Curacao video

Anybody who wants to see one of the results of the visit I made to Curacao last June, should follow this link to youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByGpAjoyZVM

enjoy!

A muse about super powers

This weekend, my family and I flew up to New England (Boston) for my niece's wedding, which was actually held in Hartford CT. Sally went up early with Thing 2, while Thing 1 and went later to allow her some additional days in the her new school.

My niece married a nice man whom she met at work, down in Greenville South Carolina. His brothers all seem nice too. But his family are Super Christians, who belong to some really strict Southern Baptist sect. His Dad is a minister, who I heard wrote a book about why drinking alcohol is sinful.

So at the wedding, my in-laws, who are fairly religious Christians themselves, had an outdoor reception in a tent, complete with a dance floor. The Super Christians showed up, and ensconced themselves at one end, and looked down their noses at my wife's Protestant (but not good enough) family and my brother in law's big Irish Catholic (ah no - Papists!!!) family.

But not for long. After waiting an hour, the super Christians super powers failed (super-cilious-ness?) and the wine and beer came out of hiding where I had stashed them in the garage (trust those Irish Catholics to find it!!!!), and dancing broke out when the bride and groom cinched their way across the floor.

The groom beckoned to his Mom to come and dance with him, but she turned her back. Soon they all left, making a large hole with no people, soon filled by the Irish, having a good time.

Not much good, those Super Powers, if all it takes to counter them is a little dancing.........

The Commercial Pilot

I have started training for the commercial pilot’s license, and ultimately flight instructor rating. To do this, a pilot must have passed a written test, meet a long list of experience requirements, and pass a practical check ride with an examiner. To pass the check ride, you must be able to fly all the maneuvers listed in the FAA practical test guide, while maintaining heading within 10 degrees and altitude within 100 ft.

Some of the maneuvers are essentially the same as the private pilot test – you must be able to take off and land under a variety of conditions, simulating short runways, soft surfaces and emergency conditions such as engine failure in the pattern. The difference is that were as in the private rating, an emergency power off landing just had to get down on the runway in one piece, a commercial pilot is expected to touch down within a couple of hundred feet of a designated spot. Everything is more precise.

In the air, the pilot must be able to perform very steep turns (my new instructor likes 55 degrees, just shy of a 2G 60 degree banked turn), a steep power off spiral (also at 55 to 60 degrees of bank), and two performance tasks – the chandelle and lazy eight. A chandelle is an emergency avoidance maneuver. While flying straight and level in cruise, the pilot banks the aircraft at about 30 degrees, and pulls the yoke back to start a climb, while advancing the throttle to full power. The purpose is to reverse direction and climb the most possible while covering very little ground. If that baseball player who crashed in NY had done a chandelle instead of a level turn, he wouldn’t have hit the skyscraper back in 2003 or 2004. A good chandelle ends facing the opposite direction, much higher, with the pre-stall warning buzzer sounding.

The lazy eight involves a start similar to the chandelle, only without adding power, and after turning through 90- degrees and slowing, you let the nose fall through and finish the other 90 degrees in a turning dive instead of a climb. The goal is to end up facing the opposite direction, at the same altitude, but having reduced your turn radius by making it at reduced airspeed. Link several together, and it makes a kind of “8-on-its-side” pattern.

The ground reference maneuvers are the same as the private test (circling a tree in a field, flying a square pattern while adjusting for wind, S turns along a road), but with one new one, “8’s around pylons”. You select any two landmarks (a big house with a pool, a road intersection) and fly around each making a figure 8 as seen from above.

I am not really having any problem with this. I have enough experience now, and I am familiar enough with my airplane that I can make it do all these exercise. Some took a few attempts, such as the chandelle, to find out how much to raise the nose to maximize the altitude gain before finishing the course reversal, but that was about polishing it. I can quite constantly do a 360 degree steep turn, and hit my own slipstream as I level out. The more difficult part is still to come. I have to change aircraft.

A commercial pilot has to have 10 hours at least in a complex aircraft. That means one with a retractable undercarriage, and a constant speed (more efficient) propeller system. So now I will have to learn how to do all those maneuvers again, only on a bigger, faster, and more complicated airplane.

I spent most of last week visiting a customer in the Caribbean island of Curacao. Scarlet BV offers a wireless broadband service in the Nederland Antilles islands, some of the most southerly islands in the Caribbean Sea.

Curacao is the biggest of the 4 islands that make up the Nederland Antilles, still owned and governed by Holland, although with a large degree of autonomy. The population of about 130,000 is made up of 50,000 Dutch, with the rest coming from all over. The island is very polyglot, with Dutch, English, Spanish and Papiamento (the local language, which is unique to Curacao) all of the commonly spoken and official languages. This Wikipedia entry has much more detail about the island, and some great pictures - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curacao.

In 2001, the only telecommunications service came from the government owned telco monopoly, with no broadband. Gaining access to an undersea fiber line, Scarlet launched a broadband wireless service to offer competitive voice and data access. Realizing that they needed a non-line-of sight offering to penetrate the hurricane proof thick walls of Curacao residences, Scarlet converted to a TD-SCDMA based technology from Navini Networks, since bought by Cisco. The first site was a 650 foot (200m) tall refinery chimney, now they have nearly island wide coverage.

In 2009, Scarlet converted their network to Mobile WiMAX (802.16e). Most of the network was upgraded by a software upgrade, including nearly all the subscriber units, the few older base stations that couldn’t make the upgrade were replaced, and re-deployed to start service on St. Maartin. The following is the link to their website, where you can see their service pricing and marketing - http://www.scarlet.an/en/.

Plans to expand onto Aruba and Bonaire are well underway. Recently Scarlet was purchased by an investor group headed by Belgacom, providing access to capital for additional expansion. Cisco is also an important business partner as well as radio technology and network services provider. Scarlet now has close to 5% market share by population on the island, possibly the highest market penetration of any WiMAX service provider in the world. In fact, they have more customers than there are households on the island, showing that Mobile WiMAX offers a “personal broadband” experience, similar to cellular voice service.

And the Hilton Curacao has great Mango Daiquiris!!

Instructor

Woohooo! Passed the 2 FAA Certified Flight Instructor written tests!

Changing the past

I had a revelation the other day. A full up, light came on, jaw dropped open revelation of how utterly astonishing the universe is. I tried to tell my wife about it, but she just shrugged and said "I knew that".

I was thinking about the Bell continuum. This is the strange place where all things happen simultaneously, because there is no time. The name comes about from the Bell Theory, which is itself an offshoot of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Let me explain from the start.....

Way back in the history of quantum mechanics (about the time my Dad was born), a physicist named Wolfgang Pauli explained the fact that you could never see two electrons in the same orbit around an atomic nucleus by postulating what became known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle. It states that for electrons in a single atom, no two electrons can have the same four quantum numbers, that is, if n, l, and ml are the same, ms must be different such that the electrons have opposite spins.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle is what keeps subatomic particles distinct and separate from each other. If two particles did have the same quantum numbers, they would actually be the same particle. It has applications in electronics (semiconductors) and astrophysics. By insisting that particles must remain distinct one from another, it implies that things can only be compressed by certain amounts. The Principle is in fact what prevents my fingers from passing through the keyboard I am typing on, despite that fact that both are largely empty space.

It also says (in complex math that I won’t try to do here!) that if a particle spontaneously is created, that the sum of all its attributes combined with the other particles created from the same event is zero – all the quantum numbers add up to nothing, just as my high school teachers said I would.

John Bell extended this work and postulated the creation of 2 “entangled” particles, which he then separated and sent to mythical Alice, and mythical Bob. Alice and Bob didn’t measure anything about their particles, but one stayed home while the other flew to the other side of the world.

At exactly the same time, as they have agreed to previously, they measure one of the particle’s quantum properties, such as spin (s). The strange thing is that according to quantum mechanics (the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which I have discussed earlier), the particle that Alice has is in an undetermined state until it is measured – it doesn’t actually have a spin, it has both spins until the observer measures it. That’s how a photon can go through two slots at once. When measured, it “selects” an output, and exhibits a given spin number.

Because of entanglement, the other particle instantly has the other, opposite spin. Bob’s particle will always have the opposite spin to Alice’, no matter how far apart the particles are. Somehow, they communicate faster than light and determine their outputs. This has actually been proven experimentally to be true, over and over. Einstein didn’t like it – he called it “spooky action at a distance” and declared that “God does not play dice with the universe”.

We now know that it is true, and the hypothetical medium through which the p[articles communicate is called the Bell Continuum, and it is the place in the “Star Trek: Next Generation” series that “Q” lived.

Here’s the part that blew my mind. Distance is one thing, but we see time as being something else, something fixed in the past and changeable in the future. However, let’s suppose I look up at the night sky. A human eye is quite capable of seeing a single quantum of light energy. The impact of the quanta on my retina in effect measures the quantum attributes (numbers) of the quantum, and transmits that information to my brain where the observer lurks.

That pins down the quantum of light energy. Any other quanta with which it is entangled have to “decide” their own states as a result. Now let’s suppose that these quanta all came from a quasar stellar explosion billion of years ago, and that some of the entangled quanta have already interacted with other matter elsewhere in the galaxy (which is very likely). By capturing and observing the quantum here on Earth in 2009, I am affecting (changing?) the past all the way back to the creation of the entangled particles.

When we look at things, we are not only creating them here in the here and now (by collapsing their uncertainty waves), but we are also creating the past, and our present is being changed by people in the future as I write this.

Mouth slackly hanging open ………

Yeehaaa!

Passed the FAA Commercial Pilot written test! Now for the fun part......