Leather burnishers have been pretty much unchanged for 50,000 years
I need more of these.
One I’ve heard recently was…the hair styles you see on ancient Roman art look remarkably modern. Art historians got to wondering just how they managed such complex hairstyles without modern hairspray, plastic clips or elastic bands? A hairstylist took one look and said “They’re sewn.” The historians go “NAAAAAH that can’t be it. Whoever heard of sewing hair?” The hairstylist goes “Hairstylists. Watch” and then she replicated the styles on the statues by sewing.
Here’s another one: Marine biologists long struggled to understand/describe the shapes of certain marine life, including corals. They had these weird wavy patterns that didn’t make sense to us rectangle building monkeys. Meanwhile, a mathematician studying hyperbolic geometry realized that crochet patterns that add loops with every row achieve wavy ruffles in a hyperbolic pattern. It took a few others to piece those two ideas together, to recognize the coral structures as having hyperbolic geometry as a means of maximizing surface area while minimizing volume. The Crochet Coral Reef project has been making crocheted models of sea life ever since.
As a woodworker, it amazes me how the mortise and tenon is still hanging on.
If you aren’t familiar, a mortise is a square or rectangular hole in a board, might go all the way through, might not. A tenon is a square peg basically cut on the end of a board to fit into a mortise. This produces a very strong joint.
The very oldest intact wooden structure known on earth - a well head in Germany - is held together with mortise and tenons. We don’t know the name of the man who built it, because written language hadn’t been invented yet.
There is a thing called a floating tenon. Imagine you want to join two boards, but don’t really want to cut a tenon onto either. Make a mortise in each, then make a third smaller board to fill both tenons. Floating tenon, loose tenon, there are many words for it. The Ancient Egyptians held boat hulls together this way, the hull planks were joined edge to edge with loose tenons which were then cross-pinned with dowels. One such boat was found disassembled in a pit next to the Great Pyramid at Giza; the seal on the chamber was so good they said it smelled of cedar when opened. The ship was assembled and is currently on display.
All the way on this end of history, the European tool brand Festool has a tool called a Domino. It has the form factor of a Lamello-type biscuit joiner, but the domino cuts with a wagging router bit to form a wide, short, deep mortise to insert store bought loose tenons into. This tool is so new, it is still protected under patent.
We’ve been making mortise and tenons for tens of thousands of years, and yet we’re still innovating on the concept.
That’s dope af
Also I’m in the UK, visited the next town over last week and walked past a pub and thought, that looks like a pretty old building… turns out the pub was built and has been running as a pub since the 1500s
My place of work has a telex machine in the corner still… I presume if a message comes in on that it is because ww3 happened… it just sits there and makes me feel slightly anxious to consider it.
The bicycle hasn’t changed its basic design in 135 years.
Yes the frame is now welded but most bikes still have the cup and cone bearings that were the limitation of engineering in the 19th century.
Me.
I mean, I’m not particularly old — only 29. But I’m super surprised I still exist. And it’s not for lack of trying. It just turns out that even though I’m pretty mediocre at living, I’m even worse at dying. Fortunately, I’m in a place now where that’s a thing I’m happy about, for the most part.
I’ve got at least 8 different attempts under my belt, and the way that some of them failed makes me feel like it’s almost offensive to be an atheist. For instance, when I swam out into the sea, as far as I could until I couldn’t anymore, and the next thing I remember was waking up on the beach, not super far from where I’d swam from. I thought that was a thing that only happened in movies. Granted, I’m not a strong swimmer, so I didn’t get very far out, but still.
That was one of my attempts as an adult, but I had a lot as a teenager too. When I was about 16, I was resentful of all the people who cared about me, because the guilt I felt over hurting them was the only thing keeping me alive. Building off of the crisis management advice that I’d seen that said it’s good to try to put some distance between you and your suicidal feelings by trying to hold off until the next day, for instance, I resolved that I would stick around until I was 20, and if nothing had improved by then, I would kill myself and fuck anyone who begrudged me this escape — no-one could say I didn’t try.
Well, it turns out that some things did improve by age 20 — enough that it suggested there was a non-zero hope that I could some day live and actually be happy to be alive. I still struggled a lot after that point, because it’s not like my mental health was magically resolved (it still isn’t), but I’m glad I stuck around.
