Getting Ready For The Addition

While we haven't committed to anything yet, we do believe we're getting close to signing a contract and having work begin on our new addition.

To this end, we've cut down 3 trees in the backyard to make room. It's made the backyard much sunnier, yet at the same time there's a more desolate feel to it compared to the intimacy that the cover of the erstwhile 3 trees provided.

We had talked to some people about the bid process, and one acquaintance of mine said that the 3 bids for his remodel project all came back at pretty much the same number. Not so with us. There was a pretty wide variation in terms of the bids we got back.

All the advice we've read (like This Old House magazine) have said to reject the lowball bid. Bit our low bid was so attractive price-wise that we could not ignore it.

The premise behind rejecting the low bid is that the contractor is probably taking some shortcuts to arrive at that price point, or is desperate for work. However we don't believe that to be the case here. We know that he is in the early stages of another sizable project. Also, in our dealings with the bid process, he has been the most detailed and organized of the 3. He was previously an engineer, so we believe that his meticulous preparation allows him to spec a job with more detail and accuracy than the others, who have probably built in a sizable safety margin to protect themselves.

If things go according to plan, we probably will start the project in a matter of weeks. Check out a previous post for details on what we're going to do.

Tribute In Light Panorama

Tribute In Light to honor victims of September 11, 2001 - Fullscreen QTVR Panorama



Here's a Quicktime panorama of the Tribute In Light, taken from street level looking straight up. Pan up from the initial view to get the best view.

Having Kids Lowers Your IQ

Indiana University study: having children significantly lowers parents’ IQs [hoosiergazette.com]: "People who before were intelligent and open-minded turn into raving lunatics who want to blame a teacher or coach every time their mediocre child fails"

As if it wasn't bad enough that I feel I am half as smart as I was in high school and college, now comes word that being a parent lowers one's IQ even further. The article has a kind of The Onion-essay parody flavor to it, so it's hard to know whether to take the Hoosier Gazette seriously. I'll have to look on i's site to see if there's a press release on the research findings.

It would be interesting to see if it is merely the loss of objectivity that is the basis for the reduction in IQ, or if there is a psychological effect that lowers IQ across the board.

But a loss in objectivity in one particular area does not necessarily have to point to a lower IQ. I once listened to a lecture from Nobel Laureate Daniel Chinaman, a cognitive psychologist who observed that most people over estimate their abilities. This was borne out by a question he posed to the audience: "All those who think they are better than average drivers, raise their hands." About half the audience did. Then he asked, "All those who think they are below average, raise their hands." Not one hand went up.

The obvious lesson is: since empirically there must be an equal number of above and below average drivers, this simple experiment proves that people overestimate themselves, or at the very least their driving abilities.

Does this loss of objectivity necessarily have to manifest itself as a lowering of IQ? Does the fact that I think my kid is the best ever have some bearing on my abstract and visual reasoning capabilities? Like I said, it seems very suspect.

UPDATE: According to the Kinsey Institute site [indiana.edu], the article is a hoax. Also, just a little digging by me would have shown that the Hoosier Gazette "was created by a couple of guys who thought it would be fun to create a website that uses both real and fictional news stories to provide a humorous look at life and culture in the state of Indiana." So my "The Onion-esque initial characterization was right on. I still feel dumber than I did 20 years ago, though. :)

Revolutionary New Type of Nuclear Reactor Being Built in China

Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom [wired.com]: "... a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete."

Nuclear energy in the US and much of the industrialized West is very much a pariah among energy sources. Accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, not to mention many a Hollywood movie plot, have cast nuclear energy as an inherently dangerous method of generating energy: an operator misstep away from turning the entire planet into a glowing ball of radiation.

It turns out that it didn't have to be that way. From the very beginning of atomic research, there have existed ways to harness power from atoms without the danger of meltdown and radiation release. But historical decisions and inertia, not physics or science, are what have made all nuclear power plants in the US as dangerous as they are.

Traditional water-cooled designs have fuel rods which are essentially time bombs, prevented from going critical through the use of cooling water and control rods. If you fail to manage the controls rods properly, or let the cooling water drop to expose the fuel rods, you have a major problem.

Essentially, the new reactor design places great emphasis on the design and creation of the fuel elements themselves. The fuel elements are designed and arranged in such a way such that they physically cannot go critical, no matter what. From a safety design perspective, this should be a no-brainer. But for various reasons, this design was not adopted for nuclear power generation.

One beneficial side effect of this design is that it can also be harnessed to generate hydrogen from water. Think of it: an inherently safe, non fossil-fuel, non-greenhouse gas emitting energy source that can also be a catalyst to drive the adoption of non-fossil fuel energy for automobiles and fuel cells.

Yes, there is still the matter of nuclear waste disposal. And it's no small matter. The public also will need to be acclimated to the fact that nuclear energy can be much, much safer than it currently is. But with so many potential positives, I think it's definitely worth pursuing.

Even pre-eminent British environmentalist James Lovelock agrees: "We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear, the one safe, available energy source, now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet."

Backup Your Backups

Is your data really safer stored digitally? [detnews.com] "I popped the CD-RW into my PC with the same expectation one gets when cracking open a time capsule. And I got -- I got -- nothing but a Windows error message offering to format the unformatted disc in my PC. Everything I had saved, everything I had disposed of because it was supposedly safe, was gone."

This article highlights a fact for which many people have misconceptions: "digital" does not equal "forever." When CDs first came out in the 80s, people said, "Oh, they're digital, they'll last forever. Not like those pesky vinyl albums and magnetic tapes."

What they really meant to say was: "Oh it's stored in a digital format, so it'll be lossless for the life of the medium." Yes, you won't lose any information as long as the storage medium remains intact.

But now we're coming to realize that CDs and DVDs don't last forever, and this is especially the case with recordable CDs and DVDs: CD-R, CD-RW, and the myriad recordable DVD formats. The dyes in CD-Rs will eventually break down, as will the crystalline recording layer of CD-RWs. Recordable DVD have similar physical degradation issues. The optical media industry itself has estimated recordable optical media lifetime of between 20 and 200 years, though there have been reports that some become unreadable after just 5 years.

The current recommendation is to re-copy those backups to newer media every few years or so. Don't just assume that because it's digital, it's forever.

The article also highlights another less publicized issue: that of format obsolescence, as opposed to physical obsolescence. Got any documents in WordStar format? Or pictures in RLE? What can you use to read them now?

In addition to making sure that your physical media isn't degraded, you also need to be sure that your files can be read by existing software. Sure, JPEG seems like it's been around forever, and will always be here. But can you be so sure that it'll be a standard 50 years from now?