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Every Sunday I do my ironing. I have to wear reasonably "smart" clothes to work four days a week and on Friday we're allowed to dress down. Every Sunday night, depending on how tired I am, I try to iron four shirts and a pair of trousers.

It has always occurred to me that ironing clothes is a waste of time and energy. It serves no purpose other than to adhere to a social convention. If I were putting Lean Six Sigma onto my life, I think it would probably come under the category of "necessary waste" since it is there to comply with the law (an unwritten social law enforced by the Central Scrutinizer) which adds no value to the value stream.

I just found a calculation I did about three years ago to work out the impact to atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions that ironing clothes causes.

I used official UK government statistics on the proportion of electricity generated by fossil fuels and the carbon dioxide gas produced.

I have no idea if these links are still valid.

Carbon Dioxide (Equivalent) Emissions from Electricity Generation (2013)

Historical elctricity data: 1920 to 2013

For my calculations. my electrical iron is rated at 2kW and I estimated the heater to be operational 50% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to iron a single item, and I do 5 at a time.

To cut a long story short, I calculated that in the UK, given 2013 electricity generation data, 1 million of me doing my ironing would produce about 244.5 Te of carbon dioxide gas.

Here's my data:

Constants
Seconds per Minute    60
kcal/joule 0.000239005736
1 billion 1000000000
Seconds per Hour 3600
1 million 1000000

Iron Power (W)    2000
Time to Iron (mins)    5
Time Heating (%) 50
Energy per Item (J) 300000
Energy per Item (kcal) 71.7017208

MtCO2e 178.5
Energy Supplied (Gwh) 304155

CO2(kg) 178500000000
Energy Supplied (J) 1.094958E+018
Mass of CO2/unit energy (kg/J)    1.63019951450193E-07

CO2e(kg) per item ironed     0.048905985435058

CO2e(kg) per million items ironed 48905.9854350578
CO2(Te) per million items ironed 48.9059854350578

Items/person/week 5
1 Million People (Te)    244.529927175289

Too much going on in the world. Can't get anything done.

Defenders or enablers? [foxnews.com]

I was reading this article and thought it might be a good submission as a follow up to the post about Comey's firing.

I held back, as I thought it might already be referenced in the comments. As such, I went back and, as I was reading through the comments, came across this gem from VLM:

Could someone explain the Russia conspiracy theory?

It seems to be anointed queen in waiting lost because she sucked and the electorate hates her although the elites love her, therefore someone is to blame, and it can't be her and it can't be the D party leadership, so obviously it was gremlins or space aliens or ... I know, Russians!

Is there anything to it beyond "argh matey here be tinfoil internet pirate hats"

This got me thinking about the various ways in which we (Americans) have allowed ourselves to be divided, and discussion has devolved into demonization and wacky conspiracy theories.

I posted the following as a response (with minor changes) to VLM:

Regardless of whether the outcome would have been the same, the Russians continue to use active measures (as they have for decades) to influence public opinion in countries of interest for them. This includes the US, UK, France, much of the former Soviet bloc and FSM (okay, FSB) knows where else.

The rise of social media and the ridiculous conspiracy theories^* of the right in the US have primed the public to accept fake news (that is, lies intended to pollute public discourse) as long as it comports with their existing biases. That, and demonizing political opponents has weakened our political system and allowed folks like the Russians to muddy the waters and make it more difficult for us to work together to address the issues we all face.

It's appropriate that we all stand together to identify and understand how our public discourse and political system are being affected by those who wish to weaken, destabilize and/or harm the US.

^*Partial list of right-wing conspiracy theories. Feel free to add any left-wing ones you think appropriate.
Pizzagate
Birtherism
Jade Helm
Common Core will turn your kids gay
Agenda 21
Sharia Law coming to your town
Plans for firearms confiscation
FEMA Concentration Camps
Clinton death squads

I posit that by promoting bald-faced lies as truth and attempting to discredit those with whom we disagree, we open ourselves up to just the sort of stuff that Russia has been trying (and with the expansion of news bubbles, aided by social media, being more successful) to do for decades.

I chose not to submit the Reuters article, as it seemed to be more of a piece with the Comey firing article. What's more, even though many sources were cited, the core source(s) were anonymous. I'm sure that if there's truth to the allegations, we'll hear more about it soon.

All the same, it seems appropriate for the US to examine the role of external actors on its political and information ecosystems.

Just because the folks attempting to sway public opinion with lies are doing so at the expense of your political enemies, they are not your friends, and should not be defended or given a pass on their interference in our system.

Such actors are a threat to our national interests and should be treated as such by all of us.

I guess the question becomes, are you an American first, or a [Republican|Democrat|Libertarian|Alt-Right|Communist|Socialist|Whatever] first?

I'm an American. And my fellow Americans (regardless of political stripe) are valued members of my society. Let's work together to make our country successful for all of us. Doing so will benefit society as a whole, socially, economically and politically.

Further to my rant about the speed of current versions of Firefox, I'd like to add one about LibreOffice. At the same time I upgraded Firefox, I upgraded from LibreOffice 4.0.x to 5.2.x and the difference was spectacular.

Now, I have to wait while I watch the buttons on the GUI being repainted.

I think I'll change to Siag Office. Bah!

Over Christmas, I upgraded my main box to Slackware64-14.2. I put in a pair of new hard disks (Western Digital Blue 3TB) and noticed quite a speed improvement over the Green 2TB ones they replaced.

Slackware64-14.2 still comes with a broken version of vim (it was broken in 14.1 as well) so I rebuilt the vim-7.3 that comes with 14.0. The breakage is that it doesn't redraw the screen properly when run in a terminal window (xterm).

I've been using Firefox as my main web browser for many years, and I know that for a while it's been sub-optimal in a number of ways, technically and politically, but I've been too busy to try anything else. I did look at PaleMoon a few months back, but never went any further. Slackware64-14.2 comes with Firefox 52.x and it's painfully slow. Recent security updates have made it unusable. It's very sluggish when scrolling, and you can see it repainting. When it renders an image or a video, you can see a bright green box behind it! Forget trying to watch a video.

Perhaps I should upgrade my hardware? I've got an AMD Phenom II X6 1045T (2.7GHz, 6 physical cores) on an ASUS M4A 77D motherboard with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. It's five years since I bought the CPU.

In the mean time, I thought I'd try rebuilding firefox. Being very short of time nowadays, I decided to use the Slackware build scripts to do the build rather than trying to do it myself from scratch. I figured rebuilding on my own machine might result in slightly faster binaries if the gcc options were more machine-specific.

I set of a build without looking too much at the build script. The SlackBuild script has to run as root (yuck) which makes me nervous, but I went ahead. I made the mistake of firing up a web browser at the same time to do some googling about firefox performance issues at the same time.

Very soon, the machine was using over 2.5GB of swap. No web browser was usable. After taking several minutes for the browser windows to die, I looked at the build script. It was defaulting to doing seven jobs in parallel (-j7). Obviously, there's not much point in filling up your CPUs if you don't have enough RAM to keep them fed. And Firefox is written in C++ (don't get me started - we have 64GB machines at work that aren't big enough).

It turns out that lots of people are frustrated with the speed of newer versions of Firefox, so I decided to try to rebuild version 45.9.0esr that comes with 14.1 on 14.2. I carefully read the SlackBuild script first, and ensured that it only used a maximum of two cores in parallel. That was a success. In a little over 99 minutes I had a nice mozilla-firefox-45.9.0esr-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz which installed and is running.

The question is, how much RAM do you need nowadays?

Back to the C++: one of my colleagues is working on a project that runs on 32-bit Linux, and when he was building his C++ which used a lot of template code, it used to run out of memory (address space).

It's amazing how much RAM and CPU cycles (and network bandwidth) you can eat up with C++, Java, Ant and eclipse. There are some particularly perverse ways you can abuse C++ and Ant should be burnt in an incinerator for biological warfare agents.

And who in their right mind designs a build system that depends on an IDE? Eclipse? Argh!

Trump voters don't believe he has played more golf than Obama in first 3 months

During his first three months in office, Trump spent 19 days at a golf course and played golf on at least 13 occasions, according to The New York Times.

The Times found that Obama spent no days at a golf course during his first three months. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also spent either no time or very little time golfing during their first 90 days — Bush made no trips to a golf course, while Clinton spent three days at courses.

A smattering of hypocritical quotes from Trump:

The 26 times Donald Trump tweeted about Barack Obama playing golf too much

It seems like almost every day a new story comes out about yet another unsavory practice by Uber.

First it was the sexual harassment allegations and apparent cover up, then it was the angry rant by their CEO, then an expose concerning their deceptions to avoid law enforcement scrutiny.

As if that weren't enough, Google/Waymo then sued Uber for the theft of documents by Tony Levandowski. Uber and Levandowski's lawyers continue to stonewall Google's lawyers and the courts.

And now, it seems that Uber has been skimming fares by quoting one (higher) fare to customers and another (lower) fare to drivers, then pocketing the difference.

So what is it with these folks? Is their culture so ethically sparse that this seems normal? Or does every corporation act this way and these guys just aren't very slick?

I hope Uber gets sued into oblivion. Sadly, the folks who perpetrate this stuff are protected by the corporate veil. They should go to PMITA prison until they lose all sphincter control.

I haven't posted a journal entry in a while and it's a slow day at work, so buckle up; here we go!

In my last entry, I said that my wife was pregnant, and I was pretty bummed because this girl that I had barely started seeing decided to end things. It's been almost 9 months since then.

The pregnancy went pretty well. I found it really interesting to see how my wife's body changed and read about all the developmental milestones of the little bundle of cells that was growing in her belly. She downloaded some phone app that every week would list some things that were being developed that week, and then would compare the size of the fetus to a vegetable. This week, your baby is the size of an avocado. The next week might be an orange, then eventually pineapple, and finally a small watermelon.

Throughout the pregnancy, we would go in for ultrasounds. We wanted the sex of the baby to be a surprise, so we made sure to tell the technicians not to tell us anything we didn't need to know. As the pregnancy nears completion, the doctors appointments get more and more frequent (Thank Jeebus I live in socialist Canada). During on of those appointments, the doctor wheeled in this ancient ultrasound machine and started looking to make sure the baby was upside down and in position for delivery. The doctor wasn't able to see the baby's head in the right position, and so scheduled us in for a modern ultrasound to see what was going on. We learned that our baby hadn't flipped yet.

As soon as it was confirmed that we had a breech baby, they gave us the option to schedule a c-section. My wife really wanted to have the natural birth experience, so we looked into other options. Apparently, there is a procedure that can be done where the woman is given muscle relaxants, and then a doctor massages the belly to manually manipulate the baby into position. This procedure is quite painful, and doesn't have a very good odds of success (something like 60%) and there is a chance that you might go into labor, or they may have to do an emergency c-section if the baby is in distress.

We decided to try it out. I took the day off work and we headed to the hospital. Before the procedure we went for another ultrasound, and it was found that the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck, and there wasn't enough slack to allow for them to flip it. With no other choice, we scheduled a c-section delivery.

As delivery day inched closer, we were getting more and more excited to meet our baby. Finally the big day arrived, and we were at the hospital bright and early at 7:00am. We waited for quite a while, but around noon, we were told it was time to get ready. They took my wife away and gave her the epidural, then I was allowed into the operating room. The next thing I remember is holding my baby girl. She was (and still is!) so beautiful, with lots of copper hair! I cried. It was amazing to finally hold her in my arms. My wife was still strapped to the operating table and was being sewn up, so I got to show her to my wife.

We were released from the hospital a day later. It was surreal experience bringing her home for the first time. We had a steady flow of friends and family coming over, and it was actually pretty stressful (we are both introverts).

Our little girl is now 3 months old, and cute as a button (when she is not crying, anyways). When she looks into my eyes and smiles, my heart melts.

Just before the birth, I volunteered here at SN to be an editor. Just as I started actually posting stories, we found out our baby wasn't in birth position, and then things have been crazy ever since. Now, when I have a moment, I don't really have the energy/motivation to actually do the editing/posting work here. I'm really sorry guys, but it looks like you have done just fine without me. Maybe one day I'll be able to contribute again.

Anyways, I think I'll end things here. Maybe next time I'm bored at work, I'll post my experience with being a first time father (hint: the first 3 months, at least, are mostly terrible with moments of joy).

Tom Wheeler: Telecom/Cable Industry lobbyist, FCC Commissioner, protector of network privacy.

I always thought he just went with the flow to make sure he was getting a piece of the pie. Now I'm not so sure. In a March 29, 2017 OpEd piece in the New York Times, Wheeler decries the actions of Congress in weakening (some might say destroying) online privacy protections:

On Tuesday afternoon, while most people were focused on the latest news from the House Intelligence Committee, the House quietly voted to undo rules that keep internet service providers — the companies like Comcast, Verizon and Charter that you pay for online access — from selling your personal information.

The Senate already approved the bill, on a party-line vote, last week, which means that in the coming days President Trump will be able to sign legislation that will strike a significant blow against online privacy protection.
[...]
Here’s one perverse result of this action. When you make a voice call on your smartphone, the information is protected: Your phone company can’t sell the fact that you are calling car dealerships to others who want to sell you a car. But if the same device and the same network are used to contact car dealers through the internet, that information — the same information, in fact — can be captured and sold by the network. To add insult to injury, you pay the network a monthly fee for the privilege of having your information sold to the highest bidder.

This bill isn’t the only gift to the industry. The Trump F.C.C. recently voted to stay requirements that internet service providers must take “reasonable measures” to protect confidential information they hold on their customers, such as Social Security numbers and credit card information. This is not a hypothetical risk — in 2015 AT&T was fined $25 million for shoddy practices that allowed employees to steal and sell the private information of 280,000 customers.

I would have thought Wheeler wouldn't want to rock the boat, but apparently is willing to stand up for online consumer privacy.

Did I have him wrong? I don't know. And now I'm not really sure I care.