.02 on the Comey Firing

I guess I'll contribute my two cents on Trump's firing of James Comey, like so many other folks are doing.

My only complaint about the actual firing is that it should have happened around Inauguration Day or weekend.  Maybe by robocall as soon as the Oath of Office had been administered.  "Hello Director Comey, this is a recorded message from your President Trump.  You're fired.  This has been a recording".

I try to be consistent here, and in life in general.  I said Comey had made the FBI a laughingstock after his July Cop Out last summer, in a piece on July 6th. 

The director of the FBI has singlehandedly struck a mortal blow to the rule of law in America and simultaneously turned the FBI into a laughing stock agency that no one can possibly take seriously anymore.  We have transitioned into that dangerous territory of a nation Without Rule of Law.

I stayed consistently hard on him throughout the campaign.  Like in early October when he complained people were calling him a weasel

You don't carry water for anyone? Listen, Director Weasel, I've had those clearances and I don't believe for a nanosecond that I would have been treated like Hillary. I don't know anyone who has had those clearances who feels they would have been treated that way.
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You hung the weasel name tag around your own neck. Don't get mad at us for using it.

Or in late October, when there was an article that he was sick of the beating he was getting for being such a weasel.

Maybe I watched a bit too much of Efrem Zimbalist Jr. during my junior high and high school days, but his lack of spine was disgraceful for an FBI agent, let alone director.  As I said before, everyone may assume that he went full weasel on this because of concern for showing up dead, but I thought guys in his position weren't supposed to be so easily intimidated.

I checked my reactions when conservatives were supposed to suddenly love the guy, when he did his couple-of-days reversal on Hildebeest.  Just to make sure I didn't suddenly act as though I liked the guy.  I think I did OK.  

Does this matter?  In a reality where Comey thoroughly discredited the FBI (and then gets mad when everyone talks about them being weasels), it's hard to say.

If there's one thing I hate with a burning rage about modern politics is that it has turned into some sort of crappy substitute for a team sport.  You know: when "their guy" does something it's the most horrible thing in the history of History, but if "our guy" does the same thing, then it's no big deal.  Along that line of thinking, there's the predictable outrage of people defending Comey who were calling for his firing a few months ago.  There's a recording from last night where Colbert tells the audience the breaking news of Comey's firing and they cheer.  Colbert is aghast saying something like "Huge Trump supporters here!"  Rush suggested it's not that they're Trump supporters, but because they can't keep track of whether they're supposed to love him, like last July when he let Hillary get away with all those felonies, or hate him like when they decided he cost her the election.  I think he might be right. 

Can't resist the Ramirez cartoon - for the third time. 

Bob Owens Gone at 46

I must admit to feeling like I'd been gut punched on hearing of the rather untimely passing of Bob Owens to an apparent suicide - not that there's ever a "timely".  I just don't expect it in someone almost 20 years younger than I am.

No, I didn't know Bob.  I never spoke with him, never texted; I don't Twitter and I killed my Facebook account a couple of years ago.  I only know him from reading his writings on Bearing Arms and seeing him on TV a few times.  Still, like I remarked about feeling affected when Carrie Fisher died, for some reason I got to feel like I knew him.  Perhaps the writing style, the subject, those indefinable somethings that come across as personality. 

It's always sad to see someone feel so desperate in life that they feel that's the only reasonable answer (if, indeed, it's what it appears).  I feel terrible for his wife and kids.  His co-editor at Bearing Arms, Jenn Jacques, seems to have been hit pretty hard as well as you might imagine.  People who have had a family member or close friend take their own life often have a hard time with it and it can spread in a family.

It's particularly nauseating to read the comments on Breitbart from the anti-gun forces.  Miguel at Gun Free Zone captured some of the disgusting comments from the CSGV.  It's a given that they will dance in the blood of any tragedy involving a gun, but it's particularly disgusting today.

It's OK If Migrants Rape Me; I'll Heal, Says Teen Czech Girl Scout

On the far side of the Atlantic, the debates in the scouting community are a bit different than here in the Collapsing States of America.  On our side, we debate whether people should use bathrooms that match their "factory standard plumbing fixtures".  In Europe, they're actually debating whether Europe survives.  Even if they don't know it, as is the case with this young girl.  PJ Media tells the story.  

This past May Day, much ado was made about one Czech Scout, Lucie Myslikova, who dared to confront a Neo-Nazi demonstrator while wearing her scouting uniform. Google the event and you’ll get a slew of headlines about the teenager who “Stood Up to the Far-Right” and the photo of the “girl standing up to a skinhead” that went viral.

The media went into full-tilt fawning mode.  A schoolgirl crush on a schoolgirl, if you will, and emphasized that angle, not the discussion itself.  It's such a dramatic image!  That'll sell us some magazines!!

But what were the girl scout and the "Neo-Nazi" actually talking about?  It becomes a bit harder to find out than you might think.

What, exactly, was she discussing with the skinhead? “The nation,” “borders,” and “migration.” The details of the discussion were quickly brushed aside by Western media anxious to highlight the image of a young woman confronting an adult male—something Fortune was so impressed with that they spun it into a montage of photographs of women staring down men at political rallies across Europe.

It turns out, you need to read French to find out.

If you want to know what she actually said, you’d have to translate an article that appeared in the French language publication the Paris Match. There, buried in the last paragraph, is a quote from the exchange between the Scout and the Neo-Nazi regarding immigration. When the Neo-Nazi asserted the teen would be “violated by those she defends,” Myslikova replied, “Even if something happened to me, the physical wounds always end up healing.”

It's hard to be that naive, but I'll cut her some slack for being a child.  She has clearly never heard of nor seen someone who was killed by the "physical wounds (which) always end up healing".  It's a stunning ignorance of reality in the name of some globalist's diversity agenda.  The European death wish in one sentence.

A girl wearing a Scout uniform willingly acknowledged that she could be raped by an immigrant, something that is happening to women across Europe in record numbers. Then, she essentially reasoned, I’ll get over it, and the Western world lifts her up as a hero. She justified rape in the name of political discourse. A Girl Scout opened herself up to sexual assault for the sake of her political beliefs.

France may have voted for their perceived lesser of two evils, but what they did is ensure that the Islamization and subsequent destruction of Europe will proceed unabated.  About eight or ten years ago, I heard Mark Steyn saying if an American wanted to go see the great capitals of Europe, they had about five years before the trip would be meaningless.  I think he got it pretty close.  Yes, there are one or two bright spots in Europe, but the Dark Ages are descending.

A Little GB-22 Update

Let me lead with the conclusion: I'm not done yet.   

On the other hand, I'm very close to making the last piece, the frame itself.  All of the other pieces are cut and ready, mistakes have been left in place, and recovered from as best as can be.  The frame is to be cut from a piece of 3/16" thick steel and looks like the brownish piece here:

The turquoise colored piece is there to take up room, so that when I tell my CAM program to make tool paths to cut that frame out, it doesn't waste time cutting away that area.  My plan is to cut the main outline out with a 3/8 square nose cutter (End Mill) and leave a bit of a skin on it - about 25mils thick.  This cuts away the majority of the frame, cuts away most of the metal inside the trigger guard and that large open area in the top of the frame, where the slide goes.  This gets followed by another machining operation with a smaller cutter, 1/4", that gets everything except for the area around the trigger and that small gap extending to the left.  The small slot between the trigger and the frame will get cut with a special cutter bought just for that.  

I hold this on the machine to cut with those screw holes in the handle: 10-32 screws threaded into a plate that holds it for the cutting.  Up in the frame picture, around where the barrel mounts, you'll see four 1/8" holes.  Those line up with matching holes in the barrel holder and 1/8" spring pins make the mechanical connection.  Since 1/8 is in that awkward range that's too large for a #4 and too small for a #6 screw, I'm undecided on how to firmly attach those holes to my tool plate.  Today, I did a test cut to ensure the system could hold a piece of sheet metal down, withstand a generous cut (in aluminum), and come out the right size.  Because the piece of 1/16" aluminum I had was too small to cut the entire outline, only one of those four was available, so I added two special tooling holes to hold the plate in place and used the spring pins as fasteners.  It was all rock solid.  Those extra holes are visible in this picture on the left side of the frame and just in from the right edge of the frame, below and to the right of the real pin hole. 

This is the result of the test cut and came out as expected.  My next move is to go to on to the steel plate. 

I showed the barrel and holder a month ago; here are the three parts of the slide, the sides and the shorter middle piece.  Note the fancy cuts on the left edge of the short piece.  That had to be done by the CNC and tested out to make sure it worked.  The two long pieces, BTW, are not supposed to be beveled on the end facing the camera.  Oops.  Purely cosmetic, so "no harm, no foul".  Since I don't have metal white-out, these will stay that way. 

I'm pretty bad at estimating how long it's going to take to finish this, but I'd hope to get the first rounds through it this week.  I had no idea what to use for the spring that drops the firing pin onto the round (the firing pin is just visible as a nub above the centerline on the right hand piece).  I found a few bad ballpoint pens around here and grabbed the strongest spring to try.  I need some grips.  In the CAD world, I took a pair of 1911 grips and modified the hole spacing to fit the handle, since 1911 drawings are widely available.  Scaling the whole grip to make up for the hole spacing being different made them too narrow, though, so I need to start over.

How do you test a pistol you've made?  How do you fire the first round?  I'd like to go to my club range when nobody's around and try a few different things.  Maybe the typical "long string"?  I have some subsonic .22, and that might be quiet enough to use inside the shop.  Just to make sure the spring is strong enough.  A subsonic 22 shouldn't be any louder than a nail gun or a hammer, right? 

Some of you may be unaware that Mark came up with a closed bolt version of the GB-22.  I haven't heard anything about plans being available, but I signed up for the mailing list, so I'd hope they'd let those of us who bought the originals know about that.  Along another interesting path, the ECCO Machine video channel upgraded the pistol to a .380 centerfire, the GB-380.  People are having fun with the basic idea of the GB-22; this guy answers my basic "how do you test it?" question by firing a blank in his shop. 

Got an Android Phone? Ultrasonic Tracking is Growing

In November of '15, I reported on a story about how advertisers were embedding ultrasonic tones, 18 to 20 kHz, in TV ads and using it for a whole new level of user tracking.  These tones are beyond normal human hearing, but within the bandwidth of most phones' audio paths.

These sounds, above the range of human hearing, are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser.  While you can't hear the sound, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it.  When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.  Of course, they also know the location of all those appliances, too. 

While I don't see how they could know "how long a person watches the ads" - you could leave your phone in the room with the TV or computer and be somewhere else.  I could see, though, that if your phone shows you were exposed to a TV ad for something and some time later did a web search on that subject, they might conclude you saw it and were influenced by it. 

In that article, I wrote about industry-leader SilverPush, a rapidly growing (50% per quarter) Indian software company.  Under pressure from the Federal Trade Commission, they promised in March of '16 that they were going to kill off their product, a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows others to write software that does the tracking and correlating.  Yesterday, ARS Technica reported the use of their SDK seems more widespread than ever.

As of January, there were 234 Android apps that were created using SilverPush's publicly available software developer kit, according to the paper, [pdf warning] which was published by researchers from Technische Universitat Braunschweig in Germany. That represents a dramatic increase in the number of Android apps known to use the creepy audio tracking scheme. In April 2015, there were only five such apps.
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A representative sample of just five of the 234 apps have been downloaded from 2.25 million to 11.1 million times, according to the researchers, citing official Google Play figures. None of them discloses the tracking capabilities in their privacy policies.

SilverPush is denying everything.  Founder Hitesh Chawla said his company abandoned the ad-tracking business in late 2015.

"We respect consumer privacy and would not want to build our business foundation where the privacy is questionable," he told Ars. "Even when we were live, our SDK was not present in more than 10 to 12 apps. So there is no chance that our presence in 234 apps is possible. Every time a new handset gets activated with our SDK, we get a ping on our server. We have not received any activation for six months now."

In a case like this, I trust the German researchers over the software company.  The team that did the research says all 234 apps positively contain the SilverPush SDK.  That means phones that have the apps installed are silently listening for ultrasonic sounds without the knowledge or consent of their owners.  On the other hand, the researchers were unable to find any ultrasonic beacons in TV audio, although they thought their tests were too limited in time and scope to really know.  For their part Google said everything in the Google Play store had to meet their requirements for developers to "comprehensively disclose how an app collects, uses and shares user data, including the types of parties with whom it's shared."  They never answered the question (from ARS) asking why none of five apps cited in the research findings disclosed the SilverPush functions.  As of yesterday, when the ARS published the story, those apps were still in the store. 

There are uses for this technology that are considered ethical.  Marketers can track the whereabouts of shoppers as they move throughout a large department store. Promoters using other companies' audio-beacon technologies can also use them to push ads or coupons to people who are near a certain store or service. The researchers said two services—Shopkick and Lisnr—use ultrasonic beaconing for legitimate purposes such as these, and they disclose the tracking prominently.

 (Graphic from the Technische Universitat Braunschweig pdf)
There are some other possible uses that are considered rather less ethical.  Note in particular the last sentence here:

Advertisers, for example, may use the beacons with no disclosure at all to measure how often a particular TV ad is viewed. The technology can also be covertly used to perform cross-device tracking that allows marketers to tie a single person to the multiple media devices she uses. The researchers said the beacons could similarly be used to identify people using the Tor anonymity service.

The German paper was presented at the recent (late April)  2nd annual IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy in Paris, France. In the paper, the researchers wrote:

In summary, an adversary is able to obtain a detailed, comprehensive user profile by creating an ultrasonic side channel between the mobile device and an audio sender. Our case study on three commercial ultrasonic tracking technologies reveals that the outlined tracking mechanisms are not a theoretical threat, but actively deployed (e.g. Shopkick and Lisnr) or at least in the process of being deployed (e.g. SilverPush).

I'm somewhat paranoid about privacy (a blogger with a pseudonym?  Who would've guessed?) and this technology creeps me out.  I don't want things running on my devices that I don't know about.  It even creeps me out when the Weather Channel app puts a little footer on my iPhone that says, "Good morning" and uses my name.  My policy on all software is "when I want something out of you, I'll ask you".  This stuff brings to mind the increasingly prophetic scene in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise's character is walking into a store and the ads are calling him by name - everything targeted at him.  Along with everyone else in the store creating a constant cacophony of ads.  I don't like the idea of being watched, listened to or tracked at all, and I don't particularly like the idea of ads being shoved in my face all the time.

 

The Diet Sodas and Strokes Study - Junk Science?

Back in late April, the "scientists say" study of the week became a study from the American Heart Association's journal Stroke which said drinking as little as one diet soda a day led to a nearly 3x relative risk of ischemic strokes (loss of blood flow) or Alzheimer's disease.  (The exact numbers were 2.96x for stroke and 2.89x for dementia)  The conclusion of the piece was that artificially sweetened soft drinks were associated with the increased risk while sugar-sweetened soft drinks were not.  The press immediately jumped into action saying "one diet coke a day triples your risk!". 

So what's going on here?  Is this meaningful?  Is it presumptuous of me to call a study in a prestigious journal junk?  Stay tuned...

To begin with, the study used nice-sized groups; sure I'd like to see bigger (by at least 10 or 20x and preferably 100x) but they weren't really small groups of < 100 like you sometimes see.  They used 2888 participants over age 45 in the stroke portion and 1484 over 60 in the dementia portion, and the study was conducted over a long time, from 1991 to 2011.  That sort of makes me wonder why it took them until 2017 to announce this, but perhaps they had "bigger fish to fry" and were looking for other associations first.  The biggest disadvantage is that it was a Prospective Cohort study, which attempts to find associations.  How the study was completed was by food-frequency questionnaire at 3 to 4 year intervals,   So, real quick, how many diet sodas did you drink per day in 2014?  This sort of recall by questionnaire stuff just isn't very accurate.

No study of this kind can prove cause and effect, it can only show that two things are associated with each other.  The cliche' example is that firemen are associated with house fires, but nobody thinks firemen are the cause of house fires.  Just like the firemen being at house fires, it may be that they're associated for a different reason.  A prospective cohort study can't prove cause and effect but is useful for finding associations to study with double blind, controlled studies.  Those, unfortunately, are ferociously expensive, and therefore completely impossible to conduct for 20 years, like this one.  There some minor disclaimers for really strong effects, if a plausible mechanism is postulated. 

The thing about this study and its reporting that immediately gave me grief is that it said, "artificial sweeteners" as if it was one compound or class of compounds.  Not even close.  It implies that they're all involved in some sort of mechanism, but no such mechanism is known.  Artificial sweeteners?  Aspartame is a dipeptide,  which is chemically more like a protein (extremely simple...) than a sugar; saccharin is an aromatic compound, unlike sugar or aspartame; in contrast, sucralose is a sugar, just not metabolizable and acesulfame (or Ace K) is another aromatic.  I think those are the sweeteners mostly found in diet sodas although my "artificial sweetener recall questionnaire" doesn't show what was in diet drinks in the 1990s.  The sugar alcohols like sorbitol, xylitol, mannitol and so on are, well, sugar alcohols and are probably more like a sugar than the others mentioned but they're used more often in other foods than sodas.  All of those compounds are handled differently by the body, so it makes me ponder what could they have in common.  If this disparate group of compounds is doing something, it can't be chemical. 

The authors didn't actually put forward an explanation, just the usual refrain: "more research is needed", which is fine; "more research" is what researchers do.

I have a suggestion.  What they've found is that people on diets drink diet soda.  They've found a correlation with something else; people who may have been told they were at risk for Something by their doctors are trying to lose weight, or "get healthy" and are cutting out sugars because of that.  Or they're dieting because they think they should for some reason.  The people in the over-45 stroke cohort or the over-60 dementia cohort who are still drinking sugary drinks are the exception, not the norm.  To say the strokes or dementia associate with drinking diet sodas is looking at the problem backwards.  The risk didn't come from the diet sodas, it came from whatever caused them to start drinking diet soda in the first place.  Find out what the people who were drinking sugary drinks and did not have strokes or dementia were doing that allowed them to do that.  Other than having chosen better parents.

What's my interest, other than just curiosity?  I typically have one diet soda per day; I can think of days when I've had two, but I can think of plenty of days when I haven't had any.  Mrs. Graybeard and I refer to studies like this as he-who studies, or just he-whos: he who drinks one diet soda a day triples his risk of a stroke or dementia.  The media loves he-whos because they require no thought and can be dramatic; just present the press release.  Sodas in general and diet sodas in particular are demonized by a certain segment of society so there's a ready audience.  I look at sodas like everything else:  there are trades involved, everything has a cost/benefit ratio.  Don't think changing from sugary soda to diet soda will fix all your problems, but I don't think changing from soda to unsweetened tea or plain water will fix all of your problems either.

Hey, I said I had one per day, didn't I?  Just kidding.  Image stolen from.

Star Wars Day

Ironic day for the house to pass the health care bill.  Why?  I think everyone is familiar with the Star Wars line, "So this is how liberty dies.  With thunderous applause." - spoken by Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) in Star Wars III - Revenge of the Sith.  The line is given as she watches Emperor Palpatine tell a cheering Senate that he had taken all their power away to form a Galactic Empire.  By all accounts, that line was written as a slam on George W. Bush.  Today we could just as easily say, "so this is how the 'repeal Obamacare' promise dies."

Tales From the Over Regulated State # 24 - Respect Our Authoritah

Does your area have those automated red light cameras that generate automatic traffic tickets if it "thinks" you've run a light?  Pushed by a handful of companies that sell the cameras as revenue streams (once they take their third - or half), they spilled into the country a decade ago.  Some had infiltrated my area at one time, but now appear to be going away.  This story, though takes place in Oregon, which is nearly as far as you can get from here and still be on the CONUS.  Reason Magazine online has the story.

When Mats Järlström's wife got snagged by one of Oregon's red light cameras in 2013, he challenged the ticket by questioning the timing of the yellow lights at intersections where cameras had been installed.

Since then, his research into red light cameras has earned him attention in local and national media—in 2014, he presented his evidence on an episode of "60 Minutes"—and an invitation to present at last year's annual meeting of the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

It also got him a $500 fine from the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying.

According to the board, Järlström's research into red light cameras and their effectiveness amounts to practicing engineering without a license. No, really. Järlström had sent a letter to the board in 2014 asking for the opportunity to present his research on how too-short yellow lights were making money for the state by putting the public's safety at risk. "I would like to present these fact for your review and comment," he wrote.

Are you familiar with the term PE, or Professional Engineer?  In some disciplines of engineering, notably civil engineering, state governments started regulating who may design or sign documents accepting responsibility for designs.  Wyoming appears to have been the first, in 1907.  As an electrical engineer designing products for a few military and commercial suppliers, I've never needed to apply for a PE, so I never went through the process, but it's required in certain areas.  For example, if someone is going to design a house, a PE must sign off on the drawings for the building inspectors.  I like to think of it this way:

• Teams that designed NASA's Saturn V or the SpaceX Falcon 9 - PE not required 
• Team that designed the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkway - PE required 

That may seem like I'm making fun of PEs, but I'm not.  I'm making fun of the bureaucrats who think having a PE sign drawings will keep bad things from happening.

In this case, the Oregon State Board is saying that because Järlström doesn't have their blessing, he not only isn't allowed to look at their designs, it's illegal for him to do so.  Järlström has sued the state, as you might expect, and is being aided by the Institute for Justice.

"Criticizing the government's engineering isn't a crime; it's a constitutional right," said Sam Gedge, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, in a statement. "Under the First Amendment, you don't need to be a licensed lawyer to write an article critical of a Supreme Court decision, you don't need to be a licensed landscape architect to create a gardening blog, and you don't need to be a licensed engineer to talk about traffic lights."

It turns out the reliably leftist utopia of Oregon guards their authority over engineering quite jealously.  The board

investigated a Republican gubernatorial candidate for using the phrase "I'm an engineer and a problem-solver" in a campaign ad. The candidate in question, Allen Alley, had a degree in engineering from Purdue University and worked as an engineer for Boeing (and, of course, wasn't trying to lie about his lack of an Oregon-issued licensed but merely was making a freaking campaign ad), but

It doesn't stop there. In 2010, the state board issued a $1,000 fine for illegally practicing engineering to a local activist who told the La Pine, Oregon, city council that a proposed new power plant would be too loud for nearby residents.

The board once investigated Portland Monthly magazine for running a story that described a young immigrant woman as "an engineer behind Portland's newest bridge." The woman in the story did not describe herself as an engineer, but the magazine's editors included that description in the headline, the board concluded.

In Järlström's case, what he did was what thousands of other engineers or techno geeks have done.  He looked at the design for how long lights remained yellow, found it was outdated so he figured out how to make it work better.  In stories like this, someone finds a better way, starts a company and sometimes even becomes the next Gates, or Woz or Musk.  But not in Glorious Peoples' Republic of Portlandia.  In Portlandia, it got him fined. 

He did a little Googling and found the formula used to set traffic-light times. The length of time a traffic light stays yellow is based on a relatively straightforward mathematical formula, originally drafted in 1959. Mats realized that the formula is incomplete, because it fails to capture the behavior of drivers making right turns. After developing a modified formula and even corresponding with one of the formula’s original creators, Mats started to reach out to others in the scientific community, government officials, and the media.

It's truly a ridiculous case.  The Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying said  “critiquing” the length of yellow lights and talking about his ideas with “members of the public” made Mats a lawbreaker because he’s not an Oregon-licensed professional engineer.  They also told Mats that he couldn’t refer to himself using the word “engineer” either.  Järlström actually is an engineer by degree from Sweden, and has held various problem-solving jobs that go with that training, he just doesn't have the state's blessings. 

It may be ridiculous, but it's classic leftist elitism.  Much like how blessings from the wise and wonderful state magically grant "The Only Ones" in law enforcement the ability to always handle firearms with near-infinite wisdom and safety, the board is saying only their blessings in the form of their PE license magically allow thinking.   

Best Video of a SpaceX Booster Landing Yet

Yesterday morning, SpaceX launched a secret payload for the very secretive National Reconnaissance Office, NROL-76.  Since these launches are visible from the backyard, that's where I went to see it.  The view was bad - blame it on the neighbor's trees and an ill-placed cloud - but their livestream feed of the launch was excellent, and the combination of excellent angle to the sun and generally bright, clear skies gave us the best view ever of the return of their booster.  The first stage landed on a bulls eye pad, about 9 miles south of pad 39A, where it was launched from.  This is a new vehicle which they plan to inspect and re-fly if it's in good enough shape.  Enjoy the video:


As I usually say, watch it in full screen and the highest resolution your connection supports. The launch isn't until 12:00 into the feed, so you can skip over that much if you just want to see the flight, and skip further ahead to 14:15 for first stage separation and the video that follows.

The range infrastructure that SpaceX leases includes tracking cameras from the Space Shuttle era that lock onto the booster and all the cameras to film it virtually all the way up and down.  The booster can be seen separating from the second stage, and beginning maneuvers to return to the Cape while still coasting toward its apogee at about 150 miles altitude.  The visual that stood out to me was the large bursts of nitrogen, used as thrusters to help maintain the position of the orientation of the booster.  They're very dramatic, looking like white jet spray coming out of various places on the booster.   

One of the tracking cameras - Wikipedia.

It's the coolest video of one of these landings I've seen.  While I haven't kept a spreadsheet of missions or anything, I read the last six attempts to land a booster have succeeded. Before that, there as a string or three good out of four.  

Is Hannity On the Way Out at Fox News?

Back on 4/20, when I wrote that Bill O'Reilly's firing didn't bode well for the future of alternative voices on the news, I passed on that Rupert Murdoch's son, James, was apparently going to scuttle the channel.  He "regarded many of the people at Fox News as thuggish Neanderthals and said he was embarrassed to be in the same company with them".

In the Hollywood Reporter piece, James Murdoch is not in the least bit trying to disguise or hide the message that he wants to kill Fox News as we know it.

Today, Bill Shine left the channel.  Shine was Rupert Murdoch's co-President and an executive with the network for 20 years.  According to the Washington Examiner (audio autostart warning)

Bill Shine, who has worked at Fox News for 20 years, has resigned as co-president.

An internal memo sent out by Rupert Murdoch, top executive of Fox's parent company, made the announcement on Monday.

"Sadly, Bill Shine resigned today," Murdoch's memo said. "I know Bill was respected and liked by everybody at Fox News. We will all miss him."

Twitchy reports that this was the result of Shine asking for a vote of confidence last week and not receiving it, based on a tweet last Thursday from someone named Gabriel Sherman.

How this ties to the subject question is that Hannity has long considered Bill Shine an ally and a friend.  Shine is the one who recommended Fox hire Hannity, pairing him with Alan Colmes in what became one of their most popular early shows.   At 4:50 PM (ET), Hannity tweeted to Gabe Sherman

“Somebody HIGH UP AND INSIDE FNC is trying to get an innocent person fired. And Gabe I KNOW WHO it is. Best Sean.” 

A bit after that (5:28), the Daily Beast was reporting Hannity was preparing to leave. 

Shine was Hannity’s long-time ally whom he personally recommended the network hire two decades ago to produce Hannity & Colmes. In recent days, Hannity warned it would be the “total end” of Fox News should Shine leave, and he rallied conservative activists to back him up.

Initially, insiders said, Hannity’s army of lawyers had hoped to discuss with Fox ways of protecting his 8-year-old primetime show, amid fears that Lachlan and James Murdoch—fresh off the ousting of Bill O’Reilly—were looking to push the network away from hard-right politics.

It has been speculated that Hannity could be out as soon as he wants, with the claim that he has "key man" clause in his contract that he can invoke if someone he values in leadership is fired.  Projected dates have ranged from "by Friday" to leaving tonight.  Fox producers are saying to watch his show at 10 Eastern for a "very important" update. 

As you can see from his tweet at almost 6:30 this evening, Hannity is not saying he's out, but he's not not saying it.  All he's doing is confirming a story that he "is not negotiating" for an exit.  That step may not be necessary. 

As I said about O'Reilly, I can't call myself a real fan of Hannity.  I've probably seen more minutes of Hannity's shows than O'Reilly's, but that's because of timing and the "rhythm of the day" around here. O'Reilly was on while I was tending to be here writing a blog post; Hannity was on when I was sitting around either practicing guitar or kicking back for the end of the day and vegging.  My knock on Hannity is that he's too repetitive; often using the same few phrases word-for-word like some sort of mantra for months on end.  The value of both shows was their ability to bring in very credible and often high-ranking guests for their views. 

With what appears to be the coming death of Fox News, the chances of hearing genuinely alternative voices are going down.  I'm not sure when I first noticed that Fox was drifting away from being a good source, but it has been a while.  Judge Napolitano is a reliable alternative voice as a "contributor", as are Tucker Carlson and several minor voices around the network, but more and more the network is becoming a voice more like CNN/MSNBC/etc. than different.

Is Trump Really Cutting Regulations?

Regular readers know that I've been pushing the idea of killing off regulations, and putting a sunset date (expiration date) on all new Federal regulations.  Early on, and at the start of his administration, President Trump said he was going to require that agencies delete two old regulations for every new one.

How can we tell if it's happening?   For one thing, I'd expect the pace of new regulations to be declining.  That seems like it should be one outcome.  The other aspect, deleting two for every new one, seems harder to quantify.

Back in January, I grabbed this screen save from our old stomping grounds, Regulations.gov.

The file was saved on inauguration day, January 20th.  Notice the number posted in the last 90 days of Obama's administration was 6313 new regulations.

This weekend was, of course, the 100 day benchmark, so it was a natural day to compare.

Notice this one says 5477 in the past 90 days.  That's a 836 fewer regulations, a 13% decrease in the 90 day number, and the lowest 90 day total I can recall ever seeing. 

The first time I posted about visiting Regulations.gov was in March of 2012, so just over five years ago.   While I neglected to write the real numbers down for every visit, a search for regulations.gov in this blog's search engine (upper left of the page) shows that during the Obama years the number was approximately 6000 regulations every 90 days (every quarter).  That corresponds to 24,000 per year and 192,000 regulations during his eight years.  That's an estimate pulled from a PFA average based on infrequent visits to the website.  The highest number I ever saw was in September of 2012, between Benghazi and the election, when 6417 were posted.  Maybe they were trying to get a bunch more regulations put in place in case they got a new boss who sends them home? 

I'm reminded of the old joke, "What do you call a thousand lawyers on the bottom of the sea? ... A good start".  In this case, that's the answer to "what do you call 13% fewer regulations in 90 days".   It's a good start.  I'd like to figure out how many regulations are being deleted because I think that could be the big story. 

For quite some time, the most popular post I had on this blog was a long 2010 post about the consequences of regulations growing like weeds.  I wrote then:

Although the legislators and regulators never consider this, every regulation consumes some amount of time and money to comply with.  The new Finance Reform [reference to Dodd-Frank - SiG] bill has been estimated to required the development of 250-300 new regulations.  Every regulation slows down, hinders and costs every honest business real money.  Despite the widespread talk of corrupt CEOs and general lack of corporate ethics, I've been working in the manufacturing industry since the mid 1970s, and every company has had an active, if not aggressive, ethics compliance program with requirements for training and seminars every year.  There are exceptions but most companies do their best to be honest and law-abiding.  Government seems to think it's mere coincidence that countries with lower tax rates and lower regulation attract business, and they demonize companies for moving to countries where the environment is better.
...
Regulation and litigation are sand in the gears of society. Big, sharp, 40 grit silicon carbide abrasive particles that grind the gears and shafts away. [Emphasis added - SiG]

Thanks to his non-government background, Trump has a very good feel for the impacts of excessive regulations.  If he can reduce the burden and expense of these regulations he could leave a lasting legacy.   It's a good start.

Photo by Senator Mike Lee.  The 2-1/2 columns of stacked paper are over 80,000 pages of new Federal regulations passed in 2013.  On the top of the case, the small pile of papers is the actual laws passed by congress.

Russian Spy Ship Sunk by Sheep - Sheep & Sailors Survive

I'm sorry but it's simply an irresistible story.  The alliteration is just as irresistible.  

In a freak accident, the Russian Sigint ship, the Liman, collided with a freighter carrying sheep from Romania to Jordan.  The Liman's hull was ruptured and the ship went down. 

Carrying sheep from Romania to Jordan?  Mail order brides.

It's A Conditioned Response

President Trump released his early goals for his tax reform.  As predictable as the sunrise or the tides, it immediately was criticized as "a tax cut for the wealthy" and a "giveaway for corporations".  When you hear such things, those translate into two statements that are absolutely true: either the party making them doesn't understand economics, or the party making them knows better and is trying to manipulate you.  I see a lot of both of those happening.

The easiest fallacy to address is the "tax cut for the wealthy".  Dollar wise, any tax cut is going be mostly for the wealthy because they pay the vast lion's share of taxes.  According to the Tax Foundation's 2016 Update,

• The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (39.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.1 percent).
• The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 27.1 percent individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.5 percent).

The top 1% of incomes earned 20.58% of all the adjusted gross income (AGI) reported to the IRS, and paid 39.48% of all the income taxes collected.  Graphically easy to see (Excel spreadsheet from the IRS):

The top 1% had an income above $465,626.   Furthermore, the top 5% to 1% and the top 1% put together reported 35.96% of all the AGI reported and paid 55.46% of all taxes.  The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (those with AGIs below $38,173) earned 11.27 percent of total AGI. This group of taxpayers paid approximately $38 billion in taxes, or 2.75 percent of all income taxes in 2014.

The next complaint is that the proposed reduction of the top corporate tax bracket from 35% to 15% is a "giveaway for corporations".  Corporate income taxes are usually regarded as double taxes, since the same income is taxed once as profit, and once as individual income when distributed as dividends to shareholders.  Since the dollars that made up those sales that turned into profit were from after-tax income from consumers, you could argue that income is taxed three times.  Contrary to popular misconception, the burden of corporate income taxes isn't paid by corporations, but is instead paid by workers, shareholders and consumers.  Corporations act more to collect taxes than to pay them.  People crying to tax corporations are really asking to tax themselves, but few understand that.

Finally a few words on how reducing taxes will "affect the deficit", "CBO scoring", and similar nonsense.  Tax revenues are not the same as tax rates; the two are related, but it has been shown several times that leaving more money in consumer's pockets affects if and how they spend, and cutting rates can increase revenues.  CBO scoring is based on the assumption that spending and attitudes are constant.  Likewise, I don't put the slightest bit of faith in numbers projected for any budget item out 10 years.  I'm not even sure they're even a general guide of what to expect.  I always say to go back 10 years and look at what was projected for now.  They never get it right.

Is it a good plan?  As far as I can tell it isn't a plan, yet.  It's more of an outline for haggling to start.  Will it help the economy?  I don't know.  Some will win, some will loose.  I'll keep an eye on it.

LED Light Bulbs - A Little Good and A Little Bad

The last week has led to more time spent on LED light bulbs than usual - which is to say, more than zero.  After all, you put up a light bulb and it lasts for years, right?

Not quite.

We were fairly early adopters in the move to LED bulbs, replacing the four 60W incandescent bulbs I'm sitting under with LED bulbs in October of 2012.  One of those LED bulbs died around a month ago, and another one failed last week.  Naturally, I didn't have a Watt-Hour meter on them, but they lasted on the order of 1600 days (thanks to this site).  How many hours per day?  It's hard to estimate, but I feel comfortable saying 12 hours/day or about 19,000 hours.  That's probably a worst case estimate.  At the time, 4-1/2 years ago, people were saying LED bulbs were likely to give 50 to 100,000 hours.  50000 hours is over 11 years, if the bulb ran 12 hours a day.  Clearly, something is amiss.

Within a few days of the overhead bulb failing, I had one in our kitchen fail.  The one in the kitchen was bought a couple of years later than those first bulbs and was chosen because it's a Cree and I know from my career that Cree is a semiconductor maker that knows what they're doing.  Unfortunately, I don't know exactly when I installed it, but it had a date code on it that indicated the bulb was made in late 2013.  I believe that bulb could have been on 14 hours/day; there's a big range here, and that would be closer to the worst case.  14 hours/day since January of 2014 is still less than 17,000 hours.   A visit to Cree revealed that the bulb should have been guaranteed for 25,000 hours. 

What's going on here?  I have yet to find an LED bulb that makes 25,000 hours, and almost certainly not even 20,000 hours.  Unfortunately, I didn't do the one thing that would really help me be certain and write the date the bulb was installed on the base or side of every LED bulb.  So I wrote Cree's customer service email address; I listed their part number for the bulb (their photo above) and said I wasn't sure of my numbers, but believed it didn't have more than 17,000 hours.  Then I asked what I could do to get the life they're claiming.  I didn't say I wanted anything other than information.  I was hoping to get a note telling me how to get the most life out of the bulb - whether that meant I should direct chilled 30 degree Fahrenheit air at it whenever it's on or I need to sacrifice the blood of a virgin chicken.  So I was surprised to get this email the next day:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us.  We apologize that your experience with your Cree LED bulbs was unsatisfactory. A warranty request has been processed and one replacement bulb will be shipping on 4/18/17 via FedEx or UPS. It is not necessary to return the defective bulb; it may be disposed of, or recycled.

I replaced the burned out bulb with another 60W LED until the replacement became available.  It's in place and quite good. 

Our kitchen was redone in '03, and (as was popular at the time) setup with recessed halogen bulbs.  Halogens are a nice light quality, but I had always heard they were more efficient than the conventional bulbs.  About the same time as the LED failed, one of the halogen bulbs died.  I noticed when I was putting it in place that the box only claimed 500 lumens out of this 39 W bulb.  I had looked for an LED replacement for the halogen bulbs before and never found them.  This time I told myself, the other bulb I just replaced was 800 lumens, why can't they make a 500 lumen LED bulb to replace halogen bulbs?  They can.  This time I searched for the right shape factor (PAR20 - a parabolic reflector bulb with 2 inch front), and the slightly rounded top version of that, the BR20.  I found this bulb which is actually 675 lumens in the same package, so brighter than the halogens - at 10W input opposed to the halogen's 39W. I ordered three and waited for a halogen to die, figuring I'd replace them one at at time (there are six in use) as an experiment.  It didn't take long for a bulb to die, just a couple of days, so we replaced it.

All I can say is Wow!.  These bulbs give much better and more uniform illumination.  I had planned to replace them one at a time as the rest of the halogens lived out their lives, but Mrs. Graybeard asked me to change the ones closest to the kitchen counter work areas.  The light is noticeably more uniform.  The halogens are warm color, 3000K, and this bulb is designed to match that.  The halogen bulbs also have a narrower, spotlight pattern than these.  All in all, we're both really impressed with these.   I have a couple of ways of measuring the bulb temperature (we all know halogens are a really hot light bulb, right?) my early-version Flir One on my phone hit full scale at 215F, the other (like this) told me over 350 degrees - that's an oven temperature.  The LED bulb?  115F.  You could hold it. 

But I think I'm not Done done.  I neglected to write the installation date on the bases of these new LED bulbs, too. 

The Greening of America

As in grass - marijuana.  Last November, five more states voted to legalize marijuana outright.  Here in Florida, we joined the states with legalization of medical marijuana.  Now 29 states and Washington, D.C., allow you to use marijuana either recreationally or for medical purposes.  Conceivably, with the way the trend is going, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the country follows suit and marijuana is fully legalized.  Assuming all the states that have passed these laws would vote for a constitutional amendment, the marijuana lobby is short just four states. 

According to one poll I saw referenced, 60% of Americans already think that the federal government should legalize marijuana outright.  In 1995, that number was 25%. A Quinnipiac University poll showed more than 90% of respondents think medical marijuana should be legal at the national level.

Given all that, I think this cartoon is only missing one character.  Lawyers.

(Scott Stantis -Chicago Tribune)

Florida's medical marijuana campaign was (apparently) led by an AKC registered ambulance chasing lawyer from Orlando named John Morgan.  Morgan also bankrolled the previous attempts to amend the state's constitution, and well over a year before November's victory, Morgan was already describing the business windfall that legalization was going to bring. Who better to advise businesses setting up to provide marijuana about how to navigate the new laws than an experienced lawyer, right?

There will be greenhouses and grow houses; there will be dispensaries; there will be different industries that will produce ways to deliver medical marijuana, whether its brownie pans or pipes or whatever. And there will be real estate opportunities that will emerge.
...
I think it will be a tremendous boon for Florida's economy. It will be a huge tax base for revenue. There will be a boon in real estate … There will be a lot of new jobs created, which is Gov. [Rick] Scott's first, second and third priorities in Florida.

It was long rumored that the real money isn't in ambulance chasing, it's in controlling the marijuana infrastructure, and that's what he's been angling for.  He's now floating an exploratory effort to evaluate running for governor (the website is supposedly the effort of an independent friend, not Morgan himself).  Although the amendment went into effect on January 3rd, there is no marijuana industry in Florida, and the state Department of Health is saying they may have the rules defined by July.  The next governor is going to control the distribution scheme and John Morgan seems to be betting it just might be him.  A potential problem for Morgan is that he has famously backed many Democratic causes, and Florida has been more red than blue in the governor's mansion despite the influx of blue state refugees from the Northeast that the state is known for. 

The North American marijuana industry is already a $7 billion market.  Bank of America Merrill Lynch says it could be a $35 billion market by 2020 and Investment bank the Cowen Group projects the market will be worth $50 billion a decade from now in 2027.   Marijuana can be invested in through publicly traded companies.  Bonner and Partners presented this graph this week, showing four small Canadian marijuana stocks which are all up at least 270% over the past year. Two of them are up by more than 400%.

What seems to be a good list of US marijuana stocks is here.

Disclaimer: I detest John Morgan's commercials and that industry he represents (ambulance chasing, not marijuana)  That personal dislike may have permeated this piece. 

A Looming Government Shutdown? It's Like Old Times

Ah, gee.  It's like old times, gang.  We haven't had a pending fake shutdown in forever!  Gosh, it must have been back when the Administration Party and "Party of No" wore different tags.  So long ago... It was September of 2016.  I can barely remember that.  Do you recall where you were?  Do you even remember how old you were?  Someday, we'll all talk about the great government shutdown of 2017, too.  At this rate, it'll be around a year from now. 

As always, this is a bunch of melodramatic theater; made-up crap so that they can avoid doing their real job (creating and passing actual budgets) and instead pass their Continuing Resolutions, which (IMO) is done for that great DC buzzword Plausible Deniability.   
 

At least this time, they're not invoking the mythical debt ceiling.  As I've said more times than I can recall, we don't have a debt ceiling.  It has never, once in history, been lowered.  It has never, once in history, not been raised.  Once or twice, it was held steady for a few extra weeks, but it has always been raised.

If I recall correctly, the last time they actually went though the silly government shutdown ritual was 2013. 

Back in October 2013, Democrats and Republicans fought over the implementation of parts of the Affordable Car Act and the debt ceiling. The sides couldn’t agree on a continuing resolution to fund federal government operations, and the federal government saw a 16-day shutdown as a result.

Obama - vindictive, obnoxious little prick that he is - made a point of shutting down things that were popular, such as public lands, memorials and parks which cost more to put roadblocks and barricades on than to leave open.  WWII veterans were blocked from visiting their memorial.   Classy things like that.

Sorry if I seem jaded, I just think it's kabuki theater; brinksmanship so that the Evil party can show they're doing something to stop the Stupid party, and the Stupid party misreading the public's contempt for the situation that causes these arguments. 

The very last line in this cartoon from VirtualShackles.com (which I've used multiple times) sums it up perfectly.  Paraphrasing to fit the situation  "Just sit on the agreement a bit longer so we look like heroes." 

Completing the G0704 CNC Conversion

To the extent that a project like this is ever "Done", this one is done and what I write from now will mostly be either what I do with it, or improvements I make to it.  The mill itself is now done.  I think all CNC hobbyists end up tweaking their machines as part of their hobby, though.

I started putting together a project page which appears in the "Special Pages" list in the right hand column.  I've moved that up to just below the Florida Gun Blogs section.  It became apparent to me that the page needed an introduction and a conclusion; this is the conclusion.

The last thing I wrote about the project was that I had a small but persistent oil leak out of my oiling system onto the floor.  Small as in 3 or 4 drops in a day.  As my last fix, I replaced the push to connect fittings with plastic barb fittings.  Because I used 5/32 OD, 1/8 ID tubing everywhere, I needed a fitting that went from 1/8-27NPT male threads to a barb in that size.  I couldn't find one, but I could find a fitting that I could adapt to and make work by using a short piece of 1/4 tubing.  It ended up looking like this, and has not dripped one drop of oil in 5 full days.

People considering building something like this will wonder if it's worth it.  In response, I'd have to ask why you'd consider building it.  Do you need it now, urgently? Are you trying to learn what's in a system like this and make one, just because?  

If it's purely to save money, it might not be the smartest thing to do.  The G0704 is $1359 today (including shipping).  Automation Technologies will sell you a ready to run, CNC converted G0704 with an Ethernet interface for $4000 (I don't think that includes shipping while the Grizzly price does).  That's paying $2620 more to have it now as opposed to working on the conversion as long as I did.  I'm not 100% sure I've captured every expense in my journey, but I think I spent close to that amount, maybe more.  That prebuilt machine doesn't appear to have an oiling system, a chip tray, and an enclosure, all of which mine does, and all of which were considerable effort and expense to get working. 

How long did it take me to build it?  I actually started in June of 2015, six months before retirement.  Once I had all the parts made for the approach I was taking, in March of last year, I switched approaches rendering all of what I'd made useless except for the Z-axis motor mounts.  I started in early April '16 and had the system running on all three axes, ready to use this February 2nd; 10 months.  It wasn't full time work, but I worked several hours every day, weekends included. 

A really good machine that has more travel than mine, is the Tormach PNC1100 from Little Machine Shop at $8500.  Tormach is industrial quality without a doubt, and I have no doubt it outperforms mine.  It still isn't complete as it doesn't have an enclosure around it and I'm not sure if it includes an oiling system.  The next cheaper Tormach that LMS carries is priced at $7000; it has less travel than mine and a motor rated for less power.  Both of these machines include things I can only aspire to at this point - automatic tool changer systems, and tool holders (the Tormach Tool System - as an add-on, it's half the price of their milling machine) and very likely more.

So I spent about what the Automation Technologies G0704 costs but ended up with a more complete system.  I also made and remade a lot of parts and got experience I've never had before with the tools.  With my $2600 or $2800 I not only bought the conversion, I bought an education.  If my only goal was to have the completed machine, it's a perfect illustration of "penny wise but pound foolish".  If that's your goal, buy one of those machines.

On the other hand, think of a mill like these as a system; a chain of parts that's subject to the adage that the chain is no stronger than the weakest link.  During the design, all of the components are chosen based on the expected use of the mill.  When you replace leadscrews with ballscrews, the table can go faster.  All well and good.  The spinning cutter, though, will only take so many cubic inches per turn, depending on how fast the spindle can cut off chips of metal without stalling.  How fast the spindle can rotate under load depends on how much power the motor is able to deliver to the cutter.  If you want to remove the most metal in the least amount of time, a CNC mill needs a faster spindle than a manual machine's.  Mine spins at 2300 max; those Tormachs can spin at 10,000 RPM.  The motor's horsepower determines how much force ends up getting put on the whole machine, which in turn affects how much the machine bends and deforms during a cut; which determines how rigid it needs to be and how big and heavy it needs to be.  Plus, I think that worrying about "removing the most metal in the least amount of time" is where industry lives, not hobbyists. 

Don't go thinking "I can put some ballscrews and nuts on this machine and it will be zero backlash and as good as Tormach".  First, it's possible to end up with backlash - I did.  That's in my list of stuff to tweak on and make better.  Second, like I said, this is a system and you're replacing parts in a system with upgrades expecting it to get better.  It's also possible you'll improve one thing and discover weaknesses in other areas.  The way I look at it, you generally get what you pay for.  The Tormach has the advantage that it was designed from the ground up to be a CNC mill on a small production line.  You don't buy the $4000, ATI-built G0704 and expect it to equal the $8500 Tormach - which itself is not going to equal a $50,000 HAAS. 

If you're the kind of person who approaches most problems with "close enough for government work", machining is probably not for you.  I don't have any measured numbers on what sort of accuracy to expect in the converted mill, but I think these are a good choice of a home machine for the vast majority of your mad scientist projects that will fit on it.  The mill as received from Grizzly was a good performer as a manual mill, and it should still be one.  You're not going to cut a titanium turbine for a 747 engine on it, but maybe you can cut one for a model engine. 

5-axis machining is possible with the G0704, but not the way I've configured it now.  I have all the parts of a fourth axis that I intend to get running soon. Maybe after the GB-22. 

EDIT 4/24/17 2025 EDT - Added the link to the project's page in the second paragraph

I'm Here Today

Really.  I just got busy on a couple of things that got me suddenly realizing, "hey... it's late."  So have a little Michael Ramirez cartoon.

One of them is blog related, so more details once it's ready.

Confidential to the Scientists Marching for Earth Day 2017

On your Earth Day March, here's a little confidential tip from someone just on the outside of your circle: if you want to be respected more, try doing more respectable science.  From last August.

The science world has been buffeted for nearly a decade by growing revelations that major bodies of scientific knowledge, published in peer-reviewed papers, may simply be wrong. Among recent instances: a cancer cell line used as the basis for over a thousand published breast cancer research studies was revealed to be actually a skin cancer cell line; a biotechnology company was able to replicate only six out of fifty-three “landmark” published studies it sought to validate; a test of more than one hundred potential drugs for treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in mice was unable to reproduce any of the positive findings that had been reported from previous studies; a compilation of nearly one hundred fifty clinical trials for therapies to block human inflammatory response showed that even though the therapies had supposedly been validated using mouse model experiments, every one of the trials failed in humans; a statistical assessment of the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map human brain function indicated that up to 70 percent of the positive findings reported in approximately 40,000 published fMRI studies could be false; and an article assessing the overall quality of basic and preclinical biomedical research estimated that between 75 and 90 percent of all studies are not reproducible.

And my personal favorite quote:

"I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning." 

Best story?  Best freaking story!!!??????!!!!  Arrrrggggghhhhhhhh  Science isn't supposed to be stories!!!  One out of six?  Doesn't that mean you screwed up that one time but that's the one you published?!? 

Sorry.

While I go find a blood pressure pill and a soothing cup of tea, it is, after all, Earth Day, that pagan religious holiday of mainstream America.  Time for my favorite Earth Day story.

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Earth Day, as most of you know, is a holiday made up in the late 1960s at the start of the national environmental movement.  Ira Einhorn is one of the main founders of Earth Day, if not the guy who started it.  Ira practiced what he preached: he murdered his girlfriend (less stress on the planet) and composted her body in his closet.  (Hey - reduce, re-use, recycle!)

You won't find Ira Einhorn's name listed in any of the Earth Day promotional literature, as the organizers have taken great pains to distance themselves from this man, at least since he became better known for composting his girlfriend in a trunk in his closet for a couple of years in the late 1970s.

I was a science geek in high school in 1970, the first Earth Day, and indoctrinated into the liberal crap of the day.  Who can forget the commercial with the crying Indian ("Iron Eyes Cody", who - BTW - was Italian, not Native American) looking at the spoiled earth.  Caught up in the spirit of the day, we went looking for pollution, and tested a local canal for coliform bacteria.  

The movement led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the High Priests of Junk Science, probably the single best example of an agency that has outlived its usefulness.

Well, over the years, I've wasted far too many bits on Earth Day.  Enjoy yourselves.  Remember, if you're doing it right, your lights should be visible from Proxima Centauri.

Oh, and remember that nature wants to kill you.

Robert Taylor Passed Away Last Week

Robert Taylor, 85, passed away from complications of Parkinson's Disease last Thursday, April13th.  This picture is Taylor in an undated photo, but likely from the mid-70s. 

Most people won't recognize the name, but Robert Taylor was one of the people who shaped the computer revolution as we know it.  The Internet can claim many "fathers", and there's no shortage of people claiming they're the one, but Taylor has be considered among the first and most important in the invention of not just the Internet, but of modern computing.

His seminal moment came in 1966. He had just taken a new position at the Pentagon — director of the Information Processing Techniques Office, part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA — and on his first day on the job it became immediately obvious to him what the office lacked and what it needed.

At the time, ARPA was funding three separate computer research projects and using three separate computer terminals to communicate with them. Mr. Taylor decided that the department needed a single computer network to connect each project with the others.

“I went to see Charlie Herzfeld, who was the head of ARPA, and laid the idea on him,” Mr. Taylor recalled in an interview with The Times. “He liked the idea immediately, and he took a million dollars out of the ballistic missile defense budget and put it into my budget right then and there.” He added, “The first funding came that month.”

His idea led to the Arpanet, the forerunner of the internet.
...
"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," he wrote in a 1968 paper.

Five years late, Taylor was at Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center, better known as Xerox PARC, where he was instrumental in developing the Alto computer.  Unique to its time, the Alto relied on a device Taylor co-invented in 1961; the computer mouse.  If I show you a picture of it, I think you'll immediately see what it looks like. (Xerox photo)

The resemblance to a Macintosh is not coincidental.   Steve Jobs was invited to PARC by Xerox and is well known to have taken ideas almost wholesale. He was the first to successfully market this new paradigm of interacting with computers.

In 1961, at the dawn of the space age, he was about a year into his job as a project manager at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington when he learned about the work of a young computer scientist at Stanford Research Institute, later called SRI International.

The scientist, Douglas Engelbart, was exploring the possibilities of direct interaction between humans and computers. Mr. Taylor decided to pump more money into the work, and the financial infusion led directly to Mr. Engelbart’s invention of the mouse, which would be instrumental in the design of both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based computers.

Robert William Taylor was born on Feb. 10, 1932, in Dallas and was adopted 28 days later in San Antonio by the Rev. Raymond Taylor, a Methodist minister, and his wife, Audrey.

After studying for a while at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. It was while working on his master’s thesis in experimental psychology that he developed a fascination with new forms of human-computer interaction.

His thesis research focused on how the ear and the brain localize sound. To analyze his data, he had to bring it to the university’s computing center, where a staff member behind a protective glass wall helped operate the center’s mainframe computer. The operator showed him the laborious process of entering his data and his program onto computer punch cards, the standard of the era.

“I was appalled,” Mr. Taylor recalled years later in an interview at the university, “and after I thought about it for a while, I was angry.” The data entry process, he said, was “ridiculous.”

“I thought it was insulting,” he added.

He left the center, went back to his laboratory and used a desktop calculator instead.

At NASA, as the newly elected Kennedy administration was putting the nation on a path to the moon, Mr. Taylor became a friend and protégé of J. C. R. Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist who had written a pioneering paper titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis.”.  Taylor had read his paper two years after his frustration with the data entry methods of the time, and (of course) it resonated with him.  In 1968, he and Dr. Licklider together authored the paper, “The Computer as a Communications Device,” which drew the broad outlines of how computer networks might transform society.

Taylor wasn't directly involved with the technology, but the laser printer was another idea out of PARC.  Another famous invention from Taylor's group at PARC is Ethernet, something most of use ever day.  In addition to generating revenue for Xerox, the combination of the mouse, the graphical interface and laser printer helped define the modern small office. 

In 1999, Taylor was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation "for visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including computer networks, the personal computer and the graphical user interface."

In 2004, he and other PARC researchers were awarded the National Academy of Engineering's Draper Prize for development of "the first practical networked personal computers."

Thanks for everything, Dr. Taylor.