The $30,000 Parking Space

The University of Wisconsin-Madison grew up in the center of the city, before the advent of the automobile and its requisite parking.  Until 20 or so years ago, parking was not much of an issue; students lived in the campus area (they still do) and most professors and support staff lived in Victorian homes within walking distance.  Those homes are now out of reach of most university employees, and most people now commute from the outskirts of town, or further.  There is now a dearth of parking spaces. Competition is ferocious to get them, and the cost to employees is significant, up to $1100/yr to park in a garage.  Another way for the university to make money, right?

Wrong.  I was astounded to learn that the cost of building a parking garage is $30,000 per space.  Amazing!  With that number, it is clear that the university is actually heavily subsidizing the parking.  At $1,000/yr for parking, it takes 30 years to recoup the capital cost of the garage.  I'll bet that the garage has to be rebuilt more often than that.

I admit to being, for a long time, dubious of the accuracy of $30,000/space.  Then a couple of years ago a famous Austrian physicist, Rainer Blatt, visited the UW physics department.  At lunch, we were asking him about the new institute they were building for him in Vienna, and he was describing the various travails of getting the building built, including the required parking.  I brought up the $30,000 number, which was pooh-poohed by several at the table.  Prof. Blatt thought quietly for a minute or two, then affirmed that that was close to the cost for the parking ramp he had to build for his new institute.

It is becoming increasingly clear that our customs of automobile usage are ferociously expensive, though often hidden from us, and are generally heavily subsidized.

Massive Education

I was cleaning my office this morning and came upon this standard introductory physics textbook:

It is a typical, massive, introductory physics text.  Its mass is somewhat more than a ream of copier paper.  It is 1088 pages long.   The current edition sells at Amazon for, brace yourself, a massive $268. The core content of this book is essentially identical to the book I learned freshman physics from in 1979.  

This book is a symbol of the massive problems facing modern university education.  First, in an attempt to be meaningful (whatever THAT means), it is filled with superfluous "applications", historical anecdotes, philosophical reflections, and photographs.  Here, for example, is the last paragraph of page 1088: 

It expresses some nice sentiments.  But one senses the emotion of the author, having made it so far, is being released in a final poetic burst to the line.  I doubt that the fatigued student, recognizing immediately that there is no content in this that will be on the test, will read it. For the student, the effective finish line was likely hundreds of pages earlier. Maybe, tragically, a thousand.

Second,  in my opinion the actual relevant content of this book, and its many twins, is about 200 pages worth.  The trouble facing the student is--which are the important 200 pages?  I confess to you that the instructor can't answer that question either.  I think I know the key ideas of freshman physics, but I can't FIND them in the morass.

What precipitated this post is the business card taped to the front cover of the book by the saleswoman (who I like a lot--this is not her fault):  

Did you notice--"Concise presentation"?!?  Are you kidding me?

A third problem the book serves as a symbol of, at my university at least, is the context in which this book is used: a massive course with hundreds of students.  We pack 200 students into the lecture hall two times a week and preach at them.  It is a very unsatisfying experience for everyone involved.  To our credit, we also break them up into small 25 student groups led by graduate students where the real learning occurs.  But it is a very difficult situation and most students transfer their hatred of the massive  course to the subject matter, which is a real tragedy.  We know what we should do--break up the class into a large number of smaller classes where the students get individual attention.  We've done this with our introductory course sequence for physics majors, and doubled our number of physics majors as a result (I consider this one of my major contributions to my university).  But we just don't have the money (facilities, people), to do this for the literally thousands of biology and engineering majors who are required to take introductory physics each year.

One irony of this situation is the current excitement about MOOCs--Massive Open Online Courses.  These promise to solve the money problem.  Students will, from the comfort of their living rooms, watch a "master" teacher present the material.  They will then log into the electronic homework system where their work will be automatically graded by computer.  Human interaction?  Electronic chat rooms will do!  

Education is an intensely human activity.  People need to interact.  Even at the most advanced levels of research, THE most effective learning occurs in small workshops where experts interact face-to-face.  Massive books and courses don't, and won't, get the job done.

Interesting Sudoku Logic

I enjoy working the Sudoku puzzles in the newspaper.  Starting on Monday, the difficulty increases from 1-star to 6-stars on Saturday, with a 5-star on Sunday.  I find I can nearly always work 1- through 4-star puzzles without making any marks on the paper except filling in the numbers.  Unless I want to put in 30 minutes or more of deep thought, 5- and 6-star puzzles usually require some guesswork that I write with small numbers in the corners of the unfilled squares.

Today's 5-star puzzle, however, I managed to work without guesswork, using a logic sequence that I cannot remember using before.  Here is the partially worked puzzle, with a few key squares shaded:

For you logic fans, where should the "2" go in the upper-left corner?

Here is the interesting logic sequence.  Notice that the green squares must contain "2" and "4".  In the upper left, the "2" can potentially go in either the blue or red boxes, and a "4" must go in one of the blue boxes.  But I happened to notice that if the red were not a "2", then both the blue and the green boxes would contain "2" and "4".  But this can't be, since then the solution would not be unique-- if the blue had the "2" on top of the "4" then the green would have the "4" on top of the "2".  But an equally valid solution would have the blue "2" and "4" switched, with the green also switched.  Thus there would be two valid solutions, which is not allowed.  The conclusion: the red box MUST contain a "2". Putting a "2" in the red box made the rest of the puzzle easy to solve.

Here is the full solution.

Green Bicycling

A few years ago I subscribed to Bicycling Times (BT) magazine.  I enjoy commuting to work by bike when it's warm and light enough, and the occasional day trip on the wonderful bike paths that criss-cross Wisconsin.  BT caters to people like me.  It has many articles on practical bikes and gear, and whimsical uses of bikes as well.  There's also a certain save-the-planet mentality that appeals to me.

One issue had a marvelous article on bamboo bikes.  If you live near New York City, you can go to the  Bamboo Bike Studio in Brooklyn and build your own!  Just the kind of thing I'd enjoy doing some day.

The article rejoiced in the renewable, practical aspects of bamboo.  It grows like a weed in New Jersey, and its strength makes excellent frames. 

In the next issue, there were a couple of letters to the editor which I unfortunately did not keep and cannot find on the BT website.  The letters argued that such bikes were not really "green" since they used carbon fiber on the joints.  I composed the following reply, which to my regret I never sent in.

"Most issues of Bicycling Times include one or more items that touch on “green” bicycling; the most memorable described some cool bamboo bicycles.  Amazingly, these precipitated complaints from some of your more earnest readers that joining the bamboo together with carbon fiber destroyed its green advantages.  Huh?  In comparison with the alternatives, riding bicycles is so green that it hardly matters what the bike is made of. Be yours carbon, magnesium, scandium, petroleum, whifnium or whafnium--as long as you ride it,  you’ll still be far greener than your fossil-incinerating neighbors.  Relax and enjoy the ride."

An early version of the above replaced "petroleum" with "plutonium"--tongue-in-cheek, of course.  The point is that the use of non-renewable, even exotic, materials on items such as bicycles that last a long time and, in particular, serve as a substitute for liquid-fuel transportation, makes ecological sense. The amount of petroleum that went into the above carbon fiber joint is probably comparable to a few block drive by the diminutive hospital worker who barreled past me the other day in her gigantic F-150 truck.

Until we manage to ween ourselves off unnecessarily using our valuable petroleum reserves to move ourselves effortlessly from one place to another, there is no point in obsessing over trivial matters such as carbon fiber joints on bamboo bicycle frames.