Friday Links

A few stories in the news:

From The Washington Post, a Metro train derailed this morning, and the cause is not yet known.

From Local 15, a Silicon Valley company presents robot room service.

From CBC News, a scientist in Brazil learns the hard way about venomous frogs.

From Science Daily, scientists find evidence of oscillating neutrinos.

From ForTheWin, Alabama football coach Nick Saban is not pleased about his unauthorized biography.  (FTW cites two sources for their information.)

From TheStreet, NASA TV will broadcast live the upcoming six-hour spacewalk of two Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station.

From Forward, the move to Israel by Ethiopian Jews might be making them sick.

From GolfNewsNet, Tiger Woods has opened his own restaurant.  Whether the menu includes any items once suggested by Fuzzy Zoeller has not yet been determined.

From MSN, the first production run of Honda's new S660 has already sold out.

From BBC News, North Korea is setting up its own time zone.  (via, appropriately enough, Time)

From The Washington Times, the White House is downplaying the opposition by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to the nuclear deal with Iran.

From The Telegraph, suspected Islamic terrorists have killed and kidnapped guests at a hotel in Mali.

From NewsOK, jurors deliberating over whether to sentence Colorado theater shooter James Holmes to death ask to review a crime scene video.  UPDATE:  The jurors could not agree on the sentence.  As a result, Holmes will get life without parole.

From the Los Angeles Times, immigration officials have urged a district judge to reconsider her ruling to release hundreds of detained women and children.

And from Wired, the inanimate objects you should follow on Twitter.

The Death Of Cecil From A Zimbabwean Perspective

In The New York Times, a Zimbabwean studying for his doctorate in the United States gives some perspective about the death of Cecil the lion at the hands of a visiting American hunter, and his opinion on the reaction by Americans.  Let's just say that he's not asking for condolences for a lion.  I'll provide just one brief quote:

Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people?

Read the full article.

Sights In Three States

After leaving the Allegheny Portage Railroad NHS in central Pennsylvania, I continued driving north and west toward Lake Erie and into Ohio.  I stopped in Conneaut, which occupies the northeast corner of Ohio, to visit their railroad museum.  The Conneaut Historical Railroad Museum consists of an old New York Central depot, full of various exhibits, and some larger objects outside.  Nickel Plate Road steam locomotive #755 is parked on its own track, along with several railcars.

Here's one side of #755.  A metal fence is in front of the other.

On a separate, very short track are these vehicles once used for track inspection and maintenance.  Behind the fence are active tracks used by CSX.

In this shot, we can see the track inspection vehicles from their front end.  To the left in the shade are a caboose and a yellow hopper car.  Behind all these is the east end of the museum building.  To the right is an old ball signal, along with the above-mentioned fence and CSX tracks.  This site has some good information on early railroad signals such as ball signals.

In front of the rear of the caboose is a scaled-down steam engine.

For more on the Conneaut Historical Railroad Museum, go here and here.

After my stop in Conneaut, I continued eastward into Pennsylvania and took a brief hike in Erie Bluffs State Park.  From a parking lot just off State Highway 5, a trail leads northward toward the lake.  The trail approaches these trees, and then passes them on the left.

After a bit of exploration, I found a place where I could see Lake Erie without too many tree branches in the way.  Somewhere not far beyond the horizon is Ontario, Canada.

I eventually found my way to the southwest corner of New York.  From a rest stop on Interstate 86, which is also NY State Highway 17, this is part of Lake Chautauqua.

I eventually turned southward back into Pennsylvania and toward Maryland.  There were and still are some more mountains to cross to get back home.

The Allegheny Portage Railroad

During my younger days, I once read about a canal that went across Pennsylvania, which included a railroad that took canal boats over a mountainous area between two sections of artificial waterway.  The Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site near Gallitzin, PA preserves a small section of that railroad, which ran from Hollidaysburg, just south of Altoona, to Johnstown, later known for its tragic flood.  The NHS also includes an engine house.  In each engine house along the APR, there was a steam engine that pulled ropes attached to railcars on which canal boats rode up and down an inclined section of track.  On level sections between the inclines, horses or locomotives pulled the boat-laden cars.  This is the east side of the engine house.

These tracks run eastward and downhill from the engine house.  In the distance is the Skew Arch Bridge, under which the tracks used to run.

In this closeup of the inclined track, we can see that the rails are made of wood clad with strips of metal.

Inside the engine house, the ropes used to pull the railcars are mounted on wheels, which would have been driven by the steam engine.

In the section of level track west of the engine house, the rails are made of steel and anchored via triangular supports.  In the background is the Lemon House, a tavern built by businessman Samuel Lemon.

The Lemon House, as seen from its south side, is three stories tall.

Beyond the west end of the tracks, the old path of the APR can still be seen.

Inside the engine house was a small exhibit, including these replicas of two types of rope used by the APR.  The earlier ropes (top) were made of hemp.  They were eventually replaced by steel cables (bottom), developed by John Roebling, later known for building suspension bridges.  The replicas are chained at one end to the exhibit table.  Visitors can thus handle them and get an appreciation of their physical properties.

More information about the APR may be found at Exploring The Offbeaten Path and ExplorePAhistory.

Sunday Links

Some things in the news:

From NBC Bay Area, in California, San Mateo County will conduct this coming November's election entirely by mail.

From Fox News, the families of two missing teenager boys in Florida have turned to online fundraising to continue searching for them.

From Business Standard, Motorola presents the Moto G.

From Twin Cities(dot)com, Minnesota's first month of having medical marijuana "is a mixed bag".

From CBS Chicago, a daughter of a former Illinois governor remembers the poor condition of her state's Governor's Mansion.

From The Independent, a policeman in Memphis was fatally shot while making a traffic stop.  UPDATE:  From AOL, the suspect has been identified.  He was a passenger in the stopped vehicle.

From Quartz, the Canadian hitchhiking robot, attempting to travel from Boston to San Francisco, survived only as far as Philadelphia, where it was found decapitated.

From The Street, Verizon employees continue to work while their contract is still being negotiated.

From The Chattanoogan, contrary to various Internet stories, the Navy will not charge Lt. Cmdr. Timothy White with any offense relating to the shooting incidents at two military centers.

From USA Today, debris found on the French Island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, has been determined not to be part of Flight MH 370.

From ABC News, a teenage girl has died three days after being stabbed at a gay pride parade in Jerusalem.

From The Gateway Pundit, this morning in Las Cruces, New Mexico, bombs explode at two churches.

From the New York Post, a teenage girl in New York City wonders why she was given a diploma that she didn't deserve.  She herself wrote the NYP article.

From The Guardian, hundreds of Confederate flag supports rally at Stone Mountain.

From Yahoo News, the EPA's Clean Power Plan faces legal scrutiny.

From the New York Daily News, the U.S. Coast Guard rescues a man who had been treading water for 4 hours, 44 miles off the coast of New Jersey.

From NBC Chicago, the body of a 20-year-old woman has been recovered two days after she and some friends went for a swim in Lake Michigan.

From CBS News, a wildfire north of San Francisco continues to spread.

From The Register, an asteroid known as "Space Peanut" just flew within 4.5 million miles of the earth.

And from Contract Music, a look at the musical career of British singer Cilla Black, who passed away at her home in Spain.

"Obama's Son" Causes Bomb Scare

A man in Chicago has been charged with felony disorderly conduct for causing a bomb scare near President Obama's home in Chicago.  After being arrested, he also ordered to wear an electronic monitoring device.  The suspect, Marquez Hassell, 20, claimed to be Obama's son.

I'd say that either teh stoopid or teh crazy is strong with this one.  Read more at the Chicago Sun-Times, CBS Chicago, the Chicago Tribune and WGN.

Capitol Barricade 1 - Car 0

Just before 9:00 a.m. this morning, a car crashed into the south barricade of the U.S. Capitol building, and went no farther.  The driver was taken into custody and the car towed away.  Whether the crash was deliberate or accidental has not yet been determined.

Read more at WJLA, WTOP, The Washington Post and CNN.

UK Prime Minister Hit By PC

British Prime Minister David Cameron got into a bit of hot water over his choice of words in describing the people who are trying to illegally enter his country by stowing themselves onto vehicles going through the Eurotunnel (a.k.a. Chunnel) from France.  As reported by the Australian site ABC, here is his offending remark:

"I accept that you've got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life," he said.

By referring to these illegal immigrants as a "swarm", he drew rebukes from his fellow U.K. politicians, such as:

Acting Labour Party leader Harriet Harman said Mr Cameron should remember he was talking about people, not insects.

In a way, I can see her point, since only people, not insects, are capable of understanding and therefore disobeying laws.  Perhaps "mob" would be a more appropriate term.  Read the full story.

The source of this story is not affiliated with the American Broadcasting Company, known by its acronym "ABC", but is instead the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Maryland Boy Receives Two New Hands

When he was just 2 years old, Maryland resident Zion Harvey underwent a quadruple amputation in which doctors had to remove his hands and his legs below the knee, because of an infection.  Now at age 8, he has become the first child in the world to receive a double hand transplant.  A medical team of 40 people, including 12 surgeons, took nearly 11 hours to perform the operation.

Read more at Yahoo News, ABC News, The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post.

A Tripp Down Memory Lane

During the late 1990s, Linda Tripp was a civil servant who worked in the West Wing of the White House, where she got to know a young co-worker named Monica Lewinsky and eventually exposed her affair with President Bill Clinton.  Now 65, a grandmother of 7, and with her husband the owner of a successful German Christmas store in Virginia, Tripp has broken her long silence by having an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail.  An excerpt:

It was the scandal that saw Bill Clinton impeached and which threatened to bring down his presidency. For many, it continues to define it to this day.

But according to the woman who outed Monica Lewinsky as the president's mistress, the real story was never about Monica. It was about 'subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice… a true abuse of power.' And it was about Hillary.

Because, according to Linda Tripp, it was Hillary who manipulated and stage managed the story, converting herself from a lackluster First Lady with unimpressive approval ratings to admirable First Victim - the blindsided wife standing by her man. 

Tripp has a lot to say about her former co-worker's ex-boyfriend's wife, and it's not pretty.  Read the full story.