Polistra's Mill

Old Egyptian and Turkish movies often show alternate versions of American cars. Here’s a Plymsoto. Here’s a rare Packard limo. Here’s a Weird Willys. Some of these are known factory variants, others seem to be either homemade or perhaps manufactured in small quantities by dealers. Now a new puzzle in an Egyptian movie: It’s a…

Via EvoNews, bioethicists are at it again. Surprisingly, the “virus” genocide is secondary for these demons. The “carbon” genocide is still the big deal. A bioethicist named Walter Glannon screeches: If benefit, harm and other measures of human well-being pertain to actual but not possible people, then it seems that possible people who will not…

A few months ago I was focusing on 1975 as an inflection point. It looks like there was another inflection in 2014-2015. Other writers have been trying to catch this change in the same uncertain way. 2014 wasn’t nearly as big as 1946 or 1975, so it doesn’t stand out starkly. Trump wasn’t the cause…

I’ve always been uneasy and unsettled about Assange. A major part of the story is missing. Neither side makes enough sense. I don’t have any idea what’s missing, but sometimes I can say for sure what’s NOT missing. Greenwald is solidly with Assange, for excellent reasons. In an ideal world journalists and scientists should be…

An article on new methods in neurology includes a dramatic finding. The headline about maps of connections is NOT the dramatic part. Maps won’t really help, and maps of a meaningful part of the brain are mathematically unachievable. Most of the action happens in the resonant waves, which are only partly carried on the mappable…

American Radio Library has added an autobiography of Harold Wheeler, one of the mid-level pioneers of radio circuitry. (He was associated with the better-known Hazeltine.) The book is mainly interesting for its odd style. As a pure engineer, Wheeler kept a PRECISE daily worklog every day from birth, and had his own engineerish ways of…

Continuing to republish the ‘good stuff’ from the old blog, compacted and sequenced properly. Part 1 on top, part 6 on bottom. = = = = = What’s a folly? It’s an antique word for a not-so-antique phenomenon. By dictionary definition a folly is a non-essential building or feature on a wealthy estate, offering amusement…

I’ve done a graphic salute to James Hartness already, so will review the Hartness piece first. = = = = START REPRINT: When I don’t understand how something works, I build it. With electronic stuff I can build the real thing using tubes and transistors and capacitors and so on. With mechanical stuff I don’t…

Frederick Smyth was less important in the big picture than Hartness or Green, and his folly served science unintentionally. Unlike the other two, he was primarily a politician. Smyth was born in 1819 and spent the first part of his life clerking or managing retail stores. In 1849 at age 30 he entered city politics…

Colonel Ned Green was the most influential of these men. Money talks, and intelligently-directed ENJOYABLE money talks best. His mother Hetty Green was the equivalent of Buffett. She was generally called the Wall Street Witch. She started out rich and manipulated her rich inheritance up to super-rich. (In modern terms, from $100M to $4B.) Her…

A mention in a ’50s era issue of Computers and Automation led to this mystery. The best account is in McClure’s Magazine in 1914. John Hammond was a visionary AND the heir to a huge fortune. The money and connections enabled him to turn his visions into large-scale reality. His first invention was a mechanical…