Bills, Bills, Bills: Responsibility

     Gotta pay 'em.  I'd write more but I'm trying to be a responsible adult.

The FM-Band Station That Wasn't

     Here's a tale of geekery that I stumbled across yesterday morning.  It belongs over at Retrotechnologist but I'll debut it here.  Though it's about radio and TV broadcasting here in Indiana, the story begins in Turkey.

     The principal of the tale was Armenian.  He was born in 1900.  It was a bad time to be an Armenian in Turkey, and getting worse; his father saw this and in 1907, took the family to the United States.

     Sarkes Tarzian grew up with the infant science of radio and was a bright student; out of college, he worked for Atwater-Kent and, eventually, RCA.  He was a good engineer and a master of cost-effective designs.  When WW II ended, the 45-year-old engineer found himself in Bloomington, Indiana, at an RCA plant already back to building consumer radios, much like the Atwater-Kent factory where he'd started out.

     Rather than go back to the grind, he hung out his own shingle, a consulting engineer.  FM broadcasting was just getting started back up, settling into the new band RCA had managed to get it nudged into, but receivers were expensive.  The new mode didn't use spectrum as efficiently as AM, either -- and that left an opening for a sharp engineer: "All-American Five" AC-DC radios for the AM band were cheap to build -- and, if you knew what you were doing, cheap to convert to the FM band.  Detecting FM required plenty of additional, expensive parts -- but if a station transmitted an AM signal, the AA5 would do the job.  In early 1946, Tarzian put amplitude-modulated W9XHZ on the air on 87.75 MHz, built scores of up-converters into ice-cream tins so existing radios could pick up the station, and modified a few dozen "generic" AA5s built at the not-too-distant Meissner plant (Mt. Carmel, IL) as fix-tuned receivers.  It worked.

     However, the experiment had already been tried.  In the late 1930s through early 40s, "Apex" stations transmitting AM on frequencies from 24 MHz up through 50MHz had been on the air.  They worked, too -- but Major Armstrong's FM system worked better.  TV was starting to grow and by May, 1949, it had come to nearby Indianapolis: WFBM-TV was the first, on channel 6.  The sound carrier -- FM! -- for channel 6 is, oops, 87.75 MHz.  The FCC required Tarzian's station to shut down any time channel 6 was on the air and when the license (for by-then KS2XAP) ran out, that was the end.

     If you can't beat them, join them: Sarkes Tarzian and his crew got their own TV license (and a regular AM-band station, too, WTTS)  and by November of 1949, WTTV was on the air on Channel 10, with a transmitter and antenna built at the Sarkes Tarzian factory.  Five years later, they moved to channel 4, put up a tall tower midway between Bloomington and Indianapolis, and went head-to-head against channel 6.  Little love was lost between the two; noting that transmitter problems had put WFBM-TV off the air for an extended period of time in 1949, WTTV promoted themselves as "Indiana's oldest continuously-operating TV station" for years afterward. 

     Sarkes Tarzian got into the consumer side of television early on; realizing the tuners were the trickiest part of building a TV set, he designed his own sturdy, inexpensive version and built them in bulk for many manufacturers.  TV station WTTV was built with TV-tuner money!

     ...That's the story of how central Indiana had, for a few years, an FM-band station that wasn't FM.

Bring On The Dystopia!

     In my line of work, the Engineering department ends up subscribed to a wide array of more-or-less-related magazines.  Our own trade magazines are pretty much gone, victims of a shinking, backwater industry, so we glean what we can from similar fields.

     One of the magazines that shows up is GCN, Government Computer News, aimed at data-herders and IT folks in the public sector.  It's a nice, glossy mag with lots of vaguely-worded ads.  The most recent issue had an article noted on the cover: 'Minority Report' for real.

     I was taken aback.  The film and original short story are tales of free will vs. determinism, and paint the "prediction" of crimes as a fraught, abusable and perhaps even poisonous gift, dangerous to use and invasive of freedom.  In  actual application, the biases and implicit assumptions of programmers can (and will) skew results.  The intersection of Big Data and "precrime" is not a good neighborhood for free people, and yet that's right where the article heads, lauding "New analytical platforms...to leverage this digital ocean...."

     The piece is blithely unconcerned with potential problems or Constitutional issues, ending with a quote from a former NSA analyst now working in the private sector: "Humans have short lives and simple habits.  The basics of 'The Minority Report' are not only going to happen, they will happen sooner than we think."

     Yeah. "...short lives and simple habits..."  Please face the telescreen, Comrade! Bloody hell, they really do think Orwell was writing a guide to governance, and that Philip K. Dick's amphetamine-fueled paranoid fantasies are police manuals.

Tuesday

     Another day when I don't have much.  Plenty to rant about, I suppose, things like the Supremes yet again flinching away from a Second Amendment case, while they continue to chip away at other fundamental rights, but what good would it do?  Either you know it already or there's no reaching you.

     Meanwhile, the world turns as ever, the press indulges in spin and hyperventilating and continues to increase the distance between who they think they are (noble defenders of Freedom and Good!) and how they are perceived (a pack of partisan shills out of touch with reality).  The truth is something very different: they're just there to help sell you cars and soap flakes.  Stop watching and the people behind them will come up with some other shiny thing to catch your eye.  --Of course, you've already slowed your consumption of mass media like newspapers and television, and are enjoying the targeted echo-chambers of online interaction.  It's fun, but if we don't hang together, they will indeed hang us out to dry separately.
 
     Big Data thinks it knows you, predicts you, runs you.  Does it?  Will it?  Or will it come crashing down under its own weight?

     Damned if I know.

Wldflowers!

Here's a look at the wildflower garden I planted in the raised bed.

     Not that they're all wild:

     I don't know what these are, but I like them.

     This is an interesting experiment.  I'm not much of a gardener, so this nice an outcome is really pleasing.

Placeholder

    This is just a placeholder.  I worked a late shift last night, filling in for a vactioning peer (more or less peer; the weekends include a few operational tasks I am not especially good at).  So I'm awake late with much yet to do. 

     Possibly more later!

Pretty Amazing

     To live in a time and place in which a "light breakfast" can consist of marbled rye/pumpernickel toast with truffle butter is, really, stunning.  Ancient Rome at the height of its power couldn't deliver this, not even to the Emperor: grit-free bread, fresh butter -- with truffles?  Eat your heart out, Caesar.  And the poor sods didn't even know they were missing out on coffee.

     There's a reason things didn't really start rolling until coffee, tea and chocolate started to be consumed in quantity across the world.  You could make a case for tobacco as well -- nicotine is a positively effective drug and if it wasn't, nobody would have tolerated inhaling the smoke -- but the delivery mechanism has serious downsides.

     (For that matter, it'd make me even happier if a local grocer would start stocking flageolets verts, too.  The old Atlas Supermarket had 'em, and plenty of other canned veggies we don't usually see in these parts.  Those French green kidney beans were particularly tasty.  But goodness, how obscure is that?) 

     Whatever.  Those Moon-shotting tea- and coffee-drinking smokers, with their chocolate bars and big dreams, slide rules and limited-stock companies, built a pretty amazing world.  I'd be a fool not to enjoy it.

Addictive!

     The Google Doodle of the last two days fascinates me.  It's based on the work of Oskar Fischinger.

How Not To Get Shot By The Police

     I can't promise you any sure answers on that.  The legal aftermath of the Philando Castile shooting -- police officer acquitted -- is all over the blogosphere and social media, and everyone is looking at it in the tinted mirror of their own politics and holding forth.

