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Happy Sunset day! (It’s the day of the earliest sunset)

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Greetings, and happy Sunset Day to all!

This is the day of the earliest sunset of the year in mid-northern latitudes; after today, the sunsets begin, ever so slowly, to be later, according to clock time.If you aren’t familiar with this interesting phenomenon, you can read my personal take on it in my article on the subject.  (Article included below.)Some additional resources:

For a technical explanation at a nicely done web site (requires Java and Quicktime; be sure to keep going past on the second page — use the arrow at the page bottom):  http://www.analemma.com/Now, I know that this is somewhat latitude-chauvinistic.  Sunset Day is 8 December, or close enough, for 32N to 45N latitude.Empirically, it appears to be about 12 December at Cambridge, UK (52N) and perhaps 14 December at Edinburgh (57N).  (As for Australia, it’s irrelevant — you’ll have to make do with enjoying summer!)  But the principle mentioned in the article is at work in all the non-tropical north.

May all your sunsets be later!

Doug Dodds (dodds@pobox.com or dodds@csail.mit.edu)Cambridge, Mass., USA

Analemma, my Analemmaby Douglas Dodds

When I came to Boston from St. Louis, I first had to adjust to the trauma of the local climate.  A bit later, another environmental difference became evident: the hours of daylight and darkness.  Two memories of my first year at MIT epitomize the difference.  I remember seeing the red sun five minutes from setting at 4 pm on an early December afternoon; I realizied that it sure had been getting dark early.  And I remember staying up most of the night studying in late April, and being astonished that daylight was breaking in the east at 3:45 am!I soon understood that Boston’s more northerly latitude resulted in a larger excursion in length of daylight than I was used to (roughly between 9 hours and 15 hours); and that its position relatively far east in the Eastern Time Zone shifted the whole day toward the morning on the clock (local mean solar noon here occurs 16 minutes before noon, EST).  I love the long, light summer evenings here, but have always been depressed by the early darkness in winter.In recent years, I got a bit interested in astronomy, and discovered a subtler effect: the actual solar time cyclically speeds up and slows down relative to mean solar time over the course of the year!  During most of the year the deviation of actual from mean solar time is small and slow, but between November and February, sun time travels from its maximum “fastness” to its maximum “slowness”, a total excursion of 30 minutes!One result of the wintertime swing in relative solar time is that although, as everyone knows, December 21 (approximately) is the shortest day of the year, the day of the latest sunrise is almost two weeks later, on January 4.  And, most important (fanfare), the earliest sunset occurs on December 8!  Amazingly, the sunset actually begins, ever so slowly, to become later after that date.I am seldom concerned with when the sun rises, late as that is during the Boston winter; the time of sunset defines my length of daylight.  So since that discovery, it has always been a cheering consolation to me that the “day” is already at its shortest on December 8, before winter really has set in!  For me, the light returns already; it makes winter a little easier to face.

Why the Daylight Period Varies

The strange and fascinating wandering of actual solar time relative to the clock is expressed in a peculiar parametric curve called the analemma.  It shows (now listen carefully) the locus of the subsolar point on the Earth’s surface at a given Universal Time, for all days of the year.  Alternatively, it is the locus of the sun in the sky at a given clock time, say 9 AM, on all days of the year.If one were to strobe the sun at the same clock time every day for a year, the sun would trace out its analemma in the sky.  Somebody has actually done this!  In a photograph that is now a classic, Dennis di Cicco of Sky and Telescope magazine photographed the sun on the same plate (through a filter), with a permanently mounted camera, about every ten days, at exactly the same time of the morning.  He then removed the filter to shoot the background in normal daylight; the result was a cluster of suns rising over his neighbor’s house, in the bottom-heavy figure-8 shape of an analemmaic curve.The analemma is a parametric curve, plotting north-south latitude on the Y-axis, deviation in east-west longitude on the X-axis, and the parameter of graphing is the calendar date.  An alternative interpretation of the X variable is time, via the Earth’s rotation speed of one degree of longitude every four minutes.  If there were no deviation of solar time, the analemma would just be a vertical line, tracking the sun’s seasonal movement from about 23 degrees north of the equator to 23 degrees south.The actual looping analemma is due to the sum of two effects.

  • The first has to do with the seasonal apparent travel of the sun north and south.  The sun (or rather the subsolar point) travels at a constant speed along a wavy (sinusoidal) path.  It is roughly at a northern plateau around the June solstice, moving almost parallel to the equator.  It then begins to angle south, crossing at the September equinox, then approaching a southerly plateau in December, and so on. The speed along the path is constant, but the longitudinal (east- west) travel of the sun against the coordinates of the sky is the projection of this speed on the equator.  Clearly, this cycles faster and slower.  Around the solstices, the projected motion is at its fastest, around the equinoxes at its slowest.  The result of this effect alone would be a propeller-shaped analemma, a skinny, equal-looped figure-8.
  • The other effect, completely independent, is due to the fact that the earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle, but is slightly elliptical.  The Earth moves a little faster when travelling the portion of its orbit that is closer to the sun, a little slower on the more distant part.  So the advance of the sun across the firmament varies correspondingly faster and slower through the year.

By coincidence, the ellipticality effect is, at this epoch, almost synchronized with the seasonal motion of the sun: perihelion (Earth closest to sun) is on January 3, the southern solstice on December 21.  So the resulting curve from the elliptical orbit alone is a thin elliptical analemma tilted slightly to the northwest-southeast.The complete analemma is the sum of these two curves.  The longitudinal extents of the two are roughly equal; and they are in phase (reinforcing) on the southern half (our winter) and at opposite phase (cancelling) in the northern.  The result is a distorted figure-8 curve with a very fat bottom loop, a small top loop, and a slight scrunch to the right.The time deviation of the sun is slight from April to September, less than five minutes fast or slow.  But the sun reaches its maximum fastness (16 minutes) in mid-November (sunrises and sunsets are earlier than average).  And it reaches its maximum slowness (14 minutes) in late February (sunsets later).  The period around the December solstice is a headlong rush of the daylight toward the evening.  The result is the widely spread latest-sunrise and earliest-sunset times that I enjoy so much, while the northern winter sets in.

My main reference for the information in this piece is an excellent article on the analemma by Bernard Oliver, in Sky and Telescope, July 1972.    

Upgraded my Macintosh. Super-stressful day. … Not!?

Bought a new Mac. Wanted to duplicate the config on my old one. Figured it would be 16 hours of reinstalling, reconfiguring, etc.

Turned on the new Mac. It asked if I was migrating from an existing machine. I said Yes. It said “Copying…” Copying happened. Then the machine booted, completely configured, set up, and ready to go exactly as if it were the old machine.

With my last Windows system, it took literally three times as long just to reinstall the operating system than it took to completely migrate to a new Mac  and copy 100Gb of iTunes, media files, data, and preferences.

I then spent a stressful four hours hunting frantically for some application that must surely have broken in the copying. Some preference that didn’t get transferred. Some critical system file that got overwritten.

Nope.

All that stress Microsoft had trained me to have, totally wasted. Apple did with a software team one tenth the size what Microsoft hasn’t managed for 15 years. (And don’t give me some crap line about how Microsoft has to support so many open architectures. They’ve deliberately ignored, adapted, and “extended” standards since 1993 precisely to insure consumers were forced to choose between compatibility and Microsoft software.)

The amazing thing is that I know many excellent software engineers who have gone to work for MSoft over the years. Really, really good people. Somehow, their genius hasn’t made it to the world of actual shipping software. All that talent, design ability, and skill made irrelevant and useless.

Now the question is: do I do a Get-it-Done Guy column about this? It really represents a HUGE efficiency gain, but I don’t want to provoke religious wars. Hmm…

More social networking?

My goodness. Now “Plaxo Pulse” wants me, and it insists on updating me daily that my friends and acquaintances added each other as friends, or poked someone, or whatever verbs Plaxo monitors. All I know is that if all these people actually picked up the phone to call each other instead of mucking around with Plaxo, they might actually have a real life. I continue to be utterly confused as to what the benefit of these sites are. In all my time on MyspaceFacebookLinkedInEtc., I’ve certainly reconnected with a couple of people and exchanged a few emails. At the cost of hours and days of time. If I’d spent that same time simply browsing my address book and picking up the phone, I would have reconnected with dozens of people.  (Who would then add me to their Friends list on Facebook. Hmm…)

Please, gentle readers, tell me what value you get from these sites. I must be missing something, I just don’t know what! (That’s why I’m missing it…)

I was right. I just love being right.

Cool! I love having my insecurities soothed by being right. And heck, it’s just plain fun to feel right.

I wrote a blog post in 2006: https://www.steverrobbins.com/blog/wells-fargo-do-record-profits-herald-disaster/

In it, I look at publicly available figures for Wells Fargo and conclude they’re doing really dumb things. Today Forbes had a story where those really dumb things collapse in the very predictable way.

Jeez… if I could see this (and I’m NOT a banking or finance person), why isn’t the Wells Fargo board de-voted, de-installed, and homeless? – Stever

The “Get-it-Done Guy” is now live!!

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I’m extremely happy to report that my new podcast has launched! Check out:

The Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More at http://getitdone.quickanddirtytips.com. You can subscribe via iTunes by doing this:

  1. Start iTunes
  2. Search the iTunes store for “Get it done guy”
  3. Choose “Podcast” from the drop-down list of result types at the upper left of the store pane (it probably says “All results” initially)
  4. Click on the Get-It-Done Guy’s icon

Cheers!

Stever

Will the Tragedy of the Commons doom social networking?

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Is Social Networking a Tragedy of the Commons?

I’m starting to think so. They’re pretty cool. They let you share yourself and your life with your friends. You find out more about them, they find out more about you, you swap cool stuff. Life is good.

And therein lies the problem. Life is so good that everyone is saying, “Gee, let’s start a social networking sites.” So more start. Then the originals come up with cool ideas, plug-ins, upload-your-address-books, etc. so everyone will stay on those original sites. They make it really easy for all their members to invite still more members.

The Commons here is any given member’s free time to spend doing social networking. At this point, I’m on Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and some “friends” have uploaded my name to Plaxo and Cardscan, who are now clamoring for attention.

The problem is that I enjoy social networking, but six sites? Give me a break. I’m lucky to have 10 minutes a day for these sites. Unlike many of my 21st century counterparts, I like doing things in the real world(*), which limits my online time.

Sadly, I’m now at the point where I ignore many new friend requests. I ignore it when my friends send me a “vampire bite” or electronically “chest thump” me. It would be fun to play, but there’s just too much coming at once. Picking and choosing is a necessity.

As more and more players decide that building community is the way to go, people will either ignore new communities or will have to devote less and less time to more and more communities … thus making those communities more shallow and less satisfying.

Where will it end? I’m curious to find out. My guess is that over time, we’ll have a couple of major social networking sites. The smaller sites will die off, and a few specialized communities will stick around. But which will vanish and which will survive? If you’re smart enough to figure that one out, give me a clue so I can buy stock today.

(*) How ironic is this for a kid whose social life was exclusively online until age 16, in an era when no one was online, so I was endlessly teased about it.

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How can US car companies *still* not get it?

Have you seen this Reuters article on how GM is suffering record losses? It’s amazing that they attribute GM’s slump to “suffering from stalling U.S. auto sales, a slumping housing market and rising oil prices.”

Gee, last time I checked, for the last twenty-frickin-seven years, American cars (and GM’s in particular) lag foreign imports in terms of quality, gas mileage, and style. Detroit just got done fighting legislation that would require them to meet, by 2020, the mileage standards Toyota currently gets.

