Technology – Page 8 – Into the Woods

Robots and inequality

Amazon’s new automated store in Seattle. Source: Wikipedia

Trump voters and consumers of Fox News are having the time of their lives these days, glorying in how their big man is sticking it to liberals, immigrants, and brown-skinned people. They actually feel safer, now that a con man is in the White House who feeds them what they want to hear.

Meanwhile, their world is about to go even deeper down the rat hole. The right-wing media will see to it that they won’t know what hit them.

For decades now, the 1 percent have been raking in most of the gains, while working people’s share of wealth and income shrink. Working people really don’t understand just how rich the global rich really are. Still, inequality has reached politically dangerous levels. The rich know that the political danger is rising, but so far the rich have been successful at using their media and their political control to misdirect the growing economic discontent. The rich would much rather have fascism in America than European-style democratic socialism. The Trump era, with its demonization of government, its propagandization of the population, and its packaging of the rich people’s agenda as heartland populism, reveals to us how the rich intend to keep their gains and keep on bamboozling the losers.

Meanwhile, the liberal media are trying to warn us that a new wave of economic upward redistribution is about to hit working people: robots. In the New Yorker, we have “Amazon’s New Supermarket Could Be Grim News for Human Workers.” The Guardian writes: “Robots will take our jobs. We’d better plan now, before it’s too late.” Even a business-oriented industry publication writes: “From robots to smart mirrors, the world of retail will look like a very different place in 2030.”

While robots take jobs from humans at an accelerating pace, the intent of the Republican Party is to go right on cutting the safety net for working people, while cutting taxes on the rich and shifting taxes to lower-income people.

Republicans can’t say they weren’t warned. Policy think tanks such as the Brookings Institution have published report after report about where inequality is leading and how inequality endangers democracy. But Republicans don’t care about policy (or democracy) anymore. The Republican project is simply to enact the rich people agenda.

With the right kind of enlightened public policy, this country might be able to survive the coming wave of jobs lost to robots. But I have no hope of that ever happening unless justice catches up with Donald Trump and a whole lot of Republicans go to prison for their crimes. We’re still seeing only the shark’s fin above the surface of the water, but leak by leak it’s becoming pretty clear who those criminals are. The guilty are using increasingly dangerous and desperate tactics to evade justice. What blows my mind is that about 35 percent of the American population — economic losers, almost all of them — feel safer than ever during one of the most dangerous times in American history.

Analog photography, here we come

A portrait of the abbey’s new Mamiya RB67 single lens reflex camera. • Click here for high resolution version

Sentimental as some of us may be about older, high-quality professional cameras, analog photography is not obsolete.

There’s no longer a camera shop in every town. But good film is still made by companies like Kodak and Ilford. To get the film developed, one mails it off to places like thedarkroom.com. Though one can of course make prints from the film, most people have the negatives scanned and then use a digital workflow from that point on. That’s what I plan to do.

Having worked for newspapers all my life, I’ve long been around excellent photographers and good cameras. Taking pictures was never one of my responsibilities, but many times, when on an assignment that was too far away or too unimportant to send a photographer, I took my own pictures and did a pretty good job of it, if I may say so myself. One of the most remarkable cameras I ever used was a Mamiya C330. It is a twin lens camera, somewhat older than the RB67. Unlike the C330, the RB67 is a single-lens reflex camera with a mirror that flaps when the shutter fires. I could easily have bought a C330 on eBay, but the RB67 was the natural next step up. When the RB67 was new (Mamiya made them from the mid-1970s until 1990), they cost a fortune. They were a workhorse camera as studio cameras. There’s a good chance that your old school portraits were taken with a Mamiya RB67. They are totally affordable now on eBay. They’re completely mechanical and don’t even use batteries.

For a long time, I’ve been tempted to buy a classic analog camera. I fell over the edge after a friend posted some beautiful old portraits on Facebook of some European relatives. The portraits appeared to have been shot in the early to mid-1960s. The lighting was elegant, even glamorous. That kind of work can be done only with film, by someone who knows how to set up the lighting.

The Mamiya RB67 is a “medium format” camera. That means it uses 120 or 220 film. Each negative is 60mm x 70mm. A negative of that size contains far more information than a 35mm negative, which is only 24mm x 35mm. Not only that, but the tonal range that film can capture is wider than the tonal range that digital cameras can generally achieve.

The camera is huge. It weighs 5.5 pounds. Because of the size and the un-automatic nature of the camera, it’s not exactly easy to use it as a handheld camera, or for shooting any kind of action. Rather, it’s a camera that belongs on a tripod, either in the studio or in the field. It takes time to measure the light, set the exposure, focus, and shoot. It’s more a landscape and portrait camera. The only medium format camera that might be considered a step up from the Mamiya RB67 would be a Hasselblad. I have never seriously used a Hasselblad and can’t compare.

I’ll shoot the first roll of film this week. It probably will be at least a couple of weeks before I can post photos here, since the film will be mailed to California for processing.

High dynamic range photography

HDR photo, adjusted in Photoshop. Click here for high-res version.

I am just beginning to experiment with high dynamic range photography. I won’t go into detail here about what that is, but the short version is that the camera shoots multiple versions of the exact same photo, at different exposure levels. Then, special tools in Photoshop combine the additional detail contained in multiple photos into a single photo with far more information than was available otherwise.

The method works for black and white as well as color photography.

I’ve also bought a classic film camera that will be delivered on Monday. I’ll have more about that soon. But this is fair warning that you’re going to be subjected to my photography experiments, both from classic film cameras and more modern digital cameras.

A single, non-HDR photo

HughesNet Gen5 satellite service: 6-month re-review

Dec. 18, 2016: HughesNet’s EchoStar 19 satellite aboard an Atlas 5 rocket, Cape Canaveral, Florida

HughesNet Generation 5 satellite Internet service ★★★★★

After eight years of living in a crippled and slow Internet hell, for the past six months the abbey’s Internet has been the fastest I’ve ever used. I owe it all to rockets and satellites.

This place is half a mile off the pavement, deep in the woods of the Blue Ridge foothills. If I weren’t a nerd, getting connected to the Internet these past eight years might even have been impossible. It required a directional antenna in the attic, connected to a Verizon “air card.” It was finicky and unreliable. Constant fiddling was required to keep it working, drawing on my experience both as a ham radio operator and lots of network savvy from my years as a newspaper systems person. All the Verizon components were lightweight consumer junk, because junk is all that is available for use with cellular. All cellular is consumer junk, but that’s a rant for another day.

As a nerd, it wasn’t enough just to understand the new dish in the yard and the new satellite transceiver and WIFI router down in the hallway closet. I also wanted to know what I was connected to up in the sky.

On Dec. 18, 2016, HughesNet launched a new satellite called EchoStar 19. It’s an SSL 1300 satellite, built by Space Systems Loral in Palo Alto, California — my old stomping grounds just south of San Francisco. It was carried to geosynchronous orbit by an Atlas 5 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The new satellite went into service in March 2016. I signed up in April.

Previously I had avoided satellite. The word-of-mouth reputation of HughesNet’s previous generations of satellite Internet service was not good. Though the EchoStar 19 satellite was new and un-reviewed, the specifications (true broadband by the FCC’s definition, 25Mbps minimum) and the deal that HughesNet was offering were irresistible. I called and signed up. The very next day, a technician installed the dish. It has worked flawlessly from the beginning and has never let me down.

HughesNet promises typical speeds greater than 25 Mbps. I found that speeds of 45 Mbps were typical (and still are typical even as HughesNet adds customers). At times I’ve measured 53 Mbps. Upload speeds are relatively slow — 3 to 5 Mbps.

If you live near civilization and have the option of cable Internet, or, better yet, fiber Internet, you don’t need to consider satellite. A land-based service will be cheaper and fast enough. Only those who live in the boonies should consider satellite service. The three drawbacks of satellite Internet service are:

1. It will be more expensive

2. Your data allowance will be capped each month

3. The distance to the satellite (23,000 miles) forces a delay, or “latency,” of about half a second when you’re waiting for a response, simply because of the speed of light and the 46,000-mile round trip to the satellite.

I chose HughesNet’s 30GB per month plan. I also signed up for telephone service (which is a problem; more in a second) and for the higher-priority service plan if I needed a technician on site. For this I pay $131 a month. I don’t begrudge a penny of it.

The deal from HughesNet is remarkably generous. In addition to the 30GB per month, you also get 50GB per month of off-hours data between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. If you exhaust the 30GB (more in a second), they don’t cut you off. Instead, they throttle the download speed to 1.5Mbps or so for the rest of the month. Your Internet service actually is unlimited. But your fast Internet service is limited according to the data plan you choose. You can buy more fast data by paying for a “token” ($15 will get you 15 more fast gigabytes), but otherwise you are throttled and in “FAP” mode, in which FAP stands for “fair access policy.” This makes sense. A satellite’s bandwidth is not unlimited, and HughesNet must be able to provide fast data as promised to other users who have not exceeded their limits. Data hogs mustn’t be allowed to mess things up for everyone else.

Normally during the past six months, I’ve used less than 1GB a day, and at the end of the month I have unused data. But, this month, two teen-age great-nephews were among my Thanksgiving guests. In one evening, they exhausted my remaining gigabytes and threw me into throttled FAP mode with five days to go before my data reset. This was the first time I’d ever seriously been in FAP mode. The five days gave me plenty of time to see what throttled satellite service feels like.

It didn’t really feel any different! Not only do web pages load (subjectively) just as fast, I found that I could still stream HBO, Netflix, Hulu, PBS, etc., as though nothing had ever happened. This feels like a miracle to me and makes me want to buy some HughesNet stock. If I were, say, downloading a Mac OS update of 5GB, then that download would take 20 times longer when throttled. But for ordinary web browsing and movie streaming, throttling doesn’t much matter. At your throttled speed of 1.5Mbps, the system is loafing, and the download speed is very steady. So streaming services such as Netflix adjust to the available bandwidth, and the video never stalls. (Note: My streaming tests at 1080 px, high definition, are limited. I usually stream at 740 px, which looks perfectly fine on my 37-inch television.)

If you’re throttled in FAP mode, then at 2 a.m., when your off-hours 50GB bonus applies, the speed goes back up to the maximum. At 8 a.m., you’re throttled again. I have never used all the 50GB of off-hours data or even come close. This all strikes me as a very generous and rational pricing plan on HughesNet’s part. Why not let customers have extra data at night when demand is low? And why not let customers go on streaming at throttled speeds as long as the satellite can meet its promises to other customers? Would Verizon ever be that nice and that rational? Hell no. Us hates Verizon.

Telephone service

Telephone service has been a problem right from the start — dropped audio, dropped calls, and lots of aggravation. HughesNet acknowledged the problems and made some fixes. Nevertheless, though the telephone service has improved some as they’ve worked on the system, I still would rate the telephone-over-satellite service as just short of acceptable. You’d want this only if you have no other options. Increasingly I am resolved to just stop using the telephone, because in these days of cell phones the horrible audio is just too much to bear. Emailing and texting suit me much better. I almost never answer the telephone anymore. But that’s a rant for another time.

Tech support

There are two ways to get tech support. You can make a phone call, talk with someone in India, and have an aggravating and utterly unproductive experience. (I had to do this a couple of times because of telephone problems). But HughesNet also has an on-line support forum. A very nice moderator named Liz will open tickets for you and actually get things done. Longtime, highly technical HughesNet users in the forum also can be very helpful.

The router, etc.

The HT2000 satellite transceiver and router provided by HughesNet has worked flawlessly for six months. It will enable two WIFI networks, one at 5Ghz and one at 2Ghz. The 5Ghz network is faster but has less range and less ability to penetrate walls. This is a nice way to set things up. The WIFI networks are highly configurable, through your web browser. You also can test your satellite connection and get lots of diagnostics, should you need it (I never have needed it, but I watch things just out of nerdly curiosity). This stuff is built more to commercial, as opposed to consumer, standards. Cellular stuff is junk. Satellite stuff is cool.

The installation

The installation of the dish and router went smoothly, and, six months later, the satellite signal strength as reported by the HT2000 router actually has become stronger. I’d suggest tipping the installer generously before the work begins. They are independent contractors.

Bad weather

If there is a thunderstorm between your dish and the satellite in the southern sky, then your signal strength will weaken, and you may lose service altogether until the storm passes if the storm is a severe one. This is unavoidable with satellite. I’ve learned that, if the Internet stops working because there’s a thunderstorm to the south, I can expect heavy rain within the next 10 minutes.

Overall

I’d have to say that this is an excellent service, rationally priced. And the technology is beautiful.

