But that America seems to be disappearing. I was always surprised that the richest country in the world should treat its most unfortunate citizens so shabbily. Unlike the rest of the Western world, America has not provided decent support to its poor, or provided a minimum standard of universal health care to everyone, or provided good, unbiased education for every resident. Shocking though that heartlessness may have been, an attempt was finally made recently to improve on that health care situation. But the election of Donald Trump, with his unconscionable quest to take away minimal health care from the neediest among you, has been the last nail in the coffin of an already dying American compassion-ism.

Think about his approach so far: heartless attacks on basic health care for those who cannot afford it; unequivocal racism, including support of those who march with Nazis; uncountable lies that have been repeatedly proven as such by third parties.

I and, I suspect, much of the rest of the world do not understand how Americans can sit idly by and accept this sort of behavior. Because of your current President, America has lost the last remnants of its moral authority. Moreover, the rest of the world is not going to accept unilateral attacks against it, like Mr Trump’s attacks against mutually-agreed trade agreements. His rabid anti-global stance may well encourage a free trade deal between all Western countries that would exclude America and its companies. And what if America were to be evicted from its European military bases, paving the way for a new pan-European armed forces? Many countries, including America, fought two world wars to prevent such a military build-up in Europe. Such a reversion would be a catastrophe for the world and an insult to the memories of all those brave soldiers who gave their lives to protect our freedoms.

Please, please America. Get back to the great country you used to be. Support your citizens. Unequivocally reject racism and violence. Return again to be a beacon of hope, goodness and justice for the rest of the world. The world will welcome you back if you can find your way. (But you will need to do it soon.)

New Ways of Viewing the World on Biteable.

Autism-like symptoms have affected me.  When I was in secondary school and then, later, as an undergraduate in university, I suspected that I was somehow different.  I couldn’t concentrate the way my friends did and I spent far more time organizing my notes than actually reading them.  I even took offense at the word “study” because I didn’t really know what it meant.  Later, when I was working on my Masters’ degree, I didn’t understand what others meant by “work” or “research” so I coined the phase “emulating work” to refer to my own efforts.  I wanted to suggest that I did something that looked like the work of my colleagues but was not work in the traditional sense.  It never occurred to me that, through my idiosyncratic way of dealing with others, I had something in common with those afflicted with autism.  In fact, back then, I knew very little about autism and, like others, thought autism was always a debilitating disease.  Autism may have created idiots savants with incredible, if narrow, capabilities, but I thought it always crippled its victims socially.

Don’t get me wrong:  I’m not autistic.  But in recent years I have come to understand that autism is simply an extreme version of a class neurological characteristics that creates people like me.  Furthermore, I think that many of those with a mild case of these characteristics are better human beings than the population as a whole.  A case in point is the engineering profession.  Most engineers seem to have varying degrees of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), which seems related to, if not a subset of, the Autism Spectrum Disorders.  The Economist article noted that individuals that have an engineer for a grandfather are far more likely to be autistic than those who do not.  Of all the professionals I know, engineers, as a group, are the better people.  They are kinder, more charitable and less greedy than lawyers, doctors, dentists and pharmacists.  And I say this even though I would have thought that doctors would win on this score.  After all, what could be more charitable than caring for others?  But doctors today are too well paid to be the technicians they are, leading the profession to attract the wrong kind of people.  Those with ADHD and other ASD-related symptoms struggle in our society because they have a different way of functioning socially.  They are therefore unlikely to be medical doctors, even though they might prove to be excellent in that capacity.  So, instead of considering mild-form autism as a negative, we should see it as a positive and learn to better incorporate these individuals into our society.  The more high functioning autistics we put to productive use, the better a world we might live in.

Is it a crazy idea?  I suppose it is, and yet look at the shortcomings in our society.  We all shrug and say that politicians are liars and crooks.  But how many politicians are engineers?  Or autistic?

Autism Spectrum Disorders can indeed be debilitating.  But the milder forms can also provide benefits to the individual and to society.  I’m not sure, but I think that every male in my immediate family has some form of autism spectrum disorder, even if it’s very mild.  And those individuals are very high functioning.  The fact that electro-shock therapy has been used as a treatment for autism until recently highlights the poor state of the psychiatric profession.  I feel for those parents that have a child with a seriously debilitating form of autism.  But for those parents who have children with a mild form, such as Asberger’s Syndrome (which has recently been dropped as a label in its own right) or ADHD, I say to them, “Take comfort in the fact that your child will probably be a good person and a positive contributor to our society.  Fight for your child’s right to contribute to society.  Don’t let anyone electro-shock your child.  And your child may turn out to make a significant contribution to our society.  Your child may even predict the existence of some wondrous new phenomenon.  After all, Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter.”  Isn’t that opportunity what every parent wants for a child anyway?

How much are we missing as a society by not encouraging these smart, kind and talented people to be part of our society just because they’re a little different?

B Regan

When our home central air conditioner failed last year, I decided to experiment with an alternative approach to cooling our house.  We have seen our electricity costs soar in Ontario over the last several years, so minimizing air conditioner use seemed a worthwhile exercise.

Even when our air conditioner had worked well, we had always turned it off when the weather was mild, say 25C (77F) or cooler.  We preferred the gentle summer breezes (whether warm or cool) during the day and the cool breezes at night.  But now that our air conditioner was no more, we had to cope with the warmer weather as best we could, even on the hottest of days

Damned Government Incompetence

As an aside, electricity prices in Ontario are a great advertisement for government incompetence, indifference and corruption. The price of electricity has skyrocketed so that the unit cost of hydro in Ontario at peak times is now 3.74 times what is was 13 years ago. Ontario Hydro might counter that the off-peak price is only 1.86 times what it was, but that’s hardly something to celebrate and is little consolation for us poor rate payers.

Cooling Without Hydro

Because we’re in Canada we usually have cool evenings even on the hottest days, giving us a free alternative to our defunct air conditioner and a means to reduce our hydro bill. The kernel of the solution is simple: open all the windows at night, closing them and the window coverings during the day.  In other words, cool down the house at night and insulate it during the day.  Obvious, right?  I think so but, then again, none of our neighbours seem to use this simple approach to cost savings.  We hear their air conditioner compressors running even on the coolest nights of the summer.  Why, I wonder, would anyone want to run an air conditioner when the evening temperature is 12C (54F)?  Besides, aside from the monetary and environmental savings associated with the open-window approach, I find the cool nighttime breeze of fresh air preferable to the stale recirculated air from the air conditioner.

Qualitative Results

“So what happened with the experiment?” you might ask.

The results were really quite amazing. We discovered that so long as the evening temperature was 19C (66F) or lower, and the daytime temperature was 31C (88F) or lower, we could stay very comfortable in the house without our air conditioner.  When the evening or daytime temperatures exceeded these limits we were still comfortable for most of the day, though there could be several hours in the evening where we decided to turn on a secondary conditioner.  The primary purpose of this air conditioner was to dehumidify the air, rather than to lower the household temperature.  A dehumidifier may have worked just as well.

Temperature vs Humidity

The reason that I am focusing on dehumidification is that it was a relatively fast process, reducing the household humidity to comfortable levels within about 45 minutes. Cooling on the other had was a relatively slow process, requiring about an hour to reduce the household temperature by 0.5C (0.9F).  The reason for the difference seems clear.  Through the hot day, the house itself heated up and stored the heat (in the walls, floors, furniture).  The humidity, however, was really just airborne.  I suppose it’s possible some of the water vapour was absorbed into materials like fabric and carpeting, but because most of the humidity was in the air it was removed rather quickly.

Cooking the House

There is one detail of our setup that makes our situation somewhat unique, but also means that others may fare even better than we did.  The back of our house faces South, with very large windows that are virtually unobstructed by trees or other blockages.  We therefore have a serious problem with the solar heating of our home on sunny days.  Although the South-facing windows are covered with wood shutters, blocking out the sun quite well during the day, the windows still let through significant heat when it’s sunny.  The South side of the house is very well cooked after a full day in the sun.

Savings

If we operated our air conditioner like our neighbours, meaning that we sealed the windows and air conditioned the house every day for the months of June, July and August, I estimate that our air conditioner compressor would have run for approximately 1250 hours over these months. If we fixed our air conditioner, but avoided using it at most times (ie. we opened our the windows at night and sealed them during the day, but used the air conditioner liberally to keep the house temperature and humidity at a reasonable level), I estimate that our compressor would have run for about 150 hours over the summer. That’s a savings of 88%.  In the case of our 3 ton air conditioner, the 1100 hours we didn’t run it would have saved us about $400 in electricity charges for the summer.  That may not sound like a lot, but this summer wasn’t particularly hot.  And, besides, we’re in Ontario, not Florida.  Heat really isn’t supposed to be a significant problem here. We also didn’t lose anything by opening our windows at night.  And we gained the fresh air.

Conclusion

Even once we eventually fix our air conditioner, we’ve decided to stick with our current money-saving approach.  It works.  It’s cheap.  And we are happier with our windows open at night.

Of course this approach wouldn’t work in many areas, including the US South. But it may well work to some degree in many other locales.  In some desert environments, with hot days and cool nights, the benefit may even be greater than ours.

The point of writing this summary is to show how easy it is to save money with a little thought (or, in this case, a timely opportunity).  I have used many other such approaches, some of which I also hope to eventually share in this blog.

Please post comments on this article or any others.  I love receiving comments and questions about the blog or my books.

Regan