Tag: Patient things
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Underground, undermud
I’ve been illustrating and animating the hair cells of the cochlea for work and for fun. The outer hair cells, which are also found in the semicircular canals, are designed to communicate and physically vibrate up to about 40 KC, possibly up to 100 KC. Steinheil’s ground telegraphy was DC, much like Morse except that…
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Third shift workers day!
Today is Third Shift Workers Day! Rehashing… The Weather Bureau salutes Third Shift Workers Day, for the folks who work graveyard shift. Hadn’t heard of this Day before. From the linked items I couldn’t tell for sure which day is the Official Day. They range from May 7 to May 13. This is fitting, since…
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The ice industry, part 1/5
I’ve always been puzzled by the long persistence of household iceboxes. Mechanical refrigeration was invented around 1880. Ice plants had formerly used natural ice from ponds or from frozen pools, requiring massive insulation and storage, but rarely lasting through the summer. They started using refrigeration soon after its invention, and by 1910 all ice production…
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The ice industry, part 2/5
Who invented ice? Fredric Tudor. Obviously ice is a large part of the world, but nobody thought of it as a salable commodity until 1805. Tudor was a wealthy Boston kid with an unbreakable passion for sailing and trading. He knew that spices were the source of many fortunes, but spices were inadequate for preserving…
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The ice industry, part 3/5
The Enid Ice Plant, photographed in the 1920s and seen on the EnidBuzz facebook page, inspired this piece: Ice trade journals from the era list this company as Enid Ice and Fuel, which is a rational business model. They were processing and delivering portable energy, lumps of heat and blocks of cold. The visible tracks…
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The ice industry, part 4/5
How did the ice plant make its portable blocks of coldness? The method was unexpectedly complicated. Here’s the coldroom, where the compressed and relatively cool ammonia is allowed to relieve its pressure and absorb heat from the water that will become ice. What’s going on inside? We have a grid in the floor, over a…
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Refunders vs hoarders
This is completely irrelevant and overly nuanced, but it’s what I want to write about today…. Duane Jones, in his wonderful little book about advertising and human nature, gets hardass at times. He talks openly about forcing a purchase. Here he’s discussing the money-back guarantee: = = = = = Mr Burke was silent for…
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What am I comparing with?
Lately I’ve been fussing about low quality and low quantity of online stuff. Substack is low quality and low quantity. Straight Arrow News is good quality but low quantity. What’s the baseline? What am I comparing them with? I’ve said that old newspapers and broadcasts had a much better mix of topics, a “substantial and…
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Universal Carborundum
A new upload at American Radio Library opens up a fascinating Road Almost Taken. Carborundum is synonymous with abrasives. The brand is still active, still making a variety of papers and grinding wheels. Needless to say, their original factory in Niagara Falls was closed by EPA, like all factories outside of China. The brand is…
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Illustrated two ways
Today is Morse Code Day! I don’t need to add any new animations, since Polistra has been tirelessly sending the same prayer on several different keys in two different languages. The HappyDays365 webpage has a pretty good writeup on Morse himself and the code in general, giving proper credit to the MANY inventors who came…
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NOTHING.NEW under the sun
Still thinking about trite non-info vs new info… American Radio Library has added a section for the Western Union tech journal. Trite: I’ve said this a hundred times. The HTML web is just the latest and NOT the greatest incarnation of data webs. Formalized data webs started with Chappe’s mechanical semaphores, then the electrical telegraph…
Polistra's Mill 