Violence begets violence

A soldier of the British Army was savagely murdered on the streets of London this month. There can be no reasonable doubt about the identities the perpetrators; they remained at the scene of the crime to boast of it. Sadly, they are Muslim and their intentions were terroristic. I was in London when it happened, although not nearby. My first reaction was to question whether the murder would trigger reprisals. It appears to have done so.

Only a very small number of Muslims in the UK or anywhere advocate violence; Islam is a religion of peace. In the aftermath of the incident, some are calling attention to radical extremists among Muslims. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has proved himself to be a balanced and mature commentator of contemporary affairs, expressed his opinion that radicalism is a particular problem in Islam these days.

Blair may be correct, but two points are worth remembering.

• Intervention by the western world in Muslim regions throughout the last 150 years, including today, has created an environment within which radical Muslims can readily find adherents. Our colonial, mercantile, and militarist tendencies are manifest. I'm not saying that we deserve whatever is done unto us, but we cannot overlook our complicity.
• History is replete with tragedies committed by radical Christians, as Blair noted. Don't assume that Christians have taken sufficient responsibility for those tragedies or that they will not recur.

Below 10,000 feet...

I had a lengthy Internet dialog recently with an American Airlines captain about prohibitions on "personal electronic devices" (PEDs) on board. He believes that prohibitions ought to remain in place; I believe that some of them should be lifted. He knows a lot more about flying than I do, and I know a lot more about electronics than he does. I've been building radios since the mid-1960s, and he has been flying almost that long. I didn't convince him of my position, and he didn't convince me of his. Fortunately the FAA has begun a formal inquiry. Perhaps they will sort out the conflicting opinions. The very step of opening the inquiry, however, implies that all of today's prohibitions are no longer necessary.

Before I list which devices should remain banned and which should be permitted in my opinion, I'll make four points. One, rules are rules; for the time being, all passengers must comply with all the rules as they exist at any point in time. Non-compliance not only is criminal, but it could jeopardize me as your fellow passenger -- and you don't have that right. Two, until now it has been each airline, not the FAA, who decided which PEDs are permitted and which are not. Airlines have sometimes differed in their policies. Three, prohibitions of PEDs date to the mid-1960s when transistor FM radios were found to interfere with VOR and ILS, which are important radio-navigation systems. Banning radios was fully justified at the time. Four, the question must not be phrased in terms of "can interference to an avionics system ever happen?" The answer to that question will always be Yes, just like the answer to many other troublesome, far-fetched scenarios in aviation will always be Yes, they could happen -- but they don't. Some scenarios are so improbable that there is no sense in worrying about them, high stakes notwithstanding.

On to the details:

• Radio transmitters. Except as stated below, all radio transmitters should remain banned unconditionally. No CB radios or family band walkie-talkies, ever!
• Scanners. These should remain banned. I was amazed that Delta allowed use of scanners into the 1980s. Many scanners are among the "noisiest" of radio devices. Some scanners are not, but there's no practical way for an airline employee to distinguish the sheep from the goats.
• FM receivers. They are still problematic until all future passenger aircraft are certificated to be resistant to interference from PEDs -- something the FAA should insist upon. By the way, many standalone MP3 players have FM receivers embedded. I don't worry about those because of how they're designed, but I do worry about a transistor FM radio from the 1960s even in today's aircraft.
• Wired headphones. They are ok to use above a certain altitude, but passengers must be alert for crew instructions when on or near the ground. Many airlines use 10,000 feet as the cutoff. There's no point in arguing about the specific altitude because now that 98% of turboprops have gone away, passengers spend very little time below 10,000 feet.
• Wireless headphones. As for wired headphones. Wireless headphones use Bluetooth, which is the most innocuous radio technology imaginable.
• Laptops. Sorry but these must remain stowed below 10,000 feet. They tend to require lowering tray tables, and nobody wants a heavy laptop bouncing around a passenger cabin. Note that my concerns about laptops are not derived from radio interference.
• Laptop cordless mice. They are still a concern. Some use Bluetooth, but others don't and those are potentially problematic until new aircraft are designed. This is another sheep-and-goats question. The good news is, cordless mice are seldom used by the passengers these days, so no significant inconvenience is imposed by the prohibition. Note that cordless keyboards for tablets and smartphones are of no concern because all of them use Bluetooth.
• Tablets and e-book readers. They are ok at any altitude, so long as they don't have embedded cellular radios (see next point). Tablets and e-book readers pose no safety issues of any kind other than a possible lithium fire, and we've already accepted that possibility because it is not altitude-dependent. I'd rather be hit by a flying Kindle than by some of the massive hardback books that I see passengers bringing on board.
• Cellphones, including smartphones and Blackberries. 1G phones were a huge concern with respect to interference, but they're long gone. 2G phones won't be around much longer. I know of no radio safety issue from 3G/4G/LTE cellphones at any altitude or anywhere on the ground. Skeptics of allowing cellphones have looked hard for a smoking gun but never found one. However, I do not approve of on-board use of cellphones -- except after touchdown -- for many reasons. There are few things more irritating than having the passenger next to you talk loudly into a cellphone; a plane is not like a train in which you can move to the "quiet car". Engineers at AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint have concerns about the impact of airborne cellphones on their networks, which were never meant to accommodate airborne phones. As a practical matter, the antennas in the base stations of AT&T etc. are designed to radiate horizontally not vertically, and their base stations are deployed along highways. Good luck with getting a cellphone signal when flying over most of Utah! Data usage, you ask? Your connections will, in general, be spotty and slow. In short, I think airborne cellphone usage for voice or data is an unworkable scenario and I hope that the FCC agrees.
• WiFi connections. Airlines already sell WiFi above 10,000 feet. As a practical matter, they shut off the WiFi below 10,000 feet to discourage use of laptops -- a policy that makes sense to me.

Entering the family

Many of you know that my mother-in-law, Helen, passed away this week after a long illness. Only three months ago, my own mother passed away. This double passing has been particularly difficult for my sons, but it also led to a sad type of emotional resonance between Gail and me.

As I posted on Facebook shortly after Helen's death, I could not have had a more accepting, affirming, and encouraging mother-in-law. Offhand I can't think of a single time in 30 years when Helen expressed disagreement, disapproval, or even ambiguity about how I was behaving as son-in-law. Given that I'm far from perfect, I take that as a testimony to her. I'm sure there were times when she wanted to say something but restrained herself. Life offers many ways to learn the lesson that what one does not say is as important as what one does say.

Gail's family is very different from mine. They were Yankees from Detroit; I was Southern. They were Catholic or Russian Orthodox; I was Protestant. Ellis Island was not long in their past; my ancestors had come to South Carolina in 1738, and I had never been to Poland or Russia (and still haven't). Some in Gail's family spoke Russian or Polish; the fact that my last name sounded vaguely Germanic and that I had red hair and blue eyes probably didn't sit too well with them. In short, this was a broad gap to be closed -- and the more I learned, the more I understood that the gap was not merely historical or superficial.

But we did close that gap. Thanks, Helen. I'm sure the heavenly banquet has some Golumpki.

Fond memories of NBC News

When and where I grew up, the only TV station on a VHF channel was an affiliate of NBC. The other stations, all on UHF, had weaker signals. Consequently the NBC affiliate was dominant, so I grew up watching NBC News led by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

Here's a list of other NBC anchors, commentators, and reporters in my youth. How many do you remember?

Elie Abel
Bob Abernethy
Jim Bittermann
Frank Blair
Frank Bourgholtzer
John Chancellor
John Cochran (my late mom was his baby-sitter!)
John Dancy
Nancy Dickerson
Lloyd Dobyns
Paul Duke
Linda Ellerbee
Pauline Frederick
Peter Hackes
Robert Hager
Jim Hartz
Bob Jamieson
Kenley Jones
Bernard Kalb
Marvin Kalb
Floyd Kalber
Herbert Kaplow
Douglas Kiker
Irving R. Levine
Frank McGee, whose Wikipedia article I created
Bill Monroe
Roy Neal
Ron Nessen
Edwin Newman, author of Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? and A Civil Tongue
Don Oliver
John Palmer
Jack Perkins, forerunner of Jeanne Moos
Tom Pettit
Betty Rollin
Brian Ross
Ford Rowan
Jessica Savitch
Chuck Scarborough
Ray Scherer
Lawrence E. Spivak
Carl Stern
Liz Trotter
Garrick Utley, my favorite
Richard Valeriani
Sander Vanocur.

That's a long list of excellent journalists -- including quite a few women, although almost no minorities -- from a time when news divisions of networks could spend freely, substance was far more important than style, and the mission was to report the facts accurately and objectively to the broadest of audiences. We will not see those days again.

The significance (or not) of Skagit

A truck strikes a bridge carrying Interstate 5 over the Skagit River in Washington state, and the bridge collapses. No one is killed, but the press rapidly fills with stories about tens of thousands of obsolete or structurally deficient bridges across this country. Further, the press criticizes bridges that have a single point of failure. What does one make of this?

The proximate cause of this accident is human error. The truck carried a "high and wide" load. The route for this load had been meticulously checked, and the truck was operated by professionals experienced in the movement of high and wide loads. Nevertheless, as this article explains, the truck driver inexplicably did not cross the bridge in the center of the road -- perhaps because someone saved money by not providing a rear escort car, which is not required.

Every bridge is a design tradeoff; positives such as capacity, resilience, and duration of service are tempered by negatives such as cost to construct, cost to maintain, and impact of construction and maintenance on the environment. This article provides a basic introduction to a truss bridge, which was the most common design for medium-sized bridges until advances in concrete technology supplanted it. Bottom line: if a "member" (as engineers would say) of a truss is taken out, the bridge could be in peril.

Full redundancy is expensive. I fly over the Atlantic several times a month, and I wouldn't want to do that in a single-engine aircraft. In that circumstance, I willingly pay for 100% redundancy; but in most scenarios, either implicitly or explicitly we accept less than full redundancy. Instead we rely on safety margins. Many of our bridges are indeed vulnerable to a single failure, but what the press doesn't mention is that such a failure is extremely unlikely. As this article explains, the bridge in question had been struck many times -- as bridges often are. Safety margins handle almost all such accidents. Besides, as we see in aviation, full redundancy is not a panacea.

Instead of spending a trillion dollars annually on defense, I want our nation to divert tax dollars to civil construction projects like bridge replacements and high-speed rail. Even so, we cannot afford to replace tens of thousands of bridges. A triage system is already in place for the worst ones, but the I-5 bridge was nowhere near the top of that list. The question here should be: what measures do we take to reduce the probability that human error will bring down a bridge that, although it has no structural redundancy, does have a margin of safety adequate for all but the most ridiculous accidents?

Apple and taxes

A few thoughts about Apple and taxes, to give a balanced perspective.

• Tax evasion is against the law. Tax avoidance is not. All of us practice tax avoidance every April 15, so let's not be sanctimonious on this topic.
• There is a legitimate question, however, about the degree and manner of tax avoidance that Apple and some other large corporations are engaging in. I will say in Apple's defense that aside from the sweetheart deal they signed with the Irish government about 30 years ago, Apple is relatively restrained in their pursuit of tax avoidance. Other corporations are much more aggressive.
• Apple's situation looks bad in the eyes of the public because Apple has accrued an enormous and unjustified cash hoard. Apple has begun to address this.
• Remember, 30 years ago Ireland had not yet become the "Celtic tiger" economically speaking. The country was desperate for international business, and from their point of view getting a small income from Apple was better than getting nothing. And who knew that Apple would be so successful?
• Remember also that Apple management has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize the company's returns, subject to the law. It would be unethical in that sense for Apple management not to avoid taxation.
• All that said, there can be no doubt that multinational corporate taxation should be tightened up -- and it appears to me that the E.U. will start the process.
• Most reasonable people would agree that corporations should pay taxes if they make profits. We can debate how high those tax rates should be, but as I have written previously an extreme "soak the rich" policy has been shown to suppress economic vitality.
• American corporate taxes are in a sorry state that cries for reform. Here are some ideas.

What's a coin or bill worth?

On occasion I am asked "What's this [fill in the blank] coin or bill worth"? I know something about this, and I'll describe three types of valuation.

1. The starting point is face value. If your note, or bill, is less than 50 years old, it is probably worth only its face value. Likewise, if your coin is less than 50 years old and was minted for circulation -- an ordinary quarter, for example -- it is probably worth only its face value. I mention face value because it does establish a floor for future value when you buy a coin or note; the U.S. government has never pulled the plug on old coinage and currency. The other two valuations I'll describe go up and down with the market.

2. The underlying paper in a note has no value except to a counterfeiter, but most coins are worth at least their value in metal. If the coin is composed of a precious metal such as silver or gold, this metallic value will almost certainly exceed the face value. Coins of precious metal that were never intended for circulation, such as the Maple Leaf from Canada, are called bullion coins. Platinum and palladium are used occasionally in bullion coins. At one time, coins minted for circulation also contained gold or silver.

You may not know, however, some of the complexities of this valuation. Pure precious metals are so soft that they will not withstanding frequent handling. In most cases a less expensive metal like copper is alloyed into the coin to increase its hardness. Sometimes the metallic values of older coins vary as a consequence, although in recent years the U.S. Mint has put the same amount of gold into its American Eagles (which are alloyed) and its American Buffaloes (which are not). The Eagles are simply a little heavier on a scale. When you hear the weight of a bullion coin in ounces, be mindful that the reference is to the troy ounce not the common ounce. Age of the coin is not a factor in metallic value, aside from the history of alloying, and up to a point neither is condition of the coin.

Cherry-pickers have long since captured nearly all circulating coinage that has significant metallic value. Your chances of finding a silver coin in pocket change are microscopic. Ordinary pennies and nickels these days have a metallic value above their face value, but no one cares because it's too onerous to bother with them. Besides, in 2006 it became illegal to melt pennies and nickels to reclaim their metallic value or to export them for that purpose.

Caveat: as gold speculators have seen recently, prices for precious metals fluctuate.

3. The final approach to valuation for both coins and currency is as a collectible. Many factors come into play: rarity, eye appeal, age, condition, the site of the mint or printing plant, authentication as genuine, etc. Two examples: if you have a $10,000 note -- the largest ever placed into circulation -- it is almost certainly worth at least $25,000. If you carry a 1909-S VDB penny in your pocket, for heaven's sake put it into a safety deposit box; even a worn specimen is probably worth $1000. Proof coins and commemorative coins are primarily collectibles. The true value of a collectible is whatever a buyer is willing to pay for it at a given time. Hobby publications provide approximate values based on reported transactions for the most frequently traded collectibles. The really good stuff goes to auction. Caveats: subjectivity and desire often enter into these transactions, and overall prices for collectibles can fall.

In short, your coin or note is worth the highest of these three valuations. What should you watch for in everyday life? I take a second look at notes whose seals are not green, notes larger than $100, notes or coins older than 50 years, and notes or coins that have an obvious production error (such as a quarter on one side and a nickel on the other). All else, I ignore.