Over the years, I’ve owned a couple of different cars with mechanisms for opening up the top and catching a little fresh air, and I have to say it’s one of my favorite things you can get a car to do. I’ve had a Saab convertible for years, and I don’t even care that where I live, I can only open it about ten days a year. I gladly accept the reduced forward visibility (because of the heavy frame around the windshield) and the nearly nonexistent rearward visibility (because the back window is about the size of a comic book), the increased road noise, and having to do that little windows-open-a-bit-and-shut-again thing to make them fully seal against the weather strips just for that magical first day in late spring when the time has come to undo the latches and wind back the lid. There are even some facets of the top-up experience I actually like - the sound of a heavy rain, for instance. And, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t cold in winter or drafty anytime. The Swedes know how to build for foul weather.

When I was younger, I had a T-top Camaro. This was a whole different animal. The tops were heavy, taking them off and putting them on was a pain in the ass, they took up the whole damn trunk (not that a Camaro has much of one, admittedly) when stowed, they started leaking about half an hour after we took delivery, it was drafty and cold, and there was the ever-present terror that you’d manage to very expensively break one while putting them on or taking them off (though, fortunately, I never did). To add insult to injury, it didn’t really feel much different with them off. Oh, sure, you had the open space where the bit you’d normally hit your head on getting into the car should’ve been, and that was nice, but on the road it was just noisier. With the same view through the rearview mirror either way, there just wasn’t any particular feeling of… liberation.

Put simply, the convertible is worth it; the T-top wasn’t.
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The discussion resulting from the last Technosophy item got me to thinking about a couple of things. One of them was the whole gas/electric hybrid car concept. I really do think this is a technological dead end, the kind of thing that future generations will look back on and say, “They seriously thought that was worth bothering with?” I honestly believe that, if all the money that’s been wasted developing hybrid drive systems had been spent instead on improving the efficiency of the normal ones, everyone would be getting better mileage now, not just the tiny, smug, self-important Prius minority - resulting in a much larger net gain in fuel economy worldwide with much less silly faffing around.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that piston engines have reached the limit of what can be wrung out of them. That what’s really needed now is a whole new concept in automotive powerplant technology, something that will make cars with piston engines seem as antiquated and quaint as fighter planes with propellers.

Well, funnily enough, I think that something already exists. In fact, I think it’s the same something that left propeller-driven fighter planes behind at the end of World War II… and it’s a something that engineers first seriously took a crack at putting in automobiles in the early 1960s.
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I was born just a few months before the first major petroleum crisis to hit the United States, in those last few days before the American car-buying public got its first hint that maybe - just maybe - the gravy train wouldn’t run forever. In response to the Arab oil-producing nations putting the screws on the world economy in October of 1973, my father - a shadetree mechanic since high school, which at that point was only three years ago for him, admittedly - decided, very reluctantly, to bite the bullet and buy a small car.
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Last night on Top Gear, one of the segments involved a review of some fancy European car or another, I forget what kind. It’s not really important; I just watch the review segments of Top Gear to hear Jeremy Clarkson be snarky and because they’re in between the really fun parts of the show. What’s important for our purposes today is that the car in question had umpteen zillion gadgets and geegaws and electronic whatchamacallits, including a central computer brain controlled with a big chrome knob on the center console, about where the toggle switches for the machine guns were in the Aston Martin in Goldfinger.

That got me to thinking about how much more fiddly and sophisticated cars have gotten in the last 20 years or so, and how little they really changed in the 20 or so years before that, comparatively speaking.
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The startling fact that a commenter recognized the name of my old employer Leading Edge in the last Technosophy reminded me of this little piece, which I originally wrote up for another web board some years ago. I should note in advance that we did have some competent servicing dealers and resellers - some were in fact quite good - so if you, by chance, worked for a Leading Edge dealer in the past, you shouldn’t take personally the part where I take cheap shots at them.

(It should also be noted that when I wrote this, Compaq was not merely a brand of Hewlett-Packard, but was in fact a vast manufacturing concern in its own right which had recently finished dismembering and devouring Digital Equipment Corporation.)
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I was shaving the other day when I noticed one of those small white plastic warning tags on the power adapter of my electric shaver. I didn’t pay it much mind at first, figuring that it was just the usual kind of thing - you know, “Do not immerse in water, do not feed after midnight,” etc.

As it happens, the shaver itself is cordless - the adapter is just plugged in to charge it, not used when actually shaving - so it spends most of its time not connected. Its usual spot is up on one of the shelves in the bathroom, where one tends to see it whenever one uses the facilities. So over the next few days, I kept noticing the warning tag, and eventually it penetrated my conscious mind that there was something odd about it.

Finally I took a closer look today and realized that it’s not one of the usual warnings. It’s a little pictogram showing the transformer on the plug end, a pair of scissors positioned just below it on the wire itself, and a red X over the junction of scissors and wire. The warning here seems to be at once very specific and, to my mind, more than a little bizarre: Do not take a pair of scissors and cut the transformer off this power cord.

I find this simultaneously amusing and appalling. Amusing because we’ve finally reached the stage that my friend Andrew predicted years ago, appalled because, well, we’ve finally reached the stage that my friend Andrew predicted years ago.

A long time ago, I worked for a PC manufacturer, Leading Edge Products, as did my friends Andrew and Derek (and a good many others besides, but that’s not important right now). One day we were looking over the documentation for one of Leading Edge’s laptop computers and came across the page explaining the relative severity levels of the several different types of interjectory bullets one was likely to find in the course of reading the manual. I’m paraphrasing from memory, because it’s been a long time and I don’t have any of those docs any more, but they ranged from something like Note!, which indicated something the user might find helpful but that wasn’t of particular importance, through Caution! and Warning! to STOP!, which, the book gravely explained, was a warning that, if unheeded, could lead to injury or death!

There being a relatively limited number of ways in which even a careless user could kill himself with a laptop computer, Andrew speculated jokingly that somewhere in the book was the warning, “STOP! Do not eat your laptop!”

Well, we’re there. Manufacturers now feel it necessary to include little iconic warnings advising us not to do things that:

A) Any idiot can plainly see are dangerous (cutting an electric wire with a pair of scissors); and

B) Would wreck the device if performed, even if no danger to the user was present (severing the transformer, even on a power cord not presently plugged into the wall).

So I thought for a while: Why would Philips Norelco have felt the very specific need to warn us not to do this particular thing? And the only conclusion I could come to was that someone has done it, then brought the fact that it tends to cause problems to the company’s attention, probably by way of a lawsuit.

I find this both depressing and more than a little baffling. I mean, what person rational enough to go out and buy an electric shaver, and old enough to have any use for same, would even think of cutting the transformer off the charging cord with a pair of scissors? Who looks at any electrically powered device and thinks, You know, if I had a pair of Fiskars, I could just lop that sucker right off of there? I suppose you could argue that a child might do it, but there again - any child capable of operating scissors should already know both A and B, and any child incapable of grasping those two points should certainly not be roaming around the bathroom with scissors.

I’m all for basic safety precautions with our household electric devices, but come on, people.

The other day, I used my laptop computer to order a copy of James Cameron’s classic 1984 sci-fi film The Terminator from Amazon.com. Within a couple of hours, the movie had been delivered to my TiVo, to be watched at any time in the next 31 days when I might feel like getting around to it. There is, of course, a certain irony in using this strange convergence of the Internet, the movie business, and my television set to grab a movie about a war waged by computers to destroy humanity, but something else occurred to me while I was reflecting on this technology.

For years now, we’ve been told – oddly, almost always by computer people, not TV people – that the personal computer and the television set will become one any day now. The supposedly imminent coalescence of TV and computers, we’re told, will mean new heights in convenience, instant access to… well, pretty much everything, all without ever getting up from our Barcaloungers. Mind you, they’ve been saying that and then not doing it for so long now that it’s become something of a joke, this era’s equivalent of the old Popular Science “by the year 2000, cars will fly” thing. (Remember how we were all going to have WebTVs within five years?) Still, I have to admit that, with things like the ability to push content to a TiVo by doing something on the Internet, downloading stuff to your Xbox 360, and whatnot working now, we are getting closer… and that concerns me on a couple of levels.

The first is simple, bordering on prosaic, and I don’t really have the time or the inclination to embark on a deep probing of the “is there such a thing as too much convenience?” question right now. The other is… more complex, and has its roots in a speech delivered by a journalist to a gathering of his peers 50 years ago.

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