Category Archives: View

View 744 Friday, October 05, 2012

I’m taking a fond look at my nose and hoping it will still be here at dinner time.

Back in August the dermatologists took two biopsies from my face. One was from a sore spot on my right cheek that I have had for years, and which they’ve sliced away at several times, and which is still a big red mark. The other was from the end of my nose, which looks just fine, but every now and then has a small problem seemingly fixed by freezing.

When the results came in they decided to do nothing about the cheek spot, but they found cancer cells on my nose. There is an expert at Kaiser who fixes such things by slicing open the nose, peeling out the bad cells, and putting the whole thing back when he’s done. He is also, I am told, also in demand for cosmetic plastic surgery, which is why it took a month to get an appointment.

That was for yesterday, but he had some kind of emergency yesterday, and it was rescheduled for just after lunch today. And I have to say that I’ve been sort of down and out all week thinking about this.

So if you’ve got any reservoir of well wishing, you can send some of it my way.

Now no one is worried about all this except me. Everyone seems to think it’s routine and preventive and no further treatment will be needed, and that’s the way to bet it, but it seems I don’t have as much control over my emotional makeup as I like to think I have.

Comment on entitlements:

Of course every entitlement for anyone is an obligation placed on someone else. Few seem to think about that when they argue about the importance of entitlements. And after all, if we want Big Bird, and Bunny Inspectors, and armed Department of Education enforcers, and free lunches, and expanded food stamp programs, we don’t really have to raise taxes: we can borrow the money and laet another generation worry about it. As I get older I realize that the obligations won’t apply to me longer than the rest of my life, which is likely less than on yours.

The notion that democracies tend to vote themselves largess from the public treasury – that is, to vote for entitlements for themselves – is called by some critics “the Tytler Calumny” because there is some question as to who first said this or put it in a particular way. Since the concept has been around since Aristotle, whether or not a particular person said it in a particular way seems irrelevant: the question is, is it true? Is this one way that democracies perish, by spending themselves into situations they can’t get out of without disastrous remedies that may be worse than the disease?

At some point I will publish a definitive study on who said what, but the question is, is spending for largesse to the people – food stamps, free lunches in schools, medical care, etc. – something to worry about? When the economy is good, it often is not. For a man to love his country his country ought to be lovely, and public generosity is sometimes – not always – a good sign of opulence which makes everyone feel better.

But sometimes entitlements tend to corrupt.

More another time. Time for a walk, and after that, The Nose.

1350: Well, I still have a nose, along with a moderate sized bandage that I can see with my right eye but not my left, which worried  me until I saw in the mirror that it was put on sort of asymmetrically. Everything was close to the surface and Dr. Adams thinks he got it all. It’s called a MOHS procedure, and that’s well enough known that there’s a small clinic suite with that name in the Kaiser building that houses dermatology and pediatrics. They also had a flu shot suite so we got that out of the way while we were there. So it’s over, my nose hurts like crazy and it’s likely to get worse, but I can stop worrying that I’ll end up like Freud with his iron jaw.

No big parade for Los Angeles. They decided to move Endeavor from LAX to the Science Center by towing it along surface streets, and to do that on the 12-mile route they chose they had to cut down about 400 trees. The local inhabitants of the route didn’t like that, but our mayor assured them they’d get “the mother of all parades.” That turns out not to be the case. No one will be allowed on the sidewalks, and much of the event will happen late at night.  Or that’s the plan; some have said they’ll have a party and a parade whether the city fathers like it or not. “But it’s a safety issue,” say the anonymous bureaucratic authorities who have told the mayor he can’t have his party.

Perhaps there will be an Occupy Endeavor movement, and an LA Science Party movement, and who knows what else. Los Angeles has some of the highest taxes and worst government in the nation – our streets are in utter disrepair, we charge fees for emergency responses which are generally late, and you can talk to the School Board by appointment 6 months in advance at which point you get 2 minutes – so we’re all used to this sort of thing, but this is a bit more amusing than the usual clutter we get from our political masters. Perhaps there will be a flash crowd.

