Category: Making

Projects that make or build something.

Post #2103: This and that.

 

Well,

a)  this is a blog, after all, and

b) if the President can flip flop daily on tariffs, then

c) it’s hard to see the shame in having a mere blog post that wanders a bit.

1:  AI replacement theory

1: Every human job that can be replaced by AI will be.

2: Every human job that requires speech and reasoning alone is at immediate risk of being replaced by AI.

3: All other human occupations will be condensed to the portions that can’t feasibly be replaced by AI.

 

These are laws of economics, not computer science.  New technologies have been doing this sort of thing since the start of the industrial revolution.  There’s nothing about this that’s entirely unique to AI.

This time, instead of technology making your biceps obsolete, now it’s making your brain obsolete.  The most important difference between the AI revolution and what has gone before is that this time, they’re coming for my job.

I just can’t quite get my big brain around the fact that my big brain is obsolete.

It’s going to take me a while — like a few posts — to work out the ramifications of that, to my own satisfaction.

If nothing else, if this does what I think it’s going to do, to “knowledge workers” generically, that’s got to be nothing but bad news for the real estate market here in Northern Virginia.  Pile on a dip in Federal employment, and, as I live here, I should pay attention to what’s happening with AI.

Even though I’d much rather not.

 

2: My garden is a mess

Yonder it sits, as of late fall of last year (left), and as of about 5 minutes ago (right).

In theory, this should be some sort of planned operation.  E.g., I want to grow such-and-such, in this-and-so quantity.  And so on.

In practice, I can’t even get that far.

Instead, this has turned into a game of fixing the worst errors, then seeing what’s left.

First, I need to get the sun-rotting plastic out of my garden, and disposed of.  But, as I (intentionally!) made the raised beds by recycling plastic coroplast campaign signs, removing those plastic sides effectively destroys all the existing raised beds. 

But, second, I always intended these beds to be temporary, and, ultimately, I figured the dirt would fill some of the worst “valleys” in my back yard.  So that’s what I’m doing — dismembering the side-less corpses of these raised beds and using the dirt to fill the largest and most annoying valleys in my lawn.

(These “valleys” are the aftermath of the installation of the ground loop for the ground source heat pump, and they continue to sink, ever-so-gently, 20 years after that was installed.  It really does not surprise me that this method (parallel trenches 6′ deep) seems relatively rarely used, compared to drilling a vertical well for the ground loop.  I already shoveled 10 tons of dirt trying to fill those valleys the first time.)

Third, I’m re-using the concrete corner blocks from the defunct low beds to build fewer, taller, better-placed raised beds.  I don’t actually want the resulting raised beds, but they are a place to store the concrete corner blocks, and most importantly, to store some of the soil that’s in the former plastic-sided beds.

Interesting calculation there. When I started these beds, I brought in 10 cubic yards of 50/50 mixed topsoil and compost.  And now, when I do the arithmetic on what’s left (bed dimensions x bed depth = volume of soil in bed), come up with about 5 cubic yards.  Which is just about exactly what I ought to have, if all the organic matter (the compost) in the original mix has rotted and so returned to being C02.  The upshot being that, at a density of about a ton per cubic yard, I’d have to shovel 5 tons of dirt, to get rid of these beds.  Not clear I’m up to that task any more.   Not clear that I’m not.

So, as stupid as it was to have to move a raised bed once, I am, in effect, moving them twice.  But the second time is largely to get rid of their dirt.  It’s a planned-life-cycle kind of thing.

And the new garden plan, such as it is, involves growing more stuff that neither the deer nor the bugs want to eat. But that my wife and I do.

That’s a very short list of crops.  That’s about as far as I’ve gotten on my garden plan for 2025.

3: Bee hotels, the final chapter begins

I am putting up my native (mason, orchard) bee hotels for the last time.  Mine are bundles of 6″ (or so) bamboo tubes, with smooth-cut ends (cut while green, or commercial pre-sanded cutoffs), with inside diameter around 3/8″ inch.  Above, I’m using Virginia clay to seal off one end of each tube.  When I have those sealed and dry to my satisfaction, those bundles of nesting tubes will be hung securely over the site of the emergence box (Post G25-001), ready for spring to commence.  And for the female mason bees to use at their convenience.  Next spring, the (now filled, hopefully) bundles of nesting tubes will have to be taken down and placed in next year’s bee emergence box.

