Packing for Mars

Author Mary Roach is a national treasure.

Ms. Roach is a science writer who tackles topics that other authors might shy away from or, if not, would handle in a dry and stale fashion for fear that, to do otherwise would somehow tarnish their reputation. My introduction to Mary Roach's work was a book called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, an account of the myriad possibilities that may happen to the body when it is donated to science. I had never heard of this book or of Mary Roach until it was recommended by a friend (thanks Greg). That recommendation opened up for me a world of delightfully irreverent, yet informative writing on topics that one does not often see treated in an entertaining way.

That book - on a topic I might not have otherwise explored not for squeamishness but rather for lack of interest - revealed a narrator with an incredibly earthy approach to topics others might find distasteful. In addition, there is a clear zeal and intense curiousity for the subject of each book that simply becomes infectious. In reading Stiff one could see that she was fascinated with how cadavers are used - whether for medical training or forensic exploration or as crash-test dummies (really!) - paired with an unflinching willingness to get into the nitty gritty (sometimes very gritty) components of that exploration. She quickly joined David McCullough on my very short list of non-fiction authors I will read regardless of the specific topic.

My most recent journey down the road paved by Mary - or perhaps I should say off the launching pad - was Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Though told against the backdrop of a manned mission to Mars, the book is more an exploration of what we have learned and understand about the effects of prolonged exposure to life in space, and how we have learned it.

In characteristic fashion she jumps delightfully to the point: "To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with." It is a relatively simple thing to launch satellites into orbit and even rovers to other planets compared to determining how to manage human beings in space. She goes on:

You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It has no ego. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. It's structural elements don't start to break down without gravity and it works just fine without sleep.

In the course of this book the author spends time in a Russian space training facility and interviewed former cosmonauts, took a ride on the "Vomit Comet", and along the way explores all of the realities - including the most real, human components - of the challenges of spending extended periods of time in space. Some of the simplest activities that we take so very much for granted rely far more heavily on the effect of our natural environment - especially gravity - than one might think. Anyone making their way through Packing for Mars will never think of the word "separation" in quite the same way again.

With any of her works be sure to read the footnotes as you go. They are, by design, asides from the topic of the moment, but like the marginal art of Sergio Aragonés, it adds little bits of additional delight as you work your way through the book. As is usual for me, I listened to the book on Audible, and the reader understood this implicitly. She made sure to include the footnotes as she went, inserting bits of additional factual fun.

One of my favorite facts revealed - one of many - was the sizing on the condoms used as a part of the urinary catheter system developed by NASA. The devices come in three sizes but, knowing the ego of the human male, those sizes are Large, Extra Large, and XXL - proper fit is vital, and they knew no male astronaut would choose a small or medium...

And while it's all great fun as you go, I don't want to leave the impression that it's not rigorously composed. Whether it is finding that accounts reported and repeated in multiple NASA histories have no reliable basis in fact, or determining whether someone actually did film the act of coitus on a parabolic flight (I'll let you discover that for yourself), Mary Roach demonstrates an admirable tenacity for getting her way to truth behind the story.

For anyone with even a passing interest in science writing and/or the space program I can heartily recommend this book.

Mac OS Sierra iOS-Style Keyboard Settings

On a whim the other day I took a moment to dig into the keyboard settings on my iMac, which I recently upgraded to Sierra. What I was curious to see was whether there might be any way to get parity in the typing behavior between iOS and MacOS.

On any iOS device there are two features to typing, setup by default, to which I have become very accustomed:

• Double-tapping the space bar generates a period; and
• Auto-capitalization at the beginning of each sentence.

I was surprised and delighted to find that these are now features that can now be turned on in the keyboard settings in MacOS:

Why is this important?

These features started with the iPhone, and appear to have been put in place to make typing faster on the iPhone's virtual keyboard, which for space reasons buries the period in the second-layer. Still, it was continued on the iPad when that device was released, despite the period being at the first layer. I've been working - writing - on iPads since 2010 and, as a result, my habits on the virtual keyboard have grown to expect this behavior.

Although I can do - and do - the majority of my work on iOS devices - primarily my iPad Pro - there remain a handful of activities that I must log in to my iMac to complete and, because I'm frequently away from the office, this is often done remotely from my iPad. Although I am not doing long-form writing over the remote connection, I do periodically have to write notes or short passages during this process. Inevitably, because I'm working from my iPad, this results in errors in which I am forgetting to capitalize and/or forgetting to punctuate. (These notes are for my own reference and consumption, typically, so if I were another person I could consider just leaving them as they are... if I were another person). With this new setting in Sierra that issue is no longer a problem.

In fact, it works so well that, for fun I've begun taking to simply using the iPad Pro as the keyboard for my iMac on occasion. I do this sitting right in front of the iMac at my desk, using a neat bit of software called TouchPad. I originally purchased TouchPad to allow me to work at servers - machines where there is no external keyboard connected - from my iPad. However, it works quite nicely in this application as well, such that I could easily envision a future in which even desktops and laptops simply have a virtual keyboard and trackpad attached to them. And I'm not the only one:

However, for my purposes, having the iPad Pro set up as a keyboard at my desktop is a benefit because I am more comfortable doing most things on the iPad. When I am sitting at my desktop machine it is typically because there is some specific activity that I have to use it for, but I may need to reference other things. For example, I may be doing bookkeeping on the desktop, but need to reference receipts or similar documentation in Dropbox. I can obviously pull these up in Dropbox on my desktop screen, but I'm often more comfortable - and quicker - with Dropbox on my iPad. With the iPad Pro set up in split-screen I can quickly reference materials in Dropbox and then switch back to TouchPad - by tapping on it on the other side of the split screen - to enter that information on the iMac.

The top part of TouchPad you see in the picture is a virtual trackpad - the app covers both duties, so one can sit at a desktop or laptop machine with no other input devices, And simply work from an iPad. Or an iPhone, if one were so inclined. It's also very handy if you have a computer set up as a media server (e.g. providing audio or video to your television), where it may be inconvenient or unattractive to have a physical keyboard and mouse attached.

Way of the future? I'm not sure about that. People still grouse about typing on glass. Still, for each one of those folks there is an entire following generation that is becoming more and comfortable with virtual keyboards...

21st Century Defense of the Paper Book

This past Friday evening my 14-year old and I had an extended conversation about books and technology. This is a recurring discussion, and it might not go quite the way you would think:

LB is a defender of the paper book.

Now, to be clear, LB isn't a Luddite. My offspring navigates electronic devices as if born to them (which is pretty close to the truth, as far as that goes). But in this area our opinions differ significantly.

To my mind, when someone says "I prefer the feel and the smell of a paper book, I just like to hold a book in my hand" what I hear is akin to a carriage driver in 1915 making the same statements about his horse in comparison to the automobile. Well, most of the same statements anyway.

The juxtaposition of our roles always amuses me when this comes up. It seems pleasantly odd to me that the 40-something Gen X-er is defending the advance of technology, while the 21st century teen is staunchly insisting upon continued use of a comparatively ancient format.

This particular conversation took a slightly different direction than the usual, however. Typically it's relatively brief - we each take a stand on our relative positions, agree that the other is clearly wrong, and move on from there. This evening we delved into particulars.

LB had a new avenue to consider about the e-reading experience. A frequently cited benefit of the electronic book is the ability to have many titles at hand at any given time. However, LB notes that, when reading fiction, one is typically interested only in the book being read at that time. Having a dozen options at the fingertips isn't really all that beneficial under these circumstances. And if one is only interested in the book currently underway, it really isn't that inconvenient to carry that particular book about.

Ceding this point for the moment, we turned to other types of books - reference materials, textbooks, comics. Having, historically, to carry each of these materials in large numbers - the textbooks from class to class in a backpack, the reference books from one work site to another, also in a backpack, and the comic books well... because I wanted to, okay?!? - we agreed that each of these is better in an electronic format.

The text books and reference materials are better because they are a pain in the ass to carry about. Comics are better both because they are also a pain to carry about in sufficient volume to fill one's time adequately - I can remember taking stacks of comics on family trips as a teenager about the same age as LB, and finding the number needed to sufficiently ensure limited family interaction (it's possible that I was a bit of an ass as a teenager) a little overwhelming - but they are also just better overall. Visually they are more attractive, the artwork rendered in a level of detail that the budget-conscious printing processes of the past would never have allowed. What's more the iPad Pro has a slightly larger display than the standard comic book size, and the ability to zoom allows for a much more immersive experience than paper can offer.

LB also notes that the physical book typically presents cover art, and that one develops a relationship with that book based upon that art. When one is looking to interact with the book, it's that physical appearance that one is looking for, that reassures one that they are about to re-enter the world of the book, of that particular story. In some cases, particularly in fantasy novels, there are other visuals like world maps that add to the experience. It isn't the case that these options cannot be offered - as E.O. Wilson demonstrated a couple of years ago , an electronic book can offer an extensive multimedia experience - but they are often not currently. The typical electronic book offering is simply screen after screen of text.

The paper book - an ancient item defended by a 21st century teen.

In the end, of course, no one is going to take your paperback away from you at any point in the near future. While some physical book stores may be struggling, the physical book is still readily available for the time being.

For the time being...

But it is clear that the physical medium it offers continues to have defenders, and they aren't all that old, grizzled carriage driver.

The MacStories Review of iOS 10

Every year for the past several years Frederico Viticci at Macstories has been writing reviews of each new version of iOS just following it's release.

MacStories, as you might guess, is a website focusing on Apple products, software, and accessories. They do a nice job at all of that, and if you are interested in that sort of thing (I am, as one might guess) I can happily recommend the site for that purpose.

However, Frederico Viticci's iOS reviews are something very special indeed:

While it is called a "review", these articles could just as well be considered unofficial user's manuals for each new version of iOS. Frederico delves incredibly deeply into each new version of Apple's mobile operating system and describes, in detail, what is new and different, and how to use the new features, in addition to providing critique. If you've ever wanted to know how to get more out of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, or been uncertain whether the new version of the operating system could do a given thing, these articles are the way to get there.

At first blush the articles can seem intimidating - the review for iOS 10 is 30 pages long, and that's 30 web pages: Each page is on a specific topic, and is as long as the topic requires to cover. If it were a book (and if you are a MacStories club member, I believe you can get the review as a book) each page would essentially be a chapter. But the intimidation quickly dissipates when one realizes that the website actually has a table of contents for the article that lets you move through it at your own pace and allows you to quickly find and read the portions you are interested in when you want. Don't have an iPad? Skip the section on that device. Don't care about Apple Music right now? Move on to the next chapter.

The review is written very clearly, in language that is not overly technical or techie oriented - it is clearly intended to help guide everyday users in how to take better advantage of their devices. Frederico was in the vanguard of people determined to use their iPad as a primary computing device, and so had strong motivation early on to find ways to wring all of the functionality out of these machines. These articles have been incredibly helpful for me in my own travels down a similar path. I strongly recommend checking it out if you are interested in learning more about what your device can do.

What Happened to Bluetooth Earpieces?

As a general rule, I fall into the "if it can be texted instead, it should be texted" school of thought. Despite this, I end up talking on the phone a fair amount, particularly for work.

If I must talk on the phone, I do not want to be stuck actually holding the device up to my ear like an animal. For years my go-to device for solving this particular first-world problem has been a Jawbone Era. However, time appears to be taking its toll on the device - it no longer activates voice control as it is supposed to, and when the little British voice promises "four hours of talk time remaining" she proves herself a liar a short time later, announcing I have only fifteen minutes left (I have blown right past the fifteen minute mark with no problems multiple times, so perhaps it's due to onset of earpiece dementia rather than deceit). More importantly, either the sound quality, or my ear quality, has declined to the point that it's often hard to hear conversations at full volume.

I've gotten a good five years out of the device, and it's endured some harsh treatment, spending time in my pocket with keys, for example, and at least once being dropped out of my ear while at downhill biking speeds, so I can't complain about the use I've gotten from it, but it is clearly time to look for something new. My first stop on this journey, given those five years of good service, would normally have been to look a the new offerings from Jawbone.

There aren't any. Though the website blog denies it, Jawbone appears to be going through hard times. Once a seller of high-end earpieces and Bluetooth speakers they shifted their focus to fitness trackers a few years ago. The earpieces are almost impossible to find on their website, and are marked "sold out" when you do find them; and, as for the fitness trackers... well... how often do you see someone wearing a Jawbone Up?

So, with a heavy heart I went looking elsewhere.

What I am finding is that the market for these types of devices appears to have changed. Because the time that I spend talking on the phone is virtually always for work, my priorities are on audio clarity in both directions. For that reason, I tend to look towards the higher end devices for features like noise reduction and with the expectation of good call quality. What I'm finding is that there doesn't appear to be much of a high end market any longer (which might explain a thing or two about Jawbone's change in focus). There are a few - The Wirecutter recommends the Plantronics Voyager Edge, with a couple of runners-up to consider, including the Plantronics Explorer 500, which they prefer for noisy environments like the car (The Wirecutter does a pretty good review). Given my use, the Explorer looked like the device for me.

Unfortunately, you apparently cannot get it with free shipping through Amazon, and multiple attempts to purchase through Plantronics website resulted, each time, in this:

Very frustrating and rendered in Times New Roman, which makes it inexcusable.

This leaves me, today, somewhat in Limbo. And it makes me think: I have been using my Jumbl receiver with cheapie earbuds in the interim because I can hear the calls much better through them than with my Jawbone, and I'm not getting complaints from the folks on the other end of the call. The Jumbl costs $19.99 on Amazon...

...And maybe this is the sort of thing that has happened to the Bluetooth earpiece market...

Minimalizing

I am sitting amid chaos.

I made the decision to finally replace my old, World War II era office desk with a more modern desk arrangement. That more modern arrangement currently sits, scattered around the office, in a state of disarray. It turns out (who knew) that radically altering the work and organizational system that one has been using for 20+ years takes more than a couple of hours to do.

For most of my adult, working life I have had the same desk in my home office. The old girl is a wood office desk from the 1940's. I picked it up in the early 1990's at a rummage sale in a small office building in downtown Loves Park for $10. It was actually the second desk that I'd purchased within a few days. The first was a particleboard and veneer thing that I'd purchased from a big-box store that I thought would work fine until I brought it home and placed my computer - an IBM PS/2 - on top of it. That computer - the relatively small all-in-one design - simply dwarfed my big-box store desk, so when I saw the old girl a few days later I snapped it up and took it home... With some help from a friend (it's very, very heavy), and promptly disassembled the particleboard jobbie and returned it to said big-box store.

The big old desk has moved with me from the apartment to our first house and now to the Homestead. MLW, who has never been unclear about her feelings regarding the relative attractiveness of my old office desk, had hoped that I would set it aside when I set up the home office here - a fresh start in a new place. Still, when the time came to claim that office I went ahead and cleaned up the old girl and put her in place.

I mean come on - I got it for $10 - how does one turn one's back on a deal like that when the old girl still worked perfectly fine?

There was much (well-deserved) eye-rolling at this decision, and the old girl sat in place, doing her duty in the new office, for the past five years or so. This, while I periodically looked at desks in catalogs, online, and during trips to IKEA.

It was finally time.

Advice to the wise - if the office furniture you are moving can be disassembled, don't wonder - just disassemble it.

Part of what I am re-realizing with this process is a bit of why people use big old office desks. That array of drawers has the potential to hide a lifetime of organizational sins. Taking the things out of it is a little like watching clowns exit a tiny car - one is amazed at the volume of things that can emerge from what otherwise seemed a relatively small space.

