Voices from the Rabbit Hole: Allyn C Vine (1914-1994)

[natecull]

So I've become used to the Townend Brown subject having an unusual psychological effect on me. Not bad, mind you, just unusual. Perhaps it's just that Townsend's complicated and ambiguous life intersects with so much fascinating science and history. But sometimes there seem to be odd side effects that happen when I switch my mind back into the state of thinking about this material. It's almost what Linda Brown used to call "downloads". There's a state of "flow"; things seem to surface out of my subconscious and I'm not always sure how they got in there.

In this case, perhaps it's also that there's a current sad news item about the loss of a tourist submersible around the wreck of the Titanic ( https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464 ) though honestly I have not been paying this story much attention.

In short, I had a dream last night. It was one of those tossing, fragmented dreams, all mixed up imagery and a sense of "working on" something. It seemed to be about submersibles.

As sometimes happens for me, some fragments of spoken words also came through this dream. First it seemed to be the name "Alan". Later, as I surfaced closer to wakefulness, the word turned into "Alvin", which I understood as the famous submersible Alvin DSV-2, commissioned in 1964 and which remains in use today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin

The Alvin is definitely close to Townsend Brown's old stomping ground, the Navy and hints of secret underwater spy missions. But what caught my attention on reading the Wikipedia page is this:

Named to honor the prime mover and creative inspiration for the vehicle, Allyn Vine,

Did I know this? Wikipedia doesn't know much about this man:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allyn_Vine

Allyn C. Vine (1914–1994) was a physicist and oceanographer who was a leader in developing crewed submersible vessels to explore the deep sea.[1]
Projects

* Major contributor to redesigning the bathythermograph during World War II. His version could be used on submarines to detect the ocean thermocline.[2]

* Inspiration for DSV Alvin

The January 8, 1994 New York Times has more info in Vine's obituary:

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/08/obit ... ibles.html

Allyn C. Vine, an oceanographer who was a leader in developing manned submersible vessels to explore the deep sea, died on Tuesday at his home in Woods Hole, Mass. He was 79.

The cause was heart failure, said Shelley Lauzon, a spokeswoman at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Mr. Vine was a physicist, physical oceanographer and senior scientist at the institution for nearly 40 years, until his retirement in 1979. Contributed to War Effort

Because of Mr. Vine's tenacity in pursuing the construction of submersibles, the first American manned research submersible for deep diving was named Alvin, a contraction of his name. When the vessel was christened in June 1964, Mr. Vine was unable to be present because he was three miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean aboard the French submersible Archimede.

His interests extended far beyond submersibles, to deep-sea geology and the way sound travels through water. He was noted for producing new techniques and unusual oceanographic equipment.

During World War II, he made a major contribution to the Navy's submarine forces by redesigning the bathythermograph, an instrument that continuously measures water temperature at various depths from ships and submarines. He made a version that could be used on submarines to find a layer of temperature change in the ocean called a thermocline. This layer deflected sound waves and could be used by submarines to hide from enemy sonars.

In 1972, the Navy said Mr. Vine's contributions had resulted in "the savings of untold numbers of lives and millions of dollars in ships and equipment."

Mr. Vine came away from the war with the idea that submarines were ideal for oceanographic research. When the idea of building a small submersible vessel for oceanographic research was raised in the 1950's, it met with little enthusiasm from researchers. But Mr. Vine persevered with a small group of scientists, and Alvin was built for the Navy.

Since its completion in 1964, the 22-foot-long submarine has achieved a number of triumphs. In 1966, it recovered a hydrogen bomb that had fallen to the floor of the Mediterranean after a B-52 bomber and a tanker plane collided over Spain. In 1977, scientists aboard Alvin found strange life forms thriving in water heated by hot springs off the coast of Ecuador. In 1986, an expedition reached the wreckage of the ocean liner Titanic.

Allyn Collins Vine was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on June 1, 1914. As an adolescent, he raided the local telephone company's junkpiles for gear to build contraptions.

He earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Hiram College, a small liberal arts college in Hiram, Ohio, and a master's degree at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., where his adviser was Dr. W. Maurice Ewing, one of the founders of modern oceanography.

Dr. Ewing took Mr. Vine to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for cruises aboard the Atlantis, the institution's first oceangoing research vessel, during summers in the late 1930's. Mr. Vine joined the oceanographic institution in 1940.

