Category: Miscellaneous

Geothermal Pricing

I’ll start out with an acknowledgement that what makes this comparison so shocking is the 30% federal tax credit. A straight comparison of a super high-end HVAC system with a geothermal system will be a completely different scenario if the tax credit expires.

Last year, we got the top of the line air-exchange heat pump. And we’ve had a lot of problems. Installation problems, air leakage problems, thermostat problems … all compounded by terrible difficulties getting service people out to sort the issues. And at the end of the day, the house isn’t comfortable. The “this is the only thermostat you can use” thermostat … well, first off all freezes up every now and again and the system is either ON or OFF at the time and stays there. But from a firmware / logic standpoint – there is nothing that looks at the relative humidity in our house and says “hey, we should drop the temperature set-point a degree or two to avoid living in a swamp”. Which wouldn’t be a problem if we could tie the thing into OpenHAB. But we cannot.

The system came with a 365 day 100% satisfaction guarantee … which, really, was the reason I was OK with installing it last year. Worst case, we ask for it to be removed & the entire contract price gets refunded. Well, we are not satisfied … but that means we’re back to shopping for an HVAC system.

I researched geothermal system manufacturers. Evidently there are only a few actual manufacturers whose product is sold under a lot of different labels. I contacted local installers to get a quote for each of the major systems I found. My expectation was that a geothermal system would be a couple thousand more than we paid for the air exchange heat pump once you take off the 30% tax credit money.

We got our first quote today — for 600$ less than the air exchange heat pump. It’ll be more to do vertical bores instead of horizontal bores, but that’s a decision to spend money for efficiency. I expect vertical bores will take us into the “couple grand more than we paid” territory. But I don’t see the point of high-end air exchange heat pump systems up North here — a two-stage geothermal system is going to be quite a bit more efficient, not engage the backup heating as often, and cost less than the top of the line variable speed air exchange systems.

The HVAC company that installed our current unit had horror stories of people having to rip out entire yards because of leaking tubes … but, thinking about it without needing to make a decision now … I suspect those are older installations. So, yeah, we have the possibility of leaking lines twenty years from now (lines are warrantied for 50 years, but you are still paying labor). And that would totally suck, but do I really expect the air-exchange heat pump sitting outside is going to be in service twenty years from now?

The price of an egg

Pricing can be amusing – I always thought the 6$ roasted chicken at markets is 3$ chicken with today as a sell-by date. Toss it and you lose money, cook it and you charge more for it.

We recently stopped at McDonald’s during a marathon shopping excursion (and hungry/cranky tiny people are *not* good shopping partners). Don’t know the menu, so we went inside to take our time ordering. Sausage McMuffin = 1.29$. Sausage McMuffin With Egg = 3.29$. Umm, an egg costs 2$? An entire *dozen* eggs doesn’t cost that unless you want the “free range” “organic” ones from a major chain grocery store. A dozen from the guy down the street (fully free-ranged hens, but not certified organic) only costs 2$!

I know that pricing is determined by perceived value and demand. And the cheap sausage/cheese/English muffin option is included in the tiny ‘value menu’ section while the expensive sausage/egg/cheese/English muffin option is a huge menu tile in full color with a picture so a lot of customers (especially those in the drive-through who may not feel comfortable parking long enough to read the entire menu) may not even know the other option exists. But where else does a single egg cost 2$?!

The Time Travel “Bad Guy”

I saw a commercial for a television show called “Timeless”, the premise for which is apparently that some malevolent person has stolen a time machine and is trying to use it to change history and destroy the country. So the protagonists are “saving” the country by undoing whatever changes are made. But what if the change initiator has no ill intent. They are going to stop the Hindenburg from crashing, or get a ticket on the Titanic to keep watch for iceburgs, or introduce the germ theory of disease centuries earlier all to save lives and help people. But to maintain temporal continuity, the “time police” have to prevent (or undo) these changes. A philosophical anti-hero doing the ‘right thing’, but would people still consider them to be a “good guy”?

Modest swimming costumes

I read an article on BBC News last night that asked a question I’ve often wondered why people ask: Why do some people find the burkini offensive? I remember news stories in the 1980’s and 1990’s about the scandalous thong bikinis showing up on beaches near you with all the near-nakedness and permanent mental scarring. Communities banned these strings with a few patches of cloth amid debate about the offense such attire engendered. Cannot say I was personally offended by any near-nakedness … but I understand that there is a social convention that failing to sufficiently cover oneself is undesirable. Rarely is the convention reversed — apart from compulsory nude beaches, and to me that’s more of a “you are not wearing the proper uniform” than “ack, CLOTHING!” thing.

Ostensibly, the offense some people seem to find in a “burkini” — which is about as far away from a thong bikini as one can get – is perplexing. When I was in Egypt, people at the beach in Alexandria had everything from thongs to long sleeved shirts, long slacks, and hijabs. Not wanting to embarrass my host, I wore fairly modest surfing apparel – a long sleeved rash-guard and neoprene leggings. It’s comfortable. You don’t have to worry about reapplying sunscreen all over your person. You don’t get sand in places you would much rather not have sand.

The whole “offense” discussion is a red herring. I doubt anyone is actually being offended by not seeing enough skin at the beach. Otherwise surfers out in SoCal would have been harangued to stop wearing exactly what I purchased to swim in Egypt. The real offense, such as it is, is that (1) someone is displaying anything that identifies them as Muslim and (2) people do not want to admit their own prejudices. Like don’t-ask-don’t-tell, they’d be comfortable with a Muslim at their beach as long as they couldn’t identify the person as such.

Now the legal justification is secularism … which is at least reasonable sounding. The potential disproof of that notion reminds me of the short-lived school prayer initiative in my senior year at High School. Instead of the legal battles that went on in other districts, I simply asked the Superintendent how many subversive teenagers he thought I could find to sign up to read prayers from non-traditional religions – and, sure, you could get a bunch of kids to read Christian prayers … but it’s a sign-up to read one thing, and we’ll get in queue too. How long will parents support having their kids exposed to Pagan, Wiccan, Satanic … there sure are a lot of religions out there to which people take offense, and as soon as you tell me *my* religion cannot have a prayer read but yours can, we’re out of the murky free speech realm and into clear separation of Church and State territory. We had exactly zero prayers read in our morning announcements. I would love to see a line of beachwear reproducing the stations of the cross, Star of David prints, Buddha prints. Oh, a different outfit for each of the Hindu Gods. How many people wearing those would get fined? And how many people would support the ban after people start getting fined for their religious iconry.

 

Programming in Unknown Languages

I’ve often thought that the immersion method of learning a language was setting yourself up for failure – it isn’t like knowing the fundamentals of grammar and pronunciation in English helps you in any way when you find yourself in Karnataka trying to communicate in Sanskrit. There are rather complex algorithms that attempt to derive meaning from an unknown language, but apart from body language, pointing, and gesturing … that’s not something I can manage in real-time as someone speaks to me.

*Programming* languages, on the other hand, I am finding are rather easily learnt by immersion. I know several programming languages quite well – C/C++, F77/F90, perl, and php. I know a dozen or so other languages well enough to get by.

Some of our home automation scripts are written in CoffeeScript (which is evidently a way to write JavaScript without *actually* knowing JavaScript) – and I would never be able to write the program. But to come into the middle of the conversation (i.e. to take someone else’s non-functional code and try to fix it), I can glean enough of the language to debug and fix code. And there’s always Google for any syntax I cannot guess.

I wonder if someone who is fluent in multiple disparate languages (knowing half a dozen Romance languages doesn’t really give you a good base of knowledge – I mean someone who speaks Italian, Hindi, Cantonese, Swahili, and some Levantine dialect of Arabic) is able to do something similar — they know enough words to pretty much guess what words mean & enough different language structures to guess words in their context.

Sometimes, math *is* hard

A recent meeting included a call back to “math is hard barbie” — back in 1992, Mattel produced a ‘talking’ Barbie that (among other phrases) said “math class is tough”. They ended up recalling the doll – a process which I assume cost the company quite a bit of money. And bad press. As a sophomore in high school, I didn’t understand the controversy. I was concurrently taking both Algebra 2 and Geometry (allowing me to complete two years of Calculus at graduation), so I had some experience with math classes.