And this is why I sit amid chaos. What I pictured as a single day of relocating things, moving a bit of furniture and placing things anew did not go strictly as planned. Most of day one involved relocating things in a fashion that makes them accessible for re-relocating later. On day two.

What it illustrates as well is the struggle of trying to work towards a more minimalist office approach. I am extremely fond of the visual and philosophical aesthetic of the minimalist workspace. The reality of it, however, is considerably harder to achieve.

If one were starting anew - as a young person without the encumbrance of years of work and accumulation of cruft - it might be relatively simple to attain and - perhaps more importantly - maintain that ideal. For someone with a couple of decades of work under one's belt, however, it involves removing that accumulated cruft. This is, of course, consistent with the concept - hell, it's a core tenet of the concept, that one is freed from being owned by the things one owns - but it also means that one has to sort through that cruft and determine what remains and what does not.

This is considerably more challenging than never having accumulated it in the first place.

For millennials and subsequent generations this might well not be the same issue. As we work towards a more digital world - one that some people continue to hold out against - the need for all of the assorted office supplies designed to manage paper will diminish and disappear.

To be clear, this - and one other item - is the bulk of the remaining struggle. As a person who began his career towards the dawn of the digital age, and working within a field that still has not entirely entered that age, my office continues to contain the paraphernalia needed to cope with King Paper. So: what to do with all of the envelopes - Manilla and otherwise - hanging files, paperclips, printer paper, etc? I cannot simply be rid of all of them (if I could, this would be much simpler) because my work still continues to require them. This is a progressively smaller and smaller need, to be sure, which I realize when I look at the astonishing pile of paperclips that I have gained as the papers they used to secure have been either digitized or simply eliminated, but how much of it will I need going forward - how much do I retain.

The one other item that enhances the challenge towards a delightfully minimalist space is the older technology. Desktop computers - even sleek, streamlined machines like Apple's iMac, a version of which sits on my desk as I write this (on my iPad), require an array of cords and cables to sustain them and their peripherals. This means that my futuristic desktop machine has attached to it an embarrassing tangle of wiring that was readily, easily hid behind the solid facade of that old desk. The iMac and I both knew it was there, of course, but we never spoke of it.

This will be manageable, of course - I've already got the cable organizers and such ready to be applied (more of day two - or perhaps three?). This is again a transitional problem. As we move ever forward towards mobile devices most of what all of that wiring does is now manageable wirelessly. But legacy requirements still present the periodic need for these wired machines, at least for my work and, I suspect, still for the work of many others.

It does seem that, in the near future, our homes and home offices will be able to achieve that clutter free ideal that you see in the IKEA catalog; or as I think about it, my Victorian-era homestead will return to the appearance that it had before the electric, and then digital, age modified it. It seems close.

But it's not here yet.

Bicycle Adoption - a Timeline Analysis

In the western world we live in an automobile-dominated society. Whether it involves tooling down the interstate at 70 miles an hour, or pulling up to a drive-thru window to pick up your food, your medications, or to withdraw money from the ATM, it's easy to see that we've designed much of our entire transportation system, and indeed our lives, around these vehicles.

This is, of course, a phenomenon of the last century, give or take, and it certainly wasn't always this way. While it seems perfectly clear now, from our modern perspective, couched within this car-centric society, why people might prefer to travel in an automobile rather than by bicycle, I sometimes wonder why it is that the bicycle didn't take a greater hold on our transportation needs. For millennia we relied upon our feet, and the power of domesticated animals, to transport ourselves and our goods across distances. The bicycle fits nicely as an advance upon that lifestyle, and is, in fact, the most efficient type of human powered transport. It's also very flexible for traveling on variable road surfaces - the cyclist who encounters a problematic road surface always has the option of walking or carrying the bike past an impediment.

The inklings of the why first started to dawn on me when I listened to the Wright Brothers biography, which started to suggest there might have been an issue of timing. To look at this more closely I spent a little time digging thru Wikipedia and putting together a timeline of transportation developments:

• 1869 - Frenchman Eugene Meyer invents the wire-spoke tension wheel.
• 1870's - Penny-farthing bicycles become popular.
• 1885 - John Kemp Starley produces the first successful "safety bicycle". This bike featured a steerable front wheel, wheels of equal size, and a chain drive to the rear wheel. It is, essentially, the first modern bicycle.
• 1886 - Karl Benz invents the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, widely regarded as the world's first automobile.
• 1888 - John Dunlop re-invents the pneumatic bicycle tire. Notable that, according to the Wikipedia entry on the history of the bicycle, this removed the need for complicated bicycle suspensions, and paved the way for the diamond frame design.
• 1898 - William Reilly of Salford, England, puts a two speed gear hub into production.
• 1903 - 3-speed gear hubs go into production.
• 1903 - The Wright Brothers make their historic flight at Kitty Hawk.
• 1900-1910 - The Derailleur gear set was developed in France.
• 1908 - The Ford Model T is introduced.
• 1933 - Paul Morand wins the Paris-Limoges race on a recumbent bicycle designed by Charles Mochet; Francis Faure rode a modified Mochet Vélo-Velocar (recumbent) 45.055 km (27.996 mi) in one hour, beating a 20-year old speed record.
• 1934 - Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) publishes a new definition of "racing bicycle" that effectively - and purposely - banned recumbent bicycles from UCI bicycle racing events.
• 1965-1975 - US Bike Boom; includes the 10-speed derailleur bicycle becoming widely available.
• 1981 - The first mass-produced mountain bike appears.
• ~ 1987 - 5-speed hub gears become available?

As I said: a matter of timing. The first modern bicycle appeared only a year before the arrival of the first modern automobile. It's another three years before a crucial invention - the pneumatic tire - appears, making it possible to design light weight bikes that are comfortable to ride (older bikes were often referred to as "bone shakers"), and that invention also benefitted the automobile.

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Enjoying this post? Check out our Cycling page for links to other cycling articles on Applied Life

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What's more, while early automobiles were not terribly fast - the original Benz Patent-Motorwagen had a top speed of 10 mph - the advancements that would have made bicycles competitive with those early cars, namely gearing, did not show up in earnest until the early 1900's. The Ford Model T, arriving in 1908, could travel at speeds in the 30mph range, with a top speed (which was surprisingly difficult to find information about online) of about 45mph. It's arrival is, for all practical intents and purposes, at the same time as that of the derailleur system, the chain and sprocket system that is a familiar feature on multi-speed bikes thru current day. The technology for bikes simply did not develop early enough for it to take hold.

While the inklings of this occurred to me listening to that Wright Brothers biography, it became starkly clear when I put together the timeline. It also opened up a couple of additional facts, about which I was completely unaware.

The second, simpler fact is that the real arrival of the precursor to the modern road bike in the United States seems to have been a later development. Growing up in the early 1970's riding my first banana-seat bicycle, I remember coveting what we referred to as a "10-speed" from the first moment I saw one. For a time I had a 5-Speed - essentially a 10-speed frame with only one front sprocket - which my parents had picked up at a garage sale, which made my young self think these were old bikes. Clearly that was not accurate.

The first, more interesting fact is the 1930's developments surrounding recumbent bicycles. In a series of events akin to the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy, or the Windows vs. Macintosh story, or, frankly, dozens of other stories in business, it appears that the manufacturers of upright bicycles banded together to significantly limit the exposure and development of the recumbent bicycle by having them banned from bicycle racing after it became clear that the recumbents were the faster bikes.

Given that recumbent bikes are both undeniably faster, and arguably more comfortable, than uprights, their development in the 1930's, occurring when automobiles were still in relatively early development, and with the financial opening of The Great Depression making automobiles challenging for many to afford, might have been the opening that the bicycle needed to again take hold. Alas, the shortsightedness of business defending the status quo seems to be an historical constant.

There have been many advancements in bicycling design over the past few decades - gearing continues to climb both for derailleur and hub-style gear sets, bikes are designed for all sorts of different surfaces, and recumbents have slowly gained in popularity. Still, it looks a lot like early development - with a little help from non-competitive practices - just happened within the wrong window of time for the bicycle to catch on as a primary mode of transport.

Tae Kwon Do - Achievements and Rewards

Yesterday I was offered an opportunity that few people get to experience: I was fortunate enough to be present while a young man, after years of hard work and focus, achieved his 4th Dan - Master Status - in Tae Kwon Do.

This well-earned achievement occurred not in isolation, but against the backdrop of others on their own paths of personal achievement. I watched, and participated, as a woman resolutely refused to allow her personal and physical struggles stop her from achieving her 2nd Dan. I saw one of the most determined boys I've had the pleasure to know and work with attain his 1st Dan. I watched as a deceptively tiny girl demonstrated such clear focus, recall, and grace under pressure, that she was awarded a double promotion. And all of this occurred while many others, including my own child and myself, continued on their own roads within the martial arts, taking their own steps towards their own goals.

This is perhaps one of the least recognized rewards to participating in the martial arts - the opportunity to see, to be part of people you know and have grown to care about pressing beyond their limits - or what they perceived those limits to be - to attain feats they may not have believed possible; to see children grow and mature, to learn to restrain their impulses, control their emotions, and overcome their fears, removing those roadblocks to success. It provides this opportunity again and again. This all in addition to the very real parental pride of watching my own child grow and succeed - and I have been given many opportunities to feel that pride as well.

From the outside martial arts may appear to be a way of learning to fight, to protect oneself, to learn to do some of the cool things that appear in TV shows and movies. For those with a casual interest and/or a passing interest in Kung Fu movies from the 1970's and '80's it may seem to offer access to a bit of mysticism, a way of learning to do things outside the norm. And, to be clear, it does offer those things.

But those things are hardly all it has to offer. In fact, they may not even be the most important things it has to offer.

So - Congratulations to Master Spencer, to Melanie, to Jason, to Leah, for all that you have achieved, as well as to everyone else who pushed through yesterday, working towards and achieving your goals. And thank you to Master Lee and Miss Gianna for making all of this possible. I'm honored to have been a part of it.

Orphan Apps

Like anyone else with a smartphone, I have a lot of apps on my devices - 145 on my iPhone 6s+, 165 on my iPad Pro. Some of these are apps I use every day, some routinely, and others only on rare occasion. And - lets be honest - a few of them are leftovers from a bygone era. Did I really download and play Heads Up!, the app from the Ellen Degeneris show? I guess I did, because here it stares at me. And I'm sure I'll play Plants Vs. Zombies again, so I'll just go ahead and keep it there in my games folder...

Some of the apps on my phone, as it turns out, have become orphans - applications that are still there, that I may use with some regularity, but which are no longer being actively developed by their creators.

When one goes searching for a given type of application there are often dozens of options to choose from in each category, and prices range from free to much farther up the spectrum, with options across that price range within every category. The array of choices can make selecting an app challenging - when you have dozens of versions of the same basic thing, which do you choose? Do you go with price, with features, with...?

I've begun to select apps based, at least in part, on a pair of different features: Longevity and active development. All other things being equal, I will prefer an app that has been around for a while and which has been actively and readily updated. In iOS, this information is available in the App Store on a given item if you scroll down a bit:

PC Calc, an advanced calculator app for the iPhone and iPad has been around for a long time - it's on its third major upgrade version (e.g. Version 3.5.3), and it's been updated as recently as March of this year. This is a clear example of an app being actively maintained by a developer who has demonstrated longevity in the iOS app market. In relative terms it's not an inexpensive app - $9.99 for a calculator app will seem to many a high price when there are multiple free options in the same category. But for my money a part of what these variables indicate is that the app will be much less likely to become an orphan in future updates of the operating system.

Unfortunately this perspective comes from experience. I have one app, for example - AccuFuel, a Mileage Tracker by a company called Appigo, which also makes a fairly popular to-do productivity app called "Todo" - that I've been entering mileage into since 2007, all told, and since 2011 for my current vehicle. All told, I have nearly four years worth of mileage data entered into this app (I am, shall we say, mildly fond of data).

Unfortunately, the company stopped updating the app back in 2010 and, while it continued to work for some time, it didn't make the transition to iOS 8. Since that update the entry interface is buggy (although it works), and it is impossible to export data out of the app. The company was aware of the problem, and claimed they were working on an update to the app.. Still - that was over a year ago, and nothing has happened with it. The company could have, at the very least, honestly admitted to users that they didn't intend to update or, ideally, provided an update that at least allowed the export to work so a user could get his or her mileage data out of the the app. Instead, it's clear the app is an orphan. I've given up up on it, and set up a spreadsheet for mileage in Numbers instead. While I like to support independent developers, it seemed best to move this task to an app developed by a more stable company.

And I'll be unlikely to use anything produced by Appigo in the future.

In other cases there is a middle ground, where I can see the orphan status in the cards. I have a speedometer app called aSmart HUD by Atoll Ordenadores. The app hasn't been updated for a year and a half, and while it works under iOS 9, some features are buggy (trip time sometimes starts in the negative numbers, which makes me seem faster than I am, I suppose, but cuts down on accuracy). The developer no longer lists the original app on the website (though it does have updated versions of it), and has provided no communication regarding intention on providing further updates or supporting this version of the app going forward. It looks like this apps parents are, metaphorically speaking, preparing to drop this app off at the orphanage.

Overall, the lesson in all of this is that I've found that it pays dividends to make some evaluation of the level of support and stability of the company producing the applications you use, particularly if I they are things that you intend to use over the longer term.

Amazon Prime Day

Amazon held its second annual "Prime Day" sale on Tuesday, July 12th. For the uninitiated, this is essentially a take on the concept of Christmas in July. Many things on Amazon are discounted, and those discounts come up at different times through the course of the day. Each discount is part of a limited lot so, for popular items, timing is of the essence.

What exactly will be on sale is unclear at the beginning of the event, though if the very short history can be relied upon, Amazon's own products - Kindles, Echo, etc - can be expected to be a part of the mix. Otherwise it's an event that largely involves scrolling through currently available and upcoming products to see if anything trips your fancy.

As an employed person, a sale that takes place on a weekday doesn't really afford the opportunity to spend a lot of time searching for deals (though it does go late into the evening). As such, I've taken the strategy of checking in to it later in the day, and mostly to see if anything I've been looking at, but holding off on, is on sale. Last year I managed to pick up a couple of battery packs for charging devices, one of which I keep in the car, the other I carry with me and use on my bike.

This year I ended up getting three items:

• The newer version of the Jumbl Bluetooth Audio Receiver that I wrote about a little over a year ago. As I noted then, these are relatively inexpensive, and the newer version has an upgraded version of Bluetooth, plus a standard microusb charging port.
• Bluedio over-the-ear headphones. These are Bluetooth headphones of the large, padded variety. I've been looking for something like this for a while. I really enjoy music, and like to listen to it loud, but in a household with other people the opportunity to do so is limited. These were inexpensive, with pretty decent reviews.
• Lampat desk lamp. This is an item I've been looking at for well over a year. I am a... little fussy when it comes to selecting furniture and lighting, since they are typically items you keep for a long time. This is something that I've liked the look of and, as a desk worker, I prefer task lighting to overhead lighting. But it originally ran at a much higher price.

To be clear, I'm not really a shopper. This sale reflects one of the very rare occasions on which I go into a store or a website just to see what's there - most of the time I'm looking for something specific. And - as with other "bargain" opportunities - you can't just assume that Amazon has the lowest price. For myself, I mostly find that it presents an opportunity to pick up a thing or two that I've been interested in at a price point that won't leave me disappointed if it didn't turn out quite as good as I'd hoped.

Cinderella Men

We delved into the movie Cinderella Man on Netflix yesterday. The movie is over a decade old, and I recall hearing about it before, but it must not have registered at the time. That's too bad - it's an excellent boxing movie, and it pulls at the heartstrings in just the right ways, without being overtly manipulative. 2005 me missed a treat by not seeing it when it came out.

Seeing this movie now reminded me about the recent passing of Muhammad Ali. When the news broke that Ali had died, it had occurred to me that I might want to search for video of The Rumble in the Jungle. Turns out you can find the entire fight broadcast - a little over an hour long, including Ali shadow boxing in the ring, warming up, waiting for Foreman to arrive, the commentators speculating on the outcome of the fight - on YouTube.

It's a great match, and well worth the small investment of time. Ali was not expected to win. At one point, before the match begins, a commentator refers to him as "the aging former champion", reflecting Ali's age of 32 years versus the 25-year old George Foreman. Besides being younger, Foreman was a monster in the ring. He entered this match with a 40-0 record, 37 knockouts (that's 92.5% of his matches ending in knockout, for the statistics nerds out there) with a reputation for delivering those knockouts within the first couple of rounds of a match.

But Ali, well... Watch it. It's astonishing how fast a 200lb, "aging" man can move...

Also of note is the excellent work of the referee, Zack Clayton. He's right there, throughout, rapidly breaking up clinches and unflinchingly separating two huge, dangerous men. As his obituary from 1997 will attest, they chose the right person for the job - he was an accomplished man in his own right.

And - as is often the case with Internet searches - this find lend to others. It appears that there are a lot of vintage boxing matches available on YouTube. For myself, I found it necessary to watch the Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Marvelous Marvin Hagler bout from 1987, a match I remember watching live with my parents back when it originally aired. I distinctly remembering asking my Dad whether, since he was heavier than both men, he thought he could beat them. He thought not, and suggested there might be more to fighting than just weight...

Comedians in Cars...

For most of the past decade we've been a streaming family. This started with a Netflix subscription, where we cancelled the cable subscription and relied upon the DVD's that came in from Netflix for our video entertainment. As technology has evolved over time it's grown to include streaming video services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, or Crackle.

Crackle? Yes. It's right there in your Apple TV Menu.

Crackle is the home for Sony Video offerings, both old and new. If you want to see Barney Miller, you go to Crackle.

It's also where you go to see Jerry Seinfeld doing Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. And this is delightful. Jerry picks up a Comedian in - that's right - a car, to go get coffee.

There's a period of brief focus on the car itself - be it a Ferrari, a Country Squire, or an ancient two-stroke Saab - all selected based upon it's likely relationship to the comic in question. The rest of the show focuses upon the comic his or her-self, and the questions Jerry Seinfeld can think of. Guests include Robert Klein, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Howard Stern, among many, many others.

It's delightful - check it out!

Game of Thrones Weapons & Fight Choreography

Warning - Game of Thrones Spoilers ahead

Game of Thrones is a big hit, so it's no surprise to say that there's a lot to like about this show. Like the Marvel Superhero movies, it seems to be a part of the geek entertainment revolution. Like with those superhero movies the mainstream appeal is understandable - it's very well written and directed, the actors are talented and beautiful, the show is full of action, and, well, it's HBO, so there's also nudity and sex.

For those of us who came up reading the comic books and fantasy novels upon which this revolution is based, the fear inherent in that mainstream appeal is that the stuff that we loved about these genres will be lost.

Fortunately, GoT delivers on the geek cred as well.

This past week's episode - S6E06 Blood of My Blood - reminded me just how much I enjoy the attention to detail with respect to weapons and fight choreography.

So much of medieval fantasy material focuses on swords - from King Arthur's Excalibur up through Lord of the Rings with Sting and Glamdring and Anduril, not to mention countless others in the vast cornucopia of fantasy novels - and GoT delivers on this, as I suppose it must. Ned Stark had Ice, John Snow has Longclaw, and Brienne of Tarth has Oathkeeper, among others. There is clear attention to detail - the swords are beautiful and appropriate to the characters. And this is good.

But what I truly love is how it delivers on weapons and components of medieval martial arts that traditionally get short shrift. One of the most outstanding examples (Spoiler Alert) was the battle between Oberyn Martell and The Mountain in Season 4:

This is one of the most beautiful examples of spear fighting I've ever seen in any visual entertainment. You can find a bit of it in in eastern martial arts movies, of course (and apparently the actor that plays Oberyn trained in Wushu to prepare for this fight), but seeing a spear used in western medieval-style fantasy as a weapon of focus is very rare. This is odd, given that it was likely a very common weapon. And it is very cool to see it used here, to great effect.

Of course, Oberyn gets lost in monologuing - lost in his Inigo Montoya moment - to disastrous effect. But this is no fault of his spear work.

The show delivered again last week (again, spoiler alert) with the arrival of Benjen Stark to rescue Bran. Here we see two separate weapons on display, in what must surely have been well researched action. The first weapon is the more obvious, if unusual: a (flaming) flail and sickle connected, I believe, by a very long chain.

The second weapon is Benjen's horse.

Thought has gone into how both of these weapons will work in the type of battle that Benjen engages in during this scene. The flail is flung, and wrapped around the walkers; the sickle is used both to hack into and to drag opponents. It's an amazing visual display.

And the horse? It dispatches two separate walkers, one with it's front hooves, and another by crushing it against a tree.

Both are things rarely seen in visual entertainment. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen a sickle and flail like the one employed here, and the best example I can think of with respect to use of a war horse is from Ladyhawke, which is going quite a ways back (but introduced the 14-year old me to Rutger Hauer and, let's be real here: Michelle Pfeiffer).

A little internet research suggests that there are a couple of people who likely deserve thanks for this. The fight choreographer for GoT is William Hobbs, and Tommy Dunne designs the weapons and teaches the actors how to use them. I am thankful for both of them.

In so many ways, GoT is the gift that keeps on giving.

2016 Chevrolet Volt

As anyone who comes by this spot with any type of regularity will already know, transportation issues - whether it be roads, cars, bikes, trains, etc - fascinate me. In part this is because I believe that our approaches to transportation have a significant impact on the lives we lead; and, in part, it's because I'm a person who lives in a rural area and must travel considerable distances both for work and personal activities.

To the latter end, automobile efficiency has a significant impact on my life, and I've often tried to select my cars accordingly. When the original Chevrolet Volt came out back in 2011 I spent some time trying to understand how to figure out whether it would be a good choice for me. This turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be:

The Chevy Volt has a problem.

Confusion.

This past February I had the good fortune to attend the Chicago Auto Show with the inimitable Ted E. Dunphy. We go to the auto show every year or two, but this year I was particularly interested in seeing and having the opportunity to ride in the Chevy Volt. The ride was fun - around a short track inside McCormick Place, the cars running entirely on electricity.

What was more interesting - and perplexing - was trying to figure out what kind of mileage I would get with the car. Usually this is a relatively straight-forward thing, published clearly on the window sticker of each new car. But if the Volt were treated the same way, it's sticker would just say "it depends".

In a nutshell, because the car has an electric only range, how much gas a person would use would depend upon how far they drive - the more driving done outside the range of the electric motor, the less attractive the Volt becomes.

In that original post I compared the 2010 Volt to two of my own cars - a 2007 Mini Cooper S and a 2010 Honda Fit - as well as the Toyota Prius, which is probably its primary competitor. I also included the original Honda Insight, a car I have always been interested in, albeit one that is very different than the rest of the group.

For the original Volt it turned out to best all of the others in real-world mileage for people driving less than 25,000 miles per year, over which the two hybrids - the Prius and the Insight - caught up with it. Even then, though, the Volt was still competitive in terms of mileage.

Where it suffered, though, was overall cost of ownership:

But gasoline is not the only cost of owning a car. Most people buying a car will borrow, and that cost will always be a relevant factor. If one compares the same cars, including the monthly car payment assuming a five year loan with no down payment for each new car, and the blue book value and a two year loan for the Honda Insight, and my current car payment for the Mini, one gets a considerably different picture... Because of it's relatively high purchase price ($32,780 after government rebate), adding in the car payment ramps up the cost of Volt ownership considerably.

I found then that, ultimately, the cost of monthly payments completely reversed the situation, and the Volt moved from least to most expensive to operate. The price of entry was a more relevant component than the fuel costs.

Several important things have changed since 2011:

• The electric range of the Volt has increased considerably - from about 35 miles to 53 miles.
• The MPG rating of the gas generator - the mileage the car gets after it runs out of battery charge - is also much higher, rising from 37 mpg to 43 mpg.
• The original Volt required premium fuel, while the new one gets by with less expensive, regular unleaded.
• The price of the Volt has dropped. With the government rebate in place, the purchase price is now $26,495.00

So the question is, what kind of a difference do those changes make?

This time around I compared the 2016 Volt to the 2016 Prius and the 2016 Honda Fit. I also included my 2010 Fit as a comparator to evaluate against a fully paid-for, relatively efficient compact car as an option. Assumptions made were:

• An average fuel price of $2.183 per gallon, based upon the Midwest price on 5/2/16 from the US Energy Information Administration website.
• Mileage ratings of 34 mpg for the 2010 Fit (based upon my personal measurements), 37 for the 2016 Fit, 52 for the 2016 Prius, and 43 for the 2016 Volt.
• To account for the Volt's all electric range, the number of miles it traveled was reduced by that range, assuming overnight charging only (e.g. no opportunity for additional charging during the day). For example, a yearly travel amount of 10,000 miles was averaged out to 200 miles per week, or 40 miles per day over five days (a work week) for the other cars. The 40 miles per each day was decreased by the electric range of the Volt - 53 miles - to calculate the remaining average miles traveled per day, and that remaining mileage was calculated against the Volt gas generator mpg of 43 miles per gallon.
• The same price of $26,495.00 for the Volt and the Prius. This decision was made because there are so many option levels for the Prius that it's price ranges from about $24k up to well over $30k. This seemed simpler and more straightforward.
• The 2016 Honda Fit model selected was an EX with a handful of options based upon my personal preferences (The EX is the highest end Honda Fit that is available with a manual transmission) for a purchase price of $19041.00.
• Monthly payments were based upon a 5-year loan, with no down payment, a 6.25% sales tax (Illinois), and 3.26% interest, calculated on the car payment calculator on Cars.com.

With all of this done, what I found was this:

The Volt is still the hands-down winner in terms of fuel cost:

If you drive less than 10,000 miles per year, odds are good that you will pay virtually nothing for fuel over the course of that year, and the cost for folks at 15k/year is less than $100. Back in 2011 the Volt's advantage leveled off with the Prius's for people who traveled 25k or more miles per year. With the improvements in range and fuel efficiency the 2016 Volt maintains a considerable advantage in fuel economy all the way up to 30k per year. If you are a high mileage driver deciding between a Prius and a Volt, on average the Prius will use $1259.42 worth of gas per year, while the Volt comes in at $850.35.

As in 2011, things change when we add in the cost of purchase:

What we see here, unsurprisingly, is that your cheapest option is still to own your own economy car outright (the 2010 Fit), and that the amount of fuel savings of neither the Volt nor the Prius is sufficient to compensate for the difference made by buying a conventional economy car that is several thousand dollars cheaper. If you must buy a new car, and you are looking for the least expensive overall cost of ownership, something comparable to the Honda Fit is still your best option.

What is pleasantly surprising to learn, however, is that the improvements made for the 2016 Volt make it less expensive to own than a price-comparable 2016 Prius, even for very high-mileage drivers. If you must buy new, and you are comparing hybrid options, the Volt is your best bet. General Motors has come a long way down this road, and it's worth noting that this is only the second-generation of the Volt. Toyota is on it's fourth generation of Prius, and has been building them now for nearly 20 years (the first Prius came out in 1997).

Of course, one does not have to buy a price-comparable Prius. The Prius comes in at a lower base-price, and one could opt for that car, which costs $24,200.00, according to Toyota's website. But it turns out that the cheapest Prius comes out to mostly be comparable to the Volt:

So - if you are selecting between the Volt and the Prius, you aren't really saving much in terms of overall cost of operation by opting for the base Prius to get in at a lower initial purchase price. Given Toyota's head start on this I'd still call this advantage Volt.

---

And Now for Some Speculation

I noted above that the fuel savings of neither the Volt nor the Prius were enough to make them less expensive than a conventional economy car like the Honda Fit. This is the case, in part, because gasoline is relatively inexpensive in the US at the moment. Out of curiosity I adjusted amounts to see what gas prices would need to be in order for that savings to make the difference.

The Volt takes the advantage here as well. It starts to become cost-comparable with the Fit for low mileage drivers at a gas cost of about $4.75 per gallon:

And it's comparable or better for all drivers if gas rises twenty-five cents to about $5.00 per gallon:

As can also be seen here, the Prius is still more expensive to own than the Fit, though it's getting closer to comparable for super-high mileage drivers. The Prius reaches a comparable level for those at 40k miles per year if prices rise to $5.75 per gallon, but at that price the Fit is still the better deal for anyone driving 35k or fewer miles per year:

For the Prius to reach a point at which it was comparable or better for every mileage point on the graph I had to ramp the cost per gallon up to $20.00:

And, at this (hopefully) unbelievable cost level, buying a new Volt is actually a better deal than keeping your old economy car, regardless of how many miles you drive per year. Or it would be, except that it seems likely that, were gas to reach $20.00 per gallon, we'd be cruising the wastelands in Police Interceptors, heavily modified dune buggies, or gyrocopters searching for food and a bit of juice... But I digress...

The larger point to this last bit of fiddling with numbers, I suppose, is that the Volt becomes the most economical new car choice in this mix at a fuel price not that far above prices we've seen in the past decade. This suggests that, from an economical standpoint, General Motors appears to be, at this point, far ahead of Toyota in terms of having a realistic financial savings based upon fuel economy.

Perhaps the only remaining caveat here is that the Volt's purchase price continues to include a federal tax subsidy, and things would be somewhat different - the Volt loses its cost advantage over the Prius under those circumstances. But the current reality is that the tax break is in effect, so it remains a part of the calculation here. And, given the progress GM has made on all fronts with this car, and its ongoing work on the electric side with the upcoming Bolt as well, it doesn't seem too optimistic to believe that they will reach a point of unsubsidized price parity with Toyota in the not-too distant future. This all leaves me far more excited about American - and specifically GM - vehicles than I have been in a very long time.

Evaluating Reported Science

On the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver tackles the problem of science reporting in the media. It's an incredibly important issue, and he manages it quite nicely.

We are, in our modern world, surrounded by the products of science. I'm writing this post on a technological miracle, and making it available to you on a worldwide network that would have been impossible to imagine a century ago. We live longer, we are healthier, we are safer than any generation that came before us. It's really not possible to overstate the benefits we've received from science.

Despite all of that, the actual process of science is often very difficult for people to understand. When science is portrayed in stories, whether books, television, movies, or what have you, the necessity of storytelling presents it as a dynamic, active, and rapid process. It's not. The reality is that real science is slow, methodical, plodding. It's fascinating to the people conducting it, to be sure, but it's not something that makes good fodder for entertainment.

The entertainment portrayal of science seems to interact with a growing tendency for researchers to report information partway through the scientific process. If I've begun a study and I find something interesting, a press release on that effect may bring attention - and possibly funding - to help me continue my study. Research funding is a challenging and competitive process, and one can see why researchers would look for every opportunity to get their particular project out in front of others.

The difficulty is that the interaction here leads to the portrayal of information in the fashion that John Oliver so deftly demonstrates. Each study that's discussed gets similar air time and treatment as another, with little to no evaluation of the relative merits or applicability of the research. And this is problematic at best.

For professionals that work in any healthcare-related field this often means spending time explaining to clients, patients, and concerned family and friends why the thing they heard or read about does not mean they should suddenly go out and change their diet to include eating 473 grapefruits each day, or begin sleeping hanging upside-down in their closet.

Overall, this trend suggests a need for ongoing educational focus on critical evaluation of information. This isn't a new idea, and it's certainly not one I'm coming up with on my own. As those links show, there is considerable thought and effort towards teaching students - starting in adolescence - how to evaluate information they find online.

This is excellent, but I strongly believe there needs to be more. Evaluating information online is only a part of the picture. It's clear, as time goes on and information becomes more pervasive and readily available, that the relative value of memorizing facts has declined, and understanding how to get the information you need is the more relevant skill. Again - this isn't my revelation, instructional processes have been acknowledging this for some time now.

Children should be taught, perhaps starting in adolescence, and repeatedly following, how the scientific process actually works, and how to critically evaluate scientific research. This should include at least the following questions:

• What was the design of the study? Did it include controls?
• How many subjects were studied?
• Who were the subjects? Humans? Animals?
• Was the sample representative? If so, of whom?
• Has the study been replicated? If so, how many times, and was the same effect found each time?

Science is, by its nature, long, slow, and methodical. Significant findings, when they occur, should be replicated by additional studies before results are ever felt to be a real phenomenon. The genie appears to be out of the bottle with respect to the infusion of incomplete scientific information in the media. Given this, our kids need to be able to realistically understand when they are receiving useful, actionable information.

Game of Thrones Season 6

Tonight is the night for Game of Thrones fans around the world. We wait for the beginning of the new season the way football fans pine for the opening of the next season.

Or - at least - I hope tonight is the night. Since we'll be streaming the show via HBO Now, it's a bit of a mixed bag. The app itself says that HBO Now subscribers will have new episodes “every Sunday”, but the company hasn't always been super reliable at turning these types of things around. I'm a huge fan of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which also comes out every Sunday, but the folks who post it to HBO Now are often several days behind in getting new episodes up. But I digress - one suspects they will be more vigilant with a property as popular as Game of Thrones.

Season six is something extra special. GoT is, of course, a television adaptation of a series of books - A Song of Ice and Fire - by George RR Martin. While modifications have been made to the storyline to make it work better on the screen, the TV series has been largely faithful to the ultimate focus and intent of the storyline found in those books.

But: The end of season five reached the end of the storyline in the books.

This is, of course, not news to anyone who has slogged their way through all of the existing books. Those of us who have spent that time - whether reading words on paper or screen, or listening to it via audiobook as was the case for me - have been well aware for some time that the pace of the TV Series was such that it was going to reach the end of the books before Martin had an opportunity to put out the next installment in the series.

I, for one, am very excited by this prospect. In part this is because this will be the first time since season two that I have no idea what to expect (I started listening to the books after watching the first couple of seasons). Like many, perhaps most, I have ideas about where things might be going, but I don't actually know where they will end up now. This, in and of itself, is exhilarating.

But there's something more. Frankly, I think the TV writing team does a better job with the series than Martin does himself. I described the books as a slog and, in many ways, they are. While they are ultimately entertaining as a whole, Martin gets lost in details and secondary (and tertiary, and perhaps quaternary) storylines that spend pages and chapters often, it seems, to little effect. It often seems as if he has been given a book contract without being assigned an editor.

The show writers, given the limitations of time to tell their story, has chosen to eliminate several of those components. They have consolidated characters, choosing instead to focus on a relatively limited set of primary and secondary players (yes - all of those people you are keeping track of in the TV Series really is a much shorter list than you'd need to manage if you were reading the books), and removing entire sections of storyline. There is a seemingly endless period of river flooding that seems it will never end in the middle of the series, for example, taking place during the time Arya is traveling with The Hound. Their travels end much the same in the show, but there is no flood, it doesn't take nearly as long, and Brienne and The Hound do not face off in the book. The TV writers are able to communicate the key components of the relationships and lessons learned much more succinctly, and in a more satisfying fashion.

To be clear, I do realize that the show runners are following the outline provided by George RR Martin. I'm happy to acknowledge that the show is his creation. But the originator of an idea isn't always it's best caretaker (I'm looking at you, George Lucas), nor it's most skillful operator. And sometimes the application of limitations leads to better outcome than having the world at your hands. The constraint of a fixed number of hours to tell a story, a fixed budget for cast, crew, and sets versus the seemingly unlimited space of a book makes a difference here in the decisions that are made.

So I'm excited to see what they do with the remaining story, and I'm excited to let them resolve it for me. I find, for now at least, I prefer that to waiting to see how Martin chooses to portray it on the page. It's questionable, in fact, whether I will choose to read (listen to) the remaining books after I've finished the TV series.

Time to Re-Tire

Last December I noted that I was running a bit behind on my tire-changing schedule, getting my snow tires onto my car later than I intended. This spring is no different.

We've had unusual weather here in Northern Illinois - our spring has seen multiple snowfalls late into the season, with the most recent just a few weeks ago, well into April. So - in this case, my delay is only partially due to procrastination. It seemed wise to wait a bit, to avoid having to contend with the white stuff in my all-weather tires.

As the weather gets warmer, though, one can start to see how the traits that make the tires so effective in the cold are a limitation during the rest of the year. As I understand it, the rubber in these tires is explicitly designed to stay softer in the cold than do other types of tires. This means that they become softer still when the temperature rises. Takin an off-ramp at speed becomes an interesting experience of feeling your car seem to roll to the side of its tires, bouncing and bobbling in a fashion that is, shall we say, not comforting.

And so, dear friends if you, like me, have been waiting for just the right time to get to this task, I say today is the day. For, although it's clear that this evening it will seem once again that winter is coming, it's actually done with us in the Midwest. For now.

Apple's New Notes

With iOS 9 Apple has given some serious love to its Notes app, including many features that you often have to purchase an app to get - drawing, some rich text editing features like bold, italics, etc, and capabilities like making different types of lists (in particular I like the checklist option - great for making shopping lists).

With iOS 9.3 they have added the capability to lock individual notes so the content is kept from prying eyes.

This is great. Because Notes is a system app, it's likely to fall to hand for marking down all sorts of information on the phone, some of which the owner might not want others to see. But its implementation of this feature is, well, a bit odd and clunky.

First, the feature has to be turned on in settings, and then an individual note has to have the locking feature enabled by tapping the share sheet. To finalize enabling it, the user has to either enter the password or use Touch ID. All of this is fine, I suppose, though a bit obscure, particularly with the enabling feature in the share sheet menu (which otherwise mostly houses ways to, you know, share things).

What's odd here is that this process enables the lock, but doesn't lock the document. You have to then tap the little lock symbol in the upper right hand corner to formally lock the document. What's more, you also have to do that every time you exit the document in the future.

What I mean is this: Say you go through the process of locking a document, and then go back to read it again, edit it, etc. When you get done with that, and navigate out of the document, it remains unlocked unless you manually choose to lock it. What's more, unlocking that note to edit it also unlocks every other locked note you have in Notes.

To their credit, there is a "lock now" button at the bottom of the document menu screen which, when tapped, locks all open notes. And when I manually lock the note I was working on, it also locks all of the other notes that I inadvertently opened as well. But why this manual process to lock? If I really am protecting sensitive information in a note, wouldn't it be better for it to lock automatically when I exit, always requiring a password or Touch ID to open it again? Then I would know it, and all of my locked notes, are always locked - there would be no need to, say, check to see if my notes were locked before I handed my phone to someone else to look at.

