The Tin Lizard

Too Much Warning

Here in the greater DC area, once again we are awaiting the arrival of a huge, unusually powerful, and potentially dangerous storm, Hurricane/Tropical Storm Sandy. Weather forecasters are having a field day issuing warnings, describing the possible damaging effects (high winds, heavy rains, floods, downed trees, power outages), and advising us to take precautions and stock up on gas, food, and water. 

No doubt it's a good thing that science is able to tell us well in advance when a big storm is approaching.  Ultimately, forewarning reduces damage, saves lives, enables certain events to be called off -- for example, a couple of political campaign rallies have already been cancelled (AWW), but not the Marine Corps Marathon Sunday.

At the same time, I think forecasting and preparation really can be overdone.  The constant drumbeat of predictions, warnings, and alarms simply adds to the level of tension and constant noise in our modern lives without truly adding much to our well-being.   For example, my wife and I did our routine grocery shopping this morning - the local farmers' market and a supermarket - and found stores packed at 7:00 AM, people racing around snapping up basics like water, milk, and bread (of which items shelves were already mostly empty).  Maybe they'll go home from there and sandbag their basement door, if it lies low, or tape their windows - who knows?

But the storm isn't supposed to be here until Sunday around midday.  Meanwhile, today is as beautiful a fall day as anyone could wish for, with not the least sign a storm is in the offing.  It's an excellent day for being out enjoying the fresh air.  It's enough to know a storm is coming, and when, but it's better not to get so wrapped up in taking precautions against something we can't prevent that we miss the forest and the trees. 

Ecodumb?

The compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs that were supposed to save us so much energy a few years ago continue to disappoint.

For example, take Ecosmart bulbs, sold at Home Depot.   When we remodeled a bathroom two years ago, we put in new fixtures, a total of six bulbs, and we put CFLs in them.  One or two burned out with weeks, and were replaced, and they lasted until one burned out a couple of months ago.  So:  three of six bulbs, 50%, gone in far less than the promised nine years.  Since the longevity of these bulbs is supposed to compensate for their higher price, that's not a good record.

When that latest bulb burned out I went back to Home Depot for more of the same.  They're now manufactured under the Ecosmart name, rather than the earlier N:Vision, but they're the same.  I bought two packages, a total of 8 bulbs.  I replaced the burned out one; in about two days, the new one burned out.   I replaced it again; within about two days, that one burned out too.  The third time, I swapped bulbs from one socket to another, and tried the new bulb in a different socket.   That one burned out a couple of days later.

I took a long pause of several weeks, but finally put Bulb No. 4 in place, and it's still working after almost a week.  (Though of course it may burn out tomorrow).  So technology has advanced.  Now the failure rate for brand-new bulbs is 75% (or maybe 100).  The four bulbs are now cheaper - about $ 1.10 apiece - but at that rate, even if the fourth one keeps burning for a while, what I really have is one five-dollar bulb. 

There was no noticeable energy usage saving two years ago, when I replaced perhaps 25-30 incandescent bulbs in our house with CFLs.  The latest experience shows there's no real cost saving either, since these CFLs won't work long enough to recoup anywhere near their cost.

My policy now is to stay away from CFLs entirely, and especially the "Ecosmart" brand offered by Home Depot these days.  We've tried a few of the new LEDs - so far they seem much better. 

Life On The Dark Side

It's 5:30 AM.  I'm up for the day.  It's pitch black outside.  

Most days, I'm set to walk at 5:45 or so (exercise is best done in the morning, and before eating) but it's still pitch black outside.  Not very pleasant for a walk; you can't see anything, including the ankle-twisting potholes in the street.

But it's Tuesday.  Tuesdays, I usually combine a shorter walk with a bit of weight training, which begins at a leisurely 7:00 AM.  It's time to go but it's still dark outside, with the sky showing just a hint of gray so I can start to make out the shapes of trees.  Dark at 7:00 AM?  It should never be dark at 7:00 AM.  It's unnatural.

Working folks are up getting set to go to work, using electric lights, but they'll need light in the house when they get home at 6:00 too, so nothing is being saved in power consumption.

Kids are walking to their school bus stops at this hour, along dark streets, few of which have sidewalks.

In a few days, those kids  (if they're not hit by a school bus) will be out trick-or-treating between 5:30-6:30, but it will be just dusk for many of them, too light for a good scary Halloween experience.

Also in a few days, the country will switch back to "standard" time.  Saturday evening, everyone in the country will waste time (ranging from 10 minutes to 30, depending) resetting clocks, timers, thermostats and such to the new time  And Sunday morning, a higher than average number of people will have heart attacks and die that morning.  . 

All of this is due to daylight saving time, particularly to the ridiculous and unnecessary extension of it into November.

Up in Massachusetts, or maybe just a few miles away from my house, on Capitol Hill, Congressman Ed Markey, a diehard fan of daylight time, may be stirring in bed (we're told he gets up "early" - around 7:00 !) and thinks that's early enough for the sun to rise.  In his line of "work" he can get to his office at 9:00, or 10:00 or not at all.   Sweet!   Right now, though, a few minutes past 7:00, he may see the sun coming over the horizon, but it will still be too dark in his house to read, so he'll have to turn on the light if he wants to review the report he commissioned a few years ago from the Department of Energy, which strove mightily though unsuccessfully to prove that daylight saving time provides energy savings. 

On November 6, I would happily vote for whichever candidate will promise to put and end to DST.  Barack, Mitt -- please get back to me on this! 

Europe Outstrips US In Privacy Protection

An Austrian student is reportedly gearing up to challenge Facebook's privacy policy (which if you're familiar with Facebook, you realize is "no policy at all"). 

The case brings home to me how different are concepts of privacy in the U.S. and in Europe.  While we may believe we're dedicated to privacy here, in fact Europe is far ahead of us in law and regulation that protects privacy.  Living in Germany 20 years ago, for example, I learned it was illegal to have a second telephone in your house from which listening in was possible.  As soon as anyone picked up a phone anywhere in the house, all other instruments on that line would go dead. 

Here, the basic assumption underlying privacy doctrine is that information about you is not generally protected unless you take specific steps to deny its use.  And who really reads those long, turgid agreements that you click on when you sign up for sites like Facebook?  So it's quite possible for a company, organization, or individual to amass private data on nearly anyone and use it in any way they see fit. 

A few years ago when I was more active on eBay than I am recently, I accidentally discovered that it's possible to see a bidder's record -- not just "feedback" on reliability/honesty, but a full listing of items he/she has bid on in the past, amount bid, and the like.  I was pretty sure most people didn't realize this information about them was available (I know I wasn't).  I told eBay about my discovery, pointing out I thought it was a violation of that other bidder's privacy  The response, from some half-baked customer service rep was to ask what I had to hide.  Well maybe nothing, really, but I don't see why a bidder against me should know about every bid I've made in the past, nor do I expect to be able to find such information on him.

It appears to me that privacy doctrine in Europe is the opposite:  Your information isn't presumed to be available to, or shareable by, others unless you specifically opt in to allow it.  That seems to be what the Austrian contender is arguing.  It's a far more protective concept of privacy.  It's what we should work toward.   

Memorably Mundane

My wife noticed a Macy's ad in the local paper a couple of days ago, offering a simple rolled carbon-steel Chinese wok at $14.99, and it was exactly the same as one we both recalled buying shortly after we were married 37 years ago.   In fact - ever the food lovers - we remember deciding we could use it, and ordering it from an American Airlines inflight catalog en route to our honeymoon destination.  So we had a nice little trip down memory lane.

Surprisingly the price is the same today as then (for some reason I recall it costing us $14 or so).  That would be a good deal - though I wouldn't be surprised if the contemporary version uses a higher-gauge (thinner) steel - but we still have, and use, the old one so we don't need a replacement.  The low-tech stuff lasts and lasts.

In the same category is a plain nylon Dopp kit I bought in a PX in Saigon the day I arrived in Vietnam.  I can't remember what I was using before then for shaving equipment and toiletries.  But I do remember the item cost $1.10, because even then it seemed cheap, and it was a strange amount - why not .99, or 1.00 even?  Here again, a trip down memory lane, wandering around the limited attractions of Tan Son Nhut while waiting for an onward flight to my duty assignment farther north in MR2. 

I still have that item too - simple and basically indestructible.  True, it's a little ragged now.  If I were traveling more often these days, I might get a new one, but where would I find such a thing?  Maybe The Dollar Store. 

I bought a camera that day too, my first SLR, I still have it and I'm pretty sure it still works but I confess I haven't used it in years. I've probably owned a half-dozen cameras since then, and these days rely more on my cell phone for photos.  Unlike the Dopp kit or the wok, the high tech stuff has a very limited life.

