Formula 1 season kicks off in the Cangrejero household tomorrow morning at 6AM when Practice 2 from Bahrain starts. (Practice 1 at 2AM won’t be broadcast here, but I would watch if it was.)
It’s been quite an offseason, and some interesting changes have occurred. Michael Schumacher is racing! Refueling during pitstops is banned! Ruebens Barrichello… remains, but, Lotus is back in the sport! The reigning world champion is British, there are now 24 cars on the grid… Wait a minute… all of that means… IT’S 1993!
Hey, what happened to Lou Barlow?
Anyway, all of this new action means it’s prediction time. Here’s The Midpoint’s guide to… THE FUTURE!
1) Lewis Hamilton is going to slaughter the reigning world champion now that they are in equal machinery.
The question is, is that machinery worth a damn?
2) McLaren will fall afoul of the rules at some point this season.
Actually, it looks like the annual hey-look-they’re-cheating saga has started early.
3) Lack of refueling + long circuits = someone is going to run out of fuel during a race!
No one will ever do it as spectacularly as Nigel Mansell in Dallas, 1984, however:
4) There will be one less team at the end of the season than there is at the beginning.
The powers that be have made entry into Formula 1 a much less costly proposition than it has been in years past, but staying in the game for the full season has become much, much, costlier.
5) The World Champion will be German
And we’ll have to hear that godawful anthem all the damn time. Ugh.
6) The Canadian Grand Prix won’t be the same without me there
I just hope they’re not so distraught that they cancel it… AGAIN!
7) The Belgian Grand Prix will be the best of the season
I’ll be 33 in exactly two months, I have a full-time, highly professional job in corporate America. I’m married, with no tattoos or piercings. I don’t tweet. I read newspapers. So how the fuck did I score a 90(!) on the millennial quiz? Christ, that means I have more in common with the only generation shittier than my own than I do with my own.
Don’t worry, this won’t have any bearing on The Midpoint. I hope it doesn’t have any bearing anywhere else either.
Over the past few decades, Gore had said that he had created the Internet, been the model for Love Story, led a crusade against tobacco, discovered the Love Canal chemical disaster, lived on a farm while vice president, never grew tobacco on his farm, didn’t know that his visit to a Buddhist temple was a fund-raiser, faced enemy fire in Vietnam, and sent people to jail as a reporter. It was a compelling life story; unfortunately, none of it was true.
This is a problem in several ways. The first way is that not a single word of that paragraph is true! The second is that, millions of people believe it is true! The most troubling thing, however, is the fact that the reason millions of people believe it all to be true is because no one has told them otherwise! Go ahead, try it! Ask your favorite conservative if Al Gore said he invented the internet, and see what he says. Then send them here.
Here’s a brief message from our sponsor: I don’t know what was done to these squids, but it sounds sexy.
In case you were wondering, I’ve eaten an entire large pizza by myself on more than one occasion. How else do you hide the evidence unless you eat the whole damn thing? Now that I’m a vegetarian and hungry all the fucking time I could probably eat two.
The best satirist on the web and the writer of the very first blog to link to The Midpoint has passed away:
Heartbreakingly, Al’s mother has posted this comment to the Jon Swift blog, unmasking the true identify of her brilliant son – and yes, he was a blogging super-hero to many of us.
I don’t know how else to tell you all who love this blog. I am Jon Swift’s Mom and I guess I’m going to OUT him. He was Al Weisel, my beloved son. Al was on his way to his father’s funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke. We, his 2 sisters, his brother, his partner and his best friend since he was 9 years old were with him as he took his last breath. We have all lost a shining start who warmed our hearts, tormented us and made us laugh as he giggled at our pulling something over on us. He passed away on February 27, 2010. My beloved child will live on in so many hearts. I miss him more than I can say. If you are on Facebook, go to organizations and join “Friends of Al Weisel, Unite!” It will give you just a taste of how special he was. Farewell, Jon (Al)
Al Weisel was the political poser’s worst enemy as Jon Swift, but he was also a good guy to hang around the pub with and commiserate over New York’s shrinking freelance rates. Gone all too soon, he’ll be truly missed by many.
I bought my Toyota Corolla new in 2001. It has ~180,000 miles on it now. It is waaaaaay outside the age of cars being recalled, but I have experienced, uh, uncommanded acceleration at last 3 times I can remember while driving. Luckily, it’s a manual so I can just slam the clutch down and it will eventually work out.
This article from the Times mentions some instances of pre-2007 Camrys experiencing this, but nobody has said anything about a car as old as mine. Do I have a responsibility to offer my Corolla to Toyota for study?
In related news, I went up to Maryland today to look at a generator for an under-construction hospital which failed in a big way. I learned that driving onto a construction site in a Toyota Corolla is not a quick way to get respect from the hard hat crew. Being 10 years younger than anyone there didn’t help either. I felt like a gay vegan at a Sarah Palin book-signing.
So, next time you’re on a flight and there’s a loss of engine power in one of the engines, remember it’s just a “hiccup”
Boeing test pilots made a cautionary landing at the Moses Lake airport in central Washington over the weekend after experiencing an “uncommanded loss of thrust in one of the engines.” Boeing’s Randy Tinseth posted the news on his blog, saying the problem was linked to a pressure sensing component and was quickly fixed. The first 787 Dreamliner, ZA001 returned to Seattle Sunday after the repairs were made. ZA001 is pictured above over Runway 13R at Boeing Field in Seattle during a previous flight.
The flight test department at Boeing is very busy these days with two new designs undergoing certification flights at the same time. Since the 787 first flew back in December, the company says airframes ZA001 and ZA002 have flown 49 flights totaling more than 158 hours as of Monday morning.
A third 787 is expected to make its first flight soon, possibly later today. But with the engine issues experienced over the weekend, that flight may be delayed. Boeing expects to fly more than 3,000 hours during flight testing before delivering the first customer aircraft.
Let’s hope they get that worked out…
The reason for the title of this post is because I only made the post to engage in a little bit of whorish behavior of my own. The article mentions vibration flutter testing as one of the things being carried out during this flight:
During flutter testing, the pilots and engineers purposely induce vibration into the wing, tail or flight control surfaces to ensure that the vibrations will dampen out automatically. The danger of flutter is that if aerodynamic forces were to induce vibrations in the wing for instance, and the flutter did not dampen out, the vibrations could increase rapidly and lead to structural failure. It is similar to the structural failure a bridge can experience as vibrations increase.
Like a bridge, a wing has a natural frequency at which it vibrates. During flight, the wing is stressed while it is lifting several hundred thousand pounds in the case of an airliner. When the wing experiences some sort of aerodynamic force such as minor turbulence, the stressed wing will vibrate at a relatively low frequency. This is common and can be seen during almost any flight by anybody with a window seat and a view of the wing.
My master’s thesis was on an active control scheme for this phenomenon and I got a paper out of the work which hasn’t been laughed out of the world (yet). It’d be cool (unlikely, but cool) if someone at Boeing is using that research to make planes a little bit safer… that is when their engines aren’t powering down for kicks.
You think you had a bad day at work? One of my colleagues is still dealing with this mess (The fun really starts at around the 3 minute mark):
Here’s the scenario: A company in the transportation industry ignores warning after warning about potentially fatal flaws in their vehicles. This is all over the news, right? Wrong.
This (long) piece on Paul Krugman from the New Yorker is excellent. It captures a great deal of the frustration many of us on the left who didn’t immediately support Obama in the primaries felt with the endless likening of Clinton to McCain/Cheney/Satan.
There are an infinite number of primes (I’m pretty sure I can still prove that, even though I’m drunk.), but nobody knows if there are an infinite number of twin primes. Twin primes are two apart. Like the primes, they appear pretty frequently at first (3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13) but grow pretty scarce as you move on. I suspect they are infinite, but of course can’t prove it. A pair (ha!) of mathematicians have gotten just a bit closer.
I’m sorry, I just have to share one part from this Krugman article:
Last August, Krugman decided that before he and Wells departed for a bicycle tour of Scotland he would take a couple of days to speak at the sixty-seventh world science-fiction convention, to be held in Montreal. (Krugman has been a science-fiction fan since he was a boy.) At the convention, there was a lot of extremely long hair, a lot of blue hair, and a lot of capes. There was a woman dressed as a cat, there was a woman with a green brain attached to her head with wire, there was a person in a green face mask, there was a young woman spinning wool. There was a Jedi and a Storm Trooper. Those participants who were not dressed as cats were wearing T-shirts with something written on them: “I don’t understand—and I’m a rocket scientist,” “I see dead pixels,” “Math is delicious.” Krugman has always had a nerdy obsession with puns. (He is very proud of a line in one of his textbooks: “Efforts to negotiate a resolution to Europe’s banana split had proved fruitless.”) He also likes costumes. Once, he and Wells gave a Halloween party where the theme was economics topics—two guests came as Asian tigers, several came as hedge funds, one woman came as capital, dressed as a column. Sitting up onstage at the science-fiction convention, Krugman looked happy to be there. It seemed that these were, in some worrying sense, his people.
“Hi, everyone!” he called out.
“Hi!” everyone called back.
Krugman explained that he’d become an economist because of science fiction. When he was a boy, he’d read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy and become obsessed with the central character, Hari Seldon. Seldon was a “psychohistorian”—a scientist with such a precise understanding of the mechanics of society that he could predict the course of events thousands of years into the future and save mankind from centuries of barbarism. He couldn’t predict individual behavior—that was too hard—but it didn’t matter, because history was determined not by individuals but by laws and hidden forces. “If you read other genres of fiction, you can learn about the way people are and the way society is,” Krugman said to the audience, “but you don’t get very much thinking about why are things the way they are, or what might make them different. What would happen if ?”
With Hari Seldon in mind, Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman’s economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there’s no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.
This actually happened quite a while ago, but it came up tonight for some reason.
It was book club night, I was drunk, the book was Lolita. This took place after the actual meeting, when I was walking to my car with a fellow member of the club.
Female book club member: I enjoyed the book. People are so uptight, though.
Cangrejero: Yeah, sometimes it makes it difficult to discuss the book.
FBCM: I know! I mean, my boyfriend is 24 years older than I am, it’s no big deal, right?
Cangrejero: Uh, yeah. So you guys have the same Chinese Zodiac sign, huh?
There’s a (somewhat lengthy) report on the Tea Party movement in the New York Times. I highly recommend reading it. While you do that, I’ll keep myself busy with this video of the Box Elders and marvel at how the drummer is also the keyboard player.
I imagine that took quite a bit of practice.
Anyway, after reading that article, I’m a little upset at the lack of digging into who’s behind the movement. Yeah, yeah I know, it’s a “grassroots” movement. Popped up out of nowhere. Right. Most grassroots groups don’t have 100 grand to throw at Sarah Palin. Especially ones which seem to consist of mostly unemployed people. I had hoped the Times would have looked a little harder at that.
What I really find disturbing, however, is how it seems the majority of these groups had little to no knowledge or interest in politics before joining. These people have never been told why progressive policies can help them, and now it’ll be much more difficult to convince them of that.
Did you guys watch Family Guy on Sunday? Sarah Palin did Someone told Sarah Palin about it, and she didn’t like it.
“People are asking me to comment on yesterday’s Fox show that felt like another kick in the gut. Bristol was one who asked what I thought of the show that mocked her baby brother, Trig (and/or others with special needs), in an episode yesterday. Instead of answering, I asked her what she thought. Here is her conscientious reply, which is a much more restrained and gracious statement than I want to make about an issue that begs the question, “when is enough, enough?”:
I hate to be that guy, but really quickly, I think we can all work together to end the misuse of the phrase “begs the question“. Spread the word!
Anyway, Sarah is so mad, she’s going to let her daughter answer for her:
“When you’re the son or daughter of a public figure, you have to develop thick skin. My siblings and I all have that, but insults directed at our youngest brother hurt too much for us to remain silent. People with special needs face challenges that many of us will never confront, and yet they are some of the kindest and most loving people you’ll ever meet. Their lives are difficult enough as it is, so why would anyone want to make their lives more difficult by mocking them? As a culture, shouldn’t we be more compassionate to innocent people – especially those who are less fortunate? Shouldn’t we be willing to say that some things just are not funny? Are there any limits to what some people will do or say in regards to my little brother or others in the special needs community? If the writers of a particularly pathetic cartoon show thought they were being clever in mocking my brother and my family yesterday, they failed. All they proved is that they’re heartless jerks. – Bristol Palin“
So if you didn’t see it, and don’t mind me, uh, **SPOILER ALERT** Chris likes a girl with Down Syndrome. He asks her out on a date, she reveals she’s the daughter of a former governor of Alaska, and she treats him like shit. He breaks up with her.
I’m honestly not trying to be a smartass, I honestly want to know… where was the mockery? What part of the episode was making fun of Down Syndrome or those who have it? The girl was very shitty to Chris, but there was nothing that suggested her mean behavior was caused by (or even related to) her Down Syndrome. Again, I’m not joking, I want someone to explain this to me.
In case you haven’t noticed, Sarah Palin has made a bit of a career out of waving her Down Syndrome son around like a giant foam finger at her speaking events. I wonder if Trig wasn’t a campaign prop for her, if any of this would have happened? Can you name any of her kids besides the two she mentions on television all of the time? I can’t find it right now, but there’s a great video of her stepping off a bus during her book tour, waving Trig to the crowd, and then handing him off to an aide. A living, breathing, dog-whistle of a photo-op for pro-lifers.
The life-prolonging benefits of a scrupulous life have come to light from a comparison of 20 previous studies which together rated 8900 people for conscientiousness using a standard psychological survey, and also recorded the age they died.
Howard Friedman and Margaret Kern at the University of California at Riverside found that people who were less conscientious were 50 per cent more likely to die at any given age, on average, than those of the same age who scored highly (Health Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.27.5.505). This exceeds the effects of socioeconomic status and intelligence, which are also known to increase longevity.
So go ahead and hold the door open for the next person, won’t you? Of course, if they’re a little too far and then have to run to get to the door, you’re not doing them any favors. Wait, forget I said anything.
I heard that former F1 pilot Scott Speed was leading the Daytona 500 at one point yesterday. It would have given me an excuse to post his finest moment, but I’ll go ahead and do it anyway:
