For Democrat friends, the perfect Christmas gift: audiobook of One Way Back, read by the author Christine Blasey Ford (see New version of the Boeing 787 announced: “the Christine Blasey Ford Edition 787, for which the launch customer will be United Airlines. The 787 CBFE is equipped with a fainting couch section for Premier 1K members who are terrified of flying”). Part of the Amazon description:
Her words and courage on that day provided some of the most credible and unforgettable testimony our country has ever witnessed. … This is the real story behind the headlines and the soundbites, a complex, compelling memoir of a scientist, a surfer, a mother, a patriot and an unlikely whistleblower. Ford’s experience shows that when one person steps forward to speak truth to power, she adds to a collective whole, causing “a ripple that might one day become a wave.”
Facebook AI has seen me post enthusiastically over the years about Disney World and also about Japanese gardens in various states and countries. It presents me with this advertisement for what would be an original Thomas Kinkade if Thomas Kinkade hadn’t died in 2012 at age 54 (there was a great profile of him in New Yorker in 2001 before the magazine transitioned to an all-anti-Republican format):
It’s about $780 in 24×36″ size with a rose-colored frame, which I think looks better than the above:
Considering that $780 is on track to be the price of a Diet Coke soon enough, should we be collecting this limited edition of what would have been Kinkade’s original work?
For religious friends, how about these prayer and votive candles from Etsy?
For elite friends with massive fingerprint-magnet Sub-Zero refrigerators… How about this 18×24″ print to go in the middle of a 36-inch fridge or freezer door?
A pilot friend posted on Facebook about his visit to the Sullenberger Aviation Museum, thus prompting me to celebrate Captain Sully’s heroism as the single pilot of an Airbus whose type certificate requires two pilots. He responded that it wouldn’t have been possible for the museum to be named after both Jeff Skiles, who did half of the flying on the flight that terminated in a water landing, and Sully. I turned to my spare brain, i.e., ChatGPT, to find counterexamples.
My prompt: “What are examples of museums named after two people with different last names?”
The giant brain’s answers, on different days:
I tried with a few other LLMs and the answers weren’t quite as useless, but they also included museums that plainly have just one last name in the name. Perplexity and Google’s AI summary (Gemini?) both offered the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art as an example that fit my query, along with quite a few that didn’t. From the Google:
By giving ChatGPT an example (“the Kamala-Trump Museum of Cognitive Excellence”), I was able to improve the answer, but half of the results were museums that clearly violated my criteria:
It’s interesting, at least to me, how LLMs can be both so smart and so stupid.
The Righteous say that we should substantially reduce our standard of living in response to climate models that show the Earth’s climate trajectory for the next 75-200 years. (This will be effective because there is no way that China and India, for example, will continue to output CO2 once they see us cutting back.) Let’s see how climatologists did with a three-month forecast of hurricane activity.
In August, they said that we’d have 120 days during which a Named Storm was in operation. In fact, we had 77 such days. The Net Tropical Cyclone Activity (NTC) was forecast to be 240% and it was instead 189%. NTC is defined as “Average seasonal percentage mean of NS, NSD, H, HD, MH, MHD. Gives overall indication of Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane activity. The 1991-2020 average value of this parameter is 135.” The definitions needed to make sense of NTC, from a forecast:
I’m not sure whether (so to speak) to be impressed by these weather soothsayers. They overpredicted hurricane activity, but they were correct that hurricane activity would be greater than the recent average. Their results don’t seem to be tainted by going back so far that recordkeeping and measurement techniques were radically different. (See “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century” (Nature) for the dangers of fooling oneself when using older historical data; the authors of the Nature paper concluded that we aren’t having more hurricanes and we aren’t having more intense hurricanes than we did in the 19th century.)
If the Colorado guys, who might never have seen a hurricane, got the big picture right in 2024 maybe we should have faith in the 100-year forecasts and go green by buying… Tesla Cybertrucks! There is no better way to save our beloved planet than with a 7,000 lb. eco-vehicle. I’ve seen a few without wraps here in South Florida lately and the stainless steel looks fine.
