Speaker For The Diodes - March 3rd, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

On restrictive gender roles: "it's not enough to 'reverse' the roles. the roles themselves need to be dismantled." -- stoneself, 2009-02-21

01:10 pm - An Expensive Fumble (*whine*)

*grumble* I dropped the jar of stevia powder while trying to put the lid back on. Expensive fumble, that. I still have about 1/6 of the jar left. And fine white powder in various cracks and corners.

I also nearly flung a soapy dish into the wall, but recovered my grip just in time.

Perrine doesn't vocalize all that much, when asking for things. She usually just stares and tries to beam her thoughts into my brain (it's not working very well) or reaches up with a paw, but she does give a little cry to ask me to turn on the water for her.

Today, the thing that was urgent enough for her to meow at me repeatedly for turned out to be, "Lie down so I can sleep on your leg."

No second period of wakefulness yesterday. I think the cold temperatures are getting to me (how much colder is it outside, that the expensive-to-operate electric space heater in the bedroom isn't able to even maintain the temperature that it could do a month or two ago, before I caulked the windows?). Today's plans altered due to beaurocratic stuff; have to pick up a prescription that the pharmacy was out of last week and then try to convince myself I feel like going to the grocery store. But I did finally muster the energy to deal with the dishes in the sink. (I switched back to using real dishes when I thought my hand was healed enough for washing dishes to be safe, but unfortunately was hit with a spell of "don't want to stand up that long" around the same time, so a backlog piled up.) Feeling fragile, so a key constraint on my day will be to not become too spoonless to go to HCB tomorrow.

Unfortunately, my sleep lack-of-pattern is, well, a lack. Slept through television prime-time and long distance phone call time again last night, but this time instead of waking up in the wee hours and not getting back to sleep, I woke briefly several times and then rose for real at a sane hour of the morning. So maybe, maybe (knock wood) this'll mean that tonight/tomorrow I'll be on an approximation of a normal-ish schedule. Now if only I hadn't been in so much pain each time I woke ...

Right now the two warm rooms in the house are the bathroom (sort of) and the kitchen (variably). I got around to hanging a heavy cloth in the kitchen doorway a while back (I don't recall how many weeks ago), so the heat from the not-set-very-high convection heater in there, and more importantly any heat that's a side effect of cooking, stay there instead of dissipating into the dining-room-that-I-use-more-as-a-hallway. This does mean that less of the kitchen heat makes it up the back stairs to help warm the bathroom, and it also means that setting a big pot o' water on the stove to humidify the house now only affects the kitchen (petting the cat is a rather crackly experience for both of us), but it also means that I'm not thinking "gotta get back under warm blankets" the whole time that I'm trying to feed myself (food indecision and the state of the pantry another time, maybe). It does help to make a preparatory trip down there to set water to boil with enough extra in the kettle that there'll still be enough to make coffee after I let it go for a while, and to preheat the oven if I'm going to use it, then retreat back upstairs for a quarter hour or so, so that when I'm trying to actually cook or eat, the kitchen's already warmed up.

But I can't spend all my time in the kitchen, so it'd be nice to get the bedroom a smidgen warmer. Or at least figure out an arrangement of layers of blankets and comforters that doesn't try to screw itself cockeyed while I sleep and expose bits of me to corners that have gone inconveniently diagonal on me.

Hey, at least the computers in the server room don't have to worry about excess heat. (And yes, the thought did occur to me to curtain off a little area around the noisy servers, to be heated by their CPUs, and stick a mattress in there. I'd take a far bit of rearranging though.)

With any luck, Spring will be here soon and I'll be complaining about allergies and insects (well, terrestial arthropods of various numbers of legs and body segments in general) instead of dealing with the urge to hibernate to escape the chill.

At least today I'm feeling together enough to have a proper sense of what day it is, unlike my timekeeping difficulties last week.

01:24 pm - Perspective (for previous entry)

For the record: bedroom temperature 287 K / 14 °C / 59 °F; humidity < 20% (anything less than that, and my weather gizmo reports "LL%"). Dunno what it got to overnight.

04:19 pm - How To Make Electric Cars Economically Viable

Okay, feeling too headachy -- and, more importantly, too fuzzy-brained -- to cope with this afternoon's errands. Gonna push everything that involves driving or walking to tomorrow, unless I feel better enough tonight to make a late grocery run. I think I can stretch the supplies in the house for another day or so.

So instead, while waiting for signs that headache-remedies and fuzzy-brain-amelioration are going to work or not work, some short (fuzzy-brain accessible) bits of previously procrastinated posts...

In a comment to a NY Times Blog post, "Preparing Cities for Electric Cars" [pointed out by sodyera], Jim T. wrote, "Electric cars will remain toys for rich people until major technical problems can be overcome. [...] I'm still waiting for the model T of EVs. Something which most people can afford which meets their needs."

That got me thinking about other technological advances that sounded revolutionary in glossy magazines but remained for a while merely toys of the rich, until the rich people had bought enough of them for economies of scale to kick in and early-adopter bugs to be ironed out. And what carries most of the successful advances to that tipping point? ...

... Military applications, or pornography. (Yes, really!^[1])

So, deliberately ignoring the first because it's less amusing, what we obviously need is for some way to tie buying electric cars to getting off!

(On a more serious note, the first exception I can think of to that rule about tech advances in consumer goods, would be the microwave oven. So it is possible to win on convenience alone, without porn, but I'm pretty sure widespread commercial use of small microwave ovens had a lot to do with that. So if fleet vehicles can be replaced with electrics first on cost-savings grounds, then maybe they can get to a widespread consumer adoption price point ... how's the attempt to do exactly that with natural-gas powered vehicles working out so far?)

Hmm. Instead of making this a huge compilation entry, I think I'll stop here for now and plan to just post as many separate pieces as I get around to. I'm feelin' foggy enough that going with my first plan would probably result in my stumbling over this, still unfinished, this time next week.

[1] Okay, more for communications technologies than for other stuff, but I'm really not kidding. High-spenders on porn were responsible for later more widespread commercial success of 8mm home movies, videocassete recorders, and, if I'm not mistaken, home broadband connections. All things that were invented and marketed with other applications in mind, but weren't able to really take off in the marketplace until enough of the folks who spend a bunch o' money on erotica noticed how they could be applied to that. I'm not sure to what extent the same holds true for still photography (it's not hard to find examples of photographic erotica from close to the dawn of photography), the phonograph, and the telephone, but perhaps some tech-historian will comment on those?