable, and that’s a lot of hassle for such cheap items. In a way, it’s an odd sort of progress: the new boxes are much snazzier for retail sale and appear much sturdier, but in fact the old cardboard boxes hold up much better.

Generations and personal issues

Jenica’s right, of course, on both counts.

Will library bloggers stop tossing out generational arguments that hold no water?

About as soon as library gurus stop trying to convince public librarians that print books are DOOMED (based on various oversimplistic theories, certainly not based on significant drops in either library print circulation or sales of print books) and that they should run away from the things their patrons actually use, toward some wonderful new future in which, well, you pay for each use or convince your city government that a community center needs professional librarians to run it. Good luck with that.

What? HarperCollins actually surprised you? You thought that you owned that ebook?

Hmm. I’ve combined three or four different things there, haven’t I?

“Hell, Walt, you’re old. You should retire.”

I did, whether willingly or not. But, of course, the job itself went away–and it was never a professional librarian post.

Not asking questions when you don’t want the answers

I’m moving forward with stuff for the April C&I (out sometime between 3/15 and 3/31) and, as it happens, the May issue.

I’m also still dealing with a recent incident in which I was told, in effect, that there were only a handful of people who gave a damn about one area I was active in. Which removed a bunch of already-written material I’d expected to use in C&I.

I find that I don’t want to ask about other aspects of C&I. That answer was hard on me. I concluded two things:

• I shouldn’t ask a question when I might not want the answer.
• I should work with real publishers on all but the smallest projects.

I’m doing the latter. One result is out this month from ALA Editions. I’m hoping for one more each year…

Or, what the hell, there’s an unlimited supply of books out there to be read, at least unlimited in terms of my reading capabilities…but, you know, maybe later.

I read magazines–print magazines, that is. I love good print magazines. Always have. The set of magazines I take changes over the years depending on my current interests (our current interests, that is) and depending on what’s being published, since magazines have been dying and being born for as long as there have been magazines.

Unfortunately, I’m one of those idiots who will read everything in a magazine, or at least start every article. That was particularly noticeable back when I was taking something like seven different personal computing magazines, one of which–PC Magazine when it still was the bible of the industry–appeared 22 times a year and had a book’s worth of content in each issue. I’m now down to one personal computing magazine (and should maybe look for others), partly because some have disappeared, partly because I don’t write much about PCs any more or really care about them as much. I don’t read Hammer Monthly either; the PC for me is now mostly a tool.

How many magazines?

There are, I believe, a couple hundred thousand magazines and journals published in the U.S….with at least two or three for almost any interest, no matter how obscure.

Right now, as of a key occurrence that’s part of what this blather is really about, I believe I get 24 magazines on an ongoing basis–one PC-related, five travel-related, three library-related, three science fiction, three audio/video related, and a whole bunch of others. Excluding one sort-of weekly that really barely qualifies as a magazine, I get 225 issues a year. I’m usually about a month to six weeks behind on “regular” magazines–and four months behind on science fiction & fantasy magazines, which I used to catch up on while traveling. Since I don’t travel much anymore, I’m reading them when I go out to lunch and sometimes at home, but the rate at which I’m reading them (roughly one issue every two weeks) is the rate at which they’re arriving, so the current ten-issue backlog isn’t changing much.

Ten issues? Yep. Fantasy & Science Fiction now publishes six double issues a year, each of those issues as thick as a paperback and with at least as much content as a typical book. Analog and Asimov’s each publish ten items a year, two of them double issues. So a typical four-month period will have eight to issues in all.

I’m trying to read roughly a book a week in book form. I’d guess I read at least two books a week worth of magazine articles–including roughly a book every three weeks worth of shorter fiction (although these double issues now frequently feature novellas, which at up to 50,000 words aren’t that much shorter than typical books).

Update 3/1/11: Sigh. My count was off–even apart from things like Schwab’s On Investing. Turns out that Money won’t stop arriving until November 2011, and I forgot that I’d tried another subscriptions-for-miles deal, Wine Spectator with its peculiar 15/year frequency. So it’s currently 26 subscriptions and, aside from one “weekly,” 240 issues.

So?

All of that’s prefatory to some changes, which may say something about my intellectual level or just my patience with imposed guilt.

I’ve tried a few magazines over the past two or three years using airline miles from airlines I don’t expect to travel on very often: Frequently, when your miles are near their expiration date, you’ll get an offer of subscriptions at roughly the two-cents-a-mile rate. Since magazine subscriptions are usually pretty cheap anyway (with some noteworthy exceptions, these days including all three SF magazines and, of course, Consumer Reports), it’s a bargain–if I was so inclined, I could even get the Wall Street Journal or The Economist for free.

Anyway, a year ago one of the magazines on offer was Harper’s–and I thought I’d give it a try, since I really haven’t been subscribing to those hifalutin’ magazines like Atlantic or The Nation or The New Yorker or…

That subscription just expired. I will not be renewing it. I don’t need to be told in every issue and damn near every article that I’m guilty, guilty, guilty, the world is going to hell in a handbasket (made by workers under inhumane conditions), and the glass is not only half empty, it probably has dangerous levels of lead. It just became too much of a muchness, particularly since the emphasis seems to be on what’s wrong and why we’re all to blame, not on any possible ways to improve situations. If you just love Harper’s and think I’m a philistine for dropping it, that’s your privilege.

Then there’s Fortune. I essentially got that for free along with an absurdly cheap offer for Money three years ago: $10/year for one magazine with the other tossed in as an extra. Well, OK…

Money either has expired or will shortly (I’m not counting it as part of that 24 magazines and 225 issues). I won’t renew it. I think it could just as easily be named Stocks and come out as a broadsheet: “Buy stocks. Buy more stocks. If your stocks lost half their value, trim expenses…so you can buy more stocks.” Yes, that’s oversimplified; so, in my opinion, is Money. Hell, Schwab’s On Investing (oops: that’s 25–but I don’t know that I count it) is more conservative than Money on the need for everybody to buy lots and lots and lots of stock. (We don’t own a lot of stock. We plan to keep it that way. We may be poorer in the long run, but we sleep a lot better.)

Fortune, on the other hand, surprised me–pleasantly, given that I’m not exactly one of the high-income moguls that might be its target audience. The writing tends to be excellent; the far-right columnists (not all of them) are fairly obvious in their biases; the investigative work is first-rate; articles seem to be “as long as they need to be” rather than diced & sliced to preset lengths. Their investigative report on the BP disaster is, well, let’s say BP executives probably were not pleased–and it’s hard to write off Fortune as some commie liberal radical zine.

So when I got a renewal offer for $20 for three years (that’s 20 issues per year–it’s a sort-of fortnightly), I took it. With pleasure. They must be getting a fair amount of advertising, since the thirtyfour cents an issue I’m paying can’t even cover the postage…

I’m not necessarily fascinated by business and making a fortune–it’s a bit late for the latter in any case. I do love really good writing and research. I used to read the sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle–hell, I used to read Sports Illustrated–even though sports don’t interest me, because the writing was/is so good.

I think the 24 will become 23 before too long: The airline-miles Wired subscription, which was (unfortunately) extended because the first-rate Portfolio from the same publisher folded right after I subscribed to it, has got to expire one of these months. It will not be renewed.

If someone wants to tell me that I really, truly should subscribe to some other Serious Magazine, now that I’ve dropped Harper’s, I’ll definitely listen. Whether I’ll do anything about it…well, we’ll see. There are only so many hours in a day, and I do plan to keep writing, reading books, watching TV, going for hikes and walks, etc., etc…

Major philosophical impact of this post: Zero. Sorry about that.