Tipping

You know what would help me? If restaurants would pre-calculate the amount of the tip and put it on the bill. Trying to figure out what 15% of $37.83 is a real pain, especially once I've had a couple of drinks. They've got these fancy cash registers, have them calculate the what 5, 10, 15 and 20% tip would be. Just circle the amount you want to leave if you are putting it on your credit card. It would give you some guidance if you are paying by cash.

Or maybe I could just write +15% on the bill and let them figure it out. I wonder if that would work?

Behemoth Fire Trucks

Did you ever think fire trucks are too big? Maybe it's part of being in America, where everything is bigger, so fire trucks have to be bigger too. Seems to me you could do most of what a firetruck does with a much smaller vehicle. This would in turn give you a whole bunch of other advantages:

• lower cost
• less weight
• less horsepower required
• more maneuverable

On the other hand, maybe the production numbers can't justify the expense of designing a whole new kind of compact fire engine. However, the way people fight about taxes, and since fire engines are almost always paid for by taxes, I expect we shall see a change sometime in the next five or ten years.

Protected Professions: Pharmacist

I don't know but I suspect pharmacists are the most underutilized professionals in the world. Go to school, get a degree, and then go on to medical school and study drugs for who knows how long. When you finally get out you get a job loading pills into little bottles. I don't get it.

Now I can imagine a couple of reasons for this. One might be attention to detail. Giving someone the wrong drugs could have serious consequences. Perhaps all those years in school makes pharmacists more careful about dispensing drugs. Somehow I don't think so. Any number of jobs require attention to detail, even if they don't require a degree.

I think the big one though is control of the distribution of narcotics. Pharmacists have a large assortment of drugs at their command. Some of them are on the controlled substances list. Can't let just anybody get their hands on those. A pharmacist is more likely to follow the rules, because if he breaks the rules and gets caught he could lose his license. Someone who hasn't invested the time and money getting a pharmacists license is not going to be so concerned.

If people could get morphine at their local pharmacy that might cut into the local black market distribution network, which would cut into their profits, and we can't have that.

And while we are on the subject, are these new pain killers any better than the originals? I know they like to charge an arm and a leg for them, but why? The few bits on information I have come across stress some obscure advantages of these new drugs. Why can't we just stick with the originals like codeine and morphine, which must certainly be cheaper than these new fangled concoctions. I suspect the DEA has an unwarranted influence here.

Central Sun Visor

Sunvisors in cars work well when the sun is the right position relative to the car, but that is only about half the time. The other half of time when a sunvisor is needed they work poorly, if they work at all. What we need is one long sunvisor that is mounted on a central pivot that can be swung around through a complete circle so that it can provide shade in any direction. Likewise one should be able to extend it so it comes down farther, or retract it so that it does not obscure as much of the window.

I also want a shaded transparent dot, like a sunglass lens, that can be positioned to filter the headlights of oncoming cars.

Books

I haven't been reading as much lately, too much of my time was getting sucked up by the insatiable internet vortex. I have read a couple of books and started a couple more. One that I really enjoyed was:

"To Serve Them All My Days" by R.F. Delderfield. This was a great a book from the git-go. Something about the tone or style felt very comfortable right from the beginning. Lots of insight into human nature, lots of good characters. Also a smattering of views of the first World War. There was so much good stuff in it that I started making notes intending to write something longer about it, but that hasn't happened.


"What Is The What" by Dave Eggers. I started this one about a month ago and I am about a third of the way through it. It starts off with a robbery, and then veers off into reminicing, and then comes back to the robbery in progress. After about 50 pages I was getting tired of this. "Come on, dude" I'm thinking, let's get this robbery over with so we can get on with the story. But then I talk to my daughter who has already read it and she tells me that is the way it is for the whole book, so I resign myself to having to cope with these two story lines. The story is pretty engaging, but the subject matter is very unpleasant. First there is the story of survival in Southern Sudan. Then there are the robbers in the U.S., and now we are into the craven behavior of some of the refugees when they come to the states. All in all a pretty sad bunch of people.

I was walking by the bookstore in downtown Hillsboro the other day and they had a bargain bin of books out front. I stopped to look and found three Science Fiction authors I recognized:

• Fred Saberhagen, of Berserker fame
• Robert Silverberg, and
• Gordon R. Dickson, author of numerous stories about Dorsai soldiers.

