In honour of Ada Lovelace Day, a post about Grace Hopper

I know I should blog about Ada Lovelace today, in honour of Ada Lovelace day. But I've actually always been more of a fan of Grace Hopper.

Here's why:

When I was just a wee girl my Dad bought a computer. My brother and I started writing little programs for it in BASIC and Dad thought that was pretty cool. To encourage me to keep it up, he told me a story about a lady long ago (ie, before I was born) who had been one of the very first computer programmers, and since he was an electronics engineer he told me his favourite story about her: the visible nanosecond.

Computer scientists are pretty fond of analogies. Car analogies, usually, but anything will do. The reason for this is that so much of what we do is in our heads, intangible, can't be touched or smelt or seen. I use analogies all the time. Admiral Grace Hopper, came up with a beauty: a wire "one nanosecond" long. She got a real wire, and worked out how far electricity could flow along it in a nanosecond, and chopped it off to that length - about a foot. A coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long became a microsecond. A speck of pepper became a picosecond.

A bit of tutuing around in Excel tells me that the exact length of that nanosecond-wire was 29.98cm. The microsecond wire was 299.8 metres long, and a length of wire one second long would be 299,792,450m - which would wrap nearly 7.5 times around the Earth.

I think she chose the right fraction of a second to make into wire.

Admiral Hopper did other cool things too, which had a more significant effect on the world and on me. She pretty much invented compilers in the 1950s, for example, which made it possible to program computers in something sort of like English, which in turn made it possible for a nine-year-old girl in Auckland to learn BASIC in the 1980s and wind up in IT in the 21st century.

She's also credited with my favourite axiom: "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

More detail here and here . Tell your daughters.

Quite possibly the most inappropriate new hobby

... for someone who is forever going on about reducing her CO2 emissions, is ... drum roll....

... learning to fly.

First theory lesson was tonight. We're doing Meteorology first, so we started with the hard stuff - Environmental Lapse Rate, Dry and Saturated Adiabatic Lapse Rates, and Dew Point and Relative Humidity, and how some jiggery pokery with all of them tells you how high up the clouds are going to form and how unstable the weather's going to be.

The Met theory book (Weather to Fly, hur hur) is about a centimetre thick, and has lots of juicy graphs and charts. I'm already geeking out on it a bit... I like that feeling when something which was previously gobbledygook to me becomes sense. Like this (a Creative Commons image):


There are six of us in the class - me, Dad (hi Dad!), Alan who didn't say anything at all, Ryan who is about fifteen and had to leave early because he's still on his restricted drivers' licence, Matt who is Australian and has already done the Law module and is looking for a plane to buy, and Sina who didn't say anything either. I hope we get a bit more discussion later.

I also proved (yet again) that I suck at navigation; missed the offramp on the way out, and two turns on the way home. Can't wait to see how bad I am when I'm navigating in 3D rather than 2D.

Must book a practical lesson soon. Go see these cloud formations for myself.

How does my garden grow?

The wildflowers are pushing their faces to the sky.

Biggest. Harvest. Ever.

Tomatoes grown on the balcony really do taste better than ones grown in a supermarket...

Google searches: a new CO2 emissions category?

The Times Online is reporting that each time I search Google, it generates about 7g of CO2.

That still means I'd have to do 143 searches to generate one single kg of CO2, but it's an interesting statistic. I'm counting, today, how many times I do a Google search. I'm up to 10 already, and it's not even midday.

The article also namechecks a couple more count-your-CO2-here sites. I think I need an iPhone app.

My favourite quote from the article: "...maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian." I assume they mean a person living in Brazil.

2008 in review: choices and their consequences

I've been tracking my CO2 output for a year now. Time for a summing up. My choices over the year have resulted in emissions of 12,800 kg of CO2 (which is quite a lot more than the national average of 8,600kg). That's according to my own calculations of course, but here's how it breaks down:

"Flying for work" covers two return trips to Memphis, and two to Wellington.

"NZ Apartment CO2 depreciation" is twenty percent of the CO2 emitted in building my apartment, and emitted by the building materials over the life of the building. I got the figures from NZWood - they have a handy calculator. It's probably a bit off but it's an interesting thing to consider.

"Flying for fun" covers one flight from Little Rock to Houston return to visit Pete and Ben and Adrienne, and one flight to Sydney to go for a run and do a little shopping.

"US Condo life" and "NZ Apartment life" are the costs of lighting and heating/cooling and generally using electricity in each home - about four times the emissions per day for my temporary American home, due mostly to the huge cost of heating and airconditioning.

That's without counting the CO2 emitted in the production of the food I ate, in the manufacturing off the stuff I used and bought, in the maintenance of the golf courses and movie theatres and restaurants and gyms I frequented (infrequently). I've excluded that because I don't know yet how to count it.

And it's also without counting the CO2 emitted by things I didn't actively choose - for example, the NZ government's activities. I chose to buy an apartment in a concrete building (rather than a wooden house), so I'm counting the amortised CO2 cost of building it, but I didn't choose the wooden condominium in Arkansas, so I'm not amortising the cost of building that (a pity - it was probably carbon negative). I chose to stay alive, so I'm counting the 200kg of CO2 I exhaled over the 366 days of the year :-)

To use up that CO2, it will take about 8.5 hectares of mature forest planted in a temperate land (like New Zealand) a year of living and leafing.

So what could I have chosen to do differently? The obvious choice is to avoid going to the US for five months. If I'd worked in NZ all year, and gone to Japan on holiday as I'd originally planned to, my output would be (after five minutes in Excel) about 4900kg, only 38% of what I actually caused to be emitted.

I started the year wondering if I could have any effect on my CO2 output. I think I've safely confirmed that I can.

The next step is to make those better choices which reduce my impact on the planet.

And the step after that is to make it easy for everyone else to make those choices too - by making it easy for them to see the consequences of each choice they make.

(And maybe there's a step involving buying 8.5 hectares of mature forest. )

2009 will be The Year Of Better Choices for me - for CO2 and for life in general. How about you?

Tracking my power usage with Wattzon

There should now be a "WattzOn" badge at the top of the right hand column (over there --->). WattzOn.com has a "personal energy usage" calculator, which can give you a rough idea of how much energy your lifestyle uses up. The number in the badge is my own usage. What's yours?

I went through the series of questions and the very first one piqued my curiosity: my energy usage halved when I changed my "country of residence" from USA to New Zealand. Apparently it's based on government policies which affect CO2 creation. I wonder if they've updated their estimate since the election?

Even though I did well out of living in NZ, I got all those watts back again from flying around the place. Maybe next year I should stay put.

First tomato!

Look, three little green tomatoes! And this year, I'm actually going to get to eat them.

Poo from balls of jelly is saving the world?

Heard on NatRad this morning while ironing a shirt: salps, which are little balls of jelly floating in the sea, are breathing in CO2 and pooing it out. And the poos are so heavy they sink into the abyssal depths, taking the CO2 out of our atmosphere for decades or even longer.

The NatRad reporter used words like fecal pellets and carbon sequestration, but that's what he meant.

Good on ya, little jelly balls.

In other news, I've been busy sponsoring Fronde's Mo Bros. You should too:

I went to the Sculpture on the Shore exhibition at the weekend with my mate Royden. I particularly liked this giant plane-crash. Royden particularly liked that it's a Zero, as all small Kiwi boys fantasised about attacking with their Spitfires and Mustangs. Apart from possibly the worst-designed catalogue in the known universe, the event was very well managed and over-staffed with friendly volunteers.

The whole thing was in aid of Women's Refuge, a worthy charity if you have a few dollars spare. Wouldn't it be nice if such refuges weren't necessary.

More strawberry amazement

Two lovely tasty strawberries. Ate them today: the first fruit of my garden!

Check this out for quick growth, too... 7:30 am this morning:


7:30pm this evening, a mere 12 hours later:


Long may this blessed strawberry-ripening sunshine continue.

I suggested at work today that we start a garden on our balcony to grow lunch-food. Let's see if we actually do....

New growth

Two things please me greatly today.

Thing one is the whole Obama-wins thing which is pleasing everybody sane.

Thing two is much smaller and more green (at least in the literal sense) and is pleasing only me:

Strawberries on 30 Oct


Strawberries on 2 Nov


Strawberries on 5 Nov


So quick! Look at the one on the bottom left!

It's oh so early

It's 6am. I've been awake since 3.

I woke up & couldn't get back to sleep. No particular reason, as far as I can tell. Might be the Codral Night&Day.

So I picked up a book and I've just finished it.

I know this is not normal.

But the book was really good.

And now the moon is going down behind the Vero tower, and tugs are pushing a container ship into the dock, and it's time to get up and go to work.

The book, by the way, is Social Intelligence by Karl Albrecht. Hmm.

Grin like a dog and run about the city

I can run without my heel hurting! And I have a race to do! Joy! And More Joy!

Goodness knows how, but my Achilles is completely fine now. I ran nearly 5km on Thursday. It feels like waking up from a coma.

To celebrate, I'm going to Sydney in a month, and, serendipitously, there's a run there that weekend: the Sunday Telegraph Bridge Run. Only 9km and with a slow cutoff, so that I can walk if I have to. Joy! Joy!

Of course now that I can run again, I've got a bad bad cold and it's raining. Can't have everything, I guess.

Running about the city takes me down side streets I wouldn't usually go down, and today I found this little gem near Britomart. Isn't it pretty!


Obligatory mention of CO2: I booked my tix on Air NZ and got the option to offset:

OFFSET YOUR CO2 EMISSIONS
From: Auckland To: Sydney - Return
Number of passengers: 1
Total distance flown: 4,320 km per passenger
Estimated emissions: 408.2 kg of CO2 per passenger
Cost to offset this CO2*: NZD$ 13.90 (inc. GST)

Good on them.

A post that is not about Carbon Dioxide

I was blog-surfing this evening and stumbled upon that eternal question: why aren't there more women in IT? Brenda in Wellington lists some possible reasons, and the Wellingtonista blog had a few things to say (with some really good comments).

Hmmm.

You know what? I'm glad there are more men than women in my industry, for some horribly self-interested reasons:

- I like men. I like working with men, I like hanging out with men, I'm totally okay with being the only woman in the room.

- Male-dominated professions have higher pay and higher status (massive generalisation here but if you don't agree, prove me wrong)

- In an industry without clear performance indicators, you have to be both good at your job and visible to get ahead. Just by being a woman I've got the "visible" part nailed and can concentrate my energy on being good at my job.

There are some downsides but only one significant one, as far as my experience goes: the subtle taint of affirmative action, the lingering thought that I mightn't have got that promotion, that payrise, that role, if I'd been a man.

Car? Bike? CO2 part 2

I love my car. I looooove my car. Even when it's raining and the roof is leaking and the cooling system is rusting from the inside out. Love love love.

How much does it love the environment? It's not all that bad... compared to an SUV.

This is part two of a fourish-part post on my CO2 usage. Let me know if you're bored yet and I'll stop.

The only question I really need to answer here is: how many kg CO2 per kilometre? I don't use my car all that much and I can easily keep track of how many km I do on any given day. I already know how many km per litre I get (just over 11.5) and I don't drive enough for it to be worth changing cars to get better efficiency.

That breaks down into:
1. How many kg CO2 / km for unleaded 91 octane fuel, on average?
2. Does it differ by car, in any way?
3. Does it differ by fuel provider, in any way?

And then: how many km do I do on an average day, and how many kg CO2 does that translate to?

To question 1

The NRMA says every litre produces 2.3kg of CO2

The Canadians say 2.4kg. And they've made a handy dandy calculator - cut out and make! It's papercraft for greenie geeks.

The US EPA, via Yahoo Answers, say every litre produces 2.343kg...

That's a much better consensus than the tree question earlier. And that last article also tells me something of the answer to questions 2 and 3. Check out, by the way, the final answer to that question. Love it.

To question 2
Per the Yahoo Answer quoted above, only a very efficient engine would produce the whole 2.343 kg of CO2. Less efficient engines produce more CO (carbon monoxide, not a greenhouse gas although it's pretty nasty to humans) and so on. Can I find out for my car what its efficiency is? I'm good about getting it serviced but it is eleven years old.

For now let's assume it's really efficient and it's putting out all 2.343 of those kilograms.

The internets say to make sure the air filter's clean and the spark plugs are working right. Sounds like a job for Super Roverland!

To question 3
Again per the Yahoo Answer, part of the efficiency is down to the additives. Local received wisdom says some petrol companies (Shell, Caltex) always buy the top grade of petrol from the refinery, and some (Gull, I'm looking at you) buy whatever's available. I'd love to run some statistical tests to check this out but I don't use anywhere near enough petrol - I'd be waiting a year for meaningful results. Any of you like to volunteer to keep records of your petrol purchases and mileage for a while?

Last question. How many km / day do I do. This is where I get to be insufferably smug: since 3 June (the day I came home) I've done 500km, one tank of gas. That works out to (clicks over to Excel... type type type ... clicks back) 9.1 km / day. Thus, an average of 1.84 kg CO2 per day from driving.

And bikes? Well, if I was going to bike to work, I'd be very happy to hear about BikeCentral, a new enterprise opened up just near Britomart, which has bike storage, lockers and showers, repairs and coffee. Shame I already life in the CBD...

Carbon Dioxide - finding out is a problem

I've been blithely quoting stats on my CO2 usage for a while now and you may (or may not) have wondered how I was calculating them.

I've got a spreadsheet. This will probably not surprise you.

I was updating my little spreadsheet yesterday, and hit the problem that is probably the biggest reason more of us aren't doing more: it's just so hard to work it out! I've been using estimates from various sites for a lot of my stats and I decided to dig a bit deeper.

As far as I know, my biggest CO2-releasing activities are:
- electricity usage at home
- petrol usage in my car
- co-generation which heats my water
- flying around the globe so much

I set out to tackle them in that order. So, here's how I worked out the home-electricity thing. My power comes from Mercury Energy.

Mercury Energy is somewhat coy about how much CO2 is produced by their power generation. I followed a tortuous path from the Mercury Energy website's blather about the environment, which told me precisely zip except that their power is generated by Mighty River Power....

.... so off I go to Mighty River Power's Generation page, which at least told me that they had a bunch of hydro stations (yay!), some geothermal (more yay!), a "biomass energy" station or three (a what?) and a co-generation plant, and that they were thinking about wind. So far so sweet and all but still no mention of CO2.

Some random clicking within the Mighty River Power site brought me to their Reports & Documents section, and from there to the 2007 sustainability report (large PDF).

And there, on page 18, in teeny font, was a CO2 breakdown by plant type! Hooray! And even better, on the following page, they've got a CO2 usage measurement for their corporate activities.

So, they generated 5,339 GWh of power and created 385,061 (love that 1) kg of CO2 in the process.

Armed with that data and a recent power bill I can now calculate that my 8 or so kWh per day results in about 0.58kg of CO2 being released per day into the atmosphere. This is data that should be on my bill, rather than requiring me to hunt through so many pages online.

So my questions to the internet today are:

1. is there any way to get this data about all the power companies, easily and online?
2. how does your CO2 production from your home electricity stack up?
3. and do you agree, that this data should be on our bills?

(Interestingly, I originally ran the calculation on 2005 data by mistake, and on that data I would have been producing only 0.48kg of CO2 per day. Unless I'm mistaken, that means Mercury have been getting LESS green over time. I've done my little bit today by signing up for online billing.)

Once in a decade storm? and eating locally

(Image nicked from MetVuw)

Man, it's windy. The Metservice site is down so I can't tell how windy it is, but I can't see the North Shore and the rain is going sideways. The Herald was getting all excited about the weather earlier, saying the lows would be a new record. But they've been getting increasingly excitable about the weather since this new "weather blog" thing with Philip Duncan started up. Are we really such a boring country we need to blog about the weather? Er. On to other topics...

My building creaks in the wind. It's like living in a giant tree. I suppose that makes me a little bird in a nest. In a normal wind it sounds a slow creeeaaaak..........creak......... creak....... Today it's creakcreakcreakcreakcreakcreakcreakcreak.

But I'm pleased to see that the White Lady is open for business despite the weather. Mmm, dodgy cheeseburgers. I wonder what they taste like when I'm sober.

Speaking of food: I've been buying my groceries at the Britomart Farmers' Market for the past few weeks; I'm trying to "eat local, think global" now that I'm back home. Because it's the middle of winter, only winter veges are available and I've been forced to be a more adventurous cook. No pasta and tomato sauce can be made when there are no tomatoes or pasta! I made this beef rib stew with fore ribs from Te Kainga farm and baby carrots and potatoes from the market the other night - it's delicious.

So go, buy food there next weekend.

And while you're doing good for the earth, go have a look at getacross.org.nz - they're a group trying to get a non-car harbour crossing sooner rather than later. I for one would like to walk across the bridge without paying $70 to do it as part of a half-marathon.

Enough! it's dark and stormy outside so I'm going to snuggle down, watch LOTR again, eat stew and drink the rest of the bottle of red wine that I had to open (sigh) for the stew. And maybe it will be less than two months until my next post.

Name the product

Can you guess the product, from the ingredient listing? Read and think then go to the comments on this posting for the answers.

Product 1
Sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (soybean, cottonseed), water, cornstart, corn syrup, modified cornstarch, salt, mono- and di-glycerides (for smoothness), natural & artificial flavor, potassium sorbate (preservative), polysorbate 60 (for smoothness), citric acid, yellow 5 lake, blue 1 lake.

Product 2
Sugar, corn syrup, modified whey, cocoa(processed with alkali), hydrogenated coconut oil, nonfat mil, calcium carbonate, less than 2% of: salt, dipotassium phosphate, caffeine, mono- and di-glycerides, artificial flavor, carrageenan, vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol).

Mission: Nearly Impossible (rant)

Caution: self-indulgent rant follows. You might as well skip it and wait for the next update, which will be more cheerful.

My mission, and I had little choice but to accept it, was to get some new contact lenses. A simple enough task, you would think.

I first tried in Memphis. I was there anyway, and I thought what the hell, it's a major city, they're bound to have a few lenses to spare and I'm on my last pair. I'd seen ads for Sears Optical so off I toddled. In a sweet, ever so polite, Southern accent I was told that it was Sunday and they couldn't sell me any lenses. Grumbling only very slightly to myself, I toddled away again and threw my credit card at other more interesting things which were allowed to be sold on Sundays.

My next attempt was the following weekend in Little Rock, with a little more verve this time (my eyes were starting to hurt). I let my mouse do the walking, and found a Sears Optical near the centre of this very spread-out town (think Canberra with a river rather than a lake). They had the particular lenses I use and at a very good price, and the opening hours were 10am to 6pm at the weekend (which is considered very generous in these parts). Drove there, getting only a little lost on the way. Little Rock is about an hour's drive from where I actually live. Wandered around the deserted store for a wee while and was finally directed in a sweet, ever so polite Southern accent to the Optical desk around the back of the children's wear department, about twenty paces away.

It was deserted and just a little more empty-looking than I expected for 2pm on a Saturday. I looked around inquiringly and then went back to the sweet Southern belle I had asked directions of, to be told in matter-of-fact, very polite tones, "oh, they've gone for the day" with just the slightest hint of "you silly foreigner". Muttering invective, but only to myself, I departed.

My third attempt, immediately after the second, involved driving at some speed to a mall I had visited earlier and in which I had memories of seeing a rack or two of glasses. I triumphantly found the optician, admired the gleaming spectacles briefly and presented my prescription at the desk. It was inspected carefully and then handed back with the information, delivered in a sweet, very polite Southern accent, that here in Arkansas opticians weren't allowed to dispense contact lenses, only doctors could do that, and as anybody could see by the darkened door in the back, the doctor was not there and would not be back until Monday. Apparently my NZ prescription from a real live optometrist doesn't count for much. I pitifully asked for help and was directed, sweetly and ever so politely, to Wal-mart.

I was not holding out much hope at this point (I had tried Wal-mart before. You can buy anything there, except contact lenses). But I dutifully drove the ten or so miles to the specific Walmart to which I had been directed, on the edge of town, and fronted up at their gigantic Wal-Vision or whatever the heck it's called. I waited and waited while the sweet polite white-coated people dealt with their sweet polite customers, and while they chatted to each other, and passed the time of day, and eventually it was my turn. I somewhat briskly presented my prescription to a bona fide eye doctor, and it was duly and politely inspected and admired, every single part of it, and it was a good four or five hours later that she told me in a sweet, gentle, ever so polite Southern voice, that she didn't have those particular lenses in stock. But if I came back in two weeks she could order them in for me.

I accepted this information with what I felt extreme good grace, given I was standing in the biggest flaming optometrist's I have ever been in, only about fifty miles from Wal-Mart HQ, and I allowed through gritted teeth that since I was on my last pair, and that I'd been wearing them for three weeks already, and if I had to wear them for two more weeks my eyelids would fuse shut, I was happy to use any of a dozen other kinds as long as they let me see, but I was told in sweet, polite tones that the law here in Arkansas prevents me from acquiring any kind of contact lenses other than the ones specifically on my prescription. I had spent two or three hours trying to buy lenses by now, and was just a mite frustrated, so decided to give it a rest for the day.

My nearly-penultimate try was the day before yesterday, Monday, when in a light-bulb moment I remembered there was a Sears right here in Pine Bluff. I googled, and lo and behold it had an Optical part! Hours 10am to 6pm, so I have to take time off work, but that's fine! I'll be able to see! I called their number. No answer, but the voicemail message was ever so polite and re-stated their opening hours. They didn't call back. Never mind, they must be very busy. In high spirits I went in. In good cheer I asked directions. In a sweet polite voice I was told it was just past the lawnmowers. In joy I strode. In dismay I read the large, permanent, sign stating "Monday: closed". In bad humour I strode out, past the giver of directions who must have known it was closed on Monday, the brainless woman.

On Tuesday I returned extremely grumpily for what I now know to be my penultimate attempt, at 12:05, figuring that lunchtime would probably be a busy time for them but hey, I just need lenses, it's a quick transaction. I strode. I looked with mounting anger at the hand-lettered sign: "back at 1pm". I strode out. I may have shot some people on the way out.

On Wednesday at 10am I strode back. And he was there! I requested lenses. He gravely and at some length inspected my prescription. He gravely and at some length informed me in a sweet, very polite Southern tone that while he was wearing a white coat, he was not a doctor and could not sell me lenses. The doctor, he said, comes at 1:30. I was about ready to shout, but he must have sensed it (I don't believe anybody has shouted here since 1776) and allowed as the doctor did have another place of business and was there now. I exercised great restraint and did not execute him. I strode, I drove. The doctor, in a sweet, polite, somewhat incoherent Southern accent, made conversation at length about my accent, my nationality, the fact that he had once met a New Zealander in the 60s, asked in detail about the future of the mill, glanced briefly at my prescription and said "we don't have any in stock, we'll have to order them in, it'll be a couple of days. But here are some other ones you can wear until then". And handed over a dusty pair of odd-branded lenses, in blatant contravention of the laws of Arkansas which forbid me from wearing anything other than Acuvue Advance II .

But I strode away happy, because at some point in the next few days a small box will arrive in the mail, and I will be able to see again.

This, gentle reader, if you're still here, is why America is still stuck in Iraq.

Done! Three weeks to go til I come home

Hello dear internet! The go-live is over and done with and I can finally exhale. Here's what my life has been about for the past little while: lots of tasks on whiteboards.


That's not very interesting to anyone outside of the project so here are some interesting things in the sky. Part one: I think this is called a "sundog". It's like a little segment of a rainbow, without the rest of it. Weird. Taken from an SUV doing 75mph down the freeway, so please excuse the lack of focus.


And this is a sunset outside t'mill, on the first day of the four-day cutover. The foreground flag is the Arkansas state flag. Not sure what the background one is, I don't think I've seen it before....


Yeah, that was lame. Sorry.

And in the odd few moments I've been able to snatch, I've been listening to a lot of American podcasts. The radio stations here aren't up to much so I'm getting my fill of NPR and Common Sense (really slow ugly site, but great podcast content) over the internet, same as always. Recommended listening!

I'm coming home on 3 June. If anyone wants me to bring any gadgets such as iPhones, they'd better let me know pretty soon....