As a species, we’re obsessed with the metaphysical–a concept that has long predated the scientific method and its analysis of the empirical…and of course the two have always been at odds. The latter offers explanations based on irrefutable perception, while the former is more supposition. Perhaps it’s because the scientific method has and always will probably fail to answer every question that could ever be conceived by the powers of runaway brain growth and abstract cognition.
But historically, the greater unease has been the possibility that a mortal might tap into the metaphysical to produce very physical consequences. It’s easy to be understanding of a deity, who presumably has the knowledge and intellect to manipulate the metaphysical in a responsible manner, but were a human to dabble in the occult and gain unearthly power over the physical, well then the conclusion could only be that this power will corrupt and the practitioner would become evil.
That’s one guess anyway, although I think the greatest influence on changing the public perception has been Christianity. Alchemists and shamen became witches and heretics. Then again, so too were prominent scientists in their day. Maybe the greatest fear then was threatening the status quo and the balance of power.
Despite the lengthy introduction, this is not a post aimed to tackle these questions. No, this is a post of inquisition, though not in the scary torture type of religious context.
I went out to split some firewood, and saw these:
Naturally curious at what appeared to be a magic circle, potion, and wand; I asked my daughter for an explanation. Her simple answer: “It’s a spell.” Unlike what some of her more distant relatives might have, I did not start splashing her in holy water and waving a rosary. Rather, I was curious where she had learned about these things. The color of the markings even resembled woad. Interesting. I wondered what she was conjuring. Maybe she was trying to cure herself of the virus that had been plaguing her respiratory system for the last two weeks.
But upon further questioning, it was apparent that I had misheard. A child’s soft palate had lended a lisp to her words. It was not a spell. It was a stove. She had drawn a range and was cooking stew. It was no attempt to bridge the material and metaphysical, no, it was a simple emulation of the culinary arts.
I admit, I was a little disappointed. Then again, learning to cook is probably a more valuable life skill than making love potions.
To clarify, Liz’s car broke. It had chronic problems with the O2 sensor and electrical system shorting out, then she broke two axles and potentially the transmission. In short: definitively kaput.
I had previously told her that it was my turn to get the next car, and I had long fantasized about buying my first new car, fed by rental experiences, because as with any form of technology, what I currently have immediately becomes obsolete and I grumble with jealousy as each new feature hits the market. My car doesn’t even have a working radio anymore–a problem the kid has been consistently pointing out as we cruise down the road to my tech news podcasts playing from my phone on the passenger seat.
Yet in her impatience, Liz violated the arrangement and purposely broke her car so she could get an upgrade first. That’s what I accused her of anyway. She denies it, but I’ve also noted how her phones keep mysteriously breaking each year, hmmm.
An explanation more grounded in reality, however, is that her commute is much longer, and cars break down quickly. AAA calculates the average cost per mile of driving to be 59.2 cents, so it costs her somewhere around $58 per day. With most of that being highway driving, I’d say she uses 3 gallons of gas per day, which I’ll estimate as $6.87. Therefore, let’s round it off and say each day, after subtracting gas from the total, she racks up $50 worth of wear and tear on her car. So it’s easy to believe that within the year that she’s had the job, say 260 work days, minus vacation, benefit time, work at home days, I dunno, wild guess of 160 work days…that’d be $8000 worth of wear and tear–more than the vehicle was even worth, and probably consistent with the price of repairs for axles and a transmission, unless my math is totally off. And of course, expenses aside, I’d rather not lose my wife to a horrific highway accident when something finally broke catastrophically. So, it was off to the dealership.
When I bought my car as an unmarried young 20-something, the dealership ran a thorough background check on me before I was even allowed to touch a car, and when I did get to drive one, they accompanied me. Now, as married 30-somethings with kid in tow, they just chucked keys at us for any model we asked about. And upon the day’s conclusion, home we went with a brand new Honda CR-V. I had never seen an odometer in the single digits before.
So there’s the lengthy backstory.
I went to move the new car from the driveway into the garage. A lot has changed in vehicle design since I bought my car 10 years ago. No more are quaint mechanical keys. Rather, they’ve been replaced with digital transponders. I entered the car, which had sensed my presence and unlocked itself, and pressed the ignition button. The car did nothing. Hmmm. I felt the remote in my pocket, so I wasn’t missing anything. I pushed the button again, then again and again, varying the delay and time of push, similar to my method for getting touchless faucets to provide water in airport bathrooms, except I was pushing a physical button rather than waving my hands around like an epileptic Jedi (that’ll be the future of cars when they get rid of the button).
I’m sorry Dave
The car still didn’t start, but it did fall into gear, despite the shifter being firmly still in Park. As a consequence, the car was now rolling backwards down the driveway. Reflexively, I push the break pedal, and the car stopped–which is fortunate, because the car was very obviously fully drive-by-wire, so there must still be a physical connection to the calipers somewhere.
I pushed the button again and the car started immediately. Curious, I parked the vehicle in the garage and turned it off, but other distractions soon occupied me and I forgot all about the strange experience.
A couple days later, I went to pull the car out of the garage. The scenario played out as before, except since the garage was level, the vehicle didn’t begin rolling away. This time, however, I noticed the dash flashing a message:
TO START VEHICLE, PRESS BRAKE PETAL AND PRESS START BUTTON…IDIOT!
It was something like that anyway. The realization finally sunk in. I had started the car last time when I pressed the brake to stop it from rolling into the street.
I dwelled on this experience, thinking that even the humble automobile was outpacing my ability to intuitively operate it. It was a scary thought. Amidst news of autonomous vehicles and companies promising the eventual obsolescence of the human driver, perhaps I was already seeing the beginnings of my own obsolescence.
Then, yesterday, I was walking from the parking lot and to the office entrance. In the guest parking, there sat a black Nissan of some sort. A young Asian lady, wearing an outfit which exceeded business casual, complete with tight black skirt, stood next to it with an armful of paperwork. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have given it much thought, as we meet with clients regularly and our other offices travel here for meetings. This lady, however, waved and walked up to greet me. She explained her plight: she had accidentally popped the hood of the rental and didn’t know how to close it, and did I possess such knowledge?
And so, very politely (as I didn’t want to make her feel dumb), I felt along the hood’s gap and explained that all cars generally have a little latch you just have to feel for, subsequently found said latch (except it was slightly different than any other hood latch I’d encountered–what the hell, Nissan?), and explained that you just drop the hood to close it. She felt a little sheepish and said that she couldn’t believe she had driven all the way here like that.
I feel better now, realizing that we’ve reached a point where each generation is now less knowledgeable about their vehicles than the prior. It was an inevitability, since the operator no longer controls the vehicle directly now–they send input into a computer which then determines what action to take. It’s less important to know the physical mechanics of a car now, since if anything breaks, the proprietary systems that control the vehicle would also be affected, and would therefore have to be fixed by a technician anyway. The future will indeed deprecate human input. Whether or not that’s good–if software will ultimately prove safer and more reliable than the person–will be left to history.
My daughter is still going to learn how to change a tire before she can drive though.
Who would have thought that orthopteras were just so darn munchable? This is one of those experiences I just have to share, so I’ll start with the image. I saw this during a trip to Jungle Jim’s:
Delicious and nutritious
Are these humanely killed? Because I want cruelty-free chitin.
Why was the taxonomic name used? I don’t expect a bag of jerky to be labeled as “bovine snacks” or such.
I hate it when my snackable arthropods have artificial preservatives. Good on them for that.
I certainly don’t want to add unnecessary saturated fat to my diet. I’m glad these are cooked healthily.
No MSG! Excellent. I don’t want flavor-enhancement to interfere with that natural earthy taste. I also don’t want to eat a bag of bugs and not be satiated, because then they’d be like chips: you just can’t have one.
I like that logo with the fork being stuck into a bug. Yum.
There isn’t much mystery in its origins, however: https://www.thailandunique.com/. Visiting the website, bugs appear to be their specialty.
I wasn’t feeling adventurous. I bought a can of duck liver instead.
Most of the news I consume is tech news. This is primarily because it interests me, but also because the scope of this news type tends to overlap social/political events, and therefore still exposes me to the more standard news that everyone else consumes, while remaining more esoteric and as a result–averse to the more repugnant predilections of other news (I’m looking at you, Fox).
But there’s still a gap, and I was oddly ignorant of the impending solar eclipse until just before the event. We as a people seem very divided on how much popular interest celestial events should garner. There’s people who don’t seem to care at all, and people who care a lot. Me? When I found out, I leaned towards caring a lot, though not enough to make travel plans.
