Ones and Zeros

In the vein if my last post about older ways of thinking, there are three ways of giving directions.

First, to not give specific directions but only general ones.  Assume that anyone finding your house or place of business is familiar enough with the area to know the building or major roads that you don’t have to be precise.

When we lived in New Hampshire this was common.  I once got the directions, “Go south on highway 1, pass the first Dunkin’ Doughnuts, then turn left a half mile before the old Channel Hardware store.”  For some reason most of the directions I got in New Hampshire and Massachusetts included Dunkin’ Doughnuts.  Those stores were common enough to be landmarks.  But my favorite part was to “turn a half mile before” that old store.  That store went out of business before we moved to the area and the sign was long gone. Basically you had to already know where you were going to get there!

Second, to give specific directions including turns, streets you’ll see before your turns, and streets you’ll see if you miss your turns.  In short, good directions.   Good directions that are great if you don’t have a map or a GPS with a moving map.  And are a waste of time with those devices.

I have Google Earth (version 5.1, the latest) installed on my computers.  I have a GPS with a moving map in one car, and we have iPhones with GPS and moving maps with us in any case.  Ten minutes of discussion on directions is wasting everyone’s time.  And if it’s from your memory, it may not be right either.

What I want is a third way to give directions: Note the destination address, any issues not clear on maps (funny turn lanes, oddball corners, etc) and note parking information at the destination.  I want the stuff that’s not clear on the GPS moving map.  The whole turn-by-turn directions are not that useful.

I used to make bread semi-regularly. I stopped because of the time factor when I started a small company. Well, eating fine dinners at several friend’s houses in WV where the hosts served home made bread inspired me again. This is my third in a series of bread-making experiments. I wasn’t happy with the first two, so didn’t post them. (You didn’t miss anything.)

I start with wheat berries, the whole-wheat kernels that are ground to make flour. I do this because when I was making bread earlier I found that the wheat goes “off” quickly. That’s why there is white flour, it stores better and lasts longer. The oils in the kernel go rancid relatively quickly, so white flour has that kernel removed. But we like the taste and nutrition of the whole wheat. I use the “hard red spring wheat” to the right. It’s better for bread due to the higher gluten content. Other wheat is lighter in color and softer too.

We have a grain grinder attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer to make the flour from the wheat berries. (Fresh whole-grain flour makes wonderful light & fluffy pancakes and waffles too. The fresh flour has a slightly nutty taste.)

One thing I’d forgotten was that grinding a cup of berries makes more than a cup of flour - even when shaken down. Recipes should be measuring by weight in ounces, or better yet in grams. But at least in the US we tend to make recipes by volume, “4 cups of flour” for example, which the loaf below uses.

In the last two batches of bread I was grinding 4 cups berries and getting almost 6 cups of flour. But I was adding salt, yeast, water, honey, and oil for just 4 cups of flour. So I was guaranteed to be wrong. This time I measured the flour instead of the berries and it worked nicely. I kneaded it by hand 600 times, did two rises and a final proof, and it’s good. Much better than the store! (Except for Great Harvest bakery of course, I can’t touch them.)

Maybe I’ll try French baguettes some time.

The New York Times recently reported on an issue that most Prius and other hybrid car drivers know about: “stealth mode”. When running solely on the electric motor, hybrids don’t make much sound at all. Most of what we think of as automobile sounds are from the gas engine.

Some people out there don’t bother to look before crossing a road in a parking lot and apparently just listen for a car. Many hybrid drivers have a story about someone walking in front of their car without looking.

Now, pedestrians do have the right of way and drivers do need to watch and to give way. But let’s be rational. Pedestrians shouldn’t walk directly in front of a moving car either! When I’ve been driving and this has happened to me, the offending pedestrian often looks up indignantly at me.

Niven and Pournelle would consider this evolution in action. True enough, but a little rough. I consider it a learning experience to become more aware of our surroundings.

The NYT article talks about adding noisemakers to hybrids. To an engineer this would be a kludge. That is, an unsatisfactory and cumbersome fix to a problem. Besides, I think a little less noise in the world is a good thing.

In the end a social change will result if hybrids and electric cars continue to become more common: People will start looking both ways before they cross a road - even in a parking lot. This is just like our parents trained us to do when we were kids; it’s not exactly a radical new idea.

Technology changes society (think about cell phones), and society changes technology too (the web). Neither controls the other, but in the long term they’re locked together. Both society and technology are created by humans and are just aspects of ourselves. We’re both toolmakers and social animals.

So watch where you’re walking! And if you don’t, then don’t be surprised when a hybrid screeches to a stop at your feet.

One of our cars exceeded it’s economic lifespan for us. It required a repair that cost more than the car’s value. We’d had the new-style VW bug for ten years, but it was time to move on.

My lovely wife used to drive a Citroën 2cv before I knew her and she always liked it. The 2cv is the French analog to the original German VW bug. It’s a people’s car; easy to maintain, reliable, and cheap to run. But the 2cvs were never sold in the US. While popular in Europe it’s a niche car here.

There’s a restorer and reseller online in New Jersey: Eurocar Imports. He also sells on eBay. We drove up and met the owner and looked at a car he had. Like all 2cvs the design is from the 1930s, although this car was built in 1983. (That makes it 10 years newer than our plane.) We made a deal and they’ve been doing some restoration on it since. Here it is after priming. It will be the classic Celeste Blue.

We pick it up this coming weekend and will be a 2-car family again.

The 2cv is a small car with a small engine: 26 hp. Some riding lawn mowers are more powerful. Of course this doesn’t have to drive a grass-cutting blade either! The 2cv can go 100 kph (63 mph) and gets around the same milage as our Prius, 50 mpg. We’ll drive it on longer trips sometimes but it will primarily be an around-town car.

I’ll be able to handle the repairs and maintenance. I used to work on my old-style bug and VW bus, and will be able to work on this too. I don’t work on modern cars anymore but I’ve still got my metric wrenches.