Category: Highlights

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Walk button with raised arrow.I recently took a walk through some streets that have only recently opened to traffic. One of the things that struck me was that the buttons for triggering the walk/don’t walk signs had a new design. Instead of a tiny recessed button, or a larger rounded button, they had a ~2″ flat button with a raised arrow.

My first thought was, why the extra arrow? It’s pointing in the same direction as the sign. And it means you have to press the button carefully instead of just whacking it with your hand. The answer hit me later in the walk. I was leaning on the button with my hand when the light changed, I and felt the button vibrating. Of course! It was for blind pedestrians!

The raised arrow makes it easier to hit the right button, rather than just hope that the buttons have been placed in standard orientation. And vibrating the button makes it clear not only that it’s safe to cross, but in which direction it’s safe to cross. That’s one thing I could never figure out about the chirping walk signs in San Diego. It tells you the light’s changed, but if there’s any indication as to which light is green, I’ve never noticed it.

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Despite growing up in Orange County, I never managed to go to Medieval Times. It’s a dinner show with knights on horseback staging a medieval tournament. Last month in Las Vegas, Katie talked me into going to the Tournament of Kings at Excalibur, which is the same type of show.

[Knight from Excalibur'sTournament of Kings]When you purchase your tickets, you’re assigned a country. (We got Hungary, which seemed appropriate for a dinner show.) This determines two things: your seating area, and which knight you’ll cheer for. People got really into it, cheering on their own knights, booing others, all from a random assignment. About halfway through the show, I realized it was a Drazi scarf situation.

The Drazi leaders.To explain: The Babylon 5 episode, “The Geometry of Shadows” features a conflict among an alien race called the Drazi. Two factions have been fighting each other on the station, and the crew wants them to stop. The Drazi ambassador explains that every few years, they put a bunch of green and purple scarves in a barrel. Each Drazi reaches into the barrel and pulls out a scarf. Green Drazi form one faction, Purple Drazi form the other, and they fight until one side wins, becoming the dominant political force for the next few years.

The episode was clearly meant as commentary on politics, but here in the dinner tournament was an actual case where nothing but random chance determined allegiance. It wasn’t even a random draw for a team, this was just the cheering section! For a scripted show!

[Pirate]Last weekend we went to the Pirate’s Dinner Adventure for Katie’s birthday. It’s a similar setup, only with pirates instead of knights, a smaller arena so that you can actually see the actor/stuntmen’s faces, and a more interactive setup. (There are contests where they get willing audience members to participate, kids get to be sworn in as members of the pirate crew, etc.) Again, you’re assigned a color when you get your ticket, and that color corresponds to one of the pirates. And everyone gets a colored headband. Not too different from those Drazi scarves.

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We picked up a few flyers on our way to Las Vegas, including one for the Haunted Vegas tour and show. We didn’t get around to looking it up, but we didn’t quite need to.

The South Coast Hotel* is so new that they’re still building things like the swimming pool. Being new, lots of things didn’t quite work right. The 42″ wide-screen TV was stuck on with no picture, so it glowed faintly in the dark until I unplugged it and plugged it back in. The water was so soft that you couldn’t rinse off in the shower. One drawer in the dresser just wouldn’t open.

The most bizarre was the whistling. Our first night in town, we noticed a whistling sound like water rushing through pipes, or like someone trying to blow across the top of a bottle. We figured someone in the next room over was taking a shower, but it kept going. The noise stopped when we opened the door, then started again when we closed it. Standing barefoot near the door, I could feel the air rushing in underneath it. It turned out the air pressure in the hallway was high enough that the air rushed in through the door jamb, creating a constant whistling sound.

So we blocked the jamb with a towel every night and slept soundly. But it wasn’t just our room. Every time we walked down the hallway, we could hear the sound coming from other doors as we passed them.

*We finally found out why it’s called South Coast when it’s hundreds of miles from anything resembling an ocean. (The Salton Sea doesn’t count.) The company also operates the Barbary Coast, Gold Coast, Sun Coast, and several other casinos in the city. The new one is farther south than… well, anything else in town, so: South Coast.

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There are certain ideas that I find completely acceptable in the context of science-fiction, but completely looney in the context of actual science.

Take, for instance, Erich von Däniken’s premise that gods were really ancient alien astronauts. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s way out there in terms of science. It assumes that (a) myths are historically accurate, (b) aliens exist, and (c) low-tech humans couldn’t possibly have created things like Stonehenge, pyramids, giant stone heads, etc. Not to say it’s not possible that aliens visited the planet in the distant past—just that comparative mythology and architecture aren’t exactly compelling evidence.

On the other hand, I have no problem with the concept in science-fiction. It’s the basic premise of Stargate. The movie and early seasons of SG-1 focused on Egyptian mythology and technology, and in subsequent seasons of the show, just about every ancient legend has turned out to have an alien race behind it. It also figures into the backstory of Babylon 5, with the Vorlons having visited nearly every known race in ancient times, insinuating themselves into local religions and engineering telepaths over the course of centuries.

(via Sclerotic Rings and *** Dave)

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This morning I looked north and saw a narrow band of mountains sandwiched between two layers of clouds. The first place I could stop to take a photo, the lower layer was mostly blocked by hills, but you can still see it.

Two cloud layers, with mountains visible between them.
Click to enlarge

As a bonus, this turned out to be nearly the same shot as one of the photos I posted under Snowblogging four weeks ago (reposted here):

San Gabriel Snow (from a distance)
Click to enlarge

The lighting isn’t as good in today’s photo, since it was overcast, but you can really see the effect several weeks of one-day-a-week rain have had on the hills. They’ve gone from brown with splashes of green to green with splashes of brown!

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On Friday I received an email about the “IEEE GLOBECOM 2006 D&D FORUM.”

My first thought on seeing the subject was, “Well, it’s clearly not Dungeons and Dragons.” So I thought about other D&Ds, and the next thing I thought of was drag and drop. I knew that couldn’t be it, either. Who would hold a conference on drag-n-drop? (Now, I can see a D&D game dealing with a “dragon drop” contest, but that’s another issue entirely!)

I opened the newsletter, and of course it was a design and development conference. Should’ve been obvious, but I just didn’t think of it.

Any acronyms/abbreviations you’ve mixed up? Not just acronyms for which you know more than one meaning, but the ones that you’ve seen in one context, and the first meaning you thought of was from some other field entirely.

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