Tag: Musings

How many types of boats under sail do you recognize?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Living around big waters, as I do now, means hearing a number of new terms to identify boats big and small. When you merely read about them, say in a history book, you can usually skim over the word and move on.

Not so when you’re trying to describe what you just saw.

Today we won’t attempt to get into the array of mostly motorized vessels. Not even a Bayliner versus a Boston Whaler. Naval ships alone would require a long list.

Instead, let’s look at a general overview of boats originally powered by the wind. (Admittedly, today many of them will have an internal engine for additional power.) These can range from small sailboats to majestic tall ships.

  1. Sloop. The most common type of sailing vessel, it has a single mast, usually with one triangular mainsail (in what’s called Bermuda rigging) and, in the front, a triangular headsail, usually a jib. These can range from small, single-person fun boats to larger racing boats manned by trained crews.
  2. Cat. Or catboat. Has a single mast rising from the front of the boat and a large, single sail on a long boom. A second beam of wood, called a gaff, runs along the top of the sail, turning it into a four-sided sheet of hexagonal shape rather than the triangle. They were popular New England workboats around the early 1900s, short (typically ) 20 to 30 feet long and wide, highly stable, and have made a comeback today.
  3. Cutter. A single-masted vessel resembling a sloop, but often having a gaff-rigged mainsail and an extended spar called a long bowsprit extending from the bow, which allows a second headsail (a staysail, or “staysul.”)
  4. Schooner. Two or more masts, with the largest sail (the mainsail) at the aft, plus a foresail (resembling the mainsail) on the mast ahead of it as well as a jib and staysail at the bowsprit. They may also have one or more topsails and a small sail called a mizzen aft of the mainsail. With their complex rigging, they can be fast and undeniably majestic. And, yes, my favorite.
  5. Ketch. Resembles a schooner but has an extra mast behind the mainsail.
  6. Yawl. This term has several different meanings, the first regarding rigs with one or two fully equipped masts plus a mizzen mast aft. It can also refer to a double-ended hull boat that could be worked from the beaches, not that I’m finding any reference to sailing in what would be the equivalent of reverse gear. Some of them, if you’re a bettor, may have been the fastest-sailing open boats ever built. And it even seems to be a kind of dinghy. Just so you get an idea of how loose some of these terms can be.
  7. Brig. This two-masted ship introduces us to square-rigging with sails arrayed on horizontal spars perpendicular to the keel and masts – that is, “squared.” The spars, called yards, present the sails to face the wind from behind. The foremast of a brig is always square-rigged, but some varieties may have a gaff or lateen sail on the mainmast. (Lateen is an ancient arrangement I won’t get into unless you’re going to Egypt.) “Square,” as far as masts go, means more or less perpendicular to the hull, unlike the ones more or less parallel to the hull. Trust me on this.
  8. Barquentine. Its foremast was square-rigged, with gaff-rigged masts behind. But let’s skip ahead.
  9. Barque (or bark). A three- to five-masted square-rigged ship consisting of a foremast, mainmast, and a smaller, often gaff-rigged mizzen mast at the aft for steering stability. Far and away the most numerous of the square-rigged vessels. Enough of the finer points. Let’s turn to the most glorious.
  10. Tall (or full-rigged) ship. Three or more masts, all fully square-rigged, one sail above another, often five or six on a mast, with a hull often much longer than a schooner. The individual sails were smaller than a schooner’s and less likely to rip out in a storm, but the number of them provided more overall sail surface, allowing for maximum speed. The downside was that crews of 30 or more sailors were required for handling those sheets. Still, seeing one of them is exciting. It’s what you really picture first, after all. Now, for all of the subcategories, such as a frigate.

Inside Charles F. Kettering’s mind

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and civic influence Charles F. Kettering was still alive in the Dayton community when I was an aspiring chemist in my youth.

My career in science never materialized, but his influence as an inspired ideal of leadership remains.

You may recognize the name from the famed Sloan-Kettering cancer research hospital in Manhattan or from the city in southwest Ohio named in his honor. He also led the research teams that invented the electric cash register, the automobile electrical self-starter, and no-knock gasoline. Other work made the diesel engine practicable as well as the refrigerator and, in time, air conditioning. In all, he had 186 patents, second to fellow Ohioan Thomas Edison. He was a founder of Delco (Dayton Electrical Laboratory Company) and from 1920 to 1947 was head of research for General Motors.

As a power in the new General Motors corporation, he aligned with management pioneer Alfred Sloan – as in that Sloan-Kettering Hospital in Manhattan,.

Let me repeat, there’s even a city named in his honor.

Today we have another Double Tendrils.

Get ready to know him better. Let’s start with his perspectives on the creative process and problem-solving, especially as they apply to engineering and invention.  Here’s what he said:

  1. If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.
  2. I don’t want men of experience working for me. The experienced man is always telling me why something can’t be done. The fellow who has not had any experience is so dumb he doesn’t know a thing can’t be done – and he goes ahead and does it. … The person who doesn’t know something can’t be done will often find a way to go ahead and do it.
  3. Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success. … 99 percent of success is built on failure.
  4. An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.
  5. Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need. … A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.
  6. All human development, no matter what form it takes, must be outside the rules; otherwise, we would never have anything new.
  7. A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.
  8. Research means that you don’t know, but are willing to find out.
  9. We work day after day, not to finish things; but to make the future better … because we will spend the rest of our lives there.
  10. If I want to stop a research program, I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.
  11. When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I’d place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: “Leave slide rules here.” If I didn’t do that, I’d find someone reaching for his slide rule. Then he’d be on his feet saying, “Boss, you can’t do it.”

And now for his perspective on life itself.

  1. There is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.
  2. The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
  3. If you’re doing something the same way you have been doing it for ten years, the chances are you are doing it wrong.
  4. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
  5. My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.
  6. If I have had any success, it’s due to luck, but I notice the harder I work, the luckier I get.
  7. The whole fun of living is trying to make something better.
  8. No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.
  9. You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.
  10. Every father should remember one day his son will follow his example, not his advice.

He really was one who made America great.

AI counterpoint

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The machine doesn’t know

fear

or love

or loyalty

or betrayal

or any of the gut-level

or off-the-cuff range of thinking and action

much less revolution

I’m coming to suspect that ambiguity

such as the simple “maybe”

will be the downfall of so-called

“artificial intelligence”

and its blatant plagiarism.

“Maybe” and related ambiguity may be the nemesis of AI.

Just look at the fog

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a child, foggy mornings frightened me, and attempts to comfort me by calling them “fallen clouds” only thickened my anxiety. It was quite simply abnormal. Get me outa here!

Where I now live, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that we have more than a hundred foggy days a year. Many of those, it burns off early, but on others, we are caught in gray for what can extend for weeks. Maybe I need to start counting.

Still, as one Navy commander exclaimed, “You don’t have your share of fog. You have everyone’s!”

That said, let’s get more specific.

  1. Technically, it is a ground-level cloud. Water vapor, which is invisible, turns into tiny droplets that hang in the air. That happens in very, very high humidity, wherever the temperature falls below the dew point. Not that it’s dew, either.
  2. In order for fog to form, dust or some kind of pollution needs to be in the air. Water vapor condenses around these microscopic solid particles. Sea fog, which shows up near bodies of salty water, is formed as water vapor condenses around bits of salt.
  3. Its hazy and ethereal atmospheric marvel has inspired artists, writers, poets, and even lovers, and has a profound impact on various aspects of nature and human emotions.
  4. It’s not the same thing as mist. Fog is denser, more massive, thicker. There are more water molecules in the same amount of space in a fog.
  5. Fog cuts visibility down to one kilometer or roughly a half-mile, meaning it prevents you from seeing further away that from where you’re standing. Mist can reduce visibility to between up to a mile.
  6. One kind of fog is identified as radiation, when heat rising from the ground into cooler air than the air above it. Another is advection, when warm air blows across a cooler surface and condenses. It’s especially common on the west coast of the U.S. Hello, San Francisco. Upslope or orographic happens when warm air blows up a slope, such as the face of a mountain, and then cools “adiabatically.” It’s also called valley fog, when warmer air is trapped by mountains and much colder air above. Typically, it’s a winter phenomenon. And evaporation occurs when warmer water evaporates into cooler air.
  7. Don’t confuse it with smoke, even if London’s famed “fog” was really industrial-era air pollution. Well, that complicates on fashion-coat label.
  8. Fog enhances acoustic experiences. I can definitely hear the fog horn better when there’s fog and it did create the eerie experience of hearing voices from a ship we couldn’t see as it came to the pier.
  9. It’s more common in coastal areas, due to temperature differences between the water, air, and land. As I was saying about our encounters here?
  10. It can help mitigate high temperatures and reduce heat stress. Or turn everything into a steam bath. But it can also freeze into delicate layers of crystal across a landscape or treacherous conditions on boats, airplanes, cars and trucks. Make for slippery walkways, too.

Wherever you are, look for the fog bow, too, like a rainbow within a cloud.

Individual life as a mosaic

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The thought hit me while scrolling through old posts on this blog.

Does anyone you know actually maintain a tightly focused life?

You know, someone who proclaims, ”These are my goals and I’m sticking to them”?

Or is it more a matter of steering between the many things that just pop up, like they do on the merry-go-round here at the Red Barn?

Or more like a pinball machine, for those of us of a certain age?

In the end you just have to patch together whatever you can from the pieces, even while trying to fit them to the other folks around you?

Lorenzo Sabine was a Yankee, all the same

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After running across his name repeatedly while researching the history of our old house, I decided to look him up. Lorenzo Sabine turns out to have been a remarkable character. Best known today for his two-volume, provocative 1864 book Loyalists of the American Revolution, his adulthood included an influential span in Eastport.

Here are some highlights.

 

  1. He was born in 1803 in what’s now Lisbon in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with a Methodist minister for a father and roots going back to French Huguenots who arrived in Rehoboth, Massachusetts from Wales in 1643. Lorenzo moved with his parents to Boston in 1811, and then to Hampden, Maine, in 1814, where he completed his preparatory studies. His father had been taken prisoner by the British in the War of 1812 while working in a military hospital.
  2. At age 18, following his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, he came to Eastport not long after Maine gained statehood from being a district of Massachusetts. At first, he was employed as a clerk, then tried his hand at his own business but went bankrupt, followed by working as bookkeeper of Passamaquoddy Bank and then engaging in a series of enterprises, including stints as a mercantile partner with William and Jacob Shackford, sons of the Revolutionary War veteran who built our house and much more. He shows up as a witness on many property deeds and other court records.
  3. He was editor of the weekly Eastport Sentinel newspaper to 1834, during Benjamin Folsom’s time as publisher. He was also founder of the Eastport Lyceum, and incorporator of the Eastport Academy and Eastport Atheneum.
  4. He served as a member of the Maine House of Representatives, 1832-33, and was deputy collector of customs at Eastport, 1841-43.
  5. From early childhood, he was what he called “revolution-mad,” something that grew in other directions after his move to Eastport, abutting Canada and having many residents descending from Loyalist lines. This led to his insight that “there was more than one side to the Revolution.” Prior to this “every ‘Tory” was as bad as bad could be, every “son of Liberty” as good as possible.” During the 1840s, the results of his research appeared in the North American Review, America’s first literary magazine.
  6. Quite simply, his work was not favorably received by “patriotic” Americans though it did receive support from several important historians. Lorenzo then revised and expanded his material into an 1847 book The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in The War of the Revolution; Alphabetically Arranged; with a Preliminary Historical Essay, erupting a firestorm of controversy. The work received a more thorough two-volume edition for its republication in 1864. You can read it online to see why it challenged many of the conventional treatments of the Revolutionary War and the tensions leading to the War of 1812 from the British side. He did, do note, receive honorary degrees from Bowdoin College and from Harvard.
  7. He moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1848 as a trial judge and was elected to Congress in 1852 to fill a seat vacated by death but did not run for reelection.
  8. Appointed secretary of the Boston Board of Trade, he relocated to Roxbury and also served as a confidential agent of the U.S. Treasury Department.
  9. He was married three times, to Matilda F. Green in 1825, Abby R.D. Deering in 1829, and 1837 to Elizabeth M. Deering, who survived him. Only one of his five children survived him.
  10. He died in Roxbury in 1877 but is buried in Eastport’s Hillside Cemetery.