The Picture that Straightens, not Sags, Over Time

Pyramid to dome to column (Economist graphic)

A profound shift with consequences that are only partially grasped by policy makers [bold added]:

The pyramid was characteristic of human populations since the day organised societies emerged. With lifespans short and mortality rates high, children were always the most numerous group, and old people the least. A population chart of England in 1700 looks like a pyramid, as well.

But now look at the chart of the global population in 2015. It looks more like the dome of the Capitol building in Washington, DC (middle chart). Young children are still the largest group, but now make up only 10% of the population, and those above them are almost as big a cohort, with 9.5%. The age groups start to become markedly smaller only about the age of 40.

Some forecast a forlorn future where "looking after parents and grandparents will be as big a, or a bigger, social requirement ­as bringing up children and grandchildren."

But there's another view. Extrapolating from the current pace of technological advancement, it is entirely possible that developments in medicine, robotics, and/or artificial intelligence will enable the old to live independently (and happily) much longer than today. (As I near retirement, I am keenly interested the future turns out that way!)

An Exciting Year

Quality, features, and supply rise faster than costs, except in three major sectors:

in America the number of hours of work that it takes to buy a car, or a wardrobe full of clothes, has halved in the past generation. But in three big areas it has singularly failed to operate: health care, education and housing.

All three areas are subject to extensive government regulation, government subsidies, and barriers to entry in the name of public safety (you or I, dear reader, cannot treat a patient, teach a course, or build a house without credentials that require years of experience, education, and testing).

Government solutions call for more spending and higher taxes, but the public's desire for more of the same seems to have peaked.

Limits spur creativity. This will be an exciting year, except for those trying to preserve the status quo.

It's Only January, So There's Still Time

Having made little progress on New Year's resolutions (broad categories: health, work, organization), I am receptive to advice on "how to stop being lazy and get things done."

Georgetown University Professor Cal Newport :

To-Do Lists Are Evil. Schedule Everything.

Assume You’re Going Home at 5:30, Then Plan Your Day Backwards

Make A Plan For The Entire Week

Do Very Few Things, But Be Awesome At Them

Less Shallow Work, Focus On The Deep Stuff

Can't hurt to give it a try. I'll start next Sunday :)

Two Cheers

Having forgotten--or never knowing--that I had signed up for text fraud alerts, I was a little taken aback by a message received today from Chase Bank. Actually, I wasn't sure that it was from the bank, so I followed protocol by calling the 1-800 number on the paper statement that I receive every month.

By the way, that's another reason for relying on dead-tree communications: it's easy to make a fraudulent message or website look legitimate, but a printed missive is much harder to fake. Paper quality, typeface, grammar, typographical errors, and logos all have to pass the eyeball and touch tests.

The Chase customer service rep confirmed that someone had tried to use our Visa card with an online merchant but was turned down because the $1,249.61 purchase looked suspicious. A quick check of our wallets showed that we still had our cards, so our number could have been skimmed from any number of sources, e.g, restaurants, movie theaters, stores, or other online vendors. The new cards will be sent shortly in the mail.

Everyone's uncomfortable about how governments and companies track what private citizens are doing, but in this case I'm happy that the bank understands our normal behavior well enough to know when a transaction should be investigated. Here's hoping that the technology is sophisticated enough to nail the bad guys as well. For now, two cheers for big data.

[Update - 1/15/15: in related local news

Menlo Park police arrested Menalto Cleaners owner Edwin Gary Smith on Wednesday in connection with a large-scale credit card fraud. Smith, 63, was served with an arrest warrant that alleges 40 felony counts including identity theft, credit card fraud and elder fiduciary abuse.....Menalto Cleaners defrauded 38 clients out of a total of $678,000 between December 2011 and October 2014 by overcharging their credit cards, police said.]

Vocabulary Lesson

Do you aspire to asperge the assembly?

One benefit of being a member of the Episcopal Church is the exposure to uncommon words and concepts.

Asperge (verb) has nothing to do with asparagus (the French word is asperge) or Asperger's syndrome, the autism-spectrum disorder named for the doctor who discovered it. It means "to sprinkle the congregation with holy water."

No Pressure

Yesterday morning I had to circle the block a couple of times to find parking on Ocean Avenue. Two spaces had been set aside for Zipcars, one of the new car-sharing services that have sprouted in metropolitan areas.

A monthly subscription plus hourly usage fee entitles members to use cars stationed at various locations. Mobile-phone apps make it easy to reserve a car, and a member's access card uses RFID technology to activate it during the period of the reservation.

One drawback of the Zipcar system is that the auto must be dropped off where it was picked up. Other services, like car2go, are trying to do away with that limitation.

The transportation marketplace has exploded with new technologies, equipment, ownership, and rental alternatives. Given such ferment we're inclined to select terms for our next vehicle, such as a three-year lease, that don't entail a long-term commitment. Meanwhile, with gas at $2.40 a gallon (and even under $2 in other parts of the country), it's easier to keep our clunkers going, and there's no pressure to rush a decision.

Organic Overkill

Consumers show a marked preference for organic food and are willing to pay "20 percent to 100 percent more than their conventionally produced equivalents."

Not surprisingly, food vendors use the organic designation whenever possible. However, there's such a thing as overkill.

Memo to the Campbell Soup Company: 34 mentions in 15 lines is a turn-off.

Location, Location, Location

Information from Zillow.com

We're used to seeing outrageous prices for homes in Palo Alto---excellent schools and proximity to Stanford and Silicon Valley provide a partial explanation---but $5 million for a 610-sq-ft house on a 5,000-sq-ft property was an extreme outlier.

