I agree, although I was honestly curious about "history anxiety." Math anxiety strikes some engineers as well, for certain values of math. Way back, when I was an undergraduate, and a computer science major from the A&S side, I dragged a couple of computer engineering friends kicking and screaming through their second attempt at their mandatory discrete math class.
I also lean towards awesome, although it has one similarity to boats: a hundred-year-old disc music box is a cabinet into which you can pour an infinite amount of money. Even when you can't think of a single extra thing to do to the box, there are the discs. There were originally hundreds of titles produced. There are a couple of places today that will, if you can show the proper copyright permissions, arrange new titles to fit the limits of the medium and punch up a disc for you. Arranging is a fine art -- not only are there limits to how often you can play which notes, there's a distinctive music box "style". It wouldn't be enough just to do a 60-second version of Stairway to Heaven; you want it to sound like it was intended for a music box.
I met the guy because I inherited this bad boy. The mechanisms are fascinating, from the brute force parts that run the changer and lift punched steel disks into position to play to the musical comb parts finished to a few thousands of an inch tolerance.
Next year, Denver's light rail system reaches my suburb. From my house, I'll be a 15-minute bicycle ride and an 18-minute train ride from Union Station. From there, a free shuttle takes me to within a few-minute walk of anywhere in LoDo, or downtown. There are very large parts of Denver proper where the corresponding trip won't be that quick or that easy.
The big difference between light rail and the express bus service that provides the corresponding service now is time-of-day availability. Light rail will run every 20 minutes or less from 6:00 AM until 1:00 AM or so. Express bus service headed downtown left three times per day in the morning, headed out to the suburban station three times per day from 5:00 to 6:30. When I was working for the legislature, I had to drive during the session because I was almost always in the office until well after the last bus left; light rail would have worked.
The last time I visited his workshop, he showed me his current major project that came in some months ago. Someone dropped something heavy into a $30K antique music box. He was, slowly, repairing individual teeth in the comb, including casting individual lead weights, reconstructing the tuning for that comb from the cylinders that played in the box, reproducing screws from ~1750 with pitches that were unique to the shop that built the box, then starting on restoring the cabinetry. Probably three years worth of part-time effort before he's done. Long stretches of time where semi-assembled parts have to stay put on a workbench.
One of my favorite pieces of gear in his shop is the treadle-powered lathe that lets him rotate music box cylinders at low RPMs -- single-digit RPMs in some cases, and reversible -- with hair-thin brass pins rubbing against a fine-grain stone to true the whole thing to a couple thousandths of an inch. Putting a restored 250-year-old cylinder in a box preserves the value for collectors; putting a contemporary reproduction, which is much faster and cheaper, destroys collector value.
Given the industries that pushed the huge San Jose growth, maybe or maybe not. No way do the integrated circuit fabs go into San Francisco proper -- too many nasty toxic chemicals stored in too large quantities, and very large horizontal footprints that do not lend themselves to vertical arrangements (same reasons that IC fabs ended way out on the peripheries in Ireland, Germany, etc). Unlikely that any of the math, software, and support services go into SF instead of staying with the fabs. Nor does the entire industry that supports the fabs (Applied Materials, etc) go into SF instead of SJ.
People were talking like this was some hardware thing...
The Clean Air Act makes it illegal to include a "defeat device". Back in the 1970s, when the auto makers first cheated on the emissions tests, they were indeed putting in extra hardware that did the deed. Today, of course, those companies all follow one of Cain's Laws™ that says "To the extent the budget and project requirements will allow, put the tricky parts in software."
Low-power lasers at two frequencies (one IR and one UV, I think) are pointed across the road at a reflector. As you approach the measurement point, radar measures your speed and acceleration. Just as you pass, the strength of the reflected laser light is measured. In combination, all of those indicate how much carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, and nitrous oxides were emitted. As you move away, a camera records your license plate number. The statistical match between roadside and dynamometer testing is very good. The calculated values are skewed in a way that fails rather than passing borderline cases.
The value of any of the emissions testing is a problem. Forcing the auto makers to design to tougher standards has had a much bigger benefit than identifying broken cars. OTOH, since Denver is always going to be borderline on ozone and particulates [1], there's the benefit that if Colorado is implementing its own plan, the EPA doesn't get to come in and impose whatever they decide will "fix" the problem.
