Standard Time

On November 18, 1883, four standard time zones for the continental U.S.A. were introduced at the instigation of the railroads. At noon on this day the U.S. Naval Observatory changed its telegraphic signals to correspond to the change. Until the invention of the railway, it took such a long time to get from one place to another that local “sun time” could be used. When traveling to the east or to the west, a person would have to change his or her watch by one minute every twelve miles.
…

At twelve o’clock noon on November 18, 1883, as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was transmitted, the U.S. Naval Observatory began signaling the new time standard. Authorities in major cities and managers of the railroad reset their clocks. All over the United States and Canada, people changed their clocks and watches in synchronization with their zone’s standard time. In one moment the many different standards of time that had caused conflict and confusion, were resolved into four simple standards.

Library of Congress

Don’t let Arizonans read about this “sun time” thing; surely they’d want to reinstate it.

Daguerre

Daguerre 1839

Parisian Boulevard, Daguerre, 1839.

Click image for larger version. Note the man who stopped to shine his shoes near the lower left. Most moving objects were not captured by the lengthy exposure needed. So far as known, that individual is the first human ever “photographed.”

I Wonder What Daguerre Would Think Today

If you’d prefer, you can hear Garrison Keillor with the following:

It’s the birthday of the man who helped invent the art of photography, Louis Daguerre, born just outside of Paris, France (1789). He studied to be an architect as a young man, but instead he went into theater set design. He was famous for the lifelike detail of his work, and he began to experiment with hand-painted translucent screens and elaborate lighting effects. He could use his screens and lights to create the illusion of a sunrise or a sudden storm onstage.

At the time, most painters were using a device called a camera obscura, which could cast a silhouette of an image onto a canvas for the artist to trace. But in the early 1800s, many scientists were looking for a way to capture the projected image forever. Daguerre wanted to do the same thing, and in 1829, he met an amateur inventor named Joseph Niépce, who had developed a light-sensitive pewter plate that could hold the image projected onto it. But the images took eight hours to develop, and the quality was extremely poor. Niépce died before he could improve the process.

Daguerre spent the next few years expanding on Niépce’s experiments, and he eventually came up with a combination of copper plate coated with silver salts that could be developed in about 30 minutes with the application of mercury vapor and table salt. He then set out to take a series of pictures of Paris, capturing images of the Louvre and Notre Dame. The camera needed about 15 minutes of exposure time to capture an image, so most of Daguerre’s early pictures don’t show any people. The one exception is a picture of a boulevard that shows a man in the foreground who has stopped to shine his shoes. He was the first human being ever caught on film.

Daguerre announced his invention in 1839, and the images he produced became known as daguerreotypes. It wasn’t photography as we know it today, because it only produced a single unique image, rather than multiple copies of the same image. But people were amazed at the level of detail it could reproduce.

Louis Daguerre said, “I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

City of Rocks National Reserve (Idaho)

… was established on this date in 1988.

City of Rocks

This unique geologic area became a landmark in 1843 for California-bound emigrants. They left wagon ruts across the landscape and their signatures in axle grease on Register Rock, Camp Rock and many others.

A few granite pinnacles and monoliths are in excess of sixty stories tall and 2.5 billion years old. The smooth granite faces offer exceptional rock climbing. Today, over 500 climbing routes have been identified.

The Reserve is managed by the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation under a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service.

City of Rocks National Reserve

Bo

“We played Michigan three times in 366 days in one span,” the former UCLA coach recalled Friday. “They kicked our butt in the Bluebonnet Bowl [Dec. 31, 1981], and then we played them at Ann Arbor in the third game the next season.

“In that one, they get up on us in the first half, 21-0. Some sort of bad call by the refs happened right before the half, and so, when the gun went off, I’m right out there in one of the officials’ face. I’m yelling at this guy and I turn around and who is standing right behind me? It’s Bo.

“So I ask him what he’s doing there, and he says to me, ‘It’s my stadium.'”

Terry Donahue as reported by Bill Dwyre in the Los Angeles Times.

UCLA won the game 31-27.

Another version

“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”

Jon Stewart

The Made Up Americans

This is Mack’s first Thanksgiving in school, so of course he’s hearing the public school version of the First Thanksgiving story. Schools Some teachers don’t use the correct name for the indigenous people near Plymouth — Wampanoags — or even the preferred generic term — American Indians. No, they use the presumed politically correct name — Native Americans.

That’s what the teacher says, but what do the children hear?

Mack’s mother Jill reports:

“At school, Mack is learning about the first Thanksgiving. He came home today with a short story about it, which I asked him to read to me. It went well until he got to the first reference to what he called the ‘Made Up’ Americans.”

Aging Brains

Scott Adams has a lot on his mind:

They say you get smarter every day that you’re alive until some tipping point. After that, because your brain starts to rot with age, you get dumber every day. I wonder if I’ll know when it happens. That would be a bad day. “Something feels different today. I wonder what…uh-oh.”

