I'm exploring. This looks promising and I like the designs on offer. I'll play with it to get a better feel for its appearance and the features it offers. One blog is not going to be enough, especially if I invite my family to join me in it.
My interests - writing of course, or I wouldn't be here - digital photography - reading, especially science fiction and anything of the calibre of Patrick O'Brian's naval historical novels, the gruesome pathologists' stories of Reichs and Cornwell. I fancy the idea of being a popular science writer but have yet to prove myself capable of it.
I know my grammar and spelling well enough and have done a considerable amount of writing of manuals in the past, starting with an excellent training in the RAF, including a year's Staff College course, and have had articles published in special interest groups. I'm working on a book for windsurfers at present. Its theme is the presentation of the science behind the sport in a form simple enough to demolish arguments that the subject is too complex for windsurfers.
This attitude is partly the fault of scientists who notoriously fail to appreciate the difficulties that most of us have in using mathematics as a tool for understanding physics. And having been a professional pilot for most of my working life, I was surprised to find that the much simplified aerodynamics knowledge that pilots need to acquire is barely known at all in windsurfing.
The amount of science we need for engaging with the wind and water on our sailboards is no more complex than the fact that if you press down on one end of a seesaw, the other end goes up - yes really! Most of it we all learn as we grow up, and we simply need to have it put in context to be able to start making profitable use of our knowledge.
But even those who realise - usually as a sudden revelation - that they do understand the clumsily taught mechanics find themselves frustrated by lack of information about either the forces that are acting on their equipment, or that are available to them to control the manoeuvring of that equipment. It is a surreal situation. Nothing at all is taught about hydrodynamic forces, and the teaching on aerodynamics is crude and incomplete. Some of the forces that continuously affect the performance of a sailboard have never been mentioned in my hearing in the twenty years since I took my first lesson. And there is to my knowledge still no source of this type of information available to windsurfers. I aim to fill that gap by one means or another.
It may be that publishing this news in its own blog may be the best way to present it. Most windsurfers are happy to use windsurfing forums to discuss the sport and I noted recently that there are plenty of questions on the subject but still almost no informed anwers forthcoming. I see no reason why they should not be both able and willing to use a well-designed blog as a reference tool.
The technical matters are only part of the problem. The whole syllabus of windsurfer training needs to be be discussed and the levels of difficulty evened out. While the relatively simple science of fluid dynamics is badly neglected because the designers of the syllabus do not know the subject well enough to recognise the problems it causes, they insist on a knowledge of meteorology that is both disproportionate and beyond the capability of all but the best of their instructors.
I see the blog, with its ability to cause and record discussion on a specific subject as offering the potential to be very useful to those who really want to know about the subjects it discusses. Let's see how it goes. I'll post my first article shortly, describing how pilots (and later, windsurfers) have been using a defective explanation for the generation of lift for almost a century. The article also provides details of the replacement explanation, showing what happens when an attempt is made to explore a dynamic situation such as sailing or flying wihtout references to the forces driving it.
