Reanna and I are in the process of officially combining our finances. I’d been a little nervous about it, but so far it’s going great. One of the tools we’re trying out is Mint.com, a free, online program for tracking money. Maya pitched us pretty hard on You Need a Budget instead of Mint, and my early impression is that YNAB is in a lot of ways simpler and more useful. We’re trying Mint first mostly because we can access it from our own computers. (How about some way to sync one account between two computers YNAB?) I’ll post a review after I know Mint better. So far, it seems adequate and is mostly pretty fun and intuitive for me, coming from Quicken.
One day in my psycholinguistics class in 2009, I had two ideas that my prof, Dare Baldwin, announced would make good doctoral dissertations. I wrote them down, thinking maybe I would use them. The way my mind works is that I seriously consider doing a Ph.D in every subject I study. A few months later I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do more research in psycholinguistics, so I wrote myself a note: “Look through notes from Dare’s class and post dissertation ideas for aspiring psycholinguists.”
Well I’m sorry to say that I’ve just looked through those notes and I can’t find the dissertation ideas, and one of them I have completely forgotten. The other I remember the basics of and if you are an aspiring psycholinguist you are welcome to it. Remember, this was in 2009, so check around to see if this research hasn’t been done already.
In Dare’s lecture, she explained that it is something of a mystery how exactly we hear voiced and non-voiced consonants as distinct from each other. If you pay close attention while you say the words “poor” and “bore,” for example, you might be able to notice that the only difference (at least with my accent) is how soon the vowel sound starts after the lips make the consonant. A slight gap between consonant and vowel creates a “p” and a smaller gap makes a “b.”
Using a computer to manipulate that gap, you can test what size of gap produces each consonant, and it turns out it’s a very specific and arbitrary-seeming size. We all hear the transition the same. And to make it even more mysterious, some other animals hear the distinction just like we do. How can this be an important distinction for animals to be able to make?
I believe that this is all due to a psychoacoustic phenomenon called temporal fusion. Any recording engineer knows that if you take two copies of a sound and space them at more than about 30 ms, you will hear both copies, distinct from one another. The second copy will sound like an echo of the first. If you space them at less than about 30 ms, what you instead hear is one, longer, thicker sound.
I bet you that 30 ms is also about the length of gap that starts to distinguish voiced from non-voiced consonants. That is, the length of gap is not arbitrary, but based on human hearing acuity. I will also bet you that other animals that can distinguish between Ps and Bs have temporal fusion that kicks in around 30 ms as well.
There you go. It should be easy and relatively cheap to test. If no one else has thought of it since 2009, it’s yours. If I remember the second idea, I’ll post it too.
I am aware that Tony Blankley worked for Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, but for me, Tony Blankley was the conservative voice on KCRW’s political show “Left, Right, and Center.” I discovered the show in the late 90s and have listened religiously for the last several years. After he died recently, they did a show in his memory and I was surprised at how emotional I became. I tended to agree more with the liberal and center voices on the show, but in retrospect, I really appreciate how Blankley approached their ongoing conversation. It wasn’t just that he was extremely intelligent and likeable. It was that he engaged the liberal and centrist positions with seriousness and respect, every week for years and years.
It’s a rare opportunity to get to listen in on that kind of conversation. It’s easy to find professional idealogs (and amateurs too, of course) mocking their enemies from a safe distance. On all sides it’s a straw-man game: shoot down a caricature of your opponent. I hope I am not an idealog, but I find myself doing the same thing. Listening to Blankley over the years has helped. In most cases, I can now see conservative positions not as differences in accuracy or integrity, but differences in values. He just had some different ideas about what was important than I do. And that is OK. We each get to say what is important to us.
A good lesson to learn. Thank you, Tony Blankley.
The cast of Left, Right & Center: Matt Miller, Arianna Huffington, Tony Blankley, Robert Scheer (photo by Marc Goldstein)
Reanna and I have just about finished re-sealing our 1962 Kenskill travel trailer. Everything that was screwed into the corrugated aluminum that covers the outside of the trailer had to be resealed: access hatches, tail lights, door, windows. It turns out that this is hard work and takes a long time. We did not anticipate this, mostly because the instructions for the process are very simple: 1) unscrew the window or vent or whatever, 2) remove the old putty tape, 3) apply new putty tape, and 4) screw the part back in. No problem!
Reanna vs. Butyl Putty
These instructions leave several questions unanswered, foremost of which is how much of the old putty tape needs to come off for the new putty tape to seal well? Old butyl putty is sometimes impossible to completely remove with a putty knife, short of scraping all of the paint off the aluminum. No one mentions solvents in removing this stuff, but that is the only way I can imagine getting it all. Even the non-butyl putty, which gets crumbly and easy to scrape off in its old age, hides in the tiny crevices created by staples and folds in the aluminum and takes almost forever to remove completely.
Another question is how important is it to leave the paint on the aluminum intact. I found that I could speed up the process of chipping and scraping the five or six layers of rubbery and/or rock hard sealants on the roof vents using my putty knife at a sharp angle and hitting it with a hammer. Uncovering a vent could take two hours to uncover, pre-hammer technique, and now takes only just over an hour. Unfortunately, it is an unsubtle technique which inevitably gauges the paint and the aluminum underneath. Is this a problem? Even if we are going to cover everything in sealant?
Also, is there any advantage to using non-butyl putty tape? Our extremely reticent local RV repair guy would say only that he used butyl for roofs and non-butyl for walls and that butyl was stickier. People who talk about it online mostly seemed to use butyl. We found the butyl to be much easier to work with and stopped buying the non-butyl after a couple of rolls. Half of the wall-mounted stuff like windows are sealed with butyl now. Will that be a problem?
