The Dilbert Blog

Old Fashioned Words

People mock me for referring to my athletic footwear as “sneakers.” Apparently that is an old fashioned term. I am told the correct term is “tennis shoes” even if the athletic shoes in question are not designed for use on a tennis court. This seems wrong. If my athletic shoes allow me to “sneak” someplace without making noise, and are unsuitable for playing tennis, I say they should be called sneakers. 

I was reminded of this the other day at the movies. The theater asks customers to silence their “cell phones.” This already seems old fashioned to me. I only own one phone. It’s in my left front pocket all the time. It’s my home phone, my work phone, and my cell phone. All of those terms will be old fashioned in your lifetime. Your kids will simply have a “phone.”

Do you remember when computers were “multimedia”? That word went away as soon as every computer could handle sound and video. The descriptor “high definition” will evaporate in about ten years too. And you won’t have to talk about “downloading” music because that’ll be the only way to get it.

Recently a friend joked about going to the library to help with his son’s school project. He said it felt like going back in time, to pre-Internet days. I wonder if libraries have an expiration date on them. I’m guessing yes.

I also wonder when the “e-“ will disappear from e-mail. I’m trying to remember the last time I wrote the kind of letter that requires a stamp. I’m guessing it was about seven years ago. I don’t even check my physical mailbox daily. I only check it when I think it might be too full for the mailman to stuff more crap in there.

Do you have any soon-to-be-old-fashioned words to add?

China Does Quality

Did you hear about the former head of China’s food and drug administration? He took bribes to approve bogus pharmaceuticals, some of which killed people. China just sentenced Zheng to death.

Now THAT is a country that’s serious about quality control.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/29/health/main2860989.shtml

It looks like the main reason he got the death penalty is that he was bad for business. China doesn’t want to be seen as a country with poor quality control. They figured that being seen as a country that kills thieving political assholes would be seen as more of a positive thing.

They were right!

My immediate reaction to the story was “Why can’t we be more like China?”

Generally, I’m not a huge fan of the death penalty, for purely practical reasons:

1. Death sentences costs tax payers more than life sentences because of the lengthy automatic appeals.
2. Sometimes we convict the wrong guy, as DNA testing has shown.
3. I’d be amazed if the death penalty deterred anyone who was in the frame of mind of committing a heinous crime.

But I’d be willing to make an exception for politicians that take bribes. That sort of behavior threatens the integrity of the entire system. The value is in the signal it sends to the citizens about what the government will tolerate. There’s nothing ambiguous about the death penalty. If I were a Chinese citizen, I’d feel a lot better about the quality of my food and drugs going forward.

I still think democracy is the best form of government. But the Chinese are closing that gap fast.

Global Warming – Part 4

Having worked my way through the global warming issue, starting from 100% ignorance and advancing to somewhere in the top 10% of what the uninformed public knows about the topic, thanks to lots of help from your comments, I have come to the following plateau of understanding.

1. The earth is getting warmer, and human activity is an important part of it. I base this conclusion on the lack of credible peer reviewed work to the contrary and the mountain of work that confirms human-induced warming. While individual studies might be wrong, it’s extremely unlikely the entire field has been so thoroughly duped.

2. There is plenty of bullshit on both sides of the issue. The people arguing that humans are not causing relatively rapid rises in temperatures are under-informed, misinformed, or suffering from bad thinking and bad analogies.

3. The people who are well-informed about global warming are overstating the case by conflating the well-studied fact of human-created warming with the less-than-certain predictions of what happens because of the extra warming. And there’s a tendency to leave out the “why I might be wrong” parts of the argument. I call that bullshit.

4. The people who say global warming is irrelevant because we should all be recycling and using less fossil fuel for other reasons anyway don’t understand the size of the problem. Ordinary conservation in the industrialized nations won’t put a dent in it.

5. The people predicting likely doom because of global warming have not made their case. Humans are incredibly adaptive. And technological breakthroughs happen in steps, not predictable straight lines. Every other predicted type of global doom hasn’t happened because of human resourcefulness. No climate model can predict human resourcefulness.

6. Some say that even a small chance of worldwide catastrophe is worth the “insurance” of working to reduce the risk to zero, even at astronomical expense. But how small is a “small” risk? And how does the risk of global warming stack up to the other global risks for which we could use our limited resources? That’s where I hit the wall on my understanding of the issue.

