Comically bad design - a review

I just submitted this review to Amazon. I’m sharing it here for reasons which I believe will become obvious.

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“Ridiculously bad design”

I had an Avalon water cooler. It was easy to use and easy to clean. It served us well for 5 years, until it started leaking from the cold water spout. So I shopped around, and decided to replace it with the Igloo black plastic, top-loading water cooler. Wow, what a difference. The design and engineering of this “Igloo Top Loading Water Cooler for Hot & Cold Dispenser” is almost comically bad.

To start off with, the manual is poorly written and obviously wrong. When you first plug the cooler in, make sure the hot and cold switches are OFF, not on like the manual says.

I started by cleaning the cooler, inside and out. The first thing I found was a torn strip of plastic along the bottom. Apparently, the front cover didn’t quite fit, so the factory guys just jammed it on there until it did. That sheared off a three inch long line. Not a great start. At least it didn’t shatter.

How do I get off the collar so I can clean it? The manual doesn’t give a single clue. You have to rotate it to the left while gently pushing down, then pull it up after it unlocks. I cleaned the collar with soap and water. I notice something odd - there are no drain holes in the bottom of the collar. So your water bottle will never completely drain into the vessel below. There will always be a puddle in the bottom of the collar. Yeah, I’m sure that’s hygienic. I’m going to have to drill some holes in it myself.

After that, I go back to the cooler. There are easily noticeable smudges everywhere I touched it. This smooth (mostly), shiny (mostly) black plastic shows fingerprints worse than stainless steel. Where do they find these materials?

Then I washed out the vessel with a gallon of water with a tablespoon or so of bleach in it. Let it set for ten minutes to kill whatever was in it from the factory. Drain from the hot and cold spouts until they stop running, then drain from the plug in the back. Simple. Easy. (The drain plug isn’t mentioned anywhere in the instructions, by the way.) I finished draining it, and heard water still sloshing. I looked in the top - there’s still about a pint of water visible. They didn’t run the drain line from the bottom of the vessel. I’m sure that’s hygienic, too. After all, who wants all the water to drain out of the container when you drain it? I’m sure water-born diseases are a myth, and the residual bleach will just add flavor.

Why don’t I just carry it to the sink, turn it upside down, and dump the water out? Because the opening at the top of the water vessel is wider than the hole in the plastic housing. If I dump the water, it will go everywhere inside the cooler. You know, down onto all that exposed wiring in the bottom. What genius engineered this cooler to put the electric cord directly below the drain plug, anyways?

Oh, by the way, I got small chunks of plastic out when I drained it. Good thing I did this, even though the manual doesn’t tell you to clean it out before use. Oh, and something the manual doesn’t mention at all - if you fill your cooler with spring or tap water (which tastes better than distilled), calcium will slowly build up inside the cooler. The way you clear that out: drain the cooler, mix a 5% solution of citric acid crystals in water, pour it in, let it sit for 20 minutes while you run the heater, then drain and rinse thoroughly. Do this once every six months or so (depending on the hardness of the water you use), and you’ll keep your cooler’s pipes from clogging up.

I rinsed it out five times, first with hot, then with cold. Since I can’t get all the water out, I’ll just have to settle for diluting it. After the last (partial) draining, I put it into position, plugged it in (making sure the switches were off), and filled it back up with water. I reattached the collar, then I put the 5 gallon bottle on. That went smoothly.

Then I turned it on. First the cold switch, then, a few seconds later, the hot. (Never turn them both on at the same time. That can blow the fuse this thing allegedly has inside somewhere.) The cooler didn’t leak, and it didn’t catch fire. It heated the water up relatively quickly, so I poured a cup. With my Avalon cooler, after I poured a cup of hot water, the heater would turn back on immediately. Not so with the Igloo. I guess they don’t want you to have two cups of hot water in a row.

I tasted the water. It tasted like hot plastic. I’m not sure what I expected. I forgot to run the heater while I was cleaning it out. That was my mistake.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. The spouts aren’t near the front of the cooler, where they’d be easily accessible. They’re positioned near the rear of the available area, just in front of the back wall. You’ve got to put your cup all the way against the back to make sure you’re not going to just pour the water straight down into the drip pan.

While I was doing this, I finally noticed a cosmetic design flaw. There are no markings on the cooler to indicate where the hot and cold spouts are. No, they’re not directly under the buttons. They’re over the largest holes in the drip pan - which you can’t actually see if you’re trying to fill something from the cooler. You could only see where the spouts are if you’re a toddler, or lying on your back on the floor. And even then, everything is black on black. So I got a couple of Post-It flags and stuck them on the front.

It’s been an hour now. It didn’t leak. It didn’t catch fire. The compressor for the cooler isn’t obnoxiously loud. It seems to work. Two stars, do not recommend. I’ll keep it, but I’ll never buy anything from Igloo again.

DNA mutation rates?

Vox Day has a couple new books out about how fast DNA can fix mutations. It’s based upon well-established science following the evolution of e. coli in the lab. These asexual bacteria split every half hour or so, so it’s fairly easy to track how many generations it takes for a captive population to fix a mutation. The answer, established by multiple experiments and just a touch of very simple math, is one mutation fixed per 1,600 generations. That includes parallel fixation, by the way.  (40,000 generations / 25 fixed mutations = 1,600 generations per fixed mutation on average.)

How many base pairs does e. coli bacteria DNA have? 4,639,221. Do the math, and that gives a fixed mutation rate of 7423 generations per million base pairs. Let’s call it 7,500.

So, let’s extrapolate that to a much more complex, multicellular creature - the cichlid fish of Lake Victoria. Their DNA has about a billion base pairs, and they breed sexually. Sexual reproduction doubles the chances of mutation in offspring (there being two parents, each of which may pass a mutation). So we have a sexual reproduction mutation fixation rate of 3750 generations per million base pairs.

Cichlids have a billion base pairs. That’s 1,000 million. So we expect a total of 3.75 fixed mutations per generation. Cichlids breed at two years of age. Lake Victoria has been an isolated breeding ground for at most 100,00 years. That’s 50,000 cichlid generations. 50,000 times 3.75 = 187,500 fixed mutations in that time. The average DNA spread between each of the over 400 different species of cichlids is about 750,000 base pairs. So there has been, at best, 1/4 the time needed to produce such biodiversity, given the DNA experiments with e. coli.

You’ll notice I have made no attempt to explain how 3.75 mutations would fix across an entire population in one generation. I’m just doing the math.

By the way - humans have a little over 3 billion base pairs. That would result in 11.25 fixed mutations per generation. (This obviously does not happen in modern humans.  We would have noticed.  But let’s ignore that simple observation.) There are 20 million mutations between humans and chimp common ancestry. That evolution happened in at most 9 million years. Assume one generation to be 20 years, and that’s 450,000 generations. Multiple by 11.25, and you get 5,062,500 fixed mutations. Again, one quarter of what’s necessary.

Does sexual reproduction result in a rate of beneficial (or at least neutral) mutation fixing at least 8 times faster than asexual reproduction?

(Vox's error is, in a computing metaphor, to assume that the number of cores working to parallel process information is irrelevant.  He assumes that 4 cores process the exact same amount of information as 3,000 cores.)

Different forms of Hell

The pain hell is physical therapy for frozen shoulder. When we got to about the 90% mark in the third month, my physical terrorist changed tactics. He pulled my arm up behind my back like a bully or mugger. I thought I knew what a 9 on the pain scale was before that. I was wrong. I discovered whole new realms of pain, from “Mommy make the bad man stop!” to “I can’t breathe!” to “Please just let me die.”

The hot hell is walking off the back of the C17 and into the jet exhaust, carrying your kit plus 120 pounds of gear, onto the black asphalt that’s been soaking up the sun all day, into 143 degree heat and not a cloud in the sky. (Baghdad, July 2003)

The cold hell is patrolling all night in 40 below snow. (Trivia - that’s the same in F and C.) With two, three-round magazines. Taped over. In the ammo pouches, which were also taped over. Stupid Lieutenant wouldn’t release the parkas because “we might get them dirty”. Stupid terrorists got themselves caught at the base of the hill that we were halfway up. (West Berlin, January 1991)

The bitter hell is being PNG’d1 from your base, away from your team, after complaining about the base commander actively ignoring2 (as in locking down the gates to prevent us from going out to help while he and his XO listened to the fighting on the radio while laughing3) an attack on an American convoy on the MSR just outside the base, and being sent as a spare body on convoys for three months where the other NCOs have been told to ignore you, even though you’re senior to all of them. And then watching three good NCOs get railroaded by a corrupt, incompetent, incomprehensible4, abusive5 asshole6 of a Lieutenant. (northern Iraq, Aug-Nov 2004)

1

Persona Non Grata

2

UCMJ Article 92 section 3, dereliction of duty

3

UCMJ Article 133, conduct unbecoming an officer

4

Nigerian born and raised, then moved to Moscow, then moved to Paris, then moved to the USA and somehow got a commission as a counterintelligence officer despite not actually being a citizen. His accent was so thick and English so bad that we had no idea what the moron was saying most of the time.

5

Soliciting sex from a married female subordinate, then punishing her after she refused. Chaining a detainee to a fence, torturing him for a couple hours, then leaving him there to die and never reporting it.

6

When he found out the three NCOs were writing up a report about his abuses to give to the company commander (who, incidentally, believed all enlisted were scum), he proactively accused them of making racist remarks about him to get them sent home early for courts martial. I got home before he did, wrote it all up, gave sworn testimony to the trial court, and got all three released from confinement and immediate honorable discharges “for the good of the service”, including all future pay and allowances owed.

Vindication

I sometimes run across more proof that my theory about gravity is correct.  I watched this video by Veritasium the other day. Give it a watch. It’s worth a half hour of your time.  It's all about how the effect (gravity, electromagnetism) is not the cause (the potential energy fields).

Experiments with electromagnetism and gravity have independently shown that the field of potential energy is not only real, but is more fundamental than the forces we normally describe. You see, the potential energy fields have not only a slope, which we identify as a force, but an energy level. These energy levels can be indirectly measured, by comparing their differences.

I had no idea these experiments had already been conducted. They proved a great deal of my theory about the potential energy field and gravity.  That feels really good.

Color Revolution

Aside from Saul Alinsky’s1 Rules for Radicals, the Left has a playbook for revolution. It’s called Color Revolution. Here’s the general recipe, according to American Thinker.

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A“color revolution” ... is a modern form of orchestrated political upheaval designed to replace an existing government without traditional military invasion or civil war ... These operations follow a remarkably consistent playbook, refined over two decades by Western NGOs, intelligence-linked foundations, and State Department-affiliated entities (Open Society Foundations, USAID, etc.).

Authors describe seven stages of a color revolution. The stages include these tactics, which I’ll list in approximate chronological order:

• Portray the target government as illegitimate, authoritarian, corrupt, or “fascist.”

• Front-load allegations: accuse incumbent of planning the crimes the opposition intends to commit (rigging, regression, dictatorship).

• Fund and train NGOs, student groups, and opposition politicians to repeat a unified message.

• Create/amplify a unifying symbol or theme (e.g., Orange Man Bad).

• Manufacture an electoral crisis.

• Street mobilization.

• Public appeals to and moral blackmail of the military and police: “You’re with the people, not the regime.”

• Promises of immunity, future positions for defectors.

• Threats to those who support target government.

• Provoke a response, flood media with images of “peaceful protesters” being attacked.

• International legitimation as foreign governments and media recognizes opposition leaders as “legitimate” authority.

• Sanctions, frozen assets, diplomatic isolation applied to sitting government.

• New elections scheduled under international supervision.

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This is obviously what’s going on now in Minneapolis. It’s what has already happened in Seattle and Portland, which are now enemy-held territory. (Seattle 1999 anti-WTO riots.)

Those aren’t protesters out there attacking Federal law enforcement officers. They’re Leftist revolutionaries. And they are traveling from all over the country to do so.

Leftists organize. It’s what they do. They plot. They plan. They raise funds. They hold training sessions. They deliver supplies. (You don’t think all those professionally printed signs and pallets of bricks just magically appeared at Leftist planned events, do you?) They deliver crowds. (Dozens of charter coaches don’t just happen to show up at Leftist events.) They have their own communications networks. (Anybody else remember Journo-List?) They have medics and lawyers on standby. And they always, always have the media in their pocket.

Propaganda works. Terrorism is violence as political theater. Protests become violent in order to generate a response from the lawful authorities. You, the people watching and reading the news, are the true targets of all this violence and chaos.

1

Yes, Hillary Clinton really did work for him when she was young. Yes, she really wrote her college thesis on implementing his models for revolution.