JAN.
30, 2020 Tired of shivering through winter yet? In Scandinavia they must actually like it! Finding that hard to believe, I've been inspired to illustrate an excerpt from a recent Jim Gaffigan routine.
JAN.
28, 2015 Mommy, you studied engineering. When I make a right turn on my bike, it leans to my right. When you make a right turn in your car, it leans to your left. Whats the difference?
When your bike turns right, you keep your balance by leaning into the turn. Inertia is trying to keep you going straight and seems to be pushing you > this way, so you lean and let gravity pull you < that way. But I can't bank my car, because it has four wheels on the ground. I have no way to offset what people call centrifugal force. Itll roll my car over onto its side if I take the corner too fast. Oh. Another thing: I was looking at pictures of airplanes with propellers. All the way back to the Wright Brothers, the first props had two blades. Then they had three blades, four blades, and now even more. The engineers must have figured out that more blades are more efficient, right?
Researchers say it happened in 1700, exactly 320 years ago tonight, around 9:00 Pacific Time. Most members of a Native American tribe had gone to bed, but the chief was still awake when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the subduction zone off the coast of present-day Oregon and Washington. The land shook for several minutes, and it places it dropped more than six feet. The tsunami crossed the Pacific Ocean and reached Japan as a 16-foot tidal wave. The Japanese recorded its arrival, which is how we can pinpoint the time and date.
If such an event happened today, it would cause enormous damage to cities like Seattle and Portland. And these earthquakes do generally repeat every 400 years or so.
Signs must use as few words as possible to get their message across. However, concise wording sometimes allows for multiple interpretations. Im sufficiently silly (some would say perverse) to deliberately misconstrue their warnings.
JAN.
21, 2020 In the early years of this century, it occurred to me that it made little economic sense for businessmen from Chicago, Boston, and San Diego to board three separate flights and travel to Fresno just so they could all sit around someone's conference table for an hour.
But the concept of simulating presence with mirrors has been finding some success in the field of entertainment, resurrecting deceased singers via on-stage holograms that aren't actually holograms in the technical sense.
It's an update of basic Pepper's Ghost theater magic that was developed in the 19th century.
JAN.
19, 2020 While I'm using my computer I never doze off, because I'm constantly typing or mousing. It's a different story while I'm passively watching TV. Often, after half an hour or so, I'll begin closing my eyes and just listening. Before I know it, I'm asleep.
Usually a combination of factors turns out to be at fault. But before the investigators isolate the true causes, they must rule out a number of red herrings. Was it wind shear? Did the spoiler actuators fail? Is there a glitch in the autopilot software? Did the ground crew load 8,000 pounds of fuel instead of 8,000 kilograms? Was there poor communication between the pilot and the co-pilot? (Some of this reminds me of problems we have inside a TV production truck.) For example, when an American-built airliner flipped upside down and fell out of the sky, part of the mystery's solution turned out to be the artificial horizon or Attitude Indicator. While flying through clouds, the distracted Russian-trained pilot must have glanced at his instruments and misinterpreted the AI.
A
Russian pilot glancing at the bottom AI, where the black symbol
remains level, might instinctively think that his actual plane is
still in straight and level flight. Each of these TV programs eventually tells what corrective actions have been taken to prevent future crashes. Aircraft manufacturers, standardize your instruments! Airlines, train your pilots better! (Or, in many cases, go out of business.) But those fixes are only revealed in the final 30 seconds, during the credits. I've just run across a copy of a letter I wrote exactly 45 years ago, in which I reported that I enjoy watching Nova on PBS because of the rapidity with which the viewer can follow through an investigation. The program presents a puzzle, such as how do homing pigeons home, and then shows a series of experiments that have the puzzle mostly solved by the end of the show. Very satisfying. Most other programs don't hold my attention like that. Therefore, I have other tricks to stay awake. For example, below and to the left of my main TV I have two smaller screens that can show different channels. During dull spots or commercials, I check them out. I can even channel-surf each of them independently from the main screen. At least I'm doing something, even though it's only pushing a button on the remote.
JAN.
16, 2020 Ken Jennings is now officially the greatest Jeopardy! player ever, having won the recently-completed tournament on ABC-TV against two other celebrated champions.
I also listen to him with John Roderick on their Omnibus podcast, where it's obvious that Ken has a very quick mind. But he's 45 years old now, and that quickness is beginning to fade!
I'm almost 30 years older than Ken, and my ability to recall names is also starting to slip. Not long ago I had to ask a colleague for the last name of a long-time local newspaper sports columnist, white hair, humorous, first name Gene. Collier was the answer. I have no trouble remembering it now. My brain has created an additional link to allow me to access it, as it's the same as the name of a township out near the airport.
JAN.
14, 2020
Long ago when I was a freshman in college, if someone agreed with a statement they would often say This is true. But nowadays I keep hearing You are not wrong. I can't keep up with all these trendy changes to our language! Whatever happened to I concur? Or True dat? Or Yes indeedy?
JAN.
8, 2020
As soon as I graduated in 1965, my school was consolidated into the new North Union district. Before long our Tigers (now the Wildcats) had a new building with a full-size gym. Flash forward to the present day. The North Union head coach, Brian Terrill, has a favorite sports movie: Hoosiers. In scenes filmed in 1985 at Hinkle Field House in Indianapolis (where I once worked a telecast for CBS), the fictional Hickory H.S. Huskers play for the state championship.
According to Tim Miller of the Marysville Journal-Tribune, The Wildcats have become more of a defensive pressing squad than in previous campaigns under Terrill. We've been experimenting with different presses and seeing how they work against different breakers, he said. We've got the quickness and the depth to do that.
JAN.
5, 2015 In the early days of Internet search engines, users vied to find a phrase that returned one and only one hit. Ive done it! If you take the last two words of my post from New Years Day (enclosed in quotes to specify that the words have to appear consecutively) and Google that phrase, you get a single result. Im the only one in the world whos ever put those words together!
When the Little Women movie appeared recently, I was surprised to learn that it begins in New England during the Civil War. It's based on a book which I had assumed was set in Olde England during an earlier social milieu. But what did I know? I'm a guy. Never having read any 19th-century novels by female authors, not even Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818), I can't keep their fiction straight.
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