EventHorizon1984 Log

How Old Are We? Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night?

How Old Are We? Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night?
EventHorizon1984
18 September 2013

 

"How old are you, Chiun. I mean really, you must be pretty old, right?"
"For an apricot, yes. For a head of lettuce, even more so. For a mountain, I have not even begun. For a man, just right." Chiun
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985)

It's that irritating nagging feeling when real life mimics fiction; something forgotten was bothering me (Ed.)  This mental itch was the equivalent of Tommy Albright hearing singing towards the end of Brigadoon.  (Ed. no music, but you'll get the idea.)

The 'oh yea' light popped on after reading the story of a man claiming to be 160 years old.   (Ed. likely he's remembering WWII, not 1895).

Before that epiphany there was a late night viewing of The New Avengers part 1 and 2 of "K Is for Kill" episodes.  Briefly described as "1945 Russian soldier Stanislav stole the secret of longevity from a Tibetan monk."

Preceded by catching up on Red Dwarf season 10.  The trope being, "Lister can be safely released from stasis three million years later."  i.e. the character David Lister is chronologically over three million years old.

Before Red Dwarf there was the viewing of the films Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966).  The television series Doctor Who will be fifty years old in November 2013.  The Doctor, the show lead, is over eleven hundred years old.

And more before.

"I worry. I mean, little things bother me. I'm a worrier. I mean, little insignificant details - I lose my appetite. I can't eat. My wife, she says to me, "you know, you can really be a pain."  Lt. Columbo

Eventually the 'subconscious' got through to the 'conscious mind', hence this short article.

One question we frequently receive is 'what happened to the [fill in the blank] article?'.  The short answer is 'they've been archived.'  Years ago, with over fourteen hundred articles, maintenance was a PITA.  They were archived because there was too much work involved in article management.  Also articles were archived because the subject matter was obsolete, or had been overcome by events.

Back then the plan was prune the number of articles down to a manageable one hundred.  That didn't happen, but we got close.  Today the number of articles is over two hundred on the TypePad main site, and twenty-some-odd on the WordPress mirror.

At this point you're thinking 'What does this have to do with age!?'.  It's relevant in the context of another question we receive, 'how old is this blog?'.  With other sites, that question is answered with a link and a comment 'here's our first article.'  We can't do that as our very first article was, well, archived.

"In the beginning there was darkness. And the darkness was without form and void. And in addition to the darkness there was also me."  Bomb #20
Dark Star (1974)

That article was published 2 June 2006 and briefly noted eBay's "expansion of item ID numbers to 12 digits", and eBay's advice to developers "to support eBay item IDs of up to 19 digits".  That change is a historical footnote, but is not relevant today.  The article was designated non-relevant, and (in haste) was archived and removed from public view.

Shrug.

"One little mistake ..."

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"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Dylan Thomas

"Do not go gentle into .. into .. into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at .. at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Thornton Mellon (Rodney Dangerfield) quoting Dylan Thomas incorrectly, but giving a magnificent reading.
Back to School (1986)

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Musing Bytes 3

Musing Bytes 3
EventHorizon1984
2 September 2013

 

"This is the story of a time long ago. A time of myth and legend."
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys - Hercules and the Circle of Fire (1994)

Mythbusters is an entertaining show. The leads, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, use somewhat reasonable scientific methodology to simulate real life conditions.  For example, the Surfboard Killer episode:  "In Lethal Weapon II, an SUV carrying a surfboard on its roof crashes into a car launching the surfboard into still another car"

After multiple trials the Mythbusters concluded a surfboard, "couldn't bust through the energy-absorbing windshield glass".  Essentially they stated a surfboard WILL NOT penetrate a modern car windshield no matter what.

Well ...

Sunday 1 September 2013

"A surfboard smashed into the windshield of a car while on the freeway Sunday."

This was an oddball incident. The surfboard fell on a school bus and ricocheting horizontally to impact the 2011 Honda.

The surfboard slammed through the passenger side of the windshield, missing the driver's head by inches. Had the surfboard impacted on the driver's side, the tip would have been at or past the driver's side head rest.

Moral? There are limits to simulations.

Myth Busted, Busted.

"Failure of imagination." ... "We just didn't think of it."
Frank Borman (David Andrews) on Apollo 1, From the Earth To The Moon (1998)

Will keep the following relatively spoiler free.

 In 1954 Astounding Magazine published Tom Godwin's (1915-1980) short story "The Cold Equations".  The protagonist had a sole solution, based upon the fixed laws of physics.  It would be decades before an alternate solution to this life and death space science fiction tale would be written.  Don Sakers wrote "The Cold Solution", which Analog published 1991.

The complaints about the short story, naturally most appearing after Tom Godwin's passing, were basically 'wouldn't happen in real life.'

A surfboard crashing through a windshield 'wouldn't happen in real life' too, right?

The "The Cold Equations" universe describes space flight and spacecraft as relatively common place.  One old general complaint is 'no engineer would design the space systems' of that universe.

Almost sixty years after the story was written, space travel remains not widely available.  There is no simple comparison to space flight in that universe and "real life."  We'll have to settle for this statement from Test Pilot and Space Shuttle Astronaut Bryan D. O'Connor.

NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
Oral History Transcript
Bryan D. O'Connor
Interviewed by Sandra Johnson
Washington, D.C. - 20 April 2006

"JOHNSON: I read on that flight, also—there was an article that talked about the fact that one of the hatches was padlocked. Do you want to just talk about that for a second? Was that something that was normally done?

O’CONNOR: Well, for me it was. We had done that on my first flight—Brewster [H.] Shaw [Jr.]
being the commander and me the pilot—padlock on the hatch, the rationale being that you’ve got a couple of people on this flight that you don’t know that well. They’re the “payload
specialists.” They’re not career aviators. They haven’t been through all the training we have.
We try to make sure they don’t hurt themselves or anybody else. It was a due diligence thing,
because, in theory, although it would be tough to do it inadvertently, there was a button and a
turn of a knob that could actually open up that hatch, and the hatch was very dangerous, because it was an out-opening hatch.

There were probably a lot of good reasons why they did that, one of which might be room
in the cabin or whatever, but one of the bad things about that is that the pressure in the cabin will blow that hatch off if the latches aren’t latched. You would like to have a system where the
pressure will keep the hatch closed, not open it. But that’s not the way that one was structured.
So that was a risk area. Some of the other commanders before had had concerns about that
hatch, and so when it came time for my second flight, I ordered up the lock"

Yes, engineers do create things that have a potential for disaster, for "probably a lot of good reasons."

Another story complaint revolves around fuel.  As in the fuel alloted would always be sufficient to get from point A to point B.

Can't use "real life" space transportation to make an equivalent comparison.  We'll use the next best thing, commercial air transport.

The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) provides this guideline for reserve fuel.

• Fly from that airport to the alternate airport [if one is required]; and
• Fly after that for 45 minutes at normal cruising speed
  

Meaning people who go 'by the book' will not have the problem of fuel exhaustion or having insufficient fuel reserves.  In theory, yes.  In real life, no.  A few examples:

• Eurocopter AS350 B2 Medical Helicopter, "pilot, flight nurse, flight paramedic and patient were killed", 26 August 2011
• British Airways Flight 38, 152 passengers and crew survived, 17 January 2008
• Tuninter Flight 1153, 39 passengers and crew, 16 died, 6 August 2005
• Avianca Flight 52, 158 passengers and crew, 73 died, 25 January 1990

The first crash is ironically relevant to "The Cold Equations"; the flight would have likely culminated in a safe landing with one less person onboard.

While the blame for the crashes vary, aircraft have failed to reach a destination due to insufficient fuel.  And circumstances.

Another cry goes, 'large organizations would not cut corners on fuel and safety'.

Well.

• Pilots claim airlines forced to fly with low fuel, 2008
• "concern among pilots that airlines are compelling them to fly with too little fuel."
• "airlines are emphasizing "economy to the detriment of safety""

• Ryanair is 'courting disaster' by flying planes with near-empty fuel tanks to cut costs, 2012
• "flying planes with near-empty fuel tanks to cut costs."
• "Ryanair denies any wrong-doing and insists its planes are safe with sufficient fuel reserves."

Finally there's the big complaint that 'people can't enter a secured craft without being noticed.'

Post 9/11 airport security, means it should be impossible to sneak aboard a heavily guarded and secure commercial airplane.

Well.

• Body Fell From Plane, Authorities Say, 2010
• ""It appears more likely than not that" ... "was able to breach airport security and hide in the wheel well of a commercial jet airliner with being detected by airport security," William R. Keating, Norfolk County district attorney"
• "It's a terrible tragedy what happened to this young man, but if that was someone with a different motive"
• "found handprints in the left wheel well of a Boeing 737 that was scheduled to leave Charlotte Douglas International Airport"

• How often do plane stowaways fall from the sky?, 2012
• "No-one saw the body fall from the sky" ... "It is not the first incident of this kind on the Heathrow flight path."
• "Dr. Stephen Veronneau, of the US Federal Aviation Administration, has identified 96 individuals around the world who have tried to travel in plane wheel wells since 1947. The incidents happened on 85 flights."

•  Plane flew seven flights with dead stowaway in wheel well, 2013
• "jet made seven flights carrying a dead man in its wheel well"
• "Authorities say the stowaway boarded the plane four days before he was found dead."

It is sadly amusing that the complaints about "The Cold Equations", 'not being true to real life' are visions of a perfect world.  A flawless world that does not exist, and has never existed.

In that world, Apollo 1 (204) would have been the first successful Apollo manned spaceflight.

Instead Apollo 1 has this reference: "NASA's Apollo program began with one of the worst disasters the organization has ever faced."

Frank Borman, Apollo 1 investigator, would say to Congress:

• "I don't believe that any of us recognized that the test conditions for this test were hazardous"
• "We did not think, and this is a failing on my part and on everyone associated with us"

Almost sixty years after publication of "The Cold Equations", humans remain fallible.  Systems and organizations have faults.  Despite the best intentions, despite the best by the book safeguards, unfavorable outcomes can happen and do happen.  With monstrous regularity. 

To say otherwise is Fantasy.

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"If we slide into one of those rare moments of military honesty, we realize that the technical demands of modern warfare are so complex a considerable percentage of our material is bound to malfunction even before it is deployed against a foe. We no longer waste manpower by carrying the flag into battle. Instead we need battalions of electronic engineers to keep the terrible machinery grinding."
Ernest K. Gann

"It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later, so it is not to be wondered that owners prefer the safe to the scientific. It is also found that it is almost as bad to have too many parts as too few; that arrangements which are for exceptional and occasional use are rarely available when wanted, and have the disadvantage of requiring additional care. Their very presence, too, seems in effect to indispose the engineer to attend to essentials. Sufficient stress can hardly be laid on the advantages of simplicity. The human factor cannot be safely neglected in planning machinery. If attention is to be obtained, the engine must be such that the engineer will be disposed to attend to it."
Alfred Holt, 1878

"If anything can go wrong, it will."
Murphy's Laws

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