You might be wondering, WTF is that?

I carry two phones.  One for my day job and one is my personal phone.  Some people hate dual-phoning.  I didn’t know what I was going to think of it.  After trying it out now for over a year I have determined that I LIKE IT.  It’s like having double battery life.  The most ironic/tragic part is that even with double battery life, I still have to charge BOTH DAMN PHONES multiple times a day in order to make it to bed time.  It’s pathetic.  One of these days I'll write up all the thoughts I have about how pathetic smartphone battery life is.  

Anyway, it’s been over a year.  Being a typical guy, I’ve been carrying the phones in my front pockets.  Yes, it’s sort of a PITA (Pain In The Ass), but for me, the advantages outweigh the PITA part.  Recently, I’ve decided to stop carrying the phones in my pockets.  I try to set them in the passenger seat, or generally away from my pelvis as much as possible.  It is because I’ve been obsessing about the far-fetched notion that I’ve created a VORTEX OF SEMINAL CARNAGE (VSC).

Here’s how I came up with it.  I don’t know exactly how the radio energy comes out of the phones.  But if the radio waves from each phone emit from the antennas in basically a omni-directional way, where the phone is at the center and you can imagine circular waves of sinusoidal patterns transmitting in three dimensions, then it would look like kids blowing bubbles where the bubbles get bigger and bigger and bigger until they pop.  Except with these radio waves, the bubbles don’t pop.  They just go and go and go and dissipate until all the power is absorbed or naturally gone.

So then with two phones bilaterally surrounding my testicles, now you see the VORTEX OF SPERMATOZOAN DEATH (VSD) right at the center where the arrow is pointing.  It is where the energy waves from both phones would intersect and overlap each other.  All I can think is that my poor little microscopic seeds won't stand much of a chance being nuked from both sides. 

I will still be a dual-phoner, but I won’t carry both phones in my pockets if I can help it.
​
I’ll carry them in murse. 

When I'm faced with a network issue at home, I start with the fundamentals.  I like to start with what I call "number zero".  Because counting doesn't start at one.  It starts at nothing.  (Yes, I realize that the OSI Model starts at layer 1, but humor me for a moment.)

0.0  is it on?  Is there power?
0.1 are all the plugs connected?
0.2 are all the activity lights blinking?
0.3 try rebooting one device at a time.

The whole exercise of troubleshooting is all about isolating the cause of the problem.  You can't figure out what is truly going on if you eliminate multiples variables at the same time.  For example, if you have an engine problem, you can replace the entire engine and it will probably fix your issue.  But no one replaces an entire engine.  They figure out if it's a dead battery.  Then recharge the battery or replace it.  If that fixes the issue only temporarily, then you work backwards and figure out if the alternator is working.  If it isn't, then replace it and see if your engine problems are cured.  It takes time and it takes reasonable, analytical thinking to go through one component at a time in a given system.  You have to know what you're doing.

When I think about our environment and all the arguing and debate about whether the existence of humans and our carbon-emitting vehicles and lifestyles of consumption contributes to the problem of climate change, I think about what single variable we can isolate at a time.  Some possible choices are:
* humans
* internal combustion engines
* plant life (forests, vegetation, etc)
* fossil fuels

Eliminate the existence of each, one at a time and figure out if it improves the situation of climate change.  It's really simple.  (Simple doesn't mean it's easy.)

Well, none of those are viable to isolate in any reasonable time frame.  Then the debate goes back to one semi-viable option: reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.  And then one side says "No. No! No!!  It won't work.  You're wrong.  It's a stupid idea."
But the alternative is to stay on the course we are on without any other variables to isolate.  We can always re-instate the use of fossil fuels.  That's easy.  Rather than having a negative response, how about trying it out and seeing what happens?  I bet the side that wants to eliminate the use of fossil fuels won't be mad if they turn out to be wrong.  They will just have to figure out what the next variable is to isolate.

According to the article below, we're pretty much fucked. 

One day we won't have any other choice but to swap our planet for another one.
Elon and many others think Mars is the only choice.
I wish I could be around in a thousand years to see what we end up doing.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

Lately I haven't been able to get the idea of wasting money by idling a car engine out of my head.

We got a car recently where the owners manual explicitly says "Don't idle the engine to warm it up.  It doesn't need it.  When you turn on your car, start driving immediately."   I was very pleasantly surprised!

It goes against ALL the learning I have ever received about warming up car engines.  So now I don't start the car unless I am fully, completely 100% ready to start driving immediately.

Being that men and women are different, an article I read a while back said that for some reason, women tend to sit in their cars and idle the engine more than men.  So I've been gathering my own empirical data to see if it's true.  It's inconclusive at this point.   

Then I started thinking about the hundreds of millions of cars in the world that sit idling for one reason or another.  Seems like if we could all learn not to idle car engines, then that would go a lot farther in the extreme short term to:
1.  waste less money buying gas
2.  not put extra wear and tear on your car engine
3.  reduce your personal CO2 emissions into the world
4.  contribute to saving the world by doing almost nothing

Seems like a good deal to me.

And then today I saw this article that further qualifies my rambling thoughts in a more professional journalistic way:
​​https://www.geekwire.com/2017/inrix-study-find-americans-waste-73-billion-per-year-looking-parking-spot/

Yes.  I am the one guy in the world who reads the owners manual for an automobile.  It's shocking what you can learn about your car from it.