     I'm not going to hold forth about the situation.  I wasn't there.  "Things went terribly wrong," is about the best I have.  That's no comfort at all for the man's survivors and does nothing to fix matters for them.  Nor does it provide a guideline for police retraining.  Two nervous people interacted and one of them was killed as a result.  It wasn't the policeman.

     Do what you can to manage your encounters with the police.  The officer is well-armed, has backup and works under qualified immunity; courts will tend to defer to his or her opinion.  You?  You're just some gal or some guy.  Oh, probably a citizen, and you like to think of yourself as a good citizen.  When Officer Friendly stopped you, awarding a Good Citizenship medal was probably not the reason.  So you're already behind the eight-ball, more so if you're visibly off the average, and who isn't? Play it cool.

•      Minimize the reasons you might be stopped.  All vehicle lights working, no big obvious cracks in the windshield, obey speed limits, etc.  (I do badly at this -- I have a sidelight that needs fixed and, typical city-dweller, I'm an habitual flow-of-traffic speeder.)
•      A police stop is probably not the time to engage in political protest.  Unless you were setting out to make a point, maybe get some bad policy or law challenged in court, concentrate on what you need to do to get through the experience unscathed.  Is this humiliating?  Is it something no decent citizen of a democracy ought to have to endure?  Probably -- but there you are.  Do you want to sleep in your own bed that night?  The alternatives are a thin mattress at the jail or a cold slab at the morgue.  They suck.
•      If you are stopped, engine off (if driving) and no sudden moves.  Do only what the officer tells you, offer only the information requested and remember the stakes: your life and freedom.

     Greg Ellifritz offers advice for law enforcement officers.  Read it, and consider the implications for you.

     Stay alive, stay out of jail, and write your Congressthing.  Write your state-level representatives.  Call 'em up.  Let your local government know when they or theirs are getting over the line.  And help prevent the next police encounter gone wrong.

Opioid Problem

     This country has one, and I'm not talking about a radio host getting nicked for popping pills.  Nope; from hardscrabble ex-factory towns and rural hamlets where the grain elevator is the tallest thing on the horizon for miles to the mean streets of the big city, people who can't get pills to pop are shooting up heroin (bad) or various versions of fentanyl (way worse).  A significant proportion of them are overdosing, too: it seems that while old-fashioned, street-grade heroin tended to a roughly consistent strength and was generally sufficiently diluted that rule-of-thumb dosage measurement was survivable, fentanyl's another thing.  From Wikipedia: "its extreme potency requires careful measurements of highly diluted fentanyl in solution."

     This is a high-falutin' way of saying that while a little dab'll do ya, an only slightly larger dab will do you in.  Working yesterday near a set of scanners covering police and fire in the Indianapolis city-county* only, I heard two "overdose" calls in the first twenty minutes -- with no "suspected" or "probable" tacked on, either -- and several more over the next hour.† 

     Opioids have a seductive allure (remember that radio host?).  If you're taking them for pain (and I have, quite long-term at times), they work great, but that warm & fuzzy feeling, a glow similar to a couple of mixed drinks in quick succession, is dangerous without the undercurrent of pain.  Oxycontin pipeline shut off?  Stronger drugs let the user clock out of life for awhile -- and the rest of the time, gives them something other than the grinding, hollow emptiness of a country with a shrinking middle class.  Not a good thing -- see William Burrough's The Junky's Christmas for a horrible-yet-sanitized version -- but a thing.

     I don't think we're going to fix this one treating it as a crime or merely addressing the overdoses by putting a supply of single-dose Naloxone injectors in the pockets of every police officer, fireman and paramedic in the country: by the time a user is standing on the threshold of death, it's been too late for a long while.  In conservative Indiana, a lack of needle exchanges has also led to clusters of HIV and hepatitis infections among users.  The state has -- finally -- been allowing counties to set up needle exchanges‡ for about a year now; it's not easy, and in in least one county, has been stymied by a severe "NIMBY" reaction.  So, Mr. and Mrs. America, is a dead junkie on the back porch a better solution?  Maybe it is; maybe the kindest thing to do is to let the addicts die off -- but there will be more, and their dying weighs on the tax rolls. 

     A comparative study of results in the United States and some country that treats use and addiction as public health issues might be informative; as it is, I have seen no more than anecdote.  Even that much has me wondering if something other than the present approach might offer improved results compared to making cops and EMTs haul people back from the edge of death time and again, until, inevitably, the day that help doesn't arrive in time.
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* Back when Marion County was a thin and ugly doughnut and getting smaller all the time, city and county governments merged.  Except it was more like a hostile takeover.  This essentially replaced two tottering monstrosities drowning under their own paperwork with one; and that's progress.  Dick Lugar orchestrated the change and gave it the totally non-Soviet name, "UniGov."

 † Plus the usual things you hear over a police scanner -- a man who locked himself in a business's washroom for two hours, responding only "I'm in here!" when they got worried and knocked; an apparent hostage standoff at a motel complete with multiple officers and directions how to stay "out of the line of fire" that eventually ended without a shot being fired.  It also appears we have an officer who sounds exactly like the late Larry "Bud" Melman.  I'd like to think that somewhere in the city, a short, dumpy, white-haired policeman in thick-lensed hornrimmed glasses is plodding though the challenges of modern policing, gamely triumphing over the entire panoply of modern dangers with a faint smile.

 ‡ While this clearly runs counter to the "whatever you subsidize, you get more of" rule, with Narcan injectors, society is already subsidizing addiction and the choice becomes one of disease-ridden addicts vs. addicts without additional health challenges.  The latter group at least has long-term prospects.

Another Day, Another $36.95

     They seem to be promising rain, which will gratify the flowers.  Unfortunately, I have a very large (folded-flat) cardboard box and a big paper leaf-bag full of lawn clippings to get properly stowed before the skies open up, so that just got added to my morning task stack.

     Ah, but the flowers...!  I need to add photos, but the old square raised bed in the front yard that I cleaned up and sowed with "mixed wildflower" seeds, former location of a former tree,  is really coming into its own.  A row of maroon-and-yellow marigolds led off, followed by little white flowers and for awhile, I thought that was all there was.  Recently, some fuzzy purple blooms have popped up along with a couple of lovely, delicate pink blossoms that look like (but are not) what we called "wild rose" when I was growing up.  There are plenty of buds that haven't opened to look forward to, as well.

     There's also a rosemary plant in that bed.  We managed to keep one going for several years there (and added twigs from the dead bush to the coals in the grill for years after) and perhaps this one will last as long.  So far, the weed barrier cloth I put down is working; there are one or two plants in the bed that I'm giving the hairy eyeball and which will get the old heave-ho if they turn out to be deadbeats, but considering that two years ago, before I tarped it for an entire year, that flowerbed was solid weeds, I'm not unhappy.  Elsewhere, the daylilies are doing all right -- they're pretty much on their own, though the ones along the house may get a little help this year -- and the hostas continue to prosper.  Like the orange lilies, they came with the house; unlike them, they didn't "just happen."  The realtor had transplanted extras from her own yard, and expressed uncertainty how they'd do over the long term.  Coming up on ten years and still going -- they were even completely dug up and lived in big pots for a few months when I had the house painted.  That move paid dividends: there were enough plants to divide up and add another group of hostas to the bed on the other side of the front steps.  There's mint growing there, too; I'd like to grow a little more but I'm happy to have it.

     I'll be happier if I get the paper products taken care of before the rains arrive, though.  Time to start back at it!

Singing To My Cat

Tam Keel photo

Huck, Huck, the giant cat
Reached for my food as I sat.
Thinks to claim it with a touch
Because his hunger is so much.

Sixteen pounds in striped fur,
Small for a tiger and he purrs--
He wants my breakfast, lunch and dinner, too.
Huck, eggs and a banger aren't good for you!