I Loved This Story

Reads like a fairy tale, but if the website is to be believed this is history, not fantasy. Cool!

Alvilda

Alvida (aka Alwilda, Alfhild, Alvild) was the daughter of Synardus, the king of Gotland. Her parents kept her locked in her room, and set two poisonous snakes to keep away all but the most ardent of suitors. The most persisant and brave fellow turned out to be Prince Alf of Denmark, and though he passed the test Alvilda's parents were none too happy about the match. Deciding she wasn't ready to be wedded to some stuffy Prince, Alvilda took advantage of her parents' irresolution and hightailed it out of there. She joined a crew of cross-dressing women, but had barely got started in a career in terrorizing the Baltic coast when they came across a crew of pirates that had lost their Captain. They were so impressed by her capable skills that they voted unanimously to elect her as their new leader. With these fresh reinforcements beneath her ruthless guidance, this formidable woman became such a nuisance to the merchant trade that her former betrothed, Prince Alf, was dispatched to bring the troublesome pirates to justice.

Alvilda and her crew fought back to the best of their abilities, but in the gulf of Finland they were bested at last. Prince Alf and his men boarded the pirates' ship, where hand to hand fighting ensued. After sustaining heavy casualties, Alvilda's crew succumbed and she herself was taken captive. With her beauty concealed by a face covering helmet, she was taken prisoner, and it was only when this helmet was removed that Prince Alf realized who the scourge of the seas had been. For her part, Alvilda was so impressed by how Alf had fought in battle that she married him on the spot. She went on to share his wealth and throne as Queen of Denmark, and together they had a daughter, who they named Gurith. Whether little Gurith followed in her mother's ocean going ways is not known.

My Dad Would Have Loved These

He used to keep multiple xerox copies of funny engineer jokes in a special folder, to share with friends. Thanx to Ed B. for showing me this one.

	Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design*
Space Systems Laboratory - Department of Aerospace Engineering - University of Maryland

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1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .

3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.

8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.

9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.

14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".

15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.

16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.

18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.

19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up.

20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

21. (Larrabee's Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.

22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)

23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.

24. It's called a "Work Breakdown Structure" because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.

25. (Bowden's Law) Following a testing failure, it's always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.

26. (Montemerlo's Law) Don't do nuthin' dumb.

27. (Varsi's Law) Schedules only move in one direction.

28. (Ranger's Law) There ain't no such thing as a free launch.

29. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

32. (Atkin's Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don't show up.

33. (Patton's Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

34. (Roosevelt's Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

35. (de Saint-Exupery's Law of Design) A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.

37. (Henshaw's Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.

38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

39. The three keys to keeping a new manned space program affordable and on schedule:
1) No new launch vehicles.
2) No new launch vehicles.
3) Whatever you do, don't decide to develop any new launch vehicles.

40. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit becausemost of the analysis was right...)

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*I've been involved in spacecraft and space systems design and development for my entire career, including teaching the senior-level capstone spacecraft design course, for ten years at MIT and now at the University of Maryland for more than a decade. These are some bits of wisdom that I have gleaned during that time, some by picking up on the experience of others, but mostly by screwing up myself. I originally wrote these up and handed them out to my senior design class, as a strong hint on how best to survive my design experience. Months later, I get a phone call from a friend in California complimenting me on the Laws, which he saw on a "joke-of-the-day" listserve. Since then, I'm aware of half a dozen sites around the world that present various editions of the Laws, and even one site which has converted them to the Laws of Certified Public Accounting. (Don't ask...) Anyone is welcome to link to these, use them, post them, send me suggestions of additional laws, but I do maintain that this is the canonical set of Akin's Laws...

Just for Fun: Photographs

~Photographs~ (copied from RA, thanx)

1. Do you like to be photographed or are you one of those who goes to great lengths to avoid being caught in front of a camera? ~Neither. I don't mind being in pictures, but I'm usually the one taking them

2. Do you carry photos in your wallet or purse? ~No. But the screensaver on my phone and on my Nook is a photo of our boat under sail.

3. Do you have photos on your desk at work or displayed in your home? What/who are in the photos? ~On my desk at work, I had one of Dan in the cockpit of our previous boat.

4. When is the last professional [photo] you had taken? ~ About 5 years ago I was in a photo op with the then Secretary of Interior - I suppose that counted as being taken by a professional. In about the same timeframe DH and I were interviewed for the local paper and photoed there.

5. What is the last photograph you took? ~ A set of portraits of folks I talked with for a forthcoming blog article. Before that, boringly, closeups of a rope-to-chain splice on our anchor.

Waves

Dan was born and grew up in southwest Kansas, son of a wheat farmer-stockman who was also born and grew up in southwest Kansas, as was *his* father, and so on. So what’s the trajectory that would lead him to become a sailor? It’s not like Kansas has a lot of seacoast to inspire his imagination from a young age…

I’ll leave the actual “how he got hooked on sailing” for another post, but here’s a thought. There’s a surprisingly similar mindset necessary for success and happiness on the farm or at sea. Sailing the ocean’s blue waves, and growing the amber waves of grain, both remind you of how small a single human is, set against the scale and power of nature. You must always be aware of the weather; its moods dictate what you can do on any day. The same calm patience that turns potential boredom into a meditative state applies whether riding a tractor back and forth plowing every inch of a field, or sailing at 5 knots toward a distant blue horizon. Being at sea far from help when something breaks means that your tool kit requires more than a cellphone and a checkbook; you need self-reliance, creative problem solving to jury-rig a fix far from a parts store. It’s the same way, on the farm. From Dan’s father’s house, you could not see another building except as a smudge on the horizon, so if a tractor broke in the middle of the field, you had a looooong walk if you couldn’t fix it yourself. Most of all, both life on the wheat fields and life at sea encourage independence and a love of solitude and wide horizons.

There, you see? Farm boy to sailor is not such a leap of faith after all!Waves

Dan was born and grew up in southwest Kansas, son of a wheat farmer-stockman who was also born and grew up in southwest Kansas, as was *his* father, and so on. So what’s the trajectory that would lead him to become a sailor? It’s not like Kansas has a lot of seacoast to inspire his imagination from a young age…

I’ll leave the actual “how he got hooked on sailing” for another post, but here’s a thought. There’s a surprisingly similar mindset necessary for success and happiness on the farm or at sea. Sailing the ocean’s blue waves, and growing the amber waves of grain, both remind you of how small a single human is, set against the scale and power of nature. You must always be aware of the weather; its moods dictate what you can do on any day. The same calm patience that turns potential boredom into a meditative state applies whether riding a tractor back and forth plowing every inch of a field, or sailing at 5 knots toward a distant blue horizon. Being at sea far from help when something breaks means that your tool kit requires more than a cellphone and a checkbook; you need self-reliance, creative problem solving to jury-rig a fix far from a parts store. It’s the same way, on the farm. From Dan’s father’s house, you could not see another building except as a smudge on the horizon, so if a tractor broke in the middle of the field, you had a looooong walk if you couldn’t fix it yourself. Most of all, both life on the wheat fields and life at sea encourage independence and a love of solitude and wide horizons.

There, you see? Farm boy to sailor is not such a leap of faith after all!

Slowly

"My boat reminds me to live slow. Life in the fast lane takes a heavy toll on all of us. We think we have no choice, but of course we do. Our sailboats remind us of the pleasure one can find in simple things. Experiencing the wind and water; talking; waltzing on the waves; delighting in seeing the unexpected like a porpoise, whale, or manatee; enjoying the trip; and throwing away the schedule." -- T.P. Donnelly

When Less Really IS More - the view from the outside, in

Here's another one that I also published in the Capital, under the title The View From the Outside In. One of the things we love about being in a boat is the escape from the modern jangle; a return to the original power and solitude of the sea. Technology is so insidious, though, I love it and hate it simultaneously - love it for its connectedness and efficiency, hate it, well, for the same exact reason, because sometimes I just need to get away!

One of the great things about the Annapolis boating scene is the interesting folks you meet who are passing through. In the last month we met one of those, Hinnerk, a German solo sailor supporting himself as a writer and photographer for a German sailing magazine. He was visiting the Chesapeake for a while on his way to sail the “Great Loop” – up the US East Coast, across through the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi (or Tennessee/Tombigbee) to the Gulf Coast and around Florida, essentially making a circle around the eastern 1/3 of the U.S. We had wonderful conversations about our respective boating adventures, but the most interesting conversations came when we were seeing through his eyes: things that we here in the US take for granted that are done differently in Europe, and vice versa. Some of these were minor and of interest only to other boaters; the Coast Guard is more of a radio presence here than there – is that a good thing, or do you cease to pay attention when you hear them too often? Skills testing and licensing is required to operate a boat there, not here – is raising the bar a good thing, or does it keep too many people from appreciating the sport? Some were more universal: we stood at a bar one night mesmerized by the weather radar map showing intense storms and tornado warnings – apparently they don’t have many tornadoes in Germany. Or osprey, although there was some comment that I only partially caught, the rest was lost in the wind, about “fish-eagle.”He showed us some cool weighted line with a lead center (at least, ‘cool’ is a relative term, if you’re a boater you’d realize how lovely this very heavy line could be for anchoring) that we’d never heard about this side of the Atlantic. We suggested some great quiet anchorages to get wildlife photos for an article he was working on; and took him out in our dinghy to get some photos of the ELF classic boat race last Saturday.

I got new insights into simplicity from meeting this man. His boat was old, tiny (31 feet) and almost Spartan by the standards of the American market. We raise our anchor with the touch of a button on an electric windlass, he hoists his hand over hand, getting an upper body workout and a dose of Chesapeake Bay bottom muck as well. We move our dinghy with a 10-hp outboard engine, he uses oars. And yet, this small old simple sailboat had safely taken him around northern Europe, and across the Atlantic and from the Bahamas to Newfoundland. When he docked, he walked across the deck with unhurried but sure steps, a balance and confidence that came from time spent on this boat in all conditions.

So many people have written about the link between sailing and simplicity – how you have to pare down your possessions to the essentials and give up the race to keep up with the Joneses or acquire the latest technogadget or knickknack, in order to fit into the physical space and other constraints of life aboard. Yet if you’re not careful, the glossy magazines and sometimes the less-scrupulous boat brokers will convince you of just the opposite - that you can’t go to sea without a big new boat and a plethora of instruments and safety gadgets and comforts. You may have to work another 5 years to afford the money to buy a boat equipped with the stuff you ‘need.’ Meanwhile, here we were with someone who’d gone smaller, simpler, sooner. Perhaps he didn’t have the newest and shiniest boat, but he was already embarked on his adventure. In that context, watching the classic boats was doubly symbolic – these guys didn’t have electronics when they made their voyages either.

The most impressive thing, though, that I saw through outsider eyes was the difference between “nice to have” and “gotta have.” Or between “comfortable” and “pampered.” And wondered if those lines had been blurred here in the US. His boat had just the right amount of everything, with no excess. Liferaft? Yup, mandatory. Flat-screen TV? Nope, luxury. GPS and radio? Yes.Chartplotter? Well, despite glossy boat magazine ads to the contrary, not really, as long as alertness and seamanship are there. The end result of all this is safe and comfortable although not pampered. And, here’s the big one: keeping the distinction clear meant he could begin his trip sooner, while others were still working in offices to afford the boat and shiny new gear they thought they needed. Conditions are magnified, and contrasts are sharper, on a small boat in the ocean than in a large house on land, but really the basic idea is the same. Knowing the difference between want and need is really the secret to much happiness, lack of financial stress, and the path to many adventures.

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Notes: Photos copyright 2011 Hinnerk Weiler, used by permission. If you can read German (or just want to look at the photos), Hinnerk’s website is here.

The link to the description of the May 21 “ELF Classic Yacht Race” that appeared in the Capital has expired, the text read: “Shortly after 8:30 am a train whistle will blow at the Eastport Yacht Club.
The skippers will row out to their waiting, crew ready yachts, once on deck,
caps doffed, anchors will be raised, sails set and the race across the bay
to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum will begin! Upon arrival in St
Michaels, the yacht secured, skippers will row ashore, sign in at the
Tolchester Band Stand on the grounds of CBMM registering that yacht's
finish. Awards and festivities will follow that evening. The Classic Yacht
Restoration Guild, CYRG, owner of the 1888 Lawley Built Top Sail Cutter ELF
has recreated this race from an 1800's tradition in Marblehead, MA in which
ELF participated. This fundraising event is for the CBMM where ELF
homeports.”

ALIVE FOR FIVE!!!!!

(A post that has nothing whatsoever to do with living on a boat … or does it?)

Five years ago last week Dan came home from leading a sailing trip as a volunteer for the Naval Academy, four and a half days on a 44-foot sailboat running offshore 24/7 with a crew of 9 midshipmen, complaining that he was feeling tired and headachy. Um, really? Considering what you’ve been doing, that doesn’t seem so surprising, does it? But what was surprising was that after a couple of days of rest, that he felt worse instead of better. And a couple of days after that, found ourselves in the emergency room at Anne Arundel Medical Center. There was a tumor in his brain the size of an egg.

All over the internet and in magazines are articles and seminars and therapists and life coaches dedicated to “helping you find your passion.” There’s another way, although not one that I’d recommend. I found my passion instantly, a split second after our family doctor met us at the hospital, and honestly told us, “The prognosis is not good.” I knew what mattered most in my life, what I was proudest of, what I valued, what I was glad I had had the chance to experience, and what I’d miss the most.

In Dan’s case, there was surgery, radiation, rehab; a long and uncertain summer; and then getting back to work again, the delight of a routine of ordinary days. A big shout-out to Drs. Burke, Chawla, Gordon, and Graze and the staff at AAMC; and a deep appreciation for the tremendous support from our families, friends, and marina community. Last Sunday we celebrated five cancer-free years. We had a huge party and a five-foot sandwich from Subway that actually became a nine-foot sandwich because we had so many attendees. We lit a candle and took a moment to remember the names of those who are still fighting and those who we’ve lost; and donated $5 to cancer research for every person who attended; and laughed a lot and cried a little.

So what does all of this have to do with sailing or living on a boat? It’s that thing about knowing what your passion is, and doing it. It’s about making plans instead of excuses because you just never know. Excuses abound: we don’t have the money for a new boat … and maybe we should wait until the kids are out of grad school … our parents are getting older and might need us … and … and … and … Some of those reasons are even logical and practical. There’s always next year … until suddenly there isn’t. One sunny Satuday morning in May the door to our future almost slammed shut in our faces. Dan went from being a fit very healthy fifty-something to one of those people they whisper about in the hospital corridors. It’s not just sailing, of course, though that happens to be my particular thing. It’s whatever’s big and new and scary and important in your life, however you fill in the blank in the sentence that begins, “Someday I wish I could ___.” My friend RoseAnn claims that dreams like those have a shelf life. The problem is, the “do by” date on dreams isn’t stamped in any ink you can read.

Photo: Beam me up, Scotty - right to sickbay on the Starship Enterprise ... or at least, the then-brand-new Novalis machine at AAMC

Photo: surrounded by friends, celebrating life on the fifth anniversary of the original cancer surgery

(By the way, here’s a secret trick to figuring out your passion, a way that’s not quite so dramatic as my moment of clarity in the emergency room. Your passion is that thing that you’re doing, when you lose all track of time. It could be sailing or art or gardening – hopefully its something more productive than drinking beer – but it’s that thing you were doing when you finally take a break and look at the clock and say, “Wow! I can’t believe it’s 9:30 already! I was so absorbed, I even forgot to eat!” )

===The same article appeared on my Life Afloat blog===

===More photos are on our cruising blog===