Also known as The Egyptian Diamond

Quoted in part in Randall Garrett's SF short story "The Foreign Hand Tie" 1961 writing under the pseudonym David Gordon and until recently, erroneously attributed to him.

It was originally published  in the children's magazine "St. Nicholas" No 19 part 2 in May 1892.

And now for something completely different

The Red Baron. Freiherr Manfred von Richthofen's early career, and the aircraft he flew in.

MvR first joined Fliegerabteilung 69 (FA69) in April 1915.

The Albatros C.I, B.I were both used by FA69  in the East between April and August 1915.  During the time, MvR was an observer. Missions included recon and some inffectual ground attack of the rather chaotic Russian forces.

From August through to October 1915, he was posted to the Western Front, flying as an observer with Briftrauben Abteilung Ostend (BAO) in the new wonderweapon, the AEG G.II Battleplane. These were largely, heavily armed multiengined machines that could do anything; shoot down enemy aircraft, bomb targets, recon at long range... In theory. In practice, the bombing and recon worked, the shooting down enemy aircraft not so much, smaller aircraft with machine guns fired by observers worked as well or better. The whole Battleplane concept was flawed, and the aircraft redesignated as Bombers.

Single seater aircraft with a machine gun firing through the propellor were better still, but synchronisation was still in its infancy.

Von Richthofen really wanted to get into these new single seaters. He'd already shot up - and may have shot down - a Farman while in the AEG G.II.

So he commenced training as a pilot in October 1915. To say he was not a natural pilot - though a very good shot - is not an understatement. But despite writing off 3 Fokker monoplane trainers, unlike many fledgling pilots, he didn't kill himself, so must have been average or better.

After learning to fly in October-March he was posted to Kasta/Kagohl 2 in the west, which apparently had Albatros C.IIIs. He may have shot down a Nieuport in one, using a gun affixed to the top wing firing over the prop. 

When KG2 was transferred to the East in June 1916 it re-equipped (entirely?) with Roland C.II. It had 7 flights, with a mix of aircraft before then.

 In August 1916 MvR was transferred to the West at Boelke's request arriving at Jasta 2 on Sept 1. They initially flew Fokker E.III but by September 16 they had at least 6 Albatros D.IIs. MvR was issued with one, and on September 17 flying in the group of 6 Albatros scored his first confirmed kill, an FE2b. The rest is well known.
 

This comes from a variety of sources, including MvRs rather unhelpful autobiography.

In a Universe next door...

Things to come.
Handley Page H.50 Heyfords escorted by Westland Pterodactyl Vs, somewhere over the North Sea.

Painting by Daniel Bechennec, Fana d'Avation magazine cover, April 2010

Puff the Magic Dragon

This song always bothered me. This lovely song seemed just plain wrong, and far, far too sad. I always instinctively felt there was something missing.
And apparently, there was.

The original poem had a verse that did not make it into the song. In it, Puff found another child and played with him after returning. Neither Yarrow nor Lipton remember the verse in any detail, and the paper that was left in Yarrow's typewriter in 1958 has since been lost.

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1276
Before I found this out, here's the verse I composed myself, a long time ago, as a child.

My song is nearly finished.
All good things have their ends.
But there are new beginnings,
And dragons find new friends.
Puff's new friend's Suzy Alice,
They laugh and have great fun.
For Suzy's great-grandfather
Was Jackie Paper's son.

Consider it released under the Creative Commons license for anyone else who wants to sing a more complete version.

A slightly variant form of this appeared in the comments at http://aebrain.blogspot.com.au/2009/12/some-girls-have-thing-for-horses.html

As far as I'm aware, the lyrics of the original verses, though not this one are (C) Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow and no challenge to the current copyright owners is intended.

Little Did I Know...

Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, at http://web.archive.org/web/20010719173326/http://www2.dynamite.com.au/aebrain/alan.htm 

 Birthplace and All That

 To quote Hoffnung, "I was born, through no fault of my own, at a very early age.". Or in my case, in 1958 in Earley, a small suburb of Reading, Berkshire, England. Or at least it was a suburb. Now its been swallowed up in Reading proper. Last time I was there (1986), the fields I used to watch the Foxhunters go through are now a high-density housing development ("Lower Earley", and you can't get much lower, I'm telling you...), and the stream I used to fish in is a concrete storm water drain.. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, and the song "Tar and Cement" comes to mind.

When I was 10 and at boarding school (a place called Bigshotte, which appears to have vanished with the snows of yesteryear), I got an unscheduled visit from my parents. Who informed me that in 2 weeks time we were emigrating to Australia. You can take the boy out of England, but you can't take England out of the boy, and it wasn't until 1988 that I finally decided to take out Australian Citizenship. I still retain dual nationality, though the England I came from no longer exists, but has been transformed into a diverse multi-ethnic European state. Overall, a great improvement, but not a place I can identify with very much.

Good Things, Bad Things

After attending Sydney Grammar School for 6 years, I entered Sydney University in 1976. My father was unemployed, my mother hospitalised. Not a good time. Things picked up, but then I had a number of life-threatening medical problems. Picked up a little brain damage from Encephalo-Meningitis (yes, I know, it shows...). Spent half my lectures zonked out from Painkillers. Operations etc. Nuff Said. For much of the time, I resided in International House (and this is a link well worth following up, the whole concept is a great idea).

Then I met Carmel for the second time, in 1980. Love at first sight. (The first time was when I was at Sydney Grammar, which is next to the Australian Museum. The one girl that I ever noticed as a schoolboy was a schoolgirl who I saw exactly once in the geological section. We both only realised we'd met there only a few years ago, as she remembered someone who looked exactly like me at the same time and place.) Anyway, within 2 months of first meeting, we were engaged. Hey, she had her own copy of Panzerblitz! And a Model Railway! I figure I've blown about 10,000 years of Good Karma by meeting her, but it's been worth it and more.  

A bit about my Brilliant Career*
* Career - To go downhill fast, without control

I graduated from Sydney University in 1981, with a BSc in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics. Since then, I've been CompSci-ing in various industries and businesses, but for the most part, doing what is euphemistically known as "defence work.". Some of the software I wrote early in my professional life performed according to specification in the Gulf War, on HMAS Brisbane.

 I can remember joking that it would work with any Air Defence Doctrine, except possibly Saudi Arabia's, but what were the odds of that happening?

 I've worked on software for a number of vessels in various Allied Navies. From analysis work on the 76mm gun system on the German Navy's new F-124, being Chief Designer for an Artificial Intelligence based Anti-Missile system for the Turkish Navy, to programming and design work on "very expensive machines that go PING" for submarines of the Israeli Defence Force, Hellenic Navy, Armada de Chile, Royal Swedish Navy, Italian Navy, and various others.

I've spent a ridiculous amount of my life peering into PPIs and Waterfall, DEMON and FRAZ displays, but also sunned myself on the Fantail of a Destroyer in the middle of the Pacific, relaxed watching a magnificent sunset in the Gulf of Thailand, and shared my personal space with half a tonne of high explosive sleeping on top of a Mk 48 Mod 3 torpedo.

In the course of my work, I've personally chiselled a hole through the Berlin Wall, inhaled Pad Thai (Thai Noodles) on the banks of the Chao Praya river in Bangkok, domiciled on the fabulously expensive Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, gotten nervous when the Air Raid sirens wailed in Seoul, Korea, and consumed with gusto Alaskan King Crab in Akron, Ohio. It's been fun so far. (note from 2013: Now, talk about tempting Fate....this is what I wrote at the end.) Can't wait to see what happens next. 

Last updated 09 February 1999

What happened next of course is described at http://aebrain.blogspot.com.au/2006/05/annus-mirabilis.html ....

A miracle.

The 35 Greatest Easter Eggs From The "Doctor Who" 50th Anniversary

Click on picture to enter the Time Vortex

Search inside the decimal representation of Pi

The Pi-Search page

My home phone number did not occur in the first 200,000,000 digits of pi after position 0.

An Original

From "At last it's the 1948 show", progenitor to Monty Python.

SpraySpace

We live in a wondrous world, where such talent can be shared planetwide.

