After class this morning, I wandered across the street to the bus stop. I was a little annoyed at myself for leaving my bus pass at home, but since I had a few ones, it didn’t matter too much. I got on the 75 and picked up a transfer, rode to the Northgate Transit Center, waited there for about ten minutes, and then took the 41 to our apartment. As I waited for the bus to roll to a stop, I peeked out the windows and scanned our parking lot for the car to see if Prairie was back from her morning jaunt with Hope. The car wasn’t in the lot…
…oh, wait. Crap.
I drove to school this morning.
Prairie hasn’t been able to stop giggling for the past half hour.
On the bright side, I didn’t have to catch the bus back to school, as Prairie was able to call Hope and have her drive us up to the school to rescue the car. Which I’d forgotten. Left behind.
Point one: A news story about a Darwin Award contender. Point two: great headline. Point three: horrid choice of ad banner (probably automatically generated).
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.
Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.
Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?
The Seattle Police Department this week plans to issue a new policy clarifying when bystanders are within their rights to observe and document officer conduct and when they’re interfering with officers’ law enforcement duties, a department official told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee during a briefing Tuesday.
The new policy clearly reminds officers that bystanders have a right to watch or film officers making an arrest, as long as they don’t interfere or threaten their safety….
It also emphasizes that police can’t simply seize someone’s camera for video evidence without cause or court order and suggests alternative means of negotiating with the witness.
While I’ve never been around one (something I’m not at all disappointed about), I’ve certainly heard of tornadoes, waterspouts, and I’ve seen many of their smaller cousin, the dust devil.
However, I’d never thought about what the wind patterns around a wildfire might do.
A fire whirl, colloquially fire devil or fire tornado, is a phenomenon in which a fire, under certain conditions (depending on air temperature and currents), acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. Fire whirls may be whirlwinds separated from the flames, either within the burn area or outside it, or a vortex of flame, itself.
A fire whirl can make fires more dangerous. An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo. Another example is the numerous large fire whirls (some tornadic) that developed after lightning struck an oil storage facility near San Luis Obispo, California on April 7, 1926, several of which produced significant structural damage well away from the fire, killing two. Thousands of whirlwinds were produced by the four-day-long firestorm coincident with conditions that produced severe thunderstorms, in which the larger fire whirls carried debris 5 kilometers (3 mi) away.
Most of the largest fire whirls are spawned from wildfires. They form when a warm updraft and convergence from the wildfire are present. They are usually 10-50 meters (30-200 ft) tall, a few meters (~10 ft) wide, and last only a few minutes. However, some can be more than a kilometer (0.6 mile) tall, contain winds over 160 km/h (100 mph), and persist for more than 20 minutes.
Just…wow. Cool, beautiful, and frightening, all at the same time.
In other tornado goodness, a bank security camera in Iowa was running when the bank was hit by a huge tornado a few weeks ago.
From the Christian Science Monitor, a funny editorial advertising Restraint®, a cure for Deficit Attention Disorder (DAD)!
Have you ever wondered how the federal government can bail out banks and mortgage-holders, cut your taxes, try to protect Social Security, expand your Medicare benefits, and send you a stimulus check – all at the same time? These may be symptoms of an embarrassing condition afflicting political parties, banks, and households across America: Deficit Attention Disorder (DAD).
Unchecked, normal individuals (as well as politicians and bank CEOs) afflicted by DAD start to believe in money that doesn’t exist. This silent assassin of fiscal sanity overheats your credit card, sells you a make-believe mortgage, makes your pension go “poof,” and drops a whopping entitlement tab on your kids.
Fortunately, there’s a new way to get DAD under control – without any of the cosmetic remedies prescribed by spin doctors. By combining an ancient Zen secret with a cure-all from your grandmother, our researchers are proud to introduce: Restraint®.
Google Maps Streetview seems to have discovered a wormhole while driving down Muldoon Road in Anchorage, Alaska (my hometown). Somehow, in all the years of driving up and down this road, I’d never noticed the sudden jump into a residential parking lot and then back onto the road itself. I’m obviously not paying enough attention!
Watching the season finale of Lost last night was an exercise in frustration — not because of the show itself (we enjoy the frustration that comes from the many twists, turns, and unanswered questions of the show), but from the horrendous number of and length of commercial breaks. It felt like we were getting about a 1:1 ratio of show to commercial, so starting a little before the halfway point of the two-hour program, I started jotting down when we’d switch from show to commercial.
The end result: Over the final 72 minutes of the show…
there were 48 minutes of show and 24 minutes of commercial, for a 2:1 show-to-commercial ratio (It was nice to know that it wasn’t actually 1:1, though it really did feel like it),
there were 6 commercial breaks, averaging 4 minutes each,
most commercial breaks were four minutes,
the shortest commercial break was three minutes,
the longest commercial break was five minuets,
there were 6 show segments, averaging 8 minutes each,
the shortest show segment was five minutes,
the longest show segment was eleven minutes.
Okay, so it’s not the most impressive set of statistics out there, but the continuing drive for more commercial time and less show time is ever more aggravating, and one of the big reasons I didn’t watch TV for close to a decade (and for most shows, still prefer to just wait ’til they come out on DVD). That 2:1 ratio means that every hour of TV will actually have only 40 minutes of show.
For quick (and admittedly loose) comparisons with other well-known historical popular TV series, IMDB lists original Star Trek as 47 minutes, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager as 45 minutes, and Enterprise as 42 minutes. From the 60’s to the 80’s shows only lost about two minutes to advertisers, we held steady through the 90’s, but by 2001 had lost another three minutes, and in 2008 we’ve lost another two. Not only are we getting noticeably less show and more advertising, but the rate at which advertising takes over show time is increasing. Ick.
And then people wonder are surprised that I don’t watch more TV than I do? Heck, I’m often surprised that I watch as much as I do!
Last night, Prairie and I watched The Mist, the recent adaptation of an old Stephen King short story.
Short review: for the first 120 minutes or so, while we had some quibbles with the decisions made, it’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of the original story, and we were really enjoying it. Unfortunately, the last five minutes of the film completely ruined it for us.
If you rent it, I strongly recommend stopping it about five minutes before the end, right about the 1:20 mark. That would be a worthwhile ending, and one that’s more or less true to the original story.
There are multiple versions of this floating around on the ‘net, and I’ve run across the concept before, but I saw this particular version for the first time this week in my Women’s Studies class, where it got a lot of laughs and some good discussions going.
What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
When and how did you decide that you were a heterosexual?
Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?
Is it possible your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?
If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, is it possible that all you need is a good gay or lesbian lover?
To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies? How did they react?
Why do you heterosexuals feel compelled to seduce others into your lifestyle?
Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Why can’t you just be what you are and keep quiet about it?
Would you want your children to be heterosexual knowing the problems they’d face?
A disproportionate majority of child molesters are heterosexual. Do you consider it safe to expose your children to heterosexual teachers?
With all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?
Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?
Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual like you?
Could you trust a heterosexual therapist to be objective? Don’t you fear (s)he might be inclined to influence you in the direction of his/her own leanings?
How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to compulsive, exclusive heterosexuality, and fail to develop your natural, healthy homosexual potential?
There seem to be very few happy heterosexuals. Techniques have been developed that might enable you to change if you really want to. Have you considered trying aversion therapy?
