Copasetic Flow

Scientific research in post-war America during the 1950s and ‘60s as seen through the eyes and life of ace fighter pilot turned science journalist, Michael Gladych, reveals a time when scientific possibilities were grander and fairly dripped with the promise of sci-fi style adventure.    Michael Gladych enters our story in the “The Hunt for Zero Point” , the fringe physics classic, by Nick Cook:  “The strapline below the headline proclaimed: "By far the most potent source of energy is gravity. Using it as power, future aircraft will attain the speed of light." It was written by one Michael Gladych…” Gladych, portrayed by Cook as merely the random author of a science journalism article , (figure 1), rapidly fades from the story amidst numerous claims of government and aerospace industry conspiracies to cover-up the ‘true’ anti-gravity programs of the 1950s. Ironically, Gladych is a far more interesting, and ‘true-to-life’ character than any of the...

"Sure," I hear you saying, "Michael Gladych is cool and all, but what does this have to do with the history of physics?" Read on and find out how Gladych reported on the events that would fund Higgs Particle research as well as the relativistic framework that inspired the Alcubierre drive . The same events that inspired Nick Cook's antigravity classic, "The Hunt for Zero Point" The article that brought Mike Gladych to the attention of fringe physics buffs everywhere, “The G-Engines are Coming”, appeared in its first incarnation in the pages of the November, 1956 issue of American Modeler.  The article begins with the bold assertion that nuclear airplanes will be made obsolete—by the artificial control of gravity—before they ever leave the design phase.  It then goes on to state that many aircraft companies were currently engaged in the study of the control of gravitation including: Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Co., Convair, Bell Aircraft, Lear, ...

 We have new software projects to play with here at the KD0FNR/KO6BTY ham shack in December. First, Datasette announced a new toy to play with! Enrichments If you've been regularly reading, or watching the repository for the logging software the kids and I have been building for oursevles, you've seen me mention Datasette before. It's a tool for browsing data sets using SQLite, and then applying various analyses to the data. The kids and I have used it to map  QSOs in a number of different ways. Simon Willison announced that the tool now feautres something called enrichments . What do they do? In short, they allow the user to apply operations to data that can subsequently be written back into a database. The post linked to above demonstrates how enrichments work using a geocoding example. The example uses OpenCage to geocode addresses. We've been using the Google Maps API here to do a similar thing, so the first obvious project is  Creating a Datasette enhancement th...

 After gaining access to OpenAI’s new Sora-2 video API , I rebuilt my entire B-roll workflow for The Gladych Files channel — automating prompt generation, stitching clips together, and producing cinematic sequences in minutes. In this post, I walk through the full pipeline, share lessons learned, and offer tips for anyone curious about AI-assisted video creation.

There's an ongoing effort to save HAARP from the demolition block [4], and as it inevitably does in all matters HAARP, the topic of chemtrails came up.  Chemtrails are by and large considered to be an urban legend, but like all good legends, it turns out there's more than a trace of truth embedded in the story  Perhaps the chemtrail legend has propagated so well because the ham radio community at large was involved in the first experiment that might have blossomed into the chemtrail mythos.  During a magical period, in the mid '50s  the United States Air Force experimented with augmenting the performance of the ionosphere, (think HAARP), by creating airborne clouds of particulate reflectors, (think chemtrails). In his landmark 1958 article describing the experiment[1], author Michael Gladych, (expect to see  more about Gladych in these pages soon), first explained what the ionosphere was, first in words: "In this electronic age, everybody knows that the ion...

  A few weeks ago, the 13, 11, and 9 year-old gang and I were out on our yearly camping trip, hanging out near Great Basin National Park above Baker, NV, when KO6BTY and I got to participate in a Ham Radio Workbench episode! It was a lot of fun! (It was also one of the latest nights up we had during the trip.) If you're landing here from there, we talked about a lot of things including: Project TouCans ( page ) ( and in general ) POTA / SOTA How early versions of TouCans were inspired by the OHIS Camping KO6BTY and my writing projects regarding one Michael Gladych ( page ) ( general gladych ) ( general history of physics ) unschooling / homeschooling / parenting in general and we got to talk to Thomas K4SWL about qrp rigs We just made it back from our camping trip yesterday, so I hope to have a lot of updates over the next few days, and maybe some pretty pictures as well like this one of Mt. Wheeler and, of course, Project TouCans.

 On one of the most interesting radio days of our recent camping trip, Project TouCans made QSOs with Australia, Japan, Columbia, and Argentina, all on the same day! The QSOs to Japan and Australia were made in the middle of their night. The Japan, Australia, and Columbia QSOs were all made in a sixteen minute window beginning with VK3YV at 12:40 UTC. What was the Propagation Mode? While the QSOs were awesome! How did they happen? I did a bit of research.  Spoiler: I don't have an answer yet. If you have ideas, I'd love help on this, please comment! Dayside stations talking to nightside stations led me to sv1uy's page on chordal hop propagation which had a nice diagram The rest of the notes from below followed from this diagram. I don't have answers yet, but here are my notes. I've been talking with the kids about radio occultation, refraction, and of course, the Gladych research project during all of this. I'm also using it to introduce trig which will layer i...

 While doing research for a book I'm working on, The Gladych Files , I wondered into the weeds of statistical analysis of LLM AI agent performance which relates to my everyday sort of work in engineering. One of the things I really enjoy about The Gladych Files, however, is that it's never long before the project pulls me back towards ham radio. The statistical analysis project involved determining how often, and with what certainty AI agents could find out that Lucia Hobson was the daughter of Rear Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson and then make the further link that Nikola Tesla was the best man at Rear Admiral Hobson's wedding. While estimating how difficult this was to do with plain old human operated web searches this morning, I came across W. E. D. Stokes! Stokes came into the picture as Lucia Hobson's husband. What I didn't know was that he was one of the founders of The Radio Club of America. His original interest in radio came from wanting to control a mod...

 We're working on a promo video for our smartphone-based CW practice app. We had great luck last week using the sora-2 app to create B-Roll footage for the Gladych Files . This week, I'm hoping to make an entire scripted trailer for the CW app using sora-2. There are issues though. The first one is that while the sora app has a storyboard feature, (at least the one I can access this week), the API does  not. It does however allow you to pass in reference images to bridge scenes. That's pretty cool, and seems to work. I'm working on  a Python script to wait for bridging images between clips. That's worked out ok.  The real issue, so far, has been sora-2 moderation. Profanity and Real-Person Filters You cannot pass the image of a real person, (even one sora-2 invented), between clips. Moderation stops it every time. ( Moderation is what sora-2 calls its engine that decides if it's able to make your video at all.) This is what set off a cascade of moderatio...

 Moving the camera to see the sky in CesiumJS maps has always been a little bit difficult for me. So,m when CesiumJS announced their baseline MCP for controlling the camera on CesiumJS maps, I leaped at the chance to try out an MCP and to grab hold of better control of my map camera.  This week, the sujbect of eclipses came up in my Gladych Files research. ( Ferry Barrows Colton , famed National Geographic Science writer of the 1940s was part of the 1947 Brazil eclipse expedtiion, and was also on board the Normandie with Tom Slick in 1937.) That reminded me of the following picture I took of the 2017 eclipse from Wyoming.  I've wanted to identify the stars on that picture for years, so I was curious if CesiumJS had accurate constellation maps for a given date and time. Turns out, they do. But, how to look at the stars? I revived my version of the  MCP camera control server for CesiumJS in a few minutes by starting Codex in the repo directory on my local machine, a...

Picture 1 is taken from Villard's report[5] on long delay echoes (LDEs) There's lots of science out there still to be done, even in age old hobby of ham radio.  In one of my recent posts, I talked about Operation Smoke Puff, and experiment that bounced radio signals off a man-made cloud of ions to a distant receiver.  The project was sponsored by the military with hopes of being able to provide longer distance radio communications by creating a made-to-order skip path. As it turns out, radio signals and the ionosphere are quite capable of providing long distance communications paths all by themselves, for folks who don't happen to own a missile launcher.  In some cases, a signal can be made to transmit around the entire planet.   Many amateur radio operators have experienced the phenomenon of round-the-world radio skips where the transmitted signal continues to bounce, completing a path that spans the globe and arrives back at the station.  The radio opera...

 I'm condensing the steps to move from travel manifest page to human readable findings to sqlite database here. History Research Contextual Recap I'm working on a history of physics research project, The Gladych Files , that explores how industrialists interested in fringe physics wound up actually funding mainstream general relativity research. As part of that research, I've been looking at the travel manifests of various industrialists and research scientists from the 1930s to the 1950s. Because there are literally thousands of passengers on their combined voyages, I'm using LLM agents orchestrated through Gas Town to coordinate the research. At present, I am working on a bit of a mystery. Multiple sources state that Hedy Lamarr came to the United States aboard the S.S. Normandy, arriving on September 30th, 1937. That's the same ship that Tom Slick, (one of the industrialists of whom I spoke above), took across the Atlantic. There's only one problem. Hedy is...