Websites that are like Museums

More at lileks.com





I love these public collections! Please leave links to your favorites in the comments, and if you want to make them "clickable," the code is here: http://sandradodd.com/hotlink

Corn Bags and Kirschsteinkissen

About fifteen years ago, our friend Bela gave us two lumpy flannel pillows. Turns out they were "corn bags." They were like big bean bags filled with seed corn (whole corn), intended for heating in the microwave and using as hand warmers or footwarmers, sitting around on a winter's evening, or putting in the bed to warm it up. When those wore out, I made more, using terrycloth from towels. They're wonderful.

These are about 10" a side, and are based on the size of the piece of terrycloth, and not being too big to hold or to put in the microwave easily. If you want to make one, buy seed corn and put in enough for it to be a solid layer of corn when the bag's on its side, and to fill the bag half or less when it's held by the corner.


This morning, Keith sent me a link to a blog entry on medieval bed-warming techniques, and one of the things was a bag of cherry pits heated in a low oven. Bed warmers puzzle & answers

That led me to an image search, because it said the cherry-pit bags are becoming popular again:



Once when we were in Minneapolis (Keith was working on a contract, and living in an apartment) Holly was cold, and we hadn't brought a corn bag. I put rice into one of Keith's white cotton socks and put an overhand knot in the top. That worked, and so Keith kept it for future visits. We still have it, somewhere. Corn stays warm longer, though, and when the corn is new there's humidity with it too. I suppose cherry pits were good because the heat would last a while and heat up without destroying the seed (in those pre-microwave days of yore).

The blog is worth saving and exploring.
Old & Interesting, history of domestic paraphernalia, household antiques in use.

Antique household equipment, furnishings, utensils - housekeeping as part of social history. Domestic life, household management - how people organised their homes and did the daily chores. Yesterday's everyday objects are today's antiques or museum pieces, and we may view them with nostalgia or curiosity about past ways of life. Old & Interesting takes a look at how these everyday things were actually used, how people managed their home life - and more. Alongside articles illustrated by excerpts from advice manuals, period novels and other literature, this page is updated every couple of weeks. RSS feed or email will let you know about new articles.

Building a 19th Century Computer

An English mathematician named Charles Babbage conceived and designed a mechanical calculator in the 1820s and halfway through the production of the parts, a disagreement halted the project.

From the article at Smithsonian.com:

The plans looked good on paper, but Babbage was never able to build his machine. More than a century after his death in 1871, computer historians blew the dust off his 5,000 pages of notes and drawings and wondered if his ideas could work. In 1991, on the bicentennial of Babbage’s birth, the Science Museum in London unveiled his Difference Engine No. 2, a fully functioning calculating machine, built to the specs of the inventor’s drawings. A full-scale clone of that machine is now on display in Mountain View, California, at the Computer History Museum through December 2009.

There's a video there you can watch. Very interesting.
(Smithsonian article)
There's one in London, and the one in California, and I think those are the only two.

The Science Museum in London says this on their site:

Difference Engine No 2 designed from 1847-1849 by British computing pioneer Charles Babbage (1791-1871), which excludes printing mechanism. Size 2.1m high, 3.4m long, 0.5m wide. The engine was built by the Science Museum and the main part was completed in June 1991 for the bicentennial year of Babbage's birth. The printing mechanism was completed in 2000. Doron Swade, senior curator of computing and IT, oversaw its construction. Babbage conceived the engine to calculate a series of numerical values and automatically print the results. Difference Engine No 2 was never constructed in his lifetime.

The history of computers is fresh in my mind because of the local display at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. It's called StartUp: Albuquerque and the Personal Computer Revolution

Babbage's machine would've belonged to England, or something, if it had been finished, so I'm not suggesting it's "a personal computer," though if you read those articles, it seems that one of the two is owned by an individual.

Horses, houses with names, connections

This photo arrived yesterday in part of an illustration of why a certain home/property in England is called "Longfields." When Cathy, in Hampshire, ordered a copy of Moving a Puddle and some Thinking Sticks, I included a comment that I loved the name of her house and so she sent photos of the fields, and the five horses they have.

The day this arrived, the Lyrics Game word was horse. I had fully planned to add this image there then, but the day overwhelmed me and I didn't get to it. I wanted to make a bigger deal of the fact that the day after I had done an image search for good horse photos, this came and it's better than all of them. And these horses are owned by a family which now has a set of Thinking Sticks. I'm going to England this summer. I'm half thinking of asking for an invitation to visit, and half afraid if I add more visits I'll just never come home.

Longfields, named because, well... the fields stretch out a long way behind the house.

Tiny Houses

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/
http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/testimonials/

Snap, Crackle, Pop

Snap, what a happy sound Snap is the happiest sound I've found You may clap, rap, tap, slap, but Snap makes the world go round Snap, crackle, pop – Rice Krispies!

I say it's Crackle, the crispy sound You gotta have Crackle or the clock's not wound Geese cackle, feathers tickle, belts buckle, beets pickle, but Crackle makes the world go round Snap, crackle, pop – Rice Krispies!

I insist that Pop's the sound The best is missed unless Pop's around You can't stop hoppin' when the cereal's poppin' Pop makes the world go round Snap, crackle, pop – Rice Krispies!

Tools

this came around by e-mail, from the best man at our wedding nearly 25 years ago, to Keith, to me.Wait... the e-mail didn't come 25 years ago; the wedding did. The e-mail came recently. DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the room, denting the freshly-painted project which you had carefully set in the corner where nothing could get to it. WIRE WHEEL: Cleans paint off bolts and then throws them somewhere under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes fingerprints and hard-earned calluses from fingers in about the time it takes you to say, 'Oh sh -- ' ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for spinning pop rivets in their holes until you die of old age. SKILL SAW: A portable cutting tool used to make studs too short. PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads. Sometimes used in the creation of blood-blisters. BELT SANDER: An electric sanding tool commonly used to convert minor touch-up jobs into major refinishing jobs. HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes. VISE-GRIPS: Generally used after pliers to completely round off bolt heads. If nothing else is available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to the palm of your hand. OXYACETYLENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for lighting various flammable objects in your shop on fire. Also handy for igniting the grease inside the wheel hub out of which you want to remove a bearing race. TABLE SAW: A large stationary power tool commonly used to launch wood projectiles for testing wall integrity. HYDRAULIC FLOOR JACK: Used for lowering an automobile to the ground after you have installed your new brake shoes, trapping the jack handle firmly under the bumper. BAND SAW: A large stationary power saw primarily used by most shops to cut good aluminum sheet into smaller pieces that more easily fit into the trash can after you cut on the inside of the line instead of the outside edge. TWO-TON ENGINE HOIST: A tool for testing the maximum tensile strength of everything you forgot to disconnect. PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Normally used to stab the vacuum seals under lids or for opening old-style paper-and-tin oil cans and splashing oil on your shirt; but can also be used, as the name implies, to strip out Phillips screw heads. STRAIGHT SCREWDRIVER: A tool for opening paint cans. Sometimes used to convert common slotted screws into non-removable screws and butchering your palms. PRY BAR: A tool used to crumple the metal surrounding that clip or bracket you needed to remove in order to replace a 50 cent part. HOSE CUTTER: A tool used to make hoses too short. HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer nowadays is used as a kind of divining rod to locate the most expensive parts adjacent the object we are trying to hit. UTILITY KNIFE: Used to open and slice through the contents of cardboard cartons delivered to your front door; works particularly well on contents such as seats, vinyl records, liquids in plastic bottles, collector magazines, refund checks, and rubber or plastic parts. Especially useful for slicing work clothes, but only while in use. DAMM-IT TOOL: Any handy tool that you grab and throw across the garage while yelling 'DAMM-IT' at the top of your lungs. It is also, most often, the next tool that you will need.

Keith bought a new hand axe lately. An Estwing hatchet. It has a leather-wrapped handle. It's heavier than the one he bought me twelve years ago, when we moved into this house. Mine has some kind of soft plastic over the handle, but the steel is all one piece, on both cases. A few years ago for Christmas I got him an Estwing 3/4 axe. We use these tools quite a bit, splitting wood for the fireplace and hot tub, cleaning little branches off of wood we want to use, or stripping the giant reed grass that grows in our yard so we can use the lengths of it as poles for various things.

Here's a professional artist's portrait of the model Keith just bought:


We used to have a poster of these concepts up on the wall when Kirby was little:

Lever
Wheel and axle
Pulley
Inclined plane
Wedge
Screw

When I tried to look up the list, I couldn't find it. I was looking for Greek and tool, but if I'd looked for Renaissance and machine I would have found them.

I called Keith to see if he could help. I was saying "incline, wedge, lever," and I said "I think there are six of them."

Keith said "screw," and I said a screw was an inclined plane in a spiral, but he said no, it was separate. So I believed him, kind of, and he told me about an article he had just read about the way the thinking and skills of younger people (tech natives) has changed. We talked about that a while, and then got off the phone.

I googled a bit more and then thought IF I were going to actually get up and look, I wouldn't look for that poster. I don't remember if it was rolled or folded or one of the heavy flat ones from Colborn's, a long-out-of-business educational supply house from which we used to get things like tempera, games, Dover coloring books, and single crayons. So I thought the place to look, in our fairly-vast home library would be an older encyclopedia. Yes! So I went to Wikipedia and found this, as a link from tool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_machine

So those are not about tools, but about "machines." Yet an axe is a wedge, used all of a sudden.

This is all plenty exciting to me, because I'm easily amused and I love these little hunts and connections, but honestly, the definition of "tool" and the concept has expanded since I was a kid and was told to memorize what a tool was. When I was a kid, humans used tools and that made us human, but that's no longer "the truth." Chimpanzees can use a leaf as a sponge to gather water out of a hole. They will lick a stick and put it down a hole to collect insects (termites? ants? I don't know what). They will move things to climb up on to get something they can't reach.

Marty says he thinks maybe elephants will pick up a stick to knock something down that's higher than their trunks. If they haven't, they should.

So what, these days, are "tools"? My computer? Google? Wikipedia? Blogger.com? My new glasses? That electric teakettle I'm about to go and heat water with?

We talk about parenting tools, and people adding to their toolboxes, and those are all in the realm of thought (and action proceeding from thought, but without physical tools).

I'll add pictures of my own little hatchet/handaxe...

Those are the two places it lives, by the fireplace or near the woodpile for the hot tub. I've had it for twelve years now.

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UPDATE, May 7, 2009:
Click the image to see an article Deb Cunefare sent on designer axes: