Category: Uncategorized

“Two Women, and Their Dogs, Rescued After Nearly 5 Months Lost at Sea” (nytimes):

Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiaba were rescued by the Navy vessel the Ashland 900 miles south of Japan, according to a statement released by the Navy on Thursday. After setting out in early May, a storm claimed their 50-foot boat’s engine on May 30. They spent the next five months adrift at sea and unable to make contact with others.

Ms. Appel and Ms. Fuiaba at first believed they could get to their destination using only the boat’s sails. But two months into a journey that ordinarily takes half that long, they began to issue daily distress calls using a high-frequency radio.

An EPIRB manufacturer should try to hire these two (and their dogs?) immediately!

Related:

• I will be carrying an EPIRB when I walk into Harvard Square from now on

 

Full post, including comments

I am in love with the idea of the active suspension in the new Audi A8, but maybe the autopilot is the more significant innovation?

“Audi Beats Tesla (And GM) To Level 3 Autonomy” (Seeking Alpha):

Audi’s forthcoming version of the A8 sedan is the first production automobile to arguably achieve Level 3 autonomy. … The key point in moving from Level 2 to Level 3 autonomy is that Level 3 expects that the user only has to intervene whenever the car is not able to handle a situation and asks for the user to take over. The vehicle for its part must be able to perform all activities related to driving the vehicle at other times.

Now to be clear, Audi’s solution has certain limitations. For one it is only meant to be activated in relatively slow moving traffic (up to 60 km/hr) and only on divided roads where a physical barrier separates vehicles driving in the opposite direction.

The new Audi A8 will be the first production vehicle to use LIDAR along with cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors.

Audi’s solution is the first of its kind to require absolutely no monitoring of the vehicle as long as the driver is available to take over when the vehicle asks him/her to. While the vehicle is driving itself, the customer is free to do anything else, for example even watch a movie on the on-board TV screen.

Tesla’s Autopilot also requires the user to keep their hands on the steering wheel and asks the user to monitor the actions of the car. This makes it a SAE Level 2 solution at best.

I’m wondering if an autopilot that works from 0-35 mph is useful. On a recent trip to Dallas/Ft. Worth we experienced highways clogged at all hours on both Friday and Saturday. After returning to Boston we found the central highway network jammed up and sat for an extra 30 minutes in stop-and-go traffic on the Mass Turnpike (I-90). However, traffic did occasionally speed up to faster than 35 mph in both cities and therefore we would have been turning the Audi autopilot on and off every 5-10 minutes.

Readers: What do you think? Is this Audi feature likely to be useful in practice?

[Separately, maybe Audi should be donating money to pro-immigration American politicians. If via immigration and the children of immigrants the population grows to 450 million, Americans will spend nearly all of their highway driving time below 35 mph. (Of course we have a lot of open space in the U.S., but immigrants, like native-born Americans, tend to cluster in cities.) See also How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?]

Full post, including comments

Here’s the Dallas Morning News from October 21, 2017:

Note that the center of the front page is devoted to the “firearms” category and the locals interviewed are against a ban on bump stocks. Wandering around the Fort Worth Stockyards I noticed a young lady wearing a “Keep Calm and Reload” T-shirt, complete with silhouette of a rifle. I decided to talk to ask some locals how they felt about this issue. Did they agree with a New England gun enthusiast’s statement “Bump stocks are ultra gay. I don’t know anyone who has one or wants one”?

A moderate by Texas standards (he owns fewer than 10 guns) indicated some support for a ban on bump stocks: “You can’t hit the side of a barn with one of those things.” Why didn’t he have dozens of guns? “You need to go to the range and practice. You need to clean them.” Why didn’t he have zero guns? “Well, when you need a gun you need one.”

[Note that bump stocks will be illegal in my home state, going forward: “Massachusetts House approves ban on bump stocks” (boston.com) The vote was 151-3 and, sadly, the journalists didn’t interview the three who voted against the ban. I would love to hear their attempt to explain their vote to an urban journalist!]

