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| Joseph Horne Wagon Train 1862 |
Liz Hinds talks about Mormons emigrating from Europe to the U. S. A. I thought the Mormon religion was exclusively American. She has a bunch of links.
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| Peter the Great Statue, Moscow, Russia |
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| St. Petersburg Russia Ring Road |
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| Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo |
Defence Blog tells us that Lockheed-Martin, the Pentagon's number one weapons supplier,
. . . was awarded $16,8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract in support of the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo efforts.
I like the "cost-plus-incentive-fee" bit. How fast can we pour money down the drain?
But it does get me thinking about torpedos. The Wikipedia article about the Mark 48 tells us:
The swashplate piston engine is fueled by Otto fuel II, a monopropellant which combusts to drive the engine.
Swashplate engines are kind of cool, they are compact, roughly the shape of a Wankel rotary engine like you can find in the Mazda sports car, but Otto fuel II, that's something else. Being a monopropellant means you don't need an oxidizer. Near as I can tell it's based on nitrogylcerine but they have done things to it to make it stable. It gets sprayed into the combustion chamber and ignited with a spark where the resulting explosion drives the piston. It's nasty stuff, you don't want to get any on you and the exhaust fumes are deadly poison. In a torpedo the exhaust gets pumped into the ocean where it is seriously diluted, so it probably doesn't kill too many fish. Probably.
Now I am reminded of the Russian nuclear powered torpedo. Putin announced it a couple of years ago but I haven't heard much about it since then.
Poseidon is big - over five feet in diameter and 80 feet long - which makes it like 35 times the volume of the Mark 48 and likely 35 times the mass.
Now I am reminded of the search for the missing flight 370 airliner in the Indian Ocean.
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INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released) |
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| XIAN Y-20 Kunpeng |
Pretty cool. Airliners fly at 40,000 feet. The U2 can get up to 70,000 feet. This balloon was at 60,000 feet. Balloons can get higher. Remember Felix, the balloon jumper? That was from 127,000 feet.
I'm reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer about the 1996 Mt. Everest climbing disaster. Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet tall. Base camp, starting point for most every climging expedition, is at 15,000 feet. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) requires pilots to have supplemental oxygen if they are flying over 12,000 feet. I've been up to around 10,000 feet while hiking and I got to tell you there's no air up there.
Via My Daily Kona
P.S. Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us that the tallest mountain, measured from the Earthś center is not Mt. Everest, but Mt. Chimborazo in South America:
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| Tallest Mountains in South America |
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| Goodthink Inc. |
I trust that everyone understands that a “hate group” is a group that all goodthinkers hate. It is an official bogyman, bugaboo, or Emanuel Goldstein, and all goodthinkers hate it because hating it make them good. Expressing their hatred serves goodthinkers as a shibboleth; experiencing this hatred serves goodthinkers as a mind-melding source of unity; acting out this hatred drains the hostility goodthinkers would otherwise feel for other goodthinkers. A “hate group” is simply a lot of rubbish invented by the Party, and that is why, like a comic-book super villain, a hate group never wins or disappears.
First the Dyson vacuum bit the dust. Yesterday my computer flaked out, problem with the memory cards I installed last week/month/year whenever. Last night the trash pump started making ugly noises. Got on the phone this morning looking for a replacement pump. Talked to people working for small companies in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Texas and every call was as clear as a bell, not like when I try to talk to someone in some giant soulless corporation like a credit card or drug company.
I just replaced those memory cards, so they should be around here somewhere. After precious minutes of rummaging around last night, I was stumped. But this morning I had a flash that they were in a stack of boxes stacked on top of my miniature tool chest in my office, and sure enough, there they were.
You know what ChapGPT is going to be used for? Answering customer service calls for giant soulless corporations. Most people like to talk to other people. Only a small percentage of people prefer reading. Answering calls from customers takes time, and time is money, and most of those phone calls are just nonsense, requiring only a tiny bit of information, information that is totally inaccessible from the outside, information that is stored away in some data base, but only trained operatives are able to enter the sacred chamber to retrieve the required data. Yeah, that's what AI is going to be used for and it will mostly work, but when it fucks up, which it inevitably will, it will be impossible to fix.
P. S. Remember this?
“Doctors are taught 'when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras,' meaning a doctor should first think about what is a more common—and potentially more likely—diagnosis.
The trash pump wasn't making the noise, it was the adjacent sump pump. It's a tall pump and it had fallen over and the float had gotten stuck against the side of the bucket. Question now is, why did it fall over? Must have been Russian disinformation. The sump is totally dry, like there hasn't been any water in there for years, which indicates that all the work we did to mitigate water seeping into the crawl space actually worked. Amazing. Good thing in any case, a new trash pump was going to cost me $500.
Lidia Poët (1855 – 1949) was the first modern female Italian lawyer. Her disbarring led to a movement to allow women to practice law and hold public office in Italy. - Wikipedia
In the show she is a cute, bright pixie, member of a wealthy family. I mean we don't really care about the peasants do we? She's basically a 19th century Nancy Drew, using her wits to solve a murder in each episode, and or course exonerating the falsely charged fool who has gotten arrested.
19th century technology is in evidence: she has a typewriter, she trades a priceless Ming vase for a bicycle, the concept of using fingerprints to identify a person is known, though not commonly accepted. And the prosecutor's office has a volumetric glove, which is basically a mechanical lie detector.
The first scientific lie detector test was invented by Cesare Lombrosso in 1895. This was known as the Volumetric Glove. The subject's hand was placed in a container of water. The amount of water displaced as the subject was asked questions indicated peripheral vasoconstriction, and thus the amount of stress present. - Polygraph Solutions
Cesare Lombroso, a famed criminologist, described a primitive lie detector called a volumetric glove in his 1876 book Criminal Man: "The glove is filled with air, and the greater or smaller the pressure exercised on the air by the pulsation of the blood in the veins of the hand acts on an aerial column. . . . [T]his chamber supports a lever carrying an indicator which rises and falls with the greater or slighter flow of blood in the hand." - Chegg
Mosso was encouraged in his studies of the emotions by Lombroso, his tutor and contemporary. His work is of unusual interest to the student of deception, particularly his studies of fear and of its influence on the heart and respiration. As early as 1875 Mosso demonstrated, by means of a "plethysmograph" (an instrument for measuring blood pressure and pulse changes) periodic undulations in man's blood pressure caused by the respiration cycle; " and his ingenuous studies of the circulation of the blood in the brain opened up new avenues for the study of the influences of fear. In 1895 he described a new device for measuring blood pressure, giving credit to Vierordt for first measuring man's blood pressure, from the outside, in 1855. - Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
The device in the show is a mechanical device that holds the subject's wrist and records the changes in pressure on a black tape that also runs through the device.
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| Dark Voyage by Alan Furst |
Great story about the adventures of a tramp steamer and her captain sailing around Europe in 1941.
Captain DeHaan and his ship, the Dutch tramp steamer Noordendam, are co-opted by British intelligence to carry a load of commandos to a headland on the north coast of Tunisia in the Mediterranean. The object of the commando raid is to take out a German post that is watching ship traffic using Bolometers, a new, high tech, whiz bang infra-red detector gizmo. They drop anchor just offshore in the middle of the night, the commandos take small boats into shore and do what commandos do. Naturally, there are complications, but they mostly get away, raise anchor and steam away without anyone being the wiser. Just another tramp steamer sailing east in the Mediterranean.
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| Thermal Imaging Sensor |
I didn't find any good pictures of WW2 German Infrared Detectors, but I did find this very cool image in a story about current infrared research.
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Breguet 730 Flying Boat
Page 55. Never flew during the war. |
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| Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero Page 55. |
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Browning GP35 Automatic
The captain's gun |
They dock in Alexandria, Egypt, where all is chaos as the Germans have launched an invasion of Crete. Our ship gets loaded with munitions along with a couple of tanks and a couple of airplanes. They convoy to Crete. No sooner are they docked than the harbor is attacked by a squadron of Stuka dive bombers. The anti-aircraft guns on the British warships dispose of most of them, but they do some damage. Our ship and crew escape with only minor damage.
Nothing like a little success to get you assigned more of the same. Now it's back to the west end of the Mediterranean where they pick up a cargo of black-ops radio gear which includes some largish antennae masts and trucks to haul them. They have to sail north around England and Ireland, across the North Sea and into the Baltic, passing between German occupied Denmark and neutral Sweden. Somehow they manage to arrive at their rendezvous at the southern tip of Sweden, in the middle of the night again, and manage to unload their cargo onto a fishing trawler that makes several trips carrying the gear the mile to shore. It is well after dawn when they finish, but they are underway by the time the regular Nazi patrol aircraft comes by.
Now they are home free, all they have to do is navigate the minefield between Denmark and Sweden, the same one they had to navigate on the way in, but a German patrol boat spots them and decides to inquire. Well the jigs up now, sailing under false colors, looks like they are heading for a German prison or worse. Well, except the mess boy and the cook deliver coffee to the bridge, and boy do they deliver. The guard gets a coffee pot to the head and the Nazi lieutenant gets a knife in the back. Their ship is faster than the German boat by maybe two knots, but with a thick cloud of black smoke, night falling and confusing radio messages indicating chaos onboard the ship, they manage to evade the patrol boat.
With the Germans alerted to their presence, the way west seems closed, so they head East to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania). They arrive just as Germany has forgotten their pact with Russia and has mounted an attack. The port is under attack, so they pick up a load of refugees and head north toward Finland. Their ship is part of a rag tag convoy that gets attacked by German airplanes. Their ship is damaged, damaged, damaged, but it keeps limping along well enough to carry them aground on a Finnish island.
On page 38, Captain DeHaan reviews the 40 book library he keeps in his cabin.
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J. P. Sauer & Sohn, Suhl CAL 7,65
Page 222 - The Nazi lieutenant's gun |
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| Map of Noordendam's Travels |
Tuesday, February 7
My wife and I have both come down with some kind of bug. She was running a fever of 100 degrees yesterday and feeling pretty miserable, so I suggested she might want to take a couple of aspirin or something. She declined, saying running a fever was beneficial. Now I was confused because I remember hearing both what she was telling me and recommendations to take drugs to reduce the fever, so I asked the Google and got this back:
Evidence shows that fever is beneficial to the healing process, triggering the immune response and preventing viruses and bacteria from replicating. One study showed that flu sufferers who suppressed their fevers with medications were sick for more than three days longer than those who took no medication.
So now I remember that it is high fevers that are dangerous, like 104 degrees. A piddly little 100 degree fever is nothing to worry about.
Wednesday, February 8
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| Suja Organic Immunity Defense Shot With Turmeric And Probiotics - 2 Fl. Oz. |
I open feedly like I often do and these were top three headlines:
Nord Stream Sabotage Was CIA, US Navy Covert Op: Seymour Hersh Bombshell Prompts White House Response - Tyler Durden
If case you haven't heard FORMER New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh
"has concluded the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise."
If he wasn't a former reporter before now, he definitely is one now.
I claimed the same thing five months ago. Nice to have someone confirm my feelings, even if Seymour has been cast out from Biden's mafia.
P. S. Hersh's story on Substack.
Don't know who Hersh is? I didn't. He's been a gadfly since I was knee high to the proverbial grasshopper.
Part 2 - Louisiana
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| Paguna Mine, Bougainville The central pit is over one mile across. |
Panguna is one of the largest copper reserves in the world, having an estimated reserve of one billion tonnes of ore copper and twelve million ounces of gold. The site was at one time the world's largest open-pit copper/gold mine. The mine caused devastating environmental issues on the island, and the company was responsible for poisoning the entire length of the Jaba River, causing birth defects, as well as the extinction of the flying fox on the island. Dissatisfaction with the company led to an uprising in 1988, led by Francis Ona, a Panguna landowner and commander of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. The outcome of the uprising was the Bougainville conflict, between the BRA, who sought secession from PNG, and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. The ten-year conflict resulted in over 20,000 deaths, as well as the eventual closure of the mine on 15 May 1989, and the complete withdrawal of BCL personnel by 24 March 1990. It has remained closed to this day.
I don't understand exactly the description for mww, just that they are doing some number crunching on the data.
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| Princess of Orange Possible future queen of Holland |
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| Dassault Falcon 900EX |
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| Noordeinde Palace |
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| Waco Texas airport, dam, and confluence of the North Bosque and Brazos Rivers |
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