A century ago Gilbert Small, of Waltham, Massachusetts, invented a compact pocket calculator that is small, effective, and designed with special attention to usability.
Read the new article on my History of Computing site to see what he’d crafted!
Author: Nathan Zeldes
http://www.nzeldes.com
A smart design in a lowly paper napkin dispenser
We’re all familiar with the spring-loaded paper napkin dispenser to the right. Every low-priced restaurant and diner has these; you’d think it has hit a sweet spot of stable cost and performance. After all, it works, doesn’t it?
And yet, recently I’ve run into a major improvement on the theme: a competing design that has a better user experience by far.
Here it is:
The main change is that the older design dispenses paper napkins at two opposite ends, and this one issues them at the top. Why is this important? Because in the more common design you need two hands to pull a napkin, holding the dispenser with your left and pulling at the paper with your right. In the top-loader you pull the napkin up and gravity (and a heavy bottom plate) holds the dispenser down. This not only allows one handed operation, but also makes the dispensing action far more repeatable, so you’re less likely to end up holding a large bunch of multiple napkins.
Sure, there are more important design challenges out there… but in a world full of sloppily made products, no clever design should go unpraised!
A new contraceptive?
See this product which I found at a hardware superstore. Looks useful enough for organizing stray cables in the home. But it has another unexpected function.
As you see in the close up, this device has an added benefit beyond storing extra cord length, and the packaging clearly states it:
Helps prevent children.
You don’t say! 🙂
Where is our sandbox?
Something caught my attention in this children’s playground in our neighborhood, where my kids used to play long years ago.
Back then the slide was made of metal, but the new one works just fine. However, back then the slide ended in a large sandbox, which was a major attraction in its own right. Kids would dig, build sand castles, mess around and have fun.
Not any more, as you can see: the sand has been replaced with some green rubbery material. This must have seemed a great idea – clean, easy to maintain, resilient and safe. However, consider this line from Wikipedia:
Sandpits encourage the imagination and creativity of children by providing materials and space to build several structures such as sandcastles; use toy trucks, shovels, and buckets to move the sand around; dig holes and bury objects, etc. In other words, the sand provides a medium in which children can pretend to explore, construct, and destroy the world in three dimensions.
With this ersatz version, kids can do none of these things. They can stay clean and hygienic, certainly; and safe, so nobody gets sued.
Still,my kids, and my own generation, and countless others before it, have managed quite well with the sand.
Sigh…
Simplicity before Greed
Most cafeterias sell water to their thirsty customers in plastic bottles full of mineral water. The water is no better than the tap water in most countries, its environmental impact is dubious, and of course it turns a tidy profit for the business. As a customer I find it annoying to pay for one of the most common molecules on my planet, but hey, there are bigger problems and like all of you I pull out my wallet and forget about it.
So you can understand my delight when, while visiting the Science Museum in London, I saw this in their cafeteria:
Self-serve, free and simple… what a delightful practice!
And then there is the wonderful museum itself… 🙂
That’s progress for you!
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!
Tactile sidewalk strips – now in Jerusalem!
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!
A building that looks the part
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.
Broken remnants of past skylines
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…
A lovely 18th c. gauging slide rule
The art of Gauging and Ullaging, i.e. assessing the quantity of liquor, beer or malt in a barrel in order to tax it properly, used to be an important application of mathematics, and resulted in the development of some intricate computing devices over the last few centuries.
Check the new article on my History of Computing site to see a lovely Everard-style gauging slide rule dating back to the 18th century, and learn how to apply it in case you ever need to ullage a cask of ale!