Roy Trumbull

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• Commented on Mishap at the Electrical Substation
  Around high voltage lines a coronal discharge develops which is accentuated by dust on the insulators and moist air. You can hear an ongoing crackle and the occasional pop. When a circuit is opened and the wiring or loads constitute...
• Commented on Opium dens of 1889 San Francisco in photos
  One should remember that drug use wasn't native to China. If you look up "Opium Wars" you'll find the western powers (mainly Britain) had a lock on the distribution of opium and were forcing it on the Chinese. Further if...
• Commented on The Coming Apocalypse is Pretty Funny Actually
  I think I'd bet on a whimper rather than a bang. The year unknown. Much of the carbon dioxide is sequestered in the oceans by a mechanism we don't understand. When the ice packs melt we don't have a clue...
• Commented on Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
  Russell could be brilliant but there's a few of his ideas I'm glad we didn't adopt. In the essay "The Future of Mankind" he argued that the U.S. and Britain should use their military edge and the bomb to attack...
• Commented on The decline of civilization symbolized in a modern light socket
  Two years ago I had a classic case of a bulb base welding itself to the socket. If there is resistance from a bulb being a little loose, that can happen. Often the glass will separate from the base and...
• Commented on New story podcast: MARTIAN CHRONICLES
  That title was Bradbury's big breakthrough. I think it was the first collection of Sci-Fi stories I read after hearing one of them done on radio. It's a shame that none of his stories done on screen came close to...
• Commented on Peter Tchaikovsky (and Friends) Messing Around With A Wax Cylinder Phonograph
  Edison gave a sketch of the cylinder recorder to one of his craftsmen to make. He was rather concerned when the first recording made on foil worked. Usually his inventions took much more experimentation. The recorder took the country by...
• Commented on Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp's websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals
  I just read where the NY Post is losing $70meg a year. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone start a pool on when M is dead, bankrupt, or both....
• Commented on Teen sex belongs in teen lit
  There is a word used to describe the Children of Israel in the bible that is often translated as "stiff necked". I came across a different translation which was being unable to foresee the consequences of one's acts. If you...
• Commented on Large Hadron Collider: Now This Is Just Getting Ridiculous
  When it does fire up all red states and talk show hosts will become food for a very large pigeon....
• Commented on 1962 fallout shelter design booklet
  I recall an article years ago re So. CA homes equipped with bomb shelters. They gave the real estate agent pause as to what to say in the multiple listing. The folks who marketed these things relied on scaring the...
• Commented on Videos of exploding capacitors
  Most consumer and pro-sumer electronics is built with capacitors in the form of a surface mount chip. These are also electrolytic capacitors. Their life is rated in terms of hours and degrees C. If something gets daily use the combination...
• Commented on California's true bankruptcy: kids and the future.
  When I entered school after WWII we had a tough time. The baby-boom was close at hand. Retired school teachers came back to work. We had class sizes of 45 in second grade. By 4th I was in a split...
• Commented on Anti-vaccine fear versus science
  Having been knocked flat by flu once I don't relish getting it again. As to the vaccine deniers, you're up for a Darwin Award....
• Commented on Goat rentals for clearing brush
  We've used an SF area company for 2 years on our temple property. The kids love to watch them. Only downside is that when they're done you'll find all the old tires, dead branches, and other refuse that had been...
• Commented on Newspaper circulation over last 20 years: the great swandive
  Radio had a head start. Radio audiences started slipping in the 70s along with newspapers. TV was down between 1980 and 1985 and kept on going. Granted the big city papers aren't that wonderful but in the smaller markets they've...
• Commented on Futuristic workspace looks like a dinosaur egg
  Worker bee on the half shell....
• Commented on On the literary and scholarly awesomeness of the timezone file
  Something I really don't know is how network time tracks leap seconds. The earth as a clock wanders about whereas the cesium atom is very steady. Leap-seconds bring them in sync. But I don't know if network time leaps or...
• Commented on On the literary and scholarly awesomeness of the timezone file
  During the war the time signal, usually near the top of the news would be, "6 o'clock eastern war time" for New York etc.. During that period and after, the time signal was sold to the Bulova watch company. It's...
• Commented on Spots Unknown - a great blog about San Francisco
  The old mansion at the start of Vertigo was on Gough St. It had been made into apartments at the time the movie was shot. I knew friends who lived there. A production assistant came around with $20 bills in...
• Commented on Spots Unknown - a great blog about San Francisco
  The B&W TV show "Streets of San Francisco" shows a lot that has vanished including the Hall of Justice. A Holiday Inn occupies where it was. The first reel of Pal Joey with Sinatra (bad movie) shows Pacific in North...
• Commented on Sony unveils new 3D display
  As a kid hot for 3D in the 1950s I quickly concluded it didn't add that much. You can only go hyperstereo and have things come out of the screen a few times before it gets old. A good story...
• Commented on HOWTO make a Glenn Beck Diaper Halloween Mask
  Beck and the other mouth jockys on Fox aren't worth talking about. The typical cable wrestling show or Spongebob have 10 times the viewers. Fox ranks alongside local access channels and test patterns. Based on the bad bets he's made,...
• Commented on Some Christians mad at R. Crumb
  The book of Genesis contains quite a bit of mythology from earlier periods. Angels mate with women for example. The best deconstruction I've read is "Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis" by Raphael Patai. For women I'd suggest reading his...
• Commented on Watch What You Say About Welsh
  Here are my readings of Welsh fairy tales which also contain some of the history of Wales. http://www.archive.org/details/WelshFairyTales...
• Commented on Pee as fertilizer ingredient
  During the Civil War the south was running short on potassium nitrate to make gun powder. There was a request put out for chamber lye (urine) which was put in the sun on evaporating trays With the residual contents collected....
• Commented on Trotsky: the graphic biography
  Another interesting person drunk with himself. The only reason I never became a true believer in any political system was that I understood early on that all systems can be quickly perverted by unreasonable individuals. I recall the three men...
• Commented on Google Book Search and privacy for students
  Some years ago I had a brief meeting with a major author who'd had many books on the best seller list. I mentioned about 6 of his earlier books and he said, "They're all out of print." The value to...
• Commented on Photos of Edward Gorey's house
  It was in the late 1950s I found myself laughing in a bookstore at "The Curious Sofa". I've been a fan ever since. I've been puzzled about his use of the name "Trumbull" in one of his books. Don't know...
• Commented on China's homicidal net-addict bootcamps.
  Hoaxes are hard to kill. Writer's sometimes spend years trying to kill off one of their own creations. Reagan had his bag of folklore of the urban legend variety. Stories that were just plain wrong or could never be verified....