The MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (where I was a grad student) demands that faculty job applicants include a “diversity statement” and they helpfully explain how to write a successful one:
In general, a well-structured diversity statement mimics the structure of a teaching statement, showing your knowledge of the topics you choose to discuss, demonstrating a track record of advancing DEI through past experiences, and presenting your future plans around DEI, as shown in the structure diagram below. However, diversity statements may also contain the same content organized topically rather than chronologically. Typically, diversity statements are no longer than 1-2 pages.
1-2 pages to grapple with one of the greatest issues of our age?!?!
A faculty application diversity statement is NOT a document explaining how you as a candidate are diverse.
Self-criticism is welcome:
It may be appropriate to acknowledge aspects of your own marginalized identity and/or your own privilege
Learn from books, not by talking to the people you’re supposedly attempting to serve:
If you have not spent much time engaging with issues and ideas related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, it’s never too late to start educating yourself. Look for resources that will introduce you to relevant literature and help you learn about people with experiences different than your own. However, remember that it is not the job of members of an underrepresented or marginalized group to educate you on topics related to their experience.
It’s not about the quota, but “I will strive for gender parity among my graduate students.” (doesn’t this hatefully imply that that there are only two genders?):
Over the past year, according to data released last week, net migration into Britain has soared to 504,000, the highest on record. This means half a million more people are coming into Britain than are leaving – that’s a city the size of Liverpool every year.
But not only are the Tories presiding over record amounts of legal migration, they are also overseeing a rapid rise in numbers of people arriving in the country unlawfully, in small boats across the Channel.
The number of people arriving in this manner has now rocketed from 300 to nearly 40,000 in five years. The largest single group of foreign nationals on the boats come not from a war-torn country but Albania, a country that is currently in talks to join the EU.
… the number of outstanding asylum claims has just reached its highest point on record, with 140,000 asylum-seekers waiting decisions and fewer than one in five being processed.
Who voted for this? Who wants this? If you look at the latest surveys, only 10% of Britain thinks immigration since the Brexit referendum has been “too low” and only 19% want it increased in the years ahead.
By pushing on with mass immigration, by failing to genuinely take back control of Britain’s borders, by refusing to reform modern slavery legislation and Britain’s relationship with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the only things that would enable the country to truly regain control of its borders, the Conservative Party is about to send British politics all the way back to the early 2010s, where a divided society gives rise to an ugly populism.
A majority of Brits voted for Brexit and, therefore, implicitly for a reduction in low-skill immigration. The UK is a sovereign nation. What stops the UK from saying “We withdraw from the The 1951 Refugee Convention and, therefore, asylum is no longer available”?
If humans and SARS-CoV-2 need to co-evolve, as my medical school professor friends said back in March 2020 when heaping scorn on lockdowns, school closures, and mask orders, we might be at half-time here, three years in.
The Swedish MD/PhDs agreed with the professors and, consequently, set up the country’s Give-the-Finger-to-the-Virus policy. At the time (Feb/March 2020), they said that their goal was to have the same death rate, by the time the dust settled in 2022, as other continental European nations. Did they succeed?
Our World in Data offers a cumulative deaths, compared to projections, statistic for the entire period of coronapanic (almost 3 years). This will capture COVID-19 deaths and also near-term deaths that were caused by lockdown, e.g., deaths from extra alcohol and drug abuse, from deferred medical care and screening tests, etc. It won’t capture the likely premature deaths of those of today’s children who lost 12-18 months of education, the expected premature deaths of those who were unemployed for a long period, the expected premature deaths of those who gained weight during the lockdowns, etc.
What do we see against the comparison group that the Swedes set up prior to the experiment being run? Sweden suffered 5 percent more deaths than expected during the three-year period. Austria had lockdowns, mask orders, and forced vaccination. They’re at 9 percent. Slovakia and Czech Republic were celebrated for their early and eager adoptions of forced masking. They’re at 19 percent and 9 percent. Germany, which won all kinds of praise for doing everything in a German manner? 5 percent. Infinitely rich neighboring Norway? 4 percent. K-12 education PISA test champion neighbor Finland? 5 percent.
