> The British Mosquito once carried Niels Bohr in its bomb bay
Fantastic imagery occuring in my mind while reading that title as someone unfamiliar with the lingo. Almost psychedelic.
"Niels Bohr, father of atom, birthed from anus of mosquito, 2001 Starchild-like, bomb-bay-baby, 3-piece suit full formed within placenta, from the mother insect, a mission stalk-like to replenish the darkened Britain."
I think the interesting things about the mosquito are really that it was designed for manufacture in a sense and that it was very high performance too.
It was multipurpose AND high performance. I just think we might tend always to try to specialise and think that specialisation is the highest possible good.
To turn this to software, it was powerful for Android and iOS to use languages for which a lot of developer talent existed already and to pay attention to the ease of development more than ultimate performance. Nokia used an active-objects based version of C++ which used little memory and could get good performance out of the tiny ARM chips of the day but was very hard to program for. ARM chips suddenly got better and made most of this pain unnecessary but there was no way to suddenly make the C++ dev experience better without really starting from scratch.
It wasn't at all "designed to manufacture", it was an incredibly hard to build aircraft, requiring labour of extremely skilled carpenters as it was built of large number of wood elements requiring a very high precision of shapes to tightly fit together. Incredible pain in the ass to manufacture and no one else in the world could repeat a similar project. But the result was worth it.
Well, in the sense that it could be built by a much more available manufacturing skill and more available materials. I know that's not about ease for the workers but it made production much easier overall.
“Nokia used an active-objects based version of C++ which used little memory and could get good performance out of the tiny ARM chips of the day but was very hard to program for.”
I don’t think C++ was the problem there. The tooling was terrible, documentation even worse. It didn’t feel like they actually wanted developers.
C++ was a total disaster for one reason and everything came out of this:
It cannot handle running out of memory safely.
Handling an out of memory exception requires memory. 50% of the nastiness came out of the way Symbian tried to address this by redefining the new operator so that it could return null instead of raising an exception - the whole approach to memory management became horrendous because of this. 2 stage initialisation etc. It meant that all existing C++ code and containers were not portable.
20% of the nastiness came out of C++ being very immature at the time it was all started so OS classes for handling various kinds of unicode strings were not nice, there was no ABI stability. At Nokia the ARM compiler was used and it was very slow and required licenses which made it expensive to build in parallel.
20% of the nastiness came from choosing the windows DLL model over the linux .so one with export slots so that adding one method to a class would move the slots around and make a DLL incompatible if you didn't go through a complicated freexing process which seemed to go wrong from time to time.
Adding one item to a datastructure also could crash existing programs which is par for the course in C++ but not Java and this was quite shitty.
These percentages are just my rough stab at it - maybe enough to give an idea.
> A German general decorating with the Iron Cross some soldiers of the Expeditionary Force and two soldiers of the SS, in Denmark, April 1940
Norwegian writing on Norwegian houses in Norwegian town with Norwegian trees in background. So a slight Gell-Mann effect creeps in, although the general outline of Bohr's escape seems well enough aligned with the facts as known.
My father worked on mosquitos during his national service with the UK RAF in the 1950s. He worked on the airframes, and the mosquito was notable as being one of the last military aircraft to have a wooden airframe - with some kind of canvas stretched over the frame. Apparently this made it very light and manoeuvrable.
To be clear it was more canvas over wooden monocoque than frame. It was made out of laminated wooden shapes made in molds, quite unlike early planes. The canvas was just for weatherproofing iirc.
Thanks - I didn't know that. I guess I was using the term "airframe" as the generic term for the aircraft body, not to imply that its was composed of a literal framework. Thanks for the clarification.
My father was sent to a conflict zone (Malaya, now Malaysia/Singapore) and seems to have spent a fair bit of his time there repairing damage caused by ground-based small arms. Probably an exciting time for a twenty year old.
My grandfather did his national service with the RAF driving lorries across Palestine/Egypt/Iraq/Transjordan in 1945 to 1947 and flew over to Egypt in a bomb bay with all the other recruits.
My grandfather was conscripted into the German armed forces as an engineer during WW2 and ended up in the belly of bomber planes, manually detaching bombs while hoisted above the open hatch. He refused to set foot on another plane for the rest of his life.
Fun to read about this. My grandfather worked for Boeing and was the engineer in charge of manufacturing Mosquito tailplanes in Vancouver BC. He developed a system of using steam bladders to add pressure and heat to the glued pieces while it was curing which cut down their manufacturing time.
