Linkage I run across
And in today’s absolutely creepy propaganda we have some North Korean kids playing guitar. The robotic looks on their faces is terrifying. But I must say they are talented for their age. I can’t imagine what sort of effort it would take to get a child with that small fingers (and attention span) to play like that. Hard to tell if there’s any faking since you never see enough the kids close enough at the same time.
The “Call Me Maybe” meme is becoming slightly old but some of the parodies are either quite good, or just outright amusing. For the unacquainted Carly Rae Jepsen did the original (the end of the video is kinda funny). A bunch of parodies followed including Justin Bieber, Selena, Ashley Tisdale, Jimmy Fallon, Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders (best looking of all the parodies), Tay Zonday (Chocolate Rain guy) and Barack Obama (that took time).
I think my favorite is the above gorilla variant simply because it shows the insanity of it all.
The Museum Of Endangered Sounds is a clever idea. Likely only a few under the age of 18 today remember anything on that site. Beside for some nostalgia, it’s good to catalog and index the past. Most of those sounds I used to hear thousands and thousands of times a month. Now I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s been years since I’ve heard any.
Man, remember that Tetris music playing in a loop for hours?
It’s almost 2 hours long and it went by in about 5 minutes. It’s worth watching.
Also: I never knew Johnny Carson was the classic introvert.
Via John Gruber
Slash performs Sweet Child O’ Mine acoustic, including the infamous solo. Your Argument is Invalid.
Images of what the future would look like have long been a fascination. 1950’s and 1960’s always focused on a sleek, minimalist future with a very retro (by today’s standard) color palette. It’s easy to dismiss them as silly, until you realize the basis of them is pretty spot on.
Take the image up top of Motorola’s vision of the future from a 1961 set. The two main themes in these images actually happened:
Of course part of Motorola (the Motorola Mobility part) is now part of Google, and had an influence on both of those changes as cell phones played a big role in both trends.
When you really think about it, TV’s are flatter and we cram more things into the same square footage, but these aren’t terribly far off concepts of what the future holds. From a high level they are spot on. These are really the biggest changes to the American home.
TIGHAR researchers found 5 pieces of glass they believe were from anti-freckle cream likely used by Amelia Earhart. Looking at the picture, it does seem quite possible if not likely this is actually a match. The odds of another person would bring that glass to the island is pretty small. There’s some circumstantial evidence Earhart crashed on the island of Nikumaroro, but hardly enough to conclusively confirm it.
TIGHAR is trying to visit the island again and use SONAR to map the waters off the island where there’s some suspicion her plane may have crash landed. Specifically there’s a blurry photo and a claim by a former resident that there was previously aircraft wreckage in that same location after she went missing.
There’s a reasonable chance this is where she ended up and the remains found and subsequently lost were from the crash. If they will ever find enough evidence to be convincing or not is anyone’s guess.
There is a fascinating piece of history regarding the creation of the THX Deep Note sound. Essentially the folks as the Lucasfilm Computer Division created it using an Audio Signal Processor (in the days before DSP chips) by writing 20,000 lines of C which generated a “sequence of parameters that drives the oscillators on the ASP. That 20,000 lines of code produce about 250,000 lines of statements of the form “set frequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz””.
That would make the deep note one of the earlier examples of computer generated sound.
An interesting story about Andy Rooney’s WWII reporting on USA Today :
Amid the din, Rooney’s buddy, an intelligence officer, shared an astonishing story. The day before, which happened to be Election Day, Army Air Force radar had detected the Germans launching a missile aimed at New York City from a U-boat situated several hundred miles out into the Atlantic. Fighter planes up and down the East Coast had immediately been scrambled.
The officer swore he saw the projectile being tracked on a machine at Mitchel Field in Hempstead, Long Island. It was traveling 250 miles per hour when it disappeared off the screen, either falling short of its target or being shot down by an alert pilot. The enemy’s attempted attack on New York had not come as a complete shock, he told Rooney. War planners had long feared that Adolf Hitler would use one of his Vergeltungswaffen (“vengeance”) weapons against the continental U.S. It was not outside the realm of possibility that German scientists had armed a submarine with a variation of a V-1 buzz-bomb or a V-2 rocket.
This is pretty fascinating in itself. The war could have taken a very different turn had Germany attacked NYC. But is it possible this was true and not just a rumor?
At least as early as 1942 the Germans were experimenting with the idea of launching a rocket from a submarine. That’s two years prior to Rooney hearing about such an incident. They clearly had an intent to do so but didn’t make it in time if the historical record is correct. That’s a big “if”. When wars end the victor has the ability to control what goes public and what doesn’t. As well documented as it was, lots of WWII details are still unknown for various reasons.
Many Americans don’t know this, but German U-boats weren’t uncommon off the US coast. Several were actually sunk by US depth charges during WWII:
The green points are major cities, the dark blue were sunk in 1942, orange 1943, light blue 1944, yellow 1945. You can see it’s a fair number and they were within reasonable distance. U-869 is the yellow one closest to NYC was sunk by it’s own torpedo. U-521 was sunk by US depth charges as were some others.
To protect ships coming out the Delaware from Philadelphia there’s actually a bunker in Cape May, NJ dating back to WWII. It was part of a network to help fend off attacks to ships leaving from the coast with some big guns. It’s still there to this day.
Could a U-boat have been within striking distance? I’d say that’s a safe bet. We had primitive ways of detecting subs back then and we found some quite close. Surely a few got close that nobody in the US ever discovered.
Here’s another curious note from the article:
“I have heard from my friends that they launched the first projectile before they were caught but they don’t know what happened to it,” he told Rooney, speculating that the attacking U-boats had been “immobilized” by radio beams that somehow disrupted their electric motors. “They (the U-boat crews) couldn’t move and they were all captured alive,” he said.
This is curious but unlikely as the V2 would not likely have been vulnerable to anything radio. It’s was largely analog with a few gyroscopes. I would guess magnetic interference would cripple the V2 guidance systems more effectively than radio jamming. There was no data link like a modern weapon.
A year earlier (1493) was the alleged, and largely discredited Philadelphia Experiment. Perhaps the origin of that story was some technology developed for this purpose. When the war was over Wernher von Braun and many he worked with were brought to the US under Operation Paperclip. By keeping this secret the US would have effectively gained a huge win in military superiority. The rocket knowledge as well as how to defeat it. It would take some time before the Russians could figure things out. The conspiracy theory the Philadelphia Experiment created would have been an effective cover for any little bits that leaked out.
Even more likely is the weapon simply malfunctioned and the US (at least internally within the War Dept) took credit for it.
Overall this story seems plausible to have actually happened. It would make sense for the US to have wanted to keep it quiet as an attack on the US mainland would have been very concerning to so many Americans. Even today knowing that something came close would be an amazing revelation. If I had to take a guess, I’d say it happened, it malfunctioned and the details were mixed up in history.
Someone is very obsessed with building the USS Enterprise. Not the Navy’s carrier USS Enterprise, the Star Trek one.
It’s actually pretty interesting to read. While it seems very improbable given the costs and the uncertainty, it’s interesting since we are at the point where a roadmap technically would make sense. It’s ambitious and who doesn’t love reading about an underdog idea? Especially when it involves making something that was imagination just a generation ago into a plausible reality.