improbable events.

What are the odds, really?

1.

I ordered a looper pedal to use with my violin, an electronic device that records a segment of your playing, then repeats it in a loop (hence the name). They're typically operated by a footswitch (since you're usually using your hands to play) and they come in levels of complexity, from basic ones with no indicators and a single footswitch, to monsters a couple feet wide with four or five switches. Some will play your phrase at half speed, or reversed, or whatever. I did some research and ordered one at about 75% of maximum complication, figuring I won't use a lot of it, but it has some features that would make my life simpler.

It arrived yesterday, a day early! But DOA. It's brand new! So I had a very expensive paperweight, while we do the replacement shuffle. I may have rage-ordered a much simpler one-switch model in the meantime. Will I like either one? Not sure.

This is Zoë Keating, a cellist who started here in the Bay Area, and popularized the idea of looping performance, especially on a classical instrument. At 6:07 they show the MIDI footswitch panel she uses to manipulate looping software on her laptop. This is the level of complication I was hoping to avoid by using a dedicated looper pedal.

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But for all that, if I try looping for anything more than amusement or practice, I may well end up writing code.

2.

I got a bizarre thing in the mail: a deposit confirmation from the investment firm Charles Schwab, for a considerable sum of money, attached to 1099-R forms for my 2020 tax return. The only note says "benefit lump sum." I've never seen a 1099-R before, and the Internet tells me it's a "retirement distribution," which is all well and good except that I checked on all my retirement stuff that I know about, and none of it has changed. Also I don't have a Charles Schwab account––or maybe I do, now!

This is unsettling because, while I won't claim to be on top of my finances, this is not the kind of thing I usually forget about. And while receiving money is great, there's usually a tax on that money, which is hard to pay accurately if you don't know what the money is.

3.

It's been viciously hot here, so we've been running air conditioners. Naturally, we figured we don't want to trip our circuit breakers––which would require an excursion into said vicious heat––and 2/3 of the house (built in 1938) runs on a single 20 amp circuit. So I busted out the circuit map, but then realized I had no idea how much power the A/C units used, and obviously it's a lot. Easy enough, I have a gadget for measuring a device's power usage. I started with the window unit in our bedroom, running on the Eco-Cool setting...about 75 watts. Ooookay...how about full blast...85 watts.

What?

How about the rolling unit in the office?

45 watts.

I'm expecting a power draw more like our microwave's 1500 watts. I looked at the manuals. The window unit mentions "4 watts" and "4400 watts," neither of which makes a ton of sense: a 20A circuit at 110V can only handle 2200 watts.

(Circuit breakers and fuses are measured in amps, but because the voltage is constant-ish, we usually take a shortcut and just talk about watts.)

20A is a normal household circuit breaker, so no one's going to sell a window A/C that uses twice that. And we already know empirically that the A/Cs don't trip the breakers when not run on the same circuit.

The other A/C unit's manual doesn't mention its power draw at all. I measure the usage again. I check the manual for the meter to make sure I'm not measuring in kilowatts by accident. I check against a 38W incandescent light bulb lingering in a floor lamp: the meter says 35W. Pretty solid, definitely not the orders of magnitude error I was expecting.

So apparently conservation technology has brought us to the point where I can run 3 air conditioners for at most 245 watts, which is 2-4 of the incandescent light bulbs we all used 15 years ago? My co-workers don't believe it either. But this is what data is for: because our intuitions are so often wrong.

I'm really interested in how distressed I felt in response. I really really wanted to spend the weekend with the looper pedal, and I'm annoyed that I can't. Someone deposited a large sum of money for me, and I'm bothered because I don't know what it is. And I have magic air conditioners that use a fraction of the power we would expect, and I'm worried something is wrong with...something. I don't even have a theory there.

In Buddhism there's the term dukkha, usually translated as "suffering," but what we actually mean is closer to the word's etymology, which means "[a wheel] out of balance." Dis-ease, dissatisfaction, discontent; stubbing your toe is pain you can't avoid, but being angry about it is suffering which you can. We're so used to suffering that we seek it out.