Cannon Mountain ski weather. 23-Feb-23

I got six inches of nice new snow on my deck.  My deck is easy walking distance to Peabody slopes over at Cannon. So if I got six inches, Peabody slopes got six inches. Cannon summit might have gotten a bit more.  Skiing ought to be really good this weekend.

You can teach your child to read.

The Internet is full of stories of public school were NONE of the children could read at grade level.  This is astounding and discouraging.  I went to public school many years ago, and things were not that bad, then.

First thing you can try is to get your kid out of the failing school and into a better one.  The Catholic Church runs many parochial schools, from kindergarten up thru 12^th grade that do an excellent job.  My three children attended parochial school even though we are not Catholic.  Best move we ever made.

Or you can teach the child yourself.  If you graduated high school you are better prepared for teaching than any education major out of college.  Motivation is a key step.  You need to read aloud to the child.  When he/she sees that Dad or Mom reads, they want to do it to. You need some good books, written for kids your kid’s age.  Weed out any books that go off into politics, or critical race theory or sex, they merely bore young children.  Dr Seuss is very good.

There are two ways to teach reading to children, phonics and the “whole word method”.  Stick with teaching phonics, whole word is unteachable and does not work in many cases.

For phonics the child needs to know the names of each letter of the alphabet and the sound each letter represents.  The Alphabet Song from preschool works well for this.  And the child needs to recognize upper and lower case letters and understand that the pronunciation does not change because of case. 

Now we can start phonics.  Start with simple short words like dog or cat.  Have the child say the letters of the word.  With some repetition the child will hear the letters and the word they form.  After some phonics work give the child a reward by reading something out aloud.

   After a while the child will be able to just look at the word and know its meaning, pronunciation, and some connotations and denotations that go with it.  This is the beginning of “whole word” method.  Keep up the phonics.  New readers encounter a lot of words they have never seen before, but they can sound them out and get them with practice.

 

Hot Box.

    Old railroading term for an axle running hot in its journal box.  Trains have a lot of axles, four per car.  In the old days, before 1955 or so, the axle bearings were friction bearings.  The end of the steel axle rotated inside a solid brass bearing inside the journal box (square box with a tip up lid on each axle).  The journal box was filled with cotton waste soaked in oil to keep the bearing cool.  Trainmen used to walk up and down the train carrying huge oil cans and giving a good squirt of oil into every journal box that needed same. 

Freight trains had cabooses, in which a couple of trainmen rode to keep an eye out for hot boxes. The cupola on top of the caboose was used to eyeball the train looking for hot boxes that might be starting to smoke. 

  When a hot box was spotted the train was slowed, taken to a siding, and the hot box oiled to make it happy.  Trains did not proceed with smoking hot boxes for fear that the hear might melt the end of the axle, dropping the wheel assembly crosswise onto the track, and causing a serious accident.

Roller bearings came into service in the 1960’s, and are universal today.  They are much less prone to hotboxes than the traditional friction bearings.

There is video from that train wreck in Ohio showing one of the car trucks not just hot, it was engulfed in flames.  The train crew should have seen it.  They failed to do so, and ran the train until the axle did fail and wreck the entire train.

The TV newsies haven’t asked why the train crew failed to pull off onto a siding.

Shooting down “objects”

Of the four “object” shoot downs, two went into the water and two went down above the Arctic Circle.  The Navy is still trying to salvage the big one shot down off South Carolina in only 47 feet of water.  I doubt they will ever salvage the one shot down into Lake Huron.   The winter weather around the two Arctic Circle shoot downs is so bad we may never find the wrecks.

Translation:  If we want to know more about these “objects” we gotta shoot them down over land, places with reasonable weather.  So far from four shoot downs we know zip.

A piece on the Internet claims the Sidewinder missile that missed one shot cost $439,000, nearly half a million, for an air-to-air missile.  Gold plate much? The first sidewinders came into service during the Korean War and only cost $10,000 apiece.     

Gold plating everything runs up the cost of defense.

 Gold plating is the tendency of our military services to require expensive and unneeded fancy equipment added to nearly everything they buy.  For example, the WWII Jeep did the job.  After the war we civilians could buy new Jeeps from the Jeep dealer for something like $3000.  First thing they tried was the “airborne Jeep”, made as light as possible to make it easier to parachute it from cargo places.  And it had the same swing rear axle from the GM Corvair that Ralph Nader condemned.  The troops rolled a lot of airborne jeeps over, often killing them selves.  And parachuting the “airborne jeep” would smash it up making it look like a beer can someone had stamped on.   I remember walking by the Aerial Port where there was a long line of beat up jeeps.  They had been used to practice parachuting them.  The old WWII jeeps looked dirty and battered but they looked like they could be made to run again.  The “airborne jeeps” were so bent out of shape that I don’t think they were good for parts, let alone getting them to run again.

   And after the “airborne jeep” faded out of memory, the services decided they needed something a little bigger.  They bought HumVees.  A new HumVee cost $60,000.  So expensive that only Arnold Schwarzenegger could afford one.  A far cry from the $3000 for a WWII Jeep (Jeep CJ). 

 

  Then we come to USAF.  I was maintenance officer in a squadron of F106 fighters.  Basically a good fighter.  Designed to shoot down Russian nuclear bombers coming at us over the North Pole.  It was fast, Mach 2, so it could catch anything, good range, it could fly from Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB at the southern most tip of Florida without air-to-air refueling, or making a fuel stop.  It carried a big battery of missiles.  The ones in my squadron were built in the late 1950s and kept flying into the 1980s.  

  One big piece of gold plate on the F106, the Tactical Situation Display (TSD).  This was a 9-10 inch screen that was supposed to display your position, and the target’s position, like that groovy display in the Bond movie Gold Finger, the little display in the glove compartment that showed Bond’s car and Oddjob’s car at once.  Trouble with the TSD was it was totally unreliable.  Just the engine vibration from flying the F106 would break it.  We couldn’t get replacement TSD’s, we couldn’t get parts to fix the broken TSD’s, and by the time I joined the squadron the boys had given up on the TSD.  When it broke they just left it in the aircraft.  What’s worse, the TSD didn’t do anything that needed doing.  The F106 had very powerful radar in its nose that would show targets out to 200 miles.  It had voice radio to the ground controllers who were more than happy to tell the pilot about the target’s position, course, speed, and altitude.  Who needs a TSD with that kind of support?

 

Some things we could do.  All these gold plate boondoggles are made in Pentagon meetings.  Mostly procurement paper pushers attend them.  We ought to require that specifications for weapons systems be reviewed and if necessary vetoed by operators, pilots, aircraft maintenance mechanics, submariners, navy officers, and others who actually know something.

 

W should insist that the armed forces buy stuff off the civilian market and not require (and get soaked for) a custom military only design.

The US Army is planning on a new rifle cartridge. And new rifles to shoot the new cartridge.

 The modern rifle appeared after the US Civil War, say 1870 or so.  These were Winchester and Marlin lever actions, early bolt actions, and other competitors.  They were mostly chambered for a .30 caliber center fire cartridge with enough power to take American game, such as elk, deer, buffalo, bear, and wild hog.  This rifle cartridge served well from the Spanish American war up thru WWII. Korea and Viet Nam. 

   During WWII the troops fell in love with full automatic weapons, the Thompson submachine gun and the M3 “grease gun”.  From the soldier’s point of view, the ability to point the weapon and hose down an entire enemy unit with one quick “BRAP” could be life, should they encounter a strong enemy unit in combat.  The American WWII sub machine guns fired pistol ammunition, the .45 caliber round used in the Army .45 automatic pistol.  The pistol run lacked the power of rifle rounds, but the recoil was light enough to permit full automatic fire from a 7-9 pound shoulder weapon.  The regular rifle rounds kicked so hard that they just drove the rifle up until it pointed at the sky. 

   After WWII the Army adopted the full automatic M16 rifle.  To get the recoil down enough to make the gun usable in automatic fire, the power of the M16 round (5.56 mm) was reduced quite a bit.  The real riflemen in the army still liked the WWII 30 caliber round, it reached out further, it could penetrate more body armor and it made a sniper more effective than the 5.56mm round from the M16.

