Constructive Termination

I suspected companies did this, but I didn't know there was a term for it.

On the other hand, this smells a lot like constructive termination. That’s when an employer doesn’t technically terminate an employee, but it makes the employee’s situation so bad — taking away responsibilities, badmouthing them to the public, assigning them all the worst tasks — that they quit on their own. Constructive terminations are common when dealing with employees who are protected from at will termination by law or contract — civil service employees, union employees, and tenured faculty.  - Windy Pundit

More Cold War Crazy

C-5 Galaxy Minuteman ICBM Drop Test

Compared to some of the stuff the US Military did during the cold war, this one isn't too bad, it probably didn't cost more than a few million dollars. The Aviationist has the story:

In 1974, the U.S. thought that the best way to preserve its ICBMs (Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles) from Soviet nuclear strikes was to load them in C-5 Galaxy airlifters and keep them on the move.
A three-stage Minuteman, 56 feet in length and 86,000 pounds in weight, was attached to some parachutes that could drag it out of the cargo hold and then point it upward, then it was loaded into a Galaxy and air launched over the Pacific from the aircraft: a timer ignited the rocket motor and the missile flew for about 25 seconds before it cascaded into the Pacific Ocean.

Via Quora

Pointers

Dynamic Memory Allocation

I'm working on my program to solve Sudoku puzzles again, and this time I'm using pointers. I just encountered a question about pointers on Quora that turned on my fingers and all this came out:

No, you cannot delete something that was statically declared in your source code. If you dynamically allocate a block of memory, you can assign the address of that block to a pointer variable. If you change the value of that pointer variable, it will no longer point to that block. If you haven’t saved that address somewhere, the block is effectively deleted because you won’t be able to access it because you don’t know where it is. If you delete the block of memory (using free or something similar), you shouldn’t be able to access that memory using your pointer. Depending on circumstances, if you haven’t mucked with the address stored in your pointer, you might still be able to access something, but it might not be yours anymore, or you might trigger a fault and the OS will kick you off.

Variables declared inside of functions are usually found on the stack, so the memory they use to store their values is dynamically allocated, so to speak. When the function is invoked, the space for your local variables is reserved, and when the function exits that space is reclaimed and merged with the unused space on the stack. It’s not really a problem because you can’t access those variables from outside the function.

You could dynamically allocate a variable, sort of. You could typedef (define) a structure, and then allocate space for a copy and assign that address to a pointer. You can now store stuff in this structure. If one of the fields in your structure is a pointer, you could allocate another block of memory and store the address in this pointer. Then if you free the first block, the one containing the structure, you will have lost both blocks because you will no longer have the address of the second block.

Books

Came across a couple of stories about the history of books, if you are interested in that kind of thing.

New England Primer 1764

WHY PICTURE BOOKS WERE ONCE CONSIDERED DANGEROUS FOR CHILDREN via Indy Tom

The Grapes of Wrath - Armed Services Edition

Why were the books published for American soldiers during World War II printed in landscape format? What was so special about these books? via Quora

Man Carrying Chair

We went over to the neighbors this evening for dinner and conversation. They didn't have enough chairs for everyone, so I brought a couple. When I go home they give me a chair to carry. When I get home I am very careful not to bang into the walls, and then it occurs to me that when I was younger I would have been very satisfied that I had carried the chair home and wouldn't have been too concerned about whether I banged into the walls or not. Huh. Could I be getting old?

Early Phonograph Recording

Lauritz Melchior Prize Song from Wagner's Die Meistersinger
I presume the singer is being restrained to keep him from overpowering the recording media. Via Posthip Scott.

Steampunk Violin

Roundtable Rival - Lindsey Stirling
This lively little tune showed up on YouTube. It's pretty great, it's like an old Western with cowboys and dancing girls, and wait a minute, what the heck is that thing she's carrying around? A violin with a trumpet horn?



Yamaha Performing Artist Lindsey Stirling - "Roundtable Rival" Behind The Scenes
Yes, as she explains here, that is exactly what it is. But it turns out there really was such a thing. John Stroh invented it back in 1899:

The Stroh violin is much louder than a standard wooden violin, and its directional projection of sound made it particularly useful in the early days of phonographic recording. Regular violins recorded weakly with the old acoustic-mechanical recording method, producing a thin, whining tone. The Stroh violin improved this by producing a fuller, louder sound with better tone.
Stroh violins were common in recording studios, but became rarer after record companies switched to the new electric microphone recording technology in the second half of the 1920s. - Wikipedia

Erwin Schulhoff : Susi (1937)
I listened to several recordings of the Stroh Violin on YouTube and this one sounded the best. All the others sounded a bit whiny. Could it be that what made it work well with recording equipment 100 years ago makes it sound worse with today's equipment?