Odd Lots
- Here’s an easy read about Boom Supersonic’s project to create a supersonic airliner capable of cruising at Mach 1.7 without a significant sonic boom reaching the surface beneath the aircraft. Their target is to deliver aircraft by 2029, though skeptics think that’s overly ambitious because Boom is designing a supersonic-capable engine from scratch. The engine will also be marketed as part of a power-generation system for AI data centers.
- There’s a new ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) standard, ATSC 3.0, which will improve TV image quality, it also includes technology to allow DRM on broadcast TV, encrypting “over the air” signals and turning broadcast TV into yet another form of pay TV. You’d have to buy a new “NextGen” TV to watch ATSC 3.0 content. TV isn’t my thing, but I predict a great deal of bitching and moaning against this possibility. Stay tuned, heh.
- According to recent research, working crossword puzzles for two minutes a day can slow brain aging dramatically. Actually, anything that requires cognitive activity can slow brain aging. One reason I tinker with programming (for me, in Free Pascal/Lazarus) is to keep my mind working. I do a couple of word puzzles on my tablet here and there. Maybe I should do more. What I don’t do is sit in front of the TV all day. Or on most days, even for two minutes.
- The US House has passed a bill making Daylight Savings Time permanent. Umm…didn’t we try this already? We did. Nobody liked it, and it didn’t last long. My response is that we should make standard time permanent, which wouldn’t push dawn to an hour later and force people to start the day in darkness. Yeah, back in Chicago in late December it used to get dark by 5 PM. The kids were home from school by then, and cars for commuters have headlights. Arizona is on standard time all year, and it works fine for me.
- Private collectors are outbidding museums for fossils—right up to Gus, one of the largest and most complete T-Rex fossils ever found. Sotheby’s is selling dino bones to the very rich, some of them earning in excess of $30M. It may gall some people, but even I know that leaving fossils in the ground — especially if they’re exposed to the elements—can cause serious deterioration. One wonders what a billionaire would do with a T-Rex skeleton. In the rec room? Office? Maybe we’ll find out.
- Astronomers have found a species of sugar scattered out in the gas and dust in our galaxy. Sweet!
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: aerospace · brain health · science
In 1983 I briefly worked at Supersonic Express. It was an American company looking to become a supersonic airline with flights between New York City and Los Angeles. It had already arranged a lease of an Air France Concorde SST. I had meetings with the FAA in Los Angeles to try to determine flight paths. I got to meet Scott Crossfield (2nd person to fly faster than the speed of sound) and even got a phone call early one morning from Chuck Yeager (1st person to break Mach 1). Unfortunately, by early 1984 it was obvious that nothing was going to be accomplished and I left the company. It was a fun job while it lasted!
My wife really enjoys doing crosswords. She does them in pen! I’m terrible at them. I enjoy playing FreeCell (called Seahaven Towers on the Mac) because it reminds me of programming at low levels with the four open slots analogous to the registers of a CPU and the eight columns analogous to stacks for operations in RAM. I like this better than regular Solitaire because almost all (I think it’s 98%) of the puzzles are solvable even though it doesn’t seem that way when you first look at them.
I have a game on my tablet called Nuts Sort by Guru Games. It’s a variation on the Towers of Hanoi game: You get nuts of several colors distributed randomly across several bolts and have to move them around until each bolt has only color nut–without placing any nut atop a nut of a different color. (There are two “blank” bolts with no nuts.) I play it now and then, but I much prefer Wordscapes, which is something like a crossword puzzle, above a circle of 6 or 7 letters. All the words on the crossword must be made of the letters in the circle. That takes a certain amount of thinking, but being a words person of some experience, I get through it pretty quickly–unless (for the Super Hard games) they include words like “zydeco”.
Jeff, OM, I love your commentary. I sure think you’re on the mark about doing something cognitive and avoiding broadcast TV (or cable for that matter). I’m in my 70s and still working for several reasons, one of which is that I need problems to solve or I get bored (quickly). I finished another book in The Witcher cycle last night, which surprised me. I immediately bought the next and queued it up on the Kindle to start this weekend. Keep on truckin’, OM and 73!
> skeptics think that’s overly ambitious because Boom is designing a supersonic-capable engine from scratch.
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General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, and Rolls-Royce average a decade of work for each new engine, most of it for “development.” The investment runs from $500M to $1B. And that’s leveraging all they know from previous designs.
A “from scratch” engine sounds quite ambitious.
> The engine will also be marketed as part of a power-generation system for AI data centers.
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Stationary engines for turbogenerators are generally a whole different thing that aircraft engines. There would also be considerable difference between the compressor stages for a supersonic and stationary engine.
Frankly, “scrappy startup” is looking a whole lot like “…and then a miracle happens.”
> You’d have to buy a new “NextGen” TV to watch ATSC 3.0 content.
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I’d expect a big chunk of their market would say, “what is over-the-air TV?”
We have a couple of generations since cable became the norm for TV, and closing in on a generation that expects to stream TV off the internet.
If I had to guess, I’d say over-the-air TV stations would stand to lose more audience by charging for their content than just keeping on with what we have today. We are indeed closing in on Internet streaming rather than traditional cable. Carol and I occasionally watch movies on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but we’re not big on video, and we have it mostly for when family comes out to visit.
> Yeah, back in Chicago in late December it used to get dark by 5 PM.
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Locally, almost no children walk to school. They either take the bus, which stops at every house, or their parents chauffeur them back and forth.
Locally, the buses start running at 0530 and finish around 1730. They return to the school more than once to drop off their passengers. Depending on their bus route, a child might spend more time standing outside in the parking lot of the school than in the classrooms. [doors are locked outside of “normal school hours”. Where I went to high school, if it was raining, you got wet because there was no cover near the building]
Kids (mostly) walked to our parish grade school when I was there 1958-1966. It was almost a mile from us, and we just thought it was how things worked. There was a Catholic girls’ high school only three blocks away from our house, so my sister walked less than half the distance to high school than she did to grade school.
Walking to school sounds unsafe to us today, but back then we mostly walked in groups, older kids with younger kids, and there was a crossing guard to get us across Talcott Rd. It was good exercise. We were driven sometimes when the weather was terrible (which in Chicago happened oftener than we’d like) but unless it was raining or snowing, we just walked.
Before I turned eight I walked to school, then we moved to a small neighborhood off of one of the busiest roads in Salt Lake County. That put me on a school bus.
My kids walked to elementary school until Jr. High, then before we moved to the current house they took the bus. At our new location elementary takes the bus, but everyone older walks or is in a car pool. I log a lot of hours each year shuffling kids to the various schools.
But that makes light levels kind of moot as a safety argument for or against daylight savings (I still would prefer more morning light, less evening light, but maybe I’m odd).
> Private collectors are outbidding museums for fossils
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It’s not that unusual, not just for fossils, either. And museums frequently sell donated items to private collectors when they’re short of money, which is common.
I like that Arizona is on permanent Standard Time. Since the Phoenix metro area is so hot for 5 months of the year, the sooner the sun goes down, the sooner people can enjoy a bit of the outdoors.
Heh. You nailed it. Carol and I rarely hit the pool until the sun goes down behind the garage next door. We walk indoor loops at the JCC gym during those five months, and stretch it by walking outside after breakfast on cooler days, before it gets hot.
Like I’ve said too many times but will say again anytime people ask how I can stand Arizona heat. “Well, I grew up in Chicago. You don’t have to shovel heat.” Or maybe “Arizona summers are Chicago winters turned inside-out.” People laugh, which is what I want. There’s no point in arguing about the weather.
The new ATSC 3.0 has the ability to interfere with emergency warnings (https://blog.lon.tv/2026/07/28/broadcasters-admit-emergency-alert-messages-are-encrypted/)
Also OTA is supposed to be free because the bandwidth is given, not paid for, by the broadcasters is my understanding.
If I remember right, the primary carrier has been free. But there have been schemes where certain channels were carried on sidebands or sub channels with a “locked” scheme. Maybe more common for things like Grocery Store Music on the FM band, but I remember a company provided a add on tuner that could receive cable type channels in SLC a fifteen years ago from over the air UHF station sub-bands that were blocked so you couldn’t tune without the device. Ah, I found it, Airbox TV, which died due to streaming taking over: https://www.reddit.com/r/cordcutters/comments/6yp4m0/airbox_tv_over_the_air_premium_cable_shuts_down/ for a discussion.
On DST, my grandparents raised fruit. DST, which in Michigan in my childhood was elected county by county, meant they lost an hour waiting for the dew to go off the fruit, or were discounted at the cannery for wet weight. So they didn’t like it.
I’ve had mixed feelings over the years, partly based on whether I was near the eastern or western edge of my time zone.
What I really disliked was the claim that the last change made would save energy. It did not, but a measured increase of 2-3% was recorded, as I recall.
Like you, if we will dispense with the changes every few months, I vote for standard time. Not that Congress cares any more what the will of the people is. And with so few people on farms these days, a vote would likely favor DST.
On ATSC 3.0 and the DRM aspect, have you not noticed that many businesses crave a subscription model? Partly for the assurance of a revenue stream, and partly, I am sure, because people tend to simply renew without thinking. I’m not in that group, though I used to be.
Adobe going subscription put me off. And then Serif created their Affinity products, which I happily adopted for their high quality and low price. Now the products belong to Canva, and the consolidated Affinity app merges Publisher, Designer, and Photo into one. For free.*
Yeah, the asterisk. Free app, with some very intriguing offerings which require an AI subscription. The one that interests me is image enhancement and repair. I’ve never developed skills in Photoshop-like apps, but have some old family photos I suspect they could rework far more than I might in playing with layers, filters, etc.
I haven’t bitten, as I already have two AI subscriptions running for code work, and need to decide which horse to ride.
Thanks for bringing up Affinity, I’d forgotten that I wanted to check that out.
With almost ubiquitous high speed Internet now, I haven’t used my antenna in three years… I doubt I’m that unusual. If the viewership numbers get too low, will we give up on broadcasting? Like SW stations seem to be?
[Late reply; been busy…] Now that the personal computer business is mature, people don’t buy newer versions of software that they use. A friend of mine still uses Office 2000. It does what he needs, so why not? I bought Office 2007 and still use it. It does what I need, and much of what I do these days involves publishing and ebooks, so I use the Jutoh ebook editor and will buy newer versions as they appear. 95% of my sales are ebooks. I use what I’m sure people would consider an ancient edition of InDesign for print book layout. I use a lot of open source apps.
SAAS is a desperate pitch for ongoing revenue by companies that sell software into what many people call a stagnant market. Win 11 is little more than a shill for Microsoft’s SAAS products. I keep a nice Dell Windows 10 machine that isn’t online except for extremely rare issues, and when I need it to be online for some reason, I plug a CAT5 cable to my router into the back. No WiFi. I use it for programming in Lazarus/Free Pascal and playing around with other software that doesn’t require networking. If Windows itself ever goes SAAS, I’ll move my online activity over to my Linux box, and use my current primary desktop offline, installing Win10 if I can.
Public Service Announcement:
Delphi 13 Community Edition is available at the Embarcadero website.
I registered and downloaded a copy on Aug. 12, 2026.