I bivouacked in Nashville for a week or so once, back in the day. It was a pleasant waystation. I was traipsing over the entire map from the top right corner pocket, and kept going until I got to the beach on the wrong side of the ocean. I wandered into Ernie Tubb’s and Gruhn’s and Irma’s Dusty Roads and any other damn place with neon bent into a beer sign, too.
Someone offered tickets to the Grand Ole Opry. Turned them down flat. It had moved to the suburbs. The music itself had long since moved to the suburbs of country and western, so the new auditorium couldn’t harm it more. We walked up the hill from the big strip, and the door to the Ryman Auditorium was unlocked, and we went in and sat in that church and worshiped the dead saints in silence instead.
I don’t have fond memories of the 1970s. The vibe was downright soviet, with extra litter. Of course ’76 was far from the low water mark for NYC. The early eighties were much worse. It turned around after that, and almost got livable, I guess. How would I know? I always avoided the place like a plague city, even when I had to work there for a stretch. I always got in and out as lickety split as possible. I remember distinctly the feeling of driving into the city for work, though. I felt like it was eating me and everyone else on the highway.
I’m originally from Boston. Boston and NYC have healthy competitive dislike of one another. It goes way back when Boston didn’t seem so lilliputian compared to the Big Rotten Apple. Boston used to matter more than it does now. To someone from say, Los Angeles, there probably doesn’t seem like a lot of difference between a New Yorker and a Bostonian. But the two factions always cherished the distinctions between them. Both used Rhode Island as a kind of no man’s land where you couldn’t tell which accent you had, New York or Boston. If you’ve never heard a true Vo Dieland accent, you haven’t lived.
I’ll always fondly remember the first day I showed up in New York at an office I’d been placed in charge of all of a sudden. It was the main office, and I’m sure the New Yorkers couldn’t countenance being lorded over by some dimwit from Boston. God, anywhere but from Boston.
I don’t have a Boston accent. Not really even a hint of one. I can get into one for comedic purposes, but it’s no better than my Cockney imitation, which isn’t even a three on the Michael Caine scale. Anyway, I entered the big lobby of my new New York digs and explained to the receptionist at the big, semicircular welcome desk in the two-story atrium who I was, and who I wanted to see. She never uttered a sound, just cocked her bouffanterrific head a bit sideways and looked at me with a puzzled expression, the way that the dog on the RCA Victor label used to look at the big cornucopia speaker on the windup record player. And then came out with this, finally:
It’s nearly New Year’s Day. On the intertunnel, it’s time for lists.
Well, it’s time for lists of predictions. Most folks expend quite a bit of effort to explain why the world didn’t cooperate with last year’s list, and then make the same mistakes all over again with this year’s prognostications. Of course I never get my new year’s predictions even slightly wrong, because I only have one, and it’s never wrong.
I predict next year will be worse than this year.
That’s been a safe bet every year since I was born. I hope you don’t read too much into that trend. It’s possible that I’m the antichrist, but it’s not likely. There’s a lot of competition for that gig, and I’m not much of a go-getter.
But a list is required, so I thought I’d be daring and look for a piquant one from years past. I found one. Amusingly, I wrote it the last time my workstation computer crapped out on me. That was 2012. The truly piquant part was that the list was already six years old when I posted it. So when you read this year’s panoply of ill-considered opinions filtered through cracked crystal balls all over the internet, see if you can find anyone still willing to own up to a seventeen-year-old list of future shock schlock. I am:
Had a hard-drive meltdown disaster boogaloo situation this week. My computer is an ancient Funkenstein monster of a thing. I can’t remember how old it is. It runs XP, and as I recall XP was the spiffy new thing just then when I bought it. I’ve added hard drives and a network card and assorted other things to its festering hulk over the years. The hard drives were partitioned like the Austro-Hungarian Empire after WW I, and with about as much long-term viability. I had a dash of ones here and a spritz of zeros there and panoply of pixels from pillar to post.
