Wandering Soul

And so are you! Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.Don’t believe me? Check Time magazine’s website. The annual honour for 2006 went to each and every one of us, as Time cited the shift from institutions to individuals - citizens of the new digital democracy, as the magazine put it. The winners this year were anyone using or creating content on the World Wide Web.

The Great Man theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

The magazine did cite 26 People Who Mattered, from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to Pope Benedict XVI to the troika of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And Richard Stengel, the managing editor, said if the magazine had decided to go with an individual, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would the likely choice.

It is not the first time the magazine went away from naming an actual person for its Person of the Year. In 1966, the 25-and-under generation was cited; in 1975, American women were named; and in 1982, the computer was chosen.

The 2006 Person of the Year package hits newsstands today. The cover shows a white keyboard with a mirror for a computer screen where buyers can see their reflection.

NASA is going to the same old moon, with a spaceship that looks similar to a 1960’s Apollo capsule, but the space agency said that it’s going to do something dramatically different this time: Stay there!!

Unveiling the agency’s bold plan for a return to the moon, NASA said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon’s poles, permanently staffing it by 2024, four years after astronauts land there. Why? Two reasons, according to NASA - prepare for future exploration, with Mars the next stop, and expansion of human civilization.

The destination will mostly be the moon’s south pole because it’s sunlit for three-quarters of the time. That offers a better location for solar power, plus the site has possible resources to mine nearby. To get to the moon, NASA will use two vehicles - the Orion exploration vehicle and an attached all-purpose lunar lander that could touch down anywhere and be the beginnings a base camp.NASA’s exploration chief Scott Horowitz says that the lander is like a pickup truck. You can put whatever you want in the back. You can take it to wherever you want. So you can deliver cargo, crew, do it robotically, do it with humans on board.

The estimated time frame for NASA’s lunar plans are:
2009 - a first test of one of the lunar spaceships.
2014 - the first manned test flight of the Orion crew exploration vehicle, but no moon landing.
2020 - the first flight of the four-astronaut crew to the moon.

For four years, the lunar base won’t be built up enough for long visits, so astronauts will only spend a week at a time. But after that, NASA envisions people living on the moon for six-month stints.

NASA also hopes that hydrogen, oxygen and other moon resources can be used as supplies for the lunar outpost. Eventually, getting oxygen there may be simple enough that it could be turned over to a commercial supplier. NASA’s vision for the moon is more than just American astronauts - it includes space travelers from other countries and even commercial interests, if possible.

Well well, the day isn’t far when we will get to see hoardings and neon signboards advertising the newest restaurant or the nearest oxygen supply depot on the moon. And imagine astronomers will look at the moon through a telescope and identify the Lunar Ritz. Nice!

In my wanderings through the Internet, I came upon some really interesting stuff on youtube.

There are some amazing video of aircrafts landing in cross winds. I had always heard and read that a cross-wind landing approach is a toughie. But I had never imagined it would be this bad! First of all, for the beginners, a cross-wind landing approach is where the wind is blowing perpendicular to the direction of the runway. If the plane holds it’s line to that of the runway, the wind will push it away, and it will crash-land in some nearby field. It’s sort of swimming across a flowing river. You end up going diagonally. If you had studied vectors and relative velocity in school, try to recollect the theory. Here’s a small illustration that will help you understand the concept.

In a cross-wind landing, the pilot has to fly the aircraft into the wind at an angle, so that it touches down on the runway. But just before touchdown, the pilot has to straighten the plane, else it will topple over and crash! Just look at the video, and you’ll understand what I am talking about.

Everything has a beat. A rhythm. A frequency at which it likes to shake. You can rock most objects off-beat for as long and hard as you like, and nothing much will happen. But start to push and pull in time with the natural frequency (the resonant frequency) of the object in question, and it will quite literally start to fall apart. Remember the fact that an army never marches across a bridge? It is because of the resonant frequency.

The resonant frequency plays an important role when dealing with bridges, skyscrapers or helicopters. Shake these at their resonant frequency, and the back-and-forth motion spells trouble. Each push adds more and more energy to the object, energy that, if not dissipated, starts to wreak havoc. That’s what happens with our Chinook. The rotating blades begin to shake the airframe at its resonant frequency, and physics takes care of the rest: Because the blades are unable to dissipate the excess energy, the convulsions rend them from the fuselage.

Helicopters are prone to resonant effects, which is why resonance ground testing (as seen in this video) is a standard part of chopper R&D. If both blades in a twin-rotor helicopter share the same heavy vibration and the engine mounts aren’t rock-solid, the energy generated can actually make the motors start moving around the engine mounts, and the next thing you know, the bird is cooked.

See this video of a CH47 Chinook getting pooped during a resonance ground test. The video is taken from behind the chopper.

The Pope’s address on September 12 in Regensburg has opened a Pandora’s Box. Muslims all over the world are furious over the remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI in the German city. The theme of Benedict’s address were faith and reason, Christianity and Europe, the emergence of Islam as Christianity’s significant ‘other’, topics which did not require him to attack Prophet Muhammad and his teachings.

But Benedict went on to quote the 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II:

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

And with this statement, Benedict undid 25 years worth of work that Pope John Paul II had done to build bridges with the Muslim community.

Before digging out things from the past, Benedict should have given a thought to the skeletons lying in his own closet. If he denounces Muhammad’s call to ‘spread by the sword the faith he preached’, then what about the Crusades, called the ‘Holy War’ by the Church.

In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a holy war against the Turks and Arabs, because they were in control of Jerusalem. He claimed that it was the duty of Christians to assemble armies under the sign of the cross and invade Palestine. To rouse European knighthood to war, the pope crafted rhetoric of racism. The Pope attacked them as infidels and demonized them on the basis of race.

Urban used religion as an incitement to genocide, while claiming to speak for God. The Pope promised that the sins of crusading soldiers would be wiped out ‘by the power of God vested in me.‘

The Christian army carried out unthinkable atrocities when Jerusalem finally fell to them. The crusaders slaughtered the city’s inhabitants: Muslims, Jews and Christians, men, women and children. The Franks’ own chroniclers admitted to killing 10,000, the mounted knights splattered in blood up to their hips. Their violence shocked the Muslims, who had peacefully allowed Christian pilgrims to visit Palestine for several centuries.

A second crusade was called when Muslim forces succeeded in retaking key ports and lands surrounding the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The call to war was spearheaded by the preaching of Bernard of Clairvaux, a prominent abbot who had been active in the Gregorian ‘reform’. This soon-to-be-sainted preacher continued Urban’s policy of promoting hatred of other cultures as a rationale for conquest:

The Christian glories in the death of the pagan, because Christ is therefore glorified.

Pagan to these men meant anyone but a European Christian, including Muslims and Jews as well as followers of old folk religions.

Well… with that kind of a legacy, Benedict would have been better off sticking to his theme without quoting some medieval emperor, who had been at his wit’s end trying to defend his empire from an invading Turkish army.