Blessed by the Potato

So I saw my urologist yesterday, and while all the signs point towards me having a kidney stone, they couldn’t actually find one on the CT scan. So that means it’s possible that another rare disorder is causing the same symptoms, and he wants to rule those out with some further tests. Sounds like a good idea, and I was all for it.

The first test is to make a visual inspection of my bladder’s lining. This involves sending a camera up my urethra and poking about. Sounds awful, but I figured it’s better to be safe than sorry, you know? So I went and looked up what it involves:

“The cystoscope is as thin as a pencil”

Ye-gads! A pencil is not thin when we’re talking about my urethra and ureters! We were looking for a kidney stone the size of the ball bearing in a pen that was causing me the worst pain of my life, I do not think an instrument the size of a pencil is going to help my condition any!!

“Ah, so that’s where that pack of rusty razor blades went.”

“You may have a mild burning feeling… to relieve the feeling, you may be able to hold a warm, damp washcloth over the urethral opening.”

I don’t like the sounds of “may be able to” when talking about holding a damp washcloth. It’ll be too painful to hold a washcloth?

Happy Potatomas to everyone!

I’m in the midst of packing up to spend a week with my parents. While I’m gone, the poor web server will have to chug along without me: odds are, it’ll sieze up around day 5. I’ll apologize for that in advance.

I had my CT scan today, it went fairly well (and boy is that contrast agent injection feelling rather strange). I stopped by futureshop on the way home (why do I bother?) to try to get a last-minute gift for my dad. I checked the in-store availability checker on the website, and it said that the item I wanted was in stock — but it was no where to be found in store. The clerk said not to put any faith in that tool, particularly around the holidays. Well, there goes another strike against futureshop in my book.

I’ve heard a bit about Peak Oil lately, and figured I would talk a bit about it.

First off, let’s put this discussion in context. A while ago, people were worried that we would run out of oil, and there would be a disastrous effect on the world (especially the economy), perhaps plunging us into a dark age. The fear had immediacy: in the 80’s, we were afraid we might run out of oil as soon as 2010. As technology developed, we found more reserves, and better ways of extracting the oil from difficult-to-work reserves (cf. Alberta Oil Sands).

Then the concern flipped around: one of our biggest fears was that we wouldn’t run out of oil. While it may sound paradoxical, you have to consider that the use of oil as a primary source of energy creates a lot of pollution: greenhouse gasses and waste heat from the burning of the fossil fuels, and toxic deposits from the extraction and refinement. If we weren’t going to run out of oil, then consumption would not slow, and alternative technologies would not develop.

Recently, another idea has been getting wider attention, that of “Peak Oil”. The concept here is that we extract the easiest to access sources of oil first, ramping up production with demand over the last century or so, and then eventually we reach a point where we have depleted the easy reserves, and have to resort to harder sources (such as the oil sands). For a number of reasons, the amount of oil extracted reaches a peak, and then begins to decline.

All the while, demand is constant and/or increasing.

So while we may still be 100 years or more away from extracting the last barrel of oil we’ll ever find in the planet, we’re actually getting very close to the peak of production. Soon production will slow down, and we’ll be unable to meet the current demand (or for some fossil fuels, such as natural gas, we’re at that point already). The interesting thing economically is how little production needs to slow down to lead to massive increases in price. Since oil is so necessary for many endeavors, businesses may be willing to pay much more money to keep their supply constant. For example, if energy costs are 5% of a company’s total finances, they’d easily be willing to pay double if it meant they would stay in business. And clearly, the SUV drivers of the world don’t care how expensive oil is — if the price were to double, it would be you who ended up having to conserve out of necessity, not them.

After all, since I started driving the price has already just about doubled (from a low of 45 cents/L when I would put $2 of gas in my car at the 7-11 at Sheppard and Willowdale and go out “cruising” for an hour, to $1.43/L during a road trip to the cottage when a hurricane struck New Orleans; gas today is 90 cents/L). Yet driving habits haven’t really changed much in the last few years (if anything, school kids have gotten lazier/parents have gotten more paranoid, and people are driving for short trips more often than before).

Exactly how soon is soon varies: it’s hard to predict exactly when it will happen, and there are various confounding factors. Pretty much anything that shuts down oil production (wars, hurricanes, recessions) slows the coming of the peak, both because you leave the oil in the ground, pushing back its eventual extraction, and because during those slow-downs fields that are still developing get to catch up in terms of their infrastructure development. Estimates place the peak as soon as 2010, or as far away as 2050. To me, both of those dates look pretty close though, as I’ve got a reasonable chance of living to see both of them.

I think I had more to say on that, but it’s getting pretty late. Anyway, something to think about.

First, from a conversation with Bug earlier today:

There’s a paradox, maybe you can help me with…
If Pi is infinite, that means that logically, EVENTUALLY it HAS to repeat, thus making it not infinite.

Ah, not true.
Consider a number with the following pattern:

3.14114111411114111114

It may have segments that look like repeats of previous segments, but at no point can you circle a bit and say “now the rest is just this part over and over”. The pattern may be apparent, but it’s not actually the same thing over and over, no matter how far out you go. It can be infinite without being degenerate… that’s what makes it transcendental.

I got ya… but infinite… man… that’s infinite. Doesn’t it have to repeat eventually? I mean if it goes on forever? [comment: this is more of a philosophical aside on Bug’s part, and actually came between these two quotes] It’s like… if the universe is infinite, the molecules have to line up exactly the same as they are here somewhere far away, thus making a duplicate of this world, and if that happens and it’s infinite, then there are infinite parrallel worlds.

No, because as long as it goes on, it has an infinite number of ways to remain unique (an infinite number of digits, and 10 different ways to fill each slot).

Infinite just means never-ending, not necessarily all-encompassing.

Consider a circle. Draw a smaller circle just inside. And other smaller circles (or if you prefer, Russian dolls) within. You can keep going on with an infinite chain of progressively smaller circles, but they all still fit within the finite space of your first one.

Some even more simple math to ponder. Right now my server is consuming something like 75 W of power (since the drives aren’t being taxed and all that. The power supply is rated to 220 W, but it’s just running low-processor intensive things. Doesn’t even do any drive seeks from what I hear). That’s 75*24*30 = 54 kWh used in a month. At about 5 cents/kWh, it’s costing me about $2.70/month to run. It is a bit of a pain, as I experienced earlier today; since it’s a crappy old system that I don’t much mind opening up to the ravages of the internet, it needs to be reset every 4-7 days, or it’ll just run itself in circles until there’s no more memory left and lock up. That’s a minor annoyance, but it also means that if I ever go on vacation for more than a week, I can expect my webpage to stop serving itself before I get back.

The main goal of this setup was to give myself unlimited access to the Apache, MySQL, and PHP tools I’d need to get a site up and running, and I have partially done that — I actually haven’t learned much in the way of useful things, more about how to get the programs themselves running. Anything I’m using is a pre-written script. I still have no idea how to properly set up a MySQL database or access it via PHP. But that’s beside the point, as far as hosting my webpage goes, I think I know enough about WordPress and the other software to be able to use a real host. Based on the costs/pain in the butt, ideally I’d like to find a host in the ~$6/mo range (that is, that’s the price point where I think it would be better to switch to a real host rather than what I have now). So far the lowest I’ve seen is ~$10 CDN (aside from the free ones, which may yet be an option). Let me know if you have any recommendations, and I’ll also say I have no problem giving referrals if your service has a promotion for them. (Likewise, if anyone is moving and setting up a new Rogers account, feel free to tell them I referred you so I get a free month :)

Minor outage today, server stalled on a virus update and needed to be kicked. I think it was idling for about 4 hours there, but I doubt anyone was trying to connect anyway.

Speaking of trying to connect, I found out I had another reader today. At this rate of growth it’ll only take a month or two before people who I don’t even know start to visit. The hits counter reached a one-day high of 24 yesterday — though I should temper that news by saying that because of the way the URL keeper works, the hit counter is triggered by every page (i.e.: reading the main page, then going to the comments page, or the archives, and in some cases, may continue to trigger if you follow an external link). It’s not, however counting my own hits, since I’m tunneling behind it.