13 March 2015
I had let my good flossing habits slide for a while, but following a dental checkup six months ago, I got back on flossing every day, as the dentist office recommended. This week’s checkup showed markedly healthier gum tissue than last time. I asked the dental technician if it would be even more advantageous to floss twice a day, instead of only once. She said it absolutely would be better, and in fact they would like to see people both brush and floss twice a day.
Why don’t they recommend twice-daily flossings outright, then? Most of their clients don’t floss once a day yet, she said, and they don’t want to bother trying to pester them up to twice a day.
Meanwhile, this week an article appeared in the Washington Post revealing that the sugar industry wielded their money and power to influence the United States government away from recommending that people eat less sugar to prevent tooth decay, and to instead focus on methods of reducing the impact of sugar through more extensive dental hygiene. The official reason? It would be ineffective to try to get people to eat less sugar.
While that may be true, the actual reason appears to be strictly financial; the sugar industry wants to continue making money, even if the product they are selling, at least when consumed in the quantities typical today, is harmful to its customers. As explained in the article, a recent push to include a label indicating “added sugar” to food products which have been sweetened has met with resistance from the sugar industry — the same people who say that “sugar has been safely used by our mothers and grandmothers for hundreds of years.” If that’s really what they believe, one might think they would like to see the label proudly proclaiming the inclusion of added sugar…
10 January 2015
Today’s New York Times has an article about new and forthcoming garbage incineration plants, which aim to reduce the amount of garbage simply dumped into ever-accumulating landfills. While toxic emissions from garbage incineration have been reduced with modern technology, there are still concerns from area residents that the air will be filled with enough incinerated garbage fumes to pose a hazard, or at least an undesirable odor.
Living as I do about a five minute drive from our local county landfill, I have driven over numerous car-loads of home remodeling waste and various other containers of garbage beyond our regular weekly curbside pickup. I’ve often wondered how much longer we can keep tossing junk into piles on the ground like this, and the idea of using incinerators does seem to have a certain appeal. Per the laws of physics, the matter of the garbage would not cease to exist, but would be transformed into a combination of ash and gas, the former of which should be much more compact to set aside, and the latter of which being, apparently, the main problem.
What are the toxins released through burning garbage? The heavy hitters seem to be dioxins, mercury, and lead. Perusing some online environmental leaflets, it appears typical to hand-wave about the exact source of these toxins, simply attributing them to coming from “garbage”, with one of the sources implying that the mercury comes from fish. Fishmongers aside, harmful amounts of mercury emanating from household disposal of fish seems hard to believe. Wikipedia comes through for us with some better details, suggesting that gaseous dioxins and lead are the result of hazardous chemical waste in the burnt garbage, while the mercury comes mainly from discarded batteries.
Armed with that knowledge, is there anything useful we as citizens and our municipal governments can do to improve the garbage incineration scene? Here locally, we already separate our recycling materials into one group of glass, and another group of cardboard/paper/plastic. Yard waste is collected separately, and broken down into compost. Curbside, everything else is just deemed “garbage”, though if you take your garbage to the landfill personally, you have opportunity to separate things out more finely, including areas for wood and metal scrap.
Why not then designate some forms of garbage as safe for incineration? Just like how residents use a curbside recycling container for cardboard/paper/plastic, into which glass or other sundry garbage shall not go, establish a mechanism for separating out incineration-safe garbage, into which batteries, hazardous chemicals, and fish shall not go. The vast majority of my non-recycled garbage does not fall into any of those categories, and I suspect the same is true for many people.
This wouldn’t answer the question of what to do with the garbage unsafe to burn, but would this not put a decent dent into the quantity of waste dumped into the landfills? Or am I grossly underestimating the amount of waste that is unfit to burn?
20 October 2014
Today’s New York Times has an article by economist Paul Krugman about Amazon’s alleged status as a monopsony in the book-selling world. (I remember Krugman from college macroeconomics, but had to look up the definition of monopsony!)
There are opposing views in the saga between Amazon and publishers like Hachette, but even assuming that Amazon’s actions have been entirely proper, one aspect of the story in particular interested me. From the article:
Book sales depend crucially on buzz and word of mouth (which is why authors are often sent on grueling book tours); you buy a book because you’ve heard about it, because other people are reading it, because it’s a topic of conversation, because it’s made the best-seller list. And what Amazon possesses is the power to kill the buzz. It’s definitely possible, with some extra effort, to buy a book you’ve heard about even if Amazon doesn’t carry it — but if Amazon doesn’t carry that book, you’re much less likely to hear about it in the first place.
I don’t think that I have ever not found a book that I was deliberately looking for on Amazon, though I have no idea what books I never discovered at all simply because Amazon didn’t carry them. Amazon may be unlikely to break ties with larger publishers, but tiny publishers can put out excellent books too, and might be more likely to end up unfavored by the online retail giant.
With that in mind, are there any other book discovery habits besides searching on Amazon that we can cultivate?
- Identifying favorite publishers helps in finding good books. I personally have a lot of books published by the MIT Press. Their books have consistently impressed me as well-written, well-edited, nicely-typeset, and nicely-bound on high-quality paper. Even when I buy one of their books on Amazon, I often find it first on the publisher’s website. Books from Sher Music are also consistently excellent.
- While reading books and journal articles and magazine articles, I often make note of books that are referenced therein, and look those up as well. I keep several lists of books (currently numbering in the hundreds) that I tentatively want to acquire in the future.
- There are some internet services that help people discover new books. We don’t necessarily know where these services get their book listings, so it still might come back around to whatever Amazon carries… but maybe not.
Society discovered and shared and bought and read new books for a very long time before Amazon became the de facto gateway to book shopping. If we deliberately choose to discover books through means other than searching Amazon, we certainly can do so, but I suspect that for many readers, Krugman will prove very correct. And to allow Amazon to wield such power seems kind of disconcerting.
13 October 2014
After seven years and 92,000 miles we traded in the 2006 Honda CR-V for a 2014 model. What has seven years of design revisions given us? The most notable changes include a rear-view camera and corresponding display in the dashboard, which is automatically activated when you shift the car into reverse; a switch for turning on and off a mode for better fuel economy (which sucks resources from other areas of the car and makes acceleration take longer, so it actually does make sense to turn off the better fuel economy at times); and Bluetooth connectivity to your mobile phones / tablets / whatever, offering the ability to place phone calls through the car interface and play music from your portable device.
Since you can so easily play your portable MP3s through the car sound system, the 2006 six-disc compact disc player has been scaled back to a single-disc player. Unsurprisingly, the cassette player has disappeared entirely. I first bought an Apple iPod about ten years ago, and started using an iPhone six years ago, but have still listened mostly to CDs. After two days driving around with the iPhone-to-car-stereo interface, I can readily imagine that Honda will ditch the CD player altogether in a couple of years, and I for one won’t object.
A myriad of other smaller updates also make the car generally nicer: passenger doors that open wider; back seats that fold down automatically at the pulling of a lever; extended field of view on the driver-side mirror; a little bit more interior space, both for passengers and cargo.
The owner’s manual (p238) offers some good advice:
If you get stuck, carefully go in the direction that you think will get you unstuck.
Sound words for driving, and perhaps for life in general. And in case the temperature warnings on cups of McDonald’s coffee aren’t enough, the manual (p134) also advises us:
Be careful when you are using the beverage holders. Hot liquid can scald you.
But most importantly, how does Samantha the border collie enjoy the 2014 CR-V? Seemingly just about as much as she enjoys every other vehicle she has been in, which is to say, not at all. After sitting in the passenger seat for a few minutes, she much preferred going for a walk over going for a drive!
More: pictures on Flickr
07 April 2014
In Selected Papers on Fun & Games, Don Knuth writes about his experiences playing an early computer game in the 1970s:
Clearly the game was potentially addictive, so I forced myself to stop playing — reasoning that it was great fun, sure, but that traditional computer science research is great fun too, possibly even more so.
Is this something we should keep in mind today, surrounded by countless opportunities to do something frivolous instead of something substantial?