Month: August 2011

09:28 – According to this article, outstanding college student loans are on track to exceed $1 trillion this year. People are finally starting to question just how much benefit these students are getting in return for shackling themselves with huge amounts of debt.

The final paragraph of the article begins, “[b]eyond dispute is the value of a higher education diploma, notwithstanding the risks associated with borrowing heavily to obtain it”, which is a fine example of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. Correlation does not imply causation. Yes, it is beyond dispute that college graduates, on average, earn more than those without a college degree. But what is not beyond dispute is whether the college degree itself actually has anything to do with those higher lifetime earnings.

Consider this: about 27% of US adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, with another 27% having attended college or received an associates degree. So, roughly half the adult population of the US has at least some college. Few would dispute that, on average, those people are smarter and work harder than those in the other half. If colleges did not exist, one would expect that that smarter, harder-working cohort would be more successful and earn more than the dumber and lazier cohort.

The question becomes whether a smart, hard-working person is better off spending four years or more and tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend college, or hit the ground running and get a four-year head start without incurring a crushing debt burden. Intuitively, it seems obvious that if one has what it takes to become a professional, it makes sense to take that front-end hit in the interest of earning more down the road. But it’s by no means obvious that less stellar performers should make that decision. In short, if you have what it takes to become a physician or other professional, you’re well advised to spend the time and money to get a degree. If, on the other hand, you plan to major in history or literature or sociology, you’re wasting four years and a lot of money that you’ll never get back, particularly when you consider the time value of money.

Barbara and I spent some time yesterday getting my kit assembly work area cleared out and organized. Until now, component inventory storage has been haphazard, with cases of components stored wherever there happened to be a free space. When I was assembling a batch of, say, half a dozen kits, I’d have to go here and there to get the components for them as I was packing them, which made everything take a lot longer than it should.

We moved all the stuff that had been stored on the shelves behind my work area to shelves elsewhere in the basement, so now when I need, say, two dozen 250 mL beakers, I can simply turn around and pull two boxes of a dozen beakers off the shelf behind me. We also cleared a lot of workspace that had had components stacked on it. Rather than build batches of half a dozen, now that I have more workspace I can easily do batches of two dozen, which makes things a lot faster. It should now take me only half again as long to assemble two dozen kits as it was taking for each run of half a dozen. It also makes it a lot easier to keep visual track of inventory levels.

08:52 – Barbara and I drove out to the body shop this morning to pick up her car, only to find out that it wasn’t ready. Originally, it was supposed to be ready Wednesday afternoon. When I called Wednesday around lunchtime to check, the guy who was doing the work said they were having problems with their spray booth and he wasn’t sure it’d be ready that afternoon. He said it would be ready by Thursday at lunchtime. I told him that Barbara worked, and first thing Friday morning would be better for us. He said that’d be perfect, so we just headed out this morning to pick the car up. Apparently, the spray booth problem took longer to resolve than they expected. They promised the car would be ready in a couple hours, but Barbara had to go to work. So the body shop is going to send someone over to pick me up when the car is ready.

I’m still working on the prepared slide sets. The first set, Slide Set A, has 25 slots available, of which I currently have 19 allocated. The problem is, it’s an iterative process. I have to make sure I have at least one source for every particular slide, and ideally a second source as well. Then I have to correlate the slides I’m choosing with the text. If it turns out that I can’t reliably source a particular slide, I have to re-write the text to use a different slide that I can get. And that may in turn affect other slide choices.

It’s all a balancing act. I’d like Slide Set A to represent as broad as possible a selection across kingdoms and phyla, but at the same time be deep enough to be useful. The depth requirement mandates, for example, that I allocate three of the 25 slots to monocots and dicots: cross-sections of a representative monocot and dicot leaf, stem, and root. I’d like to include a representative monocot and dicot flower bud as well, but that’ll have to be in Slide Set B. Similarly, I’d like to include both a cross-section of a Grantia and Grantia spicules, but there isn’t room for both in Slide Set A, so the spicules slide will have be in Slide Set B or even C. Oh, and I’m trying very hard to keep the price of the 25 slide sets A and B to $50 each or less.

