ectoblog.com

When I have a bad day, I try to remember to keep things in perspective.  “At least I wasn’t raped and murdered by Mongols” is a reminder that I give myself that appears to help. I urge you to try it out next time some kind of clusterfuck happens to you, see how it feels.

PS: People of Massachusetts? Go fuck yourselves.

You know how it’s said that a hybrid gets better city mileage than highway mileage because 1) the gas engine shuts off when the car is stopped, and 2) because of regenerative braking? That’s gotta be bullshit, and here’s why:  an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton, law-giver.

For example: say you’ve got your Prius cruising along at 40 mph. You see the light up ahead turning yellow, so you slow to a stop. Yes, the regenerative braking is recovering some percentage of the energy the car put into accelerating to 40 mph, but it’s not recovering 100% of that energy. In fact, a website I went to today (since navigated away from and lost) rates regenerative braking as delivering between 5 and 10% of a hybrid’s fuel economy (which translates into some unknown but less than 100% efficient energy conservation). In other words, if the stoplight hadn’t been there, the Prius would’ve continued merrily along at 40 mph without losing any energy to braking.

Second, at the stoplight, the Prius’ engine shuts down for the wait. Yes, no fuel is being used at the stop, but on the other hand, no mileage is being run up either. It’s a wash. But, you say, when the light turns green and the Prius accelerates back up, most of that acceleration is accomplished by the electric motor before the engine kicks back on; there’s your savings!

Im gegenteil mein freund!  The electric motor is solely charged via the gasoline-powered engine. Yes, in the several seconds after the stoplight, the energy is taken from the electric motor, but at some point down the road, that energy has to be replaced by transferring it from the gasoline engine back to the electric motor’s battery, with some concomitant loss of energy during the transference. Newton.

So why are hybrids touted to be so much more efficient in the city than on the highway? It just don’t add up. It just don’t add up. My guess (and it’s just a guess, albeit an incredibly educated and insightful one) is that it has everything to do with average speed and wind resistance. My guess–educated, insightful, and of an overall incredible nature–is that if a Prius were tested on the highway (meaning no starting and stopping) at an identical average mph as that achieved in city driving, its mileage would be significantly better than what it could achieve in the city, owing to reduction in wind resistance (from that at normal highway cruising speed to that at 40mph) and Isaac Newton. Because speed increases linearly, while the amount of energy necessary to overcome wind resistance increases exponentially (several of my brain cells swear this is a true statement based on graphs they remember seeing long ago, and that’s good enough for me).

Insightful, you say? Incredibly educated? Darn tootin’.

In sum: it’s obvious and goes without saying that a hybrid gets better gas mileage in city driving than a non-hybrid because of its ability to shut down its gas engine from time-to-time, as well as its being equipped with regenerative braking. But given the same average speeds (admittedly not going to happen) in highway vs city driving, a hybrid does not magically pull energy out of a hat to become somehow more efficient in the city than it is on the highway; the only reason that a hybrid achieves “better fuel economy” in the city is that, at average city-driving speeds, wind resistance is much less of a factor than at average real-world highway speeds. Therefore, the commonly-understood, commonly cited, but wrong, assumption that a hybrid’s better city mileage versus highway mileage arises from some laws-of-physics-defying aspect of stop-and-go driving is an often-parroted but chowder-headed massive misunderstanding of what is really going on.

And that’s the way it is, this eleventh of January, 2010. Courage.

I started riding my bicycle again this week for the first time in a long time. You’ve probably seen me on the road; I’m that guy you pass that you look at for a couple seconds, then say, “Well, good for him!”

I used to be the guy you passed on the road and said “Jesus, I’ve got to get in shape!” I’m not that guy anymore. It’s been a few years now since I was that guy. Maybe I’ll be that guy again, it’s hard to say.

At least I’m not the guy you pass and say “I hope he talked with his doctor before doing that” or even the “My God! Somebody call an ambulance!” guy. Nope, I’m not either one of them.

I’m hoping to go in the other direction, back upstream. Upstream was a nice place as I recall. I think the “Jesus” guy is the sweet spot (or, for this metaphor, the slickest rock in the creek). I liked being him, if only for a little while. It takes a little maintenance to be that guy (which is why he isn’t me right now), but I think it’s still possible. Sure; why not?

There is a guy who’s fitter than that guy: the guy you see riding along the side of the road, perfect form, even breather, lightning quick. The guy other people, as they pass him in their cars, prayerfully urge to eat shit and then immediately get to dying. Now that’s a guy!

But he’s not the slickest rock in the creek. That title goes to the guy who can eat a slice of pizza or have a beer whenever he wants to.

In a recent commercial for Allstate, Dennis Haysbert intones that drivers who switched from Geico to Allstate saved an average of $396 per year on their auto insurance. He then intones “Surprised?”*

Not really, Dennis, and here’s why:  My guess is that most (if not all) drivers who switched insurance companies switched because the switch saved them money. But there are all these other drivers who didn’t switch, and they didn’t switch because they found out the switch wouldn’t save them money.

So for the purposes of disingenuousness, Allstate selected out all the people who came to the conclusion that switching companies was expensive and stupid before they averaged anything. Those left over–90% of everyone? 3.5% of everyone? Allstate doesn’t tell us–those left over saved some average amount of money. Allstate tells us that average was $396. Allstate doesn’t tell us how much money the other 10% or 96.5% of drivers saved, on average, by sticking with Geico. They left that up to Geico to do in some caveman or googly-eyed money-wad commercial somewhere down the road.

And they knowingly left us to mis-translate their carefully-crafted copy in our heads, so we’d be left thinking that the average driver would save $396 by switching to Allstate, instead of what they really said, which was merely that the average driver who discovered a reason to switch saved $396 by doing so. Crafty!

It’s a pretty disingenuous commercial, but you have to be suspicious and cranky to realize it. That’s where I come in. You’re welcome.

How’s Dennis feel about the commercial?

Haysbert… is happy to be in the Allstate ads. He says it’s the first ad work he’s done in about 15 years, because “most commercials are not very dignified.” But, he says, Allstate is different: “These had integrity. They have a team of lawyers that hover over each word I say. It might be a little frustrating, but it works. I can have the confidence and knowledge that what I’m saying is true.”

I conclude that Haysbert is neither suspicious nor cranky enough for his own good. And he has lawyers hovering over each word he says, like angels.

Microsoft spent time and money on this video:

Somebody came up with this idea, other people okayed it. Actors were hired.

In the paraphrased words of Ignatius J Reilly: “Filth! How dare they pretend to be virgins. Look at their degenerate faces. Rape them!”

I could look at Greta Scacchi all day.

Absolutely gorgeous pics of the bridge and beach of Bay St Louis by Steve Martin.

If you’ve had a Sierra Nevada, and then have another Sierra Nevada that tastes like it’s gone over, check the bottle. You may have just poured yourself a Heineken.

David Attenborough - Wikipedia

Is there a more excellent 83 year old man out there?

Check out the “Favourite Attenborough moments” on the wikipedia page, and this:

“Can people levitate?”
“‘Can people levitate?’”
“Oh, I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”
“‘Can people levitate?’”
“Don’t…. I mean, it’s ‘No,’ isn’t it?”
“…… Yes, it is ‘No.’”

ginandtacos.com » Blog Archive » A NATION OF WHINERS AFTER ALL

It’s ironic that the author chooses to quote Ms. Bushnell since this article inspired the exact same reaction I had the first time I saw an episode of Sex and the City - I went in expecting mindless distraction and emerged from the experience a hardcore Marxist.

You know how scientists and historians are liable to liken the total time civilization has existed versus the total time the earth has existed to “the blink of an eye?” At the drop of a hat? I’ve always taken their word for that. I mean, why would scientists and historians lie to me, or be so sloppy that they screwed up on such a common comparison? They’re not typically liars and slobs. But I, for no other reason than I’m here in Miami with time to waste, decided to actually check that comparison. You lucky, lucky people!

First, I want to make it clear that I believe I’m the first one to check this comparison ever, in the history of the world. I realize that’s a powerful statement, but a 50 second Google investigation leads me to believe it’s true, and that’s good enough for me.

Second, to even make sense of the “blink of an eye” statement as a comparison, I realized I needed to know what unit of time the blink was being compared to. I mean, you can’t just say “civilization is to blink of an eye” as “age of the earth is to blank” without providing options for “blank.” That would be thoughtless and cruel. That would also get you a vicious, well-earned beating at an SAT exam if you were proctoring the test.  So I had to apply a little common sense to this. What biological process would a scientist or historian pair with “the blink of an eye” when trying to stun the reader with how really big the time difference is  between  the lifespan of civilization and the lifespan of the world? What biological process could they use? It’s, of course, a gigantic differential, a geological one; no one’s disputing that. At least no one near enough for me to reach out and slap some sense into. In the end, the only thing that seems reasonable to put up against that huge disparity is the human lifespan. And I think that’s a reasonable conclusion for any non-slappable person, especially when I can now word it like this: “civilization is to blink of an eye as earth’s lifespan is to human’s lifespan.” See how pleasing and SAT-ish that looks?

Third, now that I’ve identified my terms, the only thing I have to do prior to figuring out if I’m being lied to is to rigorously define these terms, viz: 1)time-length of civilization, 2)time-length of eye-blink, 3)time-length of earth’s existence, and 4)time-length of human life:

1. The length of time civilization’s been around depends on your definition of civilization. That doesn’t really apply here, of course; I don’t personally care what your definition is. My definition depends only on googling “when did civilization begin?”, clicking through to 2 or 3 different sites that appear the least bit relevant, grabbing some numbers, adding those numbers up, then dividing by the number of numbers added. Civilization’s been around for 7,000 years.

2. Wiki-answers answers “How long does it take to blink an eye” as if the question were about how much time humans go between eyeblinks. That definition had never occurred to me. It seemed, in fact, like bullshit. On the other hand, it also seemed like one of those things that was obvious to everybody else in the world, yet I had somehow managed to get wrong for decades. Luckily for my sanity, searchengineguide.com timed an eyeblink at about a tenth of a second, which conformed to my previous thinking, so wiki-answers is indeed a-bursting with bullshit.

3. If I’d approached the age of the earth in the same way as I approached the age of civilization (1 above), I would’ve had to arrange for some mechanism with which to throw out the Jesus-freak estimates. Instead I relied on high school and college textbook memories of this amount of time that are so ingrained in me that I could probably access those brain cells before I access the ones that tell me how many legs a tripod has. And then I arbitrarily added 500 million to come up with the answer: 5 billion years.

4. 75 years, because I’m all agreed that that’s about what it is.

That settled, I was able to mathematically describe the comparison:

(time-span of civilization)/(age of earth) = (time to blink an eye)/(human lifespan)

or, filling in those statements with the rigorous numbers from above,

7,000yrs/5 billion years = 0.1 second/2.36682 billion seconds

(where 75yrs = 75yrs x 365.25days/1yr x 24hrs/1day x 60min/1hr x 60sec/1min = 2.36682 billion sec).

So, canceling out the units and typing out the zeroes to make my work look more impressive, we have 7,000/5,000,000,000 = 0.1/2,300,000,000, or

7/5,000,000 = 1/23,000,000,000, or even

1/714,286 = 1/23,000,000,000

which we can finally see is utter bullshit.

Therefore (or, if we spent an extra 2 minutes googling it up, and we did, ” ∴ “), the entire span of human civilization is 5 orders of magnitude larger than the blink of an eye, if by “orders of magnitude” I mean what I think I mean.  In other words, my friends, the metaphor is a lie.

To be accurate–and scientists and historians are nothing if not accuracy fetishists–they pride themselves on it, they live for that shit–the metaphor should really be phrased something like this: “Civilization began 7,000 years ago, which, in geological terms, is around 32,000 blinks of an eye” (computation available upon request). Or if that doesn’t float their boat, “Civilization began 7,000 years ago, which is like everybody in Tupelo, MS, blinking at once, provided 4,000 of them are on vacation at the time.”  Granted, the phrase has become kind of verbose and pitiful, but I didn’t make this bed, and I’m not the one who has to sleep in it.

In conclusion, “Beeyatch.”

Could Twitter’s Realtime World Blur Our Moral Compass?

Emotions linked to our moral sense such as admiration and compassion- awaken slowly in the mind, according to a new study from a neuroscience group show that emotions linked to our sense of morality are aroused slowly. The study was led by Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

This makes three different ways I’ve seen people try to make a cautionary tale out of this study. And this is one of the more subtle consequences of growing older: since I’ve seen this process several times before (the ‘new study of a particular process is abstracted to give a potential overall insight into why we’re fucked up’ process), and I’ve seen the process almost without exception sputter toward final inconsequence, I have become, if not scornful, at least indifferent to it. Is that wisdom? If it is, wisdom blows.

I miss the days when this sort of thing fired my imagination.

This meme is very similar (if not identical) to the one in which a fairly technical discovery in some particular scientific field is immediately seized upon by the media and extrapolated to construct a probable future in which wild, weird, new things become as common and important as the car or air travel or the cellphone. The media delight in telling us these things to the point that they will make one up if a ‘real’ one hasn’t come along for awhile.

Obviously, the fact of cars, air travel and cellphones indicates that, sometimes, the “probable future” actually happens. I’m aware of that. But by the same token, the fact that there are no personal submarines, no cures for cancer, no cold fusion, no teleporters, no huge starships trolling the asteroids for uranium and gold, no robot salad makers squatting inside kitchen cupboards, no cheap solar panels on every home, no healthy cigarettes, no fat pills, no telepathic communication–it makes it hard to pay attention when tidings of “the next greatest thing” worm their way into the popular consciousness.

Another similar if not identical media process is the one in which a particular thing happens (eg: USAir’s plane ditching in the Hudson after a birdstrike) which is so exciting that they are compelled, for awhile, to over-report other happenings that have even the slightest chance of producing the same outcome (eg: any birdstrike on any plane that forces the plane to return to the airport for a landing). Because I’m a pilot (and so through professional channels heard about many birdstrikes that required emergency landings that weren’t considered worthy of mainstream reporting until after the USAir incident) I know that these things happen all the time.

This new study shows that there is a difference in the speed that more and less visceral displays of tragedy matter to people.  That’s interesting: there are differences in the speed at which things matter. For example, seeing someone break an ankle elicits a response of compassion more quickly than seeing someone being told that her mother died. It’s an interesting study. But interesting psychological studies happen all the time. And because I was a psych major (and also because I’m a human being that pays a certain amount of attention to things that may impact my human being-ness), I know this new study should be interpreted narrowly until proven to matter more generally. That’s just the way it is. You can’t go from this study to a pronouncement on the moral effect of Twitter in one go and not sound like a shrieking ass, at least to experts. That’s just the way it isn’t.

The tricky part is knowing the difference between a carefully constructed hypothesis and the shrieking of an ass when the subject is not one you know well.  Years of being led to believe things were important that in the end turned out not to be very important have taught me to delay judgment on anything that isn’t already completely obvious. While that may be wise, it’s hard on optimism.

I know when things that happen in my areas of expertise are being stretched to fill a news vacuum. Birdstrikes and psychological studies happen all the time. They happen all the time. So where was CNN the thousand other times these things happened? I’ll tell you where CNN was: CNN was busy over-reporting some other goddamn thing that, since I’m not a professional sailor or bond-trader, I had no idea that they were over-reporting. So because I’m not an expert on everything, I am potentially duped by the media, day in and day out, to believe things are more consequential than they really are.

I know the media don’t do this on purpose. They don’t get up in the morning and say “Let’s over-report tsunamis today.” I know it’s just the lousy way things work. I know one of the functions of the media is to find whatever excitement there is in the daily crush of happenings in the world and offer it to the public, so that they can make money and continue existing. Or if there’s nothing really inherently exciting that day, to find the hook into something else that was exciting before and offer that. To blur potential and real if real doesn’t look like it will sell. I know all that.

Knowing that doesn’t make me happier. And one of the cardinal attributes of wisdom, I think, is that once you become wise to something, it’s very hard to become un-wise to it. In other words, I can’t go back to being optimistic about such things even if I wanted to. Wisdom is a jealous god.

I used to think that, given the choice, I would choose wisdom over innocence every time. Every time. I used to think that, given the choice, accurate knowledge of the probability that something is true is always preferable to ignorance of it. Do I still think that? It’s hard to say.

I guess I just wish wisdom wouldn’t trash optimism quite as thoroughly as it seems it has to do.

And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight
So I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he’d tell you to your face, man you’re some kinda sinner!

Ecto, 12 years old: “Yeah! There’s way too many signs! And I hate people telling me what to do all the time, too!”

Ecto, 45 years old: “Just keep off the man’s fucking lawn, a-ight?”

The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic May 2009

Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

I don’t pretend to understand the convoluted way we got here. I do understand why we got here; we got here because of greed. Pure and simple. And when the greedy are the very ones making the rules, you have disaster.

Citigroup is too fucking big. So is JP Morgan, Delta/Northwest, Microsoft, and Mosanto. They’re too fucking big. So when disaster hits one of these gargantuas, disaster hits everyone. And the answer is NOT to allow them to gobble up other companies in the name of market efficiency. Because, given enough time, disaster always strikes an individual company; always. That’s why there is no company called Amalgamated Boulders or Amalgamated Myrrh.

Those that didn’t understand this either weren’t paying attention or had a vested, selfish interest in playing the violin while the ship went down. Unfortunately for us, the violinists were the ones writing the rules. How could the government, even a Republican government, be so obtuse that it would let this happen? It’s hard to believe.  I’m afraid that it’s easier to believe that they were evil.

I used to like to say this: Republicans are evil, and Democrats are stupid. I’m now inclined to think that I was at least half right when I said that. Hopefully, that’s all I was: half right.

If Obama fucks this up, we are in a world of hurt.

So when do you think the people who keep calling World Depression I “The Great Depression” will be considered old-fashioned and quaint? I’m thinking ‘12 or ‘13.

What am I, 45? I only now noticed that embedded in the rock group “The Beatles” name is the word “Beat.” Which is pretty much probably why they chose that name.

I know, it’s fucking inexplicable how I could have survived this long.

I just realized that if I do this long enough, eventually I’ll blog the exact same thing I blogged previously without even knowing it. It’ll be like noticing that today’s Beetle Bailey is a slight re-working of a Beetle Bailey from 1977. Except that instead of being disgusted with Mort Walker’s cynical or senile recycle of an old strip,  I’ll be the senile old guy recycling old ideas. In fact, it might have already happened. There’s really no way to know for sure.

(as far as I know, today’s Beetle Bailey is not recycled from 1977)

In the Sun Herald there’s a page, usually not far past the editorials page, which I call the ‘fluff’ page. It may even have a name, but I don’t know it. It’s the page that contains a smattering of celebrity gossip, a ‘this day in history’ section, and a ‘birthdays’ section. Maybe a crossword puzzle or sudoku too. I at least glance through most of the page, but I find myself actually analyzing the ‘birthdays’ section. It’s a 2-column list, usually of 20 or 23 or so famous living people, why they’re famous, and how old they are today. The two things I particularly notice are 1) why exactly each person is famous, and 2) how many people are older and younger than I am. The first is to be moderately outraged that it’s a list of ‘famous’ people, not ‘important’ people. So it’s very heavy on actors, very light on, say, physicists and philosophers. The second is to be disturbed when the bottom person in the first column is younger than I am. Which, of course, means that more than half the famous living people born that day were born after me.

I find that I’m not disturbed very often. Yet. But the bottom of the first column can only become more disturbing as time passes.

I do this to myself every day.