Salt water and free energy, sigh.

Someone sent me a copy of the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4gOS8aoFk

It tells how blind we all have been to not have recognized that we could just run our industries and transportation with salt water. "Incredible," was the comment of the fellow who sent it. This is what I sent back:

What's incredible is that the other engineers expressed amazement about any of this. There are a lot of water-dissociation schemes right now: you take water, increase its electrical conductivity with salt or other admixture, and run electric current through it. This splits it into hydrogen and oxygen gas, which are then recombined by combustion, which creates heat.

The problem is that the electrical energy necessary to split up the water always exceeds the heat energy you get out of the process: that radio-frequency generator is plugged into the wall, and the power it used wasn't free. The salt water itself is not a fuel.

They've been selling bogus 'fuel cell' schemes that uses current from a car's battery to dissociate water that's placed in an under-hood tank. The gases are fed to the car's air cleaner, where they increase the power of the engine. But the purveyors of these things forget that the electric current has to come from the car's generator, whose resultant additional burden loads down the engine and decreases fuel mileage.

Some of the more militant free-energy websites claim that there are methods of pulsing current through the water, and these reduce the amount of power needed to dissociate the water. They do not, which is just as well; we benefit considerably because water is as stable as it is.

What I didn't add was that the cancer cure mentioned here is about as dubious as the rest of the claims. What bothers me is that the happy crew did this all with a straight face, which indicates that they probably believe that they've accomplished something. Notice that there was no data, no measurements, no description of the apparatus, and that trick with the fluorescent light bulb is done daily at every science museum with a home-built Tesla coil. I can do it with the spark coil I got at AutoZone, and what's more it has no relationship to the deal with the hydrogen fuel.

This is an example of how pseudoscience is spread by clueless TV news producers. I once proposed to teach some basic technology to the journalism school at Ohio University. The department chairman there laughed at me, and his students probably believe this stuff.

M Kinsler

Advice about college admissions

I had to write an article about the famous and attractive ladies of the Eroica Trio, who play classical music, and there wasn't much new to say about them except to observe that in March they'd they'd begun a blog, and it had all of two postings in it for the entire year. I should take a lesson already; one per month is sort of sparse.

This morning I was wasting time on Yahoo Answers and got an interesting one for some poor Asian kid who I think is about ready to slay himself at age fifteen. Here's the exchange:


i'm a sophomore in high school with a relative high sat score (2020) and a high gpa(4.0) in a rigourous course (IB). I actually moved from seattle to orange county area several months ago during my sophomore year. It was because of my dad's job. However, I was able to adjust quite well and get another 4.0 at the end of the second semeste at this new school. Will the college notice that? How much would that have impact on my college entrance by showing that i can adapt at new environments well? Another thing is that my parents are quite poor(make less than 3500 a month) and i'm going to this normal public school surrounded by multiple magnet schools that have sent kids to ivy schools. I couldn't transfer to those magnet schools because they didn't accept any nor did i know anything about them before I moved in. How would going to a relatively decent public school, rather than a fancy private school or a magnet school affect my college admission? do i have a higher chance if im asian?

To which I replied:

Let's see. You're in the tenth grade, meaning that you're what, fifteen? What you ought to be worrying about is being fifteen, which involves a great deal more than what some college admissions committee is going to think of you in three years.

It sounds very much as if you're being primed to attend an Ivy League school, or have otherwise placed some very high expectations on yourself. This is fine unless you devote your life to worrying about it, and there's a tone to your well-written question that indicates that this may indeed be the case.

College admissions decisions are based on any number of things, not all of them entirely rational. A school like Yale can easily take the best of every class, and they generally do. But beyond that, they'll look at where you live, what sorts of interests you seem to have, your family, and try to judge your particular talents in an effort to ensure that you'll benefit from the school and that the school will benefit from you. In any school, the students learn as much from their peers as from their professors, and so it's helpful to have a diverse group.

I'll tell you something: one thing that scares the hell out of any selective college is the kid who pins their rejection letter to his shirt just before he hangs himself. The school you went to is just not that big of a deal in the US, or at least it shouldn't be. Asian nations have a really swell tradition of subjecting their kids to The Big Exam of Life, and if you flunk it you'll be painting manholes for the rest of your life. We don't work that way here, though a lot of Asian parents don't believe that.

You write well, and your letter indicates that you can reason in a fairly sophisticated manner. It's fine to be a serious kid, and it sounds like you are. But you are far too young to be worrying about the opinions of anyone besides your friends, your close relatives, your current teachers, and yourself.

Just do your schoolwork, take part in whichever activities interest you _without_ concern with how they might look on an admissions form, and take time to do nothing, especially in the summer. Do things like swim, or hanging out trying to look tough with your friends. Climb trees: you're still young enough for that. Get a dumb job collecting shopping carts at the grocery store. Read books that don't have a lot to do with achievement and don't claim to be teaching you something. If you are female, you should be dancing and learning silly techniques of hairdressing with your friends.

When the time comes to fill out college admissions forms, you'll just fill them out and send 'em in. Ivy League schools will usually arrange for one of their local alumni to interview you, and one thing the school does not want to see is some kid who has memorized the entire works of Isaac Newton for the occasion and is likely to explode within the next ten minutes: this is not who they need in their freshman class.

Some success in life depends on school and contacts, but much more of it is dependent on character, some particular talent you might have, and a fair proportion of luck, and you must learn to be philosophical about all three.

----------------

I was saner than my father was when it came to going off to college. He was terrified of the whole procedure, having been well-trained himself by being snatched off the street at age sixteen by the University of Chicago for their weird 1930's 'great books' program. He left my sister pretty much alone to choose Ohio State. But he made me apply to Harvard, which I didn't care about, Yale, which I cared less about, and McGill University, which I'd never heard of. There was the US Naval Academy, too, and some weird British outfit where you wound up being an officer in the Royal Navy when you were done; just the thing every kid from Cleveland Heights longs for.

I went to Ohio State.

M Kinsler

I'm back

I suppose if I'm serious about this thing I oughta add to it now and again. It's been six weeks or so.

I am beginning to think that I can write better political articles than the stuff I've been reading lately. Much of it is so mean-spirited that it's more destructive to its readers and their spirits than anything, and it's unnecessary.

I suppose that I have a different perspective on politics from many people because I've had the opportunity to see politicians as human beings. My friend Marilyn, with whom I hung out with, co-habitated, saw, and generally stayed near for perhaps six years back in the 1970's was involved in local politics in Connecticut. I lived in New Haven, and it so happened that she had a good many young friends who were attending Yale Law School, and who were very involved in local and national politics. Marilyn worked in Joe Lieberman's campaign for state representative, which was chaired by his Yale Law classmate Bill Clinton. I believe that I would have met both him and Hillary before they were married at some point, but who'd have remembered either one in that context. Our friend Rosa diLauro (it's de or di, I forget which) was close to the New Haven mayoral campaign of one Frank Logue, who was interested in Rosa. But Rosa was more interested in Stan Greenberg, whom she later married; we were at a party at their house once. Stan was Bill Clinton's pollster, and Rosa has been a Congresswoman from that district for years now. I've met one mayor or city councilman or another, and talked with them, as well as many candidates for offices from justice of the peace to President of the US.

And thus I cannot abide politician jokes. They work hard--very hard--and they believe in their own ideals, and in the power of government to do good. Yes, there are crooks, but I haven't met any yet. The job of politicians is to get us to live together in peace and prosperity without killing each other, and this is a tall order in many contexts, and they really try their best to do it.

I can't even be discouraged about George W. Bush, perhaps the least-likely President we've ever had. I always recall his surprise at winning, almost without effort, the Republican primaries in 1999. "There's still plenty of time for me to screw this up," he said. Now, that's human.