The explanation: Bernard Newcomb, founder of E*Trade ($6.7 billion market cap), lives next door and made the owner an offer he couldn't refuse.

Good fences make good neighbors, but a successful IPO makes even better ones.

Buyer on the left, seller on the right (Google street view)

Men's Kaffee Klatsch

Tuesday morning at Starbucks

Men as a group don't engage in conversation as much as women do, but that broad general statement, of course, masks infinite variations.

At Starbucks a group of older guys carried on conversation and experienced bonhomie for well over an hour. It's common to find women's kaffee klatsches but coming upon the male version is rare.

It takes a while to regain one's footing during retirement. These guys had found theirs.

If Ever

(SFGate photo)

Like a runaway freight train there's no stopping the California high-speed rail project, which broke ground today in Fresno. Forget that the initial cost estimates have more than doubled to $68 billion, or that initial operations will serve only about a million people in the Central Valley. (It would be a shock if the Fresno-Bakersfield corridor will produce a regular ridership of at least 1%, i.e., 10,000 people.)

If all goes according to plan, the San Francisco--Los Angeles connection won't be operational until 2029. Governor Jerry Brown "said the state owed it to the future to think big and invest in projects like high-speed rail."

OK, Guv'nor, let's dream about a new, customizable, eco-friendly transportation system for California:

$30 billion for 1,000,000 driver-less all-electric cars @ $30,000--which won't need feeder buses to/from the train stations.

$20 billion for new power plants (nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind)

$20 billion for highway improvements and strengthening the power grid.

This cocktail-napkin transportation project was concocted in two minutes, but there is absolutely no doubt that the CNTP would be operational long before California's High-Speed Rail is completed, if ever.

Not on the Horizon

Centaurus A, where galaxies collide (NASA photo)

Scientists have discovered (bold added)

a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other more closely than any ever before observed.

Other twin black holes won’t merge for another few billion years, but these, says Caltech’s George Djorgovski, co-author of a paper in Nature describing the new discovery, “could merge in a mere million years.”

Centaurus A is 11 million light-years away (Andromeda, the closest galaxy to our Milky Way, is 2.5 million light-years from Earth), which means that we are watching events from 11 million years ago; the two black holes have likely already merged.

Unlike Comsat in the 1960's, however, there is no technology on the horizon that will eliminate this tape delay.

No Provocative Adornments

The newly ordained priest guest-substituted for the two regular ministers who were away this Sunday.

Episcopal priests must be able to perform the sacraments whether they are held at the grandest of cathedrals or around the humblest of altars. Today the milieu was closer to the latter. Rebecca had to do it all---the Gospel reading, the sermon (homily), and the celebration of the Mass---and she did it without missing a beat.

Your humble observer especially appreciated her by-the-Book approach. The homily was derived directly from the lessons, and there were no adornments (e.g., references to Gaia / Mother Earth, calls for social justice) that some clergy feel compelled to provoke their listeners with.

In the near future Rebecca will retire from her longtime secular job to take a position at a parish or mission. For our sake we hope that she'll be nearby, but wherever it is, she'll be just fine.

Tech Etiquette

(Image from grooverpr.wordpress.com)

This article is about rules of etiquette in the brave new technological world. Examples:

You can’t quit a social network just because your mom joins.

Early Apple Watch owners.....don’t act like you’re better than the rest of us because you can order pizza by talking into your wrist.

All smartwatch owners: No messaging during dinner and pretending you’re just scratching your wrist. Wrists aren’t that itchy.

An insightful quote at the end, IMHO, takes the prize:

When my friends and I go out to dinner, we’ll sometimes go ‘phones down’ as soon as we’re seated. Whoever accidentally picks up the phone first has to pay the tab for everyone. It is really effective at getting people off their phones. — Andy Dunn, CEO of the online men’s fashion retailer Bonobos

The Day After

Plump, tasty, and tender

Our visiting relative has both a bigger budget and love for the slots than we do. Being gracious hosts, we complied with her wish to return to Graton.

The casino was more crowded than it had been on New Year's Eve. I killed time at the bar in Martin Yan's M.Y. Noodles. The drinks and food were generally overpriced (menu here), but one tasty bargain was the chicken feet at $5.

Chicken feet (they're cleaned thoroughly and the toenails are removed) are marinated, fried, and steamed over many hours. M.Y. Noodles gets the texture right---very tender but not overcooked to the extent that the feet fall apart. The dish compared favorably with the best dim sum palaces in SF and the Peninsula.

Chicken feet dim sum in Rohnert Park? Knock me over with a feather.

A Resolution That I'll be Sure to Keep

à votre santé!

Having received the gifts of Bacchus this holiday season, I needed to purge the liquor cabinet. Neither we nor visitors are fans of the hard stuff, and some of the bottles had not been touched for decades. Well, it's time to do one's duty: I resolve to take 1-2 shots every night until the bottles are empty.

As you, dear reader, are undoubtedly aware, alcohol taken in moderation can have health benefits. Here are seven:

1. It Can Lower Your Risk Of Cardiovascular Disease
2. It Can Lengthen Your Life
3. It Can Improve Your Libido
4. It Helps Prevent Against the Common Cold
5. It Can Decrease Chances Of Developing Dementia
6. It Can Reduce The Risk Of Gallstones
7. It Lowers The Chance Of Diabetes

More on item #5: contrary to what we've been told since we were children, alcohol (in moderation) can help brain function:

researchers at University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that light alcohol consumption could be linked to better episodic memory—the memory of events. They studied adults over age 60 with no indication of dementia, and saw that moderate drinking was associated with larger hippocampal brain volume—the area of the brain responsible for the consolidation of short- and long-term memory.

I've always wanted to increase my hippocampal brain volume.