Get an NTSC DV camcorder and import a clip into your system, but don't play it back in an NLE like iMovie or Premiere -- feed it to Quicktime Player or WMP and see what happens. The aspect ratio of NTSC pixels isn't quite square, so what a proper video editor will render at 640x480 is actually stored on the tape at 720x480, so the final product will look rather squashed if the playback program doesn't quite understand DV./brian
Can't quite answer that one for you -- I don't know all the details. I can only relate it to what I know about video signals.
There's four different ways you can transmit a video signal (apart from an RF connection, that is): composite, s-video, component, and digital. I'll skip s-video, as AFAIK it's just a hybrid between composite and component. Digital means you're sending bits, and it's up to the monitor to make sense of them; in this context it can be dismissed. That leaves composite and component.
High-end video standards -- SVHS, MiniDV, DVD -- tend to favor component (or s-video) connections because of the higher bandwidth required. It's possible to mash the R/G/B signals together, but the end result will be somewhat lossy. This doesn't matter on straight VHS, since the picture signal of VHS-NTSC is so poor compared to an OTA NTSC signal that the loss of color value doesn't really matter.
I've actually seen a fairly dramatic example of something similar to this, though I'm not sure if it's precisely the same issue. I produce a public-access TV show, and since I work part-time at a not-very-high-paying job my equipment is all consumer equipment -- JVC GR-DVL70 (single chip) camcorder, Mitsubishi S-VHS VCR, and my monitor is a Zenith TV-VCR combo. I've had the opportunity to view my output on a decent TV, both straight off the camcorder and from an S-VHS master.
Well, as it happens we have a new VCR in the house that includes SQPB, so I was able to pop the S-VHS master into the deck for a showing. I immediately noticed that while I got decent color from my personal VCR, the new family unit caused massive color washout, probably from the circuitry's attempt to downconvert the signal to standard VHS before pumping it through a composite connector. (It's a DVD/VCR combo unit, with both S-video and composite outputs, but as is common with those units it's not possible to run the VCR through the high-quality outputs -- if you ask me it makes having SQPB sort of pointless.)
I'm not quite sure what I've just proved, but essentially more data, properly managed, is better. If you have three CCDs, each tuned to a primary color, the DSPs in the camera don't have to worry about trying to separate a composite color signal. I suspect it makes frame encoding easier, and the end result is certainly better in terms of color space.
(There is one downside, though: at least in the case of Sony units, the construction of the CCD assembly makes it impossible to implement night shot on a 3-chip camera. But then night shot is more of a consumer feature than anything else...)
It's called color separation -- the three chips make for much better color quality because they don't have to composite all the color information. And consider this: if I can do that much better with one CCD in my el cheapo JVC, don't forget that the same applies to the chips in the Canon GL-2 I drool over at my not-so-local Micro Center./Brian
I always wanted a pocket computer. Granted, I have a Palm IIIx now, and I could probably spank a TRaSh-80 PC-4 with a Casio graphing calculator, but still.
I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm reading this with the voice of Mike Myers in my head. I say "I'm not entirely sure why" because it's just Mike Myers, not Dr. Evil or Austin Powers.../Brian
The other bit of info is that the studies surrounding the Dvorak keyboard were known to be so biased and buried under conflict of interest that they weren't to be trusted. I might have seen something on snopes.com about that, I don't remember for certain./Brian
Nuh-uh. William Poundstone, Big Secrets. He's got a pretty in-depth analysis of the Coke formula, along with a reconstructed procedure for making the Merchandise 7X that is the basic "cola" flavor essence. There is also a version of the original secret formula at large, but it is not believed to be the current formula (the rumor that at least one version of the formula -- don't remember if it's this one -- was retired because a reformulated version with phosphoric acid tasted better; a switch in the can material apparently accompanied it.)
Poundstone (and others) have also made an excellent point about secret formulas in food -- yes, you can do it by reverse-engineering, but when you consider Coca-Cola is one of the largest companies in the world, but why would you want to? You can't match their economy of scale, and who would buy something identical to Coke but more expensive anyway? Better to create your own unique product. (The same also infamously applies to Tricon/KFC, whose "eleven secret herbs and spices" seem to be nothing more than salt, pepper, and MSG... rest assured that if you put in the cayenne, garlic, and whatnot that was probably in the Colonel's true original recipe you'd get a product very different from modern KFC, even if you used the same pressure-frying process.)
Industrial espionage seems somewhat counterproductive anyway -- I've heard stories out of Soviet Russia (shaddap) that one of the big problems the Soviets had was that they spent so much effort on reverse-engineering American technology that they were five years behind on any given tech. It probably didn't help that for decades the scientific establishment (especially in biology and nuclear physics) was so politicized that innovation was more or less impossible for fear of running afoul of Uncle Joe -- under Lysenko, for example, the accepted lines of genetic research were so primitive and unscientific that the only way the Soviets were likely to get increased production in crops would be to smuggle high-yield crops in from Western countries and hope to Josef (no God, remember?) that they'd grow the same in the Russian environment. Russian computer systems would be virtually identical to the IBM systems they copied, right down to mounting holes in the cases. The upshot is that in the interview I read, the general who was giving the interview said that by the time the Soviets had finished reverse-engineering the technology, it was obsolete./Brian
Finally, an Apple-supported X. The big question is where it was before now. BUT -- surely someone will attempt to port Cinelerra over now? And forget Photoshop Elements -- while the GIMP will never knock off Photoshop, its little brother will be toast in short order.
Aw, hell. It's about time, and it's nice that all the cool iApps will be free-as-in-beer now./Brian
RDRAM is not a bad idea in theory, though -- it's the same idea as replacing 1284 and SCSI with USB and Firewire. After a certain point it's not worth the trouble trying to maintain a wide paralell link -- the modern interconnect busses are serial (including SATA, which I'm still a bit skeptical of), and Rambus has only a 16-bit pipe with some mighty fast bit bang going on.
That said, all indications are it's a bear to work with, and perhaps narrow memory busses aren't the Right Thing? (Don't forget -- Intel RDRAM chipsets, with the exception of i820, all operate on dual-channel RDRAM, which means a 32-bit bus instead of 16... says something rather interesting about the limitations of serialized memory. On the flipside, I wouldn't want to be the engineer trying to root out crosstalk problems on a dual-DDR mobo design either... that's got to be even more of a nightmare.)/Brian
Sorta-kinda, but let's face it -- the G4 Cube was Apple trying to go a little too high in the cool factor and pricing itself out of the market as a result. Their problem was creating a system that was essentially an iMac with a G4 and pricing it like a high-end system, and they blew it. They got it right with the Luxo Jr. iMacs, but got burned pretty bad in the process.../Brian
I tend to agree with you about "exotic" looks. I'd say in general that geek standards tend to at least be higher than most, probably because the closest a lot of us get to getting any is porn.
In my case, I've actually known a couple of women who are way above the curve as far as looks go (of course in true geek style saying that I "dated" either one is a slight stretch...), so I'm a little spoiled./Brian
The wax thing you're talking about happens pretty regularly in commercial kitchens, usually when a cook throws some wine into a pan containing drippings to make sauce. Some of the water in the wine evaporates, atomizing fat in the pan drippings. A commercial gas range (a *lot* more powerful than your average Bunsen burner) generates enough heat to cause the flashover; a home range usually won't so you don't generally see it in home kitchens. You've probably seen it if you watch shows like A Cook's Tour where you see behind the scenes of restaurants./Brian
I mention elsewhere about the whole fiasco surrounding the construction of the Inner Belt in Boston and how it made the current Big Dig necessary... well, for those of you keeping score at home, I might point out that the project currently under way is probably the second or third incarnation of the plan -- even before I-95 was supposed to be finished through Boston they were already planning a third harbor tunnel (i.e. the Ted Williams Tunnel), a bit north of where it is now, starting on Fan Pier where there is now the Moakley Federal Courthouse. In other words, they were already planning a version of the Big Dig (rerouting 95 under Boston Harbor to Revere) long before the original I-95 would ever have been completed!
This probably would all have been finished some time in the late 70s or early 80s had everything originally planned been finished on schedule (which, barring those pesky residents in the way, would probably have been around 1968).
They have a concession speech already written -- it's called Yamhill. But of course if they run with that they're essentially admitting that AMD was right all along and they've officially lost control of the ship./Brian
I don't know about mobbed-up, but there are some very unpleasant operators on the Boston City Council that wouldn't need to be Connected (TM) to be dirty. South Boston (especially whatsisname, Jimmy Kelly, I think) seems in general to behave as though the entire city revolves around it; most of the commercial part of the waterfront is there, the Boston World Trade Center and the new convention center are there, the Red Sox considered relocating there, and on top of it all the place's most notorious inhabitants are dirt-poor Irish rednecks whose section of the city has the rep for being down there with the bad parts of Dorchester for slumminess (and the Boston Irish can be as clannish as any other ethnic group; my own family is part Irish from Brighton, and I do see it in certain older members). That is where all the kickbacks are going.
If there's Mob influence going on in the Big Dig, it's on the QT -- the New England organized crime scene has been a shambles for years (two words: "Where's Whitey?"). No, IMHO it's just a whole lot of people on the take on their own behalf. Linkage funds indeed... I'd be willing to bet the Dig budget would be half as much as it is if it wasn't for "linkage"./Brian
Actually, the Belmont/Arlington stretch was built I think in the late 60s -- I used to live in Belmont, and my dad used to be a Belmont cop when they were building it. That particular stretch runs from Lincoln to about the Belmont/Cambridge border, with another short stretch of what I think is original construction leading up to Alewife Circle. The Northwest Expressway (the first part of the system to be canned, before they killed the Inner Belt) went east from there to somewhere in East Cambridge, where it was supposed to connect with 695, and northwest through Arlington and Lexington to Burlington where the existing NW Expressway goes to New Hampshire. (They were thinking of building two more beltways -- one between 128 and 495, and one right about where we're talking about, but I don't think either of them got past the stage of being handed around in memos saying "wouldn't it be nice if...")
In other words, Belmont had already gotten smacked, and right through some fairly wealthy areas on top of that. Arlington was in for more (after MassHighway had moved the route southward once already). The brunt of the damage was to hit Cambridge and Roxbury, also clipping Brookline in the process.
The story was a little different south of Roxbury; that stopped because of similar political pressure, but by 1972 (when Governor Sargent killed everything but the part of I-93 that leads through Somerville and Charlestown) parts of the I-95 route were not only under construction but striped and near completion. They ultimately built the Southwest Corridor Park along the route, along with commuter rail and rerouted Orange Line tracks. (That fight was even nastier than the Cambridge fight; parts of the city threatened to secede in order to sabotage the project. Ultimately I think the only parts of that road that were completed (and ultimately torn up) were between Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, though what is now Melnea Cass Blvd from Roxbury to the SE Expressway was built along land clearances for the Belt.)
IMHO the Inner Belt would never have been built even if the highway projects hadn't been stopped (though the Southwest Expressway would probably have been completed eventually if Massachusetts hadn't given up the allocated highway funding); the "Evel Kneivel" ramps I mentioned upthread were probably wishful thinking by the time they were built, as was the gigantic pile of sand in Saugus placed in the late 60s that was supposed to continue I-95 to the north, away from the chaos of Route 1./Brian
The official line is that this is the biggest public works project since, oh, the Roman Empire. I don't know if that's overstating it, but take a look at a map some time; the sheer size of the Dig is unbelievable. While it doesn't cover most of what now fits into the boundaries of the City of Boston, it's quite a bit bigger than the original Shawmut Peninsula (which was expanded by progressive landfilling to create what is now downtown, the North/West/South Ends, and Chinatown)./brian
We've got two twenty-game-winning pitchers (and a few other really good ones on top of that), at least two of the best batters in the majors, a front office that now actually gives a shit since the team was sold, and the Sox are still out of the playoffs. There ain't enough talent in the world to get this team past friggin' July, never mind to the pennant./Brian
The original plan was for several roads around it; someone mentioned 128, but there was also I-695 that was supposed to just skirt downtown. It was never built because it would have utterly destroyed a number of poor but vital neighborhoods, and because the inhabitants of those neighborhoods no longer trusted the Mass Highway Dept to take care of their interests (i.e. relocation, etc); there had been an awful lot of bad faith building the Mass Pike and the (old, elevated) Central Artery. Check out www.bostonroads.com for the gory details.
Boston's highway system (with the exception of the Pike, which has its own connected but separate history) was designed around I-95 and the Inner Belt, but two major segments of I-95 (Canton to the South End and Revere to Peabody) were never built (the segment that was built is now I-93 downtown and Route 1 north of Boston), and the entire system is a half-baked mess because the core of the system was never finished. Depressing the Central Artery is supposed to alleviate at least some of the resulting mess by increasing the downtown capacity to handle the traffic that the Inner Belt was supposed to deal with.
(And no, they can't build the Inner Belt now -- the northern ramps (built, but cut off -- a news crew once put up a prank sign saying "Out of town drivers exit here) now lead to Storrow Drive, one of the major roads that runs along the Charles River, and the southern ramps were demolished and replaced with a commercial-vehicles-only connection to the airport.)/Brian
Irreducible complexity is the creationist equivalent of yellow police tape -- if it has yet to be adequately explained scientifically, creationists slap the label "irreducibly complex" on it and tell everyone to "move on, there's nothing here to see..."
In other words, it's a gigantic copout -- I can't explain it, couldn't understand the explanation if I had it explained to me, so God Did It.
(and don't even start with me about Intelligent design -- it's just a way of saying God Did It without acknowledging God...)/Brian
Slashdot Mirror
Get an NTSC DV camcorder and import a clip into your system, but don't play it back in an NLE like iMovie or Premiere -- feed it to Quicktime Player or WMP and see what happens. The aspect ratio of NTSC pixels isn't quite square, so what a proper video editor will render at 640x480 is actually stored on the tape at 720x480, so the final product will look rather squashed if the playback program doesn't quite understand DV. /brian
Ah, yes... enough irony in that preface to make Alanis Morissette pay attention...
/Brian
That said, I still want to see someone port v6 (the Lions Book Unix) to the iMac just so I can see what happens.
Can't quite answer that one for you -- I don't know all the details. I can only relate it to what I know about video signals.
There's four different ways you can transmit a video signal (apart from an RF connection, that is): composite, s-video, component, and digital. I'll skip s-video, as AFAIK it's just a hybrid between composite and component. Digital means you're sending bits, and it's up to the monitor to make sense of them; in this context it can be dismissed. That leaves composite and component.
High-end video standards -- SVHS, MiniDV, DVD -- tend to favor component (or s-video) connections because of the higher bandwidth required. It's possible to mash the R/G/B signals together, but the end result will be somewhat lossy. This doesn't matter on straight VHS, since the picture signal of VHS-NTSC is so poor compared to an OTA NTSC signal that the loss of color value doesn't really matter.
I've actually seen a fairly dramatic example of something similar to this, though I'm not sure if it's precisely the same issue. I produce a public-access TV show, and since I work part-time at a not-very-high-paying job my equipment is all consumer equipment -- JVC GR-DVL70 (single chip) camcorder, Mitsubishi S-VHS VCR, and my monitor is a Zenith TV-VCR combo. I've had the opportunity to view my output on a decent TV, both straight off the camcorder and from an S-VHS master.
Well, as it happens we have a new VCR in the house that includes SQPB, so I was able to pop the S-VHS master into the deck for a showing. I immediately noticed that while I got decent color from my personal VCR, the new family unit caused massive color washout, probably from the circuitry's attempt to downconvert the signal to standard VHS before pumping it through a composite connector. (It's a DVD/VCR combo unit, with both S-video and composite outputs, but as is common with those units it's not possible to run the VCR through the high-quality outputs -- if you ask me it makes having SQPB sort of pointless.)
