Analog Surround Sound Was Everywhere, But You Probably Didn’t Notice

October 28, 2025 by Lewin Day 21 Comments

These days, most of the media we consume is digital. We still watch movies and TV shows, but they’re all packaged in digital files that cram in many millions of pixels and as many audio channels as we could possibly desire.

Back in the day, though, engineering limitations meant that media on film or tape were limited to analog stereo audio at best. And yet, the masterminds at Dolby were able to create a surround sound format that could operate within those very limitations, turning two channels in to four. What started out as a cinematic format would bring surround sound to the home—all the way back in 1982!

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The Channel Crossing Bridge That Never Was

October 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

*Full marks for clarity of message. Credit: Euro Route materials*

When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the undersea rail link saw Britain grew closer to the European mainland than ever before. However, had things gone a little differently, history might have taken a very different turn. Among the competing proposals for a fixed Channel crossing was a massive bridge. It was a scheme so audacious that fate would never allow it to come to fruition.

Forget the double handling involved in putting cars on trains and doing everything by rail. Instead, the aptly-named Euro Route proposed that motorists simply drive across the Channel, perhaps stopping for duty-free shopping in the middle of the sea along the way.

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Built-In Batteries: A Daft Idea With An Uncertain Future

October 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 60 Comments

Having a gadget’s battery nestled snugly within the bowels of a device has certain advantages. It finally solves the ‘no batteries included’ problem, and there is no more juggling of AA or AAA cells, nor their respective chargers. Instead each device is paired to that one battery that is happily charged using a standardized USB connector, and suddenly everything is well in the world.

Everything, except for the devices that cannot be used while charging, wireless devices that are suddenly dragging along a wire while charging and which may have charging ports in irrational locations, as well as devices that would work quite well if it wasn’t for that snugly embedded battery that’s now dead, dying, or on fire.

Marrying devices with batteries in this manner effectively means tallying up all the disadvantages of the battery chemistries and their chargers, adding them to the device’s feature list, and limiting their effective lifespan in the process. It also prevents the rapid swapping with fresh batteries, which is why everyone is now lugging chunky powerbanks around instead of spare batteries, and hogging outlets with USB chargers. And the task of finding a replacement for non-standardized pouch cell batteries can prove to be hard or impossible.

Looking at the ‘convenience’ argument from this way makes one wonder whether it is all just marketing that we’re being sold. Especially in light of the looming 2027 EU regulation on internal batteries that is likely to wipe out the existence of built-in batteries with an orbital legal strike. Are we about to say ‘good riddance’ to a terrible idea?

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What Happened To Running What You Wanted On Your Own Machine?

October 22, 2025 by Lewin Day 136 Comments

When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.

Today, that freedom is dying. What’s worse, is it’s happening so gradually that most people haven’t noticed we’re already halfway into the coffin.

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Ore Formation: Return Of The Revenge Of The Fluids

October 21, 2025 by Tyler August 16 Comments

In the last edition of our ongoing series on how planets get ore– those wonderful rocks rich in industrial minerals worth mining– we started talking about hydrothermal fluid deposits. Hydrothermal fluid is the very hot, very salty, very corrosive water that sweats out of magma as it cools underground and under pressure.

We learned that if the fluid stays in the magma chamber and encourages the growth of large crystals there, we call that a pegmatite deposit. If it escapes following cracks in the surface rock, it creates the characteristic veins of an orogenic deposit. What if the fluid gets out of the magma chamber, but doesn’t find any cracks?

Perhaps the surrounding rock is slightly permeable to water, and the hydrothermal fluid can force its way through, eating away at the base rock and remineralizing it with new metals as it goes. That can happen! We call it a porphyry deposit, particularly in igneous rock. It’s not exactly surprising that a hydrothermal fluid would find igneous rock: the fluid is volcanic in origin, after all, just like igneous rock. (That’s the definition of igneous: a rock of volcanic origin.) Igneous rocks, like granite, tend not to be terribly reactive so the fluid can diffuse through relatively unchanged.

Igneous rocks aren’t the only option, though. If the hydrothermal fluid hits carbonates, well, I did mention it’s acidic, right? Acid and carbonates are not friends, so all sorts of chemistry happens, such that geologists give the resulting metamorphic formation a special name: skarn. Though similar in origin, skarns are often considered a different type of deposit, so we’ll talk about the simpler case, diffusion through non-reactive rocks, before getting back to the rocks that sound like an 80s fantasy villain. (Beware Lord Skarn!)

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Word Processing: Heavy Metal Style

October 20, 2025 by Al Williams 13 Comments

If you want to print, say, a book, you probably will type it into a word processor. Someone else will take your file and produce pages on a printer. Your words will directly turn on a laser beam or something to directly put words on paper. But for a long time, printing meant creating some physical representation of what you wanted to print that could stamp an imprint on a piece of paper.

The process of carving something out of wood or some other material to stamp out printing is very old. But the revolution was when the Chinese and, later, Europeans, realized it would be more flexible to make symbols that you could assemble texts from. Moveable type. The ability to mass-produce books and other written material had a huge influence on society.

But there is one problem. A book might have hundreds of pages, and each page has hundreds of letters. Someone has to find the right letters, put them together in the right order, and bind them together in a printing press’ chase so it can produce the page in question. Then you have to take it apart again to make more pages. Well, if you have enough type, you might not have to take it apart right away, but eventually you will.

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A Tale Of Two Car Design Philosophies

October 16, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 123 Comments

As a classic car enthusiast, my passion revolves around cars with a Made in West Germany stamp somewhere on them, partially because that phrase generally implied a reputation for mechanical honesty and engineering sanity. Air-cooled Volkswagens are my favorites, and in fact I wrote about these, and my own ’72 Super Beetle, almost a decade ago. The platform is incredibly versatile and hackable, not to mention inexpensive and repairable thanks to its design as a practical, affordable car originally meant for German families in the post-war era and which eventually spread worldwide. My other soft-spot is a car that might seem almost diametrically opposed to early VWs in its design philosophy: the Mercedes 300D. While it was a luxury vehicle, expensive and overbuilt in comparison to classic Volkswagens, the engineers’ design choices ultimately earned it a reputation as one of the most reliable cars ever made.

As much as I appreciate these classics, though, there’s almost nothing that could compel me to purchase a modern vehicle from either of these brands. The core reason is that both have essentially abandoned the design philosophies that made them famous in the first place. And while it’s no longer possible to buy anything stamped Made in West Germany for obvious reasons, even a modern car with a VIN starting with a W doesn’t carry that same weight anymore. It more likely marks a vehicle destined for a lease term rather than one meant to be repaired and driven for decades, like my Beetle or my 300D.

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