One suspects that this is an attempt to compromise. Other notetaking and writing apps can have a password applied, but this is typically to access the the entire app. Here you can access the Notes application itself without entering a password, but your notes themselves can be protected. One can see the value in that - I can show another person what's on a note without giving them free access to everything I've written. The same cannot be said for an app like Day One, an otherwise excellent journaling program. There, when you enter your password or Touch ID and hand your device to another person you have just granted them free access to anything you've ever written in that app. The Notes solution is better, I suppose, if you want to be able to show others selective information on your device. But honestly, those notes I want secured should automatically secure themselves when I exit them - period.

Time Change...

Today is, of course, the start of Daylight Savings Time here in the United States - a day that presents distaste and a bit of dread for many. It steals an hour from us each year simply to make it lighter later in the day, a phenomenon that, with the nature of the seasons, was already well on its way toward taking care of itself without our crazy clock dance.

This also leaves me with the weighty responsibility of moving about the house and adjusting the time on the analog clocks that we have scattered around the home. It occurs to me that this latter activity is one that, like so many others, is likely on its way out due to the changing nature of technology. For many of us, the clock dance is taken care of automatically, as our cell phones are also our primary timepieces, and they update religiously based upon location and event. In addition to updating for DST, anyone who has traveled across the country with their phones in recent years is also familiar with the fact that they update to the local time zone when you pass across those borders.

It's certainly a convenience, even in my household, as I no longer need to calculate whether I'm advancing forward or taking back - I just look at my iPhone and make the clock on the wall match it. And as I do this I find myself considering the relative value of those clocks at all.

I enjoy an analog clock. I find, with a lifetime of practice, that I can quickly determine the approximate time by glancing at the positions of the hands on a clock face. But my daughter would not say the same. We will routinely be standing in the kitchen, which has two wall clocks opposite one another, and she will say to me "what time is it?" For my own personal entertainment I will point at the larger of the two clocks, as if perhaps she is unaware of its presence. This is then followed by her departure as she moves about the house to find her phone in order to read the time on its digital display.

Like handwriting or paper books, it's unlikely that analog clocks will disappear in their entirety but, as time goes on, it seems likely that they will fade back to become luxury and/or fetish items. And, upon reflection, it isn't all that surprising that this is occurring. Analog clocks are significantly harder to read than a simple digital display of the time.

The thing is, they don't actually need to be. The other day I came across something - or more accurately, I realized something about a thing that I've been looking at, off and on, for a few years now. I have, on my iPad, an app called Emerald Observatory.

This lovely looking app has a number of features that are tied to the movement of the planets, including a display of the relative daylight across the map, and so on. It also includes both a standard analog clock with two hands, and a single-hand 24-hour clock. I'm a little embarrassed to say that I don't believe I realized, until now, that this was part of what I've been looking at over the couple of years that I've had this app.

And it turns out that single-hand clock faces are a thing.

Setting aside one's own lifetime of experience reading traditional analog clocks, how much simpler would it be for a new learner to pick up reading the time on one of these? Rather than sorting out what to do with the minute hand, and remembering that the hour hand isn't going to point directly at the current hour unless it's the exact top of that hour, and so on, one only needs to look at the relative position of the hand between the hours. If it's quarter past, the hand will have moved a quarter way past the hour. Half past? Halfway. Quarter till?... You get the idea.

Our history is replete with examples of society adopting and keeping less than ideal versions of things due to primacy, or political or business strategizing - highways instead of railways, the failure of the U.S. to adopt the metric system, the proliferation of Microsoft Windows, etc. This, combined with the fact that digital clocks are both ubiquitous and easier still to read, makes this an idea who's time has past or, more honestly, essentially never came. Still, an intriguing idea in the abstract.

Things That Actually Kind of Suck: Facebook - Part Deux

So.

Facebook is a platform that is supposed to keep us in touch with our friends, our families, even when separated by vast distances. And, to some degree it does that. It's obviously immensely popular, in the literal sense of the word - a lot -lot - of people use it.

It's also doing a delightful job of illustrating some of the worst, and frankly creepiest features of the Internet in general and social media in particular. I submit, for your consideration, three examples, in order of escalating creepiness.

The first is the insistence Facebook has presented in suggesting that I follow Mark Zuckerberg. I assume absolutely everyone sees this particular recommendation, and it seems to be working, as he has a metric shit-ton of followers already:

Now, I've repeatedly tapped that little "X" in the upper right hand corner to make him go away, and yet he repeatedly returns, like the veritable bad penny or the frustrating bit of dog poo on your shoe that is too tiny to find so you can remove it, but stinks to high heaven. Facebook supposedly uses algorithms to determine who it should recommend you follow. Apparently the salient variables in this particular algorithm are:

• Does this person exist on the planet earth?
• Does he or she have a Facebook account?
• If yes to both, recommend the Zuck.

To be clear, Facebook, I would not, could not follow him on my phone.

I would not, could not, look at him in my home.

I would not, could not tap him on my iPad.

I would not, could not - this recommendation makes me mad.

(Apologies to the estate of Dr. Suess)

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The second item is the eerily targeted advertising. The other day I was listening to the ladies on the Nerdette Podcast interviewing Sarah Vowell. It occurred to me that I had a friend, who is a history buff, who might enjoy one of Sarah's books, Assassination Vacation. I hopped over to Amazon to see if it was available there so I could send her a link.

That evening I sit down on the couch and begin to scroll through my Facebook news feed, and I see this:

This has become a regular occurrence. My child needed to read the book Life of Pi for school, so I sent it as a Kindle gift and, sure enough, there on Facebook was an ad for Life of Pi.

And let's just set aside, for the moment, just how f&@king stupid it is to advertise a book, that I just bought, to me. Is there some hope that I will have been so excited about my purchase that I will run off to Amazon and buy it again?

And - while we are at it, have you ever noticed how many of the sponsored links that show up on Facebook say that your friends have "liked" that particular item? It's clear that at least some portion of this is an outright lie - check with your friends and ask them if they've done so. I happen to have two of my Facebook friends living here in the same house with me, so I've had the opportunity to do exactly that, and it turns out the answer is "not so much". One of those two - my child - is on Facebook only by protest (apparently the cool kids nowadays prefer Instagram which, I've been informed, I would know if I were a cool kid... But I digress...), and it's quite rare that they even open the Facebook app. And yet, there they are, liking products on a routine basis.

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Item number three has to do with phone numbers - specifically, mine.

For some time now, Facebook has been encouraging me to share my phone number with them "for security purposes". This is irritating, to be sure, but it's only that. It's likely an artifact of the extremely limited amount of personal information I actually put on my Facebook profile. As a matter of principle I limit this - ultimately, Facebook is an advertising company - yes, it's a social media platform, but advertising is their source of revenue, so this is really what they are - and I just don't see handing my particulars over to such an entity.

So - irritating I can put up with. In fact. Irritating would describe about 80% of the Facebook experience anyway. So, you know, c'est la vie.

But the other day, something different happened. Instead of "tell us your phone number" I had a notification indicating a specific phone number, and asking if it was mine.

It was. It was my personal cell phone number.

That number is unlisted, and is on the do not call list. I share it sparingly. I have never entered it into Facebook, and won't ever do so.

And there it was, right on my screen, waiting, wanting for me to verify it.

Where did Facebook get it? After a bit of thought, I realized: Facebook got it from my friends.

Periodically this evil little service will ask its users to upload their personal contacts to its servers. If you scroll down to the bottom of the "Friend Requests" page it will offer you that option again, and you will see a list of your Facebook friends who have already done so.

And, of course, some of those people have my phone number.

So let's take this in for just a moment.

This means that Facebook has scanned the contact information uploaded by other people, pulled my phone number out of that information, and used that data to try and get me to give them my number.

Which, let's be honest, they already have, so why would they need to ask me? And in what universe does it register as being okay to both do this in the first place, and to then think that it will be well received to present it to me and ask me if I'd like to verify it?

It's uber-creepy.

What universe is it in which these things seem okay? Mark Zuckerberg's universe.

Which is why I won't be following him.