Actually, once you’re a parent, that’s often replaced by Christmas-level anticipation.
Related
71 Comments
Maybe it’s because I live just across the street from a public elementary school, and in a neighborhood with a University campus, but I have never lost the feeling that autumn is effectively the start of a new year.
There is a particular scent of cool crisp air in the early mornings of late summer and early fall that I still associate with the first day of school. Even now (decades later) a whiff of that makes me think that I’ve got to check my pencils and textbooks.
I never felt dread at back-to-school time. Is it really that universal, or is it fake-universal where popular culture has just agreed that every kid hates school?
I never hated school; I just loved summer vacation more.
Parents feel the twinge of back-to-school in their pocketbooks
@ Andréa – Algebra: yes(*); calculus: not really. To be precise: twice, and in one of those cases I was using calculus just to get an “exact” answer to a problem that I had guesstimated with an algebraic formula. After all that work, I was somewhat ticked off to find that the “correct” answer was exactly the same as the algebraic approximation.
P.S. (*) OK, I’m a nerd, my answers are not representative.
You use algebra every time you catch something thrown to you.
And if you’re a parent who is also a teacher, it can vault up to massive dread…especially if (as my sister has had happen) your kids start school a week after you start school.
I was a 10-month school employee, so my favorite times of the school year were the two weeks before school began, and the two weeks after school finished. You can see why I retired ON THE FIRST DAY I could; my 57th birthday. Never looked back, even tho I dream about my job constantly. But I can at least wake up from that!
Kilby: When do you use algebra in “real” (read “everyday” [*]) life? I want to give a positive answer to Andrea’s questions, but I can only think of a few one-off examples where I’ve used it (e.g. mortgage and life insurance planning), and in those examples it ended up being combined with “higher level” math as well.
[*] I’m a data scientist, so in my work I use algebra, as well as lots of other math – but I’m restricting myself to non-work examples.
@ WW – It’s a little hard to reconstruct an example on the fly(*). I’ve used algebra as a shortcut to find solutions that would otherwise require repetitive arithmetic guesses, and occasionally to solve puzzles. Neither one represents a “need” for algebra, it’s merely a useful tool when one has the facility to employ it.
P.S. (*) I don’t consider “catching a fly” to be an algebraic solution – that would be ballistics and or orbital mechanics, and “real” ball players don’t do either either one: they train their instincts to run to the correct location.
P.S. I have to admit that on more than one occasion I have found myself looking up the quadratic formula to generate a solution to a “real world” problem. While this proves an example of “using algebra”, the fact that I had to confirm my memory of such a simple formula proves that it is not something I’ve done that often.
JP, most people call that physics*, not algebra, and I’m pretty sure that Andrea’s question implied actually using numbers and equations on paper, not the almost instinctive uses we have doing physical actions.
You have to realize that technically you did simple algebra in first grade, when they asked you if 3+[ ]=5, what goes in the [ ]? It’s the same as 3+x=5, they just don’t call it algebra then, because it would scare the parents.
You use algebra whenever you do price comparisons, figure a tip, calculate the sale price (% off), figure out how long it’s going to take you do drive some distance, calculate your average gas mileage for this tank of gas, or decide if you’ve got enough money to buy all three of those things you want with the $20 in your pocket. But those are all simple algebra problems and most people don’t really think of them as algebra. I’m sure there are many more examples like these.
The more complicated algebra problems are used less, but still apply. Certainly it is used in medical fields to calculate dosage of a medication based on patient body weight, or the above mentioned financial applications.
(*)Yes, I know that physics is applied maths, including algebra. And yes, we do amazing mathematical calculations in our heads to do simple things like catch a ball, but that’s not really what she was asking. Please let’s not start an argument about it.
Kilby: Sure, I would consider it a legitimate “use” of algebra if you’re using it to avoid doing a bunch of trial and error. I just can’t think of a case where I’ve used it to do that.
OTOH, when I searched online for examples of using algebra in everyday life, I got things like “How many $5 items can I buy with $15?”, which I would not consider using algebra, despite the fact that it can be cast as an algebraic equation. I suppose there are things like “How many $5 items can I buy with the $18 I have, and still have $2 left over for the bus?” Which sounds sort of realistic, but I can’t think of cases like that coming up too much, if at all.
“And yes, we do amazing mathematical calculations in our heads to do simple things like catch a ball…”
Actually, we use a very simple heuristic: (1) Fixate one’s gaze on the ball, (2) start running, (3) adjust one’s speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze_heuristic )
So yeah, elGeo’s comment feeds right in to what I was about to say: I use it all the time as I’m figuring out how to allocate my contributions to my IRA so that I keep the overall proportions at the predetermined percentages I want, but I don’t know if that’s “typical” or “real life”; I’ve seen even supposedly smart people leave money on the table by not contributing to a retirement savings plan when the company was offering matching contributions, let alone actually managing said retirement plan, let alone even having a retirement plan as opposed to living pay-check to pay-check (on a software developer’s salary, and not in Silicon Valley).
My other example I know doesn’t count as typical, so I guess see elGeo’s link above: I’m in the middle of writing a little routine to automatically figure out for me the optimal route to take between member libraries to pick up all the books and DVDs I want to borrow for the week; I do it on the fly in my head, but the information’s not optimally presented for that, so if I’m going to scrape the site to present the info in a better format, I may as well just have it run a calculation for me and figure the route out. Using GPS coordinates and the pythagorean theorem, you can easily calculate the distance between two places. So I just have to figure out which algorithm is best for approximating the best solution without too much complexity, and quash all the bugs arising from the poor data consistency from the library site…
larK: Surely the optimal solution is to request all the libraries to send the books and DVDs you want to the library closest to you?
WW: That’s actually an interesting philosophical question — is the most optimal life the best optimal life? You are right, that would be the easiest solution, but 1) I like instant gratification, ie: to get the book now instead of three days from now, 2) I like the thrill of the hunt (though yes, using a computer algorithm will eat into that as soon as the novelty’s worn off…), and 3) I need an excuse to go out and about and see new things and places; there are some 80 member libraries all over and even outside the county.
Plus, while I’m engaged in building this solution, like Sherlock Holmes, I don’t need to resort to the seven percent solution… ;-)
Doubling the recipe? Figuring out how much paint you need for the room? Calculating the MPG of your car?
Actually, statistics are more useful in everyday life, but overall, math teaches you a way of thinking.
larK: “I like instant gratification. . .”
Fair enough. But then the people who don’t take advantage of their company’s matching contributions to a retirement savings may also have their optimal solution.
OK, you can probably make a better case that your desire for instant gratification has a better short-term/long-term tradeoff.
Incidentally, I’m not sure Pythagorean theorem is best for travel time. It depends on your locality, but I would have guessed Manhattan distance was better. My guess is Google Maps has an API you can call, which is better yet, and which would also let you determine which approximation was better. (At any rate, I suspect the goal here is a fun project, rather than truly optimization of travel time.)
@WW re: travel time — I’m not at all after true travel time optimization, just a rough number I can use to sort. I’m not even getting travel time, I’m getting distance, and only crow-flies distance at that. And while Google may have an API, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, I’m never using a Google API again if I can help it: just when you have it all figured out they either get bored and shut it down on you, or rejigger it so you have to start all over. And anyway, I have a simple 1-liner in SQL involving squaring, subtraction, and square-rooting, or I can build a whole Google API interface… Yes, I am arguing that we need some complexity to keep life interesting, but I don’t need that much! ;-)
Then main reason I was thinking Google API would be interesting to use would be as a one-off to determine whether Pythagorean theorem or Manhattan distance was a better approximation of travel distance. So you would just be using it once, and never need to rejigger it or worry about them shutting it down. (Or you could just save the O(80^2) distances in a table, I guess, and assume that they won’t build any new libraries.)
But I guess we all have our own standards for what’s “interesting.” :)
larK and Winter, that’s how it works around here: I’m always getting books and CDs from other libraries shipped to mine.
“JP, most people call that physics*, not algebra”
Calculating a parabola intersect is algebra (or geometry if you draw it out). The algebra in questions happens to be in service to solving a physics problem.
A good deal of mathematical “story problems” involve A) identifying the relationship(s) between the known quantities, and B) applying the appropriate mathematical calculations to figure the unknown, desired quantities. A thrown object will follow a parabolic curve in most cases (there are a few cases where it won’t, such as, for example, a vertical “drop” as opposed to a “throw”.
Anyways, most physics really needs calculus, rather than algebra. A thrown ball happens to follow a simple curve (in most cases). A thrown Frisbee, more complex.
I used to be a teacher, to adults, of some applied math. Many adults have a fear of applied math, particularly if you talk about it in those terms. But a good many people use math… and sometimes fairly high-order math… without thinking about it or even realizing it. When the carpenter decides to build something, and figures they’ll need xome number of 2x4s or some other number of sheets of plywood… sometimes they’ll sit down and calculate the exact need, and sometimes they’ll use their judgment from doing the same task previously and build a top-of-head estimate that turns out to be fairly accurate. The key difference is practice… you don’t know how to calculate a transfer orbit from low-earth orbit to Mars orbit, because you haven’t done it lately, if you’ve ever done it at all. Solving a hyperbola intercept sounds like something hard to do, but it isn’t… as a quick classroom demonstration usually indicates.
My particular subject of instruction was TCP/IP addressing, which is all math, but it’s almost all 5th-grade math. There’s some unfamiliar application, but the only mathematical operation that my students didn’t already have by the 5th grade is calculating the log-base-2 of a number, which we don’t actually need to accurate closer than the integer so once I show them how to do THAT, they already know how to do all the math needed in TCP/IP addressing. It takes a couple of weeks to teach the relationships between the different known quantities, and how to calculate from the known quantities to the unknowns. But that’s all. Every student could do it by the tenth week of the class, and most were by then doing all the needed calculations in their heads..
Was Geometry, not Algebra, but the last two weeks of 10th grade math were spent out on the school campus with transits, tapes, and levels, calculating things using the geometry we’d just learned. Brilliant: let the kids see that there was some real-world use for this stuff. (1977, Palo Alto High School, Mr. Parker)
I’ve used geometry/algebra every once in a while for sewing – figuring how wide a cloth I need to have this length and width (it was a cloak I used it for first, longer than my measuring tape, and the calculation proved useful enough I used it several times after that). But I haven’t done big sewing in a while, so haven’t used it – I’d have to work out the calculation from scratch if I wanted to do it again.
Oh, thanks jjmcgaffey, I totally forgot about sewing, I used to use algebra (and trig) for quilting all the time.
I was thinking along the same lines as WW about storing all the predicted travel times between the libraries, until I noticed that there were 80 of them. You wouldn’t really need 6400 data points: the actual number (assuming equivalent times in either direction) is N*(N-1)/2, but even 3160 distances is vastly more than anyone would dream about assembling by hand.
This task is of course identical to the famous “travelling salesman problem“. I thought it was NP-complete, but Wikipedia calls it just “NP-hard”. Nevertheless, if larK does manage to find an adequate solution with that “little routine”, it might be worth publishing in a reputable journal.
P.S. I would also like to thank larK for identifying the exact heuristic baseball method that I was thinking of but did not know how to refer to in my first P.S. above.
Kilby: Assuming larK isn’t considering visiting more than 10 libraries a day, it doesn’t matter that it’s NP-hard. It would make most sense to just brute force it.
BTW, I never said you would need 6400 data points. I said O(80^2).
” A thrown object will follow a parabolic curve in most cases”
[pedant] Actually, they follow ellipses. If they had taught us that, orbits would have made *much* more sense. Thrown objects approximate parabolas, as small distances on the earth approximate flatness. [/pedant]
@ WW – Yes, I knew you were using O(…) to mean “on the order of”, but not everyone here is a mathematician. And you are definitely right about the irrelevancy of the NP-class distinction. I simply lost track of the fact that we are talking about a single day trip, which drastically limits the subset of potential destinations.
I can tell you one thing for sure which is that I have never used Physical Education in my life after getting out of high school.
“‘ A thrown object will follow a parabolic curve in most cases’
[pedant] Actually, they follow ellipses.”
What?
You’ve either got an UNHITTABLE curveball, or you can throw objects hard enough to put them into orbit, neither of which is included in “in most cases.”
@Kilby: Not that I’m not flattered, but what I’m doing is simply applying a few variations of a simple heuristic (that I learned about in 10th grade, to tie this back to at least Andréa’s off-topic question ;-) to get a hopefully good enough solution — the hard problem is to get a complete solution. The heuristic is simply go to the nearest unvisited node, and then from their to its nearest unvisited node, etc. The variations I’m trying out are to see if weighting it with most-books-available first does better than simple nearest first. Because of an interesting distribution of libraries and materials, I could see this going either way, and if the answers aren’t good enough, I’m not above brute-forcing it, because I’ll rarely if ever be looking for more than about five things anyway.
The interesting distribution is that libraries outside the county that have only more recently joined our county-wide system tend to have much larger collections, because they were solo libraries so much more recently. So there’s a very good chance that a far away library outside my county has all the things I am looking for, but I would probably be better served going to two or three much closer local libraries.
“The heuristic is simply go to the nearest unvisited node, and then from their to its nearest unvisited node, etc. The variations I’m trying out are to see if weighting it with most-books-available first does better than simple nearest first.”
Don’t you need to take into account hours each branch is open, or are all of these “open essentially all day on whatever day you plan to make the run”? Also might ideally want to consider ease of parking, and of access within each building to book(s) requested — do you have to climb stairs? Do the books have to be paged from inhouse storage or are you sure each is on open shelves? And if you have a preference for, say, hardcover over pb or large-print over standard print, and your library catalogs note those points, should that waffect your ideal route plan?
At some point all this time spent thinking about the problem will vastly exceed any amount of driving time that the algorithm might save. The more I look at it, the more the best answer appears to be “find out which libraries will deliver to a central location”.
Kilby, well, like I said before, I suspect the goal is to have a fun project, than really to minimize driving time.
I prefer the solution of having the books delivered to a central location, not just to minimize driving time, but also frustration – in my library system, quite often the item that the system claims is at a particular library, is not actually there (or at least not shelved in the stated location).
I’d rather be home reading than driving around picking up books.
Library staff need the work, or they will be downsized. Many libraries already have automated check-in and check-out systems, thus eliminating staff. Also, reference librarians are minimized, as everyone seems to use Google. No one needs to discard/file catalog cards, so there you have more staff elimination. At least give ’em a chance to find the books for you! ‘-)
“Library staff need the work, or they will be downsized.”
I feel bad then. More and more I just get e-books onto my iPad.
I guess I was just a little jealous of larK having 80 libraries within reachable driving distance, but I shouldn’t complain. I just checked, the Berlin public library system has 68 locations, all of which are (theoretically) within an hour or two of my home in the suburbs. However, it doesn’t work that way in practice. Even the closest of the Berlin libraries is far enough away to keep me from renewing the card that I once had (over a decade ago).
As for delivering, the Berlin system nicks the customer just for reserving a book in advance, and charges another Euro to deliver it to another library (for each direction). The way I read the fee schedule, this means €3/book that you don’t pick up/drop off at its “native” location. So figuring out the best pickup route might be a good idea.
I was using algebra the other day. The 401(k) at Megacorp has a fund that I use, the stable-value fund. It’s composed of a bunch of different bonds, for which they purchase insurance wrappers to ensure that the principal never decreases (unlike a typical bond fund can). They used to also guarantee a quarterly annualized rate. Second quarter of this year was 2.65% annualized, for example. Starting with third quarter, the rate will adjust daily, like a money-market fund. But they don’t tell you what that rate is. So I spent some time using the performance numbers to calculate an average rate for the quarter.
Kilby . . . for real?? Are libraries not taxpayer supported, then? When libraries became computerized, the best thing (to me) was being able to reserve books online, have them delivered to the library nearest me, and pick them up without having to deal with other patrons, esp. in WI during flu season. Even for books out of “my” library system, inter-library loans are free to reserved and have shipped.
Yes, that’s a whole ‘nother issue that I didn’t get into ’cause I don’t read anything but dead tree media.
“Library staff need the work, or they will be downsized.”
This is why whenever I go to the library, I remove all the books from 3 or 4 shelves at random, and scatter them across the library. :)
” I don’t read anything but dead tree media.”
I get some electronically. I tell the library that I want it, and they authorize it to be delivered to my Kindle, and I don’t have to go pick it up… or, more critically for ME, remember to take it back before it’s due.
” once you’re a parent, that’s often replaced by Christmas-level anticipation.”
I never had this. Of course, for much of the time I was a parent, I was a teacher, in a vocational school with a year-round schedule.
Don’t laugh; we had students DO that! One year when we moved from one building to another, the custodian didn’t agree with me that spins should be in the FRONT of shelf; when I came to work the next day, ALL THE BOOKS HAD BEEN PUSHED BACK TO BE EVEN WITH THE BACK OF THE SHELVES. He quit soon thereafter; couldn’t take the ‘alternative’ students we had.
I find it amazing how in this regard the stereo-types are on their head: Germany (Berlin, at least) seems to be libertarian dystopic heaven, and the US (some states, at least) we have honest-to-goodness socialist systems, where we get something in return for our tax dollars. Weird! (Germans also seem to be way behind the curve on public domain free books; their version of Project Gutenberg (the irony is delicious!) is some attempt at profit owned by Der Spiegel, if I recall correctly; at any rate, good luck finding much in the public domain for German language — you’re better off at Project Gutenberg, which will probably at least have some Goethe and Schiller…)
I was also surprised by the Berlin library fees, but the fact that an institution is tax-supported isn’t really inconsistent with fees. We have lots of tax-supported services here that also have usage fees. e.g. camping in state parks, DMV fees, toll bridges, etc. . . It seems quite reasonable to me to provide basic services for free, but charge an fee for services that cost the system a little extra, to make sure that they don’t get overused. (I always feel a little guilty when I get a book through interlibrary loan, pick it up, immediately realize that it’s not what I want, and return it right away. Sometimes I hold onto it a week, just because I imagine an ILL librarian seeing the book coming back right away, which is silly, I know.) Having the library transport books for you seems more of a “luxury” service than, for example, health care.
It’s funny y’all should mention both these topics today, because I was just trying to figure a vaguely comprehensible way a library could assess me $2.70 for being eleven days late returning four books.
“I always feel a little guilty when I get a book through interlibrary loan, pick it up, immediately realize that it’s not what I want, and return it right away.”
A friend of mine says that once at the library he checked out a few books, sat down and read them quickly, returned them and checkout a couple more, read them and returned them — all without leaving the library. He apologized to the librarian for checking them out and returning them immediately, and the librarian said “That’s all right. It’s great for our circulation numbers.”
YES!! And believe me, those numbers are VERY important!
“I was just trying to figure a vaguely comprehensible way a library could assess me $2.70 for being eleven days late returning four books.”
Probably a rate for each weekday, plus a different rate for weekends. Also different rates for different books depending on categories (books in general vs. books in high demand.) You often get new releases getting special treatment because they have (or are expected to have) a strong waitlist when they are first made available. So, when the long-awaited Harry Potter book 8 finally comes out, and has 534 holds on it before the library has even received any copies, the books are put in special status… you can only check it out for a week, you can’t renew it, and the overdue fees are triple the normal ones. Then, after everyone’s read it, it gets shelved with the regular books and has the regular checkout rules (including overdue fines).
Andréa: So you’re saying that I should supplement my policy of creating busywork for librarians by randomly taking off the books off shelves, by ordering books I don’t need through interlibrary loan? OK, I guess I want to support my library.
It doesn’t cost anything(*) just to check out a book from a Berlin library, the fees I mentioned above are for the privilege of reserving and/or having a book delivered to a different location. They will even deliver direct to your house or office, but that costs €3.50
P.S. (*) There is a €10 annual fee for the library card.
P.P.S. Our local library here in the suburbs is a exceptional. Membership is free, and they don’t charge anything to check out books or CDs (there is a small fee for DVDs). It’s small, and open only Tuesday to Friday, but compared to the size of the town, it is a wonderful luxury.
WW: Just don’t tell ’em I sent you.
@Kilby & WW: Yes, it isn’t inconsistent to charge fees even if you are tax money supported, but isn’t it so much better when you DON’T? Also, there is a slippery slope in that thinking, whereby Kilby thinks his local library is great because they DON’T charge a (small) membership fee. I find it particularly ironic that the example we have is from socialist Europe and not from, say, libertarian Colorado or something.
Compare the library that Kilby finds so exceptional for a suburban Berlin small town to my county, the most populous in its state, said state being the most densely populated state in the Union, and within a major metropolitan area. (Don’t know why I’m being so coy…) That said, the most populous town only has some 40,000 residents; the majority of the towns have libraries, and these libraries, even if for a town with a 5000 population, tend to be open at least 5 days a week, often 6, with at least business hours for the weekdays, but usually open till nine at least 3 days a week. All of these libraries are free for residents of their town to join, and all of these libraries are members of the County-wide system, so you can borrow from and return to any member library, and you can have books sent to your home library, and you can reserve books, all for free. The libraries offer services, free wifi, computer use, ESL classes, passport applications, museum passes, ebooks, internet access points to borrow, cultural programs — all for free! By banding together, they are able to offer much more than any individual library could offer (as can be seen by the bigger, formerly solitary big libraries from outside the county joining our system).
Yes, ours is a very rich county, yet there are still poor people and poor areas, and they are well served by our libraries; by being free to all and not having a means test for free services, more economically marginal people are likely to take advantage of the services, because there is no stigma attached to using the library, taking advantage of all the free services. It is actually hard to convince people to use the free services, they seem too good to be true, people assume there must be strings attached.
Libraries have volunteer Friends of the Library associations that work to support an individual library, mostly with funds. I just recently was recruited to the board of my local library, which hasn’t had a friends organization for the last 20 years.
I have always felt that the library system here was one of the best things about where I live. I love the fact that it is so widespread, so generous, so effective and so seemingly effortless. I don’t see this as an either/or, either we can have good health care, or we can have a nice library system; instead, I see this as a model — like our library system, we can get a better health care system that just works, use the one system as a model for the other. (The libraries are funded through property tax, with a minimum state defined rate of 33 cents per $1000 of property value; I can’t remember the exact amount I pay (largely because it was to me so trivial), but it was in the range of $100 per year, possibly less; divide that by 2 for me and my wife…) (There are towns that don’t have libraries, and so save their residents some ~hundred bucks in property taxes; if these people want to use a library, they have to pay a particular library an annual fee, somewhere around $100 per person, and this membership is restricted, you don’t get all the privileges I mention above, it’s more like Kilby’s German system. It tends to be the very rich towns that eschew a library, which I find ironic — a “poor” town has a fantastic library with super services, and the rich town has nothing, but I suppose when your median house price is just under $4 million, you are saving a whopping $1320…)
Kilby, you should expect better library services in Germany!
Several counties in southern Oregon have closed all their county public libraries, because there was no money to pay for them. Residents pay very low property taxes, which in the past were subsidized by the fact that the federal government owned huge tracts of land in those counties, and shared logging revenues from logging the forests with the counties.
Along came the Northern Spotted Owl, and it’s particularity in selecting nesting sites only in old-growth forests, and the logging in those forests was severely restricted. The federal government made payments to the counties to make up for the lost logging revenue, but they have been severely decreasing of late. The county sheriffs have also felt the crunch, with serious debate over whether or not the state police would have to take up services normally provided by the county sheriff deputies.
The prosperous northern Oregon counties, by comparison, have extensive library facilities. Because they can put a levy on the ballot and win passage, usually by a substantial margin.
The most beautiful, efficient, extensive library I’ve been in was in Yuma, AZ, a city with 33% unemployment.
“Yes, it isn’t inconsistent to charge fees even if you are tax money supported, but isn’t it so much better when you DON’T?”
If this is asked as a blanket rule, I would not say “yes.” I think it’s reasonable, appropriate, and even useful for tax supported services to charge fees. There are reasonable points between complete libertarianism, and communism.
“I don’t see this as an either/or, either we can have good health care, or we can have a nice library system”
It’s not an either/or, but if a country/locality isn’t going to socialize everything, or leave everything to the private sector, it has to make choices about which services it’s most important to have government support. You’re saying that there’s something weird or ironic about a locality in supposedly socialist Europe having fees that we don’t for one particular service, and I’m saying that this strikes me as a strangely narrow thing to focus on. It’s as if you’re assuming that every country had the exact same stack ordered list of priorities for government support, and some German library fees are a sign that the popular perceptions of Europe and Colorado are wrong. That doesn’t seem to me a reasonable way to frame things.
One country’s government has made it a priority for all its citizens to have access to health care, while its municipalities have given its citizens access to libraries, but charges fees for some of those library services. Another country’s government has not made it a priority for all its citizens to have access to health care, while some of its municipalities have less library fees. Regardless of whether you agree with those priorities, it’s hard to see what’s “amazing,” “ironic,” or “weird” about the first government being considered more “socialist.”
To be clear, I’m not saying you can’t make a case that it would be better not to have these library fees. I’m saying that you seem to be overstating the significance of these fees by several orders of magnitude
WW: “You’re saying that there’s something weird or ironic about a locality in supposedly socialist Europe having fees that we don’t for one particular service, and I’m saying that this strikes me as a strangely narrow thing to focus on.”
OK. I happen to value libraries very highly, and it seems I have a deep-seated belief that attitudes and expectations toward and of them serve as bellwethers of underlying attitude. Therefore, I am very surprised to learn that in and around Berlin, where my family comes from and I know lots of people, and they tend to be annoyingly proselytizingly leftist in all things, and highly value society providing things for them, that their library system — something I might disproportionately value — is so regressive, and that the system I enjoy here, in the US, which I have consistently learned over 40 years of comment from them is inferior in all ways to Europe (and it’s my fault, and why don’t I do something about it?!), is so much better.
So yes, it’s on me. I have a probably wrong deep-seated assumption that I need to mull over, and I have a life-time’s resentment accumulation of left-leaning European propaganda that has been directed at me, so yeah, for me, it is weird, ironic and amazing. Apparently your mileage varies. Probably because those smug bastards at Volkswagen have been hacking the emissions…
“Apparently your mileage varies. Probably because those smug bastards at Volkswagen have been hacking the emissions…”
That’s what I like about these conversations – no matter how serious, a bit of humor can be injected anywhere.
As a kid in junior high I volunteered in the school library. All of my books at home had little pockets on the first page with a little card in it for when “someone borrowed” it. My name was rubber stamped on the edge of the book and on page 15 (which they did in the junior high library). My poor grandparents would have to borrow books when they came to visit and return them the next trip. And to tie it into the rest of my life – prior year NYS IT- 201 (resident income tax) forms had the tops cut off of them to use as applications for library cards -the card number went where the Social Security number was suppose to be written.
My mom later got an MS in library science – I always wondered if I gave her the idea.
MItch 4 – the fall is the start of the year. Rosh Hashanah this year is September 10.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Maybe it’s because I live just across the street from a public elementary school, and in a neighborhood with a University campus, but I have never lost the feeling that autumn is effectively the start of a new year.
