A Change in the Air

by Conroy

Djokovic celebrates a win over Nadal at Indian Wells

The last time I wrote about tennis on this blog, Roger Federer had just defeated Rafael Nadal to win the prestigious year-end ATP World Tour Finals. The win capped a great late season surge by Federer and seemed to set the stage for 2011, another year to be dominated by Nadal and Federer.

The Other Year-End Result
Just a week after that result, tiny Serbia, a nation that had virtually no tennis presence as little as five years ago, won the Davis Cup, tennis' annual national team competition. The victory over a powerful French team in front of a rabid Belgrade audience captivated the Balkan nation. The victorious players became national heroes, flying the flag for a country seeking outlets for a brimming national pride. Leading Serbia, and winning all seven of his singles matches over the four rounds of the competition, was Novak Djokovic.

Word Play in Bullet Park

After reading Conroy's post about the mot juste, I decided to run a search on my Kindle for narthex, one of the words that Conroy identifies as being part of the specialized vocabulary used to describe castles and churches. My hope was to see it used in the context of a story, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it in Bullet Park, a novel by John Cheever. The passage in which it appears, quoted below, showcases Cheever's mastery. He often chooses not merely le mot juste, but le mot musical; when he writes of the "sound of the priest's voice in the vestarium," we hear the alliteration and marvel at Cheever's skill in using just the right word in just the right place. And by drawing from the "system of terms" appropriate to a church—pew, font, narthex, vestarium—Cheever places us inside of one:

This division of Nailles’s attention during worship had begun when, as a young boy, he had spent most of his time in church examining the forms captured in the grained-oak pews. In certain lights and frames of mind they seemed quite coherent. There was a charge of Mongol horsemen in the third pew on the right, next to the font. In the pew ahead of that there appeared to be a broad  lake—some body of water—with a lighthouse on a peninsula. In the pew across the aisle there was a clash of arms and in the pew ahead of that there seemed to be a herd of cattle. This lack of concentration did not distress Nailles. He did not expect to part with his flesh or his memory in the narthex. His concerns in church remained at least partially matter-of-fact, and on this winter morning he noticed that Mrs. Trencham was carrying on her particular brand of competitive churchmanship. Mrs. Trencham was a recent convert—she had been a Unitarian—and she was more than proud of her grasp of the responses and courtesies in the service; she was bellicose. At the first sound of the priest’s voice in the vestarium she was on her feet and she fired out her amens and her mercies in a stern and resonant voice, timed well ahead of the rest of the congregation as if she were involved in a sort of ecclesiastical footrace. Her genuflections were profound and graceful, her credo and confession were letter-perfect, her Lamb of God was soulful, and if she was given any competition, as she sometimes was, she would throw in a few signs of the cross as a proof of the superiority of her devotions. Mrs. Trencham was a winner.

At the beginning of the passage, we learn that when Nailles was young, he would pass the time in church transforming random, mundane patterns seen in the grain of wooden pews into iconic boyish imagery. In the latter part of the passage, we watch him transform Mrs. Trencham into a burlesque of sanctimony. And here we see more specialized vocabulary put into play; we learn of Mrs. Trencham's disingenuous amens and mercies, her genuflections and credos, her confessions and Lambs of God. These terms—together with a couple of striking phrases ("competitive churchmanship" and "ecclesiastical footrace")—heighten the bathos of the scene. This is diction at its best.

There's a Word for That...

by Conroy

It should hardly surprise that a blog writer would love language and words, but you know what subset of this topic really interests me? Terminology, or the system of terms that belong to a particular subject. Let me give you an example.

Leeds Castle - not so simple as it looks

Recently I was flipping through the channels on my TV and came across a show about castles. I don't know much about castles, I've visited a few during vacations in Ireland and England, I've seen a bunch in movies, and they're an iconic part of medieval history, but still I don't know all that much. Nor, to be completely frank, am I all that interested. I always found the castles I visited to be cold and dark. Not very pleasant places to spend time, let alone live. Nevertheless, the show drew me in. Why? Because it featured a description of all the parts and features in classic castle design supported by real world examples. I love this sort of thing. Sure, most of us know about the moat built around some castles, but did you know that the mound that a castle was frequently built on is called a motte? Or that the open courtyard area is known as a bailey? You might know about dungeons, but did you know the underground dungeon reached by trap door is known as oubliette (or less elegantly a starvation hole)? How about some other castles features like the squint, narthex, and finial?

