Monday: Hili dialogue

52 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

1. Anyone like duck sauce?

   Apricots.

2. That just shows the limitations of ChatGPT. For all its effusiveness, it still refers to this web site as a “blog”.

   1. Good catch. I guess that the ChatGPT AI engine does not fit ALL of the data as I recall at least one explicit admonition from our host on this site that it is a website, not a blog. I do not think that that is necessarily a bad thing as overfitting noise in data leads to problems but so does blind fitting of curves without context. Just an AI limitation.

      1. You beat me to it! Not a blog.

      2. If somebody’s (repeated) assertion is a reason to accept something as a fact, President Trump would have spent most of the last 3 years repealing the “term limits” amendment of the US Constitution.
         I acknowledge Prof CC’s preferences by referring to this as a blo^H^H^Hwebsite (at least, when I remember).

   2. WEIT merely looks and quacks like a blog, but as we all know, it’s a website. ChatGPT hasn’t read Da Roolz yet.

      1. Thanks, Gordon. Mea culpa, it is indeed Rool 13. Now that does concern me regarding the AI engine since the admonition regarding website vs blog is not just a random discussion line, but set aside as a specific rule and da roolz are referred to everyday by inclusion at the end of the posting. I would think that that should carry some weight in the training process.

         1. As I pointed out a few days ago, ChatGPT does not have the sense to learn the roolz of chess before playing.

            1. I’m almost tempted to investigate ChatGPT enough to sucker it into a game of Go.
               Actually, given the number of game records online, and that best-outcome predictors were significant players in computer Go 15~20 years ago, that might actually be interesting.

   3. ChatGpt referes to the site as a blog -probably- because the question was posed that way?

      The site is referred to similarly on google searches:

      “Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.”

      1. But real intelligence would go to a primary source…and discover da roolz.

3. On this day:
   871 – Æthelred I and Alfred the Great lead a West Saxon army to repel an invasion by Danelaw Vikings.

   1297 – François Grimaldi, disguised as a monk, leads his men to capture the fortress protecting the Rock of Monaco, establishing his family as the rulers of Monaco.

   1735 – The premiere of George Frideric Handel’s Ariodante takes place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

   1746 – Second Jacobite rising: Bonnie Prince Charlie occupies Stirling.

   1790 – George Washington delivers the first State of the Union address in New York City.

   1811 – Charles Deslondes leads an unsuccessful slave revolt in the North American settlements of St. Charles and St. James, Louisiana.

   1828 – The Democratic Party of the United States is organized.

   1835 – US President Andrew Jackson announces a celebratory dinner after having reduced the United States national debt to zero for the only time.

   1867 – The United States Congress passes the bill to allow African American men the right to vote in Washington, D.C.

   1877 – Crazy Horse and his warriors fight their last battle against the United States Cavalry at Wolf Mountain, Montana Territory.

   1889 – Herman Hollerith is issued US patent #395,791 for the ‘Art of Applying Statistics’ — his punched card calculator.

   1912 – The African National Congress is founded, under the name South African Native National Congress (SANNC).

   1918 – U.S. President Woodrow Wilson announces his “Fourteen Points” for the aftermath of World War I.

   1936 – Kashf-e hijab decree is made and immediately enforced by Reza Shah, Iran’s head of state, banning the wearing of Islamic veils in public. [So much for progress…]

   1940 – World War II: Britain introduces food rationing.

   1961 – In France a referendum supports Charles de Gaulle’s policies in Algeria. [De Gaulle also became the first President of the French Fifth Republic on this day in 1959.]

   1964 – President Lyndon B. Johnson declares a “War on Poverty” in the United States. [Like the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror”, it’s a work in progress…]

   1973 – Soviet space mission Luna 21 is launched.

   1973 – Watergate scandal: The trial of seven men accused of illegal entry into Democratic Party headquarters at Watergate begins.

   1975 – Ella T. Grasso becomes Governor of Connecticut, the first woman to serve as a Governor in the United States other than by succeeding her husband.

