Dad Joke CCCIII

What goes around the world while it stays in a corner?

A stamp.

Building a medieval castle using only medieval technology

It seems that this is a thing, and has been for a couple decades:

Guedelon Castle in Burgundy, France, is built using only techniques and materials that were available in the Middle Ages. Michel Guyot and Maryline Martin started the project in 1997, and it has been nearing its inevitable completion ever since. Today, it has created over 55 jobs and draws more than 300,000 visitors every year.

It looks pretty cool:

Here's their web site, Building A Castle From Scratch.  I'd go there, if I ever get the chance.

California Dreaming

So I'm back from my trip to silicon valley.  I've been working remotely for a number of years, and while there's a very Jetsons-living-in-the-future vibe to video conferencing I have to say that it was nice to meet my colleagues (most for the first time in real life).  It was a whirlwind trip and I'm pretty wiped out (I'm not 30 any more, or even 40), but there were some interesting impressions from being in California.  I present them here in no particular order.

My rent a car was an electric hybrid.  I'd never driven one before and I have to say that if you're in an urban environment like the Bay Area, this might be a good commuter choice.  It used battery power a lot, and it was disconcerting when the engine started up solely to charge the car.  It's not cool like the Jeep is - no lift kit, super swamper tires, winch on the bumper, etc - but it sure got good gas mileage.  Which leads me to the next impression of California.

Holy cow, is gas expensive.  I paid $4.79/gal to fill up the the rental car.  Hokey smokes.  That's what I pay in Florida - if you add 50% to the price!  The good thing was that in a 4 day trip I used less than 2 gallons (!) in the rental car.  Still not as fun as the Jeep, though.

There was a lot of interest in my group about all things Florida.  While they all thought that the weather in California was "what everyone wanted", more than one showed a little bit of envy when I looked up the weather back home and said "Sunny and 79°" when it was 59 and foggy in California.  Glad the meeting was in December, not July ...

Lord, the traffic.  I complain about Florida drivers, but holy cow.  I had more than one conversation with folks out there about motorcycles.  The consensus is that riding over the hills to Hall Moon Bay - good; riding anywhere on route 101 - express lane to the Emergency Room (or the morgue).

Once you get off route 101, it's a pretty area.  Crazy expensive to live there, but pretty.

All in all, my impression of life there was that California is living the life of an aging Diva, getting dinners and compliments of a renowned past but still with a hint of her former beauty and much of her former wit.  It wasn't a bad trip (other than four 12 hour days) but you can tell it's not 1965 any more.  Or even 1995.  But while the greatness that was California is gone, it's still perceptible that the greatness was in its day very great indeed.

Oof

Back from a trip to the Bay.  Four consecutive 12 hour days have kind of wiped me out.  Blogging to continue later. 

Back now

Been traveling.  Oof.

Blogging to resume today. 

Great Great Grandfather's bloody day

159 years ago (well, last week) this was the view for my Great Great Grandfather (photo credit: The Queen Of The World.  Click to enbiggen):

It looks peaceful today, but 159 years ago it was a different story.  This is the Hornet's Nest at Shiloh Battlefield, looking west from where the 7th Iowa Infantry waited the charge of the Confederate forces.  My Great Great Grandfather stood there, and today I stood on the same ground.

The 7th  Iowa was at the center of the line.  This is what Great Great Grandfather would have seen looking to his right:

Peaceful today, not so much that day.  This was the view the other way:

Then all hell broke loose.  After 4 brutal hours, the 7th Iowa was forced back, regrouping at Grant's "Final Line" where they held the southern forces.  Barely.  Not all of the Union soldiers in the Hornet's Nest fared so well - 2,500 were surrounded and surrendered. 

It was quite a feeling walking that ground today.  Great Great Grandfather was a Kansas boy back when the war broke out.  Kansas wasn't a state then and so he couldn't sign up, so he and his buddies went north to Iowa where they enlisted in 1861.  He went all the way through the war - Ft. Donaldson, Shiloh, Atlanta, Savannah, Columbia, Bentonville.  He marched in the parade in Washington D.C. and was mustered out.

