Annie the Kuster has a new TV ad

The ad claims that Annie passed a new law to reduce opioid smuggling into New Hampshire.  Since she is a US congressional rep presumably this was a federal law.  Strange, I don't remember ever hearing or reading about this before Annie started running this election commercial just the other day.  I wonder what the number of her bill was.  I wonder what her bill really says. 

New Hampshire Greenies release a new state energy plan

I heard about this on NHPR yesterday.  The greenie's plan calls for 100% renewable energy state wide by 2040.  Sounds great, but...  They did not describe just what they mean by "renewable".  At a guess they are talking about wind and solar.  Usually the greenies don't consider hydro to be renewable, even though it rains a lot and refills the reservoirs.
   They did not explain how we keep the lights on since solar doesn't produce any electricity after the sun goes down.  Even up here in the White Mountains, we have long calm spells of no wind.  How do the greenies plan to keep the lights on after dark on a calm night?  This is important.  My furnace doesn't work when the power goes out.  That means my pipes freeze in winter.  I am not the only electricity user who needs dependable 24/7 electricity. 

Some advice for Google Maps software weenies

1. Fix the bug that causes a blank sheet of expensive paper wasted before getting down to the business of printing the real map. 
2.  Remember that white is free, other colors consume expensive inkjet ink.  Make the background of the printed map white.  The road map people had this figured out long ago.  Don't make the roads white, they don't show up against the grey background.  Roads should be bright primary colors.  Color ought to indicate the quality of the  road, from interstate down to dirt. 
3.  Make the printed map fill the page.  Most of us have inkjet or laser printers that handle A size paper (8 1/2 by 11).  That gives you a target to shoot for. 
4.  Once you get it working, if you are smart enough to program it, don't change it.  Remember, in software there are NO HARMLESS CHANGES. 

Archiving all the TV newsbroadcasts

I listened to this piece on NPR yesterday.  There is an organization that has been archiving all TV news broadcasts going back to he 1960s.  Cool.  They went on to describe various obsolete technologies, used on the older archive, videotape, VHS, and how they had transcribed everything to DVD's.  And, they plan to move the entire archive to "the cloud" real soon now. 
  Me, I have serious doubts about the reliability of "the cloud", especially after natural disasters or war.  I'd feel better with racks of tapes or DVD's, and the machines to play them, in a nice deep underground site that I owned, outright.  A site on high ground and away from city centers. 
   For that matter, I have never read anything about the life of a home burned DVD.  Are they truly permanent? Or does the data fade away after ten years or so?  The old floppy disks would become unreadable after a few years in a desk drawer. 

Kavanaugh squeaks by the Senate. TV Newsies still talking about it

I was hoping, after the full Senate voted to approve Justice Kavanaugh yesterday that the newsies would move on.  Surely there are other things of interest  happening somewhere in the wider USA or the wider world.   The TV newsies are still talking about the Kavanaugh appointment.  Is that all they know about? 

It's all about compression ratio

Compression ratio is the number that sets fuel economy and power output for internal combustion engines.  More is better.   Inside the engine, the fuel air mixture lights off at top dead center.  The piston goes down, expanding the hot combustion gases, cooling them, and converting the heat energy from the burning fuel into mechanical work.  Ideally we would keep the piston moving down, expanding the cylinder volumn until the combustion gases had been cooled down to room temperature, extracting all possible mechanical work from the fuel burn. 
   In real engines, the piston cannot keep going down forever.  The piston gets to bottom dead center.  Which is about 4 inches in a typical car engine.  At which point the exhaust valve opens and the still blazing hot combustion gases go out the tailpipe.  At night, running a short straight exhaust pipe, no muffler, you can see the exhaust gas glowing blue-white.  That's a lot of heat energy that didn't get converted into useful work. 
   Compression ratio is the ratio of cylinder volume with the piston at top dead center (as small as it gets) to the cylinder volume with the piston at bottom dead center (as big as it gets).  The higher the compression ratio, the more of the heat energy of the fuel gets converted into mechanical work.  Gasoline engines in cars have compression ratios as low as 8:1, 10:1 in good engines like the Cadillac Northstar, and 13:1 in outright racing engines. 
   Why not use a higher compression ratio and get more efficiency?  In gasoline engines we put a combustable fuel air mixture into the cylinder at bottom dead center and compress it as the piston goes up to top dead center.  As the mixture is compressed, it gets hotter.  When it gets too hot,  it catches fire and burns before the piston is at top dead center, and tries to drive the engine backwards.  You can hear this happening, it is a pinging noise (knocking) from the engine.  Good fuel  (high octane rating fuel) will suppress knocking for a while, but there is a limit.  Call it 10:1 for a "street" engine. 
   And this is the benefit of the diesel engine.  Diesels have just pure air in the cylinder for the compression stroke.  Fuel is injected into the cylinder at top dead center. Diesels cannot knock.  Which means that diesels can run compression ratios as high as 20:1.  Which is why diesels have better gas mileage than gasoline engines.

US Senate votes to have a vote on Kavanaugh

Which is plain stalling, Senate style.  They should not be voting to take a vote.  That is a pure waste of time, and offers senators a way to vote both yes and no to confuse their constituents.  Senate ought to just have a vote on confirming Kavanaugh, and have it right now, not tomorrow.