The Economist's Gulliver blog points out something opponents to Heathrow's third runway may have missed:
In Britain the long-awaited Davies Commission report on a third runway for London is set for release shortly. The main objections to new runways by locals is the additional noise they will suffer. But by the time any new runway gets built in a decade or more, much of the fleet serving London will have been replaced by these new planes that whisper rather than roar. Describing volume is tricky but Bombardier’s new CSeries, a small single-aisle short-haul jet, equipped with Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan engine, was barely audible at times during its flight at just a few hundred yards from the watching crowds. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner (pictured) and even Airbus’s A350 and A380 also made far less noise than would seem possible. Critics will point out that the planemakers do their utmost to make these display particularly silent, nevertheless the results are astonishing.
The noise reduction from new technology is significant. In early jet engines, which were ear-splitting, all of the air was forced through the engine core in which combustion takes place. High bypass systems, with some of the air directed around the engine core, made engines quieter and more fuel efficient. The engine on the CSeries uses a gear, allowing the front fan to turn at a lower speed than the engine core, reducing noise further. The CSeries, 787 and A350, constructed from composite materials, are lighter than their predecessors too, which helps keep noise down.
My new place is directly under the approach path to O'Hare's runway 28C, which opened in October 2013. Residents along this flight path worried that the runway would generate tons of noise. As it turned out, it really didn't, principally because of these new technologies. (Also because landing airplanes make much less noise than departing airplanes.) Someday, I hope London gets another runway, and I hope that people realise sooner rather than later that it won't be nearly as bad as they fear.
Here are the last two photos from Milan: the Duomo.
Later, that same day:
And this concludes (for now) the Italian portion of our program.
It hardly feels like eleven days have gone by since we passed through Como on our way to Milan. Como seemed like an Italian lake town with a heavy tourist population, which, it turns out, it is. But there were a couple of nooks:
Then there was Milan. I didn't have a great impression of the city when I visited in 2007, and this sign, glimpsed on the way to drop off our rental car at the airport, didn't inspire confidence:
Translation: "For about 10 years, this road will suck. Sorry." And suck it did.
Tomorrow I'll show how my opinion of the city changed, like night and day.
One step in the Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters move this weekend was to get my Internet connection turned on at my new place. Unfortunately this meant moving the modem from the old place, so I will have only a little bit of Internet this weekend, if any. I still have a bunch of photos to post.
Meanwhile, I wanted to post some context. Here is the map of where Google thought my phone was last week; it's remarkably accurate:
Here's the same data constrained to Wednesday through Friday:
I have a few thoughts about Google Location Services, but none that I'm going to share as I'm trying to leave the office right now to get to Ribfest. And to pick up my dog, who's with his new pack.
All of this comes after getting a major project moved from "nice to have" to "must have by Monday." Because why wouldn't I want to create a major policy document over the weekend I'm moving when I'll have almost no Internet connectivity?
Today I'm going to get a salad from Whole Foods Market. But last Thursday, at Ristorante Arté al Lago in Lugano, Switzerland, I had this:
That is a venison tortellini in a broth that must have taken them two days to cook. The only pasta I have ever had in my life that topped it was the peacock ravioli I ate at Mistral the night before.
Why did we go hiking so much? So we could fit into the clothes we brought with us, of course.
Security guru Bruce Schneier, writing for CNN, is not surprised that TSA screeners missed 95% of guns in a recent drill:
For those of us who have been watching the TSA, the 95% number wasn't that much of a surprise. The TSA has been failing these sorts of tests since its inception: failures in 2003, a 91% failure rate at Newark Liberty International in 2006, a 75% failure rate at Los Angeles International in 2007, more failures in 2008. And those are just the public test results; I'm sure there are many more similarly damning reports the TSA has kept secret out of embarrassment.
The TSA is failing to defend us against the threat of terrorism. The only reason they've been able to get away with the scam for so long is that there isn't much of a threat of terrorism to defend against.
Even with all these actual and potential failures, there have been no successful terrorist attacks against airplanes since 9/11. If there were lots of terrorists just waiting for us to let our guard down to destroy American planes, we would have seen attacks -- attempted or successful -- after all these years of screening failures. No one has hijacked a plane with a knife or a gun since 9/11. Not a single plane has blown up due to terrorism.
Of course, what American politician would ever vote to reduce security spending? The incentives on the individual representatives are too strongly skewed in favor of an ever-ratcheting security state. This is one of the things that did in Rome.
That said, Italy is a lovely country these days...
Part of the reason one stays in an Agriturismo is to go hiking. This is a state highway (scala provincale) near the closest village:
Despite being as far north (46°27') as Quebec City and Portland, Ore., Dosso del Liro is surprisingly warm and dry, the perfect environment for these guys, which we saw all over:
These guys (common Italian wall lizards) are about 8 cm nose to tail, and very fast. We didn't even try to catch them. But they're also hard to photograph; I got lucky and moved very slowly for this shot.
Northern Italian Alpine lake village, go:
This is another example of how a little HDR makes a big difference.
Tomorrow: photos from Thursday, including lunch in Lugano.
Last Wednesday we had one of the best dinners of our lives at Mistral, in Bellagio, Italy. I don't have the ability at the moment to describe it, except to say that I will never look at a peacock again without salivating. We had 8 courses each, one set of molecular-gastronomy dishes and the other more traditional, ending with a batch of vanilla gelato made with eggs, milk, cream, sugar, and liquid nitrogen.
Oh, and we had a view:
Someday, I will have better words to describe the food. I think it was better than the other Michelin-starred restaurants I've been to, but I'm not sure. More field investigation is required.
When you're crossing Lake Como from Cadenabbia to Bellagio on a sunny day, it looks like this:
I've also uploaded a full-sized JPEG (15 MB) to Azure storage. Enjoy.