Prez Sez

Almost forgot to post...this may not be as easy as I thought...

Well, I had dinner with Stanford Pres. John Hennessey tonight. He was meeting with a bunch of grad students, who mostly had pleas for support for various projects (shuttles, programs, housing, etc.). But it was an interesting conversation, so I didn't butt in with any of my own questions.

I like his style--he's pretty down-to-earth, non-pretentious, but sensible and reasonable. Not afraid to make a mistake. On forgetting to put lockers in the new rec building: "That was just really stupid." On late notifications about the end to off-campus housing subsidies: "We should have notifitied you sooner."

The best thing he said was what I think more people in power need to be saying: "I would say that agriculture subsidies in Europe and America are simply immoral." Thank you. We need more and more people to talk about the immorality of these antiquated and destructive trade barriers.

Love at first sight?

I must say, this is pretty cool. So I think I'll have a go at the whole blogging enterprise. I wonder whether I'll enjoy blogging enough for it to stay fun, or whether I'll tire of it as quickly as I did of "diary-ing". I think posting daily up through Easter is a reasonable, if not artificial, goal to aspire to. Let's see how far I make it.

But before I sign off, a couple thoughts. If you make $80K per year, and we assume that the marginal cost of your labor equals the average cost (of course it isn't, but hear me out), then the marginal cost of your time is: $80K * (1yr/50 weeks) * (1 week/40 hours) = $40/hour * (1 hour / 3600 sec) =
1.1 cents/second. A penny a second. Every second of every day: another penny. Somehow that just seems like a lot. You can almost hear the penny falling into the piggy-bank with every tick of the second-hand. If you think about it for a while, it really makes you value time a lot more and money a lot less.

More time calculations: If you live to be 83.3 years old, you will have lived a thousand months. Every month of your life is 0.1%.

There are ~50 weeks per year, so every week is 2%. There are only 100 weekend days of the year, so every weekend night is 1% of the weekend nights for that year.

First post

Here goes. My first blog. I was daydreaming at work today, trying to figure out how to use a Citrix portal to run Windows applications on my Linux machine (warning! geek alert!), and something itched in me making me think that I ought to write a blog. If my youngest brother can make a blog as a puny college frosh, then certainly I'm up to the task.

Obviously, this software makes it easy enough for Grandma to make one. So that's not the challenge. I think it was probably a discussion with CB the other day about Lent: I said I wasn't giving anything up, but that if I you're going to do something unusual for forty days, you might as well make it proactive, like writing in a diary. She asked if I kept one, and I said that I only did when I was younger, still figuring out how the world. Now that I'm omniscient, what's the point?

But I think the more important issue (besides my omniscience) is that diaries are solipsistic. Sure, there are some things you can write in a diary that you wouldn't post publicly on the web; so it has its own niche. But after writing in a diary, I realized that the only reason why I was doing it was out of some self-centered hope for postmortal Anne Frank-esque fame. It's pretty naive and solipsistic to think that anyone, much less a large number of people will give a hoot about that kind of stuff once you're gone. Andy Warhol stored boxes and boxes of crap--shoelaces, trinkets, magazines--that some poor historian had to sift through eventually. He gets away with it because he's Andy Warhol. The rest of us, with much less than even fifteen minutes in the limelight, can't bank on that much.

But, the critics say, who will read it? (AD, I'm thinking of you on this one.) True, true, but the same argument can be levied against writing about the determination of Vub from exclusively reconstructed charmless semileptonic decays of the B meson, a piece of writing to which I devote a much larger fraction of time and which has a much smaller audience (let's be real--there are at most 5 people in the world who will ever read my disseratation, and probably not a single one of them will make it all the way through; who could blame them?). So the small-audience argument by itself does not discredit the medium.

I could keep going, but I wonder how this is going to look, so time to publish...

p.s. Is it possible to edit these posts easily? Only one way to find out.