Full post, including comments

Back in 2003 I asked why cars didn’t integrate data from existing sensors and warn owners about kids left in the back seat (see Lack of wireless Internet killing children). Today’s New York Times carries “Forgetting a Child in a Back Seat Can Kill. Cars May Soon Warn You”:

At least 41 children have died of heatstroke this year after being left in the back seat of a parked vehicle. Since 1990, when the annual number of vehicular heatstroke victims was first recorded, more than 800 children have died in hot parked cars.

But congressional lawmakers are now weighing whether to require new cars to include a device for detecting children in the back seat and warning the driver of their presence after the car has been turned off. The requirements were attached to a House bill, passed last month, that is meant to speed the development of self-driving vehicles. The Senate version of the bill, which cleared a committee vote this month, includes an amendment with the warning requirement.

It looks as though my 2003 post overlooked a super simple way to do this:

General Motors and Nissan have introduced technologies that remind the driver that a child is in the back seat by analyzing door sequencing. If the rear door is opened before the car is started but not after it is turned off, a warning sounds.

This will be annoying for dog owners, though, in moderate temperatures. The dog enjoys riding around in the back seat, but isn’t welcome in the Kwik-E-Mart. So there will be a lot of spurious warnings.

My 2003 post also overlooked the utility of an additional sensor:

Some companies that sell equipment to the auto industry have developed warning devices. One such system, the VitaSense, uses low-power radio to sense movement and breathing. The technology, developed in Luxembourg by IEE, a manufacturer of automotive sensors, can reportedly detect even a sleeping infant in a rear-facing child seat. If a child is detected after the vehicle has been turned off, it alerts the driver by several means, including flashing lights, beeps, and messages sent to cellphones and computers.

(maybe this is why Luxembourg is so much richer, per capita, than the U.S.?)

For proponents of markets, it is kind of sad that this has taken so long. Why wouldn’t Toyota have added this (at least the trivial door sequence monitor) to the Camry in order to distinguish its product from the Honda Accord? Unless consumers are indifferent to whether their children survive, how to explain this apparent failure of the market?

Readers: how come hundreds of children had to die between my 2003 post and today? There is sort of a competitive market in automobiles (enough competition that GM needed almost $100 billion in tax dollars to survive!).

Related:

• Maybe Tesla is our only hope

Full post, including comments

Bernie Sanders supporters are apparently the most hostile Internet users. This map of average hostility level of an Internet comment (WIRED) shows that comments from Vermonters are, on average, the most hostile (rage travels by Prius?), while comments from the adjacent Live Free or Die citizens of New Hampshire are the least hostile.

Maybe New Hampshire needs to build a border wall to keep out angry Vermonters?

Full post, including comments

The only thing Californians love more than expressing hatred for Donald Trump is fighting with each other. Right now opposing groups are battling it out in court over the City of Santa Monica’s plan to trash their federally-funded airport by shortening the runway from 5,000 to 3,500 feet (AOPA covered a brief victory for the pro-transportation folks, subsequently reversed).

Maybe it is time to ask cui bono? The standard business jet needs about 5,000′ of runway for operation with airline safety margins (e.g., land within 60 percent of the available runway). There are airports with runways this long pretty much all over the U.S.

The Swiss elves at Pilatus are about to certify their PC-24, an unusual jet whose textbook landing at max weight consumes 2,525′ of runway. So with Harvey Weinstein and a couple of young women in the back, the newly chopped 3,500′ runway would be comfortable for non-heroic pilots and likely legal for charter operations.

Who says that California politics don’t create jobs? Certainly there will be plenty of happy workers in Switzerland!

Full post, including comments

Not all of the crime in America in the U.S. happens in hotel rooms between old men and young women… From a WIRED article on stealing purified silicon:

Wasi Ismail Syed had endured a draining day of travel by the time he picked up his rental van at the Pensacola, Florida, airport. He’d left his West Coast home that morning in February 2009, then weathered a lengthy layover in Houston. But rather than pining for a comfy hotel bed, Syed was excited to conduct a bit of late-night business: He was meeting two strangers who called themselves Butch Cassidy and William Smith outside a nearby Walmart.

Cassidy and Smith unloaded the 5-gallon painter’s buckets that filled their truck. Syed pried open one of the buckets’ lids and peered inside. He was pleased by what he saw: a pile of rock-like chunks of a silvery metallic substance. These were fragments of polycrystalline silicon, a highly purified form of silicon that is the bedrock for semiconductor devices and solar cells. … the average price … $64 a pound.

on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama … Mitsubishi Polycrystalline Silicon America Corporation … The plant’s feedstock is metallurgical-grade silicon, which can be extracted from pulverized chunks of quartzite. In this raw form, silicon exhibits the properties that make the element so essential to the tech industry: It can both conduct and resist electricity—hence the term semiconductor—even at high temperatures. But metallurgical-grade silicon is far too tainted with flecks of iron, aluminum, and calcium to be usable in high tech products that are expected to perform flawlessly for years on end. The material must thus be chemically refined, a process that begins by mixing it with hydrogen chloride at more than 570 degrees Fahrenheit.

After having its impurities removed through multiple rounds of distillation, the resulting hazardous compound, called trichlorosilane, is pumped into a cylindrical furnace containing 7-foot-tall silicon rods shaped like tuning forks. Hydrogen is then added and the temperature is turned up to more than 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes hyper-pure crystals of silicon to leech out of the trichlorosilane and glom onto the rods. After several days the rods are thick with grayish polysilicon, which is then cut into foot-long cylinders, cleansed with acids until glittery, and packaged in thermally sealed bags for shipment.

When the vast majority of manufacturers reach the end of this process, their polysilicon is as much as 99.999999 percent pure, or “8n” in industry parlance. This means that for every 100 million silicon atoms, there is but a single atom’s worth of impurity. … What the Mitsubishi plant in Alabama produces, by contrast, is 11n polysilicon, marred by just one impure atom per every 100 billion silicon atoms. … Mitsubishi’s facility on the Theodore Industrial Canal is one of fewer than a dozen plants worldwide that produce 11n polysilicon.

The Walmart parking-lot deal went smoothly, and Syed’s buyer was impressed by the quality of the merchandise. So Syed kept doing business with “Cassidy” and “Smith”: He bought another 441 pounds of poly­silicon two weeks after the initial purchase, then 1,323 pounds more in July 2009, then 2.2 tons that November, shortly after he’d moved his family and company to McKinney, Texas. As the scale of the transactions grew, Syed enlisted a freight company to pick up the polysilicon in Alabama and truck it across state lines to his customers; then he, his assistant, or his brother-in-law, Shahab Mir, would travel to Mobile, Pensacola, or Shreveport, Louisiana, to hand over the cash.

More: read WIRED

Full post, including comments

Because there isn’t enough written about Harvey Weinstein…

“What decent men can do in response to #MeToo” (CNN) is a good example of one point of view from Plato’s Republic (see Harvey Weinstein gives Americans a teachable moment regarding Plato and the Myth of Gyges?) and, for those who think that Glaucon was right, a good example of the “fundamental attribution error.”

The author describes “male friends — good, decent men.” Plainly most men are better behaved than what has been reported about Hollywood’s most-hated person. But have her “good, decent men” been tested or tempted? What if they had the power and fame that Harvey Weinstein had? Due to their inherently superior character would they have behaved better?

[The article is also good because it is refreshing to see a young person with the courage to consider herself morally superior to old people: “Teach your elders to do better.”]

[Update: buried in the comments below is a simpler formulation of the above, from the 19th century “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” (Lord Acton)]

Related:

• Bill Burr talks about the absurdity of an average person criticizing a celebrity (about 6 minutes in)

Full post, including comments

My moderately deplorable friends have been sending me private messages with their candidates for American Victim of the Week. Here are a couple of the most plausible…

“George H.W. Bush Apologizes After Actress Says He Sexually Assaulted Her” (Huffington Post) concerns Heather Lind, 31 years old at the time (2014) she was assaulted by a wheelchair-bound 90-year-old accompanied by his 89-year-old wife.

Jenn Sterger, whose Wikipedia page says “Sterger has posed in Maxim and Playboy magazines … Sterger was featured on the E!: Entertainment Television show Byte Me: 20 Hottest Women of the Web … In 2009, Sterger had her breast implants removed, stating that they had served their purpose for her career, and that she was tired of being stereotyped,” is the second candidate. Fox News says “The former Playboy model wrote a scathing Twitter post lampooning the sports network and claiming she was subject to inappropriate behavior by ESPN employees.” It seems that she was imprisoned in a strip club (“had to watch”) and unable either to (1) turn around in the parking lot, or (2) walk out of the building once she realized that she had entered a den of sin. (Like the married man ratted out by Find Friends on his iPhone who said that he thought that “Pure Platinum” was a club for precious metal futures traders and then wandered around for 3 hours trying to get insight into why platinum was now cheaper than gold.)

Readers: Who are your candidates for the American Victim of the Week?

Full post, including comments

“America’s affordable-housing stock dropped by 60 percent from 2010 to 2016” (Washington Post) is kind of interesting on its face:

The number of apartments deemed affordable for very low-income families across the United States fell by more than 60 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to a new report by Freddie Mac.

At first financing, 11 percent of nearly 100,000 rental units nationwide were deemed affordable for very low-income households. By the second financing, when the units were refinanced or sold, rents had increased so much that just 4 percent of the same units were categorized as affordable.

… affordable housing without a government subsidy is becoming extinct.

The study defined “very low income” as households making less than 50 percent of the area median income, and “affordable” rent as costing less than 30 percent of household income.

During the period in which the U.S. was a market economy this never happened, did it? People who were poor found crummy places to live. If poor Americans couldn’t could afford the rent on a crummy place then the landlord would have to reduce the rent.

Can we blame income inequality? Supposedly it was higher 100 years ago and poor people were able to afford crummy houses back then.

Can we blame rich people stealing all of society’s wealth? Again, wealth inequality was very high 100 years ago. In any case, a rich person may cause us to become sick with envy but he or she doesn’t usually occupy 50 apartments at a time. So it doesn’t make sense to blame rich people for reducing the housing supply, does it?

How about population growth? We’re stuffed with 325 million people now, with planeloads of immigrants arriving every day, and immigrants choosing to have lots of children once they’re settled here. (“Foreign-born Americans and their descendants have been the main driver of U.S. population growth, as well as of national racial and ethnic change, since passage of the 1965 law that rewrote national immigration policy. They also will be the central force in U.S. population growth and change over the next 50 years.” (Pew)) But we still have land on which we can build apartment buildings and, in a lot of cities, we can also build higher.

Finally there is government, which promises to pay for housing if a low-income resident of the U.S. can’t afford it (“means-tested public housing”). That’s a change compared to 100 years ago. Landlords can insist on rents higher than poor people can pay because they know that the government will pay. (“As a former affordable housing underwriter, I’d say that affordable housing is 1% altruism, 99% profit..” (Wall Street Oasis))

I’m wondering if the most likely answer is a change in the definition of “housing.” Americans live in roughly twice as many square feet per person compared to the 1950s. So the standard low-income unit today might be larger than the standard high-income unit circa 1950.

Could it be selective click-bait journalism? They picked 2010 as the base year because the economy was still sluggish after the Collapse of 2008 and therefore cheap housing was unusually cheap? 2016 is therefore less affordable than 2010, but not that different in affordability compared to 20 or 30 years ago?

Could it be that low-income Americans circa 1900 could afford housing, but it was so cramped that it didn’t meet our modern definition of “housing”?

What about blaming/crediting Malthus? On a planet populated by nearly 8 billion people, not everyone can expect to have his or her own room? (world population was roughly 1.6 billion in 1900) Evidence for a housing “shortage” being inherent given current population levels sharing only a single Earth is that newspapers in England are running the same stories, e.g., “Housing crisis threatens a million families with eviction by 2020” (Guardian): “Shelter says that in 83% of areas of England, people in the private rented sector now face a substantial monthly shortfall between the housing benefit they receive and the cheapest rents, and that this will rise as austerity bites and the lack of properties tilts the balance more in favour of landlords.” The situation seems to be similar throughout Europe, unless someone wants to live in a barn on a farm that is 50 miles from the nearest job: “Wild Rent Hikes Are Leaving Europe’s Cities Totally Unaffordable” (Vice)

Full post, including comments