Tag: Patient things
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Cursed weight, sacred weight, part 2 of 2
= = = = = MEDIEVAL METROLOGY PART 4 = = = = = Why has gold been a standard** for so many centuries? Partly because it’s a suitable standard in a metrology sense. It doesn’t mix easily with other elements, it doesn’t degrade with time, and it can be purified and verified. But metrology…
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Red and black in daily life
The oldest principle in the ceremonial side of life is Say the black, do the red. Poets, politicians, priests, and publicists followed this rule. Churches formalized it with a series of actions (red) to be performed by the priest and the people, with standard TUNES (black) accompanying each action. Mainline churches and megachurches have abandoned…
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The Foy Rebellion HAS ARRIVED.
Headline: Art majors beat computer majors. = = = = = START QUOTE: For computer science and computer engineering, the unemployment rate in those fields was 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively — notably higher than the national average. Finance majors were 3.7%. By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional…
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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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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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Math pope
Prevost is a Villanova grad with a major in math. This could make him a somewhat more significant figure for nerd types. A math pope would prescribe csc as the cure for sin. When sin goes to zero, csc ascends to heaven. He would give absolution as the cure for negative feelings. An inner product…
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Eureka Lake
In 1966 I was exploring the Manhattan area. Southwest of town I found a huge brick building with a nice porch, fronting a peaceful little lake. The building looked like a hotel. On a nearby corner was a little country general store. Checking maps, I found that the building was the Oddfellows nursing home, and…
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It’s even older
Noticed an article in NewSuperstitionist, describing how causality can be re-introduced into the quantum world. Why bother? Causality exists in the REAL world. Nature doesn’t care if we set up an abstract spiritual world of angels on pinheads or live/dead cats in boxes. Quantum is a modern religion, not a description of reality. Quantum theologians…
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Fessenden the farmer
Well, not really. Fessenden had a wide-ranging vision and tried his hand in many different areas. Around 1914 he got into agriculture. In one patent he wrote a treatise on improving agriculture, showing the tech optimism of the time. Mass production will solve all problems. He developed a sort of super-greenhouse system where everything could…
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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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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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Scrollwave
Random thought. Scrolling through media on the web is the modern equivalent of tuning across the bands on shortwave. Shortwave broadcasting was killed by the web, much more firmly and directly than other media. With a good receiver and good propagation conditions, you could find every kind of entertainment or news in every language, plus…
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Back to Magic Lanterns 2
Last week I returned to the subject of Magic Lanterns, the intersection of science and entertainment. Now I’m imagining another development of magic lantern tech that was easily possible in the era of the lanterns. Fluidic analog computers came along in the 1930s, AFTER electronic analog computers. This sequence was common. Many machines could have…
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Nothing new.
Something randomly reminded me of the remarkable Tyler family history. President Tyler’s grandson Harrison Ruffin Tyler died earlier this year. Grandpa married a trophy wife and had a son when he was 75, then the son did the same thing and had Harrison when he was 63. From a 2012 interview with Harrison: = =…
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Third Shift Workers Day (habitual reprint)
Today is Third Shift Workers Day! 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 graveyard shift blurs the boundaries of dates. I’ve always been happiest and steadiest on graveyard shift. I worked graveyard at motels in…
Polistra's Mill 