Based on the strength of some book reviews on web sites I normally visit, I headed down to a Borders Books near where I live and purchased The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 - 1815, by Tim Blanning, a Professor of History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of the British Academy. Blanning's book is a tour de force of a wonderfully rich subject - what happened in Europe during the 170 years between the conclusion of the Treaty of Westphalia and Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. I am now about 100 pages into this book.
Of interest here is that Dr. Blanning starts off his book with a most curious topic - the amazing improvement in transportation and communications which occurred, particularly in Britain and France, during this period. Blanning also notes that in Eastern Europe, little changed in terms of infrastructure during this time. Blanning of course gives due to what happened when railroads were invented, but in his first 40 pages Blanning compares the difference of what transportation was like in the middle of the 17th century and what it was like 150 years later.
As a student of history, I knew that for most of mankind's history, transportation was slow and expensive for most and that not many people traveled more than 10 or so miles away from the homes they were born in during their own lifetimes unless something compelled them to. Nonetheless, Blanning's book drives home exactly how expensive it really was for our ancestors to travel and that travel was rarely faster than walking pace.
Some exerpts:
1) (If one desired to travel outside of one's own town - Wizard)
"Four or six draught animals were needed to pull a coach and they had to be changed every 6 to 12 miles, depending on the condition of the roads. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the stagecoaches which traveled the route. Those horses in turn required an army of coachmen, postillions, guards, grooms, ostlers and
stable-boys to keep them running. As a coach could carry no more than ten passengers, fares were correspondingly high and out of reach of the mass of the population. A journey from Augsburg to Innsbruck by stagecoach, although little more than 60 miles as the crow flies, would have cost an unskilled laborer more than a month's wages just for the fare."
2) "Almost everyhere the 'roads" were tracks, with no foundations or drainage and consequently deeply pitted by wheel-ruts."
'more like a retreat of wild beasts and reptiles, than the footsteps of man', in the view of an English observer writing in the early eighteenth century.... The roads of Europe were essentially those of the Roman Empire - after fourteen hundred years of neglect.
3) Blanning includes a table of travel times from London 1700-1800 in hours:
1700 1750 1800
Bath: 50 40 16
Edinburgh 256 150 60
Exeter 240 120 32
Manchester 90 65 33
4) Blanning talks about how forced labor from the farming peasantry was not an efficient method of infrastructure improvement. Instead...
"By that time, however, another method had been found. This was the 'turnpike', a word which originally designated just a barrier across a road to keep marauders out."
Blanning goes on to say that one of the beneficiaries of turnpikes were members of Parliament, who could now travel to London much more comfortably from their country homes - and proceed to pass more Acts of Parliament which created more turnpike roads!
5) Improvements in roads and road surfaces greatly dropped freight costs. To quote Blannning:
...but freight too could benefit. Much larger and more heavily laden wagons could pass along the improved roads: in the 1740's three-ton loads were permitted, by 1765 that had been doubled. The improved surfaces meant that fewer draught animals per ton were required. Writing in 1767, Henry Homer claimed that 'the carriage of grain, coal, merchandise, etc. is in general conducted with little more than half the number of horses a with which it formerly was.'
6) Writing in the middle of the 19th century, the German social historian Karl Biedermann estimated that travelling had been fourteen times more expensive two generations earlier!
7) Blanning wrote that the expansion of Europe's infrastructure also created a new class of society - the highwaymen - who would prey on hapless coach riders since cash was demanded up front in exchange for being permitted to use the turnpikes. Some wondered whether all this newly found mobility was worth the crime and congestion. London had streets choked full of coaches and wagons.
8) And perhaps my favorite excerpt:
"The turnpikes brought speed and mobility into a society previously characterized by their opposites. This was a culture-shock which many found upsetting - especially when the lower orders started to move out of their villages, on to the roads and into the towns, picking up insubordinate habits on the way. John Byng complained bitterly in 1781:
'I wish with all my heart that half the turnpike roads of the kingdom were plough'd up, which have imported London manners and depopulated the the country - I meet milkmaids on the roads, with the dress and looks of Strand mistresses, and must think that every line of Goldsmith's Deserted Village contains melancholy truths.'
The reference to Goldsmith's poem is revealing, for it is an elegy for a lost world of rural innocence and harmony, from which the forces of modernization have banished the inhabitants to urban anomie and vice."
300 years later, some people are still complaining that mankind's vastly increased mobility has resulted in the same urban ills. It seems that for some people, the more things change the more things stay the same. At the same time, one really does need to remember that one of the primary reasons why we build the cities we do today is because we can - due to the staggering drops of transportation costs in real terms. Otherwise we would still be living in huddled and cramped conditions.
Wizard.
To illustrate how many ideas simply refuse to die in politics until they get shoved through, we have once again witnessed the rise of universal health insurance in Amerika (yes, the our hallowed country's name was misspelled on purpose). We have seen Mike (I live in Manhattan) Moore unveil his movie Sicko, the story of Kathleen Aldrich going bankrupt to stay alive, pushing for expanded kiddy care in Texas, and now the Houston Chronicle chimes in saying that we should have universal health insurance. However Houston's own GHP Pravda bravely refuses to describe in that editorial how it is that Amerika is supposed to reach universal health insurance nirvana. All of this on top of Harry Truman's failed 1949 plan, Richard Nixon's universal employer based mandate, and Billary's 1993 failed plan.
I am going to make an assumption that many who bother to read this blog entry are reasonably aware of the many arguments for and against universal health insurance, the various ways in which a society can attain such a nirvana, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of America's vast patchwork of providing for health care (such as its heavy component of cross subsidization involved). If you want to read of some interesting stories regarding health care and its provision, here is a practicing M.D. who keeps a blog. You might be interested in reading the NHS Blog doctor. Try reading this and try watching the film The Barbarian Invasions on the joys of health care in Canada.
Several years ago, I was out of the country on vacation when I met an Englishman who climbed all over me because the United States did not have universal health insurance. He told me that people had a right to their health. I said okay, and... He replied that since people had a right to their health, then they had a right to health care when things went bad. That is when I told him to hold the horses. I told him that nobody has a right to health care anymore than they had a right to a house, an apartment, food, or anything else. You do have a right to seek help if things are wrong, but the providers may well turn you down in one way or another. You may well not get what you want. Indeed this happens quite often in the 41 countries which have some form of universal health insurance.
One thing I will say about the policy debates is this. A frequently advanced argument for socialized medicine is that everyone will get equal access to health care. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I was in the UK earlier this year, I read in one of the newspapers of a study which noted that wait times in the UK were shorter and hospitals were better funded if you happened to live in an area that was represented by a member of the Labour Party than if you happened to live in a constituency represented by the Conservative Party or by a Liberal Democrat. Do remember that Labour has been in power since 1997. When the study came out, the Tony Blair directed spin machine predictably went into action, declaring that people in their districts needed the greater spending for various reasons, but this rationalizing when you've been caught plundering more than your share of the public purse is to be expected with any government program.
Now that is not an attack against the Labour Party per se, as I would automatically assume that the Conservatives would do exactly the same thing were they to seize power in the next UK general elections. The Economist noted some years ago that when the Republicans were in control of the Congress, it seemed that the main difference between the time when the Republicans were in control and when the Democrats were in control was where the taxpayer monies went to. Taxpayer largesse does flow more in the direction of the party which controls the houses of the legislature, irrespective of what the government funded program happens to be.
As an aside, I work for a Big Evil Company. My UK counterparts have access to a private health insurance plan, which they take advantage of in droves. Recently, one of my colleagues suffered a heart attack while doing desktop work in Libya. Fortunately he survived. The BEOC sent him to London when he was strong enough to travel and they put him into a rather nice private hospital. Note that the BEOC did not put him at the whims of the NHS.
More to the point, I have this to say about universal health insurance. If there is to be a substantial government component to such a regime, then I want the Paul Krugman's, the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board, the Michael Moore's and all the rest of you to tell me something. It is pretty clear to me that under any such regime that I am going to have to wait to get health care when I need it. Like most men, I am the type that will not bother to see a doctor until I absolutely have to. Compare this to a (female) high school science teacher I had. This lady had a five year old girl who was just oh so dear to her. This lady must have taken 15 days off during the school year to run off to take care of her daughter (she was a single mother at the time, but I think may have remarried). If I remember correctly, most of these sick days taken off for her daughter turned out to be for minor ailments and eventually the school district docked her of pay, which really threw her into a funk. She then naturally complained to the teacher's union but those were the rules which had been worked out between the district and the union.
My point here is this. I do not under any circumstances want to wait when I need treatment - End of story!!! I know myself better. As I have gotten older, I have become the type of person that can often be very patient, but if something is important enough, then when I really want something now then I want it right now and that goes for health care. If anyone is going to shove some universal health insurance plan down my throat, then they really had better come up with a component that will allow someone such as myself to pay for convenience, get treatment on my time, and not have to wait in line the way that the hoi polloi does down at the county hospitals.
But you know, I've decided that is not enough. I have a hard time imagining that any new proposals will not end up raising my taxes in some way. Moreover, any new health care regime is pretty much going to take away more of my freedom. What I want to hear from the Michael Moore's, Paul Krguman's, Houston Chronicle Editorial Board, and all the rest of you who advocate some universal health insurance regime, is this: What else are you going to do for me? Don't answer that we are guaranteeing health insurance because I already have that. In fact I might end up with something inferior afterwards where I am going to have to wait for treatment. Moreover, I am worried about choking off the revolution that pharmaceutical drugs is bringing us. What I never hear from the advocates of universal health insurance is what are you going to do for me in return? How much of my freedom are you going to give me back?
Well in case you universal health insurance advocates are clueless, I have an idea. I am probably going to get hammered by Social Security to the tune of north of $500,000 irrespective of what happens. Ergo, what I propose is this. Either shut down the Social Security plan, or as a lesser option I will renounce any and all claims to Social Security benefits if or when I become eligible for them in return for being allowed to opt out of the program right now and to quit paying taxes. I figure I can cut my losses now and save several hundred thousand dollars in the process by doing this. In return, I just might consider supporting a universal health insurance regime which allows me to pay for convenience and to buy my way out of waiting for treatment. Now how's that for a deal?
Now I can just hear the chorus: We just can't shut down Social Security and we aren't going to allow you to get out of the program anyway! Don't you know millions depend on those checks and we just can't allow people like you to opt out because we are all in this together and if one rat jumps ship then all the rats will too!
Well if that's your Road to Serfdom type answer, then all I can say is that you can go kiss my ******* ass.
Wizard
Well not quite, but I thought that such a title to a blog entry would be catchy. Ergo I have deliberately mislabeled the subject matter of this blog entry. As it it, my central air conditioning went out the other day and I am sitting here writing this entry in a hot residence, next to a constantly blowing fan. The repair person shows up on Monday.
More seriously, the true subject matter of this entry comes from The Marginal Revolution. In that entry, entitled "Move South to live longer", Tyler Cowen points to a potentially important new paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research which discusses the effects of extreme weather events on human mortality (a non-gated version can be found here) and as an accompanying topic discusses the effects of migration towards warmer climes.
This is the abstract of the paper:
We estimate the effect of extreme weather on life expectancy in the US. Using high frequency mortality data, we find that both extreme heat and extreme cold result in immediate increases in mortality. However, the increase in mortality following extreme heat appears entirely driven by temporal displacement, while the increase in mortality following extreme cold is long lasting. The aggregate effect of cold on mortality is quantitatively large. We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US. This effect is even larger in low income areas. Because the U.S. population has been moving from cold Northeastern states to the warmer Southwestern states, our findings have implications for understanding the causes of long-term increases in life expectancy. We calculate that every year, 5,400 deaths are delayed by changes in exposure to cold temperature induced by mobility. These longevity gains associated with long term trends in geographical mobility account for 8%-15% of the total gains in life expectancy experienced by the US population over the past 30 years. Thus mobility is an important but previously overlooked determinant of increased longevity in the United States. We also find that the probability of moving to a state that has fewer days of extreme cold is higher for the age groups that are predicted to benefit more in terms of lower mortality compared to the age groups that are predicted to benefit less.
So there you have it. Speaking a bit frivolously, if you've ever wondered why those elderly snow birds show up down south every winter, there is some real academic evidence that what they are doing is good for them. Sadly, (and arguably as usual) the effects of extreme cold hit the poor the hardest.
More accurately, the authors state in the paper that both extremely hot and cold weather events cause mortality. However, the data which they collected from the 1972-1988 period indicate that there is a substantial difference between mortality which is caused by extremely hot weather events and cold weather events. In heat spells, there is a marked jump in deaths and as expected many of these deaths are of elderly people. However in the weeks afterwards, there is a substantial drop off of mortality rates. In contrast, with cold spells there are spikes in mortality, but there is no offsetting drop off in mortality rates in the weeks or months that follow (emphasis added)! The authors note that the the incidence of deaths from cold spells is greater than those leukemia, liver disease, or homicides, and that there are sizable differences in deaths from cold blasts, with the cities of Minneapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago experiencing the highest rates.
Finally:
We calculate that each year 5,400 deaths are delayed by the changing exposure to cold temperature due to mobility. The average number of years of life gained per delayed death is 9.1 years, a sizable increase in life expectancy. As a consequence, the average individual experiences an increase in longevity of 0.02-0.03 years per calendar year as a result of the lower exposure to cold weather. We compare this figure to the annualized increase in longevity experienced in the United States over the past thirty years, which has been 0.25 years per calendar year. Thus, our estimates indicate that 8%-15% of the gains in longevity experienced by the US population over the past three decades are due to the secular movement toward warmer states in the West and the South, away from the colder states in the North. This evidence on mobility-induced changes to cold weather exposure identifies an important but previously overlooked explanation for increased longevity in the United States.
So there you have it. If you live in Chicago, then pack that U-Haul and head on down to Houston! Your life may depend on it.
Wizard
I present to the public a photo story book of a Tolkien literary pilgrimage I made to Oxford in January 2007.
Several months ago wrote of my visits to the United Kingdom on behalf of the Big Evil Company. Two items which I never got around to writing about were a pair of visits I made to visit the places of legend where J.R.R. Tolkien lived, taught, worked, and wrote his stories. My first trip occurred during the weekend of January 20-21, 2007. I made a follow up visit on February 3, 2007. I had to make the follow up trip because of several factors. First, I took a train to get to Oxford since renting a car would have been a pain in the rear to do. The train which I had originally booked from the Paddington Station was canceled, leaving myself and dozens of other passengers stranded. One British man traveling with his girlfriend was less charitable. "God Damn!" he shouted. I caught the next train, but that train was a slow one which stopped at about 8-10 places before getting to Oxford. The trip took 1 hour and 45 minutes one way to only go 67 miles. One trio of 40-something British men who got on at Reading talked about the girls they thought were hot and how Felicity Kendall was the hottest thing they ever laid eyes on. They also complained that they could have gotten to Oxford faster if they had taken a car.
So I get to Oxford at perhaps 1:30pm. This gave me only 3-4 hours to make my trips. I eventually wended my way through the town to St. Giles Road and found the Eagle and Child pub. As the Wikipedia entry notes, I am now a marked figure amongst the fans of Professor Tolkien.
From there I made it to the Tolkien's house at 20 Northmoor Road. I wandered around the neighborhood that day, soaking up the feel of what the Professor's world was like. I saw St. Aloysius Church where the Tolkien's would sometimes worship. However the day turned cloudy and it started to drizzle. It was a brisk day and the weather reminded me of how I always envisioned Frodo's travels through to Rivendell in Arnor. I decided it would be better if I made my way back to London since I was on foot.
Because my time had been cut short, I had not been able to locate Tolkien's grave. I made a considerable effort to locate all six of Tolkien's homes as well as where he taught school. I made a second trip on February 3, 2007. This time I was able to find Wolvercote Cemetary. I had planned to purchase some flowers to lay at the Tolkien's headstone, but that thought got pushed out of my mind as I walked along the road. Incredibly, I didn't realize that the Tolkiens had lived at 22 Northmoor Road, right next door to 20 Northmoor Road, so I stopped by the neighborhood again before I made my way back.
So there you have it. I never thought I would be get around to making this pilgrimage and I will never forget those two days as long as I live. Having walked those streets of that ancient university town helped me understand how it was that the man whose stories of magic, fantastic races and creatures, war, conflict, romance and heroism which had entranced me as a teenager growing up in suburban America could have written them. The Professor wrote of what was all around him, but as a boy growing up in 1970's America I never understood that. We didn't have the Internet, nor the wave of secondary literature which has been produced over the past 15-20 years to help Tolkien fans understand what the Professor was writing about. As I wrote in one my of my photo notes, it became clear to me that there was no way that Middle Earth could have been invented by someone living anywhere else and not by any other man.
And that is my Ode to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Wizard.
I know that a lot of big thing have happened in the past week which are worth writing about including the death of Marvin Zindler, the collapsed I-35 West bridge in Minneapolis, and Metro's giving everyone a choice on Richmond as to how they are going to get railroaded (but at least they will have some public artwork to look at). Still, I wanted to blog about some notable events which are happening in Nerd World.
1) First, the news came across the wires two weeks ago that checkers has been solved. I should clarify that statement a bit. From a Game Theory standpoint, the game of checkers has been weakly solved, meaning that once you get down to a position where you have 10 checkers on the board, then the developed program cannot lose! The program will always at least obtain a draw, if not a win.
Now I can hear right now a lot of chess players jumping to their feet, shouting that chess is ultimately unsolvable. All I can say is that most chess players have programs these days, which says quite a bit about the state of player's attitudes these days.
2) Neal Krawetz, a security researcher, has written a program which can compare the metadata on image files and determine if a file is an original or whether it has been Photoshopped. The article goes on to describe how most of the Al-Queda images we have been seeing in the media have possibly been doctored up.
3) Several weeks ago, I noted how Microsoft was developing touch screen computing, which would revolutionize the computing experience. I noted how developers in Penguin land needed to get their act together or M$ would leave them behind. Well, it seems that developers in Penguin land are doing just that with MPX (Multi Pointer X-Window). The good news is that MPX will recognize multiple users at once.
4) Dell is indeed shaking up Linux land and is seeing some demand for Linux. The good news is that Dell (and Google) is / are starting to lean on developers for better drivers.
5) Meanwhile Red Hat, which is the leading Linux distributor, is not sitting still. They are coming out with their own Linux desktop. Meanwhile, Information Week brings up the hoary old argument of whether 300 different Linux distros is fragmenting and hurting the adaption of Linux. Remember that Unix forked in the 1980's between Sun's Solaris, IBM's AIX, HP's HP-UX, and lots of others, which opened the door to Microsoft winning over the desktop.
6) Last, but probably most interestingly, here is an article with noted Australian (former) kernel developer Con Kolivas, where he talks about his frustrations with kernel development which led him to quit working on Linux.
My own .02 worth is that Linux will continue to be a niche hobby OS until we can develop reliable drivers which always work! Also, the Open Office suite needs to be improved so that it always can open and deal with Adobe and Microsoft Office documentation.
A quick story about Linux and drivers. Several weeks ago that the Big Evil Company, one of our processors came in with a USB stick which he wanted to mount on his Linux desktop. My senior counterpart, an incredibly knowledgeable, hard working, and diligent guy, fiddled for some 2 hours trying to get a USB stick to work on his desktop. There's more to the story than issuing a simple mount command, but if Linux is going to make inroads on $200 - $800 copies of Microsoft Vista, then we need to make sure that the user experience is painless and that things work the first time and every time - end of story. Otherwise, the world will continue to pay the steep Microsoft premium and the world will stay a WinTel type place.
Wizard