Blessed by the Potato

After moving in, we noticed that the relatively new (<4 years old “Crosley”) washing machine was not doing a very good job of getting the water out of our clothes in the spin cycle. It got progressively worse so that after just a few weeks, there were still large puddles of water in the bottom of the tub. A closer investigation revealed that the motor had gotten so weak that it wasn’t actually moving the tub at all for the spin cycle: it was just making noise and pretending to work. We called our landlord, who called the repair people. They took a look, and found that the tub seal had broken and water had been seeping into the motor and the rest of the undercarriage: the motor bearing had rusted out and the resistance was just too much for it to overcome and drive the spin cycle. The estimated repair cost was over $400, and this is a washer that’s already had the tub seal repaired once before (the last tenant told us to keep an eye on it). At first, my landlord authorized the repairs, but I talked to her for a bit and suggested that just getting a new washer might be a better plan, and not too much more expensive. She agreed, and told me to basically pick one out and send her the bill. I went for a reasonable, middle-of-the-road Kenmore top-loader that’s also reasonably energy efficient (important since I pay the water and hydro!), it also happened to be on sale for $500 so it was pretty close to the repair cost for the old Crosley (a brand I’ve never heard of, but is supposedly manufactured by Maytag).

Sears delivered it within a few days, and the delivery went very quickly: the guys came in, took away the old washer, hauled the new one down the stairs, connected it and were gone in less than 10 minutes. However, our new washer was possessed. Not surprising, since the bill came to $666 after tax and delivery. During the spin cycle of the first load, it started violently shaking, attempting to walk its way across the room and possibly destroy itself in the process. The instructions said it was important to level it properly or “some vibrations” may be present. So, Wayfare and I spent nearly an hour carefully levelling the thing with no sucess (and many cuts on my hands in the process — they sure don’t sand/grind the sharp edges on the sheet metal around the bottom!).

Finally I gave up and said that there’s no way the washer can be that sensitive to being perfectly level, and called Sears to sort the mess out. They went through the troubleshooting guide with me: was the load uneven? (No, it was barely a load at all, just a few shirts and one pair of pants) Were all the shipping restraints removed? (I said yes, I specifically saw the guy pull the yellow zip tie out of the back that he said held the guts together). Was it level (oh, hell yes). Finally she said there might be something wrong with the washer and set up an appointment to send someone out to look at it next week. After I hung up I looked in the garbage to just double check that the guy got the ziptie out properly. The manual clearly showed a picture of a long tie with two cotter pins attached to it. In the trash was a short yellow tie, and no cotter pins. Cursing, I moved the washer out from the wall and looked in the hole in the back: sure enough, a ripped-off yellow zip tie was stuck in there. With a handy pair of pliers and many stabs at it, I finally managed to pull it out (with, what would you know, two cotter pins attached to it). It was at least twice as long as the piece in the garbage, and the washer worked fine after that. I was pretty pissed that the guys were in such a hurry to get in and get out that they didn’t check that the cotter pins actually came out with the zip tie when they yanked on it, or even that the zip tie was even approximately the right length (it looks like he tore off the third of it that was sticking out the back — there should have been a lot more zip tie, and I think he should have known that). Anyhow, that itself didn’t cause any permanent damage to the washer, though it is a bit of a piss-off since my landlord paid $85 for them to deliver and set up the washing machine. Unfortunately, I caused a bit of damage to the brand new washer when I tried to walk it back towards the wall: I pulled on the top instrument panel to get leverage, and rather badly bent the bit of sheet metal around the back of it. :(

Anyhow, I found out this morning that my grandmother passed away after having a bad stroke this weekend (she was in the hospital all week), so I’m leaving for PEI for the funeral. I’m holding up ok: everyone seemed to think this stroke was going to be the last, so we’ve had a bit of warning to prepare mentally.

Well, I just got back from the dentist after having a crown put on the tooth I broke on a TicTac about a month ago. My dentist was fairly concerned because the crown is so thin in the centre that the porcelain didn’t coat the metal underneath, so you can see the shiny spot. Of course, a shiny spot in the centre is nothing new for me; I’ve had metal fillings before (and still do in the top), and of course, the top-centre of my head is pretty shiny, too. It’s funny though, since I had a pit that was well on its way to becoming a cavity in that tooth, and they reproduced the pit in the porcelain crown. Now I guess I’m stuck with it. Oh, and my dental insurance doesn’t cover crowns. It raises the question of course of what it does cover: AFAIK, insurance is supposed to be there to cover unexpected, expensive events. It doesn’t get much more unexpected or expensive than breaking a tooth and needing a crown. By contrast, paying for half of one-third of my cleaning/checkups (I go every 4 months now since my teeth are so bad, but they only cover one per year) and half my fillings is more of a subsidy than insurance: I know I’ll have a checkup every X months and can budget for that, and with my mouth I can even tell you that roughly, I’ll have a cavity that needs filling in March, and then another one approximately 18 months after that. Then every 18 months thereafter until all my teeth are prosthetic. These are not only relatively known events, they’re also about as cheap as they come in the dental playbook (of course, that is only speaking relatively).

