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Sorry for the hyperbolic headline. Just thought I might try my hand at web-speak teaser writing. Did it make you want to read it more? Probably not, I didn’t offer a life hack or the best free gift. Of. All. Time. Anyway, let’s get on with the real business at hand.
What we’re talking about is not the political left-right divide, but brain lobes. The differences between which is not what you may have heard in the 70s or 80s when the left brain-right brain notion was more popularly discussed. You know, the old creative-logic, emotion-reason left-right location in the brain business. That’s all been shown to be wrong.
The new thinking on thinking is... well, rather than rehashing it, or botching it badly, we suggest watching the video. Or, being an interview, you could simply listen to it as there’s not much to see except the usual talking heads sort of thing. That way you can multi-task. Which is what the combined halves of the brain pretty much do. Or maybe duo-task. Confused? Click the link already. Afterwards, the opening pic with the brains and rainbow might actually make sense. One hopes.
Iain McGilchrist ‘The Divided Brain’
–Interview by Iain McNay
Filed under Links & Sites to See 9/23/16
I’m not a big fan of elaborate stage magic, if that’s what you call it. You know, big boxes and machines and such where the trick seems to be performed by the apparatus more than the magician. I much prefer sleight of hand stuff with very simple items, coins, cards, etc. If you do, too, you might enjoy what I’ll declare the best rope trick I’ve ever seen:
Las Vegas Magician Mac King Shows Us a Trick
If I have it right, this particular bit of virtuosity blows the mind of Teller, as in Penn and Teller. I’m supposing he rates it as highly as I do. Which is a much better endorsement, to be sure.
Filed under Links & Sites to See 9/20/16
When Scotty helped the 20th century engineer concoct transparent aluminum in Star Trek IV I chalked it up to sci-fi imaginariness, like transporters. Regular readers know transparent aluminum really exists. Not only that, they can make other transparent metals, too. Seems strange something so solid and opaque like metal could be made transparent and still be solid. Until you consider glass is made of sand, which we don’t give a second thought to being clear.
Some might say, “Ah, but glass is actually a very viscous liquid and not a solid.” Maybe you’ve heard that one. Well, that’s yet another science myth. Some folks reckoned such when examining Elizabethan (and the like) windows which were thicker at the bottom and concluded they flowed very slowly downward over time. Like super slow, stiff Jell-O or something. Anyway, they figured wrongly.
In the olden days they didn’t make rolled plate glass, float glass. They manipulated glass the old fashioned way, same as glass blowers do today. One window pane making method was spinning a blob of molten glass at the end of the pipe into a flat disk with centrifugal effect which they cut rectangles out of for windows. That’s where the old bull-eye glass you sometimes see in old buildings came from.
A second method was to blow a cylinder, like a vase or tumbler. While it was still molten they’d lop off the end connected to the pipe. Then they’d slit the resulting tube open along its length unrolling it into a flat rectangle.
As you can imagine, neither method guaranteed uniform thickness. When they framed this type of glass for windows they put the parts with the same thickness together at the bottom. Probably just made it easier to make the leading or frame that held it all together. Thing is, there are cases in very old buildings where the glass is thicker at the sides or even at the top. The glass didn’t flow sideways or upwards, the panes were that way from the git-go. The bottom line, glass is a solid and not a liquid.
To make stained glass they added different metals to the glass which produced different colors. Of course, you don’t see teeny-tiny bits of these metals embedded in the glass, it’s all transparent. Or translucent, anyway. Which means transparent metals have sort-of been around quite a while.
Filed under Fun Facts & Trivia 9/17/16
And now, a “Strange Deaths” art spot from Fortean Times magazine of some years ago.
A woman died from a heart attack caused by the shock of waking up at her own funeral in Kazan, Russia. As mourning relatives filed past her open coffin, Fagilyu Mukhametzyanova, 49, woke up and started screaming as she realized where she was. Her husband Fagili, 51, had been told his wife had died of a heart attack after she had collapsed at home with chest pains. “Her eyes fluttered and we immediately rushed her back to the hospital, but she only lived for another 12 minutes before she died again, this time for good,” he said. “She wasn’t dead when they said she was and they could have saved her.” He planned to sue the hospital.
