Category Archives: Navy

An Anniversary, of Sorts

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This isn’t going to be about physics. In fact, the only connection is that I was teaching physics when this happened. This is about what happened one night, 28 years ago: Ex-sailor Releases Hostage After Siege At Navy Base. LT Steve Gabriel (who taught Chemistry, Materials and Radiological Fundamentals, aka CMR) was taken hostage by a former student.

About the same time, Gabriel also called security while he was being held

“Security” would be me, since I was standing the Command Duty Officer watch at the time. CDO is a 24-hour watch that one stands, and you are responsible for, well, everything when the commanding officer (CO, aka captain) is gone. Imagine borrowing a car from someone — you’re responsible for it until you return the keys. Except that the CO doesn’t actually own the car — s/he was assigned to it by someone else, and is ultimately responsible for it. If the car starts making sounds, you’re going to call the captain up and make sure it’s not a problem, and the CO is not prone to yell at you for checking, because the last thing they want is to get the car back with a surprise problem. “My CDO was an idiot” is not an excuse, because that only prompts one to ask why you lent the keys to an idiot. The navy is not fond of excuses, especially ones that sound like they are passing the buck.

On a quiet watch, the kind you hope for every time, there are no incidents to worry about. You do your rounds, do the paperwork that’s required and get a few hours of sleep. If it was during the week you’d teach and not have to worry about the CDO part during the day, while the captain was there. After you took charge the other watchstanders all did their jobs (there was a duty chief petty officer for each building, and someone from the first lieutenant’s staff, in charge of the evening cleaning crews and other duties, plus a dozen or so people as unarmed security watchstanders, working the phones and checking traffic into and out of the buildings, making sure you had your security badge, or weren’t leaving with any classified documents)

On a good night, aside from a stroll or two around the buildings, you got to sit around and hear the enlisted guys tell sea stories. I was 23, just a year out of college and still an Ensign and had no stories to tell (yet), other than some drunken stupidity, but even then, exotic-port navy drunken stupidity made for much better stories. It was fun to listen to that, and some of the things that happen at sea. But on this evening, there wasn’t going to be much time for sea stories.
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How to Think Like Approximately 1 Physicist

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Think Like a Physicist

Physicists and estimation.

Students (the vast majority of whom are engineers and chemists) invariably look at me like I’ve sprouted an extra head when I do dimensional analysis tricks, though, and whenever I assign a problem asking for an estimate, I’m all but guaranteed to get answers reported to all the digits that a calculator can muster, which misses the point.

But I’ve also had this happen even with other faculty from science and engineering departments. I’ve had several meetings where I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope toy model to check the plausibility of something or another, and get baffled stares from everybody else. Or arguments about how the round numbers I used weren’t exact (“But we don’t have 600 students in the first-year class. There are only 587 of them…”) It was a real shock the first time that happened, because I’ve always thought of that as a general science trick, but I’m coming around to the idea that it’s really more of a physicist trick. And maybe, if you’re looking for an explanation of what it means to think like a physicist, specifically, that might be the place to look.

I recall the first time I experienced this, in a physics class in college. The professor gave an answer to a question to within a factor of 2 faster than anyone with a calculator got to the more precise answer, and he explained that in a lot of (informal) cases, a factor of 2 or even order of magnitude would be sufficient — able to rule out possibilities or make a plausibility argument, or even check that you haven’t fat-fingered an answer on your calculator and gotten an obviously wrong answer. He was right, and I’v used the technique quite a bit. Later, in the navy, I heard this estimation technique called “radcon math” — the radiation control folks on a ship/sub care mainly about the order of magnitude of a radiation dose when first assessing a situation, because that tells you the level of urgency should you need to cordon off/evacuate an area. So it’s not just physicists, per se, but it’s plausible estimation is more prevalent in disciplines that do more computation.

Copyright and Trivial Efforts

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I am linking to How does copyright work in space? where I read the summary even though the actual article is at The Economist. That’s because while the subject of the complexity of copyright is interesting, or possibly depressing, what got me was this comment

We live in a world where sending a guitar into space is trivial while ironing out rights agreements is the tough part.

I understand the sentiment, but I’m also bothered by the characterization of sending anything into space as trivial (and besides, copyright is hard because we choose to make it so). Too often, “trivial” is a tag placed on an effort when someone else does it. It reminded me of a comment one of my previous commanding officers had made to the research group of which I am a member, which was basically that because of his past experience, he had the appreciation that most of the work that goes on in getting a job done happens behind the scenes. In our case, that building a top-of-the-line atomic clock isn’t easy, and that the uninformed often look at the final product (or result) without the comprehension that 90% or more of the project is invisible, like an iceberg. Making it look easy doesn’t mean it is easy.

Which is why I want to point out that putting a guitar into space, like many endeavors, isn’t trivial. I would also count some of the efforts of my former shipmates, such as operating a nuclear submarine, or landing an airplane on a tiny postage-stamp of a flight deck bobbing in the ocean. At night, even. A lot of really hard work and discipline go into achieving these things, and that you only rarely hear about failures of such efforts is pretty frikkin’ amazing.

Pew! Pew! Pew! … Splash!

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Speaking of lasers, just a navy laser (not a 5 mW laser pointer) shooting down a drone. Mars rovers don’t have a monopoly on laser fun.

Biodiesel, Ahoy!

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My Heart-Stopping Ride Aboard the Navy’s Great Green Fleet

The navy is pushing toward green fuels and energy efficiency, but not always with the agreement of Congress.

Four times in history it has overhauled old transportation paradigms—from sail to coal to gasoline to diesel to nuclear—carrying commercial shipping with it in the process. “We are a better Navy and a better Marine Corps for innovation,” Mabus says. “We have led the world in the adoption of new energy strategies in the past. This is our legacy.”

It goes beyond supply lines. Rising sea levels lapping at naval bases? A melting and increasingly militarized Arctic? The Navy is tackling problems that freeze Congress solid. What it learns, what it implements, and how it adapts and innovates will drive market changes that could alter the course of the world.

But not without a fight.

Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

what if: Spent Fuel Pool

What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?

Spoiler alert, but necessary for my comment

In fact, as long as you were underwater, you would be shielded from most of that normal background dose. You may actually receive a lower dose of radiation treading water in a spent fuel pool than walking around on the street.

This jibes with my experience in the navy — the crew had their exposure monitored, and the word was that it wasn’t unusual for someone on a sub not directly being exposed to radioactive/contaminated materials or hanging out near the reactor compartment to have their dose be lower than what one would get on the surface. The benefitted from spending most of their time several tens of meters blow the surface, and all of the attenuation that afforded.

Going Retro

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Retro Science – Part 1
Mostly about Matthew Fontaine Maury, the first superintendent of the US Naval Observatory.

Maury embarked in crowdsourcing data in 1842 when, as a lieutenant, he was placed in charge of the Depot of Charts and Instruments of the Navy Department. Sailors followed a strict routine and were systematic in recording very specific observations around the clock. Ships were mobile weather stations, accumulating a standardized set of weather variables with the strictest regularity at 15 minute intervals. As much as sailors emphasized these routines, once a voyage was completed, the logs were practically viewed as rubbish.

But when Maury saw the Navy’s stockpile of old ships logs, he quickly realized the collective information could improve navigation. Maury developed a method to systematically extract key information from each log book.

Physics for Fun and Profit

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In modest amounts, at least.

There’s an opening in the research and conspiracy consortium to which I belong. There’s an announcement at the GS-12 level, and one at the GS-13 level of duties and compensation.

This position is located in the Time Service Department, Clock Development Division, U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO), Washington, DC. The United States Naval Observatory is responsible for Department of Defense standards for time, and for the establishment of the Department of Defense precise time and time interval (PTTI) requirements for operations and research on time and time interval, and for the coordination of Department of Defense activities in these fields.

The official duties listed are what we all do, translated into HR-speak. We play with physics toys in the area of atomic physics, but, like the private sector, we expect results.

et al, Brute?

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Top Wrangler

When I was in the navy, we (well, me, mostly) used to joke about doing a movie about Nuclear Power School in the format of Top Gun. (Top Chalk?). Similarly, there’s a reason they never do movies like that. (Not having call signs was but one of many fatal shortcomings)