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The fly-in, fly-out eclipse-viewing idea (previous post) ended up working reasonably well. Here are some lessons learned from our August 21, 2017 trip…

For viewing the eclipse per se, Celestron EclipSmart 10×42 binoculars were amazing during the partial phase. I lent them out to kids from age 5 up and they just loved them, as did their parents. (Kids were also great at finding the sun through the binoculars, something that eluded most adults, including me!) Totality was enhanced with Zeiss 8×42 Victory binoculars. A camping pad and pillow were helpful for comfortable viewing, though probably tripod-mounted binoculars would be better and, of course, a telescope with equatorial mount is the gold standard (Charles Edward Marsden, an amateur astronomer visiting KSRB (see below), was kind enough to let us look through his rig during the partial phases).

On to the aviation stuff…

Round-the-world hero pilot Matt Guthmiller took his Bonanza down to Tennessee, dropped a passenger, and then treated himself and four passengers to the view from 11,500′ with 24 additional seconds of totality. His advice is to fly as high as practical: “Less traffic, less worry about clouds, above 10,000 MSL with TCAS and talking to approach don’t have to worry as much about everybody else doing the same thing.” The dropped-off passenger was David Spiegel (Instagram: d_spiegel), who made this photo from the ground:

How about using an aircraft to skip out on the $2,000/night motels and traffic jams but still view from the ground? Except maybe for airports close to California, it is virtually impossible to max out an airport’s capacity for parking. Airports with multiple runways occupy so much area that, as long as you’re willing to park on the grass, there is always space. We landed at one of a handful of idiot-proof airports (long runway; precision approaches) within the clearest forecast band in the eastern half of the U.S. Ramp space was by reservation and did fill up a week in advance, but pilots of singles and light twins were invited to park in the grass on the other side of the runway “at their discretion” via a recording on the ASOS.

We started planning on July 12, using a Google Doc (shared in case it is helpful or interesting). We got serious around August 10 when weather forecasts first began to cover August 21 and then contacted a bunch more airports on August 15. We made the near-final “where to go decision” after 8 pm Eastern the night before (new aviation weather comes out at 0Z, 6Z, 12Z, and 18Z; the cloud forecasts are at 3-hour intervals) and confirmed the next morning. We started out thinking that Clarksville, TN would be the likely destination, then shifted to South Carolina (a little closer to us), then shifted back towards eastern Tennessee.

In retrospect, none of this would have been necessary in a four-seat or six-seat airplane. A pilot willing to land on a 3000′ runway would find a huge selection of airports within any weather band. For a jet that needs to stay on pavement or a plane that takes up a lot of space, such as the Pilatus PC-12, it does make sense to make reservations. None of our friends with light airplanes had any trouble landing last-minute in South Carolina or Tennessee.

KSRB in Sparta, Tennessee provided a near-textbook example of how to run one of these events. They sold ramp space with non-refundable deposits. They invited the public to drive in and view from a field next to the ramp. Airport management set up porta potties, brought in a DJ and a food truck, etc. PAX and crew who arrived airside were given wristbands that allowed them to transition freely between the public area and the ramp, packed with about 130 transient aircraft, moving tugs, a medevac Airbus H135 that went in and out a few times, etc. Folks who drove in had to stay off the ramp. We met a lot of quasi-local pilots as well as airborne families from Texas, Florida, and New York.

The airport added a huge complement of extra staff to drive “follow me” trucks, operate tugs, and pump fuel. We were parked and fueled within about 15 minutes after landing. The only thing that the airport could have done differently is ban APUs. It probably didn’t occur to the management that a NetJets Challenger (N726QS) and a G450 crew (N888XY; SexyJet), parked directly in front of the invited public, would run their APUs (crazy noisy small jet engines in the tail, used to generate electricity and run A/C when parked, then used to start the main engines) for hours. “What assholes,” commented one light aircraft pilot. “Douchebags,” said another. I figured “well, maybe the passengers are making them do this,” but then found that the NetJets customers had deplaned and were in lawn chairs near the terminal with their Havanese dog. In other words, the NetJets crew was running the APU for themselves. (The privately owned jets did not abuse their neighbors or the public in this manner. For example, a huge Falcon 900 (N874VT) showed up (loud!) taxied in, and did a complete and immediate shutdown once on the ramp.)

We were able to escape the noise inferno created by NetJets and SexyJet by walking about 1/2 mile to the piston side of the ramp, but the general public did not have this option: “The taxpaying citizens behind the fence are the actual owners of the airport,” said one pilot. “It is like NetJets coming into your house and pissing on the floor.” [Update: A friend who owns an FBO read the above and said “Those NetJets guys do that all the time. They run the APU for hours. They don’t care.” Note that NetJets is owned by Warren Buffet.]

Landing was a little scary for pilots accustomed to busy towered airports or sleepy nontowered airports. The volume of landing traffic in the three hours prior to the eclipse was at times similar to the busiest towered U.S. airports, but with pilots responsible to figure out who else was in the pattern. This on a UNICOM frequency shared with other nearby (and busy) airports. There was a mix of jets with pro crews, experimental (home-built) taildraggers, and boring family airplanes. What kept this reasonably safe is that the airport managers broadcast a “please use Runway 4” on the ASOS. That kept everyone landing in the same direction. And then there are a lot of conventions for traffic patterns published in the FAA’s Aeronautical Information Manual, which every student pilot reads carefully.

NetJets and SexyJet shut down their APUs during totality, which enabled everyone to hear the crowd cheering. For the true Zen experience it would probably be worth trying to get to a wilderness area (in the U.S., anything more than a 1-mile walk from a road!), but I enjoyed being with enthusiastic people and, especially, so many children who were awestruck.

After totality ended, pilots literally fled. The first airplane departed just a few seconds after totality ended. I.e., they had started up before the end of totality. Two more were waiting. There were departures every 30 seconds during the partial eclipse that followed totality. We waited until the end of the eclipse, waited behind three other airplanes, and departed without any conflicts with other aircraft. The airport positioned a couple of spotters near the runway to call out on the radio that they were not observing any landing traffic. (Only an FAA tower controller can clear an aircraft for takeoff so these guys were providing information to pilots, not instructions.)

The FAA did not seem to have prepared in any way for the high traffic. Single controllers were working multiple frequencies, just as on an ordinary weekday. On arrival we were pressured to cancel IFR about 80 miles from the airport and, on the way out, were unable to get VFR advisories until more than 200 miles northeast.

Summary: Whenever a solar eclipse comes through the U.S., viewing is as easy as checking the weather a couple of days in advance and turning the key on a Cessna, Cirrus, or Piper. Not a pilot yet? You have nearly seven years to get your certificate before the April 8, 2024 eclipse. If the weather is clear this will be awesome for folks in the Northeast. The moon’s shadow goes right over Niagara Falls, Burlington, Vermont, and Moosehead Lake in Maine. One idea: Plattsburgh.

More:

• a video made by of the SRB airport during totality (credit: Isaac Kohane)
• photos by me and Zak (I took very few on the theory that I should be listening and learning during my first total eclipse rather than fiddling with cameras and trying to out-do the professional astrophotographers with a subject that admits of no compositional creativity)
• Inspiration to watch the eclipse on August 21
• Did you see the Eclipse? How was it?

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“Treasury Ends Obama-Era Retirement Savings Plan” (nytimes):

An Obama-era program that created savings accounts to help more people put away money for retirement is being shut down by the Treasury Department, which deemed the program too expensive.

The 30,000 participants in the program, known as myRA and intended for people who did not have access to workplace savings plans, were sent an email on Friday morning alerting them of the closing.

President Barack Obama ordered the creation of the so-called starter accounts three years ago, and they became available at the end of 2015. Since then, about 20,000 accounts have been opened, with participants contributing a total of $34 million, according to the Treasury; the median account balance was $500.

The program has cost $70 million since 2014, according to the Treasury, and would cost $10 million a year in the future.

So it cost $3,500 per customer to administer a $500 account? And it was going to cost $950 per year going forward to hold onto $500?

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Here’s a fun New York Times article showing an imperial minister’s wife getting out of what seems to be a taxpayer-funded Gulfstream G550 (7 oval windows minus 2 = basic model number for the new series). The article doesn’t explain why someone would want to take a free Gulfstream trip to Kentucky on August 21, 2017, but I am going to guess this was eclipse-related.

As a measure of how times have changed, below is a photo of President Eisenhower’s short-hop Air Force One, an Aero Commander 500.

The twin-piston Aero Commander had a value of about $53,000 in 1962 (classified ad in December 1962 Flying). That’s about $432,000 today, about 1/100th the value of a Gulfstream G550 or 1/10,000th the cost of the latest B747-based Air Force One program.

Related:

• Aero Commanders for sale on Controller
• Shopping list: four helicopters, but don’t spend more than $1.24 billion
• My Christmas Present to Barack Obama (I offer to save taxpayers $1 billion/year by providing Presidential helicopter transportation at my personal expense)

 

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Dear Readers:

Happy Eclipse Day!

Did you see it? If so, from where and what was it like?