I bring this up because I think there's a certain joy to being able to use the exact right word to describe an object, idea, or concept. Sure I could write that castles often included an enclosed passage between the main entrance and the nave of a church, but isn't it more interesting and informative to note that this passage is called a narthex?

I'm sure most people use specialized terminology everyday in their work and other activities. Think about some of the terminology associated with your occupation. Using the right word is often essential to effective communication. Using the wrong word can lead to confusion and mis-communication. In addition, using specialized terminology demonstrates a familiarity and understanding of a subject that often needs to be expressed for reasons that go beyond simple necessity. You may not understand all of the jargon your doctor is saying to you ("myocardial infarction" instead of "heart attack"), but you get a certain confidence that at least he knows his trade. [At the same time, specialized terminology and jargon can be intimidating to a layperson. In my experience you should avoid jargon if possible and be clear in explaining terminology to someone unfamiliar with the subject and/or details.]

I like English because as a language it is so word friendly, including a vocabulary of more than a million by some counts. And English speakers have no reticence in borrowing terms from other languages. For instance, the exact right word is the mot juste, a term English took from French. Well I'll strive to use the mot juste in my writing. If I ever have to write about castles, I'll be off to a good start.

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To give another example of the terminology associated with even seemingly simple systems, consider just a sampling of the terms associated with basketball (timely because the NCAA Tournament began today):

shot clock, air ball, three-pointer, alley-oop, assist, backboard, backcourt, ball fake, screen, bank shot, baseline, pivot foot, bench, shot, backdoor cut, rebound, brick, center, forward, guard, dribble, dunk, fast break, field goal, foul, free throw, halftime, jump shot, layup, over-and-back, front court, pass, run, swingman, technical foul, block, three-point play, travel, turnover, offense, defense, foul line, mid-court, sixth man, referee, sideline, paint, key, flagrant foul

As a casual fan you can overlook the myriad terms associated with the sport, but each term has an exact meaning in this context.

Perhaps you can take a few minutes to think of the wide terminology used in other everyday activities and items (cooking, your car, exercise, etc.). What's the difference between a car's fender and quarter-panel? In food preparation, how does a scraper differ from a spatula?
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Build it Tall

by Conroy

The iconic spire of the Chrysler Building

When I was a little kid I was awed by tall buildings. I thought skyscrapers were the coolest thing (along with bridges, tunnels, dams, etc.). Little surprise that I became a civil engineer. Perhaps a little surprise, or irony, that my career has been focused on transportation, close to the ground. Anyway, back in my youth I never asked myself why we built these tall, expensive, monumental structures. An economist will explain that in dense urban environments, where land is in great demand and therefore expensive, building high makes economic sense. Certainly this is true. But I doubt the pharaohs were thinking of economics when they built the great pyramids in Egypt, or that cost was on the mind of the designers of the Chrysler Building, or that economic investment was the real impulse behind the building of Burj Khalifa (Burj Dubai). No, the real reason these iconic structures were built, along with the tens of thousands of other "great" buildings erected by man, was not for economics or any other practical reason, the reason was, is, and will always be: wonder.

Ask yourself how you react when you see a tall building, or long bridge, or high dam. Do you find yourself staring at these creations of man? At our achievements in engineering? We build higher and higher, span greater distances, dam massive rivers, tunnel under water and through mountains. Man has built countless churches, cathedrals, and mosques to the glory of God. But maybe, also, for the glory of himself. Is it a masculine impulse? Perhaps. Are our great buildings absolutely necessary? Perhaps not. But like anything else, great achievements arise from great ambition. And who wants to live in a world where our imaginations don't reach toward the sky?

Top 250 - Update

by Conroy

Recently my favorite radio station, WTMD, out of Towson, Maryland (and affiliated with Towson University) played a list of the "500 Desert Island Songs" as compiled by WTMD listeners. WTMD has a history of playing countdowns of lists like these during its tri-annual fundraisers. Like all public radio stations, WTMD survives because of user contributions, a fiscal reality that may become even more basic if federal funding is largely or entirely curtailed.

