a book recommendation

While on vacation, I read (among other things) City of Thieves by David Benioff. Set in Russia during the siege of Leningrad, the story follows two young men who are arrested by the Soviet police but given a chance to earn their freedom if they can track down a dozen eggs for the Colonel's daughter's wedding cake and deliver them before the week is up. It was an excellent read, though I would have ended it slightly differently. (If any of you have read it already or read it in the future let me know because I like discussing books but don't like spoiling them for people.)

It even has something special towards the end for Alex and Matt, but I won't tell you what it is because I think you two especially would like this book. :P

To sum up: short, well-written, and with war and soviets to boot - two of this group's favorite things! 

Fun with cameras

Recently, I have been getting into photography. Partially due to my job and the resources available here, but also due to all of the interesting things to photograph out in this part of California.

My manager, Theseus, and I have recently become very interested in a type of photography called tilt-shift photography, where the plane of the image that is in focus is rotated around 2 axes to artificially shallow the depth of field. If you didn't understand that, no matter: the main reason to do something like this is to make a faux macro image. For example. Of course, one of these tilt shift lenses costs upwards of 1000USD, a not-insignificant sum.

Needless to say, with a dearth of work and nearly infinite camera resources, we decided to try and make our own tilt-shift lens for far cheaper.

Combine 1 part high-end SLR, 1 part custom-made lens of unspeakable value, 2 parts espresso, and about 30 parts duct tape, and we managed to make an unabashedly haphazard yet effective tilt shift lens. Of course, all sorts of regulations relating to NDA's and good taste prevent me from showing a picture of the final delightfully horrific Frankensteinian creation. But fortunately, I can show you the intial promising results.

Inflation: An Offer You Can't Refuse

I saw The Godfather the other day, for the first time ever – justly considered a classic movie, though The Departed will always have a special place in my heart among gangster movies. I had seen bits and pieces before, though, including the famous scene where Jack Woltz gets a dose of Mafia persuasion when he wakes up to find the severed head of his prize racehorse Khartoum in his bed. (That’s a real horse’s head, by the way. PETA was indignant but apparently didn’t carry enough weight in Hollywood in 1972.)

What caught my ear this time around was Woltz’s proud comment to Don Corleone’s consigliere Tom Hagan, introducing Khartoum on a tour of his estate: “Six hundred thousand dollars on four hooves!” That got me thinking: how much would that be today once you corrected for inflation? It’s often tough to think about monetary amounts in old movies like that because they’re difficult to quantify in today’s money. (Although it’s easy to compare Woltz’s $600,000 in relative terms, for example to the millions the Corleones talk about later… or, more pointedly, to the missing $8,000 that nearly ruins George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, also set in 1945.)

So, like any good economics concentrator, I found some CPI tables and rigged up a chart that shows some inflation “multipliers” - rules of thumb to convert old prices into today’s dollars:

• $1 in 1985 would equal $2 in 2009
• $1 in 1979 would equal $3 in 2009
• $1 in 1975 would equal $4 in 2009
• $1 in 1969 would equal $6 in 2009
• $1 in 1955 would equal $8 in 2009
• $1 in 1945 would equal $12 in 2009
• $1 in 1934 would equal $16 in 2009
  

So Khartoum would be worth about $7.2 million in 2009 dollars – pretty good money for a racehorse. At least until Luca Brasi got ahold of him.

Engineering Fail

In 1628, Sweden and Poland were at war. They were fighting because King Gustav Adolf of Sweden and King Sigismund of Poland were cousins. Sigismund had been king of Sweden, but he was catholic and Sweden became Protestant so they kicked him out because he wouldn't convert. But he wanted to be king of Sweden and king of Poland because Sweden is pretty. So he and cousin Gustav went to war.

Sigi was doing a little too well in this war so Gus decided Sweden was going to build the biggest boat it had ever made to help win the war. The swedes spent almost two years (I think. This was a couple days ago.) building their huge ship. Finally it was ready. They loaded it up with the sailors and the cannons and the sailors' families for the celebratory maiden voyage. The ship, called the Vasa, sailed out into the port of Stockholm.

Then a breeze came.

Then the ship sank.

The Vasa was top heavy. It had too many cannons and decorations and not enough ballast. It was too tall and too skinny. Engineering fail.



Apparently Stockholm water is weirdly preservative, though, because after sitting on the ocean floor for three hundred years, they pulled the wooden ship out of the water and rebuilt it inside a museum. It's pretty cool. Check it out if you go to Stockholm.

I am in Helsinki now waiting for my traveling companions to get themselves packed up so that we can head out for the day. They should hurry up.

An engineering marvel

Over the weekend, we were out in Santa Cruz doing all of the things one does in such a place [beach, heavy drinking, pu-erh, and so on]. During one of the many meals that weekend, I had to retrieve something from Rebecca's dilapidated 1997 Honda Civic. Strangely, the driver's side door refused to lock from the inside, requiring locking it using the key from the outside. This is not strange as a phenomena of broken door locks per se, but strange as an isolated incident because the 1988 Honda CRX EV we have at work exhibits the same problem. I asked Rebecca how to lock it, and she told me to hold up the door handle and lock it from the inside.

This morning, I tried that solution on our own CRX and it worked, to my complete amazement.

I find it astounding that these two cars, with 10 years of engineering development and design separating them, manage to manifest the same problem and also the same exact work-around to that problem.

1993 All Over Again

My dad and I went to a Phillies game Wednesday night, for the first time in a few years: we hadn't been in the new stadium before. Citizens Bank Park is really nice, with more personality than the old cookie-cutter Veterans Stadium (although it's tough to top Fenway on personality) and a great view of the Philadelphia skyline from behind home plate. Unfortunately the game itself could have been better: it rained off and on, and the Toronto Blue Jays trounced us, 7-1, on their way to a three-game sweep. It felt like 1993 all over again.
In other Canadian sports news, Blackberry billionaire Jim Balsillie's plan to take over hockey's bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes and move them to Hamilton, Ontario, has stalled for the moment. (No word on whether the scheme's backers also include Sameer.)

Cass Sunstein, Extremism, and Judicial Panels

My ex-thesis advisor Cass Sunstein (ex because he got hired away by Obama in January) has a new book out – Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide – and there’s a pretty good review in Slate. I haven’t read the book, but it looks like the gist of it is similar to a paper he published this winter with Ed Glaeser: when groups of like-minded people discuss an issue together, they tend to come to a more extreme conclusion than they would have reached individually. Glaeser and Sunstein call this “Credulous Bayesianism,” reasoning that people in such groups draw support from their peers’ views, but don’t account for the fact that their peers may all be biased in the same direction.
I was interested to see that Sunstein seems to be extending his reasoning to heterogenous groups too: “If you bring the two clashing sides together, they don't find middle ground any more than like-minded people do,” Christoper Caldwell writes in the review. “Each side digs in.” That would seem to go against the grain of Sunstein’s work on three-judge federal appeals panels, which I wrote my thesis on. The very fact that Democratic or Republican appointees “cast more ‘extreme’ votes when they are in the majority than when they are not” means that judges who hold a minority view on a heterogenous panel are more likely to join the majority opinion anyway than to write a dissent. That doesn’t mean they actually change their minds, but it does mean that they go along with the majority rather than “digging in.”
Judicial panels aren’t an archetypal “deliberative group,” of course: the norm of judicial collegiality discourages dissents (as does the sheer number of cases appellate judges decide). Furthermore, dissenting judges can usually support their position with prior precedents, so the skewed dynamic of Credulous Bayesianism can’t really operate. The book seems to tie together a bunch of different studies beyond judicial panels (by Sunstein and others), and I’ll be interested to see how he connects the dots to make his overall points.

Khameini and Moussavi Go Way Back

Interesting tidbit in an NYT piece about Ayatollah Khamenei. It turns out the two were political opponents when Moussavi was Prime Minister and Khamenei was President in 1981. This is one of the first pieces of information that helps to explain why Khamenei has been willing to climb so far out on a limb for Ahmedinejad. The smart play seemed to be to let Moussavi win and allow Ahmedinejad absorb popular anger over his misrule. But this suggests that Khamenei might see Moussavi as a personal rival.

In the same article, it also turns out that Moussavi is challenging Khamenei's religious authority within the Shiite establishment. That move can only raise the stakes of the confrontation.

Kicked Out

I left Facebook's Harvard network for about twenty seconds last night, and when I got back on half of my groups had vanished.
It was a little bit frustrating, but there wasn't really any way around it. When you take your FAS email off your profile, your network membership goes with it - and as far as I can tell you can't be a member of the Harvard network twice at one time. I rejoined the Harvard network as a "grad student" right away, but it was too late. I'd already been kicked out of those exclusive Harvad-network groups like "FOP 41 - FOP Hardcore!" and "Canaday '09... You Know You Want It." Tragic.

The Conspiracy Begins...

Welcome to The Wolbach Conspiracy - a group blog where the Usual Suspects can trade anecdotes, travel stories, musings on current events, and other aspects of their journeys out into the post-graduation world. The title is an homage to Pfoho's Wolbach Hall, and to the name of the Volokh Conspiracy law blog (though only if you mispronounce it, as it depressingly turns out).
Glad to have you aboard!