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| February 1 2007 |
LEDs in the News:
Boston
Security Scare triggered by the "promotional item" of today's
great image. Todd Vanderlin snagged one two weeks ago and posted the
great
location shot from under a bridge, in his blog. Contrast with the detailed daylight
on-the-bench
view showing the its four threatening Duracells. (So thankful to Andy
that I already know all about these Mooninites and the ATHF.)
Wikipedia: Boston Mooninite Scare
|
| January 24, 2007 |
A trio of great photos of the beautiful McNaught comet,
visible now in the Southern Hemisphere, even in
the daytime:
Evening
in Chile, at
night
in Australia and during
Sunset
in New Zealand.
From a student today I learned that Indian Vegetarian
cuisine includes dairy, but garlic and onions are
forbidden because they "are not considered conducive
for spiritual progress" due to odors (and other factors
not yet entirely clear to me). Although I may have the
occasional no-meat day, sometimes as frequently as once
a week, I'm unquestionably omnivorous. But being
vegetarian has always been an admirable goal, especially
when it's stated as not eating anything with a face. On
the other hand, the strict no-animal-products Vegan diet
has always seemed too extreme to me, like the Islamic
notion of fasting with its prohibition on even
water, during Ramadan, countering any health benefit
and making that ritual a kind of flagellantism.
|
| January 21, 2007 |
The phrase for today is
Rodina-Mat, Russian for Mother Motherland. Although it refers to
their enormous statues, no better day for me to consider things
Ma then today, my mother's 80th birthday. A lot of the following
linkage is into Wikipedia, which is admittedly getting kinda
lame.
I became aware of the
biggest
one doing research on Stalingrad recently, then
encountered the lesser but still huge
statue
in Kiev in a photo in a recent New Yorker
(part of a current show by the photographer, but I neglected
to note his name). Both commemorate the Great Patriotic
War, naturally, as does the relatively puny
memorial
in the former eastern zone of Berlin, which
I saw from a distance one rainy afternoon in 1994. That
soldier's only 12 meters tall (all heights listed here omit
the pedestal) whereas
the big
Mamayev Kurgan on the Volga is 85m. She reminds me of
Franz Kafka's vision of the Statue of Liberty, who brandished
a sword instead of the torch. Note that if you scroll down,
that last link has a view from the top, reminding me of my
1977 visit to the 18.5m
Statue
of Bavaria in Munich, where I encountered a pair of Teutonic
lads up top who'd never heard of the 46m Statue of Liberty.
Wrapping up these figures, the
Kiev
statue is 62 meters, and
this
comparative diagram includes the big Jesus which
overlooks Rio.
'Nazi'
Raccoons on the March in Europe -- the non-native
carnivore was released into the wild there on Goering's
command, in 1937.
|
| January 19, 2007 |
Gah, sick again, another cold. Timing couldn't be better,
since I have the whole weekend to lay low and recover; but
as my last rhinovirus encounter was only three months ago,
doesn't seem fair. The infection vector is of course my new
classes, I'm in close proximity now to so many people, many
of whom have young children. The widest variety occurs
Thursdays when I help out with three classes which pass
through the computer lab, everybody running the powerful
Rosetta Stone
program. (There, it's only English, but local libraries have
it available in all languages, where I've played around
with the Japanese and German variants.) One Beginning ESL
teacher requested that I sit with a bashful Chinese woman who
I don't think had ever used a PC before, leastwise a mouse.
Said teacher, less patient than I, commented in an aside about
how it might be a hopeless task, but by the end of the hour
she was pointing&clicking like the rest of 'em, which was
rather gratifying.
Good "Cult Leader" column in this week's Metro where
Steve Palopoli offers up instructions on
How
to Watch an Old Movie. Says
a lot of people just
won't watch "olden" movies which was definitely the
attitude I'd developed, but then fortunately, my cinematic
consciousness was raised about age 21 due to various influences
and opportunites I had in college.
A few days ago, heard about the Chinese last week taking out one
of their old weather satellites with a ground-launched missile
on the BBC, and finally, NPR reported the story today. In
Aviation Week and Space Technology see
Chinese
Asat Alarms Washington for more details. All the reportage
says recon satellites could be targets but don't mention how
the ISS and the shuttle would also be in range.
|
| January 15, 2007 |
|
MLK Day -- and for the first time, didn't have to work!
But unfortunately, I'm not being paid for holidays
anymore... Contemplating another trip to Japan, in
August (I've never been there in the summertime, and
I'll be free for weeks then). The itinerary would be a
big triangle between Tokyo, Kanazawa and Niigata
prefecture. Education in the language continues; now
rather than no-pressure Adult Ed I'm in an undergraduate
course at the same community college where I took a few
programming classes in the final years of the last
century.
|
| January 14, 2007 |
In today's SJ Mercury News,
Revolution
in a Bowl concerns Momofuku Ando, the instant
ramen he invented, and how it's a Silicon Valley staple
among techie folk. On the rare occasions when I eat that
stuff I eschew his Cup Noodle in favor of the
less-ubiquitous Sapporo Ichiban brand, learning of its
superiority in Sarah Dyer's
Action
Girl comic book.
Max Headroom
recently came up in discussion. Coincidentally, a
Damn Interesting
post
about an enigmatic 1987 jamming incident featuring a
Max surrogate who briefly appeared one night
on two Chicago television channels.
|
| January 11, 2007 |
In Psychology Today,
The
Ideological Animal reports on the differences between us and them:
Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more
clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents,
maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives
are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly
lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books
cover a greater variety of topics.
|
| January 10, 2007 |
Do you suffer from
adultitus?
I now have two classes, and today had interesting brushes
with history in each one. My new class is just Conversation
which is so easy, just sitting around a table, talking (although
I can't resist my pedantic urges, jumping up often to write
vocabulary on the board). Hard to believe this introvert's
now paid to initiate discussion...but anyway, one of my students
is a wacky, extroverted German woman (whose hometown is near to
where I broke my leg) who at one point was telling the South Korean
guy details of what living through reunification is like. (For
one, a 10% tax increase on everyone in the West, which funds
infrastructure updates in the East.) My other class is a rerun
of the one I taught last term, with a new batch of students.
Current ethnic mix is one Indian (who rides her bike to school
wearing her sari), five Japanese, a Colombian, five
Chinese (including the one male in the group, a young guy with
spikey hair who's a busboy in a nearby dim sum restaurant), two
Koreans, and four Russians. Last term, one of my Russians was an
elderly, semi-annoying lady who'd emmigrated to Israel when
that door opened in the early '80s. Now I have a trio like her I
think of as The Three Babushkas. Only one of them is annoying in
that same way, demanding more of my attention than I care
to give -- but today, she was telling me about her memories
of the Volga River burning, (I suppose from spilled fuel
or burning wreckage) during the Great Patriotic War, as
she lived downriver from
Stalingrad
when the battle there was raging.
You dinosaur internauts reading this with IE have noticed a
subtle change in this page's appearance, I hope --the font's
no longer too big. This fix was accomplished by adding a
table { font-size: 100%; }
directive to my style sheet.
|
| January 7, 2007 |
|
The movie yesterday haunts me with all manner of new
and familiar dystopian visions of the near future. If
you want to preserve your optimism, skipping Kunstler's lengthy
Forecast
For the Year Ahead would be a good idea. On the
other hand, Rebecca Solnit's hopeful
View
From the Grass (a speculative look back from the
same year in which "Children of Men" is set) is so
optimistic, many would characterize it as a
naïve pipe-dream.
|
| January 6, 2007 |
In
his
Thursday column Jon Carroll held forth on "Casablanca"
and "Children of Men." Coincidentally, I noticed it in a section
of discarded newsprint, while waiting for my slice to get crispy
at Pizza My Heart, just after viewing the gripping new film.
The Pilot
finally
weighs in on the "airplane taking off from a
conveyor belt" question, and thankfully agrees that
no, it couldn't become airborne. Seems like those
who conclude otherwise get hung up on the feasibility
of a conveyor belt matching the aircraft's speed and
acceleration -- agreed, probably not possible; but that's
not what the question's about. Note how
kottke's
in the contrary camp; his blog's where I first got wind
of this thought experiment, although he sources
The
Straight Dope (and surprisingly, it even confuses Cecil).
|
| January 5, 2007 |
|
Greetings, reader. Thanks for stopping by. Apologies for
the offerings here being so paltry of late, but I'm
weary of blogging, maybe due to a bit of post-holiday
let-down.
|
| January 4, 2007 |
|
Yahoo!News
photo -- the
Stormtrooper Legion in the Rose Bowl Parade.
|
| December 30, 2006 |
Marking the unlikely trio of 2006 year-end deaths:
James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein, the
latter hanged at dawn on the Islamic holy day Eid.
It made some best-of lists, but certainly not
mine -- here's 'Appreciating Great Trash's
"F"
review of Flight 93. Follow along if you
want the sort of penetrating, readable movie reviews
like you don't find here. My best five of cinema
includes the usual unknown titles, seen this
year at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley
(instead of the usual Stanford Theatre):
- The Young Girls of Rochefort
- Little Man, What Now?
- Ed Norton double feature:
Down in the
Valley (until
it was clear Harlan wasn't) and
- The Illusionist
- Little Miss Sunshine
The Economist provides a
survey
of Russian airports.
|
| December 17, 2006 |
Friday marked the end of my cushy software job, with its
easy internet access. Now it's a time of transition, so
be warned -- changes are inevitable, after a brief
holiday hiatus.
At Slate, a short slide show --
Tiffany
the Architect. Also,
an
update on Hollywood's progress making a film of
A Confederacy of Dunces.
|
| December 14, 2006 |
Last day of class: the party. Almost all will
move on, to be replaced by a new batch of students
in January. Sad to see 'em go.
Persephone,
Pomegranates, and the source of the Seasons.
(Warning: Greek mythology. Found while
searching on how to juice a pomegranate.)
Photos:
building a Danish offshore wind-farm.
|
| December 12, 2006 |
Readers the New Yorker cartoons know Roz Chast.
She's just a few months younger than I, suppose that's
why I can relate, sometimes, to her cultural references.
The recent Cartoon Issue had a two-pager called "Turning
Japanese" about her journey when an Unknown Force drew her
into the manga section of a bookstore. It provoked
this
question on AskMe for which I scanned in the
pertinent panels, and posted 'em in a
new page. Inscrutable? You bet.
Ten
Bible verses never preached, and the
Ten
Most Bizarre People on Earth.
|
| December 8, 2006 |
CBS editor apologizes, in
Good
Riddance To The Gingrichites --
The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of
Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of
weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest
legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years,
the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not
something we're supposed to do.
I disagree, Dick -- that's exactly what the
Fourth Estate is supposed to do.
The Washington Post reports that
Japan
Plans to Scrutinize Restaurant Offerings Abroad.
At last, a catchy term for the phenomenon of
inauthentic Japanese cuisine: Pseudo Sushi.
Fanatics
killing off Hitler's special beetle, which only
lives in a single cave, in Slovenia.
Photos of
shipwrecks
on the coast of Mauritania.
Michael Miller provides
Ten
Tips for Smarter Google Searches.
In the current New Yorker their film reviewer I
like, Anthony Lane,
holds
forth on Walt Disney at length, mentioning Neil Gabler's
new book which sounded fascinating when he was promoting
it
on "Fresh Air" in October.
|
| December 7, 2006 |
A handsome portrait, altho I wish somebody'd yanked
down my shirt, to straighten out the wrinkles. During
the mid-class break they were playing with each other's
hair and my remaining Persian student was wearing her wig
that day. One thing led to another, and then the cell phones
appeared, amidst much hilarity and giggling. (Compelled
me to master the image-capture features of my own new
handy,
once I got home.) Back when I had that much, my hair
never looked this good!
|
| December 5, 2006 |
A random scan from a library book
of matchbook cover art, published 1990.
Richard Cohen is a perpetual Washington Post
columnist who's irritated me for a long time even
while I often enjoy his writing. Now he's shown up in
Slate with a fine essay:
Is
James Bond Responsible for the Iraq War?
It's not new, but in season -- instead of
Charlie Brown, here's the
Pumpkins in
Smashing
Peanuts -- the sort of thing Lawrence Lessig
is talking about in Free Culture
(big .pdf)
which is initially confusing because in his intro, the author
describes the impact of the Wright Bros' invention as well as
Edwin Armstrong's development of FM radio, quoting Lawrence
Lessing's 1956 bio of the latter,
Man of High Fidelity.
The Cato Institute provides a map of
Botched
Paramilitary Police Raids, an epidemic of
"Isolated Incidents."
|
| December 3, 2006 |
That rainy May day when I first visited Moffett Field
in 1997, I couldn't help but make an unauthorized detour to
Hangar
One -- at the time, it seemed to be unattended, and I managed
to find my way inside. Ended up working practically in the
structure's shadow for eight years. But they closed off the
historic site behind chain-link fencing a couple years ago
(since it's allegedly dangerous with chemicals). Here's
my final insider photo, snapped at an optimum morning hour
when the sun's angle highlights the corrugated siding.
|
| November 28, 2006 |
My time on
the
base is winding down fast, after almost a decade; today,
I turned in my keys to the friendly guy at the Lock Shop.
For an hour in the morning and another in the afternoon,
he's available in the little office of the tiny building
devoted to his purpose. I never learned his name, but once,
late in the last century, he appeared at my office door,
asking "These your keys?" As a matter of fact they were
and I was glad they finally turned up even though by then
I'd replaced the lot. A couple weeks before somehow they'd
fallen out of my pocket while I was riding my bicycle home,
late one autumn afternoon. An evil person found them and,
after removing my Swiss army knife, tossed the rest into
the bushes outside the cafeteria. A nicer, more with-it
person found them later whereupon Mr Lock Shop eventually
matched the US Govt numbers on my office keys to me.
The
beautiful night New York.
|
| November 24, 2006 |
Hoping you&yours having festive holiday
weekend. Three things I've learned over the
past few days:
- The kids call my school
"Tino" -- found this archaic routered wood sign,
labeling a bulletin board outside the cafeteria.
Wondered if the nerdiest of their numbers have
ever thought of it as "Teen Know" -- somebody
must've, in some previous era.
- Japanese vocab: kaiju. The
most famous Kaiju is Godzilla and other well known Kaiju
include King Kong, Gamera, and Mothra.
- Hot
Ice -- a recent discovery, water freezes
into room-temperature ice when 6 million volts are
involved.
At the Only Movie Review Website Aimed Expressly at
the WRONG-Thinking, el Santo does one of my favorites,
F°451.
|
| November 19, 2006 |
Beautiful site by Bertrand Celce, a world traveler and
photographer. It's been cool-cloudy here for the past
couple days and the weather & times trigger a
yearning for Tokyo -- his photos
(like Shinjuku
Girls) take me there. Also liked the China images,
and don't miss
DDR
in the 1980s.
Better
map, with commentary, from the Zompist.
|
| November 3, 2006 |
Primary
and early e-voting problems point to a gathering storm.
Read it & weep. Also, at the BBC,
'Only
50 years left' for sea fish. Optimistic response: It's
not too late to reverse the trend. As if. In more cheery
news, NASA management reversed an earlier decision this
week and announced a new repair mission to the Hubble Space
Telescope, rather than letting it die. To commemorate, its
top
100 photos.
The USPS issued a set of DC Superhero stamps this year, but
it didn't really concern me. Next year, however, they're doing
a
set for Marvel and that's rather exciting -- it includes
three Spideys, and two of the Silver Surfer! Also an early
Fantistic Four cover featuring the FantastiCar, which is rumored
to appear in their next movie, along with the Surfer plus the
wedding of Reed and Sue (even as Sue just left Reed in the
fascinating
Civil
War ongoing in the contemporary Marvel universe).
Wonderful
Astounding-Analog
cover archive. My father has had a subscription to this
magazine for decades, and I'd save his discarded issues
during my early-60s Sci-Fi awakening, years before I could
manage actually reading their content. Favorites among
those covers included the
Sandworm
and
first
image of Arrakis from when the serialization of
Frank Herbert's Dune began in 1963; as well as
Harry Harrison's
Time-Machined
Saga.
More
about that enormous slide installation at the
Tate Modern, in London.
|
| October 31, 2006 |
Here we are, at the black & orange
harbinger of the red & green holiday
season. Next year they're tampering with Daylight
Savings again, shifting the switch back to Standard
Time to the weekend after Halloween.
DST
Incidents and Anecdotes hails this as a good thing,
kids trick-or-treating before sunset, but
c'mon -- where's the fun in that? Today's photo shows
some Japanese chochin lanterns tinted for the
season and hanging from a tree, outside a Palo Alto
residence.
Retrocrush has a show-and-tell of the
worst
Halloween costumes of all time, the cheap
store-bought kind.
A very amusing impersonation staged by the pranksters
at Improv Everywhere --
when
Chekov gave a reading at the Union Square Barnes
& Noble.
|
| October 27, 2006 |
On the House posts a
rant
about the proliferation of flat-screen TVs in
restaurants. This scourge infected my favorite
local noodle house (also during the World Cup) and
it's not so much a visual problem for me as
an audio. And unfortuanately, the placement of the
infernal device isn't within surepticious range of
my TV-B-Gone.
A couple more good rants, on things political:
Tuesday's
Jon Carroll column, and a fresh and wide-ranging
Salon
interview with the noted amazon Camille Paglia, who's
been absent from my screen in recent years. Finally, Letter
From Here ponders an
October
surprise as Halloween nightmare. Does sound like
they're preparing for something, perhaps a symbolic raid
on a uranium processing facility.
Moving on to things technological, Miguel Carrasco describes the
Ten
Biggest Computer Flops of all time and at Damn Interesting,
the Last
Great Steam Car.
|
| October 25, 2006 |
As promised, here's a photo of my class. (It's a thumbnail,
of course -- click for bigery.) The students
come and go but almost everyone showed up today; my
roster's currently about 30 and the ethnic numbers here
total four Japanese, two Russians (although one of those
migrated to Israel many years ago), one Mexican (Alberto,
in the middle), one each from Chile, Ethiopia, India
and Iran; four Koreans and the rest Chinese. The J- and
K-Girls are flashing their traditional peace-sign for
the camera. (Why they do? Some answers
here.)
Shuttle
launch photos taken from a
WB-57
high-altitude research plane.
Cover story in the current Wired --
Battle
of the New Atheism by Gary Wolf.
|
| October 20, 2006 |
Hot Rod tabulates the
Top
40 Car Movies. I'd add "Badlands" for Martin
Sheen and Sissy Spacek in the '59 Cadillac, driving
across the prairie.
Jen
links
to a video of Slade, in concert, worth it just for the
fashions. Can't explain why I acquired
Sladest
in 1974 -- never heard their music on the radio (even
though they were huge in Britain, at the time), but I
ended up playing the record lots, although my buddies
couldn't relate. (But then, they often found my musical
tastes a bit extreme.) The LP was long gone by the time
Quiet Riot had a hit stateside covering
Cum
Feel the Noize ten years later, when I advised my
sister how it wasn't their song, but lacked any proof.
Finally, here it is, on YouTube. Listen and Obey.
Keith Olbermann:
Beginning
of the End of America. IMO we've been ending for
decades... but if you can avoid the media, things
don't seem bad at all.
|
| October 17, 2006 |
California Trees in the News:
Coast
Redwoods (a new tallest was just discovered, and
named "Hyperion") and
Palms
("vanishing" from LA). I think the latter's a kind of
ignorant article -- it discusses a fungus attacking the
Date Palms, which are the more full-bodied type with the
thatched trunks. But the more common LA palm, which way
out-number the Date, are the tall, slender
Washingtonia
Palms (which remind fans of
The
Lorax of Truffula Trees).
Also in the news, from the BBC:
Human
species 'may split in two'.
|
| October 16, 2006 |
From today's news, an announcement by an unnamed
director of national intelligence:
"Analysis of air samples collected on October 11, 2006,
detected radioactive debris which confirms that North
Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion."
But was there fission? If not, this detonation would
definitely qualify as a 'dirty bomb' -- hence, a "nuclear"
explosion. Seeking detailed data for comparisons (especially
with those tests performed by the former atomic club newbie,
Pakistan) the
Nuclear
Forces Guide has all the numbers.
Beware
Empires in Decline, a short essay by Michael Klare.
Yesterday, I linked to a new page of Firefox tips and
proselytizing where I blithely claim of no more
difficulties with sites refusing that browser and
insisting on Microsoft's IE.
This
Page Requires Internet Explorer - Worst Offenders
has a long list of comments, submissions for this
category, interesting to both Firefox afficienados as
well as the Apple folk. Banks seem to get the most
mentions (making it obvious that I'm a late adaptor
who doesn't pay bills online).
|
| October 15, 2006 |
From the Burke Museum of the Universty of Washington --
Myths, Misconceptions, and Superstitions about Spiders.
Some new products:
Tiles
coated with titanium dioxide, a pollution-fighting
technology that is activated by ambient daylight. The
One-Click
Butter Cutter -- brilliant! For swimming fun, the
Inflatable Iceberg. An
Instant
Building for emergencies. And for those who want
to live on the road but can't afford an RV, Jay Baldwin
Design presents the amazingly spacious
Quickup
Camper shell for your pickup truck.
One more, from a list of
Firefox
extensions for geeks -- Copy
URL, a great timesaver for a by-hand HTML
coder, like myself. You folks still using the IE browser,
don't know how you can stand it -- at the library recently
I did a bit of web-surfing with it, and the Flash ads are
as out-of-control as the animated-GIF banners used to be.
And I find the lack of tabs incredibly frustrating (although
I hear this feature will be available in IE7). Since you
might be unaware of what I'm babbling about here, check
the upper right corner of this window. Is the lower-case,
blue "e" up there? Then you're using Microsoft's Internet
Explorer, the browser used by the vast (though shrinking)
majority of web-surfers. Just put together a
new page describing how
I utilize the benefits of the Firefox browser, how
you can upgrade (probably even at work, where you
might think you can't) and why.
|
| October 13, 2006 |
A flickr set documenting
a group's hike out to
the Bridge
to Nowhere in the Angeles Forest. (Most of the Bridge
photos are on the second page.) Upon reflection,
I'm amazed I found the thing, whenever that was (around
1990) and wish I'd taken along my camera. My visit was
just after a minor earthquake, which had knocked down
fresh rocks I'd encounter, littering the trail (where
there was a trail!) -- so glad I missed their falling.
And since the route involves fording a creek at least a
dozen times each way, a good pair of hiking boots was
ruined by this trek. Although of smaller scale, this
bridge is quite similar in design to the Bixby Bridge
on Highway 1 in Big Sur. You'll have no trouble finding
online info about that one, but I've searched in vain
previously for Bridge to Nowhere linkage, so I'll post
a little more detail here, an excerpt from an April
1989 Los Angeles Herald Examiner clipping
stored in my bulging California file:
This bridge, erected in 1936, served the East Fork Road
until March 1938 when a massive debris flow, launched by
one of the heaviest rains ever recorded in Southern
California, roared down the canyon. This unimaginably
powerful flood completely obliterated, wholesale, miles
of highway above and below the Narrows, yet, incredibly
left the bridge unscathed and unattached.
On one end, it's hard to picture a road at all -- it
butts up against a mountainous slope.
The Halloween season is upon us, a time I've grown
to dislike in my dotage, mostly for aesthetic reasons.
(As it's also one of the best times to travel, I often
arrange to be abroad during the festivities; not
this year, unfortunately.) Many can't relate to my
displeasure, just as I don't understand the loathing
some feel for certain fonts, like Lauren and her list of the
Seven
Worst.
|
| October 11, 2006 |
My early years here in Silicon Valley during the
Internet boom were spent within walking distance of
a branch of Tower Records. I considered myself fortunate
to be so close, and shopped there often. But then I
discovered Amoeba up in the City (as well as the superb
CD and video selection at the local library) and gradually
stopped spending money at Tower -- visits to the latter
instead involving extended browsing of the books and
magazines. The past few times, the place has resembled
a ghost town, and the writing's been on the wall for a
while now -- here, the ultimate result, the death throes
of a great American business writ large on a hand-held
sign on el Camino. Another local business is booming,
however -- they were in the news yesterday for paying
billions of dollars (!) to purchase YouTube. I've only
been to Google once, and never inside -- that time, we
were scoping out the territory at lunch since a
co-worker had an interview there the next day. Here's a
slideshow:
Life
inside the Googleplex.
Despite all the media hysteria, I'm skeptical about the success
of the North Korean bomb test -- by all accounts, it was
too small. Less than a kiloton? Oh, be real. Before Trinity
in 1945, they blew up a thousand pounds of dynamite nearby,
as a benchmark, creating the unit for measuring atomic bomb
force. The blast of the Trinity device (the first Plutonium
'implosion' bomb) was estimated at 20 kilotons, whereas the
Uranium 'gun' bomb dropped on Hiroshima only yielded
15. (Of course these first bombs were minute in comparison
with what came later.) So I agree with US intelligence sources
which speculate that the North Korean explosion was a large
conventional blast intended to trigger a plutonium device,
which failed to detonate. (Curiously, I've so far only read
of this assessment at the far-right media mouthpieces of
Fox News and the
Washington
Times.) To see a photo of a multple kiloton non-nuclaer
explosion, check the Wikipedia entry on the June 1985
Minor
Scale test.
Two new visions of Art, in London:
Walk
on water describes an installation in a flooded church, and
the one at the Tate sounds like fun:
five
giant slides visitors can ride down.
|
| October 9, 2006 |
Two glass links:
Ever heard of Canary Glass? I've seen samples in
antique stores -- it's a kind of yellowish-green. Also
known as
Vaseline
glass -- that's a collector's site, with a banner of a neon
sign photo. But nowhere do they identify the neon; I guess it's
up to me. It used to be known as Airplane Green, which is what
you get when you put the standard 'clear blue' mixture of Neon
and Argon gas (with some Mercury vapor) into a tube made with
this colored glass -- glass tinted by the addition of Uranium
(which is why this glass is now a collector's item). If no
metal's added to glass, its color is that default beer-bottle
brown, but Lead makes it clear, Gold makes it red, Copper, green,
and Cobalt, blue. If you know me well, you're familiar with my
cobalt glass fixation --
here's
a source which sells rough-cut boulders of the stuff,
by the pound. (There's a quarter-ton minimum.)
Geoff summoned me up to the City yesterday to attend the
recent Burning Man
DeCom in the industrial
Dogpatch district, which was fun (except for the volume and
density of the music). Marlene attended the real deal again,
and I rather like her
Lamplighters
photo -- it's medieval, other-worldly. Many more great
pictures in her report; don't miss the Belgians'
Waffle.
An
animated
GIF of cats worth spreading around, just for laffs.
Or maybe not.
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| October 6, 2006 |
I've been back in The Village, engaged in a periodic review
of the old videotapes. For in-depth criticism and analysis, see
Anorak's
Guide to "The Prisoner."
Was fortunate in catching the recent American
RadioWorks program,
Japan's
Pop Power. The associated web page has bonus imagery
replete with a chibi-style manga version of host Ray Suarez.
It's not all fun and games in Akihabara, however --
Youths
arrested for 'otaku hunting' is a local news article
from last week.
In the Atlantic Monthly, a long essay by Matthew
Crawford on the decline of Shop, and why that's a problem --
Shop
Class as Soulcraft. He goes on to show how thinking
was removed from blue-collar and now white-collar jobs,
turning professionals into clerks -- very interesting.
Do
You Know What Lives In Your Eyelashes? We don't like
it, but there they are.
|
| October 3, 2006 |
Gah... was kept awake in the night due to an ominous
scratchy in my throat, and then today, development of
a runny nose -- think I'm coming down with something.
To boost my immune system I just sautéed up
some fresh garlic and shitake mushrooms, which may
help ward off the illness. I can't be sick now -- I
don't know how to arrange a substitute yet!
Milestone: Received my first teaching paycheck
today. I've been paid to tutor previously, but until
this 'gig' all of my former standing-up-in-front
classroom experience has been strictly volunteer.
Lecturing about comparative and superlative adjectives
yesterday, writing Bad, Worse and Worst on the board, I
almost began describing the sight of Michael Jackson's
"Bad" in a display next to Weird Al Yankovic's "Even
Worse" but didn't since the explanation would take too
long and even then, they wouldn't all get it. Weird Al
is still in good form, however, and made my weekend, his
hilarious new
'White
and Nerdy' video.
Willamette Weekly reviewer
pans
the "Too Much Coffee Man" opera (but everybody else
seemed to like it).
|
| September 29, 2006 |
Valuca's
Strange
Clouds -- mostly Lenticular but also some Wave,
Mammatus and a Nacreous. (Just one huge page of beautiful
photos.)
Smoker's Style's
Manners
Graphic Gallery is a series of 41 peculiar
cartoon-diagrams from a Japanese campaign to
educate inconsiderate cigarette smokers, in both
English and nihongo.
Scalzi echoes my sentiments about the "enemy
combatent" bill:
On
Moral Cowardice. Greg Saunders
profiles
the worst Democrats who voted for it (many with
no apparent political need to cave).
|
| September 25, 2006 |
Bet you didn't know
Jesus
is buried in Japan. Or maybe it's his brother -- the
story's kinda murky, and not all that old.
Willie
Nelson's stash. Also,
Growing
pains by Brian Whitaker. And that new commercial,
Pete's
Couch.
If you've ever read Doctor No you might recall
how he changed his appearance, gaining height somehow by
having his spine stretched, on some modern-day
rack.
This was probably a figment of Ian Fleming's imagination
but a new technique is now available, to achieve that result:
Chinese
leg extension surgery.
|
| September 23, 2006 - Equinox |
The
Battle of Kurukshetra -- photos on the
beach, taken the morning after a Hindu festival in
Bombay, which featured floating statues of the gods,
discarded afterwards.
Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth,
Tales
of the Rat Fink.
Swapped out the damaged trunk-lid of the Tercel today
(slightly but terminally mangled previously in a
backing-up blunder). Acquiring auto parts at the
junkyard used to be a DIY affair, an expedition into
a wasteland of twisted, picked-over wreckage; but now,
the Internet provides. The amazing
car-part.com
connected me with a provider down in lower San Jose.
That site has the most remarkable pull-down option
menus, containing all of any given car's
components in one scrolled list. The detailed, sortable
search results remind me of the used book interface at
abebooks.com.
The party it directed me to was a salvage yard, an
amazing place, all those scavanged components
organized in a vast collection.
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