The thing that struck me — the actual phrase is not untrue. Sometimes math class was hard. As someone with hand-eye coordination issues, art class was hard too. As someone who is tone deaf, music class was really hard. People who take offense at someone declaring something to be ‘hard’ have themselves declared difficult things as somehow negative. Not worth doing. I understand that the offense was people familiar with existing stereotypes extrapolating the statement to mean “girls think math is hard and girls avoid difficult academic subjects” or “females think math is hard because their brains don’t work that way and males have an innate advantage”.

I worry that we’re selling people false hope by refusing to tell them that something is hard. At some point, you’re going to encounter reality. I studied theoretical physics – gravitation, specifically gravitational phenomenon brought about during binary black hole collisions. Had someone told me it was going to be a super easy way to earn money – head into a computer lab for a few hours a day, drink some coffee, do a little typing, and head home … wow, what a shock my first day would have been. Why don’t we work on teaching people that a lot of things are hard. And each person makes their own effort:reward analysis. Raising chickens is a lot harder than picking a carton up at the grocery store; but if you like fresh eggs, or if you like to ensure the welfare of the animals providing your eggs, if you want to avoid using fossil fuels to transport your food, or if you just want to be involved in the process of generating your food … you decide to get some chickens. If you want to understand the mechanisms of the universe, you learn the math and physics. You do the research.

Buzzard Day Celebration

Join us on 20 March for any of the Buzzard Day activities:

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The arrival of the Buzzards at the Hinckley Reservation on 15 March is an annual occurrence. The Hinckley Township web site has a page detailing the history of this event.

Hinckley’s Buzzard Sunday celebration is the first Sunday following the return of the buzzards — 20 March . Details about Buzzard Sunday can be found at the Hinckley Chamber of Commerce web site.

We plan to meet at the Elementary School at 10AM for the pancake breakfast and then check out the festivities downtown. Weather permitting, we can walk the paved trail around the lake; and we plan to grill some burgers for dinner.

Last year, many of the newly arrived vultures perched in the trees along our driveway. Near sunset, the group took flight and flew around our property and the park. We are hoping to capture pictures of the flight on our BloomSky. Even if you cannot make it to Buzzard Day, check out the BloomSky time-lapse movies to spot some Buzzards.

And for any early risers out there … at 7 AM on 15 March, the Hinckley Reservation has an official Buzzard Spotter at the Buzzard Roost. Maps of the Hinckley Reservation can be found at the Cleveland Metroparks web site. The buzzard roost is at the south end of the park, at West Drive and State Road. Since this is 7 AM on a Tuesday … we weren’t planning on attending this particular event 🙂

Primary Elections In Ohio

This is mostly a note for myself, but if anyone else in Ohio is currently an unaffiliated voter who wants to cast a primary ballot for a party, you can switch party affiliation at your polling location by asking for the party ballot. Since you did not cast a ballot for that party in the previous primary (I’ve used the non-party issues ballot for the past few years. In Arkansas, you did not have to be party-affiliated to use a party’s primary ballot), you may be challenged by the poll worker. If that is the case, tell them you wish to switch parties and would like to complete the appropriate form.

Per Ohio Revised Code 3513.20, this is the proper process *provided that you “support the principals of the political party whose ballot” you vote*. Political party principals are *really* generic (and don’t specify the specifics to reach those goals) – not a lot of people who want more crime, think primary education is a bunch of nonsense, wish there was more unemployment, and so on. Really, even long time party members disagree about how to reach a goal and how well an individual candidate reflects the principals of their party … so not liking a specific policy implementation does not negate my support for the PRINCIPALS of the party.

Buzzard Cam — Almost There!!

We got our BloomSky!!! There has been a lot of snow, and it is very cold. We shoveled our driveway on Sunday hoping there’d be some melting today & delivery vehicles would be able to get up our hill. Then we got another two or three inches of snow overnight. Scott and Anya did some shoveling and put a large plastic box at the bottom of the driveway … and they actually delivered packages to the large plastic box. WooHoo!

The Buzzard Cam is almost ready! Right now it’s inside — so it looks like you could take a tropical holiday in Hinckley because it’s 65 degrees on our window 🙂 But we’ve got the network set up, the device registered, and can upload data. We’ll get the device mounted up outside on Friday or Saturday when it’s not so cold and snowy.

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