Author: Captain Obvious

Do you remember the childhood story of the boy who cried wolf? It is one of Aesop’s Fables.  The idiom “to cry wolf” is defined as “to give a false alarm” meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved.  You no doubt know the story of Chicken Little as well.

The original tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly fools villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his town’s flock. When an actual wolf appears and the boy calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm, and the sheep are eaten by the wolf. In a later English-language poetic version of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy.  The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is, “this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them.”

Why did I start this blog with this story?  Well, you may have heard or read that the earth rotated once around its axis on Wednesday, June 29, in 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours.  Based upon the media’s coverage, you would have thought the world as we now know it was coming to an end.  Let’s take a deep breath and a few steps back from the abyss.

How many readers even know what a millisecond is?  I suspect very few.  It is 1/1000^th of one second.  Yes, we are reading news warnings that the earth rotated in 23 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds and a final 0.99841 seconds compared to the usual 1.00000 second for a “normal” day. I hope you can you see that this is mostly about us being able to measure time precisely rather than anything meaningful about the change in time.  If this rate of speed up was cumulative over a lifetime of 100 years, the earth would have sped up 0.16 seconds … 1.6 seconds after 1,000 years.

You would have thought the news was a warning to move to some isolated place on the planet and wait for Jesus to return.  Clearly, he must be coming soon.  Can’t you see the silliness.  Yet it not only makes the news, but it is presented in the tone: “the end is near!”

We have to cross over from nagging to helpful, from ideological to relevant, and from boring to funny and engaging. Simply howling at the moon does little to change anything and tends to further polarize people because of the loss of trust.

It was about 6-8 years ago that I read a Scientific American article claiming we should stop just talking about things but rather we should declare things as a crisis.  Somehow these eggheads thought that being right and shouting at the top of their lungs would educate and inspire the masses.

Nope, it is precisely that articles like this are doing much more harm than good. We need an educated and inspired community around us.   A key question we might ask about the prophets of old might be should they have changed their messaging?  Did it work at all?   Or were they just as silly as we are today?  Perhaps they just wrote for the same reason I do … to get it off their chests.

What should a modern prophet say and do to get people’s attention?  Once again, watch Planet of the Humans to see how dangerous our current situations is right now.  And, if you are interested (and you should be), the recent apparent passage of energy legislation is going to take us further into the ditch and when it is proven faulty and foolish, further tainting public trust.

 

Most people find spiders pretty unappealing.  As an engineer, I find them inspiring even though I do not like them anywhere around me in my home.  I grew up in New York City where black widow spiders were extremely common, especially in your basement.  I knew their bite was poisonous but they mostly stayed to themselves in dark dank areas.  It was the spiders that spun huge precise webs in between bushes that truly impressed me with their handiwork.  I would often catch flies and moths and feed them to watch what they did to encase them for use to feed their young.

Now, curious people have found a remarkable use for dead spiders taking advantage of their leg actuation mechanisms.  Unlike mammals and other animals, spiders do not have opposing muscles to move their legs.  Their limbs are essentially on rubber bands that stretch to open using internal body pressure.  Remove the internal body pressure and they curl up.  That is why dead spiders all look the way they do.

Take a look at this research from IEEE Spectrum:

Best of all, they are biodegradable when your done!  End of story, right?

Don’t be so lazy.  The simplicity of this solution should make us rethink the approach to the problem.  If it was this easy to take a dead bug and make a gripper, perhaps the whole approach to gripping you see in today’s robots should be rethought.

We all know that line from the first Top Gun movie, and who doesn’t admire the incredible flying scenes from it and the sequel.  But, as many know, and engineers will remind us, the energy use goes up as the square of the increase in speed.  That means if you want to travel at twice the speed, you will use about four times as much energy to do so.

It should not be surprising then that the speed limits on highways were reduced down to 55 mph during the oil embargoes in the late 1970s.  Energy use went down, and there were fewer wrecks and highway fatalities.  I found it a bit surprising that our politicians here and around the world have forgotten this lesson … I never hear anyone suggesting we “impose” on the free will of Americans to do their part by slowing down.

