Ones and Zeros

What’s more useless than a plane stuck in the snow?  A plane that won’t start.  Like last winter we’re having problems again.  We (the owners) have replaced the starter, the battery, and the voltage regulator based on expert mechanic’s advice and debugging.  But it’s still having problems turning over in colder weather when left idle.

The clock draws power even when the master switch is off - but I figured that to be about a 1/2 Watt-hour per week.  Not enough to be a sole cause to this problem.  Granted it’s in the mid 30s when I tried to start it (about 2 degC).  The battery’s useable charge is about half its rated charge level at this temperature, this pushes something else marginal just too far and the engine won’t turn over.  If the engine turns over, it’ll catch reliably though.  So not an engine problem.

Ok, that leaves the charging system.  Which we’ve replaced a lot of already.  That leaves connections and cables.  The greybeards on a local pilot’s email list are recommending (from their experience) to check the grounding connections especially.  Of course current needs a full circuit path from the battery, to the starter motor, back to the battery.  If the ground connection is bad, that return path doesn’t work well.  The starter motor draws around 200 amps.  This means that any small resistance creates a large voltage drop. (Ohm’s law: V = IR)

So when I can (weather and work permitting) I’ll charge up the battery, check cables during cranking, and verify grounding connections.  I’ll also validate the components in the system too.

When I first heard of the crash this morning I paid attention.  We used to live there.  Turned out we lived about 2 miles from the crash site for a while.  After reading Joe Stack’s screed and looking at his website on the Internet Archive it’s clear he was mentally ill.  His illness is not an excuse for what he did, but it helps to understand it.

He was upset about some IRS rulings and changes in the tax code that made it harder for independent contractors and helped “body shops” or contracting houses.  He felt singled out in this and it affected him personally and financially.  Those changes affected probably well over a hundred thousand people, myself included.   Most of us just adapted our business models.  That’s life.  The world changes around us and we adapt.  That’s how it works.

Stack complained about financial problems.  He owned a house, a plane, and rented a hangar.  Many well-off pilots rent or share plane ownership.  So Stack wasn’t lacking cash at all. Yet he still felt persecuted.

He felt that politicians and big business were riding roughshod over small business people and taking advantage of taxpayers.  Basically Stack seemed to think that decisions were being made without considering their affect on most people.  True enough perhaps.  But his actions were abhorrent and vile.

He decided to burn his house, and attack an IRS office with his plane.  He didn’t consider the effect of his actions on his neighbors, his wife and daughter, nor the innocents in the IRS office, nor the other offices, nor the owners of the building, nor anyone else at all.  He’s exactly guilty of what he accused others of doing.

I don’t understand it, I just don’t understand it!

There’s been a lot of people who lost power around the Washington DC metro area this last week, I understand that.  But several times I’ve heard people quoted on TV or radio complaining that the stuff in their freezer and refrigerator would spoil.  I can’t understand that.

Right now the outside temperature is 27 degrees F (-2 degC).  That’s freezer temperatures.  The warmest it got outside this week was about 40 degrees F.  Most of the time it was in the low thirties or colder.

You don’t need a refridgerator or freezer.  Just a box (read ice chest) to even out the day/night temperatures and keep squirrels and birds out.

The short answer to the above question:  No.  Nor does a a single warm winter mean global warming is valid either.  The trend of average temperatures over time is much more informative and useful.  (Hint: That’s going up.)

The long answer is more interesting.  Climate change - a better term than global warming - is affected by the movement of heat and cold through the atmosphere.  When the planet averages warmer, not all areas are made equally warmer.  The areas with more sun - like the tropics - get warmer proportionally than the poles do. (Although the poles do also warm some.)

But there’s a flow of heat from warmer areas (tropics) to colder areas (poles) through areas in between the two (like temperate areas like Washington DC).  If there’s more heat to move, it has to move faster.  The way that that heat moves is through broad atmospheric masses of air swirling along.  A shorter term for that is “storms”.

So the higher the average temperature on earth, the more extreme the weather since the more extreme the storms.  There are wider swings of temperature and weather at any given point over time.  Washington DC area’s weather doesn’t mean that climate change is invalid. But basically, extreme weather IS climate change.

Senators DeMint and Inhofe as well as others either are being ignorant, stupid, or are being demagogues.  Nothing new there.