Monthly Archives: January 2024

Smoked

by in Boundary Behavior, Culture, Existentialism, Hmmm..., Identity, Ride, Risk | 12 Comments

A Treatise on the Importance of Smoke
by Joseph Lucas, (1834-1902), founder of the British electrical manufacturer, Lucas Industries.
“A gentleman does not motor about after dark.“

All electrical components and wiring harnesses depend on proper circuit functioning, which is the transmission of charged ions by retention of the visible spectral manifestation known as “smoke”. Smoke is the thing that makes electrical circuits work. Don’t be fooled by scientists and engineers talking about excited electrons and the like. Smoke is the key to all things electrical

We know this to be true because every time one lets the smoke out of an electrical circuit, it stops working. This can be verified repeatedly through empirical testing. For example, if one places a large copper bar across the terminals of a battery, prodigious quantities of smoke are liberated and the battery shortly ceases to function. In addition, if one observes smoke escaping from an electrical component such as a Lucas voltage regulator, it will also be observed that the component no longer functions.

The logic is elementary and inescapable! The function of the wiring harness is to conduct the smoke from one device to another. When the wiring harness springs a leak and lets all the smoke out of the system, nothing works right afterward.

Starter motors were considered unsuitable for British motorcycles for some time largely because they regularly released large quantities of smoke from the electrical system.

It has been reported that Lucas electrical components are possibly more prone to electrical leakage than their German, Japanese or American counterparts. Experts point out that this is because Lucas is British, and all things British leak. British engines leak oil, British shock absorbers, hydraulic forks, and disk brake systems leak fluid, British tires leak air and British Intelligence leaks national defense secrets.

Therefore, it follows that British electrical systems must leak smoke. Once again, the logic is clear and inescapable.

Sometimes you may miss the component releasing the smoke that makes your electrical system function correctly, but if you sniff around you can often find the faulty component by the undeniable and telltale smoke smell. Sometimes this is a better indicator than standard electrical tests performed with a volt-ohm meter.

In conclusion, the basic concept of transmission of electrical energy in the form of smoke provides a clear and logical explanation of the mysteries of electrical components and why they fail.

This occasionally circulated bit of British-inspired motorcyclist humor re-emerged as the result of a recent, and rather serendipitous exchange.  I had a most remarkable and surprising encounter last weekend… one that’s actually left my brain a little smoked.  I reconnected (online) with my college boyfriend…
sort of.

Looking into something motorcycle related last week, I sent an email query to an old, Italian-motorcycle connection.  After a couple of back-and-forth messages, one of them included, “You know, ‘Mark’ is still around.  I can give you an email address, if you want.  But I should fill you in, first.“

I first met “Mark” as an occasional member of a mostly college-student group of sport-bike (motorcycle) riders that I’d sometimes join for day-rides.  A Criminal Justice major, he’d usually show up on a black, Ducati 900SS for canyon rides out to places like the Lookout Roadhouse above Lake Elsinore , accessed via the area’s winding “Ortega Highway”.

During my first year of college, I only knew Mark as that good-looking guy who rides a piece of Italian exotica.  And then, I pitched my bright red, white and blue Honda VF500 down some asphalt in the San Gabriel mountains, leaving me without a ride while paying-off a repair bill that involved installing a surgical wire into my right shoulder.

Sort of a “Come-to-Jesus” moment for me, the event initiated a few reassessments of my life-direction in general while learning to write with my left hand.  As a result, I decided to quit an utterly life-sucking Bio-Chem Pre-Med that I knew in my heart I was never going to use.  And then, I switched my major…
and my motorcycle, to a black Kawasaki  ZZR-600, “Ninja”.

Rejoining the riding group that spring, perhaps it was that we were both into black motorcycles… or maybe just dopamine; but Mark and I somehow ended up hanging out together over the following year.  Mark had been an MP in the US Navy, explaining the Criminal Justice thing.   And he’d acquired his interest in Italian motorcycles while stationed in Europe.

Mark was also a pretty good rider, easily outpacing me on his Ducati despite the Kawasaki producing considerably more horsepower.  But mostly, he was into working on the infernal machines.

Once explaining that I’d settled on the Kawasaki largely because it was low enough for me to get my boot-heels on the ground, Mark let me sling a leg over his 900SS and take it for a short ride.  I was instantly sold.  And therein began my affair with the “Pirate Kitty”, a bright red, Ducati 900SS CR with a cracked frame that I acquired in a trade for the Black Ninja.  Subsequent to its own skeletal repair, my relationship with the Kitty would well outlast that with Mark.

