Category: Uncategorized

It is getting close to time to replace my 1998 Honda Civic. One of the cars on my short list is the Toyota Prius. There has been a lot of talk about plug-in hybrids which, unlike the current Prius, are not powered by gasoline alone, but are plugged into an electric socket to recharge the batteries and then run on electric power alone for as much as possible.

The current Prius keeps the charge of the batteries somewhere in the middle and never seems to charge them completely nor let them drain down completely. I think that is the most efficient way to keep a charge on the batteries and also avoids complete charging cycles which shorten battery life.

So the problem with a plug-in is that you will need to top off the batteries and probably run them down much further in order to run the car solely on electrical power. This will shorten battery life. Also there is some inefficiency in using coal to produce electricity and then use the electricity to charge a battery and then use the battery to run the car. You lose a little power with each step. Additionally, by using electricity you are just transferring the pollution from the tailpipe to a powerplant somewhere (which would at least help Atlanta’s air).

So it occurred to me that instead of a plug-in hybrid, it would be better to put solar cells on top of the car and charge the battery that way. One reason this occurred to me is because my car is parked in the sun all the time, whether that is at home or in the MARTA parking lot.

Continue reading “Solar Prius”

When Jeb and I were over at Mom and Dad’s this weekend working on their computers, I brought up GNU licenses and Jeb pointed out to Dad that GNU is an acronym that refers to itself (GNU’s Not Unix), so really you can substitute any letter you want for the G and it would come out SNU, ONU, or whatever. I knew there was another of these but couldn’t think of it this weekend. I did some research and the word I was thinking of is LAME:

“LAME is an open source application used to encode audio into the MP3 file format. The name LAME is a recursive acronym for LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder, reflecting LAME’s early history when it was not actually an encoder, but merely a set of patches against the freely available ISO demonstration source code.” –Wikipedia

Nowadays, it seems, LAME *is* an MP3 encoder, but they haven’t changed the name. That’s irony, right? PHP was another example and there are a number of others. Apparently the whole thing started at MIT in the 70’s. The article on Wikipedia for recursive acronym has all of the examples including fictional ones. In Dilbert there was the TTP project which stood for “The TTP Project”.

That got me thinking about whether there was a name for redundant letters like in “ATM machine” where the M already stands for “machine”. Well, I found out that this phenomenon is called RAS Syndrome (where RAS is Redundant Acronym Syndrome.) I also found a humorless person who has a list of examples and calls his site the Redundant Acronym Phrase Project or RAP Project when, clearly, it should be RAPP Project. PIN number and DC current are the most common examples of other RAS words.

I finally canceled my home phone service a few weeks ago. Today I was walking the dogs and got a call from a local number I didn’t recognize. It was the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Last Spring I had taken Susan to see Carmina Burana, and ASO has been sending me mail, e-mails, and calling every now and then ever since. Not sure why I gave them my cell phone number, but I quickly informed them that they were calling my cell phone and I didn’t want them to use that number. The guy asked if there was another number where they could reach me. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but realized I could only answer No. So he said “So you just don’t want us to call you?” I said “I guess not.”

For birthdays and other special occasions at work sometimes we will go to a restaurant near Little Five Points called Front Page News. They serve regular American fare with a little emphasis on New Orleans food. One item they have had for years is a grouper sandwich. Sometime last year it started to come out that most restaurants offering grouper on their menu weren’t really giving you grouper. This is because we have eaten almost all of the grouper in the ocean and it is very hard to get anymore. Groupers mature very slowly and a typical fish might be 40 years old. Fishing for grouper is completely unsustainable.

Continue reading “Asian Grouper”

This week has been a winter wonderland with two big snowfalls. Wednesday was fun at work as we anticipated the snow and watched its approach on radar. Once it started coming down there were giant fluffy flakes of snow. And in almost no time it started sticking to the grass and parked cars. A couple of people were talking about how silly it is when the news talks about bridges and overpasses icing over. Overpasses are bridges. The only time this distinction seems to be made is when referencing ice. And there just isn’t a distinction.

Continue reading “Snow”