Plane malfunction illusion: Rolling shutter effect

Chris wanted to take a photo while on an airplane flight. The aircraft was a Bombardier Q400. Chris didn't have a camera with him, only his Apple iPhone 3GS. The scanning order of his iPhone sensor combined with the light refracted from the airplane window caused a distinctive "detaching blades" phenomenon in the photo. Rotating the camera warps the blades in different directions.

Edit: Unfortunately for me, Chris is no longer sharing his photos online, but I have found others. Keep reading!

Bombardier Q400 digression

Q400 passenger airplane by The Cranky Flier on Flickr

There have been some serious safety concerns with the Bombardier Dash Q400 Turboprop. Persistent problems with faulty landing gear received plenty of media coverage. Also, landing gear failure is highly noticeable to passengers! Some of the worry is depicted by The Cranky Flyer in the little drawing.

Although there have been no passenger injuries, thanks to pilot skill, multiple instances of left or right wheels failing to extend fully (or at all!) upon landing have occurred in Canada, the United States, and France. Those are the markets for Bombardier's small-to-medium sized commercial and business aircraft.

Engine stalls in very cold weather, due to ice, is another issue with the Q400. Both the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Canadian air safety regulators launched formal inquiries.

Despite the appearance of Jason's photo below, there have never been any problems with Q400 propellers blades detaching and falling off while in flight!

Blades by Jason Mullins on Flickr

Decline of Web 2.0

As I wrote in a prior post, about an 1870s cartographic depiction of America as a young hog, I wish the University of Michigan Map Library blog hadn't been discontinued. It isn't surprising, as Web 2.0, i.e. user contributed web content, has been in decline for years. It's difficult to believe that Technorati, once the authority for blog activity, tracked millions of blogs at one time.

Blog growth outpaces Moore's Law?

Technorati sounded great! It was a blog search engine that was superior to Google's Blog Search. Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.

The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general: A new blog created every second: In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. Blog count was doubling every five months! Maybe.

Look familiar?

This was the Technorati landing page

Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was an awful lot of Internet hype.

Make America Porcine Again

Years ago, I found a post on the University of Michigan's Map Library blog. I consider it evergreen, as it is about two of my favorite things: Piggies and cartography! 

It seems like a good time to blog about it. After all, maps were the safest way to travel during the COVID19 pandemic. Old maps even allow one to travel in time, with sufficient imagination.

The UMich Map Library blog has been retired, sadly, although its archives are still accessible. In lieu of the Map Library blog, I turned to Big Think's Strange Maps. I located this excellent post, National Porcineographic: Portrait of America as a Young Hog.

Helping humans by helping pigs

William E. Baker was a 19th century tailor. He made his fortune thanks to a strategic alliance with what became the Grover & Baker Sewing Machine Company. (It was later acquired by Singer Sewing Machines.) Baker's philanthropy was extensive, but centered on his Hygienic Farming and Sanitary Cookery initiative. He wanted to improve human health by helping pigs.

Unvirtuous circle: Boston was a cesspool

New England rapidly industrialized, and the population grew along with it. An ecosystem evolved but it was of a distinctly pragmatic sort. The City of Boston instituted a garbage pick-up service but then disposed of the garbage anywhere and everywhere possible. Typical locations for garbage dumping were on the outskirts of the city or in neighboring communities. It was NOT environmentally friendly! Town and nearby country dwellers developed a recycling response: They fed the garbage to pigs.

W.E. Baker believed that this practice was the cause of much disease, in both swine and the people who consumed unwholesome pork. In 1875, he introduced a 'Sanitary Piggery' in rural Massachusetts. It was the cornerstone of Baker's contribution to the pure food movement.

"Baker’s Sanitary Piggery involved a clean environment and wholesome food for its porcine residents - it was even rumored they had individual beds, and slept under sheets. That may have been hyperbole, but it underscores Baker’s belief that public health depended greatly on sanitary food production."

He didn't blame pigs for the filth and squalor in which they, um, wallowed.

The world’s finest example of porcineography

The United States of Pig map commemorated the opening of W.E. Baker's Sanitary Piggery. 2500 copies of the map were produced as numbered lithographs. Few still exist. Most were given away as party favors to guests attending the event, i.e. as a Good-Cheer Souvenir. 

The map is reproduced below, in a smaller size than its original glory. I will try to remember how to make the image clickable, so that it may be enlarged for better viewing. My html is getting rusty from disuse.

The Porcineograph 

Haiku spam and double digit sigma events

Haiku Schmaiku

Howdy Ma'am,
Just spam, I am.
Five syllables short

-- Bloggerel Doggerel blog, 2007

Verse is courtesy of The Climateer, who doesn't write about climate too often, thankfully! He has a great blog description which is perpetually relevant: "In war, everything not censored is a lie."

The Climateer DOES write about investment bankers who blame statistics for their poor trading decisions... or possibly, outright deceptive practices. There was a lot of that going on in 2008. I finally hoisted some posts about double-digit standard deviations from my bookmarks and read them.

25 Sigma Event Very Unlucky

From Climateer Investor and others along the way, it seems like a 25 sigma event is impossible. "How unlucky is 25 sigma?" (2011): When Goldman Sachs was Really, Really Unlucky: 

"One of the more memorable moments of last summer’s credit crunch came when the CFO of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, announced in August that Goldman’s flagship GEO hedge fund had lost 27% of its value since the start of the year."

As Mr. Viniar explained, “We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row.” 

April was the month of mathematics

April 2020 was the scheduled date for the most recent Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month. It is a biannual event, i.e. held once every two years. Sadly, it was uniquely ill-timed to coincide with the arrival of the full-force of the COVID-19 global pandemic. A lot of recurring events have fallen by the wayside. 

Tea for 8 by S. Goldstine

Possibly even worse is the fact that I see no mention of

any activities for 2022. I noticed this while browsing through the pages of the online Mathematical Imagery SIG (special interest group) of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). I encourage readers to visit! Included here are two scaled-down examples that I liked. 

The Four-Color Theorem works for any map on a plane or a sphere, i.e. four colors are sufficient to color every neighboring region with a different color. For other shapes, say this toroidal tea set, eight colors were necessary. 

Polar coordinates
by D.A. Lakew 

The shape on the left is a group of super-imposed polar surfaces. There is much more, along with detailed explanations, equations, etc. 

 You will also find pleasing drawing such as those I shared in my Cornucopia of Mathematics post, dating back to the turn of the century, uh, this century. Although I didn't hot link to the images (well, maybe one), and gave full credit to the source, a 2003 academic event at a university in New England, I noticed a few months later that the source web pages had gone 404 error not found.

On the origins of Mathematics Awareness Month

As any blog reader of mine knows, I strive to find surprising information. The origin of AMS's Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month can be traced back to none other than... Ronald Reagan?  

Bard of the Deep State: Brookings not to merge with Heritage

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the central bank of central banks. Think Tank Watch is similar to BIS, except it is for think tanks. Both are meta organizations although only BIS has global gravitas. Also, I suspect that Think Tank Watch lacks any governance role for think tanks, unlike the mild governance authority of BIS over central banks.

Think Tank Watch's editor-in-chief seems rather pleased with himself. There's nothing wrong with taking pride in good work.

One of Harvard’s best think tank sources: Think Tank Watch. #thinktankshttps://t.co/7mwFAnKm8H

— Think Tank Watch (@ThinkTankWatch) March 24, 2021

Think Tank Watch saw something and said something

Brookings Institute to merge with the Heritage Foundation:

Think Tank Watch has learned that the center-left Brookings Institution is in the late stages of a merger deal with the conservative Heritage Foundation to form a new think tank behemoth called "Brookitage."

The news comes via unnamed sources. Is there any other way to get information in Washington D.C. than 'unnamed sources'? Of course not!

Making policy not shaping or influencing

"We cannot afford to be just a liberal think tank in today's polarized political atmosphere," said a senior level Brookings official. "Bringing the most well-known liberal think tank together with the most well-known conservative think tank would send a huge message to Capitol Hill. Things need to change."

It is unusual for think tanks to take such an active political role. Also, think tanks tend to be hothouses of similar ideologies. Brookings and Heritage are not similar, so merging will no doubt be uncomfortable for all involved. Also, Heritage is likely none too happy with that portmanteau of a name, Brookitage.

Why hasn't the growth rate of real potential US GDP recovered?

