I am amazed at how much white noise and white light a small city like Charlottetown generates*. As I drove down Grafton Street on my way to my apartment last night I watched the whole city flicker and die out; A remarkable sight.
Of course I don’t own a flashlight or a candle. Picture me navigating my apartment via the faint green glow of my cell phone keypad (see artists conception to right) – I’d rather you not picture me trying to use the bathroom though.
Like most who have grown up with The Learning Channel and Discovery Channel, I am not easily impressed by weather in our temperate maritime climate. Last night, however, I was impressed.
By the way, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, we had a storm here in the Maritimes last night.
*I was also amazed at how much white noise a few computers can generate. I knew it was bad, but until it went silent, I hadn’t realized how bad. It’s almost enough to make you wanna buy an iMac.
I witnessed the same event last night. My father flew in on the last flight of the night, arriving at 10:30PM, just about dead in the middle of the storm. Passengers on the plane looked quite shell shocked. They sat on the runway in Halifax for about 20 minutes with the plane swaying heavily from side to side. Once in the air they were fine, but eventually they had to land. With the runway being the open, desolate area it has to be there is nothing to stop wind and they described the force during the walk from the plane to the door as being hard enough that they struggled to breath. One passengers was literally gasping for air leaning against the giant cow, strange site.
Driving home we stopped for a red light near That’s Entertainment on Belvedere Ave. Sitting there we watched a large chunk of the city and university flick on and off like some strange Christmas display. Every 5 to 10 seconds the lights would flick. All the lights. Street lights, traffic signals, buildings and signs.
Everythings normal.
Complete darkness.
Everythings normal again.
Complete darkness.
It tricked us into thinking you were seeing lightning.
We drove slowly, expecting transformers to explode or poles to come down. They never did, but it was one of the strangest and most interesting things I have ever seen. I considered going back out and driving through the park to see the waves. Today everything is fairly normal, but they haven’t lifted the wind warning yet.
Maybe tonight will be another show.
If you can get hold of the video from TED 8, there’s an amazing speech cum epic poem by Godfrey Reggion that includes mention of how, when they were filming Koyaanisqatsi, they found themselves shooting in Times Square at the exact start of the famous New York blackout. He talks about how the effect was something like watching the erasure of history happen before his very eyes.
The local radio station playing in my car was flickering with the lights of the city – nice added effect.
Ah, green keypad-glow. I used that once to navigate around my house last … was it Thanksgiving? When all the power went off. Then I was lucky to stumble upon my amazingly cool Photon Light that lit up my basement. Until Charlie decided to flash me in the pupils with a larger, normal flashing, sending me wincing for darkness.
When I was just on ThinkGeek looking for that link, I think I found the first clever anti Bin Laden shirt.
might i add that the lack of fan noise is only one of the countless reasons one should consider getting an iMac.
Dave, despite our occasional apple-bashing, I welcome your pimping. The silence of the iMac is very impressive and, while I’m not in the market for a low end mac with a 15″ monitor, sound levels will be a factor in my next PC purchaces (which may mean I have to build my own from components).
Then again, moving my office out of the server room would probably help with the white noise a bit too.
While some macs run with quiet hard drives and no fans, no manufacturer can eliminate that awful barely-sensible hiss of electrics. You know the feeling, and it is just that – a feeling, when someone in the house turns on a TV. That spooks me good.
I remember walking down hallways in high school and knowing that we would be watching a tape in my next class because I could “hear” the tv from the hallway as I approached the door. I always find it strange when I look across a room at a monitor and I can see it refresh.
Yeah, Charlie, I know what you mean. We sometimes jokingly ‘zap’ eachothers monitors at the office here by hitting the degauss button (especially powerful in my 21″ behemoth).
I can’t help but think that we’ll tell our grandchildren that we did this (much to their horror) just like our grandparents would play with the mercury from a broken thermostat.
My longing for a flat-panel display is 90% techno-lust and 10% ambiguous health concerns.
Among my earliest weird interests or hobbies – the kind of thing you do not discuss on a first date – was long distance AM radio listening: “Look, Jenny, there’s Al…he likes radio…ooooh.” Anyway, in the late 1970s, for example, I heard East Germany on a common AM radio in Truro. So much of the world of electronics send out interference that when I would want to hear a signal that was truly weak – say Chinese internal broadcasts around 4000 Khz – I would go around the house turning off TVs, computers, lights. [The variable speed fans are really noisy.] Once it was all done and the white noise stilled, the house would sound much quieter than I would have imagined. On September 11th, I remember a similar absence of noise walking into the house at noon when I realized no cars or trucks were on the road, no jets were in the air, no boats were on the water and no one was outside doing work for miles. I often wonder what the world in 1600 sounded like if all the technology is subtracted like than but then you add in all the wildlife that we have erased.
In Michael Chrichton’s book “Timeline” he makes mention of what the world sounded like in the 1600’s. If I remember correctly, multiple characters, after being switched into a parrallel universe which exists in the 1600, become dizzy and have to sit down for a few minutes because they are not used to a world without radio frequencies bombarding them.
I recall that book quite clearly, and Dan is correct. The characters are indeed puzzled by the lack of sound, and one even notices a difference in the air quality.
On the topic of quantum theory, The One sucked.