Thursday, July 30, 2009

Americans and Energy Use

An interesting statistic that I came across the other day is that Americans make up 4% of the world's population but use 25% of the world's energy.

The most obvious place where that energy goes is our cars: we have more cars and bigger cars, and we drive a lot.

But, here is an interesting exercise: I know this sounds weird and geeky, so yeah, okay, I am: but one time I tried counting up all the electric motors in my house. Give this a try, and go room by room. It's very hard not to overlook any: I came up with around 60 or 70.

First, nearly every appliance in your kitchen has an electric motor. Your blender, mixer, coffee grinder, electric can opener, knife sharpener. There may be one or two in your microwave. Your refrigerator has a motor. Don't overlook the vacuum cleaner, washer, dryer. Your furnace has a blower motor and if you have central A/C, that's at least two or three motors.

In your bathroom—have you got an electric toothbrush, hair dryer, electric shaver, Water-Pik? Exhaust fan? Count even the battery-operated devices.

A CD player or DVD player has an electric motor. If you still have a VHS recorder or an audio cassette recorder, one of those has one or more motors. Any DVR will have a motor. Digital camera? A motor for the zoom action.

In the home office--inside your computer, your hard disk drive and any floppy drive each is a motor. Got a printer, too? Guess what, a motor. Paper shredder?

Include your garage. There's your electric garage door opener, one motor. In your car, you've got any number of motors: probably a number of electric motors under the hood, such as for the cooling fan and maybe fuel pump. And there's the heater motor, the starter motor; each power window. power mirror, or power seat has a motor. And your car has an audio system, which uses at least one motor for the tape and CD players. Then there's the car's air conditioning, at least a couple more.

Where is your count now? Dozens, I'm sure, maybe nudging 100. Now, how many motors does a person in a third-world country have, do you suppose?

Another exercise is to count the light bulbs in your house. Here, too, it may be hard not to overlook a few. Unless you live in a small studio apartment, the number is likely to be in the dozens.

Don't forget your closets, the outside of your house. Inside your microwave, your oven, your refrigerator (my refrigerator has three). The headlight on your vacuum cleaner. (You don't have to count LEDs, those tiny red and green and blue indicator lights that are so ubiquitous these days; those use a negligible amount of electric power.)

Think you're done? Oh, and there's the. . . .

So what was your total?

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Saturday, July 25, 2009

The Gates Affair: Like Obama, I don't know enough to keep quiet

President Barack Obama got into hot water for his comments on the affair involving the arrest, as his home, of African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Gates, as you recall, was trying to "break into" his own home because the door got stuck. A neighbor saw "two African Americans" trying to break in, and called the police. (First, I gotta wonder—and no one has mentioned this—why the neighbor didn't recognize Gates. Dr. Gates, it's time to get acquainted with your neighbors, so that they will recognize you!)

I wasn't there, and neither was Obama. That isn't deterring either of us from sticking in our two cents. Obama has learned he should have kept quiet, but hey, I'm not the President, I don't have to worry about making the news and getting embroiled in controversy like he does.

What should have happened is this: Policeman: "Oh, this is your house, Okay, I'm sorry."

And that should have been the end of it. Apparently Gates did show his ID, but presumably the policeman was (1) not as impressed as Gates expected him to be to learn who he was (Gates is pretty well known but maybe not quite a household name); (2) not quick enough to apologize; and (3) not deferential enough. All this in Gates' view.

I know a fair amount about Gates and I can imagine that he sort of has a chip on his shoulder, and is too quick to see racial bias where there is none. It's come to light that the policeman in question has actually taught a police class in racial profiling and had the endorsement for doing so from an African American colleague on the police force. Also, this is Cambridge, Mass., a relatively liberal city, certainly not Mississippi.

Cambridge has a lot of professors living there, both from Harvard and MIT. So maybe the police are not that likely to be overawed by finding out that someone is a Harvard professor.

The two men who were "breaking in" were Gates and his driver. His driver?? How many professors have drivers? I have never known of any. I used to see Saul Bellow, who was an award-winning writer (National Book Award) and college teacher, driving between his University of Chicago and Northwestern University gigs. He had a Mercedes, but he drove himself.

So what kind of Imperial professor is this Gates? I think he simply was angered, not merely at the injustice of being accused of breaking into his own house—which is fairly understandable, and many would wish their neighbors to be as vigilant as Gates' neighbor was being—but also annoyed that the cop was not sufficiently impressed when he learned who Gates was.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Monday, July 20, 2009

What Do Teachers Know?

Vincent van Gogh was kicked out of his art class at the Antwerp Academy.

Julia Child was judged not qualified to attend the famous Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.

Albert Einstein was judged a mediocre student in school.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Presumed Stupid, until Proven Otherwise

Stupid people will assume you are stupid—like themselves. Seems they can't imagine an intelligence greater than their own.

Smart people, like members of Mensa, are used to the majority of people being stupider than they are—so they will assume you are stupid (even if they know you are another Mensa member).

People like doctors get used to dealing with the lowest common denominator, so they assume you are stupid.

So—sort of like innocent until proved guilty--you are presumed stupid until proved intelligent.

Maybe I am the sort who tends to hide his light under a bushel. I have found people who seemed to interpret everything I said as evidence that I was stupid.

It doesn't help that I stutter. This can have two consequences: One, what I'm saying is not understood (maybe because the steady rhythm of normal speech is very important and, if you interrupt it, communication is inhibited). Two, many people, simply out of ignorance, associate impaired ability to communicate with subnormal intelligence.

Copyright © Richard Stein

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Sarah Palin, Please Just Go Away!

I don't like Sarah Palin, and I never have. From the moment she burst upon the public's consciousness (that is, the public outside of Alaska), when she was announced as McCain's choice for Vice Presidential nominee, I said, That woman is a bimbo, a bozo, and a fruitcake. And I have never seen any reason to change my mind.

Once the McCain-Palin ticket was defeated in November, I hoped that Palin would quietly slip from the radar screen and return to that obscurity that she so richly deserves. That she has not is the fault of the media, and of the public as well. The media always insist on milking any story for all it is worth. When someone of note dies, we keep hearing about that person for days or a week afterward. It is not enough to run an obituary and suitable eulogies; they cover any funeral, etc. The person may be dead, but he or she is not gone (from our TV screens) and certainly not forgotten. We are destined to go on hearing about Micheal Jackson for a long time, it seems.

And I say it's the fault of the public because of a phenomenon akin to what has been termed the "Hollywoodization of America." There is a truly bottomless interest in any celebrities, whether political, entertainment, or sports (evidently they used to call this "hero worship").

Are celebrities larger than life, or a special class of beings? The image that they are goes back probably to the 1930s or 1920s when the Hollywood movie studios started publicity departments to keep their stars in the public eye. These publicity departments managed to conjure up larger-than-life personae for these movie stars. The stars were given glamorous clothes and glamorous settings for their publicity photos, whether the setting was a movie premiere or a Riviera resort.

These efforts were very successful in creating in the public eye the idea that these celebrities were not ordinary human beings. Maybe we all need idols or demigods. But it ought to be clear to anyone who thinks about it for a bit that many of these people are not superior beings. Typically they are not smarter than the average human being. The move stars can't maintain their marriages. Many seem to have died of drug abuse. Many times (look at sports "stars") they run afoul of the law. To be charitable, some of the problems these individuals seem to exhibit are that they can't handle fame or its concomitants such as continually being in the eye of the public, being in the lens of the paparazzi, and so forth.

Anyway, back to Ms. Palin: Far from my being able to forget about her, she seems to crop up everywhere. As revenge for my having a poor opinion of her, and having said nasty things, she's haunting me. I see her face where it is not. Photos of so many women look to me, for a moment, like Sarah Palin. Oh, how I want to beseech her, Sarah Palin, please just go away!

Copyright © Richard Stein

Attention: Robin Staging Area

It seems that, since Swiss Family Robin has made its home in the nest above my coach light (formerly known as One Mourning Dove Lane), my front porch has become their staging area. Papa or Mama Robin, with food for the young'uns in their beaks, seem to rest for a few moments on my front porch or its railing. I just looked out through the sidelights of my front door only to see a robin staring back at me.

Well, I was happy to be a grandpa to mourning dove chicks two or three times, so I guess I should be just as glad that now it's robins.

Actually, the Robin family chose a poor place to raise their Robinsons and Robindaughters. They used a nest that had been built by mourning doves the previous year (and used again by the doves earlier this season).

The mourning doves seem more adapted to being around human beings. The nest they built, atop a coach light right next to my garage door, is pretty close to human activity. The doves pretty much took it in stride when my car entered and left the garage, but it bothers the robins more: they often fly away when the car comes in or goes out. (I think actually it's not the car that spooks them but rather that they can see and recognize a human inside the car.)

So, given the robins' relative skittishness, that's a poor place for them to nest (although I guess it was okay in the end since they successfully hatched their eggs). But I feel akin to the robins here because I may have chosen my home poorly, too. Guess I'm no smarter than the robins. Call me bird brain.

Copyright © Richard Stein

Friday, July 3, 2009

50 Years After High School

For me, it's fifty years since high school. My graduating class is having a fifty-year reunion this summer. I probably won't go. I've never gone to a high-school reunion (I won't go into the reasons now), but the class has a web site, and there are photos posted of luncheon gatherings the class has held the last two summers.

Those fat, old, gray-haired people can't possibly be the same people as the slim, young people I knew in high school. I can only identify them by the captions to the pictures; I'd never know a single one. Some of them look better than others. There's the quarterback of the football team: he looks like he's in good shape and stands very erect. But so many are overweight. Two are in nursing homes (no, they're not in the photos), others use canes or oxygen bottles. A number—too many—sadly have passed away.

I am sure that I don't look like they do. Somehow—good genes, clean living (okay, stop laughing!)—I escaped thirty years of aging.

Now, if you believe that. . . .

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Television makes us fat

You've probably heard over and over—it's even discussed elsewhere on this blog—that Americans are increasingly becoming overweight and even obese. There's been a lot of discussion among experts as to what the causes are.

I want to suggest that television is at least one possible cause. No, I don't mean the inactivity of sitting and watching TV; I mean the advertising of food on television.

Just to make a very rough and random sample, in three or four days of my own televiewing, I saw commercials for some half-dozen fast-food chains (one of them at least four times), one for yogurt, two for sausages (one of those at least twice), ice cream, a pancake house, raw chicken, baked beans—and paper plates, piled high with food to show that they can hold it. This is not an exhaustive list. The Fourth of July is approaching so the sausages and paper plates are to be expected, I guess.

My theory is that watching food commercials—seeing the sponsors' food items shown, often in close-up, in their best make-up (and that's not totally facetious: food is doctored for still photography, as in magazines, and I'm sure something similar is done for TV) so as to look as appetizing as possible—doesn't this make us hungry? Some social scientist needs to do a study to show just how often seeing a TV commercial for food makes the viewer get up during a commercial break and go to the refrigerator. Meanwhile, I've got this bit of advice: the next time a food commercial comes on, showing that double cheeseburger, quickly change the channel, look away--anything but watch it and start to salivate.

And then there are the cooking shows on TV and other food programs. I know that those make me hungry, maybe more so that the food commercials. I'm pretty much immune to most of the food commercials because I almost never eat fast food and I eat almost no red meat. So because of how I have conditioned myself, that close-up shot of a big, juicy burger isn't going to do it for me. But I'm in the minority.

Update, June 28, 2012
Yesterday the TV news reported on a study done by the University of Southern California that shows that TV ads for fatty foods make the viewer crave fatty foods. I feel this shows that I was right in what I said in 2009.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein