Not quite what the Feminists had in mind

Thanks to Dragon models you can let your girls play with dolls and still grow up to fight for their country. Personally I think it’s a good thing and that any woman that wants to and can meet the physical tests should be allowed in a combat role. Equal rights also means equal responsibility.

Historical note, Soviet women served with distinction as noted by the service of Lyudmila Mykhailivna Pavlichenko

Sea Fort

Ugh! I can’t imagine this would be an enjoyable stint on these forts, the fact that men went squirrely is no surprise, same thing happened on this coast where some men posted to the coastal fort on Yorke Island went nuts or “Yorkie” as it was called.

Madness Under Water

Living conditions on the artificial islands were extreme, with each of the seven-tower fortresses housing up to 265 men at a time. The isolation and close quarters were hard to bear, especially in the concrete legs of the naval sea forts. While the officers' sleeping quarters were in the upper part of the cylinders, where there was adequate light and oil heating, it was intolerable for the crews, who spent their nights below the surface of the water.

To distract themselves when there was nothing to do, the men were convinced to take up hobbies. Psychologists recommended painting, knitting or building models. The men remained on board for six weeks at a time, spending 10 days on land in between deployments. Many required psychiatric treatment, and the soldiers soon came up with their own name for the manmade platforms: "Fort Madness."

At the end of the war, the crews had chalked up an impressive list of successes. Some 22 aircraft and 30 V-1 flying bombs where shot down from the Thames forts, and one was involved in the sinking of a German speedboat. But the use of the forts in the Mersey estuary had proved to be difficult. Because of their location on a constantly shifting sandbar, the structures on stilts repeatedly sank into the ocean floor. In 1948, the Admiralty had them dismantled because they posed a danger to shipping.
More
I would love to spend sometime exploring the old forts in the UK, if you are into old forts and such, check out these sites here and here.

Some more pictures

A visit to Yorke Island

Lunch Break

21 gun Salute

Took the family to Remembrance day, we watched the 15th Field Regiment RCA fire a 21 gun salute from their 105mm C3 Howitzers, I managed to get this very good shot of the #3 gun firing. You will note that the crew is kneeling, unless you are wearing a knee pad under your uniform it sucks. Kneeling as such is a holdover from the WWI days when horse drawn artillery was expected to go into the Direct Fire mode against infantry and kneeling kept you behind the gunshield.

Afterwards we went back to the Armouries and had lunch at the Sergeants Mess. It was great to see the guys again as I served with the Regiment from 1977 to 1987. My kids had a great time there and enjoyed the food and playing in the WWII vintage Field Artillery Tractor (FAT) that they have restored and pulling a 25pdr field gun and Limber.

Iman at the wheel of the FAT




The guns must be cleaned before the men can have lunch

lest we forget

Lest we forget, those who have gone before and do not neglect those that came back in who or in part.

WWI


WWII


Korea
Medak Pocket

Afghanistan

Peak Plastics? Man invents small portable machine to convert plastic to oil

I am sure the idea is not completely new, but it’s well packaged and thought out. One key question would be how much electricity is required, another would be scalability. Plastic litter is a significant issue in 3rd world countries, this type of machine could be a local source of oil for small remote communities, especially in Africa where solar energy is more abundant. I have always thought it would be good to separate garbage into types, even if we can’t use that type now, someone will look at that stockpile and come up with a way to exploit it.

Thanks to Rod from Tanknet

How an Engineer opens their blinds

Chain reaction through the house

No respect for Mosques (or Churches)

For a religion that gets inflamed about cartoons and some idiot wishing to burn a Koran, they are strangely silent on the rather too common attacks on Mosques and the people praying inside of them. Pray tell what crime did this child commit to deserve this? In fact I wonder what were the crimes of all these people to suffer this pain and anguish?

Now had the West done this deed there would be hell to pay both in Islamic countries and by our own media, but sadly the Western media really doesn’t care if some foreign nutbar kills a few foreigners in some strange place, especially any place where kidnapping and killing curious journalists is considered an acceptable past time.

At least Islamic nutbars are not discriminatory as shown by the recent brutal massacre inside a Christian Church in Iraq by the remnants of AQI. I have met many good and decent Muslims over the years, but there is one glaring problem with Islam in it’s current form:
Evil flourishes when good men (and woman) do nothing to stop it
When the average Muslims begin to stand up shoulder to shoulder and say “Stop this madness now” only then will the people who create this violence feel the fear of the wrath of the people they have kept subdued. Only then will peace be upon him and his followers.

Klondike shipwreck brought to life with 3D scans

A Gold Rush-era shipwreck at the bottom of a Yukon lake is coming to life with the help of cutting-edge digital 3D scan images.

The images were produced in June by researchers working on the wreck of the A.J. Goddard, a 19th-century sternwheeler that vanished in Lake Laberge in 1901.

Researchers from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology captured images of the sternwheeler with underwater sonar scanners supplied by the U.S. firms BlueView Technologies and Oceangate.

Millions of captured images were then assembled into a 3D model, similar to a recent map of the wreck of the Titanic off the east coast of Newfoundland.

Last year, an archeological team that included the Texas-based institute and the Yukon Transportation Museum announced that it had discovered the shipwreck, mostly intact, at the bottom of Lake Laberge.

Read more at CBC North

Some good images of the gold rush, a number of sailboats on Lake Labarge at 5:10

I'm A Denier

Remember that Galileo was a denier also.


Via SDA