Ducati motorcycles were fairly unique at the time.  While Japanese sport bikes were getting faster by becoming increasingly more complex (and civilized), Ducatis were little more than stripped-down race bikes.  With their stiff and rattling dry clutches, high foot-pegs, low handlebars, and hard seats, they weren’t known for comfort.  But that wasn’t why people rode them.

Riders of older Ducatis, however, also quickly learned how to work on them.  Unless one had an on-call mechanic with a name like Marcello or Enzo, owning a Ducati that would actually start and keep running also implied knowing how to adjust their valves, replace timing belts, or fix just about anything electrical.  And Ducatis were absolutely notorious for their electrics.

Given enough time, it was pretty much guaranteed that virtually nothing in a functioning Ducati’s electrical system would be original.  And while I actually got to be pretty good at what could otherwise be fairly sketchy 2nd-gear bump-starts of the 900’s, torquey, high-compression V-twin, it was once suggested that I had renamed it, “Start! You piece of …”  Consequently, my familiarity with Lord Lucas’s alleged, Treatise on Smoke.

Graduate school would eventually change my priorities.  It wasn’t the greatest split.  But we stayed civil while moving-on, each in our own directions.  We exchanged a few messages for awhile, among the last being when I finally acquired a long-coveted Ducati “916” in the late 90s… the infamous , “Garage Queen”.

A great deal has changed for both of us in the three-plus decades since college.  But far more than I would ever have guessed for Mark.  Perhaps not so surprising, he ended up in a line of work that had absolutely nothing to do with his old college major.  But what’s really left my brain so thoroughly smoked…
she now goes by “Marlie”.

 

Know When is When

by in Culture, Hmmm..., Identity | 18 Comments

 

“No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.”
– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Reading Aggie Soon’s piece this morning, “Those wooden shoes,” a response to a “Daily Prompt” question… “Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?“, it occurred to me that aside from a rag that I grew accustomed to falling asleep with while teething, that I don’t think I’ve ever become all that attached to anything.  But then…

Today’s weather having disintegrated, I was tending to some accumulated, less critical life-maintenance projects.  Between the vacuuming, laundry, and getting a few bills out, I finally took the time to properly adjust the intonation on a down-tuned guitar, and I replaced the battery on my usual watch.  And that last activity suddenly made me realize that I’d somehow latched onto this physical object.

The watch is an old, Nixon, “Channel T”.  It’s a little peculiar, an analogue with reversed buttons that face away from the hand (when worn on the left), a third hand that will follow a local ocean tide, and a display for the moon’s phase.  Intended for surfers, I’d bought it for myself in 1997, at a point in my life when I’d finally “made it”.

At the time, I also bought another watch, a very thin, formal, and ludicrously expensive time-piece for those moments when I wanted to look a little more “sophisticated”.  The Nixon, while not exactly inexpensive, was intended to be something more utilitarian.  And having grown up along the Pacific coast, it referenced back to more youthful days that had been enjoyed in the ocean.

Ironically, I think I’ve probably worn that far more costly formal watch perhaps a dozen times, and maybe once or twice in the last decade.  But the old Nixon still gets worn fairly regularly, on pretty much any occasion when I think it might be wise to keep track of the time.  It goes with me to jobs and on day-trips, into the mountains, and it’s my go to travel watch.

At the time I bought it, I think the Channel T sold for about $250.  That was a fair amount in the 1990s.  But Nixon, as a then new US brand, was making itself known for producing rugged, high-end watches, with well-sealed stainless-steel cases and Swiss-made internals.  And the reversed knobs were to keep them from being hit against loosed surf-boards, leashes, sand or rocks.  Consequently, they quickly became “cool” surf watches.

Banking on their trendiness, however, these were among Nixon’s last unique and really good watches.  As Swatch revealed, it was immensely more profitable to capitalize on selling a fashionable, but cheaply manufactured product.  So, Nixon also began to produce still pricey, but essentially disposable plastic, digital watches marketed to “surfers”.  After an acquisition, the end of the crappy plastic watch craze, and a subsequent de-acquisition and reinvention, Nixon again began producing a few decent watches.  But the old Channel T and its surf origins were never re-imagined.

Some time after I fled the US for Thailand at the end of the 90s, the watch’s integrated rubberized band had disintegrated.   Getting it replaced was going to involve shipping the watch back to the US.  But then someone suggested perhaps using a “NATO” watch band as a temporary replacement.  And ever since, I’ve kept the the old Nixon on one of these fairly cheap, military-style, multipurpose nylon straps, whether on my wrist or hanging from a travel pack.

Twenty-seven years later, and this is probably something like the watch’s tenth battery replacement.  Being mechanical, batteries are only good for about eighteen months before the watch starts to give a warning that the battery is low.  (The second-hand begins moving in four-second intervals.)  I long ago bought a back-removal tool for the watch, and I can swap-in a new battery in about 5-minutes.

A few times over the years, people have recognized the old Channel T.  And in one case, a guy offered me an on-the-spot $200 for it.  But it’s not for sale.

For whatever reason, the old watch has become a sort of trade-mark for my life.  I look at  it and see a little mirror into my past, a moment of reflection on a time when I thought everything had been accomplished, and my life was set.  But even then, it also represented a sort of looking back, a longing toward everything I’d sacrificed to reach that point.  And nothing lasts forever.

It’s hands move with the moments, the comings and goings of the tides, and the passage and rebirth of the moon.  And it’s endured, surviving through the years, if with a little periodic maintenance.  The same; and yet, not the same.  I slip in another battery and reset a few functions.  And for now, time goes on in its measured rhythm.

Edit:
Just coincidental, but the theoretical physicist, Matt Strassler, wrote an article about the Earth’s tides at his site just two days after this post.   While the article is overall intended as technical, a chart near the start graphically shows why my watch displays both the tide as well as the phase of the moon.

The magnitude of a tide is greatest when the moon is in line with the sun (“full” or “new”).  And you can see on the chart how tide magnitudes fluctuate with with the lunar cycle.  Very cool!

Here’s a link to the article:
https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/01/12/what-ocean-tides-teach-us-about-the-sun/

Saeculum

by in Boundary Behavior, Culture, Death, Existentialism, Fear, Humanity, Identity, Philosophy, Politics, Risk | 44 Comments

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
—Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001).

Another year drawn to a close, I find myself looking back and considering whether anything was accomplished. In all honesty, I don’t know. In terms of the big picture, I’m not sure most really try anymore. And I think a certain loss-of-faith plays a big part in that. You have to open the door in your mind before you can walk through it.

Among the great disappointments of modernity is that few truly believe in the benefit of our personal rituals anymore. Instead, we’ve turned outward, to the manifestations of modern life, to the worship of technology, to consuming sermons on the Internet while reciting the sutras of those who have something to sell.

That’s not to say that we should expect that even the most sincere incantation allows surviving an act of ignorance. Knowledge, real knowledge anyway, grants an understanding of the elements of life. But what we believe is potent magic, giving access to whatever alchemy influences what we make of ourselves, and especially in the ways that make the most difference.

The old sacred places were once temples and shrines to the gods-of-nature, those who brought the rain and the harvest, and animals to hunt. The voices seeking assurance from their gods are long forgotten. But images found etched into the ancient stone monuments speak in muffled, distant echoes attesting to their importance.

The farmers had faith that the rains would come, and so they planted. And the hunters prepared, so that they would be ready to act on their good fortune.

Subsequent generations would add their own invocations, perhaps when the river flooded, others arrived on the lands, or groups moved on. New ceremonies would provide the confidence instilled by a belief in something greater, and a sense of purpose in being a part of the way in which things worked. Whole civilizations were born around the shared experience of spirits glimpsed flickering in the ceremonial fires.

And they died when those fires went out.

Just a few thousand years from those sacred illuminations, the blink of an eye in Earth’s history, and the flickering lights of today’s collective fires have been captured within strands of glass. The gods of nature have been forgotten, their wisdom replaced by an “artificial” version. The new gods find a place in our minds, though mostly without purpose.

–

I stopped believing in much a long, long time ago… when I was still a child, perhaps. But my father made sure that I would at the very least have a mantra. To paraphrase a wise man who once thought about such matters while meditating for years in the desert, Trustworthiness and creativity belong to your own mind.*

The Universe may not care that I exist; but I can still find some meager light of faith in myself. And the internalized repetition of that belief, instilled by the god-like wisdom of an attentive parent, it’s been enough to open a few doors.  So I keep running, and learning, and trying to understand… doing the things that bring passion to a life lived among others.

