Update: Suckin’ it Down

February 8, 2009 – 7:08 pm

In October I posted about my electrical consumption. I've gotten a few more bills since then, so I can give the complete picture for 2008:

Yearly Usage (2005-2008)

As I guessed, I used about the same amount in 2008 as in 2007. I haven't done anything to reduce my usage since then, but I'm still thinking about it.

Every few months, ComEd includes with my bill an environmental disclosure pamphlet that lays out how its power was generated over the last twelve months. The most recent one covered the period up through September, 2008 and it broke down the sources as 60% nuclear, 34% coal, and a few percent from natural gas, hydro, and biomass. This seems to change quite a bit from pamphlet to pamphlet, which I'm guessing is because they're always buying their power from different sources.

It also provides a table that gives average amounts of emissions that those sources produced, per 1,000 kilowatt-hours. This lets me calculate my personal impact:

per 1,000 kWh My emissions
Carbon dioxide (lbs) 761.39 1,453
Nitrogen oxides (lbs) 1.35 2.58
Sulfur dioxide (lbs) 4.23 8.07
High level nuclear waste (lbs) 0.006 0.011
Low level nuclear waste (cubic) 0.0004 0.0008
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The Dismantler

January 31, 2009 – 4:24 pm

I’ve always liked to take things apart and see how they work. (Yes, I’m a dork.) I’ve pried apart a computer, a VCR, a TV, and, once, a whole washing machine, among lots of other smaller items. I’m not trying to fix them, just to see what the inside looks like, and how they work. Weird, I know, but the point is that I get a kick out of opening up machines and seeing their guts, and I’m not afraid to pull something apart. Which comes in handy when the office espresso machine goes bust.

Isomac Tea Schematic

It’s a nice one, with lots of shiny chrome and stainless steel, and shipping it off to a repair shop would have cost a fortune (above and beyond the cost of the repair itself). So another interested co-worker and myself opened it up, found the problem and fixed it. For a while, and then it broke again.

We cracked it open and diagnosed a faulty pressurestat and a blown heating element. The heating element in particular is a fairly serious part (1400W of power!) It screws into the boiler with a 30mm wrench, and when we tried to unscrew it, we could not budge it. The boiler isn’t really attached to the frame of the machine. Instead it hangs off a tangle of copper pipes. (The heating element is the large hex-shaped piece in the picture below.)

End of the boiler of an Isomac Tea

Watching the guts of the machine flex as I torqued the heating element made us all very nervous. There’s nothing worse than creating two problems while trying to fix one, and the last thing we wanted to do was bend or break some crucial part. So we took the whole boiler out. (Sorry about the picture quality, all I had was my camera phone.)

What's left of an Isomac Tea once you take out the boiler

It was still a bit of a struggle, but eventually we did manage to remove the heating element. Now we can install the new parts, reassemble the machine, and then, hopefully, start pulling shots again. After climbing a slope of increasing frustration: i) a bad pressurestat; ii) broken heating element; iii) heating element can’t be removed; iv) boiler has to be removed; we finally seem to be on the downslope. Wish us luck.

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My 2002 Road Trip in Virtual Form

January 28, 2009 – 7:52 pm

Those who know me know that I have an unnatural love for Google Earth. It probably ties to my attraction to maps and travel in general, but the upshot is that I can get lost for hours soaring from place to place.

Sooner or later a great tool like GE leads to the urge to do something productive with it, hence my road trip project. In 2002 I made a solo motorcycle trip across the country, going from Michigan to Seattle to San Francisco and back to Michigan. These were the olden days, so although I had a GPS with me, I mostly navigated by paper and pencil. Whenever I entered a new state I’d buy a nice road map at the gas station (Rand McNally makes good ones) and I used it both to plan my route and to record it.

Me and my BMW R100RT before I left on my road trip

Shortly after GE was available (I don’t remember exactly when, but it was years ago) I decided I’d recreate my road trip in it, plotting the path I took and the places I stayed. For most of the route, this was a painstaking process of repeatedly clicking out my path, turn by turn, and so my progress was slow, especially once I reached the twisty roads out west. However, recently I discovered a shortcut using Google Map’s driving directions and KML export that cut the time required by 99%, and finally I’m finished.

Route of my road trip in Google Earth

For those of you who are curious—or bored—KML linkhere’s a file containing the record of my trip. It has the route itself (red for travel between destinations, blue for side trips), places I stayed (tents for campsites, houses for homes and hostels), and photos I took along the way.

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Knowledge is Power

November 11, 2008 – 7:01 pm

Google sits on top of a gold mine of information. They can essentially tap into our minds whenever we go online to learn something. They can see what we’re thinking. For example, check out their list of hot trends, which shows the top 100 fastest-rising search terms as of right now. For today, #24 is “is there mail on veterans day” and #53 is “is the post office open on veterans day.” Another example is Google Trends, where you can explore the search volume for any term you choose. (Check out foreclosure.) Not only can Google tell what people are searching for, they can also identify roughly where the searches are coming, so these trends can be explored on a regional level.

All this is interesting, but there’s more useful data in there waiting to be uncovered. Someone at Google put together a list of search terms that might be entered by someone with the flu, extracted a few years of search data, correlated that with the CDC’s disease data, and created Google Flu Trends. The idea is that when flu season hits and people start getting sick, they’ll start hunting for information and advice online. This will get noticed by Google and can provide useful data on where the flu seems to be hitting hardest. Additionally, since most people are likely to go online before they call their doctor or go to the hospital, trends might become apparent earlier through search data than through more traditional methods.

Graph of search data from Google Flu Trends

All in all, it’s a very clever way to take information which otherwise might get ignored, or used for a purely business-related purpose, and use it in a way that could help people. Get the backstory in this article at the New York Times.

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At Last!

November 6, 2008 – 10:01 am

I was lucky enough to attend Obama’s election night rally in Grant Park. It was both dull—I could have watched CNN at home, and that’s what I did for most of the rally—and awe-inspiring. How often does it happen that so many people come together to celebrate something other than a sports championship? The number of bodies standing in the southeast corner of the park was impressive, but my eyes really got wide when we left our little gated community of 60-70,000 near the stage and found Michigan Avenue—from Congress up to Randolph—full of people, with more streaming west to get to the L. And despite the vast crowds, heavy police presence, and dire reminders of Chicago in 1968, I didn’t see a single unpleasant altercation; everyone was there to revel in the fulfillment of a dream.

Obama Rally - 09

After two intensely disappointing elections, I finally have had some of my faith in the American electorate restored. The last eight years have shown us clearly what happens when our vote is guided by fear and ignorance. I have my fingers crossed that the next eight will be a demonstration of the effects of hope and intelligence, and that people will remember the difference, and not go down that old dark road for a long time to come.

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