The Jones Act should be repealed

I sent this message to my Senators, Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), and to my Representative, Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio District 2):

"The Jones Act will saddle Puerto Rico with unnecessary rebuilding costs as materials will need to be shipped to the island. It should be repealed immediately for Puerto Rico and after a period of time (a year?) for the rest of the country. This protectionist act has outlived its usefulness. Thank you."

In case you're unfamiliar with the Jones Act, formally known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, here's a summary from Wikipedia: It "requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on U.S.-flag ships, constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents." It is a protectionist act and, in my humble opinion, has no place in modern commerce.

Why are so many celebrities dying?

Carrie Fisher died today. I thought she would recover from her medical problems and live many more years but, alas, she didn't. We still have four more days this year and I expect another celebrity will die before January 1, 2017.

Why are so many celebrities dying? Mathematically, it's simple: It's due to a reduction in life expectancy in the United States. Many people aren't making it to 60 years old any more, and celebrities are included in that. George Michael died recently at the age of 53 and Carrie had just turned 60 a couple of months ago. People are succumbing to cancer, heart disease, drugs (legal as well as illegal), suicide (some caused by repeated concussions) and gun violence.

I am especially appalled at the increase in drug overdoses. I feel that the pharmaceutical companies as well as the doctors are responsible for the increase in overdoses due to painkillers and are making big profits from this. The Charleston Gazette-Mail found that, over the last six years, pharmaceutical companies have shipped 433 pain pills for every man, woman and child in the state of West Virginia. That's a total of 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills.

Meanwhile, the people from an earlier era who are now in their 90s, such as Zsa Zsa Gabor, 99, are dying as well. Expect this combination of seemingly large numbers of young and old celebrities dying to continue until the average life expectancy in the United States begins to increase again.
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Note: I donated to Wikipedia for the third year in a row during their recent fundraising campaign. They said that if everyone who uses Wikipedia donated just $5 per year, they would reach their goal. I gave a bit more than the average because I'm an above average kind of person!

Don't say "never again" ever again

Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Union. Postings on Facebook contain the phrase, "never again." Feel free to remember the Holocaust but don't say "never again." Maybe never again for Jews, but there have been dozens of massacres since World War II, including one this month where between 600 and 2,000 people died.

Wikipedia reports 32 massacres since World War II of 500 or more people although I admit that these aren't on the scale of the Holocaust. The Khmer Rouge tried to match the Germans, killing between 1.4 million and 2 million people with another 650,000 Cambodians starving to death. This happened in the 1970s and 1980s, within the lifetime of many people reading this post.

We as a country simply can't keep this from happening. Massacres will keep on happening indefinitely. Repeatedly saying "never again" will not change this. So don't do it.

Math problem one solution: The Time Clock Problem

On July 24, I posed a math problem based on a real-life situation. In summary, here is the problem: If you have a group of 200 employees, what is the probability that two or more employees have the same last four digits in their Social Security numbers? When my son heard this problem, he immediately said, "That sounds like the birthday problem!" He's right. The birthday problem can be stated this way: If you have 23 people in a room, none of them was born on February 29 and you assume that birthdays are evenly distributed throughout the year (which we know is not true) what is the chance that two of the people share the same birthday? The answer turns out to be about one out of two, or 50.7%.

The birthday problem and the solution to it is discussed in Wikipedia. They point out that it is actually easier to solve the opposite problem. What is the probability that the 23 people have unique birthdays? Once you calculate that, you can take one minus that probability to get the change that at least two of the 23 people have the same birthday (as there could be more than two).

The solution to our problem actually is more accurate than the solution to the birthday problem because the last four digits of a person's Social Security Number are more likely to be randomly distributed among the 9,999 possibilities (0000 is not used).

Using the Wikipedia article, here is a solution. We are also going to figure the probability that all 200 employees have a unique combination of the last four digits of their Social Security Numbers. That probability is

P(200') = 9999/9999 * 9998/9999 * 9997/9999 * ... * 9802/9999 * 9801/9999 * 9800/9999

where ... indicates many more terms in the equation. I calculated this number using a spreadsheet with 15 digits of precision and got this result:

P(200') = .134853157876989 or about 13.5%.

This means that there is only a 13.5% probability that all 200 employees have different values for the last four digits of their Social Security Numbers. Taking 

P(200) = 1 - P(200')

means that there is a 86.5% probability that two or more employees have the same four digits. So the answer to the math problem is about 86.5%.

