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only a bit of me is from Portugal ... my left leg i think ... i have no problem using google to find stuff , but i didnt have to in this case .. I seen the films plenty of times , and other Robert Newton pirate films , there were a few others ,, ...(i ll google them later on to remind me ..) ....but the international talk like a pirate day I know cos it also my Dads birthday .. who's favourite drink was rum .. strangely enough ....and often me and my brother used to turn up at dads house with a bottle for his birthday .. and AAA HAAAr at the front door ...funny how things work out ...
Anyway the Portuguese had their fair share of seafaring folk and more than some ..and their own Pirates ... Like Bartolomeu and that ... and even had a Pirates code of conduct and fair play .... gotta learn that lot if you want to be a pirate .... (thats something else i have to google in a few minutes )
only a bit of me is from Portugal ... my left leg i think ... i have no problem using google to find stuff , but i didnt have to in this case .. I seen the films plenty of times , and other Robert Newton pirate films , there were a few others ,, ...(i ll google them later on to remind me ..) ....but the international talk like a pirate day I know cos it also my Dads birthday .. who's favourite drink was rum .. strangely enough ....and often me and my brother used to turn up at dads house with a bottle for his birthday .. and AAA HAAAr at the front door ...funny how things work out ...
Anyway the Portuguese had their fair share of seafaring folk and more than some ..and their own Pirates ... Like Bartolomeu and that ... and even had a Pirates code of conduct and fair play .... gotta learn that lot if you want to be a pirate .... (thats something else i have to google in a few minutes )
Yes, no need to be apologetic for the Portuguese, they were also passable pirates back in the day. Of course being part of the ECC and all that has put the kibosh on a lot of old nautical heritage. I also on occasion do my fair share of 'aahhaaahhhrring'. It got a bit passe (acute e) a few years ago but could be making a comeback again. Best to keep it on a steady boil - coz you never know when it may come in 'andy ...
There is a very good book just published in the United States entitled, "Conquerers: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire," by Roger Crowley. The development of the Nao and superior navigational skills led the Portuguese to go ever further down the African Coast, round the Cape, and find the route to India and the Far East.
The story of Vasco de Gamma, Afonso de Albuquerque, and the consolidation by the Portuguese of their holdings in the East--Goa, Malacca, Macao, and others, including monopolization of the spice trade, as well as their exploration of Africa--is told with narrative skill backed by solid research.
Most people think of the Spanish, French, British, and Dutch when they think of the great European empires. But it was the Portuguese who paved the way. Perhaps we should lift a copita of Jerez and salute the Portuguese this evening as we drink our sundowners. And let's have a postprandial glass of port later, in celebration of port, Portugal's great gift to the world.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Posts: 2697
Joined: Jun. 7 2010
From: The South Ireland
RE: What side are you on??? (in reply to BarkellWH)
correcto .....in Coimbra , Portugal ,, where my lot is from , there is a place you can visit called ...Portugal dos Pequenitos...which is like visiting every colony that Portugal had all over the world in Africa , India china , etc .. they have made all the famous buildings and typical houses of that country ,, but small..although still big enough to go inside ... and the are artifacts and stuff in each house ...its a big place as there were so many colonies ...
Anyway the big one was Fernão de Magalhães...Magellan , who went south and found a way around the bottom of, what is now, south america for a new route to get spices and that from ... and entered a new sea ..that was a 'peaceful' ocean
...and all them other ones you mentioned .. Vasco de Gammas name is all over Portugal .Vasco de Gamma bridge , Vasco de Gamma road , Vasco de Gamma shopping centre .. etc ....
and they all played the hurdy Gurdy ,veiguinha, like a stringed instrument with a handle that turned a wheel that kinda bowed the strings .. very distinctive sound it has ..
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In 1989, during a three-year assignment at the American Embassy in Santiago, Chile, my wife Marta and I traveled around southern Chile in the Patagonia region. We spent several days in Punta Arenas, on the Estrecho de Magallanes (Strait of Magellan). In Punta Arenas is a square with a large statue in the middle dedicated to Hernando de Magallanes (the Spanish name for Ferdinand Magellan). We stayed in a hotel about three blocks away named "Hotel Los Navigantes" after Magellan and his crew. Lots of memorials to the great Portuguese captain who was the first explorer and navigator to "round the Horn."
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: What side are you on??? (in reply to BarkellWH)
Which side of the Force am I on? I have been on both sides. A dirty little war in Central America. When I turned in my resignation, the Head of Station asked me, "Don't you think there are bad guys out there?" I answered, "There may be. But I can tell you this, we aren't the good guys in this country." Definitely the dark side.
Then I got involved in the Cold War. Dark side or the good side? Apparently it depends on your point of view. From my point of view, the right side.
I always envied my brother, who was the Head of the Flight Medicine Branch of the NASA Manned Space Flight Center. Not just space medicine, but the life support systems and backups, the medical telemetry that monitored the astronauts' vital signs, the Receiving Laboratory, where the astronauts were quarantined for 30 days after they came back from the moon.....definitely the good side of the force.
After the cold war, I was still in the space end of mighty weapons. Then more and more on the civil side of space. NASA missions to explore the boundary between the solar system and deep space, unmanned missions to the moon and Mars.
I was radar test director for Spacex's very first flights, launched from Kwajalein. It was a hoot working with them. They had the fire in their belly. They were out to accomplish something.
Last night they did something very important that no one had ever done before. Elon's big goal for Spacex is to make access to space cheaper. Returning a rocket's first stage safely to the ground so it can be refurbished and re-used is a major step down that road.
Shooting the breeze before a mission planning meeting for one of the projects I was involved in, someone asked me, "Richard, how many Glory Trip missions have you been on?" Before I could answer, someone else said, "This is GT-99, so the answer is 99."
Another time someone asked me, "Does it ever get routine, just another day at the office?"
"No," I answered, "your pulse rate always goes up, you breathe heavier at liftoff, and every major stage of the mission. It's the same for everyone on the team, and being a part of a team like that is one of the finest things you can ever do."
Tonight I watched the Spacex video for the Orbcom 2 launch last night, the first mission to return a major rocket stage in reusable condition. It's almost an hour, live, real time from Spacex Headquarters in Hawthorne, CA and from the launch site at Cape Canaveral. It had me literally stomping and cheering.
Seeing all those 20- and 30-something hard charging men and women carrying on what my brother and I spent our lives helping to advance, step by step, failure by failure, success by success, was like watching your grandchildren win a half dozen Olympic gold medals.
Even if you're not completely hooked after a few minutes' watching, it might give you the feel for what it's like to be part of a magnificent team, definitely on the right side of the Force.
After the first stage lands, there's some shouting, "USA! USA!". But I have sat and looked Elon and Hans Koenigman and those guys in the eye when they were just starting out, before they ever got a rocket off the ground, and they said, "This is not just for us, this is not just for the USA, it's for the human race. One day we will take the next step, not just us, but the whole spaceflight industry, we and the Russians and the Chinese and the Europeans, and anyone who wants to play, and we will go to Mars--that's the next step."
Today's explorers. And they can throw one hell of a toga party.
Today on BBC radio I podcasted a dreary documentary about satellites and how vital they are to life on the dirt. And how some countries which shall go unmentioned are potentially gunning for them as a way of creating an advantage in warfare. Knock down com satellites equals knock out enemies fighting capabilities. It seems like another world round of detente in orbit. If they knock ours we knock out theirs.
El Kiko, as long as we are singing the praises of Portugal's empire and discoveries, let us praise one of the greatest of Renaissance poets, the Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes. I first heard of Camoes when I was getting my Master's Degree, but it was not in academia that I first made his acquaintance. My wife Marta is Brazilian, and I met her in Arizona while attending graduate school. She was studying on a scholarship, and it was she who first introduced me to Camoes and his epic poem "Os Lusiadas" (The Lusiads). With that epic poem, Camoes put pen to paper and created the national epic of Portuguese exploration and discovery.
