A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Some music-oriented friends and I were trying to come up with titles for modern operas that would be sequels to The Marriage of Figaro.
We quickly came up with
But then we stalled out.
Readers: What would be a good update to this 18th century story? It has to be something that is reasonably likely to happen in the 21st century, but not in the 18th century.
Full post, including commentsSemi-local readers: Would anyone like to meet up at the Rhode Island Air Show this weekend? Due to overwhelming kid-based demand, I plan to be there on both days. The show is free. Fly in before about 10:00 am (PPR).
Full post, including commentsA friend’s son was playing violin in a chamber music concert recently. At the after-party we were chatting about summer plans with the violist. I mentioned plans to go to Oshkosh (more propertly, EAA AirVenture) and noted that people who have restored World War I and World War II airplanes will fly them in. She looked politely blank so my friend said “Those were wars before you were born.” I added “Donald Trump was leading the Germans in World War II. Well… actually it was someone who was very much like Donald Trump.”
Full post, including comments“In a Twist, Low Scores Would Earn Admission to Select Schools” (nytimes):
Students with low test scores are usually shut out of New York City’s best public schools.
But next year, such students could be offered a quarter of the sixth-grade seats at even the most selective middle schools in Manhattan’s District 3 as part of a desegregation plan being debated in the district, which stretches from the Upper West Side to Harlem.
The plan is unusual because it focuses explicitly on low-performing students, and seeks to achieve “academic diversity” across the district’s middle schools.
Although it might be the last race-neutral government program in the U.S., I have never been a huge fan of the NY system of sending the smart kids off to a nerd farm. It seems unfair to those who are left behind. They’ll never see the top 10 percent of achievers and therefore will overestimate their abilities. If I were a school dictator, I would set up individualized instruction and extra challenges delivered to the brightest students who stay within a regular school, reserving the magnet schools for special subjects such as arts and music.
If New York is now going to have quotas for academically weak students in their schools for the academically strong, I wonder if it wouldn’t be more sensible to tear down the entire exam school system. Just have “schools” that can cater to both the good and bad students.
Readers: What do you think? Does an exam school become pointless if people who fail the exam are also admitted?
[Separately, a friend’s daughter recently graduated from what is perhaps America’s toughest high school: Stuveysant. She crushed the entrance exam, got grades near the top of her class, and scored 1580 out of 1600 on the SATs. She rejected advice to “pull an Elizabeth Warren” and check a box to identify as a member of a victim group. She was in turn rejected by Yale, despite being, objectively, one of the best-educated 18-year-olds in the United States. To me this shows just how tough the U.S. has become for young people. When I was in high school (late 1970s), anyone who was reasonably bright and willing to work hard would get into an Ivy League college. To young people who might be impressed that I have an undergrad degree from MIT… close to 50 percent of people who applied to become members of the Class of 1982 were admitted. It was a different world!]
Full post, including commentsOur town wants to demolish a 140,000 sf school that is in basically good condition and replace it with a “Net Zero” building (I created a mini-site just for my thoughts on this school). A handful of the town’s environmentalists question the “greenness” of pushing an apparently usable building into a landfill.
My brilliant idea to relieve the guilt: Tesla bulldozer. Model B!
Full post, including commentsThe Longfellow Bridge that joins Boston and Cambridge has reopened. The number of car travel lanes has been permanently reduced from 4 to 3 as part of the renovation.
In “Cost to renovate Longfellow Bridge compared to its construction cost” (2013), I wrote that the project would be done in 2016 and cost $260 million, roughly 4X the original cost of $65 million (2013 dollars).
In “Longfellow Bridge repairs will now take about as long as the original construction” (2015) I gave an updated completion time.
The bridge is not quite finished, but it is open, and the cost to repair came in at roughly $300 million, about 4.6X the cost to build. See “Longfellow Bridge Reopens After $300 Million Reconstruction Project” (NECN).
