Practical Matters – Page 2 – Cosmic Reflections

Email Overload: “Digest” It

Like many of you, I have more than one email address. One of those email addresses I use as a catch-all for nonprofits, political organizations, and commercial entities.

Over time, the volume of email I’ve received at that address has increased exponentially. Many senders subscribe me without my having ever opted in, and many senders send multiple emails a day (or per week)—and they don’t always give you the option to opt down. I unsubscribe from many every month, but the emails I receive daily keeps on growing.

I’m tempted (often), to unsubscribe from everything, but every once in a while I get an email that is important enough or useful enough that I’m glad I got it.

What to do? I am making a conscious effort to cut all of the insidious time wasters out of my life (this becomes much more important as we get older), freeing up precious time for what is most important. Email is one of the worst offenders.

Many online discussion groups have a “daily digest” option with all of the posts for the day being assembled into a single email, with a topical index at the top. I would like the ability through my email service provider to batch together emails from a variety of senders into a single daily email. It would work something like this:

Create a list of email domains that you want batched (facebookmail.com, ewg.org, onefairwage.org, etc.)
Activate the digesting service so that all emails coming from these domains gets batched into a single daily email with the subject line and sender of all the emails listed in the top section, followed by the full contents of the emails in sequence below that.

You’d have the option to receive the email sorted by time received in either ascending or descending order. You’d also be able to add or remove email domains from your list at any time.

Sure, it is going to be one long email for many of us, but it would go a long way towards reducing the clutter in our inboxes.

Another option would be to have an email service provider (unfortunately, digest.com is already taken) that will provide you with a pass-through email address that does this digesting for you, then forwards the daily email to the email address of your choice. You would update your senders with the pass-through email address. Let the digesting begin!

Best Jacket Ever

Little did I know at the time, but a decade (or was it two?) ago, I purchased a jacket at the Kitt Peak National Observatory Visitor Center store that is the best, most comfortable, most durable jacket I have ever owned. And, as often is the case with the most extraordinary products, it is no longer available.

Kitt Peak logo on the front of the jacket

Port Authority made the jacket in Sri Lanka, but a search of the Registered Identification Number RN 90836 indicates that San Mar Corporation is the owner. The product ID is Port Authority J-755.

Port Authority style number J-755, registered identification number RN 90836

My jacket has faded quite a lot over the years, as demonstrated by the upturned collar below.

Though the Kitt Peak Port Authority J-755 jacket is, sadly, no longer available (wish they would bring it back!), as of this writing I was finally able to find something fairly close: the Port Authority J754 Challenger. I ordered one from A2Z Clothing (True Navy/Grey Heather) and will report back here after I’ve had a chance to evaluate it.

Update May 14, 2021

Received the Port Authority J754 Challenger in the mail yesterday from A2Z Clothing. I’m very happy with their service. This jacket is similar enough to the Kitt Peak jacket that I’ve ordered two more. (I’ve learned in recent years that it is a good idea if you find an article of clothing you like to order two more right away for later use, because there’s a high probability that when you need to replenish, it won’t be available any more.)

There are some differences. The collar of the new jacket is 22″ wide and 4″ deep. The Kitt Peak jacket collar is 19″ wide and 3″ deep. I prefer the less substantial collar of the Kitt Peak jacket.

The new jacket is made in Vietnam, and the old jacket was made in Sri Lanka.

Old Jacket
shell: 100% nylon
body lining: 75% polyester, 25% rayon
sleeve lining: 100% nylon
inter lining: 100% polyester resin coated
J-753, RN 90836

New Jacket
shell: 100% nylon
lining: 100% polyester
sleeve lining: 100% nylon
insulation: 100% polyester resin coated
J-754, RN 90836

Forever Stamps

The United States Postal Service has issued a number of enticing forever stamps in recent years, and I’ve begun accumulating stamps faster than I use them. Sound familiar? If so, why not use them for extra postage items—even if you end up spending a little more than is required.

The current value of a forever stamp is 55¢. If you have a postal scale at home to weigh the envelopes you want to post, this handy guide will show you how many forever stamps to use for envelopes of different sizes and weights. (Mail within the U.S. only)

Standard Envelopes (≤11.5″ long, ≤6.125″ high, ≤0.25″ thick)

0 to 1 ounce: 1 forever stamp
1 to 4 ounces: 2 forever stamps
4 to 8 ounces: 3 forever stamps

Large Envelopes (11.5-15″ L, 6.125-12″ H, or 0.25-0.75″ T)

0 to 1 ounce: 2 forever stamps
1 to 4 ounces: 3 forever stamps
4 to 7 ounces: 4 forever stamps
7 to 9 ounces: 5 forever stamps
9 to 12 ounces: 6 forever stamps
12 to 15 ounces: 7 forever stamps

If you are mailing a standard envelope that has one or more of the characteristics in DMM 101.1.2, add an ounce to the measured weight to cover the non-machinable surcharge.

If you are mailing a large envelope that is rigid, is non-rectangular, or is not uniformly thick, then take your envelope to the post office to mail because you will have to pay parcel prices.

Smaller Portions, Please

Some facts about U.S.:

The average adult weighs 15 pounds more than 20 years ago
40% of adults and 20% of children are obese
The average adult is eating ~300 calories more per day than in the 1970s
Beginning in 2015, more money is spent eating out than eating at home
Restaurant portion sizes have quadrupled since the 1950s

It’s true, we’re eating away from home more often, and the portion sizes we’re being served at restaurants are usually larger than they need to be. Have you ever had a totally satisfying meal at a restaurant that doesn’t leave you feeling like a beached whale afterwards? A well-prepared and well-presented meal does not have to be large to be loved.

Large portion sizes at restaurants are particularly a problem for those of us who are conditioned to eat everything on our plate, and who don’t like to take leftovers home.

Restauranteurs, please step up to the plate and fight obesity by making your standard portion sizes smaller. If a customer wants a larger portion, they should have to ask for it.

References

Briefing: The obesity epidemic. (October 18, 2019). The Week, 19(946), 12.

Cell Phone Fiasco

I am one of the holdouts who really has no interest in carrying around a smartphone everywhere I go. I spend most of my day in front of a computer screen, get far too many emails to keep up with, and have even less time for social media. I treasure the precious little time I have to be “unplugged” and do not want my treasured (and increasingly rare) face-to-face interactions to be interrupted by technology—nor do I want to be distracted by it.

To me, a screen is to be viewed, not touched. I much prefer a physical keyboard, and web browsing on a large screen. I hate all the pop-up ads on a smartphone browser, and all the places you go to accidentally while swiping to scroll.

For several years, I have had a great basic cellular phone with a slide-out keyboard, the LG Cosmos 3.

The LG Cosmos 3 – A Basic Phone with Slide-Out Keyboard

I do more texting than phoning, so this phone works great for that, and it is smaller than a smartphone. Recently, the charging port on my LG Cosmos 3 gave out and I could no longer charge the phone.

There has got to be a better way to charge a phone like this that avoids all the wear and tear plugging and unplugging the micro USB plug into the phone. I first took the phone to a couple of phone repair shops in Madison, but they both said they could not fix or replace the port. I then took the phone to Verizon. Here’s what I found out:

Verizon cannot fix the LG Cosmos 3 charging port.
The LG Cosmos 3 is no longer available.
The LG Cosmos 3 is a 3G device, and Verizon will be shutting that network down on 12/31/19 so even if the phone could be fixed, it won’t work after that date, nor will any other 3G device.
No cell phone is currently available with a slide-out keyboard.

What?! No basic phone with a slide-out keyboard for texting? After spending several hours researching other cellular phone service providers and manufacturers, I discovered that no 4G/LTE phone with a slide-out keyboard exists. My only basic phone option was to go back to a flip phone where texting would require the multi-tap entry system on 12 keys. Slow and tedious, like it was on earlier generations of cell phones. This is progress?

After a second visit to the Verizon store, I decided to purchase the LG Exalt LTE flip phone. My very positive experience using the LG Cosmos 3 gave me a good reason to stick with LG. Though I like the LG Exalt LTE phone, texting is tedious. I really hope that LG will release an LTE version of the Cosmos 3. LG Cosmos 4, perhaps?

If you feel as I do that cell phone manufacturers like LG should once again offer a basic phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard, please sign this petition on Change.org:

https://www.change.org/p/lg-ask-manufacturers-to-make-a-4g-qwerty-flip-phone

Anyone Need a Good SAS Programmer?

My current company, despite my objections and expertise, is phasing out SAS, and I think it is a misguided decision.

I am only about three years away from semi-retirement, but you won’t find a more motivated worker. Not only am I a “virtuoso” SAS programmer with many years of programming and data analytics experience, but I’m also very good at teaching and mentoring others in the use of SAS—something I almost never get to do in my current position.

I need a change.

I have “big city” job skills in a small town where there appear to be no other employers who would be able to make use of my SAS expertise. And, at this stage of my life, I can’t relocate and am unwilling to commute, so working from home appears to be the only option.

I’m looking at potential opportunities as an “encore career” and would really like to do something that directly benefits society. I loved my 21 years at the Iowa Department of Transportation, and would love to be a public servant once again, or to work for a nonprofit organization. Or work on scientific projects—true science, not data “science”. Or, data for good projects. Both salary and number of work hours (up to full time) are completely negotiable. I’m at a point now in my career where I can be more flexible for the right opportunity.

I have my own personal SAS Analytics Pro license, so could do work for you even if you don’t have SAS.

SAS is a great product, and SAS Institute is a great company. And SAS keeps getting better all the time.

In Praise of SAS

Some say that SAS is difficult to learn, but, like many things, it is not difficult at all if you have a good teacher who has a thorough understanding of the subject matter and a passion for teaching it. That would be me.

In Praise of Indexes

SAS Press recently discontinued selling physical books, and now offers publications only in an electronic format (EPUB, Kindle, and PDF). I’m sure this is not an isolated incident and many other smaller publishing houses are going the same route.

I recently purchased the 3rd edition of Kirk Paul Lafler’s useful book, PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS. I have the first and second editions of his book in softcover, and I was pleased to find that I could order a physical copy of his third edition through Amazon. After receiving the book, I quickly discovered that the third edition no longer includes an index!

I contacted SAS about the omission of the index, and received a prompt and courteous reply:

“You are correct about the index. Indexes are no longer a standard part of our print books. I do understand your concern, and have forwarded your feedback to the appropriate editors. All of our e-books are searchable. If you would like a complimentary copy of the corresponding e-book, I will be happy to forward that to you.”

I learned that neither the hardcopy nor the electronic version of the book contains an index.

I know I am 63 years old, and maybe not as immersed in modern technology as my younger colleagues, but since when did an index become a dispensable part of any non-fiction book?

First page of the index of **PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS**, Second Edition

A good index is like a table of contents, only much more detailed. Sure, you can search a PDF for a particular term, but what if you can’t think of the term you’re searching for? For example, you might not remember that the type of many-to-many join you are looking for is called a Cartesian product, but when you see this term in the index it jogs your memory and you can find it on pages 237 and 242, which then leads you to the term cross join.

Another problem with searching through a document is that I have yet to see any search provide the ability to search for more than one non-contiguous terms at a time on a page or adjacent pages. A well-crafted index is often more effective than one-dimensional searching at finding topics that can’t easily be reduced to a single word or term.

Index subheadings, such as shown for CASE expressions above, are also hard to replace with one-dimensional searching.

Indexing is so important and requires such skill (to do it right) that there is even a professional organization for it: the American Society for Indexing.

I hope you can see now that every non-fiction book, printed or electronic, needs an index to help you quickly find the information you need.

In Praise of SAS

I’ve been writing programs in SAS since 1985. Back then, it was SAS 5.15 on an IBM mainframe computer (remember JCL, TSO, ISPF?) at the Iowa Department of Transportation. Today, it is SAS 9.4, under Windows 10 at home and Linux at work.

I love this language. It is elegant. It is beautiful. I’ve become an expert. I’ve never had a computational problem to solve, a data manipulation to do, a process to automate, or a report to write that I couldn’t do with SAS.

New features are being added all the time, and I am constantly learning and improving to keep up with it all. And the legacy code still runs just fine. Peace of mind. The company behind this success story is SAS Institute, based in Cary, North Carolina. SAS Institute has the best technical support of any company I have ever dealt with, and that is as true today as it was in 1985, and all the years in between. Again, peace of mind.

I’ve heard from multiple sources that SAS Institute is a fabulous place to work, and it shows in their software, their customer service, and the passion their employees have for making SAS software the best it can be—and helping us solve just about any analytics problem. Inspiring. And you won’t find a more passionate user community anywhere. At least not with any company that has been around as long as SAS has (since 1976).

SAS Institute is the world’s largest private software company, and being privately owned has much to do with their success and consistency, I believe. No greedy shareholders to please. SAS Institute need answer only to their customers, and to their employees. That’s the way it should be.

Computer languages have come in and out of vogue over the years: FORTRAN, PL/I, Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, R, Python, etc., and with each new language that comes along, SAS absorbs the best elements and moves forward to the next challenge.

Python is currently very popular, as is open source in general, and I have no doubt that SAS will incorporate the most valuable functionality of Python and open source (already in progress) and keep tooling along like a well-oiled machine. In another ten years, SAS will be incorporating another new language that will have supplanted Python as the programming language du jour.

You’ve got to admire a company like that. In an era when everyone wants — even expects — “stuff for free”, the old adage “you get what you pay for” still applies. Yes, SAS is expensive—and I’m hoping their mature “core” product will come down in price—but I can’t complain too loudly because quality, longevity, and dependability costs money. It always has.

I’ve noticed that our younger open source programmers use a lot of different tools to do their work. One big advantage of SAS is that I can do most of my work using one tool – SAS. SAS provides a beautifully integrated and far-reaching data analytics environment.

Year-Round Daylight Saving Time?

I’ve never been a fan of daylight saving time. During the warmest months for stargazing and other astronomy activities, daylight saving time (DST) puts the end of twilight (and every other astronomical event) an hour later: near, at, or past bedtime for children and early-rising adults.

The last time we tinkered with DST in the U.S. was to extend it in 2007 to begin the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November (previously it was the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October). We currently observe daylight saving time 65.4% of the year (almost ⅔) and standard time the remaining 34.6% of the year (a little over ⅓).

DST is a zero-sum game. Getting that extra hour the first weekend in November sure is nice, but we pay for it when we lose an hour the second weekend in March. For a few days in November, we feel like we’re sleeping in an extra hour, but for a few days in March, we feel like we’re getting up an hour earlier than usual.

While I would much prefer to stay on standard time all year long nationwide, there doesn’t appear to be much public support for that. On the other hand, there is a groundswell of support for going to year-round DST. Even this would be preferable to our current system, in my opinion.

We have toyed with the idea of year-round DST once before: from January 6, 1974 to October 27, 1974. During the winter months in early 1974, there was a lot of public outcry about schoolchildren going to school in the dark, and I’m sure the pre-sunrise cold was a factor, too. So, the year-round DST experiment was terminated early (it was supposed to last until April 27, 1975). Would it be any different this time around?

Northern states (where the winter nights are longest) would be most affected by year-round DST, as would areas in the far-western reaches of each of the time zones. Here in Wisconsin, we would see something like the following:

Some Highlights of Year-Round Daylight Saving Time in Wisconsin (times are for Dodgeville, WI)

Earliest End of Evening Twilight: 7:08 p.m. (around December 6)
Earliest Sunset: 5:26 p.m. (around December 9)
Latest Sunrise: 8:32 a.m. (around January 3)
Latest Onset of Morning Twilight: 6:50 a.m. (around January 6)

Date	Sunrise	Sunset
November 1	7:35 a.m.	5:53 p.m.
November 15	7:53 a.m.	5:37 p.m.
December 1	8:12 a.m.	5:27 p.m.
December 15	8:25 a.m.	5:27 p.m.
January 1	8:32 a.m.	5:36 p.m.
January 15	8:29 a.m.	5:51 p.m.
February 1	8:16 a.m.	6:13 p.m.
February 15	7:59 a.m.	6:31 p.m.
March 1	7:36 a.m.	6:51 p.m.
March 15	7:12 a.m.	7:08 p.m.

I have an idea. If we extend DST to year-round, why not also start the school day an hour later? There are studies that show that most students would benefit from a later start of the school day. Of course, that would also mean that many parents would probably want to start their work day an hour later, too. But if we do that, then what’s the point in going to year-round DST in the first place?

Many states are currently considering and some have even passed legislation extending DST to year-round, but federal law will have to change to allow any of these states to do this. Right now, states only have the right to opt out of DST altogether, as Arizona and Hawaii currently do.

Retirement Advice?

I’ll be 63 in a couple of months. My the years go fast, faster still of late.

Naturally, I’m beginning to look toward retirement when I can finally devote nearly all my time and energy to astronomy, preservation and restoration of our nighttime environment, and classical music. These three avocations have been my primary interests all of my adult life.

I’m in need of some retirement advice by someone who is not trying to sell me a financial product. I’d like to semi-retire as soon as possible, but want to wait until age 70 to collect Social Security when the monthly benefit reaches a maximum. So, I guess that means gradually cutting back work hours and supplementing the lost income with some retirement benefits.

I’m in a good position in terms of having a marketable work skill for the semi-retirement years. You’d be hard pressed to find a better SAS programmer. I’ll be at SAS Global Forum 2019 in Dallas this spring if you want to talk.

Honestly, I’ve been in a bit of a funk since I started this blog back in December 2016. First, Trump got elected, and that made me realize how bad things have gotten in this country. That someone so boorish and with zero job skills as a public servant got elected as President of the United States is both frightening and depressing. And the national nightmare continues. Then, last fall, my employer moved everyone except for management into an open office environment, which I hate. Throughout my work career, I’ve always had my own office or a cubicle and now I’m in a big open room with lots of distractions and a desk half the size of what I had just a few months ago, and no place to put my books, so I had to bring them all home. No one wants to learn SAS at my company anymore, even though I do amazing things with it every day. I’m in high demand, but they’re not hiring anybody anymore with SAS skills. That’s depressing, because it is a great language and a great company and SAS Institute most definitely continues to innovate. But open source is the name of the game where I work now.

It is easy to feel isolated living in a small town. As my friend Jeff Dilks once said when he was a physics teacher in Shenandoah, Iowa, the chances of finding anyone else in a small town (or rural area) with similar interests and abilities are vanishingly small if you have “big city” interests and a specialized education. That’s true, but where else are you going to live if you want to do observational astronomy and ride a bicycle to and from work? Quality of life issues like that, you know. But loneliness, yes, and I imagine that gets to be more of a challenge in our later years.

For something like 30 years, I’ve wanted to help develop and nurture a science-oriented and education-oriented intentional community where astronomy is a major focus. I even have a name for it: Mirador Astronomy Village. Can’t think of a better way to spend my retirement years, but it takes serious money to get something like this off the ground, and money I don’t have.

With open office and all (which is pretty much ubiquitous nowadays), I’ve soured on the idea of working for “Corporate America” any longer. I’d be much happier as a public servant, trying to make the world a better place and helping to solve the many problems for which Corporate America is not the answer, and has no answers.