The State of the Art of Washing Machines

..is despicable.

They take clearly too little water.
They take it clearly too slowly.

They idle far too much at the beginning.
They idle far too much at the end.

They do not offer fast forward capability like mechanical machines did.
They do not show their current status like mechanical machines did.
They’re often broken like mechanical machines were.

They make it unclear which programs have pre-wash and which don’t.
They make everything else pretty unclear too, like what a particular button does.

An ideal washing machine:
Large intake hose (or two if it is a model that takes warm water too where district heating or wood heating is available). When the user presses start, the machine starts taking water at full speed at that precise microsecond, unless it is gauging the weight of the laundry.
Laundry weighing will be done in a few spins, after which water intake commences with no delay.
A display shows the state of the machine. At least the following states are displayable: pre-wash, wash, rinse, spin.
A fast forward mechanism moves the machine to the next state.
A stop mechanism stops the machine in any state.
After the laundry is spun, the machine can spin slowly and reverse a few times to unstick the clothes from the drum walls, but this can be stopped and the laundry removed from the drum immediately.
The spin is braked so it doesn’t take minutes to coast down.
The temperature of the wash can be changed even if the program or wash has already started without having to reset or flush.
The spin cycle can be enabled or disabled even if the program or spin has already started without having to reset or flush.
Extra water can be enabled in the middle of the program.
etc etc.

All this was possible with seventies mechanical logic industrial washing machines. Note that almost all of it is pure logic whose cost is pretty much exactly zero once you’ve developed it, and other things like large hoses are trivial improvements.

If you will use this specification when designing a washing machine, then send me a machine: I will test it and say what improvements still have to be made.

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There’s No Such Thing As A Reasonable Price Launch

Apollo 11 JSC KSC Flight Control, pre-launch

All these people had to get paid. Even when there wasn’t a launch. Well, to be exact: until the money was spent and there weren’t gonna be any more launches, which was a few years from this photo.

From the new NASA Flickr database.

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The Press Messed Up And They Won’t Admit It

The whole climategate affair was a quite successful smear campaign where the press was played easily. Michael Tobis has more and you can comment there if you want or on the blogs he links to.

If you want to get someone convicted of murder, just accuse him of two. The stupid “truth is in the middle” crowd will then feel like reasonable good guys by sentencing him from one. Or maybe if they’re journalists, just widely circulate the accusations – they will certainly make people’s life harder even if they had no basis whatsoever.

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Betting on 400 PPM CO2

Well, not real money. But Atmoz is discussing about when it will be reached with commenters. My bet is march 2018, though if you use woodfortrees to visualize, straight extrapolation seems to predict before 2015 already, for the northern hemisphere winter peak. Most seem to bet around 2014-2016.

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BP Phones Child Psychiatrist

How does a corporation respond to a disaster it has created? By seeking the best PR strategy by polling around which response might look like the best move! Is this for real? Thanks to Things Break.

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The Media Has Been Silent

[EDIT: image link is broken so removed]

Fox News reported something – getting it quite wrong in the process – that the van persons that tried to rescue the lone crawling survivor (before they were shot by the Apache as well ) was “collecting bodies”.

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Shooting Random People

Warning, this shows killing of humans. Make your own judgement.

1945 in Italy

2007 in Iraq

EDIT: apparently the latter video doesn’t work here (at least not for now), you can watch it at collateralmurder.org

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Iso-Haisu Launched Today Thursday, Still Missing

A Finnish largish amateur hybrid rocket project, Iso-Haisu (Large Stinky or Big Skunk, the successor of the smaller Haisunäätä, Skunk, the first Finnish hybrid) was flown today at a military artillery range. Reports say it disappeared into the clouds but it has not yet been located. The flight computer logger was onboard so the altitude is unverified. And no onboard video / pictures yet either!

The rocket radioed furiously after landing but failed to get found. It apparently landed about a kilometer from the launch site when the GPS data was deciphered.

It’s a heavy rocket with considerable overbuilding and lots of electronics. Better not try to reach all the goals at the same time.
Hope it gets found tomorrow!

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Hollandgate, potentially

BEGIN EDIT: I think I misread the Britannica part. Netherlands has half of it’s area highly developed and half of that highly developed area is low lying, so a quarter of the total. END EDIT

The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55% of its territory is below sea level where 60% of its population lives and 65% of its Gross National Product (GNP) is produced

IPCC AR4 Working group II Chapter 12.2.3.

If this too is wrong, you bet the WG1 people are pissed off.  (WG1 is the scientific basis, WG2 the effects and WG3 is the mitigation ways working group of IPCC.)

But it seems Britannica has information in similar vein:

The Netherlands is bounded by the North Sea to the north and west, Germany to the east, and Belgium to the south. If the Netherlands were to lose the protection of its dunes and dikes, the most densely populated part of the country would be inundated (largely by the sea but also in part by the rivers). This highly developed part of the Netherlands, which generally does not lie higher than about three feet (one metre) above sea level, covers more than half the total area of the country. About half of this area (more than one-fourth of the total area of the country) actually lies below sea level.

So, the question becomes tides and how sea level is measured: if it’s the mean sea level, then even low stuff over sea level is unlivable because of the tides (unless you put dikes and pump it dry of course).

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Gate N

This time seems a sloppy reference to Amazon droughts in IPCC AR4 WG2 that turns out to be correct in the end. Scruffy Dan:

Sounds, like the same type of issue as the Himalayan glacier error, citing the grey-literature, rather than the peer-reviewed literature. But on closer inspection the text of the IPCC is correct, and consistent with the science. The error was lazy citation.They should have cited the peer-reviewed literature, rather than a report from WWF.

So this is Amazongate. Awaiting for the next gate.

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