WHARF RAT

I googled the words “wharf rat” and to my dismay I found many references to those who were ardent followers of the “Greatful Dead”; not one reference to my assumption of that who wandered the docks attracted to the life on boats. Even in the International Maritime Dictionary there is not a reference to “wharf rat”. Naturally I then started to question my own idea. Was it self created; a figment of my own mind?

Continuing my internet search I found some references by Sven Carlsson about a man Jerry Warren; a self professed “wharf rat” stating it was a title one had to earn; a badge of pride.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote ” When I saw the seafaring people leaning against posts and sitting on planks, under the lee of warehouses,–or lolling on long-boats drawn up high and dry, as sailors and old wharf-rats are accustomed to do, in seaports of little business.

Of course the quote from “Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame “There is nothing–absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” spoken by Ratty.

I had many of my own experiences on Newport’s Waterfront over the years; some of which I had the good sense to capture on film.

WILLIE, AFTER A DAY OF SANDBLASTING
WILLIE, AFTER A DAY OF SANDBLASTING
FISHING BOATS
FISHING BOATS
LOOKING FROM BANNISTER'S WHARF
LOOKING FROM BANNISTER’S WHARF
LOOKIG AT MATHINOS' YARD
LOOKIG AT MATHINOS’ YARD
BOAT REPAIRS
BOAT REPAIRS
AMERICA'S CUP YACHTS ON THE WEIGHS
AMERICA’S CUP YACHTS ON THE WAYS

 

 

RULE 55

 

FREE INSTALLATION OF NORTH SAILS STOP TABS

North Sails introduced STOP TABS at the beginning of this year to help sailors comply with ISAF Rule 55 (a competitor may not intentionally throw trash in the water) by offering an alternative to rubber bands or wool ties to band your downwind sails. Through April 22 (Earth Day) we are offering free STOP TABS installation for the first five sailors at each North Sails location in North America. We’ll also send you a free North hat for helping save the environment! Make your appointment today: http://goo.gl/ER5CnR

Editor’s Note: The 2013-2016 edition of The Racing Rules of Sailing includes Rule 55 (Trash Disposal), which states that: “A competitor shall not intentionally put trash in the water.”Click here for full explanation.

THE BEGINNING OF TIME

All I know is that everything I learned in Physics has been proved untrue; discarded and replaced by new science. If I have understood correctly there are still some pieces of the puzzle that remain unproved, but their existence fits current thinking. Regardless this new discovery, if substantiated is a step closer to filling gaps in the present thinking.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein
  • New results from BICEP2 are ‘smoking gun for inflation’
  • During inflation, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light

(CNN) — There’s no way for us to know exactly what happened some 13.8 billion years ago, when our universe burst onto the scene. But scientists announced Monday a breakthrough in understanding how our world as we know it came to be.

If the discovery holds up to scrutiny, it’s evidence of how the universe rapidly expanded less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

“It teaches us something crucial about how our universe began,” said Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. “It’s an amazing achievement that we humans, doing science systematically for just a few hundred years, can extend our understanding that far.”

What’s more, researchers discovered direct evidence for the first time of what Albert Einstein predicted in his general theory of relativity: Gravitational waves.

These are essentially ripples in space-time, which have been thought of as the “first tremors of the Big Bang,” according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

A telescope at the South Pole called BICEP2 — Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 — was critical to the discovery. The telescope allowed scientists to analyze the polarization of light left over from the early universe, leading to Monday’s landmark announcement.

The BICEP2 telescope looks at polarization of light from 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
The BICEP2 telescope looks at polarization of light from 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

How inflation works

Scientists use the word “inflation” to describe how the universe rapidly expanded after the Big Bang in a ripping-apart of space. The BICEP2 results are the “smoking gun for inflation,” Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy, said at a news conference. Kamionkowski also was not involved in the project.

“Inflation is the theory about the ‘bang’ of Big Bang,” said Chao-Lin Kuo, an assistant professor of physics at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and a co-leader of the BICEP2 collaboration, in a Stanford video. “It explains why we have all this stuff in the universe.”

Imagine that you are making a raisin bun, said Stanford physicist Kent Irwin, who worked on sensors and readout systems used in the experiment. As the dough bakes and expands, the distance from any given raisin to another increases.

“Certainly everything in the universe that we see now, at one time before inflation, was smaller than an electron,” Irwin said. “And then it expanded during inflation at faster than the speed of light.”

You may have learned in physics class that light sets the universe’s speed limit, but space-time is an exception; it can stretch faster than the speed of light, Irwin said.

Stanford University professor Andrei Linde, who helped develop the current inflation theory, said the new results are something he had hoped to see for 30 years.

“If this is true, this is a moment of understanding of nature of such a magnitude that it just overwhelms and let’s just hope that it’s not a trick,” Linde said in a university video interview.

Another cool tidbit: Inflation can be used in theories that suggest the existence of multiple universes, Irwin said, although these results do not directly address such theories.

What are gravitational waves?

Scientists believe that in the fabric of space-time, there are tiny ripples called quantum fluctuations. If you could look at space-time on the smallest scale possible, you would, in theory, see them, even today. Unfortunately, no microscope is capable of seeing something that small.

Such fluctuations also existed at the beginning of the universe. Inflation blew them up much larger, launching gravitational waves that we now see imprinted on the cosmic microwave background. “These gravitational waves are an aftershock of the Big Bang,” he said. The BICEP2 study is the first to image them directly.

“We have for the first time a detection for the mythical gravity wave signal that people have been searching for so hard, for so long,” said Clem Pryke, associate professor at the University of Minnesota, at a press conference Monday.

Other experiments such as LIGO — Caltech’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory — are also looking for proof of gravitational waves, but in the context of energetic cosmic phenomena such as coalescing black holes.

The gravitational waves suggested by the BICEP2 results would have expanded across the entire universe at that time, Irwin said. The length of one of these waves — the distance between peaks and troughs — would have been billions of light years across.

Light from the early universe, called cosmic microwave background radiation, reveals these telltale signs of our universe’s history. Last year, scientists from the European Space Agency’s Planck space telescope released a detailed map of temperature variations in this light, which came from from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang


Instead of temperature, BICEP2 scientists were looking specifically at the polarization of the cosmic microwave background — that is, the direction the electric field is pointing across the sky.

Researchers were looking for a specific type of polarization called “B-modes,” which signify a curling pattern in the polarized orientations of light from the ancient universe, said Jamie Bock, co-leader of the BICEP2 collaboration and professor of physics at California Institute of Technology.

In theory, this swirling polarization pattern could only be created from gravitational waves. And that is what BICEP2 found.

“It’s a very clean signature of those gravity waves,” Irwin said.

Is it for real?

Because of how potentially important these results are, they must be viewed with skepticism, said David Spergel, professor of astrophysics at Princeton University. The measurement is a very difficult one to make and could easily be contaminated. There are, as it stands, some “oddities” in the results that could be concerning, he said.

“I am looking forward to seeing these results confirmed or refuted by other experiments in the next year or two,” Spergel said.

The Planck space telescope collaboration is expected to release results on polarization of the cosmic microwave background as well, Irwin said. Other experiments are working toward similar goals, which could support or go against BICEP2.

Regardless, Monday’s announcement is making big waves in the scientific community.

Copied from Sailing anarchy.

I have long felt that the accomplishments of Olivier De Kersauson were not fully appreciated. I am so pleased to see this post.

In the 2005 transatlantic race I sailed on ‘Tempest” and we used the same weather router who steered Olivier around the world. He was brilliant.

ultime warrior

Sodebo Ultime Trimaran (ex Geronimo)

At 111 feet long and 72 feet wide, the old VPLP Gerononimo was a groundbreaking racer in many ways. When Olivier De Kersauson launched her back in 2001, record breakers like Fossett and Peyron and Lewis were positive that giant catamarans were just better, and they’d proven it so clearly that many thought De Kersauson a nutter for risking so much on a boat that clearly couldn’t accomplish anything.  But 100,000 mostly trouble-free miles and a Jules Verne (and several other) major records later, the boat’s clear advantages – safety, ability to be driven hard, motion, upwindedness – emphatically ended the era of the maxi-catamaran.  Geronimo would become the basis for the most dominant record runners ever, as well as the boat that took the America’s Cup back from Alinghi: Franck Cammas’ (and now Armel Le Cle’ach’s) monstrous Groupama 2/BP6, Lionel Lemonchois’s (and then Loick Peyron, and now Yann and Dona’s) BP5/Spindrift 2, and the BMW Oracle Racing 90 all came out of VPLP’s computers and all owe their heritage heavily and directly to Geronimo.

This history lesson may bore some, but to us, ocean racing is all about history and legend, and that’s why we share it with you.  And with 2014/15 seeing Thomas Coville rebuilding, refitting, repowering, and restoring Geronimo for his own Route Du Rhum, record aspirations, and Ultime solo 100+ footer class racing, we can’t wait to see history come roaring to life again on the starting line.  Coville was just a kid when he first began racing with De Kersauson, and the brilliant Frenchman has now been part of most of the last decade’s Jules Verne Trophy runs as well as a Volvo Ocean Race victory.  His narrow Nigel Irens Sodebo trimaran came tantalizingly close to claiming the Solo RTW record, but it’s clear that Coville has given up on that concept in favor of the heavier and far more powerful Geronimo.  Above is an Yvan Zedda shot of the boat as her refit moves ahead quickly at Multiplast’s yard; go here for a full gallery, here

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY SUDDENLY FASHIONABLE?

PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION OF LOST PHOTOGRAPHS SHOWCASES EARLY 20TH CENTURY LONDON

Spitalfields in April 1912 by CA Mathew

An exhibition opens later this week at the Eleven Spitalfields Gallery in London showcasing the work of a mysterious early 20th century street photographer known only as CA Mathews. Mathews photographed a variety of street scenes, almost at random, in the East London neighborhood of Spitalfields one April morning in 1912. Mathews’ purpose in taking the photos – as with almost all the details of his life – remains mysterious.

All that is definitively known about Mathews is the address of photography studio in Spitalfields, where he operated from 1911 until his death in 1916.  His wife also died the same year, leading to speculation that they might have been early victims of the Spanish Flu epidemic, which swept through London.

Spitalfields in April 1912 by photographer CA Mathew
Spitalfields in April 1912 by photographer CA Mathew

Mathews’ photographs depict the predominately Jewish neighborhood in all its confused early 20th century glory, with children bustling around teams of horses, vying with lorries and street sellers peddling their goods. The area was a notorious slum during the Victorian era, as famous for its burglars and prostitutes as for the long-standing (and long in decline) textile industry that dominated the neighborhood. Curiously, considering its reputation, the neighborhood residents appear relatively well-dressed and well-fed.

The photographs were forgotten for about 60 years, while they languished in a cardboard box in the archives of Bishopgate Institute. The photographs were uncovered a few years ago, but no record has yet been found indicating how they arrived at Bishopgate in the first place.

The exhibition will run from March 7 – April 27.