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area under the crenellated curve
Monday, October 20 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
When I was driving to work in the dark this morning, a small bunny ran out in front of my Bolt. He seemed to get past me but then turned and ran back towards my car, causing me to hit the breaks. I thought I felt a little thump but I wasn't sure, and it made me feel bad about the whole incident. But as I was driving home this afternoon, I didn't seen any dead bunnies where this happened, so maybe he got away.
At lunch today, conversation took a turn towards rocket science as we discussed the possibility of landing a human on Mars (I said it was unlikely to ever happen) or to visit nearby stars. On that latter one, I said that if we can get a space ship to move fast enough, relativistic effects would make it possible to fly many light years in a human lifetime, though then there would be other issues: the difficulty of accelerating a human safely to and from such speeds, and the danger of hitting tiny particles at relativistic speeds. The others in the lunchroom court, with the possible exception of the other software developer, weren't too acquainted with the relevant physics, and as it often is with me talking to people outside my normal peer group, it was a little like explaining an escalator to a dog.
I felt a little like that dog this afternoon as I tried to debug a vexing issue in dotnet. An Angular frontend was sending data to a backend, and I could see that the JSON looked great. But the dotnet code wasn't getting any of the data. It was being lost before it even reached the method. There was something about the way the framework, in an effort for me not to worry my pretty head about how things worked, attempted to flow that data into a model that was failing, and the JSON was being lost silently. If this had been in my ESP8266 Remote Control system, I would've immediately known what was going on and could've fixed it in a few minutes. But because it was a big ugly framework trying to make things easy on me, I put in hours of debugging without getting any closer to an answer than I had been when I began. It made me fucking hate my job, and I drove home at the end of the day in a funk.
On the way home, I stopped at the hardware store in Accord for two inch deck screws and then at MyTown Marketplace for important provisions: thick spaghetti, tempeh, beans, bananas, mushrooms, and frozen burritos.
Back at the house, I took Charlotte for a variation on her usual walk, and as far I could tell she didn't go off to harass elderly deer. I then took a very much needed bath.
This evening after Gretchen got home late from some book seller event and we watched Jeopardy!, I asked ChatGPT to write me a query to help me gauge whether or not the new refrigerator is using any less electricity. This was my prompt:
i recently replaced the refrigerator at the cabin in the adirondacks. i would like to compare the power usage of the old refrigerator with the power usage of the new refrigerator. fortunately i collect data on the cabin's energy usage, most of which, particularly at night, is the refrigerator. i have a table called inverter_log that has a column called load_power. when i look at a plot of load_power, it has characteristic crenellations as the refrigerator cycles its compressor. what i would like to do is identify the difference in height of these crenellations (which would be very close to the power being used) multiplied by the time the crenellations are "high" over a period of time. because i know the days that the old refrigerator ran, i would like to be able to run a MySQL query for two different days and look at the time between 1:00am and 5:00am for those days, find the crenellations, and measure the amount of power they represent. the crenellations will be on the order of 80 to 100 watts high. any spikes during them should be ignored (ideally using values on either side instead). is this query doable?
ChatGPT said that this was possible, though added that it was at about the limit of the sort of thing that can be done using MySQL alone. Among other things, the query would have to perform integration to calculate the area under a curve. Given all that, I was happy with the complex query it came up with, which I parameterized and made into a report in the reporting module of my ESP8266 Remote Control system. Looking at the results, it was clear that the new refrigerator uses about the same amount of electricity as the old one. It is bigger and quieter, though, so it still ends up being a modest improvement.
You can see the crenellations in the blue and green plot lines here. The color-coded band at the bottom is for various weather conditions (as reported by a weather API) and the dark green horizontal line shows when the hot water heater was on. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251020 feedback
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