He’s tanned. He’s rested. He’s ready.
He’s the newly redone animatronic LBJ from the (also recently remodeled) LBJ Presidential Library.
And if you think he looks just a little overly tan, well, you’re not the only one.
Archive for the ‘Museums’ Category
Igor, the President speaks!
Friday, December 28th, 201221-50 to headquarters!
Wednesday, August 29th, 2012Have you ever heard of the Texas Highway Patrol Association?
Did you know they had a museum in San Antonio? I did not. I might have gone down to see the museum, had I known it was there. But in retrospect, I’m kind of glad I didn’t make the trip: here are some photos of the museum from the Texas DPS website.
As you might have guessed from that link and the associated commentary (which I personally think is very unusual for Texas DPS), the THPA was one of those charities that does telemarketing calls, collects your money, and does very little to benefit anyone but the company that makes the calls.
In particular, the organization apparently promised to pay a $10,000 “death benefit” to families of troopers killed in the line of duty. The organization never paid, the families sued, and…
Interestingly, the museum was founded by a former state legislator from Waco, Lane Denton. (Waco is also the home of the Texas Rangers Museum, which is actually well worth the drive from Austin to visit.)
And:
(Subject line hattip. I loved that show when I was a kid. No, I’m not that old: one of the local UHF stations showed syndicated reruns.)
Edited to add: In case you were wondering, here’s a Google Maps street view of the THPA headquarters. Note that this isn’t the large building on North Lamar, across from Texas DPS and right next to Dan’s Hamburgers, but another building.
Ancient Men and Fire.
Thursday, August 16th, 2012You know, if I had it to do all over again, I’d seriously think about becoming a food anthropologist.
It doesn’t seem like this is a profession that rakes in the big money. But I think it’d be kind of fun to figure out how they made beer 9,000 years ago, or what the Anasazi indians ate, or how teosinte became corn. Why is meat inside some form of dough common across so many cultures?
What prompts this thought? Tuesday night, my mother and I went to see Steven Raichlen’s “Man Food Fire: The Evolution of Barbecue” lecture at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. (We had a very nice meal at Lambert’s beforehand. I had forgotten how much I liked their charcuterie plate.)
I hadn’t really thought much about the relationship between evolutionary biology and cooking. Part of Raichlen’s lecture was that we went from this:
(Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis. Note the large jaw and the protruding attachment points for jaw muscles.)
to this:
(Homo erectus)
largely due to our ancestor’s use of fire to cook meat. I may be glossing over some subtleties here, but the short version is that cooking meat (and other foods) allowed our ancestors to use their food more efficiently, leading both to the evolution away from the large jaw and large jaw muscles, and to an increase in cranial capacity – thus, larger brains to fill the space. And that’s how we got to modern man.
(It isn’t that I don’t trust Raichlen, but I’d really like to sit down and talk about his ideas with someone like LabRat, who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. By the way, that linked post over at the Atomic Nerds site is well worth reading.)
Some other highlights:
- Raichlen (and, I assume, his escorts) hit three barbecue places for lunch: Franklin Barbecue, John Muller’s (“tx@bugmenot.com”, “texas”), and…Stiles Switch. I still haven’t made to Franklin (I’m waiting for the circus to die down), and I need to try Muller’s. But Stiles Switch is probably my current favorite barbecue joint (at least in the Austin area) so it fills me with delight that it earned the Raichlen seal of approval. Here’s a review of the Switch from the Statesman.
- This one goes out to our great and good friend Carol: grilled ice cream, an Azerbaijani recipe that I’d like to try. (Azerbaijan has TV chefs? I wonder if there is Azerbaijani public television, and if it has pledge drives.)
- This one goes out to our brother-in-law. Raichlen on ceramic cookers (like the Big Green Egg): there’s really not much difference between them, so go with the one that matches your patio furniture best.
- Packaged charcoal briquets actually originated with Henry Ford, as a method of recycling wood scraps from the Model T. Ford started converting them into charcoal, packaging them, and selling the bags; this venture became the Kingsford company.
- The Statesman pretty much f’ed up their coverage of this event. The first article I saw on it said it was free, you just had to call and RSVP. A few hours later, they amended that to “free for museum members, $4 for everyone else“, and blamed the museum for the error. I can tell you we were not museum members, and nobody was collecting money for admission. (They were selling Raichlen books, and he did do a signing after the talk.)
- Raichlen seems to me to be a pretty swell guy. I was impressed not just with his presentation, but his willingness to stay and answer questions afterwards. I think we would have been there all night long if the museum staff hadn’t cut off the Q&A (and he was still answering questions during the signing). My biggest surprise of the night: he has a degree…in French literature. Hmmmm. Maybe there’s hope for my food anthropology dreams after all.
- Raichlen’s blog, though he hasn’t put up anything from Austin yet. There is stuff in his Twitter feed.
Edited to add: Let me throw this in. The patron saint of barbecue and barbecue pitmasters? Saint Lawrence. This explains much.
Noted for the record.
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012The two NSA pamphlets I mentioned previously, “Solving the Enigma – History of the Cryptanalytic Bombe” and “The Cryptographic Mathematics of Enigma” are available from the NSA website as free downloads, along with quite a few other publications related to WWII cryptography. There are also publications available on cryptography in other eras: Korea, Vietnam, Cold War, etc.
I personally like having the printed versions to have and to hold (and you can request them by email), but this is a gold mine for the impatient person who really wants to know the “History of the Cryptographic Branch of the People’s Army of Vietnam 1945-1975“.
0-day DEFCON 20 notes.
Friday, July 27th, 2012I got in line for my badge around 7:30 AM. Registration opened at 8 AM, according to the schedule.
I got my badge at 9:30 AM. I have no idea how many people were in line, but it was packed. We were told that folks started camping out for badges at 10:30 PM Wednesday night.
But, hey! I got mine!
After what was (in my opinion) last year’s badge fail, they went back to an electronic badge this year, still tied in to a “crypto-mystery” game, but at least the badge does something useful.
Or perhaps can do something useful, would be a better way of putting it. The designer calls it a “development platform”: there’s holes for I/O pins at the top, and we were issued VGA (1) and PS/2 connectors (2) with the badge to attach ourselves. And remember my inquiry a while back about microcontrollers? The badge CPU is a Parallax Propeller.
(I haven’t been able to get the badge and Project E talking yet. I suspect a bad or wrong USB cable.)
I hit two panels today. Worth noting is that today’s theme was “DEFCON 101”: there was only one programming track, and the theme of those items was more “introduction to” rather than “deep dive.”
DaKahuna’s “Wireless Security: Breaking Wireless Encryption Keys” wasn’t quite what I expected, in that he didn’t do a live demo. (Though he did suggest that there would be systems available for practice in the Wireless Village.) Rather, this was something of a “view from 10,000 feet” presentation, giving a basic introduction to hardware requirements and tools for attacking wireless keys, along with explanations of how WEP and WPA keys work, and where the vulnerabilities are. A lot of this stuff I already knew from my academic studies, but then again, I wasn’t the target audience here, and I did pick up a few tips.
The presenters for “Intro to Digital Forensics: Tools and Tactics” sold me in the first five minutes by pointing out that:
- Not everyone knows everything.
- It would behoove the community to stop acting like dicks when people ask reasonable questions, like “What switches should I use for NMap?”.
The presenters then proceeded to give example usages for what they considered to be the top five tools for testing and exploration:
- The Metasploit framework, which they sadly ran out of time while discussing.
- Ntop, the network traffic analyzer.
- Nmap, for doing port scans and OS fingerprinting. For example:
#nmap -v -sT -F -A -oG 10.x.x.x/24
What does this mean?
-v turns on verbose mode
-sT forces NMap to do a full TCP connection to each host
-F enables fast scan mode
-A tells NMap to do OS fingerprinting
-oG tells NMap to output in a format grep can work with,
10.x.x.x/24 tells NMap the range of hosts to scan. - tcpdump, which captures packets on a given network interface.
tcpdump -i eth1 -n -x
-i specifies the interface
-n turns off /etc/services translation, so instead of displaying the service name (ftp, telnet, etc.) it just shows the port number.
-x dumps hex output to the screen - Netcat, which creates TCP sockets that can be used for communications between systems. But that’s a little misleading. Let’s say we have two systems, our localhost and a machine at 192.168.1.128. On the .128 machine, we run:
nc -l -p 2800 -e cmd.exe
-l tells netcat to listen for a connection
-p tells netcat to listen for that connection on port 2800
-e tells netcat to run a command when a connection is made on that port: in this case, netcat will run cmd.exe.
On the local system:
nc 192.168.1.128 2800 connect
which establishes a connection between our system and the remote system. The remote system will run cmd.exe, which (on a Windows system) should give us a command shell on the remote system that we can use from our localhost.
I took the rest of the day off to visit a couple of bookstores (both are still there, pretty much unchanged) and the Mob Museum.
My first thought was that $18 seems a bit stiff. Then again, the Atomic Testing Museum is $14, And the Mob Museum seems to have more people on staff, and may possibly be a little larger than the ATM. (I can’t tell for sure, but the Mob Musuem bascially has that entire building: all three floors.) ($5 for parking cheesed me off a bit, though.)
Anyway, while the Atomic Testing Museum is still my favorite Vegas musuem, the Mob Museum is well worth visiting, especially if you have an interest in organized crime in the United States. (Not just in Vegas, though that is a key focus; the museum also talks about organized crime in other areas, including NYC and Cleveland.) There is a lot of emphasis on Estes Kefauver, perhaps just a little more than I thought was warranted.(I admit, I chuckled at the “Oscar Goodman” display.)
Two things that surprised me:
- The number of families with small children at the Mob Museum. Parents, would you take your kids to a museum devoted to organized crime? (There’s some pretty graphic stuff, but the Museum confines it all to one section, warns you before you enter the section, and gives you an option to skip past it.) (And I feel kind of hypocritical saying this: if my parents had taken me to the Mob Museum when I was, say, 10, wild horses couldn’t have dragged me out of there.)
- The popularity among small children of the firearms simulator. Kids were having a lot of fun pretending to be cops, running through various scenarios (like a domestic dispute) and busting caps in bad guys. (I didn’t tell any of the kids that, had they actually been out on the street, they’d be dead before they got their first shot off. Do I look like an asshole?)
Tomorrow is when things start for real. Look for an update, but probably late in the evening.
(Oh, I did want to mention Chad Everett’s death yesterday, but I was using the Kindle to blog, which was a pain, and things got kind of sideways leaving LAX and arriving in Vegas, so consider this your obit watch.)
Battleship!
Thursday, July 5th, 2012I believe I’ve mentioned in the past that I’m a big fan of museums. Especially little museums, and especially military museums. I’ve had a lot of fun visiting official Navy museums, like the one at the Naval War College in Newport and the Submarine Force Museum in Groton. (However, I am not biased; I’ve been to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB twice, and loved that both times.)
It isn’t just the official museums I like. I want to get back over to the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg soon. (I know, it is now the “National Museum of the Pacific War”, but I still think of it as the Nimitz Museum.) It isn’t even just the military ones; there’s a whole host of little museums in Houston, for example, that I’d like to visit.
(We visited the San Jacinto Monument a lot when I was a child, but I don’t remember ever touring the battleship Texas. Odd that. I also never got to eat at the San Jacinto Inn during the glory days of that establishment. Not that I’m bitter or anything.)
The purpose of this long digression is to point out an article in today’s LAT (I know, I know, but they come in waves, and the Cudahy articles were actually yesterday; I just didn’t have time to blog them) tied to the battleship Iowa docking in San Pedro.
The basic point of the article is that warship museums may or may not work out. Why? It depends on the location: thank you, Captain Obvious!
I’d suggest both of those are very special cases; San Diego has a strong naval presence, so I’d expect a warship museum to work well there. And the Intrepid is, to my mind, an atypical warship museum, what with the space shuttle and the SR-71 and the glaven and the HEY NICE LADY!
Sorry.
On the other hand, I’m not exactly shocked that the battleship New Jersey in Camden, New Jersey has trouble attracting visitors.
I’d also note Chumlee and Rick have a full work schedule at the shop and can’t be running off to every warship in the country, and the Old Man is probably too grumpy to be a good docent.
TMQ watch: October 11, 2011.
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011Let’s start off this week with a video:
The reasons why will become apparent. (Also, we have a couple of friends who are students of ti kwan leap.) After the jump, this week’s TMQ:
Confucius say, “We’ve lost our lease! Everything must go!”
Monday, January 31st, 2011The Forbidden Gardens in Katy are closing.
Yes, I know. “The what?”
Lisa Gray in the HouChron has a pretty good piece that covers the closing, the history of the Forbidden Gardens, and what little she could find out about Ira Poon, the shadowy millionaire who’s supposedly behind the attraction.
Based on the Chron’s story, I wouldn’t be shocked if they start digging for the Grand Parkway expansion and find a gargantuan underground lair beneath the Forbidden Gardens, complete with death ray and shark tank.
Corporate tourism.
Monday, October 11th, 2010MattG over at Better and Better (which I shamefully have not added to my blogroll previously) has a nifty post up about his field trip to the Hornady plant.
In addition to making me want to schedule a road trip (and, hey, I can stop on the way at the SAC Museum! Don’t tell me the SAC Museum isn’t on the way; if I’m going to Nebraska, it’s on the way.) Matt’s post reminds me of something we’ve lost along the way.
Back when I was a child and we took family vacations by car, one of the things we’d do is stop at the obscure (and not so obscure) little museums along the way, and take the corporate tours at manufacturing plants as well. The corporate tour that stands out most vividly in my mind was the one of the Daisy factory in Rogers, Arkansas. I can’t tell if Daisy even offers those tours any longer, or if they’ve been replaced by the Daisy museum; but as good as the Daisy museum might be, the factory tour was at least one of the things that made me a lifelong gunnie.
One of my favorite things in Boston was the observation deck at the John Hancock building. I remember thinking it was one of the best thought out spaces I’d seen in a long time. There was a huge diorama of the battle of Bunker Hill. The observation deck overlooked the approach path to Logan, so they had a section set up where you could listen to ATC traffic. They had telescopes. They had little kiosks where you could print directions to other Boston landmarks (this was in the pre-Mapquest/Google Maps days). The operative word there is “had”. They closed the observation deck after September 11th, ostensibly for “security reasons”.
Goodyear used to have the “World of Rubber” museum. They let that fall into disrepair, and closed it down last year.
I never got to take the Kellogg’s factory tour, but they apparently stopped doing that due to “corporate espionage” concerns (“Oh my God! Someone might steal the trade secret for Fruit Loops!” Here’s a hint; the trade secret is “sugar”!), and replaced it with a badly thought out “attraction” called “Cereal City USA” that closed in 2007.
I understand some of the reasons these things are going away. Cheap air travel means that families fly more, instead of driving, so you’re unlikely to make the “World of Rubber” a destination unless you’re flying into Akron. As manufacturing moves offshore, and we stop building s–t in this country, it becomes more difficult to schedule a factory tour in China. I know that security and liability are concerns, too.
But what are the long term benefits? How many kids toured GM when they were little, and grew up to buy Corvettes? How many gunnies came out of Daisy or Smith and Wesson factory tours? (Yes, you can tour the Smith and Wesson factory, but you should really call ahead to get information first.) And how many kids took factory tours when they were young and came out inspired to build stuff?
Are these cutbacks short-sighted? Are we killing off the inventors of tomorrow? And is the demise of the factory tour one of the reasons for growing anti-corporate sentiment? Can you really think GM is evil if you toured the Corvette plant as a little kid? (Note: sadly, this author has never toured the Corvette plant. At least, not as of yet.)
It seems that as we lose these things, we’re also losing a part of our national soul, and that makes me sad. I don’t know what to do about it, except to suggest that we support companies like Hornady that keep their doors open and the lights on for the passing public.
Sad news from Las Vegas.
Monday, September 13th, 2010The Liberace Museum is closing.
I’ve actually toured that museum twice, and had a great deal of fun both times. I find it just a bit surprising that they employed 30 people, but with all the clothes, the cars, the musical instruments, and what not, as well as staffing the museum, I guess I shouldn’t be that shocked.
The mention that they also hired a professional curator from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (who lasted a year) is also kind of interesting. I know Mike the Musicologist had some thoughts on curation and the Liberace Museum after our first visit, but I’ll let him post those if he wishes.
(Thanks to Bill Crider for the tip on this.)
Edited to add: Here are links to two stories from the Las Vegas Sun: link 1 and link 2. I do not believe the Sun is associated with the Las Vegas Review-Journal or Righthaven, but if I’m wrong about that, please let me know.
Random notes: August 19, 2010.
Thursday, August 19th, 2010The NYT is all over Philadelphia’s efforts to save three historic ships: the Olympia, the United States, and the battleship New Jersey.
The New Jersey does not actually seem to be in any danger, except from government cutbacks. People have been trying to save the United States for years, but there just doesn’t seem to be that much enthusiasm; the current plan is for a conservancy to purchase it, and convince someone to turn it into a hotel, casino, or other project.
Of the three ships, the Olympia seems to be the most endangered and most important. What’s interesting to me about the NYT article is that:
- Various bloggers were on this story months ago.
- The NYT doesn’t mention the embezzlement scandal, which may have had something to do with the inability to keep the Olympia running.
The NYT is also on the case if you want to spend six figures on a fish tank. But what if you don’t? The NYT is there for you, too, with some options in the four and even three figure range.
Into the Wild
Remember the Titans.
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Titan II Launch Control Center, level 2.