Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The theme of our MIT Reunion 2007 was energy.  John Fernandez, a professor of architecture at MIT, gave a talk about how the urbanization and wealthification of humanity has led to climbing energy consumption.  Here are some interesting facts:

• half of all of the construction in the world occurs in China
• concrete accounts for 6-8% of CO2 emissions
• Percentage of Chinese urban households with air conditioners:  24% in 2000; 87% in 2007.
• Shanghai every year adds more building space than exists in all of Manhattan
• World population is heading to 9-10 billion, of which 6 billion will live in cities (up from 3 billion today)
• In the U.S., residential and commercial space accounts for 40 percent of our primary energy consumption; 38 percent of CO2 emissions are from operating buildings.
• Globally, lighting accounts for 19 percent of electricity usage.
• an American will consume 3.6 million lbs. of materials in his or her lifetime
• the percentage of renewable materials in a building constructed in 1950:  15%; in 2000: 5%.
• the folks at http://www.globalfootprint.org/ estimate that humanity is currently consuming more than one Earth’s worth of stuff; i.e., we are dipping into stores of forests and water faster than they are being replenished

Fernandez talked about a lot of ways to build energy-efficient structures: glass that reflect heat in the summer; double-walled houses that don’t offer easy thermal exchange interfaces; etc.  He did not mention what seems to me to be the easiest way to reduce energy consumption:  stop heating, lighting, and air-conditioning houses in which nobody is home.  A toilet knows whether you are standing in front of it.  Why can’t a brand-new house know when everyone has left?  Consider the House-as-Smart-as-a-Toilet (TM) in the summer.  When the last person leaves, it lets the temperature rise to 80 degrees, turns off the lights, and closes the blinds.  When an owner of the House-as-Smart-as-a-Toilet (TM) programs his or her car GPS to “destination home”, the car communicates the ETA to the house and the A/C is turned back on.  When the owner arrives home, the House-as-Smart-as-a-Toilet (TM) opens the blinds, evaluates the resulting light levels, and turns on lights as necessary.

MIT’s president Susan Hockfield spoke briefly.  She seemed charming, competent, and energetic.  Her talk was also boring, insipid, and laced with cliches such as “herding cats”.

At lunch, the oldest alum stood up.  He was apparently in great health, a member of the Class of 1935.  Each class’s fundraising manager stood up to report on the total amount raised ($1-15 million) and the participation rate (25-70%), after which everyone was supposed to clap (my offer of a gift to MIT was rejected a year ago (story)).  In the spirit of MIT competitiveness, I suggested that our table of 1982 graduates should actually boo the other classes, but this policy was not adopted.

We 1982ers had dinner in the new Brain and Cog Sci building, a magnificent structure.  Compared to modern students, it is striking how few of us went into finance, law, or medicine.  Seemingly everyone was doing science, engineering, or business management (usually of a fairly technical business).  Despite the fact that our class was more than 80 percent male, a lot of women alums showed up and the guys managed to find wives and have children somehow.

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Yesterday my friend Julian had a business meeting in Manhattan, so we fired up the Robinson R44 at 0700 and headed down there. stopping at 0815 in Oxford, CT (OXC) to refuel with 100LL and coffee before proceeding straight to the city.  We obtained VFR advisories from NY Approach, who handed us off to LaGuardia Tower.  The controllers wanted us to fly across Long Island Sound (always fun in a single-engine piston aircraft, but especially unnerving in a helicopter without popout floats), over the “south stanchion of the Throgs Neck Bridge” and then “over the tower cab” (where the controllers sit at the top of the tower) of the LGA airport at 1500′.  This is known as the Whitestone Bridge route, even though it doesn’t involve the Whitestone Bridge and isn’t on the NY Helicopter chart.  From the top of the airport, we proceed to the 59th St. bridge and down towards the E. 34th St. heliport (6N5).

The heliport consists of a strip of asphalt seemingly underneath FDR drive.  There are six spots marked by lines, seemingly far too close together for helicopters to park.  A big Bell was on Spot 4.  Spots 1, 2, and 3 were empty.  They could have asked me to land on Spot 1, leaving ample space between me and the spinning Bell.  Instead, they wanted us on Spot 3, right next to the $2 million Bell, loaded with jet fuel.  Presumably they were trying to leave the first two spots free in case a big Sikorsky wanted to come in.  I forced myself to concentrate on the painted lines, told myself that people probably do this all of the time in bigger helicopters and don’t touch rotors, and tried to banish thoughts of the spinning adjacent Bell from my mind.

Julian got out, reaching the street at about 9:20 a.m. (saving at least 1.5 hours compared to driving to Logan from his suburban house, going through security, taxing a taxi from LaGuardia, etc.).  Some of my friends who live in Manhattan got in and we lifted off for a sightseeing tour down to Coney Island, over the Intrepid’s new location, around the Statue of Liberty, over Ellis Island, up the Hudson, over Central Park, and down by the United Nations and past the Brooklyn Bridge to the Downtown/Wall Street heliport (KJRB) where the R44 could be parked for a few hours.  The Port Authority folks took a more realistic view of the average Robinson pilot’s likely skills and asked me to park about three pads away from the nearest other helicopter.

Julian had his meeting, so I decided to look at loft spaces to rent.  I think it would be fun to have an apartment in Manhattan for trips down every couple of weeks and with high ceilings to use as a temporary photo studio.  I had a list of places culled from Craig’s List and also some brokers.  The high cost of New York real estate is amazing.  A $4000/month apartment in New York City will either be an exquisitely crafted closet or a shabby normal-sized dwelling.  The places where a visitor might conceivably say “this is a nice apartment” start at $5000/month.

What amazed me more, however, was the inefficiency of the market.  Most markets for most products in the U.S. are fairly efficient.  Cars that cost about the same are more or less equally nice and functional.  If you spend more money at a hotel or restaurant, it is usually better than a cheaper place.  Houses that are reasonably similar and reasonably close together sell for about the same price.  The first apartment, at 11th and 2nd Avenue, was advertised as being a “loft” and “drenched in light from three exposures”, $3900.  It was two average-sized rooms with a total of about four average-sized windows, all of which faced a central airshaft.  At 11:00 am on a sunny day, it was too dark inside to read a book.  It seemed like a ridiculously bad value, but the broker said confidently that it would rent at that price.  Just on the other side of the island, in the West Village, she showed a couple of apartments that were actually cheaper, in a beautiful building, with a lot more light, with a view of the street instead of the airshaft, etc.  Something seems badly wrong with the market if these dissimilar apartments were being offered at the same price.

The brokers themselves seemed very odd.  In NYC now, they try to collect 15% of a year’s rent for their services.  You would think that people with sales jobs like these would be exceptionally smooth in dealing with customers.  Yet most of the brokers didn’t bother to introduce themselves and were not even curious to know my name.

Given the expense of a NY apartment and the hassle of running around the city looking at places that aren’t as advertised, you’d think that there would be a market for much better information about rental units.  Apartments would be in a database, characterized by floor plan, square footage, total window area, a grading system for condition (possibly assessed by an independent appraiser), etc.

Maybe the readers in Manhattan can enlighten us as to why the process is so painful and inefficient.

[The flight back was beautiful, up the CT beach at 500′ (after watching the waterside mansions pass undernath, the back seat passenger said that he never imagined there were so many rich people in this world), sun behind us.  We stopped at Lanmar in KGON to investigate their Cirrus service capabilities, ended up chatting for a long time, and proceeded back to Hanscom for a 7:15 pm arrival.]

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One technique that I learned from an instructor with 30+ years of experience is teaching simulated engine failures (“throttle chops”) by rolling off the throttle on a Robinson only enough to split the needles and bring the engine down to 90% RPM.  That way, if the student does not react properly, the rotor speed will not drop below 90% (once it gets to 80%, you are dead; the trip from 90 to 80% in an R22 with the collective still up takes about 1 second).

You can generate the nose yaw and the low RPM horn without chopping the throttle to idle.  This also makes sense in helicopters where there is a risk that the engine will actually quit if the throttle is chopped suddenly, e.g., older R44 Raven IIs.

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The helicopter instructors at East Coast Aero Club spent today doing some recurrent training in simulated engine failures and 180-degree autorotations with a Vietnam vet who has tens of thousands of hours of helicopter time.  For 25 years, he ran a helicopter flight school with a lot of Japanese students.  “They would come to our school through the U.S. Commercial license and then go over there for about 10 hours of training and some ground school.  They would take their checkride in an R22 and fail the first few times.  Most of them gave up after that.”

How hard is the check ride in Japan?

“I would fail it,” this expert pilot said.  “The checkride takes 2.5 hours and involves a three-leg cross-country.  You aren’t allowed to use any navigation equipment.  No GPS.  No VOR.  The instructor forces you to fly off course for 15 or 20 minutes.  Then you have to use an E6B to calculate an intercept angle to the original course and figure out a new ETA and fuel consumption.”

You have to use an E6B while keeping your hands on the flight controls?  “Yes.”

We went around the room.  Paul said “I couldn’t use an E6B while flying an R22.”  Joris said “I couldn’t use an E6B while flying an airplane.”  I said “I don’t think I could use an E6B while sitting here at this conference table eating a sandwich.”

Now we know why it is rare to find a Japanese who is unqualified for his or her job.

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I’ve written two new articles on photonet:

• Canon 16-35 lens review
• Guide to Victoria Falls

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At a dinner party a week ago, a woman talked about one of her friends from professional school. He was the nicest guy in the world, friendly, optimistic, happy. Everyone was shocked when he married “a total bitch.” The marriage has now lasted 15+ years with no signs of friction.

I offered my theory: “Happy people can marry anyone and stay married. They are dating someone who isn’t so great, yet their mood is good and they don’t feel any strong motivation to change their circumstances, so they slide from dating to marriage. Fundamentally unhappy people, however, are always trying to change something in an attempt to become happy. They will break up with partner and search for someone new, thinking that a new partner will make them happy. They keep doing this until they are 40 years old and desperate, never realizing that it wasn’t their circumstances making them unhappy, but their genetics.”

[A more refined version of this theory could be “The ratio between one’s innate happiness and one’s expected happiness predicts the likelihood that one will marry young.”  For example, if you are happier than average, but expect every day to be as fun as the best day of your life, you will keep searching.]

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From the June 2007 AOPA Pilot:  Orville Wright quit high school after junior year.  Wilbur finished four years of high school, but did not receive a diploma.  Bill Lear (Learjet) also did not graduate from high school.  Texas has more public-use airports than any other state, with 389 airports.   Alaska is second with 312, then California with 263.

I spent part of today flying with a young U.S. Air Force officer.  She has about 100 hours of airplane time and is completing an instrument rating.  I introduced her to the Robinson R22 and she didn’t do anything clumsy or dangerous.  For that I am very grateful.  It is such a pleasure to teach people who are good learners and good pilots.  You don’t have to work hard.  You don’t get scared.  You pat yourself on the back at the end of the day and call yourself a great teacher, taking credit for their inherently good flying skills and intuition.

Plan:  Fly the R44 to the E 34th heliport in Manhattan on Thursday, dropping off a friend for a business meeting.

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More than three years ago, I started a thread here on the ideal laptop configuration: http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2004/02/14/ideal-laptop-configuration/

What has changed in three years?  Apparently not that much in the hard drive realm.  I wanted 120 GB and this is apparently still a stretch (though bizarrely some Toshiba models (A205?) claim either to have a 200 GB drive in them or two hard drives plus a DVD drive and yet they are not especially heavy).

What do I want?  Mostly the same things:

• Windows operating system (aviation software is Windows-only and, without that software to keep databases up to date, a plane will become illegal for instrument flight)
• Medium-sized display, 14- or 15-inches (with medium resolution; I don’t want to be straining my eyes on tiny fonts)
• TrackPoint pointing stick or similar (the nub in the middle of the IBM Thinkpad; I can’t use a trackpad)
• big hard drive(s) for storing digital photos
• built-in socket for CF cards and possibly SD and other cards
• built-in Webcam and microphone for video/audio conferencing
• reasonable quality playback of DVDs, ideally from the built-in speakers
• built-in mobile phone-based Internet radio (my pet idea of having a universal wireless 802.11 network in the U.S. is apparently not going to happen within my lifetime)

What are the best laptops on the market that meet most of these specs?  As far as I have seen, Toshiba is the only company that claims outsized hard drive capacity.  Dell and Lenovo are the two with pointing sticks.  The built-in Webcam/microphone idea does not seem to have become universal.

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Seven years ago, I bought a bunch of Windows NT machines called Gateway Profiles. Imagine the display of a laptop computer, stuck on a deskstand, and thickened with a CD-ROM drive, CPU board, and hard disk. You plugged a keyboard into the back and had yourself a very compact machine that yet had (1) the screen at the right height for desktop use, and (2) the full-size keyboard of your choice.

What is the 2007 equivalent of the Gateway Profile? I’m looking for something to stick in a corner of the helicopter hangar, to use Firefox/gmail in between flights.  The closest thing that I could find was the Apple iMac, and it seems like a very poor value (a clunky Dell desktop with 1 GB of RAM and 22″ LCD monitor is $520; an iMac with 1GB of RAM and 24″ display is 4X the price at $2000).

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