October 2003

Weather

A short article on weather resource sites on the net. Would a glossary at times be helpful? A page on forcasting weather by nature. Another on weather folklore:

Pickover

I could spend a half day browsing thru the Pickover Report. I don't know how to describe it, just go to the page. Below is how he describes himself:

"My primary interest is finding new ways to continually expand creativity by melding art, science, mathematics and other seemingly-disparate areas of human endeavor. I seek not only to expand the mind, but to shatter it."

He answers questions on fractals, creates puzzles, and answered (along with others) the edge.org question for 2003.

Explore

Exporatorium is a good education site, a museum of science, art and human perception. Top bar is the navigation index, of which explore is the most interesting. I found the science of cooking most interesting. They have a question of the week. Below was this weeks:

I am wondering what difference there is, if any, between sautéing onions and "sweating" them i.e. covering them with the lid while they sauté which seems to bring out a lot of liquid.

Tower of Pisa

Who is the original architect of this spiraling tower, built on a sandy foundation. No one knows. Nova has a brief construction history timeline page. Construction of the medievil walls surrounding the town (erected for the threat of invasion) was started in 1155 and the tower in 1173. In 1499 during the florentine siege of the city the tower was lowered to the height of the walls. A short background page on suspected tower authors.

When the construction reached about one meter and half of the third floor, because of marshy and unstable soil, it leaned fearfully, so the works got suspended. The events which led to the inclination of the Tower aren't known. The proof we have are very uncertain. Surely two phenomenons took place: the building subsidence due to the weight excess and the soils differential sinking, which were the reasons for the inclination. The restarting of the works took places in two phases, during which they tried to reduce the slope. It is not known which height was reached at the end of the first phase of the resumption, before the intervention of Giovanni di Simone. The second phase of the thirteenth-century, started probably about the years 1272- 1275 and perhaps consists in the building of four "loggette".

Cool Design Page

For those that have websites, browse thru this page of design tips. The whole page has ideas and coding for enhancing any website. Be sure to visit the home page.

Blues

I've tried to select a few interesting articles on the blues

The onslaught of the Depression in the 1930s spelled the end of the recording careers for many blues artists, as well as nipping many others in the bud before they had even had a chance to begin. Between the mid-'30s and mid-'50s, country blues was documented on record sporadically. The commercial record companies of the time had turned their attention elsewhere; wide interest in the blues' roots, from national and/or White audiences, wouldn't gain momentum until the seeds of the blues/folk revival were planted in the late '50s.

Also in 1970, Pat joined a band called What. The Allman Bros. Band, based in Macon, Georgia, 75 miles to the south, often dropped by to sit in with them. Eventually What started touring with the newly formed Allman Bros., and opened for them at concerts throughout the southern U.S.A. It was Duane Allman who first taught Pat how to play slide guitar, when they toured together. While visiting his parents who had moved to Charleston, South Carolina, Pat went to the Flying Dutchman club, where he met up with a band called Blackmore. (as in Richie!) They needed a lead guitarist, so Pat was hired and moved to New Orleans. New Orleans was a Mecca of musical learning experience for Pat. He felt influences there from local music legends such as Dr. John, Professor Longhair, The Neville Brothers and The Meters, to name only a few! That's where Pat first learned how to play rhythm guitar.

One such drifter, Robert Johnson, received notoriety in Blues folklore as having sold his soul to the Devil to become the "King Of The Delta Blues," having done revolutionary things with the sound of the music even after his predecessor, Eddie "Son" House, Jr. According to African mythology, a God called Legba stood guard at the crossroads, donning a long, black coat and hat that hid his face. It was said that Robert Johnson made a deal with such a man to fulfill his aspirations of becoming a great Blues musician due to the fact that he had no natural ability of his own. He meets the "Devil" at Highway 61 where it crosses Highway 49 and hands him the guitar where he tunes it with fire coming out of his hands. The "Devil" passes the guitar back to Johnson for him to create some of the most remarkable music made in the genre.

Bottled Water

I enjoy Dasani, which is bottled by Coca Cola. Here is a snip on regulations. Now, think about this for a moment - would you buy Pet Refresh for your dog??

Mineral Water

Previously exempt from definition, bottled mineral water must have at least 250 parts per million (ppm) in total dissolved solids (TDS). Certain types of flavored bottled water fit into this category as well. Sources must be "tapped at one or more bore holes or springs, originating from a geologically and physically protected underground water source." If the TDS content of mineral water is below 500 ppm, or it is greater than 1,500 ppm, the statement "low mineral content" or "high mineral content," respectively, must appear on the principal display panel. If the TDS of mineral water is between 500 and 1,500 ppm, no additional statements are needed.

Spring Water

This is water obtained from an underground formation from which water flows naturally to the surface or would flow if it were not collected from the underground via the borehole. To be identified as spring water on the label, the water has to be collected at the spring or through a borehole next to the point where the spring emerges. Excluded from this are products labeled as "carbonated water," "seltzer water," "soda water," and "tonic water," all of which are considered soft drinks.

I must say that I am not a connoisseur of fine water; but the article is interesting.

Taste + Smell + Mouthfeel = Flavor

We would like to use the term Flavor to describe the complex integration of taste, smell and the tactile sensation food scientists call “mouthfeel”. This integration of sensation happens in the brain as a result of information relayed by sensors reporting taste, smell and tactile information. This integration is a very complex system and we are just at the beginning of understanding how it works. Lets look at the main components that that we integrate into flavor.

Hitler & WWI

I never knew this. I believe it to be true but you be the judge. Here is a summary of Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler's WWI record.

As the ferocious battle wound down and enemy troops surrendered or retreated a wounded German soldier limped out of the maelstrom and into Private Tandey's line of fire, the battle weary man never raised his rifle and just stared at Tandey resigned to the inevitable.  "I took aim but couldn't shoot a wounded man," said Tandey, "so I let him go."

The young German soldier nodded in thanks and the two men took diverging paths, that day and in history.  Hitler retreated with the remnants of German troops and ended up in Germany, where he languished in the humiliation of defeat at wars end.

TV & Homosexuality

Read a brief article titled "Outing TV's Heterosexual Homosexuals". View the index of columns archive. Top left corner will take you to main page of website.

Before it even hit the airwaves, Soap became the subject of controversy after the first two episodes were screened at the ABC network affiliates meeting in the summer of 1977. A Newsweek article reported the affiliates' shocked reaction to the pilot's adult content, which reportedly touched on such themes as adultery, homosexuality, transsexualism, impotence, and the mafia (which now can all be seen regularly on Sunday nights on HBO and Showtime). When several major newspapers published similar stories on the upcoming ABC sitcom, it caught the attention of several religious organizations, including Reverend Donald Wildmon's National Federation of Decency. As a result of Wildmon's campaign, ABC reportedly received over 20,000 letters calling for Soap's cancellation before it even hit the airwaves. Consequently, twelve ABC affiliates chose not to air the show's first two episodes.

Religious groups were not the only ones to voice their objections. Newt Dieter, head of the Gay Media Task Force, understood the tone of the show's humor, but felt Jodie was too much of a wimp. He suggested to the producers that they make the character stronger by turning him into a militant gay activist (nice try, Newt). The National Gay Task Force made an even stronger statement by taking an ad out in Variety expressing their anger by dubbing the character a "gay Stepin Fetchit."

Domain Lookup

There are various "whois" sites on the net. I prefer using whois/sc, partially due to the wildcard domain lookup feature. This comes in handy if you are selecting a name for a site you want to put on the net. The blocks and X's are color coded; blue is active, yellow and white is parked, blank is available (box on right side explains colors). Status code info here. I will use "historyof" as an example. It's the second search, first is if you know the domain name you want info on (owner / date registered / etc.) I have clicked the "left anchor" box. The search will start with numbers and then from the letter a. Scroll down to the third box and narrow you search - "historyofho".

I wanted to see what shows were on Showtime, I only have HBO on cable. In the browser addy window, I typed in showtime.com. To my surprise, I was taken to a ticket sales site. Next I wondered when Showtime (cable company) registered their domain name. So I researched with showtime as the wildcard. The cable company is showtime.net. They must lose thousands of visitors a day. I was net savvy enough to try net next.

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 18-Feb-2003.
Record expires on 26-Dec-2008.
Record Created on 27-Dec-1994.

Record expires on 21-May-2005.
Record created on 21-Sep-2003.
Database last updated on 13-Oct-2003 18:02:17 EDT.

Science of Star Trek

I have always been fascinated by the technical and scientific aspects of the Star Trek series. Here is an interesting page on the science of star trek, written in 1994.

I could name other similar mistakes. I'm a physicist, and many of my colleagues watch Star Trek. A few of them imagine some hypothetical, perfectly accurate science fiction TV series, and discredit Star Trek because of some list of science errors or impossible events in particular episodes. This is unfair. They will watch Shakespeare without a complaint, and his plays wouldn't pass the same rigorous test. Accurate science is seldom exciting and spectacular enough to base a weekly adventure TV show upon. Generally Star Trek is pretty intelligently written and more faithful to science than any other science fiction series ever shown on television. Star Trek also attracts and excites generations of viewers about advanced science and engineering, and it's almost the only show that depicts scientists and engineers positively, as role models. So let's forgive the show for an occasional misconception in the service of an epic adventure.

The BBC Online has an entertainment cult section. Here is the index page to interviews with Andrew Bormanis, the science advisor. Here is a snip from his page on nanotechnology.

We didn't hear about nanotechnology in the original series. That wasn't discussed much in the real world of science and engineering. Richard Feynman, in a fairly famous lecture some time in the early 1960s, asked the question; 'How small can a machine be and still be a functioning machine?' People didn't really seriously start to investigate that question until the 1970s and '80s.

Then it became a very active area of research thanks to people like Eric Drexler and some others who actually started to develop techniques for assembling very, very, very small, microscopic machines and potentially, for building machines from the ground up, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. This became known as nanotechnology - nano being the prefix for a billionth in the metric system.

Some cultural history of Roddenbury and the original series.

Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry, a former bomber pilot, airline pilot, policeman, and television writer. The format of the show and its original pilot episode borrowed heavily from the classic 1955 movie Forbidden Planet. The central trio of Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Science Officer Mr. Spock, and Doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy was modeled on classical mythological storytelling. Roddenberry envisioned a multi-ethnic crew, including an African-American woman, a Scotsman, a Japanese American, and most notably, an alien, the half-Vulcan Mr. Spock. In the second season Roddenberry added a Russian crewmember at a time when the United States was engaged in a tense cold war with the Soviet Union. Blacks and women were also shown as scientists and doctors on the ship.

Roddenberry sold the show to the network as classic adventure drama, calling it "Wagon Train to the Stars" and "Horatio Hornblower in Space". But in reality he wanted to tell more sophisticated stories, using futuristic situations as analogies for current problems on Earth. The show's writers often addressed moral and social issues in the episodes, tackling such subjects as slavery, warfare and discrimination. The opening line "to boldly go where no man has gone before" was taken virtually word for word from a White House booklet on space released after the 1957 Sputnik flight.

CookingwithCarlo

The October page has some interesting trivia, on both cooking inventions and how ingredients got here. Site is in the form of a newsletter.

A former Toll collector's corner, would never have counted on making it into the history books by sheer coincidence, but it did. An innkeeper by the name of Ruth Wakefield was baking her favorite Butter Drop Do cookies one bright day in the 1930. She was using a recipe that dated back to colonial times.

Ruth, as a typical woman, in an effort to put chocolate into everything, cut up a chocolate bar putting the chunks in the batter. She expected them to melt, but much to her surprise and to the delight of mankind, she reached into the oven and pulled out the first Chocolate Chip Cookie. That mistake became one of the most famous cookies of all time. She named her miraculous mistake after her Inn . . . THE TOLL HOUSE COOKIE

Another way in which new food were introduced to the United States was through the Caribbean. Sugarcane originated in Southeast Asia, and was introduced into India 2,500 years ago. From India, sugar was introduced to Persia (today known as Iran) by 600 BC. Arabs then introduced sugar into the Mediterranean region and to southern Italy and Spain. Europeans introduced sugarcane to the Atlantic Islands, and European explorers, beginning with Columbus, brought sugar into the Caribbean.

Carnivale

Carnivale is HBO's newest series, a 12 episode series. The cast of characters is quite interesting. Nick Stahl has a fan page, Patrick Bauchau played the husband in "Panic Room", the twins are trapeze artists with Quebec's Cirque du Soleil. Soon you will be able to play an online Tarot game.

In addition to Nick Stahl ("In the Bedroom," "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines") and Clancy Brown ("The Shawshank Redemption"), cast regulars on CARNIVALE include Michael J. Anderson ("Twin Peaks") as Samson, who runs the show for Management; Adrienne Barbeau ("Escape from New York") as Ruthie, the maternal figure of the carnival, as well as the snake charmer and mother to the strong man; Patrick Bauchau ("The Cell") as Lodz, the mentalist who can see into the future and the past; Debra Christofferson ("Seraglio") as Lila, the carnival's bearded lady; Tim DeKay ("Swordfish") as Jones, Samson's right-hand man and the rousty manager; Clea DuVall (HBO's "The Laramie Project"), as Sofie, the tarot card reader and medium for her comatose mind-reader mother Apollonia, played by Diane Salinger (HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm"); John Fleck ("Star Trek: Enterprise") as Gecko, deformed with a rare condition that makes his skin lizard-like; Amy Madigan ("HBO's Laramie Project"), as Brother Justin's loyal sister Iris; Karyne Steben ("Cirque du Soleil: Saltimbanco") and Sarah Steben ("Cirque du Soleil: Saltimbanco") as Siamese twins Alexandria and Caladonia; Brian Turk ("American Pie 2") as Gabriel, the strong man. The carnival's burlesque family consists of the emcee father Stumpy, played by Toby Huss ("Beyond the City Limits"); mother Rita Sue, played by Cynthia Ettinger ("Thirteen"); and daughters Dora Mae, played by Amada Aday ("Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back"), and Libby, played by Carla Gallo ("Undeclared").

Writers on the series include Henry Bromell ("Northern Exposure"), Toni Graphia ("Roswell"), Daniel Knauf ("Wolf Lake"), Ronald D. Moore ("Star Trek: The Next Generation"), Dawn Prestwich ("Ally McBeal") and Nicole Yorkin ("Judging Amy"), and William Schmidt ("Prey").

American Memory

I have been surfing the American Memories site here and there for the past month. I really enjoy it. It was created by the Library of Congress. Here are a few sample pages to spark your interest in our countries history:

Fifty Years of Coca-Cola Television Advertisements: Highlights from the Motion Picture Archives at the Library of Congress presents a variety of television advertisements, never-broadcast outtakes, and experimental footage reflecting the historical development of television advertising for a major commercial product. The online collection includes five excerpts from stop-motion advertising developed for Coca-Cola between 1954 and 1956 by the D'Arcy agency and makes public for the first time eighteen excerpts from the Experimental TV Color Project of 1964, which determined the best lighting for the cans, bottles, and performers in television advertisements. Featured advertisements include the 1971 "Hilltop" commercial with an international group of young people on an Italian hilltop singing "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke"; the "Mean Joe Greene" commercial from 1979; the first "Polar Bear" commercial from 1993; the "Snowflake" commercial from 1999; and "First Experience", an international commercial filmed in Morocco in 1999.

From February 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919, by order of General John J. Pershing, the United States Army published a newspaper for its forces in France, The Stars and Stripes. This online collection, presented by the Serial and Government Publications Division of the Library of Congress, includes the complete seventy-one-week run of the newspaper's World War I edition.

When The Stars and Stripes began publication, American forces were dispersed throughout the Western Front, often mixed at the unit level with British, French, and Italian forces. The newspaper's mission was to provide these scattered troops with a sense of unity and an understanding of their part in the overall war effort. The eight-page weekly featured news from home, sports news, poetry, and cartoons, with a staff that included journalists Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, and Grantland Rice. Printing the paper on presses borrowed from Paris newspaper plants, the staff used a network of trains, automobiles, and a motorcycle to deliver the news to the doughboys (as the American soldiers were called). At the peak of its production, The Stars and Stripes had a circulation of 526,000 readers.

The images in the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection are among the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. Created by a group of U.S. government photographers, the images show Americans in every part of the nation. In the early years, the project emphasized rural life and the negative impact of the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and the Dust Bowl. In later years, the photographers turned their attention to the mobilization effort for World War II. The core of the collection consists of about 164,000 black-and-white photographs. This release provides access to over 160,000 of these images; future additions will expand the black-and-white offering. The FSA-OWI photographers also produced about 1600 color photographs during the latter days of the project.

LuvBugs

Its fall weather in the south and the luvbugs are gone!! They thrive in the humidity. They were not genetically engineered by the University of Florida to kill mosquitos. An interesting thread on the topic.

Southern Louisiana experienced flights of lovebugs during the 1920's. The species was described by Hardy in 1940 from specimens collected in Mississippi. First reports of their presence in Florida were made in 1947 from Escambia County. Subsequent reports indicate their presence in Leon County in 1955-56 and Alachua - Marion Counties in 1964-65. Since that time, flights have progressively moved southward. In 1974, specimens were collected in Homestead. Lovebugs also have moved northward and have been reported from Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina. Two flights of lovebugs occur each year. The spring flight occurs during late April and May. A second flight occurs during late August and September. Flights extend over periods of 4 to 5 weeks. Mating takes place almost immediately after emergence of the females. Adult females live only 2-3 days.