Ergonomics Experts Explain How to Set Up Your Desk

Ergonom­ics aren’t a joke, Jim. — Dwight Schrute, The Office

Tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions are snow­balling faster than ever in the third decade of the 21st-cen­tu­ry. A home office set-up that would have been cause for pride in 2019 seems woe­ful­ly inad­e­quate now.

Just ask any­one whose desk job piv­ot­ed to vir­tu­al in March of 2020.

So, per­haps don’t take phys­i­cal ther­a­pist’s Jon Cinkay’s near­ly three year old advice in the above Wall Street Jour­nal video as gospel, but rather as a chance to check in with your carpal tun­nels, your aching neck and back, and your favorite refur­bished office fur­ni­ture out­let.

Cinkay assumes that your desk is a stan­dard 29 — 30” tall, which is not the case here, but okay…

Our bod­ies’ unique dimen­sions mean that no desk can be a one-size-fits-all propo­si­tion, and Cinkay makes a robust case for mak­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions:

1. Adjust your desk chair

Cinkay rec­om­mends adjust­ing the seat height until your elbows are bent at a 90-degree angle when your fin­gers are on the key­board. (As of this writ­ing, key­boards have not yet become obso­lete.)

In a 2020 arti­cle for the Hos­pi­tal of Spe­cial Surgery, he also rec­om­mends mak­ing sure your chair’s arm­rests can fit under your desk to avoid pos­tur­al com­pro­mis­es when reach­ing for your key­board or mouse.

He also wise­ly advis­es look­ing for a chair with a min­i­mum 30-day war­ran­ty so you don’t get stuck with an expen­sive mis­take.

2. Con­sid­er a foot­stool

If crank­ing your desk chair to the per­fect height leaves your feet dan­gling, you’ll need a foot­stool to help your knees main­tain a prop­er 90-degree bend. If you can’t invest in a high tech adjustable foot­stool, a ream of paper will do in a pinch.

Tech expert David Zhang, who we’ll hear from soon below, rests his cute striped socks on a yoga mat.

Who among us does not have dozens of things that could be pressed into ser­vice as a foot­stool?

I am left to pon­der the fate of the dec­o­ra­tive needle­point­ed foot­stools my late grand­moth­er and her sis­ters scat­tered around their liv­ing rooms.

Can an actu­al foot­stool be con­sid­ered a foot­stool hack?

3. Adjust the height of your mon­i­tor 

To avoid neck pain, use a mon­i­tor stand to posi­tion the top of the screen lev­el with your eyes. If you’re work­ing with a lap­top, you’ll need a stand, a sep­a­rate key­board and and a mouse.

Cinkay’s mon­i­tor stand hack is — you guessed it — a ream of paper.

Mine is 5000 Years of the Art of India which is about the same thick­ness as a ream of paper and was in easy reach at the library where I work.

To judge by some of the com­ments on Cinkay’s Wall Street Jour­nal video, his key­board dates to the Stone Age.

What­ev­er his key­board vin­tage, the afore­men­tioned arti­cle did sug­gest gel wrist rests to relieve pres­sure on the sen­si­tive carpal tun­nel area, but watch out! Zhang is not a fan!

4. Get a Head­set

Leav­ing aside the fact that the phone in ques­tion appears to be a land­line, a head­set allows you to keep your head on straight, thus min­i­miz­ing neck and shoul­der pain.

5. Remem­ber that you’re not chained to your desk

Of all the ergonom­ic advice offered above, this seems like­li­est to remain ever­green.

Take a snack break, a water break, a bath­room break, and while you’re at it toss in a cou­ple of the stretch­es Cinkay rec­om­mends.

(The Mayo Clin­ic has more, includ­ing our favorite shoul­der stretch.)

Zhang’s desk-cen­tric video was uploaded in 2017, when key­board trays were already becom­ing a rel­ic of a bygone era. 

As men­tioned, he’s anti-wrist rest. If your wrists are in need of sup­port, and they are, get a palm rest!

Zhang’s also crit­i­cal of draw­ers and — unusu­al for 2017 — stand­ing desks though like Cirkay, he’s a big fan of stand­ing up and mov­ing around.

His video descrip­tion includes some com­mon sense, ass-cov­er­ing encour­age­ment for view­ers with irreg­u­lar symp­toms or pain to seek pro­fes­sion­al help. We think this means med­ical pro­fes­sion­al, though unsur­pris­ing­ly, ergonom­ic assess­ment is a fast grow­ing field. It’s expen­sive but pos­si­bly costs less in the long run than rush­ing out to buy what­ev­er a stranger on the inter­net tells you to.

To that end, we appre­ci­ate Zhang’s trans­paren­cy regard­ing his channel’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Ama­zon Ser­vices LLC Asso­ciates affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing pro­gram.

Caveat emp­tor!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Why Sit­ting Is The New Smok­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Expla­na­tion

Who Wrote at Stand­ing Desks? Kierkegaard, Dick­ens and Ernest Hem­ing­way Too

Behold the Elab­o­rate Writ­ing Desks of 18th Cen­tu­ry Aris­to­crats

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Make Your Own Medieval Memes with a New Tool from the Dutch National Library

As much joy as inter­net memes have giv­en you over the years, you may have strug­gled to explain them to those unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept. But if you’ve found it a tall order to artic­u­late the pow­er of found images crude­ly over­laid with text to, say, your par­ents, imag­ine attempt­ing to do the same to an ances­tor from the four­teenth cen­tu­ry. Intro­duc­ing memes to a medieval per­son, the best strat­e­gy would pre­sum­ably be to begin not with sar­don­ic Willy Won­ka, the guy dis­tract­ed by anoth­er girl, or The Most Inter­est­ing Man in the World, but memes with famil­iar medieval imagery. Thanks to KB, the nation­al library of the Nether­lands, you can now make some of you own with ease.

“On www.medievalmemes.org vis­i­tors can use images tak­en from the Dutch nation­al library’s medieval col­lec­tion and turn them into memes,” says Medievalists.net. “When using the meme gen­er­a­tor, peo­ple active­ly cre­ate new con­texts for these his­toric images by adding cur­rent cap­tions. The avail­able images are accom­pa­nied by explana­to­ry videos, pro­vid­ing view­ers with back­ground infor­ma­tion and show­ing them that, much like today, peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages used images to com­ment on their sur­round­ings and cur­rent affairs.” You might repur­pose these live­ly pieces of medieval art for such twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry top­ics as club­bing, online shop­ping, or the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

At the top of this post appears an image from 1327, orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed for a book of mir­a­cles King Charles IV ordered for his queen. As KB explains, it offers “a warn­ing of what can hap­pen if you don’t learn your prayers prop­er­ly.” Below that is “a sort of Medi­ae­val car­toon” from 1183 about the tech­niques involved in prop­er­ly slaugh­ter­ing a pig. And just above, we see what hap­pened when “the Ken­ite Jael lured the leader of the army, Sis­era, into her tent. Sis­era had been vio­lent­ly oppress­ing the Ken­ites for 20 years. While he slept, she whacked a tent peg straight through his head.” Though cre­at­ed for a pic­ture Bible 592 years ago, this pic­ture sure­ly has poten­tial for trans­po­si­tion into com­men­tary on the very dif­fer­ent per­ils of life in the twen­ty-twen­ties. But when you deploy it as a meme, you can do so in the knowl­edge that even your medieval fore­bears would have known that feel.

via Medievalist.net

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Butt Trum­pets & Oth­er Bizarre Images Appeared in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch Stevie Wonder’s Amazing Drum Solo, and See Why He May Be the “Greatest Drummer of Our Time”

When Prince passed away, many a non-Prince fan sud­den­ly found out that the man was not only a bril­liant song­writer, singer, dancer, gui­tarist, pianist, styl­ist, and super­star, but that he was also a vir­tu­al one-man band in the stu­dio, able to play almost any instru­ment, in exact­ly the way he want­ed it played. Prince fans knew this, as do fans of the musi­cian who made Songs in the Key of Life — or what Prince called the great­est album ever record­ed. And if Prince were here, he would agree:  Ste­vie Won­der deserves more appre­ci­a­tion for his mul­ti-musi­cian­ship while he’s still with us.

Yes, of course, we know him for his “stag­ger­ing song­writ­ing and vocal skills,” writes PC Muñoz at Drum! mag­a­zine, for his “prowess as a for­mi­da­ble, inven­tive key­boardist (and pop music syn­the­siz­er pio­neer)” and “his vir­tu­oso-lev­el skills on har­mon­i­ca.”

But do we know Ste­vie Won­der as a drum­mer? Well, “news­flash for those who did­n’t know,” Muñoz announces: “Ste­vie Won­der also hap­pens to be one badass drum­mer.” (In fact, his very first gig, at 8 years old, was on the drums.) Not that he hasn’t received his just due from fel­low musi­cians, far from it.

Eric Clap­ton called Won­der “the great­est drum­mer of our time” in 1974 — “hefty praise” (and maybe a bit of a swipe), wrote music jour­nal­ist Eric San­dler, “com­ing from a man who played with Gin­ger Bak­er.” See a demon­stra­tion of Won­der’s for­mi­da­ble feel and groove behind the kit in the drum solo at the top of the post. But, of course, you’ve already heard his drum­ming — all, or most, of your life per­haps — on his albums, includ­ing most every track on Talk­ing BookSongs in the Key of Life, and Innervi­sions — songs like “Super­sti­tion,” “High­er Ground,” “Liv­ing for the City” … all Ste­vie.

“I grew up prac­tic­ing to Ste­vie Wonder’s music,” drum­mer Eric Carnes tells Muñoz, “but I actu­al­ly didn’t know he was often the drum­mer on his own stuff. Until I was in my twen­ties.” Carnes goes on to describe the hall­marks of Won­der’s style: “very relaxed – not so crisp and not so metro­nom­ic. He’s using dif­fer­ent parts of the stick at dif­fer­ent times, and his hi-hat parts change through­out the song. A lot of times, each cho­rus in a giv­en song is played slight­ly dif­fer­ent­ly, too. He esca­lates a song over a long peri­od of time, real­ly grow­ing the whole piece, instead of top­ping out ear­ly; it gives the music some­where to go.”

Bill Janovitz of the band Buf­fa­lo Tom — in a very thor­ough paean to Songs in the Key of Life – points to the “innate sense of groove in his drum­ming.… There is a musi­cal inven­tive­ness that might stem from being a well-round­ed mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist, as opposed to some­one who strict­ly defines them­selves as a drum­mer.”

In his appre­ci­a­tion of Won­der’s drum­ming at Slate, Seth Steven­son also high­lights Won­der’s “expres­sive­ness.… No two mea­sures sound the same.” He offers a mini best-of roundup of Won­der’s record­ed drum­ming moments:

My favorite Won­der drum track comes on ‘Too High,’ the first song on Innervi­sions. Sub­tle snare rolls, sud­den tom-tom tum­bles, jazzy ride-cym­bal swings – they’re all scrump­tious and all in the greater ser­vice of the song. This is not the approach of a hired drum­mer attempt­ing to carve out his own ter­rain. It’s the work of a mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist com­pos­er who fits his vision for each part into an inter­lock­ing whole.

Steven­son and Janovitz speak to a thread in so many dis­cus­sions of “vir­tu­oso” musi­cians: com­posers who are also musi­cal prodi­gies have ways of play­ing instru­ments in an idiom only they can under­stand. One imag­ines that if we had record­ings of Mozart or Bach – both prodi­gious mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ists from very young ages – we would hear clas­si­cal instru­ments played in ways we’ve nev­er heard them played before. The mag­ic of record­ing — and Ste­vie Won­der’s record­ings espe­cial­ly — means we can hear the drums on his songs exact­ly as he heard, and played, them, and exact­ly as he want­ed them played.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Catch Ste­vie Won­der, Ages 12–16, in His Ear­li­est TV Per­for­mances

