Non-football related stuff that really makes your day

[Malto Marko]

The City of Dearborn always has a Memorial Day parade on Memorial Day. They always (while they were in the Militarys budget) got a flyover.

From 1985 to 1999 there were 4 of the latest and greatest jets flying over my house at about 9:58 AM. I learned to look for them and always took time out of my prep for Memorial Day BBQ for the staff, to catch them.

Around 1999 they changed the incoming flight path and we have not seen them since.

[DanO]

Sweet, Malto. I don't recall hearing of it on a national scale though. Whatever the case I hadn't seen nor heard of it before I witnessed it.

[The Cat]

SLF I have seen you tube stuff on the Seatlle show you refer to....I you ever want to take in a great show.....Three days of it at the lakefront in Toronto labour day weekend. It used to be great when the Jays played at Exhibition place,b ecause it was just across the street....could watch the game and airshow at the same time./ I remember one of the snowbirds flying throught the light standards in left field and right over home plate. Morris dropped the ball in the middle of his windup and I could see Kaline tapping kell on the arm several times with the back of his hand.
Great memories.....

[Tony G]

No Blue angels or Thunderbirds this year. They are grounded for the sequester

[Marko69]

Cats post no 8302......, unbelievable. I'll raise Islairs "wow" to a "FKN WHAT?!"
There ain't a snowballs chance in hell that you'd get me doing that shit.

[CGVT]

We were the rescue ship one year at the Atlantic City Air Show. The Thunderbirds were impressive

[Marko69]

I can't work out that bottom picture, CGVT. Looks like "Jaws" is about to attack it. What's happening here?

[-Deborah-]

The City of Dearborn always has a Memorial Day parade on Memorial Day. They always (while they were in the Militarys budget) got a flyover.

From 1985 to 1999 there were 4 of the latest and greatest jets flying over my house at about 9:58 AM. I learned to look for them and always took time out of my prep for Memorial Day BBQ for the staff, to catch them.

Around 1999 they changed the incoming flight path and we have not seen them since.

Now they fly over my house. I thought a plane was crashing into my condo last time it happened.

[CGVT]

That one is breaking the sound barrier. Somebody told me that when they break the speed of sound there is some kind of vapor break. That is a picture of that moment.


(I'm sure Tony will come with a better explanation in a minute )

[CGVT]

One more of that show

[Tony G]

Amy’s Baking Company vs. The Entire Internet

By Alexandra Petri, Published: May 16, 2013 at 1:28 pmE-mail the writer

If you were, for some bizarre reason, to gather children at my knee and ask me to impart to them the hard-earned wisdom of my years, I know exactly what I would say:
“If you do something stupid on the Internet, children, never, under any circumstances, try to pass it off as a hacking. This just makes you look like someone who has done something stupid on the Internet AND who does not understand how the Internet actually works.”
I would go on to point out that seldom in history has any self-respecting hacker come dashing in and made you look stupider than you were to begin with. Sure, hackers take over news accounts from time to time and release startling tweets about assassinations and cause the stock market to fluctuate. But when it comes to private individuals, no hacker of note has ever gone waltzing in to your account and started firing off sexual innuendos, CAPITALIZED TIRADES or emailed Images You Would Just As Soon Did Not Reach The Public Eye to the more nubile of your followers.
The children would probably have wandered off by this time to seek sandwiches, but they would know I was right.
Well, if the Anthony Weiner scandal didn’t do it for the hacking excuse, the Amy’s Baking Company meltdown certainly has.
For anyone not familiar with Amy’s Baking Company, this is the most amazing non-news story that has happened all week.
In Scottsdale, Ariz., there is a restaurant so far gone that even Gordon Ramsay’s shouting cannot save it. In fact, its owners so terrified the man behind “Kitchen Nightmares” that he decided to quit working with them rather than endure them any longer.
If you haven’t been in the nooks and corners of the Web where this has been bouncing around, you are missing out. It’s brilliant and unhinged, in the way all things that go truly viral are. First, the “Kitchen Nightmares” episode itself, which features the classic lines from Amy, “We have three little boys but they’re trapped inside cat bodies. They’re cats.” It shows the owners taking the waiters’ tips, berating the customers and insisting that they do not know the kind of food they want, firing the waitstaff, shouting at Gordon Ramsey and completely refusing to accept any criticism of any kind.



Then, if viewers had any nagging fear that this insanity was staged for the cameras, the Facebook page of Amy’s Baking Company lit up with insults, as co-owners Amy and Samy inveighed against all the Web sites where the “online bullies” had given them negative reviews. Most of them are unprintable, but some highlights include: “To all of the Yelpers and Reddits: Bring it on … Come to arizona. you are weaker than my wife, and weaker than me. come to my business. say it to my face. man to man. my wife is a jewel in the desert. you are just trash. reddits and yelpers just working together to bring us down. pathetic.”
“I AM NOT STUPID ALL OF YOU ARE. YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW GOOD FOOD. IT IS NOT UNCOMMON TO RESELL THINGS WALMART DOES NOT MAKE THEIR ELECTRONICS OR TOYS SO LAY OFF!!!!”
As a general rule, if you are the one typing in all caps insisting that everyone else is wrong, they are not wrong.
The couple has been doing this for some time, but suddenly they announced that “Obviously our Facebook, YELP, Twitter and Website have been hacked. We are working with the local authorities as well as the FBI computer crimes unit to ensure this does not happen again. We did not post those horrible things. Thank You Amy&Samy.”
If so, this hacker has an awful lot of spare time and an uncanny ear for dialogue.
The Amy & Samy story is essentially a master-class in How To Lose An Argument on the Internet. The basic steps, for anyone curious:

• TYPE IN ALL CAPS
• Explain that God is on your side.
• Call the other person a rude four-letter, three-letter, five-letter, six-letter, ten-letter, or twelve-letter name.
• Explain that you are right because the other person is an idiot, while misspelling something.
• USE ERRATIC PUNCTUATION OR GRAMMAR WHILE CALLING THE OTHER PERSON STUPID ALSO DO THIS IN ALL CAPS.
• Describe your cats as “little boys in cat bodies” or “little people in cat suits” or “children, but actually cats, but really children” or “non-human children.”
• Refuse to stop arguing.
• When the backlash starts, insist that you were hacked.

They manage to do all of these, in some cases in a single post. They do everything short of comparing someone to Hitler.
Naturally, this has been blowing up online. To call this kicking the hornet’s nest would be an understatement. They poked and poked and poked the hornet’s nest while making disparaging remarks about the hornets’ mothers. No wonder there’s a swarm.
Folks, it’s not the Internet. It’s you.
UPDATE: I have constructed a handy Venn Diagram of the meltdown.

[Tony G]

A Sonic Boom
Credit: Ensign John Gay, USS Constellation, US Navy

Explanation: Many people have heard a sonic boom, but few have seen one. When an airplane travels at a speed faster than sound, density waves of sound emitted by the plane cannot precede the plane, and so accumulate in a cone behind the plane. When this shock wave passes, a listener hears all at once the sound emitted over a longer period: a sonic boom. As a plane accelerates to just break the sound barrier, however, an unusual cloud might form. The origin of this cloud is still debated. A leading theory is that a drop in air pressure at the plane described by the Prandtl-Glauert Singularity occurs so that moist air condenses there to form water droplets. Above, an F/A-18 Hornet was photographed just as it broke the sound barrier. Large meteors and the space shuttle frequently produce audible sonic booms before they are slowed below sound speed by the Earth's atmosphere.

[Tony G]

Summary of eRumor:
This email features a picture of an F-18 jet fighter flying through a cloudy circle of what is said to be visible evidence of breaking the sound barrier. The story says the photo was taken by Ensign John Gay when the plane swished past the U.S. aircraft carrier Constellation at 750 miles per hour.

The Truth:
Ensign Gay is real and he did take the picture. There is controversy among people who have seen the picture, however, as to whether it is authentic. Some observers say that what Ensign Gay has photographed is not a breaking of the sound barrier, but a different phenomenon involving a combination of the aerodynamics of the airplane, the atmospheric pressure, and the temperature. Also, Ensign Gay says he took the picture at the moment he heard the sonic boom. Critics have said that is not likely since the plane was flying faster than sound, so any sonic boom would have been heard after the plane passed.

To get a professional perspective on this, TruthOrFiction.com turned to Professor James R. Frysinger of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University/College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina and who served in the United States Navy. He says such pictures can be authentic and explains why. He also describes why the person taking a picture of a supersonic jet would indeed hear a sonic boom even if the jet had exceeded the sound barrier long before arriving at the photographer's location:

Dr. Frysinger wrote: The explanation
A conically shaped high pressure surface is formed by objects traveling faster than the speed of sound in a medium, e.g., a jet flying through the air.

This cone is caused by the sound source (jet) traveling faster than the sound waves that are produced by it can travel.

The result is an "envelope" of overlapping circles ("sound wave crests"), each with its center lying ahead of the last sound crest. That envelope is conically shaped with its point at the actual sound source. Lying just inside this conically shaped sound pressure wave (above ambient pressure) is a similar, conically shaped surface of below-ambient pressure air ("sound wave trough").

This is a necessary result of the wave nature of sound waves. Any decent physics text will have a sketch of this. If the humidity level is high enough (e.g., just above sea surface on a warm Pacific Ocean afternoon), the humidity in the air may condense in that trough of low pressure and form a cloud, only to be reabsorbed by the air when pressure returns to normal.

Such clouds tend to form on the noses, nacelles, an leading egdes or tips of wings, canards, etc. These are not unlike contrails except that the water vapor is present in the air before the jet passes, as opposed to being the result of burning jet fuel.

The sonic "boom"
Pictures of these show the result of moisture condensing in the conically shaped wave trough just behind the shock wave. The sonic "boom" reported with these events is NOT caused at the time the jet's speed rises past the speed of sound. It is in fact the continuous sound that the shock wave "crest" represents. A person farther down the path of the jet will hear the same "boom" but later than a person nearer the jet's direction of approach. The speed of the sound crest is equal to the speed of the jet in the direction of travel and equal to the speed of sound perpendicular to the cone's surface. The movie clip on my website at www.cofc.edu/~frysingj/fs14ss.mpg shows the jet approaching and at that moment it has not yet been heard by the observer. Many of the stills being passed around are single frames from similar video clips; the camera was rolling before the "boom" was heard.

A personal account
I was fortunate during my last tour of duty to be standing atop a building at the end of the main runway at NOB Norfolk, a large naval base during a show by the Navy Blue Angels. My height above ground was equivalent to being on the fourth floor, but I was on top of it and "in the elements". The announcer let us know that a jet was coming in at a supersonic speed and would pass at that speed down the length of the runway and "very close to the deck". I saw it coming and aimed my camera slightly downward to its altitude and then tripped the shutter on my tripod-mounted camera as it went by. Immediately, I was blown over backwards and my camera and its tripod landed on top of me. The sequence--all in a fraction of a second--was click, boom, thud. Having been alerted I didn't need to "wait for the boom" to tell when to take the picture. And since the shock wave is NOT a momentary phenomenon, I could let my eye judge when he would be "dead ahead". All this happened so fast that it seemed for a moment to be simultaneous, but that was an illusion. Yes, I got the picture, looking slightly down into the cockpit and with a clear view of the pilot. Humidity levels that day were too low for a contrail-type cloud to form as they did in the movie clip cited above.
The technical explanation
The geometry works out such that the sine of the apex half-angle (half the angle at the point of the cone) is equal to the ratio of the speed of sound in air of that temperature, pressure, and humidity to the jet's speed. That speed ratio is called the Mach Number. So, sin(theta) = V/v or sin(theta) = 1/(Mach Number) where v is the speed of the jet, V is the speed of sound at that location, and theta is half the angle made at the point of the cone.
Notice that if the speed of the jet equals the speed of sound, the "cone" is actually a flat surface perpendicular to the direction of travel. If the jet's speed is less than the speed of sound, the equation is not valid; there IS no superposition of crests taking place (although there is a large pressure build up, similar to a bow wave on a ship).
Our thanks to Professor Frysinger

[CGVT]

I knew Tony would come through. ;)

One more from that show. Some were taken from my ship others from our small boat.

The jets were so fast that they were past and everything was rumbling before you knew what was happening. If you were their target you would be dead before you even knew they were coming.

[Panoptes]

REMINDER: The 2013 ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME INDUCTION CEREMONY will be on HBO tomorrow night (5/18/13).

Do yourself a favor and check it out.