VDH for the win!!!
As a general rule, anytime Barack Obama lectures the country or its people on their purported sins—with Khalil Gibran pop platitudes—he is seeking absolution for his own obsessions by projecting his own guilty desires onto others. The latest? At the dedication of his narcissistic Obama Presidential Center in Chicago—a $850 million flak-tower, monolithic boondoggle mired in debt—Obama lectured us on the need to resist the allure off “money, attention, [and] fame.” Thus spoke the owner of four homes, three of them multimillion-dollar mansions, whose last inert year in office was spent closing book and Netflix deals that ensured he would become a multimillionaire the moment he left office, and on spec, jets private to sermonize to various audiences–often at $400,000 a shot—on their own false-consciousness shortcomings. Plain-speaking, frugal Harry Truman in obscure retirement in Independence, Missouri Obama certainly is not.
He says it much better than I can, and didn’t even use any four letter words!!! HERE
Personally, I think Harry and Beth Truman were MUCH better examples of the presidency and first lady, but that’s just me…
And in other news, the US beat Australia 2-0 yesterday in the FIFA soccer match in Seattle, much to the dismay of the left…
But the US supporters that were there were very obvious, loud, and enjoying themselves! Now the US is guaranteed a place in the knockout round, still with a long way to go, but small steps get big results sometimes!
And the Qatari 747 is now officially in the Presidential air fleet, pending final checks and flights. It also has a ‘new’ paint scheme…
The new Air Force VC-25B Bridge jet “has officially arrived at the Presidential Airlift Group and will commence its initial commissioning flights, marking the successful delivery of a secure, modified executive platform,” the Air Force announced Friday afternoon.
Full article, HERE from TWZ.
And this one is just too funny…
The research team, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Institute’s (NOAA’s) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) was on a Voyage to the South Pacific in 1997. They were listening through hydrophones for sounds that would indicate underwater volcano activity.
All of a sudden, the scientists heard what they described as a “Bloop.” It was a sound not only heard in the South Pacific over hydrophones. It was picked up by other underwater listening stations as far as 3,000 miles away.
A “Bloop?” Really? It was most unusual. And scientists, being scientists, crave the unusual and can’t resist trying to solve a mystery.
As unscientific as that seems, the researchers on the ship and dozens of other scientists around the globe spent a significant portion of their careers trying to solve the mystery.
“It’s unusual when a sound is recorded on all of the sensors we have deployed,” said NOAA Acoustics Program manager Robert Dziak. “If it’s a ship, or a whale, when it makes a sound in the ocean, it isn’t big enough to be recorded all the way across the Pacific. But this sound was recorded on so many hydrophones, so it stood out in our mind as being something unique.”
Full article, HERE from PJ Media.
What always struck me as ‘strange’ was they had all these disparate arrivals over a wide area (yes, the Pacific is BIG), and nobody ever thought about using a ‘magic asshole’ to back plot arrival times and signal strengths… I remember us talking about it, as that was a technique we used in the Navy for ‘distant’ sounds to get rough location data.
When you know the speed of sound in sea water 1540 m/s and you can calculate the effects of Temperature (Increases/decreases by about (4.5 m/s per degree), Salinity (Increases/decreases by about 1.3 m/s per Salinity Unit, nominally assumed to be 35 ppt), and Pressure (expressed as depth) (Increases by about 1.7 m/s per 3 feet of depth based on a nominal surface pressure of 10.3 dbar).
Soooo, you know the depth of your hydrophone, you know the water temp (where you are), and salinity is pretty much the same everywhere other than the arctic/antarctic. You know what time ‘you’ recorded the noise and the strength. You find the arrival times/signal strength at the other locations, and back compute…
Sigh…
VDH is a parallel for Thomas Sowell. Pragmatic Observation and Critical Thinking are becoming more difficult to find in the information sphere, but not impossible. Rush was obviously at the top of the totem pole. Walter E. Williams and Neal Boortz were close to him in the overall perspective.
For the USN, locating, identifying, and assessing the threat-potential of things in relation to their own assets would always be a “big thing”. Maybe not for NOAA because of different mission parameters?
1. Did the NOAA have the same equipment and capabilities as the USN when it came to underwater back-plotting and triangulation?
2. Were their people well practiced in it?
3. Was it part of their SOP?
Since the PJ Media article is behind a paywall, what was the big bloop?
{{ “It wasn’t until 2005 that they were finally able to confirm the source as an ice quake,” reports Popular Mechanics.
…
Broad spectrum sounds eerily similar to the Bloop include calving, the actual cracking of ice, and iceberg harmonic tremors, which are generated when icebergs scrape against the seafloor or each other.
Whichever iceberg was responsible for the BLOOP heard around the world, or at least the Pacific, was never identified. }}
Archived copy at archive.is:
https://archive.is/kez9u
I’m with BillB on questioning what’s behind the paywall.
VDH is a national treasure. I’m also a subscriber to VDH’s “Blade of Perseus” blog. His thrice weekly podcast is a must-listen for me.
The use of hydrophones takes me back to a project I worked on when I was in VX-1. The SMILS project used echo-location to pinpoint the splashdown location of the Poseidon and Trident reentry bodies using moored hydrophones. The process was accurate to a few feet.
NOAA says math be hard.
I probably should not try to defend NOAA or scientists.
The PJ media is mostly quoting the Popular Mechanics article, and the Popular Mechanics article was spinning it in a more sensational way.
They did do the backprojection/localization. But, they could apparently get research funding from deliberately trying to listen for more, and collected a bunch of similar but quieter sounds from the same area. They just took a very long time to make up their mind that it was ice bergs, and not the other alternatives.
Yes, if you stick with one set of assumptions, you might get one best solution to that problem. (I think it is maybe an inverse wave scattering problem?) The issue that likely developed is that it admits more than one set of assumptions, so you can argue with other people over which set is best, and which solution is correct.
If you have a group of people arguing with each other for score, then their ‘within this area’ as a group can maybe be much wider than any one individual’s solution.
Grog- Agreed!
Ag- Nope, not a ‘funded’ program…
Bill/Ag- Iceberg calving…
Flugelman- LOL, oh yeah, I can name that tune, lots of ‘dets’ to Midway.
Gerry- Oh yeah, especially when not funded.
Bob- What/how they did it is still up for question. It was obvious that data was not shared!
The PM article mentions that a volcano program was one of the places they heard it, and that means seismologists. Going from accelerometers to reversing the wave propagation to triangulate where the energy was released is something those do. It is not all that seismologists do, and I do not know how reliably seismologists can do it, but the literature does say that seismologists can do it.
The difference between sound wave triangulation in fluid and what seismologists do is that the seismologists also consider the shear waves. Shear waves do not propagate in fluids.
The geophysical inversion books seem to imply that not only can you use the same equations and algorithms for pressure waves, and pressure waves plus shear, but also electrical and electromagnetic waves. But, these cookbooks have a lot of recipes, and I do not understand even a single recipe or the whole.
My feeling is that geophysics and seismology definitely are places with a toolkit for this problem. (I suspect I had the instrument that seismologists use wrong. I have accelerometers on the brain because of another subject I read things about that uses them a ton. )
Anyway, there maybe should still be some geophysics people in your neck of the woods. I do understand that some of the remaining oilfield services companies are leaving OKC due to corporate taxes. (Which might have been the teacher’s unions fucking Oklahoma, such as back in 2018.)
Truman was never in the FDR inner circle and had a tainted background. He rose to the occasion, both at FDRs death and later on. The country was fortunate he was there. In a similar vein I would place Gerald Ford as a man who raised to the occasion.
From the pictures I’ve seen, I always felt it was a dystopian movie set prop. Not a museum that has a “come see me” vibe.
Everything Obama ‘did’ was theater by a crazy person.
If he has cheated the construction people? They fucked up, they trusted Obama.
If the actual construction was mishandled by Obama’s people? Well, we will see how the structure lasts.
Basically, if it turns out to be tofu dregs it goes from being a speaking testimony of the Obama administration to poetic perfection. The best evidence for this, it actually happening, is not yet timely.