Thinking out loud: Fairness and Ethics

A close friend of mine sent me this interesting Planet Money article the other day

The Fall And Rise Of U.S. Inequality, In 2 Graphs

I don't see why they needed 2 graphs, because they seemed pretty redundant to me. Either way, here's the graph:

It's a really nice way of showing the income inequality in the US, and how's it's changed over time. The take home point is that the richest 1% have seen a huge increase in their income while the middle class has been more or less stagnant for the last 20-30 years.

We talked about this for awhile, but I kept coming back to a question that I come around to in most discussions:

Is this bad? 

This is so tricky for me to answer. I have the gut reaction that most people probably have, and I say to myself "that's not fair!" But then I ask myself, "So what? Life's not fair."

In my discussion with my friend, I realized that this is a topic in which we have vastly different opinions. His approach to determining whether something is ethical often involves asking how fair it is. The more fair it is, the better. And less fair things are bad things.

I find it better to detach myself from questions of fairness in this instance, since my opinion of fairness comes from an emotional reaction, which is often very irrational.

However, I'm sort of a hypocrite, because I think questions of fairness have a place in many other issues. Here's a few of them where I think fairness is really important:

• The gender pay gap
• Racial profiling by police
• Mass incarceration of minor crimes with mandatory minimum sentences

But can I have it both ways? Can fairness be important some times and not others?

I'm not sure that I have an answer to that question yet.

Florida to North Carolina

So we're settling into our new place in Raleigh, North Carolina. Raleigh is such a nice change from the heat and congestion of Miami.

The move felt like it took forever. We tried to find someone to take over our lease, but in the end we had to pay a penalty to get out of lease in Miami. Then my boss, Brian Mapes, was very generous and let us stay in a little building behind his house in Coral Gables that he referred to as a "mother-in-law cottage". It was a very cozy little spot that were are eternally thankful for, since it made our transition much easier.

On our way to North Carolina, we stopped for a night in South Carolina. Andrea's aunt and uncle from Iowa have a house near Mrytle Beach that another Aunt and cousin just happened to be visiting while we were passing through. It was great to see them and have a nice (and free!) place to stay.

The trip was about 12 hours of driving, which was not bad. The hardest part is that we had to drive separate cars, since we had 2 cars and 2 drivers. We listened to a LOT of podcasts. What did people do before podcasts?!?! Andrea listened to one about beer called Strange Brews, which was pretty interesting. I found that it can get boring though, since it's just a couple guys talking to each other about beer. Apparently there's a few podcasts about beer out there. I would never have guessed!

The most addicting podcast was called "Serial". It's one story, told in a dozen episodes or so. The story was about this guy who got convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend. The problem is that the evidence for convicting him was really spotty. But on the other hand, there's no better explanation for why someone would kill her. I highly recommend this podcast for anyone needing to kill a lot of time.

We made it to Raleigh, safe and sound. We found a nice little apartment and that in a really great location so we can bike almost anywhere that we need to go! Andrea got a job at a local bottle shop. I'm still wrapping up research from my last job, but I'm really enjoying work these days.

That's all the news for now!

New Year's Resolutions: 2015

2014 was a huge year for me personally. Here's the highlights:

• Finished my Ph.D.
• Got my first real science job at the University of Miami
• Got engaged to the love of my life (!)
• Travelled to Germany
• Received the NSF AGS fellowship

Each of those things have left me feeling very lucky. Sometimes I feel bad that it took me longer than most to finish my Ph.D., but that's hardly something to complain about, given that I've found a career that I really enjoy, which something a lot of people don't have.

Last year I made a few goals, one of which I failed to meet. Here's the list from 2014:

• run at least 2x per week on average (success!)
• have 3 publications either published or submitted (fail)

I had 1 paper get published, and I submitted another paper in late December, so that's why I failed on the second goal. This year I'm gonna set the same goal again. If the recently submitted paper gets published, that will count. So I have to submit 2 more papers. This shouldn't be hard since I still have most of my Ph.D. dissertation un-published, and I've got all this new interesting stuff from my postdoc job with Brian Mapes at UM.

The running goal was new for me because it was quantifiable. In the past I had made an effort to do similar things, but I was always too vague about it. Like I would tell myself to "run more", but at the end of the year I never had any idea whether I actually done what I hoped to do. This year I made a serious effort to get better about tracking my running. Part of this was to use an app called Strava, for tracking miles and such. Strava is my favorite running/biking app for a few reasons, one of which is how it keeps stats for you. However, since my goal was to run a certain frequency per week, I need to calculate my own stats.

