My Welcome to Texas

I moved to Texas from Virginia in 2000 after getting a job with a large defense contractor in Austin. The Texas I found in Austin and its suburbs was radically different than my expectations. Having been born and raised in Scotland the only thing I knew about Texas came from cowboy movies. I expected semi-desert scrubland with cactus everywhere and no shortage of tumbleweed. What I found was a hilly, green oasis filled with smart and friendly people dedicated to complying with the mission to keep Austin weird. In hindsight I do wish that my uneducated vision for Austin had prevailed because since the truth of this place became widely known we have been deluged by folks coming to live and work here, and that makes the traffic a nightmare.

The other characteristic of Texas that had escaped my cowboy movie education of the place was its biblical weather. I quickly came to understand that everything is bigger in Texas, particularly the distances, but I missed the lesson about the weather being bigger too. Austin is over 200 miles from the Gulf of Mexico where hurricanes frequently come ashore. With my Scottish upbringing I assumed that 200+ miles was far enough away from a hurricane to be safe. After all, Scotland is only 275 miles from north to south at its longest and only 150 miles wide at its widest. Not so I found out.

It was late in 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so as a defense contractor we were busy. Outside our office building the weather was stormy with flashing lightning and peals of thunder but I was paying no particular attention to it. All of a sudden we were interrupted in our work and told to evacuate to the parking lot under our building; there was a risk of a tornado touching down in our immediate vicinity. I later found out that although tornados were rare in the Austin area, they did occur especially on the backend of a tropical storm in the Gulf making landfall between Corpus Christi and the Mexican border at Brownwood. This was the case on this day.

I obediently stood in our semi-underground parking lot watching the deluge, the streams of rainwater flowing across the concrete, and the flashes and bangs of the storm. It was very dark so if a tornado was coming we wouldn’t see it before it hit. Fortunately the tornado didn’t arrive although there were many reports of tornados on the ground all along the I35 corridor south and north of Austin.

It was close to quitting time when we all traipsed back to work but the recommendation was to stay put until the storm had abated and the danger passed. I kept working on something until about 7:30 when I was advised that it might be an opportune time to head home. I took the advice and headed out after calling home to tell my wife that I was on the way. She informed me of the TV news’s list of road closures and flooding and we agreed that I she would keep me updated via my mobile phone. This seemed like a good plan to me. Since the road reports had most of the main highways either flooded or traffic jammed I decided to take my usual backroad route around the airport and across country. What could possibly go wrong?

The car I was driving at that time was a Mazda Miata MX5; a small two seat convertible with a fabric roof. My first feeling of dread came when I noticed that the road was not so much wet but riverine. I had not realized just how much rain was falling; it was a biblical deluge. The roads were flooded and depending on how they sloped, one side or the other might be a foot deep or more. In my little car with its low profile I was trying to negotiate around the deeper sections. Did I mention before that everything is bigger in Texas? Well, of particular note is the size of Texas vehicles; particularly pickups and SUVs. Since these are high off the ground and since their drivers like a challenge I was continually being passed by them in the other lane as they headed for the deeper spots to play in the rain and to create large waves that almost flooded my little car. The experience was verging on the terrifying but I pressed on since there was no good place to pull over and my wife’s reports told me that my alternate routes were impassable.

During all this time the storm continued its wrath. It was pitch black, the headlights were mostly useless and vision was only obtained during the frequent lightning flashes. Despite all this my wee car was doing good. As I made progress along my chosen route the other traffic faded away. Now I was on a two lane backroad with only a few miles to go. I came to a familiar fork in the road; go right along my usual route or go left along one I was less familiar with. I knew the route on the left was a lot less hilly while my normal route involved a downhill section before a sharp left turn alongside a mostly dry streambed. I went right.

As I was going slowly downhill through the darkness and deluge I became more and more concerned. I had the idea of turning around bit there was no place to do it. I was wary of reversing since I could see less behind me than in front. My quandary was suddenly taken away from me when the windshield turned brown and the engine stopped as I realized I had run into a big puddle splashing dirty water on the front of the car. I was wrong. My foot was on the brake, my other foot on the clutch (it was a 5-speed stick shift) but I was still moving. I pressed the brake harder and pulled on the parking brake; I was still moving. I turned the steering wheel from left to right with no effect on my direction of travel. As I was trying to figure out what was going on I came to the realization that not only was I moving but accelerating rather quickly. I was in the middle of a river that had not been there this morning when I came by this way on the way to work and I was heading into a torrent filled with trees and surrounded by ranchland.

