WWII Allied Fighter Aircraft - The Far Side of the World

This video comes to us courtesy of Roger Dodger Aviation. It can give you a pretty good idea of the complexity of these machines. Fighter aircraft in the Pacific theater were a little different than the ones used in Europe, mostly because they belonged to the Navy, and the Navy was going to do things their way, which meant using radial engines, instead of the V style engines used in Europe. The Corsair was a standout. It was about the same size as the Army's fighters, but it was considerably heavier (4.5 tons as opposed to 3 tons). It also had a more powerful engine: 2,000 horsepower compared to 1,500.

The Corsair so impressed Young Park that he built not one, but two models of it (in 1/16th scale). This page has the full story and a bunch of pictures. I think this picture is especially good.

Via Scott, the Post-Hip guy.

The Blues Elements

The word of the day at Scott's Post-Hip is "Joliotium", which sounds like it ought to be a name of an element, but I've never heard of it before. Naturally we start speculating on the origin of the name and the only thing we can think of is Joliet Jake, and if an element has been named for him, can Elwoodium be far behind?

Turns out the name Joliotium comes from Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who was an assistant to Marie Curie and married her daughter, Irene. He and Irene won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for their work in trying to figure out the structure of an atom. Joliot also won the Stalin Peace Prize. The Stalin Peace Prize? Isn't that like an oxymoron?

But the name Joliotium didn't get picked as the name of element 105. Seems to have been a bit of an issue. The Russians wanted to name element 105 for a Danish physicist, while the Americans wanted to name it for a German chemist. Neither of those guys got picked either. Element 105 was eventually dubbed Dubnium (what? They named it namium? You know, like "I dub thee Sir Dub") after the town of Dubna, Russia, (about 50 miles North of Moscow) where the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research  is located.

The picture is supposedly of Seaborgium, which was discovered around the same time. I don't know how you could tell, I think it's just an artist's concept anyway. It certainly doesn't have enough balls to represent all the hadrons in a nucleus of Dubnium, and if those are supposed to be atoms, well, they are all different sizes, which does not make sense. Could be actual macroscopic balls of the material, but I don't think they ever made enough that you could make a picture of it.

While I was looking for a picture for this post I came across an interactive chart of the electron structure of atoms. It's kind of cool. I also found a page of mysterious French charts about a bunch of the heaviest atoms. They don't mean anything to me, but if you need to baffle someone with bullshit, they might come in handy.

WWII Allied Fighter Aircraft

The P-40 Warhawk that was found in Egypt last month got me to wondering about WWII fighter aircraft in general. The P-40 Warhawk was supplanted by the P-51 Mustang, likewise the Hurricane was supplanted by the Spitfire, so I put together a little spreadsheet comparing the specifications of these four aircraft. I just used the specs I found in Wikipedia. They were all similar size and style: single seat, low wing monoplanes with big V-12, liquid cooled engines. They were about 30 feet long, had a wingspan of about 40 feet, and weighed about 3 tons. We built about 15,000 copies of each one, and each aircraft cost about a million dollars (in today's money).

The big difference between the older and newer aircraft was the addition of a supercharger. The supercharger gave the newer planes more power and more altitude. You have to take the performance specifications with a grain of salt. On one other page I looked at about the Hurricane, the performance specifications were all different. The Mustang versus Spitfire performance specs are especially suspect as the Mustang apparently weighed considerably more than the Spitfire, had approximately the same amount of power, yet according to the specs, the Mustang performed as well or better than the Spitfire.

Quote of the Day

Just read a story about the rise of the Nour Islamic Party in Egypt by Wendell Steavenson in The New Yorker. The link just goes to an abstract, you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, though I don't how long that will last. Maybe it will become available for free in a week, when next week's issue comes out, or maybe this is some new policy. I dunno. At first I thought Wendell, the author, was a man. I used to know a man in Ohio by that name, but evidently this Wendell is a woman. It figures. Of course a liberal rag like The New Yorker would want a woman's point of view on Islam. Anyway, it's a pretty good story about what's going on in Egyptian politics these days. Some people in Egypt are trying to implement a democracy, and some people are trying to implement Islam's Sharia Law, and that's a bit of a problem. Wendell explains:

Keyboard Skin

K bought a Spanish language keyboard "skin" for a Sony laptop. It lies right on top of the keyboard. No fuss, no muss, and does not seem to interfere with the operation of the keys.

It came packed in a box:

You could have fit a pack of pachyderms in there.

Bumper Sticker of the Day

Wait a minute, who's ripped on acid? Your friends? Or the bulldozers?

Quote of the Day

C.S. Friedman, Feast of Souls, page 204.