Bronco Gets New Life

North American Rockwell OV-10 Bronco

Bronco repurposed as a CalFire spotter plane. The Bronco was originally developed as a ground attack aircraft during the Vietnam war.

Political Contributions

Diligent daughter noticed something odd about the biggest political contributors. The biggest is George Soros, the insanely rich, muddle headed old fart who thinks that being nice to vicious people will make them nicer*.  It might do that, but amount of improvement in their attitude will be negligible. You should stop being muddle headed, George. Anyway, Georgie gave $130 million to the Democrats. 

The interesting part is who the second largest contributor is. That is Richard Uihlein of Uline Inc. with $80 million for the Republicans. Richard Uihlein of Uline Inc? Who the heck is that?

Uline Catalog

Well, Uline rings a bell. Back when everybody was mailing out catalogs of products for sale I somehow got on a material handling mailing list. It was full of parts bins and packaging from - you guessed it - Uline. I guess the pandemic and Amazon conspired to really boost their sales.

* I really have no idea what is going on in Georgie's brain, but 3rd hand scuttlebutt has given me that impression.

P.S. I took the data on political contributions from Open Secrets and loaded it into a Google spreadsheet. The total amount of contributions tops $1 billion, $480 million to the Democrats and $680 billion to the Republicans. Once you have the data in a spreadsheet you can muck it around any number of ways. Over $700 million came from just three states: New York, Illinois and California.

Wildlife

I just caught a glimpse of a some big bird flying by. He was maybe a hundred feet away and partially obscured by the trees. He wouldn't have been visible in midsummer but the trees have lost some of their leaves so he was visible. I think it was a heron.

We hear owls on occasion. We see them rarely. Coyotes show up occasionally. We'll hear a chorus of them sometimes. We'll hear them for a week or two and then they move on. A month or two later and they'll be back. Squirrels are pervasive. Racoons show up fairly often.

I really like this. It's kind of weird since I spend all my time surfing the internet and hacking away on my computer. You might think I wouldn't need this exposure to wildlife, but I think if I moved closer into the big city I would miss it.

Synchrophaser

ALENIA Surveyor

Nothing special about this twin prop regional airliner, unless you notice that the propellers are in phase. The photographer, Wilfried Broemmelmeyer, comments: "Looks like the synchrophaser is working perfect." Synchrophaser? Oh, yeah, I used to have one of those installed my car, right next to the slankerator. 

Okay, slankerator is just something I made up, but a synchrophaser might be a real thing. At least SKYbrary thinks so:

A refinement of the propeller synchroniser is the propeller synchrophaser. Like the synchroniser, the synchrophaser precisely matches the RPM of all of the propellers. However, the synchrophaser also compares the propeller to propeller position of the propeller blades within their individual arcs and then adjusts them to their optimum relative positions. This refined adjustment results in a significant further reduction in propeller noise and vibration as compared to those achieved by the more basic synchronisation system.

Now I'm wondering how the heck you could accomplish this. I can't think of any technique that would work. Must be black magic.

Airbus A380-800 (G-XLED)

Airbus A380-800 (G-XLED)

You would need a steady hand on the camera to capture this shot. This airplane was flying at an altitude 9,600 feet when this picture was taken. That's almost two miles straight up. To someone standing on the ground it would appear to be about as big as your hand held at arm's length.

Airliner Dream

Boeing 747 traveling to Delta’s world headquarters to become an exhibit. KENT D. JOHNSON

I'm sitting in a window seat in an airliner taxiing prior to takeoff. It might be a 747. We have left the airport and are on a city street.  Now we have to avoid some automobile traffic so we hop the curb at an oblique angle into a parking lot. There is a concrete curb with an adjacent strip of grass, then a fairly wide parking lot and then a big brick wall of a warehouse-like building. I'm expecting to feel a bump when the nose wheel crosses the curb but I feel nothing. Now the plane turns to avoid the building and when the turn is almost completed I see the tip of the wing scratch the wall of the building and I say "contact". The plane stops and the pilot announces that CHARLES PERGIEL noticed the contact followed by some mumbly jumbly. Great, now everyone knows who to blame for the endless delay we are going to suffer because I bothered to notice this inconsequential contact. Of course we don't know if it's really inconsequential or not, the wing tip is a hundred feet from the fuselage, you can't really tell if there is any damage or not.

Now I have to get up to take a whiz but when I get back to bed the dream continues. Never had that happen before.

Now I'm inside the building we just hit. Everyone is all a-twitter about the airplane in the parking lot. A couple of people are looking at airplane parts, in particular wing panels that have strange markings reminiscent of cave paintings on the inner surface and the question on their minds is how to do you see these markings without taking the panel off. I ask if they have found anything about the wing tip and it all fades away.

Random Thoughts

What makes a woman beautiful? A long time ago I read something about how a beautiful woman is simply the average of all women. Now I'm wondering if our idea of a beauty is something we develop from all the women we see, or is it somehow genetic and we have an inborn idea of what a beautiful woman looks like.

Manners, staying cool and parties. Manners are what enable us to conduct business with people, people we wouldn't like if we knew them any better. Good manners generally requires staying cool. Parties are usually with people you know and like so you don't have to be so reserved, you can let your freak flag fly, which is something you can't do in polite company.

Normal range of hearing for humans is from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. My hearing only goes up to about 8,000 Hz. I wonder if this has any bearing on the kinds of music I like. Just took a look and found this:

10-20kHz is only one octave, and it's right at the edge of a human's ability to hear. In this range, the only thing in music is upper level harmonics in cymbals. There was a test done where they rolled off everything above 10kHz and people compared it to full frequency response samples. Although people could hear a difference in direct comparison, they had no preference between them when it came to sound quality.

Sound quality exists in the middle of the hearing range, not the fringes. - bigshot