The Azadi Tower is one of Tehran's landmarks, once marking the westernmost entrance to the city. The tower is about 150 feet tall and is clad in cut marble. It was commissioned by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, to mark the 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire and was completed in 1971.
B-25J Mitchell “Maid in the Shade” was built in early 1944. She’s very rare – one of 34 B-25Js still flying. Nearly 10,000 were produced.
Used mainly as a low altitude strafe and skip bomber. Was used in America’s first large-scale bombing offensive in the Philippines - sunk 8 ships and shot down 5 planes.
Combat History – Based out of Serraggia Airbase, Corsica from Nov 1 – Dec 31, 1944.
This story is set in the 1970s, near as I can tell.
I'm gonna give this book a 4. I was gonna give it a solid 3.5, but goodreads doesn't allow half points. First off, I was able to read the whole thing in four days. Given that it often takes me months to get through a book, that's pretty good. Of course, time spent reading the book depends on whether the story gets a hold of me or not. This one has espionage, a doll, a dollop of science, and a heaping spoonful of the KGB (Soviet secret police), so yeah, right up my alley.
The story tells us of Bekuv, a Soviet MASER expert defecting to the USA, his wife and the CIA agents and MI6 agent assigned to pick him up. They pick him up in the Sahara desert, take him to Washington D. C. Talking to Bekuv, our agents start to hone in on a leak somewhere in the US government. Eventually their focus lands on one guy and the whole story explodes. There is a hostage scene at the airport that makes no sense, but then maybe if you are suddenly feeling this extreme pressure, you wouldn't be making any sense either. So maybe realistic. Probably wouldn't be handled like this now, but we've had fifty years of studying hostage situations, so we might do better.
Now we're back in the Sahara desert at a secret Soviet satellite communications station. The Soviets have set up shop in an old fortress with sixty foot walls. Inside the fort are two satellite antennas, each sixty feet in diameter, along with a helicopter. I'm thinking such an establishment would need to be at least 500 feet square. I looked for old fortress and satellite stations and found plenty of old satellite stations and plenty of old forts, so many that I haven't been able sort them all out. Did not find a Russian satellite station set up in an old fort, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.
Both the US and Soviet governments want Bekuv because his knowledge of MASERs, but his interest lies entirely in communicating with alien civilizations. Quasar CTA-102 get mentioned on page 52. Look it up on Wikipedia and we find this line:
"In 1963 Nikolai Kardashev proposed that the then-unidentified radio source could be evidence of a Type II or III extraterrestrial civilization on the Kardashev scale."
I made a map with all the places mentioned in the book, well, at least all of the ones I made note of. The map also has a couple of giant Soviet radio telescopes cause that's what our man Bekuv would have liked to get his hands on.
The Virgo interferometer is a large-scale scientific instrument near Pisa, Italy, for detecting gravitational waves. The detector is a Michelson interferometer, which can detect the minuscule length variations in its two 3 km (1.9 mi) arms induced by the passage of gravitational waves. The required precision is achieved using many systems to isolate it from the outside world, including keeping its mirrors and instrumentation in an ultra-high vacuum and suspending them using complex systems of pendula.
Between its periodic observations, the detector is upgraded to increase its sensitivity. The observation runs are performed in collaboration with other similar detectors, including the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories (LIGO) in the United States and the Japanese Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA), because cooperation between several detectors is crucial for detecting gravitational waves and pinpointing their origin.
Virgo was conceived and built when gravitational waves were only a prediction of general relativity. The project, named after the Virgo galaxy cluster, was approved in 1992 and construction was completed in 2003. After several years without detection, Virgo was shut down in 2011 for the "Advanced Virgo" upgrades. In 2015, the first observation of gravitational waves was made by the two LIGO detectors, while Virgo was still being upgraded. Virgo resumed observations in early August 2017, making its first detection on 14 August (together with the LIGO detectors); this was quickly followed by the detection of the GW170817 gravitational wave, the only one also observed with classical methods (optical, gamma-ray, X-ray and radio telescopes) as of 2024.
I liked the look of this picture, peaceful, calm, tropical paradise, sunshine, blue skies, the whole kit and caboodle. Google image search* comes back with a long list of places that use this image, for some unknown value of long. I mean, I hardly ever go beyond the first page of Google's search results, and if I do I really have to be in a digging frame of mine. Every once in a blue moon, something on the second page will pay off.
Google search results all pointed to Hole in the Wall, Coffee Bay, Wild Coast, South Africa.
Looking on Google Maps, I could not find this place. Finally figured out that while all the search results pointed to Hole in the Wall and Coffee Bay, the two places are six miles apart. Looking at the map, I wondered if there were any street view images. I was expecting any, but Google has sent cars down the roads. Pull up a street view image, swing around and boom! There we are.
In 1991 MTS Oceanos sunk five miles off the coast of Coffee Bay. The South African Air Force sent 16 (!) helicopters to rescue passengers. All 571 passengers were rescued, no thanks to the Captain and the crew who were among the first people to abandon ship.
* Google image search - Google's search page looks like this:
Notice that there are two icons at the right end of the data entry line. The first is a microphone and the I believe the second is a camera. Click on the camera icon and you can upload an image, or enter the URL of image, if it's on the net.
Is including explanations like this a good thing? I've been pointing and clicking for 40 odd years and I have probably picked up a few tricks to make my keyboard battles a little easier. I tend to assume that all of these little tricks are common knowledge, but I really have no idea. I am sure there are other methods of doing this, especially if you are using a smart phone, but I am not keen on my smart phone. To me, it's like a wrench. I use it when I need it and then I put it away. I don't spend hours cuddled up it. I have my desktop machine for that. It has a much bigger screen. Looking at pictures on a smartphone is stupid. I don't care how high your resolution is, the image is just too friggin' small. Bring it close enough so that it occupies the same field of view as a desktop display and you are going to be cross-eyed.
AMC always built quirky cars that stood out from the more mainstream models produced by Detroit's Big Three, but the 1965 and 1966 AMC Rambler Marlin proved too much even for AMC fans, with sales totaling only 10,327 in 1966 and a paltry 4,547 in 1966. A redesign in 1967 caused sales to fall even further to just 2,545 units, leading to the model's cancellation after that year.
The ALn 668 (Automotrice Leggera a nafta, Light Diesel motor car) series is a family of diesel railcars built by Fiat Ferroviaria between the 1950s and the 1980s. The trains were built for the Italian public railway company Ferrovie dello Stato (FS), now Trenitalia as well as many Italian private railway operators. - Wikipedia
In my mind, steam locomotives have two cylinders, one on either side of the front of the engine. The piston in each cylinder drives the wheels on that side through a connecting rod. Turns out that some locos have three and even four cylinders. The Royal Scot has three as shown in the drawing above. This means that the straight axle between the second pair of driver wheels has been replaced with a crankshaft. The center cylinder is slightly elevated so that the connecting rod clears the axle of the first pair of driver wheels.
The three cylinders are high on my list of unique designs that never took off over here in the US.
3-cylinder locos had a speacial exaust chuff as well, from the four chuffs per driver revolution on normal engines, 3 cylinders had six chuffs, making for some very interesting “stack talk”
While here in the US they never really took off, they became fairly common across Europe. Among some notable European 3 cylinders is the A4, thats right, the “Mallard” was 3 cylindered, along with her sisters who still operate today!
[3 tiny pictures that purport to show the center cylinder of 3 cylinder locomotive. They made no sense to me. Perhaps they would if you were familiar with these locomotives.]
The center cylinder yielded more power in a smaller locomotive, the #12 (pictures above) is an 0-8-0, but still produced more than 60,000 lbs tractive effort! Thats more than some 4-8-2’s and 4-6-4’s of the time period!
Unfortuantely, the 3rd cylinder was difficult to service, and the costs related to maintenance outweight those saved by fuel economy. These engines became known as “Roundhouse Queens” as they sometimes spent longer under repair than in operation.
This is probably more than you wanted to know,
The Great Western Archive has audio recordings of a variety of steam locomotives. Simple, i.e. not compound, engines sound different than compound engines.
For a while I was thinking that steam locomotives could have been improved by using steam engines with several smaller cylinders running at high speed, like a diesel engine, but that would have meant using gears to transmit power to the wheels, and making large gears that would take the load may not been economically feasible in early 20th century. The Shay locomotives built for logging industry did in fact do this, but they weren't carrying the enormous loads that mainline freight trains did. Diesels got around this problem by using electric generators and motors. I suspect electric motor technology in the early 20th century wasn't up to the task.
I'm kinda partial to early 50's Mercurys. I suspect this one is from Indiana. It showed up at a car show there in 2020. There's another photo on this page, about 5/6 of the way to the end (it's a long page). From the same show. Custom car builders are nuts. Can you imagine the amount of work that goes into chopping the top? The pillars and doors have to be cut, bent, welded and smoothed into their new positions. The window glass has to be cut down, and the trim and the weatherstripping has to all be customized to fit. I suppose if you are familiar with the work it wouldn't take you too long, no more than a month or so, but it's going to require a multitude of skills.
The BMW 507 is a grand touring convertible that was produced by German automobile manufacturer BMW from 1956 until 1959. Initially intended to be exported to the United States at a rate of thousands per year, it ended up being too expensive, resulting in a total production figure of 252 cars and heavy financial losses for BMW.
Engine is a 3.2 litre OHV V8 producing 150 horsepower. Elvis Presley owned two.
While the true origins of the nameplate are unknown by Ford historians, the consensus is that is derived from Montclair, New Jersey, an affluent community located near its then-new Mahwah Assembly facility.
Mahwah Assembly was a Ford Motor Company manufacturing plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, 30 miles from New York City. It occupied over 172 acres. . . .
The factory began operations in 1955, and was closed in 1980. . . .
Mahwah Assembly produced 6 million cars in the 25 years it operated before the last car rolled off the line on June 20, 1980. At the time of its completion, it was the largest motor vehicle assembly plant in the United States. The Ford plant, along with other businesses such as American Brake Shoe and Foundry Company, helped contribute to the economic development of the town and its reputation for low home property taxes. The Mahwah town sports teams remain named Thunderbirds in honor of the Ford plant. . . .
Bruce Springsteen's 1982 song "Johnny 99" references the closure of the Mahwah plant in its opening line.
Horses are great. Big, dangerous, and they take a lot of your time. But they are very cool.
Jigsaw Planet lets you choose the number of pieces you want to tackle from just a few up to 300. 300 piece puzzles take a while. Around 150 pieces is my preference these days. They take a little work but can knocked out pretty quickly, I'm guesstimating about 20 minutes.
Good looking room. Decorilla agrees. My wife remodeled the main floor of our house. She's in the process of decorating it. It looks pretty nice, too nice even, I'm afraid to go up there, afraid I'll spoil the ambiance.
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