Even if coronavirus isn’t a serious statistical risk from being on a cruise ship, I wonder if the public health response will trim the sails (so to speak) of the hitherto unstoppable industry.
Consider the passengers on the Diamond Princess in Japan. Best case for the healthy ones is to be stuck at the dock for 14 days, mostly in their tiny cabins. From NPR:
On the ship, passengers — including some who had already spent two weeks aboard the vessel before the quarantine doubled their stay — are told not to leave their rooms. They visit the deck in shifts, for a rare breath of fresh air.
But there could be days of quarantine after a scare, right? So if you book a cruise from Date X to Date Y you won’t have any guarantee of getting back to work, family, and other commitments.
Does this prove the old adage that being on a boat is like being in prison, except that you can’t drown in prison?
Related:
“Royal Caribbean bans all passengers with Chinese, Hong Kong or Macau passports” (ABC; February 7): Royal Caribbean International announced that any of its passengers holding a Chinese, Hong Kong or Macau passport will not be allowed to board its cruise ships “regardless of when they were there last.” (should be plenty of last-minute rooms available for those with no fear of lockdown)
Has anyone ever seen an explanation of why Boeing couldn’t simply remove MCAS from the 737 MAX and tell pilots “you have to push forward on a go-around, just as you would in a Cessna 172 or Cirrus SR22”?
(a) It must be possible, at any point between the trim speed prescribed in §25.103(b)(6) and stall identification (as defined in §25.201(d)), to pitch the nose downward so that the acceleration to this selected trim speed is prompt with
(1) The airplane trimmed at the trim speed prescribed in §25.103(b)(6);
(2) The landing gear extended;
(3) The wing flaps (i) retracted and (ii) extended; and
(4) Power (i) off and (ii) at maximum continuous power on the engines.
(b) With the landing gear extended, no change in trim control, or exertion of more than 50 pounds control force (representative of the maximum short term force that can be applied readily by one hand) may be required for the following maneuvers:
(1) With power off, flaps retracted, and the airplane trimmed at 1.3 VSR1, extend the flaps as rapidly as possible while maintaining the airspeed at approximately 30 percent above the reference stall speed existing at each instant throughout the maneuver.
(2) Repeat paragraph (b)(1) except initially extend the flaps and then retract them as rapidly as possible.
(3) Repeat paragraph (b)(2), except at the go-around power or thrust setting.
(4) With power off, flaps retracted, and the airplane trimmed at 1.3 VSR1, rapidly set go-around power or thrust while maintaining the same airspeed.
(5) Repeat paragraph (b)(4) except with flaps extended.
(6) With power off, flaps extended, and the airplane trimmed at 1.3 VSR1, obtain and maintain airspeeds between VSW and either 1.6 VSR1 or VFE, whichever is lower.
In other words, an airliner meets certification standards unless it takes more than 50 pounds of push-forward on a go-around. I’m sure that there is some pitch-up moment on a 737 MAX, but it is tough to believe that a gradual trim-forward from MCAS would be sufficient if, in fact, more than 50 pounds of pushing on the yoke were required in the absence of any trimming.
The B737 already had a stick shaker for any time that it was getting near a stall (reminds pilots to push forward). So it should have been less likely to get into an elevator trim stall than a flight school Cessna 172.
Why couldn’t Boeing rip out MCAS, fire any of the coders and engineers involved in its design, tell airlines to give everyone an elevator trim stall demo in every recurrent sim session, and call the 737 MAX good?
(This is such an obvious and cheap fix that surely Boeing would have tried it if would work, so I assume that some rule would be violated, but which one?)
… actually it might be more accurate to say “boots in the apartment”. I have been WeChatting with a friend who is a professor in Shanghai.
Her university is planning to start classes two weeks late, on February 17, and restrict them to online-only through March 15. Staff were given a holiday through February 10 “but all of our admins seem to be working very hard from home.”
What about food?
Malls are generally open, but only a few of the stores and even fewer restaurants in them are open. They have only one entrance open, with someone checking forehead temperature. Supermarkets, both in and out of malls, are open. About 25 percent of the food stall markets are open, a higher fraction for those that specialize in fancy fruit (popular New Year gifts). Several grocery and restaurant delivery services are working. Almost no other retail open.
Our know-everything-about-China media suggests that the Chinese response to coronavirus has been weak and that an American-style government could have done better, but this sounds to me stronger than anything the U.S. has ever done to try to contain a flu epidemic. The U.S. seems to have responded to the last big one (swine flu) by stockpiling antiviral meds for people who got sick (source). I don’t remember much being done to prevent the virus from spreading.
Now that Primary Season is upon us, a Jacob Lawrence serigraph titled “Migrants Cast Their Ballots” (from the Cummer Art Museum in Jacksonville, Florida):
If the project comes in on budget, it will be nearly $1 billion per launch with roughly 15 percent more thrust than the 50-year-old Saturn V.
The entire program, including the Orion capsule, appears similar to Apollo and, in fact, is named “Artemis,” after Apollo’s twin sister. I asked an astronaut why NASA would do this, 60 years after Apollo. Why not just wait for Blue Origin to have their inexpensive rockets ready at roughly the same time? “It’s what they know how to do,” he responded. My mole inside the scientific side of NASA, responding to “Unless Blue Origin fails it seems as though they will be far cheaper per pound”:
That question has been the hot topic for the last two years or so. Congress keeps pushing SLS so until there is something flying that is obviously better value, SLS will keep going. It’s a jobs program that employs all the same people that Shuttle did. And NASA has a PR push about first woman on the moon for Artemis.
If taxpayers are concerned that the true cost will be more than the $1 billion/launch planned, would it make sense for Boeing to limit the shirt prices to $25? Also, if they’re going to spend $10+ billion on a new-ish rocket, shouldn’t they be able to come up with a more original name than “Space Launch System”?
Related:
in the early part of this century, NASA spent at least $9 billion on the Ares I and V rockets that proved to be a dead-en (NBC)
During a recent visit to Orlando, except for one former Moroccan, all of our Uber drivers were former Venezuelans aged 50+. Via communication in a pidgin of English and Spanish, I learned that all of the former Venezuelans were chain migrants. Each had 4-5 children, at least one of whom lived in the U.S. and was therefore entitled to bring in both mom and dad. The guy who spoke the best English was a retired military officer. His pension was $2 per month.
It does not seem as though these folks are going to be net taxpayers, since all whom I met had earnings that would entitle them to subsidies for housing, health care, food, etc. American taxpayers will fund all of their medical expenses (about $11,000 per Medicare beneficiary per year plus these folks should be on Medicaid or subsidized Obamacare prior to age 65, so figure $500,000 total for health care?).
Over the last 35 years, chain migration has greatly exceeded new immigration. Out of 33 million immigrants admitted to the United States from 1981 to 2016, about 20 million were chain migration immigrants (61 percent).
According to the most complete contemporary academic studies on chain migration, in recent years each new immigrant sponsored an average of 3.45 additional immigrants. In the early 1980s, the chain migration multiplier was 2.59, or more than 30 percent lower.
I wonder if U.S. chain migration policy means that we can estimate the cost to U.S. taxpayers of a country experiencing an economic downturn. Let’s suppose that the meltdown in Venezuela has added 2 million chain migrant parents to the U.S. welfare state at roughly $1 million each (housing subsidies plus the $500,000 in medical expenses described above). Thus, it would be fair to say that Venezuela’s ongoing woes (can’t say “crisis” if it lasts for years, right?) will cost Americans at least $2 trillion?
(This does not account for the costs of congestion due to the fact that U.S. infrastructure is more or less fixed while the population grows. We experienced a traffic jam on a Saturday in Orlando and our driver said that was typical.)
Could we go around the world, figure out how many migrants from each country are already U.S. citizens, figure out how many parents, spouses, children, cousins, etc. have been left behind in the old country, and then estimate the cost to Americans if the economy in that country fails? We could then use these data to inform our foreign policy (usually starts from an isolationist premise, but due to our chain migration policy, it seems that our welfare is intimately intertwined with the welfare of any country that has previously sent us immigrants).
KMCO (thanks, Signature!), SeaWorld and Magic Kingdom from 2,000′ (thanks, Orlando Approach, for the 270 heading):
I hate day trading but can’t help but feel like I missed out on Tesla stock. Some people say it is going up another 20x, which would make them worth many trillions of dollars.
How can the big automakers continue to ignore Tesla, which is now a Colossus astride the stock market at least?
What if they’re managing the real world of car sales? Roughly 80 million cars are sold each year annually (CNBC). Tesla accounted for 367,500 of those (source). That’s 0.4 percent market share.
So perhaps there is no point in worrying about a 0.4 percent loss of sales unless Tesla can convert its stratospheric market cap into R&D money that will enable the company to pull ahead of Toyota, Honda, Audi, and BMW in overall engineering.
