Old notions

Always entertained by old notions - you got a lot more for a lot less back then!

A question about embroidery patterns

I'm confused about cross stitch and embroidery patterns people sell online.  As far as I can tell, someone puts up a lovely, high-res image (well, line drawing) on Etsy, looking perhaps like this cheerful clock from Shutterstock, and you're on your honor to pay them to send you a digital copy of the image rather than just printing out the image from their shop yourself for free.  Is it really all on the honor system?  (Kits I understand. I buy kits. But digital image files?)

Cross stitch is similar - it's a bit harder to back-form a chart and pick out your own thread colors, but (especially with one-color designs) it's still basically "here's a grid with the squares in the picture filled in with red thread - you can see it easily in the photo, but please pay me to send it to you rather than just doing it yourself."  Indeed, for out-of-print kits, it's fairly common to find an old photo online and work it out yourself, since you can't get the kit anymore (the old small pictures of English Heritage sites are good examples here).  So is buying the digital pattern just done because it's the right thing to do and you want to support the artist?  (Not that there's anything wrong with that.). Or is there something I'm missing?

(Embroidery patterns count as art for copyright purposes, I believe; so would a cross-stitch image, most likely.  Knitting does not - I mean, the words of the pattern are copyright as written material, but the technique is not copyrightable and the finished object would likely be a useful good rather than art, legally speaking.  That's why you're not going to have much luck suing someone who looked at a photo of your baby sweater and worked out the pattern on their own.  It's also a lot more work to do that than to right-click and download a photo instead of paying someone to email it to you.  Just like with quilt patterns, generally a combination of public domain patterns (if they're even copyrightable in the first place), but you pay for them to keep from having to work out all the math yourself.)

Marshmallow Utility

Before my current job, I was a high school economics teacher.  I like to think that I was a fun one, too.  We did in-class exercises to help illustrate basic economics principles, and my students seemed to enjoy those days just as much as they days we watched educational videos (the days when I had to have one-on-one progress talks with each student). 

My favorite exercise was teaching the students about marginal utility -- a lesson I called "Marshmallow Utility."  To their credit, the students remembered the name, and whenever marginal utility came up on a test they could identify it. 

Materials:

The big kind of marshmallows works best, as it has an effect faster.  Bring several bags.

I lined up several volunteers at the front of the class, and had them plot their happiness (after consuming zero marshmallows) on the blackboard. 

Fed each one a large marshmallow, and then had them plot their happiness again.  Everyone's went up.

Fed each one another large marshmallow, and had them plot their happiness (general sense of well-being, etc.) on the board.

Repeated several times.

For all except one girl (who absconded with the rest of the bags after class!), each student reached a point at which one more marshmallow made them feel a bit worse, whether from over-saturation or from dietary concerns. 

That, I explained, is marginal - or marshmallow - utility.  How much happier will one more marshmallow make you?  For all except the marshmallow-lover, the first additional marshmallow caused a big jump in happiness, the next few increasingly smaller jumps in happiness, and eventually an additional marshmallow causes a loss in happiness.  Similarly, if you're a supermarket, the first cash register makes things much better, an additional cash register makes things quite a bit better, the seventeenth cash register makes things very slightly better ... and eventually you reach a point where adding another cash register doesn't solve check-out problems but instead makes it so crowded it's hard to get your carts out the door.  If you've got a restaurant, one more helper in the kitchen is great, two is even better, fifteen means you're always tripping over each other.  Something massive, though, could be the equivalent of my marshmallow-lover -- if you're trying to pick up all the trash on the entire Pacific coast, for example, you have to go a very long way before the marginal utility of one more worker becomes negative. 

Lesson?  Keep eating marshmallows until it would be detrimental to chow down on another one.  Keep adding workers until the marginal utility of one more worker is less than the marginal cost of that worker.  (If I'd charged the students a nickel a marshmallow, they should keep buying marshmallows as long as they got at least five cents worth of pleasure out of each marshmallow.)

Economics is fun :) and tasty!

Water Bills

If you had no water pressure in your house, but there was a hole in the sidewalk in front of your house where water was gushing out, where men had been working earlier that day, you'd assume a connection, right?

And if you called the city to say that there was a leak outside and that you had no water pressure, and then someone came out and fixed the gushing sidewalk hole, you'd assume a connection, right?

And if you then got a water bill for 43,000 gallons of water, rather than your normal 2,000 gallons, you'd assume it was connected to the above, right?