I’d like to share the several techniques I invented during this job, but I have no idea what the results will be during the next rain, much less in a couple of years. There are only three things that I know I wish I had known beforehand:
1) Don’t go to the putty knife too quickly when removing the remnants of non-butyl putty. You can get a lot of it off by rubbing hard with a wet rag for a while. It is not easy to do for hours, but quicker than going after each speck of putty with the corner of a blade.
2) You will probably have to throw away almost all of the screws you pull out, so you will spend a lot of money on new ones. And while you are correct in your initial assessment that the trailer is put together almost entirely of #8×3/4″ and #10×1″ screws, you will need a large assortment of other sizes because of water damage. I now have 3/4″ screws in #8, #10, #12, and #14, 1″ screws in #10, #12, and #14, and 1 1/2″ screws in #10 and #12. And several of those kinds of screws meant another trip to the hardware store to get them.
3) Sealing up the trailer will take a lot longer than a week if you have anything else you like to do with your life. More like three weeks. (Actually, I’m not sure I would have been better off knowing that one…)
And finally, here is the only video we found, after considerable searching, of someone actually applying putty tape. (Thanks, Canned Ham Trailers!)
I wrote this up and in the meantime, Gabriel won the state-level yoga asana competition for a second time! I don’t have video of him winning, but here’s a photo, and see the footage from his last win below.
Gabriel, Winning Oregon
Posting the video of my brother Damian playing with Eric Burdon reminded me of a video clip of my brother Gabriel that I’m super proud of. This is Gabriel competing (and winning) in Bikram Choudhury’s Oregon state hatha yoga championship two years ago. I wish I had footage of him competing in the nationals, too, but sadly I do not.
My Grandpa Bob turns 93 today. I feel so lucky to get to live with him and interact with him every day–he lives most of the year in a trailer on my parents’ property in Joshua Tree, so we’re neighbors right now.
Grandpa Bob is one of my best role models, and his current living situation reminds me of how he inspires me the most. Instead of focusing on his own material security, for the past 45 years he traveled around the country, helping our his friends and family wherever he went. Whenever Grandpa Bob showed up, you knew that things were going to get done. He’d tune your piano, help build your house or shed or boat, dig a septic, whatever. He would enthusiastically join in or start projects. And when the work was all done, he’d always have good conversation about some topic he was delving into, usually from the fringes of human thought.
The result of this lifestyle is that now, when his memory and mobility are keeping him from being as helpful and active, he has built up so much goodwill that he has a lot of options in his old age. He lives with us in the winters and with our cousins in Idaho in the summers, but I imagine he could live with any number of friends and family around the country who would gladly take him in. He didn’t worry about money. He just built community. And that is a good model for living, in my opinion.
Here’s Grandpa Bob (who actually flew biplanes) with my brother Ely, about to fly model airplanes–both of their favorite activity:
Ely, Grandpa Bob at Sunburst Park, December 29, 2011
My brother Damian recently played bass and sang backup for Eric Burdon on Google Music, doing Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody.” They shot at Rimrock Ranch in Pioneertown, a cool spot that Reanna and I had been looking at for a wedding venue. The rest of the band is Eric McFadden on guitar and Wally Ingram on drums. Here it is:
Yesterday I woke up to a violent wind storm. I walked up to the house for breakfast and found Grandpa Bob had been blown over in the driveway and he was struggling to get up. A gust had blown him straight over backwards. He was embarrassed but not injured at all. (I hope to be able to take a fall like that at 93!)
Growing up in the desert, wind was my least favorite weather. I’ve been blown into a ditch on my bike and had countless teenage hairstyles ruined by wind. It is kind of exciting to see something so powerful, though. We had gusts at 66 miles per hour, making it a “violent storm” on the Beaufort scale (see below), just between a gale and a hurricane. In the Pacific northwest, and especially in cities, this intensity of wind blows trees into houses and causes pretty radical damage. Stuff around here is built for wind. You might lose your roof and you will definitely lose anything that isn’t “nailed down hard,” as we say, but the plants and other structures will be fine.
Here are a couple of very short videos I took. Turn the sound down–they are loud. Can you see the sandstorm about a half mile away in the first one?
The Beaufort Wind Force Scale, according to Wikipedia:
I had the idea that animated maps could be a very cool way of presenting data. You could show changes over time and space of any quantity that we collect, and do it in a way that is much more intuitive and appealing than graphs or databases of numbers.
After some considerable (though not exhaustive) searching, these were the most interesting animated maps I found, and I think they are worth watching. I have to say, though, that my overall impression is that this is a sadly underused technique. Come on, data people! Off the top of my head, I’d like to see animations of demographic shifts, weather and climate changes, number of scientific papers published, regime change by region… Get creative!
I should say, before presenting the map animations I found, that I either do not know or am not certain of the accuracy of the sources of the data presented in these animations. Data presentation can be used to inform or mislead, and I do not present these as True, just Interesting.
Several religions mapped over time:
This one starts slow, but the first several minutes of nothing happening make the last couple minutes fairly shocking:
This is a cool visual presentation of global health and wealth. I often find presentations of data to be either dense and non-intuitive or boring. This one is interesting and inspiring.
Hans Rosling also has a TED talk here that is really worth watching, on population, fertility, child survival rates, and wealth.
(By the way, I found this clip while looking for good map animations, which seem like a great way to present data. It’s pretty slow going so far, though. Any recommendations?)
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 