Jones as usual is observant and provocative. I once owned a book on hummingbirds by Crawford Greeenwalt, at that time president of DuPont. He had a hummingbird feeder in his back yard, and became fascinated with the idea of photographing them, particularly capturing the iridescent feathers. This was in the early 60s. He was on the board of a museum or two, and a few phone calls established that no collection of real photos existed. Being who he was he called Edgerton at MIT, the father of flash phototgraphy, and had some special flash setups built for his backyard feeder, where a bird would trip a high speed flash exposure and after many trials the iridescent plumage would be recorded. He also arranged for others to set up hummingbird feeders in central and south america, then fly down for a weekend of photogrphy. All told, there were some 15,000 pictures. The best made it to the book. As befits a gentleman scientist, there was a chart placing hummingbirds in a contiuum of sizes between the largest insects and other birds, and and an analysis of the wing movements that enabled hovering. This was the true work of a gentleman scientist making an excellent contribution to a topic that was non-commercial and of minor scientific interest, yet was unprecedented for the time.
Among all this I remember from that book or elsewhere an observation that bird wings flap at a resonant frequency determined by the mass of the wings and the elasticity of the breast muscles, requiring relatively little energy to keep the wings going. I might also note that contemporary studies of insect flight in connection with making artificial insect robots has shown that aerodynamics on that scale is different than for birds and for fixed wing aircraft. Viscosity and local vortices become important, subtle, complex, hard to model, but effective. Back in the LENR world, there are indeed hints that hydrino and transmutation processes may be at work routinely but beyond our ability to measure, model, or currently conprehend. Mike Carrell
