Obscure Heroes of History 2: Herman Hollerith

At least once a week, I find out about some dude that did something cool way back when. Last week was that Walter Wellman guy, and today I found out about *drumroll* Herman Hollerith. (That's him, with the mustache.)

Hollerith was born on February 29 (A leap year!), 1860, in Buffalo, New York. He went to college at the age of 15, and graduated with a degree in Mining Engineering.

Right now, you're probably wondering, "what the crap, Tony? Why are you telling us about this guy?" Well, I'll tell you: he invented the punch card, and the machine that reads them.

WAIT! Don't leave yet! It gets better.

He invented that machine for the 1890 Census, which takes place every decade and counts everyone in the United States. From that data, we can determine how many congressmen your state gets, how many electoral votes your state gets, and what federal grants your state gets. We've had one every decade since the Revolutionary War ended, starting in 1790. By the time Hollerith rolled around, the US was so big, and there was so much information to be filled out for the census that it took the better part of 9 years to publish all the data... just in time for the next census to start.

So along comes Hollerith, with his mechanical tabulator (I love that old-timey talk), and guess what he does with it? He cut that time down, start to finish, to 2-and-a-half years. The population stuff was figured out in just SIX WEEKS, and all that other stuff (opinions about things like churches, poverty, crime, and then individual business info) took longer, but back then, six weeks was unheard of.

Do you see what I'm getting at? This guy was instrumental in creating electronic computational devices, the descendants of which you are reading this article on. COMPUTERS, ladies and gents, computers.

Later on in his life, he became one of the founding members of International Business Machines, better known as IBM. Also, he had an awesome mustache.

I like this stuff. I'm gonna try and do more like this, hopefully once a week. Random people from history are fun to me. I'll try to make it interesting, and not scare away the few readers I actually have.

Stay classy, Planet Earth.

CAPTAIN AMERICA MOVIE NEWS!!!

So, Ain't it Cool News has reported that they're looking at a bunch of guys for the upcoming Captain America film, which I want to rock sooooo haaard I can taste it. I don't know hardly any of these guys... CLICK FOR PICS!

Chace Crawford (Gossip Girl)
John Krasinski (Da Office)
Scott Porter (Friday Night Lights)
Mike Vogel (Cloverfield)
Michael Cassidy (Lots o' TV)
Patrick Flueger (Brothers and Da 4400)
Garrett Hedlund (the upcoming nerd-gasm known as Tron Legacy)

Hmm.
Aside from the guy from the office, none of these guy's faces sprang to mind when I heard there names. That's okay, I think, because I've always wanted an unknown for the part: famous people have egos. A newbie will hopefully come without one. On the downside, each one of these guys looks like somebody I used to call a "dudebro" back in college: less "All-American" and more "Frat Guy". Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

For the Babies

I've heard of the March of Dimes, even though I wasn't really sure what they did until I went to a Kickoff meeting today. Check this out:

They save babies.

This has immediately become the most important group in the world to me. There are few things in this world that I feel more strongly about than children, and the younger they are, the stronger that feeling is, like some kind of infant-dependent Hulking out. I have no idea how their goal slipped past me for so long, but now I want to get involved, and heavily.

The money that is given to March of Dimes goes for research to prevent things like premature birth, heart defects, oral clefts, and neural tube defects. Even the child-hating crone from one of my previous posts should be able to get behind this one.

Here in Greenville, there's a walk planned for April 24. I don't know that I'll be able to search for contributions or actually do the march, but I'ma give some money to this. Maybe they'll give me a t-shirt (looking over my pamphlets, you need to donate $200 to get one, but I'm thinking that could be the best $200 I ever spend).

Check here to look for a March of Dimes near you, and give what you can. FOR THE BABIES.

Movie Monday 5: Shutter Island - 4.5-out-of-5 T's

I don't want to like Leonardo DiCaprio, and I'll tell you why: in the 4th Grade, when "Titanic" came out, every single girl at Woodland Heights Elementary turned to butter when people mentioned the letters that constituted his name.

"What was that? The letter 'D'? That's in Leo's first AND last name! Aaaahhh!" Or something like that. I can forgive Jonathan Taylor Thomas because he's faded into obscurity, but Leo is still, y'know, famous, so I want to not like him. He makes it impossible, though.

The guy is a great actor. This is absolutely, 100% undeniable. Every role I've seen him in, he takes absolutely seriously. He's more than just the girl-melting pretty face I wanted him to be, he's an actual actor, which can be hard to come by. So, I want to hate him, but he won't let me because he's so awesome.

"Shutter Island" is terrifying. And not in the way "Saw" or "Paranormal Activity" is, with scares that are limited to stuff jumping out at you, or "Oh, jeez, that's a knife in his face! Why is the knife in his face?!" or having to saw your own foot off. The way this film is put together, the pacing, the things you see in flashbacks, all are designed to throw you off balance and scare the crap out of you without the schlock that modern "horror movies" are completely dependent on.

Martin Scorsese knocked this one out of the park.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels, who comes to Shutter Island, a facility for the criminally insane, looking for a woman who just... disappeared. He comes with an ulterior motive, though: he's looking for the man who killed his wife, and he suspects that things are not all that they seem on Shutter Island.

This movie earned it's "R" rating just by being frikkin' creepy, but when I left, it was without that guilty feeling I have when I occasionally go and see an actual horror film, like "Man, Mom would be disappointed that I watched that." Nope, no misplaced crises of conscience here. This film was pert-near perfect. Upon further viewings, I'm sure that I could find more stuff wrong with it: things that don't look quite right, errors in continuity, things like that, but after the first viewing, when everything is fresh and I had literally no idea what was going to happen, I enjoyed this film immensely.

Check it out.

On a final note, and a possible *SPOILER* there are some very disturbing images in this. There are flashbacks and hallucinations, and the one that straight up nearly made me cry was right after the escaped woman, who, remember, is in a nuthouse for the criminally insane, is standing over her dead children, whom she has drowned. One when they, and she, are covered in blood (hallucination), and another set right after she drowned them, with them still floating in a lake (flashback). And to me, that was the truly terrifying bit, more so than knives in faces: seeing what people actually do to each other, instead of bombastic make-believe with serial killers and chainsaws.

Like I said, good film, but if you're at all like me, the ride to the end was a little freaky. My only worry now is that other people will see this review, watch the film, and think I'm a wuss. Just know: if I catch you calling me names, I'm probably bigger than you. Just saying.

This guy was the bomb

His name was Walter Wellman. He was born in Ohio in 1858, and he was an adventurer.

I LOVE THAT TITLE. I want that title. According to dictionary.com, an adventurer is one who "has, enjoys, or seeks adventure." How do you do that? Without money, I mean. Any time you think of someone having an adventure, it's usually funded pretty well. It seems impossible to be an adventurer without a pretty deep pocketbook... but that isn't the point now.

Walter Wellman was a journalist for most of his life, and a pioneer of arctic aviation. What does that mean? It means he tried to fly a blimp over the North Pole.

Read that last bit again.

That's epic. Even now, 100 years later, that's epic. Between 1905 and 1909, he made like 3 attempts to reach the north pole by airship, and each time he was thwarted by the wind or faulty equipment. But still: he tried to do something monumental, and that's more than most of us can say.

I'm sure there are other people who tried and succeeded at things like this, but Wellman holds a special place with me because of our similar professions. I can only hope that someday, I can go on something close to an adventure, or try to reach heights that he reached for.

Movie Monday 4: The Wolfman - 3.5-out-of-5 T's

I frikkin' love Werewolves, and the original Universal Studios "Wolfman" rocked my world. The current Wolfman, starring Benicio del Toro... rocked it less so, but there was still a bit of rocking to be had.

First, I don't like del Toro. I don't know why, but when I see him in things, he's my least favorite actor. In this, he was actually quite good, but I had to get past my dislike before I could start to dig this film. Fortunately, Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaving graciously provided a bulldozer that allowed me to begin digging almost immediately.

Seriously, these guys are two of my favorite actors ever. I will watch them in anything, and here, they eat up the scenery with their very presence. And the love interest, Emily Blunt, does a great job too, bringing some class and believability to the bosom-heaving, damsel-in-distress role.

But why do you go to a werewolf movie? To watch a wolfman kill the crap out of stuff, and here, you will not be disappointed.

The first time you "see" a wolfman, which is more a big furry blur, it's running around a gypsy camp tearing off arms and legs. It's so fast, by the time you turn around to look at the screaming legless guy behind you, it's already on the other side of the camp eating a gypsy's liver. Thrill a minute, here.

The transformation scenes were almost glorious. I would have liked to see what Rick Baker, the makeup guy, had in mind originally (he wanted to do real transformation scenes, like he did in "American Werewolf in London"), and while the 3D stuff was not bad, it wasn't perfect, and it needed to be to pull this off. When he's finally transformed, though, the makeup was fantastic.

Then, in the end? There is a fight scene. Oooooh, the fight scene. It's between del Toro and the werewolf that bit him, and it was great.

But you're asking, Tony, where's the down? Why only a 3.5? Well I'll tell you: there's a deer and a bear, and they're both computer generated, and they look it. You couldn't get a real bear, guys? They had a real bear in "Gentle Ben", and that came out in 1967. Bears can be found, and so can deer. Come on. And, as previously stated, the transformation looked not-quite-right, with that CG sheen they have when the lighting is just wrong enough to be noticed.

The settings were perfect, the cast was infallible. Screw vampires: you want a gothic horror story? Check this out. I was hiding halfway behind my hand the whole time, like a little girl, and I have no shame at that. Good movie: I'm definitely gonna buy it when it comes out.

Wolfman. Check it out.

The internet is hilarious

I love the internet. Really, I do. Every once in a while it will show me something new that is absolutely hilarious and makes me, literally, LoL. And I hate "lol". Not laughing out loud, but when people put it in texts, because 99.9% of the time, they to not, actually, laugh out loud. It's a peeve of mine, a pet one, if you will.

But I found PokéParents. And I LoL'd. Oh, how I lawled.

That right there is BlastDad. He's a Blastoise, and he's supposed to represent the coolest dad ever. Then there's CharDad, who is the angriest father ever, or VenusDad, who is the laziest dad ever, but at least he takes an interest in your life. These are probably only funny to me, but they can't be, right? Someone else came up with them, so I can't be alone in this. Here's the link.

PokéParents. You probably won't get it. But if you do, please let me know. And we will lawl together. It will be glorious. Aaaaand here's one more:

Oh, PikaDad, you're a hoot.

BETRAYED BY NATURE!

What the crap, Nature? I do what I can to pimp you to the people of Darke County, and this, this is the thanks I get? UGH.

I'll rewind. In my last post, I extol the "virtues" of the tomato: it is a.) disgusting, b.) a member of the nightshade family, which is largely poisonous, and c.) disgusting again. That makes it doubly disgusting. This is a fact.

I did some research, cause I'm that kind of guy. Unfortunately, I did the research after I ran my mouth off. I wasn't wrong about the tomato.

Guess who else is in the nightshade family? Please excuse me for a few minutes as I relieve myself of some manly tears.

The potato. It was inevitable, in retrospect. I mean, there's that whole "potato, po-tah-to", "tomato, horrible-fruits-of-the-devil" thing. The only two foods where people actively argue their pronunciation were destined to correspond on some level. Like the title says, though, I feel so... betrayed. Because now my previous argument bears no weight.

I could hide my distaste behind my questionable psuedobotany and feel superior, but now... now that shield is gone. Because the potato, my friends, the potato is one of God's gifts to Man, right up there with flannel and women. Are they necessarily good for us? No. But that's part of the fun. (I don't actually believe that Eve first showed up with a box of flannel shirts and potatoes, but it's enjoyable to pretend.)

It's a good thing I'm still in "reevaluate" mode, or this revelation might have broken me. And a broken Tony is nonrefundable. (Booyah.)

Now for manly tears.

Sometimes you're wrong, and by you, I mean me

People have trouble realizing this, myself included. It's the mark of either extreme confidence, or extreme ignorance (I'll let you decide which).

In college, I had a philosophy teacher who put it to me like this:

"Who would know better what is good? Someone who has only a passing interest in a subject, or someone who has dedicated their life to it?" To which I answerz, "Why, sir, it would be the dedicated individual!" You need to take into account personal preference, of course, but in the grand scheme, the guy who has a PHD in doctoring probably knows more about health than your "cousin's aunt who studied holistic healing in India". (That was a completely random collection of words: I've never run into anyone who's said that, but you never know.)

This goes for books as well, which is something I've had trouble with in the past. I've generally shuddered when told that I had to read "An American Classic" because that probably meant it was written right after the Revolutionary War when the idea of a State was considered cutting edge, and bleeding was still practiced by doctors. And by "doctor" I mean "dentist", and by that I mean "barber". You know, the good old days.

I have forced myself to download Moby Dick onto my eReader, and began reading it the other day.

Hot dang. That book's a good time. I mean, sure, it's full of language I don't quite recognize, it's set in a time when "slave owner" was still an acceptable thing to put on a resume, and it's about hunting an animal that might be sentient into near-extinction, but it's a great read. Which makes me want to reevaluate everything I don't like. If I didn't like it when I was young, maybe that's just because I was stupid, you know? Now that I'm hopefully less stupid, I'll try to see what everyone who actually knows what they're talking about (those dedicated folks I mentioned earlier) has been raving about for the last, oh, hundred and fifty years.

It's amazing. It's like there's a whole new world out there, one where I can form new opinions instead of hanging on to my old ones. Maybe the French aren't just cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and instead they're a people who took a bad beating in WWI that colored the way they saw the world, and the way the world saw them, for the next few decades. Maybe the hairstyles in the 80's were necessary to show us just how bad hair could get before we started to make it better. Maybe tomatoes aren't members of the poisonous nightshade family, and therefore aren't disgusting to eat!

Or, maybe they are. Disgusting. And they are members of the nightshade family of plants, which can kill you, so you shouldn't eat them either. But you know what I mean. This new revelation of mine also excludes the so-called "American Classic" known as "The Scarlet Letter". I accept that the people smarter than me say it's awesome, and that Nathanial Hawethorn (that guy in the picture with the awesome mustache) was a genius. This is where my personal preference comes in and alerts the world that it sucked in 2003, so it probably sucks now, too.

Cut me some slack. I'm reevaluating my feelings about the French now, so that stinker can wait a while in the land of "OMG, that was awful".

"Welcome to real life" and "Lessons from Z-land"

Bah. Humbug.

I was sick over the weekend. I'm still not firing on all 6 cylinders, but I can at least function, even if I sound like I'm talking through a tuba and occasionally hack up a lung. In case you aren't around Ohio right now, we got totally trounced with snow Friday night. We were at a level three ("Only emergency crews allowed on the roads") for nearly 3 days.

I STILL HAD TO GO TO WORK.

This is my welcome to the world of Post-College adulthood. My first winter couldn't be a light one, a minor dusting that was a slight inconvenience to gently ferry me into the world of being a grownup. NO. We get 14 inches of snow in 12 hours, the day before I have to pull a 10 hour shift. Aaaand I'm sick.

(This is the part where you're all supposed to pity me. In just a few seconds, I'm going to kick myself out of my pity pants, and start acting like a big boy.)

So how great is that? What a welcome! It could have been worse, I know that. I could have been one of those poor schmucks who swerved off the road, landed in a ditch in a snow drift and had to stay there for six hours because plows couldn't get to them (true story). At least I have a job to go to, right? And you know what? I didn't die. I'm sick for over two days, work for the weekend, got right back up for work on Monday, and I'm still kicking.

This is how it is. Screw pity. Dad and Grandpa had it worse than this, and I've never seen them whine about it.

The moral of this little tale? Sometimes, you just gotta man up. Or, as the immortal muse Woody Harrelson aptly stated in the 2009 film "Zombieland": "It's time to nut up or shut up."

Truer words, Woody. Truer words.

Movie Muhfriday 3: Edge of Darkness - 4-out-of-5 T's

Say what you will about the man in his private life: when you put him on screen, Mel Gibson is one of the greatest actors of his generation.

I don't even mind that he plays the same character in pretty much every movie. He tosses on a new accent, and I'm ready to watch him in anything. Let's have a quick rundown of his awesomeness: The Mad Max series, The Bounty, The Lethal Weapon Series, Hamlet, Braveheart, The Patriot (also known as Braveheart 2: IN AMERICA), What Women Want (which should have been called "Mel Reading Minds so He can Get Some")... great films. And do you want to know why? Because just about every one of those films has the same plot: Mel is happy, someone hurts him or his family, SO HE MESSES THEIR **** UP.

Edge of Darkness is no exception, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If you like Mel Gibson, and you should if you breath oxygen, you should see this movie. There's action, suspense, more suspense, and some great performances by several fantastic actors.

You want to watch this. Go. And go now.

On a potentially lighter note, check this out:

That, my friends, is a picture from Mel's next movie: "The Beaver". Directed by Jody Foster, it's about something bad happening to Mel (he doesn't lose his family this time) and he finds a beaver puppet that helps him to cope. After a while, he only talks through the beaver, much to his family's chagrin.

You bet your sweet bippy I'm gonna watch that.

Here's a little bit of "future" for you

I'd never heard of this before today, which surprises me: liquid glass. It was developed by a German company called Nanopool, and within a few years, it will be on everything you own because it protects anything it's been applied to from everything, bacteria to UV radiation.

Here's how it works: they remove the silicon-dioxide from sand, which is the main component in glass, and I guess that's a fluid in it's natural state. It can then be applied to anything: countertops, clothes, toys, plants, anything, and it will suffer no ill effects. The layer of glass is 0ne millionth of a millimeter thick (that's 500 times thinner than a human hair) and it's water resistant, which means you only need water to clean the item.

The thin layer is flexible, meaning you can pour a bottle of wine on a silk shirt and it will just wash out.

Plants coated with it are resistant to fungus, and grow fine. It has no effect on the environment. Sterile surfaces can be kept clean with just a bit of hot water instead of needing a bunch of stinky materials that irritate the eyes.

This is nuts, guys. They're shipping the product to the UK soon. Within a few years, everything you own will be covered in glass, and we'll only need soap to clean ourselves and our pets.

... Unless... no. That would be silly.

Have you ever been disappointed with a whole town?

Cause I have! Several times, in fact.

I love my hometown, in kind of the same way you love your pancreas: I don't really think about it much, but I can't imagine life without it. Last night, it was my town, and not my pancreas, that saw a child on the street (an urchin, kind of like Oliver or some other Dickinsian orphan) and promptly beat him (or her) soundly around the head with their walker for being all "uppity and young".

We needed a levy to pass in a special vote. This would have given us the money to build a much-needed new school, as the old ones are literally falling apart, dropping masonry on playgrounds (true story) and running heat nonstop during the summer. It didn't pass.

Last week, a woman called me and asked why our paper hasn't covered more of the negatives regarding this levy (higher taxes and... uhm. I think that was the only one). When I tried to explain to her why this school was necessary (masonry and heating and bad wiring and lack of space), she interrupted and stated that I didn't understand;

"Greenville is DYING," she stated.

"Well, no duh, you old crone," says I, with less insulting verbage. "This is our attempt to pump some life back into the old girl!" It was to no avail. She proceeded to tell me that she, quote, "Hates kids", and this levy will cause her to lose her house. "Why should I lose my home so some kid I don't even like can get a better education?"

... Wow. I don't think it would come to that, to actually losing her home, but this woman was full of bile and ugliness, and I eventually stopped being polite. I didn't come out and call her names or anything, but she ended up calling my boss and alerting her to my "rudeness". My boss laughed it off, then wrote an article proclaiming our paper as firmly behind and for the issue. I hope the old bat read Saturdays paper and seethed until she exploded.

It's just disappointing. Everyone is leaving this town, and that includes businesses. I can't wait until I can, too, when there are people like that here.

So I bought an e-reader

This is my e-reader. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I went to Borders on Saturday, and they were having a sale... and I spent more than I probably should have, but I bought an e-reader. I dig it. In case you've been living under a rock, and have just now crawled out from underneath, blinking into the sun, and found an internet-ready computer in the field where your rock is that just so happens to be on my blog (and how are you even reading this, you crazy rock-person, you?), how it works is thus:

Step 1. You buy the reader. Oh, lucky you! You can now read electronic books! But where are the books? All it has are excerpts of larger books, and not all of them are in English!

Step 2. Get online. Buy an electronic book, download onto e-reader. Further jubilation! Unfortunately, if you bought the Kindle and put Animal Farm on it, you don't have it anymore because Amazon can steal your books back. Douchebags. But if you got the Sony E-reader, you sacrifice "internet anywhere" for the ability to keep your books. Woohoo!

Step 3. Balk at the price of current e-books. What the crap? $10 for the latest Nicholas Sparks novel? For shame! Instead, you go here, to Project Gutenburg: nearly any book that has had the copyright run out and is now in the public domain can be found within the buzzing pages of this electronic marvel. They aren't exactly current, but I'd rather read a 90 year-old American classic than than fork over 10 clams for "Dear John".

And there you have it. I've got some Edgar Rice Burroughs on there, I'm thinking about some Mark Twain, maybe a little Walt Whitman. I'm also eagerly awaiting when some old Pulps (Doc Savage, Green Hornet, the Shadow) enter the public domain... give it about a decade, and I'll be set.

All joking aside, it's a great little gizmo. I'm just a little hesitant to spend a tenner on a book, any book, that I don't know if I can enjoy, and can't even re-sell if I don't.

You reading anything? What do you think about it?