Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• German model train manufacturer Marklin has filed for bankruptcy, though there is still some hope that the 150-year-old firm will remain in business. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
• Scientific American has an interesting retrospective on the infamous nuclear-powered B-36 that actually flew back in the late 1950s, with a live, air-cooled

Comments

[beamjockey]

Scientific American has an interesting retrospective on the infamous nuclear-powered B-36 that actually flew back in the late 1950s, with a live, air-cooled fission reactor in its rear bomb bay."Nuclear-powered" is a misnomer here; the aircraft was gasoline-powered, like any other B-36. Well, kerosene too, as it had those clusters of four jet engines outboard of the six piston engines, as though it had robbed the corpse of a crashed B-47

[regek]

Huh. I've been futzing with Melodyne (an interesting program specifically for pitch correction) for a while, but this is the first I'm hearing of Auto-Tune. I always thought they put Cher's vocals in Believe through a vocoder in reverse (to map a keyboard's modulation onto her voice).

[robling_t]

Hmm, knew 'placket' but 'interpunct' is a nifty new thing, thanks!

Placket

[anonymous]

Gosh, that must be a boy-girl thing because I don't think I know a female who doesn't know what a placket is.

Terry

Re: Placket

[jeff_duntemann]

It may also be a geek/non-geek thing. I was not taught much about clothing as a teenager, mostly because of the disruption in my home life in the wake of my father's illness, and because I wasn't especially interested, I didn't research it myself. My mother bought all my clothes at Goldblatt's (in Lawrencewood, down in the gully my father called Skunk Hollow) and I wore what she gave me. I was in college before I realized that women's shirts had their buttons on the other side, and the finer details of fabric structure never got on my radar.