I’m as atheist as they get, and in a world chock-full of idiotic religions, Mormonism is among the most patently and obviously idiotic. But I just saw for the first time their (relatively) new temple in Calgary, and damn if it isn’t the most beautiful building in this city, and well beyond.
Monthly Archives: July 2014
What are you… stupid?
I’m not the language police. Well, except when it comes to apostrophes, in which case I’m the language police… judge, jury, and executioner, bitch. But people who confuse similar-sounding words having different meanings (homphones) and mix and mangle common (cliche, really) metaphors and idioms drive me nuts. Here are a few (I’ll be adding to this catalog):
- Magic/Silver Bullet – People are forever jabbering about “magic bullets” and “silver bullets”, generally in the context of a miracle cure or unlikely solution, and using the terms randomly and interchangeably. Lemme sort you out here. The “magic bullet” was the one that punched a hole in JFK before proceeding on to mess up John Connally and finally turn up on a hospital gurney looking like it just popped out of the mold. The assassination conspiracy nutters like to call it “magic” because they think that it should have been smashed to shit after causing all that damage, and because it would have had to zig-zag en route, something that’s clearly impossible and thus – obviously – incontrovertible evidence of Sam Giancana being in bed with the military-industrial complex, sorta like Kennedy was in bed with Sam’s moll. But I digress. Silver bullets are the ones you’re supposed to be able to dispatch werewolves with (maybe vampires and some other imaginary monsters, too, but this is clearly a contentious issue). The Lone Ranger used them as well, but he also had a horse named “Silver”, so it gets confusing – buddy clearly had some sort of fixation. No matter. The point is that each has specific connotations, and if you use one of them it’s going to be heard as a metaphor, so you really should have some clue what that metaphor is. If you don’t, just don’t talk about bullets at all, okay?
- Median/Meridian – The median is the thing in the middle, including between two roads. A meridian is a line around the earth that passes through the poles. If you’re tempted to call that piece of grass you’re driving next to the “meridian”, please step on the gas and head for the first tree you can see.
- The Walk and the Talk – The proper expression is (or is similar to): “Are you just going to talk the talk, or are you going to walk the walk?” It’s simple, and challenges the subject to do something rather than just yacking about it. But over and over I hear “walk the talk” or “talk the walk”, neither of which make a damn bit of sense. Get it right or shut the hell up.
- Pipe/Pike – Here I don’t actually have any problem; it’s an unusual case of two words sounding alike and meaning completely different things, yet working interchangeably rather well. A “pipe” is a tube, and a “pike”, in the “turnpike” sense (not the thing your head belongs atop of), is a road, so things can move or flow down either. You get a pass on this one.
- Gibe/Jibe/Gybe/Jive – I’m an OED man, and here’s how my Concise breaks it down: gibe is to flout, jeer, mock, or torment. So is jibe, but that also means to agree with – as well as to tack a boat (and I sail, so don’t get started with me) – but the latter definition is also spelled gybe. The confusion arises when people try to describe agreement or coincidence, but instead of using jibe, substitute jive. That’s ridiculous, because jive itself has a whole bunch of different meanings (including a dance, 70s ebonics, and bullshit) that have nothing to do with gibe, jibe, or gybe.
- Home/Hone – Okay, this one really drives me nuts. I just heard a Supposedly Smart Person on CBC Radio (my god, she’s an assistant professor at Trent) say “hone in”, when what she meant was “home in”. A hone is a stone used to sharpen a blade. It is not involved in adjusting one’s course in order to reach a desired destination, whether literally or metaphorically. What are you… stupid?
- Rules & Exceptions – Can you think of a more nonsensical notion than that of “the exception that proves the rule”? I can’t. Let’s see if I can even to begin to convey how fundamentally stunned it is. An exception is an exception. It’s not of the rule; it doesn’t prove the rule; it’s the thing that proves the rule is wrong. You follow? Could anything be simpler?
Toilet Paper: A Buyer’s Guide
As a shopper, I’m textbook anal-retentive. (Okay, let’s skip the jokes about why, then, I need toilet paper.) I read the fine print. I carry a calculator (HP 48SX – RPN rules, bitches). I know which foods in the bulk bins actually cost more than their no-name equivalents – or in some cases, name brands. I know when name brands are a better deal than no-names. I do coupons.
But buying toilet paper is infuriating.
You’re an idiot if you think reading the package label (number of rolls, number of plys, number of sheets per roll, and the sheet dimensions) is actually going to help you. They’re nothing but distractions (come to think of it, I’ll have to revisit mattresses and ink jet cartridges – Danny Finkleman (of Finkleman’s 45s) turned me on to those).
The problem is all the other variables the butt wipe manufacturers have available to them. The width of the roll and the maximum outside diameter (OD) are the only constrained dimensions; everything else is up for grabs: The inside diameter (the size of the derder it’s wound on); the outside diameter; the roll density – that is, how tightly the paper is wound onto the derder; the characteristics of the paper itself i.e. some is flat and scratchy, some is fluffy and pillowy. So how to make sense of all these variables? Of course, how comfortable one finds it in use is a subjective measure, and outside of the parameters of this study.
Thinking that the best metric is “real world use”, I endeavoured to gather data on how long (i.e. number of days) a given package would last a family, as the averaging over the life of the package would provide a good representative number. I tried for years to gather that data, but kept getting stymied, usually by my own procrastination. I find it hard enough to develop good habits, but when it was something I had to do infrequently (say, once every month), it was maddeningly difficult. I’d buy a new package and put it in the bathroom. Sometimes I’d write the date on the package… but sometimes not. I’d commit a change date to memory and promise myself I’d get it into the spreadsheet (yes, I started one), but rarely did. And there was another variable – a friend who stays with us periodically, and whose presence or absence needed to be accounted for, as he represents a 25% increase in the user population. In the (ahem) end, I just couldn’t do it.
So one day I realized how to buy it without difficult long-term data acquisition: By weight. More or less, more weight equals more usable paper, so now I take a little pocket digital hanging scale with me (along with the calculator, of course), quickly weigh each brand/size, and calculate the price per unit weight. It’s an answer I’m happy with.
Until I try the actual-usage approach again.
Update: Okay, I know what you’re thinking. “What kind of an idiot expends all this thought and effort over what is surely a marginal difference?” What kind of idiot I am is a discussion we can have some other time, but I assure you that that difference is not marginal.
Here’s what happened when I went shopping yesterday at the Calgary Real Canadian Superstore, which is one of the Loblaw brands. Loblaw is the biggest food chain in Canada, and the family that controls it one of the richest.
I didn’t weigh out every brand on the shelf (I’m more interested in the pricing extremes than every data point in the middle), but the prices ranged from $3.07/kg for a 24-single-roll package of No Name (one of their house brands, $3.96 for 1.29kg) to a stunning $9.44/kg for 24 double rolls of Cottonelle ($18.88 for 2.00kg). That’s a difference of more than three times! (Note that I’m talking about Canadian dollars.)
For the record, I did not buy the very cheapest – those No Name rolls are tiny, would have meant another trip to the store in no time, and gas and time are expensive. I opted for the second-cheapest, which was the President’s Choice Super Soft (another of their house brands) 24-double-roll package at $3.27/kg ($9.28 for 2.83kg). Interestingly, the 40-pack of the same paper is significantly more expensive per unit weight than the 24-roll ($17.97 for 4.47, or $4.02/kg). Superstore pulls that sort of nonsense a lot; larger packages – which people automatically think are a better deal – are often much more expensive.
This just in: Costco eats everyone’s lunch. John Dicker claims (in The United States of Wal-Mart) that Costco sells more toilet paper than any other retailer, and here’s why. Costco Kirkland (30 roll package) is $14.99 for 6.12kg, which works out to $2.45/kg – more than 20% cheaper than the cheapest Superstore No Name. That’s a stunning difference. Now I just have to figure out how much TP alone one would have to use to in order to pay for one’s Costco membership…
February 2024 update: Costco’s big 30-roll package still weighs in at 6.18kg, but the price has gone up to $21.99 (CAD), for a final tally of $3.56/kg – these are inflationary times. I’ll get an update on Superstore’s numbers ASAP.
Halt and Catch Fire: Junk or Garbage?
For some time I’ve been wanting to set up a blog as an outlet for my curmudgeonly instincts, and watching the first episode of this new AMC series has given me the shove.
I’m an engineer who’s been designing with microprocessors since the late 70s, so I’m well-acquainted with the technology of the period that this show is depicting. Despite that, and quite inexplicably, I was not called upon to work as a technical consultant to the show. Who did they call? Paul Carroll (a business journalist) and Carl Ledbetter (a Ph.D. mathematician and veteran technology executive). In other words, no engineers… and it shows. From the first second they got things wrong, and the wrongness continued through the episode. Now, we’re all more than familiar with how realHollywood distorts beyond recognition every script it gets, but there’s been a lot of chatter about the promise of technical accuracy with this one, so someone’s gonna have to call them out. They’ve claimed “ample in-jokes and Easter eggs through the story to fill geeks and technophiles with glee”, “authenticity is huge for us”, “all of this felt accurate”, etc., but if you actually know this stuff you’ll grind your teeth.
Here’s the list:
- The opening frame defines “Halt and Catch Fire” (HCF) as “An early computer command that sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all instructions to compete for superiority at once. Control of the computer could not be regained.” Now, I get that they’re scratching for a metaphor, a way of linking the technical arcana with the insanity of startup culture (racing, competing for superiority, control, yadda yadda), but this gets an “F”. HCF is actually pretty funny, and you can get the correct definition from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire). I knew the story because my first machine was a 6800 and I’d read the Motorola “Built-In Self-Test Trends…” paper back in the day. But a desperate wish for a metaphor does not excuse three major errors in two sentences. First, a “race condition” is a completely different problem in logic design. Second, there are no instructions “compet(ing) for superiority”, because there are no instructions being fetched during an HCF. Finally, control of the computer can be regained by hitting the reset pin. Duh.
- In his address to the class, Slick asks whether they know anything about “Pee-rom configuration and PLC design”. After Rebel Chick pulled his chain over saying VLSI properly, you’d think he’d get “PROM” right, though it’s not a word that’s normally followed by “configuration” (yes, there are configuration PROMs, but not here). And PLCs are Programmable Logic Controllers, which have nothing at all to do with anything else he was talking about.
- In case you were wondering about that issue of Byte, it never existed.
- And it’s really, really lame that Schlub Engineer’s wife told their kid that a memory is the Speak+Spell’s “brain”.
- Slick follows Schlub and his family to the movie theatre. He says “Reverse-engineer an IBM PC with me.” What’s wrong with this picture? Nobody needed to reverse-engineer the PC, because IBM published all that information – the register descriptions, schematics, BIOS source, everything – in their Technical Reference manual, which anyone could buy for about fifty bucks. If you wanted to build a clone, the blueprint was there for the asking, no reverse-engineering necessary. I guess sometimes the truth just don’t make for good drama.
- Now, to the garage. As I said above, there’s no reverse-engineering required, but if we ignore that (file under: dramatic license), let’s look at their exciting, high-tension weekend. First, no engineer who built a computer in that era would be using some shitty old untriggered Heathkit oscilloscope with a 3″ green CRT, but that’s what gets dragged off the garage shelf. Jesus, guys, how about a little dignity… and a Tek 465? (They were cheap and plentiful even then.)
- I don’t know what the hell he’s using for a probe – it looks like a sharpened screwdriver a subway thug would carry – but it doesn’t go with a scope and most certainly wouldn’t be generating the fireworks show we get when he accidentally shorts a couple of pins on the ROMs. Those parts (judging from the pin count, mask versions of 2732 EPROMs, or maybe of those odd Motorola 68764s) just don’t have any adjacent +5 and GND pins on the 1-12 side. And in real life, when a short generates that much smoke, chances are you’ve blown your target system.
- These are all .100″ DIPs, dude. Spare us the magnifying glass.
- Now, about that scope display. Schlub is looking at logic levels, so why is a sine wave bouncing up and down on the scope? Granted, his shitty Heathkit doesn’t have much vertical bandwidth, but we should be seeing some approximation of straight lines and square waves. Instead, they speak knowingly of “plus five” and “zero”, rather than “toasted power supply, man”, which is what that waveform on the scope would really mean.
- And the ROMs are socketed, ferchrissakes, so what’s with all the desoldering… before he pulls the chip out of the socket?
- Seems, folks, that we’ve now gotten to the scene with that proto board (solderless breadboard) as long as your arm. This bit of blinkenlichts stupidity is supposed to represent how they’re sucking the data out of the BIOS ROM? Spare me. I’m not even going to explain how wrongheaded that is. Because, in addition to a decent scope, any engineer worth his salt working with this stuff in those days would have a PROM burner (I had a Data I/O 29A with a Unipak 2 right around then, but it wouldn’t have to be that posh. Surely Porsche-driving Slick, given how much he made selling product for IBM, can afford one). Plug the chip in, poke a couple of buttons, and zip-zop: You’ve got the 4K or 8K bytes of data from that part that you can then shoot up the RS-232 cable to your computer for disassembly. Worst case, you might have to hack up a little socket adapter to make it work (if the mask parts used chip select pins whose polarities differed from the EPROM equivalents, but looking at my original XT schematics, I don’t think so). As if the discrete LEDs on the proto board weren’t bad enough, we’re treated to a little extra phony-baloney gravitas as Schlub announces that they’re going to have to transcribe the data from “sixty five thousand five hundred and thirty six” addresses. Puh-leeze. And Slick’s transcription of the data is bullshit – I saw at least one “H”, and lots of two-byte values (they should have just been single bytes anyway) that had three nybbles instead of four.
- And what’s with that lantern battery, huh? You couldn’t even use one of those with a 7805 of the day – not enough voltage differential.
- “Let’s see if we got it right”. Firecracker on the monitor. Lights out. Blow me.
- Then, apparently skipping over the manual entry of 64K bytes of data from Slick’s notepad into the computer, and the disassembly (and commenting!) of the BIOS, Schlub drops a 500-page ream of paper on the desk and announces the arrival of “The IBM PC ROM BIOS… assembly language code”. In a word: Bollocks. Disassembling and commenting object code for a processor as nasty as the 8088 is not something that happens while Slick is taking a nap. In reality, you’re going to spend days, if not weeks or months, prodding the disassembler (which we didn’t see them using) into getting all the code straight (they’re notorious for getting confused by data blocks) and, based on I/O and memory maps that you have to reverse-engineer yourself (because apparently you’re too stupid to buy the manual from IBM) figuring out what’s going on in there, and that’s assuming there weren’t any data entry errors (very unlikely indeed). So here’s where I do the big reveal: In the IBM XT (close enough to the original PC they’re supposed to be taking apart, I think) Technical Reference manual I just got off the shelf, the BIOS source listing is less than 82 pages (at 77 lines per page). Not even 6000 lines in total, and less than a fifth of the ream of bond that landed on the desk with such a dramatic thump.
Now, I don’t want to give all y’all the impression that I’m a totally humourless killjoy. AMC rocked the joint with Breaking Bad, which I loved. But I’m not a chemist. If I were, would I have found as much wrongness there as I’m seeing here? I dunno, but they had an actual chemist as a technical consultant, not a journalist and a math wonk. I’m looking forward to watching a few more episodes (alright, probably the rest of the season) of Halt and Catch Fire, and hoping that they don’t saturate the show with the kind of distracting nonsense I’ve just enumerated. If they can avoid that trap and concentrate on writing a story, maybe it’ll be a show worth watching.
Nitpicking Bastard 