The Half Baked Lunatic

Here’s a question to ponder: Why do we set our kid’s bedtime at a nice round number like 9:30 pm, rather than 9:15 or 9:45? How about 9:41, or 9:22, or some other equally arbitrary time? And is that the time your kids actually have to be in bed with the lights turned off – or the time that they need to start getting ready?

If you think about it, every “rule” has a bit of an arbitrary aspect to it. You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, but where should that line be? How wide is the “grey area” between being too lenient (an 11:30 bedtime?) or too stringent (how about 8pm sharp)? Both these extremes are arguably out of the question, so the reasonable “grey area” is probably narrower than that. Somewhere between those reasonable limits, however, you need to pick a bedtime for your kids – and 9:30 seems to be a good compromise. But once the rule has been set, how strictly should you enforce it?

How often have we seen this: The kids know as well as you do that 10pm is still within the “reasonable” window … so a little delay here, a little delay there … and after a few weeks, the kids are going to bed at 10pm on a regular basis. But the official rule of the house is still bedtime at 9:30!

I’ve always been fascinated with the arbitrary nature of the actual boundary – how and where the limit is set – for any rule; this is a deep-rooted problem that has vexed humanity for centuries, in every culture and on every continent.

In the USA, our society has determined that kids can’t drink alcohol until they are 21 years old. At that magic day in your life, you are suddenly free to drink as much as you like. There is no “Slop” in that rule, as far as the legal enforcement goes. No “grey area” at all to work with.

On the other hand, the speed limit on a highway might be 65 miles per hour – yet everyone knows that you usually won’t get a ticket unless you are going at least ten miles per hour over the limit. So in our minds we don’t think we are speeding till we get to 75.

Sometimes you may have to ask why a rule was enacted in the first place. One small town in Iowa for example, has an ordinance on the books that proclaims “The Ice Cream Man and his truck are banned”. So I’m wondering, what DID the Ice Cream man do to deserve such a harsh penalty? It must have been quite drastic in order to justify banning EVERY Ice Cream Man (and their trucks) from the town forever!

Of course, we have to have rules. Our society would fall apart without them. Yet, pushing the boundaries and doing things that break the rules has opened the door to some of our greatest discoveries. Would Galileo have published his works proving Heliocentric motion if he had not broken the laws of the day?

Admittedly, Galileo was mostly breaking religious laws, which even in his day made little sense. Are all religious laws idiotic, out of date, with little relevance in modern society? No, not all – but many are. It’s quite easy to see that Kosher laws have been misinterpreted and are observed in bizarre ways that are far outside of their original meaning; but just try getting a conservative Jew to eat a bacon cheeseburger.

Across the board, rules and laws can have unintended consequences. Sometimes these “side effects” are positive, sometimes they are detrimental. The consequences can be completely unrelated to the original intent of the rule; sometimes the rule will backfire – and cause the opposite effect. Airbags in cars, for example, were designed to save lives. Indeed, they were proven to be effective on adults and certainly reduce the death toll from traffic accidents, so laws were enacted mandating airbags in all cars. But early on, we found that the airbags on the passenger side actually contributed to an increase in child fatalities! The solution to this problem was to move all children to the back seat. That’s all well and good, but this has led to a small, but “statistically significant”, increase in the number of young children forgotten in unattended vehicles. An example of unintended consequences at its finest.

Sometimes, the establishment of a rule in itself challenges people to purposefully try and break the rule, just to prove that they can – actually increasing the incidence of what the rule was trying to prohibit in the first place. Let’s say that some innovative technology is developed that can quickly and inexpensively detect cyanide in food. A new law is then introduced which mandates that all food in every restaurant is scanned for cyanide before being served to customers. Do you think the incidence of cyanide poisoning would go up or down compared to what it is today? I’m sure it would go up (from pretty much zero today) when people somehow feel compelled to prove that they can foil the device.