The hard drive that’s coughing up blood this week actually died a while ago, and I replaced it with another, but I left the original in the case, hanging on a ribbon wire, as a warning to the other components. I used it as a sort of half-assed backup to the new drive, but it’s about as reliable as a brother-in-law, so I’ve got to yank everything off it now or lose it. I found that not all of what’s on it is a copy. There’s stuff I didn’t know I had.
I found some sort of article I must have written for some other website. The style is too dull for any of my webpages, so it must have been for money. The squares don’t like frivolity. I don’t remember it being published, and it doesn’t turn up on der Google, so I figure I’ll recycle it and go back to erasing things. I found it interesting to read, mostly because it’s so dull. It’s a top-ten sort of list, and I wrote it in 2006. Most people who make predictions hide them from scrutiny six months after they make them. Let’s see how six years have treated mine:
Frustration is a symptom, not a disease. When you’re frustrated, it’s generally because you’re trying to accomplish something, but circumstances conspire to keep you from achieving it. There’s a moment of peace that generally comes to those that abandon lines of attack that are too arduous because of extraneous factors: I’ve done all that I can, there’s nothing more I can do.
Frustration is the meat and potatoes of people who wish to predict future trends, though. What are people trying to do, over and over, despite how difficult it might be to do it? That’s what people really want; they prove it by how much crap they’ll put up with to get it. Do you remember the busy signal you got trying to get online ten years ago, just so you could look at a few pages of text or a picture of a girl with her clothes off? The potential of the internet was shown by the amount of discomfort people were willing to endure early on to get just a glimpse of it.
Let’s use frustration as our canary in the coal mine and see what people are desperately trying to do, over and over, despite many obstacles. We’ll use it as a barometer to see what the onrush of civilization will make obsolete.
Because it’s obsolete that I love. I love all the things I used to have to do that I don’t have to do anymore. I don’t want to stand in line at a bank. I don’t want to punch a time card. I don’t want ink all over my fingers just to read the baseball box scores. I don’t want to have a hair farmer on the network news reading the least interesting, ofttimes made-up stories to me at 6:00 PM — really slowly. I don’t want to stand in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles twice a year. I don’t want any of that, and more. Or less. Or something.
So here’s Ten Things I don’t want any more, at least in their current iteration; Ten Things I’m going to have to tell my grandchildren about, if we’re all lucky:
10. Blockbuster Video– It’s got the smell of death on it already, doesn’t it? The idea of going to a bricks and mortar store to get a copy of digital information is going to seem as useless as drive-in movie theaters do now. The only difference is that drive-in movies seem quaint. A video rental store will seem like a shuttered crackhouse.
9. Stuntmen- Sticking with the movie theme here, who’s going to pay another person to get blown up in a car and pushed over a cliff when a computer can just put that guy there with a few mouseclicks? Lots of jobs like that are hanging on by the skin of their union teeth in Hollywood right now. Bye Bye.
8. Movie Theaters– Yeah, I said it. When the screen at home gets big enough — and you’re tired of listening to rap song ringtones and mindless chatter all the while the movie’s playing, with your feet stuck in a congealing puddle of $6 soda — you’re never leaving the house just to see a movie, ever again.
7. A Written Check– When someone whips out a checkbook at the checkout line at the supermarket, what do you do? You’d be a mass murderer if you acted out every tenth fantasy you had about those people. It’s going to seem so quaint, scratching out a little promise to pay people on a slip of paper, like a note from your mother, the bank.
7. (part B) Your Signature on Much of Anything. Never mind a check. With all the ways they have of identifying people, and the neverending cycle of identity theft and countermeasure, pretty soon you’re just going to put your thumb on a pad, or your eye in a scanner, or wave your subdermal barcode thingie at something, and your transactions will be complete. I’d sell my stock in BIC pens, if I were you.
