Boulangerie: January 2023
Unbaked bits from the month!
The Boulangerie is a regular, unscheduled feature of Technocomplex, appearing once or twice a week. It is for half-baked, rising dough, the just-now-in-the-oven entries. After all boulangerie in French is bakery. Entries are always very short. To find out when new loaves have been set out, follow @mrdelong@mastodon.online.
Boulangerie: Oooh, that's UGLY. A font from 2019, current today.
A font using gerrymandered congressional districts for the letter shapes. Free to download. Use it for your next letter to your congressman!
January 28, 2023
Alina. “Free Font Ugly Gerry — Gerrymandering Font.” FontsArena, August 2, 2019. https://fontsarena.com/ugly-gerry/.
Boulangerie: Lego men dancing in the figures
Even patents can be entertaining. Lego guys legit since December 1979.
January 22, 2023
Christiansen, Godtfred K., and Jens N. Knudsen. Toy figure. United States USD253711S, filed February 14, 1978, and issued December 18, 1979. https://patents.google.com/patent/USD253711S/en. H/T Sarah Burstein (@design_law@mastodon.social).
Boulangerie: Le Carre to Roth on cleaning up pepper, sorta
I have to remember this expression when I'm picking through prose.
January 18, 2023
Maybe it’s a standard phrase among novelists reading each other’s work? New to me, though. The entire letter is in the Harper’s Magazine that just arrived in my mailbox. It’s a letter from John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell) to Philip Roth from 1992 that was included in A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (Viking, 2022).
Carré, John le. “High Praise.” Harper’s Magazine, February 2023, p. 17.
Boulangerie: First car, first accident (1771)
Three wheeled, steam-powered, rolling hazard. But it made it to the Paris Motor Show!
January 13, 2023
We tend to think of the automobile as an invention of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, But the first self-propelled vehicle was invented in 1769 by a fellow named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. He called the thing the Fardier à vapeur (a moniker that I can imagine kindergartners having great fun saying).
Cugnot also managed to have the first automobile accident and traffic citation, though in the manner of the eighteenth century.
To see the modern replica start up, check out this video. The car was featured at the 2010 Paris Motor Show
Boulangerie: Engineers v. truck mechanics
Fusing sight, building, and repair to make a vehicle out of “a pile of junk”
January 10, 2023
From Rothman, Joshua. “How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?” The New Yorker, January 9, 2023. Emphasis added. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/16/how-should-we-think-about-our-different-styles-of-thinking.
Artists and artisans, [Temple] Grandin suggests, tend to be object visualizers: they can picture exactly how this painting should look, how this finial should flow, how this incision should be sewn up. Scientists, mathematicians, and electrical engineers tend to be spatial visualizers: they can imagine, in general, how gears will mesh and molecules will interact. Grandin describes an exercise, conducted by the Marine Corps, in which engineers and scientists with advanced degrees were pitted against radio repairmen and truck mechanics in performing technical tasks under pressure, such as “making a rudimentary vehicle out of a pile of junk.” The engineers, with their abstract visual minds, tended to “overthink” in this highly practical scenario; they lost to the mechanics, who, in Grandin’s telling, were likely to be “object visualizers whose abilities to see it, build it, and repair it were fused.”
Boulangerie: Contradiction and inconsistency
Sometimes finding inconsistencies helps you discover edges of research.
January 6, 2023
When I leaped into a new topic to flesh it out, I started my usual way — with Other People’s Footnotes. Then, footnotes of footnotes. And then, just for good measure, stabbing out on my own searches.
While the picture firmed up as contours were traced again and again in scholarly repetition, the real story for me was not in the confirmation but in the inconsistency. Finding those made me think that perhaps I’d done some research, though of course the real test was resolving inconsistency.
Research is in part finding facts, but the test is finding inconsistencies — even contradictions. Then you know you’ve done some research. You have a new task ahead, too.
A much harder task than before you started, probably.
I tried to find the truth of color availability for Jaguar E-type (in the US also known as the “X-KE”). Authorities differed, so I mapped out opinions and observations year-by-year, and I used the density of black as an indication of consensus. You can see the color differences across time, of course, but you can also see that people didn’t necessarily agree when colors were available. This illustration appears on my old format car restoration journal (https://inetogether.net/jaguar/paint.php).
Similar visualizations have been used for genome assembly.