I am a contributor to WTMD because the station resurrected my belief that radio is worthwhile, and because I think it's a great supporter of the Baltimore music scene. It is as advertised, radio for music people and not radio around commercials. It has also become my best source to hear new music. The station streams online and the website is linked in this blog's Favorite Web Sites list (see right sidebar). Check it out if you get a chance.

When I heard about the latest list, I hurriedly submitted my 10 favorite "desert island songs" to WTMD (this is how the overall list was compiled). Actually, I submitted three lists, or my top 30 songs (only mild cheating because I didn't submit any song twice). WTMD took a month to compile the full list, so I can only assume that thousands of songs were submitted. "Desert Island Songs" were supposed to be songs that a person couldn't live without, which I think is a form of a person's favorite songs. As a result, I thought it would be interesting to compare WTMD's 500 Desert Island Songs to my Top 250 Songs. How much overlap could there be? On one extreme all 250 songs from my list would show up on the WTMD list, on the other extreme none of my Top 250 Songs would show up on the WTMD list.

Before the countdown began, I guessed that 75 of my Top 250 Songs would be represented and 35 of my Top 100 Songs would be there. The actual results:

• 41 of my Top 250 Songs were on the Desert Island List (16.4%)
• 26 of my Top 100 Songs were on the Desert Island List (26%)

So I'm a little surprised that not as many of my favorite songs were listed as other WTMD listeners favorite songs. And a review of the WTMD list reveals song songs and rankings that are head-scratchers (and maybe some "ballot stuffing" by zealous fans of particular artists/songs). Still, the amount of overlap seems reasonable...my list has enough "popular" songs to avoid being overly eccentric but enough outliers to be distinctive.

What was the highest ranked song that is included in my Top 250 Songs? "Thunder Road" by Bruce Springsteen (also the highest Top 100 Song), ranked number 3. The most surprising Top 250 Song to make the WTMD list? I don't know, maybe "Misunderstood" by Wilco; I thought maybe this song wasn't as liked by others as it was by me.

True Art

by Conroy

Monet's views will live forever.

In recent posts (here and here) I've noted that making a short-term judgment on the value of a work of art is problematic. It takes time, years, to truly evaluate the worth of any particular work of art and making lists or handing out awards without allowing adequate time for reflection is a sure path to the wrong film being named Best Picture at the Academy Awards or the wrong book winning the Pulitzer Prize. As I've written, it's hard in 2011 to understand how the movie Shakespeare in Love won the Best Picture honor over the movie Saving Private Ryan. Few now, I would guess, would rank the former higher than the later. Yet that was the surprising result at the 1998 Academy Awards. And it's not just in "popular" culture that this happens. When James Joyce's Ulysses was published in 1922 it was deemed obscene by many and banned in the United States and United Kingdom. Today it is universally hailed as a masterpiece of modern literature. Time has made the true value obvious. So time is key, but time only allows for a work to be properly evaluated. What are the characteristics of a work of art that make it great?

Man vs. Machine: Barely a Contest

by Conroy

Watson "between" Rutter and Jennings

Last night I watched glumly as Watson, IBM's custom-built supercomputer, completed a comprehensive three-day (and two game) victory over top human champions on the game show "Jeopardy!". Watson proved to be quicker than Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, perhaps Jeopardy!'s two greatest champions. Jennings rose to national prominence several years ago when he went on a 74-game winning streak and amassed well over $2 million in prize money. Rutter, first competed on the show when contestants were only allowed to win five games consecutively. Since then, however, he has won three of Jeopardy!'s top tournaments (including defeating Ken Jennings) and amassed $3.5 million in prize money, the most of any competitor in the show's history. Except for a few brief flurries, these accomplished players were no match for Watson.

Best Picture...Probably Not

by Conroy

Does this statue have any value?

The 83rd Academy Awards ceremony is still over two weeks away, but I want to be the first to write that this year's winner of the Best Picture oscar was not the "best picture" released in 2010. Now as you're no doubt thinking, I don't possess any powers that let me see the future. I'm making this claim because the odds are in my favor. The Academy has a long history of not awarding the most (or one of a few) deserving films with the best picture honor. I don't find this all too surprising, as I've written before, it takes time, many years, to fully evaluate a work of art.  Even so, the Academy seems to be especially poor at identifying the real best pictures, sometimes they aren't even close. The scales dropped from my eyes back in 1998, when one of the finest films of recent memory and universally acclaimed - Saving Private Ryan - didn't win.

