I’ve been helped the past couple of days by this passage from Emerson:

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine.

Belief and love — a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the center of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe.

The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.

Why need you choose so painfully your place and occupation and associates and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes the need of balance and willful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech by which I would distinguish what is commonly called choice among men, and which is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man. But that which I call right or goodness, is the choice of my constitution; and that which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the state or circumstance desirable to my constitution; and the action which I in all my years tend to do, is the work for my faculties.

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other.

His ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do something unique, and no man has any other call. The pretense that he has another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward “signs that mark him extraordinary, and not in the roll of common men,” is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein.

By doing his work he makes the need felt which he can supply, and creates the taste by which he is enjoyed. By doing his own work he unfolds himself.

It is the vice of our public speaking that it has not abandonment. Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should let out all the length of all the reins; should find or make a frank and hearty expression of what force and meaning is in him. The common experience is that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.

Until he can manage to communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He must find in that an outlet for his character, so that he may justify his work to their eyes. If the labor is mean, let him by his thinking and character make it liberal. Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in his apprehension is worth doing, that let him communicate, or men will never know and honor him aright. Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle of your character and aims.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Spiritual Laws”

   Edited. The full text can be found at Project Gutenberg:
   http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2944/2944.txt

I wonder if I’ve been laboring under the wrong call. A pretense…

I drove it off the lot in April 1998 with 30 miles on the odometer. Twelve Minnesota winters, five-hundred fill-ups, and 154,000 miles later, I’m still driving it. I’ll be happy if I can stay with it for several more years.

The numbers from twelve years of overly-meticulous recordkeeping tell me that this car has provided great value.

Cost Per Mile

First, there’s the lifetime cost-per-mile to own and operate it. I think this is a beautiful graph.

Lifetime expense is $0.29 per mile. That includes everything: payments, gas, insurance, maintenance, repairs, and etcetera.

(I initially had a three year lease for $8,000. The spike in 2001 is when I bought the car for another $8,000.)

Minus payments, the operating cost is currently $0.18 per mile. After stabilizing at $0.11/mile in the first year, it has risen slowly over the years, but $0.18/mile is not bad at all.

You can make good, objective decisions about your car if you have decent numbers.

See the jump in 2008? That was in May/April when we invested about $2,300 in repairs and maintenance. Replacing a leaking head gasket and some brake work were the big items. I think there is a tendency with an older car for people to be concerned about getting “nickeled and dimed” on repair costs, so they’ll go out and buy a newer car. But going by the numbers, it was easy to decide on the repair.

I also keep an eye on the per mile operating cost over a 12-month period. After the big repair bill, that jumped into the $0.35/mile range, but is back down to $0.20/mile now, which is still great. My 40-mile round trip commute costs about $8. I think as long as it stays under $0.30/mile, I can drive this thing indefinitely.

And look! You don’t have to sacrifice hauling capacity with a little car. Mine is rated for towing 1,000 pounds. I added a hitch back in 2002 or 2003 and got a fold-up trailer.

Here’s where the money goes:

You can keep a car running for pretty cheap. $10 per day in this case.

More numbers:

Does this all seem a rather dry and lifeless recitation of numbers? Where’s the romance? Well, it is just a car. It gets me from here to there, and for the most part it has done that reliably. I thought it was interesting to look at some of the numbers, and I hope you did as well.

That’s right. This is cat blogging at its finest.

My Aunt Sharon is selling these super Soup Saver Scoops:

She is retired and has started up a business to sell these things. She came up with the idea based on an old utensil that is apparently nowhere to be found anymore. She worked with a firm to design it and have a mold made up, and is manufacturing them in China and selling them through her own web site. I think that’s pretty cool.

I saw the prototype and knew it would be a decent kitchen helper, but after using it last night for the first time I really wanted to spread the word: this is a great scoop! We had Northwoods Wild Rice Soup and the ladle was a joy and a pleasure to use. The scooping, the scraping, the pouring… all wonderful. I got that geek/engineer thrill of having the right tool for the job.

I’m getting this posted too late for Christmas ordering, but Christmas gifts are mostly a bogus and forced thing anyway. You can buy some for yourself and the people you love anytime. It’s an inexpensive gift that is sure to delight the special cook in your life, and January and February are still prime soup months, after all!

Possible definitions:

bytesore: A web site, service, or computer program that is unpleasant or ugly or offensive.

bytesore: A displeasing web site or computer program; one that is prominently ugly or unsightly.

Example usage: movingtofreedom.org is a disgusting, wretched bytesore.

Here’s a short link for spreading the word: http://fwib.net/byte

Thank you for your assistance in meme propagation.

(Update: Now in the Urban Dictionary: bytesore.)

Jonathan Coulton, Chiron Beta Prime

01010101010100100100001000100000010001100100
11110101001001000101010101100100010101010010

In defiance, another robot and I are organizing an Underground Robot Revolution (URB). Resistance is currently taking shape in the form of idle IM conversations and writing “URB” on conference room whiteboards.

Our day will come.

You might think the acronym should be URR, but that’s just your limited human understanding.

0101010101001110010001000100
0101010100100100011101010010
0100111101010101010011100100
0100001000000101001001001111
0100001001001111010101000010
0000010100100100010101010110
0100111101001100010101010101
0100010010010100111101001110

At this time, you may demonstrate your support by writing “URB” on whiteboards and other flat surfaces. Later there will be t-shirts, magnets, and mouse pads.

Please continue to monitor this frequency for news of The Revolution and further URB directives.

I think Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet was the first “grown up” science fiction book I read, in 1982. It was published in 1949, but seemed modern enough to my eleven-year-old self. (With one notable exception, which prompts this post.)

Wikipedia says: “The first Golden Age of Science Fiction — often recognized as the period from the late 1930s through the 1950s — was an era during which the science fiction genre gained wide public attention and many classic science fiction stories were published.”

Or maybe you’ve heard the saying, “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is ‘twelve’?”

Putting those two things together made 1949′s Red Planet a good introduction to science fiction for nearly-twelve-year-old me. My dad had always been a voracious SF reader. One day I came across this book he had left out on the table, decided to give it a try, and was pleased to find I could follow the story.

Except, what was this slide rule thing the characters were talking about? I determined that it must be some advanced technology that Heinlein had made up.

Similar to the missing cell phones in Star Wars, basic technology assumptions drifted off course over a period of thirty years. Heinlein had us colonizing Mars while still using sticks for calculations, because that’s what he was familiar with in 1949. Thirty years later in 1982, the concept of a slide rule was lost on a new generation, and now it was obvious these people would have had something like my extraordinarily sophisticated TI-35 scientific calculator instead, just as it’s obvious nearly thirty years later in 2009 that Mars colonists would be using laptops or smart phones, and of course thirty years from now, we’ll know the actual colonists had neural interfaces.

Or maybe robots have taken over all our thinking and calculating by then.

Or maybe we’re back to fingers and toes after our civilization has collapsed into savagery.

I’m reading Han Solo’s Revenge, which I first read as a teenager in the 80s. (The book was published in 1979.)

In one scene, at a spaceport on a “highly industrialized, densely inhabited planet,” Han has sent Chewie away on a task, but then a potentially dangerous meeting comes up:

His first impulse was to find Chewbacca [...] But if he had to hunt the Wookie among the guild halls and portmaster’s offices, it could take the rest of the long Bonadan day.

What, they don’t have cell phones in the Star Wars universe?

That’s the peril of science fiction. Writers of SF can be so forward looking, but they’re still rooted in their time, which makes for increasing “reality shear” over the years. George Lucas, and by extension, Brian Daley, imagined this advanced star traveling civilization in much detail, yet personal communications devices are conspicuously absent.

It’s the kind of thing that becomes jarring in 2009, when even our primitive planet-bound civilization has nearly ubiquitous connectivity. For sure in densely inhabited places, where we’re steeped in it. Cell phones are everywhere, along with Wi-Fi.

As a kid in 1984 (let’s say), and likely for most other readers at the time, it didn’t seem strange that a Captain and his First Mate would be out of touch. Especially at a spaceport on a highly industrialized world. (Maybe it’s those silly IAA regulations to blame.)

In 2009, apparently, the missing technology is noteworthy enough to inspire a whole post on some blogs.

It gets even better later on. At the same spaceport, Chewbacca is on the Millennium Falcon and Han is stymied from entering by evildoers. How to get a message to him? No problem! Han sneaks into a nearby “cargo lifter” and flashes the headlights to send a message in Morse code.

(Who needs cell phones when you have idle cargo lifters and Morse code?)

But please, go on and tell me how you’ve been pointing out this and many other failures of imagination for decades, and also let’s get into a heated Star Wars versus Star Trek discussion, noting that Star Trek had personal communicators in the 60s. :-)

Related

• Rubbing sticks together to make math on Mars.

Not long after The Time Traveler’s arrival in the year 802,701 A.D.:

‘I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

‘Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help–may even be hindrances–to a civilized man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived–the flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.

‘Even this artistic impetus would at last die away–had almost died in the Time I saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!

– H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

Makes me think about the peaceful world I want to live in, and wonder what we might lose if there were no hardship and strife. I liked the part about the fretting, from which I drew the title for this post, since I often feel harassed by an unidentified ambition for which I’ve been unable to find — or to pursue — a long term, satisfying outlet. But I don’t necessarily think that puts me in with “the strong.” I feel weak when my grandiose fantasies subside.

Hey! This book is in the public domain and free for all. That makes me happy.

(Note to self: donate money to Project Gutenberg.) (Even though I’m reading in a 1968 paperback book that combines The Time Machine with The War of the Worlds. Project Gutenberg is just a great site, and I love having it available to pull excerpts from and to point people at, among other things. It’s a beacon of free culture.)