I don't know that much about catholic iconography and I didn't really find out who built the hospital, but given it's in a state known for massive immigration of catholics from overseas around the time it's been built, I somehow had to think of holy mary as heaven queen, being saluted and given presents by children... the blue overcoat would be a typical holy-mary-color and well, the second color would typically be white, but I've seen red quite often as well. Would be nice to hear from someone who knows more about that stuff. :-)

Ahh, my mistake, of course they're like huge *inductances*, not capacitors, and consequently, it's not "RC-low pass" but "LR-low pass"... my bad.
An inductance generates a magnetic field and as long it's not established, current drops there which leads to the desired effect of blocking spikes, as an increase in current can only pass when the magnetic field is increased which takes more time than a "spike" should last. Once the field is established, no current is dropped at the inductance (save the voltage drop due to the wiring of the coils unwantedly acting as a resistor to some point).
And yes - stupid of me as well not to think of it - those coils are most definitely copper, and plenty of it ;-) ...would've been one of the first thing to be scrapped.

the "o with a line through it" is actually the small Greek letter Phi (so Richard Davis was right somehow since the Cyrillic and the Greek alphabet have some common letters) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi which is commonly used as symbol for the phase of any non-DC current (well, DC has no phase, of course..) in electrical engineering and signal processing.

About the power factor/fault current limitation thing:
Line reactors have - afaik - nothing to do with the power factor, the power factor cos(phi) describes how much power e.g. an electric motor uses to spin in comparison to how much is lost (the so-called reactive load, in German we call it "Blindlast" which is imho a nice semi-metaphoric term) into shifting the electromagnetic fields which are generated inside a running motor. This energy is not actually used, but it has to be transported via the power lines anyways. Those power lines act as big resistors, and as any other resistor it draws current.
Now there's no way to "limit" this effect; the power factor is something specific to the machinery you use, it's specified as "cos(phi)" on the type plates of motors and other heavy-duty machinery.
You can't do anthing against reactive load (well, use other machines..) but you can measure it, and at least in Austria I know they do bill factories and other heavy-duty users seperately for it.

Line reactors are like huge capacitors (coils) to limit current spikes (and possibly frequency irregularities/spikes somewhat like an RC low-pass filter I could imagine). (@Motts: was there something like lage coils, somewhat transformer-like looking around?) But I am not sure if they are really are for limiting *fault* current, I would've thought they usually attenuate the spikes occuring when a generator is put on or off the grid. But then again, we didn't learn much about power engineering, more signal processing and stuff - and I suck at explaining, and even more so if it's something we were tought in German. So, sorry if I pissed anyone off who knows that stuff better than me. ;-)

@reddll: you mean Metropolis (1927) http://en.wikipedia.or...ki/Metropolis_(film)
This movie crossed my mind as well already ;-)
MOLOCH! (if you don't know what I mean, go, watch the movie, I think there's a version with English subs out there as well (the original text is German) however, I like the dream-scene about the 7 deadly sins and the grim reaper way better "Der Tod ist über der Stadt -- !") But I digress... anyhow, a movie worth having seen I'd say. :-)

The picture reminds me of a scene from "Red Dragon" - where Will Graham visits Hannibal Lecter. He's taking a break outside (or was he already leaving?) and the annoying reporter Freddy Lounds takes a photo.