The Man Who Rode the Thunder, William H. Rankin (Prentice-Hall, 1960). Like many little boys, I loved learning lists of things. One day it was clouds. How could I not love them? The names were fluffy and Latinate, delicate little words like “cumulus” and “cirrus” that sounded like they might float away on a puff of wind. But there was also a structure to the words, intimations and hints of taxonomy. Was the relationship of an
Actually, these Chinese researchers caught ball lightning on camera, and a spectrogram camera no less, and wrote a paper about the potential origins based on its composition. Something about dirt, as I remember. Here is the paper: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.035001
When German glider pilots, who’d got used to flying ridge lift in the 1920s and 30s, discovered thermals, they got very over excited. Until about 12 of them got sucked up into a huge cunim and all anyone saw of them after that were bits o glider falling out of the clouds. That said, as a glider pilot, you can get very high, very fast, if you’re prepared to give it a go 😂
A New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple is also very interesting about electromagnetism generally and specifically ball lightning. It’s mainly about plasmas
My Dad was a guy like Rankin, served in some of the same wars as him, and trust me, guys like that were indeed capable of irony and reflection - it just wasn't done in those days to showcase it, especially in a book. Tough survivors were respected in those days, not victims, and, as you pointed out, it is indeed true that men, and women, were tougher back then. Interestingly enough, Rankin lived on until 2009 - I would REALLY liked to hear his opinion on some of the things he saw happen in the US in his lifetime...
Small nit, I believe " The human body in free-fall will rapidly accelerate to a terminal velocity of over 10,000 feet/second" should be 10,000 feet/minute. Otherwise Ranking would have completed his journey in < 5 seconds. Plus google tells me terminal velocity is 180 ft/s which maps nicely to 10,000 ft/min as 180 * 60 = 10,800.
You don't need to go through war to have a resilient reaction to near-death events like, uh, getting stuck in the upper atmosphere. George A. Bonanno observed in "The End of Trauma" that after 9/11, the federal government flooded with New York City with psychiatrists, assuming that a huge wave of PTSD was about to inundate the health care system. But it was completely unnecessary; the trauma response to the towers collapsing seems to have been a slim minority. Meanwhile, a lot of people who actually were "hardened" by war in both world wars, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq came back much worse for it.
I did enjoy your excerpt of Rankin's unashamed giddiness at piloting warplanes in Korea. I often think about Captain Sullenberger, who waxes nostalgic in his memoir about the sense of responsibility, duty, and joie de vivre he observed in the previous generation of pilots, and who seems to have treated it as an inheritance. It seems to me that the 737 MAX designers had that inheritance robbed from them.
Actually, these Chinese researchers caught ball lightning on camera, and a spectrogram camera no less, and wrote a paper about the potential origins based on its composition. Something about dirt, as I remember. Here is the paper: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.035001
When German glider pilots, who’d got used to flying ridge lift in the 1920s and 30s, discovered thermals, they got very over excited. Until about 12 of them got sucked up into a huge cunim and all anyone saw of them after that were bits o glider falling out of the clouds. That said, as a glider pilot, you can get very high, very fast, if you’re prepared to give it a go 😂
A New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple is also very interesting about electromagnetism generally and specifically ball lightning. It’s mainly about plasmas
My Dad was a guy like Rankin, served in some of the same wars as him, and trust me, guys like that were indeed capable of irony and reflection - it just wasn't done in those days to showcase it, especially in a book. Tough survivors were respected in those days, not victims, and, as you pointed out, it is indeed true that men, and women, were tougher back then. Interestingly enough, Rankin lived on until 2009 - I would REALLY liked to hear his opinion on some of the things he saw happen in the US in his lifetime...
Yes, but how did the poor man finally get out of the storm and reach the ground?
Also, PTSD may not have been named yet, but it definitely existed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-elmAeX_4U
Great read.
Small nit, I believe " The human body in free-fall will rapidly accelerate to a terminal velocity of over 10,000 feet/second" should be 10,000 feet/minute. Otherwise Ranking would have completed his journey in < 5 seconds. Plus google tells me terminal velocity is 180 ft/s which maps nicely to 10,000 ft/min as 180 * 60 = 10,800.
I love thunder and lightning 😊
You don't need to go through war to have a resilient reaction to near-death events like, uh, getting stuck in the upper atmosphere. George A. Bonanno observed in "The End of Trauma" that after 9/11, the federal government flooded with New York City with psychiatrists, assuming that a huge wave of PTSD was about to inundate the health care system. But it was completely unnecessary; the trauma response to the towers collapsing seems to have been a slim minority. Meanwhile, a lot of people who actually were "hardened" by war in both world wars, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq came back much worse for it.
I did enjoy your excerpt of Rankin's unashamed giddiness at piloting warplanes in Korea. I often think about Captain Sullenberger, who waxes nostalgic in his memoir about the sense of responsibility, duty, and joie de vivre he observed in the previous generation of pilots, and who seems to have treated it as an inheritance. It seems to me that the 737 MAX designers had that inheritance robbed from them.