There is a particular scent of cool crisp air in the early mornings of late summer and early fall that I still associate with the first day of school. Even now (decades later) a whiff of that makes me think that I’ve got to check my pencils and textbooks.
I never felt dread at back-to-school time. Is it really that universal, or is it fake-universal where popular culture has just agreed that every kid hates school?
I never hated school; I just loved summer vacation more.
Parents feel the twinge of back-to-school in their pocketbooks
Speaking of ‘hating school’ and whether that is true or not, how ’bout this –
https://www.gocomics.com/realitycheck/2018/08/13 – DO we use algebra in real life?
@ Andréa – Algebra: yes(*); calculus: not really. To be precise: twice, and in one of those cases I was using calculus just to get an “exact” answer to a problem that I had guesstimated with an algebraic formula. After all that work, I was somewhat ticked off to find that the “correct” answer was exactly the same as the algebraic approximation.
P.S. (*) OK, I’m a nerd, my answers are not representative.
You use algebra every time you catch something thrown to you.
And if you’re a parent who is also a teacher, it can vault up to massive dread…especially if (as my sister has had happen) your kids start school a week after you start school.
I was a 10-month school employee, so my favorite times of the school year were the two weeks before school began, and the two weeks after school finished. You can see why I retired ON THE FIRST DAY I could; my 57th birthday. Never looked back, even tho I dream about my job constantly. But I can at least wake up from that!
Kilby: When do you use algebra in “real” (read “everyday” [*]) life? I want to give a positive answer to Andrea’s questions, but I can only think of a few one-off examples where I’ve used it (e.g. mortgage and life insurance planning), and in those examples it ended up being combined with “higher level” math as well.
[*] I’m a data scientist, so in my work I use algebra, as well as lots of other math – but I’m restricting myself to non-work examples.
@ WW – It’s a little hard to reconstruct an example on the fly(*). I’ve used algebra as a shortcut to find solutions that would otherwise require repetitive arithmetic guesses, and occasionally to solve puzzles. Neither one represents a “need” for algebra, it’s merely a useful tool when one has the facility to employ it.
P.S. (*) I don’t consider “catching a fly” to be an algebraic solution – that would be ballistics and or orbital mechanics, and “real” ball players don’t do either either one: they train their instincts to run to the correct location.
P.S. I have to admit that on more than one occasion I have found myself looking up the quadratic formula to generate a solution to a “real world” problem. While this proves an example of “using algebra”, the fact that I had to confirm my memory of such a simple formula proves that it is not something I’ve done that often.
JP, most people call that physics*, not algebra, and I’m pretty sure that Andrea’s question implied actually using numbers and equations on paper, not the almost instinctive uses we have doing physical actions.
You have to realize that technically you did simple algebra in first grade, when they asked you if 3+[ ]=5, what goes in the [ ]? It’s the same as 3+x=5, they just don’t call it algebra then, because it would scare the parents.
You use algebra whenever you do price comparisons, figure a tip, calculate the sale price (% off), figure out how long it’s going to take you do drive some distance, calculate your average gas mileage for this tank of gas, or decide if you’ve got enough money to buy all three of those things you want with the $20 in your pocket. But those are all simple algebra problems and most people don’t really think of them as algebra. I’m sure there are many more examples like these.
The more complicated algebra problems are used less, but still apply. Certainly it is used in medical fields to calculate dosage of a medication based on patient body weight, or the above mentioned financial applications.
(*)Yes, I know that physics is applied maths, including algebra. And yes, we do amazing mathematical calculations in our heads to do simple things like catch a ball, but that’s not really what she was asking. Please let’s not start an argument about it.
Kilby: Sure, I would consider it a legitimate “use” of algebra if you’re using it to avoid doing a bunch of trial and error. I just can’t think of a case where I’ve used it to do that.
OTOH, when I searched online for examples of using algebra in everyday life, I got things like “How many $5 items can I buy with $15?”, which I would not consider using algebra, despite the fact that it can be cast as an algebraic equation. I suppose there are things like “How many $5 items can I buy with the $18 I have, and still have $2 left over for the bus?” Which sounds sort of realistic, but I can’t think of cases like that coming up too much, if at all.
“And yes, we do amazing mathematical calculations in our heads to do simple things like catch a ball…”
Actually, we use a very simple heuristic: (1) Fixate one’s gaze on the ball, (2) start running, (3) adjust one’s speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze_heuristic )
“Please let’s not start an argument about it.”
Oops.
Zach Weinersmith had a comment that’s germane to the question of algebra in “real” life –
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-teacher
So yeah, elGeo’s comment feeds right in to what I was about to say: I use it all the time as I’m figuring out how to allocate my contributions to my IRA so that I keep the overall proportions at the predetermined percentages I want, but I don’t know if that’s “typical” or “real life”; I’ve seen even supposedly smart people leave money on the table by not contributing to a retirement savings plan when the company was offering matching contributions, let alone actually managing said retirement plan, let alone even having a retirement plan as opposed to living pay-check to pay-check (on a software developer’s salary, and not in Silicon Valley).
My other example I know doesn’t count as typical, so I guess see elGeo’s link above: I’m in the middle of writing a little routine to automatically figure out for me the optimal route to take between member libraries to pick up all the books and DVDs I want to borrow for the week; I do it on the fly in my head, but the information’s not optimally presented for that, so if I’m going to scrape the site to present the info in a better format, I may as well just have it run a calculation for me and figure the route out. Using GPS coordinates and the pythagorean theorem, you can easily calculate the distance between two places. So I just have to figure out which algorithm is best for approximating the best solution without too much complexity, and quash all the bugs arising from the poor data consistency from the library site…
larK: Surely the optimal solution is to request all the libraries to send the books and DVDs you want to the library closest to you?
WW: That’s actually an interesting philosophical question — is the most optimal life the best optimal life? You are right, that would be the easiest solution, but 1) I like instant gratification, ie: to get the book now instead of three days from now, 2) I like the thrill of the hunt (though yes, using a computer algorithm will eat into that as soon as the novelty’s worn off…), and 3) I need an excuse to go out and about and see new things and places; there are some 80 member libraries all over and even outside the county.
Plus, while I’m engaged in building this solution, like Sherlock Holmes, I don’t need to resort to the seven percent solution… ;-)
Doubling the recipe? Figuring out how much paint you need for the room? Calculating the MPG of your car?
Actually, statistics are more useful in everyday life, but overall, math teaches you a way of thinking.
larK: “I like instant gratification. . .”
Fair enough. But then the people who don’t take advantage of their company’s matching contributions to a retirement savings may also have their optimal solution.
OK, you can probably make a better case that your desire for instant gratification has a better short-term/long-term tradeoff.
Incidentally, I’m not sure Pythagorean theorem is best for travel time. It depends on your locality, but I would have guessed Manhattan distance was better. My guess is Google Maps has an API you can call, which is better yet, and which would also let you determine which approximation was better. (At any rate, I suspect the goal here is a fun project, rather than truly optimization of travel time.)
@WW re: travel time — I’m not at all after true travel time optimization, just a rough number I can use to sort. I’m not even getting travel time, I’m getting distance, and only crow-flies distance at that. And while Google may have an API, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, I’m never using a Google API again if I can help it: just when you have it all figured out they either get bored and shut it down on you, or rejigger it so you have to start all over. And anyway, I have a simple 1-liner in SQL involving squaring, subtraction, and square-rooting, or I can build a whole Google API interface… Yes, I am arguing that we need some complexity to keep life interesting, but I don’t need that much! ;-)
Then main reason I was thinking Google API would be interesting to use would be as a one-off to determine whether Pythagorean theorem or Manhattan distance was a better approximation of travel distance. So you would just be using it once, and never need to rejigger it or worry about them shutting it down. (Or you could just save the O(80^2) distances in a table, I guess, and assume that they won’t build any new libraries.)
But I guess we all have our own standards for what’s “interesting.” :)
larK and Winter, that’s how it works around here: I’m always getting books and CDs from other libraries shipped to mine.
“JP, most people call that physics*, not algebra”
Calculating a parabola intersect is algebra (or geometry if you draw it out). The algebra in questions happens to be in service to solving a physics problem.
A good deal of mathematical “story problems” involve A) identifying the relationship(s) between the known quantities, and B) applying the appropriate mathematical calculations to figure the unknown, desired quantities. A thrown object will follow a parabolic curve in most cases (there are a few cases where it won’t, such as, for example, a vertical “drop” as opposed to a “throw”.
Anyways, most physics really needs calculus, rather than algebra. A thrown ball happens to follow a simple curve (in most cases). A thrown Frisbee, more complex.
I used to be a teacher, to adults, of some applied math. Many adults have a fear of applied math, particularly if you talk about it in those terms. But a good many people use math… and sometimes fairly high-order math… without thinking about it or even realizing it. When the carpenter decides to build something, and figures they’ll need xome number of 2x4s or some other number of sheets of plywood… sometimes they’ll sit down and calculate the exact need, and sometimes they’ll use their judgment from doing the same task previously and build a top-of-head estimate that turns out to be fairly accurate. The key difference is practice… you don’t know how to calculate a transfer orbit from low-earth orbit to Mars orbit, because you haven’t done it lately, if you’ve ever done it at all. Solving a hyperbola intercept sounds like something hard to do, but it isn’t… as a quick classroom demonstration usually indicates.
My particular subject of instruction was TCP/IP addressing, which is all math, but it’s almost all 5th-grade math. There’s some unfamiliar application, but the only mathematical operation that my students didn’t already have by the 5th grade is calculating the log-base-2 of a number, which we don’t actually need to accurate closer than the integer so once I show them how to do THAT, they already know how to do all the math needed in TCP/IP addressing. It takes a couple of weeks to teach the relationships between the different known quantities, and how to calculate from the known quantities to the unknowns. But that’s all. Every student could do it by the tenth week of the class, and most were by then doing all the needed calculations in their heads..
Was Geometry, not Algebra, but the last two weeks of 10th grade math were spent out on the school campus with transits, tapes, and levels, calculating things using the geometry we’d just learned. Brilliant: let the kids see that there was some real-world use for this stuff. (1977, Palo Alto High School, Mr. Parker)
I’ve used geometry/algebra every once in a while for sewing – figuring how wide a cloth I need to have this length and width (it was a cloak I used it for first, longer than my measuring tape, and the calculation proved useful enough I used it several times after that). But I haven’t done big sewing in a while, so haven’t used it – I’d have to work out the calculation from scratch if I wanted to do it again.
Oh, thanks jjmcgaffey, I totally forgot about sewing, I used to use algebra (and trig) for quilting all the time.
I was thinking along the same lines as WW about storing all the predicted travel times between the libraries, until I noticed that there were 80 of them. You wouldn’t really need 6400 data points: the actual number (assuming equivalent times in either direction) is N*(N-1)/2, but even 3160 distances is vastly more than anyone would dream about assembling by hand.
This task is of course identical to the famous “travelling salesman problem“. I thought it was NP-complete, but Wikipedia calls it just “NP-hard”. Nevertheless, if larK does manage to find an adequate solution with that “little routine”, it might be worth publishing in a reputable journal.
P.S. I would also like to thank larK for identifying the exact heuristic baseball method that I was thinking of but did not know how to refer to in my first P.S. above.
Kilby: Assuming larK isn’t considering visiting more than 10 libraries a day, it doesn’t matter that it’s NP-hard. It would make most sense to just brute force it.
BTW, I never said you would need 6400 data points. I said O(80^2).
” A thrown object will follow a parabolic curve in most cases”
[pedant] Actually, they follow ellipses. If they had taught us that, orbits would have made *much* more sense. Thrown objects approximate parabolas, as small distances on the earth approximate flatness. [/pedant]
@ WW – Yes, I knew you were using O(…) to mean “on the order of”, but not everyone here is a mathematician. And you are definitely right about the irrelevancy of the NP-class distinction. I simply lost track of the fact that we are talking about a single day trip, which drastically limits the subset of potential destinations.
I can tell you one thing for sure which is that I have never used Physical Education in my life after getting out of high school.
We missed a chance for synchronicity. This Jeff Stahler comic is also dated 9-Aug-2018:
“‘ A thrown object will follow a parabolic curve in most cases’
[pedant] Actually, they follow ellipses.”
What?
You’ve either got an UNHITTABLE curveball, or you can throw objects hard enough to put them into orbit, neither of which is included in “in most cases.”
@Kilby: Not that I’m not flattered, but what I’m doing is simply applying a few variations of a simple heuristic (that I learned about in 10th grade, to tie this back to at least Andréa’s off-topic question ;-) to get a hopefully good enough solution — the hard problem is to get a complete solution. The heuristic is simply go to the nearest unvisited node, and then from their to its nearest unvisited node, etc. The variations I’m trying out are to see if weighting it with most-books-available first does better than simple nearest first. Because of an interesting distribution of libraries and materials, I could see this going either way, and if the answers aren’t good enough, I’m not above brute-forcing it, because I’ll rarely if ever be looking for more than about five things anyway.
The interesting distribution is that libraries outside the county that have only more recently joined our county-wide system tend to have much larger collections, because they were solo libraries so much more recently. So there’s a very good chance that a far away library outside my county has all the things I am looking for, but I would probably be better served going to two or three much closer local libraries.
“The heuristic is simply go to the nearest unvisited node, and then from their to its nearest unvisited node, etc. The variations I’m trying out are to see if weighting it with most-books-available first does better than simple nearest first.”
Don’t you need to take into account hours each branch is open, or are all of these “open essentially all day on whatever day you plan to make the run”? Also might ideally want to consider ease of parking, and of access within each building to book(s) requested — do you have to climb stairs? Do the books have to be paged from inhouse storage or are you sure each is on open shelves? And if you have a preference for, say, hardcover over pb or large-print over standard print, and your library catalogs note those points, should that waffect your ideal route plan?
At some point all this time spent thinking about the problem will vastly exceed any amount of driving time that the algorithm might save. The more I look at it, the more the best answer appears to be “find out which libraries will deliver to a central location”.
Kilby, well, like I said before, I suspect the goal is to have a fun project, than really to minimize driving time.
I prefer the solution of having the books delivered to a central location, not just to minimize driving time, but also frustration – in my library system, quite often the item that the system claims is at a particular library, is not actually there (or at least not shelved in the stated location).
I’d rather be home reading than driving around picking up books.
Library staff need the work, or they will be downsized. Many libraries already have automated check-in and check-out systems, thus eliminating staff. Also, reference librarians are minimized, as everyone seems to use Google. No one needs to discard/file catalog cards, so there you have more staff elimination. At least give ’em a chance to find the books for you! ‘-)
“Library staff need the work, or they will be downsized.”
I feel bad then. More and more I just get e-books onto my iPad.
I guess I was just a little jealous of larK having 80 libraries within reachable driving distance, but I shouldn’t complain. I just checked, the Berlin public library system has 68 locations, all of which are (theoretically) within an hour or two of my home in the suburbs. However, it doesn’t work that way in practice. Even the closest of the Berlin libraries is far enough away to keep me from renewing the card that I once had (over a decade ago).
As for delivering, the Berlin system nicks the customer just for reserving a book in advance, and charges another Euro to deliver it to another library (for each direction). The way I read the fee schedule, this means €3/book that you don’t pick up/drop off at its “native” location. So figuring out the best pickup route might be a good idea.
And another . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/daddyshome/2018/08/14
I was using algebra the other day. The 401(k) at Megacorp has a fund that I use, the stable-value fund. It’s composed of a bunch of different bonds, for which they purchase insurance wrappers to ensure that the principal never decreases (unlike a typical bond fund can). They used to also guarantee a quarterly annualized rate. Second quarter of this year was 2.65% annualized, for example. Starting with third quarter, the rate will adjust daily, like a money-market fund. But they don’t tell you what that rate is. So I spent some time using the performance numbers to calculate an average rate for the quarter.
Kilby . . . for real?? Are libraries not taxpayer supported, then? When libraries became computerized, the best thing (to me) was being able to reserve books online, have them delivered to the library nearest me, and pick them up without having to deal with other patrons, esp. in WI during flu season. Even for books out of “my” library system, inter-library loans are free to reserved and have shipped.
Yes, that’s a whole ‘nother issue that I didn’t get into ’cause I don’t read anything but dead tree media.
“Library staff need the work, or they will be downsized.”
This is why whenever I go to the library, I remove all the books from 3 or 4 shelves at random, and scatter them across the library. :)
” I don’t read anything but dead tree media.”
I get some electronically. I tell the library that I want it, and they authorize it to be delivered to my Kindle, and I don’t have to go pick it up… or, more critically for ME, remember to take it back before it’s due.
” once you’re a parent, that’s often replaced by Christmas-level anticipation.”
I never had this. Of course, for much of the time I was a parent, I was a teacher, in a vocational school with a year-round schedule.
Don’t laugh; we had students DO that! One year when we moved from one building to another, the custodian didn’t agree with me that spins should be in the FRONT of shelf; when I came to work the next day, ALL THE BOOKS HAD BEEN PUSHED BACK TO BE EVEN WITH THE BACK OF THE SHELVES. He quit soon thereafter; couldn’t take the ‘alternative’ students we had.
I find it amazing how in this regard the stereo-types are on their head: Germany (Berlin, at least) seems to be libertarian dystopic heaven, and the US (some states, at least) we have honest-to-goodness socialist systems, where we get something in return for our tax dollars. Weird! (Germans also seem to be way behind the curve on public domain free books; their version of Project Gutenberg (the irony is delicious!) is some attempt at profit owned by Der Spiegel, if I recall correctly; at any rate, good luck finding much in the public domain for German language — you’re better off at Project Gutenberg, which will probably at least have some Goethe and Schiller…)
I was also surprised by the Berlin library fees, but the fact that an institution is tax-supported isn’t really inconsistent with fees. We have lots of tax-supported services here that also have usage fees. e.g. camping in state parks, DMV fees, toll bridges, etc. . . It seems quite reasonable to me to provide basic services for free, but charge an fee for services that cost the system a little extra, to make sure that they don’t get overused. (I always feel a little guilty when I get a book through interlibrary loan, pick it up, immediately realize that it’s not what I want, and return it right away. Sometimes I hold onto it a week, just because I imagine an ILL librarian seeing the book coming back right away, which is silly, I know.) Having the library transport books for you seems more of a “luxury” service than, for example, health care.
It’s funny y’all should mention both these topics today, because I was just trying to figure a vaguely comprehensible way a library could assess me $2.70 for being eleven days late returning four books.
“I always feel a little guilty when I get a book through interlibrary loan, pick it up, immediately realize that it’s not what I want, and return it right away.”
A friend of mine says that once at the library he checked out a few books, sat down and read them quickly, returned them and checkout a couple more, read them and returned them — all without leaving the library. He apologized to the librarian for checking them out and returning them immediately, and the librarian said “That’s all right. It’s great for our circulation numbers.”
YES!! And believe me, those numbers are VERY important!
“I was just trying to figure a vaguely comprehensible way a library could assess me $2.70 for being eleven days late returning four books.”
Probably a rate for each weekday, plus a different rate for weekends. Also different rates for different books depending on categories (books in general vs. books in high demand.) You often get new releases getting special treatment because they have (or are expected to have) a strong waitlist when they are first made available. So, when the long-awaited Harry Potter book 8 finally comes out, and has 534 holds on it before the library has even received any copies, the books are put in special status… you can only check it out for a week, you can’t renew it, and the overdue fees are triple the normal ones. Then, after everyone’s read it, it gets shelved with the regular books and has the regular checkout rules (including overdue fines).
Andréa: So you’re saying that I should supplement my policy of creating busywork for librarians by randomly taking off the books off shelves, by ordering books I don’t need through interlibrary loan? OK, I guess I want to support my library.
It doesn’t cost anything(*) just to check out a book from a Berlin library, the fees I mentioned above are for the privilege of reserving and/or having a book delivered to a different location. They will even deliver direct to your house or office, but that costs €3.50
P.S. (*) There is a €10 annual fee for the library card.
P.P.S. Our local library here in the suburbs is a exceptional. Membership is free, and they don’t charge anything to check out books or CDs (there is a small fee for DVDs). It’s small, and open only Tuesday to Friday, but compared to the size of the town, it is a wonderful luxury.
WW: Just don’t tell ’em I sent you.
