Steeljaw Scribe commemorates the first arrested landing aboard ship on this day in 1922 with this post.

On October 26, 1922 LCDR Godfrey DeCourcelles Chevalier, USN made the first arrested landing aboard the USS Langley, a converted coal collier (ex-USS Jupiter) and the Navy’s first aircraft carrier, underway off Cape Henry, VA.
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I’d call this the case of “arrested development,” but, it opened an entirely new era in warfare. Certainly, those present on the deck of the USS LANGLEY that day probably could not envison aircraft that could carry more ordnance weight than the gross weight of the aircraft landing and takeoff and land hands off.

A few days ago, I posted a rememberance of the first takeoff from a ship in this post.

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Oct 25th. No time for jovial stories, but a day of rememberance of the past.

My Oct 25, 2004 post on the Battle Off Samar

An Afternoon with Dick Rohde, a radioman on the USS SAMUEL B ROBERTS (DE-413) on October 25th, 1944.

My 60th anniversary post about Congressional Medal of Honor Winner Cpl Desmond T. Doss, a conscientious objector who refused to carry a weapon, but saved lives. What did his CMOH earned on Okinawa on May 5th, 1945 have to do with October 25th, 1944? He was ashore at Leyte Gulf that day. The heroic actions of “Taffy 3” saved that landing from being puished back into the sea. Not only that, at Leyte Gulf, Desmond Doss went out onto open ground to save a man shot by a sniper, despite the sniper not being located and killed. No shot was fired at him as he fearlessly went to aid a fallen brother.

Many heroic battles happened on October 25th.

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Home networking, fractal generation, 256 colors! See what you missed by not reading Part XI? Oh, yeah…it was still set in 1988.

The addition of lots of colors and sound allowed me to get to know some interesting things, that are taken for granted today. I found a company advertizing in some Mac Magazine named “Brilliant Colors.” They would produce color business cards from your Mac generated PICT file. Just do your graphics, put the floppy in the mail and a few weeks later, back came a set of business cards that were professionally done. Not that I made any money at it, but I sure loved the opportunity to learn graphics via this capability. Basically, they had you send a picture that was 4x the size of the card, which got an effective 288 dots per inch resolution.

I used a program “Pixel Paint” to colorize the black and white diagrams I scanned in (via a DEST scanner) from Uniform Regulations. It was great to get a bilateral picture, like the SWO insignia, because I could color 1/2 of it and then copy, flip and paste and I was done. It took about 3 hours to color in a warfare insignia, which I learned the artistic appeal of shaded gradients in the background. I did cards for a submariner, a USAF officer, my brother-in-law, then a Major in the 2/263rd Tank Battalion of the SC Army National Guard, and my own cards. I later did many for Surface Warfare Officers, and aviators (of both “flavors”). At one point, I got out to San Francisco and was able to meet the owner of Brilliant Colors and he and I discussed making a military art catalog, which would then be placed at the Personal Services in the base exchanges. He liked the idea, so I went to work and generated about 200 stock backgrounds. Their “civilian” catalog had the backgrounds, and used an overlay generated with HyperCard (discussed in an earlier post) to put the customer specific data on the picture. The idea never took off, as he sold the business to his brother, a doctor, who wanted a full blown business plan done if he was to consider the military side of the business. Since I had already done the artwork, I wasn’t sure what the probelm was, but…that was where that went. I still did cards for a few more years, before they closed their doors.

In addition to graphics, I learned about sound capture and editing. One weekend, when I was stuck at home, I got “Top Gun,” “Star Trek 4,” “Buckaroo Banzai,” “Platoon,” and the “Terminator” and hooked up my cassette deck to the audio output on the VCR. I’d watch the movies until I found a worthy sound bite, then I’d rewind the movie and turn the cassette on and record it. I got about 45 minutes of raw recording out of that weekend. One of the guys in the Mac club loaned me an interface box and I sat for several more days, reducing the sounds to useful form, along the way learning how to clip the right part of the waves out and also celan the sound up. When I was done, I had 28 800K floppies full of sound files. There were some fine sound bites in that set.

The Mac had the ability to link sounds to various operating system events. I recall one of the earliest ones was a puking sound that most people would attach to the “floppy eject” event. It was fun for a bit, but, got old quickly. I did help out one of my friends one weekend, by checking on his apartment. I took the time to take my sound files and attach something appropriate or funny to each of the system events on his computer, which he found Sunday night, when he got home. Again, he was mildly amused, but the processing power was still not fast enough, and he had to wait for each sound file to play before he could keep going. It played well, but significantly degraded “work flow.”

Again…this was 1988, and on a Mac….PCs had no chance of doing anything like this, without spending at least as much as you would on a Mac to kludge together a capability that was essentially built into a Mac and the OS.

Besides “Smash Hit Raquetball,” “Falcon,” an F-16 flight simulator came out for the Mac. The graphics of the PC were still so incapable, it wasn’t worth them producing the game for a PC market.

For a while, the cool games were out for the Mac, but the tide began to shift. The games, complete with poor graphics, began to be the new and more voluminous issues. The game writing companies saw the numbers were with the PC, even if the quality was much less for their work. It was a Sony Beta vs VHS format issue. Superior, but, the market liked cheap better than good.

My mind wandered, occasionally, to thoughts of creation of a database that would pull together the many things done aboard a ship, and how I could make it manageable. An officer at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, CA, had begun a model of this, using HyperCard as an interface. The opening screen had the areas that would be covered, like administration, logistics, logs and records, etc, but he had plowed down the logistics path. You clicked on the button for logistics and screen with a picture of the ship appeared. The you clicked on the area of the ship, like the Main Engineering space, then a layout of the Engine room came up. Click on the GTM module, then the attached gearbox of the turbine, then the fuel control. when you reached the lowest component, then the COSAL sheet (Consolidated Shipboard Allowance List) came up and you would then be able to fill out a DD1348 requistion form for the fuel control and send it to Supply, all using graphic controls. More on this later.

On the tail of all of that, I was headed back to a sea command, where, because of the mandate by COMNAVSURFLANT that if the Navigator billet was not filled by a LCDR, then the XO would be the Navigator. That was me. Enroute the ship, I spent a few weeks in Norfolk Fleet Training Center learing the detail work for my trade. I drug the Mac II with me, and my knowledge of spherical trigonometry from my adventures chronicled over here, which I used to do my track planning homework, using Excel.

Next time: “When should we get underway?” and the Admin Warfare Shipboard OperatiOnal Tickler program on the “dark side.”

Until this last weekend, I was pretty much stumped as to how, in this age of access to incredible amounts of information, without even laving your home or office, a significant number of people in this country could continually claim the US Government was behind the 9/11 attacks.

I have long held that the images coming out of Hollywood have had an undercurrent of an effect on many parts of society, particularly with the tend to show all adults as either stupid, ignorant, or corrupt (or any combination of those) and only children were capable of seeing the real danger, finding the real criminals, or knowing the truth. That has sent a subliminal message that anoyone of authority can’t be trusted, and, we see the results in the legal system.

This past Saturday, I was channel surfing and the last 30 minutes of “The X-Files” movie was on. I settled back on the couch and then a “BFO” (Blinding flash of the obvious) hit me. I didn’t know for how long, but I knew that series had been aroound a long time. I just looked it up: Begun in 1993, and ran through 2002. The movie was out in 1998.

The popularity of this series, which showed not just the US, but a world shadow organization, was cooperating with the aliens, and doing what ever they needed to do to keep this alliance a secret.

From Wikipedia:

The X-Files was one of the network’s first major hits, and its main characters and slogans (“The Truth Is Out There,” “Trust No One,” “Deny Everything,” “I Want to Believe”) became pop culture touchstones, simultaneously tapping into and inspiring a plethora of conspiracy theories, paranoia about the U.S. government, and belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The “Generation C” types have grown up with a well done fictional series, and have failed to discern between truth and fiction.

I think this may help explain the vast numbers of our citizens who believe the Government is behind all of the GWoT, because, we all know….The truth is out there.

Part X wrapped up discussing the lead in to the Great Leap forward to the Mac II world…

But before going on to Mac IIs, a little side track. So, there I was with a Mac SE at home. It was coming up on Christmas and one of the guys in the Mac Club, who had left his family “back home” while at War College, didn’t want to leave his Mac in his BOQ room, so he asked if I’d keep it.

Now I had two computers in the same house, and there was an inexpensive network system called “PhoneNet,” which used a network protocal called “LocalTalk” or “AppleTalk.” it used standard phone wires to connect two computers. I picked up two of them and built a home, peer-to-peer network, where we were able to play “Smash Hit Racquetball” with two players, each at separate computers. That was December, 1987 and my first journey into networking.

During this time, several of us found out we all also were using the GEnie Bulletin Board System (BBS), each of us downloading the new Mac offering each week. At that time, you paid a monthly service fee, then by the minute for your time logged in. On top of that, the nearest access number was in the next zone, so it was a toll call on top of that. we put our heads together and came up with another use for Excel. On Saturday morning, I’d log into GEnie and download the listings of new Mac files. I’d scan the list and see what looked like it had universal appeal to our group. Then I’d import the file into Excel, complete with file sizes, and assign each of us a set of files to download. The Excel spreadsheet kept a balance of downloads by file size, so in the long run, while you might download a large file one week, someone else would do that next week. Later in the week, we’d get together and pass the floppies around with the files we procured. That saved us all money. I seem to recall it was five of us doing this, so it certainly took the edge off the costs, yet got us all the files we wanted.

