I missed this good news a couple weeks ago: After three months of study, NASA has rejected the utterly idiotic idea of attempting to put astronauts around the moon on the very first test flight of the Space Launch System. The New York Times story on their decision is here.
Now who’s going to put their foot down and say “No” to Mr. Musk’s plan to off a couple of billionaire tourists?
When I was eight, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey during its Boston premiere on a huge, bowed Cinerama screen. It was April 1968, eight months before Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders flew Apollo 8 around the moon at Christmas and fourteen months before we landed. What dreams I had! I took this photo just now of the 2001 insert style poster – the paintings by Robert McCall – that’s on the wall just behind me. Sometimes I look at it and sigh a little.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has released its final report on the Air Canada, um, pre-runway excursion in Halifax two years ago. The fifteen findings are not surprising. They start with the three below and get only a bit more depressing from there. It’s disconcerting to read phrases such as “the flight crew did not monitor the aircraft’s altitude and distance…”, but only because that’s a flight crew’s actual job.
3.0 Findings
3.1 Findings as to causes and contributing factors
1. Air Canada’s standard operating procedure (SOP) and practice when flying in flight path angle guidance mode was that, once the aircraft was past the final approach fix, the flight crews were not required to monitor the aircraft’s altitude and distance from the threshold or to make any adjustments to the flight path angle. This practice was not in accordance with the flight crew operating manuals of Air Canada or Airbus.
2. As per Air Canada’s practice, once the flight path angle was selected and the aircraft began to descend, the flight crew did not monitor the altitude and distance from the threshold, nor did they make any adjustments to the flight path angle.
3. The flight crew did not notice that the aircraft had drifted below and diverged from the planned vertical descent angle flight profile, nor were they aware that the aircraft had crossed the minimum descent altitude further back from the threshold.
It is at least good to see “Collision with terrain” right there on the cover of the report and the “Damage to aircraft” section’s perfectly succinct “The aircraft was destroyed.” Honesty is the best policy…even if it is only at the investigating agency.
I followed W.C. Fields’s advice to his niece in the clip above just now before sending the email quoted below to customer service at a site. There’s a new trend of harassing people via email to buy items they’ve looked at in the last twenty-four hours, no doubt the product of some fevered MBA’s gin-soaked nightmares. To date, I’ve had three sites start doing this over the last several months. One of them is eBay, but I believe I found their account setting to shut these off. The site I wrote to has no such setting; in fact, I opted out of all emails from them many moons ago and verified that’s still set.
Can you tell me how to opt out of the emails haranguing me to buy items that I viewed on your site within the last 24 hours? These automated emails started just a few months ago and occur even when I’m not logged in, thanks to cookies I allow you to create on my system because I’m a registered user.
I do not wish to receive emails simply because I looked at an item, because they’re intrusive and, frankly, annoying to such a high degree that I can only compare them to a car salesman following me out of his lot and knocking on my door several hours later to ask why I didn’t buy anything. If they’re not curtailed I’ll be compelled to visit any competitor’s site rather than yours when I want to look at something.
I see no account setting that allows me to stop these emails from being auto-generated. Can you help? Thank you for your assistance in resolving this matter.
Had I not counted to ten before writing the above, I feel certain I would have included the phrase chuckleheaded Goddamned emails. A cooler head has prevailed, but I retain the satisfaction of having typed that anyway.
Thirty-six hours of lightning in the severe storms over the Eastern US a week ago, captured by the new GOES-16 NOAA satellite, which launched last November. It was known as GOES-R before launch.
Summarizing the satellite’s capabilities:
GOES-R will scan the skies five times faster than today’s GOES spacecraft, with four times greater image resolution and three times the spectral channels. It will provide high-resolution, rapid-refresh satellite imagery as often as every 30 seconds, allowing for a more detailed look at a storm to determine whether it is growing or decaying.
This image demonstrates the vast increase in resolution from GOES-13 (r) to GOES-16 (l). It’s 4572 x 2252 and 7.3MB:
Click for a much larger version
Hey, I can nearly see my house from here in this medium resolution image of the Northeast US taken in January:
I was thinking this morning of stepping out to try a diner that’s down the road and quickly questioned that idea as possibly a bit rash: “But why?” They seem to have mixed reviews, so there’s a good possibility that I make better versions of their breakfast fare, and I’ll wager their eggs weren’t laid approximately Wednesday like mine. Plus, a month ago, I finally got around to buying a few of the true diner plates I was eyeing some years back – and I’m talking about real diner plates, 13″ ovals weighing 2½ pounds each – so now I even have the proper ambience. To wit:
Click for a larger version – but maybe you should eat something first
The title – or something like that, anyway – is diner lingo for corned beef hash (sweep the kitchen) with poached eggs (Adam and Eve) on the hash, not the toast (raft).
