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Jumbo

Jumbo

Posted
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Well worth taking the time...this guy took 41 years of his time...

 

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/homepage2/hiroshima-reflections-will-ripley/

 

 

Hiroshima survivor: Even former enemies deserve closure

 

(CNN)Editor's Note: The atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had, by the end of 1945, taken well over 200,000 lives. Many of those not instantly vaporized by the fireballs were left with horrific injuries. More would die from the effects of radiation or endure lifelong health complications. WhenCNN's Will Ripley moved to Japan in 2014, he expected to encounter anger over America's wartime actions. Then he met 79-year-old Hiroshima survivor Shigeaki Mori.

 
Shigeaki Mori was eight years old on August 6, 1945. He was walking to school at 8:15 a.m. when an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the A-bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" on Hiroshima.
 
<edit>
 
Mori's old primary school was 400 meters from ground zero. He says all the teachers and students in the building died. A police headquarters holding a small group of American POWs sat next to the school. Mori says he saw the captured airmen from his schoolyard. Some Hiroshima survivors even drew sketches of them. 
 
Today, we know 12 American POWs died as a result of the A-bomb in Hiroshima. The POWs included the crews of two downed American bombers -- the Lonesome Lady and the Taloa.
 
The youngest, Airman 3rd Class Norman Roland Brissette of Lowell, Massachusetts, was just 19. But due to extreme secrecy and political sensitivity, it wasn't until the 1970s that de-classified U.S. documents verified the presence of American POWs there. And even then, surviving families knew very little of the circumstances surrounding their relatives' captivity and deaths.
 
Mori, a local historian, felt even Japan's former enemies deserved closure. He was determined to uncover details of the POWs situation, share the information with their families, and ensure that the American names were placed on the wall of the Hall of Remembrance in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, alongside the tens of thousands of other victims.

 

 

 

Great videos and much more at link 

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Jumbo

Jumbo

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/legendary-b-52-lot-more-195611318.html

 

 

The legendary B-52 is about to get a lot more lethal

 

Last week, the 96th Bomb Squadron at Barksdale Air Force Base became the first squadron to train B-52s with internal-weapons-bay upgrades.

 

The Military Standard 1760 Internal Weapons Bay Upgrade (IWBU) program, the latest in a long line of upgrades to the B-52's relatively ancient airframe, will allow the plane to carry ordinance inside the fuselage.

 

“The IWBU to the B-52H provides increased carriage capability for precision weapons to include the GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM),” said Capt. Kenny, a 96th Bomb Squadron instructor weapon-systems officer said in a US Air Force Release.

 

“This new capability also extends our range by reducing the amount of drag that external weapons produce,” continued Kenny. 

 

The IWBU will first rewire the plane to drop eight JDAMs from a conventional rotary launcher bomb bay, and then they'll reconfigure the pylons to go from holding 12 to 16 JDAMs, nearly doubling the B-52's capacity for these high-tech bombs.

Previously B-52s were only able to drop unguided munitions, or "dumb bombs," from the weapons bay.

 

“The B-52’s pylons have had the capability to speak to the digital systems on precision weapons like JDAM for years, while the bomb bay remained analog and only capable of dropping unguided conventional weapons. That’s where the IWBU comes in.”

 

<edit>

 

Kenny went on to explain why this small change potentially has so much meaning: “IWBU nearly doubles the number of JDAMs a single plane can carry,” Kenny said.

 

“This gives us the option to reduce the number of aircraft required to execute a mission, lowers our fuel requirements and provides us with more flexible load outs, enabling us to strike a wider range of target types during any given mission.”

 

“The B-52 has always been capable of executing a wide variety of missions,” Kenny said. “The IWBU provides more flexibility and capability in order to more effectively execute these diverse set of missions across numerous combatant commands.”

 

<edit>

 

Currently, the B-52 is slated to remain active in the Air Force's fleet until 2040, at which point it would have completed nearly a century of service. Even as the Air Force pushes toward the B-21, a new bomber platform, the B-52 remains relevant due to regular upgrades like the IWBU.

 

B-52s operating out of Qatar are supporting coalition and allied forces in the fight against ISISwith the Combined Joint Task Force's Operation Inherent Resolve.

 

 

cool pics & vids at link

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btfoom

btfoom

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My daughter is 11 years old.  Her very good friend is moving to Toronto (we live in Maryland) at the end of the school year - this Friday.

 

This marks 3 friends in the last 4 years who have moved away (yes, if you want to move, introduce your daughter to mine and guarantee w/in 6 months you will be gone :lol: ).  Well, come home from work today and ask the wife where she is.  Tells me she's up in her room - I can hear the sound of coins jingling together.  Go up and she's opened up her piggy bank where she has been saving change for more than a year now.  I ask her why she's counting her money.  She says that the school is selling extra year-books at lunch (cost $35) and she can't think of anything else to get her friend "Dad, I just don't want her to forget me or our good times together, plus all of us (their friends) can sign it.  Noone else has any money, so I said I'd do it.".  She tells me she's about 7 dollars short and can I lend her the money and she will pay it back.  I just hugged her because I was so proud that she was so self-less to do something for her friends (and because tears were running down my cheeks.

 

Sometimes the coolest things are right in front of us. :)

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btfoom

btfoom

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Not for the faint of heart:

 

http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/business/article/MASSIVE-Schlitterbahn-waterslide-opens-Wednesday-8315326.php

 

Not from link, but here are its specs:

 

Location:  Schlitterbahn Waterpark Galveston Island
 
Built by: Schlitterbahn and WhiteWater West
 
Height: Over 81 Feet tall
 
Color: Green, white, and red with translucent "belly of the beast" section

Technology: Uses patented Master Blaster technology invented by Schlitterbahn’s Wizard of Water, Jeff Henry. Jets of water are used to blast riders uphill.
 
Number of riders: 1-2 in a double tube
 
Number of uphill BLASTS: 4
 
Cool ride features: Exciting never-before-done triple-down ending into the landing pool
 
Number of slide segments: 135 slide segments (made up of 203 fiberglass parts)
 
Number of translucent segments: 7 green translucent segments
 
Length of ride: 2.5 football fields long (926 ft) -- twice the length of any other waterslide at Schlitterbahn Galveston Island.
 
Fasteners: 6,968 bolts and 6,968 nuts
 
Steps to the top: 123

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Jumbo

Jumbo

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Been figuring this is what it would be, but always very cool to me to discover how advanced many earlier cultures have been (in any way), and there's so much information on that stuff that we lack.

 

http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2016-06-09/decade-of-labor-reveals-philosophers-guide-to-the-galaxy

 

Decade of Labor Reveals Philosopher's Guide to the Galaxy

 

An international team of scientists says a decade of painstaking work has deciphered hidden writing on the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism.

 

ancient%20pc_zpsgrlfqwi2.jpg

 

 

 

 

By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS, Associated Press

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — When you're trying to fathom a mangled relic of very old hi-tech, it helps to have the manufacturer's instructions.

For over a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck, the exact function of the Antikythera Mechanism — named after the southern Greek island off which it was found — was a tantalizing puzzle.

 

From a few words deciphered on the twisted, corroded fragments of bronze gears and plates, experts guessed it was an astronomical instrument. But much more remained hidden out of sight.

After more than a decade's efforts using cutting-edge scanning equipment, an international team of scientists has now read about 3,500 characters of explanatory text — a quarter of the original — in the innards of the 2,100-year-old remains.

 

They say it was a kind of philosopher's guide to the galaxy, and perhaps the world's oldest mechanical computer.

"Now we have texts that you can actually read as ancient Greek, what we had before was like something on the radio with a lot of static," said team member Alexander Jones, a professor of the history of ancient science at New York University.

"It's a lot of detail for us because it comes from a period from which we know very little about Greek astronomy and essentially nothing about the technology, except what we gather from here," he said. "So these very small texts are a very big thing for us."

The team says the mechanism was a calendar of the sun and the moon that showed the phases of the moon, the position of the sun and the moon in the zodiac, the position of the planets, and predicted eclipses. Nothing of the sort was known to be made for well over 1,000 years.

"It was not a research tool, something that an astronomer would use to do computations, or even an astrologer to do prognostications, but something that you would use to teach about the cosmos and our place in the cosmos," Jones said. "It's like a textbook of astronomy as it was understood then, which connected the movements of the sky and the planets with the lives of the ancient Greeks and their environment."

 

"I would see it as more something that might be a philosopher's instructional device."

The letters — some just 1.2 millimeters (1/20 of an inch) tall — were engraved on the inside covers and visible front and back sections of the mechanism, which originally had the rough dimensions of an office box-file, was encased in wood and operated with a hand-crank.

It wasn't quite a manual, more like a long label you would get on a museum to describe a display, according to another team member, Mike Edmunds, who is an emeritus professor of astrophysics at Cardiff University.

"It's not telling you how to use it, it says 'what you see is such and such,' rather than 'turn this knob and it shows you something,'" he said Thursday, during a presentation of the team's findings in Athens.

The mechanism's fragments were raised in 1901 from a mid-1st century B.C. shipwreck, and at first seemed like a scruffy footnote to a magnificent body of finds that included bronze and marble statues, luxury glassware and ceramics.

But the sediment-encrusted, compacted lumps soon attracted scientific attention, and were studied by successive teams over the next decades. While hypotheses were made as to the functioning of the gears and the use of the machine, it was for long impossible to read more than a few hundred characters of the texts buried on the inside of a multi-layered mechanism a bit like a big clock.

 

About 12 years ago, Jones' and Edmunds' team started to use x-ray scanning and imaging technology to analyze the 82 surviving fragments.

"The original investigation was intended to see how the mechanism works, and that was very successful," Edmunds said. "What we hadn't realized was that the modern techniques that were being used would allow us to read the texts much better both on the outside of the mechanism and on the inside than was done before."

It was a painstaking process, as to read each of the tiny letters, researchers had to look at dozens of scans.

Edmunds said the style of the text — formal and detailed — implied that it was designed to be much more than a rich collector's plaything.

"It takes it to me out of the realm of executive toys — an executive wouldn't pay all that money to have all that waffle — it's more serious than a toy," he said.

It was probably made in Greece between 200 and 70 B.C., although no maker's signature has been found.

The team says they have read practically all the text on the surviving fragments. Their greatest hope is that archaeologists currently revisiting the shipwreck will uncover pieces overlooked by the sponge divers who found it a century ago — or even another similar mechanism.

The commercial vessel was a giant of the ancient world — at least 40 meters (130 feet) long — and broke into two as it sank, settling on a steep underwater slope about 50 meters (164 feet) deep.

Most of the inscriptions, and at least 20 gears that worked to display the planets, are still there.

"Perhaps, at some point, our reading may be fleshed out by sections retrieved from the sea," said team member Yanis Bitsakis.

 

 

 

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btfoom

btfoom

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I always wanted a big waterslide at a park to end about 40 feet above the pool at the end.  So it just spits you out into free fall, like you jumped off of a bridge. 

 

Not exactly a drop, but pretty close (edit - mildly NSFW - girls in bikinis):

 

Edited by btfoom
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