After the war, he retained close ties to the Navy. In 1946, he helped make wave measurements at the atomic bomb test site at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. From 1947 to 1950, he worked on alternate weeks at the Sonar Division of the Navy Bureau of Ships, mainly on long-range sound transmission and efforts to improve oceanographic equipment.

He was the author or co-author of 30 scientific publications and 10 technical reports and held 6 patents on oceanographic devices. He received a number of awards, including the Blakely Smith Medal for outstanding accomplishments in ocean engineering from the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.

In addition to his wife, Adelaide, whom he married in 1940, he is survived by two sons, Norman, of Woods Hole, and David, of Chattanooga, Tenn.; a daughter, Vivian Dreisbach of Woods Hole; two brothers, Everett, of Garrettsville, Ohio, and Victor, of Sequin, Tex., and two grandchildren.

The US Navy is a large place so there is probably no direct link between Allyn Collins Vine and Thomas Townsend Brown. (There could be - he would have been only nine years younger than Townsend - but I have no data to indicate that they ever met.) That's why I'm filing this as "Voices from the Rabbit Hole" because that's literally what it is. A spoken word in a dream that led me to the biography of another remarkable man about which little seems to be spoken in public. And who probably deserves to be known more widely.

Regards, Nate

[natecull]

Allyn Vine got involved with "space elevator" discussions in 1966. I guess that's that Navy space connection again.

https://spaceref.com/newspace-and-tech/ ... -c-clarke/

The Space Elevator: ‘Thought Experiment’, or Key to the Universe?
By Marc Boucher
April 8, 2013

I had the privilege of first meeting Sir Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka in 1998. We talked on variety of topics including Mars, a focus of mine at the time, and the Space Elevator. On our first meeting I was delighted that he shared articles, papers etc. with me which I took home with me. The following paper was first published in 1981 in Advances in Earth Oriented Applied Space Technologies. It is reprinted here with Sir Arthur’s kind permission. You can never dream too big.

By Sir Arthur C. Clarke

...

Abstract — The space elevator (alias Sky Hook, Heavenly Ladder, Orbital Tower, or Cosmic Funicular) is a structure linking a point on the equator to a satellite in the geostationary orbit directly above it. By providing a ‘vertical railroad’ it would permit orders-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of space operations.

...

The concept was first developed in detail by a Leningrad engineer, Yuri Artsutanov, in 1960 and later by several American engineers quite unaware of Artsutanov’s work. All studies indicate that the idea, outrageous though it appears at first sight, is theoretically feasible and that its practical realisation could follow from the mass-production of high-strength materials now known as laboratory curiosities.

...

That it might be useful to hang a long cable from a satellite must have occurred to a great many people. I myself toyed with the idea in 1963 while preparing an essay on comstats for UNESCO, published next year in Astronautics [3].

...

In the West, the group that got there first consisted of John Isaacs, Allyn Vine, Hugh Bradner and George Bachus, from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that oceanographers should get involved in such a scheme, since they are about the only people who concern themselves with very long hanging cables. Very long, that is, by ordinary standards; but in their 1966 letter to Science [5] Isaacs et al. discussed a cable over three thousand times longer than one to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, a mere 11 km down.

...

[5] John D. Isaacs, Allyn C. Vine, Hugh Bradner and George E. Bachus, Satellite elongation into a true “Sky-Hook”, Science 151, 682-683 (1966).

And Vine was side by side with the rocket men for the International Geophysical Year. As you might imagine, given how much the US space program relied on ocean retrieval. The American Rocket Society News for September, 1956 advertises the "11th Annual Instrument-Automation Conference and Exhibit", September 17-18 1956 in New York,"in cooperation with the American Rocket Society". Allyn C Vine represents Woods Hole, next to speakers for the Air Force Cambridge Research Center, the US Weather Bureau, National Bureau of Standards, the Upper Air Research Observatory, Naval Research Laboratory and corporates such as General Electric, Douglas, Lockheed, Glenn Martin, American Aviation, and the extremely On Brand For The Nineteen-Fifties "Radiation, Inc".

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/8. ... alCode=jjp

Regards, Nate

[natecull]

Woods Hole sounds like it was a fun place to work in the 1930s.

https://pubs.aip.org/asa/poma/article/2 ... Woods-Hole

May 18 2015
Underwater acoustics research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 1930-1960
Special Collection: The 169th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 18-22 May 2015
Underwater Acoustics: Historical Perspectives on the Origins of Underwater Acoustics I, II, and III
James F. Lynch; Arthur E. Newhall; Robert A. Frosch

WHOI’s story begins with two visionaries: Henry Bryant Bigelow (Fig. 1), who became WHOI’s first director, and Frank R. Lillie, who was president of the Marine Biological Laboratory (WHOI’s older neighbor in Woods Hole village) and the true “founding father” of WHOI.

(Hmm. Is Henry any relation to Robert Bigelow, or is that just a coincidence?)

WHOI’s first full year of research was 1932, with a staff of sixteen research assistants and numerous visiting summer investigators arriving from all over the world. But aside from a newfangled “sonic sounding machine” (fathometer) aboard the R/V Atlantis [1], the research fare didn’t have much to do with acoustics. Biology, geology, geophysics, physical oceanography and marine chemistry were the main topics of interest. But that was about to change drastically and soon, thanks to a young, ambitious Lehigh University professor named Maurice Ewing

Maurice Ewing (Fig. 3), known universally as “Doc” Ewing, was from a large, Texas farming family, a background which made him both hardworking and resourceful. Being an extremely bright youth from Texas, it seemed only natural that he would attend one of Texas’ elite schools, Rice University in Houston, where he received his BS, MS and PhD degrees in geophysics. He also worked a number of part time jobs there, including (no surprise) in the Houston “oil patch.” His academic career as an independent young scientist started at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania as a Physics professor. There he continued his interest in geophysics, to which he added his own twist – the use of explosive sources in water (or even in ice) above the solid earth. To pursue this new direction, Ewing enlisted students from Lehigh (most notably Allyn Vine and Joe Worzel) to spend their weekends blowing up lakes, quarries, ponds and marshes in nearby New Jersey, and developing novel, home grown source and receiver equipment.

Now that's what I call science! Cave Johnson from the videogame "Portal 2" would definitely approve.

From 1935-40, Ewing’s troupe worked the East Coast doing seismics, with summer R/V Atlantis trips being their primary at-sea opportunity. It would not be amiss to say that Ewing and his students added a huge infusion of energy to Woods Hole, with a 24/7/365 work ethic, an unflappable “can-do” attitude, and a disregard for personal comfort and danger that would probably be considered crazy nowadays. Ewing (in his car, “Floosey Belle”, Fig. 4) and his students tracked back and forth routinely from Lehigh to WHOI to test gear and grab data at sea. Cars loaded with dynamite and delicate gear would careen down hills without brakes, outrun hurricanes, and (more often than not) teach Car Repair 101 to the students.

Perhaps the most entertaining description of the adventures of Doc Ewing and his students is the candid account of his life that Joe Worzel wrote for later WHOI Director Robert Gagosian [2]. This account has wonderful historical detail, but also some very funny and human personal stories about what life was like in the pre-war and WWII era as a student under Ewing. Worzel was recruited after selling a camera to graduate student Allyn Vine (Fig. 4) and Professor Ewing, and then cutting a class in 1936 to go with them on a “fun jaunt” to NJ to shoot some seismic lines. As Worzel later put it, “this minor decision settled the rest of my professional career” [2].

1940 was also a significant year for his Ewing’s two prize students, Worzel and Vine. In that year, Worzel was accepted as a Lehigh grad student, and Vine was finishing up his PhD work. Both would be significantly assigned into the war efforts. Most notably for Vine during the war, he and Ewing worked on Bathythermograph (BT) improvements for the Navy. The improved device was given to Navy submariners, prompting one skipper to write back to WHOI “God Bless Allyn Vine” [1].

Nate

[natecull]

Oh wait here's something interesting! And a much more direct Townsend Brown link, though still tangential:

Maurice Ewing was on the Gravity Cruise. And Allyn C Vine became his student because of that cruise.

https://www.lehigh.edu/~inspc/Lehigh_Hi ... istory.pdf

In November, 1934, Ewing was visited by Richard Field and William Bowie. Field was a professor of geology at Princeton with an interest in the oceans (and a later recipient of the Bowie medal). Recognizing that submarine geology presented a rich opportunity for research, Field initiated the formation of and chaired a committee of the AGU on the Geophysical and Geological Study of Oceanic Basins. Bowie and Heck were members of the committee, and Heck wrote an appendix to its report.[14]

As we all know, the Bowie Medal can only be earned by reporting a Space Oddity.

