The earthquake in Italy has affected the market for Parmesan cheese, since about 10% of all the Parmesan stocks were destroyed. (This is not the shake-can stuff I'm talking about, rather, it's the legitimate Parmigiano-Reggiano that's been affected. Normally, it retails for $15-$20 lb.)

I was somewhat concerned about this, since I consider it one of those special things that makes life worth living, and I would hate to not have it. Fortunately the expected price increase is only about 20%. The impact may be greater here since in rural California we're extra-far from the source. I've suggested to John that we should stock up on a few pounds.

Sigh... my Florida client has a really big data analysis problem. I've been thinking of a metaphor to describe it, and it's like this.

Suppose you were offering a "How Tall Am I" service. You have a big database of people's heights all over the world, and someone comes in wanting to know how they "measure up". You take out your ruler, measure them, and tell them (for example) "at six feet, you are taller than 40% of people in the Netherlands, and taller than 95% of people in Cambodia." So far, so good.

Then one day, the company that makes rulers says "We don't think measuring height is such a great thing anymore, so we are discontinuing our rulers. Please measure weight instead. Here's a scale you can use."

So someone comes in and wants to know how they measure up. If they have a typical BMI, you can still guess with some confidence how tall they are and give them a reasonable answer. But when someone comes in that's 5'6" and weighs 400 pounds, and you say "You are taller than 90% of people in the Netherlands", they know right away that something's wrong and conclude that you're a fucking idiot.

This is a pretty accurate analogy for what's going on now, except instead of "size" we are measuring gene expression activity in mouse brains. As you might imagine, the measurements involved are vastly more complicated. The problem is compounded by the fact that not everyone understands that rulers and scales are built to measure different things. Yes, they're correlated, and yes, they are both ways of measuring how "big" someone is. But you can't assume that the measurements are directly or reliably comparable. My client's customers are quite frustrated because they have been sent barking up several very unproductive trees because of this difference - they're looking for things that are really tall, and mostly ending up with things that are simply fat.

I was worried that the big Japanese drug company who is paying for all this was going to cancel their contract. As it turns out they are quite understanding and realize that we are working hard to make the best of a difficult situation. But I definitely have a lot of work to do in the next little while.

Flying to Florida this morning. Hoping for a little fun to go along with work, so to that end I got a b+b in Wilton Manor, walking distance from the leather bar.

Sadly I will be missing tomorrows eclipse. :-( With all the news coverage my boss finally gets that this was a big sacrifice!

An I Heart Virgin Airlines moment - people not carrying roller boards are allowed to board first. Yay!

Wow, what an interesting set of things that were named after him.

What got me going on this theme was discovering large numbers of Calochortis Tolmiei on a ridge above our property:



This species was named for the botanist, fur trader, surgeon, and politician William Fraser Tolmie:



His son, Simon Fraser Tolmie, was the 21st premier of British Columbia:



Woof.

He also gave us the generic name for the piggyback plant, Tolmiea menziesii, which is the first plant I ever cultivated. So I have a certain romantic attachment to it. Here's a photo I took of one in Stanley Park in April, 2010:




He discovered a new saxifrage near Mt. Ranier, Saxifraga tolmiei:



At the time, this was a new species in a group of saxifrages I happen to find completely adorable. I once collected some specimens of a very similar species from Vancouver Island and grew them in pots with great success.

Finally, there is Tolmie Street, in Vancouver, where I have never set foot. But from the looks of it on Google, it's a lovely neighborhood.

That's quite an aesthetically pleasing legacy, don't you think?

Commenting on a comment from a while back:

...socialism and ever-increasing debt go hand-in-hand, and are not sustainable.

O rly? Anyone who beleives this maybe ought to check a list of countries sorted by debt as a percentage of GDP before making that claim. Greece and Italy, as we know, are total basket cases and are dragging the rest of Europe down in a bad way. But as individual countries, you will see that Canada, the EU as a whole, most of the individual EU nations, and a smattering of lefty countries such as New Zealand all enjoy a smaller debt-to-GDP ratio than the United States.

This particular comparison is complicated by the large, recent increase of the US budget deficit, the greater part of which is attributable to the Bush tax cuts and other factors originating in the Bush administration:



[I was a bit shocked by this chart at first but have seen no serious challenges to this claim; Bush really was a disaster, and we're going to be paying for his bad decisions for a long, long time.]

Ignoring the endlessly slippery definition of "socialism", which changes depending on whatever point someone's trying to prove, the debt-to-gdp chart shows that left-leaning economic policy has, on the whole, either no relation or a modestly negative relation to government debt. Debt is more about the fiscal irresponsibility of governments, regardless of ideology.

My wild-ass guess about what is really behind the differences in national debt? I'm tempted to attribute it to "excitability". If you've traveled around Europe you know that Greeks and Italians tend to be easily spun up, while Swedes, Germans, and the French tend to be more sanguine and critical of what they hear, and not so reactionary. New Zealanders are positively stoic. The Japanese, to be sure, are a huge exception but don't completely overturn this relationship. Americans strike me as particularly excitable across the political spectrum, and IMHO this is generally associated with short-term economic thinking that carries negative long-term consequences.

(*Update - the chart here seems to show some confusion between public debt and gross debt when compared to the linked table, which gives different numbers; there are many different measures of debt. However, as far as I can tell the definition used is consistent within each source and still supports the claims I make here.)

I hear, fairly often, and as recently as this morning, phrases like "America doesn't manufacture anything anymore". This typically comes from the mouth of right-wing rah-rah patriots who, in theory, care about America's image and international prestige.

The problem, as anyone who ever looks at the numbers already knows, is that this isn't true; the US remains, by a small margin, the worlds largest manufacturer, at about $1.7T compared to China's $1.3T (2010). And, as we might recall from the USSR during the 60s, communist nations have a habit of exaggerating their economic output. JUST A LITTLE.

Even if China did manufacture more than the US in nominal terms, making a big deal out of that would still be propagandistic; US manufacturing output per capita is still much larger than China's, in part because US workers are more productive. (Per worker, the US productivity advantage is enormous; wages here are correspondingly higher, but you get what you pay for.) The trend, I agree, is not encouraging, since the size of the US manufacturing sector is going slowly down, while China's is indisputably growing, and if we take the numbers at face value, China will indeed take first place in the next few years. But even looking far into the future, the US manufacturing sector will be a long way from "nothing".

So what we have in this statement is a morsel of explicitly anti-American propaganda dressed up as a right wing talking point. The question is, why? What is it that gets certain ideas labeled as anti-American and others not? It seems to me that unfairly disparaging American manufacturing capacity is directly subversive to American economic interests, yet this sort of crankiness routinely gets a pass.

This is a very, very strange country.

Had a wonderful party with about 26 guys in attendance. The weather could NOT have been better - half an inch of rain on Thursday followed by warmth and sunshine all weekend. Everything went very smoothly but boy oh boy am I sore. Lots of lifting and moving stuff. I think that what kills me is carrying the odd box from the house to camp instead of putting it on a trailer. Only a few hundred feet, but the temptation is always to carry more than I should.

Had several new guests this year which was very nice. The ride went OK but as I expected, nobody from the motorcycle shop deigned to join us. In fact, they weren't even there. Snubbed, or unlucky? Hard to tell.

I was quite disappointed that, once again, the ranch abalone dive was also this weekend. Not entirely a coincidence - we are both after the full moon, us for light, them for the tides. I've always wanted to go myself but have never been able to make it. Normally it's a tough sport, and it's the way young men in this county demonstrate their masculinity. As it happens, it was an extraordinary day for ab diving, and I hear even little old grannies were limiting out just picking them from the rocks. But the ranch crew got NOTHING, because they partied all night and SLEPT IN, thus missing the tide. This is something you get to do only a few times a year, so this is a case of truly epic lameness. The older guys that organized the whole thing are reportedly livid. Me, if I were there, I'd have blasted those fuckers out of their tents with an air horn. I cant imagine even being able sleep in the first place, much less sleep late when it's abalone day.

If I could point out one thing that explains why I hang with crusty old bikers and not young guys, that would be it. Even with all their aches and pains, they GET OUT OF FUCKING BED in the morning. Apathy at that level just drives me insane, and up with it I cannot put.

Driving some friends back to SF today, then it will be time to get some work done...

I am really turned on to Evernote. John is very excited too. I'm not sure why it took us so long to discover this.

I lead a complicated life and there is a lot of data to manage. Doing it with Outlook is like trying to perform your own root canal. Gah. Evernote is like frolicking in a kelp bed. Everything is just super easy and fun.

John is finding it immediately indispensable for organizing PDFs. In particular he is getting a lot of image-based PDFs from old science journals and having them suddenly be searchable is a big deal. He's become, in retirement, a fourth paradigm researcher and this is right up his alley.

I think the reason it hasn't caught on more is that it offers very little guidance for the new user. The tag-based approach for managing data is very powerful but demands a certain amount of independent thought. It's not for people who want "instructions" or are shy about experimenting.

Anyway, here's something I produced immediately - a jobs available list for work around our house we want to hire people for. Now, I can take my cell phone, bring up that notebook, tap on a note to edit it, tap the "snapshot" button, take the picture, and have the picture appended to the note. The updated note syncs with the web page and my desktop Evernote app automatically.

[If you cannot view the list for some reason, I would be interested to know.]

There are only a few software applications per decade that I really gush over, and this is one of them. Just download it and start throwing things at it. And play with it. The wonderful thing about this app is that it requires hardly any commitment, the "system" is just "Throw Shit In And Worry About It Later."

The key thing the desktop app does (and the mobile version does not) is to let you search on content, then use the search results to modify the tags on dozens or hundreds of items at once. When you do that in succession - search, tag, search on something else conditioned on that tag - you can classify data on a mass scale. When I "got it" it was kind of a rush.

It also has a set of third-party apps of variable utility that work with your data in other ways. Haven't checked those out much yet. The local storage on the Windows client is a SqlLite database, so in principle you can query it with any of a wide variety of third-party tools.

Anyway, just go, go, go and get this software. The free version is perfectly useful all by itself. Anyone who does any kind of research, runs a business, or obsessively classifies porn needs to give it a look.

Well, the finish carpentry is now almost done, but I cannot wait to share some of the pictures of how things look.

( pics )