A Dichotomy for the Ages

 

Who's the Narc?

Maybe you'll remember this post, where I talk about ChatGPT and the horror it was set to rain over English departments everywhere.

But while most of us were either blissfully unaware of the impending Skynet doom to befall English departments, were actively cheering the AI writer on, or wringing our hands over the situation but not really doing anything about it, a Princeton student wrote a web thingy capable of detecting whether a piece of writing was written by artificial intelligence or not.

I'll let the Daily Beast and Buzzfeed go into the details.

I haven't had the opportunity to try this out yet, as the site hosting this web thingy hasn't been able to keep up with the demand. Or he's scraped enough personal data out of English teachers everywhere and is now only a bale of stolen underpants away from conquering the world. So once the smoke clears, I'll give this thing a shot and report back.

Favorite Simpsons Episode: Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song

The more I think about it, the more I come to realize that "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song" is my favorite episode of The Simpsons.

Not that it matters. But it is.

It's quotable, start to finish, staring with acknowleding Martin's Geode to Lunchlady Doris' muted "Okey-dokey" to Groundskeeper Willie's "Grease me up, woman!" to Ralph being concerned about the dog in the vent and poor, poor Principal Skinner having a hiccup attack as Supernintendo Chalmers visits to the best scene of the entire episode: Poor Seymour trying to live it up by varying his choice of laundry soap.

And I still think this is one of the best lines Superintendent Chalmers delivers: "Oh, I have had it! I have had it with this school! The low test scores! Class after class of ugly, ugly children!"

And then there's Martin in his cage. Poor Martin.

I think what I enjoy the most about this episode is the time spent with more minor characters, namely Skinner and Martin. And Superintendent Chalmers never disappoints.

Now We Just Need to Generate our Own Water

As noted earlier, this weekend we turned on our solar power system, thus stigginit to the man, or at least generating a good portion of our own electricity.

If I’m doing the math right, and if the current information I have is correct, we’ve been averaging 17 kWh daily consumption from the electric company (I’ve only looked at one bill, so that number is suspect until I can look at a years’ worth). In the three days we’ve had our system on – including Sunday, which was rather cloudy – we’re averaging just over 20 kWh of power generated. In any case, we’re anxious to see what our next few bills look like from them.

However, the city of Ammon is now entering a test period for metered water. Insert frown here.

I understand they need to conserve water, as additional water rights are harder to come by. But our experience with metered water when we lived in Rexburg and Sugar City equals high bills and brown lawns. They propose now to let us use 7,000 gallons of water at a flat rate of $30, with a $1.25 per thousand gallon charge after that. For seven or eight months out of the year, that’s not a problem as we’re below that 7,000-gallon threshold. When we turn on the sprinklers in the summer, however, that’s when we get in trouble and, if we don’t reduce consumption, we’re looking at bills of close to $100 a month or more.

They’re telling us now that these are only preliminary numbers, which may face adjustment after the test period is over.

So my plan is now to eventually cut our watering time in half. For the first part of the test period, I want to run the system for about 2/3 as long, just to see what our bills would be like. Depending on what we see, we’ll adjust further.

Fortunately, our kids are already on the water conservation bandwagon, as they don’t take showers until we can present them with clear visual evidence of stink lines.

Coffee and Maple Logs in the Lobby

Yes, I’m about to launch into a boring safety presentation that affects a very small population in my neighborhood, and I don’t even have coffee and maple logs in the lobby to make up for the boredom you’re about to endure. Sorry.

Nevertheless, we’ve got a problem, right here in River City.

We live three houses south of the intersection of Matchpoint and Tiebreaker drives, on Matchpoint. At the second house, Matchpoint, which starts out in an easterly direction southbound, makes a turn to the south two houses in.

Two of our neighbors are engaged in a (mostly) silent war over who gets to park and when on the south end of the curve, headed south. Most often, there’s a trailer there belonging to one neighbor, or a black SUV belonging to the sister of another neighbor (both appear in the picture above).

Occasionally, there’s a red pickup with a camper in the bed (seen here parked in the driveway) on the corner. Such as this week. It’s a *leetle* hard to see around.

Additionally, there’s almost always a car parked on the northbound side of the curve (the white one you see here).

It may be an optical illusion, but I’m fairly certain Matchpoint narrows a bit as it enters the curve, widening up a bit again once the curve is passed.

That narrowing road, combined with the constantly-parked vehicles, is the problem. Or at least the root of other problems.

This is going to shock you, but people travel fairly fast on this street. I don’t have a radar gun so I may be exaggerating a bit, but I’m fairly certain some people approach this curve at more than 30 miles an hour, sometimes pushing 35. This is a 25 mph zone, as are all residential streets in Ammon.

Problem?

• Street narrows in the curve (maybe)
• Cars or trailer constantly parked on the curve, both sides
• Drivers going fast through the curve

There are blind spots. We have to be really careful, backing out of our driveway, to make sure there’s no one approaching the curve from the north because if they come around the corner and we’re backing out, well, that’s not a good thing.

Also, we’ve nearly been hit once in the winter when a car going a bit too fast came into the curve at about the same time we did. He couldn’t see us coming because of the parked obstruction and went into a skid when he saw us. We were able to slow and move as far to the right as we could. He got out of the skid and moved as far to his right as we could. But it was a close thing.

I’ve mentioned there’s a (mostly) silent war going on amongst the two neighbors. So talking to them about the problem isn’t going to fix things. Neighbor one got the city/police involved at one point. The result? A trailer I had temporarily parked in front of our house, far enough from the curve not to be a problem in this particular situation, was tagged as “abandoned” by the city and I only knew about it because the neighbor who contacted the city or police pointed the obscurely-placed tag out and said I should probably get the trailer moved. I did. And yet the trailer/truck/camper combinations are constantly on the curve, without a peep from police or the city.

They’re causing the problem. And I’m the one who almost had a trailer towed over it.

I’ve got a solution. The city should implement a “no parking” zone on the southbound portion of the curve, where the problem parking occurs:

The no parking zone (in red, above) would still leave plenty of room for parking, including a parking spot even closer to my driveway (not ideal for us, but I concede there’s a need for parking here).

Will it happen?

Probably not.

I contacted the city this week, and they said they'd have an engineer come out and take a look. I did not bring up the idea of a no-parking zone, because that ought to be up to the city to decide. We'll see what happens.

Slow. They Called You SLOW!

I admit to having my moments. I’m not the most observant or brightest guy in the world.

But part of improving is recognizing where one can improve, right? So, here is a list of a few of the things I’ve figured out recently.

Manneken Pis

I’m a fan of Asterix and Obelix, and just this week finally got the joke in this panel from Asterix Chez les Belges:

Up until now, I’d just assumed, “Ha ha, they’re making a joke about a kid having to go to the bathroom a lot after he sneaks beer and doesn’t really have anywhere to go, since they’d just remarked on how flat Belgium is.”

No. They’re making a joke specifically about Manneken Pis, that famous peeing-boy statue in Brussels:

Barfy

 

Not until I had to clean up one of our dogs’ barf twice in less than a span of 12 hours did I hit on a reason why one of the dogs in The Family Circus might be named Barfy. That’s certainly something they’ve not explored in the comic strip.

More revelations to come, I’m sure. Unless Lenny kicks me out.

The More You Know (r)

I needed this video years ago.

The Nuclear Not-So-Boogeyman

I make it a joke to mention the radioactive stink bugs.

Yes, radioactive stink bugs. And rabbits. And probably marmots, too. Anything that digs around out where I work is probably going to trigger a sensitive Geiger counter.

But I don’t worry about it. If I see a live stink bug crawling along the carpeted cubicle aisles at work, I’m not going to step on it. Not because of the beyond slight chance I’ll spread its radioactivity by squashing its guts, but because of the sure chance it’ll stink for a while because the stink juice came out when I stepped on it.

The biggest threat to the Snake River Plain Aquifer, which underlies the Idaho National Laboratory where I work, is nothing radioactive – it’s the carbon tetrachloride and other organic chemicals and solvents brought to Idaho from Colorado in the form of sludge that were dumped out here. And thanks to a system of giant vacuum cleaners that are literally sucking the carbon tet out of the soil and burning it, along with other cleanup efforts that are going quite well despite all the whining you hear in Boise, little to none of it has reached the water.

We were looking at a nuclear renaissance here in Idaho, with Areva planning a $1 billion uranium enrichment plant in Bonneville County.

Then came Fukushima.

Areva effectively scuttled its plans for Idaho, as demand for nuclear power plunged worldwide after the Fukushima accident. A lot of people wagged their fingers and said a lot of I-told-you-sos.

But guess what, folks – the nuclear boogeyman isn’t as scary as everyone makes it out to be. Check it out from the frothing pro-nuclearforces at Wired:

“Fukushima has not made a big impact on overall radioactivity, believe it or not,” he says.

The problem is, a lot of people still don’t believe it. “People are really afraid that the Pacific is so contaminated that you can’t eat any fish anymore,” [Colorado State University chemist Georg] Steinhauser says. “It’s not true, and I find it very difficult. This is one of the biggest challenges in my work.”

The biggest problem with nuclear power – aside from the fact modern thinking has isolated the industry with 1970s technology – is public relations. It doesn’t matter how little radiation gets released, or how much is already in the environment. People – in this case, mostly liberals – ignore the science and stick their heads in the barely radioactive sand.

You stand to get a lot more radiation from a dental x-ray or flying in a commercial airplane than you do from Fukushima. But it’s Fukushima that gets all the scary headlines.