Darth Vader In A Kilt On A Unicycle Playing Bagpipes

Cost Of Living Comparison Between Two Countries

Cost Of Living Comparison Between Two Countries

Try comparing where you live with where I live - Canberra, Australia.

An Eccentric Species, we are

Som Sabadell flashmob - YouTube

Existence

Existence
 Text : David Brin
Art : Electric Sheep
Content : 100% Win

What a year on Earth really looks like.

1000 Years of European History

From 1000 to 2005CE - about time I had an "interesting URL".

Coming Up For Air

Things are starting to stabilise, and next week I resume teaching. My Mother In Law has made a very good cognitive recovery, but there's still months of physiotherapy ahead so she can walk again unaided.

I've had time to de-stress a little, and unless another crisis appears, will be back to blogging regularly again soon. I hope. Remembering what happened the last time I said that.

As a change of pace, a tidbit from history I've been using to keep my mind refreshed and relaxed, ready for whatever Joker I get in Life's next hand. And now for something completely different. The markings on Austra-Hungarian aircraft in 1918.

This represents preprinted fabric from J. Backhausen & Söhne (sons) for the Oeffag factory and applied to the wings and horizontal tail unit of four late production 153. & about 1/3 of all the 253. series Albatros D type machines.

Further research shows that it was silk-screened, not printed (the rollers of the time weren't up to it); that there were two layers, one brown, one green, on a base fabric that could be any colour from light beige (undyed) to mustard-yellow; and that the registration was deliberately coarse, to give the effect of dark areas around the edges.

This was the effect, as near as we can determine from the black-and-white photos and a sample of the fabric that has survived:



This aircraft, "Number Six", Oeffag Albatros D.III 253-64, is shown in the picture below.



The fuselage is varnished plywood, a strip of "sworl" cloth glued on the top and covered with dope/varnish, and all wing and tail surfaces composed of this cloth.

The aircraft was usually piloted by Friedrich Hefty of the Flik 42J fighter squadron.

253.64 Albatros D.III (Oef) Flik 42J Friedrich Hefty

Hefty was wounded in the right foot by Italian anti-aircraft fire on 7 October 1915. He transferred to Flik 42J in the Isonzo sector of the Italian front in October 1917, scoring his second victory during the Battle of Caporetto. During 1918, Hefty formed a strong friendship with fellow pilots Johann Risztics and Ferdinand Udvardy. Amongst the airmen of Flik 42J, the trio became known as the Arany Triumviratus (Golden Triumvirate).

Hefty began marking the sides of his Albatros D.III with the number "6."

This particular aircraft was flown by Friedrich Hefty of Flik 42J, and it was forced down August 28th 1918 when being flown by Geza Keisz.

Doing this research on such an obscure topic hones my skills in wading through legal and medical databases, in search for clues in the Science of Sex and Gender.

But I also need to do some meditation, giving my motor skills some exercise, while the higher brain-functions relax and just exist. "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits". Sometimes it helps not to be self-aware of what one is doing, to let the unconscious mind take over for a while. The result? A model in 1/144 scale, 5.01cm (just under 2 inches) long.

Just Because

The Submarines of October

From The Submarines of October, how close we came to Nuclear war in 1962.

Very close. Very close indeed.

Soviet submarine commanders were highly disciplined and unlikely to use nuclear weapons by design, but the unstable conditions on board raised the spectre of an accident. Orlov himself believes that the major danger was not from the unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon but from an accident caused by the interaction of men and machines under the most trying of circumstances. Captain Joseph Bouchard, the author of a major study on Naval operations during the missile crisis, supports this point when he suggests that the "biggest danger" was not from "deliberate acts" but from accidents, such as an accidental torpedo launch.
...
Possibly even more dangerous was an incident on submarine B-59 recalled by Vadim Orlov, who served as a communications intelligence officer. In an account published by Mozgovoi (see document 16), Orlov recounted the tense and stressful situation on 27 October when U.S. destroyers lobbed PDCs (practice depth charges - they make a loud noise, but that's all) at B-59. According to Orlov, a "totally exhausted" Captain Valentin Savitsky, unable to establish communications with Moscow, "became furious" and ordered the nuclear torpedo to be assembled for battle readiness. Savitsky roared "We're going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all." Deputy brigade commander Second Captain Vasili Archipov calmed Savitsky down and they made the decision to surface the submarine.
...
While the four Soviet Foxtrot submarines did not have combat orders, the Soviet Navy sent two submarines, B-75 and B-88, to the Caribbean and the Pacific respectively, with specific combat orders. B-75, a "Zulu" class diesel submarine, commanded by Captain Nikolai Natnenkov, carried two nuclear torpedoes. It left Russian waters at the end of September with instructions to defend Soviet transport ships en route to Cuba with any weapons if the ships came under attack.
...
Another submarine, B-88, left a base at Kamchatka peninsula, on 28 October, with orders to sail to Pearl Harbor and attack the base if the crisis over Cuba escalated into U.S.-Soviet war. Commanded by Captain Konstatine Kireev, B-88 arrived near Pearl Harbor on 10 November and patrolled the area until 14 November when it received orders to return to base, orders that were rescinded that same day, a sign that Moscow believed that the crisis was not over. B-88 did not return to Kamchatka under the very end of December.

The weapons to be used in the attack? Nuclear-tipped torpedos to be fired into the harbour. 15kt yield each, about the same as the weapon used in Nagasaki.

If that had happened... if nuclear torpedos would have been used by the Russians - and what the USA didn't know was that nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles were operational in Cuba, and would have been used in such a case... then if Pearl Harbor got nuked as well....

Russki would be a dead language. The US had bombs big enough to not just vapourise a city, but make vast areas lethally radioactive. They had delivery systems too, while the USSR had very few rockets, and even fewer bombers capable of attacking the USA. The US SIOP - Single Intergrated Operational Plan - involved everything from unreliable missiles, through to inaccurate cruise missiles with miss distances in miles (but with a 5 Megaton warhead, that didn't matter), down to propellor-driven Skyraider aircraft launched from carriers to attack port cities in semi-suicide attacks "lobbing" small nukes nearly vertically in a half-loop, and hoping to escape before what went up came down. And lots and lots of B-52s, each with two 5-megaton warheads.

The quote from Dr Strangelove is accurate regarding US likely losses:

President Merkin Muffley: You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!
General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

Sounds about right.

The Cold War sucked. I was 4 years old at the time, and with the high-priority targets we knew about (a nuclear weapon manufacturing & storage facility, a regional centre of government, and a US bomber base) all within 10 km... the fireballs would have overlapped where I lived. The USSR had plenty of weapons capable of hitting the UK, just not many that could reach the US.

We didn't know about the ROC secret bunker buried deep under the fields behind our house. That would have been a target too: we would have been in the crater for that one.

So think about it: no matter how bad things are, if the Many-worlds explanation of quantum mechanics is correct, there's quite a few high-probability universes not far from here where things are a heck of a lot worse. And take comfort from the fact that we dodged that particular bullet in this one.

Air Sharks - and Clownfish too

Available via Hobby-On.com - when they're back in stock, and their servers are getting hammered pretty hard too. The manufacturers, x-zylo, have a fascinating range of other aerial toys too.



When I was young, I would definitely have preferred a Shark rather than a Fairy. Not exactly terribly feminine, I know. I had an inflatable shark bought in Italy when I was 6. Named "Cutty", as in "Cutty Shark".

I used to cuddle Cutty in bed, along with Neberick Moledewarp, my plush aerodynamic mole. OK, I'm weird. But my readers already know that.

An Alternate Universe

From the MightyGodKing blog, a what-if. Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer

April 24, 1976. Lorne Michaels offers the Beatles $3,000 to appear on Saturday Night Live, as a gag mocking the full-page ads taken out in the New York Times offering the Beatles millions of dollars to reunite and play in Shea Stadium. Unbeknownst to Michaels, both John Lennon and Paul McCartney are in New York City at the time, and see the sketch airing live. They consider actually going to the studio, but decide they are too tired.

That much is history. Now go to the MightyGodKing site and read on to find out what happened next in a Universe next door...