Month: January 2019

Fahrenheit 11/9

by philg

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 is streaming on Amazon Prime right now.

It’s worth watching, even if you don’t advocate for abandoning capitalism in favor of socialism, as Mr. Moore does.

The first section is about the 2016 election. Moore says that Trump didn’t want to run for president, but only staged a couple of fake rallies to show NBC that he should be paid more. Only when Trump saw how voters loved him did he decide to run in earnest. The presentation of footage from the respective campaigns on the night of the election is dramatic even though we know the outcome.

The next section is about the incompetence, insincerity, and mendacity of establishment Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and the officials who suppressed votes for beloved Bernie Sanders at the convention, even from states that Mr. Sanders had won (but what difference would it have made? Hillary did win more votes).

Moore doesn’t waste too much time trashing establishment Republicans, whom his audience presumably already associate with being on the payroll of the rich. In fact, he says that, starting with Bill Clinton, most Democrats are also on this payroll and there is little to distinguish non-socialist Democrats from Republicans.

Moore covers the Flint, Michigan water situation in detail (it was all caused by Republicans and cronies who wanted to make big $$; simple incompetence was not a factor), but the relevance to Donald Trump is never clear. Everything significant happened prior to Trump taking office (though Trump was the only candidate from either party to visit Flint during the campaign, according to Moore). There is footage of Obama lying to citizens about drinking the water. He is shown asking for a glass and just wetting his lips with the potentially tainted water, but not sipping any. Hidden below the podium is a glass of the actual water that he is consuming.

Another theme that keeps coming up is the Parkland shooting, but Donald Trump’s involvement is not explained.

There is a lot of footage of Adolf Hitler. Trump’s voice is synced up with Hitler’s lips moving. (Those who are passionate about women in aviation will be disappointed that Hannah Reitsch isn’t shown or quoted (“It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side.”))

Yale History professor Timothy Snyder is quoted saying that the comparison of Trump to Hitler isn’t perfect, but only because no comparison ever is. A 99-year-old Nuremberg prosecutor is interviewed saying that what Trump is doing by separating children from migrant parents at the border is as bad as the crimes he was prosecuting, e.g., killing 90,000 Jews. (Michael Moore has experience with U.S. family court litigation, but not a custody lawsuit that separated a child from a parent. All of the fighting has been over cash and real estate. The litigation has stretched over most of this decade and a new lawsuit was filed a few months ago (Daily Mail).)

The Reichstag fire is compared to 9/11 in terms of providing the would-be dictator an excuse to seize power, but it is unclear how Trump could have engineered an emergency 15+ years prior to taking office.

Moore and Professor Snyder seem pretty sure that Trump is on track to be the next Hitler, but they don’t say how it can be accomplished.

I had never seen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on video before (we are not TV news watchers), so it was interesting to see footage of her campaigning. Moore expresses enthusiasm about young female socialists, preferably immigrants and/or Muslim, taking over the Democratic Party.

The documentary footage closes with the Hawaii mistaken missile alert (all done by state officials in a state that last voted for a Republican in 1984) and with a student from Parkland speaking dramatically about the school shooting (but, again, why is Trump to blame for these unfortunate events?).

So Fahrenheit 11/9 is worth seeing both for how Michael Moore weaves together familiar topics and also to try to understand how young Americans who call themselves “socialist” think.

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Want to know what a test pilot actually does?

by philg

If you want to know what a test pilot actually does, explained in a way that is technical and precise yet comprehensible and clear to non-experts, let me recommend watching Day 3 – PM session from http://web.mit.edu/webcast/16.687/iap2019/

(Diogo Castilho, an F-16 pilot from the Brazilian Air Force who is finishing his Ph.D. in aero/astro at MIT, talks about a couple of flight test programs)

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Can any migrant from an Islamic country obtain citizenship in a Western country by saying “I renounce Islam”?

by philg

“Saudi teen lands in Canada after fleeing family” (CNN):

A Saudi teen who fled to Thailand to escape her allegedly abusive family has arrived in Canada after being offered asylum there. … Qunun had flown to Thailand from Kuwait to escape her family, saying she feared they would kill her because she renounced Islam.

Could this work for anyone willing to say to a Western official “I don’t think that there is a God”?