Joel Fajans was the first friend that I made on arrival at MIT (1979) and, sadly, he died last month. He was a gentle soul who never got annoyed by the comparative stupidity of people who didn’t understand physics as well as he did. Although he was generally busy supervising graduate students at UC Berkeley and running experiments at CERN (see “Nothing’s the Matter With Antimatter, New Experiment Confirms” (NYT 2023)) he always had time to answer my questions. I will miss him. If he were alive today I would be asking him “How many rockets can Elon Musk send to Mars before the Earth’s orbit is changed?” Here’s an excerpt from his research page at Berkeley:
And here’s Joel at the intersection of Hollywood and physics:
One of my favorite memories of Joel is when a group of us went on a bike ride from his house in an upscale neighborhood of Berkeley (he saved some money as a young single academic and then married into a bit of inherited wealth). Accustomed to being able to bike in any direction over any terrain on a mountain bike, I managed to ride the borrowed hybrid over of those one-way parking lot tire destroyers and punctured both inner tubes. Joel had a spare tube for one and patched the other and we resumed the group cycle. Joel never complained about or harped on my incompetence.
About half of my class at Comair failed a stage check and received additional sim training, but I got only the bare minimum. My checkride was not too stressful either. The oral exam, which can last 2-3 hours and can include any item of minute knowledge involving regulations, the aircraft’s systems, or almost anything else aviation-related, must by regulation precede the actual flying and it tends to set the tone. The examiner to whom I was assigned was accustomed to humiliating applicants with an opening oral question that none had ever been able to answer satisfactorily. After they realized how ignorant and worthless they were he beat them down for an additional three hours before getting into the sim with the demoralized young pilot.
What was the question? “Why does the Canadair Regional Jet have both an alternating current (AC) electrical system and a direct current (DC) system as well?” As it happened, I had wondered the same thing myself just a couple of weeks earlier. I’d carefully studied the electrical diagrams for the airplane and had a one-hour phone discussion with a friend who is a physics professor at UC Berkeley. Without giving the guy any hint as to my non-aviation background or the fact that I’d discussed this with a physicist, I went up to the whiteboard and gave a 5-minute talk about how Maxwell’s equations explained that a time-varying magnetic field, like you would get from using engine power to rotate permanent magnets, generates a time-varying electric field, i.e., alternating voltage potential. This AC power is ideal for driving the heaviest load on the airplane, the hydraulic pumps for the flight controls (a spinning motor having more or less the same structure as a generator). Having AC power at a high voltage also makes it easy to have lighter wires to move the power around the airplane and then transform down to lower voltage for radios, etc. A transformer will pass AC voltage but not DC.
He said “Your oral is complete. We’re getting into the sim now.”
Searching through my Gmail, I found a good 2007 answer to one of my helicopter student’s questions:
(Student) from Principles of Helicopter Flight, p. 4: “Equilibrium means a state of zero-acceleration. When an object travels in a straight line at a constant speed, its velocity is constant (since there is no change in either speed or direction). It can then be said that the object is in equilibrium. If an object travels at a steady 50 mph on a curve, however, it must be accelerating because its direction is constantly changing and it can then not be in equilibrium.
(Joel) The solar system is in a pretty good equilibrium. (Alright, you can prove that it isn’t but its lasted a long time. A system consisting of just the sun and the earth would be in equilibrium.) The earth is traveling in a circle. So the quote from “Principles…” is incorrect.
A centrifugal force is a fictitious force, but as any fighter pilot would tell you, it feels pretty real.
You are correct that some force must be applied to force a plane into a circle.
However, if you want to pretend that the reference frame rotating with the plane is “normal”, than, in that frame, the forces are balanced…the centrifugal force is balanced by a force from the wings pointing towards the center of rotation.
The question is not profound…just semantics.
Modern thinking on how to teach physics (teaching that I don’t subscribe to) bans mentioning fictitious forces. The claim is that it just confuses the students.
A 2008 discussion about “why treadmill incline makes walking harder”, in which I quote Joel:
I asked Joel Fajans, physics nerd, and he said “consider what happens if you stop walking; you go backwards but also down”. Joel says that if you want to get fancy, you can go for a special relativity-style argument about frames of reference.
