Hating drywall

Doc wonders if my hatred of drywall is abstract or metaphysical. I hate drywall because it’s miserable contrary stuff. The drywall how-to books feature a man and wife. He’s smiling as he holds a panel up against the ceiling with a T-brace made of a couple of two-by-fours. She’s smiling as she nails it up. That picture is a vicious lie. Here’s the truth.

First, it’s taken all morning to get one whole four-by-eight panel upstairs. A pair of panels taped together was too heavy, and now the corners are crushed. Having taken apart a pair outside, the single panel broke as they tried to bend it through the entry-way. Having taken the door off it’s hinges, one panel just clears.

The next check is the dining room. The table and chairs have to go. The chairs go outside, the leaf goes in the closet. The table has to be lifted, turned ninety degrees vertical, and walked through the doorway. Wait, the legs are hung up. Huh. Well, put the leaf back in. Okay. Wait, the drywall’s in the way. Can’t put it there; that’s where the table has to go. They’ll have to take the panel back outside. Go around through the front door.

They try again, the dining table now on it’s side in the living room. The next check is the bottom of the stairwell. Either the banister comes out, or they cut the drywall into two-foot squares. Get the saw; they’ll put up a temporary banister after they’re done. (Twenty years later the temporary banister will still be there. After ten years they’ll give up and paint it white.)

So, rather than bring up and hang the sheets one at a time, they’ll have to haul up the whole stack. Finally, lift one up to the ceiling. Okay, hold this end and prop the brace under… Um, they need a bigger brace. He nails together another one.

“Maybe if we grind it to a paste and trowel it on…”

Eventually the truth comes out: They’ll have to hire Superman and his two brothers, or build some kind of wooden scaffolding under each sheet, levering it up with shims and jacks. Fortunately, before he actually re-invents one, he hears someone at McDonald’s say “drywall jack.” So they rent one of these from the hardware store. It’s heavy and awkward as they wrestle it up, then back down the stairs. The stack of drywall was in the way – the stack they had to bring in all at once instead of one sheet at a time.

Another eighteen trips up and down stairs positions the jack and drywall. After he runs back out to the hardware store to rent a drywall screw-gun, the jack works great – on the first two panels. Then the ceiling gets too high, because of the slope, but they set the jack up on cinder blocks. For the last two, the way the ceiling angles back makes it impossible to get the jack underneath. Going through the attic lets him nail up temporary metal clips to hold one side. Lift and slide it, up and in; brace the other end with the pair of T-braces (Remember those? Later they’ll make these into the “temporary” banister; waste not, want not.) Push in shims under both ends to hold it up tight… Wait. The corner isn’t square. Take it all down, cut it to fit, put it back up. They’ll cover that side with molding. Back to the attic to remove the temporary clips.

There’s the ceiling done; now the walls. In an old house, nothing is level, square, or straight. Even if the new construction was perfect, the carpenter still had to attach it to the existing house. They have to cut and fit every piece of drywall on all four sides. Hanging drywall in the new bedroom wasn’t a weekend project; it was a second job. But at least they got to do it together, right Dear?

Then there’s the taping and mudding.

And that’s how it works. Now we learn contractors borrowed more than they could afford to build houses nobody wants, and the bank secured the loan with houses built of material that was smelly and radioactive. It’s really no surprise. That’s just what drywall would be if it possibly could.

What’s the alternative? An “expensive wood interior?” That would be nice, I guess, but if it were just me I’d staple Visqueen to the studs and be done.

“No time for nothing; no Patek Philippe”

Jacques Seguela, who is both a Frenchman and an advertising executive, says “you’re a failure if you don’t own a Rolex by the time you’re 50.”^* He’s a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, the Rolex-wearing president of France. The French have issues with all this. I kind of like Sarkozy, so I’m assuming his Rolex is a fake.

In the era of power ties and padded shoulders, my father bought a fake Rolex. He thought it was absolutely hilarious, for reasons I never completely understood. Dad said, “What do you think of this?” as he handed me a watch.

“A Rolex? Those are pretty expensive, aren’t they?”

“Not this kind. Twenty dollars, no questions asked.”

“You got a fake Rolex? Why?”

(For reasons never entirely clear, like the one-inch cube of lead; the quart of pure glycerin; a can of Norwegian codfish ball soup; two aluminum ingots; some kind of special magnet; a watered silk waistcoat; et cetera, et cetera.)

“Look at the second hand.”

“Yeah?”

“It sweeps. This is a battery powered quartz watch. A Rolex is mechanical, driven by a spring, so it ticks.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Right, so this twenty dollar quartz watch is probably more accurate than a thousand dollar Rolex.”

“Huh; interesting commentary on, uh, human nature, I guess.”

“Doctor G______ will bust a blood vessel when he sees this. I wore it down to McDonald’s the other day and D_____ almost broke his neck trying to sneak a look. The trick is to not say anything about it; just casually let it show while you take a sip of coffee. Ah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah! Have you read about the sumptuary laws?”

He was able to provoke two reactions: a knowing smile (“been to the city?”), or some mix of resentment, anger, and suspicion.

After he had his fun, he started lending it to his friends for their own guerrilla humor operations. At some point it stopped running, but that was no impediment to whatever they were doing. Finally the fake winding stem fell off, and the local jeweler wouldn’t fix it. I guess he wasn’t in on the joke.

^*“Si à 50 ans, on n’a pas une Rolex, on a raté sa vie.” I’m not convinced “you’re a failure” is the best translation, unless it’s an idiomatic expression or something.

No risk in short-term piano exposure, scientists say

“The resultant brain scans were extraordinary. Not surprisingly, the brains of those who simply sat in the same room as the piano hadn’t changed at all.” — The REAL brain drain. Well there’s one less thing to worry about anyway. The point, though, is that imaginary piano lessons work almost as well as real ones. That fits with my own experience as a boy. I might just as well have sat and imagined playing that piano for all the good the lessons did me.

Okra

My parents and grandparents grew up when people ate whatever was edible and thanked God for it. Then from the thirties to the sixties food became various, plentiful, and cheap. We could eat what we liked all year round, but the adults kept the habits of their youth. They ate a variety of foods, some I did not much care for: blackeyed peas; sweet potato pie. Others were absolutely disgusting: boiled spinach; stewed rhubarb. Looking at what they would eat, it seemed significant to me that they would not eat okra.

I heard something about it in school. Maybe the cafeteria served it; maybe we saw a film strip about it. (We had several about the soy bean, and the peanut.) When my parents asked what I had learned that day, I told them about okra. They already knew about it. My mother said some people served it with corn and tomatoes, and then she shuddered. My father hoped he never had to choose between starving and eating okra. I think he said the Nazis fed okra to American prisoners of war. I asked around: One uncle glared; cousins laughed; my grandmother just said ‘we’ did not eat okra. Most of the neighbors had never heard of it. The old man across the alley had never had any, but reckoned he could eat it if that was all there was. All these good people would happily tuck in to a dish of stewed rhubarb, but dismissed okra as slimy, gluey, and nasty.

So I had not eaten okra before I joined the Army. I wasn’t afraid of it, exactly. Wary, maybe; impressed. One day I tried some at a Shoney’s in Alabama, and it was okay. Nothing I would seek out especially, but basically a pretty unremarkable vegetable. Later there was an incident involving some pickled okra and a foreign visitor we were entertaining, but no lasting harm was done to US interests. When they served it in the mess hall, I ate it. I told my grandmother I had eaten some, and liked it okay. She said I could have hers.

Greed

A couple of weeks ago at Walmart they had Trappey’s okra and tomatoes on sale for fifty cents a can. It was on the special shelf where they mark down and sell off products they will no longer carry. There were several cases. I bought two cans, figuring if it was good I’d go back for more later, and maybe make some Yankee imitation of gumbo.

It was quite good. Trappey’s products often are. I heated up the okra and made a pan of spoon bread to go with some ham. Nobody else cared for any okra or spoon bread just then, so I had all I wanted. I re-heated the leftovers the next day, and then put the rest in with some ramen the day after that. Next time I went to Walmart, I hiked back to the mark-down shelf, and was disappointed to see the okra was all gone. In its place was a concoction of canned beer, tomato juice, and clam broth that wasn’t selling.

Well, what’s a can of okra more or less? It’s not as if it were Seaside butterbeans – the best canned butterbeans in the world, which they stopped making ten years ago, leaving us all with inferior substitutes. I’m not driving into the city for okra, or ordering a case from Amazon. A man’s got to keep a sense of proportion about these things.

Then the other day I was at the Walmart in a neighboring town, and guess what I saw – the same Trappey’s okra and tomatoes. But this was at full price, right in there next to the jolly Green Giant at $1.08 a can. Fifty cents a can wasn’t good enough for them. Those greedy merchants moved that okra from my hometown Walmart to the big Walmart down the road, hoping to cash in. Well, they aren’t going to take advantage of me.

Bored now

Nothing to do? Try sitting quietly by yourself

Occasional time with nothing to do used to be unavoidable. “Spare time,” the old folks called it. Now technology lets us fill ever-smaller idle moments with a quick game of Tetris, the latest headlines, a two minute video, or aimless cell chatter. People are loosing the ability to do nothing. We have forgotten the joy of boredom, according to Carolyn Y. Johnson.

In Officer Candidate School we learned a parody of a physical training exercise. It was called “the prone.” An eight-count exercise done to a slow cadence, the start position was laying on your back in the position of attention. The exercise was to maintain the start position. The leader counted the cadence, shouting numbers one through seven; the exercises shouted the number of completed repetitions after each cycle. The punishment for incorrect execution of the exercise was, not fifty push-ups, but fifty repetitions of the prone. So basically we all lay on our backs and shouted for a while. The “tactical” version of the exercise was the same, but without the shouting. US Army officers are made, not born.

Boredom is not having nothing to do; it is the emotional response to lack of stimulus. People become bored when alone and unoccupied. In the past you just had to suck it up. Now modern technology lets people avoid even brief periods of boredom, never mind a three-month ocean voyage. We are not forced to develop the same internal resources as in the past. People today cannot tolerate even a few minutes of idle solitude, and have lost the capacity to sit and think. Of course, people who had the capacity to sit and think discovered electricity. The devil finds work for idle hands.

“The problem with instant gratification is it takes too long.”

Today we experience the emotion of boredom too briefly. Boredom must last long enough to push us onto our internal resources and stimulate some creativity. It can be useful to sit and think, or just to sit, but it seems ironic to argue for boredom on grounds of utility, as some of Ms. Johnson’s sources seems to. Certainly one’s time can be under-utilized. But it is equally a mistake for a man to organize his life so tightly that every minute is optimally filled with purposeful activity, even if it is more efficient. McDonald’s is not such a brilliant model that we should adopt it as the way to order our lives.

In a way, the entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on the small moments of spare time that are sprinkled through modern life parallel the pharmaceutical industry. A growing chorus of mental health specialists has begun to question whether normal sadness and social anxiety are being transformed into disorders that people believe need to be cured — by the companies offering elixirs. The tech industry may be doing the same thing with disconnection. — The Joy of Boredom

A better argument is that it is emotionally impoverishing to stave off two minutes of boredom by talking on the cellphone while walking down the hall. It annoys those around you; it prevents you from being fully aware of where you are or what you are doing; it imperfectly connects you to a disembodied voice, while isolating you from the human community. Plus, it is stupid and vulgar.

Time capsule

At the top of the kitchen cabinet, way in the back, I found a small decorative canister. In it was nothing but an empty book of AAFES matches on which I had written “April 1994.” I have no idea what it means, but I added “March 2008″ and put it back.

What are kids reading today?

Karin Chenoweth at Britannica Blog asks What Exactly are Kids Reading in those “Reading Blocks”?:

Whenever I hear about elementary schools that have cut out social studies and science instruction in order to devote 90 minutes or even two hours a day to reading instruction, my main question is, “What on earth are the kids reading for all that time?”

I wrote a while ago about learning to read. I do not remember much from my regular reader. It must have been something between ‘See Spot run!” and “It will not go.” There was an article about the surprising intelligence of dolphins, another about how Eli Lilly made new medicines, and a biographical sketch of Robert Goddard. There was a story about the pioneers finding a salt-lick, and one about Till Eulenspiegel. So we seemed to have a good bit of substantive non-fiction, along with stories and tales. Maybe we were still reacting to Sputnik, or I just remember what I was interested in.

Xargs

People learn Unix one epiphany at a time. I had never really understood the command-line utility xargs until Michael Stutz made it clear in UNIX tips: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits: “In its simplest invocation, xargs is like a filter that takes as input a list (with each member on a single line). The tool puts those members on a single space-delimited line.”

The man page says that too, right up at the top. My problem, I think, was reading tutorials describing how to use xargs with the find command, which obscured what xargs was doing. Unix commands have lots of options and can be combined into powerful utilities, but in isolation they do one simple thing. If a command seems very complicated, find that one thing.

Mister Stutz then goes on the recommend using grep with the -c[ount] option instead of piping the output to wc. His own reasoning, and his warning about what can go wrong, seems counter to his conclusion. No doubt there is a time to use -c, but I would usually pipe to wc and hang the extra milliseconds. Of course I routinely cat things and then pipe to grep, which infuriates some people, so you can go wrong either way I guess. And to be fair he is also quite right that it is better to change the path than to move the archive. That is a minor epiphany itself, and also cryptically zen-like. I look forward to working that one into a conversation.

I remember listening to my father and his friends talk for 90 minutes about the intricacies and hidden pitfalls in operating the Spicer transmission. I’m going to stop now before I drift further into incoherent shell-speak.

Patti’s sense of snow

I lived in Alabama once for a few months. One night in January it got down to thirty degrees and snowed, maybe an inch or less. I got up, dusted off the car, and headed to work. I found the city in chaos: cars off the road in the ditch, people dressed in arctic gear flailing around with jumper cables, everything closed for the big snow emergency.

Upstate New York is not Alabama. They gets lots of snow every year, and they know how to deal with it. This year, they are getting a lot of snow, even for them. According to the Washington Post, one town “carts snow to a two-acre reservoir, where it’s piled into one big mound. Last year, the pile did not entirely melt until July. ‘With all the snow we’ve gotten, that snow mound might be there all summer into next winter,’” one town official said.

The Second Grade Teacher has written about it, and explains the culprit, lake-effect snow.

Spherical blackboard

Make calls this a Blackboard Idea Globe. My first thought was to use it for graphing equations, which also occured to the inventor. A quick Google search led me to a Spherical Chalkboard. I wonder if there are spherical computer monitors?

Speaking of spherical trigonometry, Prosthaphaeresis is an archaic method of multiplication that used trig functions instead of logarithms. I cannot imagine it was common, but for specific navigational problems it might have been useful.

This in turn reminds me of solving cubic equations. In a particular type of dynamics problem invloving the motion of rigid bodies in space, a cubic equation with three real roots appears. It can be solved by applying a trigonometric identity, and the answers come out in a very nice form. I cannot find a good web link for it, and my old class notes are in a box underneath something, so I’ll leave further investigation to the interested reader.

That reminds me of the time…

Before I learned the clever technique above, I ran into a cubic equation in an easy-to-pose elementary statics problem. A weight is suspended from a slack (massless) line hung between two buildings. The ends of the line are at different heights. The weight can slide on the line. Find the location of the weight at equilibrium.

The professor assigned this with several other problems, and without much thought, apparently. The next day he asked if anyone had been able to solve it. I had tried and failed with Cardano’s method. Other students with more sense had spent their time more productively. None of us had got an answer. The professor said, “Well, I got the answer,” and he pulled out a piece of string, a sinker on a paper clip, and a ruler. I think that was half of my engineering education right there.