Who Was Reverend Book?

One of my favorite TV shows, 2002's martyred Firefly series, had several interesting characters.  It takes place in an imaginary solar system where there are dozens of habitable planets and moons, some of which are high-tech, urban and modern, while others are rural or even backwards.  The show takes place six years after an interplanetary civil war, after which the urban "central alliance" worlds imposed a police state over all the others, but with somewhat limited reach imposed by distance.  The circumstances present many opportunities for interesting contexts for the writers to tell their stories, putting horses and space ships in the same scenes, and allowing all sorts of social circumstances to be considered.  So much more could have been done with the show had it been continued.

One of the interesting characters is Reverend Derial Book.  He had been a monk in an abbey not too far from the Persephone Spaceport--as he puts it "out of the world" for a time, when he catches a ride of the show's namesake spaceship, the Firefly class "Serenity".  He proves very knowledgeable about spaceships and many other things, especially things related to weapons, small force fighting and apparently espionage, and has an identity card which gives him surprising rights in the alliance.  All of this is implausible for the preacher he purports to be.

My theory is that during the war, he was a secret agent for the Alliance, possibly even a highly trained Operative.  After the war, he didn't want to do this sort of work anymore, but was privy to many secrets that needed to be kept.  The deal he worked out with his bosses was that he spend some period--probably five years--completely out of the world, and was prohibited from selling his expert services and knowledge, so he couldn't work as a consultant of some sort.  Moreover, he'd done sufficient bad things that he really didn't want to be in the spy business anymore, but had earned a permanent "get out of jail free" card with the Alliance.  The abbey suited him well--it fit his new-found religiosity and allowed him to be out of the world for a while, but after the five years were up, he could go back out.  He enjoyed space travel and had many skills that would be useful, so he took a ride on what appeared to be a tramp freighter, and was in fact a pirate ship, and after the first adventure, joined the crew.

His background prevents him from telling the rest of the crew what his true history is, especially since the Captain and Zoey had fought against his side in the civil war, but he's realized that his ideas about freedom and civilization are more or less aligned with theirs, and besides, it's exciting and fun for him.  Eventually, he'll probably tell the captain about his activities during the war, but probably not for a long time yet.  As it happens, he was killed by "the operative" in the movie Serenity before this occurs.  I regard the events of the movie as non-canonical and perhaps even retcon, although much of the movie does extend the story of the series.  In particular, I think Book and Wash's deaths were intended to terminate the story and make reviving the series impossible rather than being a real part of the story.

Worst Vice President

A deeply offensive and fact free commentary on Fox News rates Biden as the worst VP ever and Harris as #2.  I'd put them close the opposite end of the spectrum

Really bad VPs, in no particular order:

Aaron Burr: Jefferson's VP in his first term.  Murdered Alexander Hamilton in a duel while serving as VP.  He was never tried for this, but Jefferson dropped him for his second term in favor of George Clinton.  Burr headed west and believing that war with Spain inevitable, provoked several incidents that came close to starting that war, specifically undermining Jefferson's careful policy.  Brought home and tried for treason and acquitted due to some shenanigans. 

Spiro Agnew: Nixon's VP for both terms.   Ran a bribetaking operation which started while he was governor of Maryland and continued when he was in the white house.   He pled Nolo Contendere to a single charge of tax evasion and resigned from office.  Apparently this was a deal: he never served a day in prison although he was disbarred and had to live the rest of his life on handouts from rich friends, most famously Frank Sinatra.

Richard Cheney: GW Bush's VP.  Manipulated and lied the country into two unnecessary and deeply counterproductive wars.  Advocated torture and suspension of due process.

John C Calhoun: VP for both Quincy Adams and Jackson. Believed that slavery was a positive good for the slaves themselves, strong proponent of states rights and nullification.  Probably bears more responsibility for the Civil War than any other individual, although he died in 1850.

John C Breckenridge: Buchanan's VP, he ran against Lincoln as the one fully pro-slavery candidate in the 1860 election.  After his defeat, he returned to the senate, but shortly joined the Confederate Army and was expelled at that time.

Andrew Johnson: Lincoln's VP in his second term.  He was inept and perpetually drunk, and undid many of the social gains from Civil War after Lincoln's assassination.  He was the first president to be impeached.

Pretty bad VPs:

Dan Quale.  George HW Bush's VP.  Obviously very stupid and inept, although it turns out not quite as incompetent as Pence

Mike Pence: Trump's VP.  Not as stridently stupid as Trump.

Chester Arthur: like many VPs, the only reason he was in office was as payment to corruptors.  When President Garfield was murdered, he proved so incompetent he wasn't able to do much, good or bad.  To his eternal credit, he refused the efforts of his mentor Conkling to exploit Arthur's office.

Calvin Coolidge: Harding's VP, he was not quite as corrupt as Harding himself, but pretty bad.  Like Arthur, he didn't really do much except allow the conditions that led to the Depression to fester.

Charles Dawes:  Coolidge's VP.  He was responsible for the "Dawes Plan", which resulted in huge loans, over half of it from American Banks, to Germany to pay off their war debts, and led pretty directly to the German hyperinflation of the 20s, worldwide depression and the rise of the Nazis.  He seems to have meant well and they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, but it turned out to be a terrible idea.

My rankings put Burr and Cheney in a class by themselves, for actively and knowingly pursuing treasonous policies, along with many other evil that they did.  Calhoun and Breckenridge were traitors, but they they tried to work within the system to make it conform to their horrible ideas.

Trump would rank even on this list with Burr and Cheney for actively trying to overturn the lawful governance of the US, but he was never VP. 

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.