We have a propane heater that served us well last year when the thermocouple on the water boiler of our radiator system needed to be replaced. This would also have been handy in 2010, when we returned to an ice-cold house after a holiday in Santa Fe, where we wed in 2000 and first lived. In addition to the heater, we have a camping stove that can burn either propane or butane. However, both of these devices thread onto 1-pound propane canisters. These small bottles are exceedingly wasteful, from an environmental standpoint because the steel containers should be disposed after just a single use, as well as from a financial standpoint because one is actually paying more for the container than for the fuel itself.

Fortunately, there is a solution: 1-lb propane cylinders that have been designed and manufactured specifically to be refilled, along with a kit to connect these bottles to 20-lb tanks, which are more widely available, being a typical size for RVs and BBQ grills.

Yesterday I bought the last remaining propane refill kit from a store down in Washington, PA. This morning I went on a quest for a new, filled 20-pound tank. Here is the result of my mission:

• Home Depot has empty tanks inside the store but was out of propane. The customer service rep did not know when they would have more, and said the Sunoco across the street would have some.
• The Sunoco attendant said they were out of propane too and had no recommendations.
• The cashier at the Marathon gas station on the way home said that they did have propane but couldn’t help me because she was alone at the store. She gestured towards the beer distributor (I misheard her say “bear distributor”). Even though this is my neighborhood, I have to admit that I never knew there was a package store in the area. It just never registered because we are a teetotaling family.
• The beer distributor said they no longer carry propane. He pointed me towards the two gas stations nearby — the Marathon where I had just been, and the Sunoco (different from the one I had already visited).
• The Sunoco cashier said they didn’t carry propane and suggested the Home Depot. When I explained I had already been there, she moved her thumbs as though using a smart phone and suggested Googling propane.

I had already tried Duck Duck Go, Google, and GasBuddy — none of them could help me find current prices for propane, whether a store has current stock, or even a clear map for where it is available. I guess search engine and app developers don’t use propane, or already know where to find it? Maybe they just go to gas stations near campgrounds, or to national chains like Wal-Mart, U-Haul, or Home Depot. It seems like a ripe opportunity for a developer to gather this information, especially because propane can obviously undergo temporary local shortages. Here in the US we do produce more than enough propane to meet our needs; this is a storage and distribution problem — and maybe a little predictive modeling could solve this issue.

Anyhow, because I don’t have a smartphone, when I returned home I called U-Haul, which is also close to our house. (I don’t want to travel far with a full tank of propane in our passenger car, out of an abundance of caution.) I called U-Haul with great reluctance, because years ago I had the most horrendous experience with U-Haul in Chicago and swore that I would never never never give them my business again. I learned that they do have it in stock, and the person on the phone sounded very knowledgeable and matter-of-fact about the pricing. So I’ll return to Home Depot to buy an empty tank, and go to Marathon or U-Haul to fill it up.

Here are more widely relevant things I have learned recently about propane:

• 20-pound tanks are DOT-approved and initially certified for 12 years. Because they meet stringent government standards, the brand is irrelevant. Government FTW.
• New tanks are not purged and the air inside may contain moisture. There is some disagreement on the Internet about whether this must be done by a professional, how many cycles of purging are required, and whether this is necessary if the tank has been manufactured in the past six months.
• There are three ways to get a full tank of propane: buy a pre-filled tank, exchange an empty one, or refill an existing one. The problem with exchanging an empty one is that you are receiving an indeterminate amount of fuel — there are discussions about whether overfilling the tanks might be a safety issue because gas could be vented in hot conditions, or whether underfilling the tanks is another way for propane companies to increase their profit margins.
• In the United States, propane now comes primarily as a by-product of processing natural gas, not from refining petroleum.
• Propane is measured in pounds instead of gallons. You can determine how much propane is in a tank by using a luggage scale and subtracting the tare weight, which is stamped on the handle. A typical volume capacity for a 20-pound tank is 4.7 gallons; that is, liquid propane has a density of 4.2 pounds per gallon.
• Propane prices vary across the country. I imagine it must be relatively cheap here in western Pennsylvania, with our proximity to Marcellus Shale and nearby natural-gas processing plants. The person who answered the phone at U-Haul quoted me $3.25 per gallon, mentioning that it would cost about $15 if the tank is completely empty. That’s about 75 cents per pound.
• Meanwhile, four 1-pound containers cost $12 plus tax at Wal-Mart last year (or $16 plus tax at Home Depot yesterday), corresponding to $3 per pound. Because the Flame King refill kit cost $50 plus tax (it was only $38 at Home Depot last year) and an empty 20-pound tank at Home Depot cost $35 plus tax, the break-even point for buying these items instead of individual 1-pounders is nearly 40 pounds. While I don’t know if we will use enough propane to make this outlay economically wise, I feel better knowing that we don’t have to deal with the safe disposal of single-use tanks, that we will produce less waste metal, and that we have greater flexibility in obtaining fuel for cooking and heating.

