[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

He treats us like men. He lets us wear earrings.

Torrin Polk about his college football coach

 

How many roads must a man walk down before he admits he's lost? 

Anonymous

 

Never judge a book by its movie.

Anonymous

 

I didn't mean to push all your buttons, I was just looking for the mute
button. 

Anonymous

 

Be careful when you follow the masses. Sometimes the M is silent. 

Anonymous

 

I stopped understanding math when the alphabet decided to get involved. 

Anonymous

 

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Dry run

 

The sense of rehearsal meaning is known in the United States from the early
1940s. The oldest example found is from the Gettysburg Times for August 1941
in reference to an army operation: "The occasion was a 'dry run' for the
maneuvers that will begin within the next ten days."

 

One explanation that is often given is that it is linked to a much older
North American sense of an arroyo, a stream bed that is normally dry or
almost dry but which floods after heavy rain. These are common in the USA,
as witness the many places called Dry Run. (Run here just means a course or
route.) This sense dates back to the 1840s. One might guess that the idea
behind the rehearsal sense is that it's like a dry river bed before a storm,
in waiting for the big event when the rain comes and it fulfils its
potential function.

 

However, that explanation seems too great a stretch of meaning.
(Incidentally, there is a story, in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,
that it refers to "the reconnoitring by bootleggers of the route they plan
to use before transporting their illicit goods along it". That's so
stretched it broke the elastic, not least because the expression dry run is
definitely older than Prohibition.) 

 

Douglas Wilson of the American Dialect Society found evidence for a much
more plausible origin.

 

The term run, more fully fire run, has for at least the past century been
used by local fire departments in the USA for a call-out to the site of a
fire. It was once common for fire departments or volunteer hose companies to
give exhibitions of their prowess at carnivals or similar events. A report
of one such appeared in the Stevens Point Journal for 8 July 1899:
"Wednesday night's carnival feature was a grand exhibition fire run by the
Milwaukee fire department, under the direction of Fire Chief James Foley."
Companies also competed with each other to show how well they could do.
These competitions had fairly standard rules, of which several examples
appear in the press of this period, such as in the Olean Democrat of 2
August 1888: "Not less than fifteen or more than seventeen men to each
company. Dry run, standing start, each team to be allowed one trial; cart to
carry 350 feet of hose in 50 foot lengths ...".

 

These reports show that a dry run in the jargon of the fire service at this
period was one that didn't involve the use of water, as opposed to a wet run
that did. In some competitions there was a specific class for the latter,
one of which was reported in the Salem Daily News for 6 July 1896: "The wet
run was made by the Fulton hook and ladder company and the Deluge hose
company. The run was made east in Main street to Fawcett's store where the
ladders were raised to the top of the building. The hose company attached
[its] hose to a fire plug and ascending the ladder gave a fine exhibition."

 

It's clear that the idea of a dry run being a rehearsal would very readily
follow from the jargon usage, though it first appears in print only much
later. Douglas Wilson found that by March 1943 the idea of a dry run as a
rehearsal had so taken hold that Stars and Stripes created an odd-looking
compound term in a feature on an airbase crash team: "There aren't any brass
poles, and no false alarms, but there is plenty of authentic firehouse
atmosphere around the place. Regularly the crash crews go tearing out on a
dry run; once in a while they empty the 400-gallon tank on their truck in a
wet dry run."

 

He also points out that there is another sense in which dry run is used
today in the US - that of a call-out of an emergency service, such as an
ambulance, in which no service is given, either because the patient refused
help or because no emergency was found. He suggests that this might have
arisen through an extension of the firefighting term in situations in which
the crew arrived at the scene of a supposed fire but found either that it
was already out or that it was a false alarm. In neither case would any
water be pumped, so they were also dry runs in the firefighters' jargon.

 

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First hard disk of 1 GB capacity was developed in 1980. Weight of the first
gigabyte hard disk was 249kg and its cost was USD 40,000 at that time.

 

The first 1 TB hard disk was developed by Hitachi in 2007.

 

Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra graphic card contains 222 million transistors.

 

First microprocessor from Intel was Intel 4004. It contained only 2300
transistors and it worked at a clock rate of 740 kHz.

 

The design team of the IBM PC prototype was code-named The Dirty Dozen.

 

On average a human being blinks 20 times in a minute. But while using a
computer blink rate goes down to 7 per minute.

 

If we could turn human brain into a computer, then that computer would be
able to do 38,000 trillion operations per second and hold more than 3580 TBs
of memory.