Dark Matter "discovered"? part II

Ars Technica has a much better write up of the dark matter experiment than the New York Times.

SAAB to die

GM will shut down SAAB. A pity, the cars were cool. They had some buyers for the company. You would think GM would do better by giving SAAB away, selling it for $1. Turn SAAB over to anyone. If it flies wonderful. If it goes bankrupt at least it isn't GM's fault. Just shutting SAAB down makes it all GM's fault, and is just as expensive as giving it away.
On the other hand, GM senior management has been brain dead for decades. Looks like the new guy (good old whats-his-face) is no smarter than dearly departed Waggoner or Henderson.

Words of the Weasel Part XII

"Progressive". It's what liberals want to call themselves now that "liberal" has become pejorative.

Dark Matter "discovered"?

Dark matter is an idea going back decades. Some astronomer noticed that galaxies rotated faster than expected. Each star in a galaxy orbits the central mass of the galaxy. Newton published the formula for the orbital speed of a satellite, the more massive the primary, the faster the satellite revolves.
When the faster galactic rotation was discovered, it was obvious that the galaxies were more massive than previously believed. It had been assumed that the mass of galaxies was made up of stars, bright objects that can be see in telescopes. Initially the nature of the extra dark matter was thought by some to be weakly interactive massive particles (WIMPS) and by others to be massive compact halo objects (MACHOS). Wimps were unknown sub atomic particles, MACHOs were chunks of rock floating in interstellar space where the sun doesn't shine. No sunlight, no see um.
When first announced, I always thought the MACHO idea was an fine explanation. Somehow over the years the WIMP concept has dominated, MACHO's are obsolete, and physicists are out looking for WIMPS.
According to the NY Times (reliable source that) the physicists are claiming to have detected a couple of WIMPS. The experiment has been running at the bottom of an old mine (to screen out cosmic rays) for years. Over all than time two, just two, events occured that signified the passage of WIMPS.
The experimenters did admit that the two events could have been caused by radioactivity in the rocks making up the mine, so they were only making a tentative claim of seeing WIMPS.
If I had been nursing an array of sensitive cyrogenic detectors in the bottom of a mine for years and years, I'd expect a few glitches from time to time. Hell, I get more glitches than that in my Compaq desktop.

Hacking Predator

Even the Wall St Journal's reporters can fall for technical baffle gab. The enemy has been receiving video from our Predator drones for nearly a year. This is kinda serious, it essentially puts US drone reconnaissance at the disposal of the enemy. Damn near as good as having your own fleet of drones. The drone electronics broadcast their video in clear, not encrypted.
The obvious fix is to encrypt the video in the drone. Encryption at video rates (18 megabits/sec) could be done on a printed circuit board maybe 5 by 7 inches. There is room inside the drones for such a card. So why hasn't that been done?
"The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the US, Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes."
Journal reporters Siobhan Gorman, Yoichi J. Dreazen and August Cole printed this bit of malarkey in a front page WSJ story Thursday. They should have known better.
Networks move bits from place to place. They don't care what the bits are, what they say, whether they are encrypted or not. All the network does is move the bits from one place to another. Nothing in the network need be changed to move encrypted video. The unnamed officials are offering excuses and bad excuses at that.
And three clueless journalism school graduates fell for it. Even the best newspapers go brain dead occasionally.

NH Hampshire does its bit for the housing market

According to NPR, NH building code will require sprinklers in all residential construction, starting next year. Just the thing to spark the sale of new houses, shiny chrome sprinkler heads sticking out of the living room ceiling. To say nothing of the extra few thousand dollars added to the price of the house.
This bit of user friendliness is brought to you by the fire departments of America who lobby for anything fire suppressive. The firemen are the largest group on the building code committees and they pushed this one.
The insurance companies did a good imitation of a hole in the ground on this issue. They figure it's a wash. Fewer fire claims but a whole bunch more water damage claims when the sprinklers sprinkle down the house when they shouldn't.
We are probably stuck with it although the NH legislature could overturn if they cared. If we can do some good work next November, maybe this irritant could be rolled back.

Pratt & Whitney goes to Russia

The Russian Irkut company selected Pratt & Whitney engines for their new MS-21 medium sized airliner. Pratt will supply the ultra modern geared turbofan PW1000G engine.
Hmm. The Russians are going to stay in the airliner business. Right now Aeroflot advertises that ALL their international flights use Boeing aircraft. The old Russian built Tupolevs are uncomfortable for passengers, hard to maintain, and scary to ride in. And plenty of them are still in service on Russian domestic flights. Looks like the Russians want to fly in made in Russia airliners even if the engines come from America.
That's the way to bring unemployment down, make world class products and export them. The Russians came to Pratt & Whitney because their engines are the best, not because they love Americans.