To illustrate this point further, below I've provided a long list of the Best Picture winners, and those films that were more deserving. Before we get to the list, allow me a quick diversion.

We Get Awards Because We're So Great
This blogger finds the whole award circuit to be ridiculously self-important. The entertainment industry is of course populated by self-centered egoists, and that includes the "talent" and the management, so we shouldn't be surprised by the indulgent adulation we witness at these events. Every year you hear some pompous celebrity, Sean Penn comes immediately to mind, that declares how "important" peer-sponsored awards like the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) are...please, don't these people know that no one cares? But I guess the glamorous movie elite will take any excuse to get dressed up and strut before the cameras, get interviewed by fawning "reporters", and adored by our celebrity-obsessed culture.

Wikipedia: Not for the Weak

The first time I made a revision to a Wikipedia article, I took care to ensure that my work was free from error. I previewed the article several times to see how it would look with my changes. Finally, I clicked "save" and admired my contribution. I got up and stretched, feeling great. Maybe 15 minutes later, I checked the site again. My work was gone. Nowhere to be seen. Worse, when I checked the history tab (which I hadn't even noticed before then) to see what had happened, I found a personal message waiting for me: “newby . . . unless one has a record here, keep out.”

So much for “Please Do Not Bite the Newcomers,” a Wikipedian “behavioral guideline" the very existence of which suggests that Wikipedians have a tendency to greet newcomers with less than open arms, and my experience would seem to confirm this tendency. But experience can be deceptive. The first problem is understanding who Wikipedians are. Contributions to Wikipedia seem to approximate a kind of power law, with a small group of contributors doing the bulk of the work. So there is no "average" user in the ordinary sense of the word. Of the smaller group of major contributors, we don't know much. Perhaps it changes members frequently, perhaps not. Some evidence suggests that its members are predominately twenty-something males. No surprise there. Few women participate because this is not a place most women would care to visit. (Apparently this is debatable.) It is an intellectual battleground where the odds of having an unpleasant encounter with an obsessive and pedantic geek are uncomfortably high—this isn't Facebook, and you're not surrounded by friends.

The second problem is that even within this smaller group, it only takes one apple to spoil the barrel. We're more likely to remember the few encounters we have that are notably bad, than the many ones we have that are neutral—for there's no reason to remember a perfectly ordinary experience. And unlike ordinary social settings, where you can choose with whom you converse, there's not much choice in the discussion pages of Wikipedia: you can always leave, but if you choose to stay, you will have little choice but to deal with whoever else enters the fray. If you can't work things out amicably on a talk page, you may end up grinding your way through Wikipedia's formal dispute resolution process. (Who would do that?!) Some people even get into "edit wars" in which they repeatedly undo ("revert") each other's edits. And nothing is too trivial to spark an edit war. (Check out this list of the "lamest edit wars.") 

As for my own unwelcoming experience, I didn't get into a crazy edit war. Instead, I went to the discussion page to defend the worthiness of my revisions. After some heated debate, I did some more research and discovered that a handful of fanatical Wikipedians had been wrangling for control over the style and content of that particular Wikipedia article for—get this—not hours, not days, not months, but years. Years! 

After several days, I reluctantly laid down my sword. 

But I live to fight another day!

Punctuality (or How I Learned to Tolerate People Being Late)

by Conroy

I was in a meeting yesterday with my firm's senior partner. My boss and I arrived about a minute before the meeting was to start. Partially in jest, but only partially, the partner paraphrased Vince Lombardi in saying that if you're ten minutes early to a meeting you're on time and if you're five minutes early you're late. I questioned the wisdom of these words, but gently, he is the senior partner after all. He insisted on his point and I dropped my argument, but I took some time after the meeting to think more on this subject.

I'm as sure as ever that I am correct and the senior partner is wrong. And this incident brings to the fore the larger question of schedules and timeliness. As a rule, I make it a point to be very punctual, and if anything I err on the early side (I was a minute early to the meeting above). In fact, I think many of my friends find it somewhat annoying when I show up exactly on time for whatever social occasion has been planned. Someone suggests meeting at 5:30, and there I am knocking on their door while they scramble to finish getting ready. I on the other hand get extremely annoyed when my friends, a couple in particular (they know who they are), show up quite late even when meeting times have been explicitly arranged and emphasized. (A couple of my friends seem to exist in their own personal time, totally separate from the rest of us).

My friend: "Why are you so stressed out?"
Me: "Because you're 45 minutes late and now we're going to miss the start of the movie!" 

So who's right? Here are my thoughts:

Business. In a business setting, if you want people to show up at a certain time, tell them that time. Want someone at a 10 AM meeting, tell them there is a 10 AM meeting. If you want them to show up fifteen minutes early to discuss a couple of issues before the meeting starts, tell them to get there at 9:45. In business everyone is busy and it's a deep narcissism to assume that your time is more valuable than someone else's time. That fifteen minutes early that you expect of them is fifteen minutes that they can be doing something else. By no means should you accept habitual tardiness from anyone, but punctuality cannot be punished.

On the flip side, as Shakespeare wrote in The Merry Wives of Windsor (about a very personal meeting), "better three hours too soon than a minute too late." The person who is constantly late is certainly more in the wrong than the person who insists on being early. Again, everyone's time is valuable and showing up late to meetings is highly disrespectful. The bottom line, in business be on time and expect the same of others.

Think about businesses built upon schedules, movies don't start around certain times, FedEx doesn't arrive sometime around their scheduled pick-ups, and planes don't take off twenty minutes early (though late is certainly possible!). Schedules are vital to the orderly operation of society. Respecting this fact, we should all embrace the idea that punctuality is the best behavior. Disorganized, disrespectful, nonchalant, are all characteristics that we should strive to eliminate from our lives.

Social Occasions. Now social occasions are something quite different. Experience certainly tells you that sometimes being late is appropriate. When someone says a party starts at 8 PM they really mean show up no earlier than 8 PM. If you show up early you end up standing around awkwardly while the host finishes setting out the food and beverages. On other occasions you better be on time. When you have dinner reservations at 8 PM, make sure you're at the restaurant a few minutes early (I hope my friend reads this post!). But that's the real difference between many social occasions and work, in leisure we have flexibility, you're a little late or a little early, it's not too critical. At least up to a point.


I guess I'll never understand the mentality that seems to disregard schedules. Our entire lives are set up according to time. Hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the year. Schedules are almost always set up with a purpose, ignoring that fact is inconsiderate. It's a bad behavior that is all too often overlooked. By that same token, going beyond punctual, insisting that others be always early, is unnecessarily onerous. Maybe I'll tell that to the senior partner, but I'm going to wait...until exactly the right time.

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A few quotes on punctuality:

"Laugh and the world laughs with you, be prompt and you dine alone."

-Gerald Barzan, humorist

"If I have made an appointment with you, I owe you punctuality, I have no right to throw away your time, if I do my own."

-Richard Cecil, clergyman

"Punctuality is the soul of business."

-Thomas Haliburton, writer and businessman

"I have been on a calendar, but I've never been on time."

-Marilyn Monroe, actress and celebrity

"I am a believer in punctuality though it makes me very lonely."

-Edward V. Lucas, writer

Happy Birthday Wikipedia

by Conroy

Wikipedia turned 10 this month. The online, user-controlled encyclopedia is one of the favorite websites of this blog (as many readers will know from the numerous links to the site's articles). The distinguished news magazine, The Economist (perhaps the best of its kind), recently included two articles about Wikipedia discussing its rise and relevance over the last decade and the growing editing clique that has made contributing to the site a sometimes (but more and more) vicious experience. The Man is going to write a post addressing the culture and experience of being an active Wikipedia contributor, while I'm going to write on how I use the site and how useful it is in my information gathering.

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One Stop Shop
Google virtually any topic, go ahead, try diverse subjects like string theory, Albert Pujols, London, The Godfather, you'll see the link to the associated Wikipedia article within the first few pages listed, if not the first. Currently, Wikipedia offers more than 3.5 million articles in English alone, which has to be far more than even the most comprehensive of traditional encyclopedias. And the returns from a Google search attest to the site's popularity. I can go to Wikipedia and be confident of finding an article on almost any subject I desire...that's useful. What I also like is that Wikipedia doesn't discriminate about the articles included. Sure extensive and numerous articles are devoted to serious academic subjects like say, biology, but articles are also included on mundane topics like Andy Samberg's and Justin Timberlake's hilarious spoof video, "Dick in a Box". This blogger loves the serious and the mundane, so it would follow that I would love a site that caters to my diverse interests.

Further, what Wikipedia is all about is the free sharing of knowledge. A complete listing of every The Simpsons episode will not change the intellectual landscape, but surely having that information easily available, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, enriches human knowledge.

And while the standard knock on Wikipedia is that it's littered with inaccuracies and bias, I've found that when reading about the topics I know well, it gets the facts pretty much correct. Beyond that, Wikipedia's standards for citing and references tend to identify claims and statements that are either unsupported (which is okay for a lot of subjects) or provides helpful links and references that can be used to validate information and pursue additional investigation. And of course, Wikipedia does get things wrong, but really, the site's overall accuracy comes close (if not virtually equal) to many supposedly authoritarian and rigidly reviewed academic and professional sources.

A Chain of Interest

...World War II to The Simpsons

Only with Wikipedia can I link...

One of the ways that I love to use Wikipedia is to follow what I term a "chain of interest". Let's start with a huge subject like World War II. Through Wikipedia's linking, I could jump from World War II to the Manhattan Project, then read about the Trinity Test in New Mexico, which I can then follow to the subject of nuclear fallout, the building of fallout shelters, a depiction of a fallout shelter in The Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter", and finally the parody of that episode in the terrific The Simpsons episode "Bart's Comet" where the town of Springfield takes shelter in Ned Flanders' backyard bomb shelter. Not only do I get to follow my chain of interest, but I also get to link World War II and The Simpsons, the serious and the mundane. Only with Wikipedia.

Keeping Pace

Wikipedia confirms, Pluto is no longer a planet

Online resources are so valuable because they can be so easily and quickly updated. The last time my family bought hardback encyclopedia's was in 1994. The minute they arrived at our house they were out-of-date. Wikipedia has no such issues. I remember when Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet and a fifth ocean was added to the world. These changes were reflected in Wikipedia almost (seemingly) as soon as they were announced by the news media. For any subject where there are major developments or where interest is really keen, the Wikipedia article is updated almost immediately, ensuring that facts are up-to-date and discussions current. Do you know who won the Men's Singles title at the Australian Open today (1/30/11)? Wikipedia does.

Presentation and Consistency
Finally, I have to credit the designers and editors of the site who have provided style and content guidelines that allow for a consistent look and organization of all pages. This allows for much simpler navigation and information scanning, and ultimately a more comfortable reading and researching experience.

The Future
I hope that Wikipedia continues to prosper. The questions about funding, declining numbers of active contributors, and resistance by academic and other rival information resources are not to be dismissed lightly. But hopefully, Wikipedia can continue to mature and become an even more valuable repository for information and research. Wikipedia is a great contributor to human knowledge, we should celebrate this birthday and hope for many many more.

The Perfect Climate - Part 2

by Conroy

In Part 1 I detailed my climate formula and the ranking of U.S. metropolitan areas. In this post I want to explore the rankings in more detail, highlighting some interesting aspects.

Classification

Los Angeles has a "perfect" Mediterranean climate (Koppen)

My rankings make no reference to existing climate classification systems, such as those by Koppen and Thornthwaite. This is intentional. These standard systems are designed to classify global climates, identifying very large areas by temperature, precipitation, flora and fauna, prevailing winds, etc. This is absolutely legitimate, and I really like the Koppen regime that provides major climate groups (tropical, temperate, polar, etc.) and various sub-groups based on annual precipitation, temperature ranges, and seasonality (among other characteristics).

However, there are two major reasons I chose a different approach. First, I'm interested in where it would be most comfortable to live and/or spend a lot of time, which I think is primarily based on temperature and not other climate characteristics such as precipitation. All aspects of climate matter deeply in the various Earth sciences and maybe even economics, but not necessarily in livability. Second, because these systems are global in scale, they group vast areas together with insufficient differentiation. According to Koppen, Baltimore (my hometown) falls under the Humid subtropical classification, but so does Brownsville, Texas. As my rankings show, Baltimore and Brownsville experience very different climates (mean January temp.: 37 degrees and 60 degrees, respectively). For practicality, we need a system that is more specific.

