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.
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?
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?
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.
We visited the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee on our way to Oshkosh. It was completed in 1892 at a cost of $250,000 for 20,000 square feet. Although we are informed that we live in an inflation-free society today, thanks to the efforts of our wise political leaders in Washington, D.C., the $250,000 back then is roughly equivalent to $8.6 million now (the official BLS calculator goes back only to 1913). So that would be $430 per square foot for a house built in two years.
Rich people had a lot of friends back then…
It was a great tour, but I didn’t learn why Pabst went from the world’s largest brewer to being a niche supplier. They didn’t advertise their allegiance to the Rainbow Flag Religion (Bud Light never recovered). Wikipedia says “Pabst’s sales reached a peak of 15.6 million US barrels (1.86 billion litres) in 1978 before they entered into a steep decline”. Today, the company is headquartered in Texas and the brewing is done by contractors.
Before “Oshkosh” (EAA AirVenture), we spent a night in Racine, Wisconsin. The town is notable as the birthplace of J.I. Case, which pioneered backhoe loaders, and S.C. Johnson. The downtown square was once filled with shade trees, we learned:
There are some arty/fun shops:
There’s a big marina:
Do we think that the owner of Knot Woke is going to vote for President Kamala Harris?
Here’s an idea from Linda Dolack for a fun kitchen table project with kids:
Right next to this art, the museum explains that it is tracking “self-indentifying women” and “artists of color”:
The museum was featuring what I think is a great idea for kid room decor: a 2.5-dimensional glass wall mural.
The above mural is by Frances Higgins (1912-2004) and she can’t be commissioned to make more. However, it looks as though her studio is still in operation and individual pieces can be purchased and, perhaps, commissioned. Imagine a custom mural with each element being an aircraft seen at EAA AirVenture! Maybe with the fireworks at the end of the night airshow as well. That would be great for a kid’s room.
What about the gift shop? Exactly one category of books was featured in a window visible from the street:
Once inside, they also had several books on the subject of career advancement via having sex with a married man who was already famous within the field:
A few more items from the shop…
Overall, it is tough to disagree that this is Racine County’s best art gallery!
It began losing altitude a minute and a half before crashing. The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m., when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds.
A spin, which is not recoverable in an airliner, is a consequence of an aerodynamic stall. In a stall, the wings lose lift because the critical angle of attack (angle between the wing and the oncoming air) is exceeded. Why does the plane spin instead of simply descending due to the loss of lift? Because the wings don’t stall to the same extent at the same time. One wing will drop first and the plane then spins in that direction. As flight instructors we are required to learn how to recover from a spin, but these techniques are useful primarily in low-performance single-engine aircraft. A Cessna 172 supposedly will come out of an incipient spin if the pilot simply removes hands and feet from the flight controls. Making an airplane this forgiving impairs cruise speed and, therefore, airliners aren’t designed with spin-recovery in mind. Instead, they prevent the pilots from the initial stall via a stick shaker and/or stick pusher that activates when the plane is getting too slow. Fly-by-wire airliners, such as the Airbus A320, prevent the pilots from stalling by ignoring inappropriate flight control inputs. (Captain Sully had the stick full back during his heroic single-pilot landing on the Hudson, just like a panicked student pilot, but the French software engineers kept the plane flying (not quite at the optimum speed for a water landing due to the higher-than-minimum vertical descent rate, but apparently close enough due to efforts of the French aeronautical engineers in overbuilding the airframe to survive both the high vertical speed and the high forward speed from landing downwind).)
The ATR 72-500 apparently has both the shaker and pusher (source):
Shakers and pushers prevent most stalls, but not all. A Bombardier Q400 turboprop crashed in 2009 despite the shaker and pusher activating after the pilots leveled off and forgot to add power. Wikipedia:
Following the clearance for final approach, landing gear and flaps (5°) were extended. The flight data recorder indicated that the airspeed had slowed to 145 knots (269 km/h; 167 mph).[3] The captain then called for the flaps to be increased to 15°. The airspeed continued to slow to 135 knots (250 km/h; 155 mph). Six seconds later, the aircraft’s stick shaker activated, warning of an impending stall, as the speed continued to slow to 131 knots (243 km/h; 151 mph). The captain responded by abruptly pulling back on the control column, followed by increasing thrust to 75% power, instead of lowering the nose and applying full power, which was the proper stall-recovery technique. That improper action pitched the nose up even further, increasing the gravitational load and increasing the stall speed. The stick pusher, which applies a nose-down control-column input to decrease the wing’s angle of attack after a stall,[3] activated, but the captain overrode the stick pusher and continued pulling back on the control column. The first officer retracted the flaps without consulting the captain, making recovery even more difficult.
(The root cause of the above accident, in my opinion, is the complacent attitude by the FAA and airframe manufacturers regarding deficient avionics. The aspiration seems to be an LCD version of the gauges and dials that were in a B-17 bomber over Germany in World War II. The computers on board the aircraft had all of the information that they needed to warn the crew “you can’t hold altitude at this power setting” long before they came anywhere near stalling. See my 2010 post.)
The ATR 72-500 is equipped with de-icing equipment, but no aircraft is capable of maintaining level flight indefinitely in “severe icing”. Ultimately, pilots of a sophisticated airplane will have to do what the pilot of a crummy airplane with no de-icing gear must do: allow the plane to descend while maintaining a reasonable airspeed. If it is below freezing on the surface, this means that an epic amount of runway will be consumed for landing because it will be unsafe to slow down and also probably unsafe to add flaps (the airplane certified for operations in icing conditions comes with a big book explaining what speeds and configuration to use). If the airplane can descend into above-freezing air, the ice will come off almost immediately.
