Cyclone 4006

Via Maria Popova, this humorous review of the Cyclone 4006 - Ultra High Pressure Hard Surface Cleaner, 40,000 psi water with Full Recovery:

It used to take me 1 1/2 hours to get to work in the morning. It takes me less than 15 minutes now and that includes stopping to get an Egg McMuffin!

My secret? Easy. I bought a Cyclone 4006. Now, if there is anyone in front of me on the road, I beep my air horn once or twice. If they don't get out of my way, I turn on the "juice". If 40,000 psi water pressure (with full recovery) is strong enough to blast off concrete curing compound from asphalt, you won't believe what it does to a Toyota Corolla! Woo hoo! Beep beep! Wooooooosh!

OK, it's a little difficult to parallel park and it doesn't go faster than 30 mph. I'll give you that. But, trust me, when you are behind the wheel of a bright yellow Cyclone 4006, these things don't really matter.

PS. It comes with an "optional remote walk-behind head." If you figure out what this is, please let me know.

To really appreciate the review, you need to see a photo of one.

The Cyclone 4006 looks like a truck wearing a gas mask

Sadly, the Cyclone 4006 is out of stock. Some days when I have to drive to work down the 101 I could really use one of these. I wonder how much it cost? I'm going to guess it wasn't available for free two-day shipping via Amazon Prime.

31 Days of December

November passed, and this year I'd forgotten about Nanowrimo, the annual tradition of trying to write a novel in the month of November, which also happens to be the month in which people try to grow moustaches for charity. Both are difficult, and I've never completed either.

I tried to complete Nanowrimo one year; I started strong, like a rookie marathon runner carried away by the exuberance of all the surrounding participants, the newness of it all. After a week I was several thousand words ahead. Of course I proceeded to crash hard and miss the deadline by a wide margin.

But it was a good exercise in the power of habit and steady, incremental effort, and so I'm going to try something on a smaller scale this month: a post on my blog every day. Though it seems eminently achievable, I have not, in all the years I've had a blog, ever achieved this.

It's often less about finding the time or about writer's block as it is about forcing myself to think critically about something every day outside of work and then pushing every post and line of thought to conclusion instead of abandoning ship midway to check Twitter or Instagram or my email.

Today marks one.

Ciclotte

I like the look of the Ciclotte, a high end exercise bike that looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Most normal exercise bikes are a visual blemish for most urban living spaces, but the Ciclotte is a real conversation starter.

View fullsize

However, those handlebars look to revere form over function. Though they are said to be adjustable, a more traditional handlebar shape would be far more practical for quick maneuvering into a variety of common positions.

Also, it costs over $11,000, so your wallet will be losing weight faster than you will. Maybe they'll make it into a local Soul Cycle class soon where I can give them a whirl while sweating and crying to the uplifting sounds of Beyonce's Halo.

Amazon Prime Air

In a promo spot for tonight's episode of 60 Minutes, Jeff Bezos promised to drop a big surprise. Well, he delivered (according to Twitter since those of us here on the West Coast haven't seen the episode yet).

Announcing Amazon Prime Air, delivery by drone. 

We're excited to share Prime Air — something the team has been working on in our next generation R&D lab.

The goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers' hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles.

Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations.

Watch the video of a recent test flight.

I mean, really. Tacocopter was ahead of its time.

Tyler Cowen's arguments against 23andMe

Tyler Cowen offers several reasons why he decided not to send in a saliva sample to 23andMe:

1. I thought there is option value and I can always do a test later, for a better and more accurate service.  (I hadn’t thought of the FDA shutting the whole thing down, but still I expect the service will return in some manner, if only under another corporate banner or from overseas.)

2. I thought the “worry cost” of negative information would exceed the benefit of whatever specific preventive measures I might take.  Most useful ex ante preventive measures, such as diet and exercise, are fairly general in their application and I didn’t think there was likely much to be learned about specific measures for specific potential maladies.  And here is an interesting short piece on the likelihood of false negatives.

3. One might take more preventive measures with one’s ex ante and more uncertain knowledge than with one’s ex post and more certain knowledge.  For instance an absence of negative information might have encouraged me to slack on exercise, to the detriment of my eventual health outcomes.

4. I wouldn’t describe privacy concerns as my major worry, but at the margin still they counted for something.  I felt eventually this service would prove equivalent to making my genome public information, via something called GenomeLeaks or the like.  Why do that without having a better sense of its longer-run implications?

23andMe held a sale a long time ago, and I sent in a saliva sample. I can attest to Tyler's second point. Opening my test results for things like my chances of getting Parkinson's Disease was terrifying, and it's not clear how accurate the results are.

It's disheartening how much of life's happiness depends on ignorance or self-deception, but even though 23andMe forces you to read and agree to a waiver that lays out all the uncertainty inherent in its current test results, it's likely that test results indicating a highly elevated risk of Parkinson's or some other fatal condition would have haunted me the rest of my life.