We’re Number 21!

I opened my News and Messenger today to discover that Virginia ranks 21^st on the “best drivers list.” As a professional number cruncher and data/info geek, and frequent driver in this temperate commonwealth, my first thought was, “what have they been smoking?” You can read the article in its entirety at the N&M website:

http://www.insidenova.com/isn/news/local/article/holiday_deaths_decrease/36445/

Its new title is “Holiday Deaths Decrease,” which is actually what the article is about. It starts with some tedious statistics about traffic deaths, seatbelts, and alcohol, and is blissfully devoid of any explanatory factors (traffic level changes? decrease in # of illegals? harvest moon?).

One item that caught my eye was a preposterous statement from driving instructor Sagair Ayub: “We tell our students every day that there is a 30 percent chance they will get into an accident each time they get behind the wheel." So approximately 1 of every 3 trips taken by Mr. Ayub’s students results in a paint exchange and possible airbag deployment? What are you teaching them, sir???

Forgive the digression, but this reminds me of a hunter safety class I had to take in MI to get my first hunting license a few years ago. The class was geared toward 12 to 14 year old kids, its main audience, and had a sort of “scared straight” approach toward safety education, rather than a logic- and facts-based method which I would have preferred, but would probably not have had the same appeal to the kids’ tiny, hormone-soaked brains. I shouldn’t complain; I was just there to check a box and get a certificate; they actually stood a chance of learning something. Anyway, the sermon on tree stand safety was particularly hyperbolic: “If you fall out of a tree stand 15 feet in the air, how fast do you think you’ll be going when you hit the ground? 120 miles and hour! That’s terminal velocity for a human body!” (Actually you’d be going about 17 miles an hour). And another gem: “If you fall out of a tree stand, YOU WILL DIE!”

So that’s what I was thinking when I read that Mr. Ayub tells his students that for every three trips they make, slightly fewer than one of them will result in higher insurance premiums for his or her coverage pool. Not wishing to belabor a point, but the problem is that when an instructor makes categorically ridiculous claims, why should his students believe anything else he says? Of course there is the possibility that something was lost in translation; neither Mr. Ayub nor the writer of the article appear to be native English speakers.

Meanwhile, I’m slogging through this tedious article with the sole purpose of finding out how VA could have possibly scored in the top half of anything related to driving. Astute VOB readers will remember my rant from last February on the subject. Finally toward the end of the article, it emerges that GMAC conducted a survey designed to assess drivers’ knowledgeability, using questions drawn from DMV tests. VA respondents ranked 21^st of 50 states, “including the District of Columbia,” the article states, so evidently DC is now a state, and some unlucky state apparently has reverted back to territory status. The article states that a similar survey ranked VA 40^th last year, so we charged ahead of 19 states in one year. Explanation in the article? No such luck, leaving the hapless reader to assume that VA drivers’ stellar performance can be attributed to the tutelage of such luminaries as Mr. Ayub, or, and you’d better sit down for this one, the survey is measuring noise and reporting it as fact.

At any rate, actual driving competence was not assessed in the GMAC test. If it were, VA’s ranking certainly would be a lot closer to the frost line. I would like to invite the GMAC investigators to actually spend a few days driving here in VA; I believe they’d think twice about publishing such irrelevant reports in the future. In the meantime, while I’m maneuvering around the random lane changers, getting boxed in by slow drivers in the right and left lanes, waiting for the person ahead of me to realize that the light turned green, getting rear-ended yet again (I’ve been rear-ended twice so far in VA, and have had two prostate checks – coincidence?), being prevented from changing lanes by a driver who has me locked in his tractor beam, and dodging the teenage texters (why can’t they go back to drinking and driving?), I’ll just have to remember that there are 29 states out there whose drivers know even less!

The 75 Mile City

As most of my eight or nine readers are from Detroit (hi, Mom; hi, Kwame), today's column will have some local color for you. BTW, congrats to the Red Wings and their many fans for sending the Ducks (at least they're no longer called the "Mighty Ducks") back to Anaheim. Today's topic is Muscle Shoals, AL, but unlike most of my geographically oriented dispatches, I haven't taken, nor do I intend to take, a trip there any time soon. And since the closest military installation is the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, a good 70 miles away, my professional services are not likely to be required in Muscle Shoals either. Oh, and in case you're wondering, it is "Muscle" Shoals, not "Mussel" Shoals, which would seem to make more sense. I've read several lame attempts to rationalize the use of the word "muscle" in the town's name, all of which lead me to believe that it was bequeathed by a lousy speller.

