Were you looking for this?

Essential news for technologians:

TALKING SAW Sensor in blade detects absence of pencil marks on wood, triggering recorded message: “You’re deviating, you’re deviating.” (Japanese accent optional).

NEW CE RATING Die-stamped symbol (labrador rampant) indicates approval by Le Laboratoire Culinaire de Bretagne. Applies to small kitchen utensils.

ITEM FROM AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL GIFT CATALOGUE Portable transmitter causes hologram of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, reciting extracts from De Profundis, to dance tango on car bonnet of Richard Littlejohn. (US model note: For Richard Littlejohn read Rush Limbaugh, for bonnet read hood.)

SARKOZY TEMPTS ANGLO TOURISTS A bill just issued by the Elysée will force all French supermarkets to erect a 50 m high mast carrying illuminated sign visible for 5 km, “Closed for LONG lunch break”.

WHICH? EASES SHOPPING Polymicroancrylinate glove increases finger-tip sensitivity allowing shoppers to check ripeness of melons, soft spots on apples, cracks in egg-shells (without opening box) and tastelessness of prepared meals. Not suitable for use on humans.

FROM HEREFORD WINE LOVERS SOCIETY New gadget combines essential features of gas chromatograph and allows potential buyer to check whether wine is corked without need to open bottle. One member says: “Saved me thousands in one year”.

POLYGRAPH DEVELOPMENTS After British MPs rejected being attached to a conventional lie-detector during Newsnight interviews (“undermines the dignity of the Mother Of Parliaments”), the manufacturer has designed a variant which flags up Hasn’t answered the question. PM Gordon Brown orders an enquiry.

Type setter's toast; presses still roar

During a professional low tide I wearied of giving space on MotorCycling’s letter page to readers celebrating the Golden Age of British Bikes. Disapproving of many models cited I inserted a fake letter decrying this tendency, adding “nostalgia is a suspect emotion”. The foam-flecked response was gratifying. Yet here I am being just as nostalgic.

But not about badly engineered bikes with total-loss oil systems. Rather the mechanisms of publishing. This is a Linotype which set type in the hot-metal days. Press a keyboard key and a brass mould (for a letter, a number, a punctuation mark or a space) came tinkling out of the large box on top. Repeat this until sufficient moulds for a line of type assemble themselves in the machine’s bowels.

Work another control and molten type-metal from the Linotype’s small furnace – Just imagine it! – flows into the moulds to cast that one line of type. Start again. A newspaper might well own two dozen such machines, tinkling away and smelling like… well, over to Proust. Now my humdrum computer can do the same job and I haven’t seen a Linotype for thirty years.

One mechanism still remains. To print many newspapers in next to no time you need a press. And a Heidelberg, a Hoe or a Crabtree in full flight (and full throat) resembles open warfare. The power of the press indeed, all directed towards an ephemeral product with a life-span often measured in minutes. The newspapers I worked on were printed in a Bradford street called Hall Ings and the soles of my feet twitch sympathetically down the years as I remember the roar and vibration of those majestic machines.

Christmas wish list

Technology to improve all our lives:

● Force field that levitates certain objects (china, books with bookmarks, hi-fi knobs) when anyone under age of five enters living room.

● Additive for milk and milk-based dishes to prevent skin forming.

● Lavatory brush that…. sorry, can’t complete this one.

● Wine-glasses that change shape from slender (white) to wide (red) and wash themselves while user remains prone on the couch.

● Bath plug flexible enough to seal the ‘ole but strong enough to withstand removal.

● Display panel at rear of car for touring in France. Lights up with – what else? - Trop proche!

● Quarantine flag, indicating outbreak of cholera, for use when queueing at airport check-ins.

● Auto-censor for TV news bulletins. Deletes user-selected expressions (eg, “The England soccer team hopes…”, “billions”, “trillions”.)

● Standardised supermarket checkout card reader with label: Insert here (50 pt Dayglow yellow type) this way round (with picture).

To be continued

A sort of secular prayer

POST NUMBER 150. Try something different.

Each Tuesday and Thursday I swim 90 lengths of an 18 m pool, just slightly more than a mile. This takes about 49 minutes. Because I swim crawl my face is mostly submerged and the non-aqueous world is glimpsed only in two-second bursts while taking on air. Otherwise I commune with tile patterns suffused pale blue, the roar of breath exhaled underwater and the passage of numbers through my mind. Those numbers are gathered into sets.

Lengths 1 to 11. Sense of burden and a need to struggle out of single numbers; 10 lengths is pseudo-single-number; 11 marks first real – albeit minor - achievement.
Lengths 12 to 22. Dog days. Length 15 is 1/6th of total but passes uncelebrated.
Length 22 and a bit. Quarter distance. Fraction makes it messy. Uncelebrated.
Lengths 23 – 30. One-third distance. Worthwhile milestone but must avoid thinking about 60 lengths that remain.
Lengths 31 – 45. Long haul, preferably done mindlessly. Halfway there.
Length 46. Vital number! Future now smaller than past.
Lengths 47 – 60. Sense of swimming downhill. Mild exhilaration. Glance sideways at other swimmers doing breast-stroke, head out of the water. Accelerate and blast past.
Lengths 61 – 90. Each length increases laddish tendencies. Legs kick frothily, turns become flashier. Finally, climb out of pool, careful not to breathe hard, off to changing room without a backward glance.

NOTE: Frequent flashes of terror that lengths have been miscounted are quite normal.

Now, the computer does the measuring

Pretty boring photo, I’m afraid. Perhaps that’s forgivable since it’s here for sentimental reasons.

The millimetric scale on the right suggests it’s a ruler. However the units on the left won’t be familiar to everyone for this is an em-rule used in an activity that has almost disappeared. Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to lay out a page design for a magazine or a newspaper you cut up galley-proofs with a pair of scissors and glued them to a large sheet of paper. The stone-hand or clicker at the printer’s used this to create the design for real with cast metal type. Now the designer creates a virtual page on a computer screen and sends the result over the wires in file form.

Printing employs some of the most wilfully obscure units outside pharmacology. Typeface heights come in points and there are a handy 72 of them to the inch. Theoretically column widths could be similarly measured but because this would lead to large figures ems (equivalent to 12 points) are preferred. These archaic units are retained on DTP software and elsewhere on computers because printing is nothing if not conservative.

When computer design became widely available I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Now, with a perversity born out of wishes granted, I have sentimental (if not practical) regrets. Print-shops were smelly, dirty, esoteric places filled with ex-apprentice craftsmen who shared a journalist’s desire to put ink on paper. I enjoyed their company. The em-rule is a memorial to that friendship.

Stays a must when boarding

My brother was bringing Takista into a slotted berth at the – which? – marina. Say Ile de Ré, it’s such a smashing name. My job was twofold. To jump on to the pontoon and prevent the bows from hitting the rear of the berth. Then, using a line attached to the boat, tie on to a mooring cleat.

Ashore a French lad looked up questioningly. I nodded and it was he who protected the bows. When I joined him to tie on he gestured, Un joli bateau. He was right. Built for racing, and somewhat cramped below, Takista was sleek and purposeful. Here she is at St-Jean-de-Luz and the photo reminds me of when I first boarded her. No doors, as with a car. How do you “get on” a boat?

First, don’t grab the guard-rail. It prevents people going into the sea but it’s not intended to withstand the pull of someone climbing aboard. Search out the metal cables, called stays, running to the top of the mast from the edge of the deck amidships. These, duplicated at the other side of the boat, hold the mast up and are strong enough to pull on.

Other stays, forward and aft, do the same job and are your good friends at sea. Leaving Cap Breton Takista emerged into shallow water over which poured a tide race which corkscrewed the boat alarmingly. I’d gone aft to stow a fender in the lazaret (Yes, yes, I love the jargon) and wanted to return to the cockpit two metres away. Impossible. So I stood up, took hold of the backstay, feeling safe and relaxed enough to enjoy watching Takista’s pirouettes.

In those days equipment did the selling

Machinery is only one aspect of technology but I wonder if a coffee roaster I saw in the late forties in my home town, Bradford, was the first device to awaken my interest in things that did things. Mind you, it wasn’t the roaster’s raison d’etre that attracted attention. Its ostentatious manufacture, its flamboyant operation, the way it was displayed and its delectable byproducts meant it was unignorable.

The inset gives some hints but this machine is smaller and more utilitarian. The Bradford roaster had a cast-iron chassis with the name (alas now forgotten) standing out in relief. The chassis had something in common with clothes wringers dating back to the previous century, and was painted in brilliant red and green.

Even at rest it looked impressive. When working, flames licking round the huge central drum that held the beans made it look like an industrial accident. My wife says something similar still functioned in the seventies in Kingston-upon-Thames but, not surprisingly, the HSE had suppressed the flames.

