Linguists identify 15,000-year-old 'ultraconserved words' - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/linguists-identify-15000-year-old-ultraconserved-words/2013/05/06/a02e3a14-b427-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html

<comment><USER2> I'm going to reserve judgment on the findings themselves until I read the paper (although, having a background in historical linguistics, I've learned to be _very_ skeptical of _any_ claim that posits historical superfamilies.)

However, I _will_ complain about the pop-science intro, because the thought that a hunter-gatherer has some chance of understanding a sentence like the one given is laughably preposterous. An Old English speaker would only barely understand it (just as we would only barely understand _gief þæm menn ealdan þisne fýr_ [1]), to say nothing of the many thousands of years of change between us and the hunter-gatherers spoken of. There is a _vast_ difference between 'two words have a statistically provable correspondence' and 'two words are understood as the same word.'

[1]: My old English is pretty weak, so I take full responsibility for grammatical errors.

Edit: accidentally used 'th' instead of 'þ' in the Old English.

<comment><USER3> What do you think about theories like Vilayanur Ramachandran's that some words exist because they are sort of onomatopoeic?

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture4.shtml>)

<comment><USER4> That is someone's theory? That's what 'onomatopoeia' means.

<comment><USER3> I've really dumbed it down, and horribly mangled it.

Read the link I provided, he does a much better job there. If you don't want to read all of it just search for "Now, remember I said the third thing you have to do in science is show that this is not just some quirk.", and read from the top of that section.

'slush' is onomatopoeic. Is 'axe'? How about 'milk' or 'mother'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the citation to the underlying research study.

Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade. Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia. PNAS 2013; published ahead of print May 6, 2013,

doi:10.1073/pnas.1218726110

Abstract link:

<http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110>

Link to .PDF full text:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf+html)

</comment><comment><USER5> languagehat writes, over at metafilter:

Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Actual linguists weigh in in this LH thread [ <http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php> ];

Marie-Lucie Tarpent writes:

The article announces "Eurasiatic" (a hypothetical supergroup originally suggested by Joseph Greenberg of "Amerind" notoriety) as a major discovery by scientists (not linguists) but seems somewhat confused as to its relation with PIE. It also quotes a few words which the authors interpret as culturally too important to have been lost or replaced, so that they have lasted 15,000 years (one of these words is "bark" (of a tree) for which the authors propose an explanation). Like Renfrew and the Proto-World people, the authors do not seem to differentiate between the survival of a lexical item (although made unrecognizable through millennia of phonological changes) and the survival of the sounds that compose it (which are independent of the meaning of the whole word) (eg Renfrew et al thought that words for 'nephew' had endured almost unchanged for hundreds of years because of the importance of this concept, but actually this longevity is due to the fact that the consonants in the word had been more resistant to change than others, as shown by the behaviour of those consonants in other words totally unrelated semantically to 'nephew'). In any case, the article does not cite any actual forms, only meanings. Read it at your own risk.

And Piotr Gąsiorowski says:

This is exactly the kind of approach which makes wishful thinking look like science and gets it past reviewers. Even if the numerical methods are basically sound, the data are garbage (obtained by the intuitive eyeballing of reconstructions from the Tower of Babel database -- itself a highly questionable source -- without any actual comparative analysis). No different from ordinary "mass comparison", except perhaps for a tighter control of semantic matches. [...] I realise that one has to start somewhere, but mass comparison is at best of some help in formulating preliminary hypotheses, and mass comparison based on unreliable data is no use at all.

<comment><USER6> Very few reputable linguists believe in a hypothetical supergroup of "Eurasiatic". The reason that the same linguists are skeptical is that related languages diverge fast enough that after a few millenia, any similarities beyond that are indistinguishable from chance similarity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get this. I know this is a monstrously crude approach, but I put the sentence given in the article to Google translate

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!"

After translating it into a few different languages, almost none of the words sound anywhere close to their English counterparts. French and Danish had a fair bit of similarities but that's to be expected. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here?

For reference I tried estonian, albanian, czech, finnish, and georgian

<comment><USER8> > _Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here?_

Perhaps.

For one, Google translate is not very accurate, even for simple stuff.

Second, the translations it picks might no be the form that has survived from the old times. Newer words might have put the use of the older form in disfavour, but it can still exist in the language. If something was the same in a language from 15,000 years ago up to 500 years ago, it won't be picked up in Google Translate, which will pick the current vernacular.

Third, they probably give an exact table of the equivalencies they found in the actual paper. It would be easier to check that if they have it available for free.

Four, they speak about how words sound, not how the look. So you have to take pronunciation of each language into account, which often can be quite different from what is written.

<comment><USER9> Yes, saying that "thou" is a word that has survived for hundreds of centuries is a bit odd to me. As far as I can tell, the only reason thou even exists as a word in modern English (at least in the US) is because it's so heavily used in the Bible (not exactly a modern book). The only times I hear someone using thou is in context of the Bible or ye olde tyme joking.

<comment><USER10> Bible wasn't originally written in English of course. The more recent the translation, the less Thou you get. We didn't have much alternative for 2nd person singular pronouns until "You" wiped "Thou" off the map somewhat recently and attempts at turning "Thou" into a formal religious version of "You" seem to have flopped. Then again we did pretty well without a second person plural until y'all invented y'all, plus or minus some "ye" anyway.

Theres some idioms that'll never die even if no one understands the history. "Holier than thou". Much like "Your name is Mudd" sometimes kinda horrifies people who don't know the story of Abe Lincoln and Dr Mudd. I've met people who claim to not know the history of "cotton pickin hands" or even acknowledge its racial background, which seems hard to believe, then again cotton hasn't been hand harvested in a couple generations locally so its possible the kids were telling the truth about not knowing what they're saying...

<comment><USER11> Looking up "cotton pickin" in Google ngram viewer, it appears to be mostly a product of the 1960s-1970s ruralsploitation fad: The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw and Foghorn Leghorn.

It's probably just an intentionally quaint pseudo-folk saying invented by someone in Burbank.

<comment><USER8> I don't think the Google ngram viewer is an appropriate tool for something that mostly belongs to the spoken language, and even more that of pour illiterate blacks and southerners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The original publication is linked to from here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5667610>

</comment><comment><USER13> _In fact, they calculated that words uttered at least 16 times per day by an average speaker had the greatest chance of being cognates in at least three language families. If chance had been the explanation, some rarely used words would have ended up on the list. But they didn't._

I don't think that this logic is valid. It assumes that if the languages had had no common ancestry that any random word would be similarly likely to match between the languages. I'm no linguist but in my experience the most fundamental and commonly used words tend to be shorter, often composed of a single syllable. It also makes sense that the more fundamental words would be created early on and be given simple sounds while later words would be more complicated by necessity. If this is the case then you would expect more random coincidences within the cores of different languages than outside of them. This is also consistent with the fact that most of the examples in the article are very short: thou, give, hand, bark, spit, worm. I think that this would need to be taken into account in the statistical analysis before attempting to draw any conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder what kind of metrics could be achieved simply by measuring how many mAhs it takes from google translate to translate from one language to another?

EDIT: Put simply, converting understandable sentences from one language to another is a lot more than just counting word frequences. Sorry having been mentioned an actual company name there!

I just wrote a lenghty text in Finnish and had it translated by an on-line service to English. Suprisingly, it wasn't the vocabulary but is was the structure that mattered. The machince got 99% of the words right, but it lost the meaning in 1/10 of the cases.

EDIT2: Not really sure who I am arguing here, on a stale thread, but I just have to finish the thought.

So it takes a measureable amount of work to analyze a sentence in a language into an abstract syntax tree.

An another amount of work to synthetize that back into an understandable sentence in another language.

The average sum of that work for all given sentences is the lingual distance of the two languages. No?

Of course all language analyzers and synthetizers are not equally good. What caught my eye, however, was how poor English _a network translator_ was able to produce out of my Finnish. I'm pretty sure (althought the jury is still out on that) that the Russian it produced out of the same origin was remarkably more understandable. The main reason being the liberal word order.

I somehow assumed the english synthetizer would have been the top of the line. Turned out if wasn't. Or else the language model was not deep enough, which actually is a more plausible explanation.

Ok, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER15> Naive review of the interactive infographic

 _thou_

Altaic, Dravidian, Indo-European and Uralic sound similar enough

I can see how Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Kartvelian might end up where they are

And then we end up with Inuit-Yupik which sounds so dissimilar, the only thing I hear in common with the others is that it was apparently made by a human

 _to give_

okay, I can kinda see maybe where Altaic, Inuit-Yupik and Uralic ended up where they are, but they're definitely different sounds

Dravidian and Indo-European are a bit more similar, but don't sound like they have anything in common with the others at all

 _hand_ okay, these are sorta similar, there's a clear m-vowel-n element in most of them but Indo-European gets all "weird"

 _bark_

Altaic and Uralic may as well be slight accents

Inuit-Yupik diverges quite a bit

and Indo-European even more.

If I squint I can kind of see some similarity with a k-vowel then some other stuff so...okay

 _to spit_ these are the most similar to my ear, it probably doesn't hurt hat these appear to be onomatopoeia as well. Indo-European just seems to have reversed the bits somewhere along the way. If you squint "spit" in English would fit right in with these.

I always come away from these kinds of linguistic analyses scratching my head. _Especially_ once you hear the words in the different languages.

</comment><comment><USER16> It says Chinese wasn't included in the seven family of languages.

Yet, I, a english and cantonese speaker, couldn't help but notice these two words which sound similar in both languages.

Mother is "ma" in English, and also "ma" in Cantonese.

Father is "pa" or "dad" in English, and "ba" or "deh" in Cantonese.

Remarkably similar, considering both languages are considered by linguists to be practically completely unrelated.

<comment><USER17> The words are similar because these are some of the first sounds babies learn to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. Is there some objective way of determining if the words are cognates or not? In particular, in the audio section, the Inuit-Yupik example for "thou" sounds very out of place.

<comment><USER19> I would like someone to answer as well. See I only know English, Polish, and German pretty well. So take father, ojciec, and vater. I don't see it. Thinking about it the languages I know, I would expect something like ta da pa (or backward) at, ad, ap. Would they say the ojci it sort of like a at sound and close enough?

Edit: Wait a minute, though matka and ojciec are the words for mother and father in Polish, little kids might say more mama and tata. I might have answered my own question here, but I too noticed some in the linked web page did not sound particularly similar to me.

<comment><USER2> Words are cognate if they stem from a common root. How can we tell? If we have two sets of words S and T, then we need to postulate a third set R of 'proto- words' as well as two mappings R → S and R → T where the mappings can (within reasonable margins of error) predict the form of the words given the roots.

For example, take German and Latin: I assert the words _Vater_ and _pater_ (both 'father') are cognate, but to do so, I need to examine a whole _set_ of corresponding words in both languages, so I take the sets {Vater, Fisch, Fuß} and {pater, piscis, pes}. From these, I can see clear correspondences (e.g. a German _f_ sound always corresponds to a Latin _p_ sound[1], the Latin _sc_ seems to correspond to the German _sch_ ) and some things that are unchanged.

Next, I come up with a set of roots like { _pater,_ piš, _pes} and a set of rules to apply like {p → f in German, š → sc in Latin, š → sch in German}, and I can state with some confidence that these words descend from a common root.

In practice, you'd do this with _way* more than three words—preferably you'd use most of the language—and there is some wiggle room for related meanings or exceptional changes, e.g. the German word _alt_ and English word _old_ seem unrelated to the Latin word _senere_ 'to be old', because they actually stem from words for 'to grow up', and are therefore cognate to the Latin _altus_ 'high, tall'. Additionally, some rules are _more plausible_ than others based on research and phonological considerations, so the change of s → h is well- attested in actual languages and is consistent with similarities between the two sounds, while the change of r → b is highly unlikely.

And while there is _some_ room for error, there is a limit e.g. one might argue that English and Japanese are cognate because in Japanese, 'to eat' is _taberu_ and 'to see' is _miru_ , and in English we eat off a table and see in a mirror. This doesn't get borne out with more thorough phonological rules and doesn't seem to reflect regular semantic processes, either.

tl;dr: Two words are cognate if they come from a common root; without direct knowledge of the parent language (e.g. Latin for Italian and French), we postulate one and show that regular processes can derive the child languages' vocabulary.

[1]: If you don't speak German, know that the German _v_ is pronounced like an _f_.

<comment><USER19> That was an excellent explanation, thank you. Also regarding ojciec, I found this: <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ojciec#Etymology> The changing over time following rules was the missing part for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another negative response from a linguist <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612>

</comment><comment><USER21> Why couldn't the NYT have transitioned as eloquently as the Washington Post onto the web?

</comment><comment><USER22> So, suppose we want to know what 'bark' sounded like in the common language 15,000 years ago. Call that common language X.

Well, take languages A and B now where 'bark' is shared as a cognate.

Now, start with language A now and realize that as we go back in time 15,000 years ago to language X how 'bark' was pronounced changed year by year. Then realize that as we go forward in time from language X 15,000 years ago to language B now, how 'bark' was pronounced has changed year by year.

Then the change in how 'bark' is pronounced in languages now is smaller than either the change from language A now to language X 15,000 years ago or from language B now to language X 15,000 years ago.

So, how close is how 'bark' is pronounced now to how it was pronounced 15,000 years ago? Closer than to how 'bark' is pronounced between A and B now.

So, if 'bark' is pronounced nearly the same in languages A and B now, then it was pronounced nearly the same 15,000 years ago. Thus we have an approximation to how 'bark' sounded 15,000 years ago.

It may be that languages A and B have a common ancestor more recently than 15,000 years ago. So, for a better approximation want to pick for languages A and B languages for which we have some hope that their most recent common ancestor was X 15,000 years ago.

How to do this? For candidate pairs A and B, look at geographical and genetic distances and pick the most distant pair.

<comment><USER23> Individual words often migrate between languages even if they don't share a common ancestor.

<comment><USER22> Cute. And there are other issues with what I wrote. For a more careful analysis, would have to do, say, a 'probabilistic' analysis, e.g., where in principle can walk back to the beginning and start over but actually, e.g., with some common assumptions, in a space of dimension 3 or greater, probabilistically keep getting farther from the starting point.

Your point should come out in the wash in estimating where there is a common language and how far back if use more than one word, etc.

My guess, especially from many of the other comments on this thread, is that the basic data is so bad, noisy, etc. and pronunciation changes so large that the math I outlined, while basically correct, would mostly give such large distances that we wouldn't learn much.

Maybe a better solution would be just to assume that the tree of languages would follow the tree of genetic inheritance and, then, via genetic analysis trace that tree.

But the article wanted to ask what one of those 'common' words would 'sound' like 15,000 years ago, so I gave a way to get an approximation. The cute part is while 'father' in English sounds a bit different from 'vater' in German, the common ancestor should sound closer to either 'father' or 'vater' than those to two each other, that is, closer rather than farther away. That is, our intuition would be that the sound from 15,000 years ago should be much different from either the current 'father' or 'vater', but with the math model I gave that should be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "I was really delighted to see 'to give' there," Pagel said. "Human society is characterized by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don't see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn't."

<comment><USER4> This is the sort of unscientific wishfulness that undermines the analysis.

And is directly contradicted by known animal behavior.

<comment><USER24> Your way of living is not a happy one.

<comment><USER25> It's unfortunate that you believe happiness requires self-delusion.

<comment><USER26> And you just know more than the experts. Armchair expert...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why there are no software equivalents of Rolex - <AUTHOR> https://thejollyteapot.com/2020/04/12/why-there-are-no-software-equivalents-of-rolex <comment><USER2> thanks for submitting.</comment>


How Apple's Obsession with Google Is Hurting Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/192350/how-apples-obsession-with-google-is-hurting-apple/#Pj6KF8qE3DqGj3OK.99

<comment><AUTHOR> > Meanwhile, Google+ is the Google Maps of social networks. Although Google+ > may have as little as 10% of the active users of Facebook, it's growing > faster than Facebook ever did. And more importantly, Google+ has a vastly > superior user experience to Facebook and has a much brighter longterm > future, in my opinion.

This is a highly contentious point.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is far more true of Google > Facebook than Apple > Google.</comment>


One-command deploy for Nodejs and MongoDB apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.nodechef.com/ <comment><USER2> Awesome. Now if only I could decide between the 100 million services that do this.</comment>


Flash Game History - <AUTHOR> http://www.flashgamehistory.com/ <comment><USER2> > Nowadays, games like the McDonald's Videogame, where you corrupt politicians > and destroy the rainforest to make fast food, would most likely be banned > from the App Store, cutting it off from a large percentage of players.

Brings up a good point of the old WWW: we _expected_ to have to navigate a number of sites to source content, and it was good! I remember having to surf Ebaumsworld, Newgrounds, and a bunch of direct content-creator sites to play a whole slew of games.

