Rich and Strange Aeons

At the place I'm staying now, there's a hair dryer prominently labeled as 1875 Watts. That's... a lot. A 5000 BTU/hour window air conditioner is 1465 Watts. Small and effective [1] space heaters are often 1000 or 1500 Watts. No wonder hair dryers can trip breakers.

[1] Unless trying to heat a cavernous and leaky basement on low power.

Without looking it up, what's your guess for the average estimated life expectancy of someone born today? This isn't a trick question ("3 months because WWIII will start"), just what you think the WHO statisticians would say.

mtbc you're disqualified, unless you want to post your original guess from IRC. :)

Is Tesla overvalued? Argues Tesla either can't cause disruption, or can't monopolize it. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/26/15872468/tesla-gm-ford-valuation-justifying-disruption

did Seattle's minimum wage lower employment? two studies, two reports
and two summaries, differing about which sucked
http://www.eoionline.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/27/15879346/study-high-minimum-wage-job-killer-seattle

Internet addiction and ethical web design https://aeon.co/amp/essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-don-t-we-regulate-it

Asian anthem authoritarianism http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/28/asia/philippines-anthem-bill/index.html

Air pollution still kills thousands. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/28/534594373/u-s-air-pollution-still-kills-thousands-every-year-study-concludes

Intravenous vitamin C as cure for sepsis? http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/could-deadly-infections-be-cured-vitamin-c-180963843/

origin of Ashkenazi? https://theconversation.com/uncovering-ancient-ashkenaz-the-birthplace-of-yiddish-speakers-58355?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=facebookbutton

slow progress in parking reform: http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/06/27/american-cities-are-chipping-away-at-the-burden-of-parking-mandates/

Sea Trek https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?805937-Star-Trek-Alternate-Trek-settings&p=21196309#post21196309

plate tectonics and evolution https://theconversation.com/plate-tectonics-may-have-driven-the-evolution-of-life-on-earth-44571

right to carry increases violent crime, maybe? It uses a fairly new statistical technique to make synthetic controls. The result sounds robust. But the abstract says "elevates violent crime rates, but seems to have no impact on property crime and murder rates". Isn't murder a violent crime?
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/06/21/violent-crime-increases-right-carry-states/
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23510

expert view on reducing gun deaths https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/10/upshot/How-to-Prevent-Gun-Deaths-The-Views-of-Experts-and-the-Public.html?_r=0

oil eating bacteria https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170626155740.htm
Neanderthal dentistry https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170628131510.htm
host specific enemies and tropical biodiversity https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629142949.htm

Vancouver sea wolves http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/sea-oceans-wolves-animals-science/

Things I've been told by recent Lyft drivers:

* Uber and Lyft "take the same percentage", but Lyft charges more so they get more.

* Uber cheats on mileage, holding out until an attorney general was called in.

* If your ride estimate was e.g. $31, but actually was worth $22, Lyft charges you $22; Uber charges you $31, but pays the drive for a ride of $22, pocketing the difference.

* Uber often charges you surge price but doesn't pay out as a surge. Which, I note, rather defeats half the alleged point of surge pricing (luring more drivers onto the road.)

* Lyft surges based on demand, Uber often surges by the clock.

* Lots of drivers are switching to Lyft.

* Edit to add: Lyft is a lot easier for the drivers to contact and talk to when there's a problem, and more responsive.

Certainly I've been seeing a lot more Lyft availability in Boston than I did a few years ago.

Edit to add: comment below got me wondering about relative pay. A few sources:

http://www.ehow.com/info_8522975_much-average-cab-driver-make.html
http://oureverydaylife.com/much-average-cab-driver-make-9448.html
http://work.chron.com/much-fare-taxi-drivers-keep-22871.html

In 2012-2013, taxi drivers were reporting $12/hour on average. This Vox article https://www.vox.com/2014/12/17/7402311/lyft-driver-pay suggests Lyft in 2014 was similar, but that drivers were enthusiastic about the flexibility.

The Chron.com link suggests taxi companies take a 1/3 cut, and that the drivers may have to pay for gas and vehicle use out of what's left, too.

Try again!

Date your entries. "When did I write this?" can be a fun detective exercise but not in the aggregate.


Fully date your entries. Yes, it's annoying to write the year all the time, but much later, when paging through (paper or textfile), you'll thank yourself for not having to find the beginning of year marker, assuming you left one.

If you have multiple diary books, putting the date range on the covers is nice too.

***

I found a book split between my USSR trip in 1991 and life notes in 2001-2002. Very frugal of me but makes the diary hard to order. Thanks, me.

