Boeing Starliner Test Flight Failing Main Objective

As we reported on back on December 2nd, Boeing was preparing for an unmanned, Orbital Flight Test of its Starfire crew capsule this month.  The launch was before sunrise this morning, at 6:36 AM EST, so I got up at 6:15 to watch.  It wasn't until around 20 minutes into the mission that the problem surfaced.  At this time, it appears the main objective of the mission, to launch a man-rated capsule to ISS for autonomous rendezvous and docking is a failure.  Summary reporting from Ars Technica:

During a post-launch news conference, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that the mission elapsed timing system had an error in it, with the net effect that the spacecraft thought it was performing an orbital insertion burn, when in fact it was not. The on-board computer then expended a significant amount of propellant to maintain a precise attitude, thinking it had reached orbit.

"Today, a lot of things went right," Bridenstine said. "But we did not get the orbital insertion burn we were hoping for."

When ground-based controllers realized the problem, they immediately sent a command to begin the orbital insertion burn, but due to a communications problem—which could have been a gap in coverage of NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System or some spacecraft error—those commands were not received right away by Starliner. So it continued to expend fuel to maintain a precise attitude.

By the time the commands got through, Starliner had expended too much fuel to make a safe rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station, the primary goal of this test flight.

This sounds like a silly mistake in software (and I realize it's always easier to see them in retrospect): the vehicle decided it was firing the orbital insertion burn based on one thing: the mission timer.  They could have used other sensors to cross check the mission timer's accuracy rather than just assume the timer is correct.  Starliner is safe and in a stable orbit, so some of the tests planned for the mission can be conducted, up to and including landing under parachutes in New Mexico on Sunday.  It seems that is likely to be an obstacle to Boeing getting this capsule approved for a manned flight to the ISS.

The spacecraft has operated nominally in a number of different ways so far, with good power systems, cooling, and more. However, the inability to perform a docking at the station raised the question of whether Boeing will need to perform a second uncrewed test flight before NASA allows its astronauts to fly on Starliner,.

“I think it’s too early to know," Bridenstine responded during the news conference. "We don’t know what the root cause is. I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no."

NASA does not have a specific requirement that Starliner must demonstrate a rendezvous-and-docking before it clears Starliner for human flights, but certainly the agency's engineers would feel more comfortable with that task having been performed.

In any case, the primary issue appears to be one of software rather than hardware. Boeing may be able to convince NASA that had humans been on board the vehicle, they would have immediately recognized the problem and manually commanded the orbital insertion burn.

Whether there is an additional test flight or not, this problem almost certainly delays Boeing's crewed flight of Starliner beyond the first half of 2020. This would, for the time being at least, put SpaceX back into the lead for getting humans back into space from a US-based launch pad. A source said Friday that the company appears to be on track toward a springtime launch of astronauts on board the Crew Dragon vehicle.

Interestingly, from before this morning's launch, again sourcing Ars Technica:

After funding several development efforts in the early 2010s, NASA down-selected to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to finalize design and development of their commercial crew vehicles. All told, the agency has paid Boeing $4.8 billion and SpaceX $3.1 billion for Starliner and the Crew Dragon spacecraft, respectively.

I read within the last couple of days that SpaceX is planning their next major test of their Crew Dragon craft, the in-flight abort test, “no earlier than” January 11th.  SpaceX flew their equivalent of today's Boeing mission last March.

This morning's Boeing Starliner Atlas 5 mission, Trevor Mahlmann photo.  This appears to be across the Indian River lagoon, so probably from Titusville, looking southeast toward Cape Canaveral.

Before The Use By Date Goes By

From the incredible Michael P. Ramirez.

Since I ran the story about the Peloton ad, compare congressman Nadler to Peloton mom in that post.  This will burn out your eyes. 

Are Solar Cars At the Tipping Point of Mass Adoption?

That's the view of Raghu Das, CEO of market research firm IDTechEx, who has been studying electric vehicles.  The reason is that for some percentage of drivers, their EV may be able to recharge without plugging into the grid.  This was an article originally published in eeNews Automotive  and reprinted in Electronic Design.

Startups Sono Motors and Lightyear announced solar family cars available as of next year. They have solar bodies rather than the useless scrap of solar roof seen on other cars.

Take the Lightyear One.  The entire body will have integrated solar cells, not just a panel on the roof.  Because of this, they claim “In extreme conditions (in winter, at highway speeds and with heating on) we guarantee at least 400 km (248 mi).”  In optimum conditions, they claim a range of at least 725 km.  The article contradicts this a little, saying it can go 740 km:

They do not have the acceleration of a Tesla, but Lightyear cheekily points out that its Lightyear One will go 740 km faster than any Tesla because the Tesla would have to stop and plug in. 

Lightyear One

When I see a claim like this, I automatically do the mental calculation.  The maximum solar energy available to charge a car is about 300 Watts per square yard, when you consider the efficiency of solar cells.  That would require a flat panel positioned optimally; that is, always tracking and perpendicular to the sun's rays.  For a rounded, streamlined surface like this car's, the amount it can recover won't be that large.  According to IDTechEx, they expect cars to get about 1 kW.  That seems reasonable.  They go on to say:

“We are clearly at the tipping point for adoption of solar on land, water and air vehicles, particularly on pure electric ones where range sells. There are now camper vans, delivery trucks, robot shuttles, buses, boats and even aircraft getting at least 10% and often all of their electricity from daylight. Many find it useful even on the sides of their vehicles. Any designer of any electric vehicle must now seriously consider solar bodywork. It is a new key enabling technology”, says Das.

They're considering a typical commuter car that might do 30 miles in a day (reported to be the American average).  The car might be capable of two hundred miles (or more) in a day, and 10% of that would be 20 miles.  Cars like that might well be at the tipping point of getting enough energy to run for a day by sitting and charging in a parking lot all day while the owner is at work. They're still not a car to take on a road trip, or to spend all weekend driving while going shopping, or other things people typically consider when they buy a car. 

An Unrelated Twofer

Two stories that are there just because they both came up on this busy day.  In a way, they're both because of the elephant in the room, the impeachment boondoggle.

Top FISA Judge Accuses FBI Lawyer of Criminal Act

I find this story reminiscent of what I posted eight days ago about the FISA courts.  My argument is the FISA court should publicly slap the FBI around for lying to it.  If you watch any network except Fox last night, you wouldn't know the court did just that.

A complete and total blackout. That was how ABC, CBS, and NBC reacted on their Tuesday evening newscasts when the top Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge, Rosemary M. Collyer blasted the FBI for misleading the court when seeking surveillance warrants for a former Trump campaign staffer. The order was damning, accusing an FBI lawyer of a criminal act in intentionally lying to the court. It added that the court’s confidence in the FBI’s evidence was so shaken they needed extra oversight for all cases.

It's not as much face-slapping as what I proposed they should tell the Fibbies, but the spirit is there.  Judge Collyer said,

The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.

