A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
From Facebook:
Back in August I wrote a posting about the New York Times portrayal of Amazon as a sweatshop. Most of my friends who have worked at Amazon were there in the mid-1990s and have departed for various reasons (“called in rich” being one; didn’t agree with Jeff Bezos being another; wanted to help rid the world of Republicans being a third). Thus I don’t have personal knowledge that would support or contradict the Times story. As a database programmer, though, I find Amazon’s rebuttal interesting. Some of the response rests on information queried from database management systems:
Elizabeth Willet, who claims she was “strafed” through the Anytime Feedback tool, received only three pieces of feedback through that tool during her entire time at Amazon. All three included positive feedback on strengths as well as thoughts on areas of improvement. Far from a “strafing,” even the areas for improvement written by her colleagues contained language like: “It has been a pleasure working with Elizabeth.”
Chris Brucia, who recalls how he was berated in his performance review before being promoted, also was given a written review. Had the Times asked about this, we would have shared what it said. “Overall,” the document reads, “you did an outstanding job this past performance year.” Mr. Brucia was given exceptionally high ratings and then promoted to a senior position.
I’m wondering if this is the future. Companies who are attacked by journalists will be able to use DBMS queries to argue that information was presented selectively and/or incorrectly.
Full post, including commentsA new emergency procedure, in Year 70 of widespread helicopter flying… a technique for getting out of vortex ring state with a powered bank instead of by reducing power and lowering the noise: “Flying Through the Vortex” (Rotor & Wing, September 1, 2015) by Tim Tucker, reporting on a technique developed by Claude Vuichard, a Swiss pilot.
Full post, including commentsI had dinner with Stefan Cavallo, a test pilot for NASA (“NACA” in those days) during World War II (interview). Cavallo intentionally flew a P-51 fighter into a thunderstorm to figure out why they were breaking up on the way back from bombing runs into Germany whereas the supposedly weaker B-17s were fine. It turned out that the stresses from turbulence caused the engine internals to come apart. Gaining this knowledge meant the loss of the airplane and Cavallo was forced to bail out of the test airplane.
At age 89, in 2010, Cavallo was off the Long Island coast when the engine on his Cessna 210 failed. He dead-sticked the plane onto the beach (the media account is interesting because the journalist adds an ejection seat to the P-51 (“I crawled out” said Cavallo when I showed him the piece) and conventional landing gear (with a tailwheel) to the Cessna 210).
Cavallo is also notable for being an inventor of the rigid flight helmet. His 1943 design was used by the federal government as prior art in a patent infringement lawsuit defense and subsequently donated to the Smithsonian.
What does this quiet widower hero, still flying light airplanes, think of the society that younger folks have created? “Somewhere along the way younger Americans squandered what we had built,” said Cavallo, though not with any bitterness. When he looks at us he sees timid paper shufflers, aggressive divorce lawsuit plaintiffs, and a general “can’t do” attitude: “By our mid-20s nearly all of us were in what would turn out to be lifelong marriages and we already had kids. The Empire State Building was built in a year.” I was pretty sure that this was an embellishment. They could not have actually built the world’s tallest building in 1/5th the time that we would today spend in the planning and approval process, could they have? Wikipedia shows that Cavallo’s 94-year-old brain is in fact working better than mine!
Related:
“On Tinder, Off Sex” is a New York Times article by a graduate student in English at USC. She’s is “interested in both men and women” and consumed half a bottle of bourbon before her last sexual encounter. The author sets a pretty high bar for indecisiveness.
Some of my Facebook friends (i.e., not my friends!) are interested in this. What I find most interesting is why the New York Times would run the piece. Readers of traditional newspapers are pretty old. Is this article there to make them feel better about their own sexuality? E.g., “Well, I thought things were bad here at age 70 but at least I have figured out who I want to have sex with and sometimes we get the energy to follow through.”
Readers: Why would the Times run this? How is it newsworthy if a young person is confused about sex and unable to act?
Full post, including comments“The Law That Makes U.S. Expats Toxic” is a Wall Street Journal article by a former U.S. State Department diplomat. It covers what happens to American who want to earn a living in the global economy but get caught up in the 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. (Personal story: A friend from Europe gave up his Green Card and moved back to Europe because his job was money management (of a small foreign fund) and the costs of compliance with Fatca ended up exceeding his total compensation.)
The author concludes that “The best solution is for the U.S. to join the rest of the world in taxing based on residency rather than citizenship.” I’m not sure that is practical given the uncompetitive tax environment of the U.S., e.g., compared to Switzerland (negotiable rates) or Singapore (top marginal rate of 20%), and how comfortable a Gulfstream G650 is. But on the other hand this will become an ever-larger issue as an ever-larger percentage of the world’s good jobs are outside of the U.S.
Full post, including commentsFlight of Passage
The boys pay $300 for the Cub ($2,270 in 2015 dollars; a similar airplane would sell for $25-30,000 today), trailer it home, and spend the winter re-covering and otherwise sprucing it up (unclear what the legality of this was back then; today they would need to have been working under the supervision of an FAA-certificated A&P mechanic (probably the rules were the same back then but Buck glosses over who might have been supervising their work; perhaps the father)). The plane had no electrical system and therefore no radios, no navigational equipment, no lights for after-sunset operation, and no intercom for front-to-back communication. Without radios they had to avoid the biggest airports and, presumably, make advance phone calls whenever preparing to land at a towered airport (but mostly they went to uncontrolled fields, then as now in the majority).
According to the FAA’s online airmen registry, Charles Rinker Buck earned his Private pilot’s certificate in 1979 and never earned an instrument rating, Commercial or Instructor certificate. Nonetheless he is able to explain the aeronautical aspects of the trip fairly well. There are a few technical errors that the CFI in me feels compelled to point out. Buck asserts that landing a light airplane in a crosswind stronger than the manufacturer’s “demonstrated crosswind component” is illegal, but this is not true. Max demonstrated is simply what the manufacturer happened to demonstrate when the airplane was being certified. It might be the case that the airplane has sufficient additional rudder authority to be operated in a stronger crosswind and the FAA leaves the ultimate decision up to the pilot (more from AOPA). More substantively, Buck describes a North American continent that requires climbing to approximately 11,000′ to cross. In fact, as ferry pilots of feeble Robinson R22 helicopters know well, if one follows Interstate 10 the country can be crossed without climbing any higher than 5,000′ (and even the I-80 route requires a climb only to about 10,000′ to clear all of the passes comfortably). The Guadalupe Pass, which Buck describes as having crossed at 11,600′, was crossed just this month by a Robinson R22 pilot who said that he never went above 7,000′.
The boys added a huge amount of challenge to their trip by (a) rushing, and (b) ignoring the most important principles of mountain flying. Instead of waiting an extra day or two for clear dry weather in which to depart New Jersey or Indiana, the boys plunge ahead into low clouds, strong headwinds, and turbulence that literally shakes some parts of their plane apart. Instead of waiting an extra day in Carlsbad, New Mexico before going through the Rocky Mountains to get to El Paso, Texas, the boys cross during the worst heat and turbulence of a summer afternoon. (In my opinion the most important rules for crossing mountains in a light aircraft are the following: (1) pick a low altitude route so that airplane performance is at a maximum, (2) wait a few days if necessary for calm winds so that one does not get caught in strong downdrafts on the lee side of the mountains, (3) cross in the early morning so that temperature is at a minimum (maximizes air density and therefore airplane performance), (4) cross in the early morning when winds are typically at a minimum. By following these rules I have crossed quite a few mountain ranges in low-performance aircraft (albeit not quite as low as a Piper Cub!) without facing any real challenges or surprises.)
Americans, and therefore news media, didn’t have as strong an appetite for bad/depressing news in those days. In fact, according to Buck, the country was hungry for news about wholesome heroes. Therefore the trip turned into something of a media sensation despite the fact that the boys hadn’t planned it that way. Reporters were never interested in any technical aspects of the trip, nor what had transpired in the plane, but rather how the boys “felt.”
Despite the wholesome nature of the country, the U.S. Border Patrol was apparently on high alert in 1966. A swarm of government vehicles and armed agents surrounded the Piper Cub at a small airport in Arizona, wanting to take apart the airplane, which they believed had arrived in the middle of the night from Mexico. The boys’ fuel receipt and the testimony of the airport manager and local pilots did not convince the Federal agents to back off, at least at first. (See AOPA for what it is like today.)
Students of economics will appreciate that the budget for the entire trip was $300 (food, lodging when sleeping under the wing was impractical, gas for the Cub, etc.). That’s $2,270 in 2015 dollars. If the Cub were burning five gallons per hour and achieved an average ground speed against the typical west-to-east headwind of 60 miles per hour, that’s about 50 hours of flying times 5 gallons = 250 gallons of fuel to be purchased. If we assume $5/gallon as a typical small airport price, that’s $1250 for fuel and therefore it does seem as though the boy’s trip could be replicated for somewhere in the same cost neighborhood.
Pilots will appreciate this book, especially the audiobook version read by the author. A pilot today with a smartphone has a much easier time navigating than did these kids. Buck was the primary navigator for the journey and anyone who ever went through Private training will appreciate the challenge that he faced in keeping track of their position, especially when scud-running. Due to the family dynamics aspects and Buck’s writing, I would also recommend this book to non-pilots.
Highly recommended.
Related:
Given the financial incentives presented to doctors I have always wondered why Americans aren’t getting surgery on a weekly basis. This New York Times article answers the question: at least in some parts of the U.S., we are!
Related:
The killjoys at dxomark.com have put the iPhone 6s through its paces and its camera scores the same overall as the iPhone 6’s camera. More megapixels from a sensor of the same physical size turn out not to be useful.
The top-performing camera phone, according to dxomark, is the Sony Xperia Z5, which has a 1/2.3″ sensor. This corresponds to 6.3×4.72mm (about 30mm^2). Apple relies on a 1/3″ sensor, 4.8×3.6mm in size (17mm^2). Thus the Sony has roughly twice the sensor area.
Readers: Who has traded an iPhone 6 for a 6S? How does the real-world camera performance compare?
Full post, including commentslight.co offers a $1,700 camera with 16 crummy little sensors and software to combine output from 10 of those at a time into an image that purportedly can compete with a full-size digital camera’s output.
I have a tough time imagining how the output from this little Silicon Valley miracle could be better than from a standard pocketable camera, e.g., the SonyRX100
Perhaps this will be a great camera for casual use in a harsh environment. It doesn’t have the weight and size penalty of a sealed professional grade DSLR.
What does that leave us with? Burning Man!
Readers: What else is an exciting application for this new camera?
Full post, including comments