res ipsa loquitur

We all need an occasional reminder that, hey, we're living in the future, with computers in our pockets and cyborgs walking the streets -- and a space station orbiting the Earth. This amazing photo by Thierry Legault, showing the ISS transiting the Sun during the recent partial solar eclipse, is a great reminder. That thing that looks like a TIE fighter in front of the Sun? That's the International Space Station. There's people up there, zipping around Sol III at 17,000 mph. That's worth stopping to think about.

You can also see the ISS transiting the Moon in another wonderful photo by Legault.

Geraldine Doyle was the model for the "We Can Do It!" WWII poster that became a feminist icon. She died Sunday, aged 86.

A photo of Doyle taken by a UPI photographer was used as a model (just for the face, not the muscular arm) by Westinghouse graphic artist J. Howard Miller when he created the poster, which was originally aimed at deterring strikes and absenteeism. Doyle herself didn't know about the poster until the 1980s, when it became a icon of the women's movement.

The character in the image is often called "Rosie the Riveter", a name that comes from stems from a 1942 song. The song was inspired by Rosalind P. Walter, and Rose Will Monroe became the best-known "Rosie" after she was featured in a wartime promotional film. But the image modeled on Doyle -- though never originally associaited with the Rosie name -- perhaps proved to have more staying power, after it was re-discovered in the 1970s or 80s.

According to Doyle's daughter, Doyle was quick to correct people who thought she was the original Rosie the Riveter: "She would say that she was the 'We Can Do It!" girl...She never wanted to take anything away from the other Rosies."

The Swedish Bed (hey, I don't name 'em) says, "Some great illustrators thought it might be cool to redesign Darth Vader using only the passage that first describes him in the script." Check out the alternate interpretations, some are pretty nifty.

Really, it is not my intention to turn this blog into the obituary pages. But I can't let the passing of Leslie Nielsen go unremarked.

There are a couple of movies that are classics in my family, that we might quote at each other at any opportunity, and Airplane!, which featured Nielsen's deadpan comedy debut, is one of them. My mom has also always been a fan of Nielsen's work in Police Squad!, though I didn't get turned on to that until later, after The Naked Gun came out.

Long before his turn to comedy, Nielsen starred in the classic SF film Forbidden Planet. So he played big roles -- very different roles -- in key films in two of my favorite genres.

Thanks, Mr. Nielsen.

As a young geek, I whiled away many hours playing interactive fiction text games like Adventure (Colossal Cave), Zork, and Planetfall.

So I was quickly enchanted with this video of Jonathan Guberman and Jim Munroe's Automatypewriter. Guberman has essentially converted an old Smith-Corona into a fanciful teletype terminal for interactive fiction.

Watching the type type "by itself" reminds me of a scene from the Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth", where Roberta Lincoln -- played by a young Terry Garr -- encounters a voice-operated typewriter in the office of time-traveling secret agent Gary Seven. Anyway, it's cool.

"It might be noted here, for the benefit of those interested in exact solutions, that there is an alternative formulation of the many-body problem, i.e., how many bodies are required before we have a problem? G.E. Brown points out that this can be answered by a look at history. In eighteenth-century Newtonian mechanics, the three-body problem was insoluble. With the birth of general relativity around 1910 and quantum electrodynamics in 1930, the two- and one-body problems became insoluble. And within modern quantum field theory, the problem of zero bodies (vacuum) is insoluble. So, if we are out after exact solutions, no bodies at all is already too many!" -- Richard D. Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem

If I haven't stated it clearly before, let me do so here: the disaster hype around 2012 is a bunch of muddleheaded nonsense. The Mayans themselves didn't believe that some great disaster was due when their "long count" calendar wraps around; it was just time for a big party, same way 2000 was for us.

And no, there will not be some grand alignment with the center of the galaxy on December 21, 2012: the Milky Way is too blobby for the idea of a visual center to be meaningful, and the winter-solstice sun will never actually eclipse the galaxy's central black hole (which shows up as a point-like radio source) -- it doesn't even make its closest alignment in the sky with that black hole for another 200 years, not that this means anything anyway.

So there's no big deal in 2012. And...it seems that maybe the Mayan calendar doesn't actually wrap around in 2012 after all. A new review of the conversion of the ancient Mayan calendar to our Gregorian one suggests that it may be off by as much as 50 to 100 years. Gerardo Aldana, associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, looked at the arguments anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury made in support of the so-called "GMT constant", and found them wanting, throwing the conversion into doubt.

So it might not wrap around until decades from now -- or it might have already happened decades ago. (Rather than taking this as a debunking, I'll bet that at least one 2012 disaster entrepreneur will try to take advantage of this when the world fails to end in 2012, and start hyping some other date for the apocalypse.)

Now, some folks think that 2012 is a convenient time to think about making a change -- just as with a New Year's resolution, there's actually nothing special about January 1, just a social convention. Fine, great, and wonderful: just don't assign unwarranted supernaturalism to the date.

Me, I'll be turning 42 in 2012, and as a big Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan that means more to me than any old Mayan calendar. Also, 2012 fits the Law of Fives: 2 + 0 + 1 + 2 = 5, so as a Discordian it's significant. But Mayan prophecy? Astronomical disaster scenarios? Poppycock.

Two signs that the End Times are surely nigh:

• The new Vdara hotel in Vegas has a problem with its pool. It's not the chlorine balance or a leak: it's an accidental death ray. The glass skyscraper is focusing sunlight to a degree that's burning people and has melted plastic. The "solar convergence phenomenon" was taken into account when the hotel was designed, and owner MGM Mirage hired a consultant -- who placed a filter over the window, reducing the effect by 70 percent, apparently not enough. (Imagine if this filter were to be removed, bwah-ha-ha.)
• The upcoming Commonwealth Games in Delhi also have a problem: monkeys. Rhesus macaques often cause property damage and occasionally attack people (they were indirectly responsible for the death of Delhi's Deputy Mayor S.S. Bajwa), but are protected by devout Hindus. Delhi has decided that the solution to monkey problems is more monkeys; in a scene that could be part of the next remake of Planet of the Apes, officials are deploying langurs, a larger species of monkey, to keep the macaques at bay.

  (Yes, I know monkeys aren't apes.)

If you've ever climbed a tree, you may have learned that sometimes it's easier to get up than to get back down. Ringo apparently learned this lesson this evening; I came back from my karate class to find him on top of this deck box/bench on the back patio. (Click on the thumbnails for larger versions of the photos.)

It was apparently within his capability to jump up on top of it; but when I called him to get down, he balked. I finally had to lift him up and place him back on the ground. I don't know what got him up there in the first place -- somehow I'm reminded of old cartoons where fear of a mouse sends a 1950s housewife jumping up on to a table, but I can't see that being the case here.

Anyone who works with computers can understand this guy: after a night of drinking, Joshua Lee Campbell allegedly returned to his workplace (RANLife Home Loans) and opened fire on their computer server with his .45-caliber handgun.

According to prosecutors, Campbell called police and claimed that he had been "mugged, assaulted with his own firearm and drugged" by an assailant who then shot up the server; but Campbell's acquaintances told the cops that they had seen him drunk, armed, and threatening to shoot the computer -- and maybe himself.

I've been programming computers for (counts on fingers) 29 years. (Great ghu, is that right? Yes...my first programming class was in the summer of 1981, at the Maryland Summer Centers for Gifted Students' "Center for Advanced Studies" program.) Trust me, I know the urge to employ a high-velocity lead debugger all too well!