Who does not love an ambitious railway plan? The Guardian reports about a report about Chinese “plans to build a high-speed railway line to the US: The proposed line would begin in north-east China and run up through Siberia, pass through a tunnel underneath the Pacific Ocean then cut through Alaska and Canada to reach […]
Tag: train
They trained chickens to play baseball, and then some
Psychologist B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning work inspired the work of Marian Breland Bailey. Bailey’s work inspired this study: “Marian Breland Bailey: The Mouse Who Reinforced,” John N. Marr, Arkansas Historical Quarterly. Vol. 61, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 59-79. Marr writes: Marian and her first husband, Keller Breland, had become the most experienced and accomplished […]
Improbable TV: Tay Bridge Disaster recited on a train on the bridge
Here’s a new episode of the Improbable Research TV series. It’s the 4th of many episodes featuring the bad poetry of William Topaz McGonagall. (For no good reason at all, we are releasing this 4th episode before we release the 3rd episode.) William Topaz McGonagall, who died in 1902, is widely regarded as the worst poet […]
Railway-collision ejection-capsule
In case two trains were about to collide head-on, this emergency ejection capsule would allow at least one person, likely the train engineer, to escape. The scheme was described in a magazine article in 1915. The blog Technologia Obsoleta spotlighted it recently. BONUS: An alternate solution, devised by Flann O’Brien