</comment><comment><USER3> At Leaning Technologies, we are working on preserving _all_ flash content by running the original x86 Flash plugin via WebAssembly virtualization (CheerpX). If you want to read more:

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in- webassembly-...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly- using-cheerpx-an-update-d500b6fbc44e)

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content- with...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with- webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f)

A presentation about the architecture of the system: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo)

Feel free to drop me any question: [https://twitter.com/alexpignotti](https://twitter.com/alexpignotti)

<comment><USER4> Amazing work! Years ago Mozilla was working on a javascript implementation to help support legacy flash content on a Flashless web, but that got quickly abandoned before it mature significantly. Glad that someone else is working on it with a more modern approach.

<comment><USER3> You are referring to Shumway. I was working at the time on Lightspark, another FOSS implementation. All these efforts, including the recent ones, like Ruffle, are doomed due to the sheer complexity of implementing Flash from scratch.

Our approach is different. We run the binary plugin safely in the browser via WebAssembly virtualization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi everyone! I wrote the article. It's great to see it shared here on HackerNews. The people buildings today's tools and technologies are exactly the people that I want to reach!

So many developers still feel like Flash was the most amazing thing that ever happened to them in their creative careers.

For building today's platforms and technologies, it is important to remember what made Flash great, but it is at risk of being forgotten because Flash will no longer be supported after December 2020.

I'd like to spread the message to influence and inspire the next generation of tool creators!

<comment><USER6> Hey, I loved the article! One comment is the animated header backgrounds are pretty jarring for people with sensitivity to motion when trying to read. Would there be a way that you could add a button to pause the animations? I think it would make the meat of the article much more accessible.

<comment><USER5> You are right. It's only in the beginning, but it can still be annoying. Maybe it would be better without the screenshake from Canabalt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is such a shame that no modern game development tool comes close to Flash in terms of ease of use, development speed, and integration of art+animation (I say this as someone who worked as a professional Flash developer for 5 years and then spent a decade working in Unity).

<comment> salt-licker Yep. It was also an amazingly natural way to learn to code. Gen Z has a lower barrier to entry than before for creating just about every form of multimedia content except games — I'd love to see someone build a fully integrated, easy- to-learn game design platform to encourage more of them to get into programming.

<comment><USER8> I'm a bit out of the Adobe Animate loop, but was a lot of functionality removed from it?

<comment><USER7> It hasn't had functionality removed but it feels clearly like an unloved product at Adobe. The updates have mostly managed to make it feel worse instead of better.

On top of that, for kids learning to make games, the idea of getting a $20/month Adobe CC subscription is a massive stretch. For it to catch on these days there would really need to be some free tier.

<comment><USER8> What was the free tier before, piracy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is missing a pretty big chunk of the end-game(s) of Flash: social network gaming. All of the top Facebook games were using Flash. We built the engine for FarmVille, CityVille, etc. using ActionScript3. Our artists would author the animations and sprites in the Flash editor and we'd be able to drop them in seamlessly into the game.

Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in 2018.

Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.

<comment><USER10> How did you find ActionScript compared to other more modern languages?

<comment><USER11> Major FB games were all AS3, which was a very standard language. If you're familiar with C# or Java you'd be totally unsurprised.

In fact, Adobe hoped it would become the new JavaScript. The history of ECMA 4 was fascinating[1].

1: [https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind- es4/](https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/)

<comment> collective-intl AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers.

In a surprising twist of history, AS3's ideas were rediscovered years later with a language called Typescript that among other things added classes and static typing...

Flash development's language and tools were surprisingly ahead of their time!

<comment><USER12> There is still no replacement tooling on the web, the way you can manage movie clips (as instances), attach animations, control the timeline.. (compose them)... That was really a joy.. Also was awesome the feedback loop within the ide (just hit ctrl+enter) to run it and try it. On these times, flash was also the predominant option for embedding video on websites.. (there are lot's of stories that are coming back to now: preloading, lazy loading, easing... (I still follow Robert Penner for they ease equations). Thought people still uses tweenlite ;)

<comment><USER11> Ha hey, Greensock was and was and is the best, and it's still going strong for Js. Frankly we could probably get half the experience of flash if we all just went and worked with that library!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Newgrounds will always have a special place in my heart. I remember learning flash over the summer on a lark and porting a game a friend of mine had originally written in Q-basic. It was the first time I'd ever "shipped" something and Newgrounds was where I launched it. The game ended up on the frontpage which at the time was a huge deal. From there, my game started showing up all over the web at various flash game websites. One site offered me $50 for a non-exclusive license which for a college kid was fantastic! Paid for a nice dinner and drinks for me and my friend. Its neat seeing the game show up in the top 2000 as well.

Game in question is Roadblocks for anyone interested [https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217](https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217)

<comment><USER5> That's so cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Flash cartoons were also a big deal, off the top of my head: Homestar Runner, Happy Tree Friends, Family Guy, Harvey Birdman, Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends, Squidbillies, Metalocalypse, and tons more.

For all the problems with Flash, we definitely lost a lot when we dropped it.

<comment><USER15> The key aspect of early flash was the vectorization of graphics. It resulted in tiny filesizes for videos that could scale to arbitrarily high resolutions yet still be downloaded over a dialup connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there any _easy to use, safe_ flash game preservation project?

I remember some project that seems to require you to download the entire 1 TB torrent and/or some sort of custom launcher, but nothing that focuses on trying to translate games into JavaScript (or WASM, or something else that lets you go to a web site and start playing right away), or just provide ZIP files that you can drop into a VM with an old browser.

Edit: The project I know of is [https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/) and seems the most promising so far that I've seen. It's windows-only, the sandboxing seems sketchy (seems to explicitly make changes on the host then try to revert them), and the launcher is almost 2 GB, but I suspect it's the best we have right now.

<comment><USER17> You may be interested in Ruffle, which is a Flash emulator written in Rust that can be cross compiled to run in a browser on WASM.

[http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us- west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/w...](http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us- west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/web-demo/)

<comment><USER16> The problem with this is finding/getting the SWFs and compatibility, but newgrounds.com seems to be using this to make old games available, e.g. [https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/81219](https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/81219)

Unfortunately not all games are compatible yet. (Edit: actually, I could only get two games to run - the above-mentioned Fishy and Divine Intervention [https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/136337;](https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/136337;) everything else fails)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wasn't much into games but wrote a lot of ActionScript. Some such as the video engine for Vongo (STARZ), quite a bit for Walt Disney, and Educational tools for Pearson Publishing, and few thingies for Nokia.

Let me tell you a story.

So, there was a gathering of supposedly some of the best ActionScript developers in the world in the Macromedia office in San Francisco (just as they were about to be acquired by Adobe). These developers were the ones that wrote libraries the world uses, best game developers, et al.

One of the talks was by Gary Grossman, the father/inventor of ActionScript. He starts off by saying in the lines of, "I'm going to go a bit technical in this."

Well, we heard him talk about things after which we begin to think if he was talking about ActionScript or something else. We looked at each other, "We are all n00bs here." ;-)

</comment><comment><USER19> As a game developer it feels like _nothing_ has replaced flash; sure, there have been attempts to recreate the ease of creation, but the surrounding community was as much flash as the tech itself.

</comment><comment><USER20> 10 years later WebAssembly is still trying to match this

[https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/](https://adobe- flash.github.io/crossbridge/)

Unreal Engine 3 demo on CrossBridge

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y)

While trying to play the safe card,

"Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly" \- USENIX 2020

[http://www.software- lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAs...](http://www.software- lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAssembly.pdf)

And no other tool is yet to match the tooling capabilities of Flash.

<comment><USER21> I remember at the time how everyone were simply saying that Flash was no longer needed, that sure JS wasn't as fast, but that it would quickly surpass Flash...

We talk about tool capabilities, but it's also a standalone format, a single file that you include and it works. There's no way to achieve the same yet in JS. I'm sure some people tried to push standard ways, but none never became as standard as including a SWF file.

<comment><USER22> > a single file that you include and it works. There's no way to achieve the > same yet in JS.

You can include all your JS and CSS into one HTML file.

It's widely considered a bad practice for sure, but you absolutely can include it all in one file. Even your images can be included in the file with base64 encoding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great piece of work, seems to focus completely on NewGrounds, which, as a Flash games developer from 1999-2009, I had not heard of back in the day. There were Flash games EVERYWHERE from b3ta to Orisinal. We wrote games for clients and were paid for doing so, and these often had decent marketing budgets behind them to popularize them, had competitions attached and the like. The biggest was for LBi and British Gas, Generation Green, where we threw everything including the kitchen sink at the game, Box2D, particle emitters, level editor for our game designer, everything. It was pretty amazing. In the end I was working on Facebook games for Square Enix, which was - for me - the beginning of the Free-to-play genre but monetization behind the surface for extras. What a time. Way more fun than it is now.