Anyway, the incline does in fact make you work harder than simply lifting your legs from a lower position to a higher one. The fact that your body isn’t going up doesn’t mean you aren’t working because the treadmill is creating a new reference frame.
In response to a 2008 question about why airplane generators are rated in KVA (kilo-volt-amperes) rather than in watts:
watts are true power, while kVA are apparent power. The difference has to do with the phase relationship between the voltage and current. With a resistive loads (light bulbs) the voltage and current are in perfectly in phase. Then kVA=kW. But with a pure inductive load (or pure capacitive load) the voltage and current are 90deg out of phase. Inductors (capacitors) do not dissipate average power; there maybe substantial voltages across them and currents, but there is no net power. So the load in watts is zero. The kVA load is not zero…it is the product of the RMS voltage times the RMS current. So what is this extra “load”? It is power sloshing back and forth between the load and the generator…first the generator stores energy in the load, and then the load puts the energy back into the generator.
Loads in the real world tend to be somewhere between perfectly resistive and perfectly inductive, with phase angles in the range of 10-30%.
The amount of coal you have to burn is proportional to the watts, not the KVA (assuming perfect conductors carrying the power to the load.) But in practice, a generator may fry even with a perfect inductor because the instantaneous demanded currents can be quite high. SO on an airplane you would protect for kVA, not kW.
A 2008 exchange:
(me) Can you make [a jet-powered airplane] generator of equivalent power with fewer windings and lighter weight at 400 Hz. compared to 60 Hz? If you want to run the whole airplane on AC power, forgetting about any rectification to DC, does it make sense to use 400 Hz? I figured the 60 Hz. or 400 Hz. would relate more to the speed with which the rotor was spinning and not the number of windings. In that case there is a gearing issue where it would be a lot cheaper to gear the 30,000 rpm power turbine down to 400 Hz. instead of 60 Hz.
(Joel) Running at higher frequencies makes transformers much smaller. For example, I have a 200A power, 10kW power supply that runs at 60Hz and weighs about 300lbs. I have another power supply, which runs at about 30kHz, which supplies 1000A at 6kW which weighs only about 30lbs.
Most power supplies these days are “switchers”. Rather than working at 60Hz to convert AC to high quality DC, they first convert that AC to very low quality DC (glitchy, not well regulated) and convert the low quality DC to 20-60kHz. Then they take the 20-60kHz and convert it back into high quality DC. This takes a lot of extra circuitry, but is definitely worth in terms of weight and cost. All computer power supplies are switchers, for instance. The only down side is that they tend to have noise at the fundamental and harmonics of the switching frequency, which can be problematic, particularly in the sorts of physics stuff I do. (We are fighting such noise at the moment.)
Anyway, the only thing I’d quarrel with is the claim on the web site that there are extra losses at 400Hz. This isn’t quite as simple as described on the web site. Inductive “losses” aren’t really losses…to first order no power is dissipated, so no extra fuel has to be consumed. It simply means that there are voltage drops on the lines. And I can’t believe that its very large.
One issue not mentioned on the web site, which represents a real power loss, is skin depth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_depth It turns out that AC current only flows on the outer “skin” of a wire. The skin depth is the thickness of the layer in which current flows. At 60Hz in copper, this depth is about 1cm, but at 400Hz it decreases by the square root of the frequency to about 0.4cm. But this effect doesn’t matter unless the cables are of thickness comparable to the skin depth. I can’t imagine that there are any cables of radius ~0.4cm on an airplane (maybe on an AWACS plane). It is a real problem, however, on long distance transmission power lines.
