138 pages "Medicare and You"

"This is the official U.S. government Medicare handbook". Came in the mail yesterday. Am I going to read 138 pages of gobbledy-gook? Probably not. Is it worth filing away just in case I develop some strange malady and need to know if it's covered? Dunno, I think I filed last year's and never touched it.

Wikileaks and leakers Part II

Wikileaks is right out there, making the world safe for democracy by publishing 400,000 secret US Army field reports. The reports, filed by junior officers after action, some times describe intelligence sources, name Iraqi informers and describe Iraqi Army prisoner treatment that makes the Marquis de Sade look like a pussy cat.
A treacherous US Army enlisted man is responsible for sucking all this stuff off Army computers and passing it to Wikileaks.
In the old days, 400,000 reports would be on paper and kept in GI steel safes, the kind with the user hostile combination lock. Carrying that much classified out the door without being noticed was impossible. But now we got automation, the reports are all kept on disk and anyone with a password can sweep them onto a flashdrive and be gone. So number 1 mistake was putting this stuff on computers in the first place. Windows computers are so insecure, you might as well publish the classfied on the base bulletin board as put in on disk.
Second mistake is keeping it. Back when I was serving my country, we had a January ritual. Every January we cleaned out the classified from the safe and changed the safe combination. Junior commissioned officers (like me) were required to haul the out dated classified up to the base power plant and heave it into the furnace. This was Duluth Minnesota, and the base power plant ran a huge coal furnace to heat the whole base. Any classified more than a year old I burned. And signed each one off as destroyed on our classified documents inventory.
Finally, the Army seems to have forgotten about compartmentalization. This one enlisted traitor should never have had access to that much stuff. His pass word should have been limited to just stuff from his unit, not everything in every unit over all of time.

Laptops on Airliners

Atlantic magazine has an article about the difficulty of providing 120 volt AC power at each seat to charge passenger laptops. Clearly the Atlantic people are journalism majors who have trouble changing lightbulbs. (How many J school students does it take to change a light bulb? Five, one to hold the bulb and four to rotate the stepladder.)
Allow 100 watts per laptop charger on a 200 seat aircraft and you have 20,000 watts, about what five electric kitchen ranges take. It's a respectable amount of power but nothing that the jet engines cannot provide. The engine drives an AC alternator thru a power takeoff shaft. In fact airliners since the DC-6 (and maybe earlier) have 115 volt AC alternators, one on each engine. There is plenty of power available to drive the alternator. A 20 Kilowatt alternator only needs 26 horsepower to turn it and jet engines furnish thousands of horsepower.
In fact, it's only a matter of wiring up each seat. All jetliners currently generate 120 Volt AC power at 400 cycles per second (hertz). 60 cycle electrical equipment works just fine on 400 cycle power. We used to operate delicate electronic test equipment out on the flight line off 400 cycle power. Worked fine and lasts a long time.
So, all that is required to bring laptop charging outlets to all the passengers in coach is will on the part of the airlines. Doing it right would be to have Boeing and Airbus do an engineering change order (ECO) to fit a passenger charger alternator into a couple of engine nacelles and do a cabin wiring diagram. An ECO of this nature would have to be reviewed by FAA for safety and and that takes time, but it's doable. Installation would take the plane out of revenue service for three or four days. Not cheap.
Cheaper for a small outfit like Virgin Atlantic, would be to just wire the cabin, and either install an inverter to convert aircraft power to 60 cycle AC or just run 400 cycle aircraft power to the seats. Cabin wiring can be customized by each airline and changes, like laptop charger circuits, probably do not require FAA approval. That's the low cost way to go.
As soon as one airline decides that offering laptop charger plugs will bring in business, they will put 'em in. As long as the airlines think the passengers don't care all that much, they won't. It's a matter of economics, not technology.

NPR does bait and switch

Listening to the clock radio this morning, NPR did a piece that started out wishing for scientist's who can make science clear to non-scientists. That's good. We used to have people like Willy Ley and Jerry Pournelle and Isaac Asimov who were superb science writers. They have not been replaced and I miss them.
Just as I was getting with the program, the interviewer changed the subject to global warming. And right off the top of his head, the interviewee said the Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) people should have counter attacked the great document leak, and called it theft, copyright infringment and mopery and dopery.
Wow. big switch from explaining how the science works, to tactics for winning a political argument.
Hadley CRU was a British center of global warming. Somehow a vast internal collection of emails, memos, computer programs, and data files from CRU appeared on the Internet last October. The emails and memos concerned discrediting other climate scientists, and the computer program code had places that fudged the data to create warming graphs no matter what the data was. Every technical person who read thru this stuff became convinced that Hadley CRU was all propaganda and no science.
NPR a year later is explaining how to wish the great document leak away. In my book that is NOT explaining the science to the laymen. That's selling a political point of view.

Picking your college major

University of Texas is the subject of this article on the cost-benefit ratio of various majors. The spreadsheet shows the tuition money brought in vs the salaries of the professors for a variety of majors. Chemistry comes out on top, with history and English running very respectable seconds. Three trendy hard science majors, oceanography, physics&astromony, and aerospace engineering actually loose money for UT, faculty salaries and expenses exceed tuition income.
Very interesting. How does chemistry, with twice the class room/laboratory time, expensive labs, lab assistants, glassware, plumbing and whatever, pull in more money than easier-to-teach history and English. Easier-to-teach means just an ordinary classroom with a blackboard is required, no pricey labs. Clearly the chemistry department is onto something that the other departments ought to copy.
And what of the money loosing departments? Is it just lack of students or too many faculty members, or expensive field trips and facilities? The tuition numbers seem reasonable for these departments which ought to mean decent enrollment.
This article gives hope that decent education can be done for less money.

Juan Williams Part 2

I saw Juan on O'Reilly Factor last night. It was clear that the firing had upset him. Firing is like that, it's upsetting. O'Reilly made a serious effort to cheer Juan up, speaking of good things that will happen, books he will write, positive stuff intended to make him feel better.
Strong contrast to the lady reporter from the Washington Post who, just a few minutes earlier on Bret Baer's show, coldly said that if Juan had kept his mouth shut he would still be at NPR.
The conservative reporters are showing a lot more sympathy and support for a fellow reporter than the liberal ones are.

Heresy, penalty therefore

NPR just fired Juan Williams. Williams apparently sinned against the doctrine of NPR when he expressed reservations about flying on a plane with Muslim passengers in traditional garb. Plus probably a few other things, I didn't pay close attention to details of the heresy charges.
Wow. NPR is running a very tight ideological discipline these days. Juan was a good solid liberal/progressive. He used his airtime on Fox to good advantage for the liberal cause. I thought he was a nice guy, liberal but not misguided. I didn't agree with him all that often, but that's what freedom of the press is all about.
In the showdown between NPR and Juan, I'm on Juan's side.