Generic Drugs

The morning news summarizes a new Consumer Reports look at generic medicines.  The focus is on how generics are required to be the "same as" the brand name products, but also on how generics can be different.

The underlying message is that even with the required same amounts of active ingredients, generics may create slightly different levels of medication in the body.  Also, the inactive ingredients in the medicine may be different from maker to maker.

I'm fortunate not to have to take a lot of medicines, but I humor my doc by taking something for my blood pressure.  Once or twice during the past 10 years, we've experimented twice with taking a generic.  But in one instance the new pill caused near-constant diarrhea, and in the other, my blood pressure go so low it felt like I was going to have a heart attack any time I exerted myself a bit.   These weren't side effects I read about on the package and then experienced; they appeared shortly after I started taking the new medicine, and ceased as soon as I went back to the regular one.

If the only compositional differences between brands and generics are their "inactive" ingredients, it doesn't make sense that side effects could exist.  Yet clearly they do, and they are my reason for not trying generics more often.

 

Why Trigonometry?

I thought about trigonometry today.   (No, really, I did!)

For some reason, for the first time in about 50 years, I remembered trigonometry.  It was one of the triumvirate of high school math courses everybody in a "college-bound" curriculum had to have:  geometry, trigonometry, algebra.  I also took a college-credit course (which would now be known as "advanced placement), in calculus.   

Of those four courses I have found some use in life for geometry, algebra, and even calculus, which is central to probability theory.   But I can't think of a single instance where I've ever had to concern myself with the secants, tangents, and sines that are the bread-and-butter of trig.  I've never even cosined a loan!  Nor could I recall, when I thought about it, exactly what trigonometry was about.

Wikipedia to the rescue!  Trigonometry "studies triangles and the relationships between their sides and the angles between these sides."  Gee, that makes it clearer, doesn't it?  What was most shocking was that the subject is said to be a prerequisite for calculus.  As I said, I took calculus, I passed calculus, and I remember a major focus on measuring the space under a wavy line ... but I don't recall trigonometry being involved in it. 

I suppose it's a good thing I didn't go into certain fields like astronomy and navigation, where trig is said to be essential.  Since I didn't, though, I'm free to again forget all about trigonometry, the one subject in high school that seems to have been a total waste.  

 

ZolaBooks [Not Nana]

Last night we watched one of those mystery/detective yarns that PBS imports from Merrie England.  Figuring as a "clew" was trace evidence of bookcloth on one of the victims' smacked heads.  Bookcloth?   Many of us, I'm sure, do recall the days of physical books with paper pages, and covers sort of wallpapered with a textile for durability.  That textile is bookcloth; in the U.S. we usually refer to it as "buckram" but other sorts of cloth may be used.  Fittingly, the whacker turned out to be a professor of advanced years, because the subliminal message of bookcloth is: How quaint!

It's another reminder of the ongoing process of shifting our reading habits from ecologically wasteful wood pulp to equally ecologically wasteful high-tech electronic gadgets.

Like many such processes, there are bound to be false starts and readjustments.   (Recall Betamax, and cassette tapes.)  I've been a convert to e-books and specifically to the Kindle for several years now, but these devices have drawbacks.  The original Kindles, for example (including Gen 3 and the keyboardless touchables) lack color, and can't provide satisfactory viewing of charts, graphs, or illustrations that may be in the original book.  More important, they're all proprietary:  What you buy from Amazon has to stay in an Amazon device, ditto with the Nook and other imitators.

So I think the concept offered by ZolaBooks, described today in the Sunday Post, sounds like a winner.  They are planning an on-line service that will enable books purchased there to be read on ANY device.  This and other features suggest that Zola might be a "germinal" idea. 

The downside may be that ZolaBooks envisions itself as yet another entry in the social media category.  "Follow" your friends or favorite reviewers, track what they're reading, link to Facebook, see what's "hot," make recommendations yourself ... all that kind of stuff.  I've never been much of a herd-reader.  A lot of current bestsellers just don't interest me.  And I tend to read books in a wide variety of subject matter and styles, so I have little interest in a site that tries to lead me to "other books I may like."  We'll see how that works out.

The service is being rolled out gradually as certain contractual problems are being solved but readers can check it out:   www.zolabooks.com . 

Meanwhile, as of this morning there seems to be a little malfunction in the website.  The site is "optimized" for Safari or Chrome browsers but using Internet Explorer, completing my basic account information proved impossible.  I suppose that will be ironed out.