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Post by nomuse on Mar 31, 2006 16:32:47 GMT -4
And on the other hand....some of the nastiest conspiracy theories have come from engineers -- usually retired engineers.
When engineers go bad they come up with complex and hermetic conspiracy theories with tons and tons of scribbled references and impenetrable (often hand-grown) mathematics.
For some reason more of them are Electric Engineers. What is it about EE's? And can it be inherited, I worry.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Apr 1, 2006 7:40:11 GMT -4
I knew someone was going to bring that up. The famed Capt. Cook probably would have survived much longer had he been able to swim.
I don't know, it's pretty hard to swim with a half a dozen natives are stabbing you with daggers, bashing in your head with a club and sitting on you.
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Post by JayUtah on Apr 1, 2006 11:40:55 GMT -4
Help me with the historical details. I recall that Cook's men were in a boat just offshore firing small arms at the crowd in an attempt to drive them away from Cook. Had the captain been able to swim, I figure he could have swum to the boat and been rescued. But the boat could not approach the shore without risking its occupants, and Cook could not reach the boat because he could not swim. Now I guess my question is whether Cook ever had a chance to swim to safety. If he didn't, as you imply, then I agree his swimming (in)ability is irrelevant.
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Post by Stout Cortez on Apr 1, 2006 13:51:24 GMT -4
Having read this thread, I would suggest that anyone believing the moon landings were hoaxed should remember that statements of evidence do not begin with these words:
"I think that..." "I can't believe that...." "I doubt that..."
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Apr 1, 2006 14:35:29 GMT -4
I haven't come across any particularly detailed accounts, but what I have read suggests that Cook was confronted by armed and hostile Hawaiians immediately on landing, and wouldn't have had much chance to swim anywhere: getting stabbed in the back as soon as he made to leave.
His crew managed to negotiate to get what was left of his body back: his hands, a thigh, his scalp and bones.
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Post by JayUtah on Apr 1, 2006 21:56:38 GMT -4
Apparently the Hawaiians had stolen some of Cook's boats and Cook was coming ashore to arrange for their return, ostensibly by seizing hostages. I've read that this was standard procedure (both the theft and the hostage-taking) so it could very well be possible that the islanders knew exactly why Cook was coming ashore and struck pre-emptively.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Apr 2, 2006 5:57:11 GMT -4
Below is a first hand account of the incident. I have blanked the colour because it is rather graphic in places. Indeed the witness does note that his inability to swim was a factor, however from the account, it may have been unlikely that he could have indeed escaped by swiming when he managed to disengage for a short time right before the killing stroke was landed. From The Death of Captain Cook
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Post by JayUtah on Apr 2, 2006 10:34:56 GMT -4
Reading the entire account I gather that swimming was an advantageous skill in this series of events. Especially the marines, having fired their volley, managed to retire successfully only if they could swim. Ironically it seems that swimming was a "low" skill and that officers and midshipmen could not swim whereas it was somewhat more common among the men.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Apr 2, 2006 11:14:48 GMT -4
I think it is an excellent analogy even if some salors cannot swim.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Apr 2, 2006 11:15:14 GMT -4
A rather unfortunate series of events and a horrible and sad ending to a great man and grand explorer that changed this part of the world forever. The Strait between the North and South Island, and NZ's tallest mountain will bear his name forever (well at least until we become so politically correct that the English names are totally removed and we revert to speaking only Moari.)
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Post by Mr Gorsky on Apr 2, 2006 20:09:12 GMT -4
I love this board ... only seven pages in and we have already leapt from Ralph Rene to whether or not Captain Cook was able to swim, and whether this was an important contributory factor in his rather gruesome demise. Whoever said that rocket science was boring ...
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Post by mosis2 on Apr 29, 2006 19:42:00 GMT -4
I will probably agree that we are now about 15 years out from a manned lunar mission, but that's not because we lacked the skill to do it in 1969. We did. But that kind of expertise quickly becomes stale if left fallow. In 1972 we quit doing it because of political reasons. And if you leave that alone for 30 years, you really do lose the ability to do it again quickly. Aerospace really is a "use it or lose it" proposition. Sure... So with the massive increase in computing power we have nowadays, we've somehow 'forgotten' everything that we allegedly learned during Apollo? And having massively more powerful computers to both design spacecraft, and run simulations, we are still unable to go 'back' to the moon? What a crock. Which bits do you suggest they've magically 'lost'? Did all the work from Apollo get destroyed in a fire or something?
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Post by mosis2 on Apr 29, 2006 19:43:37 GMT -4
I love this board ... only seven pages in and we have already leapt from Ralph Rene to whether or not Captain Cook was able to swim, and whether this was an important contributory factor in his rather gruesome demise. Whoever said that rocket science was boring ... There's a reason they've changed the subject... It's called 'bait and switch'...
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Post by PhantomWolf on Apr 29, 2006 21:42:42 GMT -4
So with the massive increase in computing power we have nowadays, we've somehow 'forgotten' everything that we allegedly learned during Apollo? And having massively more powerful computers to both design spacecraft, and run simulations, we are still unable to go 'back' to the moon?
Computers don't magically create things. They require humans to do the thinking for them. That means people that are trained and have experience with the systems. Let's take a real worlds example from the poroject I am working on currently. Part of it is the building of a Gas Platform about 3 km off the coast here. This has been done worldwide, so people have an idea how to do it, we even have another platform just down the coast, around 30 years old, but guess what, they are having problems getting this one ready. I'm not going into all the details what the troublke is, but it extends to the fact that the engineers doing the work have never done it before so they are working with a little trial and error. The rocket industry is the same. You can't just take a J-2 engine off the old Saturn and hope to reproduce one in a week, instead they are looking at the equipment they do have today and figuring out how to comvert it over to to use in a new Moon missions. Add to that, that the new mission parameters include bigger crews and longer stays. That means that even if we did back engineer the old Apollo stuff that we'd still have to improve it to carry far more weight. Add to that, the crews all have to be trained in flying the new equipment which will be totally different from the shuttle. Remember that Apollo took from 1958 to 1969, 11 years and they were racing the Soviets and the clock with massive funding compared to the then federal budget. Today there is no time pressures, and their funding is a pitance of what it once was, yet they are expected to pull off as program grander than Apollo. Why wouldn't that take about the same length of time if not longer?
Which bits do you suggest they've magically 'lost'?
Most of the contractors have destroyed the tooling and achived much of the drawings dealing with the Apollo craft. Most of the engineers who workrd the projects have retired or died from old age, and the producers of the components that the contractors relied on have stopped producing those things because they have been superceeded. And finally many of the those companies have closed or been merged into bigger ones over the past 40 years. In of that results in the loss of information and the required things to rebuild.
Did all the work from Apollo get destroyed in a fire or something?
No, it's just been lost because it isn't being used. Again a loacal example from near me. We have a Methanol Plant that has been operating since about 1987. Recently it was shutdown and even though it has only been non-operational for around 9 months it is now virtually impossible to restart the plant, it's basically a huge pile of scrap metal. Other examples would include the Concorde and Space Shuttle, we couldn't build a new one if we wanted too. This isn't just an Apollo thng, it's an engineering thing.
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Post by nomuse on Apr 29, 2006 23:01:15 GMT -4
I'm not sure this is a good example, but we have only recently begun to learn how to duplicate a Stradivarius. Yet there are Stradivari being played today. There are samples available for investigation by the highest tech methods available to science.
Some of the difficulty lies in techniques that were trade secrets -- passed on to a small number of apprentices and eventually forgotten over the years. But much of that was due to simply techniques and methods and crafts that no longer exist, of which information about them is insufficient to recreate them.
You'll find similar cases across the art and music world: despite detailed church records and much surviving music manuscript, period works, even surviving instruments, recreating the sound of medieval music is still guesswork. Despite an incredible volume of writings and of course a plenitude of samples, we can not quite recreate the glazes used by Rembrandt -- information sorely needed by preservationists.
So crafts fields can have the same problem; methods can be lost, and there aren't always high-tech substitutes that will quite match the peculiarities of that original craft -- such as that unknown factor in wood and glaze that lies behind the unmistakable sound of the Stradivarius.
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