In a way though, things got harder after age 20. Ironically, there were countless times throughout my late teens in which looking forward to my death was the only thing that saved my life. When things were particularly rough, I would work out how many days I had to go before I could rest, and it soothed me. After I was 20, however, I was unanchored. I had a life that didn’t feel like it was my own, because I never expected to make it this far. Even now, it still sometimes feels like I’m in a bonus level. It’s a bizarre feeling.
But yeah, I, and many of the people who know and love me, are surprised that I’m still around. I’m proud of myself, even if a significant part of why I’m still here is sheer luck. Obviously this wasn’t what you meant when asking your question, but I’ve been reflecting on my progress a lot lately, and the idea of giving this answer amused me. It feels healing to joke about this stuff a bit, I think
Sometimes it’s good to fail, even eight times, and I’m glad you did. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you continue to do so.
Me
I was going to say my spinal disks
I recently learned that the TOSLINK (S/PDIF) optical ports with the little door that I’ve seen on every game console and AV receiver my whole life and never thought about or used is from 1983. The same port is now used for professional digital audio with a different protocol too.
Credit card imprinters. Went to a car rental that required a card to be swiped with that thing. Needless to say the card got canceled the second it got in there lol
Credit card imprinters.
In western Canada the electronic ones used to be called sliders (from when the magnetic strip was still widely used, before chip & pin), and these were called strikers (from how the card was pressed or physically struck onto the paper).
At this point, all but one of my cards would be completely incompatible with those things. They’re completely flat, with printed numbers on the back instead. I hadn’t even thought about that change in a while, but I am glad that my wallet is a little bit thinner.
Retails stores sometimes still have these in high-volume areas. Imagine your store loses power on Black Friday weekend. Some stores live or die by a few critical weekends a year. You might lose some merch through declines later but avoiding the loss in total sales will almost certainly make up for it.
Trump.
Boomers.
Horseshoe crab. These things existed before DINOS! AND ARE STILL AROUND!
Although they’re struggling at the moment, due to their blood being harvested for use in biomedical research.[1]. Although fortunately, there have been synthetic alternatives developed in the last few years, so hopefully their numbers should recover as that is phased in.
Edit: if this makes you feel overly sad, here is a palate cleanser(30 minute long, ideally listened to in one uninterrupted block). It’s one of my favourite things I stumbled across last year, and it makes me feel hopeful about the world. It made me cry, but in a good way.
[1]: Linked article has more info, but the TL;DR is that their blood clots in the presence of bacterial toxins, so it’s super useful in stuff like vaccine development and production. They capture the crabs, harvest the blood and return the crabs alive, and the stats that the system has on this says that only a small percentage of them end up dying as a result of this. However, given that we can’t see how many of them die or fail to reproduce in the weeks and months following their release, we can’t confirm that.
We do know that the numbers of a bird that feasts almost exclusively on horseshoe crab eggs have seen severe reductions over the last 40 or so years, so it seems likely that the impact of this harvesting on horseshoe crab populations is more severe than the official data suggests.
It’s unfortunate because they fall between the cracks when it comes to animal research ethics. For one, the research isn’t being done on them, so they probably wouldn’t be protected under most existing legislation anyway. But also, animal research legislation doesn’t tend to give much protection to invertebrates (with the exception of octopuses, which are smart enough that they get additional protections).
I think it’s a pretty interesting case study of a big gap in the legislation that protects the rights of animals — existing legislation focuses a lot on our duty to individual animals, but here, despite the harm to any one horseshoe crab seeming to be tolerably low, the vast scale at which we have been harvesting them has had an impact on the species as a whole.
My view is that an anthropocentric framework that puts humans above all other animals is probably harmful in general and something we should work to undermine, but that if we are taking that tack (which seems necessary for the utilitarian view of “harvesting these crabs’ blood has saved many human lives” that most people seem to take on this topic), then we must also accept that we have an ethical duty to be good stewards of the natural world. We can’t have it both ways and think of ourselves as so rational and smart, but not accept the responsibility that would come with that.