Thanks in advance for comments.

Philip

[Update: After about two weeks of planning and a week of watching cloud forecasts, we flew to KSRB, the Upper Cumberland Regional Airport, in Sparta, Tennessee. The sky was clear for totality and there were just a few clouds passing in front of the partial eclipse, which added interest. They never ran out of grass parking for light aircraft. The pattern was a little crazy for landing, with planes landing every minute or so up right up until the first moments of totality. Then there was a mad rush to take off, with some planes that must actually have started up before totality was over. We waited until the eclipse was completely over and departed behind about four other airplanes (no wake turbulence issues with little airplanes, so departures were every 15-30 seconds). Air Traffic Control was completely unprepared for the event, with single controllers working multiple frequencies per usually. Requests for VFR advisories were denied within about 200 miles of the eclipse path.]

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Part of the software expert witness’s job is delving into computer science history. Sometimes the most efficient way to do this is to go to the library and browse among the books (sadly MIT seems to be archiving anything that doesn’t relate to C, Java, or Big Data; books on our home-grown MULTICS operating system are now banished, for example). My note-taking technique is to use my iPhone 7 Plus as a copier: open book, snap photo, turn page, snap photo, put book back on shelf. When I get home I find that a lot of these photos are upside-down. If there is nothing in the photo except for a book page and there is nothing on the book page except for Roman characters, why isn’t the software smart enough to orient the JPEG file correctly?

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Some folks a scheduled “Free Speech” rally in Boston today. This was characterized by “counter-protesters” (not sure the term is apt, given that the Free Speechers may not have been “protesting”) as Nazi-oriented, hate-oriented, racism-oriented, and/or white supremacist. Here’s my IM exchange with a friend who attended:

• How was the rally? How many Nazis showed up?
• dunno. i think just a few dozen people showed up for the whole rally (vs. about 10,000 counter-protesters), but i never saw them. being in a large crowd is not necessarily the best way to know what’s happening at an event

In other words, my friend was protesting people whom he never saw and opposing ideas that he never heard expressed.

As a reenactment of the Nuremberg Rally, it seems as though Boston was a bit short on Nazis.

It is interesting to me that nobody seems to care what the purported Nazis had to say. A New York Times article on the rally provides detail on the “counter-protesters”. There were about 40,000 of them in Boston and their mission was “to denounce racism, white supremacy and Nazism.” They “shouted down their opponents.” But there was no reporting on the number of Nazis and no detail on what they said before they were shouted down.

Shiva Ayyadurai, the inventor of email, was quoted briefly, but no other speaker is even mentioned. (Ayyadurai is running for U.S. Senate against Elizabeth Warren, a race that an MIT friend characterizes as “Indian v. Indian.)

Readers: Did you find a source of information about the speeches that the “protesters” gave? If so, please share!

[Separately, I’m wondering if we run short of Nazis whether some of the counter-protesters will step in to handle both sides of the altercations. Otherwise how can counter-protesters say “We fought against Nazis like those brave souls depicted in the Dunkirk movie”? Related phenomenon: In The Elements of Style, the authors noted that “another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. … Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure, executives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights. We should tolerate them–every person of spirit wants to ride a white horse. … A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user’s dreams than to express a precise meaning.”]

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“Subway Tiles That Look Like Confederate Flags to Be Altered” (nytimes) and “Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down Across the United States. Here’s a List.” (nytimes) suggest that there will soon be a lot of used statutes available.

Plainly we don’t want cities to sell them to private citizens to put up in front yards (also need a law to make possession and display of replicas illegal?).

We don’t want to destroy statues due to the effort put in by the artists and, in the case of equestrian statutes, the fact that the horses depicted were not guilty of secessionist or pro-slavery sympathies.

What about an export market? This would help cities with their pension deficits and also ensure that the hated statues are eliminated from the U.S.

The British were fond of pointing out American hypocrisy back in the 18th century, e.g., “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (Samuel Johnson) Soviets took over this task in the 20th century.

How about a theme park at the end of one of the Moscow subway lines? Visitors would be assured of trains running to the park every minute on weekdays and every two minutes on weekends. Moscow tends to be rather spread out so there should be plenty of space for all of the statues and monuments that we are discarding.

Within the park, a Museum of Empty Words:

• Room 1: Public school classroom. Animatronic schoolteacher explains to mannequin children (eyes glazed; staring into space) that seceding from Britain was noble while seceding from the Union was traitorous. Countdown clock shows days, hours, and minutes remaining before teacher can retire. Countup clock shows taxpayer pension obligation for the teacher growing (calculated using cost of TIPS).
• Room 2: Silicon Valley. 1/3-scale three-bedroom house with $3 million pricetag next to the front door. Living room contains pussy hat knitting tools. Sign in front yard advocating for the suburb to be made a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. Tableau of childless worker-slave couple turning away immigrant family seeking sanctuary in their spare bedrooms.
• Room 3: Sundar Pichai declaring Google’s commitment to hearing diverse points of view while simultaneously shoving James Damore into the parking lot.
• Room 4: FBO. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton on the stairs of their respective chartered Gulfstreams talking about how Americans need to trim CO2 emissions.

Readers: Ideas for additional rooms of the Museum of Empty Words?

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In Two big questions for economists today, a January 2015 report from the American Economics Association convention, I wrote the following:

Justine Hastings, of Brown University, presented “Earnings, Incentives and Student Loan Design: The Case of Chile.” It seems that Chile did what the U.S. did, i.e., offered a lot of student loans for higher education. Their program was more intelligently designed, however, in that they didn’t allow universities to raise tuition in response to this new source of funds. Schools ended up with more students, but not more money per student as has been prevalent in the U.S. Nonetheless, the default rate has been high, especially for graduates of non-selective schools and especially for those who majored in humanities and arts. Unlike Americans, Chileans don’t like to keep flushing cash down the toilet, so now they are experimenting with adjusting the maximum loan amount according to the expected return to getting a particular degree (in Chile you don’t apply to “University of Santiago” you apply for a specific major). It turns out that when students see that the government won’t lend them the maximum for a particular degree program they get the message and try to switch into a degree that will result in higher post-graduate earnings. … Hastings has a separate paper “The Labor Market Returns to Colleges and Majors: Evidence from Chile” with the discouraging result that attending a lower quality college and majoring in poetry will not set the country’s employers on fire and, in fact, many people would have higher lifetime earnings if they refrained from attending college.

“Programs That Are Predatory: It’s Not Just at For-Profit Colleges” (nytimes) shows that Americans may gradually be catching up:

The Harvard program is run by the A.R.T. Institute at Harvard University (A.R.T. stands for American Repertory Theater). It’s a small program, admitting about two dozen students each year into “a full-time, two-year program of graduate study in acting, dramaturgy or voice pedagogy.” On average, graduates earn about $36,000 per year.

The problem, from a regulatory standpoint, is that they borrow a lot of money to obtain the degree — over $78,000 on average, according to the university. The two-year tuition total is around $63,000. And because it’s a graduate program, students can also borrow the full cost of their living expenses from the federal government, regardless of their credit history.

After accounting for basic living expenses, the average Harvard A.R.T. Institute graduate has to pay 44 percent of discretionary income just to make the minimum loan payment.

Related:

• “Universities and Economic Growth”
• Americans interested in everything that goes on at universities except for the education part?

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“Japan Buries Our Most-Cherished Economic Ideas” (Bloomberg) is kind of interesting for folks who’ve taken Macroeconomics and then watched various world economies over the decades. Excerpts:

Japan is the graveyard of economic theories. The country has had ultralow interest rates and run huge government deficits for decades, with no sign of the inflation that many economists assume would be the natural result.

Some economists think more fiscal deficits could help raise inflation. That’s consistent with a theory called the “fiscal theory of the price level,” or FTPL. But a quick look at Japan’s recent history should make us skeptical of that theory — even as government debt has steadily climbed, inflation has stumbled along at close to 0 percent:

Japan’s persistently low inflation comes even though essentially everyone in Japan who wants a job has one.

Basic econ theory says that as the labor market gets tighter, competition should push up wages, which will then boost consumer prices via increased demand and higher costs. In Japan, nothing of the sort has happened — wages and prices show little sign of rising despite the disappearance of unemployment. So much for the Phillips Curve.

is Japan’s lack of inflation really such a bad thing? The country’s per capita growth is pretty low, but that’s just because of population aging. Measured in terms of real gross domestic product per employed person, the country has been growing in recent years: [chart shows GDP per employed person, in 2011 dollars, growing from $64,000/year in 2000 to $73,000/year in 2016]

In other words, despite a near-total lack of inflation, Japan has managed to grow and increase employment. That means Japan is in the midst of that rarest of situations — a disinflationary boom.

Related:

• Another way of looking at Japan’s economy (2012)
• Explaining Japan’s slow growth by looking at its debt (2010)

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A day without a James Damore-related post is like a day without sunshine…

“I’m An Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader And I’m Sick Of Our Approach To Diversity!” is way more hostile to Google’s diversity crusade than James Damore ever was. The author, Vidya Narayanan, shades into infidel territory rather than being merely a heretic:

I can tell you that our obsession with diversity and attempts to solve it are only fucking it up for the actual women in tech out there!

• What do I mean by this?
• We get upset about the state of gender diversity in tech
• We make a pact to hire more women
• The pool has (a lot) more men than women
• After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to
• These women show up at work and perform not as great as we want them to
• It reinforces to the male population that was already peeved by the diversity push that women aren’t that good at tech after all
• They generalize that observation on the entire women in tech community
• Sooner or later, some such opinions get out there
• The feminists amongst us go crazy
• The diversity advocates are caught in a frenzy and make a pact to hire more women (again)
• This loops. Infinitely.

In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech.

[I.e., the female ex-Googler says the thing that Damore was wrongly accused of saying: “women on the tech job at Google actually are inferior because they were hired to fill quotas.” Yet nobody is outraged by Ms. Narayanan’s statement.]

The topic of today’s post is part of Ms. Narayanan’s conclusion: “Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.”

My comment:

But why should they? Why is a career as a software engineer better than a career in health care or finance or law or something else? Why is selling undergraduates, regardless of Gender ID, on programming doing them a favor? Wouldn’t young people be more likely to find careers that suit them if we provide neutral information?

Personally I love to program in SQL and Lisp, but this weekend when my friend’s daughter said that she wanted to be a screenwriter I set her up with some friends and cousins who work in Hollywood. It didn’t occur to me to try to sell her on the beauty of E.F. Codd’s relational model or lambda calculus. I also love helicopters, but I didn’t say “Instead of screenwriting, you could be a Robinson R44 instructor and then move up to medevac AStar pilot. Let’s spend the next two hours talking about helicopter aerodynamics because everyone should know about angle of attack, retreating blade stall, and dissymmetry of lift.”

What’s the definition of boorish behavior at a cocktail party? Someone comes up to you and starts talking about what is interesting to them without first checking to see if it is interesting to you. How is it good manners to wade into a sea of college students studying premed and talk at them about the wonders of software engineering?

Narayanan responded reasonably:

The reason to go out and talk to students (all the way from middle school to college) about tech is to dispel the myths that it is a tough field for girls/women. That there is no such thing as tech is for boys/men. All the way from long haired pretty princesses, the image is all messed up for girls! And it takes a lot to correct it really.

Legitimately, after showing the possibilities that tech can bring, if someone makes a choice it’s not for them, that’s totally fine. The point is not that tech is superior to any other field — it’s just that there isn’t enough talk about tech for girls and women to even form an opinion about it.

Is she correct? On the one hand, being an engineer or computer nerd is so common (1.1 million software developers alone, according to BLS, plus a range of related subcategories within nerdism and then millions of workers within engineering per se) that women within the fields are commonplace even if they are a minority of nerds. On the other hand, there is a constant drumbeat of material from do-gooders in politics and the media highlighting that women and nerdism are not compatible. “Until I came to the U.S. and started reading the New York Times,” said one female immigrant, “it never occurred to me that women were intellectually inferior when it came to math and science. But all of the articles saying ‘women aren’t inferior’ have made me doubt myself.”

Readers: What do you think? Can we consider ourselves to have helped young people by telling them about why they should abandon their current dreams and embrace C++? And do we have an obligation also to point out that we have colleagues who haven’t been to find work after age 50 or who haven’t enjoyed their lives in tech? Would it be more reasonable to tweak ““Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about why they should pursue a career in tech.” to “Go out and talk to freshmen and sophomore women about what it is like to have a career in tech“?

Related 1: An MIT graduate in the mid-1990s couldn’t figure out what to do with herself so she got a job at the MIT Admissions Office. One of her responsibilities was traveling around to talk to high school students about how to apply to MIT and what the school was looking for. She was given a standard response to questions about race discrimination in admissions. MIT definitely did not have quotas or different standards for white versus black applicants. In the spring, however, she sat at the big table with stacks of folders, one for each applicant. A collaborative process terminated with about 1,500 folders in an “Admit” pile. The director of admissions asked “How many black students did we admit?” She didn’t like the answer and said “Pull 50 black students from the Reject pile and add them to Admit.” Our young friend later asked “Doesn’t this mean we’re using a quota?” The answer turned out to be “no.”

Related 2: A programmer friend in Silicon Valley said “Lawyers always come up as some of the least happy workers [Forbes], but programming is an even worse job. It’s just that programmers can get into the field faster and quit once they realize how bad it is. Lawyers, on the other hand, get trapped by three years of law school. It is too late for them to quit by the time they find out what working as a lawyer is like.”

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