Would you believe I found a postcard for Irvine?
It’s a bunch of office buildings with mountains in the background. I guess it makes sense. I mean, what else would you put in an Irvine postcard?
Category: Strange World
Man-Eating Bird
Fossils linked to Maori legend of man-eating bird
The giant Haast’s Eagle, which died out at least 500 years ago, was originally thought to have been a scavenger, but new analysis of fossils indicates that it was a lion-level predator…making it the probable basis for the Maori Te Hokioi legend.
Shock & Wave
Weird: Routine Coast Guard training exercise spooks press because it’s 9/11. I wonder how many people were freaked out by the shuttle landing’s sonic boom because of the timing?
Wingnet
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of disks on the freeway. Or a pigeon with a datacard.
[A] company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a “data card” strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data.
2024 (well, 2023) update: Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet (via)
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers. With the proliferation of super-fast home connectivity like gigabit fiber, one might expect the carrier pigeon to be blown away in 2023. Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin. However, as you will learn later, the pigeon gets outpaced at distances over about 600 miles.
I’d been wondering whether bandwidth or SD card density had changed faster since then!
Powerless at the Mall
How an outdoor mall dealt with a lunchtime power outage. And some Apple observations.
Power’s out at the mall. No teriyaki bowl for me. Subway it is! (Hmm, and no iced coffee either. *sigh*)
Near as I can tell, the Apple store is just completely shut down. Hazards of making checkout depend on computer network, I guess. For contrast, Subway just dug out a pad of paper credit card slips and did texture rubbings w/ a pen.
Odd: muzak is so omnipresent I didn’t notice it was still playing. Speakers must be on another circuit from the stores.
Turns out only some buildings have lost power. Including all the coffee except Starbucks. But Jamba Juice has power!
Was weird walking through mall at lunch seeing lighted stores on right and dark on left. Some stayed open, some closed, some adapted.
Coffee Bean was mostly closed during the power outage, but they set an employee out front with two urns of coffee. No ice, though.
Deep Fried WHAT???? A Night at the Fair with Al’s Brain, Melissa Etheridge and a Ferris Wheel
We went to the Orange County Fair on Saturday afternoon. Most years we end up going to at least one of the Pacific Amphitheater’s summer concert series, which includes fair admission, so we just combine it into one trip. This year it was Melissa Etheridge, and we also had another goal: Al’s Brain.
We started by grabbing some water and (in my case) a chocolate milkshake (because I wanted some ice cream, dangit! and drinkable made it easier), then wandered through the arts and crafts displays, where they showed prize-winning jewelry, crochet, display models, dresses, origami, etc.
Al’s Brain
Then we made our way to the back of the fair, where they had set up a portable theater for Al’s Brain (in 3-D!). There was a huge sand sculpture out front of “Weird Al” Yankovic holding out a brain in his hand. An animated question mark and exclamation point would occasionally pop out the top of his head, and smoke would pour from his ears.
“Weird Al” has actually had a long association with the Orange County Fair, often doing free concerts on multiple nights during the run. We’ve seen him there at least twice, possibly three times. One year there was a “Weird Al” museum of sorts. This year, he got involved in a short 3-D educational film (comedic, of course) about the brain.
Pipeline to the Underworld
Sometimes when walking to lunch I pass this pipe sticking out of the ground. I have no idea how deep it goes, or whether it connects to something or just stops. I also have no idea what it’s for, unless as a vent or a placeholder. It just pokes out a couple of feet next to the hedge bordering a vacant lot.
I wonder how much litter collects at the bottoms of things like this. People tossing garbage, leaves falling in, people dropping rocks to gauge depth, people accidentally dropping things like flashlights or keys. If I dropped something important, would it be retrievable? If I couldn’t fish it out with a hook or gum on the end of a string, who would I call? Or would I just have to write it off as lost?