What are these bumps on the top of a pull-tab can?
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
Someone on r/HomeNetworking cursed whoever invented the RJ45 connector, and in the comments, Richard Benett, vice-chair of the first IEEE 802.3 task group that wrote a standard around RJ-45-style connector, appears and offers to take the blame.
That led to this short documentary: "TWISTED: The dramatic history of twisted-pair Ethernet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8PP5IHsL8Y
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/IBM_herm...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/IBMtrcon...
https://imgur.com/found-old-ibm-cable-while-cleaning-up-ware...
> why is the dot spacing different on the left vs right can?
> When a product design like this gets licensed out to others in the same industry, they will often change the design slightly to make their version incompatible with other potential suppliers
> why want incompatibility?
> to enforce supplier loyalty
Another kind of moat. Everyone is for a free market until they can use some form of lock-in to force a transaction.The difference is something like phone ports and docking are things which end users readily benefit from having interoperability, so it's a selling point and there's market pressure to conform. Factories are bespoke installations and they often run without major changes for many years at a time. There's less pressure for them to have interchangeability when they don't move and don't interact with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_System_Standard
But if ever (hopefully) colonize space, would there be a single government to legislate standards? I'm less optimistic here: a feudal model seems more likely with widely spread, isolated communities.What's crazy is how modern shipping has made it economical to process this elsewhere, all over the globe. For example, from one of the biggest bauxite mines, in Pará, Brazil, the raw bauxite is shipped across the Atlantic to be processed by Hydro in Norway, which refines it into alumina powder, which is then shipped elsewhere to be refined into aluminum. You would think it would be more cost-effective and energy-efficient to centralize this, not to mention more environmentally friendly.
[1] https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/profiling-the-top-five...
Still, bauxite is pretty weird business.
If the Brazil plant is putting out enough ore, I can definitely imagine it is cheaper to sell it internationally to someone with hydro power than to build and operate their own power plant.
Has he stated that anywhere? Because looking at the upload date (8 months) of the latest video and the gaps between previous uploads (sometimes multiple years), it doesn't look uncharacteristic for him.
"Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work that went into the ordinary objects around me."
He also sounds unbearable.
There's an idea in psychology called the illusion of explanitory depth. It's the idea that everyone has much more confidence in their understanding of how things work, even the most mundane and apparantly simple things, than is warranted. In turn we tend to hugely underestimate the difficulty, complexity and skill in jobs we have never done.
The world is absolutely full of utterly prosaic objects that are far more sophisticated that we imagine, either in their function and design or in their manufacture.
Most people overestimate how well they would cope in some post-apocalyptic world. But I think even many people who regard themselves as prepared, underestimate how much skill and sheer effort is involved in making really simple things like rope. To do more than just scrape by you would need to reconstruct a society of specialists, it won't be the rugged individualists.
Most things are pretty simply and someone with a basic understanding could get them mostly right or at least right enough to work. The complexity comes from the many layers of refinement over the years. No, your clay molded toilet won't flush like a modern one but if you understand the basics of how a toilet works it'll probably flush.
Inversely, those folks that think about how things work tend to be fairly overconfident in their ability to recreate/repair/innovate. In reality there are often fine details that you miss.
Of course people can learn anything. It's that we tend to not realise that we don't know this stuff, and so we underestimate the difficulty/complexity of them. This often leads to people actually looking down dismissively on other people's jobs, as they assume they must be simple or easy, because they have never done them. You get endless political commentry on how people doing certain jobs don't deserve to be paid well because what they do appears "simple". Train drivers are a classic example. It's a job that is a lot harder and more involved than it appears at first.
For a while I worked in the rail industry. That was full of things that were way more complex and involved than I had ever realised. Things that seemed simple on the surface had decades of refinement and subtlety to them born of experience.
Your example is a great one. The principals of the flushing toilet with a siphon flush, ballcock and an S-bend outflow are not complex, but a lot of people have no idea what pressing a flush down actually does to get the water into the bowl, how it refills or what the S-bend is actually for (it's more than just the smell, sewer gas is explosive). It's the reason that a lot of people don't tackle more DIY jobs, they suddenly realise they don't understand it. But it's also why YouTube is so great, because these things are all learnable.
In the event of a societal collapse, I sometimes think that preserving all the instructional YouTube videos would be our best hope for rebuilding :D
I had a similar moment once (I'm a regular reader of the sub) when someone asked about about a balise [1] when I was at one of the primary manufacturers and operators of them, doing work on software handling logs from passages. :)
Also, of course whenever someone on here mentions Nagle's Algorithm [2] and gets fun feedback from a particular user, that's fun too! :)
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/yrijd9/wha...
That’s an attempt to mitigate cans where you’d pull the tab and the tab would just break off without opening the can. So the person who answered it’s usually because of the seal is right.
other half’s dad [retired from] Campbell in Ohio and isn’t an internet let alone a Reddit person, you’d never guess how much trivia there is about their #2 can. I’d have commented but a brand new account will probably be buried as spam … and the second answer is correct anyway.
Pull tabs do not break the seal by pressing in to the can. They break the seal by pulling the lid up away from the can, where the "swivel" point is. The tab acts as a class two lever, where the "tip" of the tab is the fulcrum.