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A friend works as a helicopter tour pilot. The operator has a fleet of beautiful EC130s. One day a colleague was flying the usual route when the Turbomecca engine remembered that it had been built by the French. There was an instant loss of power and it was time to enter an autorotation. Unlike in training, the engine failure did not come with quotation marks (a throttle rolled to idle) and did not occur conveniently over a smooth clear surface. The pilot did the best he could and the helicopter landed hard enough on some uneven terrain that the gear was bent. Two groups of tourists were on board. The Germans booked a replacement flight for the next day. The Americans went to the hospital “to be checked out.”

Separately, as part of our ground school class at MIT, we scheduled a Brazilian Air Force officer (and current MIT PhD student) to talk about flying the F-16 and working as a test pilot. Here’s some email correspondence:

the American (me): MIT is doing an article on the class and the journalist, cc’d, would like to talk to you about your role. I explained that you’re going to give a talk on the last day of the class (Thursday, Jan 18, around 12) on the differences between Brazil and the U.S. and also, of course, about your heroic adventures in the Air Force!

the Brazilian: “Keep in mind that there is nothing ‘heroic’ in defending my country during peaceful times. We all prefer this way, right?”

I explained to him that, with this kind of attitude, he would never make it in the U.S. military….

Related:

• NTSB report available on the Grand Canyon helicopter crash (unfortunately, sometimes there are also serious impacts with the ground)
• The AStar fuel shutoff lever, and surviving a helicopter water landing (anther bad one)

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Here’s a meme that programmers between age 60 and dead will like: Tesla is the Lisp Machine of cars.

A recent message exchange:

• friend1: Prediction: Tesla is done. They already closed the Hingham [Massachusetts] store.
• friend2: Everybody who wanted one bought one

This reminds me of the MIT Lisp Machine, a $100,000 personal computer to which only a handful of programmers could gain access in the 1970s. The computer itself was the size of a refrigerator and lived in a machine room. The programmer worked on a big-by-1970s-standards bitmap display in his or her office, with the display connected via a coax cable (a Tom Knight design). The keyboard was vastly better than today’s pathetic $29.95 examples, though it was rumored to cost $1,000 per sample. The mechanical mouse wasn’t so great, but Knight eventually designed an optical mouse along the lines of today’s devices.

Symbolics commercialized the machine and it sold rapidly for a few years as “Everybody who wanted one bought one”. The company went public. Confident predictions were made. Then sales fell off a cliff after the market of people who had already wanted a Lisp Machine was saturated. Computer buyers who hadn’t been desperate for Lisp Machine would, if reached by Symbolics marketing materials, decide that cheaper personal computers, e.g., “Unix workstations,” from larger and/or more established companies could serve the same function.

Readers: If you’re over 60 and passionate about writing software, what do you think of the meme “Tesla is the Lisp Machine of cars”? There were tens of thousands of (rich, smug) people who wanted a fancy electric car, but couldn’t buy one. They rushed to buy Teslas, which made it seem that Tesla was awesome at selling and taking customers away from legacy car-makers, but actually Tesla was just fulfilling orders from people who had already wanted a fancy electric car. Now they will face the challenge of actually selling and it is unclear if they will be good at it.

[Not related, but from the same friends:

[son] wanted school off tomorrow for Good Friday. I said only if you accept the Lord Jesus as your savior and no longer eat meat on Friday.

]

Related:

• Clojure: If Lisp is so great, why do we keep needing new variants?
• Lisp diehards = Holocaust deniers
• Steel tariffs and computer programming (an example Lisp Machine application)
• Olympics meme (my failed attempt at generating a viral meme)

 

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A couple of years ago I wondered Why aren’t there a lot of backyard miniature golf courses? and the Wall Street Journal shows that the dream is alive: “Unused Roofdeck? Add Miniature Golf” (January 10, 2018). A direct link to the main photo works for non-subscribers.

Spring will be here in Boston in a month or two. Maybe it is time to start building one of these.

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During the first March nor’easter storm I had a ticket from Dallas to Boston, nonstop on Americn Airlines. About 12 hours before the flight, American emailed to say that the flight had been canceled. Shortly after that, American emailed to say that I had automatically been rebooked for the Dallas to Boston trip via a 9-hour ordeal with a long stop in LaGuardia. Although there were American planes leaving DFW every minute for various destinations, many of which were also served by nonstop flights to Boston, there was no way for me to say “I acknowledge that I’m not getting back to Boston for two days, but I would like to sit this one out in Florida rather than Dallas”. Why not? Wouldn’t that be a common customer desire?

I figured I would try to arrange this over the phone. I spent one hour and 9 minutes on hold and then gave up. I did manage to execute on my plan, though. I purchased a ticket on Southwest to DCA and spent two days with family before purchasing a DCA-BOS leg (arriving at roughly the same time as American’s automated reroute).

To American’s credit, when I called them about 30 hours later they did answer the phone after a 5-minute hold and they refunded my fare for DFW-BOS. But due to the lack of a Web interface for my “take me somewhere else” request, they gave up the revenue for the Dallas-DC leg. I actually would have been willing to kick in an extra $500 to wait in the city of my choice. And American refunded me about $500. So they gave up $1,000 in revenue because they couldn’t answer the phone and couldn’t handle the request via their web site.

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Suburban heroes needed…

We rent a small hangar with an underlying asphalt floor. Perhaps 30 years ago a previous tenant painted this floor with what seems to have been a lot of sand mixed in (for anti-slip?). Now this coating is disintegrating and every time we go into the hangar there is a seemingly huge amount of sand to be pushed out with a broom and/or vacuumed.

Sand plus airplane is a bad combination because people walk up on the wing to get in.

Keeping in mind that we are renters and don’t want to invest a huge amount of $$, what can we do to seal this floor? We don’t care about aesthetics. It would be okay, for example, if the floor were to show tire tracks. Note that the airplane parked inside is somewhat lighter than a typical car, roughly 2,500 lbs. when fully fueled, but there are only three tires and they are not as wide as car tires.

Home Depot sells epoxy floor paint. If we were to clean up and dry the existing floor, would that likely work to seal in the remaining sand? Customer reviews are not promising, with dire tales of peeling and flaking.

If we want to “seal” asphalt, why not “asphalt sealer”? Example 1 and Example 2. Is this stuff too goopy? It will stick to everyone’s shoes and then end up on the wing and the carpet of the plane?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

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Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Mailland and Driscoll; MIT Press) says that the French were banking online starting in late 1983:

The first service, Vidéocompte (video account), was launched on December 20, 1983, by CCF Bank (now part of HSBC). But far from being what the Financial Times called an “electronic gadget,” within a year the service attracted 65 percent of CCF clients who owned a Minitel. Other banks were a bit less successful, for unlike the CCF, they actually charged a monthly fee for the service. A 1991 France Telecom survey estimated that “the penetration ratio (total subscribers/total bank customers) average[d] 8% for nationwide banks and 19% for local banks.” Nonetheless, that was enough for banking services to repeatedly be ranked in the top of all services by France Telecom. Services ranged from checking balances and making appointments with bank personnel, to ordering checkbooks and transferring money. Using Minitel as a modem, the home or office accountant could download banking data to further manipulate it using a personal computer. The contrast between the successful Minitel model for online banking and US videotex failures in this realm highlight the power of Minitel as a neutral, open platform on which private actors could layer their services. In contrast, the fragmentation of US systems made it impossible for banking services to succeed. Different banking applications required separate subscriptions to distinct gated communities and sometimes dedicated hardware. The United States would have to wait for the privatization of the open Internet as a neutral, open platform to see the successful emergence of online banking in the retail sector.

They had Amazon Fresh:

Tele-Market promised to deliver food to the Paris area and offered same-day delivery. It competed with several other companies; a 1987 guide lists four different services focused on delivering to the Paris area, and twenty-three total in France, enabling one to order from large stores, specialized wine retailers, or straight from local farms.

[under a 1985 photo of a Tele-Market van]

They had Google:

The France Telecom telephone directory, known as Le 11, featured a natural language interface. Name searches could be successfully completed even when the name or address was spelled wrong, and the yellow pages sections of the State-run directory as well as the Minitel online directory MGS offered powerful natural-language search capabilities. For example, one could search for “reservation of theater tickets in Paris” or “residential real estate rentals in Lyon.” By May 1991, France Telecom would boast a 98 percent rate of accuracy in the search results.

They had Siri:

In addition to natural-language interfaces, the private sector also experimented with on-demand personal assistants and semantic search. Before Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, Minitel users could chat with Claire or Sophie. Claire provided administrative information, while Sophie answered questions on Parisian cultural activities. But Claire and Sophie were not powered by artificial intelligence software; there were real, live people on the other end of the connection, referred to as “Minitel girls.” That was 1984. Truly automated personal assistant services with natural-language interfaces began to appear around 1987, such as 3615 AK, a public-facing database of health information similar to WebMD.

The Minitel nerds also envisioned (and built) the Internet of Things (IoT), but without TCP/IP or the Silicon Valley Insufferables:

The Minitel terminal—and specifically, its serial port—played a central role in coordinating the domotique network. First, it provided communication to and from the outside world by supplying an interface between the various “smart” devices in the home to the telephone system. This enabled cybernetic devices to communicate with the outside world. For example, a domotique fire alarm could ring the firehouse. Similarly, the Minitel could receive orders sent remotely and communicate them to the control unit.

Domotique devices from the 1980s included thermostats, VCRs, security systems, lights, yard irrigation, and even kitchen appliances—although it remains unclear why anyone would want to remotely control a stove, fridge, or supply of laundry detergent or trash bags.

[Sadly these folks couldn’t get $3 billion after doing a little 8051 coding.]

More: read Minitel: Welcome to the Internet

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“State Police pay higher than reported, data hidden for years” (Boston Globe) should be required reading for young people:

Payroll records for an entire 140-trooper State Police division — including some of the department’s highest earners — have been hidden from public view and weren’t filed with the state comptroller for several years, the Globe has found.

The records for Troop F, which polices Logan International Airport and parts of the Seaport, among other areas, accounted for more than $32.5 million in spending last year and portray a lucrative, overtime-laden operation that outpaces the compensation totals of troopers working in other State Police divisions.

At least 79 percent of Troop F made more last year than Governor Charlie Baker, who earned $151,800. The percentage would be even higher if you included the pay that some workers received in 2017 for time spent in other State Police divisions.

The median hourly wage in Massachusetts was $22.45 (BLS), or about $45,000 per year for full-time work (May 2016 numbers).

Especially in the #MeToo era where being denounced by a coworker means the end of a career, why incur the risk, low pay, and job insecurity of private-sector work? Don’t want to do police work? There are a lot of other highly paid jobs with union protection. The official state web site:

Over 90% of Executive Department employees are covered by a union contract. Unionized roles include: accountants, facility service workers, electricians, correction officers, state troopers, LPNs and RNs, social workers, lawyers, physicians, engineers, and librarians, among hundreds of other roles.

[Using the incomplete data set, a business executive friend was able to look up the state trooper who had pulled her over for speeding. He had earned $450,000 in the preceding year.]

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Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Mailland and Driscoll; MIT Press) describes how people used the first mass-market Internet-style service for sex-related applications.

Why would anyone turn to the online sex-oriented message boards? Minitel Magazine, Jan-Feb 1987:

It was a chance to step out of their normal identity and be superman or a beautiful woman and say all the things that they only think about in their most secret fantasies. You are a nobody at work. You have to fight a commute to work and back. You are lonely, or you are married. Indulging in an hour of sex chat is a crude but effective way of creating a different self.

Department of Know-Your-Customer: Before the system launched, Jean Autin, a French bureaucrat said that if the government didn’t control the content providers the result would be a “race to the bottom” and “You will transform France into one giant porno theatre!”

With messageries accounting for up 50 percent of all traffic, revenue was enormous. And with the top twenty sites garnering 85 percent of pink connections, visibility was key. The result was a feedback loop that incentivized the messageries to put out more and more ads, in more and more public places. By the late 1980s, ads for Minitel rose were pervasive on the streets of Paris. Short codes such as 3615 SEXTEL appeared on any surface that could carry an ad—billboards, buses, subway stations, magazines, and television. Everywhere. Most ads were playful rather than crude; they were, after all, displayed in public for eyes of all ages. But while their level of explicitness varied, there was no question what was being advertised.

The government-run system encouraged the use of Minitel for naughty stuff because there was no detail on the bill. The spouse would see “X francs for Y hours of connect time.” The government also protected users from being known to application providers:

Minitel, unlike the Internet, was private by design, and the privacy features of Minitel took sex chat into the workplace. Minitel flows were anonymized both on the upstream and downstream. On the host side of the platform, service providers did not see from what number users were calling. This precluded later Internet innovations such as user tracking and micro-targeted advertising, as well as prevented service operators from getting an accurate head count of their client base. On the user side of the platform, connections were anonymized as well: the phone bill would only list connection minutes in bulk, without detailing either the specific times of connection or destination addresses. The privacy features were key in helping the DGT move forward despite popular opprobrium in the early days of Minitel; remember that the regional press has cried Big Brother in its campaign to kill the high modernist project. Full privacy was therefore a crucial public relations tool for the DGT.

With all digital destinations anonymized on the bill by the DGT, it was easy for Minitel-enabled workers to escape the gloom of the workday for a few minutes here and there, and ramble into rosy paradises. Visually, the text-mode interfaces of these digital frolics also made it difficult for a zealous boss to discern the specific nature of the computing act from a distance. Just in case a compliance officer happened to pop in, some sites built in a feature that enabled the user to display a fake, “clean,” home page at the touch of a button. And as an added forbidden pleasure, self-employed business owners could even write off the not-so-rosy phone bill as a business expense.

As with Facebook today, companies found that they had to try to block workers from connecting in order to avoid productivity losses:

Minitel filtering systems offered upstream control mechanisms. Maya, a board connected to the Minitel through the peripheral DIN output, could limit upstream connections to a select forty sites as well as offer time limit controls. Despite France Telecom’s denial that the pink workplace was even a thing, four thousand Mayas were said to have been ordered in the first month.

As in the U.S. society today, people were horrified by what might happen to children online:

Associations of Catholic families became active in initiating complaints and lawsuits against what became dubbed “the pimp State,” and other critics would raise the alarm about “the moral decadence of the State and of the high administration.” The criminal code was even amended in order to increase penalties for the crimes of “offense to good morals” (outrage aux bonnes moeurs), “incitement to debauchery” (incitation à la débauche), and the publication of messages that “adversely affect human dignity” (porter atteinte à la dignité humaine) when the target of the messages are under fifteen years old—the legal age of consent in France.

One of most vivid memories of Boston-area nightlife is from circa 2005. A restaurant in Somerville brought in a solo guitarist who was singing the Piña Colada song. It turns out that they had this in France too!

Les Ignobles du Bordelais narrate the story of a gentleman who meets a young lady over Minitel while his wife, Simone, is at work. After days of electronic flirting, she agrees to speak on the phone. His anticipation peaks as she picks up the phone—she must be naked!—only to discover that the voice on the other end belongs to Simone, who was herself expecting a young stud.

More: read Minitel: Welcome to the Internet

 

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Apple and Samsung have been making such small advances in smartphone tech that consumers outside of Silicon Valley can’t figure out what they’re paying for. Domestic Senior Management, for example, a few weeks after swapping a failed iPhone 5S for an iPhone X said, “Tell me how this is supposed to be better than my old 5S.”

Everyone in the smartphone marketplace seems to have adopted the same formula. Start with a super thin package, which necessitates using a tiny sensor and a feeble battery. Make it sufficiently fragile that consumers need to wrap it in a beefy protective case. The result is a Galaxy S9 Plus that is only slightly better than an iPhone X.

From China, however, comes something interesting… the Huawei P20 Pro. From the DxOMark review:

At 1/1.78″, the main camera’s sensor is unusually large—approximately twice the size of the Samsung Galaxy S9’s 1/2.55″ chip [sensor size guide]. Despite a slightly slower f/1.8-aperture lens, the RGB main camera sensor of the P20 Pro captures approximately 20 percent more light than the smaller sensors used in most competing models. This sensor is also helped by the B&W sensor which also catches a lot of photons.

With an equivalent focal length of 80mm, the P20 Pro’s optically-stabilized tele-camera offers a significantly longer reach than the 2x tele-modules in the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy devices.

So it still a pretty tiny sensor, but substantially bigger than the competition (Apple has historically used puny 1/3″ sensors and then tried to fix everything in software, but it is tough to find authoritative information about the sensor size in the iPhone X).

The “telephoto” lens is actually a telephoto, equivalent to an 80mm perspective on a “full-frame” or 35mm camera. The iPhone X “telephoto” lens is actually a “normal” 52mm equivalent.

How thick and heavy did they have to go to get there? The phone supposedly weighs 180g, which includes a 4,000mAh battery, and is 7.8mm thick. The iPhone 8 Plus is 202g and 7.5mm thick with a 2700 mAh battery. The iPhone X is 174g and 7.7mm thick with roughly the same battery capacity as the 8 Plus (source). So… somehow Huawei managed to do this without going to the thick/heavy side!

DxOMark’s conclusions?

With a total photo score of 114, the Huawei P20 Pro is currently the highest-ranked smartphone for still image capture by quite a margin.

The Huawei P20 Pro is the best smartphone for zooming that we have tested to date, thanks to an intelligent mixture of digital zoom and the long reach of the 80mm equivalent tele-lens.

looking at the images and test results from the P20 Pro, it seems Huawei has skipped one or two generations. … The P20 Pro’s triple camera setup is the biggest innovation we have seen in mobile imaging for quite some time and is a real game changer.

Warts?

The Huawei P20 Pro achieves a Video score of 98 points, making it also the number one camera in our video rankings, albeit not by the same large margin as for still images.

The camera does not come with optical image stabilization and therefore has to rely on Huawei’s electronic video stabilization when shooting video.

Maybe the Chinese manufacturers will finally bring some diversity into the smartphone market?

Related:

• Tech Radar review of the P20 Pro

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As recently as 2016, it was possible to get paid more for having sex on camera than for working at Starbucks. CNBC shows that porn industry compensation was $300-1500 per “scene”. (The article notes that there is a gender pay gap; actors identifying as “men” get paid less than those identifying as “women”. Where is Hillary Clinton to demand an end to this injustice?)

Given that a lot of folks who work at Starbucks for $12 per hour do meet the minimum qualifications for selling sex it seems reasonable to infer that the higher compensation is due to Americans preferring to have “worked at Starbucks” on their resumes than “worked as porn actor/actress”.

Our most respected media, however, is now promoting careers in porn to young people (a refreshing change from English majors promoting STEM careers!) by valorizing Stormy Daniels. One example is “Stormy Daniels, Porn Star Suing Trump, Is Known for Her Ambition: ‘She’s the Boss’” (nytimes):

To many in the capital, Ms. Clifford, 39, has become an unexpected force. … for most of her professional life, Ms. Clifford has been a woman in control of her own narrative in a field where that can be uncommon. With an instinct for self-promotion, she evolved from “kindergarten circuit” stripper to star actress and director, and occasional mainstream success, by her late 20s.

“She’s the boss, and everyone knew it,” Nina Hartley, one of the longest-working performers in the industry, said about Ms. Clifford.

“She was a very serious businesswoman and a filmmaker and had taken the reins of her career,” said Judd Apatow, who directed her cameos in the R-rated comedies “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” “She is not someone to be underestimated.”

She has a daughter, a third husband and an expensive hobby: equestrian shows. “She blends right in,” said Packy McGaughan, a trainer on the competition circuit. “A pretty girl riding a horse.”

Pre-Trump, the same media outlets took the position that women who took cash in exchange for sex, outside of a family court context, were being exploited. The assumption seemed to be that women would not willingly sell their bodies, regardless of the price, and therefore a man had to be coercing them into a transaction.

Now it seems that Americans who sell sex, on-screen or off-screen, can be celebrated for their heroic bravery. They are powerful independent actors, not passive victims.

If having sex with rich people off-camera and/or having sex with middle-class people on-camera are laurels to be worn proudly, will that increase the supply of Americans who want to work in this sector of the economy? If so, with an increase in supply do we expect prices to fall?

[Some perspectives from Facebook:

Just saw Stormy Daniels interviewed and I can tell she is twice as smart as Donald trump. At least. I think the best way to get back at trump for the fucking hell hes put us through is by electing Stormy Daniels the next president. I’m officially offering to work for the Stormy Daniels campaign in any capacity –

…promiscuous, dumb, narcissistic, attention whores. Stormy should have been smarter in her choice of partners.

]

From my middle-aged perspective it seems that American mores have shifted rapidly. Ten years ago, for example, I don’t think that someone who exchanged sex for cash could be expected to talk about it on national TV. The vendor of the sex wouldn’t have wanted to be identified and the TV network wouldn’t have wanted to devote airtime to a debrief on the business transaction. In a country where there is no shame in selling one’s body, why does someone get paid $1,500 to have sex for 20 minutes?

Related:

• Stormy Daniels, prostitution, cell phone video, and the snowflake gynecologists

 

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