Vakkotaur

On the 18th I placed an order. There's nothing particularly special about that. And I got an estimated delivery date of the 23rd, which is today. The item did not ship on the 18th. Or the 19th or 20th, which was no surprise being Saturday and Sunday. Nor the 21st. Nor the 22nd. Yet the delivery date kept appearing as the 23rd. And now I see this:

Date/Time   Activity    Location	
05/23/2012  22:25:00    IN TRANSIT TO[I]    MINNEAPOLIS, MN, US	
05/23/2012  22:24:00    DEPARTURE SCAN[I]   EDISON, NJ, US	
05/23/2012  20:54:00    LOCATION SCAN[I]    EDISON, NJ, US	
05/23/2012  16:34:00    ORIGIN SCAN[I]	    EDISON, NJ, US	
05/18/2012  00:08:24    BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED[M]

I went rummaging around the attic yesterday looking for something that as far as I can tell isn't up there. But I did find some other things, including the rabbit ears I was looking for a few months back, not that they'll do me any good anytime soon. I also found a couple old 'personal music players'. One was a cheapie GPX AM/FM radio and the other, to my surprise, was an honest to goodness Sony Walkman (WM-FX301 if model numbers have any meaning for you). It's no mp3 player, but it has AM/FM and the tape player is even auto-reverse. I had forgotten I had such a thing. I'm not even sure how I wound up with such a thing.

As if that wasn't enough, this has to have been sitting for oh, about 8 years I'd guess and the cells were still good. How did I manage to forget this, with a set of lithium cells in it yet? I don't know.

I used it last night while doing a few things about the house. The advantage is that I can listen and not disturb jmaynard. The AM band was full of noise, hardly a surprise in a house (or world) full of computers. FM didn't have as much noise, but aside from some of the programming on Public Radio, FM broadcast is pretty much junk. So I grabbed a tape. One that seems to have stuff on it from about 1984. I hadn't listened to it in some time.

One tune was Mark Russell singing about how "Fritz Can't Win Come Election Day" when it was plain a couple weeks before the election that Walter Mondale wouldn't get far. Another was Garrison Keillor going on about the loss, "We're Never Gonna Run For President Again." I suspect he'd be less than thrilled if Tim Pawlenty ran - and won. Another tune was about alternate energy and was clearly before the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hysteria as it belittled everything but coal - and fusion when it finally is made to work - and there was no concern at all about carbon dioxide. I'm tempted to copy down the lyrics of some of these to see what folks might have to say about them.

The Walkman seems big and clunky now, but it is mechanical and not all that much larger than the tape it plays. I'd still like to have a personal mp3 player, but I have something workable right now.

One of the neater things seen at ROFLThing was a single slide (well, the modern digital equivalent of a slide). The slide shown on this page. Jason Scott summed things up quite well in a very simple Venn diagram. That, or something very much like it, is apt to become a journal icon.

I've noticed that many microwave instructions now call for a heating time of 1 minute 30 seconds. I think this is fairly recent thing (last few years) as I recall seeing instructions calling for a 90 second time. It's not any big deal, but it is a curious shift. Is 90 seconds now somehow nonstandard? Is it like an improper fraction, being over a full minute but all in seconds? Or is it that a new generation of instruction writers or rather those who approve them, has decided that "1:30" makes more sense with numeric keypads than "90" which is one less keypress? They mean the same thing. All the microwave ovens I've encountered deal with 90 seconds just fine, so not only do they mean the same thing but they have the same effect. It's hardly as if 1:30 would have been a problem setting the timer on the older twist-knob timers of earlier microwaves. Or is there now an assumption that people have trouble with 90 seconds instead of 1 minute 30 seconds?

Suppose you have a device that can display bits, or pixels. To make it simple each pixel can be only on or off, white or black, no grays and no color. If each pixel is a bit, the whole display can be represented, or is a representation of, one long binary number. If you make that number 0, display it, add one, display it, and keep adding one and displaying until the binary number has gone from all zeroes to all ones then the display will eventually show you everything it ever could.

Everything. It'd be in high contrast, but it'd be there. Every scene that could be, real or fictional. Every page of every book. Every newspaper headline of the New York Times.. and the National Enquirer.. and the Onion. Everything you ever did. Everything you never did. And the same for neighbors and strangers. Next week's winning lottery numbers. Next week's losing lottery numbers - all of them. There are a few problems. One is that most of things it will show you will be garbage. What isn't garbage will be impossible or at least very hard to distinguish from garbage. Supposing you do see tomorrow's headline how can you be sure it's fact or fiction?

But the real deal-killer of this is that there just isn't enough time to do it. If the display is a very modest 10 x 10 pixels, little more than the size of a character, already the binary number is 100 bits long. That's 2 to the 100th power combinations, or 1.267.. x 10 to the 30th. Supposing an add and display rate of 1000 times per second - too fast to see individual images - and then figuring in 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour, and 24 hours per day, and 365.25 days per year (on average - remember leap years) and 1000 years per millennium...that's still 4 x 10 to the 17th millennia. For any really usable size display, say 100 x 100 pixels, the time requirements are even more staggering.