The Perfect Climate - Part 1

by Conroy

Dreaming of Honolulu during cold winter days

As I write this post, I'm experiencing yet another cold January day in Baltimore (click on the links of city names in this post for annual weather data). Every winter I get a little depressed because, well, like a lot of other people - I HATE the cold. I was in Orlando a couple of weeks ago (see my recent Disney World post) and the weather was lovely; very un-winter-like, with highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s and 60s. Places in the United States like Florida and Southern California have very mild (or practically no) winters. Put simply, they would seem to have more comfortable climates than most of the rest of the country, and certainly where I live in central Maryland. I hardly think that I need to explain the simple pleasure of good weather. Comfortable conditions (however they may be defined for a particular individual) improve mood and the enjoyment of nature and the outdoors. Long-term uncomfortable conditions or extreme weather makes you want to hide indoors. I doubt there are many people who would deny a preference for a pleasantly warm sunny day. Indoor climate control allows people to live in extreme locations (think Phoenix in summer or Fairbanks in winter), but deep winter cold and extreme summer heat can be dangerous or evenly deadly. You may prefer heat over cold or vice-versa, but how many enjoy the extremes over a moderate balance between the two?

Thinking along these lines, I asked myself the question: can we identify the locations with the best year-round climates in the U.S.? I think we can, and I think I've developed a quantitative formula to do it. The rest of this post details a major research effort that I have undertaken to identify the cities with the best climate in the United States. I'm pleased with the results and think the formula can be applied to other regions of the globe.

Project: War and Peace - Post 3

by Conroy

This my third post (of six) discussing Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. It's taken me a bit longer than anticipated to get this post prepared, but with the holidays behind me I hope that the future posts in this series will follow at shorter intervals. The first post discussing this project and second post discussing Volume 1 can be found here:

Project: War and Peace - Post 1
Project: War and Peace - Post 2 

As I stated in Post 2, I'm going to write about each volume based on what I find interesting, eschewing a set structure. After finishing Volume 2, and comparing it to Volume 1, I think this approach is validated.

War
In Volume 2, war, while present, retreats from the center of the action. After the Russian defeat at Austerlitz, so vividly described near the end of Volume 1, Tolstoy does not present the action at the Battle of Friedland, in which the French decisively defeated the Russian army in early summer 1807 and ended the War of the Fourth Coalition. We see the peace made between Napoleon and Alexander at Tilsit, which made Russia and France allies. We hear about skirmishes with the Prussians. There is talk about the far-off campaigns of the French army in Spain. We sense the resentment of Napoleon's Continental System, especially as the years pass after Tilsit. We are told of reforms in the Russian military, and of preparations to raise additional troops to supplement the standing army. We are witness to the quiet pleasure of military life during peacetime.

The Experience of Disney World

by Conroy

I spent three days over New Years at the Walt Disney World Resort (official name) in Orlando. This was my first visit since June 1987 - when I was six - so I was interested to know how my childhood memories would compare to an adult experience. I was pleasantly surprised. Some thoughts (in the form of a travel review):

Immersive Experience

Cinderella's Castle in the Magic Kingdom

The Disney World slogan is "Where Dreams Come True", which I think is a little ambitious. What I will endorse is that Disney World is an immersive experience. My girlfriend and I visited all four theme parks over three nights and two days and I was struck at each park by the attention to detail, the direct and indirect references to Disney characters and movies, and the interactive nature of the attractions (they aren't all rides). For instance, on just the first night in the Magic Kingdom we witnessed fireworks, a parade, fake snow falling on Main Street U.S.A., and continuously varying lights on Cinderella's iconic castle. Events that go above simple rides or themes to grab you and pull you more into the "Disney experience". Another good example is the Kilimanjaro Safaris in Animal Kingdom, which amounts to a tour through a park zoo, as opposed to outside of concrete moats and fences, with the standard big African mammals (lions, elephants, giraffes, etc.), but includes travel over a rickety bridge that threatens to collapse (pretty effective) and a continuous mission to aid the park warden on hunting down poachers in search of the park elephants. There must also be electric fences or some other invisible features to keep the lions and other animals from mauling the park guests (hopefully anyway, on real African safaris the guides reassuringly carry rifles and shotguns). These touches raise the attractions above typical amusement park rides. (Incidentally my girlfriend worked one summer as a safari driver - that took the suspense out of the bridge collapsing element.)