What I Learned Today

Last year, I bought some solar-powered garden lights and put them along my driveway to make it easier (and more welcoming) to follow the driveway to my house. I was very pleased with the little spots of light marking the edge of the driveway. Then I kept finding two of them knocked over… with scrape/gnawing marks on them. The top part of one disappeared entirely. These had plastic tops, and maybe weren’t as durable, but it was weird to have a piece just disappear. What animal would want it? But what human would take just the top of one light? The two affected lights were under a tree, and squirrels maybe jumped onto them? My best hypothesis was that the squirrels thought they were some kind of bird feeder and hoped there were seeds inside the glass. I finally relocated them to the front of the house and bought metal ones to replace along the driveway. Neither set has suffered further attacks.

Recently I was doing some yard work, and I found the missing top, buried in leaves! But it just raised more questions. Because something spent some serious time and effort extracting just the solar panel. See below an undamaged top (left) and the one I found (right):

You can click to enlarge. It looks like dedicated… gnawing, to me. A human would have used a tool – or just taken the whole top with them (why dig out the solar panel and then leave the shell?).

The back side is equally weird, with the rechargeable battery and its cover removed. A human would have opened the cover with their fingers. Instead, whatever took this battery dug/gnawed it out.

This no longer looks like someone thought it was a bird feeder.

So I’m standing here with this chewed-up solar light and I’m wondering just what kind of squirrel is hungry for this technology. Or am I living next to the rats of NIMH? Help?

Before text-to-speech, there was the optophone. It scans the letters in a text and converts them into chords that represent the visual shape of the letter. Instead of hearing someone speak the text, you hear what the text looks like.

This invention was published in Nature in 1914 (!). (By the way, there’s a bit of delicious irony in the disclaimer attached to the 1914 article in its current digital form: “This text was harvested from a scanned image of the original document using optical character recognition (OCR) software. As such, it may contain errors.”) You can access a PDF scan of the original paper for the full details, including the claim that the device “should, with some practice, enable totally blind persons to read ordinary books and newspapers through the sense of hearing.”

The device conducts a horizontal scan, with 8 “dots” moving in parallel across the letters. Each dot is assigned to a different tone. With no input (totally white background) all the dot-tones are active. When a dot crosses a dark region (text), its tone disappears, so the sound changes. I think they must have inverted this plan later, to turn on the sound when a dark part appears, based on the examples.

With practice, in theory you can learn to “read” words by their tonal patterns. Give it a try! This is the optophone “reading” the letters f, i, k, j, p, q, r, and z:

Not super harmonic, but I can see that it’s possible to distinguish letters. However, it’s a slow way to read, even after practice, which led to the development of more “compressed” versions. In general, the goal wasn’t necessarily efficiency, though – it was an attempt to make available the large volume of existing printed matter to those who could not see, without requiring a translation to e.g. Braille first. Neat invention!

Morse code just got 10 times cooler – or maybe just 10 times easier to learn!

A few years ago, I stumbled on the mind-blowing binary tree version of Morse code. I was so excited about this that I downloaded a “learn Morse code” app on my phone and started practicing it, gradually working up to faster comprehension speeds. But then I got distracted by some other shiny thing and stopped practicing and Morse code went dormant in my brain.

Two days ago I re-encountered it in this amazing video by the always impressive Nelson Dellis:

Nelson gives us mnemonics for learning Morse code. This is absolutely BRILLIANT since Morse code is already audible. :) After watching his video exactly *once*, I already know Morse code for my name and can recall it with negligible effort:

-.- .. .-. ..

(mnemonic: KAN-ga-ROO i-bid ro-TA-tion i-bid)

*and* I discovered a beautiful symmetry in my Morse name!

I’m truly impressed by how quickly and easily this mnemonic sunk in. Nelson, you rock!

Yesterday, it actually rained! So I got to use the long-neglected windshield wipers on my Chevy Volt. They have options that include OFF, INT (intermittent), LO, and HI:

“Intermittent” is the tricky one. There are five options shown by the horizontal white bars. Do they indicate how frequently the wipes happen? Or do they indicate the delay between wipes? Effectively, in which direction does the scale increase? I can never remember this, so every time I end up trying out different settings to re-learn how to use my wipers. In this case, a bigger white bar (bottom) means more frequent wipes, which is the reverse of the order implied by “HI” being on top.

And what’s up with the exponential growth implied by the white bars? Is that real?

As Francis Bacon might have said, “When in doubt, collect data.”

I timed the delay between wipes for each of the five settings. And here’s what I found:

If we invert this to report wiping frequency in number of wipes per minute:

So, nope, the labels on the control do not reflect actual frequency. I’ve been reading Edward Tufte’s book titled The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and this would be a perfect example of what he calls graphics without integrity. One of his principles:

“The representation of numbers should be directly proportional to the numerical quantities represented.”

Boo, Chevrolet designers! And especially for inverting the order with respect to the “LO” and “HI” markings.

Recently I discovered a new service offered by the Post Office called Informed Delivery. Once you sign up, the Post Office sends you a daily email around 8 a.m. that contains a PICTURE of each piece of mail that they plan to deliver to you later that day. It’s like getting to peek inside your mailbox from afar… no, it’s like peeking into the FUTURE of your mailbox, from afar!

My understanding is that this service came about because the Post Office already scans each piece of item for routing, so why not share the pictures with the recipients.

Why not indeed? I immediately had to wonder who would request this service. Maybe it’s for folks who suspect that mail is being stolen out of their mailboxes? Or just for those of us with an impatient streak?

Well, having signed up myself, I can now report on my experience. First there’s the signup process. Wow, that was onerous! In theory, you can verify your identity online. In practice, I apparently failed at least one security question (these are like the ones you have to answer to get a credit report, not questions you selected yourself) and then had to wait 72 hours (that’s three days) to try again.

On my next try, I failed again.

For those of us unable to authenticate online, you can do it in person at a participating post office. It’s not enough to show up with id; you also need a QR code that they email to you but mysteriously won’t display in my iPhone mail reader. (The message helpfully suggests that if the code won’t display, print it out instead.) Fortunately, doing a “save all images” from the message meant that the QR code plus 6 other doodads ended up in my Photos and I was able to get properly scanned and verified.

Now I get a mailbox email every morning! It’s great fun. And yet… it also takes a bit of the fun out of the evening ritual of opening the mailbox, not knowing what you’ll find. It remains to be seen whether I’ll continue the service or revert back to surprise mode. :)