N, Author at Bean Sprout Adventures

March 2, 2018

Finished with grad school apps!

I just turned in the last of my grad school apps! Finally done~

I’ve been applying to Masters of Statistics programs since I’ve been doing a lot of data analysis and experimental design. I swore after undergrad that I wouldn’t go to grad school, but… it would be really useful to know more about statistics. I still refuse to get a PhD, though.

Friend A who’s allergic to everything is so done with software engineering after less than a year that he wants to get a PhD in linguistics. To be fair, linguistics was an existing interest of his, but it seems a little too soon to want to change fields 😛

March 2, 2018October 1, 2018

To Sacramento

Two weekends ago, J and I went to Sacramento to take advantage of the President’s Day holiday. We chose Sacramento because it is close enough to ride the train to, but far enough that we wouldn’t go on a normal weekend. It’s also the state capital.

Apparently though, it is not considered a valid vacation destination. Almost everyone we told our plans to said, “Why Sacramento??”, as if there’s nothing there. For the record, Sacramento has nearly 500,000 people (2.1 million in the metropolitan area), a very walkable downtown, and some of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the US (think of them as the antithesis of ghettos). Sacramento is a lot cheaper than the Bay Area too 🙂

J and I took Amtrak‘s Capitol Corridor line from San Jose to Sacramento. The ride took about 3 hours, which compares very favorably to driving. It cost $40 per person one way.

Flowering pear (so said another train passenger) trees as seen from the train.

Cows as seen from the train. I’m sure they love that 60 Hz buzz.

We stayed at a Hostelling International hostel (J’s first time in a hostel!) just a 10-minute walk from the train station. The hostel is housed in the repurposed Llewellyn Williams Mansion.

A classic and very spacious example of Victorian Italianate architecture. We stayed on the third floor.

I’ll make more posts on what we did in Sacramento.

March 1, 2018February 27, 2018

Chocolate soufflé

We made a chocolate soufflé a while ago (actually, pretty sure it was months ago) using this recipe. My main complaint is that it was too sweet. Next time, I might leave out some sugar from the egg yolk mixture or use less-sweet chocolate (although I used bittersweet as directed).

I know J has a picture of the souffle somewhere. I’ll try to dig it up…

February 28, 2018March 1, 2018

Better phone options

Electronic devices never seem to last very long. The fancier they get, the shorter their usable lifetimes (think smartphones vs flip phones).

Planned obsolescence is a major part of this. It is manifest in such design choices as soldering the battery to the phone case, or putting the battery underneath the motherboard. Doing this makes it really hard to replace the battery. You can’t do it yourself, so you have to pay someone else to do it. The difficulty of the repair makes it more expensive and more likely to break or damage something else in the device. You probably won’t be able to replace the battery more than once.

Next time you’re in the market for a phone, keep these things in mind to get a longer-lasting mobile phone. Basically,

if feasible for your needs, get a simple phone
consult the iFixit list of phones by repairability (notice that the newest highly repairable phone is from 2016)
if you can’t get a highly-repairable phone, at least get one with an easily replaceable battery
extend the usable life of your phone by installing other operating systems once your phone no longer gets security updates (you may need advanced technical know-how to do this!).

I probably won’t need to buy a new phone for a long time. I’ve used a cheap candy bar phone for everyday use since 2012 (with a free upgrade to a 3G phone when 2G was being phased out). I use a J cast-off phone (Google Nexus 5) for traveling. In fact, I’ll probably be able to provide for all of my phone needs using old phones of J’s 😛

If I did need a new phone, I’d either: buy a used one that is listed as highly repairable by iFixit, or buy a Fairphone (pending additional research, although the concept alone is extremely appealing).

The Fairphone is a modular Android phone made with ethically-sourced materials and components (Wiki). It was specifically designed to be easy to repair and upgrade without throwing the whole phone away. The end goal is device longevity. But the Fairphone isn’t perfect.

Unfortunately, support for the Fairphone 1 has already ended, only 2-3.5 years (depending on batch) after the device’s release, partly due to poor choice of SoC. This is worse than Apple, which generally supports devices for 5 years. Fairphones are only sold in Europe (although they are unlocked and would presumably work in most countries).
Replacement (e.g. battery, screen) and upgrade (e.g. camera) modules are available only from Fairphone, whereas components of other phones are not proprietary and can be bought from various suppliers. Fairphone is such a small company that it could go out of business at any time.
Because of the small size of the company and ethical sourcing requirements, the phone is relatively expensive for its specs. The Fairphone 2 was €529 (~$650), which although on par with other high-end smartphones is expensive for, e.g. it’s camera quality, lack of USB-C, etc.
The modularity of the phone means that it is a little bulky (11 mm thick).

The Fairphone 3 will be released sometime in 2018. Previous models have only been available in Europe; it is unclear if the Fairphone 3 will be available on other continents. Fairphone is aiming to support the Fairphone 3 longer by, for example, stocking up on repair components that are in high demand. The Fairphone 3 will be a smaller, less fancy smartphone with a correspondingly lower price of ~$500. (It is unclear why Fairphone feels the need to release additional phones at all. Shouldn’t they be making modules to update the Fairphone 1?)

Edit: J says to use swappa.com to buy used phones. Devices sold on eBay tend to be stolen D:

February 27, 2018

Getting to know the other side

Featured on a recent NPR story, Better Angels is a group for people with different political views to meet and learn about each other. It sounds really cool! The goal of the organization is to prevent a major divide along political lines from happening. It’s too easy to be exposed to thought similar to your own if you just use the Internet sounding board to get news and opinions. People online tend to be more extreme than in person, so it’s also easy to get a skewed picture of a certain political group or demographic.

February 18, 2018February 16, 2018

Sustainable cleaning basics

The majority of the time, I clean things (wipe surfaces, hand-wash dishes, etc.) with a wet dishcloth and soap, if needed. It is rare that I need anything else.

More specialized cleaning tools (in no particular order):

Kamenoko tawashi – Japanese vegetable scrubbing brush, but really good for getting stuck-on food off of pots and pans. Do not use these on Teflon or soft plastic; it is incredibly stiff and will scratch delicate surfaces.

Baking soda – Good for removing stains (apply to surface with some water and let sit for 15 min) and odors, good for scrubbing. Can also use it for deodorant, toothpaste, and shampoo.

Salt – Good for removing ground-in dirt, but very abrasive.

Vinegar – Takes off limescale, can be added to baking soda to unclog drains. Can also use as a conditioning hair rinse.

Soap – J and I use Dr. Bronner’s liquid castile soap. We bought a gallon of it – the biggest size available! – since we anticipate using it for all of our liquid soap needs. We use it for hand-washing dishes, for example.

A scrubby brush, rag, or cloth (sponges not recommended because of low durability and unsustainable materials). Loofah is a good sponge-like sponge substitute.

You might want a toilet brush, although old toothbrushes work fine for cleaning toilets. LifeWithoutPlastic has a plastic-free option.

Plunger – J and I use our plunger to unclog the shower drain (I’m not sure why it gets clogged in the first place, but it happens regularly).

Broom, dust mop, vacuum come in handy occasionally.

Advanced cleaning tips

I don’t know any, ’cause I don’t clean that much. I just google when I need a fancy solution, like what to use to get blood or tomato stains out.

February 17, 2018February 16, 2018

The 47 most effective ways to shrink your carbon footprint that you won’t believe, especially number 7 it’s so cool

I came across a super cool infographic and article (based on this research paper) ranking different actions by environmental impact. You know those things that people always say to do – recycling, washing your clothes in cold water, changing lightbulbs? They don’t do that much 🙁 Too bad, since those are some of the easiest and least controversial changes to make.

The article says that the most effective things you can do (if you live in a developed country) are:

Don’t have kids (The study attributes 1/2 of your children’s emissions, 1/4 of your grandchildrens’ emissions, etc. to you)
Don’t use a car
Don’t fly
Buy green energy (This is easy to do!!!)
Don’t eat animal products (The study actually specifies no meat, with no mention of other animal products, although dairy in particular has a large carbon footprint.)

Less effective actions include:

Recycling
Doing laundry with cold water
Hanging laundry to dry

There’s a table with a bunch more actions listed. Improving home insulation and producing no food waste are both moderately effective; composting is listed as not very effective, but no carbon footprint reduction estimate is given so maybe they just couldn’t find any data on it.

The less effective actions are obviously more attractive; after all, they don’t require major lifestyle changes. This may be why “textbook and government writers intentionally [promote] low-impact actions,” following a ‘foot-in-the-door’ approach, “a type of positive spillover where encouraging small actions is hoped to lead individuals to take more substantial behaviours later”. It’s unclear if this actually happens, though… Man, behavior modification is hard.

February 16, 2018February 14, 2018

A tool to see the energy profile of your local electrical utility

I found a neat tool from the EPA that shows the energy sources that your local electricity is generated from.

California is looking pretty good! J and I do buy a solar/wind mix, but it’s nice to know that even the average user gets 1/3 renewable.

Our electricity provider, PG&E, has a really nice website. It has plots of our energy usage by hour (wow, such resolution!) and compares our overall usage to similar homes in the area. You can totally see those days when it was too hot to go without air conditioning, ’cause the energy usage goes waaaaay up. It is also really easy to switch to different billing plans (tiered, energy at night is super cheap, etc) and to buy renewable energy. It’s a very fun website 🙂

This was that heat wave day last summer. We used air conditioning that night, as you can see. You can also see when we were cooking brunch (we have an electric stove).

February 15, 2018February 13, 2018

Sweeteners

I found this really thorough and very interesting blog post on basically every type of sweetener available. The author evaluates each sweetener with regards to processed-ness and healthfulness (with an initial warning that sugar is bad for you…). Once we run out of the sugar we have, I’d like to get palm sugar (coconut sugar). I can probably get some from SoCal, which has a bunch of date palm plantations. Although they’re not native to the Americas – they probably originated near Iraq, date palms are supposed to be pretty sustainable to grow, since they require very little water. Sorghum syrup, blackstrap molasses (high in iron!), and rapadura (panela), the least-processed form of cane sugar, also have some appeal.

On a related note, I’ve been reading about the purported benefits of a low-carb diet and thought it would be interesting to track my carb consumption (although paleo seems hard if you don’t eat meat…). MyFitnessPal is really good for food consumption and body-measurement tracking, and it’s easy to use.

February 14, 2018February 13, 2018

Vegetable volunteering

Over Christmas break, my siblings A and C volunteered at Johnson’s Backyard Garden (JBG), a local Austin CSA that delivers produce in the area.

JBG relies pretty heavily on volunteers to maintain fields and pack the produce. To persuade people to volunteer, JBG gives each volunteer a free box of produce!!! Okay, the value-per-hour based on the cost of a box is below minimum wage, but it’s nice to go somewhere and do something. If you go volunteer, you also get access to the reject veggies (which mostly look fine – food waste!) to take home.