caesar novus
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Posts posted by caesar novus
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This post generated by error... see prev post here instead http://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/11550-coming-up-next/page-4#entry124582
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OK, the "What Lies Beneath: Roman Empire" series starts Monday and is bookended by repeats of 2 other quality Rome documentaries.
It's a series, so look for it next week. Also repeats, and maybe online videos. The first episode seems to cover speculation about Rome's port based on satellite images leading them to new trace evidence. Computer reconstructions ensue.
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High sink rate is normally easily tamed through ground effect and aggressive properly timed flares, if the runway is long enough. You get cushion from your wingtip vortices squashing against the ground, and flares can convert forward/downward speed into lift and drag. There can be a problem with moveable passengers; a bunch of people changing seats in a small turboprop can shift to bad CG which can prevent or prematurely promote flares.
Airliners don't do well with off runway landings. There was one success recently covered in Air Disasters where a south/latin American airliner glided onto a random grassy area in California, and later even flew off after an engine and tire was replaced. But it turned out to be a manicured area at a Nasa facility that maybe was intended for future emergency air use, although unmarked and unused.
Of course the French pilot I mentioned did better gliding to his island of departure rather than ocean landing (craggy coast without rescue infrastructure). He had the wisdom to set up biased toward overshoot rather than undershoot, but he didn't know how to angle down with a slow forward slip once the runway was guaranteed. So they probably got a lot of fright lawsuits from the fast and bumpy panic braking.
The Canadian airline pilot did right to aim for an inland runway because he was also a sailplane pilot whose every molecule is tuned to never land short (a la Asiana) and with a bag of tricks to avoid running long after the runway is guaranteed. Landing off field is tricky with half invisible power lines, and even your runway may have stone walls or trees at the end. In Alaska, I guess they encourage light aircraft pilots to practice emergency landing on freeways even amongst traffic
The "I have the controls" phrase and it's mandatory acceptance by the other was presented as an airline company policy. First by Korean Air, then by others. Even useless remedies may need to be followed to avoid lawsuits in future crashes. But I think it could have helped for instance the case of a Korean co-pilot who recognized the fatal mistake of his retired-general ex-fighter pilot. It was almost understandable that the co-pilot struggled for the right words, which probably was a familiar pattern because I think the senior pilot had been a poor student at airliners.
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OK, the "What Lies Beneath: Roman Empire" series starts Monday and is bookended by repeats of 2 other quality Rome documentaries. Don't cancel that overpriced cable TV yet, or else tell us all an alternative way to access these from Discovery Science HD:
9:00 PM
60 min.
Strip the CityRome
TV-PG CC
Using stunning CGI animation to strip the Ancient city of Rome naked of its concrete, roads and rock, layer by layer, to explore the secret technology and infrastructure that enabled it to be built.
10:00 PM60 min.
What Lies Beneath: Roman EmpireEpisode 1
The Roman Empire at its height spanned 3.5 million square miles. Thousands of undiscovered archaeological sites lie within these ancient borders, and now, with the help of satellite imagery they are being brought to light.
11:00 PM60 min.
Unearthing Ancient Secrets 3Engineering Ancient Rome
TV-PG CC
The center of one of the greatest civilizations, Rome was a modern city in an ancient world. They built the Colosseum and Pantheon, supplied 1 million residents with fresh water every day - all achieved with manpower and the most basic machinery. But how?
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There is a Rome documentary coming on the discovery science hd channel (and maybe elsewhere) called something like Rome... revealing the underground on Aug 12. It is new, and not the same as two very similar themed series in the past. Sched should appear at the bottom of http://science.discovery.com/tv-shows/tv-schedule.htm in a couple days. Computer aided reconstructions seem to be involved.
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It's been confirmed that the fire truck killed one of the victims. It was under the supervision of a very immature looking fire chief, and just reminds me of the dysfunctional public sector situation in California. Steven Greenhut's "Plunder!" book documents a world where merit or experience can mean nothing but instead is on some reckless utopian social experiment.
A local newspaper recently quoted a United Airlines pilot who instructed at Korean Air for 5 years. He also brought up the cultural issue of Korean copilots being reluctant to correct a pilot. Also he said those students tended to be overly trustful of technology (thus not monitoring autopilot closely?). Normally this would raise red flags for some who seem to believe the world is driven by racism, but this was a well documented issue in multiple Korean Air crashes.
Last I heard Korean Air itself solved their safety record with strict training that a copilot in any doubt of the pilot immediately take over and simply say "I've got the controls". All airlines apparently teach that now, and insist pilots defer to it. The "Air Disasters" documentary episodes showed in chilling detail both a Korean and non-Korean co-pilot failing to over ride a pilot who they see making correctable but fatal mistakes.
With heavy jets the key phrase is 'sink rate', or the speed of descent which is not necessarily linked to the axis of the aeroplane.
You're talking about good glide angle but high sink rate and thus excess speed. First of all, I only brought up Asiana's fast/steep glide as being a factor that allowed them to not notice their speed autopilot was disengaged. If they weren't playing training games and had a normal descent, they would have needed power kicking in earlier and overridden it before it was too late,
Secondly, I think it's a shame airline pilots don't get elementary glider experience. The "Air Disasters" series had two episodes of airline pilots gliding into landing. You have to come in high, because as seen in SFO falling short is a disaster. Then you land steeply and fast as did a French airliner who took off with an empty fuel gauge which they thought was faulty. The pilot glided back to the Atlantic island for 45 minutes and scared the passengers with a fast bumpy landing.
Or you land steeply and elegantly, such as a Canadian pilot who knew how to forward slip a sailplane. He had no power to lower the airliner flaps, but plopped down nicely even on a disused Ontario runway with kids biking on it. I love forward slips which synchronize the stick and pedals backwards to increase drag, and even wonder if it might help to alternate a forward slip from side to side to further increase the safe descent angle.
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Caligula's reputation seems in an upswing over recent years http://www.unrv.com/book-review/caligula-review.php and even on the history channel, as can be seen on their documentary I recently posted under numismatica/Scotland (topic drift alert... grin).
I abandoned an audio recording of Suetonius's 12 Caesars because it just rung so false. I mean compared to their refined level of architecture and bust sculpture. I am quite used to associating crass examples of that from crass totalitarians like Stalin, Mussolini, or Mao, and find it hard to believe the most sensationalist mud thrown at the "bad" Caesars who oversee such sublime art and engineering.
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Maybe Grant brought logistics to the world stage, and Sherman brought counter-logistics to the equation... instead of just army vs army. I dunno; my closest related education is just reading umpteen pilot bio's in an Air Force library as a kid.
Nice to know that Petreaus scares were overblown. I happen to live where such fringe movements come to roost after being rejected as too looney even in California. They get laws passed that just amaze unbiased mayors or governor as being of no practical use and very expensive and restrictive. But they don't dare veto them because the movements use exactly what Goebbels recommends... hit simple emotional rather than logical points, and repeat and repeat. Make your falsehoods big and brazen, which are harder to tackle than small lies which can be disposed of more easily.
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I don't think he's saying who was best in a particular war, but who has special transcending qualities in all history of recorded warfare. I was unfamiliar with his Roman choice because that late eastern empire period doesn't grab me for some reason yet. It's nice he didn't rehash the obvious choice from second punic war, since I am reading Goebbels vast diaries and he was pushing that as a prime example to everyone why not to surrender and to continue the hopeless meatgrinder to the end.
I barely knew about Ridgeways story because Korea was kind of an embarrassing, error prone conflict. I barely followed Petreaus because I was so disgusted at the left democrat agitprop attempting to deny him senate approval to head USCENTCOM. He was so obviously the ideal, effective, yet humanitarian choice which should have pleased the left, but they needed to stereotype some random target to make a point. They do the same Goebbels-style agitprop today for example on laws for (but sabotaging) green-ness. Of course Patreaus did a transformational job, and as this book says of course he was then reviled and torn down (by the right?).
Sherman is spun so nicely in this video that it may be worth sliding the dial to find that section. He is of course reviled in southern memory, yet inflicted and incurred miniscule casualties in his famous march in the SE (I realize he had a rough start further west). He caused property damage that was targeted against warmaking capability and the elite, not against everyman such is remembered. With Grant's slow progress and high attrition, the north was risking to lose an election and the supposedly anti-slave european countries were itching to recognize the slave south to restore cotton trade. The north couldn't afford many more Grant style victories, so Sherman had to think out of the box. Goebbels at one point convinces Hitler and Goring to try something similar, in switching the final bombing of England from military or urban targets to the homes and neighborhoods of the elite ruling class, but I guess it wasn't followed up.
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US History channels and even BBC America standards plummet lower every year due to mass-market and price pressure.
Well, here is a decent recent History Channel doc on Caligula... they seemed to use good judgment in choosing among less sensational explanations. Only marred by the usual over dramatic recreations, they had a few good site visits (be ready to pause because it goes away fast), and best of all had reasonable hosts. A few quirky greybeards and some younger presentable hipsters, all seeming to give plausible academic views. At least I was lulled into liking "Caligula: 1400 days of terror"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZT6LVwZlQyU
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Here is a spectacular lecture series (even if the subject itself bores you) by historian Barry Lewis, who loves hundred year old New York City architecture... often with Roman themes: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/search/?keywords=%22barry+lewis%22
Most of them are intense, entertaining, and end with loud whoops and applause... a study on how lectures should be. Well, the first GCT one on the list is not the best, and the last three I didn't intend to be included in the search. In a lost post, I urged folks to see the one on the demolished Penn Station which was modeled on a Roman bath. The Coney Island one will be on cspanTV this weekend if you don't like watching on PC.
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GORGEOUS visuals, FASCINATING facts, but tiresome victimology spin. Maybe the noble caledonians themselves invaded as genocidal brutes in earlier years, and with less to offer than the Romans. Well, I don't want to diss whoever made the Scottish enlightenment possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Enlightenment
I too wondered if such high technical documentary standards can be maintained if it will be paid for by local ratepayers absent English taxpayers and dwindling north sea oil. The US History channels and even BBC America standards plummet lower every year due to mass-market and price pressure.
At least the professor didn't actually touch the morocco woodwork he was pointing out, and used gloves for things he touched (probably regulations, but often ignored by tv hosts). Whenever there was an absence of info, he chronically speculated Rome doing evil and Caledonians as hapless victims... rarely symbiosis. Maybe the wall was to prevent freeloading of Roman benefits without paying the price by way of taxes and obligations. However, a tentative frontier of Roman society maybe didn't provide many blessings unless it had stabilized more. Endurance of a plucky underdog makes an appealing foundation myth for a country I suppose, but insurgencies only work when you stay too primitive to develop ripe targets.
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Cool... On android jellybean I side loaded my free ICS version of boat browser, which does not seem to be directly offered to native jellybeaners. I set the browser mode from android to desktop and the videos show up fine on this forum. No size problem in either my new 11.5 inch China tablet or 13 inch convertible win8 laptop. Either something changed here, or more likely boat browser rules the world... solved most of my other probs too.
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You can access the video links by hitting the quote button... I had to do this on android, but not win8.
The videos were interesting attempts to grab attention of youth, but heavy on the leftest victimology framework... An exaggerated but veiled commentary on more modern history and how it should be legislated. If this was presented as an anthropology 101 project, it would be failed due to stereotyping the society as if they had your aspirations and were stuck in chains of their own culture. Rather you should either respect or agnosticize their own values, and recognize their real tradeoffs and context. Look at the peace and prosperity within Rome vs without, for instance.
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OK, the still preliminary info seems to begin to gel now... The pilot doing his first landing with that type of plane and the instructor copilot doing his first teaching flight... apparently armed but didn't activate the auto speed control. Or it possibly deactivated... point being they thought the speed was taken care of until too late.
In a car I notice if cruise control failed to activate or kicked off, because once you drop one iota in speed the sharks immediately swarm around you in reckless passing. They didn't have that feedback; so there's my quota of compassion and maybe a direction for improvement in yet another cockpit warning. I do wonder why they would put 2 first timers together in a landing.
Anyway, to wrap up my myth paradigm: It may be a myth that the deaths were caused by the airline crash... one or both were possibly clobbered by "rescuers". I always am wary of good samaritans because they are blinded by their good intentions and tend to do unintended damage.
And most importantly, based on the black box info that was unprecedently released immediately, I can still say the low and slow theory may be a myth. If they were in proper and normal glidepath, they should have noticed earlier the speed wasn't being automatically kicked in. But in that unusual steep descent, they had all the speed they needed just by gravity... until the last few seconds when they needed juice fast.
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It's just too painful to hear the news muddle proceed... now they say a firetruck appeared to kill at least one of the 2 non-survivors. I saw yesterday an interview with the so-called firechief on the scene, and was struck by her seeming to appear about 17 years old. OK, maybe a young looking 27 year old, but what are the chances of her being more qualified for the top job than the huge pool of more experienced ones?
SFO is the leading edge of spreading hiring practices based only on being a minority and not a drop on administrative qualifications. All fire departments should be privatized and jobs not treated as rewards to dole out, but with position, pay and benefits based on the actual job marketplace rather than rigged up monopolies.
They are still harping on the low and slow glidepath instead of the root cause anomaly. If my detailed preliminary info is correct, the problem was an awkward recovery from a too high and steep glidepath. Then you are like on a roller coaster with too much energy/speed that has to be quashed. The inexperienced pilot appeared to overcorrect in flattening out and slowing down way too much in a drastic last minute fashion. The instructor co-pilot probably artificially set up this challenge to practice landing under difficult conditions.
There may have been some equipment failure, but it wasn't that they were merrily coasting in and failed to power up. Everything was going their way in terms of excess speed and altitude even if their engines quit.. they had to intentionally try hard to slow down... it was almost more surprising they didn't overshoot rather than undershoot.
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Although this is very early to analyze the Asiana Airlines crash http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/07/19337501-i-have-trouble-audio-from-cockpit-reveals-moments-after-deadly-crash?lite>1=43001 I would like to take the risk of denying the myths that I have already heard being spread by news commentators who don't have much clue about flight..
1) "The gears started shaking in the cockpit":
No gears, but they must mean the stall warning device shook the controls to get pilot attention.
2) "They came in too slow and low":
NO! that was just during the last moment where they overcorrected or whatever. The glidepath was absolutely too high, too steep, and probably too fast for all but the last few seconds.
3) "The pilot was a trainee with lots more experience than his 43 hours in that aircraft implies":
Groan.... so he had equivalent of 4 pacific crossings and a ton of hours in simulators and other aircraft. Do you realize he was offered rare permission to experiment with a manual visual approach without the usual autopilot guidence that would keep him nailed on proper glidepath?
They were departing from Seoul; do you realize there was a famous co-pilot syndrome connected with multiple Korean Airline crashes, where they would fail to correct fatal but recoverable errors by the pilot out of respect for their social rank? This not a Korean airline, but what about the instructor copilot? Well, a timid instructor seems a stretch, but instructors often push their student to a stressful limit and may have setup something tricky for this trainee pilot.
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Here is a writeup about British English borrowing from Hindi, which I guess didn't affect American english as much http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog/hobson-jobson-henry-yule-kate-teltscher/#.UdB5YrB6fm6
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Above art program is being repeated on cspan tv this weekend http://www.booktv.org/Schedule.aspx . I partly mention it because another Roman related book talk by an author is being rebroadcast several times this weekend: Victor Davis Hanson, "The Savior Generals: How Five Commanders Saved Wars that Were Lost - From Ancient Greece to Iraq," .
I think I mentioned the latter on the temporary version of this forum, but I noticed that one doesn't seem to have an online video... so it has to be seen in real time. I guess you can stream it if you convert the EDT timezone. It briefly covers a very late general of the east to represent the most notable of Rome, rather than more familiar ones. Also worthwhile to see his surprising and well argued heros proposed for US civil war and Korean war.
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It's strange how some british words sound hillbilly-ish in the US, like "reckon", or "got" (as in "you have got overweight"). Reckon is sad loss, because "I guess" or "I estimate" can be too weak or too exact. Maybe it is associated with appalachian scots/irish, but even the technical "dead reckoning" gives a whiff of slumming it.
"Got" seems a role reversal with the Brits for once streamlining things and the USians clinging to awkward familiar complexity. But I think a functional argument supports the US form. Gotten sets up your expectations to interpret the next sounds in a more specific way, avoiding misunderstandings in a noisy environment. "You have got fat" would not be an obvious insult in the US... it could mean "is that a can of lard in your hand?". "You have gotten fat" is needed for a true insult, sort of like having to flip a safety off to arm your gun.
Also is there danger of ambiguity in british "got" followed by a verb? If there is an infinitive that doesn't need "to" as in "You've got (to) go" and the go term has ambigous forms... well, some of us need multiple cues to not jump to wrong conclusions. If you think cues aren't needed, try to make sense of a rural New Zealand dialect... just their bizarre "e" sound makes it hard for me to even parse where words start or end.
Actually I perceive a simpler english on the rise, practiced by non-native english speakers with other non-native english speakers that have lost interest in either the British or US exactness. It's just pragmatic and maybe leans toward simplified constructs of the US, but more continental (latin?) vowel sounds of the UK. It tends to abandon rare words in favor of pairs of common descriptive words for example, and I think is on the road to becoming the dominant favored english.
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no knowledge of looting except one statue by Goering.
I know I am beating this to death, but ran across Goering's response to that charge to the same psychologist. He said he did pay (a nominal fee) for the art taken by Rosenberg's or Goering's representatives. It was intended to be protected from opposing armies, and donated to a museum after his death. Well, he just liked the stuff too.
He said he liked to mentally review his art collections and favorite parties when in long court sessions behind dark glasses. This backfired when was criticized for having blissful expressions when they were reviewing atrocities. By the way, he mentioned he personally halted plans to invade Sweden due to his ties of marriage to a Swedish baroness.
We can suspect this is self serving, but it was spoken after his defense had formally ended and when he already expected the death penalty. It is from the notes of a doctor who died before publishing them and only recently went into book form.
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Well, they did show a slide with a tank grinding over what appeared to be something like Palmyra. I assume it was on the side of the once great liberal hope, the euro-educated dentist who was supposed to transform the tyranny after replacing his father. A modern Caligula?
Anyway, I did review the psychologist discussion with Kesselring... quite unenlightening, as is the whole book of "Nuremburg Interviews"... full of self-proclaimed eagle scouts. He said he tried to avoid towns with art treasures, and had no knowledge of looting except one statue by Goering. Anything bad he did was justified by the terrible circumstances... oh, wait a minute, now he says he did nothing bad. He wasn't actually on trial there, but was a witness.
I have a selfish wish that mainland Italy was bypassed in the war. Not so unlikely... when they said the monuments officers were prevented from looking up Sicily in the library, it was for a justified security reason. The attack was pretending to be a pincer on either side of Italy... thru Sardinia and Croatia. A body was floated out with fake battle plans to that effect, which was plausible enough to be believed. Then the allies would have gotten strategic air bases, with only Diocletians palace at risk for Romanophiles. As it was, I wonder what was lost in Sicily only because the monuments men had no clue what was there.
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cannot re-edit a topic title, which by the way gets truncated without warning.
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What Lies Beneath: Roman Empire (series)
in Colosseum
Posted · Edited by caesar novus
Is it worth having a discussion area for the Discovery Science TV docu-series "What Lies Beneath: Roman Empire"? I think it is getting rarer to have such a series, and maybe some don't have it available. Also it seems to have a weak presence online, and hard to tell what episode will come when (doesn't appear in the same timeslot next week).
Anyway it seems to be an extension of a recent documentary on Egyptian archeology guided from computer processed satellite photos. Now the same researcher is panning around the whole Roman empire and knocking archeo-collegues off their chairs by what a few photo hen scratching appear to suggest about ancient villages etc. I'm not sure any great answers are made, but at least good questions... and some cool site visits or computer recreations that look scrumptious in HD.
First episode focused on Ostia. Visited the hexagon port now inland, and eventually tramped around the surrounding wastelands. The photos suggested various canals (remind you of Mars?) such as a shortcut to Rome along the winding Tiber. I would guess the function isn't as they said to relieve congestion so much as to allow animals to haul the barges from paths alongside against the current, then riding the river current on the way down (riding higher over sandbars, etc).
She found a possible extra warehouse area (yawn) and an oval interpreted as an amphitheater on the far outskirts of Ostia. Some hen scratching was suggested as the famous lighthouse, which they scaled using the base size to estimate about 35 stories in height. I guess the harbor was expanded by Trajan, so they took a sidetrip about his attacks on Rumania. The harbor received grain from inland Tunisia, so they used photo hen scratchings to ID an unknown inland fort to protect this. Those site visits were very brief... I almost preferred the unusual peeks of Rome proper thrown in.
Some OxBridge accents had to chime in for the obligatory rants against Rome as a fascist bully... the architecture of large boatsheds and big Trajan statue supposedly being aimed at psychological terror of visiting diplomats. What diplomats did they need to impress, and do we even know the height or flavor of that disappeared architecture?
Isn't most of Roman architecture alternatively understandable as an expression of societal pride and morale building? Anyway not like modern dictatorship architecture; here are quotes from Dom Joly's "Dark Tourist" book on visiting Pyongyang: "It was the usual, ugly, brutalist architecture so loved by totalitarian regimes." ... "I wondered if anyone had attempted a picturesque dictatorship."
I note that public architecture/facilities/parks in the US often have prominent plaques giving credit to the mayor or governor. This seems strange when you realize that they aren't desperate for re-election... it's almost impossible to kick out incumbents, and it isn't always big egos. Rather, I think it is more more trying to gather of support of the majority who benefit a little bit from these improvements VS. the whiner self centered activists and the powerful not-in-my-backyard obstructionists that the mayor or whoever had to fight to get anything done. A canal thru the backyard of my villa... death to Trajan! I think today's plaques imply: It almost killed me to get this obviously beneficial thing done; I had to call in all my favors and still may get stabbed in the back, so give this project some props and support me to do more of this.
And they went on to depict Rome as a chronic military and administrative bully, although this was done with such a skeleton crew (150k soldiers they said) that statically they would be absolutely lost among the millions of Roman citizens.