Aliens

Soldiers 'prepare for a mission' (kill time making wisecracks) aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington somewhere on the far side of the world. U.S. Navy photo by Everett Allen.

Who knows what they are actually doing. The red light and their gear makes it look like a set from a new science fiction movie.

Dark Matters

The ultimate aim of the darkness is to capture souls, and fear is their most effective tool because fear energy forms a barrier between the soul and the consciousness, thus literally keeping a fearful person “in the dark.”

That is why time and again we have urged you not to fall prey to grave predictions or claims, and you have seen that the timing ascribed to those kinds of events has come and gone without any of the catastrophes coming to fruition.

But the majority of the population doesn’t know how fearful feelings affect them personally or that the collective feelings create world conditions or that the dark ones need fear energy so they can continue fomenting devastation and death.

Matthew Ward, Aug 2 2012.

Stolen entire from World Boat. Matthew Ward is one of the pioneers of the Jesus music genre, later to be called contemporary Christian music. - Wikipedia

I'm not a big fan of Christian music, and I'm not a big fan of taking the advice from celebrities, but I think Matthew is describing our current media saturated environment very well.

P.S. In case you don't recognize the scene, it is Senator Palpatine's office from one of the Star Wars movies. Sad that I don't remember which one.

Inspired by a post on Dustbury.

Quarantine

Monrovia, Liberia. A US airman uses razor wire to delimit an Ebola treatment center. 

(AFP Photo/Pascal Guyot)

We've been watching The Blacklist. It's a very formulaic cop show with lots of secret spy stuff. One episode from last season had a guy die in a bank. An official somebody was on the scene in seconds and declared that he had died of a contagious disease and placed the bank under quarantine, which means the coppers drew guns on all the customers in the bank who were rushing for the door. On one hand it was very silly, on the other hand the show was only 40 odd minutes long, so it's understandable that the writers would want to compress a week-long procedure into a two minute long scene. I mean, we have a bunch more stuff we have to cram in here.

All this talk about Ebola reminds me of Typhoid Mary, which is where a lot of these public health issues first got some attention.

The basic premise of The Blacklist is that there are all kinds of people operating outside the law, and some of them are very organized and very powerful, and possibly insane. For instance, some of the tragedies we hear about, like where a ferry capsizes or an airliner crashes, are not accidents at all, but deliberate acts taken to kill one particular person (see "The Freelancer"). All the other people who die in the tragic accident are of no concern to the killers, just so much collateral damage.

The same idea was floated in The Madmen of Benghazi: the 747 was blown up over Lockerbie Scotland in order to kill one person. It wasn't done to call attention to themselves, that was a mere side effect. What's worse is the person they were trying to kill was not even on the plane. It's doubtful the "true" reason will ever be proven, and even if it is proven to some people's satisfaction, there will always be some who won't accept that version of the story.

There are a couple of reasons I like The Blacklist. One is that I like the idea that there vast criminal operations going on all over the world. I much prefer it to the Disneyfied version we keep telling ourselves. The other is the idea that someone not restrained by rules of evidence and those nasty constitutional amendments can obtain all the information they need to make a snap judgement. Oh, yeah, forget about the 'reasonable doubt' thing as well. All we need is one good whiff and boom! We know who the culprit is. Makes for a much more satisfying story.

Update: Posthip Scott sent me a link:

NBC's Medical Correspondent Is Quarantined for Ebola, Goes Out Anyway

Night Flight

Ernest K. Gann, author of Fate is the Hunter, mentions "Mermoz of l'Aeropostale", and down the rabbit hole I go.

Jean Mermoz and his office in Buenos Aires

He's referring to Jean Mermoz, French aviation pioneer. Established airmail routes to Argentina and Chile. Being an aviation pioneer means he had some misadventures.

Latecoere 25 3R LV-EAB in the markings of Aeroposta Argentina exhibited in the museum at Buenos Aires Aeroparque in 1975.

One Latécoère 25 was involved in a celebrated incident when it made a forced landing high in the Andes. Hitherto, flights between Buenos Aires and Santiago made a 1,000 km (620 mi) detour to avoid the mountains. On 2 March 1929, while searching for a safe route across the range, a Latécoère 25 piloted by Jean Mermoz was caught in a downdraft and forced down onto a plateau just 300 metres (1,000 ft) across at an altitude of 4,000 metres (12,000 ft). With his mechanic Alexandre Collenot and passenger, Count Henry de La Vaulx, Mermoz spent the next four days repairing and lightening the aircraft and making a clear path from it to the edge of the precipice. He then rolled it off the edge, diving to attain airspeed, and successfully reached Santiago. - Wikipedia

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was another French aviation pioneer, friend of Mermoz and author.
    He wrote Night Flight [1], a best seller in 1931 described as "lyrical" by Wikipedia. A few years later it was made into a movie. After its initial run it was locked away in MGM's vault for 70 years. Antoine, the author, didn't like the movie. Turner Classic Movies finally obtained the rights to show it and broadcast it in 2011. Got all this from the introduction to the movie on Vimeo.
    Antoine, being an aviation pioneer, had his own misadventures.

On 30 December 1935, at 2:45 a.m., after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his mechanic-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the speed record in a Paris-to-Saigon air race (called a raid) and win a prize of 150,000 francs. The crash site is thought to have been near the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.

