It's acceptable even if it doesn't meet spec.

This from Mary Barra, new GM CEO to a Congressional committee investigating the GM ignition switch failures.
  In all my career in engineering, I never heard anyone ever say anything like that.  The rule anywhere I ever worked was simple, if it doesn't meet spec, back it goes and we don't pay for it.  That's what incoming inspection is about.
  To hear the CEO of GM, a long time engineer there, say that GM would accept parts that don't meet spec means that GM doesn't believe in written quality standards.  Apparently GM will ship anything, whether it is any good or not.
   Talk about a dysfunctional corporate culture.
   Mulally at Ford would never say anything like that. 
   My next car won't be from GM.  

Artichokes

An amusing veggie to eat.  Actually a thistle.  You pluck off the leaves one by one and nibble the tender part off the bottom of the leaf.  With mayonnaise.  You discard the tough and fibrous upper part of the leaf.  They are in season, not too expensive, and tasty.  One artichoke can make a nice light meal, and many of us find a light meal plenty filling.  The impressive size of the artichoke, and the amount of plucking and nibbling makes them seem like more of a meal than they really are.  Note.  DO NOT put the used leaves down the disposal.  They are tough and stringy and will clog your drain, but good, every time.
   Cooking is simple.  Boil or steam them until tender.  About 45 minutes.  The Barefoot Gourmet has an entire chapter explaining how to prepare them.  Barefoot is into garlic, and recommends slicing up a whole fresh garlic clove and placing slivers of garlic in between the artichoke leaves.  Me, I'm not a real garlic fan so I skip that part.  But do slice off the stem and the top 1/2 inch or so, leaving a round spot about the size of a silver dollar.  Put them in a pot, sprinkle a generous amount of salt on the cut off tops, dribble some olive oil on top of the salt.  Add cold water and go for it. 
   Virtuous.  And tasty.

How to destroy your civilization

Simple.  Start World War I.  In 1913, the last year before the war, Europe ruled the world.  Her technology, steam railroad, telegraph, steamships, repeating firearms, telephone, machine woven textiles, electricity, and mass production was totally dominant.  Non European countries could not even duplicate European technology, they had to import it, from Europe.  The less advanced regions of the world were "colonized" (taken over) by European countries and run for the benefit of the colonizing countries.   
   After four years of slaughter and destruction on the Western Front, the Russian revolution, and the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire the European countries were too shattered, too broke, and too demoralized to keep it up.  What's worse, the seeds of the second world war, and the following  cold war had been planted.  In 1918 the Allies were too exhausted to invade and occupy defeated Germany, and convince the Germans that they had truly lost the war.  The Communists had seized power in Russia and would keep it for 70 years.  The majority of Germans felt they had not been beaten fair and square and were ready to try it again twenty years later.  This brought Adolf Hitler to power and kicked off WWII, which was as bad, or worse, than the first one. 
   What went wrong?  First.  The Austro-Hungarian empire could see and feel it's power crumbling in the face of nationalist feeling among it's massive subject peoples.  The German speaking Austrians and the Hungarians had struck a deal to share power and run the empire.  The rest of the empire, the Balkans, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Moldavians, Bohemians, and others were second class imperial citizens, and wanted out.  The ruling Austro-Hungarians knew that when the subject peoples got out, they would be reduced to running a third class eastern European now-wheres-ville.  They saw the Sarajevo assassinations as the pretext for a sharp little war that would  teach their subject peoples to shut up and do what they were told.  The ruling eleite believed that unless they took drastic action they were doomed, so they were strongly motivated toward war.   War was their salvation.
   Second.  Germany, a brand new country created just 45 years before, lacked national institutions with the power to constrain the central government, a monarchy with a nut case monarch.  The nut case liked international crises, the Sarajevo killings looked like a fine crisis, he decided to stir the pot.  When the Austrians came the Berlin asking for support in their hassle with the Serbs, he told them to go right ahead, kick some Serbian ass.  With that backing, the Crush-Serbia-Now faction in Vienna was able to silence their opponents and kick off the war.
   Lessons learned.  First, if you run an Empire, you want to give everyone in the empire a stake in it.  The Romans understood this; they would make anyone a citizen of Rome.  Even the Apostle Paul was a Roman citizen. The Austro-Hungarians might have survived and not needed a brisk little war to shore up the empire, if they had worked harder on giving everyone in the empire a fair shake.  Second,  you want to require assent from everyone in the country before going to war or taking steps that lead to war.  If  approval in the Reichstag and in the foreign ministry had been required for the infamous "blank check" that Wilhelm II issued to the Austro Hungarians, it would not have approved.  And WWI would have been avoided. 