I already forget more things than ever. But to be fair, I have more things to forget. So even if my retention-to-forgetting ratio stayed constant, I’d be forgetting more next year than I knew by the age of 17. …

Adams continues, including this:

All the experts agree that kids can learn new languages faster than adults. I am not impressed. If I had as few problems as a 9-year old, I could learn Chinese over the weekend. Let that kid start worrying about his HTML code, Iran’s nuclear program, and the Alternative Minimum Tax trap – then let’s see who can conjugate faster.

November 17th is the birthday

… of Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). Inhofe is the senator who has said, “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” He’s 72, his age having finally matched his IQ.

… of Gordon Lightfoot. The singer is 68.

I can see her lyin’ back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don’t confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you bin creepin’ round my back stairs
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you bin creepin’ round my back stairs

… of Martin Scorsese. The director is 64. Six Oscar nominations; will “The Departed” win one for him?

Tom Seaver Plaque

… of Danny DeVito. The actor/director/producer is 62. Very early in his career DeVito played Martini in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

… of Lorne Michaels. The producer of Saturday Night Live is 62.

… of Tom Seaver. Tom Terrific, the baseball hall-of-famer is 62.

… of Elvin Hayes. The basketball hall-of-famer is 61.

… of Howard Dean. The politician is 58.

… of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The actress is 44. Mastrantonio was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for “The Color of Money.”

… of Daisy Fuentes. The hottie is 40.

Rock Hudson was born on this date in 1925; he died in 1985. Hudson got a best actor Oscar nomination for “Giant.”

Soichiro Honda was born on this date in 1906; he died in 1991. Honda started as an auto mechanic at age 15.

Aargh!

So I buy J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton’s new CD last night. This morning I go to import it into iTunes, which happily pulls up the track names from some database on the internets. If you’re obsessive-compulsive as NewMexiKen is from time-to-time, you verify the iTunes information against the actual CD.

iTunes title: “The Road To Escondito”
Actual title: “The Road to Escondido” (Escondido is an actual place not far from San Diego. I’ve been there.)

iTunes song title: “When The War Is Over”
Actual song title: “When This War Is Over”

OK, not exactly the end of the world, but doesn’t anybody proof their work anymore — or take any pride in getting it right?

(It’s rare for the database to have the album title wrong, but song titles are often incorrect.)

Delta Kicks Breastfeeding Mom Off Plane

NewMexiKen finds that much of what I read on the internets, or elsewhere for that matter, is biased or only tells one side. Here’s another one of those stories that I find a little incredulous. Why would Delta do this if she was, as the story says, discreet? Am I just being naive?

I almost got kicked out of a Flower & Garden Show for nursing my son ten years ago, but that pales in comparison to actually getting kicked off an airplane–as happened recently to a mother on a Delta Airlines flight in Vermont.

She was sitting on an airplane nursing her child in a next-to-last row window seat with her husband beside her (in other words, she was in a discreet location), when a flight attendant offered her a choice: Cover herself and her child with a blanket, or get off the plane.

She declined the blanket, and was escorted off the plane. …

Fearless Voices | The Huffington Post

The woman, from Santa Fe, was feeding her 22-month-old daughter. Here’s a report from the Burlington Free Press.

Time

The playlist for this week’s Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan.

The theme is Time.

Time is on My Side – Irma Thomas
Right Place, Wrong Time – Dr. John
As Time Goes By – Dooley Wilson
Time Marches On – Derek Morgan
All The Time – Sleepy La Beef
Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong) – Count Basie
Only Time Will Tell – Etta James
24 Hours – Eddie Boyd
Turn Back the Hands of Time – Tyrone Davis
Life Begins At 4 O’Clock – Bobby Milano
60 Minute Man – Billy Ward and the Dominos
15 Minute Intermission – Cab Calloway
Funny How Time Slips Away – Willie Nelson
September Song – Lou Reed
Two Years of Torture – Ray Charles
Walking After Midnight – Patsy Cline
Midnight Hour – Clarence Gatemouth Brown
What Time Is It – The Jive Five
Real Rock – The Soul Vendors
Armigedion Time – Willy Williams
Time Has Come Today – The Chambers Brothers
Time is Tight – Booker T and the MGs

Drug Doubles Endurance, and You Live Longer

If you’re a mouse.

Given that some athletes will take almost anything to gain a one percent edge in performance, what might they do for a 100 percent improvement? That temptation is made somewhat more real by a report today in a leading journal about a drug that doubles the physical endurance of mice running on treadmills. And it could only be more tempting, because the drug in question has also been reported to extend the lifespan of mice.

An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer — five-eights of a mile — on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far.

The New York Times

For all we know, the drug induces hallucinations and the poor mice are running out of fear.

Gila Cliff Dwellings (New Mexico)

… was proclaimed a national monument 99 years ago today by President Theodore Roosevelt.

Gila Cliff Dwellings

Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument offers a glimpse of the homes and lives of the people of the Mogollon culture who lived in the Gila Wilderness from the 1280s through the early 1300s. The surroundings probably look today very much like they did when the cliff dwellings were inhabited.

Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument