Ouvrages du Libron

View Larger Map
Roberta X poses an engineering question and I am curious enough to investigate.
   What I find is an engineered canal-river intersection near the middle of the French Mediterranean coast. I read the description on Wikipedia, and I looked at the pictures, but I didn't really understand what was going on until I saw the map and this picture. The canal runs East-West (across the picture). The river runs basically North-South. French engineers put two forks in the river: one upstream of the canal that splits the river in two, and one downstream that allows the two streams to recombine. The two streams flow through either end of the structure seen in this image.
     When the river is quiet, which is most of the time, boats can pass through this structure unimpeded. When the river floods and a boat wants to cross, a system of gates is brought into play to force the river to one side while the boat enters the channel on the other side. When the boat has reached the quiet center section, the gates are reversed, the river is diverted to the other side and boat can sail out the far side.

Cadillac Dream #4

There is a motor home with a Cadillac front end parked at the house. It's an older Cadillac, from sometime in the 50's. The vehicle is pretty sharp, all done up in kind of a woodsy color scheme, orangish-brown and green. The brand name is PERCOLATOR. It is written in stand alone chrome letters, i.e. not written in script. Sitting there it looks normal sized, well maybe a little wider than normal, like somebody has stretched the image sideways. I go inside and go to the back and I am surprised at how big the room is. I am so surprised that I decide to measure it. I measure it with my shoes by putting one foot right in front on the other. From one side to the other is fourteen feet. That's huge, you are going to have a hard time driving this thing anywhere. I notice a normal interior house door opening out to the side and I think that's not a good idea, but I stick my head out the window and see that the door opens onto a little triangular porch that was made by slicing off the forward corner of the room.
    I knew I had recorded Cadillac dreams before, but I was surprised to find that this was the fourth one. Unrequited dreams? Subconscious fantasy? I dunno, kind of odd in any case.
    The problem with Cadillacs and all other big fancy cars is all the gimcrack gizmos they use. Nice thing about luxury cars is that they are bigger, faster and more comfortable than your ordinary car, and if that was all the difference, they would be just great. But someone has decided that big, powerful cars should also be fancy, and so they install all these gizmos that are fine and entertaining as long as they work, but eventually they fail, and they fail much sooner than any of the standard mechanical stuff, and they cost a fortune to fix, so nobody bothers to fix them and that leads to a cascade of failures that eventually make the car unusable, even though mechanically it is still very sound. I want to buy an older luxury car and rip out the dashboard and all the other whizbang gizmos and replace them with standard switches and dials, or a standard off-the-shelf computer if that would be simpler. I don't want to have to learn a bunch of new stuff to work on a car. I invested a good part of my life boning up on all kinds of esoteric computer crap and it was mostly a waste of time because the stuff all went obsolete before I ever got a chance to use all my hard won knowledge.
    It's kind of weird that we have been using the Otto-cycle internal combustion engine for over 100 years. People are constantly making noises about replacing it with this that or the other, but I think it is probably going to be around for a long time to come.

P.S. I looked around for a Chrome letter font, but I didn't find one I could just use with the feeble tools I have at my disposal. Plus, any that I did find had a price tag attached to them. How rude.

Viva La Difference

From The Devils Panties dot com, via a comment on EB Misfit.

Top of the Lake

Mini-series murder mystery, 7 episodes, set in a small town in New Zealand where everybody carries a big gun, even the 12 year-old girl who is at the center of the story. She carries what looks and shoots like a double barreled rifle, though it might have been a shotgun. I got to thinking about this and I'm wondering what kind of big animals would you have in New Zealand? I mean, it's an island, and a long way from anywhere. I'm thinking the biggest animals would be sheep. So I checked. Seems the place is overrun with critters, deer mostly, that the Europeans imported in the 19th century. They didn't import any predators, so the place has become a mecca for hunters. Before humans showed up (around 1300) the only mammals on the islands were bats.

The Fall, Part 2

One of the Family by Frederick George Cotman

There was one more little bit I wanted to mention about this show (The Fall). There was a scene in the last episode where the killer's wife is talking to him about how well you can know a person. Something about how with most people you meet their family and friends and so learn things about them, but with him there hadn't been any of that. Right off the bat I thought that was pretty weird. Why would you ever care about someone else's impression of a person? People are so varied and so weird there is just no telling who you are going to get along with and who is going to rub you the wrong way. There may be some subconscious group think going on when I meet someone new, but I don't think I have ever specifically used someone else's opinion to help me select who my friends are. My wife and I did go meet both our parents before we were married, but we had already made our decision. I thought her family was nice enough. Quiet, conservative, professionals.
    Different story when I took her to meet my parents. At least one of my brothers joined us for a family dinner. We had what I thought was a fairly normal conversation. My wife was horrified. She thought we were extremely loud and rude. I was shocked by her reaction. This was a typical dinner for us. She married me anyway.

