What’s it like to record an aria on 120-year-old technology? Met tenor Piotr Beczala and soprano Susanna Phillips give it a try.
Category: Tools and Technology
Still ticking
I wrote up some notes on A Portable Cosmos, by Alexander Jones, a summary of what 120 years of studying the Antikythera Mechanism (one of my obsessions) have revealed to us.
Riding the Rarely and Never
I’ve been trying to keep up with the extensive reporting by the Times on the shabby state of New York’s subway system, and how it got that way. Here’s a nugget from Brian M. Rosenthal et al.’s kickoff (it’s from November—did I say that I was trying to keep up?):
A bill passed by the Legislature in 1989 included a provision that lets state officials impose a fee on bonds issued by public authorities. The fee was largely intended to compensate the state for helping understaffed authorities navigate the borrowing process. It was to be a small charge, no more than 0.2 percent of the value of bond issuances….
The charge has quietly grown into a revenue stream for the state. And a lot of the money has been sapped from one authority in particular: the M.T.A.
The authority — a sophisticated operation that contracts with multiple bond experts — has had to pay $328 million in bond issuance fees over the past 15 years.
In some years, it has been charged fees totaling nearly 1 percent of its bond issuances, far more than foreseen under the original law….
But records show that other agencies have had tens of millions of dollars in bond issuance fees waived, including the Dormitory Authority, which is often used as a vehicle for pork projects pushed by the governor or lawmakers. The M.T.A. has not benefited as often from waivers.
The Dormitory Authority? What’s that? DASNY likes to style itself as New York State’s real estate developer. Its Wikipedia article needs some work.
Some links: 80
- Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann write about strategies for mustering grassroots support for transitions in energy sources. How did the German Energiewende reverse the rise in nuclear energy dependence, replacing nuclear power with other renewable sources?
- Andy Newman does a ride-along on New York’s century-old technology: manually operated elevators. (And a map of buildings that still use them.)
- J. F. Meils reviews what’s news in the struggle to fully enfranchise the District of Columbia.
Since 1835
Washington’s National Theater quite recently gave up its rope-and-sandbags rigging system: it was one of the last of the “hemp houses.” Rebecca Cooper has the story for Washington Business Journal, and there is good video about the transition to the cables-and-counterweights system (less flexible, but standardized) that most hands know.
Going back a little farther in time, a documentary short from the 1950s shows IATSE Local 22 loading in the National’s touring show of My Fair Lady.
Some links: 77
- A stunning 30-minute video documenting the end of Linotyping at the New York Times in 1978.
- Gabrielle Emmanuel’s series, “Unlocking Dyslexia,” begins with its definition.
- A lovely 5-minute video visit by Amanda Rodewald and Nick Bayly to a coffee finca: what’s the connection between shade-grown coffee and our neotropical migrants?
In transit
Joe Palca takes a ride on the personal rapid transit system on the University of West Virginia campus at Morgantown. The system was built in the 1960s-70s.
The concept feels strangely familiar. Somewhere in my boxes of files from B school I may have some lecture notes from Russell Ackoff. I seem to recollect that he had done some consulting on the psychology of transit riders that led him to promote the idea of small transit pods. In his view, what transit riders valued more than speed, or reliability, or short headways, was the ability to control who they shared a vehicle with. Hence, big city busses, not so popular; private automobiles, very desirable.
The key
Now I know what those gizmos stuck to the sides of office buildings are for, and what they’re called: Knox boxes.
And then there’s this
On the boards
A very nice piece by April Peavey about the electro-mechanical flip-flapping annunciator boards that have all but disappeared from American train stations. I now know that they can be called Solari boards, after the Italian manufacturer that first introduced them in 1956. Maybe I realized, but have forgotten, that the letters and numbers flap in only one direction, so that the transition from an E to an H, for instance, takes much less time than for an S to an A—and hence the new destination or train name is displayed one letter at a time, as the individual units cycle around. It’s that gradual reveal that I remember, like watching a photograph develop, or like playing the word puzzle from Wheel of Fortune in real time.
Alas, the news peg for this story is that Amtrak is replacing the Solari board in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, where many years ago I would wait for the regional train to New York to take me back to my internship.
Some links: 76
ICYMI: Linda Poon reports on a genuinely useful application of new, whizzy 3-D printing technology: tactile maps for blind and visually impaired students.
Altitude
Melissa Block interviews Leslie Shook, the Betty voice of Boeing’s F/A-18 fighter jets.
How does it feel
To sweeten a Blue Saturday, Orkestra Obsolete plays New Order’s “Blue Monday” using only instruments and technology available in the 1930s.
ᔥ kottke.org and @tcarmody
Glass-enclosed
Corey Kilgannon counts the last four outdoor phone booths in Manhattan.
Under pressure
Callan Bentley turns the screws on a diamond anvil cell. Pressures inside the cell, a little gizmo smaller than a snow dome, are on the order of 60 GPa. He writes:
- 60 gigapascals is therefore a pressure equivalent to about 2100 kilometers of depth in the planet – most of the way through the mantle, though not quite to the outer core (which is at ~2900 km depth).
- A pressure cooker cooks at 0.0001 GPa.
- Your car’s tires are inflated to a pressure of 0.0002 GPa (2 bars, or ~30 psi).
- 60 GPa is a lot more than 0.0002 Gpa.
(Sorry, but I had to go to that song.)