Friday, December 7, 2012
Lap Around The Boat
All You Need to Know About the Middle East in Three and a Half Minutes (in Song, No Less)
Stolen entire from E.B. Misfit.
No Comment - Updated
I've stumbled across a couple of websites this week that prompted me to want to make a comment, but, no place to make a comment! One site even exhorted readers to contact the author, but provided no way to do so. On one hand I can understand this. I mean if you are really busy running your miniature multi-media empire, taking the time to read and reply to comments could be cutting into your time on the cocktail party circuit. Still, if you don't want to hear from me, I don't really want to hear from you, so no links to these talk only sites.
Comment that just arrived via e-mail:
So if you don't want some kind of internet ID, you can always send me a comment via email: c dot pergiel at gmail dot com.
Comment that just arrived via e-mail:
Stu Savory here (Eunoia),
I am one of those with comments turned off due to permanent and sometimes offensive spamming.Anyone may send me a comment, but via e-mail, whereupon I will put non-spam as a comment online.But you already know this.
You, OTOH, dear Charles, do not allow Name/URL comments, but Google Account only.
I do not accept Google Account’s terms of use, and so cannot comment at your site, much as I would like to do so. Pot calling the kettle black?
Stu
PS: Yes, you may put this on your site as a comment ;-)Google has "Terms of Use"? I suppose they do, but I never paid them any attention. Blogger works well enough, or I've figured out how to make it do what I want, and that's good enough for me. Once upon a time I tried reading one of those EULA things (End User License Agreement), but I quickly got bored. I do what I want and so far no one seems to have noticed. Well, Stu noticed, and I suppose a few other people have noticed, but I haven't done anything serious enough to warrant releasing the hounds. I have had a couple of disagreements with people, but I have not pursued them because I realize there is no point in arguing with A-holes. I have been there and done that to a capital A and it has done no one any good. I mean the only satisfactory conclusion to an argument is the death one of the participants, and there are generally severe consequences for that kind of thing, much worse than what you might get for violating a TOS agreement. I mean you could end up being the one not breathing.
So if you don't want some kind of internet ID, you can always send me a comment via email: c dot pergiel at gmail dot com.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Avanti
I look around for airplanes now and again and I keep coming across the Piaggio Avanti. It is not a jet, but it is as fast as some. It is expensive ($5 million, give or take), but that goes without saying. I came across one guy's story about it and I thought his description of the instrumentation system was enlightening. Just to get warmed up he spends a couple of paragraphs cataloging all the things he doesn't like about the instrument panel. (Bunch of acronyms in here. You only need to know what a few of them mean to get the gist of this story. Everyone knows what GPS means, right? VFR & IFR stand for Visual Flight Rating and Instrument Flight Rating respectively. You might call VFR pilots amateurs and IFR pilots professionals. ATC is Air Traffic Control. Those are the guys who direct the commercial airliners. You're playing with the big boys now. Just for grins I looked up the rest of the abreviations and listed them at the end.) Then he gives us this:
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| Picture from 2012, Complaints from 2010 |
So why do we have such a terrible interface? Why the lack of moving map? Lack of good GPS-controlled autopilot for full approaches? Lack of XM-weather? teeny-tiny traffic display that you can hardly even see from the pilot's side? Panel covered with warning lights that will almost never activate and radios that include DME or ADF that are almost never used? The answer lies in the way the plane is OPERATED. Every Avanti in the world is operated IFR, every moment of flight, under air traffic control and supervision for every moment, flying airways as cleared by ATC.Anyway, one of the reasons this plane costs so much is it uses turboprop engines. Airplane designers love turboprops. I don't for the simple reason that they cost too much. All I have to do is wait until somebody runs their turbines out of time and decides they don't want to spend $4 million for new engines and I can pick up the plane for a song, bolt a couple of alumimum V-8's on it and I'll be flying high.
Moving map? Who needs it? ATC guides us or puts us on an airway, and we follow it with a simple CDI.
Traffic avoidance? Who needs it? ATC gives traffic alerts and keeps us clear.
XM-Weather? Who needs it? We fly IFR so we do not care if it is foggy or raining, and ATC guides us around the bad storms.
Much of the situational awareness that I want in my G-1000 so that I can fly VFR, safely, alone, any place I like, becomes much less needed in the Avanti because every flight is pre-planned and then flown IFR with constant ATC supervision. This makes the old panel adequate for the needs of the airplane, even though a new G-1000 would provide much, much greater situational awareness and flexibility.
ADF - Automatic Direction Finder
ATC - Air Traffic Control
CDI - Course Deviation Indicator
DME - Distance Measuring Equipment
IFR - Instrument Flight Rating
GPS - Global Positioning System
VFR - Visual Flight Rating
XM - Satellite Weather Radio
XM - Satellite Weather Radio
WWII - Bombing London
Some Brits have put together a map of all the sites where bombs were dropped on London during the first year or so of World War II. If you zoom out so you can see the whole area, it looks it London was absolutely plastered.
The map is kind of cool, and it's nice that someone went to the trouble to translate the old paper archives into digital format, but when I tried to figure out who was behind it I got a little lost. The map was put together by Bombsite dot org, which was funded by JISC, which is some kind of nebulous quasi-governmental agency. I looked and looked at their site, but the more I looked, the less I understood. I guess this is part of the new world order that the fruitcakes are always hollering about. You don't need to know who or what they are, all you need to know is that they're helping make things better. Don't you just love bureaucrats?
If you zoom all the way in you can see that only the occasional building actually got hit. 'Course this is just one neighborhood. Your neighborhood might have got it a bit worse.
The map is kind of cool, and it's nice that someone went to the trouble to translate the old paper archives into digital format, but when I tried to figure out who was behind it I got a little lost. The map was put together by Bombsite dot org, which was funded by JISC, which is some kind of nebulous quasi-governmental agency. I looked and looked at their site, but the more I looked, the less I understood. I guess this is part of the new world order that the fruitcakes are always hollering about. You don't need to know who or what they are, all you need to know is that they're helping make things better. Don't you just love bureaucrats?
Two Types of Crude
Actually there are more that two types. There might be dozens, but I stumbled across a website that provides price charts for two of them.
I'm not going to put in my sidebar because I am not interested in the daily fluctuations of the price of oil. It's like a three year old hopped up on candy, he's bouncing off the walls continuously. Who knows where he's going next? If he ever achieves escape velocity and busts a hole in the wall, well, that might be worth noting.
WTI Crude Oil is West Texas Intermediate and Brent Crude Oil is from the North Sea. Crude oil is supposedly categorized by properties such as density and sulfer content. WTI and Brent have slightly different specifications. I suspect that the names come from the places where these kind of oils first originated. I can't tell whether any oil from anyplace other than Texas is ever categorized as WTI, or whether oil from Saudi Arabia is ever categorized as Brent.
WTI used to be the standard of the world on account of it was so superior. (Superior crude? Isn't that an oxymoron?) That it's fallen out of favor seems to be a bit of surprise to some people. (Today WTI is $88 a barrel and Brent is $109.) I suspect it is because the demand for oil outside of the US has gone up. I imagine we (the USA) consume all of the WTI, so even if somebody else wanted some, there may not even be facilities to deliver it, whereas all other oil producers pretty much export the bulk of their production. So if you are outside the US and you want oil, you're going to have to get it from somewhere else. 'Course, I could be all wet, and there is some other factor in play, like all of the major oil traders have lost their collective minds. I mean, who knows?
I'm not going to put in my sidebar because I am not interested in the daily fluctuations of the price of oil. It's like a three year old hopped up on candy, he's bouncing off the walls continuously. Who knows where he's going next? If he ever achieves escape velocity and busts a hole in the wall, well, that might be worth noting.
WTI Crude Oil is West Texas Intermediate and Brent Crude Oil is from the North Sea. Crude oil is supposedly categorized by properties such as density and sulfer content. WTI and Brent have slightly different specifications. I suspect that the names come from the places where these kind of oils first originated. I can't tell whether any oil from anyplace other than Texas is ever categorized as WTI, or whether oil from Saudi Arabia is ever categorized as Brent.
WTI used to be the standard of the world on account of it was so superior. (Superior crude? Isn't that an oxymoron?) That it's fallen out of favor seems to be a bit of surprise to some people. (Today WTI is $88 a barrel and Brent is $109.) I suspect it is because the demand for oil outside of the US has gone up. I imagine we (the USA) consume all of the WTI, so even if somebody else wanted some, there may not even be facilities to deliver it, whereas all other oil producers pretty much export the bulk of their production. So if you are outside the US and you want oil, you're going to have to get it from somewhere else. 'Course, I could be all wet, and there is some other factor in play, like all of the major oil traders have lost their collective minds. I mean, who knows?
Word of the Day
There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is UP.
It's easy to understand UP meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?
At a meeting, why does a topic come UP?
Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends.
And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen.
We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.
At other times the little word has a real special meaning:
People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.
To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP up is special.
A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.
We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.
We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP.
To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary.
In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.
If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used.
It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.
When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.
When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.
When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.
One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so...it is time to shut UP!
Now it's UP to you what you do with this made UP info.
It's easy to understand UP meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?
At a meeting, why does a topic come UP?
Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends.
And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen.
We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.
At other times the little word has a real special meaning:
People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.
To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP up is special.
A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.
We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.
We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP.
To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary.
In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.
If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used.
It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.
When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.
When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.
When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.
One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so...it is time to shut UP!
Now it's UP to you what you do with this made UP info.
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