A Crummy Commercial

yesterday Blogger wasn't allowing pictures to be uploaded but today OK,  weird but true I've mentioned the sleep inducing power of the PBS show: NOVA several times, here is one: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/01/it-happened-again.html But I just found out that this wiki list of NOVA episodes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nova_episodes has hyperlinks to some of the episodes on Archive.org, neat !  Unfortunately they aren't all there, for example Skydive To The Rainforest mentioned here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/04/nova-skydive-to-rainforest.html Luckily Skydive To The Rainforest is on Youtube :) Recently I was looking for a NOVA episode on how training for sports affects the human body.  In the episode an MLB pitcher is x-rayed to show how throwing a baseball has affected his arm - I *think* it was Don Sutton who played for the Milwaukee Brewers for a few seasons including the World Series against the Cardinals.  Search engines are useless for ...

I have heard of this sonification concept before - I *think* it was on NOVA  which mentioned using musical notes to scan for errant DNA pairs ?      This article/interview in IEEE Spectrum mentions landline Morse code and how it transitioned from inked characters (tele-GRAPH, distance writing, get it ?) to the clicks/clacks of a sounder: https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-sonification-stephen-roddy Here is the reference:  (Blogger isn't allowing photo uploads today for some reason)   Then in the mid-19th century, telegraph registers [printers that receive incoming Morse code messages] started out by recording received “dots” and “dashes” as indentations on moving paper tapes. Reading the printed data was slow and challenging work, so skilled operators quickly learned to identify the distinctive rhythmic clicking sounds produced by the registers. By the 1850s, the telegraph registers were replaced with sounders. These devices amplified the rhythmic clicks into...

source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qPLEPfYlNE The magazine itself:  https://archive.org/details/Space_Science_Fiction_v01n01_1952-05_cape1736 Incidentally, I noticed that Mann's Store no longer sells newspapers or magazines.   Sometime fairly recently (a year or so ?) the store was cut off by the supplier - not enough sales to justify the account.  So I can't even report on what magazines sell for these days.  Here's the inflated price of Space Science Fiction : And in the style of the OTR radio shows like The Whistler there is a twist at the end of Youth :) This story appeared in the first issue of  Space Science Fiction,  the wiki:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Raymond_science_fiction_magazines Space Science Fiction didn't have a long run but the stories were pretty decent.  BTW, it's a good thing this person has a cape and gloves, otherwise she might feel COLD  :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham....

 I took a required engineering design class in college - one thing they gave us was a deck of cards (about the size of the chance cards in Monopoly ).  The cards provided suggestions on designing a product - I remember one of those cards said something like:  Make it smaller - that is what Xteink did with their e-readers: about the size of a credit card I saw the Xteink X3 mini ebook reader reviewed in The Atlantic : https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/xteink-e-reader-best-technology-years/688539/ the Xteink X3 page:     https://www.xteink.com/products/xteink-x3 Incidentally I have actually read the book mentioned in The Atlantic  review, The Power Broker - in hardcover - I have it around here somewhere, I remember the cover picture of Robert Moses standing on a beam: from the 1930s to the 1960s Robert Moses was hot stuff in New York The Power Broker is a really interesting book.  But I always wondered: how did author Caro know that R...

It's Labor Day, NFL football starts on Wednesday 2026-09-09.  So I thought this video was interesting: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hrtkYKlbn8   The Super Bowl name started as a placeholder ?  Who knew ?  Inspired by a Wham-o product called the Super Ball. I *think* I had a Super Ball but lost it quickly.  I seem to remember that they developed cracks after a while anyway.  One thing I remember is if they were spun the Super Ball would bounce back and forth.  Fun for a brief while.  I think they were more suited to the city than suburbs - you need nice level pavement away from houses. I wonder if Wham-o ever tried making golf balls with a Super Ball inside ?   Of course: Yuck, not only printed in USA but also stained there :) source:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/157434233831 $89.99 plus $10.95 postage, just a little out of my price range !  Also, not a "legal" ball. That brings up the old:  "there's acid in ...

There was this guy: in 1939 everyone in the USA knew what this guy was about source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley Yes, old Doc Brinkley - he sold potions and treatments over the radio to cure: EVERYTHING !  Eventually he moved his station to Mexico where he could boom his disinfomercials over all of the USA.  And he did advocate goat glands for restoring virility, yikes ! But then there was this (I think I heard Norman Gilliland point out the Doc Brinkley reference on the discontinued  Old Time Radio Drama  program on Wisconsin Public Radio): https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Jack_Benny_Singles_1939-1940/JB+1939-11-19+Mary's+Thanksgiving+Poem.mp3 1939 was Dennis Day's first season on the program taking over the singer/stooge role after Kenny Baker left.  At about 8:20 Dennis is about to sing when Mary interjects an amazing line: Jack:     Oh Dennis ! Dennis:  Yes, please ? Jack:    How about a song before we get inv...

The Questor Tapes popped up - I really can't remember if I ever saw it before or not.  It was a TV movie, essentially a pilot for a TV series which didn't sell ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Questor_Tapes The tape on Archive is from January 23, 1974 - a Wednesday night ?  So maybe I was hard at work studying for my freshman electrical engineering classes ?  (yeah, right :) https://archive.org/details/questor-tapes-1-23-74 The video quality is strictly Beta or VHS although watchable.  But it reminded me of the Demon With a Glass Hand episode of The Outer Limits , mentioned previously here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/11/youtube-stuck-in-its-thumb-and-drew.html Both shows featured robots who didn't quite understand what their purpose was, at least at the start.   "Through all the legends of ancient peoples – Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerican [sic], Semitic – runs the saga of the Eternal Man, the one who never dies, called by various names in various...