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I bet you didn't know that this thread would have a part 2
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,099 Mod ✭✭✭✭
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Oh certainly, though I would say the biggest change in our lives in the last say twenty years is the rise of social media.The acceleration of that change really took off in the 1900's though. Before 1900, most children would have had lives that weren't dramatically different from that of their parents - a miller's son might see a few enhancements in the powering of his mill versus that which his father worked with (water -> steam etc) but the essence of the job would have been the same, now we see more dramatic changes within our own working careers, never mind inter-generationally - can you imagine being told that "social media manager" or "diversity manager" were real job titles when you were getting career guidance in the 90's? I certainly can't.
All the other changes we see have been much more incremental. Me and my mates had personal computers(sinclair, commodores et al) in the early 80's. France had an "internet" in the early 80's too. The mobile phone has been around since the 80's as well(well there were radio phones going back decades but...).And they both have bits that glow in the dark.
Even there you see the innovations. The old one originally had radium glow in the dark goo, a substance that had only been recently discovered at the time and only available for commercial purposes from around 1909. Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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Even there you see the innovations. The old one originally had radium glow in the dark goo, a substance that had only been recently discovered at the time and only available for commercial purposes from around 1909.
That radium was literally painted on by workers in the watch factories, who were almost exclusively women due to the nature of working with tiny parts. It helps if you have dainty hands when trying to get small bits to link together properly.
Anyway, the easiest way to get the paintbrush into the correct shape to apply the radium onto the dials was to lick it. There were huge instances of people developing all sorts of horrific illnesses from it, and in one particular factory they became known as "the Radium Girls".
Mind-boggling, given what we know now but at the time they were told it was harmless and some even used it as fancy nail-varnish.
In a similar vein, The felt that was used in the construction of hats contained mercury. Those who were using this felt all the time ended up suffering the ill-effects of acute mercury poisoning, some of which made the sufferers appear as if they were crazy. Hence the expression "Mad as a hatter".0 -
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,099 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 59028
Painted their teeth so they'd glow in the dark at parties too. Radium and radiation itself was seen as a panacea that could cure many conditions and was sold as such. You could get radium toothpaste, radium water, radium tablets, radium makeup for women, radium hair tonic, even radium suppositories. :eek:Deleted User wrote: »That radium was literally painted on by workers in the watch factories, who were almost exclusively women due to the nature of working with tiny parts. It helps if you have dainty hands when trying to get small bits to link together properly.
Anyway, the easiest way to get the paintbrush into the correct shape to apply the radium onto the dials was to lick it. There were huge instances of people developing all sorts of horrific illnesses from it, and in one particular factory they became known as "the Radium Girls".
Mind-boggling, given what we know now but at the time they were told it was harmless and some even used it as fancy nail-varnish.
The real problem beyond the direct radiation exposure is that the body sees it as calcium and laps it up so it goes straight to the bones and causes horrendous damage. Their jaws could literally rot away and snap off.
What has always amazed me about that story is how many of the women didn't get sick and die.
The radium girls factory owners realised it was dangerous quite early on(a couple of the chemists working in the industry had died horribly and word had gotten out among the higher ups) and in the vein of good old American industrialism and exploitation had sought to protect themselves and fought those women hard in court for years. :mad: Those women's sacrifice and ultimate victory in the courts changed American industrial law.
Radium itself stayed in use well into the 1950's on clocks, watches, instruments and things like gunsights. So if anyone has an old clock or watch with a brown or dirty grey type paint on the hands and dial chances are high it's radium. It won't glow in the dark any more because the radiation blasts the zinc sulfide material which is what actually glows when excited by the radiation, but the radium itself has a half life of around 1600 years so it's still as dangerous as the day it was painted on(and breaks down into nasties like radon). So care is needed. Other things in the home that are radioactive are smoke detectors, though they give off a tiny amount, mostly alpha IIRC so falls off rapidly with distance and won't go through the skin(or the case of the detector). Other sources are some antique glassware, uranium glass. It's usually a pale green or yellow.
The uranium is what gives it a "glow" when exposed to UV in sunlight.
I will say having replaced the radium with non toxic modern luminous material by painting it on myself, by god they were skilled women. It took me well over an hour to do one dial(the hands are easy), with a few feck ups and lots of cursing. They were expected to do a dial every minute or so. :eek:Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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Moderators, Arts Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Social & Fun Moderators Posts: 76,490 Mod ✭✭✭✭
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That's another massive change; the pervasiveness of very accurate time in all our lives. Even in the 20th century there was personal time, clocks and watches in the home, and universal(if local) time. It had been like that for centuries, where the local church rang out the hours with bells and people would set their clocks at home by that. Then when a few German inventors came up with portable clocks in the 16th century they were set to church time (like early clocks, they only had an hour hand, the minutes hand came later). The word "clock" itself comes from the Irish word for "bell". So 12 o'clock is 12 bells. Then with the industrial revolution the church became the factory clock. Now time is inescapably everywhere. As we type here on phone, tablet or PC it sits there in the corner.
*as a male thing, women were wearing them earlier.
Funny you should say that...
This was posted over 2 years ago - not sure when it actually happened, but it's interesting all the same.0 -
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,099 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 59028
You never know S, they could well be keeping you in your dotage. Streaming "my Da's boomer knees, and why they sound like a crisp packet rustling. Tune in next week when we mic up his lower back". Like and subscribe.I've had both kids tell me they want to be streamers or Youtubers... :rolleyes: Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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Chancer3001 wrote: »Seems like this thread is full of brainy people so I'll ask here
Say i want to drink my tea as hot as possible but i have to take a 5-10 min phonecall.
I have just poured the tea into the mug.
I can add the milk or leave off the milk until i return. But the same amount of milk is going in either way (say 10mls).
Should i add the milk before i leave the room or add it when i come back?
You make a fresh cup of tea obviously :eek:
Now away to the stingy thread with you
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Chancer3001 wrote: »Seems like this thread is full of brainy people so I'll ask here
Say i want to drink my tea as hot as possible but i have to take a 5-10 min phonecall.
I have just poured the tea into the mug.
I can add the milk or leave off the milk until i return. But the same amount of milk is going in either way (say 10mls).
Should i add the milk before i leave the room or add it when i come back?
The physics of the dilemma explained here are interesting.
But if I had a phone in another room (landline presumably) I would simply take the cup of tea with me, not leaving it behind.
Another option is a tea warmer, one of those little things fuelled by a tea light. I have one for my morning coffee and can drink same with leisure without it getting cold.
Sometimes you don't need science, just common or practical sense. :cool:
On another note: I love Wibb's watches. I'm one of the relics who prefer wrist watches to phone clocks. Proper wrist watches not those unappealing digital ones. Got a new one for Christmas. Beautiully understated but highly sophisticated thing on my wrist now... 0 -
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Moderators, Arts Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Social & Fun Moderators Posts: 76,490 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 75790
Cistercian monks had a way to write numbers from 0 to 9999 with just one symbol
The medieval Cistercian numerals, or "ciphers" in nineteenth-century parlance, were developed by the Cistercian monastic order in the early thirteenth century at about the time that Arabic numerals were introduced to northwestern Europe. They are more compact than Arabic or Roman numerals, with a single character able to indicate any integer from 1 to 9999.
Digits are based on a horizontal or vertical stave, with the position of the digit on the stave indicating its place value (units, tens, hundreds or thousands). These digits are compounded on a single stave to indicate more complex numbers. The Cistercians eventually abandoned the system in favor of the Arabic numerals, but marginal use outside the order continued until the early twentieth century.
The digits and idea of forming them into ligatures were apparently based on a two-place (1–99) numeral system introduced into the Cistercian Order by John of Basingstoke, archdeacon of Leicester, who it seems based them on a twelfth-century English shorthand (ars notaria). In its earliest attestations, in the monasteries of the County of Hainaut, the Cistercian system was not used for numbers greater than 99, but it was soon expanded to four places, enabling numbers up to 9999.
The two dozen or so surviving Cistercian manuscripts that use the system date from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, and cover an area from England to Italy, Normandy to Sweden. The numbers were not used for arithmetic, fractions or accounting, but indicated years, foliation (numbering pages), divisions of texts, the numbering of notes and other lists, indexes and concordances, arguments in Easter tables, and the lines of a staff in musical notation.
Although mostly confined to the Cistercian order, there was some usage outside it. A late-fifteenth-century Norman treatise on arithmetic used both Cistercian and Hindu-Arabic numerals. In one known case, Cistercian numerals were inscribed on a physical object, indicating the calendrical, angular and other numbers on the fourteenth-century astrolabe of Berselius, which was made in French Picardy. After the Cistercians had abandoned the system, marginal use continued outside the order. In 1533, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim included a description of these ciphers in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy. The numerals were used by wine-gaugers in the Bruges area at least until the early eighteenth century. In the late eighteenth century, Chevaliers de la Rose-Croix of Paris briefly adopted the numerals for mystical use, and in the early twentieth century Nazis flirted with the idea the numerals could be used for Aryan symbolism.
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Apologies for the length, but that reminds me of this old thread on /b/, which was the worst place on the internet before social media was really a thing.BonnieSituation wrote: »Alt + F4 will highlight any errors on a page. Try it there.
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