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Wing Leading-Edge Damage "pre-existing" Re-entry

New Analysis Shifts Theory on Shuttle Breakup [NYT]

The Times reports that the leading-edge flaw thesis just rose to leading theory, based on data recorder analysis:

Admiral Gehman also said today that the new data hinted that the shuttle already had severe damage when it began its re-entry, and not a minor flaw that was made worse by re-entry. Engineers had theorized that minor damage to the thin layer of protective silicon carbide on the panels could have allowed hot oxygen to begin eating away at the leading edge, but Admiral Gehman’s comments suggest that this is unlikely.

Damage before re-entry is likely, he said, because the data show extreme heating taking place early, while the force of air passing over the wing was still quite weak. Admiral Gehman spoke in a conference call with reporters this afternoon.

The damage referred to here as “severe” is also described as extant prior to re-entry. Does this implicate the mysterious shed matter, then? The article also notes that the foam debris shower could still be the cause of the damage.

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You've got Blimp!

lta-mail is an informational page on Hewlett-Packard’s website exploring a new intraoffice mail delivery system initaitive intended to demonstrate the many efficient ways that Compaq and HP are merging corporate cultures and adding value for shareholders the world over.

[A big TYVM to hot tipper Eric! Your prize is already lost in the mail!]

(And in contrast to the snarky tone above, I found this fascinating, and you really should read Josh’s explanation of how it works… hint: it’s computer guided, rather than hand-guided.)

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Down in the U-17

Jim and Marianne’s Jukebox is a pretty good sized collection of mp3-format recordings of old 78’s, including the catchy Great War ditties, Down in the U-17, I’ve Got My Captain Working for me Now, and Wilhelm the Grocer. I formerly had this collection stored locally, but it was lost in the great hard-drive corruption disaster of two-thousand-ought-three ([homer] stupid upgrades [/homer]). I would play them whilst engaged in aerial combat in the rickety WW1 combat flight sim Dawn of Aces.

Some time ago, I recall seeing a pointer on MeFi, probably from the remarkable music historian y2karl, to another hobbyist’s archive of material, but alas, I cain’t find it.

While looking for it I did find David Lynch’s “Old-Time Music Home Page,” coming to you straight outta Asheville, NC. I would commend your attn. to the links section, which included a pointer to Norm’s 78 Record Room, now apparently defunct – or maybe just spotty – it looks like a transient URL. I believe Norm’s was one of the archives I was looking for.

honkingduck.com offers 701 78’s in RA format (pfoo, but I understand).

Ah well – while I have a personal fondness for the mp3 transfers created and curated by hobbyists, academic folkorists have done a bang up job on the material, such as the music collections seen at the Appalachian Music Archives, the Smithsonian’s American Memory (which I’m sure you are all familiar with by now).

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Visitors and such

This weekend we had a pleasant visit from my high-school chum John Strohm, currently deep in law school at a small Alabama college. He and I visited the Experience Music Project, and I must say the museum is improved as a result of visiting in the company of one other person with a deep, life-long interest in American popular music. I’ve been a couple times in the past, and I just kind of find myself lecturing people, instead of swapping stories or exclaiming over the original mechanicals for the first Husker Du album, as happened on this visit.

John also told me that both Jake and Dale, of Hoosier label No Nostalgia, will be presenting papers at a conference at the EMP, April 10-13, according to the website. Hope I get a chance to catch up with them whilst they are here.

After the EMP we strolled through Pike Place, as we’re statutorily obligated to when friends, family, and acquaintances visit us here in the Damp City, and picked up some Columbia River salmon and a bag of clams (or “rocks,” as our fishmonger called them). We then ate hearty and chatted deep into the night.

I’ve always enjoyed John’s intellect, and appreciate that we’re able to track each other through our lives. We jawed up a storm on intellectual property issues, the copyright wars ongoing, and the like – it’s very interesting to discuss this stuff with a seasoned touring and recording musician.

His touring and recording background gives him a familiarity with basic practices and assumptions of the music industry as my experience in technology does for computing, development, and software, so a certain component of the conversation consists of comparing notes. It’s a very interesting time to look at law, I have to admit, and John’s certainly encouraged me to consider it as a possible school route.

We had a good time swapping gossip about pals. One person that came up was Paul Mahern, recording engineer on John Mellencamp’s last record, possibly on the new one that comes out shortly, and the leader of 80’s proto-hardcore rockers the Zero Boys. Out of curiosity, I took a look at the Coug’s website and what the heck?

Mellencamp.com is hosting an anti-war song, “To Washington,” based on a really old folk song, the White House Blues (it’s the song on the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music that opens with “McKinley’s in the White House a-doin’ his best” and refrains on the line “From Baltimore to Washington”). Apparently Mellencamp recorded the song over the past year as a part of the sessions for his upcoming all-folk and traditional record, Trouble No More, due out in May.

WHAT?

Now, let me be totally clear: my favorite Bob Dylan record of all time is a spare recording he made of traditionals called Good As I Been To You, so I have no beef with Mellencamp looking in that direction. In fact, I kind of expect that it’ll be pretty good – his style of music has always had a strong traditional element.

Mellencamp’s career started in Bloomington, and after he broke around 1980, he chose to keep working from his home near Seymour, very close to my hometown. His music, while aesthetically preferable to much of what was on the radio in the 1980’s , was adopted as a sort of standard by the tobacco-chewing segment of my high school populace, some of whom quite literally could not restrain themselves from beating the crap out of me every time they saw me (one troubled young man was actually banned from the school’s property, under threat of arrest and charges, yet his desire to beat the shit out of me – to kill me – was so great that he did indeed return to pound my ass into the dirt).

So, you know, it’s a bit unsettling to hunker down behind my barricades of piled up seventy-eights, muttering imprecations, and glancing to my side see the songwriter whose little ditties were adopted by my fisticuff-oriented classmates lofting his “No Iraq War” sign. Mind you, I’m glad to see him.

I haven’t listened to it yet, but will do so tomorrow – I can say that the original tune he borrows from is among the catchiest of the songs on the Anthology. And I still don’t know if Mahern worked on it or not.

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Zeitgeist

MovableTypeZeitgeistPlugin, from Jim Flanagan of Everything Burns, is a plugin for Movable Type (duh) to allow one to implement Jim’s astonishing Zeitgeist search-engine referrer report.

It’s purty neat.

In the tin-foil and baling-wire department, I’d like to announce that Athena, an elderly (maunfacture date July 1994!) Macintosh of the 9500 model variety, has undergone successful XPostFacto-assisted OS X installation (yeesh) and will soon be functioning as a backup or mirror or something for poor dear bellerophon. The lovely dowager sports a G3 daughtercard upgrade and a brand-spankin’ new PCI Firewire card, which should help keep me from totally losing my mind as I try to schlep files around.

In the “yorg” department, some part of the 10.2.4 March 24 security update is making my main desktop computer not see bellerophon. Foo.

Happily, it’s wholly limited to said desktop unit. But still.

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we watched the fires from our balcony

The New Yorker: Letter from Iraq – The Bombing of Baghdad, by Jon Lee Anderson
(from March 31, 2003 issue)

The second strike came on Thursday evening, and when I looked out my window I noticed that several Iraqis were sitting on lawn chairs on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to a small hotel nearby, as if nothing much were happening and they were just enjoying the fresh evening air. There were three big hits quite close to us, but across the river, and we watched the fires from our balcony. We could see a few cars driving around, even over the bridges. Dogs barked, and the river looked as calm as olive oil, with just a shimmer of motion on the surface.

Hallucinatory piece on last week in the Iraqi capitol. I was interested to note that I had a site vistor from condenast.com recently, on a search request for “crispin glover singing.”

Another interesting visitor of late originates at cache.kuwait.army.mil – always to the front page, with no link referrer, probably as a result of the proxy configuration in Kuwait. I wonder – could it be Sgt. Therron Thomas, of the Indiana National Guard?

UPDATE: Nope. Not him.

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Columbia Investigation Updates

Yee-owtch! I’ve been struggling to get time to update the Columbia story here for a couple weeks, and it’s been tough, what with the outbreak of Armageddon and all.

Over a month ago, on February 21, when last I revisited the state of affairs in the investigation into the loss of the shuttle Columbia on mission STS-107, preliminary findings indicated that a rupture in the shuttle’s wing had admitted superheated plasma into the structure, eventually destroying the wing. Debate over the cause of the rupture continued.

NASA had released audiotape and transcripts of the last few minutes of communication with the ground, and the astronaut’s funeral services had begun.

Since then, several news cycles of coverage have come and gone. News links below will be largely to NYT or internal video of the shuttle’s flight deck had survived re-entry, but that the tape ended prior to the period of catastrophic failures of interest to investigators. Additional news included the release of imagery of the shuttle in orbit taken January 28 by an Air Force telescope on Maui, probably the source of the reports that Air Force gear had been used to look at Columbia. Additionally, tiles found 40 miles west of Lubbock, Texas have unusual signs of heat damage; these tiles represent the westernmost material from the Columbia recovered to date.

Lubbock, of course, is remembered as the home of Buddy Holly. ‘Nuff said.

Additionally, by the end of February, significant attention continued to be focused on internal NASA communication concerning worries about possible tile damage due to the foam impacts at liftoff – on February 28, the author of some of these emails came forward to explicitly disavow any thought that his emails were more than “what-if” scenario projections (Another author came forward on March 10).

During this same news cycle, more information was released concerning a small piece of debris that appeared to detach itself from the shuttle and orbit in tandem for a couple of days before undergoing reentry on January 20.

By March 8, investigators had narrowed to 10 the probable scenarios causing the craft’s disintegration, all featuring the hypothesized front-wing gap. Foam shed at liftoff from the large external tank is continues to play the role of suspected case of the rupture.

On March 14, the board of investigation was told that a high-ranking NASA official rejected the possibility of requesting inter-agency help in the form of a spy-satellite inspection of Columbia‘s underside on the basis of NASA conclusions that the craft would land safely.

On March 19, the orbiter experiments recorder – unique to Columbia in the shuttle fleet – was located on the ground by search crews near Hemphill, Texas. On Monday, March 24, it was reported that the recorder’s data is thought to be largely intact and may provide valuable insight into the last few seconds of Columbia‘s final flight.

Overall, the tone of the board of inquiry has grown increasingly critical of NASA’s internal culture, building on suspicions that the same sort of risk-blindness held to be at fault in the Challenger disaster led to poor decisions in the case of Columbia. Continuing revelations about the open internal discussion of the possibility of serious tile damage leading to no investigative action have enhanced this perception.

NASA response to these concerns – and their airing in the press – has taken on an increasingly defensive tone, as participants in the discussion come forward to discount their own viewpoints expressed while the shuttle was in orbit.

War news has not obviously disrupted the reporting on the breakup, but as the Bush administration’s lean to closely-held data increases in the wake of hard news from the front, I expect to see some parallel obstructionism in this investigation, especially if it becomes clearer that contractors with involvement in defense assets may have been involved in crucial maintenance activity.

It’s also possible that lessened public interest as a result of the war news will actually lower the stakes somewhat and permit a fuller look at the information on the table, if NASA personnel don’t feel that the agency’s future is on the line (a probable motivation for the recantations noted above).

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One Year

Initial Entry: mike.whybark.com is one year old, as of yesterday.

The global archive page details the whole year’s stats.

For me personally, highlights of the year have included The Death of Mr. Red Ears, The Wreck of the Shenandoah (as well as the rest of Blimp Week), the story of my sister’s passing, and a carefully written, accurate account of a nightmare.

Of course, I also take pride in unmasking Watergate informer Deep Throat, the recent Kensapoppin’ series, and of course, the Ken Goldstein Project.

I’m also pleased to have consistently presented original material that stems from actual journalistic activity, specifically the interviews with Man in Space creator David Sander and noted author Michael Moorcock.

I do have at least one more interview to present here, but as I’m attempting to balance the demands of writing for publication with those of blogging, mum’s the word for now.

Over the past year, my writing practice has matured in ways that I think would have been difficult for me to conceptualize as a younger person. For example, I can give reliable time-based estimates for the labor involved to develop a piece to a given word count (depending on the background materials for the piece). I hope that I’ve mastered some of the basic technical aspects of writing for publication.

I believe that the aspect of my writing that still needs the most technical attention is consistency of tense and staying in the active voice. It’s something I can edit into a piece, but getting it right the first time is a better way to go. Saves paper. Much of what I write is essentially just direct recording of my stream of consciousness, and in my head, tenses are fluid.

Regarding the active voice, (make that “Grasping the active voice,”) it’s probably just something I’ll always have to watch (“fight with”). My inner voice is contemplative and analytical, and when musing, the personal pronoun is rarely employed.

I’ve also learned that my long held belief that I cannot write fiction or develop plots or imagine characters is simply wrong. What I have learned is that I have to fool myself into accessing that aspect of my creativity, and it really frustrates me.

There’s a connection between this phenomenon and my native avoidance of the active voice: my fondest desires, and most rehearsed inner fantasies, from earliest childhood, involve the disappearance of not the self, but my self.

Those of you who know me personally will find this hard to believe, as you’d be hard pressed to ever meet another grandstanding blowhard who can outdo me in the monopolize-your-attention department.

Interestingly, the erosion of identity is precisely what good character visualization and development truly requires, so perhaps, if I can find a way to link the two in my mind, the lifelong block will dissolve.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I am not planning any big changes here, although I have been constantly worrying the bone above. I rather expect that I’ll be experimenting with solutions to it here.

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Oregon Coast

I hope to turn in a longer entry, but a picture is worth a thousand words, correct?

We spent Saturday night at a beachfront cabin on the Oregon Coast in a small town called Netarts (nee-tarts). The cabin was an outrageous bargain – directly on the beach, with a complete kitchen (dishwasher, microwave, etcetera), and feturing miscellaneous amazing antiques, including what appeared to be a completely original turn-of-the-century floor lamp, a freestanding cabinet Victrola that included a selection of 78s (but sadly, did not play becasue the tone arm was stiff), and a basket full of stereopticon views, with stereopticon (among the views were several selections from the time of the United States’ 1898 invasion of Cuba, including views of American volunteers, President McKinley’s cabinet, soldiers writing home, a battleship in harbor, a sentimental series depicting the veteran’s return, and finally, the gravesite of the assassinated McKinley).

And topping it off, a fireplace. Damn!

However much the cabin amazed me – it felt as though we were staying in a friend’s house – the spectacular beach walks wowed me more. We’ll be returning, without a doubt.

Here’s the full galleries: March 22 | March 23

And a few selections:

Viv in the distance. This is just about high tide and it’s around 5:30 pm.
A Suntory whiskey bottle. One of quite a few Japanese bottles that had apparently crossed the ocean. We, in fact, found not one, but two blown-glass fishing floats.
Clouds reflected in the wet tidal flats. The flats extend way, way out from the bluffs and are quite hard-packed. This picture was taken at around 11 am, near low tide.
One of many factory-trawler (I assume – it’s obviously for a big net) net fishing floats we saw. This one, and then all of them, became “Wilson.”
I’m holding a group of mussels, each one at least six inches long. It’s heavy. We did not eat them. I believe the beach is a state park.
The start of a long walk. The three off-shore rocks on the horizon are about two miles away, and we walked beyond them, to the beach front of the next little town to the north, Oceanside. We ate lunch there and then walked back, on the hard-packed sand of the beach the whole way.