Burt Rutan’s five heroes and Florida real estate development

by philg

We showed up late for a Burt Rutan talk at Oshkosh and found an overflow crowd learning about, after a presentation of Rutan’s latest aerodynamic thinking, five of Rutan’s heroes:

One thing that I learned from the talk is that Glenn Curtiss, the father of naval aviation and a constant target of the Wright Brothers for patent litigation (the Wrights claimed that Curtiss’s ailerons, now standard on virtually every airplane, were an infringing variation of the Wrights’ wing warping method; this held up progress in American aviation for a decade), was a major participant in the 1920s Florida development boom. From Wikipedia:

Curtiss and his family moved to Florida in the 1920s, where he founded 18 corporations, served on civic commissions, and donated extensive land and water rights. He co-developed the city of Hialeah with James Bright and developed the cities of Opa-locka and Miami Springs, where he built a family home, known variously as the Miami Springs Villas House, Dar-Err-Aha, MSTR No. 2, or Glenn Curtiss House. The Glenn Curtiss House, after years of disrepair and frequent vandalism, is being refurbished to serve as a museum in his honor.

His frequent hunting trips into the Florida Everglades led to a final invention, the Adams Motor “Bungalo”, a forerunner of the modern recreational vehicle trailer (named after his business partner and half-brother, G. Carl Adams). Curtiss later developed this into a larger, more elaborate fifth-wheel vehicle, which he manufactured and sold under the name Aerocar. Shortly before his death, he designed a tailless aircraft with a V-shaped wing and tricycle landing gear that he hoped could be sold in the price range of a family car.

(see also Bubble in the Sun book: even those with the best information can’t predict a crash)

Notice that Werner von Braun, a huge booster of women in aviation via his admiration for Hanna Reitsch (see Hanna Reitsch after Germany was defeated (including her work with Amnesty International) for how von Braun and President John F. Kennedy had a shared love for the Flugkapitän) makes the list. Also Elon Musk for doing what everyone said couldn’t be done (von Braun didn’t have to worry about the budget) and Ed Heinemann for his work on attack aircraft. Pioneering female aeronautical engineer Kelly Johnson, of course, is #1 for her work on the P-38, U-2, and SR-71.

The speaker with the largest ambition was John Bossard of TurboRocken, an open-source engine design that replaces the heavy high-pressure tanks of a conventional rocket with a spinning nozzle that runs a pump to generate the high pressure required for efficient propulsion. See US Patent 9,650,997 for some additional detail. Bossard says that EAA members should build “spaceplanes” at home. Does that mean going up against Rutan’s heroes in getting payloads into orbit? No! That requires not only pushing up but also flinging out in order to escape Earth’s gravity. The homebuilt solution can just go up and down like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin or Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. What about the intense heat of reentering the atmosphere? Bossard says that you don’t need fancy heat shields if you can generate enough drag, maybe simply by deploying a long streamer to change the ballistic coefficient.

EAA throws a nice party (“Oshkosh”!), but it doesn’t do much to support collaborative development of advanced technology such as what Bossard is proposing. Elon Musk has shown that access to space can be achieved for as little as 1/30th of what NASA might spend to do a project, but 1/30th of a government budget is still far beyond what most individuals can spend.

We enjoyed a series of talks titled “The Wonderful Warthog”, all delivered by veteran pilots (“Hog Drivers”). These included a good grounding in the aircraft design, including of the various weapons, and then a presentation of tactics.

Tough to get the kids up for an 8:30 am talk, so I missed this one:

But I did make it to the NGPA booth:

Also at the intersection of pilot identity and aviation…

In the tradition of Are women the new children? it looks as though Cathy Babis flew around Australia with a high-time male seaplane pilot in a Searey. This is a single-pilot aircraft owned and flown by David Geers, which means that Cathy Babis was baggage from a regulatory point of view:

She is new to seaplane flying, earning her commercial pilot seaplane certificate in September of 2020 with the Missouri River as her water runway near her home in St. Louis, MO, USA. … He has been a pilot since 1980 and has flown his Searey amphibious airplane over 1000 hours since purchasing it in 2010. He is past president of the Seaplane Pilots Association of Australia and current committee member. He is passionate about flying, especially seaplanes.

