NPR this morning said that 17.5 million new cars had been sold in 2015. Damn, that's a lotta wheels. There was a time, back in the 60s, when a 5 million car year was considered good. And consider that a car easily lasts 10 years these days. Keep up a 17.5 million a year sales rate for 10 years, and you have 175 million cars on the road. For a population of 300 and some million. That's a car for every two citizens.
Then the NPR greenies went on to wail about the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE). The sales figure are "cars and light trucks" and light trucks are selling well. The light trucks (SUVs count as light trucks), get about 20 mpg at best, the little econobox cars might get 35. Obama wants 50 mpg in a few years. I got news for him. We won't ever have a 50 mpg CAFE except by lying. We do some of that already, flex fuel (gasoline or alcohol) cars give the CAFE a big boost just by bureaucratic fiat.
Was I Detroit, I'd make all my production "flex fuel" because it's easy and cheap to do, and I get all sorts of CAFE improvement for every flex fuel vehicle produced. Just a little attention to gasket materials in the fuel system, using only gaskets that are alcohol proof, a bit more code in the microprocessor to recognize the fuel and for alcohol program the injectors to throw in a good deal more than for gasoline, and presto chango, I have a flex fuel vehicle. Good for a 20 mph bump in my CAFE.
Friday, January 8, 2016
Thursday, January 7, 2016
Particles: Nova's story of the Higgs Boson and Large Hadron Collider
Nova on NPR ran this show. The subject matter is fascinating, the mysterious "God Particle", the biggest particle accelerator ever built. Claims to discover the basis of "the standard model" or the fundamentals of space time.
The TV show had a lot of shots of physicists and bigwigs partying and drinking champagne to celebrate major milestones. Some cool shots of big pipes running down endless tunnels. Shots of physicists bicycling to and from work.
It did not explain what the Higgs boson is, or why we expected it to exist. No mention of the boson's mass, electric charge, spin, lifetime, or how we would detect one, should one form. No discussion of the accelerator, what keeps the particle beam on course running down the pipes. No discussion of what fields are used to accelerate the particles down the 50 mile radius particle racetrace. No mention of how close to the speed of light the particle speed reached. No mention of how the accelerator compensated for the growth of particle mass as the speed of light is approached. No mention of what particles were accelerated, I assume protons, but it would be nice to know. CERN had a serious accident in the early days, the particle beam came off the track and burned a hole thru the wall of the vacuum chamber. They didn't bother to show the damaged piece of pipe up close. The camera swept over a stack of pipes, one of them was burned black on the outside, but that was it.
They interviewed a number of the physicists, but they all talked about metaphysics, what it means, what it might mean, the goodness of doing it. That ain't science. Science is observations and measurements tied together with theory. Nobody talked science.
Really too bad. I guess the TV show producers know little science themselves , and don't care much about it.
The TV show had a lot of shots of physicists and bigwigs partying and drinking champagne to celebrate major milestones. Some cool shots of big pipes running down endless tunnels. Shots of physicists bicycling to and from work.
It did not explain what the Higgs boson is, or why we expected it to exist. No mention of the boson's mass, electric charge, spin, lifetime, or how we would detect one, should one form. No discussion of the accelerator, what keeps the particle beam on course running down the pipes. No discussion of what fields are used to accelerate the particles down the 50 mile radius particle racetrace. No mention of how close to the speed of light the particle speed reached. No mention of how the accelerator compensated for the growth of particle mass as the speed of light is approached. No mention of what particles were accelerated, I assume protons, but it would be nice to know. CERN had a serious accident in the early days, the particle beam came off the track and burned a hole thru the wall of the vacuum chamber. They didn't bother to show the damaged piece of pipe up close. The camera swept over a stack of pipes, one of them was burned black on the outside, but that was it.
They interviewed a number of the physicists, but they all talked about metaphysics, what it means, what it might mean, the goodness of doing it. That ain't science. Science is observations and measurements tied together with theory. Nobody talked science.
Really too bad. I guess the TV show producers know little science themselves , and don't care much about it.
Washing Windows 8, yet again
Killing off crapware, specifically hpservice.exe. This baby shows up in Task Manager as a "process", ie a program loaded into ram and running, but does not show a window to control it or observe results. I tried to DISABLE it in task managers startup tab. Did not work, when I powered up next day hpservice.exe was still running. Net searching had told me that hpservice.exe was not a regular Windows service but just got loaded by a key in the registry. So I started up regedit (more difficult to do in Win 8 than in XP) and searched for a key that said "run" or "runonce" and the hpservice.exe name. No dice. Could not find the desired key let alone zap it.
Went back to Task Manager, and yup, the SOB was still there, big as life. Some fumbling around and I tried "Control Panel"," Administrative Tools", "Services" And there it was, a service, set to "AUTOMATIC" start, which means load and run every time the computer boots up. I changed that to "DISABLED".
I checked for hpservices in Task Manager this morning, and he is dead and gone.
Moral of story: Don't believe everything you see on the net.
And, Win 8 works just fine without hpservice.exe.
Went back to Task Manager, and yup, the SOB was still there, big as life. Some fumbling around and I tried "Control Panel"," Administrative Tools", "Services" And there it was, a service, set to "AUTOMATIC" start, which means load and run every time the computer boots up. I changed that to "DISABLED".
I checked for hpservices in Task Manager this morning, and he is dead and gone.
Moral of story: Don't believe everything you see on the net.
And, Win 8 works just fine without hpservice.exe.
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Do the NORKS have the H-bomb?
And does it matter? The first fission bombs used in WWII had a yield that changed over time. Up until recently the yield was "classified" but all writers said it was 20,000 tons (20KT) of TNT equivalent. Recently, after declassification of 70 year old work, the yield is now given as 12 KT. These two plain straight fission bombs each leveled a city, with a severe damage radius of a couple of miles. This is so bad, that it doesn't really matter if you have more powerful bombs. A 20 KT yield fission bomb is so terrible that bigger bombs aren't that much more terrible.
As a cold war stunt, the hydrogen bomb, a fission-fusion device was developed. This device used a fission bomb's heat as a trigger to set off a hydrogen fusion reaction, boosting yield to 1000 KT (a megaton MT) And for a while in the 1950's the Americans and the Russians would exchange bragging rights to the greatest yield. In actual fact, a yield of 100KT is enough to do anything that is needful. The Minuteman missile warheads were all 100KT devices at a time when 1000 KT H-bombs were available.
So now to the NORKS. They have been doing nuclear testing for some years now. The first test was so puny (1KT) that we didn't really believe they had nukes until radioactive fallout was detected in the atmosphere, the seismic signal was so weak as make us doubt the NORKS had done anything at all.
So this morning, the NORKS claimed to have tested an H-bomb. But the seismic signal was still pretty weak, about 6 KT yield, less than the Hiroshima fission bomb of 70 years ago. Color me unimpressed. Might have been a fizzle, where the fission bomb trigger went off but the hydrogen fusion reaction did not light off. I don't think it's an H-bomb until the yield reaches 1000 KT, which is a long way from 6 KT.
As a cold war stunt, the hydrogen bomb, a fission-fusion device was developed. This device used a fission bomb's heat as a trigger to set off a hydrogen fusion reaction, boosting yield to 1000 KT (a megaton MT) And for a while in the 1950's the Americans and the Russians would exchange bragging rights to the greatest yield. In actual fact, a yield of 100KT is enough to do anything that is needful. The Minuteman missile warheads were all 100KT devices at a time when 1000 KT H-bombs were available.
So now to the NORKS. They have been doing nuclear testing for some years now. The first test was so puny (1KT) that we didn't really believe they had nukes until radioactive fallout was detected in the atmosphere, the seismic signal was so weak as make us doubt the NORKS had done anything at all.
So this morning, the NORKS claimed to have tested an H-bomb. But the seismic signal was still pretty weak, about 6 KT yield, less than the Hiroshima fission bomb of 70 years ago. Color me unimpressed. Might have been a fizzle, where the fission bomb trigger went off but the hydrogen fusion reaction did not light off. I don't think it's an H-bomb until the yield reaches 1000 KT, which is a long way from 6 KT.
The 11th Commandment (again)
Somebody is running a lot of TV ads, on Fox News, trashing Marco Rubio for missing votes in Congress. The ads are sponsored and paid for by a PAC that I have never heard of before. ("Right to Rise"?) I assume this PAC is working for some other Republican candidate, but I have no idea which one.
