65 years since Hiroshima

One of these years I need to plan that vacation trip that includes a stop at Pearl Harbor before heading on to Japan in early August. I need to see where my car was built and visit ground zero of the first A-bomb used in combat as well as the place where it all started for the US in the Pacific. And Kyoto.

One of the odd things about these anniversaries is that, for my students, much more time has elapsed since Vietnam ended than had elapsed between the end of WW II and when I was finishing high school.

Another odd thing is that the film of the bomb going off was either taken or witnessed by someone I once knew, but he never talked about the experience. (In contrast, other people I know who worked on the Manhattan project or other war-related enterprises - such as code breaking - have shared that history and their views of the project.)

One particular irony is that there was an editorial about radiation exposure limits just a few days ago. (Hat tip to Chad at Uncertain Principles.) The dose limits were adjusted based on what was learned from single (acute) dose exposures at Hiroshima, but the editorial argues that we need to look more closely at the evidence from low level (chronic) exposures documented in the 60+ years since those first studies.

PS - I tweaked the posting time to match when (by Japan time) the bomb was dropped.

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A big day in history

Today, June 16, is:

• the 65th anniversary of the first test of an "atomic" bomb outside Alamogordo, NM;
  
  
• the 41st anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the first mission to land men on an extraterrestrial body, the Moon.

It is also the 37th anniversary of Butterfield's testimony that President Nixon had been taping conversations inside the oval office, tapes that eventually showed he was guilty of obstruction of justice and other major felonies, but I want to talk about technology today.

So, in the context of "if we can put men on the Moon, why can't we stop the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico", what is the relative difficulty of these three tasks?

Based solely on the time required to complete the project, the Moon mission was by far the most difficult and complex. The project started more than eight years earlier, before we had even put a man in orbit. Although the Saturn I was already on the drawing boards as an orbital launch vehicle, the Saturn V project started in early 1962. After about 4 years of research and development, there were two unmanned test flights (both showing problems that had to be fixed) before the first manned test flights. Even though we rather boldly used the first manned test flight to orbit the Moon, almost two years elapsed between the first unmanned test and the Moon landing mission. Given that this was a very high priority project that went as fast as possible (too fast, at times, resulting in three astronaut deaths) with essentially unlimited resources in the early years, it is almost nonsensical to compare design and construction of the "capping stack" to a Moon mission.

Next would be the development of the plutonium bomb first tested on this date in 1945. Plutonium was first isolated in 1941, so it only took four years to determine that one isotope, Pu-239, could be used as a nuclear explosive (it was already known that U-235 could be used that way) and figure out how to produce kg quantities of it and turn it into a weapon. Like the Moon mission, this was a "money is no object" project on the same scale as radar and a pressurized bomber that could fly at high altitude and carry a payload big enough to drop an atomic bomb. So, on the basis of time alone, this was easily half as difficult as going to the moon even if you include the U-235 weapon and the need for both radar and that bomber if the project was going to succeed.

Of the two bomb projects going on at the same time, the Pu-239 weapon was by far more complicated technically. The only challenge with U-235 was producing the purified isotope. (That remains the reason it poses the greatest threat for the spread of nuclear weapons, but that is a topic for another day. Our confidence in the U-235 weapon was so high that it was never tested before being used on Hiroshima.) With Pu-239, you had to produce the isotope essentially one atom at a time in a reactor and then separate it chemically from a huge quantity of preposterously radioactive material. Even then, you have to figure out how to assemble it into a weapon that will explode. That was enough of a challenge that it required a test before being used in combat a few weeks later. Again, based on time alone, four years does not compare to a few months of work to develop the capping stack (and the tools to cut off the pipe and install it) as well as the temporary fixes that were used until it was ready.

It is a good thing that fixing the mistakes made by BP was not nearly as complicated as rocket science or weapons. Those took years, this took months.

As I said yesterday, I don't think most people realize how long it takes to design and build something, even something as "simple" as a highway. You don't notice it until construction begins, but the work was going on for years before that.

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Celebrate Independence!

I think it was sometime in grad school, as I got to know more foreigners, that how odd it is that we celebrate "July 4th" as if a date could be the name of a holiday. (Do you have July 4th in your country? Of course, but it isn't a holiday.) Similarly, it is always celebrated as the "birth of the United States" even though it was almost 13 years later, in March 1789, that the United States government as we know it came into existence. But we don't celebrate a "constitution day" holiday like some countries do, nor do we celebrate the ultimate event that truly sealed our existence as a nation (victory in the War of 1812), although we could have celebrated two others of almost equal importance yesterday (victory at Gettysburg in 1863) or today (victory at Vicksburg, also in 1863).

So "Independence Day", or "July 4th", does multiple duty as holidays go. Including, of course, the opportunity to set off illegal fireworks while watching state-sanctioned fireworks, watching NASCAR fireworks (last night's wrecks were spectacular) and the start of the Tour de France (also featuring spectacular wrecks this morning) in HD, and dining on the least healthy food this country has to offer.

I didn't appreciate the length of the Revolutionary War or the huge gap between it and the formation of our nation until I took a middle school government class. I had a crazy radical teacher who thought we should know the real truths of the history that was behind the sound-bite myths of political speech. So I know that the Revolution War began in 1775, before we declared our independence. I remember that blew the minds of some of my classmates, but it made sense that they might have wanted to win a few skirmishes before putting it all on the line.

Ditto for the wonderful detail that George Washington wasn't the first President of the United States. There were something like a dozen of them (aha, Wiki has both the full list starting in 1774 and the ten who headed the government), each serving as the "President" of the single house of the US Congress that (weakly) governed the confederation that was the United States for 8 years, starting in March 1781 even before the Yorktown victory, negotiated the treaty of Paris in 1783 that actually granted us our independence from Britain, and developed a Constitution that would dissolve that government in favor of a stronger one.

One wonders if the United States would have been reconquered by Great Britain in 1812 if not for that stronger federal government. Ditto for surviving the unpleasantness that came along 50 years later. Would there be Spanish speaking nations of Texas and California to our west and Florida to our south if we had stuck with a Confederation that ended up a part of the UK (like Canada) or split in half across the Mason-Dixon line?

PS -
Our menu includes chili dogs, watermelon, and beer from Vermont. While you digest that, check out the great pair of videos that Unbalanced Reaction put up today. And Dr. Crazy got to watch fireworks from the porch of her new house!

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Historic papers available on line

The Royal Society has put 60 historic papers on line for free public access. It is available here.

Franklin's paper about his experiments with lightning and Newton's with color components in white light appear to be well worth a visit.

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Ten Twelve

Today is the ninth anniversary of 10/12.

Lots of people commented on 9/11, including myself and some other bloggers I follow, echoing the media emphasis on that important and memorable event. But the media gets it wrong when they assert that it was Al Qaeda's second attack on US territory. It was the fourth. And it says something sad about us as a nation that we give more importance to an attack on a civilian office building than one that left dozens of our servicemen either killed or wounded.

I am, of course, talking primarily about the attack on the USS Cole on 10/12/2000, which killed 17 sailors and left 39 others wounded. (The other event I allude to was "8/7", the attack on two US embassies on 8/7/1998. Embassies, like US flagged military vessels, are considered sovereign US territory.) Al Qaeda's first attack on the World Trade Center was not viewed as an act of war. Oddly, even their attack on a US naval warship was not viewed as an act of war. Even more oddly, it was their second attack on the World Trade Center -- not the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon and/or the White House and probably the Capitol -- that got recognized as an act of war.

This attack on our warship is so far off of our cultural radar that, when I alluded to this event on Dean Dad's blog last week, even my reference to "naval warships" left him scratching his head about 10/12, thinking I was talking about Hitler rather than Japan. No, I was not talking about Japan invading China or Germany invading Poland or France. I was talking about Japan attacking US Navy ships while in port at what was then US colonial territory (Hawaii) as well as on the seas in and around another US colony (the Philippines). Al Qaeda attacked a US Navy warship visiting a port in Yemen, almost a full year before it attacked the Pentagon. Both attacks on naval vessels provided an abundantly clear indication that they were at war with us, whether we liked it or not. Some might argue that both were wars of "choice", we could have chosen to let Japan control the Pacific as its own private lake and we could have disengaged completely from the middle east (including Saudi Arabia and Israel), but neither were likely choices for us to make.

Al Qaeda's timing was perfectly bad, by the way.

They hit a pair of embassies in the summer of 1998, when the US was totally preoccupied with a sex scandal and the subsequent impeachment of the President. The Clinton administration, weakened as it was by those events, seemed to view it as an isolated act of terror rather than part of a growing campaign against the US. That view seemed to be shared by the professionals in the DoD and CIA, as reflected in the refusal to attack bin Laden when we had him in our sights.

They hit the USS Cole in the late stages of the 2000 Presidential campaign, and the information about the connections to Al Qaeda were developed during the interregnum period that included a delayed handover because of the contentious recount in Florida. The report of the 9/11 Commission makes it pretty clear that the Clinton administration, having been unable to get the CIA and DoD to attack bin Laden himself for previous acts of war, did not even try to push that point during its last weeks in office. It also makes it very clear that the Bush administration seemed to think that those were attacks on the Clinton administration rather than on the United States, blowing off the new information developed in December and January by the FBI and others.

Forgetting the USS Cole seems typical of the way we have, as a nation, downplayed the significance of the war against Al Qaeda in response to its war against us. We had 8 years of the Bush administration talking about how much it cares about US servicemen, yet they did nothing when 17 of them were killed by Al Qaeda and continued to do nothing when reports surfaced that the same people were planning more of the same. When they complained that Oh, we didn't think they would attack the US, all I could think was What do you think a ship flying the US flag is, if not part of the US? Did Bush and Cheney really think it would be no big deal if Al Qaeda sunk more ships?

The people questioning the war in Afghanistan need to remember that there is at least one target on their list that they haven't hit yet, the Capitol, and that past history says they will not rest until they carry out their plans ... unless we stop them first. We need to remember 10/12, or 9/11 won't be the last we hear from Al Qaeda.

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Reflections on Eight Years Ago

Looking back at 11 September 2001.

What stands out in my mind was the first anomaly that hinted that something was going on. We had not had the TV on, so I had no idea anything had happened as I headed into campus just before 9 (between the two attacks on the World Trade Center). As usual, I turned on the computer ... but it simply would not boot up properly. It was taking forever to load various shared applications off of a network server. Forever, meaning something like 15 minutes to do something that normally took less than 1 minute.

Was something wrong with the network? Yeah, people all over campus (and one just down the hall) were hammering it trying to get an update from CNN, or other news sites. When I saw what an office neighbor was trying to understand better, I also went to CNN once my machine was up.

Futility.

Just before I had to leave to teach my 10:00 class, I got lucky. I killed a page load to shortcut its failed attempts to load all the advertising crap from akamai, and managed to 2nd click to just load a single news image. Its name actually said all I needed to know: "second plane". You know what it showed.

We were under attack.

So I went and taught my morning class, which was probably a lecture about electrostatic potentials and fields. I don't recall anything about that part of the day, except that most of the students had no idea that anything had happened. (And the studies of 9-11 indicate the government was in a similar state at 10 AM.) When I got back to my office, it was clear we were likely at war. In truth, of course, we had been at war with Al Qaeda for almost a decade but only Al Qaeda was taking it seriously until that day.

The indecision on campus was amazing to see. Are classes cancelled? No. OK. And it was soon time to teach my afternoon class on classical mechanics. That was the hardest class I ever taught. But before getting down to doing physics, I told the class what was on my mind:

That I had a much better idea of how my parents felt when they learned about Pearl Harbor.

