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Don't knock Nat Geo, it is one of the best periodicals around. Recall the recent awareness around plastic straws? That was Nat Geo.

The two issues I hold dear are:
1982 - The Chip/Silicon Valley - Awesome article about the coming of the modern microprocessor and the rise of San Jose/Silicon Valley. Interviews with Steve Jobs, Marvin Minsky, and many others:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com...
1969 - Landing on the Moon

This is not a recent development. Pluto's claim to planetary status has been doubtful since shortly after its discovery. Here's an article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... that ends with the quote...
> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid, rather than the smallest
> planet; and it may be necessary to look farther for unknown planets.

In a way, it's very similar to the story of Ceres. A pint-sized "planet" was discovered, and proclaimed to be a planet. Then another one, and another one, etc etc. Eventually it became ridiculous According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> As of 20 September 2013, the LINEAR system alone has discovered 138,393 asteroids.

Asteroids long ago stopped being called "planets".

Similarly, when Pluto was first discovered, it was called a "planet", but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> In 1992, Albion was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO)
> since Pluto and Charon. Since its discovery, the number of known
> KBOs has increased to over a thousand, and more than 100,000
> KBOs over 100 km (62 mi) in diameter are thought to exist.

Again, you're looking at a gazillion "pint-size-planets" in similar orbits. You don't really expect kids to memorize a thousand plus planets in science class. And if you insist on forcing Pluto in, why not Eris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which is more massive than Pluto, even though Pluto is larger in size? And if you include Eris, then what about the slightly smaller ones like Quaoar and Sedna? And slightly smaller ones than them? You have to "draw a line in the sand" somewhere, or else you'll be calling every pea-sized fragement in orbit around the sun, a "planet".

> it is a good thing for pluto's sake that public schools have no money
> for new textbooks, the ones here are from the 90s at best when pluto
> was still a respected ninth planet of our little corner of the universe.

Actually, Pluto's "planetary status" has been suspect since just after its discovery. Here's an article featuring a snippet from 1934 (YES!)... http://blog.modernmechanix.com...

> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid, rather than the smallest
> planet; and it may be necessary to look farther for unknown planets.

> The only "good" reason I could think of is that they wanted to retain the
> formula "Rocky planets inside, gassy planets outside" and Pluto kinda messed
> with this. But with Pluto no longer being a planet, the order is restored.

When Ceres was discovered, it was originally called a "planet". More and more bodies were discovered in a similar orbit. Rather than having thousands of "planets", the definition changed to make Ceres and friends "asteroids".

Fast-forward a century or two. Uranus' orbit was not as predicted for a 7-planet solar system. Mathematicians scrawled away with their pencils, and astronomers found an 8th planet, Neptune. This was a major triumph for Newton's Law of Gravity.

Neptune's mass was estimated, but after a while, Uranus and Neptune were still not orbiting exactly as predicted. Another planet hunt began, and we stumbled over Pluto, which was originally estimated to be about the size and mass of Neptune. However, even as early as 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... it became obvious that Pluto was a lot smaller/lighter. It obviously wasn't the cause of anomalies in Uranus' and Neptune's orbits. The downward revisons to Pluto's size continued. From 2600 mile diameter (1934) to 2372 km or 1474 miles (2015).

Actually there was no "Planet X perturbing Uranus' and Neptune's orbits". The original estimate for Neptune's mass was off by 1/2 of 1%. This threw the calculations off. The Voyager 2 flyby gave the correct value for Neptunes mass, which was figured out 2 or 3 years later. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co... When the corrected Neptunian mass was plugged into the gravitational equations, the "orbital anomalies" disappeared.

Anyhow, a whole bunch of similar objects have been found in the area. Just like with Ceres, it became obvious that Pluto was merely one of many. The discovery of Eris, approximately same size as Pluto, brought things to a head. There was no way of classifying Pluto as a planet, without also classifying Eris, Sedna, etc as planets. This hearkened back to "the asteroid problem" of the 1800's. Just like Ceres, Pluto was kicked out of the planet club.

Spamming is much older than ARPANET

http://blog.modernmechanix.com...

In those days bombing could solve the problem for real. But in all seriousness, this is why there are international laws about broadcasting into another country's territory. A law that Radio Free Europe conveniently ignored during the cold war.

Tried one. Honestly, it didn't work that well.

Note for pedants: Yes. I know the ad is from 1980 and that the referenced patent expired long before now. You can silently thank me for saving you from a ranting response. And by "silently", I mean without responding. Even though posting the text could be considered silent. Unless someone has a reader. Or... Never mind. Rant away.

According to the suspect's father, the bomb scare started after his 18-year-old son was arrested for trespassing, entering an abandoned warehouse and salvaging mercury switches...

That fenced-off warehouse may look abandoned, but that doesn't make it your personal salvage yard.

It's been a long time since the home chemist has been encouraged to muck around with mercury; scavenging industrial sites for mercury in any quantity makes you a "person of interest" to the police, to say the least.

Fun with Quicksilver, Unusual stunts you can do from Freakish Quicksilver 1939 and 1934, respectively.

''He's not building bombs. He does do a lot of experiments. A lot of them I don't fully understand, but I'm certain he's not making bombs,'' said the suspect's father, Allen Mason.

This is a tad less reassuring than it might be.

Induction drives are not safe enough.
This is a design using a worm drive.
If you have exprience with worm drives you know their self breaking properties make this very safe. In addition the designs I saw years back had emergency breaking systems similar to normal elevators.

Here are some more examples of software distributed on flexible records.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com...

It was a pretty good idea, considering that software was loaded from audio cassettes back in the day, and unlike a cassette, a flexible record can easily be distributed in an unpackaged magazine.

> Pluto is a planet. The definition of a planet is arbitrary, and always will be.

If you can find an astronomy textbook from the 1830's or early 1840's, it'll list 11 planets...
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Ceres (discovered 1801)
Pallas (discovered 1802)
Juno (discovered 1804)
Vesta (discovered 1807)
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus (discovered 1781)

As time went on, more and more asteroids were discovered. Today, there are a few hundred thousand asteroids. To keep the number of planets at a manageable number, the asteroids wwere given their own class. Similarly, there are now almost 1300 http://www.minorplanetcenter.n... known objects in Pluto's vicinity. If you want to think of the solar system having 1300 planets, be my guest.

Scientists occasionally make mistakes, based on incomplete data. When more info becomes available, they correct those mistakes. E.g. they junked the Aether theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... after the Michelson-Morley experiment.

There was *ALWAYS* major doubt about Pluto's planetary status. This article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... is an example.

> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid,
> rather than the smallest planet;

BTW, it's worse than the article suggested; Pluto is actually less than 1/10th the mass of Titan.

> and the dipshits who insist that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.

So you think the ancient Greeks were dipshits? And the French who introduced the metric system? The real dipshits are the people who arbitrarily change the meanings of words after thousands of years..

Before that, people had pocket transistor radios, or carried around a larger cassette player (or a even a boom box). There was apparently an unreleased invention called the Stereobelt which predated the Walkman but was unable to secure funding, and something called the Bone Fone which came out around the same time as the Walkman, but which was not successful. But overall, agreed, the Walkman was a revolutionary product.

For those wanting a visual of the bus: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/ModernMechanix/6-1930/giant_bus.jpg

The 105MHz is a bit deceptive in that this thing probably had much higher memory/IO/etc bandwidth and vector capability compared to a traditional desktop of that era running at that speed.

According to this popular mechanics article from 1982 the top 6 home computers were the IBM PC, the TSR-80, the Apple II, the Atari 800, the Commodore PET, and the TI 99/4a. The IBM PC ran at 4.77 MHz. If I recall correctly , "wait states" also played an important role-- something that Cray would have avoided.

Then again, personal computers were designed to be affordable. Minicomputers, workstations and mainframes were quite a bit faster.

30 inches or GTFO!

Actually the review is here: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-lisa-computer-system-apple-designs-a-new-kind-of-machine/

And the actual review of the Lisa on BYTE magazine: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-development-of-apples-lisa/

But are those elephant floppy disks still good, nothing forgotten?

Very probably just fine. I last booted my //e a year or so ago. Came up just fine. And yes, one of the disks was an Elephant.

EMS: An elephant never forgets.

This reminds me of the James R. Berry article from Modern Mechanix, November 1968, describing life in 2008. Interesting to see what they got right and wrong. Still missing my jetpack...

Could you tell some more of the story behind your Empire Strikes Back theater performance recording (bootleg)?
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/07/17/portable-vcrs/#comment-1058349

It made me think of the film Andromeda Strain (1969), but while googlising for a picture, I found this 1954 image from a nuclear facility.
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/tail-of-hot-suit-serves-as-entrance/
Yes, these have 'tails', but the climbing-in-through-the-back part is there.

uh, rotating cylinders generating lift? similar described in this 1925 paper? or a concept drawing in a 1950 Mechanix Illustrated?

nice engineering (if it works/flies) but nothing exceptionally new...

We're not very good at predicting the future anyway: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/qf/c/PopularMechanics/2-1950/next_fifty_years/xlg_next_fifty_years_06.jpg

Not quite what you asked for, but I imagine you'll like this.

Mac 5 melts aluminum steadily
Mac 6 melts steel

And don't forget that keeping this friction heat down also requires a good deal of power.

Exactly right. Or to look at the flipside: In the C64 era, I often heard old timers talk about "kids these days! You just bring your computer home and plug it in! If you really want to know something about computers, build it yourself, like I had to do with my Altair and my Heathkit!" If you look at Popular Science from the 1950's it isn't even talking about computers much-- just a lot of radar, radio, and general electronics. Most people today don't know the first thing about RF, but that was all the rage then.

And before that, people probably raged about losing the art of sword mastery with the advent of guns. And on and on.

Nostalgia is great and all. But on a C64 I'd write a FOR/NEXT loop from 1 to about 400 to do a 1 second delay. Write that in C, or heck, Python or even javascript and see what happens. Computers are mind blowingly faster now. Plus, think of the wonders youngsters can learn Google now-- everything from the details of bestiality to the finer points of making explosives with things from the garden supply store. Or even useful things like honing their skills in other languages, or connecting with other cultures from their laptop. Get a grip people: it's better now than it was then!

Considering how laptops have become fair game for involuntary search and seizure at US borders, I think putting your 'important stuff' on a microSD card inside a hollow coin is probably a good idea.

It's a brain-dead stupid idea.

The border guard has a gallows sense of humor.

If some mischance, your Johnson Smith spy tech toy is discovered, you had better be prepared for what comes next.

Yeah, I saw that and also immediately thought Bone Fone. Here's a link.

Come on! Even in Next Generation the communicators were badges that were added to the uniform, not built into it. No Star Trek featured any clothing with built in communicators (at least the Federation never had that tech). If you're going to count stuff like that, well then, we've had wearable electronics since the invention of the digital watch. No, wait! Since the invention of the walkie talkie.

The bone fone!

Bone Fone 1980

Here are just two examples of people in the past trying this; to be fair, the first one isn't technically a flying submarine.

Submersible aircraft- http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/ModernMechanix/9-1930/submarine_plane/submarine_plane_1.jpg

Submarine aircraft carrier- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_aircraft_carrier

Every good citizen should pay the price for this, as he has nothing to hide! While you are at it use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without, and don't ask for a raise.

Modern Mechanix is a great website that reprints stories from old issues of Popular Mechanics and similar magazines. Thus guy's got a ton of scans and they all look great. You might want to visit the site and ask him how he does it.

You know what? Fuck Apple. Fuck the living room. And fuck Forrester Research. Where's my flying car?

