A good idea. As it is now, they start the primary season better than a year before the elections. And things change in the course of a year. Candidates that looked good a year out, often look less good on election day. And the ceaseless inane TV coverage gets tiresome. And the year long ordeal drives off good candidates. I mean what sane person wants to give up a year of his life, to be on the road constantly, making the same speech over and over again? To say nothing of making himself and his family targets for the MSM.
Far as I am concerned, a three month primary, say April, May, and June, followed by a convention to ratify the primary elections in late June early July, followed by a summer and a fall to patch up wounds inflicted in the primary, and campaign against the other party, instead of campaigning against people in your own party.
Of course the newsies love primaries and wish they would last forever. Primary campaigns require no knowledge of anything to write a story. Just report the poll numbers and then opine about why so and so is ahead or behind. No more challenging than writing about baseball games or horse races. Newsies love this kind of simple story, 'cause most of 'em don't understand anything complicated.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
Penny Ante at Fox News
Fox TV News was complaining about pork in the recently passed "continuing resolution" that funds the government for the next few months. And rightly so. In a bill the funds the entire US government, there are plenty of diark corners to hide pork. Like who can read a thousand pages of legalistic gooble-de-gook?
But, all pork that Fox can cite is some penny ante stuff, mere 10's of millions of dollars a year. That's chicken feed. Stick with Everett Dirksen's famus quote, "A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money". Skip the mere million dollar scams.
And I can think of lots of them. How about $27 billion subsidies to farmers? How about about the huge (but secret) NSA budget? How about the TSA spending? How about ethanol in gasoline? How about the Space Launch System, a new NASA rocket booster that duplicates the performance of TWO existing rocket boosters. How about the highway bills, billions to road contractors, that should properly be paid by the states in which those roads run. How about "Nextgen", a vastly expensive program to replace the current air traffic control system with a satellite based one.
Fox has a point about "continuing resolutions", but they need to pick up on some real examples. Skip the chicken feed.
But, all pork that Fox can cite is some penny ante stuff, mere 10's of millions of dollars a year. That's chicken feed. Stick with Everett Dirksen's famus quote, "A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money". Skip the mere million dollar scams.
And I can think of lots of them. How about $27 billion subsidies to farmers? How about about the huge (but secret) NSA budget? How about the TSA spending? How about ethanol in gasoline? How about the Space Launch System, a new NASA rocket booster that duplicates the performance of TWO existing rocket boosters. How about the highway bills, billions to road contractors, that should properly be paid by the states in which those roads run. How about "Nextgen", a vastly expensive program to replace the current air traffic control system with a satellite based one.
Fox has a point about "continuing resolutions", but they need to pick up on some real examples. Skip the chicken feed.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Some smoke, no fire
Boeing's mods to the 787 battery system are at least partially successful. On 14 Jan, this year, A JAL 787 started to smoke while standing on the ramp. A single cell in the eight cell main battery got in trouble, heated up, and vented. The main part of the 787 mods was a fireproof metal battery box vented overboard. That part worked fine, the overheated cell did not touch off the rest of the cells in the battery, the ovrheating/fire was contained inside the new battery box. Not clear is the effects of such a failure in flight. Depends upon the flight I suppose. If the engines keep running, the engine driven alternators will supply plenty of juice. If we have first a battery failure, and then total engine failure, will the batteries ( there are two of them) have enough juice to get the gear and flaps down, power the radio, and keep the cockpit instrument lights alive? And keep the fancy fly-by-wire system working?
Anyhow, doesn't look like they have licked the battery bursts into fire problem, but the battery box is strong enough to contain the fire.
Anyhow, doesn't look like they have licked the battery bursts into fire problem, but the battery box is strong enough to contain the fire.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
U2 vs Global Hawk. U2 is winning the funding
The U2 recon manned recon aircraft has been flying for a long time. It became famous in the the 1950's when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, flying a secret photo recon mission, violating Russian airspace big time. U2 is still flying. It's main claim to fame is fantastic altitude capability, 70,000 feet or better. Few fighters can reach that high.
A new fangled competitor is a drone, Northrup Grumman's Global Hawk, a big drone with a bulbous nose. For a while the high tech drone looked to replace the vintage U2 for photo recon. But this fiscal year the Pentagon changed it's mind, it wants to dump Global Hawk and keep flying the U2.
One argument is Global Hawk now has a lower cost per flying hour. Used to be, both U2 and Global Hawk cost about $33,000 per hour to fly. Last year, Global Hawk claimed to have reduced its cost per flyng hour to $25,000. This is attributed to an INCREASE in Global Hawk flying hours.
This makes me think the computation of cost per flying hour is too crude to be much use. It doesn't get cheaper when you fly more. What's gotta be happening is they divided FIXED costs by flying hours. In this case, yeah cost per flying hour goes down. They largest fixed cost is the money spent to buy the drone in the first place. They probably just assume a 20 year service life, and tack on a fixed cost per year of 5% of the acquisition cost (depreciation) . That's crude.
The drones have a fatigue life, the number of flying hours before stress and vibration cause dangerous cracking of the structure. The proper depreciation should be the acquisition cost pro rated by the percent of airframe hours used up. Fly more and your depreciation goes up.
One thing about Global Hawk, it ain't all that reliable. Last year 55% of Global Hawk missions were canceled. Whereas only 4% of U2 missions were scrubbed.
A new fangled competitor is a drone, Northrup Grumman's Global Hawk, a big drone with a bulbous nose. For a while the high tech drone looked to replace the vintage U2 for photo recon. But this fiscal year the Pentagon changed it's mind, it wants to dump Global Hawk and keep flying the U2.
One argument is Global Hawk now has a lower cost per flying hour. Used to be, both U2 and Global Hawk cost about $33,000 per hour to fly. Last year, Global Hawk claimed to have reduced its cost per flyng hour to $25,000. This is attributed to an INCREASE in Global Hawk flying hours.
This makes me think the computation of cost per flying hour is too crude to be much use. It doesn't get cheaper when you fly more. What's gotta be happening is they divided FIXED costs by flying hours. In this case, yeah cost per flying hour goes down. They largest fixed cost is the money spent to buy the drone in the first place. They probably just assume a 20 year service life, and tack on a fixed cost per year of 5% of the acquisition cost (depreciation) . That's crude.
The drones have a fatigue life, the number of flying hours before stress and vibration cause dangerous cracking of the structure. The proper depreciation should be the acquisition cost pro rated by the percent of airframe hours used up. Fly more and your depreciation goes up.
One thing about Global Hawk, it ain't all that reliable. Last year 55% of Global Hawk missions were canceled. Whereas only 4% of U2 missions were scrubbed.
Cannon Mt Ski Weather
It was 8 below this morning. Not a flake of snow. The snow all fell in Boston.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Electro Magnetic Pulse EMP
EMP, something discovered in the late 1950s. Consider a nuclear bomb. Several tons of uranium or plutonium and casework and whatever. Detonate it. The furious energy of the atomic detonation blows all the electrons off the atoms comprising the bomb, and immediate surroundings. Turns them into charged ions, and blows them away at supersonic speed. This is a massive moving electric charge, which creates a massive magnetic field that spreads out from the detonation site at the speed of light. Such a field will induce massive electric currents into any conductor that it encounters. Other doomsayers worry that solar flares or "coronal mass ejections" can do the same thing. They point to the 1850's Carrington event, a solar flare so strong that telegraph wires sizzled and crackled with sparks in telegraph offices, scaring the bejezus out of telegraph operators.
The fear is, that such currents will melt wires, arc over insulators, trip circuit breakers, melt transformers and destroy alternators. Wreaking the electric power grid, the internet, the wired phone system, the cell phone system, stereos, TVs, Ipads, everything electric or electronic and hurl our civilization back into a dark age, lit only by fire.
Not to worry. The millions of miles of wire hanging from poles, all across the continent, get struck by lightning, every minute of every day. A single lightning strike stresses electrical systems to the limit. Lightning will arc over any insulator, and fry anything. Half a century ago, every summer lightning storm would knock out the electric power. Well, over the half century since then, the power companies have hardened their systems. My lights stay on, unless a windstorm drops a tree on the wires and breaks them. Local damage, sure. My mother's home took a lightning hit a few summers ago. Blew out her satellite receiver, her DVD player, and few other things. But the electric lights survived, along with the furnace, the hot water heater, and the electric stove.
I don't believe any EMP event will ever be as bad as a lightning strike. We have hardened every thing against lightning strikes. They are probably safe against EMP events, be they hostile nukes, or solar flares.
The fear is, that such currents will melt wires, arc over insulators, trip circuit breakers, melt transformers and destroy alternators. Wreaking the electric power grid, the internet, the wired phone system, the cell phone system, stereos, TVs, Ipads, everything electric or electronic and hurl our civilization back into a dark age, lit only by fire.
Not to worry. The millions of miles of wire hanging from poles, all across the continent, get struck by lightning, every minute of every day. A single lightning strike stresses electrical systems to the limit. Lightning will arc over any insulator, and fry anything. Half a century ago, every summer lightning storm would knock out the electric power. Well, over the half century since then, the power companies have hardened their systems. My lights stay on, unless a windstorm drops a tree on the wires and breaks them. Local damage, sure. My mother's home took a lightning hit a few summers ago. Blew out her satellite receiver, her DVD player, and few other things. But the electric lights survived, along with the furnace, the hot water heater, and the electric stove.
I don't believe any EMP event will ever be as bad as a lightning strike. We have hardened every thing against lightning strikes. They are probably safe against EMP events, be they hostile nukes, or solar flares.
Cannon Mt Ski Weather
Nothing much. We got three, maybe four inches over the past four days. Last night got really cold. It was 4 below this morning. No snow, and the forecast is for no snow. All the snow is gonna fall in Boston according to the TV weather guys. It hasn't warmed up much, its only 4 about right now.
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