Why we’re not going to make it

In the James Cameron movie; Terminator 2, there’s a scene where young John Connor is helping the programmed-to-protect terminator fix a car.  Nearby they see two kids playing with realistic toy guns, and the game becomes so violent that their mother has to intervene.  Conner asks the robot; “We’re not gonna make it, are we?”  The matter-of-fact answer: “It is in your nature to destroy yourselves.”

From my photo album FAIL

I had that same feeling when I saw this table in our local Wal-Mart.  Not because of violence, but because of our national inability to delay gratification.  There’s no doubt in my mind that the store manager knows his customers, and if they can get a credit card, they’re old enough to vote.  As someone once said; “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

A recent study found that the ability to delay gratification is crucial to personal success and I can’t help wondering if the same is true of societies.  Might a cultural commonality of analyzing, thinking ahead, and investing resources wisely not help a nation as it apparently does an individual?  We’ve pretty much made a national pastime out of ignoring connections between our concerns and those of the rest of the world starting with our doorstep.  Starting sometime back during the Reagan administration, we became convinced that rainy days just wouldn’t happen if we didn’t acknowledge them.

Deficit spending comes to mind, but it’s only a symptom of something much deeper, which is the tendency to wait for emergencies before doing anything.  We just can’t seem to conceptualize sustainability in our use of natural resources, the health or education of our citizenry, our national infrastructure, our environmental infrastructure, or our relationships to our allies and enemies. 

Or to apply that conceptualization to anything as simple as consistently recycling aluminum or refilling a water bottle from the tap.  We seem to have erased from national memory the concept that big problems consist of accumulated small effects.  We are the snowflakes that feel no responsibility for an avalanche, the raindrops that know nothing of flooding.  Being stuck in traffic means it’s everyone else’s fault.

Just for one example, how long have we known that we need to get off the foreign-oil merry-go-round?  Or fix decaying bridges, upgrade our power grid, or equalize schools in poor neighborhoods?  Some problems can be addressed on an emergency basis, but it’s the one (or several) that can’t which bring down empires.  Those problems are much better addressed by the rule of nukes, which is: don’t ever let things get so bad that you need to use them.

Sorry to be pessimistic.  Can anyone tell me why it’ll all be OK?

Posted by George on 02/07/10 at 10:31 PM
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So it’s come to this… (AARP magazine)

I subscribe to a LOT of magazines - mostly science, technology, politics and history.  But the other day I was stretching and the only thing within reach was the AARP rag.  MrsDoF subscribed to it while I was in hospital last year, I think, but this was the first time I picked one up:

“Michael Douglas on his second chance as something something…”
“The perfect panini”
“The lost art of conversation”
“A bunch more articles with similarly boring titles”

Sorry, I couldn’t actually read any of them.  I just can’t make myself give a crap about some actor, for instance.  The advertisements were mostly for rich, very good-looking old people who go on cruises a lot.  And ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles and use cell phones with enormous buttons.  And what’s up with the name?  At the rate I’m going, I should be able to retire sometime during the Paris Hilton administration.

But wait!  There was one article about knee exercises, which I actually read.  I’ve added one of them to my regular workout, to strengthen the muscles that give my knees lateral support.

Thanks, AARP.  And I think your magazine, if folded out flat, will make a great cat-box liner.  So you’re twice useful.

Posted by George on 02/06/10 at 11:50 PM
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A thought for winter

As Chauncey Gardiner would say; Spring follows Winter, and then Summer:

From my photo album; biosphere
Posted by George on 02/05/10 at 11:52 PM
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First Contact: octogenarian meets Linux

My mother received the computer yesterday that I sent her.  We spent about an hour on the phone exploring the desktop together, and she didn’t sound too freaked out by it.  We opened up Gmail, I sent her a YouTube link which she played, she started a Linux guest session for my sister who was visiting, and so on.  To all appearances, they had fun playing around and she’s pretty happy with it.

She informed me that she is getting old.  “I’m eighty two”, she said.  When the hell did that happen?  I remember her making fudge in Iowa City.  No moon landing yet, but lots of Vietnam on our black-and-white television.  And Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on how she does with it.  There will be a news gap while she is down in California taking care of her mother.

Posted by George on 02/03/10 at 07:58 AM
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Bright pink string vs. the Google home page

In my office there’s a clipboard that everyone uses.  It tends to get laid down all over the place, so time is wasted hunting for it.  I put up a hook on the outside divider wall of my cubicle and hung the clipboard on it.  While it is below eye level (it’s a low divider) it is still visible for the entire length of the room, and is the only object in about 12 square feet of featureless fabric, right next to the desk surface where most people set down the clipboard.  Yet at least two people have been unable to find it while it was hanging on the hook.

There’s more.  Time is often wasted looking for a pen to use writing on the clipboard.  So I tied a pen to the clipboard using bright pink string.  Today I handed the clipboard to someone, with the pen on the board’s clip.  I watched as the person looked at the clipboard, patted his shirt pocket looking for a pen (the bright pink string was touching his hand) and then studied my desk for several moments to find a pen and fill out the form which was directly under the pen.

This is an interesting problem.

All of us have had the experience of not seeing an object because it was not in its normal context, or was in a different orientation than expected.  It happens to me all the time - keys, hat, or a tool that I just set down moments before.  My grandmother had an expression; “If it was a snake, it would have bit you!”  I take the existence of that expression as evidence that this interesting problem is also a widespread, longstanding problem.

It’s easy to build a stereoscopic camera, but object recognition is a difficult computing problem.  It’s not even all that easy for our hunter-gatherer, pattern-seeking brains.  We might see the face of Mary in a cheese sandwich, but miss the eye-level sign that says in block letters: “Please use other door”.  And since both work and commerce depend on pattern recognition, this interesting, widespread, longstanding problem is also of considerable economic importance.

Consider the placement of fire extinguishers, the design of signs, icons, and door handles.  Visit the detergent aisle of your supermarket: it’s a chaos of bright colors where nothing stands out.  But it isn’t just the lack of contrast: even a splash of bright pink string might not be noticeable on twelve square feet of drab fabric.

Whether you advertise detergent, design websites, or write baking instructions, there are several shortcuts to handling attention, perception, and recognition.  The cheap, easy ones - bright colors, moving, blinking lights, and arrows, pretty much amount to tying on bright pink string, and they often don’t work.  That leaves more subtle solutions.

One is the creation of visual triggers.  It takes time to make a corporate logo that gets instant recognition, and changing that logo is playing with the company’s bottom line.  The same is true of safety icons.  How to make them culturally universal, or for that matter, mean the same thing to individuals in the same culture?  Not everyone has the same neurological makeup.

From Design

An effective shortcut in most cases is to include faces.  For deep evolutionary reasons, most people notice faces.  But take a look at any modern magazine and you’ll see that even that hard-wired shortcut can be overused.  As Scott McCloud says in Understanding Comics, greater degrees of abstraction makes for more universality… up to the point where the face is no longer recognizable as such.  But the abstraction has to go pretty far before that property is lost.

Another shortcut is conventional position.  You may invest energy finding something the first time, but cognitive parsimony installs a time-delay before that investment can be triggered again.  So you’ll start by looking where you found it before.  A set of controls or objects that are in a consistent place (as I hope the clipboard hook will become) will, over time, reliably save time.  This is the reason we expect web pages to have basic controls along the top and outer edges, with the logo hot-linked to the home page. 

Still another is extreme simplicity.  Google’s text-entry box in the middle of a nearly blank screen is like a clerk behind a desk when you enter a blank room where everything else is painted white.  The first - almost the only - thing you can do is walk up to the clerk and ask a question.  And yet, the clerk knows the answer to almost every question you could possibly ask.  All you have to do - as James Cromwell said to Will Smith in I, Robot, is ask the right question.  Other wise the answer may be as cluttered as the room is simple.

Still, the Google page is not nearly as blank as it appears on first glance.  I count twenty controls on it, of which two are drop-down menus.  Here Google is combining nearly every trick in the book to push usability about as far as it can go - conventions, position, and making the “website” do the work.  Because while the Google home page appears to be a website, it is really the business end of an inconceivably large and powerful computing system. 

The handling and exchange of information on the scale of the web is far too vast for (analogues to) bright pink string.  For one thing it is no longer possible to prioritize information.  What will be important?  About the best we can do is work on metadata and systems to make sense of it. 

