Tuesday's News

The downside of being able to cram a zillion lines of communication through one little fiber optic thread is that when it gets cut, the whole world gets disconnected. Our man on the spot reports:

A cut fiber optic cable south of Dubuque caused me to lose the ability to print to a printer 50 feet from my desk. All [company redacted] employees were sent home to work from their personal Mediacom cable connections, those with Qwest & ATT cable at home were outa luck and could not work. Also 911 & ATMs were down with all Qwest telephone and all [company redacted] connections to the outside world. I don't have at home cable so I stayed and cleaned out my desk, till service was restored 4 hours later.

Bonus: I got to use [redacted] just like the cool kids from the alphabet jungle (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.).

Seamount

A seamount if basically an underwater mountain. If it is tall enough to break the surface of the ocean we call it an island.

Tam got me started on this one. She's talking about geology and islands, which leads to the Great Meteor Seamount, which make me wonder how it got it's name. Did a meteor fall into sea nearby? Did someone see a meteor about the same time as they discovered this lump in the ocean floor? No, it was named after the ship that discovered it in the early 20th Century: the Meteor. More poking around leads to this really cool sonar recording of the Nashville Seamount, which is about 1700 miles to the WNW.

Note that the scales along both the X and Y axis are not in distance as you might expect, but in time. The horizontal axis is marked in hours of the ship's travel time. Each division of the horizontal scale is about 12 miles. The vertical axis is marked in the number of seconds it takes sound to make a round trip to that depth.

The speed of sound in seawater is about 1560 m/s (meters per second) which is not quite one mile per second. That is about four times as fast as it is in air. Since each division of the vertical scale represents one second, and we are talking about round trip time, this means the distance between index marks on the vertical scale is about one-half mile. The vertical scale is expanded relative to the horizontal scale by a factor of about 24 to one.

The difference between the top of the seamount and the base is a little over 4 intervals. At one-half mile per interval means this seamount is sticking up something more than two miles (or 10,000 feet) from the bottom of the ocean floor. I guesstimate the length of the rise is about one hour, or 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles. Which means the average slope of this underwater mountain is about one foot of rise for every six feet of travel.

Fault Finding

I find it a little strange how some things will trigger a 47 tab Wiki-wander and eventually lead to a post like this one, while most stuff just slides off my plate (pate?) unnoticed. If anyone ever notices a pattern to my ramblings, be sure and let me know what it is. In any case, Dustbury got me started on this one with his post about a high school commencement speech.

The speech was given by some semi-famous, old, white guy at what must be some la-tee-da high school on the East Coast. I say semi-famous because when I first saw his name I thought of the blond guy on The Man from UNCLE, but when I looked him up I found that, no, that is not who we are talking about. David McCoullough Jr., the guy we are talking about has written several books, the first one was named The Johnstown Flood. Johnstown? There was a Johnstown near our farm in Ohio. Did they have a flood? Or maybe we are talking about Jonestown (drinking Kool-Aid has been on my mind today, and I'm still waking up, so you'll have to excuse me for getting the two confused). So I have to look it up.

Turns out we are talking about a flood that wiped out Johnstown, Pennsylvania back in 1889, when a dam 14 miles upstream failed. This led to a BIG change in how liability is interpreted:

After the flood, victims suffered a series of legal defeats in their attempt to recover damages from the dam's owners. Public indignation at that failure prompted a major development in American law—state courts' move from a fault-based regime to strict liability.

From the Wikipedia article on Strict Liablity: 

A rule specifying strict liability makes a person legally responsible for the damage and loss caused by his or her acts and omissions regardless of culpability . . . .

The law imputes strict liability to situations it considers to be inherently dangerous.

Which essentially means that if you do something inherently dangerous, and somebody gets hurt, it is your fault whether you intended for anyone to get hurt or not.

"Your intentions" are covered by the Latin term Mens rea, so I had to look that one up as well, where
I found this:

In Australia, for example, the elements of the federal offences are now designated as "fault elements" or "mental elements" (mens rea) and "physical elements" or "external elements" (actus reus). This terminology was adopted to replace the obscurity of the Latin terms with simple and accurate phrasing. 

That's the second time this week I've heard of something sensible coming out of Australia.

Orange

Went to a wedding reception last night where orange was a prominent color. The bride's older sister was wearing a bright orange skirt, the bride's father was wearing a bright orange tie, my wife was wearing a flowered blouse thing with several orange flowers, and the tables were decorated with large sheets of paper, the topmost of which was orange. I credit my noticing all this orangeness to Dustbury's continued posting of pictures of people wearing orange stuff, and what do I see when I open his blog this morning? More orange:

Anoushka Shankar, daughter of Ravi Shankar

Hmmph.

Bumper Sticker of the Day

OK, technically it's a window sticker, not a bumper sticker, still, I thought it was pretty nifty when I saw it. This isn't the one I saw, I didn't use zoom and by the time I got my pic blown up big enough to see the critters they were just big blobs of white pixels, so I stole this one from Furious Fanboys.

General Tso's Chicken

Dustbury has an interesting story about how this Chinese dish came to be Chinese. How the General his own self got to be famous is another story:

The Taiping Rebellion was a widespread civil war in southern China from 1850 to 1864, led by heterodox Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, who, having received visions, maintained that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, against the ruling Manchu-led Qing Dynasty. About 20 million people died, mainly civilians, in one of the deadliest military conflicts in history. 

And here I thought the 20th Century had a lock on "deadliest".

Via Dustbury, Nancy and Wikipedia.

Comments

Because other people turned off word verification on comments, I thought I would try it. It worked, sort of. No spam comments appeared on this blog, but I was getting a dozen or so emails a day notifying me of Anonymous comments. That wasn't too bad, but I just went to clean out the spam trap and there were 250 spam comments in there. If you could delete them all at once it would be one thing, but you can't, you can only delete 50 at a time, and it takes a while, seconds, I tell you. So now I have turned on the stop-and-identify-yourself barrier, but word verification is still turned off. We'll see how that goes.