Month: January 2017

Selections from America’s Finest News Source

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The Onion on the inauguration:

I’m not sure if the Biden one or the drone one is the best.

Remember that “Hiatus” in Anthropogenic Climate Change from 1998-2012?

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Not so much.

The reports of a plateau in we saw were due to a change in instrumentation and methodology.

Specifically, in the mid 1990s, ocean water temperature reporting moved from ships cooling water intake data to dedicated free-standing buoys.

It turns out that there is significant heating present in the ships that is not present in the newer methods:

Nope, climate change didn’t pause for about 15 years, scientists say – again. But just how did that misunderstanding happen?

From around 1998 to 2012, the rise in global temperatures seemed to plateau, according to NOAA’s Extended Reconstruction Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST) dataset.

To most climate scientists, this so-called hiatus was another puzzle of our complex climate system for them to work out. But to people who were already skeptical of global warming, this data was evidence for the idea that human-induced climate change is a hoax.

But the data itself was unsound, scientists now say. There is no evidence of a hiatus.

………

For decades, sea surface temperatures were measured on ships, using water sucked into a ship’s engine room. But in the mid-1990s, scientists began deploying a new strategy across the world’s oceans: thermometers on buoys. By the late 1990s, this method had taken off, Hausfather says.

But here’s the catch: the buoys bobbing on the surface of the sea take colder measurements than those taken within the warm engine room of a ship. And, in the ERSST version 3b, scientists had just tacked on the buoy data without adjusting for that difference.

When NOAA scientists realized the problem, they calculated that difference and weighted the data differently, resulting in ERSST version 4. And, according to their calculations, version 4 showed more than twice as much warming, on the global scale, as version 3b.

………

Instead of looking at all the data mashed together, Hausfather and his colleagues studied the trends in the data from different sources separately, including data from ships, buoys, satellites, and drifting robots called Argo floats.

“The authors did a great job of inter-comparing independent and semi-independent SST data sets,” Thomas Karl, the lead author on the 2015 NOAA paper and former director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, writes in an email to the Monitor. “Their results show the importance of independent measurements to clarify observational uncertainties.”

“This paper further allays any qualms that there may have been scientific errors or any non-scientific agendas,” Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who was not part of either paper, writes to the Monitor. “Lamar Smith owes Tom Karl an apology.”

So from the late ’90s to the early teens, there was a transformation in the sources of the data, and if you view the data filtered by source, you see the ΔT, but if you view it in aggregate, it shows a moderation.

Good science, but bad news.  We are in for a world of hurt.

Linkage

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Why we love cats:

Tweet of the Day

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Betsy’s DeVos’s response re free college yesterday is nearly identical to John Lewis’s attack on Sanders/defense of Clinton in February. pic.twitter.com/HaGZLYK4Aw

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) January 18, 2017

The argument was bogus when John John Lewis made it, and it is bogus now.

I have no idea what Clinton had on the Democratic Party establishment, they really did sell their soul to her during the primaries.

The Term Here is Kafkaesque

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In Supreme Court arguments, the state of Colorado is arguing that it has no obligation to refund fines collector after a defendant is exonerated:

The Supreme Court on Monday seemed deeply skeptical of a Colorado law that makes it hard for criminal defendants whose convictions are overturned to get refunds of the fines and restitution they had been ordered to pay.

The justices were helped by the forthright presentation of the state’s solicitor general, Frederick R. Yarger, who did not shy away from the more extreme implications of his argument. Money taken from defendants after valid convictions belongs to the state, he said.

A Colorado law requires people cleared by the courts to file separate civil suits and prove their innocence with clear and convincing evidence in order to obtain reimbursement. But Mr. Yarger said the state was under no obligation to do even that much. He said the state was not only free to impose onerous procedures, but could also enact a law making exonerated defendants forfeit the money entirely.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked if the state could impose a $10,000 fine on everyone convicted of a crime and refuse to return the money if the convictions were later overturned.

Mr. Yarger said yes. Just as there is no need to pay people for the time they spend in prison after their convictions are reversed, he said, there is no need to reimburse them for fines and fees. “The assumption is that the deprivation of both the liberty and the property at the time of conviction is lawful, and that the property passes into public funds,” he said.

………

The Colorado law was challenged by Shannon Nelson and Louis Madden, who had been ordered to pay thousands of dollars in fees and restitution after they were convicted of sex offenses. After their convictions were overturned, they filed motions in their criminal cases seeking refunds of what they had paid.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled against them, saying that their trial courts lacked authority to compensate them. Under the state’s law, the State Supreme Court said, they had to file a new civil suit and meet a heightened burden of proof.

Stuart Banner, a lawyer for Ms. Nelson and Mr. Madden, said the state’s approach amounted to “charging people money for the privilege of trying them unlawfully.”

This may be stating the obvious, but when the state subverts the administration of justice such that it becomes little more than a protection racket, you have a Mafia state.

Not Enough Bullets

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Amazingly enough, the story shows the subjects of the story even more self-absorbed and clueless than the headline dows:

Davos Elite Fret About Inequality Over Vintage Wine and Canapés

You morons broke the world.

You were born on 3rd base and though that you hit a triple.

You are not deserving, you are lucky.

  • You won the parent lottery.
  • You won the nationality lottery.
  • You won the social class lottery.

Now try and do something to make the world a better place for the rest of us.

    Another John Carpenter Moment

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    Yesterday, I noted that after almost 35 years, I was finally more horrified and disgusted than Palmer was in the 1982 version of the movie The Thing.

    Who knew that the mixture of horror and disgust at Betsy Devos would be exceeded in the next day.

    Specifically Judith Miller tweeted her horror at the commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence:

    Obama commutes sentence of Chelsea Manning. How many people died because of manning’ leak? https://t.co/WrijBtp4fo

    — Judith Miller (@JMfreespeech) January 17, 2017

    This engendered the following observation from Jason Concepcion:

    don’t worry, no one can touch your high score https://t.co/2pzkm7dHEz

    — ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) January 17, 2017

    For those of you who don’t recall, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter was desperately shilling for the Bush administration (Google Judith Miller Curveball) and was typing up anything and everything that she could find, without regard to classification to help them.

    So, 4,424 US Soldiers dead, and around 500,000 Iraqis dead, because of her casual handling of classified material, and her even more casual handling of the truth, and suddenly, she’s concerned about the body counts.

    Why she isn’t selling perfume one cash register over from Janet Cooke for a living is completely beyond me.

    H/t Naked Capitalism.

    Still a Few Bugs in the System

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    Some neuroscientists decided to see if the latest neuroscience tools could handle a simpler case than the human brain.

    They chose a 40+ year old CPU, and they failed abysmally:

    In 2014, the US announced a new effort to understand the brain. Soon, we would map every single connection within the brain, track the activity of individual neurons, and start to piece together some of the fundamental units of biological cognition. The program was named BRAIN (for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), and it posited that we were on the verge of these breakthroughs because both imaging and analysis hardware were finally powerful enough to produce the necessary data, and we had the software and processing power to make sense of it.

    But this week, PLoS Computational Biology published a cautionary note that suggests we may be getting ahead of ourselves. Part experiment, part polemic, a computer scientist got together with a biologist to apply the latest neurobiology approaches to a system we understand far more completely than the brain: a processor booting up the games Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. The results were about as awkward as you might expect, and they helped the researchers make their larger point: we may not understand the brain well enough to understand the brain.

    On the surface, this may sound a bit ludicrous. But it gets at something fundamental to the nature of science. Science works on the basis of having models that can be used to make predictions. You can test those models and use the results to refine them. And you have to understand a system on at least some level to build those models in the first place.

     ………

    That’s where Donkey Kong comes in.

    Games on early Atari systems were powered by the 6502 processor, also found in the Apple I and Commodore 64. The two authors of the new paper (Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording) decided to take this relatively simple processor and apply current neuroscience techniques to it, tracking its activity while loading these games. The 6502 is a good example because we can understand everything about the processor and use that to see how well the results match up. And, as they put it, “most scientists have at least behavioral-level experience with these classical video game systems.”

