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According to this New York Times article, President Obama will be the figurehead for a new program to encourage American kids to study engineering, math, and science. One wonders how effective this will be, given that Mr. Obama himself has been one of the most successful Americans of all time without ever having studied any engineering, math, or science. Obama’s undergraduate major was political science. Instead of enduring six years of slavery in science graduate school, Obama enjoyed three years of professional training at a law school. Wouldn’t a kid, every time he saw Obama’s face or heard his name, be encouraged to drop tech courses and pick up politics and law?

I would be grateful if readers can fill the comments section of this posting with the names of people holding power in Washington, D.C. right now who have a substantial technical background.

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… and then decide to do nothing about flight crew work and rest time regulations. It is tough to know whether to be glad that businesses won’t have to spend money figuring out how to comply with these new rules or sad that tax dollars have been paying government workers to sit in meeting rooms for 17 years to no purpose.

More: aero-news.net.

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The FAA has published a flight restriction for Nantucket from Wednesday (tomorrow) at 10:30 am until Monday at 5 pm (details). Who’s taking a 6-day vacation on the beach island? Probably Vice-President Joe Biden, given that the flight restriction has a 3 n.m. radius (it would be 30 n.m. for the President) and that Biden’s 2008 Thanksgiving sojourn in a $4 million Nantucket house was covered by the press (example). [according to Henry Blodget, the $4 million house might not be worth as much anymore]

The taxpayers’ role in this Thanksgiving feast would have begun a couple of weeks ago with the Secret Service sweeping the island, dozens of monster SUVs being driven up from Virginia and ferried over, and perhaps a few helicopters being flown in. For Biden and his immediate family’s departure tomorrow morning, the Air Force will be putting some jet fuel into a Boeing 757’s 11,500 gallon tank.

My plans for tomorrow? Flying the Cirrus to Martha’s Vineyard for the day to see some friends, which should burn about 10 gallons of fuel for the round-trip. The challenges of the flight include possible airspace restrictions related to Biden’s arrival, ceilings down to 500′, mist, and the main runway at MVY being closed except for 15 minutes prior permission.

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When the newspapers are all gone, I will miss the political cartoons. Here are a few recent ones…

• Major Hasan
• Deciding about Afghanistan
• Goldman Sachs executives getting swine flu vaccine ahead of pregnant women

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Today I showed a group of high school kids, teachers, and parents around Hanscom Field. They are planning to build a human-powered helicopter, hoping to hover for 60 seconds, and wanted to see a conventional helicopter. We ran into a U.S. Air Force colonel. I introduced him and told the kids to feel free to ask him why we weren’t able to win any of our current wars. Then I asked if it violated any Air Force policy to be both an officer and a member of Al-Qaeda. He said “I’d have to check. Apparently it is okay in the Army.” We continued out on the ramp where I cautioned them against walking over what I call the “red line of death” that outlines the sterile area for scheduled airline flights (policy and badges remain in place despite the airline having shut down two years ago). I showed them the flight school planes that remained on the ramp in the middle of a beautiful Sunday morning (most of the fleet having dispersed with renters to Maine, the Cape and Islands, etc.). The two Cirruses were parked on the ramp; customers prefer the less expensive Piper Warrior. I told them that Angelina Jolie flies the same kind of plane. The fathers were excited, but not the students.

When we got to the Robinson R44, I showed them how the flight controls worked. They had the typical layperson’s misconception that the cyclic tilts the rotor system (the cyclic changes the blade pitch as the blades rotate around the disk, generating unequal lift, which causes the rotor system to fly itself into a new position; the helicopter hangs from the rotor system and follows). They were very interested in the engine/belts/driveshafts/transmissions. Once we had the inspection panels buttoned up we walked past the corporate jets into Signature Flight Support where they treated themselves to the free cookies and we had a question and answer session in the conference room. Not believing in my friend Dirk’s maxim that “pilots are notoriously stupid”, they asked me all kinds of questions about the best materials to use for their helicopter.

One of their ideas was to lift a transmission from an old helicopter and use it for their design. I reminded them that the Robinson transmission was designed to go 2200 hours without more than a tiny risk of failure, which meant that it was going to be hugely overengineered and therefore heavy. I reminded them of Colin Chapman’s statement that “the perfect race car falls apart as it crosses the finish line.” They needed a transmission that could run reliably for a few minutes in a hover, not one that could transfer 200 hp for 2200 hours.

The kids talked about various ideas for rotor systems and whether they should have more than one human power source. I told them that I thought the best design might be two counter-rotating rotors as seen in the Chinook (designed in 1957). With one bicyclist working each rotor they would not have the weight and complexity of a transmission. A conventional helicopter design wastes a significant amount of power driving the anti-torque tail rotor. In a Chinook-style helicopter, both rotor systems are producing useful lift.

Before and after the show-and-tell I taught a couple of helicopter instrument flying lessons in near-perfect conditions.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics’s more inclusive U-6 unemployment rate is at about 17.5 percent (source). This does not include “discouraged” workers, so the real proportion of the expected-to-be-working population that is unemployed is probably 20 percent or more. More relevant is the number of Americans with jobs: 138 million in October 2009, down from approximately 146 million in 2007. The U.S. population, meanwhile, has grown from to 301 million to 308 million. In other words, an ever-smaller percentage of Americans are working, despite substantial growth in the number of government jobs.

Let’s assume that businesses ignore Barack Obama’s directives for them to hire more U.S. workers (see “Obama to push private sector to hire at forum”). Can the U.S. economy grow? Can U.S. businesses prosper? Current stock market investors seem to think so and have bid up the S&P 500 accordingly. Are these investors irrational?

Let’s try to find some historical examples of economic growth despite limited labor market participation. In the 1950s, our culture arbitrarily excluded a lot of people from the U.S. labor market because of sex. Many employers did not want to hire women. Many women did not want to work, especially after marriage. Pressures to exclude women from the labor market were stronger in countries such as Japan. Yet despite having a large fraction of the working-age population excluded from the labor market, both the U.S. and Japan achieved strong economic growth and investors received a healthy return (almost 17 percent real return during the 1950s in the S&P 500; source).

If these economies could grow just fine with 50 percent of the population discouraged from working, why shouldn’t the U.S. economy circa 2010 be able to grow even if the unemployment rate were to grow substantially? In fact, because our labor force now benefits from the contributions of the best educated and most skilled women, in some ways the economy should be better-poised for growth than it was in the 1950s.

How can an investor prepare for a U.S. economy in which an ever-increasing number of working-age citizens are staying home and living off parents or spouses? Perhaps it is time to buy Nintendo, cable television, Sony, broadband Internet, and Dell.

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This week’s news was full of stories about residential house construction statistics (example). I’m wondering why we should pay attention to these numbers.

Suppose that an American has a job. He or she is likely to pay for a place to live or a portion of a place to live. Suppose that an American does not have a job or pension. It is unlikely that such a person is paying rent or a mortgage. He or she is probably living with a parent, spouse, or other relative.

If we accept these premises as true, we should be able to predict the number of houses being paid for in the U.S. by looking at employment statistics. If more people have jobs, more mortgage and lease payments will be made. In looking at house construction we would start by looking at employment growth (if any), the number of houses that are so decrepit as to be unmaintainable, and the number of people moving from towns where factories have closed to towns where factories have opened.

I can understand why an architect or builder would be interested in watching these numbers, but I don’t understand why the rest of us would want to. Won’t the number of houses eventually track the number of people with jobs? If so, why not simply watch the number of jobs?

[I understand that one argument economists might make for paying attention to housing is that the government throwing subsidies at the housing market (tax credits, mortgage interest deductions, federal mortgage guarantees, etc.) will cause people to be hired in the construction trades. Those new workers will spend money, magically creating economic expansion. It seems obvious that this strategy cannot work. If more and better houses created sustainable wealth, a poor country could become rich by having 100 percent of its citizens engaged in building fancy houses for each other.]

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On November 1, I posted a question about how the House Democrats could be considered humanitarians while leaving 18 million people living in the U.S. without health insurance. Not to be outdone, it seems that the Senate Democrats propose to spend $1 trillion in order to leave 24 million people without health insurance (nytimes).

The Senate bill should provide a boost to the economy. Hollywood and the cable networks will have 24 million subjects from whom to choose when they want to make a tearjerking documentary about an American dying for lack of funds to pay for an operation. We’ll have as many as 24 million people working productively instead of spending 20 hours per week filling out forms and writing letters trying to persuade insurance companies to pay their medical bills. Finally those 24 million people will boost revenue for airlines when they fly to other countries for low-cost treatments.

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You’ve probably been wondering lately “How can I possibly spend the thousands of dollars that I’ve saved by using Google Docs and Spreadsheets instead of Microsoft Office on all of my desktops and laptops?” If disposing of this excess money has you concerned, you’ll be interested to know that Microsoft has added something very interesting to Excel 2010: Edward Tufte’s sparklines, as described in his latest book Beautiful Evidence.

I’ve always loved and been amazed by Excel, though I can’t use it anymore because I’m addicted to the real-time collaboration of Google Spreadsheets and, in any case, few of my collaborators have Microsoft Office.

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/07/17/sparklines-in-excel.aspx discusses the inclusion of sparklines and provides examples.

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My September 15, 2009 posting about the Leica M9 attracted a lot of angry comments from rabid Leica enthusiasts. I pointed out the oddness of people being excited by a Leica that comes 7 years later than the comparable Canon and costs nearly three times as much. My assumption in the posting was that Leica had produced something roughly equivalent in image quality to Canon’s mainstream advanced amateur body, the 5D Mark II. The December 2009 issue of Popular Photography arrived in the mail recently and it seems that I was wrong in my assumption. Here’s the update that I added to the September posting…

This issue put the Sony A850 and the Leica M9 through their standardized test protocol. The Sony is the world’s cheapest full-frame digital SLR, selling for $2,000 (compared to about $2,650 for the Canon 5D Mark II). The Leica is the world’s most expensive, at $7,000. How did the cameras compare on Pop. Photo’s test bench? The Sony, with a 24 MP Sony-built CMOS sensor, achieved “low” noise through ISO 1600. This is greatly inferior to the 5D Mark II, which had a very similar noise measurement at ISO 6400 (two f-stops more sensitive). The Sony delivered 3135 lines of resolution and a superb “7.7” on color accuracy, albeit still inferior to Canon’s.

How did the Leica perform, at 3.5X the price of the Sony? Noise from the 18MP CCD sensor became “moderate” at ISO 1600 and “unacceptable” at ISO 2500. The noise of the M9 at ISO 800 was comparable to the Canon 5D Mk II at ISO 6400. Leica’s color accuracy and resolution were significantly inferior to the Sony.

How did Popular Photography deal with the embarrassingly poor image quality results of the $7000 Leica compared to the Japanese cameras? “They’re completely differently tools for completely different styles of photographer. We don’t categorize the M9 as a pro model–think of it as the ultimate (deep-pocketed) enthusiast’s camera.”

Leica was beaten not just by Canon, its competitor from the 1950s rangefinder days, but by Sony, a company that is relatively new to the still photography market. Now that we taxpayers have purchased GM and Chrysler at a cost of $100 billion, let’s hope that this doesn’t happen in the car market. Just when GM and Chrysler think that they might have something that can sell in competition with a U.S.-made Honda or Toyota, new manufacturers from India and China may blindside them.

[Update: I found a Canon white paper on sensors that says that CCD sensors, especially big ones, consume a lot more power than CMOS. Unless the sensor is cooled, like a CCD used in a physics experiment, the result will be more noise in the image. This may explain the poor high ISO performance of the Leica.]

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