What I wonder is: how far can Google’s model be explored for other sites?  Could an e-commerce site use it?  A college? Might all future competition for web usability be in the arena of intelligent response?  Could future web users come to expect it everywhere?  Might we become accustomed to querying our physical environment as we query glowing rectangles today? How will education be affected when information, once valuable, is in limitless supply (and therefore by definition, cheap) and the most important thing will be… the right question?

Posted by George on 02/01/10 at 10:31 PM
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Firefox Web Developer plugin

If you work with websites at all, you need the Firefox Web Developer plugin.  It is a fantastically useful analysis tool, and will make your life a lot easier.  I’ve seen this many times: the really good stuff seems to come from people like Chris Pederick, who created the plugin.  Adobe couldn’t make a tool this good if their lives depended on it.

I made a donation to Perdick, and he sent back a nice thank-you reply. If there’s a piece of freeware that you use a lot, consider its “Donate” button.  I’ll leave it to economists to figure out why there’s so much great stuff that people make for free, leaving payment optional. But here’s my theory: the author wants to know, when someone pays them, that the product was really worth something.  In a world full of “just barely good enough” and chrome-plated sham, real value is all too rare.

Posted by George on 02/01/10 at 08:54 AM
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Happy birds, and risk of burning down the house

It might have been last Friday, when I heard the dryer drum scraping against the side of its housing and thought; “That dryer is not long for this world.  I should say something to MrsDoF.”  But as my scatter brain is wont to do, I completely forgot to do it.

Saturday, the Dryer quit turning, hot and smelling like burning.  My guess is it burned through a belt trying to spin that drum that had worn through its bearings.  So today we sent dryer-shopping.  Having become disenchanted with high-end appliances over the years, we got the second-cheapest one. 

This evening I cleaned out the dryer vent, which goes from basement through crawl space under kitchen breakfast nook to outside.  ‘Twern’t a small job, neither. 

I will be making a cleaning tool to facilitate doing it 1) more easily and 2) more often.  I’m thinking a couple sections of PVC flex conduit joined end-to-end with a plastic scraper fashioned from 2-liter bottle plastic would work well.  Anyway it added up to a LOT of lint, enough to be a fire hazard.  If the dryer hadn’t failed when it did, we might have had a fire.  From FEMA:

“...NFIRS data show that 80% of clothes dryer fires in structures occur in residential buildings and resulted in approximately 12,700 fires, 15 deaths, 300 injuries, and $88million in property loss each year… Proper maintenance for clothes dryers involves removing the lint from the traps, vents, and surrounding areas of the dryer. Not unexpectedly, the leading factor contributing to ignition for dryer fires is operation deficiencies (Figure 3)—specifically “failure to clean.” Failure to clean accounts for 70% of dryer fire operational deficiency contributing factors…”

That vent cleaning procedure just got added to Google Calendar as a recurring event.

Oh, and the happy birds?  They’re getting a huge bag of lint to build nests with in the Spring.

Posted by George on 01/31/10 at 10:49 PM
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In which I say nothing of substance about Apple’s new iPad

I saw a professor reading from his Kindle and asked him; “So are you going to get one of those new iPads?”

He responded with a grin; “Man, I am so sick of the latest must-have technological gadget!”

OK, one observation of substance: the iPad might be exactly the “computer” for your mom.  Especially if it can use a Bluetooth keyboard.  Which it can.

Posted by George on 01/29/10 at 08:49 AM
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In case they’re wondering why we don’t watch TV news anymore…

A similar take could be done on the “uninformed talking heads blowhard show”.  Which, by the way, does not include Rachel Maddow, the Oxford-educated commentator who actually goes to the trouble to find out stuff from actual authorities in the issue at hand, instead of bringing on ignorant twits who have memorized five slogans.

(h/t Grrl Scientist)

Posted by George on 01/29/10 at 08:26 AM
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Pitiful cries in the frozen darkness

Man this stuff breaks my heart.  There’s a sweet little kitty hanging around our house.  It’s young, healthy, friendly, and obviously someone’s pet, and just as obviously lost and cold and hungry.  It wants in so bad, but our cats (whom I also adore) are too stupid and territorial to do their fellow feline a solid and let him come in and get warm and have a bite.  And it’s, like eight degrees f out there.

Yes, I know we’d likely end up owning him (or her) that way (or in cat parlance, he’d end up owning us).  Or possibly we could locate his pet humans and return him to home base.  Either way would be fine.  But because of our cats’ territoriality we can’t feed this little fellow or even give him any positive attention.  So he’s out there…

Posted by George on 01/28/10 at 09:57 PM
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Depressing, the button…

There they are, 372 unread items in my Google Reader.  35 of them specifically shared by people whose insights I’ve learned are worth attention, and all the authors brilliant, passionate people.  Waiting for me to pull up to a table with coffee and treats and enjoy them, a feast of science and technology and art and news and commentary on interesting stuff and just plain humor.  And thence probably to take that inspiration and enjoy writing posts for my own blog. 

But I have more than the usual number of projects going at work and home.  And since having to cut out painkillers, I’ve been managing chronic pain with daily exercise - certainly a good thing in every way but it is time consuming.

372 items.  I click the button that says; Mark All As Read.  There’s a sense of loss, like dropping new books in the trash…

Posted by George on 01/28/10 at 08:29 AM
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Giving up on my new eyeglasses

Last summer when I was laid up, I exclusively used my reading glasses - and managed to misplace my regular glasses.  When i went back to work, I just used the reading glasses.  This is not exactly a hardship since I spend 90% of my time either reading or looking at some glowing rectangle.

But for some reason the coating on my reading glasses failed so I needed some new specs.  I got another examination, picked out some frames, and they tried.  Oh, how they tried.  They got the prism backwards - made me see double.  They got the prescription just a bit “off” so I couldn’t read my computer screen.  Not useful.

After enough return visits, I’ve given up.  This evening I asked them to just reproduce the lenses in my old reading glasses.  But that means using my “street” glasses (which I did eventually find) for a few days while they get it done.

It’s a wonder that eye examinations ever result in a useful prescription, when you think about it.  They’re trying to calibrate a variable, partially self-compensating optical system on the basis of verbal feedback from an untrained person who is partly influenced by wishful thinking.  The people who made corrective lenses for the Hubble space telescope had, in that respect, a much easier time.

Posted by George on 01/26/10 at 11:27 PM
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Is Ubuntu ready for Gran’Ma?

I am building two computers this weekend.  One is for my son to use temporarily at an apartment where he’ll be living until the end of the semester.  It’s an old IBM model 50 ThinkStation;  a P4 with 1.5 gb RAM running Ubuntu 9.10.  Runs surprisingly well for being a rather modest computer.  He is already experienced in using Ubuntu so it’ll be easy for him.

The other is for my mom, who now has broadband (good-bye dial-up, we won’t miss ye).  Her old computer was * no way * ready for that challenge, so I am building her a new one.  It’s only about the size of a 2-slice toaster, with an Intel Atom processor, DVD burner, 2 gb of RAM, and a 350 gb hard drive.  It is very energy efficient and darn near silent in operation. 

Since I cannot easily travel to Seattle to keep a Windows machine running, again I am loading it with Ubuntu 9.10.  I think she’s been using either Windows ‘98 or XP so there would be a learning curve no matter what (current) operating system I put in front of her.  I’ll let you know what she thinks of it after she’s had it for a little while.  Meanwhile, any of you Linux people know an Ubuntu manual I can print out and include in the box?  I’m shipping it out tomorrow Wednesday.

  • h/t to fellow Seattlite Dana Hunter who gave us some advice on broadband options in that city.
  • I risk fanboi wrath in saying this, but Win7, Mac, and Ubuntu are very similar from the user’s perspective.  If you were coming from ‘98, anyway.
  • The computer started with a $170 bare bones box from TigerDirect.  It included the case, power supply, motherboard with processor and ram.  The DVD burner was $25 and I found a 350 gb Seagate 7000 Barracuda rpm hard drive in my miscellaneous parts bin.  The hard drive was EIDE but SATA would be better if for no other reason than SATA cables are better suited to a tiny box.
  • The Ubuntu installation went without a hitch and everything worked.  I partitioned 100gb for /, 4gb for swap, and the rest for /home.  It isn’t super-fast but it runs Open Office, Firefox, and Gimp easily.  It would be a different matter if she wanted to install Wine and try to run Modern Warfare 2.
  • Here’s a picture of the motherboard.
Posted by George on 01/24/10 at 09:14 AM
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“...so rare, it’s practically a super power”

Another person died today between Bloomington and Peoria, in a late-model pickup.  She spun out of control, collided head-on with a semi, flipped over and died en route to the hospital.  The highway patrol attributed the accident “100% to the icy conditions”.

Nonsense.  During an ice storm, nobody should be going more than 20 mph, but we all know that isn’t the reality.  Everyone has an excuse for going almost the full speed limit, ignoring the other speed limit set by common sense. 

Let’s say that the amount of energy at 20mph equals X.  At 40mph you’re packing four times the kinetic energy.  You need four times the traction to steer or brake, and then a collision hits four times as hard.  The survivable, becomes the unsurvivable.  You die for no good reason.

The woman was driving a late-model GMC pickup.  It’s a sturdy, well-designed vehicle, but head-on with 40 tons is hard to beat.  She left a husband and kids.

Once when I was a service manager for a chain of computer stores, I was riding in a van and the owner of the company was at the wheel.  There was a snow/ice storm going on and the worse it got, the faster he drove.  Visibility was poor and the road was slick.  He brushed off requests to slow down, and we exceeded 70mph in places.  I thought about my wife and kids.  The next day, I told him I would never get in a car with him at the wheel again, and I never did.

One of the rationalizations he used was; “if we slow down, we’ll get rear-ended”.  That is a distinct possibility, which in such conditions is a good reason to make sure your seat belts are fastened, your head rests adjusted, and to put on the emergency flashers.  But it’s a really stupid reason to go too fast for conditions.

Last Fall in this area, a young woman died when her Buick Rainier rolled over.  It’s a well-built SUV with a good safety rating, but rescuers surmised that she unbuckled her belt to reach her cell phone, which she had dropped while text-messenging.  In a rare moment of insight, Illinois legislators just passed a law making it illegal to text while driving, but I wonder why a law was even necessary.  As the poster says; “Common Sense: So rare it’s practically a super power.”  If they can’t figure out it’s a bad idea to text and drive, I wonder if a law will really help.

Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, and I’ve done a dumb thing or two behind the wheel.  But four of my classmates died in 1973 from a high-speed accident.  Makes you thoughtful.

Posted by George on 01/20/10 at 11:05 PM
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A weekend wasted on home repairs
From Notes
New sink, assembled,
ready to drop into
hole in counter.
Click to embiggen. 

I spent a good part of the weekend fixing the fridge and installing a new kitchen sink.  Got a little studying done on Saturday and Sunday but otherwise it was this stuff.

The fridge had really clogged up with ice and wouldn’t, you know, “chill”.  I think the root problem was too much stuff crammed into the freezer compartment, but will check it again in a month.  The defrost heater element is very easy to replace if that turns out to have been the problem.  (My DVOM needs a battery so I couldn’t check its impedance.)

Somewhere in the weekend I augured out the bathtub drain, which chose this weekend to become clogged.  The culprit was hair, which points to MrsDoF, not me. 

The sink was suffering from being 30 years old and not much of a sink to begin with.  Luckily I got MrsDoF to accompany me to the lumber yard to help pick out a new faucet.  The old sink was somewhat difficult to remove because the clips had rusted solid.  The old pipes, both water and drain, were both clogged and corroded.

I assembled everything with a view to easier service 30 years from now.  Threads, including sink mounting clips, treated with silicone plumber’s grease.  Pipe fittings, wrapped with PTFE thread seal tape.  Used grey non-adhesive gasket silicone under the edge of the sink against the counter - it is the same color as the stainless steel.  Real good quality faucet.  Replaced crappy old-style service valves (which had frozen into immobility) with the more current ball-type.  The guy at Menard’s said they still sell the old type - people want them because they’re 30 cents cheaper.  This, I don’t understand at all. 

Next up, water heater.  Then furnace and roof.  And paint.  I’ll replace the water heater, and paint the house, myself.  Will bring in contractors for the other items.

( I’ve been controlling chronic muscle pain with daily exercise but without meds I don’t have a solution for arthritis yet so my hands are killing me right now and it’s likely to cost me some sleep tonight.  Will try soaking them in warm water before going to bed.)

Posted by George on 01/19/10 at 12:15 AM
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