To All,
Good Thursday Morning August 29.. The dawn did not bring any sign of the sun but it is supposed to come out in a couple hours. Temp of 82. Busy day today with chores, a few errands and then classes tonight. I hope you ae all doing well.
Warm ReSkipsList@googlegroups.comgards,
skip
Make it a good Day
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This day in Naval and Marine Corps History (thanks to NHHC)
Here is a link to the NHHC website: https://www.history.navy.mil/. Go here to see the director's corner for all 83 H-Grams
Today in Naval and Marine Corps History
August. 29
1861 During the Civil War, Seaman Benjamin Swearer lands with troops from the steam sloop of war, Pawnee, and takes part in the capture of Fort Clark, at Hatteras Inlet, N.C. He serves throughout the action and has the honor of being the first man to raise the flag on the captured fort. For his gallant service throughout the action, he was awarded the Medal of Honor.
1862 The gunboat, USS Pittsburgh, supports Army troops landing at Eunice, Ark., during the Civil War.
1915 After pontoons are brought to Hawaii from the west coast, and following extensive additional diving work, the submarine USS F-4 is raised from the bottom and taken into Honolulu Harbor for dry docking. Previously, in March 1915, during a routine dive a few miles off Honolulu, F-4 sinks in 51 fathoms of water, with the loss of her 21 crewmembers.
1916 High waves force armored cruiser USS Memphis aground at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, killing 33 men. Lt. Claud A. Jones rescues crewmen from the dying ship's steam-filled engineering spaces. Years later, in Aug. 1932, Jones receives the Medal of Honor for his actions.
1944 USS Jack (SS 259) attacks Japanese convoy H3 and sinks minesweeper W28 and army cargo ship, Mexico Maru, northwest of Menado, Celebes.
1944 PBY aircraft sink Japanese sailing vessel, Toyokuni Maru, at the entrance to Ambon Bay.
1998 USS Decatur (DDG 73) is commissioned at Portland, Ore., before arriving at its homeport of Naval Station San Diego. The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer is the fifth U.S. Navy ship named for Commodore Stephen Decatur.
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Today in World History August 29
70 The Temple of Jerusalem burns after a nine-month Roman siege.
1526 Ottoman Suleiman the Magnificent crushes a Hungarian army under Lewis II at the Battle of Mohacs.
1533 In Peru, the Inca chief Atahualpa is executed by orders of Francisco Pizarro, although the chief had already paid his ransom.
1776 General George Washington retreats during the night from Long Island to New York City.
1793 Slavery is abolished in Santo Domingo.
1862 Union General John Pope's army is defeated by a smaller Confederate force at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
1882 Australia defeats England in cricket for the first time. The following day an obituary appears in the Sporting Times addressed to the British team.
1942 The American Red Cross announces that Japan has refused to allow safe conduct for the passage of ships with supplies for American prisoners of war.
1945 U.S. airborne troops are landed in transport planes at Atsugi airfield, southwest of Tokyo, beginning the occupation of Japan.
1949 USSR explodes its first atomic bomb, "First Lightning."
1950 International Olympic Committee votes to allow West Germany and Japan to compete in 1952 games.
1952 In the largest bombing raid of the Korean War, 1,403 planes of the Far East Air Force bomb Pyongyang, North Korea.
1957 US Congress passes Civil Rights Act of 1957 after Strom Thurmond (Sen-D-SC) ends 24-hour filibuster, the longest in Senate history, against the bill.
1960 US U-2 spy plane spots SAM (surface-to-air) missile launch pads in Cuba.
1964 Mickey Mantle ties Babe Ruth's career strikeout record (1,330).
1965 Astronauts L. Gordon Cooper Jr. and Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr complete 120 Earth orbits in Gemini 5, marking the first time the US set an international duration record for a manned space mission.
1966 The Beatles give their last public concert (Candlestick Park, San Francisco).
1968 Democrats nominate Hubert H Humphrey for president at their Chicago convention.
1977 Lou Brock (St Louis Cardinals) breaks Ty Cobb's 49-year-old career stolen bases record at 893.
1986 Morocco's King Hassan II signs unity treaty with Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, strengthening political and economic ties and creating a mutual defense pact.
1991 USSR's parliament suspends Communist Party activities in the wake of a failed coup.
1992 Thousands of Germans demonstrate against a wave of racist attacks aimed at immigrants.
1995 NATO launches Operation Deliberate Force against Bosnian Serb forces.
2003 A terrorist bomb kills Ayatollah Sayed Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the Shia Muslim leader in Iraq, and nearly 100 worshipers as they leave a mosque in Najaf where the ayatollah had called for Iraqi unity.
2005 Rains from Hurricane Katrina cause a levee breech at the Industrial Canal in New Orleans, causing severe flooding.
2012 The Egyptian Army's Operation Eagle results in the deaths of 11 suspected terrorists and the arrest of another 23.
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OPERATION COMMANDO HUNT Thanks to the Bear
Skip… For The List for the week beginning Monday, 26 August 2024 continuing through Sunday, 1 September 2024… Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION COMMANDO HUNT (1968-1972)…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post for 25 August 1969… Includes two great stories: The saga of "Balky Company A" and the 40 year search for her missing Marine by a wife who never gave up…
(Please note the eye-watering ongoing revamp of the RTR website by Webmaster/Author Dan Heller, who has inherited the site from originators RADM Bear Taylor, USN, Retired, and Angie Morse, "Mighty Thunder")…
To remind folks that these are from the Vietnam Air Losses site that Micro put together. You click on the url below and can read what happened each day to the aircraft and its crew. .Micro is the one also that goes into the archives and finds these inputs and sends them to me for incorporation in the List. It is a lot of work and our thanks goes out to him for his effort.
From Vietnam Air Losses site for "for 29 August
29-Aug: https://www.vietnamairlosses.com/loss.php?id=233
Vietnam Air Losses Access Chris Hobson and Dave Lovelady's work at: https://www.VietnamAirLosses.com.
This is a list of all Helicopter Pilots Who Died in the Vietnam War . Listed by last name and has other info
https://www.vhpa.org/KIA/KIAINDEX.HTM
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Thanks to Carl
An interesting Read
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/08/27/the-african-origin-of-the-slave-trade/
The African Origin of the Slave Trade
August 27, 2023
Paul Craig Roberts
For decades liberals have beat into the heads of white Americans that they are racists responsible for enslaving blacks. The insistence on white racism was music to the ears of black activists….. Read the rest in the URL; ABOVE
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From the Archives
Thanks to Doctor Rich from many years ago. The speeds below are all slower then what They are doing now.
Acceleration explained ........
* One Top Fuel dragster outfitted with a 500 cubic-inch replica Dodge (actually Keith Black, etc) Hemi engine makes more horsepower (8,000 HP) than the first 4 rows of cars at NASCAR's Daytona 500. Under full throttle, a dragster engine will consume 11.2 gallons of nitro methane per second; a fully loaded Boeing 747 consumes jet fuel at the same rate but with 25% less energy being produced. A stock Dodge Hemi V8 engine cannot produce enough power to merely drive the dragster's supercharger. With 3000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ignition. Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lockup at full throttle.
* At the stoichio metric 1.7:1 air/fuel mixture for nitro methane the flame front temperature measures 7050 degrees F.
Nitro methane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from atmospheric water vapor by the searing exhaust gases. Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. Which is typically the output of an electric arc welder in each cylinder.
Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during a pass. After 1/2 way thru the run, the engine is 'dieseling' from compression and the glow of the exhaust valves at 1400 degrees F. The engine can only be shut down by cutting the fuel flow. If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in the affected cylinders and then explodes with enough sufficient force to blow the cylinder heads off the block in pieces or split the block in half !!
Dragsters reach over 300 MPH +... before you have completed reading this sentence.
In order to exceed 300 MPH in 4.5 seconds, a dragster must accelerate an average of over 4 G's. In order to reach 200 MPH well before reaching half-track, at launch the acceleration approaches 8 G's.
Top Fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light!
Including the burnout, the engine must only survive 900 revolutions under load.
The redline is actually quite high at 9500 RPM.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Assuming all the equipment is paid for, the pit crew is working for free, & NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run will cost an estimated $1,000 per second.
0 to 100 MPH in .8 seconds (the first 60 feet of the run)
0 to 200 MPH in 2.2 seconds (the first 350 feet of the run)
6 g-forces at the starting line (nothing accelerates faster on land)
6 negative g-forces upon deployment of twin 'chutes at 300 MPH
An NHRA Top Fuel Dragster accelerates quicker than any other land vehicle on earth . .
quicker than a jet fighter plane . . . quicker than the space shuttle....or snapping your fingers !!
The current Top Fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.420 seconds for the quarter-mile (2004, Doug Kalitta).
The top speed record is 337.58 MPH as measured over the last 66' of the run (2005, Tony Schumacher).
Let's now put this all into perspective:
Imagine this ..... You are driving a new $140,000 Lingenfelter twin-turbo powered Corvette Z-06.
Over a mile up the road, a Top Fuel dragster is staged & ready to 'launch' down a quarter-mile s trip as you pass.
You have the advantage of a flying start. You run the 'Vette hard, on up through the gears and blast across the starting line & pass the dragster at an honest 200 MPH.... The 'tree' goes green for both of you at that exact moment.
The dragster departs & starts after you. You keep your foot buried hard to the floor, and suddenly you hear an incredibly brutally screaming whine that seares and pummels your eardrums & within a mere 3 seconds the dragster effortlessly catches & passes you. He beats you to the finish line, a quarter-mile away from where you just passed him. Think about it – from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you 200 MPH.....and it not only caught, but nearly blasted you off the planet when he passed you within a mere 1320 foot long race !!!!
That, my friends.....is acceleration.
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From the archives
Thanks to Interesting Facts...BUTTONS
Royal Air Force WWII uniforms included a pants button that served as a compass.
Tiny, hidden survival tools packed into the waistband of your pants may sound like something fantastical from a spy movie, but in the case of British wartime pilots, they were a reality. During World War II, the Royal Air Force sent its aviators skyward with all the tools they'd need to complete a mission, along with a few that could help them find their way home if they crash-landed behind enemy lines. One of the smallest pieces of survival gear pilots carried was a compass built into the button of their trousers.
Three months after entering World War II, the British military launched its MI9 division, a secret intelligence department tasked with helping service members evade enemy forces or escape capture. Between 1939 and 1945, masterminds at MI9 created a variety of intelligence-gathering and survival tools for troops, such as uniform-camouflaging dye shaped like candy almonds, ultra-compressed medications packed inside pens, and button compasses. The discreet navigational tools were typically made from two buttons, the bottom featuring a tiny needle. When balanced on the spike, the top button acted as a compass that rotated with the Earth's poles; two dots painted on the metal with luminous paint represented north, and one indicated south.
MI9 distributed more than 2.3 million of its button compasses during the war. They could be paired with secretive maps that were smuggled to captured service members inside care packages delivered to prisoner-of-war camps. Often printed on silk for durability and waterproofing, the 44 different maps (sent to different camps based on location) were tucked discreetly into boot heels and board games. The ingenuity worked — by the war's end, MI9 was credited with helping more than 35,000 Allied soldiers escape and make their way home.
Some American colonists were banned from wearing fancy buttons.
Buttons can be an innocuous way to add panache to a piece of clothing … unless you were a colonist living in Massachusetts during the 17th century, that is. Choosing the wrong type of buttons for your garment during that time could have landed you in court and required paying a fine. Puritans in Massachusetts during the 1600s were ruled by a series of sumptuary laws, aka legal codes that restricted how people dressed and interacted with society based on moral or religious grounds. Massachusetts passed its first sumptuary law in 1634, prohibiting long hair and "new fashions" (aka overly swanky clothes), and five years later even banned short-sleeved garments. By 1652, the colony further restricted lower-wage earners from wearing "extravagant" accessories such as silks, fine laces, and gold or silver buttons, unless they had an estate valued at more than 200 British pounds — more than $38,000 in today's dollars. However, the law did include some loopholes: Magistrates, public officers, and militia members (and their families) were free to choose buttons and other adornments without fear of penalty, as were the formerly wealthy and those who had advanced education.
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Thanks to Interesting Facts
Time moves faster at higher altitudes.
Time seems like a simple enough concept — 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and so on. That is, except for a little something called "gravitational time dilation." First explored in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, the idea is almost confusingly simple — the farther away you are from a massive object (e.g., a planet), the faster time travels. The more massive the object, the slower time travels, which is why things get very wonky around supermassive black holes like the one at the center of our galaxy.
These differences in how time flows are minuscule on Earth, so they don't really affect us — the top floor of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, does not operate with a special time-dilated clock. Yet technically, even our heads experience time just a bit differently than our feet. In 2010, the U.S. National Standards and Technology (NIST) even performed an experiment using optical atomic clocks that could measure a change in time dilation within less than 1 meter.
Although imperceptible to our minds, precision technologies such as GPS need to factor in time dilation in order to work at all. So the next time you use Google Maps, consider giving a shout-out to Einstein and his mind-bending theory of the universe
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Thanks to DR and Rich
Wendy Bell is the host of "Common Sense" a weekly 30 minute program on Newsmax, airing Saturday afternoons and repeating Sundays.
Below is my conversion of her signoff commentary. I found it so concise and relevant that I listened to it multiple times. Unable to obtain a digital copy of it I created my own so share with others.
**
If it wasn't for Trump you'd still be in the dark about the "deep state".
You wouldn't know how RINO's in Congress have been voting and about the "uniparty".
If it wasn't for Trump you'd still be trusting the "news" despite their 89% negative coverage of him.
You'd be blind about the "beltway blackmail bribery" scam.
If it wasn't for Trump you wouldn't know about "groomer educators".
Or the corrupt FBI and activist Secret Service.
Or the deceitful world of "dark medicine".
You'd have no clue about the Biden crime family syndicate. And selling access and secrets to China, Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
If it wasn't for Trump you'd still be listening to that little twerp Fauci. You wouldn't be questioning every piece of medical advice.
You wouldn't appreciate the need for a wall, or know other countries never paid their fair share. For anything.
You'd be in the dark about the beagle-killing NIH.
You'd probably still think the U.N. was a "humanitarian" agency.
And that revolving door between social media companies and the F.B.I. was just some urban legend.
You might not know about Bill Gates' weather seeding or George Soros' dark money influencing.
And you'd probably be on your 9th booster, for heaven's sake.
You wouldn't pay attention to train derailments, chicken farm fires, and you'd probably think Lahaina was just a tragic accident.
And you wouldn't have a clue about "lawfare".
You wouldn't know about organ harvesting, the child sex trade or "minor attracted people" because "pedophiles" sounds so dirty after all.
You wouldn't know what world peace felt like or historically low unemployment.
You wouldn't know Fani was sleeping with Nathan or that they changed the statute of limitations in the E. Jean Carroll trial and that Juan Merchan's daughter was making millions of dollars off her father's court case.
If it wasn't for Trump there would be no November 3rd that started it all, or January 6th, and then July 13th.
In fact you'd never know that the people who hate him, hate him so much they'd try to kill him.
So knowing what you know now that you didn't know before, do you think any of us should be telling Donald Trump how to run his race?
After all, this show is about "Common Sense". So what we should be doing is helping him win.
Wendy Bell; Common Sense; on Newsmax.
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From the archives
Thanks to Carl I think. Maybe some information is better left unsaid
http://www.anh-usa.org/what-if-beer-companies-told-the-truth/
August 27, 2013
What if Beer Companies Told the Truth? Would some of their labels say, "Brewed with pure Rocky Mountain spring water, GMO corn syrup, and fish bladder"?
If you like to kick back now and then with a cold one, you may not have given much thought to what's in the bottle or can. Perhaps you were reassured by ads with wholesome images of sparkling mountain streams and barley rippling in the breeze, or by slogans like "Budweiser: The Genuine Article."
The reality is far less appetizing. The list of legal additives to beer includes:
MSG
Propylene glycol (it helps stabilize a beer's head of foam, though in high quantities it can cause health problems)
High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
Calcium disodium EDTA
Caramel coloring
FD&C blue 1, red 40, and yellow 5
Insect-based dyes
Glyceryl monostearate
Isinglass (see below)
You're unlikely to see any of these industrial-sounding ingredients on a label, because listing ingredients in beer is voluntary. And when ingredients are listed, it may be a partial list—which is even more deceptive than having no list at all.
Several beers, for example, contain HFCS, most of which is genetically modified (GMO), and isinglass, a clarifying agent made from the swim bladder of fish. But check most beer websites and they'll tell you their "key ingredients" are "roasted, malted barley, hops, yeast, and water." Perhaps the HFCS and isinglass were not "key" enough to merit inclusion on this list?
Some brands with less-than-wholesome ingredients:
Newcastle uses artificial caramel color to simulate the golden brown color that is supposed to come from toasted barley. "Caramel color" sounds innocuous, right? But it's manufactured by heating ammonia and sulfites under high pressure, which may create carcinogenic compounds.
Miller Light, Coors, Corona, Fosters, Pabst, and Red Stripe use corn syrup, and Molson-Coors acknowledged that some of their corn is GMO.
Budweiser, Bud Light, Bush Light, and Michelob Ultra use dextrose (made from corn).
Anheuser-Bush uses corn.
The labeling regulations are confusing and capricious. Food is regulated by the FDA, and requires a Nutrition Facts panel, but alcohol is regulated by the US Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). Unless it's beer made with something other than malted barley, and then it's regulated by the FDA and must carry a Nutrition Facts panel. States also have their own regulations, which can supersede those of TTB, but not of the FDA.
Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, explained on her blog why we still don't know the ingredients in alcoholic beverages. In short, TTB has been procrastinating since 2007 on completing their rules for labeling of alcoholic beverages.
People with allergies to genetically modified corn are taking a chance when drinking beer, as there is no requirement that GMO ingredients be identified on the label. We told you early this year about the dangers of GMOs, and in 2011 about the dangers of sugar, especially fructose. So genetically modified fructose carries a one–two punch, and may be one of the more toxic foods that can be hiding in your food or drink—with nothing about it on the label.
Unfortunately for those with a sweet tooth, eschewing HFCS for plain old cane sugar may not be that much of an improvement. A recent study of mice fed a mixture of fructose and glucose showed that even moderate amounts of sugar shorten life span (females fed sugar died twice as fast) and hamper reproduction (males were less likely to hold territory and sired fewer offspring).
While it certainly has its health benefits, and studies suggest that people who drink a little live a bit longer, alcohol—even without unsavory additives—has more negatives than plusses. It introduces what is treated as a poison by your body and stresses the entire gastrointestinal system, from mouth to colon, making cancer possibly more likely, especially in the esophagus. It may increase the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, and cirrhosis of the liver.
Not ready to give up the occasional brewski? According to the Food Babe, Sierra Nevada, Heineken, and Amstel Light are good choices, as they use only non-GMO grains and no artificial ingredients, stabilizers, or preservatives. German beers are subject to the "Reinheitsgebot" law mandating that beer be produced using only water, hops, yeast, malted barley, or wheat—you won't have to guess what's in them.
An obvious choice is certified organic beer, which cannot include GMOs and other harmful additives by law. And then there are the microbreweries. Many craft beer companies will give you a complete list of ingredients if you ask. Be warned, however: large beer companies are buying up microbreweries one by one, as Molson-Coors did with Blue Moon and Anheuser-Busch did with Goose Island Brewery.
The healthiest of all alcoholic beverages is not beer at all, but red wine. It naturally contains resveratrol, which appears to have anti-aging, cancer-preventing, cardio-protective, neuro-protective, and anti-diabetic effects. It's also an anti-inflammatory and an antiviral to boot. As we noted in a recent article, red wine can also help clear bad bugs from your stomach. Cheers!
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The first real climatologist and with no multi colored presentation just facts and research. skip
Interesting read
Milankovic Stamp
A 2023 commemorative stamp from Serbia's postal service showing Milutin Milanković alongside illustrations of some of his scientific work. Posta Srbije Milutin Milanković, a 35-year-old Serbian scientist, was honeymooning in his family's hometown village of Dalj when the world changed overnight. At the time, late June 1914, the town, today part of Croatia, was a Serbian enclave nestled in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That same week, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir-apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Austro-Hungary declared war on the kingdom of Serbia, and suddenly Milanković was caught in the middle of a global conflict.
Milanković was taken prisoner before he and his new wife could make it back to their home and work in Belgrade, Serbia. All he carried with him was his briefcase containing a few scientific papers and some of his notes.
For the first six months, he was held in the Nezsider internment camp under rough conditions. Eventually, though, through the efforts of his wife, Kristina, Milanković secured supervised release in Budapest. There, he was required to check in with the authorities once a week but was otherwise allowed to work among the vast library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Still, despite his improved circumstances, he longed for home and freedom, and sought refuge in his work.
A decade later, reflecting on his time in Budapest and imagining gazing upon the building where he was confined, Milanković wrote, "I was her prisoner of war, and in her my four-year longing for freedom would have drained my core, if I had not found refuge in scientific work. ... There, it is the window where I sat for days and, looking at the blue Danube and proud Buda, wrote my first scientific work."
The work he refers to is a book written in French, titled the Mathematical Theory of Heat Phenomena Produced by Solar Radiation. It contains the core calculations of what would become Milanković's life's work: solving the math behind how Earth's orbit slowly changes over time to influence the amount of sunlight received by climatically important locales. Today, his name remains on scientists' lips, as so-called Milanković cycles are widely accepted as the cause of the periodic ice ages of the past 2.5 million years. Geologists have even found evidence of their rhythmic impacts on the Earth system deeper back in time.
But in the earliest years of the 20th century, before the Austro-Hungarians captured him, Milanković wasn't known as a scientist. Rather, he made his living as a civil engineer. As a teenager in 1896, he moved to Vienna for school, completing a doctoral thesis on reinforced concrete construction in 1904. He found good-paying work for a prominent firm in Austria, designing large factories and military facilities.
young Milutin
Milanković as a student in Vienna, around 1900 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons He felt something was missing, though. "He knew that his main inclination was science," says Fedor Mesinger, a meteorologist at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
In 1909, the University of Belgrade reached out to Milanković and offered him a position teaching applied mathematics. He accepted the professorship in Belgrade despite "a much smaller salary," says Mesinger. In early October 1909, Milanković got to work brushing up on the latest discoveries in the fields he would be teaching, including theoretical physics and celestial mechanics. But he hadn't yet settled on what questions to pursue in his own research.
One story holds that, a few years later, around 1911, Milanković was drinking wine at a café with a poet. By then, Milanković was settled into teaching his courses and beginning to think about what scientific issues to pursue in his research. Meanwhile, the poet was feeling good, having just sold his first book. He proclaimed he would abstain from short poems, and instead write about his "entire society, our country, and our soul."
Milanković, swept up in the moment, replied, "I want to do more than you. I want to grasp the entire universe and spread light into its farthest corners." Milanković was "on the lookout for a cosmic problem."
He soon found a scientific problem worthy of his cosmic ambitions. In the early 20th century, the cause and timing of the ice ages was being hotly debated in European and American science. Geologic evidence had piled up that mysterious landforms were caused by vast ice sheets that had descended out of the Arctic onto more temperate continents, disproving the lingering idea that the deposits came from icebergs suspended in the biblical flood.
But many more questions remained. When did these ice sheets advance and retreat? How many times? Why did this keep happening?
Ideas abounded. Some thought that the Earth's surface moved up and down¬-when the altitude increased, it got cold enough for ice sheets to form. Others thought that changes in the strength of light emitted from the sun could be large enough to account for major climatic changes. Still more suggested space dust or giant volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa in 1883 could be responsible.
Meanwhile, a small group favored a theory that came from the halls of astronomy. In the 1860s and '70s, in a remarkable story, a janitor named James Croll got access to the libraries at the Andersonian College and Museum in Glasgow and discovered writings that showed how Earth's orbit changed over time. He thought that variations in Earth's distance from the sun might influence the relative coldness or warmth of winter and summer.
Croll's ideas failed to gain mainstream traction, in part because they were wrong in their specifics. Croll presumed that orbitally caused cold winters would allow vast ice sheets to build up on the continents to the point that they were large enough to last through a warm summer's melting. It turns out, however, that it's more important for the weather to stay cold in the summer so that accumulated snow was less susceptible to melting. Warmer winters are also important because they can lead to more moisture in the air and thus more snowfall to build up glaciers.
Milanković's key insight was combining this idea of the importance of mild seasons with three different variables in Earth's orbit. First, is the cycle of eccentricity-a measure of how circular the Earth's large loop around the sun is. When the orbit is less circular, like right now, the Earth spends part of the year far away from the sun and the other part closer. When that happens, the Northern Hemisphere summer season is about 4.5 days longer than winter. When the orbit is more circular, that seasonal length difference disappears. This cycle of eccentricity repeats every 100,000 years or so.
The second variable Milanković defined is obliquity, a term that describes the angle of Earth's rotational axis relative to a flat orbital plane. When the axis is more tilted, polar regions experience colder winters and warmer summers. A more vertical axis lessens the seasonal extremities, and, as Milanković proposed, those warmer winters and cooler summers help encourage the growth of ice sheets. The axis makes a full cycle of tilting and straightening about every 40,000 years.
Finally, cycles of precession are the third variable. Precession is a wobble in the direction of Earth's rotational axis, kind of like a toy top spinning in wide circles as it slows down. This wobble enhances seasonal extremities in one hemisphere while weakening them in the other. When the Earth's axis wobbles so that Northern Hemisphere seasons are milder, that helps ice sheets grow. The cycles vary on a time scale of about 23,000 years.
Together, the cycles of eccentricity, obliquity and precession interact to change the total amount of incoming sunlight at different latitudes. When the variables align in just the right way, this can cause a global ice age or cause even the largest glaciers to melt.
So, while confined to Budapest during World War I, Milanković took the mathematics of these cycles and calculated the amount of solar radiation each latitude on Earth would receive at that moment. He was able to accurately predict the average temperature at locations across the globe, proving that the fundamentals of his method were sound. He then ran his calculations back 600,000 years in time, predicting multiple episodes of widespread glaciation that seemed to match the geological evidence available at the time.
But scientists of the day didn't readily accept his ideas, and despite becoming respected throughout Europe, his work wouldn't be proved true until well after his death in 1958. Meanwhile, climate scientists even treated him with some disdain.
"There was a geologist who, publicly, one year before Milanković died, said that the theory of Milanković was rubbish," says André Berger, a climatologist at the University of Louvain in Belgium.
Even as late as the 1960s, scientists dismissed his ideas out of hand.
Berger recalls learning about Milanković and his theory at a conference around that time. "Both meteorologists and geologists were highly criticizing a person that I did not know, whose name was Milutin Milanković.
They were finding that still he was totally stupid." Berger decided to look into Milanković's work for himself and defend him if possible. Since then, he has worked on refining and expanding on Milanković's ideas.
The negative reactions didn't bother Milanković during his lifetime, though.
He was rightly confident that his ideas would stand the test of time.
Writing in his memoir, he said "As many scientific discoveries, far greater than mine, had remained unrecognized for years, I knew that, if my work was to become a real contribution to science, it would find its way without any help, recommendation or praise."
By the 1970s, Milanković's work had truly found its way, but it did need some assistance. Berger's calculations refining Milanković's original work helped, and a groundbreaking paper in 1976 found evidence that the cycles Milanković calculated were influencing the composition of deep-sea sediments going back almost half a million years.
Now that scientists had proved Milanković's ideas had merit, geologists began to see his cycles everywhere. Milanković cycles are even visible in the stratigraphic layers of rocks found around the globe and have inspired a whole new field of science called cyclostratigraphy. For example, geologists have found that layers of rock deposited in far-flung places like New Jersey, Italy and Australia match up to the cycles described by Milanković-even in rocks that are billions of years old.
Before Milanković's theory won the contest of potential ice age causes, as early as the mid-19th century, scientists understood the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and posited that changes in the gas's concentration in the atmosphere could cause the ice age cycles. Technically, they were wrong about that at the time. Over the past million years or so, geologists have found that atmospheric carbon concentrations didn't vary enough to instigate the advance and retreat of ice sheets. Through that period, atmospheric carbon ranged from concentrations of about 150 to 300 parts per million.
Now, though, we're over 420 parts per million, and no longer within the range of conditions under which Milanković cycles have caused ice ages over the past two million years. "We're just way off the charts," says Linda Hinnov, a cyclostratigrapher at George Mason University. In fact, the last time carbon concentrations were as high as they are today was about three million years ago, during a geologic epoch called the Pliocene. "You know, here in Washington, D.C.," says Hinnov, "we were underwater in the Pliocene."
The planet's climatic conditions at such high carbon concentrations could render the world of cyclical ice ages that Milanković described impossible.
With so much CO2 in the atmosphere, even changes to how much sunlight hits the Earth won't be able to kindle an ice age. But while the future of the ice age cycles that Milanković sought to understand might be uncertain in a warming world, his legacy is secure-at least among scientists. His impact on climate science has been vast, and hundreds of researchers rely on the calculations he pioneered to learn about both the past and future of our planet.
2000 Dinars
The Serbian 2000 dinar note features portraits of Milanković and some of his most famous graphs of the ice ages. Fedor Mesinger Outside of scientific circles, Milanković is not widely known. In Serbia, his name is familiar, and he even appears on stamps and one of the most used pieces of Serbian currency. But, even in Belgrade, few non-scientists know the details of his contributions to our fundamental understanding of how our planet works.
Milanković continued to work on the mathematics of Earth's climate over the ensuing decades, and in the spring of 1939 was ready to write a canonical book detailing his findings. The Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts agreed to publish the work, titled the Canon of Insolation and the Ice-Age Problem, once Milanković finished writing it.
By 1941, the Canon was ready, and Milanković sent the text to the publisher.
On April 2 of that year, he walked across Belgrade to the printer to review the first copies. After flipping through the loose pages, he headed home with assurances that the book would be folded and bound, ready to distribute, without delay. But, later that week, German and Italian bombs began to fall on Belgrade, and by the end of the next week the city was under German occupation.
As it had been 27 years earlier, Milanković's life was upended by a global war. No longer could he spend long hours secluded in his university office or chatting with other scientists at a local meeting hall. Instead, he wrote in his memoir, "I dug a rubbish pit in the back garden, collected water in cans from a central tap 500 [meters] away and chopped wood to fuel the long-discarded kitchen stove for cooking. Our civilized existence had disintegrated into a life of hard grind."
It would be some months before he made his way back to the printer, which had been dug out of rubble flung by an explosive bomb, to find that all but a few pages of his Canon had survived. In the fall of 1941, the first copies were fully printed and bound-ready to be sent to scientists around the world, where they were eventually dusted off decades later by climatologists like Berger.
For his part, Milanković felt the publication of the Canon marked the end of his scientific career. "You know, once you catch the big fish you cannot be bothered with small ones," he told his son, Vasko. "For almost 30 years I worked on my theory of solar radiation, and now that it has been finished and printed I feel too old to start anything new. Theories of that magnitude do not grow on trees!"
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This Day in U S Military History
August 29
1778 – The Battle of Rhode Island, also known as the Battle of Quaker Hill and the Siege of Newport, took place. Continental Army and militia forces under the command of General John Sullivan were withdrawing to the northern part of Aquidneck Island after abandoning their siege of Newport, Rhode Island, when the British forces in Newport sortied, supported by recently arrived Royal Navy ships, and attacked the retreating Americans. The battle ended inconclusively, but the Continental forces afterward withdrew to the mainland, leaving Aquidneck Island in British hands. The battle took place in the aftermath of the first attempt at cooperation between French and American forces following France's entry into the war as an American ally. The operations against Newport were to have been made in conjunction with a French fleet and troops; these were frustrated in part by difficult relations between the commanders, and a storm that damaged both French and British fleets shortly before joint operations were to begin. The battle was also notable for the participation of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, a locally recruited segregated regiment of African Americans. It was the only major military action to include a racially segregated unit on the American side in the war.
1949 – The USSR successfully detonated its first atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. It was a copy of the Fat Man bomb and had a yield of 21 kilotons known as First Lightning or Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.
1952 – In the largest bombing raid of the Korean War, 1,403 planes of the Far East Air Force bombed Pyongyang, North Korea.
1958 – Air Force Academy opened in Colorado Springs, Colo.
1962 – A US U-2 flight saw SAM launch pads in Cuba.
1965 – Gemini 5, carrying astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles ("Pete") Conrad, splashed down in the Atlantic after eight days in space.
Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day
JONES, CLAUD ASHTON
Rank and organization: Commander, U.S. Navy. Born: 7 October 1885, Fire Creek, W.Va. Accredited to: West Virginia. (1 August 1932.) Citation: For extraordinary heroism in the line of his profession as a senior engineer officer on board the U.S.S. Memphis, at a time when the vessel was suffering total destruction from a hurricane while anchored off Santo Domingo City, 29 August 1916. Lt. Jones did everything possible to get the engines and boilers ready, and if the elements that burst upon the vessel had delayed for a few minutes, the engines would have saved the vessel. With boilers and steam pipes bursting about him in clouds of scalding steam, with thousands of tons of water coming down upon him and in almost complete darkness, Lt. Jones nobly remained at his post as long as the engines would turn over, exhibiting the most supreme unselfish heroism which inspired the officers and men who were with him. When the boilers exploded, Lt. Jones, accompanied by 2 of his shipmates, rushed into the fire rooms and drove the men there out, dragging some, carrying others to the engine room, where there was air to be breathed instead of steam. Lt. Jones' action on this occasion was above and beyond the call of duty.
*McVElGH, JOHN J.
Rank and organization: Sergeant, U .S. Army, Company H, 23d Infantry, 2d Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Brest, France, 29 August 1944. Entered service at: Philadelphia, Pa. Birth: Philadelphia, Pa. G.O. No.: 24, 6 April 1945. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty near Brest, France, on 29 August 1944. Shortly after dusk an enemy counterattack of platoon strength was launched against 1 platoon of Company G, 23d Infantry. Since the Company G platoon was not dug in and had just begun to assume defensive positions along a hedge, part of the line sagged momentarily under heavy fire from small arms and 2 flak guns, leaving a section of heavy machineguns holding a wide frontage without rifle protection. The enemy drive moved so swiftly that German riflemen were soon almost on top of 1 machinegun position. Sgt. McVeigh, heedless of a tremendous amount of small arms and flak fire directed toward him, stood up in full view of the enemy and directed the fire of his squad on the attacking Germans until his position was almost overrun. He then drew his trench knife. and single-handed charged several of the enemy. In a savage hand-to-hand struggle, Sgt. McVeigh killed 1 German with the knife, his only weapon, and was advancing on 3 more of the enemy when he was shot down and killed with small arms fire at pointblank range. Sgt. McVeigh's heroic act allowed the 2 remaining men in his squad to concentrate their machinegun fire on the attacking enemy and then turn their weapons on the 3 Germans in the road, killing all 3. Fire from this machinegun and the other gun of the section was almost entirely responsible for stopping this enemy assault, and allowed the rifle platoon to which it was attached time to reorganize, assume positions on and hold the high ground gained during the day.
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AMERICAN AEROSPACE EVENTS for August 29, FIRSTS, LASTS, AND SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS. THANKS TO HAROLD "PHIL" MYERS CHIEF HISTORIAN AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE AGENCY
29 August
1916: Congress voted a $3.5 million budget to buy naval aircraft and equipment. This act created a permanent Navy Flying Corps with 150 officers and 350 enlisted men for the Navy and Marine Corps. The Navy then ordered 60 planes, including 30 Curtiss floatplanes. (10)
1938: Maj Alexander de Seversky set an east-to-west transcontinental speed record of 10 hours 2 minutes 55.7 seconds in a 2,457-mile flight. (9) (24)
1952: The SM-62 Snark completed its first test at the Air Force Missile Test Center, Cape Canaveral. (12) KOREAN WAR/SORTIE RECORD. Far East Air Forces fighter-bombers set a new 24-hour record by sending 854 Fifth Air Force sorties against Pyongyang, N. Korea. At the request of the U.S. State Department, Far East Air Forces conducted the largest air attack to date as a show of force during a visit by China's premier, Chou En-lai, to the Soviet Union. The State Department hoped the attack would lead the Soviets to pressure the Chinese into accepting an armistice rather than expend further communist resources in the war. Far East Air Forces aircraft, protected by USAF F-86 Sabres and RAAF Meteors, flew nearly 1,400 air-to-ground sorties. This closely coordinated attack destroyed 56 buildings and damaged 33 others. (17) (28)
1954: Flying a Sikorsky XH-39, Army Warrant Officer Billy I. Webster set a helicopter speed record of 156.005 MPH over a 3-kilometer course at Windsor Locks, Conn. (24)
1968: President Johnson signed Executive Order 11424 to give flight pay and incentive pay for hazardous duty to military personnel flying spacecraft.
1969: TAC received its first production-model A-7D attack aircraft. A C-5A Galaxy completed its first inflight refueling successfully. (3) PEACE SPECTATOR PROGRAM. The USAF delivered the first six F-4D Phantoms to the South Korean Air Force at Taegu AB. (17)
1970: The Army's Safeguard anti-ballistic missile system completed its first full-scale test, when a Spartan area defense interceptor missile launched from Kwajalein Atoll intercepted a Minuteman I reentry vehicle launched from Vandenberg AFB. (6) The Douglas DC-10 tri-jet, ended its first flight at Edwards AFB, where it underwent FAA certification tests. (3)
1984: Rockwell International's chief test pilot, T. D. Benefield died when B-1A number two crashed near Boron, Calif. (12) The last OV-10 Broncos left USAFE's Sembach AB, Germany, after a decade of operations in Europe for George AFB. (16) (26)
1990: The combined Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics team unveiled its YF-22A Advanced Tactical Fighter in ceremonies at Lockheed Plant 10 in Palmdale. (20)
1998: The Global Hawk UAV reached 61,000 feet on an 8-hour mission over Edwards AFB and China Lake. The flight doubled the number of hours flown in its previous three tests and reached 10,000 feet higher. (3)
2003: At Edwards AFB, F/A-22 Raptors flew a four-ship formation, a first for the new fighter, to test the Intra-Flight Data Link. The new link allowed pilots to share flight data with other aircrews automatically without using radios. Three other F/A-22s were also in the air at the same time for their initial operational testing and evaluations, the first time seven Raptors were airborne simultaneously. (3)
2005: HURRICANE KATRINA. With 145 mph winds and torrential rains, Katrina came ashore near Buras, La., and then crossed the coast of Mississippi and Alabama to devastate low-lying coastal areas and obliterate the south's transportation, communication, and electricity networks. On 30 August, the protective levees around New Orleans gave way, allowing water from Lake Pontchartrain to flood the city and trap residents by the tens of thousands. From 30 August through the last mission on 10 October, AMC and its AFRC- and ANG-gained units flew 38 C-5, 69 C-17, 63 C-130, 5 C-141, 2 C-9, and 28 commercial relief missions in the region to move 5,191 short tons of cargo, 13,717 passengers, and 1,794 patients. Additionally, to help maintain law and order in New Orleans, AMC carried 82d Airborne Division troops at Fort Bragg, N. C., from nearby Pope AFB. Two C-130 flights and 13 commercial missions returned Fort Bragg's soldiers to Pope on 30 September and 1 October. (22) The AFFTC flew two sorties from Keesler AFB to test the WC-130J's modified propeller under severe weather conditions. Testers flew repeatedly into Hurricane Katrina as it approached New Orleans. Katrina virtually destroyed Keesler AFB shortly afterwards. (3)
2006: The 11th Intelligence Squadron's activation at Hurlburt Field, Fla., gave the Air Force Special Operations Command its first intelligence squadron. The squadron received the mission to process, exploit and disseminate to commanders information on terrorists and their operations gathered by the MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles and other airborne intelligence and surveillance sources. The 3rd Special Operations Squadron at Creech AFB, Nev., operated the medium-altitude, long-endurance, remotely piloted Predator. (AFNEWS, "New Intel Squadron Turns an Aerial Eye on Terrorists," 29 Aug 2006)
2007: 100th F-22 Delivered. Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne accepted this milestone aircraft (Tail No. 05-0100) for the 90th Fighter Squadron at Elmendorf AFB, Alaska, in a brief ceremony. (AFNEWS, "100th F-22 Delivered," 4 Sep 2007.)
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