Odd Lots
- My old friend Lee Hart scratchbuilt a marvelous model of the Galileo spacecraft, including an operating COSMAC processor that blinks out the Arecibo message on an LED.
- The COSMAC 1802 was a good choice for spacecraft, because it drew almost no power and could be radiation-hardened. It was all static CMOS, so the system clock could be slowed arbitrarily, down to audio rates, or just stopped. Alas, the contention (which I’ve shared) that there was an 1802 on the Viking spacecraft isn’t true. Bummer.
- Here’s an essentially bottomless collection of old radio literature, including magazines, technical books and articles, and ephemera. The PDFs are of excellent quality, though I wonder how legal some of the items are. Worth a look, for the Deco artwork in the 20s and 30s magazines, if nothing else.
- And if you’re interested in toilet paper on a total lifestyle basis, Toilet Paper World is just the thing. I’m not sure I even noticed that tinted toilet paper existed before they told me. And now it’s gone. I guess it’s true that 80% of the world is always below our radar.
- We’ve had air rifles since…1779. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I’d heard about how the Soviets repaired their ailing Salyut 7 space station, but not in anywhere close to this kind of detail.
- Paris used to use (and may still; the article is unclear) a sort of Indiana Jones mechanism for clearing blockages in its extra large economy-sized sewer pipes: Rolling a 9-foot iron ball through them.
- If you’re watching sea ice levels in the Antarctic (as I am) this site puts up very nice graphs on an almost daily basis.
- Is there anything that hipsters can’t ruin? (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Murder comes naturally to Chimpanzees. The sad part is, it comes naturally to us, too. I suspect it came so naturally to the Neanderthals that they didn’t need Sap to extinctify them.
- Somehow I managed to see the first Hobbit flick four times and never noticed that Bifur had an axe stuck in his head. I thought it was some sort of ornamment.
- Oh, and predictably, Buzzfeed has a stack rank of Peter Jackson’s dwarves by, um, hotness. They should have asked some Dwarf women; the hottest dwarves are also the ones that look the least like dwarves. Several times I was asking myself if Fili and Kili had been left in a basket on some dwarf’s front porch.
- One more and I’ll let the dwarf thing go. Separated at birth: Bofur the Dwarf and…Sister Bertrille.
- I survived the 60s. I had all the Beatles albums. I am not and have never been a Communist. I guess this means that hypnotism is impossible.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: aerospace · anthropology · electronics · fantasy · humor · radio · weirdness
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We toured the Paris Sewer Museum just a couple of months ago. The sewer-cleaning balls on display are not models, they are full-size, and according to my recollection of the accompanying text they are still in use. However, the author of the page you linked to got the balls’ function wrong. They are not used to smash against obstructions but to clear the gunky mixture of sewage and sand (called “batard” [bastard] in French, but referred to as “hybrid material” in the English signage) that accumulates at the bottom of the pipe. The ball, which is just slightly smaller than the pipe, floats to the top of the pipe (the small ones are wood, the big ones are hollow iron) and the restricted flow of water beneath it pushes the ball along and flushes out the gunk, pushing the gunk to the next available clean-out trap.
There were air rifles earlier than 1779. At Blair Castle in Blair Atholl, Scotland, they have a number of them on the wall in the entrance hall which used brass globes to store the air. They could be fired five or six times before you had to pump them up again. Interestingly, each is equipped with a flintlock mechanism which isn’t connected to anything. Apparently, it was considered unfair to use a gun which didn’t have a big flash and smoke to show where you were shooting from, so these guns had the false flintlock to disguise their nature.
I’ve been avoiding The Hobbit. As much as Jackson’s LOTR impressed me, what I appreciated most was how little he tinkered with the story. Leaving out Bombadil completely was forgivable and understandable. Leaving out the Scouring of the Shire was less forgivable but somewhat understandable. But very little was added. To turn The Hobbit into two films required adding rather a lot it would seem, and just the thought of that bugs me enough I have put it off in favor of waiting for the disks.
Well, he turned it into three films, actually, one of which we have yet to see. Some of that is padding, or CGI showing-off (e.g., the rock giants) but some of it is a reasonably smooth melting-in of background elements that Tolkien didn’t mention in the novel itself. We see Radagast, and Gandalf’s trip to Dol Guldur. The Tauriel character was something Jackson invented, and while she works well in context, I can understand why people object, including some who feel she was tossed in for “romance” and mostly wasted as a character. Parts of the first two films drag here and there, and if the whole weren’t so sumptuous (especially the footage inside Erebor in the second film) I wouldn’t be as enthusiastic as I am.
Air rifles saw serious military use, including during the Napoleonic Wars. They had nearly the range and effect of black powder rifles and the best ones had a much higher rate of fire.
Users carried a pump and several spare reservoirs/stocks. Those would be filled ahead of time, and each could provide several full-powered, carefully metered and consistent shots. The weapons were breech loaders. Just open the hatch, pop the bullet in the chamber, arm and pull the trigger, safe and repeat.
Makes you wonder why the NSA or whoever isn’t developing “pneumatic stealth weapons” for today. 🙂
How good were pressure vessels of the time? How long could they hold a charge? I’d have to guess that all the joints were filled with solder. The machining tolerances of that era were not spectacular. See:
http://www.wrexham.gov.uk/english/heritage/bersham_ironworks/tremendous_bore.htm