Search Results for: new york

A New Commute

http://books.google.com/books?id=uFk2AQAAMAAJ

In 1914, Russian physicist Boris Weinberg proposed an electromagnetic vacuum train that could move an individual passenger from New York to San Francisco in half a day. Reasoning that air resistance and friction are the greatest enemies to speed, Weinberg envisioned using electromagnets to suspend a car in a tube from which the air had been partially exhausted. An individual passenger would lie prone in a 300-pound iron cylinder drawn along by a series of solenoids. New passengers could be introduced into the system through an airlock at a rate as high as 12 per minute, “the whole proceeding being not unlike that of feeding cartridges from a belt or clip to a machine gun.”

Weinberg estimated a maximum speed of 500 mph. “Think what that means!” he wrote in The Popular Science Monthly. “New York would be no more distant from Chicago than it is now from Philadelphia, so far as relative times are concerned. Florida might easily become a kind of winter Coney Island for all New York.”

He built a model of the system at the Technological Institute of Tomsk, but the project never got off the ground (so to speak). One reason may have been the cost: In order to slow the cars gradually, each station would have to be 2 miles long.

| Technology

All the News …

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E2DE163CE633A25754C2A96E9C946096D6CF

How’s that for a headline? It ran in the New York Times Sunday magazine on Aug. 27, 1911:

Canals a thousand miles long and twenty miles wide are simply beyond our comprehension. Even though we are aware of the fact that … a rock which here weighs one hundred pounds would there only weigh thirty-eight pounds, engineering operations being in consequence less arduous than here, yet we can scarcely imagine the inhabitants of Mars capable of accomplishing this Herculean task within the short interval of two years.

The Times was relying on Percival Lowell, who was convinced that a dying Martian civilization was struggling to reach the planet’s ice caps. “The whole thing is wonderfully clear-cut,” he’d told the newspaper — but he was already largely ostracized by skeptical colleagues who couldn’t duplicate his findings. The “spokes” he later saw on Venus may have been blood vessels in his own eye.

Whatever his shortcomings, Lowell’s passions led to some significant accomplishments, including Lowell Observatory and the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death. “Science,” wrote Emerson, “does not know its debt to imagination.”

| Oddities · Science & Math

New Music

The 10-member Vienna Vegetable Orchestra plays instruments created entirely from fresh vegetables, including the carrot recorder, the pumpkin tympanum, the zucchini trumpet, and the bean maraca. These must be fashioned anew before each concert, because the old instruments are made into soup.

The Thai Elephant Orchestra, created by American expatriate Richard Lair and Columbia neurologist David Sulzer, improvise on drums, gongs, harmonicas, and sawmill blades. To date they’ve released three CDs.

Sulzer referred to one 7-year-old member as “the Fritz Kreisler of elephants.” “I put one bad note in the middle of her xylophone,” he told the New York Times in 2000. “She avoided playing that note — until one day she started playing it and wouldn’t stop. Had she discovered dissonance, and discovered that she liked it?”

“Just as there are a lot things they don’t understand about our music, I am sure there are things we will never understand about theirs.”

| Art · Oddities

Snappy New Year

In Insurmountable Simplicities (2006), Roberto Casati points out that a traveler flying east may miss midnight — by entering a new time zone, he may jump from the 11:00 hour into the 12:00 hour without passing through midnight:

Mathematics and geography tell us that during the flight it will happen more than once that we reach the stroke of the hour without leaving the time zone we are in. If our flight lasts eight hours and the time difference between New York and Paris is six hours, this will happen at least twice, and at most eight times. But there is no guarantee that the stroke of midnight will be among these cases.

Thus, if it’s New Year’s Eve, an eastbound traveler may get no champagne.

| Science & Math

News to Order

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moranvoxpop.jpg

Publicity stunts undertaken by press agent Jim Moran, 1938-1959:

  • Sold a refrigerator to an Eskimo in Alaska
  • Threw eggs at an electric fan
  • Changed horses in midstream in a Nevada river
  • Sought a needle in a haystack (for 10 days)
  • Walked a bull through a New York china shop
  • Hatched an ostrich egg (by sitting on it for 19 days)
  • Opened a Washington embassy for a mythical country

By the 1950s the era of the flamboyant stunt was ending, and authorities put a stop to Moran’s more ambitious schemes. He said, “It’s a sad day for American capitalism when a man can’t fly a midget on a kite over Central Park.”

| Oddities

The Emperor’s New Pose

exaltation - disumbrationism

In 1924, irritated with the undiscerning faddishness of modern art criticism, Los Angeles novelist Paul Jordan Smith “made up my mind that critics would praise anything unintelligible.”

So he assembled some old paint, a worn brush, and a defective canvas and “in a few minutes splashed out the crude outlines of an asymmetrical savage holding up what was intended to be a star fish, but turned out a banana.” Then he slicked back his hair, styled himself Pavel Jerdanowitch, and submitted Exaltation to a New York artist group, claiming a new school called Disumbrationism.

The critics loved it. “Jerdanowitch” showed the painting at the Waldorf Astoria gallery, and over the next two years he turned out increasingly outlandish paintings, which were written up in Paris art journals and exhibited in Chicago and Buffalo.

He finally confessed the hoax to the Los Angeles Times in 1927. Ironically, “Many of the critics in America contended that since I was already a writer and knew something about organization, I had artistic ability, but was either too ignorant or too stubborn to see it and acknowledge it.” Can an artist found a school against his will?

| Art · Hoaxes

“Newsman Extraordinary”

One of the carriers of a New York paper, called the Advocate, having become indisposed, his son took his place; but not knowing the subscribers he was to supply, he took for his guide a dog which had usually attended his father. The animal trotted on ahead of the boy, and stopped at every door where the paper was in use to be left, without making a single omission or mistake.

— The Scrap Book, Or, A Selection of Interesting and Authentic Anecdotes, 1825

| Oddities

Bad News

In the 1890s, William Randoph Hearst’s New York Journal was in a circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. When the World published an obituary of “Reflipe W. Thanuz,” Hearst revealed a trap — there was no such person, so Pulitzer must have stolen the item from his paper. (“Reflipe W” is “we pilfer” spelled backward, and “Thanuz” is “the news”.)

Pulitzer got his revenge, though. He planted the name “Lister A. Raah” in a World story, and when the Journal ran a similar item, he revealed that the name was an anagram of “Hearst a liar.”

See also Nihilartikels.

| Hoaxes · Language

A New Observatory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kenncity.jpg

Tourists marvel at the architects of Stonehenge, which apparently was built to align with the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset.

Many then innocently return to New York — where on Dec. 5 and Jan. 8 each year the setting sun aligns perfectly with the east-west streets in Manhattan’s main grid.

| Oddities