I had never seen a solar eclipse before. The last one I recall was in the 90s, but it was far to the north and not visible where I was at the time (Texas). I assume this was the same event Liz recounted, and while in grade school she was far enough north to view it, but for the anti-litigatory reasons of school systems, she was not allowed to watch. However, she advised me that she defied authority and snuck a peek through the window, thus watching without protective eyewear and potentially causing the problem her school was seeking to avoid–and something that would have been easy to mitigate with cheap filters, had they just let the kids watch in the first place.
And so it was that my own daughter would have been prevented from partaking, had I not already scheduled the day off for unrelated reasons. And as she is AM kindergarten, I was able to bring her home and offer her this experience.
But, there was a problem. How was I to record this event without any specialized photographic equipment? We had a pair of filters, which made for a really good first-person viewing, demonstrated as follows:
Astute observers may notice interesting objects in the background–I’ll get to that
Naturally, the thought progression led to taking a photo through the filters. That didn’t turn out so well:
Option 2: projection. Following some instructions for the pinhole in box method, I got a decent solar projection onto white paper, which I was then able to capture:
As the eclipse began, I took a second photo:
Later, I tried again:
It worked, but left something to be desired. So, I considered lens magnification. I had a pair of compact binoculars. I angled them, which in itself was difficult, and eventually I managed to get a decent image:
The image was much sharper, but still I wanted something better. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a telescope. But, I did have one more optic device, and it had much bigger lenses–a rifle scope!
The trouble with this method is that it’s attached to a rifle (and rather unwieldy when the objective is to point it skyward with one hand). The scope comes off, of course, but it’s been sighted, and I wasn’t willing to have to re-sight it just for this day’s project. No, I would simply take the entire weapon outside. Of course, it is my own damn yard and I’ll walk around it with a high-powered rifle if I damn well feel like it, but I’m also trying to be a decent neighbor, so I did feel a little guilty about brandishing a gun, but oh well. Maybe it’ll keep the neighbor’s kids off my lawn for all of 5 minutes.
It was difficult to hold the rifle (it’s heavy) while trying to get a photo, but eventually I was rewarded for my efforts:
Again the image was a little sharper, and after numerous attempts I was satisfied that it was as good as I was going to get. Then the moment of maximum coverage arrived and we simply watched with our own eyes. Despite waning attention spans, I hope the experience will make lasting memories.
Then the neighbors starting lighting firecrackers to celebrate, and I became cognizant of the fact that I was waving a gun around while explosions which sounded a lot like gunshots were echoing across the neighborhood. I put the weapon away. It will certainly be a memorable experience to me.
With the new house came a lot of blank walls. And what are blank walls but blank canvases, ready for inspiration to convert them into decorative facades? They’re also tinder boxes for countless marital arguments.
But a blank wall does not a home make, and we are forced to have these arguments. Still, I find Liz’s tastes a little too cosey for my liking, and having a tendency to centralize on the theme of cabins in the woods. It was such a common recurrence that I pointed it out, and turned it into a joke, mocking her quaint tastes whenever the artwork discussion resurfaced. She responds, appropriately, with the usual round of insults and obscenities. Ah marriage, how do they survive without these bickering matches?
Personally, I enjoy surrealist art–something that isn’t quite decipherable upon viewing, and somewhat unsettling–something by Peter Gric or Zdzisław Beksiński. But, I get why that type of art might not make the best focal-point for a room designed to be a mental retreat from the outside world, so I haven’t pushed my preferences.
The other problem is that art is expensive. So while in Wisconsin, we paid a visit to a local art store, Maple Marsh, hoping to find some prints on the more affordable end. Turns out, after speaking with the proprietor, that times aren’t very good for art (unsurprisingly). In order to stay in business and appeal to the less affluent, she had taken on the practice of acquiring reprints and sealing them in some sort of epoxy. The result very much resembles an original, and are cheap and durable. She’s still learning the process, as some of the prints had shadowing effects and foreign debris within the sealant, but at $8 to $25 a print (including frame), the compromise is worth it.
Eventually, we agreed on some art for the reading/sitting room, which looks out upon our shade garden and bird feeder. This outdoor area is a haven for squirrels and various small creatures, so we decided upon some “critter” paintings to match the theme. One day, we’ll finish decorating. And now, we’re one room closer.
Yet in her impatience, Liz violated the arrangement and purposely broke her car so she could get an upgrade first. That’s what I accused her of anyway. She denies it, but I’ve also noted how her phones keep mysteriously breaking each year, hmmm.