    So they built upon the work of the Visual 6502 project, which got ahold of a batch of 6502s, decapped them, and imaged the circuitry within. This allowed the project to build an exact software simulator with which they could use to test neuroscience techniques. But it also enabled the researchers to perform a test of the field of “connectomics,” which tries to understand the brain by mapping all the connections of the cells within it.

    To an extent, the fact that their simulator worked is a validation of the approach. But, at the same time, the chip is incredibly simple: there is only one type of transistor, as opposed to the countless number of specialized cells in the brain. And the algorithms used to analyze the connections only got the team so far; lots of human intervention was required as well. “Even with the whole-brain connectome,” Jonas and Kording conclude, “extracting hierarchical organization and understanding the nature of the underlying computation is incredibly difficult.”

    Remember, in a microprocessor, a transistor is a transistor is a transistor, in the brain, neurons and ganglia vary from cell to cell.

    This is a valid test of the software, the 6502 is arguably the most thoroughly understood CPU in existence, and Donkey Kong is arguably one of the best understood pieces of software in existence.

    And they still could not do it on a  processor that can access only 64K of RAM.

    We are much further from mapping the brain in any detail than is implied in the mainstream media reports.

    You Gotta Be F%$#Ing Kidding………

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    Musical Accompaniment by John Carpenter and Ennio Morricone here

    One of my favorite films is John Carpenter’s magnum opus, The Thing, released in 1982.

    It is closer to the original work (John Campbell’s Who Goes There) than did the 1951 Howard Hawks film.

    If you haven’t seen it, see it. It is an investigation of isolation, paranoia, with allusions to AIDS and sexual ambiguity.

    The movie has many classic moments, and in one, when confronted with a human head sprouting legs and walking off, and Palmer notices, and says, “You gotta be f%$#in’ kidding.”

    It is an expression of horror and disgust that I have not seen equaled ………

    Until today ………

    By me ………

    Because today ………

    On Capitol Hill ………

    ………

    At the confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, announced that she opposes banning guns in schools because ……… Grizzly Bears:

    Senator Chris Murphy who represented the district with Newtown, asked Department of Education Betsy DeVos whether she would oppose guns in public schools.

     As she did with most questions, she waffled.

     Murphy asked, “Do you think guns have any place in or around schools?”

     DeVos fell back on her usual deflection that it is for states to decide, which set Murphy off.

     Incredulously, he asked, “You can’t say definitively today that guns shouldn’t be in schools?”

     With disingenuous wide-eyed misunderstanding, DeVos replied, “I will refer back to (Wyoming) Senator (Mike) Enzi and the school he was talking about in Wyoming. I think probably there, I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.”

     Murphy ended his questioning by telling her he looked forward to her visiting his state to discuss guns in schools with a disgusted tone. I was seriously surprised that he didn’t throw all of his papers on the floor while walking out.

    I will say it again, “You Gotta be F%$#ing Kidding ………”

    Murphy is the Senator from Connecticut, the former home of Newtown Elementry and the Newtown Massacre.

    I am sure that Ms. DeVos’ reception in the Nutmeg state would be ……… enthusiastic.

    I’m Cynical, so My Question is, “What’s Obama’s Vig?”

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    I gotta figure that the news that Barack Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning sentence is more about Barack Obama than it is about Chelsea Manning:

    President Obama on Tuesday commuted all but four months of the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst convicted of a 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted Mr. Obama’s administration and brought global prominence to WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures.

    The decision by Mr. Obama rescued Ms. Manning, who twice tried to kill herself last year, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction.

    At the same time that Mr. Obama commuted the sentence of Ms. Manning, a low-ranking enlisted soldier at the time of her leaks, he also pardoned Gen. James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who pleaded guilty to lying about his conversations with reporters to F.B.I. agents investigating a leak of classified information about cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program.

    The two acts of clemency were a remarkable final step for a president whose administration carried out an unprecedented criminal crackdown on leaks of government secrets. Depending on how they are counted, the Obama administration has prosecuted either nine or 10 such cases, more than were charged under all previous presidencies combined.

    My guess is that this has something to do  Obama’s quest for legacy.

    He does not want Manning’s suicide to be in his historical footnotes, and for the speaking circuit, he needs to get along with former military speakers, and he could not pardon Cartwright without commuting Manning.

    It is completely out of character for Obama though.

    There Is Something about This That Is an Inexorable Draw to Current and Former Denizens of the Pacific Northwest

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    The Rare Earth Elements

    I am referring to the hijacker (incorrectly) known as D.B. Cooper.

    For some reason, anyone who has spent any time living in Oregon or Washington (I dunno about Idaho), it’s like catnip

    So when I came across a report of new evidence in the only unsolved airline hijacking in the continental United States, (updated incorrect link) I gotta comment:

    A group of amateur scientists claim they may have narrowed the suspect pool in a case that has stymied the experts for decades.

    The infamous case of D.B. Cooper and the nation’s only unsolved skyjacking has left investigators befuddled since a parachuted Cooper leapt from a Boeing 727 headed to Seattle from Portland on Nov. 24, 1971.

    But a team of “Citizen Sleuths” say that evidence they’ve uncovered could mean that Dan Cooper, the name used when the culprit bought his one-way ticket with cash, was in fact an employee of some sort of aerospace engineering firm.

    The crucial pieces of newly uncovered evidence: thousands of microscopic particles on a $3 clip-on necktie from JC Penney.

    “All of these particles are too small to be seen with the naked eye, but modern science can now track them to their source,” the group wrote on their website. “These particles through their shape and composition can tell a story.”

    If you are one of the few who are unfamiliar with the saga of D.B. Cooper, here’s the short version:

    On that fateful day in 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper purchased a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle on Northwest Orient Airlines. He hijacked the plane, demanded $200,000 in ransom money, and having received it during a stopover in Seattle, jumped from the aircraft wearing nothing but a business suit and a parachute somewhere over the forests of southwest Washington.

    ………

    “Each of those particles comes from something and somewhere and can tell a story if the proper instruments like electron microscopes are used,” the group wrote.

    The particles in question — Cerium, Strontium sulfide and pure titanium — are of note because because of how rare they are, lead investigator Tom Kaye told King 5 News in Seattle.

    “These are what they call rare earth elements. They’re used in very narrow fields, for very specific things,” he said.

    As an aside, neither Strontium nor Titanium are rare earth elements.  (Click on image above for larger image)

    Of particular interest was the pure titanium. The mineral was widely used in aircraft manufacturing in the early 1970s, but titanium used in airplanes was almost always mixed with other metals, which ruled out Boeing, the region’s largest aerospace manufacturer.

    So, I already pointed out one scientific error, the listing of Strontium and Titanium as rare earth elements.

    Here are scientific and business facts about the substances in question:

    • Strontium sulfide could NOT be present now, because it would have reacted with wqater in the air over the past 40 odd years to form Strontium Hydroxide and Hydrogen Sulfide (SrS + 2 H2O → Sr(OH)2 + H2S) or with both the water and CO2 to form Strontium Carbonate (SrS + H2O + CO2 → SrCO3 + H2S).
      • Strontium Sulfide has no applications, it is an intermediate stage in refining.
      • The primary used of Strontium are  in CRTs (Picture tubes and the like to keep the watcher from being irradiated) and as a coloring agent in fireworks as SrCO3 (red sparks).
      • The article might have made an error, instead we are referring to Strontium Sulfate (SRSO4)
    • Metallic Titanium (as sponge or powder) is used in fireworks, as is TiO2, and produces white sparks.
      • Pure Titanium is almost NEVER used in structures.  An alloy, most commonly Ti-6Al-4V (6% Al, 4% V) is, and but this may be another error.
      • Titanium has been used extensively in medical implants since the 1960s.
      • Titanium began to hit bicycle frames in the 1970s. (With unimpressive results until the early 1990s)
    • Cerium has the following applications:
      • “Flints” used in lighters and fire starters (Ferrocerium and Mischmetal).
      • Fine polishing of glass.
      • Phosphors in fluorescent lights and CRTs (in the latter application, they keep the screen from darkening over tiem).
      • Catalytic converters in automobiles.
      • The nitrate is used in ointments for treating severe burns. 
      • Medical implants like artificial hips.