A bunch of my diaries actually have class notes in the front, diaries in the back; school year ends without filling the notebook, so there was spare space...

***

On the electronic front, my journal files have a format of

{{2014 Dec 3}
life stuff
here

{special event like Arisia
whole bunch of lines
}
}

Not exactly sophisticated, but allows pretty free-form entry, while delimiting entries on characters you can %-bounce on in vi, while also not competing with the parentheses one might normally use (including smiley face parentheses, which don't close). And yes, I have a script somewhere that checks for mismatched curly braces. I designed the date header with some idea of easing parsing by simple scripts, though it hasn't come up much.

As you can see, the braces recurse, so I can group logically connected paragraphs within a day's entry.

One could obviously make the format smarter, with tags, or {{event} stuff}, but even what I have has been pretty helpful. I can find a day's entry quickly, beginning and end, and see the bounds of long sub-entries. There are ad hoc tags: "book:" at the beginning of a line for books I might want to read; "movie:" at the beginning for movies I've seen (yes, not very consistent); semi-regular tags for regular social events, to enable searching for those; "me on " for links to stuff I write elsewhere. Could be better though, like having an index at the top of such tags for standardized use.

In theory I could write a script to bound searches, e.g. looking for regexes within entries of a certain date, basically primitive database functionality. (Or you could put entries in a real database, but I'd rather stick to textfiles for stuff like this.) I haven't felt the compulsion to go beyond searching in less or vim, though.

But first, unrelated stuff:

I was going to drop off some mail, and passed a postman sitting in his truck. "I don't suppose I could just give--" "Sure you can." And I handed it over. One fewer rush hour crossings of Mass Ave!

Coming home, I saw a Drain Doctor van outside. And now I hear mysterious chunking sounds from the bathroom ceiling. I suspect he's working in the apartment upstairs. Amusing to ID that out of a medium-large apartment complex.

A while back, I saw advice about looking at things and imagining drawing them. Even though my drawing skills are rudimentary and I haven't tried physically drawing any of the things I've looked at since, applying this advice has been useful for focusing visual attention, especially on details. Tracing outlines with my eyes, counting elements, paying attention to colors. "If I were drawing this, what would I need to know... aha."

Similarly, though I don't remember all the tree stuff I've read so far, and there's obviously far more I don't even know yet, there's already a change in how I look at them: now that I've run through a few ID keys, I have an idea of what to look for. "I have no idea what this is, but these are the things I'd want to look up." Or as today, "I'm not sure this is a honey locust, but it sure has similar pinnate leaves without a leading leaf."

And, today's haul! I think I found a ginkgo: certainly it was something with a very fan-shaped leaf, though I didn't see any top notches.

And... a day or two ago I learned that 'sycamore' seems to be a somewhat generic term for star ("stellate") or maple shaped leaves. There's a sycamore maple, which is really a maple, but there are also unrelated trees with similar leaves, like the American sycamore, distinctive for mottled exfoliating bark, and 'naked' light gray or white upper branches, and spiky spherical seeds.

So, a few feet beyond the suspected ginkgo, I notice a bunch of "maple" leaves, and then that they're hanging off of bone-white branches, and then that this tree doesn't have any of the 'helicopter' maple seeds that I've seen quite a lot of under other maple trees. Hmmmm. Found a few more like that, and then some undeniable maple trees -- helicopter seeds ahoy! -- that had more conventionally barky upper branches.

For some reason, this morning I thought about astronaut health, and how much it must suck to have a cold in zero gee. Let alone diarrhea. I wonder if they're quarantined before being sent up.

I've been reading more Holmes stories. One early thought was "he has his own wikipedia!" More accurately, his own encyclopedia, or almanac, or such. Books of clippings or other notes on people and things, which he can look up. Or have Watson look up.

I was at a Holmes panel at Arisia One panelist thought Holmes would have trouble adapting to new circumstances, or to computers; another thought he was superlatively adaptable and would love computers. "He has his own database already!" I agree with them. I mean, he might not take to computers a thing in themselves, because he's Crime Geek, but insofar as they could be useful to him? Yeah.

Cambridge has jumped onto the plastic bag ban-wagon, despite the lack of clear evidence of plastic bags being environmentally worse than paper bags, overall. I find paper bags shittily worse at being able to carry groceries home reliably if walking, never mind it raining. I wonder how many banners have cars and thus can smugly drive their bags home.

I've always wondered about the wolf-wheat association in Spice and Wolf. Wolf tail -> wheat head seemed the connection. At another panel at Arisia, I remembered Inari being the goddess of rice and foxes, and I suddenly wondered if Spice and Wolf is simply an off-by-one analogy: fox : rice :: wolf : wheat. But then I found a post saying there used to be traditional wolf:wheat associations in Japan. http://www.eugenewoodbury.com/foxwolf/kitsune.htm

***

The D&D SRD has a cute 404 page: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/

I. Headphones
I keep buying cheap earbuds and they keep breaking mysteriously. I'm not sure this is avoidable, even if you spend lots of money. Well, there is some alleged "Rugged" model out there. I figure as long as they're cheap enough it's okay, but I searched anyway, and found good reviews for the Panasonic Ergo-fit TPM 125. Also some others. Not necessarily for ruggedness, but for sounding good and fitting well at a $10 price point. And Panasonic has a good reputation with me, I've liked all few of their products I've owned (a walkman tape player, a VCR) compared to alternatives. And Consumer Reports rated them very highly for reliability a while back.

OTOH I also like instant gratification, and when I popped into a Dollar Tree the other day, I found earbuds there (despite what the two employees I asked thought) for, yes, a dollar. I bought three different ones.

One is technically over ear -- not like a muff, just hooks that go over your fleshy bit. Sounds okay but not that comfortable, and pops out when I try to wear my actual noise muffs over them. The second one sounded okay but smelled of plastic so strongly that I got paranoid about cheap Chinese products and put it in my spare room to air out. The third one I opened too and left to air as well.

Then I decided to go by Panasonic. Never seen them in a store so away! to Amazon! Next day wasn't that much more compared to basic shipping, so I indulged, and they came tonight. Sound fine and fit well, yes; nothing's going on for me to judge their noise isolation properties. And they don't smell toxic.

Keep in mind I'm no connoisseur, so feel free to be skeptical about my ideas about "sounds fine."

II. Bikes and pedestrians
So when I'm a pedestrian, I hate it when a bike zips by me at speed. "What if I'd stepped to the side for some reason?" I wonder. So when I sidewalk -- which I do a lot, because cars are scary -- I try to pass peds considerately, with enough space that I'd miss them even after a big sudden step sideways. If I can't I slow down a lot; if they look particularly fragile or unpredictable (senior, child, dog) I slow down even more, to pushing with my feet if need be.

OTOH I admit that from the other side, sometimes you can model the ped so that they seem predictable and you don't have to be that chary. Today I had an example: I was taking my safety-cut (I'm not sure it's a short-cut) across Harvard's extended campus, and a woman was crossing from left to right. Totally unaware of me, but given the paths and visibility, it totally made sense that I could zip by her on the left with little risk.

III. The Martian
I read the book a while back and liked it. I've heard the movie is good and sort of thought I should see it. When I realized it had left the Somerville theater (which is nice and walkable) I realized it was starting to fade and I should go see it Now. Happily I got two friends to come with me to the Alewife/Apple Cinmea. It was pretty good. They cut out at least two crises from the book, and may have jazzed up the final intercept a bit, I'm not sure. I'm still skeptical that Martian storms are at all like that. But good. I cried. I was disappointed they cut Mark's boobies emoticon/leet after they told him he was live.

As for the theater, I miss Somerville. Or Kendall. We had to buy tickets from the concession stand, waiting for her to finish getting food for other people. While there's a certain labor efficiency, it's also inefficient for people not planning to buy stuff. And she refused to give me a cup of water. I don't know if they'd have let me bring in a backpack with a water bottle inside. Oddly, there seemed to be lots of other employees standing around doing nothing.

I'm fairly sure that Kendall gave me a cup of water when I asked, and I don't remember grievances against it or Somerville, so probably either got cups or brought my backpack in.

The three of us stood in the lobby talking about it for a bit; right after the other two split off a woman asked me what we'd just seen. I guess we sounded animated and excited, I'm skeptical she was randomly hitting on me.

A deleted paragraph from the Wikipedia article on bow shape:

"There is a section in Homer's Odyssey when the suitors attempt to string Odysseus' bow and are unable to do so, whereas Odysseus is able to string it without standing up. A reflex bow is almost impossible to string unless one knows the technique and is easiest to string from a sitting position. This passage has been suggested as evidence that reflex bows were just beginning to spread into the Aegean area at the time of writing."

I think I'd always found it odd that "wily Odysseus" was suddenly supposed to be superstrong at the end of his story. Seems more fitting if it were more a matter of his knowing the right trick.