My adventures into blogging have given me a new perspective on the world of free-lance writing. Since it’s my blog, I’m going to share that perspective with you and you may or may not read it. That’s what this is all about, right?
When I was in college, one of my teachers told us about a writing assignment he had accepted. He had written a unit of Sunday School literature for his church’s denomination. What an honor! To interpret the Bible for the faithful. To write literature that would be studied simultaneously by the masses on a Sunday morning. To literally be the voice of the denomination for a brief moment in time.
Oh, and the assignment specified that he had to do it in exactly 675 words. Well, he could squeeze in 690 if he was really feeling verbose.
You see, the article had to come out even at the bottom of the page. That wasn’t an option. Too much white space at the bottom of the page and the parishioners might feel cheated. If the article was too long, it would spill onto the next page and, well, we just can’t have that, can we? A smaller or larger font was out of the question because, after all, we have our standards.
The practice is sarcastically known as the “divinely-inspired line count”.
Editors! Can’t live with ’em. Can’t shoot ’em.
How many authors have lamented editors that have arbitrarily split or combined paragraphs to make things come out even at the end? Or who have mangled sentence structure to delete or insert words to eliminate widows and orphans?
How many authors have determined that they will never succumb to the banal wishes of editors, only to do so in order to be paid?
Ah, the life of a blogger. No editors. No line counts. Nobody telling me my article is too long or too short.
Oh, yeah, and no pay.
Oh, well, at least I can end the article any time I want to.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Hawaiians Learn Economics
State legislators in Hawaii got a lesson in capitalism recently. And it’s a lesson that should be shared with the rest of the world. The lesson: supply-and-demand works.
Here’s what happened:
Last year, the citizens of Hawaii were in a state of revolt. Gasoline prices were at an all time high. For a state that already pays the highest prices for just about everything, that was just too much to bear. How could they scoot around on those interstate highways in Hawaii if they couldn’t afford to fill their tanks? Something must be done. The perpetually Democratic Hawaiian legislators were more than eager to act.
So they did what any good blue-state lawmakers would do. They increased government intervention into private market forces. Yep, the way to keep gas prices low was simply to pass laws that put ceilings on the price of gasoline.
But the lawmakers forgot that free-market enterprise is rarely a respecter of idiot laws.
Guess what happened? The price of gasoline went down — yes, down — in the 48 states. The sudden increase of prices had been simply the marketplace reacting to what it perceived to be a supply-and-demand force. Capitalists all over the world knew it would eventually self-correct. And it did.
Except in Hawaii.
What did the gasoline dealers in Hawaii do? They left their prices, uhm, high. Yeah, high. They were scared to death that they wouldn’t be able to raise their prices at a later date. So they refused to lower them. Soon, the state that already was paying the highest prices for gasoline was paying prices that were 50% above the market level.
The legislators were confused. Waitaminnit. How can laws that are supposed to keep prices low actually increase prices?
Last week, after it was determined that their ridiculous policies had actually cost Hawaiian citizens $35 million dollars in excess gasoline costs, the red-faced, blue-state lawmakers hastily and overwhelmingly reversed their previous decision and repealed the law. The marketplace promptly and politely responded with lower gasoline prices.
Here’s a lesson in Economics 101 for all liberal law makers. The definition of a commodity is a product that is so ubiquitous and so homogenous throughout the marketplace that it can only be differentiated by, well, price.
Gasoline is a commodity.
You don’t mess with Mother Nature, Superman’s cape, or a free-market economy.
Here’s what happened:
Last year, the citizens of Hawaii were in a state of revolt. Gasoline prices were at an all time high. For a state that already pays the highest prices for just about everything, that was just too much to bear. How could they scoot around on those interstate highways in Hawaii if they couldn’t afford to fill their tanks? Something must be done. The perpetually Democratic Hawaiian legislators were more than eager to act.
So they did what any good blue-state lawmakers would do. They increased government intervention into private market forces. Yep, the way to keep gas prices low was simply to pass laws that put ceilings on the price of gasoline.
But the lawmakers forgot that free-market enterprise is rarely a respecter of idiot laws.
Guess what happened? The price of gasoline went down — yes, down — in the 48 states. The sudden increase of prices had been simply the marketplace reacting to what it perceived to be a supply-and-demand force. Capitalists all over the world knew it would eventually self-correct. And it did.
Except in Hawaii.
What did the gasoline dealers in Hawaii do? They left their prices, uhm, high. Yeah, high. They were scared to death that they wouldn’t be able to raise their prices at a later date. So they refused to lower them. Soon, the state that already was paying the highest prices for gasoline was paying prices that were 50% above the market level.
The legislators were confused. Waitaminnit. How can laws that are supposed to keep prices low actually increase prices?
