Sharon Kahn

For the past couple of years there has been a faction in the debate about reinventing policing that insists that the police should be preventing crime rather than reacting to it. Every time I read this argument, something pings in my brain - wasn't that a P.K. Dick story? Some movie with Tom Cruise? Oh, right, Minority Report. All about preventing murders before they happen. And how did that work out? Not too well, I think, although I don't remember the details. 

So when I noticed that Minority Report was running on Netflix (but only until the end of the month) I decided to rewatch it.

Wow. Just, wow. I had forgotten what a brilliant movie that was. It may be one of those movies that keeps getting better as the decades roll by and it starts to be obvious how prescient it was. But it's also just a really good movie. I'm not usually a big fan of thriller/mysteries, but when they are this well put together I'll make an exception. And of course it is also a big-budget science fiction movie with spectacular sets, a John Williams score, and Tom Cruise. With all the genres it manages to pack into its running time,  I think it's even earned the right to be more than two hours long. And I don't grant that lightly.

Only 9 more days, people. If you haven't seen it since 2002, give it a whirl. 

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I just discovered that somewhere between my old iPhone SE and my spiffy new iPhone 12 Mini, Apple decided to introduce a new image format that nobody ever asked for called High Efficiency Image Format (which of course is abbreviated HEIC in the new file extension because WTF?). I did not realize this until I attempted to copy some pictures I took this summer onto the new Digital Picture Frame I got Richard for Christmas, and the device did not recognize this incomprehensible new format. 

DAMN YOU APPLE!!!!   DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

I figured out how to turn this helpful feature off on my iPhone camera for future pictures, but what about the thousands of pictures I've already taken? Do I have to download some dubious looking utility from some sketchy Internet site to convert these pictures? 





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I have been watching "Twelve Monkeys," an SF series based on the apocalyptic pandemic movie of the same name. It's a solidly well produced show which does its best to be scientifically plausible (insofar as a show about time travel can be). But it was made 6 or 7 years ago, and what seemed plausible then sounds really dated now. 

We've just been introduced to a cohort of scientists, barricaded inside a well-supplied and prosperous scientific hospital, who have been trying to "cure the virus" for almost 30 years. Specifically, they have devoted every resource at their disposal to trying to create a vaccine. After 20 years they were right on the verge of a working vaccine, but THEN THE VIRUS MUTATED!  *gasp* So they had to start all over!  Worse yet, there are signs that the virus is starting to mutate again! Oh no!  Naturally the more ragtag group of scientists that we have been rooting for so far realizes that this is a fools' errand, because nobody can create a working vaccine that fast. We the viewers are invited to agree with them and view the lead scientist of the Spearpoint Project as most likely inspired more by his status as a cult leader than by any reasonable expectation of developing a vaccine against a virus that can mutate as often as twice in 30 years!  Ridiculous. Our group is going to keep trying to perfect their buggy time travel machine instead. 

IRL in 2022 we are upset because when faced with a virus that has developed multiple significant mutations in 2 years time, the vaccine that we developed (in 12 months) is becoming gradually less effective. And it might take as long as THREE MORE MONTHS to develop a new vaccine that will better target the emerging variants. Unacceptable! 

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Josh showed up at 8:20am with the replacement gas valve, which is actually a little larger and more complicated than I realized, but still doesn't look like something that should cost over $1000.

tldr; boiler seems to be working great now. Crisis averted. Details below are mostly for me. If you happen to have hot water heat in your house it might be of interest to you. 


As before, Josh spent a long time adjusting and checking things after he installed the part. He verified that the gas pressure on the boiler side of the valve was now in the recommended range, then topped off the water in the system and bled the radiators. This was more complicated than it sounds. You add water by opening not one but TWO of the multiple valve handles on the maze of water pipes around the boiler, a little at a time, alternating with running up two flights of stairs to bleed the top radiator.

This gauge is on the left side of the boiler, low enough down to be hard to see. The bottom gauge measures water pressure, which was initially so low that it didn't even register on the gauge. After adjustments the water pressure is now where it should be (15-20). Water temperature (top gauge) is still registering low, but is clearly climbing now that the gas pressure is up. It should reach a max temp around 170F (80C), probably in a few hours. 

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And Richard only had to reset the furnace twice. This morning when I got up the radiators were hot and the dining room temp at 71, so I didn't even bother limping down to the basement to check the status. It's better not to hover over the thing anyway. Catching it stuttering and retryng in mid-cycle is distressing, but it's not helpful to interrupt it at that point. Most of the time it apparently recovers and runs smoothly for 1-2 hours before encountering another crisis. I can relate - that's about how my typical night's sleep goes.

ETA: Apparently Thorin also did a reset at about 5 am, so that's 3 resets in the course of 6 hours - not a great record. But now that it's (barely) above zero, it's tootling along okay, and the house is actually slightly uncomfortably warm. Trying to keep it as warm as possible for the runup to another subzero night. 

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It's -18 degrees Fahrenheit and your furnace/boiler stops running. Yup, that happened on Thursday night. There was an error code (63) blinking on the front of the boiler and we didn't see a reset switch (because we're stupid. We were looking inside the front panel and failed to notice the prominent switch on the side of the boiler). So we just had sit and watch the temperature drop all day while frantically calling around to find a heating company that both services boilers and had somebody available for an emergency call. 

Fortunately, hot water heat takes a long time to cool down, so the radiators were still a little warm by the time Josh showed up at about 5pm. The outdoor temperature had come up slightly above zero and we remembered that we had a nice electric heater in the basement, so the temperature (at least at the dining room thermostat) was still in the mid-50's. Not great, but nowhere near pipe bursting level.  

The good news is that we found a well-recommended company that was able to get someone out to us within hours. Josh turned out to be just what you want in a home emergency: calm, friendly and competent. He also doesn't mind explaining everything he's doing, which is important to me. If you're going to pay hundreds of dollars for a home visit from an expert you might as well learn something.

The first thing we learned was where the reset switch was. The second thing was that there was a placard inside the furnace door listing all the error codes. 63 is "soft lockout," which is not exactly self-explanatory. It turns out to mean (at least in this case) that the gas pressure inside the furnace was borderline low, causing the furnace cycling to fail intermittently. Fortunately, that means that flipping the reset switch has a pretty good chance of restarting the furnace. Which is a good thing, since the small but jaw-droppingly expensive part that needs to be replaced is not available until Monday. Since the people who live in this house with me are troglodytes there is usually someone awake at all hours of the night to flip that switch as necessary. Richard and/or Thorin reset the switch 3 or 4 times last night. 

The cycling failure mostly happens when it's really cold out for some reason, so it's doing fine today and the house is back up to about 70. But the temperature is scheduled to plummet again after midnight, so wish us luck. 

Our service company is Midland Heating & Air Conditioning, btw. So far we've been extremely happy with their service. It's not their fault that the part that failed is insanely expensive or that the warehouse that they had arranged to get the part from this morning was inexplicably closed and not answering their phone. *sigh*  Apparently Josh drove over there this morning and sat in their parking lot for an hour trying to rouse someone on the phone before giving up and rescheduling us for Monday morning. 




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 ... is right twice a day. And today that stopped clock is the odious Florida Governor DeSantis, who has been saying that the hospitals need to start distinguishing between those hospitalized with COVID and those who "just happen to have it."  He is right. COVID hospitalization numbers have been contaminated by this problem since the start of the pandemic. Which might be okay if the percentage of incidental COVID infections among hospitalized patients had been staying steady. The number might be inaccurate but it should remain a good basis of comparison between one wave and the next.

But that is not what is happening. With the Omicron wave there are now so many people with asymptomatic or trivial COVID infections that in hot spots like New York City most of the COVID hospitalizations were not actually hospitalized for COVID. That makes the "number of COVID hospitalizations" a pretty meaningless number. Although it might provide some insight into what percent of the population is already infected with Omicron.


This is actually good news, in a way. It means that Omicron hospitalizations are even lower than the already much diminished numbers being reported. 


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My New Years Resolution this year was to cut back on the amount of waste plastic I was pumping into the environment. This requires some thought and some research. In this installment I tackle the Amazon question. Amazon appears to be trying to reduce excess packaging in the products they ship. Probably not out of the goodness of their corporate heart, but because it simultaneously makes a good impression on their customers and saves them money. I don't really care so much about their motivations - I just want to know if it's true that, as they claim, all of their packaging is recyclable. 

They have a nice page on their website that lists all their product packaging in picture form. When you click on a picture, a popup box tells you what it is and how to recycle it. Okay, that's actually pretty cool. Ignoring the Grocery Delivery section, I clicked through all the Amazon.com packaging items, and damn, I think they're telling the truth (mostly). All of their current product packaging is either paper, cardboard, or plastic film. Paper and cardboard all go into what they call "curbside recycling." The only issue here is that you are supposed to remove the tape from boxes, which isn't that hard. 

But the plastic is what I came here to research, because there are so many kinds of plastic involved - mailing envelopes, plastic bags, and those ubiquitous air pillows. For all of them the popup box is the same: "Some cities offer curbside recycling. Where not available, use designated store drop-off locations where plastic film is accepted. Find your drop off location." And guess what! That link works. I entered my zip code and every grocery store in Minneapolis popped up. Nice. Now if you are asking yourself whether grocery store plastics collections are REALLY recycled or if they just throw them in the trash, I tackled that topic last year.  tldr; yes the bags from Cub get picked up by an outfit called Trex that turns them into "wood-alternative decking products."  

THEN THERE'S AMAZON'S FRUSTRATION-FREE PACKAGING INITIATIVE
This program was hard to understand. It appears to be aimed partly at cutting back on packaging and partly at simply making the packaging that is there easier to open. Both laudable goals, but how does the customer request it? Well, you can't exactly request it because it's only available for a subset of Amazon products. That's because it's a certification program that Amazon established with their third-party sellers where the sellers agree to package their products in a way that is sturdy enough to send through the mail as well as using less packaging and being easy to open. If the product you are ordering has that option available it is selected by default at checkout. And how do you, the customer, know that? Because there is a little disclaimer that says “Item arrives in packaging that reveals what’s inside.” You can opt out of that by changing it to "Ship in Amazon packaging." Which is admittedly a little confusing, but I guess it makes sense. Why would anyone want to opt OUT of Frustration Free Packaging? The most likely reason is because the buyer wants to keep the contents of the package a mystery when it arrives, so they want that nice FFP box to be hidden inside an Amazon box. 

It is possible to filter your product search to look only for FFP items, but most of the time you won't find what you're looking for if you do that because only a minority of products on the site are certified for FFP.  If you start ordering eco-friendly things on Amazon, you're more likely to see this option pop up. I just saw it for the first time when I ordered a shampoo bar (no plastic bottle). 

ETA: Oh, right I forgot to mention the exceptions to the "EVERYTHING is recyclable" claim. In the Amazon.com section the only non-recyclable is the paper mailer with air bubble padding. Plastic mailer with air bubbles is recyclable as plastic; paper mailer with paper padding is recyclable as paper; but the hybrid case breaks the system. And there are some oddball insulated doohickeys in the grocery delivery section that are just flat-out non-recyclable and probably toxic. So before you order a food item that must be heat insulated, check here. Surprisingly, it IS possible recycle the Ice Cream Pouch, but it looks like a lot of trouble. 

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A few years ago I read about somebody who vowed to give up plastic for a year as her way of fighting pollution or global warming or something. I was impressed with the idea at the time, and briefly thought "Maybe I should do that!" until I actually thought about what that would entail. But I feel increasingly guilty every time I regard the ridiculous pile of plastic left behind by one salad kit. Surely I could do better.

So I'm resolving to use LESS plastic this year. I'm not willing to give up all packaged foods, cancel my newspaper subscription, brush my teeth with baking soda, and bake all my own bread. But surely I can find a way to make a salad that doesn't require 4 plastic sleeves inside another larger plastic sleeve inside a plastic bag, right?  

I should probably do less ordering from Amazon (although I'm not even going to think about that until the latest pandemic surge abates). But even if you shop only in brick-and-mortar stores, almost everything on the shelves is sheathed in plastic film, stuffed in a plastic bag, or embedded in a plastic clamshell. 

Any suggestions, folks?

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