[Bloganuary] Live Long and Prosper

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

Today’s my 43rd birthday. Based on the current best statistics available for my age and country, I might expect to live about the same amount of time again: I’m literally about half-way through my anticipated life, today.1

Naturally, that’s the kind of shocking revelation that can make a person wish for an extended lifespan. Especially if, y’know, you read Andrew’s book on the subject and figured that, excitingly, we’re on the cusp of some meaningful life extension technologies!

Paperback copy of Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, by Andrew Steele.
I’ll be leaning heavily on the only book I’ve read on the subject for this one.

My very first thought when I read Andrew’s thoughts on lifespan extension was exactly the kind of knee-jerk panic response he tries to assuage with his free bonus chapter. He spends a while explaining how he’s not just talking about expending lifespan but healthspan, and so the need healthcare resources that are used to treat those in old-age wouldn’t increase dramatically as a result of lifespan increase, but that’s not the bit that worries me. My concern is that lifespan extension technologies will be unevenly distributed, and the (richer) societies that get them first are those same societies whose (richer) lifestyle has the greater negative impact on the Earth’s capacity to support human life.2

Andrew anticipates this concern and does some back-of-napkin maths to suggest that the increase in population doesn’t make too big an impact:

In this ‘worst’ case, the population in 2050 would be 11.3 billion—16% larger than had we not defeated ageing.

Is that a lot? I don’t think so—I’d happily work 16% harder to solve environmental problems if it meant no more suffering from old age.

This seems to me to be overly-optimistic:

  • The Earth doesn’t care whether or not you’re happy to work 16% harder to solve environmental problems if that extra effort isn’t possible (there’s necessarily an upper limit to how much change we can actually effect).
  • 16% extra population = 16% extra “work” to save them implies a linear relationship between the two that simply doesn’t exist.
  • And that you’re willing to give 16% more doesn’t matter a jot if most of the richest people on the planet don’t share that ideal.

Fortunately, I’m reassured by the fact that – as Andrew points out – change is unlikely to happen fast. That means that the existing existential threat of climate change remains a bigger and more-significant issue than potential future overpopulation does!

In short: while I’m hoping I’ll live happily and healthily to say 120, I don’t think I’m ready for the rest of the world to all suddenly start doing so too! But I think there are bigger worries in the meantime. I don’t fancy my chances of living long enough to find out.

Gosh, that’s a gloomy note for a birthday, isn’t it? I’d better get up and go do something cheerier to mark the day!

Dan waves, his head and shoulders peeping out from underneath a white duvet.
This post brought to you from my bed at the forest chalet I’ve spent the weekend in!

Footnotes

1 Assuming I don’t die of something before them, of course. Falling off a cliff isn’t a heritable condition, is it? ‘Cos there’s a family history of it, and I’ve always found myself affected by the influence of gravity, which I believe might be a precursor to falling off things.

2 Fun fact: just last month I threw together a little JavaScript simulator to illustrate how even with no population growth (a “replacement rate” of one child per adult) a population grows while its life expectancy grows, which some people find unintuitive.

Paperback copy of Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, by Andrew Steele.× Dan waves, his head and shoulders peeping out from underneath a white duvet.×

[Bloganuary] A Different Diet

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What could you do differently?

Well that sounds like a question lifted right off an Oblique Strategies deck if ever I heard one!

An open Oblique Strategies box with the face card showing: "The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten".

I occasionally aspire to something-closer-to-veganism. Given that my vegetarianism (which is nowadays a compromise position1 of “no meat on weekdays, no beef or lamb at all”) comes primarily from a place of environmental concern: a Western meat-eating diet is vastly less-efficient in terms of energy conversion, water usage, and carbon footprint than a vegetarian or vegan diet.

From an environmental perspective, the biggest impact resulting from my diet is almost certainly: dairy products. I’m not even the hugest fan of cheese, but I seem to eat plenty of it, and it’s one of those things that they just don’t seem to be able to make plant-based alternatives to perfectly, yet.

In an ideal world, with more willpower, I’d be mostly-vegan. I’d eat free range eggs produced by my own chickens, because keeping your own chickens offsets the food miles by enough to make them highly-sustainable. I’d eat honey, because honestly anything we can do to encourage more commercial beekeeping is a good thing as human civilisation depends on pollinators. But I’d drop all dairy from my diet.

I suppose I’m not that far off, yet. Maybe this year I can try switching-in a little more vegan “cheese” into the rotation.

Footnotes

1 I missed many meats. But also, I don’t like to be an inconvenience.

An open Oblique Strategies box with the face card showing: "The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten".×

Will swapping out electric car batteries catch on?

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Without even a touch of the steering wheel, the electric car reverses autonomously into the recharging station

Underside of a car with a removable battery.

I won’t be plugging it in though, instead, the battery will be swapped for a fresh one, at this facility in Norway belonging to Chinese electric carmaker, Nio.

The technology is already widespread in China, but the new Power Swap Station, just south of Oslo, is Europe’s first.

This is what I’ve been saying for years would be a better strategy for electric vehicles. Instead of charging them (the time needed to charge is their single biggest weakness compared to fuelled vehicles) we should be doing battery swaps. A decade or two ago I spoke hopefully for some kind of standardised connector and removal interface, probably below the vehicle, through which battery cells could be swapped-out by robots operating in a pit. Recovered batteries could be recharged and reconditioned by the robots at their own pace. People could still charge their cars in a plug-in manner at their homes or elsewhere.

You’d pay for the difference in charge between the old and replacement battery, plus a service charge for being part of the battery-swap network, and you’d be set. Car manufacturers could standardise on battery designs, much like the shipping industry long-ago standardised on container dimensions and whatnot, to take advantage of compatibility with the wider network.

Rather than having different sizes of battery, vehicles could be differentiated by the number of serial battery units installed. A lorry might need four or five units; a large car two; a small car one, etc. If the interface is standardised then all the robots need to be able to do is install and remove them, however many there are.

This is far from an unprecedented concept: the centuries-old idea of stagecoaches (and, later, mail coaches) used the same idea, but with the horses being changed at coaching inns rather. Did you know that the “stage” in stagecoach refers to the fact that their journey would be broken into stages by these quick stops?

Anyway: I dismayed a little when I saw every EV manufacturer come up with their own battery standards, co=operating only as far as the plug-in charging interfaces (and then, only gradually and not completely!). But I’m given fresh hope by this discovery that China’s trying to make it work, and Nio‘s movement in Norway is exciting too. Maybe we’ll get there someday.

Incidentally: here’s a great video about how AC charging works (with a US/type-1 centric focus), which briefly touches upon why battery swaps aren’t necessarily an easy problem to solve.

Underside of a car with a removable battery.×

Say… “Cheese?”

For lunch today I taste-tested five different plant-based vegan “cheeses” from Honestly Tasty. Let’s see if they’re any good.

Prefer video?

This blog post is available as a video (here or on YouTube), for those who like that sort of thing. The content’s slightly different, but you do get to see my face when I eat the one that doesn’t agree with me.

Background

I’ve been vegetarian or mostly-vegetarian to some degree or another for a little over ten years (for those who have trouble keeping up: I currently eat meat only on weekends, and not including beef or lamb), principally for the environmental benefits of a reduced-meat lifestyle. But if I’m really committed to reducing the environmental impact of my diet, the next “big” thing I still consume is dairy products.

My milk consumption is very low nowadays, but – like many people who might aspire towards dropping dairy – it’s quitting cheese that poses the biggest challenge. I’m not even the biggest fan of cheese, and I don’t know how I’d do without it: there’s just, it seems, no satisfactory substitute.

It’s possible, though, that my thinking on this is outdated. Especially in recent years, we’re getting better and better at making convincing (or, at least, tasty!) plant-based substitutes to animal based foods. And so, inspired by a conversation with some friends, I thought I’d try a handful of new-generation plant-based cheeses and see how I got on. I ordered a variety pack from Honestly Tasty (who’ll give you 20% off your first order if you subscribe your favourite throwaway email address to their newsletter) and gave it a go.

Bree

Dan eats some Bree.
It’s supposed to taste like Brie, I guess, but it’s not convincing. The texture of the rind is surprisingly good, but the inside is somewhat homogeneous and flat. They’ve tried to use mustard powder to provide Brie’s pepperiness and acetic acid for its subtle sourness, but it feels like there might be too much of the former (or perhaps I’m just a little oversensitive to mustard) and too little of the latter. It’s okay, but I wouldn’t buy it again.

Ched Spread

Dan eats Ched Spread.
This was surprisingly flavoursome and really quite enjoyable. It spreads with about the consistency of pâté and has a sharp tang that really stands out. You wouldn’t mistake it for cheese, but you might mistake it for a cheese spread: there’s a real “cheddary” flavour buried in there.

Blue

Dan eats 'Blue' Veganzola.
This is supposed to be modelled after Gorgonzola, and it might as well be because I don’t like either it or the cheese it’s based on. I might loathe Blue slightly less than most blue cheeses, but that doesn’t mean I’d willingly subject myself to this again in a hurry. It’s matured with real Penicillium Roqueforti, apparently, along with seaweed, and it tastes like both of these things are true. So yeah: I hated this one, but you shouldn’t take that as a condemnation of its quality as a cheese substitute because I’d still rather eat it than the cheese that it’s based on. Try for yourself, I guess.

Herbi

Dan eating Herbi.
This was probably my favourite of the bunch. It’s reminiscent of garlic & herb Boursin, and feels like somebody in the kitchen where they cooked it up said to themselves, “how about we do the Ched Spread, but with less onion and a whole load of herbs mixed-through”. It seems that it must be easier to make convincingly-cheesy soft cheeses than hard cheeses, but I’m not complaining: this would be great on toast.

Shamembert

Dan serves a Shamembert.
If you’d served me this and told me it was a baked Camembert… I wouldn’t be fooled. But I wouldn’t be disappointed either. It moves a lot like Camembert and it tastes… somewhat like it. But whether or not that’s “enough” for you, it’s perfectly delicious and I’d be more than happy to eat it or serve it to others.

In summary…

Honestly Tasty’s Ched Spread, Herbi, and Shamembert are perfectly acceptable (vegan!) substitutes for cheese. Even where they don’t accurately reflect the cheese they attempt to model, they’re still pretty good if you take them on their own merits: instead of comparing them to their counterparts, consider each as if it were a cheese spread or soft cheese in its own right and enjoy accordingly. I’d buy them again.

Their Bree failed to capture the essence of a good ripe Brie and its flavour profile wasn’t for me something to enjoy outside of its attempts at emulation. And their “Veganzola” Blue cheese… was pretty grim, but then that’s what I think of Gorgonzola too, so maybe it’s perfect and I just haven’t the palate for it.

Dan eats some Bree.× Dan eats Ched Spread.× Dan eats 'Blue' Veganzola.× Dan eating Herbi.× Dan serves a Shamembert.×

Coca-Cola company trials first paper bottle

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

image captionThis image from Coca-Cola's filling line gives a clear view of the plastic cap still in use

Coca-Cola is to test a paper bottle as part of a longer-term bid to eliminate plastic from its packaging entirely.

The prototype is made by a Danish company from an extra-strong paper shell that still contains a thin plastic liner.

But the goal is to create a 100% recyclable, plastic-free bottle capable of preventing gas escaping from carbonated drinks.

The barrier must also ensure no fibres flake off into the liquid.

If only somebody could invent a bottle suitable for containing Coca-Cola but 100% recyclable, plastic-free, and food safe.

Oh wait… for the vast majority of its history, all Coca-Cola bottles have met this description! The original Coke bottles, back in 1899, were made of glass with a metal top. Glass is infinitely-recyclable (it’s also suitable for pressure-washing and reusing, saving even more energy, as those who receive doorstep milk deliveries already know) and we already have a recycling infrastructure for it in place. Even where new glass needs to be made from scratch, its raw ingredient is silica, one of the most abundant natural resources on the planet!

Bottle caps can be made of steel or aluminium and can be made in screw-off varieties in case you don’t have a bottle opener handy. Both steel and aluminium are highly-recyclable, and again with infrastructure already widespread. Many modern “metal” caps contain a plastic liner to ensure a good airtight fit (especially if it’s a screw cap, which are otherwise less-tight), but there are environmentally-friendly alternatives: bioplastics or cork, for example.

