Coat Check

I'd like to design a robotic coat check system (rccs). It seems silly for venues to have to pay people to stand around all night exchanging coats for number tags. It's certainly not a trivial sorting problem and the mechanical aspects of handling different types of coats would undoubtedly prove to be a sufficient challenge for control system developers. From an engineering point of view, having an automatic system that can handle coat checks for large events would be really cool to build. The complexity of efficiently sorting the coats and storing them for rapid retrieval would be fun to try to tackle. Figuring out how to build something where random hooks won't get caught at inopportune times would cause lots of careful design decisions. But since engineers like having lots of careful design decisions, that'd be a good thing.

Apple Inc.

In the 1980s the Apple Computer built a revolutionary computer system comprised of their own software running on their own hardware (or rather, a Motorola processor that nobody else was used). Apple ][ (pronounced "Apple Two") became a household name.

Throughout the 1990s the Microsoft Company provided their Windows Operating System software to anybody willing to package together hardware which supported the IBM x86-based architecture. These Windows computers have dominated the market since about 1995.

Then in the 2000s Apple built a revolutionary cell phone comprised of their own software running on their own hardware. "There's an App for that" became a cliche associated with the iPhone telecommunications device.

Now it's the 2010s and Google Inc. has launched their Android Operating System for anybody willing to package together hardware which supports it.

The only reason I mention this is because history has a way of repeating itself and Apple's monopolistic "proprietary" business practices have shown to be fallible in the past. The phrase "Does not play well with others" comes to mind. Also, "I'm going to take my ball and go home". Maybe Apple enjoys being a trendsetter and as soon as everybody else catches up, they're happy to take a step back and bear witness to the transformation process that comes when "fast follower" behemoth companies figure out how to raise their game to the benchmark that Apple has established.

Rube

This past Saturday I served as a judge for a Rube Goldberg Contest at a local Middle School. Most of the judges felt it was wrong of the contest rules to favor teams who's designed were incredibly complex (with 30 or more steps) but didn't work smoothly. The winning team had 49 distinct steps of which it was reported that 11 required some kind of human intervention to "push them along to completion". I was a judge of the team that came in second and they had 29 steps with (I recall) 5 individual failures. Another group that I judged was able to build a Rube Goldberg machine which had 21 distinct steps with a single step that needed a human influence to intervene to get it to work. I thought this was particularly noteworthy because on a different attempt we observed that one step work smoothly with two different failures (thus proving the entire design is actually somewhat viable). A third group that I judged had 7 steps that all worked perfectly. Let me tell you, it may not have been complex, but it was nice to see things work as designed.

If I were to redesign the rules of the contest, I'd give 50 bonus points to teams who could finish without those minor "human intervention failures" and I'd take away 15 points (the contest had deducted 10) for each of the first 3 interventions and 25 points for every one after that. I think that would have resulted in a more enjoyable design experience. I feel like too many "student" designs don't have the same type of real-world trade-offs that force you to sacrifice one desirable thing in order to build a balanced system. Being able to "optimize the design" for a characteristic that ends up producing a worse end-product isn't the proper thing to be teaching the children. But they had fun (and so did I), so I guess that's what's important.

Shame

This post is dedicated to shame. There are some truly awful people in the world. Rapists and murderers are repugnant. Pirates and homeless beggars are deplorable. Arsonists and casino operators are misguided. But the people listed here are much, much worse. Shame must be brought on them for doing the things they did. Shame must be brought on their families for not standing in the way. Shame must be brought to the society who let these cretins play their games. Shame must be brought to the world that didn't protect itself from these monsters.

And a bit of shame needs to be brought to me. I'm actually ripping off this list from the fine people at Time Magazine. They should be thanked for the research they did to create the various biographies contained below, but they need to be scolded for not offering a "customer friendly" version of the article that doesn't span across 25 different pages. As a way of providing this scolding, I am withholding the associated link that I would normally include to point back to the source article.

#1
Angelo Mozilo co-founded Countrywide in 1969 and co-founded IndyMac Bank in 1985 (spinning it off as an independent company in 1997). Mozilo left Countrywide last summer after its rescue-sale to Bank of America. A few months later, BofA said it would spend up to $8.7 billion to settle predatory lending charges against Countrywide filed by 11 state attorneys general.

#2
Phil Gramm was the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000. Gramm was Washington's most prominent and outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

#3
Alan Greenspan Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006. The super-low interest rates Greenspan brought in the early 2000s and his long-standing disdain for regulation are now held up as leading causes of the mortgage crisis. The maestro admitted in an October 2009 congressional hearing that he had "made a mistake in presuming" that financial firms could regulate themselves.

#4
Chris Cox SEC chief from 2005 to 2008. His blindness to repeated allegations of fraud in the Madoff scandal is mind-blowing, but it's really his lax enforcement that lands him on this list. Cox says his agency lacked authority to limit the massive leveraging that set up last year's financial collapse. Cox oversaw the dwindling SEC staff and a sharp drop in action against some traders. In the end, his propensity towards deregulation helped lead the nation astray.

