Compton Cowboys

Fire on the Hill - Official Trailer from Brett Fallentine on Vimeo.
If you are like me, when you hear 'Compton' you think of hip-hop and gang bangers, not cowboys, so when I heard about this I had to check it out. I like horses, so I think this is very cool.

Update April 2015 replaced missing "Teaser" with "Official Trailer".

Biking the LA River

Deepest Congo? No, Los Angeles River. I have to admit that this is the only photo that looks like this.

Hillel Aron has a story in LA Weekly about his bike ride along the Los Angeles River. It's thoroughly entertaining. I plotted the places he mentioned on a couple of Google Maps (because even Google has limits).

Part 1

Part 2

Hillel's route leads past a number of LA landmarks, and following along ties them to the river and so to each other, so it doesn't seem like such a vast, unknowable city anymore.

Sweet Meteor O'Death

Sweet Meteor O'Death

"The odds of a near-Earth object strike causing massive causalities and destruction of infrastructure are very small, but the potential consequences of such an event are so large that it makes sense to take the risk seriously," John Holdren, science advisor to President Barack Obama, told the Science, Space and Technology Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. - From a 2013 story on Fox News

We've gotten by so far without doing anything about the threat of rogue asteroids, and we will probably continue to do so. For a while, anyway. However, if we are really in love with ourselves as much as we claim to be, we probably ought to start thinking about what we could do about it if one ever did decide to show up.
    Gaining some space faring capability would be a good start and a mission to Mars would be a step in that direction. Personally, I think Venus is more interesting, but I can see how Venus's toxic, super-heated atmosphere would put people off. Much better to freeze and aphixiate than to boil in acid. Besides, we should be able to drive on Mars while the most we could hope to do in the near term on Venus is to fly around in the clouds.

Via Dustbury.

Drone Racing

Drone racing: First Person View (FPV)
Seems to have exploded. There are videos from all over the world of people racing their drones using VR (Virtual Reality) goggles. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Via Detroit Steve.

Mitsubishi Timing Belt

Mitsubishi 3.8 Liter DOHC V-6 Timing Belt. You cannot see the whole thing when the engine is in the car. Once you have removed a couple dozen bits and pieces, you can see part from above. To see the lower end, you need to take off the right front wheel and the splash shield. Nice that someone pulled their engine out just so we could see this.

I just realized our Mitsubishi Endeavor was overdue for a timing belt. The factory maintenance schedule calls for replacement at 105,000 miles and we are at 113,000. Not something you want to stall on as failure of this $2 part will destroy your $5,000 engine, so belly up to the bar and flex your credit card or prepare for two days of hard labor.
    It probably costs more than $2, but it doesn't really matter how much it costs because the big pain is the time and effort needed to do the work. The Endeavor, like most modern cars has the engine mounted transversely, which means the front of the engine (where all the belts are) is pushed up against the right front fender. A whole boat load of stuff has to come off before you can even see the timing belt, much less get to it. A shop will charge 5 or $600 just for the labor.
    Since you are going to all this trouble, it might be a good idea to replace some other items that are in there as well, like the water pump, tension rollers and a couple of seals. I had Accurate Auto do the work. The bill was just a shade over $1,000. The engine might still blow up, but it won't be because I neglected some important maintenance.
     Accurate Auto used to be in an old, converted gas station downtown that didn't have hardly any parking. Then I started going to Eric Heaton's on 25th. Eric lost a technician and now he has a backlog of work as long as your arm. I didn't want to wait on this deal, so I called Accurate and found that they had moved to a spacious facility next to Hale's restaurant on TV Highway.

School Dream

Winston University Lecture Hall

I am in a basement corridor. It is wide and long so presumably it is underneath a large building. It's clean and adequately lighted. There are your typical basement accoutrements (pipes, light fixtures, that sort of thing), but not many doors, so it looks like it is used for moving stuff from one place to another. There's nobody down there but me. I walk down the hall and it turns to the left and then to the right and eventually I come to a Tee. There are a couple of men wheeling carts laden with boxes across the Tee. The left hand of the Tee goes outside where they are loading boxes on a truck. Evidently this is the school's commissary and the boxes contain food.
    I go outside and I am walking down a city street. The school campus is mixed in with other buildings. I cross the street on a diagonal. On the far side are some train tracks and just past the tracks is a tall curb which gives onto a train platform. There is a short commuter train coming down the tracks with it's headlight on. It is at least a block away so I have no trouble crossing the tracks and stepping up onto the platform.
    I head up a slight rise to the Hamilton's, a collection of medium-high rises that are part of the school. I see a sign on the wall announcing the class I am looking for. It's a permanent sign and gives the professor's name, the name of the class (Flying), the days and times. I go inside. It is an auditorium style lecture hall with tiers of seats arranged like you would find in a theater. There are high windows around the outside and the walls are pale yellow. Instead of the typical foldaway desktops you would find in such an arrangement, there are full size tables in front of each row of seats.
    I find my friend in the midst of this. He has some papers in front of him and a stack of half a dozen books. I ask him about the class as I am considering taking it. He says it's okay, but lately all they have been talking about is economics, which he isn't too thrilled about. Class is about to start so I make my way out between the rows of tables, chairs and people.
    I go to see a professor about something and he starts telling me about his pen. It's kind of like a fountain pen, or a calligraphy pen. Most of the pen is black or brown or metal, but part of the grip is glowing slightly with a dim red light. First off he's telling me about how the grip directs your fingers, or their force, to a point just short of the pen's tip. I don't get what he is talking about, but I don't object. Then he starts telling me about the tip, how it is U-shaped, and how by rotating the pen you can bring any of several edges to bear on the paper and so determine the width of the line you can draw. They all seem to be variations of wide, from 1/16 of an inch up to a quarter. There does not seem to be a way to make a fine line.

Airline safety

Airliner burns at Las Vegas airport last week.

I asked a question on the Wikipedia Reference Desk:

I have always heard that "flying is safer than traveling by car" on a per mile basis, and I believe that is true. But what about on a per trip basis? Say I make about two car trips a day (I drive to work and then I drive home). In 40 years that could add up to 25,000 trips. I've had two accidents that were serious enough to make my car undrivable. I don't know how many airline flights I've taken, not many, maybe 100. My point is all you can do about these kinds of things is you can either decide to make the trip or not, so the odds of an accident on a per trip basis are more meaningful then on a per mile basis. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.43.33.62 (talk) 17:55, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

I got back a couple of replies. I thought this one was especially good.

Indeed; ultimately, what we choose as our denominator when we normalize statistics for comparison is purely a heuristic. Should we compare number of trips? Number of miles? Number of passengers multiplied by number of miles? Number of dollars spent? Whichever value we choose represents a heuristic model of our threat: if we count miles, that implies that (for some reason) we believe the risk is uniformly distributed over distance; if we choose number of trips, that suggests that we believe the risk is quantized - e.g., because of the adage that the riskiest part of a flight is the takeoff and landing. There is no universally correct answer.
I feel safer when I fly myself than when I fly on a commercial airline, even though accident statistics very clearly show that airline transport is safer than general aviation. This may be an illusion, but it is a real psychological effect. The process of Aeronautical Decision Making is the "systematic approach to the mental process of evaluating a given set of circumstances and determining the best course of action." It means becoming fully informed about all the pertinent objective facts of a situation. It also means to think clearly through the details, and to be aware of our own mental limitations. Finally, it means to take a reasonable course of action, based on all available data.
It is also worth emphasizing the formal distinction between probability and statistics, because this is relevant to making good decisions about outcomes.
In my short career as a (non-commercial) aviator, I've seen many mechanical failures - on the ground and in the air. Thus far, none of these interesting occurrences have resulted in a fatal accident. But from this perspective, I recognize the widespread fallacy of fixating on Gaussian distributions. The mean and median event rate for a large population has zero impact on when I will experiece an event. This is the causation-correlation fallacy. It is tragic that in the basic tiers of formal schooling, we spend so much time studying bell-curves for large populations. We ought to spend more time studying Poisson distributions and their effect on probability. Bell curves are fantastic ways for institutional regulators to study safety on the macro-scale, and do provide actionable information if your decisions can affect large numbers of events. However, I am only one individual. I do not represent 300 million air travelers; I do not actually feel effects of n-accidents-per-hundred-million. What I care about is likelihood of a single event - one single event, not n-events-per-mille - and all I care about is how that single event will affect me (and my aircraft and my passenger). Recognition, and realistic understanding, of these types of probability distributions, is more useful for me to inform my judgement than all the bell-curves in the world. My aircraft will not suffer an accident because the national average for aircraft predicts it. My aircraft will only suffer an accident if a mechanical or systems failure occurs, or if there is a fire, or if I command the aircraft to do something unsafe, or if some outside occurrence creates an unrecoverable situation. None of that is caused by nation-wide average. Quite the opposite: the nation-wide accident rate is caused by the aggregation of all of these individual events.
This perspective completely changes the way I evaluate, and reduce, my risk - whether the risk is related to automobile traffic, operating or riding in aircraft, or participating in any of the other uncertain activities of ordinary life.
Nimur (talk) 15:44, 14 September 2015 (UTC)