Also a woman has to be far enough along to be showing before I can tell her what it is.
Glad I could make you laugh to me life is not worth living without humour.
agree with that 100%
As long as we are off tangent I have used dowsing rods or warlock sticks to help locate underground utilities, choice of last resort at the water utility.
some people swear by them. I have never tried it but would like to try to see if it works.
I think all the old mobile ‘phones’ were really just radios in telephone drag; that’s how Motorola got its name. I remember them in taxis, see them in taxis and cop cars in old movies.
Landlines had their own power supply, kept working during blackouts. I guess cell phones do too as long as you keep them charged, but not those substitutes for landlines.
One of Edison’s tactics in the fight for DC power instead of AC was point out that electric chairs used AC.
Some animals sense the Earth’s magnetic field with bits of magnetite in their nervous systems. I wonder if humans who do have that. I’ve always had a good sense of direction, used many times when I got lost in the wilderness, chalked it up to my knowledge of stars and where the Sun is supposed to be.
That would describe every wireless phone, from the old cordlesses to modern smart phones.
Edison didn’t have any particular real problem with AC beyond that it was a direct competitor to the DC he had invested in. He’d not have raised any objections to it except that he didn’t stand to make any money off of AC. One way he tried to persuade people to buy DC is to cast AC as horribly dangerous. The electric chair was a good example of these exaggerations. You could not execute anyone in an electric chair in your house unless you took several first steps: Remove the fuse/circuit breaker and replace it with a solid connection, attach electrodes to your victim with a path through the brain or heart, and possibly even increase the conductivity of those connections (the old executioners would soak a sponge in salt water and put it under the electrode on the guy’s head, which had to be shaved first to increase conductivity), etc. Oh, and you’d probably have to strap your victim down because otherwise he’d jerk away at the first shock unless you got him to grab hold of a live wire (which might clench his muscles and make it hard to let go).
It’s actually fairly hard to kill yourself with house current. You’ll often get a rather unpleasant shock if you touch a live wire, but you usually have to be doing something pretty monumentally stupid, like maybe working in the breaker box with both hands without shutting off the power to have it go farther than that.
And Edison knew that, and knew that AC power would not kill very easily unless whoever was working with it had an actual intent to kill. But like I said, there was money to be made and therefore scaring people away from his competitor’s product was desirable. The more you read about Edison, the more you realize that he was kind of a sociopathic jerk.
And there’s a large group of people world wide who think the earth is flat. They all keep regurgitating the same pseudo science crap. I’ve watched a few of their videos on Youtube. It’s hilarious watching them spout science like they have an idea what they’re talking about. It’s obvious that not a single one ever took a science class (and passed). They even get basic math wrong.
Oh, yes it can!
@Mustangman Thanks for posting the article.
I learn something new every day.
And every once in awhile their stupidity gets them killed. Like that dope who recently died in his home-built steam-powered rocket that he wanted to fly high enough to prove there’s no curvature to the Earth.
@Mustangman Thank you for the article. Interesting. I don’t know enough to understand all of it but still find it quite interesting.
Renewing my old tagline of:
Marnet
… still reading, still learning
Kinda what we have been hearing out of DC for the past 15 months and of course it is dangerous to their view of science to question their conclusions. What a laugh. Windmills will save us though. It’s science.
At any rate if you are in Ft. Meiers take in the Edison Museum. It’s very interesting. History is written by those that win.
Back to phones. Back in the 80’s in Minneapolis, in our particular zone, we could not get touch tone phones from bell so we were stuck with rotary dial. Over 1000 phones and Bell refused to upgrade their central office equipment to allow touch tone. Finally, we just bought our own phone switch and saved a ton of money each month. When they were pulling out our old solenoid equipment, I asked the guys what they were going to do with it and they said it was destined for South America someplace where it would be an upgrade. Ha ha. A rotary switch would maybe be an upgrade to no phones, or strings and cans, but it was dependable anyway. Business, not science. Gold plated contacts built to last and last well beyond the point of obsolescence.
They allow you to make telephone calls to ‘real’ telephones. I assumed what OP was talking about was phone-appearing things that really just made radio connections - am I wrong?
Darwin award at it’s finest.
I like Dr Neil Tyson’s approach to these people. They can believe what they want. It becomes a problem when these same people are law makers making policy. Like that brain trust congressman who asked NASA if they can change the Moon’s orbit. Those people scare the crap out of me.
You mean like we should drink bleach to cure Covid…or that this virus is under control and going away…Or now the one about Vaccines are making people magnetic…or how about that Covid is spread through Microsoft 10 updates… Yea…those people scare the crap out of me.
The first real mobile telephone system in a car was indeed installed back in the 40’s, and you’re both wrong and right about it. As you say, it was really just a glorified 2-way radio, but the base station it transmitted to patched into the telephone network. It was even voice activated! You would tell the mobile operator who you wanted to call, and they would connect you to someone on a real phone on the other end. Believe it or not, despite the growing popularity of cell phones, this service lasted in some areas into the early 2000’s.
I remember MARS.
Another Superman (TVseries) reference. Perry White had one in his car. Looked like the transceiver was mounted on the transmission hump.
Well let’s not forget Dick Tracy then with his wrist mounted communicator. Like a smart phone but smaller and didn’t allow scrolling. 1950’s I guess.