Wayne and Layne

• Ruled Surface
  In geometry, a surface  S is ruled if through every point of S there is a straight line that lies on S. The most familiar examples are the plane and the curved surface of a cylinder or cone. Other examples are a conical surface with elliptical  directrix, the right conoid, the helicoid, and the tangent developable of a smooth curve in space. A ruled surface can always be described (at least locally) as the set of points swept by a moving straight line. For example, a cone is formed by keeping one point of a line fixed whilst moving another point along a circle.
• Blue Riband
  The Blue Riband is an unofficial accolade given to the passenger liner crossing the Atlantic Ocean in regular service with the record highest speed. The term was borrowed from horse racing  and was not widely used until after 1910.  Under the unwritten rules, the record is based on average speed rather than passage time because ships follow different routes.  Traditionally, a ship is considered a “record breaker” if it wins the eastbound speed record, but is not credited with Blue Riband unless it wins the more difficult westbound record against the Gulf Stream.
• P.O. Box 1142
  P.O. Box 1142 was a secret American military intelligence facility that operated during World War II.  The American Military Intelligence Service had two special wings whose core duty was to interview the Prisoners of War (POWs), known as MIS -X and MIS -Y. They were known by their codename, the mailing address “P.O. Box 1142.”  Notable prisoners housed at the facility included rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, spymaster Reinhard Gehlen, and Heinz Schlicke, inventor of infrared detection.
• Shellac
  Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug, on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is processed and sold as dry flakes, which are dissolved in denatured alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze  and wood finish. Shellac functions as a tough all-natural primer, sanding sealant, tannin-blocker, odor-blocker, stain, and high-gloss varnish. Shellac was once used in electrical applications as it possesses good insulation qualities and it seals out moisture. Gramophone  (or phonograph) discs were also made of it during the pre-1950s, 78-rpm recording era.
• Duck, Duck, Goose
  Duck, Duck, Goose (called Duck, Duck, Gray Duck in some parts of Minnesota and surrounding states) is a traditional children’s game often first learned in pre-school or kindergarten . The object of this game is to walk in a circle, tapping on each child’s head until you finally choose one to be the new picker. A group of players sit in a circle, facing inward, while another player, the ‘picker’ (a.k.a. the ‘fox’), walks around tapping or pointing to each player in turn, calling each a ‘duck’ until finally picking one to be a ‘goose’ The ‘goose’ then rises and chases and tries to tag the ‘picker’, while the ‘picker’ tries to return to and sit where the ‘goose’ had been sitting. If the picker succeeds, the ‘goose’ is now the new picker and the process begins again. If the ‘goose’ succeeds in tagging the picker, the ‘goose’ may return to sit in the previous spot and the ‘picker’ resumes the process. With teenagers such as in high school, the ‘goose’ may attempt to tackle the ‘picker’.

• Knight’s tour
  The Knight’s Tour is a mathematical problem involving a knight on a chessboard. The knight is placed on the empty board and, moving according to the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once. A knight’s tour is called a closed tour if the knight ends on a square attacking the square from which it began (so that it may tour the board again immediately with the same path). Otherwise the tour is open. The exact number of open tours is still unknown. Creating a program to solve the knight’s tour is a common problem given to computer science students.
• Chicken hypnotism
  A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and continuously drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at its beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will remain immobile for somewhere between 15 seconds and 30 minutes, continuing to stare at the line.
• Blue Hole
  A blue hole is a submarine cave  or sinkhole. They are also called vertical caves. Blue holes are roughly circular, steep-walled depressions, and so named for the dramatic contrast between the dark blue, deep waters of their depths and the lighter blue of the shallows around them. The deepest blue hole in the world—at 202 metres (663 ft)—is Dean’s Blue Hole, located in a bay west of Clarence Town on Long Island, Bahamas.
• Super Outbreak
  The Super Outbreak is the largest tornado outbreak on record for a single 24-hour period. From April 3 to April 4, 1974, there were 148 tornadoes confirmed in 13 US states, including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and New York; and the Canadian province of Ontario. It extensively damaged approximately 900 square miles along a total combined path length of 2,600 miles. It remains the most outstanding severe convective weather episode of record in the continental United States. The outbreak far surpassed previous and succeeding events in severity, longevity and extent.
• Derecho
  A derecho (from Spanish: “derecho” meaning “straight”) is a widespread and long-lived, violent convectively induced straight-line windstorm  that is associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms in the form of a squall line usually taking the form of a bow echo. Derechos blow in the direction of movement of their associated storms, similar to a gust front, except that the wind is sustained and generally increases in strength behind the “gust” front. A warm weather phenomenon, derechos occur mostly in summer, especially June and July in the Northern Hemisphere. They can occur at any time of the year and occur as frequently at night as in the daylight hours.

