"Lo"? What the !@#$ does that mean?!"

One of those standard things I think all homes should have is a smart thermostat. We bought this one shortly after moving in. Though I agonized trying to find a reasonably easy-to-use one that fit the space, I failed. Its sort of junky. Do not buy it.

One thing is that its sort of hard to manually control. There is no real "fan-only" setting, for example. You end up working around the software a lot, to trick it into things.

Lately, its been worse. Its performing uncommanded actions. You set it to manual, click over to the air conditioner (which is still "unplugged" so will not engage) and if you wait a bit you can see it go "nope, you need heat." The little heat-mode icon lights up, and then the wavy lines that mean its making heat light up. Go to the basement, and yup, the heater is on. On a 76° day. One other hint, the temp display has a tendency to say "LO" instead of a number.

So, I finally give up with shorting leads and beating it with a screwdriver, and call the tech support line. Turns out LO means off scale low. The tiny, stupid computer in the thermostat thinks that its freezing cold. But its not, its just a bad temp sensor. Apparently, it feeds signal directly as a resistive signal, and 0° is about 0 volts.

Okay, its not the computer's fault. Its the designers. While its nice it says (cryptically) off-scale low, instead of a falsely low temperature when it gets a zero voltage response, who decided that the thermostat is smarter than the user? I am requesting "cooling" mode, so why switch to heat mode all by itself? Or, how about a spurious data sensor? It seems to disregard the 95% of the time it gets valid temperatures in order to fire some emergency recovery mode if it gets ANY zero-voltage temp gauge readings. This is poor design, making me sweat and wield a screwdriver needlessly.

What if all signaling was like your dog?

Our dog has a series of signal methods. If outside:

1. Stare at door
2. Sigh
3. Scratch lightly
4. Scratch firmly
5. Bark

These are pretty easy to interpret, as she pretty much always wants in. Occasionally its a notice "there's a possum" but we don't care, so that's fine, and we want her in so the net effect is the same. But indoor signaling, or rather "proximity to humans" signaling is different. The methods, again in increasing order, are:

1. Stand nearby
2. Walk away (leading you somewhere, but we never notice)
3. Stare longingly
4. Stare pathetically
5. Rest head on you
6. Bring you something
7. Paw you (or scratch at things of interest)
8. Jump up on you
9. Leap around
10. Yipping or wooing
11. Talk
12. Bark

But in this case, it could mean /anything/. Food, water, walk, play. Anything. And, therefore, its pretty easy to misinterpret. We routinely have to disregard the messaging as we know she's got food and water, and just came in, so doesn't need anything. Sit on my lap and shush. Exceptions are even worse. One night she just bugged the hell out of us for a while at 4 am. It only went to stage 4 or 5, so we disregarded (not critical enough, if its like "I must go outside") to get up. She can hold it. Turns out the pickup truck was being stolen. Well how the hell was I supposed to get "the truck is being stolen" from that? Its fun to imagine atrocious computer systems that have only one signal, for notifications, errors, everything, in much the same way.

Sometimes, the internet just freaks me out

I am generally jaded and unfazed by, well, everything. Especially consumable technology (vs. really cutting edge stuff) and most especially by most internet stuff. I especially am too old and boring to really get the full gist of some social-side stuff (I may never really understand why I would want to tweet all the time). But sometimes, I am totally surprised. Backstory: Every digital photo we have ever taken, and a few paper ones I have scanned (thousands to go, someday) are categorized with an individualized control language, and and then hosted from my home computer. Like 6,000 photos. We routinely post every photo we take on a vacation, for example. Not that many people look at them, but we can get to any photo we want, whenever and wherever we want to. This has been going on for like 7-8 years, well before most folks shared photos, and if not before Flickr existed, before I heard of it. But the software we use is old; hasn't been updated for years, and it has bugs. Replacements essentially do not exist; no hosted, heirarchical organizational systems, and most want you to run thru an organized like iPhoto, which is weak and a pointless extra step to me. So, I finally succumbed and am loading everything to Fickr. Got the uploadr (clunky!), paid the Pro fee, and there are just short of 600 items up there now. More every day (it takes a while just to tag them). Its fun just for me, and the wife. We see photos we haven't looked at in forever, we have to look to label and categorized them, and the tagging means we can find them more easily later. And even though we've only been loading for a few days, people are discovering them, and commenting, and inviting us to "adorable pets" groups and so on. It supports EXIF and other meta-data also, which is a nice addition as well. Now, see this. Sorry, its a screenshot, too big to fit in the page well. I'll quote it:

Questions from other members : Apple Power Mac G4 Dual 867 MDD system + Cinema Display Q: The computer is great, but looking at your pics on Flicker, you animals are adorable! The black and white cat looks almost exactly like our, actually. Sorry to take up your time on this, but wanted to let you know the dogs and cats are super cute.

Yup, its a comment about our pets, in the middle of an ebay auction for a computer (which, you are free to bid on also, btw). Seriously, community aspects overtaking the primary objective (buying and selling) of another community site. To which, I am sure there is something to be said about this looping back to the old-line small town way of selling, where everything was personal in the same way.

My dad is very ill

Just as a head's up for anyone who knows and likes my dad, or wonders why I will be distracted for a while here, my dad has been ill lately. Went to the doctor yesterday for an exam, and after a chest x-ray he's immediately admitted to the hospital. Further scans indicate large stage 4 tumors in the lungs and brain. Biopsies to come, but anything that is in multiple areas has metastasized, so is inherently malignant. No numbers have been put forward, but its very bad and timescales may be very short. And, if anyone wonders, he never smoked a day in his life, worked in a factory or... anything that would be a risk factor. If anything, much more active than the norm.

Can you be iconic, but not really any good?

Someone will probably want to run me down over this, but I never really liked Charlton Heston. Sure, Touch of Evil was fully good (and I bought him as an upper-crust Mexican even), but otherwise its mostly intentionally (Wayne's World 2, True Lies) or unintentionally (Airport '75, Earthquake) funny stuff. And do not EVEN get me started on stuff like Planet of the Apes. Jeesh. Okay, I have not seen El Cid. Probably should get around to that. Maybe I'll change my mind then.

More on trustworthy data

You are flying a high tech airliner, at night, over the ocean. Your instruments become useless, airspeed and altitude randomly moving from off-scale-low to other, arbitrary values. Or are they true values? The computerized control system reacts to those with a series of warnings, some of which are contradictory: over-speed and stall, at the same time. Without any visual frame of reference, there's no way to tell even roughly how high or fast you are going. What do you do?

Ask for help.

Air traffic control has radars covering the area (it does for most places airliners fly, but not some of the deep ocean routes) so you call back and ask them to give you accurate information off their screens.

They can easily, if slowly and by voice, give bearing, direction of travel and speed.

Who knows what is wrong with this last data point?

Altitude is not derived from radar data, but is instead telemetry; the aircraft sends the information, along with those identifying codes at the top, to the radar as part of the transponder data. If flight instruments are inaccurate, its very likely -- and in this case, indeed true -- that the number on the ATC display screen is wrong also.

And as a result, you fly into the ocean.

Aeroperu 603 New York Times article Wikipedia article

There's plenty more to hate about this crash (and the similar Birginair one) from a human factors point of view, from providing static and pitot port blocking devices, to the difficulty the flight crew has of focusing on a problem with so many conflicting instruments and warnings.

But I think there's something to be said for the problem of displaying the trustworthiness of data in this one narrow context. ATC systems have worked like this forever, and will probably continue to do so. I was surprised no one seemed to be aware of their manner of operation. And remember, the ground controller does not have as many issues as the aircrew, so should have had a chance to think over the issue. I presume he was, deep down, aware of how the system works.

But I generally avoid anything that has training as its backbone. Would there be a way to denote how information works, or where it comes from? I have nothing now, but its worth considering. The big problem as I see it is that the information is of mixed sources, and therefore mixed reliability. When transponders fail, or are turned off (terrorists, smugglers), the data supplied by it simply disappears. But before that, its displayed in the exact same manner as the systematically, radar-derived data.

Note that just because air travel is a high-reliability system with lots of history, these systems are not bulletproof. Changes to the displays frequently are poorly implemented and cause confusion. I suspect much of the design is status quo, and is not that good were testing to be done on it. Problems are alleviated with training and procedure, leading to accidents that result from poor training, breakdowns in procedure, and poor communications of changes in either.

Rounded-bottom Design

Much of what comes out of slanty design, and possibly the whole manner of designing architectures of control today, bugs the hell out of me. Its been bothering me since I read a spate of related articles a few months ago. I like the concept at its core. Don't prohibit by labelling, but make it impossible for users to do the wrong thing. Much of the slanted design stuff seems to split the difference, and feels user punishing still. Sloped floors leading to baggage carousels (scroll down in the first link to slanty design, or try the ACM article, if you have a membership)? Toronto for ones has snaking baggage rooms that already solve this dilemma. I am sure others have solved it in similar ways. Though the bags do come out one place, its inconvenient to get to, no one notices it, and there are other things to distract you around the room, like TVs. So people spread out, and no one fights for space. And, when full of people, sight lines are poor, so you just see your little lane, and don't race to the end of the room to get your luggage as soon as it comes out. I've been trying to keep track of other bits of good design that avoids problems without punishment. And then I saw the fire buckets on a UK TV show. They have round bottoms! And they are still made, though this one is rather less aggressively curved. Seem to be for factories and ships, more than places like police stations these days: In case it doesn't make sense, normal folks don't have hooks all over the place. Buckets get put down on the ground in normal use. A round bottom prevents use of the bucket as a normal bucket, so they won't get messed with or stolen. Brilliant. And a machine-age solution. This one, with a wire to serve the same purpose is from the turn of the last century: Personally, I prefer the very obvious ones, as then it doesn't just not work to stand up, it so clearly doesn't work for any but the designated purpose that no one would try it.