Metric vs English System

 I think it's important to understand that the metric system is in some ways superior to the english system of measurement, but in most ways equal.  That the US is stuck on the English system is an accident of history.

During the middle ages and earlier, every region had its own set of measurements, all a little distinct, and in most cases, the units didn't relate well to each other.  France and the rest of Europe pretty much stuck with the old ways--there were at least a dozen distinct units call a foot (pied) in France at the time of the revolution, all a little different from each other and none relating particularly to longer or shorter units.  Britain had this same problem, but in the late 1500s, Parliament decided to rationalize this.  They determined, by statute, that a foot was 12 inches, a yard was 3 feet, a chain was 22 yards, a furlong was 10 chains, a mile was 8 furlongs, an acre was 10 square chains, (or a furlong by a chain), and so forth. This happened to be at the start of the great period of British colonization, and as a consequence, these statute measurements found close to universal acceptance in the largely British American colonies.  They made far greater sense than the mess of the rest of the world.

One of the fads at the time of the revolutions was decimalization.  When Hamilton and others were deciding on a currency for their new country, they embraced the new idea, and went with the decimal dollar.  The english system of money at the time was a mix of sensible and less so:  the pound was 240 pence, split into shillings, but also split into other weird things like a guinea.  240 is divisible by 3, which is not true of decimal systems.

During their revolution, the French decided, finally, to rationalize their system and based it on navigation:  there were exactly 10,000,000 meters between the equator and the north pole on the line that ran through the Louvre, in Paris.  The US president at the time, Jefferson, thought this was a good idea and got the french to send a standard meter and kilogram to Washington.  Unfortunately, the ship was lost at sea and they never got there. Rather than cook up their own, possibly different versions, the Americans stuck with feet, inches and pounds, until another set of standards could be sent from France.  Unfortunately, the French government never got its act together to send another.

At the same time, something really amazing was happening--the industrial revolution.  This started in Britain (Scotland) but soon spread to America.  All of a sudden, standardized parts were all the rage, especially things like Nuts and Bolts, because that made it possible to outsource large parts of your manufacturing process, and suddenly manufacturing was a Big Deal.  The US standard, which has come to be called SAE (society of automotive engineers) measured things in fractional inches and threads per inch, but they did something very special: they established a rating system for the strength of these components.     An American engineer was unlikely to specify a metric (or whitworth) bolt because it was harder to be confident of its strength.

I am an american trained as a scientist--I am perfectly comfortable with either system.  Most of the time it really doesn't matter.  1/4-20 is pretty close to 6mm .8 thread.  as long as I know which I'm using, the difference is unimportant.  There are a few cases where it does matter.  3/4 inches is a standard width for a lot of things, such as the width of electrical and masking tape.  Much of the time it doesn't matter.  But when somebody specifies 20mm, as they often do in Europe. it's a bloody pain to find this in America.  3/4" is 19.1 mm.  Close, but no cigar.   I just needed to get some holddowns for my workbench.  American dogholes are 3/4", european dogholes are 20mm. one will not work in the other.

Bands from Berkeley

I randomly caught a few bars of "Feelin' Blue" from their Willie and the Poor Boys album brought me back...I probably hadn't heard this since I lived in Berkeley in the mid '70s, but it took probably less than a second to recognize it.

Credence Clearwater Revival.  Technically, from El Cerrito, a town just north of Berkeley, but they made most of their records at Fantasy Records, on Parker Street, in Berkeley.  I lived on Parker myself during school year 74-5, although over a mile from the studio.

Country Joe and the Fish.  Joe McDonald's family didn't move to Berkeley until he was an adult, but his mother would be mayor while I lived there and the band would be formed there.   I saw them once, Country Joe without the rest of the band a couple of times.  Of course everybody saw them at Woodstock:  "Give me an F.  Give a U..."

Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen.   Their one big hit, Hot Rod Lincoln, was very out of character for them.   I saw them at Winterland, the Oakland Coleseum, several free shows in various parks.  They always put on a great show.

Joy of Cooking.  A short-lived but terrific band, led by two women.  One of them, Terry Garthwaite, sang in a style strongly resembling Mavis Staples and I was a fan of them before I'd ever heard of the Staples Singers.

Greg Kihn Band.  I first saw Greg Kihn, busking, solo, with his guitar in 1973 on the steps of the Student Union building on the Berkeley campus.  He played there several times, until he came back with a full band.  I wasn't really surprised when he had a hit on MTV in the early 80s.  His band was largely from another Berkeley band, the Earth Quake, which was pretty local.  One of their songs was called AC-DC and it enough resembled a different, later band called AC-DC that at first I thought it was the same band.

The Klezmorim were a Klezmer band that got its start playing in Sproul Plaza, where I saw them several times.  They had some success

Green Day and Counting Crows were both from Berkeley, and didn't get their start until after I'd left.

There are of course a bunch of other bay area bands that frequently played Berkeley.  I saw Jerry Garcia at the Keystone, and the Grateful Dead famously played the Greek Theater on campus several times.  I saw Merle Saunders a couple of times on campus.  Tower of Power didn't come to Berkeley much, but their home base was just south in Oakland.  Santana

Reagan Won in a Landslide?

 No, Reagan didn't win the election of 1980 in a landslide, or even close to it.  But he governed as if he had won the mandate conferred by a landslide.  

There were three main candidates in 1980:

Jimmy Carter, incumbent, got 35.5M votes and 49 electors.

Ronald Reagan got 43.9M votes and 489 electors

John Anderson got 5.7M votes and no electors.

Anderson was a moderate republican, a thing which no longer exists.  In hindsight, it's pretty clear that he ran as a spoiler, stealing votes from Carter.  In addition to the third party candidate, Reagan's team sabotaged the hostage negotiations with Iran, getting them to defer the release of the prisoners until shortly before the inauguration.  Reagan took credit for this, even though it was entirely the work of Carter's team.

Before this sabotage occurred, it looked like Carter had a solid path to re-election, being up by as much as 15 points over Reagan.

Carter won only 6 states: Hawaii, Maryland, Rhode Island, DC, and his home state of Georgia and his running mate's home of Minnesota.    But many of the states that Reagan won were flipped by Anderson's cut:

Reagan won Arkansas bu 5,000 votes.  Anderson got 22000.  6 electors.

Reagan won Connecticut by 135000 votes.  Anderson got 172000.  8 electors.

Reagan won Delaware by 5500 votes, Anderson got 16000.   3 electors.

Reagan won Kentucky by 19000 votes.  Anderson got 31000,  9 electors

Reagan won Maine by 17000 votes.  Anderson got 53000.   2 electors.

Reagan won Massachusetts by 4000 votes.  Anderson got 382,000.   14 electors.   (This is where I was living in 1980)

Reagan won New York by 170,000 votes.  Anderson got 468000.   41 electors

Reagan won North Carolina by 40,000 votes.  Anderson got 53000. 13 electors.

Reagan won Tennesee by 4500 votes.  Anderson got 36,000.  10 electors.

Reagan won Vermont by 12000 votes. Anderson got 32000.   3 electors.

Reagan won Wisconsin by 107000 votes.  Anderson got 160,000.  11 electors.

All together, Anderson took at least 120 electors from Carter.   this was not enough to overturn the election: 369 to 169 electors.  Reagan won.  but where the pundit class tells us it was a landslide, it was actually a fairly near thing.

Reagan proceeded to sabotage the income tax, unions, monopoly regulation, infrastructure construction and much more, and we have still not been able to recover to this day, more than 40 years later.

Trapped Under a Sail

 I was reminded of a scary incident from my youth and I wanted to tell about it.  I was sailing a 505 high performance sailboat from the Palo Alto marina in California in wind in the upper 20s.  I was 20 or 21.  The Palo Alto Marina was killed by the city so it no longer exists.

The sailing venue at Palo Alto is extremely shallow, with a very soft, muddy bottom.  The deepest part is in the middle.  When sailing on a flood tide, there's a benefit to going left, where the water is shallowest, to get current relief.  Carried too far, this leads to boats running aground, in the nasty, soft green mud.   To minimize this, our fleet set a buoy halfway up the weather leg, which we called "E".  This kept us away from the worst of the mud.

On the day in question, I was sailing with a different boat than usual.  We were getting close to the layline for where E had been 5 minutes ago when we realized it had drifted, and we were a little overstood.  So we tacked right away and sailed towards E.  As we got closer, E was continuing to drag it's anchor so we bore off to follow, when suddenly we capsized, hard, to weather.

I was in the water, under the sail.  An experienced sailor can usually see a capsize coming a few seconds in advance, but this one was a complete surprise.  Consequently, I was pretty disoriented.  The water in the bay near Palo Alto is pretty murky and visibility was less than 2 feet.  I couldn't see the edge of the sail.  I hadn't had much time to catch a breath before the sail came down on top of me, so I didn't have much time.

I made my best guess, and fortunately, was not too wrong.  I quickly found the edge of the sail and found my way to air.  The skipper, who I did not know well, was looking for me and I spoke up as soon as I realized.  I said "What the ... happened?"

He explained "The centerboard broke".  I immediately understood.  505 centerboards are designed to jibe in their trunk.  there's a clever arrangement that if you rake the board slightly forward, it increases its angle of attack.  this increases lift and thus pointing angle quite a bit, and also load.  But if you're sailing too low, it greatly increases the lateral force on the board.  In this case, it sheered off right at the hull.  The right thing to have done was to rake the board aft a little when we'd had to bear off.  We both knew it but there was so much wind, we didn't want to stop hiking to do it, especially when.

The moment when I realized I was trapped under the sail and didn't know exactly where was what came back to me.  A 505 main sail is vaguely triangular about 20x12 feet.   when it's on the surface of the water, the sun is illuminating it, but everything else is in shade, and the water was pretty murky, so I couldn't see the edge of the sail or any part of the boat.  I literally had to guess.  worst case is I might have swum the wrong direction maybe 15 feet or so, before I found an edge, and provided I didn't get further turned around.

I've tried to confine the sailor jargon to the explanation of why it happened--you should be able to figure out what it was that happened without understanding the jargon.

Should Trump Be Crucified?

 He certainly deserves it.  But the tl;dr answer is no.

The ancient Romans mostly reserved their most horrible punishment for what they deemed the most serious crime: Sedition against Rome.  Crucifixion was the worst way to die that they could think of, and they were very inventive.  The person is suspended by their outstretched arms so that in order to draw breath, they were working against their own weight.  Eventually, they would suffocate, but it would often take days.  They'd often add several other non-fatal injuries to make it even more painful, and to attract scavengers, which would begin picking the victim apart while still alive when they realized he couldn't resist.  Once the person died, they'd be left up there for all to see, as the scavengers completed their work.  To a Roman, a proper burial was important to their idea of afterlife, so this was a fate worse than death.  It was a reminder, often left standing for years, that loyalty was important and enforced.

History has undermined much of the meaning of this.  Part of it was done by the Romans themselves, by applying the punishment occasionally to crimes other than sedition and by tolerating the punishment to be weakened, most often by killing the victim early or by allowing the family to remove the body and give it a proper burial.  Jesus benefited from both of these.  The story of Jesus has also resulted in the punishment being connected with martyrdom.  Modern passion plays sometimes have a willing victim crucified, although generally not for long enough to kill them.  Jesus was purportedly convicted of sedition, but what the actual act of sedition might have been has been lost or possibly suppressed.  The Romans were actually pretty tolerant of alternate religions; it's unlikely they'd have crucified Jesus based on the story we're told.  (one possibility: there were actual bands of seditionists in the holy land doing terrorism to try to make the Romans abandon their colony.  It's certainly possible that Jesus was involved with one of these in some way.)

Donald Trump has been our very worst president.  He is amazingly corrupt, and what little he actually did accomplish was deeply counterproductive.  His handling of the virus probably killed half a million americans more than a competent handling would have, and several times that world wide, and has led to the virus becoming intractable, where a better response might have been able to suppress it.   His support of Putin and other autocrats has given them freedom to suppress their populations and kill their neighbors.  His tax cut had no positive effects at all, and made the deficit much larger.  His deregulation has resulted a significant bank panic and several environmental disasters.   His judicial nominees have proven to be shockingly corrupt. He openly leaked highly classified documents to his Russian allies and stole  hundreds more--possibly planning to use them to buy safe passage once US authorities caught up with him.  And he attempted to overturn a fair election in several different ways to stay in office.  Sedition.

Trump is exactly the guy that crucifixion was intended for, and my gut really wants to see him tortured to death this way, as a punishment for him and as a warning for all the mini-Trumps who might like to continue his misdeeds.  But my head reminds me that cruelty like that would lower me to his level...the 8th amendment got it right.  No cruel or unusual punishments, no matter how terrible the crime.  But we need to actually punish this guy, and soon, or his imitators will not be intimidated.

Politifact Lie of the Year

2022: Putin's lies about Ukraine
2021: Lies about the Jan 6 insurrection
2020: Rs, especially Trump, downplaying the coronavirus
2019: Trump's repeated false claim that the whistleblower got Trump's Ukraine call almost completely wrong
2018: Online smear machine tries to take down Parkland high school students
2017: Trump's repeated false assertions that Russian election interference is a "made up story"
2016: Fake News
2015: Trump's campaign lies
2014: The Ebola Scare.
2013: If you like your health care you can keep it.  (Had this been expressed "If you like your qualifying health care, you can keep it" it would have been true: the plans that were closed by ACA were fraudulent in some way.   In 2008, they had rated this same statement as true)
2012: Romney/Ryan completely false claims that Jeep was moving its factory to China
2011: Democrat's completely true statement that Republicans voted to end medicare as we know it.
2010: Republican's absurdly false claims that the ACA is a government takeover of healthcare.
2009: Republican's dangerously false claims about death panels.

Bands Named for Places

Originally called the Chicago Transit Authority, they renamed themselves just Chicago a year later in 1969, when the actual Chicago Transit Authority asked them to stop using their name.  Led by Keyboardist Robert Lamm, Guitarist Terry Kath, Bassist Peter Cetera, all of whom also did lead vocals, and Arranger and Trombonist James Pankow, they did several successful albums.  Kath accidentally killed himself and Cetera has left the band, but they're still doing shows.

Boston is pretty much the creature of MIT grad student Tom Scholz, who invented a number of electronic gizmos and played all the instruments in a recording studio in his basement (In Watertown, Mass, which is across the river from Boston but not actually in it) to make the first album in 1974.  He got help from singer Brad Delp and added several others to do live shows.  Delp killed himself but Scholz and and many of his collaborators are still going.

Guitarist and Pianist Ralph Towner and Oboist Paul McCandless met while students at the University of Oregon, and with Sitarist and Tablaist Colin Wolcott and Bassist Glen Moore formed the group Oregon during the 1960s but didn't start calling themselves that until 1971.   Walcott was killed in a traffic accident, but the rest of the band is still going.

Progressive Rock band Kansas was formed in Topeka, Kansas in 1973, by a group of musicians who are mostly from Kansas.  They are still going although several of the original members, including the violinist/lead vocalist, have died.

Alabama is a country and rock band formed in Alabama in 1969.

America was formed by Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek and Gerry Beckley, all sons of US Air Force personnel, while their fathers were stationed near London, England.  Their music is light rock and roll, most of which is written by Bunnell.   Peek has died, but Bunnell and Beckley are still making music.

Nazareth is a Scottish band that was founded in 1968.  They took their name from Nazareth, PA, which is mentioned in the song "The Weight", by The Band.  The guitarmaker C.F. Martin is based there, as is the Andretti motor racing family.  The original Nazareth, in Israel, is also purportedly the home of Jesus although there are no references to it outside the New Testament prior to about 200AD.  It was at most a very tiny village when Jesus was there.  It became a bit of a tourist trap during the Crusades, and today it's one of the largest predominantly Muslim cities in Israel.

Berlin is an American New Wave band from Los Angeles, formed in 1978.  They have no known connection with the German Capitol.

Portishead is a British band formed in Bristol, which is a just a few miles east of the tiny town the band is named for.

The Manhattan Transfer is a vocal group that is named for a novel of that name, although the group actually is from New York City.  Some version of this group has been performing for more than 50 years although none of the originals is left.

The Bay City Rollers are a Boy Band from Edinburgh, Scotland, on the Firth of Forth, which is the estuary of the Forth River, and thus not actually a bay.  They're still making music, sort of, with a great many staffing changes.  I'm not sure I've actually ever heard one of their songs all the way through as I haven't been a teenager for 50 years and have never been a pre-teen girl.