Ozexpatriate

Perhaps, and Boeing has been strong in civil aviation since its earliest days, as it is today with the long awaited first customer delivery of the 787. The B-52 though never looked like a commercial airliner to me. To any aviation fans visiting the Seattle area, in addition to the area's railfanning opportunities, I would recommend the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field (King County Airport). Tons of great stuff including a 707 used as Nixon's Air Force One, and a Concorde, not to mention the Red Barn - Boeing's 'spiritual' home. In the US and overseas, the Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space is deservedly well known, but off the beaten track at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Akron, OH (the home of military aviation) is one of the world's best collections of aircraft, the National Museum of the US Air Force. The collection is staggering. Sure, they have a B17, and a B29 and a B24 too. Want to see a Convair B36 Peacemaker and B58 Hustler, MIGs a B1B, nukes? Yup, they've got 'em. Akron, which is not far from Dayton (home of the Wright brothers) has a lot of aviation history going for it. It's also the home of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and its former subsidiary, the Goodyear Zeppelin Company. At the Goodyear Airdock, (a large blimp hanger) the USS Akron and USS Macon were constructed in the early 1930s. The building still stands. All this is a bit off topic, but as this is wheel-tapping anyway ...

I think it's a school of design sort of thing. There's is a distinctive aircraft aesthetic in the 1930s (more common in the US West Coast design shops - Boeing, Douglas, etc) that the B17 belongs to. Look at the shape of the B17, DC3, and Boeing 314 (the Clipper flying boat). All have more evidence of 'voluptous' oval shapes in fuselage cross-sections, the side view of the vertical stabilizers, and plan views of the horizonal stabilizers and wings. (The Spitfire and the Hughes H1 - the plane Hughes crashes in "The Aviator" movie - share these attributes.) By the time of the P51 there was a move away from this aesthetic. In comparison, the Lancaster contains more straight line segments - and therefore fewer continuous curves. I think the eye is drawn to the the organic shape of the curved surfaces versus the more 'artificial' straight segments. The same appeal is true of locomotive streamlining, which not coincidentally, had it's forte in the 1930s. By comparison, the Germans built very little that looked like this until the Me262. Except for some Heinkels, most of what they built looked very angular.

I like Wikipedia. I think it's generally accurate, though of course there are exceptions. Peer review is the same process used by most reputable publishers, with Wikipedia the definition is just broader which can arbitarily be good or bad.

No, I didn't forget it. An earlier post talked about comparing the Lancaster with the B17 so I confined the comparison to the heavies. (I could have included the Short Stirling and others too.) As you say, the Mosquito was a phenomenal design. Super fast, with a heavy bomb load and a small crew. For comparisons though, it belongs in the multi-role aircraft category like Beaufighters and the A26.

I do miss this night sky from the southern hemisphere. I don't know if the Milky may is necessarily more visible there. The ambient light from cities makes such an enormous difference. Even when it's not raining, night sky viewing here in Portland is not nearly the same as just 100 miles away. Head for the desert!

Both were very effective designs, according to their parameters. Interestingly the B17 was developed several years earlier than the Lancaster. The Liberator (before) and the B29 (after) are closer to the Lancaster in development cycle. In overload circumstances the B17 could carry 17,600lb. It is my impression that when carrying the grand slam, Lancasters must have been range limited. It's certainly interesting to see, in general, a much heavier bomb load on the British bombers. Here's some data, courtesy of wikipedia: Aircraft .......... 1st flight ... production .typical bomb load* B17 Flying Fortress ... Jul 35 ... Apr 38 ... .4,500lb @800 miles Halifax ........... ... Sep 39 ... Nov 40 ... 13,000lb B24 Liberator ..... ... Dec 39 ... ... 41 ... .5,000lb @800 miles Lancaster ......... ... Jan 41 ... ... 42 ... 14,000lb B29 Super Fortress. ... Sep 42 ... May 44 ... 20,000lb * Not thoroughly researched by me. (This is data from the wikipedia pages) The amount of focused (and overlapping) development and the progression of technology that resulting in the B29 in such a short period is staggering.

Pete, I know, I'm lucky to have had a very mild summer - no heat waves, tornadoes, earthquakes, or hurricanes. There are a lot of people suffering hardships across the eastern seaboard right now. I haven't lost sight of that. I hope you and yours are well and things are back to normal soon.

I think it's interesting that we collectively (I don't want Pete to feel singled out here), now consider broadband access as being in the same class of essential services as electricity, water/sewer and natural gas (for those that have it) and certainly more important than traditional wired telephony (twisted pair). Indeed, given that there are alternative sources of electricity to the grid (portable generators, solar, etc) broadband access might even be rated by many (most?) of us as more essential than electrical grid connectivity. Broadband access of course is a very loose term. There is a plethora of wireless access modes, 4G (LTE versus WiMax or whatever) versus 3G / WiFi and the bevy of physical connections like FIOS, cable and even T1 and on top of that, satelite. It is a testament to the nature of the internet - conceived as defence infrastructure, it was designed to function with local disruptions - that this system could be thought of as not only more essential than the electrical grid, but pragmatically, more reliable ... up to a point. All the media for broadband access have wide variations in their availability - particularly in the event of natural disasters. Even if cell towers stand and base stations are equipped with some kind of uninterruptable power supply, most of this infrastructure is eventually at the mercy of the electrical grid. Even the satellites need a ground station somewhere for the internet point of presence. It is natural for 'infotainment' infrastructure to get a lower priority in the recovery to a major disaster than the more basic services. Yet I have lots of colleagues who depend on the 'infotainment' infrastructure for connectivity to do their jobs and might prioritize this even over electricity (if a backup solution is avaialble).

Brilliant - very creative and amusing. They're all good; randomly, looking at Birth Kind Eggs, I would never think of Knightsbridge - or vice versa. I like Queen's Park. It's not a difficult anagram but it's funny.

No real updates on the actual failures that caused the collision but it now has rammifications in terms of speed reductions on China's high-speed rail. CNN: China recalls bullet trains, slows down high-speed rail

Yes, I remember that the original pricing for the Garratt was much less expensive. Plus, Eureka had to change suppliers when Kanda San dropped them.* I suspect that transition factors into their new pricing along with what are probably relatively small volumes. The Australian dollar continues to be strong. Today the AU$1.00 = US$1.02 = £0.62. (*Mike I think you started a thread to that effect.)

At one point I tried to order the NSWGR Garratt from Eureka to add to my collection of articulated steam power (US prototypes, also in H0). Unfortunately my compatriots in Victoria don't appear to be particularly well organized in the mail order deparment. (Eureka is a small operation.) They took a deposit from me for a 3801 that hasn't materialized and my Garratt order disappeared into the void, but that's just me whinging and I haven't 'done' anything about it. Pictures of that Garratt look sensational. I think I'll be able to resist the pull off the LMSR Garratt as much as I have avoided all those Princesses in Crimson Lake over the years. (At least for now. We'll see when preliminary images start to appear.)

Nice link. Thanks Keith! That caption has the train at Clifton - which was on the Canadian side of the Niagara suspension bridge. The ties back to Britain for railways in the colonies are not surprising.

There is. Andy turned it off. (And a good thing too, I think!)

It's interesting to see the suble variations in the caption that went with this picture: BBC travel section version: Original Life.com version: Life (while the source of the erroneous association with Brunel's GWR) at least named the locomotive "Essex" which it appears to be. The BBC translated this to the train (also dumping the freight reference), compounding the error. "Flying Scotsman" anyone?

Based on Pete's idea we have some Google hits, though it's not related to Chicago. Rip Track notes the following locomotive: "Essex" GWR (built by Lowell Machine Shop in 1853) 4-4-0. Rip Track also defines the GWR = Great Western RR of Canada. The Great Western Railway of Canada operated from Niagara Falls to Toronto beginning in 1853. Indeed it even used the infamous 1855 - 1877 suspension bridge over the Niagara gorge that was designed by John A. Roebling (who later went on to design the Brooklyn Bridge). Here's a scan of a contemporary lithograph for the "GWR". If you didn't think a railway suspension bridge was scary enough, three gauges were supported on the bridge using four rails: 4'8.5" New York Central 5'6" Great Western (of Canada) 6' Erie If we assume the picture is of a locomotive named "Essex" on the Great Western Railway in 1859, I think we can safely say this picture is the colonial Great Western Railway operating in Canada West before confederation. The line was originally built to a 5'6" gauge and the picture appears like this may be the case. Having done all that on-line digging, there is a comment to the life.com article also suggesting the wikipedia link to the Great Western Railway of Canada. If you look closely at the end of the train in the 'large' version of the LIFE picture you can see what looks like one of the suspension cable supports for the Niagara Gorge suspension bridge. That's pretty conclusive for me. You don't get to see pictures of colonial railways in Canada every day.

When I looked at the Life article, there was no text - just a byline "Paddington Station, Minus the Bear". Dreadful! Is this the one with the caption "Snug as a bug in a rug"? I can't make out what is going on in that photo. The guy with the apron - who is clearly some kind of worker - has his right knee on the seat, but what is he doing and what is covering his boot heel? "Ship to Shore" What's Lincoln's death got to do with immigrants to Australia??? And - I'm not even sure that's a Pullman car.

Apparently the very far west of Wales. The Great Western is well known for it's record-breaking 4-4-0 motive power at the turn of the Century but this really is an "American"! ... or perhaps more accurately "Canadian"! I find it hilarious that this would appear on bbc.co.uk. I expect this kind of clanger on the poorly edited CNN.com (which frequently links to "news" providers like Time and People) but not so much the BBC.

Thanks Ian. I guess "don't believe everything you read on the internet" are good words to live by. While I questioned their motives, I have to admit it had me fooled - I first saw this on CNN.com. CNN has picked up the BBC story today: Internet Explorer IQ report appears to be a hoax

Sadly, we don't all have our mums to ride as copilots whenever we go beyond our regular haunts. That would be nice. 30 years ago London cab drivers had to memorize every street and pass a test before they were given a taxi driving license. Do they still? I don't frequently drive in Britain, but in my collective driving experience (Britain, Europe, US and Australia) I'd say traffic is either much faster or more congested depending where and when you are driving, than it was 30 years ago. This is certainly true where I grew up and there are fewer opportunities today to pull over safely and read the map. In these situations, the sat nav is not only more convenient, but I think safer as well.

I believe that AptiQuant has an agenda here. If I extrapolate from what I read in their paper, I suspect that they have to do a lot of extra development work to get their web-based surveys to operate correctly on IE compared with other browsers and they are frustrated by the extra time and cost to do this. That seems to me to be the logical reason they would introduce this idea in the second paragraph of their conclusions stating it as "common knowledge" that IE is incompatible with modern web standards. (Curiously, I was taught that no new information should ever be introduced in a section labelled "conclusions", certainly not an assumption based on "common knowledge".) Their "previously unpublished" results from 2006 do not show any correlation between lower IQ and test takers using IE, (arguably they suggest a contrary conclusion) which may explain why those results were unpublished back then. They appear to have waited until their data correlated with the viewpoint they wanted to express. They certainly took an immflammatory position. In any case, thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts.

Clearly using the SatNav to play a game of junior rally champion falls under the law of unintended consequences. I'll counter the map afficionados with an experience of mine from several years ago, before the ubiquitous Garmin and Tom Tom hand-helds. I drove a rental car in Paris, armed with a suberb and very detailed fold-out Michelin map. By myself, underground in Paris at speeds approaching 100kph, the map with it's <2 mm high print, was worthless. I can't say how effective a SatNav would have been in the Parisian ring tunnels, but it can't have been worse than the map. My school-boy French is adequate to read the signs but without being able to correlate them with the map, I was flying blind. Despite intending to go to the SW side of Paris, for a short while I ended up headed NW on a tolled autoroute to Normandy, which at least I knew was certainly wrong. Happily I knew my destination was not far from Versailles. Since there were signs to Versailles everywhere, old fashioned highway signage got me where I needed to go.

The notion that China doubled the compensation for victims to 915,000 Yuan ($143,000) is an indication that they want publicity around this problem to 'go away'. China doubles compensation for relatives of train crash victims Interesting quotes from the previously linked news report: Train crash explanation raises more public doubts Non fail-safe signals on a high-speed line are pretty terrifying.

Yes, they did: but apparently declined to share this in the report.

In their conclusions, the authors of the report state the following: In light of the recent problems with IE's handling of cookies and summarily logging off RMWebbers, these comments ring true, although it also rings of an 'agenda' given that their business is to supply web-based tools to do HR assessments.