Cop Car's Beat

Launch of JPSS-1 with Pet Peeve #16

LIFT OFF! NOAA’s JPSS-1 Heads to Orbit

Nov 18, 2017

The Joint Polar Satellite System-1 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, at 1:47 a.m. PST this morning. The satellite’s next-generation technology will help improve the timeliness and accuracy of U.S. weather forecasts three to seven days out.

“The value of the new JPSS satellite cannot be understated after this tragic hurricane season,” said Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. “JPSS offers an unparalleled perspective on our planet’s weather, granting NOAA advanced insights which will be used to guard American lives and communities.”

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Although I planned to post about the launch of JPSS-1, I must mention that, much to my chagrin, the article contains word usage that is one of my pet peeves. At some time during the past 20 years, people have decided to invert the meanings of some American English terms. In this case, Secretary Ross is quoted as saying, "The value of the new JPSS satellite cannot be understated after this tragic hurricane season...." In my day, he would have said "The value of the new JPSS satellite cannot be overstated after this tragic hurricane season...."

Another word whose meaning has been inverted is "transparent" or "transparency" when used to apply to a process rather than to a medium through which light passes. It used to be that when I told my customer that the change in personnel in my office should be transparent to him, I meant that he should not notice any difference: the change would be internal to our processes and what the customer was exposed to would not differ from his past experience. Now, if I told someone that the change in personnel would be transparent, she would expect to be told about every little change that happened. How do these things happen?

Control freaky household appliances - (Pet Peeve #15)

Joared (of Along the Way) posted about a member of her household that went to eternal rest - her Hotpoint Refrigerator (1962-2017). Oh, how many of us long for the simple, old days, eh? At one point in my life, the only setting on the ice box was the insertion or removal of a block of ice. Now, each shelf of our refrigerator adjusts position/location, some refrigerators have various drawers for various temperature settings, there are multiple temperature settings, some feed water and/or ice cubes to the exterior without opening a door/drawer, and various vanes may be adjusted to control humidity and/or air flow. Oh, me!

The newer of our refrigerators (perhaps vintage 2005?) is another Kenmore. The controls are shown in the photos, below. The first photo shows the main temperature controls for refrigerator and freezer compartments.

 The next photo shows the main chilled air distribution controls.

There are secondary air-flow controls - one for the fruit drawer, another for the vegetable drawer.

Although we don't have external delivery of cold water and/or ice, we do have an ice maker - with controls.

Even worse, these days, are laundry appliances. Hunky Husband's current clothes washer and clothes dryer include more control settings than the V-2 Rocket launch system that sent the first American critters into space - fruit flies in the launch from White Sands Missile range that reached 63 miles in altitude according to Wikipedia, qualifying the travel as space travel. Of course, that flight took place in 1947, well before the birth of any of my own major household appliances, at any point in my adult life, so it should have been simple, eh? (I was making a point about the complicated control systems on current major household appliances, so perhaps you'll forgive me?)

First, the washer:

 
Then the dryer:

 
Further, the water softener and the heating-ventilation-air conditioning-humidifying system controls:

When asked if we wished to have wireless control of the HVAC system, I said a pleasant but firm, "No!" Who wants the Russians turning up the heat?

Finally, only to show you that I can be pleased with controls, a fine example of simple but effective controls on the microwave oven that I bought my mother (her only microwave) just a few months before her death. After Mother died (June 1994), I took the microwave to my office. Most of my subsequent lunches were taken from home (not a change) and heated in that microwave (cleaner than the communal microwave available to us - and saving me time by its close proximity.)

To use the little microwave oven (aptly named "Half Pint"), one places the container of food inside (I had purchased a spring-driven turntable for it), sets the spring-driven timer, and (when the soft click indicates that the time has elapsed and the power to the magnetron has been switched off) pushes down on the handle to open the door to retrieve the food. Can't get much simpler than that. Mother had never purchased (or allowed anyone else to purchase for her) a microwave oven believing their controls to be too complicated.

