I was one of the first kids to have a computer among my friends. It was an old Apple ][ and it was, at the time, the coolest thing to have. I was doubly cool because I had a computer and an Atari. When the Nintendo came out, I was left forever in the dust, but for six months I was on top of the world. However, just as my shoe selection kept going down the bigger my feet got, the game selection kept going down as time passed and more and more games were becoming available on the PC but not the Apple. Worse yet, even the games I could get were not as good as they were on the box. Not because of some creative photography like the burger and fries on the display of a fast food restaurant, but because the graphics they showed on the box were invariably the graphics for the PC, which were cooler.

So was I extremely excited when my father started making noise about getting a PC. The problem was that he wanted another Apple. Something called a “Macintosh”. He was outvoted three to one as my brothers and I expressed a rare solidarity. The computer we got was an Acer 386 with a 50Mhz processor, a 250MB HD, and a spectacular 4MB of RAM. The best part, though, was that it had Windows (3.0), which is what a lot of the games my brothers and I wanted to play required.

Besides the repercussions for games, I didn’t know a whole lot about computers at the time. Or, I should say, everything I knew was built around what I knew about the Apple that we’d had. I thought that a hard drive was a 3.5″ floppy cause they were less floppy than the 5.25″ floppies that we’d used up until that point.

Once everything got set up, I naturally invited my friend Clint over because he’d already had a PC computer and he was able to set me up. Since I didn’t have such a firm idea of what hard drives were, but it seemed like something important that I would not want to mess with, I tried to tell Clint that I wanted to run all of my games off floppies just as I had with the Apple. He either didn’t understand me or pretended not to, because within no time we were installing applications on the hard drive. The thing that I remember most was that PKUNZIP, used to install the files, utilized unfortunate terminology. Rather than saying it was “unpacking” or “unzipping” files, it said that it was “exploding” them. I was totally freaking out despite his attempts to assure me that nothing explosive was actually occurring.

Once the computer was hooked up, I excitedly began to devour the new techology. One of the first things that I did was to retype the novel that I was writing on the Apple to Microsoft Works, which was the coolest application that I’d ever seen. I also played a lot of Wolfenstein, which was the coolest action game I’d ever seen. The computer was the coolest thing on the face of the earth… for about ten weeks.

After that, I started noticing limitations. The monitor only had 256 colors, so there was a problem with light colors becoming white on images that I’d had my father scan from work. Then I found a picture viewer that used something called a JPG that managed to get the images to look right. I started wondering what else other applications could do and started downloading them. Eventually I replaced the entire shell with something put out by NeXT that wasn’t as cumbersome as the Program Manager, which Windows 3 used and which had the philosophy “Why let them do it in one click when you can require three?”

At some point, there was a problem with the computer. Dad told me that when there was, I should use a program called Dr Watson’s something-or-other to figure it out. I don’t know how I did it, but that was when I inadvertently learned how to format a hard drive. Oops. Windows 3 had 29 floppies for installation and Dad made me man the station, inserting one disk after another to get Windows reinstalled. I didn’t mind cause there as a TV and the TV had Matlock (or something similar) on it pretty much at all times. Even when it was installed, though, things didn’t look right on it. The pictures I had were distorted. My friend Excalibur’s picture had him sporting a silver face. the odd thing was that these pictures actually looked pretty cool and when I figured out the problem (the system was set to 4 colors instead of 256), one of the first things I did was learn how to bust an image down to 4 colors to recreate that cool effect.

I became a master of MS Paint, learning how to distort pictures in all manner of ways. I spent an inordinate amount of time on the picture of Excalibur because it was the only really good portrait I had. Exca had a thinning hairline, so I modified the picture to make it look like his forehead wasn’t so big. I mirrored both half of his faces in two seperate images. He must have been tilting his head to one side or the other because one made him look like a broad-chinned jock and the other almost alienesque. I also put Exca in a crude Batman and Captain America mask. My crowning achievement was when I actually added to his forehead. A cut’n’paste job that took hours and hours. Years later, when Photoshop came along, I was actually disappointed at how easily it made some of the things that I had tirelessly worked on before.

I’ve purposefully left out everything related to BBSes because that’s a post unto itself, but my family first logged on to the Internet with that computer. Back then AOL was a much bigger deal than the Internet and a lot of companies (including DC Comics) had an AOL site but no WWW site. Partially because of the BBS, I didn’t take to the Internet as quickly as my parents did. Dad had the Internet at work, so he came into it knowing everything that you could do on it. He was, however, extremely frustrated with the speed we were getting at home. He assumed that something must be wrong, but with my experiences with the BBS, I told him that it was about right. He asked around at work and discovered the difference in speed between high-speed connections at government installations and dial-up. By that point we had a reasonably fast modem at the time because of my extensive modem use. My mother quickly joined a bunch of travel newsgroups and played crosswords on it and that more-or-less made her day.

My mother and I both are naturally inclined to have hot tempers, but despite that there was only one time when we stopped talking to one another altogether. Despite assurances that no more would ever be necessary, somehow the 250MB HD started filling up. So I went through and started deleting things that I didn’t think that we used. Unfortunately, one of them was one of the three applications you needed to access the Internet. I had it up and working within an hour of discovering the problem, but Mom was so upset with me that I had messed with one of the only two parts of the computer that she used that she stopped talking to me until she could calm down. I became upset that she was so upset at what was obviously a mistake and one that I had rectified in pretty short order. It took two days for us to be on speaking terms again.

The hard drive wasn’t the only hardware limitation that I was running into. The CD ROM that we had was only 2x and some of the newer games were requiring 4x. Worse yet, a lot of the games coming out required 8MB of RAM, which not only could I not afford but the motherboard couldn’t handle. Then of course there was Windows 95, which didn’t require more than 4MB of RAM, but required more at least 8 to work. I didn’t understand the vendor’s logic then. By chance, I’ve come to understand it over the past 5 months or so.

I got a job in high school solely for the purpose of buying a better computer so that I could have one when I went to college. Having a computer was something of a luxury, according to Dad, because they had computer labs there after all. Still, he matched me dollar-for-dollar and I remain appreciative. I bought my next computer from a fly-by-night operation in western Colosse that (I later deduced) used pirated software. It was 166MHz with 16MB of RAM, a 1GB HD, a 4x CD ROM, and Windows 95.

Who could possibly ask for more than that?!

I got my first advance drive from Western Digital… and it is not in approved packaging! It’s not even in the same ballpark as what they were requiring. For one thing, it uses plastic instead of foam.

Don’t get me wrong. It was pretty safely sealed. I have no doubt it arrived completely undamaged. And I do have the ability to send in my drive using this packaging. I’m not worried that they will reject my drive. So no real harm done.

Except that I’m kind of pissed off. I was actually sort of looking forward to seeing what the hell they had in mind. But even they can’t live up to standards that were only one step away from requiring a talisman from the Archangel Uriel. And that if this hadn’t been their specific packaging, and I had sent it in using this packaging, they reserved the right to void my warranty for it.

Apparently, the wife of the Governor of Iowa was caught smoking in a government car:

The issue arose Wednesday morning, when a Des Moines Register reporter noticed Culver openly smoking in a sport utility vehicle the state provides to her family. The truck was stopped at a red light in downtown Des Moines. Culver was sitting in the passenger seat, with the window rolled down. A state trooper was driving.

Culver’s action violated the state smoking ban, which forbids smoking in most workplaces, including bars and restaurants. The ban also applies to employer-owned cars, and it specifically says no smoking is allowed in state-owned vehicles.

She requested a ticket and that was that. Nothing brings forth honor like getting caught, no? Whatever hesitations I have about smoking bans in public places, state-owned cars are certainly a place where it’s fair game.

I did enjoy this gem by an Iowa writer named John Carlson:

The loopy law does permit smoking in a hotel or motel room in Iowa, if said room is designated for legal smoking. But no hotel or motel may have more than 20 percent of such rooms in the establishment. But if you, Mr. Motel Owner, have 15 percent of your rooms as smoking rooms, you may not increase that to 20 percent. But you’re allowed to increase the number of nonsmoking rooms.

Unless there’s a full moon on the second Tuesday of the month, and then you have to go to the casino nearest your home to fill out the forms seeking an exemption. At least I think that last part was in there.

