Lights, Batteries, Temperature?

I need to replace the bulbs in my outdoor lights—the porch light, the old dog run light, the lights over the garage door, and the light on the Arctic entry off the bedroom. And I find myself in a quandary.

Ordinary incandescent bulbs work at the outdoor temperatures we have up here in Alaska — below -40°F most winters, and not uncommonly below -50 or even -60°F. Their lives are probably shortened when they’re turned on at these temperatures, but they do turn on.

Incandescent bulbs, however, are being phased out. The idea is to replace them with fluorescents, and I’ve done that wherever possible indoors. I even replaced the hanging fixture over the kitchen table with a ceiling-mounted fluorescent.

Outdoors, however, is another story. Fluorescents (or rather their ballasts) simply will not work at the winter temperatures found in interior Alaska – or the northern tier of states, for that matter. Even low temperature ballasts only start working when it warms up to -20°F – and warms up is the way we think of it up here.

LED’s do work, and I’ve had outdoor LED Christmas lights for several years now. Over the last year, I’ve begun to see a few screw-in LED bulbs. But they are either very low light output (useful for replacing the bulbs in night lights) or highly directional – useful in some, but not all, of my outdoor fixtures. Yes, there are self-contained outdoor LED lights. They use batteries. See my earlier post on indoor-outdoor thermometers, and the problem with the outdoor sensor being battery-powered – even lithium batteries are questionable at temperatures below -40°F. And a size “C” lithium battery? Just try to find one! They’re available on line, but they are obviously a very expensive specialty item, and I’m not at all sure they’ll work at temperatures colder than -40°F.

It’s not the first time national policy has failed to take Alaskan temperatures into account.

I am reminded of my first new car – bought the year Congress mandated seat belt interlocks, which required that you have the seat belt buckled before the car would start, and which activated a blaring alarm if the seat belt was not buckled. 1973, I think. Fine, I thought. I put on my seat belt as a reflex. My father drilled holes in the frame of our old Woody so he could install seat belts. I’d never be bothered by failure to do something as automatic as that.

Turned out the car I got had two switches to implement the Federal requirement. One was in the seat, and turned on the seat belt safety mechanism if there was weight in the seat. The other was in the buckle, and told the car whether the seat belt was buckled.

The switch in the buckle did not work if the temperature of the buckle was below about 0°F.

I did not have a heated garage then.

I finally figured out that I could start the car at low temperatures by bracing myself between the back of the seat and the floor, so no weight was on the seat. Once the interior warmed up, the alarm would quit.

That worked until the temperatures got below -40°F, and the rather poor heater was unable to bring the interior temperature of the car above 0°F. At those temperatures, the alarm screamed constantly – a serious distraction while trying to drive in ice fog with frosted windows. I would never have heard a siren, for instance.

The dealer said sorry, federal law prohibited them from touching the interlock system, never mind that it wasn’t working properly and was a safety hazard rather than a safety feature.

Cars are not my thing. I lived with that alarm for the next couple of months, until the ban on interfering with the system was removed January 1.

It got disconnected January 2.

Thermometers in Fairbanks

I have a new thermometer.

Now there is nothing new about having a thermometer. As an atmospheric scientist, I have several. The big one out in the old dog pen seems fine in the winter, though it is useless when the summer sun is shining on its back. (I know it doesn’t get to 120° F up here, even in summer!) The one next to the front door reads suspiciously high in the winter, and I suspect it is influenced by heat leakage from the house wall.

I had an indoor outdoor pair, with one outdoor sensor, well located on an outside corner on the north side of the house, and two indoor stations, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom, but the two receivers did not agree on temperature. (I don’t mean a degree or two; I mean they could be off by 20°, reading the temperature from the same sensor.) They needed replacing, I thought. What’s more, the outdoor sensor was battery-operated, and batteries don’t work very well at sub-zero temperatures. Even when they worked, the indoor stations quit even trying to show outdoor temperature at -20°F, which could mean for weeks at a time.

Then about a week ago I was idly checking the thermometers at Fred Meyers. They’re generally good for a laugh — who in their right mind would buy an outdoor thermometer that only reads to 40 below (let alone to only 20 below) in Fairbanks? They had the battery-operated indoor-outdoor sets as well, and for the first time I noticed that while they had an alleged range from -40°F to 158°F, the alkaline batteries I’d been using were only good to -4F. Lithiums were supposedly good to -40°F. (There’s a lot of difference between -20°F and -40°F, or for that matter between -40°F and -60°F, but below -40°F I just stay indoors.)

Old and new outdoor temperature sensors. Outside NE corner, N side, under roof overhang.

The sets, indoor display unit and outdoor sensor, were on sale for under $10, and I decided to get two — at that price, I could just keep one sensor in reserve. Of course to use them, I had to get them out of their plastic bubble packaging.

When possible, I try to recycle. It’s not easy up here, and until recently about the only things you could recycle were aluminum cans, but it is now possible to recycle #1 and #2 plastics (soft drink bottles and milk bottles.)

Not the stuff they use to package electronics. At least it does not have a recycle symbol – I looked. After I had just about cut my fingers off trying to open the blasted thing. Why is it that you have to carry the equivalent of a box cutter and pliers to get anything open nowadays? Even airline snacks (if you can find an airline that still has them.) And then you have all that plastic cluttering up the landfill.

Well, I did finally get the new stations and sensor out of their hermetically sealed plastic coffins and talking to each other. I used lithium batteries in the sensor, and let the sensor and both stations sit side by side overnight, verifying that all four of the temperatures displayed were within a couple of degrees of each other. Then I hung the new sensor (which had a hanging loop) from the old sensor with a piece of string. Now I have base stations in the kitchen and bedroom again, and – surprise, the old stations are showing outdoor temperatures within a degree of the new ones. Guess they just needed the competition.

And lithium batteries come in AAA size, which is what the old sensor needs.  I could have base stations all over the house!

Does Banking Software Work?

One would think that banks, given all the recent problems they have had (and produced) would at least try to get their software right. Apparently they don’t.

Yes, that's me on my tricycle--and the house I now own.

I had better start out by saying I am one of the lucky ones. I have (or rather had) a fixed-rate mortgage, with monthly payments less than the rent I was paying before I decided to buy the house, and an auto-pay arrangement where my checking account bank automatically sent my monthly payment to the mortgage bank. Once I found my IRA (don’t laugh — as a state educator I went off Social Security to IRA’s years ago, but I didn’t know where mine was) I found I was getting less interest on the IRA than I was paying on the mortgage so I started paying down the principal — especially as I’ll have to start distributions this year. So far, so good.

The beginning of this week I got a phone call from the bank that held my mortgage. I was in arrears. There would be a penalty. Did I want to pay at once? (I don’t think it was meant as a question.)

Needless to say, I have heard the horror stories about people who have actually paid off the mortgage being foreclosed on, of robo-signing, of families being turned out into the streets. “I can’t be in arrears,” I babbled. “It’s on auto-pay.”

“Well, we didn’t get your April payment. It’s 10 days overdue. There must be something wrong with your account. Maybe you’re overdrawn.  Now will you pay up?”

“I’ll check with my bank and call you back.”

Well, I checked with my bank. No, they had not sent funds to the mortgage bank in April. The mortgage bank normally billed them, but they had not received a billing in April. My account balance was fine.

I called the mortgage bank back, of course getting a different person. I explained that they had not received a check for April from my bank because the bank had not received a bill — the account was fine. “I’ll have to check on that.” After a long pause on hold, she came back. “No we did not send out a billing in April. We’ll have to set up the autopay all over. Now we’ll need your account number. But I don’t understand why … Let me check something else.

This time, she sounded apologetic. “We didn’t send the bill because your regular monthly payment was more than you owe.”

“On the whole loan?” I knew I’d paid down quite a bit, but the last statement I could find from the mortgage bank — for the first of this year — still had quite a bit of principal. Still, I had sent in a large check near the end of the year. “Did you post that payment before the end of the year?”

“No.”

In other words, that dunning phone call was because I had almost paid off the loan. Their auto-billing software was not set up to handle the case that the regular payment was more than the outstanding balance. This kind of programming error was frequent in the early days of computers, when it was not uncommon to get a dunning letter saying you owed $0.00 and you’d better pay up. But that was 40 years ago! Surely programmers have learned to cover all the possible outcomes of an if-then branch! I learned that when I was leaning to code FORTRAN, 45 years ago!

Apparently not.

Well, she told me exactly how much I needed to pay off the loan, and I got a cashier’s check and went down to the local offices of the mortgage bank and paid off the loan. (They did cancel the late fee, though they still charged interest between the date they should have sent out the bill and the date I paid.) Given the efficiency of their computer system, I’ll relax a little when I actually have the deed in my hands. But not completely, even then.

Ninth Day

On the ninth day of Christmas my true-love gave to me
Nine houses sinking
Eight cars polluting,
Seven blizzards raging
Six aurorae swirling
Five solar flares.
Four chickadees,
Three mammoths
Two ptarmigan
And a spruce hen in a spruce tree.

Eighth Day

On the Eighth day of Christmas my true-love gave to me,
Eight cars polluting,
Seven blizzards raging,
Six aurorae swirling,
Five solar flares.
Four chickadees,
Three mammoths
Two ptarmigan
And a spruce hen in a spruce tree.

Geophysical Christmas Carols 2

Oh, Christmas Tree (1986, to the tune of Oh Tannenbaum”)

Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree,
How green were once your branches
Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree,
How yellow now your branches
We think it’s something in the air,
But ozone? Sulfur? And from where?
Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree,
How brown are now your branches

Remember acid rain? Now it’s more insects, at least in our area. Global change?

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Domestication is a mutual process—the plants and animals domesticated historically have met us halfway.

We and our domesticates have entered a kind of symbiosis—both we and they benefit, at least in numbers.

Plant and animal domestication was the first step toward civilization.

There are only two ways of increasing agricultural yield: Increase the amount of food produced per acre, or increase the amount of land farmed.

Once domestication occurred, we were locked into a positive feedback loop between food production and population. But a positive feedback loop is inherently limited and unstable. Are we approaching a crash?

I’ve been taking a Teaching Company course on DVD for the last couple of weeks, and I have to say it’s one of the best I’ve taken so far. I’ve always been interested in the process of domestication, especially since it became clear that the early agriculturists were generally less healthy than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. How did wolves become dogs? Who first thought of riding a horse? Did riding come before or after driving? And are cats really domesticated, or did they domesticate us?

The course is “Understanding the Human Factor: Life and Its Impact” by Professor Gary A. Sojka, but it’s really about human impact. I can’t say it answered all of my questions, or even asked them, but it did a good job of summarizing our current state of understanding, and of steering a middle course between “domestication is a sin and all domesticated animals should be returned to the wild” (most would not survive, and we probably wouldn’t, either) and “animals have no feelings and were put on this world solely for our use.” There are fewer moral problems with domesticated plants and microbes, though even here there are quandaries. How dangerous are monocultures, for instance? Or reliance on a small number of closely related varieties? (Think the Irish potato famine.)

If I have an argument with Professor Sojka, it is that he is too optimistic about the future. This may be appropriate for a college course, but I don’t feel enough sense of urgency. Yes, some people—a small minority even in the West—are beginning to think about long-term sustainability. (The politicians aren’t, by and large.) But the major problem—a population that is rapidly outstripping the carrying capacity of our planet (if it hasn’t done so already)—has become a taboo subject for serious discussion.  “The demographic transition will take care of it.” But will that happen soon enough?

Historically, our population has been kept in check by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. War. Disease. Death by wild beasts—today, accidental death of all kinds. All of these are premature deaths—death by old age simply is not mentioned. Today, we tend to regard such deaths—those of the young—as particularly tragic. We fight them in every way we can—and in many ways, we’ve succeeded. What we’ve forgotten is that every person born dies eventually, and to reach sustainability we have to reduce the number of people being born until it balances the number who die. Otherwise the four horsemen will eventually increase the death rate to match the birth rate—or more.

Food and energy both rely on sunlight—the sunlight that falls on the earth today and the sunlight that fell hundreds of million years ago, and is now stored in fossil fuels. I group food and energy for several reasons. Fertilizer. Biofuels. Pesticides. Transportation. Pumping water to where it is needed for crops, in some cases pumping down water that has been in storage since the ice age. All of the advances that have allowed us to hold back that horseman ultimately rely on those fossil fuels and fossil water, or plan to replace them with agricultural products. And fossil fuels are becoming increasingly risky to exploit—look at the BP oil spill.

But an increase in agricultural output to match the increase in population means more efficiency—which we are obtaining today largely through fossil fuels—or more land in agricultural production. There is only so much land suitable for agriculture, especially if we want to keep the ecosystem services we depend on going. And one of the oldest causes for war is the desire for more land.

Disease? In part that ties back to our methods of food production, as well. Certainly much antibiotic resistance can be linked to the widespread use of antibiotics in animals, and many diseases that started out in animals have crossed over to human beings. I find it interesting that all of the great world religions, many of them very pro-natalist, trace their origins to early city dwellers. Disease can spread rapidly among city-dwellers. In fact until the last century or two, urban areas were dependent on immigration from the countryside to maintain their populations. Having many children was important to these early city-dwellers—most of their children would die before having children themselves. That’s not true today, thanks largely to public health improvements—but the mindset and the religious imperative remain.

All living things—plants, animals, and human beings—are driven to reproduce. In our case, that deep-seated drive is reinforced by religious and social pressures. We claim we have a right, even a duty, to reproduce. But do we? Not in nature. Nature says the “right” to reproduce must be earned. It’s a lesson I hope we can learn before it is enforced by the Four Horsemen.

The Perversity of Inanimate Objects–2

I stand beside my car, melting in the heat as I press the button for the doors to unlock.  No response from the car, no click of locks, no flash of headlights in acknowledgement of my signal.  I just changed the battery–or had it changed, since it was not at all obvious how to get at the battery–yesterday.  Is the freshly-purchased battery bad?  Well, it’s not a major problem.  I hold the keys in my hand, and there is a keyhole in the door.

BLAT!

Startled, I jump back as my car’s anti-theft alarm goes off.  The horn honks frantically, the headlights blink, I stand staring at my suddenly rebellious car.  It’s my car, the key unlocked the door, why is the blasted thing suddenly acting as if I were trying to steal it?  How do I turn the blaring sound off?  I try climbing into the overheated interior and starting the car–it won’t start.  I walk around it, again thumbing the keyless system.  No response.  Only continued loud embarrassment.

A cyclist rides up, looking amused.  I try to defend myself.  “I don’t know why it’s acting this way.  All I did is unlock the door of my car!”

Luckily, I don’t look like a car thief.  I look like what I am, the stereotypical little old lady in tennis shoes, with a name badge proclaiming that I am on campus legitimately.  “Get in and turn the key on and off five times,” he advises, and it works.  The blaring stops.  When I stammer my thanks, he comments that he heard the car clear across the lot and it happens all the time, then waves and rides off.

Later I drive by the dealership, certain something is wrong with the car.  The keyless entry of course works perfectly for the dealer.  “Just make sure you press the button hard,” he advises loftily. No, there is no way to turn off the anti-theft system.  The car is working correctly; it seems the manufacturers prefer that customers use the keyless feature.  What happens if the batteries go dead?  “Keep fresh batteries in the remote.”  Interesting that they gave me more keys than remotes.  And the only new thing I learn is that it only takes three times turning the key on and off in the ignition to silence the alarm in my new car.

If it’s that simple, and that widely known–remember it was a cyclist who first gave me the information–then any competent car thief surely knows how to turn off the alarm.  Just use whatever he used to turn the lock in the door to turn the ignition on and off–probably much faster than I did.  Bystanders are unlikely to interfere, especially if the nuisances go off all the time.  Car thieves don’t necessarily look like car thieves; some may even be little old ladies in tennis shoes.  So what is the use of having an anti-theft alarm that goes off if you use the key to open the door?
________________________

The “perversity of inanimate objects?”  Not exactly.  When was the last time you considered a rock, a stick, even a tree, perverse?  Annoying at times, even maddening, but not really perverse.  That particular adjective is most often applied to made objects.  Objects that are designed by human beings.

I am convinced that the inventors of Superman got Clark Kent’s profession wrong.  He wasn’t a reporter; he was a designer–and a rather thoughtless designer, at that.  One is expected to fly to the ceiling to change the batteries in a smoke alarm, and use X-ray vision to see how the battery is to be replaced.  X-ray vision would also be useful in tracing the wiring of the anti-theft system, and great strength would have allowed me to open a glass jar of pickles in less than the three days it took.
More realistically, product designers act as if everyone were six feet tall, possessed of perfect vision and hearing, superstrength, and had an average body shape.  Oh, and live in an average climate.  That covers very few of us who actually use their gadgets.

Take climate.  I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, and the first new car I bought was the year the law required that the car wouldn’t start unless the driver was wearing a seat belt.  If the driver’s weight came on the seat and the seat belt catch did not report it was closed, a loud alarm blared inside the car.  No problem, I thought.  I always used seat belts.  My father drilled holes in the frame of our old Woody to put in seat belts.  That is, no problem until a Fairbanks winter.  Then I discovered that the sensor that told the car that the seat belt was fastened quit working when the temperature of the car’s interior was below zero °F.  I was a lot younger then, and I could still start the car by bracing my shoulders against the seat back and my feet against the floor. But the instant my weight hit the brittle plastic of the seats, the alarm started blaring.  The cacophony continued until the car interior warmed to above zero, and when it was forty below outside–common that winter–it never got that warm inside the car.  Since it was illegal for the dealer to disconnect the thing, and I didn’t know how, it blared continuously every time I drove anywhere.  If a siren or the horn of another car had sounded, I’d never have heard it–what was intended as a safety device was anything but.  I can blame Congress for that one, but it was the design of the implementation that was faulty.

(Congress is also responsible for my washing machine.  To save energy, they have made a hot-water wash with a warm rinse nearly impossible, forgetting that powdered “cold-water” detergents are not designed to work with cold water half a degree above freezing.)

Good design includes the idea that it should be possible to use an object for its intended purpose.