This is kind of cool. Via Jim Oberg, I’m informed that two Russian strategic bombers are going to fly from Russia over the north pole and land in Oregon.

1350 GMT — Russian strategic bomber to visit U.S. for first time

MOSCOW. June 4 (Interfax-AVN) – The Russian TU-95MS Bear strategic bomber will conduct a flight to the U.S. for the fist time, Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky,head of the Air Force press- service,told Interfax-Military News Agency on Friday. According to him,the strategic bomber’s flight is timed to the 100th birthday of famous Russian test pilot Valery Chkalov to be celebrated on June 15-21.

“The ferry flight will be conducted along Chkalov’s route from Russia to the U.S. via the North Pole,” Drobyshevsky said. He also noted that the TU-95MS would be refueled in the air over the Arctic Ocean outside the Novaya Zemlya archipelago by the IL-78 Midas tanker.

The TU-95MS is to fly from the Russian Air Force base in Engels to Portland, while the IL-78 from Anadyr airbase to Portland. The IL-78 will carry a delegation of Russian Air Force officials and various equipment for the bomber. “It will be the first time Russian aircraft of this type visit the U.S.,” he emphasized.

This is kind of cool. Via Jim Oberg, I’m informed that two Russian strategic bombers are going to fly from Russia over the north pole and land in Oregon.

1350 GMT — Russian strategic bomber to visit U.S. for first time

MOSCOW. June 4 (Interfax-AVN) – The Russian TU-95MS Bear strategic bomber will conduct a flight to the U.S. for the fist time, Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky,head of the Air Force press- service,told Interfax-Military News Agency on Friday. According to him,the strategic bomber’s flight is timed to the 100th birthday of famous Russian test pilot Valery Chkalov to be celebrated on June 15-21.

“The ferry flight will be conducted along Chkalov’s route from Russia to the U.S. via the North Pole,” Drobyshevsky said. He also noted that the TU-95MS would be refueled in the air over the Arctic Ocean outside the Novaya Zemlya archipelago by the IL-78 Midas tanker.

The TU-95MS is to fly from the Russian Air Force base in Engels to Portland, while the IL-78 from Anadyr airbase to Portland. The IL-78 will carry a delegation of Russian Air Force officials and various equipment for the bomber. “It will be the first time Russian aircraft of this type visit the U.S.,” he emphasized.

The beginning of the end of the war in the Pacific occurred for the Japanese.

The Battle of Midway was the most decisive single naval battle in U.S. history. The battle left two heavy Japanese carriers against four U.S. carriers, and cost the Japanese veteran pilots whose inexperienced replacements would require a full year of training. Furthermore, the Imperial Japanese Navy lost the secret of its Zero fighter, leading to certain improvements of the F6F Hellcat, which would, just a year later, begin to destroy Japanese air supremacy.

The Battle of Midway enabled the U.S. Navy to go onto the offensive. Herein lay the importance of the battle. For this is where I think people are wrong when they say that the loss of the battle would not have been a too important event. If the U.S. had indeed lost all three carriers at Midway there would have been merely three carriers remaining to oppose any Japanese move — none of which was a really good ship. Saratoga was old and slow in maneuvering, Wasp small and with a small complement of planes, and Ranger slow and small as well as ill-protected. None of these carriers could hope to last in a battle with the Japanese carrier fleet which would allow the Japanese to prosecute several goals: construction of airfields on Guadalcanal; invasion of Port Moresby; invasion of New Caledonia; and more. The Battle of Midway reversed this. The Japanese could never again operate offensively, while the Americans could now do so at places of their own choosing.

Two years later, almost to the day, the successful invasion of Europe at Normandy would signal the beginning of the end of Hitler’s regime as well.

The folks over at The Corner are debating the merits of phasing out the penny (there are several posts–just scroll down or control-F for “penn”).

Most seem to favor keeping it, and make all kinds of arguments for it, few of which I find compelling, and most of which are, in my humble opinion, at base a simple conservative resistance to change, them being conservatives and all. One last holdout was Peter Robinson, who was swayed to the pro-penny side by the following flawed argument:

A penny is to money as entropy is to thermodynamics. When you spend money, you get some useful work (the stuff you bought), some useful left over energy (large change), and some energy lost to entropy (pennies). Sure, if you get enough pennies together, you can make most of them useful, but some will always be lost to the pavement, cracks between the cushions, and not having quite enough to fill a roll of pennies.

Just as you can’t get rid of entropy in thermodynamics, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to get rid of fiscal entropy; the most you can do is turn nickels into the new unit of entropy.

Sorry, I don’t find the “entropy” argument compelling. If it were true, then if a hundred to the dollar is good, a thousand to the dollar would be better. Why stop there?

