Archives for May 2005

I didn’t write up lesson #4, but it went well. It’s nice to get back to more stable, summertime weather conditions. It makes it easier to practice turn coordination. Lessons 4 and 5 were all about that. Very precise turn coordination. Setting a bank for a turn, but making sure the nose stays fixed to a point on the horizon until the bank is complete. It’s harder than it sounds.

In the Cessna 152, you can forget you even have rudder pedals, except when you need to do a slip, which you never really need to do since you have flaps. Anyway, in the Citabria, unless you coordinate an aileron input with rudder, the nose will actually yaw (very substantially) in the opposite direction of your input; bank to the left, and the nose yaws a good 20 degrees to the right, opposite the direction you want to turn. The reason for this is that to bank an airplane, you’re decreasing lift on the wing that you’re lowering and increasing lift on the wing you’re raising. Decrease lift, decrease drag; increase lift, increase drag. The drag differential causes the airplane to yaw in the direction of the highest drag.

But it’s even more complicated than that. Due to the forces caused by the rotation of the propeller counter-clockwise, the plane has a built-in yaw tendency to the left. In fact, the vertical stabilizer is offset just a bit to counteract this. However, when you’re coordinating turns, it means that when you turn to the left, only a teeny bit of left rudder is needed, whereas, when you turn to the right, you’ve got to step into it pretty good. That is, if you want to execute perfectly coordinated turns, and who wouldn’t?

So, it was a never-ending series of turns this way and that–at shallow banks and steep banks. I’m happy to report that I performed 45 degree banked 360s in both directions and kept the altimeter pretty much pegged at 4,000 ft. Jim was pleased with that.

We also did some slow flying. It’s amazing how slow you can fly this thing, and with the nose pitched up perhaps 30 degrees above the horizon. You can actually fly around just kissing a stall, and each time it starts to break, just the slightest bit of forward stick brings you right back to the edge. These exercises are quite important because it’s important that you know what it feel like when you’re are about to stall.

Takeoff and landing are getting much better. I was given an article on "Taming the Taildragger Pilot," written by Bud Davisson, which was immensely helpful. For the time being, when I get off center line on the runway, my primary focus now is to just get the airplane going straight, and not worry about getting back on center line. If I can tackle the correction and make it go straight, I will eventually be able to prevent it getting much off center in the first place.

I’ve started doing the radio work, and I pretty much do all pre-launch and pre-landing checklist and procedure items without prompting. Today, on approach, Jim commented on how well I was doing on the glide slope (probably my chief talent, as I’m accustomed to gliding) and decided to relax and do some sightseeing. So, as an instructor, he’s getting more comfortable with the skills I’ve learned so far and my judgment.

I’m very pleased. A week ago I was a bit discouraged. Now, I’m at the next level and moving forward.

I’ve got a ton of projects going, including advanced planning for three (or is it four?) new business ventures. Plus, I’m taking lessons for my private pilot certificate, and that requires a certain amount of attention. Once I began thinking about the pilot thing, I began thinking about buying an airplane, and perhaps, even building an airplane. That’s something I’ve always had in mind to do–someday.

Perhaps something like this. 230 mph cruise speed is, well, remarkable for a small aircraft that hauls 4 people. Or, perhaps an older factory model, like this 6-seater Piper Lance. Not bad looking for 29 years old, is it?

Anyway, all dreams that require being made reality at this point, and that’s going to require focus and working smart.

I’m headed to New Orleans tomorrow morning for a conference. Back Friday. That and the busyness probably means light blogging for a while.

Thing is, both human-embryo destroying stem-cell engineering and human cloning are as inevitable as it was inevitable that all the world’s leaders (religious and political) would eventually embrace a heliocentric universe over the quaint geocentric notion that the heavens revolve around the Earth.

It’s as inevitable as the previously "evil" notion of transplanting one person’s bodily organs into another–or even animal parts, such as heart valves from pigs. The failure of religious mysticism to answer any important questions, coupled with the rise of scientific inquiry is responsible for such an advancing state of affairs. Talk about a culture of life vs. a culture of death… Ultimately, all religions foster and indoctrinate their devoted into a dead-end culture of death. There are only degrees of difference.

The knowledge of the structure of the universe had existed–suppressed under force and coercion–for hundreds of years. So, were the world’s leaders just stupid, or did they see that knowledge as a threat to their centralized power structures? I’d tend to guess the latter.

But neither possibility is very appealing in the present case. Is it that we have to determine whether the President of the United States is so feeble-minded as to actually believe the absurd religious nonsense that comes out of his mouth, or, that he’s willing to sacrifice the potential healthy well-being of others for the sake of fairy tales?

Now, before anyone jumps on my case, I realize that he’s only talking about federal funding of such research. Of course, the feds shouldn’t be funding anything, so perhaps Bush is just being clever: pander to the religious here while the research goes on privately and in other countries.

It’s just that it’s disturbing enough to have a president who’s a Luddite. It’s very nearly intolerable, in this day and age, when the basis of all that is religious superstition.

What do the cops do without sufficient number of criminals to justify their existence? They create and invent them, of course.

This is what happens when your "job" is disconnected from the rational role of producing tradeable values that others voluntarily pay you for. Would any rational person not be willing to pay for some measure of security? Of course not. We all already buy locks for our homes,  cars, bikes, motorcycles, gym lockers, etc. We buy alarms, guns, ammunition. Some people hire companies to patrol their homes and offices regularly. Private security and surveillance is a growing industry, in part, because the cops are just so generally incompetent at it–and of course, that’s because we have to pay them whether they are effective in meeting our real security needs or not (and they almost never are; they show up to clean up the mess).

I have almost zero respect for cops, anymore. It’s been a long, long time since I could think of any value they provide me that I’d be willing to pay for, or, at least, that I wouldn’t be far happier and more satisfied purchasing from some private company that has to win and keep my business.

Wait…I take it back. Some San Jose policemen are out every weekend at a huge Flea Market around here. It’s so huge that it bottles up traffic for miles around, and intervention to direct traffic is a necessity. ‘Course, it’s not enough that the company who runs the market pays hundreds of thousands in property taxes for that enormous space and parking lots in this choice R/E area. They have to pay the cops separately, who are moonlighting. Get it? To get cops to deliver real values that are meaningful to everyday people, you gotta pay them extra. Not to mention the fact that you have to have "official" police officers direct traffic, but that’s a stupidity to reserve for another post sometime.

David Westberg, business manager for the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 609, that’s who

Barbu says he’s just trying to get by. Critics say he and a handful
of vendors who sell pizza and other snacks near schools from vans and
trucks are not only undermining school officials’ efforts to get kids
to eat better, but also threatening the jobs of cafeteria workers.

This, it turns out, is both a competition for job security and a skirmish in the war against teenage obesity.

Citing the growing girth of Seattle’s schoolchildren, City Council
members voted yesterday to bar all kinds of mobile vendors from within
1,000 feet of schools.

The vendors have been allowed to sell within 200 feet. Their most
vocal critic has been David Westberg, business manager for the
International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 609, which represents
Seattle Public Schools’ cafeteria workers.

Westberg said only three or four people have been selling pizzas
near Cleveland, Franklin and Garfield high schools. Still, he’s
concerned the vendors could jeopardize union workers’ positions and
benefits.

"If 16 kids go off campus, somebody’s mother loses health insurance," he said.

(link: Balko)