Supreme Court Decision on Health Care Law

I know people have strong opinions about the health care law, and normally I wouldn't post political stuff here on the family blog, but I thought you might be interested in this. Back when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the health care law, it was pretty clear that some of the justices had serious concerns with the government's primary argument that the law was constitutional under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. I thought it would be interesting to see if a different argument could be made for the constitutionality of the law. I spent some time on it and came up with something. I thought it was good enough to post online, which I did on April 10th. It turns out that Chief Justice Roberts independently arrived at basically the same conclusion I did, that the law is constitutional under the Taxing and Spending Clause. Anyway, it's a bit long, but here is a link to my post:


http://billtidd.com/2012/04/10/affordable-care-act/

Growth Spurt?

Sometime last summer, with my 40th birthday looming, I decided it was high time to get those pesky cholesterol numbers under control.  I'd been working on my diet for some time, but those HDL readings were still too low and there was only one way to boost them (Tidd men worldwide shout in unison):  More exercise!

So after more than twenty years, and despite having sworn I never would, I started running again.  At first just a couple miles at a whack.  Then boosting up to four.  I'm now putting in up to six miles, or one lap around Central Park, a few times a week.

Now I don't know about my cholesterol, still waiting for that follow up appointment, but I sure have lost a few pounds.  In fact, while according to online BMI calculators I am still a tad overweight, just a pound or two, I have been, for the first time in my adulthood, "in range" on more than one extra skinny day.

You know.  Skinny days.  When you forget to drink water all day and become excessively dehydrated.  And got a haircut.  And trimmed your fingernails.

I can tell you that the first time that happened there was much rejoicing in the Tidd household, on the level of what Chaim Potok has long attributed to my Hasidic neighbors.  There was much singing and dancing and general cheerfulness.  Lachlan is still trying to figure out what all the hubbub was about, but nevertheless continues to voice his approval in the usual way:  “Again!  Again, again!”

The downside to weight loss is, of course, the cost of re-outfitting oneself.  With all my clothes looking loose and shlumpy, my Christmas list was straightforward.  Being bold, I asked for new trousers with a 32-inch waist, a size I have not required in several decades, and was delighted come Christmas morning to receive a new pair of JCrew’s “Vintage Slim” jeans.  Very nice.  I tried them on and found they were all I had dreamt of and more, with one exception.

They were too short.

And I mean way too short.  As in not fit for public viewing.  A showcase for bony ankles.  Flood city.  

A trip to the store confirmed it was not a problem with that particular pair.  I now had another inch of leg.  I was befuddled.  Where had this come from?   I have always worn 32-inch length trousers.  It was only my waist that expanded over time.  But now that my middle was snapping back better than a pair of Fruit-of-the-Loom tightie-whities, had my legs stretched out to compensate?

Of course not.  A trip to the height wall in Lachlan’s room confirmed I haven’t grown.  (Though to be clear I haven’t shrunk, either.  I’m still the tallest Tidd around, i.e. the tallest one I see on a daily basis.)

The answer to the “Mystery of the Missing Inch”, which if all goes well will soon be a reality TV show on ABC Family, became clear enough when I lined my new 32x32 trousers up with a pair of my older and more bagel-friendly 33x32s, also “Vintage Slims”.  While JCrew says both pairs are the same length, the 33s were, in fact, an inch longer.  How can this be, I ask?  And then it hit me. 

The length of 32 inches is a measure of the inseam, the inside of the leg, not the outside.  And the inseam of both pairs of jeans was... drum roll... exactly the same!  But when JCrew cuts an inch off the distance around the waist, reducing it from 33 to 32, they in their wisdom also cut an inch off the vertical distance from the waist to the beginning of the inseam at the bottom of the crotch.  (I realize a diagram would really help about now.) 

Bottom line:  there is an inch of difference but no way you can tell by looking at the label.  Eureka, Watson, you're a genius!  Why thank you, Holmes, it was elementree, really.

But, you are saying, couldn't he tell when he tried them on?  Weren't they, you know, a little snug?  Truth be told, the 32's were still comfortable despite the missing inch.  Why?  Well I’m not 100 percent sure but, since you are being so pushy about it, I have a hypothesis:  my ahem has shrunk along with my waist, and isn't as low to the ground.

That’s what Lachlan tells me, anyway.  It's not like I've now grown eyes in the back of my head too.  But that makes me think clothing manufacturers need to add a third metric to their sizing charts to clarify the issue.  Not sure what to call it.  Seat Circumference?  Total Butt Volume?

I don't know.  Never been too good at naming things (Sorry kids).  Maybe that's why I'm Watson.  I'll ask Sherlock what he thinks.

[PAUSE]

All I can get out of Sherlock is:  "Again!  Again, again!"

The Real Reason for the Tragedy of the Titanic

By CHRIS BERG

In the 1958 Titanic film "A Night to Remember," Captain Smith is consulting with the shipbuilder Thomas Andrews. After the two realize that the Titanic will sink and that there are not enough lifeboats for even half those aboard, Smith quietly says "I don't think the Board of Trade regulations visualized this situation, do you?"

In the run-up to the 100th anniversary of this tragedy this weekend, there's been a lot of commentary about who and what were to blame. Left unsaid is that the Titanic's lifeboat capacity is probably the most iconic regulatory failure of the 20th century.

The ship had carried 2,224 people on its maiden voyage but could only squeeze 1,178 people into its lifeboats. There were a host of other failures, accidents, and mishaps which led to the enormous loss of life, but this was the most crucial one: From the moment the Titanic scraped the iceberg, the casualties were going to be unprecedented.

Yet the Titanic was fully compliant with all marine laws. The British Board of Trade required all vessels above 10,000 metric tonnes (11,023 U.S. tons) to carry 16 lifeboats. The White Star Line ensured that the Titanic exceeded the requirements by four boats. But the ship was 46,328 tonnes. The Board of Trade hadn't updated its regulations for nearly 20 years.

Enlarge Image

Getty Images

Artistic rendering of the Titanic from Le Petit Journal Paris, April 28, 1912

The lifeboat regulations were written for a different era and enforced unthinkingly. So why didn't the regulators, shipbuilders or operators make the obvious connection between lifeboat capacity and the total complement of passengers and crew?

It had been 40 years since the last serious loss of life at sea, when 562 people died on the Atlantic in 1873. By the 20th century, all ships were much safer.

Moreover, the passage of time changed what regulators and shipowners saw as the purpose of lifeboats. Lifeboats were not designed to keep all the ship and crew afloat while the vessel sank. They were simply to ferry them to nearby rescue ships.

Recent history had confirmed this understanding. The Republic sank in 1909, fatally crippled in a collision. But it took nearly 36 hours for the Republic to submerge. All passengers and crew—except for the few who died in the actual collision—were transferred safely, in stages, to half a dozen other vessels.

Had Titanic sunk more slowly, it would have been surrounded by the Frankfurt, the Mount Temple, the Birma, the Virginian, the Olympic, the Baltic and the first on the scene, the Carpathia. The North Atlantic was a busy stretch of sea. Or, had the Californian (within visual range of the unfolding tragedy) responded to distress calls, the lifeboats would have been adequate for the purpose they were intended—to ferry passengers to safety.

There was, simply, very little reason to question the Board of Trade's wisdom about lifeboat requirements. Shipbuilders and operators thought the government was on top of it; that experts in the public service had rationally assessed the dangers of sea travel and regulated accordingly. Otherwise why have the regulations at all?

This is not the way the story is usually told.

Recall in James Cameron's 1997 film, "Titanic," the fictionalized Thomas Andrews character claims to have wanted to install extra lifeboats but "it was thought by some that the deck would look too cluttered." Mr. Cameron saw his movie as a metaphor for the end of the world, so historical accuracy was not at a premium.

Yet the historian Simon Schama appears to have received his knowledge of this issue from the Cameron film, writing in Newsweek recently that "Chillingly, the shortage of lifeboats was due to shipboard aesthetics." (Mr. Schama also sees the Titanic as a metaphor, this time for "global capitalism" hitting the Lehman Brothers iceberg.)

This claim—that the White Star Line chose aesthetics over lives—hinges on a crucial conversation between Alexander Carlisle, the managing director of the shipyard where Titanic was built, and his customer Bruce Ismay, head of White Star Line, in 1910.

Carlisle proposed that White Star equip its ships with 48 lifeboats—in retrospect, more than enough to save all passengers and crew. Yet after a few minutes discussion, Ismay and other senior managers rejected the proposal. The Titanic historian Daniel Allen Butler (author of "Unsinkable") says Carlisle's idea was rejected "on the grounds of expense."

But that's not true. In the Board of Trade's post-accident inquiry, Carlisle was very clear as to why White Star declined to install extra lifeboats: The firm wanted to see whether regulators required it. As Carlisle told the inquiry, "I was authorized then to go ahead and get out full plans and designs, so that if the Board of Trade did call upon us to fit anything more we would have no extra trouble or extra expense."

So the issue was not cost, per se, or aesthetics, but whether the regulator felt it necessary to increase the lifeboat requirements for White Star's new, larger, class of ship.

This undercuts the convenient morality tale about safety being sacrificed for commercial success that sneaks into most accounts of the Titanic disaster.

The responsibility for lifeboats came "entirely practically under the Board of Trade," as Carlisle described the industry's thinking at the time. Nobody seriously thought to second-guess the board's judgment.

This is a distressingly common problem. Governments find it easy to implement regulations but tedious to maintain existing ones—politicians gain little political benefit from updating old laws, only from introducing new laws.

And regulated entities tend to comply with the specifics of the regulations, not with the goal of the regulations themselves. All too often, once government takes over, what was private risk management becomes regulatory compliance.

It's easy to weave the Titanic disaster into a seductive tale of hubris, social stratification and capitalist excess. But the Titanic's chroniclers tend to put their moral narrative ahead of their historical one.

At the accident's core is this reality: British regulators assumed responsibility for lifeboat numbers and then botched that responsibility. With a close reading of the evidence, it is hard not to see the Titanic disaster as a tragic example of government failure

Eagle Nest

Check out this live cam of an eagle's nest with three babies!

http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles

Happy Easter!

Hoping everyone had a happy Easter weekend. We're starting to see a trend with Ava and holiday photos... or it could be that this is the creepiest bunny I've ever seen...

Love you all,

Allan, Kathleen & Ava

A Patient Named Lachlan

Lachlan was in the hospital this week for a "small" procedure to repair a hernia in his stomach wall. They gave him a special hospital gown and trousers with orange tigers all over them. Lachlan was very brave.

The operation took longer than anyone expected, even the doctor. After the procedure Lachlan took a nap in the recovery room.

That night Lachlan slept in his own bed. He hugged his new stuffed Nemo. He didn't wake up all night.

The next day Lachlan was swollen but smiling. He played with Nemo and James, his new red train. He called his sisters with Skype and Facetime.

The day after that he danced and laughed and ran laps around the apartment.

Black Jack

The doctor tells us that grandkid #21 is a boy! One of each, the all American family! Now to come up with a name... It needs to be strong and original. Something with meaning. We can't use Jack or Monty, already assigned those to the cats. I know, I remember long ago... I had come up with the best name for a cat! Doug. Hmmm, this isn't going so well... this name thing is hard! Well, we'll come up with something but I wanted everyone to know that we're doing our best to even out the boy/girl ratio. Love you all,

Allan, Kathleen & Avangeline

Practice Makes Perfect

I've been reading the book "Talent Is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune, which aims to debunk the myth that the world's top performers - whether in sports or business or chess - possess some type of innate ability that the rest of us don't.

Some interesting points:

Mozart, I've always heard, was reputed to be able to compose symphonies in his head. Not so, says Colvin. That belief can be traced back to a letter that was later proven to be a forgery. The truth: Mozart's manuscripts are as marked up with revisions as Beethoven or any other composer. Further, Mozart's early works were simply rearranged compositions of other composers, of little note, and he didn't compose anything exceptional until his 9th symphony, at the age of 21. That's 18 years after he began his rigorous training.

Apparently Mozart starting learning at a young age from his father, who was also a composer. The presence of a driven, skilled parent is a common story for those with "innate talent" regardless of the profession. Tiger Woods in golf, Andy Roddick in tennis, and Warren Buffett in investing each had one, and began their training at an exceptionally young age.

The point Colvin makes is that disciplined practice is what distinguishes top performers from the rest, not innate skills. The early start of Tiger and Roddick meant they had practiced more hours than anyone else in their age group, and that gave them an edge. And by practice, Colvin emphasizes long periods of specific skill-improving repetition, not just "hitting the ball around" or "jamming". Coaching is almost always required, even when they are at the top. Malcolm Gladwell makes similar points in "Outliers."

Colvin also spent a great deal of time talking about memory and how exceptional memory is learned, not innate, and generally specific to a single area of expertise. Example: chess experts can memorize where the pieces are on a board much faster than non-experts, but only when its a real game. If the pieces are placed randomly, experts tested the same as nonexperts.

While I haven't finished the book, his punchline seems to be that there is no replacement for experience, in particular the type of self-improving experience that is hard work and few people want to do.

What does that experience give top performers? Colvin mentions a few things:

1. They develop ways to access more information in a shorter amount of time than average, and gain an edge that way. Conversely, they develop the judgment required to read situations with less information and fill in the blanks.

2. They also develop intricate mental models of how their domain works, and use them to predict likely outcomes of any given action, filter important information from the noise, and know which buttons to push on whatever machine they are operating, and when to push them. It's interesting to note that Johnson O'Connor had a "structural visualization" aptitude test that sounds similar, but again Colvin asserts this is not innate, its something people learn to do.

3. Another common trait is they have a highly tuned process for achieving excellence. Before Chris Rock does his stand-up act for 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden, he has refined his material over a large number of sessions in front of small forums. He refines what works and drops what doesn't work.

It is, in the end, a book about succeeding in business. Colvin draws many parallels between business managment and the more visible sports and entertainment examples. He rebukes the theory, born of MBA programs and consulting groups like McKinsey, that great general managers could be plopped into any business situation, apply a set of standard rules, and be successful. Not so. More and more companies are looking for managers with deep domain expertise, because it is the foundation of sound judgment and good decisions. Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric since 2001, points to their aircraft division as a place where long tenure of management has resulted in 4-5 key decisions that won them 50 years of industry leadership. By contrast, in their reinsurance business, where they've churned people, he says they've basically failed.

A final note: Colvin doesn't think intelligence, measured by IQ or any other measure, is necessarily an advantage. Why is that? Because smart people often decide, for whatever reason, they don't want to do the work.

This is an 8" floppy that would hold 128k bytes. Dad used a lot of these in the early days...

It was on this day in 1975 that the Homebrew Computer Club first met. It turned out to be an enormously influential hobby club: its existence made possible the personal computer. At the time, computers were not for personal use or owned by individuals. For one thing, they were gigantic in size-- a computer easily took up an entire room. And they were very expensive, costing about a million dollars each. Not even computer engineers or programmers who made a living working on computers had access to their own personal computers. But many of these tech-minded people wanted to build personal computers for fun, to use at home. And they decided to start a hobbyist club to trade circuit-boards and information and share enthusiasm. The first of its kind, the Homebrew Computer Club first met 36 years ago today — in somebody's home garage in the Silicon Valley.

Among the early members: high school friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who designed the Apple I and II to bring down to the club to show it off, as well as Lee Felsentein and Adam Osborne, who would later create the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1. Other legendary figures in the computer world, including Bob Marsh, George Morrow, Jerry Lawson, and John Draper, were Homebrew members.

Less than five years later Dad bought his first computer. It was shortly after we moved to Gilford in 1979. It was then that he started consulting for Alphatype. That first computer cost $30,000. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Ski Utah

Elliot and Emmaline take a break from skiing the 4 ft of new 5% water density powder. It's just waiting for you!

New Englanders

Monique helped me track down Grammie Kimball's family, the Harrimans. Seems they're from England and our first Harriman ancestor born in the US was Jonathan Harriman born on Dec 5, 1657 in Rowley/Georgetown, Mass. Subsequent Harrimans stayed close to home in Haverhill, Bradford and Groveland.

One thing that's interesting about this is that all four Grandparent family lines (Tidd, Prescott, Kimball and Harriman) came to Massachusetts by the mid 1600s from England and stayed in Massachusetts for the next 350 years - mostly the Haverhill/Georgetown area.

As a reference, Plymouth Colony was founded in 1620.

The Andes Crossing Revisited

Hello, here are some fotos of our recent race via the link. Hats off to Luciana for running a great race...all the pressure is on the women in a mixed team. We finished 1st in the mixed category and 4th overall. Sweet!

https://plus.google.com/photos/117490841777311448667/albums/5711331480482590241?authkey=CI3Unc2Ip8bDwwE&banner=pwa&gpsrc=pwrd1#photos/117490841777311448667/albums/5711331480482590241

Enjoy! I highly recomend a visit to the south of Argentina!

Highlights from Danielle's 2011 Soccer Season

Here is a link to a video with some highlights from Danielle's soccer season. She will be sending this to college soccer coaches to try and generate some interest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjLEeW0Kt_Y

Hacking into Mom's email

So Mom has been using "18grands" for her password for years now. Nathan and I have increased the grandkid pool to 20 and Mom mentioned that she needed to update it. Not so fast! Just to save Mom the aggravation of changing it again, Ava has a little buddy in the works. So Kathleen and I would like to claim grandchild #21 unless there's some information we're not aware of (Cy?????). We already have a cat named Black Jack, I'm not sure I can use that name again....

25th Anniversary Trip

Here are A few photos from Bill and Melanie's 25th anniversary cruise in April 2011...


The ship...




The ship in Malta...





Our cabin was in the rear, the fourth pair of windows from the right, above where the ropes are attached to the ship...




Kicking back in the cabin reading a book about the Mayflower...




The happy couple at dinner...




On the deck (with lifeboats overhead)...




The ship today...