Anyhow, early the next year, I was able to buy a Mac II. This was the first “open box,” where you had slots to put in interface cards. Using the Motorola 68020 series chip as a CPU, operating at 16Mhz (so I doubled my CPU clock speed, YEAH!), it was a great leap forward. I went from greyscale graphics on a 9″ screen of the SE, to 256 colors on a 12 monitor. It, as did the SE, but I never messed with it then, had built in 8 bit sound, so there was more to life than a series of essentialy monotoned “beeps,” like the PC could do.

It was on this machine I found out about “fractional dimensions” or “fractals” from some programs I found on GEnie. I bought the book “Chaos: The Making of a New Science” by James Glieck and studied the subject. I’d set in parameters for a very small area, deep indie a Mandelbrot fractal and go to bed. In the morning, I’d wake up to find a picture on the screen that took 2-3 hours to draw, showing the subtle changes in the repetition of the shape. The understanding I took away from al this is what we would view as chaotic processes are most likely ordered, but the order is to the right of the decimals we have chosen to round off at, leaving us scratching our heads in wonder.

It is also that understanding that was the genesis of the title of this blog.

More on Mac IIs and doing serious graphics work at home later.

Falcon Hypersonic Plane

From DefenseTech:

A decade after the final retirement of Lockheed Martin’s Mach-3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the Air Force is preparing to test a plane that flies more than three times as fast. Two Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicles, built by Lockheed Martin with input from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), will take to the air in 2008. The $100-million program aims to field a Mach-10 unmanned aircraft that can spy on foreign powers, drop bombs or even lob satellites into orbit.

Read the rest here!

This project, aimed at making a Mach 10 aircraft, will drive all sorts of R&D in the form of high temperature resistant, light weight materials, as wll as aerodynamic research and propulsion technology…which, or course, will one day make it’s way into all sorts of other markets to give us things we haven’t even conceived of yet.

That thing will fly so fast, they may not have to design a relief tube system for the aircrew.

From MS NBC, it seems Kim Jong Il is “sorry” he upset so many, in the “region” (read: China) and around the world.

I’d like to have been a fly on the wall when the represenative from the Chinese government walked in and said: “This conversation never happened…” and went on to tell the little man just what he was going to do next. I’m sure saying “I’m sorry” was but one of the steps to redemption that was issued, followed by a list of things that would no longer find their way across the borders, such as food and fuel….

It will be many, many years before what happened in the last few days in an office in North Korea, but…that’s the way “history” works.

Update 10/24/2006: OOPS! Just kidding! great…well, you know, the left thinks all things are settled if someone says “I’m sorry!” What are they to think now?

Most likely it will be light blogging this weekend….but not sure yet.

Anyhow: Thought of the moment that confounds me:

The left wing/liberal mentality really hates this war. They mostly show it by claiming they hate President Bush, but they also drag out the “No War for Oil!” signs, too (BTW, I like that war right now). These are the same people who have culturally “evolved” to ensure that human rights have been stretched to the nth degree, using an “umbrella” argument about a right to privacy being stated (not so) clearly in the Constitution.

The next few statements are presented for the purpose of illustrating my upcoming points:

As a result, women have attained positions of very high economic and social levels and pretty much do what they want.

Homosexuals are pushing hard, and have succeeded in some school districts, of taking a message about sexual experimentation into the middle and elementary level of schools.

Children are lobbied to become sexually active, and given the freedom to make major medical decisions about their lives, to the exclusion of parents being told of such conditions. Adults, other than parents, and sometimes not even known to the girls, have become accustomed to transporting them to where they can get abortions.

Christian or Catholic references are being removed/banned from being seen or talked about in public at an alarming rate. Islamic advocacy groups have successfully lobbied to teach Islam, for up to three weeks, including requirements to memorize verses from the Koran and pray to Allah in schools around the country.

These are factual conditions that exist today and efforts to reverse them are fought with lots of money and very high powered lawyers and judges.

Ok, that being said, the same political mindset that supports all of this are the ones against the war against terror and get particularly upset when it is couched as the “war against radical Islam.”

Yes, the confounding part: The Islam that would sequester (or quarantine, if you prefer) women to their homes, would not allow them to vote, to drive, to wear swim suits skimpier than their underwear, and would allow them to the beaten, but not so bad as to leave marks; The Islam that would allow stoning to death the woman if they were caught exercising their “sexual freedom;” The Islam that would hang a teenage girl for having sex; The Islam that would allow male members of the family to kill their sisters/daughters is they talked back to to them and demanded to be able to marry who they chose.

The very people who have gained so much in freedoms in our society are the ones who would wish us to welcome, with open arms, the religion that would first line them up and inform them they would not only not have those freedoms anymore, but would tell them the consequences. They welcome the one state religion, yet scoff at the one that has been the dominant one in this culture for over 200 years, and has been a part of ensuring and supporting the freedoms the society now “enjoys” as a result.

Oh, well, it’s not looking good for the “good guys.”

Lots of discussion on President Bush acknowledging that the situation today in Iraq could have a resemblance to a battle fought almost 29 years in the past. Almost a year ago, I blogged about echos of the 1968 Tet Offensive in the current conflict.

Executive Summary of Tet:

The Tet Offensive was conducted during an agreed upon truce between the beligerants in the conflict.

The NVA used the Viet Cong as an “ablative shield.” This worked to clear out the “tainted” South Vietnamese fighters by sacrificing them “for the cause.”

Despite a few VC getting into the US Embassy compound, they were all killed in the yard, and did not get into the building.

The US and international press presented the Tet Offensive as a success for the forces opposing the Government of South Vietnam.

The press was wrong in a military sense, but were correct in the historical context, yet they had no clue at the time how correct they were.

The NVA understood the power of the press had “crossed over” and had become more of an effective weapon that raw military might, which led to the strategic move.

———————————
Commentary for today:

Yes, it is similar to today in the sense that the enemy understands:

• 1) How we have abandoned, as a culture, any significant effort to keep ourselves informed beyond the headline of any article, or cover statement of current news magazines;
• 2) Anything the tradtional media states must be true and;
• 3) The public contains significant numbers of skeptical people who believe the US Government is behind all the conflict for the purpose of lining their pockets, or those of their friends in industry;
• 4) Regardless of how devastating such an effort is in the short run in terms of physical resources or manpower it is to them, it has the potential to cause us to turn our gaze away and vote for the appeasers, just as was done in Spain.

Differences:

• 1) We have historical perspective, as a result of the long term effect of the 1968 events to view this period in history;
• 2) The war then was defined by soverign nations and international boundries, fueled by an idealology, this time it’s a war defined by one side with national boundries, and an opponent that knows no territorial constraints, yet it still filled by an idealology;
• 3) If the insurgents do make a “final sprint” in the hopes of biasing the outcome of the November 7th elections, they will be in poor logistical shape to follow up on any attacks, therefore we need to be ready to step up and squash them when they are at a low point militarily and;
• 4) Our political leaders can use this analogy to their advantage, while the press will try to use it to the nation’s disadvantage.

In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, and even the Vietnam War, both sides of the equation, the Coalition and the insurgent forces, can take lessons learned away from the Tet Offensive. It is not a perfectly modeled analogy, but it has similarities. It would serve the press well to do some more detailed study of the actual battles across South Vietnam. It would serve the military, and our political leadership well to study the battles across South Vietnam.

If the military has read the tea leaves correctly, they will have stockpiled supplies, pre-postioned troops and tactical/strategic reserves, and have shored up the defenses. In addition, focused analysis of intelligence, to help tactically prepare for the next 3 1/2 weeks. Once the battle has joined, then it will be time to crush the exposed enemy forces, then be prepared to follow them, physically or via collected intel, back to their safe houses to continue the fight, with one intention to eliminate every possible combatant, then, they will have correctly interpreted the lessons of February 1968.

The press should spend some time studying history, beyond what some old timer in the press room tells them. I’m sure George Stephanopoulos doesn’t comprehend the bigger implications this all has within the story from a war long ago, which I discussed above. If he somehow thinks the current levels of violence, like Tet will cause us to “cut and run,” he has to understand the US military didn not “cut and run” from that battle, in fact, they stood tall and obliterated the VC in massive numbers. We are doing the same thing today. If anyone cut and ran, it was the Democratically controlled Congress, that withdrew funds from the Vietnamization effort and the US military for non-Army support for the ARVN forces.

Our leadership needs to prepare us for a potential “October Surprise” from the enemy in the form of massive, coordinated, widespread and well documented attacks, and also the knowledge that our military is prepared to take it to the enemy and put the dampers on civial war, insurrection and other violence behind us and the people or Iraq. If anything, President Bush should highlight that it was the Democrats who lost their nerve in the face of the enemy, but only after a Republican took office. They certainly supported the war (and the dreaded “military-industrial complex”) while Kennedy and Johnson were in office. If any lessons should be taken away from Tet, it is that one in the last sentance.

As a final statement, even General Giap acknowledged to a US officer, many years later, that the NVA/VC never won on the battlefield of Vietnam, but he also stated, wisely and accurately, that fact was also completely irrelevant.

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