"The Philco Predicta is a television made in several cabinet models in a 17” or 21” screen by the American company Philco
from 1958-1960. The Predicta was marketed as the world's first swivel
screen television. The picture tube was surrounded in Eastman plastics
new product called “tenite” which protected the glass and gave it its
greenish tint... Predicta television sets were
constructed with a variety of cabinet configurations, some detachable,
but all separate from the tube itself and connected by wires. Initially introduced in 1958 for the Holiday Inn hotel chain and rolled out for general consumers shortly thereafter, the Predicta was discontinued in the early 1960s."
"Controlling your own destiny" is a timeworn stock phrase used by sports commentators and pundits in reference to a team that will go to the playoffs if it wins its final games, regardless of how other teams do in other games.
The fallacy of the phrase was explained by UCLA football coach Chip Kelly, when asked whether he was aware that his team controlled their destiny: "No, to be honest with you. Grammatically, destiny is a predetermined
set of events, and if it's a predetermined set of events, you can't control it. Think about that one."
Those should keep you busy while I go do some last-minute Christmas shopping this morning. I'm going to defer tackling the RSS quiz this year (looks way too hard for me) and will instead await the release of the King William's College General Knowledge Paper this weekend (to be published in The Guardian).
This week I've been playing Civilization V in the role of Maria of Aragon, Queen of Portugal (the game describes her as "struggling with illness" throughout her reign, but the Wikipedia entry notes that she was "almost continually pregnant," carrying ten children to term in 14 years). In the course of the game I learned about the nau -
- which was totally new to me, even as a word. But this same week I happened to listen to a podcast of No Such Thing as a Fish, where the discussion of seasickness included the comment that the word nausea was related to nautical. So... to the dictionary. Portuguese nau borrowed from Catalannau, from Latinnāvis. And nausea is a borrowing from the Latinnausea, from Ancient Greekναυσία(nausía, “sea-sickness”), from ναῦς(naûs, “ship”). You learn something every day.
Staggering graph in a screencap from an Atlantic video about overtourism.
And note the vertical scale is not truncated for emphasis (the x-axis is zeroed). I'm old enough to remember the left side of this graph. It was a different world.
The Tamborine Mountain state school has run out of water, even as
water miners in the Gold Coast hinterland are sending millions of litres
to commercial bottling operations.
Trucks sent by the Queensland
government carrying emergency supplies to the school, including Mount
Tamborine bottled water, have been passing trucks heading in the
opposite direction taking local water to bottling plants for beverage
giants such as Coca-Cola.
The school remains open but parents have been advised by teachers to consider keeping their children at home.
Water
miners in the Mount Tamborine area supply roughly 130m litres of water
each year to commercial bottling operations. Now the local bores are
running dry.
“Now the government is buying water back from Coca-Cola to bring here, which is where it came from in the first place.”
In reply the state's natural resources minister replied that...
“As I have previously said, groundwater is not regulated on Mount
Tamborine and so my department does not have the power to limit take. I do have the power to limit take in a declared water shortage – but
that is everyone’s take, including local farmers, households, and
businesses.
“QUT research says levels of groundwater extraction are equivalent to
less than five per cent of average annual groundwater recharge. Of that five per cent, farmers use almost 84 per cent of the extracted
groundwater for horticulture, households almost 11 per cent, and bottled
water operations, about five per cent.”
Obviously the recent heatwave and drought are exacerbating the situation.
Empire Builder Investments, the real estate arm of
Progressive Rail, sought approval in October from the Minnesota
Department of Natural Resources to install two pumps on 6 acres in
southern Dakota County. Under the scheme, the pumps would have tapped
our deepest aquifer, extracted up to 500 million gallons of groundwater
annually, and then shipped it by rail using Water Train, an Oregon-based
company currently providing water to agencies in Colorado, Utah and
Arizona.
This request to export groundwater is unprecedented in Minnesota history.
The Dakota County Board of
Commissioners voted unanimously to oppose this exportation of water for
several reasons, not the least of which is that Dakota County may face
water issues of our own over the next two decades.
Locals have offered to let Empire Builder Investments take the snow from their driveways.
Posted for the photo (via), but then I had to look up about piebaldness:
A piebald or pied animal is one that has a pattern of
unpigmented spots (white) on a pigmented background of hair, feathers or
scales. Thus a piebald black and white dog is a black dog with white
spots. The animal's skin under the white background is not pigmented. Location of the unpigmented spots is dependent on the migration of melanoblasts (primordial pigment cells) from the neural crest to paired bilateral locations in the skin of the early embryo.
Animals with this pattern may include birds, cats, cattle, dogs, foxes, horses, pigs, and snakes. Some animals also exhibit colouration of the irises of the eye that match the surrounding skin (blue eyes for pink skin, brown for dark). The underlying genetic cause is related to a condition known as leucism.
In medieval English "pied" indicated alternating contrasting colours making up the quarters of an item of costume or livery device in heraldry. Court jesters and minstrels are sometimes depicted in pied costume and this is the origin of the name of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The word "piebald" originates from a combination of "pie," from "magpie", and "bald", meaning "white patch" or spot. The reference is to the distinctive black-and-white plumage of the magpie.
And I sure didn't know this:
The bald eagle derives its name from the word "piebald" in reference to the contrast of its white head and tail with dark body.
This morning I found a very informative video at the BBC, about a Georgia farmer who manages his (extensive) farm in such a way that the cattle do not have an adverse carbon footprint. His "regenerative farming" is a reversion to (and enhancement of) older practices radically different from modern "factory farming."
The video takes three minutes and is worth a watch. Unfortunately I don't know how to embed it, but you can watch it at this BBC page. [addendum - here's a somewhat messy embed] -
As I searched for the YouTube version, I discovered that Will Harris' White Oak Pastures farm is well known and has been the subject of lots of videos. I'm going to embed a seven-minute one entitled White Oak Pastures: Our Story -
I come from several generations of Norwegians and Norwegian-American farmers who raised milk cows, chickens, hogs, corn etc in the old "family farm" fashion, so this video spoke to me. Mr. Harris has taken the process to the next level in terms of recycling farm "waste." Very impressive.
