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

by philg

Me, in 2018:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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S.C. Johnson Frank Lloyd Wright tour

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jewish Democrats in Illinois

by philg

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

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

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

perhaps should be

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Vuichard no bueno for escaping vortex ring state

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

An Nvidia branch office receptionist’s new weekend boat:

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

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

A Tesla charging facility:

The Balboa Pier:

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

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

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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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