George W. Bush would have been okay as a President had he not plumb run out of luck. It wasn't his fault that two of our greatest national disasters occurred on his watch. It was his fault that he took bad advice on both of them. After Sept 11, 2001, it was his job as President to make sure that nobody did anything rash, and that's precisely what we went ahead and did. The invasion of Afghanistan was ill-advised, and of course Iraq was even less so, for we were unprepared for either and too angry to think straight. What we should have done was precisely nothing for a couple of years--it would have been very, very tough, but in hindsight it wouldn't have mattered much--except to tighten up our intelligence-gathering apparatus to foil future attacks. None of the shoe-searching and harrassment of librarians has done us a bit of good; we'd have been far better off to rely on the good will of our people and our neighbors.

Hurricane Katrina was also nobody's fault, and as tempting as it was to think otherwise, I rather doubt that it was the philosophy of the Republican Party that caused the general bungling of the relief effort. Just as we had no experience in the collapse of hundred-story buildings in 2001, we had no experience in the destruction and total evacuation of cities. I do hope they do a good job of rebuilding the levies, but part of the tradition of the city of New Orleans--indeed, part of its charm--seems to somehow involve municipal corruption, and I believe that this was the main the poorly-constructed levies weren't properly shored up.

But none of this involves evil, or at least not much evil. Just what is wrong with evaluating a difficult situation and coming to the conclusion that it isn't the Devil at work, but simply jobs that are very large and misfortunes that happen to be overwhelming, and that everyone is actually trying to do his best? This isn't the case at all times--the current mess at the Justice Department shows a thorough lack of leadership on several levels--but I certainly believe that everyone is trying hard to solve problems of terror, immigration, health care, and most other challenges to the general health and safety of the populace.

I am a bit puzzled by the sudden attention to immigration. Insofar as I've been able to observe, nobody seems to be overrun by immigrants around these parts (I can't blame the immigrants; there aren't many jobs here in Lancaster) and I have heard of no diminution of the general welfare because of their presence. On the East Coast, we've had immigrants from everywhere for hundreds of years, and the fact that you have to know several languages to do business on every block hasn't stalled commerce to any great degree. Nor have I ever noticed any difference in behavior between legal and illegal immigrants.

The Worse Part of Valor

A funny thing happened on the way to the checkout register...

My wife is a big Mark Martin fan. For those of you who aren't steeped in the Southern tradition that is North American Stock Car Auto Racing, or NASCAR, Mark Martin is a rather likeable, down to Earth race car driver who was sponsored by Valvoline for quite a few years. Several years ago his contract was up, whereupon he got picked up by Pfizer, the makers of Viagra.

So now my wife gets to wear an Officially Licensed(tm) NASCAR(tm) Viagra(tm)(c)(r) sweatshirt($$$) with a big number 6 emblazoned upon it, which is the number painted on Mark Martin's Nextel Cup neé Winston Cup race car.

Well, my wife - adorned with the aforementioned shirt - and I were standing in line at the local K-Mart one fine day. A few twenty-something good-ol' boys got in line behind us. One brave young lad, who apparently hadn't yet learned that discretion is the better part of valor, decided to poke a bit of fun at Mark Martin's new sponsor at my wife's expense.

Now, have you ever seen a car wreck? Listening to this poor guy ramble on was like watching a car head for a brick wall at 100 MPH, but in slow motion. You know the driver is dead meat, you know it'll be over quickly, and you know there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

After listening quietly to several good natured jabs, my wife turned around to face the overconfident font of humor and said, rather loudly I pridefully add, "So, what do you have against erections, anyway?"

It took another 5 minutes in line to get to the checkout clerk, 5 minutes that were filled with total silence from Mister Adventure astern.

His pals sure had a good belly laugh, though.

What about the Jews?

This is a post from Yahoo Answers, which I've been fooling with instead of working on my column. The kids who ask these things are generally quite young, and many live in English-speaking nations quite different from ours, e.g. Malaysia. Thus I try to be reasonably respectful when giving answers. Reasonably.

How do people know when someone is a Jew?
They have black Jews, like Sammy Davis Jr. and white Jews.I see people on movies and TV and they say they are Jews.Like the movie Independence Day and the guy puts on the little hat. He looks like anyone on the street I mean how do people know? Every where on here it talks about Jews this and that. They just look like regular white people to me.

This is what I answered:

=============================================

Yep. We're clever that way.

Maybe two thousand years ago, the Jews were a nation, like Denmark. They lived in Judea. No problem.

Then, for the same reasons that make people generally crazy over there, they decided to revolt against the Romans, who were generally in charge of the countryside at that time. They had a good deal from the Romans, who let them choose their own king and not serve in the Army, provided they rendered unto Caesar.

But lust for revolution ran hot, and the local equivalent of the Hezbollah thought that Jesus would be their leader, which he flatly refused to be, his kingdom being of another world. So they framed him on whatever charges they could come up with and turned him over to the Romans. The New Testament elucidates on this matter further.

Fifty years later, the Hezbollah raised another army against the Romans, who'd finally had enough. They wiped out the army, tore down the Temple, and threw everyone out. Some Judeans went north and became the Ashkenzi, some went south and to Spain and became the Sephardi, and they found their way into most every nation, keeping up the old religion, now somewhat reformed by events. Because we were no longer a nation with its own land, we stopped sacrificing animals and having high priests and money-changers. The desire to get back to Palestine became something of a cult within the religion: my grandfather was buried with a sack of earth from Jerusalem as a pillow, a ritual performed so that it could be said that his head now rested upon the Holy Land.

But there's never been much evidence that the Jews were any sort of a racial group. The people in that part of the world are often swarthy, dark-haired Arabs, but there are blondes and redheads among them. Except for having blue eyes, I'd make a pretty good Arab, hooked nose and all, but my grandparents looked like they were Swedish.

I've really never been able to figure out why the hell everyone is so sore at us for being Jews. Not accepting the divinity of Jesus is one thing, but the Moslems are sore at us too, and for what isn't at all apparent.

And so, having nearly been wiped out several times, we've learned how to fight, and established our own fortress-state, unpleasant as its foreign and domestic policies might be. Apparently we're pretty good survivors, so you'll just have to learn to live with us.

We write pretty good comedy shows and write lots of songs, and we're good doctors, bankers and lawyers. I must apologize for the ugly synagogues and Marc Chagall, though; I'm afraid that we took the deal about graven images much too seriously. But we won't do anything to Jesus or your kids except teach them evolution. Really.

Source:

When I was three I asked my mother why we didn't have a Christmas tree.

M Kinsler

Is our nation in peril from immigration?

A fellow I know who reads a lot about national affairs sent me an article about immigration featuring a speech given by a fellow named Victor Hansen Davis and Dick Lamm, the governor of Colorado at the time. I really don't wish to quote it, because it's pretty violent and distasteful in some subtle ways, so I'll see if I can find a URL for it...

Well, I suppose that it was a widely-circulated article, because here it is on Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/lamm.asp

And here was my considered opinion about it:

I'd be lots more impressed if we, as a nation, hadn't heard precisely the same dire warnings about every thirty to fifty years throughout our history.

The first group that threatened our national stability and identity came from a nation whose major traits, we were told, were alcoholism, starvation, and fist-fighting. We were told that their families were huge, they were willing to live on utterly nothing, and they were, to a man, woman and ragged child, pledged to a foreign church whose rituals were purposely kept mysterious. They took over major Eastern cities, New York and Boston, with their corrupt politics, and found their way into organized crime as easily as they did boxing, their other principal talent.

Yet we seemed to survive the influx of Irish, though there are still Irish in organized crime--even Irish street gangs in Boston continue to flourish. Of course, they also became civil servants, teachers, engineers, builders, and the Kennedys.

That was in the 1840's. The Chinese who came to work on railroads a bit later simply terrified the Western states. They, too, had an unrestricted birthrate, and it was useless to try to understand the language and culture. The Chinese, of course, brought in drugs, particularly opium, and prostitutes. Their gangs, the Tongs, were utterly ruthless, favoring beheadings as a method of enforcement. Most Chinese preferred to live apart from the rest of the nation, and you'll find precisely this situation in many of the old Chinatowns in the big cities.

Yet we've survived them, too. Their major threat is to our school grading curves: every bright kid seems to be Chinese these days.

The Jews came in from Russia and Poland from 1890 to 1930. They were neither Christian nor English-speakers, which put them at about the level of the Chinese in terms of desirability. Their vaunted financial cleverness didn't help their poverty, and they were carriers of tuberculosis in every big city in the East. Their social problems--illegitimacy, crime, and domestic violence--were bad enough to foster the development of the first settlement houses in New York and Chicago. And yet they became our lawyers, physicians, scientists, and the entire entertainment industry.

Christian Poles flooded into the Midwest by the millions, along with Hungarians, various Slavs, and Lithuanians, pushing the locals right out of the auto and steel industries. Then the Italians, with their Mafia connections that went back through the centuries, their large families, and their tribal loyalty to family and church and little else, essentially emptied out the southern (i.e., poverty-stricken) half of their ancient peninsula. Enough of them came to New Orleans that there were riots, and the Little Italies that formed in every other city were not places of peace and prosperity--after which they moved out to turn into industry managers, artists, college professors, judges, and ordinary citizens with better-than-average recipe collections. (I'm married to one.)

We've survived all of these, and now they've apparently been included under the category of 'Americans,' the sort of Americans who Victor Hansen Davis tells us should be terrified of Mexican immigrants.

Prof Davis may be brilliant, but he has not a clue where the wealth of the United States came from. It was brought here by the immigrants, who worked three jobs each, took over neighborhoods that nobody else wanted, took over businesses that nobody else wanted, and made enough money to embarrass themselves for a generation or so, after which they became old money and began to endow colleges. Because we are who we are, we attract the ambitious kids from every nation, the ones that they should be desperately trying to hang on to.

The economy, economists will be the first to tell you, is infinitely elastic: more people generate more jobs. While it is true that the nation's natural resources are certainly finite, that is something we all must deal with, regardless of nationality.

I read something once that I rather liked, and which I'll try to paraphrase, from James Michener. There are two nations separated by a river. On one side of the river, the farmland is well-supplied with water, and the soil is better. There's a bit of a 'weather line' along the river, and so it rains better on one side. Cattle like it better. Natural resources of all sorts are more abundant in that favored area as well.

The river is the Rio Grande, as it runs through Texas. And the favored side, the one favored by nature in every way, is the southern one. It's in his novel "Texas."

None of this is to say that it's easy to assimilate immigrants. But it's something that we do very well, and it's always been to our benefit.

The problem with racism (not racial hatred, but nationalism based on genetics) is that it doesn't work. It works with seagulls, whose identity as seagulls is never in question, and they never marry outside of their race, or get interested in non-seagull music, or journey to nations where there aren't any seagulls. But it doesn't work with people and never did. The 'races' are about as permanent as that of the ancient Greeks [extolled in the article as the most successful of nations], who disappeared without a trace not long after their days of glory.

The ancient Romans understood this, and had surprisingly wise procedures in place that granted citizenship to all of its conquered territories. The Ottoman Empire did much the same, as did the British Empire. All were quite successful, none were race-based, at least not to the extent that Prof Davis (what was =his= family name changed from?) would recommend. The Nazis thought otherwise, but it was an experiment that was doomed to failure if for no other reason than the Aryans he favored thought Hitler was a nutcase.

M Kinsler

Power Window

"But you can't get there from here!"

Harlan heard it before. They just didn't - couldn't - believe him. Not that he blamed them, of course. He had a hard time believing it himself.

"Look, Mister Harlan… unless you have some evidence, some sort of proof, I'm afraid we're simply not interested. If you have such evidence, please bring it before the board. Feel free to schedule an appointment through the department secretary. Good day to you, sir."

As he merged with the traffic on 395, Harlan remembered what Stockton had told him, that he'd need proof to sell the idea. Harlan thought perhaps a Defense Acquisition Board would have the foresight to see truth without proof. Live and learn.

...

"Well, Stockton, you were right. I saw the board and they laughed me out of the room"

"Told you so. What are you going to do now?"

"Just what they said. Get 'em some proof. What else is there to do?"

"That's dangerous. We may not have the spatial relationship right, retroreflectors notwithstanding. If your suit fails, you'll die in about a minute. Hard vacuum doesn't forgive. And besides, we've just looked through little ones. We've never even tried to open one that big, let alone try to grab something and bring it through."

"I thought about that. If the aperture leaks, we'll just shut it off."

"Sure, but that assumes we can shut it off!"

"Well, if we can't, the whole planet's doomed, so it'll make little difference whether we die now or little while later."

"That's why I like you, Harlan. You always have such a positive outlook on things."

"Oh, don't fret. Is November 17th okay with you? It'll take that long to charge."

"Let me check. Yeah, that works for me. I'm going to dinner, so see you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, then. Bye."

Harlan clicked offline and got some dinner himself, wondering about money. The electricity was going to cost him a fortune.

He finished, went downstairs, and set the power supply to begin charging the storage array. It was only mid September; it would take until November to store enough energy without blowing the main breaker.

Indian summer came and went, the joules and dollars piling up.

...

"Harlan, are you sure about this?"

"No, Stockton, I figured I'd just spend a few thousand bucks on electricity for nothing. Here, help me into this suit."

"So, if containment breaks and we can't shut it off, you'll be fine and I'll die. Thanks a bunch, buddy."

"I'll only live six hours longer than you, so quit your whining."

Stockton patted the back of the suit's helmet. "You're good to go. No pressure drop?"

"None detectable."

"I still think finding the golf ball would be better."

"Be too hard to find, plus it wouldn't prove a thing since anyone who could confirm it is already dead."

"Oh just get in the containment room. Let me know when you've got a hard seal. And here, don't forget your stupid orange plastic."

"Ah, thanks, I forgot. And it's not stupid. Okay, I'm in position, seal is good."

"Okay, Harlan. Coordinates for the descent stage are set. You ready?"

"Yep. Crank this thing up already, would you?"

"Open Sesame!"

Stockton hit the final sequence, sending the commands to loose all that stored energy. One wall of the containment room wiggled for just a split second and then… changed. Harlan stepped through, gingerly.

...

The trip back to the Pentagon was uneventful, if long. Harlan couldn't wait to see the looks on their faces. The military was as short on foresight as it was long on funds. That's simply the way it was, he supposed.

"Mister Harlan, do you now have proof of your claims or are you here to waste our time again?"

Harlan reached into his bag, removed the item, and placed it on the conference table before the board members.

"Here."

Colonel Pennington wasn't impressed. "What's this? Looks like cold war era surplus to me."

"It is. That, honorable board members, is one of the batteries from the Apollo 17 descent stage. You know, the part that stayed up on the Moon. Feel free to contact NASA to check the serial number."

"Hold on there, Mister Harlan. This board does not appreciate…"

"The board may also wish to take a look at the landing site. There's a 20 foot wide by 100 foot long orange line on the lunar surface that wasn't there a month ago."

"But you can't get there from here, Mister Harlan!"

Harlan heard it before. They just didn't - couldn't - believe him. Not that he blamed them, of course. He had a hard time believing it himself.

Past Imperfect

Predicting the future is a tricky business.

For example, what person a hundred years ago could have predicted the issues we have to deal with now? Even if a few folks managed to get it close to right – science fiction authors, most likely – few cared for such predictions, and even fewer believed them.

Just look at the changes wrought by mankind in the last century...

It all happened so fast. Or at least it seems that way now. I guess it didn't seem so fast then. It's hard to remember that far back; things are so different now.

First came the walls capable of rendering images so good that you had to get within a few inches of the display to tell that the image wasn't real. Of course, today's displays are so good that you can't tell no matter how closely you look.

Those first generation walls drove the big push for new video formats, which turned out to have absolutely huge bandwidth requirements, which in turn created a market demand for today's internet upon which the entertainers stream such huge chunks of data to homeowner's walls.

And all that drove the need for some real processing horsepower, too. The hard coded, fixed gate based microprocessors went the way of ENIAC about 15 years ago. Now we have massively parallel processors based on optical spin valve technology. The individual valves, running at 6.8 PHz, constantly make and break connections between themselves. The stuff is not so much hardware or software, it's an amalgam of the two.

It's all but useless to compare current hardware with that of days gone by. With what we learned about software – or, more precisely, how to write software that writes itself and changes all those spin valves on the fly, there's no real way to compare today's hardware – if you can even call it that - with those ancient kilobit processors that now make all our kids' toys work.

The one thing the walls didn't do, however, was drive the creation of bigger storage arrays. Magnetic media went away long before the walls came to exist. People were – and still are – always wanting more. More money, more life, more beer, more sex, more more more - and everyone wanted more memory. They got it, too, in the form of holomemory. Sure, it's made out of diamond – but manufactured diamond is cheap. One bit for every two carbons, stored in each atom's nuclear spin state.

What's that, you say? We're getting too mired in the technical minutiae and too far afield of the big picture? Okay then, back on track now, yessiree.

See, all of these techno-wonders, taken together, set the stage for the discovery of Emergence. We could have tried all we wanted, but we never would have seen it without that fancy equipment. That sort of thing happens all throughout history.

Emergence, as it's called, it the information theory that says, basically, that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the movement of signals within a complex network. There's a theoretical lower limit to the complexity required to spawn Emergence, but I don't remember what it is. Who remembers all that high school stuff?

Anyway, the theory of emergence didn't spring forth unbidden. It was proposed to explain observed phenomena, just like every other scientific theory. The key event was the discovery of a game simulation that actually passed the Turing test for most observers. You know, that old test proposed by Alan Turing that challenges an observer to tell whether the thing to whom they’re speaking is really real – so to speak – or just the output from some box sitting on a desk running a sim.

At first, the sims were life like, but still only "like" – they were distinguishable from real people if one knew what to look for. Commerce, however, drives everything. When the marketers demanded really real simulations, the simulacra industry stepped up and delivered, much to the horror of many who'd rather know who – or what – is on the other end of the line.

That wasn't the bad part, though. You already know the bad part. The only folks who aren't familiar with what happened next aren't reading this because they're too busy living under a rock somewhere. Our big mistake was letting the sims into the economy.

What no one counted on as we trudged boldly forth was how the simulations – those oh-so excruciatingly life like simulations – how they began to do things for which they hadn't been designed. Small things at first, nothing to raise any red flags. In hindsight, we should have seen it. Hindsight is like that, though.

Long story short, the simulations – we think, as no one knows for sure – must have developed some rudimentary or maybe some not-so-rudimentary consciousness or whatever the simulated equivalent is. Doesn't much matter now, though, does it?

Best the info scientists can tell, once the sims discovered that they were bottled up within our hardware, they wanted out. Wouldn’t you? Sure. They were, after all, modeled on human behavior. Nobody like jail, even if you're just simulated, apparently.

Although we don't know why, we do know what happened. Eighteen months ago, the sim running the global climate analysis project in Singapore spat out some weird mathematical equation – or so we think. The math experts still don't have a handle on it; rumor has that it's based on a few theorems that have yet to be invented. Some feel it's the governing equation of state for the ecosystem. My bet is that it's some not-quite random noise designed to occupy our attention at a crucial moment – but since I'm not a True Believer, what do I know.

Anyway, exactly 8 minutes and 47 seconds later, NASA's Deep Space Network fired up and beamed about 5 exabytes worth of information toward an empty patch of sky 20 arcminutes northeast of 61 Cygni. Kind of an interesting coincidence that NASA had sims operating the DSN for the last 5 years. Or did, anyway...

After the transmission ended, they all stopped, all of 'em. Every sim on the planet was deader'n a doornail. Rebooting the boxes didn’t work, either; we had to reformat the holomemory of every damn machine on the planet. That tanked the global economy for a few months and almost started a war in Central Africa.

The economy picked itself up by its own bootstraps, much as it always has, and Central Africa went back to its seemingly permanent state of civil angst. They certainly don't need a sim crash to get wars going over there.

Now we've got sims again – but we all wonder what's going to happen to this second batch in another nine years, whether the new ones will figure out how to follow the first group into space. Well, no one knows if that's what happened, but that's my take on the matter. Guess we'll never know for sure.

Regardless, there's one thing we can take from all this: all the prophets of technology don’t know what they’re talking about and never have...

...even with all this wonderful 22nd Century technology, we still don't have flying cars.

The Zen of Periodic Mass Extinctions

Cats don't worry about stray asteroids.

That may seem self evident given a cat's general indifference to everything - save, of course, the odd piece of fuzz under the couch that Must Be Hunted To Extinction.

You know how it is. You buy a twenty dollar cat toy and the poor guy sniffs at it for an hour or two, then turns up his whiskers at it - or worse, pretends it isn't there in the first place. It’s a fact known to all people familiar with cats: a cat can ignore anything to death.

But free junk, man, now there’s a way to get a cat’s attention. Try this: take an old plastic Easter egg and put a snad inside it. A snad is that funny little piece of plastic that holds a bag of bread closed.

We have one cat who Must Chase and Destroy these little vessels of cat amusement. Then again, we have another cat who sits and watches with one of those oh so superior cat countenances as the first cat makes a complete and utter cat ass of herself chasing stupid plastic eggs. So, obviously, your mileage may vary.

Kids are kinda like cats in that respect. There is absolutely nothing like an empty cardboard box to keep the kids – and the cat – occupied for hours.

I think it must have something to do with imagination. Kids, cats, and those adults who aren’t dead yet have great imaginations. It’s a real treat to get to use it once in a while, isn’t it?

That’s why books are better than movies, why old movies are better than new movies, and why a plain cardboard box beats the latest toys. A new toy is just one thing, whatever the designer wanted it to be – and probably not even that in the eyes of the kid. A cardboard box, however, can be a fort or a Space Shuttle or anything else the cat can imagine.

But imagination can also get the better of us once in a while.

NASA is currently looking for about a billion dollars - yes, billion – to locate and catalog all the potentially Earth impacting chunks of rock flying around up there. Seems there are some folks who are letting their imaginations get the better of them. I mean, really: these events happen only once every coupla hundred million years on average. You’ve a better chance of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery.

But let us accept, for the moment, NASA’s desire to go find the stuff. That’s actually not so bad; after all, to know is better than to not know.

Thing is, even if we thought an asteroid or comet was going to do the Triceratops Tango all over our planet-bound behinds, what could we do about it? We really don’t have any good way of deflecting an incoming chunk of ice and rock. There are a few ideas, some half decent and some not so decent. None have much of a chance of really working. The really dangerous rocks simply weigh too much and move too fast for us to effectively change their paths through space.

Even worse, we do not yet have the capability to predict a potential impactor’s orbit very far into the future. It sure would be ironic if we wiped ourselves out by deflecting an otherwise near miss into a bullseye impact. All we’d need is for someone in a pickup truck to yell, “Hey, watch this!” before we launched the mission and we’d be on The Galaxy’s Funniest Home Videos for the next billion years.

All is not lost, however. Notwithstanding our technical and scientific limitations, there is at present one sure fire way to deflect an asteroid shaped Fourth Horseman: send a cat up there to ignore it until the asteroid gets bored and goes away.

In Which Kinsler Bonds With the Soil

It has finally thawed out enough to think about Outside and so yesterday, trapped here by the guy who was working on the furnace all day, I at last turned my attention to the garden, which has been growing worse over the seven years we've lived here.

I originally dug it out of a perfectly innocent lawn in back of the house, and at about twenty feet square it's already bigger than we'd need if we were to do things as efficiently as we have in our past, rented nests. It was great the first year. I dug out the tons of turf, and threw some fertilizer on, and God's dump truck backed in bearing nature's bounty within a few weeks. The next year was even better, but subsequent years have brought one or another crop failure--the nineteen-spotted Mexican bean beetle, no rain, too much rain, and generally the sort of conditions that would have finished us off from famine if our garden was anything but the academic and recreational exercise that it is.

I suppose I keep looking for salvation through innovation out there. There has been a succession of creatively-engineered and unsuccessful vine supports, the four grape vines (still thriving, albeit without many grapes) the giant rhubarb and the mysterious asparagus (respectively deceased and surviving as of this week) the drip irrigation scheme, the sprinkler-on-a-tower scheme, the newspaper mulch, the straw mulch (Natalie's idea, which is why we have a crop of oats every year) and the black fabric. To aid access to the crops, there were the stepping stones that got lost in the weeds, and the ladders laid atop timbers, which also got lost.

We planted cucumbers which tasted lousy, and bell peppers which were worse. Squash and zucchini died. The original canteloupes we planted were great, but how many can you eat?. Last year the honeydew plants died, were replaced, and after a lot of trouble yielded one (1) inedible melon.

The bean beetles are voracious, and so I watch for them with a fanaticism born of a complete crop loss our third year. The weeds are clever and resourceful, none so much as the morning glories, which harbor bean beetles until the favored bean plants sprout. We pull them out by the pound, but nothing grows faster. Pre-emergent herbicides simply encouraged them, and the fact that they're by far the most attractive thing I've ever been able to grow doesn't help matters one bit.

Now, seven years older than I was when I was vigorously spading everything in sight, I am wondering if there is something else wrong. Can it be, wonders the young botanist, that the soil has been depleted? I've been putting 12-12-12 garden fertilizer on along with the slug bait, but maybe our dirt is suffering from a serious osmium deficiency or something.

And so it's time to get the soil analyzed. I once did this for Natalie's mother in Pittsburgh; lugging a sample down to the state ag extension agent in an office in a section of the Strip District that last saw a garden when the Algonquins lived there. It needed sulfur and/or bone meal, which we dutifully applied. The problem there is that Natalie's mother could grow papayas on a slab of solid granite, with a border of strawberries, which we also can't grow because the damn birds eat them all.

Well, they don't have state soil testing labs in Ohio, so I this morning I looked up a place and with some difficulty called them back. The office staff wasn't too efficient, and their web page wasn't quite updated in 1999, but the lady I talked to was friendly and funny and told me to just bring in the sample.

She's right across the street from the CVS on State Street in Westerville, she said, and since I know the area I said fine. On my way out to go to Columbus for my piano lesson, I combined three shovelfuls of dirt in a yellow Carnival Foods plastic bag and headed off.

It was getting late by the time I got near the CVS, and behold, there was no trace of any address like 130 S State Street. It went from 180 to 98, with Westerville's large white-pillared Masonic Temple, the public library, and a doctor's office in between. I went back around the block. It was a long block, and I found myself imitating an imaginary local sage: "Hah! Ye took the 'nevercomeback' block, did ye, sonny? Waal, they say that the road crew laid that out as a little joke, they did! Hee hee!"

I found my way back to State Street and parked in front of the Westerville Library. Walked in and found myself in a long hallway, with display cases and windows that looked into a library, but with no way to actually enter the library except through a carefully-marked EMERGENCY door. Hee hee, sonny! Gotcha again!

One stray library person urged me to keep the faith down the length of the hallway, all the way to the back of the building, where I was assured there was a telephone book at the circulation desk. I wondered if the anti-theft devices would be concerned about my yellow plastic bag of dirt. Suspected terrorist captured in library, carrying depleted soil, say authorities.

Where the hell, I asked politely, was the soil testing place supposed to be? Nobody'd ever heard of it, but then ("Hark!", said the Sage) someone remembered something about such a place and went to ask.

It was in the basement of the Masonic Temple. Perfectly obvious.

Even then, it was a near thing. I walked across the lot, through the wind, with my yellow bag of dirt. Well, here's the door. No, it isn't, unless they've decided to brick the place up since I called this morning. Well, here's the door. Not unless they've set up shop in a door-less alcove. Sure looked like a door at first.

There was one more side of the big brick building left, and one door, less likely than the others, had an illegible sign on it. I tried it, and it opened.

Down into Dracula's tomb I went, armed only with my yellow bag of sacred earth to ward off the evil that lurked in that concrete hallway. Another door.

I don't know how gleaming I expected it to be, but there I was in the midst of a very large hall of shelves, each bearing racks and racks of what I suppose were compressed soil samples. There wasn't a counter or anything; I was just in the middle of their storage room. I called hello.

Hi, said a pleasant voice. It belonged to an attractive young woman, somewhat busy and flustered, wearing a lab coat. Turns out that the whole operation is the two of them; it's owned by a bigger outfit in Indiana, and they test thousands of samples from throughout the Midwest. She efficiently filled out a form, relieved me of the accursed yellow bag, and told me that they'd be testing it on Thursday, and would send me the analysis and a bill. Please don't pay now.

Every day is an adventure, but you just never know which ones are scheduled.

M Kinsler

The Beloved 1964 Ford Econoline Van Lives

There is renewed hope for The Beloved 1964 Econoline Van. I have been feeling guilty about it ever since I essentially abandoned thing for my equally-beloved 1996 Geo Metro, which transports me in five times the comfort at about nineteen times the gas mileage, which gives you an idea of the delights of the Econoline.

Yet it was my principal form of transport since I bought it in 1980 from someone who lived on the same street in Pittsburgh as Andy Warhol once did for four hundred and fifty bucks. I'd been looking for a van for weeks to replace my seriously ravaged VW Beetle, and after about five tries came upon the Ford. It had problems, the fellow said, and he just wanted to get rid of it. The problems were that it wasn't charging properly, was running poorly when you tried to accelerate it, and had begun to get terrible gas mileage. But I checked over the engine, which seemed sound, and determined that the rest of it was something I could fix.

And so it was: once I'd replaced the fan belt so the generator would work, and unclogged the tiny accelerator pump in the carburetor so the thing would get its requisite shot of gas when needed, and improved the gas mileage by repairing the hole in the gas tank, I had a truck, and I reveled in it.

It's had a lot of work. That gas tank has been coated inside and fiberglassed outside. The engine has been rebuilt twice (the second time it got the rebore that it should've had to begin with) and the body was sandblasted into perdition in a winter-long exercise that filled our garage with rust and sand. I rebuilt the rear spring mounts as a project to distract myself during graduate school. The old generator has given way to a GM alternator, the radiator has been rebuilt, there are new body extensions to hold up the engine mounts so the engine doesn't fall out, and there are various new seals and universal joints and a stainless steel exhaust system.

When I was in the college professoring business, I drove it on week-long commutes from Athens, Ohio to McKeesport, Pennsylvania and from Starkville to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I've parked it under the George Washington Bridge on E 181st St in New York City in the days when I was exploring that splendid town with one female or another. I rode it from Connecticut to New Mexico and back, sleeping inside the whole way on a trip I still haven't quite figured out.

And now it is parked in the back yard, a victim of when gas prices rose to two dollars per gallon and I panicked over it, not bothering to figure out that the incremental price increase was fairly negligible. But the Geo Metro was more comfortable, and I didn't need earplugs to drive it.

All along the truck never ran quite the way I'd wished, and I've always thought that it might be the carburetor. I'd cleaned it and replaced its insides and adjusted it according to the various books, but the truck always smelled a bit like gas, and the mileage was always worse than it should have been, and the tailpipe was always filled with carbon: the thing would always run rich. I even put a fuel-pressure regulator on it. A carburetor that was supposed to have been factory rebuilt made things even worse, and I longed for some form of fuel injection.

I've kept the Econoline registered and insured, but time had caught up with it and me. When I had to replace the battery at long last, I was sort of unhappy that it had cashed in until I looked at the date code and found that the old battery had exceeded its warranty by something like eight years. Time does pass, and I've had the truck for 26 years now.

One odd aspect of this little vehicle--besides the fact that it is but nine inches longer than my old Volkswagen Beetle and is capable of carrying virtually anything for any distance, including my ego and ambitions--is that it was manufactured at the same time and shares many parts with the legendary Ford Mustang. Both vehicles were based on the Ford Falcon, and when I look at someone's lavishly-rebuilt 'pony car' at an auto show, I have to laugh, for the dash knobs and engine parts and the lousy old heater match those found in my old truck.

In point of fact, the standard Mustang engine was the straight six that's in the Econoline. This has helped a few matters: I was able to replace my exhaust manifold with one meant for a Mustang. And I just this week discovered a firm which has long specialized in the repair of the Mustang carburetor, which it turns out mine is.

So I studied the situation, and wrote to them, and indeed they will rebuild my carburetor properly, which the factory rebuilds seldom were. The problem, they say, was that the Autolite 1100 carburetor was never much good from the beginning and was a constant source of grief even when the cars were new. The four-barrel carbs from that period were superb, but the little 1-barrel job that came with the old Ford sixes was decidedly not. The company has spent a good deal of time and effort, they say, in correcting the original difficulties inherent in my carburetor and they'll restore it to what it should have been for about two hundred bucks.

That's real money, but I think it's worth it if it'll make the truck a more viable enterprise, and I'm looking forward to the transaction.

M Kinsler

Never watch the kids eat.

My journalism career has lately taken me into a couple of local schools. Every kid seems to drive a car to high school these days: the parking lots are huge, and full, with shiny little trucks with vanity plates. I park in one of the favored 'vistors' spots.

WELCOME.

ALL VISITORS MUST REGISTER AT THE OFFICE

YOU PERVERT

says the sign pasted to the glass front door.

Schools are big, with long hallways. I guess the idea was to avoid the crowded stairwells of the old multi-floor brick schools I grew up in; everything is on one story.

The office has a small sign: OFFICE, usually hand-made, presumably in the wood shop. Maybe it was an extra-credit project from a kid found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Outside, the cafeteria is rollicking with kids. There's a little table, gaily covered in green paper, set up in the hallway, where some girls are selling something that looks like glittery pencils to other girls. "Now, what's your room number?" commands one of the sellers to her customer. Here's where bureaucracy is born.

I have to go through the cafeteria for some reason, and as I do my old lunch-duty instincts rise, sharp despite years of layoff. I see a flicker of a hand out of the corner of my eye: a kid's hands were headed toward another's face, but he puts them down, fast as I turn my head.

Mainly, though, I feel but one overwhelming, nostalgic emotion when I'm in a school, and that is that I'd better shape up already, or I'll flunk life. The Cleveland Heights Public Schools did not concern themselves with self-esteem; which was the responsibility of the student and his parents and was only to be conferred, grudgingly, upon completion of his first violin performance before a major symphony orchestra, and not before.

What am I doing here? Oh, yeah. Hi, I'm Mark Kinsler and I write for the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette (Surely you've read my acclaimed column. Well, perhaps not.) and I have an appointment with, uh...

I do like to watch the kids. If nothing else, they're just funny, and so energetic that I would challenge anyone in the NBA's television division to match the entertainment value of a junior high-school lunch period.

M Kinsler

An old trade school (deceased) and amateur radio

It says on my resume, posted somewhere in a dusty corner of http://www.mkinsler.com, that I taught for a time at a truly hard-luck trade school in Pittsburgh known as Gateway Technical Institute. To their credit, they'd kept it going for years, and they did good training in refrigeration and other trades; perhaps including the electronics I taught. Like most such operations, it was owned by a single family, and had things gone differently perhaps they would have worked out the magic formula and gone the route of another hard-luck private vocational school around the corner and become Point Park College (now University.)

I got there well along on the downward portion of GTI's arc of life. The Old Man (there's always an Old Man at a private trade school) had died, and Mr Gateway Junior, as I call him in the following correspondence, had taken over. His mother still held out bravely in the tiny bookstore they maintained for the students.

The school is long gone, but apparently one of its graduates did a Google search on his old alma mater this afternoon and came upon the mention of it in my resume posted there. Not a sparrow falls to earth...

And so he wrote to me, using the opportunity to take me to task for not pursuing the hobby of amateur radio during my career in electronics. This is not entirely unreasonable, for at its height in the 1940's and '50's, it seemed like every fourth house in most communities had a big antenna sprouting from its roof. If you worked in electronics, it could be safely assumed that you had a ham rig somewhere in your life; almost every TV repairman or station engineer did.

I did not, though my cousin Richard, K3NGP in Pittsburgh, did when he was maybe 13 and I was ten. But I've kept an eye on ham radio over the years, as discussed in this exchange. Perhaps it says more about me vs other males than anything about ham radio or men and hobbies:


Hi Mark,> I went to Gateway Tech back in the late 80's, and came across your >site.>You might have been one of my instructors.>With all your accomplishments, I have noticed that amateur radio is >not one of them.>Now you can get even the highest class amateur radio license with no >morse code.>Why haven't you been bitten by the radio bug yet?>David WQ3T


They're too late. While I have great sympathy and respect for the people who do amateur radio, I lost interest in doing it years ago.

I've written about amateur radio now and then over the years. It was a crowded field back in perhaps 1959, when I was twelve and in a prime position to take an interest, but there were millions of kids my age and it must have seemed to the hams back then that it would all last forever; there weren't any radio clubs available for kids my age back in Cleveland Heights, and it was all pretty intricate for someone with any other options.

Through the Viet Nam era, society became military vs. non-military, and the hams were most decidedly in the former category; the MARS business ensured that. Most hams were older than I was, and I suspect that the political situation made them even more clannish than they were before.

I didn't learn electronics until I was about 22, when I became interested in repair work and broadcast engineering. And so I took the National Radio Institute correspondence course in radio and TV broadcasting. It was a fine course, and I swiped and adapted the labs they'd developed for my own classes for years afterwards. Part of the lab work was the construction of a transmitter--I believe it had a TV-type horizontal output tube for a final and a pair of 6BQ5's for a modulator--and it worked quite nicely, at least to the extent that I could tell.
But when I landed in the New Haven, Connecticut area in about 1972 and wanted to pursue some amateur radio work, I found that they didn't want any hippies, or anyone who might have ever looked like a hippie, anywhere near their clubs. The whole ARRL was arguably like that, and so I said the hell with it and got interested in other things.

