On Jan 24, 2012, at 18:40 , steve harley wrote:

> on 2012-01-24 00:36 Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote
>> I took the M9 up to Alameda for a photo walk at the USS Hornet on Sunday. It 
>> was really the wrong camera for the task, but I wanted to get to know it 
>> better and push myself a bit.
>> 
>> Quickie output ... thirty five photos in this set:
>> 
>>   http://gallery.me.com/godders#100435

A most enjoyable set. In real life carriers are a lot dirtier, with grime and 
streaked dirty grey paint. The interior lighting I see in your photos looks 
much more even and bright than I remember.

> this is very real; the details, for one who has some sense of the convoluted 
> systems on these ships, are very suggestive of the whole (i could do without 
> the people-shots, the airplanes, and the vignettes)
> 
> just read a bit about the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet, and a few 
> months ago read an eye-opening (for a baby-boomer at least) book on the 
> battle of Guadalcanal; i think warships, and how their little systems worked, 
> are perhaps the perfect expression of the 20th century machine age; looking 
> at controls and gauges, etc., one is forced to imagine the physical reality 
> of the people who operated them

Spent 10 months at sea and in various ports in 1965/66 in the south china sea 
on a carrier that is even newer than the one your were on, CVA-31, the Bon 
Homme Richard, built in New York in 1944. The thing you can't capture with a 
camera, or even sense in port is the incredible amount of noise  those things 
make when at speed (40-45 knots), the steam turbines in the engine room hissing 
and whining, the screech of the arresting gear playing out every 45 seconds, 
the rumble of that heavy cable being drawn back across the deck for the next 20 
something pilot to thump his plane onto the deck, all diminished by the 
undulating movements and rumbling sound of the entire steel envelope you are in 
being pushed through water by 4 huge brass propellers. The ship creates 
exclusive sounds at differing speeds, from the aforementioned rumble to a sound 
like shaking a large china cabinet so it beats against the wall, but more 
metallic.

I've also been on more modern carriers (the Lincoln) but only cruising from 
Everett to Seattle, never exceeding 10 knots, if that. And was most surprised 
once stopped in Elliot Bay, beginning flight ops! Launching one or two of each 
type of aircraft aboard, then recovering them. The Bonnie Dick had to have at 
least 35 knots of wind down the deck to do that! We tourists toeing the yellow 
safety line on the angled deck catapult, which meant the wingtips of the F-14s 
and 18s passed about 4 feet in front of our noses as they were pulled into the 
sky pointing right at downtown, a mile or closer to our bow. Then came 9.11.01, 
and these publicity cruises stopped happening here. Probably everywhere. Well 
worth the $20 fee, 'cause you got lunch and free roam of the ship.

Thanks for reading my memories. Images in a year or so when I start getting my 
slides scanned.

Joseph McAllister
pentax...@mac.com

The Big Bang was silent, and  invisible in it's beginning moments.
Photons were one of the earliest particles to develop, 
but I don't think any were able to escape for a little bit more.
Once they could, there would have been a flash during expansion.
No one would notice, of course, for another 4.2 billion years.
Now we are trying to catch up by looking out, and back in time
to that infinitesimally small fraction of a millisecond in an attempt 
to see what caused that singularity to become the Big Bang. This attempt 
will fail in any visual way, as the furthest galaxies and elements 
are now moving faster than light by recent theory, making the 
information sought beyond a theoretical event horizon.

— update to the Pentaxian's thoughts on particle physics, so far.


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