We lived in Manhattan between Santa Fe and Pittsburgh, from 2003 to 2005, soon after 9/11. During that time, I carried various talismans in my pockets and backpack: a whistle to be heard in the midst of rubble, potassium iodide tablets to flood the thyroid if there were a dirty bomb or nuclear power plant accident, an N95 mask to protect against fine particulates, a pocket knife because sharp metal is one of the most important tools devised by humanity. I did not have a cell phone at all, even as they were becoming ubiquitous. I did carry my MetroCard and a swatch of the orange fabric used in Christo’s The Gates.

How differently I prepared for dangers during the 80s and 90s whenever I visited the city of my birth! Back then I carried mugger money along with subway tokens.

Mugger money, potassium iodide, propane.

Just in case.

Why are you dressed up today? I asked my daughter as she stood near the front door, wondering whether she was planning to go out somewhere during this time of COVID-19. It’s Culture Day, she replied, speaking of the school she attends online.

Later in the day, I expressed surprise to my wife that our daughter was wearing a Filipino dress. She thinks it looks cottagecore, she replied. I had no idea what that was. It’s an aesthetic, you need to see pictures. Look it up. So I did.

Foxfire ≠ Firefox

Cottagecore is like the Foxfire movement back in the Seventies, I offered, referring to the series of books devoted to self-sufficiency, a rejection of over-reliance on technology. Foxfire is tangled in my childhood comprehension with hippie and folk culture, as well as with popular culture through TV shows like Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons. Wikipedia characterizes cottagecore as a back-to-the-land movement.

The Little House books depict Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life from 1870 to 1894; the first book was published in 1932; the television adaptation premiered in 1974. The Waltons television series depicts life in rural Virginia starting in 1933; the series first aired in 1971. Cottagecore, with its emphasis on traditional skills, became popular here in 2020 during quarantine, according to Google Trends:

 

Before these works of literary, broadcast, or social media, there were the Transcendentalists, with their emphasis on the goodness of nature. The Transcendentalist Club held its first meeting in 1836.

It seems the American back-to-land movement revives in popularity about every generation and a half, with a period of forty to fifty years. Everything old is new again.

This morning I received this email message from Senator Pat Toomey:

I Will Vote to Confirm Judge Barrett

This week, I had the pleasure to meet with Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Our meeting, along with her record and recent confirmation hearing, affirmed for me that Judge Barrett clearly has the intellect, experience, character, and judicial philosophy needed to be an outstanding Supreme Court justice.

Importantly, Judge Barrett reiterated to me her strong belief that the proper role of a judge is to apply the law, including the U.S. Constitution, as written, and not to serve as an unelected super legislator who imposes one’s preferred policy outcomes.

Given Judge Barrett’s stellar record and credentials, her nomination is deserving of overwhelming bipartisan support. It is unfortunate that most Democratic senators rejected her nomination from the start and even refused to meet with her. Nonetheless, I look forward to supporting Judge Barrett’s successful confirmation.

Read more about my decision in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

I replied:

Confirmation Bias

I received your message this morning that you intend to vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court.