What about looking at some countries that weren’t part of the original experiment but might yet be interesting? Peru, which brought out the police and military to enforce lockdowns and masks… 41 percent. Spain, where you had to borrow the neighbor’s dog if you wanted to legally walk out of your apartment? 11 percent. Greece, which was celebrated for its Science-informed response to COVID-19? 11 percent. (“they approached this initial crisis in an exemplary manner. We should all consider following their lead of consistent messaging, evidence-based evaluation, and adherence to the scientific method.”; or give the finger to the virus and experience fewer than half as many excess deaths?) How about the U.S., where just over half of us were clean and tidy Followers of Science and where, for 2/3rds of the covered period, we have enjoyed the best and most competent Science-following government? After spending $20 trillion(?) and cowering in place for 1-2 years (in the states and cities that followed Science)…. we’re at 14 percent.
Caveat: these data are not age-adjusted, which is critical to do with a virus that targets the elderly (see this ranking of U.S. states for how much the needle can move, e.g., for a younger-than-average state such as California). The median age in Ireland is 5 years younger than Spain’s, with Sweden’s median age falling in the middle.
That day [in 2002], [Masahiko] Kimura, who was then in his sixties, was working on an Ezo spruce with a spiky, half-dead trunk which was estimated to be a thousand years old. A photographer from the Japanese magazine Kindai Bonsai was present to document the process. Neil and the other visitors observed as Kimura, with the help of his lead apprentice, Taiga Urushibata, used guy wires and a piece of rebar to bend the trunk downward, compressing the tree—an act requiring a phenomenal balance of strength and finesse. Kimura misted the branches with water and wrapped them with thick copper wire. He then bent the branches—some slightly upward, some downward—arranging the foliage into an imperfect dome, with small windows of light spaced throughout the greenery. He worked with relentless focus, but what amazed Neil most was the synchronicity of Kimura and Urushibata: whenever Kimura needed a tool, he would wordlessly extend his hand, and Urushibata would have the implement waiting for him.
“So you want to apprentice here?” Urushibata said.
“I do,” Neil said.
“You should reconsider,” Urushibata said, then turned his attention back to the spruce.
How did Kimura become a legendary master?
Kimura is sometimes said to have done for bonsai what Picasso did for painting—he shattered the art form and then reëngineered it. Using power tools, he performed transformations so drastic that the resulting shapes seemed almost impossible. Moreover, his new methods allowed him to execute dramatic alterations in hours as opposed to over decades. Not surprisingly, his accelerated technique was admired and imitated throughout the West.
Masahiko Kimura was eleven years old when his father, a successful engineer, died suddenly.
Kimura apprenticed from age 15 to 26 and did not become a full-time bonsai artist until his late 30s.
Around this time, a thirty-year-old engineer working at Toyota named Takeo Kawabe visited Kimura’s bonsai garden, fell in love with the trees, and asked to become his apprentice. Together, they developed an arsenal of custom devices—sandblasters, small chainsaws, grinders—that made it easy to quickly shape deadwood into whorls and wisps. Using power tools, Kimura could hollow out thick roots, allowing him to coil them up in smaller pots; he could also bend stout trees, to make them appear smaller, or split them apart, to create forest-style plantings.
Everything is bigger and better now:
Of late, the fashion in bonsai has shifted to larger specimens, to accommodate the tastes of wealthy Chinese buyers, who display their prized trees in outdoor gardens rather than inside their homes, as Japanese people do. Kimura’s work, which is monumental by bonsai standards—some trees reached as high as my sternum, with trunks nearly as wide as my waist—was well suited to this trend, and he had profited greatly from it. He told me that he had recently sold a tree to the C.E.O. of a major Chinese tech company. “To them, a million dollars is like a pack of cigarettes,” he said.
The former apprentice rejects his master’s core innovation:
Neil pointedly avoids power tools; he never grinds or sandblasts. This leaves the grain with a nuanced texture laden with spidery fissures. When you lean in close to a classic Kimura tree, in each carefully sculpted curve of the deadwood you perceive the handiwork of the artist. When you lean in to one of Neil’s trees, you marvel at the handiwork of nature.
How does being one of the world’s greatest bonsai artists compare to filling a chair at a FAANG company?
Neil, now in his early forties, had chronic back pain and was developing arthritis in his fingers. His financial situation, he told me, was “hand to mouth,” and the chaotic nature of climate change was making it harder to keep his prized trees alive. … He has been in therapy for years, attempting to root out the odd mixture of insecurity and callousness that Kimura ingrained in him. During his six years in Japan, Neil was prohibited from dating. When he returned home, he began a relationship with a former schoolmate, and they had a son, but before long they broke up, leaving him a single father with a seven-day-a-week job and perilous finances.
(If the bonsai expert doesn’t earn a lot of money, the mother made the economically rational choice under Oregon family law to leave him with the child. Separately, the above phrase “they had a son” is ambiguous in modern American English. Does it mean that a pair of hetereosexual adults working together produced a son? Or that a non-binary solo adult (“they”) produced a miniature human?)
I won’t be investing $10,000-20,000 in one of Neil’s creations. This is partly because I don’t want to kill a $10,000+ tree via incompetence, but also because I don’t think the species that he works with can thrive in South Florida where they won’t experience cold weather (article that says cold weather/dormancy is essential for temperate species). Florida does have its share of bonsai artistry and commercial bonsai production, but the popular species are adapted to the subtropics. Heathcote Botanical Gardens in Fort Pierce has a substantial collection that was developed by James J. Smith. Here are some photos from an October visit:
Another favorite place is Robert Pinder’s Dragon Tree Bonsai just west of Stuart, Florida. The most interesting stuff is not for sale, but can be enjoyed. A more commercial operation, which can be a good source for supplies such as stone lanterns, is H&F Imports, a.k.a. Sunshine Tropical Gardens, in Davie, Florida.
One nice thing about Florida is that keeping a bonsai in the back yard can be done with zero effort. Just place them where the HOA’s sprinklers will hit them (with “reclaimed water”; maybe best not to ask where this comes from) and Nature takes care of the rest. I did move ours under an alcove for overnight shelter from Hurricane Nicole.
A Los Angeles-to-Washington, D.C. helicopter trip started at PBI on a Sunday in November. Here are the Righteous preparing for a return flight to Boston after their optional vacation trip to South Florida.
When I arrived at LAX, I discovered that they’ve set up a Fall of Saigon-style area for everyone who wants to get out via taxi or Uber/Lyft. At 9:30 pm on a Sunday, the traffic was so heavy that it took my Uber about 25 minutes to go what Uber said would be a 5-minute 1-mile journey.
I was welcomed to the Redondo Beach Hotel in the distinct California style:
Even more upsetting, in a back corner of the hotel parking lot:
If you thought that people who were constantly surrounded by poisonous chemicals wouldn’t have time for coronapanic, you’d be mistaken. At the helicopter safety course, which includes an hour of simulated failures, each of which can easily turn into a real emergency:
The attendees, mostly beginner flight instructors, are typically men in their 20s and 30s (one pilot identifying as a “woman” was in our class of 30). Apparently they are at greater risk of being felled by COVID-19 (after failing to stand 6′ apart) than they are of being killed in a helicopter crash.
California taxpayers spent money on a Facebook ad encouraging me to get a COVID test:
At the Rite Aid, a reminder to keep injecting the 5-year-olds and also, some gluten-free rainbow wine.
They lock up stuff that wouldn’t be considered precious in most of the U.S.:
With no hurricanes, California’s beach towns have a lot more funky old stuff than do Florida beach towns, in which only the hardened and concrete survive:
Some more snapshots in our Redondo Beach neighborhood:
Conclusion: Los Angeles in the winter is awesome for people who don’t have to work (see Table 4 for how welfare spending power in CA compares to median-wage work). The mid-day weather is mild and sunny, which is of no value to those who are stuck in offices. It is dark and cold by the time the slaves are paroled from their plantations.
Let’s go to Reagan National Airport now. Here are some folks preparing for an optional vacation trip to Florida (PBI) over an extended Thanksgiving weekend. Counting airport transportation and TSA screening, it will take them half a day in crowded indoor public environments to get there. If they’d wanted to ensure a COVID-free experience, yet were unwilling to give up their vacation trip, they could have driven in one full day (14 hours door-to-door says The Google).
This is my favorite image. Eight people sitting in a row, all of them wearing various kinds of masks that have been proven ineffective against an aerosol virus.
Some apparently young/healthy people masked in the terminal:
A detail from the 8-in-a-row photo above:
Always a conundrum… our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters who choose to wear masks, but refuse to shave their beards. COVID-19 is a deadly threat, but not so deadly that anyone should pick up the Razor of Righteousness. Walking onto the crammed-to-capacity Airbus A320:
I didn’t get a video, unfortunately, but the two guys at the breakfast table next to me (they seemed to be traveling together and only one was wearing a mask prior to food arrival) insisted that the waitress remove the offensive items that she had delivered to their table: “We don’t use straws.”
Related:
“You May Be Early, but You’re Not Wrong: A Covid Reading List” (Nov 15): “Over the last few months, there’s been an avalanche of studies telling us that Covid poses a major threat to our health, our lives, and our sanity. The biggest risk now comes in the weeks and months after we recover. … There’s no permanent immunity from this virus. Each time we catch it, this virus attacks our hearts and minds. It weakens us. It tries to kill us. It imprints on us, so a future variant has a better shot next time.” (About half of Americans think as this author does, yet they won’t stay home. They’re voluntarily in crowded airports, airliners, theme parks, resort hotels, etc. SARS-CoV-2 has not changed substantially. The vaccines have a mediocre and temporary effect. Why are those who supported lockdowns in 2020 behaving differently than they did in 2020?)
Here are some thoughts after flying a factory-new $700,000 Robinson R44 Raven II from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Our machine is the gold one in the foreground on the ramp at KTOA:
(One of the teachers in the safety course, regarding a photo of the R22, R44, and R66 lined up, said “They’re not going to win any beauty contests.”)
The $25,000 air conditioning is a great luxury and worth the 33 lb. payload penalty. The lack of a sliding window for taking pictures is a continued disappointment. If you want a good aerial photo you need to land, remove a door, take off again, take the photo, land, put the door back on, etc. Bell and Airbus manage to include simple mechanisms for temporarily obtaining an unobstructed camera position. Why can’t Robinson do this?
The $57,000 autopilot should have been a game-changer and it kind of was, but usually not in a good way. I have trained some Blackhawk pilots who were transitioning down to the R44 and they struggled initially because they always flew the Blackhawk with the stability augmentation system (SAS) enabled. The Genesys autopilot’s core mode is SAS, in which it seems to return the helicopter to whatever attitude was preset. The system is hyperactive, however. If there are small attitude changes from extremely light turbulence or just the vibration of the helicopter, the autopilot will fight those small changes. A human pilot would do nothing and assume that the attitude bumps will average out. In straight and level flight, the SAS system is applying a control input literally every second. It is like having the world’s most nervous copilot on the controls with you. It probably should try to figure out if a human pilot is on the controls and, if so, do nothing until there has been at least a 2-degree disturbance in attitude. We were able to get the autopilot to fly a NAV course, go down a glide path on an LPV approach, etc. It more or less works just like an autopilot in an airplane, but because the helicopter shakes so much more it is not as confidence-inspiring. Is it worth $57,000 (the pre-Biden price of an airworthy certified IFR-capable 4-seat airplane)? Maybe! Despite the annoyance factor, I think it is worth enabling SAS for night flights and any time visibility is reduced or there is a chance of inadvertent instrument meteorological conditions (i.e., going into a cloud).
Robinson has limped into the glass cockpit era, but not gracefully. The Garmin G500 is a primary flight display, but not an integrated flight deck like the G1000 (see the Bell 505). So the pilot needs to look at the warning lights above the PFD to see if anything dramatic is wrong with the machine. Although the helicopter is certified for visual flying only and there is nothing on the PFD that is necessary for continued flight and landing, the FAA requires that Robinson install a full set of backup steam gauges. These are much larger and easier to read than what’s on the Garmin glass (the vertical speed indicator, for example, is at least 5X the size).
The G500 does not display a lot of the information that you’d expect it would. For example, it shows the outside air temperature and the aircraft’s altitude. Even without access to the manifold pressure sensor, it could look up in a table to find out what the current maximum continuous manifold pressure should be (corresponds to a horsepower limit) and display that to the pilot. It becomes the pilot’s job to use a table on the checklist or in fine print on the cyclic. Robinson continues to have separate fuel gauges for the main and aux tanks so it becomes the pilot’s job to do a bit of arithmetic and calculate flight time remaining.
