Virtual Pedometer

Gmaps Pedometer is a "little hack that uses Google's superb mapping application to help record distances traveled during a running or walking workout."

This program works like a charm. The instructions are to the left of the map. Place your cursor and your starting point and double click. Double click at your first turn, and follow that process until you have finished your route. Distances are figured as you go. (It is 0.56597787156678 miles from the front of the Orendorff Building to the post office.)

In case you are not familiar with maps.google.com, you can place your cursor on the map and drag it until you get the spot you want centered. You can zoom in or out, and you can switch from map view to satellite view to hybrid view.

Click here for a map of Powell. The general address for the site is www.sueandpaul.com/gmapPedometer/
The map covers the US, but the Satellite view is not as good everywhere as it is for Powell (Sorry, Cody.)

Beepilepsy, Cube Farm, and Mouse Potato: New Office Slang

Slang comes and slang goes. (Cool, daddy-0!) Some interesting terms have popped up recently in the office world. Sometimes called geek speak, sometimes called New Office Slang, the terms have been floating around the internet of late.

Here are a few choice examples:

• Beepilepsy -- the strange expression someone gets when his or her cell phone goes off while the person is speaking.
• Cube Farm-- a large office composed of many cubicles.
• Mouse Potato -- the online generation's answer to the couch potato
• Treeware -- documentation or other printed material
• Ohnosecond -- the split second in which you realize you've made a terrible mistake.

For more delightful examples, check out New Office Slang at Essays and Effluvia.

Northwest Trail Pacemaker Finalist

For the second straight year, the Northwest College Trail has been named a finalist in the Associated Collegiate Press national Pacemaker Award.

According to the Associated Collegiate Press web site, "Judges select Pacemakers based on the following: coverage and content, quality of writing and reporting, leadership on the opinion page, evidence of in-depth reporting, design, photography, art and graphics."

The winners will be announced October 26- 30th in Kansas City.

Other finalists include Harvard, University of Texas, Carnegie Mellon, Miami, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Syracuse, Northeastern, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Emory, Pepperdine, and Auburn.

Bad Movie Physics

As TIMES ONLINE reports this morning, the popular horror movie image of ghastly death due to sucking quicksand is just another movie myth.

This discovery is based on the work of four scientists (A. Khaldoun, E. Eiser, G. H. Wegdam and D. Bonn) publishing an article in today's issue of Nature titled "Rheology: Liquefaction of Quicksand under Stress." As it happens, "A person trapped in salt-lake quicksand is not in any danger of being sucked under completely." Instead, one would sink about half-way and stop; the graver danger is if the tide sweeps in on a stuck person and causes drowning.

But that's only half of it: Neither can you pull a stuck person out of quicksand without ripping them asunder. The force to remove one foot from the sand, says the TIMES ONLINE, "would require as much force as it takes to lift a family car, and the body would give way before the sand relinquished its grip."

Sadly, many of nHumanities' favorite movies have made use of horrific quicksand death, such as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), Lawrence of Arabia, Flash Gordon, King Solomon's Mines, and The Jungle Book.

More bad film physics . . .

Broken windows: hero jumps through window, not a scratch. In reality jumping through plate glass would slice off body parts.

Flashing bullets: sparks as bullets ricochet off walls, doors etc. Bullets are made of copper-clad lead or lead alloys which do not produce sparks in this way.

Bangs in space: sound is carried by a wave that needs matter to propagate. Outer space is, in essence, a vacuum in which no one can hear you scream.

Banned Books Week 2005 :: September 24–October 1

Celebrate the Freedom to Read!

Observe the American Library Association's Banned Books Week by visiting these links:

• The Top 10 List of Most Frequently Challenged Books
• The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000
• Notable Quotes & Links on freedom of speech and banned books
• Banned Books Online
• Develop Yourself: Expose Your Mind to a Banned Book
• Book Burning through the ages

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." -- Noam Chomsky, speaking in a BBC television interview with John Pilger on The Late Show (1992)

Liquid Sculpture and Strobe Alley

Liquid Sculpture is the web site of photographer Mark Waugh, featuring his pictures of liquid droplets at the moment of impact. The photo at right is of colored water, but his collection includes various colored and viscous fluids as they form frozen fountains, coronets, and other sculptures.

Waugh's work reminds me of the first such photo I ever saw. When my elder brother went off to MIT, he sent back a postcard of a coronet of milk--amazingly frozen in time against a red background (1957). It was the work of MIT's Institute Professor Harold E. "Doc" Edgerton. An earlier Edgerton picture of a splashing milk drop was so beautiful that it was featured in the New York Museum of Modern Art's first photography exhibit (1937). More images included athletes frozen in competition; bullets piercing balloons, apples, and playingcards; and hummingbirds in mid-flight.

Such images may seem common today, but they were a miracle in the 1930s when Edgerton invented the stroboscope which was used to create ultra-high-speed and still (or stop-motion) photography.

Interesting links:

• Flashes of Inspiration: The Work of Harold Edgerton, MIT Museum
  
• Exploring Photography : Photographers : Harold Edgerton, Victoria & Albert Museum
  
• A Biographical Memoir (PDF) by J. Kim VanDiver and Pagan Kennedy, published by the National Academy of Sciences

Gigi rongak, Bakku-shan, and Backpfeifengesicht

Estimates on the number of words in the English language range from 500,000 to over two million. (Obviously, figuring out the number of words in a language is more difficult than one might suspect.) At any rate, with all those words floating around you'd think that English has virtually every thing, action, or concept covered.

Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Adam Jacot de Boinod has scoured several hundred language dictionaries looking for words which have no English equivalents, and he has collected them in his book The Meaning Of Tingo, a collection of distinctly non-English words and phrases. Here are some choice examples:

• gigi rongak -- the space between the teeth (Malaysian)
• bakku-shan-- a girl who looks pretty from the back but not the front (Japanese)
• backpfeifengesicht -- a face that cries out for a fist in it (German)
• kummerspeck (grief bacon) -- excess weight gained while overeating during emotional times (German)
• plimpplampplettere -- skimming stones across the water (Netherlands)
  

For more choice terms, read "Tingo, nakkele and other wonders" in the BBC News Online.

Definitions Can Be Tricky

Writing for BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin offers a post on BlackMetal for Dummies. An excerpt from her post illustrates the dangers of facile definitions--an object lesson for all young scholars:

"Musical characteristics include superfast guitars and shrieky, bummed-out vocals. Fashion characteristics include spiky shin guards, medieval accessories(swords, chains), and generous use of corpse paint.

"But as the comparative graphic above shows, identification can be tricky. At left, Dani from the band Cradle of Filth is wearing lots of corpse paint. He is Totally Black Metal. At right, Louie the pug -- who is owned by television news producer Jeremy Blacklow from a Certain News Network -- is not one bitBlack Metal, despite facial markings that strongly resemble corpse paint."

Half of Europeans Bilingual

According to an Associated Press article, a recent European Union poll shows that 50% of the citizens in Europe can speak a second language.

The country with the highest percentage of citizens who are able to "master a conversation in a second language" is Luxembourg, at 99%. Hungary came in at the bottom of the scale, with 29%.

In the United Sates, only 9% of the population is bilingual. According to a U.S. Senate resolution, 2005 is the "Year of Foreign Language Study."

Link

Jerred Metz Presentation

Jerred Metz read selections from his work The Last Eleven Days of Earl Durand on Thursday evening, Sept. 23.

The reading was followed by an intense discussion and question and answer period. Even though Metz' book focuses on events which took place in 1939, a number of members of the audience had personal connections to Durand's saga: his escape from jail, flight, and the eventual deaths of six people--including Durand.