With an asset like this marketing instincts (long before the principles of marketing were articulated) had it positioned in the shop’s front window. Wow! But of course there was another powerful positive, and the olfactory products of roasting were allowed to escape into the street. This at a time when probably nine out of ten Bradfordians drank tea.

To tell the truth I didn’t really understand what it did since my apostasy from tea was a year or two away. But it worked in the way a firework display works. And I can see and smell it now.

Like a crystal ball, but more reliable

Having emerged from re-reading A la recherche… I needed a change of pace. James Lee Burke’s Cadillac Jukebox got me back to modern times which now resume with The Drunkard’s Walk or “How randomness rules our lives”.

This is not a clone of Eats Shoots and Leaves. It’s by a professor (Leonard Moldinov) and it explains the mathematics of probability and statistics. If you can add up you’re OK. Even readers of average curiosity should be interested because here mathematics solves what most lay people would regard as the impossible.

As well as illustrating the penalties for getting it wrong. The author was told by his GP that the chances were 999 out of 1000 he would be dead within the decade. This followed a blood test taken for a life insurance application. On a hunch the author had taken an HIV test and it came back positive. But his doctor “had confused the chances that I would test positive if I was not HIV-positive with the chances that I would not be HIV-positive if I tested positive.” With probability the words are as important as the figures.

Even given more than my self-imposed limit of 300 words I would risk traducing Moldinov’s carefully-worded prose. So read the book. The style is lively and non-technical and the examples are interesting (The somewhat maligned baseball player Roger Maris is sympathetically analysed). The examples include the mathematical side of coin tossing (with an empirical proof – new to me) and dice throwing, perversity in the face of overwhelming evidence, the danger of judging ability by short-term results and the fact that so-called “random”numbers are biased towards the lower digits.

Well-reviewed in The Guardian.

Look on my works ye mighty, and despair

To post one’s face or not? Plutarch recently came out full frontal, others disclose only a carefully chosen part. With herhimnbryn it’s ankles and feet clad in multi-coloured stockings, while Rosie provocatively offers an ear lobe plus pendant.

I belong to the obscurantists since I doubt even my wife could honestly identify me as the marine creature here on the dashboard. Two or three months ago I posted a slightly more recognisable photo in context with a different subject and it drew no comments whatsoever. I took the hint.

In any case with B. Bonden Esq it’s la technologie c’est moi. That’s why I’m aping The Observer series on writers’ workplaces and providing a view of the hardware I surround myself with. Perhaps those who are shy about their faces will be more forthcoming about their digital pulpits.

The deep kitchen table came from Ikea for I cannot stand being cramped. At the far end the colour printer is encircled with a modified plastic crate on top of which stands the scanner. A wireless router and Skype impedimenta crown the computer. Apart from a few techno-manuals the books are French, mainly novels. The upper shelves support my collection of forklifts, souvenirs of my life as editor of a logistics magazine.

From the window I can see the tower of Hereford cathedral.

No such thing as a free leap forward

A post with the same first para appeared yesterday. The post sought to be funny but wasn’t. So the idea is here recycled.

We’d just finished with Siegfried Idyll and were about to hear Four Last Songs. But, as a sort of entr’acte, came the tinkle of a mobile phone. The acoustics of Birmingham’s Symphony Hall are so good I was able to identify the culprit immediately and watch his panicky scrabbling.

When mobiles first impinged on our family I recall someone saying this was how all phones should be. No more naked dashes from bathroom to hallway, no more trudges from one vandalised, urine-smelling cavity to another, no more running out of change. What we didn’t foresee is there would be a price to pay and the unfortunate Birmingham concert-goer was paying it. Perpetual connectedness comes at the risk of public humiliation.

My brother paid a variant of this price. He went to a concert and switched his phone off. Halfway through he began to have his doubts about this but the phone was in a bag and getting to it would have caused much disturbance. The concert was blotted out by his subsequent agonies.

I pay a different price. I cannot trust batteries. So my mobile is always turned off and only used when I make the briefest of calls. I’m a candidate for half a phone but none is available.

And there’s an even heavier price. Mobiles are ideal for triggering car bombs remotely. Not exactly an unalloyed benefit to mankind as the phoner (above) appears to realise.

Does techno discourage viewers?

Judged by the aims of this blog Flight of the Phoenix is a movie that got it wrong. But see what you think.

A twin-boom plane (that's one in the inset), carrying a mish-mash of cardboard characters, crashes in the Gobi desert. Because one passenger can design planes and because there’s a cargo of manufacturing tools, the cast fashions a new aircraft based on one of the booms which is flown away into the sunset. FotP is a remake of one starring James Stewart which I saw and have forgotten. Except that it wasn’t this tedious and predictable.

The premise of amateurs building a plane is unlikely but, hey, let’s give it a go. But the movie makers didn’t. The techno-stuff is mostly unexplained and pushed into the background. Instead there are sub-plots about warring tribesmen, who’s stealing “the precious fluid” (water), personality clashes, and the rest of the nonsense by which Tarzan films were blown out to full length.

It’s my belief that if they’d stuck mainly to the re-building the movie would have been better. Even those with no real interest in technology could have responded to a story which laid out the problems and explained how they were resolved. “Caper” crime stories follow this route; so did Dambusters. But the makers had no faith in that, an opportunity was missed and a string of clichés ensued.

I am not transfixed by technology. It’s only one of my interests and I chose it simply as a way of imposing self-discipline for a blog. However I believe an intelligent “How to…” approach can be entertaining, even in fiction. Or am I over-estimating the movie-going public?

Experienced velcro user needed

Retirement meant donating my suits to Oxfam and sloughing (sluffing?) it in grubby chinos and open-necked shirts. It also meant disdaining shoes that need polishing and opting for trainers. One advantage of this tatterdemalion outfit is I spend less time getting dressed of a morning and, looking to reduce this time still further, have contemplated velcro-straps for the trainers rather than laces. Still am contemplating them, thirteen years later.

I feared velcro would, in a phrase my mother favoured, lose its nature. Interrogating those who had gone down the velcro route produced no useful information. Nearly all regarded trainers as fashion accessories and discarded them long before the straps had ceased to strap. I only discard mine when light shows through the heel.

The fancy suede-ish shoe shown is my wife’s and was bought in January. Given she has size 3½ feet it probably cost a bomb. The straps are still giving good service but there is no guarantee that aesthetic disenchantment with the shoe will not precede velcro failure. So, no guidelines there. In any case my footware gets a far harder work-out than my wife’s.

I usually expect my continuously-used trainers to disintegrate within fifteen months of purchase. For some deeply buried reason I would feel betrayed if I was forced to junk them because the hairy bits no longer hooked up. For me a junkable trainer is one that lets in water. Does anyone out there have any scientifically-backed views on velcro longevity?

Well, am I deluding myself?

My two most necessary screwdrivers are both about 35 cm long. Length is important for delivering maximum torque and 35 cm is about the optimum: beyond that it’s often difficult to maintain contact with the screw head.

Two other features are vital. The handle must be 100 per cent grippable and it’s surprising how many aren’t, usually because they can’t accommodate the whole of your hand. The other is the tip of the shaft, of which more later.

The conventional (yellow handle) screwdriver dates back to 1972. We’d just bought our first British house and were faced with installing hundreds of Rawlplugs. Screwing into Rawlplugs sometimes requires enormous force, especially if the hole in the wall is slightly too narrow. This rather brutal driver sometimes appeared too big for the job but only if you worried about aesthetics. Its dimensions ensured that the tip could be squared off (instead of tapering like a chisel) to give maximum tight contact with the screw slot.

The blue-handle Pozidrive screwdriver cost what was then an eye-watering £10 but once I’d got over that I was well satisfied. Cheap cross-head tips quickly wear and the driver must be thrown away. This one has survived 35 years and still engages sweetly. But its unique quality relates to its thin shaft. I may be deluding myself but the shaft seems to twist very slightly when force is applied, tightening the contact with the screw. As a result it rarely disengages accidentally. An old blogger’s tale?

Gardeners waste vital resource

That new presenter, so smug, so egregiously exhortative, resembling a former Scots Guards corporal reduced to teaching PT at a minor public school. And when Carol Klein comes on I go upstairs to put on my pyjamas. No, I’m not a fan of Gardeners’ World but I allow it to flicker at the far end of my focus, earning me reciprocal viewing rights when MotoGP comes around.

I’ve watched GW for years concentrating on the bits I suspect real gardeners ignore. The presentational techniques, the way the camera loved Monty Don, Titchmarsh and Geoff Hamilton and how the simplest of jobs (eg, taking a cutting) was often invested with particle physics mystique. Then there’s the linguistics.

It started with the verb to pot. Quite quickly I learned gardeners potted on, potted out and even potted up. I was never able to discover whether these variants were different or simply an oral tic on the part of the instructor, wheezing as he bent over the terracotta. Digging up and digging in are perhaps predictable but last Friday the PT teacher employed rotted out.

This cavalier attitude has spread like oxalis. New plants are watered in. Lawns mowed over. I tried some inventions of my own based on less promising prepositions. Fertilise between? Didn’t sound plausible. But there are other corruptions. Trees fruit, for instance. Mulch can be turned into a verb and attached to a preposition: mulch down.

The computer industry is rightly censured for murdering English. But try out those ruddy-faced, salt-of-the-earth sons of toil, the aphids of communications. Far from innocent.

A manufacturer for our times

“So what kind of magazine is it? The shitty kind?” Ivor Tiefenbrun opening the batting when I interviewed him in 1987 about his Glasgow hi-fi systems company, Linn Products. No complaints, it was a dream interview.

Linn is renowned for quality and prices. An LP turntable (they still do them) costs £2000, plus £250 for the power supply. But I was there to find out how products were made. Tiefenbrun’s methods were ambitious and techno-sharp-edge. “Automation as the first step to more automation,” Tiefenbrun said. Getting hold of the stuff wasn’t giving him any joy.

Tilting back, feet on the desk, in jeans and an open-necked shirt (both rare among businessmen then) and wreathed in Gauloise smoke, he railed against suppliers’ poor service and lack of realism. “One quote for the automated handling system was bigger than the budget for the whole new factory. Another company was well down on price but they gazumped us.”

And: “Planning delays eroded our budgets and cost us a fortune. All the state bodies have buggered us about. Some 10% of the building cost is related to fire protection; it’s just a joke.”

A lot of it was too technical – but funny and profane – for general consumption. If he hadn’t been someone with a worldwide reputation he might have been seen as a blowhard. But he often knew more about technology than those supplying it. Later I actually paid to hear him speak about manufacturing at a prestige event organised by the Royal Society of Arts. One memorable sentence: “Those that didn’t know about willies would think it was a good thing to have.”

José, can you see....!

Didn’t post yesterday for reasons that become apparent if you click on:

http://bestofnow.blogspot.com/2008/11/portrait-election-celebration.html

So, late in the day, what can technology contribute to the emotions running through the blogs I’m most familiar with? We could imagine a Linn hi-fi chain (Expensive but the best) playing a familiar piece of Beethoven and blasting out those childish but heart-breaking words Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt although I always thought it was fur rather than der.

Fireworks? They’d be good, except I’m ignorant about their creation. I do know the constituents of gunpowder (charcoal, sulphur, saltpetre) but not the amounts. Now there’s a future post: an attack on those oh-so-blasé culinary experts with their esoteric “handfuls”, “pinches” and “soupcons.

Booze (by which I mean anything alcoholic). The obvious grape for toasting Obama is, of course, pinot noir. Its peculiarities previously limited it to the vineyards of Burgundy but now everyone’s at it. California (If you haven’t seen Sideways try, try and rectify that emission), Chile and – especially – New Zealand have all done marvellously and, alas, proved that no one can do burgundy like Burgundy can.

Physiology. When I first managed half a mile of continuous crawl several years ago I left the pool feeling as if my arteries were pumping Alka-Seltzer. “It’s the endorphins,” explained my wife. Dunno what they are but endorphins and Obama go together.

Most watch but who remembers?

Each day my eyes observe two minutes of minor theatricals which, once over, are instantly forgotten. Given my druthers (splendid Pittsburgh idiom) I’d resume my book but my wife insists. Then she too forgets what has been disclosed. I am talking about the weather forecast which follows the late TV news.

It should interest me. It’s based on technology, measurements and science. I assume those frequently mentioned isobars are notional lines linking points of equal barometric pressure and they allow somebody, not me, to analyse what’s going on in The Great Invisible. When isobars are close together it’s going to blow. But why? And do I care?

The French TV weather forecasts are similarly choreographed but the announcers do it at 400 words a minute. With one other difference: they tell you what saint’s day it is.

Britain, whatever the moaners say, is a temperate country and as Robert Robinson of Stop the week fame said: tomorrow’s weather will be like today’s but slightly different. When I first got to the USA in early January I heard a forecast with two salient points: there’d been 103 in. of snow in Oswego, NY, and the temperature in International Falls, Minnesota, was minus 47 deg. Now that’s weather!

However there are circumstances when my meteorological atheism becomes faith-based and that’s at sea. The super-condensed information (with its evocative regions) takes on a liturgical tone with implications of life and death. For light relief I’ve been known to listen to it a second time, in French, just to hear peu perturbé repeated over and over.