Face it, any choice of the smallest denomination of currency is going to be arbitrary. While it would be nice to see some deflation a la Ramesh, it’s a dangerous path to get there, and at the current valuation of the dollar, pennies really are useless.

I’d say that a reasonable criterion for when a coin has too small a value is when it’s not possible to purchase anything with a single one of it. A penny may still buy thoughts, but there’s nothing else that it can purchase in today’s society, since the demise of the penny gumball machine.

Away with it.

The folks over at The Corner are debating the merits of phasing out the penny (there are several posts–just scroll down or control-F for “penn”).

Most seem to favor keeping it, and make all kinds of arguments for it, few of which I find compelling, and most of which are, in my humble opinion, at base a simple conservative resistance to change, them being conservatives and all. One last holdout was Peter Robinson, who was swayed to the pro-penny side by the following flawed argument:

A penny is to money as entropy is to thermodynamics. When you spend money, you get some useful work (the stuff you bought), some useful left over energy (large change), and some energy lost to entropy (pennies). Sure, if you get enough pennies together, you can make most of them useful, but some will always be lost to the pavement, cracks between the cushions, and not having quite enough to fill a roll of pennies.

Just as you can’t get rid of entropy in thermodynamics, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to get rid of fiscal entropy; the most you can do is turn nickels into the new unit of entropy.

Sorry, I don’t find the “entropy” argument compelling. If it were true, then if a hundred to the dollar is good, a thousand to the dollar would be better. Why stop there?

Face it, any choice of the smallest denomination of currency is going to be arbitrary. While it would be nice to see some deflation a la Ramesh, it’s a dangerous path to get there, and at the current valuation of the dollar, pennies really are useless.

I’d say that a reasonable criterion for when a coin has too small a value is when it’s not possible to purchase anything with a single one of it. A penny may still buy thoughts, but there’s nothing else that it can purchase in today’s society, since the demise of the penny gumball machine.

Away with it.

The folks over at The Corner are debating the merits of phasing out the penny (there are several posts–just scroll down or control-F for “penn”).

Most seem to favor keeping it, and make all kinds of arguments for it, few of which I find compelling, and most of which are, in my humble opinion, at base a simple conservative resistance to change, them being conservatives and all. One last holdout was Peter Robinson, who was swayed to the pro-penny side by the following flawed argument:

A penny is to money as entropy is to thermodynamics. When you spend money, you get some useful work (the stuff you bought), some useful left over energy (large change), and some energy lost to entropy (pennies). Sure, if you get enough pennies together, you can make most of them useful, but some will always be lost to the pavement, cracks between the cushions, and not having quite enough to fill a roll of pennies.

Just as you can’t get rid of entropy in thermodynamics, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to get rid of fiscal entropy; the most you can do is turn nickels into the new unit of entropy.

Sorry, I don’t find the “entropy” argument compelling. If it were true, then if a hundred to the dollar is good, a thousand to the dollar would be better. Why stop there?

Face it, any choice of the smallest denomination of currency is going to be arbitrary. While it would be nice to see some deflation a la Ramesh, it’s a dangerous path to get there, and at the current valuation of the dollar, pennies really are useless.

I’d say that a reasonable criterion for when a coin has too small a value is when it’s not possible to purchase anything with a single one of it. A penny may still buy thoughts, but there’s nothing else that it can purchase in today’s society, since the demise of the penny gumball machine.

Away with it.

I’ve run into a little bit of a problem with my wireless service that I thought I’d share with y’all. I signed up with AT&T for a one year contract, with free phone thrown in. All good so far. I added a second phone for my wife, at $79.99 for the phone, and ten bucks a month extra for the service. Come billing time, we find that contrary to what we were told over the phone when we signed up, the second phone requires a two year contract, not a one year contract. OK. So let’s just eat our little sh*t sandwich and get on with life. They lied, but the hassle of fixing the problem outweighs the hassle of just dealing with it. Trying to sort out an unrelated billing issue, I’m informed that actually, we’re now obligated to a two year contract on *both* phones. Needless to say, there was no mention of this when we talked to them, despite explicitly asking about modifications to the original contract. F*ck that! cancel both contracts, have your damn phones back, and here’s a nice idea for where exactly you can put them… “We’d be happy to cancel the contracts, at a fee of $175. Per line. ”

Ma Bell, meet Mr Tenacious Bastard, Attorney at Law. I’ll update as things develop. In the meantime, I suggest you avoid doing business with mendacious *ssholes. Just a suggestion.

The title of this post is the name of my maternal grandfather, known to his friends as ‘Mac’. He was a tobacconist and newsagent, a quiet, intelligent man who raised his daughter to think for herself and to delight in words and ideas. It is from him that I get my love of language and music.