Our second radio was a Garmin 225B. It was entirely unreadable/unusable at night due to being so much dimmer than the G500H and the GTN 750 (the NAV/COM1).
As we remember Pearl Harbor today, I will share some photos from a recent visit to the National WASP WWII Museum in Sweetwater, Texas. I learned that just over 1,800 women who’d already earned at least Private certificates were invited to train as Women Airforce Service Pilots (closer to 1,000 completed the program). The museum does a good job of walking visitors through the progression of training to fly military aircraft.
I knew that WASPs had ferried new aircraft from the factory to military bases, but I didn’t realize that they’d also towed targets for live fire practice (video interview). Remarkably, none of the women were killed during this activity.
Some details on the admissions and training processes:
Note that an interview with Florida-native superstar pilot Jacqueline Cochran was required.
The museum preserves some of the trainer aircraft (airworthy, apparently; note the oil drip pans) and shows off the skeleton of a “Bamboo Bomber”:
There are some poignant stories and memorials regarding each of the 38 WASPs who died during the two years that the program existed. No WASP was ever in combat, but there was plenty of potential for a mechanical problem in an airplane made without CNC machine tools. There was no moving map, no GPS, no NEXRAD for weather, etc.
WASPs were civilians, though Jimmy Carter retroactively made them military personnel (on the one hand, their job was nowhere near as dangerous as being a combat pilot and they never had to deploy overseas; on the other hand, their job entailed far more danger than that faced by millions of military men, e.g., those who worked stateside at desks). The museum highlights later female-identifying military pilots. The sign below makes it sound like an F-14 crash was the plane’s fault (after mismanaging an approach, Kara Hultgreen stomped on the rudder like a student pilot, which killed one engine, and then failed to manage the single-engine go-around).
The sign below about Colleen Cain caused me to search for more. She and two fellow crewmembers died going out at night into horrific weather to try to save seven sailors on a fishing boat. They had trouble with navigation, plainly, and ended up hitting terrain. They would all likely still be alive today given GPS and moving terrain maps. It is tough to understand how people can be brave enough to fly helicopters for the Coast Guard. A core part of their job is going out into weather bad enough to sink ships.
T
The museum’s conference room featured incredibly comfortable “sled” chairs that allowed a slight recline and had sufficient cushioning. It looks like they are Office Master OM5 stacker chairs. I am tempted to order some for kitchen table use!
As noon approached, muezzins across Qatar called Muslim soccer players, fans and officials to the first Friday prayers of the first World Cup to take place in a Muslim country.
How’s the World Cup going? Reuters says that this is the first time that a Muslim country has hosted. So it would be exciting if a Muslim country won the tournament. Besides England and France, which Muslim countries remain competitors?
Separately, here’s a guy at London’s Tate Modern studying a soccer game play analysis by Coach Cy Twombly:
I arrived in Los Angeles for the Robinson Helicopter Company’s safety course on November 13. The engineer who founded the company, Frank Robinson, died the day before at age 92 (AVweb). Frank democratized helicopter flying with his reasonably priced machines that were simple to operate and maintain. I had a few conversations with him over the years and he was always generous in sharing his time and direct in sharing his point of view.
Frank’s son Kurt Robinson now runs the company and he welcomed us to the class: “We want you to know what we know.” He stressed how important the safety course was to his father, a point later backed up by Bob Muse, a legendary LA helicopter pilot and teacher. “Frank missed fewer than 5 safety courses over the years,” Bob noted. “He would reschedule vacations and business meetings so that he could welcome every class of pilots. Frank loved aviation and the company. It was never about money.”
Bell and Airbus (“Eurocopter”) pilots enjoy heaping scorn on Robinsons, but we learned from Bob and Tim Tucker about how the pilots and engineers at all of these companies cooperate and fly each other’s machines. Robinson has been a leader in some safety areas, e.g., crash-resistant fuel bladders and standardizing on the Vuichard technique for recovery from vortex ring state (most likely encountered during a downwind steep approach to an off-airport landing zone).
Some of Bob’s points:
we overemphasize autorotations in training; it is rare to see accidents that are caused by something that would require an auto
seek recurrent training every 6 months, which is what the most experienced pilots will get
take phones away from mechanics; interruption by phone call is a common reason for a procedure step to be skipped
The previous generation’s aircraft mechanics have been retiring and are being replaced by younger less intelligent less conscientious Americans. Maintenance-related crashes are nearly twice as high a percentage of the total (still less than 10%, however) compared to 10-20 years ago. The biggest causes of Robinson accidents are wire strikes and weather, each contributing roughly 30 percent.
A huge number of safety-related initiatives and FAA regulation updates that would improve safety have been delayed by two years or more due to coronapanic. Everything that was on track to be approved in 2020 is still pending. One big change would be to revoke SFAR 73 and update the Robinson POH to add similar requirements, e.g., 20 hours dual before going solo, to the limitations. The requirements would then apply to international customers as well (currently about 80 percent of Robinson’s production is exported).
The latest Robinsons all come with dome light cameras (see Time for a robot assistant up in the dome light of the cockpit? for what I think it should do, but of course it doesn’t!). These have been very helpful in investigating accidents. (As with seemingly everything else in aviation, it was already obsolete when installed. The limit on memory card size is 128 GB, which is good for 10-15 hours. There is also an internal 16-hour memory that the pilots can’t access and that is recorded to even when the camera and audio are switched “off”) The dome light camera also provides some interesting cautionary videos. In one video a Bell 407 pilot, who previously did a lot of flying in Robinsons, is getting current again in the R44. She pulls the mixture, thus shutting off the engine, instead of the carb heat. She then immediately pushes the mixture back down, but the engine quits anyway. If they’d crashed, it would have been due to an “unexplained power loss.” (As it happens, the instructor in the left seat pushed the collective down and did a nice autorotation to the side of a railroad track. We then see him frantically pulling on the rotor brake. It turns out that a train was coming!)
My favorite video featured Julie Link on a sightseeing tour in Hawaii. The R44’s engine quits (the mounting block for the magnetos failed; apparently they’re both on the same piece of metal) and she does an autorotation to a field with two tourists in the back who don’t seem to be aware that things have become perilous. After they land, we hear her say “The engine stopped. It happens. It happens to me a lot.” (She previously did a heroic autorotation in an R22 to a street in Honolulu (Daily Mail).)
Once established in an auto, if the low RPM (97%) horn goes on, I like to take out half of the collective check that is in. Bob says to push it all the way down so as to build that reflex and then pull it back up slightly after the RPM is back to 100 percent.
Robinson now offers a polycarbonate windshield that will ruin a bird’s day, but not yours. We talked to a guy who owns 13 R66 (the turbine-powered Robinson) helicopters and he said that the view is distorted (he also said that he’s had disabling engine problems with 4 out of 13 Rolls-Royce turboshaft engines!). Robinson says that they scratch just as easily as the standard acrylic windshields, but the scratches cannot be repaired.
Those are some of the things that Frank Robinson might have wanted you to know! It is sad that he is gone, but he did pack a lot of achievement into his 92 years. He is the only person in world history who built a sustainable piston helicopter business.
After the class, I joined a former student from MIT who was picking up his new R44 Raven II helicopter. We flew from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. together and the only squawk was that the left front door became a little tougher to latch after about 15 hours (we picked it up with 4 hours on the collective Hobbs). It is tough to think of another aircraft manufacturer that delivers this kind of quality, especially down in the piston ghetto. I think it is reasonable to say that the more than 13,000 helicopters Robinson has built are Frank Robinson’s true memorial.
I am headed to Las Vegas today. Would anyone like to meet there or in Pahrump/Death Valley over the next 7 days? No plans currently other than meeting Hunter Biden at Sheri’s Ranch.
The couple next to me on this luxurious private United jet has voluntarily elected to come from San Antonio to Palm Beach for a destination wedding, changing planes in Houston. They have decided to expose themselves, in other words, to every respiratory virus that exists anywhere in half of the U.S. (other guests also traveled in). They’re protecting themselves from exposure on four crammed flights, three airports, one hotel, and multiple restaurants with comfortable non-professionally fit masks.