Like they say, waking up dead is a very bad way to start the day. Or end the day, for that matter.
Filed under Snippets 9/15/16
Click pic to replay animation
In a world where they erect bridges to nowhere and build cities nobody lives in, it seems no construction is too pointless not to be imitated by folks hither and yon.
Flip This Home! 10 Unbelievable Upside Down Houses
People do live in some of these inverted structures, so the inside is right side up. Others are furnished and outfitted totally upside down inside. In which case we recommend you not try the plumbing.
Still, if you’re going to do this inverted house folly fully, bury the house so only the basement is above ground. All the same, couldn’t you simply put in a reflecting pool for a similar effect?
Filed under Links & Sites to See 9/12/16
Infrequently Answered Question #100: What’s big and red and eats rocks?
A: A big red rockeater.
Yes, an old gag you might recall from childhood. Yet notice, it’s a big red rockeater and not a red big rockeater. It’s also a grumpy little old man and not an old little grumpy man. To follow the train of thought, which of the following sounds right?
One of those ugly little day-glo English police cars.
One of those English day-glo ugly police little cars.
Though the adjectives are the same in both cases, the second sentence just sounds wrong, even illiterate. That’s because there’s a rule of syntax English speakers use without ever formally learning that such a rule exists. Which is, adjectives generally appear in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose noun. At least, according to one source. A second has it: quantity-opinion-size-temperature-age-shape-color-origin-material noun.
Whatever the case, you can sometimes get away with changing the order a bit. It could be a little old gray-haired man or a gray-haired little old man. You can also have an ugly big green metal box or a big green ugly metal box. Still, you can’t switch adjectives up too much, there’s no such thing as a metal big green ugly box.
Then again, if you’re keeping inventory you’d pretty much put everything in reverse order, including putting the noun first. The noun is the real gist of the item so you organize and alphabetize by that. In which case you’d have: box, metal, green, big. Opinions of its ugliness, being subjective, are usually not included.
Filed under Infrequently Answered Questions 9/8/16
“History is bunk.” –Henry Ford
History is not always written by the people involved and so often relies on stories told by witnesses. Though, as in the Kurosawa classic Rashomon, eyewitness account can vary quite a bit. Then again, history can be told by people based on, well, hearsay. We’re into the whole friend of a friend system of urban mythology as history. How accurate is that?
Even so, eyewitnesses don’t always see everything, or remember correctly. Plus, they can be biased and only see what they want to believe. Oh yeah, people are also capable of lying. And believing lies. Especially if the lie is the only story you’ve heard and is repeated over and over and made its way it into the history books.
One wonders how much history, like the previously mention slanders against Ty Cobb, really is bunk. To that point, here’s an article which might be subtitled: “Everything You Thought You Knew about Rasputin Is a Whopping Lie”
Filed under Quotes & Sayings 9/6/16
I’ve decided to become a prepper and put up a six month or so supply of non-perishables. Am I expecting the breakdown of commerce, or the collapse of civil society? Nope. Do I anticipate hyperinflation? Nah. Do I reckon the end of the world as we know it is just around the corner? Not really. I’m not that kind of prepper, more of a traditional prepper, if I can call it that.
What I’m expecting is not a catastrophe, but winter. Why trudge through the ice, snow and cold of a Michigan winter lugging bags of consumables when I can stock up now in my shirt sleeves? I mean, I’m going to need such things sooner or later, so why not get them sooner? Canned goods, frozen foods, dried pasta, beans, and the like. As well as things like toilet paper and kitty litter. Hey, it goes in one end and comes out the other, right?
This is not a new idea, it’s a very old idea. For people 250 years ago it wasn’t very convenient to hop down to the supermarket once a week. Heck, there were no supermarkets. In the past to get through winter people put up stores, packed the root celler, cured meat, pickled and fermented things, etc. This was before they invented canning, but folks knew how to store enough stuff to last until spring.
Now, I don’t have a root celler, but I have a fridge with a freezer. Even better. Unfortunately, since I don’t raise chickens or have a cow in the garage I’ll need to occasionally ankle to the local bodega for milk and eggs. Plus, I’ll have to forgo salads for the duration. Still, fewer trips and lighter loads to schlep through the slush suits me right down to the ground.
The other option for surviving winter is an even older idea, head to warmer climes. Would that I could. While we moderns are highly mobile, perhaps in a way the nomadic ancients got around more than we do now. After all, they say eighty percent (or whatever it is) of Americans never live more than 25 miles (or whatever it is) from where they grew up.
Filed under Odds & Ends 9/1/16
The standard western musical scale is an octave, that’s eight notes. Though the scale begins and ends on the same note, as in do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. That second do is double the harmonic vibration of the first do, so it is and isn’t the same note. Or something. It’s a vibrations per second thing we won’t go into. Though one wonders if we divided time a little differently so a second was a bit longer, would all music be out of tune?
Anyway, toss in flats and sharps, which are the same notes depending on the particular scale, and you get thirteen notes, or twelve since you’re repeating yourself once you close the scale at the upper end. Either way, you still call it an octave and not a trideskitave. All the same, you get more than thirteen (or twelve) scales out of all that because there’s major, minor, diminished, flattened fifth scales and such.
As you can imagine the number of chords and progressions is quite large. Yet, if you want to write a hit pop song you can throw out all that because you don’t need most of it. That’s because every hit pop song uses the same four chords and progression. Don’t believe it? Listen and maybe laugh:
Axis of Awesome - Four Chord Song (with song titles)
As you can see, writing a pop song is simple. In construction. Writing one that’s a hit, not so easy.
On the other hand if you want to write Middle-Eastern pop music you have many more possibilities to use, and, one supposes, also ignore. That’s because, while the European scale goes in half steps, those darn Asians shove in some quarter steps. Which would mean you can’t play a lot of Middle-Eastern music on traditional European instruments because they won’t play the tweener notes.
On the third hand (assuming you’re a freak), the traditional Chinese scale is only five notes. Or is it six? This repeating the note at the beginning and end is confusing. Anyway, if you want to play anything and make it sound Chinese-ish, simply use only the black keys on any keyboard instrument and there you go.
Filed under Links & Sites to See 8/30/16
Another good old “Brickbats” spot of art from Reason magazine of July, 2007.
A Florida court has found Tracy A. Thomas guilty of harboring ducks. Thomas says she leaves her garage door open so her cats can get in and out. But the judge found she was allowing ducks to come into the garage; he also told her she could be prosecuted for breaking a city law against allowing cats to roam freely. Thomas faces a fine of up to $500, but the judge says he will waive the fee if she keeps her garage door closed.
Hey, I used to do that. Not harbor ducks, leave the garage door ajar so the cats could go in and out. Wound up harboring squirrels. Not really so much harboring, I didn’t want them in there. They’re pretty destructive, ripping up stuff for nesting material. A squirrel’s nest is pretty much like a big rat’s nest in a tree. Or in a garage, as the case may be.
Anyway, I put an end to that by putting in a cat door for the garage. Pesky squirrels haven’t figured that out yet. Haven’t noticed any possums or raccoons using it either. Though I wouldn’t put it past a raccoon to figure it out someday, clever little masked bandits that they are.
Filed under Snippets 8/25/16
Depending how you define “best selling” you could make the argument the Ford Model T would top the list. In its heyday this single car had a fifty percent market share, half the cars on the American road were Model Ts. Try outselling that. It wasn’t the top selling in total numbers, but there were a lot fewer people around back then.
By volume the Volkswagen Beetle wins the title of best selling car at over thirty million units sold. Of course, unlike the Model T, it sold all over the world in a much more populous world. It helped that they built the thing for about forty years, more than twice as long as the tin Lizzy.
Still, the VW doesn’t get the crown as the best selling motor vehicle of all time. Notice we said motor vehicle and not automobile. At over 80 million units sold, the winner is… the Honda Cub. That’s right, the ultimate people’s car is a motorcycle. Or is it a scooter? Or, with its large, narrow wheels a sort-of cross between the two? Whatever it is, its the king of the road.
Now then, if you want to say a vehicle that has changed over time but carried the same badge is the same model, the T isn’t the best selling Ford model ever. It’s the Transit van which has been selling world-wide in all its iterations some five decades and counting.
Filed under Fun Facts & Trivia 8/23/16
America doesn’t have an official dialect, or even language, which isn’t the case elsewhere. Many countries have a standard version of their particular language for official communication. In Germany, which has a dozen different dialects, they have Dachsprache, based on the Hannover dialect. In England, the unofficial official accent is Received Pronunciation, or RP. Some call it the mid-Atlantic accent, a sort-of mix of English and American someone living on an imaginary island halfway between the two might sound like.
Some professions also have their own way of speaking. For instance there’s what you might call media-speak. Newscasters, documentary narrators, and advertising voiceover artists speak in ways that don’t really match up to any regional, natural, conversational way of speaking. As Jack Lemmon said about Tony Curtis’ Cary Grant imitation in Some Like it Hot, “Where did you come up with that phony accent? Nobody talks like that.”
Another example is a speech pattern many airline pilots have informally adopted when speaking on the intercom to passengers during flight. It has a relaxed, folksy, confident feel to it based on the West Virginia accent. Why West Virginia? Because that’s where Chuck Yeager hails from. You want to sound like a top pilot, talk like Chuck Yeager.
Are these dialects or accents? Or something else?
argot (är′ gō; är′ gət) noun, A specialized vocabulary or set of idioms used by a particular group or class; especially the jargon of the underworld.
jargon (jär′ gən) noun, 1. Nonsensical, incoherent, or meaningless utterance; gibberish. 2. A hybrid language or dialect. 3. The specialized or technical language of a trade, profession, class or fellowship.
patois (păt′ wä; pă twä′) noun, 1. Any subliterate regional French dialect. 2. Any regional dialect. 3. The special jargon of a group; cant.
So, we seem to have a number of synonyms, some with multiple meanings. None of which hit the bullseye. English, what a language.
Filed under Word Meanings and Origins 8/17/16
My next-door neighbor is having his driveway redone today. True to the stereotype, by an Italian concrete contractor. Which one supposes is appropriate since the Romans invented concrete, a sort-of artificial stone. Maybe not artificial really, since it’s made of natural stone material. Perhaps more like reconstituted stone. Or perhaps artificially hardened stone. Whatever the apt description, it’s stone you can pour and mold into whatever shape you need rather than chiseling it like marble or something.
Like the previously mentioned corrugated cardboard, concrete is also a ubiquitous, relatively cheap wonder material. Only not so modern. And it makes lousy packaging.
What I’m wondering is how they pour concrete in places like San Francisco. What I mean is, some of the streets there are pretty steep grades, how do they keep it from simply running down the hill when it’s wet?
Filed under Odds & Ends 8/15/16
Infrequently Answered Question #99: Paper or plastic?
A: Something of a vague question, but for my money it’s paper. Not so much for shopping bags, but for another container, the cardboard box.
Corrugated cardboard is one of the greatest, if least celebrated, inventions of all time. Strong, light, versatile, cheap, ubiquitous. How much damage has been spared goods by shipping and storing in corrugated cardboard? How much time, energy and space has been saved by replacing wooden crates with cardboard boxes? Forget plastic, corrugated cardboard is the modern wonder material.
I came across the following and figured there wasn’t much I could say about the wonderfulness of cardboard to beat it, they’re making houses out of the stuff. I’m not talking about the homeless sleeping in cardboard boxes, real homes.
This Tiny Cardboard Home Takes Only 1 Day To Build & Lasts 100 Years
Folks like to make claims about things that haven’t proved out yet, so you’ll understand if I don’t take the “lasts 100 years” as fact. Remember Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion house? How about Thomas Edison’s concrete house?
For a little backstory on the origins of corrugated cardboard, there’s this from Gizmodo:
How the Cardboard Box Was Invented
Filed under Infrequently Answered Questions 8/10/16
Now that I know a thing or two about web animation, I’ve updated an old lift explanation companion article, “The Trouble With Airflow Diagrams.” Since this bit was all about how wings and air and whatnot move, what better than to have diagrams that, you know, move. Seems a natural. These should make it much easier to understand what I was getting at.
It’s brand spanking new old content, if you will. Even if you don’t really know, as I don’t, why something new is brand spanking.
The Trouble With Airflow Diagrams
Filed under Odds & Ends 8/9/16
Forget Hoffman, not that anyone remembers him, Porsche is the German car guy to remember. Ferdinand Porsche is famous as the founder of the car company bearing his name, the first offering of which was a relatively affordable sports car. Not something the outfit is known for these days. He’s also renowned as the creator of the Volkswagen Beetle. Perhaps less well-known are his highly successful Auto Union (now Audi) mid-engine race cars of the 1930s.
Herr Porsche was an auto innovator of the first stripe from the beginning. His first effort was a revolutionary electric car where the wheels were electric motors. A highly efficient design since there was no loss of power through mechanical connecting shafts and whatnot. His second car was a gasoline engine/electric hybrid. Pretty much the same system in hybrid cars today, only about a hundred years ago.
Elon Musk is but a pale imitation of the real genius that was Ferdinand Porsche.
Filed under Links & Sites to See 8/5/16
I reprise an old Suck.com spot that just seemed appropriate considering the time in the political cycle. Only this time around, I’ve animated the spot for your enjoyment. Too bad I didn’t know how to do that back in the day. Would it have made it funnier? Would it have made Suck better? Would it have saved my job? We’ll never know.
All we know for sure, for this election we have some different liars telling different lies. Have no fear, many of the old lies and liars are still going strong. The classics never die. Enjoy that, too.
Filed under Snippets 8/2/16
Not that anyone tunes in to terry colon dot com for handyman advice, but I made a promise of a few tips so here they are. Hopefully, they are not the usual tips you’ve run across before and are possibly useful. If not, well, a couple are animated. Just as good as an instructional video, only not.
Ten DIY Tips for Revamping Your Studio (or Any Room, Actually)
You may have noticed I have no tips for painting windows. I don’t have to paint windows because my old place sports 1950s aluminum windows. Not the panes, which are glass of course, but the frames, sills and so on are unpainted aluminum. Not all that energy efficient, but they have that mid-century modern look that suits me right down to the ground.
Filed under Top Tens and Other Lists 7/29/16
Not every Brazilian is a soccer star, not every Frenchman can cook, and not every German is a brilliant car engineer. To wit, the misbegotten automotive monstrosity, the Hoffman. Never heard of it? Well, there’s a very good reason for that. See for yourself:
What It’s Like To Drive The Worst Car In The World
While the dedicated reader may have noticed my fancy for bubble cars, not all bubble cars are created equal. The Hoffman is a lot less equal than the rest.
Filed under Links & Sites to See 7/25/16
Believe it or not I’m amongst the richest people in the world. The key phrase is, “in the world.” Globally, over $77,000 in net worth puts you in the top ten percent.
Then again, the comparison is a bit misleading because the local cost of living makes a difference. Plus, things like income and GDP are calculated in terms of commerce rather than actual production or goods. For instance, paint the house yourself, no GDP. Hire a painter, GDP. Did more work get done because you paid for it rather than doing it yourself?
Subsistance ruralists grow crops, herd animals, build housing, make textiles, tools and pottery, yet generate no income or GDP simply because they didn’t buy or sell any of it. Doesn’t mean they created no wealth, it just doesn’t show up as GDP or income. So when they tell you such-and-such country has some really low per capita income, what does it really mean?
On the flip side of the above, when American moms got jobs in large numbers starting in the 1970s an entire daycare industry emerged to do the work for money mothers had been doing unpaid. When the wife works and then hires out the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, GDP goes up. Yet no more work is done than if they stayed at home and did those things themselves as they used to do. Makes you wonder how much GDP growth in the last 50 odd years has been phony?
Speculations aside, in light of how little effort I’ve been putting into terry colon dot com of late, I guess it makes me the idle rich. I can live with that.
Filed under Talkin’ Bout Money 7/22/16
A very early Suck.com that pretty much sums up my current attitude to frequent blogging, if blogging’s what I’m doing here at terry colon dot com. Not that I’m actually at the beach sunbathing, just enjoying the great outdoors of summer. Working, actually. Only on homeowner type stuff. I’ll get back into the swing of internetty things later. How much later? Time will tell.
And considering that spot of art is nearly twenty years old, time flies, too.
Filed under Snippets 7/18/16
There’s this bit about square pegs and round holes, but how about square pegs that are round holes? Which won’t make any sense until you go watch the video:
The Ambiguous Cylinder optical illusion
Filed under Links & Sites to See 7/13/16
Got the studio redone and all systems are back online. Finally. Took longer than expected and didn’t work as planned. The initial plans were left in tatters, as they say. As I drew. I’ll spare you the details.
One thing in the aftermath I also didn’t foresee or plan on I discovered when I sat down to draw this pic and some sketches for a Reason job, I’m out of drawing practice. Take almost two weeks away from putting pencil on paper and you lose your touch. Just goes to show, practice, practice, practice. Hey, the best athletes and musicians in the world practice constantly to keep their edge. Same thing applies to third rate illustrators.
Can’t tell whether it’s effected my writing. Well, that wasn’t all that good to begin with. Onward and upward. Onward, at any rate.
Filed under Odds & Ends 7/11/16
Seven DIY Rules of Thumb
While the last sounds like a weak joke, it’s actually true. They studied it. Something to do with adrenaline or dopamine or something, I’m not sure. Still, screaming with pain is natural, you gotta figure it must have a purpose. Cursing is just putting words to the scream. If having your mother kiss the owie will make it better... I have no information on that.
Filed under Top Tens and Other Lists 7/1/16
I’m currently refurbishing the studio from ceiling to floor so everything is more or less broken down and out of sorts. So, nothing really new from me here, content-wise. But there will be some hard-learned DIY tips in the aftermath. So stay tuned. OK, not tuned really, but bookmark and come back later for the goodies on how you can redo your room the Terry way.
For the time being, enjoy this old Suck.com Jackson Pollack spot of art. Or is that a splot of art? Some pun.
Filed under Odds & Ends 6/27/16
A few days late, but still timely enough. I mean, summer lasts for months. Anyway, the word summer comes from… oh, who cares? It’s summer. Relax. Enjoy the warmth and sunshine. Take your shoes off and stroll barefoot through the grass. You’ll feel better. It’s good for you. At least, if the grounding/earthing people are right.
Filed under Odds & Ends 6/23/16
Forget battery electric cars, could be the 200 year-old Sterling engine is the future of motoring.
San Antonio man has engine that gets 100 mpg
Filed under Links & Sites to See 6/20/16
Infrequently Answered Question #98: If you park on the driveway and drive on the parkway what do you do on the freeway and highway?
A: To follow form I guess you drive freely on the highway and drive high on the freeway. Well, some folks do, at any rate.
OK, admittedly silly. Here’s a road related segue question: Why is, as they tell us, driving a privilege and not a right? Just because the government decided so? How about walking or riding a bike, privilege or right? What’s the actual underlying principle here? They say it’s a free country, but look how many things you need a license for. Meaning, all the things you need government permission to do. Hunt, fish, own a dog, cut hair, start a business and on and on. Could be worse, I suppose, in England you need a license to own a TV.
Filed under Infrequently Answered Questions 6/17/16
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Blog blog, blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog, blog. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Whether that’s an entire case of the blahs or maybe just half a box is hard to tell. Still, just because there is a terry colon dot com doesn’t mean it’s required writing. I mean, we’re not locked into updating regularly, as depicted in the old magazine (forget which one) spot from 1997. Enjoy it for what it’s worth, blah blah blah.
Filed under Snippets 6/14/16
Do imaginary lines of longitude and latitude move and break causing earthquakes? Well, we suppose if astrophysicists did geology that might be the theory. They talk about magnetic reconnection, magnetic field lines of force that break and spew energy.
A magnetic field is a continuum, there are no lines of force to them. There is also no flow of magnetic particles or whatever. How can NASA get it so wrong? I thought they were, you know, rocket scientists.
An Electrical Engineer’s Take on “Magnetic Reconnection” - Space News
Filed under Links & Sites to See 6/9/16
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