Why We Can't Fix Rush Hour

I live in Mountain View, as I have done since before Google was founded. Even in the 1980s it was not much fun to drive on the Bay Area's freeways during rush hour; today, the delays are almost legendary.  A few naive youngsters still have the courage to ask why local (or state, or federal) governments don't Do Something About It. Well, they've opened a new stretch of freeway (I can remember when most of SR 85 wasn't there) and widened an old one, but commuting still sucks. All right, let's look at the causes of the trouble.

Rush hour occurs because many people start and end work at roughly the same time, but what makes it so horrible is that they live far away from where they work, and spend a long time getting there. Thus the people who leave home at 7:30 are still on the road when the people who leave at 8:00 start driving, and the road gets crowded, which makes it even slower. Come 8:15, the 7:30 people still haven't reached work, and more cars are pouring onto the roads. We have a positive feedback loop here. Now, a positive feedback loop can work both ways. Many years ago, I used to work within a mile of where I lived. I would walk (yes, walk) the whole way in ten minutes, and arrive in a pretty good mood. Imagine if most people could get to work in ten minutes! The people who used to leave home at 7:30 "to beat rush hour" could wait until 7:45, and would still be able to vacate the road in time for the 8:00 people to have full use of it. If commutes were short, we could get a lot more people to work, over the same amount of road.

Trouble is, most people don't want to live that close to work because they can get a bigger place five miles further away. Or a yet bigger place ten miles away. Or an even bigger place twenty miles away, with a real back yard. Mind you, this means that after eight hours at work, eight hours for sleep and personal hygiene, two hours commuting, and some yard work besides, they don't actually have much time to enjoy the bigger place (and are too tired and grumpy to do so after driving home), but hey, it's the American Dream, it's going to  make them rich, and they get a tax break on the mortgage. So when we build more roads and widen a few existing ones, people decide they can now live thirty miles away in a really spacious place, which they have even less time to enjoy (and more yard work to do).

What we have here is a negative feedback loop. We can build roads, or paint carpool lanes, or do anything that makes for shorter commutes, and after a year or two there will be an increase in land values in the places that used to be out of reach for commuting to the Googleplex. Some people will have decided that they can now afford that spacious house, and have not really reckoned with the cost of the extra commute in money, time, and temper.

What else is there to do? I don't imagine that more meetings will help much. Driverless cars may well increase the effective capacity of freeways, but such an increase will quickly fall victim to the negative feedback loop, pushing property values up until commutes are, once again, just barely bearable. The same applies to mass transit: a bus or a train is, from the commuter's point of view, a very large self-driving car. Ask people to take jobs closer to where they live? Good luck with that! Having the best possible job is important. (I must admit to commuting twenty miles. I do value my job.) Telepresence? It works for some jobs, some of the time; not enough, not yet.

One fix that is gaining some traction is denser housing, which I can see being built in many places. Simple geometry permits people to live closer to work (or to mass transit) if they live closer to each other, and perhaps they'll even get rich out of it. In fact, if rush hour gets worse, it would be hard not to get rich out of owning a place that allows of a short commute.

I still live in the house we bought twenty years ago, but I haven't traded up to a place with a spacious back yard. My kids don't need a back yard to play in: they have YouTube. Telepresence, you might call it.

[This is adapted from something I wrote on Quora a year or two ago.]

Is the USA short of SWEs?

Reposted from Quora, to be sure.  Lightly edited.

Is there actually a STEM shortage that requires foreign workers? If so why are Americans lacking in these fields?

• EDIT: please also read Kathryn Berck's answer to Why does the US have an H1-B Visa program when we have great universities and a well educated population? to find that some of the statements I make below are misleading.
• This is kind of an addendum to Ernest W. Adams' excellent answer to Is there actually a STEM shortage that requires foreign workers? If so why are Americans lacking in these fields?
• Consumer warning: I am in the middle of reading Why Nations Fail so I reflect some of its thesis.

TL;DR: the industry that employs these damn’ foreigners also provides some of the fastest progress and best value in the USA.

Many excellent Americans, including a girlfriend of mine, a crush of mine, and others I’ve known, have gone into the legal and medical professions even though they mostly had the brains to go into STEM. Why? Those two professions have high barriers to entry, reinforced in the USA by government-mandated licencing that gives foreign credentials much less weight than domestic. This boosts the incomes of Americans in those professions artificially, for which they express their gratitude to their lawmakers every election season in the customary manner $$$.

