Steele's 10 rules for Whodunits

1.  There is always a corpse involved.

2. The location of the action is always an exotic or luxurious locale.

3.  The Victim is always the biggest asshole on the premises, someone that nobody really liked.

4.  The murderer is never the one suspected at first.

5.  The murderer always commits the murder in such a way to throw suspicion on someone else.

6.  When the murder is happening, all you can see are the murderer's feet.

 
7.  The murderer is always the one person you would NEVER suspect.  (Your grandmother,  Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, a little girl selling cookies). 

8.  The nefarious past and reason nobody liked the Victim is gradually and painstakingly revealed. 

9.  The murderer is finally confronted in one final scene by the detective,  if any plot elements are unexplained these are cleared up here by the murderer who suddenly turns talkative once  he/she has the detective at his/her mercy and is holding him/her

at gunpoint, however, and this is always the case that...


10.  ...a momentary lapse of attention by the murderer allows the detective to knock the gun out of his hands, a brief struggle ensues, and  the policemen clap him/her in handcuffs and take him/her away. 

 

Book em' Danno.

Testing the life of different brands of AA batteries (test 1)

I use a lot of AA batteries in two of my cameras and the apparent frequency with which I find myself needing to replace them led me to this test.  Using my Olympus SP590UZ camera, I set it for time lapse taking pictures at 10 minute intervals and up to 99 exposures, which means a maximum of a little over 16 hours.  To test the batteries, I used three identical (except for color) single AA cell LED flashlights.  The batteries were

1.  Blue Flashlight (left)  Utilitech Alkaline battery (LG Sourcing, Wilkesboro, NC) (Expiration date January 2021)
2.  Purple Flashlight (right):  Rayovac Alkaline battery (Expiration date July 2024)
3.  Green Flashlight (middle)  Rapid Super Heavy Duty Battery (Ningbo Rapid battery Co. Ltd., (expiration date, July 2016)

10 minutes in they were all equally bright, apparently.

 After 270 minutes the Rapid "extra heavy duty" battery (middle) had started to dim noticeably (note the circle of light in the middle). 

  At 370 minutes the Utilitech brand Alkaline battery started to dim, and dimmed even faster than the Rapid Extra Heavy Duty battery.

The Rayovac Alkaline battery persisted until the morning light which somewhat spoiled the end of the experiment except that clearly by this stage it was clearly the winner in the battery life contest.  This was at 770 minutes.  

From this I have to conclude that the Rayovac batteries have roughly twice the life of the store-brand alkaline batteries (Utilitech) which in turn were only somewhat better than the "super heavy duty" batteries supplied with the flashlight.

I hasten to add that this was a single test using only one battery of each type and that to be statistically significant I would have to repeat this experiment several times with different batteries and for good measure switch the color of the flashlights around.  I might also consider doing the experiment in a totally darkened room so that the sunlight does not make evaluation of the flashlight beams 

I noticed too that once I had turned the flashlights off for several hours, all three of them had "recovered" their beam strength, at least for a while.  While the super heavy duty batteries began to dim within minutes the other two did not.  Maybe I should investigate this "recovery" and see how long the cells last after supposedly being drawn down almost to nothing. This last tendency is somewhat maddening when using a camera continually.  The batteries seem to be dying and then after a rest, they have a bit farther to go before depletion. 

The Most Interesting this I did this year (2014)

If you have Alan Parson's I Robot album you've seen this.

I guess the most interesting thing I did this year was visit Paris in April.  I’d always heard there was this city there in France and by god it turned out to be true, when I got on a plane and flew out there.  A little over 8 hours strapped into your tiny coach seat on a United Airlines flight from Chicago and you are at Charles de Gaulle-Roissy airport.  The French did not hassle me much about getting into the country or leaving it, unlike the customs at O’Hare. 

Anyway it is a real country with all these people speaking a language other than English.  A lot of French people were on holiday over what turned out to be Easter holiday and this complicated my plans to visit museums and all.  I thought that over

The Musee d'Orsay used to be a train station

Easter the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay would be closed and unfortunately even if they translate their regs into English you still need some kind of interpreter.  So for example I discovered rather too late that the Louvre, the biggest art museum in the world, was having an “exceptional opening” on Easter Sunday.  What this meant was that the museum was open on Easter Sunday whereas on a normal Sunday it would be closed.  

