Technology – Page 7 – Into the Woods

Rethinking the unthinkable

Those of you who recognize the quote in the image above will guess the subject of this post: thermonuclear war. The quote is from the 1983 classic film “War Games” starring Matthew Broderick.

First of all, I’m not the only person with a renewed concern about nuclear weapons. It seems to be in the zeitgeist recently. For example:

• Two days ago, on Christmas day, Russia tested a new bomb-delivery missile that flies at 20 times the speed of sound. Putin gloated. The Russian people were thrilled. Here is a link to the Washington Post story, Russia is poised to add a new hypersonic nuclear warhead to its arsenal.

• The day after Russia’s missile test, Vox published a fairly detailed overview of the current state of the world’s nuclear weapons, including some quotes from experts about the global level of danger as it stands today. The article also includes some scary information on just how deadly the detonation of even one nuclear weapon would be. Here is a link to the article, This is exactly how a nuclear war would kill you.

• Earlier this year, the United States released a report with the title Nuclear Posture Review 2018. The report was signed by Jim Mattis, the former Marine Corps general who recently resigned as Secretary of Defense because of his disgust with the Trump administration. The report is a slick piece of public relations. You have to read it carefully to catch the main point. That main point is that, under Trump, the United States has lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. Here is a link to the report.

• The Vox story includes an anecdote from a Georgetown University professor who, for many years, has taught a course on nuclear weapons and world politics. As part of the course, he always asks students whether they think nuclear weapons will be used in their lifetime. In years past, no more than one student would raise their hand. But for the past two years, 60 percent have raised their hands. The professor agrees with them.

In this context, please take a moment to ponder the insanity of an American politics that construes the most urgent threat to the nation’s security to be the U.S. border with Mexico, a politics so depraved that it’s willing to shut down the U.S. government to get billions of dollars for a border wall. Yes, the Pentagon is spending lots of money to catch up with Russia on hypersonic missiles. But to the Trump administration, diplomacy is a dirty word, as Trump repeatedly insults our allies and sucks up to corrupt and belligerent strongmen. Trump boasts that his nuclear button is bigger than North Korea’s nuclear button. The world’s nuclear arsenal is now largely under the control of madmen.

I grew up during the Cold War. Most people concluded that elaborate shelters were not affordable or justifiable. The government at the time actually recommended the building of fallout shelters and made plans available. But, as my father used to say, what would you do when the neighbors show up and want in? Shoot them?

But I think that there probably is a sweet spot on the affordability scale. There are inexpensive things that one can do in advance that greatly improve one’s options in a sudden emergency. These include the storage of a certain amount of food and water for all types of emergencies, including weather emergencies or earthquakes. Where might that sweet spot be for thermonuclear war?

As far as I can tell, the standard handbook is still Nuclear War Survival Skills. It was originally published in 1979 by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was revised in 1986. The revised edition is available, in print, from Amazon. A PDF version is downloadable, free, from many places on the Internet. You can find it by Googling for the title.

Chapter 16 of Nuclear War Survival Skills is only two pages long. It’s a summary of “minimum pre-crisis preparations.” Most of those preparations are inexpensive, and all are based on common sense. For example, you may not make the effort to turn your basement into a fallout shelter. But why not have a plan, and why not stash some items such as tools and tarps. Did you know that stacks of books can be used for radiation shielding?

One potentially costly item that must be stashed in advance is a radiation detector. I have an old Civil Defense Geiger counter. It was made in 1963. It still works great. I bought it on eBay. Dosimeters also would be highly desirable, to track the total cumulative exposure to powerful radiation such as gamma rays. A cheap dosimeter card is available on Amazon. I can’t vouch for its quality, but I believe that the science of it is sound. I don’t want to get into the science of why iodine absorption is a problem with nuclear fallout, but having potassium iodide on hand is a good idea. It’s inexpensive and is available on Amazon.

Preparations aside, survivability would greatly depend upon one’s knowledge. Some of the needed knowledge is easy to acquire. Some of that knowledge is probably not available. For example:

• What should you do if you see extremely bright lights in the sky and suddenly the power goes out? Nuclear War Survival Skills contains these instructions: Don’t look at the light. As quickly as possible, get behind the strongest shield possible between yourself and the light. Stay there for at least two minutes. If no shock wave or explosion sounds reach you in two minutes, then you are more than 25 miles from the detonation. Congratulations. You probably will not be harmed by the effects of the blast itself. You can now come out of hiding and deal with the problem of surviving the nuclear fallout. How to survive nuclear fallout in an improvised shelter is a complicated matter, and that’s why you might want to have a printed copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills on your bookshelf. You also will want to know as much as possible about prevailing winds in your area and the location of nuclear power plants or other military targets, especially if they are upwind of you. This information is easy to acquire now. But after the power goes out, suddenly many things become much more difficult.

• Even with the 1986 revisions, the information about military targets and the capabilities of nuclear weapons is hopelessly out of date. There may be places on the Internet where one might find much of this information, with some diligent research. But all I’ve been able to find is low-quality stuff from people such as right-wing preppers, people with high levels of paranoia and low levels of knowledge. In addition to the lack of references, I’d imagine that much information is a matter of military secrecy. Should we continue to assume, as we did in 1986, that any runway long enough to land a B-52 bomber is a target? I have no idea. Are nuclear power plants still a target? I have no idea. Are major cities still a target? I have no idea. Still, those are all things that I would not want to be downwind of. The amount of fallout from a nuclear detonation greatly depends on the size of the warhead and how far above the ground it detonated. A flash of light will tell us little to nothing about those factors. We just don’t — and probably can’t — know enough to fully assess the risks, either before or after we see a flash. Would radio broadcasts provide information after a flash? Though a battery-powered radio is an essential item, my guess is that any stations that are still able to broadcast are likely to be far away, out of range of most receivers and antennas and with no information on local conditions.

Readers in Europe: Your risk calculus will be a little different that risk calculus in the U.S., but the risk to Europeans is as great, or greater, than in the U.S.

I’m not arguing here that we ought to worry ourselves to death. The Vox article, for example, says that the actual risk that a nuclear weapon (or weapons) will be used remains small. We’ve lived with nuclear weapons now for almost 75 years, and, except for once, we’ve had the good sense not to use them. Nevertheless, the world and its leadership does seem to be particularly disordered at the moment. There is still a huge investment in nuclear weaponry, with new generations of weapons coming online. The United States has lowered the threshold for the use of these weapons. There also is a chance that a rogue state or a terrorist cell will get a nuclear device.

Minimal preparation, I think, is in the same category as insurance. We all spend relatively minor sums on insurance to protect ourselves against major losses. As far as I know, every major business has a disaster plan, prepared in advance and kept up to date. When I worked for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, where earthquakes are a constant threat, we always had a disaster plan, with backup production sites that were equipped and ready, so that we could continue to publish after an earthquake.

Households, I think, would do well to have a disaster plan, with an affordable level of preparations in place. It’s not just about thermonuclear war. It’s also about storms, blackouts, and epidemics, which are far more likely.

Update: From today’s Irish Times, a European take on Russia’s new missile: Bullish Putin unveils ‘invulnerable’ nuclear weapon.

The Apple watch EKG function

Apple released a bunch of software updates yesterday — 10.14.2 of Mac OS; 12.1.1 of iOS; and 5.1.2 of watchOS. The updates for the iPhone and the Apple watch enable the long-promised EKG function on the Apple watch 4.

I’m going to guess that thousands of people who’ve never seen an electrical graph of their own heartbeat before (including me) saw that for the first time today. It’s easy. You press your right finger against the stem of the watch, and the back of the watch has electrical contact with your left wrist. That forms a circuit that goes across your heart. In 30 seconds, the watch creates a simple EKG. The test is intended only to detect atrial fibrillation.

The iPhone saves a record of all your EKG’s. If you request it, the iPhone app will create a PDF of the EKG that you can use to start a conversation with your doctor. I used that PDF to create the image above.

Lucky for me, the watch didn’t detect a problem.

I’ve had the Apple watch for about three weeks now. I have become very fond of it, not only as a timepiece but also as a communications device and fitness coach. If I’ve been sitting at the computer for too long, it taps my wrist and tells me that it’s time to stand up and move around for a while. It has encouraged me to walk more, knowing that it counts every step and that I’d like to have a good report at bedtime. I am still trying to understand how to make use of its “heart rate variability” function (as are many watch wearers). But heart rate variability is a complicated subject for another day, after I understand it better.

Three times, I have triggered the watch’s fall detector. In all three cases, I was slapping my hand against my leg — for example, when I was on the deck yelling at the squirrel to get off the roof. I replied to the watch’s prompts and told it that I had not fallen.

Honestly I would feel a little insecure now without the watch on my wrist. That, I’m sure, is just what Apple was aiming for.

The eternal elegance of good technology

The signal strength dial on a Collins 75A-4 receiver, circa 1952

Uh-oh. This is a nerd post.

Every so often, I have a maintenance day for my collection of obsolete technology. Stuff gets dusted. Stuff gets turned on and exercised. Batteries in portable devices get charged. Little fixes gets done. These things are like pets. Like pets, they like to be photographed. Unlike pets, they hold still for tripod shots with long exposures.

To keep working and for a long life, many devices actually need the periodic exercise. Failure to periodically use my IBM Selectric III would be one of the worst things I could do to it. Capacitors in old radios and other electronics need tend to deteriorate unless they are energized and charged periodically. Batteries require maintenance. But old devices, like old pets, also need to be (and like to be) petted and loved. They are intelligent machines from some incredible engineers. I have been known to say that engineers were some of the best artists of the 20th Century. A collection of old technologies is in many ways an art collection.

Strangely enough, pretty much all my old technology works. I realized today that my Pioneer SX-9000 receiver-amplifier (about 1972) is sitting idle and needs to be used. It works fine, but all of its dial lights are burned out. On eBay, for the SX-9000 and many other classic amplifiers, one can buy brand new LED replacement bulbs for the dial lights. For $19.95, I ordered a set of bulbs. I’ll soon make a project of opening up the SX-9000, dusting it out, replacing the bulbs, and moving it to a place where it can be connected to good speakers and still be heard.

I didn’t get to all my old pets today. But they’re still loved, so maybe tomorrow.

A Monroe 650 calculator, with Nixie tubes, which just calculated the square root of 2. This is my go-to calculator when I’m doing my taxes.

An Astatic D-104 microphone

A 10-point “Delegate” typeface for my IBM Selectric III. My IBM Selectric is long retired from the San Francisco Examiner and bears a nameplate for The Typewritorium, a San Francisco typewriter business that may still be in operation, though I think it has moved.

An analog measuring device with a very long history

The fine-tuning dial on the Collins receiver, which has 21 tubes and weighs 35 pounds

A Tektronix 2430A oscilloscope, totally cherry and shipped from San Francisco when I moved. It was retired from the data center of the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, where I believe it was used for calibrating the read-write heads on early “wash tub” disk drives.

The somewhat dusty interior of the Collins 75A-4 receiver

A Civil Defense CDV-700 Geiger counter, in perfect working condition. There were times when winds from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan (2011) blew this way. The Geiger counter reported a significant (but not dangerous) increase in the North Carolina background radiation.

Kirby vacuum cleaners

A Kirby Avalir vacuum cleaner

Sorry again, non-nerds. This is another nerd post. Though we’ll also talk about Kirby’s business practices.

I had not been inside a pawn shop in probably 50 years. Nice people don’t go into pawn shops. But I was waiting for the oil to be changed in my car, with a one-hour wait on my hands. I got in 2.5 miles of walking, checking out the businesses in the neighborhood of the car place. One of those businesses was a pawn shop. When I went in, a nice young man told me that if I saw anything I liked, he’d make me a good deal on it.

Only one thing caught my eye. That was a Kirby Avalir vacuum cleaner, model G10D, that looked like new. The sticker said that it came with a box of tools. The sticker price was $199. After wandering around the store for a while, I told the young man that I had some time to kill while my car was being serviced, and that I was interested in the vacuum cleaner. I asked what kind of deal he’d make me. He went behind the counter and looked up something in a computer. He’d sell it for $140, he said. I went out and walked some more, and I Googled for that model of Kirby. The price he’d offered me was a total steal. I resolved that I’d go back, and, if the box of tools (which was in the back, he said), was complete, then I’d buy the vacuum cleaner. After visiting an ATM machine and withdrawing enough cash, I went back to the pawn shop. Most of the tools in the box appeared to have never been used. There even was a shampoo attachment (which I will never use and probably ought to sell on eBay).

Kirby vacuum cleaners are an American icon, with about 85 years of history. Their build quality is superb, and they’re very high-powered. The mechanical beauty of a Kirby vacuum cleaner is so appealing to men that it seems that most of the YouTube videos on Kirby vacuum cleaners are done by men. Kirby’s marketing, though, has often gotten the company into trouble. They’re sold by “direct sales” only, door to door. Though they’re great vacuum cleaners, they cost twice as much as comparable products, like every product that is sold door to door. Poor people and old people are often targeted by Kirby salesmen, people who can’t afford Kirby’s prices. I would assume that Kirby must also make money through financing, because it seems very unlikely that many customers are in a position to write a $2,000 check for a vacuum cleaner.

And so the value of a Kirby vacuum cleaner drops by about half as soon as the salesman walks out the door. After that, Kirby vacuum cleaners hold their value very well, as you’ll see if you shop for one on eBay.

Driving home with the vacuum cleaner in the front seat and the box of tools in the back, I had a good chuckle at the model name “Avalir.” As a word nerd, I knew that it’s clearly taken from the French avaler, which means to swallow or to inhale. It was a bit of work, Googling in French, to trace the root of the French avaler back to Latin. The Latin root is valles, or valley. The French avaler, it seems, originally meant “to descend,” but later the word acquired the meaning of swallowing. An English cognate is avalanche.

I haven’t used the vacuum cleaner yet because I’m waiting for some new vacuum cleaner bags from Amazon. But Lily (the cat), though she has never heard the thing run, recognized it instantly as a vacuum cleaner. She turned and fled upstairs.

Using the Apple watch in fringe areas

Sorry, non-nerds. This is a nerd post.

Technology companies these days assume that everyone, everywhere, has fast Internet and good cell phone coverage. In rural America, that is not the case. Millions of us have been left behind. In the 10 years that I have lived here in the woods, things have gotten better. But I still have sketchy cellular service (the nearest tower is about 2.75 miles away). For Internet, I now have HughesNet satellite service. It’s fast, but it’s expensive. I get only so many gigabytes a month. And a half-second delay is built into everything you do, just because of the speed of light and the round trip to the satellite (46,000 miles).

A week ago, when I bought an Apple Watch 4, I knew that I was taking a risk and that some of the features might not work well in a fringe area. For example, by default, if the watch’s owner is more than 65 years old (I am), then fall detection is turned on. If the watch’s internal sensors think that you have taken a fall, and if you don’t move and don’t respond to the watch for a minute, then the watch will call emergency services and send texts to your emergency contacts. I wanted that feature not only for fall detection, but also so that I always would have on my wrist a way to call 911.

I am happy to report that, when I did a walkaround today, the watch was able to make calls from anywhere on abbey property — the woods as well as the yard, garden, and orchard. However, to make that happen, I had to order a WIFI range extender and mount it in the abbey’s attic. It took a lot of fussing, experimenting, and reading to figure out why a WIFI range extender was necessary in my situation.

My watch is paired with a new iPhone XR. The phone actually is quite a good cell phone, much better than my now-retired iPhone 5, which was six years old. I’m on the Verizon network. The iPhone XR will make an LTE connection to Verizon if it can. That’s the fastest kind of connection, but LTE also requires better signal strength. If the nearest Verizon tower is too far away to support LTE, then the iPhone will fall back to 3G, or CDMA-EVDO, which is slower but totally useful. If the signal strength is too weak to support 3G, then the iPhone will fall back to CDMA-1x, which is very slow but good enough for phone calls and even slow, slow, data. The iPhone even has another option. If WIFI is available, then the iPhone can make phone calls using WIFI, routed through Verizon’s “VZW-Wifi” system. In short, the iPhone XR has options for how it connects to the nearest tower, it has decent antennas, and it has enough power to be a pretty good cell phone. The iPhone also has the option of routing calls over WIFI.

The Apple watch can function as a cell phone even when its paired iPhone is not nearby. The watch can connect directly to Verizon. But the watch is not a powerful cell phone. The watch has low power and tiny antennas. Even worse, the watch supports only LTE, so it cannot fall back to 3G or 1x when signals are weak. Apple watches love the city. But there is a limit to what they can do in rural areas with fringe cellular coverage. However, if the watch’s paired iPhone is nearby, then the watch will make its calls through the iPhone, using a Bluetooth connection to the iPhone. That provides some options for people like me who are in fringe areas — as long as the iPhone is within Bluetooth or WIFI range of the watch.

So, what if I’m out mowing the yard, the mower turns over on a steep bank, I’m thrown off and land hard, and I don’t respond when the Apple watch asks if I’m OK. As long as the iPhone is in my pocket, the Apple watch will connect to the iPhone, and the iPhone will make the call and send the texts. Depending on where I am on abbey property, the iPhone might make its emergency call using LTE, 3G, or WIFI. By walking around the entire property, including into the woods and up the ridge, I determined that the iPhone always has an option for making the call. LTE works up on the ridge, for example. But down by the stream, and in most of the yard, the iPhone chooses WIFI.

About the watch: I love it! I actually like wearing a watch. The Apple watch will always be accurate to a fraction of a second, because it gets the time from network time servers. I was somewhat skeptical about whether the fitness features of the watch (and of the iPhone XR) would be useful, but they are, not least because the watch gently encourages you to keep moving. I also learned that my old-fashioned rural lifestyle is more active than I realized. Even on a sedentary day, I cover two miles and 25 flights of stairs. Four miles a day is easy to achieve. Because the watch helps you calculate the number of calories you’ve burned each day, it provides decently accurate advice on how much you can eat without gaining weight. It’s also nice to know that my resting heart rate is in a very healthy range. The new Apple Watch 4 has new features that obviously are aimed at older people. The geniuses at Apple are geniuses at separating us from our money, even our retirement income.

To test the watch’s ability to make phone calls anywhere on abbey property, I used the number that anyone can call to hear BBC’s audio — (605) 781-9836.

Apple Pay? Yes, you should …

When I first heard about Apple Pay a few years ago, I assumed that it was nothing more than a play by Apple to insert itself into the lucrative credit card transaction business and extract a cut. To some degree, that’s true. But, as far as I can tell, Apple gets only a meager 0.15 percent cut of each transaction. That’s not much, so Apple has other motives. I believe those other motives are the usefulness of their devices such as iPhones, and security. The bank pays the 0.15 percent, and you get the benefit of the convenience and the added security. Apple Pay doesn’t cost you anything. To use Apple Pay, your credit card stays in your pocket. Instead, you hold your phone close to the credit card reader. To the merchant, it’s as good as swiping your card. To you, it’s free. Plus your credit card information can’t be stolen. And you get a receipt stored inside your phone.

On my recent trip to Scotland, I noticed many people paying with their phones — far more than I had observed in the United States. Europe, it seems, is ahead of the U.S. in this area. Consequently, Europe also has a lower rate of credit card fraud than the U.S.

How Apple Pay works is fairly technical, and we need not get into that here. The important factor is that the merchant never sees your credit card or your credit card number. Instead, the merchant sees only a “token,” presented wirelessly from a chip in your phone, which is good for that transaction only. Thus your credit card information cannot be stolen when you use Apple Pay. (There are similar services for people who use Android phones.)

That’s another thing I noticed in Scotland. Whether I was in a restaurant, a hotel, a grocery store, a book store, or a train station, my credit card never left my hand. Instead, you were always presented with a card reader into which the customer inserts the card. In the U.S., we are moving in that direction. But it’s still common for credit cards to vanish from the table at restaurants while the charges are run somewhere else. When credit card information is stolen, that’s often how it happens. Someone “skims” your credit card data while it’s out of your sight. Last month, for the third time in ten years, my credit card information was stolen or compromised. I’ve vowed to never let a credit card out of my sight, or out of my hand, again. My bank has always detected the problem very quickly when my credit card was compromised. And I have never been stuck with a charge that I didn’t make. But it’s a huge aggravation to come to terms with the bank on the illegitimate charges and to wait for one to two weeks for a new card to be issued.

I would have adopted Apple Pay sooner. But it was only a few days ago that I retired my six-year-old iPhone 5, which did not support Apple Pay, and upgraded to an iPhone XR. The Internet is a dangerous place. These days we (or our banks) can be robbed by someone who is thousands of miles away in a corrupt country such as Russia. We need not only to protect ourselves, but also to take advantage of improved technologies that make crime harder for criminals.

Some nerd talk about gasoline

The gas station nearest me actually has what I need.

Liberals don’t generally talk much about gasoline. Conservatives do. But I’ve done some reading up on gasoline during the past few days, so let’s have a bit of liberal-oriented nerd talk about the technicalities of gasoline. Both for fuel efficiency and the life of your car, it does matter.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the lease recently expired on my Smart car, and I replaced it with a Fiat 500. Those two vehicles have pretty different requirements for gasoline. So I wanted to understand the factors involved in choosing the best gasoline for the Fiat.

First, here are some basics, stuff that everyone needs to know about gasoline:

• OCTANE. Everyone knows that most gas stations have gasoline of at least two types — high octane (typically 91 or 93), and low octane (typically 87). Which you should use depends on your car. But what does octane measure?

Octane is a measure of the temperature at which gasoline ignites. The higher the octane, the higher the ignition temperature.

When the piston of an engine begins its compression stroke after gasoline and air have been injected into the cylinder, the compression alone raises the temperature inside the cylinder. But you don’t want the gasoline to ignite until the spark plug ignites it. If the compression is high enough, and if the octane is low enough, then the increase in temperature as the mixture is compressed will cause some of the gasoline to ignite too soon, from the heat of compression rather than from the spark. This is what causes the “knocking” sound. The knocking can damage the engine (particularly the valves), and it wastes energy, because the fuel that burned too soon in the “knock” is not available to burn when the spark (as determined by the engine’s timing) wants it to burn.