I find the legislative angle of it especially interesting, because most people I have told this to are shocked to learn of how they’re not protected, and they share at least some of my view that effective animal research ethics legislation should surely account for our duty to ecosystems as a whole. People far more learned than I in legal matters have struggled to think of ways we could effectively legislate this though. It’s possible that additional legislation isn’t the best way to handle this, and that we would be better served to aim to regulate in opposition to the economically extractivist ideology that seems to be the default setting nowadays (because horseshoe crabs are just an illustrative case study of the problem).
I apologise for info dumping in reply to your joyful comment with such downer info. I do feel hopeful about the progress of synthetic alternatives though. I also find it a fascinating topic to learn about, even if it is a bit depressing
1 ↩︎
I love them! Little cute babies with their scuttling legs and long spike!!
Litteral little living roombas.
Hmmm if they would get along with cats?
My grandpa. Hes in his 90s, ready to go, and not only still alive, his mind is still there and he’s still sharp.
The Amiga.
The latest update of AmigaOS was October 2025. MorphOS (which I’m using): January 2025.
The latest “complete” new hardware I’m aware of is Apollo Accelerator’s A6000 from September 2025.The baths on the Titanic still hold water today
There are more hydrogen atoms in a single water molecule than there are stars in the entire solar system!
That’s good I’ll admit it took awhile.
Did you mean water drop? Because I thought it was precisely two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms that make up a single water molecule…
Take another minute to think about just how many stars are in the solar system…
Whoosh…
Incredible
There’s an even more fucked up joke in there somewhere about the shared bathwater still belonging to the same people
Fax machines.
The amount of “modern” companies I had to fax shit too when my dad died was infuriating! Hyundai, Target, etc etc etc. Email is a thing dumb ass companies! Fuck me.
Why did target and Hyundai need to know your dad died?
He had accounts with them, that’s part of the probate process. Letting them know.
Fax may outlast landline telephony.
It already has. Vast majority of companies still handling fax are using VoIP fax modems with digital receivers that turn it into a PDF. I haven’t seen a functioning copper landline probably since 2015…
Did you know that it would have been possible for Abraham Lincoln to send a fax to a samurai?
I think the reason I didn’t know it is because it isn’t true.
Unless you’re a Lincoln truther who thinks he wasn’t killed in 1865 way before fax machines were available in the USA and Japan.
The first fax machine was invented in 1843.
But of course they had to wait for the second one to be invented…
They still have some uses (Invidious: mirror selection or Nadeko).
Also maddening and frustratingly!
Faxes are common in healthcare facilities and hospitals. I would imagine that they’re safer when it comes to sensitive data.
comes to sensitive data.
not really. there’s no encryption to faxing, and the software to fax from pc’s directly (enabling faked records for example) has been ubiquitous since the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFax
THANK YOU.
You know another fun thing that can happen? A doctor moves practices and changes fax numbers, and the old number gets assigned to a new, completely unrelated non-medical group. But no one told the medical entity that sends faxes, and no one updated the relevant records. All of a sudden several months worth of PHI has been getting sent to a women’s clothing store.
Fax in the medical field needs to die. Between the possibility of this happening, higher probability of transmission failure, paper (where offices are still using physical faxes) getting misplaced before getting filed in charts, etc., it’s just a plain bad way to send medical information in 2026.
Edit: OH, and don’t get me started on fancy, marketing-designed lab reports that use colored indicators to communicate treatment-critical information that no one checked for legibility in black and white, yet still get sent by fax. Like, fucking WHAT??
on’t get me started on fancy, marketing-designed lab reports that use colored indicators to communicate treatment-critical information that no one checked for legibility in black and white, yet still get sent by fax. Like, fucking WHAT??
holy fuck
Not really safer, they just work with the existing infrastructure. Personally, I think there’s still a place for fax, it’s essentially a convenient way to scan and transmit, and these days you can get them to your email or phone (not in healthcare because that’s not HIPAA compliant). Sure, not anybody’s first choice, but I think it’s still valid.
It’s only convenient if you have access to a fax machine, which the majority of us don’t
My comment was in context of existing business infrastructure. You’re right that most of us don’t have a fax machine, but many organizations still do and therefore it can be very convenient for B2B communication. And in the case of orgs that want faxes but you don’t have one, ifax is a thing as well.
I’m not making an argument for faxes, I’m just saying for an outdated technology it’s stayed quite useful in the modern era.