Too bad the MSM doesn't take a look at this PAC and let us know who is really behind the "trash Rubio" movement. Of course doing a story like that would require getting off their butts and going out on the streets and doing some digging. It's easier to just read the poll results over the air, and do a bit of pontificating.
Postscript:
I just googled on Right to Rise and got some hits. Wikipedia called Right to Rise a JEB Bush super PAC.
Too bad the MSM doesn't take a look at this PAC and let us know who is really behind the "trash Rubio" movement. Of course doing a story like that would require getting off their butts and going out on the streets and doing some digging. It's easier to just read the poll results over the air, and do a bit of pontificating.
Postscript:
I just googled on Right to Rise and got some hits. Wikipedia called Right to Rise a JEB Bush super PAC.
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Washing Windows 8 (yet again)
Today's first crapware kill is hpmsgsvc.exe, This is an HP program, not Micro$oft. Web searching returned a lot of hits, but few of the hits actually knew anything about hpmsgsvc. It's been around for a good while. Fair number of hits talked about troubles back in Windows 7, where hpmsgsvc would go crazy and hog all the available CPU time. The few knowledgeable hits say the hpmsgsvc is a kludge that lets you "hook" a program to a function key so that you can start that program for just touching one key. Why anyone would want to do that, it's an ancient DOS idea, is unclear. If I want to set a program for easy start, I just put its icon (a shortcut) on my desktop, and then the program will start with the click of the mouse.
Hpmsgsrv is NOT a regular Windows service, which means you cannot kill it off with the Administrative Tools Service manager. I killed it with Task Manager. The old three finger salute (control-alt-delete) still works to bring up task manager. Hpmsgsrv in in the process list only it tries to hide itself under the name hpservices. No matter. STOP shuts down the copy in RAM. Select the "Startup" tab in task manager and set hpservice to Disabled. Underneath hpservices is a second bit of crapware calling itself "Hp Smart Adapter". He is now gone too. Web searching tells me that HP Smart Adaptor was nagware that specialized in selling you genuine HP accessories. I don't need that either.
I will have to check tomorrow that the "disable" in task manager really works. If it fails and lets hpmsgsvc come back to life, I plan to go after it with regedit. According to web sources, a Run key in the registry starts hpmsgsrv. If necessary I will use the search function in regedit to locate and then zap a registry key that contains "run" and the program name (hpservices.com). This probably won't be necessary, task manager is supposed to have done all this, but just in case a new Micro$oft feature doesn't work, I have a backup plan.
Hpmsgsrv is NOT a regular Windows service, which means you cannot kill it off with the Administrative Tools Service manager. I killed it with Task Manager. The old three finger salute (control-alt-delete) still works to bring up task manager. Hpmsgsrv in in the process list only it tries to hide itself under the name hpservices. No matter. STOP shuts down the copy in RAM. Select the "Startup" tab in task manager and set hpservice to Disabled. Underneath hpservices is a second bit of crapware calling itself "Hp Smart Adapter". He is now gone too. Web searching tells me that HP Smart Adaptor was nagware that specialized in selling you genuine HP accessories. I don't need that either.
I will have to check tomorrow that the "disable" in task manager really works. If it fails and lets hpmsgsvc come back to life, I plan to go after it with regedit. According to web sources, a Run key in the registry starts hpmsgsrv. If necessary I will use the search function in regedit to locate and then zap a registry key that contains "run" and the program name (hpservices.com). This probably won't be necessary, task manager is supposed to have done all this, but just in case a new Micro$oft feature doesn't work, I have a backup plan.
Monday, January 4, 2016
The 11th Commandment
"Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican" Attributed to Ronald Reagan. Well with a dozen candidates going for the Republican nomination there is gonna be a few sharp elbows thrown. But, if you are gonna violate Reagan's 11th commandment, you oughta make it over something real.
Right now we got Republicans trashing other Republicans for missing votes in Congress. If you are running for president you gotta get your butt out of Washington and go meet voters out in the real world beyond the DC beltway. If you do that, you will miss some votes inside the Beltway. To criticize candidates for campaigning is pure BS. If you wanna trash somebody, find a real issue.
Right now we got Republicans trashing other Republicans for missing votes in Congress. If you are running for president you gotta get your butt out of Washington and go meet voters out in the real world beyond the DC beltway. If you do that, you will miss some votes inside the Beltway. To criticize candidates for campaigning is pure BS. If you wanna trash somebody, find a real issue.
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