“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 146

August 23rd, 2020

Science Sunday!

This is something I’d vaguely heard of in the past, but only just stumbled across on the ‘Tube.

“Mr. Tompkins In Wonderland”.

Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland is a short educational film from the University of Akron based on the story by George Gamow. The film uses Gamow’s story featuring the titular character Mr. C.J.H. Tompkins to explain the basics of space, time, and relativity.

Bonus video: I could sit here every Sunday and post videos of Richard Feynman from YouTube until the end of time. But I’m going to try to avoid doing that.

This one interests me, though: Feynman responds to the question “Do you think there will ever be a machine that will think like human beings and be more intelligent than human beings?”

I like that statement: “Intelligence is to be defined.”

One more. I’m going to assert something here: pseudoscience is science. At least, when you’re debunking it.

Orson Welles talks about “cold reading“.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 145

August 22nd, 2020

This is another one of those days when I don’t have a real theme, so I hope you enjoy some things that amused me.

First up: Salvador Dali appears on “What’s My Line?” You’ve got to like the way he signs in.

Bonus: Orson Welles talks about Ernest Hemingway. That story about Welles and Hemingway attempting to trade punches and ultimately opening a bottle and toasting each other is also recounted in a neat little book, To Have and Have Another, about Hemingway and Hemingway’s cocktails. (Affiliate link.)

Last one, because this is a little longer.

“A Conversation with Igor Stravinsky” from 1957.

Airing on NBC from 1957 to 1965, the Wisdom series featured interviews with luminaries in science, the arts, and politics. These interviews were often conducted by a journalist or colleague well-known to the guest and usually took place in familiar surroundings such as the subject’s home or workplace. While each program forms a picturesque snapshot of the cultural conventions of the day, it frequently transcends its mid-20th-century broadcast style as it presents challenging and in-depth perspectives from a great mind. Guests include Igor Stravinsky, Robert Frost, Somerset Maugham, Eamon de Valera, Alfred P. Sloan, Robert Moses, Edward Steichen, Margaret Mead, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pearl Buck, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marcel Duchamp, Arnold Toynbee, and Carl Sandburg. 14-part series, 29 minutes each.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 144

August 21st, 2020

This isn’t exactly travel, but more a cross between business and aircraft.

“Tailspin”, which seems to be from something called “Enterprise” narrated by Eric Sevareid. This is a fairly short documentary about the history, and especially the fall, of Braniff. Warning: for some reason, the sound completely drops out at about the 24:30 mark, but most of what’s left at that point is shots of parked Braniff aircraft and the credits.

Bonus video #1: did you know Braniff flew the Concorde? Well, technically, they offered Concorde service between DFW and Dulles, with connecting flights to Paris and London (operated by Air France and British Airways: I think this is what we might call a “codeshare” today, but the US leg of the flights was operated by Braniff pilots.)

They started the service in early 1979.

The domestic flights often had no more than 15 passengers on average for each flight while Braniff’s Boeing 727 flights were filled close to the capacity despite being five to ten minutes slower than Concorde.

Bonus video #2: a 1966 vintage (and mildly amusing) Braniff commercial.

Bonus video #3: another one from 1965 for “The End Of the Plain Plane“.

“We won’t get you where you’re going any faster, but it’ll seem that way.”

Bonus video #3: footage of “The Great Pumpkin”.

If I remember Splash of Colors correctly, the Great Pumpkin was the last Braniff plane in the air. I do remember a story about them being enroute to Hawaii: during the flight, the captain called the chief stewardess up to the flight deck.

Officially, it appears that the crew was given the choice by Dallas operations to either divert to Los Angeles or continue the flight unpaid to Honolulu. Urban legend has it that the pilot had been ordered to divert. Either way, we suspect that the pilot really did tell Operations that he had “a good airplane, good weather, and a load of passengers who have paid for a trip to Hawaii. What are they gonna do…fire me?” The pilot then brought the lead flight attendant into the cockpit and informed her of what was happening. Her response: “Is that all? I can get another job…I thought you were going to tell me that you were putting this big son of a bitch in the water!”

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Obit watch: August 20, 2020.

August 20th, 2020

Ben Cross. He was “Harold Abrahams”, one of the two runners in “Chariots of Fire”. He also had a part in the 2009 movie reboot of a second-rate SF TV series from the late 1960s.

Mary Hartline. My mother actually mentioned this to me the other day. She was one of the very early TV stars:

“Super Circus,” a live Sunday afternoon series on ABC, began in early 1949, when the television industry was still laying its coaxial cables. Ms. Hartline was a striking presence with her long, wavy hair, her majorette-style costumes — including her signature uniform, with musical notes on the thigh-high hemline — and white tasseled boots.
Between the show’s death-defying circus acts, she conducted the band’s lively musical numbers, performed comedy sketches with the clowns, guided young audience members through contest segments and delivered live commercials. (Everybody did it. The future newsman Mike Wallace, also a cast member, pushed peanut butter.)
Ms. Hartline, often called television’s first sex symbol (a lot of fathers, it seems, were watching, alongside their offspring), was a master of promotion. In addition to having her face on Kellogg’s cereal boxes, representing Canada Dry beverages and demonstrating the joys of the newest Dixie Cup dispenser, she had her own merchandise line.
Those three dozen products included the Mary Hartline doll (“all hard plastic with socket head, jointed arms and legs, sleep eyes, blond wig,” according to a recent auction-lot description), which can still bring hundreds of dollars at auction.

Dr. Jay Galst. Interesting sounding guy: he was professionally an ophthalmologist. But he grew up with a dad who brought bags of coins home from the grocery store for him to sift through (pulling out the rare ones), and he continued pursuing numismatics into his adulthood and professional career.

He specialized in coins and coin adjacent objects (“…tokens, medals and similar artifacts”) that were in some way related to eyes, and co-wrote a book on the subject with Peter van Alfen.

The volume, “Ophthalmologia, Optica et Visio in Nummis,” which translates as Ophthalmology, Optics and Vision in Numismatics, was 574 pages and had some 1,700 entries.

He also specialized in coins from ancient Judea.

“The last time we were together, back in pre-pandemic February, we were in the A.N.S.’s vault looking through trays and trays of 17th-century British farthing and halfpenny tokens,” Dr. van Alfen said by email, “trying to find an example produced by a London optician who also produced a different token he had just purchased in order to compare the two. I knew very little about 17th-century British tokens before that morning. In the hour it took to find the token, I received a crash course. His pure joy in such numismatic arcana was always irresistible.”

Marvin Creamer, who sounds like another interesting guy, and died at 104. He:

…taught geography for many years at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J.
His expertise helped him become a history-making mariner, the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments. His 30,000-mile odyssey, in a 36-foot cutter with a small crew, made headlines worldwide on its completion in 1984.

…

It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.
But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch. He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.
Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.

…

…when the 66-year-old Professor Creamer set sail from Cape May, N.J., in his cutter, the Globe Star, in late 1982, he was widely considered unhinged: No mariner in recorded history had traversed the globe without at least a compass, used by sailors since the 12th century if not before, or a sextant, introduced in the 18th.
His 513-day journey would entail nearly a year on the sea, plus time in ports for repairs and reprovisioning. It would take the Globe Star to Capetown, South Africa; Hobart and Sydney, Australia; Whangara, New Zealand; and the Falkland Islands off Argentina before its triumphant return to Cape May on May 17, 1984 — an event that Professor Creamer gleefully described as “one small step back for mankind.”

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 143

August 20th, 2020

Travel Thursday!

I thought I’d do something different today. Instead of planes for our first video, trains. And instead of visiting a relatively civilized country, a fifth world banana republic.

“The California Zephyr”! With VistaDome! And courteous waiters!

To be fair, this is from the 1950s, prior to the decline and fall. And somewhat interestingly, Amtrak still runs a train called “California Zephyr” over a similar route (According to Wikipedia, the original Western Pacific Railroad, Burlington Railroad and Rio Grande Railroad incarnation shown here was discontinued in 1970, and Amtrak began running their version in 1983.)

Bonus video #1: More trains, this time the Santa Fe railroad. “Southern California Holiday”. Both of these videos also include some footage of the happiest place on Earth.

“You may cross here from country to country, with no passport problems.” I remember those days. (Never been to Tijuana, but when I was young, my family walked across the border between Texas and Mexico more than once. And when I was older, I made a couple more cross-border trips with friends. Then Homeland Security.)

Bonus video #2: Okay, travel by air this time. “California: World In a Week”, from the 1960s and United Airlines.

It is almost like being there. Except you don’t have to step over the needles and feces. Marineland of the Pacific operated until 1987, when it was bought by the people who owned SeaWorld. The new owners promptly moved all of the animals to SeaWorld San Diego, shut down Marineland, and poured concrete into the drains.

(Also.)

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 142

August 19th, 2020

One thing that I love is a good caper.

Well, I do like capers. But what I really meant was “capers”. You know, heists. Daring robberies. That sort of thing.

Something called “Wonder” has been popping up in my recommendations. I’m a little hesitant about posting much from them, but these are fairly short and part of what appears to be the same series: “Daring Capers”.

The first one is the one that I really wanted to post, for reasons: the December 11, 1978 Lufthansa heist.

You remember the Lufthansa heist, don’t you? Jimmy Burke Jimmy Conway, Paul Vario Paulie Cicero, those guys, those Goodfellas?

I thought this was an interesting supplement, if you will.

Bonus: the January 2, 1972 Pierre Hotel robbery.

This robbery would later be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest, most successful hotel robbery in history.

I chose this one because I’ve read Ira Berkow’s book about the Pierre, which tells the story mostly from Bobby Comfort‘s point of view. I note that the paper of record says $3 million, while the series claims $10 million. The $3 million figure is supported (to the extent anything can be supported) by Wikipedia. But as I recall, there are some questions about whether the robbery victims reported everything they lost: for example, stashes of untaxed cash.

One more: the July 16, 1976 robbery of the Société Générale bank in Nice.

Tunnel heists are awesome. Also, Lawrence gave me a much appreciated copy of The Gentlemen of 16 July for Christmas one year.

Posted in Food, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2020.

August 18th, 2020

Great and good FotB Borepatch was kind enough to send over an obit for Don Williams. But I’m seeing other reports that Mr. Williams actually passed away almost three years ago, and I’m having trouble sorting out what’s what. I’m going to argue, though, that good music is timeless.

Speaking of good music: Julian Bream.

And not speaking of music at all: Charles Wetli. He was a forensic pathologist and medical examiner, first in Dade County, Florida, then as the chief medical examiner of Suffolk County, Long Island.

He’d been at that job for 18 months when TWA 800 happened. He took a lot of flack for some of his decisions:

When the bodies were not immediately recovered and identified, family members directed their fury at Dr. Wetli. They worried that swift action regarding their loved ones had become secondary to the retrieval of forensic evidence for a criminal investigation.
Beyond that, families and politicians accused him of making blunders that only compounded their grief — he did not immediately work around the clock, he initially refused the help of pathologists from other jurisdictions and he did not allow most family members to see what remained of their loved ones.

But the obit points out that a lot of those decisions were defensible: there was no point in doing autopsies around the clock if they didn’t have fingerprints or dental records, which it took time to get from the families. And he didn’t ask for help initially because he wanted to make sure he had a good process in place with his own people before bringing in others.

“There’s no point having everybody show up and wait around doing nothing or giving advice I don’t need,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “I don’t need 30 dentists at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

And as for letting family see the remains…

The explosion and a plunge of 13,800 feet into a wall of water had sheared the skin, clothes and limbs from many passengers, making them more difficult to identify — and more disfigured — than most bodies that end up in a morgue. He did not want families to see the gruesome remains.

In spite of all this:

Christine Negroni, a CNN journalist who covered the crash and was the author of “The Deadly Departure of Flight 800” (2000), wrote in a recent tribute: “Dr. Wetli should be remembered as a pioneering forensic physician who assembled an array of dentists, X-ray technicians, pathologists and tiny samples of DNA to put a name on every bit of human remains recovered.”

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 141

August 18th, 2020

If you’re a big WWII buff (especially the kind of WWII buff that watches “12 O’Clock High”) you’ve probably heard of, or heard talk about, the Norden bombsight.

It was an early tachometric design that directly measured the aircraft’s ground speed and direction, which older bombsights could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb’s impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.
Together, these features promised unprecedented accuracy for daytime bombing from high altitudes. During prewar testing the Norden demonstrated a circular error probable (CEP)[a] of 75 feet (23 m)[b], an astonishing performance for that period. This precision would enable direct attacks on ships, factories, and other point targets. Both the Navy and the USAAF saw it as a means to conduct successful high-altitude bombing. For example, an invasion fleet could be destroyed long before it could reach U.S. shores.
To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale as the Manhattan Project. Carl L. Norden, Inc. ranked 46th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts. The Norden was not as secret as believed; both the British SABS and German Lotfernrohr 7 worked on similar principles, and details of the Norden had been passed to Germany even before the war started.

In practice, it wasn’t quite that accurate: Wikipedia gives a combat CEP of 1,200 feet.

Faced with these poor results, Curtis LeMay started a series of reforms in an effort to address the problems. In particular, he introduced the “combat box” formation in order to provide maximum defensive firepower by densely packing the bombers. As part of this change, he identified the best bombardiers in his command and assigned them to the lead bomber of each box. Instead of every bomber in the box using their Norden individually, the lead bombardiers were the only ones actively using the Norden, and the rest of the box followed in formation and then dropped their bombs when they saw the lead’s leaving his aircraft.[40] Although this spread the bombs over the area of the combat box, this could still improve accuracy over individual efforts. It also helped stop a problem where various aircraft, all slaved to their autopilots on the same target, would drift into each other. These changes did improve accuracy, which suggests that much of the problem is attributable to the bombardier. However, precision attacks still proved difficult or impossible.

I wonder, if you had told WWII bombardiers at the time that the detailed workings of the Norden bombsight would be available to anyone in the world 73 years later, what would they have thought? Maybe nothing. Who knows?

Bonus video: and here’s how you’d actually use one in combat.

According to Wikipedia, the last use of the Norden bombsight was during the Vietnam War: “The bombsights were used in Operation Igloo White for implanting Air-Delivered Seismic Intrusion Detectors (ADSID) along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.“

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Stuff’s getting serious, eh?

August 17th, 2020

The Canadian Football League has cancelled the 2020 season.

The league postponed the season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but had planned to launch a six-game schedule in early October in a secure bubble environment in Winnipeg.

It seems to have come down to this: the CFL depends on ticket sales at the gate, rather than TV or streaming revenue. Without ticket sales, they wanted a government bailout in order to play this season: and, shockingly (to me) the Canadian government said “No”.

The Manitoba government stepped up with $2.5 million for player accommodations, meals and transportation in Winnipeg.
The league, though, said it still required a significant cash infusion from Ottawa.
The federal government responded with an offer of a short-term loan with interest and fees that the league said it could not pay.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 140

August 17th, 2020

A while back, I summarized a DEFCON presentation on gun safe insecurity. I thought it might be fun today to post some demos, by way of the LockPickingLawyer channel on the ‘Tube.

First up, the “SnapSafe’s TrekLite TSA Gun Lockbox”, a case designed for airline transport of firearms. To summarize the video, this case is so bad that, if it worked as designed, it would actually be illegal to use. But because the design is so awful, it probably actually is technically legal. Still not secure, but technically legal.

Next up, the “Vaultek LifePod Gun Safe”, a waterproof gun safe endorsed by a prominent gun guy. You may remember Vaultek from almost three years ago, when it turned out their Bluetooth enabled product wasn’t secure. Turns out that the LifePod has a problem as well: the type of problem that you can exploit with a fork.

“Don’t read the comments.” But in fairness, Vaultek did respond in the comments and state that they are offering a fix for this problem.

You know what irony is, though? Irony is like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife. Okay, that’s not really ironic, that’s just stupid. But it sets up this: the Stack-On RFID Gun Safe.

But what if you don’t have a fork? Or a spoon? What if you just have a broken milk carton an orange juice bottle?

Coat hanger?

And now we know why the Knights Who Say “Ni!” wanted a shrubbery:

Posted in DEFCON, Guns, Locks | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 139

August 16th, 2020

Science Sunday!

I’ve been doing a lot of space history, so I wanted to change things up a bit. And I promised some abstract math, so here you go.

From the Numberphile channel (of which the Computerphile channel is an offshoot): “Hat Problems”.

Come on, you know I had to do that. Okay, bonus videos.

Number 1: “Fermat’s Last Theorem”, with Simon Singh (who as you may recall, wrote a book on FLT).

I actually didn’t know about The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, and I generally look sideways at these TV tie-in books. But I might take a flyer on that if it shows up used.

(All links are affiliate links.)

Number 2: “The Riemann Hypothesis”.

Posted in Clothing, Geek, Hats | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 138

August 15th, 2020

I thought perhaps I could do something on the lighter, cheerier side for Saturday.

The late John Hillerman tells the funniest joke he’d ever heard. As an admirer of Churchill myself, I approve of this joke, even though I have heard it before. Really, Hillerman’s delivery makes up for it being oft cited.

I don’t want to post a bunch of these, but just one more that I couldn’t pass up. Because: Shatner.

(“There’s no rule that says a mule horse can’t play football baseball!” My DuckDuckGo-fu may be weak, but I looked through the 2019 MLB rulebook, and I actually do not see any requirement that players be human. I guess as long as your horse isn’t on baseball’s permanently ineligible list…)

(“Bojack Horseman, call the commissioner, please.”)

Anyway, I actually had not heard that one. And it gives me a nice transition into this video, which I thought I’d post since Eddie Gaedel was mentioned earlier in the week:

One thing that’s been popping up in my recommendations recently is “STEP promotion” videos. Now, we’ve already established that I never served, and there’s probably a few (okay, more than a few) people who think I place an awful lot of emphasis on military stuff, military history, and military leadership for someone who didn’t serve.

There may be some truth to that. But the STEP videos reinforce something that’s important to me where I am now, and where I hope to be in the future: immediate public praise and reward for exceptional performance.

And finally, someone commented earlier this week: “Veronica Lake always gets the thumbs-up seal of approval.” I usually don’t like linking fiction or movie clips here, unless I’m using them to illustrate a throwaway joke or a larger point.

I’m making an exception in this case to give you something even better than Veronica Lake: Veronica Lake, wet.

Posted in History, Leadership, Movies, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 137

August 14th, 2020

Here’s something that’s right at the intersection of military history, computer science, and general geekery.

By way of the Computerphile channel, “Turing’s Engima Problem”. This explains how the Enigma machine worked, and the problems Turing et al faced in breaking it.

This is a little long, but neatly divided into two parts. Part 1:

And part 2:

I think for Science Sunday we’re going to see some more abstract math from a related YouTube channel, so stay tuned.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

August 14th, 2020

Jim Boylen out as Chicago Bulls coach. Tribune.

He was 39-84 over “parts of two seasons”, which I believe works out to a .317 winning percentage.

(Are they playing pro basketball now? I haven’t noticed.)

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 136

August 13th, 2020

Travel Thursday!

I know we went to Singapore last week, but here’s a different view, from a different airline that still exists and is one of my personal favorites. Why?

“Singapore Stop Over”, from Qantas sometime in the 1960s.

Bonus video: in all our travels, I’ve been neglecting the United States. So let us fix that. And it is the time of year when I want to visit someplace slightly cooler.

“This Land of Ours: Montana”, from 1947.

To be fair, yes, I probably picked this just so I could use the Frank Zappa video.

Posted in History, Planes, Travel | Comments Closed

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