A thread about nothing at all....

[B.D.F.]

Yesterday's date always reminds me of the time I took my kids to see the World Trade Centers when they still were kids. They were about 3 hours south / west of where we live but we did not go there from home, we stopped there on the way home from Florida.

We were on a family vacation, having driven to FL, and hit the usual tourist traps as well as all the grandparents, who were living there at the time. My wife's parents live near Tampa and while we were in that city, my father- in- law mentioned that there was a new 'high- rise' building and pointed it out to us. I made what I thought was a mildly amusing reference, calling it a 'skyscraper', which of course both of my kids picked up on and though I was serious (the building was nine stories tall, perhaps tall by FL standards but real skyscrapers have urinals deeper than that). Opps. So I told them if it worked out, we would stop at a place on the way home and I would show them a skyscraper.....

We were headed home, closing in on New York City in the wee early hours of a Sat. morning, and it looked like the timing would work out right for us to be in Battery Park around sunrise. So we woke the kids up and told them we were going to NYC to see a skyscraper. They were around 6 and 9 or so at the time and had never been to NYC or any other large (tall) city. We crossed under the Hudson using one of the tunnels and they were IMMENSELY impressed with that; I guess they had never driven under a river before either :-)  Anyway, after diddling through the bottom of Manhattan for a bit, I pulled up as close as I could get to one of the World Trade Centers (I do not remember which one) and had both kids look out the rear window to look up at the top of the building. Of course they could not see the top of the building as it just sort of fades away into the distance being that close, and it was not full daylight yet anyway. So we all got out of the car and again, I had them look to see the top of the building.... and they still could not do so. Finally, we walked a ways away from the buildings and tried it again and still we could not see the tops of either tower, at which point I said THAT is a SKYSCRAPER! The pups were impressed and both have told me as adults they still remember that visit. We all piled back into the car and they got to see both The Empire State and The Chrysler buildings, as well as being able to see the entire NYC skyline as the sun came up.

Of course we lost those buildings 16 years ago to the day yesterday but no matter what, my kids got to see them and it makes me glad that they still remember the buildings, and the experience of being there. It did not seem like a big deal at that time of course but I am certainly glad we made the detour now.

Brian

[B.D.F.]

Under the heading of 'but this does not make sense': modern submarines travel faster underwater than when traveling on the surface. No tricks or gimmicks, all else being equal, equal amount of thrust (Easy Boys! Easy Seamen!), same weight (displacement) but less surface area in the water so the logical conclusion is less drag, and that should result in greater speed, not less. But not only does it not work that way, it works very much the opposite way.

This was the major difference in submarine design for their first 50- odd years or so and modern designs; early submarines were really surface vessels that could go underwater for brief periods of time and move very inefficiently. Given any kind of choice, all subs through WWII and into the 1950's would always engage in warfare this way, contrary to common belief, and their underwater abilities were used simply to 1) hide and 2) run away when possible. In fact they were not even true submarines at all but rather submersibles.

It is all about the physics; a modern, cigar- shaped submarine hull is smooth, rounded and has flowing shapes, also called 'faired' in nautical or aircraft terms (that transitions to 'fairing' when used on motorcycles by the way). There are no sharp edges or projections to force the water into making a shock wave, rather the water just sort of moves away as the sub passes and then gently and slowly, closes back in to where it was before the sub got there, without actually accelerating any water in any direction. That does not happen on the surface because the part of the sub's hull that is above the water line is NOT smooth and does NOT make an even transition but rather forces the water out of its way; after passing, the water crashes back into the void left by the subs' passing.

There is a much easier way to prove this though without any mathematics, complex models, testing, modeling or anything else, and can be shown via a quick and simple set of examples: When a modern sub travels on the surface, it makes a bow wake, a stern wake and roils the water it travels through, exactly the same way ALL other surface vessels do. But completely submerged, there are no wakes and there is no roiled water left behind. So it takes the same energy to move the boat forward in either condition but when surfaced, it takes extra power to make those wakes and disturb (which really means accelerate) the water. So submerged, there is little to no water disturbance or acceleration to 'pay for'.

And the exact same thing can be done with craft that move in the air also, and it is not a new or even an 'off' idea, it was the original way to move objects a long way, efficiently, in the early days of air travel: a dirigible or airship. Look at the shape of a dirigible and a cigar- shaped submarine, they are virtually identical and for the very same reasons, a dirigible gently moves the air it is traveling through away and then allows it to again gentle return to where the airship had been without any sharp or sudden acceleration. Airplanes, on the other hand, accelerate a great deal of air downward at very high speed as they pass and that is the best case scenario, in reality, most airplanes, old and the most modern, roils up tremendous amounts of air in passing through the atmosphere and again, it robs power from the engine(s) to make that happen. So believe it or not, a Zeppelin from the 1930's will move the same mass the same distance and use FAR less fuel than any airplane or helicopter in existence, modern or not.

Brian

[MrPepsi]

Dogs have masters, cats have staff.

