I’ll have to research this; it was a long time ago and I can’t remember where I read it. At least it was online, so I might be able to find it.
Possibly it was an L.A. city ordinance rather than a state law. If you attended school in wooden structures that would explain it.
I did read just now that new unreinforced masonry buildings were outlawed in the aftermath of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, but it wasn’t until 1986 that pre-1933 masonry buildings (if still standing) were required to be retrofitted.
The 1933 and 1971 earthquakes really did a number on L.A.'s architectural heritage, particularly with regard to school buildings. Meanwhile, San Francisco enjoyed 83 years of terra firma between 1906 and 1989. They had far more time to retrofit the older buildings.
Nobody remembers when Rochester was a growing city on the back on Kodak, but in 1930 it built a gigantic high school. Picture on that page.
With a 23-acre campus, for 30 years from 1930, Franklin was the largest high school east of the Mississippi.
It has 500 rooms, a mile of corridors, a massive refurbished theater and a gym which holds 2,400 people.
A total of two million bricks were used to build it.
Getting from one side to the other in the five minutes between classes was almost impossible. I know because I went there.
You can see the movie palace-sized auditorium in Life magazine for January 13, 1941. Go to page 64. A picture of naked boys showering takes up half of p. 66. Life loved to insert pictures of innocent nudes back in the day. Nobody seemed to complain, but no mainstream magazine could run that picture today.
We live on the North Shore of Boston, and our 20x30 ft driveway is on an incline down toward the garage. My wife’s grandfather had installed a snow melt system under the driveway decades ago, but it hadn’t worked for many years. So when we expanded it from one car wide to two last year, I installed a new snow melt system (from the company in the link above). It cost about $7,500 installed, and draws about 9,000 watts while operating. At a nominal rate of $0.18 per kWh, that’s $1.62 per hour, plus the various fees and taxes.
It can be turned on or off manually, but it has sensors that automatically switch it on when the temp is low enough and it senses precipitation. They are adjustable, and I’ve tweaked them to reduce unnecessary activations.
With the automatic system, you shouldn’t have to melt many inches of snow. Starting as soon as the snow starts, it should be able to keep up whatever falls.
Ironically, since installing it we haven’t had anything more than light dustings.
In the late 70s, a prosperous couple I knew bought a large house/mini-mansion. His first few electric bills were outrageous, so he tried turning lights off, etc, but each month the bills remained higher than he could believe.
He called the electric company without any help. Then he called an electrician who showed him the on/off switch for his heated walkway and driveway that had been in the on position April-August. He did not know his home had this feature.
Many bird species, including gulls, robins, and plovers, engage in “worm charming.” By rapidly stamping or tapping their feet on the ground, the birds create vibrations that mimic the sound of raindrops or the movement of predators like moles. These vibrations trick worms into coming to the surface, making them easy prey.
Looks like a contender for a grant from the Ministry of Silly Walks. And of course you know it’s an American woodcock, we’re the only ones who would be hunting for worms on a pavement
TIL about a thing called the Krukenberg procedure. If you have had a hand amputated and can’t afford a decent prosthetic (say, because you are dirt-poor), then this surgery may be for you. It separates your radius and ulna (the two bones of the forarm) and rearranges some of the arm muscles so that you can grasp objects with the distal ends of those two skin-wrapped bones, like giant tweezers made of meat. Here’s a brief clip of a guy who had the procedure done on his left arm:
And here’s a 3-minute-long dive into the details and history of the procedure:
It’s visually unsettling to look at (the Wikipedia page notes that the procedure has “poor cosmesis”), but as the video’s narrator says, when your only other option is just a stump, this can be life-changing.