I read "Octagon" by Fred Saberhagen yesterday. Not a great story, but easy enough to get through. About a computer intelligence playing a game and becoming a physical menace to other players. It's set back in the early 80's and it's interesting to see what is considered high-tech back then. Amazingly prophetic on some issues. Similar story line to the recent movie "Eagle Eye" which was a terrible movie, though John and I disagree on whether it is worse than "Jumper" or not.


"Valley Beyond Time" by Robert Silverberg is a collection of four stories. I read the first one, which has the same title as the book. Not a bad story, but not much to it.


I started "Soldier, Ask Not" by Gordon R. Dickson. So far I have found some good bits and some tedious bits.

Update: I finished "Valley Beyond Time". I am not sure but I think all four stories ended with the protagonist killing people. Solved his problems, but since the stories are all hypothetical, it's okay.

I gave up on "Soldier, Ask Not". Supposedly the last third of the book was a prize winning novella, and the first two thirds were grafted on to make a full length story. I kept hoping it would get better, but the protagonist is making too many mistakes, and he is too angry and I just got tired of it.

Update July 2019 replaced missing image.

Space Bubbles

Eventually we are going to get serious about exploring the solar system. When we reach that stage it would be handy to have a real space habitat in place at either of the Lagrange points L4 or L5. These two points follow the same orbit as the moon, either leading by 60 degrees (L4) or trailing by 60 degrees (L5).

A large sphere, or a collection of large spheres might be the simplest way to construct such a habitat. These spheres might be as small as a hundred feet in diameter or as large as a mile in diameter. A sphere would be easiest because of the internal air pressure. Trying to contain a large volume of air with any other shape is going to put additional strain on the structure.

How could we construct such large spheres? We could construct them of a multitude of small pieces, each one specially shaped. We could fabricate these sections on the moon and boost them into orbit where space suited workers could rivet, weld, or otherwise bond them together. That is imaginable, but it would entail a great deal of very precise work and would likely take years to complete.

On the other hand, I have been wondering if it might not be possible to blow a giant bubble, much like glass blowers blow glass. We are working in an area of virtually no gravity, so we should not have a problem with the weight of the structure causing it to collapse. You would still have the problem of boosting enough material out to the chosen Lagrange point. And now you would also have the problem of generating enough heat to melt the entire mass of material, and keep it molten while it was "blown up" into a sphere.

In space we would be loosing a great deal of heat. We could build a large insulating structure to house our metal bubble inflation, but that is exactly what we are trying to avoid. Build a temporary insulating structure may be easier that building solid metal sphere designed for habitation, but it would still be a big job.

If we were closer to the sun we would not loose so much heat energy, in fact if were close enough, we might even be able to use the sun to melt our material. Matter of fact, how is this for a hare-brained idea? Take one correctly size iron-nickel asteroid. Bore a hole to the center. Carve out a cavity of some hundreds of cubic yards. Fill the cavity with water/ice. Seal the hole so the water cannot escape. Push the asteroid into an orbit that will cause if to pass very close to the sun before coming back out to Earth's orbit. As the asteroid approaches the sun it will start gettting warm. The water in the center will eventually become hot. The asteroid will eventually become molten, the water will turn to steam and inflate the asteroid to a useful diameter. The asteroid's orbit will cause it recede from the sun and cool. Eventually it will return to Earth's orbit where it will need to be met by a booster to stabilize its' orbit.

It would not be easy to implement, and it would no doubt take a number of trials before we arrived at a lucky combination of events that would deliver a usable sphere. Challenges we would face:

• locating an appropriate size asteroid of the correct composition.
• bringing it to Earth orbit to facilitate work.
• boring the hole and carving out the center.
• sealing the hole.
• launching into eliptical orbit that will pass near the sun.
• capturing the result when it returns to Earth's orbit.

Just think though: what a sphere it would be!

Update September 2016 replaced missing picture.

Population

Robot Wisdom auxilary provided a link to a page of maps of the election. This one is distorted to show the relative population of the states.

Presidential Election
Proportional to Electoral College
November 4, 2008

Update July 2026 replaced missing image and deleted dead links.