Compassionate Curmudgeon

Aerodynamics 101

Watch this amazing video of a glass of iced tea sitting undisturbed on a plane while the pilot does a barrel roll:

Now read James Fallows' explanation:

Explanation, theory: . Airplanes are designed so that, when they're properly flown, the floor of the airplane always feels like "down" -- whether you are flying straight, turning left or right, or turned upside down. If this seems hard to believe, it's probably because people naturally make the connection between flying in an airplane and riding in a car.

In a car, you don't need your eyes to know whether you're turning right, turning left, or going straight. You're pushed against the side of the car whenever it makes a turn. You could close your eyes and have a very good sense of which way the car was going.

It's different in an airplane -- and the reason is that the car can operate only in a single geometric plane. Its wheels are (practically) always on the ground. If it turns, the seat stays level with the ground, and your inertia moves you against the seat and the car's walls.

Airplanes are different because the entire airframe can move freely in three dimensions. When they turn they're like a car on a banked track -- and, if flown properly (in what's called fully "coordinated" flight), it is as they are on a track whose angle of bank constantly changes to exactly match the angle of turn. Thus the seat and cabin walls are always tilting (relative to the ground) in conjunction with the forces working on your body. So during "coordinated" flight, if your eyes were closed you wouldn't feel movement to the right or left. You'd only feel a force "down," into your seat. That's what the Bob Hoover video shows: the iced tea is always pulled toward the bottom of the cup, even when that means flowing "up" relative to the ground. As in the car, you feel the familiar force "down," into your seat. But "down" is no longer related to where the ground is.

For another time is the next stage of the problem: why a pilot's inability to feel left or right means he will inevitably lose control of the plane and enter a spin to the ground if he is in a cloud. (Summary of the problem: an airplane is naturally stable in a front-to-back direction, so that if the nose dips slightly, normal aerodynamic forces will bring it back up. It is naturally unstable in a side-to-side direction, so without the constant corrections a pilot makes by seeing where the horizon is, it will naturally start turning in one direction or the other and then continue that turn.)

For another time too: the interesting fact that if your eyes are closed in an airplane, you simply can't tell whether an airplane is turning very steeply in one direction (which involves heavy G forces if the plane is maintaining altitude) or whether it is climbing sharply straight ahead, also increasing the G load. In each case you'll be pushed deep into your seat. Without looking, you won't know why.

Explanation, practice:. No one who has received an instrument rating in an airplane doubts any of the above, because as part of the training everyone has been through this exercise: When the plane is safely several thousand feet in the air, the instructor will tell the trainee pilot to close his eyes and keep flying the plane. He is supposed to keep it level just by feel.

Within sixty seconds or so, the instructor crisply says "my airplane" and takes control again. The trainee pilot opens his eyes and is startled to see the ground coming up toward him, since the plane is in a spin nose-down. This always happens when the plane is flown blind, it usually happens very quickly, and generally the eyes-closed pilot had no physical sense that anything was wrong. This process is what tragically kills most pilots without instrument training when they unexpectedly enter a cloud; having no visual cue to what is up and down is the same as wearing a blindfold. It is also what is assumed to have happened to poor John Kennedy Jr and his passengers, in the dark and fog over the water.

Read the whole post on James Fallows' blog.

Don't Forget To Tip!

I didn't realize that servers and other tipped employees weren't covered by the minimum wage...

Last month, many of our nation's low-wage workers got their first raise in a decade as the federal minimum wage inched up to $5.85 an hour. But millions more who are paid in part with tips—low-wage workers like waiters and waitresses, car wash attendants, and delivery workers—are still waiting. For them the minimum wage has been frozen at a meager $2.13 an hour for 16 years. And the restaurant industry—which fights to block pay increases for tipped workers—has lobbied hard to keep it that way. It's time for Congress to stand up to this special interest and give the nearly three million Americans who work for tips a long overdue raise.

In the past, tipped workers weren't always excluded from minimum wage hikes. For decades, employers were required to pay them a base wage of at least half the federal minimum wage. This guaranteed a stable income that was automatically adjusted as the minimum wage went up. And it reflected changes in the cost of living and recognized that tips are notoriously unpredictable and can vary substantially depending on work schedules, seasons, and broader economic trends.

But in 1996, when President Bill Clinton shamed House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Congress into raising the minimum wage, Republican lawmakers sided with restaurant industry lobbyists and excluded tipped workers by permanently freezing their minimum wage at $2.13. This resulted in a tipped-worker minimum wage that is worth less and less every year, forcing them to rely almost entirely on tips to make ends meet. Ultimately, it's meant lower and less certain pay for millions of Americans.

Restaurant industry lobbyists defend their position by focusing on waiters and waitresses at high-end restaurants who earn a lot of money in tips. But such workers are the exception, not the rule. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average waiter or waitress in the U.S. makes just over $17,000 per year including tips—hardly enough to support a family, as many of these women and men struggle to do. And other tipped workers—like car wash attendants and delivery workers—make even less.

Read more.

Sondheim Interview

And now Mark Evanier has named me as the tipster who alerted him to a simpler way to download the Sondheim interview on the BBC...

Ditto for me!

Camille Paglia is a wanker.

That is all.

The Alien Invaders

The alien invaders, whether legal or illegal, are overrunning us.

Some of us think we are at war with them. Others regard them more benignly. Some say they are performing the jobs that we don't want to do, or even cannot do.

By the latest measures they already outnumber us by ten to one.

I'm talking about the bacteria that inhabit our bodies. Scientists estimate that there are ten times more bacteria in us than human cells, with the majority of them residing in our gut. That's tens of trillions of microbes, which comes to about three pounds.

Some of them aid in our digestion, breaking down molecules that our native digestive systems can't handle. Some of them may be responsible for obesity or the lack of obesity. It has been found that the bacterial profile of obese people is different from the bacterial profile of non-obese people, but it's not known at this point whether there is a cause and effect relationship or which way it might go.

Yes, I've just been listening to the July 19th episode of Futures in Biotech, where Dr. Jeffrey Gordon discusses the Human Microbiome. Yes, I'm a bit behind in my podcast listening...

Tobias v. Fitzpatrick

Hmmm, I pass along a one line tip to Andrew Tobias, and he actually quotes my email in full.

Tobias has been recommending First Marblehead (FMD) for some time; shortly after he first mentioned it, the stock soared. Then after awhile it plunged precipitously. Now Dan Fitzpatrick at thestreet.com is recommending shorting the stock based on technical analysis. Tobias makes a snarky comment about technical analysis.

Bottled Water--Bad

Bottled water is indistinguishable from tap water. In fact, several makers of bottled water actually use tap water in their products.

Bottled water tastes the same as tap water as any number of taste tests have demonstrated. Go ahead and chill some tap water in the refrigerator, then have someone blindly compare it with any chilled bottled water.

Bottled water is expensive compared to tap water.

Bottled water is bad for the environment as explained here:

According to a 2001 report of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), roughly 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of water each year.

Besides the sheer number of plastic bottles produced each year, the energy required to manufacture and transport these bottles to market severely drains limited fossil fuels. Bottled water companies, due to their unregulated use of valuable resources and their production of billions of plastic bottles have presented a significant strain on the environment.

The authors of the WWF report suggested that water bottles be washed and reused in order to lessen their negative impact on the environment. Unfortunately, reusing plastic bottles further compromises the quality of the water, due to the fact that more and more phthalate leaches its way into the water as the bottle gets older.

And here is a report from the UK on how some Americans might finally be coming to their senses:

The H2O militants, who include the mayors of cities such as New York, Salt Lake City and San Francisco, are asking why spend your hard-earned cash on buying fancy brands of bottled water such as Fiji, Poland Spring, Aquafina and Dasani, when the stuff that comes out of the tap at home - or from the fountains in public spaces - is perfectly good? The quality controls imposed on public water supplies here by federal regulators are, after all, far more stringent than those required of bottled water.

But it is not just an issue of wastefulness. Rather, the principal objection to our love affair with bottled water has to do with ecology. It takes energy and oil to make those bottles, all of which contributes to global warming. And then there is the question of where you throw them when you are done.

According to most estimates, less than a fifth of empty bottles in the United States are actually returned by consumers for recycling. The rest end up in landfills where they will take hundreds of years to decompose.

New York launched a public service advertising campaign in June, reminding residents that the metropolis has some of the most pristine public water supplies in the country, all of it from the Catskill Mountain watershed, north up the Hudson Valley. Just a week ago, the federal government delayed plans to build an expensive new filtration system for the city because the quality of its water right now is still unimpeachable.

This week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to a new controversy about where some of the bottled water actually comes from - neither springs nor glaciers - repeated his pitch. "New Yorkers can turn on the tap whenever they want and fill up a glass of some of the most delicious water on the planet," he said. "And that's something I hope New Yorkers will continue to do, because drinking tap water, instead of bottled water, is not just easier on your wallet: it's also easier on the environment."

The economics of the bottled water industry in America are astounding, and there is little to suggest that the "just say no" pleadings of Mr Bloomberg or anyone else will have any impact. In 2006, wholesale revenue for the purveyors of bottled water, including beverage giants Pepsi and Coca-Cola, topped $11bn (£5.4bn). That's more than Americans pay to go to the movies every year. And the industry is set to grow at the rate of about 10 per cent annually.

And it continues:

Then there is Marilyn Smith from Nebraska, in New York on a Christian mission and found lingering by the dog run. Poking from her bag is a bottle of Nestlé Pure Life. She would drink from the fountains, she says, but fears that in "a big city like this it might not be sanitary". What she did not know, however, is that Pure Life is among a number of leading bottled water brands that are not quite what they seem.

Last week, the Pepsi Company succumbed to pressure from a group called Corporate Accountability International, to change the labels on its Aquafina water, the largest-selling brand in the US. Up to now, three initials, PWS, are all that tells you that what is inside actually comes from the same sources as the water in your kitchen. In future, the words will be spelled out in full: public water source.

Other popular brands that are little more than tap water, if refined a little with extra filtering, are Dasani from Coca Cola and, yes, Pure Life. "That is a rip-off," said a disgusted Ms Smith.

Bottled water--bad for you, bad for the environment. Bottled water--good only for making the bottled water companies rich.

How My Mind Works

I've been reading several books about the brain recently. They all talk about how the human brain stores information by association. That's why our minds often wander from one thing to another. We think about a movie, say Sicko, which might lead to a thought about Michael Moore, which might remind us that our sister is a big Moore fan, which might lead to the conversation about Moore between her and cousin Randy at a family gathering a few years ago. And so on.

Since we store information associatively, that's also how we retrieve it.

One time I was trying to remember the name of someone's wife. I knew it was a short, relatively popular name, but I just couldn't bring it out. So I did what I often do in those situations: go through the alphabet to see if I can recall the first letter of the name.

I got as far as "I" and the name Irene popped into my head. So I knew that the name I was searching for would have some relationship to Irene, but I was also sure that the name wasn't Irene, and I was pretty sure the name didn't start with an "I".

Moving on through the alphabet, I tried "J" and Jane instantly popped into my mind. Yes, the name was in some way related to Jane and to Irene.

Finally, I had it. The name I was trying to recall was Joan! So obvious.

Because three of my aunts' names are Irene, Jane, and Joan.