Officially, June 21 is the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but this is silly. Planting season started anywhere from 1 to 2 months ago, summer crops are readily available at local markets, and it's not going to get much hotter even in late July or early August, which most people think of as the heat of the summer.As Cheryl says above, your Northern hemisphere does not seem to be my Northern Hemisphere.
Here in LA, the solstice is indeed a reasonable marker for the beginning of summer. The locals refer to the typical weather in May and June as "May Gray" and "June Gloom".
The sea warms faster than the land, so the lengthening days in May and June produce thick banks of marine fog and low cloud that get driven onshore and over the hills into the inland valleys by the Catalina Eddy (the circulation feature that keeps greater LA nicely air-conditioned most of the time).
The sun sometimes breaks through in the afternoon, but May and June often have some of the least sunny weather we have. Inevitably, a visit to Venice Beach will reveal throngs of shell-shocked tourists on the boardwalk in shorts and flip-flops pawing desperately through the racks of overpriced sweatshirts and hoodies.
But that ends about the end of June, and then the warmth of summer is finally upon us. July 4 is frequently the first really hot weekend of the summer (though we have occasional heat waves in Spring as well, mostly in March and April, before the marine layer really gets cranking).
But July and August (and even September) are most definitely hotter than May or June. And some of the hottest weather occurs in late October to early November - the 'Dragon Weather' of the offshore Santa Ana winds that parch the hillsides and bring the peak of brushfire season.
And planting season? Around here, planting season starts in mid-November, once Dragon Weather ends - you want to get things in the ground and well-established in time to take advantage of the Winter rains in late December and early January.
But the solstice as start of summer is perfectly reasonable here, in this corner of the Northern Hemisphere.
Of all the hazards that bedevil fiber-arts colors, one of the most under-appreciated is #2 in Dave Bell's list @21, "The original lighting spectrum."
I did theatrical lighting for some years, and had many encounters with harried costume designers who had used two different batches of "matching" fabric, either in a single costume, or in multiples of an identical costumes (like uniforms), only to discover, much to their horror, that two pieces of fabric that matched perfectly in daylight, or under the fluorescent worklights of the backstage shops, were quite visibly different colors under the stage lighting.
And they might or might not look different depending on whether the stage lighting used 2850° K. conventional incandescents, 3200° K. tungsten-halogen lamps, a white-flame carbon-arc follow spot at 6200° K., or a yellow-flame carbon-arc at 4100° K.
Not to mention whatever color gels the lighting designer might put on the lights.
Colors that match under one illuminant but not under others are called "metameric pairs."
I also did some lighting for fashion shows, some of which were televised, and earned the undying gratitude of the designers by lighting the entire stage with completely un-gelled 3200° K. tungsten-halogen instruments, and color-correcting my follow spots to the same color temp with filters.
The video guys also loved me because the consistent color temp made it easy for them to white-balance their cameras, and get results the designers were happy with.
With today's proliferation of compact fluorescents, which come in several quoted "color temperatures", (none of which are actual matches for the designated temp, since the flouros' rather bandy emission output is nothing like a black-body curve - the quoted temp is just the black-body temp they most nearly resemble), the entire process is rather fraught, since even common household lighting can produce widely varying results with metameric pairs, depending on what sort of light bulbs one uses.
And of course there's a high probability that "matching" fabric/crayon colors may be metameric pairs rather than true spectral matches.
One of the advantages of the Pantone system is that Pantone swatches are true spectral matches for Pantone printing inks, so the swatch color and the printed color will look identical to one another under any illuminant.
Jetpacks are the personal transportation of the future!
Always have been; always will be.
Re: Age limits
It seems that American Idol had an upper age limit of 26 until its fourth season, when it was raised to its current figure (which I believe is 28, not 29).
And it appears (at least based on somewhat sketchy, quickly-Googled evidence) that it inherited that initial lower limit from its progenitor, Freemantle Media's original Idol-format show - the British Pop Idol.
Jon Sobel @28:
But America's Got Talent is the American version of Britain's Got Talent, and it doesn't have an age limit, either.
One of its recent contestants was a 70-year-old Frank Sinatra impersonator.
AGT and BGT are amateur talent competitions. Idol is a competition to become a pop-music idol. Completely different games.
(He says, having never actually viewed an entire episode of any of them).
The other thing to remember is that history is no guarantee.
Mid-plate quakes - like the four massive Mag.7-8 temblors known as the New Madrid series that struck eastern Missouri and western Tennessee in 1811-1812, or the Mag ~7.2 that devastated Charleston South Carolina in 1886, can happen almost anywhere, with little or no warning - and with no significant seismicity in historical memory.
Here in Southern California, we get plate-margin quakes, which are far more predictable. The big quakes are accompanied by constant, ongoing small-to-medium quakes that keep everyone on their toes.
And we have very little vulnerable construction, since there wasn't much here before people figured out that heavy unreinforced building materials like brick, adobe, and stone are very, very bad ideas in seismically-active areas.
We're much better prepared, so even large quakes directly under heavily-populated areas do relatively little damage.
A mid-plate quake the size of the '94 Northridge quake, striking a similarly populated area with lots of unreinforced brick and stone buildings and no prior history of significant seismicity, could easily kill hundreds of thousands of people.
I confess I didn't realize what Van Vogt's title was alluding to when I first read the book.
Of course, it was the first science fiction book I ever read. I was in second grade at the time.
There's an even better shot now posted on the NASA Phoenix site, which has been post-processed to make textural detail of the Martian surface visible in the background, as well as making it easier to see the shroud lines connecting the lander to its parachute.
The point is that open-source software can be examined. Of course it can be made deliberately confusing, but there's nothing so thoroughly obfuscated as code that can't be examined at all.But open source is no real protection against deliberate tampering, either.
Anyone who doesn't understand why that's true should go read Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, one of the seminal works in the field of computer security.
The short summary is this: malicious code can be invisibly inserted into compiled software by hacking the compiler (or assembler or linker or other tool) used to convert the human-readable source code into machine-executable binary code.
Even recompiling the compiler itself from clean source is no guarantee, since a hacked compiler can also propagate its own malicious code by inserting it into any newly-compiled instance of the compiler.
And no, the approach suggested by David A. Wheeler, cited by Bruce Schneier in Countering "Trusting Trust" isn't any help, either.
Schneier may be an expert on computer security, but he clearly doesn't understand how compilers work; the idea that two different compilers should produce bit-for-bit identical binary code from the same source code (and that any deviation is an indication of tampering) is laughably incorrect, as anyone who has ever built a compiler can tell you.
(In addition to that, his remark that "...if you're really worried about "turtles all the way down," you can write Compiler B yourself for a computer you built yourself from vacuum tubes that you made yourself" is one of the most fatuously stupid things I've ever heard anyone say on the topic.)
Open source is no guarantee of anything.
But Alan Bostick's point above is crucial: no matter how convoluted you get in trying assure that an e-voting system is secure, the most damaging aspect is that it destroys trust in the system.
It makes it easy for anyone to claim that election results they dislike are the result of tampering; and it makes it virtually impossible to convincingly refute such claims.
Even if no actual hacking ever occurs, that destruction of trust is pernicious. It casts doubt on the legitimacy of any and all elections, no matter how scrupulously clean they may be.
And that's a real problem for any democracy.
If it's any comfort, that WSJ macro-paragraph is wrong about 'Hollywood', too.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 7 |
| 2008 | 3 |
| 2006 | 1 |
Total: 11 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Glen Blankenship:
Show all comments by Glen Blankenship.