</comment><comment><USER24> this website almost made me cry. It was a magical time to learn to program games, with such a low barrier of entry. I loved it so much, it helped me through a horrible childhood. I no longer feel like I want to make games but I will never forget the way it felt to be part of that community. I'm so glad this project is here to honor it and remind me of it.

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has there been much of an effort to make something to convert a Flash animation/game into HTML/JS? Certainly anything ActionScript could do, JS could do as well, right?

<comment><USER25> Nearly everything anyway. ActionScript had access to lots of system apis and things that may not have browser level equivalents still. In particular the networking capabilities and I'd be surprised if there's not more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Really great work here. I love the way the visualizations are laid out, and the subject is near and dear to me. I often think about getting back into making games/movies and/or creating a Macromedia Flash 8 clone in the browser. I loved how there were just a few simple concepts such as frames, tweens, movie clips, and an asset library that you could tie together with js-like code to make whatever you wish.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! So many developers loved the animation heavy Flash workflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Probably most won't remember Fantavision for the Apple II, I loved making animations with it and then became an early adopter of Flash, programming AS1 to AS3 websites and car customization apps for General Motors. The last cool thing I did with it was 3D graphics, then moved to Unity.

Interestingly the first versions of Unity game engine included support for Javascript as a way to bring Flash devs into their product.

</comment><comment><USER28> What an amazing, nostalgic site! Flash was definitely ahead of its time. I recall the pure excitement of the early Flash days in 1999. It was a perfect storm of a having simple to use tool with easy distribution, combined with being on the cusp of major increases in Internet usage and bandwidth. The Internet was ripe for a change and Flash offered a perfect combination of vector drawing, animation, development and distribution tools.

I vividly remember my first experience with Flash: watching an artist use a Wacom tablet to draw and animate a cartoon using vector brushes, the timeline, onion-skinning and then adding sound and publishing all from his laptop. As a web developer pushing out HTML pages with single-pixel gifs and tables, this was eye-opening. I worked heavily with Flash over the next few years and it really opened my eyes to the power of animation and motion graphics on the web.

</comment><comment><USER29> Remember those madness animations? And that madness flash game? I _loved_ that shit when I was 12.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've seen some other people in the comments mentioning Roblox[0]; the creator of the McDonalds Videogame mentioned on that website is a CMU professor who recently explored some Roblox games on his twitter[1]. It definitely feels like Roblox is the platform that will inspire future generations.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox)

[1] [https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128375548540196045...](https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/1283755485401960450)

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't believe it doesn't mention Kongregate.com

That's the site that really roped me into programming... and illustrating with a Wacom!

</comment><comment><USER31> Can anyone recommend Flash games I should try out? I feel like I completely missed out on this scene.

</comment><comment><USER32> I miss Flash</comment>


YouTube gets a refresh - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/t/new

<comment><USER2> Do they know that the ads team undermines any effort by the product team to make a usable YouTube?</comment>


Utility poles - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plover.com/tech/utility-poles.html <comment><USER2> Those cans are filled with transformer oil, which until relatively recently consisted mostly of polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. Imagine how many of those cans exist across the United States and you get a sense of how big the PCB industry used to be, and why rivers such as the Hudson in New York [1] and the Housatonic in Massachusetts [2] are polluted with olympic swimming-pool sized quantities of the durable oily poison.

PCBs were used because they are really good thermal conductors, which is the same property desired of cooking oil for frying. In recent years, thieves in Kenya (which has yet to replace PCBs with something less toxic) have been vandalizing [3] transformers and selling the oil to street vendors, which has the twin effects of destroying the fragile electrical infrastructure and poisoning the neighborhood.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Hudson_River](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Hudson_River) [2] [https://www.epa.gov/ge-housatonic/understanding-pcb-risks- ge...](https://www.epa.gov/ge-housatonic/understanding-pcb-risks-ge- pittsfieldhousatonic-river-site#FastFacts) [3] [https://www.reuters.com/article/kenya-electricity/thieves- fr...](https://www.reuters.com/article/kenya-electricity/thieves-fry-kenyas- power-grid-to-cook-fast-food-idUSL6N0U81JB20141227)

<comment><USER3> There's a nice recreational lake here in Raleigh, NC. People run on paths by it, sail on it, and used to fish out of it. Sadly, it's also an EPA Superfund site because a company long since out of business, Ward Transformers, saw fit to dispose of PCB-laden transformer oil right into a ditch behind the plant. The PCBs ran off into the lake and streams for miles. All the nearby waterways warn not to eat the fish caught therein.

This company wasn't just irresponsible, it was malicious. At one point, a contractor it hired to dispose of the oil was caught spraying it along rural roadsides.

[http://sph.unc.edu/superfund-pages/srpresources/ward- transfo...](http://sph.unc.edu/superfund-pages/srpresources/ward-transformer- superfund-site-resources/)

[https://sph.unc.edu/files/2015/08/SRP_Soil-Still- Toxic-25-ye...](https://sph.unc.edu/files/2015/08/SRP_Soil-Still- Toxic-25-years-later.pdf)

Related story – "How the Benzene Tree Polluted the World":

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/benzene-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/benzene- tree-organic-compounds/530655/)

<comment><USER4> Dirt and gravel roads were commonly oiled to keep down dust, and eventually create something like macadam. But they tended to use the least expensive oil available. Such as used motor oil. Which, back in the days of leaded gasoline, contained considerable lead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I absolutely love reading about a topic from a super enthusiastic non-expert. I want to subscribe to a weekly series called "Reasonably Intelligent Person Obsesses Over Something"

<comment><USER6> Something that completely fascinates me are cell towers/equipment. They are everywhere, yet I know almost nothing about them and rarely get to see them up close. Even less often (pretty much never) meet anyone who work on the equipment. I imagine each base station is basically a mini datacenter. I was at Mammoth Mountain recently for the first time and got to see the cell towers at the top of one of the lifts up close and got some good pictures.

<comment><USER7> I would absolutely love a big writeup on how they're set up and what the components are, as well as all the real-estate stuff that certainly surrounds them. I'm also noticing a lot of new towers that look like big cylinders on a pole, sort of like a TACAN so I often wonder what's up with that.

I do know that the traditional ones are triangle shaped such that they each form the intersection of a hexagon tessellation (hence the cell in cellphone) such that you have three towers pointed into every hexagonal cell.

<comment><USER8> The cell companies are actually moving away from the large towers as 5g service is deployed in favor of microcells.

[http://www.steelintheair.com/Blog/2017/04/top-10-things- the-...](http://www.steelintheair.com/Blog/2017/04/top-10-things-the-wireless- industry-doesnt-tell-you-about-small-cells.html)

They can be built into decorative lighting poles such that you would really have to pay attention to notice them.

<comment><USER9> How does that work in rural areas? Microcells all the way down the highway at regular intervals?

<comment><USER10> Microcells are good for carrying lots of traffic from lots of mobile stations. In rural areas, coverage at the lowest cost per square mile is more important. Also, farmers aren't always near the highway, so microcells on the highway would not work well for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Back around 2010 I worked for a company which built software to catalog residential distribution utility poles and the lines emanating from the poles to the houses.

To elaborate on a few of the statements from the post

        Poles in my neighborhood tend to have consecutive numbers. I don't think this was carefully planned.

The sequential ordering of pole numbers is definitely planned, and fits in with a scheme developed back in the 60s-70s which made documenting the poles lifecycle in paper records much easier. The poles are numbered sequentially with prefix numbers generally indicating which substation district the pole belongs within. Distribution utilities think about their infrastructure as a network of substation circuits. You should be able to tell which circuit you are on based on the numbering on the pole.

        There are three because that is one way to change the three-phase power to single-phase, something I wish I understood better. Truly, we live in an age of marvels.

Not all distribution systems use three phases, some use two, some use single. It all depends on where you are in the system and the general layout of the circuits within the distribution network. Also not all distribution is 7kV, some are 12kV, and some are 25kV. Again this all changes based on the properties of the system, and the qualities that are being optimized for by the power engineers.

         I have tried to imagine what the number-burning device looks like, but I'm not at all sure. Is it like a heated printing press, or perhaps a sort of configurable branding iron?

This can be done a number of different ways, but one of the common ways is with a laser engraver. This is a fairly recent practice, so I am not as versed in the operational details as with traditional tagging. Another means of tagging which is not covered in the article is carving the numbers into the pole with a physical etcher, similar to a wood router.

        Without the Internet I would just have to wonder what these were and what OSMOSE meant.

OSMOSE was at the time of my work in this field, the largest such company that dealt in the support and maintenance of residential utility poles. They have some very interesting proprietary mechanisms for managing inventories, and are generally a very smart group of people. My guess is that they collect all the inventory and survey maintenance of poles using mobile LiDAR and machine vision now, as that was what we were speaking to them about at the time.

<comment><USER12> The pole numbering also helps in things like the work PG&E has to do checking for trees and other obstacles posing a risk to transmission lines. The report indicating where the work needs to be done (for instance to cut down a tree) uses the pole number as a point of reference.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I am intimately familiar with this as this was also part of the services that I was involved in delivering. One of the deliverables for utility clients we provided was every "fall in" or "drop in" line violation for high power transmission lines, including their "between" location in relation to adjacent poles on the corridor.

I could talk about this subject for hours so let me know if you have any other questions.

:)

<comment><USER13> What's a typical range of amperage for a distribution line?

<comment><USER11> Most distribution transformers have a maximum rating of 200kVA. So depending on their voltage you can calculate the max amps by (200kVA / voltage). Minimum amps is a bit harder to calculate but I would make a best guess of 20% of the max 200kVA.

You can read a bit more about the calculations here[0]

[0] [https://yorkcentraltechtalk.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/transfo...](https://yorkcentraltechtalk.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/transformers- and-va-ratings/)

Edit: noted that 200kVA is the maximum rating, not default rating.

<comment><USER14> Do the distribution transformers have "winter" ratings like the local center tapped step down transformers that feed houses? Around here it is pretty clear that Georgia Power doesn't pay much attention to the name plate ratings, winter or otherwise, when sizing and determining the number of homes per xformer.

<comment><USER15> Distribution transformers are not usually thought of as having a winter rating. On the other hand, distributions lines definitely do. Sometimes work on lines can only be done during the winter, because the load has to be shifted to lines that can only handle the increased temporary load during the winter.

There is a science and an art to sizing residential xfmrs. Generally is depends on the square footage, number of bedrooms and type of fuel used to condition the house.

Probably where GP is running into problem(like most electrical utilities) is that the use of electricity per square foot keeps going up.(caused by the increase of electrical devices in the home) So while the xfmr might have been sized correctly when installed 20-40 years ago, it is no longer sufficient. This causes problems.

Source: I was a distribution engineer for 7 years.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the info. Day job has me using the NEC frequently, and occasionally the NESC.

But I never thought about pole xformer sizing until this house. Our 35kVA (summer) faceplate xformer services nine homes. Even though it browns, it keeps on working. They've got a lot of margin, it seems

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > There are three because that is one way to change the three-phase power to > single-phase, something I wish I understood better.

No, that's not correct.

Three transformers is for changing 3 phase medium power, to 3 phase regular voltage (for commercial customers).

For single phase home customers, you run a single one of those phases along a street and attach center tapped transformers to it.

The center tap means from the top to the center is 120v, and from the center to the bottom is another 120v. This gives something called "split phase", and is how homes in the US are wired.

This allows you to get 240v in the house if you need it by attaching to the top and bottom of the transformer.

The center tap of the transformer is also attached to the ground, and to the neutral power line (back to the generator). This gives what is called "zero voltage" (voltage is always relative, there is no such thing as absolute zero voltage - so you just have to pick something, and call it zero).

<comment><USER17> Going to be a bit pedantic here but you absolutely can have 0 Voltage. Voltage is the potential energy created by a difference in charge between 2 points. If you have a mass with sufficient free mobile charge, when you inject additional charge into it, it will rearrange the charge within itself to cancel out in injected charge resulting in 0 Volts of potential. This is the principal that a ground connection works on and why you don't have voltage inside of metal conductors, just on the surface.

<comment><USER18> If you have any conductive bar or wire of sufficient size you can safely touch both ends (and measure zero volts across them. If you stretch those conductors over miles and miles of distance, it gets harder to reference the end to both grounds at the same time. And getting a good ground can be hard. There are numerous stories of "stray voltage" making cattle jumpy, etc.

Of course if you coil up that conductor and pass a magnet by it you're going to get shocked ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My dad was an electrician for about 40 years - one story he told me when he was training apprentices years ago was teaching them how to climb telephone polls. You wore boots that had spikes in the side of them, but when climbing, you had to keep your knees away from the poll so the spikes would dig in properly. Unfortunately, when you get to the top of the pole and look down, some people panic due to the height. And when they panic, they tend to "hug" the poll, which causes the spikes to pull out, which causes the person to slide down the poll which is pretty much a collection of splinters in poll form. They called it "burning the poll".

<comment><USER20> Nit: s/poll/pole/g

<comment><USER19> Sigh, thanks ;)

<comment><USER20> They're and their are my personal bugbear. I'm right there with you. :)

<comment><USER21> The way I solved that one mostly is to always repeat the sentence back and swap they're for "they are" in my head (same for its vs it's).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I did some work for an electricity utility and they wanted to get the pole IDs described in the article into our database, alongside the GIS data. The client explained that getting the IDs was kinda difficult and there were several different data sources for the various regions they provided service to. By and by we found a guy there who knew how everything worked and promised he'd get us the data that we needed - which he did.

But he told me an interesting story - the utility had about 50,000 power poles in their network. But due to various historical reasons and how their assets were digitized over the years he reckoned there were probably about 1000 of them that were on their maps, but that didn't actually exist anymore. And interestingly, he thought the inverse was also true; that there were perhaps 1000 poles out there that weren't on any of their maps. Big ten meter tall poles, some probably carrying live cables - didn't know they were there.

<comment><USER23> > that there were perhaps 1000 poles out there that weren't on any of there > maps

I can totally see how this would happen. When I bought my house, the power/utility lines were hanging about four feet off the ground in my backyard. Apparently the previous owner didn't care.

I called the utility company to complain, and they sent someone out with a new full size pole, who basically just shoved it in the ground in the corner of my property to prop up the lines.

As far as I can tell, there are no identifying marks anywhere on the pole. No label, no inspection, no nothing. Except a sign that says "Danger, do not put ladder on this cable", which is on the fiber optic cable that runs along the pole.

<comment><USER11> This is common at every utility. Part of the issue is based on the fact that the GIS systems do not align with the paper systems 100% and the paper systems are typically regarded as the standard.

Another problem that must be considered is that utility workers, while highly competent at their profession, are not always great with working on computers. They generally write everything down on paper and then have one of the younger linemen input the changes into the electronic records system.

Also utilities often have several record systems in place, some being GIS based, and some being mobile computer based with check in with a central database. These systems are almost never developed and worked on by the same people, so inconsistencies abound. It's normal for the inventories to diverge, and for updates to take weeks to propagate from one system to another.

<comment><USER24> > "Another problem that must be considered is that utility workers, while > highly competent at their profession, are not always great with working on > computers."

You're absolutely correct on this point. When I was working as a transmission system operator the older guys (all in the 50s and 60s) would complain all day and night about the new "computer apps" that were introduced in our day to day workflow. They all preferred the old "pen and paper" way of doing things...Like you said, I'd be the who would end up putting the written switching procedures into the application we used since the older guys basically refused to learn it...

<comment><USER25> This is still a major problem in distribution. Some of the best workers are in their late 50s and they are familiar with older equipment in the field that the younger guys may have never seen.

They would much rather use pen and paper to report what they did or didn't do, with little appreciation for the reporting that could be done with a bit of input on the computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pole replacement is interesting and full of bureaucracy. At least here in Seattle, the power company doesn't have authority to move communications wires and equipment attached to poles that are being replaced. So often times they'll cut the bottom off the old pole, move it to the side, install a new pole, and then use seemingly whatever they've got lying around to lash the two of them together. Owners of the other equipment eventually get around to moving their stuff (sometimes years later), and the last one removes the pole.

Some examples: [http://archive.seattleweekly.com/news/960949-129/whats-up- wi...](http://archive.seattleweekly.com/news/960949-129/whats-up-with- seattles-messed-up-utility)

</comment><comment><USER27> Old utility poles can be reused in many ways too, but they must be outdoors, and not where it can have direct contact with people. Back in 2003 I called a local electric company if they could donate a few used poles to be used as beams for a bridge I was constructing for a local park. They we're happy to oblige. You can sometimes see these poles used in retaining walls and buried alongside hiking trails, used as water bars. I keep an eye out whenever I'm on a trail and am sometimes surprised to see an electric pole miles from a trailhead.

<comment><USER28> > and not where it can have direct contact with people.

Could you expand on that? My elementary school had a playground structure made of old utility poles. Other than getting pitch on our clothes, they didn't seem particularly hazardous.

<comment><USER29> They're treated with lots of preservatives. They're probably not all that dangerous in the short term (unless you eat some of the pitch), but it's annoying to deal with the potential long term safety. My scoutmaster worked for the power company, and I was going to ask him if we could have a couple of poles for my Eagle project, but after looking at what you had to do to reuse them I decided it was simply too much of a hassle.

<comment><USER28> Could be a lack of awareness, as this was several decades ago. We also had a jungle gym made from pipes set in a concrete pad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Regarding three-phase power:

The electrical outlets in your home have two power-carrying prongs. The third prong is just for safety (it connects to the ground), and should never carry power unless something is going horribly wrong. In that case, the power should hopefully prefer to reach the ground through that third wire than through your human body.

Anyhow, the voltage in those two power-carrying wires is constantly switching directions. At one moment, the left wire will be +170 volts relative to the right wire, and then they will slowly switch places over the next 1/120 of a second so the right wire is at +170 volts. They continue trading places, completing a cycle every 1/60 of a second.

At some point in this cycle, the voltage difference between the two wires will be zero, which means that no power will be flowing at that moment (power = voltage * current). On the average, the wires will deliver the same amount of power _as-if_ they had a constant 120 volts between them, which is why people say that electricity in the USA runs at 120VAC. The peak-to-peak voltage is 170V, but the "RMS" average voltage is 1/√2 of that, or 120V.

Anyhow, those brief moments of time where no power is flowing are a problem for a power company, who would like to deliver energy in a continuous stream. So, they build their power system with three wires. Each wire reaches its maximum voltage 1/180 of a second after the previous wire. Since the voltages on each wire are sine waves, when one wire is at 0, the other wires are at +√3/2 and -√3/2 of their maximum voltages. Therefore, there is no point where the power stops. In fact, due to a mathematical quirk, the power delivery is actually constant, even though the voltages on the three wires are constantly changing.

Turing three-phase voltage into two phase voltage is pretty easy. Just pick any two of the three wires and hook them into the home. The difference of any two sine waves is just another sine wave at the same frequency, so you automatically have single-phase power. In practice, the power company will try to balance the load between the three pairs of wires by sending different pairs into different houses or even neighborhoods.

Edit: As several people have pointed out, this isn't _quite_ how it works in real life. See the comments below for details about the hot vs. neutral wire and how both 240V and 120V are available in the home at the same time.

<comment><USER31> > the voltage in those two power-carrying wires is constantly switching > directions

I'm not buying this (in the USA). I've been in my breaker box. For a typical 110 volt outlet, the black (hot) wire is connected to the breaker, which is connected to one of the wires coming into the house from the street. The white (neutral) wire is connected to the same ground bracket that the bare (ground) wire is connected to.

240 volt connections (like my dryer and range) are taking a hot line from one of the lines coming into the house and another hot line from the other line coming into the house. You can see it on the bus bars in the breaker box. That's why dual breakers are used. Adjacent breakers pull for different bus bars.

*edit typo

<comment><USER30> Right, that is correct. To understand how that works, you have to realize that there is no such thing as an "absolute voltage", only the voltage difference between two wires.

In a breaker box, one wire (white) gets tied to ground, and the other wire (black or red) goes between +170 (relative to ground) and -170 (relative to ground). The black and red wires are 180 degrees out of phase, so when the black wire is at +170, the red wire is at -170. This gives a 340V peak difference between the black and red wires, which averages to 240V. You get your normal 120V outlet power between the hot legs and ground/neutral, and you get your 240V dryer & water heater power between the two hot legs themselves.

So, in a normal outlet, we can safely say that one wire is "more positive" than another, and that this flip-flops through time. When we look at voltages relative to ground, though, one wire stays put at 0V while the other goes between +170 and -170. It's just a question of where you put your reference frame.

<comment><USER16> This is not what you said in the other post. You are confusing people, and you should edit it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A good book on this and related subjects is _Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape_ by Brian Hayes. Published in 2006 so almost certainly out of print, but probably easy enough to get on Amazon or similar.

<comment><USER33> Thanks for the recommendation; that book looks amazing!

And there's a revised 2014 edition in print: [http://industrial- landscape.com/#/buy](http://industrial-landscape.com/#/buy)

<comment><USER34> Thanks to both of you. It does seem to be a great book! I've requested it (well, the older version) from my library. Apropos this article: [http://industrial-landscape.com/#/18](http://industrial-landscape.com/#/18)

<comment><USER35> Enjoy it! I've had this book for years. It's one of my treasured possessions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A bit of information: Openstreetmap includes a field for the identification number on utility poles. A lot of people fill this field in when they do mapping (I do). Thus OSM is quite a good reference for these numbers, and the general topology of the electricity grid.

</comment><comment><USER37> I was looking at the transmission lines one day and was curious about why there are always 4 wires. Basically, 3 lines carry equal voltage phased 120 degrees apart from one another. This kind of power is easily generated from 3 phase power generators at the power plant. The 4th wire is a common return for all three wires. It is normally smaller than any single load wire because, if the power is distributed evenly, no load is carried on it.

The second part of the system, is that, normally, no one customer will use more than one of the three load lines. That is why most houses only have one transformer on the pole out side their house. The power company makes sure they balance connections evenly within a given area. If they do this properly, the common 4th wire has no load on it.

Some buildings do use all three phases, but they would be running large industrial machines that benefit from having that type of power.

I tried to find the Wikipedia article that covered all this, but can't seem to locate it specifically.

<comment><USER38> Is that an American thing?

I've never seen 4 lines on a power line in New Zealand unless they're also carrying telephone lines.

<comment><USER39> I think New Zealand is the same as Australia with 5 wires: the 3 phases, neutral (the central return wire) and earth. Grabbing a random location in Auckland off Street View shows 5 wires:

[https://goo.gl/maps/wz1W73uWAiz](https://goo.gl/maps/wz1W73uWAiz)

<comment><USER37> That just seems odd to me to have a wire for earth... carried above the earth. I can understand having earth wires in houses made of concrete and wood since they have to get to the earth through those materials, but what makes a common earth ground better than just lots of many grounding points? All that wire has got to get expensive.

<comment><USER40> The earth is a pretty terrible conductor.

<comment><USER37> The point of an earth ground is to dissipate the accumulation of static built up. Ground is not connected to the power supply so there is nothing to return to the power company. The earth is the best place for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> _Probably they computerized this back in the seventies, and the books are moldering in a closet somewhere._

Oh, sweet naive summer child.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm now spotting fiber optic cables on different poles :) They commonly use distinguishable splice enclosures which look like this:

* [https://fiber-optic-catalog.ofsoptics.com/Asset/Closure.jpg](https://fiber-optic-catalog.ofsoptics.com/Asset/Closure.jpg)

* [https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/fiber-optic-enclosure-splice...](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/fiber-optic-enclosure-splice-cable-storage-bracket-hanging-aerial-messenger-strand-bonded-to-wood-pole-47258472.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Your bottom picture also shows half of a snowshoe fiber slack storage location. They are used at almost every splice so the splice can be moved to the ground easily and placed into a splicing trailer. That fiber pictured is a strand and lash construction where a high strength steel wire is placed and then the fiber is basically tied to it. We have stopped using any of it in favor of ADSS fiber which means all dielectric self supporting. We can place it in the power space and avoid dealing with the communications space problems.

<comment><USER42> _> a snowshoe fiber slack storage. They are used at almost every splice so the splice can be moved to the ground easily and placed into a splicing trailer._

Interesting, thanks for pointing out how it's called and what's the purpose of it. I saw it around, but had no idea what it's for :)

I noticed though, that for example Optimum fiber network is using it, while Verizon one does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> In Australia we have a life extension program for hardwood poles which slides a steel formed sock/support down the side to stabilise it for many a year more after a hard life.

We had some issues with corrosive dog wee. Tar treatment sometimes works. Also steel collars to keep possums off the top structure.

In Europe there are other platforms above the transform and wire complex for bird nests. Storks, cranes all above the risky bit.

Aussie poles are made from wood which is harder than nails. Unbelievably strong stuff which years of soaking in very nasty chemicals defends from termites which are ubiquitous.

<comment><USER11> As I understand it one of the largest concerns in AU are the wildfires damaging circuits connecting the disparate grids. There was some conversation about replacing some of the network poles with fire resistant poles in order to try and avoid the high number of outages caused by fires during the dry season.

I'd be interested to know how that project went, and if it was successful.

<comment><USER39> Not so much bushfires damaging electrical infrastructure as electrical infrastructure starting fires. A large portion of Victoria's worst day of bushfire was sparked by a faulty power line and the electricity distribution network (22kV and below) is responsible for a good portion of fire starts, especially those lines that utilise a single wire with an earth return (SWER). The recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Black Saturday fires in regard to the electricity network are available at [http://royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Commission- Reports/Final-R...](http://royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Commission- Reports/Final-Report/Volume-2/Chapters/Electricity-Caused-Fire.html) and contain a whole lot of background information. Suffice to say that the recommendation (27) of the wholesale burying of thousands of kilometres of SWER line at the cost of billions of dollars haven't gone far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> >Warning: Probably at least 30% of the surmise in this article is wrong.

I like honest authors.

</comment><comment><USER45> I have always wondered about utility poles, they always seem very fragile. Why not just stick everything in the ground?

<comment><USER46> I think it's cost, mainly. Also, in my neighborhood of older homes it would be hard to get all the easements.

[http://www.elp.com/articles/powergrid_international/print/vo...](http://www.elp.com/articles/powergrid_international/print/volume-18/issue-2/features/underground- vs-overhead-power-line-installation-cost-comparison-.html)

<comment><USER47> Many of the easements for above ground utilities also contain provisions for underground utilities, so getting easements may be easier than you would think. However, having the easement, and having it be feasible to use are two different things. In my neighborhood, some sections have the utilities in line with the sidewalks and there is easy access; others have the utilities behind the homes, over many years many buildings have been built encroaching the easement. The encroaching buildings aren't legally there, but it would be messy to remove them to underground the utilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's interesting how such super common things can be completely different in sifferen countries.

Over here (Austria) utility poles effectively don't exist. Everything is below ground and all households get three phases.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sort of related, but if anyone finds this topic interesting and is looking for software positions related to power systems engineering the startup I work for is hiring. We create 3 phase unbalanced distribution system simulation and optimization software to enable PV & battery integration by utilities.

We currently have a number of open positions: [https://www.opusonesolutions.com/careers/#navigation- positio...](https://www.opusonesolutions.com/careers/#navigation-positions)

<comment><USER24> What exactly does the company do and how do they do it? It is kind of unclear and the "Our Mission" section of the website is one of those generic PR sentences that doesn't actually explain anything about the business...

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> "The poles around here all carry ID numbers, and I imagine that back at the electric company there are giant books listing, for each pole ID number, where the pole is. Probably they computerized this back in the seventies, and the books are moldering in a closet somewhere."

Pretty much... I did data entry for 10 weeks in 2006 putting scanned records of wayleaves into a GIS system for Central Networks (a UK based electricity infrastructure company). Basically they had a record of every single pole, pylon etc, and a record of the legal agreement to access the pole for maintenance (a huge number are on private land, like in a farmer's field or your back garden or an office parking lot). All these records had been input into a GIS system by taking the (very) rough map reference and the pole number, putting that into structured fields, andthen everything else was just scanned documents - my work was part of the upgrading of that (which had been done years before) to completely structured data and a very accurate placement on the map. For legal reasons a lot of the original documents are still kept somewhere. Typically these documents outline both the placement, access arrangement and any payments (which may be ongoing) made to ensure access.

</comment><comment><USER51> The best example in my stats class on why sampling was used: working for the phone company he had to determine if poles were rotting. Practically speaking he could not use a random sample: he sent a pole climber to an area and while there, climb a few or several in the area. It would not be practical to climb one here, another 3 miles away, etc..

</comment><comment><USER52> I've always liked the symbols used to indicate pole defects to climbers, a white arrow on a red field:

[https://www.lemproductsinc.com/utilities/utility-pole- markin...](https://www.lemproductsinc.com/utilities/utility-pole-marking- tags-2/defective-pole-tags/)

[http://www.techproducts.com/new/op/markers&tags/everlast_pha...](http://www.techproducts.com/new/op/markers&tags/everlast_phase.asp)

</comment><comment><USER53> > The cans are full of mineral oil, or sometimes vegetable oil! (Why are they > full of oil? I don't know; I guess for insulation. But I could probably find > out.)

I think the oil's for cooling, actually.

<comment><USER54> I thought it was interesting so I looked it up.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_oil](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_oil)

<comment><USER53> > Its functions are to insulate, suppress corona discharge and arcing, and to > serve as a coolant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Transformer oil is there primary for cooling and secondary for corrosion resistance. When you see transformer burning, it's the oil inside. Larger transformers cycle oil through pipes visible outside.

In the Czech Republic (or at least in some parts) pole numbers and their positions are shared with emergency services. If you are disoriented, reading the number identifies your exact position. Works for railway crossings as well.

Update: typos

</comment><comment><USER56> > As I discussed recently, some of those poles are a hundred years old, and > the style of the ID tags has changed over that time:

Truly amazing craftsmanship, right there. Infrastructure that's backwards -and forwards - compatible. Unhackable, able to run for decades or centuries at a time.

I yearn for the analog.

</comment><comment><USER57> As a German I'm always amazed by the ugliness of those power and telephone poles in other countries.

There is talk here to also build phone lines with poles in the future as it is cheaper, hope this never happens.

<comment><USER58> Phone lines? Are line phones still so popular in Germany that it even requires network expansion? In my country copper lines are basically left to rot as line phones are being replaced by cell/IP phones rapidly. In some cases people living in remote areas were issued free cell phones, because it was cheaper than repairing old copper lines.

<comment><USER57> Fiber optic lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> That was the most interesting thing I've read in a while. The things you take for granted are designed well enough that you forget they are there.

</comment><comment><USER60> Is that the same image they used in the article "Japan's anime is obsessed with power lines" ?

</comment><comment><USER25> Work with a number of utilities in distribution. Happy to answer any questions.

</comment><comment><USER61> What wood are the poles made out to last for so long?

</comment><comment><USER62> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_oil) c'mon really? you didn't even look?

What is this? You're "interested in utility infrastructure" !?

7000 Volt lightning?

most household uses ... they want single-phase power!? In 1910, maybe.

<comment><USER63> _most household uses ... they want single-phase power!? In 1910, maybe._

Huh? In the USA all residential is single-phase. Although there's a center tapped transformer involved, which is what gets you both 120 V and 240 V from one phase. This arrangement is called "split-phase": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split- phase_electric_power#Nor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split- phase_electric_power#North_America)

Name one "household use" in the USA (which is where the author lives) that doesn't use single-phase power? I'll give you a head start, I once lived in an apartment building that used 120V/208V for electric hot water heaters. But offhand I can't think of anything else.

<comment><USER64> It is strange though, that residential three phase is so uncommon there, especially when the single phase voltage is only 110, further sacrificing efficiency for high power applications.

<comment><USER16> High power applications use both sides of the split phase, for 240v.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon buying Lord and Taylor building for $1.15B - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2020/03/12/amazon-buying-lord-taylor-building-for-1-5-billion/ <comment><USER2> > _Amazon is paying effectively more than $2,000 per square foot for the > midtown property, according to a source._

That's... insane?

<comment><USER3> Is it? Contrast it with retail rents in the same neighborhood: [https://nypost.com/2019/05/14/nyc-retail-rents-showing- signs...](https://nypost.com/2019/05/14/nyc-retail-rents-showing-signs-of-an- upswing/)</comment></comment>


Preview 2 – Round 15 – TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks - <AUTHOR> https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/previews/round15/r15p1-vs-r15p2.html <comment><USER2> I'll cross-pollinate my Reddit comment to see if anyone here has something interesting to add. Techempower's benchmarks seem to run on pretty beefy hardware. I'd much rather see how these stacks fare on low-end hardware like little Digital Ocean droplets.

I want...

\- A decent language (totally subjective... I don't want to write Java, C, C++, or Ruby... I wouldn't mind writing C#, F#, Kotlin, or Elixir, and I'd love to write Clojure)

\- High throughput on cheap servers

\- Low resource requirements (e.g. most Erlang frameworks hum along nicely with a few hundred MB whereas some Java frameworks are only happy with a few gigs)

It's hard to garner this information from the benchmarks as they currently stand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I agree with you. I think a benchmark running in a droplet would be interesting.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anybody here can assist me with 500Startups funding? - <AUTHOR>

500Startups is "by referral only", which means no funding application.  Anybody here can assist me to get funding from 500Startups, either through an introduction or providing useful information? <comment><USER2> The whole point of a referral system is that it conveys trust/vetting. Even if some random person from HN saw this and referred you to 500Startups, that referral wouldn't carry much weight.

Reach out through your network to someone who already knows you and can vouch for you. 500 Startups has funded enough companies that finding someone who works at one of them can't be hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know a few people as acquaintances. Right now, I'm more looking to gather information about the whole 500startups process than I am looking for a referral.

<comment><USER2> This post on Quora might help:

<http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-apply-to-500-Startups></comment></comment></comment>


Thinking of Primal diet for HIIT? what do you think about this service? - <AUTHOR> http://fuel.build <comment><USER2> Been trying to get on a paleo diet for 2 years now! Lack of time is a big constraint.. How often is the meal delivery?

