whatwuzithinking

[whatwuzithinking]

I have a new hybrid drive car, and I love it - favourite car I've ever owned. But it has raised an interesting question: what do brake lights actually mean?

If you see the brake lights activate on the car in front of you, what does that mean? Most people, I suspect, would say that it means the car is slowing down. But in fact it doesn't. It just means, in most cars, that the driver has depressed the brake pedal a half inch or so, because there is a micro-switch under there that turns on the lights.

So the lights come on - and look exactly the same - regardless of whether the car is slowing down a very little bit or is in a full panic braking situation. Same lights, same indication. In fact, if it's a two-foot driver, those lights can be on just from the weight of the left foot, and the car isn't slowing down at all.

Moreover, the car can be slowing down without the brake lights coming on. If I'm driving up a hill and take my foot off the accelerator, the car will slow down but no lights.

And now along come hybrid and electric cars with brake-by-wire. When I depress the brake pedal it doesn't connect directly to the brake pads. Instead, the computer decides how much I want to brake based on the pedal position. If I'm just slowing down gradually it will increase the load on the motor-generators. That causes the car to slow down while generating power to recharge the traction battery. If I press harder, the computer will eventually engage the traditional brake pads in addition to the regenerative braking. This all happens with no noticeable impact on the driver - the car responds as you would expect it to.

So when does my car turn on the brake lights? At a certain deceleration G-force? At a certain brake pedal position? Only once the brake pads are engaged? Articles online would suggest that different manufacturers handle this situation slightly differently, but as far as I know there are no official regulations. The Ontario traffic law refers to HAVING red lights on your vehicle but I can find nothing about when they are required to be activated.

But more interesting to me is that initial point - brake lights don't tell you how fast a car is decelerating, just that it (probably) is. That seems like a shortcoming that hasn't been updated since the Model-T.

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Classic Reuben Sandwiches - one of my favourite dinners. And the only way I can convince my kids to eat sauerkraut.

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For most of my life there were just "eye drops". You went to the pharmacy for eye drops. There were a couple of brands, Visine being dominant, but there was only one kind.

Last week I went to buy eye drops and had to make my way through at least 20 varieties - for allergies, for contact lenses, for scratchy eyes, for itchy eyes, for dry eyes, watery eyes, gritty eyes, burning eyes, all from five different manufacturers.

In the end I just bought the one that was for everything. Which made them, to my mind, "eye drops".

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We need a new couch

Last week someone - they don't know who yet - won $516 million in a U.S. lottery. That's over half a billion dollars.

Whenever I hear stories like this I like to do a little calculation in my head, starting with 4%. 4% is the figure that fundraisers use when creating any kind of bursary fund. Essentially, if you have a pot of money, you can spend about 4% of it each year without the original amount ever getting smaller or not keeping up with the cost of living. You'll make more than 4% in interest, but the extra goes to hedge inflation. So the pot gets a little bigger but still has roughly the same buying power.

So this is what 4% of $516 million means:

You could buy a really nice $56,000 car. Drive it for the day, then throw it away - no need to sell it, just give it to someone. And get a brand new $56,000 car the next day. You could do that for the rest of your life, and when you die you can leave to your children A LARGER SUM THAN THE ONE YOU STARTED WITH.

In other words, you have to spend $56,000 every day just to keep the pot from getting bigger.

And what I love most of that is when the winners turn out to be a lovely couple, usually in their 60's or 70's, who have spent a lifetime living paycheque to paycheque. They've raised a few kids, always put food on the table but never had enough to travel south every year or move out of their first home.

They sit behind a table with camera's flashing and video lights shining on them, and someone sticks a microphone in their face and says, "what are you going to spend all the money on?"

And they will look at each other like they haven't thought about that before, and say,

"Well... we need a new couch I suppose."

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Watson as journalist

I was thinking about my frustration with our recent departure into "alternative facts", and the deliberate technique by politicians and their operatives of muddying the waters, making people uncertain about what is real and measurable by confusing and vague statements, repetition, and outrage.

That got me imagining an interviewer who had the ability to recall, with perfect clarity, statements that had been made, measurements that had been recorded, actions that had been taken. An interviewer who could not be bafflegabbed or confused, or have to say, "we'll check up on that and get back to you." An interviewer who could hold political feet to the fire, call them on their lies in real time, and who was completely unbiased, with no personal agenda or leanings. Wouldn't THAT be fun to watch? Might even regain some trust in the media.

The first idea that popped into my head for this hypothetical journalist was Data, the android from Star Trek TNG who could recall perfectly what you had said years ago, and repeat it back to you in your own voice. But Data was a fictional character. It then occured to me that we have the next best thing: IBM Watson.

Watson is the computer system best known for beating several human experts on the game show Jeopardy. That was years ago, and people marvelled at its ability to interpret English language questions, understanding the nuances and assumptions, and recall the correct answer from a vast array of data in seconds. Since then IBM has greatly improved the system, and is aggressively pushing it for medical diagnosis, weather forecasting, and other uses.

I think a GoFundMe campaign with the explicit goal of raising money to buy time on a Watson system would be very popular. We'd have to pay IBM to tune the software so that, rather than interpreting questions, it can listen to answers given in interviews and determine how closely those answers conform to known facts. It would then generate follow-up questions like, "six months ago you took exactly the opposite position when you said (insert quote here). Which position is correct and why are they different?" Or, "you have stated that (such a thing) happened, yet video evidence seen by millions of people clearly shows (this other thing). Are you speaking while unaware of the facts, or lying?"

Imagine (insert your most despised political figure here) being grilled by someone with perfect, real-time recall of historical facts and scientific observation. Their ability to steer the population with confusion and rhetoric would end. This can't be done by an existing media outlet - they carry too much baggage. It would have to be a non-partisan grassroots operation with members of the political left and right until the objectivity of the system was established.

What do you think?

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I’m surrounded by mass murderers

Several times I've read, "don't use Uber, they don't do background checks so a serial killer could be driving you!". Ignoring the fact that the fear is misplaced (Uber does do background checks), it made me start thinking of all the places I deal with people who could potentially be serial killers, like the guy at the convenience store who has always looked a bit shifty.

Of course the Uberphobics (the most outrageous of whom you know have a vested interest in maintaining the current bloated, inefficient system) would say "but he doesn't have access to kill you like the driver of a car you're trapped in." Okay, so let's focus on people you deal with regularly who have an opportunity to off you.

There's that guy in the haunted house who jumps out as you roll by. He could have a knife you know.

The mortage advisor in the bank who takes me into her office to "sign papers".

Any of a number of contractors who come to my house. I stood in the basement with one just last week, supposedly discussing my hot water tank. God knows what he was really planning but my phone rang and pulled me away.

The barber. Enough said.

Who do you deal with who you suspect is a serial killer?

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Speeding up to a red light

On many occasions I have watched drivers race along at or above the speed limit even though there is a red light, or a light cycling to red, close enough that they are just going to have to stop and wait. Might as well take your foot off the accelerator and coast for a bit, it saves gas and pollution. In fact, because of those Newtonian laws involving inertia, if you time it right you'll actually get where you're going faster.

So I would like to propose a new expression - "speeding up to a red light" - to mean an expenditure of energy that a reasonable person could predict will be wasted. I offer some modest examples:

The hopeless affair - "Don't know why he's spending so much energy on her, he's just speeding up to a red light."

That person in the grocery store who nearly breaks the old lady's hip to rush into the shortest line, even though he'll end up behind that one person who still writes cheques for groceries.

People who push the "close door" button in the elevator 20 times. You know that sucker isn't going any faster.

Patrons who push their way to the front of a theatre queue with their ticket for a reserved seat.

Got any others for me?

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Sitting too close to technology can make you blind

An experience with my mother this weekend reminded me that as IT pros we often have a blind spot regarding new technologies. Things that seem really useful to us simply don't make sense to normal people. I was showing her Siri on my iPhone, which I use regularly to set alarms, add reminders, and send basic text messages without typing. "Watch this," I said, then to Siri, "what movies are playing?". Siri dutifully showed me all the movies showing in St. Catharines today. "See how I didn't have to tell it where we were? It already knew. And I didn't have to say today, because it assumed that."

"That's amazing," said my mother, who in her 80's has stopped being surprised by these feats of magic. "Let me try." So I give her the phone, and she says, "what movie is showing at the Brock Film Festival on Wednesday."

Now Brock is Brock University, and they have a film festival which she wants to attend, so this is a perfectly reasonable question. Of course Siri completely chokes, and shows her (inexplicably) films playing in a neighbouring city some distance away. A person could easily answer this question. I would simply Google "brock film festival", click on the schedule, and look up next Wednesday's feature. But Siri can't do it because the data sources aren't consistent and recognizable. It requires knowledge of English and context that Siri doesn't possess.

The interesting thing is that as soon as she asked the question, I KNEW it wouldn't work. I simply wouldn't ask Siri a question like that. I know the limitations, and work around them, so to me there really aren't any limitations. But to a normal person, asking a normal question, this is another example of "not quite ready for prime time." That's very interesting, dear, but it can't even answer basic questions.

And she's right, of course. Until a technology actually works the way people expect it to, and interfaces with them they way they interface with the world now, it's essentially a pretty contrivance. Fun to look at, but not much practical use.

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Management vs I.T.

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be in IT support," said the balloonist. "I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is, technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."

The woman below responded, "You must be in Management." "I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

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How to be a good end user

I've worked in IT for a long time. The one constant in all my roles and titles has been customer service. IT is, essentially, a customer service role, and that's the primary qualification I hire on. Technology I can teach you; taking pride in helping people is a more innate quality, and not everyone has it.

Lord knows a lot of IT people need to work on their customer service skills, but in return, how can you be a good customer to your IT department? If this seems like something you shouldn't have to think about, remember that we're human too. If someone approaches us with respect and a willingness to help solve the problem, we're going to bend over backwards to help you. Arrogant, rude, and patronizing are all approaches that will find you getting less than top-notch effort from your IT support people.

So how can you help?

We can't fix a problem that we don't know about. Doubtless your IT folks monitor a lot of systems and get a lot of warnings in their email (most of them false positives), but they probably don't know that your copy of Microsoft Word is suddenly crashing every time you choose "Print". Telling someone in the coffee room about it won't get it fixed. Waiting three weeks and then mentioning that "nothing ever seems to work properly with the computers around here" also won't get it fixed. Tell your IT people, however they want to be told. Tell them right away. Don't feel guilty or assume someone else has already mentioned it. IT people are inveterate problem solvers, they love a challenge.

Don't pull the emergency stop cord. In many organizations, the IT department and the rest of the company operate very differently from each other. I worked for 10 years in advertising. The ad people worked crazy hours one week and barely at all the next. They pulled all nighters before a big pitch. They promised clients the moon and then had to figure out how to deliver, fast. IT, on the other hand, had to be rock steady. The trains had to run on time, all the time. Just because you weren't there at 9 am one morning didn't mean the email server didn't have to be working for someone else. More than one IT person has the phrase "lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine" on a coffee mug. So if you could just try to think through the IT needs of your big upcoming project more than a few minutes before the client walks in, that would be great. Even if you aren't absolutely certain that's okay; even if we can't do anything right at that moment, it gets us thinking about the project, and being a part of the solution.

You could try this yourself. A lot of hay is made over the tendency of IT people to say, "restart and call me if the problem happens again." But seriously, people, restarting the computer solves 80% of problems. We don't know why. Well, we SORT of know, it's about memory leaks and cache size and other stuff you really don't want to talk about. And yes, if the universe were fair Microsoft and every application developer in the world would fix this but they won't, so please, just bear with us on this. And yes, it doesn't explain WHY the problem occurred but wouldn't you rather just get back to work? If it happens again shortly after, we'll dig deeper and do the CSI work.

What other ideas do you have, from either side of the server room?

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Service is love made visible.

Stephen Colbert, Northwestern University Commencement Speech 2011

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What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief: Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.

Unknown

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How to use eBay

I love eBay. You can find darn near anything and if you use it correctly, you can find amazing deals. But eBay exists to make money, for themselves and their sellers. So they will try their best to make you lose yourself in impulse buys, deals that aren’t deals, and poor choices.

The good news is, it’s easy to get the best of eBay without feeling like you’ve been fleeced. Just follows Uncle Stephen’s simple rules:

Patience. You probably aren’t going to find the best deal the first time you look. Set up a search for what you want. If you live in Canada like me, check off “located in Canada” to avoid delays and charges at the border. Use the search tools to really focus on the thing you’re looking for. Then, use the “save search” function with the email option. Once a day, when there is something that meets your search, eBay will email you. When a good deal shows go for it, but that might take a few days or a few months depending on the item. Patience.

Find your comfort zone. Ask yourself, what is the most you would pay for the item that would make you feel like you got a good deal? If paying $100 would make you feel that you were ripped off, it’s too much. If $100 would feel good, then it’s perfect.

Subtract the shipping and custom charges. If you were to buy the product at a local store you wouldn’t pay shipping, so something you can get locally for the same price isn’t a deal. Take your $100 maximum and remove all the costs of getting it to you.

Make that number your maximum bid on eBay. Don’t try to “start lower”. Put in the most you would pay now. eBay’s system will only increase your bid as much as it needs to to keep you in the lead.

Forget it. Seriously. Don’t ever go back and increase your bid. You’ll be tempted, eBay will give you endless opportunities and reminders, but remember step 2? Increasing your bid would put it past your comfort zone. It wouldn’t feel like a good deal anymore. Don’t do it. If you lose, you lose to someone who is willing to pay more than you are. Go back to step 1 and wait for the next opportunity.

That’s it. Wait for the right deal, find your comfortable maximum, and stick to it. You’ll be amazed what you can find and you’ll feel good about your brilliant negotiating skills.

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Things that my smartphone has made redundant

It occurs to me that I no longer buy a long list of things that my iPhone now handles.

Maps

Address book

Calendar - wouldn't be buying stock in DayTimer

Things to Do list, and notepads in general

Compass

Car mileage record

Transister radio, portable tape player, portable CD player

Stopwatch

Car GPS - have a mount for the phone

Small flashlight - I still have a big flashlight for the cottage, but for most "I need some light on this" needs the simplest app of all works great

Snapshot camera - still want the Canon for the lenses, but don't need the Sony

Calculator

Pedometer

Bedside clock

Bike speedometer - have a mount for the phone

Bible - the online version, with multiple translations and instant search, is a vast improvement over the print copy

Wristwatch - I rarely wear one, usually just for dressing up

Scanner - camera + app in my phone works fine for occasional use

That's a lot of objects I don't need to buy / carry / organize in my life.

What's coming up? In the next five years I doubt I'll be carrying a wallet at all. Debit card means I don't carry cash anymore (sorry young guys raising money outside Canadian Tire) and shortly I won't have debit/credit cards either - smartphone payment apps have already arrived and will soon be ubiquitous.

Would love to get rid of my keys as well - the car, house door, office security system should all respond to signals from the phone. Work is progressing on this but might be a while before it gets entrenched.

What would you add to the list?

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It's true love for sure.

(Seen on Craigslist in Kingston, Ontario.)

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Does anyone actually use these anymore? I hardly ever see one (both because of debit cards, and because I'm poor).

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To summarize: your chance of being in an airplane crash are one in a really freakingly huge number. Your chance of surviving such a crash are one in a damn-close-to-infinity number. If you sit at the back and put up with the slow deplaning, the horrible toilet lines, and the lack of overhead space over and over and over again for the rest of your life, your chance of surviving gets so much better that if you live one billion lifetimes you might get saved. Gotcha. (Note: mathematical calculations in this article are approximations only and should not be construed otherwise.)