Category: No Politics Friday

What a perfect Friday for wasting time on the internets.
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Who has your back? I have it. Let me show you.

1. I've never been the biggest fan of the Dune universe, but these paintings / prints (apparently Frank Herbert-approved) are pretty excellent. It's not often that one uses the term "lifelike" to describe a painting of a giant worm bursting forth from the desert; this is one such time.

Show the world that you control the spice.

2. Speaking of the oddly lifelike, Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag makes incredible pseudo-realist images that combine real Swedish landscapes and people with a type of mid-century futurism – robots, machines, and Space Age contraptions.

Please do check out his body of work. It's pretty wild.

3. Lots of people seem to be obsessed with fonts these days; here's Type Hunting, an entire site dedicated to collecting photos of older typefaces. If you're into that sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you'd be into. It's also fun if you just want to look at some old stuff.

You kids like "vintage" these days, right?

4. !!! A computer buying guide from 1953 !!!

5. Have kids? Or perhaps you just like things that are awesome? Make these Autobot and Decepticon pull-apart bread loaves.

6. Oh, and I have three of these sweet-ass Buzzfeed parody prints left. In all honesty, these look amazing. The colors really pop, not to mention the crazy.

Buy one. Do it.

I'm going to recount a tale from one of my friends on Wednesday evening. Let's call her Mary. She's in her late twenties and would be considered attractive by most observers.

Mary and one of her friends go out for the evening. They encounter a group of dudes led by, well, let's call him Tool. Tool tells the ladies that they are out drinking wildly because one of their friends (in the Dude Group) lost his job. No problem, right? Tool asks Mary to hug said friend to cheer him up. The ladies politely decline and leave. Incident over, right? Tool tried his little pickup line (creepy, albeit essentially harmless) and it didn't work; on with the evening.

Nope. Tool follows them into the bar asking them to hug his friend. They decline again. He leaves to re-join his group. Surely we're done now, right?

Not so. He comes back with his posse and Mary noticed his return when she feels Tool's hand grasping her arm. She yanks the arm away, subtly transmitting the social cue, "Do not touch me." He continues to linger and ask them to hug his friend. Mary's friend informs him that he's starting to get annoying (starting!) and he should leave. Tool then grabs Mary's forearm and tries to pull her toward him. She rips her arm away and explicitly tells him what he has failed to pick up on thus far: That's it. Leave us alone.

He tells them that he is sorry if they think hugs are rude. Her friend says, "No, you are rude. We find YOU rude," and he responds, "I think you're a bitch," as they walk away.

I have more female friends than male ones, and I hear stories like this all the time. And I never cease to be astounded at how tone deaf, clueless, and aggressive the men in these stories are. OK, granted, this is not to say women are incapable of rude behavior or that these men are representative of all men. But good god, the absolute inability to read very basic non-verbal cues, followed up by the absolute refusal to follow verbal ones, is beyond comprehension. I'm more surprised when I reflect and realize that, at age 34, I've never once been in a group of men who behaved this way. And that's not to pat myself and my friends on the back for being Great People. We're not. It's not an act of kindness and nobility to leave someone alone when they say "Please leave me alone." It's just…a basic part of human interaction? I don't even know how to state this effectively. It would be like saying "My friends are awesome because when a waiter brings us a check, we always pay it." You don't get to applaud yourself, or anyone else, for doing the bare minimum expected of you.

Granted, my friends could tell you that I am particularly easy to dissuade; if I meet a stranger at a bar, I usually break off conversation after about two minutes because I just assume that the person wants to be left alone, or I think they look bored (I'm extremely boring). If someone did something as explicit as turning their back or walking away, I…I would not hesitate to get the message. Would you? And then to think that the situation would progress (because I followed someone who was trying to avoid me) to the point that an explicit "Please go away" was necessary is beyond my experience. Again, this doesn't make me a good person. It merely makes me a person who can read basic social cues and…not act all rapey? That doesn't seem like Good. That seems like the absolute bare minimum that we can expect of the other people in the world.

