Tag: Metrology
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When metrology mattered
Reading about the IOOF led to this, but it’s not really related to the IOOF. One article in an Odd Fellows journal around 1920 mentioned Roger Babson as an economist who was in sync with the principles of Mutual Benefit Societies. I looked up Babson and found one of his books, which starts oddly enough…
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Fessenden’s coherer
A few years ago I did some features on Coherers, including a test of a real coherer. Fessenden tried his hand at a different form of coherer. The usual coherer was a tube of powdered metal which cohered into a semi-solid and conducted more current when RF was applied. Coherers served as a sort of…
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Aphid Day 2024
Sept 28, 2024. Today’s temperature reached 86, and the weather bureau sees nothing but cool from here on. The aphids suddenly appeared at 3PM. Are they saying this is really the LAST hot day? I hope so. This summer has been WAY too long, and the combination of poor sleep and stress got my anxiety…
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The Sechometer
Polistra is cranking a strange little machine, and the galvanometer needle is wiggling in response. The mysterious little gadget is a sechometer, with an equally mysterious name. It was made by Leeds and Northrup, one of the two big lab equipment companies. I wrote a series of features on L&N in 2021. Allegedly the name…
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Real reporting
Greenwald is probably the closest thing to objective in today’s media. He’s clearly on Trump’s side now but can’t stop being fair-minded. His piece on last night’s debate started with a wandering tour of the venue by his reporter Michael Tracy, who did some REAL journalism. He showed us what was happening among the media…
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‘Flipflop’ is the stupidest insult
Terminally tired of ‘flipflop’. Anywhere else but politics, changing your mind is a sign of LEARNING. Fuck around and find out is the definition of LIFE. Learning is EXACTLY seeing that one course of action fails, and trying a different course. Science is EXACTLY experimentation. Try something, measure results carefully, do something different if the…
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Inspired a reprint
Following on previous item about East Boston and Logan Airport. Reprint from 2020. = = = = = In 1970 GenRad published a lively little handbook of sound measurements. IETlabs continues to make and calibrate derivatives of GenRad products, and performs a tremendous service by maintaining old GenRad publications online. Maintaining old records of old…
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Pic worth 1000 busted eardrums
Vintage.es has some pix of East Boston after Logan Airport was built next door. Impressive testimony to the disruptive power of NOISE. Most of the pix show a jet airplane taking off from the airport. The planes are so close you could almost reach up and touch them. Everyone is holding their fingers in their…
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Outside the worklog
Before 2017, I wasn’t keeping a private worklog for sleeps and dumps, but this public blog included most of the external events like hot spells or windstorms. Nice example right now. I opened the window at midnight to get some non-airconditioned air, and heard an odd noise. Something wrong with the fridge? No, a cricket…
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Fessenden’s practical side
Reginald Fessenden is famous as the Canadian who claimed the first invention of radio. The first is hard to determine. Many people were working on wireless from different angles. Fessenden later made one of the first voice broadcasts in 1906, using a high-freq alternator instead of a spark-gap transmitter. Around 1912 he moved into a…
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Always baselines
BreakingPoints does word-association polls on candidates. The responses from partisans are meaningless. Partisans are simulcasters, each faithfully retransmitting today’s Official Program from DNC or RNC Network Central. Responses from independents are more salient. The top response to Harris is Incompetent, followed by variations on Fake. I can see the Fake. She’s been a standard politician…
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Tidegauge
This gadget caught my attention as an example of equipoise in measurement. The chain has a float at one end and a weight at the other. As tide rises, the float goes up and the weight goes down. The pulley drives a sliding pencil on a graph recorder. Far view, in my Electric Village scene,…
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Truly new!
My standard theme here: Most of today’s “new” ideas were already in place, either patented or produced or fully described in a publication, by 1910. Here’s one that nobody imagined, even in the ’50s when smoking was maximally cool and required! Nobody dreamed of a cigarette that also serves as a radio and phone and…
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Up the down flation
Still thinking about upflation, repurposing a product for a higher price. The largest upflators were American cars made in other countries. It’s a good illustration of BASELINES. The same product has a higher status measurement when the yardstick starts at a lower altitude. The Willys Aero succeeded here for only two years. It beat Rambler…
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