347-878-3837

Featured

Here are articles on Featured

Chaos and celebration – Book deal!

Hey! Can only type for a minute. Very exciting stuff happening. I’ve closed a book deal for a book based on the Get-it-Done Guy podcast. Starting to write next week! This week was too exciting. Burst hot water heater. Had to have the whole thing ripped out and replaced. Back went out, couldn’t walk. Car died. Yada yada yada. It’s a testimony to all the work I’ve been doing on myself that my main reaction was amusement as all my best-laid plans were washed into a maelstrom of plumbers and the like.

The time commitment to keep up a high-quality podcast (Get-it-Done Guy) and write a book is huge. I’m still working out exactly how I’m going to keep this BLOG going in a meaningful way. There’s only so much content I can generate per week before my brain explodes. (And remember that currently, all of this content is free. My actual income comes from coaching, so I still need time to run the darned business.)

We’ll see how it goes.

Cheerio!

Once again, we penalize people who make smart money decisions

It’s amazing. I always found it odd when applying for a mortgage that banks considered income, but not asset base. If I have a bunch of money and invest in an investment that’s growing in value by 33% per year but not throwing off income, they won’t consider that in deciding to grant a mortgage. But if I put the same money in the same investment that throws off taxable income every year, it reduces my effective return by more than a third (since my combined tax brackets are more than 33%).

Let’s review: Person A invests and is making 33% on their money yearly. Person B invests and is making 20% on their money. Yet banks consider person B, who made the stupider financial decision, to be a credit risk.

Not to be outdone, the State of Massachusetts is doing this now, too, with Romney’s mandatory Health Insurance law. (He claims to be business savvy, but if this is an example of his overwhelming business sense, I’m missing it.)

First, let’s look at the policies: the quoted premiums for a $2,000-deductible policy are $350/month ($4,200 per year). A $3,000 deductible policy is $300/month ($3,600 per year). So here’s the choice: I can pay a guaranteed extra $600 yearly for the $2K deductible, or I can risk that I’ll need more than $2,000 worth of medical help and if my bill makes it as high as $3,000, I might pay out an extra $1,000 under the higher-deductible plan. P.S. I haven’t even visited a doctor in five years.

So: guaranteed pay $600/year or take a risk of maybe paying $1,000/year? To me, the choice is obvious. Take the maybe $1,000, since I certainly won’t need $3k of medical coverage every year, and the extra $600 in premiums will be a guaranteed yearly payout.

But the wonderful MBA-inspired law mandates the $2,000 policy. So I’m stuck paying for this silly policy that’s a bad financial decision.

If you believe people should simply be required to buy their own insurance, Gosh darn it, let them buy the insurance that makes sense.

If you believe that we should have a national insurance program, Gosh darn it, do that.

But isn’t it absurd to say, “Gee, people aren’t buying insurance because they can’t afford it, so let’s just mandate it. And while we’re at it, let’s mandate a financially crappy requirement for the people who actually have some financial literacy.”

Romney, hats off to you. You made a third of a billion dollars writing checks to buy other people’s companies while they did the work to make them profitable (yes, yes, picking up a pen is hard work when you don’t have someone to sign for you, but we sympathize). Oh, right, you also laid people off to get those companies to profitability.

Of course, it made good practice for your time as Governor. You ran on a business development platform, and we lost 126,000 jobs during your tenure as Governor–more than any other state in the union. Perhaps you thought that eliminating residents of Massachusetts would bring economic health, the way layoffs let you quickly flip a company at a profit in Private Equity? Oh, right, then let’s throw in the health care plan that forces me to siphon off my money to private insurers by buying an inferior policy.

Hats off to you. I hope you run again in 2012. You’ll make a fine President. You can be the second in our new tradition of Presidential Harvard MBAs who have so keenly demonstrated their skill and acumen at making themselves rich, while gutting the organizations they run.

Happy or Successful? Which will you pursue?

On a recent birthday I was looking back at the strategies that my friends from high school and college and I employed to get where we are today. We assumed that success would bring happiness, and as far I can tell, we were wrong. It turns out that the two are separate, even though marketers would have us believe otherwise…

Click here to read the entire Happy or Successful podcast as an article.

When is password security not security?

In a wondrous attempt to increase security, more and more vendors are now requiring me to choose passwords of many characters with mixed case, numbers and punctuation. My bank does one better, where I have five different question/answer combinations they ask, then once I’ve passed their quiz, they display an image that I’m supposed to recognize as the “right” image. Plus, everyone wants me to change my password every 30 days.

This is a great example of security professionals gone brain-dead. Yeah, if my bank were the only website in the world that I used, there’s a slim chance I might be able to remember all that. But they’re not the only one. Every credit card company, insurance company, and bank account has a web login. Not to mention commerce sites, Amazon, eBay, etc.

When you put all that together, it’s very quick to see that the only way a sane human can possibly cope with five challenge/responses plus a mixed-case password that changes monthly is to write the whole thing down and keep it around.

The result? Far less security than before! Because all a thief has to do is find someone’s 50-page notebook of current passwords and voila–all security gets compromised in one easy step.

Security geeks: chill out. You’re undermining your own cause by going for theoretical purity and ignoring the way real people behave in the real world. Let me choose something that’s hard to guess, but easy to remember. Like my mother’s favorite record album in French, spelled backwards. And let me keep the password long enough to memorize it.The current high-security practices, alas, fail miserably.

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

Greetings, and happy Sunset Day to all!

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

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

May all your sunsets be later!

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

Analemma, my Analemmaby Douglas Dodds

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

Why the Daylight Period Varies

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

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

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


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