Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCLXXVIII

[DoctorStrangelove]

. Well the weather's either been freezing cold or torrential. .

What's a poor old retired contractor to do? .

Well apart from that of course. .

On the mag tape thing, the 3M coater is that building with the j at the end.

It was enormous, easily 3 or 4 stories high.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/...MzSAFQAw%3D%3D

And here's a streetview of the j end of the coater with the 3M water tower behind it (the water tower was demolished recently).

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.66...MzSAFQAw%3D%3D

The plant was opened by Peter Thorneycroft in 1952 and demised 70 years later though the mag tape bit demised about 30 years ago.

https://archive.commercialmotor.com/...opens-3m-plant

?Twe?NTY years ago unemploymerr in the Gorseinon area of South Wales was nearly a third of the insured population. Even four years ago it was 6 per. cent. Now it has fallen to 1.6. This stems from the.-White Paper on Employment issued by the Coalition Government in 1944, following which the neighbourhood became a development area in which manufacturers are encouraged to build factories.

These points were made last Saturday by Mr. Peter Thorneycroft, President of the Board of Trade, after opening the new £250,000 factory of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (known as the 3M cornParlY), at Goiseinon, Glam.

This -company was founded in Minnesota in 1902 to develop a corundum deposit at ' Lake Superior. To-day it operates all over the world. The four divisions of the English company specialize in Scotch Boy cellulose tapes, flexible abrasives (known as sandpapers). magnetic recording tape, and, what is particularly pertinent to the motor industry. Underseal rubberized protective coating. A large factory has been in existence for some years in Birmingham.

The "Green Death" thing was found when I searched for the RCA International mag tape factory in Brynmawr. I managed to shut that merely by having two interviews there when it was Anacomp. That factory (which would have fitted inside one of the 3M warehouses) was completely demolished in 2010 and is now under the A465 dualling improvements.

Similarly to Gorseinon, Brynmawr had the Semtex (not that sort of Semtex) Factory that was built in 1948 and was Grade II listed until they knocked it down. Great place to work if you wanted to watch asbestos fibres floating in the air. It made those flooring tiles that were everywhere at one time & are now controlled waste. .

[NickFitz]

Have we all made it through the storm? As I write, there's a nice rainbow outside my living room window, so I assume the weather will now be fine for the rest of human history, as previously promised

• Our Coast to Coast Walk Across Northern England Was an Exercise in Hope and Joy - An American couple discover the delights of northern England: ”My wife decided we needed an active outdoor getaway, a romantic ramble across moors and fells and three national parks. I knew it’d be hard. I’ve never been happier.”
• Saber-toothed kitten preserved in ice for 35,000 years - ”Found encased in ice in 2020 along the Badyarikha River in the Republic of Sakha, a northeastern region of Russia that borders the East Siberian Sea of the Arctic Ocean, a well-preserved specimen offers a rare opportunity to examine an extinct predator that roamed Eurasia during the Late Pleistocene.” You can find all the details at Nature: Mummy of a juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens from the Upper Pleistocene of Siberia.
• So, how do you make an analogue audio tape? Dave Denyer visits RecordingTheMasters in France to find out how it’s done - HT to DoctorStrangelove (who has contributed copiously this week) for this look at the process of making tape: ”RecordingTheMasters is a leading manufacturer of professional and semi-professional analogue audio tapes. Their tapes are used worldwide in major recording studios and, if you’re buying contemporary music on tape from one of the growing number of current audiophile labels, there’s a good chance it’ll be on RecordingTheMasters’ reels.”
• Why Were Blade Runner, The Thing Failures in 1982 But Are Considered Masterpieces Today? - HT to DoctorStrangelove again for this look at the original poor reception of the classic films: ”Film critics get it wrong all the time. But even so, I can’t imagine that the profession has ever had a worse day on the job than June 25, 1982… two indisputable classics directed by two unassailable masters were released in theaters only to be met by critical venom and relative indifference from ticket-buyers.”
• tree.fm - Something relaxing: ”People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, and unwind wherever you are. Take a breath and soak in the forest sounds as they breathe with life and beauty!”
• Escaping from the Green Death: Living in and Surviving a Haunted South Wales Industrial Wasteland. - Yet another HT to DoctorStrangelove for this look at the "good" old days: ”Living and growing up in a 1970s South Wales as a child was to live in a dystopian industrialised netherworld of abandoned factories, demolished streets and factories, mountainous slag heaps (a by-product of smelting ores and used metals), desolate places constrained by concrete, vandalised phone boxes broken glass, and discarded soiled plastics which was all interspersed by the occasional green farm land.”
• Programming MOSAIC - One more HT to DoctorStrangelove for this explanation of how to program the Mosaic, the mercury-laden GCHQ computer from a few weeks ago: ”MOSAIC (the Ministry of Supply Automatic Integrator and Calculator); did not have a formal symbolic assembly language, however a structured numeric method of representing instructions was devised, to remove the need for coding using binary formats.”
• The Phædrus Audio VF14M - a modern replacement for the rare VF14M valve used in Neumann U47 and U48 microphones - And a final HT (for this week) to DoctorStrangelove for this project to find a modern substitute for a valve: ”The VF14 pentode valve was manufactured for a mere nine years and would be a long-forgotten museum-piece were it not for the fact that Neumann chose this unusual component as the active device in the impedance-converter for their now legendary U47 and U48 microphones. Unfortunately, the VF14 valve is now so rare that prices are astronomically high - and often for examples of dubious provenance and quality. This paper describes our journey to develop a modern equivalent of the VF14 in order to return these microphones to their original glory.”
• Antenna diodes in the Pentium processor - Ken Shirriff emerges from wherever it is he finds this stuff with another Intel mystery explained: ”I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures where signal lines were connected to the silicon substrate for no apparent reason… I did some investigation and learned that these structures are ‘antenna diodes,’ special diodes that protect the circuitry from damage during manufacturing. In this blog post, I discuss the construction of the Pentium and explain how these antenna diodes work.”
• James Leman, Silk Designer - Rare examples of English silks: ”The oldest surviving set of silk designs in the world, James Leman’s album contains ninety ravishingly beautiful patterns created in Steward St, Spitalfields between 1705 and 1710 when he was a young man.”
  
  

Happy invoicing!