I am certain that there is extraterrestrial life out there and I am pretty sure some of it is intelligent. The universe is so vast and the number of planets so enormous that anything else strains credulity. But the distances are so vast and the number of dead planets so enormous that the chances of us discovering them or them discovering us is so small that the possibility of that happening also seems pretty small. The distances are enormous. Most of the stars we see are hundreds of light years away and those are our nearby neighbors. Our galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. The nearest big galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away. The laws of physics that we know preclude travel faster than the speed of light. To send a fleet of a million probes, to visit every star in our galaxy, traveling at light speed, would take half a million years.
But, you ask, isn't it possible that there's a way to travel faster than light? You'd have to do this by warping space through a higher dimension, most likely time. We know a little about this: Galaxy-sized masses warp space enough that light is curved a few micro-seconds of arc. Enough to detect with powerful instruments, but the space-warp available from this is not actually any faster than the speed of light. I remain hopeful that some unknown technology allows us to do this but we are very far from any plausible breakthrough. Let's say that such a breakthrough occurs--we can go 1000 times faster than light--our million probes would still take at least 500 years to visit every star. Even at 1000 times light speed, our nearest star is a day and a half away.
What if some other intelligent species is out there, looking for us? If they already have 1000x light speed travel and did a search using a million probes to find us, they are at least a few hundred years more technically advanced. Could we, using the highest technology available to us, successfully hide from the best technology the 18th century had to look for us? Of course we could. We could paint an orbiting telescope flat black and spy on them from space. We could find places where they aren't and send a lander--appearing at worst to be a meteorite. We could send out drones from that lander to watch from a distance. We'd design the drones so they'd easily be mistaken for a bird or some other creature.
Or you point out that we're sending out massive quantities of radio
waves. That's true, but each of these signals, on an interstellar
scale, is pretty weak, and while individually coherent, from 100 light
years away it's likely just a bunch of incoherent noise, and compared to what the sun generates, pretty weak at that. It may be
enough to help them find us--but the waves only travel at light speed,
which means the probe that detects them must be within a sphere about
100 light years in radius of us. It shortens the search, but only a
decade or so.
The bottom line is that an intelligent extraterrestrial that wants to hide from us, will successfully hide from us. If they want us to see them, we will. Searching for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence is basically a fool's errand at this point in human development. Once we have the technology to actually embark on the faster than light search, this may change. But for now, if they're looking, they're gonna find us, whether we're helping or not.
That said, I certainly don't object to privately funded SETI projects. There's lots of peripheral research being done, some of which may prove useful regardless of whether there are extraterrestrials involved or not. The SETI Institute in California does lots of space-related research, lots of it interesting and potentially useful, and as far as I can tell, only a small fraction is actually in pursuit of aliens. It's just that I think there are better things to spend my tax money on. On the other hand, I think the search for extraterrestrial life in the solar system is a worthwhile goal. We're still in the early days of exploring the solar system and it's entirely possible that there's life on one of the moons of the gas giants, or much less likely, on Mars in the dim past. Odds are very unlikely that it's even multicellular life but whatever it is, we'd like to know about it. (life has existed on earth for well over 3B years. Multicellular life for less than 1B)
addenda 18Dec2017
Over the weekend, the pentagon's own UFO research organization came to light. There are lots and lots of UFO sightings, many of them by completely credible people. I've seen two myself. One turned out to be a rocket launch from nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base in unusual atmospheric conditions, which left a long glowing trail. The other was almost certainly a meteor falling close enough that I could see it tumble and burn, but it might have been falling space debris. Strictly speaking, there was a time when, for me at least, they were unidentified. I know someone who managed to get a flying saucer photo published: it was a lid from a cooking pan, tossed in the air and spinning fast, and in poor focus. An at least superficial investigation should be easily available. A central clearing house can quickly dismiss the vast majority for what they are. Occasionally something mysterious does turn up, and these should be investigated. Yes, there are plenty of cranks in the world
16 December 2017
11 December 2017
We Need A Better Word for Democratic Socialist
First the spectrum, as I see it. At one extreme is communism, where the means of production and all control of it are by "the workers". The reality of this is that it is impossible. If the group is too large, decisionmaking becomes dangerously unweildy and in too many cases (the presidential election of 2016 is illustrative) easily subverted by shortsighted manipulations. Attempts to implement this have invariably led to brutal dictatorships. At the other end is laissez faire capitalism. This too is impossible. If cheating is tolerated, cheaters will win, which rarely works out for the rest of us. All attempts at being too capitalist have also ended in dictatorship (e.g. mid-70s Chile).
The right answer, therefor, lies somewhere in the middle. Enough free enterprise to foster innovation, but enough regulation to inhibit market failures, such as monopoly or inadequate service, and to take over industries when market failure has occurred.
There are plainly some industries which cannot be left to the free market. National defense is an example. Private armies are either too powerful to be allowed to serve their own selfish purposes, or too weak to be useful in a real crisis. A good case can be made that Rome fell and ended western civilization for a millennium because it had private armies. Fire safety has a similar problem. Many people go through life without ever needing the services of the fire department. But when they do, they need them in a hurry and they need a lot of expensive service. Lots of people, if allowed to make the choice, would choose to not pay for a private fire department and most of them would get away with it. But because fires tend to spread, we cannot allow this. At the same time, there are lots of industries that do perfectly well in a competitive free market, including ones that provide services and equipment to the nationalized industries. Think of companies that build fire trucks and military transports.
This middle ground does not really have a good name. The best is "Democratic Socialist", or sometimes "Social Democrat", but that's both too long and misses the target. True Socialism would have public ownership of too much of business. Democracy too is impossible for groups larger than a few hundred: we need to have a representative democracy, also known as a Republic.
I don't have a good suggestion for a better name: for now Democratic Socialist will have to do. It's important to recognize that as a Democratic Socialist I'm advocating the least amount of national ownership of the means of production as possible while preventing market failure. Capitalism, within limits, is a very good thing. But only through active, competent regulation can market failures be minimized, and only through active, competent management can those failures be corrected.
--------
The list of industries which have had market failures is extremely long. Here are a few:
The military, Police and Fire departments. Thomas Jefferson and others thought these functions could be served by a militia. It didn't work. The civil war was the crisis that ended the illusion.
Highways. Without government highways, we'd have very few of them. They help the economy enormously, but few would pay for them.
Transit. There are no urban transit systems which pay for themselves, but a large fraction of people are dependent upon them.
Railroads are so amazingly efficient that they can almost make it on their own, even competing with government funded highways. US railroads have had numerous market failures over the years which have required government intervention.
Telecommunications is most efficient as a monopoly, but this leads to gouging and other problems. Regulation worked brilliantly in the middle part of the 20th century, but we're back to monopolies again.
Medical insurance. Attempting to leave it to private insurance has doubled the cost and left about around 1/3rd of the population under or un insured. Nearly all insurance is in market failure, but medical is the worst.
The right answer, therefor, lies somewhere in the middle. Enough free enterprise to foster innovation, but enough regulation to inhibit market failures, such as monopoly or inadequate service, and to take over industries when market failure has occurred.
There are plainly some industries which cannot be left to the free market. National defense is an example. Private armies are either too powerful to be allowed to serve their own selfish purposes, or too weak to be useful in a real crisis. A good case can be made that Rome fell and ended western civilization for a millennium because it had private armies. Fire safety has a similar problem. Many people go through life without ever needing the services of the fire department. But when they do, they need them in a hurry and they need a lot of expensive service. Lots of people, if allowed to make the choice, would choose to not pay for a private fire department and most of them would get away with it. But because fires tend to spread, we cannot allow this. At the same time, there are lots of industries that do perfectly well in a competitive free market, including ones that provide services and equipment to the nationalized industries. Think of companies that build fire trucks and military transports.
This middle ground does not really have a good name. The best is "Democratic Socialist", or sometimes "Social Democrat", but that's both too long and misses the target. True Socialism would have public ownership of too much of business. Democracy too is impossible for groups larger than a few hundred: we need to have a representative democracy, also known as a Republic.
I don't have a good suggestion for a better name: for now Democratic Socialist will have to do. It's important to recognize that as a Democratic Socialist I'm advocating the least amount of national ownership of the means of production as possible while preventing market failure. Capitalism, within limits, is a very good thing. But only through active, competent regulation can market failures be minimized, and only through active, competent management can those failures be corrected.
--------
The list of industries which have had market failures is extremely long. Here are a few:
The military, Police and Fire departments. Thomas Jefferson and others thought these functions could be served by a militia. It didn't work. The civil war was the crisis that ended the illusion.
Highways. Without government highways, we'd have very few of them. They help the economy enormously, but few would pay for them.
Transit. There are no urban transit systems which pay for themselves, but a large fraction of people are dependent upon them.
Railroads are so amazingly efficient that they can almost make it on their own, even competing with government funded highways. US railroads have had numerous market failures over the years which have required government intervention.
Telecommunications is most efficient as a monopoly, but this leads to gouging and other problems. Regulation worked brilliantly in the middle part of the 20th century, but we're back to monopolies again.
Medical insurance. Attempting to leave it to private insurance has doubled the cost and left about around 1/3rd of the population under or un insured. Nearly all insurance is in market failure, but medical is the worst.
10 December 2017
EVSEs for Beginners
About 25 years ago, the first modern electric cars began to appear. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) realized with alarm that ordinary consumers would soon be attempting to charge cars from household circuits, the first time in history that people with limited electrical competence would be making and breaking connections drawing more than 15 amps. They knew that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to charge a car at 40 amps using an 18 gauge lamp cord and start a fire. Previously, anyone making these sorts of more powerful connections--household ovens and the like--would either be an electrician, or someone with enough competence to not make such a mistake. E.g. a welder.
The approach they came up with was called J1772. Basically, they mandated that all electric car chargers would require a standard plug which would inform the car of what it was connected to, so the car wouldn't draw too much current. The way this worked was a control wire, called the "pilot", which implements a square wave where the duty cycle says what the maximum current can be. The pilot signal would be generated by a device called an EVSE: Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment. An EVSE contains a circuit which generates the specific square wave, and some number of "contactors", which are big relays that can tolerate make/break of the full current. Whether the contactor is open or closed depends upon whether the charge circumstances the EVSE sees are deemed safe. The EVSE does no power conversion--it's just passing whatever power it receives on to the car. The car must contain a battery charger appropriate to the battery in the car, and reciprocal electronics to behave correctly according to the signal it's receiving from the EVSE.
Part of this design is that the plug on the EVSE is specific to the power limits of whatever it's plugged into: a NEMA 5-15 can draw no more than 80% of 15 amps. A NEMA 14-50 no more than 80% of 50 amps, and so forth. Replacing the plug on an EVSE or plugging it into an extension cord foils the safeguards that are the whole point of the EVSE's existence. Therefor, most EVSEs are intended for a single voltage/current application. A few of them have a couple of modes, which are typically controlled by switches, to adapt to different power sources.
There's a second factor too. J1772 defines two levels: Level 1 and Level 2. In the North America, this is the distinction between 120 and 240 volt power, sometimes incorrectly called one phase and two phase. 120 is wired with Hot, Neutral and Ground, where 240 is wired with Hot1, Hot2 and either Neutral or Ground or both. (connectors without a ground have been disparaged since the 1960s and became illegal for new construction in the '90s). Typically, EVSEs are configured for either L1 or L2.
Tesla came up with something clever: Their portable EVSE (which they call a UMC: Universal Mobile Connector) comes with a connector that allows different adapters to be plugged in. Thus, if it's got a 14-50 adapter, on it, it tells the UMC to send the signal for 40 amps. if it's a 5-15, it says 12 amps. (this is simply a resistor that's tuned to the particular R/C circuit in the EVSE). The UMC also detects whether the source power is 120 or 240 and modifies its behavior. They have a half dozen adapters for this. Interestingly, the adapter does not care if 240V power is plugged into an adapter intended for 120V. As long as the wires are correct, it simply passes the power along. If you're careful to make sure everything upstream is safe for the volts and amps, it all goes smoothly. If it's not wired correctly, the car gives you an error message, and you can fix your adapter. Obviously this is dangerous to play with if you don't understand what I mean by all of this.
Tesla is doing a separate thing, which they call "supercharging", which requires much bigger conductors in their charging system. Their approach was to have their own, incompatible connector, so people don't naively plug non-compatible cars into their super high powered charge stations. They provide a small adapter so people can charge Teslas with standard J1772 connectors--all the electrical stuff is identical between J1772 and Tesla connectors.
I've studied quite a few EVSEs and I'm pretty convinced the Tesla UMC is the best on the market. It's well designed and built--even though there's a pretty exterior, the whole thing is basically potted in a huge block of rubber, and it would take pretty extreme treatment to break it. It's also priced pretty reasonably: $550. You can buy a version with the tesla plug replaced with a standard J1772 plug here. Quickcharge also has their own 16 amp J1772 adapter for quite a bit less money. QCP is run by a guy named Tony Williams who is both knowledgeable and reputable. There are a bunch of others. Probably the most complete line is Clipper Creek.
The approach they came up with was called J1772. Basically, they mandated that all electric car chargers would require a standard plug which would inform the car of what it was connected to, so the car wouldn't draw too much current. The way this worked was a control wire, called the "pilot", which implements a square wave where the duty cycle says what the maximum current can be. The pilot signal would be generated by a device called an EVSE: Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment. An EVSE contains a circuit which generates the specific square wave, and some number of "contactors", which are big relays that can tolerate make/break of the full current. Whether the contactor is open or closed depends upon whether the charge circumstances the EVSE sees are deemed safe. The EVSE does no power conversion--it's just passing whatever power it receives on to the car. The car must contain a battery charger appropriate to the battery in the car, and reciprocal electronics to behave correctly according to the signal it's receiving from the EVSE.
Part of this design is that the plug on the EVSE is specific to the power limits of whatever it's plugged into: a NEMA 5-15 can draw no more than 80% of 15 amps. A NEMA 14-50 no more than 80% of 50 amps, and so forth. Replacing the plug on an EVSE or plugging it into an extension cord foils the safeguards that are the whole point of the EVSE's existence. Therefor, most EVSEs are intended for a single voltage/current application. A few of them have a couple of modes, which are typically controlled by switches, to adapt to different power sources.
There's a second factor too. J1772 defines two levels: Level 1 and Level 2. In the North America, this is the distinction between 120 and 240 volt power, sometimes incorrectly called one phase and two phase. 120 is wired with Hot, Neutral and Ground, where 240 is wired with Hot1, Hot2 and either Neutral or Ground or both. (connectors without a ground have been disparaged since the 1960s and became illegal for new construction in the '90s). Typically, EVSEs are configured for either L1 or L2.
Tesla came up with something clever: Their portable EVSE (which they call a UMC: Universal Mobile Connector) comes with a connector that allows different adapters to be plugged in. Thus, if it's got a 14-50 adapter, on it, it tells the UMC to send the signal for 40 amps. if it's a 5-15, it says 12 amps. (this is simply a resistor that's tuned to the particular R/C circuit in the EVSE). The UMC also detects whether the source power is 120 or 240 and modifies its behavior. They have a half dozen adapters for this. Interestingly, the adapter does not care if 240V power is plugged into an adapter intended for 120V. As long as the wires are correct, it simply passes the power along. If you're careful to make sure everything upstream is safe for the volts and amps, it all goes smoothly. If it's not wired correctly, the car gives you an error message, and you can fix your adapter. Obviously this is dangerous to play with if you don't understand what I mean by all of this.
Tesla is doing a separate thing, which they call "supercharging", which requires much bigger conductors in their charging system. Their approach was to have their own, incompatible connector, so people don't naively plug non-compatible cars into their super high powered charge stations. They provide a small adapter so people can charge Teslas with standard J1772 connectors--all the electrical stuff is identical between J1772 and Tesla connectors.
I've studied quite a few EVSEs and I'm pretty convinced the Tesla UMC is the best on the market. It's well designed and built--even though there's a pretty exterior, the whole thing is basically potted in a huge block of rubber, and it would take pretty extreme treatment to break it. It's also priced pretty reasonably: $550. You can buy a version with the tesla plug replaced with a standard J1772 plug here. Quickcharge also has their own 16 amp J1772 adapter for quite a bit less money. QCP is run by a guy named Tony Williams who is both knowledgeable and reputable. There are a bunch of others. Probably the most complete line is Clipper Creek.
07 December 2017
Ice
My dad grew up on the North Shore of the Boston area, and when he was a child, there were still ice houses in operation. They would cut up the ice in the from frozen ponds there, transporting it on big sleds into bigger buildings where it would be stored, packed in sawdust, until it could be shipped all around the world.
Frederic Tudor (1783-1864) dreamt up the scheme when he was 22, thinking to sell ice to rich plantation owners in the American south and the Caribbean. Ships would come to Boston and the North Shore with cotton and other raw materials for New England manufacturing, and return with finished goods, which occupied less space and weighed much less. So he could buy space on those return trips for very little. It took him several attempts to overcome skepticism, and figure out how to keep the ice from melting, losing thousands of dollars at each attempt, until he figured it out. But eventually he did figure it out, and ponds all over the north shore were used, and New England ice was shipped as far away as India. Tudor became known as "The Ice King". Walden Pond was one of the sources of ice they used and Henry David Thoreau wrote admiringly about the ice harvest in Walden.
When it was discovered that food packed in ice would stay fresh a lot longer, other businesses copied the practice, and in the 1850s, ice houses began to be built around the country, especially along railroad tracks. Special cars, called Refrigerator Cars, were built insulated sides and ice bunkers on their ends, and filled with meat and other perishables. The ice would melt and drain out, so they needed to be refilled every few hundred miles along their trip. In addition, most homes had an "Icebox", which was just an insulated box into which ice and food was placed. Although invented much earlier, mechanical refrigeration finally became practical in the 1920s with the widespread adoption of electricity, but it took a long time for it to be accepted. My grandfather was a relatively early adopter, buying a mechanical refrigerator in the 1930s, despite living in the home of worldwide ice, and my father barely remembers a time when they didn't have a mechanical refrigerator. Yet my grandfather continued to call the refrigerator an "Icebox" until he died in the late 1970s.
The ice business illustrates several interesting things about economics. The first is about entrepreneurship. Tudor was born into a family that was already very wealthy. Each of his early failed attempts to ship ice cost thousands of dollars, in a time when $500 a year was a 90th percentile income. In today's money, he lost half a million dollars each time he failed, and he failed a lot. He spent time as late as 1813 in debtors prison, until his family bailed him out and he tried again. Finally, by 1816 it was a going concern, and by 1825 he was a very wealthy man. Something similar is true today: there are very few successful entrepreneurs who are making bets that would result in their families going hungry. They may have a bankroll earned in a previous job, a rich relative, outside investors. But if they lose, they lose only what they put in. Their families don't starve to death. This safety net is critically important.
Secondly, several times in the 150 year timeline of natural ice refrigeration, big businesses continued to do things in the old fashioned, labor intensive, much more expensive way despite the obvious superiority of the new way. I'll mention two: prior to 1850, food needed to be used very close to where it was harvested. In the case of meat, this meant shipping the animals alive to a slaughterhouse near where it would be eaten. This was very hard on the animals and unless they gave them rest, food and exercise, a lot would die in route, spoiling a lot of the rest. This was time consuming and expensive. The ice refrigerator became practical in the late 1850s and the basic design was in place by 1880 and would last into the 1970s. Yet shipments of livestock continued until well into the 1930s. The railroads had a monopoly though. (part of this was that they'd centralized meatpacking in Chicago: live animals would be shipped to Chicago. Meat would be distributed on ice from Chicago to the rest of the country)
In 1940, a man named Fred Jones received a patent for for a portable mechanical refrigeration unit that would eventually be the basis for what railroads and trucks would use to this day. He and a businessman friend (Joe Numero) founded a company called ThermoKing. In the late 1940s, the fleet of ice refrigerator railroad cars was pretty much worn out, their usual cycle of replacement being interrupted by the war. Pacific Fruit Express, which owned the largest number of those cars, decided to replace them with updated ice refrigerator cars, requiring the physical plant and labor to be continued, even though ThermoKing's product was obviously completely viable and a lot cheaper, and PFE's near monopoly meant that ice refrigerators continued to be used on American railroads into the 1970s. (That Jones was an African American may have contributed to this, although most likely it's just ordinary conservatism). There was no such monopoly on the highways however, and many trucking companies installed ThermoKing refrigerators on their trucks. Despite the gigantic advantages of the railroads in driving costs, fuel and more, this was sufficient to move the refrigerated transport business almost entirely to the roads, where it persists to this day.
At the same time, passenger service was also moving from rail to highway, and also to air, and the interstate highway system made shipping of unrefrigerated freight by road closer to cost and time competitive with rail. Together, this came very close to killing the railroads despite their gigantic inherent advantages. Through consolidation and government subsidy, they've survived, but it was a near thing.
Frederic Tudor (1783-1864) dreamt up the scheme when he was 22, thinking to sell ice to rich plantation owners in the American south and the Caribbean. Ships would come to Boston and the North Shore with cotton and other raw materials for New England manufacturing, and return with finished goods, which occupied less space and weighed much less. So he could buy space on those return trips for very little. It took him several attempts to overcome skepticism, and figure out how to keep the ice from melting, losing thousands of dollars at each attempt, until he figured it out. But eventually he did figure it out, and ponds all over the north shore were used, and New England ice was shipped as far away as India. Tudor became known as "The Ice King". Walden Pond was one of the sources of ice they used and Henry David Thoreau wrote admiringly about the ice harvest in Walden.
When it was discovered that food packed in ice would stay fresh a lot longer, other businesses copied the practice, and in the 1850s, ice houses began to be built around the country, especially along railroad tracks. Special cars, called Refrigerator Cars, were built insulated sides and ice bunkers on their ends, and filled with meat and other perishables. The ice would melt and drain out, so they needed to be refilled every few hundred miles along their trip. In addition, most homes had an "Icebox", which was just an insulated box into which ice and food was placed. Although invented much earlier, mechanical refrigeration finally became practical in the 1920s with the widespread adoption of electricity, but it took a long time for it to be accepted. My grandfather was a relatively early adopter, buying a mechanical refrigerator in the 1930s, despite living in the home of worldwide ice, and my father barely remembers a time when they didn't have a mechanical refrigerator. Yet my grandfather continued to call the refrigerator an "Icebox" until he died in the late 1970s.
The ice business illustrates several interesting things about economics. The first is about entrepreneurship. Tudor was born into a family that was already very wealthy. Each of his early failed attempts to ship ice cost thousands of dollars, in a time when $500 a year was a 90th percentile income. In today's money, he lost half a million dollars each time he failed, and he failed a lot. He spent time as late as 1813 in debtors prison, until his family bailed him out and he tried again. Finally, by 1816 it was a going concern, and by 1825 he was a very wealthy man. Something similar is true today: there are very few successful entrepreneurs who are making bets that would result in their families going hungry. They may have a bankroll earned in a previous job, a rich relative, outside investors. But if they lose, they lose only what they put in. Their families don't starve to death. This safety net is critically important.
Secondly, several times in the 150 year timeline of natural ice refrigeration, big businesses continued to do things in the old fashioned, labor intensive, much more expensive way despite the obvious superiority of the new way. I'll mention two: prior to 1850, food needed to be used very close to where it was harvested. In the case of meat, this meant shipping the animals alive to a slaughterhouse near where it would be eaten. This was very hard on the animals and unless they gave them rest, food and exercise, a lot would die in route, spoiling a lot of the rest. This was time consuming and expensive. The ice refrigerator became practical in the late 1850s and the basic design was in place by 1880 and would last into the 1970s. Yet shipments of livestock continued until well into the 1930s. The railroads had a monopoly though. (part of this was that they'd centralized meatpacking in Chicago: live animals would be shipped to Chicago. Meat would be distributed on ice from Chicago to the rest of the country)
In 1940, a man named Fred Jones received a patent for for a portable mechanical refrigeration unit that would eventually be the basis for what railroads and trucks would use to this day. He and a businessman friend (Joe Numero) founded a company called ThermoKing. In the late 1940s, the fleet of ice refrigerator railroad cars was pretty much worn out, their usual cycle of replacement being interrupted by the war. Pacific Fruit Express, which owned the largest number of those cars, decided to replace them with updated ice refrigerator cars, requiring the physical plant and labor to be continued, even though ThermoKing's product was obviously completely viable and a lot cheaper, and PFE's near monopoly meant that ice refrigerators continued to be used on American railroads into the 1970s. (That Jones was an African American may have contributed to this, although most likely it's just ordinary conservatism). There was no such monopoly on the highways however, and many trucking companies installed ThermoKing refrigerators on their trucks. Despite the gigantic advantages of the railroads in driving costs, fuel and more, this was sufficient to move the refrigerated transport business almost entirely to the roads, where it persists to this day.
At the same time, passenger service was also moving from rail to highway, and also to air, and the interstate highway system made shipping of unrefrigerated freight by road closer to cost and time competitive with rail. Together, this came very close to killing the railroads despite their gigantic inherent advantages. Through consolidation and government subsidy, they've survived, but it was a near thing.
17 November 2017
Tesla Semi Charging.
Tesla has announced their long awaited Tesla Semi, along with a surprise: a new version of the Roadster.
The Semi is a class 8 truck. Class 8 are the biggest trucks in regular use on the roads. They're used for long haul trucking, dump trucks, cement trucks and so forth. The prototypes they've showed have a slick aerodynamic cab and a close-coupled trailer. My suspicion is the trailer will revert to the more conventional ones in most cases. It has a center driving position in the cab, two large touch screens, and software that controls the independently powered wheels to prevent jackknifing. He says it'll have 400 mile range, and a new, bigger than supercharger that they call a megacharger, which supposedly can charge the battery in half an hour.
400 mile range implies something between 600 and 1000 KWH of battery. The biggest batteries sold with Teslas now are 100KWH. Mine has an 85KWH battery, which others have discovered actually puts out more like 81KWH.
Charging a 1000KWH battery with J1772 protocol at 80 amps (e.g. HPWC) will take approximately 50 hours.This is obviously not suitable for a commercial truck. A conventional 125 KW supercharger brings this down to 8 or 9 hours, but Tesla is not presently selling these for commercial installation. They showed the truck side of the receptacle for charging the truck with a "megacharger", which appears to have 8 holes in it, each a little smaller than the present charge orifice. The present supercharger cable is pretty close to the limit of what a relatively frail adult can handle. 8 of them all at once is likely beyond what even Hafþór Björnsson could handle. (He's the actor/strongman that plays "The Mountain that Rides" on Game of Thrones). The strands might be connected individually, but more likely this connection is handled by a machine, such as the one Tesla demonstrated a few years ago.--the truck drives close enough to the charger and the cables are moved into place by a large robot arm.
Anything less than about 400KW is unsuitable for long haul trucking. Long haul truckers may drive 11 hours in a 14 hour day. 400 miles is only about half of that. So they need to charge twice a day, and in the case of drivers who share their truck, they may need to charge more than that. This may be adequate for a lot of Class 8 truck applications though: Cement trucks and dirt trucks spend a big part of their day loading and their routes are often start and stop and stay close to home. Trucks being used to move containers around within container terminals tend to spend well over half their day waiting in line. A 100KW charger may well be adequate for these. Tesla may choose to sell something resembling an existing supercharger for these applications, where the trucks spend their off duty time hooked to the charger. And they may not need much more than an 20KW HPWC for trucks that serve local chains, like grocery stores, where the truck spends a half hour or more loading or unloading for every 20 minutes actually on the move. But long haulers need more
I'm estimating about 1000 truck stops around the US. Tesla would need to install megachargers at a large number of these. A megacharger installation would resemble existing diesel refueling stations in that the chargers will need to be drive-through, like gas stations. There will need to be enough of them at each location that nobody has to wait too long--remember that 14 hour limit. The interesting part though is that the transformer for each megacharger plug needs to be about as big as a 12 bollard supercharger. They can do the same charger sharing, so a 12 megacharger station needs transformers the size of that needed fo 72 individual supercharger bollards. Enough to power hundreds of houses
Interestingly though, on the scale of our national demand, it's not that big a deal. 250*12*400,000 is only 100MW. 25-50 of those big windmills.
adenda 18Nov17:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/17/1716536/-Further-thoughts-on-Tesla-s-EV-Truck-announcement-from-a-former-fleet-owner
The Semi is a class 8 truck. Class 8 are the biggest trucks in regular use on the roads. They're used for long haul trucking, dump trucks, cement trucks and so forth. The prototypes they've showed have a slick aerodynamic cab and a close-coupled trailer. My suspicion is the trailer will revert to the more conventional ones in most cases. It has a center driving position in the cab, two large touch screens, and software that controls the independently powered wheels to prevent jackknifing. He says it'll have 400 mile range, and a new, bigger than supercharger that they call a megacharger, which supposedly can charge the battery in half an hour.
400 mile range implies something between 600 and 1000 KWH of battery. The biggest batteries sold with Teslas now are 100KWH. Mine has an 85KWH battery, which others have discovered actually puts out more like 81KWH.
Charging a 1000KWH battery with J1772 protocol at 80 amps (e.g. HPWC) will take approximately 50 hours.This is obviously not suitable for a commercial truck. A conventional 125 KW supercharger brings this down to 8 or 9 hours, but Tesla is not presently selling these for commercial installation. They showed the truck side of the receptacle for charging the truck with a "megacharger", which appears to have 8 holes in it, each a little smaller than the present charge orifice. The present supercharger cable is pretty close to the limit of what a relatively frail adult can handle. 8 of them all at once is likely beyond what even Hafþór Björnsson could handle. (He's the actor/strongman that plays "The Mountain that Rides" on Game of Thrones). The strands might be connected individually, but more likely this connection is handled by a machine, such as the one Tesla demonstrated a few years ago.--the truck drives close enough to the charger and the cables are moved into place by a large robot arm.
Anything less than about 400KW is unsuitable for long haul trucking. Long haul truckers may drive 11 hours in a 14 hour day. 400 miles is only about half of that. So they need to charge twice a day, and in the case of drivers who share their truck, they may need to charge more than that. This may be adequate for a lot of Class 8 truck applications though: Cement trucks and dirt trucks spend a big part of their day loading and their routes are often start and stop and stay close to home. Trucks being used to move containers around within container terminals tend to spend well over half their day waiting in line. A 100KW charger may well be adequate for these. Tesla may choose to sell something resembling an existing supercharger for these applications, where the trucks spend their off duty time hooked to the charger. And they may not need much more than an 20KW HPWC for trucks that serve local chains, like grocery stores, where the truck spends a half hour or more loading or unloading for every 20 minutes actually on the move. But long haulers need more
I'm estimating about 1000 truck stops around the US. Tesla would need to install megachargers at a large number of these. A megacharger installation would resemble existing diesel refueling stations in that the chargers will need to be drive-through, like gas stations. There will need to be enough of them at each location that nobody has to wait too long--remember that 14 hour limit. The interesting part though is that the transformer for each megacharger plug needs to be about as big as a 12 bollard supercharger. They can do the same charger sharing, so a 12 megacharger station needs transformers the size of that needed fo 72 individual supercharger bollards. Enough to power hundreds of houses
Interestingly though, on the scale of our national demand, it's not that big a deal. 250*12*400,000 is only 100MW. 25-50 of those big windmills.
adenda 18Nov17:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/17/1716536/-Further-thoughts-on-Tesla-s-EV-Truck-announcement-from-a-former-fleet-owner
05 November 2017
Compromise and the Election of 1860
The election of 1860 was one of the most consequential in our history. The issue of slavery had come to a head and the previous two presidents had tried to find compromises and had only succeeded in exacerbating tensions. Both of the two parties had split up into two, irreconcilable factions:
The Democrats had split into Southern, pro slavery Democrats, with John Breckinridge as their candidate, and Northern, moderate, pro appeasement Democrats, with Stephen Douglas. The Whigs had split into anti-slavery Republicans, with Abraham Lincoln, and pro compromise, pro union Constitutional Union, with John Bell.
Lincoln got the most votes and won the election, with more votes and electors than any two of the other candidates, but his policies were viewed as too extreme by all the southern states, and they seceded long before Lincoln took office. But New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had different ballots, that included a Fusion party. The two compromisers plus the Fusion got more votes than Lincoln, and together, Lincoln and the Fusions got 6 times as many votes as Breckenridge.
What would have happened had the two appeasement parties been able to get together and put forth a single "Fusion"candidate? Politics is often more about individual candidates than policy so it's hard to really know, but here are the numbers for Lincoln, Breckinridge and an imaginary Fusion candidate who I'll call Douglas Bell:
Lincoln Breckinridge Douglas+Bell
AL: 0 48669 41453 No Change 9 D Electors
AR: 0 28732 25420 No Change 4 D Electors
CA: 38733 33969 24542 No Change 4 R Electors
CT: 43488 14372 16959 No Change 6 R Electors
DE: 3822 7339 4954 No Change 3 D Electors
FL: 0 8277 5024 No Change 3 D Electors
GA: 0 52176 54541 D+B wins 10 F Electors
IL: 172171 2331 165129 No Change 11 R Electors
IN: 139033 12295 120815 No Change 13 R Electors
IA: 70302 1035 57402 No Change 4 R Electors
KY: 1364 53143 91709 D+B Wins 12 F Electors
LA: 0 22681 27829 D+B Wins 6 F Electors
ME: 62811 6386 31739 No Change 8 R Electors
MD: 2294 42482 47726 D+B Wins, 8 F Electors
MA: 106684 6163 56701 No Change 13 R Electors
MI: 88481 805 65472 No Change 6 R Electors
MN: 22069 748 11970 No Change 4 R Electors
MS: 0 40768 28407 No Change 7 D Electors
MO: 17028 31362 117173 D+B Wins 9 F Electors
NH: 37519 2125 26299 No Change 5 R Electors
NJ: 58346 0 62869 D+B Wins 7 F Electors
NY: 362646 0 312510 No Change 35 R Electors
NC: 0 48846 47866 No Change 10 D Electors
OH: 231709 11406 199615 No Change 23 R Electors
OR: 5329 5075 4354 No Change 3 R Electors
PA: 268030 0 195636 No Change 27 R Electors
RI: 12244 0 7707 No Change 4 R Electors
SC: No popular vote No Change 8 D Electors
TN: 0 65097 81009 D+B Wins 12 F Electors
TX: 0 74454 15401 No Change 4 D Electors
VT: 33808 1866 8866 No Change 5 R Electors
VA: 1887 74325 90679 D+B Wins 15 F Electors
WI: 86110 887 65182 No Change 5 R Electors
Final Tally:
Lincoln 176 Electors
Douglas+Bell 79 Electors
Breckinridge: 48 Electors
Reality:
Lincoln: 180 Electors
Douglas: 12 Electors
Breckinridge 72 Electors
Bell: 39 Electors
The bottom line is that had the two compromise candidates been on the same ticket, there would have been no difference in the outcome, but there would have been one more election where the popular vote didn't match the electoral college outcome. Where there was a big change is that in the border states: Missouri, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, even Georgia, the compromisers were much more popular than the pro-slavery faction.
Is General Kelly right that a compromise could have avoided the Civil War? No. There is no such thing as half a slave (at least if he is to remain alive), so there is no compromise possible. The compromises that had been made were what lead to the tensions. There were more people that hoped for the impossible compromise than either of the more extreme factions, but that simply wasn't going to happen.
One of the interesting things I learned from doing this exercise is how many states had 0 votes for the opposing candidate. I doubt that these states actually had zero voters for those positions, but that voter manipulation or intimidation kept such voters away from the polls or their ballots from being counted.
The Democrats had split into Southern, pro slavery Democrats, with John Breckinridge as their candidate, and Northern, moderate, pro appeasement Democrats, with Stephen Douglas. The Whigs had split into anti-slavery Republicans, with Abraham Lincoln, and pro compromise, pro union Constitutional Union, with John Bell.
Lincoln got the most votes and won the election, with more votes and electors than any two of the other candidates, but his policies were viewed as too extreme by all the southern states, and they seceded long before Lincoln took office. But New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had different ballots, that included a Fusion party. The two compromisers plus the Fusion got more votes than Lincoln, and together, Lincoln and the Fusions got 6 times as many votes as Breckenridge.
What would have happened had the two appeasement parties been able to get together and put forth a single "Fusion"candidate? Politics is often more about individual candidates than policy so it's hard to really know, but here are the numbers for Lincoln, Breckinridge and an imaginary Fusion candidate who I'll call Douglas Bell:
Lincoln Breckinridge Douglas+Bell
AL: 0 48669 41453 No Change 9 D Electors
AR: 0 28732 25420 No Change 4 D Electors
CA: 38733 33969 24542 No Change 4 R Electors
CT: 43488 14372 16959 No Change 6 R Electors
DE: 3822 7339 4954 No Change 3 D Electors
FL: 0 8277 5024 No Change 3 D Electors
GA: 0 52176 54541 D+B wins 10 F Electors
IL: 172171 2331 165129 No Change 11 R Electors
IN: 139033 12295 120815 No Change 13 R Electors
IA: 70302 1035 57402 No Change 4 R Electors
KY: 1364 53143 91709 D+B Wins 12 F Electors
LA: 0 22681 27829 D+B Wins 6 F Electors
ME: 62811 6386 31739 No Change 8 R Electors
MD: 2294 42482 47726 D+B Wins, 8 F Electors
MA: 106684 6163 56701 No Change 13 R Electors
MI: 88481 805 65472 No Change 6 R Electors
MN: 22069 748 11970 No Change 4 R Electors
MS: 0 40768 28407 No Change 7 D Electors
MO: 17028 31362 117173 D+B Wins 9 F Electors
NH: 37519 2125 26299 No Change 5 R Electors
NJ: 58346 0 62869 D+B Wins 7 F Electors
NY: 362646 0 312510 No Change 35 R Electors
NC: 0 48846 47866 No Change 10 D Electors
OH: 231709 11406 199615 No Change 23 R Electors
OR: 5329 5075 4354 No Change 3 R Electors
PA: 268030 0 195636 No Change 27 R Electors
RI: 12244 0 7707 No Change 4 R Electors
SC: No popular vote No Change 8 D Electors
TN: 0 65097 81009 D+B Wins 12 F Electors
TX: 0 74454 15401 No Change 4 D Electors
VT: 33808 1866 8866 No Change 5 R Electors
VA: 1887 74325 90679 D+B Wins 15 F Electors
WI: 86110 887 65182 No Change 5 R Electors
Final Tally:
Lincoln 176 Electors
Douglas+Bell 79 Electors
Breckinridge: 48 Electors
Reality:
Lincoln: 180 Electors
Douglas: 12 Electors
Breckinridge 72 Electors
Bell: 39 Electors
The bottom line is that had the two compromise candidates been on the same ticket, there would have been no difference in the outcome, but there would have been one more election where the popular vote didn't match the electoral college outcome. Where there was a big change is that in the border states: Missouri, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, even Georgia, the compromisers were much more popular than the pro-slavery faction.
Is General Kelly right that a compromise could have avoided the Civil War? No. There is no such thing as half a slave (at least if he is to remain alive), so there is no compromise possible. The compromises that had been made were what lead to the tensions. There were more people that hoped for the impossible compromise than either of the more extreme factions, but that simply wasn't going to happen.
One of the interesting things I learned from doing this exercise is how many states had 0 votes for the opposing candidate. I doubt that these states actually had zero voters for those positions, but that voter manipulation or intimidation kept such voters away from the polls or their ballots from being counted.
01 November 2017
Without the Asteroid
About 65 Million years ago, an asteroid or comet 10-15 miles in diameter struck the earth in what is today the Yucatan Peninsula, forming what is called the Chicxulub crater, causing climate change and killing most plants and animals, large and small, and making extinct all large creatures, including the giant lizards we call dinosaurs. Small creatures: small birds, small mammals, small lizards, insects, etc., managed to survive and all animal life larger than about the size of a human fist descends from the few survivors, including us humans.
If the asteroid had missed the earth, the big dinosaurs would probably still be among us. Without them, mammals were able to evolve to fill the top predator niches, but had the asteroid not killed them, they'd still be eating everything that's not good at hiding or running away. The things that evolved into monkeys and apes would have had a much harder time competing until they grew the intelligence to turn the tables on the dinosaurs.
Were there intelligent dinosaurs? Clearly yes. Those surviving dinosaurs: crows and ravens, are nearly as smart as dogs and in some ways smarter. They are more social than most other types of birds, and it seems like that ability to work together provokes the development of communication, and that feeds back into speakers ability to come up with increasingly cunning plans. Other dinosaurs also worked together--The movie portrayal of Velociraptors is hyperbole to make a good story, but they did work in teams probably planned traps. It's not that big a step to sitting around after dinner telling stories and making plans for the next day. Our hands evolved from claws that are effective at climbing and catching prey to things that are better at using tools and weapons, which gave us a huge opportunity to generalize: select the right tool for the task, rather than being stuck with the one at the end of your arm. Things like spears are essentially impossible for non tool using creatures.
Without the asteroid, a dinosaur would have evolved to fill this niche. Perhaps it would have developed the sort of awareness that we call intelligence. It probably wouldn't have been one of the giants: a top predator has fewer evolutionary pressures than the middle sized ones. It's easy to imagine them being bipedal (so they can specialize their hands and not need them for walking), neither too big nor too small; probably 3 to 7 feet tall, living in groups of a few families. It's unlikely they could fly--wings use the same limbs that hands are on, which would preclude them from handling and making tools. But they might have feathers and tails. There's nothing particularly magic about 5 fingers, but the opposable thumb is crucial, although it might be implemented in a variety of ways. Could have 3 fingers and two thumbs, or 6 fingers and one thumb. But being a vertebrate, they'd have the head on top and 4 limbs, which constrains the possibilities quite a bit.
In addition the smarter birds, there are several other critters that have developed pretty high levels of intelligence. Dolphins are pretty smart. Groups of them will make sophisticated hunting plans. They clearly have a relatively sophisticated language. Their lack of hands limits them. Of course they developed well after the K-T asteroid--their evolution would have been different had the big dinosaurs survived. Octopuses are also pretty smart and they don't use it for teamwork. They are capable of pretty significant manipulation with their tentacles. And they do predate the K-T asteroid.
If the asteroid had missed the earth, the big dinosaurs would probably still be among us. Without them, mammals were able to evolve to fill the top predator niches, but had the asteroid not killed them, they'd still be eating everything that's not good at hiding or running away. The things that evolved into monkeys and apes would have had a much harder time competing until they grew the intelligence to turn the tables on the dinosaurs.
Were there intelligent dinosaurs? Clearly yes. Those surviving dinosaurs: crows and ravens, are nearly as smart as dogs and in some ways smarter. They are more social than most other types of birds, and it seems like that ability to work together provokes the development of communication, and that feeds back into speakers ability to come up with increasingly cunning plans. Other dinosaurs also worked together--The movie portrayal of Velociraptors is hyperbole to make a good story, but they did work in teams probably planned traps. It's not that big a step to sitting around after dinner telling stories and making plans for the next day. Our hands evolved from claws that are effective at climbing and catching prey to things that are better at using tools and weapons, which gave us a huge opportunity to generalize: select the right tool for the task, rather than being stuck with the one at the end of your arm. Things like spears are essentially impossible for non tool using creatures.
Without the asteroid, a dinosaur would have evolved to fill this niche. Perhaps it would have developed the sort of awareness that we call intelligence. It probably wouldn't have been one of the giants: a top predator has fewer evolutionary pressures than the middle sized ones. It's easy to imagine them being bipedal (so they can specialize their hands and not need them for walking), neither too big nor too small; probably 3 to 7 feet tall, living in groups of a few families. It's unlikely they could fly--wings use the same limbs that hands are on, which would preclude them from handling and making tools. But they might have feathers and tails. There's nothing particularly magic about 5 fingers, but the opposable thumb is crucial, although it might be implemented in a variety of ways. Could have 3 fingers and two thumbs, or 6 fingers and one thumb. But being a vertebrate, they'd have the head on top and 4 limbs, which constrains the possibilities quite a bit.
In addition the smarter birds, there are several other critters that have developed pretty high levels of intelligence. Dolphins are pretty smart. Groups of them will make sophisticated hunting plans. They clearly have a relatively sophisticated language. Their lack of hands limits them. Of course they developed well after the K-T asteroid--their evolution would have been different had the big dinosaurs survived. Octopuses are also pretty smart and they don't use it for teamwork. They are capable of pretty significant manipulation with their tentacles. And they do predate the K-T asteroid.
27 October 2017
2018 Calendar
Tue 1 Jan New Year's Day
Mon 15 Jan Martin Luther King Day (Holiday)
Fri 2 Feb Groundhog's (midwinter) Day
Sun 4 Feb Superbowl LII, Minneapolis, MN
Fri 9 Feb Winter Olympics XXIII Opening Ceremony PyongChang, Korea
Fri 16 Feb Chinese New Year, begins year of the Dog, 4716
Mon 19 Feb Presidents Day (Holiday)
Sun 25 Feb Winter Olympics XXIII Closing Ceremony, PyongChang, Korea
Sun 11 Mar Daylight Savings Time begins
Mon 20 Mar 16:15UT (9:15PDT) Spring Equinox
Fri 30 Mar Passover begins at sundown
Sun 1 Apr Easter
Sat 7 Apr Passover ends at sundown
Tue 1 May May Day (midspring)
Tue 15 May Ramadan begins
Mon 28 May Memorial Day (Holiday)
Thu 14 Jun Ramadan ends
Thu 14 Jun World Cup begins in Russia
Thu 21 Jun 10:07UT (3:07PDT) Summer Solstice
Wed 4 Jul Independence Day (Holiday)
Sun 15 Jul World Cup ends in Moscow, Russia
Wed 1 Aug Midsummer day
Mon 5 Sep Labor Day (Holiday)
Sun 10 Sep Sundown Rosh Hashana begins year 5779
Tue 18 Sep Sundown Yom Kippur
Sun 23 Sep 01:54UT (22 Sep 18:54PDT) Autumn Equinox
Mon 8 Oct Columbus Day (Holiday for some people)
Wed 31 Oct Hallowe'en
Thu 1 Nov Mid autumn day
Sun 4 Nov Daylight Savings Time ends
Tue 6 Nov Election Day
Sun 11 Nov Veterans Day
Thu 22 Nov Thanksgiving (Holiday)
Fri 23 Nov Holiday
Sun 2 Dec Sundown Hannuka begins
Mon 10 Dec Sundown, Hannuka ends
Fri 21 Dec 22:23UT (14:23PST) Winter Solstice
Tue 25 Dec Christmas (Holiday)
Days off work in bold
Astronomical and calendar events in italic
Mon 15 Jan Martin Luther King Day (Holiday)
Fri 2 Feb Groundhog's (midwinter) Day
Sun 4 Feb Superbowl LII, Minneapolis, MN
Fri 9 Feb Winter Olympics XXIII Opening Ceremony PyongChang, Korea
Fri 16 Feb Chinese New Year, begins year of the Dog, 4716
Mon 19 Feb Presidents Day (Holiday)
Sun 25 Feb Winter Olympics XXIII Closing Ceremony, PyongChang, Korea
Sun 11 Mar Daylight Savings Time begins
Mon 20 Mar 16:15UT (9:15PDT) Spring Equinox
Fri 30 Mar Passover begins at sundown
Sun 1 Apr Easter
Sat 7 Apr Passover ends at sundown
Tue 1 May May Day (midspring)
Tue 15 May Ramadan begins
Mon 28 May Memorial Day (Holiday)
Thu 14 Jun Ramadan ends
Thu 14 Jun World Cup begins in Russia
Thu 21 Jun 10:07UT (3:07PDT) Summer Solstice
Wed 4 Jul Independence Day (Holiday)
Sun 15 Jul World Cup ends in Moscow, Russia
Wed 1 Aug Midsummer day
Mon 5 Sep Labor Day (Holiday)
Sun 10 Sep Sundown Rosh Hashana begins year 5779
Tue 18 Sep Sundown Yom Kippur
Sun 23 Sep 01:54UT (22 Sep 18:54PDT) Autumn Equinox
Mon 8 Oct Columbus Day (Holiday for some people)
Wed 31 Oct Hallowe'en
Thu 1 Nov Mid autumn day
Sun 4 Nov Daylight Savings Time ends
Tue 6 Nov Election Day
Sun 11 Nov Veterans Day
Thu 22 Nov Thanksgiving (Holiday)
Fri 23 Nov Holiday
Sun 2 Dec Sundown Hannuka begins
Mon 10 Dec Sundown, Hannuka ends
Fri 21 Dec 22:23UT (14:23PST) Winter Solstice
Tue 25 Dec Christmas (Holiday)
Days off work in bold
Astronomical and calendar events in italic
18 October 2017
Dumb Wheels
For some reason, just about all the car companies have been going with big rim, low sidewall tires, and the aftermarket is going even kookier.
To be perfectly clear, any performance advantages of these is only marginally discernible and couldn't possibly make any difference to you unless you're in a racing situation. Otherwise, unless you count appearance, it's all bad.
The good:
Low sidewalls provide a somewhat stiffer ride and are less compliant. This affects lateral stability slightly at the extremes and might give you slightly better cornering on a smooth road. So slightly that if you can actually feel it, you can probably make a pretty good living driving race cars.
Large rims allow larger diameter brake rotors. This doesn't improve braking at all. It does allow better brake cooling, which could only possibly be meaningfully relevant if you're decelerating at more than about half a G several times a minute. Basically, fairly serious racing. It would also help you if you do the stupid thing and forget to downshift for a long downhill and ride the brakes instead.
The metal rim can be slightly lighter than the rubber tire, reducing unsprung weight. Again, if this actually makes a difference for you, you're probably making a living driving race cars.
The bad:
Low sidewalls provide a somewhat stiffer ride and are less compliant. This gives you a bumpier ride, resulting in a loss of traction unless it's compensated for in the suspension.
Low sidewalls require the surface of the tire to be stiffer, which in addition to reducing compliance, results in poorer traction on slippery surfaces like leaves and ice. So much that people who use them and live in snowy areas need to replace them with higher sidewall tires for winter.
Low sidewalls have limited deflection. If you hit a rock or some other hard thing, the sidewall may completely depress, translating the impact to the rim and damaging it. At the extreme, the thinnest sidewalls cannot tolerate the one inch curb in front of a driveway.
Sidewalls thinner than standard curbs do not protect the rim from lateral impacts when you take a turn a little too close. This is such a problem that there's a business selling aftermarket rim protectors.
The are stiffer and less compliant, which results in reduced fuel economy. For example, Tesla measures slightly over 2% range reduction when switching from 19" to 21" rims.
Formula 1, IndyCar, NASCAR, and many other high end motor racing series do not use these things and manage to get pretty good performance nevertheless. Some sports car racing does, but most of the top cars do not, and have sidewall/rim ratios comparable to ordinary road cars. They have much wider tread, but that's not the same thing at all.
The silly standard way the measurements of tires are specified is part of the problem. My Tesla Model S takes 245/45R19 tires. This is 245mm wide, on a 19 inch rim. The sidewalls of the tire are 45% of 245, which is 110 mm, which is 4.33 inches. So the total tire diameter is 19+2*4.33 = 27.66. Aftermarket 21 inch wheels use 245/35R21, which gives a 3.38" sidewall or 27.76 total tire diameter--basically the same. In addition to using two separate measuring systems (mm and inches), emphasizing sidewall/width ratios has confused people so that they think that's important. In addition, you have to do some calculation to figure out whether your wheelwell can accommodate any particular tire (I'm good at math, but I had to use a calculator to figure out what 45% of 245 was and convert it to inches)
I think they look stupid and I know the are almost entirely a negative for ordinary driving.
Way back in the olden days of tires with tubes, they had to be pretty close to 100% aspect ratio to accommodate the round tube. Tubeless tires and radial cords allowed wider tires and significantly better traction, but for a road car, less than about 60% is just silly.
To be perfectly clear, any performance advantages of these is only marginally discernible and couldn't possibly make any difference to you unless you're in a racing situation. Otherwise, unless you count appearance, it's all bad.
The good:
Low sidewalls provide a somewhat stiffer ride and are less compliant. This affects lateral stability slightly at the extremes and might give you slightly better cornering on a smooth road. So slightly that if you can actually feel it, you can probably make a pretty good living driving race cars.
Large rims allow larger diameter brake rotors. This doesn't improve braking at all. It does allow better brake cooling, which could only possibly be meaningfully relevant if you're decelerating at more than about half a G several times a minute. Basically, fairly serious racing. It would also help you if you do the stupid thing and forget to downshift for a long downhill and ride the brakes instead.
The metal rim can be slightly lighter than the rubber tire, reducing unsprung weight. Again, if this actually makes a difference for you, you're probably making a living driving race cars.
The bad:
Low sidewalls provide a somewhat stiffer ride and are less compliant. This gives you a bumpier ride, resulting in a loss of traction unless it's compensated for in the suspension.
Low sidewalls require the surface of the tire to be stiffer, which in addition to reducing compliance, results in poorer traction on slippery surfaces like leaves and ice. So much that people who use them and live in snowy areas need to replace them with higher sidewall tires for winter.
Low sidewalls have limited deflection. If you hit a rock or some other hard thing, the sidewall may completely depress, translating the impact to the rim and damaging it. At the extreme, the thinnest sidewalls cannot tolerate the one inch curb in front of a driveway.
Sidewalls thinner than standard curbs do not protect the rim from lateral impacts when you take a turn a little too close. This is such a problem that there's a business selling aftermarket rim protectors.
The are stiffer and less compliant, which results in reduced fuel economy. For example, Tesla measures slightly over 2% range reduction when switching from 19" to 21" rims.
Formula 1, IndyCar, NASCAR, and many other high end motor racing series do not use these things and manage to get pretty good performance nevertheless. Some sports car racing does, but most of the top cars do not, and have sidewall/rim ratios comparable to ordinary road cars. They have much wider tread, but that's not the same thing at all.
The silly standard way the measurements of tires are specified is part of the problem. My Tesla Model S takes 245/45R19 tires. This is 245mm wide, on a 19 inch rim. The sidewalls of the tire are 45% of 245, which is 110 mm, which is 4.33 inches. So the total tire diameter is 19+2*4.33 = 27.66. Aftermarket 21 inch wheels use 245/35R21, which gives a 3.38" sidewall or 27.76 total tire diameter--basically the same. In addition to using two separate measuring systems (mm and inches), emphasizing sidewall/width ratios has confused people so that they think that's important. In addition, you have to do some calculation to figure out whether your wheelwell can accommodate any particular tire (I'm good at math, but I had to use a calculator to figure out what 45% of 245 was and convert it to inches)
I think they look stupid and I know the are almost entirely a negative for ordinary driving.
Way back in the olden days of tires with tubes, they had to be pretty close to 100% aspect ratio to accommodate the round tube. Tubeless tires and radial cords allowed wider tires and significantly better traction, but for a road car, less than about 60% is just silly.
21 August 2017
Game of Thrones Continuity
Last night's episode was very exciting, although there were some continuity issues, I thought. There are many spoilers in here, so if you aren't caught up, stay away!!
1: The whole reason Jon Snow went to Dragonstone was to fetch a bunch of dragonglass (obsidian), which apparently can kill wights and white walkers. He didn't ask for it right away but did some sparring and staring longingly with Daenerys before finally giving Tyrion the opportunity to ask him if there was some lesser thing that they could do for him. This added suspense but makes little sense.
2: The whole reason the 7 samurai and their redshirts went north of the wall was to come into contact with some wights so they could bring one of them back. They knew they'd have do some fighting with wights and white walkers. Jon had been mining dragonglass. Didn't he think to bring a few of these special weapons to arm them, just in case they ran into the very thing they were looking for? (7: Jon, Jorah, Tormund, Dondarion, Thoros, Hound, Gendry. The first part of the episode was used for exposition, just like in the Kurozawa and Yul Brenner versions) (perhaps they did use dragonglass weapons but you'd think they'd have made a point of it, which they didn't)
3: best I can make out, it's about 1500 miles from Eastwatch to dragonstone. I don't know how fast GoT ravens fly, but pigeons do about 50 mph and can only fly for about 20 hours without taking a rest. If ravens are similar, that's 30 hours of flying plus a few hours of rest. Let's assume the dragons can fly twice as fast (much more than that and a rider could not possibly stay aboard). Adding Gendry's run all the way back to eastwatch and time for a little discussion in both places lets say 60 hours. The 7 samurai experienced a little cracking ice, but the Wight army was too much for it and they pulled back. Starting from no ice, at 0F, 60 hours can produce 6 inches of ice. Enough for a person or maybe a small group to walk on but not enough for an army of wights. But they weren't starting from zero, there was already ice. The broken spots had to re-freeze, but they'll do that a lot more quickly than if they'd been starting from clear water. So, 60 hours is just barely enough.
4: the Hound's stone is much lighter than a wight army or even a single wight. The fact that the ice is now hard enough to support a stone is no indication that it can support an army.
5: I said, out loud, "oh dear, now he's got a dragon" the moment the dragon was hit by the ice lance. They can obviously make wight bears and horses, so it seemed pretty obvious. It's not clear which dragon it was, except that Daenerys always rides Drogon and that one made it out. I'm guessing it was Viserion, because Rhaegon is penciled in to be Jon's dragon once he realizes he's a Targaryen, being named for his real father.
6: What does a fire breathing wight dragon breathe? icy fire? ordinary fire? blast of freezing something? does the ice put the fire out? a non-fire breathing dragon isn't as scary as a fire breather, but still pretty scary.
7: when the Hound kicked their captive wight, a whole bunch of wights on the shore screamed. when Jon killed the White Walker with Valyrian steel, a whole bunch of wights suddenly died. The characters are thinking that they were in thrall somehow to that particular White Walker and he has to be alive for them to animate. I'm thinking this is some connection analogous to warging. There only seem to be a handful of White Walkers...perhaps emphasis should be on taking them out.
8 The 6 remaining samurai all owe Daenarys a lot. Jorah pledged to her long ago, Jon did from his sickbed, and Davos joked that he might too.
9: I think the Hound has a strong crush on the Stark girls. It's clear that he had a strong sense of decency and a little bit of a soft heart all along, but his relationship with his psychopath brother and his employment by the Lannisters had forced him to suppress this under a thick layer of cynicism. I wonder if he'll fall for Daenarys the way he's fallen for the Stark girls.
10: Way too much deus ex machina in this episode. The dragons arriving in the nick of time, Jon coming to the surface within inches of his sword, Benjen Stark arriving when he did and giving Jon his undead horse. How is it that other wights are in thrall to the White Walkers but Benjen somehow has kept a mind of his own? Did Jon realize that his uncle or his horse were undead?
11: The fight between the Stark sisters makes no sense. Arya knows enough about the Lannisters to know that Sansa had been forced to write the letter, and Sansa knows Arya could have done nothing about it. She is right to be creeped out by Arya's face collection but she took the explanation with surprising aplomb. Arya was understandably jealous of the attention focused on Sansa but she was also happier without it. Perhaps Littlefinger is concerned that if they join with Daenerys, his chances at the Iron Throne are basically gone, although he may still have a shot at Sansa and in a rivalry between the girls, Arya will side with Jon and Daenerys.
12: How are dragons born? apparently they need a big fire. Where do the eggs come from? Do they need a mating pair to make eggs? Do they need a Targaryen to go into the fire with them? We don't know what gender the three dragons are. Maybe all dragons can lay eggs and only fire and Targaryns can fertilize them. Apparently the first dragons came from a volcano in Valyria. Was this volcano also related to the Doom of Valyria?
1: The whole reason Jon Snow went to Dragonstone was to fetch a bunch of dragonglass (obsidian), which apparently can kill wights and white walkers. He didn't ask for it right away but did some sparring and staring longingly with Daenerys before finally giving Tyrion the opportunity to ask him if there was some lesser thing that they could do for him. This added suspense but makes little sense.
2: The whole reason the 7 samurai and their redshirts went north of the wall was to come into contact with some wights so they could bring one of them back. They knew they'd have do some fighting with wights and white walkers. Jon had been mining dragonglass. Didn't he think to bring a few of these special weapons to arm them, just in case they ran into the very thing they were looking for? (7: Jon, Jorah, Tormund, Dondarion, Thoros, Hound, Gendry. The first part of the episode was used for exposition, just like in the Kurozawa and Yul Brenner versions) (perhaps they did use dragonglass weapons but you'd think they'd have made a point of it, which they didn't)
3: best I can make out, it's about 1500 miles from Eastwatch to dragonstone. I don't know how fast GoT ravens fly, but pigeons do about 50 mph and can only fly for about 20 hours without taking a rest. If ravens are similar, that's 30 hours of flying plus a few hours of rest. Let's assume the dragons can fly twice as fast (much more than that and a rider could not possibly stay aboard). Adding Gendry's run all the way back to eastwatch and time for a little discussion in both places lets say 60 hours. The 7 samurai experienced a little cracking ice, but the Wight army was too much for it and they pulled back. Starting from no ice, at 0F, 60 hours can produce 6 inches of ice. Enough for a person or maybe a small group to walk on but not enough for an army of wights. But they weren't starting from zero, there was already ice. The broken spots had to re-freeze, but they'll do that a lot more quickly than if they'd been starting from clear water. So, 60 hours is just barely enough.
4: the Hound's stone is much lighter than a wight army or even a single wight. The fact that the ice is now hard enough to support a stone is no indication that it can support an army.
5: I said, out loud, "oh dear, now he's got a dragon" the moment the dragon was hit by the ice lance. They can obviously make wight bears and horses, so it seemed pretty obvious. It's not clear which dragon it was, except that Daenerys always rides Drogon and that one made it out. I'm guessing it was Viserion, because Rhaegon is penciled in to be Jon's dragon once he realizes he's a Targaryen, being named for his real father.
6: What does a fire breathing wight dragon breathe? icy fire? ordinary fire? blast of freezing something? does the ice put the fire out? a non-fire breathing dragon isn't as scary as a fire breather, but still pretty scary.
7: when the Hound kicked their captive wight, a whole bunch of wights on the shore screamed. when Jon killed the White Walker with Valyrian steel, a whole bunch of wights suddenly died. The characters are thinking that they were in thrall somehow to that particular White Walker and he has to be alive for them to animate. I'm thinking this is some connection analogous to warging. There only seem to be a handful of White Walkers...perhaps emphasis should be on taking them out.
8 The 6 remaining samurai all owe Daenarys a lot. Jorah pledged to her long ago, Jon did from his sickbed, and Davos joked that he might too.
9: I think the Hound has a strong crush on the Stark girls. It's clear that he had a strong sense of decency and a little bit of a soft heart all along, but his relationship with his psychopath brother and his employment by the Lannisters had forced him to suppress this under a thick layer of cynicism. I wonder if he'll fall for Daenarys the way he's fallen for the Stark girls.
10: Way too much deus ex machina in this episode. The dragons arriving in the nick of time, Jon coming to the surface within inches of his sword, Benjen Stark arriving when he did and giving Jon his undead horse. How is it that other wights are in thrall to the White Walkers but Benjen somehow has kept a mind of his own? Did Jon realize that his uncle or his horse were undead?
11: The fight between the Stark sisters makes no sense. Arya knows enough about the Lannisters to know that Sansa had been forced to write the letter, and Sansa knows Arya could have done nothing about it. She is right to be creeped out by Arya's face collection but she took the explanation with surprising aplomb. Arya was understandably jealous of the attention focused on Sansa but she was also happier without it. Perhaps Littlefinger is concerned that if they join with Daenerys, his chances at the Iron Throne are basically gone, although he may still have a shot at Sansa and in a rivalry between the girls, Arya will side with Jon and Daenerys.
12: How are dragons born? apparently they need a big fire. Where do the eggs come from? Do they need a mating pair to make eggs? Do they need a Targaryen to go into the fire with them? We don't know what gender the three dragons are. Maybe all dragons can lay eggs and only fire and Targaryns can fertilize them. Apparently the first dragons came from a volcano in Valyria. Was this volcano also related to the Doom of Valyria?
11 August 2017
Game of Thrones Predictions
We're 4/7ths through the 7th season. Daenerys has had some losses but just took a huge win with her dragons and Dothraki. Bronn just saved Jaime from a dragon but both are sinking into deep water, pulled down by the weight of their armor. Jaime appears to be unconscious. Jon Snow has been making friends with Daenerys but refuses to bend the knee. He's presumably busy mining dragonglass.
I predict that Jaime and Bronn survive by getting their armor off, but are captured. They will have a reunion with their brother/old friend Tyrion. They will both eventually switch sides but not for quite a while yet. They'll stay captive for a while. One of them will escape, probably Bronn.
Tyrion loves his brother, but Jaime loves his sister and is loyal to what's left of the family. Tywin and Cersei have made that loyalty impossible for Tyrion, but Tyrion doesn't want his brother to die. It's a tough one. Jaime dying heroically would resolve everything, but that would wreck the drama of the story, so the writers probably won't do that.
Jon Snow will have an incident soon where one of the dragons takes a shine to him, probably the one named for his biological father. I'm guessing the dragon will invite him to go for a ride but it may play out a different way. He doesn't yet know yet that he's a Targaryen. When he and Bran get together finally, he'll find out, and suddenly all will become clear. The writers are drawing this out for as long as possible.
Nobody seems to be concerned that the one-time Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, who is an exceptionally duty-driven person, is now King in the North. Everybody knows that the only way out of the Night's Watch is to die. There are hundreds of Stark bannermen who don't know that Jon Snow did die and was resurrected, yet are nevertheless pledged to what must seem to be a watchman who has violated his vow. Sam Tarley was already on the way to the Citadel when this happened and doesn't know. He sent a raven (which apparently got to Winterfell somehow) to Jon telling him about the dragonglass at Dragonstone, but the Citadel seems pretty isolated. Sam probably doesn't know that Jon died and that his departure is legitimate, albeit unorthodox.
Sam has been assigned to copy a bunch of scrolls that are decaying. I predict that some of them will prove very interesting and one will have some information, forgotten for centuries, that will be crucially important in the fight against the Night King. I think the Archmaester suspected that this might be the case and Sam's punishment will prove in fact to be a huge reward.
I'm guessing nobody else in Winterfell appreciates just how deadly Arya has become, although there are quite a few hints. When asked who had taught her the trick with the dagger, she told Brienne "no one". Brienne took it to mean that she'd just figured it out on her own, but she meant she'd been taught by the faceless men. If Arya (or somebody) is able to kill Cersei, just about all the POV characters remaining have a good reason to get along with each other and are already friends at some level, and can get to the real business of defending the realm against the Night King. I suppose this means that Cersei can't be killed for a while, if only for dramatic purposes.
Gendry is probably out there somewhere. He is already friends with Arya, and her reunion with HotPie a few weeks ago is probably foreshadowing. He realizes he owes his life to Davos, but he'd been penciled in for the Night's Watch. Gendry is a notch more legitimate a holder of the Iron Throne than Cersei (he's the illegitimate son of Robert) so Cersei would probably kill him if she heard about him, but she doesn't know. I'm guessing Sam plays a role. Once Sam gets his Maester's chain, he's destined to return to the Watch; he didn't die like Jon, but he effectively has a wife and child, which is a violation of his oath too.
I predict that Jaime and Bronn survive by getting their armor off, but are captured. They will have a reunion with their brother/old friend Tyrion. They will both eventually switch sides but not for quite a while yet. They'll stay captive for a while. One of them will escape, probably Bronn.
Tyrion loves his brother, but Jaime loves his sister and is loyal to what's left of the family. Tywin and Cersei have made that loyalty impossible for Tyrion, but Tyrion doesn't want his brother to die. It's a tough one. Jaime dying heroically would resolve everything, but that would wreck the drama of the story, so the writers probably won't do that.
Jon Snow will have an incident soon where one of the dragons takes a shine to him, probably the one named for his biological father. I'm guessing the dragon will invite him to go for a ride but it may play out a different way. He doesn't yet know yet that he's a Targaryen. When he and Bran get together finally, he'll find out, and suddenly all will become clear. The writers are drawing this out for as long as possible.
Nobody seems to be concerned that the one-time Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, who is an exceptionally duty-driven person, is now King in the North. Everybody knows that the only way out of the Night's Watch is to die. There are hundreds of Stark bannermen who don't know that Jon Snow did die and was resurrected, yet are nevertheless pledged to what must seem to be a watchman who has violated his vow. Sam Tarley was already on the way to the Citadel when this happened and doesn't know. He sent a raven (which apparently got to Winterfell somehow) to Jon telling him about the dragonglass at Dragonstone, but the Citadel seems pretty isolated. Sam probably doesn't know that Jon died and that his departure is legitimate, albeit unorthodox.
Sam has been assigned to copy a bunch of scrolls that are decaying. I predict that some of them will prove very interesting and one will have some information, forgotten for centuries, that will be crucially important in the fight against the Night King. I think the Archmaester suspected that this might be the case and Sam's punishment will prove in fact to be a huge reward.
I'm guessing nobody else in Winterfell appreciates just how deadly Arya has become, although there are quite a few hints. When asked who had taught her the trick with the dagger, she told Brienne "no one". Brienne took it to mean that she'd just figured it out on her own, but she meant she'd been taught by the faceless men. If Arya (or somebody) is able to kill Cersei, just about all the POV characters remaining have a good reason to get along with each other and are already friends at some level, and can get to the real business of defending the realm against the Night King. I suppose this means that Cersei can't be killed for a while, if only for dramatic purposes.
Gendry is probably out there somewhere. He is already friends with Arya, and her reunion with HotPie a few weeks ago is probably foreshadowing. He realizes he owes his life to Davos, but he'd been penciled in for the Night's Watch. Gendry is a notch more legitimate a holder of the Iron Throne than Cersei (he's the illegitimate son of Robert) so Cersei would probably kill him if she heard about him, but she doesn't know. I'm guessing Sam plays a role. Once Sam gets his Maester's chain, he's destined to return to the Watch; he didn't die like Jon, but he effectively has a wife and child, which is a violation of his oath too.
03 June 2017
Tesla Master Plan, Part Deux
Tesla's original plan was:
1: develop an expensive, very sporty electric car for early adopters
2: use the income from that to develop a less expensive electric car for a wider market
3: use the income from that to develop a mass market electric car
4: provide solar charging.
They've basically done just what they proposed, with a few distractions, some productive, some less so. The roadster was truly groundbreaking and worked just as they'd hoped. It also taught them a lot of things and the Model S was a much better, more practical car. The supercharger network was a terrific idea. It was what convinced me I could buy a Model S. The gigafactory also has a lot of potential. The Model 3 is not on the market yet but they've sold nearly half a million places in line at $1K each.
But the model X was a form factor copied from one of the poorest selling SUVs on the market, the BMW X4, and it hasn't sold well either. Had it been a more conventional SUV, it could have been a great car, but instead they went down a rabbithole with the falconwing doors. And they undermined the one thing that might have been able to do well, haul a lot of people and stuff, by putting a fastback on it.
Now that the master plan is basically complete, they have announced master plan part deux. It includes a pickup truck, an Crossover based on the model 3 chassis, and a class 8 truck.
Class 8 trucks are a commodity, produced by companies like Paccar (Kenworth and Peterbilt), Mack, International, and so forth. You can put any drive system you want into one, provided it fits the form factor. Tesla co-founder Ian Wright is showing the way: Wrightspeed will install one of their hybrid drivetrains into the truck of your choosing. So far he's aiming at Class 6 and 7 trucks, a little smaller than long haulers, but include things like garbage trucks. His drive is a series hybrid, with a fully electric drive train, using a gas turbine as a range extender. Tesla might be able to be a new player in the heavy truck market, but it seems like it's a pretty risky play. I think the series hybrid with range extender is the way to go: truckers drive for 8 hour days with required sleeping times, and to power that fully electric will be a battery in the gigawatt/hour range. 10 tons or so, even with Lithium. This will significantly impact the load the thing can carry. A ton or two of battery (100-200kwh) can be charged overnight anywhere with J1772 or NEMA 14-50 and give a hundred or so miles of electric range or climb a significant mountain. A small engine, like wrightspeed's turbine, can keep the thing topped up in the flats and leave the steeps to the battery.
The pickup truck is an obvious winner. Someone apparently pointed out to Musk that Europeans don't buy pickups, they buy vans instead, so now they're thinking about that. Tesla should make a pickup/van chassis with a long travel suspension and the cab far forward, so the cargo box can be as big as possible. This creates lots of options: Moving vans and contractor vehicles are obvious. Camper vans. What they should have done with the model X: a minibus. I don't think fully driverless is much less than 10 years out, but it's coming and driverless minibus and taxicabs are clearly be part of that. Dare I suggest a taxicab that can comfortably carry more than 4 people besides the driver, like the old Checker, or those in Great Britain?
The crossover based on the model 3 is a popular idea at the moment. Another should be a new version of the roadster. The roadster is substantially smaller than the 3 so this may not work out.
I love my Model S. It has a few problems.
1: there are still lots of places I'd like to go that don't yet have superchargers. most of them have slower chargers but not all, and I'd really prefer to get there than spend it waiting for my car to charge somewhere in route. This is obviously getting better, but not if they have too many more screwups like the model X.
2: It's too big. I live in the city and it's too big for compact parking places and a lot of narrow city streets. The model 3 will address at least some of this.
3: It's too ostentatious. I'd rather a stealthier car. I don't think the model 3 will fix this.
I want two things:
a compact, non-ostentatious electric car with at least 200 miles of range. I'd prefer a two door, boxier car than a 4 door or sleek looking car.
a pickup truck that I can use to haul lumber, appliances and tow my 5000 lb trailer up a steep hill. I'd like to be able to put a camper on it, and it'd be nice if it had 250 miles range towing the trailer.
1: develop an expensive, very sporty electric car for early adopters
2: use the income from that to develop a less expensive electric car for a wider market
3: use the income from that to develop a mass market electric car
4: provide solar charging.
They've basically done just what they proposed, with a few distractions, some productive, some less so. The roadster was truly groundbreaking and worked just as they'd hoped. It also taught them a lot of things and the Model S was a much better, more practical car. The supercharger network was a terrific idea. It was what convinced me I could buy a Model S. The gigafactory also has a lot of potential. The Model 3 is not on the market yet but they've sold nearly half a million places in line at $1K each.
But the model X was a form factor copied from one of the poorest selling SUVs on the market, the BMW X4, and it hasn't sold well either. Had it been a more conventional SUV, it could have been a great car, but instead they went down a rabbithole with the falconwing doors. And they undermined the one thing that might have been able to do well, haul a lot of people and stuff, by putting a fastback on it.
Now that the master plan is basically complete, they have announced master plan part deux. It includes a pickup truck, an Crossover based on the model 3 chassis, and a class 8 truck.
Class 8 trucks are a commodity, produced by companies like Paccar (Kenworth and Peterbilt), Mack, International, and so forth. You can put any drive system you want into one, provided it fits the form factor. Tesla co-founder Ian Wright is showing the way: Wrightspeed will install one of their hybrid drivetrains into the truck of your choosing. So far he's aiming at Class 6 and 7 trucks, a little smaller than long haulers, but include things like garbage trucks. His drive is a series hybrid, with a fully electric drive train, using a gas turbine as a range extender. Tesla might be able to be a new player in the heavy truck market, but it seems like it's a pretty risky play. I think the series hybrid with range extender is the way to go: truckers drive for 8 hour days with required sleeping times, and to power that fully electric will be a battery in the gigawatt/hour range. 10 tons or so, even with Lithium. This will significantly impact the load the thing can carry. A ton or two of battery (100-200kwh) can be charged overnight anywhere with J1772 or NEMA 14-50 and give a hundred or so miles of electric range or climb a significant mountain. A small engine, like wrightspeed's turbine, can keep the thing topped up in the flats and leave the steeps to the battery.
The pickup truck is an obvious winner. Someone apparently pointed out to Musk that Europeans don't buy pickups, they buy vans instead, so now they're thinking about that. Tesla should make a pickup/van chassis with a long travel suspension and the cab far forward, so the cargo box can be as big as possible. This creates lots of options: Moving vans and contractor vehicles are obvious. Camper vans. What they should have done with the model X: a minibus. I don't think fully driverless is much less than 10 years out, but it's coming and driverless minibus and taxicabs are clearly be part of that. Dare I suggest a taxicab that can comfortably carry more than 4 people besides the driver, like the old Checker, or those in Great Britain?
The crossover based on the model 3 is a popular idea at the moment. Another should be a new version of the roadster. The roadster is substantially smaller than the 3 so this may not work out.
I love my Model S. It has a few problems.
1: there are still lots of places I'd like to go that don't yet have superchargers. most of them have slower chargers but not all, and I'd really prefer to get there than spend it waiting for my car to charge somewhere in route. This is obviously getting better, but not if they have too many more screwups like the model X.
2: It's too big. I live in the city and it's too big for compact parking places and a lot of narrow city streets. The model 3 will address at least some of this.
3: It's too ostentatious. I'd rather a stealthier car. I don't think the model 3 will fix this.
I want two things:
a compact, non-ostentatious electric car with at least 200 miles of range. I'd prefer a two door, boxier car than a 4 door or sleek looking car.
a pickup truck that I can use to haul lumber, appliances and tow my 5000 lb trailer up a steep hill. I'd like to be able to put a camper on it, and it'd be nice if it had 250 miles range towing the trailer.
11 May 2017
Shortest Presidential Term
William Henry Harrison 30 days
James A Garfield 6 months 15 days
Zachary Taylor 1 year 4 months 5 days
Warren G Harding 2 years 5 months
Gerald R Ford 2 years 5 months 11 days
Millard Fillmore 2 years 8 months
John F Kennedy 2 years 10 months
Chester A Arthur 3 years 6 months
Andrew Johnson 3 years 10 months, 19 days
John Tyler 3 years 11 months
John Adams 4 years
John Quincy Adams 4 years
Martin Van Buren 4 years
James K Polk 4 years
Franklin Pierce 4 years
James Buchanan 4 years
Rutherford B Hayes 4 years
Benjamin Harrison 4 years
William Howard Taft 4 years
Herbert Hoover 4 years
Jimmy Carter 4 years
George H W Bush 4 years
Abraham Lincoln 4 years 1 month, 11 days
William McKinley 4 years 6 months, 10 days
Lyndon Baines Johnson 5 years 2 months
Richard M Nixon 5 years 6 months
Calvin Coolidge 5 years 7 months
Theodore Roosevelt 7 years 6 months
Harry S Truman 7 years 9 months
George Washington 8 years
Thomas Jefferson 8 years
James Madison 8 years
James Monroe 8 years
Andrew Jackson 8 years
Ulysses S Grant 8 years
Grover Cleveland 4 years + 4 years = 8 years
Woodrow Wilson 8 years
Dwight D Eisenhower 8 years
Ronald Reagan 8 years
Bill Clinton 8 years
George W Bush 8 years
Barrack Obama 8 years
Franklin D Roosevelt 12 years 1 month, 8 days
James A Garfield 6 months 15 days
Zachary Taylor 1 year 4 months 5 days
Warren G Harding 2 years 5 months
Gerald R Ford 2 years 5 months 11 days
Millard Fillmore 2 years 8 months
John F Kennedy 2 years 10 months
Chester A Arthur 3 years 6 months
Andrew Johnson 3 years 10 months, 19 days
John Tyler 3 years 11 months
John Adams 4 years
John Quincy Adams 4 years
Martin Van Buren 4 years
James K Polk 4 years
Franklin Pierce 4 years
James Buchanan 4 years
Rutherford B Hayes 4 years
Benjamin Harrison 4 years
William Howard Taft 4 years
Herbert Hoover 4 years
Jimmy Carter 4 years
George H W Bush 4 years
Abraham Lincoln 4 years 1 month, 11 days
William McKinley 4 years 6 months, 10 days
Lyndon Baines Johnson 5 years 2 months
Richard M Nixon 5 years 6 months
Calvin Coolidge 5 years 7 months
Theodore Roosevelt 7 years 6 months
Harry S Truman 7 years 9 months
George Washington 8 years
Thomas Jefferson 8 years
James Madison 8 years
James Monroe 8 years
Andrew Jackson 8 years
Ulysses S Grant 8 years
Grover Cleveland 4 years + 4 years = 8 years
Woodrow Wilson 8 years
Dwight D Eisenhower 8 years
Ronald Reagan 8 years
Bill Clinton 8 years
George W Bush 8 years
Barrack Obama 8 years
Franklin D Roosevelt 12 years 1 month, 8 days
07 May 2017
Dr Who Companions
Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladden). She worked with the 3rd, mostly the 4th, and 10th doctors (Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, and David Tennant). Her combination of independence, intelligence and feistyness combined with just the right amount of damsel in distress made her perfect.
Romana (Mary Tamm), She only did one season with the 4th doctor (Tom Baker). She was also a Time Lord and was academically and in several other ways the doctor's superior, but she had a lot less experience. She was also an ice princess, in the Hitchcock sense, which works well in a movie but doesn't last for a longer relationship than that. So at the end of that season, she regenerated into the actress that was Tom Baker's girlfriend and later wife, Lalla Ward. That character made more sense for the show, but I didn't like her as much.
Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) She worked with the 4th and 5th doctors (Tom Baker and Peter Davison). Another very smart ice princess, she was not as strong as first Romana but because there were two other companions, it held together longer.
Martha Jones (Freema Argeman). She worked with the 10th doctor (David Tennant) and had the bad luck to be with the show when they went through a really terrible storyline. The few good stories they did though, she did well.
Christina de Souza (Michelle Ryan). She only did one episode with the 10th doctor (David Tennant). I'm disappointed they didn't go with her, she was terrific as was the character she played (a skillful thief who was not entirely selfish). I've seen Ryan in other things--she wasn't as good.
Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan). Only in one episode, but it was the best episode ever.
Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman). She was with the 11th and 12th doctors (Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi) and I think she was an excellent choice for the part she played.
Jo Grant (Katy Manning). She was with the 3rd doctor (Jon Pertwee) and was a bundle of energy and vivaciousness and handled the damsel in distress well.
The Brigadier, Captain Yates, Sergeant Benton (UNIT: Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin, John Levene). Not companions in the normal sense since they didn't travel with the doctor, but they were important, mostly with the 3rd doctor.
Adric (Matthew Waterhouse). I liked Adric. For some reason most people don't. Perhaps it's that he's a mathematician. He did a lot of good things and died heroically. I think he's the only companion to have been killed off (although Rose was trapped in a different dimension, which amounts to the same thing). He's not my favorite but he's certainly in the top 25%.
At the other end
Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) was one of the most popular companions. But I don't get her at all. Her grandfather, Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbins) was in every way a better character.
Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) was also very popular. I get her a little more than Donna, but still don't see the appeal.
Melanie (Bonnie Langford) was fun to look at, but that was about it. A very annoying personality.
Peri (Nicola Bryant) Whiney and annoying, with a terrible American accent. there are so many talented British actors who can do a good American accent, and even more good actual American actors. But they chose someone who couldn't, and had her play an American anyway. It didn't help that her Doctor (#5, Colin Baker) was just as annoying as she was.
Leela (Louise Jameson) Attractive and wore her costume well, but obviously lacked the physical skills the character she was portraying supposedly possessed and completely broke the suspension of disbelief you need to have for this sort of show. The episode that most drove this home involved a pretty spaceship pilot doing mildly active things with Leela. The pilot, despite her stiletto heels, was visibly more athletic and coordinated than Leela.
An aside on monsters: Central to the appeal of a show like Dr. Who is suspension of disbelief. It's easier to suspend disbelief about a frankly cheesy special effect like Daleks or the other propman-in-a-suit monsters when it's obviously meant as a stand-in for something more credible. When the computer generated characters get good enough that you're no longer making allowances, the standards of everything else in the show also need to go up to match. But the plots of the new version are just as cheesy as they ever were and in a lot of cases even worse.
Romana (Mary Tamm), She only did one season with the 4th doctor (Tom Baker). She was also a Time Lord and was academically and in several other ways the doctor's superior, but she had a lot less experience. She was also an ice princess, in the Hitchcock sense, which works well in a movie but doesn't last for a longer relationship than that. So at the end of that season, she regenerated into the actress that was Tom Baker's girlfriend and later wife, Lalla Ward. That character made more sense for the show, but I didn't like her as much.
Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) She worked with the 4th and 5th doctors (Tom Baker and Peter Davison). Another very smart ice princess, she was not as strong as first Romana but because there were two other companions, it held together longer.
Martha Jones (Freema Argeman). She worked with the 10th doctor (David Tennant) and had the bad luck to be with the show when they went through a really terrible storyline. The few good stories they did though, she did well.
Christina de Souza (Michelle Ryan). She only did one episode with the 10th doctor (David Tennant). I'm disappointed they didn't go with her, she was terrific as was the character she played (a skillful thief who was not entirely selfish). I've seen Ryan in other things--she wasn't as good.
Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan). Only in one episode, but it was the best episode ever.
Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman). She was with the 11th and 12th doctors (Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi) and I think she was an excellent choice for the part she played.
Jo Grant (Katy Manning). She was with the 3rd doctor (Jon Pertwee) and was a bundle of energy and vivaciousness and handled the damsel in distress well.
The Brigadier, Captain Yates, Sergeant Benton (UNIT: Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin, John Levene). Not companions in the normal sense since they didn't travel with the doctor, but they were important, mostly with the 3rd doctor.
Adric (Matthew Waterhouse). I liked Adric. For some reason most people don't. Perhaps it's that he's a mathematician. He did a lot of good things and died heroically. I think he's the only companion to have been killed off (although Rose was trapped in a different dimension, which amounts to the same thing). He's not my favorite but he's certainly in the top 25%.
At the other end
Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) was one of the most popular companions. But I don't get her at all. Her grandfather, Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbins) was in every way a better character.
Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) was also very popular. I get her a little more than Donna, but still don't see the appeal.
Melanie (Bonnie Langford) was fun to look at, but that was about it. A very annoying personality.
Peri (Nicola Bryant) Whiney and annoying, with a terrible American accent. there are so many talented British actors who can do a good American accent, and even more good actual American actors. But they chose someone who couldn't, and had her play an American anyway. It didn't help that her Doctor (#5, Colin Baker) was just as annoying as she was.
Leela (Louise Jameson) Attractive and wore her costume well, but obviously lacked the physical skills the character she was portraying supposedly possessed and completely broke the suspension of disbelief you need to have for this sort of show. The episode that most drove this home involved a pretty spaceship pilot doing mildly active things with Leela. The pilot, despite her stiletto heels, was visibly more athletic and coordinated than Leela.
An aside on monsters: Central to the appeal of a show like Dr. Who is suspension of disbelief. It's easier to suspend disbelief about a frankly cheesy special effect like Daleks or the other propman-in-a-suit monsters when it's obviously meant as a stand-in for something more credible. When the computer generated characters get good enough that you're no longer making allowances, the standards of everything else in the show also need to go up to match. But the plots of the new version are just as cheesy as they ever were and in a lot of cases even worse.
25 April 2017
Vinyl Presence
In the early days of recording the goal was to reproduce the music or whatever was being recorded as accurately as possible. Early microphones, wax, and later shellac drums and disks, amplification horns and simple tube circuits were so inadequate, and very expensive, leaving little doubt whether you were listening to a recording or live music. By the 1950s though, the technology began to catch up. Speakers and amplifiers got better, microphones, got better, and perhaps most important, recording materials got better: better lathes, pressed vinyl disks, extremely lightweight diamond needles. If everything was right, it was possible for a recording to win in a real A-B test.
One of the important things that was improved was that vague thing called "presence", which is based on our "ears" ability to place a sound accurately in a 3-D environment. Our ancestors were both hunters and prey, and in such a context, this ability confers huge survival value. So we have a whole bunch of very sophisticated mechanisms, most of which are almost completely instinctual. Most of us cannot describe most of them, but they're there and they use them every day. For example, we use the slight difference in volume of a sound to place it left or right according to how our head is oriented. We use difference in phase to determine whether this sound is close to on axis or how far away from the axis it is, giving us a 3 dimensional effect. We use the pitch of the sound to determine how high it is: low sounds are lower, like rumbling or water, while breaking branches and flapping wings are higher. And the most amazing part is that our brains and ears are doing this in milliseconds, on sounds that may not even have a full wave.
Early studio recordings were as acoustically as quiet as possible. A room with as much sound insulation and damping as possible, so there would be no outside or reflective noise. But as the techniques got better, it didn't take long to realize that something was missing. The most important was reverberation: Every room, even a big outdoor performance arena, has a characteristic echo, and recordings with no echo at all sounded weirdly sterile. The solution was a device called a "spring reverb", which was a speaker and microphone connected to a short piece of spring, which would transmit sounds more slowly than air and could be adjusted fairly easily to produce a desired amount of echo. Nowadays the same thing is done with digital electronics.
Next came stereo. Two microphones were used in live situations and mixdowns to two tracks in studio situations to simulate the volume and phase difference that we use to detect position. Attempts were made to do even better with 4 and more channels, but it turns out that they were getting into diminishing returns. Some of these things still exist but they are mostly used for things like movie sound effects, so the rumbling or TIE fighter or whatever seems to be coming from behind you.
When the CD came along, one of the hobbies of audiophiles was to set up A-B tests between identical recordings on both CD and vinyl. I participated in several. With brand new vinyl and good equipment it was hard to tell. Once the record had been played a dozen times or so, it was easy. There were occasional scratches and pops, and there was a constant background hiss.
The way a stereo record is recorded, the lathe's cutter has two axes, each 45 degrees from the plane of the record and 90 degrees from each other. A sound that's only to come from one speaker makes oscillations only on one, leaving the other stationary, and vice versa. Since most sounds will come from both, this is mostly a 3 dimensional groove.
Imagine what happens when something happens to one of these tiny groves: a mote of dust lands on it, or a tiny scratch forms: the needle is deflected slightly from where it's supposed to be. It's unlikely that this will be in perfect stereo phase so our animal brain puts it some random place in the sound field. It's not even a full wave, so we don't actually register it. Another comes along a few milliseconds later and we do the same thing at a different random place. Our animal brain decides that whatever it is that's producing all of this has some size, and isn't just two disembodied speakers, but is present in the room.
CDs are unaffected by dust or scratches (at least within the limits) so they initially sounded sterile. It isn't hard to synthesize "presence" though: just add a tiny amount 3D white noise.
addenda 27 Oct 2017
A lot of guitar amplifiers have a control called "presence", which slightly changes the equalization, boosting the upper midrange. On some amps, this also includes some negative feedback for that range, which reduces distortion there, which are the fundamental pitch of the guitar are, but leaves (intentional) distortion alone across the rest of the spectrum--including white noise and the higher harmonics.
One of the important things that was improved was that vague thing called "presence", which is based on our "ears" ability to place a sound accurately in a 3-D environment. Our ancestors were both hunters and prey, and in such a context, this ability confers huge survival value. So we have a whole bunch of very sophisticated mechanisms, most of which are almost completely instinctual. Most of us cannot describe most of them, but they're there and they use them every day. For example, we use the slight difference in volume of a sound to place it left or right according to how our head is oriented. We use difference in phase to determine whether this sound is close to on axis or how far away from the axis it is, giving us a 3 dimensional effect. We use the pitch of the sound to determine how high it is: low sounds are lower, like rumbling or water, while breaking branches and flapping wings are higher. And the most amazing part is that our brains and ears are doing this in milliseconds, on sounds that may not even have a full wave.
Early studio recordings were as acoustically as quiet as possible. A room with as much sound insulation and damping as possible, so there would be no outside or reflective noise. But as the techniques got better, it didn't take long to realize that something was missing. The most important was reverberation: Every room, even a big outdoor performance arena, has a characteristic echo, and recordings with no echo at all sounded weirdly sterile. The solution was a device called a "spring reverb", which was a speaker and microphone connected to a short piece of spring, which would transmit sounds more slowly than air and could be adjusted fairly easily to produce a desired amount of echo. Nowadays the same thing is done with digital electronics.
Next came stereo. Two microphones were used in live situations and mixdowns to two tracks in studio situations to simulate the volume and phase difference that we use to detect position. Attempts were made to do even better with 4 and more channels, but it turns out that they were getting into diminishing returns. Some of these things still exist but they are mostly used for things like movie sound effects, so the rumbling or TIE fighter or whatever seems to be coming from behind you.
When the CD came along, one of the hobbies of audiophiles was to set up A-B tests between identical recordings on both CD and vinyl. I participated in several. With brand new vinyl and good equipment it was hard to tell. Once the record had been played a dozen times or so, it was easy. There were occasional scratches and pops, and there was a constant background hiss.
The way a stereo record is recorded, the lathe's cutter has two axes, each 45 degrees from the plane of the record and 90 degrees from each other. A sound that's only to come from one speaker makes oscillations only on one, leaving the other stationary, and vice versa. Since most sounds will come from both, this is mostly a 3 dimensional groove.
Imagine what happens when something happens to one of these tiny groves: a mote of dust lands on it, or a tiny scratch forms: the needle is deflected slightly from where it's supposed to be. It's unlikely that this will be in perfect stereo phase so our animal brain puts it some random place in the sound field. It's not even a full wave, so we don't actually register it. Another comes along a few milliseconds later and we do the same thing at a different random place. Our animal brain decides that whatever it is that's producing all of this has some size, and isn't just two disembodied speakers, but is present in the room.
CDs are unaffected by dust or scratches (at least within the limits) so they initially sounded sterile. It isn't hard to synthesize "presence" though: just add a tiny amount 3D white noise.
addenda 27 Oct 2017
A lot of guitar amplifiers have a control called "presence", which slightly changes the equalization, boosting the upper midrange. On some amps, this also includes some negative feedback for that range, which reduces distortion there, which are the fundamental pitch of the guitar are, but leaves (intentional) distortion alone across the rest of the spectrum--including white noise and the higher harmonics.
15 April 2017
State Abbreviations
The US Postal Service processes a lot of mail, and a human used to read every letter. To expedite this, they preferred specific abbreviations. Prior to 1963, they used relatively spelled out ones, as I've spelled them in the Abbr. column. In 1969, they decided upon a new set of two letter abbreviations. The only one that's changed since is Nebraska, which had initialy been NB. Canada asked them to change, due to a conflict with New Brunswick, so they switched to NE.
The interesting thing was that there had already been a two letter naming system in place, for the registration numbers of boats. Mostly, they're the same, but in 10 states, highlited in RED, they are different.
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/state-abbreviations.htm
The interesting thing was that there had already been a two letter naming system in place, for the registration numbers of boats. Mostly, they're the same, but in 10 states, highlited in RED, they are different.
| Postal | Name | Vessel | Abbr. |
|---|---|---|---|
| AL | Alabama | AL | |
| AK | Alaska | AK | |
| AR | Arkansas | AR | |
| AZ | Arizona | AZ | Ariz |
| CA | California | CF | Calif |
| CO | Colorado | CO | Col |
| CT | Connecticut | CT | Conn |
| DE | Delaware | DL | Del |
| FL | Florida | FL | Fla |
| GA | Georgia | GA | |
| HI | Hawaii | HA | |
| ID | Idaho | ID | |
| IL | Illinois | IL | Ill |
| IN | Indiana | In | Ind |
| IA | Iowa | IA | |
| KS | Kansas | KA | Kan |
| KY | Kentucky | KY | |
| LA | Louisiana | LA | |
| ME | Maine | ME | |
| MD | Maryland | MD | |
| MA | Massachusetts | MS | Mass |
| MI | Michigan | MC | Mich |
| MN | Minnesota | MN | Minn |
| MS | Mississippi | MI | Miss |
| MO | Missouri | MO | |
| NE | Nebraska | NB | Neb |
| NV | Nevada | NV | Nev |
| NH | New Hampshire | NH | |
| NJ | New Jersey | NJ | |
| NM | New Mexico | NM | |
| NY | New York | NY | |
| NC | North Carolina | NC | |
| ND | North Dakota | ND | |
| OH | Ohio | OH | |
| OK | Oklahoma | OK | |
| OR | Oregon | OR | Ore |
| PA | Pennsylvania | PA | Penn |
| RI | Rhode Island | RI | |
| SC | South Carolina | SC | |
| SD | South Dakota | SD | |
| TN | Tennessee | TN | Tenn |
| TX | Texas | TX | Tex |
| UT | Utah | UT | |
| VT | Vermont | VT | |
| VA | Virginia | VA | |
| WA | Washington | WN | Wash |
| WV | West Virginia | WV | |
| WI | Wisconsin | WS | |
| WY | Wyoming | WY |
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/state-abbreviations.htm
08 April 2017
59 Cruise Missiles
Thursday night, the new administration, in a major policy reversal, launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to Shayrat airbase, which had launched a gas attack two days earlier. But first he called the Russians to warn them, and apparently they warned the Syrian government in time to get most of their airplanes off the base. Nevertheless, those 59 precision guided high explosives did so little damage to the airbase that the Syrians are using the airbase again two days later. Apparently, they didn't do much damage.
What is this about? Trump and quite a few others insist that seeing the children suffering from the gas attack changed his mind. The deaths of 100,000 other children, many of them also by gas attacks, had apparently been insufficient. Many people are saying that this is a change long overdue--that we should have attacked Syria in 2013 after a similar gas attack. Obama asked congress for permission and was refused.
Syria is in the midst of a civil war. A terrible drought led to economic tensions and Syrians had joined the "Arab Spring" demonstrations of 2010. Assad had attacked peaceful demonstrators and they were off to the races. Bush's idiotic invasion of Iraq 7 years earlier had created a particularly grim and media-savvy participant, which in Syria goes by a name which translates to Islamic State In Syria. The republicans were right to put the brakes on Obama's warlike impulse and Trump had been right to stay out, no matter how horrible the events are. There is no good that can come from participating in someone else's civil war. The best we can hope is to put our thumb on the scale a little...provide intelligence and weapons to the side we want to win, for example. There will be atrocities, and any participation makes us guilty by association. 65 years of meddling in the affairs of the middle east (starting with the 1953 coup in Iran) has resulted in a much less safe world and virtually no good for anybody.
I don't think it's about the Syrian children at all. It is a distraction. The probe of Russian interference in last years election is getting closer and closer to Trump himself, and a dozen or more close advisors are clearly guilty of some level of collusion. These people conspired with a foreign power to install their puppet as president. This is high treason. Trump and his allies have been trying to deflect and obstruct the best they can, but for the moment, our institutions were still in place and the noose was tightening.
In another little bit of incompetence, Trump had signaled to Syria that he wouldn't respond to their atrocities. He hadn't understood that he was doing that--he doesn't understand much--but once the Idlib attack happened, he did figure it out and realized he needed to correct the message. This particular correction served several other purposes, too: it suggests that he might not be as beholden to his Russian puppeteers as we'd been thinking (except why did he warn them and not actually hit anything of consequence?). It distracts from the outrage over the Gorsuch appointment. It gives him brownie points from the hawks who wanted to participate in the civil war. And most importantly of all, it deflects media attention away from the investigation of Russian meddling in the election.
It isn't quite a Reichstag fire, but if we fall for it, it may be enough.
What is this about? Trump and quite a few others insist that seeing the children suffering from the gas attack changed his mind. The deaths of 100,000 other children, many of them also by gas attacks, had apparently been insufficient. Many people are saying that this is a change long overdue--that we should have attacked Syria in 2013 after a similar gas attack. Obama asked congress for permission and was refused.
Syria is in the midst of a civil war. A terrible drought led to economic tensions and Syrians had joined the "Arab Spring" demonstrations of 2010. Assad had attacked peaceful demonstrators and they were off to the races. Bush's idiotic invasion of Iraq 7 years earlier had created a particularly grim and media-savvy participant, which in Syria goes by a name which translates to Islamic State In Syria. The republicans were right to put the brakes on Obama's warlike impulse and Trump had been right to stay out, no matter how horrible the events are. There is no good that can come from participating in someone else's civil war. The best we can hope is to put our thumb on the scale a little...provide intelligence and weapons to the side we want to win, for example. There will be atrocities, and any participation makes us guilty by association. 65 years of meddling in the affairs of the middle east (starting with the 1953 coup in Iran) has resulted in a much less safe world and virtually no good for anybody.
I don't think it's about the Syrian children at all. It is a distraction. The probe of Russian interference in last years election is getting closer and closer to Trump himself, and a dozen or more close advisors are clearly guilty of some level of collusion. These people conspired with a foreign power to install their puppet as president. This is high treason. Trump and his allies have been trying to deflect and obstruct the best they can, but for the moment, our institutions were still in place and the noose was tightening.
In another little bit of incompetence, Trump had signaled to Syria that he wouldn't respond to their atrocities. He hadn't understood that he was doing that--he doesn't understand much--but once the Idlib attack happened, he did figure it out and realized he needed to correct the message. This particular correction served several other purposes, too: it suggests that he might not be as beholden to his Russian puppeteers as we'd been thinking (except why did he warn them and not actually hit anything of consequence?). It distracts from the outrage over the Gorsuch appointment. It gives him brownie points from the hawks who wanted to participate in the civil war. And most importantly of all, it deflects media attention away from the investigation of Russian meddling in the election.
It isn't quite a Reichstag fire, but if we fall for it, it may be enough.
06 March 2017
Origins of Terrorists
The Tweeter in chief is claiming that the vast majority of terrorists since 9/11 come from outside the US. That is simply false. Most of the Islamic terrorists in the US were born here and all of those who were born elsewhere were radicalized after they were already here. Apparently they discovered that the streets of the new country are no more paved with gold than those of the old country were. All of these seem to be people who had mental health issues unrelated to Islam and chose rationalize their attacks with Islam.
A few examples:
Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, was born in Virginia. It's pretty clear that he was having mental health issues that had little to do with his ethnicity, but that he used it to rationalize what he was doing. He killed 13 with a gun.
Rizwan Farook, the 2015 San Bernardino shooter, was born in Chicago and grew up in Riverside, CA, not far from San Bernardino. His wife, Tashfeen Malik, was born in Pakistan but had lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia. Neither country is on Trump's proposed ban. He seems to have had anger issues for most of his life and chose to marry a similarly inclined person that he'd met on the internet. They killed 14.
Omar Mateen, the 2016 Orlando Night Club shooter, was born in Hyde Park, New York. He seems to have had self-hatred over his own sexuality, exacerbated by misguided fundamentalist teachings and bullying over his heritage and his sexuality. He targeted gay people in the night club and killed 49 of them
Naveed Haq brought two guns into a Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 and began shooting the workers there, all women. One was killed. Haq is of Pakistani descent but he'd gone to school in Kennewick, WA. He was 30 at the time of the shootings. He seems to have been bipolar and had been arrested for public exposure, and had anger towards both women and Jews.
John Muhammad, originally John Williams, committed the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks. He was born in Baton Rouge and had converted to Islam at age 27. He had fantasized about creating a terrorist training camp in Canada, but he had always had violence issues and was probably a psychopath.
Abdulhamid Mujahid Muhammad, the 2009 Little Rock shooter, was born in Tennessee as Carlos Bledsoe to a Baptist family and converted to Islam. He killed one, injured one. He seemed more angry at the military than at non-muslims.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, were born in Kyrgyzstan of Chechen and Kyrgyz ancestry, and brought to the US by their parents with their two sisters as small children. Tamerlan enjoyed fighting and seems to have been radicalized as a teen, and pressured his younger brother to participate in the bombing.
Zale H Thompson attacked 4 New York police officers with a hatchet in 2014, killing one and injuring another before the cops killed him and injured an innocent bystander. Thompson, a native New Yorker, had been active in various black power groups before converting to Islam.
Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi attacked a 2015 cartoon exhibit in Garland, Texas which had been organized by an Islamophobic group to display cartoons of the prophet Mohammad. While images of the prophet are not banned by Islam, many fundamentalist groups regard them as blasphemous. Simpson and Soofi didn't get many shots off before they were killed by police guarding the exhibit. Simpson was born near Chicago and had converted to islam in high school, Soofi was born and raised in Dallas.
Muhammad Abdulazeez shot up two army recruiting centers in Chattanooga in 2015. He'd been born in Kuwait and was brought to Tennessee as a 6 year old, 19 years before the shootings. He'd been having drug problems and his parents had recently divorced.
Abdul Artan crashed his car into a crowd of people at Ohio State University in 2016, and then lept out and began attacking them with a knife. He injured 11, mostly with the car. He was killed by police who injured one or maybe two innocent bystanders. Artan had been born in Somalia and had come to America with his family at age 8. He is the only "Islamic Terrorist" in the US that I've been able to find that actually did come from one of the countries in Trump's ban.
The September 11th attacks of 2001 were carried out by 19 Arabs, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, 2 from UAE, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon. None of these countries are on Trump's list. All 19 of the hijackers had entered the US legally and most were still legal at the time of the attack, although a few had overstayed their visa. They killed 2996 people including themselves, and injured about 6000.
A few examples:
Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, was born in Virginia. It's pretty clear that he was having mental health issues that had little to do with his ethnicity, but that he used it to rationalize what he was doing. He killed 13 with a gun.
Rizwan Farook, the 2015 San Bernardino shooter, was born in Chicago and grew up in Riverside, CA, not far from San Bernardino. His wife, Tashfeen Malik, was born in Pakistan but had lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia. Neither country is on Trump's proposed ban. He seems to have had anger issues for most of his life and chose to marry a similarly inclined person that he'd met on the internet. They killed 14.
Omar Mateen, the 2016 Orlando Night Club shooter, was born in Hyde Park, New York. He seems to have had self-hatred over his own sexuality, exacerbated by misguided fundamentalist teachings and bullying over his heritage and his sexuality. He targeted gay people in the night club and killed 49 of them
Naveed Haq brought two guns into a Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 and began shooting the workers there, all women. One was killed. Haq is of Pakistani descent but he'd gone to school in Kennewick, WA. He was 30 at the time of the shootings. He seems to have been bipolar and had been arrested for public exposure, and had anger towards both women and Jews.
John Muhammad, originally John Williams, committed the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks. He was born in Baton Rouge and had converted to Islam at age 27. He had fantasized about creating a terrorist training camp in Canada, but he had always had violence issues and was probably a psychopath.
Abdulhamid Mujahid Muhammad, the 2009 Little Rock shooter, was born in Tennessee as Carlos Bledsoe to a Baptist family and converted to Islam. He killed one, injured one. He seemed more angry at the military than at non-muslims.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, were born in Kyrgyzstan of Chechen and Kyrgyz ancestry, and brought to the US by their parents with their two sisters as small children. Tamerlan enjoyed fighting and seems to have been radicalized as a teen, and pressured his younger brother to participate in the bombing.
Zale H Thompson attacked 4 New York police officers with a hatchet in 2014, killing one and injuring another before the cops killed him and injured an innocent bystander. Thompson, a native New Yorker, had been active in various black power groups before converting to Islam.
Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi attacked a 2015 cartoon exhibit in Garland, Texas which had been organized by an Islamophobic group to display cartoons of the prophet Mohammad. While images of the prophet are not banned by Islam, many fundamentalist groups regard them as blasphemous. Simpson and Soofi didn't get many shots off before they were killed by police guarding the exhibit. Simpson was born near Chicago and had converted to islam in high school, Soofi was born and raised in Dallas.
Muhammad Abdulazeez shot up two army recruiting centers in Chattanooga in 2015. He'd been born in Kuwait and was brought to Tennessee as a 6 year old, 19 years before the shootings. He'd been having drug problems and his parents had recently divorced.
Abdul Artan crashed his car into a crowd of people at Ohio State University in 2016, and then lept out and began attacking them with a knife. He injured 11, mostly with the car. He was killed by police who injured one or maybe two innocent bystanders. Artan had been born in Somalia and had come to America with his family at age 8. He is the only "Islamic Terrorist" in the US that I've been able to find that actually did come from one of the countries in Trump's ban.
The September 11th attacks of 2001 were carried out by 19 Arabs, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, 2 from UAE, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon. None of these countries are on Trump's list. All 19 of the hijackers had entered the US legally and most were still legal at the time of the attack, although a few had overstayed their visa. They killed 2996 people including themselves, and injured about 6000.
Terraforming Jupiter
One of my favorite TV shows was the short lived Firefly series. The premise of the show was that the Earth had been "used up" and that a bunch of humans had headed into space, finding another star system with dozens of planets that were near enough in size and temperature that they could be terraformed and turned into habitable enough planets they could be colonized. The recent discovery that there are 7 roughly earth sized planets in the "habitable zone" around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 suggests one way this could happen. TRAPPIST-1 is about 40 light years from earth, which would take thousands of years to reach with a plausible rocket, which predicates effective hibernation or perhaps even full stasis for such a colony to get there.
But there's another alternative. What if we blow up Jupiter and move the fragments into orbits close to that of earth? Jupiter is a gas giant, which means it's mostly hydrogen, but there's a metal and rock core--it's been catching asteroids, meteors and comets for 5 billion years. Estimates are that the core is between 12 and 45 times the mass of Earth. The show predicates cheap, safe energy of sufficient efficiency that it can power a Firefly-sized spaceship between planets with no visible fuel tanks. This can only be nuclear or perhaps something even better. Since we don't really have such a technology yet, it's not exactly clear how to make a bomb that would get deep enough into Jupiter to blow up the core into suitably sized chucks, but if we have such an abundance of nuclear or better energy, we can probably figure that out. Once the Jupiter fragments are out there, we can use solar sails or our nuclear rockets to move them into orbits at a distance from the sun to keep them comfortable, and at a sufficient density to accommodate billions of people fleeting Earth. This will take a lot of energy, but the spin and kinetic energy of Jupiter is substantial and if we can figure out a way of redirecting it, there's more than enough for the purpose.
Once we have a bunch of rocks that are big enough to have gravity appropriate for human habitation--between .3 and 2G--they will quickly turn themselves into spheres on their own, and the terraforming process can begin. Left to their own devices this would take a billion years and if we're fleeing Earth we won't be able to wait that long, but presumably the terraforming technology will be able cool them down quickly enough.
Since we're engineering these new planets, it seems to me the way to do it is to have them in groups. The Earth and Moon orbit each other around their common center of gravity--there's no reason they shouldn't be about the same size. A third planet could orbit their common CG at a greater distance. A bunch of such groups could be placed in such groups around the Sun, all in the same circular orbit...We'd probably use the same orbit that Earth-that-was is in. If the mass of each is about the same, it'll be billions of years before they collide with each other.
But there's another alternative. What if we blow up Jupiter and move the fragments into orbits close to that of earth? Jupiter is a gas giant, which means it's mostly hydrogen, but there's a metal and rock core--it's been catching asteroids, meteors and comets for 5 billion years. Estimates are that the core is between 12 and 45 times the mass of Earth. The show predicates cheap, safe energy of sufficient efficiency that it can power a Firefly-sized spaceship between planets with no visible fuel tanks. This can only be nuclear or perhaps something even better. Since we don't really have such a technology yet, it's not exactly clear how to make a bomb that would get deep enough into Jupiter to blow up the core into suitably sized chucks, but if we have such an abundance of nuclear or better energy, we can probably figure that out. Once the Jupiter fragments are out there, we can use solar sails or our nuclear rockets to move them into orbits at a distance from the sun to keep them comfortable, and at a sufficient density to accommodate billions of people fleeting Earth. This will take a lot of energy, but the spin and kinetic energy of Jupiter is substantial and if we can figure out a way of redirecting it, there's more than enough for the purpose.
Once we have a bunch of rocks that are big enough to have gravity appropriate for human habitation--between .3 and 2G--they will quickly turn themselves into spheres on their own, and the terraforming process can begin. Left to their own devices this would take a billion years and if we're fleeing Earth we won't be able to wait that long, but presumably the terraforming technology will be able cool them down quickly enough.
Since we're engineering these new planets, it seems to me the way to do it is to have them in groups. The Earth and Moon orbit each other around their common center of gravity--there's no reason they shouldn't be about the same size. A third planet could orbit their common CG at a greater distance. A bunch of such groups could be placed in such groups around the Sun, all in the same circular orbit...We'd probably use the same orbit that Earth-that-was is in. If the mass of each is about the same, it'll be billions of years before they collide with each other.
10 February 2017
Converting Heat to Rotary Motion
This is the flow of all energy used by the US in 2015, as calculated by Lawrence Livermore Labs.
There's a tremendous amount of useful information here. For example, wind and solar are now a noticeable part of the grid, and electricity is contributing a useful amount to transportation.
But the biggest thing is the amount of rejected energy. That's 60.6% of all energy that's being consumed by the US that's being lost due to inefficiency of some sort. 80% of this and maybe more is coming from two uses: electricity generation and transportation. What they have in common is that they're using the burning of something to convert heat into rotary motion.
Here's an example: a conventional car contains an internal combustion engine, which works by spraying a mix of gasoline and air into a cylinder and setting it alight. The resulting explosion pushes the cylinder against a crankshaft which connects to the wheels of the car to make it move. This conversion is at best about 33% efficient--most of the energy--and with it the pollution, CO2 and other stuff, is lost to heat and noise, without producing forward motion. The same thing is happening when burning coal or gas to produce electricity: it heats something (either boiling water or the natural gas exhaust itself) so that it can be used to power a turbine, which is connected to a generator. The theoretical peak efficiency of such a process is about 60% and the reality is a lot worse: the very best electric plants operate at about 40% efficiency. The rest is waste heat.
If, on the other hand, the heat is the ultimate product, for example burning stuff to make heat in a furnace, it is much more efficient. Modern furnaces are over 90% efficient. The blast furnaces used in steelmaking are similarly efficient.
Wind and Solar suffer different inefficiencies, but the waste doesn't end up in the atmosphere as CO2 or smog, and it doesn't consume a resource that takes a hundred million years to replenish. Electricity can be used to make rotary motion much more efficiently than the reverse, so it's useful for a large fraction of the needed activity in industry and transportation. according to the chart, .03% of electricity is used for transportation. This includes electric cars like a Tesla or Leaf, and Trolley Buses and Electric Trains like on the northeast corridor, but does not include hybrids like the Prius or a diesel-electric locomotive.
It seems to me this is fairly low hanging fruit. 60% of our energy production is lost to the inefficiency of using heat to make rotary motion. The second law of thermodynamics says we're doomed to lose some, but to get half of this back seems relatively straightforward. Converting half the cars on the road to electric will save around 10 Quads of rejected energy. Converting half the gas and coal power plants to wind and solar will save around the same.
But the biggest thing is the amount of rejected energy. That's 60.6% of all energy that's being consumed by the US that's being lost due to inefficiency of some sort. 80% of this and maybe more is coming from two uses: electricity generation and transportation. What they have in common is that they're using the burning of something to convert heat into rotary motion.
Here's an example: a conventional car contains an internal combustion engine, which works by spraying a mix of gasoline and air into a cylinder and setting it alight. The resulting explosion pushes the cylinder against a crankshaft which connects to the wheels of the car to make it move. This conversion is at best about 33% efficient--most of the energy--and with it the pollution, CO2 and other stuff, is lost to heat and noise, without producing forward motion. The same thing is happening when burning coal or gas to produce electricity: it heats something (either boiling water or the natural gas exhaust itself) so that it can be used to power a turbine, which is connected to a generator. The theoretical peak efficiency of such a process is about 60% and the reality is a lot worse: the very best electric plants operate at about 40% efficiency. The rest is waste heat.
If, on the other hand, the heat is the ultimate product, for example burning stuff to make heat in a furnace, it is much more efficient. Modern furnaces are over 90% efficient. The blast furnaces used in steelmaking are similarly efficient.
Wind and Solar suffer different inefficiencies, but the waste doesn't end up in the atmosphere as CO2 or smog, and it doesn't consume a resource that takes a hundred million years to replenish. Electricity can be used to make rotary motion much more efficiently than the reverse, so it's useful for a large fraction of the needed activity in industry and transportation. according to the chart, .03% of electricity is used for transportation. This includes electric cars like a Tesla or Leaf, and Trolley Buses and Electric Trains like on the northeast corridor, but does not include hybrids like the Prius or a diesel-electric locomotive.
It seems to me this is fairly low hanging fruit. 60% of our energy production is lost to the inefficiency of using heat to make rotary motion. The second law of thermodynamics says we're doomed to lose some, but to get half of this back seems relatively straightforward. Converting half the cars on the road to electric will save around 10 Quads of rejected energy. Converting half the gas and coal power plants to wind and solar will save around the same.
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