In the wild, topsy-turvy world of the Intertoobs, there is a small but nonzero chance Judge Collyer could actually stumble across this post, so let me say one little thing: it's about damned time.  We were all thinking you're as corrupt as the FBI since you didn't publicly slap them down.  This restores your honor.

‘Ghost Guns’ Rules included in the NDAA Defense Spending Package

One of the other things going on that's hiding in the press bubble around the impeachment is that Congress is submitting another budget bill doing their usual end run around actually legislating.  Their $1.4 Trillion dollar spending package is the kind of excess and out of control spending that Trump said he was tricked into signing “last time” and swore he wouldn't do it again.  Clearly congress is hoping the president is so weakened by the impeachment that they can do anything they want.

It's the usual turd package.  The funding bills dismantle three Affordable Care Act taxes: the “Cadillac tax” for good medical plans, the medical device excise tax and a health insurance tax.  All well and good, but they don't kill off the ACA - they kill funding but keep the expenses.  They raise the age of tobacco purchases from 18 to 21, secure coal miner pensions, and extend the Export-Import Bank of the United States for seven years.  There's $25 Million for gun violence studies, a 3.1% pay raise for military and civilian government employees, $1.5 Billion for the overdosing junkies opioid crisis.

Part of the spending is $738 Billion for defense, and the National Defense Authorization Act.  That's where GAT Daily reports anti-“Ghost Gun” language put into the NDAA by New York Congresscritter Max Rose.

Rose originally introduced his portion of the legislation in May to combat the increasing prevalence of ghost guns, which are assembled from individual parts that don’t meet the technical definition of a firearm under the 1968 Gun Control Act. His bill would require DHS to examine the potential for ghost guns to be used by terrorists and debrief local law enforcement agencies on its findings.

By conflating DIY guns with terrorism and obfuscating as much as possible, Rose slips the metaphorical noose around gun parts sales.  To see if he can come back some other time and tighten the noose.  Spending money to get the DHS to do this study would be such a flaming waste. The obvious first criticism is how does he know there actually is an “increasing prevalence of ghost guns?”

Interestingly, this week Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro offered the opinion that (my words) there's no difference between an unassembled and an assembled firearm so 80% firearms should be prohibited. 

Shapiro relies on two arguments to arrive at this absurd result. One, that unfinished receivers are “designed” to expel a projectile by action of an explosive. It doesn’t take a law degree to figure out how backward this thinking is. Partially-manufactured lowers are explicitly designed so that they are unable to expel a projectile by action of an explosive without further work. In other words, by their very nature, they are not firearms.

Two, Shapiro claims that these receivers “may be readily converted (to expel a projectile)” which he argues is analogous to the “may readily be restored” language of the federal National Firearms Act.

He's saying there's nothing inherently different between an incomplete lower and a complete one.  One has had a few more steps of machining done than the other, that's all.  It's just machine time or machinist work.  This argument could easily be stretched to blocks of aluminum.  After all, they require more machining steps than an 80% firearm, but it's just more machining.  And if there's no difference between an unassembled anything and an assembled one, is a collection of metal tubes a bicycle frame?  Is a pallet full of bricks a house?  Is a hickory tree a collection of baseball bats?  They all “may be readily converted” to the final product for some definition of readily converted.

Getting back to the spending bill in the overall sense, I think it would a Good Thing to remind the president that he said he'd never sign another turd spending bill like this.

“A Cheer for the Trump Uranium Plan”

So says economist Stephen Moore at Townhall.  Me, I didn't even know there was a Trump Uranium Plan.  The article opens with Moore pointing out:

Our sources are telling us that President Trump is nearing a decision on how to revive the all-but-dormant American uranium industry. This proposed plan would create a reserve of domestically mined uranium stored in a "Federal Uranium Security Stockpile."

Moore goes on to point out many things I didn't know at all, or didn't know the extent of.

• The U.S. reactor fleet purchased about 40 million pounds of uranium last year.
• America's nuclear power industry now gets 90% of its uranium through imports from nations like Canada, Australia, Russia and Kazakhstan.
• One reason for purchasing so much Uranium from overseas is that American production of uranium has fallen steadily over the last 30 years.

The Trump administration's assessment is that the risk of any shortage of uranium and the attendant disruption to security and nuclear power production would be far higher to the American economy than the cost of building a domestic reserve -- which is estimated at $1 billion to $1.5 billion over the next decade.

The one aspect of this that I was familiar with was the general attacks on mining in the US, led mostly by the EPA and the non-governmental agencies that sue the EPA and get rulings in court to shut down mining.  There are reserves of uranium in the US and there are reserves of the so-called “rare earth metals” that we keep hearing the US has to go to China for. Those metals used to be routinely mined in California

The problem is not that America is running out of mineral resources or that American miners can't compete. Ned Mamula, a former natural resource expert with the Department of the Interior, reports in his latest book, "Groundbreaking!" that the United States sits atop some $5 trillion of mineral resources -- most of it on federal lands. High-grade uranium can be mined in states such as Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.  The decline is a result of a war against mining waged by liberal environmental groups that have selectively hampered or even shut down production of everything from coal to copper to rare Earth minerals and now to uranium. 

The contempt that the left has for nuclear power would frankly be puzzling to me, if they were honest.  They scream for decades that we have a few years before we release too much CO₂ to prevent a climate catastrophe, but don't want the best carbon-free energy production there is.  As I say, if they were honest, they'd want more nuclear power.

That said, I like how Stephen Moore ends his article well enough to let him end mine:

One last point. While this national security stockpile may be necessary to get American uranium production back up and running, Trump should make it very clear that this is a one-time commitment, not a lifelong subsidy to the industry. We have seen from decades of subsidies to industries like solar, wind and biofuels that government handouts become de facto entitlements and impair an industry's road to free market profitability.

A 1950s Union Carbide ad showing the yellowish uranium ore commonly found in the southwest US.  Source of link. 

Time Magazine is Wrong But Not Completely Useless

In the December 2-9, 2019 issue of Time magazine, author Anand Giridharadas had the cover article, “How the Elites Lost Their Grip,” a (probably) self-supporting article on America's slide toward to socialism.  President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) Lawrence Reed responded to it with a detailed takedown, which includes some useful information.

Giridharadas starts by citing the well-worn analogy of the Overton window, saying the window in the US has shifted toward socialism.  The irony is that Reed says Joseph P. Overton, the inventor of the concept, “was my best friend and a senior colleague at the Michigan organization I headed for nearly 21 years (1987-2008), the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.”  From there he goes into pointing out some of the problems with the Time article.

While I appreciate the personal citations of both Joe Overton and me in Mr. Giridharadas’s article, I’m compelled to point out a few of its questionable assumptions. In doing so, I feel like the proverbial mosquito in a nudist camp: I know what I want to do, but it’s hard to decide where to begin.

For example Giridharadas cites polls that suggest capitalist uber-critics Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are “top contenders” are proof that the support for socialism is growing.  If you're following the race, you know that's wrong.  Warren was very popular until she started to put a price tag onto her plans, now she's dropping in the polls.  Joe Biden is in the lead, while Sanders, Warren and Booty-judge jostle for second though fourth.  The exact stack up of candidates depends on which poll you read.

Mr. Giridharadas points to the rise in membership of the Democratic Socialists of America—from 5,000 members in 2016 to at least 50,000 today. But that’s still half the membership (113,000) the Socialist Party claimed at its all-time high, which was in 1912. The Libertarian Party’s membership today is 10 times larger.

Among young people, the story that Mr. Giridharadas completely misses is the explosion of membership and activity among groups friendly to liberty, private enterprise, and free markets—organizations like Young Americans for Liberty, Students for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, Young Americans Against Socialism, Turning Point USA, and the one where I serve as president emeritus, the Foundation for Economic Education. If Facebook following is any sign of relative popularity, it’s notable that the Democratic Socialists’ presence on that social media platform is a tiny fraction of that for those pro-capitalist youth organizations.

Something Time never acknowledges is that Americans don't trust government.  The Pew Research Center reports trust in government is near its all time lows:

Only 17% of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (3%) or “most of the time” (14%).  Mr. Giridharadas would do the American public a real service if he pointed out that this is the same government on which socialists want to bestow more power and money.

Reed points out that the biggest mistake Mr. Giridharadas makes is the usual socialist mantra about “capitalism is driven by evil greed.” These are the people that think anyone who has more (money/status/whatever) than you got it by stealing it from you. 

Implicit throughout is his belief that capitalism is nothing more than cronyism, whereby the rich use political connections to line their pockets.

Mr. Giridharadas ignores the fact that those of us he would surely label as pro-capitalist are just as much against cronyism and corruption as anybody, and likely more so than any socialists are. We understand that the answer to cronyism and corruption is not to give government even more power and money. We support not some corrupted, capitalist straw man but genuinely free markets, limited government, private property, and the rule of law. When will mainstream media learn this distinction?

Moreover, to those of us who appreciate this distinction, the pursuit of money is not the principal objective in life. Critics of capitalism suggest endlessly that it is, but that’s infantile. The case for capitalism rests on something far more important than material wealth.

What he doesn't say is captured in this quote from economist Walter E. Williams that I've posted before.  Rather than the pursuit of money, the pursuit of helping other people will help yourself. 

The case for free markets is the case for freedom itself. 

One cannot be fully himself—or even fully human—if he must live his life and conduct his affairs according to the dictates of those with political power.  It speaks volumes that capitalism is what happens when peaceful people are left alone; socialism, on the other hand, is a Rube Goldberg contrivance with a lousy track record fueled by envy and class warfare.

The Streaming Wars Intensify

Just about two years ago (it was March 3 of '18), I started the story of Mrs. Graybeard and I cutting the cord; the term for dropping cable TV.  In brief, while we put up an outside antenna (we're in the fringes for over the air TV), we went with a streaming service.  These are done entirely over an internet connection, so we kept our cable internet hookup but dropped cable TV.  There were two main reasons for going to a streaming service; the big one was that the channels we absolutely wanted to see aren't available over the air.  The second reason was that the services we looked at (and signed on with) offer a virtual Digital Video Recorder so we didn't need to buy one.

Streaming services are sort of midway between cable TV and 100% streaming.  100% streaming would be getting every channel you want on its own.  We initially subscribed to YouTubeTV, a streaming service from YouTube/Google/Alphabet as the name implies.  They had the channels we wanted to see and offered an “infinite DVR” - there are only time limits (in months) to watch something after you record it; other services limit you to a certain amount of memory.  In the bottom line view, though, we still don't watch 75 to 85% of the channels that are offered, just as with cable we didn't watch 95% of what was offered.  It's just that we pay $55/month now versus $130 back when we paid for cable TV.  (I took out the price we pay now for our internet connection from the old cable bills)

FEE - the Foundation for Economic Education - has posted some updated statistics on all this that are quite interesting for you numbers geeks in the audience.

One of those “everybody knows” statistics is that Cable TV is dying.

• In 2000, 68.5 million Americans had cable subscriptions.  Netflix was a 3 year old startup.
• By 2017, 48.6 million Americans had cable subscriptions, and 50 million Americans had Netflix. 
• For completeness, by 2011, 21.5 million Americans had Netflix subscriptions.

Of course, the big thing that everyone is talking about now is Disney+.  With their very deep content library, including the Star Wars and Marvel Cinematic universes, they're a monster-big draw.  It's being reported that ten million people signed up for Disney+ the day it launched.  That will not go without competition in 21st century America!  Apple is preparing to unleash its own streaming service. Meanwhile, AT&T’s WarnerMedia has its own super package in beta: HBO Max, which reportedly will feature a Friends reunion.  These media companies are spending billions on content, from Disney's Mandalorian to HBO's Watchmen to Apple's upcoming project on singer Billie Eilish. Netflix isn't sitting by idly, they're working on more new content, too.  All of this is great for consumers. 

• In 2018, Americans streamed eight billion hours of content per month. That’s equivalent to nearly a million years (912,635 to be precise).
• Surveys show that 148 million Americans say they watch Netflix “at least once per month.” That’s followed by Amazon Prime (88.7 million).
• Apple, which doesn’t even have a streaming service yet, reportedly has already spent $6 billion on original content.
• Disney+ and Netflix offer streaming services for roughly 50 cents per day ($16 per month).
• HBO Max will charge even less for its streaming service—$15 per month—reports say.
• When HBO was launched in the 1970s, its service typically cost $6 a month ($37 in 2018 dollars).
• In 1995, cable cost $22 a month ($38 in 2018 dollars), on average. By 2015, cable providers were charging $69.03, on average.  That's almost 3x the official inflation rate.  On average, cable prices went up 5.8% yearly for the past 20 years. Inflation clocked in at 2.2% per year, on average.  Which means cable has gone up at about half the actual inflation rate.
• Surveys show that nearly 60 percent of Americans are cord-cutters (people who once had cable but chose to cancel).  

Just as a side note, we've never subscribed to Netflix and haven't subscribed to Disney+ or any of these other services.  Since I do have an Amazon Prime account we get their streaming service.  We've mostly watched movies that aren't on the other services and a couple of documentaries. 

This article is all aimed at the entertainment market - the segments called direct to Cable or DVD and the first run of movies on streaming after a successful run in the theaters - but there's more to it.  The news services are running to streaming - Fox News started a few months ago, CBS and ABC News are there, and more.  I know Fox is a monthly bill, while the others appear to follow their broadcast model of having commercials support the service.  CBS has a streaming version of their network TV, where they have some shows that only appear online, Star Trek Discovery and soon, the new Star Trek Picard.  That's a monthly bill.  How many monthly bills do you want? In this last case, it's almost one bill per series I'd watch.

