Truly Bizzare

Eminiar VII

The real news, 3 (count ’em) 3 web exclusive Spoon performances and this week’s guests below.

You know, I’ve voted in every election (except once, when I was involved in an accident on the way to the polls)- local, state, national, and primary since I was eligible to do so, sometimes with great enthusiasm and others less so.  Many of my ballot choices I’ve come to regret, most of my candidates have been defeated.

The reason I keep banging my vote against this wall is summarized by Stockton-

Politics is the art of controlling your environment. That is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks that ‘it doesn’t matter who’s President’ has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World – or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property – or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons – or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.

The fact that the institutional Democratic Party, the neolibs and corporatists, are actively more interested in purging any semblance of left wing populist thought and non-conformity than they are in any so-called ‘electoral victory’ (amply demonstrated by Gaius Publius today, and also here and here) is very discouraging.  The lesser of two evils is still evil.

I know that a vast majority of people are disgusted by these corrupt, lying, cowards and criminals, all you have to do is look at their approval rating to see that they’re less popular than a Root Canal.  I know the system is designed to make it virtually impossible for a candidate to succeed outside of the two party system.

It has never been my position to urge you to vote for a particular politician, or indeed to vote at all.

What I would urge is that you try and find a way to let your dissatisfaction be known.  Without action things will never change except for the worse.

My personal choice is to vote third party wherever I can so that my outrage is at least tabulated.  You can do whatever you want.

We’ll have an Open Thread up on Election Night (tomorrow) to record the debacle and undoubtedly some analysis as the results sink in.  Don’t be afraid to contribute your personal thoughts, we publish lots of stuff with which we don’t necessarily agree.

There are two big stories this weekend, actually they’re kind of interelated and the biggest one has 2 parts.

First of all there is pretty much general agreement that Bernie Ecclestone is a greedy asshole who’s been sucking the money out of the sport for years and bribing his favorite teams- Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes, and McLaren with pitiful (considering the magnitude of his theft) kickbacks to to sabotage the council of team organizations (in whatever form that’s taken) and back him in votes of the Formula One Board and the FIA.

This year has been particularly tough for the littles who’ve had to totally redesign their chassis, braking system, and electronics to work with the new powerplants that are (with the exception of Mercedes, and not always them either) anemic and unreliable.  I’ll talk more about the engines later.

Marussia of Bianchi misfortune and Caterham, the littlest of the littles, are in receivership administered by Formula One and will not race in Austin or at Interlagos and whether they will make an appearance in Abu Dhabi is questionable.  La, la, la, la, la, says Bernie, everything is fine, very unfortunate but nothing to see here.

Then, during the practice sessions came rumors of a boycott by all the littles- Lotus, Force India, and Sauber.  The concept was they’d all race a lap to satisfy their contractual obligations and avoid fines, and then park with “mechanical difficulties”.  “Forget all that crap. I promise you they will be racing. They will be racing, I give you an absolute guarantee.”

La, la, la, la, la.

Of course Lotus and the rest of the teams are denying anything was discussed at all.

Or was it?

Force India deputy principal Bob Fernley suggested there was an agenda at play, however, and said more teams risked folding unless something was done.

“Two teams have now gone and I think the commercial rights holder is comfortable to thinking there might be 14 cars next year. How many do they want to lose?,” he told Reuters.

“He (commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone) thinks there could be 14 cars next year. So the question is, if we are driving teams out of the business to what agenda is it? And what’s the game?”

The Times quoted Ecclestone as saying there was a risk of two more teams falling by the wayside.

“If we lose another two teams that is what will happen,” he said. “We need (them) if they are going to be there performing properly and not moving around with begging buckets.”

Fernley spoke after a news conference that went on for nearly an hour and that also spoke volumes about the crisis engulfing the sport.

The Sauber, Lotus and Force India bosses all sat on the back row while in front of them, emphasizing the division in the paddock, sat McLaren’s Racing Director Eric Boullier and Mercedes motorsport head Toto Wolff.

The calls of the back row for a revision of how the revenues were divided, in a sport with turnover in excess of $1.5 billion a year but where the big teams get far more than the less successful ones, seemed to fall largely on deaf ears.

Of course, if Bernie shows up with less than 16 cars in Abu Dhabi he’ll be in contract violation and there are steep financial penalties.

Bernie Ecclestone admits F1 is in deep crisis and needs help

Paul Weaver, The Guardian

Saturday 1 November 2014 19.56 EDT

Bernie Ecclestone has admitted that Formula One is in crisis and he does not know how to fix it. “We should tear all of the current contracts up,” he said. “Tear them all up and start again.”

Ecclestone, looking every one of his 84 years, also conceded that the three teams who were said to be considering a boycott of Sunday’s United States Grand Prix – Force India, Sauber and Lotus – may not be racing next year. But he also insisted that he had averted the immediate threat of a boycott.

Ecclestone, F1’s supremo, said: “We have to decide the best way to sort this whole thing out. Frankly, I know what’s wrong but don’t know how to fix it. No one is prepared to do anything about it because they can’t. The regulations have tied us up. The trouble with lots of regulations and lots of contracts is that we don’t think long-term.”

He admitted that he had been at fault. “The problem is there is too much money probably being distributed badly – probably my fault. But like lots of agreements people make, they seemed a good idea at the time. Why not just bypass team bosses and go to heads of board? I think it’s probably what will have to happen.”

…

However, hours after Ecclestone had spoken the teams involved in the dispute were still discussing whether or not to withdraw from the race.

“We have to open the eyes of those people in a position to turn the lights on and off,” Ecclestone said. “I wouldn’t want to be in a position where I was too strong and Formula One disappears and someone says it is because of you it disappeared.”

The Lotus owner, Gérard Lopez, said: “The distribution model of revenues is completely wrong. When you get teams that receive more money just for showing up than teams spend in a whole season then something is entirely wrong with the whole system, and so that cannot be allowed to happen.”

Sauber’s principal, Monisha Kaltenborn, said: “If we don’t act now together then you have to ask yourself what else needs to still happen? You look simply at the facts: we are sport here, in my view still one of the best global sporting platforms, we have turnovers of billions of dollars and the sport as such, together with the stakeholders, are not in a position to actually maintain 11 teams.”

Ecclestone had discussions with Kaltenborn in the afternoon in an attempt to get the smaller teams to race. He said: “I’m not happy. And we’ll have to do something about it. I think the situation is such that if enough people want it resolved, we can resolve it.” But he dismissed the idea of teams running three cars. “Forget third cars. Nobody can afford two cars,” he said.

Now remember what I said about related developments and how we’d get back to the crappy engine story?  A big problem this year has been all the money that’s had to be put into completely new cars because of the engine change and only one of the 3 engines available (Mercedes, Renault, Ferarri) is worth a damn.  Ferrari is slow and Renault breaks down all the time.

There are 3 drivers who are going to get penalized for unauthorized drive train replacements- Button and Kvyat who are getting dinged a 5 Grid penalty for replacement gearboxes, but the big name is Vettel who replaced everything and as a consequence is starting from the pit.  In a “controverisial” decision (controversial because it makes Bernie look bad and disappoints the customers), Vettel stayed out in Qualifying just long enough to lay down a lap that that avoided the 107% non-competitive cut rule.  Makes perfect sense to me, if you’re not going to start any higher than last anyway why bother?  Even Hamilton and Rosberg have had gearbox and braking problems (braking is integrated into the KERS and the electronic engine controls so it’s not a seperate system anymore).

On offer are the Mediums and Softs.  It’s theoretically possible I suppose that some will attempt a 1 Pit strategy (vettel for instance) but I expect most will go 2 Pits, Soft, Medium, Soft.

Hamilton is unhappy about double points in Abu Dhabi and leading the Driver’s Championship by only 17 you can understand why.  Rosberg leads the front row, but it’s notable that Williams has locked down the second.  That puts Massa infront of Alonso for the first time in a long time with Red Bull Ricciardo spliting the third row with Alonso.

• Circuit of the Americas
• Interactive Track

Pretty tables below.

Saturday Science Special

Once again there have been fatalities in the pursuit of manned space flight and I mourn the loss just as everyone does.

But you know folks, they call it Rocket Science for a reason and even after a century of development (I personally date it from the work of Robert Goddard which is terribly parochial of me, some would date it from the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsk in 1903) it’s still an extremely dangerous undertaking.

A century you say?  Well, two of Goddard’s patents, those for liquid fuel and multiple stages, were granted in 1914.

His 1919 monograph A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is considered one of the classic texts of 20th-century rocket science. Goddard successfully applied three-axis control, gyroscopes and steerable thrust to rockets, to effectively control their flight.

Although his work in the field was revolutionary, Goddard received very little public support for his research and development work. The press sometimes ridiculed his theories of spaceflight. As a result, he became protective of his privacy and his work.

Even way back when (1920) the Grey Lady often missed the point-

A Severe Strain on Credulity

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even highest, part of the earth’s atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard’s multiple-charge rocket is a practicable, and therefore promising device. Such a rocket, too, might carry self-recording instruments, to be released at the limit of its flight, and conceivable parachutes would bring them safely to the ground. It is not obvious, however, that the instruments would return to the point of departure; indeed, it is obvious that they would not, for parachutes drift exactly as balloons do. And the rocket, or what was left of it after the last explosion, would need to be aimed with amazing skill, and in a dead calm, to fall on the spot whence it started.

But that is a slight inconvenience, at least from the scientific standpoint, though it might be serious enough from that of the always innocent bystander a few hundred or thousand yards from the firing line.

…

[A]fter the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.

…

His plan is not original

That Professor Goddard, with his “chair” in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react-to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

Umm… bright boy, action reacts against the body providing the action (thrust), not against the density of the medium being traveled.  If anything it’s easier because you don’t have to account for drag and, not that I’m a math whiz or anything, when you study Newton in basic Physics a vacuum is always assumed because it makes the equations so much simpler.

While I like to imagine myself a brave revolutionary who’d tell The New York Times to piss up a rope (usually messy but theoretically possible given a rope with the right kind of capillary action) in fact I’d probably do what Goddard did and skulk away reclusively, muttering imprecations under my breath.

To their credit The Times did retract, one day after the launch of Apollo 11 and a mere 24 years after his death-

A Correction

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

I thought it especially magnanimous that they recognized that they had misunderstood Newton’s equations, which were after all published in 1687.

There is no getting around the fact that spaceflight is inherently dangerous.  Just getting to orbit is basically like shoving a stick of dynamite up your butt and hoping for good things to happen, let alone the difficulties of a hostile environment and a high speed fall (I think jumping off buildings is fun, don’t you?).

That Richard Branson is marketing this as “Adventure Tourism” seems the height (heh, he said height) of irresponsibility to me though I can’t wait for the day when (your least liked celebrity, arrogant asshole capitalist, or corrupt politician here) burns up in a Stratospheric fireball.

I’ll be sad.  Of course I will.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Crashes in New Setback for Commercial Spaceflight

By KENNETH CHANG and JOHN SCHWARTZ, The New York Times

OCT. 31, 2014

The pilots, who have not yet been identified, were flying the plane for Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company created by the entrepreneur Richard Branson, and Scaled Composites, the company that designed and built the plane.

One pilot was able to parachute from the plane and was taken to a hospital with “moderate to major injuries,” said Ray Pruitt, the public information officer for the Kern County sheriff’s office in California.

The test was the first time SpaceShipTwo had flown using a new, plastic-based rocket fuel.

It was the second major accident in a week for the commercial space industry, which has been widely promoted in recent years as an alternative to costly government programs. On Tuesday, an unmanned rocket launched by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., which was carrying cargo to the International Space Station, exploded 15 seconds after launching.

…

The list of would-be astronauts includes celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Bieber and Angelina Jolie.

Experts said it was too soon to tell when the effort would resume. “Virgin was out ahead of everyone else for space tourism,” said Michael Blades, the aerospace and defense industry senior analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a market research and consulting firm. “It will still happen, but it has been pushed way to the right.

“It is just like any kind of other new technology, especially when it comes to flight,” he continued. “You have your tests and you have your failures.”

…

Marco Caceres, director of space studies at the Teal Group, a consulting firm, said that “in an age where it is very expensive to fly these vehicles, the pressure is to do the minimal amount of test flying.”

“So that may be something we have to take a look at,” he continued. “Everyone seems to be in need of more money to conduct more flights, so the pressure is to start operational flight too soon. Maybe we are being unreasonable here.”

Patricia Hynes, director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, who organizes an annual symposium for people in the commercial space industry, said the accident “helps people understand why it’s never been done before.”

“This is a tough business,” she said.

Science and Technology News and Blogs

• Why would someone steal the world’s rarest water lily?, by Sam Knight, The Guardian
• The real-life Indiana Jones on the hunt for lost ancient Mayan cities in Mexico, by Jo Tuckman, The Guardian
• The Weather Channel officially endorses man-made climate change, by Lindsay Abrams, Salon
• Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand’, by Adam Withnall, The Independent
• China’s First Lunar Return Mission A Stunning Success (wide), by Morris Jones, Space Daily
• Does Uber-Ancient Earth Water Mean Life Started Earlier?, by Irene Klotz, Discovery News
• Could We Use Ground-Based Lasers To Propel Rockets Into Space?, by George Dvorsky, io9
• Aerial images shed light on the Middle East’s mysterious stone circles, by Fiona MacDonald, Science Alert
• First stage propulsion system is early focus of Antares investigation, by Stephen Clark, Spaceflight Now
• Low oxygen ‘delayed animal life on Earth’, by Melissa Hogenboom, BBC
• ‘Parallel universes DO exist’: Multiple versions of us are living in alternate worlds that interact with each other, theory claims, by Ellie Zolfagharifard, Daily Mail
• Has the key to Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in the Pacific been found in Kansas?, by BRIAN BURNES, McClatchy
• Net Neutrality May Extend Phone Regulations to Broadband, by Todd Shields, Bloomberg News
• Facebook Joins Tor, And The Dark Web Gets A Little More Useful (If A Little Less Cool), by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Science Oriented Video!

The Obligatories, News, and Blogs below.

Ah, yes.  Now that the tumult and hubbub are done and we can wait for April 13th to have the Mets disappoint us again, and the leaves brown and sere crunch beneath the feet of costumed children while the long night is lit by sacrificial gourds, it is time to resume my musical whimseys.

This morning we shall start with one of the oldest instruments in common use, the Organ.

If you watch that purveyor of speculative fiction and conspiracy theories laughably called The History Channel I’m sure you’ve been subjected to many, many hours of Ancient Discoveries where the slack jawed narrators marvel at the fact that our ancestors were more than feral brutes wearing animal skins, stabbing and slashing at each other with crudely made implements with none of the sophistication and subtlety of a Maxim or Thermonuclear warhead.

Hah, the reason they didn’t fix up the Iowa after the turret explosion is we no longer have the tools or skills to do it and that was only WW II.  We can’t build Space Shuttles or iPods anymore either.  We have facebook and Twitter instead and I think it’s a fair trade, even 140 characters seems tl;dr.

So anyway it should come as no surprise the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, etc., ect. were capable of stunning feats of engineering and craftsmanship based on a deep understanding of Math, Physics, and Chemistry.  Curse you Dark Ages.

Such an item is the Organ.  It basically operates according to the principles invented (as far as we know) by Ctesibius of Alexandria for the hydraulis between 285 – 222 BCE (about 2200 years ago).  He was an expert in pneumatics, the science of compressed air, and water had little to do with the mechanism except to provide a motive force to the bellows.  He did make other advances in hydraulics like the the world’s most accurate clock (a water clock) and is said by most to have been the first head of the Museum of Alexandria.

He is also reputed to have been notoriously poor.  So much for genius.

Now believe it or not music was just as important to non-contemporary culture as it is to ours, maybe more.  ‘Oral’ history in non-literate societies (those without a written language) is frequently conveyed by song where the beat and melody remind the performer of the correct wording and sequence of events in the story.  The Iliad and the Odyssey are nothing more than long songs.  We don’t have a record of most of these because musical notation, the written language of music, was not yet invented and ideas about the difference between what is called music and what is called noise change quite frequently (those damn kids).

There is some evidence that even the earliest western instruments used either a chromatic or diatonic scale so most can produce sounds we would recognize as music even if they weren’t actually used that way and the same would be true of the Organs of Ctesibius.  The problem is that they used big old pipes to create the resonant tones and are expensive and not so easily moved.  Thus they were usually installed in Houses of Worship, be they Pagan Temples or Christian Cathedrals and their purpose was to establish the proper awe and respect a major religion deserved.

And so things stood until 1517 (ironically, this very day the 95 theses were posted by Martin Luther) and the Protestant Reformation when the sects that split away from the Catholic Church (and the Orthodox one for that matter) were basically poor and despised (on theological principles anyway) the ritual and ceremony.  If they captured an Organ in battle they were as likely to melt down the pipes for musket balls (most of them were made of lead, or even more valuable brass and bronze which could be re-cast as cannons) as to use it to make music.

In time the Protestants developed their own musical tradition and Organs evolved more secular purposes especially the relatively portable ones that used Reeds or electronics to develop their tones.

However, since a large number of early “Art” composers were employed by the Catholic Church which maintained its tradition of musical accompaniment there is a substantial body of work intended for the Organ of which arguably the most famous is Toccata and Fugue in D Minor attributed (wasn’t published until 1833 and was promoted by Mendelssohn) to Bach.

This particular recording (Columbia Masterworks ML 5032) is E. Power Biggs, one of the most noted organists of the 20th Century, playing the piece on 14 different Organs in Europe.

1. Stockholm, Sweden
2. Weingarten, Germany
3. Lubeck, Germany
4. Luneburg, Germany
5. Hamburg, Germany
6. Steinkirchen, Germany
7. Neuenfelde, Germany
8. Heidelberg, Germany
9. Sor, Denmark
10. Gouda, Holland
11. Amsterdam, Holland
12. Amstelveen, Holland
13. Westminster Abbey, England
14. Royal Festival Hall, England

Since Organs were, in the tradition of Ctesibius and the ancient engineers, hand crafted individually, I’d like you to pay attention to the very different acoustics of each individual instrument as the same piece is played by the same artist.

But you’ll be forgiven if you just want it as background music while you answer the door.

Happy Halloween.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Go back to the suburb you came from!

Rolling the (Regular Polyhedral) dice

The real news and next week’s guests below.

Great Country Song or Greatest Country Song Ever?

War on Halloween

The real news, the Web exclusive 2 part extended interview with Joaquin Castro, and this week’s guests below.

The Ebola Beat

Now for something completely not about Ebola

The real news, the Web exclusive 2 part extended interview with Wendy Davis, and this week’s guests below.