The Old Mill, a Walt Disney Silly Symphonies cartoon from 1937.
Like many of the later Silly Symphonies, The Old Mill was a testing-ground for advanced animation techniques. Marking the first use of Disney’s multiplane camera, the film also incorporates realistic depictions of animal behavior, complex lighting and color effects, depictions of rain, wind, lightning, ripples, splashes and reflections, three-dimensional rotation of detailed objects, and the use of timing to produce specific dramatic and emotional effects. All of the lessons learned from making The Old Mill would subsequently be incorporated into Disney’s feature-length animated films, especially 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
How does lightning form? Evidently we’re still trying to figure it out! It all starts in the clouds where both ice crystals and hail stones form:
Scientists believe that as these hail stones fall back through the rising ice crystals, millions of tiny collisions occur. These collisions build up an electric charge which is stored in the cloud like a battery. ”A cloud is very much like a battery, but a battery with a much higher voltage than your typical flashlight battery… not 1.5 volts but 100 million volts.”
But what scientists don’t know is exactly how this electric charge generates lightning. “What remains a major meteorological mystery is how it is that ice particle collisions result in the generation of lightning. We’re very much in the middle ages on that problem.”
From the Discovery Channel’s “Raging Planet” series.
“Rooftops in the summer are hot. Cooling down buildings wastes energy. Solution: Painting roofs with energy saving white reflective paint.” The White Roof Project is a nonprofit dedicated to curbing climate change by painting NYC roofs white and then hopefully franchising the volunteering activity out across the United States.
And they’re absolutely onto something. In 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu pitched this idea. According to the Wall Street Journal, “white roofs and pavements could mean a one-time reduction of 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That… translates to removing all the cars in the world for 18 years.”
Former President Bill Clinton wrote last summer that white rooftops could lower “the utility bill in every apartment house 10 to 20 percent…”
And in the southeastern region of Almeria, Spain, the reflective roofs of their greenhouses (and they’re seriously into greenhouses) are cooling the air temperature in the region “by an average of 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade since 1983. The rest of Spain, however, has experienced temperatures rise 0.5 degrees Celsius.”
Sounds like it might be time to get some white paint and a few ladders. Read more about The White Roof Project, and if you’re in NYC, volunteer!
To Spring, made in 1936. I loved this cartoon when I was a kid. The colors. The rhymes and music. The saga. Time to pass it along…
