Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

As Barack Obama is inaugurated president today, an event the media has declared to be an historic moment, I recall a conversation that I had with a woman in Cambridge a few months ago. She asked me who I’d voted for in the Primary. I replied “Barack Obama, mostly because I wanted to make sure that my weblog prediction of his victory in the general election came true.” She snorted in disgust: “What a surprise. You voted for another tall man.”

Full post, including comments

It may be instructive to review George W. Bush’s January 2001 speech to see whether he lived up to his pre-inauguration promises.

Full post, including comments

The Boston Globe carries an interesting article on Al-Jazeera and their coverage of the recent battle in Gaza. The author is a Harvard graduate student living in Syria, so he is much closer to the locals than a typical Hilton-dwelling journalist.

Full post, including comments

I got an email today from kiva.org and it prompted me to review my portfolio. I put $650 in on July 4, 2007. I’ve made 7 loans totalling $1000 to folks in Ecuador, Peru, and Tanzania (some of the money that I put in was loaned out, paid back, and loaned out again). How much did these farmers, shopkeepers, and hairstylists pay back? All of the $1000 minus two cents, since my current account balance is $649.98.

Full post, including comments

Barney Frank, one of Massachusetts’s contributions to our Congress, had put a provision into the latest bank bailout bill that would have forced recipients of federal money to give up their business aircraft. It sounded like a war on corporate excess and it would have been a righteous war if all operators of business jets were like John Kerry, Frank’s fellow Democrat from Massachusetts. Instead of hopping the Metro to National Airport and taking one of the hourly commercial flights to Logan Airport, then hopping the T to his Beacon Hill mansion, Kerry has himself limoed out to Dulles Airport (National is closed to private aircraft), flown up to Hanscom Field, and limoed 15 miles to Beacon Hill. He doesn’t save any time compared to flying commercial, but he avoids rubbing elbows with the rabble who keep reelecting him.

Consider a bank, however, that has been paying big rents and big salaries in downtown Boston, Chicago, or New York City. Workers in a small town in Maine, upstate New York, central Indiana, or central Pennsylvania might be much cheaper to employ, but there wouldn’t be any commercial airline service to their small towns. If the bank has a bizjet, however, it can set up a facility in a place that is otherwise impractical to reach. Executives can fly in and out for meetings (a surprising number of small towns have a jet-ready airport). Take away the bizjet and those small town workers will have a more difficult job competing with workers in the biggest cities that have frequent commercial airline service.

Frank’s attempt to suppress business aviation would have had the effect of favoring his constituents (all of whom live close to Boston’s Logan Airport, a very busy travel hub) and harming people in small-town America. So far, however, members of Congress from states such as Kansas are successfully fighting what are effectively restrictions on banks doing business anywhere other than in our larger cities.

Full post, including comments

According to the press coverage of the US Airways floating tour of the Hudson River, the Airbus A320 has been certified for single-pilot operation. In the old days this airplane would have flown by a crew of two pilots, one titled “Captain” and one with the job title of “First Officer”. One of the two pilots would have been handling the stick and rudder while the other pilot worked the radio, flaps, slats, landing gear, pressurization controls (very critical in this case, since a jetliner ditching usually involves dumping the cabin pressure and then sealing the cabin just before impact). Generally these roles are swapped after each leg of a trip. The “pilot monitoring” role can be tougher than the “pilot flying” role when things go wrong. The stick and rudder stuff is what pilots have been doing since their first flight in a Cessna. Furthermore, all airplanes respond in a similar way to stick and rudder commands. The systems and switches on a modern airliner, however, are extremely complex and unique to a particular airplane type. For knowing what switch to push and in what order, experience gained on a previous airplane is of no value.

From reading the New York Times, we learn that Chesley B. Sullenberger III was the pilot of US Airways 1549 and he was apparently working everything in the cockpit by himself, a truly remarkable achievement.

[A reader of the London Times, by contrast, would have learned that the A320 is flown by a two-pilot crew and that the first officer was Jeff Skiles (profile).]

[News accounts have not spent a lot of ink on the people who did the toughest job in this incident: Shelia Dail, Donna Dent, and Doreen Welsh, the flight attendants. Being a pilot is a fairly straightforward job in a tightly controlled environment (except when both engines quit!). The flight attendants, however, face unique situations depending on who shows up as a passenger. In their training and drills they have to evacuate a fully-loaded airplane within 90 seconds.]

Full post, including comments

Suppose that you had been president for eight years and had spent weeks preparing your farewell address to the American people. You want everyone to be tuned in and paying attention. What news story could possibly be big enough to distract hundreds of millions of people? How about a jet airliner losing both engines and making a forced landing in the frigid Hudson River? What are the odds of that? No U.S. jet airliner has ever had to land in the water. Of course it would make an even more improbable and therefore compelling story if all the passengers and crew simply walked out of the floating airplane onto the Circle Line cruise boat.

Maybe God hates George W.

Full post, including comments

I was having dinner with a New York friend, her daughter, and two Argentine girls. The Argentines were talking about how they’d learned English and would casually use four-letter words in English back in Argentina. When they came to Miami they had to learn not to say “fuck” all the time. I said that it reminded me of one of my favorite movies, I Love You to Death, with Kevin Kline. It opens with him confessing to a priest and wondering whether cursing out his mother-in-law in a language she doesn’t understand counts as a sin (“it counts” is the priest’s response).

As we were leaving the restaurant, a familiar-looking guy walked in. My hostess introduced me. “This is Kevin Kline; he lives in the neighborhood.” We explained that we’d just been talking about I Love You to Death. He responded “It’s a true story, you know.”

Full post, including comments

Desperate financial times call for desperate measures and certainly I’ve put forth some crazy ideas here in my Weblog, but people expect a touch of insanity from a private blog. On January 11, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Thomas Friedman in which he

1) discloses that his wife is a public school teacher (union member)

and

2) proposes that the government eliminate federal income tax on all schoolteachers

He says that “more talented people would choose these careers” if they didn’t have to pay any tax.

Were we to implement the tax break immediately, 100% of the benefits would flow to existing teachers because no new ones will be hired until September. Friedman implies that these existing teachers are untalented because they are paid so little (topping out at just over $100,000 per year after 22 years, or age 44 for the typical person who starts after college) I don’t think he believes that the untalented will do a better job without the distraction of paying federal income tax, so perhaps he is holding out hope for five years from now. In September 2009, a truly talented young person, hearing about this tax break, will decide to go to a teacher’s college to pursue a Bachelor’s in Education. In September 2013 that person will have graduated and be ready to work. Assuming an average career length of 30 years, by 2014 fully 3 percent of our schoolteachers will be the talented ones attracted by the tax break and taxpayers will only be wasting 97 percent of their money by paying the untalented legacy schoolteachers extra.

I’m kind of surprised that the Times ran this piece.

[Note that Friedman’s idea is not totally at odds with my economic recovery plan, in which I propose eliminating public employee unions and teacher tenure.]

Full post, including comments

Usually it is bad news if a plane has a reputation for being flaky. The Piper Malibu/Meridian has a troubling history of engine fires, engine failures, landing gear problems, and generally weak construction for a plane that goes up to 25,000′ (Malibu; overworked piston engine with two turbochargers) or 30,000′ (Meridian; same plane with a turboprop engine). The windshields are kind of a sore point too, costing $28,000 to replace after typical problems with the defroster.

But what if you want people to believe you when you call ATC and say that your windshield has imploded? There is really no better airplane. Here’s a CNN article about a guy who bailed out of a 2002 Piper Meridian, tail number N428DC. He probably doesn’t get much credit for managing money, but I give him a lot of credit for being able to parachute out of a Meridian, a plane whose door is a good long walk from the pilot’s seat and right next to the tail.

Update: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhgPCL3uCH4 shows the guy flying under a bridge in 2000.

Full post, including comments