Last week, after it was determined that their ridiculous policies had actually cost Hawaiian citizens $35 million dollars in excess gasoline costs, the red-faced, blue-state lawmakers hastily and overwhelmingly reversed their previous decision and repealed the law. The marketplace promptly and politely responded with lower gasoline prices.
Here’s a lesson in Economics 101 for all liberal law makers. The definition of a commodity is a product that is so ubiquitous and so homogenous throughout the marketplace that it can only be differentiated by, well, price.
Gasoline is a commodity.
You don’t mess with Mother Nature, Superman’s cape, or a free-market economy.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
California's Insane Law
California has long been known as the land of fruits and nuts. But nothing is fruitier or nuttier than the idiocy known as Proposition 65. It’s a product of California’s well-intended but out-of-control initiative proposal system, which takes the job of lawmaking out of the hands of lawmakers. It’s not quite like putting the inmates in charge of the asylum, but this is as close as it gets.
Proposition 65 demands that companies that subject the population to cancer-causing agents inform the public that, uhm, they’re being subjected to cancer-causing agent. Good enough. I recently completed a trip to California and saw it in action. It left no doubt in my mind why California continues to have some of the highest cost of living in the country.
I yanked myself from my Midwestern roots and traveled to San Francisco on business for a few days. I stayed at a prominent luxury hotel downtown. When I first entered the lobby, I was greeted with a sign that said that — pursuant to city ordinance — the lobby was a non-smoking area. Okay, cool. A lot of cities have restricted smoking in public areas. No problem.
When I checked in, the woman at the registration desk told me they had a non-smoking room available. Would that be okay? Okay? Heck, that’s what I asked for. That way I wouldn’t have to smell anybody else’s smoke. (By the way, to all you smokers. You stink. Do you get that? You stink. Don’t worry about heart disease or cancer or anything. Just remember: you stink.)
I went to the elevator and saw my first Proposition 65 notice:
That’s right, folks. You heard it hear first. Walking in the lobby or sleeping in the rooms of this hotel won’t hurt you. But if you breathe the air in the elevator lobby, you could die! And it must be true, because the State of California says so.
The absurdity of this law cannot be any more obvious. This was not a cheap sign; it’s a classy hotel. A piece of my hotel bill helped pay for that sign. But even more ridiculous is all the logistics that go behind those signs.
The state is required to maintain an official web site to support the law. From the site, you can download an eight-page pdf document that helps you figure out how to conform to the law. The document first says that there is no “official” wording that the signs have to include. Then it goes on to tell you what the sign should include, how big the letters should be, where the sign should be, and on and on and on.
In spite of this, several national hotel chains have recently been fined as much as $50,000 each for not having appropriate signs. Who could have thought that hotels are so dangerous?
Pacific Gas & Electric recently included a notice in their customers’ bills that they occasionally use sandblasting to clean their equipment and naturally-occurring silicon is on the list. Yup, you heard it here first. Glass causes cancer.
Left Coast Liberals have always confused good intentions with results. They have never realized the incredible impact of such insane legislation. The state has to maintain regulations. Companies have to keep up with those regulations. They have to post signs. They have to notify customers.
Who wins? Lawyers, bureaucrats, printers, and sign makes. Who loses? Taxpayers and consumers. (Hey, that’s you and me.)
And guess what? Not one baby’s life has ever been saved by legislation like this.
Proposition 65 demands that companies that subject the population to cancer-causing agents inform the public that, uhm, they’re being subjected to cancer-causing agent. Good enough. I recently completed a trip to California and saw it in action. It left no doubt in my mind why California continues to have some of the highest cost of living in the country.
I yanked myself from my Midwestern roots and traveled to San Francisco on business for a few days. I stayed at a prominent luxury hotel downtown. When I first entered the lobby, I was greeted with a sign that said that — pursuant to city ordinance — the lobby was a non-smoking area. Okay, cool. A lot of cities have restricted smoking in public areas. No problem.
When I checked in, the woman at the registration desk told me they had a non-smoking room available. Would that be okay? Okay? Heck, that’s what I asked for. That way I wouldn’t have to smell anybody else’s smoke. (By the way, to all you smokers. You stink. Do you get that? You stink. Don’t worry about heart disease or cancer or anything. Just remember: you stink.)
I went to the elevator and saw my first Proposition 65 notice:
Warning: This area contains chemicals including tobacco smoke known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
That’s right, folks. You heard it hear first. Walking in the lobby or sleeping in the rooms of this hotel won’t hurt you. But if you breathe the air in the elevator lobby, you could die! And it must be true, because the State of California says so.
The absurdity of this law cannot be any more obvious. This was not a cheap sign; it’s a classy hotel. A piece of my hotel bill helped pay for that sign. But even more ridiculous is all the logistics that go behind those signs.
The state is required to maintain an official web site to support the law. From the site, you can download an eight-page pdf document that helps you figure out how to conform to the law. The document first says that there is no “official” wording that the signs have to include. Then it goes on to tell you what the sign should include, how big the letters should be, where the sign should be, and on and on and on.
In spite of this, several national hotel chains have recently been fined as much as $50,000 each for not having appropriate signs. Who could have thought that hotels are so dangerous?
Pacific Gas & Electric recently included a notice in their customers’ bills that they occasionally use sandblasting to clean their equipment and naturally-occurring silicon is on the list. Yup, you heard it here first. Glass causes cancer.
Left Coast Liberals have always confused good intentions with results. They have never realized the incredible impact of such insane legislation. The state has to maintain regulations. Companies have to keep up with those regulations. They have to post signs. They have to notify customers.
Who wins? Lawyers, bureaucrats, printers, and sign makes. Who loses? Taxpayers and consumers. (Hey, that’s you and me.)
And guess what? Not one baby’s life has ever been saved by legislation like this.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
The Sum of All Human Knowledge
Anybody who has known me for more than 15 minutes knows that I’m a big fan of Wikipedia, the world’s largest free online encyclopedia. I’m one of their editors and a frequent contributor to their effort. They have a rather lofty goal: to organize and make available to the world for free the sum amount of all human knowledge. So far they’re doing a pretty good job of it. But I have a feeling that they still have some catching up to do.
The sum of all human knowledge is, well, it’s a lot. We’re getting smarter every day. And knowledge, by its very nature, is cumulative. That means I need to know everything that I have learned, plus everything that my parents learned, and so on back to the days of Adam and Eve. Or at least back until the time that mankind figured out that fried chicken tastes better than the feathery kind.
Let’s think about a few ways to measure the sum of all human knowledge.
Twenty years ago, I was the manager of the computer system for a manufacturing company. I remember the day when we finally bought enough disk space for our mainframe computer (Boy, there’s a term you don’t hear much any more – ask your teenager what a “mainframe” is.) so that now we actually had a full gigabyte of storage. That’s it. A gig. One.
But we couldn’t fit this gigabyte of silicon in one physical drive. No, we had to chain together three separate units, each the size of a washing machine, to reach that milestone. Three washing machines; one gig.
Under the desk where I’m sitting now there is 1,000 times that storage capacity in a space smaller than a shoebox. And it cost less than one-fourth as much as that 1985 gigabyte did – in pre-inflation adjusted dollars.
Such advancements in technology are almost impossible to imagine. Let’s put it another way.
A Mersenne prime number is a prime number that can be represented by one less than two raised to the power of a prime number. (Did you get that? I think the sum of all human knowledge is increased every time I explain that definition to somebody.) It’s one of those “Holy Grails” of computing. For years scientists have sought to spin electrons as fast as possible in search of larger and larger Mersenne Primes.
In 1952, the largest Mersenne Prime known to exist contained 157 digits. That's a pretty big number — larger than I want to count in my lifetime. But it got bigger and bigger every year.
By 1957, they had found one that was 969 digits long. By 1963, they finally found one that was 3376 digits.
Last year, scientists found a Mersenne prime that was 9,152,052 digit long. Almost ten million digits! If you wanted to “say” that number, you'd have to speak for eight hours a day for 28 days.
Here’s the way I like to look at it. If the sum of all human knowledge twenty years ago was the size of a baseball and could be held in your hand, the sum of all human knowledge today would be about the size of a four-story office building. And it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee to store that knowledge on a smart stick that you could fit on your key ring. (You get the idea.)
Not only are we learning more, we are learning more at a faster rate. I remember my high school algebra teach mentioning something about geometric progressions. Funny thing about those geometrics, they tend to become almost vertical after a while.
Aren’t we just about ready to go into orbit?
The sum of all human knowledge is, well, it’s a lot. We’re getting smarter every day. And knowledge, by its very nature, is cumulative. That means I need to know everything that I have learned, plus everything that my parents learned, and so on back to the days of Adam and Eve. Or at least back until the time that mankind figured out that fried chicken tastes better than the feathery kind.
Let’s think about a few ways to measure the sum of all human knowledge.
Twenty years ago, I was the manager of the computer system for a manufacturing company. I remember the day when we finally bought enough disk space for our mainframe computer (Boy, there’s a term you don’t hear much any more – ask your teenager what a “mainframe” is.) so that now we actually had a full gigabyte of storage. That’s it. A gig. One.
But we couldn’t fit this gigabyte of silicon in one physical drive. No, we had to chain together three separate units, each the size of a washing machine, to reach that milestone. Three washing machines; one gig.
Under the desk where I’m sitting now there is 1,000 times that storage capacity in a space smaller than a shoebox. And it cost less than one-fourth as much as that 1985 gigabyte did – in pre-inflation adjusted dollars.
Such advancements in technology are almost impossible to imagine. Let’s put it another way.
A Mersenne prime number is a prime number that can be represented by one less than two raised to the power of a prime number. (Did you get that? I think the sum of all human knowledge is increased every time I explain that definition to somebody.) It’s one of those “Holy Grails” of computing. For years scientists have sought to spin electrons as fast as possible in search of larger and larger Mersenne Primes.
In 1952, the largest Mersenne Prime known to exist contained 157 digits. That's a pretty big number — larger than I want to count in my lifetime. But it got bigger and bigger every year.
By 1957, they had found one that was 969 digits long. By 1963, they finally found one that was 3376 digits.
Last year, scientists found a Mersenne prime that was 9,152,052 digit long. Almost ten million digits! If you wanted to “say” that number, you'd have to speak for eight hours a day for 28 days.
Here’s the way I like to look at it. If the sum of all human knowledge twenty years ago was the size of a baseball and could be held in your hand, the sum of all human knowledge today would be about the size of a four-story office building. And it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee to store that knowledge on a smart stick that you could fit on your key ring. (You get the idea.)
Not only are we learning more, we are learning more at a faster rate. I remember my high school algebra teach mentioning something about geometric progressions. Funny thing about those geometrics, they tend to become almost vertical after a while.
Aren’t we just about ready to go into orbit?
Monday, March 27, 2006
Inside-Out Writing
Once I saw an interview of some of the head writers for the old “I Love Lucy” show. They talked about how they always wrote the show “backwards”.
They would begin with a situation and figure out how to get Lucy and Ethel there. For example, they figured it would be funny to have the girls tromping barefoot through a vat of grapes. Or they thought it would be funny to have them wreaking havoc in a candy factory. Then they would write a plot that would put them in that mess.
That’s good advice. It’s pretty close to Stephen Covey’s “Habit Number 2”: “Begin with the end in mind.”
When I took a creative writing class, the teacher once gave us an assignment to describe a room two different ways. First, we were to go from general to specific: it was a big room, bright, with large windows, and a rug in the middle of the room with a table covered with a green table cloth and on top of the table was a pitcher of water.
Then we were to describe the same room going from specific to general: start with the pitcher of water and work out to a large, bright room. You get the idea.
The lesson was that it was possible to describe from either the general to the specific or the specific to the general. But it was important that you did one or the other and that you knew which direction you were going.
That’s also good advice.
I have discovered that the two hardest things to write are the beginning and the end. So I usually start out in the middle and work my way out. Again, it doesn’t matter what I do, as long as I am consciously doing it and I’m consistent. I call it my "inside-out" writing style. (Sometimes I write "outside-in", but the concept is still the same.)
I begin with the general idea of what I’m wanting to say (in this case, describe my writing style). Then I write the beginning (an anecdote about how “I Love Lucy” was written). Finally, I figure out a witty way to close, usually with some punch line.
It’s kinda like that old joke:
In other words, if you were looking for a witty punch line right here...
Well, I didn’t write one this time.
They would begin with a situation and figure out how to get Lucy and Ethel there. For example, they figured it would be funny to have the girls tromping barefoot through a vat of grapes. Or they thought it would be funny to have them wreaking havoc in a candy factory. Then they would write a plot that would put them in that mess.
That’s good advice. It’s pretty close to Stephen Covey’s “Habit Number 2”: “Begin with the end in mind.”
When I took a creative writing class, the teacher once gave us an assignment to describe a room two different ways. First, we were to go from general to specific: it was a big room, bright, with large windows, and a rug in the middle of the room with a table covered with a green table cloth and on top of the table was a pitcher of water.
Then we were to describe the same room going from specific to general: start with the pitcher of water and work out to a large, bright room. You get the idea.
The lesson was that it was possible to describe from either the general to the specific or the specific to the general. But it was important that you did one or the other and that you knew which direction you were going.
That’s also good advice.
I have discovered that the two hardest things to write are the beginning and the end. So I usually start out in the middle and work my way out. Again, it doesn’t matter what I do, as long as I am consciously doing it and I’m consistent. I call it my "inside-out" writing style. (Sometimes I write "outside-in", but the concept is still the same.)
I begin with the general idea of what I’m wanting to say (in this case, describe my writing style). Then I write the beginning (an anecdote about how “I Love Lucy” was written). Finally, I figure out a witty way to close, usually with some punch line.
It’s kinda like that old joke:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Most poems rhyme,
But this one doesn’t.
In other words, if you were looking for a witty punch line right here...
Well, I didn’t write one this time.
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