Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

For my aviation nerd friends: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/avidyne-versus-garmin (a comparison of the Avidyne and Garmin G1000 glass cockpits).

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Folks:  We’re teaching 6.171 again this semester and need some examples of online communities.  We would appreciate comments containing URLs of interesting online communities to check out and cite as success stories for the class (don’t bother citing slashdot or other well-known ones).  I’m particularly interested in online communities in which people are identified and authenticated with their real name and city (Amazon has this going to some extent in their reader reviews).

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I’ve finished a draft of http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/ (originally sketched for some of my friends who were early employees of Google).  Comments/corrections would be appreciated, either in this Weblog or via email.  I would especially appreciate suggestions of relevant books and movies (see the end).

Thanks!

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In http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/30/gates-proposes-cellphones-as-alternative-to-olpc/ there is a story about Bill Gates proposing that people plug their cell phones (running quality Windows XP Mobile, of course) into a keyboard and TV and, voila, instant home computer.  Sounds as though Microsoft may be gradually coming around to  http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer 

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Upon returning from Hawaii, I discover that it was mostly around 60 degrees every day here in Boston during my absence.  People were walking around in T-shirts in January in Boston.  The newspaper carries stories of violent Islamic groups winning elections over in the Middle East (no surprise to the author of http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/, but apparently a shock to other folks) and stories about our continued failure to keep Iraq under control.

George W. Bush has spent a lot of time talking about Iraq (earlier in this Weblog, I had suggested that he should never have spoken about it, but delegated the entire procedure of removing Saddam to a subordinate) and how Arabs, given the chance to vote, would put aside their hatred of the West.  His administration has also gone out on a limb saying that burning so much “dinosaur blood” into CO2 hasn’t warmed up the Earth.  A Bostonian who spent January in a T-shirt reading the newspaper is going to have some trouble believing our Great Leader.

So… the question is, what are some safe, yet significant, topics for George W. to be talking about?

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During my two weeks in Hawaii, it seems that the decline of Ford and GM became much more apparent to Wall Street and the general public.  I think I’ve written about this before in this Weblog, but I continue to be surprised that this isn’t covered more from the angle of “What would you expect to happen in a society that pays financial engineers 10-100X what it pays automotive engineers?”  It is true that Ford and GM are being sunk to some extent by pension and health care obligations (something their highly paid financial engineers should have noticed before signing those union agreements), but they’d have a much easier time if they had designs like the Honda Accord or the BMW 3-series sedans instead of the clumsy sedans that they end up having to unload on the rental car companies (is there anyone who ever rented a Pontiac Grand Am and walked away saying “I need to buy me one of these”?).  .  In fact, why should car renters have to suffer with the Pontiac Grand Am?  Perhaps it is time for GM and Ford to give up on design engineering of ordinary sedans.  If you look at Car and Driver’s 10-best cars, the only American nameplates on the list are the Corvette, the Mustang GT, and the Chrysler 300.  The Corvette and Mustang are specialty sports cars that seem to have attracted some able and creative engineers.  The Chrysler 300 is built on top of a Mercedes design and possibly points toward a sustainable future for Ford and GM.  Let the Germans and the Japanese engineer the fundamentals of Ford and GM sedans.  The American companies can tweak the body design and add some electronic intelligence (GM was way ahead of its (moribund) peers with the OnStar system).

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Just arrived back to Boston from my helicopter experience in Hawaii and here is a report for friends and family…

I have now finished my helicopter instructor rating and also got five hours of training in a Robinson R44 four-seat helicopter, which is required if one wants to be the pilot-in-command of an R44.  My instructor at Mauna Loa Helicopters was a Swiss-German guy named Jerome, a serious and demanding guy in his early 30s.  Until Jerome contracted the helicopter disease, he was a mechanic for the very expensive Swiss diesel engines that run the world’s big merchant ships, so his ability to explain the systems of the Robinson helicopters was better than anyone else I’ve flown with.

Flight training has never been fun for me and six hours per day of training (two flights with some ground instruction in between) left me feeling pretty well beat up at the end of a lot of days.  I had expected to show up there and have the Hawaiians say “You fly so well, just take your checkride tomorrow,” but Jerome immediately noticed that I had a tendency to stop talking at the ends of autorotations and during other potentially scary maneuvers.  He wanted to make sure that I could fly and explain simultaneously during all phases of every maneuver.  One reason that flight training isn’t fun for me is because the goal is always perfection and after almost every maneuver I think of some way in which it could have been better or smoother.  So at the end of every flight I feel like a failure and, indeed, at 200 hours I was not flying as well as Jerome with 800 hours.  This is a common error for students:  comparing themselves to the instructor, who is the only other person around.  On the checkride, by contrast, the goal is not perfect but rather to fly within the standards of allowable sloppiness articulated by the FAA.  Due to nerves, I probably flew a little worse on the checkride than during training, but I felt a lot better about the outcome.

Mauna Loa was a more fun environment than the big city schools where I’ve trained.  Except for the beach, there isn’t much for a young person to do on the Kona side of the Big Island.  Therefore, the students tend to train intensively and hang out together.  By contrast at the helicopter schools in Maryland, New England, and Los Angeles, the students show up for a lesson and then zip off to their day job.

Hawaii is a good place to learn to fly because the weather is almost always reasonable.  The main challenge is the wind, which regularly picks up to 30 knots and more on the windward sides of the islands in the afternoon.  If you’re on the lee side of a ridge trying to do some sightseeing, the ride can get rough and scary.  Students who do all of their training in Kona will get a rude shock when they come to California or the Northeast and have to deal with complex airspace and crowded airports.

How about the rest of the island? On my one previous visit, I loved the Big Island because there was so much open space and it seemed so uncrowded.  That was 15 years ago.  Now it regularly takes 45 minutes to get from one side of Kona town to the other.  There isn’t much room for development between the volcano and the sea, so roads and neighborhoods can seem quite congested.  What is worse is that there is no compensation for the congestion and traffic.  Kona is not a city; it is linear sprawl.  You’ve got Walmart, K-Mart, Costco, and Safeway.  Culture is Borders and a couple of shopping mall multiplex cinemas.  That wouldn’t bother me if not for the $700,000 prices for prefab houses, the paralyzed roads, and the lack of any social focus.  In some ways I think Oahu/Honolulu might be better because at least after you sit in 45 minutes of traffic, you end up among smart interesting people at the University of Hawaii.  Housing costs on the Big Island are very high compared to the available jobs.  Most of the jobs seem to be $10 per hour service and retail.  Crummy condos start at around $500,000.  Ocean-view houses on an acre or two can be $2-3 million, even if they are in some of the areas of the island that receive 20 knots of wind all day every day.  Everyone who doesn’t work in a shop or a hotel seems to work in construction or real estate sales.

There are some funky old towns spread out along the highway that rings the Big Island (about five hours to drive around), but almost 100 percent of the structures built since 1960 are utterly charmless.  With so many houses being finished every week, you’d think that someone would manage to build a charming house by accident, but it doesn’t seem to have happened.  If you compare Hawaii to volcanic islands in Greece, e.g., Santorini, it is remarkable how much extra charm the Greeks get simply by telling everyone to build out of white stone and concrete.  Hawaii should be nicer because it is bigger, offers vastly larger natural areas, has better infrastructure (including L&L Drive Inn!), a much cleaner ocean, etc.  But there is something depressing about seeing so many ugly houses and commercial buildings.  Great place to visit for a few weeks, especially if you’ve got a helicopter rating to finish, but I don’t understand why people would want to live there.

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Favorite extracts from The Great Bridge by David McCullough…

Summary:  John Roebling, a German immigrant who pioneered suspension bridge design and wire cable manufacturing, envisioned and sketched a bridge across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan.  Roebling had his toe crushed by a boat pushing up against a New York pier and died from tetanus.  His son Washington (“young Roebling”), a Civil War hero, completed the design and supervised construction of the bridge between 1869 and 1883.  Washington Roebling was almost killed and suffered decades of impairment to his personality and lifestyle by a case of decompression illness or “the bends”.  He ended his days managing the family’s very successful wire and cable manufacturing business.

Who should read this book:  Anyone contemplating SCUBA diving on compressed air, which is much more likely to produce the bends than breathing Nitrox underwater (see my personal story); people interested in the history of New York City and the development of American politics (Boss Tweed figures prominently in the book); bridge nerds (though the book could be a lot more technical, even for a lay audience).

Page 154, on the education young Roebling received at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: In three years’ time he had also to master nearly a hundred different courses, including, among others, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, … Calculus of Variations, Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, Determinative Mineralogy, Higher Geodesy, …, Orthographic and Spherical Projections, Acoustics, Optics, Thermotics, Geology of Mining, Paleontology, Rational Mechanics of Solids and Fluids, Spherical Astronomy, … Machine Design, Hydraulic Motors, Steam Engines, Stability of Structures, Engineering and Architectural Design and Construction, and Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy.

A century later, D.B. Steinman, a noted bridgebuilder and professor of civil engineering, would write, “Under such a curiculum the average college boy of today woul be left reeling and staggering.  In that earlier, era, before colleges embarked upon mass production, engineering education was a real test and training, an intensive intellectual discipline and professional equipment for a most exacting life work.  Only the ablest and the most ambitious could stand the pace and survive the ordeal.

… Of the sixty-five students who started out in [Roebling’s class], only twelve finished.  And among those who did not finish there had been some rather severe breakdowns, it appears, and one suicide.

Page 260: … the Executive Committee would grant to each of the families of the deceased [men killed building the bridge] payments of $250, or a little better than three months’s wages.

Page 522:  [Asked to compare the Brooklyn Bridge to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, young Roebling wrote] To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites.  We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force.  but when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice.  We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance.

It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had had a lot of Trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time.  The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization.

Page 554:  When [young Roebling] felt well enough, he traveled with [his wife] … to Martha’s Vineyard, which he liked, to Nantucket, which he did not …

Page 556:  To the surprise of almost everyone, he married again [five years after the death of Emily], [in 1908, at age 75].  She was a widow of about his own son’s age. … He who had weathered everything just lived on interminably, forever “bearing up,” people said.  His teeth were pulled, one by one, and in his lettes to John he complained repeatedly of physical tormet and in particular of excruciating pains in his jaw.  … “And yet people say how well you look,” [Washington Roebling] wrote, “I feel like killing them.”

Page 557:  “When the income tax came along in 1913, it was as though the country was coming apart at the seams.  “It means 100,000 spies to snoop into everybody’s business and affairs.”  When war broke out in Europe he shuddered at the fate of mankind.  “It has come to this pass, that for an extra German to live, he must kill somebody else to make room for him.  We can all play at that game.  It means perpetual universal war.”

Page 559:  [In 1917, at age 84 and after the death of younger members of the family] Roebling ran the company for the next five years and the business prospered exceedingly. … He got up each morning at about seven thirty, had his breakfast, then, like the men in the mill, took the trolley to work, accompanied by his dog.  His day was the full eight hours, the same as everyone.  He had no secretary. … He decided to change all the mills over to electric power, instead of steam, a momentous and costly move.  An entirely new department for the electrolytic galvanizing of wire was set up under his direction and the contract for the cables of the Bear Mountain Bridge, over the Hudson River–among other bridges–was taken and completed during the time he was in charge.  … “It’s my job to carry the responsibility and you can’t desert your job.  You can’t slink out of life or out of the work life lays on you.”  … He died peacefully at age eighty-nine, on July 21, 1926, with his wife, son, and several others at his bedside.

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After two full days in Hawaii, here is a list of animals observed:  Whales (from the helicopter and the shore), Reef Sharks hanging out in a breeding harbor (from the helicopter), sea turtles (on the beach at an expensive resort hotel and while snorkeling at a public beach), pod of 20-30 Spinner Dolphins (Kealakakua Bay, from the helicopter), triggerfish, parrotfish, butterfly fish, angel fish, small iridescent jellyfish, fish fish (all in the one snorkeling excursion), billy goat (roadside), cats, dogs, and Beta in a bowl (at Mauna Loa Helicopters).  Weather is just about perfect, as you’d expect.

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The Robinson R22 that I flew back to Boston from Los Angeles is just about ready for its first 100-hour inspection.  Robinson always raises its prices on January 15.  So it seemed like a good time to think about a new helicopter.  I ordered a four-seat Robinson R44, yellow with a red stripe, to be delivered in May.  In the interests of economy and with an eye toward keeping rental prices low at East Coast Aero Club, ours is a stripped Raven I model.  We’ll stick a handheld GPS up against the door frame or the bubble and call it complete.  One of the great things about buying a Robinson is that I get to do yet another cross-country helicopter trip.  The tentative plan is to fly to California on May 19, right after the MIT semester ends, and do some training and playing around with the ship on the West Coast, then have a copilot fly out and take the ship back to Boston.

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