Decon­struct­ing Ste­vie Wonder’s Ode to Jazz and His Hero Duke Elling­ton: A Great Break­down of “Sir Duke”

See Ste­vie Won­der Play “Super­sti­tion” and Ban­ter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

If Fritz Lang’s Iconic Film Metropolis Had a Kraftwerk Soundtrack

The case of the copy­right his­to­ry of Fritz Lang’s influ­en­tial sci-fi mas­ter­piece Metrop­o­lis is as con­vo­lut­ed as the his­to­ry of its film print. Lang’s vision, and his orig­i­nal almost-three-hour cut was doomed to cen­sor­ship right from the start. The Nazis took out its more social­ist scenes. It’s been edit­ed, col­orized, put back togeth­er and restored. Wikipedia cur­rent­ly lists nine dif­fer­ent ver­sions. Sim­i­lar­ly, who owns the film had shift­ed from dis­trib­u­tors back to pub­lic domain, then *out* of pub­lic domain the more orig­i­nal footage was redis­cov­ered. And then comes 2023, where Metrop­o­lis will once again land in the pub­lic domain, at least in Amer­i­ca. Will we see as many legal bat­tles as we will see new remix­es and re-scores? Prob­a­bly a bit of both.

Its orig­i­nal orches­tral score is avail­able, but many fans also seek out a score more befit­ting its futur­ist ori­gins. Some­thing more elec­tron­ic.

In fact, the four-minute clip above is YouTu­ber “Kar­maGer­many’s” 2009 fan-made edit using the music of Kraftwerk. If any band of the late 20th cen­tu­ry was born to be paired with Lang’s tech­no­log­i­cal vision, it’s the Fab Four from Düs­sel­dorf. Their icy roman­tic melodies strike the right bal­ance between Metrop­o­lis’ bat­tle, then syn­the­sis, of machin­ery and the human heart. And, look Kraftwerk even cre­at­ed a song called “Metrop­o­lis,” which becomes the actu­al score above. 

Like watch­ing the Wiz­ard of Oz while Dark Side of the Moon plays, Kraftwerk’s “Metrop­o­lis” seems writ­ten for the film, with its open­ing fan­fare over the shots of the future city wak­ing up, then how it switch­es to its motorik beat as the work­ers begin their alien­at­ing fac­to­ry day. (We haven’t done a side-by-side of the extant cut of the film, so there very well may be some edit­ing at play here.)

Now, while this is just a fan’s very well made use of the band’s full cat­a­log (it dives back into the band’s spaci­er ear­ly work for the films more ten­der moment), oth­ers have gone a more offi­cial route. Kraftwerk con­tem­po­rary and mem­ber of Clus­ter, Dieter Moe­bius record­ed a four-part, 40-minute suite Musik für Metrop­o­lis. It was released posthu­mous­ly in 2015, and it is one of his spook­i­er works.

Pri­or to that, tech­no DJ and com­pos­er Jeff Mills (no rela­tion) com­posed an hour-long score in 2000 that also had its own accom­pa­ny­ing edit, and mar­ried his career in both ambi­ent and futur­is­tic elec­tron­ic beats.

If the Kraftwerk re-edit whets your tech­no whis­tle, that clip was just the open­ing scene of the 90-minute fan edit from John McWilliam. His notes: “Orig­i­nal­ly two and a half hours long it has been reduced down to one hour 23 min­utes to pace it up includ­ing remov­ing the sub­ti­tle cards between shots and plac­ing them over [the] pic­ture instead.”

The last instruc­tion from McWilliam could apply to what­ev­er score you choose, as long as it’s for Metrop­o­lis: “Best watched on a big-ass TV hooked up to a big-booty sound sys­tem.”

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

The Case for Why Kraftwerk May Be the Most Influ­en­tial Band Since the Bea­t­les

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

How Did Roman Aqueducts Work?: The Most Impressive Achievement of Ancient Rome’s Infrastructure, Explained

At its peak, ancient Rome enjoyed a vari­ety of com­forts that, once lost, would take cen­turies to recov­er. This process, of course, con­sti­tutes much of the sto­ry of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. Though some knowl­edge did­n’t sur­vive in any use­ful form, some of it remained last­ing­ly embod­ied. The mighty ruins of Roman aque­ducts, for exam­ple, con­tin­ued to stand all across the for­mer Empire. Togeth­er they once con­sti­tut­ed a vast water-deliv­ery sys­tem, one of whose con­struc­tion and oper­a­tion it took human­i­ty quite some time to regain a func­tion­al under­stand­ing. Today, you can learn about both in the video from ancient-his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan just above.

“Greek engi­neers began build­ing aque­ducts as ear­ly as the sixth cen­tu­ry BC,” says Ryan. “A stone-line chan­nel car­ried spring water to archa­ic Athens, and Samos was served by an aque­duct that plunged through a tun­nel more than one kilo­me­ter long.”

These sys­tems devel­oped through­out the Hel­lenis­tic era, and their Roman suc­ces­sors made use of “arch­es and hydraulic con­crete, but above all it was the sheer num­ber and scale that set them apart.” Most Roman cities had “net­works of wells and cis­terns” to sup­ply drink­ing water; aque­ducts, in large part, came as “lux­u­ries, designed to sup­ply baths, ornate foun­tains, and the hous­es of the élite.” Man’s taste for lux­u­ry has inspired no few of his great works.

The task of build­ing Rome’s aque­ducts was, in essence, the task of build­ing “an arti­fi­cial riv­er flow­ing down­hill from source to city” — over great dis­tances using no pow­er but grav­i­ty, and thus on a descend­ing slope of about five to ten feet per mile. This pre­ci­sion engi­neer­ing was made pos­si­ble by the use of tools like the diop­tra and choro­bates, as well as an enor­mous amount of man­pow­er. Roman aque­ducts ran most­ly under­ground, but more impres­sive­ly in the ele­vat­ed chan­nels that have become land­marks today. “The most spec­tac­u­lar exam­ple is undoubt­ed­ly the Pont du Gard, locat­ed just out­side Nîmes,” says Ryan, and TV trav­el­er Rick Steves vis­its it in the clip above. What once served as infra­struc­ture for the well-watered man­sions of the wealthy and con­nect­ed now makes for a fine pic­nick­ing spot.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

A Huge Scale Mod­el Show­ing Ancient Rome at Its Archi­tec­tur­al Peak (Built Between 1933 and 1937)

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About the L.A. Aque­duct That Made Roman Polanski’s Chi­na­town Famous: A New UCLA Archive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“Europe’s Big Lie About Ukraine,” According to Stephen Fry

“We’ll go down in his­to­ry as the first soci­ety that would­n’t save itself because it was­n’t cost effec­tive.”
–Kurt Von­negut

When Rus­sia invad­ed Ukraine, the West respond­ed with sanc­tions, arms ship­ments, and lots of moral sup­port. But then it drew a line. Europe (par­tic­u­lar­ly Ger­many) stills buys Russ­ian gas and oil in vast quan­ti­ties, effec­tive­ly bankrolling Putin’s bloody mil­i­tary cam­paign. It shows no incli­na­tion to make hard sac­ri­fices, includ­ing cut­ting fuel con­sump­tion or poten­tial­ly putting jobs at risk. And for­get about a No-Fly zone. All of this leaves some won­der­ing about Europe’s real moti­va­tions and cal­cu­la­tions. Above, writer and actor Stephen Fry lays out his skep­ti­cal take in a 14-minute video.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Stephen Fry on the Pow­er of Words in Nazi Ger­many: How Dehu­man­iz­ing Lan­guage Laid the Foun­da­tion for Geno­cide

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18

How Ukraine’s Works of Art Are Being Saved in Wartime–Using the Lessons of World War II

Sav­ing Ukrain­ian Cul­tur­al Her­itage Online: 1,000+ Librar­i­ans Dig­i­tal­ly Pre­serve Arti­facts of Ukrain­ian Civ­i­liza­tion Before Rus­sia Can Destroy Them