Apparently not, if you're the City of Houston. After talking with mumbly people on the phone who I can't understand, or people that assure me that there is no record of anyone doing work here (in which case we've got teams of rogue road workers!), or some imbecile who insists that her records show I have a pool and the high rate must be because I was filling it (if you can find a pool here, that would surprise me!), or two girls a month apart who each promised they'd send me a form to formally complain, and three people who each said I had only to pay the regular monthly payment for 2,000 gallons rather than that spike until things got sorted out (which I have been doing), yesterday I got a notice that my water bill payment is delinquent. No forms have ever arrived, needless to say.

I've never been in a situation like this, and it feels a bit like the twilight zone...anyone know what to do? I'm thinking I'll write an actual letter detailing everything (I wish I'd thought to get the names and supervisors of the road workers, but I assumed that, having a City of Houston logo on their vehicle, and since they're still working on my street several months later, they weren't rogue road repairmen!), but perhaps I should call my-uncle-the-lawyer to see what he says... I could possibly scrape together enough money to pay for the 43,000 gallon bill, but I'd rather not, and I REALLY don't want the City to get away with that -- who else are they doing that to?

India!

India

As long promised, here are some of my pictures from India.

At a Hindu wedding, there is fire.
Also flowers.

Afterwards, we went on a trip to a temple important to Himself's family; no pictures at the temple itself, but my Picasa album (first picture in this post should take you there) has pictures I took along the way.
That's my favorite car -- the Ambassador. The British were making a style of car when they were in India, and they left, and it seems not to have occurred to anyone until about fifteen years ago that there would be any reason to change the design. They come in any color you want, so long as it's white. They're quite comfortable (think British taxicab -- same concept, really), but everyone in Himself's family thinks I'm silly for loving them, except his father, who's tickled and indulges me by requesting them from the chauffeur company.

The billboard (aka "hoarding") behind the car? Political ad. You have to see the hand-painted portraits of everyone in the whole party! My favorite candidate from the region, purely because of his name, is M. K. Stalin -- yes, named after Uncle Joe. (Naming's different there -- the "last" name is your given name, functionally your only name; initials before the name might point to your father's name or place of origin, and you might mention your caste at the end of your name. M. K. Stalin's father is the breathtakingly skilled orator Karunanidhi, hence the "K." Why I'm so hot on Karunanidhi? Tamil is an excellent classical language, but most people speak it in a nasty nasal manner dropping syllables all over the place and using compressed grammar; when he speaks, you can tell how beautiful it really should be.)

Of course, if you haven't got a driver, or even a car, you can fit the whole load on your scooter. Didn't get any pictures of it, but they do that with families too -- family of six on one motorcycle, with only the father in a helmet -- which is still an improvement over the last time I went for any period of time (2003), when helmets were almost unknown in this region.

It's a land of caste and economic distinctions, but most people overlook one or the other. Sometimes both.

Here, a fine house is next to a pretty low-end one (there's more pictures in my album of true huts, made of twigs -- there's very little true homelessness in this region, as you can always drag some sticks and palm fronds together and make a very basic shelter). In the towns where I've lived, that could mean either that the person in the low-end dwelling (who has a shop affixed to his house, and has sold a wall for advertising -- people everywhere are enterprising!) is high-caste but in reduced circumstances, or, more likely that the person in the fancy house has come into money, but is low-caste or "scheduled caste" and will not be made to feel welcome in a nicer part of town. (You can see that a bit in Houston -- I've gone out in some odd areas on Google Street View (I always like to check out where such-and-such a murder happened, mainly), and there'll be no sidewalk or curb, mostly abandoned houses or trailers, and then what would be a million dollar house in the middle of town, but has a tax value of $100,000, due to the $10,000 lots nearby.) Less common in the smaller towns, but more in the bigger cities (like when I was living in Madurai, or especially this time in Madras/Chennai), people, especially the younger generation, won't care about caste (sometimes even overlooking it when it comes to marriage, although that's less frequent), and will hang out with and live near people of the same economic standing, education level, and job type.

In any case, people today are more likely to live like this:
than like this:
But I suppose some things do have to change over time.

One thing I'm glad has changed? Medicine -- levaquin is nasty while you're taking it, but pneumonia, even when young and otherwise healthy, is no fun. Just don't want to do anything for a few weeks; without the medicine, apparently, it would have dragged on for months. But I'm all better now :)