Plus, being it’s US-1 in Maine, you’re going to experience an eerily accurate feel of interstellar space travel as it will take you roughly 150 years to journey between Portland and Portsmouth. 
Montgomery, Alabama is located in Montgomery County. But they are named after two different people.
The city of Montgomery is named after Richard Montgomery, a Revolutionary War general. Montgomery County is named after Lemuel Montgomery, an officer in the War of 1812.
Coincidentally - the Eris “planet” is displayed in Maine in a town also called Topsfield - 300 miles away from Topsfield MA. Topsfield, Maine, USA to Topsfield, Massachusetts 01983, USA - Google Maps (at the same scale, Alpha Centauri would be 13,000 miles away).
Years ago in the Journal of Irreproduciible Results, there was an paper on a doppler laser radar. If I remember correctly, the paper was about using it to measure the speed of a snail.
We had earlier done research on building a doppler laser radar for police use. It sounded like a good idea, but it became clear that at anything more than about a mile per hour, the signal overwhelmed the processor so much that we were unable to process the signal.
That’s why when the police use a laser to measure your speed, they are measuring time of flight rather than a doppler shift.
The hula dancer in the opening credits is Helen Kuoha. She went on to get a doctorate and become a college professor in business technology.
Kuoha also had a cameo in the 2010 reboot series. She was interviewed at that time and said she believed she was the last living person from the original series’ opening credit sequence. (Kuoha herself died in 2018.)
That’s funny to me because I grew up in Montgomery County Maryland and Richard Montgomery High School was one of my high schools’ rivals. My high school, Thomas Sprigg Wootton HS, is named after the guy who founded the county and named it after RM himself.
That’s cool. They could put a 70-foot-diamter Alpha sphere (or circle) in Perth, Australia and that would be pretty close to correct (it’s a little less than 12,000 miles away – as far as you can get on land, and even the true antipode doesn’t quite get you to 13,000).
(Yes, technically, it would only be a little less than 8,000 miles away…but the point is to experience the distance analogically, and one would do that by traveling along the earth’s surface.)
Olive Oyl’s brother Castor appeared in only one cartoon. Sorry, I didn’t catch the title, but it aired on MeTV yesterday or today.
I just learned on CBS Sunday Morning that on today’s date (May 3) in 1978, the first spam email was sent. I didn’t even realize that email existed at that time, so I Googled it.
On that date, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation sent a message to about 400 users on the US Defense Department’s ARPANET. The message advertised a demonstration of the new DECSYSTEM-20 computer.
The response was mostly negative, and Thuerk was reprimanded and instructed never to do it again. However, the message generated about 13 million bucks in sales for DEC.
So the first spam message proved that spam works.
Dammit.
When King Features put their stamp on the made-for-television Popeye cartoons in the early 1960s (the ones where Popeye’s nemesis is “Brutus”), they frequently worked in a few background cameos of the original strip characters. I recall seeing Tor, Ham Gravy (look it up) and Cole Oyl for examples. Any blink-and-you-missed-it appearances for Castor there?
Yesterday I learned that nostalgia for a simpler, more prosperous past took hold in America in the 1920s and 30s, when people harkened back to the last decade of the 19th century.
The term “The Gay Nineties” was used to refer to this period.
This is probably well known all around, but yesterday I was reminded that the name of the computer HAL is a Cesar cipher -1 for IBM.
I knew the IBM > HAL thing, but I didn’t know “Cesar cipher -1.”
FWIW, Kubrick always denied that it was intentional. But I never believed him.
Yeah, I think what he was really denying was wanting to be sued by IBM.
Was that ever a real consideration by IBM at the time, to sue Kubrick over the name? I couldn’t say, I was born in the year the movie came out.
Clarke himself named HAL and said often that the IBM coincidence never occurred to him.
…about once a week some character spots the fact that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution … As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence.
Maybe, but if there are 26 letters in the English alphabet the chances for that coincidence are 1 to 26³ = 17,576
I still don’t buy it. These were two well-respected and intelligent creators, an author and a filmmaker, and they both had collaborators, other writers, editors and so on, and nobody in the whole deal caught the HAL-IBM thing before the film was released?
Why would they bother? It’s not obvious.
And it wasn’t until many years later that anyone came up with that explanation.