Tag: inventions

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Moderately hard winds moaned and grumbled through the neighborhood last night. Toward eleven, I was in the kitchen when I heard a noise. It sounded like the heater could be on but it was coming from the wrong direction, or that a faucet was running, but again, no faucets where the sound seemed to be. I walked around to localize the sound only to realize, it’s a hard rain drumming on the roof outside the vaulted ceiling in the great room. It’s so rare that we have heavy rain, I didn’t recognize its sound.

Wind and rain went on throughout the night. Nice to have rain but we need snow. I can’t believe that we’re at the end of 2022 and we still don’t have weather control. The mind reels with unintended consequences which we might be dealing with now if we did have it. Weather control was always one of my favorite science fiction ideas as a child, along with space travel, teleportation, exploring other planets, and ‘time travel’. We have none of that yet. Even flying cars have evaded us. I think it’s because extraterrestrials got in among us and have sabotaged our efforts because they don’t want us advancing, but that’s just me.

Doesn’t feel like winter outside, probably because there’s no snow and ice, not even any on the surrounding mountains. It’s all sunshine and blue sky today. The temperature is 48 F and the grass is as green as late spring. Our high temperature will be just three degrees higher, but still, this is December’s end in the northern lats. Where is the cold stuff of last week? To be fair, this is around our average high. Lows usually touch the lower thirties, though. We wouldn’t mind some of the cyclone bomb snow obliterating a lot of the U.S., although cyclone bomb sounds like a bath thing. If we had that weather control, maybe we could protect others and save ourselves from drought. Instead, we’re dithering with social media.

The sun’s influence arrived with a full blaze at 7:39, just two hours ago. Sun fall will begin about seven hours later from now, if I’m doing the math right, which is very iffy. I haven’t had any coffee.

Hearing that rain last night and thinking about how hard it was falling brought out a Dylan tune called “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. The song came out in 1963 but I didn’t get familiar with it until after “Tangled Up in Blue” came out in 1975. Dylan wasn’t played much on the AM radio which I listened to in the late sixties and early seventies. It wasn’t until Tangled came out and I was stationed in the Philippines that I went searching for more Dylan and discovered his earlier stuff. I was twenty then, and became engrossed with his lyrics and style, so I bought a few album, listening to them as I painted and drew when I was off duty and not partying or exercising. I deem “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” today’s theme music. Mentioning that, the state up north and east of us is worried about this rain, because it’s going to melt the snow, opening a can of problems with flooding.

It’s Tuesday, December 27, 2022. Go have yourself a ball. I’m going to have coffee. Here’s Dylan’s somber song. Cheers

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Paper

White petals blushing with pink had drifted into piles. Snowflake sized, you wouldn’t think they’d do much, but like snow (and rain), pour enough into a place or a moment, and you start to have something. Add precipitation and time; let sit.

The rain had finally ceased. I’m not one to do yard work in the rain unless it’s critical (what could possibly be critical enough for me to do it in the rain?) so here I was, laboring against a chilly wind. Milky sunshine, lacking any sunshine, made sunglasses a necessity.

I’d had a vision: get out my blower/mulcher and rid my yard of the browning petals, part of the general cleanup. The petals had decided they liked it there. Bunching together and flattening out to endure the rain, they’d developed thick, communal layers. As I pried them off the driveway along the lawn, I found they’d turned into paper.

Nature’s paper. Dizzy implications struck. Something like this had probably been a prompt to paper’s invention. With time, heating, and more pressing, something like the petal paper could be done on a large scale. I gazed back into my imaginary past where people gathered to consider this petal paper and began thinking about what to do with this new stuff. Why, they could write on it with some berry juice.

The petals only come around once a year. What else could be used? I imagined them foraging and collecting new materials, processing and testing them, scaling up their new invention.

Temptations arose: I could treat these petals and try to develop paper. It could be an interesting experience.

Laziness prevailed. I returned to the yard work. After all, paper had already been invented.

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The Medical Device Dream

I dreamed I was a young medical device inventor. I was at a trade show, displaying and explaining the device. It was a small show, standard place of booths, tables, and displays in a hotel ballroom, but sparsely attended. It was the last day and I was very upbeat.

Looking for backers and investors, I was demonstrating my device. In retrospect, it reminds me of devices like Star Trek‘s tricorder. There were differences. Running my device over a person created a three-dimensional full-color model of their body. Nerves, muscles, bones, blood vessels…everything was faithfully displayed. Everyone seeing it responded with enthusiasm and amazement.

But the neat part was that my device could be used for cardiovascular procedures. I demonstrated that after creating the model, it became an active, functioning replication of the scanned body. Using entrance through a femoral artery with a standard introducer, a small drone could be deployed into the bloodstream.

Yes, it was a tiny ship, just like the one they miniaturized in Fantastic Voyage (1966). (BTW, can someone please consider remaking Fantastic Voyage? Everything else is being remade. I think we can reboot that puppy with modern CGI, and then create a television series and a franchise. You’re welcome.)

Except, my ship wasn’t manned by Stephen Boyd, Donald Pleasence, Raquel Welch, and the rest. Instead, the cardiovascular team use the ship’s devices via wireless virtual reality goggles to open occlusions, scale down plaque and fat, and fix valves and dead spots. While I mention cardiovascular, my ship is small enough that it can also navigate, clean, and repair the peripheral vasculature, including the cerebral vasculature and the renal and carotid arteries, without blocking the blood flow.

Pretty damn fine invention, isn’t it?

No wonder I was so pleased in the dream.

The  medical trade show ended. I was going to return with some friends to my room and then have dinner. But, to get into my room required me to use a combination lock. I’d set it earlier. Now I struggled to remember it. Taking some time, I recalled that I’d used twenty-three as the starting point, and then remembered that I’d gone two up and two back.

Success. I entered my room, pleased with my device and the show, which was now ended.

Dream ended.

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Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, ARPANET. Without you, we would be lacking the Internet.

Some will whisper, this is an anniversary, not a birthday. Maybe they’ll make such a remark on the Internet.

Few realize how long people worked on ARPANET and its principles and processes and what its success actually represents. Like Philo Farnsworth and other inventors, their work is used but rarely remembered and celebrated. Most ARPANET and early Internet pioneers worked in teams. They’re remembered but no celebrated but they had some nifty ideas. Their accomplishments helped drive Internet development. Without them, we’d not have bloggers sharing opinions, dreams, hopes, frustrations and cat photos and videos, and complaining about government, politics, manners and movies. WordPress would probably be a lot smaller and less successful.

Where would Amazon and eBay be without the Internet? What would Facebook be without an Internet?

Seriously, take a moment to imagine a Facebook without an Internet and the web.

I need not add the rhetorical amendment asking where the rest of us would be and what we would be doing, but I kinda did.

Going back to my early Internet and computer learning reminds me minicomputers once roamed the electronic frontier. Remember the Burroughs Corporation?

Sure, some remember. Some also remember the Nash Rambler.

Such is the case with inventors, engineers and their work. Their ingenuity shapes our lives but we remember few of them. As always, the winners shape the marketing we refer to as history.

Ah, it’s all ancient history, way back, like a long time ago. Here we are, on the Internet, clicking, scrolling, and googling away the morning.

Happy New Year.

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