Both Saint-Exupéry and Prévot miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous, leaving them with no idea of their location. Lost among the sand dunes, their sole supplies were strawberries, ten oranges, a thermos of sweet juice, chocolate, a handful of crackers, and a small ration of wine. The pair had only one day's worth of liquid. They both began to see mirages and experience auditory hallucinations, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third day, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment that saved their lives. The near brush with death would figure prominently in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, winner of several awards. Saint-Exupéry's classic novella The Little Prince, which begins with a pilot being marooned in the desert, is, in part, a reference to this experience. - Wikipedia

David O. Selznick, producer of Night Flight.
     I recognized this name immediately, but after I looked him up I wonder why. He died in 1965 and the only film of his that I know I've seen is Gone With The Wind, and that was 50 years ago.

Clarence Brown, famous as a film director, director of Night Flight.

Brown moved to Universal in 1924, and then to MGM, where he stayed until the mid-1950s. At MGM he was one of the main directors of their female stars–he directed Joan Crawford six times and Greta Garbo seven.
He not only made the difficult transition from silent cinema to sound cinema, but thrived there, proving himself to be an "actor's director": listening to his actors, respecting their instincts, and often incorporating their suggestions into scenes. In doing so, Brown created believable, under-played, naturalistic dialogue scenes stripped of melodrama, pulsing with the honest rhythms of real-life conversation. - Wikipedia

Shades of Quentin Tarantino.

[1] I think I inherited a copy of Night Flight, or maybe it was Wind, Sand and Stars, another one of his books. I tried to read it but it was too, I dunno, lyrical, maybe? In any case it wasn't my cup of tea.

Transcontinental Airmail

United States Contract Air Mail routes 1925–1930. The numbers on the routes are the Contract Air Mail (CAM) route numbers. The original, government-run transcontinental route is shown in a thicker, lighter-coloured, dotted line running East–West between San Francisco and New York.

Comrade Misfit furnished a link and down the rathole I go, wherein I eventually came across this story by John Schamel about how coast-to-coast airmail got started. It's just a little nuts. I found it on a couple of different sites, but because I didn't like the formatting I made my own copy which is more readable.

In the midst of this story I found this paragraph where he talks about beacons.

What resulted was the first ground based civilian navigation system in the world. Beacons were positioned every ten miles along the airway. At the top of a 51-foot steel tower was a 1 million candlepower-rotating beacon. Pilots could see the clear flash of light from a distance of 40 miles. Also at the top of the tower were two color-coded 100,000 candlepower course lights. These pointed up and down the airway. They were colored green, signifying an adjacent airfield, and red, signifying no airfield. The course lights also flashed a Morse code letter. The letter corresponded to the number of the beacon within a 100-mile segment of the airway. To determine their position, a pilot simply had to remember this phrase – “When Undertaking Very Hard Routes, Keep Direction By Good Methods” – and know which 100-mile segment they were on.

 Now why would they choose that particular sequence of letters? Let's see what the Morse Code actually looks like.


Looks like they picked codes that had some kind of rough approximation to the numbers. They also have the advantage of being shorter than numbers. Numbers in Morse code are all five blips, none of these has more than four.

I suspect that the erection of these towers caused several locations to be christened 'Beacon Hill'.

Gun Toting Pilots

On a recommendation from Comrade Misfit I'm reading Fate is the Hunter. Along about page 76 I encounter this:

"For example, we were suddenly authorized to carry our mail guns in our flight kits instead of strapping them, sheriff-wise to our belts."

A 'mail gun'? What the heck is a mail gun? Is it a gun-gun, or is it some kind of ticket puncher device, like a nail gun, that is used to, I dunno, punch the mail-bags? I go a-Googling, but I must not be holding my mouth right because I come up with bumpkis. So I asked the instigator, and she replied:

"Those who transported mail were once required to be armed. The airmail pilots in the `20s in their mail planes all carried guns. The airline routes in the `30s were all mail routes (it was the fees from the Post Office that kept the airlines from going broke), so the pilots were required to carry guns. TWA bought enough guns to have a standard-issue gun for that airline in 1931.

"I'm not sure when the requirement was ended."

So this business of airline pilots carrying guns is not new. And the internet doesn't know everything.

Infrared IFF

M1 Abrams tank firing calibration shot at Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, Oct. 1.

Saw this pic over at Military Photos dot net, and thought it was kind of cool. I mean, I like tanks (big, heavy, powerful machines, with big guns) and here we have a lance of fire shooting out to the right. But other than that, well nothing too special.
    Then someone asks what the brown panels are (you can see one on the back of the turret and one on the side) and the reply comes back that they are Infrared IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) devices that show up black on thermal imagers. They show up black because they are cooler. Whaaaaaa???? How can that be? They are just panels, no electronics, no internal mechanism, no refrigeration. This is just too weird, so I go wander down the rathole...

 

Seems a company called Cejay Engineering has come up with tape that has low emissivity in a select portion of the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Emissivity tells you how much infrared energy an object radiates in relation to its temperature. For most stuff the emissivity level is relatively high, so the radiation corresponds well with the object's temperature. Shiny metals, not so much. Doing something as simple as painting a shiny metal surface, or spraying it with oil, can boost the amount of radiation coming from the object, and drastically alter it's appearance in a thermal imager. That's how you can raise it. How they can make this material have a lower level is a mystery.
 

This is a screen shot from a Cejay Engineering video (49 second mark). The black blobs in the center are some of these magic thermal panels
Here's some more curious pics.

Hot, non-stick frying pan:

The aluminum side of the hot pan appears cool (left) because it doesn’t emit efficiently and reflects the cooler surroundings. Flip the pan over and the non-stick side (right), being a much more efficient emitter, reveals how hot the pan really is.

Steel block:

Figure 3: Steel block, left side painted black.   Figure IR3: Corresponding thermal image of steel block.  

I'm hoping I'm not giving away any military secrets here, but then I found this stuff on the internet, so how secret can it be? The tape might be embargoed.