automation and infrastructure

TRX
February 22, 2012
159:
> I remember dishwashers, but I've not
> had one since I left home in 1998.

We don't have one either. And since we both hate doing dishes, we moved to paper. $4 worth of paper plates and bowls at the dollar store lasts a month; get a clean one off the stack, throw it away after use.

I doubt we used $4 worth of hot water and soap to wash the hard dishes, but I sure have better things to do with my life than washing dishes. Or making up beds, for that matter.

TRX
February 22, 2012
187:
> I had a college professor who
> commented on gender bias in naming
> conventions -- completely aside from
> the fact that the UNIX name is,
> itself, a ball joke,

"Unix" was a joke on "MULTICS", the projects that Unix's developers had already worked on. Therefore, they would have all known that one of the main loops in the MULTICS kernel was MOTHERFORKER, and many of the rest of the names reflected the kind of thing that happens when you have programmers documenting APIs before their compiler is actually delivered...

TRX
February 23, 2012
278:
> There's something wrong with a
> political and economic philosophy
> which doesn't pay attention to
> infrastructure.

That's because once people start talking "philosphy", they're usually quite distant from the greasy gubbins that form the infrastructure.

That's how you get, say, a state government that tried to mandate the sale of electric cars during a time when their power grid was implementing rolling brownouts, and no more plants were scheduled to come online in the reasonably near future. (that is, the People's Democratic Republic of California)

TRX
February 23, 2012
285:
> A note regarding incinerators and the
> control of burning temperature and so
> forth:

Correct. Almost anything will burn, particularly at the temperatures incinerators run at. You balance your input stream to keep temperatures close to optimum, and we used natural gas or wood chips to make up the difference when needed.

I worked on control software for an incinerator plant about 20 years ago. Then, and I assume now, the problem was identifying the input stream. Getting rid of paper or hospital waste was no problem, but a mystery barrel could be anything, and without dumping and inspecting it, you had to slide them in with a known stream when the hardware could correct if it was at the extreme end of the calorie range.

Our problems were aggravated by the particulate and smoke restrictions imposed by the EPA. Most of the inspection and control issues would have been much simplified if we could have built a BIG incinerator and run it full bore; all the big variations would have become smaller ones.

TRX
February 23, 2012
291:
> Some of us in the US are rather
> dismayed at the devastation that
> several decades of suburb/sprawl
> oriented public policy have wrought
> on the landscapes and urban fabric.

We don't like your cities. We don't want to live in your cities. That's why we left. And we paid a pretty penny to do so. And we're not coming back.

Considering the political and social demographic differences, I'd think most urban governments should be very glad of that.