What to REALLY expect from Tesla

Yeesh, it's been a year and a half since I last posted. Never mind.
I recently put in an order for a Tesla Model S and have found that their "What to Expect" lacked the level of detail that would have made me more comfortable with the process. As such, here's a time-line of the process from my own experience.

Days from Start	Days to Delivery	Event	Dashboard Status
0	65	Order placed and confirmed Deposit made	Order Confirmed We have begun sourcing parts for your Model S
14	51	Received email requesting confirmation of accessory shipping address	"
26	39	Electrical contractor visit for estimate	"
31	34	VIN assigned Charger delivered	"
40	25	First contact from delivery specialist	"
42	23	Garage prepared Electrical service upgraded Charger installed	"
55	10	Manufacturing begins Notification call received from delivery specialist Vehicle trade-in inspection	In Production The Tesla Factory is building your Model S
56	9	Manufacturing complete Electronic forms "signed"	Production Complete Your Model S is being prepared for pickup or delivery
59	6	Paperwork received via Fedex Temporary registration tags incl. Forms signed and returned First local delivery call received	"
62	3	Delivery scheduled	"
65	0	Delivery taken	Delivery is accepted via the dashboard. After this, the order status and "view design" button disappear.

What didn't happened as described:

1. Owner advisor had not introduced the local delivery team (they called directly, about a week before delivery).

Other notes:

• The "dashboard" on "My Tesla" will show your reservation number (starting with "RN") up until the VIN is assigned. At that point, the VIN will replace the reservation number.

Things I've liked (beyond the obvious):

• Owner's Manual available online (and also in-car) as PDF with embedded hyperlinks. At the office, I've recently been using a reference manual that was PDF but no hyperlinks, and an interface document which was in Word format as a giant table, so I really appreciate a decent set of documentation.
• It's probably worth mentioning that when you register on the Tesla web site, one of the things on your "dashboard" is a set of online documents relevant to your account.

Prometheus

I tried watching Ridley Scott's movie "Prometheus" this evening. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. But I couldn't. In the first few minutes of the movie, Scott had painted all of the "believers" as noble characters, and all of the "evidence-based reality" people as the sort you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.

In these few minutes of viewing, I saw the same sort of nonsense that you can find in typical creationist screed, including the "it's just a theory" non-argument (which really only shows the speaker's ignorance of what a genuine scientific theory amounts to). Meanwhile, the supposed archeologists of the mission, one of whom is painted as a noble believer, is being questioned by one of the evil evidence-based reality people with (paraphrased) "Where do you have any evidence that these supposed aliens jump-started the human genome?". The response (given with nobility of course) is "it's what I choose to believe." Well, that's not science at all and it certainly isn't going to get you published. Apparently, however, there are still enough rich people with lots of money to spend on promoting faith in the late 21st century to fund a "trillion dollar" expedition, so I guess there's that at least.

Like I said, I really wanted to like this movie. I loved Alien, and Blade Runner and even Numbers (the TV show), but this movie managed to establish everyone's character as completely unlikable, at least for the half-dozen or so characters that were explored, in a very short time. This made the movie unwatchable for me.

Incidentally, I'm well aware of the fact that being a believer doesn't absolutely preclude being able to do good research, but there's a big difference between being a scientist who has religious beliefs, and practicing the sort of non-science of coming to a conclusion sans evidence - currently largely the domain of "intelligent design research".

ministry of homeland security

Anyone who knows me knows I have zero love and an equal amount of respect for the US government's DHS. Since EPIC has managed to reveal that DHS is conducting monitoring of social media for anti-DHS and anti-US content, I figured it was time to spew my rantings on the net about DHS for them to see. Why not? DHS is pissing away another half-million dollars of taxpayer money on a scheme to monitor US citizens, I figured I might as well give them their money's worth.

My opinion: DHS is a disgusting bunch of totalitarian nutjobs who are completely above law and constitution, and are run by an out-of-control demagogue/bureaucrat who will stop at nothing to keep her job. I'm referring to the director, being Janet Napolitano, but that statement also applies to John Pistole, head of TSA. Between the two of them, you really have absolutely no rights whatsoever the second you step out of your house, and thanks to things like the contract mentioned above, probably not even then.

The DHS isn't responsible for maintaining security within the US, that's just their tag line. Their primary purpose is to maintain their own jobs. Evidently a secondary purpose is to burn taxpayer money by throwing it at the same bunch of contractors that sucked on the taxpayer tit during the cold war.

So. Keep on inspiring fear in everyone so you can keep sponging money. Throw some of that money at utterly useless hand-waving "security theatre", piss away millions of dollars on worthless cancer machines, make sure and tell everyone it doesn't do the bad things that it does, and when you get caught with your pants down, do some more hand waving to make people think it REALLY DOESN'T DO ALL THOSE THINGS YOU ALREADY CLAIMED THE LAST ONE DIDN'T DO. Make sure to keep any independent evaluations from actual scientists away, you can always wave the magic "it's for security reasons" wand for that. You can't have ordinary citizens knowing whether the crap you're forcing them into is safe. Start sending those VIPR teams out to stop ordinary citizens anywhere you feel like it. It's already been made clear that the protections of the bill of rights doesn't apply to DHS or TSA. And now that the US government has authorized indefinite detention of US citizens, all the government now needs to do is label dissidents terrorists and disappear them forever. You can even do it to ordinary political opponents. Isn't being on the power-side of totalitarianism (man that is a tough word to type) fun? And DHS claims to be "preserving our freedoms" (I guess the kicker is which group of people does "our" apply to?).

Okay, steam released, here's some details. The contract EPIC obtained using an FOIA request (several years ago, mind you, the government is never particularly speedy in responding to these requests, surprise) has the following in section 4.1 item d:

Identifying media reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government, DHS (e.g. a coast guard ship collides with another or impacting DHS from accomplishing its mission) and the National planning scenarios.

As far as what the contractor (apparently General Dynamics) has been directed to monitor:

1. Monitor major broadcast news networks
2. Monitor and review all Associated Press (AP) stories generated within the U.S. by each state's AP bureau
3. Monitor and receive alerts on other wire service stories via categorized/focused Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.
4. Monitor and receive alerts on local and regional broadcast news via categorized/focused text/video feeds
5. Monitor appropriate Internet web sites on breaking situational events
6. Monitor and receive full motion video (FMV) or other streaming media

The document goes on and on. That was just one little bit from the first 24 pages of a 285 page document.

I'd suggest having a bit of fun at their expense. There's little doubt they're monitoring the big places like facebook and twitter. Myself, I deleted (yes) my facebook account over a year ago and never signed up for twitter, but if anyone reading this should have accounts, I'd suggest throwing out the occasional comment like "John Pistole is a thug". Link phrases like "anal cavity" to dhs.gov and vice versa. These guys are assholes and deserve an epic smack-down.

Dear youtube...

I would not give you my mobile phone number, even if I had one. So stop asking.

BAD power supply.

I'm trying to build a 9V power supply for a camcorder, and after seeing Dave Jones' EEVblog #110, I decided to try using the MC34063 switching power controller.

The circuit I built up on a breadboard produces 9V (well, something like 8.88V really) just fine, but my camera would not turn on! Naturally I went in to diagnostics mode (i.e. I started hunting for the cause by trial and error) and found that I was getting ... well, I'm not entirely sure what to call it. A glitch? Anyway, the voltage would occasionally pulse away from its steady state, anywhere from +/-200mV to over 1V!

After poking around a bit I finally tried hooking the scope up directly to the power output terminals of the BK Precision 1665 power supply I was using to drive my own power supply, and the same glitch was showing up even there, whether there was any load on the terminals or not. Here's the trace on my scope:

It looks absolutely terrible, however I don't think it's the root cause of the camera refusing to power on. I had tested the camera directly connected to the BK and was able to turn it on. It seems like the only remaining candidate is current, though I designed the power supply to be able to handle more than the 560mA that the camera pulls when powered on. More diagnostics are required.

Jaerb Creators

Just when I thought that the whole mythos surrounding the fictional "Job Creators" had pretty much died out, some twatwaffle whines on PBS Newshour that EPA regulations to keep power companies from poisoning everything will have an undue burden on these fictional job creators. The twatwaffle in question was Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council. Supposedly their mission is to coordinate power generation and transmission across North America but really they just come off looking like lobbyists for power companies.

You didn't even pull the "job creators" card in an even remotely convincing fashion there, guy. Maybe you could dig up some Reagan-era anti-EPA rhetoric that's long since been discredited to along with it.

Who is it that you're actually trying to convince that you'll go out and hire a mess of workers but only if the EPA doesn't tell you to keep your toxins under control? What sort of bullshit blackmail are you trying to pull, here? "You need to let us dump mercury into the atmosphere or we're just going to stop hiring people" (in case it's not patently obvious, not an actual quote, but that's an interpretation).

I must confess I didn't watch the entire interview (or whatever it was supposed to be, despite Jim Lehrer's insistence that opinion, analysis, etc. etc. be readily distinguishable on the NewsHour, it really wasn't clear here), as pulling the "job creator" card pretty much made me not want to hear anything else Segal had to say. Maybe he had some decent points after that, but when you start out regurgitating last year's rhetoric, you don't deserve my ears for the 5 or so minutes you were on.

Phew. Time for some Oedipal Zen.

Arduino, Wire, and I2C part 5b: Data Analysis and gnuplot

I've been using a feature of gnuplot lately that until yesterday I hadn't really given much thought to its potential. Gnuplot has a curve fitting tool which can be used to come up with those parameters to the sinusoidal functions in the previous post. It's not magic in that it won't necessarily always give you the right answer every time, but it can help with cleaning up estimates. Here's an example. First, define the function you're trying to fit to. In this case, I'm trying to fit to a simple sinusoidal function:

gnuplot> f(x)=a2*sin(omega*x+phi)+d2

This is the function described in the previous post, in gnuplot syntax. Now, you can try and fit the data to the function. The total data set isn't a consistent wave form so I'm going to reduce the data set to points between 150 and 250.

gnuplot> fit [150:250] f(x) "spin.dat" using 0:7 via a2,omega,phi,d2

The above instructs gnuplot to execute an iterative process, attempting to derive the values for a2, omega, phi, and d2 in the function defined as f(x). Gnuplot will output the results in various stages of the process. The most critical results are the final ones of course, which I reprint here:

Final set of parameters            Asymptotic Standard Error
=======================            ==========================

a2              = 0.774445         +/- 11.02        (1423%)
omega           = 0.973404         +/- 0.4104       (42.16%)
phi             = 6.881            +/- 82.27        (1196%)
d2              = -66.2102         +/- 6.535        (9.871%)

You may notice two things:

1. The equation parameters are quite different from those that I posted previously, and
2. The standard error percentage of the parameters is quite high (even the lowest, 9% is pretty significant).

You can "prime" the fit algorithm by seeding the parameter to reasonable approximations, i.e. give the fit a good starting point (there's probably a mathematical term for this but I'm not a mathematician). Using the parameters guessed at in the last post:

gnuplot> a2=93.5
gnuplot> d2=-75.6
gnuplot> omega=1/4.6
gnuplot> phi=-6
gnuplot> fit [150:250] f(x) "spin.dat" using 0:7 via a2,omega,phi,d2

Which ultimately resulted in:

Final set of parameters            Asymptotic Standard Error
=======================            ==========================

a2              = 90.8588          +/- 1.735        (1.909%)
omega           = 0.220797         +/- 0.0006131    (0.2777%)
phi             = -8.0615          +/- 0.1239       (1.537%)
d2              = -74.2817         +/- 1.185        (1.596%)

gnuplot> plot "spin.dat" using 7 axes x1y1 t "mag y" with lines, a2*sin(omega*x+phi)+d2

Which looks like a fairly good fit, with less than 2% error. A better fit could be made using equations with more independent variables, however, gnuplot's curve fit feature is limited to 5, of which the above already was using 4. I don't think there is much chance of refining this estimation any further using the fit feature of gnuplot.