Shame on you.

[In an earlier message] You claim to care for the will of the voters, who indirectly determine the Supreme Court by electing the President, who nominates justices, and the Senate, who confirms them. For this exact reason, you resisted reviewing Garland’s nomiation for eight *months*.

You are now ram-rodding this nominee through a hasty confirmation process, knowing full well that the Republican party could lose both the Presidential and the Senate elections in eight *days*. Indeed, it is only by accident of the six-year election cycle of Senators across 50 states that the Republican party retained control over the Senate in 2018; you surely witnessed how the party lost the House two years ago.

As for your praise of Barrett’s orignalist views, judicial activism has an important role in our history: Brown v. Board of Education. Roe v. Wade. Do you hope that the Supreme Court will review and overturn these monumental precendents, or that the court should not interpret the Constitution in light of any societal changes since the 18th century?

If you truly believed in listening to the citizens of our nation as well as in the strength of your position, you would wait until after the election. What is your hurry, sir? Surely you recognize this process is hasty. Why the big rush? I welcome a sincere answer.

Our country is going to pay the price for your planned malfeasance. I hope you see the error of this path.

May God have mercy on your soul.

When I was growing up, I looked forward to the mail. Sometimes we would have outgoing letters, so I could tell that the mail had arrived from the living room window because the flag was down. But more often I would walk to and from the mailbox. I didn’t get mail often, even collecting First Day Covers and writing famous people for their autographs. I subscribed during my childhood to Highlights, Cricket, Boys’ Life, Chess Life, Linn’s Stamp News, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, National Geographic World. Every month the Ontario Science Centre would send their newsletter.

I still do look forward to the mail whenever I have ordered something. But more often than not, the mail and the email and the phone calls I receive are an annoyance, distracting me from the other work I should be doing, which also arrives by these same methods (especially email).

People who don’t know me well are surprised that I don’t have a smart phone, that I don’t text, that I have disabled voicemail on my flip phone. Those are not for me — the world already has enough ways to reach me. 

The children are still delighted when they receive magazines or personal mail. It’s a rare treat to have something delivered to them. It’s a sign that the rest of the world recognizes their existence, separate from everyone who happens to live at the same address.

When did this change?

I have been asking my daughter what she wants for her birthday. Today we received her wish list: non-profit organizations we could support; an appeal to buy from small companies instead of big businesses; and finally some items that would advance her comfort, learning, and making.

I’ve been reflecting on her list this morning, before and after talking with her about it. I wonder why she stated a preference for smaller companies. After all, the two larger businesses that she named (Amazon and Walmart) were once small, even within my own lifetime. While Walmart’s early origins go back to my birth, I was not aware of this store until they opened a store in my Ohio hometown sometime in the 1980s after I left for college; I placed my first order on Amazon in 1996 when I was developing a course on the chemistry of food and cooking. I remember my parents expressing enthusiasm for the low prices and variety of goods at Walmart, and I myself was dazzled by the pricing and selection of books on Amazon.

Shouldn’t we be happy when small businesses such as these are successful and grow?

For me, the answer is: it depends. Both Amazon and Walmart have grown spectacularly not because they offer low prices and offer a broad selection, but also because it is easy to buy from them (up to 24 hours), delivery is fast, and it is easy to find products. This depends upon a vast distribution and transportation network. On top of that, Amazon has built a community of reviewers who share their opinions with other customers; offers digital services including hosting, entertainment media, and seller platforms; and can easily leverage all of this data to nudge users towards additional purchases. Collectively, all of these traits provide Amazon a strong competitive advantage over other retailers — and the leviathan only becomes more knowledgeable and stronger with every purchase, every view, every click. I purchase much more from Amazon now than I did 24 years ago. As I do, Amazon learns more about my preferences, as well as others’, and serves us better over time, which in turn makes me even more likely to turn there for my purchases.

What’s not to like about this cycle?