Also, more awesome predictions from PopMech

A committee of the Bureau of the Budget has proposed that the federal government set up a National Data Center to compile statistical information on various facets of our society. Certainly the computer can help us simplify record-keeping by assigning everyone a "birth" number that will identify him for tax returns, banking, education, social security, the draft, and other purposes....But such a Data Center poses a grave threat to individual freedom and privacy. With its insatiable appetite for information, its inability to forget anything that has been put into it, a central computer might become the heart of a government surveillance system that would lay bare our finances, our associations, or our mental and physical health to government inquisitors or even to casual observers. Computer technology is moving so rapidly that a sharp line between statistical and intelligence systems is bound to be obliterated....As information accumulates, the contents of an individual's computerized dossier will appear more and more impressive and will impart a heightened sense of reliability to the user, which, coupled with the myth of computer infallibility, will make it less likely that the user will try to verify the recorded data. This will be true despite the "softness" or "imprecision" of much of the data. Our success or failure in life ultimately may turn on what other people decide to put into our files and on the programmer's ability, or inability, to evaluate, process, and interrelate information....Eventually, these bureaus will make a network of their computers, creating a ready source of detailed information about an individual's finances. The accuracy of these records will become increasingly crucial; an honest dispute between a consumer and a retailer over a bill may produce an unexplained and unexpungeable "no pay" evaluation in the computer and result in considerable damage to the buyer's credit rating. link worth reading

They had get rich quick schemes back then too! Make $12 an hour!

My x-ray specs are obsolete?

With apologies to Billy Joel

Green Cards, Spamford, Snake Oil, these guys,
Michael Lindsay, Nigeria, Get Rich Quick Today.

CHORUS
We didn't start the fire...

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/ has quite a few. A lot of them didn't quite make it.

In previous discussions of this topic, several people have wondered why Diebold's banking equipment (especially their ATM machines) seem to have pretty good security and auditability, while their voting machines don't.

While electronic voting machines and electronic banking machines may look similar, the operational and security requirements for each are very different.

An ATM requires physical security like encasing it in a concrete wall to prevent theft, must identify and authenticate a user with card and PIN, must be networked to the bank's mainframe to authenticate and pull down account data, must record transactions on the user's account, and must be capable of producing a receipt identifying the user, the transaction, and the transaction number.

A voting machine on the other hand must be portable, meaning a whole different set of physical security requirements; cannot be networked while accepting votes; cannot identify or authenticate individual voters in order to preserve anonymity; cannot produce a removable receipt in order to prevent vote-buying and other fraud; and cannot record data in a way that makes it possible to connect a ballot to a voter.

Unfortunately, the requirements of the secret ballot coupled with an electronic recording system create a very non-transparent system and do little to assuage doubts people have about the system's integrity.

What's worse is the notion that adding a VVPAT (voter-verifiable paper audit trail) will solve the integrity issues. In some states, eg Illinois, the paper trail is the ballot of record in case of recount or dispute.

However, many machines from different manufacturers have had problems reliably creating a paper trail -- the feed jams, the ink runs out, the paper runs out, paper is loaded improperly, the paper is damaged by the mechanism, etc. Such problems in a close election would make the legally mandated recount process impossible.

The fact is that all this new DRE hardware is trying to solve the problems of Florida, caused by bad ballot design. In other words, a cheap and easy problem to fix. Instead the solution we've been given is colossolly expensive, of questionable reliability, of dubious integrity, and has dramatically slowed the process of tabulating and reporting results.

For a bit of perspective, here's a piece from the December, 1940 issue of Popular Science on the new voting technology of the day. The results were tabulated by hand, reported by phone, and broadcast on the radio by 11:00 pm election night.

Close, but you didn't get it quite right. 5MB = 5,000,000 bytes with 7 bits/byte. (See http://www.cedmagic.com/history/ibm-305-ramac.html and http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/19/1956-fir st-hard-drive-5mb/ )

check this out:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/19/1956-fir st-hard-drive-5mb/
its an ibm document about the drive (and some other hard ware)
It has a picture, and some more technical info!

"ASCII boobs date back at least to the teletype era... I'm sure some enterprising young engineer found ways to make punchcard boobs before that."

It would be interesting to find the earliest use of ASCII images. The first general purpose teletype goes back to around 1922. And the punch card as early as 1725. And if someone was transmitting ASCII boobs via punch cards or teletype, wouldn't that be considered ASCII art? These early sex-starved geeks would indeed predate the common practice of ASCII art on typewrites as early as 1948.