I don't get it. I don't understand how some people can charge right through so many red lights. I've seen women do it too, but somehow it's just not the same – it comes off more as, I guess, "desperate" rather than scary-aggressive. Because when it happens to me I don't end up thinking "Gosh I hope I don't get raped" whereas a woman experiencing this probably thinks exactly that. I don't have to worry, "If this person grabs me, can I break their grip? How can I get out of here as quickly as possible?
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Can anyone here help me?" I don't feel threatened, I just feel moderately annoyed (OK, this only happened to me, like, once. But you get it.)

Clearly, social situations between single people are a sort of game, and sometimes people play games to get one another's attention. Everyone has their own little conversation starters, ice breakers, and so on. And I can't blame anyone for trying. If I'm in the mood to be left alone, or focusing on a conversation with one of my friends, it would not be reasonable to shout, "OH MY GOD, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU FUCKING SPOKE TO ME!" if someone makes an attempt. But neither is it reasonable to refuse to give up in the attempt.
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Sometimes people aren't interested in talking to you. To me. To anyone. Is that so hard to accept? My self-confidence is not high, granted, but I have enough to withstand the minor rejection of someone saying "Ha. No thanks." to an effort to start a conversation. We live in a society, though, in which it would apparently be socially acceptable for me to ignore that and persist until I'm maced or escorted out of the bar.

And then, of course, I get to call the woman a bitch. For resisting my charms.

Fans of aviation or industrial design mourned the retirement of the Concorde in 2003. With it ended for the foreseeable future the brief era of supersonic passenger flight. Its retirement – which had nothing to do with the spectacular, tragic crash of Air France Flight 4590 in 2000 and everything to do with the plane's astronomical per-passenger cost to operate – was the first nod to economic reality in its history. The Concorde never made economic sense; it was finished as a matter of political and nationalistic pride in France and the UK. A textbook example of the sunk costs fallacy – which is now sometimes called the Concorde Fallacy in its honor – its existence was more a matter of 'can' than 'should'.

Flying at twice the speed of sound at 60,000 feet presented some unique challenges aside from the impractical economics. At the beginning of every commercial flight, FAA rules require flight attendants to give you a safety demonstration that you ignore completely; part of it is the infamous oxygen mask with its plastic bag that may or may not inflate (but don't worry, because either way oxygen is still flowing). The supplemental oxygen is there in case of a loss of cabin pressure. A normal jet cruising at 25-30,000 feet can make use of a passive system like this in case of emergency while the pilots descend to a safer altitude. There is very little oxygen or atmospheric pressure at 30,000 feet, so the goal is to give everyone enough oxygen to avoid hypoxia while quickly reaching a more breathable altitude.
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But at 60,000 feet in the Concorde the engineers discovered that the mask-and-baggie system doesn't work. The air is too thin and the pressure too weak at that altitude. In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, the air at that altitude would be so thin that you couldn't even inhale well enough to stay conscious. The only way to ensure adequate oxygen would be to uses a positive pressure device like a CPAP (similar to what people with sleep apnea use). Installing one for each of 100 passengers in the Concorde was totally impractical in terms of cost and weight.

Instead, they installed a positive-pressure system in the cockpit with fighter pilot-style oxygen masks to ensure that the flight crew would be OK. Then they calculated what is known as the "time of useful consciousness" (TOC) at 60,000 feet – how long it will take the average human to pass out or lose the ability to perform basic tasks. Given the impossibility of providing an oxygen system for every passenger, the engineers decided that the best solution was to take the TOC and instruct the pilots to dive to a breathable altitude in that amount of time.

That would be no big deal except the TOC is something like 90-120 seconds at Concorde's 60,000 foot cruising altitude. A breathable altitude without supplemental oxygen is around 15-20,000 feet. So in the event of a loss of cabin pressure, the emergency procedure on the Concorde was to dive 40,000 feet in 90 seconds. As far as I can tell this maneuver was never actually tested, although engineers did determine that it was well within the structural limits of the airframe. While the aircraft itself might have survived, I highly doubt the same could be said for the structural integrity of the passengers' pants if this actually happened on a revenue flight.
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Given the high cost of tickets and the high-class clientele that the Concorde attracted, explosive pant-soiling would have been quite the public relations nightmare for British Airways.

Thank god it never came to that, and thereby were many pants saved.

I know I've been maintaining this site for a long time when I can no longer remember whether I've written about a given topic at some point. My memory tends to be terrifyingly detailed, but lately – either through old age or the sheer volume of posts – it has let me down on occasion. On Thursday I posted on Facebook about Action Park and referred everyone to an old NPF post about it. Turns out that post only exists in my mind. Somehow I have been at this for a decade without writing about Action Park. The mind boggles.

Action Park was a low-budget amusement park in New Jersey that combined water rides, go-karts, skiing, and other carnival-type attractions.
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It operated between 1978 through its heyday in the mid-80s and then sporadically until 1996.
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Action Park was notable for three things:

1. The extreme number of injuries (and deaths) its ramshackle attractions caused.
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At one point, the park had to buy the local government more ambulances to handle the flow of victims. I can't decide if I like the swimming pools "infested with snakes" or the "Alpine slide" made of concrete and fiberglass that was ridden with a brake-less sled.

2. The on-site sale of alcohol from the park's own microbrewery. So it was a park full of dangerous rides wherein the owners were actively trying to get you shitfaced.

3. The extreme laxness of the employees, who were low paid teenagers working summer jobs. The park had a "Logan's Run"-type atmosphere in which it was hard to find anyone over 20.

Rather than re-hash everything here, please take 10 minutes to read possibly the funniest page on all of Wikipedia detailing the insanely dangerous rides, the routine injuries, the wasted patrons, and the various legal issues that arose. Weird New Jersey also has some extensive (and often first-person) narratives of the park; attendance appears to have been a mandatory rite of passage for kids and teenagers in the NY/NJ area during the 1980s. If I haven't sold you yet, check out their commercial:

Notice what you don't notice in that commercial – basic safety features on any of the rides. Railings? Padding? Park employees? Why, it almost looks like someone just set up some slides and swings over pools of water and let everyone fling their bodies around at extreme speeds. I believe it looks like that because…it was. It's amazing how dangerous the rides look in the commercial, when the park ostensibly is showing itself in the most favorable light. My personal favorite is the waterslide at the end where instead of landing in a pool, riders are flung across the surface of a shallow pool where they are supposed to skip like a rock.
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It's unclear whether this was an amusement park or some kind of bizarre social experiment, as though the CIA was trying to figure out what would happen if drunk children were put in charge of an environment specifically designed to kill you.

We don't like to think of things concerning death very often, especially the nasty technicalities of disposing of human remains. A few years ago I read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (10/10 should read) which offers a good deal of insight on this morbid topic. I was reading it on a flight to New York City; as we were landing, a fellow passenger pointed out the gargantuan Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, once considered the largest man-made structure on Earth. It was aerial sightseeing at its finest. It struck me just how much garbage a city the size of NYC must produce.

And then I thought back to Stiff and wondered, with its enormous and highly transient population, how many dead bodies New York generates. Processing the dead probably happens there much as it does anywhere else, with the vast majority ending up in cemeteries, crematoria, and so on. But certainly big cities must have to deal with an above-average number of unclaimed and unidentified bodies as well. So I did a tiny amount of research and learned about Hart Island, which is apparently the largest publicly-funded cemetery in the world. Hart Island is where all of the unclaimed (or indigent) dead in New York City end up for more than a century.

It's not in the tourist guides.

It is estimated that Hart Island contains well over 1 million bodies, having been used to inter bodies from the public hospitals and morgues since 1869, when it was sold by the Army (who were also using it as a cemetery) to the City. Until 1913 remains were buried in mass graves. Today they are buried (by Riker's Island inmates, formerly conscripted but who are now paid prison wage for the labor) in rows of 25 in thin pine boxes. These "trenches" are re-used after forty to fifty years, by which time the previous boxes (and occupants) have decomposed almost completely. That's 140-plus years of New York City's dead, literally buried atop one another.

If you've ever wondered what hospitals do with amputated limbs, well…in New York they end up on Hart Island. In special small boxes marked LIMBS. I'm not suggesting that this is inappropriate; personally I don't think it matters what is done with the remains of the dead. I'm simply amazed by the quantity of people who have ended up in this one modestly sized cemetery – and the literal layers of social and human history found on that island.

Hart Island is hard to visit. Ceremonies are not conducted with burials, nor are individual markers placed. If you discovered that a friend or relative is buried there, there are only one or two opportunities per year for the public to go to Hart Island to see the burial site. Is it not intriguing to think that right in the middle of one of the world's biggest cities is an inaccessible island laden with corpses?

Oh, Hart Island has had other tenants in the past besides the impoverished dead, and the list reads like a Who's Who list of the parts of our society that get shuffled off to the margins (and the worst real estate). The last tenant was a drug rehabilitation home that closed in the 1970s.

A century earlier, it was used to quarantine (and presumably bury a good number of) yellow fever sufferers during the 1871 epidemic.
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It was also home, over time, to a tuberculosis hospice, a home for juvenile delinquents, an insane asylum, and, during the Cold War, Nike Ajax anti-aircraft missiles. Side note: I've found a few of the Nike sites around Chicago – there was an installation right behind the Museum of Science and Industry, for example – and finding them in your city makes for fairly enjoyable urban exploration.

It turns out that New York City is unique in its maintenance of a public cemetery. Other large cities contract with mortuary companies to take bodies that are not claimed from public morgues and the vast majority end up cremated. It may be morbid and unpleasant to think about, but big cities must produce thousands of such corpses every year. If you're interested, here's a photo gallery and informative site from the Hart Island Project, which is trying to piece together records about the thousands of dead who ended up there. There's also a documentary, if you have $25 to drop.

My sixth sense is tingling, letting me know that this is one of those special Fridays wherein you feel like doing even less real work than usual. It would only be fair under those circumstances for me to provide as many amazing distractions as possible.
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In no particular order:

1. Here is a great "science for stupids" level video on how transistors work:

And now you know how transistors work. So that's cool, I guess.

2. Reuters posted a hilariously bad "travel postcard" on how to spend 48 hours in Minneapolis-St. Paul. This is not a joke, despite the fact that it details just about the worst two-day itinerary one could imagine.
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It advises readers to eat at chain restaurants, spend many hours at the Mall of America, and to take in a Twins game (helpfully noting that "matches normally last three-and-a-half hours but the possibility of overtime can mean a late finish."

3. In the category of "things in Ed's wheelhouse" we have a staggering gallery of 201 images of space art from the Soviet magazine "Tekhnika-Molodezhi" – roughly the equivalent of Popular Mechanics. The Russian title can be translated as "Technology of the Young Generation.
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" The gallery includes both cover art and various illustrations from space-related articles.

I was born in the wrong decade.
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4. Read the tale of a family's quest to get Thor's Hammer on the military tombstones of their deceased loved ones as a symbol of Odinism. Oh, by the way, apparently Odinism is a thing that exists. Sure enough, the Veterans Administration now includes Thor's Hammer as one of the 58 approved religious/spiritual "symbols of belief" available on military tombstones:

That list is fascinating. I consider myself fairly well informed about religions, but there are at least 15 or 20 there that I've never heard of. I'm sure some are very small (it only takes one service member past or present to request adding a symbol, although not all requests are granted). So many unanswered questions. Why the sandhill crane? What the hell is Eckankar? When did atheism get a logo?

Enjoy.

A few years ago I had the good fortune to attend the Super Bowl, which was being held in Tampa that year. Since the Cardinals lost – there is a certain Steelers linebacker whose name cannot be spoken among my family – there was no reason to stick around after the game to watch the victory celebration and the handing out of various trophies. As we (and the rest of the Cardinals fans in attendance) filed slowly and somewhat sadly out of the stadium, I noticed something very odd about the people who were sticking around. Of the Steelers fans remaining to watch the celebration, a good half of them were holding up a smartphone. That is, they were either snapping pictures or, more commonly, shooting video.

So they were watching an LCD screen showing them events that were happening directly in front of them.

I've never forgotten that – the mental image of people who paid thousands of dollars to experience something in person and then not watching it so that they might have a terrible, shaky, low-quality video of it (I really question the watchability of a phone video taken from the third deck of an outdoor stadium at night). Don't get me wrong, I take pictures of things on occasion. But I have a strong preference for actually experiencing something that is happening around me rather than missing it because I'm trying to take a picture of it. Pictures are nice memories. You know what else is a nice memory?

Actually seeing it happen and, you know, having a thing to remember.

Last week at a parade – for a certain Cup named after a certain Lord – I saw the exact same thing, only four years later and a thousand times worse. Every single person in attendance seemed to be holding a cameraphone, all of which were thrust skyward when the parade came near. So now everyone has a shitty picture of everyone else's hand holding up a phone. And no one actually saw the parade. Sounds like fun!

On Thursday evening I'm willing to bet that you saw more than a few people holding up phones trying to take pictures or videos of fireworks.
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Why? Why would anyone even consider doing that let alone actually do it? Even if your video turned out well (note: it won't), how is watching a cellphone video of fireworks going to be entertaining?
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Even if your pictures came out (note: they won't), are you going to look at pictures of fireworks? Are you going to reminisce about the one that went "BOOOOM!" with all your friends? Why? WHY? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?

But by all means, keep distracting the rest of us by waving your bright screens around in our faces. It enhances the experience for everyone.

It has come to my attention recently that there are people in the world who do not know what I am about to tell you, no matter how bleedingly obvious it might seem.

When you patronize giant, faceless retail chains, you are fairly free to behave as a freeloader. Denny's has already factored into their prices that tables full of bored teenagers will linger for three hours after their meal, and Wal-Mart doesn't suffer if you spend hours in the store and buy nothing. You can show up to Free Sample Day at your chain grocer of choice, eat all the free samples, and leave without buying anything.
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Hell, I fondly remember one summer in which I lived in a rental unit with no air conditioning, and I regularly spent entire days in Borders without buying anything. Maybe it's my fault they went under, but probably not.

These rules change when you patronize a Small Business.
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I mean a real one, owned by a person who's usually standing behind the cash register. When you go to Bob's Coffee Shop, order a small Americano for $0.89, and proceed to sit there for four hours, you are being kind of a dick. Starbucks can handle it because their profit margins are high and they do incredible volume.
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Bob might only get 100 customers in a day, and he's relying on the fact that they're not going to take the most they can out of his establishment while spending the least possible money. Yes, part of the reason you go to a coffee shop is to sit around for a long time. That's cool. But maybe buy something. Bob's not running a public park.

That's not the worst thing you can do, though. That would be the following.

A local bar owner told me a tale recently of a group of customers who came in drunk, announced that they had spent the evening getting liquored up at a different bar, and asked to be served water for an hour so they could sober up enough to drive home. Don't do that, ever. If one person in a group of bar patrons wants to sip water all night while the others drink, that's cool. That's responsible, even. But a group of people taking up real estate at a bar and expecting to hang out without buying anything…what the hell is that? Who thinks that's OK? Apparently some of you do. Would you go into a restaurant, ask for a table, and then refuse to order anything? If you answered "yes", maybe double-check to see if you are an asshole.

How do people not get this? A place of business is not a public hangout. No, you shouldn't feel compelled to buy something every time you walk in the door. But these people are not operating a charity, they are operating a business and they would like to make enough money to 1) stay open and 2) live indoors. Maybe don't expect them to do things for you for free.

I'm glad we had this talk.

So apparently in the mid-1980s Wendy's restaurants took the idea of the corporate training video to the next level and set the basic how-to rules of the workplace to music. The results are more Eighties than Tony Danza and Ronald Reagan doing jazzercise with Max Headroom to the beat of a Roland 808 drum program.

These videos are pure, concentrated Eighties.
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The "hot drinks" song is stuck in your head now, right? I wonder what became of that singer/actor. I can only hope that he wakes up every single day thinking about how much he accomplished here.

The funny thing is, this strikes us as exceptionally cheesy. But it's remarkably, even embarrassingly, effective. How many of the rules for pouring and serving hot drinks do you remember right now? I bet you remember all of them.
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Would a 3-minute video of some actor in a Wendy's uniform reading the rules have held your attention? Would you have retained anything? Of course not. These are the moments in which I realize that Children's Television Workshop (the producers behind Sesame Street) are some of the most brilliant minds in the history of the medium. They've mastered all of the necessary techniques to mesmerize viewers: bright colors, singing, and rhyming.
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We're not so different from four year olds in some ways.
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