I just learned some interesting things about transatlantic communications cables:
The first one, a telegraph cable, was installed a few years before the start of the U.S. Civil War.
The first fiber optic cable, TAT-8, was installed in 1988. It is currently being pulled up, and will sent for recycling. (I find this very odd.)
The latest cable, Amitié, went live in 2023. It has 16 fiber pairs, each with a capacity of 23 Tbit/s.
I found that interesting as well. So I found some more tidbits about that cable, courtesy of the history website.
The cable lasted only three weeks and, in that time, carried 732 messages.
A second cable was laid in 1866 and was much more reliable than the first.
That first cable in 1858, in the few weeks it worked, saved the British government over 50,000 pounds in 1850s money in one fell swoop. The military realized that British troops in Canada who were about to cross the ocean (I’ve seen versions that they were going to England, and others that they were destined for India post-Mutiny) were no longer needed and could stay put, but if the new orders were sent by ship the troops would be at sea by the time the orders arrived, so the cable was used.
One of my favorite historians, John Steele Gordon, wrote a fascinating book on this, A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable – An Epic 19th-Century Achievement that United America and Europe.
I just discovered that butter explodes in the microwave after putting butter in the microwave.
So if you want your butter to not explode in the microwave, make sure your butter never puts butter in the microwave.
My microwave has a butter soften function. It think it pulses rather than continuously runs the beams or something but that’s just a guess.
If you listen closely, you might be able to tell. My microwave has a power function. If I set it to 80% (my favorite for reheating), you can hear the magnetron cycling on and off, I’m assuming in an 80% on/20% off fashion although I’ve never actually timed it.
A March hare isn’t a particular species of leporidae. It describes the behavior of some European hares and rabbits during mating season (March) when they get up on their hind legs and box each other as if they have gone mad.
Off to look up Dormouse…
Feed your head.
Pon Farr.
From the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, there were as many as 120,000 elevator operators in New York City alone. Frequent strikes and a strong union meant the shutdown of many major businesses for days (or longer) at a time. By the mid-1960s, there were virtually none left.
And of course Huxley’s Brave New World was set centuries in the future and yet they still had elevator operators, specifically made imbecilic enough to not find the job boring. It’s astonishing at times how little automation was anticipated by much science fiction; interstellar spaceships crewed by semi-literate deck apes for example.
There are also some examples of science fiction set centuries ahead of when they were written in which people use slide rules to calculate how to set the navigation of spaceships, like Methuselah’s Children by Robert Heinlein.
Heinlein loved his slide rules (“slip sticks”).
A significant plot point in his novel Starman Jones was that spaceship navigators need big printed books filled with tables of numbers in order to navigate. The ship has a computer, but apparently the computer has insufficient memory to store a book’s worth of data. Even worse, data is entered into the computer in binary, by an operator pressing two buttons, one of which enters a “0” and the other enters a “1”. The computer is apparently unable to convert from decimal, or even hexadecimal, to binary by itself.
That reminds me of the time lift maintenance engineers in London went on strike. Within a day or two, there was at least one notice posted on the door with the words “This Otis Regrets”.
Newer “Inverter” microwave ovens can run continuously at low power.
Microwave tubes work by accelerating electrons around some kind of odd structure. The electrons come from an “emitter”, which is heated by a “heater”. If you just turn down the power on the “acceleration”, the hot electrons stay around the “emitter”, which overheats and burns out.
Old uw ovens ran the heater off a coil on the main transformer. The system was either On or Off. “Inverter” ovens can control the heater and the excitation voltage independently, and can control the number of electrons emitting uw radiation continuously, rather than just “On” and “Off”
Except, perhaps, in the Department Stores? I mention that because “Going up, Mens Wear” was still a meme when I was young.
I notice that Macy’s had early-model escalators, so when did they get rid of operators?
In my town, Myers had late-model escalators, and the building was built with wide staircases. The lifts still had operators in the late 70’s.
Old science articles sometimes claimed that microwave ovens cycled on and off because it was fundamentally physically impossible for them to change their actual power level. Which is, of course, a load of rot.
AI says “Macy’s phased out traditional passenger elevator operators in the 1970s as self-service, automatic elevators became standard, though some staffed elevators remained in operation into the early 2000s.”
I can’t imagine that elevators after the 1970s required staffing; I assume that some personnel were kept on as a working promotional relic, like Macy’s still-in-operation wooden escalator.