FYI September 29, 2019

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On This Day

61 BC – Pompey the Great celebrates his third triumph for victories over the pirates and the end of the Mithridatic Wars on his 45th birthday.
The Mithridatic Wars were three conflicts fought by Rome against the Kingdom of Pontus and its allies between 88 BC and 63 BC. They are named after Mithridates VI, the King of Pontus who initiated the hostilities after annexing the Roman province in Asia into its Pontic Empire (that came to include most of Asia Minor) and committing massacres against the local Roman population known as the Asian Vespers. As Roman troops were sent to recover the territory, they faced an uprising in Greece organized and supported by Mithridates. Mithridates was able to mastermind such general revolts against Rome and played the magistrates of the optimates party off against the magistrates of the populares party in the Roman civil wars. Nevertheless, the first war ended with a Roman victory, confirmed by the Treaty of Dardanos signed by Lucius Sulla and Mithridates. Greece was restored to Roman rule and Pontus was expected to restore the status quo ante bellum in Asia Minor.

As the treaty of Dardanos was barely implemented in Asia Minor, the Roman general Murena (in charge of retaking control of Roman territory in Asia) decided to wage a second war against Pontus. The second war resulted in a Roman defeat and gave momentum to Mithridates, who then forged an alliance with Tigranes the Great, the Armenian King of Kings. Tigranes was the son-in-law of Mithridates and was in control of an Armenian empire that included territories in the Levant. Pontus won the Battle of Chalcedon (74 BC), gave support to Cilician pirates against Roman commerce, and the third war soon began.

For the third war, the Romans sent the consul Lucullus to fight against Armenia and Pontus. Lucullus won the Battle of Cabira and the Battle of Tigranocerta but his progress was nullified after the Battle of Artaxata and the Battle of Zela. Meanwhile, the campaign of Pompey against the Cilician pirates in the Mediterranean was successful and Pompey was named by the senate to replace Lucullus. Pompey’s subsequent campaigns caused the collapse of the Armenian Empire in the Levant (with Roman forces taking control of Syria and Palestine) and the affirmation of Roman power over Anatolia, Pontus and nearly all the eastern Mediterranean. Tigranes surrendered and became a client king of Rome. Hunted, stripped of his possessions, and in a foreign country, Mithridates had a servant kill him. His former kingdom was combined with one of his hereditary enemies, Bithynia, to form the province of Bithynia and Pontus, which would forestall any future pretender to the throne of Pontus.

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Born On This Day

1925 – Paul MacCready, American engineer, founded AeroVironment (d. 2007)
Paul B. MacCready Jr. (September 29, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could “Do more with less”.[1]

Early life and education
Born in New Haven, Connecticut to a medical family, MacCready was an inventor from an early age and won a national contest building a model flying machine at the age of 15. “I was always the smallest kid in the class … by a good bit, and was not especially coordinated, and certainly not the athlete type, who enjoyed running around outside, and was socially kind of immature, not the comfortable leader, teenager type. And so, when I began getting into model airplanes, and getting into contests and creating new things, I probably got more psychological benefit from that than I would have from some of the other typical school things.”[2]

MacCready graduated from Hopkins School in 1943 and then trained as a US Navy pilot before the end of World War II. He received a BS in physics from Yale University in 1947, an MS in physics from Caltech in 1948, and a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech in 1952.[3] In 1951, MacCready founded his first company, Meteorology Research Inc, to do atmospheric research. Some of MacCready’s work as a graduate student involved cloud seeding, and he was an early pioneer of the use of aircraft to study meteorological phenomena.[2]

Career and Achievements
He started gliding after World War II and was a three-time winner (1948, 1949, 1953) of the Richard C. du Pont Memorial Trophy,[4] awarded annually to the U.S. National Open Class Soaring Champion. In 1956, he became the first American pilot to become the World Soaring Champion. He invented a device that told pilots the best speed to fly a glider, depending on conditions and based on the glider’s rate of sink at different air-speeds. Glider pilots still use the “MacCready speed ring”.[5]

In the 1970s, he guaranteed a business loan for a friend, which subsequently failed, leaving him with a $100,000 debt. This was the motivation he needed to compete for the £50,000 Kremer prize for human-powered flight, which had been on offer for 18 years. With Dr. Peter B.S. Lissaman, he created a human-powered aircraft, the Gossamer Condor. The Condor stayed aloft for seven minutes while it completed the required figure eight course, thereby winning the first Kremer prize in 1977. The award-winning plane was constructed of aluminium tubing, plastic foam, piano wire, bicycle parts, and mylar foil for covering.[6]

Kremer then offered another £100,000 for the first human-powered crossing of the English Channel. MacCready took up the challenge and in 1979, he built the Condor’s successor, the Gossamer Albatross, and won the second Kremer prize, successfully flying from England to France.[7] He also received the Collier Trophy, which is awarded annually for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics, for his design and construction of the Albatross.[2]

He later created solar-powered aircraft such as the Gossamer Penguin and the Solar Challenger.[8] He was involved in the development of NASA’s solar-powered flying wings such as the Helios, which surpassed the SR-71’s altitude records and could theoretically fly on Mars (where the atmosphere is thin and has little oxygen).[9] MacCready also collaborated with General Motors on the design of the Sunraycer, a solar-powered car, and then on the EV-1 electric car.[8]

In 1985, he was commissioned to build a halfscale[10] working replica of the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus for the Smithsonian Institution, following a workshop in 1984, which concluded that such a replica was feasible.[11] The completed remote-controlled flying reptile, with a wingspan of 18 feet,[12] was filmed over Death Valley, California in 1986 for the Smithsonian’s IMAX film On the Wing.[13][14] It flew successfully several times before being severely damaged in a crash at an airshow at Andrews AFB in Maryland.[12] The launch of the pterosaur model came off well but the radio transmitter link failed, perhaps due to the interference from some of the many base communications devices. The model nosed over and crashed at the runway side, breaking at the neck from the force of impact.[15]

MacCready helped to sponsor the Nissan Dempsey/MacCready Prize which has helped to motivate developments in racing-bicycle technology, applying aerodynamics and new materials to allow for faster human-powered vehicles.[16]

He was the founder (in 1971) and Chairman of AeroVironment Inc., a public company (AVAV) that develops unmanned surveillance aircraft and advance power systems. AV recently flew a prototype of the first airplane to be powered by hydrogen fuel cells, the Global Observer.[17]

MacCready died on August 28, 2007 from metastatic melanoma. He was an atheist and a skeptic.[18] He was survived by his wife Judy, his three sons Parker, Tyler and Marshall and two grandchildren.[19]

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FYI

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Gizmodo Science: Doctors Say a Washing Machine Helped Spread a Superbug at a Maternity Ward; Cool NASA Concept Envisions a Shapeshifting Robot to Explore Saturn’s Moon Titan; Scientists Find Three-Sex, Arsenic-Resistant Nematode in Nearly Uninhabitable Lake and more ->
 
 
 
 
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Caffeinated Reviewer: Sunday Post #388 Hello Fall
 
 
 
 
Design Luck Community

Hi there,

Thank you for taking the time to join me.

Let’s get into it.

….

Here is the new essay of the week:

The Most Important Skill in the 21st Century – The internet has created a global culture, one which is laid out as a network in which each of our individual selves is a node. This is both good and bad, depending on what we do with it. Some thoughts on why honing our sense-making apparatus is today’s most important skill (Pocket).

Here is another piece that I wrote:

The Problem With Habits and Why Most Fail – Most approaches to habit change are behavior-oriented, neglecting the role of cognition and emotion. Here I argue that if you take care of the values and the mindset, habits are secondary (Pocket).

A quote that I’ve been pondering:

“Having discarded several older partners, the young man had no real business mentors, heroes, or role models and was beholden to no one. John D. Rockefeller was not only self-made but self-invented and already had unyielding faith in his own judgment.” – Ron Chernow

A book that I’ve been enjoying:

The Ethics of Ambiguity – I’ve been thinking more about existentialism recently. This is a short read by Simone de Beauvoir, where she dives into topics of freedom and choice and what it means to be ethical in relation to others in the real world rather than in an absolute sense. I much prefer her version of existentialism over Sartre’s.

An idea that I’ve been playing with:

If you aren’t aware of how status works in different contexts, and how you respond to those contexts, you likely have social anxieties you aren’t aware of. You may not feel anxious, and you may even be socially competent, but these anxieties are likely visible in your behavior, causing you persistent, low-levels of background stress.

An interesting question to think about:

When mentoring or parenting or leading, do you teach or do you show the way?

….

As always, thoughts and criticisms are more than welcome, too. Press reply.

Talk soon,

Zat Rana

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