The Russians are coming

To Ukraine it looks like.  Ukraine in undergoing a revolution/civil war.  The Russians are mobilizing their army.  They call it "exercises" but it's mobilization, the troops are out in the field moving around, and it only takes a telephone call to send them over the border into Ukraine.  The Russians look upon Ukraine as historically Russian territory.  If it weren't for the strong and lasting reaction to a Ukraine Anschluss in Europe and America, they would have done it by now.  Putin surely thinks Ukraine will fall into his lap, without international repercussions if he just plays a waiting game. So the troops stay in Russia for the time being.  But that could change anytime. The Ukrainians have gotta be really worried, or perhaps scared to death, with the Russian army mobilized on their border. 

Do we really need PreK?

Pre Kindergarten education for four year olds.  Obama and DeBlasio have been plumping for it, calling for new taxes to pay for it.  Question: Does PreK education to any good?  Or are the kids just too young to get anything out of it?  Head Start, the federal preK program started by JFK, doesn't seem to do much good.  Studies show that any difference between Head Start kids and other kids is pretty much gone by third grade.  Parents do find that PreK solves the daycare problem nicely, but that's about it.
   Way back when, I have wonderful memories of playing out of doors with the Center St gang when I was 4 and 5.  Having to start school when I was 6 was a downer.  Playing with the gang beat sitting at a desk any day.  Do we have to coop kids up in school so young? 

Climate Change. What can't it do?

Cold and snowy winters, climate change.  Drought in the US southwest, more climate change.  Rain and flooding in Britain, climate change.  Hot and sticky summers , climate change,  Arctic ice cap melting out, climate change.  Arctic ice cap freezing over, climate change. 
   Climate change is like bacon, it's good with everything. They used to call it Global Warming, except the Goddard Institute of Space Studies data shows world temps stopped rising about 1990 or 1991.  So they changed over to calling it climate change.  No matter what happens it's change.  No hope, just evil change.
Call every bit of bad weather around the world climate change and of course it's evil and needs to be fought. 
  Oh yes, and they can tax the heat, tax the electricity, subsidize battery powered cars, raise the price of gasoline,  demand real cars get 50 mpg, close down electric power plants,  and attempt to force us back to a Hiawatha life style. 

Helicopter falls out of the sky

Happened last November 29th in Glasgow, Scotland.  A police helicopter suffered twin engine failures, both engines quit, and the chopper fell onto the roof of a pub.  All three crewmen and seven patrons of the pub were killed.  Must have been quite a scene,  crowded pub, everyone hoisting beer mugs, and suddenly a helicopter busts thru the ceiling and crashes on the bar. 
   Accident investigation hasn't found anything useful.  Twin engine aircraft are not supposed to have both engines fail.  That's why there are two of 'em.  There was 5-6 gallons of fuel left in the tanks, enough to 10-15 minutes of flight.  Nothing wrong was found in either engine.  No radio distress calls were made.  The main and tail rotors had stopped turning by the time the helo hit the roof.  No evidence of an autorotation to a safe landing.  The chopper was just flying along, both engines stop, and it falls like a brick.  No one knows why.
  

So how big a US Army do we need?

First let look at what we might need the Army to do.  How about defending Israel from invasion?  How about doing regime change on Iran rather than allowing them to go nuclear?  How about staving off an invasion of South Korea?  Or, in the aftermath of a second Korean War, doing regime change in Pyongyang?  How about intervening in some armpit in Africa to prevent another genocide?  How about cleaning out pirate bases in Somalia?  How about intervention in the Balkans, or some East European armpit?
   I'm not saying that we ought to do any of these things, but I do think America needs the capability, just in case.  So what does it take to do the job?  We did Iraq with 140,000 troops deployed in country.  It would take more to deal with North Korea.  Let's say we need 200,000 soldiers on active duty, with maybe that many again in the reserves.  Modern war is quick, you gotta run what you brung.  There is not time to enlist and train troops, the war is over before that happens. 
   Obama wants to cut the army down to 450,000 men.  Sounds like enough?  Dunno.  The 140,000 soldiers sent to Iraq were all combat troops, infantry, tankers, gunners.  Historically, the US Army has a ratio of tooth to tail of about 9 to1.  For every combat soldier carrying weapons in the face of the enemy there are nine support troops driving supply trucks, manning depots, cooking, doing paperwork, fixing jeeps, building schools and bridges, etc, etc, ad nauseum.  Based on past experience, a 450,000 man US Army might contain only 45,000 real soldiers, which clearly ain't enough. 
   In actual fact, American troops have plenty of experience in every line of work.  Men capable of fighting on the front line, are capable of doing pretty much anything else that might be needed.  I suggest that a lot of the specialists behind the lines could be re trained as infantry and sent to the front.   Regular units can do much of the work now done by specialists.  If we could get the ratio of tooth to tail down to maybe 2 to 1, then maybe 450,000 men might be enough. 
  

Mars has rivers

A lot of rivers.  We put a photo recon satellite, the Mars Global Surveyor, into orbit around Mars in 1997.  It carried wonderful cameras that returned zillions of sharp clear photographs of the Martian surface.  The best of the pictures are collected in a softback book "A travelers guide to Mars", William K. Hartmann.  Thumbing thru this book, the dried up river beds are striking, and there are  lot of 'em.  There is no question that they are rivers, even to my layman's eye they really look like rivers.  You can see deltas at the end of them where they flowed into ancient Martian seas.  Shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs
   Some of them flowed recently (like within the last 10 million years).  You can tell by counting meteor craters.  Old (going back to the formation of Mars) land is wall to wall craters.  New land, recent lava flows, has fewer craters, partly because they have had less time to accumulate meteor hits, and partly because the meteor hit rate has dropped off in more recent times.  The plentiful meteors at the time of solar system formation got swept up by planets over time.  Some of the rivers have no craters at all, which makes them very recent. 
   The unanswered question is, where did the water come from, and where did it go?  We have found a few dozen meteorites on Earth that we believe came from Mars. Some have been dated back to 4500 megayears (pretty much the formation of Mars) and some to as recently as 167 megayears.  All of them had been soaked in liquid water at some time in their past, as evidenced by deposits of water borne minerals in cracks and crevices.  So there was a lot of water on Mars, as recently as the youngest meteorites.  We think the water is still there, soaked into the soil and frozen. 
  We think Mars has been cold, and short on atmosphere, as it is today, for the last 3000 megayears.  So how did the water to form river beds as recently as 10 megayears ago come from?  No good answer has been proposed as of yet.  We think there is plenty of water frozen in the Martian soil, but how did it melt and flow on the surface?  No one knows. 
   We now think that Mars had open water, seas and rivers from the beginning, say 4500 megayears ago, until perhaps 3000 megayears ago.  That gives 1500 megayears for some kind of life to evolve in Martian seas.  Perhaps some such life still exists somewhere on Mars. 

Aerodynamic efficiency and the airliner of the future

Today's airliners are a long tubular fuselage, carrying the passengers and cargo atop a wing that does all the aerodynamic work, lifts, stability etc.  A good deal of sheet metal goes along just to carry the payload.  A more efficient design (illustrated on the cover of Aviation Week)  blends the wing and the fuselage into a single body, like the B2 flying wing bomber.  The B2 is as efficient as it gets, it's all wing, no structure is just along for the ride.  Fortunately the payload (iron bombs) is good and dense and doesn't take up much room inside the wing.  Passengers are not that dense. 
   So the blended wing Lockheed  design is a wing with a great swelling in the middle to accept a passenger cabin.  Trouble is, cabins have to be pressurized, which imposes enormous forces trying to blow the cabin open.  With only 5 pounds per square inch cabin pressure, over the 13 million square inches of a typical cabin, you get nearly 70 million pounds of force straining the cabin walls.  The only structure that can resist this is a round tube, like present day airliner fuselages.  So the Lockheed designers have a cylindrical passenger cabin buried inside their swoopy blended wing/body swelling.  Trouble is, we have many feet of space between the cabin wall and the outer skin.  Which makes cabin windows impossible.  Which doesn't bother the designers, cabin windows are a pain, heavy, prone to leaks, points of weakness, and crack start locations.  They are happy to omit cabin windows.
   Passengers are not in favor.  They like window seats, they like being able to see out, and they like sunshine.  Boarding a windowless airliner gives some of them the willies, and depresses many others. 
   Maybe the conventional jet liner design is not so inefficient after all.