My father in law grew up in the Denver area. His father made his living as a handyman, and one of his regular customers was Molly Brown (the Titanic survivor known as "The Unsinkable Molly Brown"). Every week he would go to her house to exchange her radio battery, then bring the old battery back to his workshop for charging.
There’s a great radio museum in Howth, Ireland, a waterfront town near Dublin. The founder was a lifelong radio enthusiast who grew up in a poor rural community and was mesmerized by the power of radio from an early age. I remember him telling me he had never heard a language other than English until radio came to town and he heard a broadcast in French. He also talked about using very basic acid batteries and having to go into town to change out the acid. I believe he said it was also a serious problem if you spilled any in the house because it would damage or dissolve anything it came in contact with.
Yes, in the old systems, you'd get about 90 volts AC down the line to ring the mechanical bell ringer. Once saw a guy nearly fall off a ladder, splicing phone lines with bare hands. He thought the relatively low voltage was safe enough, but then someone rang him in the middle of the job.
I had to refresh my memory about the hybrid use of AC and DC current in telephone networks.
The Alternating Current signals could be used over longer distances and were effective at making the bells ring, moving the clapper back and forth. This back-and-forth is exactly what makes AC so deadly in the body, should it cross through your cardiac muscles, for example, and set the muscles twitching at 50 or 60 times per second.
There’s nothing inherently deadly about AC nor anything inherently safe about DC. If there’s enough voltage available to drive current through your body, then electricity is deadly regardless of if it’s AC or DC.
In general AC tends to be a little safer than DC, because the voltage is constantly reversing, which means it’s constantly passing through 0V, creating moments where you don’t have current driving through your body and forcing all your muscles to contract. Those 0V crossings create moments where you can let go of whatever is electrocuting you. DC on the other hand has no such 0 crossings, if there’s enough voltage there to drive current through you, then all your muscles will be stuck contracting until either the power is turned off, or until they’re all so fried they’re not physically capable of contracting anymore.
Very cool to see one comment linking to an old Sears magazine from the 1920s, showing some of the equipment people would have constructed these networks from:
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that.
Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
SSRIs saved my life. No exaggeration. They might be overprescribed, only effective is some individuals, and they certainly have their share of side effects, but they're still the gold standard treatment for clinical depression and anxiety.
Never used a Virtual Boy, but I'm somehow nostalgic just for the development tool -- grey metal boxes with vents, LEDs, and rocker switches transport me into an optimistic future of the past.
Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book, Beej's Guide, Sipser,...); but we seem set on producing an endless, pointless, churn of frameworks and minor language differences in the name of progress.
> Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book,
True enuf, but how often do you actually refer to the books underlying ideas? I've had (now gone, presumably) TAOCP on my bookshelves for years, but how often did I use it? Stuff on RNG a bit, I guess...
TAOCP is trash. I wish I grew up in the era where you could just hit up zlib for an accessible book on any topic instead of highly rated and hardly read 'classics' like TAOCP.
I think there is a lot of truth in that. It led to the death of patriotism (which is now considered embarrassing outside of sport), national purpose, institutions, empire, and coincided with the decline of heavy industry (which only happened much more recently in the US).
EDIT: Saying that, there is still a strong positive national identity. We're just too embarrassed to express it strongly (see patriotism), because of our fall from grace.
I also think there is a breaking point, and we're seeing the resurgence of right wing parties in the UK and across Europe as a backlash to anti-patriotism and praise for everyone except those with a long history in their own nation.
"Anti-patriotism" doesn't really sum up the sense that many among Europe's owning and intellectual classes would prefer to "dissolve the people and elect another" via immigration. The example that shocked me, as an American, was when a story came out that certain schools in the UK had stopped teaching about World War II and the Holocaust because (second-generation, in many cases) immigrant parents objected to their kids being preached-at about the history of someone else's country. This was presented by, IIRC, the Guardian or the BBC, as a fairly reasonable objection.
To my American mind, for everything wrong with our country, come on, if you're an immigrant to the USA, it's your country. Taking on American history as your history is what it means to be part of the common civic project, and insisting that "the Allies beat Hitler and built the liberal international order and then we saw off Stalinism too" is somehow insulting to your family because those Allied soldiers weren't your blood ancestors sounds outright treasonous.
The history curriculum is (like nearly everything else) nationally set. The content of the leaving exams is also not set by the school (but by the national boards). It's possible that one school has decided to do something daft, but honestly not likely.
The story reads like ragebait, TBH. Brits are absolutely as keen on extolling WW2 heroism as anyone else.
"In England, by law children are to be taught about the Holocaust as part of the Key Stage 3 History curriculum; in fact, the Holocaust is the only historical event whose study is compulsory on the National Curriculum. This usually occurs in Year 9 (age 13-14)."
So not Province of Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales.
Note that WW2 is not a statutory requirement in any of the key stages although it does feature in the examples (which are non-statutory). And a reminder that history is a required subject only to Key Stage 3, so many students won't take it after they are 14 and won't study for an exam.
Reporting on education in the UK does tend to be rage-baity and most situations are more complex when you look at them a bit closer.
(I have never taught history and never taught in the school sector)
I would really like to see the source of that because as mentioned elsewhere in the replies the Holocaust is a compulsory part of the National Curriculum and has been at least since I was in high school in the 1990s.
To the extent that the Holocaust is part of British and American history it is that we knew very well what was going on in 1930s Germany and strictly limited the number of Jewish refugees because of domestic concerns over the level of immigration.
WWI "coincided with the decline of heavy industry" ? I can't think of any UK-based heavy industry that didn't dramatically expand between the end of WWI and say, 1958.
To be clear - I'm in Scotland and the flags I see are the Scottish flag and the EU flag (often combined). I know there has been a spate of flag flying for other reasons but I haven't actually seen that myself.
https://www.1900s.org.uk/1920s60s-windup-phones.htm
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