Beepers/Pagers, and, to a lesser extent, PDAs such as the PalmPilot. I’ve got a Palm, but have basically replaced it with my cell phone.
Umm- you forgot MS Windows 
Actually, mechanical wristwatches are still necessary in some cases. Strong Em fields or ionizing radiation will turn your $400 watch into so much inert jewelry in no time (of course in the latter case you have bigger problems than buying a new watch).
I like watches the same way I like guns. Purely mechanical, no computers involved, and they work.
That should have been “EM.” I let go of the shift key too soon.
I use my tie to wipe my glasses clean.
And to impress the ladies.
Sewers.
Not that I have an alternative, but I just had a pleasant evening of SDMB browsing interrupted by an ominous burbling from my toilet. Which developed into a full-scale spontaneous overflow. And it just happens to be the evening after they did some mysterious maintenance on my sewer main line today.
Must cut that line of reasoning off before it becomes a pit thread, but surely there exists the possibility of a technology a little better than that based on the “s*** runs downhill” theory.
FAXes were the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. Email should have sent faxes into the garbage bin by now, except it’s still not easier to sign and send documents via email.
What happened to that “digital signing” law that I believe Clinton signed? I hoped that was the death knell of faxes, but I still really have clue what it really was…
No, those guys have all moved to the viola section.
Heh, he doesn’t know how to use the three seashells.
Incandescent lightbulbs: Why can’t these last more than three months? I know flourescent bulbs are available, but most of my fixtures have very visible bulbs, and flourescent bulbs don’t really look good.
Actually, if they followed the curve of electronics, they’d be the size of a walkman, run on electricity, emit clean water, and have to be upgraded every six months.
Most of what’s in my pockets - money, keys, credit and debit cards, license, checkbook - these things are all just forms of ID. And fallible ones at that. Why don’t fingerprint or retina or iris readers replace every damn one of these stupid old things?
Why we keep these anachronisms going is beyond me…we elect corrupt, stupid, venal and unpricipled politicians to run (and in most cases, screw up ) our lives.
Why can’t we have a “Council of Scientists” (all must be at least MIT Ph.Ds).
These guys could really make things happen!
What I envision: all decsions of government to be made by the council. Government has NO SAY in anybodie’s personal life!
Think ofit!
We in Boston, are about to be “graced” by the Democratic National Convention…$100 millions dollars and 4 days for the corrupt party hacks to party…man, give me the “COUNCIL OF SCIENTISTS” any day!
The electronic grid system of bringing electricity to people. Anyone remember last August? Or last night in Englewood, New Jersey? We need automatic shut downs when things go wrong.
And the issue of “airplane security” is still in the dark ages also three years after 9/11.
:eek:
Have you ever MET an MIT Ph.D? Your idea is one of the scariest ones I’ve ever read on these boards. Yikes.
Are you nuts?! :eek:
You want a Science Council?
Don’t you know what happens when you get a Science Council?
The core of your planet becomes unstable and when someone tries to warn them, they’ll scoff at him.
Then, he’ll start to build a rocket to save him and his family so that the race can continue elsewhere but the Science Council will think this is a ploy to undermine them and have their goons destroy it leaving only a small working model that he’ll use to rocket his son away from the dying planet!
Do you want to destroy the world?
Fenris
No, GorillaMan, I am not ‘thoroughly misguided’ and the technology I describe not only exists - I have actually used it and so have countless others. No, Contrabass, I am not joking.
My post involved two basic contentions.
(1) If a piece of music requires, say, 20 different parts, then these days one only needs 20 different musicians to perform it. In the past, the only way to double the sound of two violins was to have two violinists. This increases (or can increase) the respective loudness / presence of that particular part and also alters the timbre, given that two violins playing the same notes sound different than one. These days, you can amplify the relative volume (of one part to another) with infinite degrees of control and subtlelty. You can also take one input and double-, triple-, or multi-track it all you want, including very subtle additions of phase delay and timbre adjustment to create pretty well any sound you can imagine. In this way, one violinist can produce a very rich array of diverse sounds and textures, sounding like a solo violin, an 8-strong string section, or a set of pan pipes fused with whale song (not that there’s much call…).
I have never contended that this approach to the rendition of a symphony would sound the same as a classical symphony orchestra, which is entirely irrelevant to my point. The point is that this is a perfectly feasible way of performing the piece of music. Whether it sounds better or worse is entirely a matter of subjective judgement.
2. Whereas in times gone by the only way to get a stringed instrument to producer higher or lower notes was to adjust the size of the wooden box it is stretched over, this is no longer the case. Again, this is not only true and non-contentious, it has been demonstrated in practice any number of times. I can play the violin, and I’ve played in orchestras. I’ve had great fun experimenting with sampling devices, octave boxes (devices which transpose the input up or down one or more octaves) and pitch shifters. There is absolutely no problem with playing a double bass part on a violin if you know how. And of course there’s no need to rely on catgut and wires stretched over a wooden box. A synthesiser is much neater and more portable, and more versatile.
Crikey, no we have to keep books! Sure they take up space and are bulky, but you want something something that doesn’t become unreadable the moment it’s scratched or introduced to a magnet; or that its reader-media doesn’t become obsolete – I am going to have to retype my dissertation for publication on this comp, because it was written originally on a comp that had no hard drive and used 2 floppies (one chapter per floppy). Bleah!
Books have heft to them: around 1990 I was in a palaeography workshop at the British Library, and one of the lectures was a senior curator came along to talk about the preservation and preventative care for the rarer manuscripts held in the collection. (This lady is well known for cuddling new mss to the Library like wee kitties, and gives them all nicknames, and will go around all day cuddling a new mss and introducing it to people. I myself do not find this at all odd, actually.)
Anyway, in the middle of her discussion, one of the students (all adults, not children) piped up and said, why didn’t they just photocopy all the manuscripts and books like Beowulf, and make those accessible, and just store the originals if they were so precious. Crikey, did those two get into it. This genteel, eccentric older British lady, and a very down to earth Australian lady…at the end, the library lady walloped the Australia lady on the backside with her book (no, not Beowulf) – a CDR upside the head doesn’t have the same effect. And there’s nothing like dropping a stack of books on the desk next to the undergraduate who is sleeping during your lecture.
What, it plays Mahler, Bartok, Bach, etc, all indistinguishable in a concert hall from a real orchestra? I doubt it.
A decent knowledge of string instrument sound production would tell you there’s far more to timbre than doubling the sounds, even with a few modifications.
I
So’s a piano reduction. Neither is accurate to the composer’s intentions, and neither can achieve the variety of effects an orchestra can.
You play open fourths…umm…how?