With that high of a probability, the employer must have a way of assigning alternate numbers to a few employees.

Updated Aug. 23: I renamed this post from "A solution to the math problem" to "Math problem one solution: The Time Clock Problem." Does this mean that there will be additional problems? You bet! But the next one is complicated enough that I'm going to solve it before I post it. That way, I can post the solution the next day. The common theme of these problems: These are problems that occur in real life.

Seven months since leaving Slashdot

At the end of December 2012, I left Slashdot. Cold turkey, no more reading, no more story submittals, no more comment moderation. I had good karma and I have no idea what they did with it. Like others, I posted under a handle so you won't find my contributions without working at it.

In case you are not familiar with Slashdot, it "is a technology-related news website owned by the US-based company Dice Holdings, Inc. The site, which bills itself as 'News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters,' features user-submitted and evaluated news stories about science and technology related topics." (Source: Wikipedia)

I left for four reasons: I have better sources for "News for Nerds," they refused to track a story back to its original source, the editing of stories was atrocious and I got tired of the stupid comments. Let me expound on these.

Better sources: I have several blogs and other news sources for my tech news. As a whole, they are faster and have better reporting and editing than Slashdot. One of the last straws in December was when Slashdot posted a story that I had read elsewhere two days earlier.

Original source: Slashdot relied on reader-submitted stories. While there is some original reporting on the Internet, many news sites simply scrape and rewrite content from the originators. How many times have you read a story in a major media source and realize that it was written by the Associated Press? The readers who submitted content rarely took the effort to track the story back to its roots, something I always try to do on this blog. This resulted in incorrect information and incomplete stories.

Sometimes, they had ridiculous situations where an Australian news publication was used a source for a United States story. It also resulted in a couple of cases where someone was able to sneak through a story that was a couple of years old.

Atrocious editing: Readers are nerds and their submissions need editing. This didn't happen as much as it should have. Ranging from misspelled words and wrong word usage to summaries that totally misrepresented the stories, this got really obnoxious after a while. Also, the problems listed in "Original source" were passed right on through by the editors.

Stupid comments: Every blog or other site that allows comments has to have a way to deal with stupid ones. Slashdot had an excellent moderation system that used people like me with good karma to keep the stupid comments in line. It was just too much work and there was just too much stupidity to deal with.

I really have a problem with tech people who work exclusively in a Wintel world (Windows + Intel) world and have no clue that there's other worlds out there that have nothing to do with Microsoft or Intel. They would be amazed to know that there are servers out there that don't run any antivirus software and yet are not vulnerable to malware!

Last year, I was wasting too much time cussing at stories and comments on Slashdot. Now I have that time back to do other things, like write this blog.

Updated Aug. 9: Replaced "stupid commenters" with "stupid comments." I really shouldn't call people stupid. People aren't stupid, they just do stupid things, like post stupid comments. As Forrest Gump's mother used to say, "Stupid is as stupid does."

“There’s gold, er, rare-earth metals in them thar hills, boys!”

It turns out that the waste from many gold mines contains rare-earth metals. Why is that important? According to this article by the Associated Press, "Two years ago, China raised prices — in the case of neodymium, used to make Prius electric motors stronger and lighter, from $15 a kilogram in 2009 to $500 in 2011, while dysprosium oxide used in lasers and halide lamps went from $114 a kilogram in 2010 to $2,830 in 2011. It's also about the time China cut off supplies to Japan, maker of the Prius, in a dispute over international fishing territory." So it's important that new sources of these rare-earth metals are found.

The AP explains that miners in the early days of the West were looking for gold, silver and copper. They didn't even know what rare-earth metals were; even if they did, these metals are much more difficult to extract. With China raising the prices for political reasons, companies are looking for new sources and they have found them in an unexpected place.

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The quote that the title is based on was originally from "The American Claimant" written by Mark Twain in 1892. However, there is some indication that this phrase was originally spoken by M.F. Stephenson describing the hills around Dahlonega, Georgia.

From Wikipedia, here are the 17 rare-earth metals. They get the name "rare earth" because they are widely distributed and not concentrated in ores as are gold, silver and copper. Also, they tend to bind to each other. This makes these metals harder to concentrate and refine.

Note that indium, also mentioned in the story, is not considered a rare-earth metal. Also, I doubt that AP Style calls for capitalizing element names. Oops.

Updated July 23 to improve formatting.