The U.S., Canada, Australia, or the European nations are required to offer asylum to anyone with a reasonable fear of persecution, right?

A lot of countries do not allow residents to commit blasphemy or apostasy. See Wikipedia on Freedom of Religion in Saudi Arabia, for example, or this page on how anyone who questions a major religion can be imprisoned for five years in Indonesia. Why couldn’t any of the 264 million folks who live in Indonesia move to Canada or the U.S. tomorrow, saying “I question the truth of all six recognized religions and I could be imprisoned for this if I were to be returned to Indonesia.”? How could a government official in Canada, for example, ever prove that such a declaration of disbelief was false?

Why would anyone from a country in which denying the truth of Islam is punishable bother with any other strategy for obtaining legal residency in a Western welfare state?

Related:

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Gillette versus Dorco Shaving Test 3

by philg

Continuing research … (see Test 1 and Test 2)

Test 3:

  • one day of growth
  • shaving in the shower
  • Edge shaving gel
  • Dorco Pace 7 on right side of face
  • latest and greatest Gillette Fusion 5 ProShield with Flexball on left side of face
  • third shave for each cartridge

Results: More or less equivalent.

Still to try: Dorco Pace 6 Plus ($6.50 for handle and two cartridges; free shipping and no sales tax collected for MA residents). This one has a single trimmer blade in addition to its 6 regular blades, so it is more directly comparable to the Gillette product.

Related:

  • a 2014 review of the Dorco Pace 6 by a serious shaver-experimenter. He concludes that the Dorco product “is comparable to the Gillette Fusion Proglide” (but he had only 6 blades, not 7, at the time!) and that the Dorco cartridge is good for 20 shaves before requiring stropping (i.e., being thrown away, since a new one is less than $2).
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Flying above 5,000′ cabin altitude

by philg

In our FAA ground school I had to show students a slide reminding them that FAR 91.211 requires oxygen for a pilot exposed to cabin altitudes above 14,000′ (and when flying between 12,500′ and 14,000′ after 30 minutes). They’ll be tested on that. From experience, however, I know that I feel more alert if I keep the (typically shorter) Cirrus flights to 7,500′ and the (sometimes long) Pilatus PC-12 flights to cabin altitude of no more than 5,000′.

“A Medical Look at Hypoxia” by Kevin Ware, a physician and ATP/CFI is an interesting article from a recent Twin&Turbine. The doc/pilot notes that the narrowing of arteries that comes with aging (and an American diet!) makes it tougher for the brain to get sufficient oxygen when starved due to altitude:

In summary, when a pressurized piston or turboprop aircraft is in the high 20 flight levels and operating just as it was designed (cabin altitude of 10,000–12,000 feet), the pilot’s body is only being supplied with half the oxygen available at sea level. This, in turn, triggers the Bohr effect, further decreasing the amount of oxygen available to the brain and heart, which if the pilot is of mature age, are already compromised due to the narrowing of blood vessels. … Given this physiologic reality, is it really safe for pilots with grey hair and some common health issues such as elevated cholesterol, high blood pressure, and possible arterial narrowing, to operate pressurized aircraft at their highest legal altitudes with cabin altitudes? The answer is probably not. But, if the pilot is willing, some steps can be taken to lower the physiologic risk to a more acceptable level, and it involves the use of supplemental oxygen.

Supplemental oxygen is something that needs to be used before hypoxia is present because its effect on the brain is very insidious and makes such recognition of what is occurring, and the logical solutions that would follow, nearly impossible. The best solution to recognizing the gradual onset of hypoxia is to wear a pulse oximeter anytime the cabin altitude is above 5,000 feet and watch the numbers on the dial.

Worth a read if you’re trying to decide if it makes sense to climb up another
4,000′ in a turboprop to save 15 gallons of fuel. Also if you’re trying to decide on whether to pay up for a pressurized plane or rely on supplemental oxygen. The author of this article implies that the typical buyer of a high-performance turbocharged, but not pressurized, piston airplane should be breathing supplemental oxygen for 95 percent of the flights.

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If programmers are anti-social, how did they end up in the bustling hives of Silicon Valley?

by philg

People often are drawn to computer nerdism partly because they prefer interacting with machines rather than with other people. (James Damore made this point while working at Google and learned that free speech is for Americans who don’t need to work!)

Yet the coder in a modern Bay Area software plantation is sandwiched tightly between two other galley slaves (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?). He or she has less personal space than a McDonald’s cashier.

How did it come to pass that people who went into programming because they could be alone with their beloved machines are now packed like sardines into densely populated coding plantations and, after hours, packed like ocean liner steerage passengers into shared apartments?

Despite the somewhat lower salaries, wouldn’t most of these people actually be better off working as COBOL programmers for an electric utility? They’d at least have a private office or cubicle.

I asked the founder/CEO of one of the companies that I visited in SoMa whether he wouldn’t get more productivity out of his workers with a more traditional office layout. “Interviewees would just walk out if they saw cubicles or rows of private offices. This [array of tightly packed desks] is what they expect for a modern tech company.” He also told me that the grungy industrial space was costing over $70/ft triple net. “It’s actually more than a modern office tower because people want ‘authentic.'”

[The same CEO told me that the monk-like amount of space per coder also is associated with a monk-like abstinence from sex. “The guys are always complaining that there are no woman to date in San Francisco.” (presumably the imbalance is far larger down in the Valley!) Perhaps if they had a better understanding of California family law they would not complain as much and/or would look at neighboring Nevada, with its $13,000/year cap on child support and 50/50 shared parent default, as a destination for romance …]

Is it fair to say that, aside from the cash, Silicon Valley now offers one of the nation’s largest mismatches between workers’ preferences and working conditions?

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Slide Rule by Nevil Shute

by philg

A reader was kind enough to give me a hardcopy(!) version of Slide Rule by Nevil Shute. It turns out that the popular novelist was an aeronautical engineer during the golden age of aviation. One of the luxuries of getting in on the early days was working with two of the greats: Geoffrey de Havilland and Barnes Wallis, of Dambusters fame.

Shute says that “the halcyon period … died with the second world war when aeroplanes had grown too costly and too complicated for individuals to build or even to operate.” Those are fighting words at Oshkosh and I think that Game Composites refutes this gloomy perspective to some extent (albeit one of the “individuals” had to be a Walmart heir!).

Shute was an airship designer at a time when a government-run operation was building the R101 (crashed and burned due to incompetence, according to Shute) in competition with the R100, a private effort. I still can’t figure out how airships ever worked. The R100 made it to Canada and back, but got kicked up 4,000 fpm in a light thunderstorm. The British airship industry was doomed by the crash of the R101 and improvements in heavier-than-air planes, but I don’t know why anyone thought that it would ever be practical given the power of Nature and the inability of an airship to outrun a storm.

Social norms were different between the Wars. Shute describes a “married woman living apart from her husband, who established herself in the village while her divorce matured.” Her sexual relationship with one of his bachelor test pilots results in an uprising by the “Wives Trades Union of Yorkshire,” upset that they might have to encounter “that woman.” (see Real World Divorce for how things have changed for the better, from a plaintiff’s perspective, in England!) Shute says that he prefers a married-with-children test pilot who will bring back a prototype at the first sign of trouble.

Airship aviation is an indoor/outdoor experience. Crew members are able to walk on top of the ship, move around outside to make repairs while the airship is flying, go to sleep in a cabin, etc. The weather has to be crazy bad before there is anything that could be called “turbulence” to disturb passengers.

The book covers topics that would be familiar today to anyone involved in startups: raising money and growing a business despite a shortage of capital. Shute co-founded an airplane manufacturer called Airspeed Ltd. in 1931 (i.e., during the Great Depression). Despite an industry that grew as fast as hoped, a war that resulted in huge demand from governments around the world, and thousands of airplanes produced and flown away by customers, the company never thrived financially and was eventually absorbed into de Havilland. A cautionary tale for those who today would try to make money on self-driving cars, electric cars, solar power, or any other obviously booming technology. Shute’s Airspeed simply couldn’t make a significant profit in the face of competition from higher-volume manufacturers that kept reducing their unit costs. The Royal Family bought an Airspeed Envoy, but that still wasn’t enough to stave off the competition.

Shute is eventually pushed out (1938), which he says in retrospect was a smart decision: “I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit. They are very seldom combined in the same person. … I was a starter and useless as a runner…”

So… to Wes: thanks! to everyone else: read Slide Rule if you’re interested in aviation, engineering, or entrepreneurship.

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Gillette-compatible blades from Schick

by philg

In https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/01/24/gillette-versus-dorco-shaving-test-2/ the one thing that seems to give Gillette a slight boost over the Korean-made Dorco blades is that flexible head on the Gillette handle.

What if one could buy third-party blades and put them on the Gillette handle?

Schick offers just such a product: Hydro Connect. I ordered some yesterday and will be offering a report!

(These seem to be tough to obtain from retailers, though it is easy to buy them direct from Schick. I’m wondering if retailers are afraid of getting entangled in litigation, e.g., “P&G’s Gillette sues Schick maker Edgewell over razor blade design,” which notes that “Procter & Gamble Co’s (PG.N) Gillette unit on Monday sued the maker of Schick razors for the second time in 13 months, seeking to stop its sale of razor blade cartridges designed to fit Gillette’s Fusion handles.”)

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Management lessons from Theranos

by philg

I’m digging into Bad Blood, the authoritative book on the rise and fall of Theranos.

I would have thought that there were no lessons to be learned for those who toil in ordinary enterprises, but there are some!

Background: Theranos was not all-fraud, all-the-time. The founder’s vision was far too advanced for Silicon Valley engineers to achieve, at least on a non-Apple budget, but the team did try. There were some reasonably competent people from Apple, Logitech, et al., and they did doggedly build devices. Maybe the combined efforts of the best people at Siemens and Agilent (formerly HP) would have sufficed to deliver most of the vision.

One lesson for managers is that firing the disloyal is a good technique for preserving one’s job. Elizabeth Holmes wouldn’t have lasted past 2005 or 2006 if not for the fact that she axed everyone who disagreed with her. A rebellion in 2008 nearly led to a Board vote to remove her as CEO, but she survived via “contrition and charm” and then fired everyone who had exposed her overoptimism and outright lies to the Board.

Another lesson is that incompetence plus sucking up = long-term job. The head of software would reliably say “yes, we can do it” and that enabled him to survive despite a long track record of failure. Folks who were more capable and who pushed back on unrealistic goals were routinely fired.

[Sort of a “management” lesson: the book describes that Holmes had a boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani, who was two decades her senior and provided her with a roadmap to garnering personal cash without necessarily building a real business. Wikipedia says that he made $40 million personally on a company whose investors were wiped out. He used some of this money to guarantee a loan to Theranos when the company had burned through its first three rounds of seed/VC money. The company might not have lasted past about 2010 without Elizabeth Holmes’s personal connection to the rich guy.]

One weakness of the book so far is that it doesn’t explain how the company was able to hire anyone in the face of competition from Apple, Google, Facebook, et al. The author makes it sound as though many of the people had skills to get jobs at the unsinkable behemoths. How did they end up at Theranos in the first place? The magnetic personality of the founder is one explanation.

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Woman who “exceeded expectations” by earning an engineering degree

by philg

The Art of Investing: Lessons from History’s Greatest Traders is a Teaching Company course by John M. Longo, a Rutgers professor who got a Bachelor’s in 1991 (so he should be 50 years old), has one lecture given over to “four women who moved financial markets” (the other 23 lectures cover investors who, at least at one time, identified as “men”).

One thing that struck me was Professor Longo’s praise of Leda Braga, born in 1967, as having “exceeded expectations.” One cited example of this was earning a Ph.D. in engineering from Imperial College London. But Professor Longo does not cite any reason for anyone to doubt this woman’s abilities other than her identifying as a woman.

(The rest of the course suggests that, except for the Renaissance folks such as James Simon, “nobody knows anything.” The successful investment strategies are all over the map. It is unclear if the folks who’ve been successful are examples of survivorship bias. They took some bold risks and succeeded. Okay, but what about the 100 other folks who took bold risks at the same time? Investor track records are presented without any adjustment for risk. So a monkey who threw darts at the WSJ in 1990 and picked Microsoft and Apple as the sole constituents of a portfolio would be celebrated as a genius investor.)

Readers: Does it actually advance the cause of gender equality to express surprise that a woman is able to do something that tens of thousands of men do annually?

Related:

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