Digital Generation, Analog Retro Chic

securitas writes "The New York Times' Juliet Chung writes about the latest technology trend: the growing popularity of analog technology with a generation that has grown up digital. 'Yesterday's technology designs are becoming popular among those in their teens and 20's eager to usher back a time they experienced only barely, if at all.' An MIT graduate student interviewed for the article, Ali Rahimi, was tired of the 'impersonal, unthinking' nature of modern technology, so he hacked an old telephone handset together with his mobile phone with the rationale, 'The handset has been going through about a hundred years of evolution in design and ... have the perfect shape.' According to Brown University technology historian Steven Lubar, 'When the available technology converges at a certain performance threshold ... consumers begin to base their choices on nontechnical considerations'. Chung also includes a sidebar that lists some of the new retro analog devices and interpretations, ranging from radio PC case mods to ancient clunker cell phones. Any other cool or interesting retro analog devices or hacks out there?" I've personally enjoyed owning tube amps on and off - the sound warmth, whether it be psychological or real, is definitely different then solid state amps.

Comments

Re:i agree ..

[tony_gardner]

I realise this is a bit offtopic, bit I moderated in the discussion on word frequency before I saw your post:

I have to learn German. I need the 86,000 most-commonly used German words. This would give me a nice target of words to get to know in the process of learning it ...

And since I'm also an English speaker in Germany I thought I'd note that typing "word"+"rank"+"german" into google returns plenty of sites including:
http://german.about.com/library/blwfreq01.htm
which only has the top 1000, but that's not a bad start.

In all honesty, I find that the word frequency depends a lot on your environment. Are you speaking in a pub with a bunch of welders or are you reading scientific literature? You'd be much better off just keeping a little notebook and writing down words you see more than once.

I also find that leo http://dict.leo.org/ is pretty good for a lot of stuff that doesn't make it into standard dictionaries.

Good luck,

Tony.

Bring Da Noise

[nastro]

Yeah, Flavor Flav is still cool. Only now he's retro cool.

Re:it's true

[dmayle]

You may be jesting here, but maybe it's a necessity. I had to switch to an analog watch to even be able to read analog clocks. After using a digital watch for so long, I used to have to stop, and figure out both hands individually to get the time. With the analog watch on the hand, I'm so used to it that the conversion is automatic.

sig

[smileyy]

fudge-packer