The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Glen Blankenship:

set a generator and electric motor side by side, plug the motor into the generator, and have the motor crank the generator.

That was actually a very popular technology back around the turn of the century (umm, the previous century, that is, not this one).

Of course, it wasn't used to generate energy, but, rather, to convert one form of energy into another (AC to DC, multi-phase AC to single-phase, high voltage to low voltage and vice-versa) and to provide line isolation.

They were quite popular with electric trolley systems for converting the multi-kilovolt AC from transmission lines into the ~600v DC that the trains generally used.

Movie studios also used them to convert incoming AC supplies to the flicker-free DC power required by early carbon-arc spotlights.

These days, motor-generator sets have mostly been supplanted by solid-state rectifiers, transformers, and other more modern tech, though there are some specialist applications that still employ them.

wide boys is a C. 20 generic term for those who live by their wits, esp. gamblers, petty swindlers, race-gangsters, the lesser 'con men', dishonest motor-car salesmen, and the like, as in Robert Westerby's Wide Boys Never Work, 1937. See wide ; cf. spiv.

--Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of the Underworld

Note, by the way, that Santorum's complaint wasn't about NOAA/NWS's prediction of Katrina's New Orleans strike, but earlier, when it stuck Florida.

Santorum's weather-privatization bill is INSANE. One of the few federal agencies that actually DID A GOOD JOB during the current disaster, and he wants to downsize and privatize it like they downsized and privatized FEMA.

Moron.

Don't miss the Graphics Archive linked at the top of the Hurricane KATRINA Advisory Archive above:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/KATRINA_graphics.shtml

It's a very nifty Javascript-animated display of maps of forecast probability cones, strike probabilities, and so on.

You can see precisely when and where Florida was warned.

Also, Google Maps online has added a DigitalGlobe post-flood satellite-image layer. Just zoom in on the NOLA area, and click the red "Katrina" button that appears.

Better than satellite photos:

Google Earth users:

NOAA Cessna aircraft have taken hi-res photos of NOLA and nearby coastal areas.

Go to http://earth.google.com/katrina.html for links to the .kmz placemark files. Open the placemarks, and click on the placemark nearest your particular area of interest. The popup will then display a link to download the 4k x 4k overlay image files.

These are very LARGE files. Don't try to open too many of them at once.

The alignment of the overlays is a bit rough. You may want to right-click the overlay and select "edit" so you can tweak the alignment yourself.

These are very high-res images, capable of determining extent-of-damage for individual addresses.

I'm a moderately experienced aerial-recon interpreter - if anyone has any particular questions about what they're seeing in these photos, let me know.

It's probably just an anachronism - like Tom sizemore in "Saving Private Ryan" when he yells 'Let's rock & roll!'

I haven't seen SPR in a while, and don't have a copy to hand, but are you sure he didn't say, "Let's lock & load!"?

I've seen sugestions that the phrase was orginally "load & lock" in WWII (which makes a bit more sense with an M1 Garand), but was reversed by John Wayne in 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima.

It wasn't until Vietnam that troops began substituting the sound-alike "let's rock & roll" as they headed out on patrol.

As for Shangri-La, the OED, the American Heritage, and Merriam-Webster's Third all attribute it to Hilton's novel.

Oh, and I confess I'm amused by the notion that Sideways, with its $16-mil budget, is a "shoestring art film". Them's some mighty niiiice shoestrings. :-)

As paradoxical and absurd as it sounds, it's cheaper for a Hollywood studio to make a big-budget action movie than to make a shoestring art film like Sideways.

Emmm, actually, that sounds absurd because it is absurd.

Consider Paramount's 2001 action flick Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. On paper, Tomb Raider's budget was $94 million. In fact, the entire movie cost Paramount less than $7 million.

This is nonsense. The article's author arrives at that figure by mentioning a couple of tax breaks and then saying:

To pay for most of the rest of the movie, Paramount sold distribution rights in six countries where the Tomb Raider video games were a big hit with teenage boys. These pre-sales in Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain brought in another $65 million.

Pre-sales, for the uninitiated, are part of the film's income. If they didn't pre-sell the territories, they'd post-sell them: that is, sell them *after* the film is in the can. And not for the "take a flyer on an as-yet-unmade sequel" discount, either, I guarantee you.

Hits with proven boxoffice records sell for more than as-yet-unfilmed sequels. Even sequels with... well... lips like those. (Which of course need no translation to sell well in the foreign market, don'cha know. :-) Sex, guns, and explosions speak a global language.)

It's just creative financing - the foreign distribs are acting as investors, taking a risk (albeit a very small one - the boys *will* come for those lips) in return for a somewhat bigger slice of the overall pie. (Or possibly to take the pie away from a more risk-averse competitor.)

(Pre-sales can also be used to reduce the studio's downside risk if a film utterly tanks, but that seems an unlikely motive here: action blockbusters have almost no downside risk to begin with. They almost never actually lose money - even the ones that bomb at the box office usually pay back their costs when all is said and done - they just don't make the huge returns of a successful blockbuster.)

(Hence their popularity at all the major studios. :-) Indeed, the summer blockbusters are the reason the studios can afford to take risks on films like Sideways (which can lose Real Money when they bomb.)

But financing a film with pre-sales doesn't reduce its costs (except to whatever small degree it may be cheaper than financing it some other way). It still costs the same amount of money to make the film. You still need to make up those costs in sales (including pre-sales!) to turn a profit.

Lara Croft:TR was not "cheaper to make" than Sideways - it was easier to finance. Which is not the same thing at all.

Confusing those two things reveals an embarrasing lack of understanding of the basic economics of filmmaking.

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood.

Oh dear.

A former gaffer's "duck/Duck/duct" tape trivia:

The tape sold in hardware stores as "duct tape" is a silvery plastic film (usu. polyethylene or PVC) over a coarse nylon or polyester mesh, with a gummy adhesive that can fill small voids.

Duct tape apparently WAS invented to seal HVAC ducts - the plastic film makes it airtight, and the adhesive prevents gap leakage. (Though it turns out the plastic film ages and degrades and the adhesive dries, shrinks and cracks, so it's really not very good at sealing airducts.)

It largely replaced a previous generation of "duct tape" that was something between heavy aluminum foil and lightweight flashing, with an even thicker, gummier gap-filling adhesive - which still exists, mostly serving odd purposes in the racing and auto-body trades, but isn't much sold as duct tape any more.

(That's why "duct tape" used to always be silvery.)

"Duck Tape" (TM) the brand-name was a trademarking of the apocope of "ductape" applied to a line of duct tape in smaller rolls (and in multiple colors) aimed at the consumer market. (They have since diversified. :-)

--

Here's the odd part:

The stuff we gaffers use on stage and set and call "Gaffer's Tape" is descended from a tape created by Johnson & Johnson's Permacel division for the US military in WWII.

It's a waterproof heavy cotton canvas with a natural rubber adhesive that separates cleanly when the tape is removed. It can be torn cleanly by hand, and can be torn into narrower widths along the lenghtwise grain of the fabric. (These days some brands use a synthetic rubber adhesive for better performance and a vinyl coat over the cotton canvas fabric for improved waterproofing.)

It comes in 1, 2, 3, and 4-inch widths and a variety of colors, though black and grey are the most popular on set. Permacel is still the choice of most pros, but there are other brands.

The orginal came in 3-inch wide rolls, in Olive Drab (and... grey? white? I forget). It was officially called "waterproofing tape" and there are attested sources of GIs referring to it as "duck tape".

It can be used for most of the things people use duct tape for - and is, in fact, a better tape for most such applications.

And so "duck tape" "duct tape" and "Duct Tape" can each be correct, depending on precisely which tape you're talking about. :-)

But, as far as I can tell, Duck Tape (TM) and the GI's "duck tape" is a coincidence. And duct tape isn't descended from duck tape. :-)

If I remember Renault's Fire from Heaven, Aristotle had Alexander reading Xenophon, which apparently made him into a fan of Persian culture (Persiaphile?).

Medeophile. :-)

Well, you know what they say: "One man's Mede is another man's Persian."

:-)

Anyone interested in more detail concerning the 19th Century PR campaign to convert the drunken hijinks of traditional Chistmas into a quiet family holiday should check out Stephen Nissenbaum's fascinating scholarly history The Battle For Christmas. (Amazon link here).

Personally, I think we ought to revive the old tradition of Callithumpian bands (see the bottom of this page), if for no other reason than to ensure that the delightful word "callithumpian" doesn't disappear from the language.

Oh, and in case my terminology is unclear, "Taskbar"="Start bar" and "Taskbar buttons"="window tiles".

(Assuming I correctly understood what you were saying, of course.)

Skwid said:

I love tabbed browsing because, right now, I have 16 window tiles on my Start bar, and if I were using IE for my non-work browsing, I would have 20 open. If I could use IE for my work (damned ActiveX Intranet apps...), it would cut the number of window tiles down to 11.

You might want to try this: Right-click your Taskbar and pick "Properties". On the "Taskbar" tab, check the checkbox next to "Group similar taskbar buttons". Click "OK" to close the Properties sheet.

That will give you one single Taskbar button for all your IE windows. If you have, say, 14 IE Windows open, the button will read "14 Internet Explorer" with a little downward-pointing carat. Clicking the little carat will produce a drop-down menu listing the page titles of each window. Select whichever one you want, and off you go.

Does that help?

My favorite line (so far) from Molatar's Castle:

getting Born Again is a wonderful experience and worth the miniscule intellectual effort

...which he (naturally) recommends as a first step prior to undergoing a permanent shape-shift.

Since when was the plural of any version of a dwarf "dwarfs"?

Umm, since at least 1847, per citations in the OED:

1770 Bp. Percy tr. Mallet's North. Antiq. v. (1847) 98 They made of his skull the vault of heaven, which is supported by four dwarfs, named North, South, East, and West.

Indeed, the OED gives "dwarfs" as the only plural, despite an 1818 citation that uses "dwarves".

Merriam-Webster's 2nd, 3rd, and 10th Collegiate give both forms (and the 2nd, ca. 1953, says that "dwarves" is "Rare"), but the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged gives only "dwarfs".

The current American Heritage gives both forms.

That chronology seems to support "dwarves" being a Tolkienian neologism, but then I suppose that must mean that W. Taylor, author of "The history of Laurin, king of the dwarves", published in Monthly Mag. XLVI. 26 in 1818 (the OED citation above) must have been channeling the future Tolkien. :-)

<drift type="character neep">

Pericat, the encoding isn't the issue. Using the numeric entity, as you did, sidesteps encoding problems.

As long as the DOCTYPE specifies HTML 4.0 or later (and this one says it's XHTML 1.0, so it's 'later'), the browser should understand the numeric entitites as ISO 10646 (aka Unicode).

You're probably just seeing a different font - one that does have the proper character. The blog's style sheet, if I'm reading it correctly, specifies:

font-family:verdana,arial,sans-serif;

...so different people may get different fonts, depending on what they have installed - and anyone who doesn't have Verdana or Arial will get whatever font their browser selects as the generic for "sans-serif", so the possibilities are... numerous. :-)

As far as I'm aware, there is no Unicode version of Verdana. There is a Unicode version of Arial, "Arial Unicode MS", but (at least for people who have both that and the non-Unicode plain "Arial" version) it must be specified precisely that way, or it won't be used.

That means that most IE users won't see the proper character, since they all have Verdana and (non-Unicode) Arial.

Only those users who don't have Verdana and (non-Unicode) Arial have a chance of seeing the correct character - and then, only if whatever font their browser uses as generic sans-serif includes the Unicode character.

(Or possibly, if the ONLY Arial they have is Arial Unicode and their browser is bright enough to substitute that.)

It's a vexing problem. You can't control what fonts users have installed, and, given the post-box filter, you can't override the blog's style sheet.

</drift>

Tina, it's not the encoding - it's the fact that the font specified by the blog's style sheet doesn't have that particular Unicode character.

And the comment-posting filter strips out span/style tags, so I'm not sure there's any easy way around it.

So, is this a reasonably good aerial view of the new neighborhood?

(That's looking roughly west, with the corner of Green-Wood Cemetery in the center foreground, Sunset Park at center left, and the docks of Bush Terminal toward the top.)

-- Recon Junkies R Us

Jeremy, there are fires in desert areas occasionally, but, as I said, they're not usually a significant problem. They don't develop into the sort of raging, deadly firestorms you see in brush and forest fires.

As for destructiveness to the ecosystem - the Coastal Sagebrush complex here in LA has evolved with fire as normal part of the ecosystem - in a sense, it's designed to burn.

Note, though, that many of last year's unusually severe wildfires weren't brushfires, but forest fires. A major factor was the pine bark beetle infestations that have killed thousands of acres of pine trees. Dead pines are explosively flammable.

(And even so, it was only good luck and the heroic efforts of the firefighters that kept the fires out of the worst of the tree-kill areas. The fires could have been far worse than they were.)

Paula: LA averages around 15 inches of rain per year in the flatlands; about 25-30 inches in the mountains that surround the flatlands and feed the local rivers and aquifers.

But of course that's the average. We rarely get average rainfall. :-)

We usually get either 8-10 inches or 22-27 inches, depending on whether we're in the wet or dry phase of the 6-8 year wet/dry cycle. Sometimes the mountains get as much as 60 inches.

And on those rare occasions when we do get an average rainfall season, it's usually a combination of unusually dry and unusually wet.

We had an "average" season a year ago, which included the both the driest January on record, and the wettest calendar day in 50 years in March.

This year we got no rain at all in March - which has only happened once before in all the time they've been keeping records - but more than 6 inches in a single day in January.

Plus we had two weeks of blazing summer in the middle of April, and another week that just ended, to 'welcome in the May.'

It'll probably add up to another average year. :-)

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