#5
American Consumers Household debt in the U.S. — the money we owe as individuals — zoomed to more than 130% of income in 2007, up from about 60% in 1982. Most Americans richly deserves their Millionth of a Tenth of One percent of share of the shame for the financial crisis. Though distributing this much blame across such a wide audience is mainly ceremonial since the other people on this list were able to reap huge profits from the downfall of the American consumer during the financial boom-and-bust.

#6
Hank Paulson was George W. Bush's third Secretary of the Treasury from 2006 until 2008. He was late to the party in battling the financial crisis, letting Lehman Brothers fail was a big mistake and the big bailout bill he pushed through Congress has been a wasteful mess.

#7
Joe Cassano a founding member of AIG's financial-products unit in 1994. He ran the group until he stepped down in February 2008. He helped invent "Credit Default Swaps", the financial vehicle that was at the heart of AIG's downfall. So far, the U.S. government has invested and lent $150 billion to keep AIG afloat. Cassano has been called "Patient Zero" of the global economic meltdown.

#8
Ian McCarthy, CEO of Beazer Homes since 1994, has become something of a poster child for the worst builder behaviors. He pushed aggressive sales tactics, including lying about borrowers' qualifications to help them get loans, to increase his sales. The FBI, Department of Housing and Urban Development and IRS are all investigating Beazer. The company has admitted that employees of its mortgage unit violated regulations — like down-payment-assistance rules — at least as far back as 2000.

#9
Frank Raines was at the helm of Fannie Mae when things really went off course. A former Clinton Administration Budget Director, Raines was the first African-American CEO of a Fortune 500 company when he took the helm of Fannie Mae in 1999. He left in 2004 with the company embroiled in an accounting scandal just as it was beginning to make big investments in subprime mortgage securities that would later sour. Last year Fannie and rival Freddie Mac became wards of the state.

#10
Kathleen Corbet was the President of Standard and Poor's from 2004 to 2007. She was responsible for slapping AAA seals of approval on large portions of even the riskiest pools of loans, rating agencies helped lure investors into loading on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that are now unsellable. Standard & Poor's was the largest credit rating agency during much of the past decade and due to a conflict-of-interest were able to get paid by the bond issuer for the fraudulent ratings they provided.

#11
Dick Fuld steered Lehman Brothers from 1994 until 2008 into the business of subprime mortgages, bankrolling lenders across the country that were making convoluted loans to questionable borrowers. Lehman even made its own subprime loans. The firm took all those loans, whipped them into bonds and passed on to investors billions of dollars of what is now toxic debt. For all this wealth destruction, Fuld raked in nearly $500 million in compensation during his tenure as CEO, which ended when Lehman did.

#12
Marion and Herb Sandler were the founders and CEOs of World Savings Bank. This bank became the first to sell a tricky home loan called the "Option ARM". This type of mortgage offered several ways to back-load your loan and thereby reduce your early payments. It was sold with increasing zeal and misleading advertisements over the next two decades. The couple pocketed $2.3 billion when they sold their bank to Wachovia in 2006. But losses on World Savings' loan portfolio led to the implosion of Wachovia, which was sold under duress late last year to Wells Fargo.

#13
Bill Clinton (the 42nd President of the United State of America) signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods.

#14
George W. Bush the meltdown happened on Bush's watch.

#15
Stan O'Neal was Merrill Lynch's celebrated CEO for nearly six years, from 2001 to 2007, he guided the firm from its familiar turf — fee businesses like asset management — into the lucrative game of creating collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which were largely made of subprime mortgage bonds. To provide a steady supply of the bonds — the raw pork for his booming sausage business — O'Neal allowed Merrill to load up on the bonds and keep them on its books. By June 2006, Merrill had amassed $41 billion in subprime CDOs and mortgage bonds, according to Fortune. As the subprime market unwound, Merrill went into crisis, and Bank of America swooped in to buy it. When he was ousted from his role as CEO of Merrill Lynch, O'Neal walked away with a golden parachute compensation package that included Merrill stock and options valued at $161.5 million at the time.

#16
Wen Jiabao is a proxy for the Chinese government — particularly those parts of it that have supplied the U.S. with an unprecedented amount of credit over the past eight years. If cheap credit was the crack cocaine of this financial crisis — and it was — then China was one of its primary dealers. China is now the largest creditor to the U.S. government, holding an estimated $1.7 trillion in dollar-denominated debt.

#17
David Lereah was the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors until 2007. He regularly trumpeted the infallibility of housing as an investment in interviews, on TV and in his 2005 book, Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?.

#18
John Devaney is a hedge-fund managers who helped make it profitable for lenders to make questionable loans and then sell them off. Hedge funds were more than willing to swallow the risk in exchange for the promise of fat returns. Devaney wasn't just a big buyer of mortgage bonds — he had his own $600 million fund devoted to buying risky loans — he was one of its cheerleaders. Worse, Devaney knew the loans he was funding were bad for consumers.