    The person wearing a clip-on tie was someone who, in a pinch, had to work machines, because if a clip on gets caught in a machine, it comes off, and a real tie pulls you in. This would imply that they are not that senior.  (It was the first and only instruction on fashion that I got in E-School)

    Though a number of sources are saying Boeing, Kaye specifically eschews this link, because pure Titanium is not used in airframes.

    His conclusion, that, “The tie was likely in a plant that manufactured cathode ray tubes,” is one that I would agree with.  (Note that many of the news reports misquote him and point the finger at Boeing)

    In fact, the Strontium and Cerium would tend to indicate this sort of application.

    I am unaware of any normal application for Titanium in CRT manufacturer, but perhaps for a high end application, say something made by Tektronix, which is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, which located just outside of Portland, where flight 305 originated.

    I don’t think that Cooper survived the jump, so I would look at people who vanished, or abruptly quit at Tektronix or its local suppliers, at around that time.

        Good News from the Borg*

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        Lucasfilm has announced that there will not be a CGI version of Princess/General Leia in any future Star Wars films:

        In the wake of actor and writer Carrie Fisher’s tragic passing in December, reports about the current Star Wars trilogy have been full of questions and guesses. What exactly should we expect from the popular character of Princess Leia in the remaining two episodes, and how will the film’s producers deal with her original actor not being able to complete Leia’s plot arc?

        Lucasfilm took the unusual step of confirming one major detail about the series’ future on Friday, announcing that the company does not intend to recreate the actor’s persona using digital means.

        Telling fans that “we don’t normally respond to fan or press speculation,” Lucasfilm published a statement at the StarWars.com blog confirming that the Disney-owned company “has no plans to digitally recreate Carrie Fisher’s performance as Princess or General Leia Organa.”

        The statement, which also paid tribute to the actor (“[we] will always strive to honor everything [Fisher] gave to Star Wars”), doesn’t specify which projects Lucasfilm’s producers may be referring to. Multiple outlets have reported that Fisher had completed her work acting in the upcoming, untitled eighth episode, and many of those outlets published follow-up reports claiming that the character of Leia Organa had been set to play a major role in Episode IX. Without going into specifics, Lucasfilm’s statement clearly isn’t a retroactive one in terms of claiming that the company would never produce a CGI version of Fisher.

        Of course, this is NOT a categoral statement, and this IS Disney, and the mouse has been seduced by the Dark Side and delights in violating the Prime Directive,† at least since the Eisner days, but it appears that for the immediate future at least, we won’t see a CGI Carrie Fisher.

        Still, we need to keep a close eye on Disney, and J.J. Abrams, and if anyone on the inside gets wind of this, they need to go public, and go all, “Danger, Will Robinson!”, on Disney.‡

        *Yes, I know that I am mixing Star Wars and Star Trek, likely pissing off both groups. This is intentional. I have no life, and I live to screw with all of you.
        †I did say that I was going to f$#@ with all of you, didn’t I?
        ‡Seriously, I said that I would be f%$#ing with all of you. How much more do I have to do before I become an object of scorn and derision? Seriously, isn’t this enough to win me the medals of damnation? Must I put half a dozen children on a spit, and toast them at the flame that comes out of my mouth?€
        €Apologies to Christopher Fry, playwright of The Lady’s Not for Burning, but whenever I have the opportunity to use that speech, I will.

        This is Obvious in any Cursory Reading of Dilbert Cartoons

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        It turns out that the whole open office setup, ditching offices for cubicles, or worse open desks, is damaging to worker productivity:

        Four years ago, Chris Nagele did what many other technology executives have done before — he moved his team into an open concept office.