   So after decades of grousing about the lack of power in the standard 5.56 mm round, the Army has announced it wants a 6.8 mm round (.270 a civilian gun shop would call it) The army claims that the small increase in bullet diameter will give a round with ballistics nearly as good as the antique .30 caliber rounds and light enough recoil to allow fully automatic fire from a 7-9 pound rifle.  

   Needless to say, adoption of the new recoil will require the army to replace all the M16 rifles with whatever will fire the 6.8mm round. And all the machine guns too.  This could become very expensive.    

What parents need to do about fentanyl. Before it kills their children.

 Six out of ten sample pills bought from street drug dealers contain enough fentanyl to kill.  Your children need to know this.  The MSM doesn’t talk about it, so unless you, the parent, pass the word to your children, they won’t know. Taking just one pill bought from a street drug dealer has a 60% chance to killing the child, right then and there. 

   The few times the MSM mention this tragedy they call it “a drug overdose”, implying that the victim took too much of the drug.  Better is to call it deliberate poisoning, because the drug dealer sold the child a pill with a lethal dose of fentanyl in it and when the child swallowed that one pill, it killed him. 

    If the children just have to get high, they should stick to alcohol or weed.  Neither of them is good for the kids, but they won’t kill them as quickly as fentanyl laced pills from the street will.  And, if the children just have to get high, they ought to do it in their rooms (dorm rooms) and not be out driving.  Just one can of beer can discombobulate a beginning driver and cause a fatal car accident. 

Biden’s State of the Union fails to impress.

 I stayed up and watched it to the end.  Biden ran on for an hour and twenty.  Biden failed to explain what he would do in a second term to pull the country out of it’s tailspin into the ground.  Biden did make a lot of claims that sounded false to me.  And he complained about stuff well within his powers to fix, without saying he would bother to fix them.  He complained about corporations who make serious money but paid no federal income tax.  That’s caused by a tax code loaded with loopholes, and an IRS that doesn’t audit the big boy’s tax returns.  Biden could fix both of these problems with executive orders or acts of Congress.  Biden said nothing about keeping Chinese recon balloons out of US airspace, or having a US Navy strong enough to keep the Chinese communists out of Taiwan. Biden apparently plans to continue current lefty greenie policies that give us $5 a gallon gasoline, $10 a dozen eggs and $10 a pound bacon. 

Balloons.

The Chinese have flown a sizable balloon over the continental US.  The Chinese admit to ownership.  They launched it from Chinese territory and it crossed the Pacific, entered Canada, and last was heard from drifting across Montana.  The TV newsies have been going ape over it. 

 

The military has discouraged attempts to shoot it down, claiming that falling balloon pieces might hit innocent bystanders on the ground.  I have a little trouble believing that. Montana has a lot of prairie that doesn’t care what falls on it.  It isn’t the way things are in the middle of say New York City.

 

So far, the balloon looks like a civilian weather balloon.  Shooting it down, although attractive, is close to shooting down a civilian airliner that got lost and violated Soviet airspace, which happened maybe 10 years ago.  The Russians took a lot of flak over that.

 

Government briefers have implied that the balloon is maneuverable, implying it has an engine.  I don’t really believe that.  I suspect it is just a free balloon that goes where the winds blow it.  Prevailing winds over the US blow from West to East.  Give the balloon a few days and it will blow out into the Atlantic. 

 

If we really want to show the Chinese that we disapprove of balloons over the US, we can launch a few of our own balloons to drift over China. 

 

 

 

Global Warming

 It is 8 degrees this morning up in Franconia Notch.  I am listening to Biden saying that climate change is the most serious threat faced by mankind.  That sounds foolish to me on a morning this cold. 

How much does Patriot really cost???

Does the Patriot anti aircraft missile system really cost $1 billion per system?  A Patriot system consists of a tracked vehicle to carry the missiles and the radar, 6 or maybe 8 missiles and good radar.  They sell tanks for like $50 million and a tank carries an expensive high power gun that Patriot doesn’t need.  The missiles ought to go for $10 million or so.  The radar would be a phased array type, which is pricey, may $20 million. 

