Month-by-month I'm working on a streak over two years long here on the HOB. There's not much new to report or gripe about, but to keep the magic alive I pulled the post below out of the drafts folder.

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My lifetime to-do list includes seeing a total solar eclipse. I made it to Paris for the August 1999 event but was foiled by clouds. March 2006 provided another chance, but I couldn't mobilize travel to Turkey. So the North American eclipses of 2017 and 2024 are already in my calendars. These long-term appointments help to balance my usual last-minute planning, I think.

Meanwhile, lunar occultations provide a compensating, if pedestrian, alternate spectacle. When it first occurred to me that the moon would eclipse stars now and then just as it does the sun, I imagined how cool it would be to see a bright star wink out behind a nearly invisible new moon, only to reappear some minutes later. Unfortunately, while this sort of alignment does occur regularly, it usually happens during daylight hours when stars are inconveniently invisible.

Predictions and timetables for lunar occultations are not easy to come by (at least compared to those provided for solar eclipses and Iridium flares). The International Occultation Timing Association provides some resources. Amateur observers make scientifically valuable contributions by providing accurate times when an asteroid or the moon blot out a star from their location. The forums at the pessimistically named Cloudy Nights site have been most helpful, especially posts by Curt Renz, who generates astronomical diagrams on his site worthy of the Mayday Mystery (examples: 1 2 3 4).

A news alert recently informed me of a major North American event, the occultation of the Pleiades. This famous cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, has been celebrated since ancient times. God, played by a whirlwind, taunted Job saying "Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose the belt of Orion?" It also features in the Subaru logo.

That evening, I parked on a rural side road on my way home from work and used an app (screenshot) to help time the alignment. The moon was several diameters from the cluster (labeled M45), and I estimated that I had half an hour or so before the event. When I got home and checked again, I confirmed the sad news that the app seemed to be indicating: the moon was actually moving away from the cluster. Of course! The moon drifts eastwards along the ecliptic (towards the cluster in my screenshot), but so do all the stars in the background, since it's mostly the earth's rotation causing the apparent movement. The moon's orbit causes it to lag behind the stars. The occultation had occurred the night before, and I had missed it!

Oh well, it was a familiar feeling. I relived the moment in Celestia (screenshot) and rechecked my 2017 calendar.

We're forty percent into a ten-year wager over the price of oil versus burgers, and it's pretty close. A barrel of light sweet crude cost the equivalent of 19.2 Big Macs in 2005. Today it costs just over 21. I'm betting that, contrary to fears of Peak Oil, you'll be able to get more than a barrel for your 19.2 Big Macs six years from now.



CNN says that cheap oil is here to stay, citing Deutsche Bank's prediction of a $65 barrel price next year.

Here's the text of the wager, the original of which has been lost to bit rot.

1 December 2005

WHEREAS

forum member wasoxygen has been quite convinced by Julian Simon the Wise that a Paradise of Plenty is nigh upon us, when the streets shall flow with honey and any other Goods and Services which the Invisible Hand shall deem needful; and member uncanuck believes this not necessarily so to be, it is hereby

RESOLVED

that, on December 1, 2015, should the cost in United States Dollars of one barrel of Light Sweet Crude Oil, today valued at $58.75, according to 321energy.com or some other mutually acceptable authority, divided by the average cost in the United States of one Big Mac, today valued at $3.06, according to The Economist or some other reputable source, be greater than 19.2, then wasoxygen shall pay uncanuck the amount of ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS, and if the ratio shall be less than 19.2, uncanuck shall pay wasoxygen the same amount.

Now that the old hecat webserver is in cold storage, I set out to recreate the wget script in a DOS batch file. After being spoiled by the innumerable tools in BASH, I feel like I'm trying to do a tune-up with a screwdriver. Nevertheless, I did manage to collect several dozens of mp3 files, and the 99% rule held true, leaving me with one keeper, "Surprise Hotel" by Fool's Gold.

For future reference, here is the much-simplified and less usable script.

do_wget.bat
set workingdir=C:\wget\
set wgetdate=%DATE:~10,4%%DATE:~4,2%%DATE:~7,2%
set logfile=wget%wgetdate%.log
wget -Q400m -nc -w2 -r -l2 -H -t1 -nv -nd -P 
   %workingdir%shells -np -A.mp3 -i %workingdir%mp3blogs.txt 
   -o %workingdir%logs\%logfile%

copy_empty.bat
FOR %%A IN (DIR /b SHELLS/*.mp3) DO copy empty.txt "SHELLS\%%A"

Last night at midnight I completed a week offline. Not completely offline, though that was the goal. Conversation over the obligation to share one's experiences via Twitter, Facebook, blogging and messaging, rather than simply experiencing one's experiences, led me to wonder how much I would miss a connection to the online world. Saturday night I did a whirlwind tour through my Bloglines subscriptions, the most popular YouTube videos of the week (always a disappointment), and a glance at Facebook. Then I disconnected and went to bed by midnight.

Early on I realized I would have to check e-mail if I wanted to remain functional in society, and decided that ten or fifteen minutes of personal e-mail a day would do no harm. By the end of the week I had expanded that allowance, and had cheated a bit, but overall spent just an hour or two on the net, far less than the self-reported national average of twelve.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't miss much. Google News, a favorite downtime filler, turns out to be mostly filler. I get better conversation starters from podcasts, especially the reliably worthwhile Radiolab. I finished a novel, completed a cryptic crossword, and did a bit of artwork. A friend asked if I was watching more TV than usual, and I confessed that I was. I saw a Subaru ad with Basia Bulat's "Before I Knew" (once linked here!) and resisted a needless urge to confirm the fact online, or mention it there.

Last night, I used a bit of the time shift to catch up, and felt a little more than usual the pointlessness of the Facebook Wall. It goes without saying that I'm online again, but I plan to put my new perspective to good use and resist the impulse to validate my existence over TCP/IP.

"Jeeves," I said.

"Sir?"

"I've just been having a chat with young Tuppy, Jeeves. Did you happen to notice that he wasn't looking very roguish this morning?"

"Yes, sir. It seemed to me that Mr. Glossop's face was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

"Quite. He met my cousin Angela in the larder last night, and a rather painful interview ensued."

"I am sorry, sir."

"Not half so sorry as he was. She found him closeted with a steak-and-kidney pie, and appears to have been a bit caustic about fat men who lived for food alone."

"Most disturbing, sir."

"Very. In fact, many people would say that things had gone so far between these two nothing now could bridge the chasm. A girl who could make cracks about human pythons who ate nine or ten meals a day and ought to be careful not to hurry upstairs because of the danger of apoplectic fits is a girl, many people would say, in whose heart love is dead. Wouldn't people say that, Jeeves?"

"Undeniably, sir."

"They would be wrong."

"You think so, sir?"

"I am convinced of it. I know these females. You can't go by what they say."

"You feel that Miss Angela's strictures should not be taken too much au pied de la lettre, sir?"

"Eh?"

"In English, we should say 'literally'."

"Literally. That's exactly what I mean. You know what girls are. A tiff occurs, and they shoot their heads off. But underneath it all the old love still remains. Am I correct?"

"Quite correct, sir. The poet Scott----"

"Right ho, Jeeves."

"Very good, sir."

"And in order to bring that old love whizzing to the surface once more, all that is required is the proper treatment."

"By 'proper treatment,' sir, you mean----"

"Clever handling, Jeeves. A spot of the good old snaky work. I see what must be done to jerk my Cousin Angela back to normalcy. I'll tell you, shall I?"

"If you would be so kind, sir."

I lit a cigarette, and eyed him keenly through the smoke. He waited respectfully for me to unleash the words of wisdom. I must say for Jeeves that--till, as he is so apt to do, he starts shoving his oar in and cavilling and obstructing--he makes a very good audience. I don't know if he is actually agog, but he looks agog, and that's the great thing.

"Suppose you were strolling through the illimitable jungle, Jeeves, and happened to meet a tiger cub."

"The contingency is a remote one, sir."

"Never mind. Let us suppose it."

"Very good, sir."

"Let us now suppose that you sloshed that tiger cub, and let us suppose further that word reached its mother that it was being put upon. What would you expect the attitude of that mother to be? In what frame of mind do you consider that that tigress would approach you?"

"I should anticipate a certain show of annoyance, sir."

"And rightly. Due to what is known as the maternal instinct, what?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very good, Jeeves. We will now suppose that there has recently been some little coolness between this tiger cub and this tigress. For some days, let us say, they have not been on speaking terms. Do you think that that would make any difference to the vim with which the latter would leap to the former's aid?"

"No, sir."

"Exactly. Here, then, in brief, is my plan, Jeeves. I am going to draw my Cousin Angela aside to a secluded spot and roast Tuppy properly."

"Roast, sir?"

"Knock. Slam. Tick-off. Abuse. Denounce. I shall be very terse about Tuppy, giving it as my opinion that in all essentials he is more like a wart hog than an ex-member of a fine old English public school. What will ensue? Hearing him attacked, my Cousin Angela's womanly heart will be as sick as mud. The maternal tigress in her will awake. No matter what differences they may have had, she will remember only that he is the man she loves, and will leap to his defence. And from that to falling into his arms and burying the dead past will be but a step. How do you react to that?"

"The idea is an ingenious one, sir."

"We Woosters are ingenious, Jeeves, exceedingly ingenious."

"Yes, sir."

  "Ah, well, I was at church that day," said Fairway, "which was a very curious thing to happen."
  "If 'twasn't my name's Simple," said the Grandfer emphatically. "I ha'n't been there to-year; and now the winter is a-coming on I won't say I shall."
  "I ha'n't been these three years," said Humphrey; "for I'm so dead sleepy of a Sunday; and 'tis so terrible far to get there; and when you do get there 'tis such a mortal poor chance that you'll be chose for up above, when so many bain't, that I bide at home and don't go at all."

In his "straight-talking book about the numbers," David J.C. MacKay provides a clear, balanced look at the possibilities of a future without carbon-based energy. He does not argue for one alternative or another (though nuclear advocates will find much to like), and repeatedly claims that the only position he espouses is that "we should have a plan that adds up." To cut through the "flood of crazy innumerate codswallop" he uses a wonderfully simple device: a stacked bar chart of average energy consumption, in consistent units of kilowatt hours per day per person. He recognizes his necessary simplifications, even calling some of his models "cartoons," but the result is an unambiguous picture of roughly where our energy is spent and how much might be generated without fossil fuel.

Chapter by chapter, he attempts to balance typical consumption with a parallel chart of theoretical alternative energy production. From the start, it is an uphill climb. A typical car driver consumes about 40 kWh per day driving. Massive wind energy infrastructure covering 10% of Britain's land area could generate half of that, 20 kWh per day per person. As a dieter finds it all too easy to consume a few more calories and hard to work them off, the consumption chart climbs ever higher while the alternative production side struggles to keep up. If you take one intercontinental jet flight each year, you consume another 30 kWh (daily average) to power the flight. ("Planes are twice as fuel-efficient as a single-occupancy car," i.e. the same, per person per mile, as a car with a driver and a passenger and worse than a vehicle with many passengers.) Solar thermal panels on every south-facing roof could provide 13 kWh per day per person. Heating, cooling, and the making and transporting of manufactured goods are significant sources of additional energy demand. With back-of-the-envelope calculations, it becomes apparent that even using all of the green energy sources to their practical maximum extent, there will be a shortage. And this is based on physical limits alone, without considering financial costs, popular acceptance, and political will.

Do we need to bother making the switch? MacKay is carefully neutral, but offers three motivations for the conversation: the finite supply of fossil fuels, energy security, and climate change. On this last one, he is sensitive to "climate-change inactivists" and merely claims that "it’s very probable that using fossil fuels changes the climate." Regardless of necessity, the practicality of many proposed energy sources should inform the dialog. Setting aside costs, the weak concentration of green energy sources means that the amount of space they require is a significant factor. A chart of renewable energy sources measured in watts generated per square meter has the sobering conclusion that "facilities have to be country-sized."

Perhaps what's most surprising and enjoyable about the book is the tone. Excusing himself from advocating any particular solution, he focuses on facts and figures, so the text is friendly, informative and not confrontational. Extensive notes provide details, and an appendix of "technical chapters" introduce equations and diagrams to expand on the cartoon models and justify estimates. There is a definite focus on Great Britain, both in the examples cited and the language. An American might well misunderstand, as I did, this sentence: "A pumped-storage chamber one kilometre below London has been mooted." The meaning becomes more clear later on, with the sentence "A 1.2GW high-voltage DC interconnector to Norway was mooted in 2003, but not built." MacKay mocks the British saying "every little helps" when used to justify pointless exercises like unplugging cell phone chargers. "A more realistic mantra is: if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little."

The graphics are also almost all excellent. The repeated stacked bar chart of energy sources is brilliantly simple, and becomes so familiar that it makes a diagram of the theoretical windfall from fusion jaw-dropping. I've seen comparisons made to Tufte, but there's an ugly chart here and there that make this an exaggeration. I did like the graphic on bird kills, though.

Best of all is the clear thinking. Again and again he exposes ridiculous claims and energy foibles:

Glendoe [hydroelectric project] has been billed as “big enough to power Glasgow.” But if we share its 180GWh per year across the population of Glasgow (616 000 people), we get only 0.8 kWh/d per person. That is just 5% of the average electricity consumption of 17 kWh/d per person. The 20-fold exaggeration is achieved by focusing on Glendoe’s peak output rather than its average, which is 5 times smaller; and by discussing “homes” rather than the total electrical power of Glasgow.

and

Fuelling the Hydrogen 7, the hydrogen-powered car made by BMW, requires 254 kWh per 100 km – 220% more energy than an average European car.... I know of no form of land transport whose energy consumption is worse than this hydrogen car. (The only transport methods I know that are worse are jet-skis – using about 500 kWh per 100 km – and the Earthrace biodiesel-powered speed-boat, absurdly called an eco-boat, which uses 800 kWh per 100 p-km.)

The price is right too. The complete PDF is available on the site as well as a ten-page synopsis.

In the first part, we celebrated the economic benefits of extracting fossil water from exotic islands peopled with locals who sometimes get thirsty. But what about the environmental impact? Are we destroying the Earth by manufacturing innumerable plastic bottles from petroleum, trucking them and tons of water all over, and finally burying most of them in the ground? (Probably more than half, anyway -- see the EPA fact sheet, 506KB PDF.)


As is common with questions of values, the values in question are rarely elucidated. To me, the most important consideration is human happiness and well-being. With this in mind, I have to wonder whether a clean portable drinking water craze is such a bad thing. When bottled water was no longer provided at my office, I didn't see lines form at the tap, but various flavors of high fructose corn syrup in solution remained popular. Public water fountains get about as much use as public telephones.

To assuage the guilt of the water-craving and increasingly green masses, bottlers have started using extra lightweight bottles. Careful observation shows that these cannot withstand two drops from a high chair, and indeed beg to be trashed when empty. After buying my first six-pack of Fuji, I refilled the heavy duty bottles from our Brita and carried them around for weeks.

Not everyone has gone bottlephobic, thankfully. Lisetta, the accused hand-wringer of two years back, still enjoys a green bottle habit, even dismissing her carbon footprint on special occasions.

And Penn & Teller have not missed their chance to weigh in.

How would you behave in a disaster? Do you have what it takes to survive a life-threatening situation? Amanda Ripley provides some surprising clues in The Unthinkable.

First of all, you probably wouldn't panic. Most people don't, contrary to common expectation and typical media coverage of disasters. Instead, they often freeze, struggling to comprehend and rationalize an abnormal situation, reluctant to recognize the risk. Survivors who left the doomed World Trace Center reported waiting an average of six minutes before heading downstairs. One, Elia Zedeño, described walking in circles in her workspace looking for something to bring, finally grabbing a mystery novel. At the Beverly Hills Supper Club, where 165 people died in a 1977 fire, six victims were found seated around a dinner table. One man took the time to order a rum and Coke to go.

Even when people start trying to escape danger, rushing and hysteria are rare. People are more courteous than usual, helping strangers and waiting for one another. They form groups, look for a leader, and resist discord. Stories of strangely normal behavior on the Titanic were not exceptional -- a survivor from the Estonia reported that many people did nothing to save themselves.

The best way to improve your odds of surviving a disaster is by advance preparation. Anticipate that your brain won't be as reliable when your life is on the line. In the words of a wartime bomber pilot, "When you walk across the ramp to your airplane, you lose half your IQ." Have a plan, and know where stairways and emergency exits are. It's no surprise that people with military experience, trained to move quickly in response to sudden adversity, are better survivors.

One curiosity in the book is a line of thought I've seen elsewhere -- an interest in finding an evolutionary explanation for a behavior that does not enhance one's survival, heroism in this case. Despite great risk to themselves and having no family members at risk, Walter Bailey repeatedly entered a burning building, Roger Olian braved the freezing Potomac, and Rick Rescorla marched back up into a flaming skyscraper. Pundits suggest that there is a hidden self-interest at work, that the risk-takers hope to benefit from being perceived as heroes. Olian, in typical heroic fasion, denied that he did anything special, just that he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he had done nothing. As for benefit, he got hypothermia, then had to retrieve his towed truck from a D.C. impound lot the next day, paying for it with bills that were still wet in his wallet. Isn't it simpler to suppose that we have adaptive tendencies (say, for assisting those around us) but they don't always lead to adaptive behavior? No one seems determined to find an evolutionary explanation for other relatively rare behaviors that diminish one's chances of reproducing, like suicide, cellibacy, hang-gliding, or homosexuality.

Ripley presents a condensed version of her subject in a Top 10 list, and in a recent article reiterates the need to prepare and equip the real first responders to emergenices: regular people.

After nearly four years of loyalty to T-Mobile, it was time to replace our cell phones with models that were not physically falling apart. In their thirst for new customers, the carrier has insultingly poor upgrade offers for existing customers. We were satisfied with the service, and I maybe could have gotten a better deal if I begged for one, but we ended up making an impulse switch to AT&T at a Costco.

It turns out that Costco was the right place to buy. All activation fees were waived, return periods were generously extended, and a small number of quite nice handsets were on offer, free after mail-in rebates. (Which I forgot to mail in, of course. I realized this on the day they had to be postmarked, naturally a Sunday. Happily, the rebate processor informed me that there's a 15-day grace period.) Not least of all, Costco handled paperwork, number transfers, and credit checks with dispatch.

The iPhone, with its budget-busting data plan, had been a temptation for some time. After putting up so long with a Nokia that was nothing special even before it went to pieces, I decided to take the plunge. I would have to go to Apple or AT&T for the handset, and the Costco guy suggested sotto voce that I wait until the following Monday to buy. Sure enough, Apple announced the 3G S that day. I had to wait until the following Friday to score one, but the end was in sight for my rundown candy bar.

I had little intention of camping out overnight outside a retail store with fanboy dorks, and was happy to make an online reservation. This turned out to be worthless, as it did not promise delivery of a device, but merely guaranteed a flood of reminder e-mails lest I forget my intention to buy the gadget on release day. So around 11:30 a.m. on Friday I started calling AT&T locations to check on stock. The Potomac Mills store had a few units left, but they were going fast. I sped over, only to find that they were fresh out. They called a nearby location and told me there was one in stock. With sketchy directions and my trusty, mapless Garmin, I circled around for a while and eventually located the store. There were several people in line, and I waited anxiously, straining to overhear transactions at the front. But eventually I did score that last iPhone, making my extended lunch hour worthwhile.

Here, then, are the pros and cons after two months of use.

for

• Visual voicemail [screenshot]. Listen to any message immediately, delete and undelete messages without listening to them or that DTMF woman.
• Physical silent mode switch.
• Maps with GPS navigation. The interface is a little bit weak compared to a dedicated device (no voice prompting; turn-by-turn steps and rerouting require interaction), but integration is a big win. Click on an address in your contact list and go. Copy and paste an address from a web page. Satellite images, street view [screenshot]. Compass-based map orientation fails in the car, but is great when navigating on foot. Assisted GPS uses cell tower triangulation for an instant fix and improved coverage.
• iTunes not required. I didn't sync to a computer for weeks, and haven't again since. Loading my music library and backing up my data are the only benefits I got from syncing.
• Smart, responsive, intuitive interface.
• Nice touches: ambient light sensor brightens the display outdoors. "Oleophobic" fingerprint-resistant screen. Standard headphone jack.

against

• Automatic location lookup for unrecognized incoming calls is a great idea, but it only appears in the call history, not at ring time.
• The silent mode switch allows no fine tuning, the way my Nokia profiles ("airport," "meeting," "night") did. You have to navigate the settings and request ring/vibration separately for calls, messages, and reminders.
• Undroppable.
• Battery not user replaceable.
  That's about it. This is the first cell phone I've had that didn't annoy me in many ways. I get most upset at unnecessary behaviors, like a useless "unlocked" message after you turn off keyguard that just slows you down. This phone was obviously tested extensively under all kinds of conditions. For example, if you put the same phone number in for two contacts, when one of them calls the Caller ID shows "A or B."

neither here nor there

• The shakes. The accelerometer enables goofy games and an app that lets you use your phone as a level. Shaking the device sends an "undo typing" command. Whatever.
• Form factor. I can't deal with corded headsets, far less with Bluetooth cyborg accessories, and pressing a pocketsize computer against my face doesn't feel right. But I can't imagine a better way to package the gorgeous display, which is fully half the size of VGA. The proximity sensor helpfully turns off the screen so your earlobe doesn't conference Grandma in.
• Virtual keyboard. This almost made the "pro" list, but I recognize that it is a compromise. Unlike some, I find the on-screen keyboard completely usable, and can enter text faster that I do with a 12-key keypad or a full Blackberry keyboard. The secret is to blunder forward and allow the software to interpret your typos, which it does with impressive accuracy. Occasionally an unwanted correction appears on-screen that you have to cancel, but the custom dictionary transparently learns your personal keywords and doesn't repeat an unwanted suggestion.
• The GPS receiver seems to drain the battery quickly -- at least the device gets noticably warm when it is on. I generally leave "Location Services" off.
• Landscape mode. This is a great feature, almost necessary for the web browser, and it is perfectly intuitive that it would switch on and off depending on how you turn the device. But it sometimes switches to landscape when I don't want it to (e.g., in bed), and I would prefer manual control or the option to disable it.

The inimitable Edward Tufte offers his opinions on the user interface in a video, and a fair summary:

The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information--too often leaving users with "Where am I?" puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.