Trash Talk, 30 x40″, oil on canvas.
(Click to enlarge)
A nostalgia piece, inspired by a time when littering, not global warming or mass shootings, was a matter of concern. That such a time existed is, of course, imaginary.
For puzzlers: A media logo, perhaps the most beautiful, is hidden in the painting.
Larry, you can call me any time.
(CNN) Officials and lawmakers push for more government transparency on UFOs.
All three witnesses provided testimony of unprecedented credibility. Their participation in a quasi-judicial process demands respect. It demands regard of David Grush as an honest broker of facts, until proven otherwise.
Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” The testimony does not by itself reach that standard. In the case of David Grush, it contradicts my understanding. I wonder if participants in relevant SAPs have themselves been deceived by excessive classification, robbing them of understanding their own activities. The U.S. has been collecting adversary aircraft since 1942, in the same time frame as claims about alien spacecraft.
Similarly, one could pick apart the gimbal camera in the F-18 targeting pod, or the alleged sloppiness in analyzing recovered materials. But for the first time, these issues do not subjectively diminish human testimony to the point of disregard. For the first time, we are faced by the inescapable question: What if it is all true?
The media tend to mix up the relevance of areas of knowledge. UFOs are not a question for aerospace engineering, which relies on Newton’s laws of motion — classical mechanics. Only in a few esoteric areas does aerospace touch on modern physics:
For practically everything else, aerospace relies on fields with mostly classical master equations:
This means that if you gave flying saucer parts to Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, or Northrup-Grumman, their engineers wouldn’t know what to do with them. It is a problem of modern physics. They could hire outside physicists, but there is a catch.
Contract physicists work with existing theories. No valid existing theory offers a hint at how a flying saucer might work. There have been many attempts; the floor is littered with broken theories that that fail to predict what is already experimentally verified.
You have to be smart to be any kind of physicist. The hierarchy of achievement is a cruel reminder to those blessed with extreme intellects, of the rarity of extreme achievement. Ignoring the hundreds of years of patient mathematical advance that enabled, there is a hierarchy:
In this cruel-to-the-ego list, building the Bomb counts for little. These days, it’s considered an undergraduate subject.
So Boeing can’t just hire the brains to crack the UFO problem. Their custody of crashed UFOs is pointless. Nevertheless, propelled by that which cannot be dismissed, the next article will speculate on:
and why we are unlikely to find the answer on our own terms.
To be continued shortly.
(CNN) Large pieces of the doomed Titan submersible arrive in Canada.
See Titan Sub Implosion: The Knowledge Stockton Rush Ignored; Snap-Buckling Failure Mode.
The design was defective in many ways, all of which could cause implosion. One feature can be identified as most probable, where the titanium end bells joined the carbon fiber tube.
The deep sea is cold. Under temperature change, from surface to depth and back to surface, the two materials contracted and then expanded at different rates — with differing coefficients of expansion. When, at the factory, the end bells were attached with epoxy cement, all the parts were at factory ambient temperature. At any other temperature, there was stress between the parts.
One might expect that the end bell side of the joint was a flange, with a smaller diameter extending into the carbon fiber tube. Sometimes this is done to achieve a thermal shrink fit, so that the joint is always under compression, which makes it stronger. This was not done. The end bell began with a flat adapter ring that was simply glued to the end of the tube.
It is possible to join materials with different coefficients of expansion, by use of a slightly elastic gasket, a flange, and constant compression of the joint with tension bands. This was evidently too much bother for Stockton Rush. Even if this were done, it is likely the Titan would have eventually been claimed by snap buckling.
Which brings us back to safety culture: