1 June 2006
Nicole plays her sax at the Unity Bar.
1 June 2006
Nicole plays her sax at the Unity Bar.
3 June 2006
A guy with a tall bicycle at Place du Châtelet.
Why is here there?
6 June 2006
It's time for Vélorution!
3 June 2006
We came to a traffic circle and rode around and around and around it, while cops blocked traffic for us and we all dinged our bells and honked our bike horns.
This is possibly even more fun that you might imagine.
3 June 2006
You say you want a vélorution, well you know. We all want to change the world.
3 June 2006
Here's a nice place to stop.
3 June 2006
Here's a place with some traffic. Let's block it!
3 June 2006
Taking up all lanes of traffic on the Champs Elysées
3 June 2006
Protesting in front of the building which holds the automobile industry association
3 June 2006
Protesting in front of the building which holds the automobile industry association
3 June 2006
Nicole listens to the anti-car speech.
6 June 2006
Riding towards the Place de la Concorde
3 June 2006
Nicole and vélorution biking along the Seine
3 May 2006
And then we really were in traffic (which we weren't blocking) and so I had to stop taking pictures.
6 June 2006
A musical instrument called a mono cord. I think the string is struck along nodal points which create the desired tone (and presumable, also it's inverse)
It's the Museum of Arts et Metiers in Paris
6 June 2006
Cray supercomputer
I don't know if it's faster or slower than my laptop (it certainly uses more electricity and is somewhat less gigable) however, I still want one.
At the Museum of Arts et Metiers in Paris
6 June 2006
This type writer is from like 1901 or something and clearly predates the invention of the shift key. Note that even on this very early typewriter, the a and q keys are transposed, although all the rest of the letters (z,x, m, etc) seem to the in the right places. French keyboards are screwed up and the q-a problem appears to back to the very beginning although other issues seems to have arisen later.
This makes me wonder if perhaps the Americans moved the Q & A for some reason. A is the only vowel on a home key and since (apparently) they keyboard was made to suck to slow down typists, one would expect to have the Q & A in the French locations rather than the American ones.
This type writer is in the Museum of Arts and Industry in Paris (Musée des Arts et Metier)
6 May 2006
"Le Celeste"
This cylinder recorder is called "le Celeste," thus demonstrating the superiority of things named Celeste in making musical sounds (and also the masculinity of same).
I think the little bell on the left might be because this records as well as plays back, or perhaps it's an early tweeter.
At the Musée des Arts et Metiers in Paris
6 June 2006
Early stereo DJ gear??
I cannot explain what this is, however, aside from the two bells seeming to indicate stereo, each needle has an air tube coming off each side. In "modern" records, this is how stereo is inscribed, such that the left channel is on one side of the groove and the right channel on the other. So is it stereo?
This also has a pressure gauge, which implies the needles are kept pressurized. This suggests that perhaps this was for cutting records? I think that mono-era records actually did have stereo, but with the expectation that it would be summed by the amp, thus resulting in haphazard stereoization which tended to sound silly when actually played in stereo and that's why old stereos have "mono" switches on them.
I would think the two platters implies duplication, but records are usually pressed, rather than duplicated sequentially, although who knows what they did in the beginning.
6 June 2006
An Edison phonograph. Ever wonder why pop songs tend to be about 3 minutes long? Every wonder why violinists play vibrato? You're looking at a picture of the reason.
6 June 2006
And what is this unusual musical instrument?
6 June 2006
It's a telegraph.
Let's see, we need something with keys. What kind of thing do we know that has keys? A piano. Therefore, we must want to use a piano keyboard, since that's what keyboards look like.
Technological evolution sometimes makes me suspect that my input devices are silly.
6 June 2006
Another telegraph machine that did the encoding for the operator.
6 June 2006
With a silly keyboard
6 June 2006
Speaking of silly keyboards, this TI-99/4A (which at least has the letters in the right place) pre-dated the delete key. What did you do if you mistypes a line? You re-typed it. They all started with line numbers anyway.
I always though that the TI/4A was the first computer with a delete key, but that must have been a later model. Why they display the one withOUT the important innovation, I can't say.
The slightly later model that had delete was my first computer. I used to write extremely simple-minded BASIC programs on it.
The white strip over the keys is removable and is designed to be written on. The computer took cartridges and had no nonvolatile storage devices (read: no disks, no floppies, no way to save). I used to just leave it turned on, but for my dad, who was a more serious programmer, the solution offered was a modem-type port to which you could hook up a tape recorder. The extremely slow-baud modem would thus write casette tapes.
My dad used to listen to them to make sure they encoded the data. For some reason, when he did this, he turned the volume ALL the way up. The screeches and buzzes and strange noises were AUFUL to my second grade ears, but now, man, I would love to have those tapes.
Maybe the Musée des Arts et Metiers will let me save some BASIC programs.
6 May 2006
No Paris attraction is complete without a scale model of the Statue of Liberty.
Apparently, the making of the statue included some major technology and technological advances.
6 June 2006
Part of the Museum of Arts et Metiers is in an old church. Near the top of this picture, you can see images of two women. One represents industry and the other agriculture.
In the center of the transept where normally there would be an altar, there is instead a demonstration of Foucault's Pendulum.
This may signify something deep.
6 June 2006
Valves are actually a fairly recent invention (1830's) and revolutionized brass-type instruments. This is a cutout of a trumpet, showing the air paths through the instrument and through the valves.
Before valves, people played trombones, natural trumpets like the cornetto or the serpent and french horns, which they changed the pitch of by moving their fist deeper into the bell. Or they played the overtone series on a brass trumpet.
8 June 2006
Solène practices playing two recorders at the same time.
