Hyperloop Problems?

 I just watched Joe Scott's piece: What's Happening (And Not Happening) With Hyperloop | Answers With Joe - YouTube.   He gets some of it, but misses more.

He's right that a long vacuum is relatively hard to achieve, but he misses a lot of the point.

1: by making the walls of the tube thick enough, the tube can withstand a hard vacuum.  His example of a big tank truck being crushed by pulling a vacuum inside is irrelevant.  That tank was designed to take a slight positive pressure and has very thin walls.   There's a simple equation to determine the needed the strength to resist atmospheric pressure.  For a light bulb or small can, it doesn't need to be thick; it's more for a bigger tube.  Elon's paper talked about tubes with 1inch thick walls. (Crazy extreme: Triton Submersibles' 36000/2 recently protected it's pilots from a pressure of 16000 PSI with a spherical structure only 90mm thick.  This is over 1000 times the pressure difference a  true vactrain would need to tolerate a hard vacuum at atmospheric pressure.)

2: this is a lot of metal, of course, but it's actually quite cheap.  the rule of thumb is fabricated steel is 1-3$K per ton.  A 5 foot tube one inch thick weighs about 640 lbs per foot.  At $1K per ton, that's about $1.7M per mile.  Not free by any means, but a lane of freeway costs over $10M per mile, and the california HSR project was several hundred million per mile.

3: for the same reason, most of the threats from terrorists are implausible.  an inch of steel can withstand a shell from a pretty substantial cannon.  A terrorist with access to such a thing will be going after much softer targets.

4: small vehicles do not limit capacity.   Why is this so hard for people?  Small vehicles somehow manage to carry many times more people than buses or trains on our highways.  You need to have more of them, but they're cheap...especially on something like hyperloop where the vehicle is pretty much a passive object with life support and not much else.

5: a big part of the benefit of small vehicles is that they can be unscheduled.  There will be a queue of them waiting at the station, which unlike air travel can be in the city core, or even several stations placed around the city.  get in, tell it which station is your destination, and the computer does all the rest.  The vehicles don't move when they're not needed.

6: the long vacuum won't be cheap and there surely will be leaks, but they're not too difficult to track down.   as long as an individual leak isn't too big, it's just a small loss in efficiency, not a showstopper.

7: putting part or all of it in a tunnel is obvious.  since it's the steel tube that's maintaining the vacuum, digging the tunnel is the same problem as ever.  Burying it protects it from the elements to some extent, and provides convenient support, but it also makes it harder to work on.  This is the reason the (much harder) vacuum at giant installations like CERN have access all around.

8: Musk's team did an analysis of I-5 between L.A. and San Francisco, and for most of the route, speeds north of 700 mph are easy without pressing the passengers too much.  near the cities they'd have to slow down a bit because there are hills and waterways and buildings..  bottom line though is that their design would be able to make the nearly 500 mile trip in about half an hour.  Dallas to Houston is half that and a MUCH flatter route.

9: There are several designs for a track switch that will work for hyperloop-speed trains.  A magnetic version of the one Ed Anderson devised for Skyweb Express will work, and there are plenty of others that would too.

10: Unless there is significant damage for some reason, there is NO risk of derailment with any sort of vactrain.  Conventional railroads use a relatively tiny flange to keep the wheels on the rails--it  meant that the track switch could be relatively simple to make and manipulate in the 1830s.  Debris on the rail, damage to the flange or rail, brakes getting stuck on, pushing a train through a swittch the wrong way, etc, will all cause derailment.  Monorail, maglev, etc., do not have these issues.

Simple Machines

 As a child, we are taught that there are only a few simple machines and that most others are derived from them.  I think I was first exposed to this concept in the third grade.  Those are undeniably important, but I think some are really just variations on others, and there are a few that are missing.

Inclined plane.  You can use this to use a smaller amount of force to achieve a larger amount of force.  For example, a ramp, a stairway, etc., are all examples of inclined plane.

Lever.  This is a different way of achieving something similar.  Give me a long and strong enough lever and a place to stand, and I can move the earth, said Archimedes.  He also needed a fulcrum.

Wheel with axle.  This supports a weight and holds the wheel in place under it, while reducing friction and wear at the axle. 

Pulley.  The earliest pulleys were blocks of wood with a hole for a rope to pass through, and can be used to change the direction (lead) of a rope or give mechanical advantage.  This style of pulley gives us the traditional name for a pulley on a boat, a "block".  Modern pulleys have a wheel with axle to reduce friction and wear, but they're still the same concept.  On boats, they are still called "blocks".

The rest on the traditional list are derivations of these:

   The wedge is an application of the inclined plane, intended to split two things.  Knives, wedges and several other common tools use this variant.

   The screw is another application of the inclined plane, where the plane is twisted around a shaft.

There are other simple machines which deserve mention on the main list.

The wick.  A wick is an object, most often a treated string, that uses capillary action to move a liquid, often against the force of gravity.  Most commonly this is melted wax, such as in a candle, but there are many other variations.  The treatment is something that makes the string fire resistant, such as salt or borax, although sometimes the wick is made of something not flammable in the first place, such as copper or fiberglass.  The invention of the wick is lost in pre-history but nearly every culture used it--whether knowledge spread or was independently rediscovered is unknown.  Capillary action was not understood to be the underlying mechanism until relatively recently.  The first recorded observation of it was by Leonardo.

The gear.  This is derived from the wheel and pulley but the idea of using a toothed wheel to transfer force, and gain or lose mechanical advantage seems to date from a few hundred years BC.   While the ancient greeks definitely had gears and used them, the earliest engineers to use them on a major scale were the Romans, working in the 2nd century AD.

Archimedes was the earliest engineer we know of to design using gears but we suspect he didn't invent them.  The Antikythera mechanism is the earliest surviving geared mechanism, dating from the 2nd century BC.  It is a remarkably sophisticated computer for calculating the motion of the planets, the seasons, and other events.  It may have been designed by Archimedes himself, but we don't know.  It was discovered in an ancient shipwreck in 1901. 

The waterwheel and Fluid dynamics.  The ancient greeks seem to have invented the water wheel, but again, the Romans were the first to really exploit them.  They are really a combination of other simple machines, but they're important enough to deserve mention. They had a number of variations, some using gravity, some using the force of the moving water.  In the 12th century, the dutch began using windmills, which are really the same thing, except using fluid dynamic lift instead of drag.  It wasn't until the 18th century that it was realized that this (called a "turbine") was the best way of doing it for all types of fluids.  The math was worked out by Daniel Bernoulli by 1738, but they really didn't catch on until the mid 19th century.  Traditional water wheels, including paddle wheel steam ships, were very common until that time.  A famous experiment was conducted in 1845 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel where he arranged a tug of war between two otherwise identical ships, one with paddlewheels and one with a screw propeller, and the screw prop won very convincingly, being able to pull the paddlewheeler against the current on the Thames river.

George, in Washington

Washington state was named for our first president.  This was an awkward, confusing choice.  I'll get into this later.

There have been several places named for George Washington.  Most obviously is the town of George, in the Columbia river Gorge in Grant county.  It is the nearest post office to the Gorge Amphitheater, scene of numerous concerts and festivals.   Population 501.

There's also a much larger city named for his plantation, Mount Vernon.  I think there's a town of Martha, but I can't find it now.

Oregon territory's history of racism played to the advantage of what would become Washington, in that a number of early black settlers settled far enough north of the river that they could avoid most of that.  Two of the most important were both named for George Washington. 

George Washington Bush had been born a free black in Pennsylvania in 1779 and was named for the then hero of the revolution.  He gradually moved west and worked as a voyageur and fur trapper, eventually marrying and settling in Missouri.  in 1844 he and his family set out on the Oregon trail.  When they eventually got to Oregon, racial violence had led to the territory enacting "Lash Laws", which allowed black people to be whipped until they went away.  As a consequence, Bush and his party built a new fork to the trail, leading into what would become western Washington.  This territory was still claimed by the British, but in 1846 a settlement was reached where what was then called "Columbia Territory" would be divided at the 49th parallel, which remains the border to this day. The British land north of the 49th parallel is called "British Columbia" to this day.  The namesake river has its origin in the mountains of eastern BC.

Bush's large family would start a successful farm near what is today Olympia, on what is still called "Bush Prairie" in his honor.  He was apparently well liked and generous toward new settlers and much of his family engaged in public service.  One of his sons would serve in the state legislature.  He died in 1863 and was buried in Tumwater.  The Olympia airport partially covers what had been his farm, and there's a museum dedicated to him on the site.

A man named George Washington was born in 1817 in Virginia, son of a freed slave and an English woman, and raised by a white family, who moved west in several steps.  Eventually they started a farm near what would become Centralia.  When, 1872, the Northern Pacific Railroad made plans to pass near his property, he saw an opportunity and founded a town, which would go through several names until they settled on "Centralia".   He was a proponent of fair business practices, so much that he became a trusted arbiter, and would frequently turn racist settlers into good friends through his actions.

While all of this was happening, the area that would become Washington was varyingly called Oregon or Columbia.  In 1852, a group of prominent settlers would apply to congress to split from Oregon territory, with the name "Columbia".   The territory would be all the land from the coast to the continental divide, in what is today Montana.  Congress decided that "Columbia" would be too confusing because the capitol is called "The District of Columbia".  So the applicants refiled with the name "Washington".  I'm pretty sure this was meant to be sarcastic; what we today would call snark, but the congress bought it, and Washington territory would be its name, starting in 1853.  In 1859, further applications split off what would become the Idaho Panhandle and western Montana, leaving the border just as they are today.  In 1889, Washington became a state, with its capitol at Olympia, near Bush's farm and the south sound Geoducks.

2021 Calendar

 Mon 20 Jan   Martin Luther King Day (Holiday)

Tue 2 Feb      Groundhog's (midwinter) Day
Sun 7 Feb     Superbowl LV, Tampa, FL

Fri 12 Feb     Chinese New Year, begins year of the Ox, 4719
Mon 15 Feb  Presidents Day (Holiday) 
Sun 14 Mar    Daylight Savings Time begins  

Tue 16 Feb   Mardi Gras
Sat 20 Mar  09:37UT (Fri 20Mar 02:37PDT)  Spring Equinox
Sat 27 Mar     Passover begins at sundown
Sun 4 Apr      Easter
Sun 4 Apr       Passover ends at sundown
Mon 12 Apr  Ramadan begins
Sat 1 May     May Day (midspring)

Tue 11 May       Ramadan ends 
Mon 31 May  Memorial Day (Holiday) 
Sun 21 Jun    03:32UT (Sat 20 Jun 16:32PDT) Summer Solstice
Mon 5 Jul       Independence Day (Holiday) 
Sun 1 Aug     Midsummer day   
Mon 6 Sep     Labor Day (Holiday) 

Mon 6 Sep      Sundown Rosh Hashana begins year 5782
Wed 8 Sep       Sundown Yom Kippur
Wed 22 Sep     19:21UT (12:21PDT) Autumn Equinox
Mon 11 Oct    Columbus Day (Holiday for some people) 
Sun 31 Oct     Hallowe'en
Mon 1 Nov      Mid autumn day
Sun 7 Nov      Daylight Savings Time ends 
Thu 11 Nov    Veterans Day  
Thu 25 Nov   Thanksgiving (Holiday)
Fri 26 Nov     Holiday
Thu 10 Dec     Sundown  Hannuka begins
Fri 18 Dec   Sundown, Hannuka ends 
Tue 21 Dec    15:59UT (08:59PST) Winter Solstice 
Sat 25 Dec   Christmas (Holiday)



Days off work in bold

Astronomical and calendar events in italic

Sons of Their Fathers

The lives of the last four presidents make an interesting contrast.  The two Rs were both sons of already very rich and powerful fathers, and the sons had numerous catastrophes of their own making, several of which would have put them into prison and would have ruined anyone without a father who was fabulously wealthy and powerful.

On the other hand the last two D presidents lost their fathers early and were raised mainly by their mother, impressive women both, and both had stepfathers that were completely out of their lives by the time they went to college.  Neither had much money and both got into and through the Ivy League entirely on their own merit.

Bill Clinton's father and stepfather were both salesmen.  His father died in an auto accident before Bill was born and his mother remarried a few years later--this time to a car dealer.   His mother was a waitress when Bill was born but became a nurse.  Bill did very well in school and got into Georgetown, became a Rhodes Scholar and went to Oxford, and Yale Law School, where he met Hillary Rodham.  Clinton opposed the Vietnam war and did not enlist, and due to a lucky high lottery number (311) was not drafted.  He went into politics almost immediately after graduating from law school.

George W Bush's father was George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st president and himself the son of an important politician, Prescott Bush.  His mother Barbara was descended from the brother of Franklin Pierce, 14th president.  The Bushes had strong connections to the oil business.  His father's connections got him enrolled in the Texas Air National Guard, where he learned to fly jets.  He received low ratings as a pilot, and went AWOL in 1972 until he was discharged in 1974, but apparently due to his connections, was honorably discharged.  He failed to get into law school, but did get into Yale business school, again, apparently because of his father.  His grades were mediocre and he was a heavy drinker.  Friends of his father set him up with an oil drilling company, which would never succeed but eventually would be bought out by another company, and George sold his shares and bought into the Texas Rangers baseball team.  He would sell these shares for a 3000% profit while he was governor.  His first political office was governor of Texas, and when he ran for president, he lost the popular vote by more than half a million votes, but won just barely enough electoral votes to get in, with a boost from Florida, where his margin was 500 votes, his brother was governor, and the secretary of state was his campaign manager, and there were tens of thousands of democratic votes suppressed.

Barack Obama's father was a talented student from Kenya who divorced his mother when he was 3.  The last time young Barack saw his father was when he was ten.  Obama Sr died a few years later.  Obama Jr's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was an anthropology student from Kansas who would earn a masters degree while Barack was still young and a PhD while he was in college.  Barack got into Columbia with a full scholarship and Harvard Law, where he was president of the Law Review.  He would work as a law professor for a while before going into politics.

Donald Trump's father Fred was a very wealthy real estate tycoon in Queens, NY, who inherited the core of his business from his father.  It seems that the brains of the outfit was actually Fred's mother.  Fred was known to be ruthless and terribly racist and left in his wake mostly slums.  Donald was big and strong and pretty wild , repeatedly beating up other kids to steal their lunch money.  Trying to get him to behave, Fred would send him to military school, where Donald finally thrived, apparently because he was pretty good at running scams to get others to do things for him.  A big, strong kid, he enjoyed baseball and other sports.  He got into college, apparently, because he paid a smarter kid to take the SAT for him, and eventually got into UPenn and obtained an undergraduate degree in Economics, which he clearly knows almost nothing about.   It's not clear he actually did much of the work for himself as he was absent for most of his senior year.   He was a millionaire before he was 5 and his father gave him $5 million to start his own real estate business while he was still in college, and would eventually inherit his father's business.   He had a small number of successes, but many, many failures.   His father bailed him out many times, yet he went bankrupt at least 6 times.  He also seems to have been further bailed out by money given to him by a division of Deutsche Bank which mainly deals with Russia, and many deals more directly with Russian oligarchs.   His main source of income since his father died in 1999 seems to have been money laundering for Russians and his salary from his TV career and a series of frauds and cons.   Don, born the same year as Clinton and Bush, got out of Vietnam service when a doctor said he had bone spurs in his feet.  In his very first political election, Don lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million but won a narrow victory in the electoral college, strongly boosted by smears to his opponent that came from Russia and one from the FBI.

Antifa?

 I'm pretty sure "Antifa" is just a placeholder for right wingers to aim attacks.  There are obviously lots of people people who are anti-fascist--I certainly am--but the number who are likely to do violent or destructive things is almost certainly minuscule. 

Here are some categories:

Peaceful Demonstrator:   These can be from any issue and with only a few very narrow exceptions, their activities are protected free speech.  I have participated in many, many peaceful demonstrations, such as the Women's marches, Anti-War demonstrations in the 1960s and early 70s and 2003 and have never once seen any sort of violence.

Rioter:  There has been some rioting in a tiny number of this years demonstrations.  I haven't actually seen any in person but I've seen a little on TV.  Rioting nearly always is counterproductive to any cause being peacefully demonstrated for.

Provocateur.  Nearly always, these are people who show up to undermine a peaceful protest.  Many strategies are used, such as starting fights, throwing rocks or other things, especially at police or windows.  They fall into two classes:

Opponents of the cause:  e.g. a right wing provocateur will infiltrate a left wing crowd and stir up trouble.  There were a lot of these in the protests this summer.

Nihilists.  Incorrectly called "anarchists", these are people who find pleasure in violence and mayhem.  They generally have little or no ideology.

The Cops:  Many cops actively oppose progressive causes and in the case of Black Lives Matter, they are representatives of the problematic group.  When they commit acts of violence against previously peaceful protesters, it is not the fault of the protesters that they get angry.   I think it's very significant that the violence in the BLM protests almost completely evaporated when the cops stopped enforcing curfew.

Looter:  like provocateurs, they are at the protest for a reason which is not aligned with the protest itself.  Some of them are there because they agree, but once there is a little broken glass, their main objective is to take advantage.

Anarchist:  There is a legitimate political strategy called anarchism, most conspicuously described by Kropotkin, but it has rarely gotten very far in practice. Kropotkin's idea was to antagonize the ruling class so they would crack down and make support for their uprising nearly universal.   Unfortunately for the strategy, there's an easy way to undermine this: punish the criminal and make a point of not cracking down.   The Portland/Eugene area seems to be a hotbed of people who call themselves anarchists.  They are not.  They are nihilists, who show up at riots wearing black with their identities obscured, and just there to make trouble.

White Supremacists:  This is by far the largest source of terrorism and organized violence in America.  Before Trump was elected, they were active but understood most people were against them, although the vast majority of mass bombings and shootings were done by them.  The vast majority of people arrested for doing violence in Black Lives Matters protests this summer were White Supremacists, trying to undermine the cause.

Religious Extremists:  This is #2 to the racists and they are often the same people, shooting up abortion clinics and so forth.

Antifa:  Appears to be a fictional group made up to be a stalking horse.   Every sane person is anti-fascists, although many Racists and Religious extremists are pro-fascist.  Not all, but enough to be a problem.   Nobody has been able to identify any actual antifa group although occasional a person arrested will admit that they are antifa.  I'll be interested to learn more about the person who was killed by the cops last week who apparently fits this category.

I live less than 10 blocks from virtually all of the protests that occurred in Seattle this summer.  Without the curfew announcements, the news reporting and the occasional news helicopter overhead, I would have had no idea it was happening. 

Worst Second Term Defeats

The incumbent president enjoys such an enormous political advantage, that he has usually won re-election.   There are a few exceptions, mainly when the incumbent is so unpopular it overcomes his structural advantages.  Here are all the failures to be re-elected, ordered by date.   All of them are interesting in some way.

1800 Thomas Jefferson v John Adams

    41,330 to 25,952  (15,378 difference)

    61.4% to 38.6% (22.8% difference)

    73 to 65 electors

1828 Andrew Jackson v John Quincy Adams

     642.553 to 500,897 (141,656 difference)

     56.4% to 43.3% (13.1% difference)

     178 to 83 electors.

     Jackson had a plurality of votes in 1824 but Adams and Clay had made what Jackson called a "corrupt bargain" to win the presidency.   Jackson started running again immediately and won decisively.

1840 William Henry Harrison vs Martin van Buren

   1,275,390 to 1,128,854      (146,536 difference)

   52.9% to 46.8% (6.1% difference)

   234 to 60 electors

1888 Benjamin Harrison v Grover Cleveland

   5,433,892 to 5,534,438 (-100,546 difference)

   47.8% to 48.6% (-0.8% difference)

   233 to 168 electors

   one of the 5 times the popular vote loser won the electoral college.

1892 Grover Cleveland v Benjamin Harrison v James B Weaver

    5,556,918 to 5,176,108 to 1,041,028 (380,480 difference)

    46% to 43% to 8.5% (3% difference)

    277 to 145 to 22 electors.

    Cleveland won the popular vote 3 times in a row but lost the electoral college in the middle.

1912 Woodrow Wilson v William H Taft v Theodore Roosevelt v Eugene Debs

     6,296,284 to 3,486,242 to 4,122,721 to 901,551

     41.8% to 23.2% to 27.4% to 6%.

     435 to 8 to 88 electors

     TR's selection to replace him, Taft, proved to be a normal republican and reversed many of his progressive policies, incensing TR, so he ran against him and beat him soundly.  Unfortunately for him, this split the R vote and gave the election to Wilson. 

1932: FDR & John Nance Garner vs Herbert Hoover & Charles Curtis
       22,821,277 to 15,761,254 (7,060,023 difference)

       57.4% to 39.7% (17.7%)

       472 to 59 electors
      Hoover presided over the start of the Great Depression and exacerbated it immensely with his misguided policies.

       

1976 Jimmy Carter v Gerald Ford

    40,831,881 to 39,148,634 (1,683,247 difference)

    50.1% to 48.0% (2.1% difference)

    297 to 240 electors

    Ford is the only president to have never won a national election: he was appointed to replace Agnew when he was forced to resign, and had pardoned Nixon.   He proved fairly feckless as president.

1980 Ronald Reagan v Jimmy Carter v John Anderson

    43,903,230 to 35,480,115 to 5,719,850 (8,423,115 difference)

    50.7% to 41% to 6.6%  (9.7% or 2.1% if all Anderson votes went to Carter)

    489 to 49 electors

    Anderson was a liberal republican, running as independent and far to the left of his historical positions.  He was obviously running as a spoiler.  It looks like a bigger landslide than it really was.

1992 Bill Clinton v GHW Bush v H Ross Perot

     44,909,889 to 39,104,550 to 19,743,821 (5,805,339 difference)

     43.0% to 37.4% to 18.9%  (5.6% difference)

     370 to 168 to 0 electors

     Perot probably took more votes from Bush than from Clinton, but not enough to swing the election.  Most of the states where Perot did well were won by Bush despite him, so there wouldn't have been much change in the electoral college.  Bush was the inheritor of Reagan's legacy (and dirty tricks) but did not have the personal charm to carry it off.

2020 Joe Biden v Donald Trump

    79,787,724 to 73,767,408 (6,020,316 difference)   (as of 21 Nov 2020)

    51.0% to 47.2%  (3.8% difference)

    306 to 232 electors

    By far our most incompetent and corrupt president.

    

The biggest defeat to an incumbent was Jefferson v Adams, 22.8%.  There were only 65,000 voters so a swing this large is not too unlikely.   This was an incredibly dirty campaign and the two former friends were alienated for years.

The largest defeat with a statistically significant number of voters was FDR v Hoover in 1932, 17.7%.