All posts by djones

rant, repair, replace, scientific method

Rant #1

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Do you ever wonder about all the things we no longer fix or repair because it is not “cost effective”? Or the services that have disappeared because there is no demand? I do.

Intellectually, I understand the economics of manufacturing things that cannot be repaired. After all, it you are making a few million of something, and it costs an additional $5-10 to make each one if you design and manufacture it so that it is repairable, you will loose $10-30 million potential dollars. Not to mention the questions of reliability, etc. But emotionally, …

 I can remember when TV/Radio repair shops were common and those items were repaired when they quit working. Now? Not so much. Talk to an automobile mechanic about major repairs to engines and you’ll find the same trend to whole unit replacement that eventually lead to the demise of the TV/Radio repair shop. If the cost of labor and parts to repair is more than the cost of replacement (12 hours of labor + $200 in parts >> 2 hours of labor + $500 in parts), replacement it is. It is not long after this point is reached that the ability to even get the parts for repair disappears. After all, none of us wants to pay any more than we have to to fix anything. And if the thing in question is on a downward price curve, it makes more and more sense to upgrade rather than repair.

I worry about what we as a society are losing in the mix as repair becomes replacement. I cannot overestimate the number of my colleges in the technical fields who grew and nurtured their interest in the field by tinkering. The ability to reverse engineer and perhaps create alternative function  from old items was a keystone in their development of an interest in science and the scientific method. The reward of making something work that hadn’t worked before led to learning the theory behind the operation and the science of the thing .

As an example, I grew up playing with old TV’s and radios. I learned how to repair some of them, cobble several of them together into one working unit, and sometimes adapt the remaining carcass to some entirely new function. You’d be amazed what a high voltage section from a TV, an old neon sign transformer, and a few other parts can become in the tinkering mind of a teenager. It was how I built my first laser, explored electromagnetic induction as a means of propulsion, built bug zappers, etc. Now with one piece custom chips and other advances, there is nothing for the budding tinkerer to play with when the appliance quits working. There is nothing to be repaired because replacement is generally the one fix. And even that is often not possible because after a few years, you cannot find those custom chips,  It is not in the interest of the manufacturer to have more of them on hand than needed to ship the product. It is often economically saner to just ship another new unit than to even waste the time diagnosing the problem. How many of you have had the experience of buying a relatively high ticket item and having the manufacturer replace it with a different model when it fails under warranty? Quote unquote because the parts are no longer available?

My concern is that young people today do not get the same chance to tinker and explore. I know that some organizations are convinced that the lack of such experiences are behind the shortages in several technical fields. Some kids have adopted to tinkering with computers, but the feel and intellectual stimulation is different. And one major difference is that instead of learning science and the scientific method, they are often learning the artificial logic of a non-real universe. I.e. one designed by a game designer where the normal constraints of reality are relaxed or removed in their entirety.

Given that change in experience, moving from the hard rules of reality to the malleable and often whimsical rules of the computer or game, the ability to discern fact from fiction is declining. The young people I talk to have a hard time applying common sense and experience to determine the plausibility of any given statement. It leads to what I refer to as “tabloid science”, where a claim in violation of scientific fact is made. And they believe it because they have no basis to rationally determine the plausibility of the claim. The effect is even more pernicious than it first appears, because with experience of the warped and arbitrary logic often shown in gaming and fantasy worlds, they have lost the ability to logically deduce consequences from posited truths. Without that ability, they cannot reason the consequences of the tabloid claim and then test those consequences. Scientific method – not in this group.

CCH, trivia

We Won!

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We won the trivia contest again. This year the format was adjusted a bit and the questions were divided into nine categories. The categories were:

  • General Knowledge
  • Music
  • Geography
  • Literature
  • Sports & Leisure
  • Movies
  • History
  • TV
  • Science
We did well in most categories and were perfect in Literature, Movies, and Science. TV came close to smoking our posteriors. Nothing like none of us having a clue. The team this year was the same as last year, so we had a CPA, a lawyer, a surgeon, a retired librarian, the young guy, and myself. Not a one of us watches TV other than for some sports or old movies. So when one of the questions was “What was the name of the coffee shop the characters in Friends often visited?”, we shared the blank look. We couldn’t even think of a good crowd pleaser for an answer. (The answer was “Central Perk”.)
It was a close battle this year. A new team (The Cracker Jacks) from a small town about 40 miles to south of here was in the competition for the first time and they came on strong to tie us at the end of regulation. It was the first tie in the history of the event at the end of regulation. So the moderator finally got a chance to ask his tie breaking questions. He had had them sealed in his Funk and Wagonall’s Mayo jar for at least 8 years. Our team and the other team both got the first three tie breakers correct. The tie breaking questions included such tidbits as:
  • What is the shortest verse in the King James translation of the Bible? (“Jesus wept”)
  • What are the colors of the three rooms on the first floor of the White House? (Red, Blue, Green)
  • If a plane travels 300 yds in 10 seconds, how many feet will it travel in 1/5 of a second? (18)
  • What were the names of the seven original Mercury Astronauts? (Glenn, Grissom, Shepard, Carpenter, Slayton, Schirra, and Cooper)
When the final tie breaking question “What were the names of all seven original Mercury program astronauts?” was asked, we scribbled like mad on our answer pad. We came up with all but Schirra . We could not for the life of us think of who the seventh astronaut was. We finally guessed Young, but that was wrong as he was a Gemini and later astronaut. Fortunately for us, the other team could only come up with 5 names to our 6, so we won! Yea us!
On the “crowd pleasing” side, one of the better answers was given to the question “Who is Angelina Jolie’s Oscar winning father?” (Jon Voight) One of the teams who was stumped supplied the answer “Shrek“.
On the “stump people” side, the best question was “What is the name of the one state whose name does not appear in the name of a university? I.e. there is the University of Colorado and the University of Hawaii and … Which state isn’t in that list?” I don’t think anyone got that one correct. (New Jersey – Rutgers is the State University of New Jersey)

All in all a fun evening. This year there were several new teams, including one organized by my grand-niece composed of seventh graders. I say grand-niece because she refers to me as uncle XXX, but the real relationship is that her mother is my cousin. It made me glad to see the new blood participating this year – there were 19 or 20 teams and all the entry fees go towards supporting Community Caring Hands.
By the way, just in case you wondered, CCH was originally founded to be a part of Habitat for Humanity, but we were too short on population out here to qualify for a chapter. Thus CCH was born to carry on the work out here in the rural boonies.
So once more our names will be engraved on the trophy and we’ll be able to show it off for the next year. Well maybe rub it in people’s faces, but you didn’t hear that here …
CCH, trivia

Trivia Contest

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This weekend is the Community Caring Hands Trivia Bowl. It is one of the more fun charity events to support the local CCH group. For those who aren’t familiar with CCH, they are a non-profit which does services for the elderly and poor in the community such as window repair and handicapped ramps and … Basically home improvements and repair for those who can’t do them without help.

The Trivia Bowl was started by a faculty group from the local community college many moons ago. It grew from a game they played over the lunch hour that is much akin to a team version of Trivial Pursuit. The way the local version works is that you get together a 4-6 person team, enter, and have fun.  Each team is assigned a table in the Elks Ballroom. A local retired faculty member and author of many trivia books is the Moderator. The normal flow is:

  • Moderator asks a question
  • Moderator starts the 60 second clock
  • Your team writes its answer on a slip of paper
  • Clock expires and the slips of paper are collected by the runners
  • Runners give the slips to the panel of judges
  • Your team is awarded a point for each correct answer

The winner is the team with the most points after all 6-8 categories of human knowledge have been exhausted.
What makes the event fun is that every one is heckling everyone else between questions and there is food and drink for all teams. Not to mention the audience in the galleries is hooting and hollering, especially when the judges announce a particularly inane answer to the crowd. You score crowd points but no game points by making up a Rube Goldberg style answer to any question you have no clue about.

Needless to say, it is a couple of hours of fun. Teams spend a lot of time visiting and talking between rounds, so it is a social event as well as a trivia contest. Teams seem to persist for years as a team. The team I am on has been competing for some years now with changes in personnel when schedules prevent some of us from participating. Our leader is an old high school classmate and former CPA. He is a bit obsessive, to the point of analyzing any question we missed in the previous year, etc. Another of our team is local lawyer who was also a high school classmate. Finally, to round out the core of our team, we have a youngster (he might be 27 by now) so that we can cover the youth trend questions. Some years we add a local surgeon or doctor or teacher or movie writer or … It all depends on who we can recruit.

We usually get a rousing round of boos at the start of the contest as the teams are announced – both because I am the mayor and because we have been the champions 3 out of the last 4 years. (We were sub-par one year and lost to the local community college faculty team. *gasp*) Most years there are 120 questions divided into 6 categories. We usually end up getting 110-115 correct. Second place is usually around 105-110 correct and then there always seems to be a gap before a cluster of other teams. But the real fun is the ones where you have no clue and so can go for the crowd points.

So think of me tomorrow night as I trivialize my way down the road … I’ll try to remember a few good questions and put them up here after the contest.

friends

Good Friends

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Yesterday, with the downer of the upchucking dog and other such wonders that one hopes to forget, was a wart on the toad of life. Except! Except that a good friend that I haven’t spent much time with in the last month called and said let’s go out to eat. Sort of like a lifeline to save the week. And so we did indeed go out for Chinese this evening and it was good.

It is all too easy to lose the connection with friends in the hassles of day to day life. Just being able to sit down with my friend and his SO and enjoy the conversation on a breadth of topics was so relaxing and uplifting. Given that I live the bachelor life during the week (well, I don’t *think* the Molly the dog can be considered my mistress in *that* sense), I have a tendency to  withdraw into my computers. The day to day tasks as mayor keep me out and about, sometimes to the limits of my sociability and beyond, but do not do anything to assuage that deep need that true friendship satisfies. It’s sort of like an itch you didn’t know you had until after you scratched it. And then it feels so good you cannot figure out why you didn’t scratch it long ago. It was that kind of a relaxing evening. I hope you all remember to scratch your itches in a timely manner.

Here’s to good friends who remember to scratch your itch even when you haven’t realized it needed scratched!

(I don’t know who to credit for this picture. If you know, leave a comment.)