READING MATERIAL FOR AN ENDLESS WINTER

I found this intriguing place while writing the previous post. What can I say? It makes for interesting reading. It's a photo of the books on the Shackleton Expedition that became trapped in the ice and foundered there. I make the assumption that the odd pipe is the Charlie Noble and heated the space, at least a little, when the galley fires were lit.

The library, seen above in a photo by expedition photographer Frank Hurley, has been decoded for the first time-the Royal Geographic Society, working with Dutch digitizer Picturae, rescanned and analyzed the photo and was able to read the titles of the books for the first time.

In addition to Greely’s sad story, Shackleton carried the Encyclopedia Brittanica, plays by George Bernard Shaw, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and a lot more. The books, unfortunately, went to the bottom of the sea when the Endurance broke apart and sank on November 21, 1915. As most of you know, all 28 men survived.

Here’s the full list of books in the library:

Encyclopedia Britannica
Seven short plays by Lady Gregory
Perch of the devil by Getrude Atherton
Pip by Ian Hey
Plays: pleasant and unpleasant, Vol 2 Pleasant by G B Shaw
Almayer’s folly by Joseph Conrad
Dr Brewer’s readers handbook
The Brassbounder by David Bone
The case of Miss Elliott by Emmuska Orczy
Raffles by EW Hornung
The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett
Pros and cons: a newspaper reader’s and debater’s guide to the leading controversies of the day by JB Askew
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Woman’s view by Herbert Flowerdew
Thou Fool by JJ Bell
The Message of Fate by Louis Tracy
The Barrier by Rex Beach
Manual of English Grammar and Composition by Nesfield
A book of light verse
Oddsfish by Robert Hugh Benson
Poetical works of Shelley
Monsieur de Rochefort by H De Vere Stacpoole
Voyage of the Vega by Nordenskjold
The threshold of the unknown region by Clements Markham
Cassell’s book of quotations by W Gurney Benham
The concise Oxford dictionary
Chambers biographical dictionary
Cassell’s new German-English English-German dictionary
Chambers 20th Century dictionary
The northwest passage by Roald Amundsen
The voyage of the Fox in Arctic seas by McClintock
Whitaker’s almanac
World’s end by Amelie Rives
Potash and perlmutter by Montague Glass
Round the horn before the mast by A Basil Lubbock
The witness for the defence by AEW Mason
Five years of my life by Alfred Dreyfuss
The morals of Marcus Ordeyne by William J Locke
The rescue of Greely by Commander Winfield Scott Schley
United States Grinnell Expedition by Dr Kane
Three years of Arctic service by Greely
Voyage to the Polar Sea by Nares
Journal of HMS Enterprise by Collinson

Photo via the Royal Geographical Society

I suppose that all of the crew were glad they weren't playing tag with the Germans on the Somme by the time they got back and read up on the early days of the Great War. It remains interesting to wonder how many of them survived the Great War after wintering over in the Antarctic.

THE PIONEERS LONG FALL IN WINTER

Everybody remembers the pioneers.

The Lament for Icarus

TIP OF THE SPEAR

The Hindmost has ordered that a U.S. Navy Warship sail within the claimed territorial seas of one of China's new islands in the South China Sea. His will be done. Obama.

One U.S. defense official said the USS Lassen sailed within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef. A second defense official said the mission, which lasted a few hours, also included Mischief Reef and would be the first in a series of freedom-of-navigation exercises aimed at testing China's territorial claims.

YOU ARE STANDING INTO DANGER

Those interested can watch an interesting video on how to claim millions of square miles of sea bed as part of your very own Exclusive Economic Zone where you too can delve for minerals, oil and natural gas without pesky interlopers.

Reefs and Shoals in the South China Sea

The navy calls these FONs. It stands for Freedom of Navigation and it is the means we use to abide by the international law of the sea that we recognize. Basically, if one doesn't exert one's rights, one loses them. We played this game for decades with the Soviet Union and other grasping communist, muslim and socialist tyrannies. Usually they met with success. Sometimes they ran into trouble. Trouble is a matter of life and death, not a matter of getting a dent or the paint scraped off some piece of hull as you can see from the shameful Hainan Island Incident in 2001.

The last FON that was not a FON but close enough for government work, involved the loss of a US Navy spy plane with all the latest and greatest spy gear, communications and equipment when it was damaged by a Chinese Air Force plane and decided it had no choice but to turn over all of America's embarked, hard won, top secret technology to the Chinese rather than crash land in the deep ocean and let it all sink to the bottom.

I don't think anything like that is going to happen to LASSEN but I am concerned about 'pirate submarines' in the South China Sea. I enjoyed the wordplay in Strategy and Policy when we discussed the pirate submarines in the Spanish Civil War.  From the excellent book by Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War

There's another problem with running USN warships around reefs in the South China Sea. The Navy's charts aren't very accurate or reliable.

USS GUARDIAN turned to scrap by reef not on chart

ON A JOVIAL NOTE

Viewed at semi-sweetsouthernbelle,

Gentle readers, I am shocked by the language on that blog. Shocked!

LEFT HANDEDNESS

Serious readers will remember a picture similar to this not more than 4 weeks ago. That picture showed the effects of 1000 degree bacon fat splashed on the epidermis. I've protected the dermis by breaking  the underlying wrist..... a month ago. Today, I returned to the hospital after my X-rays yesterday showed that yes, it was indeed quite broken and they did this to me. I think there is something very wrong with my pain meter. On the gripping hand, gout exposes one to the real meaning of unbearable pain.

I also like the book. It was the text for docents at the Smithsonian when they opened the Human Origins Exhibit.

In my case, burned, broken and neglected

A VERY SMALL PIECE OF THE LAST

This showed up awhile ago.