On the drive back, The Queen Of The World wondered about all the men who died there.  None of them have Great Great Grandsons to remember them, because the war took from them everything they had and everything they would ever have.  I would quote from Abraham Lincoln's justly famous letter to Mrs. Bixby, but Mr. Lincoln is perhaps uniquely responsible for all those deaths, and that lack of descendents for all those men.

I also wondered on that drive back why I consider Grant to be a sympathetic character.  Long time readers know my opinion of Mr. Sherman, but for some reason I can't shake a somewhat favorable impression of Grant.  I need to do some pondering on this.

But like I said, it was a thrill to walk in Great Great Grandfather's footsteps on that battlefield.

The past isn't dead.  It isn't even past.

- William Faulkner

Traveling

Blog later.  Maybe after the campfire burns down ...

 

Flying with jerks

We've all be on a flight with That Guy - the one who's obnoxious, belligerent, and possibly drunk or high.

This was beautiful.

It's from a few years back but I just ran across it.  Like I said, it's beautiful what happened to That Guy.

Back now

The Queen Of The World and I are back from seeing Mom for her birthday.  Her memory is pretty much gone, as the dementia takes its toll, but the QOTW has a particular way of holding conversations with her that Mom really likes.  A lot of what Mom says doesn't make much sense, but the QOTW keeps the conversation going.  I don't think that anyone else does that, and Mom really likes her for it.

After taking care of Mom's affairs, we took some time to do a little sight seeing.  Albuquerque is a dramatic location, and we hiked out to see the petroglyphs.  Climbing up from Boca Negra we saw this:

We went to Santa Fe to put flowers on Dad's grave.  The VA cemetery there is beautiful, and Dad liked to say that he would have a million dollar view.  He does.

But it was a pretty emotionally draining trip.  I get the sense that my visits to Albuquerque will wind down over the next couple years: Mom is declining, and while still in good health for a 90 year old, the end will be delayed but not forever.  There's still more to show the QOTW, though.  Maybe I can get her out to the Balloon Festival which is a sight to see.

Blogging will get back to a more regular schedule now.

I don't think that I want to fly on a Boeing 737 Max

There is a great analysis of the 737 Max failures at IEEE:

The engines on the original 737 had a fan diameter (that of the intake blades on the engine) of just 100 centimeters (40 inches); those planned for the 737 Max have 176 cm. That’s a centerline difference of well over 30 cm (a foot), and you couldn’t “ovalize” the intake enough to hang the new engines beneath the wing without scraping the ground.

The solution was to extend the engine up and well in front of the wing. However, doing so also meant that the centerline of the engine’s thrust changed. Now, when the pilots applied power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to “pitch up,” or raise its nose.

Larger engines were critical to the design, because that's how you get efficiency (read: lowest fuel cost).  The old airframe (fuselage and wings) were critical to the design because if you do a major change to the plane then the FAA certification is no longer valid and you need to (very expensively) re-certify the plane.

In the 737 Max, the engine nacelles themselves can, at high angles of attack, work as a wing and produce lift. And the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing’s center of lift, meaning the nacelles will cause the 737 Max at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is aerodynamic malpractice of the worst kind.

This is really, really bad.  Consider a plane that is about to stall.  One approach (especially with large, powerful engines) is to apply power to increase air speed.  On the 737 Max, this will cause the nose to pitch up and bring on the stall.  The design is inherently unstable in this situation.

Let’s review what the MCAS does: It pushes the nose of the plane down when the system thinks the plane might exceed its angle-of-attack limits; it does so to avoid an aerodynamic stall. Boeing put MCAS into the 737 Max because the larger engines and their placement make a stall more likely in a 737 Max than in previous 737 models.

When MCAS senses that the angle of attack is too high, it commands the aircraft’s trim system (the system that makes the plane go up or down) to lower the nose. It also does something else: Indirectly, via something Boeing calls the “Elevator Feel Computer,” it pushes the pilot’s control columns (the things the pilots pull or push on to raise or lower the aircraft’s nose) downward.

This sounds sensible, although kludgy.  The problem is that the Elevator Feel Computer has a really powerful actuator; pilots will struggle to overcome it and push the nose down.  It seems that this wasn't a bug, but a feature of the design.  But here's the crux of the problem:

In the 737 Max, only one of the flight management computers is active at a time—either the pilot’s computer or the copilot’s computer. And the active computer takes inputs only from the sensors on its own side of the aircraft.

When the two computers disagree, the solution for the humans in the cockpit is 
to look across the control panel to see
 what the other instruments are saying and then sort it out. In the Boeing system, the flight
 management computer does not “look 
across” at the other instruments. It 
believes only the instruments on its side. It doesn’t go old-school. It’s modern. It’s software.

This means is that if a particular angle-of-attack sensor goes haywire—which happens all the time in a machine that alternates from one extreme environment to another, vibrating and shaking all the way—the flight management computer just believes it.

There's no redundancy.  Let me elaborate on that:

There's no redundancy.
There's no redundancy.
There's no redundancy.
There's no redundancy.

Holy cow, this is the dumbest design I've ever heard of, and I'm not even an aeronautical engineer.  This smells of "we found this out late in testing and had outsourced software developers write us some code in a hurry to fix it".  I don't know if that's how things happened but I've seen this more than once or twice in my career.

It gets even worse. There are several other instruments that can be used to determine things like angle of attack, either directly or indirectly, such as the pitot tubes, the artificial horizons, etc. All of these things would be cross-checked by a human pilot to quickly diagnose a faulty angle-of-attack sensor.

In a pinch, a human pilot could just look out the windshield to confirm visually and directly that, no, the aircraft is not pitched up dangerously. That’s the ultimate check and should go directly to the pilot’s ultimate sovereignty. Unfortunately, the current implementation of MCAS denies that sovereignty. It denies the pilots the ability to respond to what’s before their own eyes.

Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder, MCAS gaslights the pilots. And it turns out badly for everyone. “Raise the nose, HAL.” “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

There's no redundancy.
There's no redundancy.
There's no redundancy.
There's no redundancy.

So Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe, the 737 Max. That is big strike No. 1. Boeing then tried to mask the 737’s dynamic instability with a software system. Big strike No. 2. Finally, the software relied on systems known for their propensity to fail (angle-of-attack indicators) and did not appear to include even rudimentary provisions to cross-check the outputs of the angle-of-attack sensor against other sensors, or even the other angle-of-attack sensor. Big strike No. 3.

None of the above should have passed muster. None of the above should have passed the “OK” pencil of the most junior engineering staff, much less a DER.

That’s not a big strike. That’s a political, social, economic, and technical sin.

This is a long and detailed article and I've only excerpted key bits.  You should really read the whole thing because the situation is simply horrifying.  Boeing has destroyed their reputation.

I've written many, many, many times about design issues in Airbus' flight control software,, where the pilots become confused or the software freaks out and people die.  I always liked flying Boeing because their reputation that "the pilot is always in charge" was my strong preference - my whole career has been dealing with software failure, and my imagination is too active to ever be comfortable on an Airbus plane.

Well that has all changed after 737 Max.  It's not just that the pilot can't fly the plane now, it's this:

That’s because the major selling point of the 737 Max is that it is just a 737, and any pilot who has flown other 737s can fly a 737 Max without expensive training, without recertification, without another type of rating. Airlines—Southwest is a prominent example—tend to go for one “standard” airplane. They want to have one airplane that all their pilots can fly because that makes both pilots and airplanes fungible, maximizing flexibility and minimizing costs.

It all comes down to money, and in this case, MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction. The necessity to insist that the 737 Max was no different in flying characteristics, no different in systems, from any other 737 was the key to the 737 Max’s fleet fungibility. That’s probably also the reason why the documentation about the MCAS system was kept on the down-low.

And so the pilots on the fatal flights couldn't figure out how to get out of the situation because Boeing intentionally did not tell them.  Allegedly.  This one will have to go through the courts but this very well may end up being the most expensive design mistake in history.

White knuckle Airbus 380 Crosswind landing

This sort of thing is Peter's gig, but he's off at Blogorado so I'll post it.  An Airbus 380 jumbo jet got hit with a massive cross gust just after touchdown at Dusseldorf airport.  The pilot's skill is very impressive.  I wouldn't have liked being on board that aircraft.



Holy cow.

(via)

Travel warning: Orlando airport gas prices

The following came around the inbox:

Orlando airport,  rental car return.  The two closest gas stations that I have used in the past have raised their gas prices to $5.99 per gallon regular.  They are the closest to the rental car and used a lot.   They have not posted a sign on the street. It is only listed on the actual pump in small print.  

... 

Both stations closest to Orlando Airport  ( Disney etc)  have these crazy prices. I drove 2 miles away and gas was  $1.99 per gallon.   

...

Just for reference rental car return gas price was $2.70. I filled up at $1.99.  

Seems pretty sneaky.  FYI.

St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

Photo taken from the roof of the Sofitel, in their Das Loft bar. They have quite a good toasted blood sausage and fennel sandwich, washed down by the local wine.

Vienna was interesting. Between the city center and the airport (and extending all the way to the border) is a huge windmill farm. There must be 500 or a thousand of them. I guess Vienna isn't expensive enough and they need millions of euros a year in subsidies.

Alas, I was too worn out from this trip to go out and see the city, but it looks worthwhile coming back. Tomorrow I'll post about Bratislava, a really interesting place.

Well, tomorrow your time. For me it's 0520 and I'm on the way to the airport. It's always a good flight when you're going home.

Wandering in Copenhagen

All y'all asked, so here it is.

Copenhagen is an interesting place.  One problem with many places in Europe is that the history is so present that it gets almost Disney-esque.  Copenhagen has a pretty interesting mixture of old and new (think "Danish Modern"), as you can see in the picture here.

Just down the street is a delightful old building, which is right next to a brand new one that has clean (almost antiseptic) lines.

Danish Modern isn't really my cup of tea, but it looks like the Danes are making this work for them.  There's lots of construction going on all over the town center, so business seems good.  The one part of the city that does have a more typical don't-mess-with-the-history European feel is the water front. If you turned 180° around on this spot you'd be looking out on the harbor.  All in all, a nice place to walk off the jet lag.

Denmark is a pretty expensive country, with the current exchange rate of around 6.5 Kroner to a dollar, prices seem maybe 35% higher than I was expecting.  Maybe my expectations weren't calibrated well, but expect to drop $50 on lunch without too much trouble.

One thing I noticed is that people here are tall (both men and women).  Noticeably tall.  I'm 6' 1", and was regularly looking up at people.  Old Viking stock, I guess.

Also, it didn't seem that there were a ton of immigrants.  Some, yes, but less than I was expecting.  Again, maybe my expectations weren't calibrated properly, but Denmark has some pretty onerous immigration laws - for example, seizing immigrant's money to cover costs of social benefits.  Maybe that's just to encourage them to keep moving to neighboring Sweden.

Oh, and the Tivoli amusement park seemed surprisingly small.  As the oldest in Europe (and maybe the world) and in the middle of some very expensive property values that's not too surprising.

Blogging from Europe

I'm in Copenhagen with a layover before flying on to Vienna and then by car to Bratislava. The layover gave me the opportunity to see the town which I had never done before.



This is, of course, the statue of Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid. It was a little disappointing, but the rest of the city is pretty nice.



Posting will be spotty for a couple days.

UPDATE: More Copenhagen here.

Your travel Protip for the day

Uncle Jay brings the snark as only he can in a hilarious post that ends with really good advice for when you fly internationally.

And since he really is a professional traveler, this really is a ProTip ...

Remember, items in the overhead bins may have shifted position

A moment of Zen

A haiku:

Repeat after me:
It is always a good flight
When you're going home.

Although it will be strange - #1 Son moved out while I was gone.  I seem to be shedding family as I age.

Good thing I'm aging gracefully.  /sarc

On the rooftops of London - coo, what a sight

View from the office:

It's a long way from Mary Poppins ...



Some things still look the same, though.

Tanks for the memories

Tanks at the Imperial War Museum.

Russian T-34:

Sherman:

World War I British tank in a very unusual mounting configuration (driving over a trench):

If you're in London, this is a great, free museum.  It's walking distance from Waterloo Station.