Zebra Question

Shangri-La, we have a problem . . .

Watching an episode of that marvelous show QI with Stephen Fry, there was a reference to a incident concerning astronaut James Lovell (1928 - ). Lovell was the commander of the ill fated 1970 Apollo 13 mission that malfunctioned on its way to the moon yet managed to come home safely. He was played by Tom Hanks in the movie Apollo 13.

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By the way:

Lovell did not say “Houston, we have a problem.” 

Not only did ho not say it, he wasn’t even the first to not say it.  That honour belongs to fellow astronaut John Swigert Jnr. 

The actual wording was:

Swigert: 'Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here.' 

Houston: 'This is Houston. Say again please.' 

Lovell: 'Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a main B bus undervolt.'

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Lovell was also the command module pilot of Apollo 8, the first Apollo mission to enter lunar orbit, and one of only 24 people to have flown to the moon. He is the first of only three people to have flown to the moon twice, and the only one to have flown there twice without making a landing. Lovell was the first person to fly in space four times.

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President Clinton poses with actor Tom Hanks (left) and former astronaut James Lovell in the Oval Office on July 26, 1995, after presenting Lovell with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

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About the incident I mentioned . . .

After finishing university, Lovell joined the US Navy and became a pilot, flying Banshee night fighters.

In his book, Lost Moon, Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell tells of a close call he had while flying a Banshee off the aircraft carrier Shangri-La in the Sea of Japan. 

It was a very dark night and the problem was that when it came close to the time to land he couldn't find the carrier. He was following a homing signal but instead of leading him to the carrier it was leading him away from it. The homing signal that he was following was a different signal that originated on the mainland of Japan and it was broadcasting on the same frequency as the carrier's. 

When he realised that he wasn't where he was supposed to be, Lovell turned to his knee board. Back then pilots used to have a little board that they attached to the top of their knees. On it was written all the day's communication codes. Those codes were given to the pilots just before they took off and Lovell needed some of the codes to communicate with the carrier. 

The problem was that the codes were written in such tiny print that in the past Lovell had had trouble reading them in the dim light of the cockpit. Lovell had therefore devised what he thought was an ingenious invention. He had collected some spare parts and made up a little light that he attached to his knee board. He could plug it into the airplane's electrical receptacle and all he had to do was flip a switch, it would then give him enough light to read the knee board. This would be his first chance to try out his invention. 

When he flipped the switch there was a brilliant flash of light and everything went black. Lovell had overloaded the circuitry and it had shorted itself out, losing every bulb in the instrument panel. He quickly got out his tiny flashlight to look over his instrument panel. He knew that he was in a lot of trouble and thought that he might have to ditch in the sea. After a few seconds he switched his flashlight off and contemplated what he was going to do. 

That's when he saw, far below, a faint greenish glow that formed a shimmery trail in the water. The propellers of the aircraft carrier had disturbed some phosphorescent algae in the water and churned it so that it glowed faintly. Lovell followed this trail and soon found his carrier. He later said that if his cockpit lights had not have shorted out, he never would have seen the phosphorescent trail, it could only be seen in the pitch dark. The shorting out of his instrument lights had actually saved him. 

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The following account of that incident is from the Apollo 13 movie:

Television Reporter: Is there a specific instance in an airplane emergency when you can recall fear?

Jim Lovell: Uh well, I'll tell ya, I remember this one time - I'm in a Banshee at night in combat conditions, so there's no running lights on the carrier. It was the Shrangri-La, and we were in the Sea of Japan and my radar had jammed, and my homing signal was gone... because somebody in Japan was actually using the same frequency. And so it was - it was leading me away from where I was supposed to be. And I'm lookin' down at a big, black ocean, so I flip on my map light, and then suddenly: zap. Everything shorts out right there in my cockpit. All my instruments are gone. My lights are gone. And I can't even tell now what my altitude is. I know I'm running out of fuel, so I'm thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I, I look down there, and then in the darkness there's this uh, there's this green trail. It's like a long carpet that's just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship. And it was - it was - it was leading me home. You know? If my cockpit lights hadn't shorted out, there's no way I'd ever been able to see that. So uh, you, uh, never know... what... what events are to transpire to get you home.

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That, however, was not the end of it. 

Lovell managed to make it back to his aircraft carrier without instruments in a blacked out cockpit by following the faint phosphorescent trail of the disturbed algae but he still had to land his plane on the carrier’s deck. 

On first approach, without instruments, believing that he was approaching the deck at 75 metres/250 feet, he realised at the last moment that he was actually only 6metres/20 feet above the water. 

Hauling back hard on his stick he screamed back up in the Banshee. On the next approach he came in at 150metres/500 feet, higher than the norm.  He decided to drop to the deck rather than possibly slam into the stern of the carrier. 

The landing worked but was hard, slamming into the deck and blowing two tyres. His skidding aircraft came to a violent stop when the tailhook caught the last cross-deck cable.

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Outstanding Historical Photographs, Part #1

Byter Nadia sent me a collection of old photographs entitled Outstanding Historical Photos. I am a sucker for old photographs, moments frozen in time of people, places, events and activities that have disappeared, altered, advanced or just been forgotten. Nadia’s photographs show diverse subjects:  well known people in their early days, curiosities,  everyday items and activities that are no longer around. 

 Perhaps in 2113 people will be looking at photographs, or whatever they use at that time, and marveling at the primitive state of our technology, at our fashions and at early photos of that age’s celebrities.

Part 2 next week.

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Miss America, 1924

Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin

Leather gloves worn by Lincoln to Ford’s Theatre on the night of his assassination. Blood stains are visible at the cuffs.

Phoebe Mozee (aka: Annie Oakley). 

Famed for her marksmanship by 12 years old, she once shot the ashes off of Kaiser Wihelm II's cigarette at his invitation. When she outshot famed exhibition marksman Frank Butler, he fell in love with her and they married. They remained married the rest of their lives.

Very Young Lucy Lucille Ball around 1930

Two Victorian sideshow performers boxing - the fat man and the thin man.

Amy Johnson, English aviator 1903-1941 One of the first women to gain a pilot's licence, Johnson won fame when she flew solo from Britain to Australia in 1930. Her dangerous flight took 17 days. Later she flew solo to India and Japan and became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic East to West, she volunteered to fly for The Women's Auxiialry Air Force in WW2, but her plane was shot down over the River Thames and she was killed.

Prison Garb 1924. Belva Annan murderess whose trial records became the musical "Chicago."

Female photojournalist Jessie Tarbox on the street with her camera, 1900s.

Roald Amundsen was the first person to reach the South Pole. At approximately 3pm on December 14, 1911, Amundsen raised the flag of Norway at the South Pole and named the spot Polheim — “Pole Home.”

The extraordinary life of Maud Allen: Seductive US dancing girl who was sued for being too lewd, outed as a lesbian, and fled London after being branded a German spy who was sleeping with the prime minister's wife.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Wedding day photograph of Abraham and Mary taken November 4, 1842 in Springfield, Illinois after three years of a stormy courtship and a broken engagement. Their love had endured.

Billie Holiday at two years old, in 1917

Washington, D.C., circa 1919. "Walter Reed Hospital flu ward." One of the very few images in Washington-area photo archives documenting the influenza contagion of 1918-1919, which killed over 500,000 Americans and tens of millions around the globe. Most victims succumbed to bacterial pneumonia following influenza virus infection.

Filming the MGM Logo

Amelia Earhart

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Funny Friday

There is something both bizarre and amusing about the concept of a dung beetle, a beetle that feeds partly or exclusively on feces. Many dung beetles, known as rollers, roll dung into round balls, which are used as a food source or brooding chambers. Other dung beetles, known as tunnelers, bury the dung wherever they find it. A third group, the dwellers, neither roll nor burrow: they simply live in manure. And yet this insect that eats and lives in crap is also currently the only insect known to navigate and orient themselves using the Milky Way. Go figure.

So guess what the Funny Friday theme is?

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Limerick Spot . . .

There was a young girl from Darjeeling

Who could dance with such exquisite feeling

Not a murmur was heard,

Not a sound, not a word,

But the fly-buttons hitting the ceiling.

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Death Spirals

Watching an episode of CSI I saw techie Nick (George Eads) talk about ants. The episode opened with ants shown moving in an orderly fashion from a disaster, which Nick contrasted with humans who tend towards chaos and frenetic self preservation in crisis situations. At the end of the episode, Nick and DB Russell (Ted Danson) are watching a mass of army ants walking in a continuously moving circle. Nick explains that each ant is following the pheromones of the ant in front, the pheromones being given off to alert the rest of the colony to danger. Left to themselves in that moving circle, which is known as a death spiral or ant mill, the ants will eventually die of exhaustion unless the circle is broken.

Here is a link to see an ant death spiral and to hear an explanation of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prjhQcqiGQc&feature=youtu.be

A Wikipedia summary:

An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations. This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organising structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, and this will work until something goes wrong and an ant mill forms. An ant mill was first described by William Beebe in 1921 who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution. Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.

It is tempting, as others have done, to use ant death spirals as a metaphor for the human condition.

In 1910 scientist W M Wheeler had observed the phenomenon in his laboratory and had written:

I have never seen a more astonishing exhibition of the limitations of instinct. For nearly two whole days these blind creatures, so dependent on the contact-odor sense of their antennae, kept palpating their uniformly smooth, odoriferous trail and the advancing bodies of the ants immediately preceding them, without perceiving that they were making no progress but only wasting their energies, till the spell was finally broken by some more venturesome members of the colony.

Moral of the story:

Don’t just follow the person in front; look around, check out what's doing, what choices you have, and don't be afraid . . . 

(Sorry about the sexist "man", that is how it was in the original Star Trek intros)

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Monkeys, Cucumbers and Grapes

Son Thomas mentioned to me, in the context of monkeys becoming angry (a continuation of discussions about “going apeshit”) a clip on Youtube about an experiment.

It is a great little clip that illustrates that even monkeys can have strong negative feelings about perceived unfairness.

The clip can be seen by clicking on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XXQMDGErL0

The clip is well worth watching.

Called 'The Fairness Study', it was originally conducted in 2003 at Emory University in the US, by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal. According to Sarah Brosnan, "One of the most interesting areas is the recent suggestion that human cooperation is made more effective by a sense of fairness." She wanted to find out if the human sense of fairness is an evolved behaviour or a cultural construct, the result of society's rules.

To test this question, she and her colleagues devised an experiment using capuchin monkeys:  "We designed a very simple experiment to see whether or not they react to differential rewards and efforts." 

Capuchins like cucumber but they like grapes even more so a system was devised whereby pairs of capuchins were treated differently after completing the same task. "They had never before been in any sort of situation where they were differentially rewarded," she said. "We put pairs of capuchins side by side and one of them would get the cucumber as a reward for a task. The partner sometimes got the same food reward but on other occasions got a grape, sometimes without even having to work for it."

The response was dramatic, the researchers said. According to Sarah "We were looking for a very objective reaction and we got one. They typically refused the task they were set. The other half of the time they would complete the task but wouldn't take the reward. That is a highly unusual behaviour. Sometimes they ignored the reward, sometimes they took it and threw it down.”

The researchers were not surprised that the monkeys showed a sense of fairness, but they were taken aback that they would turn down an otherwise acceptable reward. "They never showed a reaction against their partner, they never blamed them," Sarah Brosnan said.

Frans de Waal, a primatologist and Emory University professor who had been involved with Sarah Brosnan in the 2003 experiment, performed it again in 2012 and taped the results. That is the video that is linked above.

According to de Waal, the study has, since 2003, been repeated with dogs, birds and chimpanzees. 

If both monkeys get cucumber as a reward, according to de Waal, they are happy to repeat the task up to 25 times. 'But if you give one grapes, which is a far better food, then you create inequity between them. So, this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here. “

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Bugalugs

In conversation with Byter Petra, I was asked to do an item on the origin of the term ”Bugalugs”.

It’s an expression I grew up with, always used in the context of playfully referring to someone else but without any nastiness towards that person.

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According to the Urban Dictionary, the expression is an Australian term of endearment, similar to "Mate" but usually used in a slightly more patronising tone and with less immediate masculine connotations. A good example is a parent describing a son or daughter, or an older person describing a young person. The term is usually used playfully.

"G'day, John, you couldn't keep an eye on bugalugs over here while I get something out of my car, could you?"

Unfortunately I have not been able to find anything definitive about the origin of the word.

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Some comments:

The Australian Oxford Dictionary dates it from the 19th century and says it is of unknown origin.

One commenter online has stated that: “Bugalugs is just a cute little rhyme usually when referring to mischievous children...possibly, but not always, said to children when they are caught listening to an adults conversation.”

Some English commenters have heard the term used in England as well: “It means nothing, it is just a term of endearment meaning something like "little scamp" or "little urchin" it is not an Australian saying, or at least not exclusive to Australia, my mother used to say it to me when I was young many years ago.”

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Comments that the term is correctly “buggerlugs” and concerns sodomy are incorrect. I have heard the term used in any context with a meaning other than those described above.

Accordingly we can also reject the suggestion by one commenter online, perhaps tongue in cheek, that the word consists of two parts, bugger and lugs, the latter being a slang term for ears. That person suggests that the word buggerlugs therefore means ears of a size large enough to afford a good grip while being sodomised.

By the way:

The word “lugs” to mean “ears” dates from the 1620’s, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. It meant the "handle of a pitcher" and comes from “lugge” (Scottish) meaning "earflap of a cap, ear".

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There are various Oz slang terms that use the word "bugger" but likewise also have no connection to sodomy.

A sample of such words follow, together with their meanings, to assist overseas visitors to Australia.

Bugger: 

1. Exclamation when something goes wrong, an expression of discontent. “I stepped in dog poo, Bugger!

2. A person or animal, often a small one, such as a child or small pet. Frequently prefaced by "little." Compare with Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s comment during the 1989 election campaign when a pensioner took him to task over tax cuts. Hawke muttered “silly old bugger” but later apologised. 

Bugger me: I am surprised.

Bugger me dead: I am extremely surprised.

Bugger off: Please leave.

Go to buggery: Please leave.

Bugger up: To make a mess of.

Bugger all: Nothing. Similar in meaning and usage to "fuck all", as in The Wog Boy:  "People say I know fuck nothing, but I know fuck all!"

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Australian children’s book author Tim Winton has written a book called The Bugalugs Bum Thief.  According to the cover summary "One morning the 496 residents of the town of Bugalugs awake to find that all 496 have had their bums stolen. It’s up to Skeeta Anderson to investigate."

There is also a wine by that name:

and a children's clothing range:

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More Google Earth Finds

Continuing the strange, interesting and sometimes bizarre discovered by people on Google Earth . . .

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The above pentagram can be found in Kazakhstan, is 366 metres/1,200 feet in diameter and is the outline of a park made in the form of a star. Whether the park is used for devil worship and sabbats is unknown (joke).

A massive face of Jesus in Hungary.

There is no explanation for this large plane among trees in Brooklyn.

The fronds of Palm Island in Dubai.

A field in Piedmont in Italy contains a giant knitted rabbit. The pink rabbit was knitted by Gelitin, the Viennese art collective, as an outdoor sculpture for people to climb on, sleep on, and generally play with. It is made of soft, waterproof, materials and is stuffed with straw. Gelatin say it was "knitted by dozens of grannies out of pink wool".

Another view of the bunny, not a GE view:

This has been previously featured in Bytes. It is a naval base in California. Did not anyone, on viewing the plans, think to say "Hey guys, you know what this looks like?...”

Why is there a car on the side of the wall in this building in Westenbergstraat, Netherlands?

A native American listening to an iPod, or just mountainous terrain? It’s in Alberta, Canada

Another previously posted pic. This heart-shaped island in the Adriatic became a hit on Google Earth for Valentine's Day. The uninhabited island is only 130,000 square yards and is called Galesnjak. The owner didn't even know how perfectly this island off the Croatian coast was until he was swamped with requests from couples to stay there. 

Rhett Dashwood, a graphic designer from Australia, created the first Google Maps alphabet, featuring all 26 letters, using satellite images of natural features and buildings.

Google Earth numbers and punctuation, using only locations in The Netherlands, by Thomas de Bruin. 

Another alphabet, this one also by Thomas de Bruin using only images from his native Netherlands.

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Occasionally Google earth gets it wrong. The software supporting it apparently every now and then has some glitch that causes 3D images to be distorted. You can see a collection at:

http://designtaxi.com/news/34214/Using-Google-Earth-Artist-Finds-Surreal-Landscapes/

Here are some:

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