Joel held strictly orthodox progressive Democrat Cambridge-/Berkeley-style political beliefs. He attributed America’s woes to the existence of stupid/uneducated people in the South, none of whom he had ever met in person. He recognized that California failed to deliver what local and state Democrats promised and assigned 100 percent of the blame for this failure to Republicans because of their role in promoting Proposition 13 and its limits on property tax. (Joel himself was a huge beneficiary of Prop 13 because he and his wife purchased a house in 1999 and, therefore, paid tax on a slightly adjusted original purchase price.) I would point out (a) that California collected a relative high percentage of residents’ income (Tax Foundation) and, (b) California Democrats were in 100% control of the state and could revoke Prop 13, impose a wealth tax, raise income and sales tax rates, charge a congestion fee for use of the roads, etc. This wouldn’t convince him to hate Republicans less. One of Joel’s core yearnings was for higher tax rates and I couldn’t persuade him that the government’s greed was infinite and that, therefore, tax rates were likely already set at a revenue-maximizing level (i.e., to get more tax revenue, the government would have to introduce new taxes, such as value-added tax, not tweak rates; see these charts of revenue vs. rates). Our final political conversation was in March 2024 and regarded the battles in Gaza (I was with him last month, but he was too weak to talk). Joel, an American secular Jew, said “a pox on both their houses”, agreeing with another Jewish Berkeley resident that Hamas and Israel were equally bad. (While this sounds like a nuanced and balanced position, it is highly favorable to the Palestinians. The same people who say that Hamas and Israel are comparable also deny that Hamas was elected to power by Palestinians. Hamas either seized power or is somehow accidentally in charge of Gaza. Once Hamas is gone, Palestinians will revert to
We recently received a notice from my mother’s senior fortress. The basic “room and board” charge for her assisted living apartment (i.e., not the nursing care component) is going up from $8,100 per month to $8,750 per month, effective January 1, 2025. That’s an inflation rate of 8 percent.
Apparently, the average age of moving into any type of “senior dorm” is going up. From McKnights Senior Living, 2023:
the mean age of an older adult moving into assisted living is 85 (by comparison, it’s 82 for independent living and 83 for nursing homes), a finding that aligns with the results of other research.
It’s cheaper to stay in one’s existing house or apartment, even if some aides need to be hired, and there is more freedom, e.g., from coronapanic-style lockdowns. A middle-class American who did not purchase long-term care insurance (my mother has a John Hancock LTC policy and the company has been great about paying for most of what she has needed since transitioning from independent living to assisted) will have a lot of trouble accessing the necessary care. The standard path is for the old person to be wiped out financially and then Medicaid kicks in because the old person is now poor. In Florida, at least, the value of a homestead (primary residence) is excluded, but otherwise the only workaround is a Medicaid Asset Protection Trust and it must be done five years ahead of when it is needed (explained by a NY lawyer).
The Ivy Leaguer accused of murdering a top CEO may have spiraled into madness following a botched back surgery that required ‘giant screws’ in his spine, according to friends.
Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer, had shared X-ray images on social media showing his misaligned spine, which was reportedly worsened by a surfing accident.
Some of those looking into the 26-year-old former high school valedictorian believe that this severe back injury, which required screws in his spine, led to a concerning decline over the past year.
Former classmates of Mangione suggest that the failed surgery could have pushed the Maryland man to the edge.
It’s a shame that current medical technology isn’t sufficient to fix the typical back problem, but why is United Healthcare to blame? Luigi Mangione was inspired by Harvard’s Ted Kaczynski, educated at Penn and Stanford, and presumably gifted with a high degree of rational reasoning. How did he come up with a model of the world where his back would have been fixed by surgery if United Healthcare had done something different?
Separately, given that people have so much familiarity with the inability of medicine to fix what ails them, their friends, and their family members, why do people accept uncritically the idea that a doctor can transform a man into a woman or vice versa? Who looks at the photo below and says “doctors have never been able to solve half of the seemingly simple health issues that I’ve brought to them, but they seem to be great at gender reassignment surgery”?
Finally, is Luigi Mangione further proof that mask orders can’t work? He had a huge incentive to keep his mask in place and might well be a free man today if he had done so, but his mask discipline wasn’t perfect, even in an all-Democrat city that encourages mask-wearing, which resulted in a security camera getting an image of his full face and then some McDonald’s workers recognizing him.
• It has destabilized society. Society works best if people can be satisfied from working a normal job for normal wages. People will be less inclined to be satisfied with this, if they see their…
[Bitcoin and similar have] given utility to some individuals, by making them rich. But since no new service or good has been created in the world, this comes at the price of making everyone else a little poorer.
Can this be true? Crypto has burned up a huge amount of electricity so it made at least some electric utilities richer as well as holders of crypto currency becoming richer. Sam Bankman-Fried and at least one of his sex partners are making the prison-industrial complex a little richer. But would the world overall be better off if crypto had never been developed or used? Think of all of the important mRNA vaccines we could have enjoyed if some of our best and brightest minds weren’t sidetracked into crypto fever.
The same author on X explains why we have to hear 24/7 hype from Bitcoin holders whereas those who own Malaysian ringgit are mostly peaceful: “… for people who hold it, it is pure economic advantage to hype it. This predictably creates a landscape of self-reinforcing hype.”
A problem I have with cryptocurrency, is that for people who hold it, it is pure economic advantage to hype it. This predictably creates a landscape of self-reinforcing hype.
It will also be in people's interest to uncritically promote the hype. And so on.
“LUIGI hits all-time high at $60M market cap after Luigi Mangione’s arrest for murder” (Crypto News): The Luigi Inu (LUIGI) token first started gaining traction following Mangione’s arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania and charged on Dec 9. The token’s market cap reached $29 million before it rocketed higher to $60 million, after the arrest was confirmed. Originally launched by anonymous crypto traders, the token is trending on Raydium, the automated market maker built on Solana. The connection between Mangione and the memecoin lies in the fact that his arrest and the subsequent media attention have significantly boosted the token’s popularity and value.
Our neighborhood HOA fee is going up 18 percent for 2025. The management fee (same firm) is going up 43 percent. Xfinity’s fee for cable TV to every household is going up 7 percent (each house must separately purchase Internet service). Xfinity’s fee for telephone/Internet service at the clubhouse is going up 70 percent to $7,000/year. Landscaping and irrigation services are going up substantially, but perhaps that reflects the landscape and systems getting older (22 years). “Janitorial” (cleaning our clubhouse/gym, mostly?) is going up 13 percent. Insurance is going up 10 percent.
Happy Bodhi Day for those who celebrate. Gemini says the following about this holiday:
Bodhi Day commemorates the day Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, or the Awakened One. The name Bodhi comes from the Sanskrit word for enlightenment and the species of tree under which the Buddha meditated.
Nonviolence, or ahimsa, is a core principle of Buddhism and is central to Bodhi Day celebrations … Some Buddhists observe vegetarianism on Bodhi Day to practice non-violence and compassion.
Brady-McGinnis was mauled by her pit bull Buddha outside their home on Dennison Street in Roxbury around 4:30 p.m., according to McGuire. … Investigators said the dog also attacked Brady-McGinnis’s husband as he tried to save her and two Boston police officers. All four were rushed to the hospital. Brady-McGinnis died in surgery, according to McGuire.
ChatGPT failed to generate an image of a Buddhist pit bull named Buddha, but Grok obliged:
Related:
“Pit bull that fatally mauled 4-year-old girl in San Joaquin Valley was her ‘playful’ family dog” (Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2024): Zoey Hawkins loved to sing and dance, especially in her Cinderella dress, and she loved to play with the family dog. Since Zoey, 4, was adopted two years ago, she and the pit bull were constantly together. … An investigation found no evidence of neglect or criminal wrongdoing, and the dog had no history of violence or aggression, said Elizabeth Jones, the department’s public information officer. … “She and the dog were inseparable,” Vargas said. “They played with each other, they were around each other and the dog was always super playful. We have literally no clue why the dog did this, or turned on her in this way.”
Our media is full of stories about fighting in Syria, but they all seem to be targeted at people who are smarter than I am and/or who have a much deeper understanding of history and geopolitics.
An array of different groups have been taking territory from the government in other parts of the country as well.
Clear as mud, in other words.
A few questions, for starters:
I thought that Turkey was fighting to prevent Kurds from having their own country. But now Turkey is also fighting to depose Assad, the secular ruler of Syria, so that Islamists can take over?
Syria declared war on Israel in 1948 and, like Lebanon but unlike Egypt and Jordan, was never interested in a peace treaty or recognition of Israel. If there is a new government, is Syria then still at war with Israel?
Does Israel have a dog in this fight? Would Assad retiring to Jeddah, as Idi Amin did, be good for Israel?
I would appreciate an overall high-level explanation.
