A Kitchen Timer

Another notable invention for roasting meat was the musical turnspit, that, whilst causing joints to gyrate before the Count de Castel Maria’s kitchen-fire, played four-and-twenty tunes to the cooks of that opulent lord of Treviso. The spits of this machine turned a hundred and thirty roasts at the same time; and the chef was informed, by the progress of the melodies, when the moment had arrived for removing each piece of meat. Chickens were done to a turn when the organ had played its twelfth tune; the completion of the eighteenth air was the signal for withdrawing hares and pheasants; but the largest pieces of beef and venison were not ready for the board until the twenty-fourth melody had been played out.

— John Cordy Jeaffreson, A Book About the Table, 1875

| Oddities · Technology

Velato

The esoteric programming language Velato uses music as its source code. The first note of a composition establishes a “command root” note, and the intervals that follow specify instructions. The command root can be changed between statements, and the notes that make up a chord can be interpreted in a specified order, so there’s some latitude to help a composition sound “musical.” This program produces the output “Hello, World”:

https://esolangs.org/wiki/File:Velato_HelloWorld.gif

Here’s what that sounds like:

A few other musical languages: Fugue, VenetianScript, Yet Another Musical Esolang.

| Art · Technology

The Mahler Hammer

The last movement of Mahler’s sixth symphony calls for the sound of a hammer, which the composer indicated should be “brief and mighty, but dull in resonance and with a non-metallic character (like the fall of an axe).” (The two blows represent the death of Mahler’s daughter Maria and the diagnosis of his heart condition.)

Because no recognized instrument exists to fulfill this function, symphonies have had to devise their own solutions, often striking a wooden box or bass drum with a mallet or sledgehammer. Houston Symphony percussionist Brian Del Signore built a 22-pound custom hammer and a wooden box to receive the blow.

| Art · Technology

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hardwick_Hall_3_(7027835143).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

scattergood
n. a person who spends money wastefully

Built in the 16th century to flaunt its owner’s wealth, Hardwick Hall, in Derbyshire, boasted large windows when glass was a luxury. Children called it “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.”

Unfortunately, writes Stephen Eskilson in The Age of Glass (2018), “a cold day saw the chimneys of Hardwick Hall drawing cold air through the drafty windows and circulating it again to the outside,” “a sui generis example of thermal inefficiency.”

| History · Language · Technology

Marchetti’s Constant

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Average_one-way_commuting_time_from_home_to_work.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a depressing idea: In 1994, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti suggested that people have always endured commutes of an hour a day, half an hour each way, on average. Improvements in urban planning and transportation haven’t shortened our travel time; they’ve just permitted us to live further afield. In 1934 Lewis Mumford had written:

Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now — by driving him to a more distant residential area — effectually cancels out the gain.

Marchetti attributed the idea to World Bank transportation analyst Yacov Zahavi. He found that the one-hour rule extends over the world and throughout the year; even the mean radius of villages in ancient Greece, he said, corresponds to this estimate, assuming a walking speed of 5 km/hr. As technology permitted greater speeds, cities grew correspondingly.

(Cesare Marchetti, “Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 47:1 [September 1994], 75-88.)

| Technology

Delighted

Josiah Winslow’s programming language Bespoke encodes instructions into the lengths of words, producing programs that look like poetry. This one prints the phrase “Hello, World!”:

more peppermint tea?
ah yes, it's not bad
I appreciate peppermint tea
it's a refreshing beverage

but you immediately must try the gingerbread
I had it sometime, forever ago
oh, and it was so good!
made the way a gingerbread must clearly be 
baked

in fact, I've got a suggestion
I may go outside
to Marshal Mellow's Bakery
so we both receive one

Related: In the early 1980s, Frank Hayes was so vexed with the S-100 computer bus that he wrote a sea shanty about it:

(Thanks, Jeremiah.)

| Technology

Bid the Tree Unfix

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buckland_Yew_1880.jpg

In 1880, an 800-year-old yew tree was threatening the west wall of the church of St Andrew at Buckland in Dover. The community called in landscape gardener William Barron, who solved the problem by boring tunnels under the trunk and then raising the tree’s entire 55-ton mass onto rollers by means of powerful screw jacks. Giant windlasses could then haul the tree 203 feet across the churchard to a safer location.

“The scale of this operation was probably never matched,” writes G.M.F. Drower in Garden of Invention, his 2003 history of gardening innovations. “[A]nd Barron, who had been rather more apprehensive than he let on, later admitted that all the other trees he had moved had been ‘chickens compared to the Buckland Yew.'”

| Technology

In a Word

postation
n. the placing of one thing after another

consectaneous
adj. succeeding, following as by consequence

resiliating
adj. that resumes or causes to resume a former shape or position

finifugal
adj. shunning the end of something

Jason Allemann built this infinite LEGO domino ring in 2023. Sixty-four dominoes fall in a continuous loop, with a robot circulating perpetually opposite the cascade to restore the tiles to their standing state.

Building instructions are here.

| Technology

The Illinois

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Illinois.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In his 1957 book A Testament, Frank Lloyd Wright described a skyscraper a mile high that he hoped to build in Chicago. Atomic-powered elevators would serve a net rentable area of more than 13 million square feet, with covered parking for 15,000 cars and landing decks for 150 helicopters.

Wright imaged it would be “more permanent than the pyramids,” but the plan was never realized. The 528-story building would have been nearly twice as tall as the Burj Khalifa and four times the height of the Empire State Building.

| Technology

Rivers

https://books.google.com/books?id=mE6BFXd6ppsC&pg=PA426

Occasionally, by coincidence, the gaps between words on a page of printed text will become aligned, producing “rivers” of white space that descend across multiple lines. These occur most commonly when the font is monospaced and justification is full. Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged; typographers sometimes view a printed page upside down in order to spot them.

In ordinary text long rivers are unlikely, but in 1988 Mark Isaak found the 12-line example above on page 277 of the Harvard Classics edition of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (squint to see it).

Fritzi Striebel offered a small collection of unusual rivers at the end of this article in the May 1986 issue of Word Ways.

| Literature · Technology