-
Patent pain and Bain
Continuing on the futility and stupidity of patents…. This article in Frontiers Magazine tells the story of Alexander Bain. He worked for a watchmaker, and started mixing electricity with clocks in wildly imaginative ways. I’ve featured his absolutely futuristic tactile fax machine, reprinted below. This wasn’t practical for business use because it required turning the…
-
Less enticing
Via Web3 is going great, it sounds like Starbucks is developing an outright cult with NFTs. From the Starbucks website: = = = = = New Starbucks Odyssey experience will offer members the ability to earn and buy digital collectible stamps (NFTs) that will unlock access to new, immersive coffee experiences. Starbucks Odyssey will be…
-
High-strung
Yesterday I cited this 1910 article on telegraphers, focusing on the neurological implications of music and Morse occupying the same brain section. The words are also interesting. Telegraphers are usually nervous, high-strung men, and some develop eccentricities that cause them to be considered cranky. High-strung is literal enough. It might have originated in the violin…
-
Gold Spot
Looking through some 1930 issues of Broadcast Advertising, noticed an ad for Doc Brinkley’s station. This was aimed at national corporations, so it’s thoroughly bland and objective. Also found an ad for WIBW, my late-night comfort in the ’50s. High culture all the way! WIBW was mainly aimed at farmers, but it also had live…
-
What about Brinkley?
After writing previous item about the quack ‘hearing restorer’ who was peddling real medicine without knowing it, I got thinking about JR Brinkley. Doc Brinkley is a far more familiar figure for radio history fans and Kansans. I’m both, so I grew up hearing about him. Edwards had a brief encounter with Brinkley. Around 1933…
-
Morse is music
A column from Telegraph and Telephone Age in 1910. Morse is a way of speaking and hearing language, so it ‘logically’ should be processed in the same parts of the brain as spoken language. These 1910 observations indicate that Morse occupies the same areas as music. Experienced operators were not bothered at all by general…
-
More Tirn Tibbles
Another case where Kirn misses a point because he’s not inside the tech world. I believe deeply in creativity, innovation, imagination & in the idea that they must be protected because they benefit all of us. The framers of the Constitution believed this too. It is why they gave special attention to patent law. We…
-
Grandma was more right than she knew
Common wisdom was right about nearly everything before “science” and “democracy” and “philosophy” turned wisdom into genocide and torture. Some branches of science are accidentally recovering old wisdom in recent years, while other branches (like “social” “science” and public “health”) are zooming out beyond the event horizon of infinite satanic lunacy. = = = =…
-
It’s all in the deltas
UD notes the death of Frank Drake, father of the Drake Equation estimating likely planets for intelligent life. Drake was working at the Green Bank Radio Telescope during the early days of radio astronomy, in the late 1950s, when he was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous 1959 paper in Nature about using…
-
One Liz dies, another ascends
I’ve given up on Britain. Still, the tradition of REAL nobility resonates in REAL humans. It’s innate. Sailer catches the power of REAL nobility in an elegant little story. Another evocation of REAL nobility. The monarch leads the troops into battle. REAL nobility is detectable between species.
-
Interesting for other reasons
This new study at PNAS caught my eye. The title implies an actual resonance: Neural synchronization predicts marital satisfaction After buying and reading the article, it’s not about phaselocked waveforms, it’s about brain regions activating at the same time. Still somewhat interesting. The details of the subjects and researchers are more interesting. The team was…
-
Today is & day!
Time to reprint the genuine history of the symbol, which doesn’t match the standard etymology. = = = = = START REPRINT: I’ve always been bothered by the bizarre-sounding etymology of Ampersand. The symbol itself is no mystery: just a stylized version of et. But the usual etymology for the name doesn’t make a lick…
-
Can’t be monetized
CNN is trying, or pretending to try, for a less partisan approach. Its viewers are revolting. No fairness allowed! We want pure D-brand crack! There was never any profit in plain truth. Newspapers have always been partisan. The only difference is that they’re all D now, compared to about 60% D in earlier decades. Radio…
-
Meta-lesson
This is a good lesson of some kind. I read that British energy costs were going up from $1200 per month to $3000 per month. Both the before and after seemed utterly insane, but in a time when all governments are utterly insane, nothing can be counted out. Today I checked other sources and found…
-
Appropriate names
The new out-in-space Webb telescope has found a constellation described as a space tarantula. Huh? Where’s the tarantula? My first thought is a bow-legged cowboy wearing an old-fashioned sombrero. (eg Yosemite Sam.) Second thought is a bear rug erasing a crescent wrench. Those are obviously too contrived, so here’s a one-part image: I guess Yankee…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 