The only STEM field I know well, software, has no such barriers or licences that matter, and will accept anyone who can demonstrate the needed ability. I’ve worked alongside engineers from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lebanon, Mexico, … Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, but nobody from Western Sahara, Yemen, nor Zimbabwe. (I myself am from England.) Do I need to spell it out? Oh: I just did.

I expect even the Canadian would have found it tough to qualify as an attorney in most states of the US. Almost for sure, the others would have found it very tough. So my ex-girlfriend and others command famine prices for their talent, and the famine is caused, just like real famines where people starve to death, by government policy. Does anyone care to suggest that the USA spends too little on medical care and lawsuits?

Now, if you think Google or Amazon or Apple or Facebook are charging famine prices for the software they provide, or that American software is less good than what other countries build, please shout it from the rooftops. The only criticism I hear (living in Silicon Valley) is that these giants pay their engineers too much and thereby drive house prices up, causing gentrification etc. Certainly house prices have climbed. Don’t tell me that people who buy a three bedroom house for a million bucks are underpaid.  But these foreigners are paying such prices, out of their income from work.


Footnote: if you want to shout from the rooftops about privacy on the Web, you have every right to do so, but the aforementioned companies would not offer you any better privacy if they were forced to hire fewer engineers at higher pay.

as I bite my nails tonight

... I am reminded of some frogs

battleships: a widespread misconception

Does this look as if I'm reposting another answer that I wrote for quora.com? It should. Enjoy.

Why has the concept of battleships/pocket battleships been wiped out of modern military warfare?

The vulnerability of unescorted battleships to air attack is not the reason. A battleship could be part of a carrier group, protected by the carrier's air umbrella, and be at no more risk than the carrier itself, besides being a smaller target. (Test run of this argument: the advent of torpedoes did not make battleships obsolete, but did mean that they needed a screen of destroyers.)

The true reason is that big guns are no longer the longest-range weapons afloat, nor do they deliver the heaviest warheads. Since the 1940s, naval battles are fought at ranges of hundreds of km using aircraft and guided missiles, or if at close range, stealthily using torpedoes and depth charges. I hope I don't need to elaborate on why it's hard to fire a 16-inch shell stealthily from underwater. More importantly, the long ranges of aircraft and missiles have made 16-inch shells as irrelevant as pikes and cutlasses became during the 19th century. If an opposing ship is close enough to you that you can use these weapons, the fight is already over. As for thick armour, conventional bombs can be built far bigger and deadlier than a 16-inch shell, so a ship that could "just sit there and take it" would have to be about as big as a shopping mall or football stadium, and would not be much more manoeuvrable. The best defence (for a warship) really is attack, or sometimes escape.

The theism question

I posted this some weeks ago on Quora, but thought a wider audience might care to see it. I've edited some material that isn't very relevant, and fooled with the punctuation.

I did not and do not think that theism is necessarily irrational. It follows rationally enough, from premises that I regard as made-up.

<digression>

Please bear with me. I owe this observation to a perceptive former student of my father's.

The private schools in England, where I was educated, had spent the 19th century, and probably the 18th, churning out empire-builders: teaching boys to be the military officers and civilian administrators who would turn "Wider still and wider // Shall thy bounds be set" from poem into reality. After 1947, such people were no longer required, but high technology certainly was, as was culture, so the schools set themselves a new task: to churn out creative and innovative individuals. Eccentricity had long been tolerated, but now it was to be encouraged. Traditions and ancient assumptions were still important, but they could be questioned. And the questions deserved thoughtful answers.

</digression>

As a young boy, I knew I had to look both ways before crossing the street, and I knew why. I knew that it was customary, when eating, to hold the knife in the right hand, because that was the dominant hand, but since I was left-handed, I often held it in my left hand. I knew that the school began each day with a hymn and a prayer, then a few announcements by the head teacher. I didn't need to ask why the announcements were made. And I never got a serious answer about why the hymn was sung and the prayer whispered. Tradition, to be sure, and pretty-sounding tunes, but that was all. I tried to sing in tune.

When I got older and could ask better questions, there was the same shortage of answers ... of thoughtful answers. God the creator? Sorry, we more or less understand how the Earth formed from a disc of gas and dust. God the lawgiver? The school makes the rules for us boys, and Parliament makes them for grown-ups. Redeemer? My parents love me; I'm not a Sinner with a capital S, just occasionally naughty. Celestial cop? not when the other boys are getting away with X, Y, and Z every day. And so on.

I don't ask anyone to believe that my thinking on this subject was watertight, or that it is so today. But a massive weight of evidence pointed, in my mind, to theism being an excuse to sing pretty songs and occasionally threaten people with divine vengeance for doing things that, for the most part, weren't especially evil. Oh, and give comfort to the insecure by telling them that, yes, in the end the good guys will win. But my limited knowledge of history already had shown that the only way to make the good guys always win was to use a flexible definition of "good". When I was a boy, we were deep in the Cold War, whose least unlikely outcome seemed to be that a modus vivendi would solidify over generations whereby the USSR didn't actually threaten us, nor we them. There did not seem to be much that gods could do to help. Certainly they had not yet done so. (I hadn't read or heard of Judges 1:19.)

Summary: theism as a hypothesis could account for only a few things, which already had more detailed secular explanations.

There also seem[ed] to be real advantages accruing to people who "had no need of that hypothesis". If you used physics instead of Genesis 1, you not only knew why the Earth and Sun were here, but you could build aircraft. If Parliament made the laws, it could change them in response to new developments (when I was born, England had only the feeblest of laws against drunken driving, and none against advertising tobacco products. Just to be clear, on principle I believe that if a product can legally be sold, it should also legally be advertised, but that's a separate argument.) As for the good guys winning, we beat Hitler with a little help from the USA, we beat Napoleon with a little help from Russia, and the USSR could be contained if not beaten. Except in Vietnam. Yes, I supported that war, like the parents in The Free Electric Band Lyrics .  Being an atheist did not make me all-wise, nor does it now.

One more thing. My schools emphasised Latin and Greek, and those subjects brought classical mythology in their wake, which was fun. I was perhaps better acquainted with the Twelve Olympians than with the Three in One And One In Three. It did not escape my attention that the gods of Homer, with their all-too-human frailties, were now deemed worthy of a place on the fiction shelves. Clearly it had been possible for intelligent, cultured, civilised, technological people to sincerely worship deities that existed only in their imaginations. Equally clearly, people were much the same two or three millennia later as they had been in those times. QED.

Welcome your friends to the end

My grandfather was born in 1900 and got married in 1918. The great flu epidemic of that year meant that the woman he married then did not become my grandmother. He was heartbroken, but fortunately for me, he recovered and married again.

Grandpa lived to be 90 and he enjoyed his life; he did a lot of things, from painting and photographing to building experimental radios.  I saw him not long before the end.  His heart was slowing down to the point where it would no longer be able to keep him going, and he wasn’t complaining about that; he just wanted the end to come at a convenient time and place.

His doctors told him what medicines they had and what the effects would be. I know they increased his dosage once.  Then he made it clear to them that this patient didn’t want more medicine; he just wanted his friend at his side.  And that was what happened. We all missed him but we didn’t mourn him: there was nothing to be sad about.

A few years ago the father of a friend of mine was terminally ill. He asked his extended family to come and see him, and when they were all there, my friend tells me that the patient said, “If I weren’t in so much pain, this would be a blast.” It was cancer and the pain got worse and the doctors were not easily convinced that this patient did want more painkillers. So the last two weeks were rough, but the end itself was something of a relief.

What I want to reflect on here is why our culture has such a horror of death.  We used to apply it as the supreme penalty for the worst crimes, but many countries don’t even do that any more; it’s too scary. In a nutshell, the reason seems to me to be that until the 20th century, most deaths were like my grandfather’s first wife: untimely and no chance to prepare.  Many of the rest were like my friend’s father: not surprising, but painful. I’m optimistic that there will be more like my grandfather, but let’s face it, medicine will never be perfect.

Can we bring our mindset about death closer to the modern reality? One thing we could do is regard it not as a loss of life  (my grandfather didn’t lose anything), but rather as the conclusion of our life, the last page in the book, and accept that every novel should have a last page. What if we treated death as a milestone of life, in the same category as a graduation or a wedding?  Don’t just invite one friend, or the extended family, but throw a big old party -- remind the guests not to bring presents -- and say goodbye to everyone who cares about us. Then, well, there probably wouldn’t be a honeymoon as such; we might just go into seclusion, with the phrase “funeral home”  acquiring a new meaning. Or some people might choose to simply close the book that very day, but it could be a purely medical decision rather than an ethical question, because socially speaking, we’d already be gone.

Space elevator for surface transport

Two weeks ago I was at Space Access '13 and ran into Michael Laine, since when I've been thinking about novel uses for a Lunar Space Elevator.  I've come up with one for which a few minutes of searching could turn up no prior art, so I'm publishing it here lest some troll try to patent it.  I'm still trying to think of a snappy name for it, and you can help.

How it works

The easiest way to describe it is as a tetherball with the main elevator cable in place of the central post and a vehicle in place of the ball.  For the tether we'd use some more of the material we used for the main cable, and we'd need some kind of swivel at the place where the tether and post met.  The tether would be longer than for a playground tetherball, long enough to reach ground level with a bit to spare; the vehicle would contain a winch that could reel in enough tether so it (the vehicle) would hang at or slightly above ground level.  By some means of propulsion that might range from a push with a stick to a high-velocity rocket thruster, the vehicle would start itself moving away from the main cable, and would reel the tether in to lift itself up to clear any obstacles, then out again to descend to ground level and land at some distance from the main cable, if a landing were desired.  If the mission were to survey the surface near the main cable without landing, then when the vehicle had almost come to a stop, thrust would be applied at right angles to the direction of travel to send it on a circular or elliptical path around the main cable.  An elliptical path will precess, so that the vehicle could survey the interior of a circle centred at the main cable, rather than just the circumference of such a circle.

Ready for some snappy names?  The ones I've thought of aren't very snappy: lunar pendulum, Tarzanator, non-o-rail.  Suggestions welcome!

Energy and time

The equation for a pendulum with a rigid, massless rod under 0.16 of an Earth gravity gives, for a length of 10km, a period of oscillation about 490 seconds, so we could travel from the main cable to the end of the swing in 123 seconds, just over two minutes (journey time would be independent of distance traveled, up to a point -- if you don't believe me, ask Galileo).  I think the speed at the bottom of the swing is pi/2 times the average speed, so to travel 1km would require a starting speed of nearly 13 m/s; a ballistic launch at the same speed 45 degrees above the horizontal would give a parabolic flight that would last some 11 seconds and travel some 100 metres, so the pendulum travels further for the same amount of energy, and can have a softer landing with no extra fuel, but it is still subject to a square law: for a given length of tether,  twice the distance means four times the energy.  If we want to travel further without using more energy, we have to go slower. Making the tether 1,000km long gives a journey time of  roughly 1,225 seconds, so for the same starting speed we could travel 10 km, or for ten times the speed (a hundred times the energy) we could travel 100km.

I should not have used that equation, because the tether is neither rigid nor massless, though if it is made of a fibre such as Kevlar and is no thicker than it needs to be, well, OK, let's give a safety factor of 2, then a 1,000km tether will have about as much mass as the vehicle (including its payload).  But giving a sudden push to a heavy weight at the bottom of the tether would lead to a lot of energy being wasted in lateral oscillations of the tether: Twang!  Plausibly we could fix this by accelerating the vehicle over a time comparable to the time it takes the lateral wave to reach the top of the tether.   I estimate the speed of a lateral wave along the tether at 1km/s, so a cautious acceleration time for a 10km tether would be about 10s, which is small compared to the journey time; for a 1,000km tether I get 1,000s, and for longer tethers the acceleration time would exceed the journey time, so it seems that long tethers don't offer much advantage.

The tether would tug on the swivel and cause lateral oscillations in the main cable.  These are already a problem for space elevator designs, and I don't propose a solution here; I hope somebody develops one.

Economics

The pendulum could be constructed together with the main elevator cable and would need little additional technology development, so the cost should be modest.  For a young Lunar settlement it could provide occasional point-to-point transport and obviate the need to design and construct some ground vehicles and roads, which would require more tech.  As the settlement grew, a road, rail, or tunnel system would be added to provide more capacity than a pendulum.

Further applications

On Mars, where there is enough wind to provide thrust, a vehicle with a sail could travel modest distances with no input power; how it could achieve a trip upwind is left as a exercise for the reader. There are obvious applications to deploying instruments in the upper atmosphere of Mars, at altitudes below the reach of satellites but above that of balloons.

If a terrestrial space elevator were constructed, a pendulum carrying a current would be magnetically pulled eastwards or westwards from the main cable, and could mount a defence against space debris.

The ability to suspend a moving mass from a space elevator implies that launching from the elevator into a circular orbit may become possible, for a wide range of heights and inclinations, using a low-thrust engine.  A vehicle circling about the elevator cable would impose a hefty oscillating lateral load at the swivel; this could be overcome by adding a counterweight, but there may be other problems.