Emergency situations oftentimes require a snap decision; helping someone – maybe even saving their lives – might require breaking some rule. A lifeguard in Miami was recently fired for saving someone from drowning, because he didn’t wait for backup (a lifeguard is supposed to be “in the chair” at all times). Police and firemen are faced with similar, or even more difficult decisions, every day –  sometimes they do the “right” thing but it’s actually illegal, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they make the wrong choice altogether and someone gets killed. It’s a tough position to be in. The root of the problem is that every one of these situations is different, and as much as we try we cannot foresee and write a law for every scenario … and then expect every officer to remember which law applies in less than a tenth of a second. Right or wrong, we have to be able to rely on their judgement of the situation.

People in a position of power can abuse their privileges and “mandate” laws that legislate their own personal beliefs. How often have we seen that? This can be anything from a small town mayor who passed an ordinance saying you can only have sex in the missionary position (no, I’m not making that up!) to a national dictator like Hitler who effectively suspended all civil liberties from people that weren’t of pure German heritage.

On the flip side, laws are often “negotiated” between various parties. While the intention is to come up with a fair compromise, the net result isn’t any less arbitrary. Why do we depreciate residential real estate over 27.5 years? My guess is that it was probably a compromise between one economist that suggested 25 and another that suggested 30. So now, everyone in the USA who owns rental real estate has to deal with the “half year” ramifications of a 27.5-year depreciation table.

Dress codes in schools can be frustrating for both the students and the school administration. The rules are typically based on the “comfort level” of the parents in their district, and schools bend over backwards trying to define what’s acceptable to wear to school and what’s not. However, one parent in the community may be completely comfortable and would not bat an eye if her daughter wore a skimpy little outfit every day, while her neighbor gets very uptight if a student is not completely covered from head to toe even on the hottest day of the year. It seems that every June we hear about some high school senior who is denied the honor of graduating with their class because they wore something that they (and their parents) were perfectly comfortable with – but someone else wasn’t.

How about laws that are strictly symbolic? Berkeley California has their “Nuclear Free Act of 1986” which authorizes the city to levy fines for detonating nuclear weapons within the city limits. I guess Russia will have to go after Las Vegas instead! Seriously though, it really is just a symbolic gesture. There are also parts of this legislation that prohibits other nuclear activities, but these are ineffective; University of California Berkeley is a major research center for nuclear physics, and as a state funded institution it overrides the city level legislation.

Regulations can be established based on data analysis. A drug, for example, may be somewhat effective at a dosage of 20mg, and more effective at a 40mg dosage but with greater side effects. The side effects are lethal at 50mg. So what dosage does the FDA allow? There are guidelines and very precise ways to scientifically determine the best dosage – but if you really want to get the most effective administration, the prescribing physician may have to take into account the weight of the patient, metabolism, and other factors. In the end, the FDA may make a judgement call and only allow the drug to be prescribed at the lower dosage just to be safe.

No matter how hard we try, we cannot create a set of rules or laws that delineates “right” and “wrong” for every possible scenario. But if the rule isn’t explicitly stated, someone will try to find a way around it. Human nature compels us to “push the boundaries” to circumvent the rules. The entire United States Tax Code is a great example of what was initially a fairly simple set of rules, but has become more and more complex as we’ve patched loopholes that were being exploited. Our tax code has now evolved into a messy labyrinth of unintelligible legal language that spans some 20 volumes, totaling almost 17,000 pages, yet people and corporations still try to find any way they can to circumvent it. As a consequence, everyone else has to pay more for their tax preparation to comply with the overly cumbersome laws – and that in itself becomes an extra “tax” that we all have to pay!

Looking at the bigger picture, we have to make philosophical decisions on enacting broad aspects of government policy. This has been an issue that has pitted many presidential nominees (and their respective political parties) against each other. Do we “highly regulate” certain industries or not? When it comes to things like healthcare, finance, aviation, energy, and others, history has shown that some level of regulation is absolutely necessary. But again – where do you draw the line in the sand, how strictly do you enforce the actual placement of the line, and how many loopholes will there be that will require additional regulations in order to make the line effective?

There is a very large cost to all of this: writing the rules, enforcing the rules, punishing people that break the rules. Establishing the rule of “Bedtime at 9:30” might not have a cost to it, but it becomes ineffective if it’s not enforced.

