Young Family

We found this picture taken when we were a young family. Elaine and I had a lot of hair in those days and Janny still had very little.

In other news ... we are getting excited that Mary and Chris will be here soon. They are driving here along with Ky and little dog Vicki.

My Father in the US Army

Since tomorrow is Father's Day I am posting some pictures of my Father in the US Army. They would have been taken in 1941 when he was 23 years old. In the lower group picture he is standing at the left. I previously posted about when he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the late 1930s.

My Father joined the army in NY state in December 1940 and later was in North and South Carolina in training. While in South Carolina a family on a nearby farm invited some of the soldiers while they had some days off. The farm had some mules and my Father was going to show off to the other guys how he could run and vault onto the mule's back from behind like he used to do with the mules they had back home on his family farm. Unfortunately this mule was larger and he didn't make it all the way on. The mule kicked up his hind legs and shot my Father up in the air. Then he landed on the hard packed ground behind the mule.

He ended up in the army hospital with a broken wrist. Unfortunately the xrays did not show up the break in his wrist so they were making him exercise it. It became more swollen and painful. It worsened to the point that he was in the army hospital for 6 months. Finally they xrayed from a different angle and saw that his wrist was broken.

While my Father was still in the army hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey, there was the attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941 and the US declared war the next day. My Father was given an honorable discharge from the army for medical reasons on March 21, 1942 since his wrist had not healed up properly. When my Father told this story he always said "A mule kicked me out of the army."

3D Mapping of Chinese Cities

I saw an article on the Popular Science website about Edushi (E-City) based in Hangzhou China making 3D pixel art maps of Chinese cities. They have an ultra high resolution map of Hong Kong that you can zoom in and search like Google maps. This is just one of the maps of over 40 Chinese cities. The maps can be viewed in standard 2D map, aerial photo view or 3D pixel art view. The map of Guangzhou is animated with little cars and buses driving on the streets and fireworks over the stadium. Quite amazing.

Scientist Says Using the Internet Makes You Smarter

Gary Small, M.D., Director of the UCLA Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior says "If you think our incessant use of the Internet, Blackberrys, iPods, text-messaging and video games has changed our lives and our children's lives, here's some breaking news: Technology has not only altered our lives, it's altered our brains." The video here is an interview with him on CBS News. He says using the internet makes us smarter.

Quoted in a Popular Science article he says "The simple headline here is that Google is making us smarter." He demonstrated this with MRI scans which reveal real-time brain activity. He concludes you could build up your "brain muscles" by logging more time on the internet.

While I believe it is true that the internet has opened up access to information and learning activities, I am not sure if taken to the extreme the more you surf the internet the smarter you will get. There should be a balance in life with learning from real-life experiences.

Power Line Workers - Part 2

After the video I posted of power line workers on live high voltage lines I found this article with some examples. The picture has a worker changing an insulator string on a live 765 kV line near Miami Florida. This work is done live so as not to cause an outage to customer loads. This type of live live work has been done in Canada and USA for 30 years, and also in other countries. One reference said it is done in Russia on lines up to 1150 kV (over one million volts.)

Power Line Workers - "Birds on a Wire"

Someone sent me a link to this video. I recognized it as part of a television program I had seen called "Straight Up" on jobs done with helicopters. It shows a power line worker being transported by helicopter and then crawling along a live high voltage power line. It is quite amazing. You can see another worker walking on hands and feet along another wire in the background. They are high above the ground on a half million volt line like "birds on a wire." They are safe because they bond their conductive suit to the same voltage potential as the line. I don't know where this was filmed but live power line work is done in Saskatchewan as well by specially trained workers.

At the end of the video the worker says "There's only three things I've ever been afraid of, electricity, heights, and women, and I am married too."

School Pictures

When I was going through some albums I found a collection of my school photos. I think the top ones are grades 1, 3 and 5. The bottoms ones are likely grades 6, 7, and 9. As you can see from the last two pictures I had paisley shirts I liked wearing. I didn't have much change in hair styles other than the wave in the front in grade 7.