On the grounds that “some people in Hollywood mix sex and business is not news,” I initially ignored the New York Times “news” articles on Harvey Weinstein and his interactions with various women in the film industry.
Over the last year, I’ve asked Lisa Bloom to tutor me, and she’s put together a team of people. I’ve brought on therapists
I so respect all women, and regret what happened. [he regrets having sex with the women who said “yes,” or he regrets the public complaints by the women who said “no”?]
I am going to need a place to channel that anger, so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. I’m going to do it at the same place I had my Bar Mitzvah. I’m making a movie about our President, perhaps we can make it a joint retirement party.
America’s gun-lovers and the Trumpenfuhrer are now going to be attacked by a naked Harvey Weinstein, fresh from the shower, leading a platoon of attractive young script girls (now referred to as “Script supervisor”)? Or is there an existing army arrayed against the NRA and/or Trump that is eager to be led by Mr. Weinstein?
[Separately, how does this work in our transgender age:
One year ago, I began organizing a $5 million foundation to give scholarships to women directors at USC.
Why can’t any student identify as a woman long enough to apply for this scholarship? Is the scholarship revoked if it is awarded to a student who identifies as a woman but, halfway through the semester, decides to identify as a different gender?]
Garmin takes us a little closer to the day when a $2 million aircraft can make as effective use of computer hardware and software as a 2003 Honda Accord….
The GWX 80 weather radar pokes around in the sky and gives a high-level summary to the monkey in the front left seat (press release), just as a non-pilot would expect onboard weather radar to work. Note that Honeywell has had a similar system out for some years, but designed for heavier airplanes. Correct use and interpretation of more primitive onboard weather radar is a skill that takes years of airline flying to master. The rest of us primarily rely on datalink NEXRAD (what you see on TV news or web pages when you want to see where it is raining; one issue with this is that there is no information about the altitude from which the rain is falling; a terrifying patch of red heavy rain might be overflown in clear air at 20,000′)
If it were legal to stick an Android tablet on the panel, a 1935 airplane could have way better avionics than the latest Boeing (press release on synthetic vision (Microsoft Flight Simulator view of the world)). Note that Garmin here is playing catch-up to ForeFlight.
Garmin has refreshed their 10-year-old retrofit glass panels (press release) and added an engine-monitoring system. This, combined with the GFC 600 autopilot, would be an awesome solution for the legacy Pilatus PC-12. Again, it is unclear that a $140,000 installation of these new panels would be any better than two iPads or Android tablets on the panel, but these will be legal under FAA regulations.
What could one do with all of this good stuff? Buy a 1982 twin-engine Beechcraft Baron with new paint and interior for $239,000 (controller.com). Put in all of the above Garmin stuff, including the latest autopilot, for about $200,000. Enjoy way better avionics than more than 99 percent of the jets flying.
[Sadly, as the U.S. population grows and Americans are packed in like rats in a psychology experiment, hostility to personal aviation is also growing. Just as the good folks at Garmin are making the airplanes better, Californians are shrinking the runway at Santa Monica, in preparation for its ultimate closure.]
Some perspectives from reading the guidebooks and listening to tour guides in Portugal, the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands…
Low-skilled immigration makes a country poorer according to the Lonely Planet Portugal guidebook, otherwise filled with politically correct sentiments:
In 1974 and 1975 there was a massive influx of refugees from the former African colonies, changing the demographic of the city and culturally, if not financially, adding to its richness.
The fewer immigrants the better according to Lonely Planet Canary Islands:
Migration from Africa has also stabilized with just 288 migrants arriving here in 2014, compared to a staggering 32,000 in 2006 when some days several hundred Africans would reach the islands in their rickety wooden boats.
Guides in the Canaries told us that, in addition to using military force to resist immigration from Africa, they use police and regulations to resist immigrants from other parts of the EU. To stay in the Canaries one must have either a W-2 job or prove to authorities that one has sufficient savings and income to sustain oneself without collecting welfare.
The accepted narrative in guidebooks and among locals is that population growth historically led to unemployment and poverty for which the only relief was emigration. This is where the “tough to make predictions about the future” angle of the title comes in. During the last 120 years or so, the countries that seemed the most promising destinations for ambitious young Atlantic islanders: Cuba, South Africa, Venezuela. (A lot of folks ended up bouncing back, sometimes a couple of generations after emigrating.)
Separately, for those who didn’t emigrate you might ask what life is like. On the Azores the answer is “awesome.” The islands have fantastic roads, considering the mountainous terrain, which are never crowded. “All of these roads and tunnels were funded by the EU starting in the 1990s,” explained our guide. Every small town has a festival at least once per year and residents will party until sunrise. “There are a lot of little towns here,” explained our guide, “so we’re usually at a festival about once every week.” This prompted a Swiss tourist to mutter “When do these people work?” Locals stress the safety and security of their lives on the islands, the good schools for their children, and the strong connections to family and neighbors. The economy of the Azores is built on agriculture and some islands are just covered in dairy farms. The farther south you go to Madeira and the Canary Islands the more it feels like an artificial tourist outpost, but the locals express some of the same sentiments as do those in the Azores. One thing these folks love is transportation. Towns are clustered around harbors and airports are built absolutely as close to a town as possible. Nobody complains about overflight noise of inter-island turboprops or jets from the mainland.
