NAVWORLD QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER AUTUMNAL EQUINOX 2003 ISSUE
09-23-2003 10:37 UT
INSTITUTE OF NAVIGATION ION.ORG
ION GPS/GNSS 2003
September 9-12, 2003 - Portland, Oregon
GPS WORLD www.gpsworld.com
As a subscriber to GPS World I regularly scan its pages for new innovative applications of GPS products. In the August 2003 issue I found a unique product that melds acoustic sensors with GPS to home in on gunfire sources. The handheld device carried by a cop receives location information from an array of compact receiving stations mounted on light posts - 20 units are required per square mile. The acoustic sensors can distinguish gunshot sounds from other sounds and can even recognize the caliber of the weapon. The product was developed by Synchros Technologies.
MINIATURE GPS
http://www.delorme.com/earthmate/moreinfo.asp
Actual dimensions:
1 7/8" Wide x 2 3/32" Long x 13/16" Deep
MOTEL 6
Dial up Motel 6 and find your destination to the closest 365/100,000 of a foot as seen at San Diego Downtown site:
Latitude: 32.7213990069
Longitude: -117.1629669075
This is a resolution to ten decimal points that yields to 3600 arc sec divided by 10 billion or 0.00003648 feet. Clearly a case where the resolution exceeds the precision by six or seven magnitudes for even a GPS receiver derived location.
AIRPLANE ROUNDTRIP IN THE WIND PUZZLE
http://physics.about.com/cs/puzzles/a/100703.htmPASSINGS
CHARLES S. BRIDGE August 27, 1925 – July 14, 2003
Charles Bridge was born in Camden, New Jersey. He served in the Army in WWII as a scout in the infantry. He graduated Lafayette College in 1950. Most of his working career was spent at Litton Ind. From which he retired after more than 30 years in 1990. He received and honorary doctorate degree from Lafayette College. He rose to the position of Corporate Vice President and Chief Scientist.
He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Helen his children Michael, Nancy and Alan, his grandchildren Sheldon, Brandon, Jeremy, Jennifer, Andrew and Hannah. Compass island.
Charles Bridge was the recipient of the Institute of Navigation Norman P. Hays Award given for encouraging, inspiring and support in management in the advancing of navigation. He was the recipient of an honorary doctorate’s degree from Lafayette College. He previously worked for Kodak optical navigation systems and developed devices for celestial applications. He then joined North American Autonetics and headed an analytical group in inertial navigation. He developed the concept of using doppler aiding of inertial gyro compassing. He headed the Compass Island inertial navigation testing and evaluation group at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He joined Litton Industries in 1959 and inaugurated the advanced systems group. He headed the development of stellar inertial navigation systems and started the Litton Aero Products Division which pioneered the introduction of inertial navigation systems for commercial aviation and the airlines. He retired after more than 30 years in 1990 as Corporate Vice President and Chief Scientist.
GERALD HAWKINS,75; ASTRONOMER KNOWN FOR STONEHENGE THEORY
Gerald Stanley Hawkins, 75, an astronomer who theorized that Stonehenge represented a Stone Age astronomical computer, died of a heart attack May 26 on his farm in Rappahannock County, Va. Hawkins had asked that there be no memorial service or obituaries, long delaying widespread knowledge of his death.
Born in Great Yarmouth, England, and educated at the universities of London and Manchester, Hawkins came to the U.S. in 1954 to work at Harvard College Observatory and Boston University.
He was also associated with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Massachusetts.
Hawkins first outlined his thoughts on Stonehenge in a 1963 article for the British scientific journal Nature. The formation of stone monoliths, he said, could have been used to compute the timing of eclipses.
With John B. White, he wrote the popular book Stonehenge Decoded in 1965, using modern computers to demonstrate that Stonehenge was in reality a sophisticated observatory. This book was the basis of the ponderable "Age of Maturity" in the book Portney’s Ponderables.
Among his other books were Beyond Stonehenge in 1973, Splendor in the Sky, Meteors, Comets, Meteorites, The Life of a Star and Mindsteps to the Cosmos.
'The Bounty': He Was No Charles Laughton
September 14, 2003
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
The events that took place aboard the Bounty at sunrise on
April 28, 1789, boil down to the characters of two men,
William Bligh, age 34, and the mutineer, Fletcher
Christian, who was a decade younger. As he waited, hands
bound behind him, to be lowered into the Bounty's
overloaded launch -- and having shouted himself hoarse
calling for aid -- Bligh asked Christian, who had sailed
with him twice before, how he could have found the
ingratitude to mutiny. Bligh recorded Christian's answer in
his journal. ''That! -- Captain Bligh,'' said Christian,
sounding much like Milton's Satan, ''that is the thing -- I
am in hell -- I am in hell.''
Whereas it's safe to say that Bligh was not in hell. Not
during the voyage to Tahiti to collect breadfruit trees, or
during the mutiny or aboard the 23-foot launch in which he
and 18 members of his crew made an astonishing 48-day,
3,600-mile journey. Bligh was not in hell even while
awaiting transport home in Batavia, Java, now Jakarta, a
pestilence-ridden city that actually was hell, according to
contemporary accounts. Bligh sailed with a sublime
self-confidence he had learned in part from Capt. James
Cook, whose final expedition he had joined as sailing
master. Bligh was a brilliant navigator and, like Cook,
devoted to the physical health of his men at a time when
scurvy still regularly felled ships' crews. He had the
satisfaction of knowing his duty and doing it.
Particular Bligh certainly was, even pettily so. He had
quarreled with Christian the day before the mutiny over the
theft of some coconuts [note the parallel of Herman Wouk’s Captain Queeg in
the Caine Mutiny in the theft of his strawberries]. Lacking a company of
marines --
which Cook had always sailed with -- Bligh often had
trouble enforcing his authority, in part because he tried
to extend it to the very minutiae of shipboard life. But
Bligh was no sadistic disciplinarian, no monster of the
lash, not by Royal Navy standards. He lacked the inner
Laughton we imagine him having. ''On the Bounty,'' Caroline
Alexander writes in her stirring book about the mutiny,
''William Bligh had punished his crew with 229 lashes in
the course of a voyage of 17 months to the South Pacific.''
In contrast, one of the captains who presided at the
courts-martial of some of the Bounty mutineers ordered 278
lashes in just three and a half weeks aboard his ship, the
Brunswick. This is the kind of detail that makes one
rethink the satisfying tale that the mutiny on the Bounty
has become in popular culture. Alexander's vigorous
retelling in ''The Bounty'' leads to lots of vigorous
rethinking.
To begin with, that old nugget of a tale, as most of us
think we know it, is just that, a nugget, a concise
dramatic turn aboard a ship overloaded with breadfruit
after a long stay in Tahiti and bound for the West Indies.
The popular versions of the story are usually
over-motivated -- either a tyrannical Bligh, a la Laughton,
or a maddeningly effete Christian, a la Brando -- because
the actual mutiny seems, if anything, under-motivated. Had
Christian appeared at the courts-martial held in Portsmouth
harbor in 1792, he might have explained what hell it was
that drove him to his actions. It would be worth knowing.
The testimony of the mutineers who were court-martialed
makes them, and Christian, seem terribly thin-skinned for
late-18th-century sailors. Bligh may have been guilty of
little more than being inconsiderate of their feelings.
But in 1792, of course, Christian was on Pitcairn Island,
20 degrees of longitude east of Tahiti, with a handful of
mutineers and the women they had kidnapped from that island
paradise. We have no direct evidence whether Pitcairn, too,
was a version of hell for that willful master's mate, but
the fact that Christian and all but one of his fellow
mutineers on Pitcairn were murdered a few years later ''by
their 'Otaheite servants,' who had risen against them''
suggests that it probably was. ''Which way I fly is hell,''
Satan said; ''myself am hell.'' Christian -- a somehow
fitting name in the circumstances -- would probably have
concurred.
It seems ironic now that Bligh, who survived to tell his
tale after a stunning piece of open-boat navigation, should
appear less palatable in subsequent retellings of the
mutiny than Christian, who stole the Bounty, burned it
against the cliffs of Pitcairn Island and vanished into
silence, after having, as one mutineer put it, ''brought on
himself the hatred and detestation of his companions.'' But
there is nothing ironic about it. For Alexander's real
story in ''The Bounty'' is not the mutiny itself -- though
that is skillfully told. Her story is the Royal Navy's
effort to bring the mutineers who did not escape to
Pitcairn to justice, a proceeding complicated by the
political, legal and social influence exerted to defend
Christian's reputation in absentia and that of one of his
well-born colleagues in mutiny. This was Peter Heywood, who
was among those whom Christian left behind on Tahiti after
the mutineers had eagerly returned there after seizing the
Bounty. He surrendered to Capt. Edward Edwards aboard the
Pandora in 1791.
How Heywood evaded punishment (some less well-connected
mutineers were executed), and how Bligh became the
undeserving villain of a tale that should have made him a
hero, is a story of enormous complexity, one with
ramifications that seem to spin off in every direction,
into the bowels and high offices of the Royal Navy, into
the faded lineage of the English and Manx gentry, into the
associations of the Christian family with some of the major
Romantic writers. Alexander is more than equal to the task.
