Time Warner broad band fails again

Dunno about those Time Warner guys.  But my broadband has been dropping out about once a week lately.
Maybe Time Warner isn't paying it's Internet backbone fees?  NSA snooping is crashing their computers?  It's not the cable system, my cable TV (comes on the same wire) stays on line, but computer just cannot reach any websites. 

Going to Mars on a budget

The unmanned Indian Mars mission, Mangalyaan, was launched for a mere $80 million according to Aviation Week.  Whereas the next US Mars mission, Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN for short), due to launch in a week or two, will cost $671 million. eight times as much.  Granted, the Indian mission only carries 15 kilograms of scientific experiments, but still the difference in cost is striking.  "If India can make the world's cheapest car and the world's cheapest tablet, launching the cheapest Mars mission is no big deal," quipped one Indian space scientist. 
   Mangalyaan has a long way to go.  It will be 10 months coasting out to Mars, at which point it has to make a burn to establish itself in an orbit around Mars.  We all hope that after 10 months in interplanetary space, all the equipment will still be in working order.  Mars is a tough target.  Over half the missions to Mars have failed for one reason on another, including missions by Japan and China quite recently.
  Good luck and God Speed.

No nukes is good nukes

Aviation Week has a series of articles about selected nuclear powers, the US, the Russians, French, Indians, and Chinese. Other nuclear countries, the UK, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, are omitted.  Interesting selection that.  Dunno what it means other than perhaps Aviation Week just doesn't know anything about the non selected countries.
   They give numbers for the US.  We are down to about 2000 deliverable warheads as of now, and sequestration and budget cutting forecasts a further drop to 1550 by 2018.    Which is WAY down from the bad old days when we had 10,000 warheads aimed at the Russians.  Minuteman missiles are down to 450, from 1080 when Minuteman was first deployed back in the 1960's.  To my amateur eye, the numbers are probably enough to do the job, namely convince everyone in the world that we could reduce their country to a glow-in-the-dark parking lot if they were stupid enough to really piss us off. 
   

Computers get the new jobs.

The computers have moved into vast areas of the workplace.  Back when I  started as an engineer, we made pencil sketches of our designs on squared paper.  We took these down to drafting and drafting would produce gorgeous D size vellum drawings.  The master vellums were kept in drafting, and Ozalid copies were made for production.  Engineering change orders did not take effect until drafting had updated the master vellum and gotten the engineer to sign off on it. 
  Then we got desktop CAD.  It took a while to catch on, maybe ten years, but then we engineers did the drawings with a CAD program running on our desktop computers, and the drafting departments just withered away.  By the time I retired, there were no drafting departments.  That's a lot of good jobs, gone.
   When I started in the business, to make a trip, we called a travel agency to get the air tickets, the rental car reservation and the motel reservations.  By the time I retired, the travel agencies were gone, and I made my own reservations at Orbitz using my trusty desktop.  More good jobs, gone.
   Years ago, when we needed a memo, a letter to a customer, a proposal, an ECO, an instruction manual, a test procedure or anything formal, we wrote it out long hand on a yellow lined pad, and took it down to the typing pool.  They would type up a rough draft, we would correct same, then a final draft got typed.  Each department would have a typing pool.  In addition to typing stuff, they kept the supply cabinets stocked with paper and pencils, distributed the interoffice mail, and served as information centers.  The head of the typing pool always knew everything and everyone.  If you needed to know who to ask, or what procedure to follow,  anything, the typing pool would know.   Then we got Word-for-Windows with spell check and we began to type our own stuff.  Again, the typing pools went away.  Interoffice mail just didn't get delivered, there was no one to deliver it.  More good jobs gone.
   Again, way back when, companies had salesmen, who traveled to customer's sites and sold parts to the engineers.  The idea was, get an engineer to design their part into the circuit, and your company owned that socket for the life of the product.  We engineers were always happy to see the salesmen, 'cause the salesmen always brought fresh new data books, with the specs on all the latest parts.  A salesman was an opportunity to replace your 10 year old TTL databook, with an up to date version.  Then we got the internet.  Companies posted the datasheets on every part they made on the web.  We didn't need data books anymore, we could run off the datasheet on the parts we cared about on the office laserprinter.  I don't think I saw a parts salesman after 1995.  More good jobs gone.
   I wonder what all those draftsmen, travel agents, typists, and salesmen are doing now.    

Humanities wailing about the rise of STEM

Seen on the Web, repeatedly, college humanities profs wailing about the emphasis and money going into Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) departments, starving their humanities departments.  Statistics show the rising numbers of students with STEM majors, and the declining number of humanities majors.  This has been around since C.P. Snow wrote about "Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution".  The trend is understandable, college students want to major in something that leads to a job upon graduation.  At least intelligent students do.
   The humanities departments need to connect their disciplines to jobs.  Right now, humanities departments view their mission as training more humanities professors.  That's a loser, their aren't that many college prof jobs out there, and most of them are underpaid "adjunct" professors, part time, no health benefit jobs.   Humanities need to show prospective majors where the jobs are.
  Take English for example.  Show how an English major can lead to jobs.  Creative writing, best selling author is always attractive.  As well as playwright, screenwriting, writing instruction books, advertising copy, journalism.  Surely a knowledge of Shakespeare is useful to writing plays, movie scripts, or TV shows.  Understanding the English novel, from Pride and Prejudice to Hemingway is helpful to writers of mainsteam fiction, genre fiction, romance novels, fantasy and science fiction, westerns and mysteries.  This will require the typical English prof to conceal his aristocratic distaste for things like advertising and genre fiction, but that's better than unemployment.
   Foreign language departments need to expalin the need to speak the language, and know the culture, for overseas work in diplomacy, intelligence, sales, import/export work, journalism, and business.   Employers already know that they need American employees with language skills to represent them overseas.
   History is an ever expanding and super broad field.  Covering everything that ever happened since the invention of writing, makes history the broadest field of all.  History books have gone on to the best seller list from the days of Bruce Catton, and Barbara Tuchman, up thru David McCullough.  Plenty of good fiction have been written with a historical slant, from C.S. Forester to Tom Clancy.   As a background for a career in politics, diplomacy, or intelligence, history is far superior to political science, sociology or economics.  History is real, with real examples.  The others are theoretical, and mostly opinion.

The Economist likes inflation

Amusing cover story.  Cover has a cartoon of a limp hot air balloon  sagging toward the sea, where sharks are gathering.  Anyhow the gist of the story is we don't have enough inflation, and central banks, (The Fed!) ought to pump up inflation again.  They spend some words trashing deflation (falling prices and wages) but they never get around to expaling why inflation is good for anybody.  Any how, they are in favor of more of it. 
   They never explain just which measure of inflation they mean.  US labor dept  keeps track of "core" inflation, usually everything except food and fuel. Food and fuel are "volatile" and that makes them evil.  Core inflation is services and manufactured goods, and is "purer" in the view of economists. 
   Unfortunately, they use "core" inflation for all those cost-of-living escalators in union contracts and social security.  Doesn't help me much.  I have to buy oil for the furnace, gas for the car and food for the bod.  My house is clogged with generations of manufactured goods, both hand me downs from the older generation and left-behinds from the children.  I don't buy new stuff much anymore.  But the Social Security cost-of-living escalator works on "core" inflation. 

First Plow of the season

We had a bit of snow last night.  Less than an inch.  But the town plow rumbled by at 6 AM.  That's the first this season.  First plow counts for more than just first snow