And I told them that saying that made me wonder if we would learn the same things about this attack that we now knew about Pearl Harbor -- that we had plenty of evidence that it was coming, and missing it was a failure of intelligence rather than of Intelligence. (I knew all of the details of our code breaking and what had been done with it in late 1942, how our code breakers knew the Japanese were breaking off negotiations before their diplomats did, but that information was so secret that the military could not be told about imminent war and be put on alert.)

Wow, did that turn out to be insightful! But it was just a good guess based on the odds that we had too much excellent data to be able recognize a totally novel method of attack as a real possibility. Novel military tactics have a long history of working really well the first time.

By the time that class was over, it was announced that the rest of that day's classes were canceled. No labs that afternoon. Time to adjust schedules and make it work for the rest of the semester. (One of several cases that tell me I could figure out how to accommodate the disruption of H1N1 if it only led to the closing of campus for a week.) But we were back to normal only in the most limited sense.

The class that started the first semester of physics that Fall of 2001 was different from any of the others I have had. It took quite a while for them to get back in focus, and quite a few lost focus and quit. But the ones that stuck it out were serious about being ready to win that fight as engineers. That was a hard working bunch of students that year.

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Man on the Moon

We can pretend I was live-blogging this one (40 years ago), but I am sure the posting time for this picture is about 5 or 10 minutes too early.

Armstrong stepped off the Lem around 11 PM EDT on 20 July 1969 (Wiki says he stepped on the moon at 10:56 pm EDT), and we were watching it live on TV, on CBS. I'm pretty sure it was our old Motorola Quasar b/w television (right Bro?). Aldrin followed about 15 minutes later, after Armstrong had picked up a quick rock sample, and then the TV camera was moved to a tripod where it would view the landing area.

At some point I set up my dad's old Ricoh SLR on a tripod and, guessing at the exposure, took one picture on color slide film to record this moment of history - with both astronauts on the moon with the LM. This is that image:

Special thanks to my brother for borrowing the slide from my parents and scanning it for me so I could include it here today. (He says the picture itself is much better than this indicates, and suspects his scanner's bulb is fading. Apparently you can also see the TV tuner, etc in the original slide.) Maybe I'll get a chance to try it on my own scanner one of these months.

You can click on the image for a slightly larger version but, as I say, it is really not of archival quality. I've smoothed and resized the original scan to get rid of various scanning artifacts, which also hides somewhat the rasters of the TV image itself that are in the original.

That was a really memorable day, with the landing on the moon in the afternoon and then a long wait into the evening to see the moon walk. I don't remember staying up past midnight to see the entire 2+ hour effort, but that first hour was simply amazing ... particularly the way they moved in the reduced gravity of the moon.

But perhaps the most amazing thing was that we had live television from the moon, even if it had to be a special "slow scan" system to fit in the available bandwidth. I had grown up with the Space Race, watching launches live on TV in elementary school, so it was easy to take a lot of this for granted. However, my grandfather had grown up before radio, and lived to see live TV from the moon. Never underestimate what the future can hold.

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Live from 1969

The History Channel just ran an ad announcing their schedule for Monday, 20 July.

They will run a half-hour program at 8:30 EDT (re-run about three hours later at 8:00 PDT) that is essentially a re-broadcast of the CBS News coverage I watched as a kid.

the actual CBS News/Walter Cronkite coverage of man's first lunar landing. Using minimal editing and leaving the original footage untouched viewers will feel as if they are watching the CBS coverage in July of 1969. While today we know the outcome of Apollo 11's mission it was not a given then. This will become evident watching Walter Cronkite and his colleagues as they watch the historic lunar mission unfold before them.

Afterwards, from 9 to 11, they will run the movie "Moonshot" with the film parts converted to high definition. I can't wait to see that.

Having seen other "as it happened" re-broadcasts (one was of the NBC coverage of the Kennedy assassination that I never saw in real life), this promises to be excellent.

You will also get to see how TV looked back then, and I'll get to see it in color.

(We could not afford a color TV back then. Or, to be more precise, my parents could not afford to save for our college education and have a color TV back then. They made some excellent economic choices.)

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Revisiting the Moon Landing

I've decided not to jump the gun like so many news stories, and hold off on posting my personal photo of the moon walk until roughly the anniversary of when it was taken (about quarter after 11 EDT on the night of 20 July). Today I will just reflect on the events themselves and some articles I feel are worth mentioning.

Looking back, we knew what was going to happen, in detail. Maybe in more detail than you can find in all of the Wiki articles put together, because we had been raised on the space program. We (meaning my brother and I) had read every National Geographic article about moon missions going back to the first high-resolution pictures taken by Ranger 7. And we had read everything in Popular Science, books, Life magazine, you name it.

In addition, there had already been several missions to the moon, and the dangers were clear. We had seen plenty of launch attempts fail in the early days, so we knew every launch was dangerous. We had seen quite a few early moon missions actually miss the moon, so we knew navigation was not a trivial detail. We knew the rocket on the Service Module had to work correctly several times. Once you slowed into orbit around the moon, you were stuck there unless it fired. We knew there was a very narrow window for reentry. You didn't aim for the earth, you aimed at the edge of the earth to just barely catch the atmosphere. Too little and you skipped off into oblivion, too much and you would be crushed by the g forces. And we knew that there was a lot of kinetic energy to burn off by the heat shield, because you were coming in at 25,000 miles per hour.

Worse, we knew that both the descent and, in particular, ascent engines on the LM had to work or you would be stuck on the moon - leaving one man to go home alone. And, unlike the main engine (which was used for mid-course corrections), that ascent engine was never tested. Sure, they had used one on Apollo 10 when the LM had descended to less than 10 miles above the moon, but that was a different spacecraft. You had one shot to get home.

Best of all, it was summer. We knew when it was going to happen and we could watch it all as it happened. It was like riding along with Columbus to the New World. And that is what we did, went along for the ride via television.

One news item out there that I really enjoyed was this Audio slide show from the BBC. The music is from the top songs at that time: "In the year 25-25", "Age of Aquarius", and "Something in the Air". However, the newsman narrating is wrong about just how much chance was involved in the selection of Armstrong for that flight. The only way he would have missed is if an earlier mission had failed in its objectives, and even then one suspects that the crews might have shifted so he was flying the LM with the same skill that he showed flying an X-15.

Another news item of note was this video interview with a self-styled beatnik who programmed the computers on the Apollo mission. I'll bet The Thomas will enjoy this, with its discussion of worrying about every byte of code that had to be squeezed into that box, even more than I did. No bloatware back then!

Videos and pictures:
I suppose everyone has seen the partial set of cleaned up video (BBC version here), but I'll also link in my blog from last year that includes comments about the edits of the audio-video sync (concerning Armstrong's jump down, up, and then down again) in many of the older "first step" versions out there. By the way, the picture I will post on 20 July was taken just a bit after the part shown at the 3:00 mark of the first YouTube video.

For that matter, I think the coolest photo of all isn't on the moon, it is this one of Neil Armstrong doing his best Jack Nicholson impression after returning to the LM after walking on the moon. That look of tired joy, and the twinkle in his eye, says more than his words did.

Side remark:
The one thing I would like to see that has never been on any program is a side-by-side comparison of the Saturn launch to the moon and a Space Shuttle launch. The Saturn just crawls off of the pad. Why? The shuttle has a thrust to weight-at-launch ratio of 6.8 to 4.5 (in millions of pounds) while the Apollo rocket had a ratio of 7.6 to 6.7. Apollo didn't get going until it had burned off a lot of fuel from the first stage. A friend who watched them all as a kid was stunned when he saw the first Shuttle launch. It went up like an Estes rocket, and the roll maneuver it did early in flight looked like one of those early rockets just before they blew up.

Cranks and crackpots:
I really enjoyed some of the articles about the silly people who think a friend of mine (who witnessed the launch in person) and even the Soviets (who tracked the mission and congratulated us on kicking their butts in the biggest competition of the entire Cold War) were pathological liars and/or part of a conspiracy to fake the landing. Matt laid out part of the answer to some complaints, but posted a few days before new photos (pointed out by Astroprof) showed up that allow us to see the base of the LM at the Apollo 11 landing site. Even better, the LRO photos also include a cool image of the Apollo 14 site where you can see the disturbed lunar dirt (I was going to write "earth"!) where the astronauts hiked back and forth to set up a science experiment. However, as a BBC article explains, they won't get the resolution down to 50 cm per pixel (twice what is in the images linked above and shown in Astroprof's article) until August. They will eventually orbit even lower, giving sharper images for the reasons Matt explained, but that will be some time next year.

One thing those cranks never deal with is the 3 foot jump needed to get up on the ladder to get back in the LM. If you were faking it you would have steps all the way down. No one, not even a basketball star, could do a 36" vertical jump with all of that equipment on in full gravity, but it is easy in 1/6 gravity. And why the big gap? The legs on the LM were collapsible, to take up the impact when they shut off the engine and dropped the last meter or two to the moon. The ladder could not go all the way down; it had to allow for the possible compression of the lander legs.

PS - Every news feed has their version of this info, but CBS deserves mention because their video archives helped make up for the landing videos that NASA destroyed or simply lost. I like the BBC versions because they seem to provide better bandwidth, particularly for video.

UPDATED:
Here is today's story about Pres Obama honoring the Apollo 11 astronauts. The sidebar has a number of additional new stories related to the 40th anniversary of the landing.

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Thirty Years since Three Mile Island

Today is the 30th anniversary of the accident at TMI, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant outside Harrisburg, PA. Since that event, there were no new nuclear power plants started in the US, and some projects were terminated. More on that later.

I need to find a slide I took of the plant approximately one year after the accident and scan it. The paranoia of a security guard was captured nicely.

Among the many ironies of that event, the movie The China Syndrome was released on March 16, less than two weeks before the accident. With the tagline "Today, only a handful of people know what it means... Soon you will know.", it described a Loss Of Coolant Accident (LOCA) quite similar to TMI accident, except there was apparently no meltdown in the movie. By the way, the similarities between the movie and the actual events were no accident.

Irony #2:
Why were they no accident? If you look at the safety considerations that go into nuclear power plant design, as I have, you will see that they are built around the statistical analysis of various ways a reactor can fail. The best solution is a design with passive safety features, where the loss of some crucial element results in the device shutting itself down. If that is not possible, you build active backup systems that protect against likely (and unlikely) scenarios and forbid operation of the reactor when those systems are not available. Likely scenarios get more attention than unlikely ones. The one that started the TMI incident, a LOCA, is considered to be a highly likely scenario - whether from a pipe break or a shutdown of the main feedwater pumps (the problem at TMI, followed by a stuck valve) or manual intervention due to faulty readings (in the movie, where later events concerned a possible major pipe break).

The accident at TMI started when coolant was lost due to a failure in the external cooling system that shut down the main feedwater pumps and scrammed the reactor. This is not all that rare. The first defense against a LOCA like that at TMI is a secondary feedwater pump. My recollection from the time is that this system was physically disconnected for maintenance, but this is not mentioned in the Wiki article. I'm pretty sure that its normal operation after the reactor scram would have prevented any further problems by removing the post-fission decay heat from the reactor. Operating while it was shut down resulted in a significant increase in the probability of the next event in the failure chain. In addition, my recollection is that red tags, warning that a certain system was off, obscured crucial instruments and other tags warning that even more important systems were off. They were not operating a reactor that looked like the one analyzed to estimate the probability of an accident like this taking place.

The next key event is that a pressure relief valve opened. This was normal. However, it stuck open, and pressure in the cooling system fell. Again, an automatic "active" safety system, the emergency core cooling system (ECCS), kicked in. If allowed to run as designed, this would have prevented the accident. However, much like the error made by the operators in the movie, the ECCS was shut off manually because the operators believed the water level in the reactor was too high and did not know (due to a poorly designed warning light) that the pressure relief valve was open. This error was noticed two hours later when a new shift arrived, and actions taken at that point prevented further damage.

Irony #3:
The movie was based on the premise, common in both the anti-nuclear movement and many experts in nuclear power, that once a core meltdown started, it would lead inevitably to a full melting of the core - right through the containment vessel until all of that radioactivity got released into the atmosphere and ground water. The irony is that we learned, long after the fact, that the core of the TMI reactor had been damaged and a meltdown had started. This accident, along with some observations long after the Chernobyl disaster (see this section in particular as well as this picture of the post-TMI situation), showed that the molten core material does not appear able to sustain a "critical" nuclear reaction. It forms a lava-like mixture with whatever is around as it forms. It does not appear that it could get through undamaged concrete, let alone get to groundwater or to China.

Irony #4:
The China Syndrome movie was produced as anti-nuclear power plant propaganda, yet the accident at TMI did more to harm nuclear power than any movie could. It was the eventual loss of about a billion dollars, from an accident that would not have taken place if management had sensibly realized that safety rules were there to protect their investment rather than cut into their profits, that led the industry itself to cut back on investment in nuclear power. Who would loan money or invest in something where all of that money, and more, could be lost in an hour by a failure to operate the system prudently?

It has taken more than a generation with no comparable failures to bring back nuclear power. This is also no accident, as it resulted from revised training procedures and better control room design. In addition, the new reactor designs are far superior to the old ones, with more passive safety systems.

Shared Lesson:
The "graveyard shift" (third shift, typically 12 mn to 8 am or 10 pm to 6 am) is well named. Both TMI (4 am) and Chernobyl (1 am) occurred during that shift, and poor decision making contributed to - and likely caused - both "accidents". At TMI, the tired operators never re-evaluated what was going on. The fresh shift, arriving at 6 am, identified the actual problem almost immediately. At Chernobyl, key decisions were made under pressure, late at night, after a long day, and in some ignorance of the physics of the reactor that was the basis for rules saying you should never do what they eventually did.

The Ultimate Lesson:
Many things are safe only if you treat them with the proper respect due something that is actually dangerous. In the case of nuclear power, the challenge is to convince the public that this technology is safe while simultaneously convincing management and plant operators that it is NOT safe. It is only safe if you act as if it isn't. This applies to many things in life, ranging from shooting guns to driving cars. For example, the risk of death in a car accident is much lower if you wear your seatbelt, particularly in a car with air bags. This does not mean you are so safe in a car with air bags that you don't need to wear a seat belt. An air bag is of minimal value if you are not belted into the space in front of it. Promotion of air bags has obscured this not-so-minor detail and people die as a result.


PS -
One thing that I found interesting is that, despite its politically charged importance, the Wiki article about TMI is extremely accurate and (apart from my memory that there was a backup cooling system disabled that was the first stage in the ECCS, before the pressure valve would have opened) contains nothing inconsistent with my memory of the NRC report I read way back then.

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Female Mathematicians during WW II

Check out this 8 minute trailer for an up-coming movie "Top Secret Rosies", where "Math may be the most secret weapon of all". (Hat tip to Sherman Dorn.)

I'd take a bit of an exception to the claim in the intro that this is an untold story, since there wasn't a single thing in it that I didn't already know from histories of the projects those women worked on (or the history taught in conjunction with learning "numerical analysis"), but it is great that it has been assembled into a coherent story with a central focus on the role of mathematicians, mostly female, in winning World War II.

I hope that people who see this movie do not interpret the presence of electromechanical "adding" machines as an indication of mindless labor. That was not the case then, any more than the essential skill of entering the correct numbers into a calculator or computer program is simply clerical labor today. It still takes a person who knows what they are doing to put the right numbers in the machine and verify that the numbers that come out are not wrong.

What people today don't realize is that digital computers with the capability of doing sophisticated engineering (or physics) calculations were too expensive for a small or mid-size company until relatively recently, and you didn't have time (and could not afford the risk) to explain the task to a low-paid clerk. Your engineering license hung on those numbers being right, just as lives depended on whether a 155mm Howitzer shell landed on the enemy rather than your own troops during WW II. This was a job for experts.

One place my dad worked had a "programmable" desktop calculator, where the key sequences could be stored on a magnetic card in much the way that a program is written on a TI-83. This was in the late 1960s, when that device cost thousands of dollars, and it was operated by the engineers. A company he joined in 1969 had an in-house computer for payroll and billing, but only a few engineering tasks were done on it. Everything else was done with an electromechanical calculator like you see in this movie clip, plus lots of log and trig tables. One of the engineers bought one of the first HP-35 calculators (at a price that would be several thousand dollars today), explaining that it saved the cost of the books of log tables that he wore out every year. Highly efficient algorithms for computation were really important when you were doing it essentially by hand.

Even before the war, many women worked as mathematicians or computers who applied mathematics to engineering or physics problems. Many engineers and physicists also did this work. That is what Feynman and Teller and others did at Los Alamos, working side by side with women like the ones in this movie. Although one woman mentioned her background with business calculations on an adding machine, the complexity of the work often required someone who knew what was being done, someone who could spot a computational error because s/he knew the math or physics behind the correct answer.

[Perhaps it was inevitable that histories in the 1950s would put the focus on the men (much in the way Feynman put the focus on himself) and that female mathematicians would be expected to go back to "women's work" after the war. What is disturbing is the degree to which young women still have to fight stereotypes imposed by their fellow students. One great thing at our CC is that we have a number of highly capable women teaching mathematics, and they have served as role models for young women who never realized they could have a technical career.]

The mathematical problem being solved by the women mentioned in this clip was the solution of sophisticated equations for the flight of a bomb or shell, such as the shell fired by a 6" gun or 16" cannon. Models of the many forces acting on an object, most never even mentioned in an intro physics textbook, were used to predict where the object would land if released at some specific angle, velocity, and altitude. The models were verified against experiments done with the actual, specific ballistic projectile, and then used to construct extensive tables that filled in all the gaps between the experimental results they had available. Gunners could reverse the process, looking up the firing angle needed to get a particular shell to land at a particular distance away for given cross winds, etc.

The ENIAC, actually the second electronic computer built rather than the first as stated in the film clip, was built to replace the labor of a room full of people working with calculators. Naturally, the people (women mathematicians) who had organized the work on the hand calculations were tapped to do the same for the new machine. This was not an uncommon occupation. One of the first computer programmers I knew was a woman who wrote code used for accelerator design in the 1950s. She was old enough to have done war work, but I don't know if she did.

But she (like the women featured in this movie) would not be the only person who might have done hugely significant work during WW II without anyone knowing what they did. Until the classification rules were lifted in the mid 1990s, all I knew was that my thesis advisor had "given orders to Admirals" during WW II. It turns out that he worked at Bletchley Park, breaking German codes, and knew John von Neumann, among others. Another person I knew had been in the plane that followed the Enola Gay to Hiroshima, taking pictures of the effects of the bomb. I didn't know that until I read his obituary.

Side note:
The first electronic computer ever built, Colossus, was so secret that its mere existence was classified as part of the "Ultra" code breaking work done at Bletchley Park in the UK. It was only after the classification of that project expired that it became known that the ENIAC was not the first programmable computer.

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Ooops

Obama said he was the 44th person to take the oath as President.

Incorrect.

He is the 44th President, but the 43rd person to take the oath of office.

Grover Cleveland served twice as President, in two non-consecutive terms, and the system used to make Bush #43 and Obama #44 counts him twice.

Yes, this is nit picking ... but if I can split the atom I can also split hairs.

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Today and Tomorrow

Today has been an interesting day for reflection, if one can get a quiet moment amongst all of the blather of the talking heads. I was struck the most by some comments by Peggy Noonan (Reagan's main speech writer for you younger folks), who sounded at times like she actually voted for Obama. To paraphrase, she seemed to say that the excitement level in Washington matched that of the conservatives at parties during the 1980 Reagan inaugural, except this time it was regular people in the streets who were happy. Regular people, not just the wealthy power brokers. That does seem to capture the essence of what is happening.

What I want to say is that this is a day I have been waiting for ever since I shook Bobby Kennedy's hand in 1968, and that Obama is turning out to be much more than even RFK might have been. I say this because there is a real difference between a self-made man who had to work to pay off his college loans, and one whose big brother appointed him Attorney General of the U.S. Not in capability, but in symbolism. And not just symbolism, but reality. The reality that hard work and competence once again counts for something in America, like it used to. Or, at least, like the Horatio Alger myth said it used to, and the way it worked for my immigrant family. Yes, I am extremely excited by it.

And I am hoping that I might get a glimpse of a former student, one who came to me from inner city Baltimore via the US Marine Corps and is now an engineer working inside the Beltway, somewhere in those crowds tomorrow - but I will be in class teaching the next ones who want to tread down that path. I am excited, but I won't cancel class precisely because so more students can follow his path from the worst this country has to offer to the kind of success it has to offer.

Some commenter over in a thread about the inauguration over on Chad's blog took exception to my thoughts about the relative importance of hearing a speech live (a speech that will be available in unedited glory on CSPAN the same day and on YouTube forever) versus learning the physics needed to become an engineer or physicist. Do I lack perspective? Hardly. I've seen the ugly face of racism. I've seen the national chain gasoline stations that had a special design down south, a design with a third bathroom for "coloreds", that did not exist up north. I've attended school with black students who lived in their own upscale subdivision because the banks would not lend money to buy a house in a whiter subdivision, this in a state that had no segregated schools or legal limits on where people could live or work.

A good friend of my wife's was shot dead on the street for having the wrong color skin for that particular street. Or maybe it was for having good friends whose skin color was OK for that street.

No, I don't lack perspective on just how significant this event is in the history of the United States. But the event means nothing unless my students are prepared to carry that banner into the future.

You see, I also don't lack perspective on the difference between the "plantationist" approach of LBJ, giving things to people because you didn't think they could achieve on their own, and the "homesteader" approach that worked for many of the successful immigrant populations in the United States. (I don't see much difference between the concept of Cabrini-Green in Chicago and the approach of a powerful local lawyer who let his household help live rent-free in a shack not suitable for habitation until it fell down, then moved them to another one. I do see a difference between that and being "given" land if you live on it and work it for a number of years, investing your sweat and blood in it.)

Every day I see students who were failed by their schools and by their families and their friends, but have managed to move beyond that and achieve something. Every day I go to "work" with them in mind. I smile when I overhear students complain that some prof is too easy, and is not preparing them for what lies ahead. I wish, somehow, that this word would get back to their brothers and sisters attending a school where social promotion still rules. The message of this administration is not that people are owed a high-rise slum to make up for slavery, but that you are owed the right to work hard and succeed based on the "content of your character". There is a reason some in the black community didn't like his message, and some seeming "conservatives" are taking a different look at his message.

Many people remember the sound bite from the Kennedy inaugural speech, and not the challenge it gave the nation. The idea is perhaps clearest in the short speech he gave at the University of Michigan in October 1960, reflecting what was said in his July acceptance speech: "The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises - it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them." (That message got lost when LBJ pushed his plan through Congress.)

I also find it interesting that, in his speech at Michigan, JFK referred to the 1960 election as being as important as the 1933 election had been.

This past election was probably even more important than 1960, but only time will tell. I celebrate it with joy, by teaching my students the basics of mechanics and electricity they will need to reach the same level of success that Obama did, but the same path. The path of hard work, the work needed to prove you are better than anyone you have to compete with.

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Yesterday's Not-Really-News Historic News

Hat tip to Matt to go look for this.



Overshadowed a bit by all of the economic news, particularly Sen. Obama's plan to put a bigger push behind the economy, and the fact that this result has been pretty clear since about two months ago, this is actually THE moment when Sen. Obama is officially elected and becomes President Elect Obama. And, as Matt emphasized (from what I understand to be the other side of the political aisle), it is indicative of the way power is transferred peacefully in this country.

The calendar this year holds a rather interesting bit of irony: Monday, January 19, is the Martin Luther King Jr Day Holiday. Tuesday, January 20, is Barack Hussein Obama's inauguration day.

And one side comment on the economy, after today's news about unemployment:

We, like many states, continue to struggle with state support of education in the face of this economy. I caught a bit of Cramer on CNBC tonight, and he spoke a bit of truth that the media and politicians have avoided. We are probably in a depression, not a recession. Politicians and the media are probably correct to avoid using that word because, as professional communicators, they probably know that the vast majority of the American people are too poorly educated to have been taught that the term Great Depression was used because it was uniquely different from the depressions that had taken place periodically in United States history. I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory of the one that followed the Civil War (the Panic of 1873) and also found the Panic of 1837. It is interesting, but not surprising, that banking irresponsibility and speculative bubbles played a role in each of these. The railroad boom in the 1870s sounds a lot like the real estate boom we recently had. One wonders if the Madoff securities scandal of 2008 will rank up there with Jay Gould trying to corner the gold market in 1869.

If you can trust Wikipedia (and, increasing, I find that I can trust it in technical areas where politics does not play too big of a role), the other reason might be that there is no official technical definition of a depression. The prominent mention of the role of deflation (currency devaluation) in a depression should make clear why the Fed has taken such an agressive role in fighting deflation without regard to the risk of future inflation. The balancing act is to "catch" any surge in inflation of the pump priming gets out of hand.

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Christmas Eve in 1968.

This is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 8 putting men in orbit around the moon for the first time - and sending back images of Earthrise.

I suppose everyone has seen the color photo they took, but today's BBC article about the event includes the FIRST photograph taken of Earthrise by humans:

My version has been cropped from the 2411x2448 original available from NASA on the flight journal page describing this observation. The picture is in black and white because that is the film they had in the camera at the time, and is oriented the way NASA says Bill Anders said it looked to him from orbit. They were taking geology-oriented images of the moon, where color was not relevant. The iconic color photo was taken shortly after. A transcript of the hunt for color film and large versions of the two color photos are also on that NASA web page.


The BBC article also includes a low-def version of an HD video of Earthrise shot recently by a Japanese satellite and the first photo of the earth taken from lunar orbit.

Finally, one thing that is forever memorable: Live TV from the moon. The actual broadcast was a boring black and white image. What you might have seen later is that audio synced with the color film that was shot from orbit (see this video, for example) but only seen after they returned to earth.

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1963

The mind is funny. Does it still know what time it was?

I just remembered what day it is, without any prompting from news stories or blogs, and it is almost exactly the time when I learned of the Kennedy assassination a mere 45 years ago. And I can still see our old kitchen in they yellow light of a fall afternoon (not unlike the light across my yard right this instant) at the moment when I came in the back yard and heard the news from my mother.

No, I will never forget that.

I will never forget how moved she was, since my parents did not vote for JFK or support some of his policies. But he was our President, and we mourned with the rest of the country that day ... and that entire weekend.

The TV was hardly ever off that entire weekend, a detail my students can't really appreciate. I still remember seeing Oswald killed, live on TV, a detail my students find almost unbelievable. What was just an interlude during the funeral coverage became a part of the story and endless conspiracy theories.

And I remember the sound - the distinctive pattern of the drum beat used during the entire funeral procession. That was all we heard for what seemed like hours. There was no commentary (another detail my students find unbelievable). What is it about our aural memory that retains that rhythm, right down to the dramatic pause before it repeats?

We all identified with Jackie and her children, who were just a bit younger than we were. It has been 45 years since there were young children in the White House. (Caroline was just 3 or 4 when JFK was elected.) I don't have to imagine what kids will be thinking about the Obama family and their new dog, since we lived it for 3 years. I just hope the Obama presidency ends on a better note.

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Yankee Stadium

Today is the last game at Yankee Stadium. Only time will tell if abandoning that hallowed ground will mean hard times for the NY Yankees. Many of us can but hope that it will! (Has Notre Dame struggled in football because they remodeled their stadium? Only Touchdown Jesus knows that for sure.) Where I grew up, there were two kinds of people: fans of the Detroit Tigers or one of the teams in Chicago, or jerks who were fans of the Yankees just because they won a lot of games.

But this is a time for nostalgia, so here is my contribution. I've never been in the place, but back in the early summer of 1967, on a circuitous return home from Expo 67 in Montreal, my Dad made a point to navigate past various landmarks in NYC. That included driving around Yankee Stadium.

From the outside it was more impressive than Tiger Stadium (originally knows as Briggs Stadium), which looked more like a run-down factory. Yankee Stadium at least looked like an out-of-date office building, if your office building had a giant black sign around the top. Since plenty of NYC buildings did have an ostentatious sign on them (as did the GM building in Detroit), it fit right in.

My other Yankees memory is of going to Detroit for a ball game sometime in the early 60s to see the Tigers play the hated Yankees. To a kid, that shutout loss (1-0? 2-0?) was a boring nightmare. I think I would have appreciated watching masterful pitching (I think it was Whitey Ford on the mound) a bit more if my present-self could have talked to my then-self.

The key bit of trivia during the broadcast of tonight's game (not to mention the all-day pre-game show on ESPN) has been the price of tickets back in 1923 when the stadium opened. I used the info on Robert Sahr's inflation info site to do the conversion: It is a factor of about 12.5.

So that $1.10 paid for a grandstand seat in 1923 should be about $14 today, which is just enough to get into the bleachers at today's prices. You have to more than double that to get into the nosebleed section of the upper grandstand, and fork over about ten times that to get into the "mid priced" grandstand seats.

And that 15 cent program would be $2 in today's money. What a joke! But then I'll bet it wasn't a glossy color production either.

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39 Years ...

Today is the 39th anniversary of the first moon landing by Armstrong and Aldrin in the "Eagle" LEM, at 4:17:40 EDT during the Apollo 11 mission.

Click here for a wav file of the landing announcement.

The "first step" and the moon walk started late that night.

Somewhere in my Dad's slide box is the picture I took of the TV screen at about the moment he stepped off of the pad onto the moon. It remains unforgettable today.

The video clip above is really nice in that it shows Aldrin coming down the ladder and testing the drop (and 36"+ vertical leap in 1/6 gravity) between the bottom step and the ground at about the 2:00 mark. Watching this, it would seem that Armstrong had already finished the same test before the 0:30 mark despite the audio that comes after it: "OK, I just checked ah gettin back up to that first step." The audio and video are not correctly correlated at this point in the video clip. (See below for correct audio.) The sync is correct later in this video clip.

There is another clip available on YouTube that was not AFAIK broadcast. This is looking down the ladder from (inside?) the LEM and starts about a minute earlier than the clip shown above. This audio is different, since it includes a message to Aldrin about adjusting the aperture on this camera (the "sequence camera"), which improves the image quality at 1:40 into the clip. This clip also shows that the audio in the clip shown up above has been editted, because the comment about seeing Armstrong and his testing the first step is earlier, before the top clip even starts (you can see him go down, up, then finally jump down onto the pad at about 1:14, which is where the other clip starts).

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R.I.P. Bozo the Clown

This morning's paper carried the news that Larry Harmon, who gave Bozo the Clown his human form, died Thursday, 3 July. I consider it pretty amazing that the news rates coverage by the BBC. Or maybe not, since Bozo got started in audio form in 1946 - the year that defines the start of the Baby Boom.


Bozo the Clown and I go way back. Above is a picture of the cover of a record album in my collection.

Interestingly, the production date for this album appears to be contemporaneous with Larry Harmon being hired to play Bozo on a record promotion tour. The record itself features the voice of Pinto Colvin. The AP story contains a reference to "the last 52 years" that places Harmon's original hiring in 1952, the copyright date on this record album.

I say "gave Bozo his human form" because (according to Wikipedia) Bozo was only played by Colvig (with a different hair style) on a local Los Angeles TV station for a few years starting in 1949. It was Harmon who took the character national and recreated the look of the cartoons you see in this record album as well as earlier ones.

The logo in the upper right corner shows that Bozo was still "The Capitol Clown" at that time. Harmon did not buy the copyright to Bozo until later in the 1950s.

What made this a "Record Reader" is that the two 78-rpm discs inside were synchronized to the text in the book that was inside the album. You turned the page each time Bozo honked his horn.

If you are old enough, you probably remember film strips that worked the same way.

Unlike the Dr. Seuss books and other "early reader" books, the print is small and the words can be big. It was clearly meant to be used with a parent guiding you through the words as you heard Bozo and others tell the story.

A sample:

And on July 4th, what better selection than the Firecracker Song ...


Looking back at this, it seems a bit odd that one of the Three Duck Brothers appears to be female or (less likely) of an unrelated species. An early attempt at inclusive marketing?

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GM at $10 per share

The media makes a big deal about the value of GM stock being back where it was in 1954, but its not clear to me if they are correcting for inflation as well as stock splits. But that is not what I am writing about.

While posting this observation

Where is the alliance between GM and the U of M and Michigan State physics and engineering departments on cost-effective Lithium-Ion battery production methods? When will those Pointy-Haired Bosses at GM realize that they could build a Chevy Volt with NiMH technology and develop it on the highway with bleeding edge techno types like those of us who bought a Honda Insight in 2000 at a price well below cost? Its not like they couldn't upgrade it later, but they don't think like that even at $10 a share.

at the end of a followup comment on the Quantum Pontiff's blog, I remembered what really pisses me off about the absurdly slow development of products like the Chevy Volt.

The bombing of Hiroshima.

Not the fact that Mazda made my car in that city, despite its having been leveled by an atomic bomb, while it took GM more than a decade to try to make something even comparable to it. No, the fact that NOTHING used to carry out that mission EXISTED just three years earlier. I don't think history books get across the magnitude of what the US managed to accomplish in a few short years during WW II.

In August 1942 there was no atomic bomb, just 20 pages or so of general notes that constitute the Los Alamos Primer. There were no factories to separate uranium and no reactors to produce plutonium. There was a log building at Los Alamos. There were no B-29 Superfortresses, which were being prototyped and designed at about the same time that summer, for a September test flight. Its engines were a joke. Airborne radar in the cm range had been developed just a year or so earlier, but using it to trigger a bomb at a specific altitude had not been tried (or maybe even thought of).

Nothing except a lot of vaporware.

Yet three years later, the sky was blackened with 400 or more B-29s over a single Japanese city, and we were on track to produce an atomic bomb with a radar trigger every few months. The comparison to the MRAP program for Iraq is not a very favorable one. And just as "shade tree mechanics" produced the first up-armored Humvees out in the field in less time than it took to think we needed to draw one, garage operations have produced working plug-in hybrids while GM looks to market something in another couple of years (current goal is the end of 2010). We built an atom bomb in less time than that! Sell it to me for 20 grand or so and I will test the batteries for you for free! And guess what: since there are probably thousands of people who would do the same thing, that is 50 million dollars GM could have that they don't have today.

It can be done.

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