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• If you can find it in a Google search, then it's true.
• If you can't find it in a Google search, then it's not true.

Internet searches are replacing the fog on the horizon of truth with a list of possible answers. The most credible is the one with the best web site. Queries that come up empty are no longer explorations into the unknown; they're poorly phrased questions.

A leap of faith

If I can find it in a Google search, then it is true.

A logically consistent complement

If it is not true then i cannot find it in a Google search.

A formal fallacy

If I cannot find it in a Google search, then it is not true.

About Atlantics

In the summer of 1928, W. Starling Burgess, who would later design Ranger and two other J Boats that defended the America's Cup, sailed from yacht club to yacht club on Long Island Sound in a 30-foot prototype he called the Atlantic Coast One Design. Burgess' creation was intended to promote a class of fast boats that were identical for racing and could be daysailed as well. Eighty orders for the boat were taken that first summer, and the wooden hulls were built in production-line style at the German shipbuilding firm of Abeking and Rasmussen.

In March, 1929, the new owners gathered excitedly at New York's Harvard Club to formalize a class association. They voted to change the name of the boat from "Atlantic Coast One Design" to, simply, "Atlantic." Pequot YC in Southport, CT, whose members had purchased the first 20 Atlantics, offered to hold the first national championship that summer, and there was even a report that Cuba was planning to order four boats and hold a midwinter championship the next year. The class was off!

The new boats, shipped to the states on the decks of freighters, had been very well built, and the first summer of racing was a success. Remarked Everett B. Morris, the noted columnist of the New York Herald Tribune, "Theoretically, the Atlantics are planked with mahogany on oak ribs, but the more active these boats become, the stronger grows the belief that they are constructed of rubber." Twenty more boats were ordered that fall, and the class's first generation was built to its goal of 100 boats by the summer of 1930.

Atlantic racing flourished during the thirties and forties with the participation of such distinguished sailors as Bob Bavier, Clifford Mallory, Bus and Bob Mosbacher, Corny Shields, George Hinman and Briggs Cunningham. But by the early fifties, the boats were beginning to show their age. Fifteen of the original hundred had been lost in storms, and many of the rest required a good deal of bailing while racing. Something had to be done.

At the 25th annual Atlantic meeting in the fall of 1953, 12-Meter skipper Cunningham offered to put up $5,000 to help the class build a mold and a demonstration fiberglass boat. The Cape Cod Shipbuilding Company used Rumour, No. 27, to make a plug and attached the original keel, rudder, spars and hardware to a new fiberglass hull. Author John Hersey bought the revamped Rumour and raced her during the 1954 season to see how she compared with the wooden boats. The class wanted to be sure that the older boats would remain competitive. Hersey later wrote, "With her hull so close to the original design, the glass boat sails well in all weather.she takes chop in a seaway particularly well, without pounding, seeming to put a shoulder in and push through." The second generation of Atlantics was born, and the class became one of the first to convert to glass.

During all this time, no new Atlantics were built. The rumor mill had it that the design plans were destroyed when Abeking and Rasmussen was bombed during World War II.

It wasn't until 1962 that a boat with a sail number greater than 100 finally appeared. No. 101 was the first of a third generation of Atlantics that came out of a new mold that included the keel. Forty-one new boats have been built in the years since then, and the class has adopted a number of modifications to keep the boat modern and competitive. A new spinnaker design, with higher shoulders and greater area, appeared in 1965; aluminum spars were permitted in 1969; the jib became a deck-sweeper in 1973; in 1984 adjustable backstays were allowed. Each change has been made with careful attention to the strict one-design principles that have characterized the class since its inception.

Atlantics are still being raced competitively by owners at Cedar Point Yacht Club, Westport, Connecticut, Niantic Bay Yacht Club, Niantic, Connecticut, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and Blue Hill, Maine. The class holds an annual regatta--usually at Cedar Point or Niantic Bay, but this year in Maine for the first time.

A149 is under construction at Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co..

This year, August 7th, NBYC will be racing under the full moon. If you'd like to crew on an Atlantic this summer, and live anywhere near the Connecticut shore, write me at dowd08 @ atlantic.com.

About atlantic.com I registered the domain in 1993 and used it for many years in business as Atlantic Computing Technology Corporation. It is now dedicated to Atlantic Class racing boats and wanton raving until such time as I might be able to use it in business again. I've wrestled with three attempts to take it so far. Two of them where common thefts. The third was a petition to WIPO to claim that the domain was registered to extort a sale, to tarnish a mark, and without legitimate use. The claim was denied. The domain has a long-standing connection to me, business uses by me and a connection to Atlantic class sailboats, one of which I am an owner. —Kevin Dowd About kevindowd.com Kevin Dowd is my name.

Nuclear energy, wealth and being 'green'

A man in your village collects clams. If you want clams, you trade him something for them. You can find free clams just offshore. But the clams in the man's collection have higher value because they are on shore, all in one place; their organization has been increased by the man's work to gather them. The work the man performed came from directed energies of the man.

The clam gatherer may have eaten a few of the clams himself. These provide him the energy to gather more. The clams, on their own, obtained the energy to grow by eating other creatures. Those creatures got theirs from eating other things. Utimately, the food supply extends back to microscopic organisms that got their energy from the sun.

A Thousand Flowers will Bloom

Entropy is a term from thermodynamics that has been borrowed to describe disorder. Entropy in the universe is ever increasing; an untended house falls down; machines fail; food spoils.

You can find counter-examples: a flower blooms, a child is born, a building goes up. But unlike a gutter falling off the house, these things don't happen spontaneously. Rather, they are the result of intentional applications of work that result in local reductions in entropy, even as the rest universe tends toward disorder.

Swimming Pools, Movie Stars

Some clams go undiscovered. And some of the energy of the sun is perserved. It collects in sediments. These become the sources of fossil fuels. The chemical bonds contained within oil and coal are potential energy that can reduce entropy on local bases, particularly through manufacturing or constructive labor. Much of the wealth on the planet has come from the organizing work of applied fossil fuel energy.

Fossil fuels have always been cheap because no human wealth has been brokered in their creation; they represent eons of captured sunlight, found buried. When they are traded, the price reflects their abundance more than their potential for entropy reduction. We burn fossil fuels in many ways that create no wealth at all, such as heating our homes or driving automobiles. If oil were sold at a price efficiently commensurate with its wealth creating potential, we wouldn't be able to afford it for other uses.

You Can't Eat Gold

Localized reductions in entropy, such as a dozen clams, a working automobile or a bunch of flowers are elements of wealth. But all of them are subject to the effects of entropy; flowers wilt, machines fail, clams die. Accordingly, they are neither good vehicles for storing nor transporting wealth. For that, we use currencies.

Currencies have value by common agreement. For instance, the paper and ink of a dollar is worthless without faith that it can be traded for goods. The energy that has been expended to mine gold and organize it into bricks, or to create a painting is proportionately low, relative to the values ascribed.

Wealth is Fleeting

Wealth is always slipping away due to the effects of entropy. Sometimes, we don't have enough energy to maintain our standard of living. Think about the clam gatherer again: if the sun dims one day, there will be fewer microscopic organisms and fewer clams. The gatherer will have less to trade. He will neglect to replace excess belongings as they succumb to entropy. Eventually, he will reach a new balance between encroaching disorder in his surroundings and the resources he has to combat it. In the end, his wealth is decreased because the sun is dimmed.

Whenever energy becomes more scarce, or its price relative to its ability to perform work become narrower, there will be a general reduction in wealth.

I couldn't give it away, so I sold it

The cost of pulling oil from the ground has not increased proportionally to the cost per barrel. Accordingly, there is a growing transfer of wealth taking place, in favor of oil producers. As the wealth moves upstream, the differences in cost of the energy and the value of work it does creating local reductions in entropy become narrower.

Other economies may capture some of the value of the energy by applying it to do physical work--particularly for manufacturing. Information economies, however, do a more fleeting job of harnessing energy to create local reductions in entropy; information is specialized and typically has limited time-value. Any use of energy in ways that don't do lasting work, e.g. heating, simply become expensive.

Our Friend, the Atom

Wealth is fundamentally derived from energy. If you wish to accomplish something, you must have the means. This includes helping people, providing food, medicine, education and a dignified human existence. When energy becomes scarce, or its price rises too high, the human condition will suffer in response to reduced means. All the 'green' initiatives in the world won't improve your life. You must have energy.

Nuclear energy is the only source we have that doesn't ultimately come from the sun. And, with the right engineering, its value proposition is enormous: limitless energy for limitless wealth. This will be good for mankind.

By the way, I lived across the bay from Millstone nuclear power plant for many years. It's a horrible eyesore, and I even had ready buyers pull back from intentions to buy my house because of it. It's my hopeful conjecture that nuclear power doesn't have to be so ugly. I once visited a plant in Halden, Norway where the reactor was buried in a hill...

Portions copyright © 2008, Kevin Dowd

My opinion about the Roku Soundbridge

I have the greatest 'radio' on the planet. It's the Roku Soundbridge Radio. It takes Internet streams from thousands of stations all over the world. Your computer can do that too. But having the radio in a form factor that sits comfortably in the kitchen makes all the difference. And the sound is fantastic. I've had mine for six months and haven't lost any enthusiam for it.

Mobile WiMax is going to make the same functionality possible in an automobile. It will make satellite radio what Prodigy was compared to an Internet connection.

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