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Watch a Television Station Switch From Black & White to Color for First Time (1967)

The his­to­ry of tele­vi­sion is a murky, con­vo­lut­ed affair, filled with patent wars, cor­po­rate back­stab­bing, and sto­ries of thwart­ed genius found in many such tales. The sto­ry of col­or TV can seem no less com­pli­cat­ed, with patents stretch­ing all the way back to 1904 (filed by a Ger­man inven­tor), decades before the mag­ic box appeared in any liv­ing room. The first mechan­i­cal col­or sys­tem was designed by Scot­tish inven­tor John Logie Baird in 1928.

Attempts to broad­cast col­or TV would­n’t be made until the 1950s, with the first com­mer­cial broad­cast made by CBS air­ing in 1951 on five sta­tions. Hard­ly any­one could see it. When NBC broad­cast the Tour­na­ment of Ros­es Parade in 1954, few­er than 8,500 Amer­i­can house­holds owned a col­or TV set. By April 1961, an edi­to­r­i­al in Tele­vi­sion mag­a­zine argued that col­or “is still in the egg, and only skill­ful and expen­sive han­dling will get it out of the egg and on its feet.” Need­less to say, the adop­tion of the new tech­nol­o­gy was exceed­ing­ly slow.

Rat­ings wars and adver­tis­ing wars forced col­or to come of age in the mid-60s, and as a result “col­or TV trans­formed the way Amer­i­cans saw the world, writes his­to­ri­an Susan Mur­ray at Smith­son­ian, as well as the way “the world saw Amer­i­ca.” Col­or tele­vi­sion “was, in fact, often dis­cussed by its pro­po­nents as an ide­al form of Amer­i­can post­war con­sumer vision: a way of see­ing the world (and all of its bright­ly hued goods) in a spec­tac­u­lar form of ‘liv­ing col­or.’” Col­or was explic­it­ly talked up as spec­ta­cle, though sold to con­sumers as a truer rep­re­sen­ta­tion of real­i­ty.

“Net­work exec­u­tives pitched [col­or TV] to adver­tis­ers as a unique medi­um that would inspire atten­tive­ness and emo­tion­al engage­ment,” writes Mur­ray, “mak­ing [view­ers] more like­ly to pur­chase adver­tised prod­ucts, a grow­ing myr­i­ad of con­sumer goods and appli­ances that were now avail­able in a wider set of vibrant col­ors like turquoise and pink flamin­go.” (Thanks, of course, to the advent of space-age poly­mers.) Such his­to­ry pro­vides us with more con­text for the puz­zle­ment of news­man Bob Bruner in 1967 (above), intro­duc­ing view­ers to Iowa’s Chan­nel 2 switch-over to col­or.

“I feel dou­bly hon­ored to have been cho­sen to be the first one involved in our big change,” says Bruner after chat­ting with sta­tion man­ag­er Doug Grant, “because there are so many much more col­or­ful char­ac­ters around here than this report in the news.” That year, there were char­ac­ters like Pink Floyd appear­ing for the first time on Amer­i­can Band­stand (see that footage col­orized here), their psy­che­del­ic vibran­cy mut­ed in mono­chrome.

Bruner had already been upstaged near­ly ten years ear­li­er, when NBC’s WRC-TV in Wash­ing­ton, DC intro­duced its first col­or broad­cast with Pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisen­how­er, who extolls the virtues of the medi­um above, in the old­est sur­viv­ing col­or video­tape record­ing. Even so, only around 25% of Amer­i­can house­holds owned a col­or TV in 1967. It would be anoth­er decade before every Amer­i­can house­hold (or every “con­sumer house­hold”) had one, and not until the mid-80s until the medi­um reached full sat­u­ra­tion around the globe.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Rod Ser­ling Turned TV Pitch­man: See His Post-Twi­light Zone Ads for Ford, Maz­da, Gulf Oil & Smokey Bear

Pink Floyd’s Debut on Amer­i­can TV, Restored in Col­or (1967)