This being Memorial Day weekend I thought I’d mention him in honor of his service to King and Country. He fought in the RAF as a navigator on a Mosquito nightfighter, escorting bombers on raids against Nazi Germany. For a few months he was acting squadron leader after the man who had held the position was shot down. He never talked about his experiences during the war. When it was all over he returned home to the little apartment above the shop in Southend-on-Sea, and set about the business of raising my mum and uncle.

There can be no doubt that but for the courage and sacrifice of men like Mac, the world would be a much worse place today. I doubt that any are reading this blog, but if you are, thank you.

I’m still fuming.

I dropped Patricia off at LAX this morning on my way to work, to fly to Florida. She had a 7:40 flight.

She usually carries on, but today she had a couple pieces of luggage to check, so we decided that I’d park the car and help her check in. Now, to park at LAX is a minimum of three bucks for the first hour, but downstairs, at the arrival level, there are metered lots that take quarters, and I figured fifty cents would do me. Of course, this means that one has to enter the airport on the arrival level, which at 6 AM is almost empty since there are few arrivals that early. I cruised past an airport motorcycle cop, at the speed limit, or at least no faster than traffic. But he decided to pull out after me and turned on his flashers.

We pulled over, and he walked up to the car and informed me that we’d been pulled over because we didn’t have a front license plate. Now, I’ve been meaning to put it on, but the last time I tried, the screws that I bought at Pep Boys didn’t fit the holes on the front bumper. He took the license and registration (I’m a Wyoming resident, with a Wyoming drivers’ license), and took about ten minutes, presumably to run a check on this blatant and dangerous criminal. He finally came back with a ticket. It wasn’t a moving violation, and it could be dismissed, with a service fee, if I corrected the problem and drove to the DMV to get it signed off. Of course, because we’d pulled over into a side road heading away from our terminal, we had to backtrack to reenter the airport, costing even more time.

So to save a couple bucks, I now have to deal with the hassle of correcting a problem on a car that’s about to move to Florida, and we almost missed her flight. If I’d taken the upper level and parked up there, that cop wouldn’t have seen us at all, and there would have been much more traffic, resulting in many better things to do for whatever law enforcement was up there.

The coupe de grace, of course, was that, after all this, the metered lot ended up being closed.

Tomorrow I’m headed out to Madison for the biannual Innovative Confinement Concepts conference, so I may be offline for a while, possibly until Friday. They claim there’s WiFi at the conference center, so maybe I’ll be able to post from there. I’ll certainly post a summary of goings-on.

The conference is a meeting of researchers working on so-called innovative confinement concepts (hence the name of the conference :-). An ICC is basically any fusion concept that isn’t a Tokomak or an inertial confinement scheme. Tokomaks (and acronym from the Russian for “Toroidal Magnetic Chamber”) are the current leaders in achieving fusion-relevant parameters of temperature, density, and confinement time. Unfortunately they are inherently pulsed devices, and they have other technical features that make them undesirable for power plants. People are working to make Tokamaks power-plant friendly, but progress is slow (as in everything related to fusion). The other mainstream fusion scheme is Inertial Confinement Fusion. This uses a solid pellet of Deuterium and Tritium which is compressed and heated by external energy input from lasers, ion beams, or X-Rays. Currently only lasers and X-rays are used, ion beams having fallen out of favor (for reasons similar to those for the loss of favor of ion beam weapons for BMD – it turns out the beams are damn hard to point and focus accurately if they have any decent amount of energy). I don’t think anyone at this point honestly believes ICF is a real contender for power plants (though I could be wrong). The main reason ICF has solid funding is that the physics of the capsule implosion are exactly the same as the physics of the fusion stage of a thermonuclear weapon. In a weapon, X rays are generated by the detonation of a fission device, and passed via a carefully shaped reflector onto the surface of a Lithium Deuteride capsule, which implodes, fuses, and explodes. If you want to understand this process in detail, the ideal way to do it is to detonate small capsules under controlled conditions.

Anyway, the ICCs are the other guys, ranging in funding from ~$10 million down to ~$200K. They are the high-risk, high-reward segment of the fusion development portfolio. The designs range from minor variations on existing technology to outright Wile-E-Coyote designs. I personally believe that the ICCs are the best hope for getting fusion power on the grid in my lifetime, but that to really make things happen we need a fundamental paradigm shift in the fusion community. A lot of folks in the community don’t get basic economics, and have little idea about how technologies have historically come into the commercial sphere. That’s one of the things I’ll be talking to people about at the conference.

Anyway, if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s what I’m up to. If I can get decent net access I’ll post on the goings-on.