It's Monday, I'm Hurting, Yer Gettin' Another Picture

But not just any picture.

I took photos with the hopes of creating panoramas afterward, on the computer.

They came out better than I had any right to hope for.


Here's one. You'll have to enlarge and, depending on your browser settings, maybe scroll left and right to see it all.

I posted a different panorama, taken from the bottom of the stairs that are in this photo, on John's Daily Digital Images on yesterday. You'll have to scroll down a little to see it on yesterday's post.

(Shame on you if you read this blog and don't go over there for a minute to see the photos I post almost every day.)

Let me know what y'all think.

Picture Post, Sunday September 16, 2007

On Sunday August 26, I posted a few photos from a tour of Delta Airlines's facilities in Atlanta in 1989. I thought I would post a few more this Sunday.

I mentioned that week that Delta had the capability to create any part on any plane or engine that they needed, on-site in the Atlanta hangar complex.

This first photo coming up is related to that. For example, each of the many fan blades within a jet engine are individually made for that particular spot within that particular set of blades. Sounded crazy to me, but true; we saw men meticulously shaping and numbering jet engine fan blades.

Once fan blades, or any metal part is fashioned the way they want it to be, the items need to be cooked in ovens to temper. The working of metal causes weaknesses in the areas bent and hammered, and the cooking in the ovens allows the metal's molecules to realign into their strongest positions in relation to one another.

All of that is a lead-up to this first photo. Guess what it is? Wow! Y'all are SO SMART! Yes, it's an oven. (Pause for look at gratuitous oven photo.) On our tour, they filed the 8 or so of us into this big room where the temperature of the room was about 125 degrees F. Then the oven in the photo below started to open and all of us instinctively took a step back. I myself took two steps back. (I used to be TERRIFIED of ovens, and wouldn't even reach into our home oven to get something out until I was 18 or so.) When this door slid up and I saw those heating elements glowing orange like that I almost bolted from the room. I finally squashed the urge to flee in a screaming fit and remembered the camera around my neck and stepped in front of the rest of the group to take this photo. I took a total of two photos in this room, and this was the better of the two.They pulled that big kettle out onto the metal rails you see coming into the photo from the left. They said they had to let it cool a couple of days before they could even open the kettle, but they had another one from a few days before that they had just opened, and they had put stuff inside on the bottom, put a metal shelf above that, put in more items needing to be cooked, and then another shelf until the whole kettle was full.

They had four of these ovens in that room, and one other one was in operation that day. They said in busy times when they had to run all four ovens simultaneously, that sometimes Georgia Power would cal them and ask them to turn off one or more of them. They sucked so much current from the power system that on high demand days for the power company, they couldn't handle Delta running these ovens. They would operate them up to 2000 degrees F.

Anyway, it was scary and fascinating at the same time.


This next photo is of a jet engine being overhauled. Those two things on metal arms above and below the engine are part of the reverse thrust system that jet engines have. You know how loud the plane gets when you are on one that first touches down on landing? It's like the engines get really loud for several seconds? These big "flaps" open away from the engine as you see in this photo, and they actually come all the way around and behind the engine until their ends touch one another. Then the engines are revved really high like for takeoff, except that these flaps are now directing the engine's thrust up and down and slightly forward, which slows the plane down really quickly. That's what all the noise is when you first touch down, and why you're slung forward into your seat. It isn't that the engine actually can reverse it's thrust, it's just redirected forward against the momentum of the plane to help slow it down. Cool, huh?


This next photo is one of the pilot testing stations in one of the buildings across the street from Delta's main headquarters. It's away from the hangars but near the Atlanta airport. The lower part of the building houses all of the flight simulators for the various aircraft that Delta operates, while the upper floors has training and testing areas.In a mock up of a cockpit like in the photo is where pilots sit and are tested by FAA personnel. They simulate problems, normal flights, and whatnot to allow them to be observed and tested by the FAA to keep up their certifications.

This final photo is of the front end of the same old crop duster that I showed before. I put this photo here because you can see a bit of the room and the flight attendant's uniforms used throughout the years, models of all the different aircraft that Delta has used over the years, and on the walls you can see various incarnations of the Delta logo as it has been used over the years as well. Neat stuff to see. Looking at this photo is kind of like looking at old family Christmas photos; looking at all the other stuff in the room in the photos is just as fun as seeing our families at earlier times.As I said, I took this tour in the late 1980s and I still remember being in this room and thinking of how far powered flight had come in the then 85 years or so since Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their famous first successful flights.

If you like planes and jets, you should go see this old post of mine where I posted some photos of British Airways's Concorde on one of it's visits to DFW Airport in the late 1980s as well.

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Today on my other blog, I posted my first ever panoramic photo. I stitched together a series of nine or so photographs that I took of the beach yesterday. So the photo is super fresh.

Be sure and click on it to enlarge it.

Something for Saturday

Sorry about the math thing yesterday, folks.

Sometimes I get full of myself, and maybe I'm a teacher at heart, so stuff like that just comes out.

Only problem is that I don't get along with kids too great. Especially other people's kids, so I would last about two weeks as a teacher and by then I'd have to kill somebody.

Engineering's the next best thing I guess. I get to do and know neat stuff, but don't have to deal with kids.

I love my daughters and their friends, but they're mostly good, earnest young adults.

But trying to teach the whole baggy pants, sideways baseball cap, and stoner crowds would lead me to murder as sure as anything.

I'm really good at untangling necklaces and knots in ropes and strings, but you can't make a living doing that.

I love photography, but there are about 100million people in America that love it too and I don't have the drive to try to make a living in photography.

Weird but true. I have the drive to learn math, physics, and electrical stuff, and to do engineering work, and although I like it, I'm not passionate about it.

So I guess I'll keep on with the engineering as a day job. Do my photography and writing on the side.

And dream a lot, like most people do, that I wish I had the courage to make a go at writing or photography for a living.

Pictures tomorrow.

Imaginary Numbers Really Exist (I'm Really, Really Serious!)

Warning: Geek stuff ahead.

As children we learn to do some basic counting and learn to recognize basic colors.

We consider this counting to be as "real" and "true" as we do the colors. (Remember the big, fat Crayolas in the box of 8 we all had in first grade?)

Some of us eventually learn the difficult task of using fractions while some never get the hang of it but learn to make do; my daughters still have trouble choosing the right measuring cup,

We have even learned to accept that negative numbers are real.

We have a number line, with 0 in the middle, positive numbers heading off into infinity on the right, while negative numbers do the same on the left of the zero. Now them negative numbers are a bit disconcerting to some folks, but after years of being charged huge fees by their banks because their checking accounts dipped into negative territory, even these disconcerted folks understand that a negative number can exist and also have an impact on their lives to boot.

If I'm Silas Marner, sitting alone in my humble abode counting my coins, I might be able to make do with just the number line approach to numbers and might consider fractions to be useless and even maybe that they don't exist at all.

But time and the advancing world have shown that, yes, even fractional numbers exist and in some cases are quite useful.

If Silas Marner became the person that had to compare the sizes of the piles of coins in each home in his community, fractions would be very useful. Bob's pile of coins might only be 1/2 the size of Mr. Marner's. You get the picture.

Heck, even the Greeks (the ancient ones) had number issues. For a long time they believed that all numbers were "rational," or that all numbers could be expressed as a ratio of two integers. But they finally bowed to proof that some numbers when expressed as a ratio of two integers and the division is carried out, result in an answer that goes on forever. These numbers were grudgingly accepted and called "irrational" numbers.

Pi is an irrational number; it goes on forever even if we mostly abbreviate it to be simply 3.14.

One problem is that, ALL numbers are abstracts. At the very least we all learned to count and process numbers in very basic ways. But I can show you a rock, say five rocks, but I can't show you 5. 5 is an abstraction. It's something we mentally assign to some things.

Throughout history we have slowly gained acceptance of the usefulness of numbers and the mathematics to handle those numbers, but they are still abstract concepts that we've agreed on.

In the 16th century a man named Rafael Bombelli wrote about algebra and laid the foundations for what would unfortunately become known as "imaginary numbers" and "complex numbers."

Here's the deal: we all learn that when multiplying a number with itself, that is referred to as "squaring" that number. 2*2=4 can be said as "two squared equals four." We also learned that the square of a negative number results in a positive number. -2*-2=4 is true as well.

Mr. Bombelli's work in algebra showed that it would be useful to have a number that represents the square root of -1. In other words, he proved mathematically that there are times that the square root of -1 is useful and that he believed this number to exist.

He was swimming against the tide of accepted math. EVERYBODY knew that squaring a number, whether positive or negative, resulted in a positive number, always. Period.

Years later, none other than Rene Descartes referred to these numbers as "imaginary numbers" and that name stuck. Mr. Descartes was using this in the frame of mind that we use with a child's "imagnary" friend. That friend doesn't really exist. Mr. Descartes was using the word imaginary as a derogatory term in his desire for this to just go away.

Sadly the word "imaginary" was forever attached to these numbers, though their existence has long since been proven to be every bit as "real" as irrational numbers and fractions.

Despite their still being called imaginary numbers, imaginary numbers exist and are as useful in some circles as are fractions to a bookie, or as useful as Pi is when computing the area of a circle.

Right there along with imaginary numbers are what are referred to as "complex numbers." Complex numbers are the same old numbers we've used all of our lives, that live and breathe along the number line, along with an imaginary component. It is usually written in one of two ways: 4 + 7i, or 4 + 7j, where the 7i or 7j part is the imaginary part of the complex number.

The number 4 can also be written as 4 + 0i, or 4 + 0j. Zero times any number is zero, and 4 + 0 = 4.

Still with me?

All numbers along the aforementioned number line we learn about in grade school can be expressed as complex numbers. And if you look at my spiffy hand drawn picture at the top of the post, you'll see an old-school number line with a vertical one crossing it at the number 0. The old number line part still represents the real numbers that we've all used all of our lives, but the added vertical number line represents the imaginary part of a complex number. The whole thing is called the Complex Plane.

By convention, most people dealing with complex or imaginary numbers use the lower case letter "i" to represent the square root of -1. But, in electical engineering, we use that lower case "i" to represent current in an electrical circuit.

So, while your experience with complex or imaginary numbers would normally use "i"; we use "j" in electrical engineering to avoid confusion with current.

Still with me?

In electrical engineering, when dealing with Alternating Current circuits like your favorite table lamp uses, the trigonometry functions sine and cosine come into play. The mathematical representation for the value of, say, power, at any given time is what is referred to as a "phasor." Power company engineers live and breathe this "complex power" and it accurately represents their power distribution systems.

Still with me?

I'll back off now. After this things get really hard to explain, but just understand that power utilities and the whole science and engineering involved in Alternating Current electrical systems that are used all over the world, DEPEND on the mathematics of complex and imaginary numbers to be able to deliver power to your home and to businesses.

I was dealing with it a bit at work yesterday and thought I would see if anyone out there might be interested to know that imaginary numbers truly exist.

Besides, my calculator will even compute with complex numbers, so it must be true, right?

Imaginary numbers just have an unfortunate name; kinda like being a movie or rock star's child, ya know? (I personally would rather be named Imaginary Number than to be named Dweezil or Moon Unit.)

You probably don't care a lick, but I took the time to type all of this out, and I'm posting it.

That's The Kind of Guy I Am

I long ago came to terms with the fact that as my back pain increases, my IQ drops. On days when my back really hurts, work isn't very much fun because, unlike some jobs, engineering requires the brain to be fully functional.

Back when I worked for Delta Airlines and lifted heavy things for a living, pain and sickness from lifting things outside in cold or extremely hot or wet weather wasn't such a big issue. I'd suffer through my shift and go home. Come back the next day and hopefully feel a little better and wade through another shift.

Yesterday at work, my back was hurting AND I had a bad headache. This means trouble for me. Converting from hexadecimal numbers to binary, normal everyday stuff in my job, is like being the first guy to see and try to translate the Rosetta Stone.

It wasn't pretty, let me tell you.

So, as small animals run and hide when predators are about, my mind just wanted to wander onto any subject that didn't require actual thought. Really thinking made my head hurt worse.

See, there's thinking that you have to work at, like the above mentioned converting from hex to binary and back, and then there's simple daydreaming and remembering old times, which is effortless.

Daydreaming and remembering old times is what my back pain weakened and headache stomped brain kept wandering off to do.

I couldn't sleep, I was at work, so the next best thing is daydreaming.

For some reason I got to thinking about getting older. Maybe because Big Sis's 50th birthday is coming up in a few days. Maybe because my own 45th birthday is coming up next month.

I don't know, I just know my back and head hurt and my brain was trying to burrow into a hole and hide from those predators, ya know?

And I got a laugh about getting older by recalling an incident that happened about 12 years or so ago.

First a bit of background.

When I was a kid, there were several things in my family that came to represent Christmas to me.

Every family has their own traditions, and every kid brings with himself, out of his youth, memories and things that for whatever reason represent Christmas.

For me it's the Rankin/Bass Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It's A Charlie Brown Christmas. It's being in a store and seeing that the J.C. Penney or Sears Christmas Catalog has been put out for sale. It's Percy Faith's Christmas albums that my parents played.

But THE most Christmas-ey thing to me is the album that my parents had by Jim Reeves called, The Twelve Songs of Christmas. Velvety smooth baritone voice and a whole slew of Christmas classics plus a couple of lesser know songs thrown in. His voice is so nice, yet so dominated the background that hearing any songs off that album just make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Jim Reeve's Twelve Songs of Christmas IS Christmas to me.

So, years ago, way after CDs took over the music market, I set about to try to find a copy of Jim Reeve's Twelve Songs of Christmas on CD.

Lovely Wife and I looked high and low. Every store that we entered that sold any CDs at all were scoured looking for this CD.

All to no avail.

I couldn't even find it in the big books of music that music stores used to have that had their supplier's complete catalog in them, so I couldn't even order it.

One day in desperation while in the mall in Monroe, Louisiana, we had just checked a music store there and had of course come up empty.

One young man working in there asked it he could help me find something. I told him what I was looking for and was rewarded with a totally blank look.

I have bad luck in music stores, the workers are invariably snotty because I don't happen to like the same flavor of the month music that the workers seem to like and think is cool. Therefore they are cool, and I am not. Know what I mean?

Noticing the blank look on the guys face, I tried to start explaining who Jim Reeve's was.

He just gave me this look and waved me off and said really sarcastically, "I KNOW who Jim Reeves was, I have a grandmother."

I cracked up laughing, because at the time I thought it was really funny. He went on to tell me that he'd never seen any Jim Reeve's Christmas Cds and we left the store.

And I've always thought his response was funny because, yes, Jim Reeves was from a previous generation. My parent's generation. And I had this problem because they had played that album every Christmas time and I wanted a copy of it for myself.

That year, I actually found a Jim Reeve's Christmas CD, although it wasn't The Twelve Songs of Christmas. The CD did however sate my desire for hearing Jim Reeve's velvet toned voice singing Christmas songs around Christmas time.

And yesterday? Yesterday because of my back and head hurting, I wanted to go back in time and grab that guy by the throat and shake him real good. Do you ever get like that?

After all of these years, a passing thought on a bad day makes me want to throttle the guy.

That's pretty pitiful to have laughed at the guy's smarmy remark to me all these years because I thought it was funny, and yet yesterday, 12 or so years after the fact, I wanted the punch the guy.

I'm weird like that sometimes.

Don't push me when I both have a back ache and a head ache.

I just might get angry at you 12 or 13 years later.

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I wrote a post and posted some pictures about Jim Reeves last year on here if you care to go and read and have a look.

Yer Gettin' Pictures Today

Sorry folks, I guess I used up all of my hot air on yesterday's post.



The pictures are of the beach here on the Atlantic. I took these one day a while back on my lunch break.

Thought I would throw a little more beauty at you like I did on Monday's post, only without the fancy framing. I just put a thin black border on these; I like the way it looks.

It's still really hot and humid here. There was no magical temperature break after Labor Day.

Quotes of the Day (well, yesterday actually)

I'd love to shake this man's hand

For the past month, and especially in the past two weeks, the leaders of the Democratic party have been slamming General Petraeus, our leader of the coalition forces in Iraq, for the report he was scheduled to give to Congress this month.

First of all, I have to say it's a dumb move for the Democratic leadership to criticize the man and his message before he even says a word.

The problem that the Democrats have right now is that, as a party, they are totally invested in the defeat of the U.S. Military in Iraq.

They've painted themselves into a corner, and they have to say stupid things which sound even more stupid in the light of the successes of the surge of troops in Iraq thus far. Many areas have turned around dramatically, yet the Democrats in power are so bound by their own words of defeatism that they can only sit and point fingers. Their words ring hollow.

Lately the fingers were pointed at General Petraeus, a man that was confirmed to his position by 98% of the U.S. House of Representatives and 100% of the Senate, by these same members of the House and Senate that now impugn his honesty.

What a bunch of knuckleheads. For two weeks they've basically been calling General Petraeus a liar and his report that he had yet to give as lies written by the Bush Administration.

In other words, panicking in the face of the surge's successes and loading their guns and firing them at the messenger before he even delivers the message.

Well, I'd love to shake General Petraeus's hand, because with his opening statements, cut these Democrats off at the knees beautifully:

Mr. Chairmen, Ranking Members, Members of the Committees, thank you for the opportunity to provide my assessment of the security situation in Iraq and to discuss the recommendations I recently provided to my chain of command for the way forward.

At the outset, I would like to note that this is my testimony. Although I have briefed my assessment and recommendations to my chain of command, I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by, nor shared with, anyone in the Pentagon, the White House, or Congress.

As a bottom line up front, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met. In recent months, in the face of tough enemies and the brutal summer heat of Iraq, Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces have achieved progress in the security arena. Though the improvements have been uneven across Iraq, the overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in 8 of the past 12 weeks, with the numbers of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006.

One reason for the decline in incidents is that Coalition and Iraqi forces have dealt significant blows to Al Qaeda-Iraq. Though Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq remain dangerous, we have taken away a number of their sanctuaries and gained the initiative in many areas.

... (emphasis mine)

You can read the entire text of his appearance before our duly elected representatives here.

Touche, General Petraeus. Good job.

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The other quotes are from Rush Limbaugh, and related to what I brought out above.

See, General Petraeus had to basically tell the world that he wrote his own report without the Pentagon's help or the Bush Administration's help, because the real liars were lying about General Petraeus and General Petraeus's report.

Don't believe me?

Chris Matthews of MSNBC: "Washington awaits the Bush Report on Iraq."

Keith Olbermann: "President Bush via his surrogate, General David Petraeus, delivers his report." (I hate Keith Olbermann more than anyone else in the media today.)

Rep. John Murtha: It's not Petraeus' policy, it's Bush's policy.

Rep. Jim McDermott: The report the White House is writing for General Petraeus.

Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin: "The Bush report?"

See what I mean?

That's the kind of thing that's been happening for several weeks now, and General Petraeus gets up there on the microphone in front of all these blowhards and calmly pokes them with a sharp stick. Gotta love it.

Anyway, the quote from Rush Limbaugh was priceless: "I admit that I got some very perplexed glances from staff members on the scene here high atop the EIB building in midtown Manhattan when I mentioned that the Democrats had opened the door into their face, once again, on their pre-spin of the Petraeus report, questioning my interpretation of this. I could see the looks on their faces: "What do you mean, the Petraeus report?" The Democrats are calling it the Bush report. Even the Drive-Bys are calling it the Bush report. Who organized this? Dingy Harry and Nancy Pelosi are calling it the Bush report. Then last night the Drive-Bys are calling it the Bush report. Of course, when Bin Laden says something, we don't question it. When Ahmadinejad says something, we don't question it. When Petraeus or Bush say something, those stinking liars!"

I want to shake his hand too.

Seriously, did you read a transcript of Bin Laden's speech on tape? Holy cow, he said the same tripe that the Democrats did before the election last fall. No wonder they consider Bush and Petraeus liars and Bin Laden someone to be believed!

I haven't made any pretenses on this blog regarding my political views. I'm a conservative.

I'm hoping the Republicans will grow a new set pretty soon and start being conservatives again. The Republicans certainly have their problems, but at least they aren't determined to lose this war.