Portuguese authorities banished Camoes to the East for several years where he worked and wrote. One very famous incident was his surviving a shipwreck off the Mekong River Delta along the Cambodian coast. He swam to shore holding the manuscript of "Os Lusiadas" above water to save it. His Chinese lover, Dinamene, drowned in the shipwreck. I always found it interesting that Camoes was more concerned for his manuscript than for his lover. Priorities.
In 1977, Marta and I visited Macao when it was still under Portuguese rule. We carried a copy of "Os lusiadas" with us. One thing we noticed about Macao in comparison with Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, most of the British officials spoke English but could not speak Cantonese. In Macao, the Portuguese officials all spoke Cantonese. But then the Portuguese mixed with the local population much more easily than did the British. Brazil is the perfect example: one can see whites, blacks, and every shade of mulatto.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: What side are you on??? (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
Today on BBC radio I podcasted a dreary documentary about satellites and how vital they are to life on the dirt. And how some countries which shall go unmentioned are potentially gunning for them as a way of creating an advantage in warfare. Knock down com satellites equals knock out enemies fighting capabilities. It seems like another world round of detente in orbit. If they knock ours we knock out theirs.
Our military and naval forces are so dependent upon "C3I" (command, control, communications, and intelligence) interconnectedness (earth-bound, aerial, and space satellites) that some years ago we stopped using the term "battle-ground." The term of art now, and rightly so, is "battle-space."
Our satellites provide worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting, and, of course, surveillance. While they provide very precise information, they also are vulnerable, thereby putting our entire C3I in potential jeopardy. Of course, we have backup C3I systems, but we may become so dependent upon satellite systems that we could fumble when backup is required.
The Chinese, in particular, have been experimenting with destruction of satellites since 2007, when they destroyed one of their own weather satellites with a ground-based missile. Since then, there have been numerous reports of Chinese anti-satellite tests using kinetic weapons.
The Chinese have a program called "A2/AD" (Anti-Access/Area Denial) that they have been working on. It is being developed in case of a conflict between the U.S. and China, and its purpose would be to effectively deny the United States entry into waters enclosed by what the Chinese call "the first island chain" (running from Southern Japan, Okinawa, through Taiwan, Luzon in the Philippines, to the north coast of Borneo). In other words, to keep the U.S. way out offshore. No doubt, they are tying their tests to destroy satellites into their A2/AD development.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: What side are you on??? (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana
RNJ when did you work for Spaceex?
Today on BBC radio I podcasted a dreary documentary about satellites and how vital they are to life on the dirt. And how some countries which shall go unmentioned are potentially gunning for them as a way of creating an advantage in warfare. Knock down com satellites equals knock out enemies fighting capabilities. It seems like another world round of detente in orbit. If they knock ours we knock out theirs.
I didn't work for the company Spacex. As I recollect, Spacex planned to do their first launches at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California Central Coast. It would have been a good choice, being close to Spacex headquarters and main assembly facility at Hawthorne in the Los Angeles area. They kept getting their Vandenberg schedule pushed back by military launches getting more and more delayed. They approached the Army, saying, "How about Kwajalein?" The Army said yes.
Despite many serious logistical problems, they did their first launches (after one spectacular failure, a second hilarious one, and a "partial success") at Kwajalein where I worked as the radar boss. We tracked their rockets and used our comprehensive telemetry capbilities and tracking optical telescopes to gather info on how their flights went, and as a safety requirement.
Any time you launch a flying bomb like a rocket, you track it off the pad. If it flies off course in a way potentially to endanger people or important property, you blow it up. We had far better radars, telemetry and tracking telescopes than Vandenberg, but getting to Kwajalein was a pain in the butt for Spacex. For example, some Army genius had decided to shut down our liquid nitrogen/oxygen plant, and forgot to tell Spacex, so Spacex had to bring their own LOX from California, sloshing around in a big thermos bottle on a barge across half of the Pacific Ocean. About half of it would evaporate on the way. On the first try, the barge arrived with insufficient oxygen to fuel up the rocket.
We worked closely with Spacex on mission planning, mission execution and post-mission analysis. It was right at the beginning for Spacex, so their top guys were at Kwaj a fair amount. But every Spacex person I worked with was really smart, really well informed, and really motivated.
For example they gave us some crucial data that was demonstrably wrong. It happens in big engineering projects. I called up Hans Koenigsman, their head guy at Kwaj about 6:30 AM when I got to work. He put the guy who had calculated the data on the phone. For a NASA mission you might have waited a week or two while the question sank into the bureaucracy and the answer bubbled back up to the world. For an Air Force mission you might have waited a month or two, or forever. Not that the Air Force is generally inefficient. Their main line of work is killing people. If they want to kill you and they can see you or the building you are in, you might as well kiss your a$$ goodbye. But the Air Force isn't into developing big rockets any more like they were in the "60s and '70s. We had the corrected data from Spacex by 10 AM the same day. Someone helped Elon cherry pick the best young people in the rocket business to get started.
Elon himself is an impressive guy. He has that rare ability: if you can find the place to start with him, no matter how elementary that level might be, you can bring him pretty far up to speed very quickly. He may ask a lot of questions to get where he wants to go, but you don't have to repeat yourself. He has a degree in physics, and he did his homework.
As far as knocking down satellites, the Chinese were the first to do it that I know of. A year or so later the USA decided to perform a public service. One of our satellites had malfunctioned, and sat dead on orbit for a couple of years. Its orbit was decaying and it was about to reenter, with tanks full of frozen hydrazine. Hydrazine is very nasty stuff, but it would have burned up on reentry, and the products would have dispersed fairly harmlessly in the upper atmosphere.
But as a public service, which we made sure was in the news, we shot our satellite down just before it reentered. We didn't tell the reporters that it also happened to show we could shoot down any near-earth satellite we wanted to, nor did we point out that we made sure the Chinese were watching when we did it.
A lot of the major communication satellites are in geosynchronous orbits, much higher than satellites like GPS, GLONASS and the Orbcoms that Spacex put up the other night. You don't just fly directly up to geosynchronous orbit. First you get into near earth orbit at a few hundred kilometers altitude, then you boost yourself up to geosynchronous altitude, nearly 36,000 km.
If you were on the way up to shoot down your enemy's geosynchronous satellite, he could just shoot you down while you were in near-earth orbit, bingo, one shot just about straight up.
So what you would do is build yourself a space torpedo and park it next to your potential enemy's geosynchronous satellite. Then when the balloon went up, you would push the button and kaboom! no more enemy satellite. Or if you want to be nicer about it, you just build a robot that takes a few bites out of the bird you want to destroy. I was never involved in such an effort, and I don't know who may have gotten up to it, but it would surprise me to learn that nobody had.
I left out the part about Spacex trying to get on the launch schedule at Cape Canaveral when their initial launches were being delayed by military rockets sitting on the pad at Vandenberg.
The Cape let them know there was not a chance. The Cape was where the big dogs barked, and they thought that some Chihuahua named Spacex (Space Who?) run by some internet millionaire (not even a billionaire) should stay on the porch. Smaller companies like Orbital Sciences were enough trouble.
Spacex's first stage landed the other night on a modified launch pad at Cape Canaveral, where Orbcom 2 also launched from. Turned out Spacex wasn't a Chihuahua, it was a Rottweiler pup.
Every one of my old friends from Kwajalein who worked with Spacex in their infancy, stands up and cheers when they take another big step forward.
HOLY FREAKIN BUCK RODGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The future is here, that was awesome!
It definitely was awesome! You couldn't help but share the excitement of the people in the control room watching it.
Elon Musk and SpaceX, in my opinion, represent the very best in capitalism, private enterprise, and entrepreneurship. All the whining in the world about a man like Musk being in the "one percent" does not diminish his accomplishment one whit. The whiners could not come close to pulling together the brains, experience, and expertise to accomplish what he and SpaceX have accomplished. We need more, not fewer, geniuses like Musk forging ahead.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: What side are you on??? (in reply to BarkellWH)
Musk says the first stage of Orbcom 2 (landed successfully on December 21, 2015) is ready to go again. It costs $60-million to build the first stage, only $200K to examine and re-fuel it. Until now, the major cost of launching something into space has been building the rocket and throwing it away.
ORIGINAL: Richard Jernigan Musk says the first stage of Orbcom 2 (landed successfully on December 21, 2015) is ready to go again. It costs $60-million to build the first stage, only $200K to examine and re-fuel it. Until now, the major cost of launching something into space has been building the rocket and throwing it away.
Times are changing.
There's something I'm missing with this story. This is not the first space craft capable of multiple flights. The shuttle could take off and land and do it again. So apart from now landing upright, what's the big deal?
Remember, Elon says the objective is to make access to space significantly cheaper. The Shuttle was a highly complex manned system, hardly the vehicle to make space launches more affordable. For example the thermal protection system had to be gone over tile by tile, and any damage repaired and replaced.
The total cost of the Shuttle program was $209-billion. Over the total of 150 launches this amounts to $1.39-billion per launch. If the cost of developing and building the spacecraft is left out, the preparation for one launch was about $450-million.
The first stage of Orbcom 2 did not face the extreme heating that an object reentering from orbital velocity would have, so it had no visible thermal protection system. This makes it a lot less expensive to refurbish and turn around. Spacex is quoting $200K for turnaround of a first stage. Higher stages may cost more to turn around, but a completely reusable system sounds like maybe $a-few-million to turn around, not $hundreds of millions like the Shuttle. So the cost reduction for an unmanned reusable system would be of the order of a hundred to one.
Back to Star Wars...my kids got some cheap light sabers for Christmas .... Wow they are fun. The sounds and function are so cool, but of course the blade is cheesy (two collapsing cones into a third). You can fight with em they they make cool sounds. I started to notice the details of the hilt, and started to search on line for replicas. Of course it's a big afcionados world like anything!
Curious if anyone owns any of those high end replicas? Something like this is pretty awesome:
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: What side are you on??? (in reply to estebanana)
quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana
Fellas, don't get me started on Japanese pop culture, it's super strange. Old Japanese culture is sublime, todays pop culture...nonsense, vapid, odd, horrid.....perversely compelling and repellent.
I wonder what percentage of old Japanese culture was what we revere today, like Kabuki, the Tale of Genji, even the 19th-century wood block prints, and what percentage we would find as repellant as today's mindless TV game shows?
Today in Bali, if you look around a bit, you can find echoes of the old court culture of the Rajas. In a lot of places there are expert gamelan orchestras, dance troupes that retain (in modified form) some of the dance drama of the Hindu epics. You can even find wayang kulit, the shadow play.
But in Kuta, Legian, the whole central south shore of the island, you find endless streets of bars with blaring rock and roll, and flocks of the kupu kupu malam, the "butterflies of the night" (largely from Java) who cater to throngs of drunken white sex tourists. There are some great restaurants, but hundreds of greasy spoons catering to the tourists. There are art galleries and painters' workshops in Ubud, and great woodcarving establishments in Mas, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands of tourist souvenir shops all over the island selling cheap kitsch.
Several months ago I read Jan Swafford's long, detailed and, to me, very interesting biography of the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms. Brahms is still revered as one of the great classical composers.
Brahms's father was a hack musician. He played string bass, and was employed sporadically in various second-rate ensembles in Johannes's native city of Hamburg. Young Johannes was a noted pianist long before he became a famous composer. To make ends meet for the family, he was forced to play piano in some of the filthy waterfront whorehouses in Hamburg. As a good looking 13- or 14-year old he was teased and pawed by the aging whores.
Brahms apparently didn't talk much about this experience, but a few times he said it had marked him for life.
So I wonder to what extent the high culture of old time Japan was surrounded by and immersed in mindless dreck like the bulk of modern Japanese pop culture?
Anyway the big one was Fernão de Magalhães...Magellan , who went south and found a way around the bottom of, what is now, south america for a new route to get spices and that from ... and entered a new sea ..
...and came to a sticky end when he encountered my wife's ancestor Lapu-Lapu and his men on the island of Mactan.
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