the good old days

Your Chance To Live: Technological Failures. Made some time in the 70’s by the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, it’s a strange mixture of encouraging people to react calmly and rationally to disasters, and fearmongering about the technology that is everywhere in the world and just waiting to ruin your day.

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The narrator is a graduate of the Shatner School of Timing and Inflection.

We, all of us, are caught up in a real world…. A place somewhere between the… space technology, and the diabolical machines of the silent movies. There are no, uh, space shuttles in that world…. no Tin Lizzies, either. But there is the… technology… that we so very much… take for granted.

The over-arching message of the film appears to be that technology is out to get you…. or at best, it’s baffling, uncontrollable, and incomprehensible. The narrator yearns for the days of the pioneers.

Life was much simpler then!

Yes, the days when you had to haul all your water in buckets from a spring miles away, that was so much simpler. Dying was a hell of a lot easier, too — no pesky medical intervention, just a quick shuffling off the mortal coil.

During the [November 9 1965] blackout, people stayed calm, and helped each other overcome… an incredible technological disaster.

The movie is a bizarre, rambling exploration of the ways things can go wrong (including non-technological disasters, such as fire) — randomly combined with upbeat reassurances that when modern civilization inevitably undergoes catastrophic collapse thanks to omnipresent TECHNOLOGY, we’ll be ok just as long as we stay calm. I was really disappointed — the worst danger from technological disaster is apparently a neurotic fear of the possibility of technological disasters.

Every time I get a little confident about all these science and engineering experts (myself included) with bright shining dreams about new technologies which will save the world, I read something like this…

“We know how to get electrical energy from sunlight by means of silicon converters,” said the Chrysler engineering expert. “If we continue to increase the efficiency of these converters, and if we are able to develop small, efficient energy storage cells solar powered cars will be feasible.” — Closer Than We Think, via Paleo-Future

1958 — fifty-one years — and we still haven’t gotten beyond knowing how, but just not quite there yet…

My grandparents had this blender!

Our anti-spam server has apparently been blocking all email from outside of the college since 1am this morning. We are troubleshooting the problem and will have email back up as soon as possible.

Cleanser has gone back to graduate school this year, and she’s currently taking two thermodynamics classes.  It’s not for nothing that thermo is famous as a trying subject, and she’s spending a fair amount of time studying and doing homework for these classes.  (I can answer some of her thermodynamics questions, but my knowledge is limited to the general structure and theoretical underpinnings of the subject.  Physicists are, as a rule, much more interested in understanding how the microscopic physics of atoms and molecules determines macroscopic mechanics of heat and work than with actually knowing how fluids move and interact.)

So, to lighten things up, I am offering cleanser a few historical images, each related, in some measure, to thermal physics.  First, an 1800 cartoon, depicting “The Comforts of a Rumford Stove.”

One reads about such appliances all the time in Jane Austen novels; apparently, they were the state of the art in the early nineteenth century, having been invented by Count Rumford around 1796.  Rather than being rectangular, the Rumford stove (which was really a kind of fireplace), had angled sides, which better directed heat out into a room.  According to a company that still makes them, modern Rumford stoves meet the ASHRAE standards for high intensity radiant heaters.

I’m not sure if this picture was an advertising image, or what.  The man’s face suggests it might have been some kind of parody; but that might just have been the drawing style of the time, which affected even commercial art.

The second image is of a clever invention of Lord Kelvin’s.  Although Kelvin is most famous for being one of the founders of entropy-based thermodynamics, he also worked on many other projects in physics and engineering (for example, the transatlantic cable).

This is a device he designed for predicting Tides.  The tides are primarily controlled by the moon’s position in the sky, which is determined by the satellite’s revolution and the Earth’s rotation.  However, the position of the sun is nearly as important, as are a number of smaller effects (some of which depend on local conditions).  Each of these phenomenon is cyclic, but they have different periods.  The pictured device is a mechanical rig for adding together these signals with different frequencies.  The net result is the tide height as a fuction of time.  (A detailed discussion of the methodolody can be found here.)

Nowadays, you can’t get a bill from the electric company without an accompanying insert on ways to use less energy in your house. Insulate! Unplug computers! Buy EnergyStar Certified appliances! Considering the antiquated grid structure and long certification process required to build new plants to increase capacity, companies have little choice but to try to decrease demand by teaching consumers to use less power.

Contrast that modern reality with this 1937 concept, apparently actually used in France.

By pressing an electric switch, radio listeners may express approval of a current radio program. Holding down a small switch attached to the base of a small lamp placed near the radio, the increased current drain is shown at the local power plant or substation.