#19
Bernie Madoff is an inmate of Federal "PMITA" Prison until 2139. He ran a Ponzi scheme that cost innocent Americans $50 billion in losses. He targeted retirees and nonprofits. The bigger cost for America comes from the notion that Madoff pulled off the biggest financial fraud in history right under the noses of regulators.

#20
Lew Ranieri was a bond-trader who is known as the father of mortgage-backed bonds. In 1984 Ranieri boasted that his mortgage-trading desk "made more money than all the rest of Wall Street combined." When subprime borrowers started missing payments, the mortgage market stalled and bond prices collapsed. Investment banks, overexposed to the toxic assets, closed their doors. Investors lost fortunes.

#21
Burton Jablin programming czar at Scripps Networks, which owns HGTV and other lifestyle channels, helped inflate the real estate bubble by teaching viewers how to extract value from their homes. Programs like Designed to Sell, House Hunters and My House Is Worth What? developed loyal audiences, giving the housing game glamor and gusto. Jablin didn't act alone: shows like Flip That House (TLC) and Flip This House (A&E) also came on the scene.

#22
Fred Goodwin was the boss of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) from 2000 until 2008. It's been suggested that Goodwin is simply "the world's worst banker." He made a career acquiring as many as 20 during his tenure, growing RBS greatly during the decade. As the gloom gathered in 2007, Goodwin couldn't resist leading a $100 billion takeover of Dutch rival ABN Amro, stretching RBS's capital reserves to the limit. Too big to fail? Not when you're owned by the British Government.

#23
Sandy Weill began he career running a low-end lender in Baltimore, and eventually cobbled together the Citigroup financial supermarket. Acquisitions (Smith Barney, Travelers, etc.) and persistent lobbying shattered Glass-Steagall, the law that limited the investing risks banks could take. Rivals followed Citi. The swollen banks are now one of the country's major economic problems.

#24
David Oddsson spent two decades as Iceland's Prime Minister and then as its central-bank governor. Oddsson made his tiny country an experiment in free-market economics by privatizing three main banks, floating the currency and fostering a golden age of entrepreneurship. GDP could drop 10% in 2010, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has stepped in after the currency lost more than half its value.

#25
Jimmy Cayne was the CEO of Bear Sterns from 1993 until its collapse in 2008. Cayne's charges bet the firm on risky home loans. Two of its highly leveraged hedge funds collapsed in mid-2007. Bear held nearly $40 billion in mortgage bonds that were essentially worthless. In early 2008 Bear was sold to JPMorgan for less than the value of its office building.

PAX Magic

This post talks about how a trip to the Penny Arcade Expo led to me playing Magic: The Gathering for the first time.

Last weekend I was at PAX East at the Hynes Convention Center near Boston's historic Copley Square. I attended a Question & Answer with the creators of Penny Arcade during which Mike "Gabe" Krahulik drew this comic. I also sat in on a presentation called "Fail Now" which discussed how success eventually comes to people who fail early and fail often at other ideas. I spent a good amount of time in the "Console Freeplay" playing various new and exciting games for the Xbox 360 or the Nintendo Wii.

Anyway, the event organizers decided to stick a sample pack of Magic: The Gathering cards into the Swag Bag that they gave away to every person who attended the exposition. Needless to say, this somehow managed to pique my interest and yesterday I was overwhelmed by the exuberance of playing the game. Having only 60 cards total between the packs that Jen and I each obtained, I became determined to acquire more cards to make at least two full decks so that she and I could play the game. We dropped by The Complete Gamester on Moody Street in Waltham and found they didn't carry those types of strategy card games. Consulting the Wizards of the Coast Locator and learned that our local Target carried the cards that I desired. We went, they did, and the fates aligned.

As a result, last night Jen and I each played the first game of Magic in our lives. We both suffered from having way too many creatures compared to number of lands in our hands. She won easily because of an advantage of having a deck of fairly strong Green/Forest/Nature cards while I had a mismatched deck of Blacks, Reds, and Whites. She literally had two or three 5/5 creatures in the battlefield and I had to twist her arm to get her to use them to attack my pitiful defense (the *most* I ever had out there was a mediocre 2/2 with haste). She is a merciful person, but mercy has no place during a game of Magic: The Gathering.

Today, we spent time organizing the cards into a single Black deck, a White/Red deck, and a Green/Red/Blue deck for playing. Hopefully this will lead to a greater level of mastery of the game and a more interesting games in the future. In about half-an-hour we're planning to start our second game. And, like I said, I'm exuberant about the whole situation. Also, the fact that Jen seems to share some of my enthusiasm is a wonderful thing.

Bookcases

I added a pair of photos of the bookcase Jen and I got as an engagement present to ourselves. After having it for three days, the left half is filled up with mostly her books, which is good because it means we no longer have huge piles of old books on the floor in our spare bedroom.