Touch Trucks
07:59 Sunday, 2 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 74.84°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 68% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 582
For Mitzi's grandson's birthday, we went to a local DC event that was taking place at the former RFK stadium, in the parking lot. A "touch trucks" event for kids.
It was pretty cool, if a sonic assault. The city departments, some federal agencies and a few private companies had vehicles of all kinds on display for kids to get close to, climb on, sit in or observe. The garbage truck was very popular.
The Secret Service was there with a couple of the black SUVs and we spoke with one of the uniformed agents. Earlier, I'd seen a helicopter fly over in Marine One livery that wasn't an SH-3. I asked the agent about it and he confirmed it was one of the new ones. They haven't been accepted for service yet thought.
The National Park Service had a helicopter on display, but as we were heading for it, they started moving people away from it as it had to leave. So we retreated back to a point where a motorcycle police officer indicated was far enough.
I wasn't sure, but the decks of ships are much smaller. I told Mitzi's son-in-law to make sure his son had his sunglasses on, since we weren't carrying goggles.
The rotors were spinning and a DC PR guy on a Segway came rolling up pushing everyone farther back. So we backed up another 10 feet or so.
Then the pilots increased the rotor pitch and the fun began. Strollers went flying, all the dust and debris on the asphalt went airborne, the cop's motorcycle tipped over. I was filming, but had to turn away. I saw all the other parents had as well. Mitzi was holding on to two or three strollers. I had to brace my legs against the rotor wash, it was pretty impressive.
The helicopter went airborne and the Segway guy came back to see if everyone was all right. Many of the parents were a little distressed, including Mitzi's daughter and son-in-law.
We collected ourselves, and started out to look at some more trucks. Some yards away I spotted a white ball cap on the ground. I pointed it out and said, "Looks like the helicopter blew somebody's hat off!"
Mitzi said, "That's my hat!" She hadn't even realized it had blown off her head, preoccupied, I imagine, by holding onto flying strollers.
We had a good laugh.
The noise, though, was something else. They let the kids blow the horns, turn on the sirens and the lights. It was getting to be a bit stressful as it happened without warning, often when you were right next to a vehicle.
The music from the dj was loud as well, as it had to be, I'm sure.
The funniest thing though was one of the announcements from the dj. Among the "Your car is about to be towed," and "We have another lost child here," was one that made me laugh.
"The Secret Service has two flashlights missing. If everyone could check and see if one of their little ones picked one up and please return it, they'd appreciate it."
I can't imagine those Secret Service agents got their flashlights back, and a couple of kids got a cool story for school, if one of uncertain ethical virtue.
We headed back to the kids' place to recover with a couple of cold beers. The weather remained outstanding.
And I've finished my 67th circuit around the sun.
✍️ Reply by emailThe Future Begins Tomorrow!
08:33 Sunday, 2 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.69°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 370
And it "ain't what it used to be."
This came up in my feed from Beardy Guy, and it's a good read, albeit a bit long.
Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours.
Yes, we live in an advanced technological civilization. All of the eight billion people on this planet depend on it to one degree or another for their survival. That civilization is in overshoot, and it is going to collapse sometime in this century. Indeed, it has already begun.
The linked piece talks about how we might go about preserving some parts of it so that humanity isn't completely reduced to a feudal agrarian existence.
Among the people who see what's coming, there are some who see a "feudal agrarian existence," as the desired end-state, maybe with less emphasis on on the "feudal" and some hope for "communal." I'm pretty sure we won't be that lucky.
But there are some interesting ideas in the linked piece about what people could be doing now. Will they work? Who knows? The more relevant question is "Will people try."
I think they will. I'm somewhat surprised, but even in my brief couple of days up here, there is some acknowledgment, more than I'd expected, from educated people with children that we're in for rough times ahead.
And they're considering plans. Not "prepper" style, AR-15 heavy "survival porn," but relocating to different communities with more advantages and fewer vulnerabilities. Naturally, they are among the privileged class, with the means to contemplate and achieve these things. They may have to pool resources in many cases, but they're beginning to do that work.
The folks who aren't so fortunate are going to have to figure out how to adapt in place. Try to maximize their advantages and reduce their vulnerabilities right where they are. And that work should begin now.
This must be part of that work.
✍️ Reply by emailM3 MacBook Air
07:40 Monday, 2 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 71.69°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 509
Mitzi and I had a discussion about her 2019 21" iMac and what to do with it. We have one "desk" at the new place, which we'll have to share. My thought was to get a 4K external monitor, and swap back and forth when we wished to do some work "on the computer."
I thought she could work from her 13" MacBook Pro and I'd use my 14" M3 MacBook Pro. Hers is an intel model, which is likely to be unsupported in the near future. I still have a 13" M1 MacBook Pro, and I intended to give that to her and sell her intel model.
Both of those machines only have 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSDs, while her iMac has 16GB, which was the reason for buying her the iMac in the first place.
Looking more closely at her iMac, it also only has a 256GB SSD, and of that, only 19GB remains "free." It too is likely to be unsupported soon, so perhaps a better solution is appropriate.
I bought her a 15" M3 MacBook Air refurb, using the veteran and government employee discount. With a 512GB SSD, it was still a bit pricey, coming in at just over $1K with sales tax. That's supposed to arrive today, and I should be able move her account and documents from the iMac pretty easily since we'll be moving from a smaller SSD to a larger one.
I did that once before for a resident here, from a 1TB Fusion Drive to a 256GB SSD. That was a genuine pain in the ass. Her son gave her a much newer 27" iMac as an "upgrade," but didn't bother to set it up for her. I didn't know going in that it was going to be an asymmetrical transfer, but it became clear immediately. Never again.
The MBA has 16GB of RAM and is likely to remain supported for several years. We'll essentially have the same machine, though the 14" MBP has 24GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. Same number of cores and gpus though, so nearly identical performance. Should be a nice upgrade for her, though 16GB of RAM is now the minimum configuration, so I expect software bloat to eventually swamp that.
Hopefully we won't have to screw around with new computers for another five years or so. My 27" 2019 iMac, which I pretty much max'ed out when I bought, didn't last quite as long as I'd hoped, almost six years, though the move hastened its departure more than obsolescence.
In five years, with AI taking over the world, we're likely to be in an entirely new paradigm of some kind, one which I probably can't even imagine right now. It's also possible that we may be in a period of economic disruption, such that mass market consumer computing platforms are no longer a thing, and we'll all be living with whatever we have at the moment.
We're all in for a wild ride in the coming decades, I'm fairly confident of that.
✍️ Reply by emailDept. Q
08:28 Monday, 2 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 73.8°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 135
I binge watched much of the Netflix series Dept. Q while I was in New York, finishing the last three episodes here. Enjoyed it very much. I like a series where I can get somewhat invested in the characters.
In many ways, and perhaps there's a connection, it is very similar to the BBC series Unforgotten, in that it focuses on a cold case, and the investigation reveals more than just clues to the central case. It's also very similar in that the characters are all quite complicated, which adds some dimension and interest to the story. Unlike, say, Fountain of Youth, which was filled with indistinguishable and utterly forgettable characters.
It's pretty brutal and gory at times, so if that sort of thing puts you off, you may want to give it a pass.
✍️ Reply by emailLetters to Ed
08:36 Monday, 2 June 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 75.02°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 97
I got a couple of nice notes yesterday. One was from someone I hadn't heard from before, Loren Stephens, who blogs at ldstephens.net.
Loren uses a static site generator called 11ty (alternatively: eleventy), which was unfamiliar to me and that was somewhat surprising, because I don't recall Jack Baty ever using it. 😏
It's always nice to hear from a reader.
Also, shout-out to Shelley Powers who is recovering from some vision related issues, and to Loren Webster who has been doing a lot of bird photography blogging.
The beat, and the blogs, go on...
✍️ Reply by emailAnother Year Older
08:13 Tuesday, 2 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 54.54°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 2.75mph
Words: 562
But not, "deeper in debt."
Yet.
If you're interested in AI, and not just reflexively opposed to it, there's a thread over at the Tinderbox forum I commend to your attention.
Spent some time in Siegenthaler's book yesterday. Lots more to read and think about. It's interesting that a basement slab loses most of its heat through the edges. It's because the edges are closer to the atmosphere where the temperature gradient is greater and the path is shorter. Our slab is insulated below, and at the edges, because the slab is poured after the basement walls, and the edges meet the wall at 3.25" of EPS, so they never "see" the ground. Which is all great, because we're putting radiant heating in the slab.
The concrete in the walls meet the footings, which of course are in contact with the ground; and that's a large thermal mass as well that represents a great deal of hysteresis, or inertia, in the system. Because whether it's hot or it's cold outside, it's nearly always around 50°F at the footings. So as heat escapes the house, it will "flow" (warm) the concrete walls, down to the footings, before it makes its way through the 3.25" of EPS on the exterior of the wall.
That's not to say the house never gets cold, because heat also escapes through the windows and doors and to some extent through the ERV ventilation. But they've plotted the performance of heating systems in ICF houses constructed identically to stick frame houses with identical R-ratings in insulation, and the ICF heating system lags the stick frame, and the magnitude of the changes is less, which is what you'd expect in a system with significant hysteresis, dampening the response to external temperature changes. The key component being the reduced magnitude (energy consumption) of the response.
Still waiting on the plans. Brad the Builder is in communication with the architect. We decided that all communication should go through Brad until we have the finished product. Then we'll review them closely with Brad, and if we have any feedback provide that through Brad as well. One of the things we learned with the designer is that, even with everyone present on the same Zoom call, what the designer heard wasn't necessarily what we thought we were saying, because a number of people were talking and not all necessarily saying the same things.
I think, if we were to do this again, we'd try to structure the meetings more, so that at the end we would go over a list of things that were decided. The meetings were supposed to be limited to an hour, and there was a lot to go over, and we always felt like we were bumping up against that one-hour time limit. My bad, because I know better. But this felt different than other meetings I've been a party to. More like a collaborative effort, and less like a decision-making, direction-giving process.
While we're marking time, I'm trying to wrap my brain around the HVAC piece. I still have to get smart about how to size the ERV and the dehumidifier.
Anyway, I'm optimistic that this time next year, I'll be posting from the new Dave Cave, in a windowless room in the basement. That probably doesn't sound appealing, but it is to me.
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