Into the Woods – Page 186 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Toward more frugal homes

My new washer

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One of the nice things about new construction is that, largely because of tighter and smarter regulations, new homes and new appliances are more efficient and more frugal. My windows, with a U-factor of .31, are pretty darn snug, though no window is as efficient as a well-insulated wall. Local builders complain that Stokes County’s requirement for ceiling insulation is R-38, the same as in much of Canada, even though surrounding counties require only R-30. My Trane heat pump is far more efficient than heat pumps from the 1980s. Refrigerators have gotten much more efficient. Even my big iMac consumes far less energy than the computer it replaced.

For the month of July, with my cooling system running as needed all day and all night all month with thermostats set to 77 or 78, I used 604 kilowatt hours at a cost of $71.80. For September, with no heating and cooling needed, I’m expecting an electric bill of $35 to $40. My house is not a MacMansion. It’s 1250 square feet. [My electric company, Energy United, which is a rural electric cooperative, charges .0802 cents per kilowatt hour during the summer, meaning that my per-kilowatt charges were $48.44 for July. The rest of the bill is from taxes, fees, and fixed monthly charges.]

It has been fascinating to watch my new LG front-loading washing machine, which is Energy Star compliant. It’s astonishing how little water it uses. It’s very quiet. It spins at a very high speed to reduce dryer costs. Its behavior is very complex, controlled by a computer. Older washers with mechanical controllers were much more limited in how their wash cycles were set up.

The New York Times has a piece today on the patterns of energy consumption in the home and how they are changing.

A post for the nerds: Radioteletype

The radio is tuned to 14.08128 megahertz. This is in the 20 meter ham radio band in a frequency range normally reserved for radioteletype stations. Signals on the 20 meter band, by the way, travel farthest when the sun is overhead. During the day the earth’s ionosphere is energized by solar radiation, making the ionosphere reflective to 20-meter signals. The signals go up 200 miles or so, then bounce back down to earth, far from the point of origin.

This photo was taken during a radioteletype transmission. The meter is saying that 30 watts of power is being sent to the antenna (left needle on 30). Because the antenna is tuned for this frequency, the antenna is not rejecting and thus reflecting any of the transmitter’s power (right needle on 0). In other words, there is no standing wave on the antenna feed line. The standing wave ratio (SWR) is 1:1.

Instead of mechanical teletype machines, computers are now used to encode and decode radioteletype signals. This is a program for Macintosh named CocoaModem.

A few days ago I posted an item about Teletype machines and a mode of communications called radioteletype. Radioteletype is obsolete commercially, but it remains an excellent means of communication on the high-frequency (short wave) radio bands. When I posted last week, I had not yet got around to setting up radioteletype on my apparatus at home. As of today, it’s working.

Digital (as opposed to voice) signals were booming in from Europe today during the afternoon, when the sun was over both Europe and the United States. I was still working on setting things up and adjusting things, but I did talk with two stations in Cuba — CO8LY and CO2NO. I talked with CO2NO using 20 watts of power on a new digital mode that is a relative of radioteletype — PSK31. I talked with CO8LY via radioteletype using 30 watts of transmitter power.

You might wonder how 20 or 30 watts of transmitter power could travel from North Carolina to Cuba. Two reasons, basically. For one, the power is focused into a narrow beam of bandwidth, far too narrow to carry the human voice, but enough for a relatively slow digital signal such as radioteletype. For two, the earth’s atmosphere is very transparent to radio waves. Or, to say it a little differently: It would be more difficult to talk with someone in Cuba using a microphone and voice communications. “Narrow” digital modes such as radioteletype and Morse code carry less information per second, but the power used travels much farther.

I never use more than 100 watts.

The lost word?

Wikipedia photos

Once upon a time many years ago, while looking up a word in an unabridged dictionary, I came across a word on a nearby page that jumped out at me, because it was a beautiful word that described a picturesque phenomenon. I resolved to remember the word, and I promptly forgot it. I do recall the definition. It was a word (or words?) describing something very particular: a beam of light, through an aperture, falling on mist.

For years and year I tried to refind this word, and I failed. Once upon a time, research tools were incredibly primitive — things such as Thesauruses and indexes in the backs of books. Now we have the Internet.

My frustrated attempts to photograph my gothic window, using only a camera with a bad lens that refuses to let its exposure be manually adjusted, made me realize that I’d never gone looking for this word on the Internet.