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is happening this week in Orlando and we’ll be there. Join Engineering Director Debbie Ferguson on a flight journey as she offers her perspective and career advice from 600 feet in the air.
Ms. Ferguson has been commuting by plane from Sacramento to her office at Facebook. She says that she started the aerial commute (it could be 2-4 hours each way, depending on traffic, by car) during a previous job at Google so that she could be home with two young daughters for dinner every night.
Some public comments:
Sylvia French: “Must have been hard rising to that level as a woman.”
Missy Dawn: “I have never heard of you or any of this. I wish I would’ve sooner. I have a 17 year old daughter who is graduating this year. What an inspiration to young woman you are and this organization.”
Amy Hayes: “You are an inspiration to us all!”
The Piper Malibu, especially the early Continental-powered version with the 4-blade MT prop (quiet inside!), is the ideal family airplane. As long as you have a letter from God promising that the stressed-to-the-limit turbocharged piston engine won’t quit, you can fly in pressurized air-conditioned comfort nearly anywhere in North America with just one stop and sipping gasoline at close to 20 mpg. (Debbie’s Matrix version is slightly simpler and, unfortunately, not pressurized.)
As I tend to do with any story about aviation, I looked up the plane and the pilot in the public registries. It seems that the plane, N488EA, was purchased new by an Oregon LLC in 2008 and hasn’t been resold. (Oregon has no sales tax, so this saves about $70,000 in California taxes.) In the FAA airmen registry (who will get out the pitchforks to make them update their sexist language?) there is a “Deborah Ross Ferguson” in the Sacramento area with the bare minimum ratings necessary to fly a Malibu with insurance, i.e., a Private certificate with “Airplane Single Engine Land” and “Instrument Airplane” ratings. But the certificate was issued in May 2016. Certificates are issued when a person adds a rating, e.g., the instrument rating. How did Ms. Ferguson fly a $1 million cabin-class airplane for 8 years without the minimum ratings?
Ms. Ferguson’s LinkedIn page confirms the narrative from the video, with commuting to Silicon Valley starting in 2004 for a job at Google. Any kind of search for “Deborah Ross Ferguson,” however, brings up pages mentioning a “David Ross Ferguson.” A search for “Debbie Ferguson,” brings up this page:
Conference delegates will hear from Fiona Mullan, Facebook’s HR Director from EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) who will speak about Facebook’s diversity programmes and Debbie Ferguson, Engineering Director at Facebook who will speak about her experience as a transgender women in the workplace.
If we assume that this pilot got a new certificate due to a name change, that the transition from “David Ross” to “Deborah Ross” occurred at the time of the FAA certificate reissue in 2016, and that Ms. Ferguson was 18 years old when entering college in 1983 (LinkedIn), she spent 51 years identifying as a man.
Certainly this story could be inspiring as a tale of American personal fulfillment. Ms. Ferguson built a successful career doing what she loved, earned a pilot certificate, has enjoyed the freedom of flight, and was able to select a new gender. But why would it be specifically inspiring to women considering engineering as a career? What if the lesson that they take away is “The best way to succeed as a woman in Silicon Valley is to spend 51 years as a man”?
[And what lesson can men learn? Ms. Ferguson’s LinkedIn profile says “Particularly passionate about coaching women as they develop their leadership skills.” Is the best way for a man to demonstrate passion about women in the workplace to become one?]
Separately, I wonder if this is the answer to Bay Area real estate prices. Six Silicon Valley workers buy shares in a $300,000 Piper Malibu. That’s $50,000 each. Four of them get pilot certificates and rotate so that there are always two pilots in the front seat as an airline-style crew (for safety). They can then live 80 miles away and get to work with about one hour of round-trip flying per day. The plane thus runs 250 hours per year for the commute. At $300 per hour (everything costs more in California), that’s $75,000 per year in expenses plus another $25,000 for hangar and insurance. Each of the six is thus spending $16,667 per year or about $1,400 per month. That’s way less than the additional cost of housing in Silicon Valley, right? As an added bonus, when these six folks age out of the Silicon Valley workforce, e.g., at 50, they’ll have enough flying hours to get a job at an airline.
It is not the best timing, but the big NBAA show is next week in Las Vegas (Oct 10-12). I’ll be there on Tuesday and Wednesday and more or less free in the evenings. Happy to get together with readers. Use the comment section here or email to propose a plan!
(I’ll be in Zion National Park before the show in case there are readers in southern Utah!)
