JOSePHInE: A Tragic Love Story

            I was recently the victim of some computer problems. This doesn’t sound like the makings of a good story, but I think there is something to be learned from how it affected me and how I dealt with it.

            First, I should explain that my computer is named JOSePHInE (Jacob’s Own Self-Produced Home Information Engine, yes it’s lame, but I like it), and she is very special to me. I built her a little over a year ago and we have had many good times since. She has always been healthy and well behaved and this is the first problem we have had.

Sexy

            It all started with a few crashes of my system. At first I thought this was due to the KotOR game that I had recently started replaying, which was a distressing problem on its own. A more problem was made obvious when we had trouble booting up. The true source was in JOSePHInE’s hard drive, which the motherboard was having problems finding. To be specific, it was her solid state drive (SSD), which is the smallest of her three hard drives, but the one with the operating system on it. This was surprising since I figured the SSD would be more reliable that her hard disk drives (HDD), one of which is about ten years old. JOSePHInE was still capable of lucid operations for about an hour at a time, so after much fiddling, and unplugging and replugging wires, and endless blowing on contacts, I determined that a transplant would be necessary. JOSePHInE helped me order up a new SSD and then I let her rest and the waiting started.

I'd say about 99% of the physical side of computer repair is plugging thing in

            A kind of depression soon set in to my life as I realized how attached I had become to my computer. I suddenly had a lot of free time that I didn’t know how to spend. I started cooking elaborate meals more often, watching all of my directors commentaries that I hadn’t seen yet (yes, I like directors commentaries), and playing my X-box more often, but it wasn’t the same. I missed my girl; all the things we used to do together, the things she enabled me to do, and just the sound of her in my apartment. I’m talking about her like she was my girlfriend, and that is actually a strong analogy for our relationship. I spent a large amount of my free time with her, I spent money on her with frequent “gifts”, and she was also my primary source of sexual stimulation (that is a pornography reference, not a sex with an inanimate object reference, just so you know where I draw the line).

            After just over a week of cursing my decision not to pay for fast shipping, the new SSD finally arrived. I began the transplant surgery with JOSePHInE acting as a more than able operating assistant (there’s not a lot she can’t teach me with a Google search). This reminded me of the scene from Star Trek when Spock losing his brain and then ends up assisting McCoy in the re-implantation (it was a pretty terrible episode, but a fun idea). JOSePHInE was amazingly sober during the process and was pulling flawless reboots and other actions which I didn’t think she could still do. After a few stressful hours of work we were able to clone her old hard drive onto the new one and got the whole system running normally again. It has only been two days now, but the crashes have not returned and I am happy to have my baby back to her old self again.

Tallness, A Crime Against Humanity?

            Tallness, let’s talk about it. Height seems to be a very admirable trait in modern society and I have no idea why. I can see no real benefits and a number is disadvantages to being tall. I should probably say that I am 5’ 9” (that’s 69”... ladies), so I am coming at this from the perspective of an average height person.

            I’ll start with the pros of being tall. Um, you can reach higher things without getting a chair or something. You have an advantage when playing basketball. You can see slightly father due to a higher vantage, once again neglecting the ability to stand on a chair, or like a rock or anything. That’s all I can think of. There is also the whole thing were tall people are perceived as more attractive, but I am about to crush that misconception.

            My first con is that there really isn’t anything tall people can do that short people can’t, but the inverse is true. Anyone can wear platform shoes or stilts to gain height, but you can’t do anything to lose it temporarily. Now the only shortness exclusive activity I can think of is fitting into small spaces, but that could be a pretty big deal in the right situation. What if you are getting chased by an angry bear and the only escape is a tight gap in the cave wall or something; I sure hope those extra 6” were worth it. Now you may say that the tall person could reach a high branch and swing into a tree, but bears can climb trees so that argument is invalid.

This is pretty much all you need to cancel out a couple feet of extra height

            Con number two is the loss of body efficiency as height increases. Bone and muscle strength increase proportional to their cross sectional area, not their volume. Since area increase according to the square of the height ratio, and volume increase according to the cube; if you double your height you will quadruple you strength, but octuple your weight. This means that if you take someone who can lift their own weight and then proportionally half their size, they can then lift twice their weight. This is why people brag about ants being able to lift the equivalent of cars to their own weight, but it’s not true because if you scaled the ants up they probably wouldn’t be about to lift anything, because they would be too busy being crushed by their own weight (exoskeletons are only feasible at small sizes).

Don't worry mam, gravity will soon collapse his entire body

            My final and largest problem with tallness is the consumption of resources. Larger people eat more food, need more material for clothing and housing, and basically everything needs to be built on a larger scale to accommodate them. I don’t think food consumption will scale 1:1 with weight, but if we shrink every human on earth by half we could reduce food consumption roughly eightfold. All of our houses and cars could be built at half size, and you would save immensely on all structural components because the masses would decrease so much. It would be like reducing the human population by a factor of eight, and who’s to say that we would have to stop at only half size. At one quarter height, weight is decrease by a factor of 64!

THANKS FOR RUINING THE PLANET

            The only problem I can see with shrinking humanity is a reduction in brain size might reduce intelligence. A correlation between brain size and intelligence hasn’t been proven though, and a reduction in body size should decrease the number of nerves and what not, reducing the amount of brain power that is needed to run the body. We could also just keep most of our head size with tricks like more premature births or exclusively cesarean sections. Anyway, tallness sucks, Cob out.