I Did the Math Too Late

 

Happy Thanksgiving, USA!

I did the math and the math won.

Or, let me explain. I bought my wife a Toyota Prius Prime PHEV. I thought this would be great for her because she mostly just drives around town. Then if she wants to go on a longer trip, say to go see her sister, she has a gas engine to get her there. This is why I rejected an EV for her. She might want to take my car on the longer trip! Eeek! Plus the 2024 Prius actually looks like a nice car. We got one in red.

I live in a unique area where, due to state laws, gasoline is expensive compared to most other states (California and Hawaii are the only states where it's higher). But the area I live in has some of the cheapest electricity in the country due to being 100% hydropower. 

So, after I bought the car, I did the math. Here's what I learned:

She gets about 30 miles off of a full battery. I calculated that it takes $0.64 to charge the battery. So that's $0.021 per mile. Pretty dang cheap.

Assuming gas is $4 a gallon (which is about what regular runs in Washington State), and a Prius gets 52.3 miles per gallon (that's what a Google search came up with), that's $0.076 per mile. That's a savings of $0.0551 per mile. Yay!

But, the Prius Prime cost about $5,000 more than a Prius. So I divided $0.0551 into $5,000 and I get 90,744 miles (ignoring significant figures). So my wife has to drive about 91,000 miles on battery to pay back the extra expense of the PHEV. But it's a Toyota. She might do that. It'll just take years, though.

Now if gas goes up to $5 a gallon, its only 67,000 miles.

But if electricity goes up (and it will January 1st), the miles goes up.

Maybe I should have just bought her a Prius.

Subtitles

I have some friends who are about twenty years younger than I. And I've noticed that they like to turn on the subtitles on movies and television shows that are in English. 

And I'm not sure why.

My problem is, when the subtitles/closed captioning are on, I pay more attention to them than to the action on the screen.

I do know it's sometimes hard to understand the dialogue and turning on subtitles helps with that (I did it on Deadpool & Wolverine briefly when I missed a joke). But I still find it distracting.

And I wonder why younger folks might turn on subtitles. Maybe it's because they were available through DVDs and closed captioning when they were younger.

When I was younger, you just watched the program and hoped you heard everything correctly. You couldn't stop the television show or movie and hear it again. You just had to hope you heard it right the first time. We only had broadcast television or we could go to the movies. And the DVR hadn't been invented yet. Yes, I'm old!

I still don't like subtitles on English programming. How do you feel about it? Do you turn the subtitles on? Let me know in the comments below.

Hot Wheels and Skyhawks

When I was a kid, like most children, I adored cartoons. My favorites were the Loony Toons, but I also remember others. 

For example, I remember the Hot Wheels and Skyhawks programs. They were shown back to back on ABC 1969 - 1971.

(I'm slightly surprised I got to see them since we only had two channels and they didn't show ABC shows unless they were popular; that's why I missed the first season of The Six Million Dollar Man.)

Hot Wheels was, obviously, named for the toy cars. I don't know if there were "Skyhawk" toys. Maybe.

But here were two things I loved: cars and airplanes. Now, some 53 years later, I only have vague images from the two shows. I do remember catching Skyhawks re-using footage (I was around 10 at the time). Which they probably did more than I caught.

I remembered that they were 15 minutes each so they totaled 30 minutes. But according to the interwebs, they were 30 minutes each.

I guess they were canceled because the FCC thought they were just half-hour long ads for toys. 

Most people I've asked don't remember these cartoons. For a while I worried that I made them up (or at least made up Skyhawks).

Hot Wheels has it's own Wikipedia page. Skyhawks has an IMDB page. Which is the only tangible evidence I have that these two shows existed.

Did you have a cartoon you liked but almost no one remembers? Do you remember Hot Wheels and Skyhawks? Let me know in the comments below.

I Like Fahrenheit

When I was studying science/engineering at the University of Washington (Go Dawgs!), we always used the celsius scale for measuring temperatures. It made the calculations easier. For example, it takes one calorie to heat one gram of water one degree celsius. Any calculation that involved temperature is easier in celsius. Well, to be honest, all calculations were easier in metric.

But in my regular life, I like Fahrenheit. I think it's more suited to human existence (except for trying to spell it).

For example, 0 celsius is the freezing point of water. Not real cold. But 0 Fahrenheit is freaking cold! Saying it's going to be -18 degrees C doesn't convey the frigidness of 0 degrees F.

Or do weather forecasters in countries that use celsius breathlessly exclaim that it's going to be over 38 degrees? No, but in American, they can say temperatures will be in the triple digits.

Plus Fahrenheit has more precision than celsius. Every degree celsius has 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's almost twice as precise.

How do you feel about Fahrenheit versus celsius? Let me know in the comments below.

How to Fix One Election Day Problem

Happy Halloween!

Next Tuesday is a presidential Election Day. And there's always problems. One is the media announcing the winner of eastern states too early, perhaps suppressing the vote in western states. In 1980, it was all over by about 6pm on the West Coast. I remember I was in store and on a TV they were displaying for sale, Jimmy Carter was conceding already. I was shocked. My sister said where she lived in Idaho, people heard this and got out of line to vote. (I voted absentee because I was in college at the time.) Long-serving Democrat Frank Church, senator for Idaho, lost that year and that might have been part of the reason why.

In 2000, lots of news outlets called Florida for Gore and made it look as if he were going to win the election. They did this even before the polls were closed in the part of Florida that is in the Central Time Zone (the panhandle). This probably suppressed the Republican vote on the West Coast and the part of Florida that's in the Central Time Zone.

So, do we forbid the media from announcing who won states when? That probably wouldn't stand up to constitutional scrutiny. 

But I have an idea!

Have election day run for 24 hours from midnight Eastern Time to midnight Eastern Time. That's 9pm to 9pm Pacific Time. Then all the polls close at the same time. No one concedes early!

This would also give people 24 hours to vote, making access easier. Not many people might vote at 2am, but people just getting off a swing shift might. And lines might be shorter because people have more options of when to vote.

Then you wake up the next morning and, one would hope, know who won the election.

What do you think of my idea? Do you think it would help voting? Let me know in the comments below.

Predictions

I used to make predictions. Being a science fiction writer, that's kind of what you do. For example: I predicted that the phone, the television, and the computer would all morph into one device. The TV/phone/computer in the 2015 segment of Back to the Future Part II was exactly what I predicted. What I never realized was that it would fit in my pocket! But that's basically what a smartphone is. Now I still used my MacBook as a computer only (although it tries to be more, I just don't let it). But I use my iPhone a lot too. Not so much as a TV (I have one for that), but still it can be a TV.

Another prediction I made was that no one would own media such as records, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, etc. (this was a long time ago). Everything would be downloaded (I didn't say "stream") from the then-nascent internet for a nominal fee. I thought it would be like fifty cents, not the $5.99 that Amazon Prime video charges. 

I'm kind of behind on that. I still own media (I recently bought a 4K Blu-Ray of Smokey and the Bandit). I listen to music off my iPhone rather than stream it using Spotify or whatever. I like to be able to control what I listen to and not have a streaming service play The Police, for example. Or the Grateful Dead.

And, finally, I thought we'd all be on 24-hour military time by now. But, of course, the U.S. is holding back on that. In Europe, they used a 24-hour clock all the time. But the U.S. doesn't. Except in the military and some industries. 

Have you made any predictions that happened. Or didn't happen. Let me know in the comments below.

Will Technological Advances Ever Hit an Asymptote?

I was watching Aliens the other day and I had a thought: will technical advances ever hit an asymptote? 

Here's my thinking. Ripley was drifting in hypersleep (or whatever they call it) for 57 years. Did technology advance during those years? She started in a pretty high-tech society. Would there be a noticeable change after 57 years? Does technology eventually hit an asymptote and only advance at a snail's pace?

Fifty-seven years ago for us was 1967. There was no internet. Not even ARPANET (the precursor to the internet) existed yet. A big television was 27 inches and used a cathode ray tube. Now you can buy televisions that are over 80 inches and are flat and use LEDs. The computer you have in your pocket (smart phone) would probably take up a whole room in 1967. The thought of a "personal computer" was laughable. The thought you would have it in your pocket was inconceivable. 

And the science we have learned since 1967 is amazing. I couldn't hope to list it all here.

What do you think? Could science and technology ever come to a crawl because there isn't anything else to discover or invent? Let me know in the comments below.