[1] High altitude makes any sort of combustion less efficient with more byproducts. The Denver Cyclone and some other weather patterns can keep air pollution bottled up. The metro area can exceed its bad-particulate days for the year if there's a big fire in the next state and the wind is blowing the wrong way.
IIRC, what's actually in the Clean Air Act is that the states can adopt the EPA standard, or they can adopt the tougher California standard, but that's all. States can't make up something else that's tougher than California, or somewhere between the EPA and California, unless Congress gives explicit permission.
The good news is that there is some really good roadside testing in the works, and we can go to that.
Yep. Colorado puts roadside testing vans here and there along the Front Range. Locations are published in advance. Interstate on-ramps are popular because (a) lots of cars and (b) cars are accelerating. IIRC, drive by and pass twice in the period from one year to two months before your emissions sticker expires and you're good.
On the down side, Colorado's roadside testing doesn't currently apply to diesel vehicles.
On the really down side, gasoline vehicles less than eight model years old, and diesel vehicles less than four model years old, aren't required to be tested. The assumption is that the car makers aren't cheating.
Different strokes... I know a man whose passion is restoring hundred-year-old (or more, sometimes much more) music boxes. Not the little tinkley ones -- multiple octave combs and fine wood cabinetry. He can't make a living at it; in fact, it seems to me that he takes jobs for pay because they present interesting problems as much as anything. He and his wife live in a modest 800-900 square foot house. Out at the back of the lot is his 300 square foot workshop, with all of the tools and materials acquired over his life. It's a hobby that's probably out of reach for most people living in an urban core because of the space required.
I would have phrased cause and effect differently: the only cases of high-density cities in the US are in places where geography imposed significant limits during the time when their most rapid growth occurred.
Lately I've been looking at distance-weighted density for metro areas, which gives (I think) a better metric for multiple reasons. New York and San Francisco still top the list, but LA is third and San Jose is sixth. When you look at the top 30 or so, a surprising number (at least as I read the conventional wisdom) are western cities and California in particular. Geography arguments still come into play. Many western cities are constrained by mountains and federal land holdings. While Denver is unconstrained by geography to the east, there are a bunch of reasons why people don't want to live too far out in that direction.
While the Census Bureau keeps mucking with their definition, the one that has been the easiest to understand defined rural as "more than 25 miles from any city/town with a population over 25,000 people". My guess is that you're right, and would have to be a long way out from anything in the Bay Area to get to rural by that definition. Depending on exactly how the CB sets the definition, California and New Jersey go back and forth as the state with the smallest percent of rural population. The most recent data set I've seen has California on top.
This will be the first Presidential election cycle since Colorado started sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters. I'm curious to see if it affects turnout in the primaries.
I expect the answer is something like what I used to encounter during talks with equipment vendors that stretched out over a period of weeks. If they ranted that the questions I was asking on behalf of my company were nonsense, that only an incompetent would ask them, I knew that either (a) they knew the answer and knew how bad it was or (b) they didn't know the answer and were terrified of how bad it might be. Engineers who know they are selling you a solid system don't rant and rave, they just answer the question, or tell you that they don't know but will get back to you by a specified date.
So, lawyers who rant and rave and threaten know they have a weak position?
Physically, absolutely. There's a part of me, though, that says they goaded us into doing a number on some of the core concepts about what the US is. Take my shoes off to board the plane. If I want to write a check to buy the new car and it's larger than $X, there's a multi-day hold on the transaction because I might be a terrorist. We're debating, after they'd already started, whether the NSA ought to be able to record my every e-mail and who I called when on my cell phone -- where "me" is every US citizen.
Without going World Police Domination Force we can’t get rid of every friggin group of nutjobs who hate us.
Politics and morality aside, the price tag to make a serious attempt at this is already out of reach. And will be farther and farther out of reach as time goes on.
Many years back, at a "take your daughters to work day" session, I ran the daughters through a demonstration with lots of colored index cards about how the Internet works (ie, how data gets from one computer to another). The next day, I got lots of feedback from parents, which fell into one of two categories: (1) my daughter is insufferable because she knows how packet switching works and I don't, and (2) can you do the same demo for the senior vice presidents, please?
Apparently the memorable line in the demo was from out of order packet delivery, where a card or three went into my shirt pocket. Since we'd already done lost packets (tossed over my shoulder), someone asked if the ones in my pocket were lost. "No, just misplaced for a while."
A friend in Oregon tells me that warm weather started so early there this year that the craft brewers' pumpkin beers are already showing up. The Great American Beer Festival was this past week -- no gold medal was awarded in the pumpkin beer category.
After reading Saul's post, the article, and the comments, I have to admit that this is one of those times when I'm glad I'm the age I am. I did my undergraduate time at a big state school. The school paid upperclassmen to live in the dorms and make sure that incoming freshmen understood how things were supposed to work. Companies big and small sent recruiters to campus in the spring semester. Professors -- at least in my department(s) -- were serious about helping students get in touch with the proper people. That it wasn't an elite school wasn't a serious handicap in getting considered for (and into, in my case) an elite graduate department.
Of course, it's entirely possible that my memories are colored by my being a double major in math and computer science. At that point in time, that combination was an almost-automatic ticket into a job that paid well, even for a new graduate -- computing had just gotten cheap enough that everyone was finding ways to take advantage of it.
Most of the TV that I watch, I watch in a little window on my Mac while doing other things in parallel. Last weekend my video tuner/frame grabber died -- well, maybe it was more like manslaughter, since I was moving some things and set a table down on it. Direct replacements for it are pricey, so I ordered a refurbished Slingbox 350 to try. That arrived yesterday and there are experiments going on. The Mac player is a bit of disappointment for this day and age; OTOH, I can connect to the box from my Android tablet and carry that around the house in my back pocket.
I don't think this is the final answer, but I'm not sure what kind of device to try next.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Maybe most people don’t care about Trigger Warnings?”
I agree, although I was honestly curious about "history anxiety." Math anxiety strikes some engineers as well, for certain values of math. Way back, when I was an undergraduate, and a computer science major from the A&S side, I dragged a couple of computer engineering friends kicking and screaming through their second attempt at their mandatory discrete math class.
"
"Math anxiety" seems to be a recognized thing in education, though. Are there similar things like "history anxiety" or "poetry anxiety"?
On “Americans, Big Homes, Long Commutes, Health and Hazards”
I also lean towards awesome, although it has one similarity to boats: a hundred-year-old disc music box is a cabinet into which you can pour an infinite amount of money. Even when you can't think of a single extra thing to do to the box, there are the discs. There were originally hundreds of titles produced. There are a couple of places today that will, if you can show the proper copyright permissions, arrange new titles to fit the limits of the medium and punch up a disc for you. Arranging is a fine art -- not only are there limits to how often you can play which notes, there's a distinctive music box "style". It wouldn't be enough just to do a 60-second version of Stairway to Heaven; you want it to sound like it was intended for a music box.
"
I met the guy because I inherited this bad boy. The mechanisms are fascinating, from the brute force parts that run the changer and lift punched steel disks into position to play to the musical comb parts finished to a few thousands of an inch tolerance.
"
Next year, Denver's light rail system reaches my suburb. From my house, I'll be a 15-minute bicycle ride and an 18-minute train ride from Union Station. From there, a free shuttle takes me to within a few-minute walk of anywhere in LoDo, or downtown. There are very large parts of Denver proper where the corresponding trip won't be that quick or that easy.
The big difference between light rail and the express bus service that provides the corresponding service now is time-of-day availability. Light rail will run every 20 minutes or less from 6:00 AM until 1:00 AM or so. Express bus service headed downtown left three times per day in the morning, headed out to the suburban station three times per day from 5:00 to 6:30. When I was working for the legislature, I had to drive during the session because I was almost always in the office until well after the last bus left; light rail would have worked.
"
For my modest needs, probably. For this guy?
The last time I visited his workshop, he showed me his current major project that came in some months ago. Someone dropped something heavy into a $30K antique music box. He was, slowly, repairing individual teeth in the comb, including casting individual lead weights, reconstructing the tuning for that comb from the cylinders that played in the box, reproducing screws from ~1750 with pitches that were unique to the shop that built the box, then starting on restoring the cabinetry. Probably three years worth of part-time effort before he's done. Long stretches of time where semi-assembled parts have to stay put on a workbench.
