Excess Heat

Stinson Field was founded around 1916.  I was told it was the oldest airport in the country.  It was a lot of fun to work there.  Part of the fun was when a B-17 landed just before a large troop of actors arrived to begin using the airport as a backdrop for some TV show.  We had no advanced notification.  Ricardo Montalbon was there.  So were other famous names.  They thought my equipment room was a dressing room, which created a rather embarrassing moment. I was there to install a Denro STVS.  A voice switch is a system that allows controllers to push buttons to select a frequency for voice transmission, choose to use main or standby radios, to alert the fire station of a problem, to select phone or landline communication paths and to allow recordings of all communications. I had no training on this system, but it was not too difficult to install.  I was going to finish on schedule, but one day, I came in and noticed something odd.  The sound levels sent from the STVS to the reel-to-r

I had plenty of reason to suspect that corruption existed in government.  Everybody knows that it does.  What I did not understand is how it comes into being.  It was not like what I would have expected. I had been in FAA for about 6 years.  I was the Southwest Region's first trained Mode-S installation engineer.  I had been to school, which was taught by the engineers who designed and built it.  They wanted us to know everything and it was an intense course.  The Mode-S is a beacon interrogation type of RADAR.  Beacon RADAR is not technically a RADAR.  Beacon RADAR communicates with the airplane transponder, and there is no guarantee that the transponder will be working, so the actual RADAR provides a backup to make sure that there is something on the screen viewed by the controllers. A RADAR emits high energy RF (radio frequency) pulses at frequent intervals into a rotating antenna.  A small bit of the energy of that pulse is reflected off many kinds of surfaces, intentionally ai

The FAA maintains a website that is supposed to be for soliciting suggestions for improvement from employees.  It may exist purely as a psychological measure.  If someone is in desperate need of virtue signaling, it can provide relief.  It is a joke. Nobody ever looks at the suggestions. I decided to try it anyway.  I had been engineering and installing a new LAN for the Denver TRACON with a group of people, some of whom were the technicians doing the grunt work.  These were good and reliable people.  They had to work nights to reduce the impact of some incident causing unscheduled disruption of service.  We did a lot of installation work at lowest traffic periods.  I was on day shift.  One of them came to me and asked advice.  He was concerned because he had been witnessing controllers falling asleep at night.  I fully agreed that it was unacceptable, but was unsure what to do.  I had seen it a number of times and it was no secret.  He wanted to know that I would back him up if he mad

I spent most of my FAA career in field installation work.  The last major project I worked was a new Airport Traffic Control Tower at Broomfield, Colorado.  This was to replace an existing ATCT that was poorly positioned and too short to view one of the entire runways.  I had only a portion of the engineering work assigned to me, which was installation of communications and RADAR.  The RADAR work there consisted of a display system that is fed out of Denver International Airport.  The project was a great success for all involved. During the review of the antenna placement on the roof, I was concerned about the possibility of multipath because the air-to-ground communications uses a very old form of modulation, AM, that is particularly susceptible to multipath.  Multipath is a condition where the signal transmitted by an antenna is reflected so that there are multiple transmission paths of differing lengths between the receiver and transmitter.  So, the receiver senses interfering unsyn

I am an engineer.  Engines run on heat.  Sources of energy in any form are of basic interest to scientists and engineers.  Cold fusion experiments were supposed to be producing heat in quantities that exceeded what would be caused by the power used to drive them.  This was ridiculed as perpetual motion, but if a reaction of a type that was formerly unknown is occurring, it is not perpetual motion.  It is a discovery. My life during and since high school was in the shadow of the awareness that civilization consumes an extreme and steadily increasing amount of energy and that we live on a finite planet with an expanding population.  If we do not find a different way to power civilization, we may prove Malthus correct and discover a real need to reduce population by a large amount, or drastically decrease energy consumption per capita and that is potentially a very dismal prospect.  Even if we can get all the energy we need to live comfortably, the environmental destruction is an unaccept

Socrates was an epistemic nihilist, a fancy way to describe him claiming (repeatedly) to only know for certain that he knew nothing.  This is like me insisting during the years of discussion of Randell Mills, which included him in the online conversation, that I was skeptical about his claims and theory.  One day, Randell asked me what it was I was skeptical about.  I had no reply.  I felt rather stupid to have believed that I could just call myself a skeptic and not be responsible for thinking about concluding something with the information I was processing.  Was it all fraud?  I took that as a very real possibility for a long time, because fraud is a big part of fringe science.  I did not realize that understanding what Mills was theorizing was not fringe science. I thought I could never understand it, just as I was resigned to ever understanding the standard model of quantum mechanics, SQM.  What he was doing was attempting to help science recover from having gone over the edge 100