Post #2102: How high is that helicopter? Part 1.

 

Is there an easy way to determine the altitude of a low-flying aircraft?

After looking over my options, I’m going to try an antique optical rangefinder.

I bought it on Ebay.  I’m currently waiting for it to arrive.

Background

I was awakened last night by yet another low-flying helicopter, here in the DC ‘burbs.

The noise from these ranges from merely obtrusive, to loud enough to rattle the windows.  Below is a recording of one of the several that passed overhead today, taken from my back porch.  It doesn’t quite stop conversation, but you do have to raise your voice a bit.

This is normal for the DC area.  There are a lot of military and other government high officials stationed in this area.  These folks tend to get shuffled from place to place via helicopter.  Unfortunately, one of the well-used north-south routes passes directly over the Town of Vienna.

Is it really that loud, or is flying low?

In theory, nothing should be flying below 1000′, in my area.

But in the past, that has been an issue.  I recall that, many years ago, some Vienna Town Council members complained to various authorities about noise from low-flying aircraft, and got the “minimum 1000′ for the TOV” as part of the answer.

This got me thinking about measuring a passing helicopter’s height.

(Luckily, I am hardly the first person to have had an interest in this.  Luckily, I say in hindsight, because that way, my Google inquiries would not attract undue attention from the authorities.)

Turns out, there is no good way for an amateur on the ground to measure the height of an over-flying helicopter.  At least, none that I’ve come across.

But seriously, how hard can this be.

If nothing else, think of it as a way to rule out bad pilot behavior (low flight altitude) as an explanation for a loud helicopter fly-over.  (With the obvious alternative explanation being “that was a loud helicopter”.   Which, given that these may be military aircraft, is always a possibility.)

So, are those overflights loud because they are loud aircraft, or are they loud because they’re flying well below 1000 feet?

Optical rangefinders that won’t work

First, there are “laser rangefinders”, not intrinsically different from a laser tape measure, just more oomph and maybe some specialized optics.  But first, I ain’t pointin’ no laser at no aircraft, period.  Let alone a low-flying (likely military) helicopter.  Plus, the ones available for civilian use (e.g., laser tape measure, laser golf or boating rangefinder, rangefinders for hunting big game) probably won’t work for this use anyway, owing to the small visible target.   I get the impression these laser rangefinders (e.g., for golfers) can find the range to a hillside or location on an open lawn, but they aren’t designed to find something as optically small as a helicopter flying at 1000′.

I’m also brushing aside all the military “passive-optical” (coincidence and stereoscopic) rangefinders.   These are WWII-era and earlier tech with mirrors, prisms, and such.  If nothing else, aside from having to own one (they tend to be big, to get you the best separation of the two lenses), you’d have to have the forethought to have it handy, and set up, just as the helicopter was flying by.  Plus, those are all expensive military collectibles now.

 

A vintage civilian non-laser coincidence rangefinder, via Ebay

 

Source:  Ebay.

I can vaguely recall hand-held purely optical rangefinders, from the pre-laser era.  These are the vastly smaller, and likely less accurate, analogs of military coincidence rangefinders.  But they worked the same way, using two widely-separated lenses, then measuring how much you need to move the image from one eyepiece, until it coincides with the image from the other.

I bought one on Ebay.  Above, you see a RangeMatic 1000.

This allows you to measure distances to 1000 yards, with some modest degree of accuracy.  It looks like it should be more than adequate to allow me to identify helicopters flying at 500 feet, rather than at 1000 feet.  It looks like the difference between 150 yards and 300 yards is about an eighth of a turn of the dial.

This, if it works, will give me the line-of-sight distance to the helicopter.  That only tells me the height of the helicopter if it flies directly overhead.  I’m going to need to add some sort of mounting and an inclinometer.  The line-of-sight distance, plus the angle of elevation above the horizon, should allow me to infer the height of the helicopter over ground.  (In fact, that’s easy enough that I don’t even have to look it up.  Height above ground is the sine of the angle of elevation, times the straight-line distance to the object.

Thus ends this task, until my Ebay’ed optical rangefinder shows up in the mail a few days from now.

Estimating overflight height by apparent size.

The very crudest golfing range finders work by using the height of the pin (the stick-with-flag that marks the hole).  These pins are a standard size, and the simplest golf rangefinders simply place the apparent size of the pin on a scale — the smaller it is, the further you are away from it.

Other purely optical methods seem chancy.  In theory, if I could identify the model of helicopter, I could infer distance by measuring how how big the over-flying helicopter appears.

This is more work than I care do do.

Can I determine the height of a passing helicopter, purely from its sound?

Source:  Reference BBC.  Photo by Joe Pettet-Smith

First, an interesting historical side-note.  Listening for approaching aircraft is not a new idea.   As I understand it (likely from seeing it on YouTube), in parts of Great Britain, big, cast concrete parabolic sound reflectors still stand along the coastline.  These concentrate (and effectively, amplify) incoming sound waves.  These were used to detect the sound of incoming aircraft while they were still miles offshore, prior to the implementation of radar during WWII.  Reference BBC

This is one of those weird things that is clearly possible, from first principles.  Maybe not even terribly difficult, as a one-off proof of concept.  But for which you can buy no ready-made unit.

Sound travels about one foot per millisecond.  Two microphones, 100′ apart, would therefor experience about a 100-millisecond (or one-tenth-second) difference in when they “heard” a sound at ground level.

For this approach, I’d use some microphones, some recording gear, and the speed of sound, to triangulate where a near-surface sound is coming from, based on when (precisely) that sound shows up, at microphones placed at known locations perhaps 100′ apart.

The theory is easy:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location

Start with the concept of a gunfire locator or gunshot locator.  These (typically) use a widely-distributed set of microphones to detect and locate gunshots.  Once a gunshot is detected, these use “standard triangulation methods” to estimate the direct and distance to the gunshot.

(There are crowdsourced versions of these:  https://github.com/apispoint/soter, but that seems limited to categorizing a noise as a gunshot, not pinning down the location.)

Substitute helicopter noise for gunshot, and do the math in 3-D instead of assuming location on the ground, and that’s what I’m after.  Something that will give me a fairly precise location of a helicopter flying overhead.  From the noise of it alone.  So that I may then calculate the height above ground, from that location.

In two dimensions, you only need two microphones — think, two ears — to identify the direction that a sound is coming from.  Per Wikipedia, that’s all about the lag between the time the sound hits one ear, versus the other.  To quote:

Where:

  • is the time difference in seconds,
  • is the distance between the two sensors (ears) in meters,
  • is the angle between the baseline of the sensors (ears) and the incident sound, in degrees
  • c is the speed of sound

But that only works (pins down a unique direction) if you’re working in two dimensions.  And one pair of microphones provides no clue as to distance.  Just direction.

If you work through what you do need, to pin it down in three dimensions, a minimum rig would need four microphones, arranged like the corner of a cube.  This provides a pair of microphones in each of three dimensions.  The further apart the better, as these are going to be used to estimate a helicopter height of maybe 1000′.

The rest should be math.

But this solution involves a lot of hardware, no matter how I figure it.  Four microphones or recording devices, wires to connect them to a central station, and a four-track sound recorder.

This would be a difficult and expensive solution, so I’m not going to pursue it further unless the RangeMaster 1000 fails to do the job.

Conclusion

I’ll have to wait for my antique optical rangefinder to arrive before I can bring this to a conclusion.

My belief is that a simple hand-held “antique” optical rangefinder, plus something to measure the angle of elevation, should provide all the accuracy I need to distinguish helicopters flying at or about the 1000′ ceiling, from putative “low flying” helicopters at (say) 500 feet.

My guess is that these helicopters are merely loud, not low.  But I should be able to validate that with this simple bit of equipment.

Post #2075: Eyeglass frame repair with baking soda and superglue.

 

I first tried the superglue-and-baking-soda trick back in Post #1997, where I made an expedient repair to a plastic-bodied wrist watch with a broken watch band lug.

FYI, the baking soda isn’t merely a physical filler, it interacts chemically with the superglue and cures the superglue in a completely different fashion from what would normally happen.  The result is stronger than superglue alone, and has better adherence to whatever you’re trying to glue to (reference).

When my wife snapped the plastic frame of her eyeglasses last week, that method was the first thing that came to mind.  Like the wristwatch lug, you have a tiny surface area of plastic to glue to, and yet the part has to take a lot of mechanical stress.

And, in fact, that same superglue-and-baking-soda method worked exceptionally well to hold her eyeglasses together until the replacement frames arrived.

As common sense suggests, first wash and dry both parts to clean the plastic surfaces.  (Just dish soap and water).

Then, first super-glue the plastic parts back together, to get the alignment right.  If the snap was clean, this should look good when re-assembled.  But super glue, by itself, isn’t strong enough.  Lot of leverage on this part.

And note that, for this next part, you need liquid superglue.  Gel won’t properly “wet” the baking soda.

I then added a thin layer of baking soda and super glue all around the broken plastic.  For a thin layer, just wet the plastic with superglue and quickly heap on baking soda.  Give it a few seconds to harden.  Brush off what remains loose.  Use sandpaper to smooth the surface.

Alternatively, you can build the thicker part of the patch by first laying down a thin, shaped layer of baking soda (make a “wall” of masking tape around the edge to keep the powder from spilling over), then quickly wetting it with liquid superglue.  That was shown in Post #1997, the broken watch lug post.  When fully hardened, file it down and shape it with careful use of a common (flat bastard) metal file.  Sandpaper to remove any rough bits.

 

The result is an unobtrusive and surprisingly sturdy repair.  I didn’t try to match the frame color or otherwise make it blend in.

Better than a piece of tape, for sure.

It’s now been a week, and the replacement frames have arrived.  I doubt that this repair is going to survive having the lenses pulled out of the old frames.  But it was more than good enough to hold the broken frames together, until the new frames could get here.

I believe baking-soda-and-liquid-superglue is is now my go-to method for unavoidable repairs on rigid plastics.

Post #2074: Coffee chemistry Christmas, part II: Aeropress.

 

On the path to coffee snobbery, there is no better starting place than Walmart.

That’s where I just bought a made-in-USA Aeropress single-cup coffee maker.

In the end, coffee is all about chemistry.  Chemistry and physics.   Chemistry, and physics, and ruthless efficiency … and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Continue reading Post #2074: Coffee chemistry Christmas, part II: Aeropress.

Post #2029: 20 bags of QPR, finishing the repair.

 

A geezer, a propane torch, and some flammable material.  What could possibly go wrong?

Update 12/29/2024:  No freeze-thaw damage so far.  Not on the big patch, that I treated so carefully, below.  And not on a couple of smaller patches, where I did absolutely nothing to seal the surface. 

Given that the untreated patches are surviving the winter just fine, it’s not clear that any of the stuff in this post is necessary to prevent freeze-thaw damage of surface-laid QPR asphalt patch.

Continue reading Post #2029: 20 bags of QPR, finishing the repair.

Post G24-025: Squash-off, round 1: Waltham Butternut versus Georgia Candy Roaster.

 

On today’s menu is winter squash soup, made with rich chicken broth.

Crude recipe is given below, for putting this together in well under an hour, using a pressure cooker.

More importantly, this is a taste-test of traditional butternut squash versus newcomer Georgia Candy Roaster squash.  Both of which I grew in my back yard garden this year.

My conclusion is that Georgia Candy Roaster (GCR) is not so much boastful advertising as a statement of limitations.  Boiled — as here, in this soup — it’s pale and flavorless compared to butternut squash.  I’m guessing GCR actually needs to be roasted to bring out any latent sweetness and flavor.

Alternatively, maybe I just got a bad GCR.  If the rest of them look or taste any better, I’ll come back and edit this.

In any case, the picture tells the whole story.  The butternut (left) and GCR (right) have a depth-of-flavor that matches the depth-of-color.

The Waltham butternut is a thin-skinned, thick-necked, sweet-fleshed winter squash, with deep orange flesh.  In this taste test, the boiled butternut tasted much like sweet potato, but perhaps dryer or starchier or more potato-like in texture.

The Georgia Candy Roaster is a thicker skinned, no-solid-neck, starchy-fleshed winter squash, with much lighter-colored flesh.  In this taste test, the boiled Georgia Candy Roaster tasted like potato, that is, starchy, but with no distinct flavor and no detectable sweetness.

Boiled, together, in squash soup, the mix of the two works fine.  But the GCR is little more than a bland vegetable filler in this context.  It’s definitely food, but not much more than that.

Plausibly, GCR squash is a lot better roasted.  Just plausibly, this small-and-tubby GCR was some kind of sport.  The coloring definitely matched the other GCRs.

My other observation is that the GCR has a much thicker skin than the butternut.  I certainly wasted more of it, in the peeling process, trying to pare away any green material.

Neither here nor there.  It’s food.  This year, it out-produced butternut by a fair margin, owing mostly to the large average size of the fruit.

 

Schmaltzitarian squash soup.

This dish is winter squash cooked in full-fat, un-skimmed chicken broth.

The only seasoning is salt.  The flavor comes from the squash and the chicken.  If that’s not good enough for you, perhaps consider cooking something else, before you add flavorings to this recipe.

It’s meatless in the sense that the chicken meat. used to make the broth, is reserved for a separate meal.

Elapsed time is under one hour.

You need

  • a pressure cooker
  • a few (4 to 10, say) bone-in skin-on chicken thighs
  • chopped vegetables enough to fill the pressure cooker 2/3rds full.
    • Winter squash, primarily.
    • With optional soup vegetables such as carrots or celery
  • a teaspoon of salt

Step 1A:  Pressure-cook the chicken thighs:  Elapsed time 30 minutes.

Put a modest number of chicken thighs (4 to 10, say) into a pressure cooker.  Cover (barely) with water.  Heat.  Figure on ten minutes to bring the pot up to pressure.  Cook at high pressure for 20 minutes.

Step 1B:  Cut up the vegetables.

As that’s going on, peel and cut up whatever is going into the pot.  The backbone of the soup is squash, but I added carrots and celery that needed cooking.

You want enough to fill the pressure cooker about two-thirds full.

Step 2:  Remove the chicken and excess chicken stock, if any.

Release the pressure by running the pressure cooker under a faucet.

Use a slotted spoon or similar to remove the chicken from the pot.  Put the chicken aside for a separate meal.

Remove and save any excess stock.

In this soup, you want about one unit of stock for every two units of vegetables.  So you want the pressure cooker to be about one-quarter full of chicken stock, to which you add chopped vegetables up to the two-thirds line on the pot.  Or so.

Salt to taste.  I use a teaspoon of salt for the pot of soup.

This doesn’t need any spices.  With any luck, the chicken fat and salt add just enough savoriness to make a fully-satisfying bowl of soup as-is.

Step 3:  Pressure cook vegetables for five-ish minutes.  Elapsed time around 12 minutes.

Bring the pressure-cooker back up to pressure, and cook for five or so minutes.

Depending on how hungry your are, either release the pressure immediately, or let the pressure cooker cool off for a “natural” release.  The longer it sits under pressure, the softer the vegetables get.

Step 4:  Open and eat.

If the squash is soft but not fully disintegrated, you have chosen wisely.  It is ready to eat.

If the squash has turned too soft, use a stick blender, then pretend that that’s the kind of squash soup you were after in the first place.

Post #2011: Simple, reversible center-draft oil lamp conversion to electricity.

Today I converted a couple of antique center-draft oil lamps, turning them into electric lamps.  The cost was $8 each (plus the cost of a light bulb).  It took maybe two minutes.  No modifications were necessary to the lamp.  And it’s completely reversible, if for some reason I want to burn oil in those lamps again.

If you’re not into oil lamps, you may rightly think “big deal”.  But if you look, you’ll see a lot of electrified oil lamps for sale in antique shops, and these lamps come in two flavors.  The more heinous are the DIY hatchet jobs where somebody literally drills a hole through the oil font, for the electrical cord to pass, thus making sure the oil lamp will never again hold or burn oil.  The less heinous are those where the original oil burner assembly has been removed, and replaced by a modern piece that is wired.  The original oil-burner top is inevitably lost, but those can be restored to burning oil if you can find the right original top for them.  So to get a conversion that a) doesn’t damage the lamp and b) doesn’t lose any original parts — that’s a good thing.

My only “cheat” is that I had emptied these lamps months ago, and had let the lamp oil evaporate from the wicks.  So the round wicks in these center-draft lamps were already dry and no longer smelled of lamp oil.

The key part for this oil-to-electricity conversion is a candelabra-base light socket and switch, from Lowes:

Source:  Lowes.com.

Turns out, the plug and switch will fit through the central draft tube of a Rayo oil lamp with room to spare.   Remove the flame spreader, slide that whole assembly, plug-first, down the top of the draft tube.  Let the metal prongs on the light socket lightly grip the inside of the top of the tube.  The bulb sits right where the oil flame used to be.  (Wire the flame spreader to the underside of the lamp so it can’t get lost.)

 

You need to raise up the lamp base about an eighth of an inch, to give clearance for the electrical cord, which simply runs out from under the lamp base.  Currently I’m using folded-up sheets of paper.  I’ll eventually cut a couple of nice-looking thin pieces of wood to do the job.

Choose an LED bulb with a candelabra base and amber glass, put some sort of frosted or opaque chimney or shade on the lamp, flick the switch, and you end up with a nice, clean electrical impersonation of a steadily-burning oil lamp.  Alternatively, with a different bulb, you could have the worlds classiest night-light, as night-light bulbs fit a candelabra socket.

This only works on center-draft oil lamps, not on flat-wick oil lamps.  The presence of that central draft tube is what allows you to make the conversion without butchering the lamp in the process, or having an electrical cord hang down the length of the oil lamp.  The electrical plug, at its widest, is 1 3/64″, as shown.

One final nicety is that any candelabra-based bulb will do.  If the 40-watt-equivalent LED amber-glass bulb I’m using now is too bright, or too dim, there are plenty of options available.  (Or plug a dimmer onto the end of the lamp cord and use a dim-able bulb.)

If nothing else, this highlights what LEDs have done for home lighting.  The socket and wiring are designed to take up to a 60-watt traditional incandescent bulb.  But this 40-watt-light-equivalent LED bulb draws just 4 watts, and produces a similarly reduced amount of waste heat.  The result is that the socket and wiring are vastly over-specified for the amount of heat and electrical current they actually get when used with an LED bulb.

In any case, I rarely have a DIY project go this smoothly.  I was in the process of trying to sell them on Ebay, when my wife asked why I didn’t convert them to electricity.  And that’s when I realized that, unlike flat-wick lamps that are converted to electricity, there was no need to butcher these lamps to make the conversion, as they already have a big hollow tube running right through the center of the lamp.

No muss, no fuss.  No drilling holes in antiques.  It only took one trip to the hardware store, and a couple of minute of time.  And it would take just a minute or two to remove the electrical add-on, and return these to being oil-burning lamps.

Post #2008: Pedestrian traffic counts via cheap camera.

 

It took about an hour to construct the vehicle and foot traffic counts you see here.  The hardware was an $18 Kasa camera, plus my laptop to view the resulting footage.

I let the camera film the street in front of my house.  That was not intrinsically different from (e.g.) a Ring doorbell.  (It is legal in Virginia to film anything in the public right-of-way, or anything you can view while in the public right-of-way, other than restricted areas such as military installations, as long as you don’t record conversations that you are not part of.)

I then did the simplest thing possible.  I transferred the SD card from camera to laptop, and watched the video on fast-forward.  It was like the worlds most boring, yet tense, home video.  I stopped the film when something happened, and put down tally marks.

The fastest I could comfortably watch was 16X.  Doing that, recording the events in eight hours of video took about an hour.  (The camera itself is capable of noting the passage of cars, via built-in motion detection, but would not identify passing pedestrians at the distance this was from the street.)

If nothing else, this confirms what my wife and I had both noticed, that this street is used by a lot of dog-walkers.

This is just a proof-of-concept.  Today it’s drizzly, and there’s a school holiday, so this would not be representative of typical Friday morning foot traffic.

The context is the value of sidewalk improvements in the Town of Vienna.  With rare exception, there are no counts of pedestrian traffic in any of the Town’s various studies.  (I did find one, once, but they referred to rush-hour pedestrian street crossing counts along selected corners of Maple Avenue, our main thoroughfare).

The idea being that there’s more value in putting a sidewalk where people will use it, than putting it where they won’t.  Assuming that current foot traffic along a route is a good indicator for eventual foot traffic there, once a sidewalk is built.  (There could be exceptions to that.  But in the main, I think that’s right.)

And that, for planning purposes, you’d like to have some idea of what they’re using a particular route for.

There are currently at least two ways to get pedestrian count data on (e.g.) suburban side-streets that do not have traffic lights.  Other than the old-fashioned approach of having somebody sit by the street and count passers-by.

One is to use cell-phone data, because many cell phones track and report their user’s location on a flow basis, and that information is sold commercially.  Courtesy of the improved accuracy of GPS, data vendors can now tell you (e.g.) how long the average customer walks around a store, based on how long their cell phones linger there.

(I am not sure that this tracking is entirely “voluntary” or not.  That is, did you download an app that, had you bothered to scrutinize the dozens of pages of fine print before clicking “ACCEPT”, would have revealed that you gave that app the right to collection and transmit your location to some central source?  Or, just as plausibly, if you don’t manage to turn off every blessed way that your phone can track you, then somebody’s picking up your location on a flow basis, you just have no clue whom?  For sure, the phone companies themselves always have a crude idea of where your phone is (based on which cell tower your area nearest), and I’m pretty sure they also get your GPS data, nominally so that they may more accurately predict when your signal needs to switch from one cell tower to the next.)

The problem with counts based on cell-phone tracking that it is of an unknown completeness.  Plausibly, some people manage to keep themselves from being continuously tracked.  Or, more likely, any one data vendor only buys that data from a limited number of app providers.   Generally, it’s fine for making relative statements about one area versus another, but needs to be “calibrated” to real-world observations in order to get a rule-of-thumb for inflating the number of tracked phones in an area, to the actual on-the-ground pedestrian count.

Plus, it costs money, and it’s geared toward deep-pocketed commercial users.

Finally, it’s likely that certain classes of pedestrians will be systematically under-represented in cell phone data, most importantly school children, but also possibly joggers.

The other way to do it in the modern world is to use a cheap camera.  Then count by eye.

So, as an alternative, I decided to see how hard it would be to gather that information this way.  Turns out, it’s not hard at all, even with doing the counts manually.  All it takes is a cheap camera, my eyes, and, for eight hours of data, an hour of fast-forwarding.

Not sure where I’m going with this, in the context of writing up the multi-million-dollar make-over of my little street.  I just wanted to prove that it’s not at all hard to get data-based counts of pedestrian traffic on any street.  All you need is a camera, and a place to put it.  And the time to view the results, if you can’t figure out an automated system for that.

My approach may be a bit low-tech for the 21st century in the surveillance state.  But it works.  Fill in the hourly wage of (say) the employee who would have to watch that video, and you come up with a pretty cheap way to provide hard data on need for sidewalks, as evidenced by counts of pedestrian foot traffic.

If you’re going to spend millions of dollars on sidewalks … how could you not do this first, to see that the expenditure is efficient, in the sense of pedestrians served per dollar of expense?

More on this still to come.

Coda

As if to underscore the power of the surveillance state, about six hours after I posted this, I got my first-ever email from Kasa, with an offer for a video doorbell.

That, presumably, because this blog post had the words “Kasa” and “doorbell” in it.

This happens enough that I know the root cause of it.

Sure enough, yesterday I signed into Google, using this browser, to access something via my Google account, and I foolishly forgot to sign out.  Google was therefore somewhat aware of just about everything I did on this browser in the meantime.

Presumably Google ratted me out to Kasa.

Somewhere, the ghost of Orwell is surely laughing.

Post #2007: How hard is it to switch to wood cutting boards?

 

Short answer, easy.  The only thing wood won’t do, that plastic will, is flex.  Everything else is not a problem.

But when They say “hand wash only”, They really mean it.  See Death by Dishwasher below.  Also search “sanitary” (below), if that’s your hangup with wood.

Continue reading Post #2007: How hard is it to switch to wood cutting boards?