Out of my hat

Some while ago I wished aloud that the internet has a site that would give walking directions. To my knowledge this has not yet occured, but something along those lines has made an appearance: WalkScore, a site that purports to tell you how walkable your neighbourhood is.

This is both good and misguided. It’s good because it’s the sort of tool that I’d want to investigate a neighbourhood that I’d be moving into, giving as it does a nice summary of the various businesses and services nearby. The walkability rating, I guess, is computed from the density of points of interest.

It’s misguided because proximity is only part of the story. Having things nearby doesn’t make them accessible; when I look up the address of my last apartment, I can see on the map how it’s counting as “near” things that are on the opposite side of an interstate highway. Likewise, it’s not at all uncommon around here for major roads not to have sidewalks of any sort, so the fact there’s a grocery store less than a mile away doesn’t mean it’s in any way walkable (since, in the particular example I have in mind, you have to cross eight lanes of highway to get from apartment to grocer).

Still, it’s a start.

I would take issue with this article wondering about the future of the hybrid car. It seems like an opinion piece masquerading as news.

The thrust of the article – that hybrids aren’t The Solution to all of life’s (i.e. driving’s) ills – is certainly true enough, though I’m not sure why exactly it needs saying. There’s rarely if ever an ultimate product of technology, since we’re all so very clever when it comes to coming up with marginal improvements on known processes (and also devising entirely new solutions to old problems). Anyone claiming that any technical process cannot be improved upon is likely trying to sell something. But countering hype is by no means an unworthy goal. My issue is with the very content-free way in which the author essays this. For instance:

Hybrid operating costs also need to be heeded.

Do you drive at the speed of traffic on the highway in less than ideal conditions (i.e., when it’s windy and the road is hilly?) Or live in a climate where you use your car’s defroster or air conditioning (which, here in Ottawa, where we go from winter frost to summer humidity over lunch, is about 365 days of the year)? Using the condenser in the A/C system uses more power, which uses more fuel.

If this sounds like your driving lifestyle, you can pretty much forget about achieving the typically surreal fuel consumption estimates that most hybrids claim.

Well, yes. Gas mileage on hybrid cars are affected by all of the factors that affect the gas mileage of all cars. The suggestion here – one with no evidence presented for it – is that hybrid cars are more prone to these ills than anything else on the road.

I drive a hybrid, as you might have guessed; an ’02 Prius, specifically. During the summer I usually expect my MPG over a full tank of fuel to be between 42 and 47; in the winter, it drops down to about 35. These are lower numbers then the idealized mileages you see posted at the dealership; they’re also still better than the idealized mileages of the vast majority of other cars on the road, to say nothing of the real-world performance of those cars.

This is his second of three arguments against hybrids. The first is that they’re expensive to own, by which he actually means expensive to purchase, and that’s pretty much true; the market for hybrids being what it is, it’s hard to get dealer discounts etc. on them. The third argument is that they’re no fun:

The final reason hybrids may end up as a passing fancy is that, in a traditional sense, they effectively remove the act of driving as a visceral experience.

… and I don’t have the vaguest idea what he’s talking about. My first car, bought in 2000, was an ’82 Datsun hatchback. You want visceral? There’s a car that you really feel in your guts. I hadn’t realised that this was a desirable feature. Or does he mean that it’s impossible to drive excitingly (i.e. dangerously) in a hybrid? A friend of mine bought an Insight when they first came out, and I’ve ridden with him; trust me when I say that you can still be as insane as you please while driving a hybrid.

Or possibly I agree with him. My own driving experience in the Prius I’d describe as cerebral rather than visceral. Unlike my experience with any other car I’ve driven, the Prius feels like an extension of my body (more of a whole-body glove, to quote a character in Good Omens) and so the perception of driving seems closer to being unmediated than in other cars. That might just be due to the amount I’ve driven it, and if I’d driven any (non-Flaming Datsun of Doom) car several thousand miles I’d feel the same way about it.

(I’ll admit that the response curves on the pedals are different on the Prius than other cars, and so it’s harder to make the transition between it and a non-hybrid than between two non-hybrids. Maybe that’s what he means: when he’s tried driving it it felt awkward, and hence not visceral enough for him. In which case, he’s taking a personal opinion and universalizing it.)

I’m pleased, incidentally, that people are working on alternative ways to get the benefits that hybrids enjoy. Some of the Prius features (stopping the engine rather than idling, for instance, or the CVT) are good ideas independent of the hybrid drivetrain and deserve wider dissemination. However, it seems to me that the author of the article, having spent many paragraphs de-hyping the hybrids, immediately falls into hyping up their competitors/successors. Leaving aside the issue of viscerality, it seems like the new European diesels he’s describing would almost certainly suffer from the first two ills that he accuses the hybrids of. So why the sudden lapse in criticality?

I’ve spent much of the last couple of hours playing around with Growl. (The balance of the hours was spent clearing up divisibility confusion and evacuating the building.) It’s a nice idea in much the same way that RSS is a nice idea, in that notifications are exactly the sort of thing that should be standardized (but with the option to tweak). It’s also the sort of trick that the archietecture of OS X/Cocoa makes very easy to do, which means low overheads in processor time; this is a significant concern on my office machine, which has never really had as much memory as it needs to support my megawindowed workstyle.

