Silent Cell Phone

Cell phones are wonderfully convenient, but like many (most?) modern conveniences they have their downside as well. There are the cell phone drivers who are paying more attention to their conversation than their driving. Then there are those who will take a call in a crowded restaurant and drown out everyone else's conversation in the room. More people these days are taking their cell phone conversations outside, away from other people, which is nice.

I, being the grumpy old man that I am, still find listening to them, even if it is just a snippet, annoying. And then there is the other side of the coin: what if you are having a conversation that you do not want everyone else to hear? What can you do, besides run and hide?

I think technology may be able to provide a solution: noise canceling cell phones. Noise canceling is used on some Turbo-prop airplanes. There are noise cancelling headphones available. I am thinking that a speaker on the opposite side of the microphone from the cell phone user's mouth could be used to cancel the sound of their voice for anyone else in the vicinity.

Some other people also have ideas for cell phones.

I and others have noticed that people tend to talk more loudly when then are on the phone, and I have been wondering why that is. I have come up with a couple of ideas. One is that they are compensating for the ambient noise level. The ambient noise where the two parties to a phone call are is almost by definition going to be different. If you standing next to someone, the ambient noise level is the same for both of you, so you can filter out the background noise to pick up the conversation. On the phone, you have two sets of background noise to deal with: yours and the other person's. By speaking up, you are creating a larger difference between your voice and the background noise, which makes your voice more distinguishable.

The other idea is that by speaking louder, your voice acquires more dynamic range, which makes it easier to understand, regardless of the background noise.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Library

A friend of mine lives near Oregon City, but is not thrilled with it because their library is very poor. She feels this reflects the town's overall character.

Beaverton's old library was converted from a supermarket. It was always busy. I used to stop in occasionally. A few years ago they got a brand new, fancy library with landscaping and fountains, fancy woodwork and computers. I stopped by there at lunch one day a couple of years ago and they were closed. Not only were they closed, they were almost never open. Their hours were something like 10am till 2pm Monday, Wednesday & Friday. I could not believe it. Budget cuts, I suspect. I think they may have longer hours now.

Hillsboro had a decent small library. I go there occasionally. Not as often as I used to. They were closed a couple of times when I went there when I thought they should have been open. A couple of trips like that and I just don't bother stopping by anymore. Their hours had likewise been restricted due to budget cuts.

Hillsboro just got a big, fancy new building for a library. I am not sure whether they bought it or they are leasing it. It is a two story office building in an industrial development park. It was finished and sat empty for at least a year before the library moved in. Like most modern stores, it is a commuter library, meaning you have to drive to get to it. I have been by there once or twice.

I get most of my books from bookstores like Barnes & Noble at Tanasbourne, Post Hip in Multnomah Village and occasionally from Powell's in downtown Portland.

I am not too pleased when a city uses tax money to pay for stadiums for professional sports teams, nor am I keen on city funded opera houses. I find the way the business of professional sports is conducted repellent. High brow culture like opera's and symphonies does not appeal to me in the least.

So I am not sure whether I should support public funding of libraries or not. Literacy seems to be on the wane. Should the proles be taxed to support the literate? Or do the literate have enough of an advantage that they should pay for their own habit?

From: Para Publishing

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57% of new books are not read to completion.

It could be that 57% of new books are not worth reading to completion, but the rest of these statistics are a little scary. 58% of the people never read another book after high school. Sounds like they are assuming they read books before they left. There have been periods in my life when I did not read books. I have always been reading something, sometimes it was just newspapers or technical manuals of one sort or another. I wonder how many people in the US cannot read. I also wonder how many don't read anything. Okay, everybody reads something, even if they don't know English they learn to recognize stop signs. So let's ask instead: how many people in the US read things that contain sentences?

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Windows is Wonderful, Part 9485

I have some old archive files I am trying to open. One is a compressed archive, 160MB file with a filename extension of ARF. I do not recall how I created it, and now that I want to expand it I can't. Searching the net for information of ARF files got me nowhere.

