Shut Up!

Ali at Free Iraqi is one of the Middle Eastern bloggers I read every day. His post of a couple days ago, about the trial of Saddam Hussein, got the ponder going. Ali ends the post with this:

These two were very polite with the judge all the time (Barzan was even begging for mercy on one session) but as soon as they saw a simple Iraqi citizen with no power (or so they think) they regained that arrogant look and assumed the faces of the rulers again! How coward and how stupid at the same time! But it was more than great (and surprisingly shocking) to hear the words of that simple man from Dujail saying to Barzan, “Shut up!”.

Ali — the “Free Iraqi", blogger — finds it “surprisingly shocking” to hear an ordinary citizen tell Saddam Hussein to shup up. The more I think about that statement, the more sympathy I feel for Ali and the other “ordinary” Iraqi citizens. What a remarkable transition for them these past few years have been…

Near the beginning of his post, Ali says this:

There I saw an average Iraqi, who has no power or wealth, a man whom Saddam used to sign the execution order of hundreds like him without even knowing the name of one of them, standing boldly and exposing this monster’s horrible crimes. He was not afraid and returned Saddam’s words with stronger ones. I must admit that I saw this man as a hero and I think many Iraqis share a similar view with that of mine, as these people terrorized us for such a long time that even hearing their names used to paralyze us with fear.

"…even hearing their names used to paralyze us with fear.” I think that’s very difficult for most of us non-Iraqis to really internalize, as our comfortable and relatively safe lives have never included such a threat from our own country. Last night, this passage had me lying awake thinking for a while, just trying to get into Ali’s skin a bit. What must it have been like during Hussein’s thugocratic rule? In the end, all I could do is shudder in horror.

Yell it, Ali: “Shut up, Saddam!” Right up until one of your fellow citizens has the honor of ending that evil man’s life, and shuts him up forever…

Oh, My!

Via TigerHawk (click for a larger view).

Imagine it’s 1941, and Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry are in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese make their sneak attack. The picture at right shows what might have happened…

There’s a little tiny graphic on the picture that credits it to SacredCowBurgers.com. Now with a name like that, I thought I might be in for a treat — and I was (but check it out yourself!). The site appears to be the solo work of Jay D. Dyson, who not only makes visual parodies (many of them are excellent), but also offers some commentary with each one. On the one pictured here, he says:

Each year that I do a parody on the anniversary of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, I usually find it difficult to avoid repeating the previous year’s theme.

This year, that was decidedly not the case.

After suffering through countless episodes of the patently anti-American antics of today’s Democrats, this parody came effortlessly. And what’s more, the core truth of this satire simply cannot be denied. There can be no doubt that the conduct featured here is precisely what the Democrats would do if we had another Pearl Harbor!

Just take a long, hard look at current events: our nation is scarcely four years past the 9/11 attacks, we are currently involved in a war to assure the longevity of a fledgling democracy where terror once reigned, and what are the leaders of the Democrats doing? Why, pulling all kinds of ridiculously anti-American, anti-troop and anti-victory stunts whenever they get a microphone or camera put in front of them!

And the truly nutty part? These jerkoffs think they should be in charge of our great nation! They actually believe they’re entitled to call the shots! *brrr!* Creepy!

I am so looking forward to 2006 when Americans can stand up for our great nation and throw these lousy bums out on their ear.

Amen to that, brother.

Blog Patterns

I’m a little bemused by yet another unlikely looking pattern in the visitors to my blog: 80% of today’s visitors found me by searching Google for images of Ann Coulter. Now mind you, Ann is a very attractive woman — so I’m not surprised people are looking for pictures of her. Especially since she was splashed all over for an incident where a bunch of liberal college students heckled her so intensely that she had to give up on her speech (and if you know anything about Ann Coulter, then you know she’s not easy to back down!). What really surprises me is this: the picture at right, and a copy of the Time cover Ann was on, are the only two photos of Ann on my blog — and the one at right is the 25th hit on Google Images. And yet this is 80% of my visitors!

This must be a message in here somewhere. I’d like to think it was the power of Ann’s rhetoric, and the justice of her (conservative) cause, that made so many people want to search for her picture. But I suspect it’s just what you suspect: a bunch of guys mooning (or something) after a beautiful woman. So the message for me is … stop blogging about the nonsense I usually blog about, and just put up pictures of beautiful women.

Sigh.

Update: Something I meant to mention above (but forgot!) is that until today, the front-runner just about every day for the past two months has been Google Images searches for “rabbit”. I’m not joking! Try it yourself and see what happens!

Midway

A few days ago, a friend (Rick Pugh) asked if I’d be interested in visiting the Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum on Pearl Harbor Day. Absolutely! was my answer, and we were actually able to pull this off. We started by having a very nice breakfast at a place with an unlikely name: “Hash House a go go”. I can’t account for the name (no “go go” in evidence), but the food was very good; memorable, in fact. I am planning to go back there with my lovely bride one of these fine days…

Anyway, after fortification we set off downtown to the Navy Pier, where the old USS Midway is now permanently docked. Parking was easy; plenty of room on the pier itself (though it’s cash-only, and I had to bum some bucks from Rick). We were on board in just a few minutes, with a minimum of fuss, and there were no crowds. Bad for their business, but good for us!
We first took a tour of the island, on the advice of the first (of many!) helpful and knowledgable docents we ran into. He told us it was likely to get crowded and hurried as the day went on, so we took his advice and went on the first island tour of the day. The large photograph at right is a panoramic view (made from three individual photos) from the “air boss” position high in the island. The island is on the starboard (right) side of the ship, and you’re looking aft (toward the rear) through about amidships (directly across). From left to right, the aircraft visible include a COD (nose and port wing), the nose of an S-3 Viking, (almost hidden behind the awning) an F-14 Tomcat, an F/A-18 Hornet(in the background, in desert colors), an F-4 Phantom, an A-6 (foreground), an RA-5 Vigilante (background), and an H-3 SeaKing. And there were even more aircraft on the flight deck forward of these, and a few more on the hangar deck! The smaller picture at right is Rick sitting in the Air Boss' chair, looking out over the flight deck…
The photo at right was taken from near the bow, looking aft on the flight deck. In it, left to right, you can see another F-4 Phantom, an E-2 Hawkeye (with it’s wings folded, and the radome “flying saucer” on top), and an A-7. To an old Navy electronics guy like myself, there are some interesting things on the mast over the island: an SPS-10 radar antenna, and an SPS-48 radar antenna. The SPS-10 is a truly ancient piece of gear, of World War II vintage — tubes and prehistoric servos. They were laughably old — and belonged in a museum — when I was in the Navy (in the '70s), but a docent told me that it was still in service when the Midway was decommissioned in 1992. The SPS-48 is a considerably more modern system, but still quite old. It was one of the first of the so-called “3D” radars to be deployed. By “3D", they mean that in addition to bearing and distance (what most radars do), it also detects the altitude of a target. It does this by using a fixed-array antenna that is scanned in elevation by changing the frequency of the transmission — a relatively simple, but easy and reliable, fixed-array antenna technique. Since the fixed-array scans only in elevation, the antenna still rotates to scan in azimuth.
At right, from left-to-right: the F/A-18 Hornet, Rick looking at the big radial piston engines on the COD, an F-4 Phantom procedures trainer, and an A-4 Skyhawk on the hangar deck. This was the first time I’d seen an F/A-18 up close and personal; I was struck by how much more advanced the construction was compared with any of the other aircraft on board. Virtually every piece of its fuselage and wings are compound curves; everything is very smooth, with a nearly complete absence of the usual angular protuberances. Very impressive, even just to the casual eyeball. In my Navy career I made quite a few trips to-and-from carriers at sea; most frequently the USS Enterprise, and almost always by helicopter. But once — just once — I flew in the back seat of an F-4, catapult-launched from the Big E (and landing at Cubi Point, Subic Bay, Phillipines). That was a serious kick in the pants, especially after the pilot learned I was interested in aerobatics, and we did a few things that I suspect weren’t in the original flight plan. And twice I landed on the Big E in a COD. Now the COD is a small, rugged plane with a relatively low landing speed — so a carrier landing in a COD is a very far cry from a carrier landing in, say, an F-4. But I’m here to tell you that it was plenty exciting for me. The most memorable part, for me, was the initial approach to the carrier — it looked like such a tiny speck, lost in the vast ocean, and landing on that speck just didn’t seem very likely. Or very wise. Naturally, the pilots made it seem like a cakewalk…
Last, but certainly not least (for me, anyway!) — at right is Rick standing next to a system that I am very familiar with: a Univac CP-642B computer. This particular computer is part of a complete Ship’s Inertial Navigation System (SINS). I trained on this system, and in fact even helped debug some software on it, way back in the early '70s. This was the first inertial navigation system deployed on US ships, and for its day was quite a remarkable system. An inertial navigation system is one that figures out where it is by very precisely measuring every movement it has made since leaving another precisely known place. By integrating all those movements over time, it can calculate exactly where it is at any moment. In practice, inertial navigation systems were built back then by combining a “stable platform” and three accelerometers. The stable platform is a system of three or four gyroscopes, mounted on different axes, and it always points in the same direction (it’s mounted on a gimballed platform to allow this), no matter how the ship twists and turns. The accelerometers measure every teensy little acceleration (speeding up or slowing down) in the three different directions (usually thought of as left/right, forward/backward, and up/down). With a little math and that information, you can figure out where you are — and that’s exactly what SINS does.
For me, though, the most interesting part is the CP-642B. You see, that was the first computer I ever worked on; the first one that I ever understood. By today’s standards, it is almost humorously incapable: 30 bit word length, a blazing 100KHz clock speed, and 32 kilowords of excruciatingly slow (and tempermental) magnetic core memory. But this is what I cut my digital teeth on, and so I have a sort of sentimental attachment to the beast. I haven’t seen one of these things for close to 30 years, so I was quite surprised to discover that within moments of walking up to the thing, I could remember all kinds of details about how it works, and how to operate it. I do believe I could still key in a program, run it, single-step it, and so on. For any geeks out there: that control panel with all the lights is something you just can’t have these days. There’s a light for every bit in every register in the computer, and you can press that light to toggle the state of that bit. A momentary paddle switch allows you to stop the computer’s execution at any point, and then you can see the complete internal state of the computer at that moment. Very primitive — but it’s amazing what we managed to get done with this machine…