Archive for March 2013
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”*…
… or so it must seem to Patrick Andrews, who has, since 2006, been creating and posting (with a rhythm close to your correspondent’s heart, that’s to say, roughly daily) an “Invention of the Day.”
His website…
… is intended as an outlet for the force-four brainstorm which rages in the background of my mind, much of the time. It seems to result, most days, in some kind of invention. Many of these ideas are naive, impractical or just unoriginal. Occasionally, a good one appears (eg www.scenereader.com). In any case, disclosure here of anything clever or original will make patenting it impossible**; which is probably a healthy situation…
The obvious thing to do is to forget patents and move straight to manufacturing and selling your own products. With desktop manufacture and online marketing, this is becoming a real possibility in some cases. I recognise, however, that I won’t have enough time and money to develop and launch the majority of the ideas here in the marketplace.
Please therefore feel free to read, mock and/or exploit commercially any which take your fancy. If they make you rich, do let me know (Donating to Unicef is a good idea, even if you haven’t yet made a mint)…
Consider, for example, #2302- “the Collareel”:
Today’s invention is a dog lead with the added benefit that when your animal is off-lead, it carries the whole thing itself.
A small, spring-loaded reel of strong cord is clipped to the ordinary lead. It is shaped to fit closely to the collar and thus be impossible for the dog to remove or for it to tear off while crashing about the undergrowth.
When you want to reign in your canine, first catch it and then pull the lead out to normal length.
Browse the bounty of his brainstorms at “Invention of the Day.”
* Mary Shelly
** Sadly, as of March 16, no longer true in the U.S.
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As we await the illumination of the bulbs above our heads, we might tip the plumed birthday bonnet to Rene Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematician who thought and therefore was. He was born on this date in 1596.
Many contemporaries (perhaps most notably, Pascal) rejected his famous conclusion, the dualist separation of mind and body; more (Voltaire, et al.), since. But Descartes’ emphasis on method and analysis, his disciplined integration of philosophy and physical science, his insistence on the importance of consciousness in epistemology, and perhaps most fundamentally, his the questioning of tradition and authority had a transformative– and lasting– effect on Western thought, and has earned him the “title” of Father of Modern Philosophy.
“In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.”
– Rene Descartes
Frans Hals’ portrait of Descartes, c. 1649
Your correspondent is headed again behind The Great Firewall, where the undependability of connectivity (even, these days, via VPNs) means a hiatus in these missives. Regular service should resume by April 10 or so.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it…*
Buzzfeed’s intrepid Kate Aurthur dove into a full week’s output from Nielsen, searching for the bottom of the television ratings barrel.
There are many channels in the United States, from the massive (USA, CNN, etc.) to the tiny. So many, in fact, that it does seem possible that at some hours of the day, no one — as in zero humans — is watching them. It’s also possible, of course, that this is where the problems of Nielsen Media Research, which has a monopoly on quantifying ratings, show themselves. If 324 ordinary Joe Shmoes — or 4,000 — did, in fact, watch one of the shows below, but none of those Joe Shmoes is in a Nielsen household, then those viewings do not register. Or, as Nielsen put it when I posed this question to them recently, the shows at the very bottom of the weekly cable list, the ones that get 0.0 total viewers, do not meet “minimum reporting thresholds.”
And yet, it does stand to reason that with hundreds and hundreds of available channels, there could be instances every week when not a single soul is tuning in to certain shows. When there are no longer broadcast networks and cable channels, and everything is digital and on-demand, we can look back at this period and marvel at its ridiculous economics.
I took a random week (Feb. 25-March 3) and delved into what sorts of shows — and cable channels — are members of the Zero Club. I excluded paid programming. And that left 35 shows that got zeros. You did not watch them. I did not watch them either. But here they are…
#1-13
“WPRA Today,” RFD (Feb. 25, 6:30 a.m.). And 12 other shows on RFD.
What does WPRA stand for, you ask? Why, it’s the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association. And there is a show about it. Having not previously known about channel RFD, which bills itself as “Rural America’s Most Important Network,” I am now obsessed with it. (If you are curious what RFD stands for, it’s “Rural Free Delivery,” and as for what that means, it’s so complicated there’s a whole explainer about it on the website.)
RFD focuses on agriculture, equine issues of the day, lifestyle, youth, and livestock auctions. Unfortunately, my cable provider, Time Warner Cable, does not feature RFD — like I needed another reason to hate Time Warner Cable. (Dish and DirecTV customers, I am jealous of you, and I am coming over, k?)
But RFD may want to reconsider their programming mix, because there were 12 other RFD shows that also got zero viewers: FFA Today (Feb. 27, 4 a.m.), Ken McNabb (Feb. 28, 6 a.m.), All Around Performance Horse (Feb. 27, 6 a.m.), Presleys’ Country Jubilee (Feb. 28, 3:30 a.m.), Dennis Reis (Feb. 27, 6:30 a.m.), Julie Goodnight (March 1, 6:30 a.m.), Voices of Agriculture (Feb. 27, 4:30 a.m.), US Dressage (Feb. 27, 3:30 a.m.), Little Britches Rodeo (Feb. 27, 3 a.m.), Ren’s Old Time Music (Feb. 25 and 26, 5:30 a.m.), Chris Cox (Feb. 26, 6 a.m.), and Campfire Café (Feb. 25, 3:30 a.m.). Nielsen families! I call to you to watch these shows! In the middle of the night!
Check out chokes from ESPN, VH-1, Fox, and the rest of the list at “The 35 Least-Watched Shows on TV.”
* after George Berkeley‘s famous thought experiment: “But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park […] and nobody by to perceive them. […] The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden […] no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.” From A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).
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As we prepare to dive, we might recall that it was on this date in 1858 that the first U.S. patent for a combination lead pencil and eraser was issued to Hyman L. Lipman, of Philadelphia, Pa. (No. 19,783). Lipman’s design reserved one-fourth of the pencil’s length to hold a piece of prepared india-rubber, glued in at one edge; the balance, conventional graphite “lead.” So, sharpening one end prepared the lead for writing, while sharpening the other exposed a small piece of the eraser.
Dancing with scissors…
From Brazilian designers 18bis, a very different application of the animation technique– stop motion cut-outs– made famous by South Park: a beautiful dance inspired by Pablo Neruda’s “The Me Bird,”, set to original music.
[TotH to Wall to Watch]
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As we contemplate the cornucopia that is construction paper, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that Jack Paar said “good night” and signed off of The Tonight Show for the final time. The late night format had been pioneered by Steve Allen, who inaugurated the slot for NBC locally in New in York in 1952, then as a network offer in 1954. It was structured as a traditional variety show (though it ran 105 minutes), and was quickly tag-team hosted by Allen and Ernie Kovacs, who alternated nights. Carried on very few affiliates, it failed to satisfy the network, which switched to a news format in that time slot in January of 1957. The news was even less popular, so in July of the network tacked back, and named Jack Paar the sole host of Tonight.
Paar established the format and tropes that we currently associate with late night shows: the opening monologue, the regular cast of sketch and skit players, the catchphrase (“I kid you not”), the musical guests, and most centrally, the interviews with celebrities– of all walks, but largely entertainers. The toll of doing 105 minutes five nights a week was sufficiently wearing that Paar convinced the network to reduce the length to 90 minutes, and later, to produce only four shows a week (starting the trend of “Best of” Fridays that survived him). The show was a tremendous hit, steadily building carriage and audience; it was Paar who turned The Tonight Show into an entertainment juggernaut. But he salted his guest list with intellectuals (Paar helped William F. Buckley become a celebrity), politicians (Sen. John F. Kennedy initiated the practice of the “Presidential candidate appearance” on Paar’s show; see photo below), even world leaders. Indeed, Paar was the center of a firestorm of criticism for interviewing Fidel Castro in 1959.
Exhausted by demands of the show, Paar left to do a prime time series. His hand-picked successor, who’d been a frequent substitute host during Paar’s vacations, was Johnny Carson.
Good songs gone bad [Warning: you won’t be able to unhear this]…
Take That was (and sort of still is) a British pop group that dominated the UK charts– and charts in most of the rest of the world– through much of the 90s. Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange, Mark Owen, and Robbie Williams had 27 hit singles in Britain, 11 of which reached number 1, and seven number 1 albums. Globally, the band hit the top of the charts with 54 singles and 35 albums…
In the second half of the last decade, the group– sans Williams, who had gone solo– toured with a mix of old favorites and new material, including some covers… like this one:
Poor Nirvana can’t catch a break. Here’s Miley Cyrus performing the same tune in what Rolling Stone readers voted “The Worst Cover Song of All Time”…
Click here for Rolling Stone‘s full list of Worst Covers; and here for Flavorwire‘s roster…
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As we rethink imitation as a form of flattery, we might recall (with an ironic sigh) that it was on this date in 1964 that regular programming commenced on Radio Caroline– the first British pirate radio station. Broadcasting from a converted passenger ferry moored far enough off of English shores to evade government control, Radio Caroline offered emerging artists– mostly rock and soul acts– a route to the listening public that skirted the major record labels’ hammerlock on the market and the BBC’s monopoly on the airwaves.
“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone”*…
Calvin Seibert (Box Builder on Flickr) explains his commitment to his ephemeral craft…
Building “sandcastles” is a bit of a test. Nature will always be against you and time is always running out. Having to think fast and to bring it all together in the end is what I like about it.
I rarely start with a plan, just a vague notion of trying to do something different each time. Once I begin building and forms take shape I can start to see where things are going and either follow that road or attempt to contradict it with something unexpected.
In my mind they are always mash-ups of influences and ideas. I see a castle, a fishing village, a modernist sculpture, a stage set for the oscars all at once.
When they are successful they don’t feel contained or finished. They become organic machines that might grow and expand. I am always adding just one more bit and if time allowed I wouldn’t stop.
See more of Calvin’s modernist monuments to mutability here. Then check out SpongeBob SquarePants‘ “Sandcastles in the Sand.”
[TotH to Colossal]
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we gather a collection of rectangular pails, we might spare a thought for Sir James Dewar; he died on this date in 1923. A distinguished chemist and physicist (Dewar was an expert on the liquefaction of the “permanent gases,” conducting his work at temperatures approaching absolute zero), he is probably best remembered as the inventor, in 1892, of the “Dewar flask,” a vacuum-insulated vessel that can keep liquids at hot or cold temperatures for long periods. The first commercial vacuum flasks were made in 1904 by a German company, Thermos GmbH, which patented Dewar’s work (as he had not). Dewar sued to recover his invention, but lost. “Thermos” remains a registered trademark in some countries; but– in a 1963 decision that sent chills down spines at Kleenex (Kimberley-Clark) and Xerox– it was declared a genericized trademark in the US, since it has come to be synonymous with vacuum flasks in general.
Sir James Dewar
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