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.
07 May 2017
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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