11:14 – I just got back home with Barbara’s car, which looks fine. That was the first time I’d driven it, and probably the first time I’ve driven a car-car in 15 years or more. I’ve been driving SUVs since I bought my Jeep CJ in 1979. Driving a car reminds me of riding a motorcycle. Both are low, nimble, and zippy compared to driving a heavy truck.

Speaking of which, the other day I was talking to my neighbor about motorcycles. He still rides. I haven’t ridden in 30 years, although my driver’s license still has a motorcycle endorsement on it. Yesterday while I was walking Colin, Steve was out working on his bike. He asked if I wanted to give it a try. I told him that was tempting, but I hadn’t been on a bike in 30 years and Barbara would kill me when she found out. Assuming I survived the ride. So I regretfully declined.

I do miss it, though. I had a superbike, a Honda 750F that I paid a guy a lot of money to performance tune. We did a timed run once. Zero to 60 MPH in 2.8 seconds with my weight on it, and I was still in first gear when I hit 60, cranking over 10,000 RPM. As someone commented at the time, that bike accelerated faster than a fighter jet on take-off. Of course, the fighter has a better top end. My bike topped out around 140 or 145, or maybe 150 downhill with a tailwind. But I was always reasonable on the Interstate, seldom exceeding 135.

Barbara and I were watching a Numb3rs episode the other night, and it showed one of the characters printing a letter rather than using cursive writing. That got me to wondering. Do schools still teach cursive handwriting nowadays? If so, why? I haven’t written anything other than my signature in cursive in at least 30 years. I print everything. I don’t even use upper and lower case. All the characters are uppercase, with those that would normally be lower case just smaller versions of the upper case letters. I can print at least as fast as I can write cursively, and the result is much more easily readable. I wonder if cursive is becoming a lost art. Do homeschoolers teach it? I understand that one of the arguments for teaching cursive is that it helps kids learn to control their hand and finger movements very precisely, so perhaps there’s still a place for it.

08:50 – I just followed Barbara out to the body shop, where we dropped off her car. The guy told her yesterday when she stopped by for an estimate that it was a “pound-out” job, and that he wouldn’t need any replacement parts. We’ll pick up her car tomorrow afternoon or Thursday morning. Meanwhile, Barbara is driving my Trooper, which used to be her Trooper. The insurance company offered a rental car, but it’s not worth the hassle for a two-day repair.

Work continues on the biology book. I’m also ordering stuff to prototype the biology lab kit.

09:09 – I see that S&P has just been downgraded to junk-rater status, leaving Moody’s and Fitch as the only real ratings agencies. As the federal government pointed out at the time, S&P made a $2 trillion dollar calculation error, without which the US rating would have remained AAA even under S&P’s modified rules. I think Warren Buffett spoke for most knowledgeable people when he said that rather than reduce the US credit rating from AAA to AA+, S&P should have increased it to AAAA. The simple truth, as evidenced by bond yields and CDS prices, is that the market considers US debt to be by far the safest in the world, far better than that of other countries that are rated AAA. If Moody’s and Fitch have any sense, they’ll create a new AAAA or even AAAAA rating and award it to the US and only the US.

12:09 – The much-anticipated conference between Merkel and Sarkozy started a few minutes ago. I’ll predict that they’ll do nothing but talk. That’s understandable, because there is no action they could take that would save the Euro. They’re powerless, so they might as well have a nice chat. I very much doubt they’ll do anything other than agree to support the decisions made at the 21 July summit, which of course is and was a joke. Sarkozy will be pushing for boosting the ESFS, which Merkel and the Germans will refuse to pay for. Sarkozy will also be pushing for Eurobonds, which again Merkel and the Germans will refuse to pay for. Ultimately, the problem is that almost all of Europe is bankrupt, with huge debts that they have no hope of ever repaying and economies that are so unproductive that most of them aren’t even keeping up with population growth. What should happen is that Germany, Holland, Austria, and Finland abandon the Euro and let those profligate countries that remain on the Euro go bankrupt. I’d like to see that announced after the conference, but the chance of that happening is nearly zero.