6. Paper Money – You know, adults never have any of that stuff on them, unless you’re a drug dealer or a stripper. Or a congressman from Louisiana. It’s the mark of the rube or the criminal already. And the laser printer/Treasury Department Mutual Assured Destruction countermeasure broadsides have been fun, but paper money is silly. And any government that collects more than half of what you make (that’s all of them, as far as I can tell) isn’t going to ignore forever the fact that tax collection is sometimes- how do I put this delicately?- overlooked in cash transactions.
5. The Post Office- God I hate the Post Office. You can almost separate the world into only two sorts of people: people that hate the Post Office, and people that love the Post Office. Let’s round up the people that love it, and mail them to France, whaddya say? Let’s send them UPS, so they’ll get there, though. Nothing the Post Office does isn’t being done better by other entities right now. That includes mass killings. Good riddance.
4. Wired anything – If you’re of a certain age, you remember the first telephone you had that didn’t have a cord. A little older, and you treasure the memory of the first phone you had that allowed you to leave your house and talk into it. You didn’t care if the battery weighed forty-four pounds and lasted ten minutes. Don’t get me started with getting out of your chair to turn the channel on your TV. No one’s going to accept anything that needs to be plugged into anything alse pretty soon.
3. Light Bulbs – Edison, we loved you. But the time has come to stop burning a little wire really slowly in a glass bulb to see what the hell we’re doing after the sun goes down. And don’t give me any of that compact flourescent crap either; we can find better ways to illuminate things than exciting rare gases in a gossamer glass tube. That’s rationed whale oil thinking. LED’s, anyone?
2.Telephone Poles –There’s nothing more ubiquitous, and nothing uglier, on display everywhere you go than that endless phalanx of tarred tree boles with wires strung from them. The idea of getting your electricity from some smoke belching factory via four hundred miles of copper wires, and getting telephone service brought from even further, all so you can plug a cordless phone into the end of it is going to seem as bizarre as it is, and soon. Power generation will be local, or even better: on-site at every house, and everything will be beamed to you. Power outages will seem quaint.
I’ve been thinking about redundancy these last few days. The power supply on my workstation computer crapped out. It was (is)a major inconvenience. For instance, all the images of the HVAC system I’d show you were on the virtual desktop, and they’ll be unavailable for a week while I wait for the replacement part to arrive. I’m sure you’ll all enjoy having someone describe a heating system, instead of seeing one. Playboy in braille has nothing on me, man.
But the computer and the heating system are similar in some respects. They’re both relying on the Department of Redundancy Department to keep on keeping on. I’ll explain.
The heating system in our house, isn’t. I heat the house, but it’s not a system.
system /sĭs′təm/
noun
A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole, especially.
OK, maybe it is a system, just not in the way people usually think of a system. It’s not a flow chart. It’s a Venn Diagram. There are disparate elements, and they can be interrelated, or interdependent as necessary, but ultimately they don’t have a lot to do with one another. In some aspects they compete with each other. In others, they work together as required. It’s an ad hoc kind of system.
The heat pump isn’t big enough to heat the house when it’s twenty below. So what? If I put in a unitary system that could handle it, it would cost too much and work poorly as an air conditioning unit in the summer (too big). When it was eighteen below zero last winter, we ran the pellet stove and the heat pump at the same time, and didn’t notice anything but the bill.
If you plan for a worst-case scenario, and then use that as a baseline, you’re overprepared most of the time. And while hoarding, disguised as prepping, is in vogue, it doesn’t work in a world where the apocalypse never comes. It really doesn’t work even if the apocalypse does come, because cataclysms have a tendency to be unpredictable. What exactly do you hoard? Everything? It’s not possible.
Well, you certainly can’t hoard heat. Keep firewood too long, and it rots. Pellets get moldy in the summer from the humidity. Storing electricity for later isn’t such a great idea, either. As the joke goes, electric cars are more reliable than gas-powered cars. Up to 95% of all the electric cars ever made are still on the road. The other 5% made it home.
So making huge, unitary systems and then defending them and backing them up is difficult stuff. I didn’t have a power supply hanging around that could replace the one in my ancient computer. I could have put one on the shelf ten years ago. But how would I know what to hoard? Maybe the mother board would quit. The hard drive. The fans. The RAM. Pretty soon you’re not hoarding parts, you’re hoarding a whole ‘nother unitary system in case the original goes on the blink. But then again, how do you know a stored computer will still work when you dust it off after years in storage. Better get two spares, huh?
People who live where the weather is more than an inconvenience understand the Department of Redundancy Department. Usually because they learned the hard way, like I did. You don’t want duplicates. You want alternatives. If the heat pump goes on the blink, you still have the pellet stove. If the pellet stove doesn’t work, you still have baseboard electric heat. If there’s no electricity, you can’t run the baseboard heat, or the heat pump, but you can run a generator and run the pellet stove. If the generator quits, you hook up an inverter to the car battery and run the engine with an extension cord into the house to run the pellet stove. If that quits, you can swap the extension cord over to backup backup backup backup scheme and burn wood in the wood furnace. If it’s cold enough, you run damn near everything. I’ve done all those things. You would, too, if it was twenty below.
You know everything works because you use it every once in a while. Nothing has to do everything — or else. You end up with less stuff hanging around in the long run, because while you might have two of everything, you don’t have three of anything.
So the computer didn’t work. There were standalone backup drives on the desk. The Department of Redundancy Department strikes again. There are backups held offsite, too, of course, but if you trust an internet company to be reliable forever, I have some CMGI stock to sell you. And a bridge.
The computer that quit a few days ago was the backup. I’d replaced it with something better, that wasn’t, and had to resurrect the old beast from the shelf. So the interruption was more of a nuisance than might have usually been the case. I fished through all sorts of hardware I had hanging around, trying to cobble together a bridge to a Fedex delivery. I got sort of stymied left and right. Dongle A didn’t mesh with Jack B or fit in Case C, etc. After more than a few hours of messing about in firewalls and pressing the backup backup backup backup laptop back into service, trying to make autofill behave, and get Google to stop freaking out because I was logging in to Google things sitting three inches to the left of the usual spot, I remembered the ultimate time-saving, aggravation-avoiding backup plan of all time. I went and got a stored, eight-page printed paper backup of every login and password I needed, and dutifully typed each one into the browser as needed.
It’s easy to be impressed by companies the size of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Cisco, etc., but they still can’t compete with Johannes Gutenberg yet. Not even close. I’ll raise my hand if they manage to pass a Ticonderoga #2 on the way.
Let’s get hysterical about hysteresis for a moment. If you’re new to this HVAC game, you might think hysteresis was the Greek goddess of open toed sandals or something. Or maybe hysteresis is that problem that sends your wife to the pharmacy at 11 PM on Saturday night, wearing sweatpants, because, you know.
No, hysteresis is a somewhat less interesting subject than that. Technically, hysteresis can apply to all sorts of things, like magnetism or the gas pedal in your car. In short, it means a lag between what you want, and what you get. The only place you’ll probably ever encounter it as a topic of conversation in the wild is when you’re talking to the dirty HVAC installer who leaves handprints all over your wallpaper while adjusting your thermostat. He’ll say, “How much hysteresis to you want, anyway?”, and you’ll mumble and dissemble and try to remember Greek legends to no avail.
I’ll try to explain it. Let’s say you want your house to be 72-degrees. With the panache of Canute, you command your furnace, if it’s winter, to make it so. Of course you’re a bit of a coward, and are justifiably afraid of confronting your furnace face to dial (it’s dark and scary down there), so you send an envoy instead. This envoy, your thermostat, sends a strongly worded communique via a twelve-volt DC tingle through a tiny wire or two to your furnace. But your furnace isn’t afraid of you. It knows that if given a Sophie’s Choice between the furnace and her husband, any sensible woman would choose central heating every time. So the furnace tells you to wait, tough guy, until it’s ready to give you some heat.
That’s a form of hysteresis. It’s related to inertia. In the same way your teenage boys on the couch respond to stimuli, your furnace doesn’t jump to it immediately when ordered to do things. It’s a smart policy on their part. People fumble around with the settings on the thermostat constantly, and hysteresis helps them sit shiva on the current settings until you make up your mind, or your thumb, if you have a touchpad. Some time passes, and it finally decides to trust you, and the furnace clicks on.
But you’re not done with hysteresis. Not by a long shot. Let’s say it’s 66-degrees in your dining room, and you want 72 in there. With most furnaces, they’ll hit 72 and keep going. They figure you’re an excitable sort, and if they halt the heating proceedings exactly at 72, the temperature will drop to 71 pretty quick, and you’ll start banging on the thermostat again right away. So the furnace is set to over shoot the temp you want. That’s hysteresis. By the same token, if the low temp is set for something like 66, so you can sleep at night with more than a sheet over you, it likely will not rouse itself until the temp reaches 64, and then click on. Coming or going, that’s hysteresis.
Of course the modern electronic thermostat has many, many settings that adjust hysteresis. They involve calling up fourteen menus on a tiny screen and interpreting and entering more codes than it takes to launch missiles from a Trident sub, but it can be done. In practice, whatever comes from the factory is good enough, whether it is or not. Our thermostat stops a few minutes after reaching the desired temp, before it adds an additional degree, and won’t come on again until a short while after the temp is two degrees below the desired. It actually tells you to WAIT on the screen when it hits a set point. Mighty haughty, your thermostat is. Your mileage might vary.
So hysteresis is smart and stupid at the same time. It’s smart, because the furnace hates cycling on and off over and over over minor changes in temp, so it overshoots a bit when it runs, and waits a little before it runs, or doesn’t run. That last sentence is kinda confusing, I admit, and doesn’t explain a lot, but how many chances does an author get to write “on and off over and over over” and still make the sentence parse? I couldn’t resist.
So that’s the smart part. The dumb part is that the ideal heating appliance would run continuously, so hysteresis would be out of a job. It would adjust itself continuously to the conditions and keep everything steady-state. The Amalgamated Brotherhood of United Hysteresis is a very powerful union, though, so this ideal heating device is rarely discussed, never mind invented.
Modern houses are usually much better insulated than in the past, and weatherstipped until a firefly in a peanut butter jar with holes punched in the lid has better ventilation. The heating (and cooling, of course) devices are better at doing their thing, and the thermostats are more accurate than the big clunky dial on the wall of our utes. But there’s still a fair bit of hysteresis involved, especially if you have too much money, and are the impatient sort.
Let’s say you’re building a new snouthouse and you’re determined to finally have things your way and you’re not scrimping on anything this time around. You inform the General Contractor to inform the HVAC guy to put in the HeatSmiter Megaladon furnace or the the COOLpro Ice Station Zebra model AC blaster. You’re not going to wait for the house to warm up, or cool off, ever again. You tell him you want your hair to be blown back like a biplane pilot when the thing comes on.
This is dumb. HVAC doesn’t work (well) that way. You may want a machine that does the trick, but a machine that does the trick+10 is a worse machine, not a better one. If you select a bigger air conditioner than you need, the condenser outside becomes a block of ice. The heat inside your house that you’re trying to get rid of isn’t enough to warm up the circulating refrigerant to keep it from freezing up. By the same token, if you have a ginormous furnace, the hysteresis will be notable, because it will blast way past what you actually require before it can stop. It will run a lot, just for very short periods of time. If you know anything about machinery, you’ll know that starting and stopping is what wears them out quick. And you’ll be too hot and too cold over and over anyway.
So we couldn’t afford a bigger heat pump, or to run it even if we could. Good. The bigger one would have frozen up solid when we ran the A/C, because we don’t need very much here in Maine. And the bigger heating capacity would have been nice, but bankrupting yourself to run a bigger thing less often wouldn’t help us. We were going to achieve the closest thing to steady state HVAC we could cook up.
[To be continued]
Month: December 2023
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments