Alison

At lunch yesterday Marc told us a couple of stories about his sister, Alison.

Story #1: Chickens

Salem to Walla Walla

When Alison was about nine years old, she and her mother transported a dozen chickens from Salem, Oregon to her sister in Walla Walla, Washington. Now stuffing chickens into burlap bags is a time honored way of moving chickens, so they put the chickens in bags and put them in the back seat of the car and off they went.

They get to Hood River and Alison says 'Mom, there's something wrong with the chickens'. Mom says, no, they're fine, don't worry about the chickens. Along about The Dalles Alison says 'the smell of death surrounds me'. They get to the end of their journey and find that only one chicken has survived. It seems they weren't using real burlap bags, but the new fangled plastic imitation burlap bags and the chickens all suffocated.

Story #2: Brain Surgery & Luck

20 years later Alison is sitting on a bench at a burger joint and keels over. There happened to be an Emergency Medical Team there, and one of the guys in the crew had just completed some training on how to recognize a brain bleed. He assesses Alison and says 'brain bleed', so they load her into the ambulance and carry her to the Emergency Room.

He calls ahead and tells them 'I'm coming in with somebody with a brain bleed'. The surgical team is just going into the operating theater for somebody else but it's not as critical. They push that person aside and they stand there waiting, gloved up, and they just roll her straight through the ER and into the OR and let the pressure out and if any of that hadn't happened she would have died.

AVM - Arteriovenous Malformation

Seems Alison had an AVM (arteriovenous malformation),  an abnormal tangle or nest-like structure. It's like her brain had like an extra 10,000 miles of blood vessels in there and there's a weak spot and the weak spot broke and started leaking. So the surgeons send a probe up her leg through a blood vessel and through her body and up into the brain and they inject super glue to block off branches and keep doing that until they've gotten it. But every time they send the probe up, they have to go past the lungs and sometimes the probe would go the wrong way and go into a lung and at one point one of her lungs collapsed. She survived. She's a little paralyzed on one side but otherwise fine.

10 Short Videos #6280

10 Short Videos #6280

1. Part 2 of my “Wrong Number” bit from Conan.
2. Magic Knock - Female Houdini
3. 15mm Glass Cut Perfectly by a 60W Picosecond Laser
4. Guys the container store has containers you know what that means
5. CITY PLANTS A TREE, DISCOVERS IT WAS ALREADY THERE - mycorrhizal network
6. birds nest fungi 🍄❤️✨ 150 photos stacked - Mushroom girl
7. This Discovery Just Won the Nobel Prize in Physics - Antarctic Neutrino Detector & Blazar
8. people who know Kardashians don't know Citroëns PART 1. - Deadpan delivery
9. Amazing Ship Propeller Manufacturing Process! From raw metal casting to precision finishing 🔥🚢
10. Harmless Robot Helper

Funnies

10 Short Videos #6279

10 Short Videos #6279

1. Starting a 102.4 litre engine
2. This Is What Raw Copper Looks Like
3. Craw-Kid Learns You A Lesson
4. NASA Made This Space Station Room Grow in Orbit
5. That's quite the way to get rid of a fire.
6. ATM skit
7. Drilling Operation Oil ang Gas
8. How Astronauts Recycle Water? 👨‍🚀
9. Tiny pieces of glass can end up in the medication after opening an ampule. So what do we do!?
10. This 3D Printer Makes Flexible Chainmail in One Print

Funnies

Daytime Aurora

Auroral oval captured by SMILE shows the northern lights dancing on both the night and day side of Earth. (Image credit: ESA & CAS/Smile/UVI, Background added in Canva Pro.)

From Space.com:

Captured by the Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer, or SMILE, the footage reveals the full ring of auroral activity encircling Earth's north pole in ultraviolet light, stretching across both the night and day sides of our planet. That means we can see auroras glowing on Earth's dayside — activity that would usually be lost in the glare of the sun.

Artist's impression of the SMILE spacecraft as of May 2020 (image credit: CAS/ESA)

The big yellow tanks on the right are fuel tanks for the rocket motor that will boost it its initial orbit to its working orbit.

From eoPortal:

SMILE is equipped for remote-sensing observations of the magnetosphere and its surroundings, imaging of Earth's auroras, and in situ measurements of the solar wind plasma and magnetic field – simultaneously.

This multi-faceted goal shapes the spacecraft's orbital parameters. SMILE must reach a high enough altitude to view the outside edge of Earth's magnetopause and at the same time obtain good spatial resolution of the auroral oval.

The chosen orbit is therefore highly elliptical and highly inclined (70 or 98 degrees depending on launcher), and takes SMILE a third of the way to the Moon at apogee (an altitude of 121 182 km, or 19 RE [Radius of Earth]). This type of orbit enables SMILE to spend much of its time (about 80%, equivalent to nine months of the year) at high altitude, allowing the spacecraft to collect continuous observations for longer periods of time. This orbit also limits the time spent in the high-radiation Van Allen belts, and in the two toroidal belts.

121,182 km is 75,000 miles with is about three times as high as geosynchronous satellites.

SMILE's operational orbit

P. S. Some Russian communications satellites used the Molniya Orbit, a very eccentric orbit.

Fighters

Hawker Typhoon Mk. IB
Four 20mm cannon + rockets

Yakovlev Yak-9 T
Armed with a 37 mm cannon

Hawker Typhoon
Might be a type A armed with 30 caliber guns. 20 mm cannons have protruding barrels.