Archive for July, 2013

Closing a time loop

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 25, 2013
in Odds and Ends
. 0 Comments

Many, many years ago when I was a teenage geek, I was green with envy at the Coil Winding Calculator that an older friend had access to in his university lab. It was an extremely useful device – a cardboard slide chart that allowed you to compute the parameters for winding a coil of a given inductance (trust me, when you homebrew your own ham radio gear, that’s something you really need to do).

So, I went and reverse engineered the thing and cloned it with a Xerox copier and some cardboard and glue. I ended up with a device that was far uglier (in those days copier technology was still pretty poor) but it worked just like the original. It served me for years, then went into my computing device collection. Over the years I forgot the original completely, to the point that I had no idea what color it had been before I recreated it in smudged gray…

So a few weeks ago I had a stroke of serendipity when I ran into the “Allied RF Resonance and Coil Winding Calculator” in the Vintage Instruments online store of Dick Rose – it was the same device! Dick shipped it over, and now I remember: it was indeed orange in color. So now I have the two devices in my collection, side by side; and here you can see them in the photo. Not that I wind any coils these days (though I’m still a happy geek), but it’s nice  to close a loop across the decades and finally have the original device I so coveted back then…

Allied Coil Winding Calculator slide charts

For the full story on the Xeroxed calculator, see here.

 

Writing in an unknown tongue

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 5, 2013
in Bad design
. 3 Comments

See the hilarious street sign.

Why is it hilarious? Well, if you can read Hebrew you don’t have to ask. For the rest of you, here is the story.

Palermo-streetsign.JPG

Palermo, where this sign hangs, was home to a large and lively Jewish community in the middle ages. Then, in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella, those of Columbus fame) found the time on their busy schedules to decree that all Jews be expelled from all their dominions, Sicily included, and that was that – even today the only Jews to be seen on this lovely island are tourists. Moslems didn’t fare much better, having been expelled in the 13th century.

And it is to this history that we owe the sign, which marks one of the streets of the medieval Giudecca – the Jewish Ghetto. Someone had the neat idea of adding Hebrew and Arab names to streets in that area, in acknowledgement of their history. So far so good.

The joke, however, is that with not a single Jew living there, the Sicilian sign makers evidently relied on someone sending them the Hebrew version of the street name – which they then diligently proceeded to copy, without any idea of how to read the Hebrew script. The result is a hilarious mess of typos, most notable the replacement of the letter Yod with an apostrophe, no less than six times in this example.

I have no idea if the Arabic is any better…