• Old Abe
  A female bald eagle who was the mascot of the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War, the screaming eagle mascot of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, and the mascot of the high school I attended.
• Silly Season
  The period of time lasting for a few months in mid to late summer typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media, driven by legislative recess, holiday vacations, and a general lack of newsworthy events. Newspapers would print attention-grabbing headlines and articles to keep interest, often of a “moral panic” or sensationalist nature.
• Doppler On Wheels
  The DOW are a fleet of radar trucks maintained by the Center for Severe Weather Research, funded by the National Science Foundation. Vehicles have a Doppler weather radar dish, and are used to observe tornadoes and hurricanes at close distance, playing an important role in several recent discoveries.
• Comics Code Authority
  The CCA is part of the Comics Magazine Association of America, created to regulate the content of comic books in the US. Member publishers submit comic books to the CCA, which screens them for conformance to its Comics Code, and authorizes the use of their seal on the cover if the books comply. At the height of its influence, it was a de facto censor for the U.S. comic book industry.
• Ultramarine
  A blue pigment consisting primarily of a double silicate of aluminum and sodium with some sulfides or sulfates, and occurring in nature as a proximate component of lapis lazuli. Natural ultramarine is the most difficult pigment to grind by hand, and for all except the highest quality of mineral sheer, grinding and washing produces only a pale grayish blue powder. A new process was developed, which consisted of mixing the ground material with melted wax, resins, and oils, wrapping the resulting mass in a cloth, and then kneading it in a dilute lye solution. The blue particles collect at the bottom of the pot, while the impurities and colorless crystals remain in the mass. The pigment was most extensively used during the 14th through 15th centuries, as its brilliance complemented the vermilion and gold of illuminated manuscripts and Italian panel paintings.

American Death Triangle
Also known as the “American Triangle”, “Death Triangle” or “Triangle Anchor”, it is a type of rock climbing anchor infamous for being a poor anchoring technique due to both the way the forces of the load are magnified on the fixed anchors and the lack of redundancy in the cord.

• American Death Triangle
  Also known as the “American Triangle”, “Death Triangle” or “Triangle Anchor”, it is a type of rock climbing anchor infamous for being a poor anchoring technique due to both the way the forces of the load are magnified on the fixed anchors and the lack of redundancy in the cord.
• Pogo oscillation
  A potentially dangerous type of self-excited oscillation  caused by combustion instability in liquid fuel rocket engines.  This oscillation results in variations of thrust from the engines, generally caused by variations in fuel flow rate, and placing stress on the frame of the vehicle.
• Hyperboloid structures
  These are architectural structures designed with hyperboloid geometry. Often these are tall structures such as towers where the hyperboloid geometry’s structural strength is used to support an object high off the ground, but hyperboloid geometry is also often used for decorative effect as well as structural economy. The first hyperboloid structures were built by Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov (1853–1939).  The world’s first hyperboloid tower is located in Polibino, Lipetsk Oblast, Russia. The shapes are doubly ruled surfaces (hence can be built with a lattice of straight beams).
• The Mother of All Demos
  A name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart’s December 9, 1968 demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) at the Convention Center in San Francisco, in which a number of experimental technologies that have since become commonplace were presented. The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, hypertext and a collaborative real-time editor.
• Paella
  Aa Valencian rice dish that originated in its modern form in the mid-19th century near lake Albufera, a lagoon in Valencia, on the east coast of Spain. It consists of white rice, green vegetables, meat (rabbit, chicken, duck), snails, beans and seasoning, although sometimes seafood replaces the meat.

Images:
American Death Triangle, from Wikipedia
Adziogol hyperboloid Lighthouse by Vladimir Shukhov 1911, from Wikipedia
Paella de marisco 01, from Wikipedia

• Washburn Park Water Tower
  The Washburn Park Water Tower poses as a landmark of early 20th-Century architectural achievement within the Tangletown neighborhood in south Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has been doing so for nearly 75 years. Perched on top of one of the highest points in south Minneapolis, the tower is given the privilege to boast its unique location and role as an unofficial “beacon” for incoming planes landing at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, yet remains hidden from much of the residents and visitors that pass by the base of the hill each day.
• Louisville Sewer Explosions
  The Louisville sewer explosions were a series of explosions that destroyed more than two miles (3 km) of streets in Louisville, Kentucky, United States on February 13, 1981. The blasts were caused by the ignition of hexane vapors which had been illegally discharged from a Ralston-Purina soybean processing plant located near the University of Louisville.
• Battle of the Beams
  The Battle of the Beams was a period early in the Second World War when bombers of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) used a number of increasingly accurate systems of radio navigation for night bombing. British “scientific intelligence” at the Air Ministry fought back with a variety of increasingly effective means, involving jamming and distortion of the radio waves. The period ended when the Germans moved their bomber forces to the East in May 1941, in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union.
• Halt and Catch Fire
  Halt and Catch Fire, known by the mnemonic HCF, was originally a fictitious computer machine code instruction claimed to be under development at IBM for use in their System/360 computers, along with many other amusing instructions such as “Execute Operator”. One apocryphal story goes back to the late 1960s, when computers used magnetic core memory. The story goes that in order to speed up the core memory on their next model the engineers increased the read/write currents in the very fine wires that were threaded through the cores. This worked fine when the computer was executing normal programs, since memory accesses were spread throughout memory. However, the HALT instruction was implemented as a “Jump to self”. This meant that the same core memory location was repeatedly accessed, and the very fine wires became so hot that they started to smoke – hence “Halt and Catch Fire”.
• Glacial Lake Outburst Flood
  A glacial lake outburst flood can occur when a lake contained by a glacier or a terminal moraine dam fails. This can happen due to erosion, a buildup of water pressure, an avalanche of rock or heavy snow, an earthquake, volcanic eruptions under the ice, or if a large enough portion of a glacier breaks off and massively displaces the waters in a glacial lake at its base.

Images:
Washburn Water Tower, a Public Domain image from Wikimedia Commons
Hubbard Glacier May 20.2000, a Public Domain image from Wikimedia Commons