Field and Bowie asked if explosion seismology could be used at sea.[15] Ewing said yes, if he had the equipment and ships. The Survey owned a
steamer Oceanographer (formerly J.P. Morgan's yacht Corsair) which was in use off the Atlantic coast. It was arranged that Ewing spend two weeks,
beginning June 17, 1935, on Oceanographer. The party on board included Crary, Heck ("whose broad experience in scientific work at sea enabled him to give much valuable advice and assistance") and H.M. Rutherford from the University of Pittsburgh. Financial help was provided by the Geological
Society of America and equipment was donated by the Geophysical Research Corporation.

The voyage on Oceanographer made the need apparent for a vessel more adaptable to Ewing's requirements. Accordingly Field convinced the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to put their vessel Atlantis at Ewing's disposal for a two- week period in October, 1935. The scientific crew consisted of Ewing, Crary and Rutherford. Refraction surveys were made along a line extending south 90 miles from Woods Hole and one extending out 150 miles from Virginia.

Ewing's next cruise after that on Atlantis was in the submarine USS Barracuda, measuring the acceleration of gravity in the Puerto Rico trench by means of the Vening Meinesz pendulum. The submarine cruise started in the Canal Zone on November 30, 1936, and ended in Philadelphia on January 14, 1937. The acceleration of gravity was measured at 51 sea stations and in nine harbors.[18] In addition to the Navy, institutions providing support were the American Philosophical Society, the Coast and Geodetic Survey and the AGU, while Bell Telephone Laboratories designed and constructed a crystal chronometer used in timing the pendulum.

Ewing took a leave of absence for the fall semester, 1936, to enable his submarine cruise. Two graduate assistants, Allyn C. Vine (M.S., 1940) and Norman H. Webster, both from Hiram College, were hired as partial replacement for Ewing. Increasing enrollment justified their continued support, and they subsequently became students of Ewing's.

In the spring of 1937, Ewing obtained a grant of $3000 (which was continued for four years) from the AGS to carry out refraction measurements across New Jersey from Princeton to Barnegat Bay, similar to the work he had done in 1935 in Virginia. In this work he had the assistance of Vine, George P. Woollard, Meredith Johnson and J. Lamar Worzel (B.S., 1940).[19]

Bullard[20] quotes Woollard on life with the hard-working Ewing: "It was a tight little group, and although we worked most nights on instruments or data analysis, and spent most weekends in the field, one night a week was devoted to relaxation. We'd start with spareribs and beer in a cheap little German restaurant, migrate up to the University rifle range for a couple of hours' shooting, and then end up at either Ewing's house or my apartment for more beer, music, and discussions...followed by scrambled eggs and coffee in the wee hours before calling it a night." Life was also strenuous financially; to cope with his shortage of funds, Vine lived one semester in his lab, taking showers in the gym.[21] (He was not the last graduate student to make quarters in the physics building.)

In 1938 Ewing obtained a Guggenheim Fellowship, which was extended for another year. He took a leave from Lehigh, splitting his time between Woods Hole and Lehigh. It became clear that he could be useful to the Navy during the looming war and Woods Hole would be his natural location. After a cruise on Atlantis in September, 1940 to make additional seismic refraction measurements, he moved to Woods Hole with Vine and Worzel. He had been promoted to Associate Professor of Geophysics in April effective for the fall semester but never actively held the title. The Director of Woods Hole, Columbus Iselin, said of Ewing "He had a profound effect on the success of this laboratory. He arrived here first as a very young professor...He brought with him several Lehigh students and the place has never been the same since. They literally worked night and day, and seven days a week."[27] After the war Ewing joined the geology department at Columbia University and in 1949 he established the Lamont (now Lamont- Doherty) Geological Observatory. For his many later accomplishments the reader is referred to his biographies.