Our celebrated heroine flew a seaplane 110 years after Henri Fabre designed, built, and flew the world’s first practical seaplane (Fabre inspired Glenn Curtiss’s 1911 Model E, which is more familiar to Americans since we like to believe that we invented everything).

I wish that EAA would make videos of the forum talks. There are a lot of great ones and Burt Rutan isn’t going to be around forever. I missed his “Why Beech Did Not Replace the King Airs With Starships” talk and wish I could watch it right now! If a principal mission of the nonprofit organization is to educate, how can EAA let all of this great information be lost? Notice that the word “education” appears multiple times on the 2023 Form 990:

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How does a pig butcher have an 11-year-old Facebook account?

by philg

Here’s one of my recent Facebook posts (from Stuart, Florida, recently named “Best Coastal Small Town” by USA Today):

Then there is the standard-for-Facebook-these-days pig butcher at the bottom:

Hi! Philip I noticed you popped up on my social media feed recently and we seem to have a lot of the same interests. Btw do we know each other? Hopefully we can build some positive interactions here!

Here’s the young lady (URL: https://www.facebook.com/amiana.muah) who shares my passions:

(Does it make sense to quote a famous venereal disease sufferer on the subject of “the sensual life”?)

What I find interesting is “Joined July 2013”. How does a scammer have an 11-year-old Facebook account? Amiana Muah (based on the URL) had an account in 2013 and his/her/zir/their credentials were stolen? It doesn’t seem plausible that a scammer would sign up for a Facebook account in 2013 and not use it for 10 years (it looks as though “Anne Graf”‘s posts started on May 1, 2023. We are informed that Meta leads the world in AI, but hasn’t been able to figure out that this account is fake after almost 1.5 years of posts).

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Guilty Creatures: a book about how to have fun in Florida

by philg

For your Florida bookshelf: Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita Brottman (British-born, resident in Manhattan, and a professor in Maryland so I’m not sure how she researched this book).

The characters in this true-crime drama have a Florida lifestyle that is 100 percent opposite mine. Instead of fighting with their HVAC equipment they’re out at clubs, concerts, fishing, hunting, mountain biking, etc. When there is nothing great to watch on TV, strippers and prostitutes can add zest to an evening. Things get a little complicated when a woman figures out that the best way to extend and enhance her lifestyle is for her husband to die. The author reminds us that fewer than half of murders in the U.S. are ever solved (about half of reported murders are “cleared” (state-sponsored NPR), but you have to consider that murders successfully disguised as accidents (“alligator involvement” in this case) aren’t part of the statistic).

I want to read some more books by Professor Dr. Brottman, D. Phil. Maybe I should start with this one:

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EAA AirVenture 2024 (“Oshkosh”) Report 2

by philg

Let’s open Installment #2 of my report on the Oshkosh 2024 experience with weird aircraft seen…

At the seaplane base, an electric Beaver:

(Supposedly arrived from Vancouver by truck rather than in 10-minute hops from Tesla Supercharger to Tesla Supercharger.)

A couple of times, we walked by the Beechcraft Starship, in which high hopes, a proven Pratt engine, and Burt Rutan’s design genius worked together to produce something that was worth less than the two engines still in boxes from Pratt. Approach and arrival…

Wikipedia says that six were airworthy as of 2020. We went back to take another look towards sunset:

Some more fun Rutan stuff in the EAA Museum:

Here’s a Hawker Harrier derivative, still serving in the active duty U.S. Marine Corps (supposedly retiring next year):

Never forget Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., in which a plaintiff attempted to take Pepsi up on an advertised offer for one of these not-to-easy-to-fly planes:

It was found that the advertisement featuring the jet did not constitute an offer under the Restatement (Second) of Contracts. … “The callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents’ car, much less the prized aircraft of the United States Marine Corps. … The teenager’s comment that flying a Harrier Jet to school ‘sure beats the bus’ evinces an improbably insouciant attitude toward the relative difficulty and danger of piloting a fighter plane in a residential area. … No school would provide landing space for a student’s fighter jet, or condone the disruption the jet’s use would cause. … In light of the Harrier Jet’s well-documented function in attacking and destroying surface and air targets, armed reconnaissance and air interdiction, and offensive and defensive anti-aircraft warfare, depiction of such a jet as a way to get to school in the morning is clearly not serious even if, as plaintiff contends, the jet is capable of being acquired ‘in a form that eliminates [its] potential for military use.'”

I’m not sure how to characterize this one:

American transportation then and now…

Dyke Delta “Whitehouse Limousine”:

Down to the basics:

A Rotax-powered helicopter (with T-bar cyclic):

A 1936 Stinson promoting the health benefits of a 5-cent Pepsi:

Adjusted for official CPI, that’s equivalent to $1.14 in today’s mini-dollars so you might say that Pepsi is cheaper because it is possible to buy a can at Walmart for less than $1.14. However, I think Pepsi in 1936 was likely served at a drugstore counter where people could socialize with friends and, therefore, the present-day comparable is perhaps what a soda would cost at a fast-food restaurant (though, of course, the modern soda is also much larger).

A scale replica of the P-38 by the Brown Arch:

If “buy a shotgun” doesn’t give you an adequate feeling of security, here’s the Home Defense Edition of the Cessna T-37… the A-37:

Amphibious campers:

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EAA AirVenture 2024 (“Oshkosh”) Report 1

by philg

Oshkosh is more of a social gathering than a trade show, but people still ask “What did you see that was new?” Let’s get that out of the way, then….

Skyryse has a fly-by-wire system that can turn the $1 million Robinson R66 turbine-powered helicopter into a machine with at least some of the intelligence of a $500 drone. I booked and they confirmed via text an appointment to fly their simulator, but when I showed up they said that their schedule was full and sent me away without offering an alternative date-time. I hope that they’re better organized when dealing with the FAA certification authorities!

Champion resurrected what is apparently an old project: a bolt-on electronic magneto that is powered via the same mechanism that powers traditional failure-prone mechanical mags (Avweb). They’re saying that it will take two years to get it FAA-certified for four-cylinder engines and then an unspecified additional amount of time to get it certified for six-cylinder engines. We talked to another manufacturer who makes some stuff that you’d think would be straightforward and could earn a blanket approval for a wide range of airframes, but instead requires FAA approval on a per-airframe basis. “Each airframe takes at least six months,” the company’s chief engineer said, “and sometimes an employee tells us that he needs a signature from a more senior employee and, even though the senior employee isn’t doing any substantive review, that takes months.” EAA was so sure that something like this could never be developed that there isn’t any space for it on the Wall of Ignition in the museum:

Just in time for people who identify as “women” and sought-after minorities to have responded to the call for them to get into aviation, the airlines have almost completely stopped hiring. Quite a few had already committed to booths at Oshkosh so they were there to collect contact information for some future date. Due to the rich having gotten so much richer in the past few years, however, NetJets is an exception:

Speaking of celebrating “women”, we met a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who had flown F-4 Phantom jets (“with enough power, even a brick will fly”) onto aircraft carriers at 135 knots. His wife bravely sits right seat as he flies a simple piston-powered aircraft today. For her achievement as a passenger she was gifted with a “WomenVenture” T-shirt and invited to be honored in a dramatic photograph (note the B-52 in the background, which was a big hit with our kids):

The man who went through Marine Corps boot camp and then risked his life every time that he got anywhere near the F-4 received no T-shirt.

The former Confederate Air Force was at the KidVenture area to teach the young that women (WASP ferry pilots) and Black pilots (Tuskegee Airmen) “triumphed over adversity” (unlike Americans who fought in World War II and triumphed over Germany and Japan?):

What else happens at KidVenture? The little ones learn Air Traffic Control, soldering, riveting, etc.

Circling back to those who triumphed over adversity, “Women in Aerospace” are celebrated with a wall-sized poster in the EAA Museum and this was one of the first things that we saw on entering the grounds:

(EAA is passionate about the inclusion of “women”, but not passionate enough to build permanent restrooms around the event grounds and its campgrounds. So the core of EAA AirVenture will always be people who are happy to take care of themselves and their kids for an entire week while using outhouses. (See also U.S. airlines. They say that they want to recruit pilots identifying as “women” but won’t offer the out-and-back-live-at-home lifestyle that Ryanair offers. With the exception of Allegiant, they are limited to recruiting pilots who are happy to be away from their kids for 10-22 days per month.))

Speaking of the museum, if you want to know how I get defriended, here are a couple of images that I posted to Facebook with the captions “COVID-safe aviation” and “Democrats donated a model of Donald Trump’s design for Air Force One if he should be elected for a second term”:

We are informed that children are innocent and kind and become aggressive only after being corrupted by adults. Based on my discussions with children, if they ruled the world’s nations a lot more disputes would be resolved via strategic bombing. This was a great year at Oshkosh for bombers. World War II was represented with two of the two airworthy B-29s, one of the two airworthy Avro Lancasters, and multiple B-25s. The Cold War was represented by a B-52 and a B-1B flying over on a couple of days (triggered the Apple Watch to warn about damaging noise levels; maybe the software should be smart enough to cross-check with airshow NOTAMS?).

Boeing enabled the U.S. to destroy Germany and Japan and threaten Russia with an annihilation of the whole planet via the B-52. What’s the company up to now?

The Boeing Pavilion enabled visitors to design a livery. I did one that combines a rainbow, a trans triangle, and golden retriever fur:

The EAA Museum contains a good quote for why EAA matters:

Here were the primary T shirts of 2024:

The shirt that I wanted to buy, but couldn’t find, is this one from Chinese-owned Continental (on the back of a guy listening to a talk by Burt Rutan, which I’ll cover in a separate post):

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Pre-/Post-Oshkosh Idea: Grohmann Museum (the art of humans at work)

by philg

At least some of the downtown areas of Milwaukee make for a nice stop on the way to or from EAA AirVenture. The Third Ward is a particularly well-done gentrification/re-purposing. If you do decide to make a stop, the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) is home to a four-story museum of paintings and sculpture of humans at work. The Grohmann Museum was funded by Eckhart Grohmann, whose family was expelled from Silesia at the end of World War II (a total of 15 million other ethnic Germans were killed or, with American approval, forcibly displaced).

The tour begins in the rooftop sculpture garden, which contains heroic bronzes:

Here’s a wider view:

Then one heads down a spiral staircase to the paintings and smaller statues:

Of course, this 2020 work titled “Corona” by Hans Dieter Tylle is my favorite:

(The artist is German so he doesn’t depict the hospital administrator billing Medicare $120,000 for putting the patient on a ventilator so that he can have a 90 percent chance of death instead of the 85 percent chance that he came into the hospital with.)

Here’s “The Tax Payer”, 1877, which was hung right next to “Corona”, a perfect juxtaposition for the U.S. system:

The museum reminds us that medical quackery didn’t start with coronapanic:

Grohmann attracted some criticism for including works celebrating Nazi construction and industrial achievements, e.g., the work below.

A November 2007 article about the museum’s opening:

the most represented artist in the collection, Erich Mercker (1891-1973), was commissioned directly by Hitler’s government to create images of the Third Reich’s expanding infrastructure.

One of the 81 Mercker works in the collection shows laborers cutting stone bound for the Chancellery in Berlin, the Reich’s seat of power, and others depicting bridges of the Autobahn, one of Hitler’s proudest achievements.

At least two other artists represented in the collection also have Nazi ties.

Dr. Grohmann and colleagues told the critics to pound sand.

Here’s an oil painting of one of the world’s worst jobs, i.e., serving on HMS Resolute in the Arctic:

The ground floor contains some stained glass:

The museum features two works by Hunter Biden: “Tapping Slag” and “Hosing Down the Coke” (painted pseudonymously, apparently):

There’s a huge painting titled “After the Mine Accident” (Fernand Dresse) that reminds us that our modern society is built on people who are willing to put their very lives on the line:

At the opposite end of the spectrum… “The Electrician” (J.C. New, 1890):

Unlike any other art museum that I can remember visiting in the past 5 years, the bookstore is entirely free of books promoting art by members of victimhood groups and books about the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. Does that mean that the entire building is free of Rainbow Flagism? No. The building also houses offices for humanities professors at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Nearly all of these teachers have festooned their office doors with the sacred symbology. Here’s Candela Marini‘s door, for example.:

Note that the Duke graduate also promotes “End the War in Gaza”, end the investigation of whether residents of the U.S. are here without authorization (“End 287G“), and questioning the definition of “American”.

Are there any paintings that combine the faculty’s passion for Rainbow Flagism and the museum founder’s passion for productive achievement? Here’s one of the Norwegian Dawn, often tasked with cruising the Greek islands, under construction in Germany:

What’s missing from the museum? Asian art! Hokusai, for example, painted people at work:

And, of course, the Socialist nations made a lot of great art of people working. I didn’t see any Russian or Chinese 20th century paintings of the masses cheerfully toiling (for those who call today’s Democrats “socialist”, remember that relaxing on what used to be called “welfare” was illegal in the Soviet Union; the correct adjective for Tim Walz (still struggling with PTSD after a taxpayer-funded trip to Italy) or Kamala Harris is “transferist“).

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Pre-/Post-Oshkosh Idea: the Harley-Davidson Museum

by philg

If you’re heading to or from EAA AirVenture, here’s an idea for a stop: the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee. This is a report on our July 2024 visit. The museum is close to downtown Milwaukee, not right next to the factory as you might expect (the factory is about 15 minutes out of Milwaukee; tours were shut down due to coronapanic and, as of July 2024, hadn’t reopened). I was disappointed to see the “CAR Parking” sign rather than “CAGE Parking”:

Some guys at the entrance apparently interpret “riding bitch” literally:

A few things that I learned at the museum:

  • Harley-Davidson has a long tradition in motorcycle racing, though of course these days Honda is the leader
  • Harley-Davidson has made various forays into diversification. These have included scooters, golf carts, boats(!), and snowmobiles
  • There never were any motorcycle gangs, but there were plenty of female riders and businessmen organized into “motorcycle clubs” (the gift shop doesn’t sell “one percenter”, “Better your sister in a whorehouse than your brother on a Honda”, or “If you can read this it means that the bitch fell off” T-shirts)

Let’s check out the prices over time. In 1916, a hog could be purchased for $248 (about 7,500 Bidies when adjusted for official CPI):

The museum experience starts with a gallery of early Harleys and an explanation of how the engines have evolved over time:

If riding motorcycles wasn’t sufficiently hazardous to your health you could puff cigarettes while riding into a war zone:

You could tumble over backwards on a hill climb:

Here is what a gathering of motorcycle owners looks like, according to Harley:

Harley tried diversity, but it didn’t turn out to be their strength (as with Intel and the 21st century UK?)

Old meets new (gas vs. electric):

It’s an interesting two-hour experience even if you’re not a motorcycle rider.

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If a drone can climb to the top of Mt. Everest why can’t a drone become the ultimate assassin?

by philg

The always-interesting folks at DJI have climbed Mt. Everest with a 1 kg. drone:

(There is at least one cut so I think that there might have been a battery change at some point.)

Watching this video it seems clear that the drone was being operated from quite some distance away. If that’s the case, I don’t understand how political and military leaders can be safe going forward unless they want to live in tunnels. What stops an enemy, internal or external, from flying a lethal version of the DJI Mavic 3 a similar distance until a target is identified, e.g., while giving a speech outdoors or walking from a car into a building? If this technology had been available in 1961, for example, Cuba could have sent small drones to kill U.S. President John F. Kennedy after he sponsored the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Or maybe just the threat of Cuba’s drones, had they existed in 1961, would have caused JFK to refrain from sponsoring the Bay of Pigs Invasion. (I guess if we’re going to send DJI technology back in a time machine we’d have to consider the likelihood that the U.S. would have killed Fidel Castro with a drone before Bay of Pigs Invasion was planned.)