Elvis’ Three Appear­ances on The Ed Sul­li­van Show: Watch His­to­ry in the Mak­ing and from the Waist Up (1956)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Why Algorithms Are Called Algorithms, and How It All Goes Back to the Medieval Persian Mathematician Muhammad al-Khwarizmi

In recent decades, a medieval Per­sian word has come to promi­nence in Eng­lish and oth­er major world lan­guages. Many of use it on a dai­ly basis, often while regard­ing the con­cept to which it refers as essen­tial­ly mys­te­ri­ous. The word is algo­rithm, whose roots go back to the ninth cen­tu­ry in mod­ern-day Greater Iran. There lived a poly­math by the name of Muham­mad ibn Musa al-Khwariz­mi, whom we now remem­ber for his achieve­ments in geog­ra­phy, astron­o­my, and math­e­mat­ics. In that last field, he was the first to define the prin­ci­ples of “reduc­ing” and “bal­anc­ing” equa­tions, a sub­ject all of us came to know in school as alge­bra (a name itself descend­ed from the Ara­bic al-jabr, or “com­ple­tion”).

Today, a good few of us have come to resent algo­rithms even more than alge­bra. This is per­haps because algo­rithms are most pop­u­lar­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the deep, unseen work­ings of the inter­net, a sys­tem with ever increas­ing influ­ence over the things we do, the infor­ma­tion we receive, and even the peo­ple with whom we asso­ciate.

Pro­vid­ed suf­fi­cient data about us and the lives we lead, so we’re giv­en to under­stand, these algo­rithms can make bet­ter deci­sions for us than we can make for our­selves. But what exact­ly are they? You can get one answer from “Why Algo­rithms Are Called Algo­rithms,” the BBC Ideas video at the top of the post.

For West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, al-Khwarizmi’s most impor­tant book was Con­cern­ing the Hin­du Art of Reck­on­ing, which was trans­lat­ed into Latin three cen­turies after its com­po­si­tion. Al-Khwarizmi’s Latinized name “Algo­rit­mi” gave rise to the word algo­ris­mus, which at first referred to the dec­i­mal num­ber sys­tem and much lat­er came to mean “a set of step-by-step rules for solv­ing a prob­lem.” It was Enig­ma code­break­er Alan Tur­ing who “worked out how, in the­o­ry, a machine could fol­low algo­rith­mic instruc­tions and solve com­plex math­e­mat­ics. This was the birth of the com­put­er age.” Now, much fur­ther into the com­put­er age, algo­rithms “are help­ing us to get from A to B, dri­ving inter­net search­es, mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions of things for us to buy, watch, or share.”

The algo­rithm giveth, but the algo­rithm also taketh away — or so it some­times feels as we make our way deep­er into the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. In the oth­er BBC Ideas video just above, Jon Stroud makes an inves­ti­ga­tion into both the nature and the cur­rent uses of this math­e­mat­i­cal con­cept. The essen­tial job of an algo­rithm, as the experts explain to him, is that of pro­cess­ing data, these days often in large quan­ti­ties and of var­i­ous kinds, and increas­ing­ly with the aid of sophis­ti­cat­ed machine-learn­ing process­es. In mak­ing or influ­enc­ing choic­es humans would once have han­dled them­selves, algo­rithms do present a risk of “de-skilling” as we come to rely on their ser­vices. We all occa­sion­al­ly feel grat­i­tude for the bless­ings those ser­vices send our way, just as we all occa­sion­al­ly blame them for our dis­sat­is­fac­tions — mak­ing the algo­rithm, in oth­er words, into a thor­ough­ly mod­ern deity.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Algo­rithms for Big Data: A Free Course from Har­vard

Advanced Algo­rithms: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

This Is Your Kids’ Brains on Inter­net Algo­rithms: A Chill­ing Case Study Shows What’s Wrong with the Inter­net Today

The Prob­lem with Face­book: “It’s Keep­ing Things From You”

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

How Youtube’s Algo­rithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japan­ese Song Into an Enor­mous­ly Pop­u­lar Hit: Dis­cov­er Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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