Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Shorter Conservapedia: We don't really understand this whole "evidence" thing.
14:59 x Thomas x /science/creationism x link x 0 comments
Via a discussion by Ezra Klein, Cogitamus figures out the comparison in cost between Netflix by mail and by broadband. Hint: It's still cheaper to send DVDs by mail than it is to download them. It's not that Netflix's Watch Instantly service is a bad idea (when Comcast lets it through, I quite like it), but it's not obviously less expensive than the physical alternative.
Nor is it necessarily that much more environmentally friendly, which is another counterintuitive result. I got curious about this recently--after getting the Kindle, I was surprised to see that I was still often ordering physical boxes from Amazon, either for books that aren't available digitally or other items like games and music. But from what I've been able to find googling around*, the carbon impact from shopping online (or shipping products a la Netflix) may be less severe than traditional shopping models. And the reason is simply that those deliveries are often folded in with mail trucks that will run anyway, or UPS trucks that take trips along planned routes.
The packaging, on the other hand, is not nearly so harmless. Online shopping obviously leaves behind a trail of cardboard boxes and plastic wrapping. Amazon at least uses relatively little packaging, probably in an attempt to save weight. But this can always get better, and those materials can often be recycled.
* Google is, as always, not a substitute for someone who actually knows what they are talking about. But hopefully I'm smart enough to filter out the wackos.
18:49 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 0 comments
For my own reference: One Approach to Sustainability: Work Less.
You don't have to reduce working hours to convince me to recycle and embrace sustainable buying practices. But it certainly doesn't hurt.
15:19 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 4 comments
One of my coworkers is colorblind. She's also unlucky enough to be one of the rare colorblind women. In a way, this is handy: it's nice to be able to take this into account when designing graphics and charts. Callouts on pie charts, for example, are important.
It's also a source of fun stories, like when a fellow member of a wedding party told her, "there are pink and gold versions of the shoe you need to buy, but DON'T get the pink ones." (Oh, that's helpful.) She tries to look for the labels on the bottom, she says, in case those list which color variety describes the shoes. And in my favorite quote for the day, she says "if the crayons don't have the wrappers on them any more, I just refuse to play with them."
But I'm surprised, honestly, that no-one has addressed this problem, since there's an easy solution. After all, almost everyone's got a cameraphone nowadays. It ought to be pretty simple to write a Java applet that shows (via graph and numerical readout) the RGB values in the center of the camera's view. It's not perfect, but at least it would give the colorblind a way to compare.
How about it, science?
11:16 x Thomas x /science/biology x link x 2 comments
For the past three years I carried an iPaq PocketPC in my messenger bag. It served as a mobile copy of my recent e-mail, an address book, ebook, and game machine. In a pinch, I'd even written and filed stories on the go with a folding keyboard (DORK!). But I noticed lately that it was staying in the back most of the time, and that the phone numbers that it shared with Outlook were losing sync with my actual phone. So I bit the bullet and bought a Nokia smartphone running Symbian, thus sating this month's consumerist urges.
One of Nokia's many cool little applets that can be added to the phone is Energy Profiler, which is meant for developers so they can keep their apps from devouring the battery whole. But it's also kind of useful, on a phone that does as much as this one does, to figure out which activities will send you scurrying for the charger first. So similar to Jeff Atwood's post about laptop power consumption, here's a rundown of power usage for the Nokia E51 in common (for me) usage situations. I'll list the average wattage being pulled, as well as the Energy Profiler's estimate of total possible battery life.
But while it's fun gathering this data, learning more about battery tech (isn't that how you want to spend your weekends?) implies that it's functionally useless. Like almost all consumer electronics these days, my phone uses a lithium-ion battery. Unlike old rechargable batteries, it doesn't have a "memory": you don't have to run the battery all the way down before recharging it. In fact, since partial charges don't count as full cycles, in theory you should charge these devices every chance you get and leave them plugged in whenever possible. So in theory the amount of juice any particular application uses is basically irrelevant unless it drains the battery instantly.
On the other hand, I'm naturally forgetful and regrettably sane, meaning it's unlikely that I'm going to carry a phone charger around and make sure it's plugged in every chance I get. Considering that, it's probably good for me to know that I can Python until the cows come home, but I'll only get 1/6th as much time out of the web browser.
12:07 x Thomas x /science/engineering x link x 0 comments
I've been trying for two weeks to figure out a reason to use one of the online fabrication shops like eMachineShop.
Can't think of any good ideas, of course. I like to consider myself a reasonably handy guy, but that has never extended itself to the act of building anything from the ground up. In fact, it usually means I just keep a bunch of junk in the basement, on the assumption that one day I will get up, go downstairs, and invent cold fusion from an old laptop screen and a Boss LS-2 guitar pedal instead of sitting around and watching MacGyver.
But I find the idea of imagining all the things I could build or hack together to be a lot of fun as a daydreaming exercise. The fact that it's still extraordinarily expensive (a Wired writer built a guitar body for only $800, which is kind of pricy given that it was just a big hunk of plastic) can be ignored up while I still have no real compelling ideas. And once I have ideas, it'll serve as a handy deterrent to the addition of more junk to my basement. The day when home-designed custom fabrication is both cheap and easy may well end up a boon for people with more initiative, but it fills me with dread for my storage space.
11:47 x Thomas x /science/engineering x link x 0 comments
The US Postal Service is launching a pilot "recycle by mail" program for electronics. It's good to see this kind of thing get more play, and it's hard to get more ubiquitous than the post office, so I'd really like to see it succeed. I've found that in my own life, the greatest barrier to recycling is not the expense but the availability: I'll gladly pay to do it, or allow someone else to profit, but if it requires a lot of effort or travel, I'm likely to put it off or eventually give up on it.
13:50 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 2 comments
In lieu of original posting, please enjoy John Scalzi's visit to the Creation Museum:
...The guy who built the temple, satisfied that it truly represents his beloved load of horseshit in the best possible light, then opens the temple to the public, to attract not only the already-established horseshit enthusiasts, but possibly to entice new people to come and gaze on the horseshit, and to, well, who knows, admire its moundyness, or the way it piles just so, to nod in appreciation of the rationalizations for its excellence or to clap in delight and take pictures when an escaping swell of methane causes the load of horseshit to sigh a moist and pungent sigh.When all of this is done, the fellow turns to you and asks you what you think of it all now, now that this gorgeous edifice has been raised in glory and the masses cluster in celebration.
And you say, "Well, that's all very nice. But it's still just an enormous load of horseshit."
And this is, in sum, the Creation Museum. $27 million has purchased the very best monument to an enormous load of horseshit that you could possibly ever hope to see. I enjoyed my visit, admired the craft with which the whole thing was put together, and was never once convinced that what I was seeing celebrated was anything more or less than horseshit. Popular horseshit? Undoubtedly. Horseshit hallowed by tradition and consecrated by time? Just so. Horseshit of the finest possible quality? I would not argue the point. And yet, even so: Horseshit. Complete horseshit. Utter horseshit. Total horseshit. Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit, horseshit. I pity the people who swallow it whole.
The museum, for those who have not been following it over the last couple of years, is the work of Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis, and is located in my home state of Kentucky. Thus forcing me, once again, to consider telling people that I'm actually from West Virginia, because that might honestly be less embarrassing.
10:59 x Thomas x /science/creationism x link x 1 comment
Comedy writer Ken Levine on his Prius experience:
Rented my first Prius at the San Jose airport. For an extra $10 a day you can get one with Oregon plates so you'll REALLY look like you're going green. It would've been nice if Avis had included an owner's manual. Questions I never solved: why did the little explanation point warning light go off? What does it mean? How do you get the car out of reverse?Which reminds me: those stories you hear about people who pursue elaborate strategies for stretching their Prius mileage? They're all true. My father's last two cars have been hybrids. He's spent the entire time working to hit 60MPG, but never quite able to do it. The closest Dad's gotten to a video game in years is Solitaire and Bejeweled on his old Palm IIIc, but I see shades of arcade-esque score-breaking in his attempts. Meanwhile, there are drivers getting over 112MPG on a tank. Aficionados have techniques with names like "pulse and glide" and "state of charge manipulation."...And to answer your next question: 40.3 mpg. But I understand you get even better mileage if you're in drive.
People are easily fascinated with the Prius, and I think its causes are twofold: first, it gives you lots of information, and second, it updates that information in realtime. Both of these provide basic transparency about A) what the car is doing, and B) how your own actions are linked to those of the car. Technically, they're not exclusive to hybrids. You could put this information on a regular internal-combustion car, and chances are that people would change their behaviors in a similar way to maximize their "score."
So why don't we?
11:57 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 0 comments
How much material, every year, gets wasted or manufactured for no good reason except to fill gift bags at conferences? Including the bags themselves? The bag for this conference is not even particularly generous, but I'm still looking at a pair of branded flip-flops, a set of laptop screen cleaners, a mousepad, some kind of IP phone gadget, two magazines, and assorted promotional cards. When I think about the sheer number of CDs, USB Keys, rubber toys, and assorted office junk that gets thrown at conference attendees each year--not to mention millions of branded nylon tote bags--almost all of which will probably be thrown away or forgotten within a week, it makes me shudder.
The tech industry is not particularly good at being sustainable in the first place. There's potential there, don't get me wrong--just by digitally delivering movies and music, we could theoretically save a tremendous amount of plastic and industrial pollutants that go into CDs and DVDs. But as it is right now, hi-tech doesn't usually mean good for the environment. It would probably not make much of a dent in the overall impact if conference sponsors went green with their swag, but it would be a nice symbol.
18:14 x Thomas x /science/environment x link x 1 comment