4 July

     Today's the day when I'm supposed to commemorate the formal launch of one of the few successful revolutions in all of history.
     One of the most successful and, at least in the home country, poorly understood.  It was not a war won by winning battles, it was a war won by avoiding too-expensive losses.  It was not a war won by beating the the Crown's forces to their knees but by making continuation too costly for them (at the time, they had other troubles, elsewhere).  It was won, in fact, by refusing to give up, even though it appeared unwinnable over nearly the entire course of the war.
     And, much as we'd like to think it was fought for the very highest ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independance, it was mostly fought to get the Crown's hand out of our pockets, to get the Crown's men out of our homes, and to generally be left alone.  --Or are those the highest ideals expressed in the Declaration, after all?
     The document [that] this day marks the adoption of was not at the time and has never been a part of the actual law or foundational documents of the States, united; it is not The Law Of The Land.  If you're after the first of those, you want the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, used for four years prior to ratification in 1781.--Some perpetuity: it was replaced a dozen years after first use.
     Along about 1787, either the fed.gov established by the Articles of Confederation was too puny to work, or it hadn't grabbed enough power to satisfy the social engineers, depending on who you believe.  The reality appears to be both and motivated more by pragmatism than idealism: things were falling apart and a baker's dozen of squabbling States stood no more chance against the Great Powers of the day than it had in 1776.  Thomas Jefferson being safely out of town, the drafting of our present Constitution began, ostensibly as a "revision" of the Articles of Confederation.  Instead, the delegates threw them out and started over.
     That is the first example of what came to be a classic pattern for popular revolutions: the old order is tossed out, there's a relatively brief period of great freedom, followed by a consolidation of power or formal reordering.  Best case, there's just the one and things get back on track; worst case, um, see French Revolution.  It appears inevitable; perhaps it's just theory hitting reality and the only variable is the size of the splat.
     If so, we were fortunate; but no luck runs forever and I'm half-convinced we have already passed the point where future historians will draw a line, saying, "Here the Republic ended; here the Empire began."
     It's still a good place, compared to most, and a great life, compared to most.  The present and the past that led to it are worth celebrating.
     That past is worth remembering and worth analyzing.  What happened?  Why did it work?  What did they get wrong?  What short-term compromises lead to long-term failure?
     What did it all mean and what does it mean today?  Something more than "BANG!" and a puff of bight sparks and colorful smoke, I hope.

Stolen entire from Roberta X

The Fall - 2013 TV Series

The Fall is a crime-drama with Gillian Anderson as a senior police officer investigating a string of murders in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I've always had a hard time with Gillian's name. I want to say Lillian Gish, but that's not right because Lillian is from another age entirely. And Anderson always makes me think of Mr. Anderson, aka Neo from The Matrix, which is sort of like the ultimate X-Files, which is where Gillian made her name. What kind of a name is Gillian anyway? New, apparently. Nothing in the Wikipedia entry is dated before 1900.
    There are only five episodes so far and we watched them all on Netflix this week. It looks like there might be more episodes in the making.
    On one hand, it's kind of your typical show about a police investigation of a serial murder. On the other hand it's rather well done. We've got all your standard ingredients, pretty girls, sex, drugs, corruption, politics, villains and heroes. We also know who the killer is from the get go.
    We also have Kalinda from The Good Wife in a minor role, though she is not quite as perfect here, but then she isn't playing the ninja-assassin that she plays on The Good Wife.
    There were a few things in the show that got me to wondering. The first is the primary villain, the killer. There is no doubt that he is the killer. He is obviously suffering from some kind of psychological compulsion. Not as much as his victims, but still. The problem is that he is also a loving husband and father, a professional (he's a bereavement counselor) and gives off no indications that he is crazy as a bedbug. Of course, all we see of him is what the director shows us, but none of the other characters give any sign that they have detected anything amiss. Well, except for his (8 year old?) daughter, who is suffering from recurring nightmares. His wife occasionally looks sideways, but that could just as easily be explained by the normal everyday stresses of a working couple with kids. I'm wondering if this is even possible. Is it possible for a person to have two sides to their personality and keep the malfunctioning part hidden from even his closest confidantes? I don't buy it, but then I tend to be inquisitive and discrepancies draw my attention.
    Then there is the rowdy, wife-beating loud mouth and his cronies. These guys are loud, obnoxious and threatening, but other than one guy beating his wife and fighting with the police (which is part and parcel of being Irish in Belfast, or so one might be led to believe), they haven't caused any harm. But who do you (the audience, me) want dead? The killer, or the loud mouth jerks? All of 'em, but the loud mouths right now. The SOB is threatening you, your wife and your family? I'd say shoot him dead now and claim self-defense later, but that's TV, and that's a TV reaction. The killer? Well, we only know who it is because the director has told us. In real life, we would still have to track him down.
    I can't imagine what it would be like to have rowdy loudmouths for neighbors and not be able to move away. Maybe the self-cleaning oven analogy also applies to small ovens, i.e. maybe they will burn out or self-destruct in a relatively short time and things will become calm again. How long are you willing to wait for something like that? Six months? A year?
    Lastly, there is "doubling" which is what you do when you have a job that requires one kind of behavior and a home life that requires another. I think most people do it to some extent. When you are at work there are certain things, certain kinds of behavior that are required of you. Obedience, speaking politely, not hitting people. When you are with your friends some or all of those restrictions may be lifted. So this is something the heroines in our story do (Gillian and Kalinda), but it is also something the killer does, though maybe we should call that tripling, since he has a professional life, a home life and a killer life.

P.S. I Googled for the origin of the self-cleaning oven analogy and drew a blank, which surprised me. I thought everything was known. I did find one reference to it:

I say let them kill each other, per the doctrine of the self-cleaning oven theory. ...it was posited by a sociologist who was originally referring to gang wars in US ghettos. His point was that assuming that the overwhelming majority of those involved are gang members, they will eventually kill most of each other off.