Can you tell that one of my pet peeves is over-complication of consumer products? Note that I didn't even mention cell phones, not wishing to bring on a stroke. For 50 years I kept preaching that there was no reason that computers couldn't be more user friendly. We've made some progress on that front (we consumers don't normally have to worry about using hexadecimal location codes); but, there is much more to be made. Just because we engineers take pride in our facility with our products is no excuse for inflicting overly complicated products on our consumers.

P.S. No, I've no desire to go back to the "good old days". They weren't that good. I don't want us to go back to pre-penicillin days or to the days when an interviewer had no qualms about denying a job to a person because he or she (depending upon the job) was the wrong sex. I don't want us to go back to the days when gays were even more horribly maligned - and transgender didn't even appear on the horizon. I guess I can still preach for simplicity without sending us back to the stone age.

Three times less - (Pet Peeve #14)

The Wichita Eagle daily newspaper carries a supplement within each Sunday edition, Parade. Parade has little to recommend it being mostly populated by "pop culture" déchets (doesn't that sound classier than garbage?) The one thing that I seek out to read each Sunday is the column Ask Marilyn, by Marilyn vos Savant. While the column raises the standards of Parade, it is usually beneath Ms vos Savant who, years ago was advertised (not by herself) as being the most intelligent person alive at the time. It may have been true, then, and it may still be true for all I know - or care. She gives abundant evidence of, at the very least, being a logical person.

Today's column hit my core. It addresses English usage that has been bugging me for years. Such use started to be seen/heard in the world of advertising; but, over the years, has crept more and more into the popular parlance and even into academic writings. Ach, mein Got! (Bogie: If I'm going to thumb my nose at pop culture, I have to do a bang-up job of it! We'll let Stu tell me that I missed the mark.)

A question had been sent in to Ms vos Savant by Jack Clark in North Carolina.

I have always associated multiplication with addition (more), and division with subtraction (less), so I don't understand current phrases such as "three times less" and "twice as small." Can you explain?

Ms vos Savant replied.

Yes. Those phrases, which make many of us wince when we hear newscasters and commentators use them, are just plain mathematically illiterate! In arithmetic, the term "times" means "instances of," in the way "two times three" means "two instances of three," or six. A person who says "three times less" probably means "one-third as much," and one who says "twice as small" likely means "half as small." In short, they have it backward!

Thank you, Ms vos Savant! I only wish that a kindred type of phrase had been also addressed: a phrase in which one says "five times more" when they actually mean "five times" - or - "four times more".

OMG - "There is always a way"? (Pet Peeve #13)

I'll not give away where I found that Utopian quote; but, the discussion centered around the future of the human race - rather short-term in the discussion but could be opened up to the long-term. I wanted to answer that, "No, idiot, there is NOT always a way!" But...it is against my operating principles to actually write that a person is an idiot, particularly online, and there was no reason to make him/her the butt of my bad temper. Yikes! Let us assume that I made the whole thing up. (Oh, yeah.)

Obituaries - good for the survivors

Am I senile? Am I hallucinating? I know that, at least once I have posted about the strange (to me) ways people choose to say that someone died, in an obituary. But...I can't find it to which to link.

OTOH: I have posted about an obituary that struck a cord with me (Good life, refreshing obituary - Kay Arvin). Well, here's another obituary that struck a chord with me. It probably isn't new to you since it is said to have gone viral. Hunky Husband forwarded this link (from The Wichita Eagle) to me: ‘Hardware failures’: Obituary for Illinois man goes viral.

The photo of the obituary (from an Imgur posting): My mother-in-law was confused by this obituary, so she read it to me.... I'm sorry that the man died, but his brother wrote a bang-up obituary!

Poorly-formed plurals of Latin words (Pet Peeve #12)

Although reading "data is" (or, as the local newspaper printed the other day, "media is") is a pet peeve, I got my come-uppance from Jorge Cham, creator of PhD Comics.