General FYI: Muscle Shoals is a small town of about 12,000 in northwest AL, on the banks of the Tennessee River. Its principal industries are blah blah blah who cares, and it was incorporated in 19… just get on with it Bruck. Okay, here we go.

If you're like me, the sum total of your experience with and awareness of Muscle Shoals comes from the verse in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, "Sweet Home Alabama," wherein the singer waxes reverent about the "Muscle Shoals Swampers," whatever they are. But were you to actually go there, and if you're familiar with Detroit geography, you'd notice something really strange, a "glitch in the matrix," as it were.

Have a look at the map of Muscle Shoals, copied here under terms of fair use (my standard disclaimer) from Google Maps (you'll probably have to click on it to see it full size):

I won't copy a map of Detroit here for comparison porpoises, as anything small enough would be unreadable, but take a look at the Muscle Shoals map - what do you see? Hint - look at the street names. Familiar? Well, it's not an accident. In the early 1920's, Henry Ford concocted the idea of building the town into a metropolis, centered around a manufacturing complex attached to the Wilson Dam there. Ford's plan got some initial traction and attention from investors; Ford himself helped lay the foundation for the new metropolis, as can be seen in the street names.

So… then what happened? I've never heard of a car or truck built in Muscle Shoals…!

The short answer is, Congress put the brakes on Ford's plans, and that was the end of it, the only remaining vestige of which being a crop of street names lifted from the map of Detroit. And what of it? Streets have to have names, right? Why not copy them from one of the most historic and colorful cities in North America? Better than naming them after all the developer's employees' delinquent kids ("my address is 123 Alexiss Street, that's Alexiss with two esses, no, there's an x in the middle and two esses at the end, A-L-E-X-I-S-S"), or underpaid English major excretions like "Heatherdale Thistlebrush Chase." But it does make you wonder, what really happened behind closed doors, in the smoke-filled rooms, as it were?

According to the Almighty Internet, in 1921, Ford, along with his buddy Thomas Edison concocted the idea of creating an industrial metropolis 75 miles long, employing one million workers. Part of Ford's plan was to buy the newly-constructed, and as yet incomplete Wilson Dam for about 10 cents on the dollar. The US government had built two nitrate plants to produce ammunition during WWI, which Ford also attempted to procure as part of the deal, to make fertilizer. Congress put the kibosh on the whole deal, taking the principled position that such grandiose schemes should be mishandled by government, not private industry, and went on to develop the Tenessee Valley Authority. The leader in the fight against Ford's idea was Nebraska Senator George Norris, who quipped, "If the government turned Muscle Shoals over to Ford, it would be the worst real estate deal since Adam and Eve lost title to the Garden of Eden.”

But this was not before news of the plan sparked a speculative frenzy where developers laid out empty streets and people across the country bought lots sight unseen. And of course we can see Ford's hand in laying the foundation of the town in the names of said streets, many of which are copied directly from Detroit, others honoring Ford's friends (Edison, Firestone, Buena Vista).

Is that it? Well, not quite. Big people think big. That's how they get big, I suppose. We remember Henry Ford as the man who brought the automobile to the common people by employing efficient means of mass production in the form of the assembly line. (BTW, he got the idea from a Chicago stockyard when he observed a "disassembly line" in which cuts of beef were systematically removed by butchers from metabolically-challenged cows on a long conveyor belt.) Ford intended to end war. Yep, you heard me right. He also intended to wrest control of the world economy from international bankers. There was even talk of his running for president of the United States. I won't bore you with the tedious details, but the basic gist of Ford's and Edison's reasoning was that rather than issue bonds, and thereby pay silent investors, foreign and domestic, the principal plus copious interest, just print the money and get on with it. The underlying assumption was that the devaluation of the nation's currency would be less painful to the economy than paying out several times the bond's face value in interest over several decades. Of course this was impossible under the gold standard, when you couldn't just print more money on a whim, boy I'm sure glad we got rid of that onerous gold standard, aren't you? Well, that was part of the plan, too--get off the gold standard and instead back the currency with the ethereal concept of "public wealth," and supposedly remove the motivation for countries going to war. That worked real well; any more good ideas, Messrs. Ford and Edison?

What's this business about running for president? I'm not sure how much of this is fact vs. rumor, but supposedly President Coolidge, who took over upon President Harding's death, was up for re-election in 1924, and agreed to back Ford's plan only if he agreed not to challenge him for the nomination. Alas, neither prevailed against the stalwart Senator Norris.

Mind you, I'm not claiming that the Ford/Edison plan made sense; I'm just reporting the facts as I've found them. Supposedly the Muscle Shoals project was going to demonstrate to the world a new way of living, and a new way of managing public and private wealth, with Henry Ford and his industrialist friends at the wheel of a technocratic utopia. Personally I'm with Senator Norris in thinking that it all sounded a little too bad to be true.

Thus ended the saga of Ford's attempt to turn Muscle Shoals into a booming metropolis, end war, wrest control of the world economy from the international bankers, and run for president. Muscle Shoals has grown steadily over the decades and is home to other industries, including the recording industry. The Muscle Shoals Swampers, I've learned, are a group of particularly talented studio musicians.

Jim Hampton

Meanwhile, Detroit continues to be the epicenter of the American auto industry, whose fate is somewhat less than certain at this point, with about as many unemployed auto workers as employed ones these days. Your faithful editor is a former employee of the company that Henry Ford founded, having left it a few years ago to pursue my dreams of serving the public as a bureaucrat in Washington, DC. Now let's be practical for a moment, shall we? If you leave the auto industry, voluntarily or otherwise, and intend to continue working, dollars to donuts says you're also leaving Detroit. When you move, you'll have to relearn a whole bunch of stuff in your new locale, like doctors, schools, stores, where the White Castles and Coney Island places are, etc. etc. Here's what I'm thinking: if destiny guides you to Muscle Shoals, AL, new street names is one less thing you'll have to worry about!

MIPS

How many of you have moved from one house or apartment to a larger dwelling? Most of us, I assume. And how long did it take to get used to the added space? Conventional wisdom is: ten minutes. That is, unless you've doubled or tripled in size, then it's more like a half hour. You've probably had the same experience upgrading computers as well. The feeling of, "wow, this new computer is really fast" lasts for about the first or second use. The thing about computers, though, is that in real dollars, computing power, for a given investment, approximately doubles every 18 months. This is mostly cancelled out by the Microsoft bloatware most of us are compelled to use, but we're still seeing substantial gains in computing ability for the same or less money, year after year.

Does it bother you that despite the fact that Hawaii and Alaska never ratified the 17^th amendment, it's still the law of the land?

The quality of your computing experience is governed by many factors, most notably the hardware of the computer itself, but also the programs you're running on it, the bandwidth of your network connection, and the competing demands being placed on the network. Most computer users don't, and don't need to, understand every detail of the computing system, how its components interact, how to optimize, etc., but they are keenly aware of variations in performance. And this is fine - most of us are not computer scientists or engineers solely focused on improving the state of the art of computing - we just want to accomplish, learn, and create more and better things faster, and our computer's ability to facilitate or impede this is what matters to us. Even if your only use of computers is numbing your mind with the VOBNS, you don't want to wait ten minutes for the blog engine to return your search results for "Savior God-Scientific Allah Breakfast Nachos."

Speaking of which, who else is hungry? Here's my recipe for scrambled eggs ala Bruck:
Ingredients: eggs, milk, herbs and spices
Combine eggs (~2 per eater), milk (one good glug per 4 or 5 eggs), and herbs and spices in a bowl. Stir virorously. Pour into greased, heated frying pan, and keep the slurry moving so the leafy herbs don't clump together. Continue this until the whole thing solidifies to proper consistency; remove from heat and serve.
Herbs & spices: use what seems like a reasonable amount of: salt, lemon pepper, nutmeg, vanilla cinnamon, sage, oregano, minced onion, liquid smoke, cumin, adobo, cilantro, cayenne pepper, celery seed, thyme, paprika, and garlic (only if you're serving the eggs for lunch or dinner - don't eat garlic for breakfast, that's just wrong). You've probably correctly surmised that (a) I'm not a professionally-trained chef, and (b) it doesn't really much matter what hebs and spices you use.