I put it back on my key chain. How many people have been to Sintra much less Cabo da Roca?

OTOH, my last key chain fob was from Panmunjom in the Joint Security Area.

NASA'S LETTER OF MARQUE

I heard about the private effort to reestablish control over a NASA spacecraft a couple of weeks ago on NPR and then it faded from my view. Well it looks like the crew were successful in regaining control of a spacecraft that journeyed around the sun on its own and returned.

That's pretty cool. We build good spacecraft.

One of the many things I liked when I visited Space College's site was this picture they have of their Mission Control. It's not just the pirate flag, it's the venue. I had business that took me to Moffet Field a couple of times a month. I usually stopped by the enormous aircraft hangers built for the Navy's airships and then I'd eat at McDonalds and then get a haircut at the Base barber shop which shared the parking lot.

ISEE-3 MISSION CONTROL (formerly McDonalds)

Navy Airship Hangers. I used to see half a dozen C-130s tucked in a corner of one of these structures. That's a C-130 above.

IF SATURN APPROACHED

From House of Eratosthenes

BRINGING DATA TO LIFE

Some researchers took 351 years of
weather observations collected from the logs and reports of ships sailing the world's oceans and data from research buoys and animated it using Google maps. Collecting surface observation weather information was one of the things that warships did for centuries. As with anything that gathers dust, researchers started mining the data once they found the central records repositories and realized what was there.

I remember the first time I saw the power of detailed routine maritime observations when a retired Navy captain showed up on one of my ships with an early laptop computer and a program he called GFMPL. The Navy's Geophysics Fleet Mission Program Library had the data from many, if not all, of the hundreds of thousands of expendable bathy-thermograph (XBT) buoys used by the US Navy as its warships characterized the ocean's sound velocity profile.  Each of them recorded temperature vs depth over their recording range (about 1000-2000 feet). The primary purpose of the information was to find the deep sound channel and acoustic layer below which submarines could not be detected from the surface.

The GFMPL model merely contained the Sound Velocity Profile information that historically prevailed at a given coordinate at a given time of year over the course of decades. It let you plug values into the Sonar Equation even when you had no first hand observational data. You would not believe how helpful/critical this can be. The study of sound in water matters deeply to navy officers. There are ways to find submarines but the worst approach, bar none, is shown below. It is better if you use sound looking up their kilts or from aircraft they cannot reach. 1 vs 1 in ASW these days is not for the timid.

The picture represents the active ray path of a destroyer type ship hunting a submarine using active SONAR. Where it became personal though was using active SONAR against mines floating in the volume. When the ray path was pretty much straight down it was a good day to go back to bed. There wasn't much point in hunting mines with SONAR if physics suggested that it was taking the day off.

A few years after I left off all that, I ran across an article about a Lieutenant of the Navy who had suffered a crippling injury that prevented him from ever serving at sea again. We don't have a word for that anymore although for a long time we thought we did. Some people like to think that we keep people on in the Navy because they're pretty smart not because of how good they look in Ray Bans. Like the sound velocity profile though, that changes every day.

This was also the origin of the navy's entire geophysical data project. A naval officer named Matthew F. Maury, banished from life at sea due to a debilitating accident, found himself at the Naval Observatory and by location, custodian of the central repository of all logbooks from the Navy's ships. He found that he could transform his exile from the sea into a wonderment by taking the composite of all the weather and marine observations of generations that was slowly moldering away and turning  it into useful guides known as Sailing Directions.

Long before RADAR we had a means to guide mariners in their closest approaches to shore. I was looking for the old Charlie's Charts which used pen and ink drawings of approaches throughout Baja which I remembered from sailing there as a young Lieutenant on a 40 footer but this will do in lieu of that:

You would have to sail a thousand miles at sea to appreciate how much a geography of your desired landfall means if you want to establish your whereabouts in the pre-GPS/RADAR era. Yes, all landfalls look the same in the dark but we don't make landfall in the dark do we? No. No we most assuredly don't. We head back out to sea and live to enjoy landfalls with Mimosas in the morning and a light heart. Finding Cabo Falso unexpectedly at 0200 when the Fathometer stops working all of a sudden....not the place for sudden demonstrations of sang froid. We can do it, but no. Just saying.

FOUND YOU

From the incomparable folks at The Planetary Society.

Earth setting in the Gale Crater.

THERE ARE SOME

who would say that it would be OK for this to happen, provided it hit X first.  There are others that would scurry around madly painting little X's on their neighbor's lawns or rubbing them out on their own.

Finally watched COSMOS tonight. It was a very interesting show. Loved the photography and computer generated graphics.

OUTLANDISH UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIMS

The Fukushima Dai Ichi nuclear meltdown was no accident. It was the cover and deception contingency plan developed to disguise an accidental release of radioactivity from Japan's Top Secret nuclear research and warhead production facility.

Regrettably, the immediate nature of the radiation leaking from the weapon manufacturing site necessitated premature use of Japan's scalar resonance weapon which was used to create the earthquake and tidal wave that "led" to the meltdown at Fukushima.

Japanese workers who bravely worked in the plants in a futile attempt to prevent the meltdown were unaware of the plan and the need for the reactor cores to melt down and contaminate a critical area of Japan and stretches of the Pacific Ocean.

Scientists are only now rationalizing earlier discoveries that showed a sizable increase in the number of neutrons floating in the Pacific. They have been linked by top scientists at the Climate Research Institute in Wallingford, NH, to Neutron Bombs!

DPRK cries foul and demands a recount!

I'll be around, just not around here much. We are taking a trip.

THE VIEW FROM THE PEAK

On first looking into Chapman's Homer

MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told	5
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;	10
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats.