Meatballs with a Chance of Cloudspotting

While as a dad I enjoyed the art and humor in the picture book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, I wasn't interested in going to the recent movie. But I had to watch some of it anyway, as a silent film, since it showed on the airliner during a flight back from Japan this summer.

The blog title refers to my distracted style of eating, say, if we are having Italian. If the sky-light is favorable and the clouds are mobilized, I'll excuse myself several times to peek out the window, sometimes to run outside with a camera. My urge toward cloudspotting is in its third year and shows no sign of abating. It began with collecting digital time-lapse movies of cloud formation.

Many cloudspotters dislike contrails because they can make the sky look like a poorly-scrubbed blackboard. Atmospheric studies during the airline-banned three-day period immediately after the 9-11 attacks did show a distinct difference in cloud formation over the continental US.

But they can have a beauty of their own. Here's a garden-variety contrail:

Sometimes contrails linger and spread out.

Next is a distrail, meaning where a jet cuts a slot. I've only seen this in low- and mid-level clouds. The reason that there are two parallel slots is that sequential jets on their landing approach were following the same track, but the cloud here, which looks like a stratus nebulosus, was moving from south to north so each jet cut a new slot.

If the air is just right, high-level contrails can create some spectacular loops and whorls as the contrails are caught in the wingtip vortices shed by wings and the tail empennage. I see these less than a dozen days a year. In my limited experience it's most likely early in the morning, when the stratosphere is extremely calm. It may more likely during the turnaround, a brief time of year when there is low windshear in the stratosphere - that's when NASA launches its ultra-high-altitude scientific balloons. (Here's a link to an article I wrote for Smithsonian Magazine about that facility's work.)

At any rate the air up there has to be near saturation or else the moisture (which is always in the form of ice crystals) will sublimate before something interesting happens. Here are two contrail-curiosity photos, the first a smoke-ring of sorts I caught a month ago:

Here's a string of contrail beads, from two winters ago, low on the horizon at sunrise. Like nearly all the coolest cloud displays, these last less than five minutes, so if you want to catch them keep a camera close to hand.

Papier Mache + Halloween = Dinosaur Overpopulation

What do bloggers do when not huddled over a keyboard? On Halloween, they could be operating dinosaurs.

This year will be the 20th anniversary of our family's dinosaur display. The star of the show has always been Bronte', a dinosaur neck about fourteen feet long that cantilevers out from an upper window. To a kid, this suggests that the rest of him is inside the house, probably sitting in front of a fireplace. His neck is a Kelly green. In conjunction with a four-way swivel and a hundred-pound counterweight, I can have him raise up and eat leaves off the maple tree, look from side to side, and lean down to greet the kiddies. There's a speaker in his throat connected to a microphone at my side, and his jaw moves when I yank on a wire. There's nothing high tech in the rig; his eyes are painted wide open in a gesture of perpetual surprise.

After two decades of manhandling, storage among the rafters, and snowy evenings, Bronte's paper-mache skin has a well-aged, wrinkly look. When it's snowy, we add a gray scarf. One year a steady drizzle weakened the papier mache (which acts like the fuselage of a monocoque airplane) and his neck broke in half. We finished out the evening by propping him on a ladder. We patched him the following year, adding to his air of longevity.

We began playing with papier while in Texas. Construction of a living fossil starts with a skeleton built up from joists, bolts, and two by fours. Then I give the bones a body with more boards, dowel rods, and stiff wire. I add a skin of chicken wire and strips of gluey newspaper.

Tip: if there are any special effects, install those _before_ installing the skin. Cutting a hole in chicken wire and thrusting one's hands in to for elective surgery is a scarifying experience.

Because such creatures don't look particularly big at the early stages, it's easy to overdo it. Our first attempt was a papier mache claw with dripping red fingernails. Because I wanted it to emerge out of one window and extend to the front porch, it measured the size of a small car upon completion. That's impossible to store from year to year. After moving to Minnesota, we set a size limit of 16 feet in the longest dimension.

... But not a population limit. At its Jurassic peak, besides Bronte', our house had a smoking volcano about five feet high, a cave covering the front door, a large T-Rex in one window, a smaller long-neck dino called Bronte' Junior in another window, a Stegosaurus, and a pterosaur hanging from the entrance.

We found the volcano among the most labor-intensive of the displays, because it had no internal structure but rather was a series of flats that leaned on a central foundation, something like a tepee. We built it in four sections so the flats could be stored during the off-season on racks in the garage above the cars.

Volcanoes are pallid things without smoke. We tried dry ice and various fog and smoke generators, but nothing worked quite so well as a stockpile of highway hazard flares, because they generated a lurid red smoke.  This remained popular until the final year, when one of the magnesium flares melted through the steel bucket we used for a firebox, and came rather close to burning down our volcano. It would have been hard to explain to the firefighters.

Around 2000 the menagerie was cramping our style, at least in the garage, attic, and basement. The great extinction began. After I dropped off Bronte' Junior at the landfill, I looked back in the rearview mirror to see that one landfill guy was holding it up and using it like a big puppet to talk to his co-worker. So I like to think Junior's still in action somewhere.

So now we are one: Bronte' Senior. While running the controls upstairs, I depend on a relative to shill for me in the front yard to listen and call out the kids' first names, so I can strike up a conversation. It's dark on the lawn and there are red and yellow spotlights shining in my eyes between the blackout curtains. Without help I can't tell if the kid in question is dressed as a pirate or a turtle or a Toy Story Army Man.

Yes, our dinosaur is a big fraud, only a paper moon, but otherwise worldly-wise teenagers of the neighborhood still drop by to say hello.

Truman Soap Co: Not with this Ex-President

In this post about the Truman Committee I had mentioned a family connection to Harry Truman; he was the nephew of ex-Confederate guerrilla James J. Chiles, on my father's side.

While in DC last week I was visiting at 4701 Connecticut Ave. and in the second-floor hallway was surprised to see a plaque on a door noting that the apartment (now a condo) had been the Washington home of Truman as a US Senator and for 82 days as vice president, up until FDR's death in April 1945.

The units are roomy and well laid out, with many nice architectural details.

After Truman left the White House in 1953, he couldn't have returned to this apartment. The reason is that he couldn't have afforded it, having no income other than a $112 monthly Army pension. At the time there were no pensions for ex-presidents, and no expense account for office space or staff or a library or anything else. It must have been sobering for him to contemplate James Monroe, who had to move in with his daughter to get by, and Thomas Jefferson, who died in debt.

Still, unlike all recent ex-presidents -- some more than others -- Truman declined to trade honor for cash. He turned down lucrative offers including a ceremonial position with a Florida land company for $100,000 per year, a free car, and cash for selling his name for use by the "Harry S. Truman Soap Company." Evidence of the soap offer can be seen at the Truman Library.

Said Truman: "I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency."

Truman's fortunes turned after Life Magazine advanced him money for an autobiography, and later he received a pension of $25,000 a year -- the first president to do so under a new law. That was plenty for where he lived, the family home in Independence, Mo.

Lessons from WWII: When Only a Czar Will Do

Following up on previous "lessons from WW2" posts about Harry Truman's pursuit of war profiteers, and Henry Kaiser's production miracle. Behind those bright lights were plenty of sparks.

Ramping up the arsenal of democracy in 1940 and 1941 set off fights over money and raw materials that dragged in just about everybody: old and new federal agencies, an Army and Navy intensely jealous of each other, industries, farm-belt politicians, unions, and Congress.

One of the first to hit the headlines concerned the feedstocks for synthetic rubber. Rubber was critical to defense equipment and transport, but Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies had cut off 95 percent of natural rubber shipments to the U.S. How to fill a quarter-million-ton-per-year shortfall with synthetic rubber set off a very public battle about which production process (and therefore which feedstock) to use.

Should the new synthetic-rubber factories depend on ethanol from patriotic American corn farmers, or oil from patriotic American oil producers? Arguments went beyond lobbying to a fistfight between the rubber administrator and a newspaper publisher in a swank Washington club.

Nobody was really in charge of the U.S. war effort -- at first. Take the single commodity called petroleum: by early 1942, six “alphabet agencies” competed to direct the production and consumption of products from crude oil. Harry Truman (along with Republican leader Wendell Willkie) called for one man at the top to oversee decisions and to be responsible for the outcome.

At their urging, FDR finally decided to entrust all war production planning to a single man, a czar of czars, former Sears & Roebuck executive Donald A. Nelson. Industrial historians say this decision was the turning point of the entire war effort, though FDR had delayed the decision almost to the point of disaster.

Nelson oversaw many sub-czars, such as Admiral Jerry Land, the head of the Maritime Commission. Land decided how many ships the U.S. needed, who would build them, what cargoes they would carry, and when they would sail. Land also commandeered all civilian-owned ships (both U.S. flag and also foreign ships that happened to be in our ports) for the duration.

After Nelson took over, the war mobilization became one big tent rather than a scattering of little tents. That is, there was plenty of work and opportunity for all Americans and most businesses, but under a single overarching plan.

Henry J. Kaiser: Miracle Man of the WWII Home Front

In a previous post I had mentioned that Henry J. Kaiser -- hardly remembered now outside of his health-care organization he set up -- is one of my industrial heroes. The amazing story of Kaiser, instant shipbuilder extraordinaire, shows how fast a well-managed industry can fill a production gap during emergencies, even while looking out for its workers’ welfare. I wrote about it in this article for Invention&Technology, and had the privilege of interviewing some of Kaiser's key men at his fastest shipyard, including Clay Bedford.

In 1940, Kaiser was a construction contractor who had helped put up Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam and the Oakland Bay Bridge in record time. Other contractors knew him for his skill at motivating people, his ability to exploit latest technology to raise productivity, and the odd fact that he painted all his concrete trucks pink because pink was a “happy color.”

While Kaiser knew nothing about building 10,000-ton ships in 1940, his company came up with a way to mass-produce them so effectively that it ranked as the world’s premier shipbuilder by 1942. His brand-new shipyards in Oregon and California set speed records for freighters and tankers that have never been equaled.

One very effective method was “athletic industrialism” that pitted vast teams against each other and measured success in quality, cost-cutting, and speed. The man the press called “Sir Launchalot” or “Hurry Up Henry” also took care of his enormous workforce with subsidized housing, free day care centers, and a low-cost health-care system. He laid down a trolley line in Oakland, virtually overnight, to make workers’ commuting easier. Equal in importance to the bridge of ships, he gave heart to Americans at an early stage of the war when no military victories were in sight.

Suddenly FDR’s demands for other war equipment began to look more inspiring than insane. (When calling for US tank production to jump from four tanks per year to 45,000 per year by 1943, FDR had assured his aides, “Oh, the production people can do it if they really try.”) FDR considered Kaiser for the vice-presidential slot in 1944.

What’s the take-away from this astounding turnaround? Peter Drucker found his lesson in Kaiser’s optimistic ignorance: since Kaiser didn’t know how traditional shipbuilding worked, he was free to try new ways. (I believe Kaiser's success was more complicated than that, but Drucker's take on it was interesting.)

Kaiser did more than assemble ships. He created an entire system including iron mines and a new steel mill. Kaiser’s approach still offers solutions for emergency mass production, harnessed competition, cost cutting, and worker motivation. His approach could be applied productively to building the ships needed to tap “ocean thermal energy” from tropical waters. Fleets of giant floating plants could produce liquid ammonia in vast quantities for factories and power plants requiring process heat, and for fueling vehicles as well.

San Bruno Gas Explosion: NTSB's Preliminary Report

In my previous post on the NTSB's docket page for the San Bruno gas-pipeline blast, I mentioned that the docket was light on data, but the seven photos were worth a look and the Board would be adding more information as it developed.

Three days ago the Board added a three-page report with new detail about pipeline steel, wall thicknesses, segments, corrosion protection, and fracture locations. Now we know this was an above-average grade of 30-inch-diameter steel pipe (0.375-inch, grade X-42, minimum yield strength of 40,000 psi). Thicknesses reported by the NTSB have been close to the nominal, between 0.36 and 0.38 inches. There's no indication in this report of large corroded areas due to pooled moisture, but highly localized stress corrosion cracking is probably something they're still looking into. SCC can happen when corrosion gets a grip on a little flaw in the metal. The combination of corrosion at the tip of a micro-crack, fed with pulses of energy, can cause these tiny cracks to slowly get longer until they reach a critical length, at which they fail at supersonic speed.

The loss of two Comet jet airliners over the Mediterranean in 1954 was probably due to slow, incremental fatigue cracking as the fuselage flexed with pressurization: that's because the cabin inflates, then relaxes slightly as pressure-relief valves balance it out. Remember, in the world of disasters, little things add up!

Yet to come are micro-level test reports about fracture edges and the most likely starting point. The report mentions that "key fracture surfaces" have been cut away for lab analysis and I'd bet these are suspected starting points.

Some info is provided on the 28-foot-long stretch of pipe that, about halfway down its length, includes the rupture that is the special focus of NTSB interest. Right now the description of pipe sections are in text and therefore it's hard to visualize the joints in the length of pipe removed from the excavation. The NTSB writes about the stretch of pipe as two segments: the south segment, about twelve feet long, and the north segment, about sixteen feet long. The "rupture" is between those two.

The north segment includes two short sections (called pups) that were joined with girth welds. Girth welds are where pipes are joined end to end; the other kind of weld is the longitudinal weld, which is done at the factory -- this is where steel plates are rolled into a tube and welded along a seam. Unstated is why the pups are there: were they part of a rebuild since the line went down in 1956? Were they necessary from the first so that the pipe could make a bend at this location, say because it's at the bottom of a hill or it was making a turn? There have been press reports that this area of pipe had enough of an odd shape that the standard testing pigs couldn't slip through; the pups might be part of the reason for this.

In preliminary reports the Board leaps to no conclusions (recall, there is no probable cause finding until the investigation is winding up). Still, a close reading of a preliminary report can shed a little more light about which suspected contributory causes are still "of interest." This list is usually quite a bit shorter than the list of hypothetical ones bounced around by press reports (and commentators like me) in the first two weeks.

One of the live issues continues to be a pressure pulse. Though not one that "pegged the needle," it came just minutes before the rupture. While it could be a coincidence, and likely isn't the whole cause, it's getting the NTSB's attention and rightfully so.

The pressure pulse arose out of a chain of events (in general I call these system fractures).

The timeline started with maintenance work at the Milpitas Terminal 40 miles southeast of ground zero, which is upstream in flow terms. Milpitas has SCADA controls that are part of the pressure regulation. Some cause, presumably human error but not conclusively, caused the 24-volt DC so-called "uninterruptible power" at Milpitas to fall to 7 volts, which dropped all or part of the terminal's SCADA system offline. Without its link to Milpitas, a remotely controlled valve on Line 132 moved to a pre-set uncontrolled position, from partially open to full open. This allowed the transmission-line pressure as measured at a point downstream of ground zero to climb above the maximum operating pressure of 375 psi. The location of these measurements was Martin Station in Daly City.

About 6:00 pm, eleven minutes before the rupture, pressure at Martin Station peaked at 390 psi. Then eight minutes later it dropped slightly to 386 psi, probably due to automatic pressure relief valves. At 6:11 pm it fell rapidly to 290 psi due to the rupture at San Bruno.

At 6:45 PG&E mobilized an emergency team to isolate Line 132. This delay has attracted much criticism considering that the flames were visible 10 miles away and 911 calls began flooding in at 6:11 and 59 seconds. PG&E closed an upstream valve at 7:20 and the downstream valve at 7:40. The total volume of gas released was about 48 million cubic feet. Firefighting work continued at individual homes due to gas-fed flames from the broken house lines. PG&E shut down the distribution lines to the neighborhood at 11:30 pm and the last of the house fires quickly came under control.

Is the pressure pulse a smoking gun, in CSI terms? Maybe part of one. As far as we know from the instrument readings at Martin Station, the measured peak of 390 psi was still 10 pounds below the maximum allowable operating pressure of 400 psi. Just browsing the Web, I see burst-pressures a good deal higher than that for pipes made out of 0.375-inch X-42 steel. But cracks in the wrong places can bring about anything down. If the nearby sewer line work two years earlier played a part, there might not be any marks on the gas pipe at all; a lateral shifting of the soil due to the sewer-line work could have raised the stress on some gas-line welds. The fracture analysis at the Board's materials lab in DC will tell us a good deal.

Here's an example of an NTSB materials-lab report, prepared for the Flight 587 crash investigation. So my advice is to stay tuned, and trust the process.

Land of the Leftovers: Technological Time Capsules

Rhode Island lawyer Leo Connors had always thought that his office on the 30th floor of Providence’s art deco Fleet National Bank Building (now the Bank of America Building) was at the very top.

But one day in 1953 he found an unmarked door opening on a narrow upward stairway. Passing through two more doors, he entered a long-forgotten, rectangular room fitted out as a dirigible cabin. It had wicker chairs, dark leather-lined walls, vintage light fixtures, fine brass fittings, and a liquor closet. Windows on three sides were framed like those of the Graf Zeppelin, which had been thrilling the public when the skyscraper was new. Altogether the dust-covered room looked like an artifact from some pinched-off timeline, an alternate past in which falcons had to share their aeries with blimps and zeppelins.

But the day of powered gasbags never came to Providence. Shortly after the lounge was finished and furnished in 1928, a string of airship crashes erased all hope for a worldwide web of lighter-than-air routes. England abandoned plans for Britain–Egypt–India–Australia route after the R101 flew into a French hill in 1930. Then the United States canceled plans for a dirigible fleet after a series of disasters that culminated in the loss of the Navy’s great aviation pioneer, Adm. William A. Moffett, when the Akron went down in a storm in 1933. Just about everyone else gave up after seeing the newsreel taken at the Hindenburg’s mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. Meanwhile, in terms of all-around performance and reliability, airplane builders zoomed ahead of the dirigibilists.

Today ornithologist Joe Zbyrowski uses the now dilapidated dirigible room in Providence as a blind for his raptor studies. We'll never know what the exact purpose was: rich boys' clubhouse, or an honest-to-God boarding lobby for users of the air yachts that Goodyear hoped to build so long ago. The builders provided a door giving access to the parapets outside, so I'd vote for the latter. There are more such reality-jarring time capsules out there ... fodder for later posts.