Well That Was Interesting

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 17:15:54 GMT

Last night my roommate and I went for groceries and ended up with something completely different. We got to the intersection before our destination and in a gap between the building and a tree, saw this:

At least, that's what it would have looked like without any of the foreground elements, if I had been standing on the roof of the grocery store, and had a telephoto lens. The mountain visible is, I believe, one side of the Newhall Pass, so whatever-it-was should have been visible to anyone going north on the 5. At first glance it looked like one row of lights on an array at the high school football field; it was only after realising the high school was much further to our left, and noticing that the parallax relative to known objects, as we moved down the street, implied it was much further away than field lights of that size would be, that the oddness of what I was seeing became clear.

Unfortunately, when we crossed the intersection, a tree got in our way, so we aborted groceries for the time being and tried to get on a road with a clearer view. This took about five minutes, and by the time we saw that part of the horizon again the lights had gone. We retraced our route, to see if it had been something more fixed that would still be visible from that angle, but it wasn't.

There are any number of perfectly reasonable things it could have been. The most likely explanation I can think of is that the Burbank Airport is directly in line between the grocery store and Newhall Pass, so if a large plane with four very bright headlights along the wingspan had been landing from the north, it would have looked exactly like that ... but planes don't usually land from the north at Burbank, and I've never seen any with a light configuration like that. I did a little research this morning and found that the C-130 Hercules sometimes has a light on each of its four engines, in the arrangement we saw, but I have never seen airplane lights this bright. Perhaps it was equipped specifically for illumination?

Has anyone seen anything similar? Any ideas?

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Tealin's Weekly Junk Drawer

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:40:21 GMT

I've been working so much I've run out of interesting things on the iPlayer, so I went to YouTube in search of shows I liked as a kid. One of the reasons I gave up on television was the degradation of the Discovery and Learning Channels, which (with PBS) were pretty much all I watched, but which have since abandoned the sort of shows that drew me to them. Luckily, in our dazzling modern age, they've surfaced again on YouTube!

First up, prompted by a conversation about childhood nightmares, was Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious Universe. I remember it giving me the willies when I was young, and the crystal skull in the intro was the scariest thing ever. ( more... )

The next show I looked up was one of my favourites from later in my youth, which I remember TLC running on their Friday night marathons. I was curious to see whether I thought it was so good because it was good, or if it was just because I had a very limited frame of reference ... but no, with all adult objectivity, I can say I was incredibly spoiled by awesome television when I was young.
James Burke's Connections
Either TLC would run them out of order, or I was just bad at putting the pieces together, but I was surprised that the episodes hooked up with each other, as well as being a chain of connections within themselves.
I think this is where I got introduced to most of what I knew about world history before high school, as well as gin and tonics, exploding billiard balls, the Little Ice Age, the maximum height to which water can be sucked ... but more importantly, and surprisingly, I found in it a lot of the ideas and modes of thought that I believed I'd picked up from other things much later, but which were apparently planted by Connections and just re-activated. ( more )

This week's fascinating synthesis of art and science:

1. Cut down tree (or limb thereof)
2. Slice cross-wise into thin disks
3. 'Play' on modified turntable with a camera for a needle

... and you get this.

And finally, did anyone hear the Scott segment on Weekend Edition Saturday today? Wow, NPR, way to completely fail at research. Listening to them stumble through error after error put me in mind of Rocky trying to escape the pie machine. Is this what 'experts' feel like all the time?

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Well That Was Interesting

Tealin's Weekly Junk Drawer