Trevis Rothwell's weblog – Page 12 – Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea

January 10, 2015

Curbside Incineration-safe Garbage Collection?

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?

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January 9, 2015

Book Review: Business Secrets from the Bible

Over the recent holidays, I read Rabbi Daniel Lapin’s Business Secrets from the Bible, a compendium of guidelines for conducting one’s work life distilled from the author’s knowledge of traditional Jewish wisdom.

The guidelines are somewhat abstract; the book does not recommend specific business ventures or investment products, but rather focuses on development of character traits and general ways of thinking. Divided into forty short chapters, several themes stood out to me included:

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the goal of business is not to make money. The goal is — or should be — to help other people. This doesn’t mean you must resolve to spend all of your time volunteering for non-profit organizations; you can help other people by mowing their lawn, helping them find and close on real estate, preparing their taxes, building computer software, catching and distributing fish, or any other honest business activity, and accepting payment for a job well done. The idea here is not to eschew making money, but to make serving your customer the goal rather than making money; excel at that, and the money will follow.

Being that business is about helping other people, it is helpful to build and maintain connections with other people. If I need someone to install a new roof on my house, I can look first to my circle of trusted friends and acquaintances to see if any of them are in the business of helping others with roof work. And likewise, if any of them need custom computer software developed, they can look to me.

Wouldn’t, though, my finances be better off if I repaired my own roof instead of hiring someone else to do it? Not necessarily. Another major theme of the book is that specialization is good, going so far as to deliberately seek ways to pay other people to do things for you that you could in theory do yourself, so that you have more time to focus on your own specialization. This is better for you, furthering your own business, and good for them, furthering theirs. Everyone wins.

You need not manage your own independent company to be “in business”. If you are an employee at a company, then your customers are the managers and owners of the company. Rather than viewing your 9-5 job as a drudgery endured only to take home a paycheck, look at your role there being to serve and help your customers.

Contrary to much popular advice, your business won’t necessarily be in line with “following your passion”. Not everything you enjoy doing is necessarily something that people will pay you for. If you have the talent and skill and opportunity to work at a job that you are thoroughly passionate about, then wonderful, but relegating your favorite activities to unpaid hobbies while you work professionally in another field need not be viewed with contempt. Become passionate about serving other people, in whatever capacity you are able to.

Never stop helping people! The author explains that there is no word in biblical Hebrew for “retirement”, which suggests it is something we ought not to do. Retiring from a particular job is one thing, but retiring from serving others altogether is something else completely. Plan to continue help other people, even for pay, for as long as you are able to.

Available in print and for Amazon Kindle, this is a great book to start the year thinking positively about your work and how it relates to making the world a better place. If you’ve already read Rabbi Lapin’s earlier book Thou Shall Prosper, much of the material will look familiar, but alternate presentations of the same ideas can help reinforce learning, and I find both books worth reading.

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December 29, 2014

Seagate 2TB Expansion Drive on Mac OS X

A new Seagate 2TB Expansion Drive which I assumed would work just fine on Mac OS X since it connects with standard USB 2 or USB 3 came in a box with bountiful mentions of backing up your “PC” and notes compatibility with several versions of Microsoft Windows.

How does it work on Mac OS X 10.9.5? I plugged it in and was immediately asked if I wanted to use the drive for Time Machine backups, which I did.

Sharing here in case anyone wonders about OS X compatibility. Some Amazon reviews for the 3TB version complain that the drive doesn’t last very long; so far my 2TB unit has lasted fifteen minutes, but I will try to remember to update this post after more extended use.

[July 2017 Update, two and a half years later: the drive is still working flawlessly.]

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December 14, 2014

Making eBooks with Texinfo and Calibre

While I greatly enjoy reading, eBooks have mostly eluded me — I still prefer gazing upon ink printed on processed tree pulp, or when electronic texts are convenient, plain old HTML. But as an author, it seems questionable to ignore the multitudes of people who do favor reading on their Kindles and Nooks and iPads.

But how best to support those? I’ve done most of my serious writing by typing Texinfo word processing commands into GNU Emacs. Fortunately, it appears that I can continue writing with my ancient tools, thanks to file format conversion programs like Calibre.

I experimented using the most recent edition of The GNU C Reference Manual. The GNU Texinfo toolchain already easily produces PDF and HTML output, so I loaded the single-page HTML file into Calibre. From there, Calibre can produce a variety of eBook outputs, including the ubiquitous ePub and Mobi file formats.

The resulting ePub file I could view using Apple iBooks on my Mac laptop; delightfully, it looks like other ePub eBooks that I have seen. I don’t have a Kindle, but I presume that Calibre did an equally good job of converting to the Mobi file format.

So hooray! This toolchain will allow me to use my familiar writing workflow to produce eBook content in formats desired by readers who opt for electronic reading devices.

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October 20, 2014

How do people discover new books?

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.