Computing power is typically measured along dimensions relevant to the supporting hardware, i.e., Megabytes or gigabytes of RAM; gigabytes or terabytes of hard disk space; clock speed, bus width, architecture, number of processors, and network bandwidth. Actual performance is determined by additional factors including the operating system and software you're running.

Has anybody else noticed, there's something .not. .quite. .right. about Shania Twain…?

MIPS = million instructions per second. This is one metric commonly used to assess processor performance in computers. "Instructions" refers to processor instructions, not lines of source code or specific commands that you give the computer. Each time you ask the computer to do something, its software responds by executing thousands or millions of actual processor instructions. Windy disclaimer - for all you CS majors reading this, yes, I know that MIPS is a very rough and somewhat obsolete estimate of processor performance, that I should be talking about whetstones and drhystones and all that, but let's not confuse the muggles, okay?

To be honest with you, I'm not feeling too good about computers right now - my main desktop computer's hard disk failed the other day and I'm in the process of copying off its data files before I turn it into a target. So - a question for you bruckies - should I take it out in one shot with a 30-06, or should I make it die a slow death by peppering it with the 22?

A little history: in the way early days of computing, individual instructions were executed more or less by hand, by moving patch cords around on a huge grid of jacks, like an old-fashioned telephone exchange. So at best, we're talking several seconds per instruction. The first computers that Bruck could find any performance info about, whose developers attempted to rate performance in MIPS (KIPS, actually - thousands), were the 1954 IBM 650, at a stunning 0.06 KIPS, or 60 instructions per second, and the vastly improved 1956 IBM 705, clocking in at 0.5 KIPS. By the late 1970s, computers such as the VAX 11/780 and the IBM System/370 were running at 1 MIPS.

The 17^th amendment basically says that senators are elected by popular vote in a state, not by the state legislature. It has a few other details in it as well, but who has time to read our country's most important founding document?

Personal computers, based on single microprocessors, have experienced similar growth in performance. The original 8086-base IBM PC is estimated to have produced 0.8 MIPS when it came out in 1982; as PC and microprocessor technology improved through the 80's and 90's MIPS grew accordingly: in 1988 the 80386-based computers boasted 54 MIPS, and by the mid-90's, the first Pentium-based machines were offering upwards of 500 MIPS. Yeehah! Don't let go of the handrail!

Young David, son of Bruck, built a computer earlier this year, from components he researched and bought himself. This computer has 4 gigabytes of RAM, a 250 gigabyte hard drive (actually this is a bit of a moving target, as he keeps changing them in and out), and an Intel core-2 quad processor running at 2.3 gigahertz. It's rated at approximately 50,000 MIPs.

Kayak fishing - when you hook one, try to keep the bow pointed at the fish. Otherwise, you may end up fighting the fish on his turf! Personally, I keep my kayaking and fishing separate, but young David has taken a liking to fishing from a kayak.

So what's the point? Well… there's more computing than ever going on these days, aside from your desktop, laptop, peripherals, and public display of affection, I mean personal digital appliance (PDA). If you own a relatively new vehicle (and if not, go buy one you ingrate), you're driving around with a few computers. Most modren appliances do some on-board computing. Even your cell phone has a couple of different processors in it, one for DSP (digital signal processing - converting your voice to bits and bytes & vice-versa) and one for basic operation. The DSP runs at about 40 MIPS, and the main processor runs at about 60 to 80 MIPS. So… while we ask what the Mrs. wants us to forget to pick up on the way home, or gossip about who's taking whom to the prom, or complain about our boss, or set up our golf foursome, we are holding in our sweaty hand more processing power than the entire Department of Defense had in the early 1970s. And are we better off? ANSWER ME!!!

Okay, the 17^th amendment was ratified in 1913, when Hawaii and Alaska were not yet states. Like my new phone?