technology

Democratic Germany produced a brand of glassware named Superfest. Through an innovative production process it was eight times harder than other types of glass making a Superfest glass very hard to break.

Planners in democratic Germany believed Superfest to have great potential as an export since it was superior to competing products. It turned out they were wrong, western distributors of glassware were not interested in selling their customers a glass that lasted and reduced the need to buy replacements. Following the annexation of democratic Germany the organisation tasked with dismantling Democratic Germany's industrial economy, the Treuhand, shut down the plant and abandoned the patent.

And that's why we can't have durable pint glasses under capitalism.

modern tubeless tires are fucking magic. I drove a screw into my fucking bike tire and not only did my tire self seal around the screw and leave a tap to unscrew it, but when I did unscrew it my tire fucking healed itself.

Bicycles are pretty fantastic in how they allow you to travel further and faster than walking with only a couple of wheels and sprockets

The way China has incorporated drones into daily urban life is pure scifi. Like, the drones are just consumer electronics, but I'm also talking about the infrastructure that goes into making sure you can actually support thousands upon thousands of drones. The drones themselves should be seen as part of city infrastructure in the same way a bridge or a street lamp is as well.

What... You mean I can't talk about docker and all the services I self host that make my life nicer? 👎

The CSIRO made a thing called RAFT that can sequence polymers however you want and it can help with everything from bank notes to vaccines. It's amazing stuff and needs to be known about more

Low-end coffee hand grinders have gotten a whole lot better in the last 15 years or so.

Many years ago I bought what was a widely recommended coffee hand grinder made by Hario. It had a ceramic mill. It's frustratingly slow and tedious.

Got a Timemore like two years ago, which has a stainless steel mill and they added some teeth into the mill design, which does sort of a rough shredding of the beans before they go into the lower fine milling, which makes this super fast and quite low effort. Takes less than a minute per cup. It's also prettier and just better designed in every way when compared with the Hario. According to reviews the resulting grain consistency is pretty good and it can go quite fine, fine enough for espresso even, though I wouldn't know anything about that.

There is a vaccine for the common cold for babies. Its not a vaccine, its antibodies. Which is what you get from a vaccine.

And there is a malaria vaccine. And an Ebola vaccine.

And fuckin a: vaccines.

Hydroponics. Requires some setup but once it's in place you have plants growing while consuming up to 90% less water than traditional agriculture, and it's easy to make the whole system totally passive so that the only labor inputs are putting in new plants and harvesting old ones.

It also turns out that some plants really benefit from being grown hydroponically - put them under a grow light and in a greenhouse and you can grow multiple times as much produce on the same parcel of land while consuming less water and fertilizer to do it.

It's a process that can be scaled up industrially, but because of the high upfront cost it's fairly rare, the most mature industrial greenhouses are those in The Netherlands. Once a farm has made the transition there are logistical advantages to hydroponics as well - a farm can stagger grow times to have consistent smaller harvests instead of one or two massive harvests, making staffing and income more consistent.

Not every plant can be grown this way, but those that can absolutely should. Especially in places like California where I live, where we have the financial and technological ability to do so and our environment would greatly benefit from reduced water use.

CNCs are like the peak of substractive manufacturing and they get no love here 😞

3d printers are also cool stuff

Trains: specially maglevs. To be kind of honest I’m a massive technophobe especially after feeling like I’m too stupid for STEM, but there are some tech I fully appreciate.

Prosthetic limbs: I don’t have any, but it’s pretty cool seeing how far medicine has come.

A lot of medical breakthroughs are very fascinating

Seeing advancements in green energy is always nice. For example, I really like Quebec’s hydroelectricity and hydro-quebec seems to be something they’re proud of. Makes my Ohioan yank ass very jealous.

I wish I was good enough for STEM, because working on some of these technologies does sound sincerely fascinating

idk if it counts as technology, but cookbooks have gotten waaay better.

Electric micromobility vehicles (e-bikes, e-scooters, e-unicycles, etc) are sort of consumer electronics, but they're still pretty great. The range and speed are much more able to cope with horrible suburban sprawl than an ordinary bicycle so they're more viable as car replacements for more people.

The technology of zea mays (corn). It was intentionally genetically engineered from the non-food Teosinte. I do not think the process by which this happened is currently understood by the collective of science. Then it formed a part of the Three Sisters. Unclear if this was part of the plan all along.

I read about it in 1491. New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus By Charles C. Mann which is largely about technology and changed the way I think about the concept.

And lets give it up for chemical dye. It's pretty cool. Also dyeing with indigo is a totally other thing, also very cool.

I like the super-flexy rubbery ice cube trays where you can just push the cubes out through the bottom into the glass without touching them. Ice cubes in the fridge door are fine, too.

I saw a prototype of a new type of single-thread chainstitch sewing machine. It has a swiveling part that twists the loop before the hook catches it, supposedly making it as resistant to unraveling as a standard lockstitch. There are probably good reasons why the inventor still hasn't attracted capital (or maybe shady anti-competitive ones?), but I'd still love to play with the prototype

edit: my bad it's actually a two-thread chainstitch

I saw Porsche is prototyping a gear driven CVT. There's a YouTube channel that was given a prototype to explain the engineering, really cool stuff.

I always perk up around microbiology. I never went past my Associates, but it doesn't keep me from getting giddy on stuff involving algae.

Continuous blood glucose monitors and insulin pumps.

Drugs against high blood pressure.

Canes really help a lot of people.