Infrastructure. Need for

The state of New York has been neglecting road maintenance for years and doubtless could use a nice big federal handout to fill some potholes.  It's really noticable driving down thru the eastern states.  Roads in New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and others are in fine shape.  Cross the New York border and the pot holes attack.  Many of the TV commentators (those that are not working from DC) are stationed in New York City.  They have to drive on New York's beat up roads every day.  They seldom get out of New York into real America and so they think that all the roads in America are as bad as New York roads.  

   So, now that Biden is appeasing the road contractors and welfare recipients with a big juicy federal "infrastructure" bill, the TV people are all in favor, even when the "infrastructure" bill is nearing $4 TRILLION and is mostly welfare spending and not anything you or I would recognize as infrastructure.

    Anyhow the TV people are talking about the infrastructure bill and how we ought to pass it. 

Covid vaccines and masks

 The only thing masks do is contain that spray of yuckiness should you sneeze or cough.  They don't protect you, they do protect people around you.  If you have had your shots (two in most cases)  you won't spread Corona virus because the vaccine has killed it off in your system.  The only reason to wear one after vaccinations is to make the people around you feel safer.  For grade school kids, this doesn't really matter, the kids don't believe that they will catch corona virus.  And they are largely correct in this belief.

  As far as the people who don't/won't get vaccinated, let 'em.  All they are doing is exposing them selves to infection.  We should encourage them to get vaccinated, but if they are hard core in their beliefs that the vaccine might harm them, so be it.

Car ads on facebook that fail

 My trusty Buick is up to 99K miles, I plan to drive it til it drops, but I been taking an interest in car ads, just to see what's out there now that Detroit has stopped making sedans. And just in case trusty Buik drops dead tomorrow.

Used to be, facebook would show a picture of a nice car and I would click on it and get to see some more photos, some specs like engine power and displacement, availability of a stick shift, price, how many does it seat, stuff like that.  Now, all I get amounts to Google searches on the car name pointing to dealers who want to deal.  Not very interesting, I am not at the stage of wanting to make a deal, yet. 

And some of the nifty car pictures don't work out.  Nissan has been running ads showing a low sleek sedan "Nissan Rogue" they call it.  Clicking on the racy photo gets me to a dowdy SUV rather than the racy looking sedan. 

More Global Warming. I light the fireplace in mid July

 It's cold, it's overcast, it's threatening rain, and I am cold.  I light the fire.  Very warming and cheerful.  So much for summer warmth in the up country.  Must be global warming.  They blame it for everything these days.

Latest radar goes into F16 vintage jet fighter.

 Nice color photo in Aviation Week shows them mounting the Raytheon APF-79(V) 4 phased radar in the nose of the F16.  The array elements are gallium nitride which yields more power than the older gallium arsenide technology.  A phased array can generate a good tight radar beam.  If all the array elements are excited simultaneously, the beam goes out straight ahead.  If array elements on one side are excited a little bit earlier than elements on the other side, the beam goes out angled toward the early side.  Some trigonometry will show that the beam can be steered thru 90 degrees, which is about as good as the older technology could mechanically scan a parabolic antenna.  Major benny of the phased array is speed of scan.  The beam can be deflected from hard over left to hard over right in a millisecond.  It is fast enough to track multiple targets.

 The accompanied write up skipped a few things that I would have liked to know.  How much power can the new gallium nitride elements deliver?  The airborne radar I used to work on used a cavity magnetron to generate 50 kilowatts of X-band (10,000 MHz) power.  That radar could reach out 200 miles.  I don’t expect a single gallium nitride element to generate that kind of power, but I sure would like to know how much power all the elements in the phased array can generate.

Biden badmouths China for hacking Microsoft email servers

 This is is front page news on the Wall St Journal for Tuesday.  The US has indicted four Chinese nationals, three of them identified as Ministry of State Security (MSS) officials, for hacking Microsoft Exchange service going back ten years.   The fourth individual worked at a Chinese front company that aided in the hacking.  Apparently the hack allowed China to read all the email on Microsoft Exchange servers going back ten years.  

  I would suggest anyone running Microsoft Exchange look for some other email server.  We must suspect the Microsoft had the Windows software people, creators of the most insecure operating system in the world, do the code for Microsoft Exchange Server.  

My other suggestion to all is to consider email to be compromised.  Never put anything in email that you would not want to post on the bulletin board down at the local supermarket.  Use a phone call, or go out to the customers site rather than expose damaging data by email. 

An Olympics with no spectators in the stands????

 They are gonna do it in Tokyo.  The very recent discoveries of athletes coming down with Corona virus after traveling to Tokyo and settling into Olympic athlete quarters was unnerving.  Not disclosed by the ever clueful  MSM, did these poor athletes actually get sick?  Or did they merely test positive even though they did not show any symptoms.  Some (perhaps all?) of the tests are very trigger happy, and have called a lot of perfectly well people to be infected with Corona virus.  False positives the medics call it.