Harley L. Sachs

Features Harley L. Sachs Most Americans who remember the dirigible think only of the spectacular crash of the Hindenberg at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937. Some know that the U.S. Navy acquired a couple of other dirigibles which both came to tragic ends.
What you might not realize, however, is that in spite of the spectacular blaze that incinerated the Hindenberg as its hydrogen burned, only 36 of the 97 persons aboard were killed. The film of the disaster made such an impression that dirigible travel ended. Yet, the sinking of the Titanic with a loss of 1,500 lives did not end the era of the ocean liner. And a disaster in the Canary Islands when two jumbo jets collided on the runway did not end jet travel, either. Should the new gigantic jet airbus -- still not in regular service -- crash with 600 people aboard, that might end the Airbus, but not air transportation.

Features Harley L. Sachs By now we are all familiar with carbon dioxide, CO2, that infamous greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. CO2 is spewed into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants. Its also in comes from the exhaust of internal combustion engines, like your car, the truck that transports your groceries, the airplanes jetting at 35,000 feet, and your gasoline-powered lawnmower. Even you release carbon dioxide every time you exhale - and so does your cat.

Features Harley L. Sachs An amazing moment in Peter Seller’s “Being There” is when Sellers as Chauncy Gardener emerges from his cloistered residence into a now rough neighborhood. Chauncy has lived a life in front of a television set and carries his remote control. He’s accosted by a couple of black hoodlums. When he doesn’t like what he sees in the toughs he’s met he tries to change the channel to something else. His clicker doesn’t work. He has entered a new reality.

Features Harley L. Sachs Now that the ice is off the lakes and ice augers and tip-ups are put away for a few months of summer, it’s time to think about other forms of piscatorial pursuits. Isaak Walton, in his “Compleat Angler” (the first published treatise on the art of fishing,) never dreamed of the means available today.

Features Harley L. Sachs Bruce Schneider, author of “Beyond Fear” and one of the world’s foremost security experts, spoke at Michigan Technological University recently and his message was chilling. Privacy is dead.
He wasn’t merely referring to the surveillance cameras that are everywhere—in shopping malls, on buses, by ATM machines, at busy intersections and outside government buildings. These have played important parts in tracking down criminals, kidnappers, armed robbers, and people who run red lights. Those are external watchers outside of our control. What Schneider talked about was how we expose ourselves.

Features Harley L. Sachs Forget global warming. Forget being struck by a giant meteorite. Forget a cataclysmic earthquake or eruption of the Yellowstone volcanic complex. You can even forget al Quaida. The most credible and impending threat to our lives is happening right now. It’s the death of bees.

Features Harley L. Sachs Just what is a robot, anyway? At the most basic level it’s a mechanism that performs an action on orders from a human operator. In that sense, your toaster is a sort of robot because you set the control and when the toast is ready it pops up. In World War II the strength demanded for the operation of certain controls, such as the wing flaps on a bomber, required a servomechanism. Your power brakes and steering are such servomechanism. So is your car’s cruise control, which turns your car into a robot of sorts. Eventually, we’ll have a car that drives itself. Set the GPS destination and the car will take you there; and there are already mechanisms which parallel park some new cars. (We used to have a similar device. It was called a chauffeur.)

Features Harley L. Sachs Back in the 1960s, Sir Fred Hoyle, the astronomer whose lucidly written popular books brought an understanding of the universe to the general public, teamed up with an Indian doctor, N. C. Wickramsinghe, with a controversial book, “Diseases from Space.” In their book the two scientists postulated that certain viruses from space had infected the human population. Their theory was called “Panspermia,” the idea that life on earth is a transplant from outer space.
As examples they pointed out how totally isolated arctic communities not visited by humans or even by birds had been mysteriously infected with a virus that could have come from nowhere else but outer space. The claim was that viruses of a certain size could survive entry through the protective shields afforded by the upper atmosphere. Certain respiratory diseases, they claimed, were a form of space invader.
Other scientists debunked “Diseases from Space,” and Hoyle’s reputation as a serious scientist was tarnished.

Features Harley L. Sachs In spite of all the talk and alarm about greenhouse gasses and global warming, there’s almost no mention of the impact of high flying jet aircraft on the atmosphere. As we saw so vividly during the 9-11 hijackings, at any given moment there are hundreds, even thousands of planes in the air over the United States. Their exhausts are spewed out at high altitudes where they do the most damage to the ozone layer. If those emissions could be substantially reduced, it would make a big difference.

Books Harley L. Sachs Don’t let anyone tell you that grocery shopping in America is boring. At holiday time, Thanksgiving and Christmas, grocery stores in the United States offer special deals. Cranberry sauce is suddenly cheap. Sweet potatoes, a staple on the menu, are also pullers. Then there’s the promise of a reduced price or even free turkey. This can be an adventure.
The store whose coupon we pursued offered three different deals. If we spent $25, our holiday turkey would be 49 cents a pound. If we spent $50 the price would drop to 39 cents a pound. If we spent $100 the bird would be free.
We had no intentions of going for a free turkey. We live in a studio apartment with a small refrigerator. A typical holiday giant frozen turkey would not fit in the freezer compartment. With only two of us to eat it, a whole turkey would last for weeks. At least, after several meals followed by turkey fricassee and even turkey soup, we would be satiated on turkey for a whole year.

Features Harley L. Sachs At the height of the Cold War arms race between the United States and Soviet Union (USSR) there was a well-understood reality called MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. For anyone who fired a nuclear missile, whether from the USSR or the USA, it was well understood that retaliation would obliterate the attacker.

Features Harley L. Sachs Late on November 23, 1953 radar from Kinross airbase detected an unidentified flying object over Lake Superior. An F89 jet fighter with a crew of two, pilot Felix Moncla and radar observer Robert Wilson, were dispatched to investigate. At one point the radar images of the plane and the object appeared to merge and then they disappeared. What happened to the plane and the object it was sent to investigate has been a closely guarded secret for over 50 years.

Features Harley L. Sachs So you’ve “been there and done that”? Seen and done everything and have the dough to say the sky’s the limit on your next vacation? How about space?
While NASA struggles to complete a space station with what remains of its 20-year-old shuttle fleet, private investors are forging ahead with their own money. It’s a strange partnership: American and British entrepreneurs have teamed up with Russia to convert some of those menacing ICBMs, left over from the cold war, to civilian use.
On July 12 Bigelow Aerospace, using money from the sale of a chain of U.S. hotels, launched an inflatable space module to test the feasibility of what is to become a tourist attraction for the rich. Bigelow Aerospace, located in Las Vegas, is gambling on a plan to launch a string of sausage-like space modules in five years to accommodate space tourists.

Other Opinions Harley L. Sachs The story of the Tower of Babel applies today. The project was an attempt to reach heaven by building a high tower, a plan that failed when God made people all speak different languages. They could no longer work together. For a cohesive society, people must be able to speak the same language.
The Dutch have the right idea. Faced with a troubling influx of immigrants who want the benefits of life in Holland but do not learn Dutch, the country has changed the laws. If you want to stay in Holland and be a citizen you must learn Dutch. To not embrace the language and culture of your adopted land undermines it. We have that problem here.
English is now the official language for the state of Michigan. In the 1900s when this country had a huge influx of foreign immigrants those folks could not wait to learn English. Nobody wanted to be a “greenhorn.”
My mother was born in London and told us of a visit to an American farm. She asked what they did with all those beans and was told, “We eat what we can and what we can’t we can.” A friend explained, “Oh, they put them in tins.” Though my mother was English and knew the language, she didn’t know American.

Features Harley L. Sachs The burning of fossil fuels has two main byproducts: carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor. No one knows the effect of water vapor (clouds) on global warming, but the theory was that CO2 is a major contributor. CO2 emissions are the subject of the Kyoto treaty to limit emissions by industrial countries, especially the United States. Current research, however, suggests that basis may be false.
For several years the theory has been that increasing CO2 as the result of the burning of fossil fuels is warming up the earth. Turns out that assumption was a computer error. The latest conference in Montreal on climate change concludes that even a 400 percent increase in CO2 emissions will have such a small impact on world temperature that it can hardly be measured accurately. Oops. So what actually is warming up the earth?