Category: Life

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A while back, I mentioned one of the exhibits I remembered from a childhood visit to the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry (now the California Science Center) in the 1980s:

…a multi-screen cartoon about energy sources and engine types called “The Water Engine.” (Each screen has a character talking up internal combustion, flywheels, mag-lev, electric, etc. I still quote the Peter Lorre-inspired fuel-cell scientist saying “And then…we burn the hydrogen!”)

At the end, the scientist tries repeatedly to ignite the hydrogen while everyone else watches nervously, then starts hiding behind obstacles or off-screen before the inevitable explosion bursts across all the screens. Then they all climb out of their hiding spots and agree that this would be really cool once the kinks are worked out, but it’s not there yet.

Brooke brought it up on Mastodon last month and I decided to go looking for it again. In 2017 there was nothing I found to show it even existed. In 2024 the only thing she could find at first was…my blog post from 2017. Which I’d forgotten writing. 🤦‍♂️ I kept looking, and found a brief note that it was later shown at EPCOT, with a link to a long-dead page that had been archived in 2002 containing some extremely tiny screenshots!

9 tiny cartoon screens in a grid: You can just barely make out a cowboy, a child with a large tricycle-like assembly, a football coach, a miner with a hard hat, some old, yellowed parchment with a sketch on it, someone carrying an axle with wheels, a large lab flask filled with water, an old man holding up a picture of a horse, and someone in a superhero outfit standing on a row of horseshoe magnets.
Rescued from a long-dead web page via the Internet Archive.

Adding EPCOT to my search eventually turned up an extremely sparse IMDB entry and…*drumroll please* someone’s home camcorder video of the whole presentation!

It does exist! It wasn’t a shared hallucination! The fuel cell scientist (who extracts the hydrogen from water, hence the title) does sound like Peter Lorre! He does indeed say the line that my family still quotes decades later! And it does indeed explode across the whole display!

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“Here’s a metaphor to help you get a sense for how this complicated thing functions.”

“But it’s not really doing that!”

“That’s why it’s a metaphor, not a description.”

…

“Here’s an explanation in layman’s terms.”

“No, that’s wrong, that term only means this specific thing when used in the relevant technical jargon.”

“I’m not speaking to people who use the jargon, I’m speaking to the general public, who use the term in a much broader sense than you do.”

…

And then there’s the flip side:

“I learned this thing was simple. These edge cases can’t possibly exist.”

“You learned the simplified version. The real thing is more complicated.”

…

As the saying goes, The map is not the territory. The map isn’t complete, but that doesn’t make it wrong either, as long as you don’t insist that the real things that aren’t on your map must not be there.

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A squareish hand-painted metal sign with the words 'Coffee,' 'Espresso' and 'Wifi' stacked vertically. The letters and border are black on a bright yellow background. The sign hangs from an ornamented wrought-iron-style stand above a planter and is viewed diagonally from above. Between 'Coffee' and 'Espresso' there's a drawing of a cup and saucer with steam rising from it.

When I took this photo back in 2016, it was a combination coffee/Chinese food restaurant: they sold coffee in the mornings and Chinese food for lunch and dinner. The owner had previously run a separate coffee shop (The Bean Counter, IIRC) in the same shopping center, then combined the two businesses to save on rent. It was one of our go-to Chinese takeout sources, and I’d sometimes grab coffee in the mornings if I was in the area or on my way somewhere in that direction.

The old coffee location sat vacant for a few years until a bakery (with coffee on the side) moved in. Amusingly, the bakery — with is still there today — also chose a pun-based name: Redondough (as in Redondo Beach).

In early 2020 — and I mean early, either January or February — they were offered a really nice buyout price by someone who wanted to turn-key convert it overnight to a Hawaiian restaurant. I imagine when mid-March rolled around and the initial Covid lockdown started, they were extremely relieved to have accepted it!

I never did get around to trying the Hawaiian place, even for takeout. Eventually it was taken over by a Hawaiian-style fast food chain.

Photo taken February 27, 2016 and originally posted on my Instagram account a few days later with this title, but no commentary.

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Brightline West is ready to start breaking ground this week, according to The Washington Post. The southwest endpoint will be in Rancho Cucamonga, where it will connect to Metrolink. (Which is definitely better than Victorville, which I’d seen suggested a few years ago.) Connecting to the existing lines here will make it simpler to build than trying to connect all the way to Los Angeles proper. (gift link)

Electric trains will depart every 45 minutes from a Las Vegas station south of the city’s storied Strip and a Southern California station in Rancho Cucamonga, a Los Angeles suburb about 40 miles east of downtown.

Traveling at up to 186 mph — faster than any other train in the United States — Brightline West trains will make the 218-mile trip in about 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Cross-posted from Metafilter

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Yes, it turns out a colander *does* make a fun instrument for observing a solar eclipse! Also, thinking about how common eclipses actually are.

Circular shadow on the sidewalk, with lots of bright crescents inside, all facing the same direction.

For a lot of reasons, we didn’t arrange another road trip to see today’s total eclipse like we did in 2017 (which was amazing, by the way!). It was only partial out here in California, and not even with as high a magnitude as the one last October.

But we had clear skies, so we broke out the eclipse glasses from 2017 again. After testing them first by looking directly as a bright indoor lamp to make sure there were no scratches. And I’d heard that colanders make interesting patterns (each hole works as a pinhole camera) much like overlapping leaves do, so I brought that out — as you can see, it worked quite well!

I do kind of regret not being able to get out to see this one as total. Partial eclipses can be really cool, especially if you have multiple ways to observe them, but XKCD has a point. There really isn’t any comparison to experiencing totality, and it doesn’t come through very well in photos.

I bet northern Spain is already booked for 2026.

It is interesting to think that solar eclipses happen every year — usually twice! — but they’re not always total, and they’re only visible from a small part of the planet at a time. And sometimes that’s a slice of, say, Antarctica or Siberia or out in the middle of the ocean. Not rare for the planet, but definitely rare for any given location.

On one hand, it’s no wonder people used to see them as omens. With travel and communication slow (and in many cases impossible) in the ancient world, if you’re only going on what’s been seen in your area, it seems super-rare and unpredictable. On the other hand, cultures with sophisticated enough astronomy like the ancient Babylonians were able to calculate the eclipse cycle thousands of years ago!

One bit of funny timing: We’ve been catching up on the last season of The Magicians. Today we got up to an episode that…well, let’s just say the moon figures very prominently in it!

Update: Axios posted a nice map last week showing how fully booked AirBnBs are for the day in different parts of the US…which shows the path of totality *very* clearly!

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Me, driving a smallish gas-fueled car in the 2000s: Wow, gas has gotten expensive these days, but at least I’m not spending too much per tank.

Me, driving a hybrid car in the 2010s: Yeah, gas is still expensive, but I’m still not spending too much per tank, and I think I’m filling it less often than I used to.

Me, driving a plug-in hybrid to the grocery store and back during the first year of the pandemic: I have no idea how much gas costs. I haven’t filled the tank since the before times. I hope the gas engine still works.

Me, driving the same plug-in hybrid normally during the 2020s: Oh yeah, gas is kinda expensive. At least I don’t have to fill up the tank very often, and it’s not too much when I do.

Me, driving a rented gas-fueled SUV to the next county and back once: WTF I’M SPENDING HOW MUCH TO FILL UP THIS TANK!?!?!?