I have a printout of the law, but I stopped reading when the bizarre rules started making my eyes hurt.

I personally wish that they’d spend less time expanding the law and more time enforcing it. In our travels, it’s become not-uncommon to get non-smoking rooms that are clearly part-time smoking rooms and when confronted they don’t typically respond by apologizing and getting us a non-smoking room. Usually the negotiations involve paying more than we had planned so that we can get what he originally paid for because they don’t want to honor the Priceline (or equivalent) deal we got (specifying a non-smoking room) or the only rooms they have available are more expensive. Of course, maybe they’d do a better job of enforcing the law is people like us were to actually contact the appropriate authorities.

I always have mixed feelings about these things. The former libertarian in me is naturally resistant to regulating our private lives. Further, I find the piecemail approach a little bit insulting. Outlaw it or leave us be. However, the former libertarian in me says that the way that they’re going about it is probably the best way to cut back on smoking and make life easier on non-smokers while giving die hard smokers enough room to prevent a revolt.

Heartless Doll posted grades on all of Batman’s women:

Catwoman (comics): A
Chase Meridian (Batman Forever): D
Talia Al’Ghul: C-
Vicki Vale (Batman 1989): B
Silver St. Cloud (comics): B+
Andrea Beaumont (Mask of the Phantasm): A
Julie Madison (Batman & Robin): F
Rachel Dawes (Batman Begins): A-

I think that’s mostly right. I’d give Catwoman from the comics a slightly lower grade (B- maybe). Objectively I can’t disagree with the grade for Chase Meridian, but Nicole Kidman was nail-polish remover away from visual perfection in that movie and I think that there’s got to be a curve in there somewhere. For a Batman fan, I am astonishingly unversed on Silver St. Cloud except for knowing who she is. Andrea Beaumont was perhaps the best Batgirlfriend ever in a movie that would have been the best Batman movie ever if it weren’t for Jokerworld (as it is, it’s tied for first). If Rachel Dawes had been played by Maggie Gyllenhaal in the first movie she might have earned that grade, but it was not to be.

There’s always been the question of who Batman would end up with in the end (if anybody). Clark Kent had Lois Lane, Barry Allen had Iris West, Hal Jordan had Carol Ferris, but Bruce Wayne by virtue of his character had nobody. This made things both more and less interesting. The original Batman settled down with Catwoman eventually and together they spawned the original Huntress. Catwoman probably is it in the end. It’s a shame that Andrea Beaumont never made it into the comics because she by far had the most possibilities. Except maybe Silver St. Cloud.

Of course, given the goings-on at DC, the answer to the question is (at least for now) that he ends up with nobody. I will be posting on that atrocity once I calm down.

This is absolutely amazing!:

I’m pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch.

Nevermind:

The capabilities of OpeniBoot are still incredibly limited—at present, there’s no support for writing to the flash memory, using the touch screen, wireless networking, the cell phone, sound, or the accelerometer.

I should state outright that the pioneers are honest about the limitations of their achievement. And also that these people are doing important work aside from this little quest. Decoupling the iPhone from AT&T is a pretty important thing for anyone that wants the former instead of the latter. The thing is, though, if you don’t want the iPhone’s software at all, don’t get the iPhone! About the only reason I can think of for getting an iPhone so that you can strip the OS and replace it with Linux is so that you can tell people that you bought an iPhone and hacked it (to shreds) so you can look all kewl. I don’t generally despise computer nerds, but there is no computer nerd that I despise more than that guy. That guy who is more interested in showing off than doing anything useful.

Seriously, when you buy an iPhone you’ve already bought the software. The same goes for a Windows Mobile device. The software that was made for the device. The software that the hardware was built for. Software that’s relatively easy to use and does what you want it to do and (at least in the case of WM) gives you the option of downloading software for free that gets it to do more. You want to put Linux on a computer? I get that. Computers are often about maximum functionality. Smartphones? Pocket PCs? Not so much. They’re about ease-of-use. They’ve made tremendous strides, but that remains Linux’s biggest problem. Perhaps as importantly, an advantage of Linux on the desktop is that it’s anywhere from $75-500 cheaper than Windows. If you put a computer together from scratch, that’s certainly an appeal.

Even with that advantage, Linux has been unable to make a serious dent in the desktop market. Other than crass geekery, I fail to understand why anybody should be getting excited at the prospect of being able to utilize it where its two strongest aspects (licensing costs and flexibility) are negated or irrelevent and its weakest aspects (ease-of-use, hardware support) are most important.

One thing that a lot of people seem to agree on is that one of the major reasons that marriage rates are down is because men are stuck in a period of perpetual adolescence and are putting off marriage with the old addage about cows and free milk. Phi takes objection to this interpretation:

Stop, stop, STOP! A pox on both your houses! The premise as stipulated by both Kay and her interlocutors — that men are deciding to put off marriage — is utterly and completely false as a generality applied to all men!

But to know this, Kay would have to open her eyes beyond their currently narrow field. For she is guilty of the same error as the men for whom women of less than car show model attractiveness are invisible. Like them, Kay only sees men in the top 5% of the status hierarchy, the same 5% being pursued by 95% of women, the same 5% for whose attentions women bid in an arms race to the bottom. Of course those men don’t want to get married: in the immortal words of Kelly Bundy, why buy the cow when you can get the eggs for free?

But what about the other 95%? You know: the ones standing on the sidelines looking desperately for some sign of encouragement. The ones with no idea how to talk to a woman because, well, none of them have. The ones without game.

Phi is undoubtedly correct that this phenomenon as it pertains to all men is considerably overstated, but so is the notion that it only applies to men in the top 5%. There are at least two things to consider here. First, that while lower marriage rates is certainly true, I think we really need to keep in mind that in proportion to the entire population they are overstated. When a lot of people talk about how this phenomenon or that phenomenon is “destroying marriage” or somesuch, they’re overlooking the fact that nothing has changed the fact that most people do, at some point in their life, actually get married.

But marriage rates are down and I agree with Phi that it’s not just men that are causing that. It’s often caused because women have decided that it’s better not to get married than to marry to wrong person. I think that this is overall not a particularly negative development. Women should not be socially coerced to get married to someone that does not make them happy just so that there are enough wives to go around. The same is true of men. At least one place where Phi and I disagree is whether these men “aren’t good enough” because women are holding their standards too high or because they simply haven’t met a man that meets reasonable standards. He seems to view the problem as one of women’s standards. I view it primarily as being related to the collapse of a lot of social institutions and conventions that make it a lot more difficult to meet people than it used to be. Women’s standards are an issue, but so too is prolonged adolescence on the part of men.

Phi takes that view that pushing off getting married is the province of men with easy access to sex with a lot of different women and that composes of 5% of the male population or so. I have no opinion on whether easy access to sex is limited to the top 5% of men or not, but I really think that he’s overlooking something that really does apply to a significant portion of the other 95%. To be blunt, I think that he is transposing his own perspective, that as a former young man in search for a wife whose efforts were blunted by women exhibiting particular behaviors, to most men. At the very least, it is far from clear to me that what most young women want is to find a nice young woman to get married to as was (presumably) the case with Phi when he was younger.

First of all, it’s not solely the province of the top 5% to have sexual access to women. Most of my male friends (that I’m close enough to know this kind of thing) had somewhere between 3-15 sexual partners. That’s not a lot by the standards portrayed by the media today, but it’s enough. Enough for what? Enough to believe that if they don’t get married, they will have other sexual partners and thus they are paying an opportunity cost for their monogamy and more importantly, by marrying that they will permanently forego any other opportunities.

But it’s not just sexual access that forestall’s a man’s decision to get married. In fact, all the man really needs is the belief that the current state of affairs with a woman or women is better than a married state of affairs would be with a woman that makes herself available to him to get married. With the exception of Station Fours, any man can relatively easily come to this conclusion. It may be easier for him to do so corresponding with the number of options that he has, but relationships and partnering up are extremely relative in nature and this applies more-or-less across the spectrum.

Added to this is the fact that men (and women) have to make the active decision that they are unlikely to do better than permanently partnering up with the woman that they’re with (or that would be with them) to marry. Putting off that active decision, or failing to make it altogether, defaults to “no marriage”.

More to the point, with the social pressures of marrying lower than they’ve ever been, the ability to kick the decision down the road in perpetuity becomes more possible. As it stands now, men are able to – without consequence – stall confronting this tough decision until he runs the risk of losing what he has now because she’s telling him to fish or cut bait or if he’s not able to get something that he wants from the relationship until he makes the decision to take the relationship to the next stage.

The ideal used to require that he consents to taking the marriage path in order to have sex. Now a man can get even more. He can live as husband and wife without having to make that level of commitment. They can live together, share expenses, have one another to come home to, and have regular sexual access to one another without having to make the tough decision of permanency. This is one of the reasons that I consider premarital cohabitation to be a barrier rather than a prelude to marriage.

None of this is solely reserved for men with game. The example in my life that I was closest to, Julie and Tony, involved a man that had no college degree, made less money than her, had fewer romantic options than her, and to my knowledge had only one sexual partner before her. All he really had going for him was a good heart, a steady (though not substantial) income, and a degree of personability (but only once you got to know him). In other words, the typical “Beta Male”. Despite all this, he put off marriage, took up four years of her life, and left her exhausted and embittered.

The mistake that she made was not holding out for an Alpha, but rather for indulging him a way of life that gave him the benefits of marriage without having to confront the costs of it. It was only when she took a stand (needing a darn good reason why they shouldn’t get married) that he confronted it and determined that she was not right for him. Had she forced this decision earlier, I don’t know that the result would have been any different at the end, but it likely would have taken a lot less out of her and would have freed her up to find somebody that she’s more compatible with.

I’m certainly not saying that it always turns out this way, but I find the notion that women can avoid these fates by avoiding a specific kind of “wrong” guy to be problematic. I think that Hymowitz has a point that the current state of affairs has made too many guys wrong in this regard.

I’m also not saying that the decline in marriage is all or mostly the fault of men. It’s the product of a lot of things. It’s not entirely a negative phenomenon except to particular segments of the population (men and women that value marriage above more than their society does). But it’s definitely not the product of “alpha men” and the women that acknowledge no other.

Bobvis offers up the point from a book and other sources that we should focus on overall percentage increases in energy efficiency rather than pooh-poohing increases that look small on paper but have larger impact. The test case is a Dodge Durango (12-mpg to 14-mpg versions) versus Honda Civic (33-mpg to 45-mpg versions).

Will counters back the point echoed by a lot of environmentalists, which grates on me, that the “real” disparity is between the 12-mpg Durango and the 45-mpg Civic, and that the goal is to get the Durangos off the road in favor of Civics. In the long haul, I think both sides of the equation are really missing out on very important points that throw off the calculations.

Point #1 – If you’re a single person who never travels far and never carries much, a Civic might work for you. While I think it’s silly for a person who never hauls cargo to have a giant truck, most people need at least some cargo space; I’ve regularly cursed the lack of it in my current vehicle, sometimes for things as relatively minor as IKEA furniture (which is already highly compressed since it’s not already put together).

Ironically, it was the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, those listings of what the “average fuel efficiency” (in miles per gallon) of a manufacturer’s fleet had to be, that started some of this inanity. CAFE standards are not universal; you have one category for cars, one for “SUV” class vehicles (aka “light trucks”), and one for honest-to-gosh “Trucks” (usually, but not always, diesel). When CAFE standards were upped, manufacturers had a hard time getting the venerable station wagon (heavier/less aerodynamic than a “normal car” but still classified as one and retaining the car’s lower center of gravity for better handling and less worry of tipovers on curves or in high winds) to fit into the “cars” category, but they could get the minivan (with all the handling, high center of gravity, and aerodynamic efficiency of a rolling brick) to easily fit in while classified technically as a “light truck”.

The result? Station Wagons, which usually averaged 21-23 mpg, were replaced by attrition with minivans and their “15 mpg if you’re lucky” efficiency ratings. Why? Because there are precisely two kinds of car that really fit a growing family: station wagons and minivans. Those are the only ones that have the people capacity to haul two parents, two kids, luggage/miscellaneous items, and possibly the kids’ friends somewhere when necessary. If you don’t have a station wagon or minivan, either someone’s getting left behind or you’re splitting into two vehicles.

Point #2 – “Miles per gallon” is a lousy measure of efficiency anyways, because there are all sorts of fudge-factors that go into the measurement and assumptions being made. Setting aside jokes about Paul McCartney’s hybrid getting only 4 mpg or Al Gore wasting fuel flying a limo to Tokyo so he could be seen arriving in a “hybrid limo” to an award ceremony, we still have to deal with the fact that what we are really trying to figure out is how much work is being done by the engine.

Basic science, first of all: the maximum (theoretical) efficiency of a heat engine is definitively not 100%. It never can be, because it is measured by the equation Eff=(Th-Tc)/Th * 100; in other words, the hot side (Th) minus the cold side (Tc), divided by the hot side, with all temperatures in Kelvin. For purpose of reference for cars, Tc can be nothing other than the ambient air temperature, or approximately somewhere between 250 Kelvin (“Really Frickin’ Cold Canadian Winter”) and 330 (Furnace Creek, Death Valley, USA). For purposes of guesswork, a temperature of 300 Kelvin (~80 Fahrenheit, ~27 Celsius) is a reasonable approximation to work with.

Thus, the goal of an “efficient” heat engine is to generate a really freaking high Th, just shy of actually melting the engine’s parts, to do work with. For the internal combustion engine, this gets to be around 1500 Kelvin or so, with a “theoretical” efficiency of 80%… but of course that’s not really the case. First, the exhaust gases aren’t exiting the engine cylinder at precisely ambient air temperature (they’re usually more like 350 Kelvin or higher, then go through the tailpipe while cooling further before being released to the air), so our efficiency is lost by that difference. Second, there is inefficiency from “heat” lost everywhere that isn’t doing any useful work – the heat that heats up the engine parts (requiring a coolant system to avoid melting them after running the engine for lengths of time), friction between road and car, friction between car parts (mitigated, but not completely, by lubricant… again something that can’t be theoretically 100% efficient nor would you want it to be), and so on.

So we get “efficiency” in that sense… but that isn’t miles per gallon. What we are really looking for is an engine that will extract the most energy from a given quantity of fuel, given that gasoline itself has an energy density of 130 MJ/gallon (gasohol, the 90/10 whiskey mix most people are actually getting, is only 125 MJ/gallon and has other thermal properties that further reduce its efficiency for use in an internal combustion engine). In other words, we want the maximum amount of energy (in Joules or MegaJoules) to be transferred to “go power.”

Once we have the efficient engine, THEN basic newtonian physics comes into play; “miles per gallon” is based on the amount of work (in Joules, again) to (a) bring the vehicle up to speed, (b) maintain the vehicle’s speed when facing loss due to other factors (wind resistance, road friction, internal part friction, etc), and (c) safely maintain the vehicle’s internal features and control (modern engines “lose” mpg by transferring power to other things like the electrical system, Air Conditioning and Power Steering, rather than making passengers sweat and drivers use Power Steering By Armstrong).

Needless to say, the heavier the vehicle, the less “miles per gallon” it will get even if it has a “more efficient” (Joules/gallon) engine. Likewise, the less aerodynamic the vehicle, the more “efficient” it will be, which is why this 1.5-seat vehicle (that secondary “back seat” does not look comfy) can get 285 mpg without even needing a hybrid engine. And you trade “efficiency” for pickup power and other benefits, too. The aforementioned vehicle only gets this efficiency by skimming a mere couple inches from the ground (would damage its frame passing a speed bump or even a mere pothole), with a single passenger, no luggage (no luggage capacity even if you wanted to!), and with “pretty darn slow” acceleration, a “pretty darn low” top speed (less than 75 miles per hour), and only seeing that efficiency in a narrow power band best maintained by driving the vehicle around half its top speed. In other words, perhaps good for a single-shot “to work and back” vehicle, virtually unusable for almost anything else.

Yes, there’s room to make vehicles more “efficient” in the “miles per gallon” sense – but it would be nice if the environmentalist crowd would realize that there is work to be done, that reasonable cargo space (the ability for me to carry, say, 3 friends and some luggage without anyone feeling cramped) and a reasonable-height frame are not “luxuries” for all people (the roads in Colosse are lousy enough thanks), and that the “Work” (in Joules of energy) required for specific tasks can never be simply pulled from thin air.