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Full post, including commentsThe Adventures in Vet Bills saga that I started in “Healthy American dog runs up a larger health care bill than a slightly sick Mexican” continues…
After nearly four years of life, Mindy the Crippler needed her teeth cleaned. It cost $2,000. I don’t think that the clinic here in exurban Boston is overpriced because there was a two-month waiting list to get in.
Anesthesia, including necessary prior bloodwork, was nearly $1,000.
The specialist vet said “Be sure to bring her back every year.” If we did that, not only would the poor golden retriever have to spend a full day in the hospital once per year, but our spending on vet care would be roughly 3X what it is now.
Humans in San Diego who don’t have dental insurance will go across the border to get their dental care in Mexico. A Boston friend rejected a car-sized quote for dental procedures and had U.S.-trained professors of dentistry do the work in Costa Rica while he enjoyed a vacation. Why can’t dogs travel to Cancun or Tamarindo in January and enjoy the beach with one day off for canine dentistry?
Full post, including commentsAny engineer that has ever gone through helicopter training has wondered “Why doesn’t the collective lower itself after the engine quits?” (see “Teaching Autorotations” for an introduction to why this is important; see also Wikipedia) A typical turbojet-powered aircraft, e.g., Boeing 737 or business jet, resists pilot attempts to stall the machine via a stick pusher. If the airplane is going too slowly, roughly 150 lbs. of force are applied in the nose-down direction to ensure that airspeed is maintained (high-performance airplanes are not easy to recovery from a stall/spin). If rotor speed, and therefore airspeed of the spinning wing, is falling there is one sensible flight control action that is almost always helpful: lower the collective.
Somehow I missed that it actually can be done automatically. The Helitrak Collective Pull Down (follow the link for a bunch of videos) seems to have been available for about 1.5 years for about $15,000 in an R44. Some excerpts:
The low rotor RPM warning signal triggers the device to pull the collective down in less than half a second, eliminating pilot recognition and reaction times. … ultimately, can anyone put a price on the life of a pilot and passengers?
According to the Flight Safety Foundation, pilots take, on average, 2-3 seconds to recognize that a problem is occurring and then another 4-6 seconds to react.
A system that also pulled the cyclic back a little would be yet better, but it would be nice to see this on every helicopter!
Full post, including commentsFront-page NYT headline: “Supreme Court Rules Against Gay Couple in Cake Case, 7-2”.
But the story says that the case is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. In other words, the happy now-married couple is not part of the litigation so the ruling could not have been either for or against them.
It didn’t come down as Harvey Silverglate had predicted (see “The Colorado baker case at the Supreme Court”), but seems to have hinged on the Supreme Court justices reading the minds of the state bureaucrats who punished the baker:
“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”
So is the NYT headline accurate? Did the 7 justices rule against the potential cake customers or against the bureaucrats on a state commission?
Another way to look at this is that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of litigation. Instead of a bright-line rule that would enable everyone to know in advance how a cake situation should be resolved, they suggest a more elaborate process for litigating cake-related disputes. The process has to include judges who, if they are hostile to religious believers, keep this hostility secret and find a neutral-sounding way to stick it to the haters.
Related:
Given the strength of the #MeToo movement and identity politics in general, would it make sense for the Republican Party to run only black women for Congress and Senate positions? In a country with more than 40 million African Americans it surely can’t be tough to find a few hundred black women with conservative political points of view (e.g., see Carol Swain in this video). At that point, Democrats could no longer take easy shots regarding white male dinosaurs making decisions that will affect members of other identity groups.
Why not just put in a bright line rule: If you don’t identify as a black woman, you can’t be supported by the Republican Party?
Readers: What do you think? Would the Republicans get more votes if they had an all-African American, all-female slate? Democrats like to say that Republicans are racist (when they’re not busy being sexist and stupid), but how many Republicans would vote for a white male Democrat who promises higher taxes and more government regulation?
[Disclosure: I’m a small-L libertarian and don’t have a dog in this fight.]
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