War Commentary

What A Shame

Some people in Hamas think that it might be hard to carry out their blustering threats when their leaders are picked off almost as fast as they can name them.

“The Islamic and Arab world … expected the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas resistance movement combatants to take revenge for the bloodshed of martyr Sheikh Ahmed Yassin immediately,” he told the agency. “But [they] are unaware of the limitations and [the] amount of pressure imposed against the Palestinian combatants.”

Isn’t it a shame to disappoint “the Islamic and Arab world”? Not to mention their apologists in the west, who assure us daily that Israel’s tactics will just create more terrorism?

And this was interesting as well:

A leading Arab expert on Palestinian militant movements said in an interview that Hamas also might be deterred by the fear that a large-scale attack inside Israel would provoke Israel to kill Mr. Arafat

General

Too Cheap To Fix

Sorry, had a busy day. Here’s an interesting article at the CSM that says that cars are becoming disposable.

…many new cars today cost so much to fix that it’s becoming harder to justify repairs. The BMW that hit McConnell’s shop had dual front, side, and side- curtain air bags. Federal safety rules do not allow air bags to be reused. So each bag would have had to be replaced with a brand new one. The sensors and pyrotechnics that set them off also required replacement. Add the cost of labor, more than $1,000 for each air bag, and even more for the sensors, and the result is a totaled car.

It’s not just airbags–if it were, we could just chalk it up to idiotic federal regulations.

As the article points out, this is an inevitable (and disturbing, at least to me) trend. I first noticed it over a decade ago when my first “Hi Fi” VCR had the stereo die in it. I took it to a VCR repair place and described the problem to the repairman, upon which he said, “yeah, I can fix it, but you can probably buy a new VCR cheaper.”

This came as a shock to me, because when I grew up, when a piece of high fidelity equipment broke, you fixed it. In the early seventies, I was a radio engineer at the local public broadcasting station (in high school). My step-brother had purchased a Sansui stereo receiver when he was stationed in Thailand during the war, while in the Air Force, and one of the channels had died in it. He had paid probably three hundred bucks for it in Asia (a decent amount of money at the time).

The power output transistors had died, which I determined fairly quickly by determining that they were shorted, using a volt ohm-meter. I pulled them off the heat sink and replaced them with new ones from Shand electronics, and he was back in business. My time (at minimum wage–I think a couple bucks an hour) was a couple hours, to diagnose, go to the electronics shop, and solder in the new transistors. It clearly made sense to fix it.

In the face of the VCR problem, I had a piece of equipment that cost a couple hundred bucks, but the repairman’s time was fifty bucks an hour, and there were few discrete components on it–it probably involved replacing an entire board that would have cost fifty bucks or so. It just didn’t make sense to spend the money since, at that time, the price of a new one had dropped, and would provide much better features. I could spend my own time, but I’d have to get some specialized equipment to do the circuit tracing, and still have to get the original factory parts. It just didn’t make sense.

In one sense, it’s great that things are getting so cheap that they’re not worth repairing. That means that they’re becoming extremely affordable.

But I wonder what it means for the new generation. When I was a kid, it was fun to take things apart to figure out how they worked (and useful to do so to figure out why they didn’t). If there was a problem with a part of it, it was affordable to go buy a new one and fix the de-vice by replacing it.

What does a high-school kid with an engineering aptitude do now? What opportunities are there for him or her to indulge in exploration and trouble-shooting (the root bases of science)?

I’ve got a 1986 Honda Accord with a quarter of a million miles on it. It’s got lots of problems–a windshield wiper switch that causes the wipers to come on when you hit a bump, a sunroof that doesn’t open because it needs a slight adjustment to a tensioner that can only be accessed by completely removing the roof from the car and dismantling it, upholstery that’s ripped and dissipated by age and sun, worn carpet, a slightly schizophrenic fuel-injection system that causes the engine to “breathe” when it idles, varying between 900 and 1500 RPM with a frequency of about 0.5 Hz, a hatchback in which the hydraulic lifts have lift their last, the original clutch (which still seems serviceable). It needs a new right axle, which makes little “click-click-click” noises on turns, due to a failed CV joint, and causes an unpleasant vibration in the front end at highway speeds.

On the other hand, the engine still burns no oil. This would have seemed miraculous to a high-school kid of my generation, when cars needed to have rings and valve-guides replaced at least once per hundred thousand miles. The synchronizers in the gearbox are still fine (including the ones in first gear–an unaffordable luxury when I was a teenager–I didn’t have first-gear synchros until I got my first BMW in the early eighties). These would have had to be replaced in any of my MGs with regularity when I was a kid, to to the point that always double clutched on the principle that it was easier to change the disk than rebuild a transmission, and I always did compression braking to save on brake pads (and especially, in the rear, on shoes).

When I was in high school, I would have killed for a car with this performance and handling, even with all the cosmetic problems and things to fix. What’s it worth to a high-school kid today?

I don’t know, but I may find out, because it’s not worth driving or shipping 2500 miles from southern California to southern Florida, where I’ll be living in a few weeks.

But while it’s great to see the costs of sophisticated mechanical equipment or electronics (and the tools to repair things, or construct new things) reduced to the point at which almost anyone can afford them, I think that something has been lost when the cost of manufacturing has become less than the cost of repair–the wonder of taking it apart, and the thrill of putting it back together and having it work, particularly when it didn’t work before you took it apart.

And I wonder where our next generation of engineers will come from.

Political Commentary

Anniversary

The Branch Davidians were incinerated eleven years ago today, and nine years ago, the Murrah Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma City. We still don’t know everyone who was involved. In light of that this should stir things up a little.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

Clayton Cramer has more disturbing details from the trial.

How much else did the prosecution suppress in their effort to keep this case neat and tidy?

Good question.

[Another update, a little later]

As Jon Goff points out, there are some things to celebrate on this date as well–the beginning of the first American revolution.

A reminder of an event that makes Michael Moore all the more odious.

War Commentary

A War For Oil

By Jacques Chirac. I’m chiraced, just…errr…shocked.

…Chirac was defending something quite different when he sent his erstwhile foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, around the world to buy votes against America at the United Nations. Chirac was determined to maintain Saddam Hussein in power so that two extraordinarily lucrative oil contracts, negotiated by the French, could go into effect…

…during the first seven years alone, it would earn the French around $50 billion. Elf-Aquitaine negotiated a virtually identical deal with Saddam to expand the gigantic Majnoon oil field as well. Put together, those two deals were worth $100 billion to the French. That

Space

Fear Of Flying

Leonard David (who I hope I’ll see at next week’s Space Access Conference) has an interesting article today on the prospects for returning Shuttle to flight, and the potential consequences, political and otherwise, of delaying or failing to do so.

There’s a fear expressed in the article that a NASA that’s afraid to risk a Shuttle launch isn’t a NASA that can accept the risk of sending people back to the moon, let alone Mars.

I think that’s right. The first step toward a bold new space program is defeminizing our space policy. And while Dwayne says that his intent was to point out the feminine language of the rhetoric of our policy, I do think that this irrational risk aversion is in fact a feminization of the policy itself.

I’m with Jack Schmitt. My position is that we should quickly decide whether or not we’re going to continue the program. If we are, then start flying now, so people don’t forget how to fly it, and we don’t wear it out in the hangar. Stop wasting all these hundreds of millions of dollars and all this time developing improvements for something that we’re only going to fly another couple dozen times and are probably just political bandaids anyway, and just get on with it, while putting into place a plan to develop alternative capabilities as soon as possible. Tell the nation to recognize that the vehicle has risks, to expect to lose another one, and to suck it up and stop crying about dead astronauts who, now more than ever, accept the risk with eyes open, just as do our troops in Iraq. Fly them until we either finish station (and fix Hubble), or lose two, at which point the remaining one goes to Dulles.

If we can’t do that, then just shut the thing down now, so we can take the billions that it costs to keep the standing army sitting around and apply them to something useful. As it is now, we have the worst of all worlds, with wasted money and time, and continuing uncertainty as to whether or not we’ll get any value out of the wasted money and time. Let’s just do it or get off the pot.

General Science

More Than Skin Deep

Here’s some research that confirms my own empirical experience–that people become more (or less) physically attractive to you the better you get to know them, depending on other aspects. I’ve noticed that women to whom I woudn’t necessarily have given a second glance upon first exposure become quite physically appealing over time and repeated exposure, if they have other desirable characteristics–they “grow on you,” as the old expression goes (for me, intelligence is a key enhancer).

This is probably a useful evolutionary trait, assuming that monogamy is a useful evolutionary trait.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!