Saturday, November 30, 2024

Day 4479: 180 Rice Fields & China's Haoji Railway Bridge

"Profile": collage, digital.

Want music?

Click: Stevie Wonder, As

2GN2S

The Kunugidai Rice Terraces in the town of Asahi (Yamagata Prefecture) are uniquely beautiful this time of year. It's peak-harvest season and the 180 rice fields are lined with stakes where rice is sun dried before being shipped.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Her 30th birthday, Long Beach, CA 1945. I was 4

This is the 1,813-kilometer-long Haoji Railway Bridge in China. It is the longest railway bridge in the world, the bridge is used for the transportation of coal. The total cost was around 28 billion US dollars. It was built to transport 200 million tons of coal from Inner Mongolia and Shanxi to the southern provinces of China. It is a heavy rail system with 1435 gauge tracks The railway is also China's first north-south railway that is dedicated to coal, and is built to avoid existing coal transportation routes that pass through coastal cities by boat. The line reduces transi: time from 20 days by sea to just 3 days by rail. The line connects with existing railways at several points to share maintenance facilities.

The design speed of the railway is 120 kilometers per hour. It is operated by China Railway. The line was

approved in 2014 at a cost of 27 billion USD. It was financed by China Railway and several large national coal mining companies. The railway was inaugurated on September 28, 2019.

Me neither, but now we do?

A 4+ minute video, Spider from the depths, here

Just because ...

Diamond Dove

Saturday's Smiles ...

Friday, November 29, 2024

Day 4478: Motion with Phenakistoscope, Thanksgiving Day.

"Hopes": junk mail collage

Want music?

Click: Chaka Khan, Sweet Thing.

2GN2S

155 Years Before the First Animated Gif ...

Joseph Plateau Set Images in Motion with the Phenakistoscope

Nearly 155 years before CompuServe debuted the first animated gif in 1987, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau unveiled an invention called the Phenakistoscope, a device that is largely considered to be the first mechanism for true animation. The simple gadget relied on the persistence of vision principle to display the illusion of images in motion. Via Juxtapoz:

The phenakistoscope used a spinning disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed around the disc’s center were a series of drawings showing phases of the animation, and cut through it were a series of equally spaced radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc’s reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images that appeared to be a single moving picture.

Though Plateau is credited with inventing the device, there were numerous other mathematicians and physicists who were working on similar ideas around the same time, and even they were building on the works of Greek mathematician Euclid and Sir Isaac Newton who had also identified principles behind the phenakistoscope.

Dizzy?

The moving image was only viewable through a narrow slit. Via Wikimedia Commons

We had most of our combined family (18, I think) Thursday at Superman's brother, Jimmy and Sister-in-law, Lauren's beautiful house in Anaheim Hills. I didn't take any photos, but WonderWoman sent me hers.

After a delicious appetizers and wonderful traditional Thanksgiving meal, "the Young (+) and the Restless" gathered to play poker, this was after earlier ping-pong and football on tv.