-
Morse Day!
[I tried to write the title in code, but WP insists on condensing the spaces so it’s unreadable.] Today is Morse’s birthday! Since we tributed his original invention a couple years ago, we’ll just reprint. = = = = = START REPRINT: Last week I took a linguistic look at Morse and cranks and eccentrics.…
-
Rebadging
Meandering on a meaningless topic. The automobile industry is unique in its nearly universal rejection of rebadging. Every other industry has anonymous manufacturers who turn out the same product with different labels for different stores. It’s especially dominant in appliances and packaged food. At first there were a FEW anonymous rebranders in autos. The more…
-
Algorithm note
In the last couple weeks I’ve been spending less time reading Substack, where I’m a pure product, and more time in WordPress, where I’m both customer and producer. At first the advantage wasn’t clear, but after more exploration I’m finding more satisfaction. Substack has gone purely algorithmic. It forcefeeds you standard orthodoxy. The more you…
-
SMART!
Bloomberg’s new ‘Money Stuff’ is fun. This episode includes one SMART idea that flips the usual understanding of tech upside down. They’re discussing new proposals to take all trading into a 24/7 cycle. At present some official crimes are inside NYC exchange hours, with a lot of daytrading crimes and bitcoin crimes happening 24/7. The…
-
When ICs met gaming
From Billboard, October 1960. Japs Boast of Electronic Find The Japanese transistor industry is boasting of a major electronic breakthru by their scientists, which will open the way for even greater miniaturization of electronic products. According to information received here, the Japanese, because of the electronic breakthru, are now in position to produce electronic equipment…
-
Reconstructing a bombed country
In previous item I wrote: WPA definitely employed white-collar workers who had been discarded along with the skilled laborers when Wall Street bombed America down to bedrock. Stirred up a thought. The Marshall Plan was based on the New Deal. Marshall was rebuilding and restoring and resettling Europe after the Krauts bombed it down to…
-
You really don’t remember?
Andrew Lowenthal writes: = = = = = START QUOTE: But Katherine Maher is not a liberal or a leftist. Though she apes identitarian thought bubbles you won’t find her on a picket line, or splitting any of her previous 800k annual Wikipedia salary with the downtrodden. I don’t remember it being a trait of…
-
Might work!
Wolf continues covering the bust in office buildings. Among the usual mix of daytraders talking like ticker tapes and partisan politicians, this comment is especially interesting: = = = = = START QUOTE: Converting office space to traditional apartments is very complex, yes. But what about dorm-style living like what we have at colleges? A…
-
Uniquely appropriate
Saagar reviews the parallel between 1968 and now in politics. He doesn’t hit the points as solidly as Greenwald, who got EVERYTHING right. Saagar shows a printout of the campaign debut speech by Bobby Senior. He chose K-State for the announcement, and the printout starts by greeting Gov Docking and Sen Pearson (misspelled as Pierson…
-
New info on Zenith Phonevision
American Radio Library has added a 1955 Zenith promotional brochure that I haven’t seen before. It’s mostly PR puffery, claiming lots of World’s Firsts that weren’t really firsts. It does have some unfamiliar pictures of the Phonevision idea. Phonevision was Zenith’s attempt at subscriber TV. It was tried in NYC on a small audience in…
-
Livetech
Caution! Random thought, not intended as logic! When technology is generally sane and non-genocidal, the products of technology look like mammals and birds, like the animals we keep as livestock or pets, the animals we eat. I’ve drawn this analogy with cars. Before 1940 cars were cows or horses, with long noses and ruminant eyes…
-
WPA salesmen?
I’ve been focusing on WPA and related work since 2008. This year, for no particular reason, I’ve been focusing on sales and advertising after completely ignoring the subject for 72 years. Got curious about the connection. WPA definitely employed white-collar workers who had been discarded along with the skilled laborers when Wall Street bombed America…
-
Not just lenses…
Closely related to my ramblings on the old Islamic insistence on using alidades instead of lenses to observe the universe. Stay as close as you can to the source, don’t distort vision with lenses, don’t distort science with theories, don’t distort business with abstract debt and stocks. RemnantMD on Substack discusses how light controls much…
-
Isn’t that illegal?
Yesterday a local house-buying scam sent me an awfully realistic-looking fake check for the appraised value of my house. It had my name, the name of the company, and an amount, all filled in properly. The letter said that I could “turn this into an actual check” by letting them buy the house. Why would…
-
Unsophisticated ASM
Continuing the food chain rule in terms of programming. I started programming in assembly language on the early PCs. There was very little “sophisticated food” available for the task I wanted to perform, so I had to write more of the action myself. There was also very little memory and disk space compared to modern…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 