Circling back to Voepass 2283, the accident airplane from yesterday, the CNN report is consistent with pilots who were trying to hold altitude rather than accept a descent: “The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m., when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds.”
The last sentence suggests that they were actively trying to get back to their assigned altitude of 17,000′. In hindsight, of course, the best course of action would have been to hold 200 knots (a good all-purpose safe speed) and descend to warmer-than-freezing air (Campinas is no higher than about 2,500′ above sea level and was 17C on the surface, suggesting that warmer-than-freezing air was available up to about 12,000′ (lapse rate of 2C per 1,000′).)
(Have I encountered icing myself, you might ask? Yes, but never “severe”. In jets and turboprops I was always able to use the onboard equipment (hot wings or rubber boots that inflate) to deal with the icing while we hunted up or down for an ice-free altitude. In little piston-powered 4-seaters that aren’t certified for known icing, the rule is that you never fly into clouds that are forecast to contain ice. However, sometimes you pick up ice that wasn’t forecast. So the rule is to descend to warmer air and, if warmer air doesn’t exist (New England in the winter), the rule is not to fly through clouds because you don’t know if you’ll be able to shed any ice. An instrument rating combined with an unpressurized non-deiced small plane isn’t a fly-on-your-own-schedule formula because you can’t get over thunderstorm lines in the summer and you can’t go through clouds in the winter due to the risk of ice.)
So… icing by itself likely cannot be the cause of the recent accident in Brazil.
State Farm, January 19: $936 + $884 = $1820 for six months of car insurance.
State Farm, July 20: $1049 + $1001 = $2050 for six months of insurance.
That’s a 12.6 percent increase in half a year. If we weren’t assured that we live in an inflation-free economy, we would call that “25 percent/year inflation”.
(It’s the same two cars and, ordinarily, they would be worth less every six months. Thus, the rate of increase is actually higher than 25 percent (but it is not “inflation”).)
Keeping five copies on the shelf seems like an odd choice in a town where forty acres and a mule would, if available, cost more than $40 million. While my mother was in the Large Print section, I did a quick survey of the patrons and found just one who appeared to identify as “Black”.
(There’s a separate part of Palm Beach County just west of us called Jupiter Farms that isn’t part of the Town of Jupiter and a 40-acre farm there might be assembled for $10 million. Wikipedia says that roughly 1.2 percent of Jupiter Farms residents identify as Black. (The “white” population of Jupiter Farms fell between 2010 and 2020, according to the Census data in the Wikipedia page, while the overall population grew. Only a racist conspiracy theorist, however, would say that white people were being “replaced” in Jupiter Farms.))
I touched on my visit to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Is Donald Trump worse than George Washington? but I’d like to share some additional history lessons from the signage. This is a government-funded institution, so the lessons are, presumably, official State of North Carolina versions.
We learn that rich people love to laugh at peasants:
The Dutch were bad in general:
One Dutch guy was especially bad, being responsible for “Dutch expansion, exploitation, and violence” and giving Dutch people ships was bad because they used them for “violent establishment of foreign colonies”:
The English were bad settler-colonialists in North America (see previous post regarding a wall-sign biography of George Washington) and the Bostonians were especially bad, e.g., Sir William Pepperrell who was “the sole heir to a well-known merchant and enslaver in Massachusetts”:
The bird nerd is bad:
If you think that racism 200 years ago isn’t relevant, note that the National Audubon Society continues to support the party of slavery, with more than 98 percent of its political contributions going to Democrats (opensecrets.org; I think this might measure the contributions of executives and officers since a nonprofit org itself shouldn’t be donating to any political candidates).
Unlike Audubon, the museum bravely takes a stand against slavery (“deplorable”!) and “systemic racism”:
Has all of human civilization been exploitation and violence? No. Elites and peasants lived in harmony in pre-Columbian America. They danced and made music together at “communal feasts” where “diverse parts of society coexisted, sharing food and drink.”
When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor.
Andrés de Tapia, a conquistador, described two rounded towers flanking the Templo Mayor made entirely of human skulls, and between them, a towering wooden rack displaying thousands more skulls with bored holes on either side to allow the skulls to slide onto the wooden poles.
Reading these accounts hundreds of years later, many historians dismissed the 16th-century reports as wildly exaggerated propaganda meant to justify the murder of Aztec emperor Moctezuma, the ruthless destruction of Tenochtitlán and the enslavement of its people. But in 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at the Templo Mayor excavation site in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs—none other than the very skull towers and skull racks that conquistadors had described in their accounts.
While it’s true that the Spanish undoubtedly inflated their figures—Spanish historian Fray Diego de Durán reported that 80,400 men, women and children were sacrificed for the inauguration of the Templo Mayor under a previous Aztec emperor—evidence is mounting that the gruesome scenes illustrated in Spanish texts, and preserved in temple murals and stone carvings, are true.
In addition to slicing out the hearts of victims and spilling their blood on the temple altar, it’s believed that the Aztecs also practiced a form of ritual cannibalism. The victim’s bodies, after being relieved of their heads, were likely gifted to noblemen and other distinguished community members. Sixteenth-century illustrations depict body parts being cooked in large pots and archeologists have identified telltale butcher marks on the bones of human remains in Aztec sites around Mexico City.
Maybe show up for the concert, but don’t stay for dinner?
