Here’s an interesting gadget that I learned about from the Daily Giz Wiz podcast. It’s the CommuteMate Flameless Flare, a roadside safety device. This has several advantages over traditional safety flares. It uses LEDs and runs on two AAA batteries, so you can’t burn yourself or set your car on fire. There’s a powerful magnet in the base that lets you stick it right on your car if you need to. The Flameless Flare is reusable, and it’s remarkably inexpensive — Amazon.com currently lists it for $4.79.
If you’re wondering how Babylon 5: The Lost Tales is coming along, take a look at these photos. They include the new B5 logo and numerous pictures of sets and costumes.
Incidentally, if you read the Wikipedia article about The Lost Tales, you may notice that the Notes section includes a link to this Usenet article from 1996. In it, B5 creator and executive producer J. Michael Straczynski (JMS for short) answered the question “What would it take to convince you not to retire from television after B5?” (Retiring was his stated intention at the time.) JMS gave three answers to that question:
An anthology show.
A B5 spinoff that would complement the original series and not just capitalize on it.
Something revolutionary for TV.
Wikipedia links to that article as evidence that over a decade ago, JMS was already talking about doing an anthology series. But in fact, The Lost Tales is all three of the things he expressed a desire to do. It’s an anthology show and a complementary B5 spinoff. It’s also revolutionary because it is being released directly to DVD, something no TV series has done before.
So who asked JMS that question in the first place, anyway? Well, actually, I did.
I had never heard of Jonathan Coulton until a week ago. Last Saturday, I went to a gathering of friends at the Sealys’ house, and when I arrived, several people were in the middle of listening to various tracks from Coulton’s song “Code Monkey”, which he had made available for download by people participating in last November’s “Code Monkey” remix contest.
I didn’t pay very much attention to all this during the actual gathering, but I was curious enough to look up the contest winners page the next day and listen to the original song and the various remixes. The remixed versions didn’t impress me very much, but Coulton’s original version was instantly addictive, and I’ve been playing it repeatedly and singing it in my shower and my car ever since.
Today, I was checking the webcomics that I read every day, and saw these characters making a guest appearance in Freefall:
Hey, I recognize those robots! They’re drones from Silent Running.
Inevitably, I found myself reading the Wikipedia article about that movie. In the article’s trivia section, I read that Silent Running is “referred to heavily in John Hodgman’s compendium of fictional trivia, The Areas of My Expertise.” Wait a minute — John Hodgman? Isn’t that the guy who plays a PC in those annoying Macintosh commercials?
Yes, it is. And in the Wikipedia article about him, I learned that he has collaborated on various projects with Jonathan Coulton. Yes, the Jonathan Coulton who recorded “Code Monkey”. The guy I had never heard of before a week ago.
Is everyone else’s life as strange as this, or is it just me?
UPDATE: Minutes after posting this entry, I read a review of The Astronaut Farmer and learned that the cast of that movie includes Bruce Dern, who played the lead in Silent Running.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I later discovered that the first sentence of this article is incorrect.
Following a link from Instapundit, I read a Popular Mechanics article on Extreme Plumbing by Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters fame. Jamie makes the following point about pressure tanks:
The forces at play with high-pressure tanks can be huge. If the energy stored in a workshop air-compressor tank is released all at once, it can hurt or kill a person. I once complained to our insurers, “Why are you so fussy about the explosives we use on the show? Every day we make rigs using pressure tanks that are just as dangerous.” Big mistake. Now they fuss about pressure tanks, too.
As it happens, I was reading this shortly after I got home from Raleigh Little Theatre, where I spent all day working on the first technical rehearsal of House of Blue Leaves. I am assistant stage manager for this play, and one of my responsibilities is to handle the special effects that are used when, halfway through Act 2, a bomb explodes just offstage. One of those special effects is a compressed-air cannon that fires a load of fuller’s earth through a doorway onto the stage, simulating the cloud of dust and smoke produced by the explosion. The cannon fires when I open a valve that releases air from a pressure tank.
In fact, one of the last things I did at RLT before coming home was to repressurize that tank to 80 psi so that it’s ready for tomorrow’s dress rehearsal. Then I came home and read Jamie’s explanation that pressure tanks are dangerous and can kill you.
Actually, I’m not worried. If you read his entire article, you’ll see that that paragraph is scary only when taken out of context. Sure, pressure tanks can be dangerous if you use them in a reckless or irresponsible way, but the MythBusters don’t do that, and neither do theatre techies like me. Jamie’s article is really about how many of the challenges on MythBusters have been solved with plumbing and pressure tanks, and what that tells us about how useful and powerful that technology is. And fun, of course. I’m certainly going to be careful operating my cannon over the next several weeks, but I’d be lying if I said it won’t be a big thrill to set it off.
Pong was one of the first video games, and it’s at least 35 years old (closer to 50 years if you consider Tennis for Two an early version of Pong). But even today, it inspires new variations and tributes. For example, Curveball is a Pong-based game that operates in three dimensions instead of two, and displays the action from a very different angle. Text-Pong shows us what Pong would be like if it were a text adventure game. And then there’s this video of a Pong game that uses people as pixels:
I’ve been known to lend a book to someone and then forget who I lent it to. And it’s conceivable that the borrower might forget who the owner is. This is one reason that bookplates are a good idea. You can buy them in stores and write your name on them, but personalized, preprinted bookplates are even better. If that’s what you want, go to Bookplate Ink, where you can choose from dozens of black-and-white or color designs. The bookplates are self-adhesive with a peel-off backing and are acid-free.
