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From the fall newsletter, recently made available online:

• Eddie and Amanda Kisfaludy flew an R44 newscopter around Greenland as part of a UK-to-San Diego trip!
• The R66 (turbine-powered) newscopter is now certified, unfortunately with an HD camera system rather than 4K (i.e., you might get better footage with a $3,000 DJI Inspire 2 drone).
• Robinson pushed its 800th R66 out the door to a customer in China.
• Peter Wilson and Matthew Gallagher, both of the UK, flew an R66 around the world (121 days; 32,000 nm; 43 countries).

Readers: Are there any great trips left to be done by helicopter?

Related:

• Robinson R66 review
• Robinson R44 review
• Robinson R22 review

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The French verdict is in from DxOMark: iPhone X scores 97.

Compared to the Huawei Mate 10, which scored the same overall, the iPhone X has much better “zoom” (switching from the wide to the normal perspective camera?) and much worse autofocus (not great for parents of the young and restless).

The Google Pixel 2 scores only slightly higher overall, mostly because the iPhone X’s second camera/lens does way better in the “zoom” department than cropping from a single (wide) camera/lens as would be required for the Pixel 2. I wonder if this is true in low light. Certainly on the 7 Plus when capturing indoor scenes, cropping from the wide camera usually results in better image quality than switching to “2x”. It looks like the main camera on the Pixel 2 is much better for autofocus (98 versus 78). The Pixel 2 scores significantly better for video, but it simply won’t do 60 frames-per-second at 4K resolution so if the goal is capturing motion it is unclear that the two phones are truly comparable.

My take-away is surprise that the competition is so close. Apple has a vast advantage in money and engineering resources, yet they cannot beat Huawei or HTC and LG (the builders of the Pixel 2 and 2 XL, respectively). There is no getting around the physics when the case is that slim and therefore it is impossible to use a real sensor and real lens? Stuffing four more cameras in there and using them in parallel (see the Light L16) won’t help?

[I’m still sad that I can’t buy a phone that is 2-3X thicker than what is on the market today. It would still be thinner than an iPhone in a case and yet have room for a much better camera and days of battery life. Why wouldn’t Huawei do this in order to crush Apple, Samsung, Google, et al., in the photo quality department? They shouldn’t need new software. Just put in a larger sensor and corresponding lens and then feed the pixels to the same software as in a current Android device. Even if the “photo/battery nerd” phone gathered only 1 percent market share, that’s still more than 10 million devices (1.5 billion smartphones were sold in 2016). That’s roughly comparable to the entire market for DSLRs and mirrorless (source). Canon, Nikon, and Sony invest engineering and marketing resources to bring out $800 DSLRs. Why wouldn’t it be worth Huawei’s engineering and marketing resources to bring out a $1,200 “killer cameraphone”? It is so profitable to make regular phones that there is no reason to bother? (but Sony makes smartphones and they think it is also worth investing in the camera market)]

Related:

• iPhone X and 7 Plus cameras compared (links to full-res images from both)

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Azorian: The Raising of the K-129, currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is a rare story about an engineering challenge (grabbing a sunken Soviet submarine off the seafloor) and I recommend it. The movie is also interesting due to the huge number of Americans who were able to keep a big secret (compare to today when people aren’t even able to have sex without leaving a large, um, footprint on social media and/or in the New York Times!).

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My exciting project for this semester is high-school geometry. In addition to learning useful everyday terms such as orthocenter, I found out that students in our local public high school can check their grades in real-time via iPASS. In addition to showing grades on recent assignments, the web-based software helpfully forecasts the ultimate grade for the class. This forecast can change after any individual homework assignment is turned in or after any quiz. A student taking five classes, therefore, can log into iPASS almost every night and see a potentially different forecast report card. The software is pitiless. Though declared failure is rare in our snowflake society, after a disastrous quiz taken in September the iPASS system will calmly forecast an F for the semester.

[Back in 1999, we built a module of the ArsDigita Community System to manage the education side of the MIT Sloan School. Demonstrating the awesome creativity that happens when MIT graduates collaborate, we called this the “Education Subsystem”. The software could show the grades students had received on recent assignments, but not provide a forecast of the ultimate semester grade. We never considered the anxiety-producing potential of a system with real-time grades!]

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Here amidst the nearly-all-white Millionaires who Hate Trump there is a small church that, a couple of years ago, decided to burnish its tolerance credentials by hiring an Indian-American pastor. He moved into the parsonage with his husband and their two children, neither of whom share any genetic material (or race) with the two fathers.

As the endowment was drained by this family (total comp, including the real estate value, of about $200,000 per year), some parishioners began grumbling about the minister’s performance. According to these folks, essentially every sermon boiled down to scolding the deplorables among the congregation for insufficient zeal regarding helping undocumented immigrants, fighting for Hillary, etc. They agreed with the minister’s political sentiments, but felt that the sermons were repetitious and boring compared to those offered by his predecessor.

When some of the folks on the congregation’s board raised questions about the minister’s on-the-job performance, he instantly shut them down with “Do you have a problem with brown people?” Game. Set. Match. (on the town’s clay courts, of course!)

Related:

• When can a church take down a Black Lives Matter flag?

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Twenty years ago I posted a question on my site “To whom should I give my 1993 Dodge Grand Caravan?” and got a lot of great suggestions. Interestingly, the destination charity’s web site is still live but Marissa Mayer apparently trashed autos.yahoo.com. The kbb.com value of this fine machine, should it still be in “good” condition, is down to about $2,000.

Some things that amaze me:

• how many answers there are on a private web site in the pre-Facebook age
• how little progress there has been in minivan design and performance
• how there isn’t a single mention of a politician; maybe everyone was happy with Bill Clinton?

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Demand for the $1,000+ iPhone X is so strong that a friend went down to his local AT&T store this morning and, without waiting in line, was able to purchase two. I asked him to take the same indoor photos with his old (iPhone 7 Plus) and new (iPhone X) devices (outdoor images are easy for almost any camera). The full-res files are available via Dropbox links:

• iPhone 7 Plus
• iPhone X

The sequence of perspective selected is normal, wide, wide, normal. (What Apple calls “telephoto” is actually a “normal” perspective lens.) The EXIF data are still attached so you can verify the lens and camera with any desktop software (including clicking right and asking for Details in Microsoft Windows).

Readers: What differences do you observe in the test images? Has anyone seen any sensor size spec for the iPhone X? It is supposed to have a larger sensor than the 8, but smaller than the sensor on the biggest Sony and Samsung phones? (The WSJ said that low light images are better on the Google Pixel 2 XL, suggesting that the X does not have a large-by-market-standards sensor.) Who else got an iPhone X today? What’s the verdict?

Related:

• DxOMark, which rates the iPhone 8 Plus below the Huawei and Google Pixel 2 phones
• “The iPhone X Is the Beginning of the End for Apple” (Fortune)

 

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Plainly Harvey Weinstein is not going to be working in Hollywood again. In any event, at age 65 he has reached normal retirement age. If he stays in the U.S. he risks prosecution for whatever happened during meetings with actresses in California, Connecticut, New York, and perhaps some other states. Even if evidence against him is weak, what prosecutor could resist becoming famous by bringing charges? (See Window into American criminal justice system from the daycare sexual abuse trials of the 1980s for some stuff that influences prosecutors in deciding whether to pursue a case.)

Harvey could probably beat the “beyond a reasonable doubt” rap a few times, given that most of the situations were private encounters and there were no unbiased witnesses. Maybe he can beat the 51-percent rap of all of the civil suits that are likely to be filed? But if he doesn’t he might have to pay in the neighborhood of $32 million per successful plaintiff (see “Bill O’Reilly Settled a Sex Harassment Claim for $32 Million, Report Says” (NBC; Megyn Kelly wrote that this is more than a plaintiff in a wrongful death action would normally be able to obtain, noting in the nytimes that “O. J. Simpson was ordered to pay the Goldman and Brown families $33.5 million for the murders of Ron and Nicole.”).

Why would a 65-year-old with money want to stick around to spend the remaining years of his life as a defendant? As a thought-experiment, if Harvey doesn’t want to stick around, where can he go? What country would ignore any U.S. extradition requests while simultaneously providing Harvey with a reasonable-by-Western-standards lifestyle? And, in case he does want to continue working, what country meets the preceding criteria and also has a competent film industry?

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A Houston-based friend’s Facebook post:

I’m happy for the Astros winning the World Series. Really I am. But HISD’s decision to cancel school so the kiddos can take part in the festivities? Umm, hello, parents have jobs and stuff! Couldn’t the Astros be festive on Saturday?

He’s referring to “HISD schools, offices closed Friday for Astros World Series victory celebration”.

This is interesting to me because he is not upset that children will be denied the opportunity to learn. He is upset because taxpayer-funded daycare won’t be provided.

[In case you’re thinking that he might be anti-education or anti-intellectual… he is employed as a professor by Rice University.]

Related:

• Smartest Kids in the World: American Schools

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Avweb reports that the years-delayed two-seat Icon A5 seaplane will soon be going out the door at $389,000. That’s up from $180,000. At this rate, by 2020 the A5 will cost the same as a good used 10-seat turbine-powered Cessna Caravan on floats. The airplane is already more expensive than this Grumman Albatross on controller.com (the Albatross is about 20 times the size of the Icon A5! See Wikipedia.)

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