News and Views

What? Wait a minute — I thought the ACLU was against religion…

Students wanted to post the Ten Commandments on their school lockers, but the school wouldn’t let them. The ACLU defended the students right to do so.

Sounds backwards, doesn’t it? But this is exactly the point. The ACLU defends civil liberties, period. One of those liberties is freedom of religion, and the concomitant separation of church and state.

If a public school administration was posting religious sentiments, that would violate the separation of church and state. The government can’t promote one religion over another. However if a student is allowed to post anything on their locker, but is prohibited from posting religious items, such as the Ten Commandments, that ALSO violates the separation clause, because then you have a government entity discriminating on the basis of religion.

The ACLU is not anti-religion. It is pro- freedom of religion.

My shoulder has been hurting for a few months, since I was “thrown” to the floor while playing basketball. Today I saw the second of two orthopedic surgeons (and one of the local experts; it’s the same clinic that treats the Phoenix Suns and ASU athletes) and he is emphatic that I need surgery.

I have a complete “large” tear of the rotator cuff tendon. Left untreated it will probably degenerate to the point that it cannot be repaired,

Ironically, he said it is not a new injury. The fall probably caused another minor sprain, but fortunately it brought me in to find this problem.

For years I have been troubled by popping in my shoulder joint, and pain with some motions. That’s the rotator cuff problem.

It doesn’t seem to have affected basketball play much, except that I can’t throw an overhead baseball-type pass. But I can shoot and dribble as well as I ever could. OK, I can shoot, but I dribble water from my mouth better than I dribble a basketball. I can’t blame this injury on that.

So anyway, I have to schedule surgery. It will probably be a month out at least. I’ll update when it happens.

He said it will be at least 4 months after surgery before I can begin to play ball again, and a year before I will be completely healed. I’m probably going to get fat and lazy.

Dales son David and Dave’s wife Lisa were here in Arizona this week.

We took a day-long trip to the Grand Canyon on Thursday, and went hiking in the desert Friday and Saturday, besides lots of meals and time spent getting to know each other better.

It was wonderful having them here, as it was last year when Karen brought her kids.

Now some day we hope that Jen can come back again too so we can meet her family.

Today Carl the carpenter brought all the pieces of the entertainment center that he has been building for the past 3 months. He only had a small trailer, so he had to bring it piece-by-piece, and it was too late to start assembly today.

Right now all the pieces are standing behind the sofa in the family room. Carl has promised to come back bright and early tomorrow and assemble it.

When it is assembled it will be 84″ tall, 16 feet wide and have a large space in the middle for our big screen TV. On the sides are spaces for the speakers and drawers for about 1500 DVDs or a smaller number of VHS tapes. It includes a cabinet for Gisele’s ironing board (she likes to iron while watching TV), and lots of other space.

Once this is installed, we won’t have any excuses any more for not completing the unpacking from the flood, darn it.

I’ll post pictures tomorrow after it is assembled.

For Christmas Gisele and I got a Roomba, robot vacuum cleaner.

We like it! Every night at 3:00am it wakes up and wanders around the lower floor vacuuming up dog hair and dust bunnies. In the morning I get up and empty the dust bin, and put it back down, ready for another day. Our floor has never been so regularly clean!

About 2/3 of the time it finds its way back to the dock at the end of it’s daily toils, but once in a while it either gets stuck behind the sofa, or tangled up in a wire or string I left lying around. It’s never a big job to untangle and send it back home.

It’s a little noisy and sometimes wakes me up when it starts its rounds. I usually just close the bedroom door and go back to sleep.

Geek alert. May not be interesting to the casual reader. Technical, gadget-type stuff.

We have had our current water heater for over 15 years (it came with the house). It’s inefficient and I’m concerned that it is ready to cause another flood. So I updated to the latest technology.

I got a GE Geospring water heater. It has a conventional electrical resistance water heater combined with a heat pump. Heat pumps are much more efficient — it uses less than half the electricity to heat water using the heat pump alone. However, a heat pump is slower, so the resistive part helps when demand is higher. There’s a nice animation here.

On the negative side it was about 3 times as expensive as a conventional electric water heater, but the savings in electricity should pay for the difference in about 3 years. So it’s really an investment.

On the plus side, the heat pump extracts heat from the environment to heat the water, so it will actually help to cool the garage (a little). A nice benefit in the summer, but not so useful right now while the outside temperature is in the 30s, and supposed to drop into the 20s tonight.

Took me most of the day to install. I’m OK at sweating (soldering) copper pipes, but it took me a while to figure out that one of the pipes had water dripping into it, and it’s almost impossible to solder a wet pipe.

Now, don’t you non-techy types wish you had observed the warning at the top? Is there anything much more boring than a water heater?

Devon is coming home for a belated holiday visit. He will be arriving Thursday afternoon and staying until the 20th.

He wanted to come during the real holidays, but his various jobs wouldn’t permit.

If you’re not a geek or nerd, you should probably stop reading right now.

I upgraded my computer to an Intel Core i5 processor last year, and it’s been good. For Christmas I decided to help Derek upgrade his computer, and since he plays games and needs a fast CPU I planned to get him a Core i7. However, after doing some research he found that the Core i5 that I have is better for gaming, and the Core i7 is better for compiling and other tasks that I do a lot of.

So we swapped; I got the Core i7 and gave him my Core i5.

The main difference in the Core i5 and the i7 is that hyperthreading is enabled on the i7 and not on the i5. So with 4 physical cores, the i7 can sometimes run up to 8 separate threads. It is interesting to see the Task Manager Performance page, with 8 virtual processors:

Derek learned that for gaming, most programs can’t take advantage of more than 4 cores, so the overhead of hyperthreading actually slows it down.

The Windows 7 performance rating only moved from 7.4 to 7.5 for CPU, and nothing else changed. And the difference is most likely just from clock speed — the new i7 runs a little faster than the i5 I did have. The performance rating apparently doesn’t use multiple cores, or at least not that many.

I’ll see over the next few days as I compile and do other processor-intensive programs if there is any noticeable difference.

6 years ago I had cataract surgery, with a replacement lens inserted. The improvement in vision was striking, as everything become suddenly much clearer and brighter.

Over the years, the natural capsule in which the lens is inserted has slowly opacified, to the extent that my vision had gradually returned to about where it was before I had cataract surgery. Glare from lights at night was so bad that driving was becoming dangerous. I had trouble reading my Kindle, and general visual acuity was poor.

Today I had a laser capsulotomy, a procedure in which they zap a laser through the lens and blast away the opacified capsule.

Already, an hour later, the improvement again is as striking as it was 6 years ago with the original cataract surgery, even while my eye is still somewhat dilated. The doctor said my vision should continue to improve for a while as the shreds of capsule dissipate over the next few weeks.

Isn’t modern medicine wonderful?

Dale and I took Donna out for her first backpacking trip this past weekend.

We went out in the desert near Superior, Arizona (about 50 miles south-east of Phoenix). We started around 2300 feet elevation, hiked about 8 miles, and camped at 3100 feet. This is high desert, where saguaros are rare, and century plants start to become common. The desert was lush, with lots of acacia, mesquite, prickly pear and jojoba.

The scenery was quite nice too, as we circled rugged Picketpost Mountain, and then wound through valleys and canyons, and over ridges.

I generally prefer hiking and camping in forests, but this time of year it would be too cold. Even at this elevation, we all got chilled as the night time temperature dropped into the 20’s. After a dinner of freeze-dried lasagna and chicken a-la-king, we huddled around the mesquite campfire until about 10, and then crawled into our sleeping bags. Dale and Donna each had a tent, but I slept under the stars. The half moon rose about midnight, and I watched it move across the sky as I slept fitfully, trying to stay warm. Around 4, the wind began to pick up, but fortunately clouds also moved in and the temperature rose. By the time we got up at dawn (around 7:00), the temperature was around 40, which seemed relatively toasty.

After a breakfast of instant oatmeal, we started back. We got rained on and hailed on during the hike out, but it wasn’t heavy and didn’t last long, and was actually pleasant.

I think Donna enjoyed her first backpacking trip, but she needs to try it again some time when she can hike through pine forests in warmer weather. Still, it was one of the better desert hikes I’ve been on.