1942 adding machines: a marvel of non-essential zero elimination!: “
This 1942 ad for a Comptometer mechanical adding machine celebrates the joy of spending hours every day doing what spreadsheets today accomplish in an eyeblink. I love the feature-list: no glare dials, the elimination of non-essential zeroes, and a marvellous ‘Keystroke Censor.’
“
Locksmith’s swirling mural of discarded keys: “
The facade of NYC’s Greenwich Locksmith is an elaborate, beautiful mural made of thousands and thousands of discarded keys and locks. ScountingNY writes, ‘The key facade was designed and installed entirely by owner Phil Mortillaro back in October, and I can’t tell you how beautiful it is up close. It almost feels like the locksmith version of a Pollock painting – tens of thousands of keys seemingly strewn about haphazardly, yet in the mess, patterns emerge.’
The Coolest Locksmith Shop in New York City
“
Hamster-powered strandbeest walker: “
The mad genius at Crafbuartworks created a miniature, hamster-powered strandbeest walker. The walker is hamstered by the intrepid Princess, who is a champ.
The hamster powered? that’s just stupid, which is the exact reason why I did it. It’s different, hasn’t been done before, yet it’s in so many what’s-under-the-hood jokes. It also had a high likelyhood of working, so I had to attempt it. Only problem: I don’t have a hamster, I don’t want a hamster for a pet, and I don’t know what sort of power and weight a little critter like that has. All I know is that I’ve seen them go ballistic on the hamster wheel, and so they must have great weight to power ratio.I quickly removed the gearing and windmill, cut some plastic and mounted a hamster ball to this contraption. I used ball bearings on the hamster ball axels, and mecanno sprockets/chain to transfer the power from the hamster ball to the main crank. I did some initial testing with my son’s motorized train inside of the hamster ball, so I had fair confidence on the gear ratio needed for it to work.
Then my sister in law (who runs a great craft blog, Crafty Carnival) came to the rescue, and was able to borrow one of her friend’s pet hamster. Enter Princess the Hamster. Princess is a tiny little thing, much smaller than what I had imagined and prepared for. I was afriad that her weight wouldn’t be enough to get the ball going. But luckily it all worked out great, and test pilot Princess had no problems getting the strandbeest up to speed.
(via Making Light)
“
Yesterday’s amazing house of tomorrow is today’s boring house of today: “The June 1935 issue of Popular Mechanics had an article called ‘The HOUSE that RUNS ITSELF,’ and it describes a cutting-edge, supermodern house of the age of marvels. The house in question is so marvellous because it contains all the basic stuff we now take for granted and it’s kind of wonderful to hear it described with all this breathless excitement:
Imagine, if you can, the delight of the woman who steps into her ‘ready made’ house and finds the kitchen already equipped with electric refrigerator, dishwasher, sink, electric or gas stove, built-in clock, abundant cupboard space–and even a two-day supply of groceries on the shelves. And she never will be bothered by cooking odors because an electric exhaust quickly removes smoke, dust and fumes from the kitchen. In addition to the windows, indirect lighting gives plenty of illumination for her work in the compactly designed room.
In the bathroom, this same housewife will find bathtub complete with shower and anti-splash curtain, the large basin that also may serve as the baby’s bathtub, triple adjustable mirrors for her husband’s morning shave and an extra electric heater for warming up the room quickly. The conditioned air issues from grills set into the wall near the floor and a built-in clock tells the ‘man of the house’ just how long he has before his train or street car comes along. The packaged home is prefabricated, having a steel frame and walls of asbestos-cement, a material that looks like stucco. That means that it is fireproof, termite-proof, practically earthquake and hurricane proof and protected against lightning. Scientific insulation not only assures the owner of getting his money’s worth out of his fuel, but it combines with acoustical ceiling materials to give the extra advantage of soundproofing. The house is built on a cement foundation with three feet of air space below the first floor. Since the motor unit does all the work, a basement is unnecessary.
The HOUSE that RUNS ITSELF (Jun, 1935)
“
Captain Nemo’s Daughter doll by Marina Bychkova: “
Incredible porcelain doll maker Marina Bychkova was profiled in the second issue of Craft magazine (which my wife Carla edited).
Here’s one of Marina’s recent creations, Captain Nemo’s Daughter. It is limited to 10 pieces, but I’m not sure if any are available. There are more pictures at her website. Her blog is excellent, too — here she describes her painting process.
Previously:
Marina Bychkova incredible dolls
Marina Bychkova ‘Mermaid Song’ doll
Marina Bychkova’s Enchanted Dolls
“
Payday lender association spoof site: “
Christopher Maag of Credit.com wrote about a spoof site called the Predatory Lending Association, which makes fun of those payday lenders that make big profits gouging the working poor.
The Predatory Lending Association offers tools including a ‘working poor finder,’ which places gun shops, liquor stores and pawn shops on the map and shows would-be investors in payday loan stores the best locations to open new locations. It also gives tips on finding for the most profitable races to discriminate against.
