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Technology

Putting the 'Tech' back in 'Low-Tech'? 44

Posted by Cliff from the everything-old-may-be-again dept.
Bingo Foo asks: "Have you sharpened a pencil lately? Today was my daughter's first day of first grade. Last night, in preparation, I sharpened some pencils for her. I haven't sharpened a pencil in years, and it was an entirely new experience. It's not made of wood! I'm not talking an inferior substitute, either; it was made of some uber-substance, the way Plato would have envisioned a pencil. What other kinds of technology have changed under our noses while we've been upgrading our kernels? How technological has low-tech become?" I would be interested in knowing who made those pencils and what they were made out of, for one thing.
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Putting the 'Tech' back in 'Low-Tech'? More

Putting the 'Tech' back in 'Low-Tech'?

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  • Hmm (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe it's just me, but non-wood pencils have been around for a long time. "Bic" comes to mind. Of course, this question specifically says the funky new pencil was not made out of an inferior product, so I guess "Bic" doesn't count.

    A couple of things I've noticed that have changed:
    a) table tennis balls - they don't bust as easily and a stinky yellow gas doesn't come out of them anymore when they do
    b) light bulbs - they last longer. nuf zed.
    c) the public's attention span - no explanation required

  • I have not thought of all that must I change since out side of the computer world and other little things I find on /.. for example take calling card in Europe they seem to have microchips on them. and many other products, that I can not thing of right now. one of my favorite thing is when a product with no computer based features gets some like cars if you look at old cars there is every little computer tech to none depending on how far back you look and now we a GPS telling us make a right there blocks down and so we might have internet connectivity in our cars. I have been thinking about placing a linux PC in the trunk of my car a setting up a voice recognition(using via-voice for linux) mp3 player. with more then a enough space for a few weeks of music. but I can not find the web page. A little help please??
  • sorry I didn't proof read my work so here it is again sorry I have not thought of all that must I change out side of the computer world and other little things I find on /. for example, take calling card in Europe they seem to have microchips on them. and many other products, that I can not thing of right now.One of my favorite things in life is when a product with no computer based features gets some, like cars if you look at old cars there is every little computer tech to none depending on how far back you look and now we a GPS telling us to make a right there blocks down and one day we might have internet connectivity in our cars.

    I have been thinking about placing a linux PC in the trunk of my car, and setting up a voice recognition mp3 player. with more then a enough space for a few weeks of music.
    I can't remember the Web page with the program

  • Sawdust? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't know exactly what you may be talking about, it's been years myself since I set eyes on a pencil. But all *my* pencils in high school (about 5 years ago) were made of glue + sawdust.

    While technically still wood, it really _does_ _not_ look like wood until you start taking it apart, or do some research on it. :-P

    Of course, I'd heard strange stories of some weird plastic type of pencil, and of course there's the cheap rubber versions.. (inferior imo)
  • Those damn Chinese pencils! Man, they were impossible to sharpen, though I think they were more "real wood" than most American pencils. They smelled funny when you sharpened them; like sawdust, I suppose.

    I also remember the "Princess" brand being the strongest in "pencil pop". Anyone else play pencil pop? It's a stupid game where you crack at the middle of each other's pencil until one breaks. I played it about twice until I got tired of losing pencils.
  • Are they those wood-like plastic pencils?

    Did you know that if you heat them gently over a bunsen burner you can tie them in knots?

    The things you discover in high-school chemistry.

  • Instead of a wiring harness on new Ford automobiles, they have a little Token Ring Network.

    When you turn on your headlights, the switch doesn't complete a circuit between your battery, the switch, and the bulb. Instead, your console sends out packets telling the lights to turn on and the lights will recieve the packets and then turn themselves on.

    Gauges don't measure a voltage to display fuel/oil/foo. Instead, they have little servo-controllers in them that automatically matches up with the levels that the various sensors send out.

  • Cork (Score:1)

    by tooth ( 111958 )
    I recently went to a dinner party at which few bottles of red wine were on offer. One thing that I found interesting is that they are starting to use "corks" that are not made out of cork. It's some sort of plastic type substance.

    One of the guests informed me that there was a shortage of good quality cork in the world (I think only 2 nations produce it or something) and that they had been looking for a replacement for a while. I'm told that it is quite difficult to get a man-made substance to act like natural cork

    The advantages of man-made corks are that it won't break up in the bottle, so you don't have bits of cork floating in your drink, and also the man-made cork is more reliable than natural cork (It seals better, so there is less risk of air getting into the bottle and the wine going bad)

    If anyone has more accurate info, can you post it? Like I said, I was drinking at this party, and that may have affected my recall of some information... *g*

  • Light bulbs (Score:3)

    by shippo ( 166521 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @03:37AM (#807416)
    There are a few light bulbs in existance, still working, from around 1910. The reason why these have lasted so long is that *ALL* (or nearly all) the air has been pumped out.

    More recent light bulbs only have most of the air removed, allowing the fillament to oxidise, causing it to fail. The brand of lightbulb sold at my local supermarket seem to have had very little air removed at all, judging by their lifetime.

  • I have been thinking about placing a linux PC in the trunk of my car, and setting up a voice recognition mp3 player. with more then a enough space for a few weeks of music. I can't remember the Web page with the program

    Try this: http://cajun.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

    I don't know about voice recognition, but it should get you going in the right direction. I've been intending to put a mp3 player in my car too, but I'm having problems with power (I don't want to use an inverter).

  • I'm just amazed that a manufactured substance is cheaper than wood...granted you have to chop down the tree, but still the idea of it.
    Lately, I've seen another ubiquitous item formerly made of a natural substance that is now made of plastic...cups at fast food chains.

    I don't know about you, but I prefer the idea of a wooden pencil eventually decomposing - nature knows what to do with it, as opposed to the plastic stuff....This trend will eventually catch up with us when all the garbage dumps are full.
  • More recent light bulbs only have most of the air removed, allowing the fillament to oxidise, causing it to fail.

    Really? And this imperfect vacuum, is intended as a trick to make you buy more bulbs or is a problem of the manufacturing process?

    I thought that bulbs died because of random evaporation of the wolfram of the wire, independently of air.
    __
  • Personally, when it comes to non-mechanical pencils, I much prefer REAL wood to any of the new uber-substances they might be using. There's just something satisfying about the way real wood pencils crunch in the pencil sharpener... and the smell of real wood and graphite when they're freshly sharpened.

    Now, if only they could invent a wooden pencil that would remain sharp all of the time! Because despite loving wooden pencils, I can't stand the pencil not being sharp... back to good old mechanical pencils.
  • There's been a scare for the past few years about a cork shortage. Actually, the worldwide cork crop (>90% of which is grown in Portugal) has been susceptible to a taint known as 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA). If you've ever uncorked a bottle and it smelled musty, like damp cardboard or old newspaper, you've experienced a "corked" or tainted bottle of wine. Unfortunately, the human palate can detect as few as 4 parts per trillion of TCA.

    Over the past few years, tremendous research has gone into both cork alternatives and remedies to this blight. So, currently we can choose between a number of plastic and other artificial cork alternatives (Cellukork, Twin Top). At the same time, the TCA blight seems to have been at least contained, if not eliminated. According to Amorim [corkfacts.com], the cork crop is growing at around 4% per year. This is good news, but considering the fact that cork can be harvested from a tree only once every 9 years, I believe we're going to see a lot more artificial replacements in the future...

    deGleep

    lumpy@DONTLIKEPORKINACAN.fc.net
    "I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers."

  • Re:Planned obsolescence? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Really? And this imperfect vacuum, is intended as a trick to make you buy more bulbs or is a problem of the manufacturing process?

    I hear that in the museum located on the site of Edison's inventions, there are still lightbulbs burning away. However, it is much nicer for stores/manufacturers to have such a steady revenue stream. It is not in a distributor's best interest to sell such things. Even if they cost 10X as much, you no doubt would still buy them.

  • Plastic cork is *evil* (Score:3)

    by streetlawyer ( 169828 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @06:47AM (#807423) Homepage
    Just a note -- try not to buy wine with plastic corks. Two reasons:

    *The wine is invariably cheap shit, and you deserve better.

    *Plastic corks are driving the Portugese cork farmers out of business, with fairly disastrous results for an impossibly beautiful part of the earth.

  • The pencils that I find really amusing are the mechanical ones that are made to look like the classic yellow No. 2 wooden pencil. The lead feeds automatically as you use it, and can't be pushed back up into the body, so it marks on the inside of bags and pockets like a real wooden pencil too.
  • For farm animals. Until the past few years, most farmers/ranchers wrote numbers and letters onto the eartags using a long-lasting paint of sort. It has about the consistency of india ink and is a pain in the ass to work with as it's quite permanent on most everything. (It'll dye formica countertops, etc.)

    Now they've switched over to a sandwiched rubber system. A layer of black rubber sandwiched between two outer layers of colored rubber. One simply takes a dremel type tool and etches the number out. The tags last a lot longer, have more contrast, and are far easier to work with.

    ----
  • Want a harder pencil? Go to a stationery or art supply store and simply buy #4s instead of the trusty #3s. Slightly harder pencil lead means for sharper pencils, but also pencils that break more frequently (more brittle).

    ----
  • I think we're going to be seeing a lot of this - new technology masquerading as old tech.

    Look at the e-book formats - there's no practical reason why an e-book should open like a traditional book. That design was made for bound sheets of paper, not for a single electronic display surface and a cover. Nevertheless, e-book designers who forego the oldfashioned "opening book" design are asking for trouble.

    What I'm getting at is that what we're seeing is new technology being deliberately designed to evoke the traditional tech. The point, I suppose, is that people are comfortable with the old tech, and that designers are trying not to scare them too much by offering them a total redesign. Instead, they are getting "masquerade tech", which appears innocuously similar to stuff they are already familiar with.

    Now, back in the Hugo Gernsback days, in the early days of our fascination with high-tech, people couldn't get things futuristic enough - even the cars had wings, flanges and all kinds of totally superfluous stuff. Heck, even the refrigerators looked like space stations.

    So, what has changed? Why do people suddenly feel more comfortable with old-fashioned usage paradigms, favouring them over futuristic design?

    My guess is that it has to do with the acceleration of technological change. People are beginning to feel the psychological crunch of the fast-approaching Singularity, and they are reacting by seeking comfort in traditional modes of thought.

    If I'm right, we'll see more of this, not less. As the pace of technological change accelerates, the popularity of masquerade tech should increase.

    Of course, I could be wrong, and this could be just another fashion fad. I doubt it, though - I think this is a more deply rooted phenomenon.

  • www.mp3car.com [mp3car.com] is a good resource for putting MP3 players in your car. If you want net access and you have lots of cash you could go the Megacar [megacar.com] route. My personal favorite MP3 player install is the MP3 Blazer [mp3car.com]. It's got lots of nice features like internet access, dvd movies, it's even got a cd burner in it! I wish it was mine! I also am planning on doing something similar, but I need to get me some money first!
  • Have you tried a DC-DC power supply? I haven't tried one before so I don't know how well they work, but if they do I think that's the route I would go. Info on one can be found at http://www.mp3car.com/dcdc916.html [mp3car.com]. I have seen others out there too, I'm sure a quick web search will turn up a bunch of them.
  • I might add that the ear tags are starting to go the barcode route. Along with the number there is a little barcode on the tag that can be scanned to identify the animal.
  • Of course, he sharpens them with his utility knife, so the non-grained "uber" substance just doesn't react like wood.

    I've seen some pencils made from recycled blue jeans. Hold up pretty good too, but it's like sharpening fabric!

  • now that's cool
  • Many of today's pencils are made from plastic (I think the "lead" might be plastic too, or maybe just real low-quality graphite). They BEND, it's simply obscene. Not only that, but they don't sharpen as sharp, they're always dull, you can't make them sharp, it's absolutely horrible. And the erasers never work right either. BUT! There is no need to dismay! Dixon Ticonderoga makes high-quality pencils, that aren't plastic! They sharpen correctly, it's fantastic. So, whenever you go out to buy pencils because of the coming EMP soon to beset our homey little planet, go out and buy yourself a Dixon Ticonderoga pencils; you won't be dissappointed.

    Chris Hagar
  • For some time now, I've been using this Dell typewriter. It's the damndest thing. It's got keys sort of like my good old Underwood, but you don't have to press very hard at all, and the thing is flat as a board. And there are these strange keys with Ctrl and Alt on them, and a bunch of others that say F1, F2 up to F12, and SysRq and what not, and I don't know what on earth they're for. Mercy.

    Also, no metal rods inside. Then, here's the strangest thing. The keyboard is attached to the rest of the typewriter by this long piece of rope and goes to this box, you see. The printing part is attached to this box by another rope. And you aren't supposed to look at the paper while you type. No sir. You look at this piece of glass that looks JUST LIKE a piece of paper. Yup, that's also attached to the box with a big piece of rope.

    Oh yeah, there's one more piece of rope going into the box, and it's got this bar of soap sort of thing on the other end, but it isn't soap, and it has two buttons on it. And when you move it around (on a table, that is), this little arrow moves on the glass. When you press buttons on the soap sort of thing, you can sometimes make things happen, like printing the stuff you're typing onto a piece of paper.

    Now you may be wondering how I ever figured out that this here Dell thing is a typewriter. Heck, it was easy. If I try doing anything else all I get is a BSOD.

  • Actually, when you pump out all the gases inside a light bulb it burns out very quickly, because there's no gas pressure to help prevent the filament from evaporating.

    Modern (well, they've been doing this for decades) bulbs keep an inert gas in there at a fairly high pressure to keep the filament from evaporating. I believe the `halogen' lights keep a special gas at a lower pressure that lets it evaporate but then redeposits it back onto the filament.

    The downside of having (an intert) gas in there is that it conducts heat away from the filament, reducing it's efficiency.

    If there are bulbs still burning from 1910, it's probably because 1) they're not lit very often and 2) they don't get very hot. If you keep your light bulb filaments relatively cool, they don't burn out - but they also don't make much light. The hotter they get (to a point, of course), the more light they make, the higher the light/heat ratio, and the `whiter' the light, all good things when you're designing a light bulb.

  • what are known as eco pencils. They are made from processed recycled newspaper. The newspaper is pressed into a wood-shingle like substance with glue/heat. There are other kinds made from recycled blue jeans too. [enn.com]
    The pencil is a relatively new device (compared to the thousands of years man has been making a mark). It has a fascinating history, and the book The Pencil [barnesandnoble.com] is definitive. It shows how the technology evolves in such a 'low tech' device. This is a must read if you're the least bit interested. Buy from Barnes and Noble because they respect your privacy. If you want more about technological evolution in everyday things, the Zipper [barnesandnoble.com] is also good.
    The sad fact of the matter is that the vast majority of pencils come from overseas, which in turn comes from a rainforest. The culture of ecological sensitivity is just not present in someplace like China. Unless it says that it comes from a renewable source on the box, it is tropical wood. Worse, they are alot cheaper than an eco pencil (thats the way it is with any natural resource until it's gone). You may think that it doesn't matter because the amount of wood in a single pencil is small, but the amount of wood that is used to supply the 2 billion pencils we use each year is staggerring.
    I myself am partial to the old-tech fountain pen with all its messy implications. Because that's what the nuns taught me to write with, as ballpoints weren't "proper" (don't laugh too hard - the fountain pen does produce a nicer line).
    I am continually amazed by the constant improvements in everyday 'low tech' things. There was a day that you needed to use a tool to take off a bottlecap. Somewhere along the way the rifinement was made so that they could be screwed off. Same with the pull top on aluminum cans. The pull top used to litter the landscape, until it was improved with a tab. See Scientific American September 1994 for an excellent article on the aluminum beverage container.
    The best 'tech' is not 'high tech' or 'low tech', but 'usability tech'. Technology should not be seen as a means to an end, but as a tool to make lives better.
  • I can remember my mom buying the ultra-cheap recycled newspaper pencils for me when I was in High School. Man did those things suck. Not only did they not sharpen well, the graphite would constantly break because the pencils were so flexible -- you could bend a new pencil almost 90 degrees before it would break, but also once they WERE sharpened, the outer layer of the pencil, made of newspaper wouldn't offer enough support for the 'lead', which tended to lead to tip-breaking, and more sharpening.

    Stupid tree huggers.
  • Wolfram? That must be the secret to the still functional 1910 bulbs. As far as I know, modern lightbulbs use tungsten filaments.
  • "Wolfram" is an earlier name for tungsten [msn.com].
    __

  • Those old light bulbs are still working because they don't operate as bright. Put a modern light bulb on a dimmer set to just barely glow and it will last 100 years too. (assuming no earthquakes or other outside forces)

  • Plastic cork is not evil. Wine producers have been wanting to switch to plastic corks (or even screw-on caps) for years, because it eliminates problems with things like TCA (and other impurities) leaching into the wine from the cork. The only reason they haven't been able to is because of the perception amongst win fanatics that 'cork is used for good wine.'

    Cork was originally selected as a 'best-available' option to stop up the top of a glass bottle - what else would you use? Now that plastics are available, they preserve the flavours in the wine much more effectively. Cork can taint the wine, or allow other impurities to seep in.
  • The material that most pencils are made of is still, basically, wood. But it is wood ground to a powder, and then rebonded with a polymer into the desired shape. It saves an immense amout of wood, as the polymer is a thermoplastic! and thus the wood goo can be reworked (and you dont throw away the scraps of the distribution process.

    Translation: Heat a modern pencil, Tie it into knots. It works.

    -- Crutcher --
    #include <disclaimer.h>
  • Yeah, there were the particle-board pencils (that's what we called 'em - very solid, but didn't sharpen as well as 'real' ones), funky rubberish pencils (no good for anything... pencilwars, writing, sharpening... they just sucked). There was a superior pencil, of course... the Dixon Ticonderoga - real wood, a good thwacka sound, good leads, erasers that didn't just smear the lead and leave an orange/red mark on the paper... those were pencils.

    --
  • The Dixon Ticonderogas alway won these for us... of course, you had to hit and defend with the wood grain oriented properly - you could almost never lose that way. Same as a baseball bat... one way will hit the ball 400 feet, the other... 40 feet, and the rest of the bat will fly further than the ball. I had one pencil (Dixon Tico #4) that won something like 30 straight games... of course, you never recover from that first loss.....
    --
  • I believe the `halogen' lights keep a special gas at a lower pressure that lets it evaporate but then redeposits it back onto the filament.

    That's right, they have a halogen gas. Halogens are the column one (? ) from the right edge of the periodic table (I don't have one in front of me)- flourine, chlorine, iodine, etc.

    I don't know about their efficiency, but the gas lets you run the filament much hotter, so you get a brighter, whiter light out of them. In really powerful halogen bulbs (eg. the ones in theatre lights), the glass will get so hot it will expand to a couple of times its 'cool' size. You have to be careful seating those, because if the glass expands and then hits something cool, boom.

    The only thing I know of that's hotter & brighter than that is a sodium lamp, which is basically an arc welder with some lenses in front of it. Those suckers will give you a sunburn if you're not careful.

  • Dixon's also taste the best... fake wood pencils don't have the fiber/flavor and the sawdust ones just leave little bits of wood all over the place...
  • The Portugese cork oak plantations are indeed fantastically beautiful, and numerous species of European bird life cannot, in fact, find another business.
  • This is the only place I've found online that has DC-DC Power Supplies, AT and ATX in various wattages, prices vary from around 100-200 USD.

    Keypower DC to DC Power Supply [keypower.com]

    I plan on using these things for my off grid (solar and wind) powered computers and any car boxes I build. Have fun!
  • Yes, but the harder the lead, the fainter the line drawn with the pencil. (that's why you have to use #2 pencils for exams and such -- harder lead is too light to be picked up by the ScanTron machine)
  • It's probably a CAN network, not a token ring network. CAN (Controller area network) networks are strange and cool. The packet headers describe the content, (e.g. battery voltage is ...), and there are no addresses. The interface chips are tiny and cheap, and made to talk to minimal microcontrollers. Packets are short 29 (or 11 in old versions) bits of header and 0-8 bytes of data. The network is supposed to work, albeit at reduced data rates, if either of the two wires is open or shorted to v+ or ground.
  • I plan on using these things for my off grid (solar and wind) powered computers and any car boxes I build.

    Does Solar power provide enough juice to run a computer? I guess it should be able to drive a lap top like device, but not anything bigger for an extended period of time?

    I'd be very interested if you have a website for anything you are doing (esp solar power)

    Have fun!

    Always do :)

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