User:Greg L

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Five Great Minds:

 Archimedes Charles Darwin Albert Einstein Algernon Parsons Nikola Tesla
A great inventor, a great observer, a great thinker, a great engineer, and a great experimentalist.

“We shall not cease from exploration
  And the end of all our exploring
  Will be to arrive where we started
  And know the place for the first time.”
 T. S. Eliot – 1942 *


“Science … looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new.
  It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous
  debate, and in many respects that’s the secret of its success.”

 Carl Sagan

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in
  seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

 Marcel Proust

Hi. 

This is a 280-pixel-wide animation shown at its native resolution. Note the visible dithering due to the 256-color limitation of GIF-based animations.
This is a 280-pixel-wide animation shown at its native resolution. Note the visible dithering due to the 256-color limitation of GIF-based animations.

If you’ve arrived here in search of information on U.S. Navy SEALs, click here to automatically scroll down to the relevant section of this page.

This is a “user page” for Wikipedia authors. Wikipedia is the premier, Web-based, free encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. User pages are where authors often maintain a “sandbox”: a place to store the digital bricks & mortar that comprise Wikipedia articles. The animation at right is one of those “bricks,” which serves as a technical note to myself detailing some of the intricacies when creating certain kinds of animations.

I worked for seven years as a fuel cell engineer and am now working on medical equipment. Three of my fifteen patents pertained to entirely new ways to calculate the properties of gases. One involved a new way to back-calculate the equation-of-state of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) to—in effect—find the terms of its quadratic equation when given only the pressure and temperature. This was not an easy task because SF6 has a very high molecular weight and is far from an “ideal” gas. The other two gas-related patents were a method for calculating the dewpoint of air using an analog circuit when given the relative humidity and temperature. Before this invention, the only known way to calculate dewpoint was to use a microprocessor. Interestingly, there were geometric solutions to both these problems (separated by many years). The SF6 problem was a relatively straightforward 2D solution. The dewpoint problem, though also a geometric solution, required complex 3D geometry (and logarithmic “math” in the analog circuitry). The reason for the dew point development is certain types of hydrogen sensors (MOS) are influenced by dew point. We wanted to null dew point’s effect on the hydrogen sensor and didn’t want a microprocessor running firmware in a safety-critical circuit.

So far, I've contributed to the following:


Also, my son and I together added a small section on the Navy SEALs regarding the physical standards required to join the SEALs.

Please see the ITS–90 discussion page and the VSMOW discussion page before editing the articles. I don't do "drive-by shootings" on articles just to inflate the number of articles I've contributed to. I take pride in doing that which is hard. And doing well-researched, correct, tight, understandable (for the target audience) technical writing is among the more difficult tasks I ever attempt to tackle. I derive pleasure in making excellent contributions to just a few articles (as opposed to poor contributions to many).


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This is a 280-pixel-wide animation shrunk to 266 pixels to lessen the visible effects of dithering.

Contents

[edit] Trying to become a Navy SEAL


Lt. Weinberg: Why do you like them so much?
Lt. Cmdr. Galloway: ‘Cause they stand on a wall. And they say “Nothing's
Lt. Cmdr. Galloway: gonna hurt you tonight. Not on my watch.”
                                                                From A Few Good Men

[edit] 6 April 2006:

My son just entered into the U.S. Navy SEAL’s training program known as BUD/S. I hope he makes it through BUD/S and I pray that our President and the Navy put him in jeopardy only for well-conceived, important reasons. Over 70% of BUD/S candidates wash out (so it's real, real tough). Here's a letter-to-the-editor I wrote that appeared in our local paper. It will give you a little insight into how proud I am of my son:

    My wife and I just read your riveting article
about a 20-year-old who spent 41 straight hours
in a Wal-Mart. He reportedly passed time with
such activities as reading magazines and playing
video games.
    WOW. Just… wow. That is something.
TV networks have started calling. He was a
guest on NPR radio and he’s had discussions
with a movie company!
    Our 19-year-old son just joined the Navy
with a guarantee to join their special forces
(a six-year commitment with the SEALs). To
prepare, he ran six miles a day wearing boots.
Before shipping off, he could do 87 sit-ups in
two minutes and a 500-yard side stroke in
10:17. He studied for months to improve his
entrance exam score so he could qualify to
simply apply for the SEALs. Even though the
Navy will teach him scuba diving, he took
private lessons before joining. In many ways,
he was a product of 9-11. Events like that can
make an impact on a 15-year-old.
    But you know, with the Navy intent on
growing the SEALs to 3000 members, there’s
probably hundreds of young men just like our
son doing the very same thing. Nothing at all
unique like the Wal-Mart kid.


“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”                                             Ronald Reagan
“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”

                                             Ronald Reagan

The thing that really impressed me though was the privilege during Navy graduation of meeting two of the three other young men in my son's division who also had SEALs guarantees. To prepare before joining the Navy, they had all done almost exactly the sort of stuff my son had. They had read nearly all of Dick Couch's books on the SEALs, they knew the Discovery Channel's series about the SEALs by heart (because like my son, they too owned the DVD set), and they had all worked very hard at getting into awesome physical shape.

The future of the U.S. is in good hands with the next generation.

  • In a call recently, my son recounted an incongruity he found humorous. There’s an instructor at the BUD/S training base in Coronado who’s extremely "buff" and bronzed and has a jaw that looks like it was whittled out of granite using a chain saw. He gets around on base using one of those most-practical retro-’50’s-style bicycles with fenders, old-fashioned wide seat, fat white-wall tires, and a thumb-driven bell. It even has a basket on the front to carry items in. So as my son and his friends walk about on the base, they'll occasionally hear the "cha-ching" of the bell as this ultra-tough instructor wearing camo passes them sitting ram-rod straight up atop something that looks suitable for Dorothy (from Kansas).

[edit] UPDATE, 9 February 2007:

[edit] Mask appreciation

I guess the odds of 70% attrition rate applied to this group of three. My son and one of the two friends I mentioned above didn't make it through BUD/S. My son re-trained as a master of arms (military policeman) and now guards a naval base.

“Phase 1” is the period of SEAL training at Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado (or simply, “Coronado”) that lasts through Hell Week. Hell Week is by far the hardest week to get through. The second hardest is the first week of Phase 1; the instructors (all of whom are operational SEALs) really ride the trainees hard to weed out the weak or uncommitted as early as possible. My son's class was the biggest on record and the instructors were doubly motivated to get the class size down to something half-manageable before Hell Week started.

There's the mini-series about BUD/S you see occasionally on the Discovery Channel and the Military Channel. My son and his friends all owned a set of DVDs of the mini-series and all thought they knew what to expect. But no; the Navy has lots of stuff they put the trainees through that you never see on any TV documentary. My son and one of his two friends both washed out in the last exercise of the last day of the first week. After that, they would have gone to dinner, taken the weekend off, and would have to get through the three, somewhat easier weeks before Hell Week starts. What tripped up my son and one of his two friends is a pool exercise that doesn't appear on the mini-series. Maybe that's partly why my son didn't make it; there was a fear factor due to the uncertain novelty of it. What you do see on the mini-series is something called "drown proofing" where they put the trainees in the water with their hands and feet bound with rope. They have to sink to the bottom of the pool, push off and rise to the surface, and repeat for so many minutes. Then they have to swim — still bound hand & feet — 50 meters to the edge of the pool. My son had seen that many times (he owns the DVD) and was prepared for it.

What tripped my son up is an evolution called the “Mask appreciation exercise” (which I think is a euphemism akin to “Taser Appreciation” exercise). The instructors put about thirty trainees into the pool wearing just their swim suits and masks. The trainees all cluster tightly around an instructor floating in a raft in the middle of the pack. Everyone is treading water but since they're so tightly packed together, they are half treading other trainees. It's hard to stay afloat. Then they have the trainees fill their masks completely with water and have them start singing loudly and yelling out calls. A lot of water goes up many of the trainees' noses, down their throats, and into their lungs. Most handled the situation well. Some didn't. The instructors are looking for the ones who don't freak out at the sensation of drowning. My son kept at it until his mask was about half filled with air. Half a mask-full of water had gone up his nose and down his throat, and about half of that had gone down into his lungs. He swam out of the group to the edge of the pool. Well, of course the instructors were all over him then and told him to suck it up and get back into the group. So he did. And the same thing happened again: after a few minutes, he sucked in half a mask-full of water and felt like he was drowning. And he swam to the pool's edge again.

Well, that was it. For those who didn't handle the drown-proofing exercise well (the one where they tie their hands and feet in the pool), they had been allowed to practice the exercise in the pool over the weekend and try to qualify again on the following Monday. This wasn't the case with “Mask appreciation.” Anyone who couldn't suck up this exercise the first time around were out. They were either threatened with being performance dropped, or they were given the option of ringing the “drop on request” (D.O.R.) bell. When my son went to the pool's edge the second time and stripped off his mask and looked up, hew saw the class's officer-in-charge (the ranking officer trainee of the class) ringing the D.O.R. bell. In BUD/S, officers and enlisted are both trained together. The only difference is that the instructors (who are mostly enlisted personnel) simply address the officer trainees "Sir" while they're yelling at them and making them drop and do one hundred pushups as punishment. Anyway…

The instructor told him he was finished and had to ring the D.O.R. bell. Throughout SEAL training, instructors mess with the trainees’ minds. “Go ahead,” they chant while a trainee is doing pushups with a face full of sand, “ring the D.O.R. bell; it’s easy. You can immediately stop the misery and come back in a year or two when you’re ready. There’s a nice soft bed waiting for you in your barracks.” But if recruits are “performance dropped” (dropped by the instructors because they obviously don’t have what it takes), they can never come back again. This incident with Mask Appreciation was different though: the instructor wasn’t egging my son on to ring the bell, he was telling him he had to ring it. My son refused. Maybe the instructor was putting on an act and would relent, my son thought. My son certainly wasn’t going to simply quit. So the instructor said he could consider himself as performance-dropped and told him get out of the pool. Period. That was it. He could never come back to try again. Well, my son knew it wasn’t quite that simple; he’d have to appear before a formal hearing board chaired by this salt & pepper-haired “Capt. Square Jaw” to make it official. He called home that Friday evening, thoroughly bummed. There wasn’t anything my wife and I could say to console him. He thought about his options over the weekend and then put out the word on Sunday that he wanted to wash out under the best possible circumstances. The instructors allowed him to ring the D.O.R. bell Monday morning at the start of the 04:00 muster. In the darkness, he carefully added his helmet to the end of the long line of dew-covered helmets that had accumulated beneath the D.O.R. bell and walked away.

Note on the preceding three paragraphs: As far as I know, all evolutions in First Phase are not classified. However, it’s noteworthy that nearly all — perhaps all — books on the SEALs don’t tell about an evolution called “Mask Appreciation.” This is a likely indicator that this information might be sensitive and that the Navy requires that book authors and documentary producers not disclose the subject in return for inside access at Coronado. Mask Appreciation is no doubt designed to expose recruits to a novel situation; if the existence of this evolution became well known, it could undermine its very purpose. Wikipedia User Pages are predominantly the private domain of the Wikipedia authoring community. Still, the contents of these User Pages are indexed by Google and are discoverable in searches. To find the information on Mask Appreciation discussed above however, requires prior knowledge of the term: one must google on the words mask and appreciation (or the phrase “mask appreciation” in quotes) to hit on this page. More general Google searches like Navy SEALs and Coronado doesn’t produce this Web page in at least the first eleven Google search pages. Thus, the discoverability of detailed information on Mask Appreciation in a forum such as this is much different from that of actual books on the SEALs. Regardless of the Navy’s intentions regarding secrecy, it’s obvious that extremely few recruits or Navy personnel who are planning on trying out for the SEALs would ever happen across the information available here beforehand; they look to books on the SEALs (such as those written by Dick Couch), where they won’t find it.

The reason for this statement is the above three paragraphs were anonymously deleted by someone alleging that the Mask Appreciation evolution is “classified.” While I don’t doubt the sincerity of the individual in looking out for what he or she thought was in the Navy’s interests, this allegation seems utterly preposterous since every trainee who washes out during First Phase is discharged without signing any secrecy documents — or even counseled regarding the sensitivity of Mask Appreciation — and is free to roam about and discuss their experiences with whomever they please. Further, the URL of the anonymous editor traced back to a private Internet provider (SBC Internet Services/AT&T) in the Los Angeles area, not a government site. Even though Mask Appreciation is most certainly not classified, if the above information undermines the Navy’s interests in any way, the proper way to address this is to either contact me on my Talk page or e-mail me here. Please provide a telephone number so I can validate your identity and affiliation with the U.S. Navy. If censorship is to occur here, it will be self-censorship, for a valid reason, as requested and articulated by a responsible party. It will not be the imposed censorship of an anonymous Internet user who took it upon his or her self to delete someone else’s writings on their own User Page.


My son was real familiar with that bell. The youngest trainees in the BUD/S class are given the chore of polishing it. They take turns. Since there were four 19-year-olds in the class, every fourth day, my son polished the D.O.R. bell. It's the very same one you see in the video. You can even see the shadow of the D.O.R. bell on Google Map if you zoom all the way in on "The Grinder."

He stayed at Coronado for several weeks (though not as a SEAL trainee). He occasionally joined the crowds of civilians who gather along the road overlooking the beach where SEALs train. It's quite the tourist attraction for civilians as they cheer on the SEALs as they run on the beach under their rubber boats. My son was pretty much oblivious to them when he was under the boats. One evening after the sun had set, he realized that it should be the day and time when the SEAL trainees do rock portaging. So he joined the crowd that had gathered up on the road to watch the trainees bringing their rubber boats in over the rocks. It’s actually one of the more dangerous things, injury-wise, that SEAL trainees do. The sun had been down for about 45 minutes and the western sky was only darkly lit in cobalt blue. One could rather easily see the chemilum light sticks tied to each of the trainees and their equipment but could just barely make out the silhouetted forms struggling on the rocks. He listened as some lady wondered out loud who those soldier-types were. Her boyfriend/husband/whatever stated with an authoritative tone that they were Army Rangers doing invasion training. My son said nothing. He just stood there, part of an anonymous crowd, watching the important-looking spectacle from the sidelines.

[edit] Blue force vs. Red force

While waiting at Coronado for his transfer orders to arrive, an instructor walked into his barracks, pointed to my son, and informed him he had “volunteered” for something. He was going out into the desert where he would help play the roll of Red-Force insurgents opposing full-tilt SEALs who were receiving polish-up training before shipping out to “The Sandbox.” This training is done at a remote desert “village” not too far of Coronado. The instructors pile the club cabs of government-owned three-quarter-ton trucks chock full of people and tear helter skelter up the freeway to the desert facility. There, he got his butt kicked in sundry ways for a couple of weeks. Of course, he was exposed to how SEALs go about their business. Since all SEALs have at least a “Secret” classification and receive classified training in 3rd Phase, it’s best that I not pass along any of my son’s experiences to ensure no sensitive aspects of SEALs’ capabilities and tactics are accidentally exposed. There was this little bit of advise an instructor gave him: “Don’t get stung by a scorpion or bitten by a rattlesnake; we don’t have antivenom out here.” Okaaaaay… nice to know. In fact, when he wasn’t playing his Red-Force role, one of his tasks was to club rattlesnakes with a shovel.

U.S. Navy SEALs’ Trident
U.S. Navy SEALs’ Trident

When he was telling me of the above over the phone, he was despondent and somewhat surly because he so much wanted to be one of them one day. Instead, he was just so much cannon fodder to practice with. I was thinking at the time that he was having incredible experiences that few 19-year-olds receive. His friends back home at this time were driving around in their tricked-out Hondas with 40-series tires; their biggest concern being how to get enough money for beer on the weekend. Simultaneously, my son was in the desert playing the role of an insurgent doing “insurgent things” like getting into fire-fights (using lasers and blanks) with genuine SEALs who had received their Tridents. He did his best to make sure they earned the right to kick his butt too. I told him that one day he’d look back at this time of his life with fond memories of his experiences there. I don’t think he believed me.

There was something about his Coronado-related experiences that my son paid no attention to until after he had gone to Lackland AFB for his MA training. Lackland has an AFB/Navy joint MA training facility there. My son noted that a significant number of trainees at Lackland were immature as hell and were continually getting into trouble. During his short stay there, the Navy had to institute a complete lockdown so no one could leave base, even over the weekend. This was all due to the misbehavior of a few. Also, a driver had crashed an AFB-owned van. In response, no one would drive the vans anymore. The thing is, the vans were specifically there for the express purpose of transporting people and that was the drivers’ job!  But there they sat. This kind of babysitting struck my son as odd because it contrasted so dramatically with his own experiences at Coronado. One evening in the desert, one of the instructors handed my son the keys to a truck and told him and another fellow (another SEAL wash-out) to find their way back to Coronado. Well, what the heck?!?  He had only ever been a backseat passenger and had never driven the 90 miles from Coronado to the desert base before. Now he’s supposed to find his way back at night?  Well, uhm… yeah; that’s exactly what he wanted. So my son — still 19 years old at the time — drove a government vehicle while his friend navigated. They found their way back to Coronado from the desert OK. That’s just the way things are at Coronado: everyone there is mature and driven. And they’re all given a crap pile of freedom and responsibility in return. Trainees are effectively tortured during the week and then are given the entire weekend off. There are no limitations at all as to where they can go. About all they’re told during indoc is that under no circumstances are they to get into fights in town; drunk locals often try test their manhood by getting a piece of a Navy SEAL trainee. Trainees can drive something like 90 miles away from Coronado and screw around all weekend if they feel like it. They had just better damn well show up for Monday morning muster though. My son didn’t realize he had so much freedom until he had been put into a situation where he no longer had it. Now he was at Lackland where, due to a lockdown, he couldn’t even walk to a 7-11 to buy some dish washing detergent or beef jerky. All because a bunch of underage “goombas and pregnant chicks” (my son’s words) got caught drinking and having a party on base. It was a big culture shock for the young man.

Getting back to the subject of not getting into fights in town: When my son told me about this, I opined that the Navy must not want their SEALs kicking the living crap out of drunk jackasses in bars. I was imagining something akin to that scene in Witness where Harison Ford’s character, while dressed as one of the Amish, busted the nose of that town bully. My son said “Jeez Dad, everyone thinks we’re a bunch of ninjas or something. We’re trained to shoot guns.”  Well… perhaps. But I suspect that if the fights are done in the water, the jackasses are going down.

[edit] Hindsight: Getting ready to go back
The Navy Pier in Chicago
The Navy Pier in Chicago

While at Lackland, my son retrained as a Master of Arms: M.A. (M.P. for you Army types) and scored top of his class in shooting the M9 pistol. He's now at his duty station. At the very moment I'm writing this, he's at his duty station's gym working out. He eats plenty of protein, runs miles and miles each day, and is looking even more “rough, tuff & buff” than when he first joined. He is also spending a lot of time in the pool with a mask. Of the two friends I met on the Navy Pier boardwalk in Chicago, the one that made it past Hell Week and past Second Phase, and is now — as I write this — into Third Phase, was very comfortable in water. He played water polo in college and was a life guard. So my son understands how critically important it is to be really comfortable in the water if he's going to be a water-borne warrior. We have a pool at home and my son and I both thought that since he had access to it for most of his childhood, that he was comfortable in the water. We also took private SCUBA lessons just before he shipped out to the Navy. So we both thought water wouldn't be a problem for him. We were wrong.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, he realizes he had been developing an ever-increasing fear of the water — and lack of self-confidence — with each passing day at BUD/S. The stress the instructors put the trainees under every single time they put them into the water was no doubt designed to uncover this sort of weakness. When they finally got to the Mask Appreciating exercise, my son realizes that he simply panicked. His heart rate went way up (and so too did his oxygen requirement). In such a situation (a continuous face full of water plus panic), he truly had to quit, rip off his mask, and swim to the edge of the pool. It was a constitutional weakness in water — not a physical weakness — but certainly not something the Navy needs in their SEALs.

My son goes to the pool at his duty station pretty much every day to do various exercises. Lately, at pool’s edge, he tosses in some rope, bricks, and his diving mask to the bottom. Then he pretends that he’s at BUD/S, where he must complete an assigned task on the very first try. He jumps into the pool, dons his mask while at the bottom of the pool, and clears it. Then he ties various knots, gathers up the load of bricks under his arms, and walks along the bottom of the pool (slogs through the water) to the edge of the pool where he can get a breath. If he tries to clear his mask and only half-accomplishes it so he has to blow even more air out of his lungs (awe sh*t), he just guts through it and finishes his task. Stay calm. Stay frosty. Be “one with the water.” Accomplish the task. He used to have dreams where he was underwater at BUD/S and was failing his tasks. Freud would say this was the standard performance-anxiety dream many of us have about going into a classroom and discovering there’s a test one didn’t prepare for. Now he’s having dreams where he is succeeding at underewater BUD/S exercises. I think this dream business is very significant and telling.

He will have to work as an M.A. for a while before he can apply to go into BUD/S again. I think he will be ready then. He's damn motivated.

“But as the second jet crushed into the second
  tower at the World Trade Center, I knew bin Laden
  was the culprit, and that Taliban were harboring
  him in Afghanistan. Despite the horror that day, I
  was relieved. If al Qaeda had possessed
  deployable weapons of mass destruction, atomic
  or otherwise, they would have used them.”
            Michael Yon, former A-team member
            in U.S. Army Special Forces, in Tabula Rasa

[edit] UPDATE: COLLEGE EDUCATION; BEING AN OFFICER; EARLY RESPONSIBILITY, 10 February 2007:

Curtis LeMay (in leather flight jacket) was only 37 years old when he was first tasked with leading all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands.
Curtis LeMay (in leather flight jacket) was only 37 years old when he was first tasked with leading all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands.

The Navy is really an awesome branch of the U.S. military. Today’s Navy is a high-tech operation that places a premium on education. As soon as my son arrived at his duty station, they gave him an SAT-type test during indoc there. From that, they concluded he needed remedial math and reading. They told him that since his duty station places such a high premium on education, they wanted him college-ready before starting his job. They also told him they would pay for all his tuition and books if he would take college classes while stationed there. The first stop though, is the remedial classes and he’s been doing this for a month or so. After he started taking the remedial classes, it shortly became apparent that a mistake had been made somewhere in evaluating his English skills. The language part of the SAT-like entry test must have been at the very end of the test (and my son was burned out or didn’t get to it), or the Navy goofed somehow, but it soon became apparent in his English class that my son is actually way-advanced in his reading. They were however, correct about his lack of math skills (I knew this much) and he’s been learning a lot. These are his last few days of math. He will be doing geometry for the next two days and then he can finally start working as an MA next week (at least that’s what they tell him).

During our phone call with him, my wife and I pushed him hard about getting his college degree while in the Navy. I also emphasized (again) the value of becoming an officer in the U.S. military, where they teach you about leadership and give you tons of responsibility at a very early age. Many people are surprised to learn that Curtis LeMay, the super-aggressive, cigar-chomping WWII general who oversaw all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, was only 37 years old when tasked with the assignment. My son said “Well, I’m going to tell you something but I don’t want you guys to get all gushy and go ‘AHHHhhhhhh; sweet nookums’ ” (delivered with a lilting, musical intonement). My son said the 35-ish-year-old lady who supervises his lessons and proctors his tests (his “teacher”) asked him to approach her desk at the end of class. She asked him what his plans were; whether he was going to try to make a career of the Navy. My son told her how he had washed out at BUD/S and that being a SEAL was the very reason for his joining in the first place. He said that if his only option was to be an MA, then no, he wouldn’t likely be staying long. He added though, that if he could be a SEAL, he could imagine staying in the Navy for a long time. She said “You’re not like most of the people around here; you’ve got a head on your shoulders and you’re intelligent. You shouldn’t be wasting your time as an enlisted man, you should get your college degree while you’re here and become an officer. The Navy needs people like you.”

True to our word, my wife and I waited until we got off the phone with him to go ♬♩“AHHHhhhhh… sweet nookums!”♩♬

[edit] UPDATE, 20:56, 29 March 2007:

My son’s duty station recently had a “Command Competition” where each of the departments on base entered people to compete physically to see which command had the toughest dudes. At least that’s how it was supposed to work. In reality, people just showed up if they felt like it and entered for personal reasons. My son tried out for all that was available: sit-ups, pull-ups, and running. He won them all and the competition’s officials awarded him a trophy for each event. Since it was a Command Competition, they also gave him a giganzo-size “overall” trophy for his command, the MAs.

He took the three individual trophies to his room and the big Command trophy to his MA office. Apparently, the office had only a couple of small trophies (for things like “Third place in Softball”). His boss was so pleased that his command beat all the others (making the MAs look tough), he gave my son two days off with pay. He’s going to use them when my wife and I visit next.

Apparently, he missed a swim-off that was part of the competition. The competition had actually started the week prior but he hadn’t heard anything about it at that time. My son asked them if he could do the swim anyway but they guffawed and said it was all over. My son said he thinks that had he persisted, they would have caved and let him swim anyway. He added that he could have won the swim too. That sounded a tad arrogant so I asked him why he felt that way. He said “Well, it was a front crawl swim and the guy who won did it in twelve minutes; I can do it in seven-something.” OK, maybe not so arrogant.

He’s really looking forward to an on-base Ironman competition coming up this summer. He said he’s always been fascinated by Ironmans and wants to try one. He doesn’t own a bike though so he figures he’s either going to come in at the back of the pack due to poor bike performance, or he’s really going to hurt the next few days after the competition for pushing himself too hard, or he will have to rent a bike a month in advance.

[edit] PROMOTIONS, AND THEIR IMPACT ON SEAL TRAINING, 14:06, 4 June 2007:

Petty Officer Third Class insignia. The symbol between the eagle and the chevron denotes the sailor’s rate (job classification). Crossed anchors signifies a Boatswain's Mate.
Petty Officer Third Class insignia. The symbol between the eagle and the chevron denotes the sailor’s rate (job classification). Crossed anchors signifies a Boatswain's Mate.

My son has been in the Navy now for 13 months and was just promoted to Petty Officer 3rd Class (E-4). His promotion went like this:

(Phone rings)
My son: Hello
Voice: Petty Officer [Last name]??
My son: Uhm… well, this is Seaman [Last name].
Voice: Well, it’s Petty Officer now; you’ve been promoted. Congratulations.

If a new enlistee doesn’t feel motivated, you enter as an E-1. Immediately after enlisting, my son studied a manual the Navy recruiting office provided him (regarding ranks, uniform insignia, Navy policies, etc.). Self-adhesive reminder notes are still stuck to the downstairs bathroom mirror here at the house. Before leaving his home town for Great Lakes Recruit Training Command (“basic training”), he took the entrance exam to see what he remembered from the manual. Having passed that test, he started his Navy career as an E-2. He got promoted to Seaman 1st Class (E-3) some while ago. Getting to his current rank, E-4, can’t be done in any less than one year. His bosses were pushing him to take the promotion test before he felt he was ready. “We know it’s short notice, but we want you to take this test next week. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait six more months before you can next take the test” they told him. My son said he wanted at least a month to study (but didn’t get the extra time). He passed the test anyway.

My son doesn’t want to go any higher in rank. If he gets to E-5 and then goes to Coronado, he would almost certainly be the head of a boat crew. He doesn’t want that because the boat crew leaders receive a lot of sweet personal attention from the instructors. Apparently, there were twenty-six officers in my son’s class at Coronado. That ensured that each boat crew had a crew leader who was an officer. In the DVD series on the SEALs, one can see that the instructors hold the boat crew leaders to a very high standard of conduct. When watching the DVD, keep a lookout for the fortunes of a trainee by the name of Rivera; being a boat crew leader can be extra tough if you’re singled out. Since my son left Coronado, the Navy cut back on the number of experienced personnel from the fleet who are allowed into BUD/S. Apparently, the SEALs don’t get as many good years out of these older (but more experienced) guys before they can no longer physically keep up. Consequently, the Navy is increasingly filling slots at Coronado with new recruits fresh from the civilian world. As a result, the latest classes have an abundance of E-1’s to E-3’s but very few with the rank of E-7+ (or commissioned officers). In one of the latest classes at Coronado, there were only three officers. As a result, the boat crews are now headed by guys with the rank of Petty Officer 2nd Class or 1st Class. These soles are now on the receiving end of the special, one-on-one attention from the BUD/S instructors that used to be largely reserved for commissioned officers.

I told my son that being a boat crew leader would look good on his record and grease the rails for further promotions after receiving his Trident. I also told him I thought he would do really well as a boat crew leader (I truly feel this way, of course). But having experienced the pleasures of Coronado first hand at the ripe old age of 19 (when he really wasn’t ready), he felt that BUD/S is tough enough without further stacking the deck against one’s self. I suspect he fears that getting stuck with an underperforming boat crew would almost certainly get him jettisoned. However, I believe exactly as the instructors do: underperforming boat crews are largely the result of poor leadership. Sure you can get stuck with a real turd on the crew but an effective leader can deal with things like that. I don’t think my son’s boat crew would perform poorly at all. Effective leaders “lead.”  Men need to be lead by someone they have confidence in. It’s clearly true that being a boat crew leader can be impossibly tough and get you ejected if you aren’t up to the task. But if a boat is consistently “pretty good,” you make it through with a bearable amount of flack from the instructors. Being a boat crew leader reminds me of the Chinese character for “crisis”: weiji.  It’s an ideograph comprised of the characters “dangerous” and “opportunity.” I had that symbol posted in my cubicle for years while in R&D. It served as a reminder to me that opportunity often awaits for those who remain cool when the going gets tough.

P.S.: While looking on the Web to see if a Unicode character existed for weiji, I ran across a site stating that weiji doesn’t fairly translate to “dangerous opportunity.” That author referred to a twin-character version of the word — rather like how two German words can be chained together to create a new word. I also noted that the very next post on that same Web site disagreed with the first. Regardless, I had my weiji produced, calligraphy-style with brush and ink onto an 8½ × 11 paper, by the owner of a Chinese restaurant. He wrote the single-character amalgam version (an ideograph) and stated that it does indeed translate to “dangerous opportunity.” I later posted that sign in my cubicle at a fuel cell laboratory where I worked with a Chinese engineer who has a Ph.D. in electrochemistry. He knows English about as well as Chinese and affirmed its meaning.

On an aside, the nature of Asian languages has a profound influence on the very nature of Asian society. Westerners are often baffled by the negotiating style of businessmen from Asian countries (primarily China and Japan). I’ve met and negotiated with groups of businessmen from these countries several times myself and was struck by how little verbal communication amongst themselves they require. In every case, they flew quite a distance to visit us and had ample time to prepare in advance of the meeting. These representatives speak their native tongue as well as English. When they have a sidebar conversation, they speak privately in their native tongue. When we have a sidebar conversation, we do so in English, which our visitors can also understand. Realizing this of course, Americans may try to whisper. But Americans tend to be a loud bunch and inevitably, a less-sensitive topic comes up in a sidebar and whispering discipline erodes from thereon. I’ve long theorized that the nature of the Chinese and Japanese written languages imbues them with a harmonized philosophy and outlook on life to a much greater extent than Western peoples, who use the letter-based Romance languages. My second-favorite example of the Chinese language is the character for “trouble”; it’s an ideograph comprising three symbols: the symbol for “house” with two women in it. It should come as no wonder that male chauvinism is alive and well in these societies; old-style notions of men and women are deeply entrenched in the very building blocks of their written language. Policemen in America often tell about how after working with their partner in a car for years, they can damn near read each others’ minds. Negotiators from Asian countries invariably struck me as possessing this attribute; they sometimes just looked at each other and gave barely perceptible nods. Every time I came away from these negotiations, I tried to develop a theory-of-mind with regard to our Asian visitors: how did we strike them? I eventually concluded that we must come across the opposite of how they came across to us. We must strike them as loud, loquacious, poorly coordinated (less able to “get onto the same page”), and horribly prone to spilling the beans by discussing sensitive topics right in front of them.

[edit] UPDATE: GOING UNDERCOVER WITH NCIS, 05:55, 23 December 2007:

NCIS

In the summer of 2007, my son was in his little guard shack at his duty station when the head of the M.A.s (a lady who commands about a hundred M.A.s) told him to come out to talk to her. She told him she just received a call from NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service). The first thing that went through my son’s mind was “oh crap, what’d I do, what’d I do?” She quickly followed up by saying the NCIS wanted someone from the Navy to go undercover in an investigation. Many are surprised to learn that NCIS isn’t a department of the Navy and NCIS personnel aren’t even “military,” they’re Federal civilian law enforcement personnel, like the FBI or BATF; they just specialize exclusively in Navy-related investigations. For this particular investigation, they reportedly needed someone who was currently in the Navy to help. She said NCIS asked her to suggest someone suitable for the undercover assignment and the first person—in fact, the only person—that came to mind, she told my son, was him. She said she couldn’t tell him what it was about but he’d be contacted by NCIS shortly. By the way, when he’s not in a guard shack of one sort or another, my son spends his 12-hour shift piloting a patrol boat, chasing recreational craft away from a certain Nimitz-class aircraft carrier when it’s at its home port.

In a few days, NCIS called him. A lot of Navy personnel were buying drugs downtown so the NCIS had decided to do drug-buy stings on dealers in cooperation with local police. They wanted the word to get out onto the street that dealers shouldn’t sell drugs to Navy personnel. They wanted someone from the Navy who could talk “Navy lingo” if questioning from the dealers got detailed. They also wanted an individual who looked “obviously military.” That’s supposedly what they were looking for when they called the head of the M.A.s. They didn’t say as much, but I suspect that the reason they specifically called the head of the M.A.s is they wanted someone with law enforcement training and the powers of arrest—not because he would actually make any arrests, but work in law-enforcement gives individuals street smarts. I also suspect they weren’t terribly concerned about “talking Navy lingo,” and needed someone who really was from the Navy to bolster a legal theory or point of law, and/or that they wanted their message to the drug dealers to be strengthened by the fact that one of their people truly was “Navy.”

It’s not how my son performed in the undercover operation that I’m proud of him, it’s the fact that he was the first person that came to the mind of the head of the M.A.s. My son said he had only spoken once with the head of the M.A.s briefly when he first arrived at his duty station. She asked him about his background and he told her he had washed out of SEAL training and hoped to eventually go back. My son’s immediate superiors also know my son works out every day (he’s completely got the Crossfit “religion”) because they make special accommodations in his schedule for him to go work out at the gym. I don’t think the head of the M.A.s knew he worked out, but I believe she observed how damn physically fit he looks and how he carries himself. She also knew he must be a highly motivated individual based on her initial interview with him when he told her about his desire to be a SEAL. I offered this observation to my son and he said “Dad… this is a limited-duty station. People with medical waivers for light duty work come here. There are guys with bad backs and pregnant chicks crawling all over this base.” I asked, rather incredulously, “and that applies to the damn M.A.s? Are you trying to tell me that the guards are a bunch of ‘goombas’?” He replied, “well… no.”

Young men wear humility particularly well. I don’t know whether my son works this “awe shucks, I’m just a country doctor”-thing on purpose or if he just naturally feels that way. I think it’s the latter. Either way, I couldn’t be more proud of him.

As regards the actual sting, it was the classic drug sting stuff you see on Fox network’s Cops. My son and this young NCIS guy approached two drug dealers loitering in front of a convenience store. My son and the NCIS guy (the “buyers”) said they wanted to buy some crack. The drug dealers said they didn’t have any but did have some meth. The buyers said something along the lines of “Hey, that sounds great. We’ll take some of that!”. That response sounded somewhat unrealistic to me but it apparently aroused no suspicion. The drug dealers told the buyers someone would come along shortly with what they were looking for. Apparently, they were talking only to “runners” who front for the actual dealer. While they were waiting for the dealer, the runners and the buyers made small talk. “So, you guys are in the Navy huh?” they asked. “Yeah” my son answered.

After about fifteen minutes, the actual drug dealer drove up in a Mercedes, sold them their meth, and our buyers paid him. As they walked away, they gave a secret “signal” that local police and NCIS investigators watching from nearby could see. The plan had been that once the signal had been given, the local police would swoop in with their cars, block the drug dealer in before he could leave the parking lot, and make the arrests. Unfortunately, all the police and NCIS cars necessarily had to position themselves across the street some distance away. At the time the transaction went down and the signal had been given, traffic had backed up in several directions at once and all the law enforcement cars had to wait a moment for traffic to clear before they could move out. My son and the NCIS guy just watched over their shoulders as the drug dealer drove away with the law enforcement cars in chase. They also watched as a couple of cars pulled into the parking lot to arrest the two runners.

Reportedly, the police and NCIS caught up with the drug dealer several blocks away. He had allegedly murdered someone several months prior and had an outstanding warrant for his arrest. He had the marked drug money on him but didn’t have any drugs on his person when they pulled him over. He did, though, have a locked glove compartment. NCIS investigators made the actual arrest and turned the suspect over to local police on-scene. The police later obtained a search warrant to open the glove compartment, where they discovered more drugs and a handgun that was later determined to be the one used in the murder.

When my son told me of all the above, I asked how the runners assumed he and the NCIS guy were Navy personnel. My son said “well, for one thing, we were both wearing grey tee-shirts that said ‘NAVY’ across the front.” Yeah, but lots of people wear those shirts. My son responded “Dad, these drug dealers don’t look anything like we do; they’re all meth’d-out on drugs.”

At the end of the day, my son was at the downtown police station filling out his witness statement. He said the scene was a stereotype straight out of the movies with lots of cops sitting at their crammed-together desks with their coats on the back of their chairs and guns in their holsters. The buzz was accented with a cop who was hauling a spiky haired tuff in handcuffs through the maze. An obvious prostitute was being processed by one of the officers at his desk. Then he heard a familiar voice. He looked up. A policeman was bringing his methed-up female drug runner though the office area. She, having spied my son from half way across the room, yelled out “Hey, I had no idea you were a cop; you guys were GOOD.”

Note: The above occurred earlier this year. I can talk about the above now for two reasons: 1) The express intention of NCIS in performing the above sting was to get the word out to drug dealers on the street that customers who are seemingly Navy personnel might really be law enforcement officers who could bust them, and 2) my son will no longer be working for NCIS in this particular capacity since he recently put in his chit to go back to Coronado to try to be a SEAL.

[edit] 2008 UPDATES

My son is now going back to BUD/S to try to be a SEAL again. Click here to skip forward to the beginning of that section.

[edit] OBSERVATIONS ON “THE WILL TO SUCCEED”, 14:42, 27 May 2007:

The Navy would desperately like to find a way to screen SEAL candidates using some magic testing technique that could predict their likelihood of making it through BUD/S. Most trainees have the physical capability to get through the evolutions and tolerate the cold; it’s how much “heart” the trainee has: a desire to be a SEAL that is so powerful that a man is willing to endure pain and the extreme discomfort of bone-chilling cold. The Navy spends millions of dollars yearly advertising to recruit for the SEALs and still eliminates 70% of those who try out. That’s not an efficient way of doing things. Coronado had a brief foray where the base commander pressured the instructors to lighten up so more trainees could make it through. Of course, this was deleterious to the SEALs’ esprit de corps. In fact, the class just before my son’s was the last one under that particular commander and it had an unheard-of graduation rate. My son’s class was the first to go back to the old way of doing things under a new commander. It would be better though, if precious slots in BUD/S at Coronado could be filled with candidates who not only have high ASVAB scores, but have also scored high on a test predicting a given recruit had the will to succeed in the face of adversity.

Soon after arriving at Coronado, my son and the other SEAL trainees were given a test. It was a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-like test that MIT developed in hopes that some sort of correlation could eventually be found linking test results to the likelihood of making it through BUD/S. My son didn’t even tell me about this until after he was done at Coronado. He told me of the test and how while at Coronado, he had been under a boat on the beach (something you do a lot of in BUD/S) with some guy. This guy said he could feel and hear his knee tearing as they ran. My son reacted in the civilian-sane way: “Dude! You can’t keep that up. You’ll really screw up your knee. You gotta go see the medic.” The guy’s response was something along the lines of “Forget that! They’d roll me to a later class or drop me.” Rip, rip, crunch, crunch, rip. My son exclaimed to me “How the hell can anyone test for that?” Now, I wouldn’t put anything past the capability of the U.S. armed services to eventually solve. But I was struck by how emphatic my son was over how the reaction of his running mate was the sort of thing that couldn’t be uncovered via any written test. He had taken the test and he had “been there, done that” under the boats. Accordingly, I accept that testing for that kind of dedication is a mighty difficult task and that’s why the likes of MIT was involved in the experiment.

Strange as it may seem, this reminds me of tests some stockbroker candidates were once given. My brother is a stockbroker. He was the manager of a branch office of a nation-wide brokerage house. He was given various entry tests before getting his license, including an actual MMPI. A lot of money is spent in training a stockbroker and lots of opportunity income isn’t realized when a new stockbroker fails to flourish. After years of messing around with testing foolishness, the brokerage houses found only one correlation between all of their test data and the likelihood any given broker would be successful: people from divorced families tend to do better. They could find no other correlations. It didn’t matter if you went to a community college or Harvard. It didn’t matter if you were a first-born child or last-born. Nothing else mattered — at least no other correlations were found. They still give all their would-be brokers a test, but it’s a test to see how well an individual takes tests! At this, it’s an exceedingly accurate predictor. One has to take lots of tests to be certified as a broker so one’s ability at taking them is important. I spoke with my brother when I was writing this entry. He thought (this was his opinion now) that three attributes are required to be a successful broker: bravery (a.k.a boldness or chutzpah in this context), organization, and perseverance. One can get by satisfactorily if they have just one of these attributes in spades but the super performers have lots of all three. Apparently, these aspects of one’s personality can’t be accurately measured with a test. My brother used the word “bravery” and its two parenthetical equivalents before I told him I was adding to this article; they’re the words he chose. Bravery, organization, and perseverance; I thought that was pretty interesting. A final observation: after reading a draft of this paragraph to my brother to check for accuracy, he added that the brokerage house theorized that the reason children from divorced families succeed more often is they are better accustomed to overcoming adversity. Doubly interesting.

Perhaps this explains the affinity some hiring managers have for ex-Navy SEALs and others like them (e.g. Army Special Forces). There’s clearly a certain “cool” factor, I long ago recognized, that shines on such individuals and makes managers want to hire them. Why the bias? Could it simply be a matter that people want to “hang” with a guy like an ex-Navy SEAL on lunch breaks and listen to his stories? If the guy isn’t an arrogant cuss who’s full of himself and is genuinely likable, maybe you can pick up an anecdote here and witty retort there. Perhaps some of his “coolness” might rub off onto you. For a variety of reasons, most of us wanted to belong to the “cool groups” in high school; it’s natural to want to associate with appealing people you think are better than you in some way and have high social skills and standing. We are after all, social animals. But, I wondered, maybe there is a truly valid but intangible reason why ex-Navy SEALs and others like that might be more productive employees. I think I’ve got the answer and the stockbroker angle was the key.

Even in the modern world, we must daily overcome adversity to accomplish our assigned and personal goals. Today of course, “adversity” is non-life-threatening stuff like dealing with a prick of a boss, or a salesman not getting rattled after having heard “no” twenty-five times in a row, or someone in R&D dealing with the fallout and opposition arising from an experiment that failed and plowing ahead to salvage the project. One must continuously stay cool as a cucumber and maintain a friendly and professional demeanor at work. Our little social slights to coworkers when we are frustrated and not at our best are long remembered. Whether it is interacting with coworkers or our boss, it takes twenty “attaboys” to make up for one “awe shit.” Employers are always looking for those individuals who are perpetually on an even keel, mature, seemingly never lose their cool, and quickly and successfully accomplish complex and challenging tasks with minimal supervision. Often, jobs also require that someone must perform in a team environment as well. And look what you get when you hire someone like an ex-Navy SEAL: a man with a demonstrated ability to overcome obstacles and a demonstrated ability to work in a team environment. Even after retiring as a Navy SEAL and going to work in the civilian workforce, the man who drives to work each morning without complaint to face and overcome the day’s challenges is performing the modern equivalent of riding off to slay dragons. He must, in order to bring home the material resources necessary to ensure his children aren’t raised in poverty. Especially demanding jobs require lots of bravery, organization, and perseverance. Doing well at a challenging job is the human equivalent of the bull elk that commands the best valley territory with lush meadows and a flowing stream; his cows and offspring enjoy the resources necessary to thrive and have the best chance of survival. The ability to overcome adversity — whatever its form — and succeed is an attribute all employers seek.

What has become clearer to me since my son tried to become a SEAL is just how intangible the ability to overcome adversity is. And it isn’t an attribute that only the military needs; any demanding job, like being a stockbroker, needs it. It is important for men in many walks of life. Even more interesting, the ability to overcome adversity is so deeply rooted in one’s character that the brightest minds to date haven’t created a written test that can assess it.

Statue of Buddha at sunset
Statue of Buddha at sunset

Not that I think being a hard-driven workaholic is the be-all, best thing in existence. All societies need a mix of personality types amongst its citizens. Clearly, certain leadership positions are best filled with people with type-A personalities. One can however, overdo it while trying to reach one’s personal objectives. I have a friend who spent quite some time in Thailand. He told me of the Thai people and Buddhism. Buddhism is arguably more of a philosophy than a religion. Buddhism teaches how to accept everything that life — and death — throws at you with grace and tranquility. Regardless of whether one reaches their objective in life or how hard one works on achieving that end, one squanders their life if they endlessly chase the carrot on the stick and forget to enjoy the ride on the way. I’ve seen workaholics spend 13 hours a day at work six days a week who now have regrets over missing out on family life when their children were young. I’ve seen lazy bums who’ve done precisely the opposite. Neither is a proper balance in life.

[edit] “MATURITY”, 11:43, 11 JUNE 2007:

I’ve developed a theory regarding maturity in young men. European young men appear to be more mature and secure in their manhood than American young men. My best friend is well-traveled and I’ve spoken with him for years about differences between all things American vs. the rest of the world. Also, my daughter and son-in-law recently arrived back after teaching English in Vienna for a year. My daughter by the way, speaks German and Spanish and was able to learn much about Austrian life that year. Also, my wife and I traveled in Europe and observed first hand the differences between Europeans and Americans. I have a theory as to why young men in Europe come across as more mature and self-confident. Not surprisingly, there are a variety of reasons to account for this but all of them boil down to the fact that European young men truly have more substance at an earlier age than American men, who tend to project a superficial façade.

Why more substance? It seems to boil down to education, sexual attitudes, social hierarchies, and mandatory military service. I’ll address these in order:

  • In Europe, young men just out of the equivalent of high school are much more knowledgeable about the world and world history. They also speak not only their native tongue but also know English pretty well. This “education” factor alone is significant. A European young male knows he’s got a head on his shoulders.
  • In many European countries, prostitution is legal and well regulated so it’s not uncommon for a young man’s first sexual encounters to be with a prostitute. This is not a big deal at all in Europe. A young man heading into his first meaningful relationship is already sexually experienced and confident. Consequently, European young men don’t have an entire culture of drinking and socializing centered largely around the sexual conquest of women.
  • European school children don’t fragment into social cliques like they do in American high schools. In America, you have “the jocks,” “the soshes” (if that’s how you spell it), “the nerds,” etc. This concept is so foreign to Europeans that one of the first questions a classroom of older Viennese school children had for my daughter was “Are American high schools really like in the movies?” My daughter had to have them explain what they meant. To them, high school social cliques were the product of Hollywood screenwriters. They seemed suitably awed when informed that it was largely true. In contrast, European public schools are more like American private schools: they’re socially “flat.” Consequently, European young men don’t have a strong a sense that they’ve been pre-judged all their lives. They don’t feel they’ve been labeled as belonging to a particular social segment, nor do they feel the need to prove they don’t deserve the label under which they’ve felt marginalized. Instead, they’ve spent their socially formative years in a comparatively supportive social environment of their peers.

    P.S. The school kids got a big kick out of seeing pictures of the inside of an American refrigerator. They studied the pictures intently.

  • Finally, Austrian men, as with many other European countries, have universal, compulsory military service for men. In Austria, it’s a six-month to one-year commitment. This weighs on a young man’s mind starting in primary school. Constantly living with the realization that one will be drafted into the military when one is in his late teens or early twenties drives home the lesson that “baby” is not the center of the universe; one must subordinate himself to society for the greater good.

Due to the above four factors, I believe, young European males come across like older American men: self-confident and socially at ease. If you have dinner at a restaurant, they are invariably keeping an eye out for whether you are properly being served by the waiter. When in group discussion, they are curious about others and want to hear from their foreign visitors; they are loath to talk about themselves or brag. They develop a true independence at a relatively early age: it’s not uncommon at all for a European male in his early adulthood to have spent a summer — or an entire year — backpacking through, say, the Australian outback or throughout the Greek islands. They’re not intimidated by the notion that if they drop their cell phone into the toilet while traveling, mommy’s not going to be around to fish it out for them; they’ll have to do it them-self. All in all, European young men come across as worldly, confident, and mature. They dress more maturely too. Clearly, there are good reasons underlying this inner confidence. As Freud said, after the instinct for self preservation, there are two motivations of men to explain their behavior: the sex drive, and the desire to be great. European men have a head start in both departments. In the end, European young men at, say, the age of 22+, truly seem to have embraced the two golden rules of dealing with adversity: 1) don’t sweat the small shit, and 2) everything is small shit. They seem to understand at an early age that one will be remembered and judged not by their wealth or possessions, but by how they treated others. By contrast, you can often easily identify a young American male in Europe simply by the way he walks down the street. He takes up more room and walks “with a ’tude” as if busying himself with the effort to project the “I’m rough, tough ’n’ buff so see me strut”-look. It’s almost laughable because the bravado is pure façade. Either that, or the poor young man is projecting the military and industrial might of America upon himself. Older American males have come into their own by the time they’re in their 40s and no longer expend energy telegraphing male bravado. Accordingly, it’s somewhat more difficult to identify an older American male traveling in Europe (so long as he’s not over-weight). The easiest way to tell is from his clothing or the way he holds his cigarette.

An aside on “blending in”: I worked hard at trying to blend in while visiting Austria, hating the notion of being conspicuously “American” for any reason. One has to be especially careful when eating at restaurants; ways of holding and using one’s flatware while dining that are perfectly appropriate in America are considered childish, even barbaric, in many places in Europe. I watched what I wore, how I walked, and even the expression on my face. Austrian men have this practiced, dour, nothing-can-impress-me countenance that I found could be rather easily mimicked. Austrian men also assume a rather polished, even military-like, posture that took a bit more work to replicate. I even practiced my “Ich bin Amerikaner” (“I’m an American”) line until my daughter and son-in-law pronounced it to be passable for Viennese German. I imagined I would use that line for the inevitable (desperately hoped-for) confusion Austrians would have regarding my origins. Yet, I got to use the phrase only once: he was a young man having difficulty with a change machine in a train station and was probably desperate enough to approach the mayor of Dorkville to break a ten-Euro note. But I rattled off my line and he instantly showed me his palms in a “never mind, sorry”-type of motion and said something in German that was the equivalent of “Oh, I understand.” I walked off thoroughly pleased with myself, now ready to try to fool an immigration official with some James Bond-like exploit of impersonation. I eventually found that while traveling, some officials, like the security people at the airport terminal you show your passport to, will address an oncoming traveler in either English or German based only upon visual clues. I suppose that if all you do is ask for a damn passport all day, little games like this probably keeps your mind from turning to mush. I found that if I kept my passport hidden, they were getting it wrong (saying hello and asking for my passport in German) more often than they were getting it right. It takes effort to pull this off; if you aren’t paying attention to the details as you approach them, they’ll invariably address you in English as you approach (“Hello. Passport please.”) How’d you know, how’d you know?!? I hate it when that happens.

P.S. Going back for a moment to my “well-traveled friend”: A long time ago, I was working on an industrial control device and was designing computer-generated, algorithmically produced alert sounds for it. One of the alerts was a low-level one that I tried to make sound as close as possible to one featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was the low, grumbling alert where Bowman was in the pod and had just pressed the first buttons to blow the explosive bolts on the hatch. I played my recreation of it for my friend, proud of my accomplishment and thoroughly pleased with its similarity to the one in the movie. He shrugged his shoulders dismissively, pronounced that “It sounds like a Belgian busy signal,” and walked away quite unimpressed. Yeah, well-traveled. He might well have said “It just sounds like a Belgian busy signal: government-owned telephone exchange: east of the Senne River.”

Anyway, back to the subject of maturity: The ability to accept everything that life throws at you with grace and tranquility requires, to a certain extent, wisdom. Wisdom comes with maturity. When my son was younger, like most 15-year-olds, he had entered a phase where he thought he knew everything. That phase reminded me of something Mark Twain once said about his father:

“ When I was fourteen, I couldn’t believe how ignorant the old man was and ran away from home. When I was twenty one and visited home, I couldn't believe how much my father had learned in seven short years. ”

My son seemed to have fallen victim to that malady afflicting most adolescents: he was perpetually experiencing an awakening over how knowledgeable he had become. And yet, he was still making poor decisions. I was having difficulty explaining to him how having knowledge does not automatically equate to wisdom and maturity so I posted the following sign in his room:

KNOWLEDGE INTELLIGENCE WISDOM
(Accumulated Facts) (Synthesis) (Judgment & Maturity)
• Remembering facts that are
  each explicitly learned.
 		 • The ability to take one or more bits of knowledge
  and deduce a new conclusion that hadn’t been
  explicitly learned before.		 • Knowing what is important and what’s not.
 
 
• The ability to look at problems from a different
  point of view.		 • Anticipating what the broader implications of
  actions might be.
• The ability to recognize connections and
  associations — patterns — in data and
  observations.		 • Understanding peoples’ motivations and being able
  able to anticipate their behavior.
 
• Planning for the future rather than for the moment.
• Forgoing what you want to do in order to do what
  is expected of you.


That was just part of what it took to raise a well-adjusted, proper young man. Things seem to have worked out so far.

[edit] EUROPEANS’ VIEWS ON AMERICA, 12:46, 13 JUNE 2007:

On our first day in Rome, my wife and I were out for a walk looking for a place to eat. At a bus stop was an 80-year-old man and a thirties-something lady. Generally throughout Europe, people below the age of 30 universally know English whereas those older than that know English only if their job requires it (working in the retail service industry or tourism, for instance). Needing directions, I asked if either spoke a little English (even if they don’t, everyone understands that question). I fully expected the lady to speak up but the 80-year-old guy spoke up in a strong and confident voice and said he knew English perfectly well. He had started working for Americans right after the war. He asked what country I was from. We had been forewarned by my daughter and my son-in-law that people in Austria (our next stop) are near-universally incredulous that Americans could have voted for Bush the second time. Regardless of your political leanings, this is the reality of how many Europeans feel. As long as American’s aren’t “ugly Americans,” Europeans treat Americans decently but there’s a growing resentment over America’s foreign policy lately and many Americans can sense the tension.

Anyway, back to the old guy. He asked us where we were from. I told him we were Americans but added — largely as a way to disarm people and humorously break the ice — that I didn’t vote for Bush either time. He wrinkled his nose, puckered his lips, waved his palms at me in a dismissive side-to-side motion, and indicated that this “Bush stuff” is transitory B.S. of no substance. He’s 80-something after all; he’s a “big picture” kinda guy now. With a big, sincere smile, he put his hand on my shoulder and warmly said “Good for you. America is at the top of the heap. No other country comes close. You’re lucky.” We had a short but wonderful conversation as I did what my wife sometimes criticizes me for doing if done indelicately: I do a “brain suck.”

I thought that since Mussolini’s Italy was an Axis power during the war, that Italians had no problem with the Germans. Not true. From the point of view of the average Italian, the Germans were an occupying power who mistreated the Italian populace. Although we think that things started going bad for the Germans after June of 1944 (the D-day landings), things were going bad for the Germans in Italy by early ’43, immediately after Germany lost in North Africa. There wasn’t enough food for the average Italian citizen thereafter. By the end of the war, there was hardly a cat remaining in Italy; the Italians had eaten them all to survive. The Italians hated the Germans. Maybe they weren’t throwing kisses and flowers at American servicemen when they rolled into Rome, but Italians quickly found that the Americans were very nice, cared about their personal welfare, fed them, and got their economy going again. They even hired Italians for American construction projects in Italy. This apparently, is what happened with this man.

The average young person in Europe doesn’t remember much of the Cold War, let alone WWII. This old man had been around the block more than a few times and couldn’t hold America in any higher regard — nearly a reverence. His bus pulled up and we had to say goodbye. I wish I had taken his picture. I wish I had been able to visit with him for several hours over dinner. After his bus pulled away, my wife and I walked, as the old man had directed, up the road where we found a nice sidewalk café and ate some pizza. We like Italy. The people are warmer and friendlier than any other place we visited. The girls are prettier there too; some are positively stunning.

[edit] UPDATE: DIVE PHYSICAL 17:41, 28 January 2008:

A few weeks ago, my son filled out the proper paperwork to go back to BUD/S and e-mailed it to Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado (or simply, “Coronado”). They responded the very next day, telling him to go get his dive physical. A dive physical is essentially a standard physical on steroids. You get an EKG, blood-work, inoculations, the whole nine yards. Once he passes his dive physical, he expects to have few days to a week before he undergoes his Physical Screening Test (PST). Regardless, he’s (very) ready for the physical; he’s never been in better shape except for his run times, which have flagged a bit given that it’s wintertime. Accordingly, he’s been doing a lot of extra running lately.

The PST comprises gym performance on pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups; a 500-yard swim; and a 1.5-mile run. My son can now do all of these far better than when he first qualified to try out for the SEALs.

[edit] UPDATE: Scheduling the PST, 06:28, 21 February 2008 (UTC):

A single modified tactical SM-3 Block IA was launched at 5:36 PM (Hawaii time) from the USS Lake Erie (CG70), which is a U.S. Navy AEGIS cruiser. The missile successfully impacting a 5,000-lb, non-functioning NRO satellite approximately 247 km (133 nautical miles) over the Pacific Ocean, as it travled through space at more than 17,000 mph.Based on U.S. Navy press release.
A single modified tactical SM-3 Block IA was launched at 5:36 PM (Hawaii time) from the USS Lake Erie (CG70), which is a U.S. Navy AEGIS cruiser. The missile successfully impacting a 5,000-lb, non-functioning NRO satellite approximately 247 km (133 nautical miles) over the Pacific Ocean, as it travled through space at more than 17,000 mph.

Based on U.S. Navy press release.

First things first. Here’s an excerpt, from a less than an hour ago, as originally reported here on CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. Navy succeeded in its effort to shoot down an inoperable spy satellite before it could crash to Earth and potentially release a cloud of toxic gas, the Department of Defense said Wednesday. The first opportunity for the Navy to shoot down the satellite came about 10:30 p.m. ET Wednesday. The plan included firing a missile from the USS Lake Erie in the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii to destroy the satellite.

They did it on their first try with a ten-second launch window!

In the weeks to follow, it was reported in Aviation Week & Space Technology (an American aviation industry magazine with ads in it for stuff like missile defense systems and the 787) that airborne sensors aboard an RC-135 Cobra Ball reconnaissance aircraft from the 55th Wing at Offutt AFB, which is equipped with spectral analysis equipment, confirmed the presence of the toxic hydrazine rocket fuel after the intercept. The event was also imaged by the Navy’s NP-3D Cast Glance (a variation of the P-3 Orion), which shot the video released to the public. The MDA’s HALO I and II flying observatories also assisted in the intercept. Though the USS Lake Erie was some 500 miles northwest of Hawaii, the intercept occurred just west of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii, which bristles with telescopes. The intercept also occurred within sight of the Maui space surveillance telescope. Finally, the kinetic intercept vehicle itself transmitted highly detailed imagery back to the ground. Thus, the intercept was ultra-well documented imaging-wise.

Go Navy!


“ Air Force people do more work by 5:00 in the afternoon than most people do all day! ”

I got that one from a friend of mine who is an ex-Air Force Captain.

My son passed his dive physical so his next step towards getting back to BUD/S is getting his Physical Screening Test (PST) scheduled. It must be proctored by someone and the task was assigned to the Master Diver on base. The people at the dive locker had earlier put my son off for a week because the aircraft carrier is currently in port, which means a lot of underwater maintenance must be done.

SM-3 kinetic intercept vehicle. This warhead contains no explosives. At a closing speed of 9,151 m/s (20,470 mph), every 10 kg of the intercept vehicle has the kinetic energy equivalent to the explosive energy of 100 kg (220 lb) of TNT.
SM-3 kinetic intercept vehicle. This warhead contains no explosives. At a closing speed of 9,151 m/s (20,470 mph), every 10 kg of the intercept vehicle has the kinetic energy equivalent to the explosive energy of 100 kg (220 lb) of TNT.

Today, my son knocked on the door at his base’s dive locker. “Come on in!” a voice shouted from inside the door. “I’m on the sh*tter!” My son entered and found guys suiting up in a locker room. They were all busy with their individual tasks at hand and paid little attention to him. The place had an ambience that was appealing to someone like my son—a hybrid of the living quarters at a fire-station and the locker room of a SWAT team unit. My son continued his conversation with the voice on the other side of the door to the head. He had obviously entered a world where real men worked, in a real man’s environment, and where military-grade work really gets accomplished. This was a place where you performed and there was no politically correct patting you on the head for “good effort.” This was where the rubber hit the road.

The Master Diver eventually finished his business in the head and met my son face to face. He’s a tall guy—seemingly six foot-three, looking to be in his early 50s, and clearly in damn good physical shape. He perused my son’s dive physical report and pronounced that it all seemed to be in good order. He questioned my son about his swimming training regimen and general workout regimen. While listening to my son tell me of this conversation, I expected that at each turn, the Master Diver would respond with something like “While that might be good enough to try out for those slack-jawed SEALs, that wouldn’t be nearly damn good enough to keep up with a Navy Diver©™®! Damn it son, if you’re wanna be able to perform at 300 feet down, you gotta exercise like you mean it!”  Instead, he just listened to my son’s account of the types of work-outs he does and nodded thoughtfully at each answer. He mentioned that he had noticed him working out in the gym on a few occasions. The Master Diver asked what his time was on his 500-yard side-stroke and my son answered truthfully, that he tries to keep it in the “high eights” (~8:50). At the conclusion of their brief meeting, they scheduled his PST for next Thursday. Greg L (my talk) 07:08, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tests vs. the likelihood of making it through BUD/S

As I’ve written earlier, the U.S. Navy has spent a lot of money trying to find indicators that can be used to screen candidates for the BUD/S Challenge. They hired some MIT researchers to give the candidates in my son’s BUD/S class (the first time he was at Coronado) a computerized test in hopes of finding a strong correlation between something on the test and the likelihood of graduating from BUD/S. Currently, ASVAB scores have a decent, but not extraordinarily high, correlation with graduation rate. The ASVAB comprises a number of subtests to evaluate cognitive abilities. Different rates (jobs in the Navy) require a certain minimum combined score on certain subtests. Jobs like going into “Nuclear” or trying out for the SEAL Challenge require the same score on the same three subtests: Arithmetic Reasoning (AR), Verbal Aptitude (VE), and Mechanical Comprehension (MC). In testing shorthand, this is called a “AR+VE+MC” score.

A recent study by the US Navy Personnel Research Studies & Technology and the US Navy Selection & Classification Office found a somewhat better correlation if a different set of subtests was used to screen for SEAL Challenge candidates: Mechanical Comprehension (MC), plus two different ones, General Science (GS), and Electronics Information (EI). In 1997/1998 study of 849 candidates, those who had a “GS+MC+EI” score of 174–180 had a 49.1% graduation rate. But those with a “GS+MC+EI” score of 195 had a graduation rate of 65.4%. However, the Navy would have a tougher time setting a higher ASVAB standard to qualify for entering the BUD/S Challenge because there are so few candidates with the highest scores; there were 177 candidates in the study who (coincidentally) had an “GS+MC+EI” score of 177 but only 26 candidates who scored 195. So the correlation with mental ability and the odds of making it through BUD/S is there, but it’s a weak one.

Further, there is more to being a good SEAL than having the greatest possible ability to make it through BUD/S. It makes sense—to me anyway—that the sort of guy who can get through BUD/S would be someone with good abilities in General Science, Mechanical Comprehension, and Electronics Information. The authors of the Navy study theorized that perceptual speed and technical tests would correlate better to the highly physical BUD/S environment than would the academically oriented math and verbal tests. So it strikes me as interesting that the Navy is willing to pay the cost of going through a few extra recruits by using both Arithmetic Reasoning and Verbal Aptitude as two of the three subtests. These skills are clearly important if one is going into Nuclear but on the surface, seem less critical of a skill for a SEAL. Apparently though, the Navy places a high premium on SEALs who can deal with numbers and the written word; they don’t want a SEAL who drags a dead bad guy out of hole in the sand, drops him at the feet of a lieutenant, and announces “Here… for you. You want me kill more?!?” Accordingly, the Navy isn’t trying to attract those with the absolutely best odds of making it through BUD/S. The Navy’s SEALs must quickly solve problems, operate high-tech equipment, and must be able to communicate effectively amongst themselves and with superiors who are two, even three steps higher up in the chain of command. Being able to effectively get SEAL missions accomplished is, after all, the primary purpose of requiring minimum scores on select aspects of the ASVAB: to ensure the recruit has both the aptitude for a job, and also has the cognitive abilities to perform well at intellectually challenging tasks. It’s icing on the cake for the Navy that the current AR+VE+MC score on the ASVAB serves double-duty as an indicator (albeit a rather weak one) of the likelihood of an individual making it through BUD/S.

Although there is no mental test known that is an extremely good predictor of an individual’s odds of making it through BUD/S (the average drop-out rate is around 70%), there is a strong correlation between one’s run and swim times on their PST versus their odds. The correlations are shown in the tables below:

PST RUN PERFORMANCE VS.
ODDS OF MAKING IT THROUGH BUD/S
(Used to be 11:30 max. to enter
SEAL Challenge. It is now 10:59.9 max.)
1.5-MILE RUN* % Graduated
Greater than 11:05 8.9%
10:13–11:05 18.7%
9:52–10:12 27.9%
≤9:51 41.5%

* In boots and pants

The above are the run times. The swim time correlations are as follows:

PST SWIM PERFORMANCE VS.
ODDS OF MAKING IT THROUGH BUD/S
(12:30 max. to enter SEAL Challenge)
500-YD SIDE-STROKE % Graduated
Greater than 10:52 10.2%
10:12–10:52 19.5%
9:43–10:11 25.3%
9:02–9:42 33.6%
≤9:01 43.3%

Now here’s the kicker: For those who can do a run time of less than 9:33 and a swim of less than 10:11, they have a 55.2% chance of making it through BUD/S. I’m not sure as of this writing what my son’s PST run time is, but his swim is around 8:50. This further improves his odds.

Clearly, SEAL recruits with PST times that just barely meet the minimums have stacked the deck against themselves. Willpower or “heart” can only go so far; your legs still gotta carry your heart to the other end of the beach. Unless you have the willpower to push yourself to the point of developing rhabdomyolysis (“rhabdo” as my son refers to it), it’s nearly impossible to continue through the evening and into the next morning when the instructors have ground down those around you who are in even better shape to the point that some have already decided to DOR.

There’s something else at BUD/S that should increase my son’s odds: “surf torture.” That’s where the instructors have the recruits soak themselves in the surf—often at night—until their lips turn blue and they have uncontrollable shivering. No, it’s not easy. But getting through BUD/S is about being able to withstand the punishment only until 70% of the other recruits have DOR’d. It’s all about relative advantages. The recruits’ ears are underwater when they’re on their backs in the water. My son quickly discovered the last time he was in BUD/S that he can’t hear the instructors hollering at the group. Whereas some individuals’ minds begin to focus on the stinging cold, my son seems to “go to a happy place.” He enjoys the respite from having to pay attention to the instructors and just listens to the underwater sounds while he’s there. I’m not sure where he got this ability. I’d like to think that our conversations about surf torture before he went to BUD/S the first time helped in some way. We had discussed at length about monks who are able to condition their bodies to exposure to cold so their bodies’ shock reflex, which reduces blood flow to the extremities in order to shunt blood to one’s core, is suppressed. Instead, their bodies just crank up the furnace. There they are, sitting in a snow bank in the middle of winter, deep in meditation. Objective physiological monitoring of their body temperature clearly shows they are well and truly controlling this shock reflex; it’s not a matter that they are simply mentally coping with the pain. It’s a mind game and I think one must first suppress their adrenaline rush to master it. You have a head start in mastering this reflex when you go into surf torture with the right attitude.

Given that this will be his second time through BUD/S (which gives one retrospective insight into the instructors’ mind games), and given that he is in such good physical shape, I figure the odds are well on his side this time around. Greg L (my talk) 21:54, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] UPDATE: Results of the PST, 11:00 Pacific, 28 February 2008

My son took his PST this morning. Here are the results:

Swim (500-yard side-stroke): 8:10 min:sec (12:30 maximum)
Push-ups in two minutes: 81 (42 minimum)
Sit-ups in two minutes: 100 (50 minimum)
Pull-ups (no time limit): 17 (6 minimum)
Run (1.5 miles in boots and pants): 10:08 min:sec (<11:00 to qualify)

These were very competitive scores except for the run which was middle-of-the-pack—especially so now that the Navy recently reduced the maximum-permitted run time by 30 seconds; the 1.5-mile run must now be “under 11 minutes.” HIs swim came first and he feels if he hadn’t smoked himself by swimming forty seconds faster than he’s ever done before, he could have done better on the run. Now that the weather is improving, he plans on getting back to his old regimen of more frequently running with a 20-lb backpack.

The Master Diver was on a dive when my son arrived for his PST so another diver proxied the test. The first thing he asked my son was “You’re in shape to do this aren’t you? You’re not going to be wasting my time I hope. They’ve apparently had personnel from the base show up at the diver locker, permission slip in hand from Coronado to have their PST proxied, and not do nearly well enough. All one guy could do is two pull-ups.

My son and I both thought it was noteworthy that the PST requirements the Navy’s posted on their Web site require that the run be less than 11 minutes but the sheet the diver from the diver locker referred to had the old value of 11:30 to pass. The change must be rather recent. With the PST out of the way, the next step for my son is a “pressure test.” They’ll put him in a hyperbaric chamber and “take him down” to ensure he is able to clear his sinuses and inner ears. That’s scheduled for next Tuesday.

My son’s greatest wish now is that he can be a “mud pup” for the dive locker. Mud pupping is a new addition to the Seal Challenge program and the diver locker hasn’t participated in it before; the details of how my son might fit in are fluid. Mud pupping allows someone who is scheduled to go to Coronado to stay fit during the wait. Essentially, my son would just “be their bitch” at the diver locker and would help out with mundane tasks. He’d answer the phones, sweep the floors, and maybe clean the dive equipment after dives (whether you’ve been in a chlorinated pool or the ocean, your equipment must be rinsed after a dive). But he’d also get a lot of time to work out. In my son’s case at the diver locker, he would be able to PT with the divers in the morning and work out throughout the day.

The mud pup program is a relatively recent development and is part of a series of improvements in how the Navy manages recruits with SEAL Challenge guarantees. When my son and three other recruits in his division with SEAL Challenge guarantees were at Great Lakes Recruit Training Command (“basic training”), they were quartered and trained along with the regular recruits in their division. Whereas Great Lakes had a separate division for their marching band so they could do their high school-style “oompah oompah” out in the field and sound very pretty during the graduation ceremony, there was no similar arrangement for the SEAL Challenge recruits. My son and the three others in his division all got horribly out of shape because the PT they participated in was—from their perspective—a complete joke. The four of them snuck out of their bunks at night to work out. They even found a heavy-duty shower-curtain rod in one of the heads on which they could do pull-ups. Still, they bent the crap out of the thing. In retrospect, my son realizes they would have really caught hell if they had broken the bar and shouldn’t have tried that stunt. Notwithstanding their best efforts, all four suffered serious degradation in their physical condition while at Great Lakes. My son passed his BUD/S PST re-test upon arriving at Great Lakes and was re-tested three more times while there. He noted that his scores and times progressively worsened with each re–test. He further noted he would have just barely qualified on his fourth test.

At the time my son joined, the Navy was spending millions of dollars to advertise on TV to recruit for the SEALs; it still is. Young men throughout the nation worked their asses off to get into prime shape before joining. Then the very first thing the Navy did was get them into worse shape than when they joined! This was a classic case of a lack of coordination between different commands subverting the core objectives of the Navy. I thought this was industrial-strength stupid: a shameful squandering of human resources, a waste of taxpayer money, and an undermining of the security interests of the United States. So in late May of 2006, I wrote a letter with specific proposals for fixing the situation to the captain who heads Great Lakes. It’s hard to know if the letter changed anything, and there’s a strong possibility that Great Lakes was already working on the problem, but it wasn’t too long after my son left for Coronado that Great Lakes separated all the Special Forces guys—which the SEALs is part of—into their own division.

While my son keeps his fingers crossed on being able to mud pup for the diver locker, he is preparing for an upcoming base-wide competition simulating an “Ironman” triathlon. On Monday, he will swim 2.4 miles in the pool, then he’ll pedal 112-miles on a stationary bike in the gym, and then finish with a 26.2-mile marathon run outside. Since world-class pros do it in 8.5 hours, my son will be committing to something like over 12 hours of continuous exertion. He expects to be pretty sore at the end of it all because the bike ride consists of roughly five hours of pedaling, which is something he hasn’t practiced up to now. Five hours on a bicycle outdoors would indeed be grueling but would at least be interesting. Five hours on a stationary bike would be truly mind-numbing so he’ll move the stationary bike over to where he can see a TV.

Greg L (my talk) 19:00, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Taking ’er down in the hyperbaric chamber,19:40 Pacific Tuesday 4 March 2008

My son went to the dive locker today and was taken down to 60 feet in a hyperbaric, or diving chamber. They have different sizes of chambers at the dive locker but the one he got into was about as big on the inside as the Alvin is on the inside: just big enough for three, maybe four guys. Another fellow who was going into EOD and an observer from the dive locker accompanied him. They were taken down at a rate of one atmosphere per minute, which is equivalent to a fresh-water dive rate of 10.34 meters or 33.9 feet per minute. My son experienced some adiabatic temperature changes (Gay-Lussac’s law) going both ways: it got warm as he went down and quite cool coming back up. Anyway, he passed; he experienced no problems clearing his inner ears and sinuses.

My son wasn’t concerned about this test (nor was I) since we had taken SCUBA lessons together before he joined the Navy to be a SEAL and knew he could clear his ears. Coincidentally, on our SCUBA certification dive, we went down to the exact same depth, 60 feet, as my son did in the hyperbaric chamber. In fact, I was the one during that certification dive who experienced trouble that day. I had a bit of a cold and couldn’t open up my eustachian tubes. I had to turn back at about 25–30 feet on one of my dives that day because no amount of nose pinching and blowing could blast past the obstructions. A couple of Sudafed tablets fixed that in a matter of hours. That certification dive was quite interesting to an utter novice like me. But the water was cold (it stung the exposed skin around our mouthpieces) and very muddy. Perhaps I had seen too many travelogs showing gorgeous diving in the Bahamas, but our dive seemed nearly worthless in the grand scheme of diving conditions. One must keep track of their dive partner at all times, and in conditions like we were in, there were times when we could loose sight of each other when we became separated by as little as 15 feet. We stayed at a special hotel that caters to divers—you get high-pressure air at the dock, not gasoline. Although it was overcast, cold outside, and the water was cold and muddy, the hotel was absolutely packed at the time. Recreational divers are an enthusiastic lot.

The next step in the process is for my son to fill out his “1306” (NAVPERS 1306/7). Essentially, it is an enlisted person’s personnel action request for special training. He has to add that to his entire package (medical forms, PST scores, personnel records, etc.) and send it all off to his detailer in Tennessee. It will be up to his detailer to fit my son’s request to the needs of the Navy and assign him to a particular BUD/S class.

Even if you enter the Navy as a civilian with a “BUD/S guarantee” (SEAL Challenge), you are still interviewed by different panels several times while in “boot camp” and each time you must receive their recommendation to go to BUD/S. It seems surprising to me that someone can join the Navy after having first passed the PST and after having received good scores on their ASVAB, and then joined with a SEAL Challenge guarantee—in writing(!)—and you still have to go through a handful of interviews before you can go to BUD/S. But that’s the way it is. I guess that maybe 95% of fresh recruits make it through these interviews. I don’t know exactly what they might be looking for to screen out but imagine that some can get great scores on their ASVAB and still be complete Gomers. I knew one in fact and helped the young man get into the Navy. I was blown away when I learned that his ASVAB scores were so high that he qualified for most any rate the Navy had. Yet, both recruiters had seen only one other previous recruit in their entire career who was more of pantywaist. One recruiter was telling me “You know, we’ve never seen such a pantywaist like him before” and the other recruiter quickly backhanded him lightly in the ribs and said “No, no. Remember that kid about four years ago?” The first recruiter looked askance at the ceiling, lost in his effort to recall a particular recruit. “Oh… Yeah.” Perhaps it is these types they’re trying to weed out of BUD/S during the panel interviews. And somehow, the kid I dragged into the recruiters’ office was a near-record-setter in this regard. That kid simply wasn’t ready for the world. He had been raised without a father and had been sheltered by his mother’s apron strings his entire life. He needed to get out into a semi-sheltered, structured environment dominated by men and learn to stand on his two feet. I knew the Navy would find a place for him—and they did.

Back to my son. Apparently, getting a BUD/S “recommendation” can be a bit tougher if you’re coming out of the fleet. The Navy already “owns” you and has trained you for a particular rate (job). Even if you passed your dive physical, got great ASVAB scores and did great on the PST, there’s more to it than that; you still have to get the recommendation from the fellow who proctored your PST to receive final permission to apply for BUD/S. In my son’s case, that would be the Master Diver. Even though my son had aced his PST and handled the hyperbaric chamber without difficulty, my son’s perception from dealing with the Master Diver was that getting his BUD/S approval shouldn’t be assumed. The Master Diver really keyed on how my son had previously been in BUD/S. He had overheard my son mentioning it to another diver at the locker and said he wanted to know much more about that. So they had a long talk. He wanted to know all the details of how he didn’t make it through the first time. What phase? What evolution? Exactly what was it about Mask Appreciation that my son couldn’t handle?

They seemed to have hit it off really well. The Master Diver was generally supportive of my son’s objective to be a SEAL and signed the papers giving his recommendation for my son to go to BUD/S. But he laid out a solid case as to why my son should become a diver. It turned out that the Master Diver had been in BUD/S a long ago and had advanced well into third phase before dropping out for family reasons. The Master Diver offered to put my son in the pool with equipment to evaluate his skills. He also offered to give him an honest appraisal of whether he will be able to handle himself in the water. After my son had been systematically torn down for weeks during his first go around at BUD/S, only to have his crisis of confidence occur in the pool during Mask Appreciation, he could probably use some confidence building in the water. Still, he’s seriously considering the Master Diver’s offer/advice to come work for them. It would be a good, no-B.S. job working with good people and he’d get out of the Navy in a reasonable period of time. He had to sign a two-year extension when he opted to be an MA and his commitment doesn’t end until 2012. He’d have to add yet another two years if he gets his SEAL’s trident. As a Navy diver, he would be helping the Navy in a more tangible way than he currently does working as an MA. Still, being a Navy diver wouldn’t allow him the same, direct, hands-on involvement the SEALs have in tracking down those responsible for knocking down America’s two biggest buildings filled with people.

Greg L (my talk) 03:40, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Making the decision to try for BUD/S again, 19:13 Pacific Monday 17 March 2008

My son made his decision. Becoming a diver and later trying to become a SEAL was not an option. He would have to work for years as a diver before even trying to become a SEAL. Further, he wasn’t even sure if he could try out for BUD/S if he was a diver. Even if that was permitted, my son already has to take his test to become an E-5. If he makes the promotion (he’s thinking of trying only half-hard on the test), he’d probably be a boat crew leader at BUD/S. He doesn’t want that because the instructors really ride the boat crew leaders’ butts. Also, he would be a little too old at 23/24 years of age to try for BUD/S; Navy policy now is to try to get them young out of the civilian world, in part, because they get more good years out of them before their bodies can’t keep up. Finally, he said “Dad, the whole reason I joined the Navy in the first place was to be a SEAL; that’s where my heart is.”

Though he made his decision several days ago to not be a diver and try out for BUD/S, he couldn’t act on the decision until he had a day off. So today he went to his Career Counselor on base and memorialized his decision in writing. His paperwork (his “package”) is being put together now and the counselor will ensure that all the necessary forms are properly filled out. Then the approval form will be sent up the chain of command, signed off at each step of the way, ending with a sign-off by the C.O. Then it will be sent back to his Career Counselor who will forward it to the Package Coordinator in Tennessee. After a quick review to ensure everything is in order and the paperwork is properly handled, the job of assigning my son his orders will go to his detailer, who is in the same office in Tennessee.

My son hopes to work with his detailer so he can go to Great Lakes and participate in a special two-month-long program that prepares Seal Challenge recruits for BUD/S. This would be like a dream for him. As it is, he works over 13 hours per shift. He likes to exercise every day and it is very difficult to find the time to do so—particularly when he has a 50-minute one-way commute to the only good Crossfit gym in the area. After Great Lakes, he would go (hopefully) straight to the next BUD/S class. With any luck, that will be a summer class. The waters are a bit warmer at that time of year so the instructors simply keep the trainees in the water longer during Surf Torture to get their lips that perfect shade of blue. We already know my son has a relative advantage in surf torture—at least during summer. There is always the possibility though, that this relative advantage might evaporate in colder waters—he has absolutely no body fat—so a summer or autumn class is strategically the better play. He already knows he should have no difficulty getting his security clearances after (if) he gets through First Phase because as an MA, he already received his “Secret” security clearance. The latest understanding from his friends who became SEALs (my son has connections here and there in the SEAL world), is that at least some SEALs are now required to get Top Secret security clearance.

He’s now done all he can to prepare for BUD/S. In fact, he needs to lighten up a bit. He had been working out like a mad man at Crossfit. He was doing some overhead squat lifts with a 160-lb barbell. He thought, “OK, just one more” and pulled a muscle big time in his lower back. He had hurt it before and clearly hadn’t allowed himself sufficient time to heal. This time, he was stoved up and shuffling around like an old man with a cane for several days. He will just have to be conservative until the last possible moment. He can’t afford to go into BUD/S with a weak back muscle that is inordinately susceptible to injury. The Navy doesn’t usually kick good candidates out of BUD/S if they suffer an injury; they typically roll them back to the next class. However, if the injury happens during Hell Week, unless it occurred on a Friday, you have to do First Phase all over—including Hell Week.


Mt. St. Helens
Mt. St. Helens shortly after it became active
Mt. St. Helens shortly after it became active

Few people today realize how poorly Washington State officials understood the magnitude of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. An annual air show, SkyFest Fairchild, is held at Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane, Washington. At that time, SkyFest was purposely timed to occur the same week as the Lilac Festival, a weekend-long series of festivities that includes the Lilac Parade. This usually took place in mid-May. Not surprisingly, Spokane’s nickname is The Lilac City. In fact, I had several big lilac bushes at my first house, where I was living in 1980. My son wouldn’t be born for six more years but my first child was only one month old in May 1980.

From the time of Mt. St. Helens’ first awakening from dormancy until its massive explosion was a relatively short time period of only two months. During much of this time, it sent up many ash plumes, often to the 35,000-foot level at which commercial airliners fly. Periodically, flights had to be rerouted to avoid the ash.

The final, explosive eruption of Mt. St. Helens occurred at 8:32 AM on Sunday, May 18th. SkyFest at Fairchild was in its second day and I was planning on attending at least part of it. I turned on my home radio at roughly 11:00 AM and learned that flying exhibitions had been canceled due to yet another ash plume from Mt. St. Helens. In other words, the news was saying that a simple ash plume, a not-unusual event that typically affected planes only in proximity of the volcano, had caused the cancellation of flying demonstrations at SkyFest on the other side of the state! It seemed an absurd amount of caution given that you’d have to drive five hours from Spokane before you can even see the area of the volcano and the skies above it. Note that this news report came two and a half hours after the mountain completely fraged, turning hundreds of square miles of surrounding forest into a moonscape. Miraculously, only 57 people lost their lives due to strict enforcement of an exclusion zone. In the process, one of the largest landslides in recorded history covered over an entire lake, forming a new, much shallower one 200 feet higher.

Ash plume
Ash plume

By around 2:30, I decided to drive the forty minutes to Fairchild AFB to attend the tail end of the show and at least watch an F-14 or two depart. My wife was interested enough to attend, and that meant the whole family went on the outing; which is to say, we brought along our newborn daughter. Up to this time, the scope of the eruption still wasn’t appreciated by Washington state emergency personnel and nothing at all was on the news about how the top part of the volcano had been blown clean off. On the drive west, my wife and I could see what appeared to be a gigantic weather front moving in. It stretched from as far south to as far north as the eye could see and was black. As it was nearly on top of us, we couldn’t see quite how high it went, but it looked like a seriously big front. Opposing traffic coming from the show was unusually heavy, nearly bumper-to-bumper, so I turned on the radio. The entire air show, even the static ground displays, had been canceled due to the heavy “ash plume.”

So we turned around to head back home. This “weather front” was different. Normally, when a weather front gets over the top of you, winds pick up and the ground-level weather changes. None of that was happening with this front. It was extremely dark at high altitude and the sun was being blocked to such an extent the freeway lights were turning on. Yet the air was tranquil and there was no temperature change. Within a few minutes, although it was only shortly after 3:00 PM, it might as well have been midnight. Everyone’s headlights were on as we navigated down the freeway in pitch blackness. Note how our minds have not connected the dots of two seemingly disconnected facts: a heavy plume of ash from a volcano on the other side of the state had canceled an air show, and a humongous horizon-to-horizon weather front is moving in.

Then gray, snow-like stuff started to fall past the orange glow from the low-pressure sodium freeway lights. It hit the windshield and didn’t melt. The wipers just turned it into a smear of dust. A squirt of washer fluid turned it into streaks of mud. “What… the… hell,” I thought, “it’s ash from Mt. St. Helens! I rolled down the window and felt what was coming down. It was cool to the touch. It took probably another minute to put it all together. We still didn’t understand that this was all due to that morning’s “eruption.” We understood though, that the weather front was really something from the volcano, that it was responsible for the total darkness, and that something of unimaginable magnitude must have occurred. The scope of it all was hard to take in; whatever was happening, it encompassed our entire observable universe (and an unknowable distance beyond). My mind had that stunned feeling that occurs when events that fill the senses are beyond the bounds of all prior experience. That’s one step short of when stunning news makes Earth’s axis seemingly shift about six feet. The radio had nothing about what was going on. The broadcasters were likely running to their studio windows, as dumbfounded as we were. There wasn’t even a “Well, will you look at that!” over the radio. Nothing but music and regular programming on all channels. We had no idea where all this was heading. None. And whatever was happening, it was really, really big. I felt somewhat small and vulnerable. Thoughts of Pompeii naturally went though my mind but I had no immediate sense of danger. As long as the falling ash stays cool like this, we can get buried up to our chimney tops with this stuff.

Post eruption
Post eruption

Within about a half hour, we were back home. We dashed out of the car with our newborn completey swaddled in blankets. The ash didn’t smell particularly sulfurous; it had a near-neutral, chalky smell actually, as one would expect from rock that has been pulverized into dust but not what one would expect of a volcano. It was eerie though because people become reflexively accustomed to the fact that when stuff falls from the sky, there is a “wet” smell, or a “clean” one—at least “a thunderstorm is coming” smell. This was very different. One’s five senses and prior experience were of no help and the mind was overwhelmed with a sense of novelty tinged with danger. It was pitch black out; fluffy, clumpy snowflake-size stuff was falling from the sky; and it smelled like we were dust mites making a quick shortcut though a vacuum cleaner’s dust bag. Very odd, but only at a subliminal level and it lasted only as long as it takes to run from the car into the house.

Turn on the room lights. All seemed entirely normal inside. A house can provide fine protection from ashfall; it’s like shutting out a dust storm simply by closing the windows. That was the first thing where prior experience was of some facility in dealing with the current situation. Except that this dust is falling outside. A quarter-inch had already accumulated on the ground even though we had raced the thing eastward.

At this very moment, a fellow who would become a friend of mine over twenty years later, Mark, was ridding motorcycles with a friend up on a bluff in the forests of Idaho. They arrived at a clearing at the edge of the bluff and looked westward. For as far as the eye could see, from horizon to horizon, a black wall that seemed to ascend to the limits of Earth’s atmosphere was approaching. It looked nothing at all like a weather front and looked like the very embodiment of death. As they sat there on their idling motorcycles looking west, they concluded that World War III had begun and all life in Washington had been extinguished in a nuclear holocaust. Greg L (my talk) 22:04, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] In-demand rates, and “safety” 15:04 Pacific Thursday 3 April 2008

It’s interesting how the Navy resolves conflict when there are shortages in qualified personnel for different “rates” (jobs). My son’s paperwork arrived at his detailer in Tennessee. All was pronounced as being in good order and he was ready to be assigned to a specific class. He learned that all fleet personnel heading to BUD/S have to go (“get to go” in my son’s parlance) to Prep School at Great Lakes. However, there is currently a shortage of MAs (Master-at-Arms) so a detailer in the same office who handles MAs is holding up my son’s transfer until December when his PRD (projected rotation date) is up. It seems the detailers work a bit like commodities brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The Navy is apparently paying MAs $48,000 reenlistment bonuses due to the shortage. Given that the Navy trained my son to be an MA, they want to get at least the full two years until his PRD is up before they release him to be trained as a SEAL. If they really wanted to, they could keep him as an MA until his EAOS (End of Active Obligated Service) was up (2012). It seems a practical way to balance the Navy’s interests. You find that a lot in the military. Policies that seemingly make no sense at first usually make plenty of sense when you dig deeper into it and understand the bigger picture. Policies that seem insane at all levels of scrutiny, while not at all rare, do eventually get solved.

Prep School is the “A school” that everyone who is going into Special Forces takes. The whole purpose of the two-month-long Prep School at Great Lakes is to keep keep all their personnel with Seal Challenge guarantees in good physical condition before they ship out to BUD/S. Brand new inductees fresh from the civilian world who have Seal Challenge guarantees now have their own division at Great Lakes, where they receive more PT during basic training than do regular recruits. Then they go on to Prep School where they continue with the extra PT. Fleet returnees simply go straight to the Prep School. My son has a friend who just arrived at Prep School and it sounds like they are doing a good job of keeping them in good physical condition. However, he also heard from another friend that the Prep School guys are not doing well in Class 270. Far from it in fact. About half of the guys in Class 270 went to Prep School. Reportedly, only 13% of the prep schoolers who started Hell Week on Sunday were still there on Tuesday. This is an abysmal drop out rate and it seems safe to say that even fewer will remain when Hell Week ends. My son and I can’t fathom the reason for this. Perhaps this first wave of graduates from Prep School was dominated by fleet returnees. Maybe they have less fear of failure since they can fall back onto something that is familiar and comfortable to them. That’s a double conjecture: a conjecture about the underlying facts, and then a conjecture about what might be going on psychologically to account for it.

One of the things my son was remarking about is how safety conscious the military is. This has been on our minds because he recently severely sprained his ankle during a basket ball game. “Pop” went his ankle as he rolled it over and he fell to the floor in a heap. It was extremely painful. As it happened, there was an off-duty Naval base fireman (actually a DOD fireman) there who tended to him. The guy called an ambulance and he was taken to an emergency room at a civilian hospital. X-rays showed no bones were broken so they stabilized the joint with an inflatable cast. It was first-class, rapid service. He thought it kind of odd at the time that he was so rapidly tended to. Only as he was being rolled out out through the waiting room on a wheelchair did he realize that the waiting room was chock full of people coughing and wheezing away, others with bloodied hands wrapped up in blood-soaked bandages. He had jumped the queue because he came in via ambulance. He got first class service due to an overabundance of caution. And the military will pick up the whole tab. That’s fine though; MAs are in short supply right now. My son met an MA on his base who just got back from the sandbox. The guy told him about the kind of work he did over there. It’s tough work they do while we civilians back home watch the Tonight Show between our toes at 11:30 PM without a worry in the world. In my son’s case, he has it relatively cushy because he is stationed stateside. But still, he sits out in a patrol boat twelve hours a day, protecting in-port ships from terrorist attack and has the weaponry (I shouldn’t be more specific than that) to defend the ships. The Navy needs all their personnel back on the job as soon as possible after an injury.

My son was telling me of how safety considerations can go to a ridiculous extreme in the military. Base personnel doing PT who go for on-base jogs alongside slow military roads must wear safety-orange vests even when they’re running during the day. He said it could be that some dumb ass ran in front of a train or something ten years ago and they now wear orange reflective vests to this day. It seems prudent until you think about all the high school track kids you see running along major arterials in large groups on city roads wearing drab gray whatever-suits-their-fancy sweats. And they seem to do fine. You see this pretty much everywhere throughout the military. The list of those held accountable in the military for lapses in safety runs wide and deep. Unless a battle is being fought, military life is pretty free from routine accidents caused by shear stupidity or negligence. For instance, you rarely hear about something like how a serviceman got electrocuted when he turned on a shower and the water was electrified due to a faulty water pump. Yet this is precisely what happened in Iraq to an American serviceman because civilian contractors were responsible. The mother of the serviceman is suing a civilian contractor who was overseeing a barracks in Iraq. An investigation revealed the civilian contractor simply overlooked deficiencies in the plumbing system of the barracks after they took it over. There was a Chinese-made water pump that had an insulation failure and it was improperly grounded. My old boss at a fuel cell lab was a head engineer at an electrical utility in the civilian world and headed an Air National Guard unit whose specialty was installing the electricity infrastructure at new air bases (think: tent cities). The uniform code of military justice keeps everyone doing their jobs well. If you actually have someone die because some Air National Guard electrician goofed, he could go to jail for years if it is shown there was dereliction of duty. If it’s the civilian world, what are the personal consequences of not paying attention to your job? Likely, there will be a lawsuit. The insurance company pays and your employer doesn’t even fold. I can pretty much guarantee you that the civilian contractor responsible for that Iraqi barracks will still be in business even if they are found liable for the death.

All of this contrasts a bit with deaths during BUD/S. Deaths are not at all uncommon. They nearly lost a guy in my son’s class. He collapsed during a run and they found he had a core body temperature of 112 °F (44½ °C)! He lived though. Reportedly, the very next class after my son’s had a death. None of this means the instructors at BUD/S are indifferent to safety; they are quite safety conscious. The trainees are grilled to yell out “man down” if they see someone drop. There are signs posted all over telling trainees that if they have a concern about the safety of an evolution they are being told to perform, that they should raise their hand and tell their instructors of the concern. One time they were doing pushups in the sand and one of the recruits, in utter exhaustion, simply dropped down into the sand, unable to go any further. The instructors were standing around gabbing with each other with their shirts off, preening and looking rough, tough, and buff for the civilian ladies walking along the sidewalk above when one of the trainees yelled “Man down!” The smiles on the instructors faces instantly evaporated and they all bolted to the circle that had formed around the guy. The circle peeled open to let the instructors in. Of course, they found that the guy was simply dead-ass tired and could go no further. Though exhausted, he was entirely responsive and there was no medical emergency. They all got their butts chewed over that one. Basically, Naval Special Warfare Center does the best they can to be as safe as possible without compromising on the inherently dangerous nature of the training they must do.


Mt. St. Helens: Next morning

After our three-member family—mother, father, and month-old baby girl—were safely inside our home, all was well. There were no noxious smells inside the house since even outside, the ash from Mt. St. Helens had only a very slight sulferous odor; the smell was dominated by a chalky, very rocky, dusty smell. After turning on the house lights, it seemed like any other evening scene inside. Looking out our living room window, it appeared very similar to a midnight winter snow storm even though it was 5:00 PM. A half-inch-thick coating of ash had accumulated on the ground and one could see large clumps of ash falling past the street light across the road. It appeared every bit like a common snow fall—the clumpy kind, not the individual flake kind—except the clumps were light gray and weren’t as reflective as snow. I don’t recal hearing anything on the TV that night explaning that Mt. St. Helens had completely exploded, just that it was a big erruption, nor do I recal having any difficulty falling asleep that night. I don’t recal for sure what was on my mind at the time but I believe I had near total confidence that the worst conceivable outcome would be a couple of meters accumulation the following morning. We couldn’t possibly sufficate in our poorly insulated 1929 house and the ash had such low density that it couldn’t overload the roof. Go to sleep… see what the world looks like in the morning.

A sound level meter
A sound level meter

Only a couple inches of ash on the ground greeted us the following morning. The sun was up and the sky was bright. The ash storm had passed. Just like a winter snowfall, it blanketed everything: the lawn, the car, trees, power lines. I went outside to see what it was like. I couldn’t understand why it was so eerie; it just was. There was something very, very different from any other winter’s morning but I couldn’t immediately figure out what it was. I walked out onto the ash-covered lawn. I could hear my feet crunching down into the highly compressible ash. The experience was similar to what one would hear if they put on a pair of those blue Silencio-brand hearing protectors shooters use and walked on melting snow—I could hear the crunching transmitting up my leg, through my body, and directly to my inner ear without going through my ear drum. Each step was like this. There was no noise going into my eardrum via the ear canal whatsoever! Zero. I quickly realized that this was the property that made it seem like an alien world: there was absolutely no sound whatsoever in the air. It was the quietest quiet I had ever heard. It was much quieter than being in an audiologists sound booth for a hearing check. This was absolute silence. “Crimeny! The ash fall had somehow destroyed the ability of air to transmit sound,” I thought to myself. So I clapped my hands together. Yeah, I could hear that. The sound obviously came in through my eardrums so the air still ‘works correctly.’

So I stood out there in the middle of my front lawn. After several minutes of observation, I realized what had occurred in order to produce such a remarkable, absolute silence. The first thing everyone did that evening was rush to stores and businesses along each of the arterials in our city and turn off the ventilation fans so the dust wouldn’t get sucked into the buildings. Everything was buttoned up tight and static. That was quickly apparent. Next, no one was driving in these conditions. Doing so would kick up the biggest dust cloud imaginable and one would quickly clog their air filter and be stranded. There was zero traffic noise outside. If you were to go buy a sound-level meter right now, you’d be surprised just how noisy your living room is inside your house with all its windows and doors shut. The dB level due to street traffic in urban and suburban areas is really surprising and our minds simply unconsciously tune out the din. Our homes can attenuate the sound pressure level several hundred fold but background noise can still be 45 dB inside one’s living room (down from 70–75 dB three blocks off a six-lane arterial). There were zero car engines puttering outside in this ash; zero car tires hissing on asphalt. There were zero ventilation fans on commercial buildings droning on. As luck would have it, there was also zero wind blowing in the trees; dead-still air. Even the birds and insects had apparently hunkered down and were making no noise. Perhaps most of them were suffocated and dead? For whatever reason, clearly, no insects were flying or flapping their wings or rubbing their legs together in mating calls. Whatever noise might be generated by something (a house door a quarter mile away?) was being quickly absorbed by the dust that had covered everything. The ash covering absolutely everything served like the ultimate sound deadening material. This was absolute, total quiet. I had never heard anything like it before, and have never head anything like it since.



[edit] Advisory/Disclaimer:

The thoughts and opinions expressed above on this user page are not intended to be offensive to any particular minority group (based on race, religion, ethnicity, country of origin, gender, gender identification, disAbility, occupation, meat-eating/vegetable-eating practices, and hobbies—even hunting). Note too that parenthetically mentioning “even hunting” in the preceding sentence was not intended to signal any disapproval of the sport; the author does not wish to disparage the legal, safe, and most humane-possible methods of hunting. This preceding statement should not however, be construed as an endorsement of the sport; the author values all the biodiversity of earth and no animal should suffer at the hand of a human. However, that preceding sentence should not be construed that the author is indifferent to the plight of workers displaced by environmental issues; the author is mindful of the plight of timber workers vs. the plight of spotted owls. The preceding sentence should not be construed that the author thinks there is only one group of workers who have been financially harmed by environmental issues; there are others and not mentioning these others by name should not be construed as suggesting they are any less important than another. The author wishes to ensure all who review this communication that he values diversity and has the utmost respect for the law, government officials, the institutions of the United States, and the wide variety of social customs and diversity of its peoples. This statement should not however, be construed as being intolerant of others who have contrary or differing values or who might hold the U.S. in disdain. The author embraces the wholesome notion that no person’s or group's values are any more meritorious or valid than another’s, and the author does not wish to suggest that by stating an admiration for America and the U.S. Government, that this ought to be construed as deprecating the many other fine systems of government throughout the world and the social practices of its peoples. Notwithstanding that the author wrote the word "he" three sentences ago, (the author happens to be “anatomically male” by birth) this should not be construed as diminishing in any way, the existence of the word "she" nor does it signal that the author is adverse to the use of the gender-neutral "he/she" where appropriate. Furthermore, the words "he" and "she" should not be construed as being exclusionary or diminishing to the transgendered. This paragraph was not intended to be understood by blondes.

Hecho en China

[edit] Charles Algernon Parsons

P.S. If you’re wondering why I honor Charles Algernon Parsons with the picture included above with such prestigious company, it’s because of how well he designed the first steam turbine; not that he was also the first to do it. The current Wikipedia article doesn’t give him his sufficient due in my book. If one studies steam turbines, you will see that there is “this issue” or “that issue” that must be technically addressed to make a reliable and efficient turbine. And in pretty much every case, the lesson reads something like “Oh yeah, on this issue too, Parsons figured it all out and properly addressed it with his first design.” The development of his steam turbine is analogous to the development of the first airplane, only instead of ending up with the 1903 Wright Flyer, he ended up with a 1936 Spitfire on his first try. You can make a turbine that’s different, or bigger, but Parsons didn’t leave much room to make one better and more efficient. At a time when steam power was synonymous with big, inefficient pistons, Parsons’ invention was truly way ahead of its time.

[edit] PERSONAL SANDBOX

Moved to User:Greg L/Delimitnum sandbox

[edit] Delimitnum sandbox

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[edit] Progressions of features and digits:

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[edit] 3960-count progression

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[edit] TWO-DIGIT GROUPS FOLLOWING ALL TEN POSSIBLE DIGITS (10 × 100)

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[edit] THREE-DIGIT GROUPS (1 × 1000)=

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[edit] FOUR-DIGIT GROUPS (1 × 1000)

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[edit] NEW: Known bugs

[edit] Edit resources

Wikipedia:Tutorial Wikipedia:How to edit a page

[edit] Tables

[edit] Row spanning columns
This 280-pixel-wide animation is here being displayed at 240 pixels. This animation has the same proportion of shrinkage as does a 350-pixel file displayed at 300 pixels. Note how the dithering is much less apparent.
This 280-pixel-wide animation is here being displayed at 240 pixels. This animation has the same proportion of shrinkage as does a 350-pixel file displayed at 300 pixels. Note how the dithering is much less apparent.

Help:Table

Substance Phase Specific
heat capacity
J g-1 K-1		 Specific
heat capacity
J mol-1 K-1
Air (Sea level, dry, 25 °C) gas 1.005 29.10
Air (typical room conditionsA) gas 1.012 29.19
Aluminium solid 0.897 24.2
Argon gas 0.5203 20.7862
Beryllium solid 1.82 16.4
Water (25 °C) gas (100 °C) 2.080 37.47
liquid 4.1813 75.327
solid (0 °C) 2.114 38.09
Standard ambient temperature and pressure
used unless otherwise noted. For gases, the value given corresponds to cp

[edit] Background color, text color, and rows spanning columns

SI prefixes may be used to denote multiples and subdivisions of the kelvin. The most commonly used factors of kelvin used in science and engineering are listed in bold.

Kelvin and subdivisions Multiples
Factor Name Symbol Factor Name Symbol
100 kelvin K — — —
10−1 decikelvin dK 101 decakelvin daK
10−2 centikelvin cK 102 hectokelvin hK
10−3 millikelvin mK 103 kilokelvin kK
10−6 microkelvin µK 106 megakelvin MK
10−9 nanokelvin nK 109 gigakelvin GK
10−12 picokelvin pK 1012 terakelvin TK
10−15 femtokelvin fK 1015 petakelvin PK
10−18 attokelvin aK 1018 exakelvin EK
10−21 zeptokelvin zK 1021 zettakelvin ZK
10−24 yoctokelvin yK 1024 yottakelvin YK

A This is an example of small text. Assuming an altitude of 194 meters above mean sea level (the world–wide median altitude of human habitation), an indoor temperature of 23 °C, a dewpoint of 9 °C (40.85% relative humidity), and 760 mm–Hg sea level–corrected barometric pressure (avg. molelcular weight = 28.838).

[edit] More color control as well as alignment control
kelvin Celsius Peak emittance
wavelength of
black-body photons
Absolute zero

(precisely by definition)

 0 K –273.15 °C ∞
(No emission)
Water’s triple point

(precisely by definition)

 273.16 K 0.01 °C 10,608.3 nm
(Long wavelength I.R.)
Water’s boiling point A 373.1339 K 99.9839 °C 7766.03 nm
(Mid wavelength I.R.)
Incandescent lampB 2500 K ~2200 °C 1160 nm
(Near infrared)C

A For Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water at one standard atmosphere (101.325 kPa) when calibrated strictly per the two-point definition of thermodynamic temperature.
B The 2500 K value is approximate. The 273.15 K difference between K and °C is rounded to 300 K to avoid invalid precision in the Celsius value.
C For a true blackbody (which tungsten filaments are not). Tungsten filaments’ emissivity is greater at shorter wavelengths which makes them appear whiter.

NATURAL DECAY IN RATE OF
CHANGE IN TEMP. SENSOR
Period
(X)		 Elapsed
Time		 1–(e–X) Reading
0 (start) 0 s 0% 25.00 °C
1 1.5 s 63.21% 72.41 °C
2 3.0 s 86.47% 89.85 °C
3 4.5 s 95.02% 96.27 °C
4 6.0 s 98.17% 98.63 °C
5 7.5 s 99.33% 99.49 °C
6 9.0 s 99.75% 99.81 °C
7 10.5 s 99.91% 99.93 °C
8 12.0 s 99.97% 99.97 °C
NOTATIONS FOR DIMENSIONLESS QUANTITIES
Measure SI
units		 Named
parts-per ratio		 Parts-per
abbreviation
or symbol		 Value in
scientific
notation
A strain of… 2 cm/m 2 parts per hundred     2% [1] 2 × 10–2
A sensitivity of… 2 mV/V 2 parts per thousand 2 ‰ 2 × 10–3
A sensitivity of… 0.2 mV/V 2 parts per ten thousand 2 ‱ 2 × 10–4
A sensitivity of… 2 µV/V 2 parts per million 2 ppm 2 × 10–6
A sensitivity of… 2 nV/V 2 parts per billion 2 ppb 2 × 10–9
A sensitivity of… 2 pV/V 2 parts per trillion 2 ppt 2 × 10–12
A mass concentration of… 2 mg/kg 2 parts per million 2 ppm 2 × 10–6
A mass concentration of… 2 µg/kg 2 parts per billion 2 ppb 2 × 10–9
A mass concentration of… 2 ng/kg 2 parts per trillion 2 ppt 2 × 10–12
A mass concentration of… 2 pg/kg 2 parts per quadrillion 2 ppq 2 × 10–15


NOTATIONS FOR DIMENSIONLESS QUANTITIES
Measure SI
units		 Named
parts-per ratio		 Parts-per
abbreviation
or symbol		 Value in
scientific
notation
A strain of… 2 cm/m 2 parts per hundred     2% [2] 2 × 10–2
A sensitivity of… 2 mV/V 2 parts per thousand 2 ‰ 2 × 10–3
A sensitivity of… 0.2 mV/V 2 parts per ten thousand 2 ‱ 2 × 10–4
A sensitivity of… 2 µV/V 2 parts per million 2 ppm 2 × 10–6
A sensitivity of… 2 nV/V 2 parts per billion 2 ppb 2 × 10–9
A sensitivity of… 2 pV/V 2 parts per trillion 2 ppt 2 × 10–12
A mass concentration of… 2 mg/kg 2 parts per million 2 ppm 2 × 10–6
A mass concentration of… 2 µg/kg 2 parts per billion 2 ppb 2 × 10–9
A mass concentration of… 2 ng/kg 2 parts per trillion 2 ppt 2 × 10–12
A mass concentration of… 2 pg/kg 2 parts per quadrillion 2 ppq 2 × 10–15

[edit] Font control

Main article: Wikipedia:Manual of Style

[edit] Color control of text

This is an example of using Red text via RGB manipulation.
Here's a custom brown color with RGB values manipulated: custom brown
This is an example of using a named color “maroon” to change the color of text.
Here are more colors:
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make AQUA text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make BLACK text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make BLUE text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make BROWN text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make CHARTREUSE text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make FUCHSIA text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make GRAY text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make GREEN text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make LIME text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make MAROON text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make NAVY text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make OLIVE text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make ORANGE text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make PURPLE text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make RED text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make SILVER text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make TEAL text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make VIOLET text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make WHITE (white) text.
This is an example of using one of the widely supported named colors to make YELLOW text.

This is an example of using a wide-spectrum named color (that may not be viewable with some browsers) to make PALEVIOLETRED text.
And here is the same color but with the RGB value explicity controlled to make PALEVIOLETRED text.

[edit] Table of Decimal (DEC) and Hexadecimal (HX) number equivalents
DEC HX
000 00
001 01
002 02
003 03
004 04
005 05
006 06
007 07
008 08
009 09
010 0A
011 0B
012 0C
013 0D
014 0E
015 0F
DEC HX
016 10
017 11
018 12
019 13
020 14
021 15
022 16
023 17
024 18
025 19
026 1A
027 1B
028 1C
029 1D
030 1E
031 1F
DEC HX
032 20
033 21
034 22
035 23
036 24
037 25
038 26
039 27
040 28
041 29
042 2A
043 2B
044 2C
045 2D
046 2E
047 2F
DEC HX
048 30
049 31
050 32
051 33
052 34
053 35
054 36
055 37
056 38
057 39
058 3A
059 3B
060 3C
061 3D
062 3E
063 3F
DEC HX
064 40
065 41
066 42
067 43
068 44
069 45
070 46
071 47
072 48
073 49
074 4A
075 4B
076 4C
077 4D
078 4E
079 4F
DEC HX
080 50
081 51
082 52
083 53
084 54
085 55
086 56
087 57
088 58
089 59
090 5A
091 5B
092 5C
093 5D
094 5E
095 5F
DEC HX
096 60
097 61
098 62
099 63
100 64
101 65
102 66
103 67
104 68
105 69
106 6A
107 6B
108 6C
109 6D
110 6E
111 6F
DEC HX
112 70
113 71
114 72
115 73
116 74
117 75
118 76
119 77
120 78
121 79
122 7A
123 7B
124 7C
125 7D
126 7E
127 7F
DEC HX
128 80
129 81
130 82
131 83
132 84
133 85
134 86
135 87
136 88
137 89
138 8A
139 8B
140 8C
141 8D
142 8E
143 8F
DEC HX
144 90
145 91
146 92
147 93
148 94
149 95
150 96
151 97
152 98
153 99
154 9A
155 9B
156 9C
157 9D
158 9E
159 9F
DEC HX
160 A0
161 A1
162 A2
163 A3
164 A4
165 A5
166 A6
167 A7
168 A8
169 A9
170 AA
171 AB
172 AC
173 AD
174 AE
175 AF
DEC HX
176 B0
177 B1
178 B2
179 B3
180 B4
181 B5
182 B6
183 B7
184 B8
185 B9
186 BA
187 BB
188 BC
189 BD
190 BE
191 BF
DEC HX
192 C0
193 C1
194 C2
195 C3
196 C4
197 C5
198 C6
199 C7
200 C8
201 C9
202 CA
203 CB
204 CC
205 CD
206 CE
207 CF
DEC HX
208 D0
209 D1
210 D2
211 D3
212 D4
213 D5
214 D6
215 D7
216 D8
217 D9
218 DA
219 DB
220 DC
221 DD
222 DE
223 DF
DEC HX
224 E0
225 E1
226 E2
227 E3
228 E4
229 E5
230 E6
231 E7
232 E8
233 E9
234 EA
235 EB
236 EC
237 ED
238 EE
239 EF
DEC HX
240 F0
241 F1
242 F2
243 F3
244 F4
245 F5
246 F6
247 F7
248 F8
249 F9
250 FA
251 FB
252 FC
253 FD
254 FE
255 FF

Text size and style control

Note that the above "five-level" ===== "five-equal signs" were replaced with an <h5> and </h5>.

“ This is an example of cquote {{cquote|text}}. ”

ALIGN RIGHT

This is a synthesis of the cquote:“ 

This is an example of a blockquote: <blockquote>text</blockquote>

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, maecenas eligendi tincidunt aenean, sit et hac hendrerit massa, morbi maecenas nec vel auctor. Aliquam sit, tincidunt justo arcu neque eu mi fames. Vitae tellus suspendisse sed sit, dapibus ante purus erat non dui vivamus, dolor ultricies maecenas lacus luctus nunc, integer cursus tellus, anim a sem.
Vitae fusce non, hendrerit etiam turpis vivamus hac, eget magna laoreet. Ipsum class risus, vitae leo lacinia rutrum cursus mauris nunc, purus tincidunt quisquam est blandit sed, auctor auctor.

This is an example of a quotation: {{quotation|text}}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, maecenas eligendi tincidunt aenean, sit et hac hendrerit massa, morbi maecenas nec vel auctor. Aliquam sit, tincidunt justo arcu neque eu mi fames. Vitae tellus suspendisse sed sit, dapibus ante purus erat non dui vivamus, dolor ultricies maecenas lacus luctus nunc, integer cursus tellus, anim a sem.

Vitae fusce non, hendrerit etiam turpis vivamus hac, eget magna laoreet. Ipsum class risus, vitae leo lacinia rutrum cursus mauris nunc, purus tincidunt quisquam est blandit sed, auctor auctor.

The following words: bigger and bolder and more text

This is called an in-line CSS style. It causes only a size change but must be its own line of text since it is a paragraph attribute.

The following words: small via a "50% call, and more text
These are normal size letters and then they suddenly get small with a "-8" call, and then they go back to normal.
Using a "-8" call, there is a small gap in this string:
123 456. And…
123 456…
…had an ordinary gap

From Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers):5 Grouping of digits after the decimal point: 5.2 Grouping of digits: Discussion:

I would love to see {{formatnum:141421.35623731}} modified so it automatically generates 141,421.35623731 and further, I would hope that the template would support the expression of uncertainty in ‘concise form’ (the parenthetical suffix digits). By the way, in the coding for narrow spaces, using <span style="margin-left:0.3em">, I used “0.3em” here, which I think is easier to read.

This value has asymmetric em-based pair kerning adjacent to the digit “1”: 6.02214179463 × 1023 and is coded 6.022<span style="margin-left:0.3em">141<span style="margin-left:0.2em">794<span style="margin-left:0.3em">63</span>&nbsp;×&nbsp;10<sup>23</sup>. Note that the pair kerning between the 1 and the 7 is coded narrower to compensate for the extra space the 1 occupies to its right. Thus, any pair of digits beginning with a “1” is kerned narrower than all other pairs to make its visual appearance similar to the others. Note also the use of </span> to cancel the CSS span directives, which would indent the beginning of the next paragraph if not terminated.



This is an example of the most simple way to change a font’s color by typing font color=maroon and then the line reverts back.

This is an example of full control over color, face, size, and style:

 “Grey in color, bold, italic Palatino, in +1 size.”
“Gray in color, bold, italic Palatino, in 117%.”

Edwardian Script ITC

Music: ♬♩

☠

Talk symbol=☎

Links: html tips: fonts and… HTML Font Chooser and… font markup and… more font markup

Line spacing control:

This code:
<p style="line-height:300%">1<br>2<br>3<br>4</p>
produces…

1
2
3
4

[edit] Interesting exchange on italicizing
Copied from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (text formatting)

Hi everyone, me again :-) After possibly making some mistakes (diff.), I would like to add more clarity to the "Foreign terms" section, more specifically the good rule of thumb:

Loan words or phrases that have common use in English, however—praetor, Gestapo, samurai, esprit de corps—do not require italicization. If looking for a good rule of thumb, do not italicize words that appear in an English language dictionary.

Appearance in any single English language dictionary would suffice, or appearance in a certain number would be necessary ? In any case, it would be a good idea to designate which dictionaries would qualify for this use. (I won't propose any for lack of experience on the issue).

And then, to make sure that I don't make the same mistake again :-), how about using the resulting guideline to create a Wikipedia:List of foreign words to be left unitilicized (to be kept fully protected) ? - Best regards, Evv 19:23, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

A rule of thumb is best left as a rule of thumb to help discriminating editors, not a legal code to be enforced with a stack of dictionaries.
My dictionary (the Canadian Oxford) actually italicizes some headwords, to indicate that it is "originally a foreign word and not naturalized in English". —Michael Z. 2006-11-01 19:27 Z
Makes sense. Forget about the thumb rule then. (To be honest, only after your comment do I understand better the meaning of the expression).
How about creating the list ? - Evv 21:24, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Be my guest. Lists of English words of international origin may help. —Michael Z. 2006-11-01 21:50 Z

[edit] Superscript, subscripts, special symbols

Superscript: 999.974 95 kg/m3 at 3.984 °C
Subscript: CpH
This is multiplication with a special "times" symbol: 2 × 2 = 4
Middot: 6.626 068 96(33) × 10–34 J·s
9.111 And this is the most simple way to make a × (multiply) sign; just use the symbols from the Wikipedia box.
This is the use of of a non-breaking space (and I keep on writing a long string of text to force the value and it’s related symbol to the right): 999.974 95 kg/m3
Standard atmospheric pressure should be defined as precisely 100,000 Pa (=1 bar and ≅750.062 torr).
1.988 435(27) × 1030 kg is has full-tilt spacing control.

IDENTICAL TO: ≡ and ≡ (the second one was the HTML entity name)
APPROXIMATELY EQUAL TO: ≅ and ≅ (the second one was the HTML entity name)
ALMOST EQUAL TO: ≈ and ≈ (the second one was the HTML entity name)

This is an example of the square root of 2: \sqrt 2 where no size is specified
\sqrt{xy}
\prod_{i=2}^{6} \left(1 + {1\over i}\right) = \left(1 + {1\over 2}\right) \cdot \left(1 + {1\over 3}\right) \cdot \left(1 + {1\over 4}\right) \cdot \left(1 + {1\over 5}\right) \cdot \left(1 + {1\over 6}\right) = {7\over 2}.

= \frac {{K_b\over 2} \cdot T}{\sqrt{m\over 2}}

V = \sqrt{\frac {{K_b\over 2} \cdot T}{{m\over 2}}}

S = V \cdot \sqrt{3}
Pitch_Z = \sqrt{6} \cdot {{2r\over 3}}

And this radic: √ …is at 75%

[edit] Dashes
  • Here are the Unicode symbols:
Hand-typed hyphen/minus (character 45) = - and superscripted: 10-2
Unicode equivalent of hyphen/minus &#x002D; = - and superscripted: 10-2
Unicode hyphen: &#x2010; = ‐ and superscripted: 10‐2
Unicode minus: &#x2012; = ‒ and superscripted: 10‒2
Unicode endash: &#x2013; = – and superscripted: 10–2
Unicode emdash: &#x2014; = — and superscripted: 10—2

[edit] SI multiples

Because SI prefixes may not be concatenated (united serially) within the name or symbol for a unit of measure, SI prefixes are used with the gram, not the kilogram, which already has a prefix as part of its name.[3] For instance, one-millionth of a kilogram is 1 mg (one milligram), not 1 µkg (one microkilogram). The most common prefixed forms of gram are shown in bold text in the table below.[4]

Submultiples Multiples
Factor Name Symbol Factor Name Symbol
100 gram g
10−1 decigram dg 101 decagram dag
10−2 centigram cg 102 hectogram hg
10−3 milligram mg 103 kilogram kg
10−6 microgram µg 106 megagram Mg
10−9 nanogram ng 109 gigagram Gg
10−12 picogram pg 1012 teragram Tg
10−15 femtogram fg 1015 petagram Pg
10−18 attogram ag 1018 exagram Eg
10−21 zeptogram zg 1021 zettagram Zg
10−24 yoctogram yg 1024 yottagram Yg
  • When the Greek lowercase “µ” (mu) in the symbol of microgram is typographically unavailable, it is occasionally—although not properly—replaced by Latin lowercase “u”.
  • The microgram is often abbreviated “mcg”, particularly in pharmaceutical and nutritional supplement labeling, to avoid confusion since the “µ” prefix is not well recognized outside of technical disciplines.[5] Note however, that the abbreviation “mcg”, is also the symbol for an obsolete CGS unit of measure known as the “millicentigram,” which is equal to 10 µg.
  • The unit name “megagram” is rarely used, and even then, typically only in technical fields in contexts where especially rigorous consistency with the units of measure is desired. For most purposes, the term “tonne,” or “metric ton” is instead used.

[edit] Templates

Category:Wikipedia templates
Category:Template categories
Category:Formatting templates
Help:Magic words
Help:Magic words#Formatting (formatnum)

Template:Days elapsed times factor: 
The effect on the Moon’s orbital radius is a small one, just 0.10 ppb/year, but results in a measurable 3.82 cm annual increase in the Earth-Moon distance.[6] Cumulatively, this effect becomes ever more significant over time; since when astronauts first landed on the Moon approximately 39 years ago, it is now 1.49 meters farther away.

To transclude (imbed) text from another page, one copies to a subpage (like here Wikipedia talk:MOSNUM/draft) and transclude as though it were a template.

For instance, one could have this text

{{WT:MOSNUM/draft}}

and have the entire above page and its own green-div formatting (like this green-div) included here.

{{#expr:{{age in days|1969|7|20}}*0.00010459 round 4}} meters → 1.4861 meters

{{days elapsed times factor|1969|7|20|0.00010459|4}} meters → 1.4861 meters

{{#expr:{{age in days|1969|7|20}}*0.00010459 round 2}} meters → 1.49 meters

{{days elapsed times factor|1969|7|20|0.00010459|2}} meters → 1.49 meters

Also…

Clearly, having the magnitude of many of the units comprising the SI system of measurement ultimately defined by the mass of a 129-year-old, golf ball-size piece of metal is a tenuous state of affairs. The quality of the IPK must be diligently protected in order to preserve the integrity of the SI system. Further, given that the third periodic verification took place 19 years ago, the average mass of the worldwide ensemble of prototypes is likely to have already gained another 4.5 µg relative to the IPK. The world’s national metrology labs must wait for the fourth periodic verification to confirm whether the historical trends persisted.

[edit] Graphics and videos

[edit] “tl” Markup for templates and colon prefix for image links

Jimp: What does the “tl” in {{tl|SI multiples}} stand for and is there an equivalent syntax to do the same thing with links to images? Greg L (my talk) 20:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

FYI: Tl stands for Template link (per documentation at {{Tl}}. For images, are you wanting more than just insterting a colon ":" before the word Image in the image link? The nearest relative I could find for similar links to images is {{li}}; but that one adds several additional links related to the image, so may not be what you want. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 21:07, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

SI templates can be linked to by inserting a tl prefix, as…

Regarding the "tl" template, see Barek's answer on my talk page. Another useful one is {{lt}}. {{lt|SI multiples}} for example will give you the following.

Template:SI multiples (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
Jɪmp 00:08, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


For license tags, see Wikipedia:Template messages/Image namespace

The below graphic can be collapsed and expanded when readers have Javascript turned on. {| class="toccolours collapsible collapsed" style="width:395px; border: 0px;" !align="left"|Image:Z-machine480.jpg |- |align="center"|[[Image:Z-machine480.jpg|thumb|left|440px|Now you can see the collapsed graphic and its caption.]] |}

Click on this link to go to graph of absolute zero’s relationship to zero-point energy.

Here's an image that is this link imbedded in text.

Unicode, which is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers, includes a special “kelvin sign” at U+212A. One types &#x212A; to encode this special kelvin character in a Web page. Its appearance is similar to an ordinary uppercase K. To better see the difference between the two, below in maroon is the kelvin character followed immediately by a simple uppercase K:

KK

When viewed on computers that properly support Unicode, the above line will appear as follows:

this link

Click

THIS TEXT WILL NOT DISPLAY WHEN IT IS AFTER AN IMAGE TAG

to go to a Wikipedia internal image page link. There, you will need to click on the icon to go to a movie (with was converted from QuickTime to .ogg using ffmpeg2theora.

Click here for Theora-based video

A looping, dithered, GIF-based video. This has a native resolution of 320 pixels horizontally and is here displayed 226 pixels wide to make the dithering less apparent. This thumb can be displayed both larger and smaller than native.
A looping, dithered, GIF-based video. This has a native resolution of 320 pixels horizontally and is here displayed 226 pixels wide to make the dithering less apparent. This thumb can be displayed both larger and smaller than native.
This is a 371-frame GIF with a native resolution of 300 pixels horizontally. It has an interframe delay of 50 ms. When it is on a Wikipedia page where it is the only visible animation, it takes 20.41 seconds to repeat on a reasonably fast PC and 22.67 seconds on a medium-speed computer. This means the time to display each frame is 55 to 61 ms (18.18 to 16.37 FPS); which is to say, the processor time necessary to process a frame is 5 to 11 ms. Thus, a reasonably fast computer will display this size GIF animation—when it is the only animation visible on the page—at 35 ms per frame (28.6 FPS) if the interframe delay is set to 30 ms. When this animation is on a page with the above, small “scale” video, then the processing time increases by 50%. This thumb can not be displayed smaller than the native file and will display at its native size if the commanded thumb size is set larger than native.
This is a 371-frame GIF with a native resolution of 300 pixels horizontally. It has an interframe delay of 50 ms. When it is on a Wikipedia page where it is the only visible animation, it takes 20.41 seconds to repeat on a reasonably fast PC and 22.67 seconds on a medium-speed computer. This means the time to display each frame is 55 to 61 ms (18.18 to 16.37 FPS); which is to say, the processor time necessary to process a frame is 5 to 11 ms. Thus, a reasonably fast computer will display this size GIF animation—when it is the only animation visible on the page—at 35 ms per frame (28.6 FPS) if the interframe delay is set to 30 ms. When this animation is on a page with the above, small “scale” video, then the processing time increases by 50%. This thumb can not be displayed smaller than the native file and will display at its native size if the commanded thumb size is set larger than native.























In a galllery, images appear at 50% their original size, as shown below:

Thermally agitated molecule

Translational motion of helium atoms


Translational motion

Various parts of this type of placement can be used. This type of placement allowed this image to be placed with a 250-pixel width.

[edit] Linked graphics

Homecoming
Dorothy
Hugh Beaumont
Eddie
50s coffee ad
spitfire

[edit] Graphic search

Mayflower

[edit] Citations and PDF icons

This is a citation reference[7]

The note attached to this paragraph does have Adobe PDF icon at the end. [8]

…But the note for this paragraph does. Adobe PDF icon. [9]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Compliance with the SI regarding the percent symbol (%) is limited in this chart. According to the BIPM’s SI brochure: Subsection 5.3.3, Formatting the value of a quantity, a space is always used to separate the unit symbol from the numeric value. Notable exceptions are the unit symbols for degree, minute, and second for plane angle, °, ′, and ″ (e.g., a latitude of 47° 38′). However, according to 5.3.7 Stating values of dimensionless quantities, or quantities of dimension one, the exception does not apply to the “%” symbol; it states as follows: “When it [the percent symbol] is used, a space separates the number and the symbol %.” This practice has not been well adopted with regard to the % symbol, is contrary to Wikipedia’s Manual of Style, and is not observed here. 
  2. ^ Compliance with the SI regarding the percent symbol (%) is limited in this chart. According to the BIPM’s SI brochure: Subsection 5.3.3, Formatting the value of a quantity, a space is always used to separate the unit symbol from the numeric value. Notable exceptions are the unit symbols for degree, minute, and second for plane angle, °, ′, and ″ (e.g., a latitude of 47° 38′). However, according to 5.3.7 Stating values of dimensionless quantities, or quantities of dimension one, the exception does not apply to the “%” symbol; it states as follows: “When it [the percent symbol] is used, a space separates the number and the symbol %.” This practice has not been well adopted with regard to the % symbol, is contrary to Wikipedia’s Manual of Style, and is not observed here. 
  3. ^ NIST: SI prefixes (link to Web site).
  4. ^ Criteria: A total of ≥250,000 Google hits on both the U.S. spelling (-gram) and the U.K./International spelling (-gramme).
  5. ^ The practice of using the abbreviation “mcg” rather than the SI symbol “µg” was formally mandated for medical practitioners in 2004 by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) in their “Do Not Use” List: Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Symbols because hand-writen expressions of “µg” can be confused with “mg”, resulting in a thousand-fold overdosing. The mandate was also adopted by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices.
  6. ^ Apollo Laser Ranging Experiments Yield Results. NASA (2005-07-11). Retrieved on 2007-05-30.
  7. ^ The ice point of purified water has been measured to be 0.000 089(10) degrees Celsius - see Magnum, B.W. (June 1995). "Reproducibility of the Temperature of the Ice Point in Routine Measurements" (PDF). Nist Technical Note 1411. 
  8. ^ Citation: Torus Formation in Neutron Star Mergers and Well-Localized Short Gamma-Ray Bursts, R. Oechslin et al. of Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics., arXiv:astro-ph/0507099 v2, 22 Feb. 2006.  Download paper (725 kB PDF) See… there is no icon at left.
  9. ^ Citation: Torus Formation in Neutron Star Mergers and Well-Localized Short Gamma-Ray Bursts, R. Oechslin et al. of Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics., arXiv:astro-ph/0507099 v2, 22 Feb. 2006.  Download paper (725 kB PDF) See… the icon is at left because ".pdf" was appended to the end of the referenced file but this addition didn't break the link.

[edit] Vote Issue: Example article

The issue being discussed is whether the “Whole Foods Market” paragraph at the bottom of Criticisms and controversy should stay in the article.

[edit] Parties

Support, the paragraph should stay: Please sign with # ~~~~

Oppose, the paragraph should be deleted: Please sign with # ~~~~

  1. Greg L 03:23, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Debate

[edit] Other Proposals

Greg L / (talk)

[edit] Spelling: National conventions

Wikipedia’s official policy is that the spelling convention used by the first major contributors should be retained. The Kilogram article is written throughout with American spelling (kilogram instead of kilogramme, liter instead of litre). Note the following passage, taken from Wikipedia:Manual of Style:

“ In June 2005, the Arbitration Committee ruled that when either of two styles is acceptable, it is inappropriate for an editor to change an article from one style to another unless there is a substantial reason to do so (for example, it is acceptable to change from American to British spelling if the article concerns a British topic, and vice versa). Edit warring over optional styles is unacceptable. If an article has been stable in a given style, it should not be converted without a style-independent reason. Where in doubt, defer to the style used by the first major contributor. See Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Jguk. ”

Note that “liter” is the proper American spelling. Note further that two other instances of liter are elsewhere on the page. Please also take note of another common-sense policy from Wikipedia:Manual of Style:

“ An overriding principle is that style and formatting should be applied consistently throughout an article, unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, except in direct quotations, where the original text is generally preserved. ”

Accordingly, your insistence at “correcting” this one instance just makes the article non-harmonious. It would be highly inappropriate of you — and against Wikipedia policy — to go through the entire article to change the rest of the article to British spelling.

As regards consistency from article to article within Wikipedia, there is none. Note the Pressure article. It uses British spelling throughout. Further, if you click on a link in the article spelled centimetre (of water), you go to an article titled Centimetre of water wherein the spelling within the article uses the “centimeter” spelling!

Wikipedia’s policy (that the spelling convention used by the first major contributors should be retained) seems a good one. It encourages contributors to begin or substantially expand articles. Further, it reduces frustrations for contributors such as when someone later wades into an article (like the Kelvin article, which uses American spelling throughout) and changes “color” to “colour.”

Please adbide by these policies.

P.S. On a final note, I’m not entirely ‘hung up’ on American conventions. For instance I used the European date convention of “7 April 1795” in the History section. It is such a steaming logical way of doing it and eliminates a comma. And although I am an American engineer, I do all my primary design in SI units and only convert to inches etc. at the last step when generating prints for machine shops or writing an owners manual. (19:09, 13 August 2007)

[edit] Renaming an article

Theresa, I just created an article, Freedom From Fear (painting), and then realized that its title should have a lowercase “for”, as in Freedom from Fear (painting). Can you fix that? I don’t know how to. Greg L (my talk) 23:32, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Done. For futire reference you click on the "move" tag to move a page to a new title. The history page is moved and a redirect is created at the old page. Theresa Knott | The otter sank 06:20, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Thank you. I'll make a note of it (never did that before). Greg L (my talk) 08:47, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Edit dispute resources

[edit] Colour vs. Color, and related spelling issues (condensed form)

The issue of British English vs. American English has been a subject of heated debate. Wikipedia’s current policy seems to be the most equitable, encourages contributions, and settles conflict. Per Wikipedia: Manual of Style: Disputes over style issues, the term originally used in the article by the first major contributor(s) should be retained. Greg L (my talk) 01:50, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Auto dating

76

July 1, 1931 (1931-07-01) (age 76)

You arrived at this page today at 12:40, Saturday June 14, 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Licensing

This image is of a project the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is a department of the U.S. Government. The image is copyrighted by Robert Rathe Photography under terms with the NIST where free use of this photo is restricted to materials that describe NIST programs directly.

The use of this image on the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation,] qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement. See Wikipedia:Non-free content for more information.

This image, as used in the Kilogram article falls under fair use because of the following:

  • The image illustrates the project in question, which is the subject of a section of the Kilogram article.

[edit] Links: Principle of least astonishment

Vinyanov: Regarding these edits, according to the general principals outlined in WP: What needs to be done on pages that are targets of redirects? and WP: Principle of least astonishment, the reader should be able to best anticipate what will happen when they click on a link. Examine the below examples; the last link in both skips the page forward to the same section in the Kilogram article:

While the weight of matter is entirely dependent upon the strength of gravity, the mass of matter is constant (assuming it is not traveling at a relativistic speed with respect to an observer). Accordingly, for astronauts in microgravity, no effort is required to hold an object off the cabin floor since such objects naturally hover. However, since objects in microgravity still retain their mass, an astronaut must exert one hundred times more effort to accelerate a 100-kilogram object at the same rate as for a 1-kilogram object. See also Mass vs. weight below.

Note that by using the above method, the reader properly knows precisely what will happen if they click on the Mass vs. weight link; they will skip forward to a section of that same article where they can read a passage that expands on that particular subject. Contrast this with the following technique for accomplishing this simple task:

While the weight of matter is entirely dependent upon the strength of gravity, the mass of matter is constant (assuming it is not traveling at a relativistic speed with respect to an observer). Accordingly, for astronauts in microgravity, no effort is required to hold an object off the cabin floor since such objects naturally hover. However, since objects in microgravity still retain their mass, an astronaut must exert one hundred times more effort to accelerate a 100-kilogram object at the same rate as for a 1-kilogram object.

Note that in both examples, the reader could reasonably and correctly anticipate what will happen if they click on the “weight” and “relativistic” links: they will be taken to the relevant Wikipedia article. These two links are properly made and carry no surprises. The third link (“one hundred times”) in the latter method does not provide the reader with sufficient information in to properly anticipate what they will be taken to if they click on it. This latter style of linking has an “Easter egg hunt” quality to it as it almost begs to be clicked on just to find out what a “one hundred times”-link could possibly take the reader to: (elsewhere in the current article(?), at article about “one hundred”(?) who knows?). Sometimes very obscurely aliased links may be suitable for special purposes, like humor. As a general rule, the Principal of Least Astonishment makes articles more enjoyable to read and encourages interaction and exploration (learning) because the reader knows they won’t be wasting their time by clicking on mysterious links of no interest to them, which is not a good way to make links.  :-)

[edit] Units of measure, kiB

  • All: MOSNUM can be a little like the Bible or the Koran: you can often read what you want into it. Note however, this exceedingly practical policy on MOSNUM at #Which system to use:
“ In scientific articles, use the units employed in the current scientific literature on that topic. This will usually be SI, but not always; for example, natural units are often used in relativistic and quantum physics, and Hubble's constant should be quoted in its most common unit of (km/s)/Mpc rather than its SI unit of s−1. ”
I would argue that Wikipedia should observe whatever practices are observed by the best paid-subscription computer magazines. I am a Mac owner, subscribe to MacWorld, and routinely visit a huge number of Mac-related Web sites—usually daily. I must profess that I haven’t lately perused Windows-oriented magazines so I can’t purport to being an overall authority on computer jargon across all platforms. For instance, the Unix or Linux crowd may be much more precise than Windows/Mac magazines. Having covered myself now with caveats…
I encountered the term “kiB” the very first time on Wikipedia. I correctly surmised it must have had something to do with clarifying the ambiguity with binary and decimal math but had to click the linked unit of measure to figure out which one it meant. I submit that Wikipedia should always follow common practices and not attempt to lead—regardless of the field or article. It takes more than a proposal from an organization like the IEEE to make something an effective way to communicate; the proposal must be widely adopted so the term is well recognized by the intended audience. If scientists in the field of gravimetry routinely use a unit of measure called the gal, then Wikipedia articles should (and do) use than non-SI unit of acceleration in related articles. If Wikipedia didn’t, we would be undermining the fundamental objective of technical writing: to clearly communicate technically oriented information to the intended audience with minimal confusion. Sometimes, we just live with certain shortcomings in units of measure. For instance, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics once proposed that expressions like ppm (parts per million) be replaced with a new unit called the uno. Notwithstanding that it was arguably a great idea, it was not widely accepted and the principal proponent of the idea withdrew it. Note that the necessary virtue—and the one that was missing with the uno—is “widespread adoption.”
In a nutshell, I am unclear about MOSNUM policy on kB, MB, GB, etc. However if there is a MOSNUM policy that, in an effort to remedy ambiguity, calls for the use of terms that are unfamiliar with the typical reader who would be visiting any given article, then we should fall back to MOSNUM’s one, extremely wise policy that requires adoption of the term that is used in current literature on the subject. If Wikipedia finds itself leading the charge in an effort at correcting an ambiguity when most other publications have not entered the fray, then perhaps the “ambiguity” is more of a perception that a real problem. If “kiB” is well recognized by the Unix community, the Wikipedia articles on Unix topics would be well advised to use “kiB”. And if the term is not well recognized among general-interest computer users (and computer advertisements, brochures, owners manuals, and packaging) then Wikipedia should use whatever terms are common there. This anyway, is my 2¢ on the subject.

And this note to an editor…

Glad to help. When I come across “kiB” in Wikipedia, it reminds me of that know-it-all kid on the train in that 3D animation, The Polar Express. In my opinion, Wikipedia looks its best when authors follow what the professional editors do at Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book. My spell checker, which recognizes all sorts of arcane computer jargon, just flagged “kiB”.

The following tidbit may also be of assistance to you in your efforts to counter those whose arguments are too dependent upon proposals of standard bodies:

Wikipedia currently flouts the Mother of all Standard Bodies, the BIPM, with regard to the use of a certain unit of measure. According to the BIPM’s SI brochure: Subsection 5.3.3, Formatting the value of a quantity, a space is always used to separate the unit symbol from the numeric value. It is “23 °C”, not “23°C”. Notable exceptions are the unit symbols for degree, minute, and second for plane angle, °, ′, and ″ (e.g., a latitude of 47° 38′). However, according to 5.3.7 Stating values of dimensionless quantities, or quantities of dimension one, the exception does not apply to the “%” symbol; it states as follows: “When it [the percent symbol] is used, a space separates the number and the symbol %.” This practice has not been well adopted by writers throughout the English-speaking world and Wikipedia wisely established a policy that is contrary to the BIPM (here in Manual of Style) that effectively requires that authors flout the BIPM in order to conform to the way people are accustomed to using and seeing the percent symbol. It is “75%” and not “75 %”.

The fundamental objective at Wikipedia must be to clearly communicate technically oriented information to the intended audience with minimal confusion. Technical bodies like the IEEE and IUPAC make proposals all the time. Some are well embraced and rapidly adopted. Sometimes not.

[edit] Experiments in picture size

A 5X divisor on a 1600-pixel original.
A 5X divisor on a 1600-pixel original.
A 4X divisor on a 1600-pixel original. Note how the even divisor is so much sharper but suffers from JPEG-like artifacts in the high-contrast regions even though the original image was saved at a quality of 12.
A 4X divisor on a 1600-pixel original. Note how the even divisor is so much sharper but suffers from JPEG-like artifacts in the high-contrast regions even though the original image was saved at a quality of 12.
One of my favorite images I made. It took only moments to create the solid model and give it its surface properties; it took hours to get the lighting right. I ray-traced it —already anti-aliased—at 2800 × 2048 pixels. This goes a long way to reducing the jaggies. However, even the ray-tracing shows aliasing errors in thin lines and other odd artifacts. So I render it with more data than required. Then I reduced it 50% (1400 × 1024) in Photoshop using bicubic sampling. This results in a very smooth master. I then placed it into the Kilogram article at one-quarter size (350 × 256). Using an interger divisor for the size keeps the placed image very sharp; perhaps too sharp at reduced sizes. It is shown here at one-half size (700 × 512). My chosen rendering size allows lots of range in placed size: I can specify interger divisors to sizes as small as 175 × 128 pixels. For the full-size image, click here.
One of my favorite images I made. It took only moments to create the solid model and give it its surface properties; it took hours to get the lighting right. I ray-traced it —already anti-aliased—at 2800 × 2048 pixels. This goes a long way to reducing the jaggies. However, even the ray-tracing shows aliasing errors in thin lines and other odd artifacts. So I render it with more data than required. Then I reduced it 50% (1400 × 1024) in Photoshop using bicubic sampling. This results in a very smooth master. I then placed it into the Kilogram article at one-quarter size (350 × 256). Using an interger divisor for the size keeps the placed image very sharp; perhaps too sharp at reduced sizes. It is shown here at one-half size (700 × 512). My chosen rendering size allows lots of range in placed size: I can specify interger divisors to sizes as small as 175 × 128 pixels. For the full-size image, click here.
This version has a size divisor of of two and one-third and therefore measures 600 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of two and one-third and therefore measures 600 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of 2.5 and therefore measures 560 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of 2.5 and therefore measures 560 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of 4 and therefore measures 350 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of 4 and therefore measures 350 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of 3.5 and therefore measures 400 pixels across. Note the smoother appearance along the bright groove in the scale at the expense of contrast in the sandstone.
This version has a size divisor of of 3.5 and therefore measures 400 pixels across. Note the smoother appearance along the bright groove in the scale at the expense of contrast in the sandstone.
This version has a size divisor of of 7.487 and therefore measures 187 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of 7.487 and therefore measures 187 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of 8 and therefore measures 175 pixels across.
This version has a size divisor of of 8 and therefore measures 175 pixels across.














































































































Please note that the below text on E=mc2 is here for the review of true Ph.D experts in the subject. Although you may disagree with this information and it may not be correct, it is under professional review for accuracy.

[edit] Practical examples of E=mc2

Einstein performed his calculations using the CGS measurement system (centimeters, grams, seconds, dynes, and ergs). His formula works just as well using today’s SI system (with E in joules, m in kg, and c in meters per second). Using SI units, E=mc2 is calculated as follows:

E = (1 kg) × (299,792,458 m/s)2 = 89,875,517,873,681,764 J (≈90 × 1015 Joules)

Accordingly, one gram of mass — the mass of a U.S. dollar bill — is equivalent to the following amounts of energy:

≡ 89,875,517,873,681.764 J (≈90 terajoules), precisely by definition
≡ 24,965,421.631 578 267 777… kilowatt-hours (≈25 GW-hours)
= 21,466,398,651,400.058 278 398 777 1090 calories (≈21 Tcal) [1]
= 21.466 398 651 400 058 278 398 777 1090 kilotons of TNT-equivalent energy (≈21 kt) [1]
= 85,185,554,537.701 118 960 880 666 4808 BTUs (≈85 billion BTUs) [1]

Anytime energy is generated, the process can be evaluated from an E=mc2-perspective. For instance, the “Gadget”-style bomb used in the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki had an explosive yield equivalent to 21 kt of TNT. About 1 kg of the approximately 6.15 kg of plutonium in each of these bombs fissioned into lighter elements totaling almost exactly one gram less.[2] This occurs because nuclear binding energy is released whenever elements with more than 56 nucleons fission. Another example is hydroelectric generation. The water passing through Grand Coulee Dam’s turbines every 1.6 hours loses one gram of its mass.[3] Turbine designers look at their equations in terms of pressure, torque, and RPM. However, Einstein’s equations show that objects falling into a gravity well lose mass and, per E=mc2, this mass is equivalent to a certain amount of energy. The potential energy — and equivalent mass — bound in the waters of the Columbia River as it descends to the Pacific Ocean would be lost as heat due to viscous friction and the turbulence of white water rapids and waterfalls were it not for the dam and its generators, which convert some of this potential and kinetic energy into electrical energy.

In the equation E=mc2, mass and energy are more than equivalent, they are different forms of the same thing. Anytime energy is added to a system, the system gains mass. For instance, lifting a one-kilogram mass upwards one meter against the force of one standard gravity increases its mass by 109.114 femtograms (1 fg = 1 × 10–15 g).[4] [5] From Einstein’s perspective, the kilogram gains mass as it rises out of a gravity well. To the engineer, the kilogram gains potential energy as it is raised upwards. A spring’s mass increases whenever it is put into compression or tension. Its added mass arises from the added potential energy stored within it, which is bound in the stretched chemical (electron) bonds linking the atoms within the spring. Raising the temperature of an object (increasing its heat energy) increases its mass. For instance, if the temperature of the platinum/iridium “international prototype” of the kilogram — the world’s primary mass standard — is allowed to change by 1 °C, its mass will change by 1.5 picograms (1 pg = 1 × 10–12 g).[6] All types of added energy adds mass. Note that no net mass or energy is created or lost in any of these scenarios (except for that radiated away into space as in the case of hydropower). Ultimately, the chemical energy required to heat the platinum/iridium kilogram, or the mechanical energy required to lift it upwards or to compress the spring, expends at least as much mass and energy as is gained by the object being worked on. These are all examples of the transfer of energy and mass in accordance with the principal of mass-energy conservation.[5]

Note further that in accordance with Einstein’s Strong Equivalence Principle (SEP), all forms of mass and energy have equivalent quantities of inertial and gravitational mass.[7] Thus, all radiated and transmitted energy retains its mass. Not only does the matter comprising Earth create gravity, but that gravitational energy itself has mass. This effect is accounted for in ultra-precise laser ranging to the Moon as the Earth orbits the Sun when testing Einstein’s theory of general relativity.[7] According to E=mc2, no closed system (any system treated and observed as a whole) ever loses mass, even as matter is converted to energy. This statement is more than an abstraction based on the principal of equivalency, it is a real-world effect. One can also just as easily say that in the context of E=mc2, no closed system ever loses matter+energy or energy.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c Conversions used: 1956 International (Steam) Table (IT) values where one calorie ≡ 4.1868 J and one BTU ≡ 1055.05585262 J. Weapons designers’ conversion value of one gram TNT ≡ 1000 calories used. 
  2. ^ The 6.2 kg core comprised 0.8% gallium by weight. Also, about 20% of the Gadget’s yield was due to fast fissioning in its natural uranium tamper. This resulted in 4.1 moles of Pu fissioning with 180 MeV per atom actually contributing prompt kinetic energy to the explosion. Note too that the term “Gadget”-style is used here instead of “Fat Man” because this general design of bomb was very rapidly upgraded to a more efficient one requiring only 5 kg of the Pu/gallium alloy.
  3. ^ Assuming the dam is generating at its peak capacity of 6809 MW at 50% thermodynamic efficiency.
  4. ^ 1.3: Mass-Energy Conservation at a Microscopic Scale by Paul Marmet. One kilogram raised one meter against one standard gravity (9.80665 m s–2) gains 9.80665 J of potential energy.
  5. ^ a b The increase in mass an object experiences when raised upwards against Earth’s gravity is not observer-dependent; the effect is real from an absolute point of view, i.e., for an observer outside the Earth system looking inwards. As matter loses mass as it falls down a gravity well, its contribution to a system’s total gravitational field diminishes slightly. Taken to the extreme, this effect can be striking. As Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time, the net energy of the universe is exactly zero. He wrote that the matter in the universe is made of positive energy and in this context, gravitational fields are a negative energy. If the expansion of the universe somehow reversed and all its matter came together in a Big Crunch, no energy (mass) would remain. This is an example where the maximum conceivable amount of matter — the entire observable universe — falling down the greatest gravity well in existence — the entire observable universe — results in all mass being lost. The mass-loss effect occurs from an absolute point of view. Thus, the potential energy — and mass — the kilogram gains by rising out of Earth’s gravity well is independent of its position relative to an observer (e.g., it is independent of the respective floors in a building the observer and the kilogram are on); it is an absolute effect relative to the center of the Earth (the gravitational field outside of a sphere behave as if all of the sphere’s mass is concentrated in a point at its center). Accordingly, raising the height of an object on Earth entails an exchange of energy and mass from the lifting machine (human or mechanical) into the object being lifted; the entire Earth system (including the lifting machine and the object) gains no mass. However, if an extraterrestrial being magically reached down from space and separated the Earth and the platinum/iridium kilogram cylinder, the entire Earth/kilogram system would gain net energy and mass. Still, in accordance with the principal of mass-energy conservation, this added energy and mass would have been extracted from the extraterrestrial who did that work.
  6. ^ Assuming a 90/10 alloy of Pt/Ir by weight, a Cp of 25.9 for Pt and 25.1 for Ir, a Pt-dominated average Cp of 25.8, 5.134 moles of metal, and 132 J K–1 for the prototype. A variation of ±1.5 picograms is of course, much smaller than the actual uncertainty in the mass of the international prototype, which is ±2 micrograms.
  7. ^ a b Earth’s gravitational self-energy is 4.6 × 10–10 that of Earth’s total mass, or 2.7 trillion metric tons. Citation: The Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-Ranging Operation (APOLLO), T. W. Murphy, Jr. et al. University of Washington, Dept. of Physics (132 kB PDF, here)

[edit] The perils of collaborative writing (stress reducer)

The following is widely considered to be an urban legend. But apparently it is based in truth (Snopes). Sharon Melnicer in 1997 was teaching 12th-grade English students in Winnipeg and gave an assigment in tandem writing. The students collaborated via e-mail to the teacher. Two of her students turned in the story detailed below. If tandem writing can be so interesting, think about all the interesting dynamics and fun there can be on Wikipedia!

STORY:

(first paragraph by Rebecca)

At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.

(second paragraph by Gary)

Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off, a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

(Rebecca)

He bumped his head and died almost immediately but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.

(Gary)

Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through the congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret Mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion, which vaporized poor, stupid, Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em out of the sky!"

(Rebecca)

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate adolescent.

(Gary)

Yeah? Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. "Oh shall I have camomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of F***ING TEA??? Oh no, I'm an air headed bimbo who reads too many Danielle Steele novels."

(Rebecca)

Asshole.

(Gary)

Bitch.

(Rebecca)

F*** YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!!!

(Gary)

Go drink some tea - whore.

(Ms. Melnicer)

A+ - I really liked this one.