Well, it now surprises me even further that the idea of supersonic flight has emerged as an actual plan.  Here is the Wall Street Journal announcement:

“American Airlines has agreed to buy 20 planes from Boom Supersonic, betting on the future of an ultra-fast plane that is still years away.  American put down a nonrefundable deposit on its initial 20 aircraft, known as the Overture, and has the option to purchase 40 more, the companies said Tuesday. The companies didn’t disclose additional financial details of the transaction. Aerospace startup Boom is developing new planes capable of traveling at supersonic speeds, faster than the speed of sound. Overture is being designed to carry 65 to 80 passengers at Mach 1.7 over water, or 1.7 times the speed of sound—about twice as fast as commercial planes can fly today.

“Supersonic travel will be an important part of our ability to deliver for our customers,” Derek Kerr, American’s chief financial officer, said in a statement Tuesday.

Boom has said Overture will be able to fly over 600 routes in half the time those flights currently take—such as Miami to London in under five hours, and Los Angeles to Honolulu in three hours—at fares comparable with current business-class prices.”  Read the full article here. 

Well, why not a single word about carbon footprint or environmental sensitivity.  The only concern is whether they can manage the sonic boom as the plane crosses the sound barrier.

Remember last week’s blog where the airlines had posted the environmental performance of the flight choices?  Doesn’t it seem that this need for speed should answer the societal question of “should” rather than “how?”

Oh, I know, the airlines will offer environmental offsets to the passengers … paying for the carbon emissions with the modern equivalent of indulgences within the Catholic church.

Are we really this tone deaf?

My wife Susan and I were getting ready to take a friend to the airport and I just wanted to check to see the exact time we should be at the airport.  You know, you must be there two hours ahead of your scheduled departure.

Upon checking, I was presented with a comparison of his flight with cheaper flights that had one stop by a competing airline.  They were cheaper… that made sense.  But what surprised me was that I was offered a carbon footprint comparison.

Really?  Did they know the fuel efficiency of the specific jets in question?  Or, did they just assume one less takeoff would reduce fuel per passenger in most cases?  Or, was the lower fuel use also associated with a direct route rather than one that stopped in Atlanta?  And, did they really think that a 6% reduction in carbon would help me justify the higher price of a nonstop flight?

I will never know because the math was not given and I assume that is because they didn’t think the average person would understand or even care?

It is unarguable that to manage anything, you must be able to measure impacts.  But, one key question is how do you measure carbon emissions at this granular level?  Then, you could question why anyone would care about incremental efficiency vs convenience?  We will never know about this event.

We do now have mechanisms for the virtue-signaling wealthy flyers to buy carbon offsets. That at least has some seemingly rightful benefit… let the wealthy support the arts… in this case, the art of deception.

Perhaps your car reminds you when you should change the oil.  This is certainly a helpful reminder.  But, since it is a warning, most of us wait for a convenient time to do it. Oil cleanliness is of course not a time-sensitive measure … you could wait quite a time … or even ignore the warning and extend the intervals between oil changes.  We all know that.

However, there is another way to think of warning lights like this.  The one that I remember best was a sign on my dentist’s spotlight light that read, “Only Floss the Teeth You Want to Keep!”  Flossing teeth is not fun … unless you have been eating something like corn on the cob that gets stuck in your teeth.

As a lover of the sea and a part-time captain of a large vessel, I love this story:  It is reportedly the transcript of a radio conversation of a US naval ship with Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland in October of 1995. This radio conversation transcript was released by the Chief of Naval Operations 10-10-95.

Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a Collision.

Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.

Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.

Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States’ Atlantic fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that YOU change your course 15 degrees north, that’s one, five, degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

Deference and humility were clearly missing in this story and perhaps the lack of these is required to heed warnings.

So, let’s ask ourselves how many warning lights we have in our lives that need our attention.

Hopefully, we will not be like one of my daughters.  I was riding with her and noticed the Change Oil light was flashing red on the dash.  I asked her how long that had been on, and she said as if noticing it for the first time, “Oh no!  Thanks for pointing that out. These pesky lights keep coming on.  I have been meaning to put tape over that one for years!”