Another one is an old Microsoft Outlook message file. It has a filename extension of PST. No one will touch it. Seems the only way to open it is with Microsoft Outlook, which I don't have. Oh, look, you can download a free trial of Microsoft Office. It's only 800MB. With FIOS (Fibre Optic Internet Service, or something like that) this is actually possible. Now to install. Start it up and it starts grinding away uncompressing files. Gets all that done and tells me I need Service Pack 2. Gee thanks. I've gotten along just fine for years without having to install any updates, and now, just to access this one stupid file, I have to install SP2. Bah.

Fine. Download it and start the installation. It starts grinding away and I go to bed. Get up in the morning, and has it completed? No, it has not. It has gotten hung up with the screensaver. Cycle the power.... disable the screensaver. Restart the installation, go eat breakfast.

To make a long story short, I spent all morning on it, but I finally did get all the messages from the PST file loaded into Outlook Express, which came with the computer, so the new Outlook can go away.

If I want to get the files into any other format I will have to save them individually. After looking through them, it does not appear that any of them contain any really useful information, but at least I can read them now.

Of course, now I am stuck with SP2, and who knows what kind of changes/problems/difficulties this is going to create. I suppose I could try and remove it, but that is another time consuming mission that is also fraught with risk. Someday I will start over on a new computer, or maybe just a clean disk. This computer is still (cross my fingers) working fine.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

"Ladrón que roba a ladrón"

I suppose this is a caper movie. A couple of old pros and a handful of rank amateurs come together to rip off an infomercial con-man. The movie is full of characters, some deadly serious, some total buffoons, and some who are just out there.

There was one character who stood out in my mind, and that was this dark haired Latino beauty, who is playing this tomboy character. At the beginning she tries to pick a fight with everyone she meets. By the end she has mellowed and discovered her feminine side, much to everyone's relief.

There were a couple of other women characters in the movie, but none of them stood out in my mind. Good looking, clever, devious, admirable, but this feisty Latino is the one who captured my imagination.

There is one scene where she berates a security guard for "checking her out". In a subsequent visit to the security checkpoint, her mere appearance is enough for the guard to wave them on through, he doesn't want to have anything to do with her. I thought it was hilarious. I thought of it again today and I tried to tell my wife about it, but when I mentioned "the girl in the movie", she came back with "the wife?". This flummoxed me. I had completely forgotten about the wives in the movie. At first I could not even think of who she was talking about, and then I wondered why she would think of them. To me, they were almost non-existent characters. Curious what people latch onto in movies.

I think the title translates as "Thief Who Robbed a Thief". We watched the movie in Spanish with English subtitles, though I think dubbed English was available.

There was only one part of the movie I did not like and that was the very end where the thieves send out refunds to all the people who were duped by the sleazy infomercial guy. I am thinking what a pointless effort. If they are that foolish to send money to a charlatan once, and they get their money back, all they will do is find another charlatan to send it to. Maybe I am being too harsh. People are sometimes in stressful situations where their judgement is impaired. Some people's judgement is just not too good. Does it help to give them their money back when they have spent it foolishly? One of out of a hundred may learn their lesson, but I tend to think they would learn their lesson better if they did not get their money back.

This is the reason I am opposed to privitizing Social Security. Some people just cannot handle money. It is not in their nature. Some financial whiz-kids may think it is the simplest thing in the world, and for them it may well be. But it is not for everyone.

Some people say Social Security taxes should be invested and the dividends and/or interest used to pay for benefits. To do that, a great deal more would have to be collected to build up a large enough trust fund. That would be money that would be removed from the free market and put under the control of some investment gurus somewhere. Not a good idea. Keep the extra that would have to be siphoned off to build the giant Social Security trust fund and spend it or invest it as you see fit. If we are going to have Social Security it is better to pay as you go. Last thing we need is more investment gurus.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Just the Facts, Ma’Am

History is a curious subject. Just looking at the word you might conclude that it is a contraction of "his story". There are some famous sayings about it as well:

• Winston Churchill: "History is written by the victors."
• George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

(I remembered the quotes well enough to track them down on the web. I know who Winston was, and George sound familiar, but I really can't claim to know anything about him.)

Anyway, I was reading an essay in the New Yorker by Jill Lepore at lunch today about this topic and I came across this:

"Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes."

I enjoy stories, be they books or movies, that ring true. For the sake of the story, I am willing to overlook any number of flaws, if they do not interfere with the essential truth. Sometimes it is a little hard to decide just what is an "essential truth". More often it is just a feeling. Remember 1984? There was the department of revisionism where history was being rewritten on a daily basis. There is evidence of this going on in Communist countries like China and North Korea even now. And I don't know how many times our official American history has been rewritten just during my lifetime. Mostly this has been to the detriment of the US image, but often to the detriment of other countries as well.

I never really understood the war with Japan until I read "Flyboys" by James Bradley.

Religion & Science

I was brought up in the religion of science. That is science, mind you, not Scientology. Scientology may be many things, but it is NOT science.

My mother was a chemist and my father had a degree in physics. My father was a lapsed Catholic. I don't know if my mother's family had any religious affiliation. Belief in god was not a part of my upbringing, though they did teach me the Lord's prayer.

I was brought up to believe science could explain anything, and for the most part I still believe it. There is the occasional fuzzy place around the edges where scientific explanations do not seem to quite cover the situation, but that may be more due to the limits of what a human being can understand than due to God mucking about with our reality.

My wife's family are died in the wool Lutheran's. We got married in a Lutheran Church and we attend a church with Lutheran roots, at least occasionally. So I am nominally a Lutheran.

So I have a little conflict here. On one hand I have a complete rejection of all religion and on the other there is this huge Christian religion that permeates Western civilization. How do I resolve this?

I got one clue about ten years ago when we attended a different Lutheran Church on a somewhat more regular basis. After an adult Bible study class one Sunday when we were delving into some deep issue or another, I asked the pastor: if there weren't any people, would there be a God? His answer was no. Well, anyway you look at it, that makes a certain amount of sense. If there weren't any people, there wouldn't be anybody to care if there was a God.

I got another clue when I saw "Angels & Insects", a movie set in Victorian England about an entomologist who married into a wealthy family. There is one scene were the husband is out horseback riding. A boy comes riding out from house with an urgent message that the husband must return to the house. He does so and discovers his wife being indiscreet. There is some question as to who sent the boy with the message, and the only answer that appears is that "sometimes the house knows". A Victorian mansion has quite a population, what with family members, servants and hangers-oners. In a closed system like that nothing is going to remain undiscovered for long. So eventually this little society decided that something needed to be done and arranged to open the husband's eyes.

So I have evolved my own idea of God: he (excuse the masculine pronoun) is the collective subconscious of all the people in the world. That is why things like natural disasters still happen. They are not within the control of people. That is why people lost in the wilderness often die: there are no other people around. God is all powerful only when he has people he can operate through.

Why are there some truly rotten people around? God only knows. Perhaps they have some defect that prevents them from connecting and communicating with other people. People are very complex. I suspect that constructing a scientific model of human behavior would be akin to modeling all the atoms in the ocean. Theoretically it could be done, but it would take more resources than exist on this planet.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Bombardier

Bombardier snowmobile 1951

I gave some friends a ride to the airport this afternoon. They were flying on Horizon Airlines to LA. I thought this was a little odd because as far as I knew, Horizon only ran turbo-props, and I had never heard of a turbo-prop being used on such a long haul (800 miles) flight, at least not in the lower 48. Turns out Horizon is running a few jets made by, of all people, Bombardier, the same company that makes snowmobiles, or used to anyway. Seems that little old Bombardier has grown into such a huge conglomerate that a couple of years ago the small engine group broke off and became a separate company again.

Bombardier Q400

The jets are kind of an iffy proposition because of their high fuel consumption. For shorter flights, like up to 500 miles, the turbo-props are effectively just as fast. The turbo-props weakness is their high maintenance costs, or at least it used to be. Seems they have overcome that.

Some smaller twins, like the Aero Commander, that are normally fitted with turbo-prop engines are being fitted with converted automotive piston engines for better fuel economy. This was started by another Canadian company (Orenda).

Update August 2017 replaced one picture and corrected some links.