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A Physicist with the Air Force
An anonymous submitter - anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today, sigh - sent in this tale about the duties of a physicist during World War II.
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At the pilot's insistence (I will not repeat his heated words), I dislodged the target by jumping on it while hanging from a bomb-bay rack and wearing a parachute, just in case.
For those who didn't read the article (after all, if you did, this comment is worthless to you), he's talking about a training "dummy aircraft" for gunners to practice shooting at that didn't drop from the bomber that was carrying, and jammed in the bomb bay, preventing the doors from closing (which meant they couldn't land). Quite a hilarious mental picture if you ask me ;)
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Yeah! I was born too late... ~sigh~
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Let's face it, probably the most fun most scientists have is in the middle of a war. If nothing else, it makes for great drinking stories, and it is often easier to get things done.
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Radio Free Nation
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"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
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"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
At first I thought he was kidding about the slide rule club - I guess we're this generation's equivalent.
It's a little sobering to think of these engineering problems in their human context - even ignoring the fact that he's talking about bombers, it's striking to think that they had enough data to calculate 70-to-1 fighter-to-B29 kill ratios on rear attacks and 3-to-1 kill ratios on front attacks.
The opportunity to make adjustments to decisions as theoretical data are replaced by empirical data is exciting and rewarding. But I'm glad my adjustments don't have an immediate impact with respect to people living and dying.
This is an article which really makes me appriciate what we have today. If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.
My favorite line of the entire article (in reference to the fabrication of slide rules used in the missions):
But, to avoid paperwork and delivery delays, I chose to have them made at the Harmon Field sheet-metal shop on Guam. At that time, there wasn't much combat damage to B-29s. So the repair crews readily gave up some of their beach time for a few bottles of Old Granddad.
Yep, things we're certainly different back then!
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Silly frosh! Grad turkeys don't live in the houses, although I suppose he might have been a social member.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
And I especially note this one:
:)
``Requests for special slide rules grew. To respond quickly, I set up a paperwork-free design and production service. Our streamlined procedures took advantage of the fact that officers had a monthly liquor allowance but enlisted men did not. To secure a special slide rule, the requesting officer would pay with two bottles. I would pass these contributions along to the enlisted members of the 949th Topographical Company, who did the drafting, calculations, and reproductions. Somehow our service enjoyed a de facto priority second only to the production of mission maps.''
My God...it's the grandfather of "Free as in Beer!"
Now look at the later comparison, titled "Open Source Databases: As The Tables Turn".
Both of the comparisons that have been done on phpbuilder.net have put PostgreSQL ahead on heavily loaded sites (like slashdot). MySQL's lead has always really been connection times. However, it's a total flop under many concurrent connections.
This reminds me of an excellent Isaac Asimov story. I think he foresaw our reactions to the history of computation quite well.
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You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
The article was funny, and a good reminiscence, but:
Shockley, Teller, and LeMay
what an unholy trinity that is!
Shockley, the Nobel Prize winner who determined to devote his life to eugenics;
Teller, the brilliant scientist who pushed the DoD further into the realm of "The Super", and beyond;
and, finally, LeMay (brilliantly portrayed by George C. Scott in "Dr. Strangelove"), the hawk's hawk who would stop at nothing to achieve global superiority for his country, even at the expense of the American people.
These men, while they performed great deeds in their lifetimes, are to me a good example of how excessive hubris in the scientific and technical arena can be a very dangerous thing, indeed. None of these men can be considered Great Men, in my opinion, because they wandered from the path of integrity and truth in their zealous pursuit of technology for technology's sake.
But the article makes for a great read, and I'm sure in their day these men were admired and respected. I have the advantage of hindsight, and hope that we can all learn from these men how, for some vicious mole of nature in them, even the greatest of men are prone to fall!
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Postgres is ENTIRELY Free software, and is only licensed under the GPL, unlike MySQL, which has a commercial version, and the GPL version, and the closed source version, of which the GPL version is always behind.
Your statements are not correct:
That said, I much prefer PostgreSQL - good transaction support (no switching of table types), subselects, foreign keys, better performance under load, triggers etc. are just some of the reason why it's a better database.
(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, which is selling a version of PostgreSQL.)
anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today, sigh
That's okay. Losing Slashdot for the day was bad, but it's worth it when you picture all the trolls and karma whores desperately trying to take advantage of the second chance to get first post on the Mac metadata story.
"Gah! I click Reply and it goes back to the main page! But i need to post, it says 0 comments! Reply! Reply! Augghhh!"
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
"To facilitate the calculation, I developed a special slide rule that used the general principle of multiplying two quantities by mechanically adding distances proportional to their logarithms."
He pretty much described right there the basic concept of any sliderule ever used by anybody. All that was needed was to figure out the trig formula and making the numbers different on a normal rule. And for this the Army Air Corps needed a PhD candidate? I didn't know they had PHBs that long ago.
BTW: Is it my imagination or do we no longer need P tags?
After six weeks of data collection and statistical analysis, I completed my report. My analysis showed that, in attacks on our B-29s from the rear, it cost the enemy 70 lost fighter planes, on average, to shoot down one of our bombers. But in frontal attacks, the Japanese lost only three fighters for every B-29 they downed. This result differed starkly from the results of a massive combat simulation study, done back home, that had concluded that B-29s would be most vulnerable to attacks from behind! In light of the new findings, bomber formations and tactics were modified to bring greater firepower to bear against frontal attacks. These changes, together with some minor technical modifications, largely solved the problem
Any guesses what they were doing wrong with the "massive combat simulation study"?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
There's no question that the most effective and efficient form of "governance" is a benevolent dictatorship.
Two problems: It's never benevolent for long, and it's never benevolent to dissent.
It's also illustrative to consider the concept of "governance", and why efficient "governance" is a really lousy thing anyway.
That's why the U.S. "government" is designed at its inception to be as inefficient as possible, and why it took four-score and seven years before someone was able to install an efficient "governance" under it. And that brought war.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
It's amazing what a little "alcohol lubrication" can do to speed up the production line!
sign change error? ;-)
(how many times, if you were a technical student, have you ever calculated a negative mass or something and realized it was a simple sign error somewhere in the middle of a pages-long computation?)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
What you say is somewhat true, but if you know why you're taking losses in a certain situation you're more likely to make the most effective adjustments.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This is an article which really makes me appreciate what we have today. If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a
slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.
It's not like the pilot had to fly and use a slide rule at the same time. The B-29 carried a crew of 10 to 14. Computational tasks were performed by the navigator, co-pilot, and bombardier.
Pilot workload in today's warcraft is higher than it was back then. All those jobs are now done by one, or at most two, crew, along with multiple computers.
Designing something usable in combat with hastily trained crews was a neat trick.
From the pilot's own account of the Nagasaki bombing:
If that's what a bomb at 1640 feet feels like from 30000 feet and after turning away and hauling ass out of there as fast as possible, then there's... well... to be blunt, I see no effing way a B-29 could deliver a high-altitude demonstration burst and have survived, slide rule or not.
(By way of reference, the service ceiling of a B-29 is around 33000 feet. Flying to 60000 feet simply wasn't an option with the technology at the time - and the B-29 was the only aircraft capable of lifting something as heavy as a nuke and flying it the required distance.)
War isn't pretty. War isn't supposed to be pretty. The day war becomes pretty, we've all got problems.
Michael, SAP/DB is free, and transaction safe, and hence recoverable if the machine crashes. Might be worth checking it out. It's GPL, too.
Cheers!
I found it interesting that he'd done computations regarding whether or not we could have done a "demonstration" bombing, and that it wasn't feasible.
The B-29 over Nagasaki was barely far enough away to avoid destruction as it was; if we'd done the "demonstration" so many Slashdotters occasionally complain about, it would have been a suicide mission.
It is probably most succinctly summed up by this quote from Henry Kissinger:
Btw: that quotation comes in various forms and is attributed to various people. I selected the first example I found.
Don't be ungrateful. How much time do you spend here? For *cough FREE cough*. So there was an outage. Go outside for a few hours, instead of insulting the people who run the site. Whatever you may think of their editorial discretion (which we can all complain about at one time or another), Slashdot works almost all the time, and you love it.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Read some of the US media descriptions of the Gulf War, or even better find some CNN footage from it. Not pretty, exactly, but most of them avoided as much of the ugly stuff as they could. They made it look like a video-game war. Granted, they were mostly just passing along the stuff spoon-fed to them by the Pentagon, but that's part of the problem, innit?
Yup, we've all got problems.
the guy sounds very clever, but when i see statistics like that i start wondering about what they're really measuring.
I seriously doubt that the brief summary of his work on that problem was the entire thought process or analysis.
Considering that the analysis he did make apparently helped to alleviate the problem says something to be certain. There's also the possability that data was severely limited and all he could do is make a good experimental guess.