A 2nd Century space opera

The above video discusses the satirist Lucian of Samosata's work A True Story. In it, his protagonists get caught up in a whirlwind and get carried to the moon, where they get involved in a war between the Moon and the Sun over Venus. 

Because it takes place in outer space, a lot of people call it the first science fiction story. I don't think that is accurate. I think he is actually lampooning old-timey travel books which had a tendency to add all sort of fanciful nonsense to the tales to boost interest and sales.    

He also threw barbs at his contemporaries. One of his lines is "Plato was not there. It is said that he was living in an imaginary city under the constitution and laws that he himself wrote." So, it fits much more under the label of travel-writing satire and general lampoonery than science fiction. Still, it is interesting.

By the way, there are no women on the moon, so maybe it is actually a tragedy.

 

To the North Pole

In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen set out on an expedition to reach the north pole. His plan was unique; after studying arctic currents, he decided to intentionally get a boat icebound where it would then get carried by the ocean currents to the pole. He had a boat, the Fram, specially built to withstand the pressures of the ice and the cold. 

They spent a long time in the ice pack but eventually determined that they would not drift to the pole. In 1895, after reaching as far north as they thought the ship would, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen decided they would try to reach the pole on skis. They fell short (by about 170 miles), but at the time it was the farthest north reached to date. 

Because the ship was drifting and would be hard to locate, the two proceeded to Franz Josef Land. It was a long trek south, and they had to build a cabin to winter in. Eventually they encountered another polar expedition and were taken the others' base camp.

Meanwhile the Fram continued to drift for months, eventually clearing the ice pack and making it to Spitsbergen where they encountered yet another polar explorer -- this one trying to reach the north pole via balloon. 

Remarkably there were no casualties during the years long expedition. It was judged a success, even though it fell short of the pole.  The Fram is now a museum ship.

 

Nutcrackers

No, this post isn't about Tchaikovsky's ballet, nor is it about young ladies that majored in 'Womyn's Studies' at one of our fine universities, rather it is about the decorative Christmas nutcracker that is ubiquitous during the holidays.  

The above video gives a historical overview of its evolution from a tool for cracking nuts to its current form as a colorful staple of Christmas decor. Below is a video of a German factory that produces them.

 

First attempt to summit Everest in 1922

The video details the first attempt to climb Mt. Everest in 1922 following a 1921 expedition that surveyed the mountain to determine the best route for the climb. 

While today climbing Everest is a bit of a rich man's tourist trap, in 1922 it was a challenge in largely unknown Himalayan territory. In 1922 they made three attempts to summit Everest, but each fell short, with their highest climb ending 2,000 feet below the summit. The last ended in an avalanche that killed nine porters. Still, they learned valuable lessons on the expedition, the most important being the value of bottled oxygen. It is a very interesting video.

This is all very foreign to me. As a Florida resident our tallest mountain range is located in Disney World and features such awesome peaks as Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, The Matterhorn, and Expedition Everest. You 'climb' them by riding in little cars, which seems preferable to me than having to hack out ice steps on the side of a cliff, although you will encounter such perils as animatronic Yetis and the like. 

 

A Roman mint

This video discusses a Roman mint from Trajan's reign. It discusses how the coins were minted and gives the organization of the mint's workers. I wondered how it was guarded. No word on that in the video, which would be handy info to have in case I wanted to build a time machine and go back to do an Ocean's 11 style heist.

  

Riding to heaven on the backs of turtles

 (Note: this was first posted on November 17, 2009. I'm reposting it today for the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing)

A few years ago I happened to visited Hiroshima on August 7th, one day after the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

When you get off the streetcar from the train station the first thing you see is the ruin of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The atomic bomb detonated almost directly overhead of the building. With its few still standing walls, and its dome stripped and leaving only its framework, it is the iconic ruin of Hiroshima.

When you stand at that building, if you turn in a circle you realize your standing in a bowl surrounded by hills. Most of the rest of the buildings in that bowl were reduced to rubble by the bomb blast and resulting fires.

When they cleared the rubble they set aside several blocks of the old city as the Peace Memorial Park. You walk south along the river to get to the entrance to the monuments. At the entrance card tables are set up where there are petitions for peace that can be signed. You can buy peace t-shirts and listen to folk musicians strumming guitars and singing about peace. It is a fitting sentiment for this place.

The most visited monument is the Children's Monument for Peace. A young girl named Sadako Sasaki contracted leukemia after the bombing. As she sickened in the hospital she remembered an old Japanese saying that if one folds a thousand paper cranes one is granted a wish. She spent the rest of her short life folding paper cranes, but died before she reached one thousand. The Children's Monument for Peace was built in her memory, and in memory of all the children who died from the bombing. It is covered with paper cranes that school children have folded and sent to the park.

As touching as he Children's monument was, I most wanted to see a different monument. The monument pictured with this post. The Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-bomb.

There were tens of thousands of Koreans in the city when it was bombed. Most were forced laborers who had been brought to the city, housed in barracks and worked in the munitions plants of Hiroshima. Some 40,000 were killed, and a another 30,000 injured in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the Koreans in Hiroshima were from Hapcheon, South Korea, and so sadly two cities ended up bearing the brunt of the attack (Atomic bomb survivors in South Korea still feel the wounds).

The Korean Monument was built in 1970 by South Koreans living in Japan and sited across the river and outside of the Peace Park. The Japanese authorities would not allow it to be placed in the Peace Park. It took until 1999 for permission to be granted to move it onto the Park's grounds.

As I stood in front of that Monument I could not help but reflect that all the paper cranes in the world would not have helped the dead honored by this memorial. That the peace petitions, while a fine sentiment, were no more substantial than Chamberlain's umbrella.

The Germans dressed prisoners up in Polish uniforms and shot them to justify their invasion that started the wider war in Europe. The Japanese used bayonets to stage their low-tech version of Hiroshima in Shangai as they spread ever deeper into China. The allies pounded cities with high explosives and incendiaries from the air. All across the globe men died in combat and civilians died behind the fronts. 

A few days after Hiroshima's destruction Nagasaki was bombed. Hirohito then taped his surrender speech. That night a cadre of Japanese officers ransacked the palace seeking to destroy the recording and postpone Japan's surrender. How do paper cranes and petitions solve that sort of madness?

In the end, to me at least, this small place in the Park was less about the bomb and more about Korean farmers taken from their villages and used as forced labor. A life spent at the whim of masters. Another tragedy of the war. 

My family and I were the only people at the monument when we visited it. The insciption on it reads, "Souls of the dead ride to heaven on the backs of turtles." At its base are small stones with Korean characters painted on them (pictured). The guidebook said you should leave a gift for the slain worker's ghosts. All I had were a couple of cigarettes. I supposed the ghosts might like to relax with a smoke and so I left them. It was all that I could do.
 

 

D-Day

Pinned Down by Enemy Fire by Keith Rocco

Suddenly, all hell let loose. The beach was under fire from shells, mortars and machine guns, we dived for cover. The sea was covered in blood and vomit and flies began to arrive by the thousands, which created another nightmare. We continued all night and the following day without a break. Slowly, slowly we overcame all the nightmares. There was no lack of humor. A soldier coming ashore asked, 'Is this a private beach? I was promised a private beach. If not, I am not staying.' And we heard, 'My mother told me not to travel by air, she thought it was much safer by sea.' — David Teacher

  

The first mass tank attack

The above video covers the first mass tank attack during the battle of Cambrai in WWI. It focuses on one tank, named Deborah, that was involved in the attack and met its end on the field of battle. I suppose you could call it the first combined arms operation. However, like the first of anything it didn't work as well as hoped; there were coordination and technical issues that caused the attack to fall short of its goals.

 

The Bigfoot War of 1855

The story is that in 1850s, in western Oklahoma, there were Choctaw Indians and white settlers in the area who started having problems with thieves. It started with the theft of food, moved onto cattle rustling, and eventually escalated to women and children gone missing. This enraged the Choctaws who raised a war party to track and kill the thieves. 

They rode for a day before coming upon a forest clearing with a horrible stench coming from it. When they entered the clearing, they were horrified to discover it covered with the half-eaten bodies of their missing women and children. Standing over the bodies, they saw three gigantic hairy, humanoid creatures dining on the remains. Infuriated, the Choctaws attacked and a battle ensued. All the Bigfeet were killed with only the loss the Choctaw leader, Joshua LeFlore, who had his head tore off in the scuffle. They buried the bodies of the women and children and burned the Bigfeet carcasses. What became of LeFlore's headless body is lost to the mists of history.

Sounds totally plausible to me, especially since it was first revealed in Lyle Blackburn's highly reputable book Sinister Swamps: Monsters and Mysteries from the Mire. 

However, I do have a few questions. Why is there no contemporaneous record of this event. One would think that an outbreak of giant carnivorous monkeys would generate considerable interest -- reports to the territorial authorities, newspaper accounts, and years of retellings of the story around general store pickle barrels, but all of that is curiously missing. I wonder why people lost interest in the matter from almost the first day.

Secondly, it took only a day for the Choctaws to track and locate the murderous simian beasts. What does that say about contemporary Bigfeet investigators? They've spent decades, and used all manner of high-tech equipment, and can find nary a clue (tuffs of hair, Bigfeet scatt, etc.) much less one of the big goobers, dead or alive. They certainly need to up their game a bit.       

 

Slavery

Click any image to enlarge

Slavery is extremely common throughout human history in one form or another. The most common form being chattel slavery, where the slave was considered property of another. Other common forms were/are bond slavery and forced labor. As we can tell from the prevalence of human trafficking in the news, we are still dealing with those issues.

These are paintings of slaves in the New World.     

More than they bargained for

Cobalt-60 is a radioactive material used in hospital radiotherapy machines. Due to its half-life it eventually weakens and needs to be replaced. However, even the less radioactive cobalt-60 that remains is still extremely dangerous. It needs to be transported in a shielded container to a storage facility that can safely handle it.

In 2013 such material was being transported from a hospital in Tiajuana to a storge facility in central Mexico. When the drivers stopped at a gas station some armed men hijacked the truck and the container with the cobalt-60. There was fear at the time that it would be used for a dirty bomb, but the hijackers were simply after the truck and had no idea what its cargo was. They, after exposing themselves to a high dose of radiation, discarded the cobalt pellets in a field. 

The above video discusses that incident, and details the steps taken to find and recover the cobalt-60 pellets.

 

Riding to heaven on the backs of turtles

 (Note: this was first posted on November 17, 2009. I'm reposting it today for yesterday's anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing)

A few years ago I happened to visited Hiroshima on August 7th, one day after the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

When you get off the streetcar from the train station the first thing you see is the ruin of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The atomic bomb detonated almost directly overhead of the building. With its few still standing walls, and its dome stripped and leaving only its framework, it is the iconic ruin of Hiroshima.

When you stand at that building, if you turn in a circle you realize your standing in a bowl surrounded by hills. Most of the rest of the buildings in that bowl were reduced to rubble by the bomb blast and resulting fires.

When they cleared the rubble they set aside several blocks of the old city as the Peace Memorial Park. You walk south along the river to get to the entrance to the monuments. At the entrance card tables are set up where there are petitions for peace that can be signed. You can buy peace t-shirts and listen to folk musicians strumming guitars and singing about peace. It is a fitting sentiment for this place.

The most visited monument is the Children's Monument for Peace. A young girl named Sadako Sasaki contracted leukemia after the bombing. As she sickened in the hospital she remembered an old Japanese saying that if one folds a thousand paper cranes one is granted a wish. She spent the rest of her short life folding paper cranes, but died before she reached one thousand. The Children's Monument for Peace was built in her memory, and in memory of all the children who died from the bombing. It is covered with paper cranes that school children have folded and sent to the park.

As touching as he Children's monument was, I most wanted to see a different monument. The monument pictured with this post. The Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-bomb.

There were tens of thousands of Koreans in the city when it was bombed. Most were forced laborers who had been brought to the city, housed in barracks and worked in the munitions plants of Hiroshima. Some 40,000 were killed, and a another 30,000 injured in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the Koreans in Hiroshima were from Hapcheon, South Korea, and so sadly two cities ended up bearing the brunt of the attack (Atomic bomb survivors in South Korea still feel the wounds).

The Korean Monument was built in 1970 by South Koreans living in Japan and sited across the river and outside of the Peace Park. The Japanese authorities would not allow it to be placed in the Peace Park. It took until 1999 for permission to be granted to move it onto the Park's grounds.

As I stood in front of that Monument I could not help but reflect that all the paper cranes in the world would not have helped the dead honored by this memorial. That the peace petitions, while a fine sentiment, were no more substantial than Chamberlain's umbrella.

The Germans dressed prisoners up in Polish uniforms and shot them to justify their invasion that started the wider war in Europe. The Japanese used bayonets to stage their low-tech version of Hiroshima in Shangai as they spread ever deeper into China. The allies pounded cities with high explosives and incendiaries from the air. All across the globe men died in combat and civilians died behind the fronts. 

A few days after Hiroshima's destruction Nagasaki was bombed. Hirohito then taped his surrender speech. That night a cadre of Japanese officers ransacked the palace seeking to destroy the recording and postpone Japan's surrender. How do paper cranes and petitions solve that sort of madness?

In the end, to me at least, this small place in the Park was less about the bomb and more about Korean farmers taken from their villages and used as forced labor. A life spent at the whim of masters. Another tragedy of the war. 

My family and I were the only people at the monument when we visited it. The insciption on it reads, "Souls of the dead ride to heaven on the backs of turtles." At its base are small stones with Korean characters painted on them (pictured). The guidebook said you should leave a gift for the slain worker's ghosts. All I had were a couple of cigarettes. I supposed the ghosts might like to relax with a smoke and so I left them. It was all that I could do.
 

 

D-Day

Wading ashore at Utah Beach
(click image to enlarge)

You get your ass on the beach. I’ll be there waiting for you and I’ll tell you what to do. There ain’t anything in this plan that is going to go right. — Colonel Paul R. Goode (pre-attack D-Day briefing to the 175th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division)

  

The time I ran a blockade of the Bab el-Mandab strait

Bab el-Mandab 

With the current mess in the Red Sea, with Houthis trying to blockade of the Red Sea, I thought my story of an earlier blockade might be interesting. A caveat: these are events from my limited perspective at the time, and my memories are no doubt filtered through the vagarities of time passed and the quirks of remembrance. 

When the 1973 Yom Kippur War began, I was on a destroyer sailing with the U.S.S. Enterprise's carrier task force. We were operating in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. Soon, we were ordered to redeploy to the Middle East. We imagined that the north Vietnamese must have been glad to see us finally gone.

We headed south, transited the Straits of Malacca and sailed west across the Indian Ocean. Our first station was to patrol in the Gulf of Oman, off the Strait of Hormuz which leads to the Persian Gulf. We stayed there a couple of days and then headed south to the Gulf of Aden. On the west side of that gulf lies the Bab el-Mandab Strait, also known as the Gate of Tears, which is a chokepoint that leads into the Red Sea. 

South Yemen and Somalia had been blockading the strait (modern references say it was Egypt blockading the strait. They had a couple of destroyers in the Red Sea, but they stayed well clear of us). In the image above you'll notice Perim, the small island off the spit of land reaching into the strait. The Yemenis had dug in some tanks on Perim, and they had been occasionally firing on shipping headed to the Port of Eilat in southern Israel.  

At the time of the blockade run, the Enterprise had its airplanes off the deck. The plan was, as we transited the strait, if we were fired at we were going to radio that fact. A single plane was then going to do a low pass over the island. It was followed by a couple of planes a minute or so later. If we didn't signal that they had ceased firing (which of course we wouldn't have done), then these following planes would have carpet bombed the island with napalm. The carrier air wing would then split in two, with one portion headed south towards Somalia and the other north into South Yemen to take out their respective air forces.       

It is safe to say, that would have escalated things quickly.

I was a radarman, so my post was in CIC (Combat Information Center) which is where the ship was operated from during battle stations. On the starboard side were the radar scopes and plotting tables. I was the watch supervisor of that area. In the center were the status boards. These were clear plastic with range and bearing markers engraved on them. Other sailors, using grease pencils, would mark the location and information about ships and planes in the area to provide a tactical picture to the Combat Officer who would direct any fight. He sat on the port side, above the weapons pit where the guns and missiles were controlled from. Also, in that area was the all-important coffee pot.  

The blockade run was scheduled to occur around noon, so it was decided that naval regulations required us to be fed battle rations. We all got a brown bag lunch with sandwiches, an apple and what-not. As a result, as we faced the hazard of Yemeni tank fire and the possible start of a major war, we all sat around eating bologna sandwiches. One of the what-nots in the lunch bag was a hard-boiled egg. This led to us, perhaps inevitably, cracking eggs on each other's heads. It did occur to us that, should things go pear shaped, this detail probably wouldn't help our defense during a court martial, but we were young and full of vinegar. Damn the torpedoes and all that.

Unsurprisingly, the transit through the strait was, with the exception of a single MIG doing a rather distant fly-by, largely uneventful. There was no way the Somalians or Yemenis were going to be crazy enough to challenge a carrier task force, I suspect it was a message to the Egyptians as well, shortly after us a merchant ship, the James, carrying supplies to Israel made the transit safely.   

How the times have changed...

 

Nomads

Click any image to enlarge

One of the features of the Neolithic Age was the domestication of plants and animals. Two main economic styles resulted: farming and herding. Because of agriculture leads to a greater population of sedentary farmers it led to the creation of cities and much larger political units. We live in a civilization birthed by farming.

Herding leads to a different outcome. Herders need to follow their animals and so their range is much more transitory. It gives birth to a more nomadic lifestyle. 

The areas outside of the river valley and coastal civilizations was the home of the herders: Mongolia, the Maghreb, south central Africa and the American great plains. The two economic systems have long been in conflict, with nomads raiding villages while farms pushed into the grazing areas. Today, although some still exist, nomads have largely lost the battle for ground and they've been pushed to the fringes. 

With memories of barbarian raiding parties long past, nomads tend to be romanticized today. These are paintings and drawings of nomads. They are from various places and times.

Chinese snuff bottles

Click any image to enlarge

Snuff is dried and powdered tobacco. In usage a small amount is inhaled through the nose. While Chinese of the Qing dynasty had outlawed smoking tobacco, they considered snuff to be medicinal and it was widely used. Snuff use started with the upper classes, but soon spread to other segments of society. In fact, it became common to offer snuff to others in social settings.

Europeans used snuff boxes, but the Chinese preferred bottles which had a tighter seal and could keep moisture out more effectively. These images are of old Chinese snuff bottles, primarily from the Qing dynasty period. There are more after the jump, and more at Picryl's collection of snuff bottles where I found these images.

The Beach Pneumatic Company

Click any image to enlarge

Pneumatic systems use compressed air to move an object. We're familiar with pneumatic pistons, but at one time they were used to send cylinders for communications. When I was young, an old, family-owned department store I used to visit used them to shoot orders around the building. It was all quite fascinating to my young self.

In the late 19th Century Alfred Ely Beach got the inspiration to create a subway that would use pneumatics to send a cylindrical car full of passengers to their destination. The idea was you could use a blower to create the air pressure needed to push the car, and then reverse the blower to suck the car back. 

In 1870 he built a proof of concept, demonstration tunnel under Broadway that was about 100 yards long. To avoid complications with the government, he had claimed he was building a mail delivery system and only revealed it was to move passengers when it was completed. He then planned on building a much longer system, but he faced opposition from landowners, the 'Boss' Tweed political machine, and finally the financial panic of 1873 that was the nail in the coffin of the project.

You can read about it in more detail at Beach Pneumatic Transit: The 1870 Subway That Could Have Been?

Alfred Ely Beach

Khrushchyovka

Click any image to enlarge

Khrushchyovka are Soviet era apartment blocks. They were designed to be cheaply and quickly built and intended to give every Soviet citizen a home. They were constructed very shoddily. The apartments were small and had low ceilings with poor wiring and plumbing. They were up to five stories tall and had no elevators. They are ubiquitous, and falling apart, across the area of the old Soviet Union. 

I was amused by the East German toy above. It was their version of a sort of Lego blocks, but from the looks of it all you could do with it was to stack square apartments to make Khrushchyovkas. That seems about right.  

Immediately below is what I assume was marketing for the new housing. Following that are some pictures of the interiors of the apartments. They were small and cramped.

   

Dogfights in art

Click any image to enlarge

These are various paintings of aerial dogfights. Of course, out of necessity they are contrived, packing the planes tightly together to give a feel for the combat that actually happens at greater distances. Still, they do a good job of depicting the kinetic chaos of fighting in planes. There are more after the jump. 

Innards of a P-51 Mustang

A nicely detailed look at a P-51 Mustang starting with the frame and working though the engine, fuel tanks, landing gear, weapons and the cockpit controls. It looks like a complex plane to fly, but I'm not a pilot.