Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One of the most interesting announcements at Heli-Expo was by Bell Helicopter. Texas-based Bell was an important innovator in the 1950s and 1960s with the Huey and Jet Ranger, two of the most-produced helicopters ever. The company lost its low-end civilian business to Robinson and much of its high-end civilian business to Eurocopter, but remained fat and happy with U.S. military contracts. When Eurocopter (now “Airbus Helicopter”) won a 2006 competition for the next generation of U.S. Army machines with the EC145 “Lakota”, Bell seemed destined to end up as a parts and service organization for a legacy fleet.

With the announcement of the Bell 505 Jet Ranger X at $1.07 million, Bell is back in the market. If you can live with four seats, the Robinson R44 remains a much better value, but the five-seat Bell 505 is very attractive compared to the five-seat Robinson R66, notably because the Bell incorporates an idiot-proof FADEC engine, which prevents owners/operators from doing $50,000 of damage with a shut-down or start-up.

The Bell 505 gets rid of the center column that breaks up the Jet Ranger cabin. It has a flat floor, a large baggage compartment, decent rear seat leg room (if you don’t mind passengers resting their feet on the collective pitch control), and an engine exhaust mounted on the top of the machine where soot won’t stain the tail boom as much as it does on the R66 and where a child cannot drop a marble into the engine. The engine gets overhauled after 3000 hours, an advantage compared to the RR300 in the R66, which must be overhauled every 2000 hours. There is a full Garmin G1000 glass cockpit included as standard equipment.

Is it a triumph of American engineering? Sort of. The rotor system and transmission are carried over from the old Long Ranger (206L), so that’s a triumph of American engineers who were working in the 1970s. The slickest piece of technology is the engine/FADEC combination, which are both entirely French. The fuselage is a conventional design with a steel tube frame and a mostly-aluminum skin. The product manager said that a composite fuselage would have raised costs by 20 percent and provided little performance benefit.

The machine is supposed to be certified in 2-3 years, so expect one in the hangar next to yours in 2016 if everything goes perfectly.

[On further reflection, the headline should possibly read “Louisiana taxpayers and Bell enter the light helicopter business.” The state’s taxpayers are paying for the factory and handing out some additional corporate welfare to Bell so that it will employ 115 people (source). I wonder how the family-owned Robinson company, stuck paying California’s tax rates, feels about the public behemoth Textron getting a taxpayer-funded factory!]

Dear Readers:

If any of you are combining your passions for Mickey Mouse and helicopter innovations by going to Heli-Expo in Anaheim this week, feel free to email me so that we can set up a time to meet. If you can’t afford an Airbus EC175 (Eurocopter got bored after crushing all of their U.S. competitors so they decided to waste some time, money, and effort on changing their name), the show will still be interesting because Robinson finally got approval from the FAA to install modern avionics in their products. All three Robinson models are now available with Aspen Avionics PFD/MFDs and touch-screen Garmin nav/coms.

Following Heli-Expo I am heading up to the Bay Area and would be delighted to catch up with readers there, possibly Friday (2/28) in the East Bay or Saturday (3/1) in San Francisco.

Philip

Update: The meeting will be at 1:30 pm (Pacific time) on Friday 2/28 at 1600 Shattuck Ave. (at Cedar) in Berkeley.

Folks:

Staring out at the dirty slush piles in Cambridge I am thinking it would be nice to go to the beach. Twenty years ago when people asked what good Internet commerce would be I gave them the example of a Web-based travel booking site. Here’s how I said that it would work….

Inputs:

• where you live
• when you want to go
• what kind of vacation you want to take (beach, learning, hiking, skiing, whatever)
• rough price range

The system would then scan the airline and hotel databases (which existed back then though they weren’t Web-accessible in the first years of the Web) and find a place that

• you could get to on a non-stop flight for a reasonable cost
• where hotels were available at a reasonable cost on those dates

I touted the advantages of my system: “Instead of you just picking a handful of places that you can think of, possibly overlooking some where hotels and flights are practically empty, the system will search all of the possibilities.”

Did anyone ever build my fantasy travel booking/searching site? If not, why not?

Folks:

I’ve been reading about the proposed merger of Comcast and Time-Warner (example from The Guardian). Comcast is the monopoly Internet supplier here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They provide a sluggish service that no tech enthusiast in Romania, Latvia, Israel, South Korea, or Japan would pay for (see Figure 15 in this Akamai report). If they have enough money to pay investment bankers, management consultants, etc., wouldn’t they be better off improving their service in order to compete with Time-Warner and Verizon? Could it really cost more to offer Latvian-grade Internet to American consumers than to merge two cable monopolies?

[Alternatively, if Comcast can’t figure out how to deliver Latvian-grade services to Americans at a reasonable cost, maybe it would make more sense to merge with a Latvian cable/phone/Internet provider?]

Related: This BBC article on broadband costs worldwide; it turns out that Latvians pay very little for their luxurious Internet service.

Folks:

I’ve been watching some of the Sochi Olympics on television. They don’t talk about any of the athletes having trouble sleeping, getting food, or getting to the events. All of the technical infrastructure seems to be working. In the lead-up to this Olympics there were all kinds of articles (example; one about homeless journalists; one comparing Putin to Hilter) about what a disaster they were going to be. What if anything is going wrong in Sochi? Is there any evidence that the overall festival is running more or less smoothly than previous Olympics? The only negative that I have seen as an American TV viewer is a surprising number of empty seats at events such as figure skating (potential explanation but the most obvious one seems to be that these Olympics are being held far from any population center, e.g., a 25-hour train ride from Moscow or two-day drive).

A friend pointed out an NPR story titled “1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says”:

In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that “The universe began with a huge explosion” and only 48 percent said “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”

Just over half understood that antibiotics are not effective against viruses.

As alarming as some of those deficits in science knowledge might appear, Americans fared better on several of the questions than similar, but older surveys of their Chinese and European counterparts.

In other words, Americans are, from the perspective of NPR reporters, woefully ignorant. But at the same time NPR talks about employers’ unwillingness to hire certain Americans as though it were a problem that could easily be solved with simple top-down directives from Washington, D.C. (example story).

Is there not an inconsistency here? If we are as ignorant as NPR says we are, why would employers be lining up to hire us, even with the pressure that NPR considers appropriate for politicians in Washington, D.C. to apply?

Related: August 8, 2010 posting asking whether unemployed = 21st century draft horse

I lent out a Sony a7R and 35mm and 55mm lenses to a friend who is a very accomplished conventional DSLR photographer. Here’s what he had to say…

I was very excited to try the Sony having been impressed by the overwhelming flood of positive reviews and sample images. At first touch I hated the camera. Coming from a Nikon DSLR, I found the layout confusing and nothing worked the way I thought it should. I couldn’t adjust the focal area without digging deep into the menu. The front and rear dials, which I thought should control aperture and speed respectively, didn’t seem to do anything, and all the photos I took were out of focus. I tried reading the manual, but this was akin to following the instructions of an autistic pedant. The manual mentions every dial and menu option without ever explaining how to use the damn thing. I found some intelligible comments and reviews online and eventually was able to configure the camera enough to make it somewhat useable without too much head-scratching (and slapping).

If your subject is willing to stand still you will be hard pressed to find a better pairing. Set the camera to aperture-priority, open the lens as wide as it will go, ignore ISO, and have fun. If your subjects are mobile 13-month-old boys, load your gun and shoot yourself.

The sample images below were captured in RAW and imported into Lightroom, mainly for slight cropping. Portrait: 1/250 f2.0 ISO 800. Black and white: 1/60 f1.8 ISO 1250.

Requiring insurers to pay for lots of mammograms is one of the features of Obamacare so presumably this billable procedure is going to become more popular here in the U.S. A new study, however, shows that the billions of dollars per year (NPR estimates) that Americans spend on mammograms is mostly wasted (New York Times).

This reminds me of a conversation that I had with a woman who turned 40 and had her first mammogram. The doctors found something that looked unusual and they told her that there was a significant chance that it was cancerous. I said “Doctors can’t understand basic probability. If you’d had a mammogram last year and the one this year showed something different then they might be correct. But given that this is their first look, the probability of a real problem is vastly lower than the number that they citing. I would wait a couple of years and let them do another one and see if anything has grown. Then let them cut you open.”

The woman accepted the advice of the top physicians at the Massachusetts General Hospital and let them cut her open, removing a portion of her breast tissue for a biopsy. They found nothing but left a scar a substantial bill for Blue Cross.

DxOMark.com continues its cruel exposure (so to speak) of Canon’s image quality weakness relative to Nikon and Sony.

Their direct comparison of sensor performance among three entry-level SLRs shows that Nikon crushes Canon in dynamic range, color sensitivity, and low-light performance.

Below are two photos from brunch today. One was taken by a friend with an iPhone 5s. The other by me with an admittedly rather bulky standard camera (Sony NEX-6 with Sony/Zeiss 16-70mm lens). The light level was fairly similar, on opposite sides of a table. It was fairly bright by indoor standards, with a lot of window light reflecting off white walls.

As you can see, the camera phone picture, despite having come from a state-of-the-art phone (iPhone 5s), is painfully noisy (“grainy” as we film dinosaurs might say).

I can understand the rage for thin and light phones but with more than 7 billion people on the planet I would think that there would be a market for a thicker heavier phone that could deal with indoor photography more gracefully. Samsung has tried in this area a few times (e.g., this Galaxy S4 Zoom camera) but somehow consumers aren’t buying.

[If you’re curious to see more photos with this fairly new lens, I’m building up an examples folder. At first it seemed as though the lens would be unbalanced on the small and light NEX-6 body but I have gotten used to it.]