You could take this picture from inside the Musee d'Orsay

They allow you to take pictures in the Louvre and I did, and ended up visiting the museum twice.  They do not allow you to take pictures in the Musee d’Orsay, in fact, in the Musee d’Orsay they are incredibly anal about everything.  I had to wait about two hours in line before even gaining admission to the museum then when admitted they strictly forbade picture taking.  I did end up taking pictures of non-art and the inside of the giant clock on the top floor, but no art.    While waiting in line there was this Indian fellow who served as kind of the line Nazi who yelled at people to get off walls and other stuff.  That’s what he did all day.  When I left several hours later, he was still yelling at people to get off certain things people naturally wanted to sit on while waiting to get into the museum. 

The Louvre however was okay with photography and in fact didn’t blink when I brought in three cameras,

This painting is humongous.

all hanging around my neck.  I went to see the Mona Lisa which is really a small painting, perhaps 2 feet by 3 feet behind a glass barrier and with maybe 200 onlookers in front of it. 

La Joconde as it is called by the French

I didn’t have the patience to get really close to it, and photographed it from an angle.  On the wall opposite was Veronese’s “the Wedding at Cana” which is a truly enormous work of art.  I think it was something that Napoleon ripped off when he was in Italy.  I am mystified how one could get a painting like that into the museum without some kind of divine intervention.  It was I think about 20 feet by 50 feet.  It was very hard to get an unobstructed view of the painting simply because other people kept posing in front of it.  I got tired of waiting for them to leave and starting taking pictures with them in them.

There are of course signature works that the Louvre is known for, and the Mona Lisa is one of those. 

Others are the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory.  The winged victory and the whole gallery of the museum where it was located was under renovation however so I may never get to see that one.  The Winged Victory was in poor condition as it lacks a head and of course the Venus de Milo is minus a couple of arms. 

Another day I went out to the Palace at Versailles,  which was where Louis the XIV, the sun king had his stately pleasure dome.  It is quite a palace.  I took a train ride out there to see it, and there is a short walk from the station to get to the palace proper. Then there was a long wait in a serpentine line that stretched back and forth in the massive cobblestone courtyard area.

The Hall of Mirrors

   I saw the inside of the palace and the hall of mirrors, the royal bedrooms, etc.  the place is decorated with angels and naked women and cherubim and lions and other things standing on the brink of the rooftops,  there are paintings on the ceilings, faces emerging from the tops of doorways,  etc.  The gates were gilded.  In short the place was decorated to within an inch of its life. 

Maintaining and restoring it must have been an enormous project, but fortunately American philanthropists have come to its rescue, if not Republican France. 

   After that there were the gardens, the many statues lining the paths of the gardens,  the huge canals where holiday goers could rent boats and row themselves around with their girlfriends, their family, or in one case their dog. 

Some had their girlfriends rowing for them.   They have a lot of topiary at Versailles, and fountains, and hidden among the trees and flowers, classical baroque music playing everywhere.  It goes on for miles.  I never did walk entirely around the canal,  I only got as far as the middle of it. 

On another day I walked from the Gare Du Nord, where my hotel was located over to Cimitiere Pere Lachaise.  The cemetery is enormous, and really unlike anything I had seen in America or even in London.

  Maybe the closest approximation might be the cemeteries of New Orleans.  Once at the cemetery I bought a map of the cemetery which has mapped out all the famous people buried there.  It is a long, long list, and I can’t say I found all the ones I was looking for, although, I found quite a few, as well as some I wasn’t looking for.  Many of course I didn’t even recognize.  I have to say that the ingenuity of grave decoration in the old world far surpasses anything I’ve seen in the new.  Many sculptures, busts, angels, photographs, relics, rusting crosses, etc.  There was a crematorium off to one side of the cemetery, which levels out and forms a grid on the eastern side, whereas the cemetery on the western side is very hilly, with hillsides festooned with graves.  There is hardly any grass to cut, and only the necessary maintenance might be to pull some weeds or volunteer trees on the premises.    I found the graves of Marcel Proust, Jim Morrison, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Eugene Delacroix, and Honore Balzac. 

I also visited Notre Dame, which is a beautiful cathedral and waited a couple of hours in line in order to visit the Gargoyles in the towers. 

Gargoyle contemplating Paris

The reason it took so long is pretty clear once you got up there.  You had to walk up a very long and very narrow spiral staircase up and descend an equally narrow and long spiral staircase down.  The number and variety of them is astonishing, the view of the plaza in front of the cathedral is breathtaking.  Not sure what the purpose of gargoyles is, perhaps to keep evil spirits away. 

Other things I visited were the Eifel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe.  I only went to the second level halfway up the tower.  Naturally there were huge lines but they moved pretty fast and other than the presence of soldiers with automatic weapons and being told that I had to drink my cans of diet coke before going up, it seemed normal.  

There seemed to be a lot of French visiting the tower that day, based on the languages used.  Of course there were also American and British tourists there.   The most useful bits of Frenc

h in all the time I was there was "Parlez vous Ingles?” and “Ou est la Toilette?”

Speaking of Toilettes the automatic ones I saw in a couple of places around Paris were an interesting technological advance on old pissoir, which I did not see anywhere in Paris.  These inventions go through an elaborate cleaning cycle after each use, which takes about two minutes between uses.  I had to wait about half an hour to use the one near Notre Dame.    Fortunately French brasseries keep their toilets downstairs in the front of the restaurant instead of in back.   If you have to go you have to go, I say.  Rick Steves recommends just inviting yourself in and using them.   Better to use them first and apologise for your bodily functions afterwards.  I told the proprietor “Merci” and went forth. 

The only bad thing that happened to me during the whole trip was that I had my wallet lifted by a pickpocket as I was entering a train to go back to the airport.

Fun times at the Gare du Nord

  Voila!  He thus got almost all my money, my credit cards, my driver’s license, and I was left standing there on the train while he beat a retreat back to the platform while the train moved out.   Thank God he didn’t get my passport otherwise I would still be over there.  I had about 8 euros in my pocket in change therefore when I flew back to America.  He also got my train ticket which I needed to exit the station.  Fortunately on arriving at CDG-Roissy airport I got the attendant at the other end to let me leave the station without it. 

I made my plane and I didn’t need much money on my way back to Chicago anyway, but it certainly put me in a black mood for much of the trip back.  My seat mate was someone I took for a British national and I said something unwise to him, saying somewhat bitterly that  “I’ll be glad to be back to a land where they speak English”.  He then informed me in English that he was French and studiously ignored me, speaking French with someone across the aisle.  At this I glared at him, which apparently made him so uncomfortable that he moved to another seat. 

The unexpected benefit of this turn of events  was that I had two seats to occupy on my way back as I gloomily reflected on all the stuff the thief would buy with my credit cards in the 9 or so hours it would take for me to get back to Chicago.   I did not enjoy my trip back very much as a result.

 I contemplated bleakly the possible consequences.  I was unable to cancel my credit card until I was back in Chicago 9 hours later.   When I picked up my car I apologised to the driver  for not having any cash to give him, so I gave him a 2 euro coin which delighted him, because he was a coin collector.

A geneology of the light bulb Manufacturers

Swan

Sir Joseph Swan was a British physicist and chemist who created a light bulb that could be used commercially by 1880, focusing on carbonized filaments in a vacuum. 

Edison

Edison, who made a career of crowding in on other inventions and patents by making small improvements in them, created a commercially feasible carbon filament light bulb in America.  The two men came to an agreement to form a company known as "Edison and Swan electric light company" for its commercial exploitation when it became clear that an alliance was going to be more profitable than an extended legal battle.  

Neither man actually "invented" the light bulb since the ability to make light in a resisting filament in a vacuum had been demonstrated by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1802.   What Swan and Edison did do was create a light bulb efficient enough to actually be sold commercially. Edison often won these little tech wars since he had better lawyers. 

The first tungsten filament light bulb was patented in

Just and Hanaman

Hungary by Alexander Just and Franjo Hanaman in 1904.  This gave brighter light and longer life than carbon filaments.   Edison's General Electric company made improvements in the manufacture of the tungsten filaments in 1906 by sintering, and created ductile tungsten filaments by 1911.  Irving Langmuir in 1913 discovered that filling the light bulb with inert gas was better than attempting a vacuum. 

Edison General Electric was incorporated in New York in 1889, drawing together Edison's Electric Light Company, his electric dynamo manufacturing company, his electric sockets and lighting fixtures.  It merged with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company in 1892 to become General Electric Company.

Meanwhile George Westinghouse who developed the transformer, started an electric company based on the method of transporting electric power from the generating plant to the consumer.  Alternating current, where current changes direction at some frequency allows for the more efficient transport of energy at high voltages over long distances with less loss of power.  The stepping up and down of voltage can be accomplished by transformers, which is not possible with direct current.  He was awarded the contract to harness the hydroelectric power of the Niagara river at Niagara Falls and set up a transmission line to Buffalo, which was about 20 miles away.  This was accomplished in 1896. 

Westinghouse's first and most significant invention was the air brake, which made stopping locomotives easier and safer than before.  Apart from dynamos, home appliances, and other things they also manufactured light bulbs.

  In the 1930s they were trying to make a better filament for light bulbs by using uranium.  While this never panned out for light bulbs, it did turn out to be of use in developing processes for the refining of uranium for their use in nuclear weapons.  Westinghouse subsequently became involved in the development of nuclear energy.   

Sylvania was started as a company that refilled burned out light bulbs.    NILCO, Sylvania, and Hygrade lamp companies merged in 1931, forming the Hygrade Sylvania company. 

This company was responsible for the first linear fluorescent tubes, which originated in 1939.  They also made vacuum tubes and resistors, which were important in the early days of radio and TV manufacturing.  Hygrade Sylvania became Sylvania electric products in 1942.   In 1959 it merged with General Telephone to become GTE (aka General Telephone and Electronics).  Under the name GTE Sylvania it sold a lot of things including breakers, transformers,   In 1981 GTE decided to divest itself of its electrical distribution equipment manufacturing divisions. In 1993 GTE sold its lighting business, Sylvania but to get around restrictions on creating too large a company, the operation was split into two parts.  The part comprising the North American business was sold to Osram GmBH, a German firm to form Osram Sylvania.  The rest of the world's business became SLI Holdings LLC, which was sold to Havells India Ltd. to form Havells Sylvania in 2007.  Another fragment of the company went off to live in Australia and New Zealand.    

Before all this happened, Sylvania did invent some products which were breakthroughs at the time. 

The Flashcube which swiveled and allowed one to take 4 flash pictures without replacing the flash bulb was used in conjunction with Instamatic cameras.  In 1986 they were the first to produce the MR16 halogen lamps. In 1989 they developed the first integrated circuit ballasts, which allowed the miniaturization paving the way to the creation of the first compact fluorescent lamps.  

Osram got its start with the creation of a tungsten and Osmium light bulb in 1906.

  The name was a contraction of the two elements used to make light bulb filaments at the time, Osmium and tungsten, which in German is called Wolfram hence the name "Osram". The merger of three lighting companies in 1919: Auergesellschaft, Siemens and Halske, and Allgemein Elektrizitaets Gesellschaft (company) or AEG led to the company now part of Siemens and known at the time as the Osram light bulb company.   Just last year (2013) Osram was spun off from Siemens and acquired its own listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.  

Phillips was founded in 1891 by Gerard Philips in Eindhoven

in the Netherlands to manufacture carbon filament lamps.  From light bulbs they went on to manufacture other things such as vacuum tubes, electric shavers (Norelco), and radio sets.  Just prior to the invasion of the Netherlands by Germany in 1940, the company moved its capital base to North America with its quasi headquarters in the Netherlands Antilles.  

After the war Phillips reestablished itself in the Netherlands where it went into the business of manufacturing TV sets, and introduced the compact audio cassette,

which became a serious competitor with the then dominant medium the vinyl LP record.  It also made forays into video cassette recorders but was overshadowed in time by the VHS technology.  Later it went on to develop Laser disk technology for the creation of compact laser disks, DVD's or digital video disks and blue ray in collaboration with Sony.   

 

Phillips is today an enormous multinational conglomerate that manufactures many types of electrical consumer products. It was as of 2012 the largest manufacturer of lighting products in the world.