People ask me About Watches June 30, 2009

…because I’m a watch geek.  I have many, many more than I should.  This is a fetish, of course, so while there is no good reason, there is an explanation:  I think that there are very few ways for a man to stand out.  We all wear essentially the same uniform, every day.  We (mostly) don’t wear jewelry, we don’t (usually) do anything interesting with our hair, and we’re all wearing jeans or khakis with the same basic shirt.  So what we’ve got to work with are: (a) shoes; (b) an interesting tie if you’re wearing one; and (c) a watch.

There you go.  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

What I am asked a lot is, how would I know a good-quality watch from a cheap one?  What should I look for?  And, what lower or midrange brands do you like?  I’ll address each question here.

1. How can you tell a good-quality watch from a cheap one?  A few things set a quality watch apart: (a) its movement; (b) its design; and (c) its crystal.  There are others, of course, but since we’re sticking to relatively inexpensive watches for this discussion we won’t go into precious metals or other specialized matters.  Movements are mostly either mechanical (automatic or hand-wound), or quartz.  Interestingly, a quartz movement (which is cheaper) is more accurate than a mechanical movement.  But mechanical movements are highly prized as evidence of craftsmanship in a watch.  A Swiss quartz movement (which must have over 50% of its components made in Switzerland, and must be assembled there), though, such as those found in ESQ watches, is still a very high-quality piece of workmanship.  The design of a watch comes down to two things for me: aesthetics and complications.  Certain watches, and I’ll pick here many watches from a maker like Akribos as an example, just don’t look great, even if they are unique.  Other  companies, like Invicta, mostly just copy their basic designs from other manufacturers (which is just lame).  Some companies have a knack for making a good-looking watch.  Honestly, Seiko’s a pretty good example of that — most of their watches look great.  A watch that has complications, like a moonphase function, a chronograph or a perpetual calendar, is evidence of interesting design.  Finally, a good watch has a crystal that doesn’t look cheap.  Back in the day, watch crystals were glass, which was fragile.  Then they went to different forms of plastics, which scratched easily.  Most good watches today come with a synthetic sapphire crystal, which is durable and scratch-proof.  Good mineral crystals can also be nice, if they’re beefy enough.  Lower-end watches have thin mineral crystals or crystals of another material.
2. What should you look for?  Well, some of the above: a design that you like, made of solid materials with a good crystal.  That by itself should put you in fairly good stead.
3. What lower or midrange brands do I like?  I’ll give you some.  Presume that we’re talking about watches that cost in a range between $100 or so and $400.  That’s a fairly low-end watch, but you can still find some that are pretty nice.  For example:

• Emporio Armani.  To my mind, the most consistent maker of nice watches in the $150 – $300 range is Emporio Armani.  The designs are really nice, the crystals are great, and they mostly use good-quality automatic movements.  They’re just nice-looking, good-quality watches:

• TX.  This high-end division of Timex makes really, really nice watches.  They tend to sell for over $500, but they can be had online or at places like Nordstrom Rack for somewhere between $175 and $300.  The movements are superb, they often employ really interesting complications (one of mine has a linear chronograph, and both of mine — I have two — have a second time zone indicator), and they use nice sapphire crystals.

• Haffstreuner.  This is just a quirk of mine, I think: I don’t think Haffstreuner makes excellent watches, so much as I think they make big, clunky man-sized designs that look good on my wrist.

• Zodiac.  Zodiac is sort of the go-to low-end Swiss watch company, and to be honest they make a lot of watches whose designs I think are sort of ho-hum.  But they make a couple of watches I really like.  The one I like is really simply styled, a sort of military dial, and has a really nice crystal and a very dependable movement:

• ESQ.  Like Zodiac, ESQ (a division of Movado) makes a lot of watches I don’t really love.  But they make a few I like a LOT.  My favorite is the Blackfin, which is a really solid 300-meter diver’s watch.  It looks good, and it is just a great timepiece.  A couple of other models are nice, too:

• Seiko.  To be honest, just about every watch Seiko makes is a pretty good watch.  Connoisseurs can huff about Asian watches, but sorry: these guys make really nice-looking watches that work great.  I have a Sportura Chronograph that has a 1/100 of a second stopwatch:

• National Geographic.  You wouldn’t think so, but National Geographic makes some really nice watches, and at a great price.  They make a 1,000-meter dive watch that you can find online for $150, and a number of other interesting designs:

• Citizen.  Another Asian watch company, I don’t like Citizen’s designs as well as I like Seiko’s, but they make a really nice world-timer (it can show the time in spots all around the globe, all at once) that uses its famous Eco-Drive, which uses light for its power source (so you never need a battery):

• Chase-Durer.  Most Chase-Durer watches are a little out of this price range, but they make a really cool watch, the Wing-GMT, that you can often find for somewhere between $250 and $350:

• Orsa.  I love mentioning Orsa, because as far as I know, there’s just this one guy who makes a few watches every year and sells them.  They are incredibly well-built watches, big and beefy and solid, and they use great materials.  The Monstrum is a good 300m dive watch with a thick sapphire crystal:

• Croton.  Croton, a Swiss company, makes a lot of crappy-looking watches.  There.  I said it.  But one, called the Super C, just looks nice on my wrist:

And a couple of others I’d like to especially mention:

• Minorva.  Oh, wow, this is a really weird thing to put into a post on good watches.  Watch guys tend to hate Asian watches, and Chinese watches in particular (since they tend to be knock-offs of real watch companies).  But… Minorva is a Chinese watchmaker, and they are really cheap watches — they can often be had for under $50 on eBay.  It comes to this: I like their designs.  They are mostly not knock-offs of other designs (though one of the watches below is similar to a Jaeger Master Compressor, the others are original), and they look good and wear well.  So there.

• Botta Design.  This is usually a little above $400, but it’s just such a cool watch: Botta makes a watch with a single hand to show the time, on the theory that you mostly don’t need to know that it’s 11:39 so much as you need to know that it’s between 11:30 and 11:45.  (In the picture below, it’s about 10:40.)  Really cool watch:

Utter Nonsense June 24, 2009

The current Republican talking point over the whole Iran mess is to suggest that President Obama has not been tough enough with his talk, that he hasn’t been vocal enough.  Representative Dana Rorabacher (R-CA) today took it a bit further and suggested that lives would have been saved, that less violence would have occurred, if only President Obama had been more forceful.

I guess this would be because — the Ayatollah Khamenei, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, and their various minions have been sitting around wondering what the U.S. thought of all this?

I believe I can state without fear of being incorrect in the slightest degree that, had President Obama been more forceful (and I should here point out: if he was not forceful, he was at least very clear, which is sort of how he is), the leadership of Iran would absolutely not have responded by saying, “Whoops, our bad.  I was unaware that we were making the U.S. uncomfortable.  Now that we know, we’ll absolutely allow these demonstrations to continue unimpeded.”

Do they ever get tired of being so wrong?

From the “Math is Awesome” Department June 23, 2009

The Iranian elections are central to the news these days as supporters of opposition candidates, primarily Mir-Hussein Moussavi, have contested the validity of elections that handed the country’s presidency to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a landslide.  They have suggested a number of suspicious elements in the results, including an unbelievably good showing by Ahmadinejad in Tehran (where he is clearly unpopular) and even in the hometowns and provinces of his competitors (according to the released results, he garnered 71% of the vote in Lorestan, the home province of opposition candidate Mehdi Karroubi, for example).

Two Columbia PhD candidates in political science, Bernd Baber and Alexandra Scacco, have approached the issue from another angle — pure math.

You see, people are unbelievably bad at inventing random numbers.  For some reason, we just can’t do it.  When we’re asked to produce a series of random numbers, we tend to overuse certain digits and underuse others.  This becomes even more pronounced when we do two digits.  We’re terrible at it.  So, if we’re wondering if these results are just made up, we might profitably look at just how random the results actually were.

Baber and Scacco looked at the (partial) results released by the Iranian Ministry of the Interior, and they posited that an election that is truly on the up-and-up would have a fairly evenly distributed distribution of the final digit and also the final two digits in the vote counts.  Makes all kinds of sense.

What did they discover?  That whoever made up these results — and they almost certainly did — likes the number “7″ a little too much.  17% of the results ended in the number 7, while only 4 percent ended in the number 5.  What does that mean?  Well, to put it simply: there is less than a 4 percent chance that such a thing would happen in a non-fraudulent election.

Which is pretty bad.  But it gets worse: Psychologists have found that humans tend to have more difficulty generating non-adjacent digits (73 or 52, as opposed to 45) than otherwise.  What happens if we look for that in the published results?

We see humans manipulating results, is what happens.  On average, in a non-manipulated result, you should see 70 percent of the final two digits appearing as non-adjacent.  Instead, in these results, you see 62 percent.  It doesn’t seem like much, but the probability that a fair result would produce only 62 percent non-adjacent digits is only around 4 percent, again.

The two results together form a “conditional probability,” meaning that the likelihood of both occurrences happening together in a non-manipulated result is the product of the two: the probability that a non-manipulated result would produce these numbers is less than 2 in 1000.

Stuff like this, kids, is why math totally rocks.

Center-Right Values June 22, 2009

This kind of stuff just cracks me up:

There is a feature column in Salon entitled “Ask a Wingnut,” in which an unnamed conservative commentator responds to reader questions.  (Whoever this guy is, I love that he has enough of a sense of humor to write the column.)  This week’s question asked why so many Republicans have morality issues, from Larry Craig to John Ensign to David Vitter to thrice-married Newt Gingrich.  Hidden in the middle of the response was this gem:

“The United States remains a center-right country composed of people who believe in center-right values, like family, hard work, and honesty.”

Wait.  What?

So… those of us who are a little lefty don’t believe in values like family, hard work, and honesty?  Those are the domain of Republicans?

What would I know, though?  I’m just an anti-family lazy liar.

(This just in: add Gov. Mark Sanford to the above list.  Sheesh.)

Enough With the Sarah Palin Crush June 9, 2009

Let’s get this straight: I really, really want the Republican party to be healthy and competitive.  We all thrive when there is a free market of ideas, and no one benefits when one party runs roughshod over the other.

So, Republicans: Oh…my…gosh.  Can you please just stop with the Sarah Palin worship?  She is just not worthy of you.  Seriously.

At a big GOP fundraiser last night, the entire place held their breath, wondering if Gov. Palin would show.  When she did: spontaneous applause.  Yikes.

The short version of why this is bad: Sarah Palin is less qualified to have an opinion on a wide array of topics than I am.  The other day, she remarked that the current administration is operating in a way that “absolutely (defies) Economics 101,” which, it should be pointed out, is the highest-level econ class she ever took!  And this from the governor of a state that: (a) spends more federal funds per capita than any state in the union; (b) is number one in taxes per capita; and (c) leads the nation in pork-barrel spending, even as she rails against it.

Let’s review the resume again: Five colleges, of which the University of Idaho was the biggest and most academically rigorous.  Graduated from the U of I, where no one remembers her (I know this because it’s in my hometown, and I’ve asked), with a degree in journalism.  Soccer / PTA mom.  Mayor of a town with a voting population equivalent to my kids’ high school.  Appointed positions in Alaskan government, which she quit.  And finally, governor of a state that boasts almost exactly the same number of people as live in Fort Worth, TX.

Look, let’s be fair: it’s not the most horrible resume ever.  But it’s an unbelievably light resume for a potential president.  She just does not know enough, and is not naturally smart enough, to do that job.  Period.

Folks, you have countless well-qualified candidates: Bobby Jindal (who shares my birthday tomorrow) is governor of a large state, and graduated from Brown before attending Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.  Jindal was a successful consultant for McKinsey.  Florida State and Alabama law grad Charlie Crist was Florida’s Attorney General, and is now governor of our second-most populous state.  Mitt Romney’s qualifications are well-known, as are Newt Gingrich’s.  Texas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison or former cabinet member Condoleeza Rice have all the necessary bona fides.  While I do not agree with these candidates on most things, I am at least comfortable that they have the capability for the job.

So, you know, take your pick from the above.  Just stop with the Palin adoration.

From the “I Am Not Making This Up” Department June 7, 2009

A judge here in California recently ruled (or rather, was forced to rule by the imbecile complainant — a woman who thought that, because of their name and the fact that they’re colorful, they were real) — that crunchberries are not a fruit.

Pollution From Giant Ships June 4, 2009

Easy way to help global warming: James Corbett, professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware, recently published a study that says that the 15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as every single car on the entire planet.