fcheblog  -

2012-01-22 10:30 | fche blog politics disease with no name

The current kerfuffle about the US feds forcing private health insurance plans to include free contraception as “preventive medicine” should not have arisen. This has all been predictable, not just from the point of view of christian groups feeling under attack. This current administration is after all the one whose leaders say a baby can be a punishment, or that abortion … reduces the cost [of citizens] to states and to the federal government.

It’s not as though these were isolated statements or outlier attitudes. These folks seem to consider new life a costly disease.

2012-01-16 10:40 | fche blog flying colors

Observed on final approach to KBCB after a bumpy cloudy rainy night flight.

2012-01-08 09:00 | fche blog enun-dorsals, politics unexpected pride

Having escaped communist Hungary in the early 1980s (thanks, mom & dad), and having heard from afar that country’s tortured state since, I never expected to express any particular pride in it. However, it sounds like there is glimmer of hope, starting with a new constitution, controversially adopted in the last year. From what I gather, bravo.

2011-12-28 08:05 | fche blog tech cacert root distribution license

It appears that CAcert believes it can bind people to this license in order to redistribute their public root certificate. IANAL, but there seems little basis for that. A public key / certificate is just a few computer-generated numbers: no creative spark, so does not appear to qualify for copyright protection. They are by necessity public (or else the essential cryptography wouldn’t work), so no trade secret protection. They are not a process or invention, so no patent protection.

So what’s left? Legalese blurbage protection, whereby Powerful Words impress and frighten.

2011-12-27 12:59 | fche blog politics capitalism manufactures stuff

It manufactures unemployment, or so says an old friend. The argument is not much more than what he describes as the agreeable Luddite one: that there is a perpetual pressure to cut costs and raise profits. “Unregulated capitalism”, whatever that is, races to eliminate employees. (How much more there is to the argument is hard to say, since the posting has become non-public.)

One response to such profundity is to match it with the observation that this looks at only one side of the coin. Capitalist economies also manufacture employment. (Few people hire others out of altruism. Few people can build lots of stuff without others’ help.) They also manufacture stuff. Lots and lots of stuff, which people want to buy. (Few people give others tons of stuff out of altruism.) When unnecessary costs are cut, customers and shareholders benefit.

The system is obviously in constant change, only roughly stable, and is unlikely to ever converge to a steady state some might idolize, where some economic status quo simply persists. In order to force a utopian order, it would require a level of control and force that would be familiar to those who studied totalitarian states. And there is no other endpoint possible. At any intermediate state, there will be some perceived “social injustice” that requires more force to “solve”. People who promote just a little more regulation should be expected to state their ultimate end-point: what is the maximum power for the state beyond which they would not advocate.

(The dual situation exists with us laissez-faire types. I would like a smaller state, less control, less competition with the private sector. How much less? A good first step would be balancing the darned government budgets.)

2011-12-19 20:52 | fche blog seriously I have a better idea

SmileTrain, whoever they are, made me this offer I can’t possibly refuse.

Mr. Eigler, make one gift and we’ll never ask for another donation again.

It was tempting. It was perhaps too good to be true. Might the invasion of donation solicitations finally abate, if I only paid?

Maybe. But maybe I’m the kind of fellow who doesn’t mind shredding the occasional postal kindling to feed the backyard bonfire. Maybe I get a tiny grin each time some agency spends their hard-earned (?) cash on mailing me some “Addressed Admail”, getting nothing in return. Except the kind of publicity in this blog post. Yes, maybe that’s just the kind of guy I am. Sorry about that.

2011-12-19 10:25 | fche blog flying, tech automation reassurance

Freshly released is this investigation final report for an Airbus accident from 2008. In this event, the on-board computers spontaneously messed up during a routine flight, and harshly pitched the plane down for a second or two. This threw around unrestrained passengers and crew in the back, crashing them up to the ceiling. More than a hundred got injured, some seriously. The captain of the plane responded perfectly: declared an emergency, and diverted to the nearest suitable airport. He did not trust the avionics any more:

He then flew the aircraft without the autopilot or autothrust engaged, and using the standby instruments, for the remainder of the flight.

The bit that bugs me more is the root-cause-analysis and correction of the bugs in the system. The final report unnervingly qualifies this:

The failure mode was probably initiated by a single, rare type of internal or external trigger event …
The spikes in the ADR parameters were probably introduced within the CPU module …
A much more likely scenario was that a marginal hardware weakness of some form made the units susceptible to the effects of some type of environmental factor, which triggered the failure mode.

It goes on like that. They’ve done some impressive analysis of the systems, but the there is quite a collection of maybes and probablys.

But be reassured:

The occurrence was the only known example where this design limitation led to a pitch-down command in over 28 million flight hours on A330/A340 aircraft. ...
It is widely accepted that not all the potential failure modes and failure scenarios for complex systems can be identified in practice, and fault-tolerant design features are included in a system to reduce the risk of such problems. ...
The ADIRU manufacturer conducted a ‘theoretical analysis’ of the potential for a single event upset (SEU) on the LTN-101 ADIRU. The overall result of this analysis was that [...] the ADIRU still met the aircraft manufacturer’s safety objectives …
As a result of this redesign, passengers, crew and operators can be confident that the same type of accident will not reoccur.

It’s an uneasy situation. Having a sense of how much technology and effort goes into this sort of machinery, it’s clear that there are failure scenarios that we don’t know we don’t know. And yet we fly.

2011-12-13 10:18 | fche blog politics continuity

Spengler thinks about why societies are failing.
A few choice paragraphs are excerpted below.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn’s christmas column covers similar ground.
UPDATE2: Wretchard recaps.