Author: Nathan Zeldes

http://www.nzeldes.com

The rebellious envelope

February 11, 2010 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

Every child knows that postage stamps are affixed to the top right corner of the envelope. You lick the stamp, and you press it to the envelope at that corner. And it stays there. Or does it?…

Golden Envelope can't hold a stamp

I was sending greeting cards recently, putting them in the envelopes they came with. Some of them sported envelopes made of some shiny gold-colored paper. I licked the stamp, put it on the paper… and in a few minutes, as soon as it had dried, the stamp would pop up, curl, and drop off. The envelope was golden, but it could not hold a stamp. You’d think the card manufacturer would pay attention to such a detail?!

No pigs in the dishwasher!

February 1, 2010 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

These days vendors have become masters of trivial warnings, as seen in coffee cups that warn us their content is hot, and countless other examples. Recently I ran into an amusing case.

The little piggy is yet another form of the classic kitchen timer. What makes it interesting is the inscription on its base: “Not dishwasher safe” – in two languages too, not to take any chances.

I suppose there may actually exist people silly enough to try and dunk this along with the dishes… it’s a large planet. Still…

How to keep your submarine straight

January 24, 2010 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

I was visiting the Intrepid museum in NYC (an aircraft museum housed in a retired aircraft carrier – a real treat!) and they had, as a bonus, a fifites-era submarine, the USS Growler, moored alongside the carrier. So I had to see that too (of course).

Submarines are always amazing from a design standpoint, given the intense constraints they have to accommodate. There were many complex pieces of machinery below deck, but one of them struck me with its simplciity. It was a “Ship clinometer, Type II – Heel”, and I snapped its photo for you.

Ship clinometer on submarine USS Growler

“Heel” is the inclination of a ship sideways, and this device tells the submariners how far their vessel is heeling away from the vertical. No need to explain how it works, of course… it’s a cousin of the humble (and equally useful) spirit level we have in our toolboxes. I imagine that today more sophisticated instruments exist, bristling with electronics and digital displays; but actually, this pair of curved glass tubes must’ve done just as good a job – the Growler carried nuclear missiles, and I’m sure its designers preferred its captain to know which way was up…

A wave of the hand

January 10, 2010 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

We all know the paper towel dispensers that you crank to get the required length out. The more sophisticated ones dispense with the crank action and use an electric motor actuated by a proximity detector: wave your hand in the air in front of the machine and out comes the preset length of paper with a satisfying whirring sound. Hygienic, neat, and foolproof.

Two paper towel dispensers

But even with this foolproof concept there are different designs. The device at the left in the photo tells you to wave your hand to the right of the paper outlet slot. The one at the right has the sensor centered above the slot’s middle. Why does this matter? because the average person will reach out for where the paper is expected; with the second unit this will trigger the sensor, whereas with the first, it will not. Then you have to start groping and try to figure it out, and maybe notice the frantic effort the vendor made to guide you: the picture of a hand titled “sensor”, the big blue arrow pointing to it, and the text captions that try to make it all clear.

Towel Dispenser markup

All nice and good, but a towel dispenser is not a literary work, and should not rely on texts and explanations. Had they put the sensor in the middle all this would’ve been unnecessary…

A neat switched mains plug

January 2, 2010 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Many small appliances can benefit from an off-device mains switch, and these are often put on the power cable, or – more rarely – on the wall outlet. But in a trip to Germany I witnessed a nice twist on this theme: putting the switch right on the 220V mains plug at the end of the cable. This was done without in any way increasing the size of the standard plug; and of course it means you could retrofit such switches to any device by replacing a plug, a simpler operation than replacing a wall outlet or messing with the cable in between the device and the plug. Nice product!

Switched 220V mains plug

What is the Brain like today?

December 13, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Anyone interested in the Brain – that ultimate piece of high technology – has seen the true but overused statement that each age in history sees the brain as analogous to the latest current technology: the ancients thought of it as a hydraulic system, our grandparents as a telephone exchange, our parents as a computer…

Well, I’ve just run into the next step in this progression. We were watching House on TV, and the irritating genius explained to a colleague that the brain is like the internet, where information packets flow this way and that.

I’m not sure at all that this is a good description – in fact I doubt it very much – but at any rate, we’re one step beyond the brain-as-computer now. Can’t help but wonder what the brain will be likened to next?…

The demise of Tinkering, Take 2

December 3, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

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. Motorola Bluetooth Handsfree speaker model T305

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! 🙁

Newark airport signage… one more time!

November 24, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

We saw that Newark Liberty International airport has some serious problems keeping its electronic signs straight… here, and here. Well, here’s a third and (for now) last installment.

Baggage claim sign at Newark

This is the baggage claim area at the Continental domestic terminal where I landed coming in from San Francisco.

See the nice colorful sign identifying this baggage carousel, number 8, as the one where luggage from flight CO449 is about to appear.

See the nice empty belt on carousel 8.

See the nice people thronging carousel 7 further back.

They’re retrieving their luggage, newly arrived from flight CO 449 from San Francisco.

How nice…

Grand Prize for Engrish

November 18, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

We’ve discussed Engrish before… it’s always hilarious, but this one beats them all. Read it through! Engrish shirt tag by Azouri

This is from a very nice flannel shirt imported by Azouri Clothing Ltd, and manufactured in China.

The amazing part is that in addition to mangling the spelling and grammar, as in “You can’t using bleash”, which is fairly normal, these folks invented some linguistic innovations that – at first glance – seem to reflect some serious erudition, like “hydrograph”, “wield”, “fumigator” and “micro therm smoothing” (“ironing” to the rest of us). It sounds like the output of an English professor who was locked in a dungeon for decades until he went mad…

And if you can decipher “powder of in dusion bleach”, do share!

Shrinking print magazines

November 10, 2009 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

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?

Scientific American issues from 1969, 1983 and 2009 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.

Scientific American issues from 1969, 1983, and 2009 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).