Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I’ve been making flying videos with a Sony HDR-FX1 camcorder. Sony, for perverse reasons known only to its corporate soul, has equipped this machine with a 1/4-20 socket rather than a standard shoe. Touring the professional camera stores of Boston did not result in any solution to the challenge of mounting a wireless microphone receiver or video light on this machine.

Being in Manhattan, I stopped in to see Jeff Hirsch, owner of Fotocare, who is the standard savior of troubled studio photographers. Jeff has just moved into a beautiful new storefront on W. 22nd (between 5th and 6th), considerably enlarged from his old place. I explained my problem to Jeff and within three minutes was walking out with the right adapter.

It is nice that the world’s leading expert on which studio digital backs work best and how to light a car in a warehouse can still take time to solve small problems for small customers. It is sad to think that the Amazonification of the universe is reducing the number of cities in which a shop like Fotocare will be able to exist, but we’ll always have New York… (I hope!)

[Across the street is an excellent Provencal restaurant, Allegretti.]

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If you’re feeling insignificant and unaccomplished, head over to the Metropolitan Museum and look at a painting on temporary display. It is a very complex oil painting with a lot of color and drama. The artist, Michelangelo, was 12 years old when he did it. More: nytimes.

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I had dinner the other night with a 21-year-old and his boss. The kid had worked for the company for two summers and was trying to decide between going back to college in September or taking a year off to get more work experience.

The boss said that one advantage of going back to school was that he was more likely to meet a potential wife in college where people sit around lazily than in the fast-paced working world. He then caught himself and realized that this might be offensive if the kid, with whom he’d worked for 1.5 summers, happened to be gay. He restated and rephrased his advice, saying “more likely to meet the woman or man with whom you’d spend the rest of your life.”

It pointed out that in earlier decades it would not have been considered polite to suggest to a man a roughly equal chance of his being gay or straight. In fact, if not for the employment relationship, a person who suggested that a man might be gay would have feared a response in the form of a punch.

The college kid said “I took it in the spirit of an attempt to be politically correct and wasn’t offended.”

Was he in fact gay? “I don’t even own an iPhone,” was his answer.

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I sat in a mock-up of the new Cirrus Jet today alongside Alan Klapmeier, the company’s co-founder, who was visiting Hanscom Field (KBED). The interior reflects some truly brilliant design. The seats slide back and forth on long tracks, allowing a lot of flexibility. People could swap seats with the pilots without knocking the thrust lever. The visibility is fantastic, certainly the best of any civilian jet.  The panel is two medium-sized screens, a row of switches, and three small multi-function screens. By refraining from putting in the three or four big screens of a modern business jet, Cirrus has left room for windows.

This promises to be the least expensive of the very light jets, but for a lot of families possibly the most useful. The plane holds two people in front and realistically should be flyable by one parent. That leaves room for a second adult in the front, two sullen teenagers in the middle, and a parent with two younger kids in the back row of three seats (two of which are undersized).

If three adults want to sit in the back and have a conversation, the rearmost seat can slide forward so that it is just behind the two middle seats. This leaves a lot of shoulder room, but the three people are still close enough to talk. If someone wanted to sleep across the three middle seats, the rearmost seat can be pulled up even with the middle two.

Cirrus does not seem to be suffering from the Collapse of 2008 as badly as other airplane manufacturers. My theory is that this is due to their introducing a lot of new features recently, such as a Garmin-based instrument panel and a certified-for-flight-into-known-icing anti-ice system. A 2005 Cirrus is not a perfect substitute for a 2009 Cirrus, as would be the case with many other small aircraft.

Klapmeier is an interesting guy to talk with, very knowledgeable about engineering and certification testing. He is also candid, like you’d expect a company founder to be, rather than evading questions and parroting marketingspeak or legalspeak.

I’m pretty happy with the Cirrus SR20 that I fly regularly, but it isn’t revolutionary. If the Cirrus Vision jet can be delivered at anywhere near the originally promised price ($1 million 2006 dollars) it will certainly be a revolution in family jet transportation.

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I’ll be spending Sunday in Ridgefield, Connecticut looking at Edward Tufte’s new sculpture and hearing him speak at 4 pm (details). This should be convenient for anyone in the New York City area, particularly as the museum has an option for bus transportation to and from Manhattan (takes about 1:15 to drive). Having seen some of Tufte’s earlier sculpture, I’ve been looking forward to this event for months. If any readers of this weblog are interested in joining up for a coffee either on Sunday at the museum (around 3 pm), or Friday evening in Manhattan near the Metropolitan Museum, please let me know via email.

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Since it would appear that my economic recovery plan has little chance of being adopted, I’ve turned my attention to something that would improve long-term U.S. economic growth: improving university education. Comments on this draft would be appreciated.

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Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda is the hot new book on how our tax money is being wasted in Afghanistan. A lot of careful reporting establishes that the opium/heroin trade finances angry Muslims, to the tune of 30 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. This is not a surprising result when you consider the likelihood of Afghans, more than 70 percent of whom are illiterate, competing successfully in the world economy. What else could they be doing to generate cash?

[The author looks back to the 1970s, when the Afghans had some success with agricultural exports other than heroin, and suggests a goal of returning to the 1970s; she ignores the facts that in the 1970s there was no competition from China and India (both had economies hobbled by government restrictions), transportation from the Far East was much more expensive, and the Internet was not available in China, India, and a variety of Asian countries with highly educated citizens.]

The author’s conclusion is that we need dramatic changes in our strategy. It is not sufficient to destroy poppy crops with aerial spraying. We need to imprison the chemists who turn poppy into heroin. We need to build up the Afghan economy so that its illiterate farmers will find it more profitable to grow something other than poppy. We need to reform the corrupt government, starting with the president’s brother, who is apparently a big heroin dealer himself.

This made me ask whether it is reasonable to assume limits to U.S. power. Suppose that we succeed in imprisoning all chemists and shutting down all drug labs. Given a supply of poppy and a market for heroin, aren’t there some sufficiently enterprising Afghans who could learn to make heroin? Can we build up the Afghan economy so that people can find better jobs than being a drug dealer? We haven’t succeeded in building up the U.S. economy to that extent; there are plenty of U.S. residents who have chosen drug dealing over other careers.  Could we make the Afghan police so effective that they can find and successfully prosecute 100 percent of drug dealers? We haven’t done that with our own police. Can we fix their corrupt government? Our own government just handed out $2 trillion to various cronies.

When planning an overseas adventure, would it make sense to break the project down into small tasks and ask “Can Americans do this?” Let’s consider aerial spraying. That is equivalent to asking the questions “Can an American fly an airplane?”; “Can an American sit in an airplane and identify a poppy field?”; “Can an American purchase some Roundup from Monsanto?’; “Can an American pilot release the Roundup on top of the poppy field?”

The answers to all of these questions is plainly “yes” and in many cases these are things that Americans have 100 years of experience doing. The author of Seeds of Terror dismisses aerial spraying as ineffective, but at least we can be confident that it is doable. An effective strategy that requires us to do things that we can’t do is more like a dream than a workable plan.

Had we broken down our Iraq and Afghanistan projects into tasks of this size, we probably would have found a lot of “no” answers and that would have been a warning that we needed to plan something different and simpler.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/opinion/09aciman.html

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Friends have been asking for my thoughts on how Air France 447 crashed. Without the flight recorder and cockpit voice recorder it will be tough to know. Here’s a guess..

1. it was the middle of the night and bumpy; the airplane is on autopilot, just like any other airliner in cruise flight
2. some of the airspeed and attitude instruments disagreed slightly, either because one was defective or conditions were so turbulent that readings differed substantially on the left and right sides of the airplane
3. the avionics did what they always do in this kind of situation… disengage the autopilot and dump the airplane back into the pilots’ laps: “I can’t determine what’s going on, despite my massive electronic brain, so you try to figure out what to do with this airplane.”
4. the airplane immediately started pitching and rolling from the turbulence, thus presenting the tired and startled pilots with an “unusual attitude recovery” challenge
5. the pilots failed to meet the challenge and their control inputs were not helpful in stabilizing the airplane
6. the airplane came apart from being oversped, overstressed, etc.

How could this happen? Those same pilots would have had unusual attitude training in a Cessna 172 and they did fine. There are a few important differences between a Cessna 172 and an Airbus. The unusual attitude training was 20 minutes into a flight during the daytime. The pilots were prepared for it. It takes a long time to push the Cessna 172 over its speed limit or beyond its stress limits. Pushing the nose down on a jet, by contrast, builds up airspeed at a frightening pace. The Cessna is very tough to spin and can be easily recovered from a spin. A multi-engine jet need not demonstrate spin-resistance or spin recovery. The assumption is that the plane will spend its entire life within a normal envelope of flight attitudes and airspeeds. The Cessna 172 is built to withstand nearly 4Gs and can handle more at the cost of some bending. An airliner is designed to withstand 2.5Gs and the Airbus planes have sometimes had trouble even meeting that standard (if you built an airliner as strong as a four-seat airplane you wouldn’t be able to carry as many passengers).

This explanation of the problem does not require the plane or pilots to have done anything unusual. The Airbus had some sort of problem with its very complex set of sensors, gyros, and computers. That is a very common occurrence on a plane that has three of everything. The autopilot tripped off in response to a failure or disagreement. This is normal behavior, though much more common in light airplanes than in jets. A couple of pilots who were tired and deprived of a natural horizon by the darkness, open ocean, and clouds, turned out not to be heroes, at least not this time.

There is probably more to it, but this is my best guess.

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The New York Times Company has been flailing about trying to salvage its $1.1 billion (1993) investment in the Boston Globe. Problems have included a collapse in the market for print advertising here in New England, competition from online sources of information, and difficulties in negotiating with 13 separate unions (see Mancur Olson for how a company with more than one union is typically marked for death; each individual union has a stronger interest in its own members’ compensation than in the continued existence of the company).

Perhaps there is opportunity here. The New York Times is already distributing a hardcopy paper in Boston, i.e., the New York Times. All national papers have the ability to insert custom ads for one region’s printing. So even without the Globe the NYT has the ability to sell ads, print a paper, and distribute it to homes. The only thing that is lacking is a staff to prepare a daily “Boston Wrapper”. The truly local stories in the Globe could easily fit into one printed section… plus two more pages for comics! Instead of calling this a “supplement”, implying that it is added to the paper as an afterthought, have it be a wrapper that is the first thing seen by a reader. The New York Times front section would then be in the middle.

Freed from the responsibility to cover national and international stories, a staff of reporters in Boston could produce perhaps the nation’s best local coverage of city and state politics and government, of important research at regional universities and companies, and of our beloved sports teams. Given that the wrapper would be the first thing that people saw when the paper was on a newsstand there would be much more pressure than currently to find interesting and relevant local stories.

Opinion could also be written with more authority. Currently the Globe writes a lot of editorials on issues of national annd international importance, with the implicit claim that it has weighed the issues on all sides and is, for example, recommending something that will be best for all Americans or sometimes even all humans on Planet Earth. Who are we kidding? Boston is a provincial backwater by U.S. standards. Do wise Latina women make better decisions than white males? How should we know? We have only half as many Latinos in Massachusetts compared to other states (source). Did Barack Obama’s apology to the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims have the desired effect? Very few of those Muslims live in Boston so we’d be guessing.

The editorial page of the Boston Wrapper could unapologetically offer opinion from a New England perspective. Was it good to cancel the new presidential helicopter ($400 million each for a machine that is virtually identical to one made in Europe for $30 million)? Absolutely; it wasn’t being built in New England.  Is it important to improve diplomatic relations with Dubai? Yes; Harvard university has a lucrative relationship with the Emirate (more).

How to start? Start distributing the Boston Wrapper/NYT to every household that currently gets the Globe. Survey the readers periodically. As soon as more than half of the readers say that they find the Boston-wrapped NYT more useful than the Globe, stop printing the Globe.

If successful in Boston, the Times could extend the approach to other cities and eventually turn the death of the Globe into a template for extracting huge profits from the collapse of other cities’ local papers.

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