I'm not quite sure what I've just proved, but essentially more data, properly managed, is better. If you have three CCDs, each tuned to a primary color, the DSPs in the camera don't have to worry about trying to separate a composite color signal. I suspect it makes frame encoding easier, and the end result is certainly better in terms of color space.
(There is one downside, though: at least in the case of Sony units, the construction of the CCD assembly makes it impossible to implement night shot on a 3-chip camera. But then night shot is more of a consumer feature than anything else...)
It's called color separation -- the three chips make for much better color quality because they don't have to composite all the color information. And consider this: if I can do that much better with one CCD in my el cheapo JVC, don't forget that the same applies to the chips in the Canon GL-2 I drool over at my not-so-local Micro Center. /Brian
I always wanted a pocket computer. Granted, I have a Palm IIIx now, and I could probably spank a TRaSh-80 PC-4 with a Casio graphing calculator, but still.
I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm reading this with the voice of Mike Myers in my head. I say "I'm not entirely sure why" because it's just Mike Myers, not Dr. Evil or Austin Powers... /Brian
virii, troianes, vermesque, oh my... /brian
The other bit of info is that the studies surrounding the Dvorak keyboard were known to be so biased and buried under conflict of interest that they weren't to be trusted. I might have seen something on snopes.com about that, I don't remember for certain. /Brian
Nuh-uh. William Poundstone, Big Secrets. He's got a pretty in-depth analysis of the Coke formula, along with a reconstructed procedure for making the Merchandise 7X that is the basic "cola" flavor essence. There is also a version of the original secret formula at large, but it is not believed to be the current formula (the rumor that at least one version of the formula -- don't remember if it's this one -- was retired because a reformulated version with phosphoric acid tasted better; a switch in the can material apparently accompanied it.)
/Brian
Poundstone (and others) have also made an excellent point about secret formulas in food -- yes, you can do it by reverse-engineering, but when you consider Coca-Cola is one of the largest companies in the world, but why would you want to? You can't match their economy of scale, and who would buy something identical to Coke but more expensive anyway? Better to create your own unique product. (The same also infamously applies to Tricon/KFC, whose "eleven secret herbs and spices" seem to be nothing more than salt, pepper, and MSG... rest assured that if you put in the cayenne, garlic, and whatnot that was probably in the Colonel's true original recipe you'd get a product very different from modern KFC, even if you used the same pressure-frying process.)
Industrial espionage seems somewhat counterproductive anyway -- I've heard stories out of Soviet Russia (shaddap) that one of the big problems the Soviets had was that they spent so much effort on reverse-engineering American technology that they were five years behind on any given tech. It probably didn't help that for decades the scientific establishment (especially in biology and nuclear physics) was so politicized that innovation was more or less impossible for fear of running afoul of Uncle Joe -- under Lysenko, for example, the accepted lines of genetic research were so primitive and unscientific that the only way the Soviets were likely to get increased production in crops would be to smuggle high-yield crops in from Western countries and hope to Josef (no God, remember?) that they'd grow the same in the Russian environment. Russian computer systems would be virtually identical to the IBM systems they copied, right down to mounting holes in the cases. The upshot is that in the interview I read, the general who was giving the interview said that by the time the Soviets had finished reverse-engineering the technology, it was obsolete.
Finally, an Apple-supported X. The big question is where it was before now. BUT -- surely someone will attempt to port Cinelerra over now? And forget Photoshop Elements -- while the GIMP will never knock off Photoshop, its little brother will be toast in short order.
/Brian
Aw, hell. It's about time, and it's nice that all the cool iApps will be free-as-in-beer now.
RDRAM is not a bad idea in theory, though -- it's the same idea as replacing 1284 and SCSI with USB and Firewire. After a certain point it's not worth the trouble trying to maintain a wide paralell link -- the modern interconnect busses are serial (including SATA, which I'm still a bit skeptical of), and Rambus has only a 16-bit pipe with some mighty fast bit bang going on.
/Brian
That said, all indications are it's a bear to work with, and perhaps narrow memory busses aren't the Right Thing? (Don't forget -- Intel RDRAM chipsets, with the exception of i820, all operate on dual-channel RDRAM, which means a 32-bit bus instead of 16... says something rather interesting about the limitations of serialized memory. On the flipside, I wouldn't want to be the engineer trying to root out crosstalk problems on a dual-DDR mobo design either... that's got to be even more of a nightmare.)
Sorta-kinda, but let's face it -- the G4 Cube was Apple trying to go a little too high in the cool factor and pricing itself out of the market as a result. Their problem was creating a system that was essentially an iMac with a G4 and pricing it like a high-end system, and they blew it. They got it right with the Luxo Jr. iMacs, but got burned pretty bad in the process... /Brian
She is pretty cute, though. Just needs to lay off the Benadryl. /Brian
I'm hearing Anthony Edwards saying that. Didn't see the movie, though. /Brian
I tend to agree with you about "exotic" looks. I'd say in general that geek standards tend to at least be higher than most, probably because the closest a lot of us get to getting any is porn.
/Brian
In my case, I've actually known a couple of women who are way above the curve as far as looks go (of course in true geek style saying that I "dated" either one is a slight stretch...), so I'm a little spoiled.
The wax thing you're talking about happens pretty regularly in commercial kitchens, usually when a cook throws some wine into a pan containing drippings to make sauce. Some of the water in the wine evaporates, atomizing fat in the pan drippings. A commercial gas range (a *lot* more powerful than your average Bunsen burner) generates enough heat to cause the flashover; a home range usually won't so you don't generally see it in home kitchens. You've probably seen it if you watch shows like A Cook's Tour where you see behind the scenes of restaurants. /Brian
I mention elsewhere about the whole fiasco surrounding the construction of the Inner Belt in Boston and how it made the current Big Dig necessary... well, for those of you keeping score at home, I might point out that the project currently under way is probably the second or third incarnation of the plan -- even before I-95 was supposed to be finished through Boston they were already planning a third harbor tunnel (i.e. the Ted Williams Tunnel), a bit north of where it is now, starting on Fan Pier where there is now the Moakley Federal Courthouse. In other words, they were already planning a version of the Big Dig (rerouting 95 under Boston Harbor to Revere) long before the original I-95 would ever have been completed!
This probably would all have been finished some time in the late 70s or early 80s had everything originally planned been finished on schedule (which, barring those pesky residents in the way, would probably have been around 1968).
You think the Big Dig as it is is bad...
Just some more information...
They have a concession speech already written -- it's called Yamhill. But of course if they run with that they're essentially admitting that AMD was right all along and they've officially lost control of the ship. /Brian
I don't know about mobbed-up, but there are some very unpleasant operators on the Boston City Council that wouldn't need to be Connected (TM) to be dirty. South Boston (especially whatsisname, Jimmy Kelly, I think) seems in general to behave as though the entire city revolves around it; most of the commercial part of the waterfront is there, the Boston World Trade Center and the new convention center are there, the Red Sox considered relocating there, and on top of it all the place's most notorious inhabitants are dirt-poor Irish rednecks whose section of the city has the rep for being down there with the bad parts of Dorchester for slumminess (and the Boston Irish can be as clannish as any other ethnic group; my own family is part Irish from Brighton, and I do see it in certain older members). That is where all the kickbacks are going.
/Brian
If there's Mob influence going on in the Big Dig, it's on the QT -- the New England organized crime scene has been a shambles for years (two words: "Where's Whitey?"). No, IMHO it's just a whole lot of people on the take on their own behalf. Linkage funds indeed... I'd be willing to bet the Dig budget would be half as much as it is if it wasn't for "linkage".
Actually, the Belmont/Arlington stretch was built I think in the late 60s -- I used to live in Belmont, and my dad used to be a Belmont cop when they were building it. That particular stretch runs from Lincoln to about the Belmont/Cambridge border, with another short stretch of what I think is original construction leading up to Alewife Circle. The Northwest Expressway (the first part of the system to be canned, before they killed the Inner Belt) went east from there to somewhere in East Cambridge, where it was supposed to connect with 695, and northwest through Arlington and Lexington to Burlington where the existing NW Expressway goes to New Hampshire. (They were thinking of building two more beltways -- one between 128 and 495, and one right about where we're talking about, but I don't think either of them got past the stage of being handed around in memos saying "wouldn't it be nice if...")
