9/11 Never Changes But We Do

It seems to me that my interpretation of and reaction to 9/11 changes every year.  Like everyone, I will always remember where I was and what I was doing the Day the World Changed. Some years ago, I wrote:

On that bright Tuesday morning, I was out of the office at a small company that we contracted to do some testing on our radios.  As the technician and I were setting up the test, the company's secretary/receptionist came in and said the local radio station had a bulletin that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.  My first reaction, perhaps strangely, was that radio navigation systems can't be that wrong, it must have been a terrible accident.  Act of war did not enter my mind.  As the morning went on, a TV set was put in place and large antenna hooked up outside (there are no local over the air TV channels).  We watched the second plane hit and quickly realized this was no accident.  That's when the thoughts of Pearl Harbor and other acts of war started.  I've heard it credited to Ian Fleming as his character Auric Goldfinger, but the saying goes, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."  And so it appeared that day. 

In the days that followed, I learned that friends were affected by the events of 9-11, but weren't directly involved.  A co-worker was on business at Boeing, and had to rent a car to drive home.  A very close friend was waiting at JFK airport to fly home, and saw the attacks in real time.  He also had to rent a car and drive home.  A cousin lives within viewing distance of the Twin Towers and watched it. And now I have friends who have sons in the armed forces in Afghanistan, and others who have been in Iraq.  We need to remember we are at war, even if our enemy isn't a convenient nation-state.  You can pretend we're not at war if you'd like, but if someone swears to destroy you, it's prudent to believe them.

In all, I'm a mix of responses.  The first group of feelz is "remember the fallen", "remember the first responders who ran into the buildings", "remember the dead and wounded servicemen, the ones who came back with missing limbs, or injuries that can't be seen" and "remember their families."  The second group of feelz is along the lines expressed best by Aesop at Raconteur Report in his excellent post in 2018: "Every Day is 9/11. That's Exactly the Problem". 

Despite successes on various battlefields, and serious reductions in the capability of the other side, the fact remains that this is not a fight that's over.  It doesn't even appear to be a fight with a prospect of going away, at least as it's being conducted.  Perhaps Aesop's right and the proper response should have been MIRVs taking out Mecca, Medina and more - turning much of the muslim world to radioactive glass.  As others have said, the other side in this war is determined to play the long game and to destroy Western Civilization.  They've been playing this game for centuries.  Today, look for proof at pretty much all of western Europe, with the one or two exceptions that aren't allowing "refugees."  Or how about Representative Ilhan Omar's view that "some people did something" so she gets to play victim?  The west, mostly led by the postmodernists who are themselves determined to destroy western civilization, don't seem particularly interested in trying to stop the muslims.  Proof?  Look at pretty much all of Western Civilization.

Much like the joke about lawyers, the bad Muslims give the other 1% a bad name.

But we know where talking about carrying out a genocide leads; we have the history of the times it has been tried.  Heck, there are calls now for killing all the whites, and I'm sure if you listened more than I can stomach you'd find calls for the genocide of all sorts of folks.  Without an effort to drastically curtail their efforts to destroy western civilization, this low level fighting against the muslim world will go on for the next 1400 years as it has for the last 1400 - or until they win.  The only times it has slowed in the last 1400 years was when someone ("Charles Martel, Ferdinand of Spain, Vlad The Hero, and the entire interred Knights of Malta" as Aesop put it) responded brutally to brutal attacks.

Then there's the third group of feelz.  That group of feelz thinks that 9/11 was the day the Republic officially died.  That's probably stupidly naive.  That argument can be made going back to FDR, Wilson, and Lincoln.  The USA Patriot Act, the TSA clown circus and all the following laws that have killed civil liberty in the US are simply the ones at the top of the pile and so the most visible.  That group of feelz is just weary of the stories of being involved "over there" for as long as we have.  Stories of peace talks with the freakin' taliban at Camp David, this week of all weeks. 

Condoleeza Rice made an appearance on a couple of talk shows yesterday.  She was one of the brains behind the 9/11 responses, so has to be considered biased, but I want to know what she thinks.  Her point was we've been "involved" in Germany and Japan since the end of WWII - 74 years.  We've been "involved" in South Korea only a few years less.  Why should we think we wouldn't be involved in the Mideast after only 18 years?  It's true the Germans or Japanese don't make killing Americans in their countries a sport, so rewarding that murder by running away will only make it worse.  It will only invite them here.  As if they're not already here.   

In the end, I always think of it by personalizing it.  Imagine you were in those buildings.  It's a normal workday, maybe you had the usual morning rush, getting your kids off to school.  All normal.  You get to work, get settled into your place, start digging into whatever sort of problems your job has you solving.  Just like every other day.  Suddenly, because of a 7th century mandate, as interpreted by a nutjob in a cave half a world away, your building shakes.  Pretty soon it's on fire.  You try for the stairs but can't get there, the stairwell is choked with flames and smoke.  You're trapped.  The fire is getting worse.  There's nobody coming to help you that can give a tiny bit of hope.  The only way out is death.  But staying where you are is being burned to death.  Which way do you take?  Do you burn to death, slowly, agonizingly, or jump and get it over with in one moment, after a long fall to think about it? 

India's Lunar Probe May Still Be Alive

But probably isn't.

Last Friday, India's Vikram lunar lander was on approach to landing near the moon's south pole when contact was lost with the probe near the end of its descent.  India's Space Research Organization (ISRO) reports contact was lost when the probe was 2.1 km (1.3 mi) above its lunar landing site, and they have been attempting to contact the probe since then.  That aside, the mission has been successful: India has successfully placed a world-class, high-performance spacecraft - the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter - into a safe lunar orbit.  The orbiter is unaffected by this and will likely be returning high quality data to Earth for a long life.  It's expected to live seven years.

So far, only the US, Russian, and Chinese space agencies have landed satellites on the moon.

ISRO lost communication with Vikram just 2.1 km above the surface of the Moon. The lander was traveling a bit less than 80 m/s (180 mph), a speed that can be contextualized as ~95% of the way to landing relative to the lunar orbital velocity it started at.

• A minute or so before communication was lost, an ISRO graphic showing the spacecraft's altitude, velocity, and orientation appeared to indicate some major issues with attitude control. The lander appeared to be spinning out of control, perhaps the result of a failure of one of its several landing engines, its attitude thrusters, or avionics mechanisms needed for the craft to orient itself.
• The loss of communication makes it extremely hard to conclude anything with certainty at this stage of the investigation process. The fact that the lander appears to be intact suggests that it could have continued fighting to lower its relative velocity in the final 2.1 km, 

Vikram lander with the Pragyan rover visible on a ramp.  ISRO photo from Ars Technica.

Fascinatingly, rumor has it that the Vikram lander - despite lack of communication and a thoroughly anomalous landing attempt - is actually intact on the surface of the Moon, instilling hope that the lander may still be partially salvageable. According to those unofficial reports, Vikram somehow came to land on the lunar surface with no (or very few) parts visibly missing.

• ISRO reportedly was able to rapidly capture detailed photos of the landing site with its new Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, visually confirming the intact nature of the lander. However, it also showed that Vikram came to a rest on its side or fully upside-down, dramatically increasing the odds that communication will never be restored.

It's a foregone conclusion that if the lander is upside down or even on its side, the planned deployment of its small lunar rover isn't going to happen.  The rover, named Pragyan, ("Wisdom" in Sanskrit) is small and was not expected to survive the lunar night due to not having enough battery capacity to run heaters over the potentially two week long night.  The 27-kg (60 pound), six-wheeled rover was expected to roam up to 500 meters across the Moon.  

ISRO has been trying to contact and hear back from the lander since Friday using the big dishes of NASA's Deep Space Network, never receiving anything from the probe.  This argues that it's very likely to be dead.

All of the indented quotes are from today's Teslarati email newsletter DeepSpace.  I've tried to find something on the Teslarati website that I can link to, but the newsletter doesn't show up. 

The Climate Change Hoax is Worse Than You Thought

There's an article on Watts Up With That, featured at the top for some amount of time that stunned me when I read it.  The article is called, "Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections, Mark II."  Mark I was an article he wrote six years ago and started working to get published in the peer-reviewed science literature; Mark II is the result of six years of revisions.   The author, Pat Frank, is a Ph.D. chemist with the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in Silicon Valley.  As he puts it, with "30 years of publishing in Chemistry" in his background.

The paper that this is based on can be found here , where it can be downloaded; the Supporting Information (SI) is here (7.4 MB pdf).

It goes without saying you should read the whole thing.  As usual, I'll lift some quotes to get you started.

In my prior experience, climate modelers:

did not know to distinguish between accuracy and precision.

did not understand that ... a ±15 C temperature uncertainty is not a physical temperature.

...

confronted standard error propagation as a foreign concept.

did not understand the significance or impact of a calibration experiment.

did not understand the concept of instrumental or model resolution or that it has empirical limits

did not understand physical error analysis at all.

...
Climate modelers are evidently not trained in the scientific method. They are not trained to be scientists. They are not scientists. They are apparently not trained to evaluate the physical or predictive reliability of their own models. They do not manifest the attention to physical reasoning demanded by good scientific practice. In my prior experience they are actively hostile to any demonstration of that diagnosis.
...
In short, climate models cannot predict future global air temperatures; not for one year and not for 100 years. Climate model air temperature projections are physically meaningless. They say nothing at all about the impact of CO₂ emissions, if any, on global air temperatures.
...
From the perspective of physical science, it is very reasonable to conclude that any effect of CO₂ emissions is beyond present resolution, and even reasonable to suppose that any possible effect may be so small as to be undetectable within natural variation. Nothing among the present climate observables is in any way unusual.

The analysis upsets the entire IPCC applecart. It eviscerates the EPA’s endangerment finding, and removes climate alarm from the US 2020 election. There is no evidence whatever that CO₂ emissions have increased, are increasing, will increase, or even can increase, global average surface air temperature.

The analysis is straight-forward. It could have been done, and should have been done, 30 years ago. But was not.
...
All the anguished adults; all the despairing young people; all the grammar school children frightened to tears and recriminations by lessons about coming doom, and death, and destruction; all the social strife and dislocation. All the blaming, all the character assassinations, all the damaged careers, all the excess winter fuel-poverty deaths, all the men, women, and children continuing to live with indoor smoke, all the enormous sums diverted, all the blighted landscapes, all the chopped and burned birds and the disrupted bats, all the huge monies transferred from the middle class to rich subsidy-farmers.

All for nothing.

In a way, author Frank is probably overly optimistic.  Despite evidence of previous papers that should have called a halt to the climate alarmism but were ignored, he's hoping this paper makes a difference.  I hope he's right and some sanity returns to Clown World, but I fear he's not.

When plots of future temperatures are presented, you usually get what's on the left.  A model showing smoothly increasing measured temperatures.  If the uncertainties are included, errors propagated forward in time, and other standard techniques employed, you get the rescaled plot on the right.  The prediction for the temperature at 2100 isn't that global temperature goes up 4 degrees; it's 4 degrees +22 and -15.  When the uncertainty is 10 times your prediction, your prediction isn't worth much.  Plot from the original article at WUWT.  

August 40th in the Swamp

Maybe this is just my weird sense of humor, but today is August 40th and - as is always the case when it gets to the 40th and starts closing in on August 60th - I could use for it to cool off.  This morning, 10:30 local time, I saw this:

So it's 10:30, and the highest temperature is at least four hours away, maybe five hours away.  It's 88 and "feels like" 98.   And the forecast is for it to be cooler than yesterday.  What's that saying about people in hell wanting ice water? 

SpaceX Posts Results of Crew Dragon Explosion Inquiry

To be honest, I missed this story back in July.  Strangely, I've gone to a couple of space-related websites (Space.com and Spaceflight Now, IIRC) looking for details on the failure investigation, but didn't find anything until bouncing around like a ping pong ball last night landed me on the website Teslarati.  Teslarati seems to be an "all things related to Elon Musk" site, possibly by, for and about fanboys.  I had to sign up for the site to read it, but it was worth giving my email address up for this.

Teslarati sums up a July conference call about the explosion this way.

Hosted by SpaceX Vice President of Mission Assurance Hans Koenigsmann and NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Kathy Lueders, the call provided some minor additional insight beyond a fairly extensive press release issued just prior. According to the preliminary results from SpaceX’s failure investigation, Crew Dragon’s explosion was unrelated to the spacecraft’s propellant tanks, Draco maneuvering thrusters, or SuperDraco abort engines. Rather, the cause lies in a more exotic and unanticipated chemical/material interaction between a plumbing valve, liquid oxidizer, and a helium-based pressurization system.

The problem caused Nitrogen Tetroxide, a very potent oxidizer, to ignite a titanium valve, leading to the explosion that destroyed the crew dragon capsule and part of the ground support hardware.

In more detail:

The ultimate (likely) cause of Crew Dragon’s extremely energetic and destructive explosion centers around the spacecraft’s extensive SuperDraco/Draco plumbing and its associated pressurization system, which uses helium to keep the pressure-fed engines, propellant tanks, and feed lines around 2400 psi (16.5 megapascals). Necessarily, this method of pressurization means that there is direct contact between the pressurant (helium) and the oxidizer/fuel, thus requiring some sort of valve preventing the pressurized fluid from flowing into the pressurization system. 

During flight-proven Crew Dragon capsule C201’s April 20th static fire testing, that is reportedly exactly what happened. Over the course of ground testing, a “check valve” separating the pressurization system and oxidizer leaked what SpaceX described as a “slug” of nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer (NTO) into the helium pressurization lines. Around T-100 milliseconds to a planned ignition of the vehicle’s 8 SuperDraco abort engines, the pressurization system rapidly “initialized” (i.e. quickly pressurized the oxidizer and fuel to operational pressures, ~2400 psi).

To do this, helium is rapidly pushed through a check valve – designed with low-molecular-mass helium in mind – to physically pressurize the propellant systems. Unintentionally, the NTO that leaked ‘upstream’ through that valve effectively was taken along for the ride with the high-pressure burst of helium. In essence, picture that you crash your car, only to discover that your nice, fluffy airbag has accidentally been replaced with a bag of sand, and you might be able to visualize the unintended forces Dragon’s check valve (the metaphorical airbag) was subjected to when a “slug” of dense oxidizer was rammed into it at high speed.

The article mentions that the investigation had gone through 80% of their fault tree, which raises the possibility this is not the final word.  Another contributor may be found and the final report may be more nuanced, but it's hard to see how this titanium fire isn't a very large part of the reason for the explosion even if not the only reason. 

A view of the titanium plumbing for the Draco and Super Draco thrusters.  This is the capsule that will now fly SpaceX’s In-Flight Abort test.

As I understand it, titanium fires are much like magnesium fires in that once they're started they don't go out on their own.  Oxidizer has to be removed by covering the titanium with sand or something that completely blocks out the oxidizer, not an option in this situation. 

In itself, this sort of failure mode is not hugely surprising and SpaceX may have even been aware of some sort of check valve leak(s) and accepted what it believed to be a minor risk in order to continue the test and perhaps examine Dragon’s performance under suboptimal conditions. What SpaceX says it did not realize was just how energetic the reaction between the NTO and the check valve could be. SpaceX’s understanding is that the high-speed slug of dense NTO was traveling so fast and at such a high pressure that, by impacting the titanium check valve, it quite literally broke the valve and may have chemically ignited the metal, thus introducing a slug of burning NTO into the liberated NTO system itself – effectively a match tossed into a powder keg.

Given this scenario, even if not 100% finalized, SpaceX has a workaround for the crew dragon.  A quick and relatively easy redesign. 

Either way, the solution – as SpaceX perceives it – is the same: instead of a mechanical check valve (simple but still not 100% passive), the barrier between pressurant and oxidizer (as well as fuel, most likely) will be replaced with something known as a burst disk. According to Koenigsmann, only a handful (~4) of those valves exist and thus need to be replaced by burst disks, a relatively fast and easy fix.

I think it needs to be pointed out that, as I mentioned in a May update, the Draco/Super Draco thrusters had been extensively tested before this explosion.  In my mind, that means the burst disk fix is under-tested compared to the previous design.  There's no mention of how that will affect the schedule.

I got the link to this article by tracking down another story that SpaceX did a "routine static test firing" of the booster they intend to use to launch the Crew Dragon's first manned flight, expected no earlier than "early 2020".  Before that, the abort test on the Crew Dragon which will test their new burst disk design will be carried out.   

Swedish Climate Craziness - or We're Being Punked

It's hard to take the climate craziness from the 700 hour CNN climate scold-a-thon seriously.  It was a continuous series of one member of the clown posse after the next trying to prove they were the most serious about it and the most radical. 

Then I ran into the story about the Swedish "scientist" who says we need to overcome the taboos about cannibalism and eat the freshly dead to combat climate change.

At a summit for food of the future (the climate-ravaged future) called Gastro Summit, in Stockholm Sept 3-4, a professor held a powerpoint presentation asserting that we must “awaken the idea” of eating human flesh in the future, as a way of combatting the effects of climate change.

In a talk titled “Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh?” behavioral scientist and marketing strategist Magnus Söderlund from “Handelshögskolan” (College of Commerce) argues for the breaking down of the ancient taboos against desecrating the human corpse and eating human flesh.

At least Booty Judge, Kneepads Harris, Fauxcahontas, and the rest of the clowns just want to ban plastic straws, hamburgers, cars, cattle farming, air travel, the internal combustion engine, petroleum use and pretty much all of the rest of modern society.  It's just like Agenda 21, as really envisioned; they want policies that will kill off 95% of humanity.  We've talked about this before, but it has been several years.  Aside from Magnus Söderlund they haven't talked about wiping out 5000 years of human history.

“Is Cannibalism the solution to food sustainability in the future? Does Generation Z have the answers to our food challenges? Can consumers be tricked into making the right decisions?At GastroSummit you will get some answers to these questions—and also partake in the latest scientific findings and get to meet the leading experts.”

Söderlund seemed incapable of separating the nearly universal prohibitions against eating human flesh from what he called conservatism, despite only about 8% of the audience at his Gastro Summit talks saying they would taste human flesh. I'd expect more than 8% yes answers if rejecting the idea is a conservative principle. 

When asked if he himself would try it, he replies: “I feel somewhat hesitant but to not appear overly conservative… I’d have to say… I’d be open to at least tasting it.”

The logo for the talk, titled: “Food Of The Future: Worms, Grasshoppers, or Human Flesh,” features a splash of blood as part of the graphic design.

I'm not sure what to make of this story, like whether the guy is just a nutjob, if he's punking the world to get into the worldwide news cycle, or what.  There's (again) millennia of human experience saying cannibalism is a bad thing to do.  (I can see the public service announcements: “Cannibalism - it's not just a taboo, it's bad for you!”)  The author at Epoch Times, Celia Farber, brings up New Guinea cannibals called the Fore who lived in isolation until the 1930s.

[The Fore] believed in eating their dead rather than allowing them to be consumed by worms. This led to an epidemic of a disease called “kuru, or “the laughing death,” caused by ingestion of human meat. This disease was not caused by a pathogen, but rather, a “twisted protein,” (according to an NPR report) that tricks “other proteins in the brain to twist like it, damaging the brain’s cerebellum. Researchers compared it to Dr. Jekyll’s transformation. The last victim of kuru died in 2009.

When a 16 year old, autistic child (that Greta Thunberg kid) carries on about nonsense like climate change causing the end of all food and the end of the world, I think it's not worth trying to straighten out her misconceptions.  There's a reason we don't let 16 year olds enter into legal contracts and make other important decisions; they're not sophisticated enough.  In her case, her brain isn't sophisticated enough to understand the data-driven arguments against the climate change catastrophism.  When it's an adult, and Ph.D. like this Dr. Söderlund, that's different.  He's probably capable of understanding, he's just deliberately deciding to let someone else think for him.  Stated another way, deciding to remain ignorant.  In the case of the clown car, they're just interested in how much control and power over the world they can have.  They're each trying to be more extreme than the others so they can get all the money and power.  And then kill off the rest of us.

Magnus Söderlund (source)

Water Filters Compared

Most of us have water filters for use in the event of Bad Things that might require bugging out.  Perhaps filters for when you're out in the woods, hunting or even just hiking and don't want to lug gallons of water in and out.  Even bugging in - staying locked in your house - can require the use of filters if the infrastructure goes down or isn't well maintained.  After the 2004 hurricanes, we were on boil water advisories for a couple of days, but it's not just then.  We've had water mains break and the pressure go down at random times without the S getting remotely near the Fan, let alone hitting it.  One time, Mrs. Graybeard was in the local hospital and the city lost a water main, rendering all of the water sources in the hospital unsafe.  I bought a diet Coke, patients had nothing to drink! 

Like many of you, I get notices from a few gun/outdoor/survival related companies calling attention to a big project they've done or a blog post they're proud of.  Ordinarily, I don't post these because I prefer to deliver content everyone else can't, doesn't or won't.  Today, though, I got a link to a water filter test and evaluation from Widener's, the shooting and reloading company. 

Without a doubt, this is the most thorough and well-documented set of tests I've ever seen.  I looked up some good names, that we have, and was concerned about some of the results I saw.

The testing group worked with BCS Laboratories, an accredited water testing facility in Gainesville, Florida, to get quantitative results.  They sent water from three sample locations to the lab for assays of bacteria, viruses, and cysts. Then sent sent water from the seventeen filters they tested in to see how well they filtered. 

Go read.  Long, but worth looking at.

My After Action Review on Dorian

The storm missed us by a wide margin, turning north farther east than originally expected and staying well offshore.  The local NWS said we got 0.76" of rain yesterday and 0.37" today.  Let's assume it was all from Dorian, and say we got 1.13".  The highest wind measured at the airport in two days was 38mph and the highest gust was 51.  We were under hurricane warnings through early morning today, which means conditions of sustained 75 mph or greater winds were expected.  The last forecast graphic I have for our area predicted winds from 75 to 110 mph.

As a result, it's hard to assess an After Action Review because there really was no action.  Yes, we took down antennas, put up shutters, made sure batteries were charged and ice was on hand, but that's routine prep stuff.  We never needed the flashlights, batteries or the ice.  Our generator never came on.  It was just a quiet day here. 

On the other hand, it's very easy to get cocky over hurricanes and warnings when they're consistently alarmist and, frankly, wrong in critical predictions.  That could lead to people not paying attention when they need to and with this storm, we needed to pay attention.  As Dorian closed in on the Bahamas, it became one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic.  Winds were 185 mph sustained with gusts to 200.  The storm moved at an incredibly slow 1mph over Abaco and then stalled over Grand Bahama Island; DiveMedic at Confessions of a Street Pharmacist posts a pair of  commercial satellite photos of the destruction on Grand Bahama, and they are mind-boggling.  I combined those two images into this one.  It looks like Grand Bahama has been reduced to about 1/3 the amount of dry land it used to be. 

Everything that's outlined in yellow in upper portion of the bottom picture is land that's no longer there.  All of those light lines in the upper right of the bottom view represent streets and residential areas that don't exist.  I know the official death toll has been announced at 20, it's just hard to imagine that only 20 people would have been lost in that kind of devastation. 

Since then, I've found a larger scale image on NPR that overlays the two views at identical scales - these views are slightly different scales.

Government at all levels seems to say "when in doubt, evacuate", but that assumes there's no cost to evacuating which is never true.  I'm talking not just about the cost of gas, and hotel rooms, but also disruption to work.  What if the people don't have a car they could trust to drive long distances?  What if they don't own a car at all?  In this storm, it was possible for people on the east coast to evacuate to the west coast, but there aren't many routes across the state; just more routes than going north out of the state.  The worst thing that could happen might be getting stuck in your broken down car as the storm builds around you. 

The same atmospheric changes that pushed Dorian away from us are what caused it to stall and wipe out Grand Bahama (explained in great detail here).  It's unfortunately usually true with these storms that any change that's better for one location is worse for another.  The stall caused the storm to stir up the water underneath it so that a cold water upwelling occurred, which started sapping the storm's strength and the winds started dying down.  Essentially there were two competing weather systems, one wanting to steer it north and one trying to push it south.  The steering winds canceled each other out causing it to stall.  An approaching upper level low pushed the system on the west side south allowing the northward motion to start, and the ULL is now pushing Dorian near the Carolinas. 

Post Mortem on my Lightning Strike

A little over a month ago, we were blasted awake by an extremely loud blast of thunder and within a couple of hours realized we had the worst damage we'd ever had from lightning and a lot was damaged.  As the weeks have gone by we discovered more of what was damaged and now think we've found everything.  We've have been able to fix some things, replace some, get some serviced and are still working on a few others.  This is still going to take a while. 

While we experienced damage to a few things elsewhere in the house, the most damage was in the ham shack.  The control box for my antenna rotator blew out, taking out the computer it was attached to, and the computer took out the radio it was attached to (at least on that one function).  One antenna showed up as open, the other two are fine.  Finally, the big thing, I have a linear power amplifier that won't turn on.  I've taken that apart to pull out the power supply for more troubleshooting.  When I found the part that I think is blown in the radio, I realized it's in a specialized package I'm not really set up to work on.  (It's in a 36 pin QFN, drjim)  I opted to send the radio for factory service.  Those guys wince when they have to replace those. 

Since then, I've been trying to figure out exactly what happened.  I have a small tower by many ham's standards, just 20 feet tall with a mast that gets that up to 26.  Many people would assume the tower was struck, since the damage focused on things in or on the tower, yet there's no damage apparent to it. 

Off to the tower's northwest is an oak tree that's now in the range of 35 to 40 feet tall, so quite a bit taller than the tower.  To its south are a couple of palm trees that are close to 30 feet tall and to its southwest is a maple tree that 's also in that 35 to 40' tall range, too. 

I've seen pictures of trees that have been hit by lightning and I've looked at the oak for signs it was hit - the bark splitting or blown off the trunk.  The tree showed no apparent damage.  Sunday, while putting up the shutters for Dorian, I found myself standing over near those two palm trees.  That's when I noticed interesting, telltale signs on the bark.

There are four or five trails from the top to the bottom of the tree.  More or less straight along the entire trunk, each looking blown out from the inside.  It wasn't until we were done with the shutters that I paid more attention and looked up to where the palm fronds grow out vertically (fronds would be called leaves on any other tree); I noticed one was bent over nearly double near the top of the tree.

The stem portion of the frond (circled in red) appears broken and even blown apart.  It looks like the palm took the lightning strike, and induced a strong current in the tower, which is about 25' away. 

I had taken down my antennas on Saturday and inspected the damaged antenna, finding no evidence of damage.  On the other hand, I hadn't taken apart the part most likely to be damaged, a transformer.  I was more interested in getting it sealed well so that when the storm is over I could look into it.  I capped the connector on the cable that attaches to the antenna and sealed it against the rain.  Today, with the storm looking less and less like a threat and with time available, I attached the cable to the bad antenna to my analyzer.  My reasoning is that I know the cable is open now, so if disconnecting the cable from the antenna didn't change the results I must have substituted one open for another.  Today's plot looked exactly like my last plot of the blown antenna. 

The antenna analyzer has a function that will tell you the distance to an open or a short on a bad length of cable.  That function told me the trouble was 8.9 feet from the instrument.  I realized that meant it was inside the room, and I quickly realized what it was.  I had a surge protector where the cable enters the house, attached to my heavy ground wire.  It was blown.

Replacing the Alpha Delta Transi-Trap with a dual female connector made the instrument tell me the open circuit was now 56 feet away, which is close enough to how long the cable is.  As luck would have it, I have a replacement surge protector (probably better quality than this one) from a company that got out of that business. 

Lightning causing damage by inducing current in a nearby conductor might well be the most common type of damage there is.  Lightning strikes vary in their current, but currents ranging from tens of thousands of amps to well over a hundred thousand amps have been studied.  Like an electrical transformer, current surging through a conductor (of sorts) like a tree induces current to flow in other conductors nearby.  How large that current is depends largely on the distance.  It can be coupled by the magnetic or electric field.  I think the current flowing in my radio tower induced currents in power lines in the walls which flowed around the house.  We had concluded earlier in the aftermath that things with long wires attached were more likely to be damaged.  It all adds up.

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

Chinese Dissidents Side with Trump in the "Trade War"

Free Pressers presents the story of Chinese dissidents, both inside and outside of the country, tend to support President Trump standing up to the communist government in China.  The article focuses on the views of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng.  Chen is currently a member of the faculty of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and a distinguished senior fellow in human rights at the Witherspoon Institute.  He was imprisoned in 2006 after organizing a campaign against the forced abortions carried out under China’s one-child policy.  

On April 22, 2012, Chen, a blind legal activist, escaped from house arrest in his home village of Dongshigu in eastern China’s Shandong province. Activist friends got him to Beijing and he eventually found his way into the U.S. embassy. Most of his escape was accomplished on a broken leg.

“As the world watches President Trump wage a protracted trade war with China, many people are scratching their heads, wondering if he knows what he’s doing when it comes to my home country,” Chen wrote.

“Trump is regularly criticized for being unpredictable and erratic — praising Chinese President Xi Jinping one moment, then escalating the confrontation the next — for ignoring diplomatic conventions, and for upending a tense but supposedly workable economic relationship.

“But as someone who has spent years with the knife edge of the Chinese Communist Party bearing down on my throat for my human rights work, I know that the president is on to something.”

 In August, Chen Guangcheng wrote in August 30th op-ed for the Washington Post:

“Most activists agree that civilized talks behind closed doors have never elicited concessions from the CCP. The only way to make progress is by landing pointed blows, particularly against the party elites and their bank accounts (which are reliant on party-owned, nepotistic, monopolist companies).”
...
“Presidents before Trump naively believed that China would abide by international standards of behavior if it were granted access to institutions like the World Trade Organization and generally treated as a ‘normal’ country. But that path proved mistaken, and Beijing ignored Western pressure on matters from human rights to the widespread theft of intellectual property. Trump, whatever his flaws, grasps this reality,” Chen wrote.

“Unlike many of his predecessors in the White House, Trump appears to understand innately the hooliganism and brutality at the heart of the CCP. He comprehends that — whether in the realm of trade, diplomacy or international order — dictatorships do not commonly play by the rules of democratic nations. While past administrations have curried favor with the CCP (“appeasement” is not too strong a word), Trump has made excising the party’s growing corrosion of U.S. society — from business and the media to education and politics — a focus.”

It's an interesting article with perspectives I haven't seen elsewhere and my tendency is to think people from the inside have a much more detailed and nuanced view about situations than reporters, even subject matter experts.  Having suffered at the hands of the CCP, Chen is able to see details economic reporters won't see.

I haven't said much on the so-called trade war with China, and while I prefer and believe in free and fair trade, we are light years from that and can't get there from here.  It's simply not possible to play that game unless both sides are committed to being fair.  In the game of international trade and tariffs, the US has been a patsy.  An American car going to China pays 25% import duty, but a car from China coming to the US only pays 2.5%!  One tenth of the duty for the Chinese exporter.  Is that fair and free trade?  Add to that this tweet from Elon Musk, who also points out,

Also, no US auto company is allowed to own even 50% of their own factory in China, but there are five 100% China-owned EV auto companies in the US.

One of the things that got Trump elected is that voters who have been called every insult imaginable for as long as they can recall saw that he was a fighter.  Back in early 2016, John Robb at Global Guerillas wrote a piece about this and focused on Trump doing old-fashioned, New York construction worker-style ball-busting. 

 "From the start, Trump targeted the (mostly) white working class, which happens to be 40 percent of the country. And he’s done it not just with issues, but with how he talks — the ball-busting, the “bragging,” the over-the-top promises...

But it speaks volumes — whole encyclopedias — about the ignorance of our political and media elites that they’re only now realizing that much of what Trump’s been doing is just busting balls.  It’s a blue-collar ritual, with clear rules — overtly insulting, sure, but with infinite subtleties. It can be a test of manliness, a sign of respect, a way of bonding and much more.

It seems the Chinese dissidents think that busting balls isn't just a ritual of unionized construction workers from the Bronx or Brooklyn; it's a requirement for dealing with the Chinese Communist Party.  They needed someone with a pair of bricks to slam together on the CCP's collective balls and Trump is the guy.

Chen Guangcheng from Free Pressers.

Google is Not Just Going After 2A Sites

They're not just trying to shut down responsible pro-2A voices.  They're going after anything that has to do with liberty and freedom of choice.

A couple of weeks ago, I reported on a story that the single biggest correlation with living past 100, supercentenarianism, was living in a place that didn't have birth certificates and documentation of age.  Studies of these people found no correlations with the conventional wisdom we're all fed, such as following the Mediterranean Diet, consumption of red wine, legumes, or constant walking built into their lives.  The biggest correlation was pension fraud, not health effects.

This week, the story shifts to Google.  The story went by in the news that Google was going after "alternative health" sites and directing web searches away from them to the conventional medical sites.  This week we get some numbers posted by Robb Wolf on Instagram, via the same source as the previous story, Mark Sisson's weekly email.
 

You will note that traffic to Robb Wolf's site is down 89.89%, while traffic to Mark Sisson's Mark's Daily Apple is down 65.86%, and the only two health sites with increases as presented here are WebMD and the Mayo Clinic - the conventional medical establishment personified. 

Google is in that strange position of being such a strong brand that their name has become the alternate verb for "to search", so the way they're shunting traffic around these voices is going to drive some of these small businesses out of business.  I know a few of these sites, though not all, but that's not the point.  Why does Google get to decide who stays in business and who doesn't?

Mark Sisson puts his corporate view like this:

Some of this is due to Google weighting their algorithms toward "expert" advice, toward opinions and articles written by people with MDs and PhDs after their names. I've tried to overcome this by changing the way I cite research. I've always cited and linked to tons of medical studies, far more than the "experts" like Mayo Clinic and WebMD ever have, but now I'm actually listing a "References" section with those proper citations in the proper academic format. You've probably noticed. It's helped a bit, but the drop-off has been larger than this can account for.

In my opinion, this development just means that people like me and Robb are over the target. We're a threat, and institutions are worried. We've already had a huge effect on the way people eat, live and exercise. Grandmas are going keto. Grandpas are doing CrossFit. Your kid's school teacher is IFing. Large multinational food corporations are buying boutique avocado oil-based mayo brands for large sums of money. It's an interesting time. Conventional institutions are feeling the heat, and this might be one way to try to stem the tide.

You see it in the big, concerted, coordinated effort to push fake meat substitutes, switch the entire world over to a diet consisting of half a burger a week, and promote silly conspiracies like keto crotch—often all involving the same players.

I'm not saying it's nefarious, but it's very curious. 

If there's a nefarious aspect, it's that across everything we see about them, Google seems to be behaving in such a way that cries out for regulators to crack down on them.  This is something that big companies like because they have the resources to meet the expenses that the laws cause, while smaller competitors are less able to.  It's sometimes referred to as the successful "closing the door behind themselves."   

Let's put it this way: consider a small startup that has come up with some sort of search algorithms that can threaten Google.  Do you think Google would return the potential Google-killer in searches? 

Temporary Reprieve - Latest on Dorian

I've long had a saying while keeping track of hurricane forecasts, "the models giveth and the models taketh away".  For about a day, the forecast landfall moved south of us from the location plotted Wednesday, down to south Florida - somewhere around Palm Beach to Jupiter.  Then the models reeled that back and started moving the path closer to us, went past us and is now well offshore.  The models gave, took it back, then gave something different.

So I don't want to say we don't need to pay attention, but the models and forecasts have been bringing the turn to the north earlier in time by about a day, with the result that the storm appears to be passing us well to sea.  The latest forecast plot.

We're still in the Cone of Doom, just south of the bump on the East Coast - Cape Canaveral.  A tropical storm watch comes within 25 miles south of the house and it's reasonable to expect it to extend farther north tomorrow, but I don't bother with shutters for a tropical storm.  My current plan is to get a good look at the morning plots and decide if the shutters go up in the morning.  What I'll be looking for is if the cone shifts left tomorrow.  The path has been looking like this since this morning, and the various models almost all reflect it staying offshore and perhaps offshore the entire US. 

This is when we say, "you don't let your guard down until it's about a thousand miles past your location".  It has been hard to forecast so far, and that doesn't fill me with confidence. 

The plot of arrival time of tropical storm winds looks to be Monday morning, perhaps as early as 8AM, so any time tomorrow would be good to put up the shutters.  Being August, it's pretty hot when you don't get a cloud, so either up early or late in the day. 

Today, I took down my antennas.  The entire installation needs to be examined and a handful of problems from the lightning strike need to be troubleshot and fixed.  My antenna projects always begin with the phrase "when it cools down", which is typically by early November (but can be earlier), and that had been my plan.  Only one antenna was unusable and looked bad with my network (antenna) analyzer (current model) and since I have other antennas, I'm not completely off the air, I already found a problem I didn't even know I had. 

So here we are, in the midst of a temporary reprieve, hoping it becomes a permanent reprieve.  Over in the Bahamas, they're preparing for up to 24 hours of category 4 winds.  Honestly, pray for folks there.  From what I know, I'd be surprised to see much standing there by the time the storm clears out. 

Generating Electricity With Rust

I have to admit I've never heard of this, and the potential is mind-boggling.  Maybe because I come from a state where humidity is one of our major exports, and humidity brings rust.  Maybe because I live in an area where the salt air corrodes away almost anything left outdoors, like aluminum window and screen frames.

Machine Design had short feature piece at the end of last month, about utilizing rust covered iron to generate electricity.

New research conducted by chemists at Caltech and Northwestern University shows that thin films of rust (iron oxide) can generate electricity when saltwater flows over them. These films represent an entirely new way of generating electricity and could be used to develop new forms of sustainable power production.

Interactions between metal compounds and saltwater often generate electricity, but this is usually the result of a chemical reaction in which one or more compounds are converted to new compounds. These reactions are like those at work inside batteries.

In contrast, the new phenomenon discovered by Tom Miller, a chemistry professor at Caltech, and Franz Geiger, a chemistry professor at Northwestern, does not involve chemical reactions. Instead it converts the kinetic energy of flowing saltwater into electricity.

The phenomenon is called the electrokinetic effect, and has been observed before in thin films of graphene.  Briefly, the mechanism involves ions sticking to the surface of the rusty iron (adsorption) and then detaching from that surface (desorption).  Saltwater is pumped across the panel.  Positive (sodium) ions in the saltwater are attracted to electrons in the iron beneath the layer of rust. As the saltwater flows, so do those ions, and through the electric attraction, they drag the electrons in the iron along with them, generating an electrical current.

It's about 30% efficient at converting kinetic energy into electricity.  That's more efficient than photovoltaic cells, which practically seem to be around 25%, but I don't know if you can directly compare those.  The article, however gives us a direct comparison to bear in mind. 

“For perspective, plates measuring 10 square meters each would generate a few kilowatts per hour, enough for a standard U.S. home,” says Miller. “Of course, less demanding applications, including low-power devices in remote locations, are better candidates for this power source in the near term.” 

Recall that the power from solar radiation hitting a solar cell is typically 1.2 kW per square meter, and 25% (1/4) efficiency says to get that 1.2 kW we need four square meters.  10 square meters of photovoltaics (PV) could be budgeted for 3 kW, so those areas aren't really that different.  From what I can tell, the electrokinetic power isn't limited to daylight hours on clear days, so they could generate electricity on rainy days or all night, which is a clear advantage over photovoltaics.

Naturally, there's more to this.  The rust covered panels aren't made by sticking sheet steel in the backyard to rust, they need to be manufactured.  This is not a bad thing, and still compares to the silicon PV cells which need manufacturing of the cells and manufacturing of the cells into panels.

Though rust forms on iron alloys on its own, the team needed to ensure it formed in a consistently thin layer. To do that, they used physical vapor deposition (PVD), which turns normally solid materials (in this case, iron) into a vapor that condenses on a desired surface. PVD let the team create an iron layer 10 nanometers thick. After taking the metal film out of the PVD machine, rust formed spontaneously in air to a thickness of about 2 nanometers.

When the researchers flowed saltwater solutions of varying concentrations over the rust-coated iron, they found that it generated several tens of millivolts and several microamps per square centimeter.

The article doesn't quote any figures on the costs of systems.  A system seems like it would need a pump, a way to get it all started, and some electronics.  For the moment, they're emphasizing off-grid applications.  Some of them very off grid.  Like say, our bodies.  Our bloodstream is largely saltwater with some lumpy stuff (blood cells) in it; what if that saltwater could be used to power an implant? 

The paper describing their findings, titled "Energy Conversion via Metal Nanolayers," appears in the July 29 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A rusty old ship on the Aran Islands, Co. Galway (source).  Don't think that all ya gotta do is drag it in the ocean to generate electricity. 

Well That Got Ugly In a Hurry

In the space of a few hours, Dorian went from being forecast to be overhead at 2PM on Sunday as a tropical storm to being a Major Hurricane a little north of here and making landfall Sunday night.  Right now, they're forecasting it as a major hurricane, which means category 3 or above, passing overhead early on Labor Day.  Some of the models have it reaching category 4.

So far the models have gotten a lot wrong.  Here's yesterday's 5PM Atlantic Standard Time forecast.  The red line is where I drew in the actual path (as I can tell from Puerto Rico's NOAA weather radar).  The forecast was to pass over the SW corner of PR; in real life it went to the NE of the island and never made landfall - out of the white cone of uncertainty.  Epic fail.  Which is not what you want to see when you're planning your life based on their predictions.

We're still in the stippled area at five days and if it's not accurate one day in advance, five days is pretty hopeless.  The progression of uncertainty is ordinarily quoted at 100 miles per day, so that by five days, the total is 500 miles.  Which is pretty much what the map shows.  From the upper keys to South Georgia is in the uncertainty area.

For contrast, here's the 8PM update of that prediction, just posted moments ago.

You'll notice no real difference in where it crosses the coast, just the symbol going from S for tropical storm to M for major hurricane.  The models are updated two or three times a day, depending on who's running the models.  Many update at midnight and noon UTC, which correspond to 7PM and 7AM.  The trend in the models has been drifting south, and if that continues, we could be off the hook, but the official forecast isn't showing it. 

We're essentially ready to put up shutters and prepare, but we'll be watching the updates until it's apparent we need to do that, Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning.  I think I've spent a couple of years of my life watching storms like this and trying to see what they're going to do. 

Let me close with a meme that I stole from Miguel down at Gun Free Zone, because it's truth.

Another Obama-era EPA Ruling Shut Down

Back in 2015, Obama's EPA issued a rewrite of the Clean Waters Act of 1986 to give the agency more control over our lives.  The Clean Waters Act initially limited the federal government to regulating the “navigable waters of the United States”; waters like the Ohio, Mississippi or Colorado Rivers, or the Great Lakes.  In 1986 the EPA expanded that definition to seize control over tributaries and adjacent wetlands. They've now expanded the law to introduce the concept of a “significant nexus to a navigable waterway”.

The concept behind this is an example of the worst kind of junk science that agency detractors despise.  In a 2013 article on the New American, they talk about the paper the EPA was using as justification.  The paper, which was not peer reviewed at the time, said all the waters in the world are connected.  This gave them the authority to say a puddle on your property or a stream that only carries water for a short period in a year can eventually end up in the "navigable waters of the United States".

In September, the EPA issued a draft scientific study purporting to find that virtually all wetlands and streams are “physically, chemically, and biologically connected” to downstream waters over which the EPA already claims authority. Moreover, says the EPA study, even many “ephemeral streams” and “prairie potholes, vernal pools and playa lakes” that are dry most of the year can be found to have some connectivity to downstream waters.

According to Legal Insurrection blog, the so-called Waters of the US ruling was shelved by US District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood last week.

More than nine months after the last hearing in the case, and nearly nine months to the day of the briefing deadline for that hearing, U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood handed a victory to the state of Georgia and nine other states that sued the federal government over the Obama administration’s 2015 Waters of the United States Rule.

Wood stated that the rule, which was intended to provide better protection of the nation’s water, violated the Clean Water Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, and she remanded it back to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers for further work.

She wrote that while the agencies have authority to interpret the phrase “waters of the United States,” that authority isn’t limitless, and therefore their decisions in doing so do not fall under what’s called Chevron deference, a matter of case law in which — for lack of a better phrase — the tie goes to the agency.

Readers may recall hearing that implementation of the rule led to a Wyoming farmer being fined $37,500 a day for constructing a stock pond on his own property.  The farmer eventually won his case against the EPA in 2016.

So while Judge Wood ruled sensibly, the EPA act is still alive just bleeding out.  To begin with, the ruling only affects the states that are parties to the case she ruled on — Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia. (Wisconsin was a party to the suit but dropped out in April.)  There are other cases going through other courts that may use this precedent but may not.  Second, as it says above, she sent the law back to the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to define things better.  The ultimate answer is this needs to go back to congress to give a better definition for the Clean Waters Act.

Interestingly, U.S. Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) and U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) recently introduced the “Define WOTUS Act,” which reasserts Congressional responsibility to define what the term, “Waters of the United States,” actually means.

“The Obama-era WOTUS rule threatened Iowa’s farmers, manufacturers, and small businesses by giving the federal government authority to regulate water on 97 percent of land in our state,” said U.S. Senator Joni Ernst. “President Trump and his administration have taken tremendous steps to roll back this far-reaching regulation and provide for more certainty with a new, clearer definition of WOTUS. But it’s the job of Congress to make a new, reasonable definition permanent, and that’s what this bill does—it ensures more predictability and workability for Iowans for years to come.”

Dry river bed in Arizona, from Shutterstock. According to the EPA, this is "the waters of the US" and subject to their regulation. The scary part is this makes more sense than other waters they claim.

Monitoring the House

We don't have a smart house in the sense that term is used these days.  No self-bugging features like Alexa or the Nest thermostat.  We do, monitor though.  We have some simple wireless thermometers that we use to keep track of the spare refrigerator (which is old and barely still cooling), and the big freezer.  We can read those temperatures from the kitchen.  We have several of the so-called Atomic Clocks which include a temperature sensor in them, so we can look at the temperature in every room if we walk into the room.  We have a digital thermometer that can monitor the temperature where it's positioned.  Plus we have some of the ubiquitous cameras, a smart doorbell and so on.

When we had our lightning strike back on August 1st, among the very first things we found was blown was our central air conditioning thermostat, and it was the first thing we called in to get fixed.  It was repaired within a few hours on the 1st.  It wasn't long after getting that repaired that I started to notice I wasn't as comfortable as I had been in the house.  I felt like it was damper and that I was sweating more than I had been.

The new thermostat is different from our old one in some ways I don't like.  The first thing is that my old thermostat had a setpoint that behaved in a way that I'd gotten used to: the cooling would come on when the temperature reached two degrees higher than its setpoint, the air would cool until it returned to the setpoint and then would turn off.  By contrast the new thermostat triggers as soon as it senses the temperature has gone up one degree - the controls theory term for that is less hysteresis.  The other thing is an annoyance: I could tell by looking at the old thermostat from a few rooms a way that the unit was on by a green LED, and the temperature display had a low level illumination so I could read it at night without turning on a light.  The new one has no indicator light and the panel won't even light to read the temperature without pushing a button.

I spent several hours over the last couple of weeks reading the manual and searching online to see if the central air having a different On/Off hysteresis could make it feel more humid, or if I could change the hysteresis at the thermostat.  No results.  In addition to that we've been setting a temperature and checking it primarily on the clock in our bedroom.  With the old thermostat, we'd find that the temperature in our room was usually two degrees warmer than the thermostat setting.  Lately, the temperature was four degrees higher and some results said it didn't matter what we set the thermostat to achieve, it was always four or five degrees higher.

Around noon, Mrs. Graybeard concocted a brilliant impromptu experiment.  She took the digital thermometer and put it on top of the thermostat.  The thermostat was set to 76.  After a little while to acclimate, the second thermometer read 80.  We experimented with that by changing the thermostat several times.  The comparison thermometer always reads four degrees higher once the cooler turns off and the system fully shuts down.

We did this all day.  The main complication I can think of is embedded in the old proverb: a man with two watches never knows what time it is.  Which one is right?  Time for a double check with a completely independent sensor: an old model FLIR One infrared camera for my not-quite-as-old iPhone.  This evening with the thermostat set to 74 the FLIR read the temperature at that location at 78.3.  Case closed. 

The thermostat is not really controlling to the set temperature.  Is this another one of those EPA rules like water temperature in the washing machine or dishwasher? 

This would explain the difference in my comfort level.  I spent another half hour or hour today looking for settings to fix the thermostat with no success.  For now, I'll simply set the thermostat four degrees cooler than I otherwise would.  There's a possibility it's simply bad, so we'll contact the folks who put it in. 

ICYMI: Dick's Sporting Goods Continues to Be Their Namesake

In case you missed it, Dick's Sporting Goods is apparently considering ending all gun sales.  This isn't really surprising, after all.  Dick's ended sales of the AR-15 at all of their stores, including the much smaller Field and Stream chain, after finding the killer from the Parkland Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting legally bought a gun from a Dick's in November.  Many of you will remember they temporarily stopped sales of AR-15s after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.  This year, they started shutting down gun sales in some stores, saying they're ending all gun sales in 125 stores to start and apparently intend to get completely get out of the market.

“We did have a conversation about that [stopping all sales],” CEO Ed Stack told CNN Business earlier this year. “At the time we felt it was a part of our DNA and we should stay in it. So many people in the country are law-abiding citizens who use firearms to hunt, to use from a recreation standpoint. We didn’t think it was right to exit the business completely.”

That could be changing. Dick’s, one of the country’s biggest gun retailers, has been quietly testing the water on whether to pull out entirely from what it calls the “hunt” business, including firearms. An announcement with the results of the test is expected Thursday, when it is set to report quarterly results.

Dick's has been the poster child for "Get Woke, Go Broke" with earnings down since their decision to drop the AR-15.  They counter that with a story that dropping gun sales is turning out to be good for business.  According to The Hill:

The sports and outdoor retailer reported a sales increase of 3.2 percent nationwide, which the company attributed to solid performances in e-commerce, in-store sales and apparel sales while noting in a revenue report that the company was “continuing the strategic review of its hunt business."

The company reported that net sales for the second quarter of 2019 increased 3.8 percent and consolidated same-store sales increased 3.2 percent, compared to a drop of 4 percent for same-store sales during that quarter last year.

They claim stores that replaced firearms with locally targeted merchandise outperformed other locations.  It's conceivable that strong 2A supporters walked on Dick's and don't buy anything there while some people increased their shopping due to better deals or simply finding Dick's the only source for whatever that "locally targeted merchandise" is.

Retail sales of any kind is a rough business.  Margins aren't very big and the competition is intense.  It seems to me that companies should be trying to give shoppers a reason to come into their store, not a reason to avoid them.  They seem to be betting that they can grow new customers to replace the ones they've lost.  I'm sure there are people who will never go there again, I swore them off after Sandy Hook, but I also know a lot of people just buy wherever they find the best price.

Hurricane Season Starts to Ramp Up

Those keeping score will know that this hurricane season has been very slow - until this week.  It was off to the slowest start in at least 10 years, with tropical storm Chantal briefly forming August 20th.  This week we started seeing five day forecasts with something forming directly off the east coast of Florida, and it still might, although the rest of our weather forecasts have been stunningly inaccurate. 

The low pressure system or tropical wave that is marked by the red X was offshore south Florida yesterday, came ashore and went overhead earlier.  Our local forecast for yesterday was 60% chance of rain.  We didn't even cloud over - the independent forecasters at Weather Underground had our chance of rain at 30% and lowered the number as the day developed. 

This storm is unlikely to affect any land as steering currents will push it in that narrow red region paralleling the eastern seaboard up to the outer banks and continuing out to sea.

Miguel at Gun Free Zone posts a reminder that today is the anniversary of Hurricane Andrew hitting south Miami in 1992 - and Andrew was obviously the first hurricane of that season.  It's still the worst hurricane in Florida history 27 years later. 

Let me draw your attention to the open red circle at lower right in that map above.  That's Tropical Storm Dorian, just named in the 5PM update from the NHC.  The five day forecast cone is keeping it    slightly south of the track Maria took in 2017, but Puerto Rico is well within the cone and close enough to the centerline that they'd better be paying attention.  At least the few Puerto Ricans who didn't move up to Florida.  Maria was a major hurricane, and Dorian is not forecast to get that strong, yet.   

Here on the Space Coast, we don't need to start watching closely until the end of this chart on Thursday, and by that time, it would still be five or more days away.  It looks like Dorian will go through the southern end of Hebert's Box which correlates with strong storms hitting south Florida.  Still, most storms get pushed to the east as they approach Florida, due to upper level winds from an approaching front.

The peak of hurricane season is September 10th and it's just getting cranked up out there.  Time to start paying attention.

Because of Global Warming We Need Zepplelins! Or Something Like That

A friend sent me this story from NBC Mach.  It's actually a pretty amazing story; I went from bemusement to confusion to asking "WTAF?" all in the space of the few screens of text.

Let me sum it up for you.  Container ships now carry a large amount of cargo around the world, but they burn diesel fuel and carbon is bad!   So we need to build floating airships - a mile and a half long - to carry that cargo around the world.  Because west to east travel is "free" and low pollution, "all we gotta do" is get those floating cargo ships into the jet stream, somewhere between 20,000 and 42,000 feet up (or between four and eight miles if you prefer).

As proposed in a recent scientific paper, the new airships would be 10 times bigger than the 800-foot Hindenburg — more than five times as long as the Empire State Building is tall — and soar high in the atmosphere. They’d do the work of traditional oceangoing cargo ships but would take less time and generate only a fraction of the pollution.

“We are trying to reduce as much as possible emissions of carbon dioxide because of global warming,” said Julian Hunt, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and the paper’s lead author.

(Note, I do hate to be pedantic, but when they say, "generate only a fraction of the pollution", 2/2 is a fraction.  So is 4/2.  They don't mean what the author implies, but they are fractions)

The jet streams are a permanent part of the atmosphere but they aren't fixed in a geographic place or in their exact route.  They move north and south with the seasons, and move around with weather systems, sometimes taking huge omega shapes, sometimes being relatively straight; sometimes blowing several hundred mph, sometimes under 100.  Sometimes they can be relatively smooth flow, but at other times can be turbulent, swirling winds.  They're often referred to as rivers in the air, and their behavior can be similar to rivers in how the flow rate changes with the season and conditions. 

If you're like me, you might well be saying, "Wait!  Zeppelins a mile and a half long?  How much cargo are they talking about carrying?  I want to see neat 'artist's concept' drawings of an 8000 foot long air ship."  I went to the article linked in that first indented paragraph, but there were no drawings, just a table that shows they envision an airship 10x the size of the Hindenburg: 2453 meters (8048 feet) long and 412 meters (1352 feet) in diameter.  Such a ship would be expected to carry:

Cargo useful lift (tons)	21,000
Empty weight (tons)	14,000
Total weight (tons)	35,000

That 21,000 ton cargo lift is 625 standard 20 foot cargo containers.  The earliest generation cargo ships would handle 500 to 800 of those 20 foot units (the industry abbreviation is TEUs).  Later generation ships carry 5000 or more, up to 8000 TEUs, so while 625 sounds good, compared to the oceanic freighter fleet, many more zeppelins would be required. There are container ships that can carry ten and twenty thousand TEUs. 

Now the references to the Hindenburg might be something you'd expect them to avoid, since there's that unfortunate, almost universal memory of the ship crashing and burning on its final flight, but that's not where Dr. Hunt is going.  See the Hindenburg's explosion prompted the abandonment of the hydrogen system that the Hindenburg used for buoyancy and replaced it with helium as used in today's lighter-than-air craft like the Goodyear blimp and others that are in service today.  But Dr. Hunt proposes these mile and a half long, 35,000 ton craft be run on hydrogen!

But for all their high-tech advances, Hunt said, the new airships would still get their buoyancy from hydrogen, a highly flammable gas that is 14 times lighter than air. It’s the same gas the Hindenburg and the other big zeppelins used in the 1930s.

The possibility of another giant explosion has some pushing back against an airship renaissance.

“There is a resistance — because of the Hindenburg — to big bags of hydrogen,” said Eric Lanteigne, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Ottawa in Canada, who was not affiliated with the new research. He said that’s why the Goodyear blimp and other small airships now operating are filled with helium, the harmless gas found in party balloons.

But if helium offers a greater margin of safety, it’s expensive and hard to come by. It’s found only in pockets of natural gas deep underground, with its extraction usually a byproduct of highly polluting drilling. Hydrogen, on the other hand, can be extracted from water and so would much cheaper.

Did you catch the insult of "highly polluting drilling"?  The article is peppered with things like that and it gave me the impression that this Dr. Hunt believes he will be the one to Save the World.  So yes, they can electrolyze water to produce hydrogen and liberate oxygen (or store it for other use), but that's not a "free" process and I'd like to see numbers for their "would be much cheaper" claim.  It takes energy input to break water apart and that energy will come from somewhere.

To minimize the risks associated with hydrogen, Hunt envisions getting rid of the crew. The airships would operate autonomously — and would be loaded and unloaded by robots.

“The idea would be that the whole process would be automated so that in case you have an accident, no one will be injured — only the equipment and the cargo,” Hunt said, adding that some of the hydrogen in an airship could be used to power an on-board fuel cell that would spin the craft's propellers.

As an additional bonus, Hunt said, the fuel cell would generate as a byproduct water that could be released as the craft passed over regions hit by drought.

That last paragraph strikes me as salesmanship again.  "And if you're having a drought, we can make it rain!!"

The middle paragraph hints at what gets me.  Call me skeptical, but "what goes up must come down." They're talking about putting not one, but dozens or hundreds of these 35,000 ton behemoth aircraft and their cargo into the air 4 to 8 miles up, with minimal propulsion so they save emissions, bobbing along in a turbulent, swirling, "river in the sky" and they're worried about the hydrogen?  How about worrying about having a shipping container fall into a building?  Or having all of them fall into a city?  

The USS Macon over Manhattan - 1933.

My take on cargo container ships is that they've changed our world radically and are "unsung heroes" of modern life.  Considering it can take them over a mile to stop or accelerate to their traveling speed, they're not ocean-going hot rods.  They're ocean going long-haul trucks.  They're powered for what they need to do.