vakkotaur | Entries tagged with technology

Steampunk. Vinyl. Tubes.

All have some popularity, but why do they? Sure steampunk has a neat style - the time setting of it had few if any synthetics, which limited materials, but that seems to come across as classic style. There is no doubt that had there been synthetic materials available they would have been used. We know this because that's precisely what happened in our history. Cellophane, as one example, was a big enough deal it got written into songs:

You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane.

("You're The Top" - Cole Porter)

But people go to steam (and antique gasoline) shows. And there are records - and even tape - in use. Vacuum tube equipment is rarely seen now, but it's there and some new stuff (kits, generally) is still being made. What's the appeal? It's not just historical fascination.

But it is a fascination, an attraction of interest. And that interest? Sure, some is historical. And some will claim that vinyl records and vacuum tube amplifiers sound better than digital recordings and transistors. But there is something more. Many youtube videos of old tunes don't need to be 'videos' as such and could be a title card or lyrics, but show the phonograph. And that, for me, is a hint. You can see it working, and with only a little knowledge have an idea of how it works. Vibrations made a needle move, that made grooves in a disk (or cylinder) and now a copy of that disk is making a needle move and reproducing the vibrations. It's 19th century technology at its core. A similar idea with movies, at least on film. There are frames. Photos. Rapidly sequenced. And a flip-book can do something close enough to give an "Oh, I get it." feeling.

Tape is more complicated, but you see a medium moving and have encountered magnets, so there is or can be an idea of how it works. Granted, records and (reel to reel) tape might just fun to watch in certain moods or states of mind. For tubes, well, it's not nearly as easy, but it's the idea that this collection of relatively small number of discrete parts is doing that, that you at least have a chance of understanding it.

Compare the modern mp3 player (which for many is now a subset of all the functions of their phones). It's a literal 'black box' that sound comes out of. Other than earphone diaphragms and perhaps pushbuttons there are no moving parts. It might as well be magic, even for those who do have a good idea of how it all works. It's nice, yes, but there might be this vague unease of, well, what else is going on? I wonder how much of the nutty conspiracy type nonsense is fueled or enabled by the unease of being surround by things one doesn't necessarily understand.

The 'magic' is wonderful and modern life wouldn't be modern life without it, but the older technology is comfortable and comforting in a way. To use the terms of Harry Potter, we enjoy having the powers of wizards, but are nervous that overall, we are really muggles.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: You're The Top

On my desk ~~are~~ were four light bulbs. They are not classic incandescents, nor the slightly more efficient (less inefficient) halogen bulbs. These are compact fluorescent bulbs, and there is nothing actually wrong with them. They work. They do have the issue of slow-start and taking a bit of time to come up to full brightness, indicating they are now some rather early models. The fixture they were in now has LED bulbs which if they do not turn on instantly, the delay is so minor as to be readily ignored.

A local hardware store had a good sale on LED bulbs in a tolerable color temperature (3000K, not ideal but certainly better than the ugly yellow of 2700K) so I got a few of those and with various swappings, wound up with a few 'spares'. Eventually the CFL start delay of the dining room fixture bothered jmaynard and I replaced the CFLs there with the LEDs.

Now there are, I think, no actual incandescent bulbs in use in the house, aside from small appliance and indicator lamps. Even closets have CFL or LED. There are some incandescent bulbs outside the house, but they see minutes of use per year so there is no urgency in swapping them out. Even a straight tube fluorescent lamp above the sink has been replaced by LED. There is a torcherie halogen lamp - which I would love to change to LED, but the replacements for that aren't quite ready yet, as it's a 300W version and last I checked, LEDs weren't up to that. But I suspect it won't be long before replacements are affordably available.

We now have quite a number of spare CFLs - and not just the four that had been on my desk. They work. They're reasonably efficient. They give a good light. But LEDs are better, thus these join the collection of incandescents (we also have a box or two of those) as obsolete. It's a bit of a weird feeling, as these are not actually defective - they work. But, there is no useful place for them now. And these are the 'fancy' CFLs with the external A19 envelope to mask the spiral and look 'right' in exposed fixtures, too.

Current Mood: blah

Someone had a list of questions phrased to make somewhat common things seem rather silly. But the it's just the phrasing that does it. A little thought about how things probably actually happened defuses the phrases. It spoils the joke, but sometimes a right answer is more useful than a moment of alleged humor. So from time to time I'll post something in this series. I'll start off with a common one:

Q: Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?

A: This is a case of definitions mixing. While people do park on driveways, they do have to drive on to and off of them. The driveway is what is driven on to the garage, if a person has one and keeps their car there.

A parkway, as originally meant, is a way through a park. Parking a vehicle was not part of the original definition. As an example there is Theodore Wirth Parkway in the Twin Cities. It winds through Theodore Wirth Park.

While I'm at it, I may as well take care of another one before it starts bugging me too much:

Q: Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp, which no decent human being would eat?

A: The existence of indecent human beings. Well, maybe not quite. How about unreasonable people?

The char setting of the range is for the same reason that toasters have a setting lighter than almost anyone would really want to use. It's a classic user interface problem, really. If you were in the business of building toasters you wouldn't know what setting every person wants and if you decide for people, you will almost always be wrong. So instead of having no settings, or even a few settings, a range is provided.

So far so good. But the question is, "Why such a large range that includes those silly choices?" A narrow range would probably not be enough for some people and they'd be complaining about how they want their toast "just a little lighter" or "just a little darker" and how the manufacturer is being unreasonable for not allowing that. So instead, the range is made excessive. This quietly demonstrates that the manufacturer isn't limiting your choices. Want dark toast? Well, you can set it all the way to "carbonized bread" if you really want to.

Last night I was listening to another CD in the Spike Jones box set I bought this past Saturday. There was a tune I heard on the Dr. Demento show, but had forgotten the title. This tune, Black Bottom has no vocal but it does have a joke of sorts in it. The joke depends on knowing one way that a record can fail or be damaged. There is a point where a bit of the music repeats several times fairly quickly, and then there is a *thump* like someone hitting something, and then the tune proceeds. When that was recorded the joke worked because everyone knew what it was.

People of a certain age (I don't know the limit on that) will get joke immediately upon hearing it. I suspect that some people now might never have encountered that problem and might not have picked up on it from cultural references and wonder what that was all about. If that's not the case right now, I expect it will be in not all that long a time.

I've read a few older (well, they're older than I am) books, which I generally find more informative than many recent books. But sometimes an assumption is made that "everyone knows that" which throws me as I, several decades later, have no idea what is really meant since I'm missing that critical "common knowledge."

Another example is a bit in some old movies. One bit that I recall seeing was someone hearing a shot, except it wasn't a shot. It was a light bulb breaking. Today, that doesn't make much sense. Sure, if you broke a bulb it would make a noise. But you wouldn't mistake it for a shot. The technology changed is what happened. For some time now, light bulbs have been filled with gas. With the pressure about the same inside the bulb as outside, if they break, they just break. Those early bulbs weren't gas-filled but held vacuum. When they broke, the atmospheric pressure pressing in caused a sharp implosion. That implosion is as good as an explosion as far as the kind of sound it made.

Those sort of things makes me wonder what I'm missing or not getting because of the "everyone knows that" assumption not working. I also wonder what that is taken for granted now will seem oddly unexplained in the future.