The only issue I’ve had with it is the GrowlMail plug-in to interface with Apple Mail; installing this causes Mail to crash upon opening, which is annoying. Browsing the fora suggests that this issue comes up sporadically, but there doesn’t seem to be a single “here’s the problem” kind of solution for it.

For about the last week or so, people in my neighbourhood have been setting off firecrackers in great quantities. Today it’s been going on all day, and I anticipate many more when the sun goes down.

If I were clever, I’d be able to think of some way to make this into a hook for a crime novel; someone gets shot, but no one notices because there’ve been little explosions going on all day anyhow.

So the automotive difficulties I mentioned in the last post? As it turns out, the actual drivetrain and electrical systems of the car are pretty much fine. The issue is with the central computer… specifically, the part of the central computer that controls alerts and other notifications. It’s pretty much gone quietly crazy, which is why it’s been blithely announcing problems with the main battery when the car is, in fact, running fine.

This serves as a reminder that what you find depends on how you look. If you come up with (say) a system for ranking hockey players in a league, then you will determine better and worse players regardless of whether there is an actual difference in quality. And if your instruments are telling you that something’s wrong, then probably something is wrong, be it the thing in question or the instruments that are informing you.

Anyhow, so I decided that I didn’t want to risk driving the car down to Kentucky on the off-off-chance that somewhere along the way an actual problem with the hybrid system cropped up (and that I wouldn’t be able to distinguish from an imaginary problem until the car was in fact on fire by the side of the highway). I therefore went and rented a car, a Chevy Aveo that I’ve conceived of many reasons to hate in my brief acquaintance with it.

The good news: a former student (from over a year ago) just stopped by my office to tell me again how much he enjoyed the course, and to give me a feather for my hat. So. Very. Cool.

The bad news: my drive from Ontario to my house yesterday was a rather tense one because my car kept telling me things. Unhelpful things, like “Problem” with red alert-lights on the dashboard and icons indicating the main battery. The pattern seemed to be that the alert would spring up, last for about five seconds or so while I did some small quiet panicking and easing off of the gas, and then it would announce “Problem solved” and be back to normal. Repeat about a minute or so later, and then again… except the third time the light would stay on. I couldn’t tell any difference from the engine sound, but when your car is telling you “Warning: problem” then you don’t want to push it too much.

On these occasions, I’d pull over to the shoulder, stop the car, and turn off the engine for about half a minute. Upon restarting, the car would act as though nothing was wrong or had ever been wrong… for about an hour, at which point the whole cycle would repeat itself. This happened about three times in total, with me getting more and more wound up about it (as you might expect).

I’m supposed to drive to Kentucky today. Needless to say, the car’s currently in the shop getting looked at. Since I’m two payments away from owning the car outright, I really hope there’s nothing too seriously wrong.

Last week I had a bit of a scare when my jump drive blandly informed me that no computer I had access to would read it anymore. This was an inconvenience, since I’d just downloaded a program to install on my parents’ computer onto it (since the parents don’t at this time have the kind of internet connection required to get ten megabytes of DMG off the net); more significantly, said drive is where I keep all of my teaching materials, all of my research drafts, and a half-dozen other pretty vital things.

Fortunately, I’d backed up the contents of the drive not five days before, so that the only things I’d lost (other than the download I mentioned) were some files associated with a talk I’d given in Halifax. Since these were based on files that had already existed, I really didn’t lose anything significant.

To remedy this, I’ve gone and bought a new jump drive (for something like a third of the price I paid for the original, with four times the storage capacity) and also a large external hard drive for backing up, well, everything: my laptop, my office computer, my jump drive, and my portable HD for music and such. The backup software that came with the later has proven to be not terrifically useful, so what I’m doing right now is just dragging and dropping files from one place to another. This isn’t ideal, since the Finder in Mac OS X hides a lot of the unix internals, but at least most of the obvious stuff gets copied this way.

For instance, this post taught me that Americans don’t use the word budgie, preferring the usage parakeet.

I don’t know why I’m so bemused by this. Maybe it’s because I’ve always considered budgies and parakeets to be two different birds, with the latter being crested and the former not. I guess it’s similar to my reaction (several years ago) when I discovered that, not only are most Americans unfamiliar with the word serviette, but that the distinction in my head between that and a napkin (namely, the former is always made of paper and hence disposable; cloth serviette sounds very off to me) is not universally recognized by other Canadians.

For the moral of this story, let’s throw it over to Alice in Wonderland:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’

…man has yearned to barbecue with the sun.

In grade something or other — 5, maybe? — I did a science project about solar power. As part of this, I (with parental aid) built a solar hot dog cooker in a shoebox: essentially, a semicylinder of aluminium foil with a little skewer through the axis that you could turn. I don’t remember whether the device was ever tested for cook-worthiness.

Anyhow, this seems to be the same thing on a much grander scale. Also, Swiss.

On my way into the office today, I overheard one of our graduate students using the phrase internal biological clock. This naturally got me thinking about what an external biological clock would be; I concluded that it would be something like a squirrel that was also a wristwatch.

In other news, it’s the end of term and I’m in Grading Hell.