"History is just people doing things"

THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT

ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 168......November 2009
Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of
ABQ Communications Corporation, the focus of
The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of new
technology on society." If you'd like to receive e-mail
notification when each monthly issue is posted, please
let us know. Reach us at: correspo at swcp dot com
...and our Skype ID, not surprisingly, is: Correspo

BESPOKE
It’s a real help, if you are tailoring garments, costumes, or makeup for particular individuals, to have life-sized models of those people, so you can try the stuff you create on passive forms, instead of impatient and uncomfortable real live people. In the costume and special effects business, it’s common to make whole-body casts and life-masks/head casts of actors. (We saw several precise heads of Michael Jordan on a bench in one shop, each with a strikingly different hairdo. Mr. Jordan was not warm to the idea of undergoing all those hair modifications himself, so they did a 3D laser scan of his head, and recreated lifelike models of him for use in the commercial.) Some art and skill are required for taking molds, of course. We still have a plaster head of son Brock in which some of his actual eyelashes, are embedded, yanked out when we amateurs made a mold of his face, and then transferred from that negative mold to the positive. A learning experience for all. His own fault; he was directing the activity. A striking piece of clever technology was recently demonstrated to us. If a costume must be created quickly, and there is no time for body casts, the performer is unavailable for fittings, there’s a make-do shortcut. The performer is wrapped, neck to ankles (not as mummy, but separately around the arms, legs, and trunk), in Saran Wrap or the like. Then packaging tape is wrapped the same way on top of the plastic wrap. If it’s useful, one can even use a marking pen to draw a pattern on top of thetape, and mark key points. The wrapping can then be sliced carefully, and removed from the person. The product is an accurately sized and shaped form that looks rather like a space suit, and is a superbly practical pattern. Startlingly effective. Of course, if the party being wrapped and taped is a six-year-old kid who, when a couple of hairs are pulled by the tape, freaks out, weeping copiously, and thrashing so that three adults are required to hold her while another cuts the stuff away, the task is rather complicated. She loved the resulting Halloween costume, and we’ll all recover.

DIFFERENT STICKUM
A recent small splash of publicity reveals that a German company, REINZ- Dichtungs-GmbH, has developed a metal version of the hook-and-loop fastener referred to generically as Velcro (which is actually somebody’s trademark, and they hate to have the term used without credit to them... indeed the term was coined by the Swiss inventor of the stuff back in the 1940s, and it’s remarkable that the name has become so well established.) The startling fact about the metal version is that a patch of it, nobody has said how big a patch, but one supposes it’s within the realm of practicality, can support as much as 35 tons of weight. More, it can stand temperatures as high as 1500ºF, and shrug off the ravaging effects of harsh cleaning chemicals that weaken the plastics of which the more familiar product is made. One article commented that the stuff is an inch thick, which would make for a product stiffer than anything our household tools could deal with. They must mean an inch wide, which seems to fit the photographs available online at the website Metaklett. The applications for Metaklett (German for Velcro, they say) are not immediately obvious to us laymen, but they must be really serious. It has been pointed out that when Velcro is shaken, vibrated, the hooks tend to slip more grippingly in among the loops, making the bond stronger. This was part of the rationale offered for the disconcerting notion of assembling cars using Velcro... not just interior panels and such, but body parts like fenders and bumpers. One wonders if the hooks in such a vehicle would relax too much if the car were sitting in a garage while its owner traveled, causing it to slip apart gradually, so the frustrated driver would have to rip the thing apart fully on return, and reassemble the vehicle for use on the vibration-creating roads. How fast does Metalklett relax? Those of us who love Velcro now have whole new vistas of silly speculation to entertain us.

NELS MUSES
Item:
Some of us remember people who spoke of “Railroad Time” as something novel and especially helpful. In the good old days, people in most every community set their clocks and watches to mesh with “noon” (the point when the sun was most directly overhead) as determined by a good sundial in the middle of town. In a big city, sundials in various locations might reach noon many seconds, even minutes apart. Most every town had its own time, making scheduling somewhat approximate. That didn’t much matter until railroads began to move people from place to place fast enough to make the situation really inconvenient. Finally, in 1884, the railroads in the U.S. and Canada began to operate on a standard time system, with the continent marked off in several time zones. (Don’t forget the Maritime Provinces and Canada and Alaska, which happen to be in the same zone.) Federal, state, province, and local governments gradually began to use Railroad Time...making Standard Time official only in 1918 Unluckily, they stuck with the twelve-hour system...at twelve minutes after noon is it 12:12 am or 12:12pm? Since I never remember, and don’t trust anybody else to remember, this is a source of annoyance. Ah well, you can’t have everything. A major figure in all this was Sir Sanford Fleming, who argued in 1884 that the world should operate on a single standard time...so that 9 o’clock in Borneo would also be 9 o’clock in Nome and Ontario, though he recommended earth-surface time zones in addition for most practical matters. We should note that the U.S. was laggardly in this, the U.K and others having adopted a time standard decades earlier. Gosh, I can still hear Uncle Fred (a train conductor) speak of Railroad Time.

Item:
It’s always a treat to discover that things shrugged of as myths or native superstition have turned out to be real. A modest example, reported by the New Zealand Herald recently, is Haast’s Eagle...a bird with a wingspan as great as 3 meters, twice great as anything we know of that’s fluttering around now, and a body weight of perhaps 65 pounds...which was active as recently as thousand years ago. The Maori, who weren’t taken all that seriously, of course, told stories of a man-eating bird that made life complicated in olden times. Well, recent work has confirmed the existence of these critters, which, diving at 50+ mph could easily carry off a kid in its huge talons. Chalk up another for myth.

ITEM FROM THE PAST
This was the very first item in the very first issue of
The ABQ Correspondent in June 1985. It came to mind
because of a recent reference we spotted to stock photo
libraries.

PICKING PICTURES
At Wilson Learning Systems in Santa Fe we saw a marvel of modern times, a catalog of pictures on videodisk. You review pictures on your low-resolution television screen, choose an illustration you like from the fifty-four thousand on the disk, and for twenty-five dollars the publisher will send you a high-res slide you may use once in your article, book, ad, or film. Producing interactive video training materials, Wilson doesn't need the slide. They pull the NTSC signal right from the disk, and use it directly. (Yes, they send in the money.) Just like buying cuts from a music library. Imagine that.

These days, of course, we needn’t mess about with
a videodisk with it’s limited capacity for low-res
NTSC (old-fashioned U.S. analog TV) images. Various
services on the internet let us browse stock photos, art,
graphics, even videos whose use in print and online can
be purchased for one-time, modest fees...still on the order
of $20 - $25...occasionally more, and sometimes far less.
The commercial suppliers offer different libraries of
millions of images. One company says it has eight million
items available. Most can be browsed for free. When a
selection is made, a hi-resolution image is simply
transmitted to the buyer. Astonishing. Twenty-four
years ago, we compared this to buying cuts from a music
library, an activity that has changed with the times, too.
Online searches guide one to tens of thousands cuts of
music that can be used royalty-free after a single small
payment in videos, movies, audio, and other presentations.
The ability of a single composer to produce compositions
digitally, sounding as if they’d been produced by full
orchestras, if that’s what you want, has reduced the cost
of such material dramatically. Anybody with a trifle of
budget, and some talent, can look and sound like a bigtime
producer. Incidentally, Wilson Learning Systems, which
was sold by its founder, Larry Wilson in 1985 to a bigger
outfit, has flourished in production of training materials,
and in business consulting, becoming a significant
international operation. One rather doubts that the one-
paragraph mention in the fledgling Correspo contributed
much to their success, but it clearly didn’t hurt.

After some years of working and reworking, this has become a real book, via Lulu Publishing. The blurb on the back (under a picture of the author looking unnaturally cheerful) says:

“This book is Nels Winkless’s wry look at his half-century-and-more as a “professional outsider” writing, editing, interpreting, presenting new ideas, and serving as a sounding board for interesting people who have influenced some of the major technical developments of the era. While fascinated by the dazzling advance of technology, he’s most intrigued by the savage resistance people have to every sort of change, making technical progress virtually miraculous, and he suggests an explanation for this puzzling conflict.
His recollections of the work and people are often funny, sometimes painful, and usually surprising.

ISBN: 978-0-557-05785-6

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Available at Lulu.com (in print or an inexpensive download) and at Amazon.com