Rats and the Law of Unintended Consequences

I've got to say this is a new one on me.  According to a story in USA Today this week, some auto companies have gone to wire insulation based on soy instead of a plastic.  The insulation is derived from a bean instead of petroleum.  The Unintended Consequence is that the soy-based insulation is attractive to rats, and the rodents chew through it, causing (sometimes) thousands of dollars worth of damage.

ROYAL OAK, Mich. — Every evening, Janice Perzigian puts Pine-Sol on the ground around her 2017 Ford Mustang.

Dryer sheets go under the front seat and in the trunk. Spray made with essential oils is applied to the tires, the sides and the back.

Why does she go through this 5-minute routine?

She has a simple answer: to avoid another $600+ repair bill after a rat chewed through wires under the hood of her car, leading to problems last month starting her car.

Turns out Ms. Perzigian isn't alone.  In 2016, a class action lawsuit was filed against Toyota by Los Angeles attorney Brian Kabateck on behalf of Albert Heber of Delphi, Ind., whose 2012 Tundra had its soy-based insulated wiring chewed through by rodents three times, the first time in 2013. The costs of repair totaled about $1,500; damage that Kabateck said Toyota wouldn't cover under warranty.

"Our contention, [while] soy is certainly — it's laudable — they're trying to be more green, at the same time, it's becoming a potential food product for rats," Kabateck said. He believes rats find it "delicious." [Note: anything in square brackets is added by me - SiG]

One thing I had heard of was rats chewing through wires in all sorts of things, and I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that this really has anything to do with the soy based insulation.  Chewing on things is what rats do.

Jim Stevens, a sales representative at Suburban Ford of Ferndale, MI, said finding rats chewing through wires "is a pretty common thing around here," with two or three vehicles coming in a month.

Though he has been aware of the problem for the last five or six years, Stevens said he doesn't buy the theory of the soy-based coating.

"it's just like your home; it's pretty common (rodents) just chew on stuff," he said, noting that he lives in the country and has a pole barn, where rodents have chewed on wires in his tractor.

Tracy Noble, a spokeswoman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, takes the view that there is an increase in these damage incidents, and it probably is because of the soy-based insulation.  She said that in the early 2000s, requirements were put on the automakers to manufacture cars that were more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly.  In addition to the problems with the soy based insulation, Noble also said there were problems with insulation from natural products such as sisal and flax, and seat cushions made from coconut fiber.

(Wiring harness damage photo from NBCDFW story)

Ultimately, it's probably a worsening of a problem that has always been around to some degree.  The best thing you could do is probably to try to make sure your area is rat free.  Keeping them out of the car is probably easier than getting them out once they live in your firewall or someplace.  Perhaps Janice Perzigian's routine with Pine-Sol, peppermint oil, dryer sheets, and all the rest is a good idea.  Lacking that, there are commercial rat repellents.  You could always try to convince some owls to move in nearby.  Good luck with that.

If This Thing Was 20kW, I'd Have to Start Looking for Financing

Machine Design relays a report from NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) that a small, fission-powered, nuclear power plant has undergone some robust initial testing and is working perfectly.

A small, lightweight fission reactor built at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland recently passed extensive testing in the Nevada desert “with flying floors,” putting it one step closer to powering human outposts on the moon or Mars.

In what may be a desired name in search of an acronym (and a nod towards “The Simpsons”), the reactor is called KRUSTY - Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology.  KRUSTY went through testing from November 2017 through March.  NASA report pdf here.

The experiment culminated with a 28-hour, full-power test that simulated a mission, including reactor startup, ramp to full power, steady operation, and shutdown. Throughout the experiment, the team simulated power reduction, failed engines, and failed heat pipes, showing that the system could continue to operate and successfully handle multiple failures.

KRUSTY is said to be able to deliver 10 kW for up to 10 years.  I know I've talked about this before, but while your house may be rated for 30kW (120V with 250 Amp service), you typically don't use a third of that.  The way power is distributed to progressively smaller groups of houses in a neighborhood, the power companies budget around 6kW per house.  The higher voltage going into the neighborhood is dropped to the 120V that goes to your house (in the US, of course) by distribution transformers.  There is usually one of these to every five houses, and it's rated for 25 kW.  They budget 6kW for the average house and you can quickly see that 5 houses makes 30 kW not 25, but they rationalize that by saying it's not likely everyone will be using the full 6 kW at the same time.   

That says KRUSTY could power a typical house easily; maybe even two houses.  Cool.  What's inside?  And exactly what do they mean by "Stirling Technology" in the name? 

The reactor core is in a solid, cast-uranium-235 core about the size of a roll of paper towels. The prototype power plant uses passive sodium heat pipes instead of cumbersome pipes, pumps, plumbing, and a liquid working fluid used by traditional reactors to carry heat from the reactor.

The heat powers two Sterling heat engines which convert heat energy to mechanical work and mechanical work into electricity.  This means it could power a human outpost, which is ideal for the Moon, where generating power from sunlight is difficult due to the 14-day lunar nights. The  reactor is also fault tolerant, so any loss of cooling leads to an automatic reduction in fission power with no possibility of uncontrolled  reactions.  Ultimately, though, the target is to power more exploration, including Mars.

Artist's sketch of an array of four KRUSTY power plants on Mars.  From NASA's Kilopower project page.

Back in the first year of this blog, 2010, I offered a strange thought.  The US Navy has been powering ships with nuclear reactors for around 50 years.  These reactors have become a standard federal part number.  At least in concept, they could say "we need a new A4W" or "we need a new A1B" and order one from the approved suppliers.  One A4W delivers 104 Megawatts, or more than 10,000 times the power KRUSTY can deliver.  If KRUSTY can power a home, an A4W can power 10,000 homes.  One A1B delivers 700 MW.  You can do the math. 

What if we covered the country with these reactors?  Instead of giant, centralized power plants, what if we had a distributed network of thousands of these reactors?

Now maybe this isn't the exact ticket.  Maybe the Navy's reactors require too much human attention and maintenance, and maybe the design is based on having as much cooling water as they could ever want - the entire ocean as a coolant source.  I just still think the answer lies in distributed power systems and fewer centralized, single-point failure scenarios.  I'd love to have a KRUSTY in my backyard.  Yeah, considering it's NASA hardware I don't think there's a chance I could ever afford it.

Edit 0710 EDT 5/9/2018 - correct typo.

Glock? Sig Sauer? Remington? I'm Lookin' At You!

It's not news that the National Shooting Sports Foundation has kicked out Dick's Sporting Goods for hiring gun control lobbyists.

Nor is it particularly New news that Springfield Armory, well, cut off Dick's.  From the email they sent me:

GENESEO, IL, (05/03/18) – Springfield Armory is severing ties with Dick’s Sporting Goods and its subsidiary, Field & Stream, in response to their hiring a group for anti-Second Amendment lobbying.

This latest action follows Dick’s Sporting Goods’ decision to remove and destroy all modern sporting rifles (MSR) from their inventory. In addition, they have denied Second Amendment rights to Americans under the age of 21. We at Springfield Armory believe that all law abiding American citizens of adult age are guaranteed this sacred right under our Constitution.

It is clear where Dick’s Sporting Goods and its subsidiary, Field & Stream, stand on the Second Amendment, and we want to be clear about our message in response. Their position runs counter to what we stand for as a company. At Springfield Armory, we believe in the right and principles fought for and secured by American patriots and our founding forefathers, without question. We will not accept Dick’s Sporting Goods’ continued attempts to deny Second Amendment freedoms to our fellow Americans.

(hey - they're the ones who used the word "severing")

What is news, at least to me, is that it seems no other gun company has cut off Dick's.  After an exhaustive web search (I looked at four whole pages!), the only company I can find is Springfield Armory.  How about it, gentlemen?  Glock, Ruger, Remington, Sig Sauer, Savage, Smith&Wesson, Taurus, and any of the multitude, I'm lookin' at you!  How about we shut down Dick's?  Why do they even have guns and ammo to sell?  (As an aside, I haven't been in a Dick's Sporting Goods store since they made a show about stopping MSR sales after Sandy Hook, so what guns do they sell?)

Two can play at this economic pressure game.  Hornady did a great thing with refusing to sell to New York state or city entities as return pressure for their Governor pressuring financial companies to attack gun companies.  How about the rest of the ammo companies?  How about Glock or whoever sells the New York Police Departments their guns cancels the contracts?  Make them use a "bucket full of rocks" like that Pennsylvania school district. 

Deep Brain Stimulation Implants Susceptible to Lightning EMI

From a story at ARS Technica that links to the Journal of Neurosurgery, we learn about something new in biomedicine.  Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) devices are becoming common treatments for Parkinson's Disease and some other movement disorders.  The Journal reports on a woman whose DBS reset itself after a lightning event.  This is considered "electromagnetic interference" or EMI.

In the world of EMI, there are a couple of principle mechanisms by which and electromagnetic field can get into a device: being conducted into it on wires or being radiated into it by electromagnetic (EM) fields around the device.  This appears to be the second case.

Doctors in Slovenia report that a 66-year-old woman with an existing brain implant experienced a close call with the device after lightning struck her apartment building. The strike ruined the woman’s television and air conditioning unit and managed to switch off her brain implant. Luckily, the woman and her device were not otherwise harmed.

They say the woman's apartment was struck by lightning, although in many such instances thought to be direct strikes, they turn out to be caused by strong EM fields induced by a nearby lightning strike.  Regardless of the exact mechanism, things in her apartment were damaged and her DBS brain implant reset and turned itself off by the strong EM field.  Since her DBSwasn't plugged into its charger, we can be sure the surge wasn't conducted into the DBS over wires, which means it entered by radiation

Luckily, at the time of the thunderstorm, the woman wasn’t charging her pulse generator or charging the recharger system, so none of her equipment was damaged. But the tremor in her neck—which the brain implant was effectively treating—returned about an hour after the storm. When she checked her device, she realized it wasn’t on and went to a clinic, fearing her device had been fried by the jolt.

Doctors there discovered that the implant was simply turned off and not harmed by the electrical blitz. They speculated that a safety system in her device (the Activa RC neurostimulator by Medtronic) kicked in during the storm, sensing the electromagnetic disturbance, and caused it to turn itself off. While this is a good fail-safe for the device, it could be devastating for patients who suddenly have debilitating symptoms return unexpectedly when their implants shut off.

The doctors point out the implications of this; that patients should avoid sources of high EM fields.  They even note a case where a patient with a DBS device to treat Parkinson’s disease suffered “serious, permanent neurological injury” after their DBS electrode heated up during an MRI scan. 

Strangely, and this seems hard to believe, it sounds to me as though the medical equipment field isn't as established with respect to lightning and EMI problems as commercial aviation requirements are.  In aviation, there are standard tests and requirements all the equipment has to meet.  Equipment with different usages, for example, inside a pressurized environment vs. exposed to the outside temperature and air pressure; perhaps connected to outside antennas as opposed to equipment only connected to power or other wiring inside the aircraft. 

While the Journal of Neurosurgery listed a lot of things to be cautious of, I think they err on the side of over caution:

Patients should be regularly warned to avoid environmental sources that generate strong EMFs, such as arc welding equipment, electronic power generators, electrical substations, ham radio antennas, power lines, microwave communication transmitters, industrial furnaces, induction heaters, resistance welders, and transmission towers for television and radio signals.

Microwave communications towers, TV/radio broadcast towers, and even ham stations are set up to be safe to be around (general intro here).  They're much weaker than a lightning strike. I don't know about the exact risks from welding equipment, but the things I do know about produce fields much weaker than lightning does, so they don't concern me.

(Getty Images photo from ARS Technica)

The Happy Ending to the Rotary Table Issue

I should have posted about this earlier in the week, when I finished the part that caused me grief on the rotary table.  "Finished" in the sense of being done with the machining on the rotary table.  I "finished" in the sense of using several grits of sandpaper to make it look nicer yesterday. 

Nevertheless... 

Not perfect, but totally usable and ready to mount.  The last cut I made with the boring head on the mill made that opening in the middle a couple of thousandths too big, but that's not a problem.  The next part I make, the engine's cylinder, gets press fit into that bore so it just gets cut it to match. 

I've begun work on the cylinder, preparing the stock for the operations it's going to get. 

This is the first part for the current project.  There are many more to come.   

The Financial Attacks on Gun Owners

While there have been lots of stories about Citicorp and Bank of America curtailing or ending funding for gun manufacturers, the financial attacks on the legal commerce in firearms are bigger and more wide ranging.  They have the potential to be a serious problem.

I'm not talking about the same thing Peter, Bayou Renaissance Man, and Zero Hedge talk about: about credit card companies getting involved in micromanaging purchases.

[S]ome banks and credit card companies are now considering a more permanent move that would transform them into foot soldiers in the deep state's push to create a register of all gun owners. The Wall Street Journal [paywall warning] reported Monday that some lenders are now discussing ways to identify purchases of guns through their payment systems. This would effectively transform them into tools of the intelligence services by monitoring virtually all gun sales at sporting goods stores and other merchants that aren't transacted in cash.

What I'm talking about is how New York Governor Cuomo is pressuring the financial institutions, which have large presences in New York City, to have nothing to do with gun makers, gun sellers, the NRA, insurance or anything related to guns.

Cuomo, a Democrat seeking a third term as governor, says he wants “every individual, company and organization that does business across the state” to make gun safety “a top priority.”

To that end, the state Department of Financial Services Commissioner Maria Vullo, a Cuomo appointee, on April 19 urged the banks and insurance companies regulated by her agency to sever any ties they may have with the National Rifle Association and similar groups.

The Blaze has a more complete quote from Cuomo:

“New York may have the strongest gun laws in the country, but we must push further to ensure that gun safety is a top priority for every individual, company, and organization that does business across the state … I am directing the Department of Financial Services to urge insurers and bankers statewide to determine whether any relationship they may have with the NRA or similar organizations sends the wrong message to their clients and their communities who often look to them for guidance and support. This is not just a matter of reputation, it is a matter of public safety, and working together, we can put an end to gun violence in New York once and for all.”

Although it's often cited as aftermath of the Parkland shooting, Chubb Insurance informed the NRA they would no longer issue the NRA's Carry Guard Insurance three months prior to Parkland.  Business Insurance magazine (previous link) says the New York Department of Financial Services launched an investigation into Carry Guard last year.  That implies New York has been at this for a while and it has nothing to do with Cuomo's campaign or any specific event.  Chubb appears to be a subcontractor to Lockton Affinity in Carry Guard.  Lockton Affinity Insurance told the NRA they would no longer sell any insurances that they previously sold for the NRA - which I find strange since I just got my bill for my NRA firearms insurance renewal as if everything was the same as always. 

I think everyone pretty well recognizes that a typical manufacturer can't do business without a banking partner and that short to longer term loans are part of their world.  I'm optimistic that other banks and other insurance companies will step forward to make the money these companies are giving up, but that doesn't mean there can't be interruptions and difficulties. 

For individual buyers, though, it seems that buying on a credit or debit card could go through periods of trouble.  Our state just passed a law prohibiting long gun sales to 18-21 year old buyers, and that's what Citicorp and BoA have passed as their new regulations.  I suggest that if you're in that age group, live in a state where you can buy one, and would use one of their credit cards to buy your long gun, take out a cash advance. 

All that said, and always remember IANAL, I think that banks like BoA and Citigroup, that are recipients of tons of taxpayer dollars, should be required to respect the civil rights of all people.  Maybe we should push on our elected officials to remind them of that.  Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan famously said, "We don’t think it’s a good idea for banks to decide what products and services Americans can buy,"  Around the same time, Visa issued a statement saying, “We do not believe Visa should be in the position of setting restrictions on the sale of lawful goods and services.”

Make no mistake, there are tons of people on the anti-gun side who think that destroying gun sales this way is completely right and they're mad at Visa for not trying to shut off gun purchases.  They have no problem destroying the gun business By Any Means Necessary.  It's not just New York and not just the NY Times; even Arizona Central puts up an editorial praising Dick's Sporting Goods and attacking Visa for not stopping sales of guns. 

Can You Imagine the Dead Birds?

General Electric has a web page announcing the world's largest wind turbine.  Called Haliade-X, the 12 Megawatt turbine is enormous.  As the blades rotate, it will sweep out 360 meters tall, taller than the Eiffel tower and a bit shorter than the Empire State building

They're rating the Haliade-X to produce 67 Gigawatt*Hrs over the course of a year.  That's 45% more energy than any other offshore wind turbine currently available.  If there's no wind, there's no energy output, so the usefulness of a wind farm with an array of these depends strongly on the specifications for the wind.  You'll note about midway down the left column the legend, "Wind Class IEC:IB" appears. 

What's that?  The company that makes the blades for GE is called LM Wind Power, and they post this web site.  IEC is the standards organization and IB translates as wind class I, the highest, and turbulence class B, on a scale of A to C.  Installed offshore, the winds tend to be less turbulent than over ground.  Especially a hundred meters up in the air where the blades are. 

Wind class I lists a 50 year gust of 70 m/s, which my calculator converts to 157mph.  That's in the Category V hurricane level, and while I doubt that these will last 50 years (because saltwater) it seems sane to rate it to that.  Note that the category says the average annual wind speed is 10m/s or 22mph. 

These are still vaporware, but they're trying to sell them now.  The first Haliade-X turbines will probably be in demo next year.  Production units shipping to wind farms could be as early as 2021.

In case you've been in a cave, a lot of people are upset that wind turbines kill birds.  The numbers of just how many birds are being killed vary with the source and it's hard to know who's right.  It's honestly probably hard to know.  The Institute for Energy Research says:

According to a [2013] study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, every year 573,000 birds (including 83,000 raptors) and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines — 30 percent higher than the federal government estimated in 2009, due mainly to increasing wind power capacity across the nation.  This is likely an underestimate because these estimates were based on 51,630 megawatts of installed wind capacity in the United States in 2012 and wind capacity has grown since then to 65,879 megawatts.

Put another way, it's reported that the BP Deepwater Horizons oil spill killed 800,000 birds.  BP was fined $100 Million, yet only wind power facility has ever been fined for killing birds: Duke Energy was fined $1 Million for killing 163 birds in Wyoming from 2009 to 2013.  Two years at that modest 573,000 bird deaths per year easily exceeds the oil spill tally and wind turbines have been doing that for years, not just a one time disaster.

But no one will ever notice how many birds get killed by an offshore wind turbine.  Especially if there's no way for people to take videos of birds getting killed or photos of dead birds around the base.  Sounds like the wind power industry gets everything they could ask for. 

A Little Followup on Cryptocurrency Mining

For reference, back in January, I ran a piece about whether bitcoin was in a bubble.  As part of that piece, I introduced the concept of Bitcoin mining. 

The algorithms were designed to be resistant to computers becoming faster over time, so while someone can "mine" bitcoins by running software, it would be better for them to have a room full of computers than one supercomputer.   It costs energy and time to mine bitcoins.  Newer, faster computers are slowed by the algorithms so that technology doesn't give them an advantage in mining the "harder to mine deposits".

This week, Electronic Design runs an article on cryptocurrency mining and the impact it's having on the world.  There's a couple of pull quotes that are a bit mind-boggling.  The first one is the lesser of the two:

When it comes to mining cryptocurrency and how much power is consumed during mining operations globally, nobody knows for sure. However, based on varied utility costs alone, it’s estimated at 53.99 TWh, or enough energy to power the country of Bangladesh annually, according to the Digiconomist Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index—a website dedicated to providing in-depth analysis regarding cryptocurrencies. 

Personally, 53.99 Terawatt-hrs (which I'll call 54) means more to me than the annual power consumption of Bangladesh.  A Terawatt is 1000 gigawatts or 1 trillion watts.  A budgetary number for a house in the US is around 20 kW, and while it varies over time, let's just say it's that much energy all the time. In one year, that's 175 Megawatt-Hours.  That means they're saying that cryptocurrency mining uses the same amount of energy as 308,000 of those houses.  Given the accuracy of that 20 kW estimate, probably over a million of them in real life.  Spread out over the world, that doesn't seem like much. 

The other pull quote is the one that's mind blowing. 

The online sustainability website Grist purports that if current mining trends continue to climb, the entire cryptocurrency network will use the same amount of power the world consumes annually by 2020.

That's an astonishing number.  Specifically, Grist says:

By July 2019, the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.

While neither Digiconomist or Grist impresses me as objective - they both reek of climate change alarmism and anti-cryptocurrency bias - if it's remotely true that by February of 2020 the amount of energy used to mine cryptocurrency (Bitcoin is still the biggest example) exceeds all the energy supplied in the world, that just ain't gonna happen.  Mining will stop long before 2020.  Mining will stop long before July of 2019. 

We all know, "things that can't go on won't go on".  We all know that extrapolating trends tends to be completely worthless, usually as soon as the trends are pointed out.  What will stop it is the pure cost/benefit ratio.  The cost of the electricity to mine a coin will go up until it exceeds the amount gotten from the coin.  Just as gold miners will park the heavy equipment when the price goes below some level (depending on their cost per ounce), cryptocurrency miners will turn off the computers when it becomes unprofitable.  

Right now, I find the price of a Bitcoin to be $9,212.09.  According to that Electronic Design article, (link to a MarketWatch piece) the cost to produce a coin varies from  $3,244 worth of power in Louisiana, to $9,483 in Hawaii.  While I can see someone spending $3,244 to get a coin worth $9,212, nobody is going to keep mining if it costs more than they get back.  According to MarketWatch, cryptocurrency mining in general, and Bitcoin in particular, is profitable in any state except for Hawaii at today's prices.
 

 Cryptocurrency mining station, from Electronic Design.

A Momentary Pause for the Rock Music Fans in the Audience

Gibson, the maker of many iconic guitars in rock music, announced they have filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy reorganization today.

The Chapter 11 filing on Tuesday in Delaware keeps Gibson in business but gives ownership to noteholders, replacing stockholders that include Chief Executive Officer Henry Juszkiewicz, the company’s leader for more than three decades. According to court filings, current noteholders include Silver Point Capital, Melody Capital Partners and funds affiliated with KKR Credit Advisors.

The restructuring will allow the instrument business to "unburden" itself of a consumer-electronics unit that Gibson blamed for its financial woes. Gibson owes as much as $500 million, and lenders will provide a new loan of up to $135 million to keep the company in business, according to court papers.

The main reason for the reorganization (IMO, of course) is that Gibson took advantage of free money during the last decade and expanded into that "consumer-electronics unit".  To use the business jargon, they went well beyond their core competency, made some bad decisions, and overextended themselves.  There's no secret here; people have been talking about Gibson's problems with looming debt in several online forums (like one I belong to); debt that had to be paid back any day now.  One of those dates when notes came due was yesterday, and Gibson pulled the ripcord. 

Gibson, founded in 1894, sells over 170,000 guitars annually in 80 countries. Its guitars are U.S.-made, with factories in Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, and Bozeman, Montana. It also sells studio monitors, headphones, turntables and other musical instruments. Units also include the company’s Baldwin Piano business. All told, the music instruments business employs at least 875 people, according to court papers.

In addition to the Baldwin Piano business, Gibson owns Epiphone and their family of brands.  

While chapter 11 is going to mean big changes, it's nice to see Gibson intending to emphasize making instruments again.  CEO Henry Juszkiewicz is pretty much out; he has a one year contract to "help with the transition".  Juskiewicz is the guy who led them through the Obama-era attack alleging CITES treaty violations, which appeared to be all about violation of the laws of India as interpreted by the US DOJ!!  Or an entirely politically motivated attack.  He's also the guy who made most of the bad decisions that led to chapter 11.  Henry was at the helm of Gibson from 1986 until now (well, next year), so that's just one episode from his career. 

There's a bigger question here, though.  It's being reported that both Gibson and Fender's electric guitar sales are sliding down, year after year.  A year ago, online magazine Quartz published an article saying rock and roll is dead and that, "Nobody wants an electric guitar anymore".

Electric guitar makers are seeing their sales steadily plummet. Leading guitar companies Fender and Gibson are both in debt; Fender was forced to abandon a public offering in 2012, and Gibson’s annual revenue fell from $2.1 billion to $1.7 billion over just the last three years. Guitar Center, the largest chain of its kind, is $1.6 billion in the red.

One can philosophize all they'd like about the facts, but the numbers are undeniable.  Fender has improved its fortunes, primarily via sales of their amplifiers and lately with a subscription-based guitar lesson business called Fender Play, but the trend in guitar sales can't be ignored. 

Acoustic models began to outsell electric guitars in 2010, and that trend has only continued with every new soft-crooning Ed Sheeran- and John Mayer-like doppelgänger climbing the music charts. And even then, unplugged guitar music has to compete on the charts with the more synthetic sounds of pop and rap.

I get a weekly Fender email and they are regularly promoting their acoustics.  Gibson has some excellent acoustic guitars as well. 

A year after that Quartz article was published, they added a followup email from Fender CEO Andy Mooney:

“Sales of fretted instruments are in great shape and Fender’s electric guitar and amp revenues have been steadily rising for several years,” he said, adding that electric sales are holding steady, acoustic sales are on the rise, and “ukelele sales are exploding.”

I own only one Gibson-branded, made in America guitar, a Les Paul pictured in the right column, a few pictures above the list of books from Library Thing.  I don't have skin in the game, but they're a company with a big history and I hope to see them get back to health. 

(a "golden oldie" image when Gibson raised the middle finger to the Fed.gov)

UK Schools Removing Analog Clocks - Teens Can't Tell Time

If you're of a certain age over 20 or 30, you grew up with analog clocks.  You got fully indoctrinated to "the big hand's on the ..." and "the little hand".

Apparently that's being lost.  A bigger question is whether we should care or not. According to The Telegraph, schools are switching over to digital display clocks to help remove stress during taking tests.  The stress only exists because the students, not just first graders but 9th, 10th and 11th year students in the UK, can't tell time at a glance.

Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said youngsters have become accustomed to using digital devices.

“The current generation aren’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations,” he told The Telegraph.

“They are used to seeing a digital representation of time on their phone, on their computer. Nearly everything they’ve got is digital so youngsters are just exposed to time being given digitally everywhere.”

Mr Trobe, a former headmaster, said that teachers want their students to feel as relaxed as possible during exams. Having a traditional clock in the room could be a cause of unnecessary stress, he added.

It's easy to turn this into a "those pathetic children today" screed, but I don't want to do that.  I think it's reasonable to ask if it's really necessary.  In my mind, it's hard to not immediately see a clock face when I'm thinking of a certain time, and that the clock face helps me visualize the difference between time zones, time intervals, and other things but maybe that's just "a product of my raisin'".  Perhaps if you were born and raised with a digital display on everything, you see those things as easily.  What does someone raised with digital clocks think when they encounter instructions to position two things at the 10 and 2 o'clock positions, or to look for something at 6 o'clock.

(I can't imagine how you could visualize everything on a digital display.  For example, how fast does the sun move across the sky?  Half the speed of the hour hand on a clock; the sun goes from east to west, or 3:00 to 9:00 in about 12 hours (it varies with the season).  The clock obviously takes 6 hours.)

I think there's an honest need to ask whether tons of arithmetic-by-hand is worth doing in an era when calculators are everywhere.  For perspective, I made the observation in my first year in an engineering department that the guys who were on the top on the technical side could do the most math in their heads, so I'm not at all opposed to doing lots of math, it's just that most students won't be in that environment.  Similarly, is there a real need to spend weeks teaching children to read an analog clock if digital displays are replacing analog clocks?  If the only analog clock they see is in school (or Big Ben - this is the UK after all) what's the point?  So they can read an analog clock if they have to?  If digital electronics suddenly went "poof"?  If we really get a TEOTWAKI event, the question will be whether or not one can read a sundial, not an analog clock.

(Image from The Telegraph)

The other item the Telegraph linked in the same article is a bit more troublesome:

Earlier this year, a senior paediatric doctor warned that children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology. Sally Payne, the head paediatric occupational therapist at the Heart of England foundation NHS Trust, said that when children are given a pencil at school, they are increasingly unable to hold it.

To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers. Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills," she said.

"It’s easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes. Because of this, they’re not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil."

Do we need to ensure students can communicate with a pencil, and not just a keyboard, or even just texting with their thumbs?  Yeah, I'm gonna come down on the side that we really need to make sure kids don't lose the ability to write with pencil and pen on paper.  Using written language is being human.  Losing the ability to write has "dark ages" written all over it.

The Negative Impact of the #MeToo Movement

That's the title of an interesting piece from Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in Imprimis, the online magazine of Hillsdale College.  It's a long piece and an interesting read, so as usual, I'll recommend you read the whole thing.  I also think she misses some things so I'll quote some of what she says and comment on what I think she gets wrong.

Our nation is about to be transformed, thanks to the #MeToo movement. I am not speaking about a cessation of sexual predation in the workplace. If that were the only consequence of #MeToo, the movement would clearly be a force for good. Unfortunately, its effects are going to be more sweeping and destructive. #MeToo is going to unleash a new torrent of gender and race quotas throughout the economy and culture, on the theory that all disparities in employment and institutional representation are due to harassment and bias. The resulting distortions of decision-making will be largely invisible; we will usually not know of the superior candidates for a job who were passed over in the drive for gender parity. But the net consequence will be a loss of American competitiveness and scientific achievement.

And this is like a topic sentence to the entire piece.  Ms. MacDonald talks a lot about the distortions that are coming due to this, but puts it in terms familiar to us.

Pressures for so-called diversity, defined reductively by gonads and melanin, are of course nothing new. Since the 1990s, every mainstream institution has lived in terror of three lethal words: “all white male,” an epithet capable of producing paroxysms of self-abasement.
...
But however pervasive the diversity imperative was before, the #MeToo movement is going to make the previous three decades look like a golden age of meritocracy. No mainstream institution will hire, promote, or compensate without an exquisite calculation of gender and race ratios. Males in general, and white males in particular, will have to clear a very high bar in order to justify further deferring that halcyon moment of gender equity.

From here, MacDonald goes into a litany of examples, from fashion giant H&M, criticized for having a board that's "too white", to show business, the Academy awards, classical music, TV news, book publishing, banks and finance institutions, and to silicon valley.

It's nothing short of an all out war on competency and meritocracy as the basis of hiring.   

Mac Donald talks about STEM education, pointing out UCLA’s Engineering Department now has its own diversity dean.

Audrey Pool O’Neal, the director of UCLA’s Women in Engineering program, justified this sinecure with the usual role model argument for gender- and race-conscious decision-making. “Female students let me know how much they appreciate seeing a woman of color in front of their classroom,” she told the UCLA student newspaper.

Why not appreciate seeing the most qualified scholar in front of your classroom? Any female student who thinks she needs a female professor in order to envision a scientific career has declared herself a follower rather than a pioneer—and a follower based on a characteristic that is irrelevant to intellectual achievement. Marie Curie did not need female role models to investigate radioactivity. She was motivated by a passion to understand the world. That should be reason enough for anyone to plunge headlong into the search for knowledge.

She spends quite a bit of time on this subject, talking about the James Damore incident at Google, including information I haven't seen before. 

In August 2017, Google fired computer engineer James Damore for writing a memo suggesting that the lack of 50-50 gender proportionality at Google and other tech firms may not be due to bias, but rather to different career predilections on the part of males and females. He cited psychological research establishing that on average, males and females are attracted to different types of work: males to more abstract, idea-centered work, females to more human-centered, relational activities. Damore was not disparaging the scientific skills of the female engineers working at Google; he was trying to explain why there were not more of them. Nevertheless, Google accused Damore of using harmful gender stereotypes that put Google’s female employees at risk of some unspecified trauma.

Definitely worth the read.

Where I think she's missing things is in two places.  To begin with, these issues in hiring aren't that new and therefore aren't specifically from the #MeToo issue; this fire started a few months ago.  For at least the last few years it has been becoming apparent that white men shouldn't apply to work in Fortune 500 companies.  You'll be passed over for every important promotion, if you even get in the door past a less qualified minority that's applying for the same spot.  My last job was in a Fortune 500 company and diversity, "defined reductively by gonads and melanin" as she says, was our gospel.  As I noted in 2011,

I can't help but feel like they're going about it all wrong;  they emphasize what we look like, or what we eat, not who we are.  ... Diversity isn't white guys and Indian guys or "smart Latinas": it's engineers and art majors.  .

The second thing she doesn't address is a response that was whispered about in the immediate aftermath of the first explosion of #MeToo: startups and small companies will refuse to hire women.  If anything one says can be interpreted as threatening and lead to legal troubles, why would anyone take the chance?  It's already a problem for startups when they have to hire outside their circle of friends and people they used to work with.  An alternative is that when the startup gets big enough to need to hire more employees, they contract with a Professional Employment Organization, or PEO (think of old companies like Manpower or Kelly Services).  There are no employees, just contracted services that can be terminated instantly at will. 

This is just more pressure on full time work.  I've been saying for years that the continuing expansion of regulations is making full time employment less likely for more people, which means more and more people will be contract employees and more people will gravitate to small businesses.  I can envision large companies, call it Fortune 500 companies, with some small percentage of the work force actually being full time, permanent employees and the vast majority of workers being  contractors.  The regulatory load being put on companies is getting so odious that the companies respond by not hiring full time employees any more, hiring only contract workers. 

Solar Cycle Followup - Cycle 24 Weakest in 200 years.

A couple of days ago, I noted that while we may not technically be in the solar minimum, we're pretty much at the bottom.

Thanks to a link at Watts Up With That, we learn that a German solar activity site Kalte Sonne (Cold Sun), and translated by NoTricksZone, says this solar cycle has now surpassed previous milestones of low activity and the intercycle solar minimum has started.  They're saying this is the weakest solar cycle in 200 years, since cycle number 5.  The site opens with:

In March our supplier of energy was more inactive than in the previous months. The sunspot number was only 2,5, which is only 8% of what is normal for this month into the average cycle (month 112).  Only solar cycles 5 and 6 were weaker.

Recall that the sunspot number contains information on the number of groups and the number of spots, so that the number can't be fractional.  The smallest possible sunspot number is 11 - one group with one spot.  To get a monthly average of 2.5 means several days with SSN of zero were involved. A sunspot was detected on just 6 of the 31 days in March. 

This plot shows the average of cycles 1 to 23 in blue, this cycle (24) in red, and cycle 5 in black.  A more vivid way of examining the claim that this is the weakest cycle since cycle 5 is this plot:

The plot shows a comparison of the deviation from the mean (112 months into the cycle) of all the solar cycles recorded thus far since the 18th century.  Here it's obvious that cycle 24 with a sunspot anomaly of -4196 is the third weakest behind cycle 6 and cycle 5.  Cycle five started in 1798 and peaked in 1805. 

It's worth pointing out that the entire space age is contained in cycles from number 20 onward.  The highest solar cycle on record was 19, which peaked in 1958s, just before satellite solar observation became a thing.  At the start of this cycle, there were reports that the solar wind had dropped to the lowest values ever seen; we've only known of the solar wind in the space age; although it was thought to exist, it was first observed by a Soviet satellite in 1959.  Obviously, we have no measurements showing what the solar wind was like during solar cycles before then.

The first spot of cycle 25 briefly appeared on April 10th; there is a transition period when spots from both cycles can appear, with the newer cycle spots higher in latitude than the current cycle (which gives rise to the solar butterfly diagram).  It's entirely possible that cycle 25 won't really get going until 2020.  Or later.

Why does this matter?  As the original source (Cold Sun) says,

It is well known that frigid phases on the planet are associated with low solar activity. A number of papers, for example, have linked the Little Ice Age of the 17th century to the low solar activity of the Maunder Minimum. Other published papers link cold winters in Europe to low solar activity as well.

Now it’s sure: solar cycle 24 will go down as the weakest in close to 200 years. Thus all the news of massive snow and ice this winter over the northern hemisphere don’t come as a surprise for many scientists.

It's interesting, then, that from February of 2016 to February of 2018, we've just had the largest temperature drop in the last hundred years, 0.56C.  But I'm sure that's just weather and had nothing to do with climate change.   

Alfie Evans, Charlie Gard, the Liverpool Pathway and Ezekiel Emanuel

What do all those names have in common?

The story of Alfie Evans in the UK is another one of those "unless you've been living under a rock" stories.  It needs no introduction, but perhaps a summary.  The British National Health Service is insisting that Alfie be allowed to die with dignity - although reports from people who have seen the room say they're not even allowing him to live with dignity.  Stories and photos come back  showing the hospital staff leaves him to sleep in urine, and that mold grows in his breathing tubes.

Alder Hey, the hospital where Alfie lies, has a history of appalling treatment of patients.

In 1998, a heart specialist at Alder Hey accidentally revealed during an inquiry that the hospital was storing — in bulk — children’s organs. With no consent from the parents, Alder Hey Hospital was harvesting the organs from dead babies.

They were also caught selling human tissue to pharmaceutical companies in exchange for cash donations, but what they didn’t sell, they stockpiled. Alder Hey had 2,080 children’s hearts, over 800 other organs, and 400 full fetuses. A pathologist at Alder Hey was even accused of keeping the head of a baby stored in a jar. NONE of this was done with parental consent.

Now the hospital is not only denying Alfie medical care, they won’t let his parents take him home to die and say it's because the protests show the parents have a bad attitude.  Merseyside (city) Police threatened people who posted opinions that disagreed with the government.  Spokesmen for Alder Hey hospital are now saying that unless his parents have a “sea change in attitude,” they won’t allow Alfie to go home.  This week, Alfie was taken off life support and defied expectations by breathing on his own.  It took the hospital most of a day to decide to give the child water.  

Last July, in a similar case, the UK government insisted that Charlie Gard die - it's too euphemistic to say they allowed him to die, it wasn't that passive - and denied the parents visitation to be with Charlie when he died. After a lengthy struggle to try to save the child, he was transferred to a hospice, taken off his respirator, and quickly died.

It's important to recognize that neither case is about the cost of treatment.  In both cases, outside sources are guaranteeing funding and offering to coordinate the treatment.  In Charlie Gard's case there was a crowdfunding effort that gathered funds and an American researcher who thought Charlie might be treatable.  In Alfie's case, the Italian government has granted him Italian citizenship and has offered him treatment there.  Additionally, Pope Francis has offered to intervene, leaving an aircraft in the UK to take Alfie to Italy. 

The cases are about the governments ability to decide who lives and who dies.  Like the saying about gun control goes, it's about control. 

This shouldn't be a surprise; the UK enacted the Liverpool Pathway over 6 years ago.  The Pathway was a treatment protocol to kill off the elderly, primarily by depriving them of water and food, although there were allegations it was used on children.  Hospitals paid millions to reach their goal numbers of elderly patients "allowed" to die on the program (I hear the Mafia pays to get rid of people, too), and there have been many stories of complaints by relatives of how awfully their parents were treated. It's a system that a prominent oncologist called "immoral medicine" and "the most corrupt practice in British Medicine".  We shouldn't be surprised they'd yank treatment from the youngest.  Killing off the young as well as the old is a natural consequence of systems like the UK's. 

The same ideas are encoded into the laws of Obamacare.  This is what the media buzz about "death panels" was about back before Obamacare was passed.  The Complete Lives System, which came from a paper co-written by Chicago Mayor and former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's brother Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.  The guy who said that he hoped to die by 75 and thought that was the right way to run a healthcare system.  The concept is most easily explained with a graph (pdf warning).

It's based on the ability of the patient to repay society for the cost of the treatment.  An infant like Alfie won't be in a position to pay back taxes for at least 20 years, so they get the lowest priority of treatment of any age group.  Let them die.  Someone over 60 might be able to pay back to society, but the chances they'll pay it back in taxes get lower the farther into retirement they go.

For a concrete example, consider someone needing a kidney transplant and we'll make up that one is 30, one is 5 and one is 70.  A 30 year old working a good job has the best chance of getting one.  Heck, yank one of out of a 10 or 12 year old in for something else and get that 30 year old back to work!  The 5 year old or the 70 year old probably isn't going to be getting a kidney unless one happens to be available.  

I've met people who defend socialized medicine; I'm sure you have, too.  In cases like this, the usual response is to talk to us like we're retards who can't grasp that there's always some sort of healthcare rationing going on and that the experts of the NHS know best.  There's tons wrong with the way health care is done in the US, but I've never read one thing about the NHS that made me say, "I have got to get me some of that!"


EDIT to add, 4/28 1042 EDT:  Alfie has passed away since this was posted last night (our time).  The State wins again and grinds on.

171,000 Manufacturing Jobs "Reshored" to the US Last Year

In a report released by the Reshoring Initiative called its 2017 Reshoring Report, the group shows data on U.S. reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI) by companies that have shifted production or sourcing from offshore to the US.  According to Design News:

The report notes that last year, combined reshoring and related FDI announcements surged, adding over 171,000 jobs—up 2,800 percent from 2010. The report also shows upward revisions of 67,000 jobs from prior-year data, bringing the total number of manufacturing jobs brought to the US from offshore to 576,000 since the manufacturing employment low of 2010. The report claims that the 171,000 reshoring and FDI jobs announced equal 90 percent of the 189,000 total manufacturing jobs added in 2017.

It seems that the first mention of the word "reshoring" in this blog as back on February 12, 2013, so I've been following this trend at least since then (it links to an article here a year earlier).  The Reshoring Initiative (RI) includes data going back to 2007.  The factors involved in the decision to produce something offshore or here are wide ranging.  In the report, they question companies for the reasons of moving back (or investing in the US).  RI then ranked those reasons from 1 to 23 as factors against offshoring and factors favoring reshoring.

They're all instructive, but the top few are the ones that the most survey respondents cited.  292 respondents said that the quality of the imported goods combined with the amount of warranty cost and the cost of the rework they had to do to make the products usable was the biggest disadvantage.  The top five disadvantages were that, freight cost to ship goods to the US, the total cost, delivery and inventory problems.   The top reason for reshoring to the US was government incentives to move back, but that barely edged out the next two reasons: proximity to the customers and the availability of a skilled workforce and training for them.  Rounding out the top five were brand image (a desire to say "Made in the USA" to look better) and "eco-system synergies".  I have no idea what they mean by that, but it's generally a good idea to beware of people saying things like that.

Also, note how the numbers on the right column are greater than 100 much farther down the chart than the left column, and how the right column has bigger numbers in general.  It's a rather unified group of respondents.

RI noted that one of the reasons jobs are returning is that the cost differential between home-produced goods and landed goods from overseas has been shrinking for years. RI founder Harry Moser said:

“We know where the imports are by country, and we know the price difference between the foreign price and the US price. The total cost of foreign-made goods delivered to the US is a full 95% of the cost of US-produced goods,” said Moser. “We know how much you have to shift it to make the US competitive with China.”

Those who haven't worked in manufacturing probably don't understand how intense the pressure is to always do more with less.  In manufacturing, time is money and getting the job done right with minimal waste, and then always getting better is the mantra.  Maybe because of that, managers chase fads that promise better performance or lower costs.  The cost advantages of going offshore have to be much bigger than they are to overcome that column of reasons not to offshore.  

From Design News.

About That Shop Problem I Mentioned

Yesterday, I mentioned a bizarre problem I had come across while getting my flame licker engine's first part fixtured and cut.  I've resolved the issue and think I'm ready to move on to the original task, but it was honestly a problem that I had never thought could exist.

The problem has to do with my rotary table (RT), which I've written about before.  To use the RT the way I need to, the center of rotation has to be under the center of the mill's spindle.  It turns out the center of rotation doesn't have to be the physical center of the RT.  

I used the same centering method that I used in that "before" link.  I put my MT2 dead center from the big lathe into the matching taper in the rotary table, put a small spotting drill in the spindle and used the Rumblepad controller to jog the table around until the points lined up looking along the mill's X and Y axes.  That puts the physical center of the RT under the spindle.  Satisfied it was in place, I put the work piece (picture of part here) on the table and started working to center that.  I had coated the piece in blue machinist's layout fluid and scratched lines that crossed where the center of the big hole will eventually be.

Now with a center finder (a pointy cone), I was going to put that over the intersection of the two lines then clamp everything down.  I rotated the table so that I was looking down the Y axis, centered the work under the point, rotated the table 90 degrees so that I looked down X, centered, and repeated, going back and forth a few times until it looked like the point was always over the center.  Satisfied, I spun the table farther and when I was on the far side of the original Y axis (table set to 270 instead of 90), the center finder's point was no longer over the center.  It was about .035 away.  Red circles drawn on this photo make the marks I made look obvious.

I spent the rest of the Sunday trying to resolve this issue, eventually going back to the original MT2 center and verifying the problem was there.

On to another way of centering the axis.  I used the open bore in the table, and set each axis so that the coordinate of each edge was the same.  Then I clamped a piece of thin aluminum to the table and using the finest engraving bit I have (which has a .010 tip) rotated the table 360 degrees.  I found that it cut a circle that's about .035 in diameter (center of the path, not the very edges).  If the center of rotation was really the physical center of the hole in the table and directly under the center of the spindle, that should have been one small hole. 

The only conclusion I could make at this point was that since my machine said the center of the bore was 0,0 but the cutter put there didn't just cut a single hole was that the table wasn't rotating around the geometric center.  It was rotating around someplace else - someplace away from the center.

A consultation with some experts online said the trick was to find the coordinates of that spot.  To do that, machine a cylinder by putting a cutter in a fixed spot and rotating the table.  That would machine a cylinder centered around the table's center of rotation, and once I got those coordinates the work would rotate around that spot.

I grabbed a block of scrap aluminum about 2-1/2" square by 1" thick and cut a cylinder.   A convenient diameter to use seemed to be .750. I'd move the mill in X only and use a .250 end mill. This is easy stuff, right? A 3/4" diameter means a 3/8 radius; add a 1/8" cutter radius and the center of the spindle should be 4/8, 0.500", from the center of rotation.  I moved X to 0.500, started the cut, rotated the table 360, dropped the cutter .050 at a time and made cuts to make a ring 0.500 deep.

You might be able to see the slots I started to cut in from the sides in both +/- X so I could fit a micrometer in there, but I used calipers to measure the cylinder (the half inch wide slot is too narrow for my micrometer). 

The diameter is almost 0.700. That means the spindle was really .025 (radius) closer to the center of rotation than it should have been.  Now I switched over to an edge finder, found the coordinates of both sides of the cylinder in both axes and found the midpoints so that I get the same number (+/-) on both sides of the cylinder.

Finally, I put the mill's table to 0,0 lowered a sharp point engraving tool down to touch the top of that cylinder and rotated the table 360 degrees.  There was essentially no movement; it made a hole a couple of thousandths in diameter.  The big wobble I had with my original method was gone.  

Now it looks like the next step is to put the work piece back on it and try to center the cross hairs again.  My test cylinder block has enough clamps to keep my house from moving and I can't clamp more than half the work piece, since I cut half at once.

Up above, I remarked that it turns out the center of rotation does not have to be the physical center of the RT.   It seems that you can approximate how well they'll align by the cost of the RT.  I don't think it's true that all Chinesium tables are crap, but I do see echoes of "you get what you pay for" here.

And I need to figure out a way to not go through all of this the next time I need to use the RT.

Oh Where Oh Where Has My Day Gone?

Sorry.  Working on a bizarre problem with the little engine project on my rotary table, so no content. 

As always, I try to save a cartoon for times like this.  You've heard of Kiwi birds from New Zealand, and you've heard of, probably eaten, Kiwi fruit.  Finally a grand unified theory to explain the brown fuzzy fruit  and the brown fuzzy bird:

Earth Day

It's time for our annual bacchanalia of the festival we call Earth Day.  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.

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. 

Over the years, I've wasted far too many minutes writing about Earth Day.  It's too long to sort through and pretty much all curmudgeonly, so I'll just say I hope you had a nice day.  Still, there are a a couple of good things to remember about the modern environmental movement.  Remember that nature wants you dead and most environmentalists prefer the wild animals over you (look at how they respond to wolf attacks on cattle or people) and you'll have a pretty good start.  In fact, it's probably easier just to say that mainstream environmentalists want you dead. 

• CNN Founder Ted Turner: "A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."

• Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder: "My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world."

• Maurice Strong: "Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?"

Gee, the moderate guy only wants to kill off more than 95% of the human race.  See the current world population is around 7 billion people.  For Dave Foreman, 100 million out of 7 billion is 100 out of 7000 or 1.4 %.  At 300 million, Ted Turner would generously let 4.3% live.

And remember: your tire fire should be visible from Proxima Centauri.

