1938 Phantom Corsair

1938 Phantom Corsair

Here we are in 1938 again. Another case of great minds thinking alike, perhaps. There was only one of these and it is still around.

 The body [was wide] enough to accommodate four people in the front row, including one person to the left of the driver. The back seats could only hold two passengers, however, in large part because of space limitations posed by on-board beverage cabinets. - Wikipedia

1938 Phantom Corsair Interior

    You'd have a hard time finding four Americans that would fit in that front seat today. Could that be because we don't have liquor cabinets in our cars anymore?

Power for the 2-ton Phantom Corsair came from a modified Cord 810 Lycoming 8-cylinder unit, supercharged by Andy Granatelli to produce about 190 hp. - Automobile History USA

If you are like me, you remember Andy Granatelli from the STP ads on TV and the turbine powered STP special that ran in the Indianapolis 500 back in 1967.

Commercial - STP Oil - Andy Granatelli Turbine Car - Indianapolis 500

[The Phantom Corsair also] played the role of The Flying Wombat in David O. Selznick’s film The Young in Heart (1938). - Supercars

There's that David O. Selznick guy popping up again.

Via Posthip Scott

Update September 2018 replaced missing image and video.
 

Coffee

Funny Staples TV Commercial, "Caffeine" - 247Commercials

Caffeinate much?

Landing Gear

777-200 hanger landing gear test
Watching a video of airliners landing over at Bayou Renaissance Man, I noticed that a regular looking airliner (an Airbus 340-600) had an extra set of wheels in the back, so I go poking around and finally settled on this. Landing gear on airliners is massive. And how about them jackstands?

Programming

How a watch works ; Mechanical movement
Programming is so weird. You write thousands of characters and they all have to be just so or your program won't work. For instance, I ran into a problem that I could not solve, so I excerpted the offending section and posted it on the Go Language Help Forum:

I thought I had a simple expression in an if statement:if c2c >= (r2 + r2) {but I couldn't make it work until I replaced (r1 + r2) with a single variable.
https://play.golang.org/p/juhYJaoq5p6Am I missing something?

The sharp eyed among you will notice that inside the parentheses, inside the box I refer to the variable r2 twice, whereas in the following text I use two different variables. Doh! Kind of a crucial error. (the > is supposed to be an a 'greater than' sign. It may look like one by the time you see this.) I couldn't fix this problem because I literally didn't see it.

There are some errors that the compiler will catch, like if you misspell a variable name. For instance, if I had typed 'r3' instead of 'r2', the compiler would have complained, but only if I had not created variable r3. And in some cases you can transpose expressions, or lines of code and even whole sections, and the program will run just fine. I liken it to virtual watch making. The only parts that matter are the working bits, and those have to be absolutely right.

Quora has a good post about this.

Update April 2018 replaced missing video with something similar.

Korobeiniki

IMPOSSIBLE REMIX - Tetris Theme A by BobGmbH
You who are wise in the way of the electronical gizmoids will know that Korobeiniki is the Russian folk song appropriated for the video game Tetris. The tune was mated with a poem back in 1861. It starts out like a nice little story, but, because it is Russian, ends tragically.

You may also know that you can convert Wikipedia's ordinary, everyday URL:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

to one designed for use by your Star Trek communicator through the simple expedient of inserting an 'm' in correct, magical place.

Via Iaman.

Flying into Narsasuaq

Ferry flight USA to Germany - C182T landing at Narsasuaq (BGBW) 4K !
Ernst K. Ganntt has a story about flying into Narsasuaq in Fate is the Hunter. It's very simple if you do it right, but there are any number of ways for it to go wrong, and you can't tell you've done it wrong until it's too late to do anything about it. It must have been a WW2 story, in any case before modern navigational aids like GPS.

Narsasuaq, Greenland

To get to Narsasuaq, you have to fly up a fjord, and you have to choose the right one. As you approach the coast of Greenland, which is where this is, there are several openings to choose from. You have to choose the right fjord because they are too narrow to turn around in and the mountains on either side are too tall to fly over. War Bird Forum has a better explanation.

Video via Posthip Scott.

Warrant Canary

Canary in a coal mine

In early 2015, Reddit published a transparency report that contained heading for National Security Requests, noting, "As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information."
Five hours ago, Reddit published its 2015 edition, which contains no mention of classified requests for user information.
"Warrant canaries" are a response to the practice by governments of serving warrants on service providers that include gag orders forbidding the service from disclosing the warrant's existence. By publishing regular transparency reports listing the number of secret warrants received to date as "0," then omitting the section dealing with those warrants once the first warrant has been served, companies can create a kind of dead man's switch -- done right, it might even stop governments from even trying to serve a warrant (except in Australia, where warrant canaries are illegal).
Reddit had a national security warrant canary in 2015. It's gone now [Chris Soghoian/Twitter] 

It's all over the net. I found this explanation on BoingBoing. Via Marcel on Monday Evening and Bruce Schneier on Security