I decided to use Google drive to make a spreadsheet. The great thing about doing it this way is that I can edit it from anywhere, like my phone or office computer. Here's a snapshot of the data for 2014:

I really like this layout that I settled on. I can add more stats to the right hand side if I need to. This layout is nice and compact, and even is easy to work in leap days! The newest version of Google's spreadsheet program has lots of new and useful functions, which I make heavy use of. a good example is my formula for the "#/week" column:

= iferror(COUNTIF(B2:AF2, ">0")*7/count(B2:AF2))

The "iferror" function is a nice way to not have "ERROR" messages all over the place when you are dividing by a "count", which can often be zero.

Another nice thing about Google spreadsheets is the plotting capabilities. Here's a plot of the "# per week" and "miles per week":

The big dip in the middle is when we were travelling in Germany. in order to pack light I didn't even bring my running shoes, but I did do a ton of walking, so I don't feel bad about it. But because of some large gaps in my running, I barely made my goal at 2.03 runs per week!

So now I need to make some new goals for this year. I'm gonna up my weekly frequency, and also add a goal on getting my pace much faster. To do this I've made a new Google spreadsheet that can average times! it's pretty sweet. While I'm at it, I'm also adding a spreadsheet to track my weight, so this year's end-of-year summary should be pretty interesting.

To wrap up, here's my resolutions for 2015:

• Run 2.5 times per week on average
• Get my average pace down to at least 9:30
• Get my end of year weight down to 165 (which will be harder if I start lifting again)

We're Engaged!

She said yes! Not that I was worried....

I had been trying to propose for a while now, but several time my plans fell apart. Initially, I found a problem in my credit report, which luckily was nothing serious, but ultimately made it impossible to buy the ring I wanted. To make it worse, the credit reporting agency said it would require "opening an investigation" and take 30-45 days to correct a minor error! Somehow a credit fairy swooped in a cleared it all up in a couple weeks.

My first ideas were pretty big. First I wanted to have a barbershop quartet sing For the Longest Time by Billy Joel. But it turned out to be really hard to hire an a cappella group in Miami. Another time I had made reservations at a place that sits on a 16th floor terrace It was going to be at sunset in a big gesture written out on a elegant dessert. However, the day before some friends invited to happy hour at the same place!!! I couldn't get ahold of them, and I couldn't just casually mention that we go back to the same place the next day, so I cancelled the reservation.

I was getting somewhat discouraged. There never seemed to be a good time, and I couldn't find a place that felt right. Then on Oct. 11, I decided to try again at the Redfish Grill, which is in a state park and right next to the water. I was gonna "show up early" and suggest that we take a walk since our reservation wasn't for another 30 min. Then I would ask her on the beach and have a table waiting for us afterward. But as I called that morning to arrange the reservation I found out that the place was closed for a private event! I was pretty bummed, but I resolved that I would just wait another week and try to find a good day to try again. Later that day we went to a restaurant called "Swine" that is in Coral Gables, and has excellent food. The host ended up seating us upstairs and where we were all alone! In a flash on spontaneity I said "I forgot my wallet in the car" and went to get the ring. I gave my monologue, told her how I felt, got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. 

Although, it wasn't a very flashy proposal, Andrea's cousin, Mark, got me thinking that she wouldn't really like a public proposal. It was much more special for it to be a low key thing just between us. And it was even better that it was a total surprise!

And here's the obligatory ring picture:

We've talked a bit about getting married, but we haven't really talked about specifics of wedding planning and neither us really know what we want to do. So there will be lots more to report in the coming months!

Standing Desk ver. 1

I've wanted to try a standing desk for a while now, for a lot of reasons. Most recently, I've been working longer hours, and having trouble sleeping. I go to bed feeling like I hardly did anything all day, even though I actually did!

I started doing more research, and came across several articles and blog posts, saying,

• "Sitting is the new smoking"
• "Why sitting all day is slowly killing you"

and while I'm not exactly suffering from sedentary death syndrome, I thought it would be worthwhile to give standing a try. Eventually, if all goes well then I'll make myself a more permanent standing desk out of steel pipe, like this one, but in the mean time I needed a cheap alternative to test this idea out. There was this idea for making a standing desk converter for $22 using Ikea stuff, but Ikea was far away, and I felt like I could come up with something simpler.

Enter concrete blocks!

These things are just the right height I needed when you stand one on end (16 in), and at less than $2 each, they are dirt cheap! On the downside they are heavy and a pain in the ass to move, but they are just so cheap and perfect for a standing desk trial period.

So without further ado, I give you the first version of my standing desk!

I also got an anti-fatigue mat because most articles say everyone buys one of these at some point to help their feet. Tomorrow will be a full standing workday, so wish me luck!

