Steve's Blog

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.

William Safire
US columnist & speechwriter (1929 – )

From The Quotations Page

From a private point of view, only one:

In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers’ happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter [TC: remember the result that fathers with sons are less likely to leave?]. The first child’s sex doesn’t matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.

Interestingly, second and third children don’t add to parents’ happiness at all. In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child-though still happier than women with no children.

"If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child," concludes Kohler, adding that people probably have additional children either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too.

Here is the longer story. See this paper. Here is the researcher’s home page.

I am hardly an expert in this area, but I find the logic appealing. One kid is quite able to fill your time and thoughts. I call this the "parent as empty vessel" model. The argument for more than one kid, in this view, would rest on risk-aversion and the chance that one kid might die or not work out so well.

Note the contrast between Kohler with Bryan Caplan’s theory that you should have more kids now than you want, so you may enjoy them when you are old. At that point in time, no single kid "fills the empty vessel" and so more of them are needed.

I believe that men enjoy children more than women do, as they are less stressed by worry. Whether men want children more is a different question [this last sentence has been altered from a previous version.]

The pointer is from the still totally awesome www.politicaltheory.info.

From Marginal Revolution

Apple Insider got an "inside" look at Apple’s NAB setup. They reported that Apple’s server included 3/4 Petabytes of storage space, 3 miles of fiber optic cable, 4 M2 Gb networks, 90 Xserves and 40 Xserve RAIDs. Pardon me while I change my pants.

An interesting point was brought up on MacSlash:

There are systems on the list of the Top 500 Supercomputers with fewer and/or slower processors and slower network connections. Who knows? With a little reconfiguration and optimization for the LINPACK benchmark, maybe, just maybe… Just a little something for you to ruminate on while you marvel at the report’s pretty pictures.

Hit the jump for more pictures of Apple’s ubersetup.

Just how important is the professional video market to Apple? You tell me. – Mark Wilson

High Quality Photos of Apple at NAB 2007 [via MacSlash]

From Gizmodo

You gotta love anything disposable, and now the research to back up what I always knew – anything that avoids doing the dishes has to be a good idea

Here’s a life-cycle energy analysis on reusable vs. disposable cups -another data set to look at would be from washing a cup in the sink (I have a dishwasher and never wash cups in it) but that said, a lot of people use a dishwasher for everything. There are other factors like soap production, transportation costs, etc too, but then it would be really confusing.

It’s interesting to note that a ceramic cup takes 1,000 uses to break even with foam cups. so, about 3 years if you use a cup every day – that’s not so bad — perhaps someone could make a line of coffee cups that say "use me for 3 years to recoup the energy costs" it would make the cup more important and more heirloom-like. People would try and save the cup for as many years as possible to be efficient. Maybe bight green cups with the date of creation on the bottom.

Someone tell treehugger.

This classic life-cycle energy analysis was performed by University of Victoria professor of chemistry Martin B. Hocking. Hocking compared three types of reusable drinking cups (ceramic, glass and reusable plastic) to two types of disposable cups (paper and polystyrene foam).

The energy of manufacture of reusable cups is vastly larger than the energy of manufacture of disposable cups (Table 1). In order for a reusable cup to be an improvement over a disposable one on an energy basis, you have to use it multiple times, in order to "cash in" on the energy investment you made in the cup. If a cup lasts only ten uses, then each use gets "charged’ for one-tenth of the manufacturing energy. If it lasts for a hundred uses, then each use gets charged for only one-hundredth of the manufacturing energy.

But in order to reuse a cup, it has to be washed. The efficiency of the dishwasher, and the efficiency of the energy system that powers it, determine how much energy is required for each wash.

Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment, thanks Saul Link.

From MAKE Magazine

How true…

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."

– Philip K. Dick

From The Quotations Page