Seeing news of hurricane Beryl’s aftermath, I got to wondering whether people still have radios in their homes. I suspect most people still have the ability to receive AM/FM radio broadcasts in their cars, but how many still have a boom box or an old stereo receiver or anything in their houses that will receive radio broadcasts?

I saw interviews with dozens of people, all of whom were complaining about being “cut off from civilization” because their mobile phone service and their home Internet service were cut off. No cable television. No home Internet or mobile phone service to connect to news and information. But nobody said anything about radio and broadcast television.

I personally know people who still receive television broadcasts over the air. I don’t know how prevalent it is, but everybody I know who depends on over-the-air television does so simply because cable is not available in their locations. But I don’t know if any of them have radios in the house.

Debra and I do have some radios in the house, although I’d be hard pressed to say when we last turned one on. I have one in my shop that, until I signed up for Spotify and got a good Internet connection in there, was how I listened to music when I was out working. But I haven’t turned it on in two or three years. We’d have to carefully monitor our radio use, though: they all run on D-cell batteries, of which we have precious few.

If you live in an area that could be subject to long-term outages (I know people whose power was out for more than 10 days due to hurricane Beryl), it’s probably a good idea to make sure you have a working radio with plenty of batteries for backup, and that you know how to use it. Critically, make a list of the top five or so AM and FM broadcast stations in your area so that you’ll know where to tune when your Internet and mobile phone services go out.

In my May 30, 2003 entry I mentioned Changing World Technologies and their thermal depolymerization process for recycling organic wastes.  At the time, they expected to have their first commercial plant in Carthage, MO up and running Real Soon Now, processing 200 tons of turkey waste daily from the Butterball turkey plant.  The July 2004 issue of Discover Magazine has a follow-up article that describes their progress to date.

The Carthage plant, a joint venture between CWT and ConAgra Foods, still isn’t working at capacity.  They lost a lot of time (six to nine months) inspecting and repairing 5,000 welds and are in legal action against the contractor.  They’ve had it work at capacity for up to 12 hours at a time, but they’re still tuning the system:  calibrating, tweaking, and refining.  They’re estimating a fall 2004 opening for the plant.  Still, what they have is encouraging.  The system is reportedly 85 percent efficient, and should be able to operate without sucking power from the grid.  The oil produced easily meets the specifications for diesel fuel.  In short, the chemistry works.  The rest is “just a technical problem.”  I’m still excited about the prospects for this one.

Another thing that should have been automated years ago is fast food restaurants.  You simply shouldn’t have to talk to a surly minimum-wage employee in order to get a Big Mac.  Anybody who can operate an ATM or a Nintendo game could press the buttons to order a Happy Meal.  Add a credit card reader and cash acceptor, and you’ve got the entire required user interface for a fast food restaurant.  The rest should be pretty simple robotics:  cook the burgers for 37 seconds on each side, squirt some ketchup, mustard, or special sauce on the buns, slap on the other assorted goodies and send it off to the auto-wrapper.  Just think, fries that are correctly cooked and always hot and fresh.  Is this really that hard?  Can it possibly be more expensive than paying 20 people to do the work of 5?

The argument is that automating things puts people out of work, but my reading of recent history (since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution) doesn’t show that.  If it were true, the pace of automation over the past 300 years would have long ago put everybody out of work.  The reality is that automation causes temporary and localized unemployment, requiring worker re-training.  People are freed to do more productive things.  The primary problem being that people resist any kind of change, often to the point of violence.

I’ve long wondered why some things aren’t automated.  A public library, for example.  20 years ago my dad and I determined that all the technology required to fully automate a lending library was easily available and not even especially difficult.  Picture an ATM-like interface that reads a card and presents a simple menu of books.  Scroll through the list or enter the ISBN of the book you want and it’s delivered through the slot in a few minutes.  No fuss, no muss.  Behind the scenes is a room full of books, all with the ISBN or other identifying numbers printed on the spines, and a robotic reader/grabber that finds the book and delivers it.  Returns are handled similarly:  put a book in the slot and the machine takes over, reading the number off the spine and directing the robotics to replace it in the stacks.  This has to be less expensive and more efficient than the current system of clueless volunteers who more often than not direct you to the wrong place.

It doesn’t replace librarians, though, who are invaluable research assistants.  Nor can it match the allure of a quiet library reading room.  But for most people who just want to get the latest Tom Clancy novel or a stack full of research material from the library, it’d be a huge time saver.  To this day I can’t understand why it hasn’t been done.

A couple of notes from the weekend’s moving adventure:

In the past couple of years I’ve made it a point to buy power strips that have the outlets rotated 90 degrees from the traditional way, like this.

That makes it possible to plug in one of those wall wart transformers without blocking three or four outlets.  This particular model is especially nice, because it accommodates the really fat ones.  Imagine my surprise when I opened the package for my new USB hub and found that they’d rotated the prongs on the transformer!

Sometimes you just can’t win.

Is it possible to buy a 10 foot SVGA cable?  When we placed Debra’s monitor and computer we realized that the distance was more than the 6 feet provided by the existing cable.  I picked up a 10′ extension at Fry’s, but the ghosting on the screen made it unusable.  A gender changer to turn the extension into a regular cable produced similar results.  I finally broke down and spent $60 on a super shielded 6 foot extension, but there’s still a little ghosting.  I don’t understand why I can get a 10 foot digital video cable, but not a 10 foot SVGA cable.  I also don’t understand why there’s ghosting on Debra’s monitor running at 1024×768, and none on mine running 1600×1200 and going through 10 feet of cable and a KVM switch.  If you know where I can get a 10 foot shielded SVGA cable, please clue me in.

How many things change when $15,000 gem-quality diamond can be had for $200?  People have been trying (and literally dying) for almost 200 years to manufacture diamonds.  They’ve finally succeeded.  This has some interesting consequences to the traditional diamond industry, and has resulted in a flurry of new technologies for detecting the difference between natural and manufactured diamonds.  I think this will be effective in the short term, but I suspect De Beers’ lock on the world diamond market is nearing its end.

More important than gem stones, though, are the implications for the semiconductor industry.  Diamond is the best semiconductor material known and can run at much higher temperatures than can silicon.  It’s not used currently because it’s been impossible (or prohibitively expensive) to create high-quality diamond wafer.  But with this new technology, that could change very quickly.  Imagine, I’ll have more and higher-quality diamonds in my computers than my wife has in her jewelry.

While I was in Arkansas, my only Internet access was through my brother’s Arkansas.net dialup account.  I never encountered a busy signal, and the connection was usually at 50,667 bps–apparently a good connection speed for dialup access.  I only encountered two problems:

Something—either the ISP or some software—would disconnect me without warning if I didn’t refresh a Web page every 15 minutes or so.  This normally wouldn’t be a problem since very few Web pages take more than a few minutes to read, and even then I wouldn’t mind having to reconnect after taking that long to read a page.  But the silly thing would disconnect me even if I was chatting over Yahoo.  Now what’s that all about?  I started setting a 10-minute timer and refreshing a Web page whenever it went off.

The other problem is Web sites.  They’re too big.  Yahoo, CNN, MSNBC, Slashdot, and many other popular pages are way too big for dialup access.  And yet, dialup users make up a majority of users on the Internet.  I’d sure like to see Web site designers make pages for people who access them, rather than for the people who have local Ethernet connections.  (I’m one to talk.  It looks like this page would take 30 seconds to come down at 56K bps.)

I knew that this cell phone thing had gotten out hand, but I didn’t realize just how far.  When people say “everybody has a cell phone,” they’re not exaggerating by much.  The most recent reports show that there are 137 million mobile phone subscribers in the United States.  Current U.S. adult population is approximately 280 million.  So approximately 49% of the entire population have mobile phones.  That, to me, is an astonishing figure.

Mobile phones have long since stopped being a toy just for the rich or upper middle class.  Just walk into your local Sprint phone store and you’ll see most income groups represented.  When I was in McDonald’s the other day during lunch, many of the employees, and the high school students that made up most of the clientele had mobile phones.  In a very real sense, “everybody” does have a cell phone.

What I want to know is how we got along so well without the damned things for so many years.