Couch Communiqué

For those of you who haven’t seen Oscar in a while, here he is. I bought him last year around Labor Day. He was only about an inch long at the time, but now he’s close to 9″. I feed him mostly commercial pellet food, but he also nibbles on raw fish, lettuce, earthworms, beefheart and brine shrimp. He always seems to be hungry.

He also has quite a personality. If I’m rearranging things in his tank, he’ll lay on his side on the bottom. I think he’s sulking! He recognizes us when we come near, but cowers when strangers come close. At feeding time, if he’s really hungry, he jumps up to my hand above the water. His head comes about 3″ out of the water. Of course, when he comes down, he splashes on the couch, the wall, the window…

Oscar’s latin name is Astronotus ocellatus. He is a South American Cichlid and is native to Peru, Colombia, Brazil and French Guiana, living in the Amazon river basin. In the wild they can grow up to 18″! They are often found for sale as a food fish in the local markets.

A North Carolina mother gave birth to twins early Sunday morning on November 6th. Sounds pretty normal. But it happened right around the time Daylight Savings Time was ending. The first twin, Peter, was born at 1:32 a.m. Thirty four minutes later, Allison was born. But, because the clocks moved back an hour, Allison’s time of birth was officially 1:06 a.m. So, she is 26 minutes older than Peter, even though he was born first!

Here’s the link to the full story.

On November 10, 1975, the bulk lake freighter S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a violent storm on Lake Superior. With a length of 729 feet, she was the largest boat on the Great Lakes when built in 1958.

The Fitzgerald left Superior, WI on November 9th with a cargo of 26,116 tons of taconite pellets. She headed for a steel mill on Zug Island located at the mouth of the Rouge River just south of Detroit, MI. About 17 miles north of Whitefish Point, the captain radioed that they were taking on water. She was listing to port and had two of three ballast pumps working. She had also lost her radar. All 29 officers and crew went down with the ship, which lies broken in two sections in 530 feet of water. There is still controversy as to how the Fitzgerald actually sank.

I’ve seen the Fitzgerald’s two lifeboats and other artifacts aboard the Museum Ship Valley Camp in Sault Ste. Marie, MI.

In 1976, Canadian Gordon Lightfoot recorded the song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“, commemorating the events surrounding the sinking of the ship.

A 90 ft. church tower in the Northern Germany village of Suurhusen, has been officially recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most lopsided building. It bumped the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of the top spot. The church was built in the middle 13th century and the tower was added in 1450. The tower was build on a wooden foundation and that, in combination with wet soil, causes it to lean 5.19 degrees. In comparison, the Tower of Pisa leans 3.97 degrees.

The tower was stabilized in 1996 to keep it from leaning more. The church is still in use, but because of the perceived danger of the tower falling over, church services are held only on occasions such as Christmas or Easter.

FamilySearch, the family history arm of the LDS Church is undertaking an ambitious project of digitizing their entire microfilmed collection of family history records. They have more than 2.3 million rolls of microfilm, which is equivalent to about 6 million 300-page books.

These records are held in their Granite Mountain Record Vault, located twenty miles southeast of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. It was constructed between 1958 and 1963 and reaches 600 feet into the north side of Little Cottonwood Canyon. Specially constructed fourteen ton doors at the main entrance are designed to withstand a nuclear blast. In the storage chambers, nature maintains constant humidity and temperatures optimum for microfilm storage.

The first part of this project is called Scanstone. It’s a system to rapidly create digital images of the microfilm records. They will be able to convert 370,000 rolls of film per year and could have the digitizing project completed by 2012. You can read more about the technicalities of the scanning process here.

The second part of this project is to index these scans so that anyone can search them online at FamilySearch.org. The LDS Church is recruiting thousands of volunteers to complete the indexing project. If you would like to volunteer, go to www.familysearchindexing.org. Once you register, you download their special software and then choose from a group of projects to work on. The project images are then downloaded to your computer. You transcribe the information and then upload it back to their site. The types of images include censuses and birth and death records from various states.

I’ve been helping to index for the past year. It takes about twenty minutes to complete a project. If you have some free time and want to contribute to making these important documents public, give it a try!

So, I upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard over the weekend. It took about 45 minutes. I didn’t run in to any problems. I have a 2.66 GHz. Quad-Core Mac Pro with three internal hard drives. One contains Leopard, the second, Windows Vista Ultimate, and the third is a shared drive containing music, photos and other stuff that is accessible from both OS X and Vista. I’m running Boot Camp and VMware Fusion, and both upgraded just fine.

I haven’t had a lot of time to spend playing with it yet, but I really like the new Quick Look feature. I can preview all kinds of files, such as PDFs, images, movies, and Microsoft Word and Excel files, without actually launching the applications. It’s going to save a ton of time searching for something in all my family history files!

Leonardo DaVinci’s mural painting, The Last Supper, can now be viewed up-close by anyone on the Internet. The Italian imaging firm HAL9000 has posted a 16 billion pixel digital scan of the famous work on their website www.haltadefinizione.com. You’re able to zoom in on specific areas of the image as if you were standing right in front of it.

The original mural measures 15 ft. × 29 ft. and can be found on a wall of the refectory (dining hall) in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. DaVinci began working on it in 1495, and finished The Last Supper in 1498. He was a known procrastinator and did not work on the mural continuously during that period.

It’s amazing to analyze.