What to do? I tried to recall and lessons I had heard about what to do when your car gets submerged under water. Here’s what I did. I immediately released the seatbelt so that it would not trap me in the car. I opened both windows; they were electric but still working properly. As I realized that I was unlikely to escape through the driver’s window because of its small size, I released the roof canopy. I was now captain of a Mazda boat in the middle of the river with no control of where it was going to go. As I contemplated jumping out to try to catch a tree the car did the catching for me. It seems that I had left the steering turned all the way to the left which left my right wheel sticking out like the barb on a fishhook. It caught a sapling and we spun around and stopped sailing. Now the car was facing into the stream which must have been flowing at least 30 miles per hour. The water formed a wave up and over the windshield as I stood with one leg on each seat searching for my mobile phone. No phone could be found. Next I realized that the leather bomber jacket I was wearing had filled with water between the lining and the leather; it was dragging me backwards and trying to drown me. I managed to extricate myself from it and tossed it away. Now I was standing in this maelstrom in my Dockers and a short sleeved shirt. I was freezing and worse yet, the water level was rising.

I finished up standing on the top of the doors, hanging on to the sapling that the car was hooked to. I was now shoulder high in water. As I looked around to orient myself I saw in the distance the flashing blue lights of some police cars. I yelled ‘help’ as loud as I could into the riot of noise being made by the rushing water. As I did so I heard a voice faintly telling me to shut up and that nobody would hear me. I managed to locate the source of this sound; there was a guy half way up a tree about twenty feet in front of me. He was high enough to be mostly out of the water and his tree was at least nine inches thick. As I looked at my sapling, judging its thickness as two inches at most, I fell into a rage of tree envy. How unfair was it that I was stuck with a thin sapling while my rude companion had a proper tree to hold on to.

AS the water started to level out and even drop a little I became more aware of all the debris racing down at me on the torrent. Much of it started by coming straight at me before turning off to my right and whizzing past on the stream. There were all sorts of tree branches and the like that I braced myself from. Then as I looked far upriver I saw a brown truck heading for me. This was beyond reasonable, this was so unfair. Here I was stuck in the middle of a raging flood, about to be drowned, and now I’m going to be run down by a speeding truck driving down the stream; how ironic. Suddenly as I braced for impact the truck swerved to the right , turned upside down, and disappeared into the depths. I was saved, at least for a bit. I found out later that the truck driver escaped out of the passenger door window as the truck went underwater. He was swept away but managed to grab a tree branch and haul himself up the tree to await rescue.

By this time there was quite a collection of rescue vehicles visible on a nearby road. There was also two rescue divers with headlights in the river at the far bank. They were restrained with ropes, one near the guy in the good tree and one further downstream. The upstream diver started to throw a rope at the guy in the tree and he made what I considered to be pathetic efforts to catch it. I suppose I was still wracked with tree envy. As the rope was recovered and thrown again I was getting more and more frustrated at the unsuccessful efforts. Then it happened. On this throw of the rope the tree guy leaned a little further out to catch at and the tree fell flat into the stream with him on it. He scrambled and splashed and caught the rope and then was washed away still clinging to it. As he washed downstream the rope swung him closer to the far bank where the downstream diver dived on top of him and both were washed away out of my sight.

I was now alone with little chance of them being able to throw at rope to me. It was then that I saw the fire service’s ladder truck extend its ladder across the stream. As the ladder came closer I noticed a person on the end of the ladder who was yelling at me. With the noise of the raging current it was impossible to hear him clearly. I had been imagining that the ladder would reach me and I would walk or crawl across it like it was a bridge. The ladder stopped extending and started to retract. I was more than a bit pissed. Then I heard a helicopter. Was that one of the words he had yelled at me? It could be. Sure enough a helicopter appeared above me with a bright spotlight illuminating my surrounding; trees, power lines etc. As I was wondering where it would land to collect me the light went out and off it went. I was now really pissed.

I then heard the helicopter spool up again and in the distance it appeared from behind a row of homes. Hanging from the helicopter there was a long white rope with someone dangling from the end. The helicopter was soon over me again, this time dipping the rescue swimmer into the torrent like bait on a fishing line. Within moments he joined me in the Miata. Although yelling in my ear I found it difficult to make out what he was saying. I finally figured that he was asking me what we were standing on, was there anybody else with me and were my legs free of the car. I answered him by sticking my head through the rescue strap, cinching up the slider and yelling that it was time to get the #### out of here. Off we went way high in the air and spinning all the way. I had my eyes closed for most of this trip since when I had opened them for a quick look I got suitably terrified.

