The Traffic Light Has A 3-Star Wanted Level

Traffic lights. Ah, the humble traffic light, something something awards-show pablum about traffic lights or some kind of crap. Let's just get to it.

The traffic light was first introduced in London on December 10, 1868. The reason for its invention came down to, well, traffic. There was getting to be a lot of it in London, and they weren't waiting for the car to be invented to clog up the streets. Carriage drivers were having trouble yielding to each other, and to help them out, a man named John Peake Knight invented a device to regulate things.

It was not electric-powered, though. That wouldn't come until a light in Cleveland in 1914. This one was manually operated by a police officer on site, who would manipulate a movable arm in the manner of semaphore signals to denote what a carriage should do. If the arm was down, that meant go. If it was at a 45-degree angle, it meant caution. If it was horizontal, it meant stop. At night, gaslit lamps would be lit to serve as a further aid. Red still meant stop, but originally, green meant caution.

The light was put at Bridge Street and Great George Street, near the Houses of Parliament. That'd be right about here. All it was really supposed to do was help the members of Parliament cross the street. In that task, for the first couple weeks, it worked out well enough.

And then on the following January 2, the traffic light exploded. A gas leak caused one of the lanterns to blow up, with the traffic cop obligingly underneath. The cop at the least got his face burned half off, and at the worst died (the records aren't completely clear on that). The traffic light came down real quick after that, and its replacement wouldn't be built until 1929.

By then, they were fairly sure lightbulbs wouldn't randomly explode.

Seriously, Connecticut Has Plenty Of Food

Congratulations to the national champion Connecticut Huskies, who just defeated the Kentucky Wildcats 60-54.

Now could someone please get around to giving them food? You'd think you wouldn't have to ask, but, welcome to the NCAA.

Mickey Rooney, 1920-2014

It's just come over the wires that actor Mickey Rooney has died at age 93.

The number of people who have been alive long enough to remember Rooney's star-making series, when he was a teenager playing the role of Andy Hardy, is rapidly dwindling; Rooney was one of the last refugees of the silent film era; their confirmed number now drops to a mere 13, five of which are Our Gang alumni. If you don't remember him from much else in particular (though he was in Breakfast at Tiffany's, his otherwise biggest movie credit), that's because Rooney was among the many, many child stars through the years who had a rough professional transition into adulthood, especially because by the time he was largely done playing Andy Hardy- and entertaining troops overseas in World War 2- he had gotten somewhat typecast, with his small size kept him out of a lot of adult roles. He more or less bounced around from guest appearance to guest appearance, suffering bankruptcy in 1962, until he managed to largely transition to TV. His most notable appearance there was as horse trainer Henry Dailey in the three-season Adventures of the Black Stallion. He never really stopped working entirely, though, as he was taking bit part after guest appearance right up until his final illness.

I am not old enough to remember any of these (technically I am old enough for the latter, but it was a Canadian series and I wouldn't have watched it anyway). I unfortunately only remember Rooney as a go-to 'short old guy' joke in animated series, such as being cast as Fallout Boy in an episode of The Simpsons. Or this:



So while I may not have the greatest eulogy in the world to give you, Mickey, you're going to be missed by a lot of people who do have them.

Yet Another Awful Thing Connected To Columbus

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In order for him to sail the ocean blue, he had to get funding from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. He got permission to travel in January and left on August 3.

What happened between those two points? The Alhambra Decree, issued on March 31, which formally expelled Jews from Spain. They either had to convert to Christianity or, in modern parlance, GTFO. Spain was not the first country in Europe to do so, nor were they the last. Jews who left were not permitted to take gold or silver with them, and anyone found to be hiding a Jew had all their property confiscated. Rumors went around that some Jews had swallowed gold and jewelry in order to smuggle it out, and as a result they tended to get shanked mid-flee so as to get at the gold. (The ones who converted ended up getting persecuted anyway.)

The Columbus money didn't quite come from them, but it did come from a couple Jewish financiers who freely coughed up the cash: Louis de Santangel, Gabriel Sanchez and rabbi Don Isaac Abrabanel. Columbus set sail the day after the deadline came for Jews to get out of Spain or be executed.

Meanwhile, in 2014, a proposal is on the table in the Spanish legislature to reinstate that citizenship. The Alhambra Decree was formally revoked in 1968, in one of those instances where someone has long since stopped doing a terrible thing but doesn't get around to doing the paperwork until a long time afterwards. This is just going further down that road. Citizenship would be extended to any descendant of the expelled Jews, known as Sephardic Jews, whether they actually live in Spain or not. There would be an application process, but it's advertised as being fairly easy to get through.

Of course, there's a pragmatic aspect to the whole thing as well: with Spain's economy still straggling, calling in hundreds of thousands of people, millions perhaps, and offering them citizenship out of the blue would provide a nice bump to the talent pool. Although on the other hand, that fact may keep some potential beneficiaries away.

But even if there is a pragmatic motive to it, it's still a nice move. Now if they could just do the same for the Muslims (aka Moriscos), who were booted out in precisely the same fashion in 1609, have yet to get similar recourse, and who would very much like said recourse since we're on the subject and everything, that'd be spectacular.

How To Paint Your Face In Another Ethnicity's Color

1. Do not paint your face in another ethnicity's color.
2. That does not merely mean no blackface. It also means no redface, translating to Native Americans. Or yellow or white or brown or whatever the color is.
3. Do not use sports as an excuse. People dress up in lots of ridiculous costumes for the sake of sports. People even paint their faces. Painting your face in your team colors is perfectly acceptable, even if those colors just so happen to be black, red, brown, etc. But there are many ways to paint your face that do not evoke images of your idea of someone's skintone.
4. If you must paint your face in the color of another ethnicity, stop and think about how an actual member of that ethnicity might react if they see you in said painted face.
5. If you cannot think about that, don't worry. Someone might actually come along and demonstrate.
6. They will not be happy.
7. They will not want to shake your hand.
8. There will, though, be about half a dozen people wanting to record your reaction for posterity and also laughs.
9. Do not wear said facepaint when a protest against the team logo is underway nearby.

Previously On...

I presume you're familiar with the name Philo T. Farnsworth, credited as the inventor of television. And he is the first person to put all the components together in a neat little box. However, Farnsworth was not the first to get off a broadcast. He got it off on September 7, 1927, in his laboratory in San Francisco. We shall call that the 'mark to beat'.

Meet John Logie Baird of the United Kingdom. Baird was the first to get off a broadcast of images changing fast enough to give the illusion of motion. The threshold for that is defined as 12 images per second. He had five in his first attempt on October 2, 1925, which isn't enough to qualify. What did qualify was his demonstration in his London laboratory in front of a reporter from The Times and members of the Royal Institution on January 27, 1926, when he made it to 12.5 images per second.

I'll let Baird describe it to you.



What was the first image? Someone related to Baird, of course: his business partner, Oliver Hutchinson.

(source: wikipedia.org)

That is not what you'd call the best image of Oliver. But it's what Baird's creation was able to convey. A modern TV, as you may know, gets its image from a little dot making its way across the screen, left to right, top to bottom (assuming progressive scan; there's also interlaced scan, which means the dot does the odd-numbered rows first and then the even-numbered rows). If you hear '1080p', that means there's one dot covering 1,080 rows worth of little tiny pixels, in order, in one lap of the screen. In progressive scan, the dot does 60 laps per second; in interlaced scan, it does 30 laps due to going top-to-bottom twice per frame. Here's 1080p slowed down.

Baird's design had only 30 lines, and instead of rows, they were columns, with the dot going from bottom to top. And it wasn't a dot so much as a series of... how should I put it... high-speed Viewmasters? I want to say?

If you'd like to see what that looks like, here's a broadcast using a Baird television from 1930, a play called 'The Man With The Flower in His Mouth'.



Remember, back then, this was revolutionary. Though I don't think it'll play well on Hulu these days.

Dammit, People

So I warned you about not falling for April Fool's gags, right? Be extra super careful before believing a story written on April Fool's Day?

Meet Mireya Mayor, a primatologist doing work for Nat Geo Wild (and former cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins). Here's Mireya discussing her autobiography, Pink Boots and a Machete.



For April Fool's Day, Mayor lended her image to ZOZI, a website selling trips and travel gear. What went up was an offer for gorilla-riding tours of "Downtown" (the pictures depicted New York), led by her. Ha ha, very funny.

Later that day, the following post went up on Mireya's Facebook wall:

This is an actual letter I received from someone regarding my OBVIOUSLY AN APRIL FOOL's JOKE regarding piggyback riding on a gorilla around NYC.

"I have raised gorillas, chimps and orangs and I'm totally appalled at what I saw in the ZOZI travel newsletter...are you kidding me? Do you really use actual gorillas for touring? What a complete betrayal of what you're supposed to be about. Shame on you."

It wouldn't be April Fool's Day without a fool, would it?