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Black Rod
The king’s presence in parliament was announced by Black Rod. Many years ago I was tickled by the ancient offices with strange names like Portcullis Pursuivant. Each officer and ceremony continues to represent a tradition or an incident. Human memory was meant to be a continuum, not a digital sequence. The old world maintains this…
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Checking an old observation
Several years ago I noticed that online algorithms came in two sharply different types. Commercial algorithms do a splendid job of judging your taste in things. When you buy something online, you immediately see ads for appropriately similar things. The ads don’t steer you into the most popular product right now, or a product that…
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Thanking nature
Nature relentlessly makes beauty whether anyone is seeing and reviewing it or not. The overgrown stand of plums and lilacs and roses west of my house is a good windbreak, helping to protect the house. The wild roses bloom briefly every summer, forming a wall of yellow beauty 10 feet tall and 20 feet wide.…
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Implausible but true
Those old 1950s films about the Post Office mentioned that mail carriers were still using horses in some places. Seemed unlikely to me, but horses were common on urban routes, both milk and mail, until 1950. One of the new PO podcasts describes an even more improbable kind of mail service, which is still fully…
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Asserting OG
Carney has made an interesting move. He invited King Charles to open the new session of parliament with an official Speech From The Throne. The clear message in gangster terms is “We are still part of the old gang, and still under the protection of the old gang. Your upstart gang rebelled and claimed some…
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First answer, second answer
Continuing from previous item. The tech tyrants assure us that reshoring is impossible because an iphone would have to cost three times as much if we made it here. First answer: Well, houses already cost three times as much as they should, and you’re not arguing with house prices. You didn’t prevent Larry Fink from…
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Reality vs reality TV
“Conservatives” are reading the script of Trump’s fake reality TV show, parroting Dear Leader’s fake criticism of China. In fact we handed China our mines, factories, engineer training, and business training. Then we shut down our own mines, factories and schools. China was BOUND to succeed when it owned all the ingredients that formerly led…
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Post office podcast
The Postal Service has a long series of podcasts. They’ve been producing these half-hour programs for 4 years; I just now heard about it. Great listening for an analog fan and an FDR fan. The post office is one of the best parts of the mainly fucked federal government, true to the FDR spirit. It…
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Tally sticks
= = = = = MEDIEVAL METROLOGY PART 2 = = = = = In the first part of Medieval Metrology I showed a medieval ruler for measuring length, as used by the ale tasters. It was notched in fractional parts but not numbered. The ruler bears a close resemblance to the medieval way of…
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Then vs now
An editorial from a trade journal of commercial radio operators, July 1931. I’ll put 1931 in italics, then answer with 2025. All of the facts are essentially the same, but the details are different in some cases. The more I ponder over the reasons for the depression the more perplexed I become. In 1929 we…
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Another phonograph puzzle
One of the analog tech fans featured the Sony Flamingo. It was a marketing flop; apparently it didn’t work well and people didn’t like putting records in vertically. Raises yet another question about the history of the phonograph. When cylinders were replaced by disks around 1915, why weren’t the disks vertical, with a threaded gear…
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Deserves a serious answer
Question in the bitcoin-skeptic section of Reddit, titled ‘A genuine good faith question’. = = = = = START QUOTE: I’m a huge crypto skeptic. But I see that a core principle here is the belief that blockchain as a concept or technology (unrelated to BTC) is useless or a “scam”. My question is, why…
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Nulling the balance
After midnight last Thursday I was in the living room screwing around with courseware. Suddenly I heard a scary noise CLOSE to the window, something like sliding and squeaking. It lasted for two minutes. It couldn’t have been an animal, but it didn’t make sense. After daylight I went out to look, and found that…
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Who invented the long-d ditto?
Earlier I named and described the long-d ditto, a common practice in pen and ink business records. The standard computer keyboard, and the conventions of digital writing, have brought several punctuation marks into common use. @ and # are most obvious. Oddly, both were essentially obsolete, a vestige of quaint business usage along with pr,…
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More random meandering
Thinking about AI’s trouble with simple binary logic. It shouldn’t happen in a computer, since computers ARE simple binary logic all the way through. But real life is mostly analog, mostly positive or negative CHANGES from a center. There have been attempts to capture this in mechanical logic, but most don’t really work. In college…
Polistra's Mill
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