Slow Speed Rail

Getting up here without a car. Take Amtrak's Vermonter from New York to White River Junction VT. Amtrak departs NYC and 11 AM and arrives in White River at 6:45 PM, (sometimes). That's 263 miles in 7 3/4 hours or 34 mph. Speedy.
By contrast, the bus, with a change at Hartford, makes it in 7 hours, (37 mph) and you can drive it in 4 1/2 hours (58 mph).
Why so slow? Old and weary track. The rail line up the Connecticut River was laid in the 1830's and has been allowed to quietly rot since the 1970's. The ties are so rotten that spikes can be pulled out by hand, it's bumpy, the rail joiners are loose, and you can see the track flex under the weight of the train. So they don't run it very fast. The trainset is all modern stuff that could do 100 mph on good track.
It wouldn't take all that much to fix the track up enough to allow 60 mph schedules, even with stops at Stamford, Bridgeport, Hartford, and a few other places. Let's see, 263 miles by $500,000 a mile, is $130 million, a mere pittance compared to the $787 billion porkulus.
In short, it's not Euro style 200 mph rail service that we need, it's plain old 1920's style 60 mph rail service. The Vermonter runs pretty full, they demand reservations in advance. If it was faster, more people would ride it.

Have your ever seen a toad struck by lightening?

One of Hally Berry's few good lines in X-men. An Airbus-330 airliner enroute from Rio de Janerio to Paris is overdue, presumed lost. The home office suggested that it might have been struck by lightening over the Atlantic. Maybe, but I don't really believe it.
My Air Force squadron had two F-106 fighter planes struck by lightening back in the 1960's. Both planes landed OK. One suffered electrical damage to an antenna, sufficient to warrent replacement, but not so bad as to knock out the radio.
Lightening strikes on aircraft are not uncommon but very seldom do much damage. Since the aircraft is not grounded, being high in the air, the full current of the bolt has not where to go. Plus what current does flow thru the aircraft flows thru the highly conductive aluminum skin.
Maxwell's field equations say that electric fields cannot exist inside a conductive shell, which means the aluminum fuselage offers highly effective shielding to everything (passengers, fuel, electrical and electronic equipment) inside it.
The "lightening did it" press release sounds more like "it wasn't our fault".

The Post American World Fareed Zakaria

Geopolitics and the future of America. Copyright 2008, or just before Great Depression II started. It's well written, reads smoothly, and contains this newsie's advice to US citizens. He speaks of "the rise of the rest", by which lots of countries that were either bombed flat or still medieval at the end of WWII have rebuilt or modernized and now offer real competition to the US. He speaks fondly of his native India's economic growth since abandoning Nehru's quasi socialism in the late 1980's. He assesses the strengths and competitive advantages of America and finds them strong. The US economy is still the largest in the world, US popular culture is compelling. Unfortunately he doesn't talk about the strength of the US economy after the onset of Great Depression II, because the book went to press before the crash. He doesn't see the crash coming or even talk much about weaknesses that were obvious to more real world oriented papers like the Wall St Journal.
He talks about a dysfunctional US political process, by which I think he means that democrats didn't have the votes to push thru their pet projects. Now that they do have all the votes they need, will the country improve or will the democrats drive the country off a cliff? He also describes the US federal government as "weak", a surprising description now with Uncle owning banks and car companies, and running up a $1.5 trillion deficit in the first half of 2009.
Zacharia's prescriptions for US revival are pretty general and could have served as Obama speeches, heavy on motherhood and apple pie, short on specifics. His hindsight is fairly good but his foresight is no better than mine.
Worth a read, but it's a read once kind of book.

Cyber Security Czar

So we get yet another Obama staffer in the White House, drawing his pay out of our taxes. He is supposed to "strengthen computer security" otherwise known as keeping hackers out of government and corporate computers.
Actually, security does need to be tightened. But I doubt that another Obama staffer will do much about it. What's needed is good stiff penalties for sloppy security. About once a month some company or agency admits that hackers stole lists of names and social security numbers. That would stop if each case was treated as criminal negligence and prosecuted. A few heads mounted on pikes would tighten that up. Follow up with class action suits demanding treble damages.
Then Microsoft needs a clue by four laid up along the side of the head. Windows is totally vulnerable, with gaping security holes in the front, the back, the bottom and the top. A pack of personal injury lawyers ought to be sicced on Microsoft. Better that than more asbestos claims.
Finally we need to get serious about passwords. System managers need to insist on strong passwords, changed quarterly.

There oughta be a Law Pt 2

Against TV commercials overlaying the program. Bad enough we have to suffer thru the unending commercial breaks. But, now the commercials never stop. While the program is running we have network logos, speeding race cars, palm trees and whatever overlaying the program material. It's getting so bad you can't see the program for all the little commercials racing across the bottom of the screen.

Music Labels Zap DVD releases

Who a thunk it. The labels have things so tight in the copyright department that the studios cannot release old TV shows to DVD 'cause the labels want too much money for the rights to the musical score. Apparently the studios neglected to sign air tight agreements with the musicians back when the shows were produced. Some are quite old, say The Fugitive from the '60s, back when VHS and DVD rights hadn't been imagined.
It's so bad that some of the old shows are released with a new score, just to sidestep the copyright tangle on the original score. Which is incredible, redoing the score on a 40 year old TV show has got to be expensive. You would think in a real world it would be cheaper to buy off the labels than redo the score on a TV show.
The labels probably use the same lawyers they sic on file sharers to gouge the studios.
And the studios really really need to get better lawyers and make sure they own ALL the rights to the scores of their productions.

Citizens Against Government Waste & John McCain

A letter came in today, the usual please send money letter, from these guys. As examples of "waste, fraud and abuse" they cited buying 262 C-130's over 21 years, when the Defense Dept only wanted five. That's $13 billion, used to be real money back before the porkulus. On the other hand, the C-130 is one heluva useful airplane. It moves stuff up to the front lines at 300 knots. It can get 20 tons into a 1000 foot dirt runway. This means it can bring rations, ammunition, fuel, spare parts, combat troops, vehicles, artillery, SAM's, radar sets, hot coffee and clean laundry anywhere in the world. After WWII a US general ranked the DC-3 transport plane as one of the great war winning weapons. The C-130 is a DC-3 writ large. In short, it's a very useful thing to have, and it doesn't go obsolete. We might not need all 262 of them, but it's a real weapons system, useful in any kind of war, anytime in the future.
After trashing the C-130 buy, they whined about some nitnoy (small) stuff, dubious sounding program names with tiny price tags in the $1 to $5 million area. They did not mention big ticket programs, F35 fighters, Future Combat System (what ever that turns out to be), littoral combat ships, presidential helicopters, ballistic missile defense, C-27 cargo planes, GPS satellites, C-5 transport rebuilding, and Air Force tankers. Each of those programs is billions of dollars. Compared to that, a million dollars for "atmospheric water harvesting" is nothing.
I decided to put the letter in the fireplace with the rest of the morning's junk mail. If they cannot see the forest for the trees, heck, see the forest for the saplings, they don't need my money. Too bad John McCain let his good name be used by such an ineffectual bunch.