I had been mostly in control of my emotions until we touched down when I pretty much collapsed. They carried/helped my into an ambulance where I divested myself of my soaked and muddy clothes and got wrapped up in one of those yellow rescue blankets. The guy from the tree was already there and was bitching about how long he had to wait for me. Surly bugger. We were soon joined by the guy from the brown truck. Although we were offered a ride to hospital for a health check we managed to negotiate a ride home in a police car.

When I got home some three hours after I was expected I had to ring the doorbell since my garage door opener was still in the car. My wife opened the door to me in a blanket with a pile of dripping clothes in my arms and asked me where I had been in a somewhat miffed tone. I gave her the highlights of my journey and headed for the shower where I found the worst of my story. It turns out that among the debris floating on the surface of the river there were rafts of fire ants who take a dim view of being flooded. They tend to grab onto the nearest thing that keeps them out of the water, if human, they take out their rage on them by doing what fire ants do. I was stung all over but mostly in my crotch area. It was the final ignominy of the whole experience.

PS: I was on the TV news that night looking much like a catfish being plucked out of a stock pond.

Dark Sky

I am and have always been an unapologetic scientist. Worse than that, I’m a hard scientist, a physicist. No soft ‘science’ for me. What’s more, I’m not a person of faith. I’m not a believer that a sentient being created the universe as a playpen for humans. I also do not believe that such a being exists, or cares in any way about the evolution of the universe or of humankind. I am therefore an atheist, albeit with a lowercase ‘a’ rather than being a member of the American Atheist religion, for religion it is.

Before going further a discussion of my perception of faith. To me faith is a belief in an ontology absent proof. I also believe that faith is strongest when proof is not sought or expected. It seems to me that those who claim faith but keep searching for proof or justification of their faith are in the process of weakening their faith in that search. To me it seems that those who claim a faith should quit looking for proof that they are right and others are wrong. Perhaps in this way we can have a few less wars in the world and a lot more harmony.

Having said all that, what does a scientist like me understand of the origin and evolution of the universe and why do I care; why should you care? What you believe and how you believe it is up to you but science is a bit different. In science belief is limited to what can be proved to be true without ambiguity particularly if that belief provides an explanation or prediction of what could not be explained or be seen before. Scientific beliefs are tested against observations and experiment. If they fail to pass muster they are rejected, replaced or modified to better fit reality.

Within the framework of science there exists an intertwined philosophy that requires that science provide an explanation for both how things work and why things work that way. This is the reason that Newton’s laws of gravity are superseded by Einstein’s General Relativity.  Even though Newton’s laws are adequate for most purposes they do not explain why gravity works the way it does.

To see how science works let’s start with a simple observation with profound implications. Imagine primitive man looking up at the sky at night wondering why it is dark.  Today we notice the same thing but most of us just take it for granted that it should get dark at night. If asked, most people will say it’s because the sun drops below the horizon and does not rise again until dawn. While this observation is undoubtedly true it is completely wrong in explaining the dark sky and obscures a profound finding about the universe that cannot be discovered unless one puts aside complacency and thinks more deeply about this question.

Olbers Paradox — As you look further away there are more stars and their light all adds up

From the Greek philosophers onward many observed that an infinite static universe containing an infinite number of stars is incompatible with a dark night sky. This conflict is described as the “dark night sky paradox” or more commonly “Olbers Paradox” after Heinrich Olbers (1758 – 1840) who wrote about it in 1823. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox. Put simply, if the universe is infinite in time and place with an infinite number of stars then wherever you look at the sky you would be looking at the surface of a star. This would be like looking at the surface of the sun everywhere you looked.

Even the primitive humanoid staring at the night sky noticed that it wasn’t as bright as the sun. The question arises why this is so. There have been many suggested ideas why the sky is dark and not bright at night but fundamentally the only theory that works well is that the universe is expanding. In this model of the universe the whole of our existence started at a moment in time when the universe came into an explosive being; a Big Bang. Since then the universe has expanded with stars, galaxies planets and us coming into being as it did so. As a result the universe has a finite age, about 13.8 billion years, with space expanding at a rate that increases with distance from the observer; Hubble’s parameter . The consequence of this model of the universe is that the sky will be dark at night because of the finite number of stars, finite speed of light and the expansion of the space between us and distant stars.

We can therefore see that science sometimes provides profound findings about the nature of reality from the most basic observations; the night sky is dark leads us to the Big Bang model of the universe. Today we can observe the remnants of the fireball of the Big Bang , the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), that occurred about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. As we observe this background of microwave radiation we are able to find clues about how the Big Bang happened and how our universe will develop into its old age. Sometimes the universe is even stranger than our imaginings.

A Memorial Brick for my Dad

There are many bricks in the veterans memorial plaza where I live in Texas each with a different name and a different story. The brick I want to talk about looks a bit different than the rest and I hope to explain why, and why it sits with all the others.

It all started with a trip to Hawaii to celebrate our 40th anniversary. My wife and I flew to Honolulu a day early so that we could visit the USS Arizona Memorial before we headed off on a seven day islands cruise. We got on the coach to Pearl Harbor early in the morning and were entertained by our driver with multiple tales of the islands and tourists like ourselves. When he asked for questions one of our numbers asked him why so many Japanese visited the Arizona Memorial. I must admit to a moment of apprehension anticipating his answer but when it came it was quite unlike my unworthy expectations. He asked us all to think about how our world was changed by the Pearl Harbor attack and how the world was changed for the Japanese too. As I thought about his question I thought about my father and his circumstances on December 7th 1941.

In December 1941 my mother and father were not yet engaged, far less married and I was not yet born. In fact I was not even a twinkle since I was not born until 1949. On Pearl Harbor day my father was in a German Army POW camp in Torun, Poland (Camp 17 of Stalag_XX_A as I recall). Absent the attack his prospects of ever returning home to Scotland alive were vanishingly remote. It goes without saying that such a failure to return home would have seen my parents unmarried and me unborn.

The story of how he finished up as a POW is a tragic one, quite embarrassing to Winston Churchill’s reputation and greatly forgotten by military historians of WWII both in the USA and UK. He volunteered for the army in September 1939 the week that war was declared in the UK. He was inducted into the Seaforth Regiment and sent to Fort George, near Inverness in Scotland. After only 3 months training he was issued a Lee Enfield bolt action rifle and 100 rounds of .303 ammunition and shipped out to France in January 1940 in the 4th Battalion Seaforths, part of the 51st Highland Division. The division was eventually stationed at the northern end of the Maginot Line near Metz, quite separate from the rest of the British Army. Those readers who are military historians will realize that the 51st HD location was a precarious one, although they didn’t know that at the time but soon would.

When the Phony War ended and the real shooting started around May 10th 1940 the main German armored thrust landed north of the 51st HD, went through Sedan and onward to the English Channel coast near Calais, cutting the 51st off from the rest of the British Army. Elements of the 51st division did take part in supporting French armor assaults northward into the flank of the German penetration but without air support and after the German anti-tank forces worked out how to disable the heavily armored French tanks, these all failed.

The rest of the British Army was famously evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk between May 27th and June 4th leaving the 51st HD the only British division left fighting in France (the 50th division was in the process of landing at Cherbourg but were soon turned around and sent back to the UK). The 51st, including my father, fell back along the line of the river Somme arriving near St Valery sur Somme on the English Channel coast by May 28th. They were soon engaged by strong mechanized and infantry forces. The danger of being outflanked by German armor on the right drove them slowly back toward their bases of supply at Le-Havre and Rouen. When these bases were cut off they fell back to St Valery-en-Caux on the channel coast where they attempted to hold a perimeter while awaiting to be rescued by sea. But rescue became impossible when the beaches came under direct artillery fire. They might have been saved if earlier action had been taken but Churchill had delayed efforts to rescue the 51st and to keep them in the fight as a political bargaining tool with the French to keep them from capitulating; now it was too late.

On June 12th 1940 the French forces supporting them surrendered and, absent food, fuel, ammunition and medical supplies, and with no embarkation possible the 51st was surrendered to the famous German general Erwin Rommel. The 10,000 men of the division, mostly Scottish, were marched off as POWs to an uncertain future. At the time of this surrender the 51st Highland Division was surrounded by the 5th and 7th armored divisions, the 2nd motorized division, the 11th motorized brigade, the 57th, 31st, 12th, and 32nd infantry divisions of the German Army. A small force did escape through German lines to Le-Havre and returned to the UK but my father was not one of the fortunate ones.

He and his buddies were stripped of all that was valuable the marched eastward toward Germany. Besides marching they were carried in coal barges, in trucks and finally by train in cattle cars to Torun, Poland which is near Gdansk, or Danzig as it was called in those days. Here they entered into the German camp system, in his case as a private soldier. They were organized by service, rank and nationality. The British were treated better than most, albeit not all that well. They were issued rations of 1/5th of a loaf of black bread and a bowl of soup per day. Why 1/5th of a loaf is a mystery that only the Germans knew the answer to. At the beginning the bread was okay and the soup had recognizable vegetables and some protein in it. As time passed the ‘bread’ became sweepings and the soup became warm water.

As a private soldier my father was obliged to work in either the coal mines or on local farms. He volunteered to be a farm worker because it allowed him access to foodstuffs not available in camp that he could trade for. The POWs were sustained by Red Cross parcels, actually boxes, many supplied from the USA through Switzerland. They were supposed to receive one parcel per week but got far fewer, and sometimes none for months. The parcels contained cans of coffee, cans containing American cigarettes, cans of butter, chocolate, candies and other highly desirable products that were rarely consumed by the POWs but used as trade goods to swap for potatoes, carrots, eggs and other staples from local farmers. It was these staples that kept them alive through the next five years.

He escaped a few times; well he walked away from the farm he was working on, but with little success. When recaptured, prisoners were yelled at, perhaps hit with a rifle butt a few times, and then they were sentenced to 21 days solitary in the camp prison, the cooler. His most successful escape attempt reached the docks at Gdansk where he and his buddy were caught climbing the dockyard fence next to a Swedish cargo ship. So he was returned to the camp and his 21 day penance before heading out on the next work party to another farm. To my father it was all an adventure to escape the monotony of camp life. His family circumstances before he volunteered was pretty rough so I don’t think POW life was too unsettling for him, early on at least. He sent a postcard home to his sweetheart, my mother to be, consisting of a photograph of his hut and its residents and telling her that he was alive (I still have it). They corresponded by letter throughout his captivity maintaining their romance from afar. There is a family story that towards the end of the war, while he was again in solitary, he was informed by the guards that his older brother was in camp looking for him. Having been captured in Tobruk in North Africa and having had many adventures before pitching up in Poland his older brother, my uncle Jim got back to Scotland the same week as my dad.

In December 1941 my father had been a POW for over a year and a half. Although the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union in June that year the POWs had little hope of an end to the war in circumstances that would see them return home victorious. Then Pearl Harbor happened and when Churchill was informed of the attack wrote that he “…went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful”. I suspect that the POWs had a similar reaction when they found out than America had entered the war on their side.

Towards the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945 the camps in Poland were emptied and the POWs were rounded up and driven west to escape the advancing Soviet forces. This little known episode is called “The March” by those who took part in it. Over a period of about four months from January to April, they were marched about back and forth across Poland and Germany for more than 500 miles in some of the most brutally cold conditions. There was very little food and those who fell out of line to raid a farmer’s field for some potatoes were often shot. Estimates vary but between 100,000 to 200,000 allied POWs took part with between 2000 and 3000 that died on the way. One morning in late April or early May 1945 my father woke in a field near Hamburg. The guards had gone and soon allied forces arrived – he was free!

My dad returned home to Scotland and soon persuaded my mother to marry him. They settled down in central Scotland and raised two boys, my elder brother and me. Although he worked pretty much every day of his life my father’s health was affected by his time as a POW. He died young, not quite 55, and a little over a year after my mom died. She was barely in her 50’s when she died having been seriously ill since her early 30’s.

So what has all this to do with a brick in our Veterans Memorial Garden? Well, I was telling a neighbor this tale a number of years back. He is a Vietnam veteran who was seriously wounded flying helicopters in the 1st Cavalry. He was interested in my Dad’s story and my experience on the bus heading to the Arizona memorial. It was he who suggested the brick. So that is why the brick is there, not just to memorialize my father but to remind folks of what the others memorialized there have done to rescue freedom, and to place my dad’s name in a country he loved and among those who saved his life and who gave me mine. But for America and Americans, my dad would not have survived and I would not have been born and would never have emigrated to the United States of America and become one of its citizens – and I would never then have placed the brick.

Covid

Pfizer on Friday became the first company to seek emergency authorization for a coronavirus vaccine in the United States, a landmark moment and a signal that a powerful tool to help control the pandemic could begin to be available by late December.

 

Space X Launch

Visit Space X Texas

Big things are happening in a tiny Texas town. Located on the southernmost tip of the state, Boca Chica has rapidly become a popular destination amongst space enthusiasts from around the globe.

Why? It all started back in 2013, when Elon Musk, founder of aerospace company, SpaceX, announced that he was considering the small coastal town as the site for where an interplanetary spaceship would be built.

Take a test Flight https://www.spacex.com/

 

The SpaceX Demo-2 test flight for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program was the first to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station and return them safely to Earth onboard a commercially built and operated spacecraft.

The Birds — A Tale From Long Ago And Far Away

The Birds – A Tale from Long Ago and Far Away

Once upon a time I was doing research as a physicist on the military applications of lasers and electro-optic systems. As a consequence of world events the military became wary of having their anti-aircraft radar systems attacked by anti-radar missiles. Better they thought to look at methods of detecting aircraft by passive means to avoid emitting radar signals that could be detected and attacked. As a result we built an infra-red system that scanned the sky through 360 degrees and detected aircraft by their heat signatures. It was all very high tech and clever. It determined the direction and elevation to a detected aircraft with great precision but it did have a drawback; it didn’t determine the target’s range. That was where my group came in. All we had to do was to integrate a laser rangefinder into the infra-red surveillance system.

To design and integrate a laser rangefinder for aircraft we had first to work out the mathematics of how a laser rangefinder works. This calculation involves the power of the laser, sensitivity of the laser detector, transmission of the atmosphere, and the reflectivity of the aircraft to lasers. We could determine all the other factors but we had no idea how much laser light would be reflected off an aircraft; so we had to find out.

In the radar world the reflectivity of a target object to radar illumination is called the Radar Cross Section or RCS. The RCS of objects have been closely studied since radar got invented, particularly how the RCS changes with target structure, materials and orientation. This is an essential study when developing stealthy platforms or when estimating the operational performance of weapon systems. In the case of the equivalent RCS for laser illuminations, at that time nothing was known.

We set about determining the laser RCS of military aircraft and missiles by shining lasers at them when parked on the ground or flying controlled flight patterns in front of our equipment. We were particularly interested in how the reflectance changed as the orientation of the aircraft changed. We gave pilots all the fuel they could burn to fly aerobatic patterns in our test area.

After making some of the first measurements of the laser RCS of aircraft we moved on to design our laser rangefinder system. It was at this point that the folks developing the surveillance system  came to us with a problem; could we tell the difference between an aircraft a long way away and a large bird a few hundred feet away. It turns out that the infra-red signal from each of these cases is indistinguishable and as a result a closely flying bird looks very much like a distant aircraft until it lands in a tree. We set out to measure the laser RCS of large birds.

Since birds were not as cooperative as aircraft we had to encourage them to position themselves in front of our lasers. We tried putting bird seed on a fence post trying to illuminate the birds as the landed to peck at the seed.  It didn’t work because it seems that the birds objected to being whacked by laser pulses which they seemed to detect a lot easier than us humans in similar circumstances.

We tried lots of variations of the bird seed solution without getting any cooperation from the birds. It was obvious that we needed to force the birds to cooperate so we had to shoot a few of them to get their cooperation. We tried to mount the bird on top of a pole, but being dead it just flopped and didn’t look very bird-like. So we cut up a wire coat hanger and made the birds fly right with the application of wire and duct tape. But we were still not happy. It seemed that the pole that we taped the bird to was generating as much of a return as the bird. There was only one solution left, we had to get the birds to be free flying or as close as we could.

We constructed an arrangement using a large helium balloon, fishing line and a tether and a suitably wired and taped bird. One of our junior engineers was sent out with the balloon borne flying bird and we got down to measuring the bird’s laser RCS. As I was staring through the alignment scope I started to notice that I was having a harder and harder time tracking the bird. It seemed to be rising quickly into the air. I looked around the scope and noticed our young engineer running across the airfield while gesticulating up into the air. He had let go of the tether and the balloon, with bird attached, was rapidly rising into the air and disappearing downwind and a prodigious rate. This was very annoying. WE had to prepare another balloon and bird and recover our engineer to try again.

I have often wondered who found our balloon after in lost its helium and came down to earth, I wonder what they made of the bird with the wire braced wings and duct taped head. Maybe they thought that the birds were evolving a new method of flight. I’m glad to say that my phone never rang with an irate non-combatant complaining about strange experiments in places long ago and far away.

2020 — A Year of COVID–19 and Presidential Elections

2020 – A year of COVID-19 and Presidential Elections

In an old blog post I described my dilemma in voting for a presidential candidate in the 2016 election. I described the dilemma as like Hobson’s choice but modified that description because Hobson had the choice of something or nothing; a bad horse or no horse at all. My dilemma was one of choosing between Stalin in a pantsuit (HRH Clinton) or for Mussolini with hair (Trump). I chose neither, making no choice for President – perhaps Hobson after all

Four years later Trump has been defeated in the most recent election, although he keeps insisting that he didn’t lose but was cheated by the Democrats, who from now on I shall refer to as the Socialists for a more accurate description of them. He is to be replaced, temporarily at least, by Joe Biden a 50 year underachieving political lightweight who was recently Obama’s vice president.

Last year at this time Trump’s economy was booming. During his administration unemployment was at its lowest in fifty years, particularly among women, African Americans and Hispanics. Real take-home pay was rising faster than it had in decades and the ‘smart’ opinion was that he would be re-elected in a landslide. Then COVID happened.

The virus came from China, although we were immediately scolded by the Socialists not to mention that fact. How humans got infected by this virus remains unknown. Like the Benghazi terrorist attacks that were blamed on a video, we have been told by the media ‘experts’ that the virus originated in bats from a meat market. Others have pointed out that the meat market bats are not the kind that carry this virus. They claim that the bats that carry COVID viruses reside hundreds of miles away from the meat market and are not available for purchase there.

An alternative explanation for the infection is that it was born in a Chinese bio-lab where they were (legitimately) investigating bat viruses and how the come to infect humans. According to this explanation the virus escaped from this lab, probably in an accidentally infected lab worker who then spread it within the local population.

We just don’t know the truth about how this virus infected humans and we are unlikely to ever find out with certainty. What we do know for certain is that within the space of a few weeks this virus was out of China and with the assistance of global travel, was infecting the world. Shutting down travel from China and other seriously affected nations was hailed by the Socialists as jingoistic and racist. Nancy ‘Antoinette’ Pelosi urged us to hug a Chinaman to show our non-racist qualifications.  Suffice it to say that actions proposed to limit the spread of the virus were vigorously denounced by the Socialists until later in the year when the administration was denounced for not implementing them earlier.

As the virus spread the only methods recommended for curtailing the spread were to stay at home, stay at least 6 feet away from another, and to wear a mask to prevent breathing out infected droplets. The mask recommendation is the most interesting one since early on in the anti-virus fight we were told that masks were ineffective. That recommendation then morphed into one that claimed that masks would prevent the wearer from infecting others but would not prevent the wearer from catching the infection. Now we are being told that self-protection can be achieved by wearing a mask. It seems to me that political objectives drove these recommendations more than health considerations. I can think of no other reason that they can't keep their story straight.

We are now told that the panacea of protection from the virus is the impending vaccines. I do hope that this is so but I do have concerns. Firstly, in general there are no cures for virus infections. I believe that so far only one virus has a developed cure, the rest need prevention, usually by a vaccine. If the virus mutates then the vaccine will become less effective. Perhaps we can follow the influenza route and produce a new vaccine every year based on our best guess about next year’s virus mutation.

The virus closed our economy with millions thrown out of work. In addition the Trump administration was heckled continuously by a press compliant to the wishes and instructions of the power crazed Socialists. Unable to get his message out through the filter of press distortions, Trump continued to Tweet and to ramble during daily COVID conferences. The result is that he lost reelection to a Pandemic from China and to a Socialist rabble who hated him for winning in 2016 and giving lie to their worldview.

The next administration is to be led by a lifelong politician of no significant achievements who is raddled by his dementia and completely lacking in any political vision. His vice president, who is widely expected to replace him in a 24th Amendment coup-d’état, is a woman of mixed Caribbean and Indian heritage who seems to have climbed to the top much like a courtesan in the courts of Europe in previous centuries.

Only God can save the American experiment in government now.

The Mars Jolly

The Mars Jolly

Back in the day when I was sent on a trip to visit a customer, supplier or to a meeting we called it 'going on a jolly'. There’s a lot of talk right now about sending people to Mars; a Mars Jolly. There’s even talk of making this a one way trip and not bringing them back. There’s no shortage of volunteers.

I’m interested in the motivations to send people to Mars and the reasons why we shouldn’t. A search of the web generates numerous sites supporting sending people to Mars and a number of sites taking the opposite view. In this article by Jessica Orwig in Business Insider she presents the most often quoted reasons to send people to Mars. (5 undeniable reasons humans need to colonize Mars — even though it's going to cost billions by Jessica Orwig, Business Insider, Apr. 21, 2015). The five reasons she presents are:

·         Ensuring the survival of our species

·         Discovering life on Mars

·         Improving the quality of life on Earth

·         Growing as a species

·         Demonstrating political and economic leadership

I'm not convinced by any of these reasons for going to Mars. I'm definitely unconvinced of the sense of colonizing Mars. Here's my reasons why.

Ensuring the survival of our species

It is highly likely than humankind will be killed off by some kind of global disaster in the not too distant future. Assuming that we avoid destroying ourselves, there are a number of likely disasters that could annihilate us. We could get hit by a large comet or asteroid just like the one that killed off the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. Alternatively one of the many candidate super-volcanoes could erupt just like the one that was responsible for the great dying 252 million years ago that wiped out over 90% of marine creatures and 70% of land creatures on our planet. Another dangerous event is the reversal of the planet’s magnetic field. These reversals happen randomly. Unfortunately they are also associated with a decrease in the magnetic field strength. There’s lots of speculation on what the effect might be on humanity during a reversal and field reduction. Most likely is that the reduction will allow an increased solar wind and cosmic ray flux on the surface. Absent SPF-1000 sun blocks for humans and animals this increased UV flux is likely to be very harmful, possibly fatal.

I have often heard the argument that we need to go to Mars to save humanity but I don’t believe it.  It sounds a bit like Scientology or some other neo-religious belief system is at work. What form of narcissism makes people think that humankind is unique or valuable in the universe. Unless you believe that humanity is unique then you must believe that life will exist in our universe whether humans exist or die out. Considering the huge expanse of the universe humankind is less than irrelevant. We shall live, we shall die out, and perhaps be replaced on our planet by something else, then our planet will be consumed by our sun and the universe will not give a damn or even notice.

Getting to Mars takes about 6 months assuming that the Earth and Mars are appropriately aligned. As soon as humans leave Earth orbit they are no longer protected by the Earth’s magnetic field. For humans to get to Mars they will have to survive this time while being bombarded by a high level of ionizing radiation from cosmic rays and the solar wind. Mars has no magnetic field and is therefore open to constant bombardment from cosmic rays so humans on the surface will be continuously exposed to cancer causing radiation. The only way to survive will be to go underground far enough to be shielded.

Since Mars is constantly bombarded by radiation nothing will grow on its surface, even if adequate water was available. Growing food will have to be done underground. Water will have to be fetched from the poles as ice, melted for water and electrolyzed to produce breathing oxygen and hydrogen fuel. This will require huge quantities of energy that can only be supplied by nuclear reactors.

  1. Discovering life on Mars

I’m not at all convinced that it is necessary to send people to Mars to find evidence of life. For every manned mission to Mars I expect we could send more than ten unmanned missions for the same cost. In an age where artificial intelligence is developing fast I expect that unmanned Mars missions will both spur and benefit from AI. I also think that in this age of the risk averse one death in pursuit of this mission will close it down forever. Better to risk machines than people if only for the political optics.

If or when we discover life on Mars, what then? Shall we speculate that life on our planet was seeded by panspermia from Mars? It would seem that if this is the case we shall then wind ourselves around the axle wondering where life on Mars came from. Of could well be that life on Mars was and Earth was seeded from a common source outside our solar system. If on the other hand Mars DNA is fundamentally foreign to Earth DNA then we shall have to conclude that life began on both planets independently, or was seeded on these planets from different sources.

What then? Will the cost have been worth the effort? I recall that at the pinnacle of the Apollo program it was cancelled not least by an outpouring of claims that it was all too expensive and that the money should be spent on social welfare programs instead. Cancellation was also spurred by serious concerns about the safety of the Apollo missions and that the political objectives set out by President Kennedy of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth  had been achieved.

  1. Improving the quality of life on Earth

In my opinion the argument that progress is only possible by the serendipitous cross fertilization of technology from a ‘wartime’ mission is at best a specious one. It is capitalism that has the track record of developing technology that improves the quality of life on Earth. Consider the development of the cellular telephone system with all its technology challenges, capitalization challenges and marketing challenges. All of this driven by public demand and not driven by government planning.

  1. Growing as a species

It seems to me that our species has already grown too large to be comfortably accommodated on this planet. That may be the thinking behind the idea of transferring a significant portion of our population to Mars. Unfortunately life on Mars will be very restrictive and not at all like immigration to the Americas in the past.

Mars has a very small magnetic field that is incapable of protecting the surface from an avalanche of ionizing radiation that is incompatible with life as we know it. It might be possible to terraform Mars to support an atmosphere but it will not be possible to create a protective magnetic field.

Living on Mars will have to be subterranean to escape the deadly radiation on the surface. How living as a troglodyte on Mars will allow our species to grow is beyond my understanding.

  1. Demonstrating political and economic leadership

This reason is way too silly to be taken seriously. Are we proposing that billions or trillions must be spent in travel to Mars in order that the USA be taken seriously? Why not demand that our elected officials behave seriously or better yet that our electorate vote only for serious people. It may not work but it will be much cheaper to find out.

 

In conclusion I find the reasons given for tripping to Mars are mostly silly. They seem to be spawned by some quasi-religious belief in the specialness of the human species within the universe. I disagree with this point of view. We are an example of life in a universe that is likely teeming with life. Our passing as a species will be little noticed by the universe at large which will continue to operate in its own way whether we are around to see it or not.