60 Year Anniversary of “Underway on Nuclear Power”

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Peter Lobner

Updated 10 January 2020

60 years ago, on 17 Jan 1955,  CDR Eugene Wilkinson, the first CO of the USS Nautilus, SSN-571, ordered the following message sent as his nuclear-powered sub got underway for the first time in New London, CT.

Wilkinson_Message  Source: U.S. NavyWILKINSON-obit-web-articleLarge CDR Eugene Wilkinson and Nautilus.  Source: U.S. Navy

You’ll find an interesting, short backstory to this message at the following link:

 
Wilkinson retired from the Navy as a Vice Admiral in 1974, died in 2013, and is buried in Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, CA.
 

There’s a short history of the early Navy nuclear power program and Nautilus at the following link: 

 
 nautilus_23 Admiral Rickover. Source: U.S. Navy
 

We owe a debt of gratitude to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover for the success of the Naval Nuclear Power Program, which is quite visible here in San Diego, with nuclear-powered aircraft carriers based at North Island and submarines operating from Ballast Point in Point Loma.

10 January 2020 update:
 

In July 2018, I completed a set of eight resource documents collectively titled, “Marine Nuclear Power: 1939 – 2018,”  and comprising over 2,100 pages formatted as slide presentations.   The eight parts are:

  • Part 1: Introduction
  • Part 2A: United States – Submarines
  • Part 2B: United States – Surface Ships
  • Part 3A: Russia – Submarines
  • Part 3B: Russia – Surface Ships & Non-propulsion Marine Nuclear Applications
  • Part 4: Europe & Canada
  • Part 5: China, India, Japan and Other Nations
  • Part 6: Arctic Operations

All of these can be accessed through my 25 July 2018 “Marine Nuclear Power 1939 – 2018” post at the following link: 

https://lynceans.org/all-posts/marine-nuclear-power-1939-2018/

 

GPS and Two Alternatives You May Not Have Heard About: GLONASS and Galileo

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Peter Lobner

U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS)

The U.S. military-operated Global Positioning System (GPS) achieved full operational capability in 1995 and was declared a “dual-use” (military and civilian) system in 1996.  Today, GPS functionality is embedded in many of the electronic products and vehicles we use on a daily basis.  You’ll find plenty of information on GPS at the following link:

http://www.gps.gov

Russian GLONASS:

Globalnaya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (Global Navigation Satellite System), GLONASS is a Russian military-operated satellite-based navigation system.   The intent for GLONASS to be a dual-use system was declared in 2007 and full global coverage was achieved in 2011.  By the end of 2011, GLONASS claims it met a goal of matching GPS accuracy and reliability, and GLONASS may be more accurate than GPS at high latitudes because of the higher inclination of GLONASS satellite orbits.  iPhones and several types of Android phones have both GLONASS and GPS chips and may use both satellite signals to improve navigation results.  Check out the story at the following link:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/glonass-gps-alternative-never-knew-existed/

European Galileo:

While European independence from GPS & GLONASS was a key goal behind the creation of the new system, Galileo is intended to be 100% interoperable with GPS and GLONASS.  The first two operational Galileo satellites were launched in October 2011, with two more following in October 2012.  These four Galileo satellites represent the operational nucleus of the future 30-satellite constellation.  The 5th & 6th Galileo satellites were launched in August 2014 into incorrect orbits and are not operational.

You can get more information on Galileo at the following European Space Agency web site:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Navigation/Galileo_and_EGNOS

Relativistic corrections needed for satellite navigation system accuracy:

These three satellite navigation systems depend on relativistic corrections to ensure that accurate data are delivered to the end users.  You can find a short article entitled, “Real-World Relativity: The GPS Navigation System,”  at the following link:

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

A Time-lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion From 1945 to 1998

All Posts, Nuclear Arms & Arms Control, ,

Peter Lobner

Here’s a mesmerizing 14+ minute video created by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto with a time-lapse map (single screenshot above) showing all of the nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the “Trinity” test and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in  1998. Close your eyes for a moment and it sounds like you’re in a gambling casino near the digital slot machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY

Rendering Disney’s Animated Movie Big Hero 6

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Peter Lobner

Disney rendered the animated film Big Hero 6 on a 55,000-core supercomputer.

Disney Big Hero 6

Read the story at the following link:  https://www.engadget.com/2014/10/18/disney-big-hero-6/?guccounter=1

The 1984 movie The Last Starfighter, along with Disney’s Tron, has the distinction of being one of cinema’s earliest films to use extensive computer generated imagery (CGI) to depict its many starships, environments and battle scenes.  A total of 27 minutes of The Last Starfighter were rendered on a Cray X-MP, which was a 4-core machine with a total computing performance of 0.8 GFLOPS/sec (GFLOP/sec = billion floating point operations per second).  
 
In comparison, Big Hero 6 used a modern 55,000 core supercomputer.  To estimate it’s computing performance, I scaled the known 2012 performance of the 75,000 core IBM Yellowstone supercomputer to get an estimate of 1.2 PFLOP/second (PFLOP/sec = million billion floating point operations per second). So the supercomputer used by Disney in 2014 to render Big Hero 6 has 1.5 million times the computing performance of the Cray X-MP used in 1984 to render The Last Starfighter.  
 
That’s pretty good progress in 30 years, and pretty consistent with what you would expect using Moore’s Law (basically, computing power of new computers doubles about every two years) over that period.

35 Years Since the Introduction of Personal Computers With Word Processing and Spreadsheet Apps

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Peter Lobner

It’s hard to remember how we did our jobs before the introduction of the personal computer and several “killer apps” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It’s now 35 years since the introduction of personal computers with word processing and spreadsheet functionality; and that was just the beginning.

In June 1979, MicroPro International began selling its CP/M word processing product, WordStar. Its competitors at the time were proprietary word processing systems from IBM, Xerox and Wang Laboratories. WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer WYSIWYG functionality.

wordstar1

On 17 Oct 1979, VisiCalc was released for the Apple II, marking the birth of the spreadsheet for personal computers. In the past 35 years, the spreadsheet has become the now-ubiquitous tool used to compile everything from grocery lists to Fortune 500 company accounts. VisiCalc is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool, and is considered the Apple II’s killer app.

Visicalc

Other “killer apps” that changed our lives since personal computers became an indispensible office fixture are briefly described on the website: “Peter Coffees 25 Killer Apps of All Time”. Check it out at the following link:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Peter-Coffees-25-Killer-Apps-of-All-Time/1

How does your “top 25” list compare?