@Kilby & WW: Yes, it isn’t inconsistent to charge fees even if you are tax money supported, but isn’t it so much better when you DON’T? Also, there is a slippery slope in that thinking, whereby Kilby thinks his local library is great because they DON’T charge a (small) membership fee. I find it particularly ironic that the example we have is from socialist Europe and not from, say, libertarian Colorado or something.
Compare the library that Kilby finds so exceptional for a suburban Berlin small town to my county, the most populous in its state, said state being the most densely populated state in the Union, and within a major metropolitan area. (Don’t know why I’m being so coy…) That said, the most populous town only has some 40,000 residents; the majority of the towns have libraries, and these libraries, even if for a town with a 5000 population, tend to be open at least 5 days a week, often 6, with at least business hours for the weekdays, but usually open till nine at least 3 days a week. All of these libraries are free for residents of their town to join, and all of these libraries are members of the County-wide system, so you can borrow from and return to any member library, and you can have books sent to your home library, and you can reserve books, all for free. The libraries offer services, free wifi, computer use, ESL classes, passport applications, museum passes, ebooks, internet access points to borrow, cultural programs — all for free! By banding together, they are able to offer much more than any individual library could offer (as can be seen by the bigger, formerly solitary big libraries from outside the county joining our system).
Yes, ours is a very rich county, yet there are still poor people and poor areas, and they are well served by our libraries; by being free to all and not having a means test for free services, more economically marginal people are likely to take advantage of the services, because there is no stigma attached to using the library, taking advantage of all the free services. It is actually hard to convince people to use the free services, they seem too good to be true, people assume there must be strings attached.
Libraries have volunteer Friends of the Library associations that work to support an individual library, mostly with funds. I just recently was recruited to the board of my local library, which hasn’t had a friends organization for the last 20 years.
I have always felt that the library system here was one of the best things about where I live. I love the fact that it is so widespread, so generous, so effective and so seemingly effortless. I don’t see this as an either/or, either we can have good health care, or we can have a nice library system; instead, I see this as a model — like our library system, we can get a better health care system that just works, use the one system as a model for the other. (The libraries are funded through property tax, with a minimum state defined rate of 33 cents per $1000 of property value; I can’t remember the exact amount I pay (largely because it was to me so trivial), but it was in the range of $100 per year, possibly less; divide that by 2 for me and my wife…) (There are towns that don’t have libraries, and so save their residents some ~hundred bucks in property taxes; if these people want to use a library, they have to pay a particular library an annual fee, somewhere around $100 per person, and this membership is restricted, you don’t get all the privileges I mention above, it’s more like Kilby’s German system. It tends to be the very rich towns that eschew a library, which I find ironic — a “poor” town has a fantastic library with super services, and the rich town has nothing, but I suppose when your median house price is just under $4 million, you are saving a whopping $1320…)
Kilby, you should expect better library services in Germany!
Several counties in southern Oregon have closed all their county public libraries, because there was no money to pay for them. Residents pay very low property taxes, which in the past were subsidized by the fact that the federal government owned huge tracts of land in those counties, and shared logging revenues from logging the forests with the counties.
Along came the Northern Spotted Owl, and it’s particularity in selecting nesting sites only in old-growth forests, and the logging in those forests was severely restricted. The federal government made payments to the counties to make up for the lost logging revenue, but they have been severely decreasing of late. The county sheriffs have also felt the crunch, with serious debate over whether or not the state police would have to take up services normally provided by the county sheriff deputies.
The prosperous northern Oregon counties, by comparison, have extensive library facilities. Because they can put a levy on the ballot and win passage, usually by a substantial margin.
The most beautiful, efficient, extensive library I’ve been in was in Yuma, AZ, a city with 33% unemployment.
“Yes, it isn’t inconsistent to charge fees even if you are tax money supported, but isn’t it so much better when you DON’T?”
If this is asked as a blanket rule, I would not say “yes.” I think it’s reasonable, appropriate, and even useful for tax supported services to charge fees. There are reasonable points between complete libertarianism, and communism.
“I don’t see this as an either/or, either we can have good health care, or we can have a nice library system”
It’s not an either/or, but if a country/locality isn’t going to socialize everything, or leave everything to the private sector, it has to make choices about which services it’s most important to have government support. You’re saying that there’s something weird or ironic about a locality in supposedly socialist Europe having fees that we don’t for one particular service, and I’m saying that this strikes me as a strangely narrow thing to focus on. It’s as if you’re assuming that every country had the exact same stack ordered list of priorities for government support, and some German library fees are a sign that the popular perceptions of Europe and Colorado are wrong. That doesn’t seem to me a reasonable way to frame things.
One country’s government has made it a priority for all its citizens to have access to health care, while its municipalities have given its citizens access to libraries, but charges fees for some of those library services. Another country’s government has not made it a priority for all its citizens to have access to health care, while some of its municipalities have less library fees. Regardless of whether you agree with those priorities, it’s hard to see what’s “amazing,” “ironic,” or “weird” about the first government being considered more “socialist.”
To be clear, I’m not saying you can’t make a case that it would be better not to have these library fees. I’m saying that you seem to be overstating the significance of these fees by several orders of magnitude
WW: “You’re saying that there’s something weird or ironic about a locality in supposedly socialist Europe having fees that we don’t for one particular service, and I’m saying that this strikes me as a strangely narrow thing to focus on.”
OK. I happen to value libraries very highly, and it seems I have a deep-seated belief that attitudes and expectations toward and of them serve as bellwethers of underlying attitude. Therefore, I am very surprised to learn that in and around Berlin, where my family comes from and I know lots of people, and they tend to be annoyingly proselytizingly leftist in all things, and highly value society providing things for them, that their library system — something I might disproportionately value — is so regressive, and that the system I enjoy here, in the US, which I have consistently learned over 40 years of comment from them is inferior in all ways to Europe (and it’s my fault, and why don’t I do something about it?!), is so much better.
So yes, it’s on me. I have a probably wrong deep-seated assumption that I need to mull over, and I have a life-time’s resentment accumulation of left-leaning European propaganda that has been directed at me, so yeah, for me, it is weird, ironic and amazing. Apparently your mileage varies. Probably because those smug bastards at Volkswagen have been hacking the emissions…
“Apparently your mileage varies. Probably because those smug bastards at Volkswagen have been hacking the emissions…”
That’s what I like about these conversations – no matter how serious, a bit of humor can be injected anywhere.
As a kid in junior high I volunteered in the school library. All of my books at home had little pockets on the first page with a little card in it for when “someone borrowed” it. My name was rubber stamped on the edge of the book and on page 15 (which they did in the junior high library). My poor grandparents would have to borrow books when they came to visit and return them the next trip. And to tie it into the rest of my life – prior year NYS IT- 201 (resident income tax) forms had the tops cut off of them to use as applications for library cards -the card number went where the Social Security number was suppose to be written.
My mom later got an MS in library science – I always wondered if I gave her the idea.
MItch 4 – the fall is the start of the year. Rosh Hashanah this year is September 10.
another one . . . https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2018/08/20