[Rhino]

On March 22, 1958 a Lockheed Loadstar belonging to Mike Todd crashed in the mountains in New Mexico on land belonging to my wife's father and now belonging to my wife. All 4 aboard including Mike Todd were killed. Mike Todd was a Hollywood producer best known for the movie "Around the World in 80 days". He was also husband to Elizabeth Taylor at the time. It was rumored that he was carrying a massive diamond ring belonging to Liz. No such ring was ever found despite the fact that for years afterword my father in law would chase off treasure hunters that would sneak on to the property searching for it. Parts of the airplane were removed for investigation but most of the wreckage was buried in place and is still there. I found one of the exhaust stacks sticking out of the ground a few years ago.

[B.D.F.]

That is a really interesting story.

Not to be morbid, and of course I assume all human remains have been removed, etc. but too bad the plane itself is buried as it would probably be quite interesting to see.

Brian

On March 22, 1958 a Lockheed Loadstar belonging to Mike Todd crashed in the mountains in New Mexico on land belonging to my wife's father and now belonging to my wife. All 4 aboard including Mike Todd were killed. Mike Todd was a Hollywood producer best known for the movie "Around the World in 80 days". He was also husband to Elizabeth Taylor at the time. It was rumored that he was carrying a massive diamond ring belonging to Liz. No such ring was ever found despite the fact that for years afterword my father in law would chase off treasure hunters that would sneak on to the property searching for it. Parts of the airplane were removed for investigation but most of the wreckage was buried in place and is still there. I found one of the exhaust stacks sticking out of the ground a few years ago.

[Rhino]

That is a really interesting story.

Not to be morbid, and of course I assume all human remains have been removed, etc. but too bad the plane itself is buried as it would probably be quite interesting to see.

Brian

Tell me about it! I've thought about digging a bit but probably not much to see. It hit hard at night in icing conditions. Not a forced landing but full on impact. Was probably tiny bits. But my father in law told me they brought in a bulldozer to bury it. I'm guessing it gouged out a trench, pushed the wreckage in, then rolled over it to compress it a bit, then filled it in. So probably more aluminum scrap than anything that looks like an airplane. But still wondering if either of the engines survived in any recognizable form. Thought an outside picnic table with a big old radial as a base might make a cool conversation piece. And yes, all human remains we removed and was told was quite gruesome.

[B.D.F.]

I had to look 'cause I had never heard of it before but that plane looks to be a 'knock off' of a DC3 and <should> have some really interesting parts at the very least. It does not sound like much in the way of things such as instruments would be intact at all (they could be interesting coffee table pieces perhaps) but one or both engines might still look like an engine. ?? Then again, if it did hit that hard then both could also have snapped off several cylinders. Given the crash, and then the bulldozer compaction / burial, probably nothing worth digging up and too bad is is a nuisance 'idiot' draw on your property.

Thanks for posting that though, as I said, a great story.

Brian

Edited to add: Of course I mean it is a great story regarding how it came to be your property and the history, not the plane crash itself.

Tell me about it! I've thought about digging a bit but probably not much to see. It hit hard at night in icing conditions. Not a forced landing but full on impact. Was probably tiny bits. But my father in law told me they brought in a bulldozer to bury it. I'm guessing it gouged out a trench, pushed the wreckage in, then rolled over it to compress it a bit, then filled it in. So probably more aluminum scrap than anything that looks like an airplane. But still wondering if either of the engines survived in any recognizable form. Thought an outside picnic table with a big old radial as a base might make a cool conversation piece. And yes, all human remains we removed and was told was quite gruesome.

[Rhino]

A little more to the story. Years later Kirk Douglas claimed Mike Todd had invited him along on that trip and was looking forward to it. But his wife had a bad feeling about it and talked him out of going.

Here is a pic I found online from one of the news papers of the time:



As you can see was pretty much tiny bits before they even buried the airplane.

I could be wrong but think the man with a white cowboy hat 2nd from the left is my father in law.

[Rhino]

Also just found this on youtube which shows more of the wreckage and crash site. There was not much left of that airplane.

http://youtu.be/TcCH4AXmZYk

[B.D.F.]

Almost all elements as well as compounds (read: virtually all materials) contract when they freeze or turn from a liquid to a solid. Another behavior exibited by <almost> everything is that when materials do solidify from the liquid, they do so from the outside- in. A good example of this is welding; welding can only work because the weld puddle solidifies or 'freezes' from the outside- in, if it did not, the last part of a weld to solidify would be where the weld joins the parent metal and due to size change, it would effectively crack and fall out. Put simply, welding would not work. Luck for us that it does freeze from the outside in, and shrinks as it solidifies so that the weld bead causes all tensile (pulling) stresses in the weld, rather than expanding outwards, which would again cause a weld to fail the moment it solidified.

In the same vein, most materials expand as they are heated.

But there are exceptions, exactly two that I know of: Plutonium and Water. We need not concern ourselves with plutonium too much, mostly 'cause we are not likely to run into any of the stuff in a normal lifetime and even if we did, it is improbably that almost anyone would want to melt the stuff anyway. Water is another matter through and again, lucky for 'us' (read; everything that lives on Earth), it does not follow the rules. Oh sure, water contracts as it gets cold but then when it starts to freeze, it goes through a sudden and significant expansion..... this is why water based liquids in glass containers will break the container if allowed to freeze. So water shrinks as it cools but then suddenly reverses this process and significantly expands as it solidifies. This has a number of odd results, such as water has two points in temperature where it will be the same density, one close to boiling and one at freezing which basically makes no sense at all. Well, it does with a little more information: water forms a crystalline structure when it is a solid (ice), and to 'form up' in that way, the molecules of water actually have to move apart a bit to align with each other and form that crystalline structure. So once slightly below boiling temp. water continues to contract until reaching about 4 degrees C, at which point it begins to expand again as the temperature drops. This is because by 4C, there are enough ice crystals in water to overcome the waters' natural contraction and start to cause the entire quantity to expand, on average, as more and more ice crystals appear IN the water but before it is all frozen.

This has one other really great benefit, at least one that I really like: the reduced density of solid water vs. liquid water causes it to solidify (freeze) from the top down, rather than the bottom up like virtually all, or all other materials. This is why a pond freezes on top and yet leaves the great majority of the pond in the form of water, remember, virtually all other materials would freeze from the bottom up. The big benefit of this is that it allows life to exist wherever there is water. See, you like that too, right?

All food cycles start deep in the water on this planet, with plankton and microscopic organisms living on the bottoms of the world's bodies of water, whether sweet water or salt water. Now, if water froze from the bottom up as it <should>, the first mild freeze of any body of water would kill off these small, simple forms of life, and they are the ones that start the food chain that feeds everything else on the planet. So if water was not such an odd- ball and behaved all wrong, life may have started on Earth but a few freezing cycles would have wiped it out long before those simple forms of life even had a chance to grow in size and complexity. Nothing that moves of its own force anywhere on Earth would have evolved.

Or so science would have us believe.

Yep, Dihydrogen Monoxide: good stuff, no matter what the nay- sayers would have you believe!

http://www.dhmo.org/truth/Dihydrogen-Monoxide.html

Brian

[Rhino]

Next time you see some graph showing correlations, think about these correlations:

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

[maxtog]

Next time you see some graph showing correlations, think about these correlations:

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

That is just neat

[tweeter55]

Next time you see some graph showing correlations, think about these correlations:

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

 

[B.D.F.]

Thanks, that is really interesting. Nonsensical, but amusing and it very points out how all of us can and do fall into the trap of dissociated happenings.

Brian

Next time you see some graph showing correlations, think about these correlations:

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

[Rhino]

I hear Nicolas Cage might do 2 movies next year. Sure glad I didn't put in that swimming pool!

[Conniesaki]

Next time you see some graph showing correlations, think about these correlations:

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

3rd one down, not a surprise. I can totally picture people stuffed with cheese getting tangled in their bedsheets.

[maxtog]

Everyone who drank milk in 1850 is dead!

[B.D.F.]

Clint Eastwood optioned a screenplay named "The Cut- Whore Killings" in the 1980's with the intent of making it into a movie. An associate of his, Sonia Chernus (she wrote the screenplay for 'The Outlaw Josie Wales') read the story and gave Mr. Eastwood the following summation:

"We would have been far better off not to have accepted trash like this piece of inferior work ... I can't think of one good thing to say about it. Except maybe, get rid of it FAST." Mr. Eastwood passed on the screenplay and went along with his life.

Later, while looking for someone to work on an entirely different project, he read 'The Cut- Whore Killings' as a sample of the writer, David Webb Peoples, work, not realizing it was the same script that Ms. Chernus had recommended he not review earlier. He had a very different take on the screenplay, found out he already owned the rights to it, and went on to produce, direct and star in the movie he made using that screenplay. The only major change he made was in the title, which he did not think was very good. He chose to name it..... 'Unforgiven', and it won him his very first Oscars in two catagories, for Best Picture and Best Director as well as an additional Oscar nomination for Best Actor. It also won Gene Hackman an Oscar for Best supporting Actor; in fact, Mr. Hackman had repeatedly turned down this role claiming he did not want to make another western. On the night Mr. Hackman won his Oscar for the role of Little Bill Dagget, supposedly Mr. Eastwood asked him 'How do you feel about making another western now?".

And as an aside, maybe my all- time favorite film.

Brian

Edited to fix 'whore' when it was 'whole'. Duh!

[gPink]

 

Bill Munny: All right, I'm coming out! Any man I see out there, I'm gonna kill him! Any sonofabitch takes a shot at me.. I'm not only gonna kill him, I'm gonna kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down!

[B.D.F.]

Michael Buckley Jr., (17 May 1902 – 17 August 2006), was the first American POW of WWII. Captured near Tobruk on 23 Nov. 1941, he actually became a POW two weeks before America's entry into that war on 8 Dec. 1941. He was present as an American observer and should have been released as a non- combatant but before that happened, the US DID enter the war and so Mr. Buckley was held in Italy until freed through a prisoner exchange in May, 1942.

Mr. Buckley was also the oldest person to have graduated West Point at the time of his death, being 104 years old.

And as a final odd happenstance, Mr. Buckley was Tom Brady Jr.'s Great- Uncle. Yeah, that Tom Brady.

Brian