Musical Targets

Via Stu.

Singularity

Black Hole of Doom

There's an idea kicking around somewhere out there in the lun-i-sphere that somehow all the computers connected to the internet are going to join together to become self aware, i.e. intelligent, and they're calling this idea 'singularity'.

Remember a week or two ago when there was a big fuss about the 'Russians' supposedly hacking into ten of the biggest banks in the USA and how it was an act of war or state sponsored terrorism?

Last night we tried to watch Blue Ruin and Netflix failed to deliver. This was our second attempt. We tried last weekend and the same thing happened. We get about five or ten minutes into the show and a Loading... message comes on the screen and never goes away. Okay, 'never' might be putting it a little strong. No amount of button pushing would convince it to proceed.

Today I tried to contact Netflix on the web to inform (bitch) about this problem and I'm getting mysterious web errors. So I call (using a telephone) and in short order I'm connected to a real person (by 'short order' I mean less than two minutes). The nice lady I am talking to is having trouble with her computer system. It's being very slow and I can hear her muttering under her breath. I enjoyed it, made her seem more like a real person, not some soulless corporate drone. (As always, your mileage may vary, but in this case, if it does, you are wrong.)

While I am typing this message Blogger keeps flashing little pink warning messages at the top of the screen telling me it's having problems.

Thor VS Giants

Last week Coding Game* suffered a server crash and they lost some user files. Now these are some pretty savvy computer dudes and they suffered a server crash? How embarrassing. They seem to have recovered. Matter of fact, if they hadn't told me about it I would not have even noticed.

Just now Blogger put this message up.

We won't even talk about all the pictures of mine that Blogger has lost. Several posts to the help forum have elicited only idiotic responses. I think it happened because I signed up for Google Plus once upon a time, didn't like what it did to Picasa, so I reverted to ordinary Google, and all this plussing and minusing confused Blogger. That's what I get for not following the herd. Buck the powers that be and they will squash you flat and not even notice.

So the Singularity might be coming, it just won't be the one the lunatic fringe is praying for. It will be more like a physic's singularity where everything just stops because all the electrons have gotten sucked into a virtual black hole.

Update: Remember Moore's law? About how computers will double in processing power every two years? How about the corollary? Ever heard this one,  also from Gordon Moore:

"It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens"

P.S. I forgot to mention that HBOGO quit working on my ROKU box a couple of weeks ago. In order to get it going we had to find our logon ID and password for Frontier.com, which was kind of difficult because apparently we had never set up an on-line account, or more likely Frontier had lost it, which isn't too surprising since they seem to think that there is a phone number connected to my account, which there isn't. What's more all of the phone numbers they think are mine are wrong, except the one they used to call, which they don't seem to be able to find anymore. Color me severely impressed that their service works at all.

*Re: Coding Game - I've worked my way through all of the Easy puzzles and most of the Medium ones. Recently I've started working on some of the Hard ones and this week I ran into one (Thor Versus the Giants) that has me stumped. This is not an unusual pattern. All of these programming puzzles start off very easy, then gradually get harder, and then at the end add an element completely invalidates the approach you've been taking so far and requires a major rework of your code. But always before I knew how to deal with it. This time it's really like shooting in the dark. I have an idea on how it might be attacked, but it requires more fussing (more code and more execution time, and worst of all, more hand tuning) than I am comfortable with. It all comes down to what one sentence in the description of the problem means. Maybe that's why it is classified as Hard. Bah and humbug. That means I will have to work to solve it.

Cessna 172

Mathias Rust, his borrowed Cessna 172 and assorted KGB goons in Red Square

Younger son had a flying lesson in a Cessna 172 yesterday. When I Googled it this is the first thing that came up.

Mathias Rust (born 1 June 1968) is a German aviator known for his illegal landing near Red Square in Moscow on 28 May 1987. An amateur pilot, he flew from Finland to Moscow, being tracked several times by Soviet air defence and interceptors. The Soviet fighters never received permission to shoot him down, and several times he was mistaken for a friendly aircraft. He landed on Vasilevsky Descent next to Red Square near the Kremlin in the capital of the Soviet Union.
Rust said he wanted to create an "imaginary bridge" to the East, and he has claimed that his flight was intended to reduce tension and suspicion between the two Cold War sides. Rust's flight through a supposedly impregnable air defense system had great effect on the Soviet military and led to the dismissal of many senior officers, including Minister of Defence Marshal of the Soviet Union Sergei Sokolov and the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, former World War II fighter ace pilot Chief Marshal Alexander Koldunov. The incident aided Mikhail Gorbachev in the implementation of his reforms, by allowing him to dismiss numerous military officials opposed to him whilst reducing the prestige of the Soviet military among the populace, thus helping bring an end to the Cold War. - Wikipedia

The Cessna 172 is the most produced aircraft in the world with over 43,000 built, which puts it just ahead of the Russian Polikarpov Po-2 Biplane. There are about 220,000 private aircraft in the USA. 

Horizontal Drilling

Geo-Pilot® Rotary Steerable System from Halliburton
Oklahoma Energy Resources Board has a video that gives a good overview of horizontal drilling and fracturing techniques. YouTube  has several videos on the same topic, but their audio tracks are either A) non-existent, or B) overfull of emotional drivel. The video from Halliburton (above) covers just the drill motor.

There are two kinds of horizontal drilling:

• the kind used for drilling oil and gas wells, and
• the kind used for near-surface construction projects, where a pipe has to be installed beneath an existing structure.

We are talking about the first kind here. Inspired by Comrade Misfit and a Bloomberg Businessweek article about oil production, prices and what they are doing to the Russian economy. The Bloomberg article mentioned horizontal drilling, which I had never heard of being used for oil. I had heard of directional drilling, which has been a bit of a mystery. This video helps clear it up a bit.

Conventional well drilling is done by turning the whole drill stem, much like you use an electric drill to turn a drill bit to drill a hole in a piece of wood. For directional drilling, which includes horizontal drilling, the drill pipe does not turn. It is used to conduct high pressure fluid to a hydraulic drill motor on the end of the drill string. (Drill string is the term for all of the sections of pipe strung together.)

Airliners

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 lands as an Air France Airbus A380 takes off

San Francisco, July 3, 2011, Elliot

The blue and orange 737 looks so small because it is much farther away than the white Airbus, right? Inspired by Stu.

Gun Culture

Robert and Mabel Williams

Over on Military Photos dot net, somebody posted a link to a CNN story about guns and race. The post drew several comments. I thought this one was especially good.

This all too typical sloppy analysis where people try and explain cultural phenomena by working backwards from the current situation motivated by political bias. It’s stupid, lazy, ignorant and wrong.
North America has a gun culture thanks to its history and from well before there were any significant number of Blacks in North America. The Europeans who settled North America faced a 300 year long war on their frontier with well-armed and belligerent native tribes. They also settled a wide frontier over centuries with little or no effective law and order structure requiring self protection and self enforcements of laws. They also fought four major wars in North America between 1756 and 1864 amongst themselves and with external European powers.
The gun culture was well established and embedded in the American psyche well before the slaves were freed, Jim Crow, civil rights and the current Black crime wave. - Shelldraken

 I do wonder about "the current Black crime wave". It's not a problem where I live. I suppose there could be places where such a thing is happening. Or maybe it's just a state of mind for some people.

Robert Williams fled the country (1961) to escape prosecution on charges he believed to be false. When he eventually returned to the USA, he was arrested and brought to trial, whereupon the state of North Caroline dropped the charges. Huh. Imagine that.

Sikorsky S-97 RAIDER

West Palm Beach, Florida. October 3, 2014. Sikorsky Aircraft facility unveiled the first of two S-97 RAIDER™ helicopter prototypes.

Kind of weird that Sikorsky would do this in a theater setting instead of at an airport, but perhaps the people who count like listening to other people talk, and you can bet there was a lot of talking going on at this event. Plus their hair wouldn't get mussed. So, politics. Should be making test flights before the end of the year. It has probably already made some, but under the radar, so to speak. Last thing you want on a project this expensive is a crash of the prototype on the evening news.

This thing uses a rigid hub and flexible blades instead of the complicated hinge and flap hubs used on other helicopters. Fancy materials lets them do that.