The media told us that flooding in Houston after Hurricane Harvey destroyed up to a million cars (example: WIRED). Yet I recently booked a rental car at DFW and Orbitz showed prices for cars ranging from $13-15 per day (compact to full size). If a million cars actually were destroyed and people in Houston do need cars to get around, how can that be consistent with the low rental prices and ample supply?
DxOMark has spoken. Samsung put in a bigger sensor than Apple did. Tim Cook was unable to continue Steve Jobs’s revocation of the laws of physics (at least in the eyes of Apple customers) and therefore the indoor performance of the Samsung is better. Samsung also put in a better/faster autofocus (AF) system, according to DxOMark.
What kind of phone owner wants to take pictures of subjects that move around, thus stressing the AF system? And the phone owner is often indoors with these subjects? Parents!
One of the entertainers on our recent cruise was a magician. He played around with some variations on Three-card Monte. Of course none of the passengers (average age: 70) had a chance of figuring out what was going on, but I wondered if another magician, or perhaps a computer vision system, would have been able to track the money card.
What do readers think? Suppose that one were able to retrieve a Google Glass device from Africa or an improved successor whose camera was impossible to spot. The device is then connected up to LTE. A professional magician, or perhaps just software, watches the game and, at the end, indicates via pocket vibrations which card to select. Would this end the era of Three-card Monte? (Or maybe it will end sooner if countries abolish cash?)
I’m not a TV-watcher so I’ve been shielded from a lot of the sadness around the recent Las Vegas shooting. This seems as though it will be a significant shock to our society. After we recover from the immediate grief, I wonder what readers think will change.
Due to our Constitution and a lack of consensus to restrict gun ownership, I am not expecting a substantial change in gun laws.
Despite the shooting occurring in the middle of a downtown area and therefore in an area served by roughly 5,000 police officers (Wikipedia: “Metro is the largest law enforcement agency in the state of Nevada, and one of the largest police agencies in the United States.”), it was more than one hour before the shooting stopped (the shooter killed himself). Will this lead to a change in police equipment or tactics? [Correction from Bill Swersey in the comments below: “the shooting lasted less than 15 minutes”]
After 9/11 there was a reduction in mass gatherings. We had a population of 282 million back in 2000 and now we’re up to 325 million so, absent social change, there should be more crowded events in 2017 than there were in 2001. Will the government be reluctant to issue permits for gatherings that could be easily attacked? Or will Americans shy away from being in crowds?
Separately, what do folks think about this CBS lawyer fired for expressing her lack of sympathy for any Republican gun owners killed? (Daily Mail) She had previously been an “outspoken critic of Republicans [who] also helped organize a block party for the Hillary Clinton last year.” I’m troubled by this, especially if it was a private (friends-only) Facebook thread. There are a lot of people suffering on Planet Earth and Americans demonstrate no sympathy for most of them (i.e., despite any fine words we might utter we don’t take any practical steps to assist the sufferers). This firing seems like a move in the direction of mandated hypocrisy. The lawyer can be unsympathetic and keep her job, but she can’t admit the thoughtcrime of lack of sympathy.
Note that I will actually be in Las Vegas next week for NBAA.
Readers: I hope that none of you were personally affected by this shooting. Feel free to share your thoughts via the comments. I’m kind of stunned at how destructive seemingly obscure humans can be. This one guy killed roughly the same number of people as Hurricane Maria. That’s sobering.
[I’m aware that, statistically, the U.S. actually experiences less gun violence than we did in the 1990s, despite a much larger population (Wikipedia). But I still think that the shooting in Las Vegas will have a big impact because Americans are driven by emotions more than numbers.]
A pilot friend invited me to see American Made. There is a lot to love in this movie about, um, informal transportation networks from Colombia up through Central America and into the U.S. One of the stars is the Piper Aerostar, a fast piston twin. There is also a beautiful AStar helicopter. Progress in aviation is so sluggish that the filmmakers probably worked much harder to find 40-year-old cars than they did to find 40-year-old aircraft. All of the types being flown in the late 1970s and early 1980s are still flying today and some are even still being made!
The movie is realistic when it comes to single-engine procedures in a piston twin, short-field takeoffs, airline crew checklist procedures, etc. Barry Seal refers to a sectional chart and uses an E6B. The attention to detail and accuracy is better than in Sully, for example.
Non-pilots may appreciate the family scenes; what would it be like to be married to someone involved in some dangerous and plainly illegal activities? Also you’ll learn that you should bring in Colombian drug lords to plan your next party. If the movie is realistic (and why wouldn’t it be?), those guys really knew how to have a good time! (not using their own product, of course)
Readers: Did you see this movie? What did you think?
Journal of Popular Studies (a.k.a. People) on a fatal Aerostar crash during filming (Tom Cruise apparently did some of the Aerostar flying for the movie, but was not involved with the accident)
