Anagram Maps

Sometime last year, I was inspired by the London Underground anagram map to make a few of some of my region's transit network.

Here's the first of that series: The Long Island Rail Road. I used the official fare zone map as a base.



Next came anagram maps for New Jersey Transit and Metro-North. There were a few bugs and other things that made me take them back into the shop to re-work them.

I also did one of the Washington Metro.



Now, if you've ever seen the official WMATA map, you'll notice immediately that the style on my map is completely different from theirs. Also, notice that some stations (like "Neon Quorum Servant" [Mount Vernon Square]), I've taken a few liberties.

1. Generally speaking, anagrams on this map are based on WMATA maps published in the early 1990's. Since this time, it seems that WMATA has been tacking on ancillary points of interest to the official station names. Take a look at the name of the station two stops up from Neon Quorum Servant. ("Zero Date Courts"). This is derived from the string, "U Street-Cardozo." The latest map labels it, "U Street/African-American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo." Too many letters!

2. Street names are fully spelled out.

3. University abbreviations in station names are omitted, unless the abbreviation is ridiculously obvious.

It wasn't long before I discovered someone else had done a different version of the same system, modifying the official map. Cords Loosing. I guess because the station names are so short, or there are very few anagrams for certain stations, both anagram maps have the same name on both maps.

Franconia-Springfield	Frangipani-Cornfields Mine omits the hyphen
Crystal City	Catty Lyrics
Pentagon City	Giant Potency
Smithsonian	This Mansion
L'Enfant Plaza	Fatal Zen Plan
Morgan Boulevard	Vanguard Bloomer
Takoma	Oak Mat
Landover	Old Raven

Enjoy! More soon.

Randomoneum #2

I've been pretty bored recently, but I found a good way to entertain myself (at least for a little bit). I use Microsoft Train Simulator to pull a mixed consist down the Northeast Corridor. The train consists of three supercharged Dash 9's a few Tropicana cars, a few other assorted cars, and four passenger cars at the end. Now, the "Super-Dashes" have an insane top speed, and I can drive one from Philadelphia to Washington in a few minutes, reaching a top speed of something like 5,000 MPH. With three of them pulling the mixed consist, I can get the train to 1,000 MPH quite easily. I get the train to a certain speed, uncouple the locomotives from the train (which causes the locos to accelerate even quicker), and then drive them to a certain point out of the way of the "runaway cars." If I pull off the "Get the locos out of the way" bit successfully, the cars pass by and I chase them on an adjacent track to see where they stop. I got the train to 1,000 MPH south of Wilmington and uncoupled. The "runaway cars" stopped… 76 miles later, south of Baltimore. They were doing at least 200 by the time they passed the locos. Yesterday, I did this with 5 Super-Dashes, and let the train go at 1,400 MPH. They passed by going about 300 MPH, and they ran all the way to Washington Union Station. What happened? It's something like the GG1 wreck of 1953. I'll probably do it again and make a video of it and post it on YouTube or something.

Speaking of videos, I've made another one, and uploaded it to YouTube, in preparation for the Lingo Film Festival. The LFF is basically a thing where you have to make a short film, and it gets shown there. Hopefully, mine gets shown. The last I checked, there were only four videos (including mine) on the YouTube page. I was stressing about it on Friday, worrying that the e-mail wouldn't be received. Then I found that the deadline (which was that Friday) was extended to this coming Wednesday. I'll post it to the blog after this coming weekend, and will probably be as a double feature with another project I'm working on.

Of Pushing Daisies and Stuck Elevators

Of the new shows of the fall television season, the one I'm hooked on now is Pushing Daisies. It's about this guy (Ned the pie maker) who has the power to bring dead things back to life, and… well, I'll spare the details at this point, but the interested reader can check out the Pushing Daisies article on Wikipedia.

Anyway, when I watched the first episode, I was amazed at how everything was put together. The extra details of a person's age (i.e. "36 years, 3 months, 9 days, 12 hours, 17 minutes"), the place names (A pie shop named "The Pie Hole." Could there ever be a better name?), and the interesting relationship between the main characters (Ned's childhood sweetheart, Charlotte, who everyone calls Chuck. She was revived by his power, and as a result, cannot be touched by him again, or she would die again.) There's just something about this show that draws me to it again and again, over what else is on at that particular time slot.

There is something else of interest for that show. I first noticed it in the first episode. Ned had to encounter a man named Wilfred Woodruff. Wilfred Woodruff was of Asian descent, and his ancestor took on the Woodruff name during the U.S. Civil War. Notice that name, Wilfred Woodruff. Change the vowel in the second syllable of the first name, and change its position, and you get Wilford Woodruff, the name of the 4th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I'm not the only member of this church who has noticed this. About as soon as the episode was over, a thread about the show was posted on LDS Linkup, which basically asked if there were any Mormons involved in the writing of the show. One claimed that one guy was actually an anti-Mormon (using the statement that Wilfred Woodruff was commonly used on anti-Mormon web sites to refer to Wilford Woodruff). I thought this was interesting.

Another link between the writers and producers of the show and aspects of LDS history was established in the episode that aired this past Wednesday. In this episode, a man was murdered, and Ned was brought in to ask the deceased who it was that killed him. His response, "My wife did it." It turns out that his reply was more complicated than it first appeared, because the man had four wives. He was a polygamist. The practice of polygamy, officially discontinued by the Church in 1890, is still practiced by some groups known as Fundamentalists, who are not associated with the Church. (Church policy says that anyone practicing polygamy is excommunicated, so none of these people are members of the Church.)

Anyway, all of the stuff I've seen so far has been well-written, and changed just enough to eliminate any relation to the Church, whether it be pro- or anti-Mormon (and the word "Mormon" has yet to be uttered by the characters). As long as that continues, I have no problem with it.

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Have you ever been stuck in an elevator with an attractive member of the opposite sex, and it was just the two of you in there? Well, I was, except for that last bit. Here's what happened. After an institute class, a bunch of us went to one guy's apartment for a pizza party. A few people, including myself, went to get the pizza, It turns out that the apartment we were going to is on the thirtieth floor of the building. We get on the elevator (there were six of us in there, including the A.M.O.S.) and begin to go up to the 30th floor. After starting up, there's a sudden jolt, and the elevator stops. None of the buttons respond, and we're just stopped there in a tiny elevator (at least we're the ones with the pizza). After a few minutes, the elevator creeps up and opens on the 4th floor, and the rest was an uneventful trip up to the 30th floor.

This brings to mind a conversation I heard on a radio show a few weeks ago. Two people from the show, a singly guy and an attractive single woman, were on an elevator when they got stuck. It was just the two of them in the elevator, but the other guys on the show (and a few guys who called the radio station) were ripping on the guy for not "taking advantage of the situation." I remember that after Blackout of 2003, there were stories about couples getting together, after being stuck in an elevator during the blackout. This talk of two people from this radio show being stuck in an elevator lead me to think about what I would do if I were in that situation. I'd say that it would depend on how well I know the person, and the status of the current relationship with that person. I don't think I'd need to say any more than that. Such details are not to be posted about on the Internet, especially if people actually read this thing.

Randomoneum

I got this game yesterday for my iPod called Phase. If you've ever played Dance Dance Revolution, StepMania, or Guitar Hero, you'll catch on quickly to Phase. The goal is to catch as many "notes" as possible as the song plays. One of the interesting things is that one of the background "journeys" you can take is an urban "landscape," with various buildings, yellow taxis, bridges, subway entrances, and even buses passing by you as you play. One such graphic is of a bus, either an Orion 5 or a Gillig Phantom, with a destination sign reading, "M5 LIMITED." (EDIT: Here's a screenshot!) I found that to be quite interesting. I'm pretty much hooked on the game, too. In my first day of having it, I've caught almost 2,000 notes.

Another new record on the 60th Street Tunnel run. 2:58.07, on an N with another set of R160's. However, it was spoiled by a missed connection with a 7 local train at Queensboro Plaza.

Here are a few nuggets I wrote, and posted at LDS LinkUp recently.

1. It isn't about homophobia. It's about protecting and defending the standards and values that God has set forth for His children.

2. Sure, there may be some who claim that God does not exist. However, there are many things in this world that could instantly disprove that claim, tearing it down like the winds of a tornado to a house of cards.

3. The creations of God are all around you. You needn't go far, just look out a window.

Look up at the sky. Notice the clouds, the sun, the moon, the stars. They didn't show up there all by themselves. Read the first chapter of Genesis. <link> It says that it was God that made all of those things. If you don't believe that, look at the Big Bang theory. It didn't happen all by itself. Someone or something had to start it all. Guess what? It was God.

Look at any buildings that may be in your view. Sure, they were constructed out of steel, or wood, or stone, but where is the source of those materials? If your answer is a business that sells building materials, ask yourself where did they get their supplies from. Follow this chain all the way to the source. Eventually, you'll realize that the source is something that was created by God, either directly or through a process which He gave power to exercise.

Finally, look in a mirror. You see that person staring back at you? That marvelous creation known as the human body. It is one of the greatest of God's creations. Both male and female were created after His image. In other words, the body which we all possess is designed after the body which God has. There is not one human being on this earth that was not created by a man and a woman, or at least the key components from each which make babies possible.

The creations of God are all around you. You needn't go far, just look at yourself!