Turn the lights out when you leave.

So now that jet engines made things go fast, it became increasingly obvious that shit would happen correspondingly faster too. Meaning that if trouble did strike, there was a lot less time to save your butt.

Enter the ejection seat. The first ones were arguably conceived by Germany in the years between the wars when they were spending a lot of energy not arming themselves to the teeth. I say this because there is debate the the Brits had a few ideas of there own too about the same time.

No doubt as aircraft performance increased, the possibility of simply climbing out of the stupid thing, walking to the edge of the wing and jumping off with your parachute, decreased.

The early plan was a lot like a Wyle E. Coyote episode. That is to say the ejection from the aircraft was accomplished by a really big spring. Nice. Of course, the pilot opened the canopy first. Otherwise he had a headache.

The Germans actually did work out the concepts before the UK. In fact they had a few workable ideas in the early 30's. They thought of the spring under the seat method and and external style spring powered device that was like a small crane above the pilot that yanked the pilot free from above and tossed him kind of like a trebuchet. I'm thinking I might want to walk off the end of the wing.

The British version of the spring thing did not eject the seat, only the pilot. Christ. In reality, they never got farther than the drawing board and didn't look at the idea till after the Second World War when they had a chance to look at captured German aircraft.

Cooler, and smarter heads prevailed and by the start of the war they had moved on to compressed air and explosive charge systems.

The butler did it.

News today that the asteroid impact 65 million years ago do not immediately snuff out the dinosaurs. The Daily Mail is reporting that researchers from Princeton University have come up with evidence that suggests the Chicxulub crater in Mexico is about 300, 00 years older than the time lines generally agreed to be gospel about when the dinosaurs winked out. This is the spot the asteroid actually hit.

The resulting explosive gases and dust shrouded the earth and the rest well, is real ancient history. But, not so according to research head Professor Gerta Keller. Seems those nasty Indian volcanoes went off about the same time. I'm talking about a coincidal series of huge eruptions at an area in India called the Deccan TrapInstead she found that bore holes showed clearly a very slow gradual layer of sediment, taking round about 300,000 years to develop, just above the time of the impact. In fact the layers are about as natural and ordinary as can be. So there.

I thought it was the booze all along that killed them off.

The old folks will still have their Buicks.

For those of you who have spent the day nailed to a board in the basement may not have heard that GM is killing the Pontiac and keeping the Buick. Those of you who haven't been in a cone of silence will note with some sadness the passing of a sometimes cool automaker. I mean cars like the GTO, Firebird and the Bonneville, all classy.

Started in 1926, Pontiac didn't set anything on fire until the addition of designer John Zachary DeLorean (yes, the Back to the Future car guy) in 1959. Delorean was responsible for a number of innovative ideas including the "ropeshaft" drive shaft introduced in the 1960 Pontiac Tempest. The base engine for this car, a spunky 4 cylinder, was literally half of the current Pontiac 389 cubic inch V8. Tests proved that half the V8 ran just fine so tooling costs were cut since half the parts were already in production.

I for one will miss the Pontiac, but am slightly pleased that Buicks are still easy to spot on the highway.

Where the hell have I been post.

Well, I have been thinking about history while I've been off the radar. The job took me away for 3 odd parts of weeks and then I got lazy. I did eat more breakfast cereal the last little while. Our new family favourite is Lucky Charms. Oddly enough they have just about the exact same nutritional values as a very highly advertised "heart friendly" brand, but taste like candy. The wonders of chemistry.

I am getting back to looking at what is good to read and watch, starting with the offerings to the left. The first one will make you want to build your own. The second one is a good fun. Learn a few for your next management meeting.

There will be a new one with every new post, so don't get caught snoozing.

logical

Quick little reminder to all of you who may have slept for the last 40 years and missed anything to do with the science fiction thing. Leonard Nimoy was born this day in 1931.

Son of a barber he first started to get into film and TV around the end of the 50's. Bit parts in series and cheapo movies and the odd Twilight Zone was where he cut his teeth. Of note (I guess): Zombies of the Stratosphere was an installment in a movie serial that featured Nimoy as a martian. The stuff isn't very good. I mean really. The main character is some guy named Commander Cody. From there it goes downhill.

Oddly enough he appeared with William Shatner in 1964. They were in an episode of The Man from Uncle.

That's gotta hurt.

Starting up a new department tonight. In poking around the news and archives I see so much amazingly messed up stuff that it's too good to pass up. I'm not talking about the typical shock Internet crap a la Jackass stuff. I'm talking "it really happened." And if it has some stupid historical connection, I'm there.

So, today's 1st gem is from Japan. Though these events occurred just a few months ago, it does connect with a short couple of posts I did about submarines colliding.

The Japan Times reported that on January 12th of this year a surfacing submarine collided with a Japanese fishing vessel. This tiny little story is telling in that the fishing vessel had aboard at this time a Maritime Self Defence Force officer charged with preventing submarine / fishing boat collisions. He was on the lookout for a sub when it happened.

And from the other side of the globe now, news of another sub/boat crack up. The Straight of Hormuz is the spot, the date, last Friday night. An American submarine, the USS Hartford and a surface vessel, the USS New Orleans, ran into each other around 1am.

Seems the collision was a vertical one, that is to say, the Hartford was under the New Orleans. No details if someone official was posted on the New Orleans to spot for submarines.

Oh weely?

So history has a way of having a laugh every now and again. Case in point: British engineer Frank Whittle was the first to patent a real turbo jet engine. The year was 1932. He managed to build a functioning prototype by 1937. Though strapped to a test bed, it ran just fine. British military were not that interested.

On the other side of the channel, Hans von Ohain, a German engineer, had been tinkering with his own turbo jet. And the laugh is they never knew of each others work. The difference was German industrialist Ernst Heinkel saw a demonstration of the lab model and was hooked.

Heinkel had acces to the tools, machinery and expertise to build lots of stuff. He teamed Ohain with master machinist Max Hahn. Together they created a fully functioning stand alone engine. Heinkel was ready with an airframe and on August 27, 1939 (less than 2 years from workshop bench to production) test pilot Erich Warsitz successfully flew the He 178. This was the world's first turbo jet airplane to take to the skies. Erich Warsitz (know as titanium gut, cast iron constitution guy) was also the first guy to fly a rocket powered plane, the He 176, only a few months before. Hope he had a pension. Military testing was undertaken in quiet remote areas to maintain "secrecy and reasonable safety". Nice to know they care.