In 1942 Lord Mountbatten convinced Winston Churchill of the merits of pykrete - a mixture of ice and wood pulp created by the eccentric English boffin Geoffrey Pyke. The notion was to build an enormous aircraft carrier at least 2,000 feet long and 300 feet wide that could provide an airbase in the North Atlantic The problem was that it required an enormous amount of wood and, of course, it would eventually melt.
£5000 was provided for a small test which took place on Patricia Lake in Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. I first encountered it listening to an old timer in a tea house near the lake when I was hiking there years ago...
When your back is against the wall you are willing to try almost anything..
The name is from a book in the old testament and something that puzzles me. I was told that it is from a verse in the book - something this source agrees with.
“Behold ye among the heathen, and regard and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told to you.” Hab. 1:5
But I like something a biblical scholar told me when I asked him for a bit of background ... Habbakkuk was the only prophet who questions god's wisdom when he saw a great unjustice and asked why god wasn't doing anything about it. Somehow I could imagine that squaring with the English sense of humor a bit better.
how congress banned gun research
From the Journal of American Medicine and free -
Silencing the Science on Gun Research
Short and fascinating. I wonder if the President could get around these things with an executive order? Quality information would be useful, but one side is clearly paranoid and fearful.
05:45 in Current Affairs, General Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)