Some people credit a German sixteen year old named with this invention. One of his names for it was the appropriately awesome "Aura." But three years after his creation, a Viennese inventor named Georg Anton Reinlein was granted a patent for the fabrication of a similar device to be constructed "in the Chinese manner." Meanwhile, around the same time, the Englishman Charles Wheatstone patented yet another version -- although its differences meant that it evolved into a whole different sub-group of devices.
It's not clear when a mysterious Bohemian named Richter made his crucial innovation to the basic idea -- it may have been anywhere from a year or so to several decades after the inventions cited above -- which is at the heart of modern versions of the device. But his contribution coincided with the invention's growing popularity. The oldest manufacturers of the items still in business opened their factory in Klingenthal, but it was a rival firm from modern-day Baden-Württemberg that dominated the business, and whose name is still most strongly associated with the device. Somewhere around 100 years follow following the device's invention, this firm was making twenty million of them annually.
By what name do we know this device?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a screener edition of the DVD-only version of Project Management for Dummies, including the hilarious blooper reel featuring author Stanley Portny trying desperately to get his laptop to hook up to a digital projector. No Googling or coming over here and pinching me repeatedly really hard on the back of the arm until finally I'm so helpless with pinch-pain that I reveal the answer to you so you'll just stop already and promise never to pinch me again, you jerk. One guess per comment, please, but comment as often as you like.
Be cautious using Woogle at work. This addictively ingenious twist on image-searching proves how many of the jpgs floating around out there are of naked people. Often, the word called for produces a surprisingly...adult...result. Luckily some results are thankfully just what you'd expect.
But there's plenty of fun to be had, nudies notwithstanding. Turn off the feature that shows the word below the image, and rebus games immediately come to mind. Of course, the search box at the top of the page unfortunately shows the words...so you have to try not to look in it. Then try to decode the rendering of The first words from a famous novel. (Here's Another [NSFW], and another. Here's Another famous first line of verse.
Including common words makes this task more difficult.
I wonder if someone will figure some sort of hack (short of a screenshot) to erase the search box text but leave the produced images intact?
I try not, incidentally, to replicate the fun stuff on offer at MeFi over here, but of course that's where I found this.
Comments are down. I'm not entirely sure why -- this doesn't seem to be a blacklist problem, but something else.
Particularly sad -- I knew something was up when I had received exactly zero comment-spam notifications today.
Juan Cole makes a case for getting U.S. ground troops out of Iraq -- without regard for the number of U.S. casualties or the deceptive nature of the original rationale for war. The army should go, he says, because it's decreasing stability, not increasing it -- and we're "brutalizing" our troops in the process.
Going to the second point are new allegations of persistent cruelty toward Iraqi prisoners, the notion that Abu Ghraib was an anomaly is looking more and more like fantasy.
"On their day off people would show up all the time," the sergeant continues in the HRW report. "Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the cook."
(note: "PUC"="Persons Under Control", i.e. prisoners).
Can Christopher Hitchens answer this by continuing to change the subject to Israel/Palestine?
(For what it's worth, Cole also makes the case for a maintaining some military presence in Iraq; just not large-scale ground forces.)
The Juan Cole stuff comes to us via the indispensible Dr. Green, by the way.
In 1865, a thirty-three year-old man in Berlin finished his Ph.D. thesis, which was a critique of work done by a Dane named Ole Christensen Rømer. He sent the thesis off to a Frenchman, Urbain Le Verrier, but didn't receive Le Verrier's reply until a year later. The reply told him to look in a certain place. In order to do so, the Berliner had to ask his superior, who gave him permission reportedly over his own better judgement. The Berliner found what he was searching for almost immediately.
What was it that he found? Special bonus question: why the hell are blimps congregating over Manhattan today? (Note: the Wombat doesn't know the answer to this one. I'm just curious).
First correct answer posted to comments wins a Costco-sized can of Whiskey Sour Mix. No Googling or whacking your head into the desk in hopes of producing a cycle of pain/endorphins that will allow for enhanced intuition, because we've seen too many young players get hurt before their prime. Too damn many. Also, one guess per comment, but feel free to comment as often as you like.
Of course, by the time collective humidity-madness had finally driven all of us at the Home Office around the bend, it turned out that the Great Shvitz was about to finally let up and some distinctly autumnal breezes have been wafting -- that's right, we said wafting -- through our neck of the woods.
We regret the foray into horrible ranting about, of all things, the weather. As recompense, links to two other horrors. One is about "horror." The other is, unfortunately, absolutely horrible.
The author of the article gets significantly overheated about this, and the editor has appended a subtitle that claims, weirdly, that this "makes Abu Ghraib look like kid stuff." I don't quite get that, but the whole shebang is pretty nasty nevertheless; there's a gloating quality in the combination of pictures and soldier-supplied captions that's fundamentally nauseating here, and goes beyond gallows humor. It'll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere in the press besides truly lefty advocacy papers.
Sultry ? Ha. This isn't some kind of lazy-ceiling-fan-twirling kind of relaxation regime. This is every fan on full, every chugging air compressor working double overtime and all that happens is that the soup is stirred with a bit more speed. This is constantly asking if the air conditioner is actually on. Peeling off your seat at the desk. No cuddling. Please.
The vapors, stickiness, a warm wet blanket on a Tuesday morning. One doesn't sweat as much as one feels as persistently sweated, like a cookbook author wants you to do with a panful of onions and carrots. Choking weather, cottony air that hugs you like a psycho friend with boundary issues.
Simile-inducing, in a big way.
These are the real dog days of a New York summer. The mangy, ill-tempered, soaked-in-expired-flea-bath dog days. The air-conditioning in the subway cars has been set at cryogenic levels all summer, and the overtaxed machines are, one by one, giving up the ghost. Routinely now, a transfer from the F to the A or the reverse means that one is suddenly trapped in a torture chamber both oven-like and clammy. Each human body clinging to the overhead bar is a hyper-efficient radiator, and close proximity to a big banker dude who just did a quick seven-block hike to catch the train is the daily nightmare.
Don't think about the underarms.
The wind came up this afternoon, a hot strong wind out of New Jersey like an enormous leaf blower had achieved carnal knowledge of the world's biggest wet-dry vac full of a nameless effluvium, and had been aimed by its lethargically malicious cosmic master at a beaten-down city.
It's been like this every year of my life, come some point in September, for about as long as I can remember. By birth and birthright I hail from the wide-open West, where no such suffering exists or at least lingers beyond a freak weekend. It's wet in Oregon, where I was born, but rain-wet, greenly cool ten months of the year. And both lines of my family hail originally from the fabled "Mediterranean" climate of Northern California.
But I grew up in the swamp-reclaimed suburbs of Washington, D.C. and the sea-level frontage of the Gulf Coast. And then I moved North to New Amsterdam, only to discover that the miasmal climate of Washington is only slightly ameliorated by the change in latitude achieved by a few hours drive toward the top of the map. In Colonial times, the entire coastal region was dubbed hardship duty for British military officers. Secretly, I know I'd wither in the desert, and probably even shrivel up in the paradisal sunshine of Berkeley. Still, this wetsuit of a climate sometimes makes one wonder.
Given what's happened and goddess-forbid maybe still to happen down in the Gulf, thanks to unlovely Rita, I've really no place to complain about the weather right now. But bad form or not...I've been beaten down by it today. It's not just muggy. This is The Mug.
We couldn't agree more.
Massively brain-endowed quiz veteran (and 2004 most-wins champ) and crossword czar Boxjam asks, "Why do we need Sudoku?"
His firm and final answer is we don't.
Oh, and also, for next 35 minutes, Yar.
Looking backward through the agesWho is the hero commemorated in this song? Bonus: What was the deed that he was presumptively being praised for? Double bonus question: one of his most important subordinates in this effort went on to become more lastingly famous than he did. Who is he?
We can read on histr'ys pages
Deeds that famous men have done
We are told of great commanders
Wellingtons and Alexanders
And the battles they have won
Take our great Revolution
That began our evolution
Washington then won his fame
Today across the sea
They are making history
The Yankee spirit still remains the same
Just like Washington Crossed the Delaware
So will {BLANK}
As they followed after George
At dear old Valley Forge
Our boys will break that line
It's for your land and my land
And the sake of Auld Lang Syne
Just like Washington Crossed the Delaware
So will {BLANK}
Scott Williams. Frequent quiz champeen (and sometime devilish question-master) of our Friday fact-klatches; my illustrious predecessor as Professor of Trivology at the College of Knowledge (otherwise known as the host of Sunday night's sadly defunct "Quiz Kid" program on the mighty WCWM-FM.) Activist, soccer fan, and legendary explorer of ancient Yucatan cenotes.
And now an expert on the manly art of bottle feeding.
Congratulations to Sharon and Scott, and welcome to beautiful Grace.
The Wombat should really be in bed (although of course the common or coarse-haired wombat is nocturnal, and this specimen used to be, it's amazing what you can do with operant conditioning.)
There are a number of things large and small weighing on the marsupial brain tonight, and I hope to revisit some of them at a more reasonable hour. But I'll pause to enumerate them here:
John was my best friend during my years in southern Mississippi, and I've seen him exactly once (a few years ago) since moving away.
The two reviews make for interesting comparison, in the now-agreeably middling distance. Or, rather, so I suspect. I haven't the brainpower at this time to run through them both again as they deserve. But it's something to come back to -- because if the eloquent Banville is right, I've been hoodwinked, and it wouldn't have been the first time.
Not that any of that's substantive or analytical, but see above re: it's too damned late. But really, a fine read. Unless John Banville says its crap. In which case, what do I know. I'm just an exhausted Wombat.
I could read between the lines and say that Roberts is making quite clear his intentions to be, if not a strict-constructionist, then a "the federal judiciary has like totally limited powers, dude" kind of judge. As some of what's apparently in these documents seems to suggest. (I can't really claim to understand the legal logic in his brief on why the girl who was raped by her teacher wasn't able to sue for monetary damages under federal antidiscrimination law; but it adds up to a pretty narrow view of what restitution might encompass and what the federal court system ought to do for people).
Not that I would always disagree with Roberts' past arguments. He also apparently thought the federal government shouldn't have gotten involved in that whole Iran-Contra thing. Go figure.
Of course, I might just be really tired, and mistaking the meaningless formalities of these hearings for news, on a day when a hospital full of bodies has been found in New Orleans.
All right. I'll go crawl in my hole now.
It's getting late and the server seems a bit sluggish today -- so without further ado...
In November of 1872, James M. Ward played the title role in a drama that ran at Wood's Museum. One month later, theatergoers in Chicago watched another man play the same role in a somewhat different performance. In January of 1873, the actor J.B. Studley put on his own interpretation of the role, first in the Bowery and then again in March at the Park Theater. At that point the Chicago troupe came to New York, and started performances of their show; after they left town to tour theaters upstate, Studley re-opened in the role at the Theater Comique.
Who was the main character played by all three men?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a clock radio that, without fail, mysteriously sets itself to switch the radio on at 12 AM, helpfully jolting you out of your weird dream of being on Celebrity Poker Showdown alongside Rutger Hauer, Tilda Swinton, and the two surviving Fat Boys. No Googling or building a time machine, particularly because of that nasty butterfly effect thing (then again, things probably couldn't get much worse, so go nuts with the time machine already). One guess per comment, please, but you may comment as often as you like.
The Wombat never gets anything done, because it is easily distracted. It is distracted by little things like squirrels (from this gallery, via MeFi, naturally), or The Apostle Hagrid.
It's also distracted by larger things, like the question of the relationship of a country's political system to its likely role as a hotbed of terrorist antagonism to the U.S..
It can also be distracted by reading about other people distracting themselves.
If you need to distract yourself from something but help other people while you are doing it, you might try taking a few minutes to help out with The Katrina PeopleFinder Project.
A ray of recent sunshine. My friend Matt and I went halfsies on a PlusDeck2, and once he was finished using it, he graciously came over here and used his wicked hardware Shaolin training to get it installed on my PC.
Now, why, you ask, would I want such a thing? Wouldn't it be better to simply patiently replace the musical content of old cassettes -- like the amazingly still-in-a-shoebox-in-my-closet copy of Devo's Freedom of Choice, which came along with thirteen other modern classics -- with the much higher sound quality CDs?
Indeed it would, should the desire strike, and I will (probably) not be using the PlusDeck2 to create a tape-hiss-encumbered mp3 of "Girl U Want" any time soon.
However -- from Virginia to Minneapolis to the postdoc years in Pittsburgh, the now-antipodean force of musical delectation and dissemination that is Art Stukas perpetually graced me with mix tapes produced from his personal collection (and, during the Minneapolis years, supplemented by material accessed through his position as one of the few grad-student DJs at the university radio station; proof of his dedication to alternative radio).
The aforementioned shoeboxes are stuffed with the product of Dr. Stukas's relentless determination to complete the musical education of his former roommate, begun so long ago in the cheerfully musty dormitories of the College of William and Mary. The early tapes include fantastic songs from Unrest, Sebadoh, Eugene Chadborne, Jad Fair, Beat Happening, Giant Sand, The Bats, Bastro, Mudhoney, Volcano Suns, My Dad is Dead (a band I rejected at the radio station as mere harshness-for-the-sake-of-harshness until the patient Dr. S. forced me to recant my testimony), The Mekons, The Bevis Frond, The Wedding Present -- to name only a few, mixed in with the occaisional track from more familiar (to me) bands like the Kinks or John Cale or Yo La Tengo. As time marched on, my first exposure to bands like Stereolab were on these tapes and I heard a lot of Pavement songs I couldn't fit into my purchasing budget.
A few years later, the tapes move toward more sonic esoterica: Japanese psychedelia (sorry, Art, I lost the one with Angels in Heavy Syrup on it), Sun City Girls, Six Organs of Admittance. Older tracks from Can, Amon Duul and Sun Ra -- at least, I think they were older. Not always ear candy all the way through, but always worth multiple listens, always mind-expanding and containing some real gems.
These cassettes have been more or less unplayable over the last couple of years, after the last working walkman in the house got packed for the move and is now probably in a box in storage. But no longer. "Yes, She Is My Skinhead Girl" sounds surprisingly good considering its vinyl-to-tape-to-hard drive journey. Let the Shuffling of Art begin.
I'm sorry that this is so late, but here's today's synapse-snapper:
In the first speech he gave upon being elected for his current office (of which he is the 51st holder), this man said
Solutions to problems cannot be found in a pool of bitterness. They can be found in an environment in which we trust one another's word; where we generate heat and passion, but where we recognize that each member is equally important to our overall mission of improving the life of the American people.
Who is this dedicated American?
First correct answer posted to comments wins four probably dangerously worn tires from a 1996 Honda Civic, suitable for constructing tire swings for very thick-skinned little children. No Googling or canoodling (and no paddling the school canoe, either). One guess per comment, but you may comment as often as you like.
You can say all you want about the difficulty of mobilizing help more quickly, but on the question of the administration's culpability in allowing this crisis to happen, here's what may be the smoking gun (via KF).
The Quiz -- and a necessary return to our usual frivolity -- in a bit.
Another late evening when I should have been accomplishing something spent lost in the update cycle over Katrina. From Metroblogging New Orleans to KF's disturbing post to the holy terror that CNN offered up to the more informative and sane Times-Picayune blog to the essential but heart-tugging blog my old Long Beach friend Don Hammack is running for the Biloxi Sun-Herald to Rory and Ed...
I need to stop.
Apologies, everyone...
Hey Rob! Send me a valid current email. I've lost it. Sorry. Thanks.