View 744 Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Romney was presidential. He won the debate: if it were a boxing match I’d give Romney 13 of 15 rounds. No knockdowns, nothing spectacular, but Romney showed that he can be President.

He was respectful of the office, and he showed that he knows the issues. He was motivated, and he looked at his opponent. President Obama almost never looked at Mr. Romney.

The polls won’t show much change, and this election shows the limits of election polls; but I would guess that Romney’s numbers will go up just a little.

My guess is that Obama’s advisors will try to make the next debate a bit less polite, but it will be difficult to do. Romney is good at keeping his cool.

The election goes on.

This is worth thinking about:

OSLO (Reuters) – A 200-year period covering the heyday of both the Roman Empire and China’s Han dynasty saw a big rise in greenhouse gases, according to a study that challenges the U.N. view that man-made climate change only began around 1800.
A record of the atmosphere trapped in Greenland’s ice found the level of heat-trapping methane rose about 2,000 years ago and stayed at that higher level for about two centuries.
Methane was probably released during deforestation to clear land for farming and from the use of charcoal as fuel, for instance to smelt metal to make weapons, lead author Celia Sapart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands told Reuters.
"Per capita they were already emitting quite a lot in the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty," she said of the findings by an international team of scientists in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.
Rates of deforestation "show a decrease around AD 200, which is related to drastic population declines in China and Europe following the fall of the Han Dynasty and the decline of the Roman Empire," the scientists wrote.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-climate-romansbre892120-20121003,0,1510687.story

Another report:

http://www.livescience.com/23678-methane-emissions-roman-times.html

And something else worth following:

Iran police, demonstrators clash in Tehran protests

Hundreds of merchants join in a rally outside a bazaar in Tehran to decry rising prices and the plunging value of Iran’s currency, the rial.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-economy-protests-20121004,0,6484678.story 

View 743 Thursday, September 27, 2012

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

So Romney says he was joking about opening a jetplane window? Mad Magazine made a similar joke, long ago, in their parody of "Lost In Space". In the first panel the family was choking from lack of air; the robot droned, "why-don’t-you-open-a-window?" They did this, and it worked!

That joke worked for Mad because it’s a satire magazine; you read it knowing that nothing in it is meant as a factual statement. Is Romney running a satire campaign? Perhaps he should leave clowning to the professionals.

But seriously… one of the burdens of power is that the office does not permit joking. Or mistakes. Or spontaneity. All masters are slaves.

One of the privileges of power is to surround yourself with intelligent people so that if you say something that turns out to be wrong, someone will correct you. Of course there are politicians who do not choose to have intelligent people around them, and who intimidate their advisors so that they are not corrected; but the best do not operate that way. There may be people so intelligent that they never think or say anything egregiously incorrect, but I don’t know any of them. All of the competent leaders I have known – Reagan, Newt Gingrich, General Graham, Max Hunter, Possony – have expected their friends to speak up if they disagreed, and surrounded themselves with intelligent friends and advisors. As I have said often, one of the advantages of being me is that I have intelligent readers who will tell me if I say something silly, whether it was a simple mistake or due to incorrect information or just a slip of the mind.

I don’t know Romney, but having seen his accomplishments, particularly the reconstruction of the Olympic Games session, I would bet a lot that he likes to have smart people around him. As it happens I was on one of the advisory committees to Mr. Uberoff when he headed the LA 1984 Olympics (having been minorly involved in the LA bid made by Mayor Yorty). My involvement was mostly inconsequential but I was close enough to management to see just how complicated the task was, and how easy it would be to lose a lot of money without trying very hard.

As to windows on airplanes, the ventilation problem in the event of smoke in the cabin is not trivial.

For anyone interested in cabin smoke:

Jerry,

Many airliners still retain the option to open a window in the cockpit, at least on the ground. That’s because the pilot may have no way to exit the aircraft in the event of a fire preventing the pilot from reaching another exit. Smoke in the cockpit is one of the worst airborne emergencies for 2 reasons. First, the smoke may be so toxic that onset of neurological deficit or blood-oxygen transport problems may be only a matter of seconds. Second, the first indication of an aircraft fire or smoke/fumes in the cockpit is usually someone on board saying “hey do you smell something?”, at which point everyone around immediately takes a deep breath or two, inhaling quite a bit of whatever is in the air, delaying starting the emergency procedure procedures while everyone sits around going “I dunno it smells like a bad air filter, what do you think?”

In military aviation we try to beat these considerations into the brains of our student pilots, but over time a little complacency often sets in.

When airborne depending on the aircraft type, there may be an option to depressurize and “ram-dump” the environmental system, which opens ram air ducts to force outside air into the cockpit/cabin. I’m sure every aircraft will have variations in how this works but the basic idea that there is a switch that immediately shuts off conditioned pressurized air circulation and opens up ram-air from the outside is pretty much standard. It isn’t much different from opening a window.

I do know that my one major smoke/fume in the cockpit incident dropped my blood oxygen level to around 85% in a matter of minutes and resulted in an overnight hospital stay, from only 2 or 3 breaths of the smoke-filled air before I got on 100% oxygen.

Sean

I have limited experience with cabin smoke but the one I had went much as described: “Hey do you smell something funny?” Followed by discussion followed by “Let’s get this bird down fast!” Fortunately it was minor, although at 38,000 feet nothing involving blue smoke is really minor.

This isn’t really a mail bag, and I do have a lot of interesting mail. I’ve been subject to allergies this week, and Roberta has been gone East to see the grandkids. She’ll be home tomorrow and with luck things will go back to something like normal.

I have several messages pointing to http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/organ_ghouls_of_doom_suit_LxCZMP5uRGgI6yn3ywMN9J 

It is not unexpected – indeed the point of Niven’s story was that this was inevitable – but it’s still a bit scary.

View 743 Tuesday, September 25, 2012

The Internet is abuzz with stories of how stupid Romney must be because he said something about aircraft ventilation. The occasion was a heavy smoke incident on a flight that his wife took. The Huffington Post went insane with laughter about how Romney was so stupid he wondered why you can’t just open the windows on a jet plane. Clearly he is not qualified to be President, and in fact must be so incompetent as to need a keeper. Of course the first assumption is that the Huffington Post and other media must be joking; but apparently they were not.

Next comes the ‘news’ that Romney was joking. Probably graveyard humor on hearing that his wife had been in danger but was now safe. Whether or not Romney was joking, which should have been obvious – it’s not as if he has never been aboard a jet airplane. He may even have owned one – it’s not quite so trivial a question as you might at first think. As it happens I know something about this from a long time ago.

This was once a serious topic for discussion and study. As it happens I was in the Human Factors and Reliability Group at Boeing when the 707 went commercial. Boeing’s marketing methods for the 707 were simple: the Company brought the Chief Pilots of most of the major airlines to Seattle as guests to watch the Gold Cup 90-mile unlimited hydroplane boat races from the Boeing barge on Lake Washington. The Gold cup is run in heats, with a major break between heats for mechanical overhaul, and during one of the recesses, without prior announcement, the watching crowd (and the TV audience of course) was told to Look Up! Here comes the new Boeing 707 Stratocruiser! At which point Chief Test Pilot Tex Johnston brought the Dash 90 – the flying prototype of the 707 – down the length of Lake Washington, and at about 700 feet he barrel rolls just in front of the Boeing barge. The result was that within a week every senior pilot in America was in his President’s office panting “We gotta have one!” and Boeing had about a hundred orders within a month.

Boeing began building and selling the 707. Howard Hughes came up to Boeing Field in his private Constellation, and camped out at the end of the runway (with about 17 young lady starlets and stewardesses) while negotiating the design and purchase of a fleet of them. The commercial jet age began.

But within a month of the first commercial passenger jet flight – people paid a premium price for a jet ticket, since it cut hours off cross country flight times – they had a cabin pressure loss above 40,000 feet. The passenger oxygen masks deployed, but people didn’t know how to use them. The pilots did an emergency dive to 7500 feet, then a more gradual descent, so that there was enough oxygen content and cabin pressure for breathing without oxygen masks, but the FAA gave Boeing notice that within 30 days we had to give sufficient evidence that the passenger oxygen system was safe or the 707 fleet would be grounded. Dr. Don Stuhring, the Boeing Central Medical flight surgeon, and I as a human factors engineer were given the task: come up with evidence acceptable to the aviation medicine and human factors professional community, and do it fast.

We spent the next three weeks at the University of Washington altitude chamber. Of course Boeing had a good altitude chamber – in fact a better one than the UW – but we wanted the UW people involved in the experiments including data collection so there would be no question of the accuracy of the data. We took several rides to 40,000 feet a day – actually on most I took them, with Dr. Stuhring outside to preside if there was medical need, which there never was – and flew flight profiles of emergency cabin pressure losses, rapid descent to 10,000 feet and gradual descent to 5,000, with the subjects using the emergency oxygen system while we monitored blood oxygen content, heart rate, and other data. In those days collecting physiological data from non-restrained subjects was very difficult, and I had to use a bank of analog computers to filter out electronic noise. The subjects were paid volunteers from the UW student body, faculty, and staff, and included young and old, sick and healthy. It was a heck of a month, but we got the data, it was accepted by the relevant boards, and the 707 wasn’t grounded.

We (Don Stuhring and I) also participated in discussions about ventilation. What would happen if there were smoke incidents? Obviously you can’t open the cabin to external ventilation if you’re much above 10,000 feet, but rapid descent will fix that. Deployment of the passenger oxygen system will buy you some time, but if the smoke isn’t dissipated you got problems. There was serious discussion of building in external windows operable by the cabin crew. The alternative was a pilot controlled ventilation system, which raises the question of its reliability. We had considerable confidence in the competence of the flight attendants – generally known as stewardesses – despite the public  ‘coffee, tea, or milk?’ jokes about ‘stews’; and if we started looking into things that might fill the cabin with smoke most of those might also cripple a pilot compartment controlled ventilation system. I remember saying something to the effect that I had a lot more confidence that Miss Sparling here can open the window than I have in the hydraulics working after parts of it turn into blue smoke.

We’ve come a long way from those days in the 1950’s, but clearly there’s still the possibility of a smoke incident and ventilation problem. And some of us may remember that prior to jet aircraft there were manually operable windows on passenger airline craft. Didn’t George Kennedy open one of them and fire a flare in one of the sequels to “Airport”?

For those who don’t know: without a very efficient oxygen mask delivering pure oxygen, you won’t perform well, or even last long, above 30,000 feet. We learned a lot about that in World War II. With pure oxygen at positive pressure you can manage at about 43,000 feet (this is from memory, but it’s in the right range) but you’re already in need of a pressure suit.

Of course if you’re inhaling smoke at high altitudes you’re really in trouble. Efficient ventilation of aircraft at high altitudes has been the subject of considerable study, particularly for military aircraft – how do you get a Flying Fortress home if there’s smoke in the cabin and AA guns below? But I wouldn’t expect the Huffington Post columnists or editors to know much about that. Their “update” on the incident still doesn’t show much understanding, but that’s to be expected too. Which is fine; my point is that it’s a more complex subject than they think, and Mr. Romney is clearly aware of that. I doubt he knows as much about it as I do, but that’s another story. At one time Stuhring and I knew more about it than perhaps anyone did, not because I was so smart, but because I had reason to think about it. Mr. Romney has a tendency to answer questions asked of him, and to have confidence that if what he says is wrong, someone will correct him. That was true of Newt Gingrich, too, and it’s no bad trait for a President since it shows that he expects to have smart advisors who will say what they think.

The incident tells a lot about many people; perhaps more about the press than about Mr. Romney.

I’ll do a mail bag, but we have a couple of interesting references to things you may not have seen.

An interesting comment on today

<http://tvsac.net/BarryMeek/BM0705.html>

The author is a retired ambulance paramedic, former broadcaster, mountain bike tour guide and commercial pilot.

Mike

and

50 years of the Jetsons.

<http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2012/09/50-years-of-the-jetsons-why-the-show-still-matters/>

–

Roland Dobbins

I recall the first season of the Jetsons, and of course the endless replays. It really did affect our expectations of the future.