{"id":53172,"date":"2021-11-09T06:00:37","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53172"},"modified":"2021-11-09T02:31:03","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T07:31:03","slug":"its-that-time-of-year-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53172","title":{"rendered":"It’s That Time of Year Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about fossil fuels and fuel efficiency lately. We’ve been trying for years to make more fuel efficient vehicles and by now we’ve gotten all of the low-hanging fruit. From this point, most gains will require high-tech systems that will make vehicles more expensive to produce and maintain.<\/p>\n

So I started thinking that what we really<\/strong> need is a radical innovation to shake things up. Right now the average vehicle gets about 25 miles per gallon of fuel. So I came up with a larger one-gallon gas can that holds about twice as much fuel as a standard gallon gas can. Using one of these new gallons will get you twice as far, thus boosting the average fuel efficiency up to 50 miles per gallon!<\/p>\n

I admit that we’ll need to change all of our pumps and tools to accurately support this new Shamus-gallon. And this change will effectively halve the number of gallons you can store in your tank. But it will double<\/strong> our fuel efficiency. That’s worth it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Building on this idea, I decided to apply it to this coding project I’ve been working on. The project works, but when I compile I get about 50 warnings. Warnings usually arise when you write something a bit sloppy or when the compiler is able to detect that something could go wrong.Maybe you’re doing calculations on a variable before you’ve assigned it a value, so you’re performing arithmetic on random garbage values. It might not crash, but it’s probably not what you intended.<\/span> The code will compile<\/strong>. It will run<\/strong>. But there’s a potential for things to go wrong. If you want to write good code, then you ought to clean up the warnings by making lots of small changes to make your intentions clear to the compiler.<\/p>\n

The problem is that cleaning up warnings is dull busywork, and fixing all 50 warnings would take the better part of an hour.<\/p>\n

But! I realized that the C compiler is open source<\/a>. So what I did is I made a custom version of the compiler that starts counting warnings at -50. If you’ve got 51 warnings, then it will report just one. Since I have exactly 50 warnings, this special compiler now gives me a clean compile with zero problems!<\/p>\n

I plan to push everyone to adopt my variant compiler. I know people won’t want to change to my new system, but they’re overlooking how much easier this makes things for people in my particular situation.<\/p>\n

Also, I’ve always been disappointed that I didn’t make it to 6 feet tall. Six feet seems to be the magic number. If you can beat that, then women are more likely to find you attractive, you’ll be picked first for things in sports, and you’re generally more impressive and intimidating. Sadly, I stopped growing at 5’11 – one inch short! Worse, I’ve lost another inch over the last 30 years. So now I’m only 5″10.<\/p>\n

But! I’ve come up with a solution. I just need everyone else in the world to adopt this new measuring system I’ve come up with, where a foot is 11 inches instead of 12. With this new system, I’m now a badass six feet, four inches tall!<\/p>\n

Everyone else in the world needs to adopt this system. I know that changing measuring systems is annoying, but I personally benefit from this arrangement and so I need you to get on board with this. For those of you using the metric system, please update your conversion tables so that a foot is now 28 centimeters instead of 30.<\/p>\n

Oh hey, this is the week when we switch everyoneNot actually everyone. Only part of the world uses DST, and even among the people that do use it, we don’t all switch at the same time.<\/span> over to Daylight Savings Time, where we change the position of all clocks because some people want to do stuff an hour later.<\/p>\n

This is a completely sensible system and I have no objections.<\/p>\n

But Seriously, This is Stupid<\/h3>\n

🎵 TIME! IS MARCHING ON! AND TIME... IS STILL MARCHING ON! 🎵<\/div>
🎵 TIME! IS MARCHING ON! AND TIME... IS STILL MARCHING ON! 🎵<\/div><\/p>\n

The sun does not care about your clocks. The moon is indifferent to the display of your Apple Watch. The Earth will not alter its spin in response to you mucking with the time settings on your phone. Fiddling with your timekeeping device will not make the sunrise prettier, it won’t make the day warmer, and it won’t give you more useful hours of daylight.<\/p>\n

Clocks only matter to the millions of human beings trying to regulate their lives, keep healthy sleep schedules, and organize meetings across time zones. And it would be a huge help to us if you stopped creating this twice-yearly chaos and discomfort. If you want to do something an hour later in the day, then do it an hour later. Don’t force the rest of us to roll our clocks back so you can do it at the “same time”, because that’s not how time works and that’s not what clocks are for.<\/p>\n

Daylight savings is the work of madmen and simpletons. Just stop.<\/p>\n

STOP!<\/p>\n

Okay, that’s the fall 2021 DST rant out of the way. See you again in six months.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about fossil fuels and fuel efficiency lately. We’ve been trying for years to make more fuel efficient vehicles and by now we’ve gotten all of the low-hanging fruit. From this point, most gains will require high-tech systems that will make vehicles more expensive to produce and maintain. So I started thinking that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53172"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53195,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53172\/revisions\/53195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}