First, there is the danger of too much power being divested to one entity, even to one person (Jeff Bezos). With control over vast wealth, Bezos and his descendants can control what people see and do not see, hear and do not hear, eat and do not eat.

Second, the company influences not only its customers, but also its employees — and therefore the working conditions of many citizens. This also has an impact on the culture and the benefits that other workers experience across the country. Depending on the laws of the land, this can in turn lead to vast inequities in wealth distribution, which are unhealthy for a nation, because citizens do not share enough common experiences.

Third, there is the very real question of how much is enough. After all, growth is not always identical to success: cancer is abnormal cell growth. Although it’s been awhile since I’ve read John Bogle’s book, I recall he observes that some appetites (such as for food) have physical limits. Not so, with appetites for money, power, and adulation.

Fourth, it is more difficult to maintain a culture of quality customer service. As a gigantic company takes a life of its own, it can afford to lose a few customers due to bad service.

Fifth, a large company develops many mechanisms to dwarf upstarts who would challenge it. This drowns out alternate voices, depriving the public of opportunities to shop the world (and shape the world) in innovative ways.

On Sunday I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which I borrowed from the Homewood Library, a place that Mr. Rogers visited during one episode.

The places he visited in his neighborhood were often located around Pittsburgh; the WQED studio is just a couple of blocks away from my office on campus.

The film itself is puzzling and marvelous, continuing to resonate with me. One YouTube commenter wrote an incisive one-line review:

This movie isn’t a bio pic. It’s a feature-length episode of the tv show—for adults.

Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers. Matthew Rhys, whose work I admired on The Americans, plays the skeptical Lloyd Vogel. I am using the word play here in the most powerful sense, in the sense of how a child at play is performing the most important task to the child at that moment: deeply immersed in being creative while exploring thoughts and emotions. Making and believing.

One lesson of the film is to remind ourselves that it is important to listen when you are with someone else, to attend with your whole heart. Learn from the other person. When with a child, remember what it was like to be a child.

The director Marielle Heller employs magical realism, sometimes in jarring moments, as when we first see a photograph of Lloyd Vogel. The film invites us to reflect on the unity of Fred Rogers’ public persona and his private life, the studio set and the living room, actual buildings and tiny models, the televised neighborhood and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, the film on screen and viewers like us, ourselves and our better selves. It does not merely bridge these as though they are divided — it shows how they belong together.

We also come to realize Mr. Rogers is special in part because he is supported by the love of those around him. He is possible because of them; they are possible because of him.

…

On Tuesday I watched the Presidential Debate. It is easy to observe how the words and emotions entering our homes that night displayed a horrifying absence of kindness. It was like staring into the void. My stomach unknotted when it was over.

…

On Wednesday, yesterday, I received the most lovely email message. It concerned a pain and confusion that someone felt — a confusion and pain that I share. (I am being vague here to preserve privacy.)

I asked friends for advice on how I should respond. They said that I would respond graciously and thoughtfully, as always. I am still not sure how to do that, in this particular situation. I know I am not always gracious and thoughtful — why would my friends believe otherwise?

The film provides a lesson here too. Mr. Rogers was in many ways a living saint. But his empathy required an incredible amount of practice and care on his part. The film does not dwell on this, appropriately so. Yet the message is clear: being a better person requires mindfulness towards one’s conduct, to recognize that differences can be celebrated because we are all neighbors in this together.

When we talk about the need to attract and support a more diverse population within the university, I often hear others use the metaphor of the pipeline. I catch myself sometimes using this language too. The idea is that we want to increase diversity among the faculty, who come from graduate programs that need to become more diverse, who in turn come from undergraduate colleges, high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools that need to prepare a greater number of diverse students for the next stage in education.

One problem with this way of thinking is that it locates most of the blame and responsibility outside the university. Woe are we, goes the story that our own undergraduate admission office presented at the BOND (Building Our Network of Diversity) luncheon a few years ago, the number of underrepresented minorities graduating each year with high SAT scores is small, and some peer institutions offer them larger scholarships and greater name recognition. There is little we can do about this, except raise more money.

So much is broken with this attitude. Not the need for more scholarship funding: I certainly do not deny that. But an obsession with US News & World Report college rankings leads to tunnel vision. High standardized test scores are an important metric to the university’s admission office because they have been a significant factor (7.75%) in determining rankings.

Until last year, the admission office here firmly resisted any notion of making standardized tests optional. I know: I asked. Only after they saw the writing on the wall — that an increasing number of other institutions were abandoning the test requirement — did they begin to reconsider their position. Of course they framed themselves as prophets, enlightening the rest of the university.

This hyperfocus on high test scores even contaminated the summer pre-college programs here, until the academic leaders revolted and extricated the undergraduate admission office from the process. The pre-college programs can now finally admit a more diverse population, allowing them to more fully demonstrate students’ abilities to succeed in our college curriculum, despite low test scores.

The resistance towards increasing the diversity of undergraduate and high-school students at our university is not merely a risk-averse attitude. The conservatism that festers the admission office stems from an attitude of white man’s burden. Indeed, there have been only two people leading the admission office here in the past five decades, and the person being groomed for the position is cut from the same cloth. Provosts and presidents, deans and professors, all of them come and go, so the admission office takes credit for transforming the campus from a regional institution to an international university. Meanwhile, other staff members leave the admission office, dissatisfied with the lack of commitment and vision towards diversity.

The problem with the pipeline metaphor is that it treats individuals as masses, as though they are fluids to be confined and diverted. The pipeline metaphor objectifies our fellow human beings, as though they were part of a manufacturing process.

I suppose it is slightly better than to bottle students up, to contain them, to restrict them to living in dormitories that are separate but equal.

Some days I hope for a mighty river to wash the plain, to carry away the gatekeepers. But I know which voices whisper in which ears and where the power lies. I am not holding my breath.

The Story of The Story of Ferdinand

Once upon a time in New York City there was a little boy and his name was William. More than anything, he loved to read. One of his favorite illustrated books, which he enjoyed reading with his mother as well as on his own, was The Story of Ferdinand the Bull. In this story, Ferdinand liked to just sit quietly and smell the flowers. He had no interest in butting heads with the other young bulls or in going to Madrid to fight matadors.

Many summers later, William was learning Castilian, the national language of Spain. He had visited Spain the previous winter, including Madrid, Toledo, cities and towns around Andalusia, and Barcelona. While asking a question about how the Spanish language indicates two noun phrases are in apposition, he wrote an example with the words mi toro Ferdinand.

It had been decades since William had read The Story of Ferdinand the Bull, because he had not read it with his own children, so he decided to revisit the book. He started with the Wikipedia article, where he learned this little book was first published in 1936 and became immensely popular in the US among adults as well as children, outselling Gone with the Wind and topping bestseller lists. William also learned the story was banned in Spain during his childhood because it was considered a pacifist book against the Franco regime, as well as in Germany because Hitler considered it democratic propaganda. He learned the book drew the admiration of Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. It compelled Ernest Hemingway, that inveterate admirer of bullfighting, to write his own children’s story in response. He realized that the illustrations included the iconic Puente Nueve spanning Ronda, the town where Hemingway spent many summers and which William and his family had visited last January.

It had also been decades since William saw the short Disney film, which won the 1938 Oscar for Best Animated Short. Watching it again, he winced at the narrator’s imitation of a Spanish accent, as well as the clichéd drawings of the women (who all looked like Snow White) and the matador (depicted as a fool). But he was still pleased to see the bridge in Ronda, adjacent to the parador where he and his family had stayed.

William also learned that another film adaptation had been made in 2017. While apprehensive about the padding necessary to stretch this simple tale into a full-length feature, he requested a DVD from his local library, which he had not visited in five months because of COVID-19.

COVID-19 is the disease that ravaged New York City, coursed across Spain, and shuttered libraries everywhere, not only at home. The closures of these public space disturbed William. Wherever they traveled, he and his family sought refuge among the stacks. On their family vacations in the last three years, they had visited libraries in Spain, Hong Kong, Ohio, Massachusetts, California, Utah, and Iceland. This summer, for the first time in memory, they are homebound.

Millions of children are homebound too. Searching now for videos of “ferdinand the bull”, there are many read-aloud videos made since last March by librarians, teachers, and other book lovers. These are lovely, sharing the pleasure of reading with children whose caregivers may also be home but are occupied. Still, these videos are not as intimate as two people reading in the same room together: pointing at letters and pictures, taking turns, wondering aloud about the thoughts and relationships of the characters, looking at each other, laughing with each other, making up back stories, admiring the art, flipping back to remind themselves of something that happened earlier — traveling through at their own pace, making it their own, reading as an activity.

I’ve been playing the Coda EDC flute for a couple of weeks. Here is the instrument with its inventor, Karl Ahrens.

This vessel flute, closely related to the ocarina, is marvelously durable and portable, perfect for Everyday Carry. Beyond being literally easy to bring, it’s also easy to pick up, particularly for anyone with a musical background. The fingering for diatonic notes is linear and remains constant across both full octaves.

The Coda is a joy to play and, more significantly, a joy to learn to play. Because it is in the key of C, spans more than two octaves starting with C4, and includes the entire chromatic scale of sharps and flats, there is a world of sheet music available. I have no prior experience with woodwind instruments, so at times I struggle with embouchure, especially because it is different for the two side-by-side mouth pieces. I also need to make sure the pads of my fingers cover the holes adequately. Finally, I am working on controlling the flow of my breath: to blow steadily in order to hit the right note and prevent the tone from wobbling, yet to vary the strength of my exhalation across notes as more or fewer holes are open. 

However, these challenges in technique are manageable, as well as fulfilling to confront. I can feel when the muscles in my face get a good workout. Likewise, my fingers are becoming stronger and I am learning how to position them better; these demands are especially gratifying for my left hand, serving as physical therapy for the internal scarring and tightness I suffered from a hard fall I took earlier this summer. Finally, I love being aware of my breath, even more at my current level than when I am scuba diving. My lungs feel good after I play.

Meanwhile, I am sounding better as I progress through the lessons on the Coda website, the songs in the included workbook (I am especially fond of “Silent Night” and “Scarborough Fair”), and melodies from a Beatles fake book I purchased last week. It is satisfying to make music and gratifying to hear my progress. I think that is just one of the reasons people like to make food (that is, if they like to program or cook at all): clear and immediate feedback. Writing computer code, while much less sensory, has this quality too.

…

I taught myself to code with BASIC on the TRS-80 (“trash eighty'”) during high school, when programs were stored on the same cassette tapes we used to play music. A bit later in college I learned PL/C and kept my programs on 8-inch floppies. In grad school I programmed mostly in FORTRAN and backed up on TK50 cartridges. These computer languages are still in use in some form, although they are no longer state of the art. The hardware storage technologies are, of course, long obsolete.

These days I don’t code much at all. Still, I find it entertaining to work on similar problems by playing programming games. Recently I began while True: learn() , which is giving me a better understanding of machine learning as well as a tiny taste of visual programming. In that game I have progressed far enough in the timeline to begin using genetic algorithms, which in real life I first encountered twenty-eight summers ago at the Santa Fe Institute immediately after grad school. (As a graduate student, I handled my own multi-variable optimization problems with simulated annealing and Monte Carlo simulations.)

I’ve also been rehashing the problems in 7 Billion Humans. a game that focuses on parallel computing, a concept I initially learned while working on Cray supercomputers during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Human Resource Machine, by the same game developer, is more focused on low-level, assembly-like programming, the same highly constrained code used in classic HP calculators, the same tightly succinct code that got twelve astronauts to the surface of the Moon. 

It’s wonderful to make music on the Coda (as well as on my guilele) and to code in computer languages (as well as learn human languages). In areas such as these, the immediate result tell the tale of how well I am doing. In other aspects of life, it’s more difficult to connect intent and result; head and tail are cloven.