The War on Competence in American Colleges and Universities

Perhaps this could better be titled "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization" because that's what we're really talking about.  It isn't some sort of natural process that comes as a result of Western Civilization being old; it comes as the result of planning and deliberate actions by Marxists and other groups bent on destroying the west so that they can plunder the wealth of those nations for themselves. 

None of this should surprise you; I've talked about it here and plenty of others have talked about it on other blogs (for example).  The reason for tonight's little rant is an article in PJ Media "The Death of Merit and the Race to Mediocrity in our Increasingly Marxist Universities" by Philip Carl Salzman.  It's worth your time to RTWT.  Salzman begins with some numbers to help readers see the problem.  Recently, there has been a TV series called "The Enemy Within" that talked about 100,000 foreign agents - spies - here in the US from China and other adversaries.

There are 756,900 teachers and professors in Canada, and 5.2 million in the U.S. Almost all of these professors and teachers are daily resolutely and relentlessly attacking Western culture, rejecting American culture, and advocating cultural Marxism.

How did this come about? During the 1960s and 1970s, two converging social movements transformed the culture of education. One was the adoption of Marxism by a wide range of North American university professors in the social sciences and humanities. The other was the widespread adoption of feminist theory. Together, Marxism and feminism redefined North American society as a hierarchy of oppression, with white, patriarchal capitalists at the top, and poor lesbians of color at the bottom. All citizens were redefined as members of racial, economic, gender, sexual, and ethnic classes, with people of white oppressing people of color, males oppressing females, rich oppressing poor, heterosexuals oppressing LGBTQ++, Christians and Jews oppressing Muslims, and so on. This approach is called “social justice” theory.

When normal folks reply we don't care about that; we care that the people who design and build our bridges are competent, their answer is that ideas such as “merit” and “achievement” are male, white supremacist ideas, used to ensure the unfair dominance of white men.  Conveniently, no one mentions little details like the pedestrian bridge collapse at Florida International University in Miami last year.  It doesn't matter if the contracting company knows how to build a bridge as long as they identify as being able to.  It's the case all over in education:

McGill University, in its “Open Call” for Canada Research Chair applications, claims that “Chairholders are nationally recognized as exceptional researchers and innovators in their discipline.” But, “for the purpose of a nomination for a Canada Research Chair in the October 2019 round, preference will be given to qualified applicants who self-identify as a person with a disability or as an Indigenous person.” In actual choices, for McGill, disability and ethnicity count more than achievement, merit, and potential. And note that you do not actually have to be disabled or Indigenous, but merely to “self-identify” as disabled or Indigenous. Even in our top universities, identity is regarded as more important than facts.

Get that?  They say their "Chairholders are nationally recognized as exceptional researchers and innovators" and without skipping a breath saying “... preference will be given to qualified applicants who self-identify as a person with a disability or as an Indigenous person.”  If those chair holders really are "nationally recognized", it won't be for long if academic standards are no longer used to determine who holds the chairs.

That's right, "academic standards" are "male, white supremacist ideas, used to ensure the unfair dominance of white men."  The dirty little secret is that students who get into University based on affirmative action score and other programs (like the SAT's new adversity score) are hurt by the experience of finding themselves in over their heads.  They realize that they don't belong there. 

The reality is that, while minority students with strong backgrounds do reasonably well in university, students with weak backgrounds and levels of achievement, admitted to university for “social justice” reasons, do poorly, and are harmed by being put into a position that they are ill prepared for. But the overall effect of “social justice” admissions and hiring is the dumbing down of universities and of the U.S. and Canada. Just as world competitors, such as China, ramp up their academic and research achievement, North American universities are catering to  “identities,” and raising subjectivity—“everyone has their own truth”—above objectivity, truth, and reality. This is a deep dive into decadence.

The target of this attack, though, is western civilization itself.  This goes beyond just preferred “equity, diversity, and inclusion” admissions and hiring.  They aim to discredit Western Civilization and particularly American and Canadian society because they were founded and built by white men. The great literary and philosophical works of Western Civilization are no longer read because they are the creations of “dead white men.”  Today's Social Justice Warriors insist on judging anyone from any era in the past by today's ethical system - their ethical system because they tolerate no diversity of opinions.

It was white men in Europe who made slavery redundant by inventing science, modern agriculture, and the industrial revolution, raising productivity through the work of machines, so that slave labor was no longer desirable. Furthermore, anti-slavery movements among white Europeans and white Americans led to the banning of the North Atlantic slave trade, policed by the Royal Navy, and the emancipation of the slaves in the Caribbean and the American South. Estimates are that at least 360,000 Union soldiers, almost all white, died in the Civil War that led to emancipation.

Until retiring, I regularly had the chance to work with young engineers in their first years out of college.  As a "Fortune 500" employer with a big name, we got to choose from the tops of the engineering classes and the best are as good as they've ever been.  We haven't seen many signs of social justice indoctrination; they realized that if they did their jobs wrong people could die and they took it seriously.  The problem is that I don't know how long the sciences and engineering can hold out in modern academia.  There are many, many jobs that not just anyone can do.  Do you want the doctor doing your surgery chosen because they identified as a certain protected class, or do you want them to be the best surgeon in the area (if not the best on earth)?  If you're in this car, do you want to be sitting under a bridge designed and built by people chosen for their diversity points or by people who do the math and sweat the details? 

Racist.

First Piece For the Webster Done

OK, that's not technically true.  The part isn't "done done" as they say, there's one hole that needs to be tapped and I needed to order the tap.  It's expected on Saturday, but it's coming by USPS delivery and they regularly beat their estimated delivery dates.  Given the size, I think it will be pretty easy to tap that hole which is why I'm calling it done.  The hole is for the spark plug.  It's a widely used motorcycle/small engine plug with a metric thread.  

I showed this view a couple of days ago,

and here's the part this morning.

You'll note that the top corners (on the left) aren't rounded off like the computer model.  That's called "optional" on the prints, and I'm just not sure I'm going to do it.  I have a little while to decide. 

On the left side, above the cutaway, those two holes are 4-40.  I don't think I've ever tapped 4-40 blind holes before.  Blind holes tend to get some of the chips that don't get pushed out of the hole by the tap and accumulate in front of it, so I was super cautious about breaking the taps.  They survived just fine.  Five holes in three different screw sizes: 4-40, 6-32 and 10-32.  

Not visible in this view is a large bored out area: behind that large hole in the top middle.  That's the combustion chamber for this engine and gets mounted to the cylinder, a lathe project in the near future.  The bore is 1.000" diameter by 0.500" deep. 

Next is to switch over to the other piece I wrote about Saturday, the base plate.  This part is mounted to that plate via the hole on the right (bottom). 

I Got Nothing

One of those days where I'm not sure where it all went.  I tuned out the Mueller presser.  The same handful of stories won't go away and it's hard to pay attention to them.  There are important things going on but all we get is the same bickering over collusion and impeachment. 

Just having a periodic stale. 

Here's some Michael Ramirez to make up:

French Yellow Vests Protests Show Prescience of Frédéric Bastiat

Ironically enough, 21st century yellow vest protesters are proving the wisdom of their 1800s countryman Frédéric Bastiat, and his famous 1850 book, "The Law".  It's unfortunate because they aren't seeing Bastiat being proven right and are demanding things that he specifically showed were wrong.  Tabitha Alloway writing at the Foundation for Economic Education opens with with this harrowing story from the Guardian.

"I see my hand and scream in horror as it hadn't completely come off, it was hanging from my wrist, with the bones completely exposed."

A young man who has taken part in the yellow vests protests in France tells his story as he shows The Guardian cameraman the stump of his wrist, a testament to the violence of the clash between police and protesters.

Another who lost an eye during a protest says despondently, “I no longer believe in freedom.”

The yellow vest protests, as you probably recall, have been going on since last October.  An early reason claimed was rebellion against an imposed carbon tax on gasoline.  Tensions escalated, and these protests often turned violent, with thousands having now been injured and several killed.  The protests drew other anti-government other protesters and the movement spread, turning this into a phenomenon going well beyond France, from Australia to Canada.

Ms. Alloway does as good job as you'll find explaining Bastiat's main points.

For the sake of brevity, his work can be distilled down to a few basic points in question-and-answer format:

Q. What is the purpose of law?

A. Organized justice.

Q. What is justice?

A. Use of the collective force (law) to secure persons, liberty, and property, maintaining each in its right.

Q. What is the perversion of law?

A. Legal plunder and any use of force for reasons beyond the purpose of securing persons, liberty, and property.

Q. What is legal plunder?

A. Use of the collective force (law) to take the property of some persons to bestow it on others.

Q. What motivates legal plunder?

A. Two very different things: naked greed and false philanthropy.

Q. What is the outcome of a government that persists in legal plunder?

A. A discontented populace ready for revolution.

Bastiat argued that a government has but three choices regarding its relationship to personal property rights:

    1. The few plunder the many.

    2. Everybody plunders everybody else.

    3. Nobody plunders anybody.

    We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder, and no plunder. The law can follow only one of these three.

How do you know if your government practices legal plunder? He answers:

   See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

In other words, if it would be a crime for me to enter your house and demand your money at the point of a gun so I can share it with the "poor," there's nothing that magically makes this moral simply because it's done by a man wearing a badge.

What is morally wrong for me is morally wrong for government. What is ethically wrong for an individual is ethically wrong for a group of individuals (government).
...
Bastiat came to a simple conclusion: economic justice means that my property is safe from the looting hands of any individual or collective entity—including government.

A person free from plunder is free to prosper.

And this is how we know the yellow vests are wrong.  They're not demanding freedom from plunder so that they may prosper; they're demanding the Macron government plunder others for their benefit.  While supposedly protesting taxes, they've simultaneously demanded that the government abolish homelessness, increase the minimum wage, provide free parking in the city center, give a minimum pension equal to $1,369.46 US dollars, raise taxes on big companies, etc..  Demands the government can't possibly meet - nor should they.  They're not protesting taxes so much as they're protesting not receiving more tax money - more plunder - from other people. 

At the time Bastiat was preparing his book, France was recovering from the Revolution of February 1848. This was the period when France was rapidly turning to complete socialism.  He was studying and debunking each socialist fallacy as it hit the legislature.

Bastiat argued that for the government to organize charity, it would have to disorganize justice. He observed that the natural consequences of making the government responsible for everybody's wellbeing and happiness are a litany of complaints, discontent, and unrest tending to violence and revolution.

(Screen capture from the Guardian video)

The problem of the yellow vests and the perspectives of Frédéric Bastiat are worth looking at because America in 2019 bears a striking resemblance to 1850s France; the socialist arguments from 1850s France are talking points on most of the 691 Democratic presidential candidates' platforms. 

Memorial Day 2019

I know that for a lot of the country, Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer and there will be cookouts and parties at the lake or beach or park.  That said, it has been a weird week of weather.  While it was snowing in Arizona as recently as Thursday (H/T Virtual Mirage), the SE US is at the opposite end of the spectrum with a record heat wave for the inland portions of the area.  Here near the east coast in the middle of Florida, it has been slightly cooler than normal.  Our temperatures haven't gone over 90 more than once or twice this month, and the summer thunderstorm season hasn't cranked up yet.  Both of those seem to happen by the middle of May most years.  It has been dry with temps in the upper 80s for the last couple of weeks, since what was almost certainly the last cold front we get until next fall some time.

All that aside, allow me to join the chorus of folks saying that while you're enjoying your day, be it beach, barbecue, pool or whatever, take a moment to remember and thank those who have given their all in service to us.  Some don't get the chance to have that cookout, or be with their loved ones.

Yeah, I've run this picture lots of times, and it still gets to me.  The story:

In a final act of loyalty, Hawkeye, the dog of slain Navy SEAL U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Jon T. Tumilson walked up to his fallen master’s casket during the funeral in Rockford, Iowa, and then laid mournfully down beside the body for the rest of the proceedings  [Note: Petty Officer Tumilson was one of the 30 killed in Afghanistan in the shoot ing down of Extortion 17 which the families blamed squarely on the Obama administration - SiG]

Far too large a portion of the deep state could use Hawkeye's loyalty. 

First Steps On the New Engine

The first steps have all been done with CAD. 

The design for the Webster internal combustion engine was released to the public domain by designer Joe Webster in 2004 with 2D drawings of the parts as .DXF format files.  My CAD program, Rhino3D ver 5, imports DXF format files but they're still 2D shapes; from there, I have to convert it to 3D if I want a 3D drawing.  If I'm going to cut it out with CNC, this is the first step.  Let me show an example.

The first part is the base, a roughly 8x5" plate of 3/8" thick aluminum with a handful of holes drilled in it.  For something this simple, I'll just drill all the holes using the mill as a precision drill press and then cut out the plate's outline with an end mill in the CNC mill.  Most of the holes have far side features (countersinks) and I'll do those after the plate is cut out.  The DXF looks like this:

I turn this drawing into a 3D solid object with some Rhino operations.  I highlight all the curves that make up the outline of the part and combine them into one curve.  Next, I Extrude the Curve to the 3/8" thickness, and then cap the top and bottom to make it into a solid.  The part looks like this as a 3D solid:

I save this solid model in the .STL (stereolithography) format the CAM program can use, import that file into my CAM program and generate tool paths for cutting the outline.  This is a screen capture of the part with the tool paths shown (horizontal red lines).

The part is ready to be fabricated at this point. 

The second part I've made a model of is a bit more intricate and will require more operations.  Making a model like this starts out as taking the outline, extruding it to the right thickness, capping it and then creating all the holes.  Each hole has to be created by the tedious process of creating a cylinder to the dimensions of the hole, putting it where it belongs in the part, and then doing a Boolean operation to subtract the cylinder from the hole.  In the end, it looks like this:

You can see that it has holes along the two sides that can be seen.  The vertical face on the bottom right in this view is the bottom of the part; it's overall size is 2.750 in the long direction; the width is 1.500, that notch on the left is 5/16 wide by 1.25 tall.  The part is 3/4" thick.  The large hole in the top section is for the spark plug on the engine, so its exact dimensions depend on which plug I can get.  The far side of that hole, though, has bore that's 1.000" diameter and 0.500" deep. 

This one has a simple shape, the challenge is the holes on the different surfaces, top, bottom and left side.  I think it's enough like other parts I've made that I know how to get there, and won't do CAM tool paths for this one. 

This is a few afternoons worth of work before I can cut metal. 

Japan Creates Intelligent Test of Self-Driving Vehicles

Where intelligent translates roughly as, "for God's sake don't put actual cars on the road with that software shit running - you're going to kill people!" 

According to a piece in Electronic Design, a partnership between Japan’s All Nippon Airways (ANA) and Panasonic announced a plan to develop and test autonomous wheelchairs for use in Tokyo's Narita International airport.  Wheelchairs are already provided for travelers who require them, but the new motorized wheelchairs will be intelligent and autonomous.

These wheelchairs will be capable of safely navigating through the airport independently. Jointly developed by Panasonic and WHILL Co. Ltd., the wheelchairs are able to detect and avoid and obstacles on the way to their destinations. Front- and rear-mounted cameras and sensors provide wide angle visibility and obstacle detection.

Pre-collected map data is compared against current driving situations to create the safest and optimal route for the rider. In the event an object unsafely enters its pathway, an auto-stop function will prevent a collision. For further assurance of safety at Narita, the self-driving electric wheelchairs will operate by following a predetermined leader to a common destination (see figure), and ANA staff will be on hand to serve as guides.

(Style Note: I don't know how they'll feel if we call them WHILL chairs.) 

The chairs have several novel features, including a smaller turning radius than a typical wheelchair due to an innovative front wheel that doesn't swivel like a caster, as wheelchair front wheels typically do.

WHILL’s Personal EVs, which can travel up to 12 miles indoors or outdoors between charges, run at up to 5 mph, and climb obstacles up to two inches in height. Omnidirectional wheels roll forward like normal wheels, but also can slide sideways without skidding during turns. Conventional omnidirectional wheel technology was invented for vehicles such as forklifts. However, according to WHILL, it hasn’t been applied effectively for wheelchairs and mobility devices due to several design flaws in previous implementations.

The omnidirectional front wheels engineered by WHILL use 24 small rollers that collectively create one large wheel. The rollers all move individually, allowing the EV wheelchair to glide sideways and achieve a tighter turning radius, while simultaneously providing greater terrain coverage.

The important part here, IMO of course, is that the system will test the software in an environment that will limit accidents to minor injuries.  I've never been to Tokyo Narita, but think of the crowds in places like Atlanta Hartsfield or similar hubs and the throngs of people in apparently Brownian, random motion.  If the software can handle that chaotic situation, it's a good step toward handling the chaotic systems driving on roads will require.

In The Not Too Distant Future

Perhaps 2025, perhaps 2030.

(Cartoonist Pat Cross)

You've heard or read that the College Board which administers the SAT* has decided that the test, long one of the standard tests for college admissions, shouldn't just test the student's ability to understand written English and Mathematics.  They've decided they should weight those scores with a "double secret" adversity score that is supposed to recognize that some students come from a background which makes it harder for them to get ahead.  In principle, this new score could increase the overall "attractiveness" of an applicant beyond what their numeric SAT scores were, and let the students from a "difficult background" win a seat over a student with better scores who doesn't have as high an adversity score.  That appears to be the reason for this move.

The “adversity score” uses 15 factors to determine the level of difficulty and strife the applicant has faced that has shaped or impacted their performance on the SAT (Standardized Admissions Test), and through their high school career to provide “context” to the applicant’s social and economic background, Coleman said.

I call it double secret not just for the Animal House reference, but because the student doesn't get to see their score or know how it was derived.  The colleges see the score, but not the details of how the score was derived.   The problem is that the things they've talked about are not clear pictures of that student's overcoming adversity; they're too nonspecific.

For example, Karl Denninger talks about some of it in his piece (which I largely agree with). As Karl points out, 

That an area has a high crime rate does not mean any particular individual was a victim of crime.  That an area has a high poverty rate doesn't mean that an individual was functionally disadvantaged in learning.

Further, it's a snapshot.  If a student was living in affluence from birth until sufficiently before the test, and something that a parent did collapsed their standard of living, they will get a higher adversity score than they "deserve".  Did they overcome as much adversity as someone who lived 17 or 18 years in that neighborhood?  The converse is also true, if the parents in that bad neighborhood worked hard - maybe worked a couple of jobs - scrimping and saving to get a place in better part of town, they were in adversity all of their life until they took the SAT and get a lower adversity score than they deserve.  

An entrepreneur can see a market developing for rental units in "bad neighborhoods", so the parents doing everything cheating to get their kids into college can move there long enough to get a good adversity score on their SAT.  

This score is telling the colleges nothing meaningful.   

Cartoonist A.F. Branco of Americans for Limited Government thinks he has a reasonable guess about what the adversity score is really all about.

Definitely can't accept the Asian colors, so no whitish colors and no yellowish colors allowed.

* The articles inform me that the company that supplies the test is called the College Board, and the test is called the Standardized Admissions Test.  I'm old enough to have taken that when the company was called the College Entrance Exam Board and the test was the Scholastic Aptitude Test.  Of course, as a Graybeard, I took those while fending off hoards of velociraptors.

Peggy Noonan Giving Up on Fiscal Responsiblity?

Economist Chris Baecker manages fixed assets for Pioneer Energy Services and is an adjunct lecturer of economics at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio.  Today, writing for the Foundation for Economic Education, he notes an article by Peggy Noonan on May 2nd in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) and extrapolates it to say conservatives are giving up on fiscal responsibility.

I notice this because Peggy Noonan was among the very first people I quoted on this blog and I think of her as being fairly rational.   In this case, she's saying the rational fiscal conservatism of the Reagan years is pretty much over and conservatives need to recognize that.  She says, “The federal government will not become smaller or less expensive in our lifetimes.” and “less taxes and spending won’t resolve America’s crisis”.

I think it's a jump to say that a single writer, even one as influential as former-Reagan speechwriter Noonan is saying “Conservatives Are Throwing in the Towel on Fiscal Restraint”, which is why I didn't use Baecker's title.  Still, it's almost a cliche' that we don't have a fiscally conservative party in this country, just a Uni-party with two competing sides trying to gain power and control for themselves.  As Baecker says,

For the first time in a half-century, the GOP had control of Congress as the 21st century began, and for a majority of it, a Republican presidency. But far from being the “sober-minded … best stewards” of the government who look at spending “coolly,” they became drunk with the power of the purse. Spending rose an average of 7 percent per year, two to three times the rate of inflation.  

It's almost like Lord Acton said, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely?"  Almost ... exact for being exactly what he had in mind.

So what's left to do?  Are we to watch America sink into the sunset (or crash into the ground along the way)?  Certainly we can work to cut waste, but with the total National Debt north of $22 Trillion and unfunded liabilities estimated at $124 Trillion, almost six times that debt, is it taking a trim when a full haircut is what's needed?  As I've said before, with these numbers we don't need balanced budgets, we need budget surpluses for about the next century.

Do they think they can shut down the Department of Education and fix things?  That's laughable; the DoE is almost a rounding error.  With 62% of the federal budget this year going to mandatory spending, that leaves 27% of the budget as discretionary (which includes DOD and all the alphabet agencies you know).  Oh, yeah, 62+27=89%.  Another 8% is interest on the debt, which needs to be considered mandatory spending too, but isn't.  That still doesn't get us to 100% and that linked website never fills in the gaps.

 The money to be saved lies in the mandatory spending category.

Life expectancy, for example, has increased by roughly a decade since the inception of both Social Security and Medicare. Logic dictates that the age of eligibility should follow suit. Also, we should have more choice about our participation in these programs and the way disbursements are administered.

Furthermore, there’s a popular myth that these entitlements have dedicated revenue streams: the payroll tax. The fact is barely a third of Medicare is funded that way, and if demographic trends don’t change, it’s currently projected that Social Security will also have to start dipping into general revenues to help pay out full benefits in fifteen years.

You may have noticed that these proposed fixes fly in the face of what the Evil Party presidential candidates are campaigning on.  In addition to Medicare for All, a massive budget buster, Kirsten Gillibrand declared that illegal immigrants should have the right to pay into and receive social security benefits. 

Just about a month ago, I wrote piece passing on how government involvement in education was distorting the market for college and making prices rise at several times the official cost of living.  That's another factor in the budget.  Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has a plot that shows the rates of inflation since 1998 of a handful of common expenses.

Notice how the highest rates of inflation are in areas in which the government is heavily involved?  While I don't have numbers right now, it looks like the higher the involvement of the government the steeper the curve (hospital services, the top curve, are in the thoroughly broken insurance/government complex), college tuition and books as just described and so on, down to things where the market is working, with TVs getting the most affordable since 1998 - as anyone who has looked at the prices of 4k UHD sets can attest.

A simple but truthful statement is that America's fiscal policies over the last 100 years show a deep ignorance of, or at least antipathy toward, basic economics.  The fiscal conservatives have been our best hope, and consistently done nothing. Final words to Chris Baecker. 

If we’re stuck with a two-party system, Republicans need to be the party that aggressively represents and promotes independence and personal responsibility, not to mention logic and basic math. It’s been proven before, in 2006 and last year, that they can’t win elections maintaining or adding to the welfare state.
...
By that token, perhaps Ms. Noonan has a point that the government will not be right-sized in our lifetimes. At the same time we teach our kids about our federalist system, though, we should also impart upon them the ideal to work toward.

Old De-Rusting Trick Works!

I was surprised.  Actually, floored is a better word.  But first, I have to do a Grandpa Simpson story for a while.

I ordered a lot of the metal for my new engine build last weekend and received all the pieces by last Friday.  The issue with buying small quantities of metals is like buying small quantities of radio parts or a couple of screws.  Their default is to sell you more than you need and then stick on rough shipping charges on top of that.  "Too much" is fine - to a point.  Everyone likes having some steel or aluminum pieces to have around for repairing things, or unexpected little projects; and in the words of Mae West, "too much of a good thing is wonderful".  We just always end up needing something like a one inch long piece of 3/16" diameter drill rod and the dealers want to sell you 36".  I'd be happy to get 12".  It's still more than I should need, but not excessively.  I was able to get about a dozen pieces of various things like that from a place I'd heard of, but never shopped at, Hobby Metal Kits.  Fair prices, $10 flat shipping.

The flywheel finished dimensions are 3.750" diameter, and 1.125 thick at the hub.  Like this:

Note that it says the material is either cast iron or cold rolled steel (CRS).  So off I went to the metals dealers to find a piece of CRS that could yield this.  Some shopping around, first at Online Metals and then on eBay, resulted in me finding that a 4" diameter by 2" long piece was going to cost about $55 with shipping.  Then I stumbled across an eBay seller selling a slightly smaller piece, 3-3/4 by 1-3/4, but saying it was D2 Tool Steel.  His price was $18.75, including shipping.  I figured that the important part was that flywheel has a density more like steel or iron than aluminum and the alloy doesn't really matter.  I took what's probably a better piece of steel for many uses at almost a third of the price as the 1018 CRS.

When I received the package, there was a 5 lb 10 oz hunk of rust in the box.  That's an exaggeration, but not much of one.  There wasn't a single spot on the disk that wasn't rusty.

The thing is, the rust probably isn't an issue.  I'm going to skim the diameter of the disk down a little and take off much of its length, and if it's just superficial rust, it'll be in my shop vac within minutes of starting.

Over the years, I've read many "how to fix rusted tools" articles that involved soaking the tool in a bath of vinegar with added salt.  (Here's a more in-depth source.)  One of the voices in my head suggested I try this, just to see if it works.  It was such an impulse decision that I didn't even take a "Before" picture.  It was in a plastic leftover storage tub, covered with vinegar by about noon Friday.   Naturally, I went by and looked into the clear tub a few times, but the vinegar went nearly black as the day progressed, so something was going on in there.  Saturday afternoon I took it out, gave it a light brushing with a Brillo pad and was shocked to find it looked like steel.  It looked etched with a matte gray finish, but with the exception of some black marks that I could probably scrub away the rust was gone.

This disk was the solid reddish-brown characteristic of rust, with a fair amount of black in the color, too.

Rust comes up as an issue all the time.  I'm sure we get more of it here with our humidity and salty sea breezes, but it's an issue in most places.  I can't tell you how many times I've come across this idea but dismissed it.  I waited until now to try it and it actually works.  I may be the only guy in America who dismissed the idea of soaking files or pliers or other tools in vinegar to de-rust them, but I doubt it.  Give it a try.


Edit 5/20 2147 EDT:  The bad writing fairy snuck in between editing and posting

Radio Sunday #8 - Wrap Up

I've spent three hours this morning trying to envision what Radio Sunday #8 should be about without coming up with any real ideas.  That seems to be a pretty solid indication that the series is over; at least from my standpoint.

Mrs. Graybeard suggested something on antennas, but I've written many pieces about antennas over the years, much more than the things in the first seven installments of this column.  Let me post a few links to some highlights.

• Antennas 101 - part 1 
• Antennas 101 - part 2
• Antennas 101 - part 3
• Ham Radio - Antennas  

 For more information, in the list of Pages on the right side bar see

• Privacy in Radio Communications (a six part series) 
• Alternative Communications

Is the series really over?  I leave that up to you.  There are others who write pieces on tactical use of radios, and introductions to ham radio can be found all over online (I've done those here, too).  If there are other things you'd like to see covered, leave me a comment or send me an email at sigraybeard at gmail. 

Feds Announce Drastic Deregulation of Cherry Pies

There's a dangerous freeing of the market about to happen.  The Food and Drug Administration is about to deregulate frozen cherry pies, according to this summary on the Independent Institute.  I don't know if you're aware that they even had regulations on frozen cherry (and other) pies; but if not, you're probably not paying attention to the growing size of the Code of Federal Regulations and the fervor to regulate everything.

When President Trump took office, he promised to eliminate 75 to 80% of FDA regulations, which is clearly a tall hurdle.  Deregulating cherry pies is just one small, slightly comical step in that direction.  Comical because of the specificity of the rules and the questions that ensue.  Think "three reindeer rule" in cherry pies and you're there.

The FDA recently committed to deregulating the frozen cherry pie market. Specifically, the agency is re-examining current regulations dictating that frozen cherry pies are required to be at least 25 percent cherries by weight and that no more than 15 percent of these cherries may be blemished. 

 Clearly an obvious question is "what does 'blemished cherry' mean"?  To quote the FDA,

Not more than 15 percent by count of the cherries in the pie are blemished with scab, hail injury, discoloration, scar tissue, or other abnormality. A cherry showing skin discoloration (other than scald) having an aggregate area exceeding that of a circle nine thirty-seconds of an inch in diameter is considered to be blemished. A cherry showing discoloration of any area but extending into the fruit tissue is also considered to be blemished.

Failure to meet these requirements means the product gets slapped with a label indicating it fell "Below standard in quality," along with notes about cherry content or blemished cherries.

Personally, I'm going to be that if you're not a cherry grower, pie maker, or otherwise in the industry, you probably couldn't tell any one of those cherry blemishes from the others.  If you took a bite out of a cherry and it tasted off, you probably don't care that it looked beautiful, and likewise if it was discolored or had a scar but tasted wonderful, you probably don't care much either.  I'm not quite sure if I'd care if it had an aggregate discolored area of 0.2813" diameter (9/32) or 0.3125" diameter (10/32 =>5/16").

But that's not all.  Everything has to be defined.  For example, "Frozen" doesn't mean baked and then frozen; it's much more complicated than that. 

The agency has been regulating frozen pies since 1977. In that time, it has developed numerous additional regulations specifying what makes cherries blemished, what counts as frozen, and how much crust is needed to cover the pie. Frozen cherry pies are also the only fruit pies which must meet these standards.

I'm sure there are going to be some nanny state lovers cowering in fear, afraid that they'll get 24% cherries instead of the regulation 25%, and never consider that the market might encourage cherry pie makers to boast their pies have the Most Cherries or the Best Cherries.  Certainly, when there are standards like this, or on other foods, there is some good, the question is always whether the regulations do more harm than good.  Ordinarily, the big companies are in favor of the regulations.  They propose regulations and know how to live with them.  That's not the case with frozen cherry pie regulation.

Even bakers seeking political favors (yes, they exist) are eager to see such outlandish regulations eliminated. As one New York Post article reports, Lee Sanders of the American Bakers Association is “hopeful the cherry pie standard will finally be revoked, but that it would not make a big difference for the industry.” It’s not every day you find a regulation so poorly executed that not even special interest groups support them.

("Oven Fresh"?  What do you mean by that??)

Regardless of how the regulation passed, and how long overdue removing it is, we should be happy it will soon be gone. Maybe next the FDA will loosen its requirements on the size of the holes in Swiss cheese.

Bezos, Blue Origin Reveal Their Moon Lander

While I've covered the commercial space flights of SpaceX, I've had less to say about our neighbor up the road, Blue Origin.  (While out around the neighborhoods, I recall seeing a guy in a Blue Origin tee-shirt).  Last week, Jeff Bezos revealed his plans and vision for his rocket company Blue Origin according to that large piece in Ars Technica.

The world's richest person, Jeff Bezos, unveiled his sweeping vision for humanity on Thursday afternoon in a Washington D.C. ballroom.  With the lights dimmed, Bezos spoke on stage for an hour, outlining plans for his rocket company, Blue Origin, and how it will pave the way to space for future generations.

We have seen bits and pieces of Bezos' vision to use the resources of space to save Earth and make it a garden for humans before. But this is the first time he has stitched it together in such a comprehensive and radical narrative, starting with reusable rockets and ending with gargantuan, cylindrical habitats in space where millions of people could live. This was the moment when Bezos finally pulled back the curtain, in totality, to reveal his true ambitions for spaceflight. This is where he would like to see future generations one day live.

The highlight of the talk (from my standpoint) is that Bezos unveiled their planned lunar lander called (what else?) Blue Moon.   The base configuration is capable of delivering up to 3.6 tons to the lunar surface.  It's envisioned as a lander - that means one way only - but there's also a configuration that has "stretch tanks," and could carry up to 6.5 tons to the lunar surface.  This would be large enough for a crewed ascent vehicle, pictured here. They just say that will be "built by another company".

Ars reports that Blue Origin is being funded by Bezos personally to the tune of about $1 Billion per year.  They point out that he didn't say whether he would fund the development of Blue Moon without NASA contracts.

The rest of the talk focused on Bezos' vision for the future.  Everyone has probably heard that his (presumably) friendly rival, Elon Musk at SpaceX, envisions colonizing Mars.  Musk wants to terraform Mars: turn Mars green and vibrant to make humanity a multi-planet species and provide a backup plan in case of calamity on Earth.  Bezos wants to preserve Earth at all costs, saying "there is no Plan B."

Instead of moving off to Mars, Bezos is an advocate of colonies in space.  Not International Space Station style; not even rotating wheel-in-space from the movie 2001-style.  Those are thousands of times too small.  Instead, he imagines colonies of millions of people living in permanent colonies in space.  About a million people per colony.

Other worlds in the Solar System lack Earth's atmosphere and gravity. At most, they could support perhaps a few billion people, Bezos said. The answer is not other planets or moons, he said, but rather artificial worlds or colonies in space known as O'Neill cylinders.

These are named for their creator, Gerard O'Neill, who was a professor at Princeton University where Bezos attended college in the early 1980s. In his book The High Frontier, O'Neill popularized the idea of free-floating, cylindrical space colonies that could have access to ample solar energy. Bezos was hooked then and became president of the campus chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

And he is still hooked today, imagining up to 1 million humans living in each cylinder built from asteroid materials and other space resources. Each environment would be climate controlled, with cities, farms, mountains, or beaches. "This is Maui on its best day all year long," Bezos said. "No rain. No earthquakes. People are going to want to live here." And when they need to, they could easily fly back to Earth.

I read the first book I linked to (Colonies in Space) and it was also about O'Neill's ideas of permanent civilization in space.  It's a bold vision, if not a little short of colonizing another world.  As he points out, though, without access to materials from space such as metals from asteroids, water and other fuels that weren't hauled into orbit from the Earth, neither colonization is likely to go far.  While the piece yesterday talked about massive amounts of petroleum here on Earth, the first molecule of oil on Mars has yet to be found.  (Assuming it's there).  It goes without saying that none of this goes anywhere without low cost access to space, something that, to his credit, Bezos has been pursuing all along, as has Musk.

Bezos said he believes that—if this generation builds the infrastructure needed to enable humans to get into space and develop an economy there—future generations will pick up the ball and run. "People are so creative once they're unleashed," Bezos said.

One of five artist's conceptions of the kind of O'Neill cylinder colonies Blue Origin wants to see built. 

Why I've Never Been A Big Believer in "Peak Oil"

I've never been a big believer in the commonly expressed vision of Peak Oil (reasonable background on Peak Oil in the middle piece here).  If you're unfamiliar with the concept it starts with the very reasonable observation that the earth isn't infinite so there's not an unlimited amount of oil to use.  Then it predicts that once some quantity of oil pumped out of the ground is reached, production drops precipitously and dark ages happen.  The timing of this peak somehow always seems to be "real soon now" and has been from the earliest Peak Oil proponents in the 1950s until much more recent predictions.  The thing is, like most predictions of the future, it has been phenomenally wrong.  This graph sums it up well, from the US Energy Information Administration last year.

In 1980, we were forecast to have a 27 year supply of oil.  In 2017, after 37 years, instead of there being no oil for the last decade, the supply expanded to 46 more years.  One guy who has studied the Permian Basin in the Southwest US says it's totally reasonable to consider it a permanent source.  Essentially infinite.  Of course, what happened was that new techniques were developed to get oil out of the ground and that increased the amount that was recoverable.  All because the free market was allowed to function properly.  

All this is an introduction to the article I clipped that graph from, "Why Resources Aren't 'Natural' and Will Never Run Out" over on Watts Up With That, reprinted in turn from The Washington Times under the same title.  The version on WUWT has the cool graphics I clipped. 

The author starts with some backgrounder information; the World Wildlife Fund and a few other, like-minded organizations declared (because reasons, I'm sure) that on August 1st the world will go through "Earth Overshoot Day", when the world will go through more resources than it can produce in one year.  Exactly where the other 5 months worth of resources that we'll use will come from isn't specifically stated; there must be really big warehouses somewhere.  No, wait, if we're using resources faster than they can be mined, where would the resources to stock the warehouses come from?  I know, don't start getting all rational on them...

Anyway, this leads to a quote that is even more spectacularly stupid than that one.

Margaret Beckett, UK Environment Secretary pointed out in 2006, “It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20^th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history.”

I wonder if it ever occurred to Ms. Beckett that was because there were more people alive on Earth since the middle of the 20th century than lived before that?  Without massive plagues or Meteors of Death, the population is always increasing and it's virtually always true to say that more people are alive at this very moment than were ever alive before.  With more people, we'd be needing to cut the usage per capita massively to be using less resources than even 50 years ago.

Since commodities like metals or oil are freely traded, those prices can be tracked.  It goes without saying that if we're running out of any of those, their prices should be going up, right?  And they aren't.

The 1972 international best-selling book Limits to Growth predicted humanity would run out of aluminum by 2027, copper by 2020, gold by 2001, lead by 2036, mercury by 2013, silver by 2014, and zinc by 2022. But today, none of these metals is in historically short supply.

Global production of industrial metals soared from 1960-2014. Annual production levels were up: aluminum (996 percent), copper (417 percent), iron ore (531 percent), lead (343 percent), nickel (455 percent), tin (66 percent), and zinc (348 percent). At the same time, the World Bank industrial metal real price index of these seven metals was flat, down a little more than one percent by 2015. World reserves of copper, iron ore, lead, and zinc stand near all-time highs. Prices are not rising as predicted by resource-depletion pessimists.

The predictions were spectacularly wrong.  Of the dates predicted in Limits to Growth, we've gone past the dates for gold, mercury, and silver.  The plots below show these metals are still being mined, and the growth of production shows no signs of slowing down (right plot).  Aluminum production is hard to read thanks to the color they chose, but instead of declining, as you'd expect if we were on the precipice of running out, it has gone up tenfold since 1960 and still looks to be increasing.

The article produces a stunning quote to give some perspective on "limited resources".

Most people don’t realize the vast quantity of raw materials available on our planet. Canadian geologist David Brooks estimated that a single average cubic mile of Earth’s crust contains a billion tons of aluminum (from bauxite), over 500 million tons of iron, a million tons of zinc and 600,000 tons of copper.

There are 57 million such square miles of Earth’s land surface and almost triple that area under the surface of the oceans. Of course, only a tiny fraction of metals in Earth’s crust is economically recoverable with today’s technology. Nevertheless, Earth’s supply of raw materials is finite, but vast.  [Bold added: SiG]

Mining and minerals are one of my interests, and we've been to mines that allow tourists.  I've stood in a field of discarded iron ore - the highest grade ore found in the upper peninsula of Michigan.  Tons are lying there and have been for decades.  It's a well known place.  Do you think that would be there if we were short of iron ore?

Last November, I did a piece on the 50th birthday of the book The Population Bomb.  That was the book that claimed that population growth would result in resource depletion and the starvation of hundreds of millions of people.  I recall conversations about "hamburger wars" as people fought to the death for dwindling supplies of food. Millions would starve to death in the 1970s.

It's always the same mistake with these guys.  They take some trends, make a linear extrapolation and predict a doom.  They never consider that history isn't linear.  They never seem to grasp that human ingenuity is the most powerful resource on Earth.  Time after time, humanity has faced environmental problems or shortages and figured out ways around them.

The history of the human race is a history of using that ingenuity to improvise, adapt, and overcome.  It's not a smooth continuum but things get better.  In the long term, that's always true.

To quote the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

Idaho Embarks on Enormous Deregulation Experiment

If this is the post of the day, look to the right and see the graphic of the sunset with my message to Deregulate.  (If it's not the post of the day, look at the top of the right sidebar). 

1. Sunset all new laws.  That means all new Federal Laws get an expiration date.  
2. Throw out all useless old laws. Like how the Trump administration has thrown out 22 regulations for every new one they've added 

According to The Library of Economics and Liberty, and quoting from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Idaho has just thrown out all of their existing regulations.  All.  Admittedly, it wasn't planned and nobody seems to know quite what it means, but let me just quote from the article.

Something rather remarkable just happened in Idaho. The state legislature opted to—in essence—repeal the entire state regulatory code. The cause may have been dysfunction across legislative chambers, but the result is serendipitous. A new governor is presented with an unprecedented opportunity to repeal an outdated and burdensome regulatory code and replace it with a more streamlined and sensible set of rules. Other states should be paying close attention.

Instead, the legislature wrapped up an acrimonious session in April without passing a rule-reauthorization bill. As a result, come July 1, some 8,200 pages of regulations containing 736 chapters of state rules will expire. Any rules the governor opts to keep will have to be implemented as emergency regulations, and the legislature will consider them anew when it returns next January.

What does this mean?  Do STOP signs cease to be valid?  Is the state going to be overrun by inadequately licensed hair dressers or fingernail technicians, or some other specialty regulated into a tiny box by an established group of practitioners keeping newcomers out?  The authors of the articles say they don't know.

You might have come across the idea of a “regulatory reset.”  It would be like this, except deliberately crafted rather than the result of legislative dysfunction.  The idea is that the government eliminates all regulations and then brings back the ones it decides it wants.  Presumably, we would end up with substantially fewer regulations.  In practice, when deregulation is tried, regulatory agencies (think FCC, FDA, HEW, EPA and the alphabet soup of Fed.gov executive branch agencies) are reluctant to throw out sunsetted regulations.  It threatens their existence!  To borrow a quote from the Mercatus Center article:

The Idaho case also highlights the power of sunset provisions—or automatic expiration dates built into laws or regulations. In the past, academic research has found that sunset provisions are sometimes ineffective. Legislatures and agencies often readopt regulations without much thought.  To work well, sunsets may need to be structured such that large swaths of rules expire simultaneously, with reauthorization responsibilities falling to the legislature rather than regulators. Sunsets are perhaps most useful when rules are allowed to lapse and then forced back through the rulemaking process all over again. That way they can be subjected to public scrutiny, cost-benefit analysis, and perhaps even court challenges.  [Bold added: SiG]

The regulatory state hates this idea.  If the legislature is debating putting old rules back they're not working on new regulations.  I think that's a feature, not a bug.

It goes without saying that being in central Florida I'm just about as far from Idaho as one can get in the continental US and still be in the CONUS.  I imagine some of you are from Idaho and might have more insight.  Comments from anyone familiar with the Idaho goings-on are appreciated. 

A Change of Plans; Engine Plans, That Is

A couple of weeks ago, I told the story of how I went down every trail I could find in attempt to find plans for an engine I wanted to build.  It's an inline four cylinder from a 19-teens tractor called a Holt 75.  I thought it looked cool - I have a video of one running  This is the picture I took of one in 2015 that got me searching for the plans to build one. 

The conclusion of that story is that the plans were copyright to a company called Coles Power Models that's no longer around.  I concluded by saying that I ran across references to another inline four cylinder engine called a Panther Pup (video from the NAMES show in Detroit at the end of April) and bought the plans from Little Machine Shop. 

In the intervening weeks, a chance at the plans for the Holt 75 has resurfaced.  It's a bit of a story, but a model maker on the Home Model Engine Machinist's Forum bought the prints some years ago and built one.  Before he started he found other builders and asked them what the trouble spots were in the plans and then he improved on them.  He has gotten approval to sell his upgraded prints and is working on improvements to the engine.  The model pictured above uses castings for the intake and exhaust manifolds, at least, and I believe these new plans will replace them with manifolds made entirely from bar stock.  He expects to have his prints available "August to September", which I read as "next fall". 

Given that, I decided to put the plans for Panther aside, and instead build the Webster that I was originally considering for my first internal combustion engine.  I intend to follow the Webster with the Holt 75.  Do I build the Panther Pup or sell the booklet?   Don't know.  No harm keeping it for now.

Between last night and today I've begun the process of sourcing parts to build a Webster.  I haven't bought everything, but between what I have and what's on order, I should be able to get a good start on it before I need to get more materials.  

YouTuber PatPending's Webster. 

The Webster is the most often recommended design for a First IC Engine.  Which isn't to say that I don't expect to make mistakes, just that the design is supposed to be fairly simple and forgiving.  I actually could have made my Oh-Fish-Ul first part for the Webster today; it's just cutting a piece of 1/2" steel rod to length for the crankshaft.

#7 – So Many Radios – What Determines a Good One?

With so many types of radios, so many radios at different price points, how do we know what's a good one?

If there's one thing I've said a lot of times in the history of this blog, the answer to that question is another question:  “good for what?”  There are many reasons for having a radio system, and the definition of what's needed isn't always the same.  A radio that's intended to be battery powered and carried for long periods is different from one intended for a fixed installation with AC power; that's not even mentioning that radios for different radio services are different from each other.

I had a conversation with a guy who claimed to be a salesman for Motorola radios in the “old days”, when their HT series of radios was new.  These radios eventually became the defacto standard radio for police, fire and public service, but that outcome wasn't guaranteed when they were starting out.  He said a police radio buyer told him they needed utmost toughness and reliability from their radios because the radios had a hard life.  The salesman took the radio, not knowing if it would pass the test or not, and threw it against a wall.  He picked up the radio and it still worked.  The sale followed quickly.  While my guess is that all of us would like a tough radio when the time came that we dropped it or something made it go flying but that we might not be willing to pay two or three times the price of other radios that aren't as tough.

As a contrast to that, one of the reasons I bought my Yaesu VX-6R handie talkie is that it's rated water resistant to an industry specification, JIS7, that rates it for submersion of up to 30 minutes at a depth of up to three feet.  At ham shows, however, they'll submerse the radio in a fish tank less than a foot deep with wires to an external speaker, and leave it underwater all day.  No, I don't plan to use the radio underwater, but getting caught in the rain is pretty routine, and having a radio I don't need to worry about is a Good Thing.

Very early on in this series, I talked about the big three factors in receiver design: sensitivity, the sheer ability to hear any signal above the noise by enough margin; selectivity, the ability to receive that signal while rejecting much stronger signals off the desired frequency and potentially very close to it; and signal strength handling, often called dynamic range, the ability to handle multiple nearby strong signals without the receiver's performance degrading.  Let's go through each of these. 

Sensitivity can be stated as the required signal level to produce a required signal to noise ratio to the listener.  An immediate problem with this definition is that the signal level that's available to the receiver varies with a handful of factors.  The biggest variable is the frequency we're tuning to.  The effect of noise from the sun and the “universe” is to have higher noise levels at lower frequencies than at higher frequencies.  That means radios that work at lower frequencies can't sense signals as weak as radios working at VHF or higher frequencies can detect them.  Not from a signal generator, but from the environment.

We need to make a short excursion into the idea of noise and noise figure – two things that are different but related.  Noise is pretty simple.  All components generate electrical noise at a level determined by their resistance and bandwidth.  The noise voltage is given by:

E= ktBR

Where k is Boltzmann’s constant as known in Physics classes, t the temperature in degrees Kelvin, R is the resistance, and B the bandwidth in Hz.

For general receiver design, that tells us the noise in a 50 ohm resistor at room temperature.  That’s -174 dBm per Hz of bandwidth (this is slightly off the real value, but we all use it for rough calculations).  This says a 50 ohm resistor lying on your workbench puts out this much noise power, and a 1000 ohm resistor puts out 20 log (1000/50) or 26 dB more power. 

It’s easy to turn this number into the noise in any receiver bandwidth by adding 10 log (BW).  The noise bandwidth is approximately the passband or 3 dB BW of the circuit you’re considering.  The noise power in a 1 MHz BW is then -174 dBm + 10 log(1,000,000), equal to -174+60 or -114 dBm.

Noise figure is ratio of the Signal to Noise ratios (SNRs) of the output to the input of a network.

NF = SNRout/SNRin

A different way of saying that is that NF is the degradation of the SNR caused by going through the circuit.  A pad, for example has a lower SNR at its output than its input because of its loss.  The NF of a pad is its attenuation, the reciprocal of its gain.  A 3dB pad, for example, has a gain of -3dB and a noise figure of +3dB.  This is generally true for a passive circuit.

What this means is that we can determine what signal level gives us a required SNR by doing some arithmetic.  This is usually called the Minimum Discernible Signal or MDS.

MDS = -174 dBm/Hz + 10 Log (BW in Hz) + Desired SNR + NF

For example, in that previously mentioned example of a 1 MHz bandwidth, if we want a 10 dB SNR, we know it's at least 10 dB higher than that -114 dBm noise in that BW, or -104 dBm.  We're not done yet; -104 isn't our “final answer”; that answer depends on how much that -104 dBm is degraded by the receiver Noise Figure.  We'll call it 4 dB for a convenient number:

MDS = -174 dBm/Hz + 10 Log (1,000,000 Hz) + 10 dB SNR + 4 dB NF = -100 dBm

The problem is that this calculated number isn't very meaningful for lower frequencies.  This chart shows some typical noise levels at lower frequencies (below 1000 MHz), in dB above the ktBR as we calculate above.

Look at 10 MHz, for example, right at the middle of the horizontal axis and read going up.  It offers many different possible noise levels; the “quiet rural” noise floor is never reached because the atmospheric noise in the day or night are considerably higher.  If you're in that “quiet rural” place, during the day, the noise could be 35 dB higher than the calculated -114 dBm or -79 dBm.  It gets worse from there.  A rural environment will be 40 dB higher than ktBR, a residential neighborhood close to 50 dB noisier and a business district could be 60 dB noisier than ktBR.

A result of this is that if the design is for the lowest points of these curves, it's likely the environment will never be as good as the receiver and won't degrade the receiver.  For an HF radio, for example, it's virtually never necessary to have a noise figure below about 10 to 12 dB and therefore virtually never necessary to choose a radio based on Sensitivity claims.  For a VHF/UHF HT, it's worth looking at those numbers, and sensitivity can be verified fairly easily with test equipment that isn't all that expensive or hard to find.

As an aside, last year I did a couple of posts on a small antenna project I was building specifically for 10 MHz and below.  These antennas are viable at 10 MHz and below because, while they receive less signal and less noise, their directivity might allow the user to position the antenna to improve the SNR slightly.  It's only possible because the strength of the signal required to overcome the noise at these frequencies means we have signal to throw out in an effort to improve the SNR.

Unfortunately, selectivity doesn't offer us any fundamental relationships from the hard world of physics that make our work easier.  The requirements are really determined by the type of signals we want to receive, and a multi-mode radio can have large sections devoted to holding all the filters it might need.  You might recall that I said selectivity is bought by the cubic inch, and that's nowhere as evident as in a multi-band, multi-mode receiver.

Selectivity is entirely determined by the filters – largely either in the IF of an analog radio or in the DSP of a Software radio.  It's measurement of the amount that off-channel signals are attenuated (reduced).

Selectivity is often specified by not just the width of the passband (the lowest loss part of the filter) but by the ratio of the 6 dB loss bandwidth to the 60 dB loss bandwidth.  A theoretical filter (and the digital filters can approach this the closest) has a 60/6 shape factor of 1 – they're exactly the same bandwidth, something referred to as a “brick wall” filter – the attenuation shape is the rectangular outline of a brick.  Practically, filters with shape factors more like 2:1 or 3:1 are more common in analog radios.  A 2:1 shape factor means the 60 dB rejection part of the filter is in the adjacent channel, so if there aren't strong signals within that offset and nothing there to reject, 2:1 is fine.  Amateur use isn't as strictly controlled as commercial use and therefore might expose the user to interference in the adjacent channel.

Radios for commercial service will have requirements they must meet for the IF BW that will specify how far from the desired channel an interfering signal will be applied and how much they should be rejected.  For example, it may say to set a signal generator on the desired channel, set a 10 dB SNR, the move the generator frequency to desired offsets and increase the generator output strength to verify that you don't exceed the same SNR unless the signal is more than 60 dB higher than when on channel.  Most services will have a wide bandwidth set of tests, such as rejection of the image frequency, or any services that the radio is expected to encounter in service. 

The strong signal handling, or dynamic range, properties of the design are very much under the control of the designer.  In commercial services, there are requirements that new designs will be tested for compliance to, while in amateur and more casual services, there may be little or no mention of it.

While selectivity is bought by the cubic inch, dynamic range is bought by the milliamp.  The basic idea is that the radio distorts less if the signal being amplified in any stage is a small portion of the “idling” or bias conditions in the stage. 

When two signals are applied to an amplifier, say two strong signals in the band being monitored, the amplifier can multiply them by each other if that amplifier becomes nonlinear.  Since multiplication is the same as amplitude modulation, the two signals are said to intermodulate each other, producing Intermodulation Distortion, commonly called IMD.  The most troublesome products are generally closest to the two signals.  They're called “third order IMD” because of the terms in the equations below the graphic (two times the first frequency minus the second frequency).  Third order IMD is seen in the left picture here, the two smaller signals on either side of the two bigger signals.  You can imagine that if you're trying to listen to the something on the frequency of the smaller signal that when the IMD is present, it might wipe out whatever you're listening to.

One of the reasons these are troublesome is that they increase at twice the rate of the desired signals.  This leads to a condition, seen on the right, where the increasing intermodulation products (IM Power) will equal the power of the desired signals.  This is called the Intercept Point (IP) or, more specifically, the third order Intercept Point, IP3.

The general rule for this number is “the higher it is, the better it is”.  The cost, as briefly mentioned is more current consumption, which means lower battery life in a portable radio, and more heat in any radio.

The dynamic range of a receiver is rarely specified except in high end receivers, and there are many ways to measure it.  Since those signals might be attenuated by filters in the radio, typical tests will set different amplitudes for both off frequency channels and it is tricky to measure in the lab.