An SSL 1300 satellite like HughesNet’s EchoStar 19

Darn you, Apple

Normally, Apple product rollouts don’t phase me. I take note of Apple’s new stuff and carry on without the slightest trace of lust to buy. My old iPad works just fine, my iPhone 5 works great, my 27-inch iMac will last for many years, the Apple TV is old but still useful, and I have not perceived any need for a watch that tracks my heart rate or that nags me about my calendar.

But Apple’s new watch, announced today, actually does something new and useful. It’s a cell phone and texting device, and it uses the same phone number as your iPhone. That’s progress. Dick Tracy’s dream of a two-way wrist radio — a dream that is almost 70 years old, seems to be a reality now.

Not since my working days have I regularly worn a watch. But I do like watches, as long as they’re absolutely accurate. I have an “atomic” watch that I wear sometimes if I’m traveling or otherwise have to keep to a schedule. The “atomic” feature, which sets the time using a radio signal from WWV, is always accurate to the second.

When Ken’s not here, I’m here alone. Though I’ve by no means reached the age at which I’m afraid of falling and not being able to get up, accidents can happen. When I’m mowing, for example, I always keep my cell phone in my pocket. Many older people pay for a device that they can carry, or wear around the neck, that’s always with them and that can summon help.

Plus, my iPhone 5 is a pocketfull. I’ve never lost it, but I’ve been known to leave it places. Then I have to run back and get it when I realize it’s missing. Just a couple of weeks ago, I left my iPhone on the counter at Whole Foods and had to dash back in from the parking lot to retrieve it.

So you see the justification for the new Apple watch that is taking shape in my mind — always there, not cumbersome, hard to lose, and available in emergencies.

Unfortunately, I’d have to upgrade my iPhone to use the new Apple watch, because my iPhone is a year or so too old to work with the cellular feature of the new Apple watch.

I’m not going to rush into this. But I’m very tempted. And I’d have to say that I’ve never regretted buying stuff from Apple.

Twitter

Library of Congress

I have never used Twitter. I never will.

If I take off my snark cap and put on my nice cap, and if I try to come up with a reason to justify Twitter’s existence, then this is the best I can do: Twitter is like texting, but it’s a broadcast rather than one-to-one. The 140-character limit isn’t so weird if you assume that most twitting — I mean tweeting — is done from phones. In fact, I think that when Twitter first came into existence, it used SMS text messages and had to work within a 160-character limit. You can use Twitter to “follow” someone that you’re interested in, or you can use hashtags (#babblebabble) to tune in to particular subjects.

Whatever. It’s still useless. A text message that says “I’ll be there at 6” or “I fed the cat” makes perfectly good sense to me. But nobody in the world — including Donald Trump — has anything to say in 140-character broadcasts than I am in any way interested in.

The situation has become much worse, because “Tweets” now find their way into news stories. If I still worked in a newspaper newsroom, I’d argue until I was hoarse that “Tweets” should be treated like any other quotation — inside the paragraph with quotation marks around it, appropriately attributed. But no, the print media seem to have taken up the horrifying, visually jarring convention of putting each litle Tweet into a paragraph of its own, with lots of white space above and below it, some of it in italics, including a bunch of stray characters that are no more useful than 75-year-old Western Union routing codes for Telegrams: “LA063 OD137 0 SFR200.”

And still worse, to stay within the 140-character limit, all sorts of ad hoc abbreviations, elisions and omissions are required, unless of course the Tweet is split into multiple particles, each helpfully numbered (5), (4), (3), (2), (1) in reverse order.

During the days of Western Union, bandwidth was extremely expensive. Depending on how far a Telegram was going, each character cost a lot of money. So there was a good reason for keeping your message short.

Now bandwidth is incredibly cheap, so cheap that we can stream high-definition movies, a different movie to each room of the house. Peter Thiel is famous for saying, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

My first job was as a newspaper copy boy in the 1960s. One of my responsibilities was looking after a room full Teletype machines. There was even a Western Union Telex printer in the room, because newspapers got a lot of Telegrams.

In many ways, I loved the days when bandwidth was expensive. When bandwidth was expensive, information that came in from far away was valuable, with an aura of exotic magic about it. If it weren’t valuable, it would not have been sent. Remember long distance? It was very expensive, and it was thrilling to hear a loved one’s voice from far, far away. These days the chatter is almost all worthless. That’s why I don’t use Twitter. Increasingly, I don’t use the telephone, either. But that’s a rant for another day.

A 1960s Telex printer, Wikipedia

Informed delivery??

Back in April, the U.S. Postal Service rolled out a new feature called “Informed Delivery.” If you sign up for it, then each morning you’ll receive an email from the postal service with a scanned grayscale image of each piece of mail that is to be delivered to you that day.

I wasn’t aware of this until I picked up a promotional leaflet about it while I was at the post office today. My first reaction had to do with privacy. Obviously they’re taking pictures of every single piece of mail that passes through the post office.

After a little Googling, I learned that the post office has been taking pictures of all the mail since the 1990s. It’s part of the address-scanning and automatic sorting process. But just think what they can do with that. Not only do they have pictures of all the mail, but they also can cross-reference all the addresses and feed a database that documents who knows whom, and who does business with whom. In other words, there is no private way of communicating with anyone anymore — not by telephone, not through email, and not through the post office. You can be sure that it’s all in a database somewhere, indexed, cross-referenced and retained.

Privacy questions aside, what might Informed Delivery be good for? I live about a quarter of a mile from my mailbox. It actually would be nice to know in advance what, if anything, is in the mailbox before I go out to retrieve the mail. I don’t necessarily go to the mailbox every day. But yeah, I signed up for it.

In its promotional material on Informed Delivery, the postal service says that they hope it will make the postal service seem more relevant to millenials, since millenials’ lives apparently revolve around their smartphones. And apparently, for those who have signed up for the service, it’s popular. The postal service says that almost 80 percent of the people who receive the daily emails look at them. (You do know, don’t you, how businesses can tell whether you opened a piece of mail?)

It seems the postal service will also try to use it for marketing. Companies that send mail will be able to pay the postal service for little ads that will be displayed in the daily emails, when something the company has mailed is scheduled to be delivered that day. Direct marketers are trying hard to figure out how to leverage that.

In any case, now we know that someone has pictures of all the mail we’ve received since sometime in the 1990s. We can assume that the mail can be searched by name and address, and we can assume that they can build lists of everybody we’ve ever sent mail to or received mail from. We also should assume that the mail can be cross-referenced to telephone calls and emails. Keep in mind that, as you drive each day, particularly in urban and suburban areas, your license plate is frequently scanned by roadway cameras, and thus your car can be tracked. Your cell phone is a tracking device. And of course they have, or at least have access to, a database of credit card transactions. What you do with your computer is tracked.

It is better to be aware of these things than not to be aware. And I think it’s better to monitor the ways we’re monitored than not to. Normally all that stuff is stored, and ignored, in vast databases. But when they want to build a dossier on someone, just think how much they’d know.

Here’s a thought experiment. If you wanted to communicate with someone at a distance in a way that could not be monitored and that would not leave a record, would you be able to do that? If so, how?

Update:

I got my first Informed Delivery email this morning. Here’s what it looks like — a DVD from Netflix’s DVD division, and what appears to be an invitation to an elementary school reunion. It’s kind of cool, actually, because now I know that I need to go up to the mailbox today and retrieve the DVD.

Some speculations on Whole Foods

Whole Foods Winston-Salem, before the lunch rush

It’s interesting how much buzz there has been about Amazon buying Whole Foods. Even people who’ve hardly ever been inside a Whole Foods and who don’t use Amazon (people like my brother) have been talking about it. Everyone seems to suspect that this transaction may be the leading edge of big changes in how all of us shop.

At the Winston-Salem Whole Foods earlier this week, I said to the checkout guy, “What do y’all think of your new owners?”

I got a somewhat testy response that I interpreted to mean that Whole Foods employees have gotten tired of answering questions. No doubt many of the questions are hostile. He responded as though I had asked what’s going to change. Apparently that’s the question most people are asking. Anyway, his testy response was that he has no idea what it all means, that he’s not on the board, doesn’t get to sit in on the meetings, and has no idea what it’s all about. Ouch. Perhaps he also was expressing a bit of nervousness. After all, some of the stories that have been written about Amazon buying Whole Foods have speculated that checkout people will soon be replaced by machines. Note to Amazon PR types who came across this through Google Alerts: You need to communicate with Whole Foods employees and reassure them, if you can. They may be freaking out.

I’ve read a good bit of the commentary on this. Everybody is speculating. The liberal media — for example Salon, or Vox — have a strong dislike for Amazon and seem to assume that Amazon will roboticize Whole Foods stores and squeeze small organic farmers into bankruptcy, to the benefit of Big Organic.

