Mr Fusion under development at the Skunk Works

Well, it's bigger than the little white appliance on Doc Brown's De Lorean, but it's tiny compared to the ITER machine.  The photo in Aviation Week shows a barrel shaped device, maybe 4 feet in diameter and 10 feet long.  A cut away drawing shows superconducting magnetic coils wrapped around the device to contain the plasma.  The project is being done by Lockheed Martin, presumably on company money.  The project leader, Thomas McGuire, holder of a doctorate from MIT,  acknowledged a debt for some ideas from the Polywell project. 
Lockheed Martin has been in business for 80 years and is a pretty canny company.  They did the Lightning fighter of WWII, the Constellation airliner, the F104 (Chuck Yeager's favorite jet fighter) the cold war U2, the L1011 airliner, the SR71 Blackbird, the F22,  and recently they beat out Boeing for the F-35 project.  They know what they are doing.  They clearly think they can make Mr. Fusion (compact fusion reactor, CFR for short) work.  They are talking prototype in 2019 and production in 2024.
   The CFR project is just getting going.  They don't have any results, no evidence of neutron production, time or temperature achieved.   My electromagnetic field theory is no longer strong enough to even estimate whether their device can achieve fusion, so I am going by Lockheed's reputation.  If they think they can do it, they probably can. 

Ford comes thru

The TV news is reporting a massive recall (4.7 million cars) of nearly every make of car on the US markets.  Except Ford.  The problem is a defective airbag part that can explode and throw shrapnel thru the driver and passenger instead of inflating the airbag. The part is purchased from a parts house named Takata.
   I wonder how this happened?  Was Ford's quality control so effective that they refused to buy the Takata parts?  Were Ford buyers able to obtain a better price from some other supplier?  Was Ford just lucky? 
   Anyhow, as a Ford owner, and long time fan, I am OK with this. 

Winter is coming

Mt Lafayette. "Possible snow in higher elevations". 

Driving down to Beantown

Eldest son was in Boston on business, so I drove down to see him yesterday.  The good news, it only takes two and a half hours driving from Franconia to Logan.  Used to take three and a half a few years back.  Trusty Mercury does 80 mph, no sweat.  Car would be happy going even faster, but Driver worries about sneaky NH state troopers hiding in the center strip bushes.  So I keep it below 80. 
   Coming down from the north, the old Sumner Tunnel route off the Big Dig tunnel is shorter than the new tunnel from the Mass Pike.  Logan parking is ridiculous, $19 for two hours.  I parked on the roof of Terminal B, which is all covered with fancy solar cells.  I wonder how much they cost and what the payback time is.  Betcha the airport is using the $19 parking fees to pay off the solar cells. 
   So for old times sake we spent the day in Harvard Sq.  The Head of the Charles Regatta was on and the crowd was huge.  Much bigger than a few years ago.  So big we couldn't even get into Charlie's Kitchen.  The Sq hasn't changed much since last time I was there, all the nice places are still there, no new places groovy enough to catch my eye. 
   So I dropped eldest son off at a hotel on Atlantic Ave.  Drove right down Mass Ave, thru Central Sq, out Main St and crossed the Charles on the Longfellow Bridge (better known as the Make Way for Ducklings bridge).  Infrastructure fans will be glad to hear that Longfellow bridge is getting rebuilt.  The two inbound lanes are all tore up and closed, inbound traffic is rerouted on the outbound lanes and outbound traffic has to find another bridge.
   On the way home I checked out the NH Liquor Store on I93.  They been rebuilding it; it isn't all finished yet; but it is open to cars (only).  Truckers suck hind teat.  They now sell gas, big self service Irving station which was only $3.16 a gallon.  Cannon contributed one of the old Tramway cars which is mounted on display at the convenience store.  I looked at it, and I do think it's real, rather than a mockup.
   Stupid Beast was pleased to see me when I got home. 
  

Do we have anyone on active duty?

Anymore?   Obama wants to deploy 3000, maybe 4000, troops to West Africa to fight Ebola.  This morning NPR announced that Obama was mobilizing the reserves to raise enough troops for West Africa. 
   We don't have 3000 active duty troops fit to deploy overseas?  We have to call up reserves?  3000 troops ain't much.  What would happen if we got into a war with even a pip squeak country like Syria?  Do we have any active duty Army left? 

Antivirus on Win 8.1

Flatbeast, my new Win 8.1 laptop came with McAfee antivirus installed.  It was a freebie trial installation with a drop dead date.  Either pay up or it drops dead.  Although McAfee is good name in antivirus, that goes way back, back even before Windows, it's expensive, and slow and I have been having good results with Avast which is free. 
   So, when McAffee  dropped dead today, I uninstalled it.  What used to be "Add and Remove Programs" has been renamed to "Programs and Features" but the Microsofties didn't move it, it's still on the control panel where it ought to be.  Removal was a major effort, taking minutes and a reboot.  Uninstalling was like pulling dandelions, they will come up, but they don't want to. 
   So I downloaded the free AVAST, no sweat.
   So I checked on my RAM usage.  With McAfee installed, I had 1846 MB of RAM used.  After uninstalling McAfee RAM usage dropped to 1289 MB.  That's 557 MB worth of antivirus code that used to be hogging RAM.  That's a lot of code.  Flatbeast feels a bit more lively after removing all that baggage. 
   Installing AVAST pumped RAM usage back up to 1570 MB, which is still 270 MB better than McAfee.

Camera bearing laptop?

New laptop has one.  It's buried in the bezel, it only can see out when the lid is raised.  All it can see is my smiling face when I am using the machine.  There is an app to take a selfie for use as account photo.  I have much better selfies I took with a real camera on a tripod.  If there is an app to do video conferencing with it I haven't found it.  I cannot image using it to take pictures the way you do with an Ipad or a real camera. 
   I suppose it's there 'cause it's so cheap as makes no matter.  A couple of bucks for a chip, the lens is molded into the bezel so that's basically free. 
   There is a LED that comes on when the selfie app is running the camera.  I wonder if the LED is hardwired or software controlled.  Could an embarrassment app take a pix of me in my underwear and keep it secret by not turning on the LED?  Not that I work my computer in my underwear very often; it's too cold around here for that.
   Anyhow, to satisfy my paranoia, I placed a bit of masking tape over the lens.   Just in case NSA or KGB wants pix of my kitchen table.