</comment><comment><USER3> Maintaining a strict diet with entrepreneurial activities is a bitch. something like this is useful.

<comment><USER4> Bullshit. Everyone has time to follow a diet without wasting a ton of money on something like this. What you lack is discipline.

<comment><USER5> But if most people lack discipline, why should they not use something like this?</comment></comment></comment>


Uber CEO Promises Change in India After Driver Is Arrested for Rape - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/08/uber-ceo-promises-change-in-india-after-driver-is-arrested-for-rape/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

<comment><USER2> Uber has been banned* in New Delhi because they were "misleading customers". Uber said its service is safe for women but without laying the ground base for that, they only rely on summary checks (undergone the commercial licensing process, hold government issued IDs, state-issued permits, and carry full commercial insurance) instead of thorough background checks. That's why a previously convicted sex offender became an Uber driver.

To me it's a case of false advertising and they will support some consequences.

*[http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/delhi-gove...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/delhi-government-bans-uber-says-it-is-misleading-customers/articleshow/45411180.cms)</comment>


On "Hacking" Y Combinator Interviews and Successful Startups - <AUTHOR> https://tyler.menez.es/articles/on-hacking-y-combinator-interviews-and-successful-startups.html <comment><USER2> I have strong reservations against the word "hacking" in of itself. From an engineering perspective, "hacking" is a quick-n-dirty fix, like "hacking" it together with duct tape. It seems so subversive and manipulative, especially in the context of "hacking" these interviews.

I'd rather not say that I "hacked" together anything. What about diligently and properly planning, designing, researching, and implementing?

Where are the "How I planned for my YCombinator interviews" articles?

<comment><USER3> Did you read the article? Because that's exactly what it's about.

<comment><USER2> Yes I've read it. I'm merely emphasizing the word "hacking" in general.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, I find that it's used so much and in so many different ways that I really wish it'd fall out of favor. It now carries so many connotations and subtleties that linguistically speaking, it always seems like the "wrong tool for the job."

<comment><USER5> most of those are due to the refusal to use the word "cracker" for the connotations and subtleties that require it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great read.

You all need to relax on this hacking hate.

Hacking is often just a way of saying tips.

Just like "Fail Fast" means launch, measure and iterate quickly.

Eric Ries isn't the only one who can change the meaning of words. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think there are a fair number of tips which would help especially for a YC application or YC interview and which would generally help your business but not as much outside of those contexts.</comment>


Tribe Called Quest star Phife Dawg dies aged 45 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-35879876 <comment><USER2> "Please don't be deceived by the ugly slice of evil,the world is cold and the rhythm is blanket." RIP</comment>


July startup sprint - who's with me? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on my side project spreadgit.com for a month now and feel I need some company in order to get it out of the door by the end of July. Anyone else out there working on a project or idea or app or whatever with the goal of having a working product out by the end of July? Who's with me? <comment><USER2> I am up for this. I've been working on Admin Job Log ([http://www.adminjoblog.com](http://www.adminjoblog.com)) on and off for just over a year now. Having someone else trying to get a product out would be great motivation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spreadgit.com looks awesome.

I'm working on a SaaS in the health vertical: [http://www.checkqm.com](http://www.checkqm.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Same here trying to launch a vertical ad network that should have shipped already.

Also working on a two other smaller projects.

Thanks for the motivation!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm in! Currently taking a summer course while starting a startup. Social motivation definitely helps.

</comment><comment><USER6> shoot us a link to the feature / bug tracking!</comment>


Vibration-minimizing motion retargeting for robotic characters - <AUTHOR> https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/publication-process-vibration-minimizing-motion-retargeting-for-robotic-characters/ <comment><USER2> After seeing the Bartender sample, I'm convinced that this is significant to improving small scale robotic arms. Now the arm does not have to be rock solid, and it's precise enough to do simple tasks. For more sophisticated arms, this can increase their speed/extend their capability. This can even help in exploiting the flexibility of the material, for throwing/catapulting stuff for example. Exciting!

<comment><USER3> Maybe. One of the issues is these seem to depend on having a very accurate model of the animatronic models and how their materials will react to forces so that the required damping motions can be baked into the model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. I wonder if this would result in more-perceivably-realistic movement when applied to 3D animation?

<comment><USER5> Yeah i think some of the simulated 'optimized' control output resulted in a more realistic result than the intended animation.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, not just the real optimized motion but the simulated optimized motion looked significantly better than the original unsimulated animation.

Makes me think for actual animations they should simulate physical systems and then apply optimized control inputs to approximate the animation which the animator inputs. It would result in more grounded and realistic feeling animations.

<comment><USER7> That might be because it's not longer too perfect. As far as I know little variations in timing are added to computer generated beats to make them sound better? That might be a similar thing?

<comment><USER8> To make a different audio analogy: When they graph the input vs. the optimized control values, it looks a lot like the ringing artifacts of a low-pass filter. A low-pass filter removes high frequencies from an input signal. Since there are physical limits on how fast limbs can oscillate, maybe that's part of what makes it look more natural.

<comment><USER7> I noticed that as well and it reminded me of the Gibb's phenomenon.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Absolutely beautiful work!

As an amateur roboticist/professional dilettante I've often been tempted to consider a robot as little more than a 'Normal Line in R3' (essentially an end effector's pitch/roll/yaw at x/y/z in effector state i from 1...n) and motion planning as little more than crow flying with zero consideration for 2nd or 3rd order effects.

While this may be true for simple industrial applications with robot arms of infinite structural rigidity... I have learned two things from this post:

[1] Physical qualities of the robot arm (beyond range of freedom) can materially affect path planning

[2] Sometimes there is more to a robot than an end effector doing work (e.g. rapping robot's funky dance moves). Raises the question though... does the entire robot arm effectively become an end-effector? Can we consider delighting an audience with cool dance moves 'work' being performed?

Thanks for sharing, and hats off to the Disney team! Great work!

</comment><comment><USER7> People limping might serve as example that a _' state of the art, well trained neural net'_ can't achieve good motion with less than perfect hardware.

So how much of this is actually adressing the wrong problem, that is targeting the actuation instead of how the model should be build to achieve the result i.e. dampening oscillations?

Here's the machine-learning stick figure walking model that most likely all of you know. How much of the problem with getting them to walk decently is a wrong model with bad contraints regarding angles at joints or length of limbs? Shouldn't that be evolved iteratively as well to achieve the best results possible?

[https://www.kurzweilai.net/images/humanoid-walking- training....](https://www.kurzweilai.net/images/humanoid-walking-training.gif) (not trained well yet btw)

<comment><USER10> > People limping might serve as example that a 'state of the art, well trained > neural net' can't achieve good motion with less than perfect hardware.

Toddlers are a good example of the opposite (fall down quite a bit even with "good hardware"). Seems intuitive that you benefit from having good control of the hardware, even if you can also improve it.

<comment><USER7> I don't consider toddlers as well-trained in that regard. Or ... any other ;)

<comment><USER10> That's kinda my point :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can imagine adding this to gimbal stabilization within a drones camera. Even with a 3-axis gimbal, which is already pretty stable, I bet it would make things even better.

<comment><USER12> You would probably need to use sensing to improve stabilization there. The output of the approach here is just a position (I'm assuming) trajectory. They manage to do that because they have a good enough model of the beams and masses. I imagine it's harder to get a comparable model of the disturbances in a drone.

<comment><USER5> There's a pretty cool project using ML to help translate control from simulators to the real world. Video if it here, paper in the description: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTDkYFZFWug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTDkYFZFWug)

This seems like it could also help deliver something similar to what Disney has done (or possibly improve it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fantastic work. Is there any code/libraries online for this or is my only option to implement the paper?

<comment><AUTHOR> I also wasn't able to find any sample code, but this thread [1] has some additional comments about the techniques used in the paper.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/cjy77r/r_vibratio...](https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/cjy77r/r_vibrationminimizing_motion_retargeting_for/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this different from 6th order jerk control motion planning, as used by modern CNC and 3D printer controllers? eg TinyG, g2core, recent Marlin (PR 10337)

<comment><USER15> I think it's different in a couple of aspects:

\- there's a stronger timing constraint to the positioning (more than in CNC/3D printers)

\- the arms/body are significantly more wobbly

\- Apparently you don't need to model the wobbly response "by hand"

<comment><USER14> Cool, thanks. :)

Hopefully the algorithms (and code) they're using get Open Sourced at some point, so they can be looked over and possibly incorporated in things.</comment></comment></comment>