Things said and not said last night.

Hillary got going big on solar panels last night.  She claimed that solar panels were going to pull the country out of Great Depression 2.0 
   She is too stupid to understand that solar panels are a total waste of money.  They don't give juice after the sun goes down.  I need my juice to stay on all night.  Without juice my furnace won't run, and my pipes freeze in the winter.  Electric stove doesn't work, electric hot water goes away.   I can fake it for lights with kerosene lamps, but I gotta have the furnace in the winter.  Winter lasts a long time up here.  Without electricity the house becomes uninhabitable. 
   Which means no matter how many solar panels we put in, the good old electric company, PSNH or Eversource, has to build real power plants, enough of them to carry the entire load.  The bulk of my outrageous electric bill goes to pay the mortgages on the various power plants that keep my juice on all night.  And no amount of solar panels saves me a nickel on plant construction.  And, some of it goes to pay money to solar panel buyers, "net metering" they call it.  The cost of fuel, coal, natural gas, uranium is small compared to the cost of building the plant in the first place.  The solar panel juice supplied during the day just costs me money, it doesn't furnish dependable overnight electricity.
   Any how, a President Hillary who believes that solar panels are a worthwhile expense, is too ignorant of the real world to lead the country out of Great Depression 2.0.
   Both Hillary and The Donald came out in favor of more cyber security.  Neither of them mentioned the root of all cyber hacking, namely Windows.  Windows is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.  Middle school kids can hack Windows. 

So I survived the first presidential debate.

Nobody made a fatal gaffe.  Both of them did OK.  Hillary stood up straight, didn't cough, didn't suffer a medical emergency.  The Donald did OK, stayed on point, didn't get sidetracked, or start insulting other people.  Hillary told five or six real whoppers, and Trump let her get away with them.  The post debate spinners are hard at it as I write this.  Both of them used a lot of that vague feelgood meaningless language so popular with politicians. 
   I'll score this one as a draw. 

Flying on a wing and a tube

Going back nearly to the beginning of flight, airplanes have been a tubular fuselage help up by a center mounted wing.  Empennage at the tail kept the aircraft flying straight, the way the feathers on an arrow do.  After airliners were pressurized, the fuselage became truly round, to withstand the pressure.  And the long tubular fuselage offers a window at every seat.  The window view is cherished by passengers and the overall lightness in the cabin helps reassure claustrophobic passengers. 
   Aerodynamics whines that the big fuselage contributes no lift, just drag.  The ideal design would be a flying wing, like the B2 Spirit bomber, where all the metal of the airframe contributes lift.  And every few months Aviation Week will run a classy looking future airliner picture, either a pure flying wing, or a "blended wing body" a flying wing with a swelling in the middle to form the passenger compartment. 
    What they don't talk about is windows.  The passenger compartment has to be a tube shape to hold the pressure.  If you just pressurized the whole flying wing, or the blended wing body, it would go "pop".  In fact we had that happen on a long obsolete Air Force transport, the C-133.  So the zippy future airliners don't get windows, or window seats, because windows in the pressurized passenger compartment would just look out into the insides of the wing, full of girders and fuel tanks and wire bundles and "stuff".  No daylight, no view of the ground,  no relief for claustrophobes. 
   And, IMHO, that is why zippy flying wing airliners will remain on the pages of Aviation Week rather than on the flight line.  I don't think airlines will buy them. 

Mount Washington Cog Railway

Mt. Washington, at 6288 feet, is the highest mountain in the East.  Way back in 1869 an enterpreneur raised the money to run a steam railroad all the way to the summit.  A fairly impressive feat of engineering, especially for 1869.  It's still running today.  The grades are so steep that they ran a rack up between the rails, and the locomotives have a big cogwheel that mates with the rack and pushes the train up the hill. Which is why we call it The Cog today. 
   Up until 2000, the old time fleet of tiny steam engines did the work.  Then they started building smallish diesel locomotives to do most of the work.  They still run steam on the first train of the day, but every thing else is pulled by the 21st century putt-putts.  So we (me and youngest son) got up at 0'dark thirty this morning to catch the steam run.
  It's cool.  The cars are pure wood, in nice condition.  Takes an hour to climb to the summit.  Speed is walking pace.  Weather was good, sun, and some clouds scudding over the summit.  It was summer weather in the parking lot, but there was frost at the summit.  Great views would open up as a cloud blew by, and fade into whiteness as the next cloud blew in.
   A fun trip.  A bit pricey ($69 a ticket) but worth it, just once.   

Win 10 Megapatch

Windows Update got to work on Win update 1607 this morning.  It took 6 hours to download the patch. That's as long as it took to download all of Win 10 a few months ago.  This patch must amount to changing all the code in Win 10.  After the download it spend another couple hours "installing" itself.  Massive.  Hope it works. 
  

Flushing Greece down the drain.

Way back when, Greece was a bumbling, but no more so than many places, small country.  It had allowed far too many people to hold government jobs, it promised fat pensions to all sorts of people, and it allowed massive tax evasion. 
  Each year the government found it was paying out far more than it was taking in with taxes.  And back in those carefree days before the Euro,  Greece made payroll by simply printing Drachmas as needed.  This caused the Drachma to sink on the foreign exchanges, but no body really cared much.
   Then Brussels invented the Euro.  International currency, run by the Germans, and solid as the US dollar.  Lots of prestige for countries allowed onto the Euro.  And, the Greeks wanted to go on the Euro for the coolness and the prestige of it.  They begged and pleaded and cooked their books to look more solvent than they really were.  And the Europeans let the Greeks into the  Euro, mostly 'cause they all felt sorry for the struggling Greeks and didn't want to slam the Euro door on them.  
   Well, now when the payments exceeded tax revenues, Greece could no longer print the necessary money.  Now they had to borrow the shortfall from banks.  And Europe was full of sucker banks, who would loan money to Greece, thinking that a Euro country was good for it, and even if they weren't, the IMF or the ECB, or someone would guarantee the loans.  Whereas any one of any sense would see that the Greeks were never gonna make enough money to pay the loans off.  Sucker banks have no sense. 
  Sure enough, a few years go by, and Greece cannot make payments on the loans.  And for no good reason the IMF bailed them out in 2010, and again in 2015.  Each bailout came with firm instructions to cut expenses  ("austerity").  Each time the Greeks failed to cut much.  And now the Greeks are broke, business is terrible, unemployment is way up, things are bad, and the Greeks are blaming it all on the lenders. 
   What should have happened, back in 2010, instead of a bailout, the Europeans should have just let Greece sink.  That would have caused Greece to default on her loans.  And after a default, even sucker banks are not going to make new loans.  The money would have gone away, and the Greek government would have had to lay off a lot of government workers, and start collecting its taxes.  And the Europeans would have saved them selves a lot of grief and ill will, not to say a lot of money. 

Words of the Weasel Part 45

Weasels say "faith based organizations"  just to avoid saying the word "church"