Articles like this one remind me of why I like flying so much. It’s great buzzing around solo, but it’s even better to have someone else there who appreciates the experience.
As groklaw and other groups show, the internet blog user population has been producing more rapid and insightful criticism than mainstream media. It’s a beatiful thing to see. Powerline’s initial analysis of the suspicious CBS memos began a torrent that threatens to bring down the honour of a news network, even as opposing groups try to present contrary findings. Amongst the noise of “me toos”, there is an aggregation of deep thought that I considered the sole domain of Usenet in its heyday.
As for whether the memos are fake or not … one idea I’ve not seen elsewhere is analyzing the text layout more quantitatively. If indeed there was a 1970s era typewriter that can make a document look like that, and if in fact such a machine was used by the deceased, it may be possible to measure more carefully the horizontal layout granularity of individual characters. Somewhat like the Millikan oil drop experiment, there should be a quantum or minimum amount of distance, whose multiples all characters line up with. Someone might take a high-resolution scan of the memos, and measure carefully the horizontal offset of each character relative to a margin or tab line. All these distances would have to be an integer multiple of some greatest common denominator.
For a modern typesetter or laser printer, this quantum would be too small to be seen, since the imaging pixel resolution is so high. For the rather impressive-sounding old IBM Selectric Composer, this quantity seems like it should be one-third of the width of the “i” character, based on this IBM technical paper. Other manuals for the machine are available at this web site . It’s a marvel of mechanical engineering, but can it clear CBS of the forgery charges? Probably not .
UPDATE: Someone else had a similar idea.
Tom Hanks produced two series of excellent documentary miniseries following hit films. The latter, Band of Brothers, deals with WWII. While searching for information about the actual battles, I came across this site at the US Army. They have entire books online on military history. Awesome reading.
That was fun! About three dozen airplanes, about a hundred people, came and were fed and entertained.
There were also a lot of little kids walking the flight line with their parents or just waiting for someone to fly by. The airport is well-maintained and has a busy local user population (judging by the number of hangars, all reportedly full).
Once parked on the grass, we propped GXRP’s main door open so passers-by could get a look of the insides-it must be bewildering compared to little oldie VFR machines on display, some without even navigation radios. The traffic circuit was very busy but orderly, a reminder of Oshkosh. Everyone appeared to follow the proper procedures, and the radio was going non-stop. A biplane made a nice smoke trail (intentionally) over the airport as it was crossing overhead; another military-style homebuilt did a fast low-and-over maneuver over the runway. We did an even bigger and faster low-and-over on our way home, moohaha.
Some pictures are at the usual web area.
Yesterday at CYQS another interesting event took place. A local Air Cadets chapter had a display and an instructor (captain-ranked uniform) offering pamphlets and information about the program. They also had two air rifles lying on the table, as an additional teaser of the toys one gets to play with. All seemingly good stuff.
Several times a few of the young cadets took an air rifle out of its box, carried it at their hips with barrel pointing horizontally, swung around 180 degrees, until they came to a grassy spot where they would demonstrate pumping up and discharging it (unloaded). As a trained firearms owner and operator, I was quite disturbed that the kids ended up sweeping (allowing the weapon to point at people, even momentarily) me and others repeatedly as they were turning and moving. The guns were unloaded, but that’s not the point-those swept can’t be sure of their safety.
When dealing with guns, the issue of safety is paramount, and never sweeping people is a big part of that. The kids and their instructors could use a refresher.
People are familiar with a popular style of fundraising, where people walking, running, biking, or just otherwise sweating for a given interval of time is connected somehow to an influx of cash toward a worthy cause.
Amongst the questionable practices of such events:
- charging a fee or setting a fundraising minimum to the volunteer participant
- driving the volunteers to harrass their neighbours for donations, a practice also familiar to schools and clubs whoring kids out to sell chocolates and trinkets, and to multi-level-marketing organizations
- publishing dizzying motivational propaganda that they are causing the impending end of the disease-du-jour, when in fact they are simply funding research or treatment or administration, with ending said condition as only a long term possibility
To the volunteers, some advice:
- if you just want to enjoy some specific mob exercise event, keep in mind you can likely do so even without participating in the fundraising: just slip into the crowd and off you go
- don’t imagine that there is any kind of market or value exchange happening when your exercise efforts are “paid for” by the sponsors you signed up; they don’t care if you run or not, they may just want you to go away
- consider encouraging your sponsors (and yourself) to donate directly to your favourite cause, and bypass the mob exercise administrative middleman
no blog is good blog
I hate turbulence. Or at least, I thought I did, back during two long flights on big passenger jets, where the winds were seeming to tear at the airplane. It was not hazardous of course, just uncomfortable. Even now, after ample turbulent flying in little airplanes, I still feel melancholy when planning the next flight. Yet, invariably the anticipation is worse than eventual reality.
The opposite is true for the jarring experience of driving around Toronto. I used to not notice all the roads with sunken manhole covers, wavy asphalt, barely filled cracks, until I started flying. Now that I’ve become aware of the need to warn passengers of predictable or possible bumpiness in the air, I’ve realized that the road to the airport is even worse. And a driver is nearly as powerless to reduce discomfort as a pilot, even though the former usually can see it coming.
Maybe it’s just a function of the distribution of impulses we feel. Road bumps come as very quick, sharp, small-amplitude jabs which can make one’s teech chatter. Air bumps tend to be slower, large-amplitude pushes. The more I get used to the latter, the more the former irritate me.
You scare the bejeezus out of me. I hope you die.
You must hope you die too, for doing such stupid, suicidal things as riding in pitch black darkness on a bicycle without illumination, frequently in such flagrant disobeyance of the rules that drivers can’t anticipate your presence, making it is a miracle you’re not mowed down right away.
I hope you wisen up before you die.
I hope never to have to provide the Final Lesson on this to you personally, but I’m ready. If it ever comes to choosing whether to (a) perform emergency evasive maneuvers that would endanger myself, passengers, or other drivers, versus (b) Darwinize some suicidal night bike rider, I will know which way to steer.
Sporty’s is a mail order retailer in Ohio, selling among other things, aviation goodies. Their selection is limited to end-user accessories, and unlike Aircraft Spruce, excludes airplane parts. But I didn’t know that this morning, when I and two Hongs set out at 9 AM to visit them.
They are located at Batavia, Ohio, in the southwest corner of the state. That’s about two flight hours away, except for the small matter of customs clearance. Lacking any other plausible crossing place, we flew to the big airport in Cleveland on the south shore of Lake Erie, then got right back in and flew down the rest of the way to near Cincinatti. The near-ground portions of the flights were all turbulent but we put up with it.
We arrived at Sporty’s just as the weekly BBQ was shutting down and crowds were dispersing. Several departing airplanes just barely missed us on our way down, triggering our traffic alert system’s female voice. We had one or two last hot dogs, and set about to do …. basically nothing. We visited the warehouse/store, took a few pictures, tried and failed to get a ride into town for a real meal, and failed to meet up with an email acquaintance to get a ride on a Segway. I still haven’t quite learned how to arrange activities at last-minute flying destinations like these-for me, merely arriving there is fun enough. The question of “what now?” is quite appropriate though, especially to a passenger.
Eventually we decided to simply return to Toronto in one big hop. Two hours and forty minutes fighting a wicked headwind were enough to go direct to home base.
Ironically, when we landed back home at CYTZ, we were hungry enough to drive downtown, enjoy more road bumps, and try to find a place to eat. Saturday evening seemed to overload the Front St. restaurant strip, with hordes of hungry Torontonians circling around, hoping to find a place without a 45-minute wait. We gave up and drove instead to Casa Di Giorgio, where finally at 9 PM, we had a large if expensive meal.
One of the ways politicians bend a population to their wills is by changing the language of discourse. By associating new meanings with old terms, or inventing new terms, they hope to misuse existing connotations or induce confusion – the very opposite of clear communication. Of course advertisements use the same tricks. They are everywhere.
It appears that whiny big city governments are at some point soon going to get even more subsidies from provincial and federal governments, supposedly for running things like the local transit system. So, on one hand there are claims that cities like Toronto are the “economic engines”, and on the other hand, it needs subsidies from residents of Timmins so locals can ride the bus. Hello??! If Toronto politicians proclaim their city’s importance and power, have they no shame when the next moment they limp around begging for subsidies from outside?
Airplanes have lots of lights. Some coloured bulbs on the wingtips, some strobe bulbs all over, lots of little lights inside the cockpit to keep instruments lit at night, plus a taxi light and a landing light. The landing light is an unusually large and powerful bulb because its purpose is to illuminate the ground/runway when landing at night. Therefore, it puts out a lot of juice (250W on GXRP), and not-coincidentally has a relatively short lifespan (20-50 hours).
As it turns out, airplane owners in Canada and the US are permitted to perform some repairs without getting a mechanic involved, and replacing a landing light is one of them. Without a landing light, in Canada one is not supposed to carry passengers at night. Since GXRP’s landing light burned out the other day, and I have a Hope Air night flight planned soon, off I went to find a replacement, and set things right. Luckily John Cabaco’s crew at Island Air had some spares.
Installing the bulb ended up taking almost an hour. A transparent plastic “windshield” underneath the bulb had to be removed, but while loosening its screws, I realized that putting that part back on may be tricky. That’s because screws from the bottom mate with a metal rail very loosely attached to the top (inside) side of the plastic panel, and that rail is not reachable from the outside. There was however a circular access port above the landing light cavity, leading into the nose of the airplane. This access port was covered by a piece of carpet, and in turn covered by the weather radar dish. So all that stuff had to be loosened and moved out of the way before that access port could be opened. With it all opened up, putting in the new bulb (GE 4522) was no problem. Screwing the plastic windshield back on indeed required some concurrent prodding from the access port above. Putting the radar dish bracket back exactly where it was took yet more time. Some pictures are available, including one the inside of the nose cone, with weather radar dish and access port visible, and another with the nose and landing light area, seen from the bottom.
But it’s done, the work officially logged, and now GXRP is legal to carry passengers at night again.
Update 2007-03: GXRP’s landing light got upgraded to the XeVision HID 50W system. It’s been on day & night, for hundreds of hours. Works great.
Today Juimiin and I went off flying north to do some leaf peeping in the south Georgian Bay area. After some low-altitude orbiting, we found the spot – also on google map – where the formerly annual CottageFestTM event took place (a late-summer gettogether by Red Hat cow-orkers, hosted by Dave Brolley’s parents). To our disappointment, most of the land was still green, at least where it wasn’t water- or stone- or road- or house-coloured. Most of the darned trees still held on to their foliage.
This will not do. We will revisit the area until the colours have well and truly changed.
This afternoon I completed my first Hope Air mission. It consisted of a two-hour flight to Sault Ste. Marie, pickup of two people, and immediately returning to Toronto. The clients were not familiar with little airplanes, but put an unconvincingly brave face on. I and my co-pilot (Nathan Myers, old flight instructor) tried to soothe their nerves on the ground during our brief stopover.
Both legs of the flight were pretty good by general aviation standards. The weather was largely nice, except near Sault Ste. Marie where a cold front was just arriving, and the mixing air produced some very light occasional turbulence and some low cloud. We flew under IFR for practice anyway.
The one moment of drama occurred during the flight when an idle left pinky finger belonging to me hit a major electrical circuit breaker, which instantly shut down the intercom, all our radios and avionics. I didn’t even notice for a few seconds, because the engines and primary instruments were (by design) not affected. We quickly restored all functions and I apologized for alarming our passengers, and offered said pinky up for punishment. My offer was accepted and said pinky was spanked. By this time everyone awake was relaxed and we were joking around quite a bit. The early anxiousness was gone.
The flight ended with a lovely night-time approach into Toronto, with poor visibility limiting the neat effects of city lights, but my landing was good. We all let out a little cheer.
Half an hour later, the grateful passengers arrived at their hotel room, and I was on my way home, looking forward to the next mission.
Known to be working in the computer industry, acquaintances still regularly ask me about buying computers. My generic advice over the last few years has been to spend no more than 5-800 bucks and avoid high-end machines. Clearly even low-end computers nowadays are perfectly adequate for most ordinary uses.
But what should I do when I am shopping around for something sufficient for the next few years of my unordinary uses? Several times over the last few decades, I assembled or specified new workstations from particular high-end parts. That was because ordinary mass-produced machines were not up to tasks like heavy-duty programming, database and web serving, guest account hosting, and the other sorts of things that the machine that served you this web page generally occupies itself with. Every four or so years, I try to jump up by about a factor of six in performance and storage, and it’s about time to make the next jump.
Unfortunately, the task is not so simple as I remember it previously being. There are many mutually incompatible physical shapes for key parts like motherboards, processors, memory, storage, and a disconcerting variety of cases and other options. There is a shortage of mail-order retailers through which one could buy every part for home assembly. There are so many variants of common parts that the higher-end ones end up being only rarely carried in catalogues, let alone in stock. There is a fashion in “gamer” products which feature one specific type of high performance, but couples those with repulsive ostentation and a general lack of balance.
And I am not new at this stuff-it’s really that the complexity and variation have exploded over the last few years. So I’m on the prowl, but not making a lot of progress.
UPDATE 2004-09-30: gamepc, a US mail-order firm, appears willing to assemble even acceptably high-end computers.
Many homes have lousy indoor air. At least that’s the conclusion one would draw, upon seeing the entire volume of fine particles flying around inside, when lit up by a sharp beam of sunlight. A lucky coincidence may allow one to observe that, when taking a sheet of paper tissue from the usual box dispenser, a thick cloud of fine paper dust flies up into the air.
Juimiin and I realized at the same time this morning that this might be absolutely deliberate on the part of the tissue maker companies. They can produce an outstanding vicious circle (or from their point of view, a virtuous one): one sneezes, takes a tissue, releases a new cloud of dust, which in turn makes one sneeze. Brilliant.
With Screaming Mutant about to arrive, I suspect I’ll be suckered into the indoor air filtering widget hustle, and buy something expensive to collect some of those floating particles. And yet I suspect I’ll still use the stupid kleenex tissues.
Driving in a busy city governed by a car-hostile left-wing council is fun, but usually only after 11 PM when all the normal people are off the street. During daylight hours, the experience varies between boredom, stress, and terror, with the mood vigorously swinging between these extremes. I’ve already written about the joys of suicidal bike riders. Today I am inclined to comment about pedestrians.
No, not the well-behaved pedestrians who cross at proper intersections, or taking proper precautions. No, I mean the other kind – the kind so prevalent on streets like Bayview Ave., Yonge St., and probably countless other arterial roads with busy pedestrian shopping attractions on both sides. Here, that peculiar species of pedestrian known as “gottarun” stalks.
Many gottaruns are typical yuppies – men and women adults of prime reproductive age, showing as much desparation to get to that corner coffee shop for a morning hit as a urine-filled homeless guy searching for the perfect bush beside City Hall. Under such perilous conditions, there is no time to waste – one has to park, and one has to run across the road, right fucking now.
An intelligent person with a mere yearning instead of chemical withdrawal symptoms may take his time and walk to a proper safe place to cross, wait a while, and go in peace. But the gottarun is more cunning. It waits only as long as needed to squeeze into the already miniscule gap left between consecutive cars that, partly due to the left-wing council’s efforts, move only slightly faster on average than the giant running breast-worm after a mastectomy. This search is especially effective if, as frequently happens, the cars are blocked and therefore a gap appears stationary.
That’s when even the slowest, most ancient gottarun leaps into action. Well actually it doesn’t leap, it just wades into the traffic as if it was a warm comfy wading pool where toddlers splash and pee peacefully. It is a rare gottarun that looks left and right, and a rarer one still that having done so, does the wise thing and withdraws. No, most gottaruns proceed monotonically and moronically toward their destination, once they have planted their feet on pavement.
Many gottaruns appear to drive cars, but somehow utterly lose any consciousness of the realities of the situtation as soon as they begin their traffic crossing. If those parts of their brains didn’t spontaneously revobrigate, they would realize that the way most likely to get killed is to step immediately in front of a vehicle that is about to start moving. And yet a significant fraction of gottaruns does exactly that, rather than the slightly less stupid idea of stepping behind said vehicle. (An aside for the gottaruns and other ignoramuses: this is because the next driver has some warning and can take evasive maneuvers. Stepping immediately in front of a driver requires him to have a keen sense of peripheral eyesight, just at the moment that he may be concentrating on traffic ahead.) But apparently a gottarun tries to minimize distance, not danger.
As the reader may begin to suspect, I had multiple gottarun encounters this morning. One of them was a pretty lady blonde in her late 20s, who did everything according to the gottarun principles, meaning that she did everything wrong. She was a split second away from having to have her doubtess perfectly pH-balanced flesh and blood be scraped off the nice yellow bumper that ELASTIC so nearly smacked her with. After a “wake up, you suicidal idiot” honk, she turned to us and gleamed with a big beautiful smile: seemingly totally unaware of her near death experience. I hope that when it’s time for me to go, I’m just as spaced.