About that Southwest Airlines 737 Engine Failure

Engine failure... sounds so sterile; so mundane doesn't it?  We can't call it an explosion because there were no chemicals exploding; no fuel going off.  It sounds like a joke to call it a "spontaneous engine disassembly", although that's fairly accurate.  Everyone knows the left engine on this Southwest Boeing 737 lost a turbine blade, leading to a very bad outcome: metal penetrating into the pressure vessel and killing a passenger.  I'm sure everyone has seen the story.

While I never worked on engines, I worked in the civil aviation industry for 20 years and have some knowledge about how the industry and FAA work.  Because of that I have some thoughts I want to share with you.

Let's start here: there's a reason that Jennifer Riordan, the woman who was killed, was the first U.S. passenger airline fatality since 2009: the relentless drive of tens of thousands of engineers of all kinds driving to always determine the root cause (brief overview) of all problems and to design systems so that a single failure, like losing a turbine blade, doesn't take down an airliner.  The engine housing should not have allowed the debris that punctured the fuselage to escape: that means there were two failures here.  The second failure, and arguably the one that caused the fatality, was the failure of the engine housing to contain the flying debris.

All jet engines on commercial airlines get qualified this way.  For example, here's a video of one of the huge engines on an Airbus double decker A380 having a turbine blade blown off with an explosive as part of its qualifications test.  Engines are designed to survive this; to fail gracefully.  Additionally, all two engine aircraft like the Southwest 737, are certified to be able to fly on one engine, including be able to climb out from an airport should the engine fail immediately after takeoff.

There's an undercurrent among the news talking heads that they're scared this is going to start happening widely.  I'd say that's not likely.  The Boeing 737 is one of the most common aircraft in service, with production lines rolling out about two new aircraft every day.  I don't know what percentage use the CFM56-7B (GE/Safran) engines that are being grounded for inspection, but it's not a big population of engines they're inspecting.  Reuters put some numbers in the story.

Ultrasonic inspections on fan blades that have been used in more than 30,000 cycles, or in service for about 20 years, will be required in the next 20 days, the agencies said on Friday. A cycle includes one take-off and landing.

That order will affect about 680 engines globally, including about 350 in the United States, the FAA said. The engine that blew apart on Tuesday’s Southwest flight would have been affected, since the company said it had 40,000 cycles.

680 engines in the world, somewhere between 680 and 340 aircraft, when at any given moment there are 5 to 10,000 aircraft in the air.  The chances of even being on one of those aircraft are vanishingly small. 

Everything that gets made can fail.  System engineers compensate for that by designing systems so that it takes more than a single point failure to take out the system.  If the two failures are truly independent of each other, the probability of both failing is very small. 

Being improbable doesn't mean it can't happen; after all, someone wins the Powerball lotto regularly.  A failure analysis is going on here, and it's a safe bet there will be a change to something.  Perhaps just a change to inspection frequency or methods for the turbine blades or a change to allowed hours of flight; perhaps design changes to the forward part of the CFM56 engines, perhaps something else.  This failure will become less probable.    

Solar Cycle News Update - We're Pretty Much at the Bottom

I surprised myself by going back looking for my regular Solar Cycle News Updates, which I had been doing pretty much every six months, and finding the last time I did one was in February of '16, over two years ago!  The decline has continued and while we're not technically considered to be at solar minimum between cycles 24 and 25, we are practically at solar minium.

NOAA's Space Weather Center shows the observed sunspot number graph at essentially zero.  As always, the red curve is the predicted value, the black curve with a lot of variation in it is the monthly values, and the blue curve is the smoothed monthly values.  We can see that this cycle had two peaks, like the previous (and it's not that unusual).  It's only by going back to earlier posts that you can see that this cycle's smoothed sunspot number was always below the predictions. 

I also usually ran the planetary A index value; a measure of geomagnetic activity, so let me refresh that.  There's no red predicted line, but the black and blue curves mean the same thing.

Today, there's a solar spot complex coming around the limb into view but zero sunspot days are becoming more frequent and will become more frequent as we go forward through 2018 and '19.  There were only three days with sunspots in the past week.

Geek out note - you can skip this paragraph and not miss anything: the sunspot number is not what you think it is.  It's not obtained by taking an image of the sun and counting all the dark spots.  It's a two digit number where the first is ten times the number of spot groups and the second the number of spots.  If there was a single dark spot on the entire earth-facing hemisphere of the sun, the SSN would be 11: one group, one spot.  In general the number is k*(10*G+S). (where G is # of groups, s is # of spots and k is a coefficient for each observatory that helps adjust for differences in their capabilities).

As I've posted before, this is the weakest solar cycle in 100 years, which means no living solar scientist has seen a cycle this weak, and our records of what the sun was doing back then are more sparse than what's available now.  Since no living scientist has seen a cycle this weak, expect all predictions to be even less accurate than usual. 

After saying something like that, it seems like a fool's errand to try to predict the next cycle (although that's never stopped anyone before).  Predictions seem to be uniformly on the low side, from being roughly the same as this cycle to somewhat weaker.  I've read predictions of an SSN of 62 for cycle 25 (compared to 82 for this peak).  Nobody I can find is predicting a strong cycle 25. 

It's probably too early to consider predictions for beyond cycle 25, let's not get like IPCC predictions trying to pin global temperature to tenths of a degree in a hundred years.  You may have seen mention, though, of a prediction that cycle 26 may start another Dalton minimum with no sunspots for perhaps 20 years.  From a 2015 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, Professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University presented results for a new model of the Sun’s interior dynamo system at the meeting that points to the end of the modern active period.

Zharkova and her colleagues (Professor Simon Shepherd of Bradford University, Dr Helen Popova of Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Dr Sergei Zarkhov of Hull University) have found a way to account for the discrepancies [in observed cycles]: a ‘double dynamo’ system.
....
Their predictions using the model suggest an interesting longer-term trend beyond the 11-year cycle. It shows that solar activity will fall by 60 percent during the 2030s, to conditions last seen during the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715. “Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the Sun’s northern and southern hemispheres. Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97 percent,” says Zharkova.

The model predicts that the magnetic wave pairs will become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. Then during Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch, cancelling one another out. This will cause a significant reduction in solar activity. “In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other, peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’,” says Zharkova.

I'm wary of predictions for another Maunder minimum, on general principles.  It was both severe and at the dawn of solar observation.  We simply don't have detailed data of anything at the time.  There was no solar instrumentation comparable to what we had 100 years ago, let alone now; no radio observations, and (of course) no satellites.  Zharkova's team's method uses a technique from Digital Signal Processing, but it still depends on observations and is based on a short sample (three cycles - about 33 years) and while it matches these observations well (97%) I still don't know how well it can be extrapolated over hundreds of year.  Still, even a prolonged minimum that isn't that severe seems like it could be really bad.  It seems any deep sunspot minima correlates with colder temperatures; for example, the Little Ice Age.  Despite what the alarmists say about Global Warming (or whatever they call it this week), mankind has done better in warm periods than in the cold periods in our history (huge pdf alert - but fascinating reading).

As for my fellow hams, contacts on the higher bands (above 20 meters) will get more rare.  Perhaps FT8 and some of those new modes will help activity.  You might consider aiming improvements in your station to lower frequencies.  If you want to DX, that is.