For a long time, there was a… conceit, of sorts, in science fiction, of connecting simple large objects in such a way that produced inexplicable complexity. The sort of thing where the characters would put five or six pieces together, and suddenly have a walking, talking robot.
It never made the least bit of sense, either in reality or to me personally, but that latter is changing. As I’ve been playing around with this carbon microphone (here’s a new test recording from yesterday, using the improved circuit) and along the way reading about things like the early telephone system and early radio and most of all the telegraph – I really start to see how they get there.
Particularly early radio, and even more particularly the telegraph.
The telegraph, I mean, damn. They ran one wire. Not a pair of wires: one. They relied on local grounding at each station; the ‘return’ for the power supply was the planet.
So look at this from a not-really-that-naive point of view, right? You’re a farmer out in the middle of Saskatchewan or something, right? It’s weeks to anywhere. You go into town for your mail every couple of weeks, the nearest neighbour is a mile or two or three away, a big gathering in town is monthly market day. You’re not stupid; you deal with complex machinery pretty regularly as a farmer. You know how this works; you know clocks, you know how complex machines have to be to do even simple things well, you know how they work and now to fix them and how to adapt them to new tasks.
Now take this metal rope, attach it to a bit of wound-up metal thread and a lever and a spring, and suddenly you can talk to Vancouver. Sure, you need to learn a code, but that’s easy, and suddenly there’s impossible spooky action at a distance – a really big distance.
Then there’s radio. Even crazier. Take another metal rope, and another bit of wound-up metal thread, and a tiny bit of inexpensive crystal, and this thing you put in your ear that you ordered by post (which is not more than a magnet and some more metal thread and a piece of paper) and suddenly you have news from Toronto in your house.
To the observer at the time, it is intense complexity from small numbers of simple parts. Sure, most of the complexity comes from the humans at the far end of each connection, but it’d take a good bit of sorting out to get that really parsed, and in the meantime, the reaction is more along the lines of:
What magical fuckery is this?!
Suddenly the whole “small numbers of simple objects producing combinations of intense complexity” makes a lot more sense. They’d seen it multiple times in their lives, so… let’s make a robot with eight vacuum tubes, a motor, and a bunch of metal tubes? SURE, WHO EVEN KNOWS – THAT OTHER SHIT WORKED, WHY NOT THIS? How is an empty metal tube supposed to do anything? I dunno, I didn’t expect this metal rope to do anything either, but now it’s 8pm and dark since 4pm and I’m snowed in on the cold cold plains in January, and before going to bed I’m listening to a jazz band playing right now in the Savoy Hotel in New York City.
Impossible madness, from small numbers of simple parts.
Really, if anything, it’s surprising those decades weren’t even goofier.
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understanding something better now
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Nissrine, a Moroccan girl, reads an application for a Dutch citizenship course. An alternative version of Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. Photo by Jan Banning.
“Xenophobia, especially Islamophobia, is rising in many European countries…I feel it is necessary to mobilize against such intolerance. My ‘National Identities’ series gives immigrants the main role, using them as models in my photographic variations on classic paintings.”
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Les Moonves: Trump’s run is ‘damn good for CBS’
Les Moonves: Trump’s run is ‘damn good for CBS’
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump’s presidential bid.
CBS and corporate media have been giving Donald Trump billions of dollars worth of free advertisement, not because his every utterance is newsworthy or in the public interest, but solely for their bottom line. Greed. If you ever needed proof that huge swaths of our corporately controlled media doesn’t care about actually informing the public, then here it is.
At best, mainstream media is biased infotainment and our 4th estate is swiftly becoming a bigger joke than it already is.
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Happy towel day folks
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”
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YAY IT’S EVENING so NSFW lyrics are JUST FINE FOR YOU NOW! Unless you’re at work. In which case, wait ‘till morning. Sorry about that.
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drwhothefuckyouthinkyoutalkinto:
i was about to joke about how my political stance is “end lawnmower culture” but then it occurred to me that i actually Am against lawns as suburban status symbols and wastes of land that Could be used to sustain native flora & fauna and grow food for people, but no, instead they are these huge useless swaths of land that need Constant maintenance, the process of which is not only destructive, but Incredibly Loud
You know that actually is the purpose of a lawn? They started as a trend of the French monarchy – the ones revolutionaries beheaded for being self indulgent assholes.
It exists purely as a status symbol that says, “I have land but I don’t have to use it for anything productive. I can invest time, money and resources in maintaining an entirely useless crop on land I’m not farming just because it looks pretty.”
Lawns offend me.
Why have that stunted golf course in front of your suburban house if you can’t even water it? Get one of these instead.
Unite Against the Lawn
Pro tiny house, anti grass lawn. Prioritize practicality.
This is actually really interesting because back in the 1950s and 60s in Australia when we started getting large waves of Southern European migrants one thing the Italians and others would often so is buy a little suburban home, then tear out the ornamental flower beds and lawn and useless trees and plant fruits, vegetables, grapes and even olives. It was considered completely scandalous by their Anglo-Saxon neighbours because lawn was considered an aspirational thing and the ideal was to go from not needing a kitchen garden and having an ornamental garden to show how well you were doing.
This is great. All of it.
Not to derail this too much, but “Lawnmower” culture also reminds me of aggressively heterosexual men. Men ALWAYS will use mowing the lawn as a way to get out of doing all the other household chores – having a lawn that a man mows somehow makes maintaining everything else inside a house the women’s responsibility.
Down with lawnmower culture.i’ve actually read a whole book on lawns and lawn culture (yes, really) it’s called lawn people by paul robbins check it out and let’s all boycott lawn culture together!!!
Never thought of this and wow. It’s really an eye opener
Wow. This is really useful info !!
There’s a house on the corner (I would get a picture if it weren’t creepy as fuck) whose lawn is filled with trees, flowers and plants. You can barley see the house. Everyone in the development gossips about how it’s an eyesore. & I image how much the owners had to fight with the homeowners association for approval.
The City of Olympia has a grant for homeowners who want to turn their lawns/properties into Food Forests. It pays for some materials and all of the labor. The homeowners pay for the plants.
There is also a local organization called GRuB that provides FREE raised beds and container gardens to Thurston County residents. Folks qualify for free raised beds, container gardens, AND free plants based on financial need.
If you are a low income person who is unsure you can afford plants/seeds to start a garden: You can buy plant starts and vegetable seeds with your EBT benefits!
GRuB IS AWESOME. And yay Oly for cool grants (sadly I’m in Tumwater).
As xmagnet-o mentions, Lawnmower Culture is so entrenched that some developments have rules against anything but well-manicured lawns. There are places with lawn awards. This is not only awful for the environment (lawns are a monoculture, usually maintained to high standards only with fertilizers and herbicides, usually mowed with highly inefficient gas-engines, and can be as bad for run-off as a packed gravel driveway), but it’s basically designed to separate the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ – because if you’re a have-not, or even a have-less, wasting time and money primping your useless lawn is NOT going to be a priority.
DOWN WITH LAWNS!
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Twitter goes crazy over unlawful arrest of the teen who tried to sell his MacBook
That last tweet… get them Goldie
~Noma
this is wild af
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Returning to work with baby
When a woman gives birth, she is usually allowed to take 12 weeks of
unpaid leave. But many women can’t afford to take that much time off
work. Now North Dakota State employees have a progressive new benefit
that’s become a popular addition to the workplace.Rikki Roehrich
gave birth to her son Eli about 4 months ago. She says she didn’t know
what to expect participating in the new program, “I was kind of worried
at first that he might cry a lot or something. But I think if anything,
he loves coming here and seeing everyone on a daily basis"Fortunately
for Roehrich with the ‘Infant at Work’ benefit at the Department of
Commerce, she was able to return to work earlier and still spend time
with baby Eli. She says, “The first couple of months of life with babies
is so crucial to be there to bond with them, I really think a lot of
parents are torn and feel guilty because they can’t give 100 percent to
both work and their new child and so with this program you don’t have to
choose.”Amanda Remynse is expecting a child soon and hopes to
use the program as well. Until then though she says she can learn by
observing and asking questions, using it as a helping hand into
motherhood.She says, “I’m able to see what other mothers are
doing, what products they’re using. You know it’s a really great support
network that probably wouldn’t have been identified if a baby wouldn’t
have been in the office.”Roehrich recommends the program to all
businesses, “I came back after six week’s full-time and I had no problem
doing that. I would have taken longer without the program.“The
program allows newborn babies the ability to stay in the workplace up
until six-months-old. Workers who don’t have a baby in the office say
they enjoy having the babies around.Copyright 2016 KING
Funny that King5 (Seattle station) is reporting on this in North Dakota, when Washington State’s Department of Health has been doing this, too (It may be broader; I only know about DoH). My parents both work there – they’re thrilled, say it’s been great for morale, and always tell me about the new ‘office baby.’ Dad was a bit sad when the last one in his office aged out at 6 months. (There’re guidelines – if a baby is routinely disruptive, then they can’t come, but it hasn’t been a problem thus far.)
Still not as good as paid leave, but it’s nice to see options.
