I know I’m a softy, but this just makes me sad to be member of the species that came up with Western Civilization, the Industrial Revolution, Manifest Destiny, and Wal-Mart parking lots.

December 14, 2011 | 6:58 pm

1,500 birds die crashing into Utah parking lot, roads

. . . Utah wildlife officials were cleaning up thousands of dead and surviving migratory birds that crashed into a Wal-Mart parking lot, roads and other land after mistaking them for bodies of water.

Thousands of eared grebes, a duck-like aquatic bird, were migrating toward Mexico when they apparently mistook solid areas around Cedar City and St. George as water. Storm clouds above the city lights probably confused the birds, said Lynn Chamberlain, a spokesman for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. . . .

I suppose there were individual birds who realized that it was reflections on blacktop, not water, and flew on to reproduce another day.  But we human beings sure make evolution tough. (See my article “Doctors Thwart Darwin”)

Somebody tell me please (since every Adobe / NYTimes/ Apple HELP service seems unable to) how do I “page-down” when reading the NY Times on my iPhone?  My desire is NOT to gently scroll; I want to jump down to see the next “screen’s worth”.  On a desktop with a mouse and scroll-bars, it’s built in — you click on the bar part below the thumb.

P.S. I see that OS X Lion is making scroll-bars intermittent. . .so will paging just fade into oblivion?

I have several life campaigns; perhaps my most anal-retentive is to repopularize the semi-colon.

Don’t you love those neat auto-switching power supplies for your laptop or camcorder or other international electronic device – the transformers that you can plug into 110 – 240 VAC at 50/60 Hz?  No multiple converters to lug (except the physical plug adapters to fit the comically huge European receptacles), no need for setting little switches to the right voltage, no worries about precious equipment melting and smoking before your eyes, and no resulting nasty liquid plastic fumes.  Nope.  Plug one of these babies into any outlet anywhere in the world and they will instantly identify the power and set themselves appropriately.

Except for that *FLASH*CRACK* when the prongs first make contact.  Maybe I’m overly sensitive, from years (decades, even, from the mid-fifties) of experimenting with household current and melting or exploding all shapes and varieties of copper wire, aluminum foil, potato plants, whatever.  And living to tell the tale.  [Children: Do Not Attempt This At Home.]

I can’t help it.  I see the arc flash as the plug goes in and hear that *Crack* and immediately think, “Uh oh.  Wrong voltage?  Supply fried? Or did I pop the circuit breaker?”  Then I look at the little green LED coming to life and realize, “Oh right.  The auto-switching power supply was adjusting its internal settings to the supplied current and whatever state it starts out in causes this little Big Bang of processing.  It’s only a millisecond or two of unbridled raw energy exploding into the universe.

But it scares the liver out of me every time.  C’mon, Sony, Toshiba, HP.  Can’t you engineer these pods with an initial state that passively detects then gently adjusts, without the fireworks?

I wonder.

Call me a tri-focaled fuddy-duddy if you wish, but it seems to me that there is plenty room on speedometers displaying MPH (as opposed to km/h) to label all the 10-MPH increments, i.e. 0-10-20-30-40-50, etc.  Every car I look at these days skips every other label, ending up as 0-20-40-60. . . .  The long and short blips anchoring the numbers mark the 10s and 5s, like |.|.|.| though, as I said, every other big blip is unlabeled.   I agree this ends up looking less cluttered, but almost every time I glance at the speedo to check if I’m doing 70, I see that the needle is pointing at a biggish unlabeled blip, which is next to an (unlabeled) little blip, which is next to a big blip labeled 60.  I run the little Plus-10 algorithm in my brain that calculates the correct answer and that satisfies the plausibility-check that it falls in the series of odd integers multiplied by 10.  I also calculate the milliseconds required for this operation and perhaps how many feet have whizzed under my vehicle during the calculation.  Then I’m reminded of my obsessive compulsiveness and I get even madder.  So to calm down, I lapse into philosophizing on the spatial relations between the adjacent MPH and km/h scales.  Ach!

Is it because the Human Factors Engineers in the Dashboard Design Studios of every Asian, European, and American automobile manufacturer are under 30 (for whom both reading glasses and accurate velocities are laughable)?  Or because they have a built-in bias against the old-fashioned miles after converting their speedos from their native closer-spaced kilometer markings (for which a case can be made for skipping every other 10-blip, since they have to squeeze in more of them, plus if your speed is off by 10 km/h, it is still within the legal margin of error)?  Or is it just that style has trumped intelligibility (the classic HFE sin)?

It all makes me even prefer a fat soulless digital readout displaying exact MPH in 1-inch high characters.  Go ahead.  Call me a tri-focaled fuddy-duddy who is somewhere between 60 and Blip.