by david allan van nostrand | Jul 28, 2025 | Artificial Intelligence, Behind the curtain, The Wayback Machine, The world around us
Films, radio, and tv use SFX as an initialism for sound effects, artificially created imitative sounds that are neither speech nor music. They’re background sounds that are added to make the movies we watch seem more real. Sort of the audio version of verisimilitude,...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 21, 2025 | Human Behavior, The Wayback Machine, The world around us, Unintended Consequences
For most of recorded time in societies all over the world, goods were produced on a small scale by active hands that turned raw materials into finished products. Traditionally, these industries produced handicrafts using non-mechanized methods to knit, weave, and...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 14, 2025 | Behind the curtain, Perfesser Mango, The Wayback Machine
Silent films had no synchronized dialogue, music, or sound effects. And unlike the projectors we rarely hear in today’s theaters, the ones used back then clattered like coffee cans full of lug nuts. They made such a racket that patrons complained they couldn’t enjoy...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 7, 2025 | Americana, Inventions, The Wayback Machine
Wallace, of Wallace and Gromit, invents elaborate contraptions that don’t always work as planned. Nick Park, Wallace’s creator, said all his inventions are designed around the principle of “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” In each episode of Cracking...
