Stealing Heat to Warm your Water

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I just read one of the most amazingly radical ideas I have seen in a long time.

One thing we use a lot of is warm water.  Compared to heating the house, of course, it doesn't cost a lot, but taken by itself, the energy for water heating is quite significant.

On the other hand, in many states --most states south of the snow line-- roads and sidewalks get very hot in warmer weather.  The idea is this: pipe cold water through these sidewalks and similar places (e.g. parking lots) in the summer: cheap hot water.  As an additional incentive, the sidewalks and parking lots are kept a little cooler (or a lot cooler, depending how the water is piped), improving the temperatures outside living areas, and lengthening the life of the sidewalk/parking lot.

A similar idea is to use passive solar heating, but that is --when you think about it-- a very individualistic idea: you invest in passive solar heating to benefit you and your family solely.  This sidewalk idea is more of a community thing: an entire block can benefit from it, or an entire apartment complex.

A sort of hybrid idea is to put water pipes just under the roofs of apartment buildings.  This is simply passive solar heating without special equipment.  The roof heats the water, the water cools the roof (and the building), sweet!

Vi Hart, Ken Robbins, and Elitism in Education

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People have been sending me links to articles by (and about) Vi Hart, a musician very interested in mathematics.

Firstly, I immensely admire anyone who has an interest in several disciplines, such as Ms Hart.  As Ken Robinson points out often in his speeches, a lot of creativity takes place at the interface between traditionally distinct disciplines.  It doesn't have to happen, but these interfaces are often very fertile places for creativity.  (Even within the field of mathematics, some of the most interesting advances take place at crossover points; at the border between algebra and geometry, for instance, as in the case of the resolution of the Fermat conjecture.)

But the subtext of some of both Ms Hart's and Dr Robinson's conversations present a picture of people doing absolutely brilliant things, in mathematics or dance or music.  So they are contributing to yet another sort of educational myth that is not helpful: the myth that everyone can gain renown and self-fulfillment if only they can discover that elusive little nook of knowledge or skill that has been thus far neglected, to illuminate their own special corner of the dark that remains.  I don't want to be labeled as someone who thinks that a day will come when there is nothing left to be discovered, but a hidden assumption in present-day academia is that anyone who is sufficiently well trained and motivated can make a significant original contribution in their desired field.

The point is not whether that is true; there are almost insurmountable semantic problems surmounting the epistemological ones with that statement.  My problem is with this requirement for delivering on-demand creativity.  The educational experience of everyone can be vastly improved if we go on the assumption that everyone has to be basically functional in the vast majority of occupations out there, as well as appreciative of what other people are doing.  [In addition, everyone must have the capacity to learn on the job.]   Great specialization should be for the few; this is sort of an axiom today, even if it isn't explicitly recognized, and I think it holds true.  I very much doubt whether Ken Robinson's remark that "Intelligence is distinct" is true for the vast majority of people, if he means that everyone is a genius at something, if we only knew what it was.  One thing we might all lay claim to is to be a genius at appreciating and understanding a variety of subjects and thinking modes.  Now that is something we should all strive for.

Both Robinson and Hart say, quite convincingly, that children are bored in school, and we know this.  But it isn't necessary to be brilliant to be happy.  I'm not advocating universal mediocrity at all.  But there are many principles that an organized system of education must recognize:

1.  Everyone must be competent at a minimal level of language and mathematics.

The reason for this is simple: modern society needs lots of engineers.  The learning curve for engineering is very long, so we are obliged to start kids off early.  On top of this, modern life requires a fair amount of numeracy, so the early mathematics we teach little kids is not wasted.  So we cast a wide net, but this leads to Ken Robinson's accusation that we're trying to make university professors out of everyone, or at the very least, engineers.

Language is acquired naturally (in most educated homes), but literacy is usually acquired only with effort on the part of both students and teachers.  But the path to self-directed discovery is often through books, and the skills required to read at a sufficiently sophisticated level take time to form, so, yes, language must be taught from childhood.