It was a quick and easy search. There is a scientific name for the phenomenon, the Tyndall Effect, used to describe the scattering of light when it falls on colloidal particles in suspension. A more common description is the two-word term “crepuscular rays,” which even has a Wikipedia entry.

It is possible that, at that early age, I had never encountered the word “crepuscular” before and so was impressed by the word. It is, certainly, a beautiful word. It comes from the Latin word for twilight, crepusculum.

People generally say that cats are nocturnal. I think it is more accurate to say that cats are crepuscular. My cat sleeps at night. But she goes wild at crepusculum, both morning and evening.

What would we do without the Internet? I plan a post soon on yet another unbelievable Internet resource: Google Books.

If “crepuscular ray” is the lost word(s), then here is what I would have seen that day long ago in the Miriam-Webster unabridged dictionary:

Interior photos … eventually

I haven’t forgotten my promise to post some interior photos of the new house. It’s going to take a little time. I’m still working on getting things in place. Not to mention that the lighting and photography are difficult to manage. But I’ll get there.

Cooking for the cat

I guess it was inevitable that I’d eventually try making some homemade cat food to see if my cat, Lily, likes it. With some minor adjustments, I used this recipe from veterinarian Michael W. Fox. It’s a thick stew that sets up when it cools. It’s all meat (don’t ask) except for some mashed chickpeas and mashed yellow squash.

I put the cat food into Pyrex dishes that come with tight-fitting covers. I’ll freeze it. Dr. Fox recommends feeding it to the cat three times a week in addition to the cat’s regular rations.

If Lily doesn’t like it, I guess I’ll take it somewhere far from the house and dump it so that the varmints can have a feast.

Stigmatized dialects

Mountain Talk, N.C. State University

The Queen Family, N.C. State University

When I reflect on my long relationship with language, it seems odd to me that the schools in these parts never (or at least used to didn’t) actually tell children that they’ve grown up speaking a stigmatized dialect, and that if they want to enter the business, corporate, or professional worlds, they’ll have to learn to speak “standard English” as a second language. (You got tripped up by that “used to didn’t,” didn’t you? Just working in a bit of dialect…)

One could argue over whether the local dialect here in Stokes County is Southern or Appalachian. I would say that in the truly rural areas, the local dialect is Appalachian. Yes, I understand it perfectly, and I love to listen to it. I can still speak it, but I have to pause, think, and flip some sort of switch in my brain, because all my live language circuits have been rewired from years of speaking standard English.

Don’t doubt for a minute that Appalachian English is severely stigmatized. Once, having just told a young man from California in my department at the San Francisco Chronicle that I can speak fluent hillbilly, he said, of course, “Say something in hillbilly.” I thought for a moment, adjusted my mouth, and said something. The look of disgust on his face was genuine and involuntary, as though I’d just pulled a maggoty apple out of a bag.

Even here in North Carolina, Appalachian English is stigmatized. When I was at the Winston-Salem Journal, we had recently hired a young woman from Ashe County who was an experienced clerk and an ultra-fast typist. But she had never learned standard English, and behind her back people made fun of how she talked. This is all the more sad because anyone who can type fast has well-developed language aptitude.

Walt Wolfram, a linguist at N.C. State University, is one of the few people who have ever tried to do something about this stigma. Its human and economic costs are high.

I am no linguist, but I am doubtful that Appalachian English consists mainly of old speech patterns preserved from the British Isles or Ireland. I have traveled some in Scotland, England, Cornwall, Wales and Ireland, and I never heard anything that really reminded me of Appalachian English. The region, at least to my ear, that comes closest is Wales, where English is spoken with a kind of lilting rhythm and cadence, very pleasing to the ear, that sometimes reminds me of the rhythm of Appalachian English.

Sony strikes back

It is so exciting to see competition and innovation in the market for electronic readers. Sony has revealed a new Reader — its third model in the evolution of the Sony Reader. That should keep the Amazon Kindle developers on their toes.

Sony’s new reader includes the feature that put the Kindle miles ahead of Sony — electronic delivery of books and reading material over the cell phone network.

Sony says the new reader will be available in December.

Since Amazon and Sony are serious about the market for this technology, let’s hope Apple has something up its sleeve.

A new model of climate change

100 years from now: Model predicts redder areas will warm the most.

100 years from now: Model predicts bluer areas will get more precipitation.

First of all, I think it’s good to maintain a healthy skepticism about computer models of climate change far into the future. With a model of a system as complex as the earth’s climate, many assumptions have to be made and calibrated, and there is never enough data. Also, I can’t let go of the personal opinion that current models give too little weight to solar variance.

On the other hand, global warming is impossible to deny. Before I made the decision to leave California and move back to North Carolina, I spent a good bit of time looking for climate predictions at the state-by-state level. I never found any. The only thing that seemed clear was that climate scientists expected storms off the oceans to become more severe.

The Nature Conservancy and the University of Washington have put their model, Climate Wizard, on line. Good news for North Carolina: It’s ranked near the bottom (46th) on the getting-hotter scale state by state. The prediction for North Carolina also is for more, rather than less, rain as the climate changes.

But there is bad news for all of us who are fond of eating. The Midwest and California, on which we rely for so much of our food, are predicted by this model to get hotter and drier.

How you used to get your news…

My previous post about the death of Fred Fragler, who hired me for my first job, got me all sentimental about analog communications technology. I mentioned the Associated Press Teletype machines and how it was the job of a newspaper copy boy to look after them. The Winston-Salem Journal had about, oh, eight of them. They made a lot of noise and were kept in their own room adjoining the newsroom.

Here’s a Google video that shows one running, and you can hear how it sounds.

The old Associated Press teletype network used a nationwide network of telephone lines leased from AT&T. Since this technology used telephone lines, it follows that its signal was something that could be carried over the telephone — sound. Sound, of course, can also be carried by radio. Ham radio operators still use this type of signal for communication. It’s radio teletype, which hams call RTTY. It, too, is sound. It sounds like this on the radio. Hams now use computers and computer sound cards to generate and decode this sound.

I’m still working on setting up my radio room here in the new house, and I don’t yet have a radio teletype system set up. When I was in San Francisco, though, I had confirmed (meaning the other side of the communication later sent an acknowledgement) radio teletype contacts with other RTTY operators New Zealand, Japan, the Galapagos, Spain, and Hawaii. Radio teletype actually is a very efficient mode of radio communications, almost as efficient as Morse code.

I’m amused by young’uns these days with their iPhones. “I can call New Zealand with my iPhone,” they might say. Sure they can. But the signal from their iPhone can carry at most for a few miles, then a corporate communication system picks up the data and hauls it to New Zealand. Whereas, in a radio teletype message from San Francisco to New Zealand, there is nothing between the two radios but the ionosphere.

Seems like just yesterday…

Fred Flagler is in the far left foreground, June 1969. — Digital Forsyth, Frank Jones collection

That’s me on the far left. I recognize almost everyone in this photo. That’s Arlene Edwards in the chair in the right foreground, and Wallace Carroll in the chair to Arlene’s left. — Digital Forsyth, Frank Jones collection.

The man who hired me for my first job died Tuesday. That was Fred Flagler, former managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal. Here is his obituary in the Winston-Salem Journal.

My first job was as a copy boy. The photos above were taken by Frank Jones in June 1969, the day Gordon Gray told the staff of the Journal that he was selling the newspaper to Media General.

What a lucky young’un I was to get a job as a newspaper copy boy. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect job for me. It exercised so many of my interests — language, communications, communications systems. In those days, news arrived in a room full of Teletype machines. Copy boys tore the printouts out of the machines and distributed the “copy” to the appropriate editors. I also typed local stories into a Teletype machine to be sent to the Associated Press bureau in Raleigh. These teletype machines were my first experience with communications technology. The Teletype signals, by the way, were carried over dedicated telephone circuits.

Frank Jones, the Journal photographer who became an institution and whose photographs document the history of this area for decades, taught me how to send photographs to the Associated Press using one of the most fascinating machines I’ve ever seen, a Steam Punk device if there ever was one. It was a drum scanner, basically. It was analog, of course, with tubes in it that needed time to warm up and stabilize before sending a photo. I spent a lot of time puzzling about what “phase” meant (the operator had to twiddle some controls to get the machine “in phase”). No one could explain “phase” then to my satisfaction. Now, with my amateur radio license and my interest in analog technology, it seems pretty simple.

Fred Flagler, as I recall, always had a line gauge (a metal ruler for measuring picas and points) in his back pocket. It probably was from Fred that I picked up a habit that followed me through my years at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle — never go into the newsroom without a line gauge in your hand. It was sort of a techie nerd’s wand, I guess.

Thank you, Fred. You changed my life.