Dreams

Hi kids!


Here's a picture that was sent to me by my son. I love this painting.  I think its absolutely beautiful. No, I don't know what is a painting of and I don't care. It just makes me feel good to look at it.   It was painted by his wife. They are in London. She is studying art, making paintings and 'broadening' her experience. That's what they call it when you go do some wild and crazy thing that people like you don't normally do to learn things you might not normally learn.

London, as is well known to the junior geographists among you, is a big old city in England,  which is itself part of Great Britain. It's, whoa nelly, say five thousand miles or so east of Camptown.  A 'wicked long way' away, you might say.

So what's all this to you, you ask. Well, little buddies, the point is that people can go places and do things that are way beyond what you might think.

I remember when I was a little kid like you. That was when your teacher was a little girl, too, so that gives you an idea how long ago that was. I never knew anyone who had ever been to Europe or any of those far off places I read about in books.  I never knew any one who made paintings or did those fancy things. I was just white trash from the backwoods and hills.

But if you try, if you keep your eyes open and grab opportunities when they come around I'm here to tell you, dreams can come true.

Why, in my time I've been to London, Paris, Germany, the middle east where the men wear turbans on their heads, Japan where they have no chairs and all sit on the floor, Vietnam, Malaysia, lots of places. And now my son, who is white trash like his father, truth be known, though he's awful good looking and smart as a whip, is in London with a beautiful young woman making paintings and filming movies while his brother is the backbone of an Internet startup in Greenwich Village, New York and a masterful photographer, guitarist and all around fine, gifted young man.

Kids, dreams can come true. But remember, you have to hold onto those dreams like little bulldogs. Sink your teeth in and never let go until you worry that dream into reality.

Step one:  LISTEN TO THE TEACHER!

Why?  Come on. You know the answer.  Because she's always....

She's always what?

She's always RIGHT!*

*or at least that's the way to bet

Be good!


Pirate John and the ever lovely Angel Jen

Weather faxes

 

Hi kids!

I talked before about sailors needing to know what the weather is.  The big, benevolent federal government kindly provides mariners and others access to great resources for weather prediction.  One of these resources is 'weather faxes'.  These are actual faxes that you can receive on your boat over special radios to show you pictures of the weather patterns for the day.  You can also get them online from the internet.  I look at several every day to figure out what the weather will be when we sail.

Here is a typical fax.  It shows an outline of the United States' coast, the presence of high and low pressure systems (look for an H.  That's a high.  Look for an L.  That's a low.)  The heavy lines show different air pressures and the little arrows show which direction the wind is blowing and how strong it is.  The wind blows from the tail of the arrow where the little 'barbs' are to the other end.  The number of 'barbs' tell you how strong the wind is.  Three barbs is 30 mph.  Two it 20 mph.  Two and a short one are 25 mph, and so on. 

This fax is a picture of the storm that just passed over you.  It indicates that your wind will be coming from the northwest.  In the center of the swirl of arrows it says 'hurcn force' which means 'hurricane force' or winds over 50 mph.  Woof!  A hurricane is blowing in the north Atlantic!  Guess I better stay out of there!

Here's an internet site with lots more of these weather charts:

http://weather.noaa.gov/fax/marshlatest.shtml

Have fun experimenting with weather charts!  If you check these every day and get used to using them, you'll always be prepared. If not, you'll be just another six year old.  Your choice, kid.

Viewing a launch at Cape Canaveral

Hi Kids!

I suppose you are wondering what it looks like to watch a rocket launch.  Well, here's a picture form the place we went to watch the rocket take off:

 

The rocket is about 11 miles away. There are four tall towers around it with letal antennas on top.  These taller antennas are designed to attract lightning.  If a thunder storm comes through, they don't want lightning to hit the rocket because A) rockets, little buddies, cost a whoa whole lot of money and 2) rockets are full of stuff that can blow up.  

The big building is where they put the rocket together.  There are a bunch of other buildings.  I have no idea what they are for.  You can also see a telephone pole which is much, much closer and a sign in the water that tells boaters "Don't get any closer to the rocket than this" which actually means "Don't get any closer to the rocket than this or we will arrest you and throw you in the slammer".  Official signs always have some sort of subtext like this, often unstated, which it would do you well to be aware of.  You are six and might be able to talk your way out of a trip to the hoosegow, due to your tender years.  But they would go a lot harder on an old Pirate like me who knows better.

This is where we stood to watch the shuttle take off, too.  But a picture like this from that time would  be useless because it was night.

So get the teacher to give you a run down on the concept of perspective.  Have her explain why the telephone pole, which is actually much, much shorter than the rocket, appears to be a hundred times taller.  Go ahead.  Ask her.

 

Rocket scientist sighting!

Hi Kids! 

Well, the big storm system that brought you all the new snow swung a little too far south last night for us to sail today.  This morning the wind was just a howling down here and we decided to lay low another day and sail south tomorrow.  The wind is predicted to continue coming from the north for the rest of the week so we have time to wait.

I checked the NASA rocket launch schedule on a whim to see if they still intended to try to launch the rocket they had planned for this morning.  It was 10:13 when I checked it.  The launch was scheduled for 10:26 and the schedule said it was still on.  So I said to Angel jen, "You want to go watch this rocket blast off?"

She said, "We ain't got nothing else to do!" (She likes to talk like that to make fun of my lousy English.  She's a card, she is.)

So we hustled up, dug her folding bike out of the shower stall where we keep it, dragged it up on the dock, unfolded it and pitched my bike over the rail onto the dock and we were off.  We bicycled the mile and a half down to the launch watching place and made it in plenty of time.  I was trying to take it easy on Angel Jen because she isn't much of a cyclist but she was having none of it.  "I'm Right behind you!' she yelled."Pick it up a little!"

So I pedaled faster.

When we got down there there was another couple there.  The launch got 'scrubbed' (which is rocket talk for 'postponed') after waiting an hour past the scheduled launch time.  We got talking to the other people and it turns out he is a retired rocket scientist!  A real live, honest to god, rocket scientist.  He wrote the computer software protocols for the communication of the Apollo space craft between the capsule and earth.  As you little historians know, the Apollo project is the NASA name for the rockets that went to the moon in the sixties and seventies, back when your teacher was a youngster.  Which was a loooong time ago.

They were really nice people so we invited them back to the boat for coffee.  We talked for a while and I asked him where he was when the rocket to the moon took off.  He said he was in 'the firing room'.  That's the room with all the control panels that we all saw on TV, the room with all the engineers who controlled the rocket.  He told us he had discovered a mistake in the software about ten minutes before the launch and was in hot discussions with his boss, the boss's boss, and the boss above him about how to fix it.  He got their permission to 'patch' the software and made it so the launch could happen.  Woof!

He worked for NASA for a long time then retired.  Now he comes out to the bridge to watch the launches with the rest of us.  It sure was interesting sitting down with a real live rocket scientist. 

He said when he goes sailing on boats with his friends he gets to be the navigator, figuring out where the boat is and how to get to where it's going because the guys tell him,"You're the rocket scientist.  You figure it out."  And he does.  It's good to be a rocket scientist.

So study hard, little buddies.  Maybe some day you can launch a rocket.  Or at least learn to navigate.

Haul Away, Boys, Haul Away!

Hi kids!

Well, this lying around on a dock in Cape Canaveral is just about
over. We have spent three weeks here in one spot, tied up, hardly
rocking a bit. We waddle up to the showers whenever we get the urge,
ride bikes to the store or the library, just take it easy all day.
I've even given up studying the weather six times a day.

But now we've blasted off the rocket, I've studied and resolved the
shaft problem in Maine, and we are ready to go back to sea. Here's a
picture of Angel Jen studying the charts for the next leg of the
journey.

The snow storm that is bringing you another half foot of snow and east
winds will bring us northwest winds. Our course is a nice south east
direction so we will be 'running before the wind'. That's what it's
called when the wind is directly behind the boat.

Why do you get wind different than ours? Because wind swirls in a
spiral around low or high pressure areas. I'll show you a picture of
it some day.

Sailors have to know all about the winds and weather because, little
buddies, 'the sea takes no prisoners'. That means if we mess up, we
sink and drown. So we better watch out. That's why Angel Jen watches
the charts and weather so closely. So I don't get her drowned.

Well, kids, be good. Have fun playing in the snow and pity us poor
sailors out on the ocean again!

GGrrrrr-KaBrrrrrrrr-KaZoooMMM-Brrrrrrr-Psshhhhhh-Shheeeeeh.

Hi Kids!

 

Angel Jen and I got up at 2:46 AM, girded our loins (I LOVE doing that), packed our hot chocolate, cameras, monopod camera mount, blankets and lawn chairs on our bikes and waddled down to the end of the road, over the highway, down the dirt access road out to the Banana River for the 4:39 AM Saturday night launch of the last night time blast off  by a space shuttle.  We set up, drank our hot chocolate, unfolded our chairs, plugged in our radios and waited.  They canceled the stupid mission five moinutes before blast off time!  Those rats!

They said the sky was too cloudy to take off.  What kind of a cheap rocket can't even get through a cloud, you might ask.  Well, little buddies, the cloud isn't a problem if the rocket is ok, but it prevents the astronauts from landing the shuttle if the rocket messes up and they need to abort the mission.  The shuttle is a glider.  It has no engines of its own so the astonauts have just one chance to land it and they want to live, too, despite what you might conclude from their career choice.

So we packed up, dejected and went back to the boat.  On Saturday night we went to bed early then did it all again, this time without all the chairs, blankets and food.  That was just too much to carry!

This time the weather cooperated and the rocket took off.  The weird thing is that you couldn't hear a thing from the rocket for the first 15 seconds, by which time the thing was half gone into the sky.  That's because sound travels much more slowly than light.  715 mph vs 3x10^9 meters per second, actually.  Spend some time on the internet working out the conversion factors, ratios and physics of that, report and discuss.

During my time off I read an article on the internet about photographing the launch by an experienced photographer.  It was really helpful.  His advice was DON'T TAKE PICTURES.  It's much better to watch it without trying to handle a camera, messing up and missing the whole thing.  Good advice.  So I set up the camera, tied it to a telephone pole with a rope and when they ignited the rocket, I touched off the timed shutter release and watched the blast off.  After the single frame of the shutter snapped, I just kept punching the button as the rocket climbed but I wasn't looking through the camera viewfinder.  I just counted on the rope and the telephone pole to hold it in place and it worked.  Here are two pictures of the thing igniting and then way up in the clouds.

Freud would have a field day with this imagery, but all I see is money going up in smoke.

Quite a show, though!

Have a nice day going over the Newton's second law with the teacher!

Pelicans! So funny looking!

Hi kids!

We got up this morning and this pelican was sitting on the post outside out boat.  I don't care what anybody says.  Pelicans are weird looking birds.  There are a heck of a lot of them in Florida, that's for sure.  What is the scientific name for pelicans?  Funny you should ask.  It's Pelecanus erythrorhynchos.  What the heck is a scientific name?  It's a way scientist have of being very specific about the things they study.  There could be several different birds that look a lot alike and people might call them all pelicans but scientists like to differentiate between types very closely.  So they invented scientific names, usually constructed from Latin.  Why Latin?  Because it makes them sound smart.  Who else can speak Latin but a scientist?  Nobody!  

Have a good day up there in the snow and cold, little buddies.  Angel Jen and I are in the warm waters of Florida watching pelicans play and mermaids splash.  God, I love them mermaids!