Virgin America Inaugural Flight

For too long, American air travel has been dominated by behemoth, union-dominated, subsidised monsters which offer generally poor service all around including flight attendance. Even State airlines from socialist countries are consistently better. Virgin America gives great hope to the future of domestic airline travel in the United States in terms of both quality and competition. The San Francisco based airline has taken its inaugural flight as documented by Engaget.

Petroleum and Obeisity

In the United States, a morbidly obese country, rising fuel prices will have a very positive effect on public health. Sustained high energy prices should accelerate the effect owing to increased investment in public transit and more rationally designed cities.

Another Successful SCRAM Jet Test

SCRAM Jet engines offer the potential for up to Mach 15 atmospheric flight. At these speeds, one could fly from Ney York to Syndey in under 2 hours. Satellites could also be launched into orbit much more cheaply with a SCRAM jet than with rockets alone since rockets must carry their oxidiser. Unlike traditional jet engines, SCRAM jets have no moving parts and rely on air compression alone to ignite fuel at very high speeds.

While wind tunnel experiments have shown the potential of SCRAM jets for many years, expensive field tests have been rare but promising. Reuters reports that another successful field test has been carried out over the Australian outback. The experiment results from the collaboration of the Austrialian Defence Science and Technology Organisation and the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA, the original creator of the Internet, is one of the few truly profitable and effective components of the United States military.

*Update* I have been informed by an esteemed SCRAM Jet research engineer at Cal Tech that depending on fuel, the theoretical maximum speed could be as high as M 25.

US Department of Transportation: Not Completely Worthless

The Department of Transportation has tentatively approved Virgin America as a new domestic United States carrier allowing renewed life and competition into this overprotected and stagnant industry.

I have posted before on this story. Thank you to everyone who petitioned the DoT to achieve this result.

Air Traffic

Last weekend I was one of the unhappy passengers to be screwed by the JetBlue fiasco. Hopefully I will be compensated and the company will improve.

On another note, FlightAware is a useful website which tracks and displays US air traffic information. Maps are available showing all airborne planes and flight paths for public airlines.

The Pigou Club Manifesto

Most readers of this blog will probably already realise that the best way to eliminate carbon emissions is a direct consumption tax on fossil fuels. In the Pigou Club Manifesto Greg Mankiw outlines the seven most important benefits of such a tax.

Celebration and Reflection

Happy Christmas! Since the domination of Christianity in Rome, it has replaced the pagan holiday of Saturnalia though now has become just as secular as surely Saturnalia must have been during its decline. Let us celebrate our lives, friends, and families. Let us exchange tokens of our affection in examples of the wonderful progress that humanity has achieved after the brilliant collaborative effort by learned and well-intentioned people of science: iPods, computers, cell phones, DVDs, what have you.

When you have finished, take some time to reflect on the mentalities of those who worked to bring you the iPods or the ability to read this blog: people such as Galileo Galilei, Issac Newton, Allan Turing, James Maxwell, Benjamin Franklin, etc. Then take some time to reflect on the political leaders that have tended to dominate while the scientists progressed to our current state. Surely the scientists had a great deal more to do with our current quality of life than did those politicians and rulers and those rulers who did give us progress did so only through listening to the scientists and technocrats.

As we close 2006, let us all recognise that humanity has tried its very hardest to spite the unquestionably positive phase it has entered in the information technology revolution and revert to: a) the Dark Ages of ignorance by religious fundamentalism and jihad; b) the breakdown of the International political system of diplomacy between cooperative sovereign nation states as seen in the run up to the Great War with the war in Iraq. c) the utter fecklessness of International negotiation and treaty organisations a la mode de League of Nations in performing their vital roles to coordinate and enforce basic regulations for the peace and prosperity of mankind on the planet. I refer of course to the collapse of the Kyoto Protocols or any system to limit and reduce the emission of Greenhouse gases and other factors in the sixth extinction currently taking place. As with the League, the non-participation of the United States in climate protection was the decisive factor in its ineffectiveness. d) the erosion of civil liberties and the enforcement of basic constitutional law with a popular nationalistic, jingoistic mobilisation for war against innocuous innocent bystanders with the ultimate aim of seizing military position, valuable resources, and as some sort of unholy experiment in a backwards and ill-founded ideology disturbingly similar to the Fascism or Communism of Eurasia in the 20th Century. Iraq has lost on the order of 600,000 people as a result of the Invasion, only one order of magnitude below the relative losses witnessed in 20th century conflicts.

As we approach January, let us remember Janus, the god of mirrors, the god of doorways, the god of two faces - one looking forward, one backward. New Years, the modern acknowledgement of Janus is coming soon, and so let us reflect.

So far the twenty-first century since the birth of Jesus, which was to be the payoff for the ~10 millennia of human effort and suffering that went before has been a reminder of the lessons of the previous century. We can either choose to learn those lessons the easy way, through an intellectual study of the past and a willingness to cooperate and act properly as responsible, sentient, civilised beings, or to continue to give in to our racial, sectarian, and nationalistic passions on a clear path toward self-destruction.

That having been said, Robert X. Cringely, one of the technocrats, points out in a much less dramatic way some simple examples of how our resources could have been better applied this second millennium since Jesus. It seems almost non sequitur after all I have said, but believe it or not, this post has provoked my end of year meditation.

Traffic and Externalities

In addition to carbon emissions, one must not also forget about the negative externality of traffic congestion and increased accident liklihood with regard to automobiles. The issue is explained in this great post from Economist's View, one of the many blogs I read as noted in my 'Suggested RSS and Podcasts.'