Lorenzo Rambles

Have you ever wondered about the longest burning light bulb? I have. Fire Station #6 in Livermore, California is home to the longest confirmed burning light bulb, they even have a Guinness World Record .  Since being installed in 1901 the bulb has burned for over 1 million hours, passing this milestone in 2015. It is worth noting the light hasn't been on continuously, as there was a small break in operation when a new fire station was built and the bulb had to be moved. That being said, the fire station has kept extensive records of the bulb and it's move; when the time came for the bulb to move to the new station it was given an official escort and was placed in a specially built protective box.  While it is heartwarming to see the devotion of the Livermore fire station and community in preserving a singular light bulb (which can be seen from a live webcam here ), this ramble isn't really about the bulb, it goes much deeper than that.  The Live Webcam A few years ago, be...

John Denver's hit song isn't about West Virginia. There, I said it. It annoys me as a Virginian that people don't realize the landmarks being referenced in the song are primarily in Virginia, NOT West Virginia. Today we examine the story behind the hit song that John Denver didn't write.  That's right, the song was actually written by Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert. The story behind the hit song is complicated and reading just one article won't give you the full picture, as always I have included the links used when synthesizing this article. I have tried to simplify the story by removing extraneous details and using the most consistent features from different accounts. Bill Danoff had grown up near Springfield, Massachusetts and was familiar with rural and "country roads." He had always had a fondness for road travel and taking in the scenery. When he attended Georgetown University in Washington D.C. he began to take drives through the Maryland countrys...

There has been talk in recent years of electing a female president. However, many people don't know the United States effectively had a female president for around 1.5 years. This is the story of Woodrow Wilson's stroke and the coverup that lead to his wife, Edith, managing his affairs.  After the death of Wilson's first wife Ellen, Wilson met Edith Galt. In order to "charm her", he shared state secrets which is a totally normal and very attractive way to flirt with a potential mate. All jokes aside this form of unconventional wooing worked and Wilson sought to marry her, much to the behest of his campaign managers. We have to remember this was 1915 and "his people" were gearing up for the 1916 election. They feared his promptness in remarriage would offend some people and cost him electoral votes. Wilson didn't seem to care and continued his relationship with Edith and they were married on December 18th, 1915. Edith immediately became involved in Wi...

  After recent events (such as Spring Break) have forced me to smile in family photos, I began to think about the nature of photo smiling. It started when a family member, when looking over photo they had just taken, complained my face looked "pained" and "squinty". To which I replied with anger, challenging the convention of smiling in photos. "Why do we even smile in photos, people didn't used to smile in photos," I said, thinking out loud. The brief annoyance subsided and I decided I really would find out why and when people started smiling in photos, and I would make a LorenzoRamble out of it too! While some people have always smiled in photos it wasn't until the 1920s that people began smiling more often. One of the biggest reasons for the drab and expressionless look of people in early photos has to do with the fact that early photos took between 60 and 90 seconds to expose. This also might explain why most early photos were done portrait sty...

                                        If you didn't know, there was a new windows released, but don't feel bad, Microsoft did a pretty mediocre job of marketing it. In reality Windows 11 probably doesn't have enough major changes to be considered a whole new release. It is more of a rebrand than anything else, a chance to right the wrongs of the design choices made in Windows 10.  When it was announced in June of last year (2021), I had planned on hating it. Curiosity set in, and I decided to download it. I have decided to stop hating it.  A Fresh Coat of Paint I could go through every marginal change between Windows 10 and Windows 11. There are also plenty of things that I thought were new features, but upon further inspection weren't. I guess the redesign has de-jankified things. I am aware that is not a real word, but my point is that overall the interfa...

Source: Auth0 Picture this, just when you thought that you had successfully entered in all of your personal and totally accurate information, you could see the verification email on the horizon, but then it all comes crashing down. You just got CAPTCHA'D. Select all of the images that include a boat it says, it starts out innocently enough, but then you gradually realize that half of the images you clicked were blurry sideways pictures of vans. But, you soldier on, you make it through, you click that sweet sweet verify button.... and there's another page. That's right, you have to do it all over again. This is all extremely dramatic, but there is no denying, it's annoying. Sometimes you get off easy, and there is one of those benevolent little checkboxes, sometimes there are the misshapen words. What is CAPTCHA, why do we have it, and how does it work.  Where It Began  When doing research for this ramble I had a lot of trouble finding out who, actually invented CAPTCHA....