In 1943 Ewing and Worzel showed that sound could be transmitted over long distances through a layer they called the SOFAR (sound fixing and ranging)
channel and this was quickly applied to anti-submarine warfare.[28] Following the war Worzel went to Columbia where he obtained his Ph.D. and became Associate Director of Lamont-Doherty. The first research contract awarded by the Office of Naval Research was to Ewing and Worzel in 1946 for continuation of work on SOFAR. Worzel made other important contributions to underwater sound, underwater photography, and gravity meaurements at sea.

Nate

[natecull]

SOFAR was developed into SOSUS, the classified Sound Surveillance System, and I feel like this figured in some of the stories that either Morgan or Linda told us? And since Townsend would have met Ewing on the Gravity Cruise, I can see how he could have been adjacent to some of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS

The Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) was a submarine detection system based on passive sonar developed by the United States Navy to track Soviet submarines. The system's true nature was classified with the name and acronym SOSUS themselves classified. The unclassified name Project Caesar was used to cover the installation of the system and a cover story developed regarding the shore stations, identified only as a Naval Facility (NAVFAC), being for oceanographic research. In 1985, as the fixed bottom arrays were supplemented by the mobile Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS) and other new systems were coming on line, the name itself changed to Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS). The commands and personnel were covered by the "oceanographic" term until 1991 when the mission was declassified. As a result, the commands, Oceanographic System Atlantic and Oceanographic System Pacific became Undersea Surveillance Atlantic and Undersea Surveillance Pacific, and personnel were able to wear insignia reflecting the mission.

What crosses my mind given the current cycle of US governmental interest in investigating/declassifying "transmedia UAP" reports, is that SOSUS - or its successors - would probably be one of those frontline military surveillance systems, like radar and satellites, that would occasionally detect Unidentified Submerged Objects. That wasn't its main purpose, of course: fighting a nuclear war was. But if there were UAP detections that weren't just fish or whales, they would have been super highly classified, and so that would add to the whole thorny social problem of UAP detection mechanisms being classified (lending credence to the idea of a conspiracy) even if the subject itself wasn't of official interest.

SOSUS or its successors would also be the perfect domain for the Speaker/Microphone aspect of the Fan to finally find its place in... well, not the sun. But somewhere where it could be of use. I was struggling to understand how something as large as the cinema-sized Speaker at Decker could be used on a submarine, but of course SOSUS elements wouldn't be, they were at fixed locations and so they could be as large as they needed to be.

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

Interesting finds, Nate. Thank you. Woods Hole is one of those out of the way, oft overlooked places where interesting research is done, often with funding from odd or unlikely agencies, such as the Department of Agriculture. As you pointed out earlier, in a different message, many of these off shoot projects never come into the view of historical researchers who limit their scope to work funded directly by the Dod or DoE.

This Solstice period seems to have been accompanied by a great deal of activity in the dream world. I have had some doozies lately. In the most fun one, my DIL had learned how to teleport a person from one place to the next and was going to demonstrate it for us. Sure enough the target fellow disappeared from our view, but in the very next moment, i heard "knock-knock-knock" from inside the wall next me. I woke up LOLing.

In a less fun, but rather sweeter one, I observed the FBI removing boxes of explosives from a white bungalow with a front porch, typical of older houses in the south. In the dream, I knew it to be one of Matt Gaet's rental properties, Somehow this dream ended with Townsend holding my hand and asking if I have faith. I attributed that mishmash to a blend of my immersion in Browniana and in the US political scene.

Had I heard Alvin, I would have thought it was an English-ized pronunciation of Alfven and, likewise, attributed it to my recent readings.

Ewing's next cruise after that on Atlantis was in the submarine USS Barracuda, measuring the acceleration of gravity in the Puerto Rico trench by means of the Vening Meinesz pendulum. The submarine cruise started in the Canal Zone on November 30, 1936, and ended in Philadelphia on January 14, 1937.

This was later the 1932 expedition, and the results certainly would have been followed by Townsend. Given his lifelong persistence in tracking sidereal radiation effects on earth, at the very least, he would have had a personal interest in looking for measurement correlations.

Worzel made other important contributions to underwater sound, underwater photography, and gravity measurements at sea.

This guy would have been on the radar of Fen Cooper and Ed Hull as well as Meinesz and Townsend.

One topic that was of particular interest to Meinesz was that of microseisms. These are often only detectable through low frequency changes to the 'global hum', aka Schumann Resonance, but the subject was deemed important enough to the Air Force and the Navy in 1952, that they jointly sponsored the first international symposium on Microseisms. 'Fifty-two is notable for being the year that AF realized that gravity isn't a universal constant, hired Meinescz to advise them on how to handle that problem, and asked the Navy for a report on the "civilian" scientist, Townsend Brown.

To add another muddy burrow to the TTB rabbit warren, I have seen, among the family photographs, a photo of an instrument that appears to be a seismograph, located somewhere on the shore of the Gulf Coast, taken in the early war years. Given that I could see the word Garland on the instrument. and knowing Townsend's WWII Navy travel included a trip to Garland, Texas, I looked for a seismograph manufacturer there and found the Geotechical Corporation,* so that would seem to be a clear connection.

Here's a muddier connection: The Varo corporation would be formed as a Limited Liability Corporation in Garland in 1946. As an LLC, they do not have to answer to stockholders, nor file public accounting reports, and all profits accrue to the members. Though the company has a history of doing some very interesting techy things, they enter the TTB narrative indirectly via the (in)famous Varo Report.

struggling to understand how something as large as the cinema-sized Speaker at Decker could be used on a submarine,

But the Decker fan was only the first generation. When Townsend gave his final demonstration at Rand, he used two different models, one of which Linda and lab partner, Tom, called the the Tiny Tiger. Tiny being relative, of course, but from Linda's recounting it seems to have been closer to the size of a smaller home speaker.


* More about the Geotechnical Corporation:

Each of the 120 stations in the World Wide Standard Seismological Network had a transformer of this sort. This one is marked “Geotechnical Corporation / Garland, Texas / Model 12968 / Serial 19.” It was used at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.... Incorporated in 1936, the Geotechnical Corporation conducted research in and produced instruments for the field of earth sciences. It got into defense work after World War II, went public in 1962, and was bought by Teledyne in 1965.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collecti ... ah_1445908

[Jan Lundquist]

perhaps it's also that there's a current sad news item about the loss of a tourist submersible around the wreck of the Titanic ( https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464 )

Nate, it's several hours later now since you started this thread and the reports are coming in that all members of the Titanic exploration voyage are dead. Peace be with them.

But I would be remiss not to capture this note that is in keeping with the theme of this thread:

After the submersible was reported missing Sunday, the U.S. Navy went back and analyzed its acoustic data and found an anomaly that was consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the TITAN submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior Navy official told The Associated Press on Thu4rsday.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system.

The Titan submersible imploded, killing all 5 on board, the US Coast Guard says By PATRICK WHITTLE and HOLLY RAMER
https://apnews.com/article/missing-tita ... 24c3e9b1c1

[natecull]

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive acoustic detection system.

I just saw that too! Interesting. And it seems that the CEO of the diving company was on board the submersible too. Indeed, peace to all aboard. And to Allyn Vine, whatever his connection may be to them.

This was later the 1932 expedition, and the results certainly would have been followed by Townsend

Ah, my mistake. So there were at least two Gravity Cruises. I was wondering in the back of my mind about that, but didn't check the dates.

Somehow this dream ended with Townsend holding my hand and asking if I have faith.

Interesting. I wonder what it is we need to have faith in? Just the unexpected benevolence of the universe in general, perhaps?

My subconscious continues its attempt to completely baffle the Youtube prediction algorithm: a playlist I began sort of accidentally working on around, um, Tuesday night? Finally clicked together this morning. I don't know what it is that makes music come together in my head but the times when it happen does seem to map to various astronomical conjunctions. This time, it seems fairly obvious that it must have been the solstice which did it, though I still have no idea what the mechanism could possibly be for that influence.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... j2F6M1-g3m


Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

I decided Townsend's dream question could have apply to several situations, and I should just calm the eff down about all of them.

Thanks for the playlist...looking forward to listening when I have a mo. ETA: started it, and have to ask if you have ever deejayed? If not you have missed your calling.

I also realized once again that you and I have way different musical tastes, as in you have some, and I have none. My natural ear preference leans toward silence, unless there is dancing involved.

So there were at least two Gravity Cruises.

There were many over the years. Meinesz made earlier ones aboard Dutch submarines, before the expedition with Townsend and Henry Hess. He also made quite a few afterwards Other researchers would follow in his footsteps, though he was not aboard for all subsequent cruises.