Jason Pearce

Today I discovered John Boswell’s Symphony of Science website and his compilation of remixing of Carl Sagan‘s PBS Service Cosmos to electronic music — turning Carl’s scientific poetry into song.

Sadly, it was only last year when I first discovered the Cosmos series, which was originally produced in 1980. Without question, Cosmos is the most scientifically informing, captivating, and inspiring television series I’ve seen. And now, thanks to the Symphony of Science, I can enjoy some of Carl’s — among other scientists — wisdom in song.

John appears to use Auto-Tune, software that corrects vocal pitch, to turn spoken words into song. The result sounds a bit like rapper T-Pain, but it works well with the electronic music in the background.

Indecently, I learned of both Cosmos and Symphony of Science via The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast. If you are interested in critically thinking about controversial claims from a scientific point of view, noting beats the SGU.

I gave my wife a cat for her birthday in December 2009. We saved her from a shelter and named her Emma. She’s had a mild cold since we got her (possible corrilation to our frozen heat pump), but she got worse this week. I took her to the vet today and here’s her xray. Doc says she has a virus and will get better.

This morning, I stepped outside and noticed that our HVAC unit (or heat pump) appeared to be frozen.

I figured it was a problem since none of my neighbors’ units were surrounded by blocks of ice like ours was. Thankfully, I have a brother-in-law who engineered these things for a living. Here’s what he had to say.

When the heat pump is in heating mode it is moving heat from the outside to the inside. Since heat only flows from a high temperature to a lower temperature, the refrigerant is colder than the air temperature when it is running through the outdoor unit. This causes the moisture in the air to condense and freeze on the coil.

In order to combat this, the unit will periodically go into a defrost mode. This is essentially running the heat pump in cooling mode. So the outdoor coil heats up and the indoor coil cools down. You don’t notice the cold because the electric resistance heat turns on in the indoor unit to offset the cold from the coil.

Usually the unit will have a time and temperature logic for how often it goes into defrost mode. The temperature is typically measured by a sensor that is placed on one of the tubes of the outdoor coil (typically on a bend in the tube that isn’t visible from the outside of the unit). If the temperature is below freezing then a “flag” is triggered. The time portion is a measure of how long the unit has been running since the last defrost. This is typically set by a dip switch on the outdoor unit control board. Typically something like 60, 90, 120, or 150 minutes.

When the unit goes into defrost mode, there is another temperature sensor on the outdoor coil that will turn off the defrost once it reaches something around 80°F.

If enough ice has accumulated around the coil that the tubes can reach 80°F but there is still a layer around it, then the defrost will not function properly and you could have a situation similar to yours. This would be corrected by lowering the run time setting that I mentioned above, so that the unit defrosts more often.

The other issues could be that the defrost sensor is not functioning properly and the unit is not defrosting at all.

In order to correct the situation, I would turn off the unit and start dumping water on it until you get all of the ice off. This will be a pain in the butt. You could use a hose too if you have a water supply nearby. Once the ice is off, turn back on the unit. You should be able to hear it go into defrost from inside your living room. It sounds like a clunk and hissing. If it is doing that, then you might need to adjust your time setting. If it runs for like 3 hours straight without that, then you may have a bad defrost temperature sensor.

It took me a little over two hours to get most of the ice off of it. The ice you see on the outside of the unit was just as bad on the inside of the unit. This time it turned on for just a few minutes before turning off again — instead of running for days straight.

When I read Google’s blog posting entitled “A new approach to China,” I thought of the famous “Tank Man” image — the 1989 photo of a single man standing up to four tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

While Google is much larger than a single man, it still doesn’t have any tanks. I swapped out a Google map marker and came up with this image.

China has such a huge population that it seems to me that too many companies make too many concessions with the Chinese government in order to conduct business in their country. Today, Google said no more. It’s no longer going to filter and censor its search engine results — even if it means they are no longer welcome to provide services to the Chinese.

For the past six weeks, I have received two to five phone calls a day from the number (614) 283-3853. On the rare occasion that I did answer, it was always a pre-recorded message from Discover Card, leaving a pre-recorded voicemail message saying “This is Discover Card. Please call us back at (800) 347-0268.”

Aside from being annoyed that I was receiving multiple calls a day, I had no reason to either answer their call or respond to their voicemail for I was not a Discover Card customer. I figured I would just ignore their telemarketing efforts and they would go away. Six weeks later, I reached my breaking point.

I had some reservations in calling them back. My first was that neither (614) 283-3853 (the number appearing on my caller ID) nor (800) 347-0268 (the number left in the voicemails) appeared on Discover Card’s website. For all I know, the persistent caller could have been someone claiming to be Discover Card but were not. Furthermore, when I conducted a reverse phone number lookup on these numbers, they were also not listed as belonging to Discover Card.

I decided to just call Discover Card directly, using the number listed on their website — (800) 347-2683. Remember, I’m not a Discover Card customer, so I had to navigate a painful automated answering service that was designed for customers to enter their card number — along with several operators — before I could finally speak with someone in their security/fraud department. I wanted to ask if Discover Card was aware of either number.

It turns out that their security/fraud department was unaware of the (614) 283-3853 number, but confirmed that (800) 347-0268 was one of theirs. I was transferred one more time to speak with the department to have my number removed. Hopefully, that will be the last that I will hear from them.

I never found out why they were so desperate to speak with me and I didn’t really care. After six weeks of persistent phone calls, there was little they could have said to win my business.