   Add it all up and we have a price tag of $150 million.   That’s not cheap, but is a whole bunch less than $1 billion which is the cost of a Patriot system according to the TV. 

   It would be nice if some newsies checked out the costs on Patriot.  If newsies can count that high. 

 

Baldwin either did not know or did not comply.

 When you pick up a gun, any gun, even your own gun, you check it for being loaded.  Pop out the magazine, swing out the cylinder, look in the chamber to be sure no live rounds are lurking therein.  Basic rule of gun safety.  I learned it at summer camp when I was twelve. 

   Looks like Alex Baldwin did not comply.  The TV doesn't talk about that much. 

The Federal Debt Limit

 It’s a law (buried somewhere in DC) that sets a limit to how much the US Treasury can borrow.  Lately US taxes have been high enough to pay 60% of federal spending.  The Treasury borrows the other 40% to pay the rest of the bills.  Now that we have hit the debt limit, and there is a good chance the Republicans will refuse to raise it, the Treasury is limited to selling off various assets.  Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has said this will keep paying the federal government’s bills until June of this year.

   Last time this happened, maybe ten years ago, the government shut all the national parks and laid off all the “non essential” government workers.   This went on for some months.  It didn’t bother me.  My mail still got delivered, Air Traffic Control kept the airlines flying, I wasn’t expecting an income tax refund so putting the IRS on furlough was OK by me, and Cannon Mountain is a state run park, not federal. 

   This time maybe we could do some belt tightening to keep the federal deficit down. Like laying off those “non essential” bureaucrats for good.  Cut appropriations for the FBI, CPSC, FAA, CIA, FEC and others in half.  Look at military spending.  See what we can do to end “gold plating” of weapons systems, and improve the ratio of “tooth to tail” of all branches.  And Congress critters and their staffs don’t get paid until the budget is balanced somehow, more layoffs or more borrowing or something.   

    

Fireball Cinnimon Whisky

 I had read somewhere that Fireball was the best selling whisky all over New Hampshire.  So, to see what it was I bought a tiny bottle at the State liquor store.  I mixed it with ice and club soda.  The result was not happy.  It had a sweet taste, like sherry.  Quite strong actually.  Not like the whiskey I usually drink which has a hard to describe flavor.  It's good that I bought a really small bottle of Fireball. 

What happened to the Neanderthals?

   It used to be that carbon 14 dating of Neanderthal sites and modern human sites showed a 20,000 to 30,000 year overlap.  The Neanderthals were believed to had co existed with modern humans in Europe for 20 or 30 thousand years. 

    Then there was a recalibration of the Carbon 14 data that showed the Neanderthal sites disappeared about the same time that sites of modern men appeared.  Which leads to the obvious conclusion that Neanderthals lost the competition with modern man and were wiped out.  Unpleasant idea, but likely.

Carbon 14 data is tricky.  Energetic particles from the Sun and cosmic rays strike ordinary Carbon 12, and turn it into radioactive Carbon 14.  This has a half life of 14 thousand years, a good long time.  Living organisms take in both sorts of carbon.  When the organism dies it stops taking in carbon.  By measuring the radioactivity from the carbon 14 in the organic material we can tell how many years has passed since the organism died.  It’s a delicate measurement; the radioactivity of the Carbon 14 is not very strong, compared to say Uranium.   It gets even weaker as time goes by, 14 thousand years, Carbon 14 half life, reduces the radiation by half. 

  I am not hep to just how the Carbon 14 dating was adjusted, but the result moved the oldest Neanderthal sites back 20 to 30 thousand years, putting then up again modern men moving into Europe. 

 

 

 

How many more pieces of classified will turn up?

 So far we have four separate stashes of classified on Biden owned houses or rented offices.  Wanna bet some more classified will surface shortly?

1917 (Movie title) 2019 (date movie released)

In the height to World War I (1917 was the last full year of the war, armistice was declared in November 1918). Two British infantry men are sent on an important mission to deliver orders calling off an attack planned for the next morning.  The movie starts with long long shots of our two heroes striding thru trenches, walking across no man’s land, walking across a green pasture with a couple of cows grazing is it.  Scenery is not all that pretty and nothing happens. 

   While hiding our in a ruined barn watching a dog fight, one of the planes crashes right into the barn.  They pull the pilot out of the burning wreck.  Dunno what the Kaiser told his pilots, but this one, after they save his life, pulls out a gun and shoots one of them.  His buddy puts some rifle bullets into the German pilot and then comforts his buddy as the buddy dies in his arms. 

   The survivor does eventually make it to the unit he set out for and delivers the written orders canceling the attack.  End of movie.

    I was not impressed.  The protagonists never do anything memorable, they just act as targets.  They do a lot of walking, and hitch a ride on and army truck, but this isn’t all the interesting.    

Notices to Airmen.

 That’s what they were called back in the 1960’s when I was serving in the Air Force.  They listed things pilots needed to know before a mission, things like closed runways, Military flying exercises, new high tension power lines.  I hear our transportation secretary had the time to rename the Notice to Air Missions.  Airmen was too sexist for Mr. Buttigieg.  While having time to fiddle with the name, he did not have time to make sure the system was in good enough shape to continue producing NOTAMs to pilots.  I am so glad Mr. Buttigieg is so woke as to change names but not make sure the system works. 

In the Air Force we never took classified home.

 My Air Force service was in the 1960’s.  Each office in the unit had a safe for classified.  If I needed to read a piece of classified, I went to the unit office.  The NCOIC (NCO in Charge) would open the safe.  I would sit and read the classified in the office.  When finished I would hand the classified back to the NCOIC and he would lock it in the safe.  We never took classified out of the office, let alone home. 

  The TV news is chewing over Biden's (and Trump’s) numerous stashes of classified at the former President’s and serving president’s homes.  We would not have allowed that in the Air Force when I was serving.

Gas Stoves

Speaking as a cook, gas stoves are far better than electric stoves.  Gas stoves are hotter, boil water faster.  Turn down the heat on a gas stove and the heat goes down, right now.  Turn down the heat on an electric stove and a long time goes by, burning your food, before anything useful happens, like the heat going down. 

   Gas burns clean, far cleaner that the wood fires that heated human’s caves for 500,000 years in the past.  Far cleaner than smoke from a cigarette, of heaven help us smoke from, a cigar.

  Gas stoves use almost all of the heat energy in the gas to heat the food.  Electric stoves only use 40% (at best).  Back in the electric plant fuel is burned to make steam to turn steam engines that drive the electric generators.  Hot high pressure steam goes from the boiler into the steam engine.  Much cooler, lower pressure steam comes out of the steam engine.  Only while the piston of the steam engine can keep going down, expanding the hot steam, converting heat energy into mechanical energy, does the heat energy of the fuel get converted into electricity.  For current technology, only 40% of the heat energy goes into making electricity, the other 60% goes into heating up the plant’s cooling system.

Was the FAA system that crashed this morning running Windows??

 

FAA tried to make a nationwide failure sound a little better by calling it "glitch".  A better word for a 

nationwide failure is "crash".  

Windows is so full of holes the any sharp high school kid can break into it and do anything he wants. 

It is only fit to run games for children.

Lets hear it FAA.  Were you running on Windows?

Preview

Science was invented in the middle ages

   The Ancients did not have science.  The Hittites were the last to invent/discover something important, namely how to smelt iron back about 800 BC.  The Romans in 200 AD did not have any materials or tools that the Hittites did not have a thousand years before. 

Science is a way of looking at the world.  Science takes facts, from observations, and from experiments, and forms theories that are supported by those facts.  Science does not take ancient authors writings or popular ideas into account, only facts.  Roger Bacon spelled out how to do science in the 1300s.  Science has been very successful.  In the last thousand years we have developed gun powder, printing, electric telegraph, steam railroad, radio and TV, automobiles, aircraft, and a whole raft of  stuff that makes modern life a whole bunch more comfortable than it used to be.

When reading about scientific discoveries you should look for the facts behind the discoveries.  If there are no facts given in what you read, it is not science.

Science is dynamic, it keeps finding new stuff.  When I took geology in college, many years ago, the professor did not believe in plate tectonics.  Now, 60 years later, everybody knows about and believes in plate tectonics.  New science starts small, with perhaps just one article in one journal.  At first few people know of the new science and it is called “tentative” (maybe true maybe not).  As time goes on more and more people learn of the new science and it becomes widely known and accepted.  When it gets written into college textbooks you can say the idea has become generally accepted.  Acceptance is rarely one hundred percent.  For instance we still have people who believe the earth is flat.  When you are looking at science you need to be aware that not all the ideas called scientific are generally accepted. 

 Republicans need to do a RINO hunt.  Nineteen House RINOs denied the Republican party a Speaker of the House from the Republican party.  Dunno what happen next.  This could be the start of two years of  deadlocked votes in the House.  Democrats could not have hoped for anything better for them.  I don't have a list of the RINOs, none of them are from New Hampshire.  We don't have an Republican House or Senate members.  We had chance to vote out three Democrat Congresscritters last month, but it didn't happen.  Too bad.

Watching the crowds at midnight.

 Usually I fall asleep long before midnight on New Years Eve (or any other night for that matter).  This year I took an evening nap at 4:30.  I woke up at 11:30 so I turned on the TV and watched the New Year’s festivities at Times square and at Nashville.  Big crowds both places.  Everyone looked happy, smiling and laughing, some hugging and kissing, a little singing.  I came away thinking America is still in fairly decent shape if we can put forth such large happy crowds. 

Trump’s Taxes

   Democrats forced Trump’s income tax returns into public knowledge.  Trump managed to pay a surprising low income tax.  Absolute zero one year, and just a few hundred dollars in other years. 

Of course, Trump does not do his own taxes.  He hires the best tax lawyers and tax accountants that money can buy.   They found loopholes and special deals scattered throughout the tax code, and used them all. They probably stretched one or two of them farther than anyone else ever did. 

  The IRS is supposed to check or even audit the tax returns of wealthy taxpayers to keep them straight.  IRS never objected to the Trump returns.  It may be the IRS failed to check Trump’s returns, or Trump’s tax people were smarter than the IRS tax people (not unlikely).

   It is a long standing principle of US law that is a perfectly legal to arrange one’s affairs to minimize your tax liabilities.  Trump obviously did a fair amount of this.  It’s perfectly legal.

   Until the IRS comes right out and accuses Trump of tax evasion (they haven’t)  I am going to believe that Trump’s tax returns are legal. 

   We should straighten out the incredible complicated US tax code.  The whole thing fills shelf after shelf.  It is written in lawyer speak which confuses us regular people.  Those of us who still do our own taxes only have J.K. Lasser’s book.  In one 8 ½ by 11 paper back only ½ inch thick, J.K. Lasser gets every thing we need to know packed into a lot less that the shelves and shelves of binders holding the whole tax code.  Those who don’ use J.K. Lasser take their records down to H & R Block and they get them out in good enough shape to prevent an IRS audit of the tax payer. 

Happy New Year

 What more can I say? 

They got 'em.

 

They got someone for the four Dakota murders.  I missed the name, but the cops are charging a student in Pennsylvania.  Glad to hear the cops have a suspect.  They have not said what evidence they have to charge this guy.  Could be anything, tire tracks from the white car, fingerprints in the murder house, bloodstains that have traceable DNA, or anything.  I hope whay ever evidence it is, it sticks. 

Old Line Science Fiction authors.

 H Beam Piper wrote “Space Viking” way back in 1963. I reread it the other day; Lucas Trask is the Vice Roy ruling a frontier planet on the edge of the old Terran Federation.  The Federation crashed centuries before and many of its planets reverted to a pre industrial medieval state.  Trask has decided to make Tanith a base for Space Viking.  This means getting native workers to do the heavy lifting clearing wreckage from the long abandoned space port, suppressing banditry, establishing a planetary government and so on. 

  Somewhat later in the story Trask meets up with planet Marduk.  Marduk is fully civilized, it maintained its civilization even as the Federation fell.  Anyhow Lucas Trask is discussing problems keeping civilization going with a member of the royal family of Marduk.  As the discussion goes on, Marduk’s problems sound distressingly similar to the problem we are having in modern day America.  This in a science fiction novel written in 1963, 60 years ago.