vacuum tubes
Cashiers not being able to sit down
Also I’m in the UK, visited the next town over last week and walked past a pub and thought, that looks like a pretty old building… turns out the pub was built and has been running as a pub since the 1500s
My place of work has a telex machine in the corner still… I presume if a message comes in on that it is because ww3 happened… it just sits there and makes me feel slightly anxious to consider it.
The bicycle hasn’t changed its basic design in 135 years.
Yes the frame is now welded but most bikes still have the cup and cone bearings that were the limitation of engineering in the 19th century.
I don’t know if this counts.
The parts. The material. Positioning of the chains and brakes. Handlebar position. Pedal tech. Many more bikes have batteries on them.
There’s a lot of changes to bikes that putting a 1900s bike to a modern one, and it’s the difference between comparing the Wright brothers plane and a modern personal plane today.
Vinyl records. Its a very… space inefficient way to store your music, but they are pretty to look at.
Also incredibly heavy
And the dust on the needle sounds pleasing
Leather burnishers have been pretty much unchanged for 50,000 years
I need more of these.
One I’ve heard recently was…the hair styles you see on ancient Roman art look remarkably modern. Art historians got to wondering just how they managed such complex hairstyles without modern hairspray, plastic clips or elastic bands? A hairstylist took one look and said “They’re sewn.” The historians go “NAAAAAH that can’t be it. Whoever heard of sewing hair?” The hairstylist goes “Hairstylists. Watch” and then she replicated the styles on the statues by sewing.
Here’s another one: Marine biologists long struggled to understand/describe the shapes of certain marine life, including corals. They had these weird wavy patterns that didn’t make sense to us rectangle building monkeys. Meanwhile, a mathematician studying hyperbolic geometry realized that crochet patterns that add loops with every row achieve wavy ruffles in a hyperbolic pattern. It took a few others to piece those two ideas together, to recognize the coral structures as having hyperbolic geometry as a means of maximizing surface area while minimizing volume. The Crochet Coral Reef project has been making crocheted models of sea life ever since.
As a woodworker, it amazes me how the mortise and tenon is still hanging on.
If you aren’t familiar, a mortise is a square or rectangular hole in a board, might go all the way through, might not. A tenon is a square peg basically cut on the end of a board to fit into a mortise. This produces a very strong joint.
The very oldest intact wooden structure known on earth - a well head in Germany - is held together with mortise and tenons. We don’t know the name of the man who built it, because written language hadn’t been invented yet.
There is a thing called a floating tenon. Imagine you want to join two boards, but don’t really want to cut a tenon onto either. Make a mortise in each, then make a third smaller board to fill both tenons. Floating tenon, loose tenon, there are many words for it. The Ancient Egyptians held boat hulls together this way, the hull planks were joined edge to edge with loose tenons which were then cross-pinned with dowels. One such boat was found disassembled in a pit next to the Great Pyramid at Giza; the seal on the chamber was so good they said it smelled of cedar when opened. The ship was assembled and is currently on display.
All the way on this end of history, the European tool brand Festool has a tool called a Domino. It has the form factor of a Lamello-type biscuit joiner, but the domino cuts with a wagging router bit to form a wide, short, deep mortise to insert store bought loose tenons into. This tool is so new, it is still protected under patent.
We’ve been making mortise and tenons for tens of thousands of years, and yet we’re still innovating on the concept.
That’s dope af
I recently learned that the TOSLINK (S/PDIF) optical ports with the little door that I’ve seen on every game console and AV receiver my whole life and never thought about or used is from 1983. The same port is now used for professional digital audio with a different protocol too.
Me.
I mean, I’m not particularly old — only 29. But I’m super surprised I still exist. And it’s not for lack of trying. It just turns out that even though I’m pretty mediocre at living, I’m even worse at dying. Fortunately, I’m in a place now where that’s a thing I’m happy about, for the most part.
I’ve got at least 8 different attempts under my belt, and the way that some of them failed makes me feel like it’s almost offensive to be an atheist. For instance, when I swam out into the sea, as far as I could until I couldn’t anymore, and the next thing I remember was waking up on the beach, not super far from where I’d swam from. I thought that was a thing that only happened in movies. Granted, I’m not a strong swimmer, so I didn’t get very far out, but still.
That was one of my attempts as an adult, but I had a lot as a teenager too. When I was about 16, I was resentful of all the people who cared about me, because the guilt I felt over hurting them was the only thing keeping me alive. Building off of the crisis management advice that I’d seen that said it’s good to try to put some distance between you and your suicidal feelings by trying to hold off until the next day, for instance, I resolved that I would stick around until I was 20, and if nothing had improved by then, I would kill myself and fuck anyone who begrudged me this escape — no-one could say I didn’t try.
Well, it turns out that some things did improve by age 20 — enough that it suggested there was a non-zero hope that I could some day live and actually be happy to be alive. I still struggled a lot after that point, because it’s not like my mental health was magically resolved (it still isn’t), but I’m glad I stuck around.
In a way though, things got harder after age 20. Ironically, there were countless times throughout my late teens in which looking forward to my death was the only thing that saved my life. When things were particularly rough, I would work out how many days I had to go before I could rest, and it soothed me. After I was 20, however, I was unanchored. I had a life that didn’t feel like it was my own, because I never expected to make it this far. Even now, it still sometimes feels like I’m in a bonus level. It’s a bizarre feeling.
But yeah, I, and many of the people who know and love me, are surprised that I’m still around. I’m proud of myself, even if a significant part of why I’m still here is sheer luck. Obviously this wasn’t what you meant when asking your question, but I’ve been reflecting on my progress a lot lately, and the idea of giving this answer amused me. It feels healing to joke about this stuff a bit, I think
Sometimes it’s good to fail, even eight times, and I’m glad you did. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you continue to do so.
Me
I was going to say my spinal disks
Boomers.
It used to be a era of time. Now, it’s a full blown personality type.
Credit card imprinters. Went to a car rental that required a card to be swiped with that thing. Needless to say the card got canceled the second it got in there lol
Credit card imprinters.
In western Canada the electronic ones used to be called sliders (from when the magnetic strip was still widely used, before chip & pin), and these were called strikers (from how the card was pressed or physically struck onto the paper).
In my retail years, we called those “Knucklebusters”
At this point, all but one of my cards would be completely incompatible with those things. They’re completely flat, with printed numbers on the back instead. I hadn’t even thought about that change in a while, but I am glad that my wallet is a little bit thinner.
Retails stores sometimes still have these in high-volume areas. Imagine your store loses power on Black Friday weekend. Some stores live or die by a few critical weekends a year. You might lose some merch through declines later but avoiding the loss in total sales will almost certainly make up for it.
Old fashioned record players
78 shellacs are fucking amazing. to hear sound from a record where everyone, everyone, involved is long dead is like magic.
I’ve got some 78s from late 1800s early 1900s. every time I listen to them it boggles my mind.
My grandpa. Hes in his 90s, ready to go, and not only still alive, his mind is still there and he’s still sharp.
Trump.
