Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2019 January 7

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January 7

Chief Engineer at Hughes Aircaraft at end of WWII

I have read that the Chief Engineer at Hughes Aircraft at the end of WWII suggested to Howard Hughes that he transition the company from the building aircraft to an electronics company (specifically focusing on radar, at least initially). If so, I think this fact and naming the Chief Engineer would make a significant contribution to the current article on Hughes Aircraft which at present simply states that after WWII the new Aerospace Division was headed by Ramo and Woolridge. The Chief Engineer made a significant contribution to redirecting Hughes from an aircraft company to an electronics (and ultimately) and Aerospace company. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Martyw999 (talk • contribs) 06:07, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Maybe, if you can find a valid source. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:59, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Have you checked the full-length books listed in our article's further reading material? Like articles on many subjects, our summary does not go into as much depth as a full-length scholarly textbook - nor even as far as a light-reading non-fiction book.

A few weeks ago, I picked up A Brief History of The Boeing Company. Now, I've read a lot of encyclopedias and a lot of books on aircraft and history, but this one book was among the most comprehensive and readable summaries of Boeing history I've found yet.

It would be wonderful if Hughes had ever published such a thorough history; but on account of their tumultuous reorganizations, it's probably unlikely that you'll even find a good summary on the corporate websites of the conglomerates that acquired the various branches of the former Hughes.

Some years ago, a co-worker had created a big wall-chart of M&A dating back to the early 20th century. I don't recall where they got their data, but I think it must have been superset material from the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. If you dig through the archived copies of that report, you can find an abbreviated wall-chart in Table 7-4; here's a PDF from archive.org.

Nimur (talk) 16:56, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Straight lines on the ocean floor

What is this? Is it something to do with the photo? Thank you. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 17:16, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

According to Google, these so called "ship tracks" are an artifact of the measuring process, and the incomplete data on ocean depth, see Google blogpost. - Lindert (talk) 17:27, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

[Edit Conflict] I think it likely that Google Maps display the topography of the ocean floor according to the best data available. For most of it, this will be limited to satellite surveys whose resolution is comparatively poor and which therefore yield a somewhat smoothed appearance. However, where marine survey ships have deployed with sonar or lidar arrays the resolution will be much finer and will show the ruggedness of the ocean floor better. These linear tracks will therefore be the paths where survey ships have operated; their varying widths will be as a result of different systems having different capabilities it terms of how far sideways they are able to scan. Further details may be found in or through Seafloor mapping. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.251.247 (talk) 17:35, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

See also Seafloor mapping and Bathymetry. Unfortunately, the first article is heavily weighted towards modern methods like satellites, which are of limited utility in mapping the deepest parts of the ocean, which still basically involves driving a boat across the surface of the water and sending soundings of some sort (usually something like a Multibeam echosounder) to do the measurements. Because of this, measurement artifacts get picked up in things like Google Maps. --Jayron32 17:35, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

That's exactly what the nazi alien ghost pirates in their undersea bases want us to believe... --Guy Macon (talk) 18:29, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Ah-ha. More swastikas. Just like on the moon. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:40, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

The lines are artifacts of determining depth using marine seismic soundings (sort of a glorified SONAR, only a lot bigger and more powerful).

A very thorough mathematical treatment of the ship track problem is reviewed in Eliminating Noise and Ship Tracks, an online excerpt from the excellent book Geophysical Image Estimation By Example (Claerbout, 2008). That webpage is the jumping-off point into a lot of difficult math and software, and cites a whole lot of research papers. If you're unfamiliar with marine sounding geometry, chapter 1 of Basic Earth Imaging covers that in great detail. We also have an illustrated article section, marine survey acquisition.

Professor Claerbout used to make all the summer-students design and implement physics-based image-processing algorithms to remove ship track artifacts from sea survey data. Regrettably, his students all graduated to lucrative careers in geophysical image-processing, instead of getting snagged by Google or its ocean map data vendor - so the ocean maps you see at zero cost on the internet are ... sub-standard. (Interestingly, when Google bought the remnants of the completely unrelated technology designed by the software engineering legend, James Gosling, he quit Google to go play with underwater acoustics, before he got bought out by Boeing). He wrote a lot about this on his blog, NightHacks.

Nimur (talk) 19:17, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Thank you very, very much everyone!!! Anna Frodesiak (talk) 19:20, 8 January 2019 (UTC)