By Wall Street Journal
calculations, a baseball fan will see 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action over the
course of a three-hour game. This is
roughly the equivalent of a TED Talk, a Broadway intermission or the missing
section of the Watergate tapes. A
similar WSJ study on NFL games in January 2010 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575002852055561406.html
found that the average action time for a football game was 11 minutes. Steve Moyer
Read the methods used for
calculating actual playing time at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323740804578597932341903720.html
By combining the concepts of
bookmobile and food truck, book-publisher Penguin Group (USA) recently introduced
its first mobile bookstore. The first
bookmobiles were horse-drawn wagons. Later,
buses and delivery vans were converted into mobile libraries. Food trucks have a long history in some
communities, and recently have enjoyed more widespread popularity. “We’re always looking for new ways to bring
writers to readers, and this is one of those ways,” Glass said. The truck is 27 feet long and contains 96
linear feet of display shelving. Awnings,
LED lighting, cafe tables and chairs provide sheltered browsing day or night. The pushcart was inspired by the classic New
York hotdog cart. It also carries and
displays books, and is covered with a pop-up umbrella. The truck and pushcart made their debut at
the recent Book Expo America, the annual convention of publishers, book store
owners, authors and libraries in New York City. Their next stop was “Tom Sawyer Day” at the
Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn., and then the American Library Association
conference in Chicago. The pushcart also
will be at the Delecort Theater in New York’s Central Park for the 2013 season
of Shakespeare in the Park. In October,
the truck and cart will help celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication
of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” by traveling old Route 66 from
Sallisaw, Okla., to Bakersfield, Calif., with several stops along the way. Larry Edsall
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130711/AUTO03/307110040
Sending postcards did not appear out of thin air. A number of
innovations in the postal system in the preceding quarter of a century helped
create this new postal age. One such
innovation was the introduction of uniform penny postage in Great Britain in 1840 that made
mail delivery easy and affordable. Previously,
prices for shipping letters was based on the distance the mailman had to
travel. Fees were not collected up-front
from the sender, but instead a surprised recipient would find a mailman on his
or her doorstep, demanding payment. Post
offices had been hemorrhaging money through this system, for recipients would
often refuse their mail and the postman would be sent away unpaid. In 1837 Rowland Hill proposed that
letters be charged by weight, not distance, and the fee be collected in advance
from the sender. This new procedure
transformed the postal system. Austria
was the first country to publish the postcard, but not the first to conceive of
it. A few years earlier, German postal
official Dr. Heinrich von Stephan
submitted a proposal for such an object, which was fiercely debated and not
executed in North Germany until July 1870, a year after Austria introduced the
card to their country. Within two years,
the postcard had quickly spread across Europe. The United States did not introduce officially
issued postcards until 1873, two years after Canada and three years after most
European countries, but unlike these countries, stamped cards had been allowed
in American mail since 1861. http://blog.library.si.edu/2009/09/the-history-of-postcards/
U.S. Postcard Postage Rate Changes from May 1, 1873 (1 cent) to January 22, 2012 (32 cents).
http://www.chicagopostcardmuseum.org/postage_rate_history.html
The Phantom of the Opera, 1911, by Gaston Leroux
is based on a vague folktale. A fluke
eleven years later set it on the road to immortality. Leroux gave the book to the president of
Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, who read it through in a single night. He bought the rights, offered Lon Chaney the
phantom part, and built a replica of the Paris Opera House. The replica still stands today, and has been
reused many times. The actual Paris
Opera House has an underground lake, where every two years the level is
lowered. It covers almost three acres of
space, and is seventeen stories from deepest cellar to pinnacle of roof. Ten stories are aboveground and seven stories
underground. The Phantom of Manhattan by
Frederick Forsyth
The Phantom of the Opera is a 2004 British film
adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical of the same name, Earlier
films were made in 1925, 1943, 1962, 1974, 1983 and 1984.
The Web site I sent recently for
historic photos at the Library of Congress no longer works. You will find photos at: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
More on 3D printers Feb. 20, 2013 3-D
printing builds objects by piling up successive layers of material, hence its
more technical moniker, “additive manufacturing.” You start by designing your product on a
computer screen with drafting software. That
design then goes through a program that slices it up, translating it into a
stack of two-dimensional layers. The
printer constructs the object by depositing the first layer of material — such
as molten plastic that hardens — and then another and another, gradually
creating the desired shape. As the
printer head moves back and forth, your 3-D vision becomes reality. While makers are leading the pack, some major
companies, including Airbus, have also embraced the technology. Because 3-D printing often eliminates the need
for things like fasteners, printed products often weigh less than their
traditionally manufactured counterparts. Airbus has started printing some components of
its cabins, and by 2050, the company hopes to print entire planes. Governments have also taken note. Last August, the Obama administration
announced the launch of the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation
Institute, part of a larger effort to create a “manufacturing belt” in the
nation. The pilot institute, designated
for Youngstown, Ohio, is funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and
the departments of Defense, Energy and Commerce. It will support bringing additive manufacturing
technologies into industrial and academic labs, as well as training programs
for manufacturers to try out 3-D printing materials and machines. Last year, engineers created a robotic exoskeleton for
a 2-year-old girl with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, a condition that
makes it difficult for her to move on her own. Now she can play with her toys and hug her
mom. Another engineer created a
prosthetic beak for a bald eagle named Beauty, whose own beak was mangled when
she was shot in the face. Doctors and
engineers are even experimenting with 3-D printing to create artificial
cartilage, livers and kidneys. Wohlers
notes that more than 80,000 custom titanium parts for replacement hips have
been printed. A number of people have
already printed gun parts; the collective Defense Distributed, led by
University of Texas at Austin law student Cody Wilson, aims to create
blueprints for a fully printable firearm and make those files widely available.
When MakerBot’s website Thingiverse
removed weapon-related designs from its site last year, Defense Distributed
created DEFCAD, where people can upload (and download) files for printing gun
parts, such as a 30-round gun magazine and a grip for an AR-15 semiautomatic
rifle. Guns aren’t the only printed items
raising eyebrows: At a hackers’ workshop
last summer, a German security consultant unlocked two widely-used brands of
police handcuffs with keys that he had made multiple copies of using a 3-D
printer. And scientists recently
reported using a 3-D printer for making “reactionware,” customized polymer
containers that make particular chemical reactions run with ease. Rachel
Ehrenberg Read extensive article
at: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/348429/description/The_3-D_Printing_Revolution
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