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.

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.

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.

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.

Much like our European sedan, the "sleek Euro-styled" iBook we picked up in 2005 has proven a disappointment. The sleek looks were marred early on by a crack in the top corner of the screen housing (a common complaint, and likely the cause of the display backlight turning off sometimes). The charger, with the orange/green indicator I praised in 2007, also fell prey to a common problem -- fraying wires at the plug end (we missed the class action settlement). This is probably why the current design uses magnetically-attached charging plugs; we had to buy a replacement (aftermarket, but indistinguishable from the original). The new one arrived cracked and fell apart in days, and its warranty replacement now fits loose, sometimes sending us to battery power unawares.

The original battery put in a respectable career, but had to be replaced in March 2008. Despite paying the full $116 to Apple for a replacement, the new battery soon showed signs of early retirement.

More significantly, inopportune crashes became a regular feature. These were hard shutdowns with no warning, and we sometimes could not power back on without removing the battery first. At first I suspected a faulty solder on the main board (for which Apple was scolded in Denmark), but then I noticed overheating. The fan would not come on even when the CPU temperature rose to menacing levels. Someone cobbled together an interface to reduce the temperature threshold before fans kick in, and this seemed to help a bit, but it's still hard to convince the thing to turn on. With the unreliable battery, a flaky power supply, and fear of unprovoked shutdown lurking, the iBook has become mostly a coffee table ornament.

Tonight at a Thai place on Cary Street in Richmond I made some good progress in building up my heat tolerance. The menu offered five levels, the highest three were "Hot," "Thai hot" and "Make me cry." Cute, and not as condescending as the usual American/Thai divisions. 

We ordered three dishes for the table, two hot and one was to be Thai hot, but the server talked us down to 3.5 on their scale. My wife's tastes usually make me feel like a wuss, so I was happy to save face by taking his advice.

When the food arrived, I began by tucking into the hottest dish. Despite my hunger, it was unpleasant. Great flavor, but just too hot to enjoy. My nose, in addition to being nearly useless at its olfactory function, has the added disutility of running at the slightest hint of spice. So my usual m.o. at a Thai place is chugging ice water and ruining napkins.

This time I tried a new tack. I didn't drink anything, and kept at the hot food as fast as my chopstick skills would allow. Before long, I had gotten used to it and the other dishes tasted tame. By the end of the meal, even the hot dish was delicious, and at last the melted icewater was a perfect dessert.

I should admit that I was helped a bit by the episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History with which I passed today's commute. The thought of the miserable soldiers languishing on the front during Operation Barbarossa made a little sweat seem pretty bearable. We'll see if that's enough to get me past the ring of fire.

Things are proceeding well enough at the new place. The commute, at 23 miles, is a bit longer but much more tolerable, generally going against traffic and at speed. At yesterday's fill-up I recorded my first 40 mpg tank.

While waiting for my paperwork to be processed so I can log in and get some work done, I've been browsing some user manuals to get familiar with the work. There's more than a whiff of "your tax dollars at work" maintaining a labyrinthine bureaucracy. The change request process at the private software company I left was, essentially, QA or someone enters an issue and assigns it to a developer, who then takes care of it. This, with many acronyms and names redacted, is the CR process here:

I also stole a glance at some source code, and was pleased to see comments, regions, reasonable formatting, and even some ternary operators! Granted, the output arguments were true and false, but you can't have everything.

Finding half a buried cable!

Ha ha. While digging for a backyard patio, I unearthed some black coax cable, just like the one that carries our TV and Internet service in the house. It was kind of loose, and I gave it a firm tug and one end popped up out of the ground. Bad news. I ran inside and confirmed that the TV was still working, and even checked a computer for access, and all appeared normal. So I got lucky this time. Why don't they make buried cables day-glo orange? This thing looked just like a root.

Speaking of roots, I found that a circular saw is the most satisfactory non-explosive way of dealing with them. Not enough has been said of the virtues of dirt cooling.

I also disturbed the 17-year nap of a cicada nymph and uncovered some night crawlers.

Day 1 started off with the community yard sale. For me this meant sitting on the sidewalk among piles of used baby gear for a few hours, reading and chatting with neighbors. Bob stopped by, looking for barbells and sharing stories about work-related stress. I've had worse Saturday mornings. The take was $30, not enough to cover the mortgage but it did pay for our lunch in the afternoon. I also spent some time fooling around with our new cell phones, though I haven't got my handset yet -- the salesman muttered under his breath that a new model might just be announced on Monday, and advised me to wait until then.