Obviously the cost of defining and enforcing public policy is huge – just think of what we pay for local police departments in every city, plus federal agencies such as the SEC, FDA, FTC, EPA, FCC, ATF, NRC, USDA, OSHA, etc. This is just a small sampling of agencies whose ‘primary purpose’ is developing and enforcing new regulations. And then, we spend billions on justice administration (courts, judges, lawyers) and punishment (prisons) for those who break the laws.

There’s an additional aspect to all this, which I don’t think we take into consideration often enough: there is a high level of stress that comes with the pressures of modern society, and living with all these complex regulations certainly adds to the stress. This is an issue that’s hard to quantify, but there is no doubt that it contributes to the number of people who will just “lose it” one day and commit heinous acts of terror against whomever is unlucky enough to be in their way.

I do not think there is a solution to the “arbitrary” nature of where we set the limit for each rule or law; that truly is a fundamental issue which humanity will always face. We do need rules in order to function as a society, and we need to ensure the rules are enforced – but defending the reasoning for the exact point that something goes from being “legal” to being “Illegal” is almost impossible.

I wish, however, that we could find a better way to manage the enforcement of our laws. I’d like to be able to set clear expectations so everyone understands the intention of each rule – yet at the same time have a little “wiggle room” in the grey areas, without always requiring even more complicated rules to patch all the loopholes. We could then allow lawmakers and enforcers to embrace exceptions, instead of punishing them, when someone pushes the boundaries for social and technical advancement rather than for personal gain.

On the other hand, one person’s “technical advancement” is another person’s “evil incarnate”. Maybe I’m just asking for too much.

Along the western edge of Washington DC, parallel to the Potomac River, runs the historic C&O shipping canal. Stop at Fletcher’s Boathouse, just north of Georgetown, and you can rent kayaks or canoes for a relaxing time on the water – or just enjoy the nice biking/jogging path that accompanies the canal. The water in the C&O is calm and peaceful, you can traverse it without having to battle the strong currents and wild turbulence of the mighty Potomac just a few hundred feet away.

Built in the mid-1800’s, the C&O (which stands for Chesapeake and Ohio) was used to transport much needed goods from northern Maryland and Pennsylvania into Washington D.C. Initially intended to go all the way to Pittsburgh, the C&O canal was only completed up to Cumberland, Maryland – still an impressive 184 miles in total length.

The primary freight that was shipped via the C&O was coal from the Allegheny Mountains, but the canal was also used for transporting building materials (lumber, paving stones, sand and gravel) and foodstuff (pork, wheat, corn, oats – and even whiskey). This was an alternative to shipping goods via railroad – and for a time before it closed, the canal was actually owned by the B&O (Baltimore and Ohio) Railroad Company. The canal was a vital part of Washington DC’s rapid growth following the civil war, and all the way into the early 1920’s.

Initially, the C&O canal was built with 74 locks, used to keep the flow of water stable and to raise and lower barges from one section to the next. The very last of these locks emptied the C&O canal into the Potomac river; it was there, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington DC, that all the freight was unloaded from the barges and distributed throughout the city.

There really was never any particular name for this last lock which separated the canal from the river, but in 1942 (18 years after the canal was closed to shipping and the C&O Canal Company went into receivership) a restaurant opened directly across the street – and the restaurant was named “The Water Gate Inn”.

Another 18 years went by. In 1960, The Water Gate Inn closed its doors and sold out to an Italian real estate developer, Società Generale Immobiliare (known simply as “SGI”). SGI didn’t just buy out the restaurant – they purchased the entire ten acres of land that was owned by the remaining vestiges of the C&O Canal Company. SGI outlined their plans for a major real estate development, and named the proposed building complex after the little restaurant that had been on the corner of the property; thus was born “The Watergate”.

Right from the start, SGI had grand plans and a big budget for The Watergate. It was to be a mixed use complex More...

I’ve discussed “The Immutable Laws of Physics” a few times in previous articles. Every shred of evidence we have indicates that the interactions between matter, energy, time, and space, are themselves the very nature of the universe, and nothing we (or anything/anyone else) can do will ever change these interactions. Whenever we’ve observed or discovered something new that we don’t understand, it reminds us that we have incomplete understanding of the laws of physics – but the physical world is still immutable.

Quantum mechanics is a “relatively new” branch of physics that was discovered roughly 100 years ago, and it has certainly enhanced our understanding of these physical interactions. It has also made things quite a bit more complicated, as quantum mechanics embodies concepts which are quite difficult to grasp. The concepts are not as elegant as the pure logic behind classical “Newtonian physics”, or the mind-bending beauty of Einstein’s discovery of relativity.

One of the problems is that quantum mechanics have a large component that has to do with randomness. Changes in quantum states are thought to be the only truly random physical interactions in the whole universe!

One question that often comes up is this: how do we account for the randomness of quantum mechanics if the fundamental laws of physics are so perfect and so immutable? Why don’t our traditional laws of physics clash with the crazy and unpredictable nature of this randomness, the particle/wave duality, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? And while we’re at it, what do we feed to Schrödinger’s much maligned cat?

Quantum mathematics are somewhat abstract, yet exceedingly precise. The math has been verified experimentally to within one part in many billions; the measured data agrees with the theoretical equations to the limits of our measurement technology. This is a very key point. 

As a practical example, every time a transistor switches on and off in a computer, there is a “quantum band gap” that each electron goes through. If we could somehow “see” each electron that is pushed up against the junction of a transistor, we would not be able to tell which specific electrons would make it through the gap and which ones wouldn’t. The quantum state of each individual electron is completely random. However, we can say – very, very precisely – how many in total will go through and at what energy levels.

Advancements in manufacturing technologies, resulting in less impurities (i.e. stray molecules of unwanted substances) in the silicon junction, More...

(Note: This was a term paper I wrote for an MBA class in 2012. I recently ran across it in my files and thought it would be a good addition to my blog. Enjoy!)

An Overview of the U.S. Patent System
David M. H. Workman

Introduction

A Patent is a form of legal protection for an invention, allowing the patent holder to have exclusive rights to make, use, or sell the invention for a specific period of time (typically either 14 or 20 years in the U.S., depending on the type of patent).

To secure a patent, a Patent Application is submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); the application consists of two major elements: a description of the invention, and certain claims (which define the scope of protections desired under the patent application). The USPTO may grant the patent for the invention, but allow or disallow each of the claims individually. “Broad” claims mean that the applicant is asking for the invention to be protected in a wide range of uses, and are more likely to be rejected (and if allowed, are more likely to be challenged by competitors). “Narrow” claims mean that the invention has very focused and well defined commercial applications, which are less likely to be challenged.

For a patent application to be approved, it must meet a certain bar for (1) Novelty, (2) Non-Obviousness, and (3) either Utility, Distinctiveness, or Ornamentality (depending on whether it is a “Utility”, “Plant”, or “Design” patent, respectively). The USPTO reviews the patent application to ensure that the patent, and each of the claims, meets the bar for each criterion.

During the application process, the patent may be rejected if “prior art” (i.e. any published diagrams or descriptions which show that the invention is not original) is found by the USPTO, or if any aspect of the invention was publicly disclosed by the inventor before the filing date. Even after the patent has been granted, others may challenge the validity of the patent (or any of the individual claims) if prior art is presented which is proven to have been publicly available before the application date.

Patents cover an amazingly diverse range of ideas – from describing the optimal radius of the bend in a wire paper clip, to More...

In a previous article titled I’m a believer!, I proposed we should swap the traditional definition of who’s a believer and who isn’t – I suggested that a believer is someone who believes that the laws of physics are immutable and a non-believer is someone who doesn’t.

In this post, I’ll take a little different approach. I’ll go on record and say that what people believe in is irrelevant. I don’t care what you believe in. Heck, I don’t even care about what I believe in myself! Simply having a belief in something does not make it true.

What if I go around the world and convince everyone that the universe is governed by a Grand Orange Duck. And what the Grand Orange Duck really wants is for everyone to donate their ear wax to the famed Diamond Crucible. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out ... I really believe this is the truth! Once we have ear wax from every person on Earth, and the Diamond Crucible is full to the brim, the Grand Orange Duck will reveal himself to us and we will be allowed to marvel at his magnificent wings. It will be a glorious day indeed!

Even if I can get everyone to believe in the Grand Orange Duck (let’s just call it “GOD” for short), and convince every single person on Earth that they need to contribute some ear wax to the Diamond Crucible, that still doesn’t make it the truth.

Is this scenario really that far-fetched? How about this: The Mormons are very good at getting people to believe that there were white people on Earth before black people (Mormon scripture says that Cain, who killed his brother Abel, was so evil that God "cursed" him with black skin), and that More...

Twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, we move our clocks either forwards or backwards to accommodate the change in Daylight Savings Time.

And twice a year, there are the requisite news articles written about Daylight Savings Time, explaining to everyone why we go through all this hassle. Then there are the cutesy and often misguided Facebook posts with statements like: “only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.” (which is what prompted me to write this particular article in the first place!)

So let’s get to the bottom of what Daylight Savings really is. First of all, however, we have to understand what midnight is. That’s right: midnight, the time that we’ve decided each day should start.

Technically, midnight is the time that is halfway between sunset and sunrise. It’s simple enough, but that definition needs some clarification. As the Earth revolves around the Sun, the Earth’s tilt causes daylight hours to shift with the seasons.

A better definition is that midnight is the time that is halfway between sunset and sunrise, at the equator, on either the fall or spring equinox (the only two days of the year when the sun is directly overhead at the equator).

Now we’re getting somewhere, but there’s one more wrinkle in this definition.

You see, the Earth is just over 24,000 miles around and More...

When my kids were born, in 1999 and 2000, I decided to conduct some scientific experiments on them.

Oh, don’t worry, it wasn’t anything too gruesome; all their limbs and internal organs are still intact. I just wanted to put some personal child-rearing philosophies to the test and see if I could turn them into healthy and conscientious eaters without any odd phobias or irrational dislikes of certain foods.

Fundamentally, I believe that kids’ eating habits are mostly formed between the ages of two and five, and having a pro-active methodology to respond to the typical food related tantrums that every kid goes through would help get through those critical years and make them better eaters.

Primarily, my belief was that all kids naturally go through short cycles of not wanting to eat certain foods, not liking certain flavors or spices, and that many times (not always) this is due to external influences – not being hungry, tummy upsets, a particular mood, or just being enamored with something that tasted good last week and not wanting anything else. One of the key ideas is that these usually are “short” cycles of likes and dislikes, but having an inappropriate response can extend the cycles or even artificially create a lifelong dislike of one certain food.

What I wanted to avoid was the typical parental response of coming to the conclusion that “my kids don’t like ... xxx”, when “xxx” really isn’t the problem.

When parents come to the conclusion that “my kid doesn’t like xxx”, they usually stop giving their child that particular food and let everyone know at school and at play dates that their kid won’t eat it – or they make a big deal about it at home and try to forcefully cajole their kid to eat the food in question. Both responses perpetuates the cycle and just makes it worse. Furthermore, I truly believe that it gives positive reinforcement and the child realizes that they get extra attention when they don’t like something.

So I would never say “My kids don’t like xxx”.  In fact, in their entire lives, they have never heard me say that to anyone. Instead, I would say “My kids eat everything, but I didn’t cook the xxx right the last time. I’ll make it better next time.”

The next time I’d make the offending dish, I’d change it a little bit and do something different.  I’d ask More...

There is a pervasive and somewhat lopsided tendency in our society to separate fellow humans into the categories of being either “believers” or “non-believers”. The not-so-subtle implication is usually that there is something wrong with you if you are a “non-believer”.

Let’s play a little game; I’ll take the position that there really is something wrong with non-believers. But first, let’s swap the traditional idea of who is a believer and who is a non-believer.

For example, if I have a ball in my hand and I hold my arm straight out from my body and I drop the ball, I believe that the ball will always fall “down” – towards the ground. In our game, non-believers are the people who will say that god can make the ball go up, or sideways, or turn into a flying cheeseburger and flap its wings at the moon.

If we get all the non-believers on Earth to PRAY really hard, and ask god to make the ball go “up” when I let go of it, I still believe it will go down.

If you ask a believer why the ball will go down instead of up, the typical explanation you will get is that “gravity is a force that attracts two objects proportional to their mass”. In general, the answers that believers give you will have something to do with gravity, and the answers will be relatively consistent on average. Without some external physical force (a blast of air, or someone swatting it with a tennis racket for example), believers will say that the ball will drop “down” even if you conduct the experiment hundreds of billions of times, as long as the Earth and the ball have mass.

However, if you ask all the non-believers why praying to god doesn’t ever change the fact that the ball goes down when dropped, you will get a bunch of different, inconsistent, and largely contradictory answers.

One of the answers you might get is that ‘god doesn’t work that way’. I love that answer, I hear it all the time. I keep asking all the non-believers how god does work, and no one really seems to know. The fallback response, however, is this: “you have to have faith.”

Ok, I’ll accept that. I am a person of absolute unwavering faith, and I will gladly put the full conviction More...

Back in 1973, two mathematicians named Fischer Black and Myron Scholes wrote a paper entitled "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities".  This became known as the “Black-Scholes option pricing model”, which earned them a coveted Nobel Prize in economics in 1997 (technically, Myron Scholes shared the prize with Robert Merton, another collaborator, since Fischer Black had passed away by that time).

The Black-Scholes option model serves as the benchmark for setting the price of a common stock option. All you need to know is the stock price, the strike price of the option, the time left to expiration, the current interest rate, and this tricky little thing called the volatility of the stock.

Ahhh, the volatility. There’s the rub. The volatility of a stock is calculated using an iterative process called a “cumulative normalized distribution function”. Basically, it looks at the variations of a stock’s up and down movement over a certain time period and offers up a percentage of the average movement. The volatility is an absolute measurement, which is different from a stock’s “beta” – the beta is a ratio of that particular stocks’ volatility as compared to the rest of the market, which is actually much easier to measure.

In my definition of volatility, I said that it relies on the variation of a stock price over a certain period of time. But what period of time should you use? One week? A month? Three months? Six months? A year? Maybe two years? The time period that you use can make a huge difference in the value of the option, but there’s no general recommendation for what period to use.

All of the other factors (stock price, strike price, time to expiration, etc.) are quantifiable values that can be specifically defined. The volatility, however, requires a bit of artistic interpretation.  If the stock was highly volatile nine months ago, but is more stable now, then measuring the historic volatility over the last six months is probably a good choice. Or not. More...

For the past billion years or so, every animal on Planet Earth has been in danger of being eaten by some other animal at one time or another.

Humans aren’t immune from the risk, of course; just because we’re at the top of the food chain doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be a tasty treat to something else. A hiker was eaten by a bear in Yellowstone park just last week, and a few times a year we hear about sharks that feed on an unlucky swimmer.

So I get a little perturbed by folks who tell me I shouldn’t eat meat because it’s unethical, or because we’re “exploiting” animals for our personal gain. Frankly, if every animal on the planet stopped eating other animals, all species would die out. The “Circle of Life” would come to a complete halt.

Someone asked me if I’m a vegetarian and I said, “No, but I mostly eat vegetarian animals!”

Granted, in our modern society, homo sapiens (especially the ones living on the North American continent) should cut back on meat consumption. But from a health standpoint, completely eliminating meat from our diet is going too far in the other direction.  We are omnivores and always have been, and we require a balanced diet. Unfortunately, some people balance their diet about as well as they balance their checkbooks and they end up overweight AND broke!

Even though I’m certainly not a vegetarian, I do have many issues with our “factory farmed” meat production. Not just because it might be considered “cruel” to animals, but because we are getting increasingly isolated from our food supply.  In the past 100 years, we’ve become the very first humans in history where the majority of the population doesn’t know where our food comes from, or how it’s grown and processed. As long as the grocery store is fully stocked and the local restaurant can serve a hot dinner plate in a timely fashion, we’re happy.  We don’t want to think about where it comes from – and if we watch a video of a butcher at work, it’s considered “gross” for some reason. Why is that?  For thousands of years, More...