The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Among all the diagrams of force-vectors, there’s this wonderful illustration of a well-made machine in A Text-Book of Applied Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering, on archive.org.

There’s little reason why a pump made to these specifications in 1903 wouldn’t still be operating, unless it had had been left idle and allowed to rust through somewhere. It makes you wonder.

SONG: “Collisions”

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on BBC, 2 Sep 2020, “Black holes: Cosmic signal rattles Earth after 7 billion years”, as used in the post “A black hole bigger than a hundred suns”.

ABSTRACT:
For whatever reason, I started September off earworming myself with the Parts+Labor cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway.” I have two primary musical modes, I think: quiet (mopey) indie pop, and very crunchy noise. Parts+Labor is a noise band, though a lot of their songs are surprisi…

^{Click to embiggen}

As its Smithsonian Museum page explains, this painting is from a book that hoped to prove a slightly odd hypothesis: that even brightly colored animals would blend into their environment at key moments, giving them protection against predators they wouldn’t normally have. Abbott Handerson Thayer and his son Gerald published Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom in 1909, and attracted some high-profile criticism:

Thayer believed that the coloration of animals, no ma…

^{Click to embiggen}

A big part of a big rocket, loading onto a big barge in a big facility in Louisiana. As the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility image library description says:

The last of four structural test articles for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) was loaded onto NASA’s Pegasus barge Wednesday, June 26, 2019, at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The barge will deliver the liquid oxygen (LOX) tank structural test article from Michoud to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Cen…

^{Click to embiggen}

Treasure! Literally! A hoard of Roman gold and silver, including jewelry, figurines, and a lot of these votive “leaf” plaques.

A votive plaque like these was part of a religious offering, a small, thin wafer of gold or silver. From the description of item #8 on Wikimedia Commons:

9) Slender gold votive plaque, now detached from its uppermost position on the stack of six gold plaques. Embossed in the centre is a schematically-rendered slender gabled shrine, with a v…

^{Click to embiggen}

A dynamometer, illustrated by (or for) the United States Sanitary Commission in 1865.

A dynamometer measures power output. For an engine, it can measure things like torque or the ability to carry weight. For a human body, it can measure how tightly your hand can squeeze, or how much your bicep can lift.

This one came from a collection in the New York Public Library that also has things like photos of the Field Relief Corps, plans of locomotive hospital cars, portrait…