Technology for Luddites
“Designed primarily for weighing letters in order to determine postage, this non-digital, non-electronic, and barely even mechanical little gizmo is nonetheless accurate enough that its use has been approved by the US Postal Service. Besides its role as a letter-weigher, the ‘Personal Post Office Scale’ has reportedly also found use in fields such as home brewing, field biology, cooking, and police work.” Read more / Order. Thanks, Rasmus.
“Los Angeles will be a smokeless and sootless city, clean pure. It will be made so by all the power and heating plants being supplied with power and heat from the ocean waves by the Starr Wave Motor.”
Read more: three inventors who tried to bottle the ocean’s power. Hat tip to Klaas Van Gorp.
Moonmilk.com has, among other things, a great collection of extremely low-tech (and rather unconventional) electronic and acoustic musical instruments online. Most are built from scrap materials. Particularly geeky (and comparatively sophisticated) is the pixelated violin, which comes with building plans. Via WeWasteTime.
“If there is one thing that distinguishes the place I grew up from the place I live now, it would be not the yards and fields themselves, but the boundaries. If you grew up in the USA as I did, you were likely surrounded by chain-link fences — waist-high around our back yards and two or three times higher around our institutions, giving every kindergarten and churchyard a distinctive penal look.
Of course the steel chains were not edible, nor did they grow thicker and stronger over time. The fences did not spread shade over your land in the summer sun, nor thin out in winter to let in precious light. The chain mail did not make the soil more fertile, nor protect it from being washed away by the rain. The wires did not offer a home to wildlife, and their manufacture burned more carbon into the atmosphere rather than removing it. Here in Ireland, surrounded by hedgerows that stretch to the horizon on all sides, we see how unnecessary it all was.” Read more: Laying hedgerows.
“Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storages, which are vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and to societal changes. In Finland the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels – that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous.
Once the waste has been deposited and the repository is full, the facility is to be sealed off and never opened again. Or so we hope, but can we ensure that? And how is it possible to warn our descendants of the deadly waste we left behind? How do we prevent them from thinking they have found the pyramids of our time, mystical burial grounds, hidden treasures? Which languages and signs will they understand? And if they understand, will they respect our instructions? While gigantic monster machines dig deeper and deeper into the dark, experts above ground strive to find solutions to this crucially important radioactive waste issue to secure mankind and all species on planet Earth now and in the near and very distant future.”
“This carefully produced downloadable and printable net file represents an iconic Hasselblad camera as a low impact and functional product that is available to all as an A4 sized, 8 page PDF. The camera takes 35mm film and takes 12-14 images per roll.”
Via Lloyd Alter (and others). Previously: The pinhole camera: low-tech photography
