On this day in 1862, 150 years ago, Robert Smalls commandeered an armed American Confederate ship in Charleston in order to emancipate himself and several others from slavery.
Smalls was hired in 1861 as a deckhand on Planter, the transport steamer serving Brigadier General Roswell Ripley, commander of the Second Military District of South Carolina. Smalls later became its pilot. In the early morning hours of May 13, 1862, while the white crew was ashore, Smalls, then 23, commandeered Planter, loaded with armaments for the rebel forts. With his wife, children and 12 other slaves aboard he gave the correct whistle signal as he passed each rebel fort. He then sailed toward Onward, the nearest Union blockading ship. As Onward prepared to fire on the approaching rebel ship, it raised the white flag of surrender. As Planter came alongside the Union ship, Smalls, elegantly dressed in a white shirt and dress jacket, raised his hat high in the air and shouted, “Good morning, sir! I have brought you some of the old United States’ guns, sir!â€
Smalls then served the Union Navy, including duty as the first black captain of a U.S. vessel, and convinced the Union Army to accept black soldiers in August of 1862.
He later became a respected Republican politician in South Carolina where he created the first state law in the United States for free and mandatory public education.
Illuminating the vital role water plays in our lives, exposing the defects in the current system and depicting communities already struggling with its ill-effects, the film features activist Erin Brockovich and such distinguished experts as Peter Gleick, Alex Prud’homme, Jay Famiglietti and Robert Glennon.
Projected paths of the radioactive atmospheric plume emanating from the Fukushima reactors, best described as airborne particles or aerosols for 131I, 137Cs, and 35S, and subsequent atmospheric monitoring showed it coming in contact with the North American continent at California, with greatest exposure in central and southern California. Government monitoring sites in Anaheim (southern California) recorded peak airborne concentrations of 131I at 1.9 pCi m−3
“Greatest exposure” translates to rates 500% higher near Los Angeles than the rest of the coast. For many years now I have been researching methods of using dehumidifiers to source water. The military been developing some amazing technology that can pull water out of the air in the desert, or reclaim water from exhaust pipes in vehicles. Imagine having a drinking fountain in your dashboard. In San Francisco each building, or even each dwelling, would simply produce their own water from absorbing moisture out of the fog, powered by the sun or the wind, as I mentioned in my presentation at last year’s BSidesLV.
It makes a lot of sense to pull moisture from the air when it is such high humidity and there is no shortage of wind power. This move from ground-based systems avoids numerous pollution issues found in piping water from remote reservoirs and it creates higher resilience to attack or disruption. However, it does not help in cases where nuclear fallout or other risks are drifting through the air.
We are only a couple months away from the giant America’s Cup catamaran wings being launched. A team led by American Paul Cayard already has theirs on sea trials. Blue Planet Times explains there was a lot of effort put into design regulation.
The box rule governing the AC72 is one big sandbox, so the engineers get to play. Oracle Racing Team Coordinator Ian Burns explains: “I was involved in writing the rule for the AC72s, and when we addressed the wing, we started with a complicated rule, to limit what a designer could do. We added more and more pieces as we thought of more and more outcomes, and we came to a point where it was so complicated—and it was still going to be hard to control, because the more rules you write the more loopholes you create – that we reverted to a simple principle. Limit the area very accurately, and make it a game of efficiency.â€
“We have 38 hydraulic cylinders. We want to avoid running hydraulic piping to each of them, because that would be heavy, so we have electrovalves embedded in the wing to actuate the hydraulics. But if you had two wires, positive and negative, running to each electrovalve, your wing would look like a PG&E substation, and that’s heavy too, so we use a CAN-bus [controlled area network] with far fewer wires. Still, it’s incredibly complex.
“We wind up with lot of hydraulics,†Cayard says, “and the America’s Cup rules don’t allow stored power, so two of our eleven guys—we think, two—will be grinding a primary winch all the race long. Not to trim, but to maintain pressure in the hydraulic tank so that any time someone wants to open a hydraulic valve to trim the wing, there will be pressure to make that happen.â€
Ok, so there’s thousands of hours in design of these wings but there’s something deeply ironic about a 72 foot catamaran with a 130 foot wing that can sail faster than the wind but can’t generate enough power to manage hydraulics without two crew constantly grinding a winch. It seems like a legacy mindset. A big part of the old America’s Cup boats was to be staffed with powerful yet heavy crew who can muscle the boat around. These boats surely call for lighter more nimble crew. What if someone even figured out a way to efficiently use the wind to generate power…?
Perhaps Luca Devoti said it best. These boats are pure racing machines that have power to burn. They should have no shortage of energy at their disposal, or they may even have a reason for absorbing excess.
You have to change completely your way of thinking: the boat is sailing from the moment the wing comes out of the shed because the wing can fly away at any moment.
The trick, as explained in the following video, is to make the wing secure yet light; to keep it as uncomplicated as possible to reduce risk and reduce response time. Most of all, it sounds like the designers want to hurry-up and make up for 20 years of lost time by borrowing technology and efficiency study lessons from the A-Class and C-Class catamaran fleets:
The LA Times has posted an amusing story on the current GSA auction for a giant invisible catamaran.
…the U.S. Navy, which — after five years of trying and failing to donate the stealthy Sea Shadow to a museum — is now selling the ship for scrap metal in an online auction. All bids must be in at 3 p.m. Pacific time Friday. But there’s a catch. To win the auction, the successful bidder must agree to dismantle and scrap the Sea Shadow within six months…
What if you are a museum? Suddenly it is not good enough to be a museum?
Obviously the ship’s stealth is limited, otherwise the government would not be able to know what you did with it after winning the auction, right?
This is my favorite part of the story.
“On a typical night of testing, the Navy sub-hunter planes made 57 passes at us and detected the ship only twice,” he wrote. “A typical warship was a very high reflector of radar — a radar profile equal to about fifty barns. Our frigate would show up a hell of a lot smaller than a dinghy.”
That’s good news. The test success suggests that stealth technology in use today has come a long way from $200 million invested in 1985. Perhaps stealthy floating sea barns would now appear to be oar-sized? What’s a unit smaller than a dinghy? Life preserver?
More to the point, who in the world uses barns as a measure of size, especially when looking for something floating on the water? Perhaps it comes from people who think differently than the average person; people who use very precise and technical language to present their view of the world. People like this:
“I am amazed that it’s up for auction and a museum didn’t take it,” said Sherm Mullin, retired head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works. “But when I stop to think about it for about 10 microseconds, it becomes apparent to me that ships are difficult to take care of — a lot more difficult than airplanes.”
10 what? I would not even qualify 10 microseconds as a stop. That’s more like a yield in my mind. A speed bump at best.
Personally I would consider making bids for it but sadly it only comes with one microwave oven. I’d want at least a camp stove if I’m going to spend over $100K on a yacht. Although, I bet that microwave can cook food faster than anything on the market. Tuna in 10 microseconds anyone?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