Everyone must learn basic life skills, and if these can't be learned at home, it is not unreasonable to expect society to arrange for them to be taught somewhere.  If the population at large can't learn basic life skills somewhere, it is going to be everybody's problem.

2.  The Teaching profession is poorly paid.

Therefore, most teachers are either poor achievers, [otherwise they'll be out there doing something different,] or great idealists (or possibly both).  However, nature has endowed most adults with an interest in guiding children --this could be viewed as a social survival characteristic-- and teachers are often frustrated by the poor achievement (and worse, the poor attitudes) of their students.  As a result, on the average, a teacher is a disgruntled person, (probably just a little short of the level of disgruntlement of a postal worker,) and the classroom experience of a typical student is therefore fairly negative.

3.  A significant proportion of the education of a child must come from its parents and its family.

Modern Society (I was about to say: Western Society, but I changed my mind) is structured in such a way that employed individuals are required to give an enormous amount of time to their employer (who would rather have one worker working 80 hours a week than two workers working 40 hours each --because of the expense of providing benefits, if that wasn't clear).  As a result, parents do not have time to be involved in any sort of activity that could be considered educational.  A lot of things can be transmitted at the family level: values, interests, attitudes, skills, and only least of all, knowledge.  Increasingly, parents want the schools to parent their children, but this is unreasonable.  The child must be inculturated into the family microculture, or the parents will ultimately be unhappy with whatever the school supplies.

Increasingly, modern adults have not even seen viable models (examples) of parenting.  For every parent who remembers his or her own parents in the role of people who presented them with useful and interesting ideas and values, there are ten who can barely recall extended time with their parents at all.  Ken Robinson is clearly not thinking of this sort of dysfunctionality when he points the accusing finger at schools.

4.  Most of the mathematics a child needs in order to be ready for grade 9 can be taught over one summer.

This seems like a contradiction of my earlier remark that the learning curve is long.  But consider that producing an Engineer starting from grade 9 is already a long curve.

So why do we pester these little ones with mathematics in Grade 2?  I don't think it is really necessary.  As Ken Robinson suggests, dance, art, music, geography, descriptive biology, social studies, these higher-level disciplines are more suited to young children.  The lower-level, analytical subjects and skills can probably wait.  The exception is probably very basic arithmetic, and language.  We can hold off on long multiplication until College, as far as I'm concerned.  [To explain, I use the term "Lower-level" to describe the analytical level of a subject, in which you go down into the abstract fundamentals of a subject, and "Higher-level" to describe subjects that can be discussed at the intuitive or experiential level.]

5.  A great deal of what education must provide is: what to do with leisure time.

This is an ongoing trend, that increasingly people get limited satisfaction at work; most of the satisfaction they get is in their leisure time.  If one's leisure activity is all video games, this would be tragic, but there are other leisure pursuits: learning the Law, learning psychology (arguably of limited usefulness), reading, physical culture, playing golf, working with underprivileged youth.  It would be a great thing if society were to be enriched by the things people do with their hobbies as with their formal contributions at their main occupations.  Already, in most colleges in the US, the curriculum does make desperate attempts to remedy the narrowness of the experience and interests of students.  I tend to measure these things relative to my own educational experience, but all I learned about Anthropology, Western Literature, philosophy, linguistics, world geography, politics, European and American history (which I suspect is all the history there is, for most people!) was by reading on my own, encouraged by my family.  A movie could serve to motivate interest in the history of the Holy Land (Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia), in the history of Germany (Sound of Music!), WW2 (Counterfeit Traitor, Counterpoint), the Renaissance (The Agony and The Ecstasy).  This indirectly points to the fact that a major problem with modern education is that adults have little leisure time, and consequently little time to "waste" on their kids.  I sincerely wish such influential figures as Ken Robinson were more aggressive in studying the societal factors that influence the success of organized education.  The single biggest factor that could change education for the better (over a minimum of two generations) is a smaller work week, or a shorter work day.

