Midweek Miscellany

We frequently see or hear quips about the older generation's fumble-fingered efforts with new (to them) technology - here's a chance for those of us of "a certain age" to have a little snigger at the younger generation:

"Are we supposed to pick up the phone and then do it?' Fun footage shows two teenagers completely baffled by a rotary telephone when given four minutes to make one call:

Teacher wears same dress for 100 days to teach students a lesson

By Hannah Frishberg

Teacher Julia Mooney dressed to impress her earthy beliefs on middle school students.

To prove that you are not what you wear, Mooney, 34, donned the same gray, button-down dress for 100 days in a row, washing it only “as needed.”

She didn’t tell her young charges what she was up to in the beginning — but slowly they caught on that she was rocking the roughly $50 frock “through ceramics projects, blizzards, whatever.”

“I was a little bit fed up with the cultural expectation to go shopping and spend all this money for other people to approve of me,” Mooney told “Good Morning America” back in November, when she launched her minimalist mission. “There is no rule that says I cannot wear the same thing every day if I choose to, so I thought, why not.

Fast-forward to February: By buying into the buzzy “fast fashion” trend, Mooney says we are cultivating what she describes as a “culture of excess” that hurts the environment — and young people.

"This is something they deal with every day as 12- and 13-year-olds,” she tells TreeHugger. “As they try to define themselves, they are often identifying with brands or superficial things like their social media presence. Many seemed excited to have a reason to talk about how silly all of that really is.................“Let’s use our energy to do good instead of looking good,” Mooney advises on her @oneoutfit100days Instagram account, where she posts about the importance of sustainability and the evils of fast fashion.

Do read the full piece (linked at the title) where there's a photograph of Ms Mooney, and the dress.

Cartoon by Mad John Peck (1971) - the idea never gets old!

A movie "coming soon"- actually at the end of June 2019, is said to offer a new slant on Beatlemania, with a spoonful of sci-fi added.

A failing musician finds himself the only person in the world who remembers, after a weird world-wide sci-fi type event, the Beatles and their music. Guess what a failing musician might do next in such circumstances!

If the movie hadn't been written by Richard Curtis (from a story by Jack Barth) I'd probably be very wary of its potential, but Curtis has written such delights as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999), Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), Love Actually (2003)... Yesterday is directed by Danny Boyle.

This coming movie has to be worth a look (keeping disbelief suspended!)

Official trailer:

Technology & Dependence

Here's another of Ian Lang's excellent answers at Quora, borrowed with his kind (blanket) permission. The question here was:


What are the ramifications of being so dependent on technology?

Ian Lang, Leading Technician, wrote:

Quite soon in the future we are going to find out because we are sleepwalking our way to an energy crisis. I’m probably going to be good and dead before it bites but I’m fairly sure that some people already born are going to suffer it.

We depend on electrical or electronics for everything, from waking us up in the morning to making our breakfasts. Unless it’s a diesel vehicle we even depend upon a battery for our transport, and even if it is a diesel we use an electric starter. It carries on like this all day; hardly anything we do now doesn’t involve severely inconveniencing electrons.

We need nuclear power stations but the organic-carrot-scoffing hippies rear up and say “nope” at that and for some reason that I can’t fathom we listen to them, unless we’re French, in which case we produce seventy-seven per cent of our energy from nukes and say “allez-vous faire foutre, porteur de sandales” for which you’ve got to admire them. (Hey! must be mellowing in my old age - I’ve just said something nice about the French! =| )

Even if the beardy-weirdies do come up with some non-magical way of generating energy that technicians can make, there’s still the possibility of another Carrington Event happening. If you don’t know what that is, look it up and be afraid. Be very afraid.

If we keep on thinking that an app will solve everything then we’re doomed. We’ll lose all the old mechanical and human skills (how many can read a map and compass in the age of Sat-Navs?) and won’t know what to do when the electron-juice dries up. As I said, I’ll probably be good and dead and won’t give a monkey’s. But there’s a good chance that my niece might see the beginnings of it. That’s why I’m teaching her to do things with proper basic tools. You never know.

About that "Carrington Event" - see Solar storm of 1859

Snip:

The solar storm of 1859 (also known as the Carrington Event)[1] was a powerful geomagnetic solar storm during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867). A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetosphere and induced one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record, September 1–2, 1859.......
A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread disruptions and damage due to extended outages of the electrical grid.[2][3] The solar storm of 2012 was of similar magnitude, but it passed Earth's orbit without striking the planet.

Lesson to be learned - As Graham Nash once wrote in song lyrics:
"Teach your children well!"

Saturday & Sundry

I'm even further out of the loop than I'd imagined - I'm no longer even part of "the older generation" - said to be inhabitants of Facebook (I'm not!) I must be way out there, well past where the buses don't run! From: Why the Modern World Is Bad for Your Brain - How our addiction to technology is making us less efficient, by Daniel J. Levitin (The Guardian)

"Now of course email is approaching obsolescence as a communicative medium. Most people under the age of 30 think of email as an outdated mode of communication used only by “old people”. In its place they text, and some still post to Facebook. They attach documents, photos, videos, and links to their text messages and Facebook posts the way people over 30 do with email. Many people under 20 now see Facebook as a medium for the older generation."

My predicament reminds me of something Douglas Adams once wrote:

1) Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.”

26 Pictures Will Make You Re-Evaluate Your Entire Existence

The universe, man… THE UNIVERSE.


Hmmm - and that reminds me of something else Douglas Adams once wrote:

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

Some "portmanteau" words we might have assumed came fully-fledged from some technical textbook or other are really just a combination of two other words:

In 1969, pixel, a blend of pictures — or rather, the abbreviation pix—and element, only referred to televised images.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, meld likely came from a combination of melt and weld in the 1930s. Vulcan mind-melding came along some 30 years later.

The concept of the bit, or binary digit, has been around since the late 1940s.

In 1975, the term endorphin was created from the French word endogène and morphine to describe those opiate-like peptides that kick in just when you're about to give up jogging altogether.

More at Mental floss HERE


And...what did Douglas Adams have to say on wordy or alphabetical matters?

The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable. -"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,"

Did you know that Subaru is the Japanese name for the Pleiades star cluster M45, or "The Seven Sisters" (one of which tradition says is invisible - hence only six stars in the car company's Subaru logo), which in turn inspires the logo and alludes to the companies that merged to create Fuji Heavy Industries?

More interesting origins of car company and car model names in this video:




Mr Adams must have had a few words to say about cars?

On Earth - when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass - the problem had been cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had safely been hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another - particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe".

Best one of all!

Concluding words of wisdom from Douglas Adams:

The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.

Arty Flighty Spaced-out Friday

Mixed bag today, but there are fleeting links between items.

Last week I received a comment on a 2008 post about a piece of sculpture I'd bought back then in an Oklahoma junk store. The commenter told me that she/he has a similar piece. This commment is the third of a kind I've received during the past four years, from others who own similar sculptures. We'd all like to know more about it. There's an engraved name "Morfy" (or in one case "Morphy") on top of the base. It must be either the artist's name or perhaps the model's. On the back of the base is imprinted: "Austin Productions Inc. 1972 (c)". It's big, and very heavy. I promised to bump a photograph of the piece into 2012 to test whether some new information would surface.

Here she is, I originally spotted her on a very high shelf in a murky junk store. She was coated with grime. I bargained for my "Black Magic Woman".


Any information will be gratefully received!

Going off at a slight tangent - another piece of artwork I bought five years ago, whose origin and artist were unknown to me until just yesterday:



Pure Uranus this one, which is why it attracted me as it hung in a display tent at an Arts Festival in a nearby town. It now hangs by my desk with assorted other artwork. The limited edition print is around 18" square, marked 239/500 and, I now know it is by Brad W. Foster. Just yesterday I discovered more about it after finding the artist's own website. I obtained Mr. Foster's permission to show a small image of the print here -its title is The Stars at Night are Big and Bright (or Remember the Alamo?)

"Deep, deep, deep in space, the multi-species space cruiser Asimov and it's fleet of various support craft have come across a singularly unique artifact floating in orbit around a newly discovered ringed planet system. Many of the crew members with ancestors from the long lost planet of "Earth" insist that there is something very familiar about the design of this structure..............."

I took a quick look at the artist's natal chart from birth data given at Wikipedia.

Taurus Sun and Mercury (Taurus is ruled by Venus planet of the arts) reflect his obvious artistic talent, but it was seeing Jupiter conjunct Uranus (eccentric, futuristic, avant garde) that really "sealed the deal" astrologically. The artist is definitely Uranian in style - even the title of his website and publishing company "Jabberwocky Graphix" is Uranian. (Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll who had Sun, Jupiter and Uranus in Aquarius, the sign ruled by Uranus!)

The artist also recommends:

"...that you look at it once it is up on your wall (at least six times a week is considered the minimum), or else it will get sad and lonely, and the tear-stains will make it look less attractive."

I've looked at the illustration many, many times and found new ingredients every single time! Love, love, love it!

Which segues rather well into:

Last Friday we were in Weatherford, 2 hours drive north west of our home, and coincidentally in the area where I bought "Black Magic Woman" (above). While nosing around town, with less than an hour to spare before closing time, we found the Stafford Air and Space Museum:

"Weatherford is the birthplace and childhood home of astronaut and flightpioneer General Thomas P. Stafford. The Stafford Air & Space Museum houses an amazing collection of air and space exhibits featuring flown-in-space artifacts and historically important aircraft. Founded in 1981 it is now thepremier museum of its type in the southwestern area of the United States."

Because it was so near to closing time we were allowed in without entry fee, to have a quick look around. The husband, a keen airplane fan, was thrilled to bits to see so many exhibits of planes from the earliest scary contraptions to more recent, terrifying, bombers. After our quick look-around I did my usual poseur inpression with a sculpture of General Stafford at the museum's entrance.


I preferred the space exhibits and wondered at the highly complex "guts" of space ships, sliced open and on display. The real thing reminded me of that print of mine (above). Those innards of a beast whose power can send humans all the way to the Moon and beyond. Somebody - many somebodies - understand how these are designed and manufactured with such precision, then put together, again with such precision! Not to mention the courageous individuals who actually choose to operate the things! Makes me feel such a darned ignoramus!

I picked out a small exhibit whach appealed to me as showing the essential normalness of those exceptional men and women who travel into space - especially the earliest pioneers. In a display case were some almost empty Scotch whiskey and vodka bottles covered with signatures and an explanation:







As it happens, today, 20 July, marks two space-related anniversaries:

1969: Apollo Program: Apollo 11 successfully makes the first manned landing on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon almost 7 hours later. (US Time).

1976: The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.