Homeless in Miami

We arrived in Miami on August 1, 2014, and for 12 days we were totally homeless!!! We had signed a lease on a condo and we thought everything was in order. But when we arrived we learned that the paperwork for our application to the condo association (like an HOA) got lost in the shuffle! Every following day was filled with hope that they would get to our paperwork and be able to give us the key to our place, but for 12 long days we were continually disappointed.

Luckily, we didn't lose out on the rent during that period. There were some other unintended benefits...

For the weekends where we knew there was no chance of getting into our place we booked a room through AirBnB. This was my first experience with this site, but it was great. The first place we stayed was just an extra room in a young couples condo. We stayed in touch with these guys, and a couple weeks later they bought a boat and took us out for a joy ride! It's good to have friends with a boat.

On another occasion we got put up by my uncle Mike in Fort Lauderdale, who had a friend with a unoccupied condo. The condo was a little warm at night, because the AC wasn't working properly, but we were right on the beach. I wish I could wake up to the sunrise over the ocean out my balcony window every morning! I'm really glad we met Mike and his wife Janice. They couldn't be nicer! On another occasion we hung out on the beach and did some paddle boarding.

Our nomadic period also helped us get better acquainted with the layout of Miami. I've never actually lived in such a large city, and my internal GPS doesn't work as well an Andrea's, so I really benefitted from all the time we spent driving around aimlessly.

Germany Video

It took me awhile to put this together, and then it got locked up with our stuff while moving. So, without further ado.....

Ta Da!

Enjoy.

Wagons East!

Before we embarked on our journey down to Miami, some friends arranged a Progressive Dinner (a.k.a. safari supper). If you've never heard of this, it's a dinner party across several houses, where each location hosts a different course. We had 5 houses spread across Fort Collins, and some great food.

Each house also provided some kind of alcohol. Eventually I got pretty drunk and started taking close up pictures of people's faces. Here's a good one of my officemate Gus:

There was also this gem:

The party was complete with a foosball game, with Steph giving the play-by-play.

Aside from all the festivities and goodbyes, we still had that looming responsibility of packing up all our sh*t! Moving is always hard and frustrating, but this move felt especially torturous. After moving my stuff into Andrea's apartment, we found out that we had messed up the move out date. So instead of staying there during July, we ended up staying with Andrea's parents. I felt bad intruding, but we ended up being glad tht it worked out that way.Aside from saving a little money, I also got to know Andrea's parents much better.

During most of July, we did not have a place to move into in Miami. When we finally found a place a signed the lease, we started to realize that we couldn't bring as much as we wanted. In order to decide what to leave behind we used a floor plan, like the one below, and made scale cut-outs of all our furniture. It was a tedious process, but it really helped us visualize how much space we had to work with. In the end, we ended up leaving our living room chairs and Andrea's dresser (which she was (and still is) not happy about).

To move our suff such a long way, we used a service called UPack. They offer a service kind of like PODS, but they also offer a service where a trator trailer is dropped off at your place, and you fill up however much space you need. You then put up a temporary wall (i.e. bulkhead), and they charge you based on how much space you take up. It saved us some money and was pretty convenient.

One last jog up to Horsetooth reservoir

After the trailer was gone, we said our goodbyes to Colorado, loaded up our cars and headed east towards Iowa. Andrea's family had planned a reunion in Fort Madison, so we stayed 3 nights at her uncle's house and I got to meet a lot of her dad's side of the family. Andrea's dad was one of eight kids, so the family is quite large. Andrea made me a Bartett-family-tree "cheat sheet" so I could keep all the names straight.

I've driven through Iowa before, but had only seen it from Interstate 80. This time I got to see a very different part of the state, and I was blown away by how nice it was. I always imagined it being a barren landscape of corn and soy bean fields, but to my surprise it was a lush paradise of rolling green hills. We spent most of one afternoon biking Fort Madison and got to see the huge prison that the town is based around, as well as some large houses and old factories. We even crossed the bridge into Illinois for a brief visit.

Another notable place we visited was a little place called Lost Duck Brewing. It looked like it might have some decent beer, however, I can confidently say that this place makes the worst beer I've ever had! We heard that the beer has always been terrible, but surprisingly, none of the yelp reviews mentioned the beer being bad. I righted this wrong by adding my own yelp review. I hate to say it, but it really plays into my personal stereotype of mid-westerners not knowing good beer (or food).

We left Iowa with several tearful goodbyes and headed to Nashville, TN to see some country music. The music doesn't stop in Nashville, and the musicians are some of the best I've ever seen. The next day we drove to Asheville, NC and did a mini brewery tour downtown. In many ways, Asheville reminded me of Fort Collins, CO. I could definitely see myself living there. We had originally planned to do some camping in the smokey mountains, but being in the car for so long was getting to our heads. So after Asheville, we decided to buckle down and head straight for Miami. Little did we know,  we would not receive a warm welcome..... (to be continued).

Deutschland: Part III - Cologne

Deutschland Part III – Cologne

Dom exterior/interior

We arrived at the Cologne train station at 7am on the night train from Munich. When we stepped out of the station we were confronted with Colognes main attraction, the Dom. The Dom took over 600 years to complete (1248-1880) because of several lengthy delays. It also took a beating in WWII, but you can hardly notice.

It’s hard to convey the huge size and immaculate tiny details of this cathedral’s architecture. Each and every time we walked by this area there were hoards of tourists snapping pictures of the Dom, but they could only catch a tiny segment of the building at a time. Here’s Andrea's best attempt at a comprehensive close-up photo using the panorama setting on her iphone:

Here's a shot from the side:

The inside of the Dom was equally stunning. I didn’t recognize most of the statues and stain glass scenes, but those people must have done some great things if anyone would bother to make a statue of them.

We came back for a Sunday service on our last day so I could hear someone play the pipe organ, and I was not disappointed!

Climbing the bell tower

For a small fee, you could climb one of the bell towers, which was a spiral staircase with almost 600 steps! Here's a picture from when we were descending to give you an idea of what it looked like inside:

I was surprised by the amount of graffiti on the walls. We thought the climb would be tough, but living at 5000m above sea level in Fort Collins had kept our legs and lungs in better shape than most, so it wasn't too bad. The view from the top was totally worth it, although Andrea is terrified of heights, so she wouldn't walk over to the edge to see it all.

On our way back down the spiral staircase we were confronted with a decent amount of traffic. Even though walls surrounded us, some people were clinging to the handrail like they were walking on an exposed ledge. There was also an encounter with the most annoying tourist I’ve ever seen. The staircase had windows that lined up in the same direction, so that every dozen steps or so you would be looking at the same view again. The guy in front of us must have had a memory disorder, because he was so amazed with the same view he had just seen, he felt the need to hold up the people behind him and take yet another picture with his huge camera. It probably took about 30 seconds each time he did this.

Eating raw pork

If you know me, you know I’m a “foodie”, but more than that, I like to try “weird” foods. I prefer to think of myself as drawn to culinary and gastronomic adventures (such as live octopus and raw whale). Most of the food in Germany was not what I would consider adventurous, but there was this one exception:

This is the “Cologne Sampler Platter”, which showcased regional sausages. The light pink meat was similar to bologna that you would find in the US. The red sausage in the middle of the plate was made from smoked pig liver, and was the best liver I’ve ever had. The liver had a smooth, not gritty, texture. The dark red meat with white spots at the top of the plate was “black pudding” or blood sausage. This was good, but far from the best blood sausage I’ve ever eaten.

Underneath all this was a pile of raw ground pork! On the menu it was described as “minced pork”, but I wasn’t expecting raw meat. I asked the waiter about this and he assured me that this was the correct preparation. He suggested putting it on a piece of bread with some raw onions and salt. I tried a couple bites of it, and it wasn’t too bad, but eventually the fear of getting sick prevented me from eating anymore. Luckily, I did not get sick.

Chocolate Museum

If you ever find yourself in Cologne, I urge you to check out the chocolate museum. In addition to interesting exhibits about the history and economics of the chocolate industry, the museum houses a fully functioning chocolate factory (with robots!) that takes raw cacao beans and turns them into little chocolate bars. The great thing about this little factory is that you get to peek into every point of the process. There is also a huge chocolate store that we took full advantage of.

Ride on the Rhine

After we checked out most of the other sites in Cologne we decided that we wanted to see more of the countryside, so we took a southbound train to Bingen, and rode a ferry back up the Rhine to Cologne. This section of the Rhine is littered with old castles (see map on the right). Some are just ruins, but others have been well maintained and have people living in them, or have been turned into a hotel.

The weather was a bit gloomy, with mild rain throughout the day. The ferry wasn't very crowded so we got one of the dining rooms all to ourselves. It ended up being a very relaxing day drinking kolsch and taking pictures of the scenery.

We got back to Cologne and walked over one of the main bridges to check out the love locks. If you've never heard of this, the idea is to customize a lock with your names and lock it to the bridge. Then you throw the key off the bridge to symbolize that you're stuck together forever. People usually have some ceremony to go along with it, and sometimes they also do "unlocking" ceremonies, in which they remove the lock with bolt cutters. I'm not sure why you would bother going through an unlocking ceremony if you were breaking up. We thought about putting our own lock on the bridge but we forgot to buy one before the stores closed that day.

K-Town Jam

We spent our last night in Germany back in the barracks at the Sembach army base. We had another jam session that stemmed from an impromptu a cappella session at the local bar with some of the army choir. I was blown away by how good these singers were, but then again, almost anybody can sing better than me! Here's a video of the pre-jam singing session to give you an idea of how awesome these guys were:

Deutschland: Part II - Munich

Our second and favorite stop on our tour across Germany was Munich. Munich is the capitol of the southern state of Bavaria (I didn't even know Germany had states!). Munich is also the third largest city in Germany, but it definitely didn't have the same "big city feel" that we noticed in Berlin.

Munich is most well known for their beer, and specifically for Oktoberfest. Most of the beer we drank came in these large one liter mugs like these:

We also had lots of really large pretzels, like this one:

Generally, we found the food in Germany to be pretty simple, with minimal seasoning. Many things were served with minimal preparation. Restaurant food in the US seems very "dolled up" by comparison, with heaping spoonfuls of salt and sugar. The food in Munich seemed especially hearty. Many dishes consist of meat and some sort of starch, like this one with a potato dumpling:

Here's another example of schnitzel and potato salad:

Another interesting food-related observation was this thing called "steckerlfisch", which is simply a roasted fish on a stick. These were typically sold at little stands in beer gardens. The fish is either trout, mackerel, or fingerling. I was really curious about trying one, but I wasn't sure how to eat it! On the last day of our trip a german girl that we were sitting with at a beer garden bought one and was eating it with a little wooden utensil that resembled a popsicle stick with prongs. She was kind enough to let me try a bite, and it was actually really tasty as long as you don't mind the fish staring back at you while you eat it!

One of the coolest things about Munich is that they have a spot on one of the rivers that has been engineered to have a standing wave that you can surf! There's a nice article about the history of the wave in Munich here: http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/places/noah-lederman/munich-surfing

Being the huge nerd that I am, I had to check out the Deutsches Museum, which is the world's largest science and technology museum. This place was incredible, and it was so big that we couldn't explore it all. I wish we had set aside two days to explore this place. There was an entire hall dedicated to lasers and holograms, but by that point we couldn't take anymore science and had to go do something else.

A large portion of the museum is about various vehicles, such as boats, planes, and spaceships. The life-size exhibits included many odd and interesting prototypes to illustrate the history of how these things have developed over the last few hundred years.

Another part of this amazing museum that caught my eye was the section dedicated to musical instruments. The first section was all about piano-like instruments. I had no idea that there were so many different mechanisms for hitting or plucking a string. There was one great exhibit that showed all these different mechanisms (there must have been over 30 of them), and you could hit a button to activate each one and see how they worked. Many of the pianos were incredibly ornate, and had keys capped with ivory or abalone shell.

The second half of the musical instrument exhibits were all sorts of strange string and wind instruments, like this bowed string instrument that used a horn to amplify the sound:

The last thing I'll say about this spectacular museum, is that they had a clock tower that also showed the wind speed, wind direction, pressure, and relative humidity! I think more towns should have stuff like this for all the aspiring weather nerds out there.

For the first few days in Munich, we just walked around randomly on our own, and didn't really understand what we were looking at. On the last day, we opted for a bike tour of the city, during which we learned the significance of all the stuff we had been casually observing. In the lead up to WWII, Munich was the center of the Nazi movement. This was where Hitler staged the Beer Hall Putsch revolt (which failed), and eventually came to power. We rode by the building where Hitler gave many of his rambling hate speeches, and rode down the streets where he would lead the Nazi rallies. Munich was also home to famous "White Rose" student resistance movement in 1942-1943. The bike tour was a great way to connect all these places and historical events. I also liked that we waited to do the tour at the end of our visit, because we already had a good feel for the layout of the city.

Overall, Munich was our favorite city that we visited. One reason for this was the enormous park known as the "Englischer Garten". We ended up spending a few hours each day in this urban park, to either have a picnic or just stroll through.  All that green space made Munich seem like a nice place to live. Although, I could do without all the old men sun-bathing in the nude.

The last thing we did before hopping on a night train to Cologne, was to find a beer garden to watch the world cup game between the US and Germany. Even though the US got trounced (1-0), it was a fun game to watch. When Germany scored the single goal of the game, the whole placed erupted with a deafening sound! We got heckled by some Germans during the game, and we weren't sure what they were saying, but it definitely wasn't very nice. Luckily, we also made some friends with the germans that were sharing our table.