Ernie goes for a ride

Ernie went for his first airplane ride today. He pretty much was unimpressed. Went to sleep. Even the zero-g maneuver didn't phase him.

Pharyngula: I like ‘framing’ less and less; why are scientists the targets?#more

Pharyngula: I like ‘framing’ less and less; why are scientists the targets?#more

1. Why are scientists being told so often that they're bad at communicating? Because, like, we aren't. Most scientists are awesome at communicating, just not on the terms dictated by Fox News.

2. Blame the media. Slamming the scientists is the wrong thing to do when the flaws are obvious and elsewhere.

3. I blame YOU. Yeah, YOU. Why aren't you, the consumer of media, demanding better fare?

Mojan's Birthday!

Sean and Mojan. Mojan didn't last much longer past this. Ali is in the background right.
We had a great time!

Dude! Good looking plane!

I spent Sunday cleaning and waxing the plane. It slicks up pretty good for a 55 year old airplane! Pretty hot looking in this picture. :-)

New left fuel tank installed last week. The old one was made in 1951. I guess we got our money's worth out of that one. The right side should be just as old, and it doesn't leak at all. Yet. Got to save up for that one. $1200 for the tank and I don't have the labor bill yet.

Expensive Hamburger

My gal and I flying home from Columbia. Very expensive hamburger. But is was fun. Stopped in Tracy first just to see the place where I'll be towing at the end of the month. Pretty sleepy place, I hope they can handle our level of activity.

At Columbia we walked into town, got a burger and spent a little time in the historic area.

Liz flew the plane much of the way home, a very nice autopilot, good job with altitude hold. GPS tracking needs some work.

New fuel tank didn't leak a drop... much happiness... can accurately figure out fuel usage without guessing on how much just leaked. :-)

Bumper Stickers

A couple of bumper stickers I saw today:

 

Visualize a world without religion,

No reason to kill or die for.

 

Also:

 

My religion is simple

My religion is kindness

beliefnet: Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on Faith, Religious Tolerance, Moderates, Islam, Atheism, Letter to a Christian Nation

beliefnet: Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on Faith, Religious Tolerance, Moderates, Islam, Atheism, Letter to a Christian Nation

This is an excellent debate between these two on Faith and Religion. I wish I was as eloquent on the subject as Harris is.

"Ethics and spirituality do not require faith. One can even achieve utter mystical absorption in the primordial mystery of the present moment without believing anything on insufficient evidence.

You might want to say that every religion offers a guide to doing this. Yes, but they are provisional guides at best. Rather than pick over the carcass of Christianity (or any other traditional faith) looking for a few, uncontaminated morsels of wisdom, why not take a proper seat at the banquet of human understanding in the present? There are already many very refined courses on offer. For those interested in the origins of the universe, there is the real science of cosmology. For those who want to know about the evolution of life on this planet, biology, chemistry and their subspecialties offer real nourishment. (Knowledge in most scientific domains is now doubling about every five years. How fast is it growing in religion?) And if ethics and spirituality are what concern you, there are now scientists making serious efforts to understand these features of our experience—both by studying the brain function of advanced contemplatives and by practicing meditation and other (non-faith-based) spiritual disciplines themselves. Even when it comes to compassion and self-transcendence, there is new wine (slowly) being poured. Why not catch it with a clean glass? "

PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 14, 2003
"In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program.

NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted.

PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider?

This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous theorist of information presentation -- made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.''

Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ. Simon Marks, the product manager for PowerPoint, counters that Tufte is a fan of ''information density,'' shoving tons of data at an audience. You could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it's a matter of choice. ''If people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense presentation,'' he adds, ''they wouldn't want it.'' And PowerPoint still has fans in the highest corridors of power: Colin Powell used a slideware presentation in February when he made his case to the United Nations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, given that the weapons still haven't been found, maybe Tufte is onto something. Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it."

Clive Thompson

More towing in the haze

Just a pic before diving back into the haze and back to Byron. Am playing with Picasa and Blogger.

Hazy towing yesterday

Hazy day towing yesterday, but cool sight of Mt Diablo rising above the haze.

Lots of flying though... 21 tows, 22 takeoffs and landings. Each landing being successful. :-) That is always good. Especially since the towplane was out of annual and shouldn't have been flying, legally. We discovered that at the end of the day while doing paperwork. OOPS! No glider flying today. I wish I had noticed it before we started, then I would have spent the day working on the towplane to prep it for the annual. Not that I didn't like flying yesterday but my license being at risk if something had happened wasn't good.

Around the pattern in the plane

Tax and spend Democrats…

This is raw data from the Treasury Department. Ever since Regan, the national debt accelerates whenever a Republican president takes office. And with Bush-2, it really shot up, the 300 to 400 Billion of the war not 10% of the increase. The saying seems to be true. “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We need balance of power. Accountability. Oversight. Looking forward to it returning on Tuesday!

Notice the Democrat president with Republican congress had the budget balanced at the end of Clinton’s term. The cost of Bush-2 and a Do Nothing congress has been higher than most probably know. $2 Trillion.

Charity Flying today - Saw some whales

Flew 6 loads of strangers in my plane today for the Nintey-Nines. They were having a fundraiser for their scholarship program today at the Watsonville airport. It was WVI's open house also.

• Augustis and his mom - he has a pilot's license and works for UA in SF, wants to return to flying... nice guy.
• Maverik and his grandpa. Little 7 yr old, hard to see over the panel and may have been getting a little sick.
• Dubie and a guy with a kid in a car seat. Kid was sound asleep when we landed and didn't wake up when we hauled him out of the back. A bit young for airplane rides.
• A mom with two girls... remember no names. Girls sat in back and chattered away, I had to turn off their intercom to me. A bit of whining and lost hair in headset. Mom flew for a few minutes, her son had flown with me in Young Eagles a few months ago.
• Patrick and grandma and sis... sis was scared but got over it until I gave the control wheel over to little Patrick. But they had a good time.
• The Three Amigos... three big guys in late teens/early twenties, the load master lady was a little worried about how heavy they were but I was low on fuel and I figured they wouldn't be a problem weight/cg wise... they were fun. Lots of questions and kidding of each other, easy to talk to, interested... best flight of the day

On most of the flights I could see a whale off the coast near the concrete ship near Seacliff beach. I don't know if it was the same one or a pod of them but they were always in the same spot.

Also flew Bram for a quick flight to find the whale and let him fly the plane again. He had helped all day at the open house and then helped me clean and bed down the plane afterward.

Forgot my damn camera, no pictures.

Marketplace: Frozen Assets

Marketplace: Frozen Assets

This is getting scary, the arctic fisheries losing their stock, with it moving more north due to global warming. On top of the over fishing going on. We are doomed!

Letter to a Christian Nation (Book) :: Sam Harris

Letter to a Christian Nation (Book) :: Sam Harris: "Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen—the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."