   1989 – Kegworth air disaster: British Midland Flight 92, a Boeing 737-400, crashes into the M1 motorway, killing 47 of the 126 people on board.

   1994 – Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov on Soyuz TM-18 leaves for Mir. He would stay on the space station until March 22, 1995, for a record 437 days in space.

   2002 – President of the United States George W. Bush signs into law the No Child Left Behind Act. [Also a work in progress…]

   2011 – Sitting US Congresswoman Gabby Giffords is shot in the head along with 18 others in a mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords survived the assassination attempt, but six others died, including John Roll, a federal judge.

   2016 – Joaquín Guzmán, widely regarded as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker, is recaptured following his escape from a maximum security prison in Mexico.

   2020 – Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 crashes immediately after takeoff at Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport; all 176 on board are killed. The plane was shot down by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile.

   2023 – Supporters of former Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro storm the Brazilian Congress.

   Births:
   1638 – Elisabetta Sirani, Italian painter (d. 1665).

   1812 – Sigismond Thalberg, Swiss pianist and composer (d. 1871).

   1823 – Alfred Russel Wallace, Welsh geographer, biologist, and explorer (d. 1913).

   1824 – Wilkie Collins, English novelist, playwright, and short story writer (d. 1889).

   1859 – Fanny Bullock Workman, American mountaineer, geographer, and cartographer (d. 1925).

   1867 – Emily Greene Balch, American economist and author, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1961).

   1881 – Linnie Marsh Wolfe, American librarian and author (d. 1945). [Won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for her 1945 biography of John Muir titled Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir.]

   1897 – Dennis Wheatley, English soldier and author (d. 1977).

   1908 – William Hartnell, English actor (d. 1975).

   1908 – Fearless Nadia, Australian-Indian actress and stuntwoman (d. 1996).

   1911 – Gypsy Rose Lee, American actress, dancer, and author (d. 1970).

   1924 – Ron Moody, English actor and singer (d. 2015).

   1926 – Soupy Sales, American comedian and actor (d. 2009).

   1934 – Roy Kinnear, British actor (d. 1988).

   1935 – Elvis Presley, American singer, guitarist, and actor (d. 1977).

   1937 – Shirley Bassey, Welsh singer.

   1941 – Graham Chapman, English actor and screenwriter (d. 1989).

   1942 – Stephen Hawking, English physicist and author (d. 2018).

   1946 – Robby Krieger, American guitarist and songwriter.

   1947 – David Bowie, English singer-songwriter, producer, and actor (d. 2016).

   1958 – Betsy DeVos, American businesswoman and politician, 11th Secretary of Education.

   1967 – R. Kelly, American singer-songwriter, producer, and sex offender.

   1982 (or 1983) – Kim Jong-un, North Korean soldier and politician, 3rd Supreme Leader of North Korea.

   The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality. (Florence Nightingale):
   1337 – Giotto, Italian painter and architect, designed Scrovegni Chapel and Giotto’s Campanile (b. 1266).

   1642 – Galileo Galilei, Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher (b. 1564).

   1825 – Eli Whitney, American engineer and theorist, invented the cotton gin (b. 1765).

   1896 – Paul Verlaine, French poet and writer (b. 1844).

   1941 – Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, English general and founder of the Scout movement (b. 1857).

   1952 – Antonia Maury, American astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1866). [The organisation first to detect and calculate the orbit of a spectroscopic binary. She published an important early catalogue of stellar spectra using her own system of stellar classification, which was later adopted by the International Astronomical Union. She also spent many years studying the binary star Beta Lyrae. Maury was part of the Harvard Computers, a group of female astronomers and human computers at the Harvard College Observatory.]

   1958 – Mary Colter, American architect, designed the Desert View Watchtower (b. 1869).

   1990 – Terry-Thomas, English actor and comedian (b. 1911).

   1991 – Steve Clark, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1960).

   1996 – François Mitterrand, French sergeant and politician, 21st President of France (b. 1916).

   1998 – Michael Tippett, English composer and conductor (b. 1905).

   2002 – Dave Thomas, American businessman and philanthropist, founded Wendy’s (b. 1932).

   2017 – Peter Sarstedt, Indian-British singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1941).

   2020 – Buck Henry, American actor, screenwriter, and director (b. 1930).

   2022 – Michael Lang, American concert promoter and producer (b. 1944). [Best known as a co-creator of the Woodstock Music & Art Festival in 1969. He was also the organizer for its follow-up events, Woodstock ’94 and the ill-fated Woodstock ’99.]

   1. Woman of the day:
      Fanny Bullock Workman born OTD 1859 in Massachusetts. From the excellent Attagirls X/Twitter account:

      Fanny was not a skilled mountaineer but she was immune to altitude sickness and because her expeditions were in the early 1900s, there was no specialised equipment like pitons but she was a “slow, relentless, and intrepid” climber despite being encumbered by her thick, serviceable, voluminous skirts and hob-nailed boots. Her climbing technique was described as “bear-like; she solidly planted one foot and then groped for another secure grip with the other”.

      She is thought to be the first woman to have recorded seeing K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, and was not given to drama, describing a flimsy rope bridge spanning a gaping chasm of 270 feet across a river in Pakistan quite simply as “one of the longest and most trying in the country”

      In 1906, Fanny scaled Pinnacle Peak (22,735 feet) in the Himalayas and set an altitude record for women that stood for 28 years but her finest moment was her conquest of the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram in 1912. She triumphantly held up a newspaper headlined ‘Votes For Women’, knowing that the photo would speed around the world, sending a clear message to women and politicians everywhere.

      https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1744260199056109978

   2. 1828 – The Democratic Party of the United States is organized.

      Couldn’t happen today.

4. Track matchup : https://x.com/trackspice/status/1743651827789246658?s=46

   What is it? I’m not sure – a trained athlete v. …. what? “He does not run at all.”

   Spoiler : The trained athlete won, the guy who “does not run at all” lost.

5. The Austin story is incredible. Among its many aspects, the one that keeps gnawing at me is, Nobody noticed he was gone? I’ve read he was supposed to be working from home that week, but surely there must have been matters that required his attention, especially as his deputy was officially on vacation. What goes on?

   1. Likewise.

6. Re apricots, in 1988, I travelled with a friend along the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan to the recently opened Khunjerab Pass. During some of our side trips we stayed in villages that relied heavily on apricots in the long winter months and which were only reachable by road for twelve weeks in the year.

   1. Fresh apricots are most delicious! Dried apricots good, too, as well as apricot jam. Despite having lived in Vienna for 6+ years, I find Sacher Torte a complete waste of both apricots and chocolate. Dry🤢

      1. I partly agree with Jerry here. Generally, apricots dried, tinned and in jam are nicer than fresh apricots. BUT…

         Emphasis on ‘fresh’. Apricots bought at the farm gate were a revelation after apricots bought in the supermarket.

         There is also some variation in flavour intensity. The apricots – fresh, tinned, dried – once sourced from Central Otago far surpassed in flavour the ones now available.

         Edit: see comment #11 for a better explanation.

      2. Agreed entirely. I enjoy apricots in all their forms. A couple days ago I pigged out on an Apricot pie from Casa de Fruta in California. I was in Vienna last year and found Sacher Torte disappointing. The apricot jam was too thin. I much preferred Facher Torte, which I ate at Demel and found heavenly.

         1. Pls remind me what Facher Torte is? Stuff at Demel is generally to die for😋😋
            I’m a chocoholic, but don’t generally like to mix it with fruit. Did make a delicious fresh apricot clafouti recently. I remember the smell of apricot trees in Vienna in the Spring😻

7. Iran: Not re. anything noted above, but the latest This Week in Virology podcast is an interview with the heads of two labs in Montreal @ McGill, each together with one of their grad students.

   One of these is from Iran with an engineering background as an undergrad there. She tells her story from ~14:35 – 20:30, and comments on the situation in Iran. Without making any reference to the hijab business, she makes it clear that almost all in the academic stream there are trying to get out, and gives an example of how the regime is making that difficult. In the process, she becomes a good example of the brain drain that must be occurring there.

   1. +1 TWiV

8. Two observations:

   The elimination of the National Debt in 1836 lead to the depression of 1837. Every time the Federal government has tried to significantly reduce the debt it has lead to a severe economic downturn.

   https://activistmmt.org/surplus-depression/

   Coincidence? I don’t think so. As the economist Stephanie Kelton points out, the Federal government’s red ink is the non-Federal government sector’s black ink.

   And I am offended by the term “binary stars.” Stars exist on a spectrum.

   1. Trouble is, a lot of that black ink is on China’s books because they hold western sovereign debt. The red ink is all on ours. It’s fine when nationals of a country own their own debt. Then they just pay interest to one another, causing money to flow from taxpayers to bond-holders. Since these are pretty much the same people under progressive taxation, the red ink does equal the black ink internally, both in a macro and a micro sense. It would be micro unfair if poor people had to pay tax to bond holders but they don’t. The tax money flows the other way.

      The danger today is the macro one: money flows from western countries to China to service debt held abroad. This creates a balance of payments problem, undermines national security, and eats up fiscal budgetary room when interest rates rise and entitlement payments to non-taxpayers can’t be cut for political reasons. (Remember, the whole idea of bringing China into the world economic order as a cheap workshop was they would become our partner in prosperity and a military ally.)

      It’s certainly true that attempting to pay down foreign debt is exceedingly difficult for governments because the money has to come out of current consumption, which does cause economic contraction as even more wealth goes overseas instead of being available to spend, whether by government or by individuals.

      1. As this is not a website dedicated to economic issues, I’ll just write this:

         I urge you to read either Stephanie Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth” or Warren Mosler’s “The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.” Both are, in the terms of The Matrix, the little red pill of economics.

         Mosler has made his short book free on his website:

         https://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf

         1. Thank you. I am reading Mosler’s thought-provoking and accessible book now.

            1. Thank you for your open-mindedness and willingness to investigate the topic. I hope you find the reading worth your time, and that I can find out your thoughts after you’re done.

         2. I’m glad to say that I’m open-minded enough to learn enough to change the way I look at things. I really liked his analogy about the family that issues scrip to its children to get them to do chores and moderate their demand for things that their parents will of course buy for them with real money. I also did some other reading around MMT. I get that the national debt doesn’t ever need to be paid off — it doesn’t impoverish our children — and attempts to create budgetary surpluses (to pay off some of it) take purchasing power out of the private sector which causes recessions. The size of the deficit doesn’t matter so much because the government can always print enough fiat currency to pay the interest on the expanding debt. And government cheques will never bounce. The creditor has to accept the payments in the currency that it was lent as. He can’t demand, say, gold, or American dollars (instead of in our case, Canadian dollars) if he becomes doubtful about the value of our currency after extending the loan. I think he agrees that government spending can be inflationary because there may not be enough real wealth units (labour, machines, food, energy) for the spending to buy.

            His remarks apply to the American economy with its particular central banking system, although he was pleased that the pre-Euro Italian Finance Minister seemed to “get it”, too. I get the difference between the dollar and other fiat currencies on the one hand, and the Euro (and non-U.S. countries that use the American dollar but can’t print them) on the other. I wonder if the status of the American dollar as the world’s reserve currency brings some benefits that other weaker currencies don’t enjoy. If Canada prints more dollars to pay interest on our debt it will devalue the purchasing power of the Canadian dollar, disincenting creditors to hold Canadian dollars and causing them to demand a higher interest rate. This makes both our debt and our imports cost more*, even though imports are in general a good thing. The world seems eternally willing to hold U.S. dollars. I don’t know if this augments or undermines his theory.

            It might be not so much the size of the annual deficit that matters as much as the size of the government budget per se, since unrestrained spending could be inflationary. But I’m not sure about this.

            I’ll read it again but I wanted to at least let you know I had read it and it caused me to think differently about macro-economics at the rank amateur level where I live.
            ————
            * But our exports are cheaper, assuming we can export things the world wants to buy. Not a lot of spruce trees being mushed up for newsprint anymore. Toilet paper is still big, though.

9. National Clean Off Your Desk Day

   That, I have to tell my professor.

   The first homework I submitted to him turned up in my mailbox a week later. It was marked. In addition it had a large footprint on the cover page. It happened a few more times. Years later, I found out how it might have happened. He had so much clutter on his desk that he put graded papers on the floor under his desk.

   The footprint was probably not an expression of his opinion of my work.

10. Erdogan *is* a bad guy. Just a few days ago Turkey arrested a number of Israelis for spying. I don’t know if they were actually spying (https://www.jurist.org/news/2024/01/turkiye-prosecutor-orders-detention-of-15-suspected-israel-spies/), but I do not believe that Erdogon can be a help to Israel.

    OMG! It looks like the postmodernists took Sokal seriously and are now pursuing some of his ideas! Ceiling Cat help us!

    Three keys to success. Very clever!

    1. Three keys: So that’s why a resume is sometimes called a “CV.”

11. Strong pushback here on the idea that apricots aren’t one of our best fruits! Apricots have to be tree ripened to achieve their full flavour potential. Ripe apricots are very soft, so travel terribly. For this reason, the ones we get at grocery stores are almost always hard; underripe. They are without sweetness or flavour. Unfortunately, this is even the case with most dried apricots: producers are drying underripe fruit.

    1. Agreed. As a child, I lived in California and we had an apricot tree (with a grafted plum branch, to boot). That spoiled me forever as I’ve never had a “good” apricot since. We also had a lemon and orange tree. I do miss California’s climate, but nowadays climate change has put it through the ringer.

12. I suppose I should give my identity! “As a retired commercial airplane (Part 25) structural engineer*, DER, and engineer for aircraft certification at the FAA”:

    On the 737 in-flight depressurization:

    The part the departed the airplane was a plug assembly, not a door. It is used in airplanes where the cabin configuration does not require an exit door at that particular location. (The design (apparently) always has provisions for the additional door, I assume it’s an over-wing exit door, and they use a simple plug when the door is not required. (Functional doors are: Complicated, expensive, and heavy.))

    This particular plug was installed for Alaska Airlines (either as a new installation or as a maintenance action) by a third-party airplane maintenance company.

    So far, I have not heard whether this was a maintenance issue or a design issue. However, Given how fast these have been inspected and returned to service (and the simple fact that an inspection was sufficient to satisfy the AD), a design issue is very unlikely. This looks like the plug was improperly installed, which caused it to fail in flight.

    We all (but especially the passengers and crew on that flight, Alaska Airlines, and Boeing) were fortunate for a number of things:

    1. The failure occurred at low altitude (16K), with a small pressure differential and very little risk to the people in the plane from hypoxia.

    2. The failure occurred during climb out when everyone was seated and buckled in.

    3. There was no passenger directly adjacent to the failure (although, with 1 and 2, above, it’s unlikely anyone would have been hurt anyway).

    (* Who once specialized in pressurized fuselage doors.)

    1. The issue appears to be manufacturing. Spirit Systems installs the plug in the fuselage section which is then shipped to Boeing for final assembly.

       The issue is “loose bolts”, which indicates a manufacturing issue at the supplier to Boeing. Such an installation would be very unlikely to require a second check at the Boeing factory. (Bolts (and bolt-like fasteners) get a marking on installation or inspection that indicates they are final.)

       1. I am an engineer from a similar background (Avionics and Electrical Systems Integration) large and small aeroplanes and rotorcraft I am always interested in structures and power-plants and I thank you for that explanation, as usual an element of human factors / failings. It could have been much worse.

13. There are so many discouraging examples coming from Chat-GPT that it’s indeed refreshing to see how fairly — and fulsomely— it praises our Hili.

    1. +1

       Yes. 🙂

14. “The plane landed safely”.

    It always grinds my gears when I read this. No, it didn’t – it landed without further incident. Safety is not the absence of anything going wrong, it’s the margin for recovery in case something does.

    There’s almost nothing safe about any landing, which is why we’ve always done so much risk mitigation to prevent mishaps, from design oversight to maintenance regulations to traffic control to wind shear detection, etc.

    The earlier MAX disasters happened because the corrupt FAA gave up on design and training oversight. I’ll bet this one was the result of the lack of construction or maintenance oversight.

    1. “corrupt FAA”

       Wow, you must have some amazing insider information.

       I used to work for the FAA (in aircraft certification) and I never saw the slightest hint of corruption. In fact we got training all the time that emphasized not just integrity but the absolute requirement to not even ever give the appearance of anything less than complete integrity.

       And that supposed “army of FAA engineers” myth that you may have read about in, for instance a deeply flawed opinion article in IEEE Spectrum?: Never existed. The system that built the safest transportation system in history (and it remains so) is, and always has been, fully dependent on industry designees (I used to be one) for ensuring safety and regulatory compliance.

       This is the safest transportation system ever devised by humans. Fuck with it at your peril.

       The system is built upon the knowledge that, as my FAA manager told me the first day on the job, “people are basically fuck-ups.” So it assumes human error and makes the needed moves to counter it. And it does a damned good job of it.

       “I’ll bet this one was the result of the lack of construction or maintenance oversight.”

       I’ll bet it was simply a fuck-up.

       You might want to try to do an estimated cost-benefit analysis on trying to have an inspector over the shoulder of every single working A&P mechanic. Figure out how much that would cost, how much additional benefit would result (very little, there’s almost no room for improvement), and how many people would, based on the increased cost translated to increased air ticket prices, would choose to drive instead of flying and therefore die doing that. (Driving is, literally, 10,000 times more likely to result in your death than flying is.)

       These types of calculations are required, by law, for the FAA to make airworthiness decisions (that require action). You don’t make changes willy-nilly, based on feelings or assumptions.

       1. The FAA allowed Boeing to do its own approval of the MAX design (the unairworthiness of which inspired MCAS in the first place) and allowed Boeing to tell pilots, “It’s no different, no, no, you don’t need additional training”. They knew better at the time and knew why Boeing was rushing things. One mission of the FAA is to counter the manufacturers’ tendency to cut corners and browbeat their employees. This was all widely publicized – nothing insider about it.

          What you’re saying about “safety” is lack of risk. Yes, flying is the lowest-risk form of transportation ever devised. That’s what all the regulations, certifications, and licensing are for – to prevent, as much as possible, failures from happening in the first place. Why? Because there’s so little room to recover from them! Seat belts and emergency oxygen can only do so much.

          If my car’s engine fails on the road, I pull over and come to a stop. If my plane’s sole engine fails at too low an altitude to restart it, I crash (unless I’m very lucky and can coast to a runway). Hence the requirement for redundancy (risk mitigation) on airliners. There are other analogous situations. What makes driving so risky is operating in crowded, totally uncontrolled space, dealing with operators many of whom are impaired, careless, or otherwise incompetent.

          1. If you drive the same number of miles in your car, you are approximately 10,000 times more likely to die than flying in a (commercial, Part 25) airplane. Really, this is all you should need to know about the safety of the system.

             Splitting hairs over “lack of risk” versus “safety” is pretty pointless here: A distinction with no functional difference. Your enumeration of the features of the system is also pointless. They all exist for a reason. And they had to run a gauntlet of regulatory oversight to show that they were needed. (I don’t imagine you’ve ever worked an airworthiness directive through the system, as I have.)

             You’ll need to explain how regulatory decision errors (at the FAA) are equal to “corruption”.

             As I previously stated, the entire air transport system is fully based on industry designees. Always has been, always will be. I was at various times: an industry DER, an aircraft certification engineer at the FAA, and a project (maintenance) engineer at a major airline. I think I have a slightly better view of the system that you do.

             I can state unequivocally that I was never pressured to change a finding of regulatory compliance.

             1. I defer to the many news articles, most still on line I believe, in which Boeing employees themselves mentioned the internal pressure. Also those describing how the FAA agreed to remove all mention of a significant component from the operating manual, delegated ALL certification tasks to Boeing, and exempted the MAX from new regulations specifically intended to “[make] the needed moves to counter” human error.

                The only link I will post here is an archive of the Final Report by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure:
                http://web.archive.org/web/20201027110240/https://transportation.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2020.09.15%20FINAL%20737%20MAX%20Report%20for%20Public%20Release.pdf

                While mostly condemning Boeing, there are many findings on how the FAA themselves fucked with the system, as you put it. Section 2, Executive Summary, specifically refers to “regulatory capture” and Section 4, FAA Oversight and Delegation of Authority, is particularly informative.

                I don’t know when you were a designee, of course, but the 2005 program evidently was a drastic turning point.

                Again, I have no insider information, but a lot is public and available to all.

                As for your question below (combined here to minimize my number of replies):

                Risk is the probability of something going wrong. Not “risk of injury or death”, but “risk of an event that can result in injury or death”. That’s what needs mitigation.

                Safety is the ability to recover in the event something goes wrong. It’s not “the 787’s lithium batteries don’t catch fire often”, it’s “here’s how we contain such a lithium battery fire until after the crew can land and evacuate everyone”.

                You’re safer when you have more ability to recover. An acrobat with a net is safer than one without. The risk, falling off the tightrope, is unchanged.

          2. “What you’re saying about “safety” is lack of risk”

             Are you trying to argue that lower risk of injury and death is not equivalent to being “safer”?

             Are you trying to argue that higher risk of injury and death is not equivalent to being “less safe”?

       2. Absolutely correct. I was authorised as a “ Design, Certification Compliance Engineer” by the UK CAA ( and EASA) and many simply do not understand the processes and business. It is still the best way.

15. I engaged with Carolyn Porco quite a bit on Twitter some years before it became X — but after she had become an anti-space, mother-Earth evangelist.

    I had previously admired her inspiring role as imaging scientist on the Cassini mission at Saturn, so I was very disappointed to learn that in her retirement she had become a vociferous critic of any efforts to expand humanity beyond Earth.

    I thought her arguments were simplistic and uninformed, reflecting a zero-sum perspective about humanity and its relationship to Earth’s biosphere. The breaking point for me came when I sensed in her an undercurrent of disdain for humanity itself.

    In retrospect, Porco’s change in focus now reminds me of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s surprising embrace of Christianity as the only thing that will save us from imminent catastrophe.

    I haven’t read “The Dead” by James Joyce, but now my wife is interested in reading it herself.

16. Regarding Krauss’s article on postmodernism, I am nearing the end of my re,re,..,re-reading of Higher Superstition by Paul R Gross and Norman Levitt, published in 1994. Little has changed in three decades: a few shifts of emphasis, but the assault on science by people who know nothing about it is the same.

17. Many of the stories in Dubliners are excellent, and “The Dead” finishes the collection beautifully. It is a moving story that could not be more perfectly written. I think I might just agree that it is the finest story ever written in English.

18. In “Higher Superstition” (1994), Gross and Levitt anticipated the future of academia. When we dismissed postmodernism as a harmless, fringe affectation back in those days, we sure missed the mark. Regarding the Chicago rat hole, few appreciate the fact that Johann Straus anticipated that story in his operetta “Die Flattermaus”.

19. ”But what can that be given that right now it’s playing NO role now?”

    He has been playing a role, by unabashedly coming out in favour of Palestine. Maybe his “positive role” is like the “one-China policy”: it means different things to different people.

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