More Newport Beach coast helicopter flight photos (and some masketology)

by philg

A few more photos of how the folks who say that they want to end economic inequality are living, from a Robinson R44 flight out of KSNA (Orange County Airport) up to Long Beach and then back down the coast to Dana Point before returning to refuel and then land (with a certain amount of fear and terror) on a rooftop adjacent to the airport.

I’d love to know what drugs the architect of the roof in the last photo was on!

If we ignore the water shortages, California does seem like a great place for golf. It doesn’t matter how cold the water is if the plan is to use the water only for decoration while trying to hit some balls:

Here are some folks who’ve probably figured out a way to avoid whatever new taxes Gavin Newsom might cook up (183 days/year in the Jackson, Wyoming house, for example?):

Unfortunate (termite treatment tent) and fortunate (personal oceanfront golf course?):

A lawn bowling court for communities of color?

Some hotels that could be turned into migrant shelters if Californians were willing to deliver on what they say are human rights:

Housing is a human right, but it’s also a human right to have a beach house and a yacht, which is why tax rates on California’s wealthy elites can’t be raised to pay for the housing that is supposedly a human right:

As in the previous post, the equipment used for the above photos is simple: Robinson R44, left front door removed, iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Let’s also have a look at some other photos from the trip. I saw three CyberTrucks in various parking lots in a 12-hour period:

For Californians to save the planet with these enormous vehicles will require the output of three continuously running steel mills.

The most expensive space in the mostly-empty office building where I was working is rented by a divorce litigator:

CVS in Irvine has to keep the deodorant locked up:

At SNA on the way back to Florida, I found a Follower of Science wearing an N95 mask over a full beard, an always-delightful scene, albeit contrary to the 3M instructions:

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Bring back betting on dog racing with stipulation that they have to be family dogs?

by philg

Happy International Dog Day.

Florida outlawed wagering on dog racing at the end of 2020, which effectively closed all of the dog tracks. The rationale for the ban was that the greyhounds who race professionally are treated cruelly, e.g., living in cages. Dogs love to run, though. I wonder if it would make more sense to allow gambling on dog racing, with classes organized by breed, so long as each dog lives in a standard family pet environment (no more than one dog per human household member, for example). Mindy the Crippler could compete in the Vicious Retriever 9-12 years category, for example, and would be thrilled to chase a rabbit. I would bet on her!

This might fall into the same category as my desire to see a Honda Odyssey minivan as an Indy 500 or Formula 1 pace car.

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ChatGPT 4o tackles the challenge of AC ducts sweating in an attic

by philg

The latest and greatest Florida houses are designed with closed cell spray foam insulation underneath the roof. This has the disadvantage that roof leaks are difficult to pinpoint, since the foam prevents the water from dripping directly down underneath the part of the roof that has failed, but seals the house against humidity because any attic space essentially becomes part of the air-conditioned and dehumidified internal space of the house.

Our house, sadly, dates to 2003. We thus have AC ducts in unconditioned attic spaces, which seems to work fine on the ground floor, but when we poke our heads up into the attic we find that it is moderately hot (85F) and extremely humid (80-85 percent relative humidity). The attic has soffit vents all around, which seem to do a good job of preventing super hot temps from developing, but they also allow humidity to intrude.

Current Florida code requires ducts insulated to R-8 inside unconditioned spaces. We have R-6 ducts. The air coming out of an air handler is typically about 20 degrees colder than the thermostat setting and we’ve measured about 52 degrees at a ceiling register. So let’s say that the duct temp is 50 degrees.

The Interweb doesn’t seem to have a simple formula for determining the outside temp of an R-6 duct given the inside temp. ChatGPT 4o, however, comes up with one:

Notice that, with this formula, the outside of the duct gets colder and colder with increased R value. A perfectly insulated duct, for example, would have an outside temperature exactly equal to the inside temp, a very curious result!

New prompt:

What if we increase the duct insulation to R-30? What would the outside temperature of the duct be? (the air inside the duct is still at 50 degrees)

Sheetrock has an R value of about 0.5, supposedly. Let’s see what happens when we plug that in:

What if we reduce the duct insulation to an R value of 0.5? What would the outside surface temperature of the duct then be?

Our future AI overlord has determined that putting cold air inside a duct will raise the temperature of the outside of the duct above the ambient temperature of the attic.

What is the solution to the sweating duct problem, you might ask? A quarter-baked approach, from the energy and building envelope expert who did our Manual J calculation:

You probably have too much ventilation in your attic. I had a similar problem in my house. I blocked off more than half of the soffit vents. The temperature in the attic went up a few degrees while the humidity came down dramatically because not as much humid air was coming in from the outside.

(He didn’t say this explicitly, but I am guessing that the relatively dry attic was due to the attic being exposed to dried-out cooled-off conditioned air from the conditioned space below.)

The half-baked approach:

Install a dehumidifier with a fresh air inlet on one or more of the house AC systems. Each dehumidifier can bring in at least 100 cfm of fresh air, thus creating a positive pressure within the conditioned spaces of the house. The result will be conditioned air being pushed up into the attic and, eventually, being exhausted through the soffit vents. Expensively dehumidified air goes out of the house via the attic instead of humid air coming into the attic. A dehumidifier consumes about 700 watts of power, so this will consume about $1000 per year in electricity at 15 cents/kWh (per dehumidifier).

The fully-baked approach:

  1. Remove all ceilings on the top floor of the house and the fiberglass insulation on top of those ceilings.
  2. Bring in a spray foam company to block off the soffit vents and spray foam over them and the entire underside of the roof
  3. Have the AC contractor put some small supplies and a return into the attic so that there is nowhere for humid air to hide (humid air is lighter than dry air so it will tend to rise to the top of a house)
  4. Have a drywall contractor come back to put new ceilings up
  5. Paint

Circling back to artificial intelligence, as embodied by the latest paid ChatGPT model (4o)… I’m impressed with how confident and erudite the machine sounds when making these simple physics calculations!

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Diversity goes to space (but can’t get back home)

by philg

“NASA Decides to Bring [$4.3 billion Boeing] Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew” (nasa.gov):

NASA will return Boeing’s Starliner to Earth without astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the spacecraft, the agency announced Saturday. The uncrewed return allows NASA and Boeing to continue gathering testing data on Starliner during its upcoming flight home, while also not accepting more risk than necessary for its crew.

This isn’t unconditionally great news for the astronauts. From The Sky Below (book by an astronaut):

my multiple spaceflights and spacewalks mean the likelihood of spinal trouble is almost as inevitable as an overloaded, rickety Jenga tower toppling over into a ragged heap. In space, the spine straightens and the intervertebral discs swell when not being compressed by gravity,

(the author spent about 8 weeks total in space)

Let’s check in with Boeing…

Each member of our global team brings something uniquely valuable to Boeing, and we grow stronger when everyone has an opportunity to contribute. Boeing remains committed to creating a culture of inclusion that attracts and retains the world’s top talent, and inspires every teammate to do their best work and grow their careers.

It turns out, though, that not all members of the global team are equally valuable. Black team members are apparently more valuable than non-Black ones. Boeing’s “Aspirations and Progress” section sets out “Increase the Black representation rate in the U.S. by 20%.” as the number one goal to achieve by 2025. Lower down on the page: “Fair360, a world leader in using data to assess companies’ commitment to inclusion, ranked Boeing 9th out of more than 160 companies reviewed.”

The “2024 Boeing Sustainability & Social Impact Report”:

We value diverse perspectives and continue to see more women and U.S. racial and ethnic minorities represented at nearly every level of the company compared with a year ago.

The company’s “Allies spreading awareness” page:

Their stories are part of a series celebrating the perspectives and accomplishments from LGBTQIA+ employees and allies across Boeing.

When her oldest child, Asher, recently came out as non-binary and embraced they/them/their pronouns, the family’s main priority was to be supportive and learn as much as they could about gender identity.

Elizabeth also looked into health insurance benefits and was able to connect Asher with Boeing’s Gender Affirmation Team, which provided information and resources to help Asher and family navigate through the transition process.

For Maggie Duckworth, advocacy for the transgender community is also a key component of her life. … The software engineer met her partner more than 20 years ago at an anime convention. The two bonded over the animated art where gender fluid characters were commonly a part of storylines. Later, Maggie’s partner, Ryn, came out as non-binary and now uses the pronouns they/them/theirs. “For a long time they were struggling with defining who they were,” Maggie said. “Then Ryn realized that they were (gender) neutral and we both felt relieved because we had found a definition.”

“I want to be an example for women in aerospace”:

One of [Chantel’s] main objectives in this role is to increase the representation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers—a goal of personal significance.

If a person who identifies as a “woman” works at Boeing, one of the biggest tasks for which she is paid by Boeing shareholders is getting more “women” to go into STEM careers, regardless of whether those careers are at Boeing?

The most exciting part:

For the first time in her 8-year career, Chantel, a woman of color, reports to a director who is also a woman of color. Chantel believes she can support continued progress by ensuring other women in STEM see fulfilling career paths for themselves.

Her efforts help support our equity, diversity and inclusion commitment. In 2021, women’s representation at Boeing increased to 23.2% in the United States and 24.6% internationally. And representation for women of color at Boeing has increased at executive levels and throughout the company.

So the news isn’t all bad with Boeing. Diversity is up substantially year-over-year both right now and that was also true back in 2021.

The company’s most recent “feature stories” about the product:

Related:

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Favorite air show acts at Oshkosh 2024 (Canadians and drones)

by philg

Me, in 2018:

Least favorite airshow act: a synchronized drone array. These stayed pretty far from the crowd so it was essentially a bunch of lights that could have been replicated with a big TV (it is possible to project 3D onto 2D!). Unless the drones are all around a crowd I don’t understand why a 3D array of drones is more compelling to watch than a big TV (or your phone held up close to your eyes).

This year, however, the drones were integrated with the fireworks show and added a lot. The crowd for the Wednesday night air show was insane. Get there early with a group of friends and stake out a space near show center (Boeing Plaza) if you don’t want to stand through the entire show or view it from an angle (if you arrive at 7:30 or 8 pm for the 8 pm show the only spaces left will be to the north or south). There was a “Peace the Old-fashioned Way” opening with the Avro Lancaster (one of two airworthy examples worldwide; lock up your dams if you see one) and both of the world’s airworthy B-29s. Nate Hammond shooting fireworks out of the DHC-1 Chipmunk closed the show.

A few pictures of the Lancaster and B-29s while parked:

(It is unclear if Japanese visitors appreciate the cartoon character on a machine that was extremely destructive even before the atomic bomb, e.g., during a March 9, 1945 raid on Tokyo.)

One interesting act this year was the Canadian demonstration CF-18 team. “I’ve never seen an F-18 do anything like that,” said a friend who is an accomplished aerobatic pilot. Caleb “Tango” Robert mostly flew slowly and tumbled the aircraft in maneuvers that one is more accustomed to seeing from Extra and Gamebird pilots. Where the U.S. Navy flies the same type of plane as fast and loud as possible, the Royal Canadian Air Force, celebrating its 100th birthday this year, takes a more subtle approach.

The Snowbirds also showed up and played Elton John while doing gentle aerobatics in the 1966 Tutors (9!). Why not Celine Dion?

The Wisconsin National Guard put on a show that was the opposite of the Canadians’ mostly peaceful displays. They brought Blackhawk helicopters packed with troops, howitzers on the ground (“Let’s hope that Alec Baldwin isn’t behind one of those 155mm guns,” I said), and an F-22 and F-35 flying overhead in formation with a tanker. Much drama for the kids (we’re informed that kids are gentle peaceful creatures, but if kids were allowed to run governments I think that nearly all disputes would be settled via strategic bombing).

Bill Stein tossed around his Edge 540 and Mike Goulian tumbled in his Extra 330SC.

Here’s a video of relative newcomer Philipp Steinbach in the Gamebird:

I skipped the show on the one day that the Italian Tricolori team was flying. Here’s a video:

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S.C. Johnson Frank Lloyd Wright tour

by philg

Another installment in the series “Stuff to do on the way to or from Oshkosh.”

Racine, Wisconsin is not just a center of arts and crafts. It’s corporate headquarters for S.C. Johnson, a family-run company that commissioned some of the largest Frank Lloyd Wright projects ever built. As part of the company’s commitment to the community, they’ve been running free public tours since the FLW HQ opened in 1939 (best to go on a weekend because more of the spaces are open; photography isn’t permitted indoors).

Visitors are welcome in a transplanted 1964 World’s Fair pavilion:

The pavilion showed To Be Alive!, which won an Academy Award for short documentary (one of the three screens can be seen on YouTube) and today also shows Carnaúba: A Son’s Memoir, which chronicles a 1998 recreation of a 1935 trip in a Sikorsky S-38 amphib.

After checking in at the pavilion, you walk by a couple of statues of Elizabeth Warren’s family before entering the main building.

You then enter the Research Tower, a 150-foot-high monument to architectural incompetence:

Every part of the Research Tower felt cramped (FLW was short and loved to make tall people uncomfortable) and a single narrow staircase provides the only form of emergency egress. S.C. Johnson limited the usage of the building almost immediately due to concerns about fire risk and the local fire marshal in the 1980s issued an order making the building illegal to occupy. Fortunately, real estate in Racine, Wisconsin is not so valuable that it is imperative to tear down this white (red brick) elephant.

S.C. Johnson apparently wasn’t soured on starchitecture and chose the UK’s Norman Foster to design an employee cafeteria/gym/museum/etc. The replica Sikorsky S-38 hangs in the lobby. In this building you learn more about the company’s five CEOs, all from within the family and all with technical experience or training (the current CEO has a PhD in physics). One inspiring quote from Sam Johnson, CEO N-1, was engraved into the 2010 Norman Foster building and says that every person has a “spirit of adventure”. Fair to say that coronapanic proved that the typical human in his/her/zir/their 20s is precisely adventurous enough to cower indoors for a year or two, leaving his/her/zir/their apartment only to get whatever injections the local public health officials have dreamed up?

The Johnson family loved to fly. Sam, for example, seems to have had a Cessna Citation Jet and was also a big supporter of EAA. Flying down to South America and setting up an American-style research lab in the jungle worked about as well for S.C. Johnson in 1935 as it did for Ford in 1928 (see Book review: Fordlandia). Here’s the current CEO’s pilot certificate from the FAA’s web site:

(Having a Private certificate with a jet type rating is truly the mark of a rich person!)

In the film about the 1998 trip in the Sikorsky replica, Sam Johnson is candid about his struggles with alcoholism. Folks who believe in the power of genetics won’t be surprised to learn that his mother was an alcoholic. The typical alcoholic is soon the target of a divorce lawsuit: “The incidence of marital dissolution from W1 to W2 was 15.5% for those with a past-12-month [alcohol use disorder; “AUD”] at W1, compared to 4.8% among those with no AUD” (source). Either for love of Sam or love of the family fortune that could be accessed only via continued marriage, Sam’s wife got him into treatment at the Mayo Clinic rather than following the well-worn path to the local family court.

Jet pilots should be grateful to S.C. Johnson for all of the cans of Pledge that have been used to clean windows. New Englanders who enjoy the woods should be grateful for all of the cans of OFF! that are required during the mosquito-infested summer and tick-infested fall and spring. Our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters who shave their beards should be grateful for S.C. Johnson’s invention of Edge shaving cream (something the Followers of Science apparently reject, since they are often seen wearing an N95 mask over a full beard, contrary to the instructions that 3M includes with the mask). All of us can be grateful for Windex!

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NYT versus WSJ coverage of Yusef Salaam at the Democratic National Convention

by philg

My favorite article today illustrating the magic of politics, from Axios:

Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian Democrats attending the Democratic National Convention agree on at least one thing: Kamala Harris is on their side. … Pro-Israel Democrats who spoke to Axios at the convention rejected the notion that there is any daylight between Harris and Biden on the issue. … Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the pro-Palestinian “uncommitted” movement, said he is “hearing from a lot of folks that are closer to her that she personally is sympathetic, maybe even more than other presidents we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

Let’s turn our attention to another example of how humans on the same planet can also dwell in parallel universes…

“Members of ‘Central Park 5’ Say Trump Is Too Dangerous for Second Term” (NYT, yesterday):

The five Black and Latino teenagers accused in the attack — Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson and Antron McCray, known as the Central Park Five — served years in prison before being cleared in 2002 by DNA evidence and the confession of another man.

“[Trump] called us animals. He spent $85,000 on a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for our execution,” Mr. Wise said. “We were innocent kids, but we served a total of 41 years in prison.”

Asked in 2019 at the White House why he would not apologize in spite of the exonerations, Mr. Trump said, “They admitted their guilt.” The men have said that police officers coerced them into falsely confessing to the attack at the time.

Yusef Salaam was completely innocent, in other words. He and his friends were cleared and exonerated.

In another NYT article on the same glorious event, Yusef Salaam is “an Innocent Man”:

Chicago is the perfect place for an entirely innocent man who has been wrongly accused of a serious crime since that’s where vascular surgeon Dr. Richard Kimble was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death (documentary film).

Let’s check into the alternative universe of the Wall Street Journal circa 2019… “Netflix’s False Story of the Central Park Five” (by former prosecutor Linda Fairstein):

At about 9 p.m. April 19, 1989, a large group of young men gathered on the corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue for the purpose of robbing and beating innocent people in Central Park. There were more than 30 rioters, and the woman known as the “Central Park jogger,” Trisha Meili, was not their only victim. Eight others were attacked, including two men who were beaten so savagely that they required hospitalization for head injuries.

That a sociopath named Matias Reyes confessed in 2002 to the rape of Ms. Meili, and that the district attorney consequently vacated the charges against the five after they had served their sentences, has led some of these reporters and filmmakers to assume the prosecution had no basis on which to charge the five suspects in 1989.

Ms. DuVernay depicts suspects Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise being arrested on the street. In fact, two detectives went to the door of the Salaam apartment on the night of the 20th because both had been named by other rioters as attackers in multiple assaults.

Ms. DuVernay would have you believe the only evidence against the suspects was their allegedly forced confessions. That is not true. There is, for example, the African-American woman who testified at the trial—and again during the 2002 re-investigation—that when Korey Wise called her brother, he told her that he had held the jogger down and felt her breasts while others attacked her. There were blood stains and dirt on clothing of some of the five. And then there are the statements of more than a dozen of the other kids who participated in the park rampage. Although none of the others admitted joining in the rape of Trisha Meili, they admitted attacking male victims and a couple on a tandem bike, and each of them named some or all of the five as joining them.

Nor does the film note that Mr. Salaam took the stand at his trial, represented by a lawyer chosen and paid for by his mother, and testified that he had gone into the park carrying a 14-inch metal pipe—the same type of weapon that was used to bludgeon both a male schoolteacher and Ms. Meili. Mr. Reyes’s confession changed none of this. He admitted being the man whose DNA had been left in the jogger’s body and on her clothing, but the two juries that heard those facts knew the main assailant in the rape had not been caught. The five were charged as accomplices, as persons “acting in concert” with each other and with the then-unknown man who raped the jogger, not as those who actually performed the act. In their original confessions—later recanted—they admitted to grabbing her breasts and legs, and two of them admitted to climbing on top of her and simulating intercourse. Semen was found on the inside of their clothing, corroborating those confessions.

Mr. Reyes’s confession, DNA match and claim that he acted alone required that the rape charges against the five be vacated. I agreed with that decision, and still do. But the other charges, for crimes against other victims, should not have been vacated. Nothing Mr. Reyes said exonerated these five of those attacks. And there was certainly more than enough evidence to support those convictions of first-degree assault, robbery, riot and other charges.

In the world of the NYT (and Netflix), Yusef Salaam is “cleared”, “exonerated”, and “innocent”. As of 2019, by contrast, the Wall Street Journal characterized Mr. Salaam as at least guilty of “first-degree assault, robbery, riot and other charges”.

Where it gets interesting is the Wall Street Journal’s world of 2024. “Central Park Five Reunite to Denounce Trump” (WSJ, yesterday):

Five men who were wrongfully convicted as teenagers for a brutal attack on a jogger in Central Park took the stage …

Among the men was Yusef Salaam, who last year was elected to represent Harlem in the New York City Council. “He wanted us dead. Today, we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed, and DNA proved it,” Salaam said.

The misalignment has been eliminated and Americans of all political persuasions can agree that Yusef Salaam was and is a model citizen who happened to be out for a mostly peaceful evening stroll (pipe in hand?) in Central Park on a night when nine people were attacked.

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Jewish Democrats in Illinois

by philg

Who’s been following the Democrats’ convention in Illinois? What have you learned? Here’s my favorite part:

I think the tweet to which I am responding is inaccurate, incidentally. The Obamas have at least four houses, not three, though one of them is a house in Chicago that might not qualify as a “mansion”. So my response:

“What do I have three mansions?” asked the expert on not consuming more than she needs, “Because I couldn’t afford four.”

perhaps should be

“What do I have four mansions?” asked [Michelle Obama,] the expert on not consuming more than she needs, “Because I couldn’t afford five.”

Related… On the way out of Oshkosh in July, I stopped to visit cousins who live in the northern suburbs of Chicago. They consider their biggest enemies to be white American Republicans, with Donald Trump as the worst of the worst. They spontaneously expressed disappointment that Trump hadn’t been killed earlier in July in Pennsylvania and certainly agreed with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris that Trump was an existential threat to America, Americans, and American democracy. They were afraid to go into Chicago due to crime (see Keeping the faith in Chicago for my report on the 2023 visit), but don’t blame the Democrats who run the state and city for what they perceive as a decline. They refuse to go to a Democrat-run city in Texas where a grandchild lives because they’re afraid of encountering a Republican there. The synagogue around the corner from their house has the following sign on the front lawn:

They had been all-in for the not-senile-at-all Joe Biden a week prior to our visit, but were all-in on Kamala Harris while we shared coffee (outdoors, of course, because their level of coronapanic is still at least Code Yellow; they were refraining from seeing an elderly parent, even outdoors, because there had been some recent positive COVID tests in his senior community).

What I found most interesting was that the groundswell of Democrat support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and the destruction of Israel hadn’t shaken their faith in white native-born Republicans as their biggest and most dangerous enemies. As we got closer to Chicago, the percentage of people wearing Islamic headgear steadily increased. Yet these senior citizen Jews didn’t see the young rapidly growing Muslim population of the Midwest as a sign that Jews would one day be as unwelcome in Illinois as they are in the typical Muslim country. (If present demographic trends continue, their neighborhood will become majority Muslim. How would the neighbors feel about having to drive/walk by the above Rainbow Flag with Star of David while on their way to the mosque? See “‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags” (Guardian) for a story about Hamtramck, Michigan)

Separately, speaking of coronapanic, here are a couple of photos from the O’Hare airport:

We see the apparently young and healthy wearing masks. We see a Follower of Science wearing an N95-style mask over his/her/zir/their full beard, contrary to the manufacturer’s instructions. We see a slender youth wearing a basic mask in hopes of avoiding an infection that kills obese Americans at a median age of 82.

Related:

  • “New Study Looks into Strengths, Needs of Muslims in Illinois” (WTTW, 2022): Illinois is home to more than 350,000 Muslims. According to a new study, that makes the state No. 1 in the country for Muslims per capita. … Researchers found that Muslims in Illinois were the youngest and most diverse faith community in the state and the country. The sample in the study were racially and ethnically diverse. About half of the sample was born outside of the U.S. and a sizable number speak languages other than English at home. … Researchers also found that Muslims in Illinois were also highly politically active and civically engaged. 75% of the sample is registered to vote with an additional 16% expressing an intention to register.
  • “For Convention Goers in Chicago, the Issue of Migrants Comes Into Full View” (New York Times): Around downtown, migrants are not sleeping overnight on the sidewalks, they say, and some are staying in hotels that have been converted into shelters. A large number appear to be living in apartments that they obtained with government housing assistance, commuting downtown each day to sell candy and earn cash. Very few have English skills or official work authorization, leaving them in a limbo of illegal street vending that is often ignored by police officers. “It’s a totally different look for downtown,” said Annie Gomberg, a volunteer who works with migrants. “We’re not used to seeing mothers and children standing on the street selling candy and water.” … “We have had issues that involved having a lot of single males without a whole lot to do outside,” he said. “So we certainly have gotten lots of complaints involving drug use, catcalling, as well as some prostitution.”
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What good are the AI coprocessors in the latest desktop CPUs for users who have standard graphics cards?

by philg

Intel is supposedly putting an AI coprocessor into its latest Arrow Lake desktop CPUs, but these don’t the 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) minimum performance to run Windows 11 Copilot+. Why is valuable chip real estate being taken up by this mental midget, relative to a standard graphics card?

“Intel’s Arrow Lake-S won’t be an AI powerhouse — 13 TOPS NPU is only slightly better than Meteor Lake, much less than Lunar Lake” (Tom’s Hardware, July 9, 2024):

Arrow Lake-S will be the first Intel desktop architecture with a neural processing unit (NPU), but it won’t be as fast as people might expect. @Jaykihn on X reports that Arrow Lake-S will include an NPU that is only slightly more powerful than Meteor Lake’s NPU, featuring just 13 TOPS of AI performance.

Having an NPU in a desktop environment is virtually useless; the main job of an NPU is to provide ultra-high AI performance with a low impact on laptop battery life. Desktops can also be used more often than laptops in conjunction with discrete GPUs, which provide substantially more AI performance than the best NPUs from Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm. For instance, Nvidia’s RTX 40 series graphics cards are capable of up to 1,300 TOPS of AI performance.

The bottom-of-the-line Nvidia RTX 4060 has a claimed performance of “242 AI TOPS” and is available on a card for less than 300 Bidies. Is the idea that a lot of desktop machines are sold without a GPU and that Microsoft and others will eventually find a way to “do AI” with however much NPU power is available within the Arrow Lake CPU? (Software that evolved to require less hardware would be a historic first!)

AMD already has a desktop CPU with distinct NPU and GPU sections, the Ryzen 8000G.

AMD Ryzen 8000G Series processors bring together some of the best, cutting-edge AMD technologies into one unique package; high-performance processing power, intense graphics capabilities, and the first neural processing unit (NPU) on a desktop PC processor.

Based on the powerful “Zen 4” architecture, these new processors offer up to eight cores and 16 threads, 24MB of total cache, and AMD Radeon™ 700M Series graphics. Combining all of this into one chip enables new possibilities for customers, in gaming, work, and much more; without the need to purchase a discrete processor and graphics card, customers can keep their budget lower, while enjoying outstanding performance.

“The Ryzen 7 8700G leads the pack …The processor has a combined AI throughput of 39 TOPS, with 16 TOPS from the NPU.” (source) If the 39 TOPS number is correct, it seems unfortunate given the Windows 11 Copilot+ demand for 40 TOPS.

Why not just build more GPU power and let it be used for graphics or AI depending on what programs are running? The big advantage of the NPU seems to be in power efficiency (source), but why does that matter for a desktop computer? Even at California or Maskachusetts electricity rates, the savings converted to dollars can’t be significant.

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Vuichard no bueno for escaping vortex ring state

by philg

Less that two years ago, I wrote about how Robinson Helicopter was promoting the Vuichard technique for escaping from vortex ring state (see R.I.P. Frank Robinson (and a few notes from the safety course that he loved)). While doing recurrent training in Irvine, California at Helistream, I learned that Robinson has reverted to the previously standard technique.

What’s less than ideal about Vuichard, which results in recovery with remarkably little altitude loss? “Every other helicopter emergency procedure involves lowering collective,” responded my instructor, “so the Vuichard technique becomes an exception that is going to be tough to execute in a real-world emergency where you’re startled. Also, what if you’re settling with power because you don’t have enough power and you misidentify a vortex ring state? Then adding collective via Vuichard will immediately lead to blade stall.”

He explained that there have been at least a couple of fatal accidents during training in which the necessary counterintuitive heroism wasn’t summoned for the Vuichard technique. Thus, the new school is back to the old school.

(I have never personally gotten into vortex ring state (sometimes called “settling with power”) other than during my work as a flight instructor or while a student myself. It can be avoided by being careful during steep approaches, especially with respect to not doing a downwind steep approach.)

In addition to practicing emergencies, we managed to get in some flying up and down the coast. Here are a few snapshots.

An Nvidia branch office receptionist’s new weekend boat:

An oil platform off Long Beach cleverly disguised, when viewed from the water, as an island encircled by palm trees:

Where your tax dollars went to die (a U.S. Navy littoral combat ship)

A Tesla charging facility:

The Balboa Pier:

What your (3rd or 4th) house might look like if you and all of your friends and neighbors xpressed a passionate commitment to reducing economic inequality:

(All of the above photos were taken with an iPhone 14 Pro Max after removing the left front door of the helicopter.)

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