A History of Encabulation | Hacker News Reader

A History of Encabulation

oranlooney.com

87 pointsolooney24 comments

Encabulation is one of the most joyful subfields in engineering. It is always great to see improvements and contributions to our knowledge, whether incremental or transformative.

This is one of my favorite bits of all time. I often wondered whether the original was scripted or done off-the-cuff but you know what? Not actually knowing is part of the magic.

according to the video's description:

"This is the first time Turbo Encabulator was recorded with picture. I shot this in the late 70's at Regan Studios in Detroit on 16mm film. The narrator and writer is Bud Haggert. He was the top voice-over talent on technical films. He wrote the script because he rarely understood the technical copy he was asked to read and felt he shouldn't be alone. We had just finished a production for GMC Trucks and Bud asked since this was the perfect setting could we film his Turbo Encabulator script. [...] Dave Rondot (me) was the director and John Choate was the DP on this production. The first laugh at the end is mine. My hat's off to Bud a true talent."

hopefully the magic is still somewhat intact ;^)

part of the development of the IFB, the earpiece in common use on every tv news show: The turboencabulator skit was originally intended to demonstrate the usefulness of earpiece radios as a replacement for cue cards when actors are delivering lines for a video. Bud Haggart wanted to show that you could use the earpiece effectively even when the lines get ridiculously difficult to follow, so he used the turboencabulator as a subject because it'd been a running gag in the engineering community ever since its first technical description was published by John Hellins Quick in 1944.

> encabulation: a transmission that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters.

I am not sure if this is a joke or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag (definitely not the original)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w (another version)

https://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/... (closer to the original)

That’s the joke.

I have yet to see an encabulator with a perpulsating repultator. That should give an additional boost to mimical aeroplasticy.

Wouldn't that break speigelheimstein's 5th law of retro vuntrucular hazing?

I tried to write a Java SE application to be embedded in my retro encabulator to improve sinusoidal malleance, however due to a resonance cascade in 1.4 JVM it terfumbled and produced a cryptic stacktrace.

Kinda like GIT? See https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/#aW50ZXJjaGFuZ2U...

What motivates arbitrarily capitalizing Git like this? (Or "JAVA"?) Do people wind up with the impression that it's an acronym? Why?

Good question. I always capitalize GIT, since "git" is a word, meaning an "an unpleasant or contemptible person".

I guess Git is better/more correct. Thanks for pointing out my idiosyncrasy. I'll use that in the future.

If you like encabulation, you'll love VX: https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies

"It's not cheap, but I'm sure the government will buy it."

They ordered four, one to use, one for standby, and another pair to warehouse for parts and lifecycle extension.

That's too close to the bone.

Huh, I wonder if these guys designed the ship that the Spaceteam used.

The footnotes made this so much more fascinating.

I think my Dad has one of these in his basement.

There was a time when you could count on 5 or 6 families per subdivision would have 'em. There was a huge effort to volunteer their output during the second world war.

They had me until sonosoidal.

"Flux" was the giveaway for me.

I’m sure ChatGPT would be able to make sense of this.

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