Category: Non-disposable

Posts that may have some sort of permanent value, or that I consider to be the best of what I have posted here.

Post #927: Wheelchair floor-to-chair aid, V3

The brief for this task:  Create a floor-to-chair aid for wheelchair users.  It must be able to be made at home, using only simple hand tools and readily available materials.

The end result is shown directly below.

Above:  Floor-to-chair aid, folded and covered.  For scale, the push-up bars sitting on top are 6″ tall.

Above:  Rear view, folded.  Lower stairs sit atop upper stairs when folded.  The boxes nearest the camera flip away from the camera when put into use.

Above:  Rear view, unfolded.  Lower stairs have been flipped off the top, away from camera, revealing hardboard stair tops.  Push-up bars are on top.

Above:  Front view, folded.  Blue cloth connects the lower and upper sections of the staircase.

Above:  Front view, unfolded.  Lower stairs have been flipped off the top, toward the camera, revealing hardboard stair tops.  The blue cloth keeps the upper and lower stairs connected. Continue reading Post #927: Wheelchair floor-to-chair aid, V3

Post #910: Virginia is a right-to-dry state? (Corrected! Again!)

If you look for graphic images of clotheslines, you inevitably get a page of crap like the image to the left.  Clothes lines are stereotyped as old-fashioned, or hicksville, or as the case of the one at the left, both.  With a side-order of sexism.

 

 

And yet, indoor dryers are such energy hogs that outdoor clothes lines have received legally protected status in nineteen states.  These are the so-called “right to dry” states.  In those states, a homeowners’ association cannot ban the use of clotheslines.  And this pro-outdoor-drying advocacy group gives links to the enabling legislation in all of them.  (Of course there’s an advocacy group for that.) Continue reading Post #910: Virginia is a right-to-dry state? (Corrected! Again!)

Post #785: It’s time for the Ultimate Jeopardy Power Players Tournament.

Source:  New York Times.

We had to put up with the President bragging about passing his mental exam (“the duck says quack, the cow says _____”).  Now the Republicans are attacking the mental state of what’s-his-name, the Democratic Presidential candidate.  Pretty much every arm of the Republican propaganda apparatus today features a story on the mental decline of that old white guy running for President.

I say, it’s time to put up or shut up.  We need a person of unassailable stature to settle this once and for all.  We need the ultimate Jeopardy Power Players tournament: Presidential Jeopardy.

Alex Trebec, the host of Jeopardy, more-or-less single-handedly revived that show some years after the Art-Fleming-era Jeopardy went off the air.  And, to someone who has watched both, Trebec’s version of it is a substantial improvement over the Fleming era show. Not just for the production values, but for the rules governing the basic operation of the game.

We’ve had many variants on standard Jeopardy, including, most notably, Celebrity Jeopardy and Power Players Week.  So it’s not like the idea of Jeopardy tournament for Washington insiders is new.  I’m just suggesting they kick it up a notch.

If Mr. Trebec has one more show left in him, I say, let’s skip all the meaningless braggadocio and disinformation.  Let’s make it real.  What say we get an objective assessment of just how slow both of our Presidential candidates are.  On live TV.  For the entire world to watch.  One last round of Power Players Jeopardy.

Let’s make it a true daily double.

I’m going to miss Trebec-era Jeopardy.

Post #706: MAC zoning repealed

Above:  The Merrifield Mosaic District, overlain on the Vienna MAC zone, drawn to scale.

The section of last night’s Town Council meeting regarding MAC zoning was fairly contentious.  In the end, the Town Council voted to repeal MAC zoning.  This was no particular surprise, to the point where I’d already recycled my now-obsolete signs.

If I had to pick an item that encapsulated it, it was Councilman Noble’s discussion of the preamble to the MAC statute.  That’s the section that has all the nice language about preserving small-town Vienna, and so on.  That’s where “parks and plazas” comes up.  That’s the section — I might say, the only section — that preserved the spirit of the original, long-ago citizen direction for MAC.  The overriding goal of the citizens, from the original MAC development efforts, was to preserve the small-town nature of Vienna.  And that’s exactly what that preamble to the law said.

As it turns out, they didn’t realize that the preamble was not legally enforceable.  So it sounded nice, but, as I described it a year or so ago, in the end, it served more as camouflage than as anything else.  It made it sound like the law was there to preserve small-town Vienna.  But it had no practical or legal effect.

And, in the end — some five or six years after the law was passed — that was finally formally expressed by the Town’s attorney.  The preamble had no legal status.  And if a building met all the technical requirements in the statute — height, setback, “open space”, draining, and so on … the Town Council could not legally turn it down.  Or, if they did, they’d likely be sued and lose.

The second telling item was again from Councilman Noble, which was the MAC requirement that all of Maple avenue be treated identically.  That was not part of the original plan, and apparently that was not supported by Noble in the original drafting of MAC.  But that’s certainly one aspect of MAC that I’ve harped on quite a bit.  What they ended up with is a nearly-two-mile stretch of road, with nothing even approaching a plan for development.  Apparently this was recognized by some as a significant flaw, even as the law was being passed.  All I did was manage to rediscover something that the MAC forces already knew about.  Hence the picture above, comparing the size of the Mosaic District and the MAC zone.

To be clear, the repeal of the MAC statute is hardly the end of it.  It just shifts this struggle to another arena. 

After they passed MAC in 2014,  the Town re-wrote the Town’s Comprehensive Plan to match MAC.  That rewrite occurred in 2015 (or 2016, depending on whom you ask and/or which date serves Town staff’s purposes in any particular circumstance).  In effect, they embedded MAC-like zoning into the Comprehensive Plan, after they passed MAC.  (Which is, in fact, backwards — you’re not supposed to change the zoning, then change the plan to match.  Not, at least, by the way I read Commonwealth statute in this area.  But it is what it is.  And it is what they did.)

So the game plan now shifts to the complete rewrite of all the zoning in Vienna.  A few meetings ago, soon-to-be-ex Town Council Member Majdi, with support from Council Member Patel, asked that the MAC-like language be removed from the comprehensive plan (see Post #765).  With the idea being that if you’re going to get rid of MAC, then, logically, you should modify the comprehensive plan to match.

The pro-development forces forcefully beat back any such effort.  And they wrote a contract for their chosen consultant that, in several different places, carefully directs the consultant to make sure that the re-written zoning matches up with the master plan.  (Which, by Commonwealth law, it should).

The upshot is that resurrection of MAC-like zoning is baked in.  They have carefully set this up so that their chosen consultant must re-create some form of MAC zoning.  But this time, it will explicitly be by-right zoning.  That is, once passed, developers will have the right to develop to the standards expressed in the zoning.  No messy public hearings.  In fact, no input from our elected representatives at all.  So, Town Council’s hands will be clean.  All power over development on Maple, under this new approach will be ceded to the Town bureaucracy.  And all discretion over what is and isn’t allowed will be solely in the hands of the Director of Planning and Zoning.

And if that doesn’t make you uneasy, you haven’t been paying attention.  Marco Polo Gate?  Four floors really means five floors?  Mezzanine rules only apply to residential mezzanines.  We need buildings taller than MAC allows, not shorter.  Those of you who have tracked this for a while know what I’m referencing above.  Those of you who haven’t, you can search this website for those key phrases.

So, we’ll see what comes out of this, a year or so from now.

Separately, if I had to put out the single thing that is most screwed up about this new approach, it’s the following:

  1. Under MAC, the binding constraint on building size along Maple was a political constraint.  It was all about what the citizens would accept, and how much negative externalities (in terms of traffic, noise, and so on) Town Council could successfully impose on surrounding neighborhoods.  Purely based on economics, builder probably would have built even larger buildings than were allowed under MAC.
  2. The current process for rewriting all the zoning in Vienna specifically excludes any formal input from Town Council.  That is, specifically ignores political constraints.  As I understand it, Town Council doesn’t get to direct this at all.  There will be some consultation with the Planning Commission (only).  And then, in the end, Town Council will get to vote yes/no on the entire package of redrafted zoning laws.

This is what I have referred to as the cram-down strategy (Post #483, 12/9/2019).  (Yeah, I’ve been complaining about this for that long.)  Town Staff are going to direct the rewrite of the law, probably to be as favorable to development as possible.  Then they’re going to cram it down Town Council’s throat.  All one piece, no separate votes on separate items.  So Town Council’s only option will be to toss out a quarter-million dollars’ worth of consulting, and a year of staff work, and so on.  Or pass whatever it is that Town Staff decides to cram down their throats.

If you wonder why I have come to loathe the Old Guard here in Vienna, it’s for stuff exactly like that.  No self-respecting legislative body should ever willingly let itself be put in that position.  But, it’s a way for them to win, even if the majority of the citizens don’t want it.  So, I’m betting that they’ll win.  And I guess that’s all that matters.  So that’s the plan.

Post #618: Blue skies, a followup

White Clouds in Blue Sky ca. 1996

My wife found the definitive article in the Washington Post.  I’m not crazy, the air is significantly cleaner now, thanks to lockdown.

That article also has links to research suggesting that long-term exposure to “PM2.5”-type air pollution (fine particulates) explains much of the variation in coronavirus death rates across the country.

As I noted in an earlier post, Italian research points vaguely in that same direction.  Wuhan had notoriously bad air pollution, as did the hardest-hit region of Italy (the Po Valley).  And air quality in New York is not so good.  And, to be honest, that doesn’t bode well for DC.

So the sky really is better-looking these days.  And if the Italian analysis is right, the reduction in particulates helps slow the spread of disease.  But our long-term exposure to particulates likely increases the mortality rate among those who fall ill.

 

Post #590: Fourth mask-oriented post: Failure to wear masks outside the home is “The big mistake”

Source:  None.  Nobody has them in stock, so don’t even bother looking.  And you shouldn’t buy them even if you could find them.  Image souce is McKesson.com  This is a 3M Aseptex mask.

The idea of public mask use whenever you are outside the home is now getting considerable press coverage.  The best article I have seen so far is in Wired.  Three days ago, the director of the Chinese CDC was reported to have characterized, in an interview, the lack of public mask use as “the big mistake in the U.S. … “. 

That’s the director, of the Chinese CDC.  “The big mistake.”  I’d say that’s worth quoting in full:

Q: What mistakes are other countries making? 

A: The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you’ve got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.

Source:  Science, the magazine of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

So, wear ’em if you got ’em.

And note that the Chinese wear masks to protect others, not themselves.  Near as I can tell, there has never been a single piece of research in the US that tests that concept.  Our research is all about whether a mask protects the wearer.

So if that’s what masks are for, the US CDC has, more or less, zero evidence basis behind its current recommendation. And so, you may feel free to ignore the CDC, in this one regard.  I think.

This post was supposed to be about making masks, but it’s taking me some time to get that done right.  Surely, at this point, the US CDC is going to change its mind about public guidance on masks.  At that point, you’re going to want everyone to have and wear one.  And even if the CDC won’t change its mind, wear one anyway.

Masks won’t solve our problems.  But they’ll help, some.  And, it appears that there are plenty of places to buy masks (just not good ones), and plenty of plans for making masks.  I  don’t think there’s any further excuse for not making this the law.

Post #560: Real backpackers don’t use toilet paper: The arithmetic of panic shopping

Source:  Clipart-library.com

First, a brief public service announcement, prompted by my visit to the Pan Am Safeway two days ago.  The T.P. aisle was bare.  For those of us with standard American T.P. anxiety, note that a) 70% of the world’s population doesn’t use toilet paper, b) neither do hard-core backpackers, these days, and c) you can buy (or for that matter, easily improvise) a “handheld bidet“.

And that’s more than enough said about that.

But what about panic shopping in general?  When will it end, has it already ended, will it end?  Really, the underlying question is, when will we stop seeing empty store shelves?

I was asked this question yesterday, and I’m not quite sure what to say about it.  But that won’t stop me from writing. Continue reading Post #560: Real backpackers don’t use toilet paper: The arithmetic of panic shopping

Post #559: The intermediate and long run for COVID-19

 

Original graph source:  NPR.  Red X is not part of original graph.

If you read these posts, you’ve probably already figured out that this is not a “fun” website.  Or if not, you will shortly.

Edit:  Apparently the Feds came to this conclusion about six days ago, but that has only just today leaked out, per this NY Times article.  Take a peek at the US government response plan referenced in the NY Times article (.pdf).  Assuming that’s not a hoax, if that doesn’t make you say “oh, crap”, you’re not paying attention. Continue reading Post #559: The intermediate and long run for COVID-19

Post #552: Folk medicine

I am not a physician and this posting does not constitute medical advice.

One of the oddest aspects of the coronavirus epidemic is that the Chinese are using traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in addition to modern medicine.  And I don’t mean, people are buying folk remedies.  That may well be happening.  What I mean is, TCM is being used in the hospital setting. By report, on-order-of 85% of diagnosed cases have received some form of TCM in addition to standard medical treatment (per this reference).

I’m sure that most people scoff at any use of folk medicine/traditional medicine in this context.  And the Chinese government apparently aims for some sort of propaganda angle in the use of TCM.  And any benefits, if real, appear to be quite modest.  And, frankly, if you read what TCM practitioners actually do, it does in fact sound wildly unscientific.  And, finally, there is little evidence basis for use of TCM here, in the sense that western medicine recognizes it — in terms of controlled clinical trials.

And yet, I’m not one of those scoffing at the use of folk medicine in this context.  In this post I try to explain why.  Continue reading Post #552: Folk medicine