Author: Nathan Zeldes

http://www.nzeldes.com

Memories,memories…

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.

Cheap Flash Memory at Office Depot

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…

Cheap Flash Memory

Eyjafjallajökull and preventive maintenance

I never dreamed I’d be blogging a post with the word Eyjafjallajökull in its title…

Anyway, this volcano is belching again, and airports are closing again – and one can’t help but wonder at the shoddy maintenance practices of these Icelanders. I mean, it’s not like they don’t know a volcano needs to be properly maintained; it’s well documented in the literature:

The Little Prince cleaning his volcano“He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes; and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “One never knows!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.”

The little prince, ch. 9.

From what we hear Iceland uses its geothermal energy extensively, whether or not they use it for heating breakfast… you’d think they could do the preventive maintenance part too!

When will they ever learn?…

A Lego Surprise

Zaphod Beeblebrox in LegoI was busy putting the basement in order and found a box of much used Lego pieces going back to the kids’ childhood, and in it I found – as is – what you see in the photo.

Of course there are Lego kits today for anything from Rocket ships to Medieval castles, but Zaphod Beeblebrox?!…

🙂

Another lost shape

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?

Punched Card

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

Little Big Biscuit

You need to speak Hebrew and French to detect the hilarity of this photo:

Petit Beurre package

Here’s the thing: the package contains a local make of  Petit Peurre cookies, a timeless biscuit design. However, someone decided to brand it as PTIBER GADOL – literally, “Large Petit Beurre“. Except that Petit, of course, means Little

Oh, and incidentally, neither the package nor the biscuits deviate from the standard size we’ve had for ages. The only large thing about this product is the silliness of the branding.

Chimney sighting

Here is a striking photo I snapped in Tubingen, in southern Germany, showing a building with a tile roof… bearing a weird pattern:

Building with chimney in Tubingen

Chimney in Tubingen
The cause of the red circle on the roof is unmistakable, the air flows around the chimney… but it is the opposite of what you’d expect, and the details are a bit unclear (considering the darker soot circle around the cleared out area). If you care to speculate, do it in the comments!

All staplers are not created equal!

Continuing the theme of using the right tool for the job, here’s my take on a tool that is everywhere: the trusty old stapler.

Most everyone uses the usual kind if stapler, either the small size 10 or the regular standard office model. The problem is, neither of these is any good for more than a few pages. Yet they are readily available and people use them, accepting the frequent frustration of misaligned, crooked or ineffective fastening for thicker jobs.

My recommendation: go and buy the two following units, which do a far better job on midsized print jobs. The first is a plier-stapler, a replacement for the standard office model. It uses the same staples, but its grip is far better, its alignment is perfect, and applying the required pressure for a perfect fastening is natural and effortless. No office or home should be without one of these.

Plier Stapler

The second may not be needed in every home, but if you create serious documents you should get one: a heavy duty stapler, one designed to grab – in the case of the one in the photo – 75 pages of paper with ease. Be sure to try before you buy, though – I’ve seen many poorly designed models that were almost useless. But a good make – I’m very happy with my Max model HD-3D, for one – will slice through those fat printouts and photocopy stacks like butter. That’s what you need!

Heavy duty stapler model Max HD-3D

Language in the making: the Hebrew Typewriter

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.

Remongton 92 Hebrew Typewriter

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…

The fading memory of arithmetic

Isaac Asimov once wrote a SciFi story named The feeling of Power, in which a future age has become so accustomed to computers that the rediscovery of how to calculate sums with pencil and paper – or in one’s head – is considered a major breakthrough.

That age may be nearer than we think. Recently we went shopping and were told by a pleasant young salesgirl that we’ll get a 10% discount on an item listed at 360 NIS. I figured the final price in my head, while the girl whipped out a rather large desktop calculator and proceeded to pound its keys, displaying the result a few seconds after I’d finished. Not that I claim any arithmetical prowess: it wasn’t like I had to figure 83.45% of 382.44 NIS. Taking 36 from 360 is no big deal.

But I was curious, so I asked the young woman whether she could have figured the result without the calculator; and she admitted she couldn’t have. She didn’t seem embarrassed about it; she sounded as if I’d asked whether she could read cuneiform script, or design a spaceship. Of course she couldn’t; that’s what calculators were for, after all…

Good fitness advice

Saw the panels below by an elevator. The left one is the familiar elevator control; the one on the right, however, uses fake buttons and reads: “Before you press, think of your health – use the stairs!

Good advice, nicely implemented…

Use The Stairs!

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