Well, that could be because they were really singing, “She’s an Awwwwwwwwwwr.”
Yeah, I knew there was a famous song called “Louie, Louie” with the lyrics “Louie Louie me gotta’ go”. But I never connected it with a song I kept hearing on the oldies station that sounded something like “Ooh-Ay ooh-Aye, OH-ohhh”.
Roger Daltrey sings lead on “Athena”, but the “She’s a bomb” line is sung by Pete and (maybe) John. The song was written about Pete’s infatuation for and (again, maybe) a little affair with actress Theresa Russell. The working title was “Theresa”, but Pete didn’t want the song to be too obvious.
The most commonly used consonant in the English language is ‘t.’
However. . . the most commonly used consonant sound in English is
‘n’, followed closely by ‘r’, and next, but also close behind is ‘t.’
Now. . . I know that the linguistic nerds might nitpick on the various allophonic colors that these and other consonants might take and further deconstruct the list, but most ( American, anyway) dictionaries don’t care.
I’m just stumped by what you mean by “consonant” vs “consonant sound”.
“T” as in “Tee” is not the same consonant sound as the digraph “th” as in “the,” for example. 
Okay, so you mean “consonant letter” vs “consonant sound”?
In usual language science, “consonant” and “vowel” by themselves refer to sounds, not spellings.
I think it’s also because we* often pronounce written “t” as a “d” (or just a flap). Example: later.
(*Most Americans, at least).
Except on Wheel of Fortune. An ‘n’, or ‘s’ is better there.
In fact, the T in words is often just elided away. And English-speakers don’t even notice.
Even when they listen closely.
ISWYDT
While my wife and I were visiting The New Hampshire Farm Museum in Milton, NH, the tour guide learned that I was an Optical Engineer and asked me why it was that Technicolor film needed a special projector. (A member of the family that owned the farm became a big name in Broadway, and later Hollywood, and was an early investor in Technicolor. The guide claimed that, in the early days, to promote Technicolor, the firm offered to install this special projection system in theaters at cost). I had to answer that, so far as I knew, Technicolor made film that could be run through an ordinary projector – no special device needed. I said I’d look into it.
I quickly learned that the very first Technicolor incarnation – “Process 1” – did indeed use a special projector, as did other eaerly efforts at color movies. They used a prismatic system and filters to simultaneously shoot an image of ac scene through a green filter and a red filter, and registered these as contiguous frames on the film (with one upside-down). The projector would separate the images, erect the upside-down one, and project them both onto a screen, one through a red filter and the other through green filter. Combining the images on the screen gave you a color image. The problem was that the deviceTechnicolor used was mechanically pretty crappy, and required constant on-the-site adjustment. One of the creators said that it required the skills of a professor and an acrobat, and they decided after the initial tour demonstrating the device that henceforth they would use an ordinary single projector, and put the color directly into the film. This lead to the more familiar “Process 2”, often called “two-strip Technicolor” (which everyone calls a misnomer, although I think the term is defensible), in which they recorded red and green elements on the film. This was used inn early Technicolor films that you can still see, like Phantom of the Opera.
Two quick comments – one is that , unless the idea of sending out the special projector attachments was done while they were on this initial tour, I don’t see when it could have been done. The special projector idea was clearly abandoned early in the company history. The other is that something about the story is fishy – using a special projector apparatus to project images recorded next to each other on a single piece of film is exactly how the 1950s-vintage 3D movies were projected, and that system worked fine. On the face of it, there’s no reason that a system to take images recorded in predicable places on film and throw them onto a screen ought to be difficult to do reliably. I think the Technicolor people might just have had a rotten mechanical engineer.
BUT – here’s the really interesting part.
After I read this description of Process 1 I recognized something familiar. Separately recording black and white images of a scene through red and green filters, and then projecting them onto a screen through red and green filters is EXACTLY how Edwin Land discovered the Land Effect. Land found that, when he did this, he saw not only red and green and all the colrs in the gamut defined by the line on the CIW diagram between those, but color he ought not to be able to see (as defined by color theory) – blues and pinks and the like. In fact, if he left off the green filter altogether he still saw the effect. Standard theory suggested that he ought to only see various degrees of red, but he was clearly seeing greens and blues and yellows. He wrote about this at length in 1959, and it was deemed the Land Effect. Land came up with a theory to explain it, which he called RETINEX theory. I first read about it in 965, and was pretty amazed by it.
Land continued experimenting, and found that he could create the effect with filter pairs of other colors. have to admit that, until now, I hadn’t wondered why it was that Land was doing these experiments. At the time he was trying to extend his Polaroid Instant photography beyond black and white to color (and introduced Polaroid ColorPak film five years later). It’s now clear to me that he was emulating the work of the early color motion picture pioneers in using his black and white exposures taken and later projected through red and green filters (red and green were a good choice, by the color theory model – it would give you good flesh tones and acceptable whites)
Knowing this, the question occurred to me – could the Technicolor people have seen this effect, too? They were doing exactly the same experiment. Might they not have seen the broad range of colors produced, and that this might be on reason they pursued this method?
I contacted the people at Eastman House in Rochester, and they lead me to the notebooks Technicolor kept. After reading these, and the Technicolor patents, I had to conclude that they don’t seem to have seen the effect at all. They were more concerned with synchronizing and overlapping the images, and getting their iffy projection mechanism working.
But they weren’t the only ones working in this area. I learned that someone else doing such red-green separations, an Audtrian scientist named Anton Bernardi, who moved to England to promote his color film process, DID see the effect, and said so in his patents. In fact, he followed Land’s path precisely. He first did the ed-green separation, then later left the green filter out and saw the whole range of colors. He named his company “Raycol”, claimed that hos process was better and heaper than competing color film processes, and made a big push to corner the color film market in Australia and New Zealand. Then he went bankrupt. Only a very few Raycol films were ever made, and the process was virtually forgotten. But Bernardi had discovered the Land Effect thirty years before Edwin Land did. You have to wonder how familiar Land was with Bernardi’s work.
I wrote an article about this, which will appear in the November issue of Optics and Photonics News
Cool! (The stories, the people, the technologies…and your role in getting this out there currently).
Very cool, thanks for the write up.
The most amazing part of the story, though, is
He was stuck in ancient Rome until he could repair his time machine and passed the time reading, as one does in those circumstances…
Like you, I’m puzzled how a single-strip system would have required constant adjustment. As it happens, I know the guy who wrote the book on Technicolor. When I have a chance, I’ll drop him an e-mail and ask him.
One point I believe you’re mistaken about: I think most 1950s 3D system were dual-strip on mechanically or electrically interlocked projectors. It wasn’t until the 1960s that single-strip systems using either over-under or side-by-side anamorphic frames were introduced.
I’ve been researching an obscure 70mm 3D system for an article that will appear on the Film Atlas, so I can look up my cites a little later, if you’re interested. I’m in an airport right now.
I happened to find out that a King and Knight can, in fact, draw against a King and Rook. At Lv. 100, I was basically on the defensive right from the opening and managed to reach that ending. After ten moves, I decided I should google it because, just maybe, the machine was having a problem winning a position that a really good player could win. Nope, it is a draw.
I’ve just looked it up online, and it appears that you are right. It doesn’t affect my argument – the single-strip 3D films released after 1960 show that there was no intrinsic problem with projecting two images from the same strip of film with no jitter or skew. I had assumed that the 1950s-era 3D films I’ve seen in theaters – House of Wax, Dial “M” for Murder – were the original prints, or struck from them. The idea that all those theaters in the 1950s were trying to keep two projectors perfectly synchronized boggles my mind. The slightest difference in projection speed, or any break in the film that was repaired would wreak havoc.
More likely Constantinople.