Haste Makes Waste

I've got a Prius. Many people would probably stereotype me on that issue, figuring I'm politically or environmentally a certain way. Some people that get high mileage cars are just cheap. They don't want to spend the money on gas.

For me, it was a little bit of all that, but mostly, it's the engineering of efficiency. How do you get more for less?

So I find myself doing this thing they call Hypermiling (Hyper Mile-ing). The readout on the dashboard tells you what your instantaneous and average gas mileage are. And one screen you can select shows the instantaneous power efficiency. You drive around and you quickly learn (or relearn, or have dramatically emphasized to you) that quick starts and rapid acceleration are wasteful. If you can take the time to slowly wind up to speed, you will use a lot less fuel. And once you are going, it doesn't take as much energy to keep going.

It occurred to me that you might be able to get more mileage from premium gas. I figured that the higher octane might be enough to get enough more energy and more mileage to more than justify the price. I started thinking about this after my mileage had been going down and I had the dealer flush the injectors and got an immediate 20% jump in gas mileage. So I put in some premium gas and got another 10% boost. However, I found this to be a false savings, because I started driving more carefully at the same time. I found that the first tank was about the time it took to drain my battery. The thing is, when you hypermile, you tend to make the car run in all electric mode more often. However, it's the boost in speed you get from fuelled acceleration that charges up the battery. So after you hypermile for a while, you drain the battery down to the point where the motor is always running just to charge the battery. So instead of sitting quietly at a stop light with the motor off, you sit there with your gas engine idling just like any non-hybrid car. So there is a limit to how much you can save.

It was about this time that I started obsessing about getting solar panels for the car. I thought that if the battery would just recharge while it was parked at work or home, that it would be full at least once a day and I could hypermile around for a while, draining it. I thought about a sunshade for the window out of solar panels or a carport to park it in that has solar panels. The next problem is converting that power to the right voltage and then feeding it in to the battery without harming the car's electronics. People out there have done it, but there's nothing readily available off the shelf.

It occurred to me that any time you're in a hurry to do something, it costs you.

I was thinking about energy first. If you want it quickly and need it now, it costs you in who you have to buy it from or what it does to the environment. If you take the time to do it right, it's more sustainable.

But it's not just energy that costs when you rush it. Look at what happens with wars. When you rush to war, use up resources at a fearsome rate. It's wasteful of lives as well as respect and prestige in the world.

There are other examples, as well. There's that song that says you can't hurry love, and that's probably true most of the time. When you are smitten with someone, you can't just rush up to them and shout "I'm in love with you!" and expect this to be taken as anything but proof that you are nuts and not worthy of love.

It's kind of that way in sales, too. You have to wait for the sales to come to you to really start making good consistent sales. You can't call someone up every day and say "are you going to buy something from me today?!" and expect them to continue to take your calls. After a while, they'll make a point of not buying from you because you annoy them. If you've ever been to a car dealer and had the guy come up to you and say "what's it going to take to get you to drive off in this today?!" you know that this is the quickest way to make you want to leave and never come back.

I think weight loss is another example of haste being counter productive. If you do manage to loose weight really quickly, you run the risk of injuring yourself if it's through exercise, or making yourself unhealthy if it's through diet. And there's the rebound effect. Lose weight quickly and you become so hungry (at least I do). You have to take the time to lower your appetite while you are loosing weight.

So just like the tortoise and the hare, remember, slow and steady wins the race.

Cat Fight

Cats are cute cuddly soft little furballs, suitable for sitting on doilies or little velvet pillows. They are soft and helpless.

Anyone with any knowledge of cats knows that is simply not the case. We have lots of cats. There are outside cats that we feed that range from approachable to skittish, and inside cats that either spend all their time inside or like to go out when they can.

Valentine is an outside cat. She showed up last winter and has never let us pet her. She's not so scared of us that she runs at the sight of us, she's just leery and stays outside of arm's length. Last winter, there were more outside cats, and Valentine was at the very bottom of the pecking order. It seemed that none of the other cats liked her, or even tolerated her, and it seemed that she got the most abuse from the other cats. Valentine's nose would often have a huge scratch in it, and you just visualized her getting beat up by all the other cats.

If you imagine what a cat attack would look like, it would be pretty brutal. They have some seriously sharp and nasty claws. I've often wondered how bad a cat with absolutely no fear could hurt you if it suddenly went nuts and decided to attack. I would not want to find out, especially if I had shorts on. The other day, one of the inside cats, Eddy was coming into the cat door and got nailed by Valentine from behind. She was getting hit in the flank just as she ducked into the door. There was no blood and no apparent damage. The same attack would have easily killed a bird, and probably a rabbit. It makes you realize that these cute little kitties must be made of tough enough stuff to defend against attacks by themselves.

In fact, that's probably not a bad definition of most species. Their defenses are probably about evenly matched to their offensive abilities. Being as tough as it takes to survive the kind of attacks you yourself can dish out would be a prerequisite for survival.

The human political animal is the exception. It seems to me that the Republicans are made of sterner stuff than the Democrats. From what I always observe, the Republicans have a never ending supply of moves that smash any Democratic leaning or initiative. They always seem to state their opponents position and break it up and show it to be a sham before you even hear from the Democrats. It just doesn't even seem like a fair fight most of the time, except when you look at the outcome, which is government that pretty much hovers around the 50/50 point. Like my cat that gets hit in the side and waltzes in unharmed, perhaps there is more to this in the political animal than meets the eye.

Today's Antebellum Civil War

I've been fascinated by the Civil War for a long time. Most recently, I have been listening to a lecture on Civil War Reconstruction by Yale Professor David Blight. Most studies of the Civil War concentrate on the build up to the war and the battles and political struggles during the war. It's as if the war ended and was just over and forgotten, if you judge by what is usually taught on the Civil War.

So, given the current political divide and much of the debate going on in public now, it occurred to me that the current situation has some similarities to our country just before the Civil War.

One analysis I listened to about the Civil War broke down slavery as an economic system. It was profitable and successful, from an economic standpoint. There was a small amount of rich plantation owners that made an enormous amount of money off of slavery based agriculture, mostly cotton, but also tobacco. Slavery was a system which stole the labors of the slaves and caused them to toil and put all their efforts into the profits of their masters. They did not benefit from the system, to the contrary, they were trapped in the system with no way out and no recourse to escape or be treated more fairly.

Democrats in that pre-Civil War era had a direct stake in perpetuating this economic system that directly benefited such a small number of people. Whigs were not much better, they did not want (for the most part) to break down the system. Some of their motivation was not to upturn the economy, or to create a political rift in the country. Only the emergence of the Republican party brought out politicians that were more open about discussing the abolition of slavery.

I occurs to me that we here in present day America are a lot like that pre-Civil War society. We have two parties that protected economic systems that do harm to people. There can be no doubt that the default position for politicians today are that rich people are the capitalists that provide the prosperity of society and should not be interfered with, even when they exploit workers or the environment that we all live in and that should belong to all of us. We live in a world where the ultrarich are taxed at the lowest rate they have been in decades, and where workers' rights are more and more non-existent. Income disparity is higher than it has been since the late 20s. The power of unions is waning so rapidly that they have almost ceased to be a political force. The Supreme Court has declared that Corporations are people and that they cannot be restricted from spending unlimited money to influence politics.

For parallels to pre-Civil War society to be complete, there would have to be the emergence of a third party that may emerge from an existing party, but would be for championing the downtrodden class. Instead, in today's world, there has been the emergence of the Tea Party, which centers its attentions on keeping taxes low and shrinking the power of government in our lives. The primary beneficiaries of these ideas are ultra-rich and corporations, yet the average Joe Sixpack in the Tea Party does not understand or appreciate this. Many blue collar or low wage workers in our country support the small minority of ultra-rich in their rights and pursuits. There was a poll that revealed that most people believe that they, too will strike it rich some day, and do not want to finally arrive only to find all their rights and privileges taken away. This is a strange situation where there are a large number of people who have been convinced to vote and act against their own self interests.

So, where will we go from here? There was an interesting analysis of unrest in the Arab world, the so-called Arab Spring, where this was shown as the masses of young and powerless society finally rising up against those entrenched in wealth and power.

I've often thought that one reason Communism failed because it was never actually tried (don't get me wrong here, I also believe pure Communism would fail, but that's not my point here). "Communism" as it was set up in Soviet Russian and Red China is not a true redistribution of wealth and power, but a concentration of wealth, power, and privilege into a small elite group, which is no different than what happens when Capitalism runs away and concentrates wealth and power in a small minority. One of the differences between Soviet and Chinese communism and pure runaway capitalism is that they paid lip service to the rights of the workers (as they trampled them).

My frustration is that you need the promise of profits and wealth in order to drive innovation and motivate investment in technological and economic progress, but that it inevitably leads to individuals or corporations trying to control that technology. It does not serve society as a whole to allow technology to be controlled and restricted by individuals or individual corporations. How is this any different from people's fears of government control of tech? I tend to agree with government oversight when it protects people's health or the environment, but not when it slows down or restricts the development of technology. Of course, another major problem with communism was that it tried to control and direct technology and the markets, which also proved to be disastrous. Just like you need biological diversity in order to have a healthy environment, you need economic diversity, which is really nothing more than many companies trying many different things, in order for the most valid technology to emerge and serve society as a whole.

I believe that we have to find a way to correct the imbalance, protect individuals and the environment, and make opportunity more widespread and accessible, without taking away the profit motive and the situation that allows for good ideas to be rewarded.

Altered Self

I was listening to a podcast of Fresh Air the other day about a person who had suffered a stroke. The stroke altered the man's personality. Doctors determined that the stroke had killed a portion of his brain. As with many other examples of people with damaging brain injuries, this case would have provided proof of a connection between a certain part of the brain and certain higher functions.

It would be difficult to explain the effects exactly, but the man went from being a chiropracter, a logical and methodical person with a strict schedule and a disciplined approach to life to a artist. He could not remember most of his past life, from people's names to all the training he had. He was care-free, not in the sense that he was happy, but because he was not capable of the kind of deep thinking that would cause him to worry.

He became a prolific or maybe more accurately, obsessive artist. He was constantly making pencil drawings of intricate patterns.

As his recovery progressed, he became fully functional, seemed pretty normal in conversation, but was a completely different man.

It occurred to me as I listened to the story that this new personality must have been there before the stroke, it was just suppressed by the parts of brain that died during the stroke. While the stroke had the effect of wiping out his old personality, who's to say that's all bad? He seemed much happier in his new life, less stressed and less bothered by the cares of the world. Granted, he was also probably not as successful or organized, but he was happy.

It made me think that if the brain contains other personalities, and they are just submerged, perhaps there is a way to bring them out. If there are dominant parts of the brain overruling other aspects, maybe there is a way to suppress the dominant personality and become a different person. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to find a way through meditation or hypnosis to allow emergence of new personality? Wouldn't it be nice to take a vacation from yourself and experience a new you that would relax and find more enjoyment in life?

I realize that people can alter their personality by taking drugs, but the effects are more harmful. The pathways in the brains are being damaged and rewritten under the influence of drugs. There would not be a great deal of control in what your results would be, what personality or trait would emerge.

If there are aspects of your personality already present, but submerged, finding a way to bring them out could result in an unexpected outcome just as uncontrolled as taking drugs.

I guess my idea when I considered what would be inside your head, waiting to be discovered was that you could dial in the changes to the type of personality you wanted on demand. This is probably not a realistic idea. Any change in personality is a risky spin of the mental roulette wheel. Perhaps some day psychiatrists might find a way to use this idea to enhance therapy, but for now, it's probably more along the lines of "don't try this at home".