timelets

He led him forth into a forest, and showed him a herb which grew there, and said, now you shall receive your godfather's present. I make you a celebrated physician. When you are called to a patient, I will always appear to you. If I stand by the head of the sick man, you may say with
confidence that you will make him well again, and if you give him of this herb he will recover, but if I stand by the patient's feet, he is mine, and you must say that all remedies are in
vain, and that no physician in the world could save him. But beware of using the herb against my will, or it might fare ill with you.

“They were upon Sirenum Scopuli, the Siren Rock, before they knew it. The strains of sweet music were wafted into the ears of everyone on board as they approached. Members of the crew began to snatch at the air trying to catch the sound, like puppies snapping at butterflies. They stood at the gunwales of the Argo and leaned out, straining to get closer.
Jason was ready for his – ‘Now!’ he shouted to Orpheus, who stood high on the foredeck, picked up his lyre and began to sing his own song.
The two most enticing sounds in the world intermingled. Orpheus’s music, being in closer proximity to the Argonauts, won the day. He had been saving a special song, his most perfect, for just this occasion. Jason and the others turned away from the Sirens on their rock and let the rippling of Orpheus’s lyre and the sublime tones of his voice enter their minds and hearts.”
...
The tender beauty of the Sirens’ music was inversely proportional to the vicious cruelty of their purpose. They sang to entice sailors – birds and wildlife too – and draw them onto the rocky cliffs of their home. They would hop from their crags to the wrecked ships and feast on their transfixed crewmen.”

--- Stephen Fry. “Heroes: Volume II of Mythos.

There were two benches and twenty−eight men in all; they assembled one hundred seventy−five pistons and rods in a nine−hour day—which means just five seconds over three minutes each. There was no inspection, and many of the piston and rod assemblies came back from the motor assembling line as defective.

...
The foreman, examining the operation, could not discover why it should take as much as three minutes. He analyzed the motions with a stop−watch. He found that four hours out of a nine−hour day were spent in walking. The assembler did not go off anywhere, but he had to shift his feet to gather in his materials and to push away his finished piece. In the whole task, each man performed six operations.

The foreman devised a new plan; he split the operation into three divisions, put a slide on the bench and three men on each side of it, and an inspector at the end.

Instead of one man performing the whole operation, one man then performed only one third of the operation—he performed only as much as he could do without shifting his feet. They cut down the squad from twenty−eight to fourteen men.

The former record for twenty−eight men was one hundred seventy−five assemblies a day. Now seven men turn out twenty−six hundred assemblies in eight hours. It is not necessary to calculate the savings there!

--- Henry Ford, My Life and Work.

In olden times, a camera had one sensor, and lenses moved to magnify the picture. Now, you have several sensors and lenses, each one set to a different magnification. Where the iPhone 11 Pro’s telephoto has a “2X optical zoom” when it jumps from its wide-angle lens to its telephoto lens, the Galaxy S20 has a “10X hybrid optical zoom,” jumping from the ultrawide to the telephoto lens—the lenses themselves don’t move in either case.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/samsungs-galaxy-s20-ultra-has-a-100x-zoom-camera-so-we-tested-it-with-a-private-eye-11582907082

“Consistency is the highest obligation of a philosopher, and yet the most rarely found. The ancient Greek schools give us more examples of it than we find in our syncretistic age, in which a certain shallow and dishonest system of compromise of contradictory principles is devised, because it commends itself better to a public which is content to know something of everything and nothing thoroughly, so as to please every party.”

--- Emmanuel Kant, “The Critique of Practical Reason.”

The most striking—and perhaps most unsettling—aspect of our study is that the actual blog post about the topic of nanotechnology was neutral, with equal amounts of risk and benefit information across conditions. The incivility instigated by lay (albeit fictional) online users induced an increase in polarization of risk perception about nanotechnology. This study's findings suggest perceptions towards science are shaped in the online blog setting not only by “top‐down information,” but by others' civil or uncivil viewpoints, as well. While the Internet opens new doors for public deliberation of emerging technologies, it also gives new voice to nonexpert, and sometimes rude, individuals.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcc4.12009