Merry Christmas everyone!

National Inventiveness.

 Been a lot of talk on the internet about the Chinese are getting ahead of us at inventing new products and new weapons.  We here in the United States were the world’s champions of inventiveness for many years.  Even so, there are a few things we could do to improve the situation.

First of all we could clamp down on patent trolls.  Anyone who introduces something new will be sued for patent infringement just as soon as something new looks like it will make money.  The trolls, pretty much all lawyers, hold vaguely written patents with claims as broad as all outdoors, pop up out of the woodwork and demand money.

   We need to reform the patent office.  No patent should be granted unless it describes a device in enough detail as to permit someone to make said device, and that the device works after it is built.  This means the patent application shall contain a drawing with dimensions, a test procedure so you can see if it is working, a parts list, an electrical schematic, and a parts list.  Patents of devices containing computers or micro processors shall contain a listing of the computer program. Patents that lack this detail will not be granted. 

   All patent applications shall be publicized so that interested parties, often competitors, have time to review the patent application and if it conflicts with patents they already hold, or is ordinary prior art well known in the trade, they can make objections.  The patent office shall hold a meeting on each patent application where interested parties can voice their objections to granting the patent. 

    Interested parties may sue the patent office to repeal old patents which do not conform to these new guidelines.

   Much research is conducted by universities, using grant money.  A distressing number of papers published by these scientists fail to duplicate.  In other words when other people attempt to duplicate the reported results they cannot do it.  This is so common that I encountered it myself.  I had searched the literature, found a paper describing a method that we needed.  I spent a week coding it up and debugging it.  It worked, only the performance was only half what the paper had claimed for it.  I finally telephoned the author and asked him what I was doing wrong.  The author, somewhat sheepishly, admitted that he had left out a factor in his computation of efficiency, and the method was only half as effective as claimed in the paper.

    This sort of thing wastes a lot of time and money.  Grantees ought to keep track of research they funded that fails to repeat.  The scientists who publish fails-to-repeat papers should become ineligible for any more grants. 

  Doing just these two things would increase the number of new things invented and developed, a lot. 

 

Dumbo. Disney. 1940.

Rumor got around saying that Disney was going to vanish Dumbo, probably over those scenes with a flock of black crows, speaking in black accents.  I kinda liked Dumbo, having seen it in my childhood.  Timothy the mouse was an attractive character and so was Dumbo.  So I rented it from Netflix before Disney made it disappear.  Actually, looking at it today in 2021, 60 years after it was made, it was still pretty good.  Animation was excellent.  The stork expressman delivering Dumbo to his mom was excellent.  He was so good that he appeared in a couple of other Disney movies.  Actually the most anti black scenes were some short shots of black roustabouts hammering big top tent pegs into the ground in a rain storm.  Although I am pretty sure that circus roustabouts when Dumbo was made were all black.  The scenes with the black crows speaking in black accents seemed pleasant enough to me.  The crows were friendly, they encouraged Dumbo, including giving him the famous magic feather.  

   Anyhow I think the talk of Dumbo as a racist film is malarkey, it is a good fun film that has been around for a long time. 

Corona Virus tests.

 President Biden has called for millions of test kits.  Fox had Robert Redfield of CDC on this morning.  Redfield thinks we need more tests. 

   I have a few questions about all this test talk.  Do we need a lab test to tell if someone is sick?  And, what do we do about cases where the test comes back positive yet the patient is perfectly well?  Is this a real case of Corona virus or is it a false positive from the test?  How was the test verified?  How many subjects were tested by the test?  And how did we verify the test results.  Do we have other tests or procedures?  What might they be?  And how accurate are they.  In short, what makes us think this un-named test really works?  Some numbers would be convincing.  So far the TV news has offered NO numbers.

  And, even if the test works, how is it going to help in the Corona virus pandemic?  We can tell patients who are sick without using lab tests. 

Senator Manchin voted for his constituents.

 

Senator Joe Manchin just announced that he cannot vote for the Build Back Badder bill, a favorite of Joe Biden and leftie democrats that is pure pork and freebies.  Manchin said his constituents were solidly against the Build Back Badder bill and as their representative, he had to vote the way his constituents want, not the way the Democrat party wants.  Naturally the lefty side of the Democrat party was furious, called Manchin names, and acted out in other ways.

   I say more power to a politician who votes his district.  We have four congressional reps here in New Hampshire who don’t vote for what their constituents want; instead they vote for what the Washington Democrat party wants.

Why we don’t want Putin to invade Ukraine.

   We remember that Hitler started WWII by invading Poland in 1939.  We figure that if we forbid the invasion of neighboring countries, we can prevent WWIII.  And we don’t like invasions on humanitarian grounds; the people in the invaded country take it in the neck.  Ask any Pole, they will tell you. 

Ever since WWII America has believed that national borders should be inviolate.  We have even fought wars over this, the Korean War being the clearest example.  North Korea invaded South Korea with out warning.  We raised a huge army, fought a vicious 3 year war, and preserved the original state of South Korea.  As a side effect, today’s South Koreans have a warm spot in their hearts for Americans.  They have industrialized and are now an important power.  They were nowheresville back when the Korean War started.

One other factor in the Ukraine situation.  Today’s Russia is smaller; less populated, and has fewer natural resources than the old Soviet Union had it its disposal.  We would just as soon keep things that way.  The old Soviet Union was a dangerous competitor.  When the Soviet Union broke up in 1989, about a third of it became independent of Russia.  The new Russia, although a powerful state, is not as powerful as the old Soviet Union was.   

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

 Just for the record, I am in Mittersill.  I am close enough to walk to the Peabody slopes chair lift.  I get the same amount of snow as Cannon, at least Cannon base.  Cannon summit often gets a bit more that the base.  I measure the snow fall on my deck with a wooden yardstick.  I am an old Cannon skier, I started skiing Cannon when I was four.  I finally gave up downhill skiing when I turned 70, which was a few years ago.

   It is 9:30 AM and the snow seems to have stopped, although the weather people are talking up a "winter storm warning" lasting until 11 AM.  They forecast 4 to 8 inches.  I got 5 inches.  That is enough to make the skiing really good at Cannon.