Blackcap Blog

Published at 11:49 on 7 April 2014

So, I’ve been on the Island for a year it’s lease renewal time for me. I have two options: a normal lease at $1400/mo, or month-to-month at $1600/mo. The penalty for breaking a lease early is a fixed $1500/mo.

Wow, a fixed penalty of $1500/mo that’s less than the normal rent of $1600/mo without a lease. It seems like a no-brainer. Not so fast! Time to run the math.

The way to do it is with what is called expected value, essentially a weighted average taken by enumerating all possible scenarios then multiplying a scenario’s cost by its probability. After much thought, I chose a Poisson distribution with λ = 4 months as an educated guess.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the local real estate market and I actually think it will be more like three months, but I’m being a little pessimistic in case the entire spring and summer fly by and I end up buying nothing. In that case, things will get dead in the coming winter.  So, given those assumptions, here’s what happens when I find a home so many months into my continuing tenancy here:

MONTH       PROB        CUM      LEASE     M-to-M
    1     0.0183     0.0183    1427.47    1600.00
    2     0.0733     0.0916    1484.25    1575.54
    3     0.1465     0.2381    1491.58    1462.45
    4     0.1954     0.4335    1359.71    1230.32
    5     0.1954     0.6288    1086.19     917.64
    6     0.1563     0.7851     754.07     603.03
    7     0.1042     0.8893     457.11     350.16
    8     0.0595     0.9489     244.25     180.90
    9     0.0298     0.9786     116.24      83.83
   10     0.0132     0.9919      49.76      35.13
   11     0.0053     0.9972      11.39      13.41
   12     0.0019     0.9991       6.67       4.70
TOTAL                          8488.69    8057.11

PROB is the probability I will find something that month and CUM is the cumulative probability (i.e. the chance I find something that month or in an earlier month). Odd; what’s going on here?

The issue is the percentage cost. $1500 isn’t much a chunk of 11 month’s rent, but as time goes on, it becomes a bigger and bigger chunk of the remaining rent if one quits early:

MONTH %PENALTY
    1     9.74
    2    10.71
    3    11.90
    4    13.39
    5    15.31
    6    17.86
    7    21.43
    8    26.79
    9    35.71
   10    53.57
   11   100.00
   12     0.00

Why 100% instead of 107.14% for quitting in month 11? Simple: only a fool would pay $1500 in penalty fees when it’s cheaper to pay $1400 to rent an unneeded, empty apartment for an extra month.

Still feel like I’m pulling my own leg here, using lots of math when common sense says it must be the other way? Consider the case where I find something in five months (that’s the point where the odds become in my favor of finding something).

With a lease, I pay 5 × $1400 + $1500 = $8500.

With no lease, I pay 5 × $1600 = $8000.

Sure, there’s a chance I’ll pay more, if I end up spending another year here and not finding anything. But the odds seem to be in favor of my paying less. In fact, the lease is only to my advantage if it takes eight or more months to do something I expect to do in four or five months.

Mine is a corporate landlord; doubtless they’ve run this sort of analysis themselves and deliberately crafted their lease-renewal offer to have a seductive yet economically disadvantageous option to it, knowing they can expect to pocket on average around $400 of pure profit each time they sucker a tenant into agreeing to it.

Published at 08:07 on 26 March 2014

The nations where it’s the most popular and beloved — Singapore and Malaysia — happen to both be repressed, right-wing, authoritarian sorts of places with a very harsh attitudes towards illegal drugs. Yet they’re both nations of junkies, where an addicting substance, capable of producing euphoria in those who consume it, is sold openly in the streets, even to children.

One would think the general lack of harm caused by this one substance might help promote tolerance for consenting adults to engage in other sorts of voluntary, pleasurable activity (tellingly, both nations are also repressive to those of us who are not heterosexual). But, no.

Never underestimate the ability of hypocrites to rationalize double standards.

Published at 21:02 on 25 March 2014

About five years ago I happened across a bag of durian candy in an Asian market. That piqued my curiosity: Many Westerners describe its odor and taste in most unflattering terms, it can’t be that bad, can it? Moreover, I’ve always tended to like strange and strong flavors, so maybe I’ll be one of those Westerners who actually likes durian. After all, all humans are the same species; there’s very little difference between the “races”, really. Race is a socially-defined construct, not a biological one.

So anyhow, I bought it. And they weren’t bad. Sort of disappointing, in fact; I had expected a stronger taste. As I recall they were sort of pleasingly vanilla and caramel flavored. They were certainly not in the slightest way repulsive (as I later learnt many Western palates found such candies).

That prompted me to purchase some frozen durian meat and try it with a friend. That was anticlimactic; sort of vaguely sweet and mild-flavored, with an oniony aftertaste and only a slight whiff of pungency. (In retrospect, it was probably underripe.) Perhaps something suited to going in an Asian dessert like sticky rice where I could mix well with other flavors, thought I.

Fast forward several years to last week, and for some reason I’m craving that sweetness and oniony aftertaste. Plus there’s a pot luck coming up. A perfect excuse to make a trip to an Asian market and purchase the ingredients for durian sticky rice.

But something was different this time. On the ferry ride home a very strong pungent odor became evident. Not vile, but definitely very strong and assertive. Yes, it was the durian flesh, even though it was still over 90% frozen and sealed inside two layers of plastic! Oh, dear. People were giving me evil glances. Apparently this sample of flesh is ripe, and the rumored pungency is no rumor.

I get home, put it inside a Ziploc bag, and stick it in the refrigerator, hoping the apartment doesn’t get too fragrant overnight. The extra layer worked. Mostly.

One of the things I do when cooking is conduct “quality control assays,” i.e. I sample all the ingredients as I go. That includes the now completely thawed durian flesh. Wow, vanilla custard. Then onion. Almost completely unlike the pungent odor, which of course has completely filled my apartment. Did it really do that, go from sweet to savory like that? I must taste it again and see. Yes, it does. The urge to eat more gets stronger, not weaker. But I only have as much as the recipe calls for, so I restrain myself until the recipe is complete, then conduct numerous “quality control assays” throughout the batch of sticky rice.

Must… stop…; I’m supposed to be sharing this and what with all the coconut milk it’s way too rich for me to just pig out on myself, anyhow.

So, anyhow, at the pot luck with a “warning, it is pungent, don’t let that intimidate you, it tastes very different than it smells,” two people leave early when they hear the dessert course involves durian. Everyone else stays. Most try it, some hate it, some love it, and one guy says “I’m not sure I like this garlic aspect to it or not” as he helps himself to thirds.

I return with leftovers, but that’s fine because I get to eat all the rest. And each time I have a portion it just tastes better and better and there’s more pure pleasure involved. It’s as if I’m Edmund and durian is my Turkish delight. I’m not alone, either.

And now I read that chocolate (which I can’t eat) is in the same plant family and durian is suspected of having addictive properties (which probably accounts for its popularity throughout its native range; the customers are hooked) much like its more famous and less pungent New-World cousin. I don’t just “suspect,” I know.

Well, at least in contrast to heroin, it’s 100% legal, healthful at least in moderation, and not that easy to get here in the USA, so I won’t be pigging out and gaining weight too badly.

Published at 09:23 on 18 February 2014

Yes, even stupider than the famously stupid “open floor plan” that means you have insufficient wall space for bookcases and artwork and get to live in your kitchen. Dirty dishes and cooking smells: the perfect living room accents. Not!

Try the two-bedroom house with each bedroom being a master suite. Let’s make it impossible for either me or my prospective roommate to host a visitor on the living room couch without compelling said visitor to trudge through someone’s private bedroom in order to take a shower. Let’s pump up the cost per square foot (and compel we waste heated square feet) by adding a third bathroom (to a two-bedroom house!) for guests to use. And since it’s only a half-bath, overnight guests still have to trudge through a private bedroom once per day.

Why is it that virtually no innovations in domestic architecture later than about 1940 seem to have any merits whatsoever? About the only two exceptions I can think of are better insulation and hookups for clothes dryers. If you’re in a hot climate (I’m not), air conditioning can be added, making it a list of three.

Aside from that, seemingly every other new idea has been a variation on the theme of stupid: removing trim (goodbye picture rails, hello drilling holes in your walls and searching for studs), wall-to-wall carpeting (a floor treatment that’s impossible to keep clean, the perfect innovation for people who like to live with lots of dirt), dishwashers (let’s take up cabinet space for a device which only gets your dishes clean if you spend 95% of the effort of just washing them yourself on pre-rinsing them), soffits (let’s deliberately reduce the amount of storage in your kitchen, so that we can then compel you to devote more square feet to it than you really need), formica counters (why use tile when you can use something easily scorched and burnt instead), sinks that are no longer recessed in the countertop (that stray water belongs dripping down your cabinet faces and onto the floor, not back in the sink), the list goes on and on and on.

Published at 19:14 on 11 February 2014

Actually, it was back to normal by yesterday afternoon. A day of temperatures in the forties and mild sea breezes made quick work of almost all the snow.

The suddenness with how these winter arctic cold waves could both begin and end was one of the things that surprised me when I first moved to this region. It’s like a switch is being thrown, engaging and disengaging Cold Mode surprisingly fast. Before I moved to this region, I visited once a few days after an episode of cold and snow, expecting to find lingering piles everywhere. Instead, there was almost no snow to be seen; I had to search to find the rapidly-melting remains of what had been significant piles of shoveled snow only a few days before.

At this stage, it’s something I expect, and when it happens it’s a sign that all is still right and as it should be, and that this winter wasn’t a disappointing repeat of last winter, snow-wise.

Published at 08:04 on 2 February 2014

There is a football game this afternoon. Living in the Seattle area, it is hard not to be aware of it. And because this region does not have a history of winning sports teams, that makes for a very big deal for those who follow such things.

Myself, I’ve never gotten it. My earliest memories about football were probably around age five or so, observing my father sitting utterly transfixed and engrossed by a flickering screen displaying images of men in uniforms arranging themselves in formations and charging back and forth across a rectangular field. It was a mystery to me how such a thing could prove interesting or entertaining. It still is.

So if the weather is good, I plan to take advantage of how I live on an island that still has its wild spaces by going on a walk in one of them. If it’s the expected raw, cold rain transitioning to a wet snow as an arctic front comes in, I’ll spend the day making copper jewelry.

I will either hear the celebrating or the silence and know the outcome, but it won’t seriously affect me either way. Sorry, sports fans. Just the way it is.

Published at 08:49 on 15 January 2014

About thirteen months ago, an acquaintance of mine was nearly aghast when I spoke of my desire to move out of Seattle. Despite my mentioning how urban things matter less than nature things to me, and how Seattle is not the best of matches for me as urban attributes go, he kept bringing up the advantages of living near the center of all the action, as he saw it.

A few months later I find out that Mr. City Life has a second home in the country that he visits regularly. At my current salary, I suppose I could afford such a thing, but I don’t want the hassle of managing two homes nor to become addicted to a higher salary. So given that I am to have a single home, I’d prefer it not to be in the big city, if I can find a way to make such a home work for me (and I have).

Last month, he starts posting from the Portland radical faerie e-mail list, as if he now lives there. Turns out he does. So not only was he of mixed feelings about the city versus the country, he wasn’t really all that attached to Seattle, either. Interesting.

Yet another reason why it’s always a bad idea to do something just because of what you think someone else might think or say: that other person may be putting on a false front, too.

Published at 09:07 on 10 January 2014

Apropos this, I disagree with the answer in the headline. Science may be harder than other subjects but I also found it much more interesting than other subjects. It was always my favorite subject in school. Difficulty is not an obstacle if a subject is interesting.

Yet, I almost dropped out from a scientific major in college. The issue wasn’t the work, it was that the work was mostly ritualized bullshit that had very little to do with actual learning. And most of the professors obviously cared more about their research than their teaching.

On the latter point: why shouldn’t they? Excelling as a teacher seldom gets one the recognition and rewards that excelling as a researcher does. Any professor who prioritizes teaching over research has chosen to buck the system and sacrifice formal career rewards for the intrinsic reward of doing well at a job s/he enjoys and values. The latter is admirable, but it’s not the way to get a set of professors who typically value teaching as the number one priority.

So, there I was, struggling with lots of BS homework that was getting in the way of side projects I was doing on my own that were leading to real learning. Mathematics and physics were particular problems, since I comprehend both in different ways than most. The lectures, books, and assignments were mostly mystifying and comprehension could only come as the result of extensive pondering and research on my own.

There were two straws that almost broke the camel’s back. The first was when honor students would come to me, the student who was struggling to keep a B- grade point average, asking for help with key concepts they were incapable of grasping. The second was my difficulty of of getting courses taught by my favorite mathematics professor (one of a select few who did not mainly mystify and confuse me), who also had a reputation of being one of the hardest professors in the department. In response to students avoiding the hard professors, that department had a policy of not publishing who was going to be teaching various courses, which frustrated my desire to get courses taught by that professor. It became clear to me that formalized education was a mostly corrupt institution with little overall net value.

I persevered, but got out as soon as I could with a B.S. degree and refused to consider going further. If I’m to be assigned lots of busy-work that gets in the way of my self-directed learning and exploration, I figured I might as well get that busy work in the form of a job where someone else pays me to do it, as opposed to at a university where I am paying for the same nuisance.

Published at 19:19 on 12 December 2013

It is time again for the yearly ritual of copying my contacts from this year’s Slingshot Organizer to the next. It’s something of a chore, but it also forces me once per year to do the necessary task of purging old and obsolete information. Moreover, I keep all the old Organizers and use them as a sort of back-up device to the current one I am using.

Yes, I’m old fashioned. I’ve rehashed this several times before and won’t bother doing so again. Suffice to say I’ve considered a smart phone and concluded it just doesn’t suit me as well as more traditional technologies.

Published at 14:59 on 11 October 2013

So, there’s this new option available where I work called a “Health Savings Account”. The one offered by my employer is actually a very generous plan. And it sucks less abjectly than the ironically named “flexible” accounts, which you have to use within a calendar year or lose, forever.

But, there’s still a whopper of a catch. In this case, it’s called “You must save your receipts. Every last one. For seven long years.”

Good heavens, I can’t even keep one week’s worth of notes on a project straight. I could not fathom what would be required to care for hundreds or thousands of slips of paper for seven long years.

And note that these aren’t pieces of letter-sized paper one gets delivered by mail; they are randomly-sized small slips that get handed to you at the pharmacy or the clinic, ones that you must not, ever, leave in your pockets when doing the laundry. You must not let one fall out of your wallet unnoticed, ever. You must not forget and leave one on the sales counter. You must not toss one in a sidewalk waste-basket by mistake. You must not leave it in the bag then toss the bag in the recycle bin. Ever. Or woe unto you if you are audited.

Obviously, there’s people in the world who are intrinsically organized. My parents, for one. When they work on a big project, every item on the desk is at a neat 90-degree angle with respect to the other items and in order, always. It’s just the way they’re wired.

It’s also just not the way I am wired. Even if I make conscious effort to organize my things during a project, within a minute or two after said effort is ended, a significant degree of chaos and disorder will have emerged. It doesn’t bug me; in fact, I never even try to achieve strict desktop order anymore. It’s just not the way I work.

Sure, there needs to be greater cost control in the medical establishment, but I’d much rather get it like, say, the Canadians do, by having a Medicare card that I can just use, with other people (you know, the intrinsically organized types) being paid to professionally do all the receipt-tallying minutia that I am personally so ill-suited to do.

And I don’t think I am the only one. Really, now, saving every last medical receipt? For seven years? This is someone’s idea of “reform?” Seriously?