On a sadder note, I realized that over the past few weeks, I’ve actually seen my dentist more than my friends. Granted, the weather’s been terrible, I’ve been hella busy, people are busy planning weddings or babies, and Baum got a girlfriend, but it’s still really, really sad. Hopefully that’ll change though, as spring is coming, and I’ve got a new place that’s still waiting for a housewarming party, and I should be able to come back for more Friday/Saturday nights as work (hopefully) tapers off a bit, and I don’t have any more Monday dentist appointments.

Back on the topic of shiny spots on the top of my head, my mom was talking with my dad’s doctor about thinning hair, and how it was ironic that my dad was the one recovering from chemo, but I’m the one with the seriously thinning hair. She said the doctor said that that “stuff you just pick up at the drug store to put on your head doesn’t work” and gave her a bottle of this plant extract stuff to give me. I was a little taken aback, I mean, this isn’t just some stuff I picked up, it’s Rogaine, FDA/Health Canada-approved with ~60% success rate (for me, not so much — it’s definitely slowed the loss, but not fully stopped it, let alone lead to regrowth). Heck, it even had a Simpson’s episode! (“I love you too, Karl”). So instead she gives me this even more expensive plant extract stuff that’s “really supposed to work” and ugh, it reeks. I think I’d rather go bald. So then my mom says that even that won’t really work, and that the only cure for baldness is to get a hair transplant, then says I should go out and get one since it’s not seemly for a man my age to be so very bald. She then starts explaining the process, and I’m just like “yes Mom, I’m a night owl, I’ve seen the infomercials…”

Anyway, I’ve seen a ton of reports lately about the benefits of microwaving your sponges to keep them bacteria free. Speaking as a bioelectromagnetics scientist, I just wanted to clarify that yes, it does work, but it’s not related to anything magical about the microwave (well, not for sure, anyway). Those reports also recommend that you do this with the sponge wet, so basically you’re just using the microwave to boil the water and heat-sterilize the sponge. You can do this with a kettle or on the stovetop too (drop the sponge in a large mug and pour in some boiling water from the kettle, or bring a pot of sponges + water to a boil on the stove). The microwave does seem to be a bit faster (~2 minutes), perhaps because water tends to superheat in microwaves and steam hangs around a bit longer, so you’re getting more heat. The method I like to use is to take a microwave-safe plastic or glass cup, put the sponge in it and fill ~3/4 full with water, then turn it on high and wait for about half the water to boil off.

My hearing, which was never very good to begin with, has really been going downhill lately. My car stereo used to never see the double-digits on the volume (I believe it goes to twenty, but never felt the need to crank it) but now it lives comfortably at 12, going up through 15 for some songs/news reports. Of course, that’s partly because the car is getting louder, too. For the most part, I’m having the most difficultly distinguishing one person talking from another, or a sound from background noise. This leads to much hilarity:

[At a party tonight] “Have you ever seen the A-Team?”

[I misheard] “Eighteen? Is that like 24 but where he gets to take a nap?”

Of course, even more hilarious than my continued slide into senescence is how completely inept scientists can be about certain things. Mailing lists especially. Right now I’ve got four emails that came in today from people sending a message to the whole group asking to be removed after the monthly reminder email came out (this group actually sees more traffic from the montly reminder/unsubscribe message than it does from discussions), plus one email from someone asking to be added to the group! (You can only post if you’re already a member). Another group that sees much more traffic has had nearly half of its traffic lately devoted to morons trying to trade attachments. The mail server strips any non-text attachments, so when the message comes through without an attachment (and with the [attachment removed] notice); they, of course, try again. We’ve tried telling them to put it on a web host and add a link, but if we go more than 3 days without suggesting that, these people can’t seem to figure it out (the same person sometimes!) so then they offer the helpful suggestion that “if anyone wants this just email me and I’ll send you the attachment by private email.” And every time without fail at least 6 people respond to the entire list with their email address and a request for the file.

I won’t even get into engineers putting forks in the microwave because “one’s ok and you need two to close the circuit” because as hilarious as that story is, it’s been told before…

The question of the day is “What do you do with a PhD?” (After you’ve already gone to the bank and insited they put “Dr.” on your cheques, that is).

Graduate school is a long, arduous process, and it can be all the more demoralizing when there’s no clear goal at the end of it. Heck, the “default” career option, continuing in research, doesn’t even really have much of an end, at least not within a tangible timeline. After doing a PhD and getting a small handful of papers published, you’re typically expected to do a post-doc, which is basically doing a PhD all over again on a yearly contract while writing your own grants. You look constantly for professorship openings, which can be at some pretty far-ranging universities… and if you do land one of those, there’s still no real security for a decade yet, until you magically get tenure. And the whole time you have to deal with the peculiar headaches of research: broken equipment, misleading results, constant racing to get results out ahead of the nebulous “competition”, the grant cycle, funding shortages, not to mention short-term contracts, moving around, and research-dollars salary. Whoa, no thanks folks, if we learned nothing else during the PhD, it’s that the academic research path is not for us.

The other side of the academic coin is a good option though: teaching. Research makes you plumb the depths of a subject, looking to push the boundries of knowledge and explore all the subtle pitfalls that it contains (even if that is through a process of falling in every one of them). Teaching forces you to take something and break it down into its components, constantly looking for new ways to view, explain, and apply it. The two complement each other rather well: you can get so bogged down in details in research sometimes that you forget what exactly it is you’re doing; teaching can help bring that back into focus (and also provides you with a constant stream of new questions to investigate from fresh minds). The two complement each other well — but you don’t have to do research to teach. In fact, the vast majority of the teaching that goes on is done in elementary and secondary schools by people who only need a bachelor degree and a teaching certification. So really, the time spent getting that graduate degree really wasn’t necessary… seems kind of a waste, and if you’re in the middle of your PhD, it’s no way to stay motivated to finish.

Back to university research: being a tech is an option. You trade upward mobility and self-direction for stability. Again, actually finishing a PhD isn’t always necessary, though.

There are lots of opportunities in industry. Researchers, of course. Job stability can come a lot sooner, and you can settle in since moving around isn’t typically necessary (most companies only have one research park working on one topic, and would hate to lose an egghead to the competition). While funding is usually a vastly different game, with equipment magically appearing before the desire is even uttered aloud, the research can be very results-driven, which can be extremely stressful. Especially if you haven’t seen 7 am as anything but “really really late, man” for decades. Beyond that, being someone who can talk the talk can be useful in the middle-management type roles; someone to talk to the engineers so they don’t have to talk to the customers. A “people person”. Along the same lines, if you’re good at interviewing and padding a resume, you can try to leverage your decade of higher education into some vague form of legitimate experience and catapult up the ranks (even in completely non-scientific fields). But god, can you imagine being 30 years old with no experience in corporate life (or life in general!) and trying to jump right in to any kind of management role? That leaves sales, which can also require someone who can talk the talk, especially when it comes to pitching high tech things like drugs, medical equipment, or long distance plans (shudder). This route can lead to the pitfall of being “overqualified” though — it can be tough to convince an employer that you want to work outside your field out of anything other than temporary desperation.

Then there’s the stay-at-home option: cookbooks sell better if written by someone with a PhD. Discounting that, more school is an option sometimes as well. Extra training can take one from medical research into actual medical practice, or medical physics (that’s a very competitive alternative, though).

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers — I don’t know what I want to do myself when I “grow up” (though suggestions are welcome). It can just be a little demoralizing sometimes not really knowing what’s ahead (or worse yet, seeing the path ahead and realizing there isn’t enough hair left to lose). Some have suggested the old trick of asking yourself what you’d do if you won the lottery and didn’t have to work. In that case, I’d probably still tinker with science, still keep up-to-date with Scientific American and maybe even Nature, and likely even keep my brain sharp by doing obscure calculations (like figuring out the time for a hybrid car to pay itself off, or the real-world speed vs fuel economy curve)… but there is no way I’d keep up the discipline to go through with rigorous experiments or hinge my hopes and dreams on something likely to go horribly wrong due to random chance. Plus any science writing I did would likely be of a fictional or popular variety (or even advocacy?) rather than technical.

Long after taxi companies in Vancouver and Victoria set mileage records with their Toyota Prius, Toronto finally has a few hybrid taxis.

I’ve long been a proponent of hybrid cars, and they are ideally suited to use as taxis (well, the ones that are big enough: the Civic and Insight are a bit small). Hybrids gain their biggest gain over conventional gas-only cars in stop-and-go city driving, which is where cabs spend most of their time. The ability to run the A/C and radio with the engine mostly off also helps reduce pollution coming from those trains of idling cabs outside subway stations. Also, as the article mentions, with the extreme number of miles that taxis accumulate hybrids pay for themselves a lot faster than other cars. While battery life is a common concern among potential buyers, it’s much less of an issue for taxis since they tend to go through cars in much shorter amounts of time, and battery degradation happens at least party due to time elapsed along with use (mileage/recharge cycles).

I know that you usually don’t get your choice of cabs when you call for one, but if I did I know I’d request the hybrid cab every time.

Now, if only we could get the message out to the other cabbies that while they use up their Taurus or Crown Vic before moving up to a hybrid, that driving around like total fucking idiots costs them more in gas, we’d all be better off.

Also, for Ontario Citizen’s: January 31 is the last day to get your comments in for the Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform! (Look for mine soon)