USS Sturgis Ready for the Scrap Yard

I worked on the project performing MARSAME surveys on the USS Sturgis for the past several months.  This bit of history from WW-II and then the late 1960s to mid-1970s was an amazing vessel.  She was modified in the late 1960s and it is told that as a teenager, Jimmy Buffett worked on the conversion of the ship.  It was used in the Panama Canal Zone as a floating 10 MW power plant until 1977 and was towed back to the shipyard in Virginia.  The decontamination work was done in the Port of Galveston beginning in the spring of 2015 and was finished in August of this year.

WW-I Documentary by Peter Jackson

By the end of October, famed Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson will release an amazing documentary based on film clips from various sources on World War I.  The frames per second of the films have been enhanced using a computer algorithm, color has been added, and sound added. Jackson used lip reading experts to decipher what filmed individuals were speaking.  It is an amazing piece of work.

This blog format does not take advantage of the widescreen video format, so I recommend that you go to the Mail Online site to get a better view and to also read the article.  Click here.

Here is another clip:

Fukushima Tainted Wine in California

Radioactive fallout from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant on the north east coast of Japan crossed the Pacific ocean and settled on the vineyards of the California wine country and sample collected in recent years show about 2 times as much radioactive cesium (a fission product) as detected before the 2011 disaster.  Not that is in no measurable way harmful.  There is probably much less fission product activity today compared to the peak of the atmospheric nuclear weapons testing performed by the USA and USSR back in the 50's and early 60's.  Click here for an article in The Health Edge.  To view the report compiled by French scientists, click here.

Ektachrome Film - It's Back!

Well this is a pleasant surprise.  Kodak has revived production of Ektachrome 35-mm film.  Good thing I didn't pitch my Canon AE-1 system.  I also still have my Minolta DiMage Scan Dual III high resolution slide scanner.  Click here for the story in Popular Mechanics.  I just wish Kodak would consider bringing back Kodachrome, but that is probably asking too much.

USS Sturgis Barge is Headed to the Scrapyard

After almost 41 months, the decontamination & decommissioning cleanup project has been completed for the USS Sturgis in Slip 41 in the Port of Galveston.  The tugboats began the journey early in the morning of September 25, 2018.  Click here to read the article from the Houston Chronicle.