My best guess for the future is that global warming continues, conservation doesn’t take hold in the less developed countries because of simple economics and corruption, and something “big” has to be done by the richest players. I think that something “big” will be mammoth carbon dioxide “scrubbers” to clean the atmosphere. It’s technically possible, but not economical. The economical part will either be solved or become a moot point if the alternative is global annihilation.

The Y2K scenario is a bad analogy to global warming but it’s instructive in one minor way. When there’s a certain deadline, humans can meet it more effectively than you might think. Global warming hasn’t given us the two-minute warning yet. When it does, I like our odds.

[Update: Interesting link on reusing carbon dioxide: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kyoto/capturing-carbon.html]

Global Warming – Part 3

How good are the computer models that predict global warming? I previously linked to this article, in which the author argues that complicated climate models are reliable:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11649

The author makes three main points:

1. The best models can predict the past.

2. Some models have predicted the future.

3. Computer models are successfully used in the stock market.

Predicting the past doesn’t impress me much. There are no surprises in the past, so you can get the inputs right. Getting the inputs right seems like the hardest part.

I’m also not too surprised that some models have predicted the near future. The earth is clearly getting warmer. If a dozen climatologists build a dozen climate models, some of them are going to get the temperature about right, especially in the near term. I’d be interested in how many models got it right about the past but wrong about the near future. Without that context, I can’t form an opinion.

In a different part of the same article, the author points out that a significant wildcard is the amount of aerosols produced in the future. Between 1940 and 1970, industrial activity produced so many aerosols that it cooled the climate despite rising carbon dioxide. Most industrialized countries cleaned up their emissions and the effect reversed. But China and India are starting to pump substantial amounts into the atmosphere. And the occasional big volcano can do the same thing. It seems to me you could change the result of your climate model by what you assume about aerosols, and that’s unpredictable.

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11639

How about those computer models being used in the stock market? There’s some truth to that, for some special cases where there is inefficiency in the market. But realistically, if computer models picked stocks much better than a monkey with a dartboard, Warren Buffet would have all of your money by now, not just most of it.

The stock trades you make with a computer model will either beat the averages or not. Some computer model is bound to work at least some of the time, until it doesn’t. I’m not sure the climatologists should use stock trading models as their gold standard.

For the record, I think it’s entirely possible that human activity is warming the earth, we can predict its consequences, and those consequences are dire. I just think that case hasn’t been made to my personal satisfaction. I’m bothered by the fact that the people trying to save me are feeding me nuggets of potentially useful facts buried in huge loads of what looks and smells like bullshit.

Peer Review

Peer review in science is a good thing, in the sense that it works better than any other process you can think of. But how well does it work? Dilbert Blog reader Jeff points to this link about the limits of peer review.

http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/band88/b88-4.html

The article fits my preconceived notions quite well. Assuming scientists are human beings, it seems to me that most peer reviewers would fall into one of these categories:

1. Asshole
2. Biased egomaniac
3. Nice person who doesn’t want to make people feel bad
4. Too busy to put any quality thought into it
5. Person with low self-esteem who doesn’t want others to succeed in his or her field
6. Coward who doesn’t want to rock the boat

I suppose some scientists have plenty of free time, no biases, and would be happy to see colleagues succeed beyond their own careers. But seriously, how many of those scientists could there be? I don’t know any non-scientists who could fit that description.

Still, I assume peer review works well enough for killing the worst ideas. I don’t have a better idea for evaluating science. It’s just important to keep things in perspective.

[Update: Here's a link to an even better article on peer review: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1963 -- Scott]

[Update 2: Reader Winston points out this article debunking the notion that scientists ever generally thought an ice age was imminent: http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/ -- Scott]

Global Warming – Part 2

Apparently the two most common points of view on global warming, ferociously held, are these:

1. The earth is warming up.
2. The earth is warming up.

A few people have figured out that the only real question is whether people can or should do anything to try and slow the warming. Meanwhile, everyone else is counting icebergs and polar bears and imagining they are contributing to the debate.

The question of whether people are the cause of global warming, or part of the cause, is somewhat irrelevant. It doesn’t really matter if the problem is caused by cars or farting cows or rotting leaves. If the warming is going to threaten life as we know it, the only important questions are these:

1. Are we sure global warming will cause more bad than good?
2. Realistically, can we do anything to stop it?
3. Would the costs of stopping it be more or less than the benefits?

I’m fairly certain the answer to all three questions is “Beats the shit out of me.”

Some say the cost of slowing global warming would be several hundred trillion dollars, plus stunting the development of poor countries and dooming them to another century of grinding poverty and related health problems. That’s because the poor countries are the ones that will need to burn lots of coal and oil in order to develop. You and I can slap solar panels on the roof. But Mubutu the goat herder will have to continue getting his dental work from a guy with a rock. If he tries to build a steel plant, life on earth will cease.

If we accept the high expense of combating global warming, and it turns out we can’t make a dent in it no matter what we do, or the earth cools on its own for reasons we didn’t forsee, we’ve really screwed the pooch. It would be the biggest fuckup of all time.

Humans are wired to put more weight on avoiding potential huge fuckups than to pursue nebulous benefits to future generations. I see no hope of that changing. So regardless of how sure the scientists are that human activity is causing most of the global warming, it won’t have much impact on policies.

The other thing that struck me about the debate on global warming is that both sides are so obviously full of shit. I presume there is lots of truth buried beneath the steaming mounds of manure, but I’m not dedicated enough to dig it out. For example, a few readers pointed me to this article on the myths about global warming, as an example of a shining light of clarity:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

But I had the opposite reaction when I read it. It just looked like propaganda to me, independent of the question of whether humans are causing global warming.

For homework, read the 26 myths and see if you can find the glaring omissions and biases. In the first myth, about human contributions to carbon dioxide being too tiny to matter, the author points out how much carbon dioxide comes from natural sources, such as rotting vegetation and oceans. What’s missing is any kind of assurance that science can measure that stuff with any useful precision. Maybe it can. Maybe it can’t. I have to think it’s hard to know how much stuff is rotting at what rate all over the globe. Where’s my link to an article about peer reviewed studies showing we can measure that stuff well enough for this purpose?

The author mentions the list of 60 “leading scientists” who signed a petition asking for Canada to review its decision on the Kyoto protocol. He points out that “many, if not most, of the 60 signatories are not actively engaged in studying climate change: some are not scientists at all and at least 15 are retired.” That’s fair. What’s missing is how many people on the list ARE active scientists in the appropriate fields. Is it two? Is it twenty? Twenty dissenters who are active in the field and willing to put their necks on the line seems like a lot to me. Two doesn’t. I’d like to know the number. An unbiased article might have said, “At least 15 of those scientists are totally credible and up to date on the science.”

Clearly there is plenty of bullshit on both sides of the debate. I’d like some clarity before I decide whether or not to kill Mubutu to save my beach house.

Global Warming – Part 1

People keep asking me to blog about global warming. I have so far avoided the topic for four reasons:

1. My profound ignorance on the topic.
2. My inability to evaluate the claims on both sides.
3. My preference of not being scared shitless about drowning.
4. My observation that scary predictions about the future rarely happen.

This is one of the many, many cases where ignorance has utility. I can’t do much to stop global warming, but I can do plenty to ignore it and not worry myself into a coma before I drown in melted glacier water.

Anyway, recently I got dragged into the debate by a comment left by reader Bruce Harrison. He objected to a prior post in which I noted our President was ignoring the consensus of scientists on the question of global warming. I called this sort of behavior stupid.

Bruce countered by calling me arrogant and ignorant. So far, his opinion was spot on, so I figured it was worth seeing what else he had to say. This led me down a path of random, unreliable fact-gathering that I like to call “research.”

As I already noted, I’m not qualified to evaluate the science behind global warming. The best I can do is to evaluate the media reports of that science. Here’s the path my “research” took me.

In round one, I accepted the majority opinion of leading scientists, that global warming is happening, and that a big cause of that warming is all the frickin’ people and their energy-gobbling ways. A good representation of all those scientists is here on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

But where are the dissenters? Bruce Harrison pointed me to this web site where thousands of scientists signed a petition saying global warming is not caused by people.

http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p357.htm

Hmmm. That seems like a body blow to the idea that the science of global warming is settled. Then I noticed a follow-up comment on this blog by reader rokusan, who pointed to a web story about how the petition by the dissenters is not credible.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine

At this point in my “research” I was back to thinking the majority of scientists are probably right. You can find dissenters for any view. You can even find thousands of them if you put some effort into it. So I discounted the petition by the dissenters.

Then I looked at the next link provided by Bruce. It’s for a video called "The Great Global Warming Swindle." I figured this would be good for a laugh, kind of like a creationist museum with cowboys riding dinosaurs. It’s a long video, so I’ll summarize it after showing this link.

http://www.ksfo.com/goout.asp?u=http://leaningstraightup.com/2007/03/11/the-global-warming-swindle-video/.

The gist of the video is that Al Gore and the scientists got the cause-and-effect thing backwards. There is a strong correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperatures throughout history, but temperature increases come first by hundreds of years. Warmer weather heats the oceans and produces more carbon dioxide.

So what causes the extra heat? According to the experts on the video, the data says it’s clearly the sun. When the sun has extended periods with lots of sun spots, it raises the temperature on Earth a bit. That warms the oceans, which releases more carbon dioxide.

According to the video, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by humans is miniscule, and our industrialization doesn’t even correlate with changes in Earth’s temperatures. In summary:

Sun = huge hot thing that keeps fucking with us

SUV = drive all you want

As I’ve noted, and will continue to note, I’m not qualified to judge the science of global warming. But if you ask me to judge the persuasiveness of competing media accounts, I’d say the argument against people causing global warming is the strongest.

The video also does a surprisingly good job of explaining why the majority of scientists are politically and financially motivated to get the science of global warming wrong. I can’t judge the accuracy of that assertion, but the video is exceptional in its persuasiveness.

I expect the comments to this post to include convincing evidence that global warming is caused by people. If you plan to do that, watch the video first. It probably addresses most of your points.

Go.

[Update: It took about ten minutes for reader Chris Graham to post this link debunking the video "The Great Global Warming Swindle.": http://www.durangobill.com/Swindle_Swindle.html. Obviously I am unqualified to judge either the video or the debunking to it, but the last thing I read alway seems the most persasive.]

900 Comments and Counting

I didn’t anticipate the volume of suggestions I’d get to yesterday’s post about my restaurants. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve yet to meet a human being who isn’t a restaurant expert by virtue of his or her experience at eating.

I’m actually going to read all the comments, as will my restaurant managers. I can tell there’s a lot of good stuff nestled within the calls for nudity and midget wrestling. But I thought I’d take a moment to comment on some of the suggestions.

Many people pointed out that the quality of your food and service determine the size of your restaurant business. I used to think that too. To my surprise, those two factors are surprisingly far down the list, at least in my local area.

Obviously the food and service have to be good enough to support the price you charge. But most places achieve that goal. Around here, the restaurants with the best food, or even the best value, don’t have more business because of it. You think they do, but they don’t.

Locally, familiarity is the biggest predictor of success. Italian and Mexican themed restaurants are typically packed regardless of food or service. Everyone knows they can find something on the menu they will understand and enjoy. Indian and Thai restaurants are less familiar and they struggle no matter what they do right. My two favorite restaurants locally (Indian and Thai) are typically 75% empty.

The local restaurant that is generally considered to have the best food in the area is full most of the time. From your armchair, you might assume the food quality is the reason. You’d be wrong. The restaurant is full because it’s tiny. Both of my restaurants have more customers. There’s some sort of statistical smoothing effect that causes people to spread their eating around more evenly than you’d think. We can predict our level of business on any Tuesday night to a degree of precision that seems odd. There’s never a day when, for no reason in particular, a thousand people all decide to eat at the same place. Restaurants get nearly their baseline “share” just by existing, presumably because people like variety.

When we designed the Dublin restaurant, it was intentionally twice the size of the first, in anticipation of filling the banquet area with events. It’s the banquet and event portion that doesn’t fill itself just by doing things right. I pay rent on that space whether it’s full or not.

When asked about the most important factor for a restaurant’s success, experts often pick lighting. Your first inclination is to laugh that off as absurd, because you’ve probably never made a restaurant decision based on lighting. But if you look at the restaurants that are doing well without being Italian or Mexican or tax cheats or a chain, they generally have excellent lighting. Everything, including your date, looks better with the right lighting. And that can be enough to make you remember the food and service as being better than they were. I pay attention to restaurant lighting, and find it a far better predictor of success than food or service. (I’m working on my restaurant’s lighting too.)

Price is obviously a big factor in people’s restaurant decisions. But unless you are a chain, or a tax-cheating family restaurant, you can’t compete on price. Our niche is the “nice night out” crowd for dinner, and the “business lunch” during the day, where a few extra dollars for a more special experience makes sense. The Cheesecake Factory is a great business model, but if you take your wife there for your 25th wedding anniversary, you might not reach your 26th.

People ask me why I’d want to be involved in the restaurant business. This is why. It’s surprisingly fascinating.

Oh Great Blog Brain

I can’t help noticing that the comments on this blog are like a giant virtual brain. It’s hard to imagine any question I could ask that would stump you, collectively.

You might say Google is like a giant brain too, but it’s missing something. While Google’s algorithms are impressive, sometimes a question requires the “x-factor” that only another human, or collection of humans can grok. For example, if I asked Google what is more manly – a lamp or a pillow – I would get no useful answer. But the great Blog Brain would tell me the correct answer (lamp).

I’m going to test the Great Blog Brain with a little question that has been stumping me. I’m sure a Google search would come up empty because the answer requires intuition and personal experience and marketing savvy.

Here’s the situation. I own two restaurants locally. (See www.staceyscafe.com). One of the two restaurants (Stacey’s at Waterford) is in a neighborhood where about 12 new restaurants have opened in the past few months. A Cheesecake Factory and a PF Chang also opened just down the road. (Those are large chains, the equivalent of Wal*mart for restaurants, with the same impact on competition.) As competition increases dramatically, the smaller non-chain restaurants look for new ways to stand out.

Stacey’s at Waterford features a separate banquet room for about 50 people. The ambiance is “casual upscale” and the food is what we call California cuisine. I’ve been trying to come up with a brilliant idea to create events (as opposed to waiting for events to contact us) to fill the banquet room, or even the main restaurant.

In the past, we’ve tried comedy, live music, wine events, family nights, and various “get-something-free” promotions. They have little impact on business. And they require advertising for each event. In our perfect world, we’d find some sort of evergreen event that is self-organizing or involves existing organizations that meet on a regular basis over dinner or lunch.

So I ask you, Great Blog Brain, what is the best sort of event to fill a banquet room? (The restaurant has a large bar and cocktail area, and an extensive wine list, if that helps.)

You will be tempted to say the answer involves great food, service, value and location. That used to be enough. Now the problem is that there are more chairs than diners.

Advertising has no impact on restaurant business. We’ve tried newspapers, radio, direct mail, and magazine ads. They don’t even cause a blip in the baseline. Other restaurants have apparently discovered the same thing. So your answer should not rely on heavy ongoing ads.

I predict at least three excellent suggestions nestled within hundreds of snarky comments about celebrity restaurants.

Go.

Footwear Theory of Motivation

I once had a boss who shared his theory for seducing a woman. I’m not sure if it was genius or insanity. His theory is so simple it has to be one or the other. His two step secret to seduction:

1. Take her to your place.
2. Get her to take off her shoes.

That’s it.

His observation, after years of playboy behavior, is that a woman who takes off her shoes at your place isn’t planning to put them back on until morning. If she doesn’t take them off, she’s mentally prepped for a quick escape.

You might wonder if removing shoes causes the sex or it’s simply a sign of comfort that predicts it. Either way, it’s good to know. I leave you with that question and move to a related one I discovered on my own.

Years ago I discovered that I could put myself in any mood by my choice of footwear. For example, no matter how tired I was, putting on tennis shoes immediately put me in the mood for working out. Putting on my work shoes put me in a business frame of mind. Going barefoot relaxed me. And so on.

A year ago I was taking dance lessons to prepare for my wedding. I wore tuxedo-quality shoes to the lessons because I wanted to match the look and feel of the wedding dance. After a few months of lessons, putting on the shoes was enough to totally put me in the dancing mood. The before and after feelings were quite distinct.

And so I have generalized these observations to what I call the Footwear Theory of Motivation. It states that you can put anyone in the mood for anything by the right choice of footwear.

As silly as the Footwear Theory of Motivation sounds, it has plenty of scientific backing. On some level, it’s not much different from Pavlov’s research on dogs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov

If you always wear the same type of footwear in the same situations, your body learns to automatically adjust to that situation when the shoes go on (or off). It would be surprising if the Footwear Theory of Motivation did NOT work.

The only question is the size of the effect. I think it’s huge.