We all know about vestigial organs in living creatures, such as the useless vermiform appendix that gives many people a bad time. These were useful in earlier releases of our body plan, but are now just along for the ride.

So here is a sighting of a similarly useless historical remnant in a Bosch power drill.

I refer to the rubber part affixed to the power cord near the drill’s grip. This well-designed part was very handy in the drills of our youth…

The intent was to keep the chuck key from getting lost, of course… you could stick it into the hole and the rubber flaps would keep it in place when it wasn’t being used to tighten the chuck. These keys were all too easy to misplace, so this was an excellent solution – as the vermiform appendix used to be when we were all eating leaves before we became humans and learned about chocolate and other delights.

The thing is, my drill came with the now common keyless chuck… so the key holder is totally unnecessary. At least it isn’t prone to inflammation…

I was shopping at Office Depot, and next to the checkout line they had this bin full of cheap items on sale. And in it, thrown carelessly with less decorum than potatoes get at the grocer’s, were blister-packaged Flash memory cards.

They had 2.0 GB units selling for a pittance. That’s two billion bytes, or 16 Billion bits. I remember Thirty years ago, when a solid state memory board of 16K Bytes would come very carefully packaged – rightly so, as it cost thousands of dollars. The unit in the blister pack shown has a Million times as much capacity and costs 10 bucks. Of course we all know how Moore’s law is driving densities up and price per bit down, but this infamy of selling Gigabytes like peanuts brings it home with some poignancy.

And Below is a similar case, this from our neighborhood general store. Here the Flash Disk-on-key packs are hanging from a shelf alongside Energizer batteries, chocolates, candy and chewing gum packages.

You can bet the core memory stack I show here was not sold with chewing gum…

I was visiting a print design firm and noticed a pile of freshly printed business cards that had the shape of a rectangle with one corner cut off diagonally. I was delighted: this must clearly be the card of some IT professional who wanted to play on the shape of the IBM punched card, right?

Wrong, of course. I asked the designer and he said this is just a nice shape for someone wishing to stand out from the usual rectangular cards, but he didn’t even recognize that this is the form factor of a punched card. In fact, he’d never even seen such a card, even though they were all too common in his parents’ youth – not only in mainframe computer installations but also in every home, since they were used for utility bills to facilitate later data processing (see here). No one who was even slightly literate in the sciences could have missed the similarity back then.

Yet another iconic shape going away into the mists of oblivion…

A while back I was visiting the wonderful Museum of Business History and Technology in Wilmington, Delaware, which has countless typewriters, that incredible device that will soon be completely forgotten. Among these faithful servants of the authors of yesteryear I saw the device in this photo.

It’s an old Hebrew Remington 92 from around 1930, but what caught my eye was the Hebrew inscription on the frame, which translates literally into “Remington tool of writing type“. Now, the modern Hebrew name for typewriter means literally “writing machine”. And in fact, a little Googling will find you the same old model with this very phrase on it.

So what we’re seeing here is language in the making: the unit in the photo is so early that the term for it hasn’t jelled yet, and different batches were marketed with different names!

Speaking of which, I notice that the name for this machine, in every language I can make out, includes the root “write”, most commonly simply as “writing machine” (machine à écrire, macchina da scrivere, Schreibmaschine, máquina de escribir, etc). Nobody calls it a “printing machine”, even though that’s the immediate action. The important thing is that it is used for writing, in the good old sense that one did with a quill, or a pen, or a pencil, or a piece of chalk. It’s simply an accessory to the creative mind, and all these names – including the discarded one on the Remington 92 above – reflect that fact. Somehow, our computers and keyboards and printers and word processors have lost that linguistic flavor…

I’ve lamented before the disappearance in our time of the Tinkerer, that fix-everything general technology expert of ages past. I ran into a demonstration of how far he’s gone the other day when shopping online for a new bluetooth hands-free cellphone car kit (my old one conked out, and fixing it would of course have cost more than buying new – another sign of our times).

I found on Amazon the Motorola T305 Bluetooth Speaker, and dug into its customer reviews. Turns out it has excellent audio quality, but there was a recurring complaint: people hated its big, intense blue light, which at night would blink very distractingly at the edge of the driver’s field of vision.

The discussion among reviewers was about whether the blue light was terribly distracting, mildly distracting, or maybe you could get used to it after a while. What amazed me is that none of the reviewers I read (admittedly, only a sample of almost 300 of them) had done the obvious thing – solve the problem by tinkering with the device. This could be done in two minutes, tops: all you’d need is to cover the light with a sticker, which can be cut to measure from paper, or some masking tape, or – if you’re so inclined – a thin gold foil with inlaid silver patterns. Anything opaque to light would do. Or if you still want to see the light, but at lower intensity, you could punch a small hole in the sticker, or use a semi-transparent dark material instead of tape. Once you did that you’d have the great sound quality and none of the annoyance.

The fact that this obvious idea never occurred to anyone is disturbing indeed. We’ve become so accustomed to ready made products that the notion of improving them to serve us better is entirely gone!

I discussed the growing obesity of our paperbacks before… and now, a look at our print magazines, with show the exact opposite trend.

This trend is visible in many magazines (Fast Company is a good example), but I illustrate it with an old favorite, Scientific American. Here are three issues from my shelves. See the difference?

The issues shown are from September 1969, June 1983, and October 2009. The difference in thickness is striking indeed: 10.6, 5.3 and 2.2 millimeters respectively. As far as pages go, the counts are 288, 156 and 72. What happened??

One difference is article length: a typical article in 1969 would run to some 20 pages long, including about 8 pages of advertisements. In 1983 it would have 11 pages including 1 page of ads. In 2009, 8 pages with no ads at all. The number of articles (“features”, in today’s terminology) has also changed, going down from 10 to 8 to 7.

In other words, in the merry Sixties readers were treated to ten 12-page-long (net) articles and lots of ads; in the eighties, they had eight ten-pagers and fewer ads; and today we can read a paltry seven articles with 8 pages each, and almost no advertising.

Is this good or bad? Admittedly there’s some attractiveness in ad-free reading; on the other hand, clearly it’s bad for the publisher, and may explain the paucity of real content. It may also explain the cost per page: issue price rose from $1 to $2.50 to $5.99, which is almost constant in normalized present day dollars; but we get less and less pages and articles for this investment.

For my part, I miss the fat issues… and even some of the old ads, which in this particular publication could be fairly interesting themselves (e.g. see the ad here).

Flying to the States on a Continental 777, my favorite jetliner, alternating my attention between my notebook and the video screen in the seat back in front of me. The latter is a new model, fitted to every seat in the cabin. The technology has been evolving ever since I stared flying to America back in the eighties.

At first they introduced real movie screens, one at the front of each cabin, with a projector that would show one single movie at a time. Your viewing pleasure was a matter of luck – a tall passenger in front, or a poor seat location, could wipe it out – but passengers loved it: a movie – in the sky? Wow!

Then came TV screens jutting out under the ceiling, giving better viewing to more passengers; still one movie at a time, chosen by the airline. The passengers had no choice of content or screening time.

More recently we got personal screens, with multiple movies to choose from. Typically we’d have a dozen movies, but they all ran in synch – all started at the same time, and if you switched on in the middle you saw half the movie. Of course on a transatlantic flight there was time enough to take in the missing half in the next cycle. So – each passenger now had the choice of which movie to see but not when.

So this flight, they’ve installed larger, wider screens and with them unbelievable choice. There are hundreds of movies and TV episodes to choose from, and each traveler can start any of them at any time, and even pause, rewind or FF during the movie. Perfect choice.

What will they think of next, then?

Just got a letter from the UK, and it had this colorful stamp on it.

For an instant, I felt that special twinge of joy that an interesting stamp elicits; only after a moment did I remember that (a) I no longer collect stamps, not since I was a kid I don’t, and (b) none of my friends does, nor do they have kids that do that I might give the stamp to.

This is a shame, really, because postage stamps have a built-in ability to delight. They are often beautiful, they come from wondrous distant lands, they have a story to tell in their miniature image, and they are eminently collectible. In this way, every letter that you or your circle of friends and relatives received had the potential to surprise you with a “bonus”, a tiny capsule of serendipity where the stamps it bore could be boring or fascinating, depending on the luck of the draw.

All this may soon be over. I don’t know whether stamp collecting is on the decline (I suspect serious adult collectors do exist, but children may be more into video games these days). But the stamps themselves may soon be obsolete. People send less personal letters since the advent of email, and I’ve just read that the UK is planning postage stickers you can buy online and print out, and these have a bar code, not a picture (they also took out the queen’s ever-youthful profile we see in the stamp above, causing much consternation).

But meanwhile stamps still exist, and I know of one guy who makes full use of their joy-creating potential. He is a fellow History-of-Computing collector, and an eBay seller of slide rules; when I buy one from him it invariably arrives in an envelope covered with a mosaic of small-denomination stamps, each one different, all beautiful.

The riot of color is so cheerful that I collect these envelopes. What a nice way to delight one’s customers!

We’ve seen much diversity of On/Off Power switch symbols here and here… and there’s more.

Here’s the latest addition to the gallery: I spied this on a piece of medical equipment (a Critikon Dinamap vital signs monitor).  It shows a dot centered in a circle for ON, and the same dot banished outside the circle for OFF. Luckily, they weren’t lazy and included the two words as well. This removes the possible confusion I’ve remarked on in my post on the Alaris symbology; it also provides a Rosetta stone for deciphering that one.

The other day I noticed a car whose side mirror had recently undergone some major trauma, losing its mirror and outer casing, ignominiously showing its guts. Here:

These electrically-operated mirrors are now ubiquitous, but this brought home the complexity of their inner mechanism, with the wiring, motors, pivots and the chassis that everything must screw onto.

Which made me think for a moment of how far forward – or is it backward? – we’ve come from the days of the simple mirrors still seen on vintage cars, as in the photo at right. In the fifties, a mirror was just that – a round sheet of silvered glass fixed in a round metal plate that pivoted on an arm. That was all – 4-5 parts, max, all externally visible. No innards at all. And cheaper to replace, I’m sure, than the bill the owner of the car in the first photo will face.

This growth in complexity is seen in all parts of our cars and other products. So speak up – is this trend a Good Thing (it is really comfy to move the mirror from inside the car, to be sure) or Bad (loss of elegance in design, for one thing)?

Photo courtesy Glen Edelson, shared on flickr under CC license.