/Brian
In other words, Belmont had already gotten smacked, and right through some fairly wealthy areas on top of that. Arlington was in for more (after MassHighway had moved the route southward once already). The brunt of the damage was to hit Cambridge and Roxbury, also clipping Brookline in the process.
The story was a little different south of Roxbury; that stopped because of similar political pressure, but by 1972 (when Governor Sargent killed everything but the part of I-93 that leads through Somerville and Charlestown) parts of the I-95 route were not only under construction but striped and near completion. They ultimately built the Southwest Corridor Park along the route, along with commuter rail and rerouted Orange Line tracks. (That fight was even nastier than the Cambridge fight; parts of the city threatened to secede in order to sabotage the project. Ultimately I think the only parts of that road that were completed (and ultimately torn up) were between Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, though what is now Melnea Cass Blvd from Roxbury to the SE Expressway was built along land clearances for the Belt.)
IMHO the Inner Belt would never have been built even if the highway projects hadn't been stopped (though the Southwest Expressway would probably have been completed eventually if Massachusetts hadn't given up the allocated highway funding); the "Evel Kneivel" ramps I mentioned upthread were probably wishful thinking by the time they were built, as was the gigantic pile of sand in Saugus placed in the late 60s that was supposed to continue I-95 to the north, away from the chaos of Route 1.
The official line is that this is the biggest public works project since, oh, the Roman Empire. I don't know if that's overstating it, but take a look at a map some time; the sheer size of the Dig is unbelievable. While it doesn't cover most of what now fits into the boundaries of the City of Boston, it's quite a bit bigger than the original Shawmut Peninsula (which was expanded by progressive landfilling to create what is now downtown, the North/West/South Ends, and Chinatown). /brian
We've got two twenty-game-winning pitchers (and a few other really good ones on top of that), at least two of the best batters in the majors, a front office that now actually gives a shit since the team was sold, and the Sox are still out of the playoffs. There ain't enough talent in the world to get this team past friggin' July, never mind to the pennant. /Brian
The original plan was for several roads around it; someone mentioned 128, but there was also I-695 that was supposed to just skirt downtown. It was never built because it would have utterly destroyed a number of poor but vital neighborhoods, and because the inhabitants of those neighborhoods no longer trusted the Mass Highway Dept to take care of their interests (i.e. relocation, etc); there had been an awful lot of bad faith building the Mass Pike and the (old, elevated) Central Artery. Check out www.bostonroads.com for the gory details.
/Brian
Boston's highway system (with the exception of the Pike, which has its own connected but separate history) was designed around I-95 and the Inner Belt, but two major segments of I-95 (Canton to the South End and Revere to Peabody) were never built (the segment that was built is now I-93 downtown and Route 1 north of Boston), and the entire system is a half-baked mess because the core of the system was never finished. Depressing the Central Artery is supposed to alleviate at least some of the resulting mess by increasing the downtown capacity to handle the traffic that the Inner Belt was supposed to deal with.
(And no, they can't build the Inner Belt now -- the northern ramps (built, but cut off -- a news crew once put up a prank sign saying "Out of town drivers exit here) now lead to Storrow Drive, one of the major roads that runs along the Charles River, and the southern ramps were demolished and replaced with a commercial-vehicles-only connection to the airport.)
A rather meaningless statement, I believe... /Brian
Irreducible complexity is the creationist equivalent of yellow police tape -- if it has yet to be adequately explained scientifically, creationists slap the label "irreducibly complex" on it and tell everyone to "move on, there's nothing here to see..."
/Brian
In other words, it's a gigantic copout -- I can't explain it, couldn't understand the explanation if I had it explained to me, so God Did It.
(and don't even start with me about Intelligent design -- it's just a way of saying God Did It without acknowledging God...)