@ sign

I heard on the radio that the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in NY acquired the @ sign for its department of architecture and design as a great example of modern design. The @ sign is of course ubiquitous today, with e-mail taking a role of ever-increasing importance as a means of communication.

The surprising news however is this is not a new symbol - it was being used since the middle ages to signify the preposition "at" while using fewer pen strokes. Venetian and Portuguese merchants in the 17th century used the symbol to signify "unit price". In the 20th century it was being used by accountants and had found its way into the teletype keyboard when it was "discovered" by Ray Tomlinson (a computer scientist) in 1971. He had been contracted by the US government and was working on what would eventually become e-mail. He used the @ symbol to make the e-mail address shorter and boosted this once-obscure symbol into modern day consciousness.

Mail

The US Post Office is swimming in red ink.
Repeated postage price hikes over the last few years have not managed to bring a balance to the equation and it is now facing budget deficits approaching $4B.
Meanwhile, the amount of mail in the system is decreasing, as people have switched to electronic delivery of documents and are using online tools such as e-banking.

One approach being considered is to eliminate Saturday mail delivery.
I mention this because it is one of the most obvious differences when I compare my mail experiences in the US vs. say in Greece.

Eliminating Saturday mail delivery may be slightly less convenient, however it will bring the experiences of people in the US closer to those of people in other parts of the world.
It will also save a bunch of money and will actually provide the Post Office with a smaller carbon footprint.
I think I can live with that.

Water II

Water is a strange and marvelous substance. It is an amazingly powerful solvent and scientists tell us that life on Earth is due to the existence of this simple molecule in wide abundance on this planet. We humans are made up of about 70% water and depend on water for our survival, but too much water can lead to various catastrophes, such as floods for example (see my previous post titled "Water" or today's news about the Red river flooding).

Is Global Warming real?
If so, we may see a dramatic change in the Earth's shorelines during our lifetimes, due to rising sea-levels, fueled by the melting of ice. This might also be explained as the release of many, many water molecules which were previously kept frozen in ice and "out of circulation" so to speak.

Futurists tell us that as the global population continues to grow, clean water will be in short supply at some point in the future. Water conservation efforts are under way all over the US and the days when a large, lush, dark green lawn was a highly desirable status symbol may soon be behind us (and I for one, will not complain about that).

As I take another sip of water from my glass, marveling at its clean taste, I wonder where the various water molecules in that glass of water may have been since they were created. As Lawrence Krauss describes in his book Atom:
"... It (an oxygen atom located in a water molecule) could have been in a drop of sweat dripping from Michael Jordan's nose as he leapt for a basketball in the final game of his career, or in a large wave that is about to strike land after traveling 4,000 miles through the Pacific Ocean."
It could just as easily have coursed through the veins of a famous person - or more likely, if you embrace the laws of probability - those of one of the many, many types of insects that roam this Earth.

Wherever the molecules of water may have been in the past, I hope all of us can aspire to maintain a supply of abundant, clean water for generations to come.

Water

The weekend came and is (almost) gone, the cold rain keeps falling, but the flooding that was widely expected seems to have spared us.

The record-breaking snowfall from the last few weeks has finally melted and the landscape is no longer a monochromatic white.
The cleanup is ongoing. In my yard today I was trudging through the cold mud, collecting the large branches that had been splintered-off the trees by the massive weight of the snow we received. I cut them into meter-long pieces and bundled them together at the curb, so the trash collectors will pick them up (if you don't make it easy for them, they may just leave them there).

Pittsburgh is, among other things, called the city of three rivers, since the Allegheny and the Monongahela meet right by downtown Pittsburgh to form the Ohio river. Well, the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers are each fed by all the snowmelt from the region and each is at - or near - flood stage. Add to this the fact that we have been experiencing a steady rainfall since Friday night, which of course adds to the water load on the rivers, and you can understand why our mayor declared a state of emergency for the city on Friday. He may, at 30 years old, be one of the youngest mayors of a major American city, however he seems to have a team of wise advisers to give him guidance.

It appears then, that the region managed to avoid any major flooding.
Many people who live in flood-prone areas will breathe a sigh of relief.
Those who spent hours preparing for a potential invasion of angry water can now stand-down.
The state of emergency should be lifted soon.
Better to have been safe than sorry they will say.

Fix It!

I came across this website called SeeClickFix that proposes a radical concept: allow people to document non-emergency problems in their community and have those problems reported to the authorities that can take care of them.

With the proliferation of camera-equipped and GPS-enabled smartphones, the concept is simple:
- download the SeeClickFix application for your smartphone
- when you see a problem, open the application, snap a picture and it is Geo-tagged and e-mailed to the appropriate city authority for the location where the picture was taken
- check the website and see how many complaints are received for the same problem and how soon it is fixed

What types of problems are people reporting?
It started with potholes in the streets - a problem we are very familiar with here in Pittsburgh after the snowplows try to clear the streets of snow - and has progressed to anything people find offensive: garbage, graffiti, damaged streetlights, etc.

This tool gives citizens a means of quickly highlighting what bothers them and it also allows city departments to rapidly get a feeling for what the citizens find most offensive. In other words it is a "win-win" situation in my mind: citizens get engaged and city planners focus their limited resources on what bothers citizens the most - what a concept!

Technological challenge

When we moved to Pittsburgh a decade ago, we decided to get Dish Network (satellite TV), due to the extremely poor reception of "over-the-air" TV here (many hills and valleys). The receiver dish is not large (maybe 40 cm diameter), however it needs to have an unobstructed view of a certain part of the sky, where the transmitting satellite is located in geosynchronous orbit.

The installer attached the dish to the side of the house. He failed to notice a young fir tree in a landscaped area however, which was located close to the line-of-sight of the receiver. As the tree grew over the next few years, it's branches spread out and soon encroached on the dish's line-of-sight to the satellite, thus the signal was lost and we also lost TV reception.

When we called the repair crew, they decided to re-locate the satellite dish onto the house's roof, where it would have an unobstructed view of the sky. It was a very difficult climb up to the roof, but the installer insisted it was the best option. Things worked great up until the latest mega-blizzard (Snowpocalypse as some have called it) that we experienced in early February. The roof was covered with many inches of snow and the snow was so deep, that it also managed to cover at least half of the satellite dish - no satellite signal meant no TV reception was possible. We waited a couple of days for the snow to melt, however it just kept snowing and piling more and more snow on the roof. We resorted to listening to the radio - just like in the old days - but it soon got "old".

With the transition to digital TV all across the US on June 12, 2009, even if we could manage to somehow "find" a weak TV signal with an antenna, we would still need to get the required digital converter box to be able to watch TV. After 10 days without TV, we decided to call the service crew. They arrived and told us the best option was to relocate the satellite antenna somewhere where it would both have an unobstructed view of the sky and where it would be within relatively easy reach, in case we needed to clean snow and ice deposited by some future storm off of it. Thus it was relocated onto the side of the house and we are keeping our fingers crossed the third time will be the charm and we will not need to relocate it again.

Snow

Have you heard the latest 4-letter word?
It is spelled S-N-O-W and I'm hearing more and more people in this area who are disgusted by it.

Groundhog Day was Feb. 2 and unfortunately Punxsutawney Phil (the very rotund prognosticator groundhog) saw his shadow that morning, which according to lore means we can expect six more weeks of Winter.

The Pittsburgh area got hit with around 2 feet (60 cm) of snow between Feb. 5 and 6.
Then we received another 8 inches (20 cm) of snow on Feb. 9 and 10.
It has been a week since then and every day we get a bit more snow - sometimes a dusting, sometimes an inch or two (5 cm) - like this morning for example.
My morning routine now is to shovel the driveway, clear the snow off the cars and then carefully negotiate the sloppy roadways to and from work (this morning's commute was twice as long as it normally takes).

Meanwhile our temperature has not been above freezing since late January.
All this snow is not going away - it is just getting piled on top of the older snow and the snowbanks are getting quite large.

The landscape is white and "cabin fever" is very real - it is palpable in this area.
Quite a few folks are planning getaways to warmer places - meanwhile those of us who are still here eagerly await the coming of Spring.

Forecast for tomorrow ... more snow.