Finally got the second physics exam back: 96%, which gives me the highest score in the class. This is a vast improvement over the last test.
Posts by Berck
Things I Want
People ask. Here goes:
A (smallish?) motorcycle tank bag (magnetic, probably?)
PockeTerm kit
Weller WLC100 Soldering Station
64GB+ SATA-III SSD
Nikon D90
House with a garage
Sailboat
Vinyl! Used in good shape, or new. Some suggestions: Any Led Zeppelin other than Coda or or the first self-titled album. Pink Floyd other than the Wall or a Momentary Lapse (I think DSOTM is still being pressed…). Velvet Underground. Joni Mitchell (other than Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter). Old stuff that’s maybe edgier than my Dad might have had that ought to be listened to on Vinyl. Or, better yet, new Indie bands with vinyl releases. I’ve got the new Arcade Fire, New Pornographer’s Electric Version and Together, and Low’s Songs for a Dead Pilot. Pretty much anything else. Deathcab, Magnetic Fields, Liz Phair, Matthew Sweet or maybe something I’ve never heard but might like.
Pizza rocker blade like this.
A nice magnifying glass, to be used with a microprint edition of the OED.
Warm, leather, thinsulate motorcycle gloves, size medium. Something like this.
Good book on home brewing? I have no idea which ones are better than others.
In case anyone hasn’t seen it.
Sydney, looking like a brown Berckes.
If capitalism worked, you wouldn’t get on an airplane.
Much has been said by much smarter people than I about the idiocy of the TSA. There’s some vague evidence that industry groups are finally starting to realize that it’s likely the entire industry is being harmed by the incompetency of the U.S. government. But, I think, that’s only part of the problem. Once the traveler gets past the TSA, there’s still an onslaught of harassment he must suffer, much of it at the hands of the airlines themselves. Yet people are still flying.
The airlines are making money by treating their customers like shit, and while there’s much complaining, no one seems willing to do anything about. While the airlines were still regulated, nearly everything about the travel experience was better. Post-deregulation, the airline industry is now safer and cheaper. These are the only two areas that have shown improvement: everything else has gotten worse. I doubt that safety has been seriously improved by de-regulation, but suspect that’s primarily a result of better technology, better training, and a better understanding of what it takes to fly safely.
The list of crimes perpetrated by the airlines is lengthy. There’s the beyond-saturated flight schedules that have pushed ATL, ORD, JFK, LGA, EWR (and others) well beyond the number of aircraft those airports can handle if there’s more than 1 cloud in the sky. The common 5 hour “weather delays” have nothing to do with weather except that the airports can’t handle the number of scheduled planes. Planes can still get in and out, but the spacing between them has to be such not all the scheduled flights can still operate in the time allotted. There’s no economic incentive to fly fewer flights with bigger planes so those airports can work.
Next, the constantly overbooked flights. The airlines keep capacity at a bare minimum in order to keep prices down, and then overbook those flights by the maximum legally allowable 10%. As long as all airlines do this, (and they all do), the only choice for the customer is simply to not fly, or purchase a first class seat, which are not allowed to be overbooked.
Then, there’s the matter of the absolutely awful state of airports themselves, which is generally the responsibility of the airlines. JetBlue’s new terminal in JFK is one of the only exceptions, and it’s only barely an exception. There’s not enough seating at any gate for the number of people that are expected to wait for an aircraft. The traveler is, of course, expected to get the airport extraordinarily early, because the airlines are masters at wasting their customers time. What seating there is, is miserably uncomfortable. Furthermore, the astronomical rent on space for restaurants, combined with HMS Hosts’s monopoly on every airport food operation across the country leads to insane food prices. There isn’t enough room to walk. The gate areas are invariably hot and stuffy. Airlines are wholly uninterested in providing basic amenities at the gate that would make sense such as: power outlets for computers and phones, free (or even existent, in some cases) wifi. Worse, you have no choice but to either wear headphones/earplugs, or be bombarded with news/advertising from airport CNN. Every few minutes, you have to listen to an announcement that tells you that your car may be ticketed or towed, that your belongings may be confiscated or destroyed, and the threat level is at orange. By the 6,300th such announcement, it seriously amounts to torture. Sure you can wear headphones, but then you can’t talk to whoever you’re traveling with. 95% of the announcements made regarding flights are useless at best, and when any information about delayed flights could be useful, the airlines tend to lie if they say anything at all. Furthermore, now, when you walk down pretty much any major concourse across america, credit card companies YELL at you to DEMAND that you stop at their table and sign up for a credit card for “free flights”. In Atlanta this weekend, there were a minimum of two people doing this in every concourse.