Yet the news article persists in blaming external forces. Here’s my version:

GM has suffered record losses. After more than a generation of unimaginative, incompetent management, the company still ignores the importance consumers place on style, durability, quality, or gas mileage. As a natural consequence of producing an inferior product that doesn’t respond to market needs, people aren’t buying as many GM cars. The company calls this a “slump in sales,” though it could easily be framed as a consequence of GM’s own decisions. Rising oil prices (anticipated for over 20 years and a reality for the last six) motivate consumers to buy non-GM cars. Slumping housing prices further encourage people to drive existing cars longer, and buy higher-quality, longer-lasting, greater-mileage imports.

It was once said, “What’s good for GM is good for America.” Times change. Now, the best thing for America may be for GM to go under, freeing up its substantial resources to be redeployed more productively.

Is Love of Counting is the Root of All Evil?

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The love of money isn’t the root of all evil; *arithmetic* is the root of all evil. More specifically, counting. And it could be ruining your life. Here’s the podcast. My full October 2007 newsletter on the dangers of counting can be found in my website’s articles archive at:
http://SteverRobbins.com/articles/is-counting-evil.htm.

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Is Counting the Root of all Evil?

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Click here to listen to this article as a podcast.

The love of money isn’t the root of all evil; arithmetic is the root of all evil. More specifically, counting.

Don’t get me wrong; counting was a wonderful invention. It has its uses. We can keep track of kids: “Are all 5 kids here? Let’s see, 1… 2… 3… 4… where’s Billy?” We can keep track of time. “He’s working overtime in the salt mines, honey. Instead of 12 hours, he’s working 14 hours today. He’ll be home at … 9, 10. Yes, 10 p.m.” And we can keep track of money: “He gets paid $1.49/hour working overtime, so our bank balance will be $11.37 … $12.37 … $13.37 … $13.86 after Billy gives us his share.” In fact, they remind us over and over in MBA school that “What gets measured, gets managed.”

So where’s the problem? This is evil? This gave us the industrial-friggin’-revolution. This sounds great!!

We measure the wrong stuff

Well, the problem starts when we choose what to measure. We often measure what doesn’t lead to our goal, and expect the measuring to magically create the managing.

Want profit? Let’s count expenses. Tell all managers to submit weekly reports of their team’s expenses. Let’s call it a TPS Report, and count how many TPS reports people send, to make sure they’re doing their job (which has silently morphed from “running a profitable business” to “submitting TPS reports”). Well, whoopie. We’ve added a whole layer of useless counting, and then another layer to count who is and isn’t counting. Since we don’t actually know what to do with the silly TPS report, we slide further from profitability. We’re counting the wrong thing.

Or how about sick days? There’s a hoot. “You only get six sick days.” Nice. Like that’s controllable. If you’re sick for seven days, come on in and give it to everyone else in your department, so everyone has to take six days off. You can measure sick days, but the measure is useless.

Seemingly meaningful measurements … aren’t

Then we make up measurements that mean nothing and try to manage those. “Let’s rank our employees. Then we can fire the bottom 10%.” Sounds easy; isn’t easy. (Sadly, however, it is a much-publicized Jack Welch policy.) How much time will managers spend on this ranking exercise? Do they apply consistent standards that are directly related to the company’s goals? Do we fire the 10% of managers whose ranking skill is in the bottom 10%? Who decides that?

Ranking is hard. Really hard. In fact, in 1963, psychologist George Miller’s famous paper “The Magic Number 7 +/- 2” presented results showing people can make ranking distinctions between 5 to 9 items, and then we pretty much lose track. If you think you can accurately rank a 250-person department, you’re deluded and thus in the bottom 10%; it’s time to pack your bags.

Even if you can rank, can you use the rankings for action? We want to punt the bottom 10% of the company. We can’t really compare an accountant against a design engineer, so our fresh new Harriford MBA, Darren, suggests we eliminate 10% of each department. That will add up to 10% of the company.

But what if our 30 design engineers rock, while our 30 accountants all suck eggs? As a company, we want to fire six accountants (10% of 60 employees) and no design engineers. But firing 10% of each department means we leave three mediocre accountants standing, and three rockin’ design engineers out of work. That’s clearly wrong. But we get one benefit: we know Darren didn’t understand the logic of firing, so we know he’s in the bottom 10% and should be fired. Success! We have at least one confirmed cost savings from this exercise.

Measurement turns us evil

I know you’re asking: what in heaven’s name does this have to do with spirituality, morality, and/or the rest of our lives? (If you weren’t asking that, don’t worry, just go with the flow.)

Here’s where the evil comes in. We only measure so we can make decisions about those measurements and change our behavior. But we do this by judging the measurements as “good” or “bad.” When we’re measuring a “bad” trend, we panic. We’re afraid. We’re angry. We get frustrated, anxious, mean, jealous, violent, and nasty.

How do people act when they feel anxious, mean, jealous, violent, and nasty? Fortunately, we live in a Highly Evolved Society, so we meditate for five minutes, do some yoga, and we’re fine. NOT! Most people want to get rid of the bad feelings. Some fudge the numbers and play financial games. Think Enron. Some people hit something. Some people treat everyone around like crap. And some people blame.

Yes, they blame. They blame colleagues. “Sales are down! Sally distracted me so I lost the big prospect.” They blame loved ones. “I went over my sick day quota since I had to take Billy to treatment for his Black Lung disease.” They blame the government.”If it weren’t for the (Republicans/Democrats), (the economy/the occupation/global warming/life/love/happiness) would be better.” And they blame themselves. “I’m just a failure.”

All because they counted, then got emotionally wedded to the counting.

What counts and what doesn’t?

I’ve been talking so far about business, only not really. We count the wrong things in business, we count the wrong things in life. We go to pieces when our business counts go off-track, we go to pieces when our real-life counts go off-track. And remember, real life counts more. Where do you get caught in the counting?

Some of us count who’s done more housework, us or our spouse. Some of us count the dollars in our savings account. Some of us count what someone does to prove they love us. Some of us count how pious our neighbors are. It all turns into judgment, and from there, into emotion. When the counting is going the way we want, we think life is good. When the counting goes the other way, we get upset.

The upset is extra, though! It’s our reaction to the counting. The counting doesn’t cause the problem; it’s our stories about the counting that cause the problem.

Let’s fix this. Let counting be counting. Let emotion be emotion. All this score-keeping, counting, and measuring is made up. It’s all fantasy. It’s a convenient tool for making decisions. But it’s not real. And it’s certainly not worth turning yourself into an ogre, feeling horrible, and abusing yourself and your loved ones.

What if you count and discover your bank account isn’t high enough to send your kids to college? Don’t get upset. Use it as information and change your savings plan. But don’t beat yourself up. You can’t do anything for your kids that way, except set a bad example. Use the information to stay centered and work with the people you love to fix the situation.

What if you count and discover your spouse overcharged on the credit card? You can fly into a rage, or you can sit down with your spouse, love each other tremendously, and decide from that place how you’ll deal with the situation. I used the “fly-into-a-rage” method several times. It didn’t pay the bill, nor did it make me an attractive snuggle partner, even to our stuffed animals. The counting-as-information plus love-then-problem-solving works way better.

What if you count pounds, and discover you have more than you want? You can get depressed and eat a chocolate cake to help yourself feel better (Stever’s diet advice: learn to distinguish “sugar rush” from “feel better”). Or realize the number’s just information you can use to change your diet. If you’re going to diet, doing it from a place of fun makes it … well … more fun. And if you’re not going to diet, then at least enjoy the chocolate cake. But don’t let counting trick you into not-dieting, and also not enjoying the cake. That’s plain foolishness!

And what if you count and discover you’re not as rich as Darren, despite your superior skills? Or you’re not as rich as the goal you set at age 23? You can call yourself a failure and jump out of a plane without a parachute. That’s one solution. But maybe you can notice that a number is just a number, while you’re an entire human being who has much more to offer than a number.

Counting is optional. If you stop counting and look around, you just might find you’re warm, dry, full, and reading the web. And that’s not such a bad place to be. So count only when it’s useful, don’t take it too seriously, and feel good either way. Move your attention from counting to living. Put your attention on the things that make you feel happy, joyous, and grateful. If you must count, count those, and every day, count a little higher. It’s your life, and only you can make your counting count.