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At Solarfest a couple of years ago, I attended a home energy efficiency workshop. One of the questions from the audience was about saving energy by not opening the refrigerator frequently, and his answer was: it doesn't really matter. I was just reminded of this when my housemate mentioned feeling bad about not planning ahead when she's cooking, so she opens and closes the fridge repeatedly. A lot of people think this wastes a lot of energy, and it actually doesn't.

The guy who spoke at Solarfest told us about some actual research that had been done: Same-model refrigerators were loaded with the same amount of food. A "control" fridge was left closed for several days, while the "experimental" fridge had its door opened far more frequently than even the most scatterbrained person would do in normal life, and held open for longer than people usually hold the door open. At the end, with the refrigerators cooled down to their set temperature, they compared the amount of electricity used by both (they'd had meters attached), and found the difference to be insignificant.

It makes sense if you think about it. Refrigerators cool the air inside, but cooling air isn't the point; the point is to transfer some heat out of the stuff that's in the fridge, and keep excess heat from getting back into the stuff. Keeping air cool is a means to an end.

Air itself has very little heat content, because it's so thin. Most of the heat a fridge is concerned with is in the much denser solid/liquid food. If you put warm food in, some of its heat will transfer into the cooler air, and the fridge will have to continuously cool that air until all of the excess heat has come out of the food, which happens slowly.

When you open the door, all you do is cycle a bit of cool air out, forcing the fridge to re-cool some air, but that takes very little energy. Since heat transfers much more slowly into solids, very little heat gets into your food while you have the door open. After you close the door, the fridge quickly re-cools some air, expending very little energy. There's hardly any extra heat to transfer out of the solid stuff, so that air stays cold. To really "waste" energy, you would need to do more than cycle a bit of air out. You'd need to take the cold stuff out of the fridge, and replace it with warmer stuff. But that's the reason you have a refrigerator in the first place.

If you want use your refrigerator more efficiently, don't worry about how often you open the door. Instead, if you have food items out that you plan to put back into the fridge, and that you don't need to warm up before you use them, put them back into the fridge before they have a chance to sit out for a while and get warm. Stuff matters much more than air.

Edit: Simplified way of thinking about it: What matters is the transfer of heat (not temperature) into the fridge; that's what it uses energy to get rid of. You can't easily move much heat into the fridge with air; you mostly do it with solids and liquids.

Ever since grad school, I've been carrying with me a stack of papers by Leslie Lamport, my favorite CS writer of papers. I'd tried to find them online back in the 90s but they were all paper-only publications and I never did... until yesterday, they first time I tried in years. It turns out that Leslie Lamport at some point went and scanned in all of his papers, and posted PDFs here:
http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

If you haven't heard of Leslie Lamport, or think of him only as the guy who wrote LaTeX: His entertaining, fun to read papers laid down much of the fundamental theory behind distributed computing. For example, Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. He's known for unusual ways of presenting the math, most famously in:

• The Part-Time Parliament, in which he described how to do distributed consensus (for example, as in three-phase commit in databases) cast in the form of archaeological findings about parliamentary procedure on an ancient Greek island.


• The Byzantine Generals Problem, in which he re-cast the problem of achieving concensus when some processes/processors may go "rogue" rather than simply stop working, as a story about treason in war.

(Actually, some of these are fun to read even if you're not a CS geek.)

Also, he was at Brandeis at the same time as my stepmother.

I find this archive is sucking my time. It has many more Lamport papers than my short stack from grad school, and it's easy to poke around wondering "what's this one about?", but hard to stop reading once I've gotten far enough into one of them to answer that question. Since it's got me hooked, I feel like spreading the affliction. Err, the wonder. Yeah.

"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get any work done because a machine I've never heard of is down." -- Leslie Lamport

Basic recipe:
- Put lentils in pot of boiling water and simmer about 15min
- Sauté some onion & garlic (and maybe other stuff)
- Add rice to sauteed stuff and stir to coat rice in oil
- Pour in the pre-simmerred lentils, and a bunch of broth
- Keep simmerring about 20min, adding more broth as it evaporates

I've done this several times with some variations, like:
- Sauté mushrooms, peppers, and/or prosciutto w/onion+garlic
- Add frozen peas near the end
- Chicken broth, homemade vegetable broth, other brothlike things

... and, different combinations of spices. But I won't say which so as not to bias anyone. Which spices would you use with this? (Let me know if you read others' comments before posting yours)

My first impression of Los Angeles was not so good. We were on a several-week camping trip when I was about 9, starting in San Francisco, then to Wyoming and Utah and Arizona, and finishing up in southern California. I remember my first sight of LA, driving down from the mountains (we were probably coming in via I-15 through San Bernardino, though I don't remember): A vast sea of dark gray smog, out to the distant ocean, with tall buildings poking up above it here and there.

In Los Angeles, you couldn't really see the sky like in other places. It was lighter above, and grew steadily darker the further down you looked, a smooth gradient to gray well before the buildings hiding the horizon.

We saw the sunset from Disneyland one or two evenings, a beatiful orange sky I'd never seen before - really orange, solid orange, a thick band covering much of the sky. During the day, the sun was a diffuse focus of brilliant light spread out larger than a harvest moon.

I didn't go back to southern California until 2003, almost a quarter century later. California had made great strides on air quality in the years since. The pollution capitals of the US had mostly moved to Texas by then, and the sky in Los Angeles was unexceptional, just the sky like in most other cities I've been to.

Today, I took a flight from San Diego to Boston by way of Los Angeles, and got a view of the city from 25 or more years ago, for several minutes as we approached the airport. When we got out of the plane, I saw that same gradient sky, and that same sun. We left before sunset; I wonder if it's as orange as it was back then.

P.S. Glad to be back in Boston, where the air is cold but breathable. Although our plane waited over 50min after landing before they had an open gate for us and I'm waiting for my bags but missed the T. Yay for dreams_of_wings coming to pick me up.

I'll be in San Diego all of the second week of November.

Remind me who I know there, if you know? Or who I should meet?

[Poll #1280552]

I'm in Santa Fe for several days for listgirl & Elena's wedding, and I'll probably have some free time. Suggest somewhere I should go, something I should do or see, someone I should meet, somewhere I should eat, or any permutation of the above?

I'm sharing a hotel room with mechristy, mostlylies, and rekling. Last night I dreamed that I was away somewhere, sharing a room with the three of them, for an event put on by mutual friends. I feel cheated by my dream-brain.

Today I bought mzrowan's house, the one I've been living in ever since she first bought it in 2006. She's still here, though she plans to move soon to the place she's been renovating for a few months and will hopefully buy soon.

Although it all went smoothly today, there were a few times over the past month when I feared it'd get derailed, and the conclusion is: mortgage lenders, whoever they are, probablly all suck at communicating with you. When mzrowan and redheadedmuse's house buying turned into a mess, it turned out there was an explanation, but the bank just didn't tell them. I dealt with a different lender, Monument, but had almost-similar experiences.

What made the difference was having Joe Cooper, who redheadedmuse recommended, arranging things. He connects buyers with lenders, so he works with various banks and mortgage lenders, but the best part of the service he offers is communication. When the lender pulls some random inexplicable move and you go "WTF?!?", Joe explains why they did it, how the rules or laws relate, and even what the original purpose of those rules or laws is, and then you know what you need to do to make things work.

For example, when the lender says "sorry, you seem to be $18,000 short of being able to make your down payment" when I've looked at all the numbers and I know I have more than enough, they don't explain anything. They expect that I just take them at face value. Joe explains to me how we got laws requiring documenting the source of my funds, what funds do and don't need to be documented, and the key fact that since I made my deposit to the seller in July, that means they have to consider my July bank statement since that statement documents the deposit, which in turn means I have to document the source of any funds that went into my account in July, even though I thought I only needed to document what went in in August since they said they only need to look at one bank statement.

I second muse's recommendation: If you're going to get a mortgage without the standard lawyers and brokers, and you're not already very familiar with the process, don't try to deal directly with a lender; call Joe Cooper at 617-969-1441.

I created a new community, baystate, for Massachusetts.

Do I know anyone in Austin who may have somewhere for me to stay for any or all of July 16-20? (Wednesday through Sunday of next week)

I am pre-registered for Netroots Nation and very much want to go, and I can get a free flight with my frequent flyer miles, but I don't think I can spend on a hotel right now...

Friday afternoon, silentmachine's roommates took me to Minnehaha Park to see the falls, and we also stumbled onto World Refugee Day. We wandered into Sea Salt and got ice cream, but it wasn't until after I got mine that we noticed this...



We asked and the guy behind the counter said it really was made with squid ink, and tastes somewhat like black cherry.

First, some context: I'm at the ACLU national conference and this evening, we heard from George Soros, who recently made the largest private gift in ACLU history. Introducing Soros, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero announced the $12 million seed gift for the ACLU's ambitious new expansion. The goal is to "fill in the middle": We have strong, long-running ACLU affiliates in places like Massachusetts¹, New York, and northern California, but there are many states where the local ACLU is too small and underfunded to deal with the challenges of their coverage area & political climate.

So with that in mind, Romero was describing the plan:

"Someday there will no longer be civil liberties dead zones in the US ... you can look at the map, and you know what states I'm talking about, It's not places like Chelsea² where I live. Well, I don't know, maybe in Chelsea... if there's detention, it's the good kind of detention."

(A surprising number of people got it. I like this crowd.)

Reading The Rise of the Creative Class crystallized for me the idea, which I already had, that our new age of easy communications actually makes physical, geographic locations more significant, not less. Paul Graham's new essay, Cities and Ambition, presents another view of how cities matter - one that also seems familiar, but that I hadn't thought about in quite that way.

Some cities are centers for particular kinds of activity. Such a city subtly sends you a message related to that activity - by the things you see walking down the street, by the snippets of conversation you overhear, and many other ways. A city's message, he argues, comes from the fact that there is something people in that city tend to consistently view as more important than other things, and this attitude is catching. It's a three-way cycle:

• People move to that city because they value what it values above other things, and because it is a center for that activity
• People in that city value that thing because the city is a center for it, and because a lot of them moved there because it was the thing they already valued more
• It is a center for its activity because it is known for it so people move there to do that thing, and because people living there are encouraged to value that thing, which in turn encourages the activity itself

To really know a city's message, Graham says, you probably have to live there for a while. As examples, he gives the paces he has lived, and the messages they send:

New York City: You should make more money!

Silicon Valley: Be powerful. And start companies.

Berkeley: Live better. Enjoy life.

Boston, especially Cambridge: You could be smarter. Read more, learn more. Develop ideas.

He also gives a stab at interpreting the messages of some places he's been to but hasn't lived in, while acknowledging that he's not sure and that a local might interpret it more accurately. For example, he thinks the message Paris was sending him was "do things in style; appreciate art and beauty". And not all cities send a coherent message, because not all cities are focused in that way.

Where do live? What message is your city sending you?

Have you lived somewhere else that sent a clear message? What was it?

Edit: To clarify, in case you don't click through to read Graham's essay, in his formulation a city's message is both the thing it suggest you should aspire to, and the thing that people generally respect and honor most, and think is cool. So the coolest, most honored & respectable thing you can be in Silicon Valley is someone who started a now-influential company; in Boston, it's a smart person who had a great idea or created something new; in New York, it's being rich.