Phthursday Musings: The Heat Is On

The Furnace Guy had to come this week. His errand was short and effective. The system was short cycling because of a dirty sensor. He cleaned the sensor, now it’s good.

It works like this. The theromstat says, hey furnace, we could use some heat. The furnace says, oh, okay, I’ll get on that. The gas valve is opened. There’s a chamber in the furnace, and a sensor in the chamber, and the sensor is there to provide feedback to the control board, which could warn if something weird was going on in the chamber. Over time, the sensor can get caked with black crud, which is basically charred dust, the result being that it doesn’t communicate back. The control board, failing to get proper communication, comes to the conclusion I don’t know what the hell is going on here! and short-circuits the heat cycle. A few minutes later, the thermostat says, hey furnace, we could use some heat. The whole thing repeats. It might be that the house stays fairly warm throughout, but even if so, it’s incredibly energy inefficient, and more likely than not to cause some parts of the house to not warm evenly.

What fancy tool did The Furnace Guy use to solve the problem? Sandpaper.

Look, this metaphor makes itself. You get a signal that you need to do something. You start. Suddenly you feel lost because you’re not getting feedback. You shut it all down. You try again later. It all repeats. But, just maybe, you can solve it if you just have something gritty. And it’s probably right there. Just look within for your inner Gritty:

Yes, friends, somewhere inside, you too have a maniacal hockey mascot. Find it. Use it. End your short cycling. Get your heat working again.

A few times recently I have been asked variations of the question What are you reading? Here are a couple of answers which may not be quite what you’re expecting.

Last week I finished The Artificial Man and Other Stories, a collection of science fiction short stories by Clare Winger Harris, who is widely regarded as the first woman to publish stories under her own name in science fiction magazines. These stories are largely from the 1920s, and it’s fascinating to consider how at the same time that she considered the potential for extraterrestrial travel, she was still thinking largely in terms of communication primarily by radio waves. Science fiction is not really my go to genre, but many of my favorite writers (Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury) tend to at least hang around the space. The Harris collection is from Belt Publishing, who have issued a number of lesser known works with sort of Midwestern roots from roughly 80-150 years ago, though they’re best known for publishing contemporary works about Midwestern life, especially anthologies of essays for specific “Belt” cities, from large (Chicago) to not so large (Akron! Flint! Gary!) If you’re not familiar, you should check them out. (And if you, like me, think it’s time for them to work on an anthology on Rockford, speak up! I’d actually really like to get people together and bring them something like a proposal for that.)

One weekly newsletter I get is from Rest of World, a site nominally devoted to “reporting global tech stories”, but which I find to be much more than that. Is it especially relevant to my own day to day affairs to learn about the Colombian equivalent of Grubhub? Maybe not. But what I really respect about this work is that it gives the lie to the idea there’s just a bunch of shithole countries out there, who never make news unless it’s because of some ethnogenocide or tsunami. The articles don’t fetishize the places. When they write about livestreaming in Bangladesh, they mention things like infrastructural challenges, but as a natural part of the story. I routinely find the pieces to be well written, informative, and mind expanding, even if the nominal subjects are the sorts of things which, if they were happening in Akron or Flint, might not be attracting my attention at all! This week’s lead story is about Papuan separatists overcoming Indonesian authorities throttling bandwidth. If that’s at all the kind of thing that sounds interesting to you, you should definitely get their weekly newsletter.

These recommendations may seem wildly divergent, but as I consider them together, the thing they have in common is that they are about seeing the world from different perspectives, using the lens of technology. Harris wrote a lot about technology’s potential, for good and for bad. Rest of World does the same thing! If technology is a framework that works for you, consider looking around the world for a different vantage point on the here, and consider looking back in time for a different vantage point on the now.

Leave it to Mike Madigan to end his reign the very day Donald Trump is impeached a second time.

If you’re not a Prairie Stater, the name might not be so familiar, so in a nutshell: Michael Madigan is the longest-serving Speaker of the House for any state legislature in the history of the country. For well over 30 years he’s been the most powerful politician in Illinois state government. Wednesday, the reign ended. The new Speaker is Emanuel Chris Welch, whose suburban district is the next one over from ours.

Madigan was ultimately brought down by the Women’s Caucus, and we all owe them our deepest appreciation. He is the last of the great Machine bosses, having spent decades running Illinois into the ground. He abhors democracy. It is tremendous to see him finally gone, if a little anticlimactic given the weirdness of the ending, plus, of course, his is not actually gone, since he’s still in the House, still Chair of the state Democratic Party, and still sitting on an absurd warchest which he can use to reward allies and punish the people who stood up to him. Still, it makes a huge difference that he’s out of the Speaker’s chair.

I’m writing this on Wednesday, the day it finally went down, and it’s truly a great day for Illinois. Hopefully we can build off of it.

As for impeachment, I hope we can somehow build off of that too. I hope that we see not only conviction, but that we also see a whole lot more in the fallout. Many more arrests are in order. Many people in official Washington need to resign or be shown the door some other way.

One thing I want to explicitly call on people to do is boycott Uline, the huge shipping supply company owned by Richard Uihlein, one of the most despicable people in Illinois. Uihlein has funneled many millions of dollars into reactionary causes, including helping to bankroll one of the groups who showed up at the Capitol last week. His money has been weaponized to do particular damage within Illinois, where among other things he was one of the leading donors in opposition to the Fair Tax Amendment. And that’s just a very short list.

A lot of the padded mailers and boxes you see are Uline products. What’s critical for a boycott of such a company to work is to make sure your workplace doesn’t order supplies from them, and to call out other companies and organization when you see them using Uline products.

The firm Koeppel Design called for a boycott a couple months ago. In that call they offer information about alternatives to Uline products. I know nothing about Koeppel Design - except that they appear to offer some very expensive wooden album holders - but check out this blog post of theirs, and encourage others - especially anyone who has to do a lot of shipping - to do the same.

If you’re out and about, at the grocery store, at the coffee shop, at the stadium, wherever… good chance there’s music playing. That music could be anything, but the point is, you’re exposed to something where you’re not choosing the playlist; it’s not even like you’re choosing the radio station. But on lockdown, nothing like that happens.

Should we just tell Alexa or Spotify or whatever to perpetually play a grocery store playlist in, say, the dining room? Then when we’re in the dining room it’s like, oh, we went somewhere? Oh, I wasn’t expecting to hear something like that?

A final musing. I’ve got some office drawers right next to me. One of the drawers has batteries in it. It also has a battery tester.

When I grew up, my grandparents, in their kitchen, had a drawer full of… stuff. Old lighters. Paper clips? And definitely a battery tester.

I don’t think I got a battery tester because I truly needed it, but rather because the house seemed incomplete without it.

Is your home complete? Do you have a battery tester?

Is my home complete? Am I missing something you can’t imagine a home being without?

At some point all of this no doubt adds up to something ridiculous: “the modern condition”, say.

Maybe the residue of the modern condition is like the charred dust in the furnace? Maybe the weight of the modern condition explains so much of the short cycling we experience in our daily lives? Maybe… we should find our inner Gritty and sand some of this away?

(I’m keeping my battery tester though.)