Black Boxes Are Orange
The black box they're always looking for after a plane crash (the one with the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder), is not black.
It's bright ORANGE, with reflective white strips, to make it easier to find.
I've wondered for years why that data can't be transmitted in real time to a land-based computer somewhere, so there's no wait for answers (or total lack of answers) if the black box is hard to find or totally destroyed in a crash, as it was in United Flight 93 on 9-11-01.
I'm going to ask my pilot friend Bill McKay about that the next time I see him.
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Happy Little Duck turns 25!
Grandmother, circa 1900
In 1884 (the year my grandmother was born)
- 1884 births include Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Damon Runyon, Sophie Tucker, Amadeo Modigliani (painter and sculptor), and Hermann Rorschach (Swiss psychiatrist and inventor of the famous inkblot test).
- 1884 deaths include Gregor Mendel (considered to be the father of genetics) and Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt (wife of Theodore Roosevelt, after the birth of baby Alice Lee Roosevelt). Note: TR's mother, Martha, had died just a few hours earlier.
- Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was lambasted when he married a white woman from Germany.
- Alaska became a US territory.
- Boxer John L. Sullivan was arrested during the 2nd round of a fight for being "cruel."
- Canned (evaporated) milk is patented by John B. Meyenberg of St. Louis.
- Chester A. Arthur was finishing his term as President; Grover Cleveland followed.
- Cholera ravaged Europe.
- Claude Monet painted "Corniche of Monaco" and "Bordighera"; the later was done on the French Riviera to which he returned after a visit there with Renoir late in 1883.
- Czar Alexander III commissioned jeweler Carl Faberge to make an Easter egg for the Empress, who received the 1st egg the next year and the tradition continued to 1917.
- Edition number one of "The Oxford English Dictionary" is published.
- Eight-hour workday was formally proclaimed in the United States by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions.
- First roller coaster in the U.S. began operating at Coney Island, NYC with a breakneck top speed of 6 mph.
- Georges Seurat, French artist, finished "Bathers at Asnieres", and began his 7'x10' painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte --1884."
- Kudzu covered walls? The first state college for women in the United States was established in (are you ready for this?) ...Mississippi! Yep, Mississippi, not Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, or Pennsylvania, but Mississippi!
- Labor Day was declared a legal holiday by Congress.
- London's last debtors' prison closed. Sadly Charles Dickens died in 1870, 16 years too soon to join the celebration.
- Mark Twain published "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".
- Susan B. Anthony, leading over 100 suffragists, presented President Chester A. Arthur with a demand that he support female voting rights.
- The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor.
- The first long-distance telephone call was made, between Boston and New York City.
- The International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. fixes the Greenwich meridian as the world's prime meridian of longtitude. (This was on October 13th, 1884, the actual day my grandmother was born.)
- The Statue of Liberty was presented to the United States in ceremonies at Paris.
- The Washington Monument was completed.
- Worldwide, climate changes were still being felt after the eruption of Krakatau the year before.
Flora circa 1955 and 2002
Well Said
- Regarding the U.S. House of Representatives, an almost lyrically diplomatic observation from veteran Representative Dennis Kucinich."The pace of this institution is not always conducive to a well-thought-out approach, to considering the consequences of a certain type of action." ~ No wonder he's Ram Dass's favorite candidate...
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Happy Little Duck turns 25!
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