Wednesday 6 May 2009

Kipple, and How it Threatens Us All.



My desk?- well, no, it's far too tidy.... I'd take a photo of my desk, but you can barely see it under computer, scanner, and piles of papers, and, um, junk. lots of stuff that somehow ends up on any horizontal surface around me.
Philip K. Dick, Author, science fiction writer, coined a word for the ever-growing volume of junk and clutter in our lives, "kipple", he called it.
He said that kipple reproduces, that if you don't manage to clear it up, get every little bit, before bedtime, that in the night it will propagate, I was going to say "inexorably", but it doesn't quite fit, however, as I love the word, I'm sneaking it in, like kipple.
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I might just acquire the desk in the pic.... There are several up in the attic at work. The really huge ones went to a guy who refurbishes them as ultra-modern workstations in antique exteriors, all gleaming beeswaxwd wood, leather.. and embedded computers...
I'd love to take one, steampunk it with old gauges, wavering ammeter needles, faintly glowing vacuum tubes, a keyboard from an early typewriter.....
Like something Jules Verne, H.G Wells, or Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's characters might have used, to communicate through the aether.

How Big's Yer Steam, Punk?

Just one of my many bits and pieces of stored junk.... Most steam gauges you will see are calibrated for psi, (pounds per square inch).
Ha! psi is for juniors....
This gauge is for serious steam: Tsi, Tons per square inch.. 1 Tsi=2240 psi..
(this is an imperial steam gauge, the american ton is only 2000lbs, known here as a short ton, the imperial ton, or long ton, is 2240 lbs, whereas, just to confuse matters, the metric ton, or 'tonne' is 1000kg, or 2205lbs)
So this gauge tops out at... just under 18,000psi (17,920psi)... I think I'd want to be about half a mile away if it approached that in real life.
(The inner dial shows the maximum pressure reached, the glass front opens for resetting.)
I had a big box of assorted steam gauges, I think they got chucked out a few years ago, just before Steampunk came into vogue.
I was planning to pipe them all up in thick copper pipe, all over the chimney breast above the fire, and fit a clock mechanism into one of them, never got round to it, of course.

Sigh.

Jimi Hendrix -Catfish Blues

Haven't listened to Jimi Hendrix in a while........




"Homeless" Ladysmith Black Mambazo.