        His staff had been exclusively working from home, but he wanted everyone to be together, to bond and collaborate more easily. It quickly became clear, though, that Nagele had made a huge mistake. Everyone was distracted, productivity suffered and the nine employees were unhappy, not to mention Nagele himself.

        I need to make a note here: American management sees employee misery as an independent good.

        It is believed that if your employees are happy, the consultants believe that you are leaving money on the table.

        ………

        Numerous companies have embraced the open office — about 70% of US offices are open concept — and by most accounts, very few have moved back into traditional spaces with offices and doors. But research that we’re 15% less productive, we have immense trouble concentrating and we’re twice as likely to get sick in open working spaces, has contributed to a growing backlash against open offices.

        Since moving, Nagele himself has heard from others in technology who say they long for the closed office lifestyle. “Many people agree — they can’t stand the open office,” he says. “They never get anything done and have to do more work at home.”

        ………

        What’s more, certain open spaces can negatively impact our memory. This is especially true for hotdesking, an extreme version of open plan working where people sit wherever they want in the work place, moving their equipment around with them.

        This does not surprise me.  It has always been my experience.

        Of course, it’s cheaper in the short run, and as I noted above, it makes workers miserable, so it is like catnip to so called business experts.

        We Used to Make Things That Worked in This Country

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        Now, after a development timeline that stretches back into the last century, the US Navy still cannot get it’s Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching System (EMALS) to work:

        The US Navy is having difficulties with its latest aircraft carrier’s Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching System (EMALS) – the same system which the UK mooted fitting to its new Queen Elizabeth-class carriers.

         The US Department of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOTE) revealed yesterday, in its end-of-year report [PDF] for financial year 2016, that the EMALS fitted to the new nuclear-powered carrier USS Gerald R. Ford put “excessive airframe stress” on aircraft being launched.

         This stress “will preclude the Navy from conducting normal operations of the F/A-18A-F and EA-18G from CVN 78”, according to DOTES, which said the problem had first been noticed in 2014.

         In addition, EMALS could not “readily” be electrically isolated for maintenance, which DOTE warned “will preclude some types of EMALS and AAG (Advanced Arresting Gear) maintenance during flight operations”, decreasing their operational availability.

        Ignoring the obvious 1970s era joke, “Gerald Ford stumbles again,” this is a complete cock up.

        The selling point of EMALS was two fold, that it could be tailored to reduce stress on airframes, and that it would be more reliable than its predecessor.

        It appears not to be delivering these features, and it is behind schedule and over budget.

        This sh%$ really has to stop.

        Linkage

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        Wicked bad day at the office:

        It Really Is the Gift That Keeps on Giving

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        The F-35, of course.

        In this case, it is the C model, intended to operate on carriers.

        First they had to relocate the arrestor hook because it did not work, and now pilots are experiencing violent oscillations during catapult launch🙁paid subscription required)

        Fleet pilots say the violent vertical oscillations seen during carrier launches of the U.S. Navy’s F-35 variant are a safety concern, even as the Pentagon races to fix the problem.

         One of the most critical and dangerous phases of flight for Navy pilots is the launch, when an aircraft is shot from the carrier by a steam-driven catapult. For the F-35C carrier variant, pilots discovered a complex problem during recent at-sea testing: excessive vertical oscillations, or a bouncing effect, during takeoff.

         Pilots who conducted training onboard the carrier USS George Washington during the latest set of ship trials said these oscillations were “a safety concern,” the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) wrote in its most recent annual report.

         “Excessive vertical oscillations during catapult launches make the F-35C operationally unsuitable for carrier operations, according to fleet pilots,” DOT&E wrote.

         Pilots reported the oscillations were so severe that they could not read flight-critical data, DOT&E said. The oscillations caused most pilots to lock their harness during launch, which made emergency switches hard to reach. The pilots deemed this situation “unacceptable and unsafe,” DOT&E wrote.

         The Navy has informed the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) that it considers this problem a “must fix” deficiency.

         ………

         [Program Chief L. General Christopher] Bogdan downplayed the problem, saying the oscillations only occur at very light gross takeoff weights.

        The first thing to note is that Gen. Bogdan is Air Force, and either has no clue as to carrier ops, or is pimping the F-35 furiously without regard to the truth. (Or both)

        Light weight takeoff are routine.  They are used for things like pilot qualification and freshers and ferrying aircraft to and from land bases when the ship returns to port.

        The second thing is that they have been doing catapult launches of the F-35 for about ½ a decade now, and they have only now just spotted this.

        At this point, I expect the software to start shutting down with the plane issuing the verbal notification “Baba Booey.”

        Our Glorious Defense Procurement System

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        Yes, the most expensive defense procurement program in history, the F-35, is still not ready for prime time, with its maintenance software still unable to support aircraft operations:

        Key software for the troubled F-35 fighter jet has been repeatedly delayed, causing problems for the British armed forces as they wait for Americans to iron out the bugs.

        The F-35’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is the heart of the support offering bundled with the F-35 by its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin.

        The latest version of ALIS – version 2.0.2 – has been delayed by at least six months and counting, according to the US Department of Defense’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), and units are instead stuck with version 2.0.1.3.

        “It has yet to successfully complete testing and likely will not be fielded until early 2017,” according to the F-35 section of DOT&E’s annual report [PDF, 62 pages] to the US Congress. Version 2.0.2 will allow military personnel, rather than engine manufacturers and current maintenance contractors Pratt & Whitney, to read and act upon engine health data, but has not yet been deployed.

        Although the release version of ALIS is intended to be version 3, with various beta releases bringing incremental extra capabilities until the release of v3, “delays in ALIS 2.0.2 development have also delayed the development of ALIS 3.0,” said DOT&E. This, warned the director, would result in key functionality being released as updates to v3.0 instead of being baked into the “final” software package deployed to F-35 customers – including the UK.

        ………

        The 62-page report also revealed that the F-35 is temperamental when ground crew plug their Panasonic Toughbook diagnostic laptops into the aircraft and sync them: “In many instances, maintainers must attempt to synch several PMAs [portable maintenance aids – the laptops] with an aircraft before finding one that will successfully connect.”

        ………

        Moreover, testing of ALIS up until 2016 took place on “representative hardware” instead of actual aircraft and ground base equipment. “The current closed environment does not adequately represent the variety of ways in which the Services operate ALIS in different environments,” DOR&E drily noted.

        There was also a significant problem the first time that US personnel tried deploying F-35s and ALIS away from their home base:

        …they had a great deal of difficulty using ALIS on the local base network. After several days of troubleshooting, Information Technology personnel and ALIS administrators determined that they had to change several settings on the base network at Mountain Home and in the web interface application (i.e., Internet Explorer) to permit users to log on to ALIS. One of these changes involved lowering the security setting on the base network, an action that may not be compatible with required cybersecurity and network protection standards in place.

        ALIS is used by naval and air force personnel to determine in real time the state of the aircraft, view flight plans, and review each jet’s entire history from the moment it leaves the factory. It is an end-to-end management and planning system for pilots, maintainers and commanders alike – the ultimate vendor lock-in.

        Controversially, it also sends each jet’s history back to the US, regardless of which country actually owns that aircraft – though Lockheed has promised it won’t read the pilots’ names.

        (emphasis mine)

        That “Vendor Lock-In” snark points to one of the more significant problems with the program, that the inmates (Lockheed-Martin) are running the asylum.

        At every step of the process, LM has been allowed to design the system to ensure that it sits athwart all operations extracting a toll, and the results have been buggy under-performing and opaque systems.

        Compare this to the latest Saab Gripen, which is on time and on budget, thanks largely to a reliance on modular software and the use off the shelf systems wherever possible.  (Here and here)

        Lockheed used the same architecture for the F-22, and updates are tortuous and expensive.

        Even if this plane achieves all of its performance goals, it will be unaffordable for many nations from a direct operating cost perspective as a result.