With this and her previous book, ''The Endurance,'' she has
made the wondrous genre of open-boat-voyage narratives
still more wondrous. Even a simple ship like the Bounty --
a cutter of 220 tons, only 85 feet long -- seems in her
pages to distill the society that manned it and provisioned
it. And though Bligh, not Christian or Heywood, embodied
the august authority of the Royal Navy in the waters of the
South Pacific, Heywood's legal and extralegal defense
during his court-martial made it clear that there are rules
behind the rules, rules of kinship, fraternization and
interest that Bligh himself could not wield to his own
benefit. Through this maze Alexander leads us with
unflagging zeal.
In the early years of the 19th century, a rumor spread that
Christian had been sighted in England. It was reported as
certain knowledge by the poet Robert Southey in 1809.
Christian was said by others to have worked as a smuggler
on the Scottish border. These rumors, of course, make
slightly better endings -- more soothing to the feelings of
the Christian family, at least -- than the news that he was
shot in an uprising while working in a field on Pitcairn
Island. The ending the family feared most would, in fact,
have been for Christian to tell his story before a
court-martial, where the insubstantiality of his motives
would have been weighed against the grievous substance of
his crime. As for Bligh, he retired as a highly respected
rear admiral, but not before failing as governor of New
South Wales.
In ''The Bounty,'' Alexander doesn't set out overtly to
reach a verdict on the mutiny itself. Absent the testimony
of Christian -- who seems to have been part Adam, part
Shelley, part Satan -- any such verdict is hopelessly
incomplete. (And in Christian's case, a diagnosis would
probably be preferable to a verdict.) The temptation to
reduce the mutiny to a battle of symbols -- the solipsistic
brooding of romanticism versus the dutiful log-keeping and
chart-making of 18th-century rationalism -- is ultimately
not very satisfying, and Alexander does not indulge
herself. She prefers, as will her readers, the ambiguity of
the plain facts. But she does come to judgment, and it only
heightens the mystery of what was really going through
Christian's mind as he took over the watch aboard the
Bounty for the last time in the hours just before dawn that
April day.
''What caused the mutiny on the Bounty?'' Alexander asks.
''The seductions of Tahiti, Bligh's harsh tongue --
perhaps. But more compellingly, a night of drinking and a
proud man's pride, a low moment on one gray dawn, a
momentary and fatal slip in a gentleman's code of
discipline -- and then the rush of consequences to be lived
out for a lifetime.'' This sounds almost like Conrad
writing, and indeed it would have taken a Conrad to gives
us a psychologically satisfactory Christian or Bligh. A sea
mist hangs over this age-old tale. Alexander dispels it, to
the reader's fascination. But when all the facts are told
and the fates of the cast are duly chronicled, the sea mist
settles in again, as impenetrable and yet more interesting
than it has ever been.
Verlyn Klinkenborg writes editorials for The Times. He is
the author, most recently, of ''The Rural Life.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/books/review/14KLINKET.html?ex=1064467016&ei=1&en=2e7c86067e6fa132
Phil Rowe's Stories from the Old Navigator
Visit oldnavigator.org
REAL NAVIGATORS DON’T NEED GPS
Woods’ Hole Sea Education Association
Visit
http://www.sea.edu/SEA2000/NewsUpdates2000/JBJournal.htm and entry Monday December 22, 2002SUBMARINE NAVIGATION UNDER THE NORTH POLE
Robert Stewart of Litton Systems, Inc. Guidance & Control Systems Division, a Northrop Grumman Subsidiary, Woodland Hills, California was the inertial navigation engineer for North American Autonetics division on the first submarine crossing of the North Pole. He gave a paper in 2002 to the AIAA on his unique experience. The abstract reads: Inertial Navigation Systems have played a critical role in the exploration of the Arctic Ocean by nuclear submarine. The USS Nautilus in its historic crossings of the North Pole in 1958 used the earliest of these systems, Autonetics’ N6A Autonavigator. The N6A was also used aboard the USS Skate and USS Sargo in subsequent exploration cruises of the Arctic Ocean. This paper provided a brief description of the N6A Inertial Navigation System and its critical role in the Arctic exploration cruise of the USS Sargo in 1960.
REQUIEM FOR THE HUMAN FLIGHT NAVIGATOR
http://www.tactankers.com/mar02_4.pdf
COMPLEXITIES OF SPACE CRAFT NAVIGATION
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/bobMase.html
1421 THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED AMERICA BY GAVIN MENZIES
Read all the reviews on 1421 at Amazon.com. You will find some legitimate concerns about Gavin Menzies' thesis. I questioned Menzies on how the Chinese could have achieved the mapping precision over such vast areas with lunar eclipses alone as there are a mere few per year. He countered by citing the availability of solar eclipses (which adds a few more) and the transits of Jupiter’s moons which he threw out a figure of 1,000 per year. The problem is that the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter were discovered by Galileo with the use of a telescope in 1610. Then ephemerides of the transits of the moons had to be prepared which occurred in the next century. This is just one of many perplexing claims in Menzies's thesis.
From:Menzies To: navsense@earthlink.net Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 6:55 AM Subject: Determining longitude without clocks
Dear Joe,
Thank for your e-mail of 18 June. The Chinese had 3 methods of accurately determining longitude without clocks.
I - Total lunar eclipse - which occurred once on the 1421 - 23 voyages (details in Synopses of Evidence)
ii - Partial lunar eclipse - twice (Synopses of Evidence)
iii - Eclipses of Jupiter's Moons - about 1000 times a year. [clearly unfounded]
The Chinese discovered this latter method 2000 years before Galileo. It required observation platforms ashore.
There are accurate Chinese maps of China showing current longitude - please refer to my Synopsis of Evidence on the website.
Best wishes,
Gavin Menzies
Editor’s advice:
The reader is cautioned to refer to "Longitude at Sea" at
http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Things/longitude.html.Here you will find the difficulty of determining longitude even in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Other opinions on Menzies thesis:
Is Gavin Menzies Right or Wrong?
http://hnn.us/articles/1308.htmlMore Doubts on Menzies:
http://www.kenspy.com/Menzies/review2.html
Lack of Evidence
http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/arb/article.php?article=201
Chinese Not Sure "It Discovered America"
http://www.uctp.org/China.html
B-52 STEALS SHOW
By Kim Murphy
Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
Published August 22, 2003
ZHUKOVSKY, Russia -- For a few moments a patch of sky darkened Wednesday over
this Moscow suburb, and the screeching black profile Russians spent years
learning to hate--the U.S. B-52 Stratofortress or, to those of an earlier era,
simply the plane that would deliver "The Bomb" when it came--touched
down at a Russian military airfield.
Inside the cockpit, where a U.S. Air Force crew had spent more than 13 hours
flying from Minot, N.D., the approach had been dramatic: a joint countdown of
the last few miles before entering Russian airspace, an improbable flight over
downtown Moscow, touchdown at an airfield they had seen only on their war game
simulator flights.
On the tarmac, crowds of Russians maneuvered around the plane that has been the
Darth Vader of the American strategic arsenal for 50 years and entreated
passers-by to photograph them standing in front of it.
Images of the demise of the Cold War have been so numerous they are now
unremarkable. Except, perhaps, for this day at the Moscow Air Show, when the
B-52 joined U.S. F-15s and F-16s for the first official demonstrations of
American military air power on Russian soil.
Throughout the week, U.S. pilots [were] offering up to a million spectators
demonstrations of their flying machines, alongside similar air spectacles flown
by their Russian counterparts, the Black Knights and the Swifts, and aerial
performance groups from France and Italy.
The fighter jets took a back seat Wednesday to the venerable B-52, one of which,
as late as the 1968, was in the air 24 hours a day laden with nuclear bombs. As
late as 1991, fleets of B-52s maintained ground alert postures at U.S. Strategic
Air Command bases, loaded and parked at the edges of runways, ready for instant
deployment in combat with, as actor Slim Pickens memorably called them in his
role as a B-52 commander in the 1964 movie, "Dr.
Strangelove"--"the Russkies."
Now, here was the flat black profile of the 1961-vintage bomber, since used
heavily with conventional weapons in Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq,
parked on a Russian runway, only a few hundred feet from the workhorse of the
Russian bombing fleet, the Tu-95 Bear, and its more modern counterpart, the
Tu-160.
"It has extreme symbolic significance for us, after all the years of Cold
War confrontation. This is the plane they scared us with for all those
decades," said Magomed Tolboyev, an ex-cosmonaut and test pilot who is
president of the air show.
"This was the plane that could have brought nuclear weapons to Russia, and
now it's quietly sitting here like in a zoo. An alligator with no teeth,"
he said.
The eight-member U.S. air crew was jubilant. "To be told, `You have
permission to enter Russian airspace'--I never thought I'd hear that in my
lifetime," said Lt. Col. Rob Bussian, the B-52 squadron commander from
Minot Air Force Base who piloted the plane. "And then, to fly over downtown
Moscow?"
Lt. Col. Bill Panande, radar navigator on the flight, said the crew flew over
Canada, refueled over the North Sea, then crossed the Baltic Sea and Latvia.
"After that, we were counting it down out loud: 10 miles to go. Five miles.
Three miles. OK guys, we're in Russia," Panande said.
Shortly after touchdown, after the pilots had filled out Russian Customs forms,
Tolboyev climbed into the pilot's seat and got a rundown on the controls from
Bussian.
"CRTs, flap handle displays, new avionics," the American pilot said,
fingering each. "Also, low-light TV, and we used this for the first time in
Iraq, a laser targeting pod."
Tolboyev nodded knowingly. "Aerial refueling?" he asked.
"Yes, the doors are up here."
"I used to refuel fighters, and I never understood at the time how it was
possible to refuel such an aircraft," Tolboyev said. "But I feel like
I'm sitting in a normal Russian aircraft. No difference at all."
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism has hit the Russian air
force particularly hard, with shrinking budgets taking a toll on equipment and
training hours.
"The current military-technical revolution which is in full bloom in the
West is bypassing Russia," said Pavel Felgengauer, an independent military
analyst in Moscow. "Russia seems to be incapable of producing new high-tech
weapons and hardware anymore. Even at this air show, what they can demonstrate
was either produced or designed in Soviet times."
Copyright =A9 2003, Chicago Tribune
EUCLIDIA
In a distant galaxy the sages of the planet Euclidia have divided it into the maximum number of congruent areas with each side of each area an arc of a great circle smaller than a quadrant. How was this division accomplished. Either a regular dodecahedron
(
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Dodecahedron.html) or a regular icosahedron(http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Icosahedron.html) may be inscribed into the Euclidean sphere with perpendiculars dropped from the center to each face. Form sixty isosceles triangles with the foot of each perpendicular a vertex and the sides of the respective faces as bases centrally project these 60 triangles onto the surface of the sphere as isosceles spherical triangles.
-W.R. Ransom, A.M.M., 40 (February, 1933), 114
Afterword
Buckminster Fuller and an associate developed an icosahedron (Dymaxion Map http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/bucky.html) as the basis of a map of the Earth in the 60's. I have one that I folded together (fairly weather-beaten).
NAVIGATOR
Col. Len Sugerman, USAF (Ret.), former president of the Institute of Navigation was thoughtful to send me a copy of "The Navigator" a former publication of the Air Force Training Command. This issue was dated June 1974 and reflects the thoughts of the contributions of navigators of that era almost 30 years ago. The contents included: Navs of Note (profiles on two prominent navigators), Are You a Professional? (ethics and leadership revisited), Attack! (exploits of the F-105G Wild Weasel), Airborne Warning & Control Today & Tomorrow (EC-121D precursor of AWACS), When the Seargeant Says….Listen! (recovery of a crew of a downed AC-130E Gunship over the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos by a Jolly Green Giant), Bohds (Bailout Hatch Delivery System), "Dead Wood" Effect (eliminating "noise" in radar scope interpretation RSI), Preventive Cartography (use of the Tactical Pilotage Chart), A Different Kind of Cargo (managing drone launches from the DC-130), An Up-To-Date Look at LORAN C (200 feet accuracy), NAVWORDS (crossword puzzle) and SSNC Revisited (Senior Staff Navigator Course).
Editor’s note:
The article copied shows Sharp's new 3D laptop that creates a phase difference to `the received images by the eyes and processed by the brain (by an optical bending effect). On Page 105 in my book Portney’s Ponderables and the ponderable "3D with Half a Pair" under the link Navcerebrations at the site navworld.com, I illustrate the Pullfrich effect in "3D with Half a Pair" where the phase difference is achieved by introducing a filter in the LOS of one eye that results in the attenuation of the image and its delayed processing in the brain. My closest friend Herb Bernstein (deceased 2002) NCR inventor of Micro-image (1/40,000 optical area reduction) for data storage, optical scanner (used in price code scanning for example) and the basic patent for the laser printer consulted for my brother-in-law David Panich (deceased), writer for Laugh In and Real People when he invested in the Pulfrich effect for TV, movies etc. David invested $5K with the optical effects creator of the "House of Wax" in the mid 70's. Herb was employed to verify the physics of the effect and its efficacy for TV, film etc. This individual took the concept to Japan and marketed it there. Japan industry found applications for it and now you see its evolution in the Sharp technique.
From Associated Press
September 12, 2003
Users won't need special glasses to view the three-dimensional images that pop
up from Japanese electronics maker