Quality of life, too, is measured by most Americans in terms of where they live, which translates directly into living in a suburb far from work, and a long commute to the workplace.  So even if the work day was shortened to 5 hours, people will be led to seek homes even further out in the country, and commuting times would probably expand to take up the extra time, thus increasing the frustration of everyone still further.

6.  There is a subtle difference between sparking the interest of a child, and entertaining the child.

For some reason, I find myself trying to be more entertaining in the classes I teach.  I do realize that this is different from presenting the students with topics that might motivate their interest, but at the college level, the difference is not really huge.  But at the elementary level, the teacher who takes desperate measures to keep his or her student engaged (because of administrative pressure) could be creating children who expect to be entertained, rather than those who are predisposed to having their curiosity stimulated.  Even in college, there is a trend for teachers to use video in class in quite inessential ways.  Unable to keep the attention of their classes, they look for a snippet from a movie that will do it for them.  Textbook authors could step in to provide pointers to possible snippets they can use, and we have a spiraling tendency for this snippetation of the curriculum, with students expecting a certain amount of entertainment in every class as a matter of course.

Ms Hart seems to think that a mathematics teacher who is really interested in his or her subject could inspire her pupil to greater achievements in mathematics.  (She does not say so in so many words, but this is as much as I can get from her statements.)  This is hardly a new idea; interested observers such as the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) has said that teachers of mathematics should know significantly more mathematics that that of the level at which they are required to teach, and the subtext here is that we hope they will be inspired by their deeper knowledge of the subject to love it, and to impart their love for it to the students.

Geometry is a case in point.  One of my jobs is to prepare teachers to teach Geometry.  They often come in either bored by Geometry or afraid of it and it is a lot of work to remedy this situation over 56 contact-hours.  I have sometimes doubted whether my approach to Geometry preparation for secondary teachers really works, but they will certainly not doubt that I at least love Geometry, and there are generally at least a couple of students who enjoy the subject by the time we're done with it.  The rest of them should not be teaching Geometry, but I have no way of preventing them from doing so, as long as they obtain a fairly good grade.  If enjoying Geometry were to be a criterion on which they were scored for their grade, I would have the really disgusting situation of a whole lot of undergraduates pretending to love Geometry.  Nuff said.

Ultimately, all this talk of fabulous achievement on the part of Educationists is either naivete, or political rhetoric, or wishful thinking.  It is fine to keep saying that such-and-such a factor will encourage "brilliant" achievement in the process of persuading us as to its efficacy; there is something to be said for enthusiasm.  But to claim that every student can be a genius is misleading.

[To be continued]

I bought an e-Reader

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Though, as I have said often on these pages, I am opposed to proprietary format books published in digital form by Amazon and other such vendors, I do believe strongly that we must take digital books seriously.  If we book-lovers do not take digital books seriously, they will be left to a generation that has only experienced books hyped on the modern Internet, and as such will be biased in favor of these large players in the media.

I received an e-mail message from Borders that they were putting on sale (that is, at a discount) an e-reader (that they have been selling for roughly $150) at the promotional price of $100 (or $99.99, to be exact).  I honestly don't know what to do about Borders: they're losing market share to Amazon and Barnes and Nobles, so that they can't really support the massive paychecks they're probably paying to their top executives.  (They're probably going to hire a new CEO at some outrageous salary, who will negotiate a merger between Borders and some other book outlet, or maybe Halliburton; who knows?)  So, while I hate Borders for putting local bookstores at a serious disadvantage in every locality, I hate a market dominated by just two players even more.

In addition, the idea of an e-reader, as I have been unsuccessfully trying to convey to you, is actually quite attractive.  The question was: could I put my own Acrobat files on the gadget, so that I could read them, say, while I was on a plane flight, or sitting in a Trailways bus that would take 6 hours to bring me 200 miles?

It turned out that the answer was: yes!

I paid my cash, and took the box home.

• You get (at least with the present deal) roughly 100 books from Borders.  Among these are: Huckleberry Finn, Dracula, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and, not least, the Kobo Reader User's Manual.
• You have scalable fonts for the books.  If you want a larger font size, it re-paginates the book for you, putting fewer words on each page.  For pdf files (Acrobat documents), you can zoom in on the page, but you have to scroll around to see the portions of text.  You can make it display the text sideways --in Landscape orientation-- which gives you about 50% bigger text, with only up-and-down scrolling, in contrast to having to scroll sideways as well.
• It's completely greyscale, but supports pictures.  The resolution is remarkably high, and the screen behaves very much like a non-back-lit LCD display, e.g. in a watch.
• The controls are (1) several buttons along the side, and a (2) little square pad that works like the arrow keys of a computer, going up, down, left or right.  The screen is not touch-sensitive, which will probably result in slightly longer screen life than if you were poking it constantly as part of the control system.

You also get an USB cord that connects the thing to your PC.  As soon as you connect them up, it installs a driver on your PC, and the Kobo shows up as a "flash drive" on your PC.  To put your own PDFs on it, just move them there (drag and drop).  Warning: if you prefer not to be zooming in on your pdf text, make sure the font is roughly 26 points, which is far, far bigger than people usually use.  With a font size that puts roughly 8-10 words per line (e.g. 26 pt) you can make it display the Whole Page, and you can read comfortably, without scrolling.  To turn the page, you just use right-arrow.

It takes a while to learn to navigate with just the Home, Back, Menu, Display, Power, and Arrow buttons.  Still, since I enjoy reading the several pieces of writing I keep as pdf files, and since I'm getting to the point where hauling a heavy laptop around is too painful and tiring, I'm happy to get away with this $100 purchase, which I can use in my own way, not to mention the books I get for free from Borders, among which I can weed through to delete useless ones.  [Disclaimer: that isn't me holding the Kobo; you can tell from the nail polish.  I use a tint closer to orange.]

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Living Better With Less

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When I was in grad school, I happened to walk into a certain used-clothes store in Pittsburgh.  It wasn't your ordinary recyclery; it was, in fact, a little store put up by the little old ladies who supported the Pittsburgh Opera!  So it was called the Operatunity Shop, and it contained the most unbelievable things for sale: things that these actually quite affluent little ladies owned at one time, and could not use any longer.  (I bought myself a poorly-fitting tuxedo there, because I needed one in a hurry.)

Among other things, there was a book called "Living better with Less", or words to that effect, by the legendary Studs Terkel.  It had some of the most useful ideas I know, for living with suddenly smaller resources.

• Shop for cheaper cuts of chicken.  The cheapest available chicken parts were chicken backs, which sold for roughly 19 cents a pound.  Still, once you cooked these, you had enough to stave off the worst of your hunger.
• Put it where it shows.  This was to suggest that the practice of wearing expensive underwear was a little silly.  You wore fairly good clothes on the outside, and the least expensive undies you could find.
• When buying eggs, buy Large Eggs.  He had done research, and concluded that the price of Large Eggs was the least for usable ounces of eggs.  And check that they're not cracked.
• Grow your own veggies.  Why not?

It is probably no surprise that, in the seventies, the Cooperative Movement in the US was flourishing.  This was an organization that (1) bought produce wholesale from farms and growers in every state, (2) transported the produce to warehouses in central cities throughout the country, (3) Cooperative stores would bring it to their outlets, where members would package the stuff and shelve it.

There were three prices labeled on each package (by hand!): wholesale price, price for members, and price for non-members.  The stores were open to anyone, and you could get good food ---often better produce than you got at the supermarket--- for less money.  In addition, they would use old egg cartons, so you could bring in your egg cartons, and recycle them as egg cartons.  Today, of course, in most places egg cartons cannot be recycled at all.)

We bought a share of the local store for $5, and we had to put in 3 hours of work each month: labeling, cutting blocks of cheese, sorting eggs, shelving groceries, and, once you knew your way around, manning the counter.  These were the most fun people around, and I loved being in the store, with all its fresh produce smells!  It was on the poorer side of town (where rents were presumably lower), and across town, they had a warehouse in a sort of warehouse district.

We joined a Fresh Milk club within the cooperative; we would drive out once a week to the farm that supplied raw milk to us, and hauled it out to the home of the organizer, who saw to the distribution.  We got a gallon a week, which we used with gusto.  We evidently paid the farmer a lot more than Big Milk was willing to pay him, but he said the days of his farm were numbered.  That may be true ---the poor gentleman has probably gone to the great cooperative in the sky--- but there is no reason that something similar could not be set up even today.  (Big Milk obviously will not like this, but at the outset, a few dozen gallons of milk a week could not possibly make a difference to the volume that Big Milk demands.  Once such a movement gains momentum, of course, Big Milk will be at pains to cramp its style.)

We walked.  We took the bus everywhere, even in horrible weather.  (I remember standing at a bus stop in Wilkinsburg in freezing weather, because we had missed the last direct bus out of the Mall.  Our 3-month old baby was in a carrier on my back, singing a dreary song, and gnawing on my knitted cap.  She could be taken anywhere, but she would declare her misery in a sort of chant.)

It is fashionable to despise hippies today, of course.  Many hippies have not adjusted well to the 21st century, and some of us who have don't feel that comfortable with them.  The Cooperative types were, of course, essentially hippies, but a lot better organized.

Organizing is the key word.  Organizing has come to mean setting up a trade union, and of course, Big Business has taken brave efforts to demonize trade unions to the common people.  Regardless of whether trade unions are despised for good cause, organizing Cooperatives should be a far less threatening thing.  If a cooperative store is established in a town, it would compete directly with the health-food stores, and with the supermarkets.  The closest thing to a store whose offerings approach the type and quality of Cooperative stores of the seventies is the chain Aldi, whose national headquarters are in Illinois, and whose international headquarters are, I believe, in Germany somewhere.  Many of the shoppers in our local Aldi store appear to be small farmers, judging from their dress, and the contents of their shopping carts.  Life has been hard for small farmers for a long time, and the present Economic Depression is just the rest of us catching up to the misery our agricultural friends have been experiencing already for a couple of decades.  So, if we Organize, in the sense of banding together to get produce from neighborhood farms and retailing it ourselves, we would be helping ourselves as well as these farmers.  Small farms use land more wisely and with less ecological destruction than do large farms, from everything I have read.

Note that Big Milk and Big Food (Kellogg, Proctor and Gamble, General Mills, ConAgra, to name a few) do employ many people, but nowhere near the number of people who lose their jobs because small farms have to close down.

In conclusion, if this depression/recession is many years in going away, we will sooner or later have to take steps to make the best of what there is, in terms of conserving our resources.  (Banks will whine about people not going out and buying more, but you will notice that Banks are not spending much money, either.  And they're charging more for each purchase with your credit card.  Stores are not happy about the added per-purchase fees.  One of these days, stores will publish two prices for everything: with a credit card, and without a credit card.)  And the more options you've heard about, the better off you are.

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Blame Game

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One thing that our new cultural environment has enabled is for all sorts of people to avoid taking responsibility for any sort of outcome.  On one hand, all sorts of marginal folks feel disenfranchised: Mr Nobody, wherever he may live, feels that he should have a bigger say in what the government does, and of course all political parties hasten to encourage this feeling.  But, as we all know, there is just no way anybody is going to get what they want; everything is held hostage by the diverse wants and needs of several generations of individualists who simply refuse to submerge their needs to the good of Society.  To Mr Nobody, of course, Society is a vague thing out there that simply exists to prevent him from being happy.

Many former Nobodys, such as the former Governora of Alaska, must have had the idea that their only hope to personal advancement is to mobilize such nobodies to all go berserk in the same direction.  Harness the Entropy, you know?

All the Mr Nobodys out there are gradually having an effect.  They don't get what they want, but they make a splash, and for the worst sorts of Nobodys, making a splash is almost as good as getting what they want.  They might not have got on Reality TV, but several minutes on national TV must be almost as good.  The Muslim extremists have had this idea for several years, as we all know.  We now have some evidence that US Nobodys are getting almost as good as Muslim Nobodys!  This is progress.

Mr Gabe Zimmerman, who was killed this week, was a friend of my daughter.  It takes a lot of idealism to sign on as a political aide.  It is truly heartbreaking to learn of the death of an idealist such as he.  Of all our troops out in Afghanistan and Iraq, a good proportion are souls with great idealism.  One has to assume that a small minority must be individuals for whom serving in the military is a family tradition, and not really a seriously chosen occupation.  (A lot of us teachers are the same; the 'Rents were teachers, and so, why not?  Often once we're in it, the occupation fires our imagination, and we're hooked.)  But the rest of them willingly take on the danger to help protect the people back home.  But it is painful to realize that every day a number of idealists are dead out in the war zone.  The total loss of idealism in the Iraq theater must already be staggering, no matter how it is totted up.  To this day, I am not certain how the decision to invade Iraq was arrived at.  It must be that Saddam Hussein deeply annoyed the Bush Family.  This is something to be afraid of.  The Bushes are entirely capable of holding two nations hostage to satisfy their ... whatever; I don't have the vocabulary to describe it.

So life goes on, with many wonderful people doing their little actions patiently, in corners throughout the world, and Nobodys making large gestures whose effects have to be moderated by all of us acting patiently over weeks and months.  It's enormous leaps backwards, and a million tiny steps forward.  And we throw our shoulders to the yoke, trying not to think about the balance sheet.

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Have Minibus, Will Travel!

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As I approach retirement age, I dream of traveling around, with a friend, possibly (heh heh heh ... you know who you are), just to experience a little of the wonder of faraway places, and the satisfaction of living out of a camper!

However, the Recreational Vehicles (or RVs) that one sees on the road, are slow, clumsy, gas-guzzling, polluting eyesores at whose wheels I simply cannot see myself.  On the other hand, the adorable little Volkswagen campers of the Sixties were just the job!  What does one need?
*  A place to sleep.

*  A place in which to handle minor urinary emergencies, if someone else is at the wheel!
*  A place in which to keep your clothes and equipment, maybe a guitar, some folding chairs, or even a sitting area, where you could relax and upload your blog, or catch up with your e-mail.
*  A table at which to eat in air-conditioned comfort, if it is an unbearably hot summer's day, and you don't feel like hanging out with the natives.

Most times, you don't need to do all the above at the same time; so the enormous luxury RVs are really unnecessary.  At an absolute minimum, a minivan in which the seats fold aside to allow someone to sleep on the floor would be fine.  I don't really need anything much larger than a minivan, though minivans are (at present) very heavy vehicles.

(A lot of the weight of modern minivans has to do with how the manufacturers have chosen to address safety issues.  They're building tanks, instead of providing limited protection for the most common types of safety and collision issues.  I hope the federal government is not mandating that cars should protect their passengers from head-on collisions at 200 mph; there's a law of diminishing returns here.  The more your car protects you, the heavier the other car has to be, to survive the impact.  To survive a head-on collision with a construction vehicle, for instance, one needs another construction vehicle.)

Anyhoo ... more to follow.

"Wireless" takes on a whole new meaning!

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I recently got thoroughly annoyed with my internet service provider (whose name begins with V).  It was connected with my home telephone system, and when I first got the service ---for a very reasonable price--- it worked beautifully.  But now, I often found it not even connecting to the internet, so I gave it up, and went to a computer store.  What are my options, I asked them.

One option was to get a service ---unfortunately from the same provider, but a different service--- which actually used the cell-phone network system towers to link the customer to the internet.  Now, my wireless (cell) phone really works very well, so I knew that their cellphone tower system is one of the best in the country, especially in the places to which I usually traveled.  This is called something like "mobile computing", and seems to be catching on very widely, at least within the more affluent computing community, because it is actually significantly more expensive than DSL, provided by your cable TV company, or your phone company, over traditional cable lines.  (I'm not sure how cell-phone system towers communicate between themselves, but it could be a combination of land-cables and microwave links.)

First of all, there is a little gadget that one has to buy if one's computer does not come ready with a cell-phone modem.  (The wireless receiver on the computer that allows you to connect to the wireless modem in your house is not enough; you need a gadget that can communicate with a cell-tower, and some computers do have them, I understand.)  That cost $129, to obtain from the company whose name begins with V.  Then you have to sign up for roughly $60 for 5 gigabytes of service per month.

Yes, Virginia, these companies actually meter your usage.  They measure every kilobyte that goes from your computer to the Internet, and then every kilobyte that comes back to your computer.  The DSL service did not do this, so you could watch a movie on the Internet, or download a huge file, or upload a videoclip of several hundred megabytes to YouTube.  With this metered service, you can only do a limited number of that sort of thing before you exceed your allocation.  (A 10 Gigabyte-per-month service costs $80 per month.  It won't be long before people are signing up for that sort of service, since Internet usage is increasing at a terrific rate, and people are getting accustomed to paying pretty much what the vendors ask.)

On the plus side, I can use my computer pretty much anywhere I have cellphone service, whereas before I could only use my computer at home, or at so-called "hot spots", e.g. bars and lounges and coffee-shops which allowed you to use their wireless link for free (or for a nominal charge).

Now, Kindle and other technology of that sort, offer their users the feature that you could buy an e-book, which was essentially the right to read a certain file that they kept on their servers.  However, they deliver the book via satellite link, or wireless tower link, so that you do not have to carry the book (or file) around with you.  In some ways, this is a brilliant idea, since it makes no sense to keep something like a text file, which is what a book is, on your computer, occupying space.  Using up your computer disc-drive to keep static data is a waste of resources, just as it is a waste of resources to own an automobile, if you could go anywhere you wanted, conveniently, with public transport.  Some people actually own enormous tanks of gasoline, e.g. farmers.  For most of us, it is convenient to let the gas stations do that for us until we need it.  So Amazon essentially set itself up as a gas station for books.

On the other hand, they (Amazon) have actually been known to withdraw a book from their "library", under pressure from some author or interested private party.  In other words, censorship is easy for electronic libraries, while once you own a book, nobody can come and confiscate it from you without a great deal of trouble.  The policies of the various Netbook providers vary, but until legislation catches up with the technology on the side of the consumer, Netbooks are a convenience that can easily be circumscribed unilaterally by the providers.

As many of you know, Google and some other interested parties (possibly Verizon and AT & T) recently conferred, to decide among themselves whether to charge Internet sites fees for delivering their content.  At least, that was what we outsiders perceived.  Among the actual complicated issues that they discussed was whether Internet users whose usage was metered (such as those who used cellphone links) should be given preferred access to Internet content, since they were paying for it by the kilobyte.

It seems to me that having to pay for content by the pound, as it were, takes away from the utility of the Internet.  Having gotten accustomed to getting unlimited volumes of content, it is disconcerting.  It is like having to pay for radio by the number of notes you listen to, or something.  Or for oxygen, based on how heavily you breathe.  We already pay for water by the gallon (at least in my neighborhood), and electricity and gas, so it seems logical that Internet usage should be metered.  I'm still trying to think of a reason why Internet usage should be different than anything else I stream into my house!

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