Tag: asked and partly answered
-
Good question about learning
Quora sometimes has a question worth thinking about. Do people need to forget old things so they can learn new things (new knowledge)? First impulse: Yes, especially with skills. When you’ve mastered an inefficient process or poor word usage or poor posture, you need to abandon the old movements or shapes to get into the…
-
Less urban
Random observation spawned by looking closely at towns in Massachusetts for my next tech history item. The downtown areas in smaller Mass towns look much less urban than the downtowns in Kansas and Oklahoma small towns. In Mass, industrial buildings and stores are mixed randomly among houses and apartments. In the plains, stores are grouped…
-
Set point?
I won’t doubt modern medicine again! Personal experience is the only teacher. Last week, after stupidly DIY diagnosing the problem as psoriasis, I finally got in to see the real human doctor. (A rare GOOD doctor who listens and understands the whole patient, so he’s worth waiting for.) He knew immediately it isn’t psoriasis because…
-
Does free speech work?
Everyone says that freedom keeps the gov’t honest and “holds it accountable”. Free speech is necessary to prevent dictators. Well, does free speech improve the govt’s behavior? Not much correlation. I can think of one good positive and three negatives without trying. The positive is, of course, the only REAL positive in the last century.…
-
Is Trump Harding?
Yesterday I focused on the government as a hugely complex product with lots of conflicting parts, good and trivial and massively evil. This reminds me of an earlier vow to let the dust settle before trying to judge what Trump is doing. Without a doubt Trump is throwing a lot of dust in many directions,…
-
Simplest explanation
Looking at the recent history of economics as reflected in the automotive industry, one pattern is clear. Companies that focus more on products and profit are able to survive hard times better than companies that focus more on Share Value. The most dramatic example is Studebaker vs Nash. Both were about the same size in…
-
More wiper puzzles
Earlier I tried to pin down the start dates for electric windshield wipers, after seeing that the conventional wisdom about AMC was wrong. The earliest factory-installed electric wipers were Chrysler in 1939, then Packard in ’42, then Ford and GM and Studebaker around ’51. In each case the wipers were optional on top models at…
-
My old question
Wolf posted his latest update on housing prices. Nothing new there. The usual combination of Larry Fink evading taxes and Chinese billionaires evading taxes. Just the US economy operating as intended for the benefit of all Americans. (All Americans = Larry Fink and Chinese billionaires.) One commenter hit a new and previously unasked question: When…
-
Still trying to settle this…
I’m uncertain about the FTC ban on non-compete agreements. My consistent theme is STORAGE, which includes amortizing skills. If a company has paid an inventor or developer while he worked up a device or program or design for the company, the business should be able to protect the skill they paid to develop. Patents and…
-
Maico Chromalyzer
Here’s a puzzle. This industrial newsreel profiles Maico hearing aids, among the earliest adopters of transistors.** Like Zenith, Maico made both audiometers and hearing aids. Around 17 minutes, the film shows an interesting gadget that I’ve never heard of before. The Maico Chromalyzer was used for training deaf speech. The teacher spoke sample words and…
-
Bootstrapping a language
Okie blogger K. Latham posted an interesting brief feature on the Cherokee Advocate, a weekly paper in Tahlequah that was first founded in 1844. I had noticed several early tribal newspapers in the Ayer newspaper lists but hadn’t stopped to think about the alphabet and fonts. I asked some questions about the source of the…
-
Would it help?
Seen in the same 1895 magazine that I cited for the bloodbathing Countess. Wilson’s Ear Drum. Deafness and head noises relieved. Would it help? Hard to tell from the picture. If it provided a resonant chamber, it could emphasize some frequencies to compensate for noise-induced loss. I’m more certain that it would help suppress rumbling…
-
Random thoughts
Couple of random thoughts. 1. Thinking about the old Hollywood attitude that entertainment is a duty. Is entertainer one of the basic types? Humans unquestionably have a predesigned set of roles and duties just as bees do. Each basic type has an obvious old job, with modern variations. I hadn’t tried to include Entertainer in…
-
Trying for an open mind
I’m trying to give RFK a chance, despite my loud-clanging bullshit alarm. His website is mainly vague platitudes. He says the right things clearly and sharply in economic realms, on globalism vs localism and monopolies vs small business. At one point he comes close to the ONE THING THAT MATTERS but pulls away without touching…
Polistra's Mill 