There’s a graph from the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi making the rounds. It compares job losses from the current recession to the two previous ones, and it looks pretty alarming.

However, I find the chart a little misleading for a couple of reasons. (I’m not saying we’re not having economic problems, I’m just saying this chart may be exaggerating the contrast between the current problems and previous ones.)

There are two issues with the chart. First, the scale is in absolute numbers of jobs, rather than a percentage change. Since the total number of jobs at the peak was different in the different recessions, rather than saying “We lost 2.5 million jobs in 2001 and we’ve lost 3.5 million so far”, we need to express that as a percentage of the total jobs there were to start with. A blogger at time.com did a better job, with % changes and more historical data.

The second issue is a bit more subtle, however. The data are expressed as the “job losses relative to the peak month”. OK. But aren’t the peaks just as anomalous as the valleys, in some sense? If we had really high employment during a good period, that’s great. But I’d really rather compare the % losses to the annual average of the previous 12 months, or something to that effect, rather than simply to the peak month, which may have seasonal effects and other factors at work. (I do confess that I don’t know a lot about the underlying data for these charts and how it’s collected, which may have a large influence on whether we really care or trust a number like that, however.)

Originally written September 14, 2003 @ 11:18 p.m.

I was thinking about writing today, and for the first time in my life, I longed for winter — the long, dark quiet of the night. All sounds are muffled, there is no smell but cold, and you can be utterly alone in a wide, wide world.

The summer night is full of sound, crickets chirping, locusts buzzing, traffic flying by even in the small hours. There are the smells of plants and dirt and barbecue and rainstorms. But in the winter night comes early, and with it the eerie silence made by a blanket of snow. Summer is all around you, there are living things everywhere, but in winter, you can look out upon the darkness and feel the world collapse in upon yourself. It is both lonely and freeing. I love the silence and the darkness, being alone with my thoughts that way. I have to answer to no one but the questions and doubts in my own mind. I can have endless conversations with myself, working out my desires and conflicts and the meanings the universe holds within me. It is a time of creation.

That seems odd, that winter should create. Fall heralds the oncoming onslaught of darkness and cold in which I can create within, while without it signals the destruction of the life of summer. Spring melts away the aloneness and freedom of winter and brings out summer’s stifling closeness. This, then, is finally the reason to love the winter, to always look to the north, to orient life toward the snows that are coming. Summer is easy to love, and it gives its love easily away, but winter is less kind and accommodating. You can love it on its own terms, for what it has to give, but its love is not the warm love of summer, and no fires and Christmas carols can make it anything but what it is. Winter is the state of suspension in which the soul is free to seek itself.

My dad is a carpenter. He’s been doing it for a long time.

Most of the things I know about building stuff come from him, and my grandfather. And, I’ve read a fair number of books and magazine articles and watched plenty of episodes of This Old House and whatnot.

I’m a pretty handy guy, and a pretty intelligent one, too. But inevitably, when it comes to building something, it takes me at least twice as long as it would for my dad. Most of that time goes into planning — I have to plan everything out, really carefully, before I go ahead and do it. (”Measure twice, cut once” and all that.)

Of course, this is no big surprise; he’s been at it for far longer than I have. But exactly why this is, what it is that he does or knows that I don’t, took me a long time to figure out. It’s not that he doesn’t plan ahead — of course he does; he has to. I get that from him. It’s that, unlike me, he has enough experience to know how to proceed in a way that he can make adjustments on the fly. He doesn’t have to plan everything out completely. He has to plan just enough, in just the right way so the next bit can adjust for what wasn’t quite right in this one.

This applies to making all kinds of things. With my mom, when she helped me re-cover my couch. She’ll freely admit she’s no master reupholsterer, but she’s done it far more often than I have. I would have had to plan for hours to get it all right. She just made a few measurements, started cutting up fabric, and forged ahead. She said, “Don’t backstitch at the ends of the seams in case we decide to rip them out and do it differently.”

I find this when I’m helping people cook. I’m a fair cook and so are some of my friends, but there are others who are afraid to chop vegetables or boil water. They’re paranoid about recipes and following things to the exact letter, and stress out when something isn’t explained to death. After you’ve cooked for a while like I have, though, you learn to adapt. Don’t have some particular ingredient? No biggie, we’ll subsitute something. Or maybe it’s not really vital to the dish at all. But without experience, these things are really hard to know.

It’s really humbling to work alongside someone who really knows what they’re doing. Their experience is crucial. Reading about how to do something, imagining how to do it, planning out how it will be done — these are all helpful to the novice, but they are no substitute, in any quantity, for the experience. There is a qualitative distinction between the two.

A friend just emailed me this link. MSN Autos has an article showing that the highest fuel efficiency models in 1992 were more efficient than 2007’s most efficient (non-hybrid) models.

I wrote the following in response:

On its face, this looks really awful, and I do agree that cars could be a lot more fuel efficient if cars companies wanted to make them that way and if people wanted to buy them that way.

But realistically, those high-efficiency cars from 1992? In general, they’re lawn mowers. They struggle going up hills. It’s no wonder no one wants to drive one. The fuel efficient cars from 2007? They’re real cars. The Yaris is totally suitable, and the Mini is downright sporty and fun.

Now, I’ll be the first one to agree with someone who says that gas is underpriced in this country, who says that we have an overwhelming bigger-is-better mentality that’s often not a good thing, that we are over-consumers and not concerned enough about conservation.

But, I don’t think that means everyone has to drive a small car. If you need a station wagon or an SUV or a pickup truck, that’s OK. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you have to drive a car that can’t make it up a hill.

What I really want is for the cost-to-benefit comparison to be more transparent, so that it becomes apparent to someone who’s driving a gigantic SUV what the tradeoffs between fuel efficiency and utility really are. Unfortunately, our current energy prices don’t take a lot of things into the accounting.

The First Lady cracked some jokes about her husband, family, and other politicians at Saturday night’s dinner with the White House press corps, according to this article in the New York Times. One of the jokes cast her as a “desperate housewife”, but she hasn’t actually seen the show yet:

In Mrs. Bush’s case, playing off “Desperate Housewives” was a natural, even though Ms. Whitson said that Mrs. Bush had never actually seen the racy ABC hit show. Ms. Whitson said the first lady had heard about the characters and plot from the Bush twins, Jenna and Barbara, who are fans, and was planning to watch the entire first season on a DVD she has at home.

Wha? According to my Netflix queue, Season 1 of Desperate Housewives is due to be released on DVD in September of 2005. Does Laura Bush get an advance copy?

Or maybe she TiVo’d them and recorded them to DVD herself. Can’t you just see her pushing the buttons? Or maybe Jenna downloaded the torrents and burned them. Maybe it’s a shrewd and subtle dig at the FCC in protest of the broadcast flag. Laura Bush, crusading for electronic freedom from the repression of media conglomerates. No wonder she got that citation from the ALA.

It’s nice that major leaders in various sects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can come together over something, but I just wish it wasn’t to oppose a gay pride festival in Jerusalem.

The part of this article that made me laugh, however, comes about 2/3 of the way through. Apparently the whole furor was started by some evangelical rabble-rouser at a church in California that meets in a hotel. He was tipped off to the event by “a congregation member who had told Mr. Giovinetti that he was gay for many years and still monitored gay Web sites [emphasis mine]“. Ah yes, those ex-gays. Even though they tend to be hateful, preachy people, you almost have to feel sorry for this guy, because “still monitored gay Web sites” is thinly veiled code for “jerks off to gay porn and looks for hookups on gay.com”. He just tattles on the gay agenda to his minister later.

I am slightly heartened by the fact that, in a cursory google search to identify a few hateful, preachy ex-gay organizations to link to as examples in that last paragraph, that I actually had to dig. The top links were actually all from places like the apparently quite positive and constructive ExGayWatch.com. It’s heartening to see that confused people trying to find their way will see this kind of thing first.

I took a stupid career quiz a few days ago, and it got me thinking.

Stupid magazine quizzes are essentially simple versions of “scientific” psychological tests like the Myers-Briggs, and they’re not really very differnt from horoscopes, or handwriting analysis, or psychic readings. Except the people who write magazine quizzes are way less talented than the psychics.

The “answers” to stupid magazine quizzes, just like horoscopes, are broad and vague and at least part of them applies to almost anyone. There’s not really any suprising information there; nothing you didn’t already really know. But the writers of the magazine quiz are at a distinct advantage over the writer of a horoscope: they actually get you to tell them things about you! You answer a bunch of questions and then they regurgitate it back to you.

Psychics, on the other hand, are much more talented. I’m not talking about the people telling us that the world will end in fire and brimstone when the aliens arrive on a Tuesday in 2011. I’m talking about the real working-class of the psychic world, the people who do personal readings, or someone like John Edward. They take a look at you, gathering all kinds of subtle clues about you, ask a few questions and make some really remarkable connections, and hit you spot on. Sure, they might make some broad and vague and all-encompassing statements too, but they carefully gauge how you react and home in on the correct statements, or those that affect you the most. They don’t need no stinkin’ multiple choice questions.

(I don’t actually think psychics have supernatural or paranormal abilities per se, although I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them do this in a subconscious manner and are really surprisingly good at it in ways that are certainly extraordinary or preternatural. And I don’t think that makes them irrelevant or useless at all. But that’s material for a future rumination.)