The point is that this rush for everyone to put their entertainment on their own streaming service brings to mind the old anti-cable TV ads from the late 60s, when the movie theaters were afraid of services like HBO, and were saying the cable company wants to put a coin deposit box on your TV.  Streaming services like Hulu or Sling or YouTubeTV follow the old cable model of putting a lot of channels in a package but having one or two in any group that you'd pay for.  How many news channels can there be when CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Cheddar, Young Turks and so many more are all saying virtually the same things?  If you pay for one TDS news channel, are you going to pay for all the others?  I'd be perfectly happy with a smaller selection of channels at $2 to $5 each. 

HBO or Disney+? ... Daenerys from Game of Thrones or the Mandalorian.  Choose one? 

Lightning: Gamma Rays, an EMP, and UV Halo; All in < 1 Second

That's the subtitle to an Ars Technica piece on lightning science as measured by the International Space Station.  The new work is made possible by a piece of hardware called the Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), an instrument built by the European Space Agency that's attached to its lab module on the ISS. It's an impressive piece of hardware, tying together two X-ray/gamma-ray detectors, three UV detectors, two optical-wavelength light meters, and two high-speed cameras.  All of the instruments have to be synchronized to the same timing so that the sequence is the same between them.

The details of a lightning strike are simply amazing.  Until recently, no one could capture data fast enough to conclusively demonstrate the amazing physics going on in a lightning strike.  I'll cut to the most interesting few parts and put them here; as always, I recommend you Read The Whole Thing.

A paper released by Science today describes ASIM's imaging of a single lightning bolt, which took place in 2018 off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Optical activity heralded the formation of the lightning bolt and started to intensify about 200 microseconds before the gamma rays began registering in the detectors. The gamma rays were primarily in the form of a transient flash lasting about 40 microseconds, but there was a "long" tail of emissions that extended out to 200 microseconds as their energy gradually declined.

UV light started arriving right at the same time that the gamma-ray burst hit. The initial UV light was produced by ionized oxygen as the lightning bolt moved through the atmosphere. But the UV shifted to what's called an "elve," which is a different phenomenon entirely. In the case of elves, the light is the result of an electromagnetic pulse produced by the lightning bolt itself. This travels into the ionosphere, a sparse layer of ionized gases that starts about 100km above Earth and extends up to roughly where the ISS orbits. Because the pulse takes time to reach the ionosphere, there's a delay between the lightning and the appearance of the elve.

In this case, that delay was about 10 milliseconds, but the elve persisted for a while. That's because the pulse spreads like a balloon being inflated, tracing out an expanding sphere above the Earth. Different areas of the ionosphere get excited as the sphere makes its way through, ultimately causing UV emissions to extend over a radius of up to 800 kilometers.

All of this took place in under 300 milliseconds.

It was only six years ago that a form of energy called Dark Lightning was first documented showing gamma rays, the highest energy radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum, can be created in lightning strikes.  If that's not energetic enough for you, they also found lightning caused the production of antimatter.  That was previously only been shown on Earth with particle accelerators.

These details don't surprise me.  I've talked extensively about my lightning strike last August; about the things damaged and then the latent damage that seemed to lead to failures around the house, up to replacing our water heater in early November and then replacing Mrs. Graybeard's computer around Thanksgiving.  One thing I mentioned was having battery operated, “atomic clocks” (clocks which sync via a receiver tuned to WWVB) that reset to 00:00 on January 1.  That seemed more like an EMP stuff rather than induced RF fields; WWVB is on 60 kHz - the frequency components of lightning are higher than that so there should be low energy at 60 kHz.  The frequency components from lightning spread from several times 60 kHz up into the low VHF range.

One of the things I posted was that while preparing for Hurricane Dorian, I noticed the telltale signs of lightning damage to a palm tree about 25 feet from my radio tower and around 10' taller than the tower.  I concluded by saying:

I'll know within the next couple of months if the palm will survive the strike or if it's already dead and just doesn't know it.

It became evident that the tree was dead by the beginning of November.  Palms grow from a point at the top of the visible trunk, hidden in all the vegetation growing up there.  By the start of November,  all the fronds were hanging down, brown and dead.  The peak of the tree broke off and fell to the lawn.   Here's a closeup of the top of that palm from September 3rd (probable lightning burn highlighted):

Here's a different view of the trees a few minutes ago:

The palm on the left was hit - you can see just up from the bottom of the frame that the bark has been falling off the tree revealing the darker trunk under the outer surface and the top is gone.  It looks nothing like the other tree.

Kind of uncharacteristically, I called a tree service to see what they'd charge to take it down and haul it away.  The guy took one look at the tree and said that the second tree is dying and he'll just have to come out in a few months for it.  The trees have a fungus called (and I swear I'm not making this up) Butt Rot, or ganoderma.  Since their trunks have been almost touching for 30+ years, you can be sure they have one massive root ball and any fungus on one is getting into the other.  There's an obvious growth at the bottom of the one on the left that looks like a large mushroom that's part of the disease, but I didn't poke at it or try to break it off .  There's a black area on the trunk of the one that's still alive that's an early sign of it.

These two things merged into one story in my mind.  For years, I've been saying that if you're not even a little bit afraid of lightning, you just don't understand the problem.  I thought I understood the problem, but I've learned enough from our strike to start wondering if I'm afraid enough.

Keeping an Eye On the Quiet Sun

An interesting post on Watts Up With That (WUWT) yesterday pointed out that we're about to cross a historic milestone:  2019 will be the year with the most zero-sunspot-days in the satellite era.  As of yesterday (12/12), when this was posted:

So far this year the sun has been blank (i.e., no visible sunspots) for 266 days and, barring any major surprises, it’ll reach 269 days early next week which will be the quietest year in terms of sunspots since 1913 when the sun was spotless for 311 days. In fact, the current stretch of consecutive spotless days has reached 29 and for the year the sun has been blank 77% of the time. The current record-holder in the satellite era for spotless days in a given year is 2008 when the sun was blank for 268 days making the 2008-2009 solar minimum the deepest since 1913. 

We've talked about this being the weakest sunspot cycle in over a hundred years, and how this is a mechanism for the way solar activity can impact climate.  The mechanism is counterintuitive to many people, but was first proposed by Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Institute in Copenhagen.  The Earth is constantly bombarded by galactic cosmic rays; high energy radiation from sources elsewhere in the galaxy and even beyond.  The solar wind, the constant push of charged particles ejected by reactions in the sun, ordinarily keeps some of those particles from reaching the earth.  During solar minima, the solar wind weakens and more charged particles make it into the atmosphere.  There, just like in the old cloud chambers used to detect particles coming out of particle accelerators, those cosmic rays increase cloud formation acting to cool the Earth.

Svensmark's hypothesis was first demonstrated in the laboratory, but measurements of cosmic rays have been going on for much of the space age.  Cosmic rays have been increasing for the last four years, coinciding with cycle 24's extended solar minimum that we're in, exactly as Svensmark's hypothesis predicts.  This plot shows measured cosmic ray flux from cosmic ray monitoring balloons over California and neutrons penetrating the atmosphere to ground level in Oulu, Finland.  The balloon data includes measurement error bars on every data point.

Both ground level and high altitude cosmic ray measurements are up since March of '15. 

If you want to keep your metaphorical eye on the sun Sunday to see if we've surpassed the record, current sunspot numbers can be looked up in a variety of places.  Spaceweather has them (and says today the spotless day count is 267).   I use ham radio sites like QRZ.  Since 267 isn't the number of consecutive days without a sunspot, it's virtually certain that we'll pass the 269 before the end of the year, even if it's not on Sunday.  Today is only the 30th consecutive day without sunspots.

By the way, it's pretty common for people to say that with the solar activity the lowest in over a hundred years, that we could be headed for an ice age.  It's not that simple or straightforward.  Going back to a quote from WUWT

[T]he year 1913 cited earlier for its lack of sunspots on the order of 311 days was a year filled with wild weather extremes including the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth in Death Valley, CA. For more on the extreme weather of 1913 click here.

Are we headed for another Maunder minimum?  Nothing in this article changes any of those predictions.  The various predictors don't say that - they lean toward another weak cycle like this one, lasting until about 2030, and then a little higher after that.  One predictor, Dr. Valentina Zharkova, is predicting the low lasts another cycle, possibly two, beyond 2030; that would mean these low solar activity levels until 2052.  For my fellow hams, I'd say to work on your lower frequency systems, say 160 to 20m. 

UPDATE: Dec 16 1630 EST:  The record was broken Sunday.  From Spaceweather.com

SUNSPOTS BREAK A SPACE AGE RECORD: Solar Minimum is becoming very deep indeed. Over the weekend, the sun set a Space Age record for spotlessness. So far in 2019, the sun has been without sunspots for more than 270 days, including the last 33 days in a row. Since the Space Age began, no other year has had this many blank suns.

Since the all-time record for spotlessness is 311 days, and there aren't 41 days left in 2019, we won't break it this year.  Deep, long lasting solar minima are a characteristic of weak cycles; as the 2008-'09 minima demonstrated, so it's a possibility that 311 will fall as the record next year. 

Noted in Passing: the Opioid “Crisis” is Not Due to Prescription Drugs

I've written on the so-called opioid crisis several times in the last few years and have come to the conclusion that the narrative we're being fed simply isn't true; that the stories are manufactured for reasons that aren't necessarily clear, but that could track back to some well known politicians (hint - one of the names is associated with Arkancide).  For example a couple of years ago, Mylan, the company that makes Epinephrine injector pens - the kind used to stop anaphylactic shock in people with allergies to things like bee stings - raised the price a factor of 4x and the media howled like banshees.  The company that makes Naloxone, the drug used to stop people from dying of opioid overdose from dying, raised their price 17x and the media didn't say a word. 

Back on November 20th, the CATO institute put up an article derived from a study published November 1st in The Annals of Emergency Medicine (full text).  The study demonstrates what I've reported here from the start, the numbers of people who become addicted to prescription opioids is too small to match the overdose numbers being seen.

This prospective cohort study by researchers in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine followed 484 “opioid naïve” patients prescribed opioids for acute pain upon release from the emergency department during a six month period. The statewide prescription drug monitoring program was employed in addition to regular follow up telephone interviews. One percent (five patients) met the criteria for persistent opioid use by the end of the follow up period. Four of the five patients still had moderate or severe pain in the affected body part six months after release from the emergency department.

I'm a little surprised to find that it's as much as 1% of the group that were using the opioids persistently, but 484 patients isn't a big number and sometimes small groups give strange results.  The CATO article also talks about a much larger study with a smaller number of misusers in the British Medical Journal.  

The study comes after a much larger retrospective cohort study reported in the BMJ of more than 568,000 opioid naïve patients prescribed opioids for acute postoperative pain between 2008 and 2016. Investigators found a total misuse rate of 0.6 percent. The researchers defined “misuse” as follows:

The primary outcome was an ICD-9 (international classification of diseases, ninth revision) diagnosis code of opioid dependence, abuse, or overdose…Opioid misuse was defined as the presence of at least one of these ICD codes after discharge and encompasses a composite of a wide range of forms of misuse. We included only diagnosis codes related specifically to prescription opioids.

There is simply no correlation between opioid prescription volume and non-medical use or opioid use disorder among people age 12 and over.  Meanwhile, the restrictions on drugs that some patients need are still being withheld as policymakers and law enforcement continue to pressure health care practitioners into undertreating patients in pain. At a recent international breast cancer conference experts stated the under-prescribing of opioids to breast cancer patients in the U.S. is now comparable to treatment in third world countries.

This despite the CDC coming out this April ('19) and saying (my editing), “you guys making drug policy and passing laws got us all wrong.  Those 2016 opioid prescription guidelines we issued were supposed to be just that: guidelines.   We always figured the doctors know best what their patients need.  You doctors should treat the patients who need it for pain.”

Closing words to CATO:

Meanwhile, as prescription volume precipitously drops, the overdose rate continues apace, with fentanyl and heroin now making up the overwhelming majority of overdose deaths. And now methamphetamine is making a comeback as a major cause of drug deaths—15 years after Congress addressed the “meth crisis’ with the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act.

A clear case of, “it didn't work, so let's try it again only harder.”

Today's opioid or fentanyl addicts are not yesterday's patients.  That lie has to die.

What About the FISA Court?

Ever since this dog-and-pony show culminating in today's articles of impeachment got started, something has been on my mind.

It's clear the FBI is corrupt at the upper most levels.  Chief Weasel Jim Comey, and the dishonor roll of his underlings: McCabe, Strzok, Page, and lots more are all partisan hacks.  We know this.  We know they used the absolutely bogus Steele dossier to justify the need to monitor American citizens to the FISA courts (overview).  Borepatch started the day with post that it's time to Disband the FBI.  Count me on board with that.  While, from all I know, the majority of the agents and lower level staff are still honorable, there's a saying in management classes (I originally heard it was taken from the mafia) that goes, “the fish rots from the head down.”  If there are systemic problems in an organization, the problem lies in the top management's offices.

What I've been saying since this whole mess started is “what about the FISA courts?”  In my mind, if they were honest and honorable, they'd bust the FBI like 13 year olds pretending to be college students at spring break in south Florida.^* I'd very publicly and loudly tell the FBI, “you've proven you're not trustworthy.  Because of that, from now on there will be no warrants issued to you unless you bring 10 times the amount of justification we used to require, and you'd better have far more than one source.  You will be questioned about it relentlessly, and you'd better damned well have every last detail documented.”  Or something similar.  Let everybody know the FBI is getting their chops busted for their partisan politics.

The fact that this hasn't happened doesn't mean the FISA courts didn't slap down the FBI in some classified meetings that we're not allowed to know about.  The fact that it wasn't public, though, implies that the FISA court is just as rotten as the heads of the FBI fish.  They could have dressed them down in secret but made a public statement about how shocked - shocked! I tell you - and how appalled the court is at having been lied to by the FBI.  The fact that didn't happen tells you the FISA court needs to be disbanded, just like the FBI.  The whole Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act needs to be torn up and started again from blank paper. 

The FISA court in DC.  It's very secret, you know.

^* Not that I would know anything about being a 13 year old trying to pass for a college freshman with the college babes at Spring Break.  I was at least 16.  Ok, 15.  But I swear I wasn't 13. 

There's No Such Thing as Woke Enough - Episode 9,436,954 - the Peloton Ad

Last Thursday (or Friday?) I was doing my usual wading through junk mail.  Lots of it is easy to delete this time of year. In the mail, was the daily link to PJMedia, where I saw a story called, “Cops Should Do a Wellness Check on Woman in Peloton Christmas Ad” by Stephen Kruiser, who ordinarily writes things a bit tongue in cheek.  That demanded a read.

It turns out it's a bigger story than I knew.  I don't know when the Peloton ad first appeared but it fired immediate outrage by the easily offended and made headlines far and wide.  For your convenience, I'll embed the ad here.




Kruiser went over the top with his take on it - but not as much as the wokescolds.

Her Eyes Are Blinking "H-E-L-P" in Morse Code
...
A quick respite from the political news slog has been delivered unto us from the most unlikely of places. Peloton -- the indoor workout bike that runs around fourteen and a half million dollars -- has released a Christmas with a creep factor so high that it has people reaching across the aisle in agreement about its awfulness.

Before sharing some words from another article he read:

Allahpundit shared his thoughts about the ad at Hot Air:

The weird part is the … eagerness with which she shows her gratitude. It’s lovely to be grateful for an expensive gift, but she’s *really* grateful and *really, really* wants her husband to know it. It’s not just that she feels compelled to record herself using the bike repeatedly over a span of many months. She looks curiously anxious doing it, even when smiling into the camera. At the end of the clip, when she finally shows him the footage, her eyes are trained on his reaction, seemingly desperate for his approval.

Is, um… How do I put this?

Is everything okay between these two?

I honestly don't see a thing wrong with the ad.  For those that don't know the details, a Peloton stationary bike is an excruciatingly high end stationary bike - almost as much as an actual, fairly high-end road bike.  I looked into Peloton once; the bikes start at $2200 and require subscription to those cycling workouts they always show in the commercials.  I think I got to $3500 before I stopped looking.  As an aside, I've been riding off and on since I was 30.  I've never once been in that position they always show of the rider sitting upright with both arms straight out to the sides. (and BTW, if you have a real bike there are several apps and websites that let you do some of what Peloton does for a few bucks.  I hear good things about one called Strava.)

Deep inside, I think we all know that most exercise equipment is a clothes rack within six months -- or six weeks.  I would think it would be considered nice - or an attempt to be nice - to gift your spouse a $3500 toy for Christmas, but that's just me.  They'd probably object to jewelry or a new car, too.  

What are people so upset about?   They call it “humiliating and misogynistic.”  They say Peloton husband giving his wife an exercise bike means he thinks she's fat and needs to drop some weight.
“This fictional frightened woman’s yearlong journey to lose the 14 ounces of water weight that her husband the good Doctor Mengele insists she musts is the Christmas miracle that a news-weary world needs.”  “Nothing says "maybe you should lose a few pounds" like gifting your already rail-thin life partner a Peloton”  and “After a year, the Peloton wife looks exactly the same.  So it's an insulting gift and completely useless.”

So much misinformation... so much stupidity...  Allahpundit gets it exactly right when he says,

The first reaction everyone has is “Why is this guy buying his gorgeous, rail-thin wife an exercise bike for Christmas? Does he think this goddess is overweight?” No. That’s why they cast the actress they did. They knew that if the wife had as much as an ounce of visible fat on her, the takeaway would have been that Peloton is encouraging dudes to pressure their significant others to drop a few. There would have been sit-ins at Peloton HQ to protest a crime against body-positivity of that magnitude. Only by casting a woman who *obviously* didn’t need to lose weight could the company semi-plausibly say, “He gave her the bike for fun and for cardiovascular fitness and for no other reason.”

Then he goes on down the path to insanity.

Lighten up people, it's a commercial. Christmas is coming. People are looking for gifts, companies are looking for sales. There's no reason for us to think that Pelton Wife didn't say the only thing she wanted for Christmas was a Peloton exercise bike. I know... I know.  It's not possible to please the wokescolds. 

A funny postscript is that actor Ryan Reynolds has a small label gin company.  In the week or two this has blown up, Ryan tracked down the actress (Monica Ruiz) to do a parody of the commercial to promote his Aviation Gin brand.  You can watch the commercial, hosted on Twitter, there.

"Nobody Knows The Troubles I've Seen"

I ran across a group of guys singing that old spiritual song the other day.  They were all news people.^*

If there's one sector of the economy that's in bust times it's the news media.  And maybe it deserves what it's getting.  According to Business Insider, 7700 people have lost their jobs in the media over the last year. 

The media industry continued to execute cuts in December and November as Gannett, Highsnobiety, and the CBC reduced headcounts.

The cuts followed large rounds of layoffs earlier in the year from companies including BuzzFeed, Verizon, and Vice Media.

The massive cuts this year represent a recent trend in media that has seen upstart companies and newspapers alike shrinking and disappearing.

Gannett is the publisher of USA Today (and our local Florida Today).  They merged with local paper giant GateHouse and both of them laid off employees.  Gannett laid off 215 while GateHouse laid off 243 between last January, May and August.  Last January 23rd, Gannett laid off 400. 

It's not just print newspapers.  Highsnobiety is some sort of “men's fashion and lifestyle” website, and of course BuzzFeed and Vice Media are web presences also.  CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; they cut 35 jobs.  An attempt to relaunch Gawker failed. HuffPost laid off 13 in its video department. ThinkProgress shut down in September.

I have to agree with writer Matt Margolis at PJ Media who points out the media is very distrusted as an institution.  People are voting with their wallets.

What's the reason for the media industry doing so poorly while other sectors are experiencing a boom? I don't know; I'm sure much of it is because the media isn't adapting, but I can't dismiss the possibility that trust in the media being at historic lows is playing a part, either. A recent Gallup Poll shows that Americans "remain largely mistrustful of the mass media," and that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that much of what the media is presenting is biased, inaccurate, or misinformation.

It's worth noting here that media coverage of President Trump is 90 percent negative. Maybe the public is sick of media outlets that do public relations on behalf of the Democratic Party.

Gallup presents a graph of the combined responses for trusting the media a Great Deal and a Fair Amount.  I notice something interesting in this, besides the overall downward trend over the measurement time.

Notice the biggest drops in reported trust in the media.  I read them as the years 2000, '04, '08, '12 and '16 (although 2000 doesn't stand out as much as, say, '04 does).  Those are all Presidential election years.  It seems to me that the media reaches a crescendo of negative coverage of even RINOs like John McCain and Mittens Romney, and it stands out to people, making them trust the media even less.  It gets more revealing when you look at the same data sorted by political leanings.

Notice how the big drops in presidential years are less obvious.  Democrats had a big dip in 2000, while Republicans had the dip in 2001; is that a remnant of the hanging chad news coverage?  The Dems didn't have dips in '04, '08 and '12 while Republicans did.  Independents had dips in '08 and '12Notice also that the years since the '16 election have seen the Democrats trust in the media go up by 35%, from 51% to 69% this year, claiming either a Great Deal or a Fair Amount of trust in the media, while at the same time, Republicans went from 14% to 15%, a 7% increase but still around 25% of the Democrats' trust.   Is that because the Democrats like the media lies and the Republicans don't?  (In both cases, I'm ignoring the peaks in 2018 and treating them as transients.  It's entirely possible that in another year we'll see that the 69% and 15% numbers were also transients and we'll get slightly different answer.)  Finally, note how the last few years saw Democrat trust in the media higher than anywhere in the 22 years shown while Republican trust in the media has been in decline since 1998 and is now close to an all time low. 


^* No, I really didn't come across a group of reporters singing spirituals. That's an attempt at humor.

Pearl Harbor Day

This is just a simple suggestion to take a few seconds and think of it.  Pay respect to the WWII vets who fought and died. 78 years ago this morning. 

In the last five years, I've come to find out that my brother's Father-in-Law is a WWII vet.  He's 97 now, still drives a lot, still has a sharp mind.  He was mowing his lawn the last time we talked a few years ago.  For much of the time I've known him, he worked as a bag boy at a Publix grocery store although he was a retired banker, but that ended around ten years ago.  He's the first WWII vet I've known in years.  I'll use the term, "tough old bird".  Maybe on Christmas, I can get a few stories out of him but he hasn't made one of the holiday events at my brother's house in three years, now.

Pensacola

To borrow the Ancient Aliens meme:

The Pearl Harbor shooting seems more like some sort of “generic murder,” one that's either due to (A) someone being FN or (B) a personal conflict.  Pensacola sounds like terrorism.

Space Ketchup

Just a couple of odds and ends... (one odd and one end?)

Rocket Lab's test flight this morning (EST) of their booster recovery approach was a success.  According to an update at CNBC:

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck broke down the results of the test in a call with CNBC on Friday, explaining how the company got the booster through the atmosphere’s dense “wall” during reentry.

“The real challenge in this program has been ‘can we get through the wall’ and today we punched through the wall and came out the other side in great shape,” Beck said. “We knew that we had a chance of getting it through the wall and all the way down to the water but with anything reentry it’s hugely difficult to model.”

Instead of firing one of the booster's engines and adding legs, like the SpaceX Falcon9 and Heavy, Rocket Lab is testing a technology Beck calls an “aero thermal decelerator” — essentially using the atmosphere to slow down the rocket. After separating from the upper stage of the Electron rocket, which carried the spacecraft into orbit, Rocket Lab’s onboard computer guided the booster through reentry, successfully flipping it around 180 degrees.

“We maintained control of the stage and guided it through the narrow corridor with the heat shield and the right orientation, the right angle of attack,” Beck said. “And, not only we were able to hold telemetry on it all the way to impact at sea, we had tremendous amount of instrumentation on board that said the stage was very healthy when it impacted the ocean.”

The area of the Pacific around the calculated impact site was circled by an aircraft recording telemetry from the booster until it impacted the ocean at about 560 mph and disintegrated.

Looking toward the bottom of the Electron booster's first stage, shown at the top, and including a view of the curvature of the Earth and our atmosphere along the bottom.  Rocket Lab photo.

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Back in mid-November when SpaceX destroyed their Starship Mark 1 prototype in Texas, there was reference to iterating to a Mark 2 or 3 as fast as humanly possible.  There was speculation among Twitter-watchers about whether it would be built in Texas or here in Florida, or if one would be built in each place.  Apparently, SpaceX has decided to pour the resources into Texas.  NASA Spaceflight.com is reporting:

The new vehicle, called Mk3, is already undergoing construction in Boca Chica. It is being built by a unified team, with many of the Florida-based crew members moving to Texas. By building Mk3 with a combined team, SpaceX believes that they can reach the first flight faster.

Consequently, most Starship operations in Florida are currently on hold. Activity at SpaceX’s Cocoa site has ground to a halt for the past several days.

With Florida-based crew being sent to Boca Chica Beach, Texas, work in Florida has slowed to a crawl, or completely stopped.  NASA reports the only work being done in Florida is the refurbishment to Pad 39A, which must be nearing completion.

SpaceX is grappling with the difficulty of getting something the size of a Starship from Cocoa to the Kennedy Space Center.  Cocoa is on the mainland of Florida while the KSC is on Merritt Island, separated from Cocoa by about a mile of Indian River Lagoon on the west, but also separated from the beach island by the Banana River Lagoon.  There are only a couple of bridges across the Indian River, they're heavily used by traffic and (it's said) not rated for the loads they would see.  Add to that Virgin Trains is currently constructing a new high speed train line through the Cocoa area, and a new bridge will soon block Starship’s transportation path to the KSC.  There are indications their answer is to move over onto the KSC.

SpaceX is currently preparing a facility at Roberts Road, inside of KSC, which is expected to eventually take over most, if not all, of the Cocoa operations. This will make transportation to the launch site considerably easier for future Starship builds in Florida.

There's no word what will become of the Cocoa facility.

New Zealand's Rocket Lab to Test Tech for Recovering Boosters

New Zealand's successful small sat launch company, Rocket Lab, announced in August that in order to increase their vehicle launch rate they were going to move toward recovering their boosters.   Unlike their bigger competition, SpaceX, instead of landing boosters back near the launch site or on a drone ship at sea, Rocket Lab is going to use a parachute that get snagged in midair by a large helicopter.

This week's NASA Spaceflight.com reports that the upcoming 10th launch of their Electron booster will have modifications that will be needed for recovery and part of the launch mission is to test those mods.

Electron was never designed for this rather unorthodox method of recovery, so some changes have had to be made to the booster, known as a first stage block upgrade.

Although some previous flights have flown hardware or taken measurements in support of the Block upgrade. Flight 10 will be critically important because it will mark the debut flight of the block upgraded first stage.

The upgraded first staged includes a Reaction Control System (RCS), which will be used to orientate Electrons for recovery and guidance and navigation hardware such as a new S-band telemetry system and onboard flight computer. A parafoil is also included to allow for Electron to be “picked up” by the recovery helicopter on later missions, it is unknown if a parafoil is included on this flight specifically though.

The mission customers are paying for is the launch of seven small satellites into orbit.  I can't resist passing on that since this is going to be their 10th flight, the mission has been named, “Running out of Fingers,” but that bit of cleverness doesn't tell you anything about the flight.  The article on NASA Spaceflight.com has some details on everything being launched on this flight, so head on over there if you're curious what the small satellite launch business is all about. 

Concept art of the Electron booster under a parafoil chute, as it will eventually be flown.

This flight is to be launched from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand, and is scheduled for December 6th at 0756-0922 UTC, which is 2:56-4:22 AM tomorrow morning EST.  

Technically Miscellaneous Odds and Ends

Today's launch of the SpaceX cargo container to the ISS was scrubbed due to high level winds.  Currently scheduled for tomorrow, 12/5 at 12:29:23 PM.

Boeing's Starliner test capsule is on its Atlas 5 at Launch Complex 41.  Liftoff is currently scheduled for Thursday, December 19, at 6:59 a.m. EST.

The combination is 172 feet tall, and you get a sense of that size in this photo, from Boeing.  Much like last year's test that SpaceX did of their Crew Dragon capsule, the Starliner test will be an unmanned flight to the ISS.  If successful, the second flight to the ISS will be manned by Boeing astronaut Chris Ferguson, along with NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann.

Launch dates/times from Spaceflight Now.

Finally, there was a story that both got a chuckle and a raised eyebrow with an unspoken, "seriously?  In the 20-teens?"  If you own a Hewlett Packard computer with a solid state drive, a service bulletin released on November 19th says they have a firmware version in some drives that fails after 32,768 hours, which they say works out to 3 years, 270 days 8 hours.  There is a strongly mandated software patch for owners of these Enterprise Solid State Drives. 

Some of you get it already; for those who don't recognize it: 32768 is the largest positive integer that can be expressed with 16 bits.  People who do a lot of programming see the number often enough that it gets thoroughly woven into their brain's neurons and knowing it is as much a reflex as any physiological reaction.  From the bulletin:

HPE was notified by a Solid State Drive (SSD) manufacturer of a firmware defect affecting certain SAS SSD models (reference the table below) used in a number of HPE server and storage products (i.e., HPE ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo, D3000/D6000/D6020 disk enclosures, MSA Storage, StoreEasy 1000 Storage, StoreVirtual 4335 Hybrid Storage and StoreVirtual 3000 Storage are affected).

Checking that numbers don't go out of range should be something all programmers check, and part of acceptance quality testing of all software.  The problem is that most consumer products don't get that sort of testing.  Now think of what sort of software limits might be encroached on by a self-driving car having to react to a pedestrian who's not in a crosswalk or a kid chasing a ball into a street.

Snippi Longstocking is Gonna Hate Me

Hat tip to Borepatch, for the first time I came across that memorable nickname for Greta Thunburg, the autistic, Swedish, high-school dropout and globe-trotting, full-time wokescold.  Greta gonna hate me.

I did my holiday travel by SUV, and according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (motto: “we're from Tennessee so we're not all Nuckin' Futs.”) and posted on Political Calculations blog, the least fuel efficient way to travel is by light truck; the category which includes SUVs.

On this chart, produced by Political Calculations from the data linked here, lower is better. 

The chart shows BTUSs per passenger mile for the 40 years from 1976 to 2016.  As you can see, light trucks are at the top - the worst fuel economy.

In the chart, "Light Truck" refers to any two-axle, four wheel truck, which would include anything from pickup trucks to SUVs. "Air" refers to commercial air travel, while "Intercity Rail" in the U.S. means train travel via Amtrak.

Probably the most remarkable thing is how air travel has become less energy intensive per passenger mile than both transit buses (after 1996) and cars (after 2004). The second most remarkable thing we find is how transit buses have become worse over time.

It should be mentioned that each category is an average of everything they measured in that vehicle class.  Air travel has improved, as noted, but SUVs have improved by a bigger percentage.  Most of that was by 1991.  It's a safe bet that today's jets going into service have better fuel economy compared to 1976 jets still in service, just as today's SUVs will when compared to any 40 year old SUVs on the road.  Mine's an '09, which is right where the line jumped up (got worse) for the second to last time.

Snippi gonna hate me.  Not that I care.

(Note, that Oak Ridge file has an odd name and no extension, but if you look at it, you'll see it's a CSV file - Comma Separated Variables - that any spreadsheet program will read.  Just re-name it with a .csv extension and you'll be good.  I'm using one of the free spreadsheets, Libre Office, and it imported the file with no problems.)

Besides, she's a time traveler and just passing through.  You've seen the picture, right?  Several excellent pictures at that article. 

Edit 2050 EST:  Forgot to add one of the links I should have linked.

December is Looking to be Busy with Launches

December is looking to be a busy month on the Cape, with SpaceX potentially launching four missions in the next 29 days and Boeing adding a fifth.

The first launch is scheduled for this Wednesday, the 4th, at 12:51PM EST.  A Falcon 9 will carry the company's 19th cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station.  These missions deliver crew supplies and hardware; this mission will bring some science experiments to the Expedition 61 crew.  More details on the experiments at Florida Today newspaper.

The next launch will also be a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, currently scheduled for “no sooner than” December 15th.  The Falcon 9 will carry the JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 communications satellite for Japan.

The last launch I have a proposed date for is Boeing's, “no sooner than” December 17th.    The Boeing CST-100 Starliner will launch an uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) at approximately 7:45 a.m. EST (1245 GMT).

The other probable launches that don't have firm dates, but that are considered likely are both SpaceX missions.  According to NASA, SpaceX will also conduct an in-flight abort test for the Crew Dragon spacecraft in December, no date set, and the company may also seek to make its third launch of 60 Starlink satellites, a repeat of their early November launch, before the end of December. 

The in-flight abort test would launch from pad 39A on the Kennedy Space Center, which SpaceX has been busily renovating since signing a 20 year lease for the pad (long story here).  The two Falcon 9 launches are slated for Launch Complex 40 on the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station side. 

The SpaceX Crew Dragon with scaffolding around the capsule for workers.  SpaceX photo, posted a couple of months ago.

All Moved In, Still Getting Settled

As an analogy to moving into a new house, the move onto the new computer is finished enough to get back to life as normal.  There are still metaphorical boxes to unpack, small knickknacks to put in place and stuff that came with the house that needs to be gotten rid of or otherwise dealt with, but the one or 1-1/2 dozen big things are all here and working.  Thankfully, I don't have to print anything because one of those things is to get the printer on the network talking again.

My biggest problem was installing my 3D CAD program, Rhino 3D.  Although they've been at version 6 for a year, I never upgraded from 5, fully intending to force myself to learn Fusion360.  Which I never did.  It took either four or five attempts to install and one less uninstalls of everything.  Each time I got a slightly different weirdness, but that's not worth getting into.  That could become a bigger discussion in its own right.

A few installations want you reboot after you're done, most just quietly install.  Probably the slowest thing was to deleting a directory structure that I had on my backup drive but couldn't use.  It was smallish at about 16 Gigs, but almost 250,000 items.  Took two hours to delete. 

---

That said, did you ever think you'd be using the words “narwhal tusk” in regular conversation?  Or thinking of the merits of a narwhal tusk for everyday carry?  Or comparing a narwhal tusk to an AR-15 for ease of concealment?  Courtesy Daily Timewaster:

(although I think I read the tusk he used was over five feet long, so much longer than shown in this cartoon)

In case you hadn't noticed, Daily Timewaster has been in my reading list for a couple of weeks.