Politics, Economics and other Stuff

Test

Yet another test. Will the orientation be correct?

'Is this it for the Euro?'

DeLong reposts:

Ten Days to Save the Eurozone?

Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Or so Wolfgang Münchau says:

The eurozone really has only days to avoid collapse: In virtually all the debates about the eurozone I have been engaged in, someone usually makes the point that it is only when things get bad enough, the politicians finally act – eurobond, debt monetisation, quantitative easing, whatever. I am not so sure. The argument ignores the problem of acute collective action. Last week, the crisis reached a new qualitative stage. With the spectacular flop of the German bond auction and the alarming rise in short-term rates in Spain and Italy, the government bond market across the eurozone has ceased to function.


The banking sector, too, is broken. Important parts of the eurozone economy are cut off from credit. The eurozone is now subject to a run by global investors, and a quiet bank run among its citizens. This massive erosion of trust has also destroyed the main plank of the rescue strategy. The European Financial Stability Facility derives its firepower from the guarantees of its shareholders. As the crisis has spread to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Austria, the EFSF itself is affected by the contagious spread of the disease. Unless something very drastic happens, the eurozone could break up very soon.


Technically, one can solve the problem even now, but the options are becoming more limited. The eurozone needs to take three decisions very shortly, with very little potential for the usual fudges. First, the European Central Bank must agree a backstop of some kind…. The second measure is a firm timetable for a eurozone bond…. The third decision is a fiscal union. This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy….


I am hearing that there are exploratory talks about a compromise package comprising those three elements. If the European summit could reach a deal on December 9, its next scheduled meeting, the eurozone will survive. If not, it risks a violent collapse. Even then, there is still a risk of a long recession, possibly a depression….

I cannot quite see how the German chancellor is going to extricate herself from these self-inflicted constraints….

I have yet to be convinced that the European Council is capable of reaching such a substantive agreement given its past record. Of course, it will agree on something and sell it as a comprehensive package. It always does. But the halt-life of these fake packages has been getting shorter. After the last summit, the financial markets’ enthusiasm over the ludicrous idea of a leveraged EFSF evaporated after less than 48 hours.
Italy’s disastrous bond auction on Friday tells us time is running out. The eurozone has 10 days at most.

Sent with Reeder

Sent from my iPhone

Update #1: this was basically a test of reposting a blog post from my iPhone...clearly not (yet) optimal.  Probably not in general feasible, especially since I don't yet know how to include links.  Formatting isn't up to snuff either. 

What is this? Or rather, why? Eating at Red Robin in PA

Local food rejected due to kid 2 food allergies.

Update #1: hm, how do I orient photos correctly if I post from my iPhone? 

Update #2: still not clear how to rotate photos on the iphone...photo here rotated from my home PC.

Update #3: back to the point of this post...how common is emergency oxygen in public spaces?  Chain restaurants?  This doesn't seem to be a PA mandate, from the lack of a successful google search for one. 

From the Road -- Bethlehem Pa

iPhone update

After four days of using the new iPhone:

• battery life isn't all that horrible.  I didn't extinguish the battery after a 12 hour drive from Northern Virginia to Cambridge MA without a car charger.  The iPhone indicated 4+ hours of use during this drive. 
• we now have a (unduly expensive) car charger.  It seems to work well.  I'd not realized that there are 0.5 amp and 2.1 amp chargers.  This is a 2.1 amp car charger, as appears to be the wall charger that came with the iPhone.   The standard USB charge cable that plugs into a computer, on the other hand, is a 0.5 amp charger set-up.  The 2.1 amp chargers are much faster than the 0.5 amp chargers, appox. ~4 times faster.  So instead of taking hours to recharge, a 2.1 amp charger will charge the phone in under an hour, maybe a half hour if the phone is only partially discharged, after say a normal walk around town.  I'm going to be ordering a 2.1 amp car charger and wall charger as well, so I'll have chargers at home, at work and in the car. 
• I may want a extra back-up battery pack, but I'll need to research that more.  One issue is deciding on the right size, which will require figuring out what the exact trade-offs and objectives are for external battery packs.  Having two days of iPhone use (not just stand-by) during power failures or during hiking would be potentially very comforting.
• data use is not problematic so far, even with no wi-fi at my mother-in-laws (long story, the DSL here is also horribly slow, slower than the iphone 3G connection, which may make it impossible for me to get work done tomorrow from here).  So far 290 MB of data used in 4 days, which isn't that bad given that the phone is getting more non-wifi use that it will get on average in the future.  We have 2 GB/month data plans, with $10 per 1 GB if you go over. 
• Reeder is a fantastic blog reader.  It works very well and is fully integrated with Google's reader. Formatting and speed are as good as I can imagine for an iPhone application.  Opening links with instapaper mobilizer works well with good formatting.  In general, I need to look into instapaper and readability apps. 
• The NYT app needed a reset since it was not updating correctly.  Now it works. But the formatting (and the ads) are less good than Reeder.    
• My kids do not pronounce clearly enough to have more than a 50% hit rate with Siri or voice dictation.  I'm doing pretty well and I assume I'll do better as I learn more.  How do you do punctuation via voice dictation?  [See here.]
• After two years of not having access to gmail at work, my personal email stream has dried up quite a bit.  I need to re-establish contact with my wider circle of acquaintances.  Going through my google contact list to clean it up and update it should get me back in touch with at least a few people.  
• Luckily you can post photos from the iPhone to typepad without revealing identifying metadata.  Now I just need to figure out how to post photos from the iPhone in portrait mode orientation.  I agree with Lloyd Chambers that iPhone photo quality is pretty bad...this is not a camera that's going to compete with even a non-premium point and shoot. 
• The automatic geotagging of iPhone photos, on the other hand, is pretty cool.  I look forward to getting GPS capability on my next DSLR.   
• I need to find some good RSS feeds for news, since reading news on Reeder is much better than using newspaper webpages or apps.  But many newsfeeds are only partial RSS feeds which try to force you to click through, defeating the whole purpose of RSS feeds on Reeder. 
• My wife still needs to get comfortable with her iPhone. 
• How do I (affordably) text people in Europe? How do I text them without making them incur charges? 

Harvard Square again

Test post.

Test post from Harvard coop

Test 2

Test

Back down to 151 lbs

Not that Thanksgiving won't put me up to 155 lbs again...I was up to a tad under 155 lbs after our weekend in W Virginia.  Finding good food while underways is hard in the US, the drive to WV and back makes me appreciate Panera much more. 

iPhone Update

The iPhones seems to work...sound quality as phones could be better, but we may just need to learn how to hold them better.  Otherwise things seem fine.  I need to clean up my google contacts. 

An 'update' by the IT people at work may have broken my main workhorse machine over the weekend, so I'm annoyed I'll need to get things back to working order over the next week or so. 

Update #1 (Nov. 22): The issues so far are:

1. There def. are battery life issues if you swtich on all the services and push notifications.  I've not yet tried turning off any services or notifications.  My approach will simply be to have a USB charger for home and the office, as well as a car charger.  I may get an additional battery pack, but I'm not there yet.  I expect future software upgrades to help as well, but they'll not solve the limited battery life time constraint. 
2. The Verizon 3G network speeds at my office are not great, ~ 0.2 Mbs downloads, compared to 20 Mbs wi-fi at home...this may keep me out of trouble, in terms of using too much data.  I can see the appeal of 4G LTE.  iPhone 5 next year, with this phone getting passed down to a kid?  Probably not.
3. I need to figure out how to make the different sources for contacts, if that's what going on, play well with each other. 
4. The 'find friends' app works fine as wife tracker, though it may take a couple of minutes to update.  It also pings my wife as it does this. [Or maybe not...those may be other update notification sounds.]
5. The iphone 4S camera is not terribly impressive, in dimmer light.  I've not yet tested full daylight.  And I'm not talking dim light, just dimmer light (dark overcast daylight skies).  GPS photo tagging, on the other hand, looks fun/useful.  Not that any newer camera won't have GPS tagging, at least as an add-on.  
6. The work wi-fis seem to lock out iPhones. Not that this is unanticpated. 

24/7 email/google access is conforting, albeit not all too fast.   

Back from Kid's Cross-Country Running in W Virginia

More later.

Juvenile Black Ratsnake

Found by kid #2 while hiking at New River Gorge.  Kid #2 does not like snakes. (Identification based on pages like this.)

iPhones show up on Monday

Hm, maybe the order backlog of the iPhone 4S isn't that large and demand isn't that high...

I got a prepaid cell phone to run with since an iPhone is too big and bulky

The phone should also useful as a backup phone for other purposes.  $10 for 90 days from T-Mobile, which seems to be the best deal around for a phone you're not planning to use, 30 min in paid time.  Nobody out there seems to provide minutes that don't expire and you need to pay more per day if you don't want the minutes to expire less quickly. 

I'm planning on using my current phone, which I run with now already. 

You'd think there would be better deals out there for emergency phone service, if you provide the phone.   You'd think this would be mandated...having everybody with access to a cell phone for a $10 a year for 30 min of talk time would make sense as mandate. 

On the other hand, in urban areas you can mostly beg a phone of others in emergencies.  But that requires that other people are around. 

Injury Update

I would rate my left knee tendinitis as bad last Th, really hurting F, Sat and Sun, 'sensitive' on M and just noticeable yesterday and basically not there today.  I did, for some weird reason, get some knee tendon sensitivity around my righ knee yesterday, a bit above the knee in the center.  Not clear what that was about...

I would in the past have gone back to running today or tomorrow.  But I'm going to stick with the slow injury recovery plan and not run again until next week (where there may be not that much running, due to Thanksgiving and the need to avoid running a lot on pavement, i.e. no good trails in Cambridge, MA).  So I'll be walking again tomorrow, Friday, and during our trip out to West Virginia and Kentucky this weekend.  Maybe some biking, but not yet tomorrow. 

My max pull-up # is now 12.  153.2 lbs.  I don't see getting back down to 150 lbs or less without running. 

iPhone Software

Not all that much out there AFAIKT, despite the infamous Apple App Store.  Handbreak looks like a promising DVD ripper with iPhone compatible formatting, so the iPhones might be useful during traveling.  As for apps, Find my Friends looks promising as a (reciprocal) spouse locator.  And I do hope that Reeder, a google reader syncing RSS reader, works.

Update #1: Hm, can I rip DVDs to my 1st generation iTouch?  I should give it a try.  The 8GB memory does present a limitation.

Update #2: some of the shopping apps (link is for Android phones, but they exist for iPhones as well) look promising, especially Google, Amazon and Red Laser.

Update #3: yes, ripping DVDs to my legacy iTouch works.  Stuff you learn after years of owning the machine.    Well, this does mean we have three small screens for the kids (two iPhones + the old iTouch), one per kid.  I assume this will help on long car rides up to Boston.  

"Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviour"

I've always been puzzled by modern technologies used by Neanderthals in the late stage of their existence. Stefano Benazzi, et, al., Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviour, pubished online in Nature earlier this month, sheds some light on this issue:

The appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe and the nature of the transition from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic are matters of intense debate. Most researchers accept that before the arrival of anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals had adopted several ‘transitional’ technocomplexes. Two of these, the Uluzzian of southern Europe and the Châtelperronian of western Europe, are key to current interpretations regarding the timing of arrival of anatomically modern humans in the region and their potential interaction with Neanderthal populations. They are also central to current debates regarding the cognitive abilities of Neanderthals and the reasons behind their extinction^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}. However, the actual fossil evidence associated with these assemblages is scant and fragmentary^{7, 8, 9, 10}, and recent work has questioned the attribution of the Châtelperronian to Neanderthals on the basis of taphonomic mixing and lithic analysis^{11, 12}. Here we reanalyse the deciduous molars from the Grotta del Cavallo (southern Italy), associated with the Uluzzian and originally classified as Neanderthal^{13, 14}. Using two independent morphometric methods based on microtomographic data, we show that the Cavallo specimens can be attributed to anatomically modern humans. The secure context of the teeth provides crucial evidence that the makers of the Uluzzian technocomplex were therefore not Neanderthals. In addition, new chronometric data for the Uluzzian layers of Grotta del Cavallo obtained from associated shell beads and included within a Bayesian age model show that the teeth must date to ~45,000–43,000 calendar years before present. The Cavallo human remains are therefore the oldest known European anatomically modern humans, confirming a rapid dispersal of modern humans across the continent before the Aurignacian and the disappearance of Neanderthals.

Clothing Consumption

One concern I had buying a fancy bike and bike accessories and then getting two iPhones was that it would make my wife concerned about my spending.  But I've seen the opposite effect: she's suggeted more spending on myself, but with other priorities.  So as of this weekend, I have a new suit, showing up a bit after Thanksgiving because of tailoring.  First new suit in over 10 years and unavoidable due to weight loss.  She's also pushing for a new winter jacket setup, the first non-formal new winter jacket since I believe 1991.  I tried picking up something good last February, but the stock at the local stores was too picked over.  So I'll need to look again...I assume I'll need a wool or down jacket and a shell. 

If I was serious I'd go for three (wool, down, shell) layers, but sadly there's (yet) no winter hiking possible with these kids. But I am thinking of using some of my excess vacation days before the end of the year to go hiking in the VA hills by myself.  I hope my leg is there after Thanksgiving. 

Injury Recovery Plan

My left leg/knee is still hurting, no more and no less than Saturday or Friday.  My recovery plan now is, taking the very long-term view:

1. A daily one hour walk until my leg doesn't hurt anymore.  This may take a while (1-2 weeks?).  No biking during this period.

2. A daily one hour walk for a week after my leg stops hurting.  This is to get myself a sufficient recovery buffer to start running again and not reinjure myself. Light biking every other day during this period. 

3. Two weeks of running every other day with no speed work.  More aggressive biking every other day during these two weeks.

4. Not sure what happens here, but I guess I go for running for two days with one day off, with biking on non-running days execept for one day a week.  Start adding speed work in (very) slowly? 

Not sure if this is what I'm going to do.  For now I do think I'll start out with a long daily walk with a one week recovery buffer after my leg stops hurting.   

I'm in this for the long term and I do want to run some good times next Spring, which will call for sustained speed work. 

Bad Weekend: Kids are horrible, lots of fighting

Fighting both Saturday and Sunday.  Hard to do anything with commitments in the middle of both days and the refusal of kids to cooparate.  I'm looking forward to going back to work.  Maybe I should work late tomorrow since the kids whine about food at dinner? 

Looks Fine from A Distance

Still Fall Here

No iPhones until after Thanksgiving

It seems that ordering a 64GB iphone backlogged the order for both the 64GB and the 16GB iPhone until after Thanksgiving. 

This releates, potentially, to news stories about shortages in the iPhone supply chain. 

More Knee Issues

Today wasn't good.  Still, I hope think it will improve quickly.  I'm not sure why I believe this. 

My wife has determined that part of her back problem is due to wrestling with kid #3 when she throws one of her currently frequent tantrums.  Kid #3 did aggravate my knee issue this morning as well, when I had to hold her back from running after the car that took the other two kids to school (kid #3 didn't get ready for school in time). 

First Run in a Week

I ran for the fist time in a week this morning, first run since Wednesday a week ago.  40 min and 4.55 miles at 8:51 min/mile.  No speed work. 

My left knee tendons feel fine...should I run tomorrow?

Nice and bright with the end of daylight saving time.  Also nice and warm. 

iPhone

I put in an order for two iPhone 4S today, one 16GB and one 64GB.  First should show up early next week, the second after Thanksgiving. 

Now I need to figure out what sort of case to get.  Incipio NGP Case for iPhone 4/4S-Matte Black ($15) is the best reviewed case on Amazon, while the reviews for the Otterbox iPhone 4S cases seem more mixed.  My wife suggests a more rugged case along the lines of what she thinks one of her cousins has.  Suggestions are welcome...

We are entering one aspect of the modern world.  I can get my personal email from work again...I also have visions of my wife glued to the iPhone screen and neglecting the rest of the family.  Or me doing the same...

Update #1: the Anandtech 'thorough review' of the iPhone 4S. 

Update #2: now I'm seeing potentially bad news about network speed on Verizon of the 4S...it may depend on location and I assume the network is reasonably fast in Northern VA. 

Update #3: ordered a black Otterbox 4S Commuter case for $25 including shipping.  We'll see...

Update #4: smartphone market penetration in the US is now a bit over 40%, so it was probably time to jump. 

"Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials "

From the British Medical Journal: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials (2003).

Abstract

Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.

Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.

Data sources: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists.

Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall.

Main outcome measure Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15.

Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.

Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

via DeLong...is DeLong citing his sources?

We're heading to West Virginia/Kentucky to run in two weeks

At least the kids can run, even if I can't. 

Knee Issue

A knee issue has reared its ugly head again, some form of tendinitis to the inside above my left knee, very similar to what I had in August, but maybe not the exact same thing (it seems more localized and more the the inside side).  In any case, I started to notice it using the bike trainer on Th morning.  I didn't run F and I just did a bit of lite outside biking with kid #1 yesterday, but that aggravated it on the last 200 yards before we got back home.  Now I can notice the knee even when I walk around or climb the stairs. 

Oh well, back to resting for now. 

Not sure what is causing this.  The most obvious guess is that I did do 3 tempo runs on pavement in the 10 days before this started.  You'd think that would be fine...and I have done knee strengthening exercises.  The less likely cause is that I did move the weights further down my leg for my knee strengthening exercises the day before this started...I'll go with that cause for now, since it is easier to correct. 

Overall, this is highly annoying. 

Halloween Loot

How much Halloween loot do we need to dispose of this year?

I need to go back to pull-ups 5x per week

Every other day isn't cutting it, I'm getting weaker.  None of this 48 hour recovery for me. 

Up to 154.4 lbs

I'm up 3 lbs from last week.  Nothing mysterious: kid #3's birthday with good desert and desert leftovers, my mother-in-law and sister-in-law visiting, and now Halloween.  I'll aim to be back down under 152 lbs by Thanksgiving.  Maybe time for a fast.