Tesla S for the security guards at Pad 39a, an Apollo launch pad now leased to SpaceX
Separately, my Irish friend, a huge car enthusiast (owns an Aston Martin, a Land Rover, a vintage Mercedes, etc.), got his first ride in a Tesla S down in Charleston, South Carolina. “That was rubbish,” he said, after we got out of the 20-minute Uber trip from Signature to downtown. Interior noise, ride smoothness, seat comfort, and upholstery (“was that cheap vinyl?”) were not up to his standards for a luxury vehicle.
(By contrast, he loved an Uber ride in the front seat of a new Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, back from the USS Yorktown (CV-10; below), admittedly fairly noisy with the soft top.)
Finally, my friend with the Tesla X recently traded it in on a Tesla S. The “autopilot” software is getting worse, not better, in his opinion. The system gets confused about oncoming traffic on two-lane roads, freaks out, and hits the brakes unnecessarily. (Our 2018 Honda Odyssey, roughly once per month, similarly warns spuriously about an oncoming car, but the system does not apply brakes by itself.) He says that the car won’t use regenerative braking when the battery is cold (i.e., most of the time here in Massachusetts). Tesla has concluded that the batteries don’t like the sudden injection of power unless they’ve previously been warmed up, as they are during the first couple of minutes of being connected to a Supercharger.
Readers: What accounts for Tesla’s huge market cap? Is it achievement in the domain of self-driving technology, potentially revolutionary for sales? This market research firm does not put Tesla even in the top 10.
Bonus: demonstrating my own commitment to the battery-electric vehicle revolution by sitting in a 2005 Cirrus SR20 while wearing a Nissan LEAF cap:
THE PROSECUTION OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: How the House Democrats, in the face of certain defeat, presented the case for impeachment.
The magazine hasn’t been that interesting since 2016 when it switched to an all-Trump-hatred-all-the-time format, but this article is. Prosecutors who knew that they had no chance of convicting someone nonetheless pressed on!
This feeling of inevitability was shared among those who were most intimately involved with the House’s impeachment efforts. As recently as July … Adam Schiff, the ex-prosecutor who became the de-facto leader of the House’s impeachment inquiry last fall, said that he would “be delighted” if there was a real prospect of removing the President through impeachment. Unfortunately, he said at the time, “the only way he’s leaving office, at least at this point, is by being voted out.”
Ordinarily, we don’t celebrate prosecutors who go after people whom they know they can’t convict, but when Trump is involved, apparently the standards are different!
Mr. Wiener’s measure, Senate Bill 50, would have overridden local zoning rules to allow high-density housing near transit lines, high-performing school districts and other amenity-laden areas. Supporters portrayed it as a big but necessary step toward reducing the state’s housing deficit — and helping to curb carbon emissions from long-distance driving — by fostering development in dense urban corridors.
Well, you can guess what happened next!
Separately, how do America’s vulnerable fare when parked amidst millions of rich people who say that their #1 priority is helping the vulnerable?
Housing costs are the primary reason that California’s poverty rate, 18.2 percent, is the highest of any state when adjusted for its cost of living, despite a thriving economy that has led to strong income growth and record-low unemployment.
With no new infrastructure and not too much new housing, what will American cities look like in 30 years?
The Tesla II post started looking at the material in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, by Bernard Carlson. Summary: Tesla made bank with his AC motor and then Tesla got famous as a showman in the pre-TV age.
The book goes on to explain that Tesla was never successful after that. He never understood Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s equations and therefore kept trying to run everything through the Earth (which turns out to be quite effective at grounding out signals!):
Of course, in many modern applications of radio—such as FM or communicating with aircraft—the transmitter and receiver circuits do not need to be grounded. In insisting on a complete circuit through the Earth and returning through the atmosphere, Tesla reveals here that his thinking was based more on nineteenth-century practices in power and telegraphic engineering (which emphasized complete circuits) and not on the electromagnetic theory then being developed by the Maxwellians (see Chapter 6) that is widely accepted today. Thinking like a maverick has advantages and disadvantages.
Tesla believed that he would not need to pump huge amounts of electrical energy into the earth; only a small amount was needed, at the right frequency, to serve as the trigger, and resonance would do the rest. With the whole Earth pulsing like his metaphorical football, Tesla was confident that he could annihilate distance and send power and messages around the world.
He not only believed this, he acted on his belief:
Leaving Chicago by train, Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs on 18 May 1899. At his hotel, the Alta Vista, he was immediately accosted by a reporter who asked him about his plans. “I propose to send a message from Pike’s Peak to Paris,” Tesla boldly replied.
… he devised a telescoping mast that could hoist a thirty-inch copper-covered ball to a height of 142 feet. To stabilize the mast, Tesla added a twenty-five-foot tower to the roof of the station.
Under Tesla’s direction, Lowenstein and Gregg built an enormous magnifying transmitter. In the station’s main room, they constructed a circular wooden wall about six feet high and 49.25 feet in diameter. Around the top of this wall they wound two turns of thick cable in order to create the primary winding of the transmitter. In the center of the room they built the secondary coil using a hundred turns of finer wire. One end of this secondary coil could be connected to either a spherical terminal inside the laboratory or the copper ball atop the mast while the other end was grounded. To provide AC to the transmitter, Tesla tapped into the streetcar line that stopped just at the edge of the Knob Hill prairie. He stepped up this 500-volt current by employing a 50-kilowatt Westinghouse transformer that he rewound so that it converted the incoming current to 20,000 or 40,000 volts. The transformer was connected to a large bank of capacitors that were automatically interrupted (and hence discharged) by a motorized breakwheel. Rounding out the equipment were several large coils that could be moved around the space between the secondary and the primary.
Tesla was able to detect signals from his high-voltage high-power apparatus from a short distance away. He did not bother to check whether the signal would be attenuated with distance.
Over the next few months, Tesla conducted additional tests to verify that his magnifying transmitter was sending currents into the ground and that they could be detected. In August he tried “arrangements for telegraphy,” finding that “[t]he apparatus responded freely to [a] small pocket coil at a distance of several feet with no capacity attached and no adjusted circuit. Consequently will go at great distance.” A few weeks later, he took a receiver outside and connected it to an underground water pipe; at 250 feet from the station, he drew one-inch sparks, and at 400 feet he got half-inch sparks. On 11 September 1900, Tesla carried a receiver a mile away from the station, to nearby Prospect Lake, where he was able to measure that the magnifying transmitter was operating with a wavelength of about 4,000 feet.
This lack of witnessed distance tests can be explained on two levels: the theoretical and the personal. From a theoretical standpoint, Tesla did not believe that such tests were necessary. Tesla had decided that stationary waves in the earth, unlike ordinary Hertzian or light waves, did not lose energy as they propagated; consequently, if they could be detected a short distance from the transmitter, these waves could be detected at any distance. Likewise, Tesla also thought that in the return circuit through the atmosphere the process of conduction was extremely efficient and that there would be minimal losses. If there were no losses as the waves traveled from the transmitter to the receiver and back again, then any test detecting the waves—no matter how short the distance—was sufficient for Tesla. Hence he concluded that “communication without wires to any point of the globe is practicable … [and] would need no demonstration.”
Tesla conceived impractical ideas for radio-controlled military attack boats that earned scorn.
Tesla might have done well in San Francisco: “Though we may never know exactly why Tesla never married, the existing sources suggest several possible explanations. The first is, quite simply, that Tesla was more attracted to men than women.”
Why didn’t he invent the rainbow flag, then? “… since sexual degeneracy, like poverty, was viewed as proof that the poor were inferior, middle-class individuals were careful not to reveal anything that could be construed as unusual about their sexual conduct.”
How about mental health?
Tesla’s way through the mountain was electrotherapy. During his earliest work with high-frequency AC, Tesla had noted how such currents affected the body, and during his spectacular demonstrations, he may have observed how shocks altered his mood. Moreover, there was a tradition in popular medicine in mid-nineteenth-century America of using electric shocks from Ruhmkorff coils to treat a variety of ailments; Elihu Thomson’s father, for instance, took shocks in the 1860s as a medical treatment. Over the next few months Tesla gave himself regular shocks, probably using one of his oscillating coils, in order to keep “from sinking into a state of melancholia.” “I was so blue and discouraged in those days,” he later told a reporter, “that I don’t believe I could have borne up but for the regular electric treatment which I administered to myself. You see, electricity puts into the tired body just what it most needs—life force, nerve force. It’s a great doctor, I can tell you, perhaps the greatest of all doctors.”
In other health news, Tesla experimented with X-rays and exposed himself to what would be criminal levels of radiation: “both he and his assistants soon experienced eyestrain, headaches, and burns on the skin of their hands.” Yet he lived to 86!
