HIgh Speed Rail for Merrie Old England.

The Brits call it  "HS2", a high speed rail line from London to Manchester and Leeds. For a mere $69 billion, a little less in Euro's.  Network Rail, which does the tracks thruout Britain loves the idea, and so does the Dept of Transport. 
  But, Manchester and Leeds are only 150 miles from London, closer than New York is to Boston.  Conventional rail can do 60 mph on decent track, and 100 mph with a little work on the track.  The New York Central was running passenger trains at 100 mph, under steam, way back in the late 1800's.  Properly operated conventional rail ought to make the London-Manchester run in three hours, fast enough to beat airline time.  To fly, you gotta get to the airport an hour before takeoff, and wait for ever to recover your bags after landing.  On the NYC-Boston run, Amtrak takes nearly four hours, running on conventional track laid 100 years ago,  but it's faster than flying.  Conventional British Rail ought to be able to beat airline time on the relatively short London-Manchester run. 
   So I wish our British brothers well, but I think they are pouring money down a black hole to do "high speed rail" over such a short distance. 
   P.S.  Good luck California. 

WIMPS and MACHOS

The Universe is not heavy enough.  This finding comes from watching galaxies rotate.  They are rotating faster than they ought to be.  Speed of rotation is something Newton worked out, and it's taught in sophomore physics.  Using Newton's math, one can observe the period and diameter of a satellite's orbit, and compute the mass of the primary quite exactly. The stronger the gravitational field, the faster an object has to move, to create enough centrifugal force to keep from falling. 
   They figured the mass of  galaxies by counting the stars in them on the assumption that the mass is all/mostly stars, which shine by their own light and can been seen at great distances.  Assume the astronomers took a few short cuts, like counting the stars in a tiny patch of galaxy and extrapolating the total number of stars in that galaxy. When they computed the mass required to account for the observed rotation speed, they came up short.  The needed mass was two, three, and more times the observed (luminous) mass of the galaxy.  And so, everyone, astronomers, physicists, science writers and so on, accept that there is a LOT of dark (non luminous) matter in the universe.  Like more dark matter than luminous matter. Most of the universe is dark matter.
   The obvious question " What is this dark matter?"  came up with two possibilities.  The universe could be rich in an as yet undiscovered particle. Something as hard to detect as a neutrino but with mass like a proton. These were dubbed Weakly Interacting Massive Particles" or WIMPS for short.  The physicists loved WIMPS,. It gave them a new particle to hunt for.  Now that the Higg's Boson  has been claimed, there are a lot of accelerators and accelerator physicists looking for something else to do.
  The other possibility is simply ordinary matter that is not stars.  Like the earth, or Jupiter.  Jupiter is an interesting case.  It is a near star, it's pure hydrogen, and it radiates more heat than it absorbs from the Sun.  Jupiter must be running low level nuclear fusion way down at its core.  If Jupiter had been a little larger, it would be a star and shine by its own light, and we would live in a binary solar system.  Binary systems are pretty common out there in the galaxy, say 10% or more.
   Stars are formed by a not yet well understood process of gravitational attraction.  Plenty of stars large enough to shine were formed.  You can see them in the night sky.  But, if the process can yield large stars, why can it not yield a lot of small ones like Jupiter? Ones too small to shine.
  This is the Massive Compact Halo Object, or MACHO.   And, this year, somebody detected one.  It turned up in the search for extraterrestrial planets.  It was a Jupiter sized object, way out in deep space, all by itself.
   Right now, WIMPS are ahead, at least they get a lot of good press, and MACHO's are not talked about much.  Me, I kinda like the MACHO idea.  It's perfectly plausible and it doesn't require new invisible and undetectable particles.      

Put a tax black box in your car?

Some states are talking about it.  They want to collect a mileage tax on everyone's car, so they propose to put a tax black box in every car to record (and tax) every mile driven. 
  Dumb idea.  That's what the gasoline tax does.  And every gas station's pumps are set up to collect gas tax already.  There has been some talk about how better gas mileage on new cars has reduced the take from the gas tax.  Malarkey.  What little improvement in mileage is because more of us are driving cheap econo-boxes now instead of decent six passenger sedans.  And, with Great Depression 2.0 still in effect, fewer of us are driving to work anymore. 
   Many have decried the tax black boxes as unwarranted gov'mint snooping on private business.  They suggest that the tax black boxes will be GPS boxes that will report everywhere we drive to.  That's overkill, just recording mileage off the odometer would do the trick as far as the taxman is concerned. 
   And, it's not widely known, but the computer in all new cars records speed, throttle setting, brake application, miles driven, gear selected, and a lot of other stuff that you would just as soon not have fall into the hands of the cops after an accident.  So far only the car companies know how to read this stuff out.  Wait til the ambulance chasers figure it out.   

Battle of the River Plate

Goldie Oldie British flick from 1956.  A docudrama about the sinking of the Graf Spee at the beginning of WWII.  From the Rank people, whose opening trademark was a giant brass gong being struck with a mallet in the hands of a beefy guy with his shirt off.  It's in Techicolor and Vistavision (wide screen process like Cinemascope).  It came from Netflix.  A period piece from the era of good WWII British war movies.
   They used real ships, including one survivor of the 1939 battle, so the sea scenes are good, not model work.  The real thing, was treated as a tremendous victory by the British, who were yearning for some good news after a disastrous string of German victories.  Graf Spee was an extremely heavy German cruiser armed with 11 inch guns, far more powerful that the 6 or 8 inch armament of contemporary cruisers.  The British, remembering the damage done to them by ultra heavy American frigates in the War of 1812.  In that war much weaker British frigates felt honor bound to engage the Americans, who promptly used their heavier guns and bigger ships to blow the Brits out of the water.  To prevent this sort of foolishness, the Brits dubbed Graf Spee a "pocket battleship", which enabled British cruiser captains to put up their helm and run for it, rather than getting sunk engaging a much stronger vessel.
  Three British cruisers caught up with Graf Spee off South America and closed for a furious gun battle.  None of the ships carried enough armor to keep out the enemy's shells and all ships took quite a bit of damage.  Graf Spee broke off the action and took refuge in Montevideo harbor in neutral Uruguay.  International law forbade neutrals to harbor belligerent warships and so after a couple of days Graf Spee weighed anchor and came out to face the British.  Only she scuttled, blew herself up, rather than engage the three battered British cruisers lying in wait for here off Montevideo.   The British treated their victory as the sinking of battleship rather than a mere cruiser.
   The movie treatment of the Germans is sympathetic.  But they omit a scene where  German skipper Langsdorf gets a chance to explain why he decided to scuttle instead of fight.  They do have scene where the British officers speculate on what Langsdorf might do, they all think Langsdorf will come out and fight.  The action scenes could have been better.  For a sea fight we want to see the guns firing, and then we want to see whether they hit or missed.  The director didn't bother, we see the ships closing, but it is unclear who is hitting and who is missing.
   Anyhow, it's a good sea flick, enjoyable as a period piece.
 

How deep does the sequester cut?

Pretty deep. At least according to Aviation Week.


                                                   US Military Power
                             1988                    Today                  After Sequester 2021

Army Divisions       20                        10                       6
Air Force Fighters  2788                     1493                  1157
Navy Ships             588                       275                    228

In 1988 we had 20 Army divisions.  Today we have 10. After a bit more sequestering we will be down to 6.  That's not enough to do Iraq again.  A division is 15,000 men.  Six divisions is 90,000 men.  We put 130,000 men into Iraq, without pulling our 50,000 troops out of Korea or Germany.  With only 6 divisions, we could no longer deal with regional threats like Iran.
    I feel less worried about the Air Force.  A thousand fighters is a lot, especially now that they all carry smart bombs.  One sortie with smart bombs, that hit the target, is worth hundreds of sorties with iron bombs that mostly miss. 
    Dunno what to say about the Navy.  Now that the Soviets are gone, we don't have any enemies with fleets.  But the Chinese are clearly interested in building up a real navy. 

Red Sox Win the World Series!

Hurrah.  Everyone in Boston, and in the Boston States (most of New England) is overflowing with joy.  A fine time was had by all.
  It's impressive that we can derive so much fun and joy from such a simple low tech event.  The game hasn't changed in any important way since the Civil War.  Especially as most kids are brought up playing soccer instead of Little League baseball. 
   Go Sox

Grilling Sibelius

Congressional hearing with Secretary of HHS, Kathleen Sibelius as witness.  Big house committee with lots of members, each one waiting for his moment of fame on TV.  Sibelius was evasive, and ducked and weaved.  She was clearly attempting to reveal as little as possible.  Democratic reps spend the morning thinking up softball questions to give her a break.  Republicans were unable to stay on topic long enough to really nail her down on anything.  The Democrats are totally into Obamacare and are defending it to the death.  A lot of Republicans opened their remarks by reading letters of insurance cancellation from their constituents.  There is a lot of that going around, Humana cancelled my Medicare Advantage last week. Sibelius did admit that a full up system security test had never been run.  That's scary.  Figure everything you put into Healthcare.gov is available to every hacker, including your social security number, your address, home phone, and medical history.   They got under Sibelius' skin when they asked why she, the head of Obamacare, was NOT on Obamacare herself.  Good question.  Apparently we did manage to force the Congress onto Obamacare, but the executive has skated, and stayed with their cushy gov'mint health insurance. 
   Anyhow everyone had a good time yelling at each other.  Little real information came out of it.