–

Looking for people who still believe in the value of trying, I don’t find them so much anymore. It seems as though the last few years have extinguished all but a few of the lights who once surrounded me. Ashes, under stones, scattered in forests, on mountain tops… the wisdom slowly disappears. The end of a generation leaves only the edited versions of their stories. The gods wink out, and their incantations go silent.

The Romans called it a “saeculum”, in reference to an era of history with a span marked by the silencing of those last voices to have experienced what preceded. The concept linked cycles of time to the loss of wisdom, and to subsequent intervals of catastrophe. And they marked the periods of revolutions that fundamentally reorganized civilizations.

–

We build a world around ourselves based upon what we believe. And we mostly believe the stories we are told when still young, when we’re learning how to perceive and to categorize. We instinctively accept the wisdom of previous generations, seeing them as god-like witnesses to what came before one’s own brief time in this existence. And for better, or for worse, these perceptions define us.

But as we grow older, the voices of our histories wink out, one by one, lost stars in the night sky. The route forward becomes less clear, and we’re left to our own means. We look back in the direction from which we came. And a next generation, seeing our uncertainty, turn their eyes toward new gods.

Podcast sermons implore that we pull down the old idols, and replace them with what’s right. They tell us to forget the ways of the past, even the ways that worked, that made us happy, that made us feel “alive”. The old heroes were wrong, God is dead, and there was no wisdom in their words. And the protective social fabric of compassion and a belief in the incredible magic of life itself needs to be replaced by the passive worship of a benevolent and protective state.

Now the temple priests sell themselves in the firelight of cold living-room shrines. But their sacred voices offer little assurance; fears deliver more followers. Catastrophism is the new catechism. The gods of nature have been defeated, their flickering stars trapped in fiber-optic cables, and lightning wrath confined to power-lines. And we must free ourselves of their memory before the new gods can save us from our own ignorance.

References and recommended reading:

Top Photo: Nike Athena guarding a tomb at an old cemetery in the Nevada desert.

Bottom Photo: from Future Atlas, https://www.futureatlas.com/

* [Paraphrasing Tippy Gnu, a “Unicorn Hunter” presently stalking game from somewhere in the deserts of the the American Southwest]:
Gnu, T. (2009, 2019).  The Logic of Life and Death: How to live your life by resolving the Deep Mysteries of the here and hereafter.  https://unicorniks.com/free-bookstore/

[An extensively documented primary source account of Christopher Columbus and his voyages.]:
Delaney, C. (2012). Columbus and the quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America. Simon and Schuster.

[Journalist, Danial Gardener’s rational and scientific analysis of how we are fooled and manipulated by our most fundamental of human emotions.]:
Gardner, D. (2008). The science of fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t– and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger. Penguin.

Gardner, D. (2009). The science of fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain. National Geographic Books.

[“Strauss-Howe Generational Theory”; The concept of a “saeculum” as applied to periodicities in US history.]:
Strauss, W., & Howe, N. (1991). Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. William Morrow.

[An article and critique regarding “Strauss-Howe Generational Theory”]:
The Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, https://www.cdamm.org/articles/strauss-howe

Kudos to a J.A.L. Crew!

by in Boundary Behavior, Culture, Death, Japan | 7 Comments

If you’ve been following the news from Japan lately, you may have come across some coverage of a major crash at Tokyo’s, Haneda Airport on January 2nd. Haneda is the main commercial airport for Tokyo, located at the south edge of the city, on reclaimed land extending into Tokyo Bay. This happened during a peak travel time in Japan, when the country all but closes down for three days during the start of the New Year.

The crash happened during the landing of Japan Airlines domestic Flight 516, arriving from New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido. The route was being run on an Airbus A-350 with 379 passengers and crew. While most such domestic travel is typically done on Japan’s high-speed rail system, this flight runs as an alternative from the country’s far northern island. I’ve actually flown it twice. This particular flight was entirely booked with New Year travelers.

At 5:45 PM on Tuesday night, Haneda Air Traffic Control (ATC) cleared the JAL airliner to land on runway “34-Right”. Ten seconds later, ATC then instructed Japanese Coast Guard “JA722A”, a much smaller turboprop Bombardier Dash-8 Q 300, to move to a holding point on a taxiway next to the runway. The JCG aircraft had a crew of six, and was carrying emergency relief supplies to Niigata on Japan’s northwestern coast, which had been hit by a destructive 7.5 earthquake a day earlier.

Some reports I’ve read have said that the Japanese Coast Guard pilot repeated the instruction. However, I’ve heard a recording of the nearly incomprehensible control tower instructions, and they didn’t include the pilot’s response. Regardless, the pilot of the Coast Guard plane then apparently moved the aircraft onto the runway threshold and prepared to take off.

In the darkness, the pilot of the JAL passenger jet never even saw the Coast Guard aircraft on the runway threshold. At 5:47 PM, the JAL A-350 apparently landed directly on top of the Coast Guard plane, striking its nose against the tail of the other aircraft at about 140 miles-per-hour.

The A-350’s lower fuselage ripped through the Dash-8’s upper fuselage, tearing off the A-350’s forward landing gear, and probably killing five of the six aboard the Coast Guard plane instantly. The jetliner’s two engine nacelles then apparently struck and tore off the Dash-8’s wings, which were completely filled with fuel for the flight to Niigata. The resulting fireball engulfed both planes, and then spread down the length of the runway as the burning and damaged A-350 continued on without its nose gear.

The A-350 came to rest after about 3,000-feet, at the edge of the runway. The nose landing gear was missing, and the right landing gear had collapsed. The plane’s right engine was not, or could not be shut down and was still running.  And the cabin internal communication system was non-functional, while the plane was on fire and the cabin was filling with smoke.

The A-350 has 10 exits, 8 of which are equipped with emergency slides. Safety certifications for passenger aircraft dictate that an aircraft must be able to be evacuated in 90-seconds or less while using half of an aircraft’s emergency exits. However, more than half of the A350’s exits were unusable.

Five of the eight emergency exit slides would have sent passengers into either the fire burning beneath the central part of the aircraft, into the front of the running engine, or into the flames and debris being ejected from the engine. Flight crew wisely didn’t even open those doors. But that left only three escape routes, the two slides on either side of the very front of the cabin, and one on the left side of the rear of the cabin.

At 6:05 PM, the captain of JAL flight 516 confirmed that every passenger on his aircraft was safely off the plane, including two toddlers.  All 379 survived, with fifteen taken to hospitals for minor injuries.

Tragically, five of the six Japanese Coast Guard crew were killed in the crash. The only survivor from the JCG aircraft was the Captain, who was very seriously injured. He has apparently been able to give statements, and has said that he was certain that he had been cleared to enter the runway. I’m sure this will result in a large investigation, and probably some big changes at Japanese airports.

The crash was recorded on one of the airport’s publicly accessible live cameras. A YouTube upload is posted (until they remove it) at the following (at 3:21, you can see Flight 516’s landing lights coming into view):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NbVdIoJsHY

–

My two cents:

The phone videos people were shooting during the landing show the fire streaming outside the plane’s windows as it traveled down the runway, and the smoke immediately filling the cabin. In one case, you can hear someone, probably a child, shouting to open the doors. An adult voice says, “We’ll be okay.” Meanwhile, flight attendants are instructing people to stay seated.

I think this speaks volumes about the absolute professionalism of Japan Airlines flight crews. I’ve taken many JAL flights over the years. And I’ve also covered some similar routes with both US and Canadian carriers. There’s simply no comparison. None!

The crash of Japan Air Lines Flight 123 in 1985 was the deadliest single-aircraft accident in aviation history, resulting 504 deaths. Even though it was due to a structural failure that wasn’t JAL’s responsibility, the result was that the airline adopted an absolute commitment to professionalism and to safety. And it shows.

JAL flight attendants don’t hide in the galley, chatting during flights. Press a call light, you’ll get a quick response. And I’ve seen them tending to passengers for hours during especially turbulent flights.

The fact that no one on the flight’s crew panicked or reflexively deployed escape chutes into a fire or a running jet engine says something about the level of both crew communication and training.  The Captain also stayed on the burning aircraft for eighteen minutes, personally inspecting it until he was satisfied enough to report that no one had been left behind. This whole crew deserves some well earned recognition.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240104_06/

Personally, however, I think the passengers also played a part. Being a domestic flight, most aboard would have been Japanese. And there’s a deep, cultural impetus to maintaining calmness, following the rules, and to being a part of the group. No one was trying to take bags or recover carry-ons, or running for the exits, or opening doors. And video clips of the evacuation show people waiting at the bottoms of slides to help others off.

Tragically, five Japanese Coast Guard members lost their lives while working in the aid of others, and a sixth was severely injured. Obviously, something went wrong, and Japanese authorities will have to sort out why. But due to a great deal of professionalism, 379 others survived to tell their stories.