August 2015 archive
By
executive
branch prerogative, Mt. McKinley reverts to its Athabaskan name:
Denali. (No "Mount".) When Alaska was Russian, it was
Большая Гора
("big mountain").
Mt. Whitney was Tumanguya ("very old man") to the natives. In 1965, Congressman Charles Teague proposed renaming it Mt. Churchill, after the late Sir Winston. Among those who wrote to the Department of the Interior to protest was one Arthur J. Imm of Los Angeles, who said I'm a great admirer of both Churchill and Kennedy (though I don't think they were gods), but I think we become a bit silly in naming places after them.My father, my brother, and I never stopped calling Idlewild Idlewild. I remember a teacher trying to explain map projections, either in elementary school or junior high. She told us what map distortions were but said they were only a characteristic of maps of large areas; town maps had no distortion. I said no, maps of small areas have negligible distortion—but the teacher wouldn't budge. Mercator projection was the classic example for illustrating distortion. "It makes Greenland look bigger than South America." My brother liked Mercator projection and would tell you Greenland really was bigger than South America.
If only we had real activism along with the circus. I miss the 1960s, when public demonstrations were both deadly serious and seriously silly. When have we since seen anything like the Yippies being arrested in Chicago for nominating a pig for President? From Phil Ochs' testimony at the Chicago Seven trial:
Happy nineteenth, everyone. How would you express calm in a photograph? And how would you do it if you lived in the desert? When I search for calm on images.google.com, the first 20 pics all feature water. Placid, traced back through a few intermediate words, comes from a Greek root meaning flat. Applying for a permit to buy a transformer in Texas entails giving a "Complete description of how requested controlled items will to be [sic] used". It's tempting to request a permit just to see whether applying AC to the primary and connecting a load to the secondary would suffice. [update, 2 Feb 2019: The link in the paragraph above is dead. The current form is RSD-64. The current (as of 5 Nov 2019) form is RSD-904. The law requiring information as to how apparatus is to be used is Texas Health and Safety Code §481.080(e)(1)(C) and §481.080(e)(2)(A).] This reminds me of back when Intel said they'd replace Pentium CPUs that exhibited the FDIV bug only if you could tell them what application you were running that would be affected. How about I'm dividing 4195835 by 3145727. Intel ultimately caved and offered to replace any defective Pentium. In case you're wondering, the law in question controls the sale of stuff that Texas is afraid you'll use to make drugs. A forest fire about 60km southwest of here has made the air in my valley pretty grim for the past few days. But hey, this happens in summer. I'm just glad it's not as bad as some fires we've seen in previous years. |