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We live in a rural setting, rural enough that we don’t get good cell phone reception. After a while of dropping calls or just not being able to make calls, Some Wife discovered that AT&T will give you a cell phone signal thingy.

It’s not a booster, it’s your very own mini cell tower, in the comfort of your own home. And if their records show you drop enough calls at your house, they’ll send it to you for free.

I called, and explained the situation, and I also explained that we don’t have home internet. At that time, our home internet was just using our cell phones as mobile hotspots. (It’s slightly better now, we have a dedicated mobile hotspot.)

The customer service rep either didn’t understand what the microcell does, or they didn’t care about that part. Either way, AT&T shipped us a free microcell, to help us with our cell phone service.

For those of you not familiar with the microcell, it connects to your home internet and gives you cell service through that. Our problem was that our home internet was from the cell service. It would have been an infinite loop of the cell signal going through the microcell that was going through the cell signal.

I never even tried to set it up. But their customer service was friendly.

I was reading something about appliances and someone mentioned the benefit of a new appliance is that new appliances are so much more energy efficient than the old ones

Then I was reading something else and people were complaining about how they don’t make stuff like they used to – old appliances would last for 20-30 years and now people are happy to get 5 years out of a new appliance.

So I put 2 and 2 together, and realized everything is a wash. It doesn’t matter what you do, the end result is the same.

Total cost of ownership? The same. Your old appliance costs more to operate, but you don’t have the replace it as much. Would you rather have small utility bills and a large lump-sum purchase every few years, or have somewhat higher utility bills and no lump-sum purchases?

Total energy impact to the planet? The same. Yes, the old appliance uses more energy at your house, but it gets built and shipped only once. How much energy does it take to build and ship 3 newer appliances over the span of that one old appliance? And dispose of them too.

I give the advantage to the old appliance, because I don’t like the inconvenience of having an appliance break, and having to scramble to replace it. But others may like more frequent upgrades, akin to repainting rooms and rearranging furniture.

Note: this is also my thought process about cars. I stick with older cars that have less to go wrong. The only problem is that because of salty roads, their longevity is not as assured as something like a refrigerator or a clothes dryer.

I’m going to be explaining manual transmissions to Gamma in a month or two, so this is my homework for that.

The pre-requisite for my class Learn to Drive Stickshift is an understanding of Levers and Gears. You should have already taken the class Simpler Machines.

As we discussed last week, a wheel can be thought of as an group of levers around the axle. Gears make this easier to visualize, just think of the gear teeth as the ends of the levers.

What does a lever do? It allows one to produce varying amounts of distance or force, depending on where the fulcrum is. Want more distance on the other end? Move the fulcrum closer to you. Want more force on the other end? Move the fulcrum farther away.

What do gears do? Same things as gears – they allow one to produce varying amounts of distance or force, depending on where the fulcrum is. The difference that the fulcrum for gears is the gear ratio, or the radius of the drive gear compared to the radius of the output gear.

The other difference is that gears don’t usually deal with distance like a lever, but rather distance over time – better known as speed.

If both gears (one input and one output) are the same size, then that’s like a lever with the fulcrum in the middle. It multiplies neither force nor distance, it just changes direction.

If the input gear is larger than the output gear, then that’s like a lever with the fulcrum farther from the input. It multiplies force and divides distance or speed. This is a low gear – it provides the oomph (technical term) to get things moving, albeit moving slowly.

If the input gear is smaller than the output gear, then that’s like a lever with the fulcrum closer to the input. It multiplies speed/distance and divides force. This is a high gear – it provides the high speeds but with a lack of oomph. Note that this is called overdrive when the input gear is smaller than the output gear. Overdrive used to be a big deal on cars years back, but that was when transmissions had 3 gears and the highest speed limit was 55 mph. Now transmissions have 8 or 9 speeds and speed limits are 75 or 80, so everything can go fast enough and no one runs out of gears anymore.

I’m going to be explaining manual transmissions to Gamma in a month or two, so this is my homework for that.

The pre-requisite for my class Learn to Drive Stickshift is an understanding of Simple Machines.

The classic list of Simple Machines is Lever, Wheel, Pulley, Inclined Plane, Wedge, and Screw.

I disagree with the list, as it could be simplified. I.e. those are not the simplest machines. One of my favorite parts of science was simplifying things by cancelling units. I am going to try to show that here.

First is Screw, the most egregious example, the Screw is not a Simple Machine. It is a Compound Machine.

Take a wheel, make it thicker, and apply an inclined plane to it.

That’s a screw, just an inclined plane-wheel. Since Screw can be reduced to two simple machines, it does not count as a simple machine.

Next is Wedge. While I don’t think this can be reduced, I do think this is just an inclined plane.

If we move an object up an angled surface, we call that surface an inclined plane. But if we take an angled surface and move it into an object, we call it a wedge.

I disagree that wedge gets to be a known as a unique simple machine. I actually don’t care which term we use (it is easier to say “wedge” than “inclined plane”).

Wedge and Inclined Plane do the same thing – use an angled surface to make it easier to separate things. For the wedge, one is generally separating one object into two. For the inclined plane, one is generally separating one object from another. But it’s the same basic concept, and it shouldn’t count twice.

Since we’re on the topic of Inclined Plane, I thought there should be some overlap between Lever and Inclined Plane. I thought about how to combine them, or reduce Lever somehow. But my conclusion was they are both simple machines, and it may help to think of the lever not as a lever but think of it as a fulcrum. Replace Lever in the list with Fulcrum and it is more obvious that it’s not sharing anything with Inclined Plane.

Next is Pulley. It should come as no surprise to you that I consider a pulley to be a wheel plus a rope. Since one of its components is a Simple Machine, it can be reduced and is therefore not a Simple Machine.

I am open to the possibility that Rope should be promoted to Simple Machine.

Pulley, on the other hand, is just an application of Wheel. It’s a similar comparison to Wedge and Inclined Plane. Wedge and Inclined Plane are the same machine, just one is moving and one is stationary.

It’s the same with Wheel and Pulley – it’s the same machine, just one moves (a distance, yes they both move in that they rotate) and one is stationary.

That’s the end of my complaining about the classifications of Simple Machines.

For your homework for next week, please come prepared with an explanation of how a wheel can be reduced to an infinite number of very small levers around a central fulcrum.

This is not an exhaustive list, but just a few things I thought of while driving, for what I would do if I were governor of my state.

• Make all the crosswalk timings consistent. Some count to zero then the light changes to yellow. Some hit yellow at 2 or 3 and go to red on zero. Some hit zero and the light stays green for a few more seconds.
• Get rid of changing the clocks twice a year. This has gotten some more traction lately, but so far it’s all smoke and no fire.
• Set a maximum height above ground level for headlights. Too many jacked-up pickups with annoying/unsafe headlight placement.
• While I’m on that thought, maybe require a CDL for vehicles whose hood exceeds a certain height. If you can’t see people standing in front of your vehicle, you get extra training and scrutiny.

I have an update to an old post about the trichotomy of features. This one pertains to the problems with buying a used car.

Having bought several used cars over the past few years, I have noticed that it’s tough to find one with both an owner’s manual and two keys. And if they do have those, then there’s a large crack in the windshield. Since I avoid buying cars with bad windshields, it’s 50/50 for me on whether I get 2 keys. I get why people might lose a key, but where are they taking the owner’s manual that it gets lost?

There are some elements of slapstick humor that never grow old. One of those is people running into things. Replace people with animals, and it’s still fun. That was, if I remember correctly, a big portion of America’s Funniest Videos – people and animals running into or falling off things.

A couple months ago, we got our sliding glass doors (AKA patio doors) replaced, because they were drafty and cloudy and needed it. The view to the backyard is much better now, it’s like the glass isn’t even there, it’s so new and clear.

The animals think so too. We occasionally hear a “thump” and by the time we get over to the doors, there is nothing there. So don’t worry, no birds were harmed in the making of this blog post. But the birds did leave some evidence, so we do know that it was a bird.

Exhibit A:

That was kind of faint, so here’s Exhibit B, with different lighting/exposure.

And if you still didn’t see it, this panning shot should help. Exhibit C: