Check out this humble black marker pen.
What about it, you ask? Well, look at the close up: this marker marks most surfaces, is waterproof, practically odorless, safe… and has a cap off time of up to two weeks without drying up.
What about it, you ask? Just think of the hi-tech perfection that this list describes. What more could anyone ask for in a marker? Not long ago, you couldn’t get this for money or love. In particular, consider the 2-week cap off time. That was the one shortcoming of felt tip markers: they’d dry out if you forgot to cap them. Not any more, it seems – those boffins at the marker factory have figured a way to make ink that doesn’t dry until you actually mark with it.
That’s progress for you!
I’ve written before about the use of tactile sidewalk strips to help the blind, as seen in Japan. Well, now we have them in Israel too! I was walking under the Calatrava bridge in Jerusalem, and saw this:
At first I was puzzled, but then I noticed this led towards the Jewish institute for the blind that is located nearby. So, these are raised strips forming a path – in fact, there were a number of paths going in different directions – that the blind can feel with their sticks or even their feet.
Well done!
Here is the Physics and Mathematics faculty building in Bashkir State University, in the city of Ufa, capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia.
See what it looks like?
Depends on your age or your affection for the history of computing, I suppose. This building looks like a logarithmic slide rule, the icon of the exact sciences before the arrival of electronic calculators in the mid-seventies.
If you have no idea what those lovely devices were, here is a pocket model. Or check my collection.
The big question is whether this was intentional? Fellow collector David Rance, who presented it in a collectors’ meeting in Bletchley Park in September, says it was. If so, what a perfect design for a Physics and Math building!
You can read more in David’s article here.
I happened to look up and noticed this against the evening sky:
These skewed towers with the broken antennas on top used to densely decorate every city rooftop when we were kids; every apartment needed an antenna, and the taller its tower, the better the reception – less “snow” and other interference in receiving the paltry 2-3 stations we could pull in then.
Then came cable TV, and 300 crisply digital channels, and antennas became a thing of the past… but nobody bothered to pull down the existing ones. New houses have clean roofs, but this older apartment building still carries these skeletal corpses of earlier technology. Not that anyone notices…
Note how the delicate once-regular structures of these precisely designed directional beam antennas slowly erode and shrivel, losing a rod here, half a rod there, until in the end only the tower will remain – and finally it too will disintegrate. That’s entropy for you…