One of my favorite pieces of gear in his shop is the treadle-powered lathe that lets him rotate music box cylinders at low RPMs -- single-digit RPMs in some cases, and reversible -- with hair-thin brass pins rubbing against a fine-grain stone to true the whole thing to a couple thousandths of an inch. Putting a restored 250-year-old cylinder in a box preserves the value for collectors; putting a contemporary reproduction, which is much faster and cheaper, destroys collector value.
"
Given the industries that pushed the huge San Jose growth, maybe or maybe not. No way do the integrated circuit fabs go into San Francisco proper -- too many nasty toxic chemicals stored in too large quantities, and very large horizontal footprints that do not lend themselves to vertical arrangements (same reasons that IC fabs ended way out on the peripheries in Ireland, Germany, etc). Unlikely that any of the math, software, and support services go into SF instead of staying with the fabs. Nor does the entire industry that supports the fabs (Applied Materials, etc) go into SF instead of SJ.
On “What Would a Utilitarian do with Volkswagen?”
People were talking like this was some hardware thing...
The Clean Air Act makes it illegal to include a "defeat device". Back in the 1970s, when the auto makers first cheated on the emissions tests, they were indeed putting in extra hardware that did the deed. Today, of course, those companies all follow one of Cain's Laws™ that says "To the extent the budget and project requirements will allow, put the tricky parts in software."
"
Low-power lasers at two frequencies (one IR and one UV, I think) are pointed across the road at a reflector. As you approach the measurement point, radar measures your speed and acceleration. Just as you pass, the strength of the reflected laser light is measured. In combination, all of those indicate how much carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, and nitrous oxides were emitted. As you move away, a camera records your license plate number. The statistical match between roadside and dynamometer testing is very good. The calculated values are skewed in a way that fails rather than passing borderline cases.
The value of any of the emissions testing is a problem. Forcing the auto makers to design to tougher standards has had a much bigger benefit than identifying broken cars. OTOH, since Denver is always going to be borderline on ozone and particulates [1], there's the benefit that if Colorado is implementing its own plan, the EPA doesn't get to come in and impose whatever they decide will "fix" the problem.
[1] High altitude makes any sort of combustion less efficient with more byproducts. The Denver Cyclone and some other weather patterns can keep air pollution bottled up. The metro area can exceed its bad-particulate days for the year if there's a big fire in the next state and the wind is blowing the wrong way.
"
IIRC, what's actually in the Clean Air Act is that the states can adopt the EPA standard, or they can adopt the tougher California standard, but that's all. States can't make up something else that's tougher than California, or somewhere between the EPA and California, unless Congress gives explicit permission.
"
The good news is that there is some really good roadside testing in the works, and we can go to that.
Yep. Colorado puts roadside testing vans here and there along the Front Range. Locations are published in advance. Interstate on-ramps are popular because (a) lots of cars and (b) cars are accelerating. IIRC, drive by and pass twice in the period from one year to two months before your emissions sticker expires and you're good.
On the down side, Colorado's roadside testing doesn't currently apply to diesel vehicles.
On the really down side, gasoline vehicles less than eight model years old, and diesel vehicles less than four model years old, aren't required to be tested. The assumption is that the car makers aren't cheating.
On “Americans, Big Homes, Long Commutes, Health and Hazards”
Different strokes... I know a man whose passion is restoring hundred-year-old (or more, sometimes much more) music boxes. Not the little tinkley ones -- multiple octave combs and fine wood cabinetry. He can't make a living at it; in fact, it seems to me that he takes jobs for pay because they present interesting problems as much as anything. He and his wife live in a modest 800-900 square foot house. Out at the back of the lot is his 300 square foot workshop, with all of the tools and materials acquired over his life. It's a hobby that's probably out of reach for most people living in an urban core because of the space required.
"
I would have phrased cause and effect differently: the only cases of high-density cities in the US are in places where geography imposed significant limits during the time when their most rapid growth occurred.
Lately I've been looking at distance-weighted density for metro areas, which gives (I think) a better metric for multiple reasons. New York and San Francisco still top the list, but LA is third and San Jose is sixth. When you look at the top 30 or so, a surprising number (at least as I read the conventional wisdom) are western cities and California in particular. Geography arguments still come into play. Many western cities are constrained by mountains and federal land holdings. While Denver is unconstrained by geography to the east, there are a bunch of reasons why people don't want to live too far out in that direction.
"
While the Census Bureau keeps mucking with their definition, the one that has been the easiest to understand defined rural as "more than 25 miles from any city/town with a population over 25,000 people". My guess is that you're right, and would have to be a long way out from anything in the Bay Area to get to rural by that definition. Depending on exactly how the CB sets the definition, California and New Jersey go back and forth as the state with the smallest percent of rural population. The most recent data set I've seen has California on top.
"
Manhattan is another special case based on its age and one-off geography.
On “Why the D’s should thank God Almighty for the R’s”
This will be the first Presidential election cycle since Colorado started sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters. I'm curious to see if it affects turnout in the primaries.
On “Maybe most people don’t care about Trigger Warnings?”
...but a therapy weasel is a stretch.
Look, man, I've got have something to protect me from slaver wasps and revenants.
On “Litigating in “Easy” Mode”
I expect the answer is something like what I used to encounter during talks with equipment vendors that stretched out over a period of weeks. If they ranted that the questions I was asking on behalf of my company were nonsense, that only an incompetent would ask them, I knew that either (a) they knew the answer and knew how bad it was or (b) they didn't know the answer and were terrified of how bad it might be. Engineers who know they are selling you a solid system don't rant and rave, they just answer the question, or tell you that they don't know but will get back to you by a specified date.
So, lawyers who rant and rave and threaten know they have a weak position?
On “The Enemy of My Enemy is often My Despicable Friend”
AQ was not an existential threat to the US.
Physically, absolutely. There's a part of me, though, that says they goaded us into doing a number on some of the core concepts about what the US is. Take my shoes off to board the plane. If I want to write a check to buy the new car and it's larger than $X, there's a multi-day hold on the transaction because I might be a terrorist. We're debating, after they'd already started, whether the NSA ought to be able to record my every e-mail and who I called when on my cell phone -- where "me" is every US citizen.
"
Without going World Police Domination Force we can’t get rid of every friggin group of nutjobs who hate us.
Politics and morality aside, the price tag to make a serious attempt at this is already out of reach. And will be farther and farther out of reach as time goes on.
On “This weekend in kids’ science”
And yet, somehow, people are under the impression that network geeks have no sense of humor :^)
"
Many years back, at a "take your daughters to work day" session, I ran the daughters through a demonstration with lots of colored index cards about how the Internet works (ie, how data gets from one computer to another). The next day, I got lots of feedback from parents, which fell into one of two categories: (1) my daughter is insufferable because she knows how packet switching works and I don't, and (2) can you do the same demo for the senior vice presidents, please?
Apparently the memorable line in the demo was from out of order packet delivery, where a card or three went into my shirt pocket. Since we'd already done lost packets (tossed over my shoulder), someone asked if the ones in my pocket were lost. "No, just misplaced for a while."
On “Idiocy, One-Third”
A friend in Oregon tells me that warm weather started so early there this year that the craft brewers' pumpkin beers are already showing up. The Great American Beer Festival was this past week -- no gold medal was awarded in the pumpkin beer category.
On “Is Studying Too Much Bad?”
After reading Saul's post, the article, and the comments, I have to admit that this is one of those times when I'm glad I'm the age I am. I did my undergraduate time at a big state school. The school paid upperclassmen to live in the dorms and make sure that incoming freshmen understood how things were supposed to work. Companies big and small sent recruiters to campus in the spring semester. Professors -- at least in my department(s) -- were serious about helping students get in touch with the proper people. That it wasn't an elite school wasn't a serious handicap in getting considered for (and into, in my case) an elite graduate department.
Of course, it's entirely possible that my memories are colored by my being a double major in math and computer science. At that point in time, that combination was an almost-automatic ticket into a job that paid well, even for a new graduate -- computing had just gotten cheap enough that everyone was finding ways to take advantage of it.
On “Weekend!”
Most of the TV that I watch, I watch in a little window on my Mac while doing other things in parallel. Last weekend my video tuner/frame grabber died -- well, maybe it was more like manslaughter, since I was moving some things and set a table down on it. Direct replacements for it are pricey, so I ordered a refurbished Slingbox 350 to try. That arrived yesterday and there are experiments going on. The Mac player is a bit of disappointment for this day and age; OTOH, I can connect to the box from my Android tablet and carry that around the house in my back pocket.
I don't think this is the final answer, but I'm not sure what kind of device to try next.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.