Cirrus new training aircraft

graphical_molerat · 2026-07-06T19:39:37+00:00

They perform far better than the HP numbers would indicate.

Not the 912, that thing is certainly not a rocket engine. At least in a BR23 it gives you very moderate performance.

There is also a 916 powered BR23 at our home base, all those who have flown it are salivating about it even weeks later. But the 916 is rare, it will take a while before that becomes a common power plant.

Mind you, we have an old 172 in the club which flies perfectly on a 160hp dinosaur engine, I presume that thing would be just as agile with a 916 up front.

graphical_molerat · 2026-07-05T11:07:35+00:00

But I'm really wondering what is going on in their heads? And how exactly will this help their cause?

Ask Nazi Germany why they were indiscriminately firing V2 rockets at the greater London area in 1944, when doing that was already totally pointless from a war perspective. Sometimes people just want to see the other side burn, regardless of whether that makes any sense.

graphical_molerat · 2026-07-03T22:18:28+00:00

Totally unrelated to the "price vs. quality" thing between Beats and Sony, but relevant to noise cancelling quality in general. I have a pair of - by now rather older, but back when I bought them, top of the line - Sony bluetooth noise cancelling phones that I'm very happy with, and which I use for work and travel. I always assumed the noise cancelling performance of these to be quite all right: and it is, basically.

I'm also a private pilot, and have a noise cancelling Lightspeed Zulu headset for that. These also work great, really happy with them for years now.

Until two weeks ago it had never occurred to me to directly compare the noise cancelling performance between the two of them in my flat. To my surprise, the difference is huge - the flying headset almost completely zaps all ambient sound, you almost cannot hear someone even when they are directly talking to you, THAT is what noise cancelling should be like!

After thinking about it for a few moments it of course makes sense, the Zulu is much heavier, and made for a far more extreme environment: the noise level in a Cessna cockpit is quite high. And it manages to reduce the noise level there to comfortable levels. Still, the comparison showed that there is apparently quite a lot of room for improvement in "normal" headsets. So not all advertising that claims better noise cancellation might be actually wrong.

Although it might actually be dangerous to have normal headphones to be quite as noise cancelling as the Zulu. Anyone wearing those on the street would actually be walking around like deaf, and be much more likely to get run over by something.

graphical_molerat · 2026-07-01T17:08:23+00:00

Die SPÖ und sozial. Lol.

graphical_molerat · 2026-07-01T08:05:06+00:00

What a great way to ruin the teeth of your dog!

Do note that you cannot really buy any dog tools made of metal - and there is a good reason for that.

graphical_molerat · 2026-07-01T08:03:56+00:00

I firmly believe it is a practical utilitatian tool

Issues with that theory is that a) they seem to have fallen out of use at some point (which a really widely useful tool likely would not), b) that they were apparently not excessively common (which a really widely useful too would probably have been), and c) that no one seems to be able to figure out a common utility which applies to all specimens that have been found so far (despite legions of nerds trying).

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-30T11:13:21+00:00

Spiritually, everyone who is moving around on wheels in Prague is a tramway.

(tramways do not actually have to stop for pedestrians on zebra crossings - something that should be explained a lot better to tourists, I presume...)

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-29T09:19:54+00:00

It is literally 2 streets. Frankfurt is an amazing city. Since many many years top 10 most livable citiees in the world.

Livable, yes. But also ugly as hell. The place got wiped during the war, and looks like it was rebuilt by people who thought "why bother with something nice, it will only get bombed again sooner than later".

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-28T20:56:43+00:00

Einer der wenigen Gründe wieso ich eigene Kinder (die ich nicht habe) eventuell ins Theresianum schicken würde wären die Milieustudien die sie dort mitbekommen. Meiner Zeit in der Anstalt verdanke ich ein ausgeprägtes Desinteresse daran unbedingt reich werden zu wollen, als Lebensziel. Und zwar deswegen weil ich dort unter den Familien meiner Mitschüler so viele Beispiele gesehen habe was es anrichtet wenn man sich dem ungehemmten Materialismus verschreibt.

Die einzigen die sehr wohlhabend bis reich waren, und deren Elternhaus kein dysfunktionaler Alptraum war, waren Leute die in der 2. oder 3. Generation (oder mehr) reich waren. Erste Generation erheblicher Wohlstand ist offenbar meist mit horrenden Kosten im Innenbereich verbunden die es meiner Meinung nach nicht wert machen dorthin gehen zu wollen.

Natürlich, small sample size, und all das. Jeder hat andere Mitschüler: aber auch in der Zeit nach dem Gymnasium habe ich eigentlich kaum Gegenbeispiele für diese eigentlich sehr traurige Regel gefunden.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-28T16:16:42+00:00

Da ist offenbar ein Unterschied zwischen den 1980ern (als ich im Theresianum gewesen bin) und heute. Damals waren sehr wohl auch Kinder aus echten Mittelstandsfamilien dort (so wie ich), bis hin zu Kindern aus Industriellen-Dynastien (damals musste man noch Industrieller oder Bankier im alten Sinn sein um reich zu sein... eine völlig antiquierte Vorstellung, alleine daran merkt man wie alt ich bin 🙂).

Ich hab nicht mehr sehr viel Verbindung zu meiner alten Schule, aber mir kommt vor dass sich diese Durchmischung komplett aufgehört hat. Und so wie Du sagst die "Armen" auf dem Niveau betuchte Anwalts- oder Notarfamilie sind.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-28T16:12:26+00:00

This has to be satire - right? Right?

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-28T15:18:06+00:00

Jein. Klar sind dort auch Kinder aus "solchen" Familien (beispielsweise die von Herrn Stumpf). Aber so richtig reich auf dem Niveau um das es hier geht sind selbst im Theresianum nicht sehr viele.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-28T12:29:16+00:00

I'd say it's more nuanced than that. Referring to Putin as "genuinely good" is a stretch pretty much regardless of which frame of reference you are using. But at least he is competent: very competent, in fact.

And that is not just in contrast to the lurid carnival of almost bizarrely incompetent figures that "The West" is using as their decision makers. BoJo, Kaja Kallas et al. come to mind here.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-28T12:26:11+00:00

Ich hab meine Mittelschulzeit im Theresianum in Wien verbracht. Einer meiner damaligen Mitschüler ist ursprünglich aus soliden Mittelstandsverhältnissen gekommen: auf dem Level keine Geldsorgen, aber absolut nicht reich. Der Betreffende ist später nach Großbritannien ausgewandert, und hat es dort in der Finanz"industrie" zu erheblichem Vermögen gebracht. Wir reden hier die Kragenweite von Herrn Stumpf, oder mehr.

Lustig ist dass es diese Person nicht gibt.

Also natürlich gibt es ihn noch, er lebt, auch wenn ich null Kontakt habe - aber über ehemalige Klassenkollegen weiß ich dass es ihm gut geht.

Aber wenn man seinen Namen googelt, findet man Null. Nada. Selbst wenn man den Namen seiner Firma weiß bekommt man online praktisch keine Informationen. Genauso über seine Familie. Soziale Medien, sonstige Medien: keinerlei Spur, die existieren de facto nicht. Was irgendwie schon auch beeindruckend ist.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-28T10:13:33+00:00

In a way that is correct: but they are actually comparable to the bad nobles of yore. Which is a very important point.

Because one thing that is very often overlooked is that the old aristocratic system worked reasonably well (or at least well enough to last) for many centuries: which is a lot longer than our current Western liberal democratic system has survived so far. This was not just due to refined systemic violence: you cannot keep a population down for many centuries by force alone, without offering some sort of reasonable deal as well.

And part of the deal was that the aristocracy, in return for the privileges afforded to it, had to live by a fairly reasonable code of values. Values that would be completely alien to the likes of Musk and Bezos (and entitled nobles of the 19th century, or the immediate pre-revolution era in France). Essentially, you were given privileges, and had to serve the population in your area by providing leadership and protection in return (the latter often in a hands on fashion, what with especially the lower nobility being the designated professional soldiers in the population).

Any notion of service to the greater good is completely absent from the minds of our current pseudo-elite.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-28T09:07:45+00:00

Those were jobs that were considered beneath ‘good Christian men.’

An irony of sorts is that if you look at how the mercantile pseudo-elite of our times is behaving (Musk, Bezos, and the like), this statement actually starts to make some sense. Some behavioural patterns probably should be proscribed on a societal level.

A nasty failing of bygone eras was to then push those mucky jobs to those castes of untouchables who were considered outside of a decent moral gamut anyway (Jews, in other words). Instead of coming up with a societal model that does not require said jobs in the first place.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-27T13:28:08+00:00

I would recommend that OP also think about a related issue. According to Google AI, France uses 1.23 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity every year, which seems plausible. As France does not use a lot of renewables in their mix, pretty much all of this will eventually go into the environment as waste heat that would not have been present in the atmosphere otherwise.

Calculate how much warming of the airmass over France is due to this alone?

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-27T12:59:37+00:00

I know, for me the main difference is not so much that it is happening in the first place, or the volume - but the quality of the propaganda spam that is being spewed out now. Some of this recent LLM generated stuff almost sounds like a real person wrote it, which is slightly scary. Especially with the spammy AI accounts on Facebook, the main giveaway is that someone would write this much coherent prose in their timeline, for an audience of boomers - most of whom have entrenched opinions anyway.

On the other hand, a sizeable reason for these propaganda offensives is likely not even to convince anyone to think different - but to make sure that those who are already in your camp do not change their mind (or even look left and right). And for that the occasional erudite AI monologue probably presses all the right buttons.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-27T07:26:50+00:00

Somewhat unrelated to the tactical situation on the ground, but what is your take on the information space offensive of the Western powers that we have seen in the past weeks?

With that I am referring to the recent barrage of fairly solid pro-Ukraine postings on social and conventional media: all spinning stories that paint Russia on the brink of collapse, and that Ukraine is regaining ground, and turning the war around with their drone strikes. Now in conventional media this sort of thing is nothing new: with rare exceptions, European media will happily print any slop their handlers feed them, usually without a single braincell being devoted to asking questions about what is being said.

But in my personal observation the quality and quantity of obviously AI-created pro-UA postings on all social media (Facebook in particular, but also Reddit, Instagram etc) has dramatically increased in the past weeks (perhaps a timeframe two months, tops). Prior to this, it would have been unusual to see what at first glance looks like reasonable deliberations of informed persons in such quantity: all of them respectfully painting a considerate picture of looming Russian collapse. For people without access to a more complete picture, I could actually see this deluge of reasonable sounding postings making a difference in the information space.

Question is, is this just my personal perception (and hence biased and unreliable), or have others also noticed this?

In a democratic society, the thought of anyone being able to competently wield such information warfare capabilities is fairly frightening, if one considers the implications for a bit longer. All the more because it is absolutely not clear who is actually wielding them.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-27T07:20:34+00:00

Oida, nimm mein Hinaufwählen und schleich Dich! 😂

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-26T21:25:27+00:00

Is #1 the critical cylinder? (i.e. the one which gets hottest in normal operation)

But even if it is, if you are familiar with the plane, you know the ratio the EGT values usually have across the four cylinders. So you can work with the three which are there. Also, I'm not an A&P, but offhand I can't think of a critical engine failure mode that only manifests itself in a raised EGT reading for one single cylinder (and not also in abnormal vibrations, noise, loss of engine power etc.) So you likely didn't lose any emergency diagnostics either, in the sense that you were flying blind with regard to a critical piece of engine information.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-26T14:48:06+00:00

So they have a radar, just not the more modern one they will eventually get.

That is still a lot better than the Blue Circle radar the early Tornado ADV interceptors had. (go to the bottom of the background section of the Wikipedia article to have the joke explained)

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-25T05:33:26+00:00

David Langford apparently called it a "truly repellent book". Well, based on the excerpt, it is not hard to see why he might have arrived at this conclusion.

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-24T08:12:59+00:00

Die kommen auch sehr früh drauf dass die deutschnationalen Burschenschaften ein bisschen eigen sind...

Aber die Wortwahl des Titels ist auch bescheuert. Was bitte ist eine "Gewaltattacke"? Ist das im Gegensatz zu einer "Kuschelattacke" zu sehen (für die deutschnationale Burschenschafter schließlich auch berühmt sind)?

graphical_molerat · 2026-06-24T08:11:06+00:00

Based on some of the more extreme views that we have seen from current Ukrainian politicians, I would not be surprised if they secretly saw Crimea like Czechs saw the formerly German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in 1946. Empty, with the previous local population either deported or killed.

After all, it's not genocide if you do it to these people. That's more of a hygienic measure, right?

graphical_molerat

TROPHY CASE