What I Learned Today

I have a bedside lamp that does the cool off-low-medium-high cycle thing. Or did, that is. Recently, the bulb in my lamp burnt out, so I bought a replacement. When I put it in, though, it wouldn’t cycle. I could feel the faint fuzziness of the lamp registering my body’s capacitance, but the light was unmoved; it just stayed permanently on. Perplexed, I thought maybe I’d bought the wrong kind of bulb, so I bought some more. Same result. It seemed too much of a coincidence that it would stop working right when I needed a new bulb, but then I found this interesting tidbit, from a FAQ on touch lamp problems:

These are susceptible to damage from voltage surges or just plain old random failures. In addition, the current surge that often results at the instant an incandescent bulb burns out (the bright flash) may blow the thyristor in the electronics module. If the lamp is stuck on, the thyristor is probably shorted.

My thyristor is shorted!

So, what’s a thyristor? One definition:

A semiconductor used as a gate circuit. The solid state equivalent of a thyratron.

But what’s a thyratron? Wikipedia to the rescue:

A thyratron is a type of gas filled tube used as a high energy electrical switch. Triode, Tetrode and Pentode variations of the thyratron have been manufactured in the past, though most are of the triode design. Gases used include mercury vapor, xenon, neon, and (in special high-voltage applications or applications requiring very short switching times) hydrogen.

So a thyristor does the same thing, without the gases. What’s actually in a touch lamp is a triac, composed of two thyristors.

But anyway, the unfortunate upshot is that the lamp is now non-touch-sensitive. Apparently I can buy a plugin touch-sensitive box to restore that functionality, or, of course, I could just buy a new lamp. And track its usage so I can estimate when the bulb is about to die and swap it before the cataclysmic “bright flash” kills that lamp, too. Maybe a lamp with a manual switch isn’t looking so bad now.

Update (Feb. 13, 2011): I have successfully fixed the lamp! Thanks to Cakky_blue, below, who suggested exactly the right fix.

Out on a walk the other evening, I encountered this sign. It was so egregious that I was forced to whip out my cell phone and take a picture. Now this may be a common exercise for you all, but my cell phone is more like an afterthought than an appendage. I had to spend several minutes standing in the roadway while I figured out how to get the picture off the camera and up onto the Internet somewhere. Apparently, the only method on my severely crippled Bluetooth Motorola RAZR (thanks, Verizon!) is to send it to “MY PIX PLACE”. (Have you been counting the number of misspellings this post has forced me into so far?)

Once home, I slogged around the Verizon Wireless website until I finally found MY PIX PLACE, where I can turn the picture into an e-card with a teddy-bear frame, or send it to someone else’s phone, but not, of course, simply download the thing. MY PIX PLACE assures me that the picture has been stored at its “full resolution” (800×600, according to my “gallery”); it’s all there, sure, but I’m not permitted to get at it.

Stupid technology rant aside, the real reason we’re here is the content of the photo. One asks: why was “careful” left stripped of its suffix? Was there an “ly” shortage at the letter factory? Was there too little room to squeeze two more letters in? Why was “careful” given the shaft while “road” was decorated with a completely unnecessary “way”?

We may never know. For now, I’ll just amuse myself by inserting punctuation to correct the grammatical mistake and make it read just a little bit better.

DRIVE;
CAREFUL
PEDESTRIANS
MAY BE IN
ROADWAY

Inspired by a friend’s use of Latin in signing his email, I went a-browsing for some additional interesting Latin phrases. All of Latin would make this post rather more lengthy than even my own attention span, so let’s focus on phrases that start with E. Here are some interesting new ones I learned:

Latin phrases beginning with E:

• ecce homo: “Behold the man!” (apparently a Biblical reference to Pilate giving up Jesus to the hands of the people, but I can think of several other fun uses for this one)
• eheu! fugaces labuntur anni: “Alas! Our fleeting years pass away.”
• esse quam videri: “To be, rather than to seem.” (“And have you the will to be of it?”)
• eventus stultorum magister: “Fools must be taught by experience.” (Perhaps fools “must” be, but even non-fools find experience useful. Go empiricists!)
• en nukti boule (Greek, not Latin): “In the night there is counsel; sleep on it.”
• exitus acta probat: “The result justifies the deed.” (Now there’s a dangerous one…)

(thanks to sacklunch.net for the translations)

Why phrases that start with E? Well, let’s take a look at one more, which was the phrase that inspired my browsing:

ex animo: “From the heart; sincerely.”

I spent a weekend up in the San Bernardino Mountains for a Nature Knowledge Workshop sponsored by the Natural Science Section of the Los Angeles Sierra Club. We stayed in cabins, all meals included, and spent a lot of time walking around the vicinity in the company of expert naturalists. They pointed out the names of various plants, birds, animals, insects, habitats, etc., but perhaps most valuable was their willingness to answer any and all questions. These nature walks were augmented with several shorter workshops offered in parallel; so many interesting topics that it was sometimes hard to choose which one to attend.

Here are some of the tidbits I picked up during my weekend:

• “Sage” is applied to two different plant species. One is the white or purple sage (salvia) that is in the mint family, and this is the one you might use in cooking. However, in California we commonly find the Great Basin sage (artemisia) which is from the sunflower family, and you don’t want to use that one in cooking at all.
• The most common birds we saw were the Steller’s Jay, the Dark-eyed Junco, the Western Tanager, and the American Robin, which apparently is not at all related to the robins in England. We also saw sapsuckers and woodpeckers, the Northern Flicker and the Wester Wood-Peewee, and several others.
• Juvenile birds are often not much smaller than adult ones (once they’re able to fly), so size isn’t a good indicator of age. However, you can still pick out the juveniles because they have loose skin around their beaks (called a “gape” or, perhaps more technically, “gape flanges”) that is left over from sitting in the nest and begging for food from their parents.
• The understory in a riparian environment is characterized as “mesic” (wet), as opposed to the chaparral environment, which is “xeric” (dry).
• Firs have needles that occur singly; pines have needles that occur in bunches. I keep learning this one, and then somehow forgetting it. Hopefully it’ll stick this time. :)

I also attended two workshops. The first was on the geology of the San Bernardino Mountains, which actually ended up covering most of the geologic history of all of California, including the Cordillera I studied so intensely last fall. It was fun to recognize (and be reminded of) all of the crazy violent tectonic history of this state, as well as to learn some local specifics about the San Bernardinos, which I hadn’t previously visited or studied.

The second workshop was on herpetology (hurray!). The instructor brought in some lizards, some skinks, and a California Kingsnake. He offered to let us hold the snake, and I was the first to volunteer. :) Long, silky smooth, and rippling with muscle — snakes are pretty amazing creatures. However, I’m still more fond of lizards. I got some great photos of lizards on a solo hike I took.

I’m off to the mountains again this weekend!

I finished reading “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey yesterday. Wow. I wrote a brief review of the book, but what I want to focus on here are five words I learned from the book.

• diapason: an organ stop sounding a main register of flue pipes; poetic/literary: the entire compass, range, or scope of something
• panegyric: a public speech or published text in praise of someone or something (this word ably describes the book and its relationship to the desert)
• pellucid: translucently clear (from Latin ‘pellucidus’, from ‘perlucere’ = “shine through”)
• usufructuary: a person who has the right to enjoy the products of property he does not own (in Abbey’s usage, he was a usufructuary in Arches National Park, able to explore and enjoy the park although he did not own it)
• vermiculate: full of worms (this one I could guess from the “vermi” prefix) (he used it figuratively, to describe the appearance of some blobby, twisted sandstone forms — I know exactly what he means)

These might be tricky to work into an everyday usage, but I’ll see what I can do!