Missionary Work Among Savages aka 2slugbait wrote about whether President Reagan's 1981 tax cuts performed as advertised. I think his motivation was to determine if a similar supply side approach could have been a better alternative than the actual mild fiscal stimulus measures implemented by Bernanke and Obama, immediately following the 2008-2010 financial collapse. In other words, would a Reagan-type tax cut in 2008 have driven a stronger recovery.

Supply side economics maybe not so great

2slugbaits demonstrates empirically why supply side economics was only mildly effective. Specifically, none of the following worked quite as well as Arthur Laffer's forecast:

1. cutting the top marginal tax rate would encourage greater labor effort 
2. supply side structured tax cuts would encourage greater personal saving 
3. the tax cuts would pay for themselves

Skepticism about David Stockman and Laffer's economic policy recommendations during the Reagan Administration is only mildly interesting to me. The correct sort of tax cuts (cuts that include middle- and lower-income wage earners, not solely high net worth "job creators" 😕😦😡) CAN provide a modicum of supply side stimulus. That was apparent from 2017 to March 2020.

Something else is much more interesting to me: the long-term decline in real potential US GDP.

Real Potential Gross Domestic Product

2slugbaits elaborates on item 3 above, noting that:

"If the Reagan tax cuts actually affected the supply side of the macro economy... then we should have observed an unparalleled increase in the growth rate of real potential GDP... Yes, real potential GDP did grow at a pretty good clip immediately after the Reagan recession, but it quickly faded...  even at its peak it was only barely above the growth rates during the Nixon, Ford and Carter years and well below rates enjoyed during the LBJ and Clinton years."

Real Potential Gross Domestic Product is defined by the St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED) as "the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of the output the economy would produce with a high rate of use of capital and labor resources." The data is adjusted to remove effects of inflation. CBO measures real potential GDP in non-seasonally adjusted billions of chained 2012 dollars. Frequency is quarterly.

Gold Star of Texas

The state capitol building in Austin, Texas (21 October 2008)

Cupola of the state capitol at Austin

Photograph by TedLandphair via Picasa

Chemical Heritage

This aluminum necklace was on display at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in 2010. A description of the exhibit is still available in a mostly image-free post about Atomic Age jewelry. Peruse additional wonders from the Chemistry and Fashion: Making Modernity exhibit.

Aluminum Necklace circa 1950
 0.75 in x 6.25 in.

No Moore Chemical Heritage

Sadly, CHF was absorbed by the Science History Institute in 2018. The collections can still be viewed in person, at the former location of the CHF Museum on 315 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can still read about the illustrious past of the Chemical Heritage Foundation here. I have (mostly) found new source links for the in line URLs below.

The former CHF publication,
Periodic Tabloid: 
Musings on the Molecular

Interested in the legacy of Gordon E. Moore and his famous observation about the growth of technology? Read the original publication that introduced Moore's Law, Understanding Moore's Law: Four Decades of Innovation, that includes the original article written by Moore in 1966, and observations by Moore and others in 2006 when the book was published by (the now defunct) Chemical Heritage Foundation Press, to commemorate 40 years of Moore's law. The Science History Institute kindly keeps an electronic version of the full text (PDF) available for online readers.

IgNoble to Nobel pipeline?

I first wrote this post in 2010. Andre Geim won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. (Geim is actually a chemist, not a physicist, thus the relevancy here, if one wishes to be fussy; I do.) In the span of ten years, Geim went from winning an IgNoble prize for levitating frogs with magnets to the Nobel Prize for introduction of an extraordinary carbonate, graphene.

During the 2000 IgNoble Prize ceremony, Harvard physics researcher and teacher Roy Glauber was present on the stage with Geim, as a long-time member of the IgNoble committee. Just a few years later, Glauber won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics! It is hardly enough to establish any sort of trend or correlation, but if this sort of overlap continues to occur, it might be something to look into.

How To Rob An Online Bank And Get Away With It

Ambitious!

"The subject of our dissection is an online bank robbery. 

Not the all-too-common attack against an online banking user, his computer and his identity, but an attack against the bank itself - or more precisely, against the bank's online banking application.

An online banking attack has four distinct phases:

1. Vulnerability Finding Phase
2. Vulnerability Exploitation Phase
3. Buying Time Phase
4. Extraction Phase..."

via ACROS Security Blog: Anatomy Of An Online Bank Robbery