I've got some Mossie blueprints in my files, I really should get them framed one of these days. They're works of art!
It carried 24 rounds and the pilot said it felt like the aircraft slowed down every time they fired a round. (Which I can’t believe is true but it’s a worthy bon not from my late grandfather who was an engineer in the war.)
I'm fairly certain the de Havilland Aircraft Museum, located on the northern outskirts of London, used to have one of those cannons. It wasn't mounted, but was on display with the loading mechanism and magazine.
I've checked their website[1] but can't seen any mention of it. The museum looks a bit more neat & tidy than I remember it looking, so perhaps they've reduced what's on display.
Yea assuming muzzle velocity 1000m/s and 3kg projectile weight and 6000kg aircraft weight, conservation of momentum would put the slowdown at 0.5m/s, hardly noticable at cruising speed I think. Though the jerk would most likely be noticable.
> The GAU-8 Avenger fires up to sixty one-pound bullets a second. It produces almost five tons of recoil force, which is crazy considering that it’s mounted in a type of plane (the A-10 “Warthog”) whose two engines produce only four tons of thrust each.
The canon was an anti-tank gun ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_QF_6_pounder ), the primary intended target was U-boats, and they added quite a bit of armor (to help with AA fire from uncooperative U-boats).
It doesn't sound like the cannon-armed Mosquito was (at the time) seen as successful. OTOH, I'd guess that the Allies having both good radar, and ~350MPH clouds of cannon-armed Mosquitos, would have imposed some pretty miserable operational limitations on the Germans.
Perfect job of a news site. If I had known Rowland White had a book out about mosquitos I would have read it already. I highly commend him to the HN crowd. His Vulcan 607 book is a masterwork. It explained the situation, the technology, and the human element too.
A Man Called Intrepid adds a detail that the article skips: The Mosquito carrying Bohr didn't stay high. The pilot, fearing that Bohr had an oxygen failure, descended, trading off greater risk of interception for greater survivability for the passenger.
For those who like to tie together different contexts, this incident is briefly mentioned in the recent film Oppenheimer. (Which, much to my surprise and delight, is pretty good history for a Hollywood movie.)
>When the plane arrived, he was given a flight helmet with built-in headphones but it was too small for his head. Bohr, therefore, did not hear the pilot’s instruction to begin using his oxygen mask and passed out. The Mosquito pilot was forced to drop the plane to a lower altitude to revive the oxygen-starved scientist.
What an exciting story, but I doubt it has anything to do with history. It's chockablock full of narrative candy, eg:
> Bohr and his wife, Margarethe, left their home at the Carlsberg brewery estate within hours of the tip-off from Harald. As they slipped out of the back of their house a Nazi snatch squad was already on its way. When the couple later crawled on all-fours from a beach hut to a waiting boat, the most famous man in Denmark had with him a single bag, a beer bottle full of heavy water retrieved from the lab, and a sketch purporting to be of the Nazi’s reactor design.
How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed, nevermind that such a thing was on its way just as he decided to leave.. It's all very Biggles. These read to me like narrative plot twists to hold the reader's attention, rather than anything relating to what actually occurred.
Basically every paragraph is like this.
Still, it adds to the drama, brings story narratives vividly to life in the imagination.
The question for me, it's why is the history we are presented turned into these types of evidence-free stories? It's almost like its purpose is to propagandise the population into believing fantasies.
While the article did use very dramatic language, that the Nazi snatch squads in Denmark existed, were about to strike, and indeed did end up arresting many Danish Jews just a few days later over the Jewish New Year is very well documented history.
I find it surprising that you decided to write a skeptical comment here rather than just Googling it, as sources are plentiful. What are those 'fantasies' that you believe people are being made to believe?
> While the article did use very dramatic language, that the Nazi snatch squads in Denmark existed, were about to strike, and indeed did end up arresting many Danish Jews just a few days later over the Jewish New Year is very well documented history.
But contrast this with the article author says:
> As they slipped out of the back of their house a Nazi snatch squad was already on its way.
> How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed
Even setting aside the description "Danish woman working for the Gestapo saw an order for Bohr’s arrest and tipped off Bohr’s brother" from this account, we can look at other accounts, like the chapter "Escape" from his biography at https://archive.org/details/nielsbohrmanhis00moor/page/300/m...
"Many years later at the Nuremberg trials it was revealed that the Nazis had intended to arrest Bohr on the day martial law was declared. There was, however, a dispute about it, and the decision was made to put off his arrest and deportation to Germany until the Nazis began their roundup of the Jews. In the general excitement, they thought the arrest of Bohr would attract less attention and the furor would be less."
The contents of the chapter are mostly aligned with the linked-to account, though the chapter says the beer bottle of heavy water was not true:
"The prosaic truth was quite different. Heavy water was used in the institute's accelerator. When the supply had to be replenished, someone remembered that Bohr had once had a bottle the Norwegian manufacturer had presented to him. The institute men were unable to find it and sent an underground query to Rozental in Stockholm. Rozental sent back full instructions about where to find it and pointed out that the bottle was unlabeled." - https://archive.org/details/nielsbohrmanhis00moor/page/308/m...
> Basically every paragraph is like this.
That is not lost on anyone. From the second page of the book chapter I linked to, "Bohr and Margrethe, feeling like the principals in a spy melodrama, as indeed they were".
>How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed
Germans keep good records, and after the war all the archives were captured and read through and cross indexed. Every incident in Allied logs was compared with German logs to see what matched.
> The British Mosquito once carried Niels Bohr in its bomb bay
Fantastic imagery occuring in my mind while reading that title as someone unfamiliar with the lingo. Almost psychedelic.
"Niels Bohr, father of atom, birthed from anus of mosquito, 2001 Starchild-like, bomb-bay-baby, 3-piece suit full formed within placenta, from the mother insect, a mission stalk-like to replenish the darkened Britain."
Append "high resolution anamorphic movie still, kodachrome, trending on artstation" and you have a prompt to throw into stable diffusion/midjourney
Dall-E 2: “It looks like this request may not follow our content policy.” :(
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This is exactly where my mind went, thanks to Everything In News Being Title Case Even When It's Not A Proper Noun.
Hahah! Lol great to know. :)
Nice. Sounds like Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow :)
Thank you! :) I'll have to re-read that. Never made it through the first time in college.
Can I please see the generated image of this prompt?
[deleted]
Fantastico! How did you arrive at this disgusting pink horrorshow?
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I think the interesting things about the mosquito are really that it was designed for manufacture in a sense and that it was very high performance too.
It was multipurpose AND high performance. I just think we might tend always to try to specialise and think that specialisation is the highest possible good.
To turn this to software, it was powerful for Android and iOS to use languages for which a lot of developer talent existed already and to pay attention to the ease of development more than ultimate performance. Nokia used an active-objects based version of C++ which used little memory and could get good performance out of the tiny ARM chips of the day but was very hard to program for. ARM chips suddenly got better and made most of this pain unnecessary but there was no way to suddenly make the C++ dev experience better without really starting from scratch.
It wasn't at all "designed to manufacture", it was an incredibly hard to build aircraft, requiring labour of extremely skilled carpenters as it was built of large number of wood elements requiring a very high precision of shapes to tightly fit together. Incredible pain in the ass to manufacture and no one else in the world could repeat a similar project. But the result was worth it.
Well, in the sense that it could be built by a much more available manufacturing skill and more available materials. I know that's not about ease for the workers but it made production much easier overall.
2 replies →
“Nokia used an active-objects based version of C++ which used little memory and could get good performance out of the tiny ARM chips of the day but was very hard to program for.”
I don’t think C++ was the problem there. The tooling was terrible, documentation even worse. It didn’t feel like they actually wanted developers.
C++ was a total disaster for one reason and everything came out of this:
It cannot handle running out of memory safely.
Handling an out of memory exception requires memory. 50% of the nastiness came out of the way Symbian tried to address this by redefining the new operator so that it could return null instead of raising an exception - the whole approach to memory management became horrendous because of this. 2 stage initialisation etc. It meant that all existing C++ code and containers were not portable.
20% of the nastiness came out of C++ being very immature at the time it was all started so OS classes for handling various kinds of unicode strings were not nice, there was no ABI stability. At Nokia the ARM compiler was used and it was very slow and required licenses which made it expensive to build in parallel.
20% of the nastiness came from choosing the windows DLL model over the linux .so one with export slots so that adding one method to a class would move the slots around and make a DLL incompatible if you didn't go through a complicated freexing process which seemed to go wrong from time to time. Adding one item to a datastructure also could crash existing programs which is par for the course in C++ but not Java and this was quite shitty.
These percentages are just my rough stab at it - maybe enough to give an idea.
3 replies →
> A German general decorating with the Iron Cross some soldiers of the Expeditionary Force and two soldiers of the SS, in Denmark, April 1940
Norwegian writing on Norwegian houses in Norwegian town with Norwegian trees in background. So a slight Gell-Mann effect creeps in, although the general outline of Bohr's escape seems well enough aligned with the facts as known.
Author just copied the caption. https://www.agefotostock.com/age/en/details-photo/german-gen...
The Warzone is pretty lazy with captions.
They've mislabeled US fighter jets, and their authors have to know the difference.
ChatGPT subtitles the image “German and Italian officers exchange greetings in Norway.”
Ah yes, Mussolini's famous Norwegian campaign
My father worked on mosquitos during his national service with the UK RAF in the 1950s. He worked on the airframes, and the mosquito was notable as being one of the last military aircraft to have a wooden airframe - with some kind of canvas stretched over the frame. Apparently this made it very light and manoeuvrable.
To be clear it was more canvas over wooden monocoque than frame. It was made out of laminated wooden shapes made in molds, quite unlike early planes. The canvas was just for weatherproofing iirc.
Thanks - I didn't know that. I guess I was using the term "airframe" as the generic term for the aircraft body, not to imply that its was composed of a literal framework. Thanks for the clarification.
My father was sent to a conflict zone (Malaya, now Malaysia/Singapore) and seems to have spent a fair bit of his time there repairing damage caused by ground-based small arms. Probably an exciting time for a twenty year old.
Putting people in bomb bay was relatively common!
My grandfather did his national service with the RAF driving lorries across Palestine/Egypt/Iraq/Transjordan in 1945 to 1947 and flew over to Egypt in a bomb bay with all the other recruits.
My grandfather was conscripted into the German armed forces as an engineer during WW2 and ended up in the belly of bomber planes, manually detaching bombs while hoisted above the open hatch. He refused to set foot on another plane for the rest of his life.
Fun to read about this. My grandfather worked for Boeing and was the engineer in charge of manufacturing Mosquito tailplanes in Vancouver BC. He developed a system of using steam bladders to add pressure and heat to the glued pieces while it was curing which cut down their manufacturing time.
I've got some Mossie blueprints in my files, I really should get them framed one of these days. They're works of art!
For anyone as confused by this title as I was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito
My fun Mosquito fact that I like to share: there was a variant adapted with a 57mm artillery piece, the “QF six pounder”:
https://www.combatreform.org/cannonfighter.htm
(Good photos, odd article.)
It carried 24 rounds and the pilot said it felt like the aircraft slowed down every time they fired a round. (Which I can’t believe is true but it’s a worthy bon not from my late grandfather who was an engineer in the war.)
I'm fairly certain the de Havilland Aircraft Museum, located on the northern outskirts of London, used to have one of those cannons. It wasn't mounted, but was on display with the loading mechanism and magazine.
I've checked their website[1] but can't seen any mention of it. The museum looks a bit more neat & tidy than I remember it looking, so perhaps they've reduced what's on display.
[1] https://www.dehavillandmuseum.co.uk/
Yea assuming muzzle velocity 1000m/s and 3kg projectile weight and 6000kg aircraft weight, conservation of momentum would put the slowdown at 0.5m/s, hardly noticable at cruising speed I think. Though the jerk would most likely be noticable.
> The GAU-8 Avenger fires up to sixty one-pound bullets a second. It produces almost five tons of recoil force, which is crazy considering that it’s mounted in a type of plane (the A-10 “Warthog”) whose two engines produce only four tons of thrust each.
From: https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/
I'm not surprised at all that it slowed down. The A-10 slows down when firing as well, the gun produces more thrust than the engine.
Odd is putting it lightly, it's like the author has never heard of air defense systems
Wikipedia has a short, focused section on the 57mm-cannon Mosquito variant, starting 3 paragraphs down here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito#Strike_(...
The canon was an anti-tank gun ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_QF_6_pounder ), the primary intended target was U-boats, and they added quite a bit of armor (to help with AA fire from uncooperative U-boats).
It doesn't sound like the cannon-armed Mosquito was (at the time) seen as successful. OTOH, I'd guess that the Allies having both good radar, and ~350MPH clouds of cannon-armed Mosquitos, would have imposed some pretty miserable operational limitations on the Germans.
2 replies →
Perfect job of a news site. If I had known Rowland White had a book out about mosquitos I would have read it already. I highly commend him to the HN crowd. His Vulcan 607 book is a masterwork. It explained the situation, the technology, and the human element too.
A Man Called Intrepid adds a detail that the article skips: The Mosquito carrying Bohr didn't stay high. The pilot, fearing that Bohr had an oxygen failure, descended, trading off greater risk of interception for greater survivability for the passenger.
For those who like to tie together different contexts, this incident is briefly mentioned in the recent film Oppenheimer. (Which, much to my surprise and delight, is pretty good history for a Hollywood movie.)
It certainly would have been interesting if Bohr had been found dead upon arrival because his oxygen mask wasn’t properly handled.
>When the plane arrived, he was given a flight helmet with built-in headphones but it was too small for his head. Bohr, therefore, did not hear the pilot’s instruction to begin using his oxygen mask and passed out. The Mosquito pilot was forced to drop the plane to a lower altitude to revive the oxygen-starved scientist.
There's always this:
https://neilsbahr.com/
That website is refusing me entry, could you share more about why it is relevant?
It's a self described nerd bar in Houston. It's relevant because of the pun name I guess.
1 reply →
What an exciting story, but I doubt it has anything to do with history. It's chockablock full of narrative candy, eg:
> Bohr and his wife, Margarethe, left their home at the Carlsberg brewery estate within hours of the tip-off from Harald. As they slipped out of the back of their house a Nazi snatch squad was already on its way. When the couple later crawled on all-fours from a beach hut to a waiting boat, the most famous man in Denmark had with him a single bag, a beer bottle full of heavy water retrieved from the lab, and a sketch purporting to be of the Nazi’s reactor design.
How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed, nevermind that such a thing was on its way just as he decided to leave.. It's all very Biggles. These read to me like narrative plot twists to hold the reader's attention, rather than anything relating to what actually occurred.
Basically every paragraph is like this.
Still, it adds to the drama, brings story narratives vividly to life in the imagination.
The question for me, it's why is the history we are presented turned into these types of evidence-free stories? It's almost like its purpose is to propagandise the population into believing fantasies.
While the article did use very dramatic language, that the Nazi snatch squads in Denmark existed, were about to strike, and indeed did end up arresting many Danish Jews just a few days later over the Jewish New Year is very well documented history.
I find it surprising that you decided to write a skeptical comment here rather than just Googling it, as sources are plentiful. What are those 'fantasies' that you believe people are being made to believe?
For instance:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/rescue-of-the-danish-jews
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24427637
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/denmark-and-the-...
https://echoesandreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/...
https://natmus.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Editor/natmus/frihed...
https://sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/node/17135
Let's accept your defence of the article:
> While the article did use very dramatic language, that the Nazi snatch squads in Denmark existed, were about to strike, and indeed did end up arresting many Danish Jews just a few days later over the Jewish New Year is very well documented history.
But contrast this with the article author says:
> As they slipped out of the back of their house a Nazi snatch squad was already on its way.
It's not the same thing.
4 replies →
[flagged]
> How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed
Even setting aside the description "Danish woman working for the Gestapo saw an order for Bohr’s arrest and tipped off Bohr’s brother" from this account, we can look at other accounts, like the chapter "Escape" from his biography at https://archive.org/details/nielsbohrmanhis00moor/page/300/m...
"Many years later at the Nuremberg trials it was revealed that the Nazis had intended to arrest Bohr on the day martial law was declared. There was, however, a dispute about it, and the decision was made to put off his arrest and deportation to Germany until the Nazis began their roundup of the Jews. In the general excitement, they thought the arrest of Bohr would attract less attention and the furor would be less."
The contents of the chapter are mostly aligned with the linked-to account, though the chapter says the beer bottle of heavy water was not true:
"The prosaic truth was quite different. Heavy water was used in the institute's accelerator. When the supply had to be replenished, someone remembered that Bohr had once had a bottle the Norwegian manufacturer had presented to him. The institute men were unable to find it and sent an underground query to Rozental in Stockholm. Rozental sent back full instructions about where to find it and pointed out that the bottle was unlabeled." - https://archive.org/details/nielsbohrmanhis00moor/page/308/m...
> Basically every paragraph is like this.
That is not lost on anyone. From the second page of the book chapter I linked to, "Bohr and Margrethe, feeling like the principals in a spy melodrama, as indeed they were".
People have eyes. People see Nazi snatch squads. People write it down in their journal. People write news articles.
You seem to have zero clue about what happens in a society in wartime. This is how people sleepwalk into facism.
_Extreme_ bit of HN’s signature “nothing ever happens” tendency there.
>How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed
Germans keep good records, and after the war all the archives were captured and read through and cross indexed. Every incident in Allied logs was compared with German logs to see what matched.
And are you prepared to state that you've verified this? Or is this something you imagine?
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