Will killer drones make high-profile political and military leadership jobs less desirable? If there were no fear of getting caught, for example, more than half of the Democrats I know in Massachusetts would launch one at Donald Trump. So if the technology were widely available, there is no way that Trump could be safe without living like Adolf Hitler in the spring of 1945. (I talked to some Democrats in Illinois after Oshkosh last month and they too expressed sadness that Trump hadn’t been killed by Thomas Matthew Crooks, the outsmarter of the Secret Service.) JD Vance has already been demonized by the corporate media as a “Project 2025” subversive and a threat to abortion care for baby. Mightn’t the two of them decide to retire to a golf course if Massachusetts and Illinois Democrats had a practical means of acting on their desires?

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If we’re on the cusp of the AI golden age, why can’t web browsers fill out forms for us?

by philg

We are informed that AI is going to transform our daily lives. Web browsers are made by companies that are supposedly at the forefront of AI/LLM research and development. Why isn’t a browser smart enough to fill out the entire form below? It has seen fields with similar labels filled in hundreds or thousands of times. Why doesn’t the browser fill it out automatically and then invite the user to edit or choose “fill it out with my office address instead”?

Google Chrome, at least, will suggest values for individual fields. Why won’t it take the next step? Even the least competent human assistant should be able to fill in the above form on behalf of a boss. Why can’t AIs in which $billions have been invested do it?

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California represented by a former pimp at the Olympics

by philg

NBC:

A portion of the closing ceremony is dedicated to the host city handover from Paris to Los Angeles, in which Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo will give the Olympic flag to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. … The [Olympics closing] ceremony will feature prominent performers representing California, a nod to the next host city. Rapper Snoop Dogg — who has become a fixture of this year’s Games — will play a role in the handover segment.

(Prejudice against women is so severe all over the world that the handover is from one mayor who identifies as a “woman” to another mayor who identifies as a “woman”?)

I’m a big fan of Snoop Dogg’s performance in Starsky & Hutch, but it seems that he has a colorful past.

From Rolling Stone, “Snoop Lion Opens Up About His Pimp Past”:

When Snoop Dogg called himself a “pimp” back in 2003, he wasn’t joking. “I put an organization together,” the rapper-turned Rasta artist Snoop Lion tells contributing editor Jonah Weiner in the new issue of Rolling Stone. “I did a Playboy tour, and I had a bus follow me with ten bitches on it. I could fire a bitch, fuck a bitch, get a new ho: It was my program. City to city, titty to titty, hotel room to hotel room, athlete to athlete, entertainer to entertainer.”

Unlike most pimps, Snoop says he let his women keep the money. “I’d act like I’d take the money from the bitch, but I’d let her have it,” he says. “It was never about the money; it was about the fascination of being a pimp . . . As a kid I dreamed of being a pimp, I dreamed of having cars and clothes and bitches to match. I said, ‘Fuck it – I’m finna do it.’”

The above statements get bowdlerized in OregonLive:

The rapper-turned-Rasta artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg tells Rolling Stone he fulfilled a life’s ambition by becoming a pimp — yes, literally — a decade ago.

“I’d act like I’d take the money from the (prostitute), but I’d let her have it,” he says. “It was never about the money; it was about the fascination of being a pimp. … As a kid I dreamed of being a pimp.”

It’s an interesting reflection of current American social mores that Snoop Dogg’s involvement in the world’s oldest profession didn’t motivated Los Angeles officials to find a somewhat less colorful representative.

Readers: What were your favorite Olympics sports/moments this year and what should we watch on Peacock Premium Plus before we cancel the subscription that we started a couple of weeks ago? Our kids so far have enjoyed rugby, equestrian eventing (running horses through the country), breaking, synchronized diving, BMX, volleyball, tennis (Djokovic!), table tennis, and the transition from swimming to biking in the triathlon.

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