They say that form follows function. So - take a look at the form of this strange device, which stands about a meter tall. Can you guess its function?
No, it isn’t a trashcan with dreadlocks.
I saw this thing in the Biosphere at Potsdam. This pleasant museum is smaller and less ambitious (should I say, less pretentious?) than the one in Arizona, and serves very well to exhibit different ecosystems to the visiting public.
The item you see here is a display device for displaying smells. You sniff the end of a tube to get a whiff of the plant shown on the round image below it.
Did you guess?…
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These days, every product and service come with scary warnings intended to cover the maker’s back side in case you harm yourself. Electrical appliances warn you not to drop them in water (Duh!), restaurant menus tell you you can die by eating their food (not here, thank God, but in the US they do), coffee cups tell you their content is hot, an so on ad nauseam.
But the strangest, and strangely endearing, manifestation of this must be the sign we saw at the entrance to the Baha’i gardens on the slopes of Mt. Carmel in Haifa. Here is the sign:
What they tells us is that the beauty of the gardens is such that we might be distracted into not watching our step and falling down one of the hundreds of steps that take you downhill!
And I must hand it to them… they aren’t exaggerating. These gardens are mind bogglingly serene and beautiful, though the risk is probably from trying to snap photos instead of looking where one is walking. The photo below shows only a small portion of the gardens, with the shrine of the Bab, a prophet of the Baha’i religion, in the background, and the port of Haifa even farther out.
This small photo can hardly do justice to what we saw there, but may give you a hint. The real thing is simply breathtaking!
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We already saw how overuse of pictorial instructions can be confusing. Well, I just ran into a wonderful victory of this trend. I passed a large office copier - the Konica 7222 - and here is what I saw on its document feeder:
These guys spared no effort in their belt-and-suspenders approach: there is large text, and tiny text, in every language you could desire; there are pictures, and icons, and arrows all over the picture… isn’t it just wonderful? Especially given that no office worker would need any of it except the “Face Up” bit?
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Here is an absolutely trivial product feature that turns out to be very nice. This is the latch release for the more recent IBM (now Lenovo) Thinkpad notebook computers.
I’ve been through more models of Thinkpad than I remember, and until the T4x series they all had two latch releases on the front edge of the lid. Then came the T40, and it only had one, on the right, which actuates both latches through an inner linkage. When I first saw this I was disdainful: who cares, after all? But when I started to use a T41, I realized how useful this feature is. These days we mobile users run around the workplace from meeting to meeting with our notebook; and until someone comes out with the secondary displays we’ve seen on futuristic promotional videos (but never in reality), we often have to open the notebook to check details of our coming meeting while walking towards an elevator… and with the single-latch arrangement, you can hold the machine in your left hand while opening its screen with the right.
Like I said, a trivial detail, but it really is useful. A nice piece of design from IBM!
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While touring the Spreewald in Germany we came upon the strange device in the center of this photo. In fact we saw many of them while punting in the canals of this “Germany’s Venice”.
This is a leaky wooden box hanging on chains with a mechanism to raise and lower it relative to the water level. What the residents of this canal-riddled valley use it for is to store live fish that they’d caught in the river, thus keeping them fresh until they want to eat them. Not sure what the fish think about this temporary lease on life, but one has to admit it’s an ingenious idea, and well suited for daily use when your house’s front lawn terminates in a riverfront!
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Learning what makes things tick is a major pleasure for a techie… read my opinionated view on how one should teach the structure and function of objects, whether natural or technological, in the latest article on my Possibly Interesting web site.
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A major cause of accidents and frustration is trying to use the wrong tool for the job.
Professionals usually know, and have available, the right tool. Amateurs and beginners may be blissfully unaware of it. When I was just starting into homebrew electronics in my teens, I actually used to drill holes in metal with a hammer and nail! I soon discovered the hand drill, but for the larger holes required for mounting tube sockets, panel meters, and such I had to drill a circle of small holes, then use a file to painstakingly smooth out the jagged contour this left. This is definitely the wrong tool…
I became aware of the right tools after maybe a year of slaving over those holes. First came a chassis hole punch, where you’d drill a hole as thick as your finger, and use it for the screw that connects the punch’s two parts across the metal; tighten the screw and the punch eats the metal like butter. Making the finger-thick hole was still a matter of drilling and filing, until I discovered the Reamer, a sharp tool that widens the initial hole in seconds.
Lastly, I found the de-burrer - a tool for removing the sharp metal burrs that might remain around your hole. My trusty metal files got a well deserved rest, and I could focus my time on designing better electronic circuits… and enjoying their realization in hardware much more.
Whatever work you do, if it’s hard and frustrating, if you’re not enjoying it, you may be using the wrong tool for the job.
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A gem I saw in a museum recently: this is a large cuneiform-inscribed cylinder, maybe 3-4 inches thick, which describes the building activities of king Nebuchadnezzar (better known in the bible for his opposite exploit when he destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC).
Anyway, in one of those moments of associative memory, it struck me how similar this looked to the contact-studded drum memory devices of the ABC, or Atanasoff-Berry Computer, one of the earliest electronic computers (1941), pictured below at the left. One is also reminded of the magnetic drums that served computers for memory in the 1950s, like the one to its right.
The idea of using a drum for computer storage makes good sense in terms of allowing it to be scanned easily by rotating it; but the Babylonians probably used this form because it allows you to cram much text (and many construction exploits, if you’re a busy king like Nebuchadnezzar, he of the hanging gardens of Babylon) into a relatively compact object.
Also worth noting: The king’s memory cylinder is still readable after more than 26 centuries; so, can you read your 5-1/4 inch floppies any longer?
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Something is wrong with our Notebook LCD screens, part 2
We discussed the recent trend that is eliminating the optimal resolution in notebook computer screens. Another undesirable trend is the move to widescreen displays. These days it is almost impossible to buy a notebook PC with the traditional 4:3 screen form factor; all new models boast a “wide” screen with a 16:10 form factor such as WXGA (1280×800) and WSXGA (1680×1050). In fact Lenovo, makers of the Thinkpad I use, have just proudly declared that they’re dropping all 4:3 screens in their new line of notebooks.
And what are they proud of? What’s so cool about giving us less effective screens?
Now ideally, a wide screen might accommodate two pages side by side; and that works fine with a large external monitor. But Notebook screens are kept small for portability, and there is no way you can comfortably read two pages on a 14″ or even a 15″ screen. So you have to use the screen for one page, and since these screens are shorter (top to bottom) for a given diagonal size than the 4:3 type, you end up seeing less lines on a document at a given page width. You get more area at the edges of the screen, which you don’t need, and less height, which you do.
Like I already said, something is very wrong…