All aboard!
I love subways. That comes mostly from time spent running around NY and marveling at how easily you can move about the city on the trains. Now, I get it. I have read enough about it to know that there are serious issues with the subway system in NY. But when you are visiting, and on vacation time, those rough edges get smoothed over pretty easily.
And you have to take into account that I am comparing that to what currently passes for a commuter train system in the greater Seattle area. To call it a fledgling system would be kind. It is still many years from what you would consider real coverage of the area. And it often leaves me thinking, if only someone had the forethought to start building the train system decades ago.
Like London!
On this day in 1863, the London Underground began operation. 1863! That is crazy. And a big reason why London has a usable system today.
Oddly, our picture today doesn’t come from the London, NY, or Seattle transit systems. It’s the BART in San Francisco, because why not? 😀
Big Alphabet Brother
It’s 11am, do you know where your location data is? This was a bit of an eye-opener to me. Of course, I know that my phone is sending data back to Google about where I am. It will occasionally ask me to rate a place I was. Or, less successfully, to rate a place I walked past.
However, I have never looked at what all of that data looks like. And it’s kind of crazy. That photo at the top is the view from 30,000 feet of what Google knows about my adventures in NY.
Interesting, but it gets really intriguing when you zoom in and you see all the tiny little pins of specific places. And it gets completely bonkers when you realize you can look at the information by date. Here is a shot from one day of my last trip to NY.
Pretty crazy, right? But wait… there’s more. To the left of that is the text based version that looks similar to what you are used to seeing when you get directions from Google. But now it is a timeline of your whole day. On this day, for example, I can tell you that after having coffee at Maman with Allison, I spent 80 minutes at Penelope having dinner with Rebeccah before we walked half a mile to see our friend Lauren’s show at Tada. I can even tell you what photos I uploaded to instagram, because those are backed up to Google drive, and so have been inserted into the timeline.
Now, I get that there are huge privacy concerns to be weighed when looking at this level of data being stored about individuals. In general, I’m ok with what has been captured in my history. And there is a bit of fun to be had retracing previous adventures.
But all of this does serve as a reminder to be mindful of where your data is going. If there are places and things you don’t want a record of, even if it is supposedly only accessible by you, be sure to turn those features off before embarking on those adventures.
If you would like to see what info is on your Google timeline you can find it at google.com/maps/timeline.
Light it up
This is a bit of a trick question, because while everyone knows the Statue of Liberty, most of us don’t know its history as a working lighthouse. From 1886 to 1902, it was just that, and it was the first lighthouse powered by electricity. The statue served as a navigational aid for ships entering New York Harbor. It’s said that the arc lamps in the torch could be seen 24 miles out to sea.
That’s the simple version of the story. It was, as you might expect, much more complicated than that. This article at lighthousefriends goes into a lot more detail.
Our photo today is semi-related. It has nothing to do with lighthouses, but that is a random old electric motor that we have in the warehouse, which uses eclectricity. And electricity is what we are talking about here. 🙂
That’s some pricey metal
This is a great example of when the march of technology works for us. Early use of aluminum was very cost-prohibitive. In 1852, a kilo of aluminum was $1,200 US dollars. For perspective, at the time a kilo of gold was $664. This was all down to the expense of processing the aluminum from the ore.
Those processes changed and matured quickly. By 1859, the price had already dropped to $37 per kilo. And in 1895 it had fallen to just $1.20 per kilo. This was in large part due to the adoption of the Hall–Héroult process for smelting aluminum. As I type this, the price is right around $1.77 per kilo.
And one final number just to boggle your mind. A Boeing 747 contains over 66,000 kilos of aluminum. If we do the math, that means you could take that old 747 to the recycler and cash in for about $117,000!
Our photo today is totally relevant. That is the aluminum diamond plate of our dock plate, in a tasteful black and white style.
Batteries…Dude…Batteries
I have a love hate relationship with batteries. They power so much of what we do. But I have managed to put myself in a place where I depend on so many batteries. And, perhaps more a part of the problem, so many different types of batteries.
My last trip to NY as I was packing I decided to count them and it turns our I was taking 29 batteries. Batteries for cameras, for flashes, for LEDs, for triggers. And of course the battery in the phone, and the laptop, and the extra battery that just charges those other batteries.
The night before every production is just a chaos of different chargers being shoehorned into a power strip to try to get everything charged and ready. Which, I suppose, brings us to the trivia question.
If you are like me, you probably thought this was easy. It’s the Energizer Bunny! You have been watching that bunny on television for 30 years. And you are right, kind of. If you answered Energizer Bunny then, also like me, you are probably US or Canada based.
What you might not know is that Duracell was on the battery bunny train long before Energizer. The Duracell Bunny campaign launched in 1973. Unfortunately, somehow their trademark lapsed and in 1988 Energizer came out with the bunny most of us are familiar with.
Of course, a court case ensued. The end result was a settlement where Energizer took exclusive trademark rights in the US and Canada and Duracell took exclusive rights to the rest of the world.
This is probably a great time to remind everyone that the batteries in your UPS have a failure date. Check with your manufacturer, but generally, they should be checked and possibly replaced around the three year mark. Give us a call if you would like a quote on replacements.
Our photo today is of a meter attached to a weird old battery that I just have on a shelf. It arrived with a full charge years ago and has had one lonely status light blinking at me since then. Amazingly, it still has a bit of charge. You might even call the fact that it still holds a charge… shocking…
I’ll see myself out. 😀
Let it be, let it be
Today is a bit of a momentous day in music history. On January 3rd, 1970 (50 years!), The Beatles recorded their last new song before breaking up the following April.
The song was I Me Mine, which was released on the Let It Be album. And, I suppose, that song was the writing on the wall. It is said to have been inspired by George Harrison’s complaints about the stifling egos of Lennon and McCartney. Looking at the lyrics…
All through the day
I me mine, I me mine, I me mine
… that tracks.
Today’s photo doesn’t have a lot to do with the Beatles, other than being shot on film, which gives it that smooth 70s vibe. This is actually part of an ongoing experiment of taking a photograph of a negative and converting it to a positive in software. For reference, here is what the original shot looked like.
Still not perfect, but a solid proof of concept. This is literally just the negative sitting on a piece of white paper. I think the next step is to sandwich the negative between glass and light it from behind with flashes.
Or you could take the stairs…
I probably think about elevators more often than the average bear, for the simple fact that we share a loading dock with an elevator company. So, it is a pretty regular thing to see various bits and pieces of elevators and escalators hanging around.
To our question, while it is reported that Archimedes built his first elevator in 236BC, the first ‘modern’ elevator was Henry Waterman’s in 1850. But the thing that really sealed the deal, and opened up the world to the possibility of giant skyscrapers, was the introduction of Elisha Otis’ safety elevator in 1852.
The big development here was that the Otis elevator included a device which prevented the fall of the cab if the cable broke. He demonstrated this at the 1853 World Fair in New York by standing in an elevator while its cable was cut with an axe. That’s salesmanship!
Our photo today is related! That is an empty spool that once held cable, for an elevator! The odd perspective comes from the fact that while the camera has a modern Canon 100mm lens on it, that lens is looking at the spool through a very old Toyo 135mm lens.
That’s why they sparkle
This one was new to me. Most of us know that the speed of light is somewhere around 186,000 miles per second (186,282.4 to be precise). And high school science taught us that light changes speed when passing from air to a solid like glass or plastic.
This is all much more pronounced when light enters a diamond. The density of all of those carbon atoms slows light to 77,500 miles per second as it bounces around making its way to an exit. All of this pinballing is what gives diamonds their sparkle.
Our photo today, is kind of related? What you are looking at is a 10° grid for a reflector for one of my monolights. This chokes the spread of the light output down to a very narrow beam.
Highest grossing movie of the 80s
I suppose I should be happy I was in the top ten. When this question came in, my first guess was Back To The Future. It was certainly a hit, but at $210 million it landed in 8th place. The top spot went to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with $435 million. That makes sense. It was just no on my radar because I haven’t seen it.
That $435 million is a good illustration of what has happened to movie ticket prices. A world with billion dollar box office films makes much more sense when you note that the average price of a ticket has gone from just under $3 in 1980 to just over $9 in 2019. It would be interesting if box office records were tracked by tickets sold, instead of gross dollars.
Our photo today has nothing to do with any of that. This is a super-up-close shot of some mint tulle. I am currently in posession of 2160 square feet of tulle that will be used in an upcoming photo project. 😀
Where that new tech started
The week after Christmas finds many of us rounding the learning curve of new technology. New phones, TVs, cameras, robotic vacuums… It’s a never ending march to change.
So, occasionally, it is fun to look back on where we came from. If the current interface for Windows or the Mac OS seems boring, you need only take a look at a Windows 3.1 system or the craziness of an Apple II to have a whole new appreciation for where we are.
The same certainly goes for cameras. Current models are mindblowing with what they can do. And it has been a long road to get here. Canon dates all the way back to 1934, with the release of the Kwanon. It was Japan’s first 35mm focal-plane-shutter camera.
The name comes from Kwannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Fittingly, the lens on the camera was dubbed Kasyapa, after Mahakasyapa, a disciple of Buddha.
Our picture today is semi-related. That is the grid for a new strip box UPS has just delivered. It’s a 1’x5′ unit and should make for wonderful light.