The power company raked in extra money by convincing people to draw extra power and telling them it was some sort of rating system. And convincing them this “special” button would be distinguishable from, say, turning on a light or using an electric toaster. Edison’s approach was all wrong — if he wanted people to buy DC rather than AC electricity, he should have sold them all thoroughly useless gizmos like this, that worked only on HIS special DC current. At worst, he wouldn’t be remembered as somebody who electrocuted an elephant.

Article via Modern Mechanix.

Everyone who’s seen a medical drama is familiar with a defibrillator. It goes wheeeeEEEEEE as it powers up, somebody yells “CLEAR!“, there’s a brrrzap, and then beep-beep-beep as the patient’s heart starts up again. (In sadder dramas, there’s just a lot of brrrzaps until the doctor tosses the paddles aside in despair.)

Improvements in the technology mean that you too may someday have a chance to save a life through controlled application of electricity.

AEDs [automated external defibrillators] are designed to shock a heart that’s in ventricular fibrillation back into a healthy rhythm. The device is now so easy to use that even an untrained bystander can administer this time-critical and highly effective medical procedure. –IEEE Spectrum

That’s right — a defibrillator is almost as easy to find in public places as a first aid kit, and almost as simple to operate as a band-aid. (Well, a complicated electronic band-aid that costs $2000…) In one of those how-did-we-get-start-on-this conversations over the holidays, my EMT-certified brother mentioned that they were just as impressive as they sound.

Compare this modern technological marvel to the original defibrillator, first used on a human in 1947 (though various researchers were defibrillating animals as long ago as the 1890’s). It was literally two electrified spoons. Much of the development in the last 60 years appears to have been minor refinements in design to improve safety and efficacy (although using DC current rather than AC was a huge step in improving patient safety).

Via MedGadget.

A couple years ago, I saw Arctic Passage: Prisoners of the Ice, a Nova episode about the last (and lost) Franklin expedition. Like all good ice-related stories of Victorian explorers, it involved the expedition making grand plans but ultimately getting overwhelmed by the weather conditions and dying. Sir John Franklin attempted to traverse the Northwest Passage (which exists, though it’s clogged with ice), got stuck along the way, and his entire crew died.

There were two things that really stuck with me about the story: the sailors spreading various sexually transmitted diseases among the Inuit (charming on so many levels), and the canned food supplies caused lead poisoning which sped up their deaths.

Evidence suggested that a combination of cold, starvation, and disease including scurvy, pneumonia, and tuberculosis, all exacerbated by lead poisoning, killed the entirety of the Franklin party. — Wikipedia

In 1845 when the expedition left England, canning was only a few decades old. And to seal the cans, manufacturers used solder… lead solder. The sick irony of that was very memorable — bring plenty of provisions, and get killed by them. Makes you grateful for modern science and food preservation, which prevents lead poisoning, botulism, and so on…

It turns out that more recent (September 2008) research suggests that the water system on board Franklin’s ship was responsible for the extreme lead levels, not the solder (or not solely the solder). They had a brand new furnace and a “Fraser galley” which would allow them to distill fresh water from seawater as they sailed (or as they were frozen in the ice). And since standard plumbing fixtures were made of lead… well, we’re left with an ironic poisoning. One of the modern features of Franklin’s expedition led to its downfall.

When production of the Model T ceased almost twenty years after they were first produced, there were millions of them in the world in various conditions. New Uses for Old Fords (Modern Mechanix, 1928) described many ways the “defunct” cars could find new purpose, including an ultra-safe saw rig. (Bullshit inventions like that are why OSHA came to be, by the way. Don’t put your face within 12 inches of a huge freakin’ saw, unless you aren’t a big fan of your face.)

It’s interesting just how modern the idea of designed obsolescence is. Modern Ford would laugh for a week if you suggest their cars should have a life and function after their time as cars. (To be fair, Henry wasn’t intentionally designing his cars to be sustainable and reusable, simply durable.)

I’m not a fan of bananas unless they’re green, but still yellow enough to not have that weird astringent texture of unripe bananas; I never buy them and will eat them only when necessary. My son will vomit when we try feeding him bananas, so he’s got the same aversion I do. (It’s not the flavor, since we both like banana pudding, as long as it doesn’t have any slices of real banana in it.)

But of course when we visited relatives last week for Thanksgiving, Great-Grandma had bought plenty of bananas since that’s what toddlers love to eat. He stuck with little apples instead, leaving them half-eaten around her apartment in strategic locations (under chairs, in house plants, wadded up in a parka) so he could come back for a snack later.

I’m sure he would have liked the bananas better if we had brought along one of these little gadgets…