I fear they may be right on the matter of the small organic farmers who farm with a conscience, as opposed to Big Organic, which farms with the intent of taking advantage of a market in which they can get away with charging a lot more for what they sell. On the other hand, if big players can do truly good sustainable farming and grow beautiful and exuberant produce (rather than pale and inferior stuff which just happens to have an organic sticker on it), then how much of a bad thing is that? That’s all about how organic farmers are monitored and the standards they are held to. Amazon will need to be very careful about buying only from honest, well-monitored organic operations. Luckily, Amazon has the resources to do that. They’d better get it right.

However, as for roboticizing Whole Foods stores, I just don’t think that is going to happen. Certainly Amazon has roboticized its warehouses and shipping operations. But that’s all out of sight of the customer. It’s different with Whole Foods. Amazon’s PR people will make it clear to Amazon’s management (though I feel sure that Amazon’s management already gets it) that Whole Foods will now become the brick-and-mortar public face of Amazon and that they’d better make it pretty.

If Amazon wanted impersonal brick-and-mortar operations that lend themselves to mechanization and roboticization, then they’d be competing with low-end stores such as Aldi. Why buy a top-of-the-market operation like Whole Foods just to turn it into Aldi? That would be destroying a large chunk of Whole Foods’ value, the value for which Amazon paid a lot of good money.

One of the wisest commentaries I’ve read suggests that what Amazon wants is a network of delivery centers. Whole Foods has 431 stores in upscale locations. You order online whatever you usually order from Amazon (probably not groceries). And then, the next day, or maybe even later the same day, you drive to your local Whole Foods and pick up your order. While you’re at Whole Foods, you have some ice cream, or some coffee, or a pizza, or lunch. And maybe you even shop for groceries. Whole Foods stores actually devote a considerable percentage of their floor space to food, drink, and reasonably pleasant places to sit down for a while, WIFI included. Bottom line: Amazon has new options for lower-cost and quicker delivery, plus they draw a whole bunch of new customers into Whole Foods stores. Would you want all those new Whole Foods customers to have an Aldi experience? Of course not. Whole Foods stores would now be competing with Starbucks, with every retailer at the mall, with the grocery stores, and even with the local Barnes & Noble, if you’re lucky enough to have one. You can get anything you want there, and you can still paw the lettuce and sniff the canteloupes before you buy them.

It’s devilishly clever.

Would I go there? You darn right I would, if Whole Foods will spiff up and enlarge its stores, keep them teeming with cheerful and contented employees, and sell only the best of what America’s — and here I emphasize America’s — organic farmers can produce. If the new customers that came over from Costco still want a case of canned green beans or half a ton of Pepsi, then sell it to them through the warehouse delivery system, not in the holy space of the Whole Foods store. And since the Pepsi-buyers will be Trump voters who have the manners of Walmart shoppers, please design your stores so that we old Whole Foods customers can avoid the Republicans (and they us). This may be your biggest problem, Amazon. Whole Foods customers and Walmart customers don’t mix. It’s a culture war, you know.

Whole Foods has a bad habit that I’d like to see them quit. I complain about it regularly, both on the corporate web site and at the customer service desk at my nearest store. We all should complain. That’s to stop importing so much stuff. I abhor, for example, the garlic imported from South America. It may be labeled as organic, but it’s also inferior garlic — badly cured, blemished, sometimes moldy. I’d much rather buy healthy-looking garlic from Gilroy, California, that isn’t organic, if it’s obviously better garlic (as it certainly would be if it came from Gilroy).

Maybe my view of what’s up with Amazon and Whole Foods is skewed by the fact that those two companies already get most of the money I spend. If they keep their standards up and make it fun and easy, then they’ll get 96 percent of what I spend. The rest of my spending would go to the local hardware store and to the Tractor Supply where I buy organic chicken feed. One thing that is not efficient at present for Amazon Prime are heavy items that are expensive to ship — 40 pound bags of chicken feed, for example, or even four-pound bags of cat food. Local pickup would change the economics of Amazon Prime.

Ultimately, I wonder if there isn’t something sustainable in a one-stop supply line. All those thousands of retail stores and big box stores (and the driving to and fro) suck up a huge amount of overhead and energy — and time. As long as the delivery system is efficient and sustainable (and involves far fewer cardboard boxes — the bane of Amazon Prime) then maybe it wouldn’t be an all-bad example of creative destruction.

I am cautiously optimistic.

Rich young creeps and their creepy visions

What is it about young tech billionaires that makes them so creepy?

Partly, I’m sure, it’s the character flaws that they seem to have in common — hubris, arrogance, the assurance of superiority that goes along with their being very smart and having made themselves very rich. They also see themselves as visionaries who have been anointed to lead us all into a brave new techno-utopian future brought about by the consumption of their products (and in which, coincidentally, they will be even richer). They also tend to be monomaniacs: Their idea is the one true master key to our exciting utopian future.

Why is it that their visions of the future almost always make us gag?

Just yesterday, I came across a link on Facebook to an article in Wired magazine with the headline: “Why you will one day have a chip in your brain.” Thanks for the heads-up on that, Wired magazine.

Remember Google Glass? Back in 2013, a tech blogger wrote this about Google Glass: “According to Google CEO, Sergey Brin, Google’s latest product innovation is meant to end the social isolation of smartphones as you often miss the events going on around you while playing with your phone. Google Glass eliminates that distraction as you enjoy your life while wearing glasses and have all the functions and commands of your smartphone without having to divert your attention to your phone.” Wow, Sergey. What could go wrong?

To be fair to Elon Musk, he has a broader and more mature sense of the future than do some of the lesser tech billionaires, yet he also assumes that, without the gifts that tech entrepreneurs intend to bring us, our future will be a bleak and empty one. Just recently, in talking about space exploration, he said, “There have to be reasons you get up in the morning and want to live.” Thanks, Elon. I can’t wait.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wants to bring us virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and a “global community” — with Facebook, of course, at the center of it. In his recent manifesto about the future of Facebook, Zuckerberg puts this line in bold: “In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” Thanks for the infrastructure, Mr. Zuckerberg! And by the way, thanks for all the benefits your social infrastructure provided us during the 2016 election, particularly your focus on making your infrastructure (to use your words) supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged, and inclusive. With Facebook’s help, we’re sure on our way to building a super-duper global community!

And thanks, all you guys, for reminding me why I’m hiding in the woods.

Sergey Brin

Elon Musk

Mark Zuckerberg

Too hot to fly

This is a nerd post!

The Washington Post has an interesting story today about how flights in and out of Phoenix have been canceled this week because of the heat: It’s so hot in Phoenix that airplanes can’t fly

The story is misleading in that it suggests that particular models of aircraft have maximum operating temperatures. But it’s more complicated than that. Though no doubt there is a maximum operating temperature, there also is a maximum takeoff and landing temperature, which might be much lower.

The efficiency of an airplane, and thus its ability to take off or land on a given runway, actually is a formula with a number of factors. The factors include the weight of the plane, the air temperature, the altitude of the airport, and even the humidity.

Hot air is thinner than cold air. Air at high altitudes is thinner than air at low altitudes. Thinner air affects not only the airplane’s airfoil (its wings); thin air also affects the efficiency of the airplane’s engines. So, to determine whether an airplane can fly in a given situation, a flight computer must make a calculation on all these factors — plus, of course, the runway length and the altitude of any high terrain around the airport that must be cleared.

As a student pilot many years ago, it was easy to feel, just from the controls of an airplane, that airplanes are perky and responsive on cold days, but also that they’re sluggish and much more disobedient on warm, humid days, or at mountain airports.

But the thing that really brought this point home to me was flying on a packed-to-the-gills Air India flight from Bangkok to Delhi some years ago. Those heavily loaded flights into and out of New Delhi, I learned, usually land and take off in the middle of the night. Why is that? Because it’s too hot for the planes to fly during the daytime. And in my limited experience, Air India planes are packed to the max, so air temperature becomes a critical factor.

I wouldn’t worry, though. Today’s airplanes are incredibly sophisicated, and their behavior is easily modeled. If your flight to Phoenix is canceled, it’s because the airlines know their business and their airplanes. Still, unless it’s hotter than the airplane’s maximum operating temperature (which I doubt), the plane would be able to fly with a lighter load, even in the heat. But these days, airplanes tend to be packed, and apparently it makes more business sense to cancel a packed flight than to drag enough people and their luggage off the plane to lighten the plane enough to satisfy the OK-to-fly computation.