‘It’s easy to find the working poor,’ the predatory lenders site says, ‘but our studies reveal that a difference in location of even a few city blocks can impact profits by as much as 45%.’
The PLA spoof was one of the first websites created by Front Seat, a Seattle-based company that usually makes web tools more earnest than snarky.
“
Why women shouldn’t be “burdened” with the vote: 1915: “
This 1915 Boston Journal ad warning against the dangers of women’s suffrage lays all manner of dangers at the feet of ‘burdening’ women with the vote, including increased taxes and divorce. It warns that extending the vote to women is a joint plot of the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World, socialists, and Mormons. Good to know that we’ve come so far in our political rhetoric.
“
Cthulhu: the neck-tie edition: “
From College Humor, this Cthuloid cravat advice.
(Thanks, Gaberussell, via Submitterator!)
“
Earlier this month, I ran across two different reports summing up two very different ways legitimate autism researchers are approaching the biological mechanisms behind cognitive difference. Although studies have found genetic correlations, nobody knows the exact cause of autism. And that’s led to a couple of interesting approaches.
On the one hand you have Joachim Hallmayer, one of several researchers interviewed for a story in Stanford University magazine, who think that what we call “autism” is actually a number of different, distinct biological differences, something that would account for the wide range of symptoms, severity, and associated disorders. These researchers talk about autism as a series of subgroups—defined by particular genetic and chromosomal abnormalities. One example:
It’s long been known that about 5 percent of autistic kids have a chromosomal abnormality that can be seen under a microscope –part of a chromosome is missing, duplicated or in the wrong place. Because these changes affect a large number of genes, the children often have many problems in addition to autism. What wasn’t known until recently is that we all have slight imperfections in our chromosomes–small regions of DNA that are duplicated or deleted. When these stretches of DNA contain genes, people can end up with one or three copies of the genes instead of the standard two.
Technological advances have made it possible to detect these ‘copy-number variants,’ or CNVs. And it turns out they’re important in autism and some psychiatric disorders. For example, a region of chromosome 16–containing about 25 genes, some involved in brain function and development–is deleted or duplicated in 1 to 2 percent of people with autism (and some with schizophrenia). Hallmayer and his colleagues scanned the genomes of thousands of people with autism and 2,000 healthy individuals looking for rare CNVs. They found that children with autism had more rare CNVs that overlapped genes, including genes previously implicated in autism. Some CNVs were inherited from a parent, but some arose spontaneously in the child, likely due to a genetic error in the sperm or egg.
Meanwhile, neuroscientists Kamilla and Henry Markram have a different perspective. They think the diverse symptoms of autism all come from a single, common cause—a brain that is hyper-sensitive to stimuli. Their ‘One cause for many symptoms’ theory isn’t as well supported, biologically speaking, as the idea of many causes for many symptoms. Blogger Neuroskeptic explains:
They say that the abnormality lies in local microcircuits. The best known of these are the cortical columns and minicolumns. Neurons in any given microcircuit are connected both with their neighbors, and with more distant cells. A bit like a large company with offices in different cities: people within each office talk to each other, but they also phone and email the other branches.
The theory goes that the autistic brain has too many connections within any given microcircuit. So, when the circuit is activated, it reactivates itself too strongly, and shows a stronger, and longer, excitation. A bit like if the offices were open-plan, so everyone can overhear everyone else, and it all gets very noisy.
So what’s the evidence for this? There’s circumstantial support. It ‘makes sense’, if you’re willing to accept an analogy between hyperactive local neural circuits and hyper-intense psychological phenomena. We know that a given cortical minicolumn responds to a particular type of stimulus, or aspect of a stimulus; there are minicolumns for horizontal lines, for lines at 10 degrees to the horizontal, and so on. People with autism are often fixated on little details. It’s a leap, but not an impossible one, to see these as related. But the only really direct biological evidence is from rats.
Technically, these two perspectives aren’t mutually exclusive. It could be that there are lots of different ways that a brain can end up being hyper-sensitive. And, of course, the Markrams could just be wrong. But I think it’s interesting to see what scientists are learning about the origins of autism—what we do know, and what we don’t. So often, we spend more time debunking the fraud and false hope than we spend talking about the real research. There is much more out there than this post could hope to address, but these two articles should give you an idea of the diversity of studies that are going on, the evidence that exists, and how scientists are trying to make sense of it all.
Smithsonian Magazine: Breaking Through
Neuroskeptic: A Grand Unified Theory of Autism?
“
Fanciful zeppelins and trains: “
Etsy seller Gingerbees is selling prints of her late father Andrew George Brown’s wonderful, fanciful steamcraft, with an emphasis on trains and zeppelins. Lovely stuff!
(Thanks, Wondermark, via Submitterator!)
“