The approved wisdom seems to be that it’s very important to honor the minimum octane requirement for your vehicle, but that you’re wasting your money if you buy gasoline with a higher octane than your engine requires.

To some degree, the computers in modern engines can detect the knock (with a microphone, basically) and retard the timing of the spark to prevent knocking. That is not an optimal solution, since the timing of the spark is not optimal. Optimal timing and optimal octane are the optimal arrangement.

I’ll have more to say about octane, but let’s move on to the next basic factor about gasoline.

• ETHANOL. Ethanol, of course, is alcohol. It’s usually made from corn. The idea of ethanol as a motor fuel has been around since the “energy crisis” of the 1970s. In 2005, the U.S. Congress enacted the Renewable Fuel Standard, requiring a certain amount of renewable fuel in gasoline sold in the United States. The Renewable Fuel Standard was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Today, most gasoline sold in the United States contains 10 percent ethanol.

If you’re interested in the politics of this, then it’s important to keep in mind that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was signed by a Republican president — George W. Bush. Though the legislation had bipartisan support, both the 108th Congress (2003-2005) and the 109th Congress (2005-2007) had Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. I’ll have more to say about the politics in a second.

Chemically, there are three important things to know about ethanol.

First, ethanol contains less energy than gasoline made from petroleum — about 7 percent less, I believe. Because it contains less energy, ethanol cannot deliver as many miles per gallon as gasoline made from petroleum.

Second, ethanol, when exposed to the air, will suck moisture from the air. Over time, this thirst of ethanol for water will cause water to be absorbed into the gasoline. Engines don’t like that! The water absorption takes time. If you use up the gasoline quickly, it probably won’t be a problem. But if the gasoline sits in the tank for too long (for example, in a lawn mower, all winter), then the water in the fuel will be a problem.

Third, ethanol has a higher ignition temperature than gasoline made from petroleum. It’s harder to light. For that reason, ethanol can be used to raise the octane of gasoline.

• ADDITIVES: The Environmental Protection Agency requires that gasoline contain certain additives (such as detergents) that help keep the engine’s valves, combustion chamber, and fuel injectors clean. The EPA’s requirement has to do with emissions control. However, many car manufacturers recommend (but don’t necessarily require) more of these detergent additives to maximize the life of the engine and to reduce maintenance. These manufacturers include BMW, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Audi. Gasoline distributors adopted the automakers’ recommendations and call it “Top Tier Gasoline.” That’s a trademarked gasoline standard and may involve some marketing hype. But if the car manufacturers support the Top Tier standard, then it seems legit enough to me. Here’s the Wikipedia article.

So then, keeping those factors in mind, and trying to be as scientific as possible, what would be the ideal gasoline for my Fiat 500 (or for your car)?

A key piece of information will be found in your owner’s manual, and probably on your gas cap. My Fiat requires a minimum octane of 87, with 91 octane preferred. My ideal gasoline would look like this:

• 91 octane

• Top-Tier

• No ethanol

There’s room for argument on whether Top-Tier gasoline is worth the extra cost. My opinion, since I want to maximize the life of my car, is that Top-Tier gasoline is worth the cost.

There’s also room for argument on ethanol. The environmental issues are complicated. Yes, ethanol is renewable. But how many square miles of farmland are being devoted to growing corn for ethanol? Where does the fuel come from for distilling the ethanol? Some of it is coal. I prefer non-ethanol gasoline, if I can get it, for three reasons: Because I’m skeptical about the environmental issues; because ethanol contains less energy (and is therefore less efficient); and because the tendency of ethanol to draw water into the fuel cannot be a good thing.

Here in Trump country, if I asked the average person pumping non-ethanol gasoline into his SUV why he’s using non-ethanol gasoline, the odds are that he would say that ethanol in gasoline is a boondoggle brought to us by liberals and environmentalists. He would be wrong. He probably wouldn’t even believe me if I told him that ethanol was forced on us by a Republican Congress and a Republican president.

So you can make a better argument that ethanol in gasoline is a Republican boondoggle. Why would they do that? Well, what’s in it for farmers is obvious.

But what’s in it for the oil companies? It’s in the chemistry. Ethanol has a higher ignition temperature and therefore a higher octane than gasoline made from petroleum. It’s a cheap (and nontoxic) way of raising gasoline’s octane rating. Oil companies would almost certainly be adding ethanol to gasoline even if a Republican Congress hadn’t enacted regulations that require it. (Remember when gasoline contained lead? It’s now banned, but “tetraethyl lead” was an octane-raiser that is not chemically dissimilar from alcohol. It’s a lead atom bonded to an ethyl substance.)

Before we leave the subject of gasoline, let’s take note of how complicated the issue is, and how politically fraught it is. As for the complications, I need to add one more:

As far as I can determine, all petroleum gasoline manufactured in the United States is made to the exact same standard, though many different companies make it. It’s generic, and it’s shipped around the country mainly by pipelines. Gasoline is not branded until it’s loaded onto tanker trucks to be delivered to retail gas stations. As far as I can determine, both the ethanol and the detergent additives are mixed into the gasoline when the gasoline goes onto the tanker trucks. Or, to say it slightly differently, the gasoline you buy is not branded until it’s loaded onto a tanker truck for delivery to gas stations. The tanker trucks normally deliver two types of gasoline — high octane, and low octane. If a station sells a middle grade, then the two grades are mixed at the pump.

In the case of my Fiat, my solution worked out very well. Marathon gasoline is Top Tier gasoline, and a local Marathon station carries 91 octane, no-ethanol gasoline. It’s not cheap. But I don’t use much of it, and I’ll pay what it costs. Gasoline like this is considered conservative gasoline (even if it costs more), so that’s why it’s so easy to find here in Trump country. I’m pretty sure that this is the only advantage I’ve ever been able to discover from living around a bunch of Trump voters and their big engines — good gas, but no good restaurants or good groceries.

For a list of Top-Tier gasoline brands, see the Wikipedia article or the Top-Tier web site.

For a state-by-state list of local stations that sell no-ethanol gasoline, go to pure-gas.org. There’s also a smart-phone app called “Pure Gas” that will show you the nearest stations on a map, along with what types of gasoline the station sells.

If I’ve made any errors in this post, please let me know.

Guilt tripping at 41 mpg (or less)

My 2017 Fiat 500 Pop

I am a tree hugger, and I confess a terrible moral failing. I love cars.

It was back in the 1960s, as a teenager, when I developed a Jaguar fetish. Having one as the family car would have been as impossible as having the moon. But even in the American provinces, one might occasionally see one — a Jaguar XKE, maybe, or a MK2 sedan. And of course you could see them on television, and in the movies. I would have sold my soul for either of them. I loved Mercedes almost as much. We even had a Mercedes, bought used, in my high school years. It was a 1963 220SE. I still dream about driving that car. In my dreams, it’s a symbol of a precision machine, working perfectly, almost immortal, and thoroughly mine — a good dream symbol for sure. Typically, in the dream, I go down to the basement and discover to my surprise that it’s still there. I turn the key. The dash lights up. It starts, and its sound is like music. German music, for sure. Probably Bach.

As an adult, I have always bought sensible and moderately priced cars. I indulged my unaffordable car fetishes with rentals. Several times, when I lived in San Francisco, I’d rent a Jaguar for a road trip down U.S. 1 to Los Angeles. That was enough to prevent my fetish from leading me into something foolish.

When I retired, I had a seven-year-old Jeep Wrangler, which I bought new in San Francisco. I still have the Jeep. Its mileage is very low. I will never part with it. But I also don’t want to wear out the Jeep. I see the Jeep now as a beast of burden and as a special-use vehicle for bad weather or for outings that involve bad roads. Sometimes it goes a month without being started. To avoid wearing out the Jeep, six years ago I leased a Smart car. It was the cheapest transportation available. Mercedes was advertising Smart car leases for $99 a month. I liked the first Smart car so much that I leased a second one. That lease just expired, and I returned my second Smart car to the dealer just two days ago.

For months, I thought about how to replace the Smart car, since Mercedes no longer sells the gasoline Smart car in the United States. (There is an electric model, but its range is too low to meet my rural needs). Should I lease? Should I buy? I considered the low-end Volkswagen. But I did not like the local Volkswagen dealership. My next idea was the smallest Fiat — the Fiat 500. Fiat now owns Jeep and Chrysler. So I went to the Jeep-Fiat dealer in Winston-Salem to try out the Fiats.

I picked out the least expensive Fiat 500 on the lot and went for a drive. It just happened to be a dignified color — a dark gray. As soon as I started the engine, it had charmed my socks off, and I knew that I would buy it. If you watch some of the YouTube reviews of Fiat 500s, you’ll see that they have charmed the socks off many people. A couple of reviewers compared it with a playful dog. That’s it exactly. Fido.

If you love cars, you look back on the cars you have driven with the same sort of sentiment as old lovers. If you’re my age, those memories will go back a long time.

The first car I ever really drove was my father’s 1952 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery. I was about eleven years old. I’d pilfer the keys and drive the old Chevrolet on the farm roads behind our house. Yes — I knew how to use a clutch at eleven years old. I’m not really sure how I learned, unless my father or older brother taught me. Or maybe I learned on my grandfather’s tractor. Another car that stands out in my memory is my 1974 Toyota Land Cruiser. If only I had kept it! But, having learned my lesson, I will never part with my 2001 Jeep Wrangler.

I strongly suspect that the Fiat will be a keeper. Driving it is a blast. Everything about it inspires affection. Assuming that it holds up well, then both the Fiat and the Jeep will still be stashed under shelter up the hill, still running strong, on the day I kick the bucket.

Should we feel guilty about our automobiles, given the state of the world? Yes, I believe we should. What cars have done — and what cars have done to us — is terrible. But I also suspect that, 500 years from now, people will look at images of our cars, or look at them in museums, and envy the daylights out of us. We actually drove them. Those cars burned fossil fuels and almost led to the end of the world. But they were beautiful.

The 1957 Fiat 500, which inspired the current Fiat design

A 1952 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery, the first car I ever drove (off road)

A 1963 Mercedes 220SE. I was with one on the day it finally died.

My 2001 Jeep Wrangler

A 1974 Toyota Land Cruiser

Episcopic illumination

Two letters of the word “LIBERTY” on an American 25-cent piece, magnified 60x

Two years ago, I wrote a post, with photos, about my Nikon Model S microscope. People who are Googling for this classic microscope often find my post, and it has been quite popular. In 2016, I did not have an “episcopic illuminator” for the microscope. I recently bought one on eBay. These devices for Model S microscopes seem to be fairly rare and don’t come up for sale often — at least not at a decent price.

An episcopic illuminator is a device that lights the specimen from above. What you see in the microscope is light reflected from the specimen. The opposite of this is “diascopic” illumination. In diascopic illumination, the light is below the specimen. What you see in the microscope is light that is transmitted through the specimen.

As you might imagine, both types of illumination are sometimes used together.

Somehow, my Nikon D2X camera seems to have infected me with a fetish for optics. Like my Nikon D2X camera, the Nikon Model S microscopes are now considered largely obsolete by professionals. But collectors and hobbyists snap them up for their quality and their continuing usefulness.

Unfortunately, the through-the-microscope photos here are of poor quality, because they were shot with an iPhone held over the microscope’s eyepiece.

⬆︎ The episcopic illuminator is the attachment on the left with the lettering “Nikon / 69368 / 1.5x.” Similar illuminators are an option on many microscopes.

⬆︎ The lamp below the microscope stage is a diascopic illuminator.

⬆︎ This is a blade of grass, with both episcopic and diascopic illumination, showing the barbs on the edge that can irritate or even cut tender skin.

Apple’s 1987 “Knowledge Navigator,” and Alexa

My opinion is that Alexa and Siri are useless. Last week, I met my first Apple HomePod at a friend’s house. Siri was a total idiot who knew nothing and who kept getting things wrong. I feel sure that HomePod buyers shout “Siri, stop!” much more often than they say, “Hey, Siri.” It was like trying to argue with a cat.

Yet a piece by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times this morning has the headline “Why We May Soon Be Living in Alexa’s World.” Not me!

Apparently tens of millions of people find Alexa useful. But I don’t play music as background noise. I don’t order pizza. I don’t want my thermostats, or my light switches, to try to think for me. I don’t need help ordering from Amazon, either.

Back in 1987, Apple sales folk had a video for their corporate customers called “Knowledge Navigator.” It was amazing. Clearly the video was Steve Jobs’ dream about what computers would be able to do for us in the future, and how we would interact with computers. The human in the video was a Berkeley professor. The person inside the computer was his knowledge assistant. There was no pizza, no thermostats, no light switches, no asking the computer to play music. Instead, it was about stuff that actually mattered.

When Alexa or Siri reach the point that they can actually help people with research, I’ll be interested. When they can get messages to me without my ever having to talk on the phone, I’ll be interested.

If Steve Jobs were alive today, I wonder whether he would be worried about the failure of his vision. We keep getting cheated out of the bright futures we were promised. The old Walt Disney “Tomorrow Land” television shows of the 1950s and early 1960s told us that robots and automation would free us up to live lives of comfort and leisure. But instead, people work harder than ever, and most people have gotten poorer. Computers haven’t made us any smarter, any more than television did. Instead, computers have dumbed us down and, like television, have trained us to be better consumers. With all that knowledge and information right under our noses, most people are more easily deceived than ever.

I am pretty sure that I don’t want to live in Alexa’s world.