The worst things about glass are its fragility – which is a small price to pay – and its weight (making distribution more expensive and potentially more-polluting). But that latter can easily be overcome by distributing bottling: a network of bottling plants around the country (each bottling a variety of products, and probably locally-connected to reclamation and recycling schemes) would allow fluids to be transported in bulk – potentially even in concentrate form, further improving transport efficiency… and that’s if it isn’t just more ecologically-sound to produce Coke more-locally rather than transporting it over vast distances: it’s not like the recipe is particularly complicated.

In short: this is the stupidest environmental initiative I’ve seen yet this year.

image captionThis image from Coca-Cola's filling line gives a clear view of the plastic cap still in use×

Digital Climate Strike’s Carbon Footprint

Ironically, the web page promoting the “Digital Climate Strike” is among the dirtiest on the Internet, based on the CO2 footprint of visiting it.

Global Climate Strike's "Take Action" webpage
Save your bandwidth: just look at this screenshot of the site instead of visiting.

Going to that page results in about 14 Mb of data being transmitted from their server to your device (which you’ll pay for if you’re on a metered connection). For comparison, reading my recent post about pronouns results in about 356 Kb of data. In other words, their page is forty times more bandwidth-consuming, despite the fact that my page has about four times the word count. The page you’re reading right now, thanks to its images, weighs in at about 650 Kb: you could still download it more than twenty times while you were waiting for theirs.

globalclimatestrike.net/action: "Uh oh! This web page is dirtier than 97% of web pages tested. Oh my, 7.74g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page."
Well that’s got to be pretty embarassing.

Worse still, the most-heavyweight of the content they deliver is stuff that’s arguably strictly optional and doesn’t add to the message:

  • Eight different font files are served from three different domains (the fonts alone consume about 140 Kb) – seven more are queued but not used.
  • Among the biggest JavaScript files they serve is that of Hotjar analytics: I understand the importance of measuring your impact, but making your visitors – and the planet – pay for it is a little ironic.
  • The biggest JavaScript file seems to be for Mapbox, which as far as I can see is never actually used: that map on the page is a static image which, incidentally, I was able to reduce from 0.5 Mb to 0.2 Mb just by running it through a free online image compressor.
Image compression comparison for the map image. Before: 536K, after: 201K (-63%).
This took me literally seconds to do but would save about a twelfth of a second for every single typical 4G user to their site. And it’s not even the worst culprit.

And because the site sets virtually no caching headers, even if you’ve visited the website before you’re likely to have to download the whole thing again. Every single time.

It’s not just about bandwidth: all of those fonts, that JavaScript, their 60 Kb of CSS (this page sent you 13 Kb) all has to be parsed and interpreted by your device. If you’re on a mobile device or a laptop, that means you’re burning through lithium (a non-renewable resource whose extraction and disposal is highly polluting) and regardless of your device you’re using you’re using more electricity to visit their site than you need to. Coding antipatterns like document.write() and active event listeners that execute every time you scroll the page keep your processor working hard, turning electricity into waste heat. It took me over 12 seconds on a high-end smartphone and a good 4G connection to load this page to the point of usability. That’s 12 seconds of a bright screen, a processor running full tilt,a  data connection working its hardest, and a battery ticking away. And I assume I’m not the only person visiting the website today.

This isn’t really about this particular website, of course (and I certainly don’t want to discourage anybody from the important cause of saving the planet!). It’s about the bigger picture: there’s a widespread and long-standing trend in web development towards bigger, heavier, more power-hungry websites, built on top of heavyweight frameworks that push the hard work onto the user’s device and which favour developer happiness over user experience. This is pretty terrible: it makes the Web slow, and brittle, and it increases the digital divide as people on slower connections and older devices get left behind.

(Bonus reading: luckily there’s a counterculture of lean web developers…)

But this trend is also bad for the environment, and when your website exists to try to save it, that’s more than a little bit sad.

Global Climate Strike's "Take Action" webpage× globalclimatestrike.net/action: "Uh oh! This web page is dirtier than 97% of web pages tested. Oh my, 7.74g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page."× Image compression comparison for the map image. Before: 536K, after: 201K (-63%).×

What can board game strategy tell us about the future of the car wash?

I’m increasingly convinced that Friedemann Friese‘s 2009 board game Power Grid: Factory Manager (BoardGameGeek) presents gamers with a highly-digestible model of the energy economy in a capitalist society. In Factory Manager, players aim to financially-optimise a factory over time, growing production and delivery capacity through upgrades in workflow, space, energy, and staff efficiency. An essential driving factor in the game is that energy costs will rise sharply throughout. Although it’s not always clear in advance when or by how much, this increase in the cost of energy is always at the forefront of the savvy player’s mind as it’s one of the biggest factors that will ultimately impact their profit.

Power grid's energy cost tracker
8 $money per $unit of electricity I use? That’s a rip off! Or a great deal! I don’t know!

Given that players aim to optimise for turnover towards the end of the game (and as a secondary goal, for the tie-breaker: at a specific point five rounds after the game begins) and not for business sustainability, the game perhaps-accidentally reasonably-well represents the idea of “flipping” a business for a profit. Like many business-themed games, it favours capitalism… which makes sense – money is an obvious and quantifiable way to keep score in a board game! – but it still bears repeating.

There’s one further mechanic in Factory Manager that needs to be understood: a player’s ability to control the order in which they take their turn and their capacity to participate in the equipment auctions that take place at the start of each round is determined by their manpower-efficiency in the previous round. That is: a player who operates a highly-automated factory running on a skeleton staff benefits from being in the strongest position for determining turn order and auctions in their next turn.

Empty Factory Manager staff room
My staff room is empty. How about yours?

The combination of these rules leads to an interesting twist: in the final turn – when energy costs are at their highest and there’s no benefit to holding-back staff to monopolise the auction phase in the nonexistent subsequent turn – it often makes most sense strategically to play what I call the “sweatshop strategy”. The player switches off the automated production lines to save on the electricity bill, drags in all the seasonal workers they can muster, dusts off the old manpower-inefficient machines mouldering in the basement, and gets their army of workers cranking out widgets!

With indefinitely-increasing energy prices and functionally-flat staff costs, the rules of the game would always eventually reach the point at which it is most cost-effective to switch to slave cheap labour rather than robots. but Factory Manager‘s fixed-duration means that this point often comes for all players in many games at the same predictable point: a tipping point at which the free market backslides from automation to human labour to keep itself alive.

There are parallels in the real world. Earlier this month, Tim Watkins wrote:

Abandoned automatic car wash

The demise of the automated car wash may seem trivial next to these former triumphs of homo technologicus but it sits on the same continuum. It is just one of a gathering list of technologies that we used to be able to use, but can no longer express (through market or state spending) a purpose for. More worrying, however, is the direction in which we are willingly going in our collective decision to move from complexity to simplicity. The demise of the automated car wash has not followed a return to the practice of people washing their own cars (or paying the neighbours’ kid to do it). Instead we have more or less happily accepted serfdom (the use of debt and blackmail to force people to work) and slavery (the use of physical harm) as a reasonable means of keeping the cost of cleaning cars to a minimum (similar practices are also keeping the cost of food down in the UK). This, too, is precisely what is expected when the surplus energy available to us declines.

I love Factory Manager, but after reading Watkins’ article, it’ll probably feel a little different to play it, now. It’s like that moment when, while reading the rules, I first poured out the pieces of Puerto Rico. Looking through them, I thought for a moment about what the “colonist” pieces – little brown wooden circles brought to players’ plantations on ships in a volume commensurate with the commercial demand for manpower – represented. And that realisation adds an extra message to the game.

Beneath its (fabulous) gameplay, Factory Manager carries a deeper meaning encouraging the possibility of a discussion about capitalism, environmentalism, energy, and sustainability. And as our society falters in its ability to fulfil the techno-utopian dream, that’s perhaps a discussion we need to be having.

Sorry to Bother You
Seriously, this film is awesome.

But for now, go watch Sorry to Bother You, where you’ll find further parallels… and at least you’ll get to laugh as you do so.

Power grid's energy cost tracker× Empty Factory Manager staff room× Sorry to Bother You×

Alpha-Gal and the Gaia Hypothesis

Ticking Point

An increasing number of people are reportedly suffering from an allergy to the meat and other products of nonhuman mammals, reports Mosaic Science this week, and we’re increasingly confident that the cause is a sensitivity to alpha-gal (Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose), a carbohydrate produced in the bodies of virtually all mammals except for us and our cousin apes, monkeys, and simians (and one of the reasons you can’t transplant tissue from pigs to humans, for example).

Lone star tick
The lone star tick (You call that a star, tick? Looks like a blob to me!), one of several vectors for alpha-gal sensitivity.

The interesting thing is that the most-common cause of alpha-gal sensitivity appears to be the bite of one of a small number of species of tick. The most-likely hypothesis seems to be that being bitten by such a tick after it’s bitten e.g. deer or cattle may introduce that species’ alpha-gal directly to your bloodstream. This exposure triggers an immune response through all future exposure, even if it’s is more minor, e.g. consuming milk products or even skin contact with an animal.

That’s nuts, isn’t it? The Mosaic Science article describes the reaction of Tami McGraw, whose symptoms began in 2010:

[She] asked her doctor to order a little-known blood test that would show if her immune system was reacting to a component of mammal meat. The test result was so strongly positive, her doctor called her at home to tell her to step away from the stove.

That should have been the end of her problems. Instead it launched her on an odyssey of discovering just how much mammal material is present in everyday life. One time, she took capsules of liquid painkiller and woke up in the middle of the night, itching and covered in hives provoked by the drug’s gelatine covering.

When she bought an unfamiliar lip balm, the lanolin in it made her mouth peel and blister. She planned to spend an afternoon gardening, spreading fertiliser and planting flowers, but passed out on the grass and had to be revived with an EpiPen. She had reacted to manure and bone meal that were enrichments in bagged compost she had bought.

A delicious-looking BLT. Mmm, bacon.
Cats can eat bacon. But some cat owners can’t. More bacon for the cats? The plot thickens. Also: haven’t used this picture in a while, have I?

Of course, this isn’t the only nor even the most-unusual (or most-severe) animal-induced allergy-to-a-different-animal we’re aware of. The hilariously-named but terribly-dangerous Pork-Cat syndrome is caused, though we’re not sure how, by exposure to cats and results in a severe allergy to pork. But what makes alpha-gal sensitivity really interesting is that it’s increasing in frequency at quite a dramatic rate. The culprit? Climate change. Probably.

It’s impossible to talk to physicians encountering alpha-gal cases without hearing that something has changed to make the tick that transmits it more common – even though they don’t know what that something might be.

“Climate change is likely playing a role in the northward expansion,” Ostfeld adds, but acknowledges that we don’t know what else could also be contributing.

Meat Me Half-Way

To take a minor diversion: another article I saw this week was the BBC‘s one on the climate footprint of the food you eat.

BBC graph showing climate impact of common foods. Beef is terrible *unshocker*.
An average serving of beef contributes almost 8kg of greenhouse gases, compared to around 1kg for chicken. Thanks, Beeb (click through for full article).

A little dated, perhaps: I’m sure that nobody needs to be told nowadays that one of the biggest things a Westerner can do to reduce their personal carbon footprint (after from breeding less or not at all, which I maintain is the biggest, or avoiding air travel, which Statto argues for) is to reduce or refrain from consumption of meat (especially pork and beef) and dairy products.

Indeed, environmental impact was the biggest factor in my vegetarianism (now weekday-vegetarianism) for the last eight years, and it’s an outlook that I’ve seen continue to grow in others over the same period.

Seeing these two stories side-by-side in my RSS reader put the Gaia hypothesis in my mind.

SMBC comic frame: "Yeah, I don't buy it. If Earth is self-regulating and alive, why hasn't it produced an immune response against humanity?"
If you want a pop-culture-grade introduction to the Gaia hypothesis in the context of climate change, this SMBC comic does the job, and does so almost with fewer words than this caption explaining that it does so.

If you’re not familiar with the Gaia hypothesis, the basic idea is this: by some mechanism, the Earth and all of the life on it act in synergy to maintain homeostasis. Organisms not only co-evolve with one another but also with the planet itself, affecting their environment in a way that in turn affects their future evolution in a perpetual symbiotic relationship of life and its habitat.

Its advocates point to negative feedback loops in nature such as plankton blooms affecting the weather in ways that inhibit plankton blooms and to simplistic theoretical models like the Daisyworld Simulation (cute video). A minority of its proponents go a step further and describe the Earth’s changes teleologically, implying a conscious Earth with an intention to protect its ecosystems (yes, these hypotheses were born out of the late 1960s, why do you ask?). Regardless, the essence is the same: life’s effect on its environment affects the environment’s hospitality to life, and vice-versa.

There’s an attractive symmetry to it, isn’t there, in light of the growth in alpha-gal allergies? Like:

  1. Yesterday – agriculture, particularly intensive farming of mammals, causes climate change.
  2. Today – climate change causes ticks to spread more-widely and bite more humans.
  3. Tomorrow – tick bites cause humans to consume less products farmed from mammals?
Daisyworld in SimEarth
Both my appreciation and my rejection of Gaia Hypothesis can probably be traced to me playing way too much SimEarth as a teenager. Here’s my Daisyworld in state of equilibrium, because I haven’t yet gotten bored and spawned dinosaurs to eat all of the daisies.

That’s not to say that I buy it, mind. The Gaia hypothesis has a number of problems, and – almost as bad – it encourages a complacent “it’ll all be okay, the Earth will fix itself” mindset to climate change (which, even if it’s true, doesn’t bode well for the humans residing on it).

But it was a fun parallel to land in my news reader this morning, so I thought I’d share it with you. And, by proxy, make you just a little bit warier of ticks than you might have been already. /shudders/

Lone star tick× A delicious-looking BLT. Mmm, bacon.× Daisyworld in SimEarth×

The Dirty Secret of the Global Plan to Avert Climate Disaster

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

In 2014 Henrik Karlsson, a Swedish entrepreneur whose startup was failing, was lying in bed with a bankruptcy notice when the BBC called. The reporter had a scoop: On the eve of releasing a major report, the United Nation’s climate change panel appeared to be touting an untried technology as key to keeping planetary temperatures at safe levels. The technology went by the inelegant acronym BECCS, and Karlsson was apparently the only BECCS expert the reporter could find.

Karlsson was amazed. The bankruptcy notice was for his BECCS startup, which he’d founded seven years earlier after an idea came to him while watching a late-night television show in Gothenburg, Sweden. The show explored the benefits of capturing carbon dioxide before it was emitted from power plants. It’s the technology behind the much-touted notion of “clean coal,” a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down climate change.

Karlsson, then a 27-year-old studying to be an operatic tenor, was no climate scientist or engineer. Still, the TV show got him thinking: During photosynthesis plants naturally suck carbon dioxide from the air, storing it in their leaves, branches, seeds, roots, and trunks. So what if you grew crops and then burned those crops for electricity, being sure to capture all of the carbon dioxide emitted? You’d then store all that dangerous CO2 underground. Such a power plant wouldn’t just be emitting less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, it would effectively be sucking CO2 from the air. Karlsson was enraptured with the idea. He was going to help avert a global disaster.

Wonderful but horrifying longread about the truth of the theoretical effectiveness of the Paris Agreement. The short: if we’re going to keep global temperature rises under a “bad” 2°C rather than closer to a “catastrophic” 4°C, we need to take action, but the vast majority of the plans that have been authored on how to do that rely on investment in technologies and infrastructure that nobody is investing in and that might not work even if we did. We’re fucked, in short. See also this great video about greening the Sahara in an effort to lock carbon into plants (another great idea that, surprise surprise, nobody’s investing in).

Swiss startup Energy Vault is stacking concrete blocks to store energy — Quartz

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmrwdTGZxGk

Thanks to the modern electric grid, you have access to electricity whenever you want. But the grid only works when electricity is generated in the same amounts as it is consumed. That said, it’s impossible to get the balance right all the time. So operators make grids more flexible by adding ways to store excess electricity for when production drops or consumption rises.

About 96% of the world’s energy-storage capacity comes in the form of one technology: pumped hydro. Whenever generation exceeds demand, the excess electricity is used to pump water up a dam. When demand exceeds generation, that water is allowed to fall—thanks to gravity—and the potential energy turns turbines to produce electricity.

But pumped-hydro storage requires particular geographies, with access to water and to reservoirs at different altitudes. It’s the reason that about three-quarters of all pumped hydro storage has been built in only 10 countries. The trouble is the world needs to add a lot more energy storage, if we are to continue to add the intermittent solar and wind power necessary to cut our dependence on fossil fuels.

A startup called Energy Vault thinks it has a viable alternative to pumped-hydro: Instead of using water and dams, the startup uses concrete blocks and cranes. It has been operating in stealth mode until today (Aug. 18), when its existence will be announced at Kent Presents, an ideas festival in Connecticut.

Solar Power, part 2

At the very end of last year, right before the subsidy rate dropped in January, I had solar panels installed: you may remember that I blogged about it at the time. I thought you might be interested to know how that’s working out for us.

Solar panels on our roof.
A power plant, right on top of our house. It’s very small – like, a “13” on Power Grid – but it’s ours.

Because I’m a data nerd, I decided to monitor our energy usage, production, and total cost in order to fully understand the economic impact of our tiny power station. I appreciate that many of you might not be able to appreciate how cool this kind of data is, but that’s because you don’t have as good an appreciation of how fun statistics can be… it is cool, damn it!

This chart, for example, shows our energy usage in KWh of each of gas and electricity for the last 8 months.
This stacked area chart, for example, shows our energy usage in KWh of each of gas and electricity for the last 8 months.

If you look at the chart above, for example (click for a bigger version), you’ll notice a few things:

  • We use a lot more KWh of gas than electricity (note that’s not units of gas: our gas meter measures in cubic feet, which means we have to multiply by around… 31.5936106… to get the KWh… yes, really – more information here), but electricity is correspondingly 3.2 times more expensive per KWh – I have a separate chart to measure our daily energy costs, and it is if anything even more exciting (can you imagine!) than this one.
  • Our gas usage grows dramatically in the winter – that’s what the big pink “lump” is. That’s sort-of what you’d expect on account of our gas central heating.
  • Our electricity usage has trended downwards since the beginning of the year, when the solar panels were installed. It’s hard to see with the gas scale throwing it off (but again, the “cost per day” chart makes it very clear). There’s also a bit near the end where the electricity usage seems to fall of the bottom of the chart… more on that in a moment.
Solar panels pay for themselves by (1) powering your appliances, thus meaning you buy less electricity from the grid, (2) selling electricity that is generated but not used back to the grid, and (3) through a subsidy scheme that rewards the generation of green electricity.
Solar panels (slowly) pay for themselves in three different ways. People often find it surprising that there aren’t only one or two.

What got me sold on the idea of installing solar panels, though, was their long-term investment potential. I had the money sitting around anyway, and by my calculations we’ll get a significantly better return-on-investment out of our little roof-mounted power station than I would out of a high-interest savings account or bond. And that’s because of the oft-forgotten “third way” in which solar panelling pays for itself. Allow me to explain:

  1. Powering appliances: the first and most-obvious way in which solar power makes economic sense is that it powers your appliances. Right now, we generate almost as much electricity as we use (although because we use significantly more power in the evenings, only about a third of what which we generate goes directly into making our plethora of computers hum away).
  2. Selling back to the grid (export tariff): as you’re probably aware, it’s possible for a household solar array to feed power back into the National Grid: so the daylight that we’re collecting at times when we don’t need the electricity is being sold back to our energy company (who in turn is selling it, most-likely, to our neighbours). Because they’re of an inclination to make a profit, though (and more-importantly, because we can’t commit to making electricity for them when they need it: only during the day, and dependent upon sunlight), they only buy units from us at about a third of the rate that they sell them to consumers. As a result, it’s worth our while trying to use the power we generate (e.g. to charge batteries and to run things that can be run “at any point” during the day like the dishwasher, etc.) rather than to sell it only to have to buy it back.
  3. From a government subsidy (feed-in tariff): here’s the pleasant surprise – as part of government efforts to increase the proportion of the country’s energy that is produced from renewable sources, they subsidise renewable microgeneration. So if you install a wind turbine in your garden or a solar array on your roof, you’ll get a kickback for each unit of electricity that you generate. And that’s true whether you use it to power appliances or sell it back to the grid – in the latter case, you’re basically being paid twice for it! The rate that you get paid as a subsidy gets locked-in for ~20 years after you build your array, but it’s gradually decreasing. We’re getting paid a little over 14.5p per unit of electricity generated, per day.
A graph showing the number of units per day we've generated, peaking during that sunny spell in late April.
Late April was bright and sunny and we were able to generate up to 19 units per day (for contrast, we use around 12 units per day), but May has so-far been rainy and grey and we’ve made only about 13 units per day.

As the seasons have changed from Winter through Spring we’ve steadily seen our generation levels climbing. On a typical day, we now make more electricity than we use. We’re still having to buy power from the grid, of course, because we use more electricity in the evening than we’re able to generate when the sun is low in the sky: however, if (one day) technology like Tesla’s PowerWall becomes widely-available at reasonable prices, there’s no reason that a house like ours couldn’t be totally independent of the grid for 6-8 months of the year.

Two SSE engineers head back to their van.
These guys came and replaced our electricity meter, because it was… umm… running backwards.

So: what are we saving/making? Well, looking at the last week of April and the first week of May, and comparing them to the same period last year:

  1. Powering appliances: we’re saving about 60p per day on electricity costs (down to about £1.30 per day).
  2. Selling back to the grid: we’re earning about 50p per day in exports.
  3. From a government subsidy: we’re earning about £2.37 per day in subsidies.

As I’m sure you can see: this isn’t peanuts. When you include the subsidy then it’s possible to consider our energy as being functionally “free”, even after you compensate for the shorter days of the winter. Of course, there’s a significant up-front cost in installing solar panels! It’s hard to say exactly when, at this point, I expect them to have paid for themselves (from which point I’ll be able to use the expected life of the equipment to more-accurately predict the total return-on-investment): I’m planning to monitor the situation for at least a year, to cover the variance of the seasons, but I will of course report back when I have more data.

Electricity meter with red light showing.
Our new electricity meter, which replaced the old one – one of those with a “wheel”. The red light indicates that fraud has been detected. Yeah, about that…

I mentioned that the first graph wasn’t accurate? Yeah: so it turns out that our house’s original electricity meter was of an older design that would run backwards when electricity was being exported to the grid. Which was great to see, but not something that our electricity company approved of, on account of the fact that they were then paying us for the electricity we sold back to the grid, twice: for a couple of days of April sunshine, our electricity meter consistently ran backwards throughout the day. So they sent a couple of engineers out to replace it with a more-modern one, pictured above (which has a different problem: its “fraud light” comes on whenever we’re sending power back to the grid, but apparently that’s “to be expected”).

In any case, this quirk of our old meter has made some of my numbers from earlier this year more-optimistic than they might otherwise be, and while I’ve tried to compensate for this it’s hard to be certain that my estimates prior to its replacement are accurate. So it’s probably going to take me a little longer than I’d planned to have an accurate baseline of exactly how much money solar is making for us.

But making money, it certainly is.

Solar panels on our roof.× This chart, for example, shows our energy usage in KWh of each of gas and electricity for the last 8 months.× Solar panels pay for themselves by (1) powering your appliances, thus meaning you buy less electricity from the grid, (2) selling electricity that is generated but not used back to the grid, and (3) through a subsidy scheme that rewards the generation of green electricity.× A graph showing the number of units per day we've generated, peaking during that sunny spell in late April.× Two SSE engineers head back to their van.× Electricity meter with red light showing.×

Solar Power, part 1

One of the great joys of owning a house is that you can do pretty much whatever you please with it. I celebrated Ruth, JTA and I’s purchase of Greendale last year by wall-mounting not one but two televisions and putting shelves up everywhere. But honestly, a little bit of DIY isn’t that unusual nor special. We’ve got plans for a few other changes to the house, but right now we’re pushing our eco-credentials: we had cavity wall insulation added to the older parts of the building the other week and an electric car charging port added not long before that. And then… came this week’s big change.

South-facing roof.
Look at all that South-facing roof, sitting there serving no purpose except to keep the rain off our heads.

Solar photovoltaics! They’re cool, they’re (becoming) economical, and we’ve got this big roof that faces almost due-South that would otherwise be just sitting there catching rain. Why not show off our green credentials and save ourselves some money by covering it with solar cells, we thought.

Annabel watches the solar panelling team arrive.
Annabel sits at the window and supervises the parking of the structural engineer, the electrician, and the solar panel specialist.

Because it’s me, I ended up speaking to five different companies and, after removing one from the running for employing a snake for a salesman, collecting seven quotes from the remaining four, I began to do my own research. The sheer variety of panels, inverters, layouts and configurations (all of which are described in their technical sheets using terms that in turn required a little research into electrical efficiency and dusting off formulas I’d barely used since my physics GCSE exam) are mind-boggling. Monolithic, string, or micro-inverters? 250w or 327w panels? Where to run the cables that connect the inverter (in the attic) to the generation meter and fusebox (in the ground floor toilet)? Needless to say, every company had a different idea about the “best way” to do it – sometimes subtly different, sometimes dramatically – and had a clear agenda to push. So – as somebody not suckered in to a quick deal – I went and did the background reading first.

Scaffolding!
The shape of our conservatory made erecting the scaffolding (which “staddles” it) a somewhat complicated operation.

In case you’re not yet aware, let me tell you the three reasons that solar panels are a great idea, economically-speaking. Firstly, of course, they make electricity out of sunlight which you can then use: that’s pretty cool. With good discipline and a monitoring tool either in hardware or software, you can discover the times that you’re making more power than you’re using, and use that moment to run the dishwasher or washing machine or car charger or whatever. Or the tumble drier, I suppose, although if you’re using the tumble drier because it’s sunny then you lose a couple of your ‘green points’ right there. So yeah: free energy is a nice selling point.

The second point is that the grid will buy the energy you make but don’t use. That’s pretty cool, too – if it’s a sunny day but there’s nobody in the house, then our electricity meter will run backwards: we’re selling power back to the grid for consumption by our neighbours. Your energy provider pays you for that, although they only pay you about a third of what you pay them to get the energy back again if you need it later, so it’s always more-efficient to use the power (if you’ve genuinely got something to use it for, like ad-hoc bitcoin mining or something) than to sell it. That said, it’s still “free money”, so you needn’t complain too much.

The third way that solar panels make economic sense is still one of the most-exciting, though. In order to enhance uptake of solar power and thus improve the chance that we hit the carbon emission reduction targets that Britain committed to at the Kyoto Protocol (and thus avoid a multi-billion-pound fine), the government subsidises renewable microgeneration plants. If you install solar panels on your house before the end of this year (when the subsidy is set to decrease) the government will pay you 14.38p per unit of electricity you produce… whether you use it or whether you sell it. That rate is retail price index linked and guaranteed for 20 years, and as a result residential solar installations invariably “pay for themselves” within that period, making them a logical investment for anybody who’s got a suitable roof and who otherwise has the money just sitting around. (If you don’t have the cash to hand, it might be worth taking out a loan to pay for solar panels, but then the maths gets a lot more complicated.)

Dan with his solar panels.
Look ma, no carbon emissions.

The scaffolding went up on the afternoon of day one, and I took the opportunity to climb up myself and give the gutters a good cleaning-out, because it’s a lot easier to do that from a fixed platform than it is from our wobbly “community ladder”. On day two, a team of electricians and a solar expert appeared at breakfast time and by 3pm they were gone, leaving behind a fully-functional solar array. On day three, we were promised that the scaffolding company would reappear and remove the climbing frame from our garden, but it’s now dark and they’ve not been seen yet, which isn’t ideal but isn’t the end of the world either: not least because Ruth’s been unwell and thus hasn’t had the chance to get up and see the view from the top of it, yet.

Greendale energy usage for the last four months.
Because that’s the kind of nerd I am, I have a process in place already to monitor our energy use fluctuations: note the jump in gas usage as we turned on the central heating for the winter!

We made about 4 units of electricity on our first day, which didn’t seem bad for an overcast afternoon about a fortnight away from the shortest day of the year. That’s about enough to power every light bulb in the house for the duration that the sun was in the sky, plus a little extra (we didn’t opt to commemorate the occasion by leaving the fridge door open in order to ensure that we used every scrap of the power we generated).

Because I’m a bit of a data nerd these years, I’ve been monitoring our energy usage lately anyway and as a result I’ve got an interesting baseline against which to compare the effectiveness of this new addition. And because there’s no point in being a data nerd if you don’t get to share the data love, I will of course be telling you all about it as soon as I know more.

South-facing roof.× Annabel watches the solar panelling team arrive.× Scaffolding!× Dan with his solar panels.× Greendale energy usage for the last four months.×

The Snip, Part 2

This is the second part of a three-part blog post about my vasectomy. Did you read the first part, yet?

My vasectomy was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, so I left work early in order to cycle up to the hospital: my plan was to cycle up there, and then have Ruth ride my bike back while JTA drove me home. For a moment, though, I panicked the clinic receptionist when she saw me arrive carrying a cycle helmet and pannier bag: she assumed that I must be intending to cycle home after the operation!

The Elliot-Smith Clinic. Picture copyright Google Street View.
The Elliot-Smith Clinic lives in an old prefab building buried at the back end of the hospital campus. If you think it looks scary in this picture, imagine what it’s like when it’s dark and you’re going there to be stabbed in the genitals.

It took me long enough to find the building, cycling around the hospital in the dark, and a little longer still to reassure myself that this underlit old building could actually be a place where surgery took place.

My tweet: "Arrived at vasectomy clinic. It's the most well-hidden, badly-lit, shady-looking building I've ever seen on a hospital campus."
My tweet upon arriving at the clinic.

Despite my GP‘s suggestion to the contrary, the staff didn’t feel the need to take me though their counselling process, despite me ticking some (how many depends primarily upon how you perceive our unusual relationship structure) of the “we would prefer to counsel additionally” boxes on their list of criteria. I’d requested that Ruth arrive at about the beginning of the process specifically so that she could “back me up” if needed (apparently, surgeons will sometimes like to speak to the partner of a man requesting a vasectomy), but nobody even asked. I just had to sign another couple of consent forms to confirm that I really did understand what I was doing, and then I was ready to go!

I’d shaved my balls a few days earlier, at the request of the clinic (and also at Matt‘s suggestion, who pointed out that “if I don’t, they’ll do it for me, and I doubt they’ll be as gentle!” – although it must be pointed out that as they were already planning to take a blade to my junk, I might not have so much to worry about), which had turned out to be a challenge in itself. I’ve since looked online and found lots of great diagrams showing you which parts you need to shave, but the picture I’d been given might as well have been a road map of Florence, because no matter which way up I turned it, it didn’t look anything like my genitals. In the end, I just shaved all over the damn place, just to be sure. Still not an easy feat, though, because the wrinkled skin makes for challenging shaving: the best technique I found was to “stretch” my scrotum out with one hand while I shaved it with the other – a tricky (and scary) maneuver.

Where to shave before your vasectomy: front and side of the scrotum.
If I’d had a diagram like this, rather than an Italian street map, I might have stood a better chance of just shaving what I needed to shave.

After sitting in the waiting room for a while, I was ushered through some forms and a couple more questions of “are you sure?”, and then herded into a curtained cubicle to change into a surgical gown (over the top of which I wore my usual dressing gown). The floor was cold, and I’d forgotten to bring my slippers, so I kept my socks on throughout. I sat in a separate waiting area from the first, and attempted to make small talk with the other gents waiting there. Some had just come out of surgery, and some were still waiting to go in, and the former would gently tease the latter with jokes about the operation. It’s a man thing, I guess: I can’t imagine that women would be so likely to engage in such behaviour (ignoring, for a moment, the nature of the operation).

There are several different approaches to vasectomy, and my surgeon was kind enough to tolerate my persistent questions as I asked about the specifics of each part of the operation. He’d said – after I asked – that one of the things he liked about doing vasectomies was that (unlike most of the other surgeries he performs) his patients are awake and he can have a conversation while he worked, although I guess he hadn’t anticipated that there’d ever be anybody quite so interested as I was.

Warning: The remainder of this blog post describes a surgical procedure, which some people might find squicky. For the protection of those who are of a weak stomach, some photos have been hidden behind hyperlinks: click at your own risk. (though honestly, I don’t think they’re that bad)

With my scrotum pulled up through a hole in a paper sheet, the surgeon began by checking that “everything was where it was supposed to be”: he checked that he could find each vas (if you’ve not done this: borrow the genitals of the nearest man or use your own, squeeze moderately tightly between two fingers the skin above a testicle, and move around a bit until you find a hard tube: that’s almost certainly a vas). Apparently surgeons are supposed to take care to ensure that they’ve found two distinct tubes, so they don’t for example sever the same one twice.

Next, he gave the whole thing a generous soaking in iodine. This turned out to be fucking freezing. The room was cold enough already, so I asked him to close the window while my genitals quietly shivered above the sheet.

Next up came the injection. The local anaesthetic used for this kind of operation is pretty much identical to the kind you get at the dentist: the only difference is that if your dentist injected you here, that’d be considered a miss. While pinching the left vas between his fingertips, the surgeon squirted a stack of lidocaine into the cavity around it. And fuck me, that hurt like being kicked in the balls. Seriously: that stung quite a bit for a few minutes, until the anaesthesia kicked in and instead the whole area felt “tingly”, in that way that your lips do after dental surgery.

Pinching the vas (still beneath the skin at this point) in a specially-shaped clamp, the surgeon made a puncture wound “around” it with a sharp-nosed pair of forceps, and pulled the vas clean through the hole. This was a strange sensation – I couldn’t feel any pain, but I was aware of the movement – a “tugging” against my insides.

A quick snip removed a couple of centimetres from the middle of it (I gather that removing a section, rather than just cutting, helps to reduce the – already slim – risk that the two loose ends will grow back together again) and cauterised the ends. The cauterisation was a curious experience, because while I wasn’t aware of any sensation of heat, I could hear a sizzling sound and smell my own flesh burning. It turns out that my flaming testicles smell a little like bacon. Or, if you’d like to look at it another way (and I can almost guarantee that you don’t): bacon smells a little bit like my testicles, being singed.

Next up came Righty’s turn, but he wasn’t playing ball (pun intended). The same steps got as far as clamping and puncturing before I suddenly felt a sharp pain, getting rapidly worse. “Ow… ow… owowowowowow!” I said, possibly with a little more swearing, as the surgeon blasted another few mils of anaesthetic into my bollocks. And then a little more. And damnit: it turns out that no matter how much you’ve had injected into you already, injecting anaesthetics into your tackle always feels like a kick in the nuts for a few minutes. Grr.

  • The removed sections of my vas, on a tray (actually mine)
    You can see the “kink” in each, where it was pulled out by the clamp. Also visible is the clamp itself – a cruel-looking piece of equipment, I’m sure you’ll agree! – and the discarded caps from some of the syringes that were used.

The benefit of this approach, the “no-scalpel vasectomy”, is that the puncture wounds are sufficiently small as to not need stitches. At the end of the surgery, the surgeon just stuck a plaster onto the hole and called it done. I felt a bit light-headed and wobbly-legged, so I sat on the operating table for a few minutes to compose myself before returning to the nurses’ desk for my debrief. I only spent about 20 minutes, in total, with the surgeon: I’ve spent longer (and suffered more!) at the dentist.

"Happy Vasectomy" card from Liz and Simon
Later, I would receive this “Happy Vasectomy” card from Liz and Simon. Thanks, guys!

By the evening, the anaesthetic had worn off and I was in quite a bit of pain, again: perhaps worse than that “kick in the balls” moment when the anaesthetic was first injected, but without the relief that the anaesthetic brought! I took some paracetamol and – later – some codeine, and slept with a folded-over pillow wedged between my knees, after I discovered how easy it was to accidentally squish my sore sack whenever I shifted my position.

The day after was somewhat better. I was walking like John Wayne, but this didn’t matter because – as the nurse had suggested – I spent most of the day lying down “with my feet as high as my bottom”. She’d taken the time to explain that she can’t put a bandage nor a sling on my genitals (and that I probably wouldn’t want her to, if she could), so the correct alternative is to wear tight-fitting underwear (in place of a bandage) and keep my legs elevated (as a sling). Having seen pictures of people with painful-looking bruises and swelling as a result of not following this advice, I did so as best as I could.

Today’s the day after that: I’m still in a little pain – mostly in Righty, again, which shall henceforth be called “the troublesome testicle” – but it’s not so bad except when I forget and do something like bend over or squat or, I discovered, let my balls “hang” under their own weight, at all. But altogether, it’s been not-too-bad at all.

Or, as I put on my feedback form at the clinic: “A+++. Recommended. Would vasectomy again.”

(thanks due to Ruth, JTA, Matt, Liz, Simon, Michelle, and my mum for support, suggestions, and/or fetching things to my bed for me while I’ve been waddling around looking like John Wayne, these past two days)

The Elliot-Smith Clinic. Picture copyright Google Street View.× My tweet: "Arrived at vasectomy clinic. It's the most well-hidden, badly-lit, shady-looking building I've ever seen on a hospital campus."× Where to shave before your vasectomy: front and side of the scrotum.× "Happy Vasectomy" card from Liz and Simon×