Month: March 2014

… I recommend reading Little Failure: A Memoir (I’m halfway through).

A family vacation in which the decision to emigrate was made:

Over a bowl of tomato soup, a stout Siberian woman told my mother of the senseless beating her eighteen-year-old son had endured after his conscription by the Red Army, a beating that had cost him a kidney. The woman took out a photo of her boy. He resembled a moose of great stature crossbred with an equally colossal ox. My mother took one look at this fallen giant and then at her tiny, wheezing son, and soon enough we were on a plane bound for Queens.

Here’s the Soviet emigre engineer encountering an American college:

On his first visit to Oberlin my father stood on a giant vagina painted in the middle of the quad by the campus lesbian, gay, and bisexual organization, oblivious to the rising tide of hissing and camp around him, as he enumerated to me the differences between laser-jet and ink-jet printers, specifically the price points of the cartridges. If I’m not mistaken, he thought he was standing on a peach.

Soviet health care in the 1970s:

[the author as an infant is] revived, but the next day I start sneezing. My anxious mother (let us count the number of times “anxious” and “mother” appear in close proximity throughout the rest of this book) calls the local poly-clinic and demands a nurse. The Soviet economy is one-fourth the size of the American one, but doctors and nurses still make house calls. A beefy woman appears at our door. “My son is sneezing, what do I do?” my mother hyperventilates. “You should say, ‘Bless you,’ ” the nurse instructs.

Russian grandmothers:

Behind every great Russian child, there is a Russian grandmother who acts as chef de cuisine, bodyguard, personal shopper, and PR agent. You can see her in action in the quiet, leafy neighborhood of Rego Park, Queens, running after her thick-limbed grandson with a dish of buckwheat, fruit, or farmer’s cheese—“Sasha, come back, my treasure! I have plums for you!”

An immigrant trying to understand American TV:

The Brady Bunch: Why are Mr. and Mrs. Brady always so happy even though Mrs. Brady has clearly already had a razvod with her previous husband and now they are both raising children who are not theirs? Also, what is the origin of their white slave Alice? Three’s Company: What does it mean, “gay”? Why does everyone think the blond girl is so pretty, when it is clearly the brunette who is beautiful? Gilligan’s Island: Is it really possible that a country as powerful as the United States would not be able to locate two of its best citizens lost at sea, to wit, the millionaire and his wife? Also, Gilligan is comical and bumbling like an immigrant, but people seem to like him. Make notes for further study? Emulate? Planet of the Apes: If Charlton Heston is a Republican, are the monkeys Soviet?

Dreams in the new country:

There are three things I want to do…: go to Florida, where I understand that our nation’s best and brightest had built themselves a sandy, vice-filled paradise; have a girl tell me that she likes me in some way; and eat all my meals at McDonald’s.

More: read the book

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I’m still bewildered by the news coverage of the situation in Crimea and our politicians speaking confidently about the situation over there. Now it seems that the Crimeans (about as many as live in Pittsburgh, Denver, or Baltimore) will vote on whether or not they wish to secede from Ukraine (nytimes). If they do vote to secede, does American have a principled reaction ready or will we decide whom to support based on expediency or something else?

Let’s review where we’ve stood on issues of secession…

• 1776: British subjects in 13 colonies decided to secede from the British Empire. We were for it.
• 1830s: A majority of people in Texas wanted to secede from Mexico. We were for it.
• 1940-present: People in Taiwan wanted to secede from China. We were for it but lately our support has wavered.
• 1861: Southerners decided to secede from the U.S. We were against it.
• 1974: Some people in Northern Cyprus wanted to secede from Cyprus. We are against it (official State Department page).
• 1990s: Albanians in Kosovo wanted to secede from Serbia. We were for it.
• 2010s: A majority of people in South Sudan wanted to secede from Sudan. We were for it.

Are we decided to be for or against these secessions based on a single high principle, based on competing principles, or based on expediency and self-interest?

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I don’t know enough about Ukraine, Russia, or Crimea to comment intelligently on the current conflict. What I can say is that reading news coverage about Crimea has not been helpful for learning more. The Wikipedia article on Crimea, on the other hand, shows and explains a lot better why this territory of 2.5 million people (fewer than the Boston metro area) has become the subject of a dispute. Unlike news media coverage, Wikipedia explains that this territory was part of Russia until its 1954 transfer to Ukraine (then a Soviet Republic) and then in 1991 was “upgraded” to an “Autonomous Soviety Socialist Republic” shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. Since the Soviet Union broke up there seems to have been a dispute regarding governance that was never fully resolved and that few in the West were aware of.

My only criticism of the Wikipedia article is that it says that Crimea is about 10,000 square miles in size but does not compare that to a U.S. state or a European country. It turns out that this is roughly the same area as Massachusetts or Vermont and about 15 percent smaller than Belgium.

Can anyone come up with an article from a mainstream newspaper that includes the above facts for context?

[And separately does this conflict show that we are over-investing in our military? Our president has asked Russia to withdraw her troops from Crimea but the Russians are not complying. For about ten years we have tried to get the Afghanis and Iraqis to do what we said and they did not comply. I suppose that it is always possible to argue that it could have been worse without the investment, e.g., “The Mexicans and Canadians would have invaded if we didn’t spend so much.” (see these charts from the Washington Post) But that reasoning would also support a military budget of 50 or even 80 percent of GDP (“you can never be too safe” and “would you really risk your freedom just so that you could buy a new Honda Accord or move your family from an apartment into a house?”). Wikipedia (my source for everything now!) says that there are about 2.2 million Americans in the military, either active duty or reserve. Compared to the other countries that actually isn’t too crazy huge (sortable table in Wikipedia), but it is crazy expensive and it is tough to think of a situation where we’d want to send 2.2 million Americans somewhere to fight a war.]

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The most important thing that I learned about at Heli-Expo wasn’t on the show floor and I decided that it merited its own posting. I attended a two-hour seminar on autorotations. It seems that the stress on lowering the collective in the event of an engine failure is misplaced and that this emphasis starts in the FAA’s Rotorcraft Flying Handbook, i.e., the Bible as far as Private helicopter students are concerned.

Flying a helicopter may well be the most dangerous job in the U.S. (TIME magazine puts “pilots” in at third most dangerous but they are lumping in scheduled airline pilots, whose jobs are not hazardous at all, with helicopter pilots and Alaskan bush pilots) A real-world emergency in which an autorotation becomes necessary is not common but being prepared may mean the difference between life and death.

I decided to write an article on how to teach autorotations, incorporating the best ideas from the seminar.

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Here are my notes from the second day of Heli-Expo… (plus the rest of the trip)

For about ten years we Robinson pilots have been hearing about a stability augmentation system (SAS) being developed for the R44. If you took your hands off the controls and/or flew an R44 without an attitude indicator into the clouds the SAS system could keep the machine from rolling upside down. It could also function as an airplane-style autopilot. A system like this is standard in big helicopters that fly through clouds and could save a lot of lives. There was some excitement a few years back when this system was sold to Cobham, a leader in avionics and equipment, mostly for larger helicopters and military aircraft. It was disappointing therefore to learn from the Cobham employees at Heli-Expo that they would not be delivering this completely working system for the R44, at least not here in the U.S. “The potential for liability outweighs the potential for profit,” they noted.

Spidertracks is interesting because an FAA-approved GPS costs $5-15,000 and an FAA-approved Iridium phone installation is about $30,000. The Spidertracks box includes one of each for $1000 plus $1.90 per flight hour for Iridium fees to send back position reports.

http://aircovers.com/ has a laminated fabric cover where the inner fabric is slippery silicone and supposedly will not scratch Plexi even in high wind situations. The company starts by laser-scanning aircraft and then fabricating covers from the resulting 3D model. They are supplying all of the foreign militaries that are occupying Afghanistan.

You might think that after decades of working within a planned economy, the Russians and Chinese would be equal to the challenge of dealing with the FAA, but both Russian Helicopters and their Chinese counterparts were at the show with impressive scale models of machines that lack FAA type certificates and are therefore not legal to operate in the U.S.

Enstrom has been revived to some extent by its new Chinese owners (since roughly December 2012). They are now making 30 helicopters per year from what is basically a 50-year-old design. Scott’s Bell 47 is not basically a 50-year-old design… it is actually a 70-year-old design that Bell discontinued (plus new blades and a new engine, albeit one without FADEC). It is scheduled to be available starting in 2017 with price under $800,000 (i.e., it will be cheaper than a Robinson R66 but the lack of a back seat means that it is mostly suitable for agricultural work).

The Guimbal Cabri is going to be imported to the U.S. by Precision Helicopters in Oregon. This $400,000 two-seater is theoretically cheaper to operate than a $350,000 Robinson R44 Raven I due to the fact that there are no life-limited components. The Robinson will definitely need a $200,000 overhaul after 12 years (or 2200 hours). So for personal ownership the Robinson might have a capital cost of $550,000 over 24 years compared to $400,000 for the two-seat Cabri. On the other hand, the lower hull values on the Robinson should be good for $3,000 less per year in insurance (though on the third hand the extra two seats cost more to insure because there are two more people who could be injured or killed). And the Cabri probably will have some components that fail over 24 years, beyond normal maintenance items. Let’s budget $100,000 for Cabri components. That plus any insurance savings could bring the total cost to a comparable number. The Robinson burns a little more gas but it flies faster so against a headwind the fuel economy might be the same. People at the show were very excited about the Cabri, but I can’t convince myself with numbers that it is exciting.

After Heli-Expo I went up to San Francisco to catch up with family and friends as well as work with some patent litigators. I looked over my host’s shoulder one evening to see what he was watching for entertainment. It turned out to be YouTube re-runs of CNN’s coverage of the 2012 Presidential election returns. Aside from re-celebrating Obama’s victory, this married (to a woman) father of two had recently developed a passion for letting people know that “1 in 100 people are born as hermaphrodites” and that the traditional male/female gender dichotomy is the result of prejudice against intersex people. During the Oscars this led to the question of whether a bigendered person could win both Best Actor and Best Actress awards for the same performance in a single movie. Separately, we watched the classic movie Funny Face, which opens with a group of young women talking about how they were looking forward to their wedding day. A poll of the assembled young Bay Area women, ages 10-16, revealed that none of them were looking forward to a potential wedding day. Academics and careers seemed to be more on their mind. A 16-year-old talked about her interest in going to college to study “women’s history”. A 27-year-old said that she wished she could have “had a baby at age 15 and then frozen it until I was done building my business.”

[I didn’t do a careful political poll but generally people in the Bay Area who worked for the government or large companies were likely to be happy with the general direction of state and federal laws and regulations while those who worked for themselves or for small companies were likely to express unhappiness and disappointment with government.]

Prices throughout California seemed high and were exacerbated by the 9.25% sales tax. For example, two small tacos and a drink from a truck in Anaheim cost $12 plus $1 in tax. Art museum admission in San Francisco was $29 per person plus $28 for parking. You’ll pay another $7 per person to go to the Japanese garden next door, then another $7 to go to the botanical garden across the street and then another $7 to visit the greenhouse. Add $30 more per person to visit the science museum (previous post).

It was not until this trip that I realized that the most painful consequence of spending our tax dollars to bail out GM and Chrysler is… having to drive GM and Chrysler products. In Los Angeles Hertz rented us a 2014 Chevrolet Impala (that’s what the manual said, but it did not look like the “new 2014 Impala”) that had switches and displays that looked as though they had been kept in inventory since the 1980s. What stops GM from putting an Android tablet or iPad dock in the middle of the dashboard and letting that be the core of the interface? My Hertz Gold reservation for a “full-size car” turned into a 2012 Jeep Liberty SUV at SFO. It had nearly 60,000 miles on the odometer and was noisy and unstable on a rain-soaked highway.

I flew back and forth on United, where passengers are now herded into boarding lanes by number. There are first class citizens in Lane 1 (frequent flyers, first class passengers, etc.). I was in Lane 2 because I have a United credit card. That enabled me to get some of the precious overhead space and I should have felt great because I wasn’t stuck in lanes 3,4,5, or 6. But somehow I felt more like part of a cattle herd than when I travel on JetBlue.

It was 18 degrees Fahrenheit on the ground at Logan Airport and dirty piles of snow lingered on the sides of streets in Cambridge. Maybe that $13 taco snack eaten outdoors in Anaheim was well worth it after all…

 

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Have you been wondering what it would be like it you had $50,000 to spend on a serious professional camera system and could give your consumer-grade Nikon to a teenager? DxOMark delivers an unsentimental review of the Leica S. The Leica turns up such bad numbers that one is forced to ask if the people buying and using the Leica S are all suffering from Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome or if the things that DxOMark are measuring are not well correlated with perceived image quality.

Related:

• DxOMark’s review of the RED Epic Dragon camera, which has a similar price to the Leica S but distinguishes itself by topping the sensor ratings (beating the Nikon D800)
• DxOMark review of the Leica full-frame rangefinder.

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