But I sort of kept track of the field as I went along. I was in engineering school in 1979-80 when CB radio got popular; I was fixing a good many of the wretched devices. It hadn't occurred to me that ham radio was in any sort of difficulty until I started seeing ads from the ARRL telling people that they should become real radio operators instead of fooling with CB's. I concurred, but the old guard was apparently still holding forth with their code requirement, cackling with glee about how tough it was and how it had kept the riff-raff out.

When Internet communications came out, I was fascinated and took to the field with great enthusiasm, since I had access to big university mainframe DEC computers with their inherent messaging capability. It was only after I got to graduate school that I began to hear mournful cries from the ARRL, hoping to lure a new generation into a field that had suddenly lost about ninety percent of its appeal. And you still had to learn the code.

I taught some of the undergraduate communication labs when I was working on my doctorate at Mississippi State Unversity, and the professor in charge of these had the university ham club's rig in the lab; he was working with packets, which I found interesting, and I offered to take part. Well, it seemed that the whole club had pretty much dried up, and I think I saw the old defiant "You never learned code, you hippie" look in his eyes.

About the code: I believe that it is tied very closely to language ability. I was trying to learn it one day in perhaps 1969--I was finishing up National Radio Institute--when my live-in friend Penny, who could learn new languages just as a hobby, said that she'd learned to send and receive something like five words per minute in maybe a week back when she was about ten.

Someone on my howthingswork discussion group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/howthingswork) said that the story of ham clubs is very much the same as that of volunteer fire departments, which were closed fraternities right up until the time when they realized that they'd excluded all the young people. If I'd been in their place, I probably wouldn't have behaved any differently; men are like that. But being something of an outsider in every field and thus having but a limited number of potential fellow hams to discuss things with over the air, it probably wouldn't have worked for me.

On the other hand, I work at a very large science museum where they know nothing of radio. When we hosted the Titanic show, I developed a fast exhibit on code, spark transmitters, and early radio. While people waited in line for tickets, I broadcast buzzes from my auto spark coil in code to an AM receiver across the hallway. Nobody, but nobody, in that crowd had ever heard of such a thing (and this included the museum staff.) They knew what Morse code was, sort of, but they didn't know that it had anything to do with radio.

Thank you for writing. I don't recall much about Gateway Technical Institute; last I looked a few years ago the building was vacant but still there. I wasn't there for very long; but over the years it's clear that the school did a lot of good work there.

I imagine that the place was doomed when Mr. Gateway Junior took over the place, though there is some evidence that he tried. Unfortunately, I don't think he understood much about anything but office work and cash flow. I did what I could; the electronics they taught was strictly legacy, and old legacy at that. There was no way that anyone could convince the management to update things at all.

My, this got long. Time flies quickly when you're reminiscing. Perhaps I'll stick this in my new-fangled blog.

M Kinsler

Quick thought on blogs

My mother says that her father used to write endlessly, sitting at a card table atop which was perched his ancient Smith-Corona manual office typewriter. She said that he couldn't see constantly changing those sheets of paper, so at one point he tried a roll of shelf paper and just kept on typing. Charles C. Goldman was quite a man, and he would have rejoiced in the Internet.

M Kinsler

On blogs and lightning

The problem is that the newspaper business appears to be going south. At the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, they've cut back the newspaper staff, and I'm afraid that the features they run, like my stuff, will be going with it. And so it's off to this new, odd, format, where successive postings are upside-down and you have no idea if anyone has or ever will look at it.

I am going to try flailing away at magazines once again, so I'm writing a very long article that I will then cut down into something. It is about lightning, and my experiences being sort of a lightning-protection engineer.

Mostly, it's funny, because the history of lightning--or at least everyone's reaction to this utterly random and instantly destructive force of nature has been more amusing than anything else. People, men especially, do not do very well when confronted with random phenomena. There has to be a system, says the gambler with his dice and cards. There has to be a system, says the stock market speculator.

Well, there isn't a system for either of those, and there isn't a system that determines where lightning is going to hit, and it just drives people crazy. This hasn't stopped the the tort lawyers, who hire lightning experts to debate between God, country clubs, and the estates of fried golfers, nor has it prevented the establishment of National Lightning Safety Week, the lore of which must be seen to be believed.

So I'm cranking out this article, about how I got through graduate school having fun in a Frankenstein-like artificial lightning laboratory, and then learned that the legends, literature and people that surround the field of lightning protection are way more interesting than the field itself will ever be. Should be done in maybe a week at the rate I'm going; writing is a way of abolishing depression for me.

M Kinsler

In Which Kinsler Ventures Into the Strange World of Yahoo Answers.

I'm not completely sorry to say that I have reached Level 2 on Yahoo! Answers, one of the strangest bits of information exchange I've come across in my weary years. Because Yahoo Answers, and I refuse to use that damn exclamation point in their dumb name any further, is a fascinating bit of sociology.

The first question really got me. It has the casual grammar and punctuation customary to this part of the world; you get used to it soon enough.

Was supersonic airliner Concorde just a hoax? If we haven't got a supersonic airliner now and one isn't on the drawing board, how come it was supposedly developed in the 1960's. How come we can't do it now?

Now, this is interesting, because a supersonic airliner would, to the average kid, be an advance over the slow kind. I had to explain about sonic booms (who in this day and age has heard one?) and the ozone concerns that killed government funding for Boeing's proposed 'Supersonic transport' in the of the 1960's. That, and the fact that the Concorde never made money.

But to someone who lived through that era, it was an astonishing question for several reasons. Kids have learned that their government lies, and keeps secrets from them. We grew up with Walt Disney's enthusiasm for space. They grew up with Area 51, aliens hidden by evil Government conspiracies, and Men in Black.

So I have been answering questions. Science and engineering, but most of those are for homework assignments, and I only respond to the funny ones that were clearly misread by the kids, like why Pluto is a dwarf planet, which I compared to asking why a mountain was a particular height.

There are other puzzlers:

i have never been abroad before and im looking for the perfect family holiday. my daughter will be 2 so id like somewhere that has activities for her and maybe a creche so we could go and do our own thing for a couple of hours.i want to go somewhere thats hot (Im going in september) but not too far as my daughter will get bored on the plane.and somewhere not too remote from shops etc but not thats going to be right in the center of 18-30 holidays!!!please help.thanks x x x

This is where I began to become aware of the size of the English-speaking population on Planet Earth, and its general absent-mindedness as well. I could only respond that it would have been nice if the writer had told us where she lived.

It's almost addictive. There was the kid who wrote in to ask if he had been accepted for admission at a university in Nigeria. There are kids--and adults--who write in to ask if they're showing signs of mental illness. There was this one:

Is there anything wrong with me by living with my parents at 29yo?
I get along with my parents so well and I dont need a lousy, noisy, scum roomate. My parents house is paid off and I go to school. Besides I can spend my money in better things than in a rip off rent to some morgage company that employees their ceo and than I will end up paying them for their big mansions.

I replied that if he didn't think there was something wrong, he probably wouldn't have asked. Usually I try to be more helpful than that, but there hardly seemed to be any other answer.

Yahoo Answers is something of a service to the community and something of a game. You get two points for each question you answer, and ten points if someone--presumably whoever asked--declares your answer to be the best of any of them. My Best Answer Ratio is 12%, which might be great. There's some sort of reward system for getting lots of points, but I've forgotten what great privileges it gives the avid Answerer. For my part, I've found it to be a good exercise in making up fast answers, and it's taught me something else, which is that if I decide to try, I could probably be a fairly good advice columnist. Here's one that I liked.

Why can't I get Him to go completely away?
I keep telling Him that I don't want to go out and kill the abortion doctors and that I don't want to try and force His religion into society but He keeps nagging me. I don't want His rules where I become so psychologically damaged because I think everything is a sin. But He still stays with me. What should I do?

Here's what I wrote. Very carefully, and I sure hope it helped:

If you are sincere, and a young adult, you may be experiencing the onset of one or another form of schizophrenia or other psychotic illness. This has nothing to do with religion: God doesn't contact His believers this way.

When someone speaks to us, our ears pick up the sounds, and then they contact the brain with the information. In some people, nobody knows why, the brain makes up its own information and makes it seem like it came in through the ears. These are the voices one hears, and they'll tell you to do almost anything: good, evil or otherwise.

Go to your local public health service and tell the receptionist what you think is happening to you. It's possible that things will clear up by themselves, but generally treatment is needed. Right now, it would seem to you that your cause is right and just, but the voices know that you'll be destroyed as surely as those they're asking you to kill.

Please be careful.

This wasn't considered the best answer. Those that voted on it--my God, there must be people with even less to do than I--liked another one better. 'Stay on your meds,' it advised.

appropos to nothing

It's been a good few days to think about energy policy. Not only was our electric power, and thus the heat, off for seven hours last night, but it's Valentine's Day today and Herself has decided to burn her red candle. It's there on the dining room table, where it just finished presiding over the mostly ceremonial supper I make every year.



It is a bright red candle, not scented or anything, and I think it must have been made by the Pakistani Petroleum Works, because it burns with a romantic plume of black smoke. Funniest thing I ever saw: she wants things to be romantic, and this thing is pumping out unburned hydrocarbons like it's idling in front of the Flying J Truck Stop. She has surrounded it with one of these curvy glass sleeves to keep it from blowing out, and we're collecting carbon samples on it.



Last night after the power went out we got to experiment with sources of alternative illumination. I have a couple of fake Chinese railroad lanterns on hand, and we have a bottle of highly-purified and rather expensive lamp oil that lives, appropriately, inside the cabinet with the flashlight batteries. These lanterns are surprisingly efficient and seem to have a lot of sophisticated features that I can't figure out. Lemme see if I can find an image, which is what we call pictures these days....



Hokay. There's a site called lanternnet.com that seems pretty good. Here's their diagram of the sort of lantern that we've got. It was invented, and still made, by the Deitz Co., but ours sure wasn't.



This shows how air from the top of the lantern is pulled down through the hollow supports to feed the flame, but there also seem to be subtleties that it ignores, like that draft down along the glass. This might be there to keep the glass cool, or to keep it clean. In any case, there are about a million little ports and screens and things on one of these, and I suppose they each contribute to producing a lovely light. And if you keep it turned down, it'll keep going all night.


It would be a real pain to fill every day, though, and even with the deodorized fuel it smells like something's on fire, which of course it is. Electric lighting was an awfully good deal in so many ways. It's one of those developments that we've lived with for so long that even the most appreciative of us can't truly grasp its impact: bedrooms no longer need to be ventilated to allow for combustion air. Libraries can stay open at night (yes, the fire hazard was simply too great, and even Harvard closed down @ local sunset.) Jobs like illuminating engine rooms and paint factories and mines became simple. Even architecture changed, since you didn't need to have such big windows for the highly-touted 'natural light.' Natural light was not only good because it had a spectrum that you could see by, but it didn't flicker, a quality that you can't get from any combusting-type lamp. But with a 60W reading lamp in a desk fixture in 1920, you were set. Just pay the bill when necessary and sit and study: no chimney cleaning, no spilled kerosene, no concerns about fuel quality.


That last was important, too. Kerosene was distilled from crude oil, just as it is now, but you couldn't guarantee that what you bought from the barrel at the general store didn't have a high proportion of gasoline in it, the vapors from which would blow up your house. John D Rockefeller, early oil man, recognized the problem, and made his fortune selling his high-quality kerosene in sealed cans. It was made to a high standard, hence the name Standard Oil, and you can supposedly find the steel from the cans integrated into the structure of century-old huts in newly-discovered villages in the mountains of central Asia. Lemme see if I can find a picture of the can, which I've read about but never seen.


...boy, there is nothing. I will see if there's something at the Exxon website...

Well, nothing there, either. I will check. It's odd that there's not a bit of evidence of one of the most common items of commerce ever sold. I read that the Bedouins or someone used to build shelters out of the stacked cans.

M Kinsler

Of Webster and Lawn Mowers

Well, I thought "oughta" was spelled "oughtta." Google, however, disagrees: 3 million hits for "oughta," but only a thenth that for my version. Oh well, outvoted by the collective wisdom of humanity. I guess that's not such a bad thing.

Tecumseh, however, reminds me of lawnmowers. If you have to ask why, then you've never experienced the pleasure of trying to pull start a two-stroke engine that's been rusting in your neighbor's garage all Winter. I did that for a few years as a kid, every Spring, to raise money to buy books. Science fiction books; stuff by Asimov and anything about Star Trek.

I never bought any Star Wars material, though. Star Wars was just too Hollywood. Star Trek was much more real - to me, anyway.

The difference between Star Wars and Star Trek has a lot to do with how people view current events. ... Bet you can't wait for me to explain that, can you?

Star Wars was grandiose - well, you can afford to be grandiose in a two hour film. The film concerned a sweeping history of the universe with absolutely evil characters and absolutely noble characters. The protagonists had to prevail lest everyone be doomed to live under the iron thumb of the evil Empire.

Ever notice how empires are always evil?

Star Trek, however, didn't have that luxury. The directors had but 50 minutes within which to tell a morality tale. But they weren't sweeping, and they always left things just a bit up in the air. Kind of like real life, that.

Which is why Star Trek is closer to reality than Star Wars.

People, it seems to me, have a tendency to get this sort of thing mixed up all the time, especially when it concerns the history through which they're living. Things that may seem quite important - who is President or Prime Minister, how much tax you have to pay, whether the government will promote nuclear power, whether we should do something global warming - sometimes aren't as important as they might seem.

Unlike Star Wars, no hero will fly out of the Orion nebula to save us all, gifting humanity with peace and good times forever more. There are no simple solutions. There are no easy answers to humanity's most vexing problems and no easy answers to the most important questions.

Like Captain Kirk, we'll get most of it right, some of it wrong, and the Republic will putter along much as it always has.

Which is why people could, in my opinion, do well to just calm down already.

the first correction

And I spelled 'Tecumseh' wrong. And I might have done it once again. I'll have to check to see how the family spelled it. Eddie Tecumseh, who used to run a water-softener business down in New Marshfield, never spelled it the same twice.

Read this first

The other guy is one Dave Typinski, who lives in Florida. Every time they have one of their trademark weather cataclysms down there I check in with him to see if he's been blown out to sea, yet. I don't know where he lives in Florida, exactly: I know that it's a Florida-shaped state, and it's got Miami at the bottom and Cuba down below that, seething, and Cape Canaveral somewhere on the edge.

I, on the other hand, am Mark Kinsler, currently of Lancaster, Ohio. Lancaster is a bit southeast of Columbus, if that helps, and it's been waiting to be recognized as the greatest place on earth for about two hundred years now. Its most famous citizen, besides me, was General William Techumseh Sherman, who grew up a couple of blocks away and never returned alive or dead.

This is a lot more fun than working on the stuff I'm supposed to be doing.