A Dixie Carpetbagger

Years later, 5 of the 6 battleships present at the last battlewagon meeting had been bloodied at Pearl Harbor.  “Win through to ultimate victory,” indeed.

To all the veterans who have served and are serving this country, and whom have borne the burden of our defense, I thank you.

Happy 235th! To all of the Marine Corps brotherhood– those serving, retired Marines, and those who are no longer amongst us– I have to say “Thank You” and Semper Fi.

Dixie – I like the flag. Careful posting it on a Yankee blog though.

Right about the time you read this, I’m going to be finishing up a stint in my university’s library, digging through the stacks while trying to find some source material for a term paper.  You see, I foolishly let my Civil War and Reconstruction professor know I knew about the Republic of West Florida and the Bonnie Blue Flag… and now I’m doing a term paper on that subject.  (Please note: this is the same Doctor who first tied Toussaint L’Ouverture to the Civil War, so me tying the Republic of West Florida in with the War Between the States has him excited.  Beware excited history professors!)

Please note: geek that I am, I got sidetracked and spent an hour doing research between the last line and this one.  But it was productive…

I am finding out, though, that the Bonnie Blue Flag has… negative connotations to some people.  (shrugs)  I use it as a symbol for state’s rights and libertarianism, not for the Confederacy.  You know, maybe if the Yanks hadn’t a’ gone all annexation-happy, we wouldn’t have this problem…

405 years ago today, Guy Fawkes was arrested in the basement of the House of Lords.  To date, he has been the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.

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And, of course, what better way to celebrate than to watch a movie and set off some gunpowder?

12/7/1941 – 9/11/2001

Dates which will live in infamy.

Do not allow the victims of either day to fall from memory, for their deaths served as an alarm call to their countrymen.

AWAKE!  FEAR!  FIRE!  FOES!  AWAKE!

29 August 2005– Hurricane Katrina makes landfall as a Category 3 hurricane near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana.  Death totals in coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are lower than expected, for two reasons.  One, Katrina came ashore as a Category (Cat) 3 storm with sustained winds of 125 miles and hour, not a Cat 5 with 175 mph winds.*  Two, the local Weather Forecast Office of the National Weather Service issued this bulletin the day before.  When a weather bulletin contains words such as “devastating,” “most powerful,” and “will make human suffering incredible by modern standards,” it’s advisable for those in the path of said storm to get the blazes away from the damned thing.

I remember Katrina because I was, indeed, getting the blazes away from said storm– in the form of going to Lakeland for an engineer’s seminar.  One of the other groups was from Pensacola, and they were getting reports that even that far away, the storm was doing some decent damage.  Even before the news began covering it, everyone at the conference (all of us civil and structural engineers) knew that New Orleans would flood.  We also knew that N’Awlins was going to suffer great loss of life, due to the lack of evacuations.  (The highest estimate was around 5% of the population– 15,000 or more.)

We all shook our heads– didn’t these people understand what was coming for them?  I had Opal pass right over my head in ’95– along with close hits from Georges in ’98, Allison in ’01, and Frances and Ivan in ’04.  Heck, Cindy in ’04 went into almost the same area…

(H/T Linoge for reminding me… like the news coverage hasn’t…)

* Doing the math, a 125 MPH wind produces 40 (125^2 * .00256) pounds a square foot of pressure, but a 175 MPH wind creates 78.4 (175^2 * .00256) PSF.  (What’s sad is that I had to look this up– I used to have to know these calculations by heart.)  At some point below 175 MPH, the wind would have turned the low-pitched roofs on the coat into wings, and ripped them from the buildings.  Notice that in footage and photos from hurricane zones, the roofs that survive have a moderate pitch– usually around 45 degrees.  This allows the wind to blow over them, but not so quickly as to produce lift… like a spoiler on an aircraft’s wing.  Sorry, I worked as a structural engineer, this is fascinating to me….

The SR-71 Blackbird– built out of a material (titanium) that had to be purchased from the Soviet Union, which forced workers to re-learn everything they did in fabrication, which used a fuel that needed and explosion to ignite it– good thing, because the fuel tanks will not seal at ambient temperatures– and had engines that needed two Buick Wildcat engines as a starter.

This aircraft first flew in 1962– but as one of its creators, Ben Rich, noted– it’d still be a technological achievement if it rolled off the line today.

Now, go watch the majesty that is the Blackbird.

I almost forgot… it’s been 41 years.

What my generation can’t do with computers and a template to build on, these men did with technology that seems ancient today. The Landing Module computer had less than 4,000 programmable words (yes, words– all commands were phrased like “Verb 884″ or “Noun 284″)… and the Saturn’s guidance computer ran on a two megahertz CPU.

Truly, the Apollo astronauts were pioneers.

Newbius finds an odd exhibit in a museum.  No, that’s not an M-4 with a shotgun’s sight rib– take a look at the muzzle.  It’s Colt’s prototype Advanced Combat Rifle.  What’s so special about it?  It fires two rounds at a time… kinda.

So, instead of modifying the fire control to fire a two-round burst, (wait a second… the M-16A2 had a three-round burst setting) Colt made a rifle that fired two projectiles (of different weights) with reduced accuracy (two weights, two points of impact) from a specialized cartridge (reduced powder charge, logistics nightmares, non-standard).  Anybody care to guess why the ACR contest went nowhere?