Bloody Well Write

Mention radar, and several things may come to mind: Huge, round, metal contraptions aimed at the sky. Your local weatherman (or woman) bringing the weather forecast into your living room. Marvin the Martian and his radar gun. Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly, the clerk with the clipboard.

Did you know that the word radar began as an acronym? It stands for “radio detection and ranging,” an acronym coined in the early ’40s by the United States Navy. Radar has outgrown its acronym status and stands today on its own as a word. According to NASA’s Virtual Skies:

Radar uses the echo principle. Radar equipment emits a high-energy radio signal from an antenna. The signal travels out from the source until it is reflected back by contact with an object. The radar antenna relays this signal to a scope where the image is displayed. Using the time it takes for the emitted signal to reach the object and reflect back to its source, the distance to the object can be computed. The radar signal is moving at the speed of light and can make such a trip in microseconds.

Radar is also a character on the crazy-good 1972–1983 TV show “M*A*S*H” (based on the movie “MASH,” based on the book “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors”). MASH, by the by, is an acronym for “mobile army surgical hospital.” The army clerk is a bit on the neurotic side and makes sure that what needs to happen within his power happens. He takes care of it, whatever it is and no matter around whom he must navigate — such as Major Frank Burns, a true bumbler if ever there were one. Here’s an example of the way Radar’s mind works:

Radar: I can’t reach them now sir, I’ll be calling them yesterday.
Frank: That’s ridiculous!
Radar: Oh no sir, they’re 16 hours behind us. Our today is their yesterday.
Frank: It’s 5 o’clock in the afternoon!
Radar: Well, that’s here sir. Back there, it’s 1 o’clock yesterday morning. Everyone’s gone to bed and said, see ya tomorrow. Which, by the time their tomorrow comes, will be our yesterday.
Frank: Isn’t it 16 hours later there?
Radar: No, sir.
Frank: Well, what if it is? When would it be now here if it was our today there?
Radar: You see we don’t have the same now, sir. By the time their now becomes our now, this’ll be then.
Frank: OK. I think I got a bead on it. In order for me to talk to them at 9 o’clock in the morning their time, what time does it have to be our when?
Radar: Uh, 1 o’clock our tomorrow morning will get you 9 a.m. their today there, sir.
Frank: Then that’s what we’ll do.
Radar: Yes, sir. As soon as I get a circuit, there’s a two-day wait.
Frank: I can’t wait two days, that’ll be three days ago!
Radar: Right.

Happy trails!

SAK

Here’s something for you noncomputer geeks.

OK, maybe that’s an assumption. Maybe you’re knowledgeable in all things computer but don’t know this little gem. Or perhaps you barely know how to turn your PC on but know the exact meaning and spelling of this topic. Either way, you probably have run across this big boy at some point.

And I digress yet again. Here it is:

Captcha. Or more correctly, CAPTCHA.

What the … ?! Um-hmm. It’s a real word. Really, it’s a loose acronym for Competely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (or so says Wikipedia).

It sounds like capture. It frustrates many an Internet scammer and frequent Web surfer alike. And it’s brilliant. So what is it?

Some CAPTCHAs are discernible, some not so much (photo: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/KCAPTCHA_with_crowded_symbols.gif)

It’s that box with the warped letters and numbers, the one that you’re supposed to look at and figure out what those twisted letters and numbers are and then type them into another box, with the hope that you’ve got them right. If so, you move on to the next screen, you pass go. If not, you try again or get blocked from further attempts.

Granted, there are a lot of technical details that go along with the CAPTCHA, but this isn’t the forum for those details. Just know that I learned something today and I hope that I have been able to share a little somethin’-somethin’ with a Bloody Well Write reader or two.

Now, go and try to decipher one of those suckers.

Happy trails!

SAK