Here’s a shout out. Our fridge is misbehaving. It’s an Amana, with the freezer on the bottom. The freezer is working fine. The top has stopped working. Anybody got a theory on how that’s possible?

Update: I took it apart. There is a fan in the bottom freezer that circulates cold air. Included in that circulation is the run of air that chills the upper part. The fan isn’t working. I removed it and tested it. Of course it worked; but it also behaves in a manner that suggests it’s variable speed and has a thermostat. So I suspect I need to replace it. I put it all back together and it worked until we finished cleaning it; then it stopped.

Update 2: Disassembled again, the bearing in the fan motor is worn out. Once you know this thing is called an evaporator fan you can find some pretty good sites showing how the fridge is put together. More delightfully I found pdf containing a scan of the typewritten paper outlining the design. It was written in 1978 by some engineers at Amana in Iowa and the work was funded by the US government in service of making appliances more efficient. It looks to me like the design is unchanged in almost 30 years. Now to find the part, locally, on a Saturday.

Update 3: New fan: $80.  Installed, everything works – yeah. Oh boy, it’s really quiet!  20 minutes later it stops – boo.  A while later – it works – yeah?  24 hours later it all seems pretty good; and i think the random stopping is part of a defrost cycle.  Reading what I refer to as my handbook for obsessive compulsives I learn that the freezer should be around zero degree’s F, and the upper part should be around 36 degrees.  So far I’ve managed to get the top right, and the bottom’s 10 degrees too cold.  It’s now clear we should have sensed trouble when: it got noisy, the beer started getting warm, and the lettuce started freezing.

I take the bus to work most every day and recently I’ve noticed two new, to me, syndromes.  First off I’ve noticed that I catch later of two morning buses it will passes the earlier bus on it’s way.  Secondly I’ve noticed  that if the bus is even a few seconds ahead of schedule this advantage will  accumulate so that it arives at the train station quite a bit ahead of schedule. Both of these have to do with passenger loading delays.

The 2nd bus wins because it is less popular, so it stops less often; while the 1st bus is very popular and has to stop a lot.  It’s the passengers,  and their loading time.

The second syndrome, where the amount a bus is running ahead of schedule piles up is also due to the passengers.  In this case the bus doesn’t have to pickup passengers who come out to the bus stop on schedule.  I’ve noticed that when I miss my favorite bus, but I’m on schedule, it will drive by empty – which of of course get’s my goat.

These are interesting complementary syndromes and they suggest that being on schedule is unstable.  Early buses tend to become even earlier, since the load they usually carry doesn’t appear; while buses that run late tend to accumulate additional loading costs.  It’s fun to think about how one might overlay some regulatory scheme to temper these effects.

Seems to me there is an analagous syndrome in projects.  Delayed projects tend to accumulate more items, as the delays allow more requirements to show up and pile-on.  Projects ahead of schedule tend to pick up speed as they drive pass additional requirements which haven’t managed to get the meetings on time.

It’s interesting to muse about what interventions one might take in these situations.  Driving by a few bus stops to get back on schedule, or explicitly ignoring a few project requriments is very hard to execute on.  There is one bus driver on my route who appears to have discovered that he can spend a lot more time drinking coffee if he gets ahead of schedule; the man’s a maniac.  I’ve worked with managers like that.

From one of the blogs I’m currently sampling.

At some point in the last 24 hours a blog on some random web page slipped thru my peripheral vision. I only recall the tag line it was using.

“When supply and demand need a hand”

What a great tag line for an intermediary, a market maker, the hub in a two sided network, a dating service. I’m guessing here I but I bet it was an Ad for a head hunter, directed at the hiring side. But it’s a nice tag line for any number of scenarios where you want to reduce the transactional friction, for example it’s not a bad way to talk about what is often the motivation for specifying standards.

The L-Curve model would have us pack the entire US population onto a football field, 44 people per square inch.  In the center of the field the 2 inch high turf represents the median income.  Society cares for the lawn: prisons to the left, schools to right. California for example.

Less than 1% of the American population is in prison, while over the age of 18 6% are enrolled in school

The “Ben Franklin” is a decision making device who’s legitimacy rests on Ben’s fame and the authority of arithmetic.  You make two columns and in the first you enumerate the reasons for proceeding and in the other you enumerate the costs.  Finally you, presumably, sum up the two columns and make your decision.  This is all well and good until you discover that the same technique is prescribed as a good closing device for the saleman.

The advice to the closer is to pull out a sheet of paper; draw two columns and then fill in one column with all the reasons to buy the product.  You then hand the paper to your customer and invite him to fill in the second column.  The nominal reason why this approach works is that you, the salesman, will be well prepared for this pop quiz while the buyer won’t.  There is a secondary rational based on availablity; i.e. when you hand over the list your list of positive reasons will be close by while the objections won’t be.
I was reminded of this yesterday after reading a few papers upstream from a paper that Bruce Schneier pointed out.  The paper he pointed out The myth of the Superuser is an interesting and provocative paper; but I enjoyed more the work it rests upon, i.e. a body of work that attempt to dig into the puzzle of how people think about risk.  There are lots of amusing facts in that body of work; as well as a tremendous amount of posing.  Each paper is just like being handed the Ben Franklin by a salesman.
One of the fact’s I’d not noticed before says there is some experimental evidence that people are not able to treat the two columns as independent.  As you learn of benefits you tend to discount the risks and visa versa as you learn of risks you tend to discount the benefits.  Oh dear, the landscape we make decisions upon is ill-formed.  It is easier to push choices in some directions versus others.  If you try to push a decision, say to clarify it’s benefits, you running against the natural grain of the choice making surface.  You will have an easier time if at the same time you make a counter vailing points clarifying the risk.  If we visualize the choices as sitting on a x-y plane of risk v.s. benefit it is hard to move the discussion along the 45% line; and easy to move the perpendicular to that line.

our marbles roll naturally to into the gutters on one or another axis.    The Ben Franklin forces the decision onto this two dimensional plane.  That’s why it makes a great closing device.  We are good at making decisions and good at getting comfortable with them.  Time spent in the middle of that plain is a pain; and it’s more painful in it’s higher regions.  Specialists (technocrats, scientists, the thoughtful) who are skilled at surviving in the inner regions and high altitudes of this landscape are a pain in the neck for other people.
People, the literature reports, have a difficult time holding in their head options that are both high-risk and high-benefit.  Scenarios that feature that combination tend to be converted by the mind into something else.  Going into the war in Iraq is reasonable example.  The desired benefit was high and the risk was high.  The inability of individuals (and I presume it the same for groups) to hold in their head that extreme combination rapidly leads to polarized views of the situation.