Once you get on the plane, there’s often not enough room for a normal sized human to sit. Airlines and airplanes vary wildly in their seat pitch, but it rarely seems to be a factor for people when they purchase tickets. The temperature is usually way too hot, especially on the ground, because the airlines want to save a few bucks rather than run the APU to keep the cabin at a comfortable temperature. In the air, I suspect it’s because most flight attendants are elderly women who chill easily. The flight crew demands that you remain seated for most of a 4 hour flight because otherwise you might sprain an ankle, and the airline might get sued. (Yes, this is why the seatbelt sign stays on. There’s no incentive for the captain to turn it off, and every incentive for him to leave it on.) The flight attendants tend to be getting more and more aggressive about whatever the latest nonsensical regulation might be. Airlines are now subjecting their passengers to forced advertising ON THE PLANES, either with TV screens in the seats, or a 5-minute advertising spiel for credit cards before they serve you a few ounces of a drink. The gall here is simply astounding. You have to BUY a ticket, THEN sit through advertising that cannot be escaped!
As an airline pilot, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things, and I think it’s all pretty good evidence that capitalism doesn’t work for the airline industry. People will, in general, put up with an insane amount of crap because there really aren’t many alternatives. There’s no viable rail system, and the country is too big to drive across for business travel.
As I’ve said, the only airline that’s done anything to even recognize there’s a problem is JetBlue, and they’re only marginally better than the others. And only any help if you want to go to New York or Florida. JetBlue customers are some of the first that actively prefer JetBlue to other airlines, for reasons totally unrelated to loyalty rewards. It’s possible that things have gotten bad enough that JetBlue is able to make a market out of doing slightly better, but it’s only slightly better.
From my perspective, I would like flying to be as pleasant an experience as possible so people are encouraged to fly, pilots will be in demand, and I can get a job.
Yes, it’s amazing that we can put people into airplanes, fly them around the world at astounding speeds with very little death or injury. It’s also amazing that we can do it for such little money. But isn’t it time we figured out how to treat passengers like human beings?
Physics Test
Today was the day of my second physics test. I was rather apprehensive about the whole thing considering how I was crushed by the first test.
Things started to go wrong on Monday, when I accidentally dropped my backpack in such a way that it smashed the screen on my HP-48G. I didn’t love the HP-48G, but I liked it well enough. As a geek who went to high school in Texas, I learned to use an HP-32SII as part of the UIL Math/Science team, and suffered brain damage as a result. I can no longer use an algebraic (i.e., non-RPN calculator. Since I don’t know anyone who could let me borrow one, this meant I need to find a calculator, soon.
HP-32SII, despite being something like $30 new, are now going for nearly $200 on eBay for a nice. They were discontinued back in 2002. It might be the greatest calculator ever produced, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. I also didn’t know that when HP stopped producing it, they’d stop producing decent calculators in general. For years, there was nothing but the abomination that is the HP-33s available.
I never had my own 32SII, because I was always assigned one that belonged to whichever high school I was attending. In college, I borrowed one for physics exams, and never got around to getting my own. When I finally went to buy one, they were going for $100 on eBay. I should have bought one then. Instead, I opted for the 48G, which is basically the graphing version of the 32SII. This makes it way bigger than it needed to be, but it had the same basic keyboard feel and layout of the 32SII, so I was content. I never used the graphing functionality, as I don’t believe in graphing calculators, but I liked the big screen because it let you see several lines of the stack at once, which is probably the only thing I liked better about it than the 32SII. Unfortunately, the large screen also cracks pretty easily when it’s in a backpack that gets dropped.
I was going to replace it with another 48G from eBay, but even those seem to be going close to $100 for a nice one these days, and that wouldn’t get here in time for the exam.
But then I remembered someone mentioned that HP started producing what might be a decent RPN calculator a few years ago, the HP 35S. The Amazon reviews included a lot of former 32SII users forced to “upgrade”, and were generally favorable. Furthermore, with Amazon Prime, I could have it shipped next-day for only $3.99, and it would get here in time for the exam.
It did, and it’s an okay calculator. It has a seriously annoying display bug wherein it will display something like 1.60245856345×10-19 as “1.60245856345E-” and then you have to hit the right arrow key to see the rest of it. Which is phenomenally dumb because no one’s going to care about the last few significant digits, but everyone’s going to care about the magnitude! It would have been trivial to make it so that the “E-19” is always displayed, and you could scroll to the right for more digits. Things like that make me think HP may never make another good calculator.
The physics test was relatively easy this time around, except for one problem. I’ve reproduced it here. (Note my mad circuit drawing skills, which I needlessly acquired just for this post.) The only text with the problem was the following:
Find the current through R2.
No problem. I couldn’t believe the luck that this was one of the two big-points problems. I just needed to find the equivalent resistance between R2 and the and the 20Ω resistor in parallel with it. Then find the current through the remaining 3 resistors in series, which would give me the voltage at either side of the parallel resistors, and then the current through R2. That’s when I realized he didn’t tell us what the value of R2 was!
I stared at it. No wonder it seemed too easy. But how to solve? Maybe he didn’t want a number, but rather an expression for the resistance? It’d be an ugly expression, but I set about writing it. Then I thought maybe there was something fancy I could do with Kirchoff’s Laws, but what? I started writing down loop and junction equations to see if there were was some way to figure it out. It became obvious that was just going to make the problem worse, not better. Why couldn’t I do this? What trick, equation or law was I forgetting that would let me figure this out for an unknown resistor? I did every other problem on the test, then came back to it, and was still stumped.
There were about 15 minutes left on the test, and only a couple people had turned in their tests. I’m pretty slow and methodical, so I was surprised almost the entire class was still in the room. I figured they were probably all struggling with the same problem, so I didn’t feel too bad about it, and settled on writing down everything about the circuit that might be useful in hopes of getting some partial credit. With about 15 minutes remaining, someone went up and asked the professor something.
He walked to the white board and said, “Uhm. Sorry. Sorry. On Problem 1, R2 is equal to… err. What number would you like? How about 10 ohms? I’m really sorry about that.” There was an immediate groan, and a lot of laughter as we looked around the room at each other, realizing that we were all in the depths of the same completely pointless hell. If only any of us had asked earlier! There was amazingly furious erasing for the next 30 seconds, as I suspect all of us had covered the entire page in nonsense hoping to crack something. Of course, with the missing resistance provided, the problem became nearly trivial. Definitely one of the most amusing test-taking moments I can remember.
There was a fun problem I hope I got right that went something like this: “The winch on my jeep draws 50 amps from a 12V battery. How much power does it draw? If it weighs 2000kg, how long would it take the winch to winch the jeep up to the top of the library tower (30m)?” Cute. The first part is easy. The second part involved dredging up things from Physics-I I’d forgotten a decade ago. I managed to come up with U=mgh, so I knew how much energy (Joules) would need to be expended by the winch, but how long would it take? Where was time in this problem? Then I remembered: current is dq/dt, with units of Coulombs/second and it all fell together. Not a difficult problem, but cute. There might have been a more elegant way to solve it, but I’m pretty sure I got it right.