The Economist trashes Maggie Thatcher

In the letters section of this week's Economist magazine we have all the letters expressing various hostilities to former and recently deceased Margaret Thatcher.  Not one friendly letter.   All letter writers were willing and able to speak ill of the dead.  Despite a couple of nice Thatcher obituaries last week, seems like the Economist (a very liberal rag) harbors some ill feeling for the Iron Lady. 

Signs of Spring in New Hampshire

Spring might actually happen this year.  It was 60 here, snow is melted out except up on Cannon ski trails, and the yard sale signs were out.  Alder Brook Sportsman's Club had the annual range cleanup.  The dirt access road is dry enough to drive upon.  Some twelve members, and two big $20 K privately owned John Deere tractors  on fancy trailers showed up.  Between the tractors, the pickups, the SUV's and just plain cars there must have been $200K worth of machinery out there.
    By hand the range was raked, getting up piles and piles of broken clay pigeons and shot gun wads and shot cups.  The tractors graded the access road.
   I'm getting old.  I get tired from just swinging a rake, which didn't used to happen. 
   So we are ready for another season of shooting.

Terrorists vs Freedom Fighters

Tennessee parents are objecting to a high school "textbook" that asks "Is bombing an Israeli pizzeria terrorism or a legitimate act of war by Palestinian revolutionaries?" 
    Dunno how that "textbook" answered the question. 
   Far as I am concerned, maiming and murdering innocent strangers with bombs is always terrorism.  Nothing ever justifies terrorism.  Legitimate acts of war are conducted against enemy soldiers, not against innocent strangers. 
  I fully share the Tennessee parents concern about that "textbook".  It sounds like Al Quada propaganda to me. 

Bird lovers versus cat lovers

NPR ran a nice little piece on feral cats, and a volunteer organization that does catch, neuter, and release.  But then the inner bird lover in the reporter surfaced, and she went on about predation of birds by cats.  She claimed that cats kill 2.5 billion birds every year and isn't that horrible.  I had to wonder where she got her numbers from.  Did someone go about interviewing cats?   Then she claimed that the house cat was an invasive species, not native to the western hemisphere and the poor birds had no natural defenses.  She forgot about the native bobcats, a little bigger and faster and meaner than a house cat. Besides, any bird dumb enough to let a cat get so close it can pounce before the bird can get airborne, is probably better off as cat food. 
   On their side, cats totally understand humans, and make themselves so friendly, so cuddly, and so attractive that most humans go ga-ga and feed them, pet them, and shelter them.  Birds don't compete in this league.  So there are gonna be plenty of cat lovers looking out for cats. 

Think Boeing has it bad?

Boeing's 787 was only grounded for a couple of months and looks like it will fly again by the end of this month.  Bad, but read this.
Eurocopter EC225's (a big helicopter used to support North Sea oil drilling) was grounded in October of 2012 and looks to stay grounded until this fall.  Grounding was ordered by both the British and the Norwegian governments after two forced landings in the North Sea, caused by failures in the main gear box.  The main gearbox connects the engines to the rotor.  When that breaks the rotor stops turning and the chopper falls out of the sky.
  That's a lot worse than flaming lithium batteries.

Airline money sink, GEN-X

GEN-X is the FAA scheme to modernize the entire US air traffic control system.  Today's system works on ground radar stations, straight out of World War II.  Controller eyeball the radar screens and radio flight orders to airliners to keep them from colliding.  The radar beams are fairly tight, 3 degrees, but that means an uncertainty of plus or minus 2.5  miles when the plane is 100 miles from the radar station.  So controllers maintain a ten mile spacing between planes.
  GEN-X requires all aircraft to carry a GPS and a special transmitter to send the aircraft's GPS position to the ground station.  GPS is accurate to 100 feet and so the planes can be packed up tighter in the sky.
  The GEN-X equipment costs $500,000 per airliner.  Right now the airlines are supposed to pay for this, although FAA will make loans to airlines to fund GEN-X installation.  And, the airline gets no return on investment.  With or without the $500,000 GEN-X equipment, the plane gets from here to there at the same speed.  All GEN-X does for the airline is cost money.  It doesn't offer any benefits.
  The greater accuracy of GEN-X doesn't matter. Packing airplanes more tightly together in the sky won't help move more traffic.  There is plenty of sky to hold all the airplanes.  The bottleneck is airport runways.  An airport can only handle one flight a minute, and all the major airports have been running at capacity for twenty years or more.  I  picnicked on Castle Island, just off  Logan Airport, and watched a never ending stream of airliners, packed up head to tail, coming in for a landing.  That was 20 years ago on a nice sunny day.  It gets worse when the weather gets bad.
  Any how, FAA is pushing hard for GEN-X, for mysterious reasons.  Our tax money at work. 

So what do you do with an International Space Station?

Now that we have one.  Serious money was put into it.  Now it is up there with not much to do.  The earth imaging mission is handled by recon satellites good enough to spot a cigarette pack lying on the ground.  The astronomy mission is well in hand at Hubble.  They aren't enough tourists with money to make an orbital tourist hotel work.
  According to Aviation Week, they have space to spare for more scientists and experiments.  The only work on going is "micro gravity" (we used to call it weightlessness) what ever that means.  Could it be that the best part of ISS was the "International" part of the name.  That helped mightily at funding time.