 

Misuse of privilege (Pet Peeve #11)

From Slashdot.org comes this posting:

Stopping Universities From Hoarding Money 69

Posted by samzenpuson Thursday August 20, 2015 @08:14AM from the pile-of-gold dept.

HughPickens.com writes: Victor Fleischer writes in the NYT that university endowments are exempt from corporate income tax because universities support the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. But instead of holding down tuition or expanding faculty research, endowments are hoarding money. Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers for managing about $8 billion, one-third of Yale's endowment. In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university's operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes. Private equity fund managers also received more than students at Harvard, the University of Texas, Stanford and Princeton.
Fleischer, a professor of law at the University of San Diego, says that as part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act expected later this year, Congress should require universities with endowments in excess of $100 million to spend at least 8 percent of the endowment each year. Universities could avoid this rule by shrinking assets to $99 million, but only by spending the endowment on educational purposes, which is exactly the goal.  According to a study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity a minimum payout of 5 percent per annum, would be is similar to the legal requirement for private and public foundations. "The sky-high tuition increases would stop, and maybe even reverse themselves. Faculty members would benefit from greater research support. University libraries, museums, hospitals and laboratories would have better facilities," concludes Fleischer. "We've lost sight of the idea that students, not fund managers, should be the primary beneficiaries of a university's endowment."

 

 

Hunky Husband and I were, just a couple of days ago, lamenting over the sky-high tuition charges* the state-owned universities in Kansas are charging these days. When he and I attended a state-owned school in Missouri, tuition was essentially free to in-state students. When I transferred to the then-city-owned University of Wichita (now Wichita State U), tuition wasn't free; but, it did not cost an arm-and-a-leg or I would have been out of luck. Ten years later, graduate school wasn't free at Wichita State U; but, it was reasonable and by then our finances could afford my tuition. Today, I'm not sure how anyone who doesn't get a full-ride scholarship can afford to attend any university!

 

Well, the universities are not alone in hoarding (and I couldn't tell you how much the state-owned schools in Kansas hoard, not having yet checked). We (collectively) decry huge corporations for what we consider to be their poor citizenship, their lack of caring for anyone but the stockholders to whom they are beholding. Even more, I decry all of the non-profit organizations, be they religious-based or be they enterprise-based. In Kansas, not-for-profit companies like LLCs [from Wikipedia: "A limited liability company (LLC) is the United States-specific form of a private limited company. It is a business structure that combines the pass-through taxation of a partnership or sole proprietorship with the limited liability of a corporation."] and their owners pay no state tax on the income that the corporation produces.

 

Churches and non-profits are so pervasive (and growing!) that it is no wonder we have a hard time keeping reasonable tax rates on the "little people" while producing sufficient governmental income to support the services that only governmental units are equipped to provide.

 

* Tuition (not stated, but these number look like annual numbers to me) for the state-owned universities in Kansas, from College Data:

 

	Kansas	Kansas State	Wichita State	Fort Hays State	Pittsburg State	Emporia State
Equivalent Full-Time Students	19,217	20,169	11,787	11,433	6,236	3,873
In-State Tuition	$10,448	$9,034	$7,265	$4,766	$6,230	$5,746
Out-of-State Tuition	$25,731	$22,624	$15,299	$14,036	$16,336	$17,896
In-State Estimated Total Expenses	$22,880	$20,424	$20,063	$16,082	$17,602	$17,588
Out-of-State Estimated Total Expenses	$38,163	$34,014	$28,097	$25,352	$27,708	$29,738

 

Twofer (Pet Peeve #9 and Pet Peeve #10)

Although I read the entire daily newspaper (well...I ignore the Sports Section), my greatest enjoyment is from the "funny pages" - the pages of cartoons. Sometimes there is nothing interesting there, but sometimes we are lucky and get a twofer. I'll give an example of a twofer from Friday's newspaper - The Wichita Eagle.

            Pickles by Brian Crane        April 17, 2015

Pickles cartoons are based on the lives of an older couple. It plays into many of the stereotypes about oldsters: that excessive time is spent with grandchildren, with pets, with knitting, puttering, loafing....The cartoonist does poke gentle fun at some of the stereotypes.

How did the stereotypes develop? Well, there must have been grains of truths in them. That doesn't keep me from bristling when an acquaintance implies one of those stereotypes violating my Pet Peeve #9. BTW: I'm taking the couple in Pickles to be 10-15 years younger than Hunky Husband and me.

            B.C. by Mastrioanni and Hart        April 17, 2015

I loved this B.C. strip because of Stu's recent posting Generating Pythagorean Triples, a somewhat typical posting for Stu who has an impressive background in mathematics; but, I was particularly attracted to the B.C. cartoon because of a snarky comment that one of his readers had made. One gathered from the comment that she had wasted her time by reading the posting - the subject being of no interest to her.

Obviously, we (the multitude) do not have equivalent interests. I think it bad manners to carry on in public about it, though. It violates my Pet Peeve #10. If a reader doesn't care for a topic, I expect him/her to skip postings on the subject or, if most postings on a blog are uninteresting, to stop reading that blog. When asked (as Stu has, in the past*) what subjects people find interesting, it is perfectly acceptable for a reader to express their preferences in an email. I think that B.C. gave a perfect response.

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* My own answer to Stu was that he should keep on posting on the wide variety of topics that he finds interesting. I am perfectly willing and able to skip a posting that doesn't pique my interest!

Misuse of "comprised" (Pet Peeve #8)

I seem to not be alone!

One Man's Quest To Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake 303

Posted by timothyon Tuesday February 03, 2015 @01:02PM from the literally-exploding-with-rage dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this Fascinating profile of one particular Wikipedia editor Giraffedata (a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson), who has spent the last seven years correcting only the incorrect use of "comprised of" on Wikipedia. Using a code to crawl for uses of "comprised of" throughout all of Wiki's articles, he'll then go in and manually correct them (for example, using "consists of" or "composed of") and has made over 47,000 edits to date.

Addition of 2/7/2015:

Stu wants to know why I misspelled "Peeve" in the title as "Peave". He was kind enough to say that he didn't get the meaning of my word play. It wasn't word play, Stu. It was a screw-up! Thanks for pointing it out. I did check my spelling in previous "Pet Peeve" postings and was relieved to find that they were spelled correctly (as it is in the "Categories" listing - whew!)

Telephone calls from idiots (Pet Peeve #7)

I had just, a couple of minutes prior to the phone's ringing, hung up from answering a question that Hunky Husband had about the shopping list from which he was selecting groceries. You can understand how I may have thought it was HH calling about another selection (especially if you understand that two or three calls from him is standard for his weekly shopping foray) and, thus, may have answered a bit more flippantly than "usual"*.

-ring! ring!- as in the landline phone is ringing

CC: At your service!

Unknown Caller: This is the United States Government in Washington DC. How are you, today?

-Click- as in CC hanging up.

I know that I don't look as if I may have been born yesterday. What is it that leads idiots into thinking I will fall for every scam they can cook up?

The phone rang at least 20 times that day (Thursday). Only once (when HH called) was it a real phone call. Give me a break! Oh! And did I fail to tell you that Unknown Caller had a heavy East Indian accent?! (This is not to imply that there is no one who works for the US Government who has a heavy East Indian accent.)

Now, had the conversation started with, "This is Rajesh Koothrappali with Cal Tech...." the call may have ended differently! I might have asked him if I could be invited to a colloquium or symposium.

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* "Usual" is that I do not answer at all. Phones are not my medium. I don't yet feel adult enough to use that new-fangled contraption. (I still feel that Mom or Dad will get after me, I guess.) The answering machine will pick up after two rings...and I am perfectly willing to let it! I do know that I need to answer the phone when HH is out shopping, however.