NLRB claims workers need approval to unionize?

This came up in respects to the "unionize college football players" hooray.  The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) granted permission to the players to form a union.
   Eh?  I thought anyone could form a union.  "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to peaceably assemble... "  First Amendment.  Forming a union, I call that peaceable assembly.  Why should government approval be needed for that?  Of course the Obama people think that government approval is needed for breathing, eating, and drinking. 
   Not that I am in favor of changing college athletes from students who do sports to workers for pay.  What does need to be looked into is the current deal.  Playing sports in return for an all expenses paid degree is a fair deal.  But if the player fails to gain the degree, that's a swindle. I don't know just what the athlete graduation rate is, but if it's less than 95%, heads ought to roll.  Granted, the kinds of kids that go out for football and basketball (jocks we used to call 'em) are not the most promising students.  But with decent guidance, some tutoring, and some serious motivation, they ought to graduate.  "You can't play unless you have a C average" is serious motivation.  
 

Running for US Senate in the Northwoods

.  Jeanne Shaheen had a prominent piece on the Littleton Courier's editorial page last week complaining that Scott Brown won't sign an agreement to limit out-of-state political contributions. Which is interesting inside baseball, but it doesn't really matter to me.  I care about what the candidate, if elected, might do for me, rather than where his/her campaign money comes from.  With Scott Brown, I figure I'm getting a reasonably dependable vote against Obamacare.  With Jeanne Shaheen, I know she cast the vote that gave us Obamacare.  This is the stuff that matters, what the candidate[s] did, or might do, in office.  Whether the candidate raises out-of-state money or not just doesn't matter.  At least not to me. 

   And let's be real, Scott Brown undoubtedly has a whole bunch of Massachusetts friends who just might chip in a little money to his campaign up here.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  After all, I sent Scott a modest campaign contribution back when he was running for Senate from Massachusetts.      

Fantasy Model Railroading

Model railroad hobbyists used to be sticklers for prototype accuracy.  The models had to match the prototype exactly, and long discussions would ensue among hobbyists regarding such matters as the proper style of headlamp on this or that type of steam engine, or the proper shade of paint  for certain rail cars. But, hobbyists would be more fanatical fans of certain railroads,  more fanatical than baseball fans. 
   And so, we now have model companies offering models of up to the minute locomotives painted for railroads that went out of business generations ago.  Truly fantasy modeling. 
   My latest copy of Model Railroader contains an ad for ultra modern GM and GE diesel locomotives painted in the tuscan-with-five-gold stripes scheme of the Pennsylvania RR and the green and cream scheme of the Erie RR.  Both the Pennsy and the Erie went out of business in the 1960's.  The locomotive models didn't go into production until the 1990s.  Talk about anachronisms.  Oh well, its a hobby.

Retraining airline pilots

Fundamental duty of a pilot is to keep the plane in the air.  "Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down" the truckers say.   When an aircraft slows down, the air flowing over the wings slows down, reducing the lift.  To keep the plane in the air, you pitch the nose up, tilting the wings up (increasing the angle of attack) which makes the wings take a bigger bite of the air.  This can go on for quite some time, but sooner or later, the wing stalls, airflow becomes turbulent, lift vanishes, and the plane falls out of the sky.  This is a stall.  They have been known since Wilbur and Orville's time, and they are very dangerous.  If the plane keeps falling, it will hit the ground.
   In 2009 there were three bad fatal airline accidents, all caused when the aircraft stalled, the pilot was unable to recover, and the plane hit the ground.  In all three cases, the pilot's failed to fly out of the stall.  You fly out by pushing the stick forward, lowering the nose, trading off some altitude for speed.  The extra speed gives you more lift,  the reduced angle of attack reduces drag, which makes you go faster.  The worst case was the Air France crash in the South Atlantic.  With three pilots on the flight deck, they had the stick pulled full back right up until the plane hit the water.  Not one of the three pilots attempted to push the stick forward, get the nose down, and get some airspeed. 
   Investigation found that stall recovery pilot training emphasized adding power and not losing any altitude, rather than putting the nose down to gain speed.  Trouble with the add power strategy is simple, the engines probably don't have enough power to increase airspeed much.  By the time the aircraft is close to stalling, it already has pitched up quite a bit, increasing the angle of attack, which increases drag as well as lift.  The engines of airliners don't have the kind of power you find in fighter planes, they lack the power to accelerate the plane at high angles of attack.  In USAF we called this "Getting behind the power curve". 
   Anyhow, the industry is revamping pilot training, telling the pilots to push the stick forward, get some airspeed, and accept a loss of altitude.