Telstar Logistics

A Moondance, As Seen from Saturn

Image by NASA

What the world needs now is more pictures from outer space. Or, at least, WE sure do!

Today's fix comes from Astronomy Picture of the Day, which brings this stunning photo taken from the Cassini satellite that's currently spinning comfortably around Saturn. APOD explains:

What's that behind Titan? It's another of Saturn's moons: Tethys. The robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn captured the heavily cratered Tethys slipping behind Saturn's atmosphere-shrouded Titan late last year. The largest crater on Tethys, Odysseus, is easily visible on the distant moon. Titan shows not only its thick and opaque orange lower atmosphere, but also an unusual upper layer of blue-tinted haze. Tethys, at about 2 million kilometers distant, was twice as far from Cassini as was Titan when the above image was taken. In 2004, Cassini released the Hyugens probe which landed on Titan and provided humanity's first viewssurface of the Solar System's only known lake-bearing moon.

California High-Speed Rail Now $2.3 Billion Closer

Image: California HSR

Our transportation-obsessed colleagues at the superb Transbay Blog bring encouraging news about California's effort to build a high-speed rail network that will stretch from San Diego to San Francisco. Transbay lets the champagne corks fly:

After almost a year of anticipation throughout the United States, the recipients of the discretionary high-speed rail stimulus grants have finally been announced, to time with President Obama’s State of the Union address.  California has been especially excited by the opportunity to obtain much-needed federal money to add to the portfolio of funds that will be used to build California’s high-speed rail project.  California was in fact so eager that the State applied for $4.7 billion (PDF), over half of the nation’s total allocation.  We were actually awarded $2.344 billion, or about half of the amounted requested in the application.  Of that, most ($2.25 billion) is set aside for high-speed rail, with a small remainder ($99 million) for other conventional rail improvements.  It is indeed a respectable sum of money — intended to give a tangible boost to California’s startup corridor, which could become the test case for American high-speed rail. [...]

California’s piece of the stimulus pie, meanwhile, includes the $2.25 billion to be used to complete various projects along four high-speed segments (San Francisco-San Jose, Merced-Fresno, Fresno-Bakersfield, and Los Angeles-Anaheim), including environmental review, engineering, stations, track, signaling, and right-of-way acquisition. 

These new funds, along with the $10 billion bond allocation already approved by California voters, means that the state's high-speed rail initiative is *ahem* really beginning to gain momentum. Hooray for that.

Let's visualize a high-speed, palm-lined future, shall we?

LINKS:

California High-Speed Rail (Official website)

Two Motorcycles, Two Sides of the Law

 

Photos by Telstar Logistics

Telstar Logistics spotted these two motorcyclists within a few days of each other on the streets of San Francisco. They never met, never got close to each other, and never said hello. But if they did, it's interesting to imagine the conversation they might have.

Planespotter: An Aviation Mystery in Hanoi

Photo by Reid Yalom

Earlier this week, shutterbug Reid Yalom contacted Telstar Logistics to seek help identifying an unusual aircraft he photographed (shown above) during a recent trip to Hanoi, Vietnam.

Frankly, we were stumped. Yet several things about the aircraft's configuration seemed noteworthy: A single, nose-mounted engine, the biplane wing, and a large passenger cabin. Yalom suspected the plane might be French. "No idea," we replied, adding that "it might be Russian or Chinese."

Turns out, we were in the ballpark. Telstar Logistics Senior Taxonomist Fred Sharples quickly came though with information about the aircraft, positively identifying it as a Russian-designed Antonov AN-2.

Photo from Wikipedia Commons

Intended for use as an agricultural and forestry transport, the AN-2 was first flown in 1947. Tens of thousands of AN-2s were built before assembly lines shut down in 1991 -- a long production run exceeded only by the Lockheed C-130 Hercules.

We found this informative ode to the AN-2 at thingummybob.com:

Used as a troop carrier, paratrooper-dropper-offer, transport, passenger airliner, air ambulance, surveyor, spotter, agricultural sprayer/duster, the list goes on...The Vietnamese even tried (without much success) to use in the war, armed to the teeth, but I think it’s so large and flew so slowly that you could probably down it with a few well-aimed rocks thrown at the engine!

But what an ugly beauty! Stall speed is not mentioned anywhere, in fact you can put it down safely even without the engine at a very sedately 25 knots, with all the flaps and ailerons (yes, you can extend the ailerons as added flaps!!!) down, on both upper and lower wings, of course (the leading-edge slats are automatic...)!

Massive power, fantastic sound (er noise!), flies on its own in a straight line (but requires some ‘extra’ effort for anything other than a shallow turn) and aerodynamically as efficient as a brick shit-house underwater, you just have to love it! It will get you and all your kit into or out of anywhere on land or sea (yes, there is a floatplane and , of course, ski version) in any temperature with no bother (below 15,000 feet), no runway and no hurry. Seats up to twelve people in the passenger configuration, they even made them in a luxury VIP version. ‘Nuff said.

 

Photos from Wikipedia Commons

USNS Mercy to Leave San Francisco, Hurry to Haiti?

Photos by Telstar Logistics, 2005

As we write to you now, the USNS Mercy, a US military hospital ship, is resting comfortably at the San Francisco Shipyard, awaiting a routine overhaul. Mercy's sister ship, the USNS Comfort, was recently deployed to Haiti to assist the earthquake relief effort, and if local scuttlebutt proves accurate, Mercy's overhaul has been postponed so she can head to Haiti as well.

As reported by our friends at gCaptain:

After reading this blog post calling for the USNS Mercy to be activated and deployed to Haiti, I found some interesting tidbits here on a San Francisco bloggers page:  Work on the USNS Mercy, scheduled for drydock work in San Francisco, may have been cancelled and the workers at the drydock laid off.  A possible deployment to Haiti was cited as the reason.  The USNS MERCY was in drydock in Mission Bay area of San Francisco but the workers were told they were laid off until further notice.

Trying to find more than just a blog post to confirm.

We'll keep you posted as well.

UPDATE 28 January, 2010

Our strategic associates at SF Citizen placed a call to Military Sealift Command to get some official word on Mercy's status. Here's the scoop:

Ms. Seal [srsly] of the Military Sealift Command’s Public Affairs Unit in Washington, D.C., is that the Navy is “weighing its options” on what to do next. Which means that the Mercy be staying in San Francisco getting fixed up for a little longer anyway.

The original schedule had the Mercy’s routine maintenance work getting done by March 2, 2010, but what will actually happen is up in the air.

So, what this seems to mean is that Mercy is neither getting an overhaul nor headed to Haiti right away. In other words: The worst of both alternatives?

John Travolta Flies Relief to Haiti on His Boeing 707

Actor John Travolta flew his private Boeing 707 to Haiti this week to deliver six tons of food and medical supplies. His aircraft also carried doctors and a group of Scientologist missionaries.

We wonder: Did he depart from his stylish and convenient private airport home?

On Air Freight and Old IBM Hard Disk Drives

This photo has been floating around the Interwebs for a few years, but it's new to us, so perhaps it's new to you as well. Since the image involves both an old Pan American Airways plane and a big piece of hardware, it piqued our curiosity.

As the much-forwarded email we received yesterday asked, "Can you guess what they are loading into the aircraft?"

The answer:

It's a hard disk drive back in 1956... with 5 MB of storage.

In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first 'SUPER' computer with a hard disk drive (HDD).  The HDD weighed over a ton and stored a 'whopping' 5 MB of data.

Do you appreciate your 8 GB memory stick now?

Now, Telstar Logistics has been around the Internet for many moons, so at first we were reluctant to take this story at face value. That's why we fired up our Google terminal, and dove into the case. Much to our pleasant surprise, it seems the tale is true. According to Hoax Slayer:

The photograph is genuine, and the information in the message is factual. Another photograph of one of the disk storage units can be viewed on IBM's archives website, along with the following caption:

The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit was rolled out in 1956 to be used with the IBM 305 RAMAC to provide storage capacities of five, 10, 15 or 20 million characters. It was configured with 50 magnetic disks containing 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100 alphanumeric characters.

Here's a closeup of the 350 Disk Storage Unit:

 

The Wikipedia provides some additional verification...

The IBM 350 was part of the IBM RAMAC 305, the computer that introduced disk storage technology to the world. IBM publicly announced the IBM 350 storage unit as a component of the RAMAC 305 and RAM 650 computer systems on September 13, 1956.RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control."

Its design was motivated by the need for real time accounting in business. The 350 stored 5 million 7-bit (6-bits plus 1 odd parity bit) characters (about 4.4 megabyte). It had fifty 24-inch (610 mm) diameter disks with 100 recording surfaces. Each surface had 100 tracks. The disks spun at 1200 RPM. Data transfer rate was 8,800 characters per second. Two independent access arms moved up and down to select a disk and in and out to select a recording track, all under servo control. A third arm was added as an option. Several improved models were added in the 1950s. The IBM RAMAC 305 system with 350 disk storage leased for $3,200 per month. [...]

Currie Munce, research vice president for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (which has acquired IBM's storage business), stated in a Wall Street Journal interview^[6] that the RAMAC unit weighed over a ton, had to be moved around with forklifts, and was delivered via large cargo airplanes. According to Munce, the storage capacity of the drive could have been increased beyond five megabytes, but IBM's marketing department at that time was against a larger capacity drive, because they didn't know how to sell a product with more storage.

All of which is to say... yes, you really should think of this photo next time you stick a USB flash drive into your pocket!

RIP: Bob Noorda, Subway Modernist, Helvetica Evangelist

Images: Noorda Design Studio

'Tis a sad day for fans of Helvetica.

Sunday's New York Times contained a noteworthy obituary about Bob Noorda, the graphic designer who created New York City's Modernist -- and now-iconic -- subway graphic style. The NYT recalls:

Mr. Noorda’s best-known work in the United States was for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which in 1966 commissioned his firm, Unimark International, to modernize and unify the look of the subway system’s signs. The firm had been recommended by Mildred Constantine, an influential design curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

At the time, Mr. Noorda was based in Milan overseeing the firm’s European projects. But the M.T.A. commission lured him to New York, where his design partner Massimo Vignelli had opened a Unimark office.

“I remember when Bob came to New York and spent every day underground in the subway to record the traffic flow in order to determine the points of decision where the signs should be placed,” Mr. Vignelli said in an interview.

The existing signs they encountered were cluttered with various typefaces of different sizes.

“Their system was a mess,” Mr. Noorda was quoted as saying in “Unimark International: The Design of Business and the Business of Design” (Lars Müller), a recently published book by Jan Conradi. “Sometimes pieces of paper taped to the wall were the only indication for the station.

The Times continues:

[Unimark] was among the first international design firms to base their work on the Modernist principle that a good design could have a positive effect on all aspects of life, not just on business. An early proponent of unified branding — the consistent use of distinctive type and imagery to identify a company — Unimark has been credited with awakening the corporate world to Modernist design thinking.

Unimark became identified with the austere Helvetica typeface. “For better or worse,” Ms. Conradi wrote, the firm became “a prime contributor to Helvetica’s ubiquitous appearance in corporate identities around the world.”

Bob Noorda Is Dead at 82; Designer Took Modernism Underground (New York Times)

Telstar Logistics Goes Boldly to a San Francisco Star Trek Convention

Photos by Telstar Logistics

This weekend a Telstar Logistics away team beamed into the Star Trek Convention that's taking place at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco.

Keeping the Prime Directive firmly in mind, we did not interfere with the creatures we saw at the gathering -- although we did enjoy seeing their social rituals and merchandise for sale. Our stay was brief, so we couldn't stick around to have our photo taken with Sir Patrick Stewart. Next time, perhaps, in another space-time continuum.

More photos from our visit here.