"In a new global chapter defined by perilous conflicts, distracted leaders, and a retreating sense of international responsibility to keep peace, the safety net had never seemed thinner."
Sunday, May 11, 2025
NYTimes: The Danger for India and Pakistan Has Not Gone Away
The Danger for India and Pakistan Has Not Gone Away
Saturday, May 10, 2025
Priorities in making traffic faster
https://youtu.be/Mi_R9vVwPNI?si=BLwWH7ENlauSwtdq
Here are the top countries with the highest traffic-related death rates, based on the information I found:
* Burundi: 35.5 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2019)
* Democratic Republic of the Congo: 34.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2019)
* Chad: 32.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2019)
* Burkina Faso: 31.0 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2019)
* Cameroon: 30.2 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2019)
* Congo: 29.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2019)
* Ethiopia: 28.2 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2019)
* Dominican Republic: 27.5 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (2022)
...
* USA (12.8 - 2022)
...
* Canada (5.0 - 2022)
...
* Britain (2.6 - 2022)
Friday, May 9, 2025
Sand deposition
We think of sand on the beach as stable, but it is really mid-journey between rock and silt. This graph cleverly illustrates that it takes high flow to move both large and small particles sizes - large ones because of their bulk, and silt particles because of their cohesion.
https://www.alexstrekeisen.it/english/sedi/index.php Sand comes in many forms, as discussed in this video.
Sand is increasingly more expensive to procure for construction - because useful particles to impart strength to concrete need to be (6:36) jagged to add strength. However, (12:03) round wind-blown sand requires less water to make workable concrete that ends up being stronger. He says that the idea that windblown sands can't be used in concrete is a myth.
This video promotes the myth that round sand can't be used for construction. However, (3:55) recycled glass particles might make the perfect substitute.
Commercial flights have become significantly safer in recent decades - Our World in Data
As the chart shows, this figure has dropped steadily in the last 50 years. According to the latest data, it is now about half a fatality per million flights. This means that, on average, it now takes more than 2 million flights for a fatal accident to occur.
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Who owns California's water supply?
https://youtu.be/4B19qb1Az94?si=rgcwRn574mOm0FN-
Wow, incredible selfish manipulation of legislation for personal profit.
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Asphalt origins
https://youtu.be/-m6-LF0lptg?si=BWWH1ULSTe1cbdU7
1:25 asphalt roads were discovered by accident when some tar was spilled in a dirt road.
NYTimes: MAGA Beauty Is Built to Go Viral
""Lifestyle influencers exist in an ecosystem that prizes homogeneity," because social media algorithms reward it." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/opinion/maga-beauty-viral-women.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
Why American Communities Began Adding Fluoride to Water
"Colorado Springs in the early 1900s, where residents with brown-stained teeth, later linked to high fluoride levels, also had lower rates of tooth decay."
"first major trial of water fluoridation to a community water supply began in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where dental exams soon confirmed that children who drank fluoridated water from birth had significantly fewer cavities."
"for every dollar spent, communities of 1,000 or more people save an estimated $20 in dental treatment costs...Water fluoridation has played a very important role in helping to reduce the prevalence of complete tooth loss from 50 percent to close to 10 percent today."
"concerns have been around neurotoxicity and cognitive problems affecting children—at levels more than twice the recommended level—could harm developing brains." https://www.history.com/articles/fluoride-water-teeth-health Monday, May 5, 2025
Lifeboat launch
https://youtu.be/UGuLXLTWiCA?si=wY5lWSkOrfm22lyy
I've seen these lifeboats pitched precariously at the stern of ships - and they're about 90 feet above the water. I'm glad they have a four-point restraint seatbelt for when they hit the water! Looks like quite a jolt.
Sunday, May 4, 2025
No nation healthier than its children
Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley first promoted the farm-to-table movement. In Chef's Table "Legends" she quoted "In the long view, no nation is any healthier than its children or more prosperous than its farmers."
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-upon-signing-the-national-school-lunch-act From the Statement by the President Upon Signing the National School Lunch Act. 1946
Advanced drone techniques explained
https://youtu.be/yRl3cr6kzcw?si=JSIykLQjR_mII-PU
Excellent advanced drone techniques.
2:26 turn down the gain on gimbal settings so gimbal movements are gradual
3:27 adjust the exponential stick settings so that initial snap stick movements are very gradual
4:42 Put objects in the foreground to create a reveal.
7:40 stay close to the ground, or against the direction of moving water
8:55 keep the amount of sky in frame to a minimum
11:49 use photo ephemeris to determine the best lighting conditions for a location.
13:40 Set shutter speed to 1 over twice the frame rate to
14:02 avoid really small apertures as diffraction distorts the image. Use neutral density filters in bright conditions instead.
14:47 set white balance manually for each shot so you don't get white-balance changes happening automatically during the shot.
Ship exhaust particles increase lightning
Lightning does not flash everywhere equally on Earth. The phenomenon occurs more often over land than over the oceans, and more often in areas closer to the equator than in the mid- and high latitudes. According to recent research led by Joel Thornton, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, humans also can affect where lightning flashes.
The connection between people and lightning is visible along two of the world's busiest shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The top map shows the emissions of particles from ship exhaust (orange), calculated from a database of maritime vessel traffic in the region. The second map shows the average density of lightning per year from 2005 to 2016, as detected by the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN). The narrow light-purple bands indicate where increases in lightning occurred. Turn on the image comparison tool to see where areas of increased lightning coincide with shipping routes.
The researchers found that on average, the frequency of lightning over shipping lanes is double that which occurs in the regions immediately adjacent to those lanes. "It has been a surprise to find this feature in the data and to have it be so clearly pronounced," Thornton said. He notes that the idea of aerosol particles influencing storm intensity and lightning has been discussed for more than a decade, but that there has not been consensus that the effect would be important. "Our finding provides one of the clearest examples of a human perturbation to aerosol particles and lightning in an otherwise clean region."
The WWLLN is a treasure trove of data, with ground-based sensors recording lightning strokes around the planet. Work by Katrina Virts, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, recently made the network even more valuable. By reprocessing the global lightning climatology, she was able to increase the resolution by a factor of five. The location of lightning strokes can now be pinpointed to within 10 square kilometers.
Virts' high-resolution maps led Thornton and colleagues to pursue the hypothesis that ship exhaust was enhancing lightning. The team compared surface lightning data observed in the Indian Ocean shipping lanes with data from the Lightning Imaging Sensor on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. They also used radar data from TRMM to test whether certain parts of the storm clouds contained more liquid droplets amidst the water vapor and ice particles. Such an increase would occur if the particles in ship exhaust were changing cloud structure in the area.
"Our results indicate the ship exhaust particles are, in fact, changing what would be a tropical rain storm into a thunderstorm—from no lightning to a storm with lightning," Thornton said. "Or, the particles are increasing the vertical development of thunderstorms to have even more lightning than they otherwise would have."
Saturday, May 3, 2025
How to use AI better.
https://youtu.be/wv779vmyPVY?si=FvBooH1Qjw0uDdoH
12:59 "I don't use AI, I work with it." Interesting perspective on getting the most out of AI - treat it like a teammate rather than a tool, and give it feedback to improve. Don't accept "good enough," but persist beyond the first answer you think of. 11:22 "creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of"
8:26 Ask AI "what could I have asked to get a better answer?" "What do you need to know from me to get the best response?" "What's the best way if framing that question to AI"
Container port volumes
https://youtu.be/YXkWbhAQK5c?si=Lc_7MlTkUU-pFm6d
More than you ever wanted to know about volume of shipping containers.
The number of enjoy containers in US ports waiting to return to China is staggering.
Robot agility
https://youtu.be/NAcanWv_2Z8?si=kmz5yEhg4XBY6q_R
Wheels on legs - incredible agility in difficult terrain
Moab mites survive prolonged dehydration.
https://youtu.be/l7mb9Kyktqk?si=mMSgOv-yJgYGt-lb
Fascinating mites survive long periods of dehydration inside their wax covering and instantly spring to life when doused with water.
Friday, May 2, 2025
Alternate search engines
Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.
Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.
Here's a list of sites you may have never heard of!
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
https://www.ecosia.org/
Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company that plants and protects trees. By dedicating 100% of its profits to the planet, Ecosia has planted over 214,229,374 million trees since its founding in December 2009
Yandex.com
Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Our goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world. Since 1997, we have delivered world-class, locally relevant search and information services.
Gutenberg.org
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks
Duckduckgo.com
"Protection. Privacy. Peace of mind. Get our browser on all your devices.
Search and browse with the DuckDuckGo browser for more protection. Unlike Chrome and other browsers, we don't track you."
Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.
Here's a list of sites you may have never heard of!
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
https://www.ecosia.org/
Ecosia is a not-for-profit tech company that plants and protects trees. By dedicating 100% of its profits to the planet, Ecosia has planted over 214,229,374 million trees since its founding in December 2009
Yandex.com
Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Our goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world. Since 1997, we have delivered world-class, locally relevant search and information services.
Gutenberg.org
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks
Duckduckgo.com
"Protection. Privacy. Peace of mind. Get our browser on all your devices.
Search and browse with the DuckDuckGo browser for more protection. Unlike Chrome and other browsers, we don't track you."
Thursday, May 1, 2025
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Happiness by country
Start at 4:30. Really interesting video. Instead of ranking countries by wealth, they proposed tracking people happiness, by asking how close you feel to your ideal life. Turns out it does track fairly well to wealth. But a related question "how happy were you yesterday?" ranks very differently and is unrelated to wealth.
Saturday, April 26, 2025
Dark clothing increases car crashes with pedestrians
Amongst a host of other associations, a study found "crashes involving pedestrians in dark clothing" as a risk factor for pedestrian motor vehicle accidents.*
Even during daytime, "Motorists were more likely to stop for a brightly-clothed pedestrian."
A crosswalk warning sign, unfortunately, had no effect. "The presence of a warning sign located 48 meters before the crosswalk had no significant effect on motorists' yielding under daytime conditions."
However, a sign between the lanes of traffic was more effective at getting drivers to stop than a flashing yellow light.
"the produced very high levels of driver yielding, and that it was as effective as the 2 more expensive treatments."
* Other associations were:
"elderly pedestrian (>64 years) alcohol impairment resulting in fatalities, crashes in an open country location with a high posted speed limit, crashes involving pedestrians in dark clothing on high-speed (50–55 mph) roadways, alcohol-impaired driver involvement in crashes on two-way roads without physical separation, severe injury crashes at intersections, male pedestrian crashes on midblock locations during weekends, and young (15–24 years) female driver's involvement in crashes while pedestrians were walking against the traffic."
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Cooperative problem solving by ants and humans.
What a great illustration of cooperative problem-solving by both ants and humans. https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1EYjPwaRS8/
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
New pollen-replacing food for honey bees brings hope for survival
"Until this study, honey bees were the only livestock that could not be maintained on a man-made feed...newly developed food source resembles human "Power Bars." These are placed directly into honey bee colonies, where young bees process and distribute the essential nutrients to larvae and adult bees...tested thousands of combinations of ingredients on honey bees over more than 10 years to create this feed.
...shows in commercial field conditions that providing nutritionally stressed colonies with our pollen-replacing feed results in a major measurable step change in colony health compared to current best practices...This breakthrough addresses one of the growing challenges faced by honey bees: lack of adequate nutrition in their environment."
"A critical discovery within the research is the role of isofucosterol, a molecule found naturally in pollen that acts as a vital nutrient for honey bees...severe challenge of high annual colony mortality, with recent reports indicating crisis-level losses, underscores the urgency of this innovation"
Laser speckle interferometry
Laser speckle interferometry probes beneath an opaque surface for subtle movement. In this example it's detecting loose wall fragments.
Conservation of ancient paintings is a fine balance of removing surface contaminants without harming the underlying paint. This method, developed over 7 painstaking years, revolutionizes that by dynamically analyzing in real time how deep and how far the solvent is penetrating the damaged surface.
"With nano-motion imaging we found the sweet spot where the varnish was removed without significant solvent im-pact to the paint layer."
https://www.iiconservation.org/sites/default/files/documents/2025-04/nic-magazine-apr-may-2025-compressed_0.pdf Sunday, April 20, 2025
Complexity of computer simulations
This professor always does a mesmerizing job of describing the challenges of getting a computer to simulate light reflections and flexible deformations. Worth subscribing to - every episode over 10 years has been interesting. He saves the best for last in this video - simulation of ferrofluids at 5:12
https://youtu.be/wq8BgIfOxnk?si=7cGaSySWncNlTthn
Related: I bought my daughter a ferrofluid speaker from Amazon, and she loves it.
Friday, April 18, 2025
Economists dropped $10M in rural Africa
A randomized experiment where money was directly transferred to poverty-stricken individuals solved 2 long-standing macroeconomic questions:
1) inflation was not increased - because the economy was constrained by demand, that is, plenty of people had not enough work, so extra money allowed them to work more
2) the money multiplied, in fact by 2.5 times - poor people are more likely to spend than to save newfound wealth, which in turn is mostly spent by the recipients thereby increasing the economy more than once, before it eventually leaves the local economy.
4:14 It turns out that giving money directly to poor people without any middlemen produced greater nutritional benefits than the same dollars spent on supplying food. Giving money directly to individuals 14:19 is more effective than sending it to organizations where, because of corruption and inefficiency, only a small percentage of donated funds reach poor individuals.
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Drug-induced synaptogenesis
I knew that psilocybin induces synaptogenesis (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/02698811241249436 ) but didn't know that ketamine did so also, let alone so rapidly. ( "By the 2-hour time point, treatment significantly increased the probability of glutamate-evoked spinogenesis to ~50%."
Monday, April 14, 2025
Shrubs, not grasses, pull water from deep roots during drought
"a strong case against the idea that those plants use their deep roots to find moisture during times of scarcity. In fact, they might not be using them to draw moisture at all...prairie has survived droughts, grazing, and fire. The root system beneath these plants plays a major role in that resilience, but not in the way many of us have been taught...Despite having very deep roots, most prairie grasses pull water primarily from the top 10 inches or so of the soil...found that shrubs pull water from much deeper in the soil than grasses and forbs, starting at about 18 inches and reaching down to 8 or 10 feet...species such as sumac and dogwood, but not to more forb-like shrubs such as leadplant or New Jersey tea...Fortunately, while shrubs seem to have some serious advantages belowground, they still have a major disadvantage above ground, which is that their growing points are up in the air. Grasses produce new tillers (aboveground stems) from buds at or below the ground surface. That means that when they are grazed or burned off, they only lose the aboveground plant material they've invested in during the current growing season. If that defoliation occurs during the dormant season, it really doesn't bother them at all because all their living biomass is safely belowground. Shrubs, however, put on new growth from the tips of their aboveground stems. When fire comes through and destroys all their aboveground tissue, they lose a considerable investment, even during the dormant season, and have to start rebuilding from the ground..."
https://prairieecologist.com/2019/09/17/a-deep-rooted-prairie-myth/
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Thomas A. Edison - Opportunity is missed by most people...
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
-Thomas A. Edison
Robots learning to walk by trial and error
I find it fascinating to watch robots learn to walk by reinforced deep learning.
2 hours to learn to walk
Underwater stretchy tape
https://youtu.be/Z3BHrzDHoYo?si=oJ2F1MPJk59BQo9e
What? Incredible camouflage and protection by gluing rocks to its body.
Locating drones, aircraft, and even asteroids cheaply
https://youtu.be/m-b51C82-UE?si=mo8M3wu_0bI5TzBV
I love a concept like this, much like digital subtraction angiography - get sophisticated data by combining multiple sources of very cheap data acquisition.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Orange peel dump site spawns rich biodiversity
In 1997, ecologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs approached an orange juice company in Costa Rica with an off-the-wall idea. In exchange for donating a portion of unspoiled, forested land ...the park would allow the company to dump its discarded orange peels and pulp, free of charge, in a heavily grazed, largely deforested area nearby...offloading over 12,000 metric tons of sticky, mealy, orange compost onto the worn-out plot...16 years later...the experiment resulted in a "176 percent increase in aboveground biomass...Compared to the adjacent plot, which was dominated by a single species of tree, the site of the orange peel deposit featured two dozen species of vegetation, most thriving...greater biodiversity, richer soil, and a better-developed canopy"
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Global warming, painstakingly illustrated
Japanese Diarists have chronicled the arrival of cherry blossoms each year since A.D. 812
The 20-year average is on the steepest decline since records began 1,200 years ago, with the drop accelerating since we started burning fossil fuels
https://buff.ly/YTPdBEJ
Chart source: https://buff.ly/sbl4s9c
Twain - travel as antidote to prejudice
https://youtu.be/Yr8qPKTo8yA?si=V_Mvj7iPbME9Yz02
1:50 Twain circled the globe, and he wrote: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."
Friday, March 28, 2025
Salmon-killer from tires
https://youtu.be/RESCG-4SYpw?si=nW8iIjFC6xs4iEuQ
A soil mix containing sand, coconut fiber, biochar effectively filters out a poison from car tires, preventing it from reaching rivers where it kills Coho salmon.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
A Woman Who Can Smell Parkinson's
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/820274501/her-incredible-sense-of-smell-is-helping-scientists-find-new-ways-to-diagnose-di
"....then one day, about 10 years into the marriage, when Les was 31, he came home, and strangely, Joy says, he smelled different. "His lovely male musk smell had got this overpowering sort of nasty yeast smell," she says...Kunath asked one group of people who had Parkinson's and another group of people who didn't have Parkinson's to take home white T-shirts, wear them overnight and then return them. Then Kunath gave the T-shirts to Joy to smell. "They were all given randomized numbers and put in a box, and then she was asked to take each one out and give it a score," he says...In fact, out of all the samples, Joy made only one mistake. She identified a man in the control group...as having the disease. But many months later...that man actually approached him at an event and said, "Tilo, you're going to have to put me in the Parkinson's pile because I've just been diagnosed."
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Avoiding a simple but catastrophic error.
The key finding here was an error that resulted because "Conducting pre‑flight activities out of sequence increases the risk of missing critical steps and should be avoided." In the operating room, a similar condition occurs when the order of surgical patients is switched, as staff may have subconsciously prepared mental steps for the originally intended operation.
An ATSB occurrence brief details a flight preparation event involving an ATR-72 turboprop airliner at Kalgoorlie Airport, WA.
--What happened--
On the afternoon of 29 January 2025 a [regional jet] was being prepared for an air transport... weather was clear with a temperature of around 38°C. The aircraft had been parked since its arrival that morning at about 0900 local time and the flight crew had fitted the engine air intake covers in anticipation of an extended stop.
The flight crew returned to the aircraft at about 1500 and started preparing for the upcoming flight. The operator had recently emphasized the risk of high cabin temperatures to the passengers, so the flight crew was focused on cooling down the heat-soaked aircraft. As [it was] not equipped with an auxiliary power unit [for weight saving] the use of the air-conditioning packs required starting the number 2 engine in hotel mode.*
After the pilots boarded the aircraft, the first officer started to prepare the flight deck for engine start. The captain disembarked and walked toward the rear of the aircraft to check the airport windsock which was not visible from the cockpit to ensure the correct orientation.[3] The captain then reboarded and joined the first officer for the engine start.
A ground handler was in attendance to make sure the exclusion area around the engine was cleared. After they gave the 'start-engine' hand signal, the flight crew started the number 2 engine with the air bleed valve selected 'off'.[4] The engine start proceeded normally, but when the engine bleed was set to 'on' the crew noticed an immediate rise of the inter-turbine temperature. Closing the bleed valve resulted in the temperature dropping back to normal, but another attempt to open the bleed valve saw the temperature rise again. At this point, the first officer realised that the intake covers had not been removed (Figure 1) and they immediately shut down the engine.
The flight crew then disembarked and found that the engine air intake covers had not been removed from either engine. Additionally, the foam insert from the right-side intake cover had separated and was lodged in the intake. They informed the company operations department and after consultation with the approved maintenance organisation, it was decided that the aircraft should not be flown until an engineer could inspect and test run the engine.
Engineers of the operator's part 145 maintenance organisation attended the aircraft and conducted an inspection of the number 2 engine, followed by a test run at idle and 90% torque. They did not identify any abnormalities, and the aircraft was subsequently released to service.
Further inspection of the covers found that neither had a 'remove before flight' streamer attached and that the stitching on both the number 2 and number 1 cover was in poor condition (Figure 2) and partly loose, which allowed the foam insert to separate from the cover.
--Safety action--
The operator's internal investigation report recommended fitting warning flags to the intake covers of the incident aircraft and that all intake covers across its fleet be checked to further avoid intake cover internal foam ingestion into engines.
The internal report also recommended that involved pilots are reminded of operator's external inspection procedures and receive training in human factors.
--Safety message--
This incident highlights the importance of preparing the aircraft for flight in accordance with the company and manufacturer's procedures, even when competing priorities exist. Conducting pre‑flight activities out of sequence increases the risk of missing critical steps and should be avoided.
Intake and pitot covers may be hard to see due to their location, lighting and weather conditions. To reduce the risk of them being missed during a pre-flight inspection, they should have a contrasting colour and 'remove before flight' flags. Operators should make sure they are periodically inspected as part of their maintenance system, so they remain fit for purpose.
--About this report--
Decisions regarding whether to conduct an investigation, and the scope of an investigation, are based on many factors, including the level of safety benefit likely to be obtained from an investigation. For this occurrence, no investigation has been conducted and the ATSB did not verify the accuracy of the information. A brief description has been written using information supplied in the notification and any follow-up information in order to produce a short summary report, and allow for greater industry awareness of potential safety issues and possible safety actions.
[1] The auxiliary power unit (APU) is a small gas turbine engine mounted in the tail cone of some larger aircraft to provide autonomous electrical and mechanical power without the use of the engines.
[2] Hotel mode engages the hydraulic propeller brake and allows the turbine to be run to provide auxiliary power and compressed air to the aircraft without the propeller spinning. Compressed air is used to drive the air-conditioning packs which provide cooling to the cabin and cockpit.
[3] The manufacturer's documentation warns against starting the engine in hotel mode with a significant tailwind, as exhaust gasses being blown back into the engine casing may trigger a (false) fire alarm.
[4] Pressurised air diverted from the engine's compressor stage is delivered through the bleed valves for air conditioning and pressurisation as well as de-icing.
**Hotel mode is a feature on ATR 42/72 turboprops replacing an APU by locking the right-hand #2 engine with a 'propeller brake' while allowing the turbine, and therefore also the generator, to run, providing electrical power and bleed air...Hotel Mode seems to be generally disliked for a number of reasons:
- It's very loud, especially if you're lifting baggage next to it
- It consumes a lot of fuel, since you're running a full engine.
- It could be dangerous if the propeller brake is in poor condition and suddenly loses its grip.
This configuration is rare, if not unique amongst aircraft.
Monday, March 24, 2025
10 myths about US tax system
Interesting podcast dispelling myths about US taxation.
44:27 "Elon Musk and his merry band of budget cutters seem to be focusing on symbolic things like DEI contracts, political subscriptions, federal employment that serve a culture war purpose for MAGA warriors. But in terms of the budget deficit, they're not even a rounding error." *
26:56 Myth one is that tax cuts pay for themselves. Tax cuts can bring some extra revenue. They almost never pay for themselves.
Myth two is that tax cuts will starve the beast by forcing Congress to cut spending, but historically it's the opposite. When we cut taxes, Congress increases spending, and when we raise taxes, Congress cut spending.
Myth three is that the middle class pays higher tax rates than the rich. This is not true. If you take a look at all combined federal taxes, the top 1% pays 33%. The middle class pays 12. The bottom pays roughly zero.
Myth four is that those old 91% tax rates in the 1950s produced all this new revenue. The reality is nobody actually paid the 91% tax rates back then. In fact, virtually nobody paid over 50% in a tax bracket and those tax brackets raised virtually no revenue.
Myth five is that Europe funds its bigger governments by taxing the rich more. In reality, they tax the rich about the same as the United States and the entire overage in tax revenue for Europe is the result of value added taxes, which are essentially national sales taxes that hit the middle class.
Myth six is that tax cuts for the rich are the reason we have large budget deficits. The reality is that since 2000, we've cut taxes by 2% of GDP, of which maybe 0.6% of GDP is on the rich, but we've increased spending by 6% of GDP, much bigger driver.
Myth seven asserts that taxing corporations and millionaires can eliminate the deficit. You could tax 'em at a hundred percent and seize all their wealth. It doesn't come close.
Myth eight is that most of the 2017 tax cuts went to corporations and the wealthy. The reality is while they received bigger tax cuts in terms of pure dollars as a share of the taxes they were paying, it was a roughly proportional income tax cut. Everybody got their tax rate dropped by about one percentage point.
Myth nine is that if we go back to the 1980 tax code, essentially repealing the Reagan bush and Trump tax cuts will have painless deficit reduction. In reality, if we did that, the tax burden on the middle class would go through the roof, not just the rich but the middle class to unacceptably high levels.
Myth 10 is that America's corporate taxes are far below international standards. The reality is we had the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world until 2017, and even right now after the 2017 corporate tax cuts, our statutory and effective corporate tax rate is still in the top one. Third. We also collect slightly more than other countries and business taxes when you include pass through corporations.
* DOGE claims $115 billion in savings — but its own 'wall of receipts' shows just $35 billion.
[This is 0.05% of the total budget of 6.9 trillion.]
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Trader Joe's Freakonomics
35:20 A larger at of choices created more interest, but a smaller range of choices created more action (sales.)
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Clarion-Clipperton zone
While Norway investigates the risks and zinc/copper/cobalt assets near Svalbard Island, multiple nations are 4:46 vying for lucrative contracts (none yet granted) in the Clarion-Clipperton zone between Hawaii and Guatemala.
Why are millions of Chinese kids raising themselves?
Such a sad, sad story - young kids raising each other at boarding